Now This Commercial Message

Name the cartoon that you see below.



You probably can’t. That’s because it’s from one of countless animated commercials produced in the 1950s and early ‘60s.

This one is part of a campaign for American Express Traveller’s Cheques (pardon the British spelling) and about all I can tell you is the ad agency was Benton and Bowles. Who made it, I don’t know. My guess is, although it looks very UPA-ish, that it was the product of Animotion Associates of New York, as the company had produced animated commercials for American Express in mid-1961. It was run by Graham Place and Otto Feuer, two veterans from Paramount/Famous studio. Around this time, Animated Productions (Al Stahl), Ansel Films, CBS Animations, Cristal Animation, Elektra, Kim-Gifford, Lars Colonius, Pelican (Jack Zander), Wylde and the wonderfully-named Ferro, Mogubgub and Schwartz were also making animated commercials in New York. Many had theatrical vets on their staffs.

Here are a few more frames from this American Express spot. The dotted-line backgrounds are an interesting concept and it looks like sponges added texture to the floor. (The girl is in mid-air because she is jumping on the trunk).



Here’s John Traveler “protecting his valuables” (after a false start thinking what his valuables are). He scrunches them together. There’s a background dissolve as John hands them to awaiting hands at a bank teller’s window to be put in a safety deposit box.



John tips his hat to us as a narrator carries on, a nice bit of personality animation. Note that John’s head has a thick black outline while his body is outlined in red or some other colour.

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A spaghetti arm reminds John a safety deposit isn’t the only protection he should have. He should protect his “travel cash.”



At the end, a photo is taken of the vacationing John and his catch. The flash effect was also used in Huckleberry Hound and Yogi Bear cartoons.



The designs are creative and attractive. To think this was just one of many animated spots populating television at the time.

Let's Get a Better Look at That

Characters had to stand out on the screen in Tex Avery’s mind. There couldn’t be any potential distractions in the background art.

I’ve seen layout drawings from three different Avery cartoons at MGM that have had things in the background crossed out. One of them is below.

The Farm of Tomorrow (1954) is a weak sauce effort by Avery and writer Heck Allen, who put together a bunch of hokey “we crossed a X with a Y and got a punny XY” gags that build to nothing. I can’t help but think ol’ Tex needed to come up with something fast to fill up the MGM release schedule, and this was it. These were the kinds of puns Avery used to ridicule during his films, not make them centrepieces.

But Tex still put care into it. Gene Hazelton is the uncredited layout artist. He rendered the “ten-foot pole cat” below. Notice how Avery has crossed out trees so your eyes are strictly focused on the gag character.

Here is the end result in the cartoon.

The swirling purple sky (an interesting choice) is by background artist Joe Montell, who soon moved on to John Sutherland Productions. Tex’s animators are Bob Bentley added to the usual crew of Mike Lah, Grant Simmons and Walt Clinton. Paul Frees and June Foray provide some of the voices.

Tralfaz Sunday Theatre: The Great Rights

Readers here are familiar with Daws Butler from his work with various major cartoon studios, perhaps with Stan Freberg, on all kinds of commercials (Cap’n Crunch or stylised ones from the ‘50s) or footage from the puppet version of Time For Beany.

His voice appears in various other places, and an obscure one may be a cartoon he made with June Foray and Bill Scott.

The Great Rights (1963) is a political short about the U.S. Bill of Rights and what it means to American citizens. The copyright is registered under Thomas Brandon, who was a former OWI employee who started a distribution business, mainly involving foreign films and independent American productions. The associate producer was Sy Wexler, the co-owner of Churchill/Wexler Productions, a small outfit on Seward Street in Hollywood that specialised in educational documentaries, some of them animated.

Wexler rounded up a pile of people to work on this short familiar to fans of UPA and Jay Ward cartoons. Pete Burness and Ted Parmelee were among the directors, Gerard Baldwin and Phil Duncan were part of the animation crew, with backgrounds by Bob McIntosh. Jay Ward’s film editor Skip Craig was involved with it, too.

Designers include Shirley Silvey and Roy Morita. I really like their work here, as well as how the story and layouts fit together extremely well.

Brandon attempted to get the film nominated for an Oscar. Daily Variety of Dec. 20, 1963 reported:

"The Great Rights," animated color cartoon short about the Bill of Rights and which takes a swipe at censorship of motion pictures, will be added to the program Sunday night at the Beverly Canon Theatre.
Film is the first to deal with the Bill of Rights since Warner Bros. made a short on the subject in 1935, according to Thomas Brandon, the producer and New York distributor.
Showing at Canon is to qualify the short for Academy Awards nomination consideration. Film carries a dedication to the late President John F. Kennedy. Subject was designed and directed by William Hurtz and scored by Gerald Fried. Animation directors were Pete Burness, Ted Parmelle [sic], Gerry Ray and Sam Weiss.

