Being Backus

UPA’s Mr. Magoo cartoons had sight gags (in more ways than one), but what really benefited them was the vocal performance of Jim Backus.

How much of the dialogue was improvised is unclear, but Backus could go from sweet to annoyed to emphatic. He gave Magoo’s personality some colour amongst endless sketchy backgrounds and a continual inability to read signs.

The TV writer for one of the newspapers in Memphis gave a short report on Backus and Magoo in its edition of September 5, 1961. He didn’t actually speak with Backus. Charles Collingwood did. The writer simply relayed parts of their conversation from the September 1 edition of Person To Person on CBS. There is a mention of how Backus was making his big money from Magoo—not on the cartoons, but on a series of animated commercials for General Electric light bulbs. It ran for several years and we can only imagine the Thurston Howell-like residuals they brought in.

The column ends with words about prime-time cartoons that were to start the 1961-62 season. The trend came and went quickly. As prime-time programming, it was a failure. However, reruns on weekend mornings were welcomed by kids everywhere and kept the characters living. And making money for their owners.

In T-V Cartoons, Voice Comes First
By ROBERT JOHNSON, Press-Scimitar Staff Writer
When Person to Person cameras peered into his home the other night, Jim Backus answered a question which had never worried me it all, but which in retrospect seemed interesting.
Jim had one of his greatest successes as the Voice of Mister Magoo, the near-sighted little bumbler who won an Academy Award and is now one of the busiest salesmen in the commercials.
The question: Which comes first in an animated cartoon, the figure or the voice?
It’s the voice, said Backus. He gets a script, studies it then puts his part on tape. The pen-and-ink fellows then have to do the hard part— matching the animation to the voice.
Altho I have been around cartoon studios numerous times, I had somehow just always taken it for granted that they made the cartoons, then the actors match the voices in.
Saves Actors a Lot of Work
The way they do it not only makes sense, but it must save the actors who are voices for cartoon characters a lot of work. It's almost like working radio, with a script there to read from.
Backus was one of the best subjects Person to Person has ever presented, I thought. He is not the biggest of stars, but certainly he has been a successful one, and financially he must be far ahead of some of the glamor faces which grace the magazine covers.
At least, judging from the luxury apparent in the Backus home, and the first view we got of him walking through some manicured grounds which might have gone well with Windsor Castle, and two servants who appeared on cue, being a cartoon voice has done quite well for Backus.
The only trouble, he said, is that he works so hard to be able to afford his luxury that he seldom gets a chance to enjoy it. It even costs money to be on Person to Person, he said wryly, because his wife had their home redecorated and got new drapes.
But Backus also has another gold mine—the residual payments he gets from I Married Joan, one of the first successful situation comedies. The series has been rerun numerous times in this country, is now in the foreign market, which is turning out to be important for t-v film makers just as it was for the Hollywood feature film makers. The series turned out even more popular in England than in this country, Backus said, because in England the idea of a judge being kept on even keel by a somewhat haywire wife was even more ludicrous, because the English hold their judges in somewhat more awe than we do, and the aggressive wife is not so common.
Wears His Success Well
Backus is one of those happy-go-lucky fellows who seem to be able to have success and still do what they want and continue to be highly individualistic in personality—altho sometimes in their moments out of the public eye they are not quite as happy as they seem.
Backus is a strong, unconventional personality. He still wears suits, in Hollywood, and says that his swimming pool is rectangular, not one of those exotic shapes. He was an interesting subject for Person to Person, despite the stilted stiffness which so often pervades this program, because he insisted on being himself. He is humorous without effort, and he had a driving energy. He and Mrs. Backus write in their spare time, turned out one book, "Rocks on the Roof," and are now working on another, which he was persuaded with difficulty from not titling "Son of Rocks on the Roof." He says they have discovered the ideal collaboration arrangement. In bed.
I shall miss Person to Person when it leaves us after this summer run of shows which were made some time ago. It is interesting to see the surroundings in which well known people live.
10 New Cartoon Series Coming
The cartoon voices will really come into their own this fall, because among the major trends in programming cartoons are making a strong showing.
There will be at least 10 new cartoon series coming on, largely as the result of success of The Flintstones, Huckleberry Hound, Yogi Bear and Rocky and His Friends.
The cartoons have undergone a big change from the old format, when cats banging mice around and then getting caught in the vacuum cleaner, etc., was the standard procedure.
Sometimes I have watched curiously as Heckle and Jeckle or Bugs Bunny set various characters on fire, lured them over cliffs, banged them with clubs, etc. It seems like concentrated sadism.
But the trend now is toward sophistication, toward derisive satire. Yogi Bear and Huckleberry Hound have more adults than children watching, and the appreciation of Huckleberry has become a sort of highbrow status symbol.
Arnold Stang as Top Cat
Top Cat, from Screen Gems, which will debut on ABC at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Sept. 27, is from the Hanna-Barbara Studios, which have had the Yogi Bear, Quick Draw McGraw, Huckleberry Hound and Flintstones hits in three years. The voices include some of the most successful character actors, with Arnold Stang in the title role, Allen Jenkins, Maurice Gosfield (he was Doberman in the Bilko show), Marvin Kaplan, Leo De Lyon and John Stephenson.
Beatrice Kaye, the singer, will be the voice of Alvin in The Alvin Show, based on the chipmunk recording stars.
Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll (Amos and Andy), whom I would have thought would be content to sit around and count their millions, will be the voices of Calvin and the Colonel, a cartoon about a bear and a fox.
Now Screen Gems, which seldom moves except from strength, announces a new technique called Tri-Cinemation. The company has made a deal to produce a series in which life-like dolls, described as "exactly like human beings, down to the most precise detail, from the wrinkles in the skin to the inflection of a finger," will be made to move on film.
People—who needs them? Except for the voices.

