Today’s $64,000 Challenge

In 1950s America, it was an American as apple pie to be a little concerned about those Ruskies, even for politicians in Washington to pound their desks with their ham-like fists, shake their jowls and warn how dangerous the Soviet Union was to Our Freedom. But, even in America, there were limits.

54 years ago yesterday, someone decided to hijack live TV network airwaves to get America to do something about it. 45 million people watched.

Viewers Suddenly Challenged By Interloper on TV Quiz
NEW YORK, Nov. 18—(AP)—Viewers watching “The $64,000 Challenge TV” quiz last night were startled to hear themselves challenged.
In the midst of the program, a man later identified by police as Richard Fichter, 34, of Route 1 Springville, Pa., walked in front of a camera and read from a prepared statement:
“America, I have a challenge. The Russians are ahead of you. ... ”
Fichter got no further. The camera swung away from him, he was grabbed by the stage director and was ushered into the wings after his brief performance.
The director, Seymour Robbie, said later he saw Fichter walk into a televised area that included three contestants and a master of ceremonies but thought he was a CBS employe. As soon as Fichter began to read, Robbie shouted through an intercom system: “Remove him.”
Fichter was taken by police to Bellevue Hospital, where he was admitted to the psychiatric ward.
Police refused to divulge the contents of his statement. They said it was headed: “$64,000 Challenge as Prepared by Richard Fichter.”
Legitimately on stage at the time were the M. C., Ralph Story, and three contestants, Teddy Nadler, Norman Fruman and Barry Simmons. All three had already won $4,000 and Story was asking Fruman the $8,000 question when Fichter appeared.
Fruman, a comic book writer from the Bronx, finally answered the question correctly.
The three contestants were involved in an elimination match in the “general knowledge” quiz category. Nadler, a former civil service clerk from St. Louis, and Simmons, a 20-year-old New York City public relations man, will have a chance next week to draw even again with Fruman.
Studio officials said Fichter, a tall, bearded man, had tried to participate in rehearsals yesterday afternoon but was ejected. He had a ticket for last night’s show.

It’s easy to read this and think the guy was some kind of kook who, today, would be screeding incoherently all over the internet. But perhaps not. A little newspaper digging (thanks, internet!) reveals Fichter was born in Hamilton, Ohio and grew up in nearby Oxford, where his father was head of the state Grange, a farmer’s organisation. He and a brother became ministers and had been granted a deferment from military service in World War Two because they were conscientious objectors to war. A third brother was hauled before a grand jury for failing to report, after losing his attempt at deferral based on the same objection. Fichter took his Methodist ministry to Springville, but decided to go into dairy farming. That’s what he was doing when he challenged the ‘Challenge.’

Fichter was involved in a protest in December the following year outside a prison farm in Ohio where another minister had been incarcerated for refusing to pay taxes because they were being used for military purposes. He, his wife, and three children had driven 650 miles to picket the Cincinnati courthouse where the man’s sentencing was taking place.

Furthermore, the United Press story on Fichter’s TV appearance says he “told network official Julia Shorwell he could not ‘sleep two nights ago and got up and wrote a message to the American people about godlessness.’ His message said Americans were ‘frustrated’ because Russia was ahead scientifically and were ‘frantically blaming first this one and then that one.’” It would appear he wanted to warn about the end result of increasing Soviet paranoia, not feed it.

Later, he and his family lived for 13 years in Arzier, Switzerland, and Frankfurt, West Germany. While in Europe he founded and edited a magazine called “Equality,” at one time published in four languages. The family returned to Oxford in 1972 where Fichter died on June 3, 1977 after a long bout with cancer.

Crackpot or someone with a legitimate concern? Considering protests of various kinds have continued since Fichter’s day, it’s perhaps a challenge to decide who is what.

Van Beuren’s Barnyard Bunk

Perhaps there’s some kind of perversity in the make-up of human beings that they like theatrical cartoons that really aren’t that great. There are actually fans of the Gene Deitch Tom and Jerrys. There are people who willing watch Cool Cat. In my case, I enjoy some of the old Van Beuren cartoons.

