Before He Married Lovey

For a couple of generations, Jim Backus has brought smiles for his satire of the snooty rich as Thurston Howell III on television’s most endearingly-inane sitcom, “Gilligan’s Island.” Few of us who grew up then knew that Backus was simply digging a role out of his Golden Age Radio trunk of comedy. Alan Young may have been the star, but Backus got the most laughs as elitist millionaire Hubert Updike III, who spouted “Heavens to Gimbles!” and threatened to wash out Young’s mouth with domestic champagne.

Backus’ other most remembered role is that of Rutgers’ most famous imaginary graduate, Quincy Magoo. It’s a tribute to Backus that the character was popular at all, let alone an Oscar-winner. The TV cartoons of the early ‘60s—the Magoos that kids were mostly exposed to—were sopping with gags based on near blindness and a Chinese stereotype.

Backus recalled in his 1958 autobiography that he based Magoo’s original attitude, which was more feisty in the first theatrical cartoons of the early ‘50s, on his father. We don’t know his father’s reaction to that, but perhaps we can guess reading this Associated Press wire story from 1951.

Jim Backus Of Films Has A Swell Dad
BY BOB THOMAS
HOLLYWOOD, Sept. 22, (AP)—Russell Backus is a man I’d like to meet.
Perhaps you know his son, Jim Backus. He is a radio comedian who lately has made a career of being the hero’s friend in movies. He performed that function for Arthur Kennedy in “Bright Victory” and now he’s Dana Andrew’s [sic] friend in “I Want You.” He’s sort of a free-lance Keenan Wynn.
Likes Swimmer
Jim has many stories about his dad, who is an engineer in Cleveland and is unimpressed or unaware of the Hollywood hoopla. Recently Mr. Backus was visiting here and Jim had a golf date with Ben Gage. Jim left his father to visit with Mrs. Gage, Esther Williams.
“You know, Jim,” said Mr. Backus later, “that girl—the one who’s married to the guy with the cigar you played golf with—she’s a darned good swimmer. Any time she wants to swim at the Cleveland Athletic club, I think 1 can fix it up for her.”
All Over Cleveland
A month later, Jim received a long-distance phone call from his father, who said excitedly, “say, Jim, you remember that girl who could swim so well—the one who’s married to the tall guy you played golf with? Well, she’s all over Cleveland in a movie!”
Mr. Backus has constant doubts about Jim’s future and often inquires if he needs some money. When Jim assures him he’s drawing good salary, his father replies, “Well, I notice that other fellow from Cleveland, Bop Hope, is doing fairly well.”
Coogan Example
Jiin often takes his father to the night spots during Hollywood visits. Mr. Backus was unimpressed by the film newcomers who were pointed out to him. Then Jackie Coogan was sighted.
“Now there’s an example of a boy who let himself go,” he told Jim. “Look, he’s bald and fat. He should have stuck with that funny little man with the mustache. I wonder what ever happened to the dog in that show?”
Once the Backuses were driving past RKO studios, where a painter was working on the outside wall. “There,” said Mr. Backus, “is a good studio. If they keep it painted like that, it’s run correctly all along the line, up to the top man.”
Consolation
When Jim was on location with “Bright Victory” in Philadelphia, his father suspected that he had lost his Hollywood job. Jim tried to explain that it was the same job.
“Don’t feel bad,” consoled Mr. Backus, “and don’t try to cover up. We all lose jobs, Jim. And maybe it’s a good thing that they’re making movies in Philadelphia. Maybe they’ll make them in Cleveland now, and you can live at home again.”

Other than perhaps his role as the father in “Rebel Without a Cause,” no one thinks of drama when they think of Backus. But this wire service column from 1953 does.

