I Hear Slurping

Purely as a plot device, Jerry laps up the cream Tom has stolen from a bottle on the porch in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Mouse.

Tom finally shoves the dish into a safe and slams it shut. But like Droopy in Tex Avery’s Northwest Hounded Police, Jerry is always there. Tom hears slurping from inside the safe. Here’s the anticipation and the take.



Jerry scrambles in reaction. Here are some drawings.



Tom opens the safe and looks inside. Reaction drawings.



The best part of this cartoon is the wild transformation drawings when Jerry gains and loses his strength. Jerry pops from one odd shape to the next.

Thad Komorowski has mentioned this is one of a number of MGM cartoons where Ray Patterson and Pete Burness did not get screen credit. The credited animators here are Ken Muse, Ed Barge, Mike Lah and Al Grandmain, who generally handled effects. Someone reading may know who is responsible for the pose drawings.

The June 30, 1945 issue of Boxoffice magazine announced the cartoon was going into production. The short was released June 14, 1947.

What'd He Say?

Barney Bear matches wits with a silent snowshoe rabbit in The Bear and the Hare, a 1948 MGM release from the Mike Lah/Preston Blair unit.

One gag has the rabbit juggling snowballs then batting them at the bear with his ears.



Barney responds. Evidently it was not a family-friendly response as the voice has been replaced with a trombone. The last word is “you.” We’ll leave it for you to look at the mouth movements of the first two frames below to figure out the first word. (Please, no foul language in the comment section in response).



Don Patterson, Ray Abrams, Irv Levine and Gil Turner are credited with animation. There’s no story credit. I had always thought Jack Cosgriff wrote for the Lah/Blair group. Cosgriff was a UC Berkeley grad who returned to MGM after the war; he had been a chief specialist for the Navy based in San Diego.

This was the second of three cartoons completed by the Lah/Blair unit. Thad Komorowski found two other shorts were assigned titles and production numbers but not completed. Producer Fred Quimby decided it was cheaper releasing propaganda cartoons from John Sutherland Productions than paying for a third unit.

One Droopy Night Backgrounds

When the second unit was revived at the MGM cartoon studio in September 1955, director Mike Lah acquired Fernando Montealegre as his background artist. Monte had been born in Costa Rica on June 23, 1926 and, in his late 20s, began work at MGM as an assistant animator.

His style meshed very nicely with that of Lah’s layout man, Ed Benedict, who seems to have preferred the flat style popularised by UPA. Monte’s backgrounds tend to be very stylised. The two of them moved to the Hanna-Barbera cartoon studio in 1957 where Monte’s work wasn’t quite as abstract.

Here are some of his backgrounds for the Oscar-nominee One Droopy Knight (1957). I like his use of colours. Mountain ranges are indicated by a simple purple line.



I don’t know if the characters are on overlays on this one.



Monte worked on all the early Hanna-Barbera syndicated shows and the ABC half-hours, like The Jetsons. He stayed with the studio through the early ‘80s, and died in California on April 29, 1991.

The Old Paint-a-Tunnel Gag

If the gag works for Chuck Jones and the Roadrunner, it’ll work for Mike Lah and Droopy, right?

In Mutts About Racing (1958), Spike tries getting the edge on Droopy in a car race by painting a tunnel against the side of a mountain. You know the gag. The difference is, other than you can barely see what’s happening thanks to the huge CinemaScope screen, is that Spike’s car breaks up into little pieces, then Spike does the same. The cracking-up-into-pieces bit is an old Tex Avery gag; in fact, Avery used the paint gag in one of his Droopy/Spike competitions.

Ed Benedict laid out the scenes in this cartoon and Fernando Montealegre painted the backgrounds. By the time this cartoon was in theatres, the two were making TV cartoons at Hanna-Barbera with stylised backgrounds toned down from what you see here. The MGM studio was winding down when this cartoon was made as even Dick Bickenbach, normally the layout man in the Hanna-Barbera unit, did some animation on this short. Irv Spence is credited, but he had left MGM in August 1956 for a job at commercial house Animation, Inc.

Goodbye, Waves Barney Bear

There’s an early Yogi Bear cartoon where the smarter-than-the-average you-know-what is suspended in mid-air after some balloons break. He turns to the audience, waves with a sad look on his face and then plummets out of the frame.

It sounds like something borrowed from Wile E. Coyote, but we also find it pre-Wile E. in the 1947 MGM cartoon The Bear and the Hare, co-directed by Mike Lah and Preston Blair. Incidentally, Lah animated the Yogi scene mentioned above.

It’s a six-drawing cycle, with the first and fourth drawings (the paw up and paw down) held for two frames. The third and the fifth drawings are re-used.



Here’s the cycle.



And here’s Barney falling out the scene.



Don Patterson, Irv Levine, Ray Abrams and Gil Turner provide solid, though not spectacular, animation. The story writer is not credited.