A Weighty Matter

The Jack Benny radio show didn’t just develop over the course of a season, with a Maxwell, and age 39 and trains leaving for Anaheim, Azusa and Cucamonga showing up in the dialogue. That took years, something a show on TV would never be given the time to accomplish.

Jack debuted in May 1932. There was a revolving door of NBC and CBS staff announcers assigned to the show. Any attempt by Benny to build a comedy character around them was pretty much impossible.

When Chevrolet picked up his show the following year, Jack started with Howard Claney, who was replaced with Alois Havrilla. The carmaker dropped his show in 1934 and Benny was forced to find another announcer when General Tire decided to sponsor it.

That’s when Don Wilson won an audition and began a lengthy association with the Benny show, taking the jump into television with Jack in 1950. He had started in radio in Denver as a singer, and ended up working at several radio stations in Los Angeles, and hosting a transcribed comedy/variety show called The Mirth Parade. He was best known for calling the Rose Bowl game. That got the attention of NBC executives in New York, who transferred him back east, ostensibly as a sports announcer.

Don continued doing what Claney and Havrilla had been doing—interrupting dialogue to shoehorn a word in about the sponsor. But Wilson had something else Benny could hang a comedy peg on—his size.

Some might call it fat-shaming today, but Wilson seemed to take it in stride and got his licks in at Benny in response.

When the show became televised, audiences could see Donsie was hefty but not obese. I’m no expert on the television version, but it seems things shifted and Wilson was called to do sillier things on camera (and, out of nowhere, was father to an adult son).

Here’s Don talking to one of the newspaper syndicates in a story published on March 4, 1962.

Don Wilson: Large Bones
By DONALD FREEMAN
Copley News Service
HOLLYWOOD—28 years with the Jack Benny troupe, Don Wilson’s size is certainly no state secret. Everyone knows that the cheerful announcer-actor with the mellifluous voice is —well, ample. His bulk, in fact, has proved one of the more durable props on the show.
"Actually, I am not fat at all," said Wilson, smiling broadly as he slid into a booth at an airport restaurant. "It is true that I have a large bone structure. But, if you want the truth of the matter, I only weigh. . . . .” An airplane droned overhead at that moment, drowning out Wilson’s voice.
“What was that?” I cried, leaning forward. "What was that again?"
Weight A Comic Myth
"Let me put it another way," said Wilson, his expression bountiful. "My weight is one of those comic myths that take hold. But no one, down deep, believes the myths they laugh at.
"No one really believes that Jack Benny is so penurious, for instance no one really believes that he drives a Maxwell or has a butler named Rochester or that he keeps his money hidden in a vault."
"And your —er, size," I put it, that kind of a myth, too?"
"Absolutely," Wilson said, defiantly jutting out his chins. "But I couldn't be happier about it because it gives Jack a chance to make a lot of jokes and it's given me a pleasant living at my profession."
"How much," I asked, "did you say you weigh?"
Wilson raised a interruptive finger. "See those people over here," he said, "at that table by the window." A cluster of diners had spotted Wilson and several of them smiled by way of recognition, Wilson waved back, also smiling.
Wears A Triumphant Look
Now Wilson turned to me, a triumphant look on his good-natured face. "I'll tell you what they're saying over there right this minute," he said. "They're saying, 'My gosh, Don Wilson must have lost a lot of weight.' Wherever I go, that's what people say to me.
“I have to explain that I haven't lost any weight at all. Besides the fact that the TV camera adds a few pounds, with all the jokes they've heard about me on the Benny show, people assume that I must weigh at least 350 pounds."
Wilson laughed at the outrageousness of the thought, his chins dancing again. "And then it's a big surprise to these people when they see me in person."
"I suppose, that I have been the subject of more fat man jokes than anyone in show business. When I think that Jack's writers have used every fat man joke in the world, they come up with another one. I remember one line where I tell Jack that I had gone on a diet and taken off 25 pounds. Jack gave me that dying calf look of his and he said, 'You haven't lost weight, Don. Turn around. You've just misplaced it.' "
Scales Are Challenged
A few minutes later, we left the restaurant and Mr. Wilson approached a scale. "Now," he said, inserting a coin, "this should prove my point. Fat, indeed."
"What does it say?" I asked, but, as he turned, Wilson accidentally blocked my vision. He quickly stepped off the platform.
"When a scale is out of order," Wilson demanded, innocently, "wouldn't you think they'd at least put a sign?"

