Beaky and the Bambino Bee

Buzzards aren’t associated with Italy. So why is it that Mama Buzzard in The Bashful Buzzard speaks-a with a vaudeville-style “Atsa-a-matter-for-you” Italian accent-a? Pasta fazool!

Well, if we may venture a guess.

Warner Bros. cartoons are full of radio show references. You likely know that the lead character in The Bashful Buzzard is a takeoff on Mortimer Snerd on the Edgar Bergen radio show.

But I suspect Mama Buzzard is, too.

There was an actress making the rounds in Los Angeles in the 1930s who did an Italian dialect character. Here’s an example from the Hollywood Citizen-News of July 17, 1934.

“Mrs. Pasquale,” or, if you prefer, popular comedienne on KFWB’s “High Jinks,” will be featured with the Californians over KFWB from 7:30 to 7:45 p. m. She certainly has a line of chatter!

KFWB certainly had its own connection with cartoons, besides corporate ownership, because people who worked there like Robert C. Bruce and Arthur Q. Bryan were hired to supply voices for the Leon Schlesinger studio on the Warners lot.

Keith Scott’s terrific research points out the Franco Sunday night Hi Jinks show was hosted by Johnny Murray, who Rudy Ising called hiring for main characters in Merrie Melodies, including Foxy and Goopy Gear. As well, the programme included Jack Clifford, the hard-of-hearing-sheriff, a character voice that got mushed together with Kenny Delmar’s Senator Claghorn and became a certain, I SAY, became a certain cartoon rooster. Rooster, that is.

Back to our story.

Urecal’s Italian dialect was recognised enough in the mid-‘30s for her to make personal appearances; we note one in 1934 presented by a Legion post in Los Angeles in 1934 where she “delighted an audience of 500 with her Italian characterization and impersonations.”

Does it seem probable that Bob Clampett, noted aficionado of radio references, wanted a familiar accent in one of his cartoons, and this was one of them?

By the time the dialogue for The Bashful Burrard was recorded (the cartoon came out in 1945), fine dialectician Sara Berner seemed to be brought in to handle the female adult voices. No need for Urecal, who had been in the movies for several years. Berner could do the job just as well.

Let’s get to the actual cartoon. There’s some great expressive work we’ve posted about before. The scene with the farmer and the cow in mid-air is lots of fun (Manny Gould, I imagine). So is the perspective animation in the sequence with the flying dragon chasing Beaky.

Perhaps one of the better-known moments is when Beaky is “bringing home a baby bumble bee” (to the melody of “Arkansas Traveler”).



Cut to a close-up of the little bee and his angry mother. Despite the buzzing, it’s really a silent action scene. You can't dislike animation like this.



As you can see in that last frame, Clampett wastes no time. Action is continuous. Clampett alternates between a fast pace, a slow pace and movement within dialogue scenes.

This is another cartoon where the credits have been Blue Ribboned. The second Beck and Friedwald book gives the story credit to Mike Sasanoff. The story includes a Dumbo reference, a Lassie reference and ends with a catchphrase from The Great Gildersleeve radio show.

The animation credit was apparently rotated to Bob McKimson. I am told Dick Thomas did not paint the backgrounds. Here is one in a perspective view when Beaky's brothers are overhead scoping out their targets.



Besides Berner as Urecal as Mrs. Pasquale, Kent Rogers is Edgar Bergen as Mortimer Snerd. Keith Scott points out (in Animato! Issue 37 and later in his two-book set) that Rogers died in a training exercise in July 1944, so this gives you a bit of an idea of when the soundtrack was recorded. The cartoon was officially released September 5, 1945.

Urecal died of a heart attack in 1966 at the age of 71. At that point, if she was remembered it was for starring in a TV version of Tugboat Annie in the early '50s. She had appeared on Petticoat Junction just a few months before her death.

You can hear what Mrs. Pasquale sounded like below. Cartoon fans will recognise the first song before Urecal's routine with emcee Don Wilson.

How Not To Get Rid of a Starfish

Aloha Hooey is said to be a cartoon Tex Avery started before he left Warner Bros. and was finished by Bob Clampett directing his unit.

