Kenny, I say, Kenny Delmar. Delmar, That Is.

Fred Allen’s best-known radio routine was one that had a comparatively short life on his show—Allen’s Alley. It was Fred’s chance to satirise stories of the day and toss in a bit of regional humour by taking a mock straw opinion poll of four residents of a stretch of back road. The Alley debuted on December 2, 1942, 10 years after Allen began regular broadcasts. It morphed into “Main Street” in the early part of the 1948-49 season, Allen’s last. And the characters everyone associates with the Alley weren’t the original denizens. Three of them were played by Alan Reed, John Brown and Charlie Cantor, all of whom left the show before the Alley achieved its fame.

The best known today of the four who settled in the Alley is Senator Claghorn, played by Allen’s announcer, Kenny Delmar. He’s known no doubt because of the repeated television showings of that blowhard cartoon rooster, Foghorn Leghorn. The two shared many of the same traits and if you’re wondering which came first, you can do no better than read Keith Scott’s research on the question.

Claghorn was a modification of Counsellor Cartenbranch, a character Delmar played on ‘The Alan Young Show’ during the 1945-46 season. In Allen’s hands, the Senator became instantly popular (the Alley had an earlier Senator Bloat, played by Scott Smart). The nascent Eagle-Lion ‘B’ film factory quickly jumped on Claghorn, and spun a whole 63-minute movie starring Delmar as the Senator, with a plot separate and apart from anything on the Allen show. Shooting on “It’s a Joke, Son!” began in Hollywood in July 1946.

The movie wasn’t really a success. It was almost an impossible task taking a two-minute routine and trying to turn it into a feature film (something many stars of “Saturday Night Live” would learn about their characters years later). The Senator may have been from, I say, he may have been from the South, but fans were used to his natural setting in the Alley. The fast pace of the verbal radio gags gave way to the languid pace of an hour-long piece. And Delmar had the distinct disadvantage of trying to be a visual version of a character people had already pictured in their own minds. He may have sounded like Senator Claghorn but he didn’t look like him to many viewers; I pictured the Senator to be an older, grey-haired wheeler-dealer.



Unlike some actors who embellished their stories over the years on the talk show circuit, Delmar was consistent about how he came up with the Senator. Let’s read two articles from 1946. The first is from the National Enterprise Association. The second is by the International News Service’s maven of show biz gossip, Louella Parsons. You’ll notice how Lolly loved to insert herself (and, in this instance, her news service) in the story of what she’s covering.

By ERSKINE JOHNSON
NEA Staff Correspondent
Hollywood, Aug. 11 — Senator Claghorn was sitting at the north end of the bar, sipping a Manhattan. He saw us coming and switched to the south end, but he couldn’t do anything about the Manhattan.
“Why Senator,” we said, “how come you’re not drinking a mint julep?”
The Senator put a finger to his lips and whispered: “Shhh! Nobody knows me out here in Hollywood. I’m having fun.”
But, he assured us, he wasn’t living in North Hollywood.
As you’ve probably read, Senator Claghorn — Kenny Delmar — is a movie-star. You’ll soon be seeing “It’s a Joke, Son,” starring Kenny, which Bryan Foy is producing for the new Eagle-Lion Film Company.
No Beautiful Girls
But the Senator was unhappy.
“There are no beautiful girls in Hollywood,” he said. “Where are all your beautiful girls? I saw beautiful girls in Texas, but none here.”
We assured him a couple might show up after lunch, and that seemed to make him happy. (They didn’t show up.)
Kenny was a surprise to us. He didn’t look at all as we had imagined he would. He’s a stocky little man with bushy hair that stands up in different directions, and he wears big, black, horn-rimmed glasses.
In fact, he looks something like a fat Harold Lloyd. We told him so.
“That’s what they said at the studio, too,” he told us. “They won’t let me wear my horn-rimmed glasses because with them on I look too much like Lloyd. In fact, they gave me a flock of makeup tests, and I looked like too many actors — like Jean Hersholt, Edward G. Robinson, J. Carroll Naish, and Ed Wynn.”
But after 36 makeup tests, he assured us, he finally wound up looking the way people think Senator Claghorn should look. He’ll just wear his own face plus big, bushy, prop eyebrows. He’ll have no beard and no mustache, and his glasses will be the pince-nez type.
The South Can’t Lose
There will be plenty of gags about the South, of course, in “It’s a Joke, Son.” This is one of them.
Una Merkel, Claghorn’s wife, tells him to come into the house — “a north wind is blowing, and you’ll catch cold.”
Replies the Senator: “There is no such thing as a north wind. That’s just the south wind coming back home.'”
Kenny came to Hollywood, free, in the president’s private car on the Southern Pacific railroad. (Everybody wants to get in the act.)
“But it was pretty rugged,” Kenny groaned. “I had to do 38 broadcasts and make about 48 speeches all' through the South. Anytime there were four people at the station they dragged me out of bed to make a speech.
“I should have taken Fred Allen’s advice. He said I’d be a wreck. After walking around in 110 degrees in Tucson while they made me a member of the Sunshine Club, I was a wreck.”
But, said Kenny, he’s going to take Fred’s advice about not associating in Hollywood with people who are sun-tanned.
Before he left New York, Fred warned him: “Avoid the people with sun-tans. They’re the ones who are not working.”

