The Elephant and Michael Sasanoff

Michael Sasanoff had a short but productive career at the Leon Schlesinger studio, though much of his work was uncredited.

Sasanoff, from what I’ve been able to gather, took over as the background artist in the Clampett unit when Johnny Johnsen left for MGM in 1941. Clampett, himself, had acquired the unit from Tex Avery not too many months earlier. Clampett finished up a bunch of Avery cartoons and then put his own into production. One is the charming “Horton Hatches the Egg” (released in 1942).

It opens like a number of Avery cartoons—with a pan over a background drawing. There is foliage on a foreground cell panned at a different speed than the background so I can’t snip it together. But what you see below gives you an idea of Sasanoff’s work on the cartoon, as Clampett tried to give a flavour of the designs in the Dr. Seuss book the cartoon was based on.






Sasanoff moved into management, according to The Film Daily Year Book of Motion Pictures, 1943 edition, and finished his career at Schlesinger’s with writing credits on several of Clampett’s cartoons in 1944 and 1945. Then, he vanished. It turns out he got out of animation and into the advertising business. Billboard magazine of April 3, 1948, tells us where he went:

Schenley Distributors, thru Biow Agency, this week signed to televise film commercials on a co-ordinated sked calling or simultaneous airing of identical spots over 11 video outlets daily. The 10 film strips, which plug Cresta Blanca wine, were completed in Hollywood last week by Biow’s tele production chief, Michael Sasanoff.
Sasanoff returns to Gotham next week to present finished series to agency toppers.

Sasanoff moved from agency to agency in the ‘50s and ‘60s, eventually opening his own firm. You have to laugh at this snippet of a story from a 1957 edition of Radio Daily-Television Daily:

MICHAEL SASANOFF, creator of Warner Brothers’ “Tweety Bird,” and partly responsible for “Bugs Bunny,” has been added to the copy staff of NW Ayer & Son, Inc., Philadelphia. He will be with the New York radio-television department.

Considering his ex-boss Clampett had a reputation for taking credit for creating almost every major pre-‘45 character at Warner Bros., it’s ironic Sasanoff took credit for a character Clampett did create (Tweety).

By the late ‘50s, the Sasanoffs had settled in New Canaan, Connecticut, where his wife Rose was involved in an amateur acting troupe along with Peter Van Steeden, Fred Allen’s ex orchestra leader. He died in Wilton, Connecticut on December 20, 1984, almost six months after becoming remarried. He was 81.

Jack Benny, 1966

It seems reporters and columnists had a check-list of things they had to mention in any of their stories about Jack Benny in the 1960s. They all seemed to

● Juxtapose “39” with his real age.
● Reveal he isn’t really a cheapskate.
● Mention how he laughs at everyone else’s jokes.
● Opine that he really isn’t a horrible violin player.

And maybe it’s my imagination, but a lot of the interviews seem to have been conducted in Jack’s hotel room with some incident occurring in the room before, during, or after the interview mentioned in the story.

This one is from 1966 from the Associated Press’ New York-based TV-radio writer (an obsolete title in 1966; the beat was strictly television by then), written for newspapers to use in weekend editions. Of course, it also plugged Jack’s coming special. which was the reason for the column in the first place. There’s a factual error I’ll mention after you read it.