The critics’ attitude toward Huckleberry Hound and Yogi Bear was fairly consistent. They, and parents groups, cried against what they saw as too much violence in old theatrical cartoons (and Three Stooges shorts, for that matter). Yes, there were dynamite explosions and, yes, Quick Draw McGraw would shoot himself on occasion. But these were different. They were less frenetic than the old Warner Bros cartoons and seemed a lot less painful than what Famous/Paramount had been pumping out. The characters were amusing, clever or funny, so they got a passing grade.

The idea of “protecting” children from seeing cartoon characters engaging in slapstick violence strikes me as pointless. So does emasculating animated characters to become educators for whatever causes parental pressure groups want. Let funny characters be funny.

Magoo's Payoff

Pink and Blue Blues starts off with Mr. Magoo mistaking a fish bowl for a television and a fish for Esther Williams, and spends the remainder of the cartoon mistaking just about everything for something else.

Bill Scott weaves a robber, a child being baby-sat, a dog and a tube of toothpaste into the plot, so at the end, police show up to arrest a robber and praise Magoo for being “right on the job.”

Through it all, we get non-stop chatter from Jim Backus. It would impossible to make a silent Magoo cartoon.

In one gag, Magoo mistakes his cuckoo clock for a pay phone.



This sets up the final gag of the cartoon. Magoo has already mistaken a burglar for a police officer. At the end he mistakes a police box for the same officer.



The camera trucks in to show the cuckoo bird reacting to Magoo with a familiar sound. Then Scott adds a nice touch by having the 78 nickels Magoo has slipped into the clock pour out like a jackpot from a one-armed bandit.



To be honest, I was going to talk about another Magoo cartoon, but it had more of the same “almost-blind old guy mistakes stuff” and endless dialogue from Backus, all surrounded by flat backgrounds.

It must be me. Magoo was an incredible popular character, employed to sell light bulbs and beer. The commercials I generally like, and some of the Magoo theatricals I enjoy, but I just can’t get excited about others. And don’t get me started on the TV “Magloo” series after Hank Saperstein took over the studio.

This short was released in 1952. It was directed by Pete Burness, who maintains a good pace throughout, with designs by Ted Parmelee and credited animation by Rudy Larriva, Phil Monroe and Tom McDonald.

Tralfaz Sunday Theatre: Magoo is No Dim Bulb

You couldn’t help but see the incongruity of someone who couldn’t see, selling light bulbs.

As Television Age of March 21, 1960 put it in a feature story on General Electric signing with UPA to use Mr. Magoo in its TV ads: “The advertiser felt no hesitation in choosing for its salesman a bumbling, half-blind little guy who obviously sees no better with GE light bulbs than without, evidently feeling the humorous approach would work in its favor. Magoo himself has worked for other advertisers—most notably Stag beer—in regional campaigns, but GE intended to promote its use of the character to such an extent that Magoo and GE bulbs would be synonymous.”

