Benny on Comedy, Characters and Concerts

Random questions from Hedda Hopper. Random answers from Jack Benny. Here’s an interview published on April 16, 1960.

It’s interesting Jack spoke a bit about the Fred Allen feud. By this time, Allen had been dead for four years so, obviously, the feud was over. But it was so well-known at the time (and is still talked about by Benny fans today) that Jack saw no reason to avoid expounding on how it happened. And he outlined his radio philosophy in many other interviews over the years.

His number-one stage comedian pick may be a bit of a surprise, but in considering all the people Jack knew over the years, quite a number were not strictly comedians. Cantor and Jolson were known more for their singing than comedy, Fred Allen and W.C. Fields juggled, even Durante used music in his act. Burns (who was a straight man) and the Marx Brothers were part of an act.

The impression one gets from the story is, even though he was 66 when the column hit papers, Jack liked to stay busy entertaining. And he was until illness finally stopped him not long before he died in 1974.

Others Fade Not Benny
By HEDDA HOPPER
HOLLYWOOD—Jack Benny’s love affair with the American public keeps his show permanently in top comedy ranks from which Sid Caesar, Phil Silvers, and Jackie Gleason and others have faded away. He feels he got there thru a series of happy accidents.
“It wasn't genius on my part,” he protested. “Say, 25 years ago I developed characterizations. I didn’t stop to plan: I’m going to be stingy, or be 39 permanently, or feud with Fred Allen, or own a Maxwell. I wasn’t thinking that in 30 years such things would keep me going.
“If Fred Allen and I had planned a feud, it wouldn’t have lasted three weeks. I happened to hear him say something and I commented on it, then he replied. I came back and it rolled on. We were into it eight months before we even discussed it on the phone. We had a couple of stingy jokes which got big laughs. So the next week we put a few more in: then we dropped it.
“But we came back to it every so often, so it got beyond us and became part of the characterization. Those things were started for one show only, then they developed: How lucky for me.
“I know my type comedy should stay on a subject; but those other characterizations all came along by happenstance.”
His trick of making himself the butt of jokes, the amiable boob, always at a disadvantage, makes every man in the audience feel 10 feet tall and has every woman thinking her particular small salaried guy has far more on the ball than Jack.
Of his continuing success, he says: “We all try to keep busy. Gleason is starring on Broadway. I’ll work for Lever brothers next year. If it isn’t doing one thing, it’s doing another. Instead of going to New York before the season starts, I go after I’ve had a few good shows under my belt, so they can’t ask what I’m going to do next season. I don't know that everybody wants me, and sometimes it depends upon how much the sponsor can afford to pay.”
I asked him how much the extraneous things he does, like charity violin concerts, help.
“The concerts started as a gag,” he said, “but now it’s wonderful. It’s difficult to say what we’ve taken in for different charities—bonds for Israel netted a million dollars. I’d say they average between $60,000 to $100,000 a concert, sometimes more. I’ve done 15. I go to Honolulu this month, then back here, then to Tokyo and Hong Kong. There’ll be a concert in Denver on April 24. I love them; I play the fiddle at the drop of a hat.”
He’d like to do a violin concert in London but would have to set the date so far in advance. He’s played London six times, has had shows in Las Vegas twice, and isn’t too anxious to return. “I’ve done that bit, it’s no longer new.”
“I would enjoy a month of summer stock,” he said. “I’d like a play, such as ‘Make a Million,’ which Sam Levene did on Broadway. Sam and I don’t think alike and our delivery is different, yet almost all of his comedies would be good for me without changing a word.”
He thinks Ed Wynn in his heyday the funniest man he ever saw on stage. “He never had one risque word or gesture in his material. I’d laugh so hard Mary would be embarrassed.”

The Disney of France is Hungarian

Books continue to be written about Walt Disney today, showing people are still fascinated by him and his evolution from a cartoon producer to, as some put it, a visionary.

Studio publicity started with Mickey Mouse in the late ‘20s but slowly switched to Disney himself by the early ‘30s as the focus moved from a funny mouse to colour cartoons, then feature cartoons, then experimental musical cartoons, then live action/animated features. There was always something new for Walt to tell columnists with space to fill, and tell them he did, no doubt making sure they put only one ‘s’ in “Disney.”

