Henry Morgan, the Lobster

On came several announcers, proclaiming that they were a Schick Eversharp pen. When the commercial ended, on came Henry Morgan, childishly mimicking that he was a Schick Eversharp pen. Morgan’s audience broke into sustained laughter over the ad-lib.

Morgan hated ridiculous radio advertising which sponsors insisted on, and was prepared to go to any length to show how ridiculous it was. Morgan had a whole fan base that agreed.

One of Morgan’s fans was columnist John Crosby. They were kindred spirits. Crosby had little good to say about the banal, inane and predictable nature of a lot of radio programming. This column comes from June 12, 1946.

Man on a Street Corner
Henry Morgan is one of the strangest phenomena in radio. In a quiet way, he has built up a small band of devoted followers who consider him the greatest man in broadcasting. I know a number of people who keep their radios tuned exclusively to WQXR until 6:45 p. m. Then they switch to Morgan for fifteen minutes and immediately thereafter return to WQXR.
That’s what the Federal Communications Commission would call unbalanced programming, but I can’t persuade these people to do otherwise. And, incidentally, I have several acquaintances who read this column every day but, so far as I know, they never listen to the radio. I think it was Katharine Brush who once remarked that New Yorkers read the book reviews but never read the books. Reading a radio review when you never listen is I suppose just a modern twist to that strange habit.
*    *    *
But let’s get back to Morgan. I hesitate to recommend him because Morgan is a special taste like lobsters. You either love lobsters or you can’t stand them. There is no middle ground on Morgan, either. Many, many persons can’t understand Morgan at all and are at a loss to explain why any one wants to listen to him. In case you never heard him, Morgan just pops on the air and starts talking about anything that’s bothering him at the moment.
“I’ve been worrying about words,” he will say. “People are always getting to a pretty pass. Doesn’t any one ever get to an ugly pass? That’s a fine how-do-you-do. What’s the matter with a fair how-do-you-do? Restaurants always feature prime ribs of beef. What do they do with all the secondary ribs—ship ‘em?”
Whenever he runs down for a moment, Morgan yells to the engineer, who turns on a record, and Morgan has the dizziest collection of records anywhere. You’re likely to hear “The Moonlight Sonata” played on bagpipes.
*    *    *
A moment later Morgan is back to tell you the story of Gilda Thermidor. “Gilda is happy today because her husband, Lieutenant Phosphorus, is coming home with a wonderful brand of volcanic soap which sponsored their marriage. But Lieutenant Phosphorus has picked up a severe case of red rash. What will happen now? Tune in again next week.”
I first heard Morgan years ago when he had a sustaining program at 10 a. m. At that time he used to give a daily weather report, which was sheer wishful thinking. “Weather report—tidal wave,” he would declare hopefully. Morgan had no sponsors then, but he has picked up a great many since then. Too many, in fact. Morgan kids his sponsors, but a commercial is still a commercial, and they chew up too much of his time.
In one respect Morgan is unique in radio. Now and then he simply runs out of things to say. For a minute or two the air is full of lovely silence, and all the vice-presidents of the American Broadcasting Company turn purple at the thought of that precious, wasted time.
“Why don’t you people tune in on C. B. S.?” Morgan will mutter savagely. Remarks like that are not calculated to endear Morgan to the executives of A. B. C. either.
At other times, Morgan is likely to say: “Would you mind just sitting there for ten or fifteen seconds? I’d like to light a cigarette.” And for ten or fifteen seconds nothing comes out of your radio but the sound of a flaring match.
“Now, where were we? Oh, yes, advertising. I think we ought to be grateful for all those advertisers who took ads to tell us how much money they made during the war and are now talking ads attacking the O. P. A. because they can’t make more money.
*    *    *
You have to listen to Morgan for a long time before you discover the sense behind his nonsense. Morgan is a wit with a sharp eye for the ridiculous, but he doesn’t explain his jokes. He expects you to understand them. He recoils from any form of showmanship like a minister from sin. For that very reason Morgan will never be on the top of the Hooper ratings.
The Morgan program, I’m forced to add, is also extremely uneven. Like the little girl in the jingle, when he’s good, he’s very good; when he’s bad, he’s awful. Five times a week is too many times a week to be funny. I wish Morgan would get a full-size show with other entertainers on it which would come on just once a week. I also wish he had one big sponsor instead of a lot of little ones.
If you care to listen, Morgan “will be on the same corner in front of the cigar store at the same time” tonight. The cigar store is WJZ, and the time is 6:45 p. m.

