Proof That Times Change

81 years ago, there were the most popular guests in America’s living rooms.



Today, you can’t even mention their names without starting a debate.

‘Check and Double Check’ was released in 1930. Sources today say it wasn’t really a success because the two-man dialogue of the 15-minute radio show didn’t quite translate into a feature film, but newspaper ads of the day show the movie did business for almost a year. Still, if there were plans for a sequel, they were shelved. After the release of this movie, with the exception of a couple of lacklustre animated versions, Amos and Andy avoided the big screen and stuck to selling Pepsodent on the airwaves.

Swing You Sinners!

Maybe it’s my imagination, but it seems there were reels and reels of cartoons out of New York in the early ‘30s involving characters caught in nightmarish or out-of-control situations. One of the best is ‘Swing You Sinners’ (1930).

The Fleischer studio was, far and away, the tops of the three major cartoon operations in New York. At their best, the Fleischer cartoons are fun and extremely warped (though you can say the same thing for Terry and Van Beuren, too). ‘Sinners’ benefits from a never-ending flow of things on the screen. Something is always morphing into something else. Things suddenly sprout a mouth, arms and legs and behave like humans.

A really interesting effect happens at the beginning of ‘Sinners.’ Bimbo gets into a fight with a chicken. To emphasize the violence, the background drawing is rotated clockwise behind the animation. Look where the chicken coop is in the top drawing.




And, yes, Bimbo and the chicken have exchanged heads. Some of the gags are so casual and so much is going on, you miss them the first time. That’s just one good reason to watch the Fleischer cartoons over and over.

Ted Sears (later a Disney writer) and Willard Bowsky (who died in France during World War Two) are the credited animators in this.

It’s a shame the Fleischer cartoons got watered down as the ‘30s wore on but there was a time when a point could be made they were more entertaining than the cheery animated antics that came out of the West Coast.

The Joys of Noise

Anyone who is a fan of old network radio shows knows the vital role played by the sound effects man. Newspapers, especially in the ‘30s, sang his praises but, generally, he toiled in anonymity; though a cute song praising the work of Virgil Reimer made a couple of appearances on ‘Fibber McGee and Molly’ (Reimer created from scratch the only thing many people remember about Fibber today—the clatter from the cascading junk in the McGee hall closet).

The poor old sound effects department got even more of a short shrift in films. The first Oscar for Sound Effects wasn’t handed out until 1963, more than 30 years after sound films displaced silents. Sound, it could be said, pre-dates sound films. A good pit orchestra or a Mighty Wurlitzer could pump out musical effects to enhance silent films. Yet the seemingly innumerable Hollywood columnists didn’t really pay much attention to the “sound” part of sound films after the novelty wore off by about 1930.

A rare exception is this 1948 column by the Associated Press that delved into the MGM sound effects library.

