Jack Benny at 39 (Plus 32)

I suppose it shouldn’t be a surprise that in 1965, Jack Benny was looking back at his career an awful lot in interviews. After all, he had been in show business over 50 years at that point. It’s just that Jack never went away. He was still part of the present, not in the past.

The Associated Press interviewed Jack that year and his answers were assembled into a feature story that ran July 10th.

Jack Benny . . . The Non-Slowdown Comic
By MARY CAMPBELL
AP Newsfeatures Writer
NEW YORK (AP) — “Why are you going into a summer theater?” Jack Benny quotes his Beverly Hills doctor as asking him. “It can’t be for the money.”
Benny pauses for the inevitable laugh at his legendary stinginess, and continues, “So I said to my new doctor . . .”
At 71, looking 59 and saying he feels better than the many years when he was 39, blue-eyed Jack Benny has for the first time booked himself, “An Hour and 60 Minutes with Jack Benny,” (the hour a funny, rambling chat, the 60 minutes a combination of humor and violin playing) into a small theater, the Tappan Zee Playhouse in Nyack, N. Y.
“It’s so intimate,” he says. “The boxes are right close. I can talk to an audience like I'm talking to you.
“Of course I love the theater. If I had time this summer I’d continue to do it.”
But Benny doesn't have time. He arrived in New York from playing in Las Vegas and will go right back to the West Coast to perform at Lake Tahoe and do two hour-long TV shows. After that, there are shows in London, 10 or so benefit appearances with his Stradivarius with symphony orchestras in Arizona Texas and Florida, and then maybe he'll have time for more cozy theaters like the 792-seat Tappan Zee.
Intimate Revue Is New
Asked what else is new, Benny says, “What news could I give? I've been in the business now 100 years. Well, I’ve never done this before — an intimate revue.
“The only other new thing is if I found the right play on Broadway, I would do it. It would have to be something I was absolutely insane about. I’d want it to use any delivery but I wouldn’t want it to have anything to do with being stingy, and the Maxwell, etc. I wouldn’t want it to be too stylized, so it would only fit me and not anybody else.
“The best picture I ever made was ‘To Be or Not To Be.’ If I hadn't played it, some body else could have played it beautifully.
“If I ever made another film, I would want to make a film at my age like Chevalier, you know. Chevalier is very smart: Rock Hudson, Doris Day and Maurice Chevalier, playing the uncle, or the grandfather or the great-grandfather.”
For his “Hour and 60 Minutes,” Benny says, “Most of the material is new.
"I think the material has always been to a certain extent sophisticated. It has a human quality. It is about people, the frailties and faults of people, which I am supposed to have, you know. You have to have smart jokes, good sophisticated smart jokes. I think I’ve got them.
"My material usually doesn’t fit anybody else, therefore it isn't bandied around by a lot of people, you know. Certain routines that fit other people, they have taken. You know what I do?
“I always remember a thing Will Rogers said once when he was doing a show with Eddie Cantor. Cantor said, ‘I saw a fellow doing your whole act. Aren’t you going to do something about it?’ Rogers said, ‘Yes, I’m going to do new material for myself.’
Nicest Thing Ever
The comedian says that Jack Benny High School in his hometown, Waukegan, Ill., is “about the nicest thing that ever happened to me.
“They didn't just rename a school. They actually built it for me. I was there for the ground-breaking.
“And I never even graduated from high school. I was thrown out the first year, because I used to skip school all the time and practice my fiddle. The principal said, ‘Benny, we don't teach music here and I’m asking you to leave.’ So I walked out."
For nine years, Benny has been donating his services as guest violinist with various city’s symphonies, to benefit the orchestras or their pension funds.
“I love it,” he says. “I’m a frustrated violinist. I’m a comedian, and the greatest, most dignified, highest-class background that a comedian can have is to walk out in tails with a violin and have 100 of the finest musicians in back of you with a, Bernstein or a Steinberg or a Szell conducting, and I do what Heifetz does, but I'm a comedian.
“It doesn’t fit anybody else, except Danny Kaye, and he conducts the orchestra. If this fit eight other comedians, as nice and charitable as I'd like to be, I wouldn't like to do it.”
Mentioning the same subject at his Tappan Zee Playhouse opening night, he added, “The way I play, some people even yell bravo.”
Later in the show, Benny said he would like to introduce just one friend down front in the audience, Helen Hayes. She stood, acknowledged applause, and said to the man on the stage, “I’m the one who's been yelling bravo.”

