Porky Pig is Shocked

A Jimmy Cagney bee picks on baking shop owner Porky Pig in Porky's Pastry Pirates (released Jan. 17, 1942).

The bee is capable of twisting its stinger to zap things—including Porky’s fly swatter. The swatter conducts an electric charge. Here are some of the drawings.



The cartoon isn’t exactly a laugh-fest, but Dave Monahan’s story gives the audience some satisfaction at the end as the bee gets his comeuppance. Monahan would be off for war duty belong long.

Kent Rogers supplies the bee’s voice.

Friz Freleng directed this cartoon. Gerry Chiniquy is the credited animator. Actually, the title card calls him “Gerald”. His first name was really “Germaine.” My guess is Gil Turner, Dick Bickenbach and Manny Perez were in the Freleng unit and worked on this as well.

I’d love to know if the music over the opening titles is a Stalling original.

Who's Funny: Skelton or the Nelsons?

In 1947, John Crosby famously wrote a column for the New York Herald Tribune syndicate gushing about a Jack Benny broadcast, asking for a copy of the script, then penned a piece saying he had read it and couldn’t figure out why he laughed at it. You can read the column in this post.

This was actually the first of a pair of columns. The next day, he wrote a similar column about Red Skelton’s show. Crosby liked Benny. He didn’t think much of Skelton.

Here’s what he said. It was published on January 7, 1947. “Pat” is his announcer Pat McGeehan (cartoon fans will know him as the bear WHO CAN’T STAND NOISE in Tex Avery’s Rock-a-Bye Bear) “Rod” is Skelton’s other announcer, Rod O’Connor. “Wonderful” is Wonderful Smith, kind of Skelton’s answer to Rochester.

RADIO IN REVIEW
By JOHN CROSBY
Mr. Skelton Entertains
Yesterday, I expressed mild surprise at the fact that a very funny broadcast by Jack Benny emanated a from script that didn't appear to have a laugh line in it. Today, to complete your education I should like you to consider a script that wasn't at all funny, either when it was broadcast or when it was read. For this purpose I have at my elbow a script from a recent broadcast by Red Skelton, a comedian whose principal qualifications for his job are enormous vitality and great self-confidence. Mr. Skelton indulges in a brand of medieval humor which, while it has never made me laugh, never fails to astonish me. His comedy seems to have no antecedents and no connection with anything in my experience. Maybe you can figure it out.
* * *
PAT: And now we open our Skelton Scrap Book of Satires to the stories on doctors and hospitals. Chapter 34, each year thousands of new students enroll in our schools. We go now to a medical college where enrollments are in progress.
O'CONNOR: Next? Your name please?
SKELTON: Oh, heck! I always flunk on that question.
O'CONNOR: You don't even know your own name. You're really dumb.
SKELTON: Do you know my name?
O'CONNOR: No.
SKELTON: I guess we're both pretty dumb.
O'CONNOR: Come on, come on what's your name?
SKELTON: J. Newton Numbskull.
O'CONNOR: What's the stand for—Jerk?
SKELTON: That's right.
O'CONNOR: Have you prepared at a recognized college or university for your medical course?
SKELTON: Yup, at barber's college they said I'd make a terrific surgeon.
O'CONNOR: Is your family sending you thru med school?
SKELTON: Nope, they're against it. My mother had an awful experience in a hospital . . . me!
* * *
PAT: Chapter 35—The Ambulance driver.
(Phone rings).
WONDERFUL: Mr. Lump Lump, the phone is ringing.
SKELTON: Well, I didn't think a Swiss bell ringer. Sick people! I hate this place. Everybody is sick. Even the windows have panes. (Into the phone) Hello, General hospital. Private Lump Lump speaking. You want to report an accident? Okay, tattle-tale. Uh huh. Sounds serious. When did this happen? Two hours ago? Look, wise guy, call me back next week, it'll take us that long to get there. Why? Because we have a new ambulance and they haven't delivered the wheels yet.
WONDERFUL: Let's go back him up now 'cause you're getting to be the slowest ambulance driver in the country.
SKELTON: What do you mean? Just what do you mean? I got a guy to the hospital so fast once they had to wait five hours for the ailment to arrive.
WONDERFUL: Yes, and I remember the time you drove so slow with an expectant mother that by time you got to the hospital the kid was old enough to vote.
SKELTON: I'll drive.
WONDERFUL: You ain't really going to drive, are you' Every time you drive we look in worse shape than the people we pick up.
SKELTON: We save time when I drive. We don't have to go so far for an accident.
WONDERFUL: Take it easy around them curves.
SKELTON: If you're scared, do what I do. Close your eyes. Every second counts. There's nothing to worry about as long as one wheel is in the ground.
WONDERFUL: Yeah, but the only one touching is the spare tire.
SKELTON: Are you really scared?
WONDERFUL: Scared! I look like Al Jolson before he left home. You're in the downtown district. Put on the brakes.
SKELTON: Okay. Get them out of the tool box.
WONDERFUL: Where are we going?
SKELTON: That depends on what kind of life you've led. (Terrific crash.) Oh, well, one lucky break! We don't have to wait for an ambulance.
There is a great deal more of it but I think that's enough to give you the quaint quality of Skelton comedy. The places where you are expected to laugh are clearly indicated. The rest is up to you.

