Telescope Eyes

They were re-issued as “A Columbia Favorite.” Whose favourite, I’m not quite sure.

Dog, Cat and Canary must have been someone’s favourite, as it was nominated for an Oscar, losing in 1945 to the Tom and Jerry short Mouse Trouble.

There’s some good animation. In this scene, the cat’s eyes become telescopic, checking out the canary and the sleeping guard dog.



Then the rest of the cat’s head comes up to meet the eye pupils. These drawings are animated on twos.



The characters? Eh. Just another cat and bird and dog. They don’t really stand out, not like the Oscar-winning Tom and Jerry who were pretty expressive characters in the mid-‘40s. Despite that, the canary was turned into Flippy (at least according to Boxoffice Barometer of Nov. 17, 1945) and appeared in some forgettable cartoons. The Exhibitor of January 24, 1945 rated the cartoon “fair.”

Howard Swift directed this short, with animation credited to Volus Jones and Jim Armstrong, and the story to Grant Simmons.

The following year, Rippling Romance was Columbia’s Oscar nominee, losing again to Tom and Jerry. It was the final Screen Gems short up for an Academy Award. The studio gave the bird to the animation world and shut down.

"Ferdinand" Blanc

Mel Blanc enjoyed fishing. And, like a fish story, Blanc’s tale of how he came to be hired by the Leon Schlesinger cartoon studio grew and changed over the years.

This Week was a newspaper magazine supplement A feature story on cartoon voice actors published October 13, 1946. This may be the earliest version about his hiring. We posted this a number of years ago on the GAC site.

Look Who's Talking!
You don't know them but their voices are famous. They give life to cartoon characters.
SUZANNE V. HORVATH
The success of every animated cartoon depends on the talents of a highly specialized group of people—the men and women who speak for them. ...
Moviegoers everywhere know the Hollywood artists and the product of their magic inkwells. But it’s to the unknown “voices,” on these pages, that cartoon studios turn when a new character pops up.
These people get no special training, have to depend on their imagination and a talent for mimicry. The artists or directors can’t be of much help, beyond a vague request to “talk like a rabbit,” or “say this like a timid ghost.”
In 1928 Walt Disney had a brain storm and brought forth a “Mouse.” A year later Mickey made his first noise and Disney hasn't stopped talking for him since. Then there is Popeye, whose years of popularity make Bob Hope look like a Johnny-Come-Lately. But in recent years many favorites have come along to where they get top billing, have their own following of fans: Warner Brothers have Humphrey Bogart and buck-toothed Bugs Bunny, whose box-office rating adds up to a mint of carrots. Famous Studios have under contract, besides Popeye and his troop, Little Lulu and a small newcomer called Casper, the Friendly Ghost. Tom and Jerry, the cat and mouse, are friendly enemies at M-G-M. Terry Toons made stars of two magpies.
For each of these, and others, a man or woman plays a major role. All are talented mimics and work into the animated-cartoon world quite casually.
Bugs Bunny’s Mel Blanc, for instance, was writing radio shows when he got a call from the office of Treg Brown of Warner Brothers’ cartoon department. “Can you play a drunken bull?” asked Brown. “My best friends call me Ferdinand,” replied the surprised Mel.
The drunken bull is now a forgotten character, but Mel has become one of the animated cartoon world’s greatest talkers.

Gee, nothing about dead casting directors or wallowing in pig-pens. A “surprise” phone call sparked it all.

Whether Mel was writing for radio shows at the time of his hiring, I can’t say. But he was certainly appearing in them. You can probably find a number of these series on old-time radio websites.

The Oregon Daily Journal ran down some of Blanc’s radio career to date in a feature story printed June 23, 1946. It’s an overview, so don’t expect to find specific dates of shows. One thing it doesn’t mention is Blanc played a character named Sylvester on the Judy Canova Show. Warners borrowed the name and voice for a certain cat. The radio character was more over-the-top than the cartoon character.

