A Career Mashed By a Monster

Dear Aspiring Actors,

Please do not become famous and then complain how you’re tired of your role, or fed up with being typecast. It is an occupational hazard. And a pretty common one.

You become famous and popular because people like seeing you as the character you are performing. And they want to see more of it. Over and over and over until they get tired of it and want someone new. That’s an occupational hazard, too.

Just about every famous film actor has been typecast. All you have to do is say their name and an image pops into your head. John Wayne. Clint Eastwood. Cary Grant. Edward G. Robinson. You don’t picture any of them as “The Disorderly Orderly,” do you?

And what about Boris Karloff? Just like all great actors, he could have played a variety of roles but people remember him for one (well, maybe two, but only when cartoons are on around Christmas). And when the genre he was typecast in died away, pickings became pretty slim (at least he didn’t end up starring in movies about plans from outer space). But he became philosophical about it, as this Associated Press interview from 1949 showed:

HOLLYWOOD, Feb. 21.—(AP)—The ghost of Frankenstein’s monster still hovers over Boris Karloff.
The noted actor is back to playing a boogyman, this time with Abbott and Costello in “A. and C. Meet the Killers.” “But I think they’ll probably scare me more than I will them,” he remarked.
No matter where Karloff’s acting career takes him, he always seems to return to the spine-tinglers. He has tried Broadway plays. One lasted five performances. Another folded last month after six tries.
It’s ironic that his only Broadway success was in “Arsenic and Old Lace,” in which he played a madman with a haunting resemblance to the movie actor, Boris Karloff.
Last year he had a run as Indian chief in the movies “Tap Roots” and “Unconquered.” (Actually, his tanned face resembles an Indian more than the English gentleman he is.) He had other offers to play redskins, but turned them down to avoid being typed.
Karloff used to turn down horror roles, too, but he told me he has a new philosophy.
“I have refused many roles in the past two years because I didn’t think they were good enough,” he said. “I think now that was a mistake. From now on I shall take everything that comes along. Out of all that, something ought to turn out to be outstanding.”
The actor hasn’t played Frankenstein’s monster in 15 years, but the shade of the satchel-footed dim-wit still follows him around. He still gets fan mail about it.
When he was in New York, kids asked him for his autograph and said how much they liked him in “Abbott and Costello Meets Frankenstein.” (Glenn Strange played the role.)
Actually, he doesn’t resent the monster.
“It’s good for an actor to have a role in which he can make a name for himself,” he said.
“I’ve been pretty lucky. I haven’t played the monster in 15 years, and yet I’ve managed to keep working.” He tapped the nearest piece of wood.

That’s Why They Call it A Drooler's Delight

Let other sites intellectualise about the use and effect of female impersonation in animation. I’d rather just post consecutive frames from one of Woody Woodpecker’s drag acts from “Drooler's Delight” (1949). The gag’s pretty self-explanatory.




The credits say Ed Love animated this cartoon himself. The director was Dick Lundy, who employs a lot of camera movement in the short. He moves in on a closer shot of the bear-trap in the gag above. Lionel Stander plays Buzz Buzzard to perfection. Bugs Hardaway, who I really dislike as Woody, turns in a decent performance. I don’t know who the mock NBC announcer (we hear three chimes before he speaks) is at the start.

Three Pigs, Three Gags

Something good came out of the weak Warners musical cartoons around 1934 and 1935, the ones the directors disliked because the music got in the way of developing a plot. One was some of the Warners-owned songs were really great and are classics of popular music today. And the other was young director Friz Freleng learned how to marry animation to specific music, which helped in later years when he was able to use better gags, put on the screen with better animation.

‘Pigs in a Polka’ (1943) is really a funny cartoon. As a kid, I didn’t realise there was some Disney referencing going on. I just thought it was funny. There are three little moments (out of many more) I’d like to pick out.



A great throw-away gag is when the wolf appears on the scene. He’s evil, but law-abiding enough to signal left when he’s turning (even though no traffic is behind him to see the signal). And he doesn’t interrupt his Russian dance while doing it.



