How to Hurt a Tail in Nine Frames

Tex Avery gets credit for picking up the pace of theatrical cartoons in the 1940s, but the artists at MGM were quite capable of fast action before he got there.

In one scene of Wanted: No Master (1939), Count Screwloose races into the bathroom, races out, then races in again. J.R. the Wonder Dog’s tail gets caught behind the door.



The reaction drawings below are all one per frame. I love the exaggerated open mouth. It’s like something in an Avery cartoon.



There’s some really frantic animation as J.R. tries to free his tail. Devon Baxter tells me it its all by Bill Littlejohn. No animators are credited on the film (frames from Mark Kausler).

This short was the product of New York newspaper cartoonist Milt Gross, whose career in the MGM cartoon department lasted from May to September 1938. The California-based animators didn’t hit it off with easterner Gross, and producer Fred Quimby didn’t like his work, either. Pretty soon, Hugh Harman and Rudy Ising were brought back in to stem the turmoil, and wildness in the studio’s cartoons pretty much had to wait for Avery’s arrival.

A Less-Than-Magical Time For Dick Sargent

The Phil Silvers Show with Sgt. Bilko was a huge hit. “I know!” said someone. “Let’s do Bilko except move it from the Army to the Navy.” Thus begat McHale’s Navy. “I know!” said someone. “Let’s do McHale, except make it female instead of male.” Thus begat Broadside.

The show accomplished one thing—it proved you can go to the well only so many times.

One of the cast members was Dick Sargent. I suspect when you see his name, this is not the sitcom you associate with him. But even before Broadside Sargent was the star of another TV comedy. One Happy Family was a 1960-61 mid-season replacement with a cast that included Jack Kirkwood and Cheerio Meredith. Broadside was on the air for 32 episodes. One Happy Family was ousted by ABC after 15.

One of the wire services caught up with Sargent to talk about his new series in a story published Jan. 8, 1961.

HATES HORSES, ACTOR FORCED INTO COMEDY
Dick Sargent Born to Horsey Set but Fears Steeds
HOLLYWOOD (UPI) — When Dick Sargent quit Stanford University in 1951 to become an actor he simply had to become a comedian—there's not too much of a market for tragedians these days and Sargent can't stand horses.
Sargent, who begins a television series "One Happy Family" Jan. 13, came from a long-time family of horsemen, but even the thought of climbing aboard one makes him break out in a sweat.
"You can see this made things a little rough trying to break into Hollywood in 1951," said the tall, good looking 30-year-old Sargent. "Almost everything that was being produced involved at least one horse."
Sargent said his agent got him one role in which he had to drive a two-horse team, together with several other teams.
"I don't why but just getting behind the horses seemed to make me tighten my grip on one side and my team went racing out of the camera angle away from the others," he said.
"For the next year I didn't get a part."
During his break-in period in Hollywood Sargent was endowed with an asset most prospective actors do not have—money.
"This trust fund kept me eating," he said. "During that one year without work I moved to a little town in the interior of Mexico," then—it kind of crept up on me—the trust fund ran out. All I had left was $200. I came back to Hollywood."
Sargent said his next contact with a horse was in the TV show "Wichita Town."
"They had a couple of scenes with horses but the director had to use a double," he said. "Believe me, producers don't like this because it costs money."
Sargent blames his fear of horses on his grandfather, John MacNaughton.
"When I was about five or six, grandfather gave me a hobby horse," he said. "I promptly got on and just as promptly fell off."
"Grandfather MacNaughton, incidentally, was the first horse-racing commissioner in the State of California."
Sargent's father, Elmer Fox, died when he was 12. He owned a large horse breeding ranch at Carmel, Cal., the Central California resort city Sargent still calls "home" although he owns his own home near the ocean not far from Hollywood. He's still a bachelor.
In his role in "One Happy Family" Sargent portrays a meteorologist who marries into a family of zany characters whose operation is somewhat different than his scientific thinking. It involves the humorous situations that could and do develop with three generations living under one roof.

Audiences may not have been happy with One Happy Family but producers were happy enough with Sargent. He worked steadily in films and got another crack at TV stardom in 1964. One of his publicity stops was in Dayton, Ohio, which resulted in this feature story published September 14.