Don Wilson won all kinds of announcing awards, even though Bea Benaderet once remarked how a pool was conducted every Sunday, with actors guessing which line Don would blow first. Jack took one of the mistakes on TV and turned it into a running gag on both television and radio—Wilson twisted the Lucky Strike slogan “Be Happy, Go Lucky.” Wilson’s wife Lois, who was a fine radio actress, was hired to add to the situation.

When Benny ended his regular series in 1965, Wilson wasn’t hired to announce the specials. Veteran Bill Baldwin was brought in, while Wilson only made a few guest appearances. Somehow it didn’t seem right.

Posters, Knights and Long-Johns

Here’s a buried self-reference in The Girl at the Ironing Board (1934). Check out the poster on the left side of the fence.



Poor Friz Freleng. He and the writing staff had to find a way to make this cartoon’s man-woman-love-villain-abduction-chase-(to the theme song in double time)-vanquish formula different than the others that infested Warners cartoons. And fit in a Warners-owned song. The title song comes from the feature Dames (1934) with Guy Kibbee, Zasu Pitts and Hugh (Woo-Hoo) Herbert. The film included a legitimate smash hit, “I Only Have Eyes For You.”

The staff took the song title and came up with a story about clothes being ironed (and whatever else happens in a laundry), and then married it with an 1890s stage melodrama parody, the same thing that Terrytoons ran into the ground.

But there are some contemporary references. One of the song lyrics features Mae West’s most famous misquote “Come up and see me some time.” The female clothes emulate Joe Penner by shouting “You naaasty man!” And this may be one of the most obscure radio references in a cartoon.



At the time this cartoon was made, Fred Allen was hosting the Sal Hepatica Revue. It, and his previous show, the Salad Bowl Revue, had sketches that were set in Bedlam University, the Bedlam Penitentiary, the Bedlam Department Store, and so on. This poster could be coincidental but I’d like to think not.

My favourite gag is a pun that Friz times perfectly. First, a title card.



Cut to the next scene. The card is accurate.



That’s it. It’s like a Tex Avery gag, incongruous and quick. Then it’s back to the plot.

The flaps of woolen underwear slap the tops of barrels. The gag is borrowed from We're in the Money (1933). Wasn't it re-used later in a colour cartoon?



The long johns return at the end of the cartoon. Unexpectedly, a head pops out of the top and gives us the familiar “So long, folks!” farewell.



Frank Tipper and Sandy Walker are the credited animators, with the score by Bernie Brown. The soundtrack includes “Dames” and “Shake Your Powder Puff.” Unlike the oft-heard “Shuffle Off to Buffalo” or “The Lady in Red,” this was the only Warners cartoon that used the title song.

The Mountain is Correct

“There’s gold in them thar hills!” proclaims Oswald the rabbit in Alaska (1930), a Walter Lantz production.



The mountain confirms it by opening its “mouth.” “You said a mouth-full,” replies the hill. And it’s on to the next scene.



Jimmy Dietrich’s score includes three choruses “Go Get the Ax,” sung by a prospector in Dalton’s Palace saloon, as well as “Turkey in the Straw,” “Pop Goes the Weasel” and Oswald’s theme song. Pinto Colvig supplies the singing.

Colvig, Tex Avery and Les Kline get smaller letters in their animation screen credit than Manny Moreno, Clyde Geronimi and Ray Abrams.

A Gandhi (Not Dandy) Gag

Mahatma Gandhi believed in separating his people from British rule, opposed a British-imposed tax (on salt) and wanted an independent nation with religious freedom.

Just like the Founding Fathers of the U.S.A., right? Well, while their appearances in American animated cartoons were met with patriotic fervour, Ghandi was ridiculed.

Here’s an example from Insultin’ the Sultan, a 1934 Ub Iwerks short.