Yes, they’re pretty third-rate compared to what the people were doing across the street from Van Beuren at the Fleischer studio. Some of the drawing is downright ugly. Many of the cartoons are still written like they were stuck in the silent era—next to no dialogue, just music and sound/vocal effects. And they’re downright strange, either in terms of gags or a story that’s all over the place. But there’s something I like about them, at least the best of them.

Van Beuren’s big stars in the early part of the 1930s were named Tom and Jerry, one tall, one short. Neither had a fleshed-out personality; they just kind of went about their business and occasionally reacted. But several of their cartoons are innocent fun. One of them is ‘Barnyard Bunk,’ released in September 1932.

How can you hate a cartoon with an apron-wearing cow that dances to "Wabash Blues"? Or a chicken that lays eggs as it somersaults (and the eggs hatch into ducks)? Or farmhouse-wrecking mice that put up a ‘Danger’ sign before part of the home collapses? Or how a hoe, shovel, wheelbarrows and bail of hay sprout faces and limbs, then begin to dance to new hit song “Corn-Fed Cal” in a big finale?




You’ll notice how the dancing cow has her legs joined together. The drawing was used a couple of times in the sequence but the artists didn’t draw some Hanna-Barbaric eight-drawing cycle on twos. The dance was mainly on ones and the drawing above was used again after 59 other drawings.

Leonard Maltin dug into the bowels of obscurity in Of Mice and Magic to bring the history of the Van Beuren Studio to light in those pre-internet days, and it’s from his research our knowledge of All Things Van Beuren grew. If you want to know all about Tom and Jerry (and their predecessors Don and Waffles), go to the Cartoon Research site.

Van Beuren fans owe a lot to Steve Stanchfield at Thunderbean Animation, who did what no major company would ever do—restore the battered old Tom and Jerrys. It wasn’t an easy task for a variety of reasons but the results are just great. You can go to Thunderbean’s site here and see what they have, though I don’t believe the page has been updated for awhile. If you want to own some of the lesser-known cartoons of the ‘30s, this is the place to go.

(P.S: If you’re just new to cartoons, the cat and mouse Tom and Jerry weren’t invented until 1940, a number of years after the human Tom and Jerry vanished from theatre screens and the Van Beuren studio closed. One of Van Beuren’s employees worked on the cat and mouse Tom and Jerrys. You may have heard of him. Joe Barbera).

TV or Not TV

1948 seems to be the year many people consider the start of network television, but regular TV broadcasts were around before then. Stations went on the air in New York and Los Angeles in 1931 (some having broadcast experimentally in the late ‘20s) and the networks, small as they were, carried programming during the war years.

By 1947, newspaper articles appeared speculating whether—or when—television would overtake radio as the electronic means of choice. There was no Ed Sullivan Show yet, no Uncle Miltie. Instead, you could watch ‘Pulitzer Varieties’ or ‘King’s Record Shop’ on the DuMont Network or ‘Living Room Education’ on W6XAO in Hollywood or the first 15-minute newsreel by the Associated Press on CBS. It’s really an interesting period in television history, rarely explored.

But there was something behind the speculation. The radio networks knew it, the stars on the radio networks knew it and, most importantly, the sponsors and ad agencies of the shows on the radio networks knew it, as they watched sales of TV sets climb in the buoyant post-war economy. The question was, what was a star to do: give up a well-paying job on a radio show with a huge audience, or jump to a shaky new medium that could eventually kill their current big-money employment.

An Associated Press column put that question to a bunch of the stars during the 1948-49 season. By then, Ed and Miltie were on the small screen, cutting into radio’s numbers. Here’s what the top names had to say.