Dick Sargent: An Actor Who Can't Tell a Lie
By GREGORY FAYRE, Daily News Sunday Editor
With his thick-lensed glasses, receding hairline and professorial manner, Dick Sargent, actor, could have passed for a refugee from "Mr. Novak," or "Our Miss Brooks," or "The Blackboard Jungle."
He was, in fact, absent with leave from something called "Broadside," a new television series described by its creators, or by their public voices, as a "female McHale's Navy." (It will be seen on Ch. 2 Sunday nights.)
It features, naturally, broads, if you will pardon the word, who join the Navy to see the world, or something like that.
In addition to Sargent, the show stars Kathy Nolan, who swapped her flower-sack dresses in "The Real McCoys" for bell-bottomed trousers, and Eddie Andrews, who usually is a guest star.
Dayton was one of the numerous stops Dick was making in the line of duty during what he laughingly called, "my vacation."
Over a dinner of swordfish, French fries and raspberry sherbet, (at 6-2, 173, he doesn't have to sweat his weight), he discussed his life, his career and his current vehicle, quite candidly. “I am one of those people who really loved his parents," Dick said. "You know there are so many actors and actresses who say. 'I lived in the slums and I hated them' or 'They gave me everything and I hated them.' Not me. I loved them."
Dick's father, to hear him tell it, was a combination of Errol Flynn, Rudolph Valentino, George Raft and Lionel Barrymore.
"He was fantastic," he says proudly and loudly for a soft spoken man. "He was many things ... a prohibition agent and a rum runner at the same time; a real estate man: an actor; an actor’s agent; a publicity man; many things. I was never able to top him."
He Headed for Mexico
After his father died when he was 12, Dick says he "became extremely introverted. I couldn’t talk to anyone for six years. I lived in a shell. My grandfather, who wanted me to grow up to be a businessman, sent me off to military school."
Finally, a more outward Dick Sargent emerged. He enrolled at Stanford, gained a group of friends, started acting and soon became "the human being I am today, whatever kind of human being that is."
He left college in his third year, hired an agent and landed two movie jobs quickly.
"I figured that it was a cinch that I would be working all the time."
Then, wham! He was out of work.
So he packed his bags along with a small trust fund and headed for Mexico and the export-import business.
"Somebody forgot to tell me that the trust fund would run out."
He went busted and latched on to odd job after odd job—selling silver door-to-door, trimming trees, digging ditches, anything to keep food in the cupboard and shelter over the head.
You've Gotta Have Faith
Then came a break and he soon had roles in "Bernadine," "Operation Petticoat," "The Great Imposter." "That Touch of Mink,” "For Love or Money," a few other movies, a few TV spots, and this series.
Dick lives by himself in one of two houses he owns. He is divorced.
He doesn't date actresses. "I dated every Susan Oliver in town," he said. "But when you sit and talk with an actress it's like talking to a man.
"They are worried about their careers. They say, 'I'm going to get that part from that woman. I'm going to knock on doors and land that part, etc.' I have enough to worry about with my own career."
Dick Sargent is a man who is doing what he wants to do.
"I am billed as one of the three stars in "Broadside." That is important. Not because I want the star billing, but because it means the studio recognizes me."
It means he has arrived, it means lean days in Mexico and peddling silver on the streets are behind him.
It means, as he says, "If you have faith in yourself and confidence in your ability, you will make it."
He doesn't know how to knock on doors, to push for a job, to step on other people, he says. He should, but he doesn't.
"I can't tell a lie on any level above little white lies."
Can "Broadside" make the team in the rating games?
"I think it can," Dick answered. "Frankly, I may sound cocky, but I don't think our competition is so tough."
In most cities the show goes against the last half of "Ed Sullivan" and "The Bill Dana Show."
As Dick Sargent said, he has faith in himself and in his series.

Faith in the series tuned out to be unfounded, but Sargent had reason to have faith in himself. That’s even though his next regular role was on The Tammy Grimes Show, which was pulled after four episodes. He jumped into a proven winner, replacing the pain-ridden Dick York on the sixth season of Bewitched. The series petered out after the eighth season but his performances as the mortal Darrin Stephens live on in reruns—along with a seemingly-immortal debate about which one played the role better.

