The Rarest Stan Freberg Cartoon

About the only people who didn’t know what to do with cartoons in the 1950s were the people who produced them. All the film companies knew how to do was make them and distribute them to theatres. They were happy (and stupid) to rid themselves of old cartoons to television syndicators or networks who knew what to do with them—make lots of money.

The television programme businessmen realised if old cartoons could make them a windfall, maybe old children’s records could do the same. After all, the 78s and 45s had been released once and had likely wrung out most of their sales. Why not marry old records to new cartoons, ones especially made for television? They didn’t need theatrical-style animation on every frame—“NBC Comics” and (especially) “Crusader Rabbit” had proven kids would watch virtually static drawings over narration, so they were affordable to make.

However, the idea of cartoons based on children’s records seems to have had a lengthy gestation period. Former Disney animator Art Scott’s company produced Mel-O-Toons starting in 1959. But the idea goes back before that, to 1954, according to an article in Billboard in December that year. Scott, apparently, wasn’t involved at that point. But Ed Nofziger, later with UPA and Hanna-Barbera, was. So was ex-Disney animator Cecil Beard.

Here’s what Billboard had to say. It looks like Fischel had all the loose ends tied up.

Film Cartoons’ Kidisk Tie-In
HOLLYWOOD, Dec. 18.—The children’s record field is expected to achieve its biggest sales potential very shortly with the upcoming television debut of a series of animated cartoons, cued to the sound tracks from children’s records.
Record-Toons, Inc., TV film producers, have completed negotiations with Capitol and Columbia Records and acquired rights to approximately 200 kidisk selections for which a series of seven-and-one-half minute films are to be produced. Further negotiations with the other major recording companies are currently under way and are expected to be consummated shortly.
Bob Fischel, president of Record-Toons, revealed that negotiations with a number of TV film distributing organizations have been entered into with the announcement of a definite agreement to be made shortly.
Included in the block of records acquired from Capitol is music by Nat (King) Cole, Jack Smith, Van Alexander, Stan Freberg, Billy May, Jerry Marlowe, Sportsmen Quartet, Don Wilson, Knox Manning, Smiley Burnette, Paul Weston, Hal Derwin and Paul Sells.
A roster of 36 additional artists are available to Record-Toons, tho contracts have not been signed. A total of 132 selections have been made available from the Capitol catalog.
Clearances for the use of the disk sound tracks have been received from the artists involved, with Record-Toons also inking a contract with the American Federation of Musicians calling for repayment to musicians originally on the recording dates, and a 5 per cent payment to the AFM’s music performance trust fund.
Record-Toons is completing its first film, an original animated cartoon based on the Stan Freberg recording of “Dinky Pinky” on Capitol.
Additional executives of Record-Toons include Milt Feldman, producer; Jerry Marlowe, music supervisor; Ed Nofzinger [sic], art director; Cecil Beard, animation director; and Max Morgan, camera man.
Lloyd Dunn, vice-president of Capitol Records, and Hecky Krasnow, artists and repertoire director of the children’s department at Columbia, represented their firms in the negotiations with Record-Toons. Hal Spector handled details of the Columbia pact in New York for the new firm.
In addition, Record-Toons is currently planning two additional TV film series, using disk material as a basis. “Sandman,” a 15 minute teleshow tailored to urge youngsters to get to bed, and “Record-Toons Review,” a one-hour panel record discussion show, are both being scripted.

Billboard of April 16, 1955 shows Record-Toons was in the pilot stage with Fischel producing, then mentions the series no more. But the 3rd edition of The Encyclopedia of Animated Cartoons by Jeff Lenburg picks up the story.

RECORD TOONS
Legendary animator James “Shamus” Culhane produced and directed this short-lived, ultra-limited animated series of seven-minute theatrical cartoons on a shoestring budget in 1957 based on popular novelty tunes of the day. Besides serving as a creative supervisor on the series, UPA animator Ed Nofziger, best known for his work on UPA’s Mister Magoo cartoons, designed and animated the films along with fellow animators Cecil Beard, Joe Messerli (of TV’s Captain Fathom fame) and Milt Feldman, and films were drawn by animators Fred Crippen, Jack Heiter, Ed Levitt and Shirley Silvey. A few 16-mm prints that exist today are in blackand white, though it is possible the series was made in color. Listed below are known titles.
Produced and directed by James “Shamus” Culhane. Black and white. A Shamus Culhane Production.
1957:
“Dinky Pinky”; “Pepe the Possum”; and “D-O-G Spells Dog.”

Evidently, the few cartoons that were made were so forgettable, Culhane forgets to mention them in his autobiography Talking Animals and Other People.

