Sailing to America, Thanks to Maurice Noble

“It wasn’t so long ago in the history of man’s voyage toward a better world that ships were carrying eager passengers toward the shores of a new nation that was just in the building.” So says narrator Macdonald Carey in the John Sutherland industrial cartoon It's Everybody's Business (1954).

Maurice Noble provided the art direction for this cartoon, funded by the Chamber of Commerce of the United States. Here are portions of the opening pan as the ship sails from Europe across the Atlantic.



Finally, they are about to each America.



Noble does a beautiful job with this cartoon. The background artist is not identified (Joe Montell may have been at the studio at that point) but the animators are Bill Higgins, Abe Levitow, Emery Hawkins and Bill Melendez.

Deduce, You Say Background

Maurice Noble and Phil De Guard are at it again in Deduce, You Say, a 1956 Warners cartoon from the Chuck Jones unit. This is panned left to right. You can click on it to make it bigger.



Oh, and while while we’re talking about De Guard...

This is from the Los Angeles Public Library collection. Photograph caption dated March 10, 1954 reads, "Philip De Guard, North Hollywood artist, shows his version of desert meeting between George Adamski, lecturer-author, and flying saucerman from Venus. Scout ship hovers over meeting place as mother ship soars in distance. In foreground is silhouette of six witnesses." Doesn’t quite look like his work on Duck Dodgers does it?

Sutherland Main Street

Will Mrs. Consumer of 1954 choose the Quickchill or the Permafreeze refrigerator? Look at the Permafreeze. New style! Better quality!



Yes, it’s a John Sutherland propaganda cartoon. America! Free enterprise equals freedom! Down with government controls!

The scene is from It's Everybody's Business, a 1954 short funded by DuPont for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The designs in this cartoon are great, though it seems the restored version of the short is a little dark in places. The man behind them was Maurice Noble; he left Warners a week before the Chuck Jones unit was laid off at Warner Bros. for the last six months of 1953. Ex-Warners artists Abe Levitow, Emery Hawkins and Bill Melendez are among the credited animators, and part of the score was provided by Gene Poddany, who had been Carl Stalling’s copyist.

Here’s a little more of Main Street, USA from a darker print.



And here’s Mrs. Consumer and her family at one of the USA’s national parks—funded by taxes, thanks to business competition driving the American economy.



The obligatory flag scene. No background artist is credited but I wonder if it’s Joe Montell. The art direction is by the great Maurice Noble.



Both NBC and CBS were experimenting with colour broadcasts during daytime hours in 1954, with NBC showing a number of industrial films. It’s Everybody’s Business was one of them, airing on Thursday, July 1st at 3 p.m. Business Screen Magazine of August 1954 pointed out:

It is always more difficult to judge color quality of animated films, like It’s Everybody’s Business, because the animator’s tints have always been at his own whim and not subject to comparison with “natural.” In telecasting them, the electronic color trimmer does not feel obliged to constantly “correct” as much. As a result, the film seemed “steadier” in its color than live action films. It demonstrated that animation will probably be a favorite device for colorcasters for some time.

We’ve got a little more on the cartoon in this post. We’ll have more on the Sutherland studio tomorrow.

Martian Through Georgia

There are places in the Chuck Jones cartoon Martian Through Georgia where the backgrounds look like they came from a UPA cartoon where a mad scientist injected the surroundings with some evil serum and the ornateness of the buildings couldn’t stop growing. Or maybe Maurice Noble and Phil DeGuard were injected with something.



Here, Jones and Noble use colour for effect, not for changing mood.



About the best you can say for this cartoon is it’s different. Well, in a way. The (non?)-hero is a Chuck Jones grinchy green. The facial expressions are pure ‘60s Jones. And the cartoon ends with one of those heart-shapes that Jones and his storyman-du-jour plopped onto the end of some of final Pepe Le Pew cartoons to show that romance is the end result of obsessive unwanted advances.

Captain of the Keyholes

Remember how Phil De Guard’s backgrounds morphed during action from right to left in Duck Amuck? Well, it happens again in Boyhood Daze (1957), a cartoon almost choked by Maurice Noble’s stylised designs.

A paper airplane against the wallpaper becomes Ralph Phillips piloting an aircraft, and the wallpaper becomes a cloudy sky.



You want symbolism? You got symbolism. A dreamy door with a keyhole fades into a number of keyholes, as Ralph pictures himself escaping his bedroom for his imaginary world. Milt Franklyn plays Captain of the Clouds in the background.



Someone once asked me if Ralph Phillips was Chuck Jones’ answer to Gerald McBoing Boing. Hardly. Not only were the UPA backgrounds far more stripped down, Gerald was a very innocent boy. Phillips thinks he’s a little adult. Gerald wants to be a part of the world which doesn’t want him. Phillips wants to be in his own little world with him at the centre of it as champion.