Willie Whopper grabs the sultan by the beard and swings him around. The beard breaks off, the sultan spins around, becomes a barber pole, his clothes come off, he crashes into a pillar and voila! Gandhi.



To add to the insult, a goat in a picture in a picture ridicules Mahatma by braying at him.



On top of that, we get black stereotypes, complete with dice fetish. But that’s not all. Because they’re guarding the sultan’s harem, we presume they are eunuchs, so we get gay stereotypes, too.

At the end of the cartoon, Willie finishes his tale and gets rewarded by his teacher (the standard Iwerks old crone design) with a dunce cap.

Grim Natwick and Berny Wolf get animation credits and the music was by Art Turkisher.

The Screen Career That Was More Than a Picnic

What do Fantastic Voyage, Ride Beyond Vengeance, The Silencers and Birds Do It have in common, besides being found on theatre marquees in 1966?

The casts of all of them included Arthur O’Connell.

This doesn’t include drive-ins that were running older films, such as The 7 Faces of Doctor Lao, The Great Race and Your Cheatin’ Heart. McConnell was in all those, too. Then there was television, eg. an episode of The Wild, Wild West.

O’Connell was one of the busiest character actors around at one time, on stage and screen. Dorothy Kilgallen wrote in a column in 1952: “Arthur O’Connell is one actor who can’t complain about being typed by the casting directors. In the current ‘Golden Boy’ he plays a punch-drunk prizefighter—but earlier this season he was seen as a letter carrier, a salesman, an aviator and a priest.”

In 1929, he was a member of the Gordon Square Players in Cleveland. In late January, he was cast as an indolent boy-friend in “The Family Upstairs” and appeared in several plays until the end of the season. One of the other players, age 19, turned up later on radio and on Mr. Magoo cartoons—Jerry Hausner.

Hal Eaton’s column in the Newark Star-Ledger of July 5, 1946 gave this short bio:

Arthur O'Connell, actor-director, has been signed by William Cahn to direct Frank Gould's "Snow-Job," a comedy about ex-GI's returned to college. O'Connell last directed "Brighten the Corner."
Cahn, an ex-GI who is looking for an apartment, liked the way O'Connell staged the recent "Operation Housing," the Veterans' Housing Rally at the 69th Armory, and decided to sign him for "Snow-Job." Apparently the Duncan-Paris Post of the American Legion liked O'Connell's staging, too, since they elected him vice commander to Sgt. Marion [See Here, Private] Hargrove.
As an actor, O'Connell worked for MGM with Lew Ayres and Lionel Barrymore in the "Dr. Kildare" pictures, appeared in Orson Welles' "Citizen Kane" and did a series of RKO shorts with Edgar Kennedy and Leon Errol. He played in the London production of "Golden Boy," with Louis Calhern and Jack La Rue.
O'Connell's first job as director was for the Federal Theater's "Little Women." During the war he was assistant director of movies for the army at Astoria. L. I., and directed John Golden's production of "The Army Play by Play."

You have to jump forward 21 years for O’Connell to get any significant publicity, and it had nothing to do with films. He was hired to co-star in a gimmick comedy with Monte Markham. This feature story was published July 19, 1967.