I’ve been trying to post Crosby’s columns beginning at the start of his career reviewing radio shows. Here’s the rest of the week that the Morgan column appeared. June 10, 1946 looks at a D-Day anniversary broadcast on NBC with correspondent John McVane, who later moved over to ABC and was still working for them on radio and TV in the early ‘70s.

The June 11th column reports on both pianist Alec Templeton and the Frank Morgan summer show; yes, the same Frank Morgan who played the title role in The Wizard of Oz.

The June 13th column looks at the husband-wife morning show phenomenon (one that Fred Allen and Tallulah Bankhead ridiculed, prompting Crosby to post chunks of the dialogue in his column). See who Crosby picks as the best of a bad lot on New York radio.

June 14th is about The Incomparable Hildegarde, who was still performing in the 1980s and died at the age of 99. She was once quoted as saying Miss Piggy of the Muppets stole the idea of long gloves from her, though they were part of ladies formal wear long before Hilde tapped a keyboard.

You can click on each column so you can read it better.

Elephantrombone

There isn’t any jazz in Congo Jazz until about 2/3rds of the way through when animals play each other and themselves as musical instruments to the song “Giving It This and That” from the Warner Bros. box office bomb Sweet Mama. Both films were released in 1930.



The giraffe that’s a saxophone and a bagpipe is inspired but most of the cartoon is pretty dull. Some of the bits remind of things in a silent Oswald cartoon; considering Hugh Harman and Rudy Ising were involved with both, that shouldn’t be a surprise.

Not the "Lumps" Gag!

“One or two lumps?” says the spy with an Eastern European accent to Boston Quackie. Yeah, you know where this gag’s going.



Quackie asks for three lumps and gets three, even though the spy only hits him twice.

Boston Quackie is a really weak send-up of the radio show Boston Blackie, starring Daffy Duck in the title role. Writer Tedd Pierce couldn’t be bothered to think of a parody name for Blackie’s girl-friend Mary. Quackie’s girl is named “Mary” in this cartoon. His pun on Inspector Farraday is “Inspector Faraway.”

The TV version of Boston Blackie with Kent Taylor was in reruns when this cartoon was released in 1957. Bob McKimson directed with George Grandpre, Ted Bonnicksen, Keith Darling and Russ Dyson animating; Dyson was dead by the time the cartoon hit theatres.

Jack Benny, Interviewer and Answerer

What would you ask Jack Benny if you could talk to him?

It seems people wanted to know if all that stuff portrayed on the Jack Benny show was true—whether he drove a Maxwell, if he was cheap, etc.

I imagine the questioning in this joke-filled column in the New York Herald Tribune was pure invention but I’ve read enough of these old newspaper stories to learn that people really did ask Benny if he wore a rug. After all, Benny related in his autobiography, edited and co-written by his daughter Joan, that someone angrily wrote him, chastising him for the way he treated Rochester, not clueing in that he was talking about a fictional character played by a well-paid actor.

This column appeared on January 12, 1959. Benny (or whoever ghosted this) attributes a quote to Fred Allen. It was actually said by Benny’s first writer, Harry Conn, but considering their not-so-gracious break-up, it’s understandable why Benny might not want to credit him.