T-V by Fall?
By BOB THOMAS
HOLLYWOOD, April 22.—(AP)—When will television become big-time? Next fall perhaps. Fall of 1950 for sure.
That’s the way it looks after a survey of TV plans of most of the big air shows. It’s apparent that most of the top television talent will come from the industry’s older brother, radio. Here is the latest news:
Eddie Cantor —Will definitely jump into TV next fall, with simultaneous radio and telecast for present sponsor.
Amos ‘n’ Andy—“We are working on an unusual idea for television and hope to come up with something in the next few months.”
Burns and Allen — Going to New York in June to discuss a TV deal with CBS’ William Paley.
Jack Benny—May do a monthly videocast in the fall; was happy with his debut on the local CBS station.
Bing Crosby—Definitely plans a TV show, but may wait another year; will do show on film.
Bob Hope—Making big plans for TV; may start in fall.
Duffy’s Tavern—Easily adaptable to TV because of one barroom set; may wait until fall of 1950.
Truth or Consequences — Did one show here on TV; waiting until Kine-scoping is better or coast-to-coast telecasting is possible.
Red Skelton — MGM contract keeps him off TV until December, 1952.
[Lux] Radio Theater—Not adaptable because film studios won’t permit telecasting of movie stories of stars.
Screen Guild Players—Same.
Edgar Bergen—Plans a few telecasts next season, will probably be a regular in fall of 1950.
Al Jolson—Laying plans for a minstrel show on TV.
Ozzie and Harriet — Have put their own children into the show, replacing actors who impersonated them; this is first step toward TV show, which may start in fall.
Dennis Day—Watching situation; may start in fall.
Judy Canova—Same.
Jimmy Durante—Tied to MGM contract.
People Are Funny—Possibility of simultaneous TV and radio show in the fall.
Groucho Marx—Probably not for another year; would be done on film.
Fred Allen—In no hurry; “Let the others pioneer it.”
Fibber McGee — Definitely interested; both son and daughter in TV field; Molly calls herself a “television widow,” since Fibber spends all his time watching the screen.
My Friend Irma—All of cast is suitable for TV; waiting for CBS go-ahead.
Spike Jones—Has been experimenting with show, but no commitments yet.
Faye-Harris—Committed to another year of radio; perhaps TV after that.
Frank Sinatra—Studying the field, but no plans yet.
Take It or Leave It—Garry Moore thinks show readily adaptable for TV, ready to go.
There seems little doubt that most of these names will join Milton Berle, Arthur Godfrey, Perry Como and other air stars who have already leaped into the new field. It will happen when (1) Coast-to-coast telecasting comes in, (2) There are enough sets in the U.S. for sponsors to put out more money.

The list is almost a Who’s Who of the radio people who never quite made the jump. For all their greatness on radio, ‘Fibber McGee and Molly’ and ‘Duffy’s Tavern’ never made it on the tube. Nobody thinks of television when they think of Judy Canova. Phil Harris and Alice Faye decided to enjoy semi-retirement after their radio days and stayed out of it. Fred Allen’s reciprocal disdain for television is well known. Frank Sinatra’s role in ‘From Here to Eternity’ took his career in a whole new direction away from the small screen. And we can only imagine the reaction to Jolie’s blackface act if death hadn’t interfered with his plans for a long career in TV.

On the other hand, Jack Benny never missed a beat, though it’s arguable that he was better on radio than television due to his marvellous supporting cast. Skelton was the opposite; television gave him range to do pantomime and other things radio couldn’t. Groucho shone on ‘You Bet Your Life.’ People associate ‘Truth or Consequences’, ‘People Are Funny’ and even the long-lasting ‘Ozzie and Harriet’ more with TV than radio. ‘Take it or Leave It’ went to television after having three zeros added to its $64 jackpot. You know how it ended. And Bob Hope outlasted them all, though he avoided a regular show and stuck to increasingly tacky, cue card-laden specials on NBC.

Perhaps even more interesting is the names that aren’t on the list. When you think of ‘50s television, you think of Lucille Ball, Phil Silvers, the Honeymooners. You think of ‘Playhouse 90’ and ‘Gunsmoke.’ In other words, television viewers almost had their fill of many of the stars of radio and wanted someone new for a new medium. Perhaps to the display of the Cantors and Wynns, the public looking forward and not back.

No Barking Swirls

Chuck Jones temporarily split up his unit at the Warner Bros studio some time in 1952 and had his animators work on different cartoons. Dick Thompson and Abe Levitow animated ‘Feline Frame-Up’ (Production 1278), Ben Washam and Lloyd Vaughn drew ‘The Cat’s Bah’ (Production 1285), leaving his remaining animator to handle ‘No Barking’ (Production 1282). All were released in 1954.