The exact same concept appeared on TV screens several years later as Mel-O-Toons, using Capitol and RCA children’s records as narration for cartoons with lots of pans over backgrounds and bits of limited animation. They weren’t 7½ minutes like the Record-Toons were supposed to be; they were the length of the record plus opening and closing titles. And one of the Mel-O-Toons was Freberg’s “Dinky Pinky the Elephant,” released on disc about August 1953 by Capitol. Incidentally, it was written by Charlie Shows, who went on to Disney and then wrote every cartoon produced by Hanna-Barbera in its first two seasons.

You can see the UPA influence on them in the drawings below. The first is from “Noah’s Ark” and the second from “Helen of Troy.”




Time worked against the Mel-O-Toons. Between the time Record-Toons was a concept and the Mel-O-Toons were released, Hanna-Barbera opened its TV factory with limited animation that was a lot less limited than what narration-over-records delivered, and starred characters like Huckleberry Hound and Quick Draw McGraw that were funny and enduring. Mel-O-Toons was merely one of a number of inexpensive series that stations could buy to fill our their morning or afternoon roundups of cartoons dominated by AAP packages of Bugs Bunny and Popeye.

The idea of combining kids’ records and animation is still a fun one and, surprisingly, has its backers today. “Daffy Duck’s Rhapsody”, with CGI animation atop a soundtrack of an old Capitol record by Mel Blanc, hit screens this year. And someone else got the idea of augmenting the song with clips from some classic cartoons and posted it on-line.

My, Weren’t There a Lot of Skunks in Here?

“Now, all’a you skunks clear out of here!” said Yosemite Sam. So they did.




Gotta love Sam’s dead-eye look when he blasts at the skunk. Look at how Sam pulls his head back. Great attention to detail.

‘Bugs Bunny Rides Again’ is one of my favourite Bugs cartoons. Friz Freleng made a bunch of great ones about this time (the cartoon was released in 1948). The credited animators are his usual bunch—Virgil Ross, Ken Champin, Manny Perez and Gerry Chiniquy.

Counterfeit Cat Brushwork

Spike follows his stretched tongue back into the frame in “The Counterfeit Cat” (1949). Nice brushwork here.



Mike Lah, Walt Clinton and Grant Simmons are the credited animators in this fine Tex Avery cartoon.

Boxing With Spaghetti

For all the talk about flat characters in UPA cartoons, I was a little astonished to see a couple of things in the 1951 Jolly Frolic “The Wonder Gloves.” Like many people interested in theatrical animation, I had never seen a number of the non-Magoo UPA cartoons, including this one, until the newly-released UPA discs came out.

It shows a descent from the rubber-hose animation of the ‘30s with plenty of rubbery animation of spaghetti-like arms and legs of the principal characters.



But there’s also perspective animation, something you wouldn’t expect to find from a studio bragging about flat designs. At one point, the janitor turns around 180 degrees while sweeping the floor. In one scene, he and then a pair of boxing gloves run at an angle past the camera. And in another, he sends a punch toward the camera (on twos).



I plead ignorance about “modern” classical music of the 20th century and even music composition itself, so I don’t want to say much about the score of this cartoon by Lou Maury. To my ear, it’s full of dissonant bridges between musical effects accenting the action on the screen, except at the very end. And that’s another astonishing thing. There’s a take by the dad that registers surprise when the boxing gloves come to life, a take that signals to the audience that his story about his boxing career that made up the whole cartoon was BS. But there no stab of horns, no musical augmentation of any type of the climax gag; the score is already playing off like the cartoon is over. So the take gets a little lost when the music could have made it stand out more, just like the music was doing during the rest of the cartoon.



I wish I could tell you I laughed during this cartoon. I didn’t. In fact, I couldn’t even feel the pain of the punches on these spaghetti men and even the evil expressions of the bad guy boxer (in medium shot) were weak. I’ll take Bugs Bunny’s “Rabbit Punch” instead, thanks.

Paul Julian designed the cartoon, the credited animators were Bill Melendez, Frank Smith and Roger Daley, and the great Marvin Miller supplied several voices.

The Bernice Hansen Mystery Solved

You’ve heard her squealing voice in countless cartoons from the mid-1930s. Little girls and animals her specialty. Leonard Maltin calls her “Bernice Hansen” in Of Mice and Magic. Even Bob Clampett and Rudy Ising called her “Bernice Hansen” in interviews. Jerry Beck and Will Friedwald call her “Berenice Hanson” in The Warner Brothers Cartoons (1981) and “Bernice Hanson” in their quasi-successor book Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies (1989). Graham Webb calls her “Bernice Hansel” in The Animated Film Encyclopedia. He got the name from the Disney Archives, though Tex Avery once claimed that was her name.