The Real Benny—As Jack Sees Him
Because Miss Torre refused to reveal the source of a news item that appeared in her column, she has been sentenced to ten days in jail. While she is away, her friends in television will write guest columns.
By JACK BENNY
WHEN MARIE TORRE asked me to do a guest column for her, I rushed right to the typewriter to do the piece. As I sat poised, with my fingers on the keys, I suddenly realized I had reached my first hurdle. I couldn't type.
So I quickly took pen in hand to write the column, but then I remembered I wasn't a writer either. As the late, great Fred Allen once said about me, "Benny couldn't ad lib a burp after a Hungarian dinner."
Undaunted, I rushed to my writers and asked them if they would write the column for me. There was a hushed silence for a moment and then one of the boys pulled out his contract, which he always keeps on hand for such emergencies. There in fine print he unearthed a clause that limited their duties to writing my program and mowing my lawn. I pleaded with them to ignore the clause, but they insisted that if they were to write a column, I would have to pay them their weekly salaries. Now I like Marie Torre—but not $200 worth.
After I fired my lawyer, I though it over and decided that just because I'm a comedian, it doesn't mean I have to be funny all the time. Why not write a straight, informative column on interviews with people on the subject of television?
THE FIRST QUESTION I posed was, "What's wrong with television?" I stopped a man on the street with the question and within five minutes I had enough for a novelette.
So I dropped that subject and asked the next person I met, "What's right with television?". It became a little embarrassing because all I heard were raves for the Jack Benny Show. I decided not to use this observation because it would sound too conceited coming from me, especially since the person I was talking to was my press agent.
Since I couldn't think of any more questions, it seemed more convenient to dump the whole interrogation idea and instead answer the question asked of me by my fans.
The most frequent question is "Are you really 39?" The answer is, "Yes." Last year I pulled a hoax on the American public and celebrated my 40th birthday, but this was because CBS offered to throw a big party for me at their expense. Mary thought it was just awful of me to accept all the presents I was given on this phony birthday and insisted I return them. I agreed with her and took them all back to the stores and got the money back.
EVERYONE wants to know if I have my own hair or wear a toupee. I must confess that I have as much, if not more hair, than Yul Brynner.
Many people inquire if my eyes are blue. If anyone is interested, my eyes are bluer than the stomach of a dachshund running through a huckleberry patch.
Everyone wants to know if I really own a Maxwell. The answer is "No" at this time, but I will own one after I make two more payments. I'll be the only one who ever got his car owner certificate and 400,000-mile checkup at the same time.
Many people are curious to know if I really have a vault 200 feet down in my cellar.
Doesn't everybody? Others ask if it is true that Brigitte Bardot is infatuated with me? Being a gentleman, I feel it only right that the announcement come from her.
And lastly, there has been a lot of talk as to whether or not I'm cheap. You can find out by asking Marie Torre after she gets my bill for writing this column.

Clampett and the Wolf

The name “Bob Clampett” conjures up wild cartoons at Warner Bros. and possibly the animated Beany and Cecil Show which aired on ABC in the early 1960s. But there were a number of years where Clampett’s fame involved puppets.

His Time For Beany show became a hit in California and was eventually kinescoped for airing on a syndicated basis elsewhere. Clampett responded by creating more puppet shows. The great irony is they were all killed off by cartoons, including his own. More and more old theatricals became available and it was easier and cheaper to programme them with a live-action host instead of a full-cast puppet show.

Here’s Clampett in an interview published November 14, 1954, talking about his various puppet programmes and his earlier career. He’s taking credit for creating Bugs Bunny and did for a number of years until a howl from some of his former co-workers and diligent research by pioneer animation historians. Almost a year after this interview, his puppeteering would be reduced to appearances on the KTTV morning show (with Bill Leyden and then Del Moore), though he managed to get briefly get Willy the Wolf back on the air in a 15-minute evening show in 1957.

Beany’s Creator Makes Bow With a Puppet for Adults
BY CECIL SMITH
Television is a world in upheaval. It is filled with creative forces continually attempting to extend its dimensions, to burst it out of its standard orbit.
One of the more successful of these forces is a man who has created a world within the world of TV—a world peopled with puppets. He's Bob Clampett, father of Beany, Cecil the Seasick Sea Serpent, Dishonest John, Thunderbolt, Buffalo Billy and a host of other characters more real to children than Ed Sullivan and Groucho Marx are to their elders.
And last Monday Clampett sent a gesticulating orator named William Shakespeare Wolf into your living rooms, and in his own way created a new extension to his world the first puppet show for adults.
This was the fourth Clampett show to reach the air. Three of his shows are on daily, Buffalo Billy at noon, Thunderbolt at 6 p.m. and Time for Beany at 6:30, all on KTTV (11). The new show, Willy the Wolf, is a weekly half-hour on the same station, seen each Monday at 8:30 p.m.
"Curiously," says Clampett, "Willy was my first show, the first I created for television. That was in the dark days right after World War II when I was working in the garage behind my home wondering where the next meal was coming from.

