I Don't Care What You Say

Here we have an eight-frame cycle of a camel chewing on, well, I’m not quite sure. Note the spacing of the drawings. There seems to be barely any movement at one point.



This is the cycle slowed down, which gives you an idea of how the mouth moved.



Yeah, I know. Not the post interesting of posts, unless you are into timing of poses and in-betweens. The director is Friz Freleng, and the cartoon is Hot Spot, a 1945 Snafu short. The gag is an example of how everyone borrowed from Tex Avery. In fact, the short is like an Avery travelogue in places.

In this scene, the narrator (the Devil, played by Hal Peary, complete with Gildersleeve laugh), informs us “Here, the native beast of burden, the camel, is the only one who doesn’t mind the heat.” After chewing a bit, the camel (Mel Blanc) turns to the viewing audience and says “I don’t care what you say, I’m hot,” and resumes chewing.



Say, that gag is familiar, isn’t it? Let’s think back to Avery’s Wacky Wildlife (1940), where a camel is strolling across the desert. Narrator Bob Bruce informs us the camel “plods over scorching desert sands, in terrific heat, never once desiring a cool, refreshing drink of water. The camel (Mel Blanc) turns to the viewing audience and says “I don’t care what you say, I’m thirsty,” and resumes strolling.



Say, that gag is STILL familiar. That’s because Avery used a variation of it earlier in the year in Cross Country Detours. In this one, a polar bear is shown on a chunk of ice. “Mother Nature has provided him with layer upon layer of fat, plus a thick coat of heavy fur, to keep him good and warm,” says the narrator. The camera moves in and the bear (Mel Blanc) tells us “I don’t care what you say, I’m cold.”



Is it any wonder that Avery came up with the idea of footage of real animals with superimposed cartoon mouths that made wisecracks. The idea ended up at Jerry Fairbanks Productions, which made the Speaking of Animals series for Paramount. If the “I don’t care what you say” routine was one of the gags in those shorts, I don’t know, but I wouldn’t be surprised.

What about the end gag of Hot Spot, you ask? Thanks for reminding me. The short has emphasized how hot it is in Iran, hotter 'n Hades as they used to say. The short finishes with the Devil discovering the camel is now in his office in Hell. The camel turns to him and casually remarks, “I don’t care what you say, I’m cool.” It resumes chewing to end the cartoon.



None of the artists who worked on this are given screen credit.

Where's Bugs?

Bob McKimson’s early Bugs Bunny cartoons as a director baffle me.

There’s potentially good animation that’s lost in the odd staging. Whether McKimson was responsible or layout man Cornett Wood was responsible, I don’t know.

Here are a few examples (and there are more) in A-Lad-in-His-Lamp (1948). In the frame below, the genie, who was on the right half of the screen, has gone back in the lamp.



There’s a take as Bugs sees Caliph Hassen Pheffer coming for him. But the take is off-screen. You can’t see the animation.



McKimson’s cartoons go from huge open mouths to teeny mouths like the drawing below.



Bugs leaps into the air before running away. I really don’t get the point of having Bugs in mid-air when you can’t see the top half of him. It seems like a waste of an animator’s work.



McKimson’s shots can be either too close or too far. Below are consecutive frames. Look at the dead space in the second one. You can’t read the expressions later in the scene.



McKimson liked perspective animation in his earliest cartoons. You’ll see characters running toward the camera and back. Here’s a perspective example from this cartoon.



The genie is a fun character and would have got more laughs in 1948 as he was recognisable to audiences then. His character was lifted from the Alan Young radio show, the upper-crust, East Coast millionaire Hubert Updyke III, complete with catchphrases. This was Jim Backus' first cartoon appearance.

Chuck McKimson, Phil De Lara, Manny Gould and John Carey are the credited animators. Dick Thomas went from forest to caliphate in his backgrounds.

Tazzy Birthday (Not Quite)

Yes, we're back. But only for a week.

Music expert Daniel Goldmark sent me some information quite a number of months ago. I thought I had turned it into a post, but have discovered I hadn't. I don't want to waste his kindness, so I've come up with something which you'll read here next week. Since I've had a bit of spare time, a full week's worth of posts will appear starting Monday. Then it's back into retirement. (The Yowp blog will have posts monthly through the end of the year but it is essentially done).

Some cartoon fans have pointed out today is the birthday of the Tazmanian Devil. Indeed, Devil May Hare was released on this date in 1954 according to all trade publications of the time.

But hold on thar! It's actually not his birthday.

Cartoon scholar and noted Release-the-Remaining-Warners-Cartoons champion Jerry Beck has pointed out on many occasions that as soon as a cartoon arrived at a film exchange, a local movie theatre could show it. It may have arrived some time before the "official" release date; A Wild Hare is a great example.

