Follow My Hop

Dry brush and multiples enliven a sequence in Hiawatha’s Rabbit Hunt, a June 1941 Warner Bros. cartoon directed by Friz Freleng.

Bugs Bunny tries to escape from Hiawatha’s arrow to the head by hopping sideways. Hiawatha keeps up with him. The annoyed Bugs blurts out “Well, try this one!” That’s where the dry brush and multiples come in as Bugs hopes to a nearby cliff. These are random drawings. Freleng, or his layout artist, has Bugs hopping to and from the foreground.



Hiawatha follows.



Yes, it’s that fine old cartoon gag. Gravity takes effect after a character next to a cliff realises he’s in mid-air. Joe Barbera and Charlie Shows were still employing it in 1958 on poor Yowp in the Yogi Bear cartoon Foxy Hound-Dog.



We get the sucker-transformation gag seen in All This and Rabbit Stew (Avery, 1941). Does anyone know when it was first used in a cartoon?



Down he goes.



Mike Maltese wrote the story for this, with Gil Turner handed the animation credit.

Elmer Fudd, Chick Magnet

Elmer Fudd is a red-blooded, heterosexual he-man. You need no further proof than The Unruly Hare, a February 1945 release directed by Frank Tashlin.

Fudd is working as a wailwoad surveyer. The twacks will go right over Bugs Bunny’s home. Much like later cartoons directed by Chuck Jones and Bob McKimson, he won’t stand for it.

Bugs’ first reaction is to play sexual head games with him using a copy of almost-Esquire.



The inevitable erection stand-in.



Tex Avery at MGM had Red. Shamus Culhane at Lantz had Miss X. Frank Tashlin, to whom leggy women were not unknown in live action, has one of his artists come up with stills. Carl Stalling plays "It Had To Be You" in the background.



An invitation to Elmer.



Fudd carries on like he’s at a strip show (Okay, it’s the ‘40s. Make that burlesque show).



Elmer’s so overcome with pent-up desire, he thinks he’s involved with one of the babes in the photos.



It’s only after Bugs says to him “Ehhhhh, is you is, or is you ain’t, my baby?” that Fudd weawizes he’s been twicked. For whatever reason, Tashlin cuts to a longer shot. Avery and Culhane, on the other hand, would keep the scene in close shot so you’d get the full impact of the take.



Tashlin only made two Bugs Bunny cartoons. Both were released after he left the studio. He was working for Moray and Sutherland on stop motion films starting in August 1944.

Cal Dalton get the rotating animation credit on this. The backgrounds are unmistakably the work of Dick Thomas. Tubby Millar’s story includes references to Joe Besser and Jerry Colonna (it’s a shame Bugs didn’t sprout Colonna’s moustache for the scene), and a war-time reference at the end.

Laughing at the Concert

After Jack Benny’s success on radio and TV, he took to the stage again. Not necessarily with a variety revue like he had in the 1940s and ‘50s. He performed benefit violin concerts across North America with symphony orchestras and the world’s greatest violin players. One benefit months before he died in 1974 was to save the Orpheum Theatre in Vancouver, where he had played on his birthday in 1928. (Yes, that is the same Don Bestor who led the musicians on his show).

How much did Jack raise? Let’s find out from this story from the Associated Press, appearing in papers starting around Jan. 28, 1964 (of course, he had almost 11 more years to go).

Musician Jack Benny Has Made $3.5 Million For U.S. Symphones
By MURRAY CHASS
PITTSBURGH (AP) — Jack Benny, whose comic tightwad image has helped make him rich, draws still more money these days with his violin.
The money, however doesn't go into the mythical vault fictitiously located in the depths of Benny's Beverly Hills home.
Rather, it goes primarily into the treasuries of many of the nation's symphony orchestras with which Benny has appeared as guest soloist in benefit concerts, where he is in as much demand as he ever has been as a comic.
BENNY, WHO played violin professionally as a teen-ager, performs the concerts in complete sincerity. At the same time he is humorous about them.
"I'm not good enough to be a concert violinist," Benny says frankly, "but I'm good enough to do a comedy concert. The playing is as good as I can do—which isn't too good."
"I am only a fair violinist—not even a good one — who would not be able to give a legitimate concert."
Now at 70—far from his legendary 39 — Benny has appeared with most of the major orchestras in the country in the past seven years, receiving no salary for his performances, just expenses.
In all, he has played with about 35 orchestras and has helped raise nearly $3.5 million for various benefits. About half of the money has gone to maintenance and pension funds of the orchestras.
"I THINK I get about as much satisfaction out of this as anything," Benny explained before a recent appearance with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. "I have a lot of fun doing it. It's very much like a stage performance, and I like it very much.
"It's a satire on a world-famous violinist. I'm supposed to think that I am a great violinist.
"The audiences have been great. Some don't know what to expect. The easiest audiences to make laugh are concert-goers because they don't get a chance to laugh at concerts."
The critics have "been great about it," he added. “They've always loved it. I expected just once that some critic would say, 'It's funny, but it shouldn't be done.' But it's never happened. I play as good as I can. They (the critics) wouldn't like it if they thought I was making a monkey of the music. They know I wish I could play better."
THE COMEDIAN does not appear in the first half of the Benny concerts but takes the spotlight after the intermission. He works his colleagues into the act — in Pittshurgh, conductor William Steinberg arid concert master Samuel Thaviu served as his chief straight men, acting more than performing at times.
The program opens with Sarasate's "Gypsy Airs." Benny becomes enraged at the concertmaster for playing part of Benny's solo and has the conductor banish him. Somehow, near the end of the piece, the melody slides over into Benny's famous trademark, "Love In Bloom."
The second item (which varies from city to city) is a condensed version of one of the major classics, during which a couple more distractions occur. Benny and the conductor start heckling each other.
Finally in "Capriccio Espagnol" Benny serves as concertmaster. The music goes faster and faster, and at the end the distraught Benny stalks off the stage. He returns, however, for some informal encores.
THOUGH STEINBERG is a serious-minded director, he was quite taken by Benny.
"I feel that the fact he's so enormously musically makes the whole thing so pleasurable," he said. "Everything he does comes out of the spirit of the music, and that's what important."
Thaviu also admired Benny for his sincerity and his timing.
"When it (the performance) done in the spirit in which does it, it can't be anything but good," said the consertmaster.