"Willy had been in my mind for years. I grew up around Hollywood. Lived next door to Chaplin as a boy and used to see him playing his violin on his front porch. And I knew actors in the old Christie comedies, the horse operas lots of actors.
“There was one actor who used to parade up and down Hollywood Blvd. reciting Shakespeare to all who would listen. I used to watch him as he strode along in his great, black cape, thundering out the words of the Bard. He was the germ cell of Willy.
"The actor later became very famous. His name's John Carradine."
Clampett, a big, jovial man with horn-rimmed glasses and close-cropped hair, grinned broadly and added: "I'd like to have John meet Willy on the show and let them throw soliloquies at each other."
Clampett from boyhood set his sights on being an artist. He attended the old Otis Art Institute and sold his first drawing to The Times.
Leads to a Job
"They printed it in full color and another newspaper immediately gave me a job," he said.
He worked as a newspaper artist for awhile and then joined the Disney staff of cartoonists. He left Disney to go to Warner Bros. where he created the animated character Bugs Bunny.
"Bugs had more of the element I wanted," says Clampett. "His was really an adult humor.
"I started doing Bugs in the 30s but even then, long before George Pal came to this country, I was working with puppets. I was thinking of movies then, of course. I wanted to use puppets to give more depth than the flat screen of animated cartoons. I filmed a puppet show in my spare time but it got me nowhere.
TV Natural Medium
"Then television appeared. I immediately saw it as the ideal showcase for my puppets. But it took a long time to convince television of it."
Clampett quit Warner Bros. in 1946 to "get ready for television." He first rented an office but soon was unable to keep up the rent and retreated to his garage. Here Willy was born and later Thunderbolt and Beany. Their births were ignored "by the growing TV industry. As a matter of fact, for three years television firmly turned thumbs down on the ideas in Clampett's fertile brain.
Beany finally went on the air in February, 1949 on KTLA (5). Its success was immediate. In no time, half the youthful population of Southern California was trotting about with propellers on their heads and talking familiarly of sea serpents.
Last year, the show moved to KTTV and Thunderbolt and Buffalo Billy joined it. And now Willy.
Clampett first produced Beany with a staff of four, which doubled as actors, directors, set designers, costumers, everything. Today, in a big sprawling wing of KTTV where all the Clampett shows are produced, the staff has grown to 25, but the same spirit of everybody taking a hand in everything persists.
"We're like a little theater group," says Clampett. "Take the actors. Our principal voices, Walker Edmiston, Don Messick and Erv Shoemaker, are voice artists. They rotate in all the roles, one week playing Cecil, the next doing Beany. Each plays 50 or 60 characters, All three will play Willy at one time or another. "You remember when Stan Freberg left us. He'd been so closely identified as the voice of Cecil people thought the show would fold. That was ridiculous. Stan was good but all of my people are good. They have to be."
Day Begins at Home
Clampett's schedule begins at his house every morning. Writers, actors, set designers gather for a conference, usually on the shows they will do that day. By 10 a.m., everyone is at the studio. Buffalo Billy is in rehearsal. At noon it goes on. Then rehearsals for Thunderbolt and Beany begin.
Each show has its separate permanent set. The actors work behind the set with the puppets, which fit like gloves over their arms. Willy, of different. He's a life-sized-like puppet and works with real people, mostly girls, as his foils.

Dance Music For One

In Cellbound, escaped con Spike is hiding inside the prison warden’s TV trying to avoid detection and is forced to become the programming the warden wants to watch.

“Hmmmm, yes. Dance music,” says the monotone Warden. Spike scrambles to play all the instruments, moving up and down or sideways in the set whenever he makes a change.



Cut to a shot inside the set.



The gag topper is the emotionless warden dancing like crazy to the Dixieland music. You can see some frames in this post.

Tex Avery started the cartoon but his unit was disbanded. This was finished up by the Hanna-Barbera unit’s animators under Mike Lah. It was released in 1955, two years after Avery was fired.

What? Me Worry, Bugs?

Yosemite Sam got laughs when he tried to look casual by playing jacks while Bugs Bunny refused to react to a possible explosion in Buccaneer Bunny (1948). So writer Warren Foster tried the gag again in Hare Lift (1952). This time, he expands the gag by having Sam start off by playing with a yo-yo.

This is a weaker cartoon than the other but Sam has some good expressions, finally panicking as it looks like the plane he and Bugs are on will crash, as the rabbit steadfastly won’t prevent it.



Manny Perez, Ken Champin, Virgil Ross and Art Davis are the animators in this short for director Friz Freleng.

The Price is Right . . . But What Next?

When did Bill Cullen find time to sleep?

There was a period in the 1950s where he was up at dawn to go on the radio in the morning then, after he finished, moved to another studio for The Price is Right an hour later, and appeared on television in the evening twice in a week on a quiz show and a panel show. (Whether he was on Monitor on NBC radio on weekends at this point, I don’t know).

