The Tuba Tooter

Early 1930s cartoons are all singing and dancing, with things coming to life and gags in between. Cartoons made on the West Coast were like that, and cartoons made on the East Coast were like that, but you’d never really mistake one for the other.

A case in point is the Tom and Jerry musical “The Tuba Tooter” (1932). You can’t mistake the New York look in this, the kind popularised by the Fleischers. But the Van Beuren shorts weren’t drawn as well or nearly as imaginative as what Max and Dave were doing. In this cartoon, the best little gag is a throwaway; Schultz’s dachshund is in a dog carrier that’s so teeny, the dog’s long front and back stick out either end.



There’s all-black cat with a Felix-like round head and pointed ears, with mice with semi-circular ears near the top of the head. At Fleischer’s, the ears sometimes had little points on them.



I love the all-head parrot. I’m not sure if those are wieners in a tray beneath him, but they come to life. There’s wide-open mouth singing. They loved showing mouth movements in the early ‘30s, especially at Van Beuren.



Tall buildings? You won’t find those all that often in the West Coast cartoons. Women in New York City all seemed to go to Olive Oyl’s seamstress.



The best-looking drawings are the twin dancers. Apparently women in Van Beuren cartoons didn’t have combs. The scrawny, Helen Kane-sounding dancing maid in “Piano Tooners” later in the same year has hair all over the place.



Ah, the pie-eyes that scream early ‘30s. Why is a pig living in an apartment building with children? Who knows? It’s a Van Beuren cartoon! The boy in the centre looks like a rejected drawing of Scrappy at Columbia (drawn by three ex-New York animators).



Hey, a march of characters at an angle, just like in a TerryToon! Tom and Jerry don’t look much like they did earlier in the cartoon. This is just plain ugly drawing. There sure was a quantum leap in quality by the time the studio was making the Rainbow Parades a few years later.



There actually is a thread of a story in this cartoon. Much like Warner Bros. cartoons were based around songs owned by Warners Bros., this song is based around the 1927 tune “Schultz is Back Again” written by Ed Nelson, Saul Bernie and Harry Pease. Van Beuren would have had to fork out money for the rights to use it. Schultz arrives back in New York on a boat. His oompah band greets him. They play. Everyone and everything sings and dances to their music. Apparently, they’re too raucous as the police raid an office building where they hide. Up top. There’s an impossible size-expansion gag.



Schultz’s band is non-violently arrested and placed on a paddywagon that’s actually a flat bed truck. Do they run away? Of course not. They keep playing. The bell of the tuba grows. Look! Tom and Jerry are inside it, singing. How can they fit? Don’t ask. It’s a Van Beuren cartoon.

John Foster and George Stallings get the credits, along with musical director Gene Rodemich. The singers are a mystery, at least to me.

This isn’t the best Tom and Jerry cartoon, or even the most fun, but there’s enough happening to please their fans.

Tex Avery’s Rejected Puns

Do I need to say it? Tex Avery made funny cartoons.

There was a laser disc set (we all got laser disc players, right?) something like 20 years ago featuring all of Avery’s MGM work. Then there was a French DVD set something like ten years ago. The discs contained some interesting things besides the actual cartoons. Facebook friend Silver Baritone sent me some snippings the other day. These are copies of layout drawings of gags that didn’t make it into Avery’s “Symphony in Slang” (released in 1951). It’s a cartoon consisting of little more than visual puns, with stylised designs by Tom Oreb. Why Oreb was brought in to design this cartoon is something I don’t understand; Avery had Ed Benedict in his unit and Ed could come up with flat, angular characters as well as anyone.

The plot of the cartoon is simple. A dead hipster from New York City (played by John Brown using his working-man character voice from the Fred Allen radio show) is explaining his life to the gatekeepers of Heaven. But he uses colloquial language known to Americans of 1950, confusing the hell heaven out of the guys hearing his story. Part of his autobiography involves falling in love, getting dumped and becoming an emotional wreck.

Here are some of the gags that missed the cut. Read the captions to yourself and see if you can hear Brown’s New York-ish voice saying them.



I was so nervous, I started mopping my brow.



It was like fate had brought us together.



She was a chain smoker.



I lost my head.



I started playing a one-armed bandit.



Drinks were on the house. (an Avery favourite, best used in 1945’s “The Shooting of Dan McGoo.”)

This may be Avery’s best example of limited animation. The final scene simply jumps from one drawing of a cat to another (used earlier in the cartoon), and there are others where just one or two body parts move, just like what Hanna-Barbera did on television. And there are some scenes that are simply static shots held for as long as Avery thought it took the pun to sink in.

