The Man Who Didn’t Like Norman Corwin

Radio has turned into the din of repetitious positioning statements and almost identical-sounding young people droning almost identical-sounding autotuned songs. But there was a time when radio was much more.

I speak not through misty eyes of nostalgia. For one thing, I wasn’t born when radio was in its Golden Age. Let columnists Edwin Seaver and Robin McKown speak from that time, from June 9, 1945 about a man who died today at age 101, Norman Corwin.

Robert E. Sherwood says that Norman Corwin is undoubtedly the finest radio writer in the United States. He has developed new techniques in the field of radio writing. His poems and dramas are written to be heard rather than to be read. Yet his two books, “Thirteen by Corwin” and “More by Corwin,” read surprisingly well.
Maybe you heard his new one—“On a Note of Triumph”—broadcast over CBS on V-E Day. It began like this:

So they’ve given up,
They’re finally done in, and the rat is dead in an alley back of the Wilhelmstrasse,
Take a bow, G. I.; take a bow, little guy,
The superman of tomorrow lies at the feet of you common men of this afternoon.
This is it, kid, this is The Day, all the way from Newburyport to Vladivostok,
You had what it took and you gave it, and each of you has a hunk of rainbow around your helmet.
Seems like free men have done it again.

Schoolteachers in the future are going to have a hard job defining Corwin’s radio entertainments, like “On a Note of Triumph.” Here’s how the publishers try to define it: “It is much easier to describe by telling what it isn’t than what it is. It isn’t an essay, an epic poem, a photo drama, a play, a novel, a short story, or a series of vignettes, yet it has the elements of each.”

Certainly, Corwin was a pioneer in television when few people had even seen a television. His “Untitled” was adapted from radio and broadcast on WCBW on May 24, 1945 in support of the Seventh War Loan. He won an Emmy a number of years later. But despite all that, radio truly was his medium.

“Brilliant” was just one of the words being used on a regular basis to describe Norman Corwin and his radio work only a few years after arriving at CBS in 1938. By then, he had achieved fame, not only working with Edward R. Murrow on ‘An American in England’ series, but with dramas such as ‘We Hold These Truths,’ and the rhyming “The Plot to Overthrow Christmas,” which was among Corwin’s sterling efforts repeated year after year.

George Tucker, in his syndicated ‘Man About Manhattan’ column, summed up Corwin’s life and career to date in 1941.

NEW YORK. March 20.—Norman Corwin’s press-agent calls him “the 31-year-old genius of radio.” If Corwin isn’t a genius, he has certainly found the short cut to promotion and pay.
Recently, just one of his broadcasts was listened to by 60 million people. This was “We Hold These Truths,” written in observance of the 150th anniversary of the Bill of Rights.
Recently, his services were acquired by the four major networks all at once, as conductor of the government’s series, “This is War.”
Recently, a baker’s dozen of his radio plays were published under the title of “13 by Corwin.”
Recently, he said, “Some radio writers feel they must shock on audience into listening. They’re afraid to ask the people to think. But some audiences like to think, and who am I to discourage them.”
After his Bill of Rights broadcast Corwin received 1,350 letters. Among those congratulating him were Irvin S. Cobb, Maxwell Anderson, George Jean Nathan, and President Roosevelt. Then “We Hold These Truths” was published, and his first act was to waive the royalties.
There isn’t anything too spectacular or unusual in Corwin’s early record. He was a newspaperman, a color writer. For awhile he was a dramatic critic and got himself banned from various theaters for his blunt opinions. He came to New York and politely sought an audience with the heads of the various radio stations. He had an idea and he thought he’d like to give it a play.
This reserved approach got him nowhere, and in a short time he became a voluminous letter writer, knocking off scores of letters to all radio stations within reaching distance. Finally, one of them gave him a minor opening.
Then he began to write radio plays that have touched so many high “O’s” in the last few years. Not all of them have been wonders. Most of them have been excellent.
He tells you that he is a defeated poet. For awhile, during his newspaper days, he used to write about the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox in rhyme. Or maybe it was just blank verse. After reading a number of these, his editor quietly moved him into the spot of radio columnist, and his versifying came to an end.
Corwin is a soft spoken young man who wears a moustache.
He has been highly praised and emphatically damned by critics.
So maybe he is a genius after all.
I am told he was offered a seven-year writing and directing contract in Hollywood only a few weeks ago—and turned it down.
He looks at the mounting baskets of mail today, and remembers a time back in his career when he made his first broadcast. That was in Boston. He was on the air ten weeks. During that time the fans wrote him exactly three letters.