Clothes Made Jim Backus Actor of Serious Roles
By JAMES BACON
HOLLYWOOD, Mar. 30 (AP)—One of Hollywood’s funniest off-screen characters is a fellow who inevitably is cast in serious roles in the movies. Usually he is the hero’s best friend.
Even on television, where he plays husband to zany Joan Davis in the “I Married Joan” series, he plays a semi-serious judge.
“It’s all because of one suit,” explains Jim Backus. “Some years ago I was in a dog (trade slang for a lousy movie) where the studio outfitted me with a $150 suit. You know, the kind that makes you look like a Wall Street banker?
“It was tailored for my exact measurements, so the studio let me have it for $25 after the picture was finished. So far I have worn it on 22 different interviews and screen tests. It always gets me those distinguished parts.”
He’s made several pictures without the suit, mostly with his old school chum Vic Mature. Vic and Jim were both drummed out of military school together.
His motion picture debut was made with Vic in a pro football picture called “Easy Living.” When the headmaster of the military school heard about this, he forgave his two errant cadets and asked them to submit a picture for the alumni paper.
The two gathered together all the scantily clad chorus girls on the lot, plus a couple prop bottles of champagne. They posed themselves with chorus girls planting kisses right and left while they guzzled champagne. The picture was sent off to the headmaster with this caption:
“By the way, colonel, what are the honor students doing now?”
Recently, Vic and Backus played Roman soldiers in “Androcles and the Lion.” Dressed to the hilt in togas, armor and steel helmets, the two stole off the RKO lot and sought out a bar which usually does not cater to the Hollywood crowd. The bartender was a little startled and hesitated before he served them. Immediately, Backus pounded on the bar and shouted so all patrons could hear.
“What’s the matter? Don’t you serve servicemen in there?”
Backus claims he had his most fun when he played the role of Gen. Curtis Lemay, the Strategic Air Command head, in “Above and Beyond.”
He bears a remarkable resemblance to the general. Pal Vic, at the time, was working on the same lot for a director who, Backus says, is “above associating with mere actors.”
“He will hob-nob only with cardinals, successful presidential candidates and L. B. Mayer,” adds Backus. Jim, dressed this time in the four-star uniform of Lemay, was in Vic’s dressing room when the director spotted him. Backus immediately was invited to a dinner party at which he would be guest of honor.

Backus’ main claim-to-fame in the ’50s wasn’t Mr. Magoo. As you can see, there’s no mention of the cartoon character in either of those stories. He was the “I” in the forgotten sitcom “I Married Joan,” which can be charitably described as NBC’s third-rate answer to “I Love Lucy.” General Electric bought the show in August 1952 (clearing 64 out of 66 cities for it by November). It lasted into spring 1955, but then had life as one of the first shows to be rerun in a Monday-Friday network daytime slot (after repeats were briefly sold in syndication).

Here’s another Associated Press piece. From 1955.

Jim Backus Married 24 Hours A Day
By WAYNE OLIVER
NEW YORK, Jan. 3 (AP)—On television Jim Backus has to convince viewers that “I Married Joan” but he spends the rest of the time trying to convince people he didn’t.
“Actually it’s my wife who’s the butt of most of the confusion,” says Backus, who on TV plays the role of husband to comedienne Joan Davis and in real life has been the husband for 11 years of attractive Henny Backus, successful actress in her own right.
Backus even claims that because of his TV role as husband of Miss Davis, who currently is unmarried, he’s had a checkup from hotel house detectives when he tried to check in with Henny.
Since Miss Davis owns I Love Joan on NBC-TV Wednesday night, Backus says he tells his wife, “I’m the only guy who comes home with lipstick on his paycheck.”
“If I’m not on time at the office, my TV wife, Miss Davis who also is my boss, wants to know ‘Why are you late?’ And if I say ‘I was working late with the boss,’ I’m in trouble. I’m married 24 hours a day.”
The confusion arising from his TV role as Miss Davis’ husband has reached the point. Backus says, that his wife has answered the telephone with, “This is Jim’s other wife.”
It also works in reverse. He recalls one occasion when he and Miss Davis were on tour and checked into a hotel in Louisville. His room was on the ninth floor and hers, on the 14th but the clerk, under the impression they were husband and .wife in real life, suggested he could provide adjoining rooms. But Miss Davis in a typical response replied, “NO, leave it like it is—he snores.”
Backus, whose role is strictly a supporting one, is convinced his is a woman’s world. On the same lot where “I Married Joan” is filmed, the Burns & Allen, Ann Sothern, Eve Arden and Harriet & Ozzy [sic] shows also are produced and, he says, “all the dames are the stars—it’s a matriarchy.”
Jim, a native of Cleveland, has seen in stock, in more than 5,000 radio broadcasts, and in a number of movie but usually in roles that left him in comparative anonymity.
It’s still that way, to a degree. His role on “I Married Joan” is that of the sane and sober judge married to Joan in which he is straight man to her comedy. The show already was competing with the first half of Godfrey and His Friends on CBS and now has to vie also with the Walt Disney show on ABC.