So it was with Devil May Hare. To the left is an ad from the Escanaba Daily Press of Saturday, May 29, 1954. It advertises Devil May Hare will be on screens the next day. (You can click on the ad to get a larger view).

This doesn't mean the cartoon debuted in a small town in Michigan. That's just the earliest newspaper ad I can find. I don't know if any records exist of when each theatre showed any cartoon, and some newspapers will simply announce "Bugs Bunny cartoon" or "cartoon" without the short being named. After all, if it says "Bugs Bunny cartoon," do you need to know more?

I am not suggesting people who want to celebrate cartoon "birthdays" stop doing it. I merely point out that "official" cartoon release dates are not necessarily birthdates of characters therein. As a side-note, some years back Turner sent out a press release with "birthdays" of Hanna-Barbera characters. It was flat out wrong for the Kellogg's series and I've spent time on-line trying to correct the dates.

Below is another ad, this one from the Omaha Evening-World Herald. Omahamians (is that what they're called?) got a chance to Dial T for Taz on June 3, 1954.



Incidentally, the Warners featurette Frontier Days had an official release date of June 12, so it was being screened early in Omaha as well. Oh, and there was another Warners short with a June 19 release date, a Vitaphone Varities ten-minute reel named When Sports Were King. Warners was still offering movie houses various shorts, including sports and music reels, something called "Classics of the Screen" that ran 17 to 20 minutes, Technicolor Specials (like Silver Lightning, the story of a salmon) and George O'Hanlon as Joe McDoakes.

Bugs and other McKimson characters were drawn with hooded eyelids. An example is to the right.

Devil May Hare was written by Sid Marcus. Perhaps that's why the character is an original. Other writers for McKimson were content with purloining characters from radio (eg. Frank Fontaine's John L.C. Sivoney was turned into Pete Puma). Motion Picture Exhibitor rated it "fair." I suppose it is compared with other Bugs cartoons that year, such as Bugs and Thugs and Bewitched Bunny, but I quite like the Devil. There wasn't a lot McKimson and his later writers could do with him (see Dr. Devil and Mr. Hare for an example. If you dare) and he was eventually turned into a TV cartoon sitcom character for the kiddies.

Herman Cohen, Rod Scribner, Phil De Lara and Chuck McKimson animated this short, with Bob Givens laying it out. Dick Thomas supplied the stylised forest background art that isn't much more elaborate than his later work at Hanna-Barbera. By the time this was released, they were all unemployed. The McKimson unit was eliminated in March 1953 but, apparently after some debate, reactivated almost a year later.

We have more about the McKimson family and the T. Devil in this post.

There Was a Crooked Hand

Of Fox and Hounds (1940) stars George the fox (behaving like a slick version of Bugs Bunny) and Willoughby the dog in the kind of cartoon Tex Avery never would have made a few years later.

At MGM, Tex loaded up his cartoons with gags and fired them at the audience at a brisk pace. This cartoon for Warners has a slow (but steady) pace and sets up the final, satisfying gag after two similar situations.

There are a number of scenes where George’s fingers are twisted or crooked.



Here are some examples from a creeping cycle. Whether this is Bob McKimson's work, I don't know, but even the in-betweens are solid.



“Draft No. 6102” gets the animation credit (looking at the credit rotation, my guess is it’s Rod Scribner), with the story by “Draft No. 1312” (Rich Hogan, maybe?). Johnny Johnsen provides some lovely scenery.

The short isn’t full of the crazed humour you’d expect in an Avery cartoon. It’s more of a situational involving two characters, with a third interfering only when necessary.

Cuckoo Kitten

It’s good some attention is being paid to the mid-1930s Warners cartoons so they’re upgraded from laser disc and VHS dubs to something more pristine.

But funny? Uh….

In The Cat Came Back, a kitten is being swept away in the sewage system. A cuckoo clock drifts into the scene. The kitten tries to grasp it. The cuckoo bird comes out. The kitten swats at it (never making contact). Apparently it was so funny the first time, it happens again with the same animation.



The third time, the bird pecks at the kitten before going back inside and the clock continues its journey over top of the cat.



Yeah, that’s the gag.

Friz pulls off one of those surprise turnabouts at the end where the happy cat and mouse families start fighting again (and why is the mother mouse the same size as the mother cat?)

The restoration is a Blue Ribbon (13 re-issues were released in 1943-44 because of a lack of raw film stock; this was one of them). This means there are no credits, though Jerry Beck must have seen a print with them as his book with Will Friedwald lists Bob McKimson and Ben Clopton as the animators.

There is no mistaking the score is by Norman Spencer, arranged by Norman Spencer, Jr. It features his beloved backbeat woodblock, and double-timed theme song played by muted trumpets in the “chase” portion. Spencer’s music, together with the squealy voice of Berneice Hansell, the Rhythmettes quietly crooning the opening song, and the concentration on kid animals makes this an atypical mid-‘30s Merrie Melodies short.