While his films may have been new, Walt himself was old news, so reporters interested in animation went looking for something different to tell (no wonder UPA was embraced by the media when it came along). And they found it in unassuming George Pal. Better still, it was wartime so reporters could work in a patriotism angle.

The Hollywood reporter for the National Enterprise Association seems to have used a comparison between Disney and Pal as an excuse to give Pal’s biography in a column released to newspapers for April 6, 1943. As he found, there really isn’t much about the two to compare.

Around Hollywood
BY ERSKINE JOHNSON
NEA Staff Correspondent
George Pal and Walt Disney are the only film producers in Hollywood these days who are not worried about where their next actors are coming from.
Disney draws his leading men. Pal carves them out of wood.
The draft, food and gasoline rationing, the increased cost of living, higher taxes, frozen salaries and three pairs of shoes a year don’t mean a thing to Pal’s puppets and Disney’s cartoon characters.
In fact, their business is booming.
Pal has been so successful with his color puppetoon shorts that he’s about to produce his first full-length feature, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”
Pal’s color puppetoons are similar to cartoons except that, instead of flat drawings, he uses small actual miniature sets and wooden figures six inches tall. It takes about 3,000 of them to provide the animation for a one-reel short. Like animated cartoons, the illusion of movement is accomplished by photographing the puppets, one after another, on the miniature sets.
It’s a slow, tedious job. A one-reel short, running seven to eight minutes on the screen, requires a shooting schedule of 22 weeks. All the puppets are carved by hand. Twenty-four separate puppets have been used just to show a character walking a few feet. A kiss—which lasts for but a moment on the screen—takes 48 hours to produce. A wink or a smile requires from 10 to 15 different heads.
When one of Pal's heroines gives the eye to the hero, 28 different leading ladies must be carved, each in a different position, starting with eyes wide open till they are closed. Each of these is painted by hand. Each line must be drawn in exactly the right place, else the lines would jump nervously on the screen.
PRODUCTION PROBLEMS
You can see now why Pal’s first full-length feature is going to be quite a job. He figures a year and a half production schedule, a “cast” of 65,000 individual puppets and a cost sheet of nearly a million dollars.
George Pal is young, only 34. He was born in Budapest, but now he’s an American—thanks to Adolf Hitler. His parents were traveling entertainers. He graduated as an architect from the Budapest academy, but no one needed a young architect. So he took a job as an animator for a Budapest film company, later moving to Berlin as chief of UFA'S cartoon production department.
Then, as the Nazis rose to power, the Gestapo started snooping around Pal's home, and following him on the streets, because he was a foreigner and he fled to Prague. In Prague, he hit upon the idea of painting faces on cigarets and using them as puppet actors. But no one was interested in the idea.
So he went to Paris and immediately sold his cigaret actors to a French tobacco company for advertising films. In less than a year, he was carving puppets out of wood, and became the Walt Disney of France.
In 1939, worried about the impending war, Pal and his wife and two children sailed for New York, where Paramount studio soon gave him a contract to produce 12 puppetoon shorts a year.
SUBJECTS VARY
Pal’s films range all the way from ridiculing the Nazis he hates—the Screwball army which rusted and fell apart in “Tulips Shall Grow” — to his next films, a delightful juvenile story, “The Truck That Flew,” and further adventures of Jasper, the little Negro boy who just can’t stay out of watermelon patches.
While Walt Disney employs hundreds of animators, Pal has a staff of only 45, mostly skilled woodworkers. His studio is a converted garage which looks more like Santa Claus’ workshop than a film factory.
But there’s nothing wooden about the nickels he’s bringing into the boxoffice. And he’s proved once again that there’s always something new under the Hollywood sun—this time that stars aren’t always born — some are hewn.

In a column a couple of weeks earlier, Johnson revealed: “George Pal’s latest Puppetoon, “Star-Studded Stampede” will be a satire of “Star-Spangled Rhythm” with puppets of Goddard, Lake, Hope and Crosby. Someone else realised the value of animation publicity, too.

A Walter Lantz Shortcut

It’s always fun watching how animators manage to change a character’s shape into something else. It can be elaborate. One problem: elaboration costs $$$. So cartoon studios used a cheaper way of doing it. Most of the time, it looks tacky.

