Sheepherder!

The cattle-raising wolf chases after Droopy the sheepherder in the great Tex Avery cartoon “Drag-a-long Droopy.” The wolf gets off his horse outside a saloon.



He flips over. I imagine someone’s assistant worked on these drawings.



He gets up and rushes in.



Those of you familiar with the cartoon know this is the set up to the punch-line. The cattlemen in the saloon aren’t interested in the wolf’s cry to do something about the sheepherder Droopy. They’d rather watch TV instead, much like suburbanites of the 1950s would rather stay home and look at their box in the living room than go to theatres and see Droopy cartoons, or anything else. Dad-gum television indeed!

Avery’s regular crew of three credited animators—Lah, Clinton and Simmons—got screen credit on this, along with Ray Patterson and Bob Bentley.

They're Famous

The Famous Studios cartoons? To quote Arnold Stang as Gerard on The Henry Morgan Show—“Ech.”

I’m not a big fan of them. I’m not even a small fan, though I like Stang, Sid Raymond, Jack Mercer, Jackson Beck, Mae Questel and the other voice actors who worked on them. The Screen Songs are especially tiresome, especially when compared to the originals made by Max Fleischer, where the animation had charm and inventiveness (and don’t get me started on Casper or Little Audrey).

However, Famous played an important role in the history of Golden Age Cartoons, especially on the East Coast, and so it’s great to see Jerry Beck delving into the studio on his website at Cartoon Research, picking up on the work of Thad Komorowski, who examined ads for the Fleischer/early Famous cartoons from the internal Paramount publicity publication, enticing exhibitors to show them. Especially interesting is Jerry’s collection of cue sheets, which list the music cobbled together for each cartoon and reported to music publishing organisations. Unlike Carl Stalling at Warners and, to some extent, Scott Bradley at MGM, Sharples wrote much of the incidental music and occasionally tossed in a song people might recognise (for example, Jack Benny’s theme “Love In Bloom,” surfaced on a number of occasions, once with new lyrics sung by Jackson Beck as Bluto). Expert Dave Mackey says Sharples’ music was eventually available as a stock library; you can hear it in the Trans-Lux Felix the Cat cartoons for TV, to name one series where it was used.

Incidentally, the first Variety story about the Noveltoons I could find was published February 13, 1946:

For Skeds New Cartoon
New York, Feb. 12.—Paramount’s Noveltoons will introduce a new cartoon technique combining animation with actual scenic backgrounds. First short will be "New York, New York," producer Sam Buchwald announced. Inker will feature travelog of Gotham with pen and ink characters.

Cartoon Research lives up to its name. Jerry and his correspondents delve into assorted nooks and crannies of theatrical cartoons, always finding something that people didn’t know about. For the time being, he’s looking into Famous Studios product every Monday. Read the latest post HERE.

The Rise of Kenny Baker

At first, Kenny Baker was a shy young man who was grateful that he was given a huge break that practically made him an overnight national success. That’s if the publicity is accurate. But something happened between November 3, 1935 when he made his debut on the Jack Benny radio show and less than four years later when he didn’t show up for the final show of the season. He later declared he left because the character he was given on the show was grating on him and he didn’t want to be typecast. Baker hung around radio for another decade, even landing a starring sitcom, but he basically kissed the pinnacle of his career goodbye when quit Benny.

It would appear there were no hard feelings; perhaps Benny felt that Baker was bettering himself by sticking exclusively as the vocalist on The Texaco Star Theatre (he had worked on that show and Benny’s simultaneously in 1939). Jokes about Kenny Baker made periodic appearances on the Benny show for the next dozen or so years, and Baker returned for the Christmas show in 1946.

Here’s a syndicated feature story published in the Rochester Democrat of December 20, 1936 that gives a nice summary of Baker’s career up to that date.

