Ernie Pyle on Disney

Death ensured Ernie Pyle became the most famous newspaper correspondent of World War Two, if he wasn’t already. Pyle built his reputation on war stories that weren’t those of the war itself; they were the first-hand stories of the soldiers overseas caught up in the fighting, and life around them.

But his byline was familiar before that. Pyle had a distinctive daily column for the Scripps-Howard news service through most of the ‘30s. He covered whatever struck his fancy. And, one day, he decided to cover the making of animated cartoons.

This story is from 1938. What’s notable, besides Pyle’s “guess what I learned” writing style, is it’s not a puff piece for Walt Disney. There are no pontifications from Disney himself, no plugging of movies with dwarves. Pyle sticks to revealing to his readers the basic process of animation.

And I like the irony how Pyle has no qualms about using the word “hell” in print, something no Disney character would ever say on screen.

15,000 Drawings For Short Film Make Mickey Mouse Move
It’s All So Simple, But Ernie Almost Tangles Himself; The Animated-Cartoon Idea Flies Apart Like a Bomb To All Parts of the Studio
By ERNIE PYLE
Scripps-Howard Roving Reporter
HOLLYWOOD, March 3.—After they’ve finally decided to put a Disney animated-cartoon idea into production, the thing sort of flies apart like a bomb and goes to all parts of the studio.
First to the music and voice departments which immediately start writing the music and recording the dialogue of the speaking characters. That’s an odd thing, too.
The whole movie is done in sound first, and then the artists have to draw the pictures to fit the music and dialogue.
There are four composers in the music department. They sit at pianos in small rooms and make up the fanciful little times we hear in the Silly Symphonies.
The sound (or casting) department is a weird one. It has to think up all kinds of silly noises. And incidentally only four of the Disney cartoon voices are actually on the payroll. The others are called in when needed.
The four are: Disney himself, as Mickey Mouse; Stuart Buchanan, head of the casting department, as Goofy; Donald Duck’s “voice” takes visitors through the studio when he isn’t quacking; and I forget the fourth one.
MICKEY DOES ALL THE RUNNING AROUND
NEXT to leap on the picture is the layout department. The head layout man takes the script and lays out the whole picture into sequences and scenes, each with its background. I had always supposed that an artist who drew the, say 150 pictures it takes to make Mickey Mouse walk a few feet in the forest and look up a tree, had to draw the whole forest into every picture.
But that isn’t so. The forest is drawn by one man, and only one forest drawing is needed. When it comes to the final photographing, they just superimpose the scores of drawings of Mickey in action, one at a time, on top of that one forest scene.
It is in the layout department that those magnificently colored scenes which Disney pictures have featured for several years are created. There are about 25 artists here, including some of the finest in the country. Men who regularly exhibit in the Los Angeles galleries, for instance.
IT’S SO SIMPLE BUT—AW, NERTS!
LAST, the director gets started. He is in charge of the 250 artists who actually make; the Disney characters move around. So here’s how:
You all remember the children’s “flip books,” where you take your thumb and flip the whole book through in a couple of seconds, and you can see the characters move as you go along, because on each page they’ve drawn in a slightly different position.
Animated cartoons are nothing more than that. Just a lot of pictures, with each succeeding one a little further along in the action than the preceding one, And when you run them through fast enough, as in a movie film, the tiny lapses between movements can’t be caught by the eye, and the whole thing appears as continuous motion.
It takes about 15,000 pictures to make a Mickey Mouse short, which runs only seven or eight minutes.
From one drawing to the next the artists can move their characters anywhere from a 64th of an inch up to an inch and a half, depending on the type of action. This scale is on their drawing paper.
In a series where Mickey is moved an inch and a half forward in each picture, he would simply be a streak crossing the screen, going so fast you could barely recognize him. It would take only about 10 drawings to get him across.
But where the interval is a 64th of an inch it would lake him nearly a minute to walk across the screen, and would require hundreds of pictures. This very fine interval is used only for very slow body movement, or for a close-up change of facial expression.
If the cartoon character were a soldier, walking in regular march time, it would take 12 pictures to make him take one step.
Now do you understand? Aw, to hell with it.