Young and Rubicam announced in the trade papers the following month that “Joan” was cancelled, thanks to the one-two punch of Walt Disney and Arthur Godfrey on other networks. Backus kept his humour about it. Fill-in columnist Hal Humphrey of the Los Angeles Mirror’s syndication service had this to say on July 19, 1955.

Proof that being off TV can make an actor virtually unknown today is furnished Jim Backus. He claims that since he quit playing the judge on Joan Davis’ ill-fated “I Married Joan” no one remembers him anymore.
“When flying across country on an airliner I used to go up in the cockpit and shoot
the breeze with the crew, and they were honored to have me,” Backus recalls.
“But six weeks after the show folded I tried it on a flight to Florida. The pilot took one look at me and yelled, ‘Get back n your seat, strap yourself in and eat your box lunch!’
“I tell you, no one recognizes me now. I’m beginning to feel like the Mary Miles Minter of TV,” says the saddened Backus.

Backus, as we all know, survived. He divorced Joan, went to marry Lovey and set off on a three-hour cruise with Gilligan, the Skipper, too, well, you know the song. Fans of silly ‘60s TV comedies are glad he did.

Springtime for Guitar Whacking

Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera showed they could be as adept at using colour for effect as anyone else in ‘Springtime for Thomas,’ a 1946 short where Tom falls in love with a fickle female (aren’t they all in cartoons?) and then try to get some alley-cat competition out of the picture.

Toward the end, Barbera comes up with yet another violence gag as we get swing in more ways than one. Scott Bradley has the MGM orchestra’s brass section blaring away in ‘40s hipster style, while Tom is on a swing set, arcing back toward the ground. Butch decides to play baseball with Tom’s butt, taking a healthy bash at it with a guitar (over a convenient pillow standing in for home plate).

Here’s where colour comes in.

The animation’s on twos. You can see Bob Gentle’s background drawing.



After impact, there’s a new drawing and the background changes to a solid yellow. One frame later, the drawing remains but the background in now a solid red. The background stays red in the next frame while the pose changes. Then the pose remains and the background is yellow again. The next frame, we get a new pose over a yellow card, then one frame later it’s the same pose but Gentle’s background returns. Hanna and Barbera are using the solid, alternating colours to accent the action, though it happens pretty quickly.






I’ve skipped some of the frames, but you can see the drawings and the backgrounds I’m referring to.

The animators given credit were Ken Muse, Ed Barge and Mike Lah but my untrained eye wonders if Ray Patterson worked on this as well.

Wotta Lightning

Van Beuren cartoons in the early ‘30s, at least the best ones, featured creepy creatures coming at the camera, skeletons, things coming to life, jumpy scores by Gene Rodemich and bizarre plot twists that sometimes don’t make a lot of sense. Fleischer did the same kind of thing with more finesse, but some of the Van Beurens can be fun.

‘Wot a Night!’ is the first cartoon featuring Tom and Jerry (not the MGM cat and mouse that stole their names) and it has an imaginative opening. The pair are taxi drivers waiting at rail station during the middle of a huge storm.

Forked lightning appears in the sky. The directors (John Foster and George Stallings) could have just left it at that, but they went for an effect that’s really effective. It appears they had the cameraman open the aperture wider and wider for a few frames to let more light in, thereby giving the effect of a flash of lightning.






I don’t know if other studios tried this before 1931. Perhaps they did, but it’s a pretty cool effect.

LSMFT

One of the downsides of Jack Benny switching sponsors from General Foods to American Tobacco in the fall of 1944 was the change in the opening commercial. I always liked the swing piece by Phil Harris with Don Wilson reading about Jell-O over top. Substituted was a hard-sell pitch that became memorable because of its repetition and stridency—and its unique opening.

American Tobacco paid good money for not one, but two real-life auctioneers to go through a mock spiel live on the air from New York before several different announcers (dare we say it?) plugged tobacco. It was attention-grabbing. It was parodied, even in Warner Bros. and Paramount cartoons. And it inspired a column by New York Herald-Tribune syndicate radio writer John Crosby.

Crosby was noted for going after what he saw banal and stupid in radio but, interestingly enough, he didn’t make fun of the auctioneers in his column of February 14, 1947. Maybe he tread lightly because American Tobacco had only resumed newspaper advertising a few months earlier. Or maybe he was simply curious about something and thought he’d pass it on to readers who might be curious, too. In any event, he spoke little about radio in what was a serious, straight-forward column.