They’re all wrong. But one is damned close. And you’ve got to be amazed with Tex’s memory.

For years, I’ve wondered who this mystery voice artist is. Some speculated she was a child. Some speculated she was a radio or movie actress using an assumed name. Others speculated she was a professional singer (and she does a good job with the Jimmy Dietrich tune “Dunk Dunk Dunk” in the 1934 Lantz cartoon “Jolly Little Elves.”)

They’re all wrong.

Recently, I found some crumbs of information, thanks to interviews conducted by Leon Schlesinger in the mid-‘30s, the period when a squeaky female voice was heard as Little Kitty in “I Haven’t Got a Hat” and in the title role of “Page Miss Glory,” among many cartoons. An Associated Press story of April 4, 1936 reveals:

On the “Merrie Melodies” vocal list is a woman who does no other film work than speaking for Kitty the Kitten.

But then Leon got a bit more specific in a full-page feature article by Alice L. Tildesley of the Ledger Syndicate. The Baltimore Sun ran it June 20, 1937, though I suspect it was written earlier and banked for use that day.

...we have a [stock] company just like the human ones on the major lots -- it consists of Beans, Oliver Owl, Kitty, Ham and Ex and Tommy Turtle. A middle-aged woman who works on the lot as dressmaker does Kitty’s voice. It’s her own natural voice, but it sounds like that of a very small girl.”

Okay. Now we know she’s not a professional actress or singer. She’s a seamstress. And definitely not a child. Maddeningly, Leon didn’t mention a name. However, we have several to pick from, thanks to the various animated history books. That sends us to the Los Angeles City Directory of 1936, conveniently on-line for public viewing.

Ah, maddeningly again, the directory contains listings for both Bernice Hansen and Bernice E. Hansell—and they’re both seamstresses. But that’s the last directory with members of the Hansen family, while Hansell appears for a number of years after when the mystery voice was still appearing in the cartoons. But both the directories and the U.S. Census returns for various years list a variety of spellings for her first name. The U.S. Death Index proclaimed her name was really “Berneice Hansell” as does the 1939 Los Angeles Phone Directory (1760 1/2 Ivar Avenue, GR-4373). So I entered the two words in a newspaper search engine.

Lo and behold.

MICKEY MOUSE’S ‘VOICE’ IN COURT
“Giggles” Hansell, Who Does Cartoon Squeaking, Says Man Beat Her
(Copyright, 1934, United Press)
HOLLYWOOD, Dec. 13 (U.P.)—You probably don’t know Berneice (Giggles) Hansell but you know her squeak. She’s Mickey Mouse’s voice.
Superior Judge Isaac Pacht became acquainted with her today when she appeared to prosecute a $5,000 assault and battery damage suit against Charles Miller. She accused him of striking her in a dispute over a dressmaking bill.
Berneice is a dressmaker when not “dubbing” Mickey’s voice in his film comedies.
“I had made a dress for his wife for $10,” the baby-talk expert testified. “When I delivered it his wife said she would only pay $8.50.
“Mr. Miller made out a check for that amount and I left. Then he ran after me and tried to grab the check away from me. He banged me against the wall, tore my coat and bruised me.”
Miller denied he ever struck a lady.
“After I paid for the dress,” he said, “she took the belt with her because she thought she wasn’t being paid enough. I tried to get it away from her, but I didn’t strike her.”

Berneice Edna Hansell was born in Los Angeles on July 11, 1897 to Edward and T. Belle (Carey) Hansell. Her father was born in England and came to the U.S. in 1877. He was a jeweller but switched careers in the late ‘20s and became an optician. We find him during the Depression an elevator operator and a widower.

Hansell worked as a typist for a grocery company in 1920 and was unemployed as of the 1930 Census, though the Voters List that year gives her occupation as a dressmaker. When she arrived at Warner Bros. is unclear. She found work in cartoons into the early ‘40s and then was never heard again. It could be that her kind of high-pitched squeal wasn’t in vogue. Maybe studios preferred to use professionals who could play more than one role. Perhaps she just got tired of it. Or maybe war work intervened. Whatever the case, Hansell’s animation career came to an end. In 1950, she was a self-employed seamstress. She never married and died in Los Angeles on April 16, 1981, age 83.

Sorry, animation historians. Better change all those incorrect references that say “Bernice Hansen.” Next time, we should all listen to Tex. After we teach him to spell.