All four of Avery’s cartoons for Walter Lantz are on DVD and it’d sure be nice if the rest of his were, too. Before my money runs out on me.

How MGM Made a Captain

When you think of how Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera churned out Oscar-winners and Tex Avery was creating some of the funniest cartoons of all time, it’s unbelievable how much turmoil happened before the M-G-M studio finally reached that point by the mid 1940s.

In a nutshell, the studio decided to sell cartoons once the sound era began, and distributed shorts made by Ub Iwerks from 1930 to 1934, then Hugh Harman and Rudy Ising from 1934 to 1937. MGM didn’t like Harman’s constant budget overruns, so it allowed the contact with Harman-Ising to expire and set up its own cartoons; Boxoffice magazine announced the plan May 29, 1937. After working in temporary headquarters, the animators moved into a brand-new building in Culver City on August 23, 1937.

That wasn’t the end of the problems. Factions instantly developed amongst the animators. Harry Hershfield was brought in to run the studio and fired. Milt Gross was brought in and fired. Hugh and Rudy were brought back as employees. All this happened by October 1938. Finally, Friz Freleng had enough and high-tailed it back to the comfort of the Schlesinger studio. Freleng had been hired in September 1937 and rolled his eyes at the prospect of animating what M-G-M bought as their starring characters—a carbon copy of the old Katzenjammer Kids comic strip (which had its own turmoil). An “animated turkey” he once called the series. He should have known the assignment was coming. Boxoffice announced on June 26, 1937 that rights to the Captain and the Kids had been purchased and Max Maxwell would be supervising them.

Of course, that was all behind the scenes. Publicly, everything was optimistic. The United Press even did a story on the newly-opened studio that started with a staff of 25; trade publications announced new hirings over the next few months. It’s interesting to note the only people mentioned in the story are the freelance voice actors, not studio head Fred Quimby, production manager Max Maxwell, or any of the directors or animators. And it was apparently impossible to do any kind of story about animation without mentioning Walt Disney.

They Make Faces At Themselves, Then Draw Movies
By FREDERICK C. OTHMAN
(U. P. Hollywood Correspondent)
HOLLYWOOD, Oct. 6— (UP) — Fifty profoundly serious men went to work here today, making funny faces at themselves in looking glasses.
They’re the animators at M-G-M’s new and ultra-modern cartoon studios and when all 50 of them really got going in front of their mirrors, they are quite a sight.
The studio intends to make movie stars of the captain, mama, the inspector, and Hans and Fritz, who have chasing one another across the newspaper comic pages these many years.
“The Captain and the Kids” first installment, now is in production. The resultant goings on inside a major studio nobody ever saw before.
There are first the authors writing the story of the captain and the brats. These writers don’t bother with manuscripts. They draw their stories in picture form, one panel after another, and paste ‘em on the wall.
The animators take a look and then they go to work drawing thousands upon thousands of separate pictures, each only slightly different from the next one, so that when they’re photographed on a strip of film and run through a movie machine, they look like they’re moving. It takes 11,600 separate drawings to make an eight minute show
The head animators, who are skilled artists and who earn a couple or three hundred dollars a week (according as to how expert they are) draw only the principal sketches, with the aid of their own faces, and their looking-glasses.
Whenever they’re at a loss, say, to depict mama in the act of weeping, they stop everything and weep themselves. Then they look in the mirrors and draw what they see.
They also have full-length mirrors with three panels, like tailors use, for struggling-with –tiger, slipping-on-banana-peel, and bucket-of-water-on-head scenes. They act these scenes out in front of the mirror, making mental sketches of what they see. They then run quickly to their desks and put pencil to paper before they forget.
Each animator has in front of him constantly a master drawing of the captain and each member of his family. This is so no artist will start drawing the characters to suit his own ideas. The work of each animator must exactly match that of every other, or the result is a mess.
When the head animators finish the key pictures, they turn them over to their assistants, who, without mirrors, put in the rest of the action. It takes about 30 pictures for the captain merely to scratch his head; 40 for mama to blow her nose, and 50 for Hans and Fritz to hand the inspector an explosive cigar.
After all the pictures are drawn on paper, a platoon of girls trace them with color on to celluloid, whereupon they are photographed, one by one, with a camera which rings a bell every time, the shutter clicks.
The studio had considerable trouble finding the proper voices for all the characters, but finally selected Billy Bletcher to growl like the captain, Martha Wentworth to bring mama’s voice to the screen, and the Misses Shirley Reed and Jeannie Dunn to impersonate respectively Hans and Fritz.
The head men were cogitating the hiring of small boys for the latter two parts, but decided that eventually that boys would turn into baritones. The Misses Reed and
Dunn won’t, hence their change of sex insofar as M-G-M is concerned. The inspector always has been a dummy, anyway, so he’ll have no voice.
The only other news about cartoons is the fact that Walt Disney, who started the whole business many a long year ago, has finished his first full-length, full-color cartoon feature, a task so prodigious that it almost gives you the willies to contemplate it.
Disney is holding a preview for his cartoon film, with all the trimmings that a Gable or a Crawford opus would get, later this week.