Giraffe of Tomorrow

Tex Avery had different kinds of gags he’d pour into a cartoon and that’s one of the many reasons he stood out as a director. His cartoons weren’t just a bunch out outrageous takes. They weren’t just a bunch of punny sight-gags. Or self-references. They were all of those tossed together. And, occasionally, Tex would add some nonsense from out of nowhere.

He did that in Car of Tomorrow (1951). The cartoon barrels along with all kinds of visual puns based on car design, then he gives us six seconds of a new model rolling down the street:

Narrator: Here’s a handy little model that comes with a hole in the top, for all those people who have pet giraffes.



The conjoined eyes of the giraffe look like something Mike Lah would draw. Lah, Walt Clinton and Grant Simmons get the animation credits. I can’t tell you who designed the cars but Johnny Johnsen handled the backgrounds. Gil Warren is the narrator and you can’t miss June Foray as the woman driver.

Baby Bottleneck Boom

There’s a lot of warped stuff going on in “Baby Bottleneck.” It’s a Bob Clampett cartoon, so what do you expect?

There’s a fun little scene that dashes along. A hyper, big-eyed dog gives Porky a demonstration of his rocket. I like the way he handsprings into the scene. Here are the drawings.



He lights the rocket and...



Animation credits go to Rod Scribner, Manny Gould, Bill Melendez and Izzy Ellis.

80 Years of the Jack Benny Show

If I asked you what Fran Frey, Paul Small, Dick Hotcha Gardner and Canada Dry have in common, you probably wouldn’t know. If I asked you what Rochester, Mary Livingstone, Don Wilson and Jell-O have in common, you’d answer “Jack Benny.” As strange as it may seem, the answer to the first question would be “Jack Benny” as well.

It was 80 years ago today Jack began his radio career in earnest. The Associated Press’ radio columnist C.E. Butterfield highlighted the Benny debut and opined the show would be on for “a while.” “A while” turned out to be until 1955 and then it carried on even longer on television. But Jack’s debut was an entirely different Benny show. There was no Mary, no Maxwell, no age 39, no money in a vault, no bad violin playing. That was schtick developed over the years. Instead, Jack was an M.C. who shared billing with orchestra leader George Olsen and Ethel Shuttá, Olsen’s singer and (at the time) wife. Frey and Gardner were vocalists, Small provided incidental character voices, much like Mel Blanc and many others would do after the show moved to Los Angeles from New York in 1935. By then, the idea of a quasi-musical show had long been abandoned and the comedy and light satire which slowly developed became dominant.

Over the years, Jack segued from “comedian” to “living legend,” a title which makes reporters prone to enquire about the subject’s nostalgic past rather than the future. Mini life stories about Jack were not uncommon during the course of his radio and TV career. He practically invited a look back by fabricating occasional how-I-found-this-cast-member episodes. But reporters apparently reached the point where they had written almost all they could about Jack, so they asked him (or his buddies) to reminisce instead.

One such story was syndicated by the National Enterprise Association, and appeared in papers on February 22, 1960. Some of the things Jack talks about may be unknown to Benny fans. I’ve left in the columnist’s post-script on a non-Benny item because it features a project I’ve never heard about with truly bizarre casting.

