Jack Benny, Gone For 50 Years

Jack Benny died 50 years ago today.

The intervening time has taken away many of his fans. Time also brings new fads and stars to popular culture, pushing out the old. Network radio, at one time the principal medium of home popular culture, has been gone longer than Benny. But the two are really inseparable.

On the air, Jack Benny gradually evolved. His initial popularity was sparked by parodies of films, and making gentle fun of his sponsor and the general stuffiness of radio commercials. Later, Benny regularly lampooned movie western serials, with characters breaking character and the “real world” intruding on the playlets.

Over time, Benny built a cast whose characteristics and personalities assigned to them on the broadcast mixed and meshed well with each other. Eventually, the standard variety show premise gave way to a situation comedy about people ON a variety show. Benny’s radio career could have carried on longer had the sponsor money put into radio not been transferred to television. Such was inevitable. Popular culture was changing.

By then (1955), Benny had been on the home screen, too, with his own show and appearing periodically on The Shower of Stars for several seasons. When his series ended in 1965, he was still wanted for occasional specials. One was in production at the time of his death.

The reason for the longevity (not even including his vaudeville career in the 1920s) is simple. People liked Jack Benny and the people he surrounded himself with.

Benny’s death was a stunning event. It brought forth a cascade of grief and remembrances. Columns in many newspaper editorial sections contained tributes to, and nostalgia about, Jack Benny. Always positive. They treated him like an old friend. Considering he had been in living rooms for decades, that shouldn’t be a surprise.

We’ve published a number of these editorials over the years. The one we’ve picked for today has a different perspective. It was from Stanley Reynolds’ column in the Arts section of the Manchester Guardian, Dec. 28, 1974. The English loved Benny as much as the Americans, though it appears his TV series didn’t air there. Reynolds’ perspective of Benny comes from the years of the Battle of Britain. The U.S. was attacked once at Pearl Harbor. The Brits had to deal with Nazi bombers over their homes on a daily, continual basis. As Winston Churchill inspired them, Jack Benny cheered them.

HERE HE IS walking home alone at night. His footsteps ring with that lonely nighttime sound and to keep his spirits up he starts humming. The song of course is Love In Bloom which is his theme song like Hope’s is Thanks For The Memory. Suddenly a bandit steps from the bushes and demands:
“Your money or your life.”
And then there is a long, long pause. The only sound is the audience falling about.
“Well?” the bandit finally says.
“I’m thinking it over,” says the oh so very familiar exasperated voice of Jack Benny.
How he used to milk that simple gimmick about being tight-fisted. And how difficult it is for us to believe he is dead. We know that so many of the great comics have gone. But there they are, Ollie and Stan on TV on Christmas morning and our own children know their routines by heart. Harpo and Chico are also alive and well in a double bill on BBC-2 on New Year’s Day.
Jack Benny will be less alive than the others. Not because he was any less a master of comedy but because he did his best work on radio. His films were few and his television appearances rare: usually as the guest star on someone else’s show, or topping the bill at the London Palladium.
Still, the few films that Benny did make were so good that he will survive as a character actor. I am particularly fond of To Be Or Not To Be, directed by Ernst Lubitsch, with Benny playing opposite Carol Lombard. They were supposed to be in a troupe of travelling actors who suddenly found themselves trapped by the Nazis in Poland. The film is probably unique in Worlds War II comedy because it makes fun of Hitler’s anti-semitism and the Gestapo, which is referred to as Der Hotfoot Department. This was, you see, 1942 and no one really knew how bad things were; when they found out good taste prevented any further comedy of this sort. But Benny is marvellous in the film and the satire on Hitler and his Nazi elitism so keen and on the mark that you know it is a classic which will someday come into its own again.
Probably Benny’s greatest success as a film actor was with Ann Sheridan in George Washington Slept Here in 1942. This was the film version of the Broadway hit, one of the modern classics of the American stage, and Benny showed what a fine character actor he could have been if he had not made so much money making people laugh on the radio.
Which leads me to what is probably the most important thing about Jack Benny. He was unlike any, other comic. He was not, for example, either a clown or a buffoon or even a mocker. I think it was Kenneth Tynan in his drama critic days who first pointed out that Benny was basically a straight man. The great Groucho was the eternal mocker, an aggressor doing battle with a boringly sane world. But Benny was simply a fellow who suffered at the hands of the world, usually in silence, arms folded across his chest, vain1y rolling his bright blue eyes heavenward.
He would plead his innocence to Mary Livingstone to Rochester, his gravel-voiced valet, to the US Treasury Department, and anyone else who wanted to take his money from him. Clownish enemies and aggressors surrounded him, all after his money or, like Fred Allen, his arch-enemy of the old radio days, simply trying to get the better of him comically. And Benny would simply react to their blows. Usually the reaction was a long silence, followed by a long drawn out “Well, I’ll tell you” or “Now look here.”
He had, of course, gimmicks galore—the avariciousness, the appalling fiddle playing, the ancient Maxwell motor car, his feud with Fred Allen, and his age (he was 38 for years and then became 39 and stayed there)—but his greatest gimmick was that long silence. This was his alone, perhaps because no other comic had Benny’s sense of timing. Even such masters as Hope and the great William Claude had to keep saying things; Benny could get a laugh just staying mum.
I suppose this was the most unusual sort of talent to be let loose on radio—especially American radio which has always been a bit frantic and where silence is “dead air time” and could be used to sell somebody something. I am well aware of my own failure here really to give anyone, especially the young, a good idea of this great idiosyncratic underplaying of Benny’s. He belonged to the radio in the great days of radio, of the depression and the war years. He was listened to all over America and was, in an era of some truly wonderful radio comedy shows, the most popular of the lot. His radio show was also heard here during the war years and much appreciated as were his many appearances at the London Palladium.
His voice for those of us who were small children then was familiar as a household object. We knew it like we knew the giant hands of our fathers and mothers — eye-level objects of childhood. When I hear the name Jack Benny it is a long ago winter night, and a schoolday in the morning, and I and my sister have been shushed off to bed but we leave the bedroom door open and listen, sometimes stealing out to the hallway to hear the radio better, for Jack Benny is on.
The world had gone mad and we children were well aware of it. If we were geographically 1ucky enough not to have bombs falling on us, well we had nightmares about it just the same. But here was this extraordinary man who lied about his age and hated spending money, and was silly in a most extraordinary way for a grown-up to be silly. Somewhere the grown-ups had gone mad and were killing children but Jack Benny was on the radio with Rochester, and Mary Livingstone and Dennis Day, and he was getting in a terrible state about having to spend money to buy Christmas presents and it seemed all very peaceful and calm,” sealing off thoughts of school and the real world outside.