As we are close to the anniversary of the JFK assassination, it may be an appropriate time to view it.

Ernie Pyle Talks To Jack Benny

Ernie Pyle won a Pulitzer Prize for his stories of the soldiers who fought during World War Two.

Before the war, he travelled the world writing the same kinds of they’re-just-regular-folks stories for the Scripps-Howard newspaper syndicate. Interestingly, one of his subjects was Jack Benny. He doesn’t seem all that sympathetic to the rich and famous. The article came out in 1937, meaning the Fred Allen feud was an almost obligatory subject. He also elaborates on something that Benny fans would find curious today.

When Phil Harris replaced Johnny Green as the music man of the Benny show, he wasn’t the self-absorbed ladies man and booze hound we remember. He and Jack spent their time arguing, and not always to the laughter of the studio audience. Their feud just didn’t work. Coincidentally, the one between Benny and Allen started about the time the other one ended, and Pyle found out why it ended. This was published April 2, 1937.

ERNIE PYLE
Being Number 1 Radio Man Is Pretty Tough On Poor Jack Benny, Who Keeps Worrying
NEW YORK, April 2 — Stop The Presses! Of whatever the equivalent of that would be in radio. Stop the presses or twist the dials or something. I've got Jack Benny in the bag.
Benny and I had a brief but very interesting chat. We shook hands and I said “I’m writing a column about you, but I’ve got a lot of dope already and so won’t have to take too much of your time." Whereupon Jack said, “That's swell." I shall always wear that pair of $2.50 words next to my heart.
Benny is the No. 1 man of radio. But he would rather not be No. 1. He would rather be No. 6, or something like that. The constant responsibility of maintaining the No. 1 position is just too tough.
I feel so sorry I could cry for these great public figures toiling under their load. Gable wishes he hadn’t done it. Lindbergh doesn't like the attention that made him rich. Benny wishes he weren’t No. 1 man. Boo boo! Boo hoo! Boo phooey!
ALSO HAS DRAWBACKS
It was about three weeks ago that I saw Benny and his radio troupe. (Incidentally, I took a day and a half off from my vacation just to round up this shining light. My No. 1 position has its drawbacks too, you see. Boo hoo!)
The boys are all back in Hollywood now. They came East purely for a little vacation trip. Seems that every so often the whole troupe gets the itch for New York, so they just bundle everybody onto a train and East they come.
Benny travels with quite a retinue. He has an agent, a business manager, a secretary and three script writers. I don’t see how he can ever think of anything funny with all that platoon around. And then there are always a few helpful souls from the advertising agency and the radio company.
The manager of Benny’s show took me to lunch at the Murray Hill and told me all about his prize number. (The manager paid for the lunch, so that makes $6 I owe them now).
A SWELL FELLOW
The manager says Jack is a swell fellow. I imagine he is at that. He looks like he would be. He is good-looking; very straight and well set up. He wears horn-rimmed glasses most of the time. He’s getting pretty gray along the sides. He smokes one cigar right after another.
His real name isn't Jack Benny. It's Ben Kubelsky. He used to go by the stage name of Ben Benny. But that was too much like Ben Bernie, so they tossed to see who had to change his name, and Mr. Kubelsky lost so, now he's Jack Benny.
He really did start his stage career as a violinist. But then he got to filling in with patter, and the patter was better than the fiddling, so he finally did nothing but get out on the stage and talk. But for years he always had the fiddle hidden in the footlight trough, in case he should get stuck with his patter.
Incidentally, when it was finally decided that Benny should actually play “The Bee” in his broadcast he practiced on it two hours every night for three weeks.
ARE GOOD FRIENDS
Benny and Fred Allen are, of course, actually good friends, and have been for years. Everybody knows, I guess, that the feud was all in fun. But radio listeners are queer. You can't tell how they're going to take things.
For instance, Benny had a similar trumped-up feud with Band Leader Phil Harris a couple of years ago. But the listeners took it seriously, and the Harris fans wrote nasty letters to Benny, and the Benny fans penned dirty tomes to Harris, and it got into such a mess they had to abandon the whole thing.
Benny in person isn’t as funny as Fred Allen. He isn't so good at ad libbing, and quick extemporaneous repartee. But he isn't so bad, either.
Mary Livingstone (who's on the Benny show too, you know) is Benny’s wife. She is medium tall and very thin, and says she's scared to death before every broadcast.
Benny's father is still living and spends his winters in Florida. He never misses a broadcast, and never fails to telegraph his son right after the show. And he doesn't always think it was good, either.

