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.

"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.