A Timid Tenor
The Story of a Chap Named Kenny Baker, Who Really Is Very Modest
By Frances Morrin
KENNY BAKER is the Horatio Alger, Jr. of the networks; the answer to the success story writer's prayer. Unknown a year ago, today he is one of the big names in radio. In the year that he been the timid tenor on Jack Benny's hour, he has won his way into the hearts of the radio fans. Stacks of fan mall testify to that. And now he is act for a career in motion pictures with Mervyn LeRoy, Warner Bros.' ace director, as his sponsor.
His story has all the ingredients that go to make up the popular Horatio Alger, Jr., rags-to-riches story formula. Struggling young tenor playing tag with jobs runs away with high school sweetheart whose parents object to son-in-law who sings for a living. Terrific struggle ensues to keep their heads above water financially and then practically overnight comes fame and fortune.
Kenny, however, is inclined to discount his success and put it down to luck, as I discovered when I attempted to pry the story of his life from him one afternoon recently. We had made arrangements to meet at the reception room of the Hollywood NBC studios, and I admit I was curious about this young man whom I had -heard only over the radio.
When he came in in white ducks and a sweater he looked more like a six-foot college football player than a leading light of radioland. And he is not handsome; rather he belongs to the homely-but-cute school with his befreckled nose, generous mouth and shy but friendly manner.
AND definitely he is very modest about his arrival. The details he gives are very sketchy. When 1 asked him to tell me something about himself he said: “Well, I sang around here for several years and then, I won the Texaco Radio Open contest and that led to my engagement with Jack Benny. Now there’s a grand fellow, Jack.”
The first thing you know you’re talking about Jack Benny instead of about Kenny Baker. But by dint of much questioning of the young man himself and members of the Benny cast I finally pieced together his story. Kenny, who was christened Kenneth Lawrence Baker, is the son of Mr. and Mrs. Gordon Baker. He is one of those rare specimens, a native Californian, for he was born in the little town of Monrovia, Calif., a suburb of Los Angeles, 24 years ago.
We skip over the tender years of his life except to say that Mr. and Mrs. Baker had ambitions for their son to be a great violinist. Kenny admits that he wanted to play the violin, but not enough to practice very much.
The Baker family moved to Long Beach and it was while going to the Polytechnic High School there that he first began to take any great interest in singing. After graduation he decided definitely that he would follow a musical career and studied music theory at the Long Beach Junior College. While he was studying he entered the Atwater Kent radio contest but nothing happened.
THE next year, 1933, was an eventful year in Kenny's life. That was the year of the Long Beach earthquake. After the quake he quit school and went back to work. Just what the earthquake had to do with his leaving school and going to work I don’t know, unless it was that he had fallen very much in love with his high school sweetheart, Geraldine Churchill, and promised to show her parents, who objected to a crooner as a son-in-law, that he could make a living.
Or perhaps the earthquake convinced young Baker that life was short at best and that he should set about living in earnest. At any rate, he went to work in a furniture store. There followed a series of jobs including one as a day laborer on the Boulder Dam project.
Finally he managed to get steady work singing in a church in one of the small suburban towns. With a regular income assured Kenny decided to risk matrimony, so he and Geraldine, who had waited patiently for him, eloped. Then, as Kenny puts it, the fight started.
The church job vanished and the youthful Benedict found that there were many more tenors than there were jobs for them. He got a coach, Edward Novis, brother of Donald of radio fame, and worked with his voice, studied and practiced. He sang at night clubs, at churches, filled occasional radio engagements. Anything to keep the wolf from the Baker doorstep. Gradually he began to get local recognition, and finally became a member of the staff quartet on Los Angeles station KFWB.