Ernie Pyle and Jack Benny both had something common, though not at the time this article was written. Pyle’s war stories were about the G.I., the young American man who was away from home, overseas, and how he was coping with life and war. Jack, too, made the average American his interest, too, taking time to talk to the people in uniform, and then writing letters to their parents or other loved ones back home to let them know how they were doing.

Both men demonstrated an interest in the welfare of others, and that’s probably one reason they were both loved and respected by so many people.

Colonel Bleep Blasts Off

Once upon a time, there was a company in Florida that made animated commercials. Soundac Productions decided to try for something bigger—a cartoon series for television.

There weren’t too many examples to follow. The adventure series NBC Comics (1950) was little more than still drawings with an intoning narrator. Crusader Rabbit (also 1950), produced by Alex Anderson and Jay Ward, was a narrated adventure series with humour but very little character animation.

Miami wasn’t near the television capitals of New York City or Hollywood/Los Angeles, but Soundac decided to give it a go in 1956. That’s the year a cartoon called “Man Hunt on the Moon” was copyrighted by Soundac’s general manager Robert D. Buchanan, but the man behind it all was the company’s production manager, a former animator named Jack Schleh. The cartoon starred “interplanetary investigator” Colonel Bleep and “space deputies” Squeak (a puppet) and Scratch (a caveman) battling the evil Dr. Destructo.

It doesn’t appear the cartoons aired in 1956. Variety reported on June 19, 1957 that 78 half-hour episodes (in colour) were being readied for syndication, with Richard Ullman of Buffalo signed to find stations willing to air them. Newspaper TV listings show the half-hours began airing on WGR-TV in Buffalo every Monday evening as of September 23, 1957; I can’t find anything earlier. The last listing for the series I could discover was in early 1973.

Schleh chatted with historian Jerry Beck. Schleh designed the characters and directed the cartoons. There may be little animation and the stories may be pretty basic (they were aimed at younger children who loved outer space) but the designs are neat and some of the movement short-cuts were imaginative.

But there was another artist involved. Fran Noack was the art director for Soundac. Long after retirement, he was interviewed by the Fort Meyers News-Press. He doesn’t take any credit for Bleep, other than he “drew occasional concept art.” What’s interesting is he claims to have been responsible for “The Weather Man,” which employed pose-to-pose animation (if you want to call it that) as some happy tunesters sang a jingle before George Fenneman announced a vague, one-line weather prediction (“Rain, and cooler”). They’re cute in their own way and you can find them on video-sharing sites.

Here’s the story from August 10, 2012.

