Why, it’s Eddie Cantor!
Fire chief Ed Wynn.
Scrappy needs a winch to load hefty Kate Smith onto the boat.
Walter Winchell, with a voice by someone who doesn’t appear to have ever heard Winchell before.
And we get the NBC chimes in the form of icicles on Winchell’s nose. Yes, announcers used to strike hand chimes with a little mallet up to the microphone before the chimes became electronic a few years later.
We’re at least spared Joe Penner in this cartoon, with the story by Sid Marcus and animation (and there’s some good animation in this) by Art Davis.
A good example of your point about hand-striking the chimes can be seen in this 1933 reconstruction of a radio show. An actual NBC announcer is doing the work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96rA-QgXL5
ReplyDeleteIt must have been very much to the chagrin of CBS that the G-E-C chimes became such a shorthand for radio in cartoons of the 1930s and 1940s.
I remember reading that Chicago's WMAQ Radio actually used a Xylophone to simulate the G-E-C in the early 1930's. The chimes were also sort of an inside joke with The Three Stooges in at least two Columbia shorts. One where the boys are working the rock pile in prison. Dropping the shackled metal balls on their ankles to the G-E-C chimes. And a another one where Moe slaps Larry and Shemp three times with the chimes as sound effects. I have never seen " Scappy's Expedition ". I take it the actor didn't do the rapid fire, sharp,staccato Winchell type delivery.
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