Mel was to start his own network radio show within a few months. All his voices couldn't save it. The show ran for one season.

Heard But Not Seen Makes a Living
By TOMMY HOXIE
(Special to The Journal)
There is a voice in Hollywood that is heard by more radio listeners than that of any other comedian . . .
one that pays off to the tune of a figure well up in the six-digit bracket—and that’s not counting the two ciphers to the right of the decimal point, either.
Yet the name of the owner of that voice won’t be found listed in any schedule of daily radio programs, for it’s Mel Blanc, the “one-man-crowd” of radio.
* * *
AND IT’S MEL’S flexibile voice that portrays Pedro and Roscoe Wortle on the Judy Canova show; the cigar store clerk and the melancholy postman on George Burns and Gracie Allen’s broadcasts; and Scottie Brown, Cartoony Technicolorovich and the chronic hiccougher of the Abbott and Costello show.
For the Jack Benny broadcasts, he portrays the train announcer, the French violin teacher, the loquacious parrot, the news reporter and Benny’s English butler. It was the latter bit of acting that won for Melvin Jerome Blanc the nomination as one of the outstanding bit parts in radio for 1945.
In addition to his four weekly radio broadcasts, Mel is busy on the Warner Bros. lot, where the voices of 90 per cent, of the masculine cartoon characters are dependent on his versatile vocal chords. It was he who devised the stuttering voice of Porkie Pig and the belligerent one of Bugs Bunny. And his new contract with Warner Bros. gives him screen credit for his voice characterizations, the first time this distinction has been given an actor in cartoons.
* * *
“PORTLAND and San Francisco both claim me,” said Mel in an interview following the rehearsal of a recent Judy Canova program. “Portland claims I was born in San Francisco, and San Francisco claims I was born in Portland.”
Actually, the man who plays so many parts on the air and on the screen was born in the Bay City 38 years ago, but moved to Portland at the age of 7.
Fellow classmates at Lincoln high school will remember Mel as the lad who began producing and directing amateur vaudeville shows at school. And in writing the skits for these shows he usually managed to feature himself as comic. It was then that Mel first to show an inkling of the career that would some day make him famous.
AS A BOY, WHEN MEL studied the violin, he never suspected that he would one day portray the role of Jack Benny’s French violin teacher. But he did know that he would never win much acclaim as a violin virtuoso in his own right. So, after eight years of study, he packed his violin away and turned his time to the tuba. With his big horn, Mel joined the staff hand at station KGW, played with some of the Northwest’s leading dance bands and filled a spot with the Portland Symphony orchestra.
It was for Portland radio listeners that Mel first aired his amazing voice dexterity when on KGW-KEX’ famous “Hoot Owls” and “Cobwebs and Nuts” broadcasts, he occasionally put aside his tuba to step up to the mike in one of a score of voices and dialects.
Some time after this, Mel began writing, producing and acting in a show of his own. But not content with putting in as many as 16 hours a day on a six-day-a week, 52-weeks-a-year job, he spent the seventh day writing the Portland Breakfast club scripts.
* * *
“IT WAS in 1935 that I left Portland for Hollywood,” Mel reminisced, “and, believe me, things weren’t easy for a while. For the first two years, I was lucky to do one show a week.
“Finally, I started getting chances at auditions and wound up with a spot on a network show. From then on, I’ve been pretty busy.”
That network show was with Al Pearce—and “pretty busy” is putting it mildly. By 1943, Mel was appearing in 14 radio shows a week and already becoming widely recognized for his movie cartoon voice characterizations. And with a half-hour radio show requiring a full day-and-night schedule.
“I finally just dropped everything except the four network shows I do now and the cartoons.”
* * *
“OH, AND BY the way,” he explained, “I never see the cartoons at all, you know. I merely do the voice part as prescribed by the script, and then later the artists draw the characters. Facial expressions and body movements are animated to match the dialogue.”
Mel can portray 57 different characters, sometimes doing as many as 8 or 10 on a single program. But his own favorites are the Burns and Allen postman and salesman Roscoe Wortle.
It was while he was doing the latter at the Judy Canova rehearsal that I saw he marked his script with a mechanical pencil with four colors of lead—a different color for each voice change.
“I always carry this pencil and a fountain pen,” he remarked. “The pencil is ideal for coding the script, and I save the pen for signing contracts.”
IT IS NOT ONLY his voice that Mel uses in his radio characterizations. His whole body fits into character as he strives to inject into each one a complete naturalness. When he assumes the character of the lazy Pedro, he slouches at the microphone and cocks his head to one side. Then on the same show, when he returns as Roscoe Wortle, he stands erect and straightforward.
In the few recreational hours his busy schedule allows. Mel fishes, plays with 7-year-old son Noel and does the buying for a successful Venice, Cal., hardware store which he started as a hobby. His merchandise features sporting goods with an accent on fishing equipment. His father-in-law operates the business while Mel operates his larnyx.
It is at their ocean-view home at Playa Del Ray, near Santa Monica that Mrs. Blanc (Estelle) and Noel listen to the radio so that when he comes back from the studio they can serve as critics to Daddy.
“I get a little homesick for Portland now and then,” Mel said as we left the studio,” “and maybe one of these days I’ll be able to take Estelle and Noel and go back there. You see they have the best fishing up there, and all the time I lived in Portland I never went fishing. Now it is my hobby, and I’d really like to try out my tackle on some of those big ones that get away.”

