Cubby and the Code

“Pre-Code” does not mean “Pre-Code.”

The Motion Picture Production Code did not suddenly appear in 1934. There was a code in 1930, and other measures going back to the silent era. It’s just that enforcement was lax until 1934.

One wonders if a gag in The Last Mail, a 1933 Van Beuren cartoon, would have gotten past the Code if it were made a year later. It stars Cubby Bear as a mail deliverer on a sled pulled through the snow by squirrels. The film cuts to a scene of beavers building a snowman. Emotion lines indicate they see something in the distance and they run away. It turns out to be Cubby.



Cubby and his sleigh plough through the snowman.



Here’s where the Code comes in. The snowman comes to life and checks his privates. They’re gone!



The snowman runs into the distance, a standard Terry/Van Beuren scene-ender going back to the silent days.



Somehow, I don’t think the Code would go for a Cubby Castration™.

Mannie Davis is the director of this one.

Tralfaz Sunday Theatre: A Coronet Xmas and a Christmas Tree

Coronet Films is known best known for films telling weenie-roast-loving “swell” teenagers to change their behavior, maybe using a list. But social guidance wasn’t their only interest.

Here’s a Christmas short from 1955. Reader Jim Engel points out “Mrs. White” is actually Fran Allison, which is why the performance is very professional (she’s no Nick Baxter in Coronet’s What To Do on a Date).

This may be a little sugary for some viewers, but you can’t disagree with messages like helping the less fortunate. If you do, maybe one of those kids can treat you like a piñata.



If you’re going to hire someone to play a cartoon Santa, who would hire? At one time, the answer was likely Hal Smith.

He was Santa on the Flintstones Christmas episode in 1964. He was Santa in Tony Benedict’s Santa and the Three Bears.

It also turns out he is Santa—and the narrator, along with other male voices—in a 1959 animated short from the Soviet Union called A Christmas Tree.

It’s possible this got TV airplay. Shows like Captain Sailorbird and the The Nutty Squirrels filled half-hours with cartoons from eastern Europe, dubbed into English. Sorry for the battered print.

Jack Benny's Gift to War Vets

Christmas is a time of giving, the cliché goes, and one person who knew that was Jack Benny.

It seems every time I look up what Jack was doing over the holiday season, he was performing, often for charity.

75 years ago, he was one of a number of entertainers who went to San Francisco in December to perform for wounded veterans. He told columnist Herb Caen “When I saw then, I could have cried—except that I was supposed to make them laugh.”

Caen’s paper, the Examiner, sponsored the shows. This story appeared in the Dec. 22, 1950 edition.

Wounded Vets Cheered By Jack Benny, Troupe
Comedian Joins Examiner Fund Show For Bay Region War Hero Patients
The kid in the wheel chair didn't feel much like smiling.
None of the guys lying on beds, or sitting in wheel chairs, in the ward at Letterman Hospital yesterday felt much like smiling.
They were all just back from Korea. And they were all amputees, some with one, some, like the kid in the wheel chair, with two legs missing.
They were waiting, their expressions solemn, yesterday afternoon, to see the Examiners War Wounded Fund Show. Jack Benny, they had heard, was coming, and Constance Moore, the musical comedy star, and a lot of other top entertainers.
FAMILIES THERE
The wives and children of some of the wounded men were there. A tall blond sergeant who lost his right leg in the battle near Yongdang on September 24, sat quietly on his bed, his arm around his 4 1/2 year old daughter. The pretty blonde little girl sat gingerly on the big hospital bed, looking from time to time to her father for reassurance.
Suddenly, somebody shouted, "here he comes" and the wounded soldier applauded as Jack Benny stepped to the microphone in the center of the ward.
"Hiya, fellas," Benny said and the show was on.
Slowly the atmosphere of tension, of solemnity, began to break. The kid in the wheel chair rolled himself up closer to the entertainers, a small smile on his face.
ALL LAUGHING
Before long Benny had the whole ward shouting with laughter.
And when Constance Moore invited her audience to join in on the chorus of "Harvest Moon," they did, even the kid in the wheel chair.
It was a big show. Besides Benny and Miss Moore there was the impressionist, Arthur Blake; singers Katy Lee, Bob Hamma, Russ Byrd and Harry "Woo Woo" Stevens; dancers Charlie Aaron, Tony Wing, Toy and Wing, and Earl "Happy Feet" Burrows with the Four Naturals. The wounded soldiers cheered for more.
SHOWS TODAY
Benny and The Examiner troupe played the wards at Letterman yesterday afternoon, then gave an evening performance at the Letterman Theater for ambulatory patients last night with Walt Roesner and his band joining the show cast.
Benny will journey this morning to the Travis Air Force Base at Fairfield for a 10 a. m. show. He will entertain at 2 p. m. at Matte Island Hospital and will give a third performance at the Marine Hospital tonight. His final performance with The Examiner troupe will be tomorrow afternoon at the Oak Knoll Naval Hospital at 2 o'clock.
Harold Peary, "The Great Gildersleeve," and Movie Starlet Marylou Gray will join the troupe for an extra noon show tomorrow in the wards and the theater at Travis Air Base.
Benny was met on his arrival here yesterday by Col. John S. Mallory, special service officer of the Sixth Army; Lt. Cmdr. William G. Palmer of division of welfare of the Twelfth Naval District, and George Heinz, producer-director of The Examiner shows. Also with Benny are Charlie Bagby and Frankie Remley of his CBS radio show.