And Television Age was told by G.E’s ad manager that it moved its money from print into spot TV because it worked for Lestoil, which had cartoon ads parodying Dragnet.

Sales Management magazine of February 17, 1961 pointed out G.E. spent a million dollars on Magoo TV spots in the fall of 1960, and another $100,000 in accompanying promotion among its dealers.

It boiled down to one simple fact: people loved Mr. Magoo.

Rather than go on and on about what trade publications had to say, let’s give you something a little more fun—a 1963 G.E. promotional film for the company’s retailers. Not only does it feature some Magoo commercials, but Jim Backus is on camera to give an explanation. And there’s a cameo appearance by the NBC peacock (a little washed out, but the print is old).

Tralfaz Sunday Theatre: Tune in Tomorrow

They tried to save network radio. It was a lost cause.

Since the late 1920s, people wanted television in their homes. It took some time to perfect it. After the war, there was a steady stream of stations signing on. That brought advertising money. Advertising money that had been going to radio. The big-time network shows started disappearing because there wasn’t the money to pay for them.

NBC, CBS, ABC and Mutual had all kinds of capital tied up in their radio networks and they didn’t want to see that collapse. CBS’ reaction was a publicity campaign to tell everyone that radio still had lots of listeners and there would be even more—and all willing to buy products advertised on radio.

To get its point across, CBS commissioned UPA to make several animated promotional films. The first, More Than Meets The Eye, was made in 1952 to describe the impact of the human voice in advertising. The second, in 1953, was It's Time for Everybody, and dealt with the changing patterns of daily life in the U.S. CBS claimed it had been seen by nearly a quarter of a million business and professional people.

The third was Tune in Tomorrow, previewed for newsmen on Thursday September 30, 1954 before being shown to advertising, business and broadcast industry groups. It looked ahead to where radio would be in 1960. The release, according to Broadcasting magazine of Oct. 4, 1954, coincided with new nighttime programming offering Monday through Friday runs of newsman Allan Jackson, commentator Lowell Thomas, Tennessee Ernie Ford, The Choraliers, Edward R. Murrow, Mr. and Mrs. North, Amos 'n' Andy Music Hall, and Mr. Keene, Tracer of Lost Persons.

Psychic, CBS was not. Mr. Keen needed tracing himself in 1955 when CBS told him to get lost. 1960 saw the last of the big-time evening shows on the network; the venerable Amos and Andy didn’t even have a sponsor when they were taken off the air on November 25th. The sainted Murrow was unwelcome and gone, too.

Since someone will mention this if I don’t, CBS had a later relationship with UPA when it put The Boing Boing Show on the air in 1956. That's even though the network owned a cartoon studio (Terrytoons) at the time.

Let’s look at Tune in Tomorrow. The cartoon (not this version) has been cleaned up and released on one of Steve Stanchfield’s fine Thunderbean discs, with commentary by Mike Kazaleh and Jerry Beck. I haven’t heard what they had to say about the cartoon, but I understand it was directed by Bobe Cannon. Broadcasting helpfully tells us “Narration of ‘Tune in Tomorrow’ was by John Cone and Harry Marble, sound direction by Gordon Auchincloss and music adaptation by Bernard Herrmann.” What it doesn’t say is the voice at the start and at the end is that of Tony Marvin, among the people fired by Arthur Godfrey. In the 1960s, he ended up on Mutual doing top-hour news, which is about all the networks were airing.

Why Can't Magoo See?

Our Kartoon Kwestion Box has a Quincy query (better make that “Kwincy kwery” for more “komedy”).

“Since Mr. Magoo has trouble seeing, why doesn’t he get glasses?”

Well, the answer is, Quincy Magoo HAS glasses. They make an appearance in the second Magoo cartoon Spellbound Hound (released in 1950).

Mr. Magoo is on the phone in the Point Dim View Lodge when a dog peers through a window. Magoo thinks the window is a mirror. He sees the dog, then grabs his glasses for a better look.



This is what he sees in them.



Magoo can’t believe it. “Boy, I look terrible,” he says to himself.



