Pizzicato Pussycat Backgrounds

Friz Freleng’s cartoons of the mid to late 1940s had lovely background work by Paul Julian, but as the ‘50s bumped along, Freleng evidently wanted more modern designs, with outlines and representational shapes.

He borrowed Dick Thomas from the McKimson unit for Pizzicato Pussycat, released in January 1955. Thomas gave Freleng stylised backgrounds. Here are some examples.



Here’s a nice representation of one of Hawley Pratt’s layouts.



Pratt’s main characters don’t have the same kind of appearance as Sylvester or, say, the mouse in Mouse Mazurka (1949), which have a fairly traditional Warner Bros. look.



Being the 1950s, it is necessary that a piano is decorated with a candelabra. Thanks, Lee. Thomas manages to get some colour variation in this panned background.



Yes, music is involved in this short. It’s a Freleng cartoon, after all. And being a Freleng cartoon, the Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 by Liszt figures into the score. But the classics get tossed out the window. When the cat uses sticks to try to bash the highbrow piano-playing mouse running around a drum kit, the music suddenly switches to jazz. And that’s what we hear to end the cartoon.



Milt Franklyn is given the on-screen music credit and I suspect he arranged his own score. It seems a little odd a 1920s bandleader would come up with a ‘50s jazz arrangement. But the tune in question goes back to the ‘20s. It’s “Crazy Rhythm” by Irving Caesar and Roger Wolfe Kahn. (The pizzicato string/flute cue over the titles is a Franklyn original. He digs back to 1905 for the next piece of music, the well-used “Me-ow” by Mel Kaufman).

This short was made around the time of the six-month Warners cartoon studio shutdown (a year for the McKimson unit). Manny Perez and Virgil Ross are the only animators mentioned on screen; Gerry Chiniquy and Ken Champin are gone (Chiniquy returned when the studio re-opened). Warren Foster, one of a handful of people kept on during the shutdown, wrote the story.

Besides Mel Blanc, the wife is played by Marian Richman, who was also employed by UPA and various commercial studios. The narrator is Norman Nesbitt, who is heard in a number of Warners cartoons around this time. Nesbitt was a newscaster and actor whose cartoon career ended when he left Los Angeles for KOA-TV in Denver at the end of July 1954. Nesbitt retired in 1959 to look after the estate of his brother John, who was the narrator of The Passing Parade radio/MGM shorts series, then came out of retirement in 1964. He died in Los Angeles on January 26, 1975.

Listen to “Crazy Rhythm” below. This version is a little less crazy.

Jeeper's Creepers Backgrounds

Appropriately creepy backgrounds take up a good portion of the first third of Jeepers Creepers, a 1939 cartoon from the Bob Clampett unit.

Dick Thomas is responsible for these. There’s an establishing background. Then the camera trucks in. It also jerks sideways a bit. Warners cartoons always seemed to be doing this in the late ‘30s; it’s not a smooth shot and I don’t know why the studio liked doing this.



There are some lovely long paintings that I can’t put together from frames because of camera movement or effects animation. Here’s part of a house shot.



Looking up.



The shutters are on frames as they’re animated. The camera pans up to the roof.



Here’s a great living room painting that Manny Corral pans over, back and forth and in and out. Because of that, I can only show four portions.



The camera pans in then dissolves to a background featuring a radio.



Carl Stalling picks J.S. Zamecnik’s “Storm Music” to use over the footage of the house.

Ernie Gee wrote the story and Vive Risto got the rotating animation credit.

All Fowled Up Background

Dick Thomas paints a rather prosaic farmyard to open All Fowled Up, a 1955 cartoon that was sort of by the Bob McKimson unit.



This cartoon was started in 1955 and used two animators from the Chuck Jones unit, Dick Thompson and Keith Darling, as McKimson’s unit was being laid off for almost a year.

A Bob Clampett Background Trick

There are two ways you can have a very long background pan in a cartoon. One way is to paint a very long background. The other way is what you’ll find in Chicken Jitters, a 1939 Bob Clampett cartoon.

Dick Thomas painted two different backgrounds. The cameraman simply dissolved while panning both backgrounds. Because the pan is quick, you can’t see where one faded in and the other faded out.



Vive Risto and Bobe Cannon are the credited animators. There’s no story man listed. Perhaps Clampett did it himself. If so, he doesn’t seem to have been enthusiastic about this cartoon. The gags aren’t strong. There’s even one scene where the bad-guy fox talks but his mouth doesn’t move, as if Clampett wanted to get the cartoon done and saved time but not putting mouth movements on the exposure sheet.