Benny and his troupe whirled through three more performances the next day, cheering audiences at the Travis Air Force Base, Mare Island and Marine Hospitals. The next afternoon, on December 23, he put on his act at the Oak Knoll Naval Hospital.

Out of curiosity, I looked up what Jack was doing 100 years ago at Christmas. That week, he was appearing at the Orpheum in Kansas City. Among the other acts was Benny Rubin. The Journal-Post reviewed him on Dec. 20, 1925.

A few minutes with Jack Benny are as many minutes of hearty humor. His comedy is of a lingering kind. There is so much real humor and such a variety of fun in his work that the result is not merely passing laughs but laughs his audiences take home with them.

As for charity work, sure enough, I found this in the Star of December 24, 1925:

Actors from various Kansas City theaters will join tonight in an entertainment for the United States veterans hospital. The entertainment, which will begin at 6:30 o’clock, will be preceded by a dance and the distribution of gifts given by patriotic organizations associated with the veterans’ hospital.
Among the actors who will entertain the veterans are Jack Benny, who is appearing at the Orpheum theatre, and the Marcell Sisters from the Pantages theatre, Ray Stinson’s orchestra will play. The Red Cross at the hospital is in charge of the program.

The next day, the Kansas City Times reported he “jested and played the violin.”

(Did Rubin appear? I dunno).

After K.C., Jack was off to Madison, Wisconsin for another vaudeville stop—and more of a long career that included giving morale to those who needed it.

SIDE NOTE:
Jack was mentioned in Dorothy Kilgallen's Christmas column of 1954. Oddly, fellow What's My Line? panellist Fred Allen was omitted.

Cartoons on TV, Christmas 1965

60 years ago, Christmas fell on Saturday. And you know what that meant in 1965. Cartoons on TV!

Christmas cartoons fell into two categories, from what I recall. There were the prime-time specials earlier in December. In 1965 that meant Magoo’s version of “A Christmas Carol” (didn’t see) and the new A Charlie Brown Christmas (which I watched after anticipating it with excitement). And then there were old theatricals, some set during Christmas, others with Christmas gags. Included in this would be the touching and gentle classic Mice Meeting You with Herman and Katnip.

I don’t recall any others, but my memory is mistaken, or there were shows I didn’t watch. CBS sent a release to newspapers outlining its programming plans that morning. There were Christmas cartoons on shows made for TV.