Show Biz’s Busiest ‘Youngster’
by Cynthia Lowry
NEW YORK, Nov. 26 (AP)—Jack Benny opened the door of his hotel suite, then quickly retreated into another room and reappeared in a dressing gown:
“Forgive me, forgive me,” he apologized. “It’s this time difference from California.
His manager, Irving Fein, who accompanies him on all professional journeys, appeared from an adjoining room, and everybody sat down to breakfast.
Benny, whose manner and mien belie his years, eyed two glasses of orange juice and one slice of Persian melon.
“Who gets the melon?” he demanded, in that petulant, ready-to-get-my-feelings-hurt voice he has developed over 35 years of radio and television. Then he laughed, and said he’d rather have orange juice anyway.
Benny, in spite of the fact that his official biography states that he was “born 39 years ago in Chicago,” will be 73 in February. And, although in semiretirement from television for two seasons, he manages to be about the busiest senior citizen in show business.
A professional errand of mercy jetted him to New York this time—to be a guest star on CBS’ “Garry Moore Show,” part of a desperate effort to save the show from sagging ratings.
Benny had just finished making his annual special, and was also using his time to plug it. A spoof on beauty pageants and loaded with former contest winners, it will be broadcast next Thursday on NBC.
Benny is not the funniest man in the world off-camera. In fact, he is a bland, somewhat understated fellow who is rated by his colleagues as the greatest audience for humor in the world.
Steve Allen, in his book “The Funny Men,” says that Benny is “to humor what Arthur Rubinstein is to music: ‘a performer of genius.’ He calls Benny ‘the world’s greatest reactor’ to jokes and situations, which usually are on him — “straight man for the whole world.”
Over years of show business Benny has honed his professional character: a conceited tightwad of easily punctured dignity. Years of limelight have also developed what is widely believed to be his real character — a generous, outgoing and modest man who is an inordinately big tipper and a: lavish appreciator of other people’s humor.
In an interview, Benny will have pleasant words about all his colleagues. He will discuss his recent move from his Beverly Hills home to an apartment close to his favorite golf course. He speaks of enjoying freedom to spend more time in his Palm Springs home —although he has not done so yet — and the pleasures of doing charity concerts all over the country with top orchestras.
Benny practices on his violin at least two hours a day. He is a much better violinist than he appears to be; it takes considerable skill play delicately off-key. He goes to his office daily. He performs on a lot of stages.
“It is a good life,” he says. “I enjoy playing a few weeks a year in Nevada — once I get accustomed to the turnaround in hours. And I like to be able to work on a concert or a show for a few concentrated weeks and then take time off.”
Over the years, Benny shows have been real innovators. The old radio show and the newest special, however, are built from the same brick and mortar. There will be the stingy jokes and several samples of his fantastic timing.
Benny’s first radio broadcast was a 1932 Ed Sullivan show, and his opening lines were: “This is Jack Benny. There will be a slight pause while everyone says, ‘who cares?’” Today, Benny can produce laughter merely by exploding “Cut that out!” or just by facing the audience thoughtfully and droning, “hmmmmm.” Over 35 years, the audience has come to know the character and is conditioned to laugh,
Benny’s timing is peerless. Don Wilson once told a magazine writer that when Benny turns to the audience for his famed long “reaction,” other actors are not allowed to continue with their lines. The signal to resume comes when he again faces his fellow, performers.
Benny jumped off the Sullivan Show into his own NBC series in 1932 and was one of the network’s big stars until, the famous “Paley’s Raid” of 1949 when CBS wooed away big names like Benny, Bergen and Skelton. He continued the radio show until 1955, but in 1950 started his television series. These continued, in one form or another on CBS until 1964, after which he returned to NBC for one season of specials.
When the weekly show was discontinued for low ratings, Benny was not exactly happy, but obviously he has adjusted to the idea of one special a year, plus as many guest shots as he wants to take on.
“Listen,” he confided, in mock exasperation, “I am an awfully easy fella to get along with. I like everything I do and I’m happy with everything I do. I like to work and I like to practice. I even like to walk down Fifth Avenue and have people say hello to me.”
And, for his amour-proper, he’d also like is very much if his “Jack Benny Hour” Thursday landed him on top of the Nielsen ratings.
Oh, yes, and he did, after all, eat the melon.

Now the factual error:

Just about everyone today seems to cite a 1932 appearance on Ed Sullivan’s interview show as Benny’s debut on radio. When this became part of the Benny legend isn’t clear but it’s not true. Benny celebrated his tenth anniversary on the air in a show broadcast in 1941, and that was quite correct. Jack appeared on the radio for the first time in 1931 and it was not with Ed Sullivan. We’ll have that story next week.

Liz Taylor Drinks

She was 18 when “Father of the Bride” was released in 1950. It was nominated for three Oscars.



We suspect Liz preferred something a little stronger than milk not too long after this ad campaign.

Porky’s Continuity Hunt

Gags are going to win over consistency any time. At least that was true in the cartoon that introduced Daffy Duck to the world.

At the beginning of “Porky's Duck Hunt,” young Mr. Pig lives in a home with a dresser against the wall by the door. But at the end of the cartoon, a window is there.




The window’s only there to allow Tex Avery to set up a gag where Porky can look out it to see a bunch of ducks taunt him. It makes even less sense considering Porky is in an apartment building, as you can tell by the shot of the neighbour going back to his suite upstairs. Any window in the previous shot would look out into a hall, not outside. But the neighbour’s part of a running gag so the cartoon has to be set in an apartment.



Porky’s got a pretty big apartment. It’s even got its own upstairs. Note the staircase to the right.



It just proves anything’s possible in a Tex Avery cartoon.

The background artist isn’t credited in any of the ‘30s cartoons. Art Loomer was in charge of the Warners background department but whether Johnny Johnsen worked on this cartoon, like he did for Avery a few years later and then at MGM, is your guess. It doesn’t look like his work; there are lots of wonky angles on pictures, door frames and so on in the interior shots; a style that died in the ‘30s but was really popular at the Fleischer and Iwerks studios a few years before this.

If Woody Had Gone Right to the Police...