It’s a pretty tame cartoon for either of them. There’s a dullard crow with buck teeth (Pinto Colvig doing his Goofy voice, same as in Little Rural Riding Hood for Avery at MGM) and a slicker seagull (Mel Blanc, sounding much like Technical Fairy First Class in the Snafu shorts). They two engage in a competition for an island bird (Sara Berner). Unlike Avery’s Spike vs. Droopy at MGM, neither of them is evil; the bad guy shows up out of nowhere near the end of the cartoon and is quickly quelled. And the procreation gag at the end is familiar, too.

There are really few highlights, but one is for freeze-frame fans. Cecil Crow tussles with a starfish that attaches itself to various parts of the body, which seems like something in an early Jones cartoon. This provides dry-brush work for the ink and paint department. Cecil shakes his head to no avail.



Cut to a medium shot. The swirls remind me of the ones with Bugs and the sumo wrestler (by Virgil Ross?) in Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips (1944). First, the starfish attaches itself to Cecil’s butt (and kicks it), then puts him in a toe-hold.



Ross is the credited animator on this short, with story by Mike Maltese. Carl Stalling fills the soundtrack with Arkansas Traveler.

This frames above are from a laser disc.

Jack Benny is a Tattletale Grey Bunny

When sound came into theatres, animated cartoons featured piles of celebrity caricatures and parodies. So did radio shows, too. The early Jack Benny show featured imitations of, or jokes about, Garbo, Ed Wynn, Eddie Cantor, and so. It seems fair, then, that cartoons made fun of Jack Benny, too.

The climax for the animated Benny likely came in the 1959 Warner Bros. short The House That Jack Built, but there were others we detailed in this post. In several, he was depicted as a rabbit named “Jack Bunny.”

One of these was Goofy Groceries, released by Warners in 1941. It was directed by Bob Clampett, who loved tossing pop culture references into his cartoons. Early in this one, “Jack Bunny” introduces himself to us. “Hello again, folks,” he says to us (the real Benny opened his show then with “Jell-O again”), waving a Benny-esque cigar.



The cartoon harkens back to the Harman-Ising days of the early ‘30s, when a villain would grab the heroine in the second half of the cartoon, and the good guys would unite to rescue her. Here, a can-can dancer (yes, she’s a can) is trapped by a huge gorilla.

Bunny sees it and reacts, jumping on a bottle of horse radish. Off-camera, Mel Blanc shouts the name of Benny’s 1940 feature film—“Buck Benny Rides Again.” (The movie’s cast includes Carmichael the bear, voiced on Benny’s show by Blanc, but Blanc doesn’t do Carmichael in the film).



Bunny gets cornered after an axe he is carrying is shrunk by smoke from a Roman candle held by the gorilla.



The gorilla lights another fireworks stick and hands it to Bunny. A blare of trumpets. It's Superguy! He fails to rescue Bunny. Only Clampett would have a super-hero drawn with cross-eyes and buck teeth (it appears Superguy also skipped leg day in the gym).



The gorilla lights another fireworks stick and hands it to Bunny. But the gorilla is stopped by another radio reference. Shouts a female voice from off-camera: “Henry!” “Coming, mother,” shouts the gorilla. You should recognize this from the opening of radio’s The Aldrich Family which filled in for Benny as a summer replacement series in 1939. The mother gorilla is voiced by Sara Berner, who portrayed a number of characters on the Benny radio show.



None of this stops the large firecracker from exploding.



The explosion leaves Bunny blackened into a rabbit version of Jack Benny’s valet. “My, oh, my,” observes the now-Rochester rabbit to the camera, “Tattletale grey!” It’s the same ending Clampett used with a ghost in Jeepers Creepers (1939).



The “tattletale grey” is another pop culture reference.



While Blanc does Bunny-as-Rochester’s voice, Bunny is played by Jack Lescoulie, who hosted The Grouch Club on KFWB radio. In 1939, the show appeared on the Red network's WEAF at 6:30 p.m. Sundays just before Benny. His impersonation doesn’t do anything for me, but I’m in the minority as his version of Benny is heard in several cartoons at more than one studio, and even on the Benny show itself during a programme billed as Jack’s “10th anniversary” on radio.

Benny, his show, and his supporting actors provided plenty of inspiration for writers and directors when cartoons and network radio shared a golden age. You can learn much about this from the ne plus ultra of voice acting experts, Keith Scott, in his two-book set.