Why Jones did it, I haven’t been able to discern. The studio shut down production for six months, but that wasn’t until June 1953. Regardless, Ken Harris came up with a really likeable cartoon. Not bad for a former car mechanic.

Among the many attractive things about it are a couple of bits of animation featuring swirls and multiples, the first time with Frisky Puppy and the second time, toward the end of the cartoon, with Claude Cat and Frisky.




In the last sequence, there are 12 different drawings of heads, eyes and swirls animated on twos before we get back to the drawing you see above.

Like all animators, Harris had an assistant—it was Al Pabian for awhile in the ‘50s, then Willie Ito—but whether the assistant did any work on this, I don’t know.

Harris was born Karol Ross Harris on July 31, 1898, the son of William and Katherine R. Harris. He spent his youth in a little whistlestop called Elliot near Livermore, California, and then in Stockton before moving to Los Angeles. He died in Los Angeles on March 24, 1982 after a fine, well-documented animation career.

As a trivia note, ‘No Barking’ appeared on the bill with MGM’s attempt to cash in on ‘I Love Lucy.’ See the teeny letters at the bottom of this ad for ‘The Long, Long Trailer.’ And another theatre advertised it as a “new Tweety colortoon,” even though Tweety only has a cameo at the end.

An Egg Scrambled Background

Here’s the kind of thing people never noticed until the advent of home video when they could stop scenes and peer at them for a bit.

In the Warners cartoon ‘An Egg Scramble’ (1950), Prissy the Hen escapes from a house with her precious egg that a housewife was about to boil. She thinks the cops are after her. She runs down the street and hides in a garbage can. There’s a cut to another scene, then back to Prissy jumping out of the garbage can and running down the street some more. Only the two garbage can scenes don’t have the same background.




I suspect this was done because Prissy runs across a street and to the steps of a rundown old building. Having both scenes on one background would have made for a long drawing, so two different backgrounds are used instead. Who would notice?

The layouts are by Cornett Wood and the backgrounds by Dick Thomas. I’m led to believe they were both in the Frank Tashlin unit when Bob McKimson took it over in the mid ‘40s.

The animators in this one are Phil De Lara, Chuck McKimson, Bill Melendez, Rod Scribner and Emery Hawkins. I suspect the animator of the Prissy in the first scene above is different than the one in the scene below, where there’s a fluid take and then Prissy cradles the egg like a football with one hand, uh, wing and the other to the front.

There’s an inside joke with a store called “Foster’s Fresh Eggs” (Warren Foster wrote the cartoon). My favourite background can’t be clipped together but here’s the end of it. There’s a farm road with a barbed wire fence in the foreground, and barns and stacked wheat in the background. The countryside abruptly ends at the city limits and there are cars, buildings and a strip club on a corner.



Bea Benaderet plays all the different hens in the cartoon though, inexplicably, Prissy’s voice is her’s in a couple of scenes and Mel Blanc’s in the rest.

Why Kenny Baker Quit Jack Benny

On June 18, 1939, singer Kenny Baker appeared on ‘The Jack Benny Program’ and to all the world it sounded like he would be with the rest of the cast the following week broadcasting from Waukegan, Illinois. He never made it. He was never part of Benny cast again (though he later made two guest appearances).

So what happened?

Benny fans have debated for years whether Baker was fired, whether he quit, whether he left on good terms or bad.

It took Baker more than five years before he talked about it. And, even then, it seems pieces of the story are missing. Here’s a syndicated news article from 1944, at a time he was on Broadway and had shot a couple of films, including ‘Silver Skates.’