Here’s an example from the cost-saving Walter Lantz studio’s ‘Hot Noon’ (1953). The sheriffs don’t really morph into chickens, though that’s the gag. Instead, cycle animation of sheriffs and cycle animation of chickens are gradually superimposed on each other, with the former fading away.





The animators on this cartoon were Gil Turner, La Verne Harding and Bob Bentley.

Droopyville

“Dumb-Hounded” was the first cartoon featuring Tex Avery’s Droopy and it has some nice muted backgrounds by Johnny Johnsen. Here’s one of his cityscapes; I’ve matched the colours the best I can in this reconstruction.



The shot cuts from a pan of the street to the drawing below. The door is on a cel.



And what would an MGM cartoon be without animals running at an angle past the camera in perspective?



Irv Spence, Preston Blair, Ray Abrams and Ed Love animated Droopy, who is a lot rubberier than he was in later cartoons, and lethargy is used to set up gags by Rich Hogan.

There’s a model sheet for this cartoon dated March 1942. The short was released almost 12 months later.

Miss Brooks 101

One of the better situation comedies coming out of the days of network radio was ‘Our Miss Brooks.’ Eve Arden helped it overcome all the things that can chafe the ears—Gale Gordon’s standard-issue pompous, condescending jerk and Dick Crenna’s grating falsetto. The characters managed to play off each other really well—it helped Gordon’s Mr. Conklin wasn’t always a jerk—though it’s a little much to hear the formal “Miss” and “Mr” manner in which teachers address each other in casual conversation. Arden plays a catty-when-necessary character but toned down for a family audience from the version that the names “Bette Davis” and “Tallulah Bankhead” bring to mind (her natural television successor in that respect was, perhaps, Bea Arthur).

The show started as a summer replacement series in 1948, found a sponsor, was kept on in the fall and made an easy transition into television with its cast pretty well intact, though Crenna felt he was too old (he was 25) to convincing play a teenager on screen.

Situation comedies on radio were, in many cases, anything but comedies. The situations and characters were unbelievable, predictable and trite, even in the most popular ones on the air. But there were others that were somehow a cut above. ‘Brooks’ was one of them. Connie Brooks came across as a real, more-than-one-dimensional person, much to the delight of teachers across North America (being the heroine of the series helped).

New York Herald-Tribune columnist John Crosby expounded on how he liked the show. He gave it a bit of a panning earlier, so I sought out the first column (he reviewed ‘Brooks’ and ‘Cabin 13). Let’s start with that one, from July 23, 1948.

Radio in Review
New Radio Farce ‘Just Misses Fire’
By JOHN CROSBY
In “Our Miss Brooks,” a new CBS show (not broadcast in the West), Eve Arden, a capable though frayed comedienne, is cast as an English teacher in love with the biology instructor, whose biological interests are limited to the breeding of mice. Since Miss Arden’s concern with biology is somewhat more extensive, this leads to one situation after another, few of them comic.
Miss Arden is also beset by a pixilated landlady who cooks improbable and indigestible foods, a high school principal who roars at her and a fatuous high school student who gets her into jams. Through it all, misunderstanding flickers like summer lightning and Miss Arden wisecracks indefatigably and courageously; still the program just isn’t very funny.
I don’t know why it isn’t. This show, which seems fashioned rather too persistently after
“My Friend Irma,” has a number of tried and true ingredients. A lot of quaint characters have been amassed in one room; Miss Arden’s personality has been given the elements of all of George S. Kaufman’s comic ladies—tough, sentimental, fast on the draw. The plots, heaven help us, are contrived with almost too much ingenuity. Yet, it just doesn’t come off.
OLD, OLD TRICK
It’s a blasphemous though but I’d like timidly to advance the idea that misunderstanding isn’t perhaps as funny as it was in the days of “Charlie’s Aunt.” There was one scene—the one where the high school student hid behind the curtains—where misunderstanding was taken to its outermost limits. Miss Arden’s intentions were thoroughly misunderstood by everyone in the room, including, as I recollect, the biology instructor’s mouse. If that didn’t lay ‘em in the aisles—and it didn’t—then the whole theory of comedy may have to be revised, which wouldn’t be such a bad idea.
Well, perhaps it will get better as it goes along. As it was, the only time a smile forced its way through my reluctant lips was when the aged landlady quavered to the young high school student: “My, how you’ve shot up since I saw you last.” And the high school student shot back: “You saw me yesterday.” Come to think of it, this joke was phrased better when I first heard it many years ago in “The Bandwagon.”
In that late, lamented show, Frank Morgan, playing the part of a white-thatched Kentucky Colonel, quavered—no other word for it: “Seems like only yesterday man li’l Miranda was fifteen.:
And his wife, played by Helen Broderick, snapped: “It was yesterday.”

