Riff Raffy Daffy

Bring up the directorial abilities of Chuck Jones, Friz Freleng, Bob Clampett and especially Bob McKimson and you’ll get any number of opinions about their work. But when it comes to another director, there seems to be universal agreement. It was a damned shame that Art Davis’ unit got shut down.

Davis made some great cartoons. And against all odds. By all reports, he was not a confident director and was the victim of backstabbing studio politics. He got saddled with a lot of one-shots and was allowed only a solitary, token cartoon with the studio’s star character (Bugs Bunny). He was given a pair of rookie writers. The studio was too cheap to process his cartoons in Technicolor. Yet his unit succeeded, especially when Daffy Duck or Porky Pig were on the screen. His writers (Bill Scott and Lloyd Turner) proved their worth not too many years later elsewhere and he had solid animators (led by Emery Hawkins).

An underrated gem is ‘Riff Raffy Daffy’ (1948), where our vagrant hero ensconces himself in Lacy’s Department Store window and won’t budge, despite the efforts of cop Porky Pig. A great scene is a pantomime of Daffy and Porky arguing on each side of the store window (which Daffy uses a glass cutter to create a door). I like how the cartoon uses multiples to move characters. Is this Don Williams’ work?




Williams, Hawkins, Basil Davidovich and Bill Melendez are the credited animators and Phil De Guard drew the backgrounds.

Build a Gag, Kill a Duck

‘What Price Fleadom’ (1948) is another of Tex Avery’s cartoons loaded with variations on his standard gags. It’s hard to pick the best one but it’s easy to pick the most bizarre.

Avery would sometime build up a gag, taking one ridiculous thing and piling more on top, ending with something outrageous that has a logical relationship to everything else in the gag. The routine is silly but makes sense in its own context. He’s done it in this cartoon.

The hobo dog (played by Pinto Colvig, I believe) is searching for his flea. He opens up the long beard of a sleeping old-timer. Some little birds fly out. But Avery doesn’t stop there. Ducks fly out. Avery doesn’t stop there. The barrel of the rifle sticks out, fires and shoots down a duck from off-camera above.






Gil Turner, Bob Bentley and Walt Clinton are the credited animators. You can tell that’s Johnny Johnsen’s work in the background. There’s no story credit so either Heck Allen worked on it and was on one of his periodic Quimby firing periods or Tex did the whole thing himself.

The Rise of Sara Berner

“American Idol” existed 80 years ago. Only it wasn’t called “American Idol,” and didn’t have catty judges, perma-smiling hosts or waste time with a lot of build-up-the-sympathy back-stories. It was a stripped down endeavour called “Major Bowes’ Amateur Hour” and was little more than a radio version of vaudeville houses’ amateur nights.

The major would take the ones he found he thought had talent, or were sellable, put them in units and send them performing around the U.S. Some took their talent and moved onward. One was Sara Berner, who toiled for a bunch of cartoon studios and then in network radio.

Sara’s name wasn’t really Sara Berner at all. She was born Lillian Herdan on January 12, 1912 to Sam and Sarah Herdan (Berner was her mother’s maiden name), and was the oldest of at least five children. The family was in Albany, New York in 1920 and Tulsa, Oklahoma 10 years later.

Her best-remembered radio role was when she was paired with Bea Benaderet as phone operators on Jack Benny’s show. They first appeared together on October 30, 1945. Benaderet had replaced Berner as the main female voice in Warner Bros. cartoons only a couple of years earlier. Why Berner dumped her extensive cartoon work, I don’t know.

Perhaps her agent was busy in early 1949 as a number of biographical newspaper articles about her appear. This one is from January 21st.