Why Would a Top-Notch Actor Do a Situation Comedy?
By DONALD FREEMAN
Copley News Service
HOLLYWOOD, Calif.—His actor's moustache bristled only slightly when Arthur O'Connell, after 38 years in the profession, after winning one Oscar and being nominated for another, was asked why a distinguished performer of his stripe would go into a situation comedy series.
This particular series, moreover, is a complicated bit of business which may or may not capture the viewers' fancy. A Screen Gems-ABC entry, "The Second Hundred Years" involves O'Connell as the 67-year-old son of a man in his 20s who — are you following this? — was buried alive in a Klondike snowslide, frozen all the years and then discovered and defrosted.
Now then — "I have a mortgage to pay," quoted O'Connell. "A situation comedy is as good as anything else to pay the mortgage for an actor. Besides, an actor has to work. If not, you're out there in left field with the sun in your eyes."
O'Connell, as befits a star of the Broadway stage, has been in any number of television series, and this one he accepted because of its inherent comic possibilities. In fact, he was ready to return to Broadway before producer Harry Ackerman offered him this particular show.
* * *
THE thought of facing a camera — or an audience —still fills O'Connell with a strange, nameless fear, an oddity for a man who once played the old five-a-day routine in vaudeville.
"Years ago," O'Connell said, "I was doing a comedy sketch with my partner and just before we'd go out on stage I'd be standing there in the wings, trembling, full of trepidation.
"What I would do, I'd devoutly promise God if he got me through the performance I would go back to pumping gas and make an honest living.
"And after each show, I'd say to myself, with great relief, 'God knew I was lying.' Surely he must have, else why would I still be in the acting business?"
It is one of Arthur O'Connell's major assets as an actor that he can portray a drunk with such devastating believability. Most actors overplay when in a drunk scene and you don't believe for a minute that they have really hashed it up. I wondered how O'Connell handled this type of acting assignment.
He shrugged. "Easiest thing in the world to play a drunk," O'Connell said. "To begin, I've had experience in the real thing. But mainly I've observed people after they've had a belt. They're loose — oh, so loose, bumping into the furniture, missing the cigaret with the match. Very loose. Even though I'm under tension always as an actor, I stay loose externally.
"Fear is all in the wings, anyway. Acting! Listen, there's very little acting done today at all. Mostly it's reacting. And I know a lot of actors who never stop acting —until they get before a camera.
"Looseness is a deceptive commodity in a performer," he went on. "Look at Johnny Carson — apparently as calm as a leaf in a breeze. Ah, but he's up inside. He has that inner energy going for him. But I don't know much about theories. When young actors come to me for advice, I tell them the best thing I know, 'Say your words and mind your own business and you'll do all right.' "
* * *
WE TALKED about "Picnic," the movie that won him an Oscar and, O'Connell insists, changed his life [photo above with Roz Russell]. "After 'Picnic' won me an Oscar, suddenly I was known," O'Connell said. "Suddenly I could ask producers for more money. Which reminds me of a producer story.
"After he won an Oscar for 'Mr. Roberts,' Jack Lemmon gratefully paid a call on the producer, Harry Cohn, who was paying him something less than the world's biggest salary, and he says, 'Thanks, Harry, for everything.' Cohn said back at him, 'Listen, kid, I made 16 million bucks on the picture. So you don't have to thank me for anything,' "
* * *
O'CONNELL'S movie career goes back to "Citizen Kane" and Orson Welles. "I'd come out to Hollywood and I wasn't doing much, making a few shorts with Leon Erroll, and I hear Orson is casting for 'Citizen Kane.' Orson would sit there, in his office, and actors would troop in and he'd say, in that big rumbling voice of his, 'My name is Orson Welles. Tell me about yourself.' And the actors would rattle off whatever movie credits they had.
"Well, I didn't have any movie credits," O'Connell said. "So I walked in to see Orson and I'm scared witless and he informs me that he is Orson Welles and would I tell him about myself. I cleared my throat and I said, 'Mr. Welles, I'm Arthur O'Connell. I've been out here for four months. I'm a stage actor.' At the sound of the word, 'stage,' Orson perked up. That means you're an actor,' he said to me, 'and you are hereby hired for my picture.' "

Being a stage actor may have given him respect with Welles, but not at Screen Gems. He was used. Robert de Roos, in the December 30, 1967 issue of TV Guide, had this behind-the-scenes dirt:

Arthur O’Connell, an accomplished and veteran actor, was billed as the star in the pilot film: “Starring Arthur O’Connell and Monte Markham.” Now the billing has been reversed and O’Connell’s parts have been cut and Monte’s built up.
A studio executive said, “Arthur O’Connell was billed as the star on the pilot because we thought it would help sell the series. No one had ever heard of Monte and O’Connell was well-known.”
“I feel guilty about it,” Monte says, “but it’s out of my control. Arthur O’Connell’s been nominated for Academy Awards and now he’s featured under me, a guy no one ever heard of. It’s . . .” His voice trails off and he drops an embarrassing subject.
As for Arthur O’Connell, he seems resigned to the situation. “I turned down series after series because I didn’t want a supporting role,” he says. “I signed here because I was to be the star. Now the word is around that my part is being purposely written down.
“I think Monte is upset about it. He asked me to have lunch one day, but I refused. I just didn’t want to talk about it.”