Going Up?

A stretch in-between and dry-brush help move the “Gildersleeve” clerk who continually gets outsmarted by Bugs Bunny in Hare Conditioned (released in 1945).

Bugs is disguised as an elevator operator and tricks the rabbit-chasing clerk into getting off the lift, who suddenly realises what has happened.



He gets into the elevator again and Bugs shoves him out. Another reaction with multiples and dry-brush as Gildersleeve rushes to take the stairs instead.



Ken Harris, Ben Washam, Basil Davidovich and Lloyd Vaughan are the credited animators for director Chuck Jones.

The official release date was Aug. 11, 1945 but, naturally, it appeared on movie screens earlier. The Varsity in Iowa City showed it July 14 along with Rosalind Russell and Jack Carson in Roughly Speaking. Say! Someone should make a cartoon parodying that title. Are you listening, Mr. Jones?

Pink Elephants Not On Parade

There’s a great sequence in Walter Lantz’s The Bandmaster (1947) where a drunk on a circus high-wire sees pink elephants. There’s a cut to a scene where they are ballet dancing to the Overture to Zampa.

There’s a cut back to the drunk and the elephants, which dive into his bottle of hootch. Each of the three elephants go into the bottle in a different way. The drunk’s reactions are animated as well.



How did the drunk get up there? Beats me. Maybe that scene got cut.

Bugs Hardaway and Webb Smith came up with the gags. La Verne Harding and Les Kline received the animation credits but the star animator in this one is the great Pat Matthews, who gives us some lovely perspective animation of the staggering drunk. He is my favourite of the 1940s Lantz artists.

Darrell Calker does a fine job for the score.

Tom and Jerry Home Video News

Delightful news has come out from the Warner Archive Collection twice this year.

First, the company was able to release all four seasons of The Huckleberry Hound Show. Now comes word that the complete Hanna-Barbera theatrical run of Tom and Jerry will be on Blu-Ray AND DVD. Release date is December 2nd.

Let’s get right to the point. Anyone reading this likely knows a release of Tom and Jerry cartoons was stopped several years ago because of concerns about blackface gags. Here’s what Warners says:

The complete collection of Hanna Barbera’s Tom and Jerry Oscar® winning masterpieces, available at last! Including three shorts, Casanova Cat, Mouse Cleaning   and His Mouse Friday   which are now completely remastered and uncut for the very first time.

Six discs. 20 audio commentaries. From what I can tell, correct aspect ratios for cartoons released in Cinemascope. A 28-page booklet. Bonus features. They’re going all out on this.

I’ve mentioned over the years I’m not a huge Tom and Jerry fan, though I can name a number of cartoons I really like (none of which include an annoying duck). But this release sounds great.

You can read more at this site.

A minor announcement from yours truly: I’ve finished some partial posts and Tralfaz will be active again for a full week, starting Monday.

Dave Ketchum

He was a screenwriter, a columnist, a disc jockey and a cartoon voice, but may be known more for sticking his head out of sofas, mailboxes and washing machines.

That was all part of the role of the hidden spy, Agent 13, on the mid-to-late ‘60s comedy show, Get Smart.

He was played by Dave Ketchum, who has passed away at age 97.

Ketchum’s fame in the 1950s was pretty much restricted to southern California. The San Luis Obispo County Telegram-Tribune of May 24, 1952 notes he was a speech student at San Diego State College who was 11 days from starting a movie career in October 1950 when he entered the army with a National Guard group. He was discharged the day before the story was published as a sergeant at Camp Roberts where he wrote 42,000 pages of script and emceed shows at the camp and toured with the USO.

He then put together, as the Sacramento Bee of Dec. 1, 1956 calls it, “The Dave Ketchum Show, a singing, dancing and comedy revue which has played to service audiences all over the world.” A year later, the revue was in Alaska. Included in the company was folk singer Louise Bryant, whom he married. In November 1955, he was in the cast of KRCA Kapers “an experimental showcase to comics and writers who are trying to develop into big-time pros,” as columnist Hal Humphrey called it (the February 28, 1956 show was broadcast in colour).

