Rhapsody in Cement

Friz Freleng’s Rhapsody in Rivets (1941) was one of a number of cartoons to synchronise Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 to animated action on screen. It was nominated for an Oscar, but the cartoon based on the same music which won the award was the Tom and Jerry short The Cat Concerto (1947).

Mike Maltese (at least he received the rotating story credit) and Freleng must have worked closely to match gags to the timing of the music. I can’t explain it, but the humour is something that would come out a Freleng unit cartoon.

One routine involves a cement mixer acting as a cocktail shaker. After the “drink” is poured out, an arm appears from behind the mixer and plops a garnish on top. I cannot picture Chuck Jones (even with Maltese writing) using this kind of gag.



Correct me I’m wrong, but I believe the first cartoon to employ this piece of music was in 1929 in The Opry House, a Mickey Mouse short. You can also hear it (besides in the aforementioned cartoons) in various lengths in Fire Bugs (Fleischer, 1930), Bars and Stripes (Mintz/Columbia, 1931), The Candy House (Lantz, 1934), A Car-Tune Portrait (Fleischer, 1937), Farmyard Symphony (Disney, 1938), Dipsy Gypsy (George Pal/Paramount, 1941), Rhapsody Rabbit (Warners, 1946), Back Alley Oproar (Warners, 1948), The Magic Fluke (UPA/Columbia, 1949) and Convict Concerto (Lantz, 1954). I must be missing some.

(Yes, I know, The Simpsons, Roger Rabbit. I’m talking about theatrical animated shorts).

It was originally released Dec. 6, 1941; the Warners’ theatre in Fresno screened it that day. Spake an exhibitor to the Motion Picture Herald:

You might call this a partial burlesque of Fantasia. No matter what you call it, it is a very, very clever cartoon showing the building of a skyscraper to the Second Hungarian Rhapsody music. My audience laughed a great deal and praised it afterward.

Gil Turner received the rotating animator credit, chopped off when the cartoon was re-released in 1947. The backgrounds appear to be the work of Leonard Kester.

Jack Benny is a Tattletale Grey Bunny

When sound came into theatres, animated cartoons featured piles of celebrity caricatures and parodies. So did radio shows, too. The early Jack Benny show featured imitations of, or jokes about, Garbo, Ed Wynn, Eddie Cantor, and so. It seems fair, then, that cartoons made fun of Jack Benny, too.

The climax for the animated Benny likely came in the 1959 Warner Bros. short The House That Jack Built, but there were others we detailed in this post. In several, he was depicted as a rabbit named “Jack Bunny.”

One of these was Goofy Groceries, released by Warners in 1941. It was directed by Bob Clampett, who loved tossing pop culture references into his cartoons. Early in this one, “Jack Bunny” introduces himself to us. “Hello again, folks,” he says to us (the real Benny opened his show then with “Jell-O again”), waving a Benny-esque cigar.



The cartoon harkens back to the Harman-Ising days of the early ‘30s, when a villain would grab the heroine in the second half of the cartoon, and the good guys would unite to rescue her. Here, a can-can dancer (yes, she’s a can) is trapped by a huge gorilla.

Bunny sees it and reacts, jumping on a bottle of horse radish. Off-camera, Mel Blanc shouts the name of Benny’s 1940 feature film—“Buck Benny Rides Again.” (The movie’s cast includes Carmichael the bear, voiced on Benny’s show by Blanc, but Blanc doesn’t do Carmichael in the film).



Bunny gets cornered after an axe he is carrying is shrunk by smoke from a Roman candle held by the gorilla.



The gorilla lights another fireworks stick and hands it to Bunny. A blare of trumpets. It's Superguy! He fails to rescue Bunny. Only Clampett would have a super-hero drawn with cross-eyes and buck teeth (it appears Superguy also skipped leg day in the gym).



The gorilla lights another fireworks stick and hands it to Bunny. But the gorilla is stopped by another radio reference. Shouts a female voice from off-camera: “Henry!” “Coming, mother,” shouts the gorilla. You should recognize this from the opening of radio’s The Aldrich Family which filled in for Benny as a summer replacement series in 1939. The mother gorilla is voiced by Sara Berner, who portrayed a number of characters on the Benny radio show.



None of this stops the large firecracker from exploding.



The explosion leaves Bunny blackened into a rabbit version of Jack Benny’s valet. “My, oh, my,” observes the now-Rochester rabbit to the camera, “Tattletale grey!” It’s the same ending Clampett used with a ghost in Jeepers Creepers (1939).



The “tattletale grey” is another pop culture reference.