Much more could be said about Benny. How he spent time during World War Two to write to families of soldiers he had visited in war zones. How his concerts starting in the 1950s raised money for orchestras, musicians’ pension plans and perservation of old theatres, including the Orpheum in Vancouver months before his death.

Suffice it to say, Jack Benny made people happy for several generations. Despite changes in popular culture, many of his radio shows are on the internet. He still makes people happy today.

From All of Us At Tralfaz

Yowp here.

I’m not a Christmas celebrant, but some of you reading are, either of the religious or secular versions, so I’m taking this time to thank you for stopping by this blog. I hope it’s been entertaining and/or informative. We will be on indefinite hiatus again soon.

The number of readers here is quite small but generally dedicated, and helpful if I get something wrong in one of the posts.

Below is a little Christmas song by one of the fine voice actors of the Golden Age, Mae Questel, from a 1937 Decca recording.



Another great cartoon actor was Daws Butler. We’ve talked about the “Talking Komics” he made with Marian Richman. Here are two sides of one involving Christmas, called “Sleepy Santa.” Radio veteran Ray Erlenborn provides the sound effects and the music is by Bob Mitchell. Bob Bellem wrote the story and lyrics. Marian Richman may be best known as Ralph Phillips’ mother, and she worked at UPA in addition to Warner Bros. We wrote about her in this post.

King Crowned For Christmas

Of the dozens of cartoons made by the animation division of Van Beuren Productions from 1929 (when it changed from Fables Pictures following the firing of Paul Terry) to the animation division's demise in 1936, only one was Christmas themed.

The Film Daily of Dec. 19, 1933 reported:

Otto Soglow, creator of the famous “Little King,” has drawn a special Christmas animated cartoon subject for RKO-Van Beuren wherein the merry monarch becomes a good samaritan with charitable purpose and comic effect.

I suspect Soglow didn’t draw anything; that was left to the Van Beuren staff under Jim Tyer, who got screen credit for animation.

“Comic effect” is in the eye of the beholder. Perhaps audiences of 1933 laughed at a king who behaved unregally and more like a child. But perhaps not, as the Little King series lasted ten cartoons and the king was dethroned when Burt Gillett was hired to run the studio.