On TV screen, his creations came to life
Cape Coral artist created some of TV’s early cartoon characters.
By Charles Runnells
Scratch the Caveman, Colonel Bleep and The Weather Man: Fran Noack knew all three of them well.
An exhibit of Noack’s paintings opens today at The Alliance for the Arts, but the Cape Coral man is best known for the TV cartoon characters he created, designed or otherwise helped bring to the air in the 1950s.
As art director for Miami’s Soundac TV Film Productions, Noack created TV weather mascot The Weather Man and drew occasional concept art for the ground-breaking “Colonel Bleep” series—the first TV cartoon broadcast in color.
“We beat (animation studio) Hanna-Barbera by several months,” said Noack, 86, sitting in his Cape Coral living room. “We felt pretty good about that one.”
Noack’s best-known creation is The Weather Man, a triangular cartoon character who appeared on TV weather reports. The animation was syndicated to TV stations across the country.
Noack doesn’t have any original art of The Weather Man—he says most of it was stolen from a studio van in the ‘70s—but he doodles his creation on the back of a notepad: Googly eyes, bulbous nose and a weather-vane-shaped hat.
“He’d pull out an umbrella sometimes,” he said. “Or it would start snowing on him.”
The Buffalo, N.Y., native helped form Soundac after graduating with an art degree for Albright-Knox Art Gallery. He and four other men set up shop in a former Miami truck stop and soon found themselves shooting TV commercials and cartoons.
“We were just boys right out of art school,” Noack said. “We decided to do this grand thing and create a world of entertainment.”
Wife Peggy even got to act in a TV commercial for the Buffalo Evening News newspaper.
“That was quite an adventure for all of us,” she said about starting up the studio. “We were all kids. I was just 20.
“They had big ideas back then. They were going to rule the world.”
The studio started out with a $10,000 TV commercial for an olive oil company. That led to more animated commercials—sometimes with live action mixed in—for companies and products such as Good & Plenty candy (he designed an alien character), GE, Mountain Dew and Pan-Am Airlines (Noack created a cartoon owl for those commercials).
Villain battler
The studio’s biggest success was “Colonel Bleep,” a kids cartoon about an alien who battles villains such as pirate Captain Patch and master criminal Doctor Destructo. The cartoon short ran from 1957 until the early 1970s.
Noach says his involvement in “Bleep” was minimal, but he did concept sketches of side-kick Scratch the Caveman and also occasional designs for minor characters such as a zebra and a hippo.
“I did a couple of sketches (for studio head Jack Schleh and the cartoon’s creative team),” he says. “Sometimes he used them, and sometimes he didn’t. But, really, it was his baby from the word ‘go.’” “Colonel Bleep” was a milestone in the history of TV animation,” said Andrew Farago, curator for the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco.
“It introduced color,” Farago said. “Making that innovation was very important.”
The animation on “The Weather Man” and “Colonel Bleep” was very limited, Farago said.
“You can see that if you watch them on YouTube,” he said. “They were working on a very tight budget, obviously.”
Noack can’t recall all the details from his animated TV creations in the ‘50s. He’s foggy, for example, about he exactly he dreamed up The Weather Man.
“It’s been a long time,” he laughed. “And I do so much afterward. This is something I did when I was a kid.”
At its height, Soundac employed about 30 people and created ads and TV shows that appeared nationwide.
He and his family—Peggy and four sons—eventually moved to Key Largo and lived there 30 years before moving to Cape Coral in 2002 for medical reasons. His son, Kevin, also lives in the Cape.
Noack says he’s happy, after all these years, to be remembered for his 1950s cartoons. His colorful, Tropics-inspired paintings are being displayed in the Foulds Theatre lobby at the Alliance. “This is a total surprise,” he laughed. “I’ll have my 15 minutes of fame. And then, all of a sudden, they’ll say ‘Fran who?’”
People don’t made many cartoons like Noack’s anymore. He said he loved modern computerized animation, but he misses that old-style animation—drawn by hand, frame by painstaking frame.
There’s magic in a simple pen, paintbrush and paper.
Anything can happen.
“It’s that instant when you pick up the paintbrush, before you actually start, that makes all the difference,” he said. “I’ve probably changed it three or four times in my head. There’s a lot more freedom.”
Noack draws and paints as much as he can.
“I’m blessed with a gift,” he explained. “And I’m going to use it until I can’t lift up my pen.”
He smiled.
“The studio lamp is still burning,” he said.

Noack died in 2016. Schleh passed away in 1993. For the record, the narrator on Colonel Bleep was Miami TV newsman Noel Tyler, who died of a heart attack in 1963 at the age of 48. Oddly, his obituary doesn’t mention the cartoon series at all.

Naturally, Jerry Beck has more about the cartoons on his website and we visited the cosmic colonel before in this post.

Today’s Changing Lesson

You’ll sometimes see in cartoons when a character has an expression and then the director cuts to a different shot and the expression isn’t the same.

It happens with backgrounds, too.

Here’s an example in the Ub Iwerks cartoon Mary’s Little Lamb. The lamb escapes from the old crone teacher by jumping into a stove. The teacher pulls out the lamb covered in soot. Look at what’s on the blackboard.

Cut to a different shot of the pair. Look at the blackboard now. The stove has conveniently vanished and there is now part of a map on the wall.

The cartoon comes to a less-than-rollicking end by the crone spanking the lamb. The soot is now transferred from Mary’s lamb to the teacher. That’s the gag.

Mary’s Little Lamb was one of ten ComiColor shorts released independently in 1935. Carl Stalling scored it. No animators are credited.

Endless Woody Chase

Ed Love animates a good chunk of the middle part of Walter Lantz’s Wet Blanket Policy (1948), including a scene where Buzz Buzzard chases Woody Woodpecker around an office desk.

There are 18 drawings animated on ones. The cycle lasts for a couple of circles around the desk. Here it is, slowed down in an endless loop.