Bell, Book and Wood

The “books come to life” cartoons at Warner Bros. always gave the opportunity for the background artist to sneak in a reference to cartoon studio staff. We’ve mentioned this about Bob Clampett’s Book Revue in this post. There’s a name we didn’t catch until now. Observe the author(ess) name on the fifth book from the left.



Raynelle Bell worked under Clampett at the “Katz” division in the 1930s (making a sojourn to Florida and the Fleischer studio before returning to the West Coast), and was his ink and paint supervisor when he opened Snowball and made the Beany and Cecil cartoons in 1962. Bell was a cousin of inker Dixie Mankameyer, who later married animator Paul J. Smith.

Raynelle was born January 21, 1916 in Kansas City, Missouri; her father was named Ray and her mother was named Nelle. The family moved to Tulsa in 1920 where her father ran Bell's Cafe on Third Street until 1927. The Tulsa papers in the ‘20s report she and Dixie were pupils of Rose Arnott Littlefield and took part in her recitals.

The Bells arrived in Los Angeles between 1928 and 1929. Raynelle was a graduate of Hollywood High School (where she led the volleyball team) and USC. While in the land of the Trojans, she received honourable mention for a poster in an “Art in America” contest. In 1935, she won a suntan contest sponsored by the Long Beach Chamber of Commerce.

She was remembered fondly by the wonderful inker and painter Martha Sigall in her autobiography, who said Warners hired Raynelle in August 1936.

When she got married in June 7, 1944 to Cpl. Franklin Eugene Day, she was employed by Walt Disney; Day had been a singer and employed at MGM before enlisting in 1941. She was back at Warners by early 1945, judging by the company's Club News photoshoot published in April that year. Evidently, she got out of the animation business to raise her two young children as she has no occupation next to her name in the 1950. Martha worked for her at Snowball, and later at Kurtz and Friends. Raynelle moved to Eugene, Oregon after retiring and died there on November 9, 2002.

The backgrounds in this cartoon were painted by Cornett Wood. A native of Indianapolis, Cornett Francis Wood was born September 12, 1905. He was a member of Troop 43 of the Boy Scouts as World War One was winding down. He attended Shortridge High School, where he was on the art staff for the high school annual. He entered a number of art contests and in 1925, he won a $130 winter scholarship given by the Indiana Poster Advertising Association.

Wood had the unfortunate situation in 1932 of testifying in the juvenile delinquency trial of his 17-year-old sister Vera who, it was claimed, held up either nine or eleven people with a toy pistol, was obsessed with crime novels, got angry easily and was addicted to cigarettes. “I think she is subnormal,” he told the court.

The Indianapolis Star of Sept. 8, 1933 gives a short biography in connection with a painting demonstration at the state fair art gallery:

Wood [was] a graduate of the [John] Herron art school in 1927 and later a student for one semester in the Pennsylvania academy under Daniel Garber and George Harding.
For two years Cornett Wood has been doing commercial art for the Bemis Brothers Bag Company. He designs pictures and lettering that are printed on the front of flour bags and coffee bags. In spare time he paints pastel portraits that are unusually artistic He had months experience as a sailor, following the period of advanced study in the Pennsylvania academy, when he shipped on a freighter with the American Export Line and went to Italy, remaining on the boat while it put in at ten or twelve Italian ports.

The Star reported on Sept. 15, 1936 that Wood was now in Los Angeles working for Walt Disney. A story in the Santa Barbera News-Press of Apr. 1, 1945 about a demonstration and lecture he was conducting about making animated cartoons said:

Wood is considered one of the outstanding artists in the field of animations. He worked at the Disney studio for nearly seven years, and during the past three years he has been made Warner Brothers’ cartoons. At present he is designing backgrounds, which is the stage for the characters.

Book Revue was the first Warners cartoon where Wood got a screen credit. After one more cartoon with Clampett, he was moved to Bob McKimson’s unit to handle layouts. He left the studio after making Dog Collared (released Dec. 2, 1951) and was replaced by Pete Alvarado.

He had an interesting distinction at Warners, at least according to the Dec. 23, 1949 edition of the Palm Springs Limelight-News, which called him the “well known creator of Bugs Bunny.”

In 1959, his name is found on two film strips made for the Girl Scouts of America.

Wood died May 16, 1980. He had been living in La Canada.

Clampett's name can be found on various books in the background of this cartoon. Perhaps the most interesting one is to the right of a comic book.



“Invisible Man” aptly describes Clampett at this point. The cartoon was released on January 5, 1946. The Warner Club News of June 1945 announced Art Davis had replaced Clampett as a director. Considering it took months to have Technicolor prints struck for completed cartoons, it’s likely Clampett was still at Warners when Wood painted the backgrounds. But it’s a neat coincidence.