The answer to the question, from the Tralfaz medical department: “He doesn’t bother with glasses because his astigmatism is so bad, they don’t help.”

UPA director John Hubley probably had a better explanation, recorded in Leonard Maltin’s Of Mice and Magic: “It wasn’t just that he couldn’t see very well; even if he had been able to see, he still would have made the same dumb mistakes, ‘cause he was such a bullheaded, opinionated old guy.”

Spellhound Hound is certainly not a static cartoon. There are some enjoyable stretch in-betweens. I like the short, squat version of Magoo. Even some of the visual-mistake gags are funny because they come out of nowhere. Who expects Magoo to mutter “Yo-yo fish” when he catches his rod pulls a doorknob out of the lake?

Pat Matthews, Bill Melendez, Willie Pyle and Rudy Larriva are the credited animators. Jim Backus shows more emotional range as Quincy Magoo in the early cartoons. Jerry Hausner plays Ralph and likely the dog.

Man on the Land

There must have been an incredible feeling of irony going through the UPA studios when they won the contract to make Man On The Land.

It was an industrial short released in 1951. UPA wasn’t exactly populated by members of the John Birch Society. Director John Hubley and publicity man Charles Daggett lost their jobs because of pressure from right-wingers (Bill Scott was treated to the same fate thanks to guilt by association). Yet here was the studio crafting a 15-minute film for Corporate America—and Big Oil, at that.

It was clothed a bit in 1950s leftist sensibilities. Through the film, there is a guitar-strumming folk singer (off screen). After footage of a farmer and a truck driver, he sings “That’s what it takes to make a country strong. A man on the land who knows right from wrong.” The only thing here is “wrong” means the supposed ideals of pinkos and Commies, and the “man on the land” is supposed to be “ready to fight” to protect the glorious American free enterprise system.

UPA gets a credit at the end. None of the people who worked on this cartoon are mentioned, but we do know a few of them, thanks to publications of the day. The musical score and folk song were provided by Hoyt Curtin, who made a number of films for UPA before being hired at Hanna-Barbera. The Nov. 1953 issue of Music Journal also reveals the singer is Terry Gilkyson. Art Direction, in its April 1953 edition, identified Bill Hurtz as the director.

There was something called the National Lubricating Grease Institute. Its monthly publication was The Institute Spokesman, which wrote in its Oct. 1951 issue:

New York — The dramatic story of how man has been able to wrest today’s high standard of living from Nature and the Land is the theme of a new motion picture sponsored by Oil Industry Information Committee.
Entitled “Man on the Land,” the action-packed motion picture was made for the Committee by United Productions of America—the firm which won an Academy Award in 1950 for an animated motion picture [Gerald McBoing Boing]. The same style of animation and full technicolor is used in “Man on the Land.”

This unusual film tells the story of agriculture in 16 swiftly-paced minutes— from the time that man first scratched the earth with a forked stick to the present age of oil-powered tractors, petroleum fertilizers, insecticides and other petrochemicals.
It illustrates graphically how every one of the nation’s 150 million people benefits in one way or another from the side by side progress and the inseparable relationship of two of America’s great industries—agriculture and petroleum. A ballad singer carries the story instead of the conventional narration.
The new motion picture is now being made available to oil companies, trade associations, agriculture societies and organizations, and other interested parties. It is available in both 35 millimeter and 16 millimeter prints. The film is expected to receive thousands of showings from coast to coast, particularly during the period of October 14-20, when the industry observes Oil Progress Week.
Production of the motion picture was supervised by Film Counselors, Inc., of New York, and a subcommittee of the Oil Industry Information Committee headed by Philip C. Humphrey, public relations director for The Texas Company, New York.

Humphrey, told the Public Relations Journal of Feb. 1952 the short played at the Royx Theatre in New York for three straight weeks for free. The film was also broadcast on the DuMont network on its Better Living Television Theater (Wednesdays, 10:30 p.m., WABD). It was propaganda, pure and simple, with the broadcast being preceded by a panel discussion involving the chairman of Seaboard Oil, the president of Power Oil and the agricultural counsellor for the aforementioned institute (as per the May 1954 issue).

The film is mentioned in a feature article about UPA in the April 1953 edition of Art Director & Studio News. It was penned by the PR man whose career at the studio was killed in the blacklist.