While Blanc does Bunny-as-Rochester’s voice, Bunny is played by Jack Lescoulie, who hosted The Grouch Club on KFWB radio. In 1939, the show appeared on the Red network's WEAF at 6:30 p.m. Sundays just before Benny. His impersonation doesn’t do anything for me, but I’m in the minority as his version of Benny is heard in several cartoons at more than one studio, and even on the Benny show itself during a programme billed as Jack’s “10th anniversary” on radio.

Benny, his show, and his supporting actors provided plenty of inspiration for writers and directors when cartoons and network radio shared a golden age. You can learn much about this from the ne plus ultra of voice acting experts, Keith Scott, in his two-book set.

UPA: Better Than a Cartoon

Is it possible to say when the UPA cartoon studio peaked?

There were plaudits through the early 1950s, with a handful of films being praised. In 1955, When Magoo Flew won an Oscar and the company signed with CBS to produce a cartoon series for television. Within a few years, there wasn’t much left. The McBoing Boing show didn’t attract young viewers, who seem to have preferred Bugs Bunny and Popeye, Columbia dropped its cartoons from theatrical release, and a number of key employees walked out to set up Format Films.

The story below from the Los Angeles Daily News, Feb. 2, 1953, is atypical. The praise was always the same: a) The cartoons are arty, b) they don’t have talking funny animals. While both are true, the studio’s product is, on the whole, not entertaining to me. Does anyone really want to see The Popcorn Story? Or Georgie and the Dragon? Or Picnics Are Fun?

The Tell-Tale Heart can hardly be called animation. It consists mainly of camera pans over Paul Julian’s backgrounds, augmented with moody music and narration. And Mr. Magoo went from delightfully cantankerous, to an old fuddy-duddy who can’t read signs, to a pitch-man for light bulbs and beer.

ANIMATED CARTOONS FIND HIGHER PURPOSE
Film cartoonists try to be more than just quaint
By DAVID BONGARD
"Why, that's better than a cartoon."
These were the words of a spectator after her first encounter with United Productions of America's cartoon, "Family Circus," an old effort in that company's increasing by popular derby of short subjects for movie houses.
Such household friends as Walt Disney's Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse and Pluto are now up against a still new type of competition. This new adversary in the cartoon field depends upon the latest and most inventive expression in modern art to win public affection and cut production costs. Where the venerable Disney plant employs a horde of artists to supply the wealth of minute detail for Disney's animated subjects, UPA's Steve Bosustow relies on simplified, fixed backgrounds and concentrates on the dramatic movement of his central figure. This character may be an abstraction, a semi-recognizable young man such as Gerald McBoing-Boing, a caricature of such universality as Mr. Magoo, or an impressionistically costumed little sweetheart such as Bemelman's Madeline.
Adult
This form of expression lends itself well to telling sophisticated yarns identifiable with the trials of our own era. Its appeal to the adult is discernable in the reaction of the spectator quoted above.
Its possibilities for communication seem limitless. Adults aren't the only ones impressed. Children also are vastly amused by the antics of "Gerald McBoing-Boing," the youngster who never learned to talk, but expresses himself by making sound effects. Besides a host of international awards, Gerald won for Bosestow [sic] an Academy Award for the best cartoon in 1951.
Contending also for public affection is the irresponsible Mr. Magoo who perpetrates colossal blunders due to a combination of myopia and an amusingly cantankerous view of life in general. In charge of Magoo's onslaughts is Pete Burness, an affable cartoon director who admits Magoo resembles his dad in some respects.
Variety
Variety in repertory is the life blood of UPA. Bosustow, once he approves a story for production, leaves the execution up to his staff of young, imaginative directors who include Burness, Robert (McBoing-Boing) Cannon, Ted ("Tell-Tale Heart") Parmelee and Bill Hurtz. Hurtz directed the fabulously effective CBS radio commercial feature which uses a compelling array of abstract art to prove that radio is far from dead. Hurtz also is working on Thurber's "Unicorn in the Garden," which again should show what can be done with a cartoon.
UPA is hoping to do a full-length feature based on more Thurber humor which they will retail with the title, "Battle of the Sexes." Financing for such a project has yet to be worked out. UPA as yet operates only on its periodic earnings from film distributors. The enterprise, nevertheless, has come a long way from the day a few years ago when the first cartoon was laid out on a dining room table. It now has its own cheerful studios across from the Warner lot in Burbank.
The studio hires nearly 100 people. A UPA cartoon costs from $30,000 to $50,000, which is about $20,000 less than it costs most other cartoon companies to make one. Musical scores are an integral part of each cartoon, and a composer is specifically commissioned for a subject. Musicians are hired for each production as they are needed, and well-known actors are hired to speak the dialog. Jim Backus talks for Magoo.
The company produces training films for the armed services which dip heavily into psychology to make their point. UPA also makes commercial films ballyhooing products.
For entertainment, a new project is Edgar Allan Poe's thriller, "The Tell-Tale Heart," which will be ready in April. The adjoining reproductions of the background are those conceived by artist Paul Julian. It should mark another step in inventive story-telling as inaugurated by UPA's successful version of Frankie and Johnnie, "Rooty Toot-Toot."
The second McBoing-Boing cartoon, which soon will be released, concerns young Gerald's ability to save the day for a radio station when a symphony orchestra fails to show up for a broadcast. He impersonates the sounds of the full orchestra.
With its fresh approach, its unfettered individuality combined with a style designed to limit production costs, UPA is well on the road to revolutionizing the cartoon world.