Love doesn’t get screen credit but there are scenes where Buzz’s mouth has the same shape as Mr. Jinks and Huckleberry Hound cartoons Love worked on. Ken O’Brien and Les Kline are the credited animators, with Lionel Stander perfectly supplying Buzz’s voice.

Robert Clary

The Nazis gave him and his family ten minutes to get their belongings before being loaded into a cattle car and transported to a concentration camp where children were killed by gas.

It’s a far cry from bumbling German military officers in Hogan’s Heroes, but it’s part of the real life of the man who played French Resistance fighter Louis LeBeau on the series, Robert Clary.

The TV comedy had nothing to do with concentration camps, or their atrocities, but it always had the same message every week: Nazis are real losers.

In the last decades of his life, Clary had another message he took to college campuses and anywhere people would listen—that the Holocaust was no myth, no exaggeration. The people who said otherwise weren’t there. He was.

The story of how Clary came to the United States after being liberated from Buchenwald in 1945 was reported by “I.K.” in the San Angelo Standard-Times, Nov. 20, 1955. By then, Clary had some modest fame from his work in the “New Faces” revue in New York, where the breakout star was Eartha Kitt.

Robert Clary Finds U S Likes French
Talent-scouting is one of the perennial hobbies of thousands of people who like to acquire their own favorites before the publicity mills get to work, and there is increasing evidence that Robert Clary (it’s pronounced “Rohbair") is enjoying one of the most spontaneous word-of-mouth buildups nationwide that any new performer has had in years. A native Parisian (he was born in the Ile-St.-Louis district), Clary was hoping for a start in the amusement business when war broke and he wound up in a prison camp.
Postwar France was hardly a happy hunting ground for new talent in the singing line (old talent was having plenty of trouble, too), but Clary found some inconsequential work including singing with a band at the Olympia Hall in his native city.
Here he was fortunate to be heard by the American violinist and orchestra leader Harry Bluestone, who became the first of the talent scouts to sing the praises of Clary. In fact, he sang them so well to the young man himself that the latter agreed to record two songs in English, which he now manages handily (with a pleasant flavoring all his own), but at that time didn’t know at all.
These opened the way for West Coast nightclub engagements (Bluestone is well oriented in Hollywood circles), followed by exposure to the sophisticates who patronise such New York nighteries as the Village Vanguard, the Blue Angel and La Vie en Rose.
In turn came an opportunity in the show called “New Faces” and, most recently,” the chance to distribute his art nationally via an Epic disk titled appropriately Meet Robert Clary.” In it he performs a mingling of French ("Fleur Bleue,” “Un Rien Me Fait Chanter" and “La Route Enchantee”) and American (“Have You Met Miss Jones?,” “Hoops" and “Out of This World")–songs with an ingratiating blend of Gallic charm and a Negroid-influenced vocal manner which is hard to resist.
A shortish, compact French type, Clary now affects a crew cut which gives him a decidedly jaunty air and the adolescent appeal without which no popular balladeer can succeed these days.
If having all the ingredients is the secret of success, Clary is practically there already. He also draws Steig-Iike pictures, whose reproduction adds to the merriment of his album.

Success on television followed Clary in the 1960s. After Hogan’s Heroes, he had regular roles on soap operas.

But then he decided he had to speak out. Here is a portion of a story from the St. Louis Jewish Light, April 24, 1985.