UPA breathes modern spirit and style into traditionally romantic movie
CHARLES DAGGETT, UNITED PRODUCTIONS OF AMERICA
“The cleverest movies, foot by foot and frame by sophisticated frame, that are coming out of Hollywood are the animated cartoons made by United Productions of America.”
Thus the Los Angeles Times for Sunday, February 8, 1953...
“United Productions of America — familiarly known as UPA — is the new movie-cartoon studio that has recently worked to the fore as a virtually revolutionary producer in the field of the animated film. UPA is imposing what amounts to the spirit and style of modern art upon the traditionally romantic and restricted area of the movie cartoon. The UPA people are unhampered by any urge toward the literal. Their drawing and designs are imagistic, contrived mainly from subtle colors and fluid lines.
“Staffed for the most part by artists with young minds and progressive ideas, whose talents extend beyond the field of the screen cartoon to the fine arts (many of them are exhibited in the galleries of Los Angeles and New York), the UPA studio out in Burbank, Calif., is a West Coast center of artistic industry. The whole place — a cheerful California ranch-type studio building — breathes freedom, imagination and taste.”
Thus Bosley Crowther, motion picture critic of the New York Times, in his Sunday magazine piece on December 21, 1952 . . .

These are only two of the scores of superlative comment UPA has earned in the past few years with its brilliant new animated film techniques. Mr. Crowther’s on-the-scene report particularly emphasizes the key to UPA’s success. This success lies in the hearts and minds of an outstanding group of artists who are permitted the fullest freedom in expressing themselves. At the head of this group is Stephen Bosustow, 42 year old President of UPA, who provides the enlightened production leadership that permits artists to work as they please in the animated film medium.
The chief differences between UPA’s entertainment and commercial films and the films of other companies are those of story, design, color, animation, and contemporary art. UPA’s greatest impact in the motion picture field has been made through its entertainment films such as “Gerald McBoing-Boing,” “Rooty Toot Toot,” the Near-sighted Mister Magoo films, and scores of others produced for Columbia Pictures’ release. However,
UPA recently blazed new trails in the commercial film area with “More Than Meets the Eye,” which it produced for CBS Radio. This was the striking story of CBS Radio’s tremendous influence over the buying habits of millions of Americans and was the first business documentary film ever to be told in terms of abstract modern art.
The ingredients used by Bosustow to build UPA into prominence in the brief span of years were business initiative, an artistic and creative background, good taste in story and art selection, a marked organizing and executive talent and a large amount of intestinal fortitude.
Ten years ago, Bosustow was working for the Hughes Aircraft Co., as head of production scheduling and control on the giant experimental flying boat Howard Hughes was building. His business sense and his ability to express an idea in simple drawings attracted the attention of the Consolidated Shipyards in Long Beach (Cal.). The shipyard needed a film to teach some safety rules to welders. Bosustow made the picture, a slide film called “Sparks and Chips Get the Blitz” and began his career as head of an industrial animated motion picture company.
Within two years his Industrial Films and Poster Service had turned out score of animated training films for the Navy, the Army, the Office of War Information, the State Department and several business firms.
There were a half dozen employees when UPA was incorporated eight years ago. Today there are 75 employees, the company does a $750,000 yearly business, has its own studio in Hollywood and consistently produces the most modern and mature animated cartoons in its field. In New York, UPA also has a studio that is devoted to making television commercials and industrial documentary films. UPA won the New York Art Directors Club award for the best television commercial of 1950 and won both the New York Art Directors Club and the Los Angeles Art Directors Club awards for the best television commercials of 1951.
UPA, although it won film awards from the beginning of its existence, was really “discovered” when it produced “Gerald McBoing-Boing,” the Academy award winning cartoon for 1950. This year, for instance, UPA won three Academy nominations for its productions. In the cartoon field, nominations were for “Madeline,” a charming children’s story by Ludwig Bemelmans, directed by Robert Cannon, and “Pink and Blue Blues,” a rousing chapter in Mister Magoo’s career as a baby sitter, directed by Pete Burness. In the documentary short subjects field, UPA’s production of “Man Alive!”, for the American Cancer Society, also was nominated. This film was directed by William T. Hurtz.