This is Crosby’s renewed assessment, published March 14, 1949.

Radio in Review
‘Miss Brooks’ Evolves Into Good Comic
By JOHN CROSBY
Last July I remarked rather petulantly that “Our Miss Brooks,” a house-built comedy of the Columbia Broadcasting System was a little too ingenious to be very funny. They had everything in there—a good idea to start with, a lot of picturesque characters, more situations than I could cope with, and, of course, wisecracks. There was just one too many of something, though, and the whole thing left me tired and cross.
I’m afraid I’ll have to revise these churlish remarks to some extent. “Our Miss Brooks” is approaching its first birthday; it’s got over some of the more convulsive aspects of infancy; people don’t hide under the bed any more—or anyway only one person hides there at a time; and the characters have been smoothed down to some semblance of humanity. It’s a very amusing program and, more importantly, a winning one.
EVE ARDEN STARS
Eve Arden, the pretty, reddish-blonde, acid comedienne, plays our Miss Brooks, a high school teacher unlike any of the high school teachers of my acquaintance. Come to think of it, Madison High, where she teaches, doesn’t parallel anything in my early experience very closely, either. The principal is a blustering, rather wistful character who blows his horn whenever he’s driving in the vicinity of his home to give his wife and child a feeling of security.
Naturally, the school contains a surfeit of squealing and demonic adolescents who are typified or at least represented by a boy named Walter Denton. He’s the great American boy, this Denton—high-pitched, nasal voice and drives Stanley Steamer or something like
that—but his relations with Miss Brooks are curious. He drives her around in that Pierce-Arrow or whatever it is, acts as confidant to her, and worships her for her beauty and at the same time acts as if she’s 102 years old.
IDOL OF TEACHERS
Miss Arden, to get down to brass tacks, is represented as a toothsome young lady, bright as a whip and tough as nails. I never had an English teacher up ro these specifications, but I suppose they exist. At any rate, Miss Arden has become the idol of thousands of teachers throughout the country who are sick and tired of being portrayed as ageing schoolmarms with spectacles.
Miss Arden’s interest in teaching is dim; her primary purpose at Madison High seems to be to land the biology instructor, man named Boynton, whose own biological urges are fully satisfied by peering through microscopes. Don’t know what she sees in this dimwit, but he must have something because Miss Arden—or Brooks—has a rival, Miss Enright, who is also chasing him. Most of the time the two instructors are clawing each other to ribbons in a bright, feminine, ruthless way.
“Miss Enright,” murmurs Miss Brooks, “if you ever become a mother—I would love to have one of the kittens.”
Most of the dialogue is second-hand George S. Kaufman, which makes it first-rate radio. Since Ilka Chase retired from the field, there isn’t anyone in the business who can handle feline dialogue as well as Miss Arden—at least no one I know. The situations she gets into on this show are funny, reasonably plausible and untarnished by too much usage.
But I don’t see how they get any studying done at that school. Too much romance.

One can only imagine what Crosby would think of today’s sitcoms, where romance was replaced long ago with sexual innuendo and double-entendres. Ah, it was a simpler time!

The TV version of ‘Brooks’ was shot at Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz’s Desilu studio. When ‘Brooks’ became a daytime rerun hit soon after leaving first-run in 1956, Gale Gordon went on to play Lucy’s pompous, condescending jerk foil in several sitcoms. And Arnaz produced Arden’s 1960’s sitcom ‘The Mothers-in-Law,’ a show with potential if it had been fleshed out a bit more and pointed in some kind of direction. Not everything Arden touched turned to comedy gold, but at least one well-remembered show did.