Ketchum wrote a column called “Assignment Hollywood,” distributed by New Era Syndicate. A squib in the Valley Times of August 30, 1957 mentions Ketchum was headed to Mexico City to interview people for the column before returning to play a comedy role in Will Jason’s film Desert Massacre. I can’t find that it was released.

As the new decade came, Ketchum landed some roles on network TV. He appeared on I’m Dickens, He’s Fenster before David Swift cast him in another comedy series, which had an animation connection. Here’s a column from the Newspaper Enterprise Association that appeared in papers starting in late September 1965.

Zany Comedy Makes Series ‘Incomparable’
By ERSKINE JOHNSON
HOLLYWOOD (NEA)—Don't fire until you see the whites of their pies.
In proof that there's reaIly nothing new on television this fall, the show business trade paper Variety recently listed the new shows. In one way or another, each show resembled one of last season's hits.
But one new show, NBC-TV's "Camp Runamuck" did not appear on the list.
"And I think that's a good sign," says David Ketchum, the lean, likable comedian who stars as Spiffy in the series. "If nothing else, we are incomparable and I think that's something on television these days."
Wild really is the word for "Camp Runamuck" with silent movie comedies, Red Skelton and pair of one-time Disney studio animators being responsible for its zany approach.
This may be news to Skelton, but he is at least responsible for David Ketchum's career as a comedian.

In 1941 Ketchum was a high school student in San Diego. Red visited the campus for a war bond rally and broke up the student body when he drove up in a jeep, stepped out and promptly fell flat on his face.
"If you can make people laugh by falling down, why don't we try it," Ketchum said to a student pal. With that both lads 'fell' into show business by taking lessons in the art of falling and then putting together a rambunctious act for servicemen's camp shows which led to night clubs, TV and movies.
After 24 years, Ketchum is still falling down for laughs.
The format of "Camp Runamuck”—a boys' camp under the supervision of four experts in chaos—tells only half the "incomparable" label. Ketchum tells the other half when he says:
"The show really is 75 per cent sight gags—the chases, falls, stunts, and other mishaps right out of old silent movie comedies. In the first six shows we have sent a fellow across a lake on a surfboard equipped with a jet engine, shot a fellow into the air from a giant bow and arrow, recreated the gunfight from High Noon with pants falling down, had an entire house collapse on us and flooded the entire camp with soap suds.
"The show is mad, mad, mad. There's only one thing I can compare it to and that's the movie, 'Mr. Hulot's Holiday.’ We don't stop between gags to try to make sense." The pre-planned sight gags of the show are developed in special story-board technique, a skill the show's creator David Swift acquired early in his career as a Disney animator. Still another ex-Disney sight gag man, Cal Howard, is the show's full-time "animator."
In the Swift-directed movie, "Good Neighbor Sam," Ketchum was the Hertz car man in a spoof of the TV commercial. Everytime he slid down the wire he missed the car and fell on his face.
"But," laughs Ketchum, "that was tame compared to 'Camp Runamuck’.”

Runamuck was run off the NBC schedule after one season. He told the press at the time it was likely because CBS’ The Wild Wild West kicked them in the ratings, and some affiliates delayed airing the show.

Ketchum was quikly cast in Get Smart after Victor French, who played a similar role as Agent 44, left. He evidently made an impression on newspaper columnists, as a number of them talked to him about the show. This is from January 1967.

Dave Ketchum Proves to Be A Very Versatile Performer
By ERSKINE JOHNSON
HOLLYWOOD (NEA)—In the new role of Agent 13 on television's Get Smart this season, Dave Ketchum turns up la the strangest places.
With sudden abruptness Agent 13 appears inside a popcorn dispenser or from out of a trash can, inside a foot locker or out of a mail box, inside a sofa or out of a picture frame.
Guessing where he will be next week has become a game with regular fans of the show.
Off screen Dave Ketchum also keeps Hollywood guessing about where he will show up next. The other day even a man from NBC guessed wrong about Dave’s presence on the Get Smart set. There had been a last-minute change in the shooting schedule, it was explained, to permit Dave to play a role in another TV series.
We found him, four miles away, playing the part of a real estate salesman on The Andy Griffith Show. For a rival network yet.
"I like to be a moving target,” Dave kidded about a career which has been booming since he starred in the short-lived Camp Runamuck series after first winning TV fan attention in I’m Dickens ... He's Fenster.