Friz’ timing is perfect when the two gullible pigs are lured behind a rock, there’s a fight and they suddenly jump out as grinning, dancing gypsy women. It’s completely unexpected, which makes it all the more funnier. The rassin’-frassin’ Blue Ribbon re-release of the cartoon has divested it of its credits, but I can’t help but think Mike Maltese wrote it. At Warners and even at Hanna-Barbera in Quick Draw McGraw cartoons, he’d have characters jump somewhere and come out with a comic costume change.



And I like the fake snow gag. It’s been done in other cartoons, probably done to death to anyone who has dined on animation for decades, but I don’t think it was done any better than in this one. Give credit to Carl Stalling and Milt Franklyn. The pathetic first violin solo really augments the fact the wolf is a complete fraud. It shows you why the Warners cartoons are so great. All the elements—drawing, movement, sound—work together and enhance each other.

Walt Lee’s Reference Guide to Fantastic Films (1974) says Gerry Chiniquy received the animation credit on this short, but the Freleng unit was using the talents of Manny Perez, Dick Bickenbach, Gil Turner and Ken Champin, and occasionally Jack Bradbury, around this time.

Uncle Miltie, the Crook

So, was Milton Berle’s reputation as the Thief of Bad Gags deserved?

The answer’s “yes,” if you talked to just about anyone, even before Berle was at his peak in the early time of television. John Crosby, syndicated from the New York Herald Tribune, took a stab at the topic in his column of April 9, 1947. But unlike anyone else, he doesn’t blame Berle for doing it.

THERE’S NO MYSTERY IN BERLE’S LIFE OF CRIME
Milton Gayly Continues His Bold Thieving
By JOHN CROSBY
For the last couple of weeks on the new Milton Berle show (NBC 8:30 p.m. Tuesdays), the announcer, man named Gallup, has been introducing, much against the wishes of Berle, a quartet with a high-flown, Russian name. “Stop that noise!” shrieks Berle. “Quiet!” All season long on the Jack Benny show, another announcer named Don Wilson has been bringing in, much against the wishes of Benny, another quartet. “Stop it,” yells Benny. “Stop it.”
Later on the Berle program, the orchestra played a truncated version of “Blue Skies.” “That was ‘Blue Skies,’” announced Berle. “Sort of an eclipse—by Ray Bloch and his orchestra. The only reason they still have their instruments is that Jamaica Park isn’t open yet.”
Well, let’s see now. Way back last fall, if memory serves, Fred Allen interrupted the orchestra with the words: “That was just a smattering of ‘Chattanooga Choo Choo’ played by Al Goodman and 25 men who followed him home from Belmont Park last night.”
Jack Benny has for years been kidding his announcer, Don Wilson, about his sumptuous waistline. Berle jibes at his announcer, that man Gallup again, because his waistline is so skinny. A switcheroo, as they call it in radio.
BOTH FUNNY
Then there is a man in the show called Fulton Drew Gilbert “bringing you the news from Washington” and contradicting himself in every sentence. It’s pretty funny and it was pretty funny a couple of weeks ago when Peter Lind Hayes did it on the Dinah Shore show.
And so it goes. If you can find anything on the Milton Berle show, which doesn’t remind you of somebody else’s show, don’t blame Milton. He’s doing his best. Over the years, Berle has built up a towering and quite justifiable reputation as the Raffles of show business and he’s not going to risk it by fooling around with any dangerous originality. Just the same, in spite of all his vigilance, I’ll bet a new idea slips in there some day. A man can’t keep his guard up forever.
Apart from grand larceny, the Berle show is a great improvement over the Rudy Vallee show which it replaced, though that’s not much of a compliment.
GOOD PERFORMER
Berle plays the part of a timid soul who is browbeaten by his announcer, his wife, his child, his sponsor and his advertising agency. Making the star the butt of all jokes is hardly a new idea, but Berle goes considerably further with it than any one else. He is not just insulted; he is lampooned, derided, degraded, starved and all but beaten to death by the people around him. Much of this is funnier than it ought to be because Berle, a man of the old school, is a great performer no matter what you think of his material.
However, I’d like to interject a note of mild protest about the sketches that end the show. The other day Berle did a sketch about a man who drives into a gas station in a hurry for gas. The attendants — stop me if you’ve heard this — clean the windshield, change the oil, pump up the tires, marcel his hair, put on a floor show, do everything, in fact, except give him gas. Well, it had a certain vestigial charm if only as a reminder of the good old days. But isn't there a statute of limitation on these things?
Oh, yes, and there’s a singer on the program named Dick Farney, who sings in a soft, tentative style as if he were afraid of waking the baby. Sometimes I think singing is dying out entirely and perhaps it’s just as well.
Copyright, 1947, for The Tribune