Billy Bletcher, not Mel Blanc, was the original cartoon voice acting super-star. He was Peg Leg Pete at Disney and seemed to work for just about all the cartoons studios of the ‘30s, providing dialects and growling bad guys. He found time for it in between on-camera work in both features and shorts. M-G-M (Tom and Jerry’s Spike) and Warners (Papa Bear) still used his services in the ‘40s. In the ‘50s, he added children’s records to his resumé. All the voice work seems ironic considering Bletcher started in silent films.

The Associated Press of November 27, 1937, had this to say about his work on M-G-M’s flagship cartoons.

Billy Bletcher Sells One Voice —That Leaves Him Just 999
BY ROBBIN COONS
Hollywood— The man with a thousand voices has just signed away one of them.
For 15 years—in vaudeville, on the air, in pictures—Billy Bletcher has been in show business. His weird ability to mimic anybody or anything practically stole away his own identity. He found himself becoming a “voice” — or many voices.
Once, on the air, he substituted for a famous comedian and 1isteners never knew the difference. When Hollywood’s animated cartoons began to talk. Billy spoke for all of them. Vocally, he has been pig, frog, dog, rabbit, mouse, horse, cat, practically all the creatures of the animated screen. In spare time he has played parts in feature pictures, sung on the air. His tenor is trained for music, too.
Metro was launching a new series of talking cartoons, “The Captain and the Kids.” For it, Bletcher was signed to a contract. He will speak for the Captain—and he cannot use that voice for any other purpose.
But he is still free to use the other 999 voices in his repertory. He calls it the ideal contract.

Only 12 Captain and the Kids cartoons were released in 1938 and three more in 1939. By then, Hugh and Rudy were back, with glacially-placed stories of animals and cutsie, faux Disney characters. But toward the end of the room, Hanna and Barbera were on their own developing a cat and a mouse. M-G-M’s time of turmoil was about to end.

Here’s a timeline, gleaned from a few months of stories in Boxoffice:

● April 17: Harman-Ising rushing seven shorts to completion this week, three with Bosko, two with the little pups and one each with Little Cheeser and a rabbit, and “Smoke Dreams” (Yes, I realise that’s eight cartoons. I imagine “Smoke Dreams” is actually “Pipe Dreams”).
● May 1: MGM and Harman-Ising terminate their contact “this week” after not coming to terms on a new one. The pact expires when 18 more shorts are delivered. 14 are to be made.
● May 29: MGM will establish its own cartoon department. Unnamed “top flight director” from another studio has been hired. Harman-Ising still has 16 shorts to deliver.
● June 26: Fred Quimby closes a deal to produce “The Captain and the Kids.” New cartoon unit will be supervised by Max Maxwell with an initial series of 13 one-reelers. Signed as story writers are Bill Hanna, Bob Allen, Fred McAlpin, Heck Allen, Charlie Thorson and Victor (Bill) Schipek.
● July 3: Ground has been broken on the new studio building. It will be 100 feet square and house 150 workers. Max Maxwell is preparing to start production on “Captain.”
● July 10: The studio building will be opened August 16 and cost $200,000.
● July 31: Karl Karpe signed as a cartoon director, Wilson Collison as a writer. Plans for early production are being rushed.
● August 7: Percy Charles joins the cartoon unit as a writer.
● August 14: Harry Hershfield arrived last week from New York to join cartoon unit. Will also be gag man and writer on the main lot.
● September 4: Animator Cecil Surry becomes father of a girl this week.
● October 9: Organisation of studio virtually complete. Bob Allen, Bill Hanna and Friz Freleng are directors, George Gordon is an associate on layouts and animation. Ray Kelly, Kin Platt and Henry (Heck) Allen added to the unit. The first “Captain” cartoon to be released in December in sepia platinum prints in a process developed by John Nicklaus.
● December 11: “Little Buck Cheeser,” Harman-Ising cartoon, to be released December 18, first “Captain” cartoon, “Cleaning House,” a week later.
● February 5, 1938: “Blue Monday” is set for release as the first “Captain” cartoon on February 5 in sepia platinum.