CLARY SHARES EXPERIENCES
By CAROL B. LUNDGREN
Executive Editor
Robert Clary folds back his sleeve, revealing the crude concentration camp tattoo A-5714, and spews forth a staccato of images about his harrowing Holocaust experiences.
Sobbing children gaining only false security by desperately clinging to their mother's hand; rancid bits of food stolen from pigs who had rejected them; wretched rags wrapped around feet to protect them from the stinging cold—Clary does not merely talk to his audience; he takes them on a wrenching journey with him.
He unabashedly admits that it is not vanity which prompts him to tuck his glasses into his pocket when he delivers a speech. Rather, he fears that if he sees his listeners cry, he will cry with them. Clary, 59, is most well-known as Louis LeBeau, the French prisoner of war in Hogan's Heroes. Now it is debatable whether he is seen more often as the hilarious chef in Hogan television reruns or as a Holocaust survivor on the lecture circuit.
St Louis was a stop last week on Clary's itinerary—a criss-cross of cities probably only he and his agent can decipher. As the Wolf-Najman Memorial Lecturer, he addressed an audience of 825 at this year's Yom Hashoa Commemoration, held at Temple Shaare Emeth and sponsored by the St. Louis Center for Holocaust Studies of the Jewish-Community Relations Council.
Clary, who turns over his fees to the Simon Wiesenthal Center, places a strict stipulation upon his speaking engagements. He must be booked to speak to high school students in addition to adult groups.
While here, he was whisked from place to place. Four-hundred students from Parkway, Pattonville, Mehlville, University City and John Burroughs high schools packed the Loretto-Hilton to hear him; he spoke to the upper grades at the Central Agency for Jewish Education's Jewish Community High School He also managed to offer his time to the media; a full slate of newspaper, television and radio interviews crowded his agenda.
Just being an actor or a lecturer alone implies a hectic, energy-sapping life style. But Clary has coupled them in an overly complicated schedule of his own choosing. And if the name Robert Clary draws a bigger crowd than usual to events focusing on the Holocaust, then all the better to hear about an era which must never be forgotten.
Clary admits that he was fatigued before his lecture here; he had delivered two in Baltimore earlier the same day. But if he was tired, it was imperceptible to his audience, who watched as tears filmed the eyes of the diminutive Frenchman as he was living a role rather than playing it.
Clary is well-prepared for the inevitable question how could a survivor act in a humorous series about German soldiers during World War II. He sees no anomaly in the situation, strictly differentiating between his part as a POW from that of a death camp inmate and between the Luftwaffe and the SS. "No one in their right mind could do a situation comedy about concentration camps," avers Clary, who was in every episode but one of the classic show, filmed from 1965-71.
In an interview with the Jewish Light and in his passionate speech, Clary said that until four years ago, he did not discuss his 31-month death camp ordeal. It was not fear of pain for himself or others—that he elected silence. Although he was afflicted with nightmares, "it was not eating me alive," he attests. Instead, he wanted to take his suffering, fold it up into a tight bundle, set it aside and "get on with living again."
What then turned him into such a vocal advocate of Holocaust documentation and education? A resurgence of anti-Semitism and a spate of books and tracts denying Hitler's attempt to systematically exterminate the Jews, he replies. Clary saw, and continues to see, cemeteries being desecrated; restaurants and movie houses being bombed; professors hiding behind the guise of scholarship making a mockery of what he endured firsthand.
It is ironic then that the final "slap on the face" which catapulted Clary into the forefront of the Holocaust lecture scene was not an anti-Jewish incident, but a documentary film, Kitty Returns to Auschwitz, in which a survivor takes her son back to the scene of her incarceration.
It was then that Clary realized that "30 or 40 years from now there won't be any survivors" to refute those who deny the Holocaust and to remind the world that anti-Semitism, if left to fester, can burst open into another Holocaust.

Clary appeared in his own biographical film, made on a low budget at Kent State University in 1988.

His death today at age 96 gives yet another opportunity of life for his story, which must never die.

Allen Swift

He uttered the immortal phrase "Dicky Moe!" (from the cartoon of the same name) but, fortunately, that is not what actor Allen Swift is noted for. Swift was a mainstay in the Total TeleVision stock company, and won roles as Odie Cologne on King Leonardo and the wonderfully villainous Simon Bar Sinister on Underdog (a personal favourite).

His larynx was one of the busiest on the air in New York at one time, even before Total TV formed in the early ‘60s. He appeared in almost countless TV and radio commercials. Here are three articles about him, all from 1956. I don’t recall him voicing Herman the Mouse but reader J. Lee in Texas pointed out when this post originally appeared on the GAC Forum that Arnold Stang spent time away from New York shooting The Man With the Golden Arm and Swift could have filled in then. Reader Ken Layton in Olympia, Washington says Swift did work for the Famous Studios, lending a voice in the 3-D Casper cartoon Boo Moon (1954).

These columns are before Total TV, before his buddy Gene Deitch cast him in his Czech-made Tom and Jerry cartoons, before WPIX-TV gave him the rank of Captain Allen Swift and told him to show kiddie viewers some Fleischer Popeye cartoons. The first column is from the McNaught Syndicate, dated April 12.