In addition to acting these day s he’s also writing (five Petticoat Junction and three Hey, Landlord scripts); working in TV commercial (he’s that fellow with a glass garage for his 1967 car) and providing the voices of five different characters in the Roger Ramjet kiddie cartoon series.
Some actors belittle commercials and cartoon voices, but Dave welcomes them. He says, “I once read that the Hollywood Screen Acton Guild has a membership of 10,000 but that only 1,000 members work full time in the industry. I’m proud of the fact that in this basically insecure business I’m a full-time worker. To be one, it's necessary to be versatile.”
That, of course, is the story of his show business career which started on a San Diego, Calif., radio station before he invaded Hollywood television.
Since turning to writing TV scripts (with Bruce Shelley) Dave says his eyes have been opened to a new advantage for him as an actor.
“Writing scripts,” he explains, “has taught me to recognize good parts which I might otherwise have turned down. Writing scripts teaches you how to read scripts from a different viewpoint.”
About his TV commercial work, he said:
“It takes two days to film a one-minute commercial. It's just like making a big-time movie and I think there’s more real creative talent behind some commercials than in many TV shows. For young unknowns, a one-minute TV commercial is better than a major studio big screen test”

This piece likely came from the producers as there is no byline. It also appeared in papers in January 1967.

Hollywood—Dave Ketchum may have been destined from birth to appear in strange places. He was born in an elevator.
Today, he may be found in mailboxes, lockers, washing machines, garbage cans, cigarette machines and grandfather clocks.
Ketchum, as Agent 13, has been hiding inside these various containers while awaiting contact with other operatives in Get Smart on the NBC-TV Saturdays.
"I'm not bothered by claustrophobia," said Ketchum, "But I have a slight tendency towards motion sickness."
The only time this problem seems to arise, however, is when he's spinning around inside a washing machine.
Asked what's more his speed, he said:
"F-11 at 125."
As any shutterbug knows, this is shoptalk for a standard lens opening. Ketchum, who has handled a camera since he was a youngster, would just as soon take pictures than be in them.
"I'm often in the dark room until three and four in the morning," he said. "It's a great place for getting away from it all."
He's ALWAYS had a hideaway of some kind. As a youngster it was a friend's hut.
"Once we saw a movie with a steam room scene," said Dave. "We decided to turn our hut into a steam room. We didn't know how to make steam so we used dirt instead. We poured buckets of dirt into the hut and sat around breathing dust."
In time Dave came to Hollywood.

"When I first came to this silly little city I lived in a little room, the size of a restaurant booth, under a staircase," he said.
The room's major virtue was the cost—five dollars a week.
Dave has done many things and popped up in many places. He was a student at UCLA, an entertainer with the Armed Forces and for the Defense Department, and currently he is one of the busiest and most versatile talents in show business.
"I haven't been on unemployment for years," said Ketchum.
His last series was Camp Runamuck. When camp closed, he packed his bags, slipped out of his tent and became the peek-a-boo agent on Get Smart.
WHEN NOT HIDING behind his role or in the dark room, Ketchum hides behind a typewriter.
"I've written 10 scripts in one year," said Ketchum. "I've also written a television pilot. I write with Josh Shelley. We were in the Army together."
They work in a small room, naturally.
"We started out in a larger room," said Ketchum. "But we had a hard time getting started. So we moved to a smaller room. I work better in small spaces."
Some people say their life is an open book. Ketchum puts it differently,
"My life," he said, "is a little room."

After Get Smart, it appears Ketchum focused more on writing than performing. It’s too bad. Even in the most over-the-top roles, Ketchum was never-over-the-top. As Yogi Bear might rhyme: “As a hidden spy, he was a regular guy.” That, to me, was appeal during his time on the small screen.

Eye-Sproing on Broadway

Animation takes could be pretty exaggerated during the years of World War Two. Take a look at Tex Avery’s Northwest Hounded Police (MGM, 1946 release). By the 1950s, that kind of thing had settled down, as cartoon characters became more stylised. My guess is the take-gag had also become a cliché.