A story in the Lompoc Record of Oct. 16, 1974 said Jack had appeared with 88 symphony orchestras as of Sept. 14 (after a show in New Orleans) and had raised an estimated 5.9 million dollars.

The paper advertised an engagement with the Santa Barbara Symphony on Nov. 26. He never made. Cancer had taken told. Jack Benny was dead in a month.

Mannie Melodies

For years, you’ve read or heard about Manny Farber’s praise for Warner Bros. cartoons. Any claim he was he first to take notice of them is hearsay. An earlier champion was Paul Harrison in his column for the Newspaper Enterprise Association around June 23, 1937.

Farber’s opinion piece was published in the September 20, 1943 issue of The New Republic. In case you have never seen the full article, here it is:

Short and Happy
SOME of the best movies of the year are seven-minute cartoons called by names like "All This and Rabbit Stew" or "The Fighting 69th 1/2," which come on as unheralded transitions in the double bill and feature the notorious Bugs Bunny, a rabbit that not only performs physical feats of a Paul Bunyan magnitude but is equally sharp with his mind. They come from Warner Brothers, are produced by Leon Schlesinger and are called "Merrie Melodies"; ten of them are being reissued this fall, still as "Merrie Melodies" but with the addition of a Blue Ribbon.
One reason for the brightness of "Merrie Melodies," and for their superiority over fellow travelers in the field, is that Schlesinger is out to make you laugh, bluntly, and as it turns out, cold-bloodedly. This runs him against the grain of the several well worked grooves down which the animated cartoon has traveled under the belief that these grooves will never wear through. However, it no longer seems funny to see animals who talk and act like human beings, who do all sorts of ingenious tricks—most of them superhuman—who go through lives of the highest excitement and reward, but have no inner, or mental, life. The complex emotional life and three-dimensional nature of the Schlesinger characters allow their makers to poke fun at everything in sight, or out of sight—especially if it is something familiar and well loved, like "Hiawatha," a kind person, or any bad actress' great moments. It is an illusion of most cartoon makers that they must have a moral, or do good, if it means only killing the villain; Schlesinger is not under this illusion. The masterpiece, "Inki and the Lion," is also a masterpiece of amorality—so far the other side of goodness that it is a parody of "Bambi." In this version of forest life Man is the likable spear-thrower, preyed on by animals, and the king of the Forest is a supernatural horror called the Mina bird, who hates man and beast alike.
The artistic method in Schlesinger cartoons is neither in Disney's top drawer (at his best) nor Popeye's bottom one, but even so it has gone off at a tangent lately that may open up new paths to the cartoon method. It is a change from the straight, insipid realism to a sophisticated shorthand, made up of flat, stylized, posterlike representations, using a sort of Persian color of fancy tones like dusty pink. It is a much simpler style of cartoon drawing, the animation is less profuse, the details fewer, and it allows for reaching the joke and accenting it much more quickly and directly: it also gets the form out of the impossible dilemma between realism and wacky humor.
The goal in Schlesinger heroes is a comic figure with a temperament and behavior as peculiarly his own as those of a Chaplin or a W. C. Fields, which goal is never achieved; but it leads to several rewards, like the Mina bird, who appears in the "Inki" (little African boy) series. The Mina bird is like a toucan, shaped like an acorn, coal black, who moves inscrutably in an atmosphere of over-whelming supernaturalism, to the tune of Mendelssohn's overture to "Fingal's Cave." At the end of each musical phrase he gives one prodigious, syncopated hop, thereafter moving forward indomitably. 'The Mina bird is inevitably followed by a passive three-year-old individual named Inki, who loves to throw spears, and by a lion (the lion is Schlesinger's most unsuccessful creation—he looks like Robinson Crusoe). The famous Bugs Bunny is Schlesinger's one-animal advertisement of the moral that unadulterated torturing of your fellow men pays off.
At the 26-issues-per-year rate at which they are thought up, the "Merrie Melodies" are bound to vary greatly in quality. The surprising facts about them are that the good ones ("The Case of the Missing Hare," “Hiawatha's Rabbit Hunt," "Inki and the Lion") are masterpieces and the bad ones aren't a total loss. For instance, the poor "Rabbit Who Came to Dinner" is given a tremendous lift when in the midst of the inevitable and tedious chase of the rabbit by Elmer, the clock strikes twelve and Bugs breaks into one of his typical emotional upsets, roaring out "Auld Lang Syne," kissing Elmer, flinging confetti in the age-old tradition of New Year's Eve—Elmer being as easily diverted in July as in any other month. Schlesinger is in the Sennett tradition, which uses the whole sphere of man's emotion and behavior simply as a butt for humor, no matter what it leads to. The aim is purely and simply laughter. Schlesinger's men are rich and inventive humorists, and their smart-alecky freshness has turned what is meant to be an interval on the program into the moment when the whole audience brightens up. MANNY FARBER