One of the emphatical damners was Axel Storm of the King Features Syndicate, whose ‘Broadway Nights’ column of August 27, 1941 ripped apart a mystery/horror that was pulled off the stage after eight performances. He then pointed his poisoned pen at another topic:

[t]here are many things worse than death. And one of these things is to have to sit through a play written by an author of radio sketches.
We’ve squawked about the movies so much that our readers surely know that we are a highbrow of the worst and most snobbish sort. But harsh, and bitter as were the things we have said about what we cognoscenti call “the silver screen,” they’re lullabies and panegyrics compared with what we think of radio sketches.
In the first place, a writer of radio plays writes for the ear. There’s a Mr. Norman Corwin who writes the way Mr. Orson Welles acts—that is, you can just hear the corn grow and bask in the orotundity of his prose-poetry. And Mr. Corwin appears, by popular acclaim, to be tops in his questionable profession...There may be something in a loud speaker which makes you scare easy, but we’ve yet to hear a scary sketch on the radio which doesn’t have the suspicious odor of frying ham...
There’s an old saying in French (we’re a world-famous linguist, as you should know) on which we’ll improve slightly. It’s to the effect that “chacun son metier les cochons seront bien garde” and in English it means that if everyone stuck to his own trade there’d be no lack of swineherds.
Let this be a warning to ladies and gentlemen who write sketches and skits for the radio. Avoid, we beseech, the legitimate stage as you would the plague. It’s a different medium which requires, despite your lofty salaries and your high-minded desire to educate the public, a little something that radio scripts don’t need and can’t use. Remember that the stage is a mature author’s playground, and that a blood-curdling shriek can be appallingly, heart-rendingly funny.

The play which raised Mr. Storm’s bitchy ire was not written by a radio writer, as best as we can tell, let alone Norman Corwin, so his “warning” is little more than a chance to prove his point he is indeed a snob. He offers no specific criticism of any of Corwin’s works. And while Axel Storm is long forgotten, Norman Corwin is remembered today. You can read more about his career HERE.

And here is ‘The Plot to Overthrow Christmas’ from 1942. It takes about 11 seconds to get going. The opening announcer sounds like Tony Marvin.



THE PLOT TO OVERTHROW CHRISTMAS

Back Alley Oproar Smears

How often is Sylvester the Cat a winner? Almost never. And that may the reason I like ‘Back Alley Oproar’ (1948). Poor Sylvester’s always losing to Tweety or Speedy Gonzales or that giant mouse. Here, he takes on a heckling persona for a change and does a great job at it.

Friz Freleng reworked his 1941 ‘Notes to You’ and came up with this cartoon, with many of the same gags but a quicker pace. The original cartoon with Porky Pig is funny but this remake is even funnier.

This cartoon also features a few smear drawings where an in-between is stretched between poses.






The first drawing is as Sylvester is conducting himself in a rowsing version of ‘Largo al factotum’ (or ‘Figaro’ as I called it as a kid). The second is when he hands his sheet music to a goofy cat (with a soprano voice) before rushing away to avoid Elmer’s baseball bat. The third is as he’s about to tap a vase with a hammer to get a bell sound to punctuate his performance of ‘Angel in Disguise.’ The fourth is when the angelic version of Elmer realises the nine lives of Sylvester are following him into the after-life.

I’ve always like Paul Julian’s attention to detail in the way he handles light in background drawings. Look at how he has a nail in the fence reflect moonlight in the first drawing.