...this would never have happened.

Even die-hard members of the Paul J. Smith Sucks Society admit this is one of his better cartoons, though he treats some groaners a little too seriously. It’s McKimson-esque in that “Bunco Busters” (1955) is a parody of the TV show “Racket Squad”. Dal McKennon does a pretty good job approximating the stiff delivery of Reed Hadley, who played Captain John Braddock in the crime show (the character here is called Captain Haddock). The character even looks like Braddock.



The animators on this cartoon all spent time at Warner Bros. in the late ‘30s—Gil Turner, Herman Cohen and Bob Bentley. I’ve never liked some of the thick ink-line work at Lantz around this period; look at the palm trees above. The story’s by ‘40s stalwart Milt Schaffer.

From Laurel and Hardy to Joi and Lois

Not all of Hollywood shuddered in fear over the rise of television in the late ‘40s. The makers of feature films short-sightedly shunned the new medium into the ‘50s, but it was embraced early by producers of short subjects. And for good reason.

The bottom was falling out of the shorts business in the ‘40s. In 1948, the court-ordered end of block booking—where theatres were forced to take short subjects released by a studio along with features—was only one problem for producers of one and two-reelers. They had been complaining, independent producers especially, it took too long to see profits from their films. The war had cut off overseas markets, and then post-war currency freezes kept film profits from leaving foreign countries to the U.S. It’s no wonder veteran producers of shorts saw television as a land of opportunity.

Everyone thinks of early television—and in this post, we mean 1948 onward—as a time when the radio networks tippy-toed into the industry, pushing its stars (and their sponsors and ad agencies) along with them. But besides network programming, there was a large syndication business, too. And that’s where the shorts producers hoped to cash in. True, there were more than enough networks to go around for stations in most cities to pick from (there were 59 TV stations in the U.S. by June 1, 1949). But networks weren’t able to fill a lot of time in the late ‘40s so filmed syndication programming was appealing to stations that didn’t, or couldn’t, rely on live shows the rest of the broadcast day.
Here’s an Associated Press story from 1948 that is a follow-up to developments from a month earlier. At that time, Billboard announced Hal Roach was getting into the television. The producer best known in the sound era for Laurel and Hardy features and the Our Gang shorts was casting his lot with the small screen. He cancelled a six-picture deal he had signed with MGM in the spring.

Video Gets a Shot In Arm From Roach
By BILL BECKER
HOLLYWOOD, Dec. 22 (AP)—Television—the baby whose bounces have been followed by many worried Hollywood eyes, is getting ready to take bigger steps.
Hal Roach, for more than 30 years a producer of motion picture comedies, today begins the first of a series of television productions. And from now on, says Roach, all his work will go into the television field.
If, as video insiders say, films are the lifeblood of the new industry, Roach’s entry into the field might be regarded as a major transfusion.
And producers already in the hectic field are inclined to welcome the old comic master openly. Despite the dozens of small video production companies which have mushroomed up here in this talent mecca, there seems to be plenty of room for competition.
LOOKS TO FUTURE
As Jerry Fairbanks, who has a video producing contract with NBC puts it:
“We feel we are pioneering an industry that will eventually be many times larger than the movies. The time is not far off when films will provide at least 50 per cent of all television programs.”
Fairbanks and other major video producers claim too that the break with the movies—reshowing old Westerns and other films on television—is not far distant. Production costs are averaging nearly $10,000 per half-hour program so far, but the television producers say they’re determined to make good original shows for the fireside trade.
For example:
Fairbanks has completed “Public Prosecutor,” a series of 26 shows each 20 minutes long, and “Television Closeups,” five-minute oddity featurettes for NBC. He has three other series in production.
The first 13 shows of another detective-type series, “The Cases of Eddie Drake,” have been completed for CBS by IMPHO (Independent Motion Pictures Releasing Organization).
FINISH SIX PICTURES
Marshall Grant-Realm Productions has finished six of a “Great Stories” series for American Tobacco Company that will start next month. Slated for NBC release January 21 in New York and about the same time here, the weekly show will run at least six months.
Dipping into the public domain for stories available without copyright the series includes
“The Necklace” by Guy de Maupassant, “Sire Maletroit’s Door,” “Mademoiselle Fifi,” “The Mummy’s Foot,” “The Invisible Wound,” and “The Substitute” for starters.
Production costs ran slightly higher than $10,000 for each of these 30-minute shows, General Manager Norman Elzer of Grant-Realm said. The talent lineup included Arthur Shields as narrator, John Beal, Robert Alda, Reginald Denny, Maria Palmer, Hurd Hatfield and J. Edward Bromberg.
Hollywood talent—for the most part held in leash by the big movie producers—is also represented in “TV” shows by John Howard, Anne Gwynne, Patricia Morrison and Don Haggerty. Among those toying around the experimental fringes of the industry are Joseph Cotten, Rudy Vallee, Frank Albertson and Designer William Cameron Menzies.
Many others are itching to get in on the ground floor of the business, even though the foundations are just beginning to harden.
Roach’s announcement tipped the current mood:
"Following the entertainment-seeking trend the public mind has been a lifework of mine since the inception of motion pictures. I am thoroughly convinced that the insatiable desire to be entertained will find its greatest satisfaction through television.”
Roach plans six half-hour shows at his Culver City studio. “Sadie and Sally,” a comedy show starring Joy [sic] Lansing and Lois Hall, will be the opener.