Kenny Baker Tired of Being Just a Jerk
Walks Out of Job Paying Him $150,000 a Year
By Art Cohn
NEW YORK, Nov. 1 (INS)—Kenny Baker was tired of being a jerk, even a $150,000 per year jerk.
The world knew him only as the high-voiced dope on Jack Benny’s program who made such incredibly yappy remarks everyone else on the show sounded like an intellectual by comparison, even Phil Harris. Kenny was the all-American oaf and everyone wanted him to remain that way.
He had become a jerk unconsciously. Most jerks do. He stopped being one intentionally. Most jerks don’t.
“It wasn’t easy walking away from $150,000 a year,” he said last night in his dressing room at the Imperial theatre, “but I realized if I didn’t kill the jerk character it would kill me.”
Kenny had to make his choice: To remain A. Jerk at $3000 a week or to be K. Baker with no offers in sight. It was a big gamble but he took it. He quit Fred Allen’s program more than a year ago and rejected dozens of movie, stage and radio offers—each one wanted him only as a 21-karat Stoopnagle.
“I was doing concerts,” he recalls, “sang with symphonies, went to England and made ‘The Mikado’ but nobody would take me seriously, they thought of me only as a jerk. I couldn't get a straight part to save my soul. That made me mad.”
The fact he has a boyish face and does not look a day over 22, although he is 10 years older, did not help either.
Father of Three
“It’s awfully embarrassing,” he growled. “When I bought a ranch in California last year, the man who sold it to me insisted that my father sign the papers; he didn’t think I was old enough.”
Rather ironical, considering that Baker is, the father of three children—Kenny, Jr., 7; Susan, 4 ½, and Johnny, the 8-month-old baby.
The “jerk,” as he always refers to the character he portrayed on the radio, was an accident.
“Mr. Benny originally hired me only as a soloist,” he says, “after I won a national audition conducted by Eddie Duchin. I was a genuine hayseed when I started on the program. I had lived in Long Beach, California, all my life and had never been on a train, let alone out of the state.
“I was 24, but shaved only once a week. I wore a $22 tuxedo, had the darndest mop of bushy hair and two buck teeth. The first night I stumbled over three chairs and when I was introduced to Mary Livingston I said, ‘How do you do, I am sure.’ It was on the level; that was the way I looked and talked.
A Sap Is Born
“Harry Conn, who was Mr. Benny’s chief script writer at the time, nearly split a gut laughing at me that first night. Then he got together with Mr. Benny and they began giving me hick lines to read...”.
And a new national symbol for a sap was born.
Baker is a revelation as the leading juvenile in “A Touch of Genius,” Broadway’s latest musical hit. The critics gave him rave notices and, as a result, he has received special offers to return to radio—in a serious drama. He is about to sign for a weekly half-hour show over a national network, one combining his talents as a singer and narrator.

The story is incorrect to claim Baker had no offers in sight when he quit the Benny show. He was under contract to Mervyn LeRoy Productions, as each Benny broadcast reminded listeners, and LeRoy certainly wouldn’t let him sit idle. Not only was he on screens in ‘The Mikado’ in an unjerk-like performance praised by critics, he was also pulling down good cash every Wednesday night as the vocalist on ‘The Texaco Star Theatre,’ starring Ken Murray. He was already doing the show when he was on with Benny. In fact, one syndicated newspaper columnist suggested on the day he missed the Benny show in Waukegan that “Texaco would like to have Kenny Baker’s services exclusively.” And that’s exactly what happened. By July 15, newspapers reported Baker’s exclusive contract and that Jack was looking for a new vocalist, though he made an unsuccessful move to try to keep him.

Fans who prefer not to do research have suggested Fred Allen somehow enticed his phoney feuder’s singer away, but Allen didn’t join the ‘Texaco Star Theatre’ until 1940. In a way, Fred joined Kenny’s show.

The article claims Baker quit Allen’s show, but Billboard magazine of August 22, 1942 tells a quite different story. The show was being cut from 60 minutes to a half hour in the fall, which was a perfect opportunity to dump Baker. Reported Billboard:

Baker, who drew $2,000 weekly for singing two songs, proved to be a constant headache to producers because of his alleged prima donna attitude.
The singer, because of the stipulation in his contract giving him the right to choose his own selections, was allegedly difficult to handle. This might have been worked out, according to an Allen spokesman, but he kept picking slow numbers which consumed anywhere from three to four minutes and which caused Allen a good deal of concern because they slowed the program. Christmas Eve he insisted on doing the Ave Maria in German instead of the customary Latin, an incident which cause Texaco much embarrassment because the mail man brought in loads of protests from irate listeners [remember, the U.S. was fighting Hitler at the time]. This was not the entire reason for X-ing him off the spot, but it helped.