Lantz Camel Dance

The best part of Shamus Culhane’s “Abou Ben Boogie” doesn’t show up until about halfway through the way into the cartoon. We have to live with Ben Hardaway’s sign-puns and goofy-looking characters until Miss X appears and the great dance sequences begin.

It’s a shame Lantz only made two Miss X cartoons (this was the final one). The movement is superb in this and you can really feel Miss X and Abou Ben Boogie pulling each other on the dance floor thanks to the posing and timing. And their dance sequence is wisely interrupted by a comic dance by a camel introduced earlier in the cartoon. There’s some great rubbery movement here, thanks to that great animator Pat Matthews.



The camel is hiding in a mummy’s wrapping (did they have mummies in Arabia?) and is unravelled into action.






Culhane and layout man Art Heinemann go in for a solid background so nothing distracts from the action.




The camel twirls like a ballerina—in perspective. Nine drawings on twos. The head comes right at the camera and so does the toe.



Next, a butt wag. The camel turns his head to see the audience.



Next a little high-step off the stage, vaudeville style (the camel is wearing a straw hat), followed by a slip-step.



Landing his body parts perfectly to Darrell Calker’s beat, the camel flips over and then his hump turns into feet and he walks out of the scene. Great work.

Pat Matthews and Paul Smith get the on-screen animation credits. Matthews, as far as I know, did the Miss X dance sequence in this one which I’ll have to post some time.

Just a note about Matthews. His name wasn’t really Pat. The 1940 Census shows he is John R. Matthews; his son is named Pat (but has John H. crossed out in the report; see below). In-laws were living with him on Laneer Drive (you can see he was renting a house for $35 a month). He was at Disney at the time and the Census reports he was making only $888 in a 46-week year.

Mrs. Fang

It’s highly likely that none of the ladies who heard a six-year-old girl playing the saxophone at a Methodist Church club meeting on May 6, 1924 suspected she would go on to become a trailblazer and then to worldwide fame. Then, again, it didn’t happen because of the saxophone. Or the piano, which she also played for the church ladies. Or her soprano voice. Or her dramatic acting while in college.

Or her bi-weekly newspaper column, for that matter, though they might have got a hint. “Around the Horn” was inside the paper of Bluffton College in 1940 and written by a senior whose last name was Driver. She was nicknamed “Screwy” Driver, not because it’s an obvious pun, but because it described the content of her stories. Her name actually wasn’t Driver by then. The local paper in Lima, Ohio, which reported on almost her every move, had announced her wedding on November 4, 1939.

That’s when Phyllis Driver became Phyllis Diller.

There were women comics who headlined in vaudeville, in burlesque, on radio and on television. But until Phyllis Diller, few headlined in nightclubs, and she was the first stand-up comedienne to go on to enormous, lasting success.

It wasn’t without a lot of work. Diller had gone west and landed a job as a continuity writer at a radio station in Oakland; in those days it involved writing comedy material for shows like one called “Nick and Noodnick.” Salesmen sold the station. She sold herself. Constantly. She wrote gag letters-to-the-editor. One stated a crap game was more appealing to TV-watching kids than the puppet show Kukla, Fran and Ollie. She got noticed.

Here’s the Video Notes column by T.R. Temple in the Hayward Daily Review of November 19, 1952.

DILLER MAKES GOOD
The first letter I ever received from KROW’s female Barnum, Phyllis Diller, began with the salutation, “Lover Boy!”
Later her correspondence blossomed into a veritable garden of publicity releases, all unconventional, about the various radio personalities she was trying to make me listen to. After a while, by george, I did listen to them.
Now Phyllis has branched out. She’s currently filming a show for TV titled “Phyllis Dillis, the Homely Friendmaker.” It's enough to make Marjorie King’s hair turn grey.
Dillis [sic] portrays a bumbling fraud who can’t boil water. She urges housewives to try “something different”, and brother, it’s different all right. Hubby will get ulcers just watching her.
The show hasn’t been picked up by a sponsor yet, but we can almost promise you'll be seeing it soon. It’s a riot.
Miss Dillis, dressed in an evening gown, goes through the first demonstration in a nightmarish episode on how to make tossed green salad.
We have a female Robert Benchley, I think.
(P.S. Dillis in real life has five children, used to work for the San Leandro local newspaper and—she informed me—her house has termites).
The 15-minute series is a BART (Bay Area Radio-Television) production, directed for TV by ABC’s Jim Baker, and will be available outside Northern California via telefilm. Don Sherwood will be the announcer.
He just presents Phyllis and gets away as quickly as possible from the scene of action.