The plot of Pals involves the Little King altruistically picking up two hoboes (one of whom is wearing a bra) on Christmas Eve, inviting them to bathe with him before a sleepover, and then coming downstairs the next morning to see what Santa Claus has brought. The King gets a small car, one of the hoboes getd a miniature fire truck, which they crash into anything and everything (“comic effect”?).

The two vehicles collide head-on. Positive and negative drawings emphasize the impact.



When the smoke clears, the woozy King is in the middle of a Christmas wreath.



Then he hiccoughs and a bubble comes out of his mouth to end the cartoon.



Yes, I know, it was one of the hoboes who swallowed a bar of soap and started bubbling away. Why is the Little King doing it now? The writers evidently thought it was hilarious. Methinks they were swallowing something a little stronger than a bar of soap.

Gene Rodemich fills the soundtrack with “Jingle Bells.”

Zapping the Cat

On the night before Christmas, Jerry attempts to evade Tom by disguising himself as a light on a tree. The mouse doesn’t fool the cat.



The mouse, however, turns out to be a conductor of electricity.



Director Bill Hanna alternates a blue-ish card with still drawings of Tom and Jerry and the zapping effects, varying the number of frames for the alternating artwork. Below are some of the drawings.



Finally, there’s an explosion. Interestingly, Hanna elects not to reveal a frame of a singed or burned Tom (if it were a Tex Avery cartoon, there might have been a blackface gag here). Instead when the dark clouds appear, the scene has dissolved into Jerry running in a different part of the living room.



Cecil Surry is the animator of this scene and gives way to Bill Littlejohn in the running scene. George Gordon, Jack Zander and Irv Spence supply excellent animation as well.

The Night Before Christmas is a fine cartoon all-around. The story is solid, the cat and mouse show plenty of different emotions, the backgrounds are incredibly well-rendered and Scott Bradley's score fits the action from start to finish.

News reports at the time said MGM rushed the short to completion, forcing Warner Bros. to re-title an Edward G. Robinson feature with the same name.

The Venice Vanguard reported on Nov. 13, 1941 that MGM was making 112 extra prints of the cartoon so it could be seen in as many theatres as possible in South America, England, and other places outside the U.S. On Nov. 17, The Hollywood Reporter said the studio had reserved space on all Clipper planes to ensure it was seen in foreign countries on the official release date of Dec. 6. However, the Lyric in Havre, Montana screened it Nov. 20 with the Bob Hope/Paulette Goddard feature Nothing But the Truth.

Hmm...Could Be

Artie Auerbach died in 1957, but his catchphrase lives on.

Auerbach was a newspaper photographer who met a man in Bronx. When Auerbach became a radio actor, he created a Jewish character based on the man, and called the character “Kitzel.”

On the air with Jack Haley, then Al Pearce, he was given several recurring lines, including “Mmm...could be!”

Yes, cartoon fans, that’s where the line you’ve heard for years comes from.

Tex Avery was particularly fond of it. Bugs Bunny said it in a A Wild Hare (1940). You can hear it Screwball Football (1939), Holiday Highlights and Ceiling Hero (both 1940).

It also turns up at the end of The Peachy Cobbler (released by MGM in 1950), with the story by ex-Warners writer Rich Hogan. A sick, destitute cobbler gives his last crust of bread (“whole wheat”) to poor, hungry snowbirds, who turn out to be happy, little shoemaker elves who surreptitiously make shoes and boots for the man to sell.

The shoemaker (played by Daws Butler) wakes up and jitterbugs happily with his wife (to the sped-up strains of “Running Wild”). They stop. “Mama,” he says to his wife, “I wonder if them little birds had something to do with this.” Cut to the birds, putting on their shoemaker hats, giving a stereotypical palms-out shrug and say the Kitzel catchphrase.

Avery used Kitzel’s other phrase of the period—“Hmm...it’s a possibility!”—to end Blitz Wolf (MGM, 1942).

Other directors used “Could be” as well. Bob Clampett ended Slap Happy Pappy (1940) with it, and so did Bob McKimson in Rebel Rabbit (1949). I suspect both cartoons were written by Warren Foster.

Incidentally, when Auerbach brought Mr. Kitzel to the Jack Benny show in 1946, the writers decided to develop their own catchphrases, so “Could be” was abandoned. Auerbach continued to appear on the Benny show, radio and television, until his death.

Normally, I don’t like lists on this blog, but if anyone reading can add another cartoon to the list, especially from a studio like Lantz or Screen Gems, or the Snafu shorts, please leave a note in the comments.