LOOKING SIDEWAYS
By WHITNEY BOLTON.
NEW YORK.—No man can have truck with Broadway and Madison Avenue for long without getting stray wisps of report concerning a modern Leonardo da Vinci who whisks his way through the worlds of theater, writing, music, TV, radio and puppeteering with the greatest of ease and. apparently, without working up a sweat.
It was never in my mind to track down this prodigious New Yorker, but fate tossed us together in an Irish snug the other afternoon where to the consternation of all employees in sight we both happened to be drinking tea. The proprietor was beside himself, where I left him when I sought out Allen Swift, whose only claim to attention at that point was that he was as militant about his tea as I was.
Swift was sitting in a padded booth and giving his whole attention to the tea, when I brought my cup over and said: “As a fellow iconoclast in this snug, may I sit with you for mutual protection?” He laughed and said, sure, and that was that.
Many Activities.
Introductions followed. He was Allen Swift, writer, painter, composer, magician, man of 1,001 voices, comedian, sculptor, director, producer, puppeteer and tea drinker. I told him his name sounded like the title for a boys’ adventure series; “Allen Swift and His Atomic Speedboat,” “Allen Swift and His Space Boat”—things like that. He said, yes, it did, but since it didn’t happen to be his real name, what did it matter?
How does a man of prodigious attainments start? Well, obviously, to get it all in, he has to start early. He started at 8 years of age when, in one sudden winter swoop, he began acting and painting. When he was 10 he began winning prizes for painting first prize in the annual Wanamaker art contest for children.
“The acting part just sort of happened,” he said, “I got a job acting.”
The late John Barrymore scarcely could have claimed more, for his starter. He got a job acting.
When Swift was 12, he saw a magic performance by Galli-Galli, the Egyptian who gets baby chicks out of empty brass cups. This so inflamed Swift that although he didn’t have a cent with which to buy magic show equipment, he went home and in three weeks became a child prodigy at sleight of hand and even made some home-type apparatus, based on his intellectual solution of how certain tricks were done. He turned out to be right. His home-made apparatus was as good as the kind he could have purchased—if he had had any money.
Became a Poet.
At 14 he was in the High School of Music and Art, a New York school reserved for talented young who have demonstrated their ability. It isn’t enough to dream. You have to demonstrate. He became poet laureate and editor-in-chief of the school’s magazine, and one issue won first prize in a national contest for school publications.
Feeling restless and a little empty, he passed his freshman year by organizing a dramatic group, directing it and presenting it in a play of his authorship. He went down to mid-Manhattan, rented one of the largest auditoria in town, put the show on and had a net profit of $538. Which is more than a lot of professional groups make. He told the management of the hall that he was 22—not 14—and somehow they believed him.
Since then he has been on Broadway, appeared in more than 1,000 radio and TV shows, paints with Raphael Soyer and makes a sprightly dollar for himself doing all the voices on some of those TV commercials you see in cartoon form—he can speak anything from a British Duke to Brooklyn waterfront, with animals, fowl and Martian in between.
What is left with the other 90 idle minutes in each 24 hours? He has got his foot in NBC’s door with an idea for creating a school for comedians. The young, he says, have no training ground since the demise of burlesque and vaudeville. Consequently, few young comics are coming along to displace the aging ones. He sees this as a gap to be filled if buffoonery is to survive. The lovely thing about New York is the odd and fascinating people you can meet over a cup of tea.

Next is from the International News Service, June 20:

Assignment America
By PHYLLIS BATTELLE
NEW YORK (INS) — If you know a small child with vast potential for being an actor, there are two things to do about it.
1.) Don't tell him he’s a genius,
2.) Lock him in the basement.
“It always amuses me when a parent says, ‘now watch Johnny, he’s a natural actor’,” says a trained actor named Allen Swift.
“All kids are natural actors and mimics. Before the parents botch up the job and give them inhibitions, they’re good . . .
“But the worst thing parent can do is to think they have a little genius on their hands, and promote him into becoming a professional. Because I’ve never seen a child actor who didn’t turn out to be mixed-up and obnoxious!”
Mr. Swift is not speaking with the traditional jealous, sour-grapes attitude of an adult actor who has thrown away too many scenes to child stars. He is speaking as a 32-year-old gent who thought he was pretty great at the age of eight and was—fortunately—put in his place.
That was in 1932 when an aunt in Philadelphia took him to see a double-feature movie starring, in order of appearance, Maurice Chevalier, Will Rogers and Zazu Pitts.