The Second Hundred Years didn’t get to a second season. The cancellation did not stop O’Connell from keeping busy. He had already shot The Reluctant Astronaut with Don Knotts earlier in the year and there were other films ahead (including 1968’s forgotten If He Hollers, Let Him Go with Barbara McNair). He never got another series, but appeared regularly as a kindly store owner in Crest toothpaste commercials.

O’Connell vanished from the screen in 1975. He was claimed by Alzheimer’s on May 18, 1981. He was 73.

A Fishy Camel

Before we get to the lacklustre Beau Bosko, let me grumble about the worse-than-lacklustre copies of many of the Bosko cartoons that circulate on-line.

I know they come from VHS dubs of 1990 cable TV enhancements, but shouldn’t there be decent versions around? They look like sixth-generation dubs recorded on the slowest tape speed. The copy of this cartoon has an end title spliced on.

It is true that Bosko is no Bugs Bunny, or Daffy Duck, or even Pepe Le Pew. But he was Warners’ first animated star and he deserves better treatment than this.

He deserved better treatment than the story of this cartoon. The first half is a bunch of snoring gags, and then a wash basin-in-a-backpack gag. The cartoon is just under seven minutes, and the villain doesn’t appear until the five-minute mark. There’s a gag about flies around a snoring turbaned guy and another with a different Arab stretching up and down as he rides a camel. Those are the gags. Yikes.

Here’s another one that’s cuter. Bosko’s camel drinks water out of a shallow pond in the desert (no mirage gag this time). Unexpectedly, a fish pops up. You can follow the action in the fuzzy frames below.



Ham Hamilton and Norm Blackburn are the credited animators. Frank Marsales' music provides the proper mood; most of it was original.

Pill Poppin' Pullet

There’s a bit of stylised action in Porky the Rain-Maker (1936) as a hen swallows a lightning pill and turns into a bolt of lightning.



Cecil Surry and Sid Sutherland get the animation credits in this short, but we know that Chuck Jones, Virgil Ross and Bob Clampett were in Tex Avery’s unit at Warners at the time. John Waltz provided the backgrounds. The ending is a lot of fun, and typically Avery.

I'll Have a Can of Laughs, Please

Have you read anyone defending laugh tracks?

You’re about to.

Anyone who watched filmed TV comedies in the 1960s (especially in daily reruns) came to recognise the same laughs over and over and over. Then there was the ridiculousness of laugh tracks on cartoons (ABC demanded one on The Flintstones over Hanna-Barbera’s objections).

On live shows, adding laughs could ruin the comedy, as the people on stage had to figure out how long to wait for their next line as the reactions didn’t exist until added in production after the show.

But no less a comedian than Jack Benny thought there was a place for a laugh machine. He explained his feelings to one of newspaperdom’s favourite Benny quoters. This was found in the Camden Courier-Post on Dec. 7, 1959 and later in other papers.

Benny’s Success Secret—Timing
By EARL WILSON
NEW YORK—Jack Benny would like to confess right now that he used canned laughter recently —with no less a guest star than Harry Truman.
When all that furor about “honesty" and "realism" in TV was raging, CBS president Frank Staunton said canned laughter would have to go—but Jack figures there was a misunderstanding because nobody from the CBS brass asked him to drop it.
"When you film a show, you almost have to have it," Jack remarked a few days ago at the Sherry-Netherland while relaxing late in the afternoon in a dressing gown.
"We filmed the Truman interview in the library in Independence. He was saying some very funny things.
"For him to have said these things without any laugh response would have been deadly. Furthermore, I know that when Harry Truman says something funny, an audience is going to scream more at him than at a comedian." Laughter Important
And so the canned laughter was inserted—with Jack personally doing the editing.
"Could this have been the canned laughter from some old Fred Allen show, the laughs being from people who are now dead?" I asked Jack.
"I don't know where we get them," Jack shrugged. "I just know that they're important."
"You have to know which joke is worth a tiny giggle, which one gets a shriek, and which one gets a roar that will lead to applause."
Probably Jack's attention to such details of laughter is responsible for his reputation for having such great timing.
"Nobody can explain timing," Jack said. Nevertheless, he has his ear carefully attuned to it during a show. And fearing that some guest star may not understand timing as thoroughly as he does, he will flash a cue to the guest. He'll tell the guest in advance, "Wait till the first laugh simmers down, and then when I look at you, but not until then, you read your next line."
Jack's "pauses," generally accepted as the secret of his timing, have had strange results. Playing the Palladium in London, he permitted Phil Harris to insult him onstage.
Phil had been pretty smart-alecky about his boss in the routine and had strutted off after saying, "I'll be back again, folks, because the old man needs me."
"I got a big laugh just standing there glaring at the audience," Jack said. "The audience could read my mind: 'I'm paying this so-and-so big money and all he does is insult me.' I could keep the laugh going as long as I wanted to. The laughing went on so long one night, that finally somebody up in the gallery yelled, 'For God's sake. Mr. Benny, say something!' That got the biggest laugh of all."
Jack thought of planting a spectator there to do it every night but decided against it because impromptu laughs generally are better than planned ones.