Occasionally, one would pop up in a ‘50s short. The eye gag at the end of Droopy’s Double Trouble (MGM, 1951 release) is my favourite. Here’s one from in Broadway Bow Wow’s, released on August 2, 1954.

The tale is of lovers John and Mary, whose dancing act rises to the top of vaudeville. Then, John gets a look at a femme fatale. Here’s the take.



This short was one of two made by Ray Patterson and Grant Simmons for Walter Lantz. People on the internet claim Grantray-Lawrence made it. Let’s look at the facts. Variety of June 16, 1953 reported Lantz had hired Simmons and Patterson as part of a studio expansion, and mentioned on July 21, 1954 the two had formed Grantray Animation to do commercial work for Robert Lawrence. As the cartoon was released August 2, 1954, there’s no way it could have been made at Grantray-Lawrence.

However, Business Screen magazine’s issue of August 1954 reported the two “have been in the animation business for twenty years. Both were formerly with Walt Disney and later with M.G.M. cartoon studios. Operating as a partnership for the past two years, Simmons and Patterson have been producing television animated commercials and writing and directing theatrical cartoons.”

Buried in the background of one scene is a sign reading “Grantray’s Snake Oil.” There are also signs saying “Garity’s Goiter Pellets” (for Lantz’s studio manager, Bill Garity) and another for “Batchelor’s Eye Wash” (for Mickey Bachelder, Lantz’s chief cameraman). There’s also one for “Avery’s Liver Tonic.” I am assuming that’s a reference to Tex Avery, who was hired by Lantz in December 1953 to be his executive producer, according to the Hollywood Reporter of December 23 that year.

There are no animation credits on the short, but Ray Jacobs and Art Landy handled the backgrounds and layouts, and Dick Nelson got screen credit as John, the narrating dog.

This post will be the last on Tralfaz for the indefinite future.

Indestructible Benny

There may not have been a comedian who was analysed so much during his time as Jack Benny.

Over the years, we’ve posted a number of articles from columnists explaining the appeal of Benny and his show. Jack talked about it himself at the time as well.

This article is from Leon Gutterman of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. What may be interesting is a great deal of credit was given to his irregular supporting cast. Don Wilson, Dennis Day, Phil Harris and Mary Livingstone were the only people to be mentioned at the start of each radio show. Anyone else got credit for their performances only on rare occasion. An exception might have been Mel Blanc, whose name Jack mentioned as the show was unfolding on the air. Unlike other radio shows, you wouldn’t hear “Appearing tonight were…” though credits were given on the Benny television programmes.

The writer got Schlepperman’s catch-phrase wrong, but his column otherwise sums up the Jack Benny show that people remember today.

It was published Oct. 13, 1950.