Bell Hoppy Background

The establishing shot of Bell Hoppy, released in 1954, starts with a quick pan down a background drawing by Dick Thomas. Director Bob McKimson doesn’t seem to want to waste any time; the camera’s already panning when the scene fades in.

Thomas started out as one of the new, young background artists at Warner Bros., working first in Bob Clampett’s unit making black-and-white cartoons in the late ‘30s. By this time, he was paired by layout artist Bob Givens.

McKimson’s unit was disbanded before Warners shut down its cartoon studio for the last six months of 1953 and wasn’t reassembled when the studio reopened in January 1954. There was some question whether there would be a third unit at all (Friz Freleng and Chuck Jones headed the other units). But it was reactivated several months later with Thomas returning, but McKimson finding himself with a new animation crew and layout artist. Givens eventually returned and the two left for Hanna-Barbera in 1959, though Thomas stopped first at Disney to work on Sleeping Beauty.

Thomas’ last credit at Warners was Dog tales, released in mid-1958

Walky Talky Tree

Foghorn Leghorn steals the show in the Henery Hawk cartoon Walky Talky Hawky (1946). Director Bob McKimson scored a hit on this one. Showman’s Trade Review rated it “excellent.” Ray McFarlane of the Arbuckle Theatre in Arbuckle, California told the Motion Picture Herald: “One of the best cartoons we have had for a long time.” It was nominated for an Oscar (and lost to The Cat Concerto with Tom and Jerry).

Warren Foster’s inventive idea of a chicken hawk that doesn’t know what a chicken is sets up the cartoon takeover by loud-mouthed, aggressive Foggy, who is in the midst of harassing the barnyard dog.

The cartoon opens with an establishing shot of a tree. The camera “looks down” to the ground from mid-tree, then pans up to the top. It’s all on one drawing, so artist Dick Thomas had to paint it with an odd perspective when you look at the complete background (which, of course, the audience never did).

Mel Blanc changes voices on the father chicken hawk after the first line and Henery tosses away a Lucky Strike cigarette catchphrase for good measure.

Since the Foghorn-Leghorn-is-Senator-Claghorn story keeps making the rounds, you can do no better than to click on this research by Keith Scott who actually delved into the origins and timeline to come up with the truth, using Warner Bros. studio records.

Foggy had some pretty good outings at first. McKimson’s cartoons got tamer and tamer as the ‘50s wore on and were inert compared to some of the wonderful thrashing about you can find in the earliest shorts.

McKimson had recently taken over the Frank Tashlin unit, so Dick Bickenbach, Don Williams and Cal Dalton animated this cartoon; whether Art Davis worked on this, I will leave to the experts.

Naughty Neighbors Backgrounds

You know how some Hollywood musicals just scream to a stop for an uninteresting singing number? That’s what happens in Bob Clampett’s, go-through-the-motions, Porky Pig cartoon Naughty Neighbors (1939).

The cartoon stops for a pretty much gag-less musical number, as Mel Blanc as Porky and some woman ridiculously sped up as Petunia croon “Would You Like to Take a Walk.” Writer Warren Foster doesn’t even bother trying to imbue this with a sense of parody of musicals which halt everything because stars are expected to sing in a musical.

Instead, let’s look at frames of some of the backgrounds. There’s a pan near the start of the cartoon where we get a rural scene with a pun.



The pan comes to a stop here.



A nice farm country road.



I like the layout of this one. Porky and Petunia are still walking and singing in the distance.



There’s no doubt the backgrounds are by Dick Thomas. A few of them have the same scratchy grass that he painted in his cartoons at Hanna-Barbera in the early ‘60s.

The start of this cartoon is butchered in the recent Porky Pig DVD but I don’t want to beat that dead horse other than to say it spoiled Clampett’s opening gag.

Thumb Fun Take

Daffy Duck in shock in the cartoon Thumb Fun (1952).



Oh, and an inside joke. Dick Thomas painted the backgrounds for Bob McKimson unit (including this cartoon).



The animators credited are Rod Scribner, Phil De Lara, Bob Wickersham and Chuck McKimson.

The Turn-Tale Wolf Backgrounds

Dick Thomas was responsible for the background art in the Bob McKimson unit for the first number of years it was in operation at Warner Bros. (He had been in the Bob Clampett “Katz” unit in the late 1930s).

Here’s some of his work in The Turn-Tale Wolf (released in 1951). I love the pin-ups and the pillow stuffed through the broken window in the wolf’s run-down home.



Here’s part of an interior of the home the sissified version of the wolf lived in with his mother.



The layouts in this cartoon were supplied by Pete Alvarado.