Popeye was invincible after eating spinach, so the Fleischer staff found ways to make it backfire.
In Can You Take It (1934), Popeye leaps into a Fleischer version of the fight club and (non-twisker) punches the guy to his right. The fighters are in a circle and fall like dominoes. But the force of the punch is so strong, Popeye gets knocked down, too.
He punches the guy on his left. Same result.
Finally, Popeye hits on a solution by hitting the wooden floor with his fist. Perspective animation follows.
The music in the background is “You’ve Got to Be a Football Hero,” though there are no footballs in sight. Myron Waldman and Tom Johnson get the rotating screen credits. The cartoon was made when Bonnie Poe was playing Olive Oyl.
Spinach doesn’t just work on “hu-mings” in the Popeye cartoons. In Strong to the Finich (1934), the sailor demonstrates to the sick-of-eating-spinachk kids living at Olive Oyl’s Health Farm for Children that it gives vitaliky to just about anything.
In one scene, Popeye pours it into a hole of an anaemic-looking tree.
Being a Fleischer cartoon, the tree sprouts a mouth (and teeth) and begins chewing.
The tree begins to grow.
It sprouts leaves. And since “In the Shade of the Old Apple Tree” is playing in the background, apples begin to grow.
Wait a minute! The apples become pears.
The pears become pineapples.
Finally, some of the pears become bananas.
It’s on to the next gag.
This is one of the cartoons with a low-voiced Olive played by Bonnie Poe. Red Pepper Sam (aka William Costello) is Popeye.
Much like an Our Gang comedy, there’s a black kid. This is likely meant to be inclusive; all the children are equal in this. He doesn’t talk like Amos ‘n’ Andy, and he’s not the subject of ridicule (like being slow or afraid of ghosts).
Seymour Kneitel was the de facto director of the short, with Doc Crandall also getting an animation credit.
Imaginative visual gags are part of what makes the Screen Songs created at the Fleischer studio in the early 1930s so much fun to watch.
Here are just a few examples from Show Me the Way to Go Home (1932). We start with a goldfish in a bowl in a saloon. He jumps into a glass of booze.
As the background male quartet work their way through the song, the fish becomes drunk, jumps onto the top of the glass, yells “Whoopee!” and then leaps out of the scene.
The fish stands in for the usual Fleischer bouncing ball for the theatre audience to sing along. Each time the fish lands on a lyric word, hands pointing “the way to go home” sprout up. There are seven words in the line. Six of the hands form pairs and shake. The seventh picks up the fish and throws him out of the scene.
The fish staggers across the next line of words. There’s a swirl. It forms a bowl. A pillow and blanket appear and the fish enacts the words “I want to go to bed.”
There are other imaginative treatments of the words as well.
Some of the Screen Songs feature live-action footage of Paramount stars (on the East Coast), including Louis Armstrong, Cab Calloway and Ethel Merman. This one does not, but it has angular footage of a live-action drunk. It’s very clever. I wish these Screen Songs were on TV when I was a kid instead of the weak Famous Studio versions with the same mixed chorus.
There are no credits available for the cartoon, but the old man drawn in one of the scenes reminds me of a figure in a Shamus Culhane Christmas card. Culhane was soon off to the West Coast and Ub Iwerks.
The Fleischer studio cartoons of the early 1930s are among my favourites of all time.
Their attitude is different than the happy musical setting you’ll find in a Harman-Ising cartoon for Warner Bros. The Fleischer cartoons are bleaker, nightmarish at times, and, given the musical artists featured, not very white. In urban New York, that meant alcohol, drugs and illicit sex.
Jerry Beck’s “The 50 Greatest Cartoons” (JG Press, 1998) skips past Swing You Sinners! (1930), but includes three great Fleischer cartoons in its top 20. Number 19 is the Betty Boop version of Snow-White. Unlike the Walt Disney feature version, the dwarfs here are not likeable with child-like personalities. They’re zeroes. Instead, we get Betty in the title role, Bimbo and Koko as palace guards who rescue Betty, the Wicked Queen and her magic hand mirror.
