Staircase Cycle

Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera didn’t come up with the idea of cycle animation for their TV cartoons. They used it much earlier. Here’s an example from the second Tom and Jerry cartoon, The Midnight Snack. There are 12 drawings (a half foot) of film to this cycle, which we’ve slowed down.



The character you see descending the staircase is voiced by Lillian Randolph. Contrary to what you may have read, there is no indication the character had a name in the MGM cartoons. Radio historian Chuck Schaden asked her about it in an interview in August 1976:

CS: Did you ever do any voice work for any of the animated cartoons on TV or in the movies?
LR: You know Tom and Jerry?
CS: Yes.
LR: Well, you know, remember the legs, the striped stockings and the big feet of the cook and that was all you could see? That’s my voice.
CS: That was you. The legs made the...
LR: The legs and big feet. (laughs) Oh, listen. The funniest thing. I saw that cartoon in Japan.
CS: You did?
LR: With a Japanese woman doing it. I laughed! I’m telling you, I was sitting in a theatre. It was real funny. And they still show it over there.

Randolph also revealed in the same interview she was “taught Negro dialect by a Caucasian” when she first appeared on a radio show called “Lulu and Leander” a number of years earlier.

Unfortunately, Randolph never received screen credit for this or any other MGM shorts. Roughly six weeks after this cartoon first appeared, Randolph would begin a long-running role as a maid on the radio show The Great Gildersleeve that lasted into the mid-‘50s.