Much Ado About Jones

Chuck Jones never divested himself of the Disney cuteness. Even while he was making some really funny cartoons with Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck, his penchant for “aw-gee” characters kept rising to the surface in other series and in one shots. The difference between his cute characters of the late ‘30s and those of the ‘50s is mainly in the drawing style; Jones’ artists got more sophisticated.

“Much Ado About Nutting” (1953) is a cartoon with a great premise, one that Jones and writer Mike Maltese used again and again. A little squirrel becomes greedy and that’s enough for karma to kick in. And that isn’t all that Jones uses again and again.

The squirrel is yet another of Jones’ overly cute types. He has the big eyes Jones used in all his cute characters around that time. The squirrel’s head even has the same construction as Pussyfoot, the too-cute kitten, in some shots. And, like Wile E. Coyote, the squirrel looks at the camera (perhaps not coincidentally, the cartoon is structured the same way as the Roadrunner cartoons with blackouts and a longer climax gag).




The squirrel flicks its tail (on ones), no doubt as Jones tries to make the character seem as squirrel-like as possible. At the beginning it’s, well, cute. But after awhile, it just gets too cute. There’s no gag involved, so once the character’s established, there’s no reason to keep doing it. Other than the fact Jones liked cute.

Lloyd Vaughan, Ken Harris and Ben Washam are the credited animators. Maurice Noble is here with some nice layouts painted by Phil DeGuard, such as his opening panorama of a city park.

Jack Benny’s Not an April Fool

Jack Benny was victimised by things out of his control time and time again on his radio show. Events and people seemed to conspire against him, which made for great comedy. And it even happened to him after one of his broadcasts, and in real life.

You’d think it’s pretty common knowledge that you play April Fool’s Day jokes only on April Fool’s Day. But someone got the idea you could play one the day before and everyone would know that’s what you were doing. It didn’t work.

The NBC Red Network had a powerhouse line-up on Sunday nights, starting with Jack Benny, followed by “The Fitch Bandwagon” (with Dick Powell), followed by Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy. On the evening of March 31, 1940, the other networks conceded the 7 p.m. half-hour to Benny; NBC Blue and CBS ran war news roundups while Mutual broadcast another in a series of Bach cantatas. So someone thought they could use Benny’s popularity to get some publicity. With an “April Fool!” tossed in.

It resulted in front page news with a bit of irony.

Says Radio Broadcast Was Publicity Stunt
PHILADELPHIA, April 1. (AP)—An announcement that “the world will end at 3 p. m,, E.S.T., Monday, April 1,” purported released by the Franklin Institute’s director of publicity and broadcast over a local radio station (KYW) sent thousands of frightened Philadelphians hurrying to their telephones for additional details last night.
Newspapers, police stations and the city’s information bureau were deluged with calls. The information bureau estimated it handled 4,000 calls itself.
The announcement, read after a radio program (Jack Benny) which featured the name of Orson Welles, of Martian invasion fame, and a discussion of the possible end of the world, said:
“Your worst fears that the world will end are confirmed by astronomers of the Franklin Institute, Philadelphia.
“Scientists predict that the world will end at 3 p. m., E.S.T.,, tomorrow.
“This is no April fool joke. Confirmation can be obtained from Wagner Schlesinger, director of the Fels planetarium of this city.”
Then the radio station checked the story and broadcast an explanation.
It said the announcement was a publicity stunt conceived by William A. A. Castellini, publicity director of the institute, to arouse interest in the opening of a show at the planetarium.
Castellini said later he had told “some of the people” at the radio station about the announcement and “thought they would know it was a stunt.”
Castellini explained Welles and Benny had no knowledge of the stunt. He said he heard the Benny program and thought it a good chance to get some publicity for the planetarium.

The show’s first half involved a phone call to Welles (he was not heard), who Phil Harris blamed on the current sun spots that Jack said had disrupted radio transmissions and could destroy the Earth. But there was no way the P.R. guy for the Franklin Institute could possibly have known in advance that dialogue would be taking place on the live show.

Benny and his writers chose to ignore the whole thing. There was no reference to the stupid scam on the following week’s broadcast.

The Life of an Inker

The Walt Disney studio seems to have been as adept at publicity as making cartoons. Granted, the studio was continuously doing something new—and therefore, easily sellable to reporters—in the ‘30s and ‘40s. But even when it didn’t, Disney’s PR people got the studio’s name—and, by extension, his—into the press.

Other studios would have struggled to get their top-line employees a line in print. Disney managed to get a wire service to profile his ink-and-paint department in another of those how-cartoons-are-made pieces that still fascinate anyone with an interest in cartoons.