Berle jumped into the radio game in 1933 as part of the Fred Waring Show for Old Gold. He starred in his own show in 1939 for Quaker Oats but bounced around from show to show, season to season. Paul Ackerman of Billboard explained why in the April 26, 1947 edition.

Milton Berle, recognized as perhaps the fastest man in night clubs and vaude, has on this NBC series failed to impress as a top radio comedian. Impression one gets is the master of the bistro and boite simply can’t break loose from his script. This is tough, for inasmuch as the script must keep within the radio limits, Berle can’t cash in on what admittedly is one of his strong points—blue stuff. This doesn’t necessarily mean that radio is out of Milton’s reach. It just means that as of now the comedy writers and doctors simply haven’t found a formula. For Berle on the air doesn’t sparkle and crackle with audiences know he does on the boards. It’s all quite discouraging—what with every web and ad agency in the business looking for comics. And it’s not comforting to know that in the past Berle has not been able to do well on the air.

The show for Philip Morris had top writers—Nat Hiken and Aaron Ruben. It was originally intended to be similar to Ozzie and Harriet and included Berle’s wife Joyce and Joe Besser as a stooge but, evidently, changes were made at the last minute. Meanwhile, Berle was about to open at the Copa in New York for $12,500 a week.

Berle’s life changed when his television show debuted for Texaco on September 22, 1948. He didn’t need the blue material that Ackerman talked about. Instead, he dug into his old vaudeville grab bag of broad comedy and mugging and by December, had the biggest audience of any programme in history, including radio, remarkable considering he was only seen in 24 cities. Berle was eventually rewarded with a 30-year contract by NBC before the inevitable (to everyone but NBC) ratings slide. People were tired of the old frantic routines in the calm, suburban ‘50s. But, like when was not A-listing in radio, Berle remained a constant presence on television for years to come, trading on his reputation as show biz’s biggest heister of humour.

Daffy Dittys

Cartoon fans the world over have heard of Merrie Melodies and Looney Tunes. They may have heard of Silly Symphonys (I don’t recall ever seeing the name when I was a kid). But you can be sure they haven’t heard of the Daffy Dittys, let alone seen one

There was a time when the big movie studios had full schedules of productions, not only feature films, but a wide variety of shorts—things like news and sports reels, travelogues, musical numbers, two-reel comedies and cartoons. The biggest studios had them because shorts involved a huge cash outlay for very little return; they made money on features but realised a good short could entice people into the theatre—and they all owned theatres. The small studios couldn’t afford it so they stuck with their programme of low-budget features; Monogram and Tiffany never got into the cartoon business. Then there were others in between that were in and out of the shorts business. United Artists was one of them.

U-A had released Walt Disney cartoons from 1932 to 1937 but generally stayed out of the shorts business after that; a two-reel documentary series called ‘The World in Action’ during the war being an exception. But then it decided to get into animation again. Or, more specifically, it decided to release animated shorts produced by someone else. That someone else was John Sutherland and Larry Morey.