The credited animators in this cartoon are Gerry Chiniquy, Manny Perez, Ken Champin and Virgil Ross. Virgil liked doing these kinds of drawings and Thad Komorowski tells me he did the first one. I suspect he did the last. I can’t tell you about the rest.

Cow Puncher

Take Tex Avery’s sight-gag puns, mix them with “modern” design and limited animation, and you get ‘Symphony in Slang’ (1951). The animation is by Walt Clinton, Mike Lah and Grant Simmons and the backgrounds by Johnny Johnsen, but the star is designer Tom Oreb. He was between stints at Disney and Tex brought him in for this one cartoon. Why he did it is a bit puzzling as John Canemaker’s book on Avery shows Ed Benedict was already at MGM and Benedict was thoroughly capable of coming up with designs that moved away from the 1940s style.



The “carry on” pun is probably the most outrageous, but my favourite is the one about punching cattle. Avery used it in ‘Detouring America’ (1939) at Warners but it works better in this one because of the limited animation; there’s no extraneous movement, just the punching. And you’ve got to love those cows.

This cartoon must be a favourite of many. You can see screen grabs and layout drawings from it HERE. And you can read the dialogue HERE. You’ll see “John Brown” next to the slang hipster character. That isn’t his name. That’s the name of the actor who is doing all the parts in this short. Brown used virtually the same voice on Fred Allen’s radio show for John Doe, McGee (a songwriter) and a host of incidental man-on-the-street, New York types.

Jack Benny in Vegas

For years, Sunday was Jack Benny day on the radio. He was so popular that, for a time in the major cities on the West Coast, he was heard twice a day. One station picked up his 4 p.m. broadcast designed for eastern stations (Sunday nights at 7) and another would broadcast the repeat performance that supposed to be for the West Coast at 9:30. At least on American stations. Once Benny’s sponsorship switched to an American cigarette company, Canadian stations didn’t, or wouldn’t, pick up his show. No matter. Seattle beamed into Vancouver with ease.

As today is Sunday, it’s therefore an appropriate day to post Jack Benny here on the blog. Jack’s character would appreciate my thrift in presenting old newspaper stories which I put up elsewhere on the internet over the last several years.

Jack had received offers to play Las Vegas and turned them down because wife Mary Livingstone wasn’t crazy about the gambling atmosphere. But then Noel Coward played Vegas, so Jack or his people decided there was nothing wrong with Jack Benny doing the same (and collecting a large cheque). So he opened at the Flamingo in June 1957. And it was a huge success, as if anyone had any doubt.

One of Broadway’s great entertainment columnists, Earl Wilson, devoted a whole day’s effort in 1958 to Jack and his best friend, George Burns, in Sin City.