CIGARETS NOT IMPROVED BY THAT GARBLED GARGLE
Tempers Also Take Beating As Lads Chant
By JOHN CROSBY
“Lasa la laaa la— sold American!”
The chant of the tobacco auctioneer, which has infuriated, exasperated and sometimes entertained radio listeners for years, has given the tobacco auction a peculiar publicity even greater than and certainly more lasting than the recent New York auction at which Dr A. S. W. Rosenbach purchased the Bay Psalm Book for $151,000. This curious advertising device has made the tobacco auction a part of popular folklore.
I never saw a tobacco auction but several years ago I was stranded in Waycross, Ga., where an amiable Georgian volunteered to drive me out to a huge barn-like structure where a tobacco auction was to take place the next day. On the way out he told me a good deal about the business which he had only recently abandoned. Tobacco buyers are full of more tricks than horse traders, I learned. Frequently, he said, they will bid in a basket of tobacco for more than it's worth—generally they’re spending somebody else’s money— and later split the extra profit with the farmer.
The baskets of tobacco leaf are arranged in long lines at the auction. The autioneer proceeds up one aisle and down the next, auctioning the baskets in order. A buyer may bid in a basket of tobacco for, say, 27 cents a pound, then quietly push the basket across the aisle.
TRICKY FELLOWS
When the auctioneer reaches it the second time, it may or may not bring more than 27 cents. If it brings less, he will, of course, bid it in himself. If it brings more, he will clear a few cents profit.
The sellers employ a variety of tricks too. It’s not uncommon for a farmer to hide a couple of bottles of whisky under the top leaves. When the purchasers inspect the tobacco, their appreciation is considerably heightened by the sight of the whisky, sometimes to the extent of paying a few extra cents a pound for the tobacco. The leaf goes to the tobacco company; the whisky goes to the purchaser.
Good tobacco has a velvety feel and is slightly sticky. It this texture is not naturally present in the leaf, there are a good many ways to simulate it. One method favored by farmers whose leaf did not turn out as well as they had hoped is to spray it with a mixture of water and honey before the auction. The treated leaves are usually at the top of the basket so experienced buyers will usually inspect leaves at the middle or bottom of the basket before they buy.
OVERDONE SALES TALK
However, trick or no trick, the manufacturers of popular cigarets buy fine tobaccos, the finest they can lay their hands on. That curious chant is the price, say 27, repeated over and over in a sort of sing-song. When the pitch of the chant changes, the auctioneer has jumped one cent. Incidentally, my friend was of the opinion that the two auctioneers on the Jack Benny program overdid it a little. Many auctioneers are quite intelligible.
Tobacco is just about the most lucrative crop there is. An acre of tobacco may bring in $650, as compared with $23 which is a good yield from an acre of wheat. At the same time, tobacco is more expensive and more trouble than almost any other crop.
Where a wheat farmer’s troubles are largely over after he has planted, the tobacco farmer must keep his eye on his tobacco plants every day guarding them against weather and insect pests. Tobacco leaves must be picked one at a time when they ripen, which means a daily inspection of the plants leaf by leaf. Also tobacco is a soil robber, which is one reason why the South uses more fertilizer than any other section of the country.
Any further questions about the chant of the auctioneer?

The auctioneers were, by all accounts, a favoured advertising device by American Tobacco president George W. Hill. When Hill died in September 1946, they stayed on the air for a few years but were replaced in the ‘50s with a recorded jingle and a pitch by Don Wilson that was decidedly less interesting and attention-grabbing. By then, big ad money was moving from radio to TV.

Why Leon Schlesinger Fired Buddy

You’d think the first place anyone wanting an interview about cartoons would go, circa 1935, was the door of the Walt Disney studio. Disney had the name, Disney had the prestige. But that wasn’t the case for one Hollywood columnist who decided to talk to Leon Schlesinger.

Alice L. Tildesley worked for the Philadelphia Ledger, which syndicated several full-page stories with photos for papers every Sunday. Tildesley generally did puff stories on Hollywood items appealing to women—fashion, hair, romance and the like. But she interviewed Leon Schlesinger for one column, perhaps because Leon came from Philadelphia. Then she decided to a whole page on the making of animated cartoons and the bulk of the spotlight went to Leon.