On the other hand, Crosby had some affection for a fairly banal radio sitcom, The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet. Despite bouncing around on the radio dial in the 1940s, the series settled in during the 1950s and remained on television for 14 seasons, going off the air on September 3, 1966 after 435 episodes.

Here’s Crosby’s column from Jan. 9, 1947. No, I don’t know why the drawing accompanying the Los Angeles Daily News version of this story shows Ozzie and Harriet had a daughter.

RADIO IN REVIEW
By JOHN CROSBY
Ozzie and Harriet
A great many young married couples strain mightily to portray marital bliss on the air but very few of them succeed. One of the most successful and certainly the most convincing of these young couples is Ozzie Nelson and his wife, the former Harriet Hilliard. The word young may be out of place in their connection. The Nelsons have been married 11 years, have two children, and appear to take matrimony more or less for granted. Possibly just force of habit gives their program an easy-going air, missing in most of the other of these connubial affairs.
Mr. Nelson, it will be recalled, was once a bandleader and pretty good one. Miss Hilliard was his vocalist. They were married in 1935 and, after Miss Hilliard had a brief fling in the movies, settled down in radio. The couple put in a long period of apprenticeship with Joe Penner and Red Skelton before they got their own program (“Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet CBS, 6 p. m. E.S.T. Sundays) two years ago. Originally the idea was for Miss Hilliard to sing once in a while but this idea was dropped and nowadays the Nelsons merely portray married life and make it sound very fetching too.
* * *
It’s difficult to catch in print the charm of the Nelson show. Much of Harriet’s dialog consists of such admonitions as "Drink your milk, David,” and the children’s conversation runs largely toward "Golly" and “Holy Cow.” The problems that beset the Nelsons are so minute that you sometimes wonder how in the world they'll last half an hour. They do though, chiefly because the Nelsons devote a good deal of time coping with the small, vexing details which make up much of our lives. They have difficulty getting David off to school, Ozzie up from the sofa, getting waited on in stores, and even finding a place to park the car.
Recently the problem was helping David with a theme that had to be produced at the end of his holidays.
“How much have you got to do?” inquired his mother.
"Not much.”
"How much is not much?”
"All of it.”
"Really, David, haven’t you done any of it? I don't know where you get such habits—such bad habits.
“Oh, it’s not so bed,” says his father.
"Yes, I do," remarks Mrs. Nelson.
* * *
Ozzie, a bland, frequently feather-brained, procrastinating sort of fellow, volunteers to help his son with the theme. He dispatches himself to the public library to do some research on the costumes worn in 1847 although his wife voices the suspicion that he is headed for the movies.
"Do you think I’d sneak off to the movies Instead of doing David's research?” he inquire indignantly. “I don't like the tone of what you're saying.”
Unfortunately, on the way to the library, he runs into his old friend Thornbury, who is on his way to "The Killers” at the Rivoli. "No, no, I can’t, Thorney,” says Ozzie, resisting temptation. “I've got to go to the library.” "Why don't you do this, Ozzie? Flip a coin and then it's not your fault. It's fate.”
"I haven’t got a coin.”
"Tell you what we'll do. We’ll go to the Rivoli and buy two tickets and then we’ll have a coin."
* * *
In the end it is Mrs. Nelson who does the research and I'm happy to report David got an A. He is a big-hearted lad and cheerfully gives his father credit for an assist on the though it isn’t quite clear what his father did to deserve it.
Ozzie is the spring around which most of the program revolves. He has a nice radio personality which will remind you a little of Jimmy Stewart in the movies. The rest of the family are pretty nice, too, including the two kids who play Rickey and David. They manage, somehow to avoid that air of precocity, which is so irritating other childish radio actors.

“1847” was a commercial tie-in. The show advertised “1847 Rogers Bros” silver cutlery. Ricky and David Nelson didn’t play themselves until 1949; Henry Blair was Ricky and Tommy Bernard was David when Crosby wrote this column.