She changed radio stations. She judged a beauty contest—“Maid of San Leandro, 1954.” And she started working the local clubs; the Hungry i was the first. By August 1955, she was headlining at the Purple Onion in San Francisco (four shows daily) at a reported $500 a week. She stayed for 107 weeks. And she got her first national exposure—in a story by United Press, dated November 14, 1955. One would expect a wisecrack-filled interview, with the standard gags about looking ugly and her husband Fang. But she’s serious and subdued. She was only a regional comic. She wasn’t the Phyllis Diller yet.

She's Mother of Five During Day; Turns Comedy Artist Every Night
SAN FRANCISCO — (UP) — Phyllis Diller, 38, is one gal who could give even Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll lessons on how to live a double life.
By day, the willowy blonde is the stay-at-home spouse of an Alameda, Calif., insurance salesman and the hard-working mother of five children. But at night, it’s an entirely different story.
Each evening about nine, Phyllis trades her apron for a slinky gown and the rubber face of a night club comedienne to become the feature attraction at an intimate basement bistro here known as The Purple Onion.
Since Age of Three
“Sometimes I realize what I’m doing—cooking all day and clowning all night—is impossible,” she says. “But all the world’s energy is yours, and it’ll work for you if you only meet it half-way.”
Mrs. Diller sings, mimics and composes much of her own material.
“I’ve felt the need to be funny and musical—to make people laugh—since I was three,” she said. “Just last year I realized that it would soon be too late in life to build such a career, unless I went ahead and did the thing I’ve always wanted to do.
Co-operative Spouse
“Now instead of telling my grandchildren what a great comedienne I could have been,” she continued, “I can let my scrapbook speak for itself.”
Mrs. Diller’s husband really set the whole frenetic scheme in motion. He urged her to go right ahead and "be funny.”
“My husband’s a real doll,” Phyllis said smilingly. “He cooperates in every way possible to make our family life a happy, full one.”
And the children, ranging in ages from five to 15, are being taught self-sufficiency by their mother’s nightly trips to the microphone.
“The kids fix their own breakfast,” she said. “I feel I’m setting them a good example in fulfilling my deep personal ambitions,” she says.
“They will learn from me and this will lead them on the way to living satisfying lives of their own.”
Phyllis would like to keep going “right on up” in the entertainment world, but she never intends to lose sight of the fact she’s wife and mother.
“I don't believe in baby-sitters. But then, who needs them when your children are as level-headed as mine,” she said.
“Besides raising a fine family,” she says with a grin, “I’d also enjoy becoming the funniest female who ever lived.”

Finally in 1958, NBC gave her a national audience—at both ends of the broadcast day. In May, she guested as the Women’s Editor for a week on the “Today” show. And by the time this story appeared in print on December 27, Diller had made five appearances on the “Tonight” show with Jack Paar.

The Phyllis Diller Saga: From Kitchen to Comedy
By DICK KLEINER
National Enterprise Association Staff Correspondent
NEW YORK (NEA) — Shari Lewis got a letter from a young fan that read like this:
“Dear Shari:
“I like your morning program, but I have a problem. My father sleeps late, so I have to turn the sound on the program down. And I can’t hear you. Could you talk a little louder?”
If you’ve always had a desire to get into show business, but somehow never had the nerve to try it, take heart at the story of Phyllis Diller.
She’s a comedienne who got a big break with Jack Paar not long ago, and has since been back and back and back. And now she’s about set for a spot in the next edition of “New Faces” on Broadway. Yet, up to four years ago, she was a contented housewife, with five contented kids and a contented husband.
The story of Phyllis Diller, strange even in the strange world of show business, begins in Lima, Ohio. She was born there, grew up wanting to be a singer, but never got around to it. So she went to Bluffton, Ohio, college and just two months before her graduation, eloped.
For 10 years, she was strictly a housewife. There was a boy, three girls and then another boy. They’re now nine through 18, and her oldest son is in college.
"I was the kind who was funny at parties,” she says. “Gradually, I got asked to entertain whenever we went out, and I worked up something like an act. But still she never worked at it, nor thought she would. And then came a time of financial crisis for the Dillers—“the roof fell in on us”—and she had to work. At first, she tried advertising, and had progressed until she was merchandise manager of a San Francisco radio station.
“My husband kept after me,” she says, “to be a comedienne. Isn’t that a switch? Most husbands are after their wives to stay in the kitchen—and mine was kicking me out.”
Phyllis resisted. She says she thought, at first, that it would be “morally wrong” to leave the children to go on the road. But her husband persisted and finally she gave it a whirl. That was 3½ years ago, after she’d been married for some 16 years. Now, except for being away from her brood—“that's the thorn in my side”—she’s happy. She hopes to get to the point where she can settle down, reunite all seven Dillers, and live happily ever after. It should happen soon.