All This and Rabbit Stew has never been on my winner’s list. When I watched it 60-some-odd years ago, I thought the hunter was too slow and stupid. Elmer Fudd may be a bit of a dullard, but at least his emotions change, and he’s a good foil in The Wabbit Who Came to Supper, with Farber describing one of my favourite scenes in the film.

Regardless, the one thing Farber wouldn’t have known at the time was the Warners cartoons got better and better. There were plenty of fine cartoons made before 1948, which were sold to Associated Artists Productions and found their way onto seemingly countless TV stations for ubiquity starting in June 1956. Over the years, millions of young people couldn’t turn away from their TV sets as they watched Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and others (including the unfortunate hunter in Rabbit Stew) over and over and over.

Maybe Farber praised the Merrie Melodies and Looney Tunes early, but it’s those kids who grew up to research and write books and fanzine columns about them, creating the foundation of animation history knowledge that, today, seems like it was always there.

Fake News in Real News

The Phantom Ship was released by Warner Bros. on Feb. 1, 1936. But when was the cartoon made?

We can get an idea when the shot cuts to a newspaper read by those rascally scamps, Ham and Ex. You will have click on the frame grab to see the text.



The first thing I thought was “That typeface looks like the one Variety used.” Well, it is. Whoever pasted together this fake newspaper used the Nov. 29, 1935 edition of Daily Variety.

The items about Dewey Wright and the New York hotel situation come from page 12.


And the Loew's State story is from page 1.



While Tex Avery was coming up with enjoyable one-reelers like Gold Diggers of ‘49 and Page Miss Glory, Jack King was futilely endeavouring to make Beans a star in tepid cartoons like this before going back to Disney later the same year.

Paul Smith and Don Williams are the credited animators. I suspect the backgrounds are by Art Loomer. I'd love to know who else was in the background department in 1936.

Care For Some Maltese Minestrone?

Phil De Guard gives viewers of Bye Bye Bluebeard some inside gags in a medicine cabinet in Porky Pig’s bathroom.

When Bluebeard opens the cabinet to find something for his indigestion (caused by eating bombs not-well-disguised as popovers) what do we see?



On the top shelf is Frizby Mixture for director Friz Freleng and Maltese Minestrone for that native son of Italy, via New York City, writer Mike Maltese.

On the middle shelf is Ted Pierce’s Medicine, named for writer Tedd Pierce, McKimk’s Solution for director Bob McKimson and Dr. Foster’s Panacea for writer Warren Foster.

On the bottom shelf is Jones Laxitive (sic) for director Chuck Jones. It’s next to the bottle of Lydia Hokum, a parody of the Lydia Pinkham tonic.

“Alky Haul” may have been popular with many of the staff members, certainly more so than Quinine, Boric Acid or Castor Erl.



Hidden on the middle shelf is a hair oil, perhaps named for Hawley Pratt, Friz layout artist. His name shows up as “Hadley” in other Warners backgrounds.

Did director Art Davis use the Hair Tonic?

Davis’ old buddy, Sid Marcus, wrote the cartoon, with animation by Bill Melendez, Emery Hawkins, Don Williams and Basil Davidovich, with layouts by Don Smith.

The cartoon was the last one made by the Davis unit, and released on Oct. 21, 1949.

Years ago, there was a website devoted to inside and background gags at Warners cartoons. It has suffered the fate of many a site. It’s off-line. But view it here.