TRANSRADIO STAR GAZER
By BOB KALB
NEW YORK — Some of the choicest bits of comedy on the Jack Benny show are the laughs emanating tram Mabel Flapsaddle and Gertrude Gearshift, the Brooklynese-voiced telephone biddies who cut in with wisecracks on the Waukegan wit’s conversations. The names this pair sign to their income tax returns are Sara Berner and Bea Benaderet. They are two of radio’s top character actresses. In addition to her stint on the Benny show, Sara has been heard in various roles with Amos & Andy, had her voice sound-tracked into five academy award-winning cartoons, provided the squeaky tones of the animated, mouse which appeared with Gene Kelly in “Anchors Aweigh" and has appeared visually in the film “Gay Intruders” and the upcoming flicker, “The Amboy Dukes.”
Bea Benaderet was a staff member and maid-of-all-trades for a number of years on radio station KFRC, has played varied radio roles, been featured with Orson Welles, and is frequently heard on the “Lux Radio Theatre” and the “Jack Carson Show.” Her future in dramatics was presaged in high school when, as an enthusiastic actress, she played an old man with a beard and won rave notices in the school paper. She’s a native New Yorker. Following her high school graduation she studied dramatics on the West coast and served her apprenticeship in stock companies and with a number of little theatre companies. She landed in Hollywood in 1936 and has been there ever since. Her husband is screen Actor Jim Bannon and they have two children, a boy 8, and an 18 month old daughter.
Sara Berner’s career began less according to formula — to fact as a baby sitter. Her charge was her little brother. Brother loved cowboy pictures and Sara liked vaudeville. The formula became simplified when she discovered he would sit willingly through several showings of a neighborhood horse opera while she adjourned to a nearby movie and stage house. While little brother sat content among the bang-bangs, she could be enthralled by the silent drama and visiting jugglers. When the show was over she would dip off to the powder room and act out the complete show to the wonderment of the attendant. The sight was scarcely less inspiring for casual customers who would walk In to find her gesticulating wildly in the throes of heavy drama.
Before she was through high school her lather moved the family to Tulsa Okla., a locale she best remembers for the opportunity it gave her to play Mrs. Cohen in an amateur production of “Abie’s Irish Rose.” Not necessarily as a result of this appearance, but following it father moved his brood back east again and Sara got a job in a Philadelphia department store. Life was passable as long as she had time to mimic the customers, but on a certain fine day she picked the wrong customer — a main line dowager. In one manner or another she transferred her affections to a local radio station and since, the industry was yet in its infancy, managed to wind up with her own 15 minute program Bolstered by such success, she ditched the deal after a few months and moved to New York City to be close to the hub o£ airwave activities She got a job as salesgirl in a Broadway hat shop.
Selling bonnets in working hours and making the round of talent agencies during lunch produced nothing until she landed by luck on a Major Bowes amateur hour. Her five minute appearance flooded the Major with phone calls and he placed her the following morning in one of his traveling units. Eventually it reached Los Angeles. So did Sara The trip has been paying off ever since.

Here’s another one from the Associated Press.

Hollywood
BY GENE HANDSAKER
HOLLYWOOD, March 22 (AP)—You may know Sara Berner as Mabel Flapsaddle, telephone operator on the Jack Benny show. (“What is it, Goitrude?”) She also plays Jack’s old girl-friend, Gladys Zybisco.
Sara has been doing all right with a Brooklyn accent that is, for her, completely synthetic. In the new picture, “City Across the River,” she plays the proprietress of a cheap soda fountain in a tough tenement section where you’d swear the accents are home-grown.
Yet Sara was reared in Tulsa. Set on entering show business, she went to New York and got a job in a Manhattan lingerie shop. When customers from Brooklyn came in, she jotted their accents on tissue paper linings of stocking boxes. One day she played hookey from the store for an hour or so. The furious proprietor wanted to know where she had been. She had been next door to a theater and had won a Major Bowes amateur audition, with Brooklynese comedy, that started her as a professional dialectician.
Her toughest assignment on the radio was to talk with an Armenian accent. She called all the rug dealers in the phone book to find one who talked that way. The last place listed had a proprietor born, she was told, in Armenia. Sara hurried to the store only to find that the merchant that very day had had all his teeth pulled. He couldn’t speak a syllable. Sara muddled through the program with a mixture of Balkan accents.

And this was in part of an AP television-radio column by Wayne Oliver the same year. You can see how incredibly busy Sara was and also get an indication how she tested her skills.