Applause, Memories Balm to Benny
By ERSKINE JOHNSON
HOLLYWOOD — (NEA) — As George Burns keeps insisting, Jack Benny is a pushover for life’s little things, and it is fond little personal memories we have Jack talking about today.
The world’s most famous “39-year-old” has just celebrated his 66th birthday on the road from Waukegan to riches. But if you think Jack keeps working because he wants to become even richer, you’ve got the lad pegged wrong.
Money, fame, social security and old age paychecks he doesn’t need.
What keeps that youthful zest up at such a hectic, enthusiastic pace is applause — applause and friendly laughing faces out there in the audience. They’re better than vitamins for Jack.
Well, anyway, everyone knows how busy Jack keeps himself on CBS-TV, and in concert fiddling, and everyone knows all about all the fame he has had.
But as George Burns keeps insisting, Jack flips over the darndest little things.
“One day,” Burns tells it. “Jack phoned me and asked me to rush over to his house. I rushed over and he said come upstairs to his bedroom and there, in the center of the rug, he had a pair of newly shined shoes. He pointed to them and said to me:
“ ‘Look at those shoes, George. Did you ever see a shine that good? It’s fantastic, George. I just found this fellow down in Beverly Hills. Best shoe shine I’ve ever had. You just gotta take all your shoes to this fellow, George.’ ”
George Burns, as everyone knows, is a bit of a dramatist but people who know Jack Benny best know about the little things in life which keep him happier than new fame or another lousy million in the bank.
Looking back at 66 years, little personal memories overshadowed the big ones as Jack flipped the calendar.
A 50-foot putt on the 9th green at the Hillcrest Country Club which gave Jack his first nine hole golf score of 39 — “I shot my age that day.”
There was an old, 1908 newspaper clipping someone sent him, a story in a Waukegan paper about a 14-year-old Benny Kubelsky in a violin recital.
There was the first time he saw the name “Jack Benny” on a Chicago theater marquee—“I thought it was an awful name”; the disappointment of not being able to accept (because of a vaudeville booking) a costarring role with Fred and Adele Astaire in “The Bandwagon” on Broadway — “Frank Morgan got the part and I thought I had missed the opportunity of my life.”
There was a date Jack could remember: July 4, 1945.
The place was Nuernberg, Germany, and he stood on a platform and made two thousand GIs laugh until there were tears in their eyes. On the same platform, just a year before, Hitler had promised to wipe out the entire Jewish race.
Jack flipped the calendar way back to World War I to remember young Benny Kubelsky, a violin-playing sailor in the Great Lakes Naval Training Station Revue. The director of the show gave him one line of dialog but the line came out so funny that he was given another line and still another line and in that sailor suit “Jack Benny” was born.
Jack finally made the next to closing spot in vaudeville at the Palace. “On that day I thought I had gone as far as I could ever go.”
But it was really just the beginning because radio, movies and TV were still to come.
SHORT TAKES: Bing Crosby’s lads will revive the singing act, but not until next summer . . . Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin couldn’t get together on the time and the place. So, for the time being at least, “The Jimmy Durante Story” is on the shelf. They were to have played Clayton, Jackson and Durante.

Meanwhile, back in July 1932, columnist O.O. McIntyre buried vaudeville in its showcase tomb by waxing about the great acts in former times at the Palace, including star emcee Jack Benny. And C.E. Butterfield’s column on the 13th announcing Jack’s renewal for 13 weeks was overshadowed by something else—word of a concert to be televised on W2XAB-CBS. That was mass entertainment’s future, and Jack eventually starred there, too. In fact, old Benny reruns are still seen on TV today, proof that his comedy has stood the test of time, making him one of the greats of modern show business.

Oh, no, Lumbago!

The words “favourite Paul J. Smith cartoon” usually don’t fit together in a sentence. Smith had the misfortune to become a director after theatrical cartoons peaked and his became more pale and pointless as the years wore on.

But picking a personal favourite out of his work is pretty easy. It’s “Real Gone Woody” (1954), and I prefer to give writer Mike Maltese more credit than Smith for its success. Maltese dumps Woody, Buzz Buzzard and a girl in a light satire of the world of ‘50s high school sock-hops. They all fit in very nicely.

The gag I like the most might get lost on kids today. Buzz puts money in a juke box and then stops and cringes when he hears a hokey version of ‘Auld Lang Syne.’ “Oh, no! Lumbago!” he cries. It’s a play on Guy Lombardo, whose saccharine saxes were considered old-fashioned well before 1950. Lombardo’s biggest claim to fame—and he was still doing it in the mid 1970s—was ringing in the new year from New York with his Royal Canadians groaning out ‘Auld Lang Syne.’

If anyone was considered square, it was Guy Lombardo. Cut to a shot of the record in the juke box. It’s square shaped.



Musical director Clarence Wheeler sets it up nicely by having the record wow, like the vinyl is warped.

And, to top the gag, Maltese has invented a little gadget that breaks the hokey record, sweeps away the remnants and then puts a new platter on the turntable.