Sound Men Have Huge Noise Library
By JACK QUIGG
(For Bob Thomas)
HOLLYWOOD, Sept. 22—(AP)—A short burp, the plaintive whistle of a distant train, a cougar’s cough and a gallows’ clatter are a few of thousands of odd noises that are the daily concern of movie sound men.
The noises, recorded on the sound tracks of standard movie film, are kept for short notice use. This, if Mickey Rooney’s sneeze comes off key, sound men merely dub in one of hundreds on file in the library.
MGM’s collection is typical. Sounds from airplanes to zippers are carefully catalogued and stored in fireproof vaults. This “library” consists of four walk-in vaults, each holding 2,000 cans of film.
Under airplanes, for example, are listed sounds of planes idling, taxiing, taking off, landing and diving, as heard from both inside the craft and on the ground. One card even reads: “old bi-plane, fairly hot. circling.”
Most animals found in zoos, and many that aren’t have had their vocalizing immortalized on celluloid. On hand are a bull elephant’s bellow, the chatter of a squirrel and the unmistakable warnings of rattlesnakes and bumblebees. Camels are classified as barking, growling or crying. Dogs are listed by breed.
There may be as many as 40 or 50 subclasses under a general heading. Thus the sounds of auto engines are recorded by make and model back to tne Maxwell, Stanley Steamer and the Bean (an old English make).
Belches are classified as “long,” “short,” “man’s,” “boy’s,” “through a hankerchief” and numerous other ways.
The sounds of a pea shooter, a candle being blown out, a spittoon being hit, a skull crushed are there. Native chants and yells are catalogued geographically. Baby’s cries are listed by age and whether the infant is happy or fretful.
“Our sounds are 99 per cent authentic,” says Mike Steinore, in charge of the library. “It’s easier to record the real thing than it is to invent a substitute.”
MGM has been adding to its files since 1926. Occasionally a film will require a noise for the mixing skill of an expert chef.
The “Green Dolphin Street” script called for an avalanche. By blending the sound of thunder with the crash of falling trees, tearing timber and falling glass—done inside a greenhouse for greater resonance—an avalanche was achieved.
For the atomic bomb explosion in “The Beginning of the End” the sound men simply amplified and extended their biggest explosion, a 16 inch cannon blast.
“Often it’s the simplest sounds that are the hardest to record,” Steinmore says. “Getting Lassie to give out with a remorseful bark is as hard as anything.”
His toughest assignments, Steinore says, were duplicating the din of the earthquake in “San Francisco,” and the rustle of millions of locusts for the plague in “Good Earth.”

To anyone who thinks ‘The Jazz Singer’ (1927) at Warners broke the silent barrier in films for good, it’s a surprise to see MGM began collecting sound the previous year.

Cock-A-Doodle Dog

Tex Avery talked about using the element of surprise in his cartoons, coming up with a gag that the audience least expected. By the 1950s, Tex was still doing that, but there are other gags that fans can see miles away. The fun is watching how he handles them.

‘Cock-A-Doodle Dog’ (1951) is a good example. Tex hangs the cartoon on a simple premise he used a number of times—sleep vs. noise. Tired Spike the bulldog tries to stop a scrawny rooster from obsessively crowing so he can get some rest. Since roosters are supposed to crow, Spike doesn’t have a chance in his effort to change the natural order of things.

Toward the end of the cartoon, Spike throws a cake of soap at the rooster, who swallows it. The rooster blows a huge soap bubble which floats into Spike’s dog house. You can see a nail on the wall. You know what’s going to happen—the bubble will burst and loud crowing will come out of it to wake up Spike—but you don’t know what kind of crazy take Tex is going to pull off. Here’s just one of the drawings.



There’s a gravity gag I really like, where the rooster and Spike back into each other, then start walking up into the sky as their feet touch each other. Finally, the two realise what’s happened. In ‘Ventriloquist Cat’ (1950), Avery uses a fright gag with the cat’s fur standing on end. He does the same thing with the rooster here (feathers standing on end?).



The animators are Avery’s truncated ‘50s MGM crew—Mike Lah, Walt Clinton and Grant Simmons.

Kevin Langley looked at this cartoon 4½ years ago and you can read his post here.

What’s Wrong With this Wabbit?

If you’ve watched enough of the old cartoons, you’ll see an occasional error. Generally, it’s in animation—a limb disappears for a split second, there’s a brief colour change, or something like that. Once in a while, there’s a continuity error. There’s one in the 1942 Warners cartoon ‘The Wabbit Who Came to Supper.’ Look at the telegram that Elmer Fudd gets in the forest.



Now, here’s Elmer at home.



No wonder he’s surprised. He’s in the wrong house. The address on the mailbox isn’t the same as the one on the telegram (And it doesn’t exist in the 1942 Los Angeles City Directory). The wrong house would explain why Elmer could afford a “Steinbeck” piano. Here’s a reconstructed background of Elmer’s living room that was panned in the cartoon. Click to enlarge.



There are no layout or background credits on this cartoon, but Graham Webb’s animation history book says Lenard Kester constructed the backgrounds from layouts by Owen Fitzgerald.

Jack Benny on Radio Success

If you asked Jack Benny the secret behind his big listening audiences, he would have said “Consistency.” Well, he actually did say it in an interview with the Associated Press in 1948.