OUR FILM FOLK
Why Jack Benny Is the Indestructible Comedian
Jack Benny has returned to the nation's air waves for the 19th season of his comedy career in radio. And he has come back, as always, in his familiar role of the balding, penny-pinching patsy, but his CBS program as in the past, will be replete during the coming year with new riotous laugh skits, new characterizations, new guest surprises. At least that's what Jack tells me.
This indestructible quality of the great wit's character creation and a show format flexible enough for a perennial infusion of fresh idea material and talent point to the secret of his enduring and inimitable success. As one newspaper editor once wrote: "Benny hasn't, as is so persistently rumored, been doing the same thing for 18 years. He wouldn't have lasted that long if he had."
Comedy situations in a Benny program season had, year after year, been marked by freshness and originality. New characterizations, his own and those of an odd assortment of fellow actors and actresses, have paraded across; the script in endless procession. His guests, too, have been spectacularly impressive, as witness the case of the Ronald Colmans, who appeared 16 times on the show.
But the program personalities, including the whimsical portrayals of regular cast members, are probably the most memorable highlights of the Benny saga. Among those who turned up last season was Frank Fontaine, a new comedian, playing a mentally retarded sweepstakes winner named John L. P. Sivony [sic]. Mel Blanc, a regular, (the voice of Bugs Bunny) did a week-by-week impersonation of Al Jolson. Jack himself added another facet to his characterization, that of the naive treasurer of the Beverly Hills Beavers, a boy's club.
Once, there was an ostrich in the script, and even a polar bear named Carmichael. Jack kept Carmichael in the cellar and Rochester was his keeper. At the time, the husky-voiced valet was in an endless search for a gas man to do some repairs. The versatile Mel Blanc played Carmichael. Blanc now is the voice of the Benny parrot, which keeps Rochester from delivering soliloquies while doing the household chores. Its screams drive him to distraction. Blanc is also Benny's French violin teacher. He is the coughing, sputtering voice of the rattletrap Maxwell auto as it tunes up, and he doubles as well as the rhythm-tongued train announcer calling out Azusa, Cucamonga and other weirdly-named stations.
Buck Benny Rides Again
Who doesn't remember the famous Buck Benny of the long-running "Buck Benny Rides Again" sequence? Andy Devine, whose entrance line was "Hiya, Buck" was the chief stooge of this comedy turn. The skit ceased with the release of the Paramount film "Buck Benny Rides Again." in which Jack and most his fibbers appeared.
Mr. Billingsley was a quaint character dreamed up and played by Ed Beloin, a former Benny writer. A subnormal, self-appointed house guest, Mr. Billingsley consistently made wry comments at the wrong time in a dry voice. Beloin, never an actor, always had Benny worried that he'd miss his cues or fluff his lines.
Another witty specimen knocked on the Benny door anouncing [sic] "A telegram for Mr. Benny." The role was played by Harry Baldwin, Benny's secretary, who would glow with Barrymore-like pride at the end of each performance, over his laconic line.
Mr. Kitzel, a current fabrication, is played by Artie Auerbach, former New York newspaper photographer. His "peekle in the meedle with the mustard on top" and his baseball stories are laugh toppers. Mable Flapsaddle and Gertrude Gershift, the Benny telephone opertors [sic], enacted by Sarah Berner [sic] and Bea Benadaret [sic], tie the program in knots with them saucy badgering of the boss.
Schelepperman’s "Howdy Stranger"
Off and on the show have been Sheldon Leonard, Sam Hearn, Frank Nelson and many other stooges. Leonard is the racetrack tout with the soft, patronizing voice. Hearn played Mr. Schlepperman, whose greeting, "Howdy, Stranger," stirred a ripple of chuckles. Nelson is often heard as the haughty floorwalker, the butler or some generally nasty type, with a mocking "Yeahus" when addressed.
Jack's main foils of course, have come in for equally hilarious typing. Tenor Dennis Day is the timid mama's boy who is always asking for his salary, and Phil Harris is ribbed as a lady-killer with a predilection for word-mangling and liquid refreshments. Rochester as the extrovert valet and chauffeur constantly befuddles the harassed Benny. Mary Livingstone, Jack's wife, is the heckling girl friend whom Benny constantly threatens to send back to the hosiery counter at the May Company department store.
Practically every important figure in show business has guested on the Benny funfest, but Fred Allen's visits have been among the most notable. Jack and Fred carried on a feud for years, on their own programs. Every once in a while they crossed over for mutual calls, letting the quips and sparks fly at close range. "If I had my writers here," Jack once exploded, "you wouldn't talk to me like this."
Benny at His Best
For years, the Benny comedy situations have run the gamut of thing that could possibly happen to Jack Benny has been satirized. Last season, for example, he did a takeoff on an actual operation on his nose, and in another skit he roved through the script for several weeks spending his money like a drunken sailor after a can of tomatoes fell on his head and put him out of his mind. It was Benny at his best.
To his sheer delight, the fabulous funnyman has taken the worst beating from his stooges of any comedian in radio history. Everything about him is mercilessly lampooned . . . his thinning hair, his baby blue eyes, his age (39 years), his romantic attractiveness, his Maxwell, his money vault, his thriftiness and his fiddle. A few years ago his writers even dreamed up a contest in which listeners were invited to send in letters of 25 words or less dwelling on the theme "I can't stand Jack Benny because . . ." More than 500,000 letters poured in. Benny revelled in the scheme.
That's why Jack Benny is the indestructible comedian, who never changes himself but keeps his show over fresh with funsters. That's the secret of his 19 years of radio success.