Her dream of reuniting her family didn’t last. She and Sherwood—who she later pointed out in interviews was not her husband “Fang” in her act—divorced. But she did accomplish something she hoped for in that interview in 1955: “I’ve felt the need to be funny and musical—to make people laugh—since I was 3.”

That’s why the world misses her today.

Rocket-bye Baby Exteriors

Ernie Nordli worked on several cartoons for Chuck Jones at Warner Bros. when the cartoon studio re-opened after being closed in the second half in 1953. Jones liked stylised backgrounds in the early ‘40s and he started going for them again in the early ‘50s with Maurice Noble as his layout man.

One of the cartoons Nordli laid out is a one-shot called ‘Rocket-bye Baby’ (copyright 1956). Here are a few of the settings he designed and handed off to Phil De Guard to construct.








It appears this is the third-last Warners cartoons Nordli worked on. It has Production number 1395. His final cartoon was number 1399. Noble was back to do layouts on number 1400 (“Deduce, You Say”). He also came up with designs for number 1397 but Noble tossed them out and started over. The cartoon was “What’s Opera, Doc?”.

Ban Rochester Van Jones

Everyone loved Rochester on the Jack Benny show. Almost everyone.

We don’t know if Lloyd Binford actually disliked Eddie Anderson. But I strongly suspect he’d certainly want Anderson to, as some odiously put it back then, “know his place.”

In looking for stories about Rochester and the Benny show, I stumbled upon this column from the Scripps-Howard News Service that appeared on editorial pages beginning November 14, 1950. That was almost four score and seven years to the day that President Abe Lincoln gave the Gettysburg Address.

Is TV a Modern Abe Lincoln in Dixie?
By ROBERT C. RUARK
MEMPHIS.—Mr. Lloyd T. Binford, the bull censor of Memphis, is confronted with a new and horrifying medium to test his mettle, and may wind up as the most frustrated censor in the land.
Television has come to Memphis, thereby posing quite a problem for Mr. Binford, who has long fought a valiant battle against anything in the entertainment business which might show the Negro in the light of equality.
When he banned a film called “Imitation of Life,” he said it illustrated “one of most disgusting cases of racial equality I have ever seen.” He also slew a comedy called “Curley” because, he said, it showed equality between children of different races.
Mr. Binford has a long, proud record in the banning business. He cut an oldie called “King of Kings,” a Biblical show. He banned “Lost Boundaries" while approving “Pinky,” a story of a Negro girl who was light enough to pass for white, but decided not to.
He also banned a road show version of “Annie Get Your Gun,” because “Negroes sing, and dance on equal terms with white performers.” He killed “Duel in the Sun,” one of the dullest hoss-operas ever compounded and in this instant did the town a favor.
But in the case of television, Mr. Binford is undecided. He tells me he has never seen a television show which is just as well for his heart because all sorts of horrifying examples of racial' equality are in daily evidence.
Mr. Arthur Godfrey, who get into more Southern homes than the South’s entire population of meter readers, steadily employs a mixed quartet called “The Mariners.” Horrors of horrors, the Mariners are composed of two white, two black, and they sing on equal term with Mr. Godfrey and his other white associates.
* * *
Then there is the awful example of Jack Benny and Rochester. Rochester is declaredly a Negro and often winds up as the sly superior of his boss, Mr. Benny. He is sarcastic with Mr. Benny, and taunts him all the time, and makes cracks behind his back. This would be unsettling to Mr. Binford, I am sure.
Then you got Ethel Waters, Negro actress, playing a recent TV show called “Beulah”; and, of course, most of the talent variety shows feature Negro entertainers. Recently, on a Cedric Adams talent show, a little Negro boy who won hands down over flock of white competition.
We have also the reissuing of the old movies for the Video screen possibly many of the very movie banned by Mr. Binford. The equalizing effect on Memphis' children must be terrifying indeed, since note that the old “Our Gang” comedies are being replayed for TV—over, of all things, Howdy Doody, a children’s program. If I remember rightly, the most appealing member of the gang was Farina, a little Negro girl with a runny nose.
* * *
Mr. Binford tells me he does not believe that he can censor television so long as people see it a home, and is also somewhat dubious about the possibility of banning it in public places.
“I will cross that bridge when I come to it,” Mr. Binford says. "But I imagine some sort of legal structure could be set up to protect the public, if this becomes necessary.”
Television is red hot in the South, and on its screen, at least, equality is rampant. It would be odd indeed if the coaxial cable eventually takes up where Abe Lincoln left off, despite the valiant effort of Mr. Binford in other fields of artistic endeavor.