The two were employed for Walt Disney but decided to strike out on their own in 1944. They evidently hoped to duplicate the success of George Pal’s stop-motion shorts released by Paramount. Top Cel, the newsletter of the New York local of the Screen Cartoonists Guild, announced in its edition of July 14, 1944.

New method of producing animated cartoons with plastic models and characters will be utilized by Plastic Cartoons, organized by L. Morey, John Sutherland and John Landis in Hollywood. Use of plastic models for animation, combined with color photography, gives third dimensional effect which is not possible generally in the regular cartoons. Plastic process was developed by Lion, and allows for molding characters in large numbers, utilizing one for figure in each frame of film, with change in movement flexible through workability of the plastic material used. Figures are set up from pencil animation, miniature sets are used and cartoons shot in stop motion as is the rule with this type of production. This films will be released by United Artists with whom the outfit has signed a contract. Four pictures will be released each year. The title of the first will be “The Cross-eyed Bull”.

How do you make plastic cartoons? Popular Science devoted space to answering that question in its May 1946 issue, complete with pictures.

Sutherland and Morey had a pretty ambitious schedule. The Motion Picture Herald spoke in 1946 of a 13-picture deal. Only six were made. Boxoffice magazine reveals in its edition of January 25, 1947:

United Artists to Drop Daffy Dittys Shorts
Because of mechanical and labor problems, these are trying times for the independent producers of short subjects, most especially those who use color photography. Resultantly, United Artists is losing another series of briefies, the Daffy Dittys, which have been produced by John Sutherland, whose pact with UA was terminated by mutual consent. Sutherland has one more of the current series to deliver, after which he will devote his time exclusively to commercial and educational films.

There isn’t very much information about the Dittys themselves out there. Boxoffice reviewed a few of them.

The Cross-Eyed Bull. Not reviewed. Released October 21, 1944.

The Flying Jeep. Not reviewed. Released August 20, 1945.

The Lady Said No [Short released April 26, 1946]
UA (Daffy Ditty) 9 Mins.
Excellent. This clever offering bodes well for the new series of Technicolor puppet cartoons produced by Moray and Sutherland. Photography, animation and the characters warrant praise. A gay but naïve caballero courts a provocative senorita who persuades him marriage is the best policy. After a variety of little caballeros have been delivered he realizes the bliss of batcherhood. (Boxoffice, April 27, 1946)

Choo Choo Amigo [released July 5, 1946]
UA (Daffy Ditty) 9 Mins.
Tops. This extremely imaginative and entertaining color cartoon employs model miniatures to excellent advantage. It is the story of a little Mexican locomotive, beloved by the natives for its kindly deeds. After long years of faithful service Choo Choo Amigo, replaced by an ultra-modern super-streamliner, is condemned to be converted into scrap. Its last-minute reprieve is complete with smiles and suspense. Highly recommended. (Boxoffice, July 20, 1946)

Pepito’s Serenade [released August 16, 1946]
United Artists (In Color) 10 Mins.
Excellent. A Latin subject, built into a sock bit of entertainment for all. Deals with a puppet character who, advised to become better perfected as a musician, in order to win his sweetheart, goes through some horrifying experiences with a teacher. Trick lightning, unusual animation help make this a top subject. (Boxoffice, September 14, 1946)

The Fatal Kiss, Not reviewed. Released August 28, 1947.

“The Fatal Kiss” was not stop-motion. It was strictly animation, directed by George Gordon and animated by Pete Burness and Irv Spence, according to the U.S. Government Copyright Catalogue.

One more animated Ditty was begun. The cartoonists union newsletter Top Cel mentioned on August 1, 1946 that “The Fatal Kiss” had been finished and the studio was working on a second animated short, “The Missing Ghost,” with Gordon directing, Burness as the head animator and the Pied Pipers handling the vocal numbers. Gordon copyrighted model sheets for Forelock Bones, Dr. Woof and Professor Sly on November 18, 1946 for “The Case of the Missing Ghost” but how much farther the cartoon went is anyone’s guess. As Boxoffice talked about labour problems, it could be that Burness and Spence left Sutherland while the cartoon was in production.