A host of Christmas-morning presents will be offered on the CBS Television Network and WHBL-TV [Columbus, Georgia] today in the form of Christmas cartoons, Christmas stories and Christmas songs. The network is presenting five and one-hall hours of daytime holiday fare starting at 8 a.m.
There's a song-filled Christmas in (Captain Kangaroo's) Treasure House, from 8 until 9 and a jolly Christmas with “Tennessee Tuxedo” at 9:30. The precocious penguin and his walrus pal Chumley cut some hilarious Christmas capers in "Tree Trimmers," a cartoon created especially for the occasion.
Those who prefer a whimsical Christmas can watch 'So Hi's Nite Before Christmas" on “Linus the Lionhearted,” which presents the loveable Chinese boy in a charming Yuletide tale at 10:30 a.m.
At 11 a.m. the cat-and-mouse team of “Tom and Jerry” take over not only to deck the halls with fun and frolic, but also to turn halls, trees, walls and Santa himself topsy-turvy.
On a more serious note, "The Mighty Mouse Playhouse" at 10 a.m. offers a poignant story that expresses the true meaning of the day. Boris Karloff narrates the award-winning cartoon, "Juggler of Our Lady," based on the classic French fairy tale, "The Juggler of Notre Dame."

There were other TV Christmas cartoons. A week before Christmas, ABC advertised an hour-long special featuring “the yuletide adventures of Hoppity Hooper, Commander McBragg and Dudley Doright.” Hoppity was involved in a four-part holiday sequence. I never had a lot of interest in the frog and the cartoon series is the only one produced by Jay Ward I stopped watching. McBragg was even less entertaining.

Newspaper listings include the generic title Christmas Cartoons with no specifics. You have to wonder if the stations got their hands on syndicate-packaged chestnuts like The Shanty Where Santy Claus Lives, the Fleischer’s Christmas Comes But Once a Year with Grampy, or public domain shorts like Iwerks’ Jack Frost, or any cartoon with a flake of snow in it. Today, whole playlists of these can be found on the internet.

While I have a strong affection for that bygone period before endless bombardment of cartoon cable channels, I admit that there are probably more animated cartoons made up to 1965 available to watch today than back then, thanks to companies of all sizes restoring them. We can only hope that continues in the new year.

To Get to the Other Side?

Why is a chicken carrying an umbrella on a frozen pond?

No, this isn’t a joke. And there isn’t really a joke in this scene from the Terrytoon The First Snow. It’s just an oddity.

The hen is run down by a tobogganing dog. Then, as it staggers out of the way, its eggs are run over by another sledding dog. They skate around (without wearing skates) in a figure 8 and the scene’s over.



Here’s an incongruous character I quite like. A giraffe sucking on a pipe?



It would seem Phil Scheib is into his Silly Symphonies mode as he gives us several original songs. Young dog-lettes hold hands and frolic around a snowman. The female chorus sings:

Building up a snowman out of snow and ice.
When we’re all finished it’ll look mighty nice.
Coal for his eyes and a carrot for his nose.
He’s all dressed up in his Sunday clothes.

Then the snowman with the usual Terry tenor voice happily warbles:

I’m all dolled up like a Christmas tree.
Look what you kids have done to me!
Let’s get together and offer in rhyme
Good old winter time!

There’s a dramatic rescue on a waterfall at the end; Scheib’s music is quite effective. The cartoon ends in song:

This little pig fell in the lake
Upon a winter’s day.
And these little doggies saved her life
Let’s shout hip-hip-hooray!

There’s cycle animation aplenty. Some characters crash through the ice into the lake but silently. The beloved Terry Splash™ hadn’t been invented yet.

The cartoon was released on January 11, 1935. The studio was still churning out a new Terrytoon every two weeks.

What'd He Say?

Barney Bear matches wits with a silent snowshoe rabbit in The Bear and the Hare, a 1948 MGM release from the Mike Lah/Preston Blair unit.

One gag has the rabbit juggling snowballs then batting them at the bear with his ears.



Barney responds. Evidently it was not a family-friendly response as the voice has been replaced with a trombone. The last word is “you.” We’ll leave it for you to look at the mouth movements of the first two frames below to figure out the first word. (Please, no foul language in the comment section in response).



Don Patterson, Ray Abrams, Irv Levine and Gil Turner are credited with animation. There’s no story credit. I had always thought Jack Cosgriff wrote for the Lah/Blair group. Cosgriff was a UC Berkeley grad who returned to MGM after the war; he had been a chief specialist for the Navy based in San Diego.

This was the second of three cartoons completed by the Lah/Blair unit. Thad Komorowski found two other shorts were assigned titles and production numbers but not completed. Producer Fred Quimby decided it was cheaper releasing propaganda cartoons from John Sutherland Productions than paying for a third unit.