I’ve only been able to find one paper that ran this particular story, The Baltimore Sun of June 20, 1937. Judging by the rare references to Tommy Turtle and Oliver Owl, one suspects the story was written maybe even a year before and banked for publishing at a more convenient time. Unfortunately, I can’t view the full text, let alone the photos, so the version you see below may not be complete. Still, as Leon died in 1949, before he could be interviewed by animation historians, this story is about as good as we’re going to get. It’s likely the only time anybody spoke much about “Page Miss Glory,” other than director Tex Avery, who didn’t like it. Or the less-than-winsome Buddy.

Stars Without Temperament
There Is One Set Of Actors In Hollywood That Never “Crabs” About Parts Or Clothes They Don't Get Upstage, Try To Hog The Camera And, Best Of All, Pay No Taxes
By ALICE L. TILDESLEY
HOLLYWOOD. THIS is a story about motion-picture actors who have no morals clauses in their contracts. They are never temperamental, never keep the director waiting, never argue with the make-up man or drive the wardrobe designer crazy because they can’t wear green, won’t put on calico, or don’t think the dress is as smart as Marlene Dietrich’s last outfit. None of these incredible actors ever upstages each other or attempts to hog the camera. They don’t descend on the publicity director and storm because there are no stories about them in the paper today. Most startling item of all: They don’t crab about their income taxes!
NOT ANGELS
No, they’re not angels. They're cartoon characters.
In spite of their perfections, they are like regular picture actors in that they can rise from obscurity to stardom, they can fail to register on the screen, they get fan mail—or don’t—
and they make fortunes for their producers.
“Personality is what counts, whether in a cartoon character or in Greta Garbo,” said Leon Schlessinger [sic], producer of “Looney Tunes” and “Merrie Melodies.” “Porky the Pig is a good example. He was a minor character in a cartoon but his stutter and his expressive face—or should I call it a countenance?—attracted so much attention that I said: ‘Star him!’ after the first preview. Now Porky has his own starring vehicles specially written for him.
NO PERSONALITY
“What makes personality is as much a puzzle to me as it is to any producer of films starring human actors, however. Once we used Buddy, a little boy who seemed to have comedy possibilities, as a character in a cartoon, but on the screen he was negative. We tried several times to pep him up, but he seemed to go flat, he couldn’t develop personality, so we let him out.”
In major studios some attention is paid to the comments of critics, the tenor of fan mail, etc., concerning new players. This is just as true in cartoon studios.
“We had a monster in one picture,” Mr. Schlessinger related. “We thought him quite a minor menace, but we had letters complaining that children who saw him had nightmares. The monster received his notice that same day, and since then scary creatures are barred from our cartoons.” You never hear of the Wolf bringing suit because the Three Little Pigs got top billing; you never read that Mickey Mouse has gone to Europe after a dispute over salary, or that Oliver Owl has walked off the just because he doesn’t like the camera man. All these things happen at major studios.
SOME TROUBLES
Yet now and then a cartoon comedy gets under way, with as many as seventy drawings completed, and then goes blah. “‘There’s nothing in that story,’ I decide,” said Mr. Schlessinger. “We haven’t the right slant on it, so we put it away. After a few months or a year, some one on the staff gets a new idea, and we rearrange the scenes, add to them and have a hit.
“No one ever destroys a drawing, once it’s made, for you never know when it can be used. Sometimes we use a sequence from an old picture, just as stock shots of floods, fires, trench warfare, and so on are used and reused in regular films. We merely change the background or reverse the action.”
LOOK AND STUTTER
Andy Devine’s appeal to film fans seems to be his earnest look and his stutter. Imagine creating a cartoon star from a bodyless stutter!
“There's a boy on the lot, doing props for Warner films, who has an uncontrollable stutter,” said the producer. “It was from him that Porky the Pig got his voice. The boy can’t talk to order, so we record his lines first then draw Porky to conform to the [stutter].
“Our stock company—we have company just like the human ones on the major lots—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.”
A cartoon studio often gets actors to imitate actual well-known voices. A crooner in a recent cartoon did a perfect imitation of Bing Crosby.
THE FARMYARD
“Farmyard characters are funnier than human characters in a cartoon,” Mr. Schlessinger pointed out. “Making our crooner a rooster, the honest farmer a black crow, the deceived maiden a bantam chicken, adds to the comedy of the old story of the farmer’s daughter and the city slicker.
“Not long ago, we decided to do something definitely different. A girl from Chicago showed me some ultra-modernistic sets she had designed which she thought could be used as backgrounds for a sophisticated cartoon. In order to show off the sets, we had to use human characters and have the camera shoot the sort of angles Busby Berkeley made famous. The idea was novel and the result original, but somehow it was not so funny as if animals, fowls or insects had been used.”
STORY CONFERENCE
A cartoon begins in a story conference. Mr. Schlessinger, his three directors and the staff assemble to discuss ideas. The ideas are drawn, not written, and are talked over in sketches. The musical tempo is decided upon, the musical score written, the art director creates the sets or backgrounds and the animators draw the characters. Then each scene is drawn, transferred to celluloid, which is first inked, then painted, then photographed. As many as thirty animators may work on different scenes of the same picture, so each animator receives a sketch of every character in several poses and must conform to these sketches.
FELLOW-PIONEERS
Hugh Harman and Rudolph Ising, who were pioneers with Walt Disney in the cartoon field, when all three shared a garage-studio in Kansas City and produced locally distributed films, have advanced in ten years in Hollywood from a one-room office to an extensive plant of their own, employing 335 people. Bosko, a small Negro, is Harman-Ising’s oldest cartoon character.
“In the beginning,” explained Mr. Harman, “you could hardly toll whether Bosko was a child or an animal, but with the passing of years he has evolved into a real and believable character.”