On Broadway
Gaming Tables Won’t Get Jack Benny's Bucks
By EARL WILSON
LAS VEGAS, July 19—Jack Benny, on vacation here from television, gave me an exclusive explanation of his secret system of not losing at the dice table. (He doesn’t play.)
Actually, he doesn't play much. He'd been sitting in the Flamingo coffee shop with George Burns about 5 p.m. when he yawned and George said, “What are you going to do? Take a nap?”
“I think I might go lose $20,” he said.
And so one of the richest men in show business, in shorts and sports shirt, was seen leaning over a hot dice table a few minutes later, risking a few silver dollars—while next to him several nonentities with much lesser fortunes were betting $50 chips.
“I limit myself to $100 a day,” Jack told me earlier. “And if the $100 is gone by noon, that's still my limit. If I didn’t—being here a whole month—I could get killed.”
In his Flamingo night club act —a big sellout—he tells it somewhat differently.
“We all get about the same salary here but I take mine home,” he says. “Oh, I may risk a few dollars. But by that time, the house has bought me four cigars and six drinks, and I’m ahead. I may become an alcoholic but never a gambler.”
Jack’s fascinated by the highrollers. We discussed a well-known figure who won $1,000,000 in a card game.
“That guy can't sit down to lunch without making a bet—such as how many seeds there are in his slice of watermelon,” George Burns said.
“Or whether the waitress will serve you or me first,” Jack said, “Those guys know how to gamble. I don’t.”
Jack’s playing it safe, too, by starring here in a cafe show. “I was such a big hit the first time they brought me right back only 11 months later,” he says.
JACK WORKS with fellow fiddler Gisele MacKenzie—and has something fresh and novel for cafe crowds: The Jack Benny fan club from Yermo, Nev., a small town near here. The Jack Benny fan club turns out to be, Jack says, “dames all about 80 years old.” Actually, some are only 60.
“I tried to get them to work nude,” Jack tells his audience.
When the fan club is invited up on stage, one fan titters “I haven’t been so excited since I danced with President Buchanan.”
They invite Jack to the convention of the Jack Benny fan clubs which, they say, is to be held in Minnesota.
“Why Minnesota?” asks Jack.
“Well we’ve tried other places,” one of the “girls” says, “but we seem to do better the nearer we are to the Mayo Clinic.”
Jack also tells his audiences that he conducted a poll to find out whether people preferred his TV show live or on film.
“I was surprised,” he says, “by how many didn’t like me at all.”
The truth is that Jack’s looking forward to another big year on TV. “There’s no way of changing my format because I have no format,” he said.
He felt one of his best shows last year was his takeoff on Jackie Gleason and “The Honeymooners.”
“I’d like to repeat that in New York!” he said. “And get Gleason to come on at the end. I’ll have tell Gleason to stay fat so I can do it.”
“Jackie's slim again,” I said.
“That would be better!” he decided. He thought Audrey Meadows was great on that show.
“If they want an exciting new star on Broadway, they should get Audrey Meadows,” he said. I think she’s sensational.”
JACK’S WIFE Mary came over at this point to say she’d been on the phone all day. “Do you know what all those calls were for?” she said. “Reservations, what can I do about them, Jack?”
“You can’t do a damn thing,” Jack said. The room where he performs has a sign over it saying, “Jack Benny’s Vault.” The lettering is in pennies. The club even removed chairs from Jack’s dressing room so more customers could be accommodated.
Jack asked me how I liked “The Music Man” and I told him about a man in it who drops a valise with a loud crash. When asked what he does, he says, “I’m an anvil salesman.”
“Isn’t that an old vaudeville bit?” I asked Jack and George Burns.
“I never saw it,” both said.
“But I think it’s very funny,” Jack said. “If it were given to me, I’d do it.”
George Burns sucked his cigar. “I’m going to do it!” he announced. “Not only that, I’m going to wire them and tell them to take it out of the show because I originated it and it’s mine.”
Jack laughed for two minutes.
That’s why they say he’s the world’s best audience and one of show business’ nicest people.

The Honeymooners parody was broadcast on January 26, 1958. It really showcases what talent Dennis Day had. He spoofs, but captures, Art Carney as Ed Norton. Benny’s Ralph Kramden is pretty funny; he’s got all the mannerisms down. Audrey Meadows makes a guest appearance to add some authenticity. And Benny’s Art Director Robert Tyler Lee has come up with a great imitation of the dingy Kramden apartment.

Texas Tom

Tom and Jerry may have won seven Oscars in the ‘40s and early ‘50s but I’d, frankly, rather watch a Warner Bros. cartoon from that same period over them any day. The MGM cartoons are expertly animated with wonderfully displayed emotions. But I prefer the wise-ass Warners characters who are silly and unexpectedly inventive, generally in the same cartoon. Tom and Jerry are too full of humiliation and pain for my liking. And the less said, the better, about the later Tom and Jerrys which needed to rely on whining ducks, childish mice and even a teenaged babysitter to drive the plots.

But there are some cartoons that don’t altogether fit in those categories, and they can be enjoyable. ‘Mouse in Manhattan’ (1945) has a charm that overcomes potential hokeyness. ‘Heavenly Puss’ (1949) is highlighted by Tom reacting to his own desperation and a fun, evil Satanic bulldog. And then there’s ‘Texas Tom’ (1950).

There’s a great sequence of animation by Ray Patterson as Tom dudes up in cowboy duds to impress a girl kitty with his “singing”, only to have Jerry show off what a poser he is by changing the speed of the record the cat is lip-synching to.