That’ll Fix You

Writer Mike Maltese pulls the old switcheroo in “Little Red Riding Rabbit” (1943). Bugs Bunny has outsmarted the wolf in the Red Riding Hood story and has him over a shovel of hot coals. But he finally gets so annoyed with the screeching Red that he switches her for the wolf, who shares a carrot with Bugs as the picture ends.



Manny Perez gets the animation credit. Friz Freleng directed this in the days before Hawley Pratt did his layouts. Can’t tell you who did the backgrounds; I want to say Paul Julian but I wonder if it was Lenerd Kester.

The Mice Sing La-La-La

Attractive backgrounds, elaborate title cards, a cute operetta score and turntable sets are the highlights of the Fleischer cartoon ‘Poor Cinderella’ (1934).

Oh, there’s the usual Fleischer ridiculousness. The ending when the ugly stepsisters get crushed by the doors announcing the end of the cartoon is fun but I always like the silly aspect of a Fleischer cartoon and nothing can be sillier than mice, lizards and a pumpkin (voiced by Gus Wickie?) each getting a chorus of the title song.



I defy anyone to hate mice singing “la-la-la” in falsetto.

Seeing Betty Boop as a redhead is a bit disconserting and I enjoyed her far more in the bizarre ‘Snow White’ the previous year but this short has its charms.

Seymour Kneitel, Doc Crandall and William Henning are the credited animators.

The Same Old Jack

Publicity agents by the office-load spent their careers fretting how to dream up gimmicks that would get their clients noticed. Jack Benny got publicity by doing absolutely nothing new.

Jack began the 1956 TV season with more than one major wire service writing about his debut show. They all admitted it was the same old Jack. And they all admitted that’s what the audience wanted.

Ostensibly, the season opener was on Sunday, September 23rd but a number of cities (Des Moines and San Antonio, to name two) didn’t see it until the following Sunday and got ‘Private Secretary’ instead. One local paper mentioned the delay without giving the reason.

Thus the Associated Press plugged the opening show, but the column ran in papers before and after the 23rd. Here’s a version taken from various papers. And the story contains yet another example of how Mary influenced Jack’s business dealings, though he seems to have consulted her about almost anything before making a decision.

39 Plus 23 Can’t Stop Jack Benny
By BOB THOMAS
HOLLYWOOD, Sept. 22 (AP)—Jack Benny, who is 39 in his scripts but 62 in real life, begins another strenuous TV season tomorrow night over CBS.
He’ll account for 20 half-hour shows in the Sunday night spot alternating with Ann Sothern, plus five hour-long Shower of Stars shows. In addition, he’ll probably drop in on other shows. And he plans to make charity appearances with symphony orchestras, the first being at New York’s Carnegie Hall Oct. 1.
Over lunch at Romanoff’s, Benny explained his decision on the season’s activities:
“Mary was right. I had been thinking about leveling off this season — maybe doing only four or five big shows, playing Las Vegas and generally calling my own shots. But Mary argued against this.
“She pointed out that I would miss having the deadlines. If I did just a few shows this year, each one would grow so important to me that I would worry about making them successes. In between the shows, I wouldn’t know what to do with myself.
“But if I had a deadline for my shows, I’d keep working, always striving for good shows, but not worrying like crazy if one isn’t a hit.”
Mary, of course, is Mary Livingstone, his ever-loving spouse. She’ll appear on most of the filmed shows this year, especially those Benny shot in Europe this summer.
The comedian looks forward to the new season with none of the panic that grips most funnymen.
“For instance, my first show will be all about leaving for the Carnegie Hall concert. The second show will be about what happened at the concert.”
Nor does Benny worry about his rating, as most comics do. He had been discussing what Elvis Presley had done to the ratings of shows opposing him.
“I wouldn’t want him opposite me,” Benny remarked. “I wouldn’t want anybody good opposite me. But you can’t worry about those things. You just try to do the best you can.
“I’m not going to worry,” said Jack. “If I had to start from scratch and devise comedy situations, it would be a rough job. But I’ve got characters and situations that we have been building up for 25 years in radio and TV. The situations just about write themselves.”

The opening show featured the usual cast along with familiar bit players Mel Blanc, Artie Auerbach (as Mr. Kitzel) and Benny Rubin, all old friends in the living room. The audience never tired of the string of Benny routines. And why? The Associated Press’ New York TV writer saw the show and had an answer.