This drawing just screams late-Warners Chuck Jones.



Ralph is played by Dick Beals, while Abe Levitow, Dick Thompson and Ken Harris are the animators in this short.

Stand Back, Musketeers!

So much has been written over the years about the great cartoon Duck Amuck, you probably don’t want to read anything from me. So, instead, we bring you the opening title. Whether Don Foster was responsible, I don’t know. We’ve snipped it together as best as we can, though the lettering is on an overlay which shifts at one point during the pan down the drawing.

By the way, the music over the titles is a Carl Stalling original.

Maurice Noble Meets John of the Bon Ton

The changing look of animation in the 1950s was something that John Sutherland Productions adapted to very easily. Having big-moneyed corporate clients meant Sutherland could go out and hire the best designers available. The great Tom Oreb and Vic Haboush co-designed my favourite Sutherland short, Destination Earth. And, for a while, Sutherland had the services of Warner Bros.’ most adept layout man, Maurice Noble.

Noble was the art director for It's Everybody's Business, which told the story of American free enterprise and freedoms (as big business saw them) in 1954. Noble moved away from the Disney style of settings, just as he had been doing for Chuck Jones at Warners. An uncredited background artist worked up these scenes from Colonial times from Noble’s layouts. Forgive the poor quality; this is from a well-used print posted to archive.org.



The main character of the first portion of the cartoon, Jonathan, goes into the ladies hat business. “First, he had to advertise,” oozed narrator MacDonald Carey. Writer Bill Scott came up with an inverse of the famous Kent-Croome-Johnson Pepsi jingle of the 1940s that Jonathan (played by Herb Vigran) sings in the street, accompanied by a bell, to lure customers.

Shop at Bon Ton, it’s the spot
Twelve new hat styles, that’s a lot!
Ladies, get that new hat thrill.
30 days to pay your bills!



E.I. DuPont DeNemours and Company really pushed this cartoon. It was featured in a three-page spread, with frame grabs, in Business Screen magazine shortly after it was released. Sutherland had just won an award for its clever and attractive industrial A is For Atom and would do the same with this short. Business Screen reported (Vol. 16, No. 1):

Freedoms Foundation Honor Medal Award to "Everybody's Business"
It's Everybody's Business, an animated cartoon documentary of the American economy in Technicolor, sponsored by the Chamber of Commerce of the United States, has crowned its record first-run year in the field by winning the Freedoms Foundation gold honor medal award at ceremonies in Valley Forge. Pa. on Washington's Birthday.

In the eight-months' period the film has been in circulation, It's Everybody's Business has had more than 9,000 showings by local chambers of commerce, trade associations and business firms in addition to telecasts by 266 stations.
Chamber Vice-President Receives Medal
The Foundation's top motion picture prize was presented to Arch N. Booth, the Chamber's executive vice-president, in traditional Washington's Birthday ceremonies at Valley Forge, Pa.
It's Everybody's Business was sponsored by the U. S. Chamber in cooperation with E. I. duPont de Nemours and Company, Wilmington. Del., and was produced by John Sutherland Productions, Inc. of Hollywood. It's animated technique shows how the free enterprise system, based on a foundation of fundamental liberties and financed by individual savings, has made American business the most productive in the world.
Besides showings to business firms, fraternal and civic organizations, the film has gained audiences in junior and senior high school classes and adult education groups in hundreds of communities.
Running 22 minutes, It's Everybody's Business is available in 16mm or 35mm from state and local chambers of commerce or the Education Dept., Chamber of Commerce of the United States, 1615 H. St., N.W. Washington 6, D. C.

Animation credits went to Abe Levitow, Bill Melendez, Emery Hawkins and Bill Higgins, with music by Les Baxter and Gene Poddany. Ex MGM animator Carl Urbano was the director.

The Cats Bah

Phil De Guard paints some exceptional background drawings in “The Cats Bah” (1954). There’s a beautiful long shot of what we imagine to be Algiers as Pepe begins his flashback story. Director Chuck Jones shoots it diagonally so we can’t really snip it together.

There’s another pan shot tracking down the next background painting and that’s what you see to the right.

Maurice Noble was the layout artist on this cartoon.

Here are some shorter background drawings. Pepe’s love nest opens the cartoon. It has cherubs on the wall. Too much pastel and too frou-frou; Noble and De Guard got the effect they were going for. There’s some variety in the shots as well; some backgrounds are on a slight angle.

Writer Mike Maltese includes a little pun here. “Peter the Potter” is a play on Peter Potter, who was a disc jockey at KLAC in Los Angeles when this cartoon was made. Hanna-Barbera’s Peter Potamus was named for him as well.