IT WAS while he was singing there that he decided to enter the Texaco Radio Open contest held in Los Angeles last year. Much to his own amazement, he won it over the other 1,100 contestants.
“Boy, you don’t know how good $100 in cash looked to me. That was the prize and also an engagement to sing with Eddy Duchin’s orchestra at the Cocoanut Grove,” Kenny beamed as he told me this.
“It was while I was singing at the Grove that Mervyn LeRoy, the director, heard me. He came backstage after my act and told me he thought I had moving picture possibilities. I thought at first be was kidding, because I know I’m no Romeo. Then when he offered me a contract I signed it so fast I splattered ink all over the paper.”
Another famous personality caught Kenny’s act at the Grove. Jack Benny heard him, liked him, but did nothing about it. For Benny’s program was all set. He had Mary Livingstone, Johnny Green, Don Wilson, and Michael Bartlett was to take Frank Parker’s spot. But Bartlett failed to click as a radio personality. His voice, which thrilled the motion picture audiences, lost something over the air waves. So Bartlett withdrew from the cast.
Agents for the program called a number of singers for auditions to fill Bartlett’s place. Kenny says he didn’t know it was an audition for the Benny program when he was called or he would have been too scared to sing. And whether Benny asked for him Kenny says he doesn’t know. At any rate, before Kenny had finished his first song, one of Benny’s men tells me, Benny himself stepped from the control and said, “There’s the boy I want.”
CAME the first Sunday and time for rehearsal. (This part of the story was told me by one of the cast.) Jack and his cast were assembled when Kenny walked in. In his usual bashful manner he went over to a corner and sat down by himself. When they started to rehearse their lines, the young tenor was so nervous he fumbled his.
Jack, smart showman that he is, decided to capitalize on Kenny’s real personality, so they wrote his lines to portray him as the timid tenor. And the audience loved it. After Parker’s heckling of Benny for two seasons, the listeners liked a sympathetic character.
So after his first appearance he was signed for the season and proved so popular with radio audiences that he was contracted for the program again this year. This national recognition as a featured artist on Benny’s program has not increased Kenny’s hat size the fraction of an inch. If anything, he errs on the side of modesty, and I told him so.
He shook his head. “I’ve been very lucky,” Kenny says. “I have been fortunate enough to get the breaks and I know it. I haven’t had any pull and I have worked hard, but so have lots of others. So why should I get a swelled head? Look at Jack Benny.
“There is a fellow who has about everything anyone could want and yet he is the grandest guy you’d ever want to meet. Nothing high hat about him. And what a showman. He has a mind that works like lightning and can always turn a mistake into a laugh.
“SOMETIMES in rehearsing, someone will make a mistake and if Jack thinks it will get a laugh we put it in. For instance, when we were rehearsing for our first program this season, Jack’s line to introduce Phil Harris was ‘He’s the tall handsome, romantic type.’ Jack in reading it said ‘romantic tripe’ instead and it proved to be such a laugh we kept it in.”
When Kenny isn’t rehearsing for the show or trying out new songs, he likes to play handball, golf or go fishing. But soon, as he told me this morning over the phone, that will be a thing of the past. For just recently Mervyn LeRoy nought the Clarence Bodington Kelland story, “The Great Crooner,” for Kenny and will star him in it. It is a tailor-made story for the timid tenor of the airlanes, for it concerns a bashful young man who makes a tremendous hit as a radio singer, and was written by the author of “Mr. Deeds Goes to Town.”
If tins story does for young Baker what Mr. Deeds did for Gary Cooper, he’ll be able to write his own ticket. But whatever happens, I’m gambling he’ll still be wearing the same size hat.

Baker’s entertainment career pretty much petered out at the same time as network radio did. He had a show on Mutual in the ‘50s and made some religious recordings. But it would seem he had enough money to walk away and spend time with his family and Christian Science endeavours. If he had any regrets, he never made them public.

Friz

Nobody goes on line or writes books to debate the merits of the Pacemakers shorts put out by Paramount. Or the Pathé Sportscopes released by RKO. Or Universal’s Variety Views. But you’ll find huge numbers of people endlessly lavishing attention upon animated cartoons released by the various movie studios at the same time as the previously mentioned shorts.

In 1947, all of those series—and many more—served the exact same purpose. They were short subjects that theatres could put on the screen and then send back the reel to the exchange and forget about it forever. But television changed that. The cartoons filled airtime directed at children, and were run over and over countless times. Kids who admired the cartoons wanted to learn more and became the first generation of animation scholars. They learned about, and told of, the people behind the cartoons. As result, today, many of the names of front-line people associated with cartoons could be considered part of pop culture.

One of the many is Friz Freleng.

Freleng lived into the era mentioned above so he was around to receive honours within the “animation community” and recognition of fans. He made the rounds in the glory days of seri-cels, when drawings from cartoons were re-created and signed by old time artists or directors. Making the rounds meant doing interviews and here’s one from the Chicago Tribune of January 31, 1989. Freleng deserves credit for making some of the best cartoons at Warners but the writer of the story goes a little too far. Freleng had nothing to do with assembling Tex Avery, Frank Tashlin or Mel Blanc at the studio. And we’ll leave the sub-head of “creator of...Bugs” alone. And saying Freleng did Roadrunner cartoons is like saying Dave Barry was the voice of Elmer Fudd. But it’s nice to see Freleng get accolades in the print medium.

