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.

Escape From Clampett

Bob Clampett’s Book Revue is an energetic tour-de-force of perspective animation, huge open mouths with curly tongues, and stretch in-betweens that are worth stopping the film just to look at.

Below are 24 frames—one second of animation. The Big Bad Wolf is breaking out of jail. He races up “past the camera.”



Here is the animation slowed down.



Clampett loved radio and pop culture references. There are plenty of them here, with a send-up of The Whistler and The Aldrich Family, and caricatures of Gene Krupa, Harry James, Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey, Bob Burns, W.C. Fields, the inevitable scrawny version of Frank Sinatra, and Daffy Duck impersonating Danny Kaye. (See E.O. Costello's comment; this cartoon pre-dates the radio show Escape; I was thinking of Suspense).

Rod Scribner, Manny Gould, Bill Melendez and Bob McKimson are the credited animators.

My favourite drawing in this cartoon is Daffy turning into an eyeball. You can see the frames in this post.

Tomorrow, we'll have a hidden gag from this cartoon for you.

Tubby Fights the Civil War

A Union military commander gives a pep talk like a baseball coach in Friz Freleng’s Confederate Honey.



Cut to a shot of the Northern soldiers.



Movie fans in 1940 wouldn’t have noticed, but Warners staff would recognise three of these soldiers. On the left is writer Tubby Millar. Next to him is Leon Schlesinger’s office manager Henry Binder. On the right is animator, and future Lantz director, Paul J. Smith.

It was inevitable that some cartoon studio would parody Gone With the Wind. Friz and his writing staff (Bugs Hardaway gets the story credit on this) decided to stick Elmer Fudd, previously seen in Elmer’s Pet Rabbit (also 1940) in the part of the Rhett Butler send-up. Because the two have an awful lot in common.

The Exhibitor, in its April 17, 1940 issue, rated the cartoon “excellent,” adding it was “by far the slap-happiest and most laugh-provoking reel of color cartooning ever put out by Leon Schlesinger (and that takes in a lot of territory)” and that it “had a projection room audience doubled up with laughter.”

This was the third Warners cartoon where Bryan gave a character his Waymond Wadcwiffe voice from radio. The first was in Dangerous Dan McFoo (1939), which didn’t feature a Fudd role.

Warner Bros.’ pressbook for Tear Gas Squad suggests pairing the feature with Confederate Honey, calling the cartoon “a mirthful mélange of satire and good-natured fun.” Well, I guess in 1940, lazy Stepin Fetchit types were yuck-fests.