Felix and the Bell

Felix the Cat was one of the great actors of silent film. Otto Messmer and his crew at the Sullivan studio developed an attractive, imaginative character rich in emotion. And toward the end of the ‘20s, Messmer put him in increasingly unusual settings.

One cartoon I like is ‘Astronomeous’ (1928). Felix, for reasons that aren’t all that clear, fires a harpoon which lands on a cyclist going around the rings of Saturn. Our hero then finds himself punted to Mars.

The New York animation studios were known for their morphing animation into the early ‘30s. Felix turned things (including body parts) into other things. Here’s a cute little scene where curiosity creates a question mark, which hangs in the air, and Felix uses it, a Martian mushroom and his tail to create a bell that he rings.





The crescent moons in the atmosphere is a nice touch.

There’s a lot of cycle animation. Some of it is pretty obvious but some is used to good effect, like when the letters of the word “DONG” change shape.

Felix took a rest for awhile when the sound era came in, with the exception of a couple of ho-hum cartoons for Van Beuren, and then returned with a revised format, a cute little theme song, and even less elaborate animation in the late ‘50s in some made-for-TV cartoons that are liked by many today who grew up with them.

A Puss’ Booty

The cartoon delivers on its title. It’s called “Puss N’ Booty.”



Yup. There’s a puss. And a booty.

This 1943 Warners cartoon features more of Frank Tashlin’s experimentation with layouts. The evil cat slinks toward the camera in perspective and his body fills the whole frame. There’s a quick cut to the cat creeping away in perspective and then sitting down, watching the bird in the distance.

Tashlin fills the cartoon with jagged camera work and low angles, as if parts of the film are shot at the cat’s level. And there’s the angular, deco-style house exterior and interiors that Tashlin loved, apparently drawn by Dick Thomas.

Cal Dalton gets the sole animation credit. Izzy Ellis and Art Davis would have been in the unit as well. Dave Hilberman worked with Tashlin and I’ll leave it to the experts to definitively say he did the layouts on this cartoon.

Meet George O’Hanlon

George O’Hanlon’s life might be summed up by his entry on the Hollywood Walk of Fame web site. The page on George can’t make up its mind about when and where he was born. Events somehow always seem to have conspired against poor George, and not only in the roles he played. Perhaps the only difference is in real life, nice guy George O’Hanlon finished on top.

O’Hanlon received his star on February 8, 1960, the same day as Morey Amsterdam. At that point, his star was very much in the past tense. His big career break came when he was cast as the lead character in Richard L. Bare’s “So You Want to Give Up Smoking” (1942). Warner Bros. released it, and that led to a series of one-reel comedies from 1945 to 1956.

It’s interesting to read Bare’s comments at the outset of the series. He envisioned it like the Pete Smith specialties at MGM—a comedy instructional short with voice-over narration and sound effects. Evidently, Bare and/or O’Hanlon realised they’d be funnier if they were done in live action with dialogue, and the two produced 63 films ranging from average to extremely funny and clever (O’Hanlon was later a vice-president of Richard Bare Productions).