And just before that, we get this reaction from Tom when he sees the girl cat. Yeah, it’s not as wild as a Tex Avery take, but it’s an attractive and effective one. The animator is Ken Muse, a former Disney animator who was a mainstay when Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera opened their own studio in 1957.

Tom’s song, “If You’re Ever in Texas, Look Me Up,” is casually crooned by Ken Darby of The King’s Men, the vocalists (with Billy Mills and his Orchestra) on ‘Fibber McGee and Molly’ (radio comedy shows always seemed to break for a musical interlude). Darby also worked on ‘Song of the South’ for the Walt Disney studio.

Hare-Brained Backgrounds

It appears Paul Julian painted the woodsy backgrounds for ‘The Hare-Brained Hypnotist,’ a 1942 Warner Bros. cartoon.




What’s odd is not the backgrounds themselves but how they were used. Here’s the scene: Bugs is in his hole. There’s a cut to a shot of Elmer in the sky above him, then a cut back to Bugs in his hole. But, as you can see, the setting has changed. The same background drawing should have been used.

This is an enjoyable cartoon. Director Friz Freleng and writer Mike Maltese are already making fun of the Bugs/Elmer formula, two years after it was created. The self-parody is much more satisfying and likeable here than in Freleng’s later ‘Hare Brush’ (1955).

The cartoon was laid out by Bob Holdeman, according to author Graham Webb. Robert Logan Holdeman was a graduate of Chouinard who had been at Disney in the ‘30s. Newspaper stories indicate he moved north to the Bay area by early 1955, where he was a landscape architect, designer and a faculty member of the California School of Fine Arts. His watercolours graced a number of showings in the San Francisco-Oakland area. Like Lenard Kester, John McGrew and Gene Fleury, he was another artist of the early ‘40s who never received credit in a Warner Bros. cartoon.

Jimmy Durante and His Bed

The mark of really good entertainment is not only whether it stands up over time, but continues to attract appreciative new generations, something that delights the fans that came before them.

I’ve been watching old cartoons for as long as I can remember, and listening to old radio shows for about as long. Just like the best cartoons, the best network radio shows of the ’30s, ‘40s and ‘50s still have a huge fan base of all ages.

My favourites are in the comedy, variety and musical genres (with the occasional quiz show tossed in). Jack Benny had an almost perfect show of casting and timing. Fred Allen’s at his best when he suddenly blurts out a cutting analogy (despite his endless, health-sapping labour to write each week’s broadcast).

And then there’s Jimmy Durante.

I grew up near the end of Durante’s life when he wasn’t treated as a comedian so much as a living piece of nostalgia. Talk about Durante inevitably included talk about a time that had passed long ago. Of course, Durante traded on the past even during his peak (as did Cantor and Jolson, but with less sentimentality at the time), belting out his old vaudeville tunes and peppering shows with references of the era when the Palace was The Top.

Durante had been in a bit of a career slump, partly due to his wife’s illness, until he was hired to be the comedian opposite a rising young comedian named Garry Moore in a restructured version of ‘The Camel Caravan’ that debuted March 25, 1943. Newspaper stories of the day strongly suggest the programme was actually supposed to be Moore’s with Durante as a kind of permanent special guest comedian. But the unlikely combination clicked.

I defy you not to love Durante. You can’t help it. He has an infectious enthusiasm. He really wants to entertain you; you can hear it right on the air. He butchers the English language and realises that’s funny (and it’s never contrived). He seems completely devoid of ego, which can’t be said about some others on the air then. Jimmy Durante’s the kind of guy you’d like to hang out with, even if it’s just for a half hour via a piece of “furniture that talks” (as Fred Allen put it), which was fine as far as the Camel cigarette people and their ad agency were concerned.

It was from radio’s Durante that we heard “Dat’s my boy who said dat”, “I gotta a million of ‘em,” and what eventually became a poignant good night to Mrs. Calabash.

There are always great stories about Durante out there, and here’s one from January 5, 1942. It’s a syndicated newspaper column in conjunction with a publicity tour for a movie he shot with Phil Silvers called ‘You’re in the Army Now.’