More Caricatures Than There Are in Heaven

All-star pictures fell on North American movie theatres in World War Two as often as bombs on Berlin. And not all of the pictures bombed.

Here’s a great ad from Boxoffice magazine for the 1943 MGM extravaganza “Thousands Cheer.”



The thing that struck me instantly was that I had seen the caricature of Lucille Ball before. And so has anyone else who watched “The Lucy Show” in the 1960s.




It’s a shame the ad is unsigned. If anyone knows who drew these great caricatures, please leave a comment.

Sara Berner and the R Word

The at-times rancorous debate whether all exaggerated impressions of non-white people are racist (and, conversely, why exaggerated impressions of white people are not) is nothing new, as the article below will show.

Sara Berner was an actress who specialised in exaggerated accents, both on network radio of the Golden Age, and in animated cartoons of the ‘30s and ‘40s. Dialect and ethnic humour was perfectly acceptable (and wildly popular) in vaudeville. Exaggeration equals comedy. But eventually questions were raised about whether the humour was really at someone’s expense or, worse, bigotry. It’s a debate that continues to this day, one that will never result in an agreement. And I certainly don’t propose to debate it here.

What I will do is give you Berner’s take on it, from a United Press story of June 15, 1950.

13 ‘Voices’ Put Sara Berner in Demand for Show Parts
By VIRGINIA MacPHERSON
HOLLYWOOD. (UP) Sara Berner, who makes her living with 13 “voices,” said today she’s won her fight to keep rattling her comedy dialects.
“It’s been tough,” the brown-eyed comedienne explained. Radio bosses didn’t like it. They thought I was fostering racial prejudice.”
Miss Berner thinks different. She thinks she’s breaking it down by cracking wise in Jewish, Italian, Southern, and what-have-you.
So do a lot of top comedians who pay fancy prices for her talented vocal chords.
Jack Benny's had her on for years as “Gladys Zybisco,” his gum-chompin’ telephone operator. She’s “Mrs. Mataratza” with Jimmy Durante, “Helen Wilson” on the “Amos ‘n’Andy” show, “Mrs. Horowitz” on “Life with Luigi” and “Mrs. Jacoby” with Dennis Day.
She's also Gene Autry’s “Chiquita,” Fanny Brice’s “Phoebe” and Eddie Cantor's “Ida” (on the air, that is.)
MANY VOICES
Sara can switch her tonsil tones from Greek to Polish to French without a quiver from her vocal chords.
She’s pretty good at it, too. Good enough, anyway, for NBC to hand her her own half-hour show, “Sara’s Private Caper.”
But for a while there she sure had the big boys along radio row quaking behind their desks.
“Then a columnist had an item about my dialects being in bad taste,” Sara said, “and they ordered me to stop getting laughs with an accent.
“I argued and argued and finally convinced them. Golly, what’s all the fuss about? Dialects are a natural part of American speech.
“And the sooner people stop being on the defensive about them the sooner we can wipe out all that silly prejudice.”
POINTS TO OTHERS
Every time somebody bring up the battle Sara points to “Amos ‘n’ Andy” as the classic example.
“They laugh with Negroes—not at them,” she says. “And that’s the secret with dialects. You have to do them sympathetically. Otherwise you can cause trouble.
“But I know I haven't offended anybody because in all the years I’ve been doing them I’ve never, not even once, got a nasty letter.”
And she’s dead sure she’s getting her negro dialect across okay—the maid in the powder room at Ciro’s won’t ever let Sara tip her.

MacPherson’s made a slight factual error Gladys Zybisko was not one of the phone operators. That was another of Berner’s characters. Zybisko was Jack’s occasional girl-friend on radio.