We’ve mentioned three of Crosby’s columns for the week. The other two:

Wednesday, January 8: A look at the Ginny Simms show, featuring announcer Don Wilson, and comments about the pre-Chairman-of-the-Board version of Frank Sinatra, when everyone was making jokes about how scrawny he was.
Friday, January 10: a wordy examination of radio “contact men.” Crosby takes four paragraphs before he gets to his subject. He could have easily cut them out and started with “Whenever prosperity.” The drawing to the right is, like the other two, from the Daily News of Los Angeles.

You can click on the columns to read them better.

Jump! Jump!

A roll of dollar bills and a price tag jump over each other in the John Sutherland cartoon Why Play Leap Frog?

Both have little arms and feet. It takes 32 drawings for the two to leap frog, animated one per frame in a cycle. Unfortunately, the graph background doesn’t match at the start of each cycle, so we can’t put together a repeating version. Instead, you can see all 32 drawings below. There’s some slight movement, then a stretch up and down again.



The cartoon is copyright March 1, 1949. The music cues by former Disney composer Paul Smith are copyright September 26, 1949. This is one of the Sutherland cartoons MGM put on its release schedule, with a date February 4, 1950.

The first showing of the cartoon we can find so far was on July 26, 1947 at a meeting of the Batesville, Arkansas Lions Club at which members were warned about the bogey-man of socialism, “now the accepted philosophy in many sections of the United States,” according to a report on the event the next day in the Batesville Guard. The message of the cartoon is if Joe wants a raise, he’d better be a more productive worker, otherwise prices will jump to keep up.

The capitalist propaganda short made immediately before this, Meet King Joe was also screened.

There are no credits on the short. Bud Hiestand is the narrator, Frank Nelson plays a couple of characters, but I haven’t been able to identify the voice of Joe.

The Cartoon With Two Meanings

Symphony in Slang looks to have been an experiment by Tex Avery in several different areas—stylised backgrounds (except for the opening), limited animation and a story consisting of nothing except visual puns.

Avery and writer Rich Hogan shoved in as many literalized phrases as they could string together to make a narrative. They come at the audience quickly.

Just one: “My breath came in short pants.”



Avery uses a 20-drawing cycle for the pants flying out of the hipster's mouth.

Years ago, we posted a link to screen grabs of the gags and to the dialogue. The links are still active.

Tex suggested to author/historian Joe Adamson if MGM cartoon boss Fred Quimby had his way, the cartoon never would have been made.

We got smart, and we would wait until it got close to our deadline and we'd say, “Chief, this is all we’ve got! The only way to keep from making this show is to lay the animators off. This is all we've got!”’ So we got by with some things. That's how we did Symphony in Slang, where we illustrated literally a lot of popular expressions—‘‘I was in a pickle’, “‘I went to pieces.’ He had a hell of a time trying to understand that one.

The short seems to have sat on a shelf (try saying that five times). Variety reported on Aug. 5, 1949 that John Brown was recording three different voices for it. Brown, at the time, was Digger O’Dell, the friendly undertaker, on The Life of Riley and deadbeat boyfriend Al on My Friend Irma. Then this story popped up in the papers; one was published Aug. 27th.

SCENES FOR SLANG
HOLLYWOOD—Largest number of scenes ever listed for a one reel cartoon are scheduled for M-G-M’s “Symphony in Slang,” Producer Fred Quimby states. An entirely new cartoon technique will give five feet each to individual slang expressions. The cartoon will also be different in that it will have commentation behind the action for its entire length.

Scott Bradley's score was copyright September 11, 1950, but the cartoon’s official release date was the following June 16th. However, to the right you see it advertised for screening on April 29 at a theatre in Waverly, New York.

I can’t imagine this cartoon went over in theatres outside North America, but it did go over well at one American institute of higher learning. Reported the Hollywood Reporter on Dec. 27, 1951:

Cartoon Lesson
E. A. Warren of Notre Dame has requested Fred Quimby, producer of MGM cartoons, to show “Symphony in Slang” before the English classes at the University. Cartoon pokes fun at some of our more familiar slang clichés.

As the cartoon’s hipster might say, “Ain’t that a kick in the head!”

A Jack, a WAC and a Camel

Jack Benny couldn’t make it happen again.

He had success on his radio show when a pet polar bear became a part of it. Carmichael even played a role in the feature Buck Benny Rides Again (1940). Benny and his writers decided to bring other animals onto the show, but they didn’t last very long. Audiences didn’t seem to connect with them. One was an ostrich. Another was a horse that replaced Benny’s Maxwell (which reappeared after the war years). Another was a camel.