Whether you want to attribute it to UPA, animated TV commercials through the 1950s featured inventive, simpler designs, both in characters and backgrounds (when there were any). Limited animation was the norm when made-for-TV cartoons began appearing in the ‘50s, but Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera never (as far as I know) mentioned UPA, instead talking about its pose reels at MGM being an inspiration.

Still, UPA created something different from other studios, and deserves credit for trying and, for a while, succeeding.

Banana Bugs

Bugs Bunny makes a 360-degree turn in perspective in Falling Hare (1943) as the gremlin trips him up with banana peels.

These are 17 consecutive drawings.

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Tom McKimson apparently animated this scene. The rotating screen credit for animation went to Rod Scribner.

Deer Mother-in-Law

In 1910, humourist Irvin S. Cobb wrote the mother-in-law joke was one of only eight jokes in the world, and all others were derivatives of the eight. (The “Peevish Wife” and the “Husband-Who-Comes-in-Stewed” were among the other two).

They were old then. And, more than 40 years later, Tex Avery was putting them on screen at MGM.

In Field and Scream (1955), the narrator tells us “Our old friend Ed here has designed a special deer hunting outfit for the mother-in-law.” Ed even helps her on with it.



It comes with a special accessory.



The mother-in-law strolls out of the scene. We hear a shot off-camera. Ed bows his head in mock sorrow.



A great look to cap the scene.



Grant Simmons, Mike Lah and Walt Clinton are the animators. Designs by Ed Benedict.

If you want an earlier example of a mother-in-law cartoon, here's one from a newspaper from 1903.

The Mid-60s Smothers

The Smothers Brothers are known today because of that moment when their variety show was pulled off television by CBS for daring to air comedy with a political viewpoint that upset the Nixon government (the same viewpoint they aimed at the previous Johnson administration).

Before that, they were like many comedians. They worked in nightclubs. They appeared at colleges and fairs. They were booked on TV talk shows and variety programmes. And they were among the many inked to that staple of the late 1950s and the 1960s—comedy records. Just like top tunes, the albums were reviewed in Billboard and in other publications.

Their first LP in 1961 consisted of routines recorded on stage at the Purple Onion in San Francisco. The article from the Newspaper Enterprise Association published Aug. 8, 1964 plugs their fifth record and goes into a bit of their background.

Smothers Brothers Recall Start in Entertainment
By JOAN CROSBY
NEW YORK (NEA) — Tom Smothers looks like a young advertising executive and Dick Smothers looks like a teacher, and that's what they both would have been if they hadn't been accidental successes as folk-singing comedians. The Smothers Brothers, whose delightful Mercury album "It Might Have Been Something I Said" is a fast-climbing hit, began singing in school in California, where they were raised.
"We were born on Governor's Island in New York," Dick said. "Our father was in the Army, and Fort Jay, on the island, was the cheapest place to have a baby."
"We began with a repertoire of two songs, 'Down By the Riverside' and 'It's a Sin to Tell a Lie," Dick said. "They were enough to get us runner-up spots in two amateur contests. One of the songs must have been weak."
They are the first in a long line of Smothers to enter show business, even though their initial appearances were hardly earth-shattering.
"We're the end of a great tradition," says Tom. "We're also carrying on the family tradition for mediocrity," adds Dick.
* * * * *
EVENTUALLY THEY achieved some fame and not much fortune in California when the first of their accidents occurred. An act canceled out of the Blue Angel in New York, and they were booked, one week before they were to open. "Jack Paar saw us,” Dick recalls. "But there was no spot for us on his show. Then another act canceled, and he put us on the show. Maybe we have had it too easy. The first two years we weren't making much money, but we were working steadily. We look around and see others who have talent but things just didn't happen to them. They don't get the break."
"It was only five and a half years ago that we began to sing," Tom, 27, says.
Dick. 25, thinks they would like to settle down into a television series, or make some movies in the future. Comedy albums for them, he says, are reaching the end. "Our well of material is running very shallow. Of course, we said that after our first album, and then we did half of our second album straight because we didn't have enough comedy material."
"Our first album sold seven copies," Tom says. “The second sold several hundred, and the third snowballed actually into the thousands."
Both Smothers are married, and Dick is the father of two children. Susan, 3 1/2, and little Little Dickie Smothers Jr., eight weeks. "I'm Little Dickie Smothers Sr., so he has to be little Little Dickie Jr."
"Have you heard," Tom asks, "that there is a rumor we are going to sign a contract with CBS like the one Barbra Streisand has? There is such a rumor. I'm starting it."