Berner’s own radio show suffered from a variety of trouble, not the least of which was revealed by columnist Erskine Johnson of the NEA on October 9. He said the show started out as “Sara’s Private Eye,” then became “Sara’s Private File,” was changed to “Sara’s Private Crime” then “Sara’s Private Caper.” By then, it had long been off the air. The final show was broadcast August 24, replaced the following Thursday with ‘Folk Songs of the Menhaden Fishermen.’ It lasted 11 weeks, short even by summer replacement standards. The biggest problem was much like the one Mel Blanc had when he was handed a starring show in 1946—being adept at voices means nothing unless you do something funny or interesting with your characters. And even radio editors had trouble discerning whether “Caper’s” format was a comedy or a drama.

Unfortunately for the gifted Sara Berner, the R Word when it came to her big network break was “replaced.”

The Great Piggy Bank Phone Call

Daffy Duck looks fairly normal while on the phone as Duck Twacy in ‘The Great Piggy Bank Robbery’ (1946).



But then he stretches out in a few in-betweens.





The credited animators in the cartoon are Rod Scribner, Manny Gould, Izzy Ellis and Bill Melendez. Someone will, no doubt, comment below about who they feel made these smears. Though other artists at Warners were known for them—Bobe Cannon and Virgil Ross come to mind—any (assistant) animator should have been able to draw them if that’s what was indicated. Weren’t there five animators in each unit at this point?

Clampett cuts to this scene after a couple of seconds of Daffy answering the phone.



I’m no expert, but this looks like the work a different animator (Ellis maybe?). Notice how Daffy’s fingers are tapered.

Past Paarticiple

Jack Paar was a whiner.

I’m not referring to how he walked out on his late night TV audience because NBC censored his joke about a water closet. I’m not referring to his spat with Ed Sullivan, where he called Mr. Toast of the Town “a liar.” No, I’m going back even further.

Paar came out of the Army and was handed a network radio career by Jack Benny, who saw him overseas. But in almost every newspaper column I can find from his radio days (his first TV appearance was in 1951), he’s complaining about something. He’s complaining about poor Jack Paar and how everyone’s doing him wrong.

Want an example? Here’s one from the United Press from 1950 where he, basically, says his audience is stupid.

Comic Jack Paar Returns to Radio
With Lower I. Q., Down to Earth Gags
BY ALINE MOSBY
HOLLYWOOD, July 26.—(UP)—Comic Jack Paar confessed today he was a flop in Hollywood until he lowered his I. Q. and didn’t go in for “intelligent” gags any more.
Paar, once heralded as the funniest guy in show business, is back on the radio after two years of being “broke and hungry.”
He hadn't had a pay check since he left R. K. O. where he sat for three years, with pay, doing practically nothing. And he hadn’t had a radio job since he made a hit with the critics as a summer replacement for Jack Benny’s show three years ago.
+ + +
“I’VE STOPPED trying to make people think while they laugh,” he explained. “I’ve quit being clever or new.
“People don’t want new gags. You can’t change show business. They want to hear the same old thing. They feel inferior if you make them think too much. If you give them something different they say it’s corny.
“Before, I was cold and satirical. Now, on the radio I talk about my baby, and they die laughing.”
Paar originally was discovered when, as a buck private entertainer, he verbally ripped Army brass with insults other GIs just thought about. After the war R. K. O. signed him before he got his Army boots off. Then he sat home and cashed a pay check every week for doing nothing.
“THEY WOULDN’T even let me park my car inside the studio,” he complained.
Once he was so sure the studio was going to drop him he insulted top movie brass at a studio party.
“I said the publicity chief ran a forest lawn with typewriters,” he said.
Dore Schary, then R. K. O. production chief, thought Paar was so funny he signed him up for another year.
Paar finally got in a movie, “Weep No More,” which he says is awful. He also landed the plum job of subbing for Benny.
He won every show business magazine award that year as the best comic on the air.
“Those awards were the kiss of death. I never worked again,” he said. “My wife’s family is well-to-do and they kept us going, or we wouldn’t have eaten.”
He finally got a foot back in the door and replaced Eddie Cantor on NBC’s “Take It or Leave It.”
“I discovered what the critics like isn’t what the people like,” he said. “I’ve stopped acting intelligent.”