NEW YORK, Dec. 24—(AP)—You're no doubt familiar with the voice of Mabel Flapsaddle, the telephone operator, and Gladys Zybisco, the girl plumber, on the Jack Benny program. Also Ingrid Mataratza on the Jimmy Durante show, Helen Wilson on Amos ‘N’ Andy, Mrs. Horowitz on Life with Liugi, Chiquita on the Gene Autry program. Also Crystabelle, Geneva Hafter and Aunt Nellie on the Beulah show.
What you may not know is that all these voices—each with its distinctive accent, dialect or personality — belong to one person. She is pert, blonde Sara Berner who can turn different accents on and off as easily as you turn your dial from one station to another.
How does she do it?
“Well, you have to have an ear for it,” she tells this column. “Some people have an ear for music. I have an ear for accents.”
When Miss Berner wants to test the authenticity of her accent, she goes to the region where it is most common. Then she tries her version on a store salesman, ticket seller or someone else who deals with the general public. If she gets a laugh there or is spotted as being from another section, she knows her accent is phony and there's more work to be done.
Although Miss Berner is best known for her Brooklynese on the air, she is from Oklahoma.

Berner’s Major Bowes shows went through 1936 and until about April 1937. They took her to Los Angeles in March the latter year and that may be when she landed some radio work. While her accents got her on radio, and are peppered throughout her cartoon work (the Italian mamma buzzard in “The Bashful Buzzard,” for example), it was her impersonations which originally got her into animation.

The story below from 1944 isn’t altogether accurate.

So Sara Shines
Moviedom Films Yuletide Fairy Stories of Animals
BY TED GILL
HOLLYWOOD, Dec. 23—(AP)—This Christmas season has kept Sara Berner busier than a cartoon moth around an animated lighthouse!. . .
Why? . . . because practically every studio has been filming yuletide fairy stories about animals. . . and that's where Sara shines. . .
For eight years, she has been putting words into the mouth's of animals that appear in movie cartoons. . . in fact, she once won an academy award for vocally imitating top feminine stars.
She got her first screen assignment when a film cartoon producer, after hearing her impersonate Katharine Hepburn. . . signed her for the voice of a baby panda. . .

“Life Begins For Andy Panda” was released by Walter in 1939 but she can be heard in Disney (“Mother Goes Goes Hollywood”) and Warner Bros. cartoons the previous year. Animals impersonating Kate Hepburn had made periodic animated appearances, voiced by Elvia Allman, a fine character actress, comedienne and veteran of the Los Angeles radio scene. Internet guessers who post to databases and encyclopaedias can’t seem to tell the two apart. Allman plays a Hepburnish chicken in “A Star is Hatched” (1938) but when a similar chicken appears in “Daffy Duck in Hollywood” only months later, it has Berner’s voice. Berner’s sound is a little higher than lighter than Allman’s.

Historian Keith Scott explains what actually happened. Lantz heard Berner do Hepburn on the Eddie Cantor show, then hired her to do it for “Barnyard Romeo” (1938); the Panda cartoon was, of course, later. She was then hired for the Disney cartoon, then for the Daffy cartoon.

Berner turns up on ‘Fibber McGee and Molly’ in 1939 and it’s almost impossible to list the network radio shows she appeared on. She appeared with Bob Burns, Burns and Allen. She was a hit with a nasal-voiced character on ‘Al Pearce and His Gang’ in 1942 which she later used on the Jack Benny show, even singing with it. She was Bubbles Lowbridge on ‘Nitwit Court’ (1944) with Mel Blanc and Arthur Q. Bryan. She showed up on Rudy Vallee’s broadcast of May 10, 1945 with Adolphe Menjou, Irene Ryan and B.S. Pulley, then sued Vallee in October, claiming he reneged on a 39-week contract to pay her $500 a week and credit on each broadcast. Then there was her role as waitress Dreamboat Mulvaney on the 1947 summer show ‘Arthur’s Place’ whose namesake producer-star, Arthur Grant, was suddenly fired after five weeks and replaced with Jack Kirkwood. Berner was a daily regular on the “Anna and Eleanor Roosevelt” daytime show on ABC in 1949, performing Fanny Price’s Indian routine on one 15-minute broadcast.

Two odd radio stories, first from the Valley News of Van Nuys from February 25, 1946.