Blanc’s hiring by Treg Brown came at a time when the Schlesinger studio had decided to bring in professional actors; after all, Warner Bros. owned KFWB radio with all kinds of actors at its disposal. Billy Bletcher is probably the best known of the earliest pros. Not too much later came Danny Webb and Elvia Allman, joining seamstress-turned-actress Berneice Hansell. That early group seemed to find work at most of the West Coast studios. Blanc’s voice can be easily spotted in cartoons produced by Charlie Mintz for Columbia, and almost every cartoon fan knows he was the original voice of Woody Woodpecker for Walter Lantz (and, later, on children’s LPs).

Mel Blanc outshone all the others. His expressiveness, accents, even singing, was perfect for animated comedies, where Warner Bros. had become the top dog (or, bunny, perhaps). The dialogue got better and better as the 1940s wore on. In turn, Blanc’s performances got better and better. No doubt he inspired many, many others who followed. Mel Blanc really was the best cartoon actor of all time.

What’s that, you say? This is a perfect opportunity to plug Keith Scott’s two-volume history of actors in animated cartoons, you say? Why, indeed this is.

I can’t say enough good things about this set, which needed to be written. Only Keith, with his meticulous research and attentive ear, could write it. Check out the BearManor Media site for more. Keith has the full Mel Blanc story. Without any fish.

Tendlar and Betty

In 1950, a local newspaper staff writer named Erma Bombeck told readers about alumni artists from Stivers High School in Dayton. First on the list was Milt Caniff. Second was an animator by the name of Dave Tendlar.

Tendlar’s career in animator stretched more than 50 years. He was cartooning a little before that. The Dayton Daily News of March 14, 1926 mentions he had been drawing for the student newspaper. A 1925 story mentions he was musically inclined, but didn’t state what instrument he played in the Stivers Orchestra.

His father was a tailor and by 1930 had moved the family to the Bronx, where the elder Tendlar was in the fur business. The Census that year lists Tendlar’s occupation as “cartoonist, movie.” He told the late Jim Korkis, quoted on Cartoon Research: “I started at Fleischer as a painter [in 1927]. It was opaqueing, but now they call it painting. I was there a very short time but they reorganized Fleischers so I went to Krazy Kat for a couple of years. And then I went back to Fleischer as an animator.” There was also a stop at the John McCrory studio in between.