Over the years, Jack gave full credit to his “gang”. He felt the years had allowed people to befriend his cast—and his secondary cast, like the phone operators or Mr. Kitzel or even the Maxwell—and therefore tune in to hear what they were doing in the radio world Benny and his writers invented. Fortunately, Benny had enough people to mix and match that it carried him into the mid-‘50s despite the show suffering from the loss of some of his old regulars (replacing the larger-than-life Phil Harris proved impossible).

Though he doesn’t mention it in the story, Jack also hooked his audience to come back every week with something else. For several seasons, his writers came up with a running plot that bubbled up over the course of the whole radio season. One year, it was hiring/firing the Sportsmen Quartet. Another year it was trying to find anyone to sing the wretched song he wrote. The best-known one may have been the “I Can’t Stand Jack Benny Because...” contest, an audience participation gimmick that even the giveaway-hating Fred Allen would approve (and took part in as the chief judge).

Allen gets a brief mention in the column with a little tale Jack may not have told before.

Some Radio Stars Revise Shows, But Not Jack Benny
By HOWARD C. HEYN
(For Bob Thomas)
HOLLYWOOD, Sept. 21—(AP)— Feel that nervous fluttering in the autumn air? Radio’s old standbys are flocking back, in new trappings, after as arid a summer as most listeners can remember.
New writers and new formats are legion. Bob Hope, Fred Allen, Eddie Cantor, Jack Carson, Edgar Bergen and others have changed their shows or their casts, some radically.
But not easy going Jack Benny. Consistency must be his mark of distinction.
Jack, just back from Europe, starts his 17th year Oct. 3. And with the same crew. This is Mary Livington’s 17th year too. He’s had the same writers for six years. Don Wilson has been with him 15 years, Phil Harris 13, Rochester 11, Dennis Day nine.
With Benny, every broadcast is a new show, although the basic character of the program remains the same. “It’s the people that the fans like,” says Jack. “As long as we stay in character we can do pretty much as we please. And we keep the show flexible. Maybe we put a guy on like Sinatra, for one line. Some weeks one or even two of the regular company aren’t in the script at all."
I had lunch with Jack at Romanoff’s, and he didn’t gag once— humorously or otherwise. Not even about Fred Allen. He talked about Allen though.
“He’s a strange fellow. He lives very simply. I don't think there’s anything he wants very badly. If there was I’m sure he’d get it. If I go to New York I call him and we have dinner. Otherwise I probably wouldn’t see him. If he comes out here, I offer him my house and my swimming pool, and he stays in a hotel. I like that, in a way. We’re good friends because, when we do get together, we’re really glad to-see each other.”
Jack returned from Europe about two weeks ago. He got a lot of acclaim in London’s Palladium and a lot of golf in the countryside. British audiences he said are just about the most gratifying in the world.
“I gave ‘em the sort of thing I do here, except that I didn’t have Dennis, Don or Rochester with me. Believe me, next time I want them along. Everybody there knows who they are.”
Since he got back Jack has been watching his weight and putting off, as long as possible, any serious work on the season’s broadcasts. He isn’t worrying about television, either. “We’ll take care of that when the time comes,” he said.
The cast has been together so long that, Benny doesn’t have to work half as hard as he did. He puts in, personally, about three days instead of six.
Time was when Benny worked with his six writers Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, Saturday they read the script. Rehearsal came Sunday, just before the show.
Now he and the writers get together on Sunday, after the broadcast, to discuss next week’s airing. The writers work Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. Benny plays golf. Friday, at 9 A. M., he goes over the rough script. Maybe they start again, from scratch. By Friday night things are in fairly good shape.
But, Jack says, on Saturday anything can happen. They may rewrite the whole show.
One thing they don’t do: When the show hits hard one week, they don’t strain to top it the next week.
“We just rock along,” said easy-going Jack, “and usually it turns out all right.”

Incidentally, in hunting around for this article, I found the newspaper ad you see above, published the same day in one paper. I didn’t realise Jack endorsed R.C. Cola. It must have been a nice little deal that showed him that consistency also equalled cash.