This story is from 1946. The cartoon in question is most certainly “Rescue Dog,” released March 21, 1947. It’s interesting to note that this story has what must have been mandatory for any wire story of the ‘40s and ’50s dealing with women—a description of their appearance. Of course, times are far more enlightened now. Today, you can go to any entertainment news web site where touched-up photos of female stars with artificial enhancements are unavoidable.

PRETTY GIRLS BRING DISNEY’S PETS TO LIFE
One Inker Has A Doggone Tough Time Putting Point On Pluto’s Tail
By GENE HANDSAKER
Associated Press Movie Writer
HOLLYWOOD, May 24—Cried my guide in a tone of pride: “It’s like a college campus.”
And so it was: a neat, two-story building ... blue air-conditioned corridors with pretty, personable girls flitting about ... and nearly 200 of them at desks beside big windows, doing the tedious, exacting, non-creative part of bringing Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck to life.
Joan Anderson, for instance, is a livestock broker’s 20-year-old daughter. This former U. C. L. A. commercial art student has been a Walt Disney studio inker for two months. She’s small, shapely, black haired and freckled and has a lively personality.
Disney puts a pleasing personality on a par with artistic ability in hiring employees, my guide said.
Joan explained her work. This pencil sketch here on her desk—a silly-faced seal sitting on ice on his hind flippers—had been drawn by an animator.
Over it she placed a sheet celluloid (called in shop talk a “cell”) measuring about 12x14 inches. On the cell, wearing cut-away a glove to prevent hand marks, she copied the sketch with a pen and India ink.
For Joan, the most difficult detail she has encountered is the dog Pluto’s tail, a curving, tapering line that ends in a point.
The cells go upstairs to the painters, another battery of attractive girls who paint in the water colors (mixed in a laboratory in the same building by girls with expert eyes for pigments), as directed by little notes on the animators’ sketches.
A painter who makes a mistake can rub it out and start over. That’s partly why painting is considered a little easier than inking.
The cells are photographed on 35-mm. film. A short like Donald Duck needs about 12,000 cells. A feature like “Snow White” or the new “Make Mine Music” requires some 120,000.
It’s tedious, all right, but Joan likes the work. She said: “People say: ‘Where do you work?’ and you say: ‘Disney’s,’ and they say: ‘Oh’—like you're a big wheel. Mother thinks I’m a real artist.”

The story contains evidence the public bought into the Disney hype. Even the inker’s mother thinks her daughter is an artist because she’s at DISNEY. But the movie itself, despite some attractive artwork, is ordinary. It’s Pluto versus yet another pesky smaller creature that ends in yet another “Aw, isn’t-that-sweet?” moment. But Disney sentimentality must have been liked by someone. The studio still trades off on it today.

Cameo Appearance

Staff and even management at the Warner Bros. cartoon studio sometimes found themselves plopped into animated shorts. Some were characters driving the plot like in ‘Wackiki Wabbit’ (1943). Some merely made quick appearances, like the Tex Avery unit in ‘Page Miss Glory’ (1936).

Animator Virgil Ross appears to have graced ‘Ain’t She Tweet’ with a cameo shot. Most character designs at Warners about this time feature eyes with whites and pupils and look fairly cartoony. But there’s one character who’s different in this 1952 release: a mailman with beady eyes that looks an awful lot like Virgil.





Layout man Hawley Pratt had a moustache but his face was much wider. Animator Greg Duffell believes it’s Pratt, and as he knew Virgil (I don’t recall if he met Hawley), my guess could be quite wrong. At any rate, it wasn’t Art Davis, as he was bald. It certainly doesn’t look like Manny Perez or Ken Champin, who also worked on this cartoon.

Friz Freleng’s cartoons were known for in-jokes on signs, generally painted by Paul Julian. When Julian left for UPA, Irv Wyner took over doing the backgrounds for Freleng’s unit. He’s on a sign in this one.

TIMMM...ber.

Tex Avery called up some standard gags for Spike time and time again in his later MGM cartoons—being burned to a crisp, an explosion creating a hole in his body, the coy blush after his butt’s blasted (and revealed) .

And then there’s the “timber” gag, the one where Spike chops down a huge tree but it lands on him in between syllables of the warning “Timber!” It’s always accompanied by a little four-drawing stomping run, shot on ones. This version’s from ‘Daredevil Droopy’ (1951).






And then the fall.




The same animation was used in each of the cartoons with the gag, “Wags to Riches” and “Cock-a-Doodle Dog” being two of them. Some times, the drawings were reversed so the run was left to right in the scene. The animation was by Mike Lah (and whoever assisted him) and the yell unmistakeably belongs to Billy Bletcher.