Animated genius
The creator of Porky and Bugs is still quite a draw
by Deborah Sroloff
“Eh, what’s up, doc?”
“Thufferin’ thuccotash!”
“I tawt I taw a puddy tat!”
These catchphrases—uttered by Bugs Bunny, Sylvester the Cat and Tweety Pie—have become such part of our collective lexicon, it’s easy to forget that those critters are cartoon characters not real people. But, of course, there is real person behind all these celluloid crazies—Friz Freleng, resident genius of animation at Warner Bros. from the 1930s through the ‘60s.
In a 65-year career, Freleng was present at the birth of the animated cartoon, and still keeps his hand in exhibiting his limited-edition animation cels in 40 galleries nationwide, including the Circle Gallery in Chicago, where they are on continuous display.
Did he have any idea at the outset of his career that he would someday be an exhibited artist?
“No! We were making a living. We were just happy to do that kind of work. Now it’s considered art,” he says, shaking his head in bemusement.
Freleng, 82, was born in Kansas City, Mo., the birthplace of another animation giant, Walt Disney. He never lost his childhood interest in drawing, and in his teens intended to become a newspaper cartoonist.
“By the time I got out of high school,” he recalls, “I was looking for a job, and saw an ad in the paper for an office boy who could draw. . .It happened to be where Walt Disney had been working, [United Film Service].
“Walt had left for California, and one of my high school friends, Hugh Harman was there, getting ready to join Walt.
“ ‘Gee, I don’t know anything about animation,’ I told him—I didn’t even know how you got the drawings onto film! Well, he showed me little bit and told me to get a book called ‘Lutz’s Book of Animation,’ saying I’d learn everything had to know from there.
“Hugh left me there alone, and I was doing the animation, transferring paper drawings to celluloid, painting the cels. They didn’t have inkers and painters so I did everything myself. And, believe me, sometimes they came out pretty wrong! Then Hugh told Walt about me, and I came out to California.”
Though the association with Disney didn’t work out—“Did you ever try working for genius?” Freleng asks. “You do exactly what the genius wants. And you can never satisfy him, because you can’t do it as well as he can or as well as he’d like it done.”
He eventually set up a California production company with Harman, Rudy Ising and Ham Hamilton. In 1930, the dawn of talkies, they came up with a talking cartoon, “Sinkin’ in the Bathtub,” starring a character named Bosko. Warner Bros. then hired Freleng and thus began its golden age of cartoons: cartoons that were more wild, freewheeling and tongue-in-cheek than anything put out by Disney.
Freleng assembled a legendary group of cartoon men—Bob Clampett, Tex Avery, Chuck Jones and Frank Tashlin (who later went on to direct many of Jerry Lewis’ films) and, of course, the chameleonic-voiced Mel Blanc. And so were born a riotous of Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies.
One of Freleng’s first creations was Porky Pig. “He was the first character that really took hold,” Freleng says. “That little, stuttering pig. How I came up with him was I had two fat playmates as kid, one we called Porky and one we called Piggy. To make him different, I had him stutter.”
The unit produces 10 to 12 cartoons year—an unaffordble feat today. “We figured they’d just run in the theaters and then disappear,” he chuckles. “Cartoons were like newspapers—you print it, you read it, it’s gone. Nobody even thought about TV; you never thought you’d see them again.”

With the use of the Warner Bros orchestra and cadre of irreverent writer-directors and animators, Freleng churned out laugh riot after laugh riot, starring Porky, Sylvester, Tweety, Daffy, Bugs, Elmer Fudd, Yosemite Sam (Freleng’s personal favorite), the Road Runner and Wile Coyote.
“They really were personalities,” Freleng says of his creations. “People have asked me, and I ask myself, why can’t they do now what we did then? But we had the time and the patience and the desire to make those things come alive.”
And a studio. As Freleng is sadly aware, the cost of animation today is prohibitive.
“ ‘Roger Rabbit’ luckily had a producer and a director and a cartoonist who could think the same and believed in one another. But that’s very rare. The reason you see what you see on Saturday morning is that they can’t afford to make the cartoons here. You have to ship the story board off to Taiwan, where somebody you have no communication with is going to make it.

Giant Runs At Audience

A cartoon character running at the camera and swallowing it isn’t much of a gag, but it must have looked great in theatres.

You’d find it in Disney, Harman-Ising and Ub Iwerks cartoons (the studios were all related in a way, anyway). Here’s an Iwerks version in the 1934 ComiColor short “The Valiant Tailor.”