Jack Benny Returns With Old Formula
By CHARLES MERCER
NEW YORK, Sept. 26 (AP)—In an age of uncertainty there is a pleasant certainty about Jack Benny. Comedians come and comedians go, but Benny goes on forever with a squeaky fiddle, a butler named Rochester and vault filled with hoarded money.
If you were tuned to his return or a new season on CBS-TV Sunday, you could close your eyes and believe you were listening to Benny on radio 20 years ago. At least 90 per cent of his opening program was auditory humor with none of the camera techniques so many comedians strain for on television.
That was perfectly all right with at least one viewer.
Why does Benny fail to tire one as the years pass? Probably it is because of his superb sense of timing, his absolute self-assurance.

Hal Humphrey, with the Los Angeles Mirror’s syndication service at the time, expanded on that.

Old Jack Benny Gags Still Click
By HAL HUMPHREY
HOLLYWOOD, Sept. 28 — Other TV comedians who watched Jack Benny's first new season show last Sunday must have turned positively green with envy.
While they and their writers knock themselves out to come up with new gags and jokes each week, here was Jack employing many of the same old running comedy bits that he has worked for 20 years. And doing very well with them I should add.
There was the business with Rochester looking up the word “parsimonious” in the dictionary, which referred to “penurious.” When Rochester looked up the latter, the dictionary read, “See cheap,” and when he got to the word “cheap,” it read “Jack Benny.”
The viewers were treated to situations having to do with Jack’s vault, his violin playing, and his being taken in by Rochester.
In other words, most of this half-hour consisted of jokes hung on the character which Jack has built up over the years. They were simply dropped into a slightly different situation, and the laughs (which were many) came from the audience’s recognizing an old friend with all of the same “faults” and foibles.
It reminds me of something which comedy writer Joe Bigelow once told me. “A comic must have a point of view. It isn’t enough today to just stand up and tell jokes,” said Joe.
That has been the case with Jack. He has built up a point of view, and his millions of fans know what it is, and love him for it.
Radio fans should be happy to learn that CBS is planning to bring Jack Benny back on the air next month via tape-recordings of his old radio shows.
The radio net is waiting approval from the American Federation of Radio-Television Artists of a fee arrangement for the re-runs.
Here again Jack is in a better position than any of his colleagues. Those old shows will stand up very well for the simple reason that Jack has not changed his point of view. He’ll still be “cheap,” blue-eyed and 39.

Even the Carnegie concert at the centre of the plots of the first two shows of the season became a template for many more to follow over the years. More of that Benny Familiarity at work.

Jack Benny Says Practice No Help On Violin Tunes
NEW YORK, Sept. 27 —(INS)—Jack Benny, the poor man’s Jascha Heifitz, will make his “debut” at Carnegie Hall Oct. 2, but he won’t be playing any rock ‘n’ roll.
“If there weren’t any ladies present,” said the movietown maestro, “I’d tell you what I really think about that kinda music!”
Jack twirled his $8,000 fiddle and played a few scratchy tunes for the benefit of a group of newsmen and photographers who gathered to get the lowdown on his upcoming classical concert.
“It’s on the level,” Benny insisted, “I’m gonna play Mendelsshon’s Concerto in E Minor, Sarasate “Gypsy Airs” and that famous classic, “Love In Bloom.”
He said “Love In Bloom”wasn’t really on the bill, but added:
“I’ll slip it in somewhere along the line.”
Jack admitted he “plays awful,” but “the worse I play the funnier it is. I practice all the time. It just doesn’t help much.”
Not only will Mr. “Jascha” Benny scratch out three classical numbers, he’ll also take over the concertmaster’s job near the end of the performance.
“What's that thing — ‘Cappricio Espangnol?’” Benny said, “Well . . . the orchestra will be playing that. But they'll be playing so loud it won’t make any difference what I do in there.”
Benny’s all-out musical effort will be for benefit of the National Association for Retarded Children and the Committee to Save Carnegie Hall. (There’s a movement afoot to tear down the hallowed building to make way for a new hotel).