Cannon, who directed “Gerald McBoing-Boing,” and “Madeline,” has a particularly fluent ability to make whimsical and amusing films. Burness, who does the Mister Magoo series for UPA, is also one of the most skilled directors in the animated film field. Hurtz, who did the Cancer Society picture, two years ago, directed “Man on the Land” for the American Petroleum Institute, and it won a Freedom Foundation award in 1952. At the present time, Hurtz has switched over to the entertainment field and is now finishing the “Unicorn in the Garden,” a grim and amusing story of domesticity by the great American wit, James Thurber. Ted Parmelee, another of UPA’s directors, is now making one of the most experimental films UPA has attempted. This is Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Tell Tale Heart.” The Poe story is a horror tale and does not follow the conventional cartoon story line. Artists working with Parmelee on this film have been allowed to do highly abstract backgrounds, which should make the short picture a melodramatic shocker.
In New York, the directors are Abe Liss and Gene Deitch. Deitch specializes in TV commercial direction. Liss also works on commercial films but presently is directing one of UPA’s entertainment cartoons for Columbia release.
Among the artists who contribute so much to the outstanding quality of UPA films are Paul Julian, Jules Engel, Robert McIntosh, Robert Dranko, Michi Kataoka, Sterling Sturtevant, C. L. Hartman, and Abe Liss.
UPA’s films have met with wide acclaim throughout Europe as well as the United States. The company now has plans for making a full-length feature. In this production, UPA will adhere to the use of fine modern art, modern music and adult story telling. Among the stories being considered for production are James Thurber’s “Battle of the Sexes,” and “Don Quixote.”

You can watch a muddy dub of the short below. The voices aren’t named, but Vic Perrin is the narrator and Jerry Hausner as the scoffer who appears through history.

Hidden Inside Gags, UPA Version

Warner Bros. cartoons had names hidden in the backgrounds, and other studios did the same thing.

Here’s an example from the UPA short Barefaced Flatfoot (1951) starring a somewhat tetched Mr. Magoo.



On the billboard advertising the movie “Scandale” (opening Oct. 14) are the names Novotny and Pilchard. Who they were, I don’t know.



Another billboard advertises a talk by “Dr. Julius Engel. Jules Engel gets the “color” credit for this cartoon.



The sign on one building is a little unusual. The name is “Danch.” Bill Danch was a cartoonist and radio writer whose name you’ll find on some early ‘60s Walter Lantz cartoons with Tedd Pierce. He is not on the credits for this short, but he co-wrote Grizzly Golfer and Wonder Gloves, both UPA cartoons that were released the same year as this one. Danch later wrote the syndication Jim Backus Show, where Backus runs a newspaper.



Left to right, director John Hubley, designer Abe Liss, John Hubley (backwards) and Sherm Glas (backwards), the unit manager.



Hartman’s Pipe Shop. This could be for C.L. Hartman, an animator who worked at several studios, including Disney and Hanna-Barbera. He, too, got animation credits at UPA for Magoo’s Moose Hunt (1957) and Scoutmaster Magoo. Hartman also worked for Hubley at Storyboard, Inc.

Magoo is no chortling, Rutgers-reminiscing softie hawking beer or light bulbs in this cartoon. He decides to become a detective (with an appropriate radio mystery show organ in the background) and even gets nasty with Waldo.

This was the fifth cartoon in the series, before Columbia ordered UPA to includes Magoo’s name in every short.

Bill Lava

Carl Stalling was the master of musical directors for Warner Bros. cartoons, incorporating pieces of classical music, Raymond Scott’s compositions, and the-title-fits-the-scene popular songs to weave scores that have become fixed in the minds of millions of people. His arranger, Milt Franklyn, followed pretty much the same template. Frank Marsales, in the Harman-Ising era, put bouncy versions of tunes from Warner Bros. musicals into the background of cartoons. Norman Spencer and Bernie Brown (if Brown actually wrote music for the cartoons) provided serviceable accompaniment, despite the use of a back-beat woodblock that bordered on obsessiveness.

That brings us to Bill Lava.

Lava gets dumped on by some Warner Bros. cartoon fans because of his sparse orchestrations and less-than-melodic scores. Lava used far fewer of the Warners’ musical possessions than any of his predecessors. He was hired to score the cartoons after Franklyn’s death. One Sylvester-Tweety short, The Jet Cage (1962), features both composers, with Lava finishing the cartoon after Franklyn died.