“On the way to the soda shoppe afterwards,” he remembers, “I had a strange experience. I felt inside me that I could talk like Chevalier and Pitts and Rogers. I waited for awhile till I was sure I could do it—kids can convince themselves of anything—and then popped out with an imitation.”
His aunt looked startled. It was “eerie,” she said ecstatically.
His father was not so impressed. Any time Allen would start to mimic a movie star or family friend, he was suppressed with the words “everybody can do that if they want to.”
And so, in the quiet of his own room, Allen Swift practiced glibly to himself—not achieving the applause of the throngs, but achieving perfection, instead. He is known today as “the man with a thousand voices.”
Also an actor, song-writer dramatist and painter, Swift gets his lucrative income from radio and TV. On both media, he is the “voice” behind such famed and fascinating personalities as Mighty Mouse, Howdy Doody, Dinky Duck, Herman the Mouse (“I’m known particularly in the rodent field”) and many unusual sounds on radio-TV commercials.
When the UN planned a show for which they needed the voices of FDR and Winston Churchill, Swift was the man they called upon.
“I’ve evolved my own theory on simulating voices and dialects,” he says. “It is a complex one—involving analyzing the personality of the subject before you try, with:
your own vocal chords, to imitate his voice. The most difficult voices to mimic are the average non-characteristic, ones. Naturally.
“It’s like a caricaturist’s art. The more perfect the features of a person, the more tough it is to capture him in caricature.”
Swift says there is no such thing as a “normal voice.”
“The important thing in the voice of a person is that it must go with his appearance and personality. For instance, a big man with a high and weak voice has a voice that jars. Keep your voice in line with your personality and it is pleasant to the listener.”
Swift said my voice was okay.
“Technically, I’d call it a ‘woman’s fog voice,’” he smiled.
“Fits the personality very well.”

And finally from September 13:

Man and Mouse is Voice of Yogurt
By WILLIAM EWALD
United Press Staff Correspondent
NEW YORK — Allen Swift is both a man and a mouse. In fact, two kinds of mouse.
He is also a tea kettle, a coffee pot, a gurgling sink, Howdy Doody, Dinky Duck, several species of bird and the voice of Yogurt.
You probably hear Swift’s voice echoing through the confines of your living room more frequently than any other TV personality, but the chances are you never recognize it. The reason—Swift’s voice assumes as many shapes as salami.
“I do voices, all kinds of voices, any kinds of voices,” said Swift today. “I’ve played in more than 1,000 network radio shows—mugs, old codgers, kids, everything. I’ve done more than 50 different characters on “Howdy Doody,” including Howdy Doody himself.
Does Movie Cartoons
“I do movie cartoons—Herman the Mouse, Mighty Mouse. Also just about all the voices for UPA cartoons in the East.
“But my principal activity right now is TV film commercials. As far as I know, there isn’t anybody who can do as many kinds of voices as I do.”
Within the past few weeks, Swift, 32, has provided the voices for more than a score of the commercials you’ll see on your home screen this season. Among others—two brands of cigarets, a hair tonic, a watch, a soft drink, a beer, an instant coffee, a razor blade, a spaghetti, a macaroni, a candy bar and a five-day deodorant pad.
Swift is a specialist at providing a voice for objects. He has done such things as houses, kitchen sinks and three-way lamps.
“What I do is try to identify each object with some kind of person,” said Swift. “You take a perking coffee pot—it’s got a big, deep, hearty kind of personality, so you give it that kind of a voice.
British Tea Kettle
“A tea little is different. A tea pot is quite delicate, very British with a hiss in its articulation.
"Now, a three-way lamp is a little more difficult. You have to do it with voice level — low and dull for a low light, medium rasp for a medium light and then light and happy and high-pitched for that bright light.”

Allen Swift was born as Ira Stadlen. The “Allen” part of his stage name came from Fred Allen, showing his excellent taste in comedy (for his part, Allen’s real name was not Allen, but John Florence Sullivan) and went to school in Bensonhurst. He died at age 87 in 2010, leaving behind performances as a plunger for Drano, Dwight Eisenhower (dubbed voice) in the movie The Longest Day (1962), a fill-in Howdy Doody, and as a cartoon sailor who alternately mumbled and shouted “Dickie Moe!”

Tex's Other Rabbits

You all know about Tex Avery and Bugs Bunny. Tex had another couple of rabbits who weren’t as lippy but were still fun. They’re the two magician’s bunnies he featured in 1952’s Magical Maestro.

They pop into scenes at will. The effect seen on a big screen is terrific. In one scene, the evil magician turns baritone Poochini into a Hawaiian war dancer. The rabbits leap from either side of the frame to dance in unison.



One of the things Avery and writer Rich Hogan had to do was come up with different ways for Poochini to turn into something and then back into his regular outfit. Several gags involve something sweeping past the singer to reveal he’s wearing a tux again. In this scene, it is the Hawaiian lei. These frames give you an idea.



Mike Lah, Walt Clinton and Grant Simmons are the credited animators. I can’t tell you who designed the rabbits. Gene Hazelton maybe?