Unlike the others, the camel had some basis in reality. Jack, Larry Adler and others toured the Middle East in 1943, entertaining soldiers in the sweltering heat, afterward going to Italy. The Los Angeles Daily News had some information in its edition of Oct. 22, 1943.

WACS 'draft' Jack Benny as he returns with head unbombed
Jack Benny, the only entertainer to return from an overseas tour without claiming he had been subjected to gunfire, was met at Union station yesterday [21] by a mob scene that included a detachment of WACS and a stuffed camel. The WACS were on hand to “swear" Benny in as an honorary recruiting officer in the current campaign, while the camel's presence was explained to be in connection with a "gag” Benny had broadcast from Cairo.
It seems that while the entertainer was entertaining in that Egyptian city he let loose with the remark that he had bought a two humped camel, the two hump model on the ground that “you can get a better tradein deal, and besides you can keep dry ice in one."
Press agents from the broadcasting company here, hanging on every word, immediately instituted a search for a two humped camel, which was located by a safari at Goebel's Lion farm on Ventura blvd.
It was thought best to rent a stuffed camel, rather than a live one, it was explained, the latter being “a little unpredictable, front and back."
Benny, when he got off Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe's Chief and stood in the midst of an admiring group, said he had had a fine time on his trip.
“But, kids,” he cautioned, “if you want to make a Frank Merriwell story out of this, I can't help you. I had a wonderful, exciting time, practically a vacation.”
In 10 weeks and 15,000 miles, Benny played 150 shows in Africa, Sicily and Italy, points on the Persian gulf, and Iceland on the way home.
“The big thing was the trip to Italy," Benny said. “It was the only place we made a hazardous trip, where we had no business going.”
Though he had been in what the army designated as combat zones, Benny said, he hadn’t been up at the front. No bombs, no shells.
The comic, who said that he had put on 15 pounds which he would have to take off for his next picture, ran into a lot of people “over there."
“I ran into Bruce Cabot in Tunis, and, what’s the name of that fellow who was married to Joan Bennett and Hedy Lamarr?”
"Gene Markey?" somebody said.
“Yeah, Gene Markey,” Benny continued. “And then I ran into people like my caddy from Hillcrest. That was in Tunis, too."
Asked what he thought the troops overseas needed by way of entertainment Benny said “More live entertainment, they could stand. Especially in places where there isn’t any combat duty."
When Benny arrived in New York, he was quoted as having said that some of the pictures being shown the boys were so old that Shirley Temple hasn’t been born yet and Francis X. Bushman is the lending man."
Yesterday he explained that he hadn’t meant it quite that way.
“I don’t like to start a thing all ever again," he said. “My statement was that in two places, Sicily and Persia, I saw old pictures. But in other places I saw very late pictures."
Among the military present to greet the homecomer was Lt. Col. Clifford Henderson, staff officer to Maj. Gen. Jimmie Doolittle, on detached service with the air transport command.
Benny and the colonel had missed seeing each other in Benghazi by about 10 minutes, and if the colonel had gone away mad when the train didn't come in on time yesterday, he would have missed him again.
The reason the colonel was there was that he is giving some indirect help on the WAC recruiting drive, and what with some WACS being at the station to meet Benny it all adds somehow.
In New York Benny picked up his radio troupe for the return home.
With him were his wife, Mary Livingstone; Phil Harris and Mrs. Harris (Alice Faye), Rochester (Eddie Anderson), Dennis Day and Don Wilson.
Day got off at Pasadena and Harris and Miss Faye at Union station, the latter two availing themselves of invisibility to avoid the crush.
A station passenger agent, long since used to anything Hollywood can spring on him, was unimpressed by the presence of the stuffed camel. “That's not so bad,” he said. “When Fred Allen came in they brought him a calf."
And before that, when a consignment of Cover Girls was shipped to a local movie studio they were met at the station by a Russian wolfhound.
The presence of live or stuffed stock is rapidly becoming standard equipment at these trainside events.

The Cairo broadcast was a special programme on NBC on Sept. 13, 1943. You can listen to it below.



Benny’s pet camel debuted on his show of January 9, 1944. You would think the role would have been given to Mel Blanc, who had been appearing with Jack. Instead, it was handed to 17-year-old Alhambra High School student Stan Freberg, who went on to a career in the public relations department of McCormack General Hospital (and a few other things).

Freberg did the one thing you never did on the Jack Benny show. He pissed off Jack Benny. In his anxiousness during a rehearsal, he rushed to the microphone to do his camel voice (supporting players sat on chairs on stage) and threw off Benny. Benny then threw off Freberg. He never appeared on the Benny radio show again, and evidently took the camel with him.