One Brass Bed Has Jinx On Durante
By GEORGE TUCKER
NEW YORK — There’s an old brass bed to storage in the basement of the Astor hotel. When Jimmy Durante heaves his funnybones to town, this bed is resurrected, with many a sigh by the hired hands, and set up in a room that looks straight down Broadway. It’s the only bed and the only room the Schnoz will sleep in.
He told me this seven or eight years ago, and I set it down as the genial palaver of a guy who felt like talking. I was wrong. Durante has a standing order for that bed to be resurrected and sheeted for his benefit whenever he is in town.
Jimmy is in town now. And this hideous token of a vanished elegance is in its place at the hotel.
“I love it,” the clown says. “Best sleepin’ bed in town.”
* * *
James Durante, who came to fame through the open door of the lower East Side, with an assist from his nose, is a funnyman who is indulging in the serious business of a professional comeback. His appearance in the city at this time was dictated by the opening of “You’re In the Army Now,” a film, and said to be a very funny film. I haven’t seen it
On the way to New York he stopped off in Chicago to do a benefit that was witnessed by 28,000 people. His reception was so enthusiastic that Jim reverted to his form of other days and began breaking the furniture. During the process he broke off the legs of an expensive Steinway piano. Next day Ashton Stevens, noted drama critic, commented on the breakage editorially; it was well worth it, said Stevens. What’s a few pianos when the crowd got such a laugh.
Mr. Stevens is a man after Jimmy Durante’s own heart. Only, Jimmy would say it this way,
“What’s ANYTHING matter . . . when you can get a few laughs.”

‘You’re in the Army Now’ wasn’t really a great success, surprising to us today considering Silvers went on to do a wonderful army sitcom on television. But critics were lukewarm, at best, about the script. And the star combination doesn’t strike me as a good one. Silvers’ delivery is just too brash against the old-corn pitching of Durante. They don’t complement each other, not like a Hope and Crosby. Or a Durante and Moore, for that matter. Garry Moore’s humour just smart enough to befuddle and bemuse former street-kid Durante. Moore’s known today as being little more than a genial host; Goodson-Todman TV game shows never gave him a chance to display all his talent.

You’ll see Jack Benny posts along the way on the blog and a few about Fred Allen. And I hope some about Durante, too. I don’t gotta million of ‘em. But one or two should be just fine.

Pat Matthews

One of the most enjoyable pieces of animation that ever appeared in a Walter Lantz cartoon is in ‘The Bandmaster’ (1947) where a drunk with his finger stuck in a jug of moonshine staggers across a high wire and meets some imaginary pink elephants. The timing and poses of the stumbling are perfect, complete with the drunk weaving in perspective at the camera. It must look terrific on a movie screen.

This great little expressive scene was drawn by a former Disney in-betweener, one of greatest unsung animators of the Golden Age—Pat Matthews.





Classical music, dancing and pink elephants invite instant comparisons to Disney (think ‘Fantasia’ meets ‘Dumbo’) but Matthews doesn’t let the audience down with hack work. His terpsichorean sequence is handled with grace and then inventiveness as each of the elephants finds a different way to flow, ghost-like, back into the little opening of the jug. Certainly not all of this would have been on a storyboard (writer Bugs Hardaway specialised in corny puns), leaving Matthews room for his own imagination.

(Yes, the jug disappears on occasion but I’ll accept the dramatic license in this case).

There are a few really unattractive parts in this cartoon (the one with a female aerial artist held aloft by a set of false teeth, for example), but they’re not by Matthews. He also has the task of animating Andy Panda conducting and, again, perfectly times a variety of poses with thrusts in perspective at the viewer. Fred Brunish was responsible for the nice light/highlight effect on the podium in the background drawing.



Lantz remarked that the animation in his musical cartoons had to be to the beat and the animators couldn’t cheat. Matthews does not only a wonderful job here, but an even more astounding job a few years earlier when he animated “Miss X” (as publicity blurbs called her) for Shamus Culhane’s marvellous ‘The Greatest Man in Siam’ and ‘Abou Ben Boogie’ (both 1944).