Yet Lava shouldn’t be judged on cartoons alone, especially when the studio that employed him was past its prime. He had a fine career providing music for features and shorts. He wrote the theme song for F Troop, a stirring march that bore no resemblance to what sounds like budget-saving instrumentations on his cartoons.

William Benjamin Lava was born on March 18, 1911 in St. Paul, Minnesota; his father Abraham was a cotton broker specialising in bedding textiles who had emigrated to the U.S. from Poland. In 1916, the family was in Chicago. In 1930, Lava was employed as a railroad clerk. He studied at Northwestern University, writing for the university’s commerce magazine, and arrived in Hollywood in 1936; the Los Angeles City Directory in 1937 lists his occupation as “musician.”

The Hollywood Reporter of Aug. 2, 1937 mentions he supplied songs for Republic’s Sea Racketeers. Lava was responsible for more music for Republic and is mentioned as the “arranger for Joe Reichman’s orchestra” in the Jan. 26, 1938 edition of Variety. The Los Angeles Daily News of March 26, 1940 talks about his “pleasing music score” for Courageous Dr. Christian, produced by Stephens-Lang for RKO, while the Citizen-News of Sept. 11th that year reports he conducted a 92-piece orchestra in an original score for an industrial film for the Department of the Interior.

The two trades published occasional squibs about Lava. With the war on, Lava contributed to musical propaganda, co-writing “Let’s Take the Blitz Out of Fritz” (Variety, Oct. 21, 1942). He also spoke at a music conference at the Carthay Circle Theatre, discussing his score for Warners’ I Won’t Play. At the same conference, speaking about music for cartoons, was Scott Bradley, who elaborated on his scores for Bear Raid Warden and Dance of the Weed (Reporter, Oct. 26, 1944). Lava was on the staff of Warner Bros. at this point providing music for features and shorts, including the Joe McDoakes series starring George O’Hanlon.

He was involved in an unusual recording in 1946. Columbia released a single featuring the Hollywood Presbyterian Church choir performing “highly stylized” versions of “The Lost Chord” and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” with a solo by Warners actor Dennis Morgan (Ft. Worth Star-Telegram, Mar. 10, 1946).

Radio beckoned Lava as well. On June 3, 1949, he began work as musical director (uncredited) of a new dramatic series about police work starring Jack Webb (Reporter, June 1). No, Lava did not write the well-known Dragnet theme. However, he did compose an opening/closing march featuring horns and a timpani that may have inspired Walter Schumann’s theme that debuted in the third episode.

A “musical poem” entitled “The Young Fox” was a Lava composition and debuted Nov. 5, 1950 at John Burroughs High School, performed by the Burbank Symphony.

With television now a big deal, Lava and N. Gayle Gitterman formed Allegro Productions in June 1951, with offices at the Goldwyn studios. The Reporter said the pilot for a special agent series (Special File, starring Dick Travis) was to be shot in a month. In October, the Los Angeles Times reported on casting for Allegro’s Voyage of the Scarlet Queen (starring Kim Spalding and Sean McLory), which had been a radio show on Mutual. The idea was to cut records with the series’ stars. Allegro ran into trouble. A show called Lives of the U.S. Rangers was cancelled before it even began filming; Lava blamed the “inability to secure certain conditions that were deemed essential,” according to the Reporter in Aug. 1951. Allegro went bust and Lava opened Telescene Productions, announcing a 15-minute filmed travelogue TV series called Beauty Is Where You Find It (Variety, Dec. 9, 1953) with James Brown as narrator-reporter (Reporter, Jan. 8, 1954).

In the meantime, he also scored his first cartoon, though not for the studio where he was on staff. He composed the music for UPA’s Fuddy Duddy Buddy (released Oct. 18, 1951). Britain’s Monthly Film Bulletin declared the music “witty,” a term never applied to his cartoons for Warners.

Lava joined seven other composers on the staff of Universal-International (San Bernadino County Sun, Oct. 31, 1954), though he was still at Warners writing music for theatricals and television. He also provided his first music for Walt Disney Productions in the short Stormy the Thoroughbred (released March 1954).