The animation in the cartoon is credited to Gil Turner, La Verne Harding and Bob Bentley.

Mr Jinks Pretzel

The Hanna-Barbera TV cartoon studio will never be accused of fluid animation. But when the studio opened in 1957, it had the most elaborate for-TV animation seen to date. And there were some funny poses, too, at least for a few years after ‘The Huckleberry Hound Show’ made its debut the following year.

Huck had three main animators—Ken Muse, Lew Marshall and Carlo Vinci, who had all been in the Hanna-Barbera unit at MGM. But some of the earliest cartoons on the show (which also featured Yogi Bear and Pixie and Dixie), Mike Lah took care of maybe a minute’s worth of footage. Lah’s drawings don’t look all that polished; odd considering he went from Disney to MGM. But he seems to have been given some of the funniest poses to do.

Lah takes care of some of the action in ‘Judo Jack’ (1958), including a scene where the stereotype Japanese mouse puts Mr. Jinks in an airplane spin. Lah has a couple of swirl drawings shot on twos and then the gag pose.




The credited animator is Muse.

Lah was working at Quartet Films, a commercial house, at the time, so I can only presume he was freelancing at Hanna-Barbera. He animated a couple of cartoons on his own with his distinctive drawing style. It’s a shame he didn’t stay longer.

Jack Benny, 39 (1939, That Is)

Could Jack Benny’s character on radio somehow get snookered by a conman, then end up on the losing end as a result? Anyone familiar with the Benny show would say “sure.” And that’s probably why Jack emerged with no permanent damage to his reputation when it happened in real life.

Jack was fined $10,000 and given a dressing-down by the judge after being indicted in January 1939 and pleading guilty the following April in a case that was front-page news. (Who says being obsessed with celebrity court cases is new?)

In the middle of it all, the National Enterprise Association did a profile on Jack and made a reference to the smuggling case. The story didn’t seem to take it all that seriously and, ultimately, neither did radio fans. This version was published February 2, 1939. The photo came with the story.