Let’s go back to 1959 and see what United Press International had to say about Cullen. The quiz show scandal was still burning but Cullen and The Price is Right weren’t even singed. Cullen’s show didn’t involve huge cash jackpots, in fact, someone might win five sheep (yes, that was a prize). Perhaps the winner could have given them to Cullen to count so he could get some shut-eye.

‘Price Is Right’ Host Gets Quiz of His Own
Bill Cullen Has Hectic Schedule But Says it's Easy; He Uses Different Personalities
By FRED DANZIG
NEW YORK, July 25 (UPI) — Just every time Bill Cullen gets into a taxi cab, the dialogue goes something like this:
Cabbie: Hey, I know you. You're Bill Cullen.
Cullen: That’s right.
Cabbie: (Chuckling) Is the price right?
Cullen: I'll let you know when I see the meter.
Cabbie: Tell me, Bill do those winners on ‘Price Is Right’ have to pay taxes on what they win?
Cullen: Yes. They add the fair trade value of the prizes to their income.
Cabbie: How do I get my wife on the show?
Cullen: Tell her to send away for tickets. We pick all our contestants right out of the audience.
"I get the same questions every time," said the boyish-looking host of NBC-TV’s "The Price Is Right." "And not only from cab drivers. When I’m walking along the street, I sometimes get stopped and that's the conversation.
"I think we’re in a rut," said Cullen, whose rut also finds him serving as a panelist on CBS-TV’s "I’ve Got A Secret" and chief waker-upper on a four-hour early-morning NBC radio show.
His "on the-air" schedule keeps him around the mike for 25½ hours each week and gets most hectic on Wednesday when he does "Price" and, a half-hour later, "Secret.
It sounds hectic, but Cullen says it’s all very easy. “There is no rehearsal required for any of my shows. ‘Price’ runs itself. I come in 45 minutes before, learn where learn where I'm to stand, the names of the models, the prizes and the commercial cues. The radio show? No work at all. I just talk," he said.
"I use completely different personalities on the different shows. On radio, it’s early morning so I'm quiet. If any humor is there, it's in a low key. On daytime TV, I work about two pitches higher. On night-time TV, I'm another pitch higher. For ‘Secret,’ I'm in between.
"Sometimes," said Cullen, “I catch myself starting too high, so I adjust. I guide myself by the studio audience. I think I've developed a sixth sense that enables me to tell how the audience feels about the contestants, the prizes, or me. I can adjust to meet their feelings."
That sort of perception comes with experience, and Cullen has it.
Born in Pittsburgh in 1920, he started out to become a doctor, decided It was too tough and went into radio. After serving an apprenticeship in Pittsburgh, he came to New York with CBS radio in 1944. Two years later, he took over the "Winner Take All" show, his first quiz. been running quiz and games shows ever since and insists that there's nothing else he'd rather do.
Many of his TV fans are unaware that Cullen walks with a limp, the result of polio when he was a youngster. Cullen makes a point of not walking around while on camera.
"Price," which offers its viewers a chance to win valuable prizes by guessing price tags, averages around 20 million postcards a week. "There's something about guessing prices," Cullen said. "Everyone thinks he can do it. I’ve seen sophisticated people—bankers, lawyers, professors—really get involved with our game."

Actually, the cab driver asked Cullen a pretty good question. Did winners pay taxes? And what is “fair trade value” anyway? For the answers, we go to this feature article from the Associated Press, also from 1959.

When ‘The Price Is Right,’ Uncle Sam Gets His Share
By CHARLES MERCER
AP Movie-TV Writer
NEW YORK (AP) — What do people do with the prizes they win on television shows?
Usually they enjoy them. Positively they pay federal taxes on them.
Some prizes are sold — to friends or strangers — when the winner can't use them. There even are instances where an unusual prize has launched its winner into a new hobby or business.
These are among the things one learns from looking in on one of the most popular—and generous— of the giveaway shows, "The Price is Right” (NBC-TV, Wednesdays).
Although a winner must pay taxes on all prizes, none of the winners cited by the program reports any tax problems. Anyone who wins a new refrigerator, for example, is happy to pay the tax on it. When prize values rise into the thousands of dollars, the method is to sell some of the prizes to pay taxes on the others.