An example of his “intelligent” humour? Well, one joke involved him looking at a photo of Paulette Goddard in a brief evening gown, then remarking “It that dress were a book it would be banned in Boston.”

It seems strange that someone like Jack Benny would hand his top-rated show to someone like Paar, but that’s what happened on June 1, 1947. Benny had his cast insult him. Paar insulted everybody but Paar. Sure, Don Rickles has insulted people for years. But he always made it known he wasn’t serious. That isn’t the impression one gets from Paar. Here’s a column from a couple of weeks after he debuted on the Benny show.

By Erskine Johnson
NEA Staff Correspondent
HOLLYWOOD, June 17—Hollywood’s newest comedy sensation, Jack Paar, landed in the movies because, as a GI entertainer during the war, he insulted army brass hats from one end of the Pacific to the other.
To a base command officer: “The only way you'll ever get the purple heart is if you get caught between two desks coming together.”
The tens of thousands of men Jack entertained in the Pacific will be happy to hear that he is now insulting the brass hats in Hollywood.
To Producer Sid Rogell: “I just saw a trailer of your latest picture. If you haven’t made it, don’t.”
But the Pacific veterans will be unhappy to hear that Hollywood hasn’t figured out what to do with Jack Paar. Sure, he’s a hit on the radio now as Jack Benny’s summer replacement.
“I’ve got enough money to last for the rest of my life. If I commit suicide at noon tomorrow.”
But after eight months under contract to R-K-O, Jack Paar still hasn’t appeared in a movie.
Jack, 29, who describes himself as “an aging Donald O’Connor,” did some film tests by himself.
“They were terrific,” says Jack, who has as much self-assurance as he has jokes. “Then they gave me a director and that mixed me up. He started talking about shading and reading my lines with tempo and stuff like that.
“I haven’t got any shading I’ve got four speeds—fast or slow or soft or loud.”
Some people refer to Jack as a “young Fred Allen.” Jack likes that. Fred is his idol. In fact, someone was trying to embarrass him in front of Fred at a New York cocktail party.
"You know, Fred, this Paar fellow worships you like a god.”
To which Fred replied, “What a shame. Five hundred churches in New York and he’s an atheist.”
It was Jack Paar’s irreverence to brass hats, as we said, and of just about everything else out in the Pacific during the war, that brought him to Hollywood’s attention.
Jack was a radio announcer in Cleveland and Buffalo when he was drafted into the army. It soon got around that he was a very funny fellow. He was sent around eastern camps to entertain troops. Then he was assigned to a special service unit of GI talent. For months he and his troupe toured the Pacific foxholes.
Jack became a hero to heroes. He got bigger writeups in the army papers than stars like Benny or Hope or Jack Carson. Paar was just one of the boys—a GI with enough nerve to insult the brass hats.
To a lieutenant who kept talking out loud during one of his shows: “Lieutenant, a man with your I.Q. should have a low voice, too.”
To a commanding officer: “My dear sir, and you are none of the three.
To a noisy captain: “You be quiet or I’ll take your shovel away and you won’t have any fun at the beach tomorrow.”

13 years later, NBC told him to be quiet or they’d take his water closet joke away. He didn’t think that was funny, told his audience they’ve have to do without him and left the studio to let announcer Hugh Downs somehow follow an act like that and fill the rest of the show. Paar may have idolised Fred Allen, who never concealed his dislike for network executives, idiotic sponsor decisions and inane radio programming, but Allen never walked out on his audience because of it. Paar did.

Fred Allen’s remembered, at least by those who still remember him, as a clever analogist and a benevolent man. Paar isn’t. And if he were still with us, he might just whine about that.

Wackiki Writers

It’s a real disappointment that a cartoon featuring cartoon writers Tedd Pierce and Mike Maltese playing themselves isn’t funny. But that describes ‘Wackiki Wabbit.’

Director Chuck Jones and Layout Man John McGrew spend virtually the whole cartoon telling the viewer “Look at us! Look at the angles we made! Look at our camera shots! Look at our design-y background art! Look how we’re not like everyone else!” Very little of any of this is for the sake of advancing the story or for gag purposes. It’s there to show off.

Ken Harris is the credited animator. But we get some smears suggesting Bobe Cannon is at work.