As a side note, Fairbanks had his hands in many pies. Besides producing shorts like the “Unusual Occupations” and “Speaking of Animals” series for Paramount, he also made industrial films into the 1960s.

Television history is littered with projects that never were and that seems to have been the fate of almost all of Roach’s first TV efforts. Billboard of January 1, 1949, announced Roach was filming six pilot shows to shop around to agencies and sponsors. Besides “Sally and Sadie,” the others were “The Brown Family,” a sitcom starring John Eldredge, Ann Doran, Carol Brannon and Billy Gray; “Botsford’s Beanery,” a slapstick comedy, “Foo Young, a Chinese comedy whodunit; “Puddle Patch Club,” an Our Gang ripoff and another sitcom called “Our Main Street.” 12 additional shows were in various stages of planning. Roach was still peddling them in 1952, along with a TV version of “Myrt and Marge” through the International News Services television department., though it appears none made it past the pilot stage.

Oddly, one show that’s not mentioned was revealed in the Billboard article of the previous November and it did get on the air almost two years later. It was “The Stu Erwin Show,” subtitled “The Trouble With Father.” General Mills was its sponsor and the show was one of the early successes of television syndication.

Cat Fishin’

Lots of brush work in this scare take by Tom in “Cat Fishin’”.



There are only three credited animators in this one—Ken Muse, Ed Barge and Mike Lah. This looks like Lah to my untrained eye; I’ve seen similar jagged teeth in Pixie and Dixie cartoons he worked on. There are other spots where Jerry’s mouth is animated at the side of the face, much like Lah’s work at the Hanna-Barbera studio.

Corny Gag

Yeah, Bob Clampett used this gag in ‘Baby Bottleneck’ and re-used it in ‘The Great Piggy Bank Robbery’ (both 1946), but Dave Monahan put it in a Tex Avery cartoon in 1941 (if Avery didn’t think of it on his own). This is from ‘Tortoise Beats Hare.’



The background is by Johnny Johnsen, who moved over to MGM and the Avery unit not long after Tex left Schlesinger’s. He never received billing on a Warner’s cartoon but his full name appeared near the end of his Metro career.

We’ve mentioned before on this blog that Johnny was an artist with the Los Angeles Express by 1909 before going to the Schlesinger cartoon studio. But he was also an inventor, receiving a patent in 1917 for a process to make colour-printing plates. You can read it HERE.

Ringing in The New Year in Comics, 1905

January 1, 1905 was a Sunday and the Atlanta Constitution published its usual Sunday comics that day. All of them had a new year flavour. Most of them are long forgotten.

Jimmy Swinnerton got the majority of the space. His “Jimmy” took up a full page and had its own masthead. “Katy” was yet another of Swinnerton’s comics.




I would hope the Katzenjammer Kids need no introduction. Remarkably, it is still being drawn today.



Frederick Opper wrote “And Her Name Was Maud!” No, this isn’t a comic starring Bea Arthur. The title character is a donkey. This may be Opper’s least-known comic. He was the creator of “Happy Hooligan” and “Alphonse and Gaston.” You see Happy below.




“Foxy Grandpa” was from the pen of Charles E. Schultze. He used “Bunny” as a pen name, probably to avoid confusion with Charles Schulz, whom he psychically knew would be born 17 years later and become a cartoonist.



Lulu and Leander was drawn by H.M. Howarth.



You can click on any of them to enlarge them.

Happy New Year

One of my favourite Bugs Bunny scenes ever since I was a kid is when he dupes Elmer Fudd into thinking it’s midnight on January 1st in “The Wabbit Who Came to Supper.” The gag comes out of nowhere and the confetti comes out of nowhere. It builds nicely and lasts just long before before Elmer realises it’s July and he’s been conned.






Bugs is beautifully expressive here. Dick Bickenbach gets the only animation credit. Manny Perez, Gerry Chiniquy and (as far as I know) Gil Turner were animators in the Freleng unit at the time.