On radio, studio audiences provided the laughter. Fred Allen hated them because he felt they didn’t get the jokes, so there were no laughs and it screwed up his timing. Henry Morgan tried to do comedy without an audience for the same reason. The experiment lasted one show. Then there were Bob and Ray who never needed laughs on radio; they treated their show like a jock shift, not a studio comedy/variety.

Jack Benny, as you read above, had a fine sense of timing when it came to laughs. But changing to a transcribed radio show changed the laughs. Jack milked them. He waited until they died down before going on to the next line.

The transcribed shows are different. Some of the shows are overwritten so they tried to squeeze everything in by having dialogue jump in while the laughs are being heard (the show would have been mixed that way in production after recording). One bad example is the end of the “grass reek” show; Jack’s tail line has obviously been edited over top of the laughs.

Regardless, Jack got plenty of laughs from real people in real time over the years. It’s why his career lasted so long.

Vanishing Binko

Animation is full of footnotes, and Binko is one of them.

I still can’t figure out if he was called Binko Bear or Binko the Cub. But he’s notable because a number of the people who worked on him went on to bigger things—Ken Harris, the McKimsons, Jack Zander, Preston Blair and others.

Binko was the product of the Romer Grey studio. Over the years, knowledgeable people have pieced together the Grey story. I’m not one of them, but I posted about the studio here.

In 1930, not much was expected out of animated cartoons. The idea of sound married to animated action on the screen was novel enough. So it was Grey followed the example of Harman-Ising at Warners and Walt Disney. Animals played make-shift musical instruments. They danced.

Grey’s animators tried overlays and perspective animation but a surviving cartoon, Hot Toe Mollie, comes out blah. Bosko and Mickey Mouse are at least likeable in their early cartoons. Binko is a zero.

The animation checking leaves something to be desired. In one scene, Binko vanishes twice. The first time, he disappears for three frames, the second time, for four frames. The second example is below (The fourth drawing below is held for two frames).



Even the sausage horse disappears for a frame.



Evidently the opaquers got conflicting instructions. The horse’s grey shades are inconsistent. It’s tough to tell in the drawing below, but the horse isn’t the same colour as the one above and you can see the tone switch back and forth on the screen. Compare the two drawings.



Perhaps the most painful thing is an animation cycle of an elephant swaying at a table. It would appear the drawings were not numbered correctly as the elephant violently twitches, He jerks to the right and then back to the left.



The cartoon has floating action as the director (Volney White?) hadn’t learned a good use of timing and spacing in-betweens. And there are an awful lot of unmatched shots, where a cut to a close-up has a character in a completely different position than in the previous longer shot. Yes, it was 1930, but other studios were far slicker than this.

Even if the Binko cartoon had been more competently made, Grey had a large problem—there was no major studio available in 1931 to distribute his cartoons. Warners, Paramount, MGM, Univeral, RKO, Columbia, even Educational all had cartoon releases. United Artists wasn’t releasing shorts then. That didn’t leave very much (Monogram and Tiffany). Personality-challenged Binko never stood a chance.