Matthews career took him to UPA where he worked on the studio’s most critically-acclaimed films, and then to Mexico, where he died in a car accident in 1971. Matthews’ work deserves to be more widely-known by fans of classic animation.

Thanksgiving With Irv Spence

It is said on the internet, and the internet is never wrong, that buried in this scene of Tex Avery’s ‘Jerky Turkey’ (1945) are caricatures of members of the MGM animation units. I can only pick out one with any certainty. The pilgrim on the far left (and again under ‘Ye Vine’ sign) is Irv Spence.



Irven Leroy Spence needs no introduction if you’re a fan of the Golden Age of Theatrical Animation. His career in animation spanned almost 60 years, and he worked with Avery three times—once at Warners in the later ‘30s, then twice at MGM in the ‘40s before being parked in the Hanna-Barbera unit to handle many action scenes on Tom and Jerry cartoons. He ended up at the Hanna-Barbera studio around 1964 and stayed for a number of years (he and Hanna had gone to high school together).

Spence caricatured himself better than whoever did here (whether Ben Shenkman was at MGM at this point, I don’t know). Spence drew a daily diary in 1944 and it’s been on the internet for awhile. You can find the drawings at the Filboid Studge site. You’ve got to love Spence’s sense of composition, especially in the drawings of him golfing with Ed Barge.

As a public service for all animation fans, Thad Komorowski has compiled a “reel” of some of Spence’s best work at Warners, MGM and Iwerks.



Spence suffered from Alzheimer’s in his later years. He died in Dallas on September 21, 1995, age 86.

Psychedelic Pspider-Man

No cartoon series in the history of television made an abrupt change more than the original adventures of Peter Parker’s alter-ego.

The show debuted September 9, 1967 (9 a.m.) and went from a pretty standard hero-fights-villain-as-supporting-cast-provides-comic-relief cartoon to something disconcerting. The supporting cast vanished, the animation was reused over and over and over (even within the same episode) and the plots seemed pretty warped and other-worldly.

And the most bizarre cartoon of them all was one that’s become a cult favourite: ‘Revolt in the Fifth Dimension’ (1970).

The tabloid tale of events: Grantray-Lawrence in Los Angeles produced the first season of the show and went bankrupt. Steve Krantz and Ralph Bakshi in New York took over for the last two seasons. Both would explore the drug culture in ‘Fritz the Cat’ a few years later, but the two experiment with psychedelia here. Lots of flashes on the screen, nightmarish fast spinning, and a disjointed story line. The fact is the story, drawings, even the voice track was lifted from a cartoon made a couple of years earlier: the ‘Dementia 5’ episode of the most wretched Canadian cartoon series ever made—‘Rocket Robin Hood.’

But the backgrounds are really cool. And they’re by someone who was known for fairly ordinary and unobtrusive work at Warner Bros. and Hanna-Barbera—Richard H. Thomas. Check out these. Beautiful colours, too.




Dark and foreboding. Who knew Dick Thomas had it in him? Think you’d see this in a Hippety Hopper cartoon? (Although that “giant mouse” is disconcerting in his own way).

Many of the backgrounds in this cartoon weren’t designed for characters to work in front of. They were flashed onto the screen for effect. And, if the whole cartoon hadn’t been undermined by the repetitive, cheap-looking animation, it might have worked.

Thomas worked from layouts by incredibly inventive illustrator Gray Morrow, who died ten years ago when he decided he could live with Parkinson’s Disease no longer.

The other great thing about Spider-Man in the Krantz years was the decision to save money by going with recorded background music from England featuring some of the greatest library composers of the 1960s. It’s instantly recognisable to any Spidey fan. I don’t know whether this will work, but try to play these two tunes by Johnny Hawksworth. (Late note: Sorry, the links don’t work any more).


THE EYELASH


BEAT TO BEGIN

‘Revolt in the Fifth Dimension’ may still be up on the internet. It’s worth watching just to see how odd a cartoon it really is.