Here’s what Bare had to say about the series in this 1946 column by the Associated Press:

By BOB THOMAS
HOLLYWOOD, June 22.—(AP)—You are about to see yourself in your full folly on the screen. That is, if you are the average Joe McDoakes.
Joe is the start in a series of one-reelers that ex-G. I. Dick Bare is making for Warners. A list of titles gives you an idea of how you will be cast: “So You Think You’re Allergic,” “So You Think You Need Glasses,” “So You Want to Keep Your Hair,” “So You Want to Stop Smoking,” “So You Think You’re Neurotic,” “So You’re Going to Have a Baby” and, of course, “So You Want to Be in Pictures.”
In the “Hair” reel, Joe McDoakes, played by comedian George O’Hanlon, washes his head in the shower with laundry soap, brushes his tresses with a stiff brush, then notes his hair is falling out. He visits an authority, his barber, who tells him to rub his scalp. Another barber tells him never to rub his scalp. A third tonsorial expert tells him to always wear a hat; a fourth, never to wear a hat. He finally goes to a specialist who gives him a super-duper treatment. Guess what happens to Joe. Just call him “Baldy.”
The conclusion is that there’s no cure in view for falling hair.
In the “Allergic” reel, Joe suffers from the sneezes. He tries all types of medicine, atomizers, shots and what have you. His house is hermetically sealed and all possible sneeze-sausers are removed—including a floral painting. Finally Joe discovers he’s allergic to his wife’s dandruff.
Needless to says, Joe feels like a jerk for having wasted his dough on the quack cures. What Joe should have done, said Dick, was to let science discover his allergy and then stay away from it as much as possible.
The writer-director-producer had a good deal of difficulty selling his idea to the studios. It was feared the “smoking” film would antagonize the tobacco industry. However, he now has carte blanche to do just about anything he wants. In “So You Think You’re Neurotic,” Dick will parody both “Spellbound” and “The Outlaw.” And “So You Think You Can Beat the Horses” does a takeoff on “Lost Weekend.”
“The purpose of these 10 minute films is to discourage the average guy from quack remedies,” Dick said. “The films are not training films, but they are education.”
Dick actually goes into deep research before making any of the films. “After I finished reading up on neurotics,” he said, “I found I was the most neurotic guy in the world.”
Just an average Joe McDoakes, eh Dick?

One of the McDoakes shorts in 1948 was “So You Want to be on Radio,” where everything goes wrong as Joe innocently tries to win a few prizes. And that almost sums up O’Hanlon’s luckless simultaneous radio career. Billboard of March 20, 1948 reveals O’Hanlon’s agent had made an audition record adapted from one of the McDoakes shorts and was shopping it to Old Gold for possible radio or TV sponsorship. O’Hanlon finally landed on radio on November 9 that year and the circumstances sound like something that would happen to McDoakes. The debut was delayed a month for some reason and not only was it on the last-place network, Mutual, the show couldn’t even find a sponsor. It was pitched to Colgate that month (as a radio or TV property, according to Billboard), but there were no bites. In January, Mutual announced the show’s cancellation.

Things looked up for O’Hanlon’s radio career, though, on April 30, when the show was picked up as a summer replacement for Alan Young, with Tums as the sponsor. Ad agency Dancer, Fitzgerald and Sample picked it up for around $3,500 (Billboard, May 7, 1949) with plans to run it from July 12 to October 4 (Tuesdays, 8:30 p.m. Eastern). “Me and Janie” (her last name wasn’t ‘Jetson’) had a top supporting cast in Sheldon Leonard, Lurene Tuttle, Willard Waterman and Marvin Miller, with Don Wilson as the announcer. Sam Chase reviewed it in Billboard of August 6th. In part, it reads:

A moderate entertaining bagatelle is this latest show featuring George O’Hanlon. It is another in the long line of situation comedies based on the well-meaning guy who somehow always gets things all balled up with his job and his wife, but everything always turns out to be semi-satisfactory by the stanza’s conclusion...The humor was all lightweight, with nothing to titillate the lazy listener’s thinking apparatus. But the net effect was harmless to any age group and won’t do any obvious damage to NBC’s prestige. On the other hand, its possibilities as a year-round show seem limited.