The ComiColor cartoons were Iwerks’ entry in the “let’s-try-to-be-Walt Disney” sweepstakes. The attitude was better artwork equals better cartoons. But other than Disney, the cartoon artists didn’t realise cartoons were about more than art. They’re entertainment. There has to be a story that engages the audience. “The Valiant Tailor” has overlays, muted backgrounds and nice colours, but there’s little except a basic storyline. It took me a while to figure out what the tailor was eating (who eats honey out of a bowl, anyway?) and he was far from valiant; he was in a tree that dropped the bowl of goop on the giant’s head.

Art Turkisher incorporates Schubert’s “The Bee” into the score during scene with the bees. Grim Natwick and Berny Wolf are the credited animators.

An Ub-tastic Cartoon Show

Steve Stanchfield is, well, you don’t need me to tell you yet again what an outstanding job he’s doing ensuring cartoons that might be long forgotten are being restored and exposed to audiences, thanks to his company’s DVD releases. I hope you’ve been following his progress on Jerry Beck’s exemplary web stop, Cartoon Research.

Steve’s made a trip to the West Coast and some of his handiwork will be put on public display. I’m not anywhere near Los Angeles, but would urge anyone who is to go and see this. Here are portions of a news release about the event.

GOLDEN AGE CARTOONS SCREENING
Egyptian Theatre, Hollywood - Sat, June 20, 2015 - 3:00pm.
Film preservationist Steve Stanchfield will turn back the hands of time and present a program of newly restored vintage cartoons on the big screen at the legendary Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood. Stanchfield is a champion of rare and forgotten animation, and his company, Thunderbean Animation is helping preserve our cartoon heritage, utilizing modern digital technology to return these precious films to their former glory.
Highlights of the program include a newly restored copy of Ub Iwerks' "Hell's Fire", presented uncut and in color for the first time since it debuted in 1934. Felix the Cat, the very first cartoon superstar, will be represented by pristine prints of "Felix the Cat Shatters the Sheik" and "Draggin' the Dragon (1926). There will be rare stop motion puppet films by Lou Bunin, a wartime training film made by Warner Bros that was never released to the troops, and rare films starring the deliciously obscure Mickey wanna-bes, "Cubby Bear" and "Binko the Cub".
ORDER TICKETS ONLINE AT FANDANGO.

The frame you see above from “Hell's Fire” is not a restored version. So anyone going to the show can expect to see something even better.

Want to learn more about Binko? Click HERE and let historian Mike Mallory tell the story.

I don’t plug too many things around here, but looking at the programme being put together, it sounds like a great afternoon, so I thought I’d pass on word of it.

Nose Handshake

Why two native Indians are flying and joyfully rubbing their noses together is just one of many unanswered questions in the strange 1938 Terrytoon “The Last Indian.”



I get the impression the story for this one was invented after a long liquid lunch by the Terrytoons staff. It doesn’t make a lot of sense and there are some gags that are so odd they’re funny. Take this one when the Indians’ noses turn into hands and shake.



For some reason, the native in his roadster starts weaving along country and city streets that are shot in live action footage that’s edited together with no regard for geographic continuity, as Paul Scheib’s saxes toot away. Friz Freleng did the same thing with Porky Pig in “You Ought To Be In Pictures” about two years later, though it’s less zany.

Without Their Advance Knowledge

An intellectual from a respected family couldn’t be a cheater, right?

That attitude was the whole lynch-pin surrounding TVs quiz show scandal. The realisation that an intellectual could be a cheater—and was a cheater—and the fact the intellectual seemed like a nice young man is why viewers were so outraged they had been had. Television still had some self-respect in the ‘50s. Amidst the quiz shows, laugh-track laden sitcoms and strident commercials were documentaries, live drama and Edward R. Murrow. Today, no one cares that reality shows aren’t real. The audience doesn’t expect anything lofty out of television, just entertainment.

Among the millions of Americans fooled by the performance of Charles Van Doren (photo to right) on “Twenty One” was noted critic John Crosby. Crosby was not one to admire quiz shows—he was scathing against “Stop the Music” and even “To Tell The Truth”—but “Twenty One” was, well, intellectual, so it had to be good. One can’t blame Crosby, though. An intellectual from a respected family couldn’t be a cheater, right?