Tendlar’s first screen credit was on the Betty Boop/Bimbo short Crazy-Town (copyrighted 1931 but released in 1932). He followed the Fleischers to and from Miami, where he was president of the Flippers social club (the club had a 40-page magazine called Flip. Oh, if copies survived!).

He was part of the staff when Fleischers became Famous. Evidently, he left the studio briefly, then returned, as the 1950 Census records him as “cartoonist, novelty films.” He was back at Famous that year. When Gene Deitch arrived at Terrytoons, Tendlar was hired to work for him. Near the end of the 1960s, he had moved west where he worked for Filmation and then Hanna-Barbera, where he was picked to train new animators, among other duties.

In 1936, the Dayton Herald announced he was coming to town to visit friends. The Daily News followed up with a story about him in its August 7, 1936 edition. He talks about the changes in Betty Boop's design.

Comic Movie Artist on Visit
David Tendlar, native of Dayton, but now one of the most interesting of the commercial artists in New York is home on a visit to family and former haunts. And with him is Mrs. Tendlar on her first visit.
Tendlar is the leading artist of a group of animators for the “Betty Boop” and “Pop-Eye” cartoons, seen in the movies. He spends a full working day either drawing one of the characters, depending upon which one is in production at the New York studios of Max Fleischer.

When interviewed at the Biltmore where he is domiciled while in Dayton, Tendlar, personable, jolly and interesting, said that the making of an animated cartoon such as those he works on was a great job. “An artist makes about four and one-half feet a day,” said he; “that is all he can do. The average visual length of a completed film is about six minutes on the screen. Ninety feet of film pass in one minute, so you see the cartoon is about 550 feet in length. Each move is a frame, and each frame is a separate shot for the photographer, and that makes more shots than one could figure up in a few moments.
“We sketch our figures on thin paper, and the first move is placed on another piece of paper, and so on and on. A bright electric light bulb is under our sketching desk, and in that way we watch the progress of the figure across the screen.
“The figures are then placed on transparent celluloid and colored, as the background is stationary for each scene, only the figures are changed.
“About 10,000 separate sketches are made for each cartoon,” and with that amazing statement Mr. Tendlar was asked to sketch the figures of the famous Betty and also Pop-Eye, Olive and Wimpy in the interviewers book which he did. Said the artist, “We have lots of fun with Pop-Eye, and we can make these figures do anything, fall down, hit each other, and indulge in all sorts of slap-stick comedy, hut it is different with Betty. She is always dignified. She must never fall, never be treated too roughly, and for that reason she is a very difficult character.”
Eagerly the idea to include Betty’s missing garter was made, but it seems that the censors preferred to have Betty eliminate that obsolete piece of apparel, and also to observe that the fashion trend was for an added inch or so on her skirt length, and so that is the reason why Betty flirts a longer skirt.
Tendlar went to Stivers high school, and was interested in art always. When quite a youngster he admits that he went in for cartooning and copying all sorts of pictures, and chose the wall paper (on the wall) for “bigger and broader fields.” Martha Schauer was the teacher of art at Stivers, and encouraged Tendler and Milton Caniff, also a Stivers student, when they sketched for the Stivers paper. Caniff lives in New York.
The first visit of Tendlar in some years is finding him visiting various places which he remembers most happily. For instance, Thursday afternoon was to be spent at Lakeside park and the Soldiers home. Tendlar wanted to see the lake, and the spots in Lakeside park in which he remembered having good times.
Max Fleischer owns Betty Boop, and has been making cartoons with this character for eight years, also with Pop-Eye, although the character is copyrighted by someone else.
Saturday Mr. and Mrs. Tendlar will complete a number of social gatherings which have feted them during the week of their visit in Dayton, and will then return to New York to start work on several technicolor cartoons.

Tendlar was 84 when he died in Los Angeles on September 8, 1993.

Happy New Year

How could it be that Warner Bros. released a spot-gag cartoon about holidays on a calendar and Columbia did the same thing 13 days later?