Limited it was, but you can blame Niles Trammell at NBC and, indirectly, Bill Paley at CBS for O’Hanlon’s radio career ending. Paley had been raiding NBC of its stars and president Trammell was determined to sew some of them up before Paley got to them. So he worked out a deal in October with Fanny Brice and Dancer, Fitzgerald and Sample, who promptly put Brice on the air for Tums and left with O’Hanlon with a stomach ache caused by unemployment and more McDoakes-like hard luck.

Television should have been a land of opportunity. ABC looked at a kinescope of an O’Hanlon pilot in 1950. It passed on the show. Three years later, Bare and O’Hanlon were at it again with “Real George,” with O’Hanlon as “a slightly befuddled young department store employee who plausibly gets in and out of trouble.” Phyllis Coates, Bare’s off-screen wife and McDoakes’ on-screen one, had a part, and so did Ray Collins in his days before Lt. Tragg on “Perry Mason.” The William Morris Agency shopped it around. No sale. Warner Bros. gave him one final shot at a starring role in 1956, hoping to sell Joe McDoakes as a TV sitcom since the series of theatrical shorts was ending. No takers. O’Hanlon’s marriage broke apart in 1952 and it took him until 1955 to land a regular on-screen role, inheriting “The Life of Riley” neighbour role of Calvin Dudley abandoned by Tom d’Andrea. O’Hanlon started writing for TV—he co-wrote the McDoakes shorts—and that’s how he started making his living. But it’s clear he wanted to act. A unbylined newspaper article of November 25, 1960 quotes him:

“I’m always identified with McDoakes,” says O’Hanlon, “which would be fine if the studio would just re-issue the films. But as it is, I’m sort of a McDoakes without portfolio — and without pay.”

O’Hanlon wrote himself into several Sothern shows but his other TV appearances seem few and far between, according to newspaper listings. He did a ‘Cheyenne’, appeared on ‘Make Room For Daddy,’ did a guest shot with the immortal Keefe Braselle on ‘The Red Skelton Show’ and even ended up on the panel of ‘Pantomime Quiz.’ He had his own quiz show on KTLA starting in March 1957 called ‘Behind the 8-BaIl.’ Variety panned the show. Clucked the trade paper: "KTLA must have figured this an answer to Tom Duggan. Who asked?" He then went into a film production company with stand-up comics Tommy Noonan and Peter Marshall. Yes, the ‘Hollywood Squares’ Peter Marshall. Surely you remember their 20th Century Fox hit ‘The Rookie’ (1959)?

But O’Hanlon had also found work, albeit limited, in cartoons. It was an odd career choice for someone who could only do one voice—his own. The John Sutherland studio hired him for several shorts and, more significantly, Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera had him play the part of George in the weak 1958 Tom and Jerry short “The Vanishing Duck.” He auditioned for the pair in 1960 for the part of Fred Flintstone, and lost. Two years later, he auditioned for the part of the head of the Jetson family and lost again. But the actor wasn’t suitable so the role was cast again. This time, O’Hanlon won. And the unsuitable actor who was originally George Jetson? He was the man inducted on the Walk of Fame the same day as O’Hanlon—Morey Amsterdam.

Even a Joe McDoakes script couldn’t have ended any better than that.

If you want to know more about the McDoakes series, there’s no better place to go than this web site run by Facebook friend Steve Bailey.

Who Needs Paint Anyways?

Let’s see. Characters that are outlines. Cigarette-shaped heads. Walls represented by a signs in the background. If it’s a 1950s commercial, it could be just about any studio. But if it’s a theatrical cartoon, you can pretty well guess which one it is.

Here’s an example of the limited animation of UPA. This background is from “Gerald McBoing Boing’s Symphony” (1953). The heads are on cells. They turn to follow Gerald as he comes toward the camera from the buildings in the distance, turns and then proceeds across the drawing. The bodies don’t move.



If you’re curious, the pastel blue sign in the background reads ‘Carmel.’

The designs are by T. Hee, while the colour schemes were worked out by Jules Engel and Michi Kataoka.

I Wanna Easter Egg

Nothing quite conveys the message of Easter than a bratty kid bashing Elmer Fudd’s head that’s been decorated as a candy egg.



This is from the 1947 Warner’s cartoon “Easter Yeggs.” You should recognise the early Bob McKimson directorial style. The credited animators are Dick Bickenbach, Chuck McKimson and Izzy Ellis. Thad Komorowski reveals this is a Bick scene.

Rachel Newstead reviews the cartoon HERE.