John Crosby’s Television & Radio
If you have to watch giveaways—and these days you have to turn the set off—I can only recommend “Twenty-One”, the only wheel in town that reminds me of the big table at Cannes. That is, the contestants stand to lose big dough as well as win it. Of course, they’re losing house money—but still it’s money that would otherwise be in the bank—and they’re matched evenly against another contestant rather than playing against the house which adds a certain morbid, and altogether fascinating allure to the proceedings.
The current winner is Charles Van Doren, the son of Mark Van Doren, the author, who has run up his score to $99,000. Young Van Doren, an English instructor at Columbia University, may reopen the whole argument about progressive schools which I thought we had safely behind us. He is a product of progressive schools, having attended City and Country School and St. John’s College before taking his Ph.D at Columbia. However, the very breadth and variety of his interests, which have been fair awe-inspiring, are the result, teammates say, not so much of formal schooling as the fact that he is Mark Van Doren’s son and was reared in a family of lively intellectual curiosity whose members were incessantly running to the encyclopedia to make sure they had it exactly right.
“Twenty-One” demands wide general knowledge, not specialized information, as do most of the others. The emcee, Jack Barry, simply throws a category at the contestants without their advance knowledge or consent and consequently Mr. Van Doren has had to be very nimble-witted about the United States government past and present, Shakespeare, kings and queens, the Air Force, the theater, opera and heaven knows what else.
On “Twenty-One”, two contestants are acoustically sealed off from one another in isolation booths, the manufacture of which must be one of the growing industries of our hemisphere, and are asked to pick a number from one to eleven, the size of the number determining the difficulty of the question. Frequently they pick either ten or eleven and consequently the two contestants get the same questions on, say Lincoln. There are two sets of questions and you can, if you’re bright enough, win twenty-one points which are paid off per point at a rate which jumps $50 every time a contestant surmounts each set. Everyone straight on that?
Well, whether you are or not, Van Doren last session was playing for $2,000 a point against a rival, Miss Ruth Miller, who had already got her twenty-one points. Consequently, Van Doren stood to lose $40,000 of the $46,000 he had built up over the weeks and the tension as he hesitated over Lincoln’s two Secretarys of War and two Vice Presidents was something terrible. Still, he got it right and went on to demolish Miss Miller on a question pertaining two World War II and run his winnings up to $99,000.
Miss Miller had to walk off with a mere $2,500 and she looked as if a two-mile race, not only beaten but exhausted. I learned at my grandpa’s knee that in gambling there had to be a loser as well as a winner — but this is the only TV giveaway that plays quite like that. Of course, I suppose the sponsor would be horrified to hear it called gambling but that’s what it is — except that the house gives you the chips to play with originally. After you’ve played a week or so, though, it’s your money and I suppose losing it is as painful as any other kind of losing.
NBC seems confident enough of its entry to throw it up against the perennial champion “I Love Lucy” (9 p.m. EST Monday’s) and it may put a dent in the ratings.

Crosby’s column is from January 11, 1957. The scandal claimed “Twenty One” on October 17, 1958. Crosby was livid when he realised he had been duped. He put his anger in print. “The moral squalor of the quiz mess reaches through the whole industry,” he wrote in November 1959. He opened that column with “Charles Van Doren may go down as the Shoeless Joe Jackson of his age. ‘Say it ain’t so, Joe,’ is the plea on the lips of a million true believers—and the answer is silence.”

Van Doren wasn’t silent more than 50 years later. You can read his story to The New Yorker here.

Something's Wrong Here

The first directors of sound cartoons grew up in the age of silent film, and the best of them could express their stories and gags without dialogue.

Here are some poses from “The Counterfeit Cat,” a 1949 Tex Avery cartoon co-written by Heck Allen and Jack Cosgriff. All you need to know is a cat is after a bird and unwittingly steps on the dog’s head when he sneaks into the house. The poses do the rest, assisted by Scott Bradley’s score and Jim Faris’ sound effects.



Mike Lah, Walt Clinton and Grant Simmons are the animators.

From Log To Log

Warren Foster could be cynically funny at times. One of my favourite Foster commentaries on the idiocy of the world is in the Goofy Gopher cartoon “Lumber Jerks” (1955).

The gophers (and audience) look on as a log is ground up into sawdust, mixed with glue and turned back into a log. It’s all done without words. “Scrumptious! Simply scrumptious,” as one of the gophers might say.



Manny Perez, Artie Davis and Virgil Ross animated this cartoon.