A Bick and Some Chicks

Frank Tashlin doesn’t have anyone cradling large milk bottles against their chest like he did with Jayne Mansfield in ‘The Girl Can’t Help It’ but you don’t have to look far to find a sexual subtext going on in his cartoon ‘Swooner Crooner.’ Well, maybe it’s more aptly deemed a sexual sub-subtext because the cartoon’s all about female fertility (though no offspring result). Hens that were laying eggs for Porky suddenly stop when a Frank Sinatra rooster shows up. The early ‘40s stereotype of Sinatra gets played up—frail and not terribly manly. You know, someone who wouldn’t induce fertility in women.

Then along comes the Bing Crosby rooster, who casually arouses the hens into renewing their fertility and pumping out endless stacks of eggs. The Hens Can’t Help It. And who better than the Ol’ Groaner? His wife Dixie Lee had four sons by the time this cartoon was released in 1944.

(You’ll notice I’ve avoided any comment about the use of the word “lay”)

We get a bra and panties joke.



And then there’s the famous “between-the-legs” shot as the camera pulls back to demonstrate another of Tashlin’s fixations—camera angles.



In the finale, the crooner roosters prove to be so hyper-masculine when combined, they even make men (or, rather, a male pig) fertile like a female chicken.



Nice use of coloured filters in the shot. Presumably, Tashlin handled his own layouts. Historian Graham Webb says Dick Thomas did the backgrounds.

Of course, Sinatra and Crosby don’t supply their stand-ins’ singing voices. Tashlin didn’t have to look far to find his Crosby. He used Dick Bickenbach, who was animating for Friz Freleng unit but ended up in the Tashlin unit. Bick toddled off to MGM in 1946 to replace Harvey Eisenberg doing layouts for Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera, then stuck with the pair when they opened their own studio.

Bick sang for his wife’s mixed fraternal group and in a church choir—he came from a fairly religious background—but he was also a vocalist on radio before he got into the animation industry. The newspaper back home in Freeport, Illinois published this story on January 12, 1926:

RICHARD BICKENBACH TO BROADCAST SONGS TONIGHT
Richard Bickenbach, son of Fred Bickenbach, formerly of Freeport and now a resident of California, will be on the air tonight and doubtless many of his friends in this city will listen in. The young man is to broadcast several songs from station KTBI, Los Angeles, between 11 and 12 o’clock, Freeport time, tonight. He is said to have an excellent voice and has been heard over the radio several times in the past few months.

Bick was born August 9, 1907, so he was 18 at the time. He lent his bari-tones to several other cartoons. He died June 28, 1994. You can read more about him here.

Barker Bill by Bob Kuwahara

In the early 1960s, there was an animated Terrytoon series called ‘Hashimoto’, the pleasant product of the mind of Bob Kuwahara. That’s all I knew about Kuwahara until recently—I’m not a Disneyphile—when I was surprised to learn he was one of the artists enticed to join the new MGM cartoon studio in 1937. His Disney career began several years earlier.

Kuwahara was also behind a newspaper comic called ‘Barker Bill.’ Of course, his name wasn’t on it. He worked for Paul Terry, so in a time-honoured tradition that saw such comic strip “artists” as Leon Schlesinger and Fred Quimby (and even Walt Disney), Terry took credit for the strip, though unlike the aforementioned he didn’t sign his name to it. Animator and historian Mark Kausler has been busy tracking down the strips and reached a bit of a dead-end. His preliminary research couldn’t find the start of the series.

Allow me to help.

The Winnipeg Free Press had a little blurb on September 25, 1954 announcing it was carrying the strip as of the following Monday, the 27th. Here are the strips for that week. They’re not very good scans and have suffered from dirt and scrapes on the microfilm of the newspapers but they’re the best I can do. Click to enlarge them.








You can see the strip had a story line that continued from day to day.

Kuwahara got his own strip in 1956. He was one of five contest winners and United Features syndicated his ‘Marvelous Mike’. As far as I know, what you see below was an entry.



Mark Kausler is a real friend of animation and he’s helped me so many times in the past. I hope this post has helped him and interested you.

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).