Space Wiener

Daws Butler played a seemingly uncountable number of cartoon characters in his career. He was a star at Hanna-Barbera in its early years. MGM, Warner Bros. and Walter Lantz regularly featured him in their cartoons. He was the voice of all kinds of animated TV commercials, and even wrote some. This doesn’t include children’s records, writing and appearing on Stan Freberg’s radio shows and manipulating and voicing puppets on Time For Beany. But perhaps his most unusual role was that of Cadet Frankie Luer.

Frankie was an animated wiener. Well, barely animated. In the brief clips available of him, only his mouth moves for the most part. And while he’s in a commercial, it doesn’t appear it was a television commercial. It was shown on a makeshift rocket.

If you’re a kid, it sounds like something fun. The Torrence Herald wrote in its issue of January 10, 1957:

Jim Dandy to Offer Trips To Moon at Lomita Store

Local children will be treated to tree trips to the moon tomorrow when Frankie Luer brings his huge space ship to the Jim Dandy Market at 24911 S. Western Ave. Free trips in the rocket ship will be available from 12 noon to 7 p.m.
Built by Luer Packing Co. to entertain their young friends, Frankie Luer's Space Ship is an authentic 60-foot replica of the giant interplanetary ship of the future.
Inside its metal hull, the space ship contains a comfortable 34-seat auditorium where children are seated for their seven-minute trip to the moon. During their trip the young space travelers experience all the thrills of supersonic flight, from the first surge of power as the ship blasts off to the final bump as it lands again.
Technically, the Luer Space Ship is a mechanical and electronic wonder. The full color animated film of the trip is projected onto the front "view plate" by means of a lens device that resembles a periscope. This allows a projection space of a few feet to accomplish the same thing as a huge auditorium projection room, and adds realism to the film.
Vibrators mounted in the tail of the ship give the illusion of flight with both sound and vibration. Other unique devices on the Luer Space Ship record altitude and flight time in a series of lights that can be seen by the passengers.

Charles Pappas’ book Flying Cars, Zombie Dogs & Robot Overlords reports the budding astronauts also received a promotional pamphlet called “Frankie Luer’s Space Adventures” where the space winner joins a boy named Davey Rocket on a trip to Venus, where they meet mushroom people and see moss-covered cities. On the back of the comic was a Flight Certificate which officially certified the bearer travelled aboard the Luer space ship. Mycomicshop.com adds the 5-by-7 full colour comic was 36 pages and included instructions for making a flying saucer sandwich. It was printed by Western Publishing. Comic price: ten cents. The Catalogue of Copyright Entries reveals it was written by the Dan D. Miner Co.

By the way, the Luer Space Ship was rescued from a life-time of increasing rust. Its story is on this web site run by its co-owner. I’ve spotted ads in Los Angeles papers up to 1968 advertising the rocket’s appearance.

Getting back to the cartoon, the always enjoyable Prelinger Archives posted bits and pieces to archive.org. Parts of the first two silent films were used to make the animated plug that apparently appeared at the beginning of the “space trip.” If you want to hear Daws, click on the audio player. You might be able to get it to match up with the first part of the first video and get a better idea of what it looked like to the kids in the rocket ship.







And below is silent footage of the space trip itself. Not very exciting and the animated portions are very limited. I couldn’t tell you who did the animation.