Tralfaz Sunday Theatre: A Visit to Santa

Some fine Christmas films have been made over the years. Perhaps you have some favourites.

And then there’s A Visit to Santa.

If it were a professional film it would be pretty easy to laugh at its incredible ineptness. But it seems to me that it was made by an amateur as kind of a glorified home movie to entertain family and friends, so picking on it may be unfair.

Stiff acting, a music soundtrack of someone playing a melody with one finger on an electric organ (and some basic chords), a suburban living room masquerading as Santa’s castle, an elf’s outfit that looks like someone’s mother made it, stock footage from who knows where, shots inside a department store, the list goes on. It has to be seen to be believed.

The opening credits say “Clem Williams Films presents.” This was an actual company based in Pennsylvania and was functioning as early as 1933. A story in the Pittsburgh Press in 1948 called it “the largest distributor of Religious Films and Equipment in the state” and that it was a rental outlet for movies by Cathedral Films.

The Syracuse Post-Standard, in 1989, published a feature story about movies being shown free outside an elementary school that were rented from Clem Williams, including classics like Dumbo and Bambi, and Who Framed Roger Rabbit? Groups could also rent highlight films of the Pittsburgh Steelers narrated by the great John Fazenda.

Also in its catalogue was 1970’s The Watermelon Man, sent by mistake to an elementary school in Cape Coral, Florida. Its racial stereotypes and profanity were not quite appropriate for the audience.

A. Clement Williams, Sr. died in Seminole, Florida, on June 27, 2001. He had moved there from Pittsburgh in 1979 and had sold his company. His obit mentioned he was married for 67 years and had been a member of Franklin-St. John’s-Trinity Masonic Lodge No. 221 in Pittsburgh for 57 years.

With that bit of background out of the way, you can watch the film below.

Jack Benny, 90 Decembers Ago

The Christmas holidays in 1934 seem to have been pretty good for Jack Benny.

Besides his radio show beaming out on the NBC Blue (WJZ) network, his musical comedy Transatlantic Merry-Go-Round (see it here) was on screens.

Jack had started out the 1934-35 radio season with a new sponsor—General Foods, makers of Jell-O. The contract must have been a comparatively good one. Radioland magazine at the end of 1933 didn’t list Jack among the top ten money earners when he was sponsored by Chevrolet. Things were different a year later, as reported by the Associated Press.

Santa Gives Radio Stars Fat Contracts
By C.E. BUTTERFIELD
NEW YORK, Dec. 20 (AP)—Santa Claus has dropped in already on many of the top-notchers of radio.
It isn’t the old gentleman’s dropping in alone that has ushered out a burst of early Christmas cheer—it’s the breath-taking contracts he’s dropped into many a prematurely hung sock or stocking.
To Eddie Cantor has gone the bulkiest gift of the lot to date. When the heavy-browed comedian returns to the air in February, he will top them all with a contract calling for $10,000 a Sunday—divided $7,000 for himself and $3,000 for needed program make up.
This figure isn’t so far above the amount due Kate Smith beginning with her new series, Christmas Eve. Altogether she will be making $7,150 per week, $5,000 for a Monday night show, $1,500 for a local station appearance and $650 for her Wednesday matinee.
The Revelers’ Quartet will rate $1,500 per microphone singing. Edwin C. Hill can figure up approximately $2,500 for four programs a week as commentator. The highest paid orchestra on the networks is declared to be the Fred Waring group at $6,000 for one program, or $10,000 for two a week.
It was in this $6,000-a-week class that Santa already has placed Will Rogers, Ed Wynn, Jack Benny, John Charles Thomas and Morton Downey. Out of his $6,000 for two programs Downey must pay the orchestra and narrator.
Santa has not done so badly by some others, too, as the following list shows:
$5,000—Phil Baker and his accordion; Rosa Ponselle, operatic soprano.
$4,500—Grace Moore, soon to start a new series; Bing Crosby and Lawrence Tibbett.
$3,500—Guy Lombardo’s Orchestra and Fred Allen.
$3,000—Roxy (S. L. Rothafel), Burns and Allen, and Joe Penner.
$2,800—Rudy Vallee.
$2,500—Helen Hayes, beginning a new series soon, and Nino Martini.
$2,000—Stoopnagle and Budd and Alexander Woollcott.
$1,200—Gertrude Niesen.

More stations continued to pick up Jack. KSTP in Minneapolis-St. Paul added his show on December 16. A few weeks earlier, his reach extended across the Pacific as he was heard on KGU in Honolulu.