Jack Benny Has Lots of Luck—But It’s Bad Most of the Time
By PAUL HARRISON
(NEA Service)
HOLLYWOOD— Jack Benny usually is a fall-guy—on or off the screen, on or off the air, in or out of court. He accepted his indictment on charges of buying smuggled jewelry with about the same spirit that he displays when somebody gives him the hotfoot, and with the same remark: “That’s VERY funny.”
Unhappy things are always happening to Mr. Benny, who is Hollywood’s champion worrier and deadest-pan comedian when he isn’t performing. He is dead-pan because he actually does not see or hear what is going on about him. He just stalks around, rolling his cigar in his mouth and worrying about some imminent crisis which may be nothing more than a 30-second scene in “Man About Town.” Not even an appearance in federal court can be more terrifying to Mr. Benny than those first few moments when he faces a camera or a microphone.
Pants in Flames
In spite of the actor’s preoccupation and grim mien, nobody takes him very seriously. While he was wearing cowboy costume during the filming of his last picture, someone set fire to his chaps. When he was being lowered from a window, a costly watch dropped from a pocket and was smashed to bits. He has a large entourage of stooges who by all the Hollywood rules should behave in an obsequious manner and say, “Yes, Mr. Benny.” Instead, they argue with him until, exhausted, he sits down in a chair that has been fixed to collapse.
When such things happen, Benny says, “That's VERY funny.” Occasionally there is the ghost of a smile behind his cigar.
There are some who say that Benny is a thrifty man who will go out of his way to save a dollar here and there, but his closer friends declare this idea is engendered by the ribbings he gives himself on the radio. Last year, on the first day of his return from New York after an absence of months, Benny was touched for $1,200 by numerous needy pals. He is a generous player of benefits. He and Mary Livingstone entertain handsomely in a large house in Beverly Hills, and their swimming pool is so big that it has a skiff on it. Benny and his wife have large wardrobes, and he undoubtedly is the world's best dressed comedian.
Jokes are Cash to Him
Whether pinch-penny or prodigal, he is no waster of gags. A joke is the most precious thing in the world to a man in Benny’s business, and he almost never says anything funny in informal conversation. His companion in smuggling trouble, George Burns, lets quips fall where they may. But Benny mumbles through a newspaper like a small boy in juvenile court.
When Benny is not working in a picture, and has time to go to private parties or his golf club, he is almost as gay as anybody. During picture production, though, he works all the time. Two gag writers. Eddie Beloin and Bill Morrow, and Secretary Harry Baldwin are always with him at the studio. During every spare minute they work on the radio program for the following Sunday.
Benny never appears in the Paramount cafe; he has gags and coffee in his dressing room. The three employes all talk at once. Benny sits back and listens. Occasionally he seizes a suggestion and rises and paces as he elaborates on it. He never petulantly says that a lousy idea is lousy; he says, “Maybe we could switch it around like this—” His writers believe that he is the most kindly fellow who ever lived.
He’s Good, That’s All
Beloin and Morrow are on his personal payroll, and he often uses them on movie dialogue. “That doesn’t play right,” he’ll say, tossing away a few pages of script. He and his writers then will work out some new lines. The result always is an improvement, or he would not be allowed such liberties.
His perpetual cigar is not a posed trademark: he smokes about 15 25-centers a day. Never smoked in his life until 10 years ago when he took a part in Earl Carroll’s “Vanities” which required him to puff stogies.
His devotion to Miss Livingstone (who was Sadye Marks) and their 5-year-old adopted daughter Joan is one of Hollywood’s special prides.
He and his wife call each other “Doll.” Benny never has attended a preview of one of his pictures. He goes to boxing matches, if there are any, and is on tenterhooks until Miss Livingstone finds him and says that the picture was a success.
And They Still Speak
Besides golf, Benny likes bridge but is poor at poker. He owns a race horse, Buck Benny, bought at a Saratoga auction. Before Buck Benny’s first race under his new colors, the actor gave Hillard Marks, his brother-in-law, $300 to bet on the nag across the board. Marks didn’t know how to bet and couldn’t find a bookie anyway, so he held the money. Buck Benny won, paid a big price, and cost its owner some $7,000 by the unplaced wager.
Marks remains one of Benny’s closest cohorts. Another is Harry Lee, his former Broadway manager, who now is his stand-in although he has to wear 4-inch cork stilts.

Much has been written about the smuggling case. Even portions of the FBI files on it are even on-line. However, we’ll try to give you a contemporary look at it in a future post.

Random Cartoon News, 1945

Old editions of entertainment trade publications are wonderful sources of forgotten information so it’s a shame few of them are available on-line. You’ve seen this blog quote from Billboard, which is available for free and searchable through Google Books. Another long-established media publication on-line is Boxoffice which, unfortunately, doesn’t have a searchable archives. But it’s worthwhile to leaf through it for something to do and make little discoveries by accident (I wish I could find the story again about Bob Clampett going into business with Don Messick about 1956).

The October 13, 1945 edition has, besides the usual release schedule of short subjects, some brief notes about cartoons. The Walter Lantz Studio seems to have planted items in Boxoffice when necessary, but other cartoon producers in the ‘40s did, too. Disney even bought advertising space. So while Uncle Walt was plugging a re-release of ‘Pinocchio’ in a two-pager on October 13th, there were a few cartoon items I found interesting.

Columbia
HENRY BINDER, recently released from the navy animation unit after three years of service, joins Screen Gems as assistant general manager.

Metro
As a sequel to "Peace on Earth," cartoon preachment against war which was released in 1939, "The Truce Hurts,” will go into immediate production. To be produced by FRED QUIMBY and co-directed by WILLIAM HANNA and JOSEPH BARBERA, film is aimed at setting an example for world peace.

RKO
Edgar Bergen and his pair of almost human props, Charlie McCarthy and Mortimer Snerd, have been signed by Walt Disney to appear in a newcomer to Disney's rapidly-expanding production slate. Disney concluded a deal with Bergen and his two partners to star in a screen version of "Jack and the Beanstalk." The picture will be done in a combination of live-action and cartoon techniques. Luana Patten, the seven-year-old child discovery Disney is featuring in "Uncle Remus" will, according to present plans, be teamed with Charlie and Mortimer.