Smeary Tedd Pierce.



Smeary Mike Maltese.



And Smeary Bugs Bunny. The Bugs smears are for the sake of smears. He’s turning his head back and forth for no particular reason other than to give the artist a chance to do smear drawings.

Two weeks before ‘Wackiki Wabbit’ came out in July 1943, Warners released another of Jones’ ultra-design efforts—‘The Aristo Cat’. It’s a far better cartoon because of a stronger story and gags once the mice show up to battle the selfish jerk cat. In this one, Bugs torments (in very few gags) a couple of lacklustre starving castaways (Maltese barely speaks) who, quite logically, want food.

I guess if you’re an artist, you find art in itself entertaining. But if you’re making a comedy film, the concentration had better be on comedy. Jones forgot that in this one.

Bad Luck Blackie

One after another, Tex Avery comes at you with a stream of variations on a gag in ‘Bad Luck Blackie,’ one of his best cartoons. You know the black cat is going to cross in front of the evil bulldog. And you know something’s going to fall from the sky and land on the dog. But you don’t know what or even when. Then, when one gag is finished, it’s on to the next one.

How about a couple of scare takes?




How about the sneaky bulldog becoming cellophane-thin to sneak up on his kitten prey?



And how about the dog as brush strokes with eyes rushing into a scene, then becoming a solid. It happens in ten frames, five drawings on twos, immediately after the drawing where the cat disappears under the building.



Avery has the same crew as ‘Lucky Ducky’ working on this great short, released in 1949—Louie Schmitt, Grant Simmons, Walt Clinton and Preston Blair. Avery himself is the snickering bulldog. The cat’s voice is open for debate; it’s a different guy than the growly Cat That Hates People, featured in the Avery cartoon released just before this one.

It’s a Great Honour Being Here Tonight

“Dean Martin put the ‘moan’ in ‘testimonial’,” a Hollywood observer once yowped. There was a time when you couldn’t get away from Dean Martin TV roasts, complete with vaudeville-era jokes (all on cue-cards), Foster Brooks’ tedious drunk act, Ruth Buzzi constantly bashing someone with her handbag, and the same guffawing reaction shots edited in throughout the broadcast. Despite all that, the shows were a huge success because viewers loved the stars no matter how weak and contrived the material was. (As an aside, I really love Ruth Buzzi. Her ability to stay in character in all these shows is a testimony to how underrated a talent she is).

The TV roasts descended from the show biz fraternity roasts put on by the Lambs, the Friars and so on. The roasts had a more stately moniker of “testimonial dinner” at one time. One was given in Jack Benny’s honour to mark his tenth year in broadcasting in 1941 (see below).

There’s a fleeting mention of Jack in this column which appeared in newspapers starting April 20, 1948. But the star is really Eddie Cantor, who tells great old stories that only the great old comedians could tell.