A survey in December by the Cleveland Plain Dealer ranked Jack the No. 1 radio entertainer and his show as No. 3 (One Man’s Family was number one). And he continued to get fan mail. A blurb published in the Latrobe Bulletin of December 28 claimed Jack made a chart of every thousand fan letters he got. The breakdown was this:
343 requests for photos.
281 telling him that he was swell.
196 seeking charity.
72 offering advice on investments.
37 constructive criticisms.
17 offering their services as writers of humorous material.
37 wanting to know how to break into the ranks of radio comedians.
4 claiming that they were distant relatives.
11 reporting that they had heard his gags before in some way or another.

Jack’s show was on the air two nights before Christmas. Here’s a summary from the December 23 edition of the Capital Times of Madison, Wisconsin.

The Christmas spirit will run wild as Jack Benny is heard over WIBA tonight at 6 o’clock, with Mary, Frank, Don, and Don Bestor’s Orchestra. Jack will receive a lot of silly present[s] from Mary, Frank and the two Dons. Nothing will surprise him, however, and Jack may even have a card or two up his sleeve. Mary has had the true Christmas spirit for about a month and has written another poem. Whether this ever reaches the microphone is highly problematical, but she’s ready for it.

Apparently Mary’s poetic muse ran wild on the show. A copy of the script has disappeared from various collections, but Kathy Fuller-Seeley points out it was recorded for posterity in this article of the same day in the Pittsburgh Press.

Mary Chimes In With Her Ode To Xmas
She’s a Bit Early But If You’re Healthy You Can Stand Her Poem
Mary Livingstone thinks it’s all right to give father applause for Christmas and let him pay the bills.
Ever since Mary broke out with her “Oh Labor Day, Labor Day,” she has been laboring under the delusion that folks wanted more of her poetry. She got by with one on Thanksgiving Day, feeling sorry for the turkey as she pushed it in the oven.
“And now,” as the announcers say, here’s Mary saying “I’m a couple of days early with my Christmas poem but what do you care as long as you’re healthy?”

CHRISTMAS
By Mary Livingstone

Xmas time arrives once more
Just as you and I expect it.
And we’re happy as of yore
‘Cause we have not been neglected.

We get stockings from our brother
And more stockings from Sis and mother,
Stockings from our friends and bosses—
We wish we had four legs like hosses.

And our boy friends—they get neckties.
Everybody gives them neckties,
Purple, brown, pink, blue and yellow.
What else can you give a fellow?

And our mothers—what do they get?
Checks for twenty, should be fifty
Or a hundred if you’re working.
It’s your mother, so be gift-y.

Now comes father, poor old daddy.
For him, what has Santa Claus?
He pays all the bills for Xmas
So we all give him applause.

So—come on, folks—get the spirit;
Do things in a great big way.
Now’s the time to give the presents.
Not on good old Labor Day.

Somehow, Jack and Mary fit in a live performance over the holidays. Jack was greeted by the mayor of Jersey City on the 28th before he and Mary and their revue hit the stage at the Stanley Theatre that evening.

The only down-side of December for Jack was his attempt at going on the legitimate stage. Producer Sam Harris had signed Jack to star in a satire written by George S. Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind called “Bring on the Girls.” It opened December 13 at Parsons’ Theatre in Hartford. Despite the big names, the play never really worked. Critics liked the first act but, despite re-writes, Kaufman and Ryskind couldn’t get the rest into shape. You can read more about the failure in this post.

As 1935 began, Jack carried on with entertainment career. It had only another 40 years to go.

"D" Stands For "Don't Get Residuals for Christmas"

“It should be an annual video classic,” decided Arlene Garber of the Citizen-News of Los Angeles 60 years ago. And she was right.

Two evenings earlier (December 6), she watched NBC’s General Electric Fantasy Hour which featured a stop-motion version of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, produced by Videocraft International, which we know today as Rankin-Bass Productions.

Jay Ward saved money with runaway animation, with Gamma Productions in Mexico hired to make some of its cartoons. Videocraft saved money with runaway acting, employing Ontario actors with stage and CBC experience to voice its characters, the recording sessions supervised in Toronto by Wayne and Shuster announcer Bernard Cowan (later the narrator on Rocket Robin Hood).

Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer includes some of my favourites—Carl Banas, Paul Soles, and Paul Kligman, none of whom I associate with animation, as they did many things in Canada. Also in the special is another actor—Larry D. Mann, who played Yukon Cornelius (writer Romeo Muller used Johnny Marks’ song as a starting point for his story and created a whole new world, including Cornelius).