The Dittys slowly faded away. They were still appearing on screens as late as Christmas 1948.

Sutherland hired first-rate people. One of them was Frank Tashlin after finishing a third go-around at Leon Schlesinger’s studio. The book Frank Tashlin, written by Roger García and Bernard Eisenschitz (published in 1994), reveals:

When Tashlin arrived at Morey and Sutherland in September 1944, planning began for the third Daffy Ditty, The Lady Said No. The next two films, Choo Choo Amigo and Pepito’s Serenade (often mistakenly listed as simply Pepito) are generally attributed to Tashlin although definitive credits and production dates may never be established since the company’s records and many of its films are said to have been destroyed in a fire in the late 1940s.

Top Cel of January 19, 1945 mentioned Ken Darby was handling vocal arrangements for “Choo Choo Amigo. It would seem that the Radio Guide was referring to The King’s Men when it blurbed in a 1945 edition that some vocalists...

have taken night lessons in Spanish and are polishing up a repertoire of Spanish folk songs an ballads which they'll record as background music for a forthcoming Morey and Sutherland Daffy Ditty Cartoon, with locale in Mexico.

A chap named Zon at the Smarter Than The Average blog has cobbled together addition information about the Dittys. You can read about it HERE and HERE. 2025 note: the links are dead. Sorry.

You likely have noticed five of the six Dittys involve characters in Mexico. The studios had a fascination with Latin America during World War Two. The two Walts—Disney and Lantz—made jaunts south of the border (Lantz went “down Mexico way” as the song says) and no doubt cartoon fans know about Disney’s “Saludos Amigos.” MGM produced at least one cartoon for the Latin American market. No doubt this stemmed from U.S. government policies designed to win support for the American Way of Life over Nazism.

The end of the Dittys didn’t end United Artists’ or John Sutherland’s involvement with theatrical cartoons. Sutherland and Morey were still releasing industrial cartoons at the time of the Dittys. Their company changed from “Plastic Productions” to “Morey and Sutherland Productions” by June 1945, and Top Cel mentioned on July 1, 1946 the two had signed six-picture deals with both Harding College and Proctor and Gamble. But Morey decided to go back to Disney. Sutherland struck out on his own, producing a 62-minute feature called “Lady at Midnight” starring radio actor Richard Denning, and carrying on with his industrial business. Several of those cartoons were released theatrically by MGM, starting with “Make Mine Freedom” on March 10, 1948, allowing Fred Quimby to dissolve the Preston Blair-Mike Lah unit and save cash. Model sheets for “The capitalist,” “The farmer,” “John Q. Public,” “The laborer,” “The pitchman” and “The politician” in “Make Mine Freedom” were copyrighted the same day as the ones for the aborted U-A cartoon “The Case of the Missing Ghost.”

U-A started releasing Lantz’ cartoons in 1947 after a hastily-constructed deal which resulted in the Lantz studio closing temporarily within two years and it getting out of the animation business for awhile. U-A had its greatest success with cartoons in the dying days of the Golden Age of Animation when it released what some consider the most entertaining shorts of the ‘60s—the Pink Panther series. By then, the Daffy Ditties were long forgotten.

Bad Luck Blackie Whitewash

Another take from one of Tex Avery’s greatest cartoons, “Bad Luck Blackie.” This is when the white cat realises he’s no longer black and his power to inflict bad luck is gone. Seven drawings on ones. It goes by so fast, you don’t notice the cat is doing a little dance step.









Grant Simmons, Louie Schmitt, Preston Blair and Grant Simmons are your animators. I’d sure like to know who the assistants were in his unit at the time.

Why, oh why, aren’t Avery’s cartoons on DVD?

Flying Chicken Leg in Perspective

Cartoon directors seem to have given in to the tempation of animating little bits in perspective just for the hell of it. Bob McKimson did. He’d have characters run toward and away from the camera whether it added anything to the cartoon or not. And Rudy Ising once said Hugh Harman was “a nut” which it came to perspective animation.