R A D I O FLASHES
By DICK EISIMINGER
Jack Benny had better be careful what he says to Mabel Clapsadle, one of the telephone operators on his NBC program, for there’s a real Mabel Clapsadle listening in. The two operators, Mabel and Goitrude, played by Sara Berner and Bea Benedaret [sic], have been regulars on the show all season, but it was not until this week that the real Miss Clapsadle appeared. She is secretary to the vice-president of the Security-First National Bank in Hollywood and she has been besieged with calls from friends who wonder if she really knows Jack Benny.

The character’s name on the radio was “Flapsaddle” but there was, indeed, a Mable Clapsadle. U.S government records show she was born in Illinois on August 24, 1895 and died in Los Angeles on September 23, 1972.

And Jimmy Fidler’s column of May 4, 1949 reveals:

Odd results from Hollywood fame. Not long ago, for instance, Sara Berner, the character actress, was a guest on a coast-to-coast radio program. The master of ceremonies, in introducing her to the audience mentioned the fact that she was the “voice” for Jerry, the cartoon mouse that danced with Gene Kelly in one outstanding sequence of “Anchors Aweigh.” A few days after the broadcast, Miss Berner received in the mail a present from a Wisconsin admirer. The package contained an elaborate assortment of cheeses.

The climax of Sara’s career came in 1950. Network radio did for her what it did for Mel Blanc in 1946. It gave her a starring showcase to use her various voices. It gave her a sterling supporting cast. And, like Blanc, she flopped. “Sara’s Private Caper” debuted on June 15th, immediately after “Dragnet.” The show was surrounded in uncertainty. It went through three names before a fourth was finally picked. Radio listings weren’t sure what kind of show it was. Some newspapers called it a drama. Others a comedy. Others a mystery. Others used a combination term. NBC’s publicity department should easily have straightened that out. It’s still a bit disconcerting listening to what’s supposed to be a detective show and hearing laughs. Even what one newspaper preview advertised as Sara’s natural voice sounds like one of her New York dialect characters. The opener featured Gerry Mohr as the bad guy and other voices easily recognisable are Eric Snowden (Ronald Colman’s butler on the Jack Benny show), Frank Nelson (Benny show) and Bob Sweeney of the comedy team Sweeney and March as the boyfriend of the originally-named character: “Sara Berner.” The programme seems to have ended August 24th, though NBC had made some Thursday night switches the week before.

Sara was still busy with the Benny show, television, films and even comedy records—for awhile. But her career wasn’t really the same. And we’ll look at what happened in a future post.

Snow Business Mouse

Warren Foster managed to get a bit of variation in his stories for the Tweety-Sylvester series by adding a third character who got directly involved in their dispute. Sometimes it was Granny, but there were cartoons where she just wandered off and was away from the action.

In “Snow Business,” Foster introduces a starving mouse. Instead of the cat chasing the mouse, it’s the other way around. I like the “two-headed” mouse below.



Sylvester’s so intent on eating Tweety, I suppose it doesn’t cross his mind he could eat the mouse.

Animation is credited to Art Davis, Ken Champin, Manny Perez and Virgil Ross. I wonder if Warren Batchelder or Ted Bonnicksen assisted on this one.

Ub’s Thumb

The ComiColor cartoons from the Ub Iwerks studio delivered on half their series name. They were in colour. But comic? They tried. I guess.

When Chuck Jones directed “Tom Thumb in Trouble” in 1940, he made what amounted to a dramatic cartoon with a bit of whimsy. When the Iwerks studio got the same character in trouble in 1936, there wasn’t either. And there was no humour, either. Even the end gag was used five years earlier (and better) in a Van Beuren cartoon. The closest thing one can possibly describe as funny are some of the character designs.

At one point, a goofy-looking orange fish (with tail fins that turn like a rotor) eats Tom. But swimming in and out of the scene for no particular reason is a snaggletooth fish wearing a hat. I guess he’s the laugh quotient.



The cartoon’s interesting because parts of it are shot from what is sort of Tom’s perspective; there are shots of the lower part of his parents’ bodies or not much more than a hand (with four fingers). And whoever the de facto director or layout man was went for some MGM-style perspective as a worm twirls Tom in a circle, toward and away from the audience.



There are no animation credits on the cartoon and I don’t know who was drawing at Iwerks at the time.

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.