Jack Benny was a rarity. Comedy audiences always want something new. Radio listeners of the mid-1930s tired of Joe Penner’s catchphrases after a few years (a fate suffered about 35 years later by “Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In”). Milton Berle’s mugging soon got to TV viewers, who discovered themselves changing the channel. And countless shows moving into later seasons found they needed to shore up their weekly hi-jinks (and ratings) with guest stars. But up to his death, Benny and his team of aging scribes kept plugging away on routines that never seemed to age, routines that fans always wanted to see or hear just one more time.

Judging by the fans Jack has today almost 40 years after his death, they still do.

Wanted: Stars For Leon

If Walt Disney can get ink, Leon Schlesinger must have thought, so can I. By the late ‘30s, he had a PR person named Rose Horsley. But he started getting space in the papers before that.

We’ve posted a 1937 feature story about cartoons that focused on Schlesinger. It may actually have been written the year before and banked since it contains some of the same information in this 1936 story from the Associated Press. I’m unable to find a byline. Fans of old cartoons will recognise the references to Joe Dougherty and Berneice Hansell, though neither is mentioned by name.

Artists Seek New Stars For Cartoon Films
Scratch Heads for Additional Movie Strip Characters Which Would Be Popular
HOLLYWOOD, April 4.—(AP)—In Hollywood, where film factories cry for new faces, there are studios that never send out talent scouts. No actors haunt their gates.
These are the animated cartoon studios. Actors they seek must come from the inspiration of their artists.
Cartoon actors, like their human fellows, must make the grade before they become stars. Like the other Hollywood puppets, they depend on public acclaim for advancement.
“We are always on the alert for characters,” says Leon Schlesinger, producer of “Looney Tunes” and “Merrie Melodies.” “A character may make an impression in a minor role, just as a feature picture with living actors, and work up to stardom in the same way,” he says. “Out best example is Porky the Pig, who has become one of our stars—a personality for whom we create vehicles.”
When Schlesinger first begun making cartoons in 1930, he featured Bosko and Honey, a.
“boy and girl” pair. Since then his “stock company” of pen-and-ink people and animals has grown considerably.
Another success of star-building in the cartoons is Walt Disney’s Donald Duck, who used to be merely one of Mickey Mouse’s playmates. Whether Donald stole scenes is not recorded, but he now stars in his own vehicles, with, or without Mickey.
To give a cartoon character “personality” is the task of the animators, who always are striving for individuality. Animators have been known to work with, mirrors, incorporating into their sketches their own facial mannerisms.
In talking cartoons, a character is not complete unless he has a voice. To find a voice that fits the personality is not simple.
Disney keeps secret the names of his “voices,” to preserve the illusion as far as possible. He admits he searched a year for a voice for Snow White, heroine of his cartoon feature.
Rochelle Hudson’s, before she became noted in feature, pictures, was a voice in “Looney Tunes.” Jane Withers came from radio to double vocally for a child character for Schlesinger before any studio gave her a chance on her own.
On the “Merrie Melodies” vocal list is a woman who does no other film work than speaking for Kitty the Kitten. A young extra stutters convincingly as Porky the Pig.
Schlesinger also has access to Warner Bros. record libraries, so today’s stars sometimes speak from cartooned mouths.
Joe E. Brown’s wide-mouthed yell has been heard in cartoons as the roar of a hippotamus [sic]. A John Barrymore dialog record, played in reverse, has served for the gibberish of animal characters.

Withers, by the way, recorded for more than just the Schlesinger studio. We’ll dig up an old newspaper article from the start of her career in a future post.

Meow Wow!

Tex Avery Rule No. 586—animals are fooled by other animals’ really lame disguises.

Actually, the Hanna-Barbera unit at MGM used this rule, too, but Tex did it with more panache. How about the scene in ‘Ventriloquist Cat’ where Spike pretends to be a sex-pot female cat? (Scott Bradley plays “Frankie and Johnny” in the background). Yes, it fools the male cat, who gives us a comparatively small Avery bulge-eyed take (we do get to see the veins in the eyes) before a bit of cycle animation and then a zoom out of the frame.






The scene gets even more ridiculous with the cat wooing Spike using a voice later associated with whiny ducks in Tom and Jerry cartoons (the duck was voiced by Red Coffey but Harry Lang may be the cat in this cartoon).

The animators in this cartoon are Avery’s standard threesome at the time: Walt Clinton, Mike Lah and Grant Simmons.