Delmar Tells How He Met ‘Claghorn’ While Hitch-Hiking
By LOUELLA PARSONS
HOLLYWOOD, Sept. 14 (INS)—I grew to know Kenny Delmar (Senator Claghorn) as well as it he wore a close friend, nil the weeks I was in the hospital. He was a must on Fred Allen’s show and the old Southern Senator and his drawl that smacks of down yonder below the Mason and Dixon line was one person I wanted to meet.
Considered the find of 1946 in radio, I was curious to see him and to hear first hand all about the Senator’s n e w movie, “It’s a Joke, Son,” which he came to Hollywood to make.
The Senator—Kenny, that is—was one of my first visitors, and he is no joke, son. He is an affable, attractive young man, who is still wondering what good luck symbol hit him square on the head. His only complaint at the moment is a bad case of sinus trouble which has kept him from being as happy as .ho feels he should be with all the golden success poured into his lap.
“HOW DID you got your sinus trouble?” I naked, when he sadly informed me he was gradually feeling worse and that he was told he had an allergy.
“I stopped at every town on the way out here,” he replied. “I never worked so hard in my life. I had to write something different about each town, and it was so hot that when I returned to the air cooled train, I caught a terrible cold.”
“The penalty of fame,” I said, and for just a split moment the smile turned into a question mark. I think he had a feeling I was being sarcastic, and ribbing him which, heavens knows, I wasn’t, so I quickly said, “Tell me all about yourself—where did you find Senator Claghorn? Are you married? Do you return to Fred Allen’s show? And how do you like the movies?”
“ONE QUESTION at a time,” Senator Kenny laughed.
“This isn’t my first movie,” he replied. “I was Joseph Schildkraut as a little boy in D. W. Griffiths’ ‘Orphans on the Storm.’ I tried awfully hard to get back into movies after that picture, but no one wanted me. It was really while I was hitch-hiking to California that I got my idea of Senator Claghorn.
“The Senator is the evolution of Dynamite Gus. An old western rancher with a rattletrap broken down car picked me up. He had to yell so I could hear him over the noise of the wheezy motor. He would preface each sentence with ‘I say’ and finish it with something like this, ‘I planted wheat, that is.’ So I turned Dynamite Gus into Councilman Cartenbranch, and he eventually became Senator Claghorn. I wrote the first two shows for Fred, but all the others are written by him.”
WHEN KENNY goes back to New York City, he will have his own show three times a week, besides his stint on the Allen comedy half-hour.
He told me that he had once worked for the Hearst organization.
“The radio, that is,” he laughed. “I did a part in Jungle Jim,’ advertising the American weekly.”
Now for you who will read this before Kenny’s movie is shown, let me describe Kenny, He is 34. His mother was one of the Delmar sisters in vaudeville. He was on the stage at the age of seven, and from his maternal side he inherits the love of art, beauty and poetry. His mother is Greek and English. He married one of the Cochrane twins, those lovely ballet dancers who appeared at the Metropolitan. He has a son aged five, who, he says, he expects to let hitch-hike because that’s where you meet the real American people.
And here’s a laugh — Kenny says he can no longer use his own gag, “It’s a joke son,” which he made famous on the air, on account of too many other radio comedians have used it.
P.S.: I used it myself on my show, and did I feel guilty when he told me how often it had been swiped.

When television killed network radio, it pretty well killed Fred Allen’s career and wounded Delmar’s; he never enjoyed the stardom of his time in Allen’s Alley. He remained based in New York as TV moved to Hollywood, but worked steadily in guest roles through the ‘50s (the commuting to and from the West Coast killed his marriage), briefly formed a comedy partnership with fellow ex-American Tobacco pusher Del Sharbutt and even produced industrial and sales films, at least one featuring a certain Senator.

In the ‘60s, Delmar became one of a handful of voice actors in the New York animation community along with Allen Swift, employed by Total Television Productions. Florida beckoned, where Delmar enjoyed retirement in West Palm Beach. The native New Englander died in Stamford, Connecticut on July 14, 1984, age 73.

We don’t suppose too many of you will sit and watch the entire version of “It’s a Joke, Son!” But a few minutes of the Senator’s bluster will give you a bit of an idea of what audiences liked on Fred Allen’s show. The dialogue director (who helped Delmar with his accent) was vaudeville veteran Benny Rubin and you’ll see a young June Lockhart. And, yes, that’s Foghorn Leghorn’s “Camptown Races” in Irving Friedman’s medley over the opening credits. Credits, that is.

The Old Sprung-a-Leak Gag

Anyone care to guess how many times Tex Avery pulled off this gag?



This time, the body-leaking gag comes from “The Hick Chick” (1946). The bad guy with the Charles Boyer voice has stabbed Lem several times with a pitch fork. “Ah, ya didn’t even touch me,” Lem says. Then the gag.

Tex pulled it again in “Garden Gopher” (1950) with Spike and a rake.

The story isn’t one of writer Heck Allen’s best; the ending is unsatisfying because it’s a running gag without a topper. You can see it coming and expect to build to something more. But the fight inside Lem’s clothes has to be unique.

The credited animators in this cartoon are Ed Love, Walt Clinton, Preston Blair and Ray Abrams. Avery and Allen use Red Skelton’s Clem Kadiddlehopper (and Daisy June) as a starting point for the cartoon; I’m not a Skelton fan so Skelton’s catchphrases aren’t any more amusing coming out of animated characters.

It sounds like Frank Graham supplying the voice of the Avery Wolf-behaving villain (complete with moustache), Sara Berner as Daisy Goon and Graham as the bull.

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.