The first time I remember Mann is from when he played Butterball in a spy send-up episode of My Favorite Martian. He did much, much more, and his career went back quite a way in Canada; he had a radio show on CHUM in Toronto in 1949 and then went into newscasting.

The Star Weekly profiled him in a feature story in its Sept. 28, 1963 issue. Ten years earlier, he and Monty Hall hosted a programme called Matinee Party, but was aiming for another job at the Mother Corp.

CBC’s MR. EVERYTHING
photostory by GIL TAYLOR and BILL MARSHALL
TORONTO
TEN YEARS ago Larry Mann tried to get a job as a TV news announcer for CBC. The producer who interviewed him said, “You’re going bald, you’re too fat and you just don’t look the type. Take my advice — forget about television and get out of show business.”
Today Mann is balder, fatter and 40. He’s also Canada’s most versatile TV and radio performer. Although Mann still hasn’t done TV news, it’s about the only thing he’s missed in his push to the top of Canada’s entertainment industry. He has a weekly TV show, Midnight Zone, for late-night Toronto viewers; he is the off-stage host of two CBC network shows, Front Page Challenge and Flashback, where his main job as “warm-up man” is to relax the audience and encourage it to applaud; he is seen, even if his versatility makes him unrecognizable, in enough character parts in CBC drama to win him awards the last three years in a row, he is heard as the “Answer Mann,” answering listeners’ questions on CBC radio’s Audio, and as the No. 1 interviewer for Countdown, a show for teenagers. Other fields in which he has built a solid reputation include school broadcasts, comedy guest spots on variety shows, playing little old ladies for films and as the catchy voice of scores of products in commercials.
Being a one-man carousel of talents has brought Larry Mann a large degree of success. A recent survey placed him in the top 10 money earners in Canadian show business, estimating his take at $35,000 a year. This means that he is often criticized for being interested more in money than the creative aspects of his craft. Says Mann, “I’m not sure I could do any of my assignments better if I cut out all the rest—and I know I wouldn’t make as much money.” The point critics miss is that everything Mann does is based on acting. There is just as much the actor in Mann the pitchman and Mann the interviewer as there is in Mann the dramatic star or Mann the comedian. They are all different roles in an all-round actor’s repertoire.
This is borne out in Mann’s lack of the entertainer’s worry about over-exposure in broadcasting. His versatility means that his audience changes from role to role and nobody really gets a chance to tire of him.
Strangely enough, the work Mann gets the biggest kick out of is his warm-up chore. “I enjoy walking out and meeting 150 people for the first time and, in half an hour, turning them into friends. It’s probably the toughest challenge I face on a regular basis and I still enjoy it after six years. I also give warm-ups credit for building up my self-confidence and teaching me a little gall.”
But there’s little likelihood that Mann has ever had a lack of gall. He joined the RCAF during World War II, planning to become a pilot. The air force didn’t agree and he ended up doing broadcasting work for the service. After the war, he was a freelance broadcaster in the eastern United States [Rochester, N.Y.], then came back to Toronto to try out for TV news. When that fell through, he stumbled into TV via children’s shows like Uncle Chichimus and Howdy Doody, over his own protests that “I’m not an actor. Honest. I’m a news announcer.”
He’s given up protesting long since and has adopted acting as part of his life. But only part. Larry Mann stresses continually that he has the greatest respect for the dedicated work of specialists who have made acting their life, “but I wouldn’t give you a quarter for their home life. I happen to have a very square approach to this business and I like very square things like taking my family to hockey games and going to the cottage. I love my work but I’m not giving up my home life for anything.”
Life in Mann’s household is not quite as zany as you would expect and that’s probably due to the stabilizing effect of his wife, Gloria. The Manns have four boys: Danny, 15; Ronny, 12: Ricky, 9, and Jeffrey Brian, 3. They’re not strikingly different from anyone else’s children, mainly because of their mother’s level-headed bringing up of a celebrity’s family and their father’s matter-of-fact introductions of stars at home.
From this attachment to his family stems Mann’s major irritation in his career. “The thing I can’t stand,” he says, “is the constant pressure to go to the United States to work. By not specializing in one aspect of performing, I make good money and I get to stay here. I like Toronto. My family likes Toronto. Why should I move?”
People in the entertainment business respect his opinions and agree that Larry Mann is unique in Canadian broadcasting. Who else can change in three hours from a polished, tuxedoed master of ceremonies to a relaxed suburbanite lying on the living room floor after a roughhouse session with his sons, looking for all the world like a beached whale?