Piousness in the Alley

Allen’s Alley is what comes to mind when Fred Allen’s radio show is discussed. But the programme evolved over the years and the Alley was a comparatively late addition.

Allen had many regulars over the years, but through almost all of it was Minerva Pious. She was there at the start of the Alley and was there at the end as John Brown, Alan Reed and Charlie Cantor moved on to other shows.

Pious is known to radio fans as Mrs. Nussbaum (during her brief absence after Allen returned to radio, Cantor played Mr. Nussbaum and Elsie Mae Gordon was the female denizen of the Alley) but she performed an array of characters for Allen, including snooty society ladies and hillbillies.

Just as Allen had problems as he half-heartedly tried to adjust to television, Pious concentrated more on stage work after the death of prime-time network radio. Here’s an unbylined story from the Toledo Blade of April 19, 1959.

What Ever Became of ...
MRS. NUSSBAUM—one of the sidesplitting comic characters on the late Fred Allen's Sunday night radio show? Listeners eagerly anticipated the inevitable point in the program when she opened her door, said "Nu!," then proceeded to outjoke Allen himself. In real life, Mrs. Nussbaum was a skilled dialectician named Minerva Pious, who learned different accents working at a department store in one of New York City's "melting pot" neighborhoods. She was with Allen from 1933 to 1952. Today, Minerva Pious lives in Manhattan, writes photo stories for syndication overseas. She has been out of radio and TV since the end of 1958, when she ended a series of character portrayals on the Robert Q. Lewis show. Minerva thinks comedy on radio and TV "has gone backwards. I don't find any bubbling clowns in comedy. I find it static."



What did Pious think of Allen? She had some remembrances for a syndicated columnist promoting a rare special on NBC radio. This is from October 25, 1965.

NBC Will Salute Late Fred Allen
By PHYLLIS BATTELLE
Distributed By King Features Syndicate
NEW YORK — Fred Allen —the golden-hearted grouch, the writer - comedian with bellhop eyes ("they carry up to four bags") — died on an icy New York street nearly 10 years ago.
Comedy has not been the same since. There is sick comedy now and satirical wit. But no one dares to sneer and growl, cleverly and brilliantly, at the hierarchy as Allen did; a man who was infinitely smarter than most of his confreres, he could sink verbal pins into the stuffed shirts of the men he worked for, businessmen and vice presidents, and make millions of Americans laugh.
"He was the model man," said novelist Herman Wouk reverently. Wouk had worked as a script writer for Allen. "He was the greatest satirical wit in America. All any of as on staff did was to try to imitate him, but he was the best writer in the lot."
How did he "get by" with biting the hands that fed him —with announcing to a nationwide audience, for example, that "within the hierarchy of the little men there is no man who can outlittle the executive in a large corporation who treats his authority as he treats a tight suit; in a tight suit he is afraid to make a move"?
HAD NEAT TRICK
"Well, he had a neat trick," says Miss Minerva Pious, who became famous as "Mrs. Nussbaum" and a variety of other personalities on Allen's long-enduring radio show. "He abhorred censorship and, since he couldn't defeat the censorship department, he simply outwitted it. In every script he, would put in four really wild, outrageous jokes that couldn't possibly get by. He did this so that when the censors would get to the fifth joke the one he really wanted to keep — it would seem so lame they left it in."
Miss Pious, who stands a neat five feet and is still laden with gracious charm, is one of several long-time associates of Fred's who will comment on the late, great comedian next month (Nov. 14) when NBC-Radio presents an hour-long "Salute to Fred Allen."
The show will revolve around tapes from Allen's radio shows which for 17 years were among the highest-rated in the medium. The only disappointment, for his fans, is that such a show could not be presented on television—which could certainly use an hour of intellectual, sardonic wit.
ALLEN HATED TV
"But I guess that wouldn't be a good idea," says Miss Pious. "The chief hated TV, as we all know, and I can't blame him. He went to battle on censorship there, but he couldn't beat it."
He once said of TV — "It's not worth it. People get 10 per cent of everything except my blinding headaches."
Minerva Pious remembers him as an infinitely kind man whose growly exterior frightened the great even more than the small. "There never was such a boss. I never realized how he impressed other people, however, until Charles Laughton came on the show as a guest.
"He arrived at the studio 45 minutes before air time and he was shaking. He asked me, 'Where can I get a drink?' I knew Laughton wasn't that kind of man, so I took him down the street, and he drank down two straight shots fast. Then he said, 'How do you know when you're doing all right with Fred?'”
SHOW A SUCCESS
Miss Pious laughs. "Of course, the show went beautifully, but I don't think Allen congratulated Laughton afterward. That wasn't his way. His way was to give everybody, whether it was a big, star or a little codger, respect.
"He never opened his mouth to direct an actor unless the actor had misread a line for the fourth time. This was a great rarity. I could name you the great comedians — but I’d better not, because many are still alive — who had to tell an actor how to handle every line.
"I didn't care that Fred didn't smile and pat me on the back. He showed his respect and appreciation by leaving everybody alone. Once you knew him, you could never feel insecure with that man."
Fred Allen's generosity is legendary. He was never without a large roll of bills, which he would peel off at the first sight of a panhandler.
REGULAR PANHANDLER
"There was one old codger who used to come to Fred's hotel room at 4 p.m. every Sunday, while the chief was in his writing conferences. He did it for years, always wanting a handout.
"One Sunday Fred got furious. He said, 'You bum—you never even try to get a job ' But he gave him the money anyway. On a later Sunday, during the writers' conference, Fred began pacing the floor, glaring at the writers and at' his watch. Finally he said. 'That SOB—he hasn't shown up yet."
When Allen died, so suddenly of a heart attack, something wonderful went out of the laugh business. He will return, briefly, on Nov. 19. If you listen, don't stifle your laughs. Remember the words of the master: "My friends, a stifled laugh does not die when you push it back in your throat. It lives in your lower colon to laugh at the food as it passes through .."