They did eventually sign with CBS, but that’s another story.



In their pre-CBS days, the Smothers Brothers managed to do something that would seem impossible. Folk music can be serious stuff. It is filled with messages to help the downtrodden, to battle injustice, to advocate for world peace. Tom and Dick managed to make fun of the genre without making fun of the message. This article from the Santa Barbara Press, Oct. 17, 1964, gives you an idea what was in their act.

COUNTY BOWL PACKED
Smothers Brothers In Madcap Show
By Bill Sluis
News-Press Staff Writer
Imagine something clean-cut, All-American and serious. Give it a bass fiddle and put it on stage. Then conjure up your idea of Freud's ID. Shape it into something that looks human with a red jacket. Put him on stage with a guitar, and you have it.
The Smothers Brothers —Tom, Dick and (there were no others).
Pack the County Bowl with 5.300 Smothers fans and Mad Magazine addicts. Wind everyone up on the Smothers' "Nor an Abernacle” choir. Sprinkle in some Addams Kids —this madcap concoction smothered the bowl with brothers—all two of them.
They're the Homer and Jethro of 1964. Talented, scoffing inane John Henry never got to be a railroad typhoon, Smothers sang. He was really a high school drop out. George Washington never told a lie, but got "smacked in the teeth" for chopping down the cherry tree. And the man "who sang to the trees" was really the man who talked to other things as well. (Like, he was nuts).
DEPRIVED CHILDHOOD
And Billy the Kid did all these bad things, like gunning folks down, because he had a deprived childhood, a deprived playground (no, other kids), a deprived sandbox (no sand), a deprived swing (no seat), and a deprived slide (straight down).
Last night can only be described as a "Smotheranny.” Nothing else quite does it. When they left around 11 p.m. no one had had enough. The Smothers lasted through it all with no problem. While Tom (the ID) acted through the entire act like a little boy with something "bad to tell everyone," Dick kept the crowd from being let in on the secret just in time.
Tremendous timing and great showmanship kept the crew-cut audience see-sawing from the naughty to the not-so-nice as Tom, the ID goes from that word he won't say to the cat he dropped 10 stories which, believe it or not, landed on all four and came up looking like a duck!
RETRIEVING CHICKEN
Bewildered Tom is still trying to get through to the folks back home, his brother, the audience, his "mommy and daddy," himself, and the retrieving chicken he used to have as a childhood pet. Somehow Smothers, the ID, his childhood, his country and his guitar-playing, all funnel into a mad mixture of irrelevance absurdity, innocence. (But, what can you do with a guy whose sandbox had no sand, whose swing had no seat and . . ?)
The act was broken up by some serious, non-spoofing folkwork by Esther Ofarim and Abraham. This Israeli couple sang five songs, each in a different language. They were the "real" thing.
But last night the audience was there to watch the Smothers poke holes into folkmusic, themselves, folk heroes, unrequited love's lament and about "hot cakes boiled in cabbage juice." And, about "Mediocre Fred," who punched a dock to show he was alive."

Some of their routines continued to be re-used as time went on (including a song involving cabbage). Fortunately, they can be seen on-line by people who weren’t around when Bill Paley pulled the plug.

The Missing Tail

A fight in the ring climaxes The Bully’s End, a 1933 Van Beuren cartoon.

As Gene Rodemich’s musicians play “Tiger Rag” in the background, fists fly. Well, and a tail disappears, thanks to an oversight by the animation checker. Each of these is shot on two frames.



It happens again, this time for one frame.



Notice the line of hat-wearing ducks in the first frame above. At Warners, you'd see in-between animation as Bosko splits into multiple versions of himself. Van Beuren doesn't even try. One frame, there's one duck. The next frame, there's a row of ducks. Then it goes from the line in one frame to one duck in the next.

Van Beuren cartoons never seemed to be big on dialogue. Here, the potential for comedy patter by the ring announcer is wasted by music and sound effects that practically drown him out.

Harry Bailey gets the "by" credit, and there's screen mention of the Rufle Baton and the Bray-Hurd Process.

The frames you see above are courtesy of the restoration efforts of Steve Stanchfield.