Ruark, for what it’s worth, was from North Carolina. Lest anyone think from the column above that he was a raving small-l liberal, a month earlier he penned a snide and smug piece about Paul Robeson not winning the Nobel Peace Prize, succumbing to the red-baiting of the day.

As for Mr. Binford, his muzzling mantra became much quieter soon after this story. He spent his last few years in arthritic pain and died in 1956. Remarkably, he was a member of several service clubs and fraternal orders which champion equality amongst humanity. You can read about him at this site.

Eddie Anderson’s Rochester is still loved by countless fans of TV and old radio shows. No one can ban that.

Lew Who?

Fans of old-time cartoons know who Warren Foster, Mike Maltese and Tedd Pierce are. They came up with some of the funniest cartoons ever made.

They’re the writers that people associate most with the Warner Bros. studio. There were others, of course, if a fan was pressed to name them. Bill Scott and Lloyd Turner went on to bigger fame with Jay Ward and sitcoms respectively. Bugs Hardaway’s name was tagged on to a certain rabbit. But the name of one writer probably doesn’t come immediately to mind.

Lew Landsman received one lonely screen credit. He wrote “Porky at the Crocadero,” released in 1938.

That begs the question—why? Why only one? Was that his only cartoon? What happened to him? And who is Lew Landsman anyway?

I’m afraid most of those questions may never be answered. Too much time has passed. But a little jaunt around the internet has produced a bit of information about him, though hardly the full story.

Landsman could be best described as a parody artist. He sold comic drawings to magazines but then took it a little further. His work was so good he had a number of showings in the 1940s and ‘50s in the Los Angeles area. One close to April Fool’s Day in 1948 attracted a lot of media coverage. It displayed his parody impressions of movie and radio artists. He drew Ed Gardner, Archie of “Duffy’s Tavern,” as a phone with a hat answering itself (the radio show always opened with Archie answering the phone). “What happens on my canvas shouldn’t happen to Picasso. It never did, either,” he joked to the Los Angeles Times.

Here’s the United Press story about the exhibit.

Screwball Artist Prepares New Show Ribbing Filmites
By ALINE MOSBY
HOLLYWOOD, Mar. 31—(UP) — Folks who dilate their nostrils when a “modern” artist changed a carrot to a glob of paint don’t know the half of it. Wait’ll they see what a guy here is doing to “portraits” of movie stars!
This character is busy at home daubing oil on canvas. He chuckles fiendishly. He says his portraits will cause numerous crises in Hollywood.
In a couple of months, Artist Lew Landsman will hang his pictures in the ultra-modern Hall of Art in Beverly Hills. Then he’ll sit back to await the repercussions.
* * *
THE MOVIE people will rush over figuring he’s painted their likenesses from glammer photos. Most of the stars will snicker, he hopes. Some might not.
Lana Turner, for instance, will nearly pop her big, blue eyes out at the picture we saw that Landsman painted of her. It’s a candle brightly burning at both ends.
The painting of George Raft we could tell without the label. It shows a guy with big feet and a pin-striped suit His head consists of a huge hand which is flipping a coin. That trick made Raft famous in “Scarface.”
Garry Moore turned out to be a big question mark with crew-cut topknot standing before a microphone But take a peek at the painting of Frank Sinatra. He’s just a microphone, with bow tie and curly hair.
* * *
RAY MILLAND wishes people would forget that bottle-on-the chandelier stuff from “The Lost Week-End.” It’s doubtful they will now. Artist Landsman painted Ray as a big eye peering over the edge of a ceiling fixture.
It’s easy to guess which picture is Harpo Marx. A fuzzy-topped character with a huge harp for lips and teeth. Humphrey Bogart’s is even nuttier. He’s just a canvas with four bullet holes in it.
This won't be the first time Lew has stuck a wacky finger in art and stirred rapidly. He has some other paintings hung in the Hall of Art now that turned Hollywood on its ear.
* * *
LEW USED TO BE a magazine cartoonist with a subtle sense of humor. Then an artist friend suggested he turn real artist because everybody else was. Landsman daubed up a stack of canvasses and took ‘em to the Hall of Art.
This institution, being brave and new, gave him an exhibition. They called it “Landsmania.” The place drew record-cracking crowds. The customers roared. Even the art critics snickered.
“The Spike Jones of Art;” “The Poor Man’s Dali,” they called him. One horrified writer, tho, said Landsman’s paintings “shouldn't happen to a critic. They're like those little guys in the corners of a Smokey Stover comic strip only bigger."