The motivation in some cases might have been simply to break up the monotony of the look of the cartoons. Maybe that’s the case in Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera’s “Part Time Pal” (1947). It’s not a great cartoon—Barbera seemed to think just the idea of Tom being drunk could carry a whole short—but we get a flying chicken leg animated in perspective. Tom swats it out of Jerry’s hand.








The credited animators are Mike Lah, Ed Barge and Ken Muse. I’m not sure if this is Lah’s work here; it looks a lot more like Lah at the end of the cartoon when Tom’s banging the umbrella and climbing the stairs. A shame Irv Spence isn’t here; he would have done a great job in the scene with Tom tripping over the milk bottles.

The Inexhaustible Bob Hope

People want to see the stars. If they didn’t, there wouldn’t be a plethora of gossip web sites and TV shows shoving people from Show Biz Land in your face, drowning us all with the minutest insignificances about their lives.

Such would seem to be an obvious fact. But it seems to have shocked radio writer John Crosby that fans would actually want to watch a radio and movie star in the flesh. Maybe he forgot that vaudeville houses were once packed for that very same reason. Or why film and radio-dom’s elite visited military bases during World War Two.

In reading Crosby’s column of March 2, 1949, I couldn’t help but think of Dave Thomas, a noted Hope impersonator among many things, meeting Old Ski Nose for the first time and how, after some pleasantries, Hope asked him bottom-line questions about SCTV’s production. Thomas realised he wasn’t talking to Bob Hope, star, but Bob Hope, president of Hope Enterprises. And, as Crosby reveals, Hope had the bottom line squarely in his sights when he embarked on a jaunt across the U.S. (I have some reason to suspect the “Crosby” referred to in the column is not “John.”)

Radio In Review
BY JOHN CROSBY
Gold In The Hinterlands
BOB HOPE, the distinguished financier of the films and radio, has just discovered a new method for turning a fast buck.
He appears before people in the flesh! Hope’s 33-day touring vaudeville show took $612,000 off the hands of some 300,000 people. Never before has he earned that much money that rapidly.
“You can’t make money like that on Broadway. You can’t make Crosby money like that anywhere,” Hope declared in a telephone interview from Palm Springs. “I was offered so much money to appear at the Capitol in New York I’m ashamed to tell you the figure.”
Yet the comedian said it was chickenfeed next to the grosses piled up on his tour.
THE HOPE TROUPE—40 persons in all—avoided theaters, the avarice of theater owners being what it is, and played stadiums and auditoriums where Hope Enterprises took 75 percent of the gate.
People paid as high as $6.10 a seat to see a two-and-a-half-hour show which is little more than an extension of Hope’s radio show.
When the comedian returned to Hollywood, his pockets bulging with large denominations, a great many intellectuals said: “Well!” They were too flabbergasted to get much beyond that word.
There has been a deeply entrenched suspicion in Hollywood that the big money lay in the mass media—the movies or radio—where you don’t get the live actor, but you can spread him among an awful lot of people.
Then Mr. Hope revived the ancient one-night stand and, brother, how the money rolls in.
ALREADY THIS has led to real restlessness among the other actors.
“I’ve talked to Jack Benny and Al Jolson,” Hope said, “and they’re all fired up to do the same thing.
“We’re going to hit the road again ourselves — probably in April. I want to keep that Providence date. (Fog grounded the troupe in Pittsburgh, causing cancellation of the Rhode Island stop-over.) We also plan to go to Rochester, Syracuse, Erie and Toronto and, of course, a lot of other places.
“I think the success of this tour proves the people want to see the actors. It shows what a great thing television is going to be.
HOPE ALSO thinks it proves the road is anything but dead, that people in the hinterlands are starved for live entertainment. Virtually everywhere he went he approached or smashed house records.
Hope played 38 performances in 34 cities in 33 days. In addition he gave his radio shows in four of the cities, and this involved rehearsals.
It sounds grueling, but, as Hope pointed out, the troupe had only one performance a day—with the exception of one day when it gave a matinee and an evening performance—whereas in a theater it would have been required to give five or six.
“You never get tired unless you stop and take time for it,” he explained. Hope never has taken time for it, and as a shrewd observer once said, he works better under almost continuous pressure.
A COUPLE OF YEARS ago Bing Crosby told me he had dug out of the Bible a quote that fits Hope perfectly: “For wherever two or three are gathered together . . . there I am in the midst of them.”
He certainly is. Hope starts to entertain automatically whenever a crowd—and three or four makes a crowd—surrounds him. They supplement each other — Hope and the crowds. The bigger the crowd, the better is Hope. The better is Hope, the bigger the crowd.
On this trip, the news that he was flying in his rented DC-6 attracted throngs to the airport. Hope usually threw in a 15-minute show free at the air terminals—unwilling to let a crowd escape without flinging a couple of jokes at it.
TEN YEARS AGO Jimmy Cagney observed, unsagely: “Bob Hope is going to kill himself with these personal appearance tours.”
This could go down along with the prediction of Thomas E. Dewey’s election as one of the worst bits of crystal-gazing of modern times.
There is a tale, probably apocryphal, that an eastern potentate once took over the upbringing of 300 babies; he ordered they be given the utmost care but that not a word be spoken to them.
The potentate wanted to know what language they’d talk when and if.
According to legend, the babies all died within six months for want of affection.
Seems to me if Hope were deprived of an audience for six months he’d die of starvation.
(Copyright, 1949, New York Tribune)