By ERSKINE JOHNSON
HOLLYWOOD—(NEA)—Everything runs in cycles in Hollywood except producers, who run in circles.
Right now Hollywood is having a testimonial banquet cycle and if someone hasn’t given you one you just ain’t anybody. (Or else you aren’t eating anyway. They never give a man a dinner until he can afford one.)
As of today there have been testimonial dinners for Jack Benny, Eddie Cantor, Al Jolson, George Jessel, a radio editor, a lady columnist, and Bob Hope, who thinks there will probably be one soon for the janitor of the Friars’ club.
Oscar winners Ronald Colman and Edmund Gwenn are next in line. They get a stag banquet at the Masquers’ club April 28.
Cantor was getting two poached eggs on toast—“they look just like me”—when I cornered him at the Brown Derby. As a veteran banquet-goer for 30 years—“always a bridesmaid but never a bride until now”—Cantor was full of testimonial dinner lore.
Testimonial Chickens
In fact, Eddie thinks there are chickens raised especially and laid aside for testimonial banquets. “Especially skinny and especially tough.”
Eddie remembered a testimonial banquet in 1924 for someone whose name he didn’t remember. The famous New York lawyer, Max Steuer, was toastmaster. One of the speakers talked for nearly an hour, then apologized, saying, “I’m sorry. I didn’t bring a watch with me.”
To which Steuer replied, “Why there was a calendar right behind you.”
This one Eddie says he’ll never forget. Will Rogers was invited to be toastmaster at a Jewish charity drive banquet. To the surprise of everyone he accepted. But the big surprise came with the banquet seven weeks later.
Will stood up and didn’t speak a word of English all evening. Everything he said was in Hebrew. He had spent the seven weeks learning a language for just one evening.
Cantor and George Jessel once promised a pal they would attend his testimonial banquet at a New York hotel. It was on a Saturday night and they were anxious to get back to their gin rummy game. So they rushed into the hotel, went to the back door of the banquet room and said to the first man they met:
“Put us on right away. We’ve got a date.”
Wrong Party
The fellow beamed, said, “Of course,” and shoved them onto the stage. They told jokes for half an hour and then rushed back to their cards. Next day the pal called Cantor and said., “What happened to you? Where were you last night?”
“Where were we?” yelled Cantor. “We told jokes at your banquet for half an hour.”
In their rush, Eddie and George had gone to the wrong banquet room and had entertained somebody else’s pal.
The great Caruso was given a testimonial banquet at the Friars after World War I. There was a long program intended to entertain him. Caruso listened for a while, then stood up and shouted:
“Why nobody ask me to sing? I am a professional. I will show you programs where I worked.”
And with that, Caruso walked onto the stage, collared a pianist and sang for nearly an hour.
“Caruso,” said Eddie, “was just an Italian Al Jolson.”

Johnson referred to the Jessel dinner among the items in his column later in the week:

Gags flew high, wide and handsome at the George Jessel testimonial banquet. Jack Benny, the m.c. , recalled his own career with Darryl Zanuck, Jessel’s boss, and quipped,
“Zanuck traded me to Warner Bros, for an assistant director and a polo mallet.”
Sam Goldwyn insisted, “Jessel has been around so long there’s a story that he’s the actor who shot Lincoln. But if Lincoln had heard Jessel sing, it would have been the other way around.”

Frankly, I’d rather have seen that testimonial dinner than Foster Brooks belching his words for the umpteeth time. I’ll bet Ruth Buzzi would agree.

To listen to the Jack Benny 10th Anniversary Dinner broadcast of May 11, 1941, click on the audio player below.



And Jack’s show of November 4, 1951 revolved around a testimonial dinner with Jessel guest-starring. The supporting cast includes Mel Blanc, Bea Benaderet, Frank Nelson and a young boy playing Jack Benny that’s still busy in show biz today. His name is Harry Shearer.

Paul Terry, Innovator

No one really thinks of Paul Terry being at the cutting edge of animation. By 1950, his cartoons looked positively old-fashioned at times next to, well, everyone else’s. But in the silent days, it was a different story. Terry’s cartoons were universally praised in newspaper write-ups in 1924, and one syndicated columnist decided to do a feature piece on what he found ground-breaking in the Terry shorts.



Much of what you’ll read is probably pretty familiar if you’re into animation, but it would have been unknown to the average person in 1924. The drawing you see above accompanied the column, which appeared in different papers on different dates (undated feature pieces like this being banked for whenever something was needed).