But move, he did. Good money? You be the judge. The Toronto Star’s Roy Shields explained in his column datelined Hollywood on March 22, 1967:

Larry Mann...in a scant year and a half has become Toronto’s acting ambassador to the land of Hollywood. His only regret is that he didn’t come here 10 years ago. The very idea of so much money lying around for so long, waiting for someone like himself to pick it up, touches a nerve in him. In his first year in Hollywood he made $80,000 as a character actor, nearly triple his earnings in Toronto where he did everything from voices in commercials to warming up studio audiences prior to the taping of TV shows.[...]
Mann made the jump to Hollywood in July 15 when a new theatre was due to open on Mount Pleasant Rd. and Mann was offered an acting assignment in it. “They phoned me and said they pay me $125 a week,” Mann recalled. “I put down the receiver and said to Gloria, ‘well, honey, that’s it I’ve reached the top.’ Then I picked up the phone again and called (director) Norman Jewison in Hollywood. He said he’d introduce me to an agent.
“So I flew down and met Wilt Melnick. We fell in love and were married. He’s a great guy, not at all like the usual image of a Hollywood agent. He has never once called me ‘Lar baby,’ ‘sweetheart,’ or told me to ‘go get ‘em tiger’.”
Three days later Mann called his wife and told her to put their house up for sale, even though they had spent loving care on it for years, making it into their home for a lifetime. “But,” says Mann, “I had already decided California looked like a nicer place to be unemployed.”
Within a week of his arrival in Hollywood. Mann was given a role in Ben Casey. His training and vast experience at the CBC opened doors for him everywhere.

While Mann was a regular on NBC’s Accidental Family (originally named Everywhere a Chick, Chick), he wasn’t quite through with Canada. He appeared as an office boss in a series of telephone commercials across the country in the ‘80s. And in the late 1970s, he had a weekly role in the Toronto-filmed Police Surgeon. Clyde Gilmour, known best in Canada for his national CBC music show in the 1970s, was also a columnist for the Star. He talked to Mann about his career, but the interview bypasses any mention of animation.

Here’s a portion, published July 20, 1974.

“I mainly played baddies for a long time on TV in Hollywood—gamblers, Mafia men, swindlers, con-men, hired killers, you name it.[...]
For example, just recently the Canadian actor depicted a shady evangelist in Black Eye, a crime melodrama starring Fred Williamson. Mann’s character wound up shot to death in that one, a fate that has often overtaken him. He estimates he has died violently at least 80 times in his bad-guy roles.
“I have been beaten to death, kicked to death, strangled, thrown off cliffs, trapped in burning cars, punctured to death with darts, dynamited, and fed into a pool of hungry piranhas. Once I was ever spun to death, which isn’t easy. They strapped me down on a circular table and then electrically rotated it until I was spinning like a top, faster than the eye could see. A nasty way to go.”
Mann said his place often used to be taken by a look-alike stuntman double in perilous scenes. But he does all his own stuff in Police Surgeon.
“Some of it looks risky, and I get by without a double.”
His first full-screen movie role after going to Hollywood was that of a music publisher in The Singing Nun, starring Debbie Reynolds. That, in fact, is by no means the non-criminal he has played, although it’s often the bad guy parts that people remember.
In Caprice, with Doris Day, Richard Harris and Ray Walston, Mann portrayed a Russian Interpol agent stationed in Paris. He was “the village idiot” in Norman Jewison’s The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming. In The Appaloosa, he was Marlon Brando’s priest. In Angel in My Pocket, he was Andy Griffith’s bishop.
“For a special reason,” said Mann with a grin, “I enjoy playing clergymen.
Every time I do, I receive a nice deadpan letter of congratulation from my old friend Norman Gallagher, the Roman Catholic bishop of Thunder Bay. I once served with him—with no distinction whatsoever—in the city of Toronto Squadron 400, Royal Canadian Air Force. If I play a bishop, he addresses me by that rank.
“But I didn’t hear from him at all after I played the ultimate role of God in a CBC stage radio play a long time ago. Frankly, since then everything has been a bit of a comedown.” [...]
Last year he turned down the offer to join the cast of Busting, a crime comedy-drama staffing Elliott Gould and Robert Blake as Los Angeles vice-squad cops. Mann’s role would have been that of a lecherous dentist [Yowp note: no word if his name was “Hermey”] who has intercourse with a call-girl in his dental chair.
The Canadian’s name is always Larry D. Mann in casting credits, although the middle initial is fictitious. This is because there already was a Lawrence Mann on the Screen Actors Guild rollcall when Larry arrived in Hollywood. He chose the central D. in memory of his father-in-law, David Kochberg.
“But get this,” said Larry D. Mann with an air of incredulity, “Lawrence Mann’s REAL name is Leslie Scruggs. Why, that’s a marvellous name, especially in westerns. Can you imagine the guy actually deciding to change it? Not me. I’d have stayed good old Leslie Scruggs forever.”