Lewis Landsman was born in New York City on November 19, 1901; his parents were Hungarian. He was still living there in 1930, and married to his wife Elsa, who was Hungarian as well. We first find him in Los Angeles in the 1936 City Directory. The 1939 directory (which mentions both of them with information likely compiled the previous year) lists his occupation as “artist,” but the 1942 edition reveals he is a salesman for the Kater Engraving Company, a block from Jimmy Durante’s home. Unfortunately, he can’t be found in the 1940 U.S. Census. Perhaps not coincidentally, Warners animator Virgil Ross is in the census at Landsman’s address in the 1939 Los Angeles phone book. It’s the only other connection I’ve found between him and the studio. How he got hired and why he left, I don’t know.

There’s little else I’ve been able to find about him. He illustrated a parody version of the Sears catalogue, published in Los Angeles in 1962. And don’t believe any of those make-up-history sites on the internet that claim Landsman wrote a “Scrappy’s Trip to Mars” (1938) for Columbia. The U.S. Government Copyright Catalogue states the writer was Allen Rose.

The self-proclaimed “Poor Man’s Dali” died in Los Angeles on April 4, 1977.

Late note:To add to the confusion, a Louis Landsman, listed as "painter, picture studio" can be found in the 1940 Census at 5722 Harold Way, Los Angeles. However and his wife Rose are Russian, and he was born in 1888 or 1889. Both Landsmans have listings in the 1939 Directory.

False Vases Backgrounds

Poor Felix. Goes to all the trouble of replacing his wife’s vase (which breaks after it falls while dancing to his piano playing) only to have a mouse break it and Mrs. Cat taking it out on him. That’s the plot of “False Vases” (1929).

Since it’s a Chinese vase, Felix goes to a Chinese store which doesn’t have a vase in his price range. So he convinces a dog to dig through the world clean through to China and steals a vase.

Silent film backgrounds aren’t known for their elaboration, but the simple drawings in this cartoon (which are shaded so they don’t completely look like line drawings) work well and set an appropriate mood. I especially like the elaborate tree.










It seems odd to have piano playing in the plot of a silent cartoon, but there would have been musical accompaniment in the theatre. As pictures on the bill with Felix were advertised as “all-talking musical drama” or “talking comedy,” the soon-to-be-obsolete organ or piano player was probably happy to have something to do.

Fraidy Cat

“The more pantomime, the better” seems to be the operative slogan at the MGM cartoon studio until Tex Avery got there, when it changed to “the more gags, the better.”

Disney cartoons had “personality” ever since Norm Ferguson had Pluto stop and take up time going through easily recognisable actions and reactions. MGM did the same thing. “Fraidy Cat” (1942) is a good example. The bulk of the cartoon involves Jerry putting a sheet over a vacuum cleaner to make Tom think it’s a ghost. One scene has Jerry turning the vacuum switch on and off. Then he laughs. Then he looks at Tom. Then he plays with the switch some more. Then he points. Then he laughs again. Then he plays with the switch some more. Then he laughs again. Then he plays with the switch again. Then he slows down and realises he saw Tom. Then he looks back. Then he looks at the audience. Then—well, you get the basic idea. Lots of pantomime. Lots of personality. But not a whole lot of action.

The same sort of thing happens in another part of the cartoon where Tom is running away from the vacuum cleaner which, for reasons of comedy only, is powerful enough to suck up rugs, telephones, books, pots and the nine lives out of a cat. Tom reacts over and over in different ways.

Here’s one of a bunch of drawings of Tom running in place. The multiple eyes and paws are fun.



He grows extra eyes as his head moves up.



There are some great drawings in this sequence. Tom’s eyes grow wide. The top of his head balloons. Tom’s eyes grow wide in a different way. The head changes shape in a different way. Finally, we come up with three wild consecutive drawings below. Great brush-work.





So Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera justifies the stand-there-and-emote routines of Jerry with frantic drawings of Tom which get lost because they go by so quickly.

There are no animation credits here but just about anything with huge eyes and huge pupils in an MGM cartoon can be pretty safely pinned on Irv Spence.