Background To Photoplays Prove To Be All Important
By RUTGERS NEILSEN
Even life itself is played against backgrounds. Events take place in varied settings—ou the land, on the sea, in the air, and beneath the earth’s surface. Backgrounds are to cartoon movies what the platinum setting is to the diamond in the ring, or the frame is to a good painting. They literally back up the subject in more ways than one. Atmosphere, that quality which tends so much to give reality to a drawing, play, or whatnot, is injected by well developed backgrounds.
Yet, despite the rapid advancement in motion picture art, backgrounds in their present high state of development, are a comparatively recent feature of pen drawn movies. Therefore, our title—“Backgrounds To The Forefront"—is not as paradoxical as it sounds because settings have not heretofore kept pace with animation.
Paul Terry illustrates some of the best examples of the latest, up-to-the-minute development of drawn backgrounds in his “Aesop’s Film Fables” distributed by Pathe Exchange, Inc. These modernized versions of the ancient fabulist’s brain-throbs are so well staged that when one is seen on the screen, you forget that the movie is a series of animated drawings instead of portrayals by human actors and trained animals.
For years, a few roughly sketched lines to give depth—as you see in newspaper comic strips—sufficed for the backgrounds in movie cartoons.
Under the direction of Paul Terry, the artists at the studios of Fables Pictures, Inc., pay strict attention to appropriate atmospheric backgrounds, highly developed.
Since we are laying stress on backgrounds, we want to correct any impression that may creep into your mind that this feature of the cartoons is given the most attention. Such is not the case, for animation comes first. But the better the backgrounds are the better they display the action of the characters and heighten the reality of the scenes.
Fully detailed backgrounds have been made practicable by the use of celluloid sheets for the series of final drawings that give the animation to the characters. Heretofore when a complete character together with the background had to be executed upon drawing paper for every exposure—and there are 16 to a foot—it was not feasible to draw any more setting detail than was absolutely necessary. However, with the system developed by Paul Terry, only the actual members of the characters’ bodies needed in action need be drawn to give the effect of life-like motion. So, now, the background has to be drawn but once and may be given more attention.
Under the modern Paul Terry system, the sketches that animate the characters are super-imposed upon the backgrounds and photographed. Through the transparence of the celluloid, the background is registered with all its detail. That part of the background which is not wanted in the particular scene is blocked out by painting over the character on the under surface of the sheet. This is necessary, for instance, where Farmer Al Falfa is supposed to walk past a building. If Farmer Al were drawn merely in outline upon the celluloid sheets, the drawing of the building in the background sketch would show through the transparency. So, in each sketch the character’s body and limbs are “filled in” with paint.
To show Henry Cat fishing, the following procedure is carried out by Terry and his artists. The spring board upon which Henry is to be seated, with its landscape surroundings, is drawn upon the background sheet of paper. On celluloid sheet the cat’s body is drawn in a sitting position, so that superimposing it over the background shows him in a natural position for one fishing, except that his arms, rod and line are missing. These are drawn on a second celluloid sheet, which, when super-imposed over the first sheet, complete Henry Cat. Then, the two sheets are super-imposed upon the background and photographed. To show Henry getting a “bite” his arm is made to raise the rod by drawing the “arm”, rod, etc., in successive positions on several sheets of celluloid. The photographing of various combinations of drawings animate the Cat. This procedure eliminates the necessity of drawing the entire body over and over to register the fishing movements.
Having explained how it is now possible to use detailed backgrounds, we shall discuss briefly the backgrounds themselves. These important features of Paul Terry’s animated drawings composing the “Aesop’s Film Fables” are painted in “wash” upon heavy drawing paper. Black and white paints are used in executing these shallow settings. By varying the mixtures of these “colors” all necessary tones and definition are secured.
The older type of background has mere lines which only suggest atmosphere. It is not so far removed from the system in the time of Shakespeare when the sign “Forest” or “The castle” was used upon a bare stage in lieu of better setting. But, as modern stagecraft has advanced, so has the staging of the animated cartoon movie.
It is surprising how much better a background looks upon the screen than when viewed as a “still” drawing upon paper. The screening, of course, shows the characters in action “before” the settings, thus intensifying the depth. Probably other features help to heighten the illusion of the mere “wash” drawings in the background and make them realistic. After you view some of the latest Paul Terry creations in the “Aesop’s Film Fables” series, you can draw your own conclusions as to just what feature you think heightens the realism. We feel sure that you will agree with us that now backgrounds are to the forefront.

Considering how few newspaper features were written about animation, it’s significant that Terry was the subject of one of them. Yet, even then, his studio was being eclipsed by the far more amusing adventures of Felix the Cat. And within a few years, sound, a mouse and a chap named Disney would overtake them all.

Cagney the Cartoon Gent

Type Mae Clarke’s name into an internet search engine and it will likely add the word “grapefruit” before you’re finished. She’ll be forever known as the woman who had one crunched into her face by James Cagney in ‘The Public Enemy’ (1931).

Warner Bros. took advantage of the movie moment in advertising for other films with Cagney. Here’s one with some glorious (and, unfortunately, anonymous) caricature art for his 1934 comedy drama ‘Jimmy the Gent.’