The Binder blurb is notable in that Henry Binder was Leon Schlesinger’s right-hand man. Leon gave his brother-in-law, Ray Katz, a nice, cushy executive job in the studio. Leon sold out in 1944 to Warner Bros. and retired from producing. Eddie Selzer was brought in to run the studio by Warners and Katz either jumped, or was pushed, to the Columbia studio. The impression I’d been left with was Binder was fired from Warners but, if that was the case, it was a mere technicality, as the Boxoffice story shows he went from Schlesinger in 1942 to the Navy in Washington D.C. and then to Columbia. Katz and Binder’s fate after they left Columbia within a couple of years is unknown.

The Disney feature with Bergen and McCarthy was scaled down and became part of ‘Fun and Fancy Free’ (released 1947). It could have made a nice stand-alone feature but Disney’s money troubles pretty much made that an impossibility.

M-G-M released a cartoon called “The Truce Hurts,” (1948) but it bears little resemblance to Hugh Harman’s drama. It was a Tom and Jerry comedy, where the cat, mouse and Butch the dog sign a peace treaty only to tear it up by cartoon’s end after a fight over a steak. It can hardly be called a sequel. One wonders how the original concept got so corrupted.

At least it didn’t suffer the fate of the next cartoon the studio announced, in the October 20th edition. And, no, I don’t know where the name “Wally” came from.

Metro
"Our Vine Street Has Tender Wolves," Technicolor cartoon travesty starring animation stars, Red Hot Riding Hood and Wally Wolf, will be directed by TEX AVERY for FRED QUIMBY, producer.

A number of Avery’s pictures were assigned production numbers then abandoned, but it doesn’t even look like this one got that far. It’ll have to go down as another Avery cartoon-that-might-have-been, alive only in the pages of old trade publications. And blogs.

Crocheting a Bathtub

One of Bugs Hardaway’s oddest non-sequiturs can be heard in “The Hams That Couldn’t Be Cured,” a 1942 Walter Lantz effort. It’s one of a number of ‘40s cartoons where the Wolf tells what “really” happened during a well-known fairy tale. Friz Freleng did it the year before in “The Trial of Mr. Wolf” with the story of Red Riding Hood.

In this one, the trial is finished before the cartoon starts. The Wolf is about to hang for his crimes against the Three Little Pigs. But then he tells the “real” story where the pigs blew down his house with big band music (including a tuba that sounds like a bassoon and a harp that sounds like a piano).

The Wolf’s non sequitur is just before the pigs arrive: “As I was busy crocheting a new bathtub...” Not only do we have an innocent looking lamb, but the Lantz checker didn’t notice the faucet kept appearing and disappearing in the cycle animation.




Lowell Elliot gets a co-story credit. Alex Lovy and Ralph Somerville get animation credits here. La Verne Harding and Les Kline were still at the studio, weren’t they? And the voices are provided by Dick Nelson (the sheriff) and Kent Rogers (likely everyone else). Rogers shows off his great ability at impressions, making all the more regretful he died as a young man while training during the War.

Symphony in Slang Opening

‘Symphony in Slang’ demonstrates a perfect use of the “modern” cartoon design emerging in the early 1950s. It wasn’t there for the sake of being there. It had a purpose.

Tex Avery wanted to create a world where a character was completely out of place in the standard world of the MGM cartoon—a world of rounded characters, full animation and pastelled, soft backgrounds popularised by Disney. So he had Tom Oreb come up with a flat 1951 hipster character, living in a flat 1951 hipster world with limited animation. The contrast when the hipster arrives in the Disney-esque Heaven where the characters are puzzled by his modernism is deliberate and damned clever.

There’s no animation in the opening, too, as Avery has the camera move over two backgrounds before getting to any character movement.




Johnny Johnsen was Avery’s background man at the time. While Oreb is giving credit for the designs, notes on finished sketches show notes from Avery to Johnsen, so he worked on the cartoon as well. I wouldn’t be surprise if the opening was entrusted to him.