Winners pay on what is known as the fair market value of a prize—not its announced value. That is, articles are evaluated by an objective commercial appraising source acceptable to the Internal Revenue Service.
The program denies it helps winners sell superfluous prizes. “Winners don’t have to shop around to dispose of prizes they don’t want,” a spokesman said, "Instead, people contact them.”
When Paul Jones of Simpsonville, S.C., won an elephant, he was contacted immediately by an animal dealer who wanted it. Jones also won an airplane which he shipped home and tried to learn to fly.
"But after a half dozen lessons at the local airport, I decided I'd never make a flier,” he reports. "So I sold it to the airport and used the money for a house at the beach.”
Mrs. Jewel Blasinghame of Baytown, Tex., told "The Price is Right” what she did with a $6,000 swimming pool:
"I always wanted a house in a summer home development near Baytown. I sold my swimming pool to the owners of the development in exchange for a $2,000 lot and $3,000 cash. My new home now is going up right near the pool. It’s still my pool because the new owners are charging admission and I get a percentage.”
Among other things Mrs. Blasinghame won a 1928 Rolls Royce which she sold to an old car enthusiast from Middletown, Pa. "He had been looking for a '28 Rolls since the war, and finally saw just what he wanted when he watched me win it on the show. He phoned immediately and I sold it to him. That car had been sitting 12 miles away from his home all those years."
Speaking of cars, Michael Podrachi of Taylor, Pa., received a new $5,500 auto on the condition that he and his wife went directly from the stage of the show to Anchorage, Alaska. He also won a station wagon. A railroad worker, he has started an electrical contracting business on the side—enabled, he says, because he has that station wagon to carry his equipment.
And speaking of business careers, the aforementioned Paul Jones, a Simpsonville furniture salesman, won among many other things an ice cream vendor's cart. He has informed the program that he got a vendor's license and a stock of ice cream—and has a pleasant side business.
Other Joneses the program has kept up with include Mrs. Elinor Jones of Lawrence, Mass. Among her many prizes were 22 pieces of luggage. What do you do with 22 pieces of luggage?
"Luggage has become the family's favorite wedding and graduation gifts," she says. "Every time we have a major family gift occasion, we take out another piece of new luggage."
Like Mrs. Jones, Mrs. Hazel Varner of Columbus, Ohio, gets pleasure from seeing others use her "Price Is Right" boodle. Among her prizes was a $600, 12-volt, battery-powered toy truck. Although she has so children herself, the kids in the neighborhood get a kick out of riding it.

Bill Cullen has always been my favourite game show host, and he was the favourite of many, many others, including the people he worked with on The Price is Right. One of the show’s cameramen revealed in a 1961 newspaper interview that, normally, the stars give the crew a gift at Christmas. Instead, the crew gave Cullen a present. And I’ll bet he didn’t have to guess the manufacturer’s suggested retail price.

Concerto in B-Flat(tened Hand)

“Five Academy Awards is a Quimby Record” is what the Motion Picture Herald proclaimed in its March 22, 1947 edition. Number 5 had just been handed out for The Cat Concerto.

Quimby, of course, didn’t lift a pencil. Ed Barge, Ken Muse and Irv Spence animated the cartoon from Joe Barbera’s story and Bill Hanna’s bar sheets.

Tom and Jerry were always very expressive in the 1940s. Here’s a good example after Jerry is woken up by Tom’s piano playing. Jerry is curious, then annoyed, and then slams down the lid on the piano.



Some of Tom’s pain animation. While he opens his mouth, there is no scream on the soundtrack.



Cut to the visual gag.



The cartoon won more than an Oscar. It was honoured as the Best Color Cartoon at the World Film and Fine Arts Festival in Brussels in June 1947. In the meantime, Hanna, Barbera and their animators carried on filling out the MGM release schedule.

Mickey and the Stars

Movie caricatures abound in Mickey’s Gala Premier (1933), where they all come to see the mouse’s newest cartoon make its cinematic debut at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre.

Sid Grauman is even caricatured (along with Mae West).



There are so many celebrities in this cartoon, it’d take forever to list and show them all.



You can see Mickey’s cartoon has the stars rolling in the aisles. Groucho Marx, Marie Dressler, Joe E. Brown (the large mouthed one), Harold Lloyd, Charlie Chaplin and Oliver Hardy are here; I suspect that’s supposed to be Jimmy Durante with the big nose in the background.

Cinema Quarterly praised the use of Hollywood caricatures, while one theatre owner called the picture “The best to date” in the Motion Picture Herald. Film Daily of September 30, 1933 revealed comedian Jerry Lester, later of Broadway Open House fame, imitated seven voices in the short, including Maurice Chevalier, Jimmy Durante, Ed Wynn and Eddie Cantor.