Pious died March 16, 1979, almost a month before Peter Donald, who was Ajax Cassidy, the man next door in the Alley.

Of Dog and Jowls

Tex Avery said (paraphrased) that if you gave him an idea and a string of gags, he could make a cartoon.

That certainly describes what he did in later years (think of The Legend of Rockabye Point), but he also had some nice cinematography and interesting layouts in his earlier shorts.

In several cartoons, he engages in a slow pan across one of Johnny Johnsen’s background paintings, with something in the foreground on a cel moving at a different frame rate to simulate depth without resorting to a multiplane camera (Disney) or sets (Fleischer).

One of a number of examples is Of Fox and Hounds, 1941 Warners release. It has been nicely restored so you can see the cartoon opening. The sign and stone fence are on a cel.



The scene fades into what I can only presume is rotoscoped action. There are no gags here, and these shots don’t really set up a gag (not like the opening of, say, Screwball Squirrel at MGM a few years later).



Even the next scene when Willoughby slides into the frame is Disney-esque in the way it handles follow-through and overlapping action as the dog shakes his head.



The cartoon is basically Avery (and writer Rich Hogan, I guess) doing a different take on the Bugs Bunny-Elmer Fudd relationship. Bugs and Elmer are stronger characters; the fox is far more casual. The difference is the dopey character wins in the end. I always liked that watching this over and over as a kid 60-some-odd years ago and I still like it today.

Newfoundland?

Charlie Dog had a routine where he was “50%” various kinds of dogs and enthusiastically went into cliché gags about different breeds (Often An Orphan, 1949).

There were earlier cartoons which foisted the same doggie puns on theatre audiences. One of them was The Pooch Parade, a 1940 spot-gag short from Columbia.

The puns in this one really make you cringe, and you can probably guess the punch lines before they happen. There’s a Spitz, a watch dog, a Mexican hairless, a bird dog, Doberman Pinchers, everything except the “setter” gag. But there’s one I don’t get.

The film cuts a couple of times to a Newfoundland dog, except he’s not there. The narrator wonders where he could be. A hand pulls down a map of Newfoundland. The map morphs into a barking dog. “Thanks a lot,” responds the narrator.



Someone is going to have to explain this one to me.

Allen Rose was responsible for the story on this one. Harry Love and Lou Lilly are the credited animators, but there’s no director mentioned on screen. Mel Blanc supplies his dullard voice and his falsetto/lady voice. The narrator is Jack Lescoulie-esque, but it’s not him.