Hope once talked about his money with that aw-shucks intellectual, Dick Cavett. Considering that Hope’s TV specials degraded into a melange of cue cards, marching bands and breasts, it’s nice to see him in the stripped-down, relaxed atmosphere of the Cavett show. Take a look.

A Lotta Actors Were Outta Woik

Warren Foster wrote a life story for Bugs Bunny and Bob McKimson filmed it in “What's Up Doc?” There are some sequences I really like, and a great one is when Bugs is on a park bench with other unemployed vaudevillians, hoping to get a break from the shining star of the big time, Elmer Fudd.



The caricatures of Al Jolson, Jack Benny, Eddie Cantor and Bing Crosby couldn’t be much better, and the animation of them auditioning for Fudd is perfect. I especially love Jolson. Whoever did this scene captured him beautifully (see the comments for the answer). You have to watch how he turns and looks pleadingly desperate as the snobbish Fudd passes by him. And Bing’s mouth movements singing “You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby” are fun.

The kicker is Fudd’s line: “Bugs Bunny! What are you hanging around with these guys? They’ll never amount to anything!” Of course, the joke is that they did. They had been stars for more than 20 years by the time the cartoon was released. And they were really stars until the day they died; all but Cantor were still working.

Jolson’s voice in the cartoon is provided by Dave Barry, who worked on the Jolson radio show.

Animators came and went in McKimson’s unit. Credited on this one are Bill Melendez, Chuck McKimson, Phil De Lara and Pete Burness, the last time his name appears on a Warners cartoon. Jack Carey and Emery Hawkins had been doing work in the McKimson unit but went from director to director, wherever needed. The background is by Dick Thomas.

Bully For Multiples

“Bully For Bugs” contains the kind of stop-and-let-the-drawing-sink-in posing Chuck Jones is noted for, but it also a couple of scenes where you can find head multiples, as a character moves from one pose to the next.

This is after the bull enters and stops after running in perspective to the camera.





And here’s where Bugs says “pardon me” while standing behind the bull.







It appears different artists in the Jones unit had different ways of moving characters. If you watch “Long-Haired Hare” (1949), for example, you’ll notice smear drawings, where an arm is moved from top to bottom of the frame by, in essence, connecting the two positions together into one long, wide arm. On the other hand, “Rabbit Seasoning” (1952) has odd multiples. I’ll put some up in a future post.