In other words, in an exhibition of irony (if Billboard was correct), Baker was being a jerk.

The character that Baker found so objectionable to play on the Benny show was a continuation and modification of the one singer Frank Parker had played on the show. After Baker left, the character was tweaked a little bit more and was handed to Eugene McNulty, along with the name of Dennis Day. If Dennis had a problem playing a daft young man, he never told anyone. It led to a long and lucrative career with Jack, and on his own. In addition, along the way, it was discovered Dennis had a very good ear for mimicry and that was incorporated into the show. And, though all these characters were silly (though not truly moronic like, say, Charlie Cantor’s Finnegan on ‘Duffy’s Tavern’), people weren’t really laughing at them. They had been given comedy lines by Jack Benny, who was the real fall guy on his own programme.

Baker’s hopes of a skyrocketing career after walking away from the Benny show never really materialised, even when compared to Dennis Day. The “weekly half-hour show” mentioned in the newspaper article lasted eight weeks after the story was written and was replaced with Danny Kaye and Harry James. Baker took over ‘Glamour Manor’ (later named ‘The Kenny Baker Show’) in 1946 for a season. He never had a starring radio show after that, let alone one on television. With few prospects, he retired in the early 1950s to record a few gospel albums and, perhaps, mull over whether quitting ‘The Jack Benny Program’ was really the best thing to do.

Dog Trouble

There are no credits on the version of the Tom and Jerry cartoon ‘Dog Trouble’ (1942) on DVD, save the directors and producer, but Irv Spence was hard at work. A few frames from one of his scenes.





In showing these to animator Mark Kausler, he says “Don't forget the masterful skill of the cel painters and inkers, who took a pencil scribble and made a colorful smear that supports the action.”

George Gordon, Jack Zander and Pete Burness also animated on the earliest Tom and Jerrys but Spence has the reputation of the most uninhibited animation of the group. You can see why.

Paul Terry, Aesop and the Missus

There was a time when Paul Terry didn’t have the same toilet-splash sound in every cartoon. That’s because his splash, if there was one, didn’t make any noise. Paul Terry made silent cartoons.

His history has been elucidated in numerous animation history books. But let’s hear Terry in his own words. And his wife’s, too.

Terry’s ‘Aesop Fables’ of the 1920s were, apparently, the cartoons Walt Disney looked up to when he first went into animation. Terry explains how he created them. You can take his story for what it’s worth, especially considering there’s no mention of the heavy influence of Felix the Cat on his ‘Henry.’ This is in the Oakland Tribune of January 16, 1928.