The songs given to Betty (Mae Questel) are fairly ordinary, but the cartoon gets into bizarre territory when the four characters go into a mystery cave and Koko acquires Cab Calloway’s voice and sings “St. James Infirmary Blues,” with Betty in an icy “coffin” (she is still alive and moving) and the clown into a high-stepping ghost enacting the lyrics. It’s a far cry from Foxy singing “Smile, Darn Ya, Smile.”
A real highlight is the background art in the cave sequence. I suspect some of you have seen this video, but it’s new to me. Someone has managed to clip together the panned backgrounds from two scenes. It must have taken forever to get around the characters that take up most of the foreground. Then there’s always a problem (as I have discovered trying to do the same thing) of making the black-and-white tones from one frame match another. I don’t have fancy software to help; I use an ancient version of MS Paint. I gather that’s what this person has done.
You can see a video of the backgrounds below.
To look at the background recreation from frames, you can go here.
We’ve posted Film Daily’s review of the cartoon elsewhere on the blog. Here are some capsule comments in The Motion Picture Herald of the day:
SNOW-WHITE: Betty Boop—Clever cartoon that features “Saint James Infirmary Blues” sung by Cab Calloway. I featured this in my advertising and believe that it helped.—H. B. Schuessler (Martin Theatres), LaFayette Theatre, LaFayetts, Ala. Small town patronage.
SNOW WHITE: Betty Boop, Cab Calloway—One of the very best cartoons we have shown. It deserves billing. Running time, 9 minutes.—A. B. Jefferis, New Piedmont Theatre, Piedmont, Mo. Rural and small town patronage.
SNOW-WHITE: Betty Boop—good filler on any program. Running time, one reel.—D. E. Fitton, Lyric Theatre, Harrison, Ark. Small town patronage.
PICK-UP: Sylvia Sidney, George Raft—Dated this with Paramount short “Snow White” and RKO “Century of Progress.” Patrons liked feature and business was excellent, due probably to extra draw of the shorts, which we had advertised heavily. Played October 1-3.—Avece T. Waldron, Blue Moon Theatre, Oklahoma City, Okla. Suburban family patronage.
And from the March 1933 issue of the journal of the National Board of Review:
SNOW WHITE (Talkartoon)—Paramount. Family audience. Junior matinee.
Yup. Entertainment suitable for children. Approved by censors. Depression-era kids were a hardier lot than the “Oh, you can’t show guns on Saturday morning cartoons. Think of the children!” Mind you, you couldn’t show kids a cartoon cow’s udder back then. Every generation has its ridiculousness.
Calloway was a Fleischer favourite, appearing first in Minnie the Moocher (1932), then in Snow-White and, finally, The Old Man of the Mountain (1933).
While Doc Crandall got the sole animation credit for this short, the background artist isn’t credited. That’s a real crime.
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.
Thanks to DVDs (and Blu-Rays), it’s easy for the animation fan to stop a cartoon and look at an individual frame. The Fleischers did this for theatre-goers in 1938 with the release of the Color Classic Hold It.
At the end of the cartoon, director Dave Tendlar (listed as an animator with Nick Tafuri) has joyous cats jumping into the air. Then they “hold it.” The soundtrack goes silent and the drawing below is held for 15 frames.
There’s a fun series of drawings of two cats, twirling 180 degrees then back again in a cycle. Did any other studio try anything like this before 1938?
The cartoon also borrows a gag from the defunct Van Beuren studio. Four singing cats join their mouths together to form one mouth.
UCLA did a great restoration job on this cartoon.
One of the cats in this short is named “Myron,” no doubt in honour of Mr. Waldman (I do not know if he animated any of this cartoon. Someone likely does).
Jack Mercer does a fine job as a raspy cat singing the title song. The short begins with Bing Crosby’s theme “Where the Blue of the Night Meets the Gold of the Day.”