As for Mann’s feelings about Rudolph, we’ll snip a piece of a feature story on Christmas television Christmas specials with a Canadian connection. It was published in the Ottawa Citizen on November 28, 1998.

There’s no gold in them thar’ reruns: Throughout the hour-long Rudolph, Yukon Cornelius is constantly sinking his prospector’s pick into bits of rock, sampling the assays with his tongue, and pronouncing dejectedly, “Nothin’.” Larry Mann, who voiced Cornelius as well as six other characters in the film, knows the feeling.
For more than 30 years, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer has been a TV staple in scores of countries around the world. And for more than 30 years, Mann and the other Canadians whose voice characterizations provide at least half the charm of the film have not seen a penny in residuals.
A miffed Mann says he figures that’s why Rankin/Bass came north in the first place; it would be easier to stiff Canadian actors. Mann says he once phoned Rankin/Bass looking for a plum from their Christmas pudding, but instead got the heave-ho-ho-ho.
“Now, whenever I see that show, I wince,” says Mann from his home in Los Angeles.
Sprinkle with Canadians, then bring to a Burl: Burl Ives, the late balladeer and Oscar-winning actor who voiced the narrator, Sam the Snowman, was not part of the original production, according to Mann. NBC (the series’ original broadcaster) wanted a name star in the credits. So Rankin,Bass axed several songs that had been originally sung by Mann and others, and handed them over to Ives in separately produced segments that were appended to the original story.

If Mann thought Canadian voice actors were the only ones losing out on cash, he should have talked to Jean Vander Pyl. She sighed in 1994 if she got residuals from The Flintstones, she would own San Clemente instead of live in it.

Mann died in Los Angeles on January 6, 2014 at age 91. The lead line in the Associated Press obit mentioned his best-known role, one he performed once but has been seen by children for 60 years every December.

Santa in Candyland

Cartoon studios didn’t waste time when Walt Disney’s exclusive contract to use full Technicolor in theatrical animation expired on September 1, 1935. A story in Variety dated the previous May 28 said Leon Schlesinger and Max Fleischer had signed deals to make three-tint cartoons, while “Radio” (i.e., Van Beuren) and Charles Mintz were almost signed to do the same.

Mintz had begun his version of Disney’s Silly Symphonies in 1934 with the Color Rhapsodies in two-component Technicolor. Now the artists at the Screen Gems studio could try to match Disney, not only in elaborate animation, but in hues.

Bon Bon Parade was officially released on December 5. Several print stories at the time said it was perfect for the holiday season, with the plot revolving a poor child being granted his wish to go to Candyland. It’s not really a Christmas cartoon, despite the appearance of Santa and his reindeer, and Joe De Nat using “Jingle Bells” on the soundtrack; the Easter Bunny and a 4th of July scenario also appear.

St. Nick is made of gelatin.



The star of the cartoon isn’t the child or Santa Claus. It’s Technicolor. Colours constantly change and director Manny Gould uses as many as he can. Balls are shot into the air from a cannon, explode and fall. The colours change with each explosion.



One of the balls evidently thinks it’s in the Bronx instead of Candyland. It gives the local cheer, transitioning from blue to purple to red, then exploding again.



At the time of the original release, trade papers rated the cartoon “splendid” and “excellent.” But that’s because those dazzling colours (outside of Disney) were new on the screen. The novelty, of course, eventually wore off, and when the cartoon was re-released in the late 1940s, The Film Daily rated it “fair.”

Strip away the colours, and the problem with the cartoon is easy to see. There’s no story. After the kid is shrunken and seemingly imprisoned forever in Candyland, it’s just what the title says—a parade of things made out of candy to a male chorus singing about it (Ben Harrison is credited with the story). The idea of candy-as-objects wasn’t original, even during the original release.

Still, the use of colour and the effects animation are ambitious, and a restored version of the short is worth a look. A shame only Gould is credited.