Romance Born In Studio With Terry’s “Fables” Cat
By NANCY BARR MAVITY.
It all began in fun.
That is one way of describing the romance of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Terry—the first member of the matrimonial firm being the creator of those animated cartoons known to the world as “Fables, Inc.,” and the second an artist who drew those same lively wiggles as a member of the “Fables” staff.
Terry is visiting his native California, with his wife, as the guest of his sister, Mrs. Carrie Donnelly, 2159 Stuart street, Berkeley.
“We’ve been married four years, and still speak—a long distance record for the movie world,” says Paul.
“I was the only woman on the staff so he married me to make it a stag studio—but there was no getting rid of me that easily,” says Irma—and snatching a pencil, she produces a cartoon wherein linked hearts and arrows figure.
“There was never any doubt as to my career,” Terry relates. “As a small child, I drew sketches on the wall paper and pilloried unpopular neighbors in chalk on the front steps. Parental efforts at suppressing these tokens of budding genius did not have much effect. Do you remember those old-time little books that children used to slip through rapidly, giving the effect of motion to the pictures on each page? Well, I wasn’t content to look at them. I made them for myself—and that was the beginning of the animated cartoon for me.
SCHOOLED IN SAN FRANCISCO.
“All this was in California. Most of my art training was received at the polytechnic High school in San Francisco, which, by the way, has turned out more successful cartoonists than any other school not specializing in art that I know. I worked on almost all the newspapers on both sides of the bay in the days when camera men and the staff of the art department were one and the same thing. I’ve been a signboard painter and a scene painter, and every bit of that training has been useful.”
Terry’s first plunge into motion pictures was in New York, in 1915, when he gave up his newspaper job and fitted up a studio, because he believed in an idea.
“It took me four months to make my first picture,” he says, “and thank heaven, I sold it! Otherwise I should have been discouraged and quit. Now we turn out a picture a week, and our organization includes 22 men—not to mention the lady. In the beginning, the animated cartoon was a mere novelty. There was so much laborious work and duplication in the tracing that no one man could turn out work fast enough to make any real impression. I had to formulate plans for reducing this mechanical labor, and that is where my knowledge of the camera was invaluable.”
ANTICS NOT SIMPLE.
When you realize that Terry has produced 367 “Fables” and 150 previous pictures in seven and a half years, and that each of these pictures, running to about 700 feet of film and lasting from 10 to 15 minutes, .requires between six and seven thousand separate drawings—16 drawings to the second while in action at an average rate of speed—you will readily believe that the antics of “Henry the Cat” are not so simple as they look.
But all of that is of secondary importance to the finding of the idea behind the picture.
“The idea must have a sustaining interest that will keep it buoyant [sic] for 10 to 16 minutes. It must be capable of comic presentation, and yet it must respond to some fundamental human interest. And it must not be an allustrated [sic] text, but a story that tells itself visually—a pantomime. Our scenarios are not written—they are drawn in rough thumb-nail sketches. Then the characters are drawn to fit. Psychologists tell us our thinking is done in images. In the pictures we keep that direct progress by images, without the intervention of words.
The cartooning of Aesop’s Fables, by which Terry won his fame, was not an accidental inspiration.
“At that time,” he reminds us, “the death of the animated cartoon was predicted in short order. The novelty of mere movement had worn off. The production required a disproportionate amount of labor—as much as a regular comedy. Audiences had grown weary of crude slap stick, and there was no apparent future in the field. It was then that I began casting about for some means of resuscitation. In digging around in the library, I ran across, a book that has retained its popularity for 2600 years, and of which more copies are still sold yearly than of any other publication except the Bible. It deals with strong and permanent human motives, in brief stories. That book was Aesop’s Fables. When we ran out of Aesop, we could do what old Aesop did — turn to and invent some more.
“I wish I could say that one night in the firelight I saw a curly-haired infant on his mother’s knee listening in delight to these immortal stories—and the great idea was born. But there is a fatal obstacle to that. We have no children. Unless,” he adds, “we may lay some claim to those children to whom we owe everything, because they sit in the audience and laugh and clap their hands at our fables. Without them, there would be no ‘Fables Inc.’—and this very clever artist here would be out of a job in the studio, though she’d still have a full-time appointment as Mrs. Paul Terry.

It Sings! It’s Rinso!

There’s nothing like a singing cartoon box of detergent, I always say. The ad’s from 1941 (right click and open in a new window to enlarge).



Notice the fashionable elf boots the box of Rinso is wearing.

120 Years Ago Today

It’s a birthday today. You could have learned to have played the organ from him, like someone did in this newspaper ad from March 12, 1929.



He was with the Kansas City Conservatory of Music and travelled to Iola, Kansas on October 27, 1913 to play at the Conservatory opening there (and made a return engagement in December). ‘A Cup of Coffee, a Sandwich and You’ wasn’t in his repertoire yet.



What? You missed the name? Try the last entry on this snippet from 1900 U.S. Census. Click to enlarge.



Yes, Carl W. Stalling would be 120 today.

Stalling’s place in cartoon history should have been cemented by his work on the first Mickey Mouse sound cartoons and Disney’s Silly Symphonys. But it’s been completely overshadowed by his huge body of work at Warner Bros. beginning in 1936 and the influence it had over cartoon scoring at almost every west coast studio. If it weren’t for Stalling, we’d still have cartoons with woodblock clicks when characters walk and the same underscore that only speeds up when characters start running (the type of stuff Norman Spencer hacked out on bar sheets before Stalling replaced him). And if it weren’t for Stalling, would any of us know Raymond Scott?

You’ve seen this before, but why not watch it again? And appreciate what Carl Stalling brought to cartoons. My thanks to Devon Baxter for the link.