Starting with part of The Jet Cage, Lava scored about 60 Warners cartoons up to Snow Excuse (released May 21, 1966). Former Walter Lantz musical director Walter Greene took over for about a year, then Lava returned to compose music for Quacker Tracker (released April 29, 1967) until the studio closed for good in 1969. A few of the cues from the Stalling era returned, including “When My Dreamboat Comes Home,” “I Like Mountain Music,” “It’s Magic” and “April Showers,” but Lava compositions were responsible for the bulk of the scores.

Perhaps his best-known work was on the aforementioned Warner Bros. TV series F Troop which aired between 1965 and 1967. Lava spoke about the Old West sitcom in an article (possibly an ABC handout) that appeared in the Sacramento Bee of Jan. 22, 1967. He pointed out while actor James Hampton played the inept Fort Courage bugler, the sound actually came from the horn of session musician Larry Sullivan. “The only way I can get Larry to play bad,” Lava revealed, “is to break him up. While he’s recording I whisper something funny in his ear, or I tickle him. You’d be surprised at the crazy results. The best ones go on the finished sound track.”

After F Troop completed its run, Lava set up another company in the fall of 1968. Orbit Productions was based out of the home of partner George A. Summerson and was part-owned by Warner Bros. cartoon effects animator Harry Love.

Lava died of a heart attack on February 20, 1971. He was 59. Samuel H. Sherman, writing in Variety of April 7, 1971, lamented Lava’s loss as shrinking the ranks of veteran film composers, equating him with Max Steiner, Victor Young and Dimitri Tiomkin. The tribute noted he was self-taught, his career as a band arranger in the Midwest in the 1930s, his arrival in Hollywood to work under Nat Shilkret at RKO, mentioned he was working at the time of his death on a Disney feature on the Calgary Stampede and a pilot for Treasury Dept. with David Janssen. And while it referred to “a wide variety of major features” at Warners, some without screen credit, his work in animation was overlooked.

Those who find his Warners cartoon scores grating may think that’s not a real loss, but Lava’s time at the studio and his longevity in Hollywood deserve to be recognised.

UPA Fudgets

Fudget’s Budget won first place in the animated short subject category at the Venice International Film Festival in 1955. Donald Heraldson, in his book Creator of Life, A History of Animation (1975, Drake Publishers), describes the animation gimmick employed:

“Fudget’s Budget” used backgrounds that were psychologically interlaced with the animation — graph paper. Family members would come and go, like stock market statistics, by vanishing in and out of the graph paper backgrounds.

Here’s an example from the start of the cartoon. George Fudget is formed from a question mark on a title. He is a straight line that expands to human outline form (one drawing every two frames).



Irene Fudget comes into the scene in between lines on a graph. We’ve skipped some drawings but you can get the idea of how the animation worked.



An article on future styles in animation in the April 1959 edition of the British Film Institute’s Sight and Sound points out

Movement now rarely involves the whole figure...In Fudget’s Budget (’55) a couple twice get up to dance, “because they enjoy it,” then return to sit completely motionless at their nightclub table. This deliberate alternation of stylised movement and total immobility can be used to obvious satirical effect.

Yet the article isn’t altogether praising this type of movement, calling the limited animation in UPA’s Ham and Hattie series “humourless stiffness.”

Pamela Anne King, reporting on the Edinburgh Film Festival in the October 1955 issue of Films in Review proclaimed Fudget’s Budget “an ideal cartoon for this inflationary decade” but admitted the Scots in the audience didn’t really get it because the short was “a bit too tangibly American.” And Ernest Callenbach, in his review of Flebus in the spring 1959 edition of Film Quarterly, termed Fudget’s Budget “UPA’s last creative gasp.”

The cartoon was directed by Bobe Cannon, straying away from his seeming preference for shorts starring children. He co-wrote the cartoon with Tee Hee and Tedd Pierce. Adam Abraham, in his superb book When Magoo Flew noted:

Hee’s own financial troubles inspired the film, which presents Mr. and Mrs. Fudget as neon-outline figures on ledger paper to suggest a world composed of numbers and sums. Hee worked closely with Jules Engel to accomplish the film’s look.

George Bruns provides an old-time, barroom-like piano score that is jaunty enough to lessen any pretensions the film may have had. Gerry Ray, Alan Zaslove and Frank Smith are the credited animators.