Today's Inside Gag

Inside gags found their way into Friz Freleng shorts from the mid-‘40s to the mid-‘50s when Paul Julian was responsible for background art. But there’s one a little before then in Freleng’s The Wacky Worm (1941).

At one point the title character, confronting a hungry crow in a junk yard, is next to an empty can for Binder Brand Peaches.



Henry Binder was the studio manager. He was born in 1906 in Bayonne, New Jersey, and worked as a publicist for Mack Sennett at one time. Leon Schlesinger hired him in 1933 when setting up a cartoon studio to replace Harman-Ising. Binder went into the navy during the war and after coming out, found Schlesinger had been bought out by Warner Bros. He soon joined Schlesinger's brother-in-law Ray Katz at Screen Gems until Columbia shut down its cartoon operations in late 1946. The 1950 census lists Binder as an “artist.” He never married and died in Los Angeles in 1975, age 68.

At this point, Len Kester was responsible for Freleng's background paintings.