Well, it’s simple. You see, Technicolor sent a print to Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera by accident and they were shocked to discover a Warners cartoon was almost the same as...oh, wait, that was another cartoon.

Anyway, I suspect the answer to the question is “coincidence.”

Columbia/Screen Gems’ Happy Holidays (released Oct. 25, 1940) even has a “more than one Thanksgiving” gag like Tex Avery’s Warners short Holiday Highlights (released Oct. 12, 1940). However Happy Holidays has a New Year’s Day gag where the other one doesn’t.

The cartoon starts with Scrappy’s brother Oopy on a calendar and suddenly realising the new year has come. He falls off the calendar, ripping off the title page to show January.



The gag? Some people don’t have the stamina for a long New Year’s Eve party. At 11:50 p.m., all is dark. As the minutes tick away, the lights in houses come on, a full moon pops into view. At midnight, there’s a celebration. Even the moon happily rings in the new year.



At 12:05, it’s all over. People go back inside their homes, the moon disappears, and it’s lights out by 12:08 a.m.



Allen Rose received the story credit for this Phantasy. Harry Love is the credited animator (no director is credited) and Joe De Nat supplied the music. Unlike the Avery cartoon, there is no narrator, but Mel Blanc supplies some voices. As you might anticipate from a Columbia cartoon of this vintage, there are celebrity caricatures. Clark Gable and Carol Lombard show up, and there’s a Baby Snooks routine.

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.

How To Make a Christmas Tree

Nothing says Christmas than a cartoon starring a Depression-era orphan in a shack unexpectedly getting presents from Santa Claus. Harman and Ising made one of those cartoons in The Shanty Where Santy Claus Lives (1933). And the Mintz studio did it a few years later in Gifts From the Air.

Much like in the Fleischers’ Christmas Comes But Once a Year, where Grampy invents toys from household items for kids in an orphange, the waif in this Columbia release creates a make-shift Christmas tree from things around the tumbledown home. First, a tattered umbrella.



Now, ornaments made from bubbles, including a star at the top.



A kitty cat conveniently shows up. The orphan rubs his fur to create static electricity, plugs the cat’s tail into a barrel and lights the tree. Hey, it’s better than Herman shoving a motionless Katnip’s tail into a light socket to do the same thing as in Mice Meeting You (1950). The electricity around the bubbles is hard to see in this pixilated video file.



This Color Rhapsody was copyrighted on December 22, 1936. While the official release date was January 1, 1937, a few theatres got it on their screens before then. The ad to the right is for a movie house in Ft. Worth on Christmas Day. The Ritz in San Bernadino showed it two days earlier with Bing Crosby’s Pennies From Heaven (an orphanage was in that one).

Ben Harrison came up with the story, with the animation credit going to Manny Gould. My guess is the song by a female trio as the boy is looking at toys in a shop window is a Joe De Nat original (“It’s Christmas time, it’s Christmas time, the glad time of the year. With lots of toys for girls and boys to bring them Christmas cheer” and so on). De Nat adds “O Come All Ye Faithful” and the inevitable “Jingle Bells” to the score. The cartoon ends with “Auld Lang Syne.”

The second half of the cartoon features something Columbia seems to have loved to put into its cartoons—radio star caricatures. Cantor, Bing, Bernie, Whiteman, Wynn and several others are here.

Motion Picture Exhibitor’s review of the cartoon in 1937 says “...a little boy gets a lot of fun out of some broken down toys. He prays and then believes the toys come from heaven.” Unless something has been edited in the re-release prints posted on-line, there’s no praying.

Wait a minute! What happened to the train and the elephant between scenes?



Mintz’s other Christmas time cartoon is the Art Davis-directed The Little Match Girl (1937) though there’s a Christmas sequence in the Scrappy-sans-Santa short Holiday Land (1934). (If I have missed one, leave a note in the comments).