Touché and Go

Pepé Le Pew devolved in a few short years from an Oscar winner to a cliché. Or perhaps that should be “Le Cliché.” By the late ‘50s, his cartoons are indistinguishable from each other. A cat accidentally gets a white stripe of paint down its back. The cat runs away, stopping to catch her breath with the words “Les Pant.” Pepé talks and talks and talks. And hearts find their way into the design. In every single cartoon. Sometimes they’re trails of smoke, sometimes they’re bubbles, other times they’re in Maurice Noble’s backgrounds. Jones loved gags coming out of the artwork. Here’s an example in “Touché and Go” (1957).



Not knowing my French geography, I’m not sure where this is supposed to take place (do they have cliffs near the French-Italian border?) but here are more of Noble’s backgrounds.






Do they have volcanic islands in the Mediterreanean?

Noble has a number of underwater backgrounds as well, as Jones quickly cuts from one to the next while Pepé is in a scuba mask.

Phil De Guard did his usual fine job constructing these.

The New Writer

This past week, the last of Jack Benny’s radio writers passed away. You can read a nice little profile of Al Gordon HERE. (The story has Gordon and Hal Goldman misidentified in its accompanying photo, judging by the 1960 photo caption to the right and another newspaper photo from the same year).

Gordon and writing partner Goldman joined the Benny show in 1950. You’d think the job would be cinch. By then, Jack, his cast and his secondary players had all settled into tried-and-tested characterisations and routines. It would seem that all the writers had to do was pick a few of them from the buffet, slap them together in a show, then pick a few different ones next week and do it all over again. It wasn’t quite that easy.

Newspaper syndicate writer Charles Witbeck did a couple of feature stories in 1960 about Gordon and Benny’s other writers in the television era. (One wonders if Witbeck simply had plenty of material so he banked some of it for use during a fallow period). Perhaps the most interesting thing is Benny trusted his writers’ judgement over his own, at least a lot of the time.

This story appeared in papers starting January 5.

Jack Benny’s Writers Live ‘In A Happy Rut’
By CHARLES WITBECK
“The happy rut” is what four well-paid writers call working for Jack Benny.
Working for Benny is a career, a lifetime job, or so it would seem by Hollywood writing standards. Two writers, Sam Perrin and George Balzer, have been making up lines on Jack’s stinginess for 17 years. Hal Goldman and Al Gordon are the youngsters who say they’re “carrying the old men” with 11 years of service.
Perrin, Balzer, Gordon and Goldman have been with Benny so long they think like him. They should by now. Furthermore, they know each other so well, one writer often will say word for word what another is thinking of. Generally all four are talking at once, and there are continual interruptions.
In a Beverly Hills office that Goldman describes as turning a dark shade of red, the four sit and dream up Benny half-hour shows and his hour specials. This is done by dictating to a secretary.
“She’s the real writer,” says Sam Perrin.
“She picks out what she likes best,” said Hal Goldman.
How can she tell what to use when all are talking at once?
“Whatever comes in clearest,” answered Balzer. “She can tell by the tone of something thrown whether it should be ignored or not, and by our attitude.”
Always Interrupting
“If after three words a guy isn’t interrupted, it’s OK,” was Perrin’s definition.
Since the men are so used to interrupting, they feel ill at ease when there is silence and often three will let one writer go on and on until he pleads for help.
It takes from seven to nine days for the four to do a half-hour TV show and they put in a regular eight-hour, five-day schedule. There are days when nothing much happens and the men are stuck with a problem of coming up with the right material, say, for a guest.
These days of famine, seen in another light, are called “the will to play golf” by elder statesman Perrin, who in his 17 years with Benny has never been out a day.
No Panic
Failure to solve a problem doesn’t bring panic. The men feel if you don’t do it today, you'll get it tomorrow. They go home to their wives and swimming pools (one, Al Gordon, doesn’t own a pool the others claim he sells pool water to them), and don’t fret. “But I think at home, not at the office,” said Gordon.
“For instance, we had Jack Paar as a guest not long ago.” Balzer said. “We were into eleven pages of a sketch with Paar and it wasn't right for him. So we took it 'and found it would fit George Burns perfectly. We never throw anything away.”
Benny Judges
Noawadays four men do most of the writing and then Benny comes in to listen and judge. In the beginning during the early radio days, Jack sat in with the men. Now he trusts them. Jack knows what he wants and all four respect his good ear. They also need him in any arguments over material. Any side that Jack goes to wins.
“We retain privileges,” said Goldman, “you tell Jack why you like a joke and sometimes that convinces him.
“And there are lines that you put in the script because you know in reading Jack will pencil out. so you just throw the line at him. If he likes it he will use it.”
Probably the best thing about Benny and his writers, besides the fact all like each other, is that Jack doesn’t keep score on who suggests what. He doesn’t care. This eliminates rivalry.
After finishing a script, the men know what will get laughs and what should get laughs and they’re seldom wrong. When a laugh doesn’t come over as expected, they have a way out. “Anything that lays dead is an ad lib,” is their alibi.
Their knowledge of what strikes the public’s funny bone has to be fairly accurate. “Otherwise we’d lose our annuities,” said Al Gordon.
With that announcement, seniority leader Sam Perrin looked at his watch, borrowed a couple of pills from the group doctor, Hal Goldman, and then led the three boys back to the office where they would be locked up for the afternoon. There was no “will to play golf” in evidence.

This is from the Modesto Bee, November 21, 1960.

Jack Benny, Writers Have Chuckles While Rehearsing Television Show
On Monday mornings at 10 o’clock in Beverly Hills, Jack Benny, announcer Don Wilson, four writers, singers and guest actors hold a reading for taping the following Sunday Benny show.
The reading takes all of 35 minutes interspersed with the loudest laughs from portly Don Wilson, followed by Benny’s chuckles and then the writers’. Benny is known to be a great audience and lives up to it during a reading.
The weekly session is mere routine to the whole group which has been with Benny so long. In a sense they're all company men. Don Wilson is on his 27th year with Jack; Rochester has been around since 1937, and writers Sam Perrin and George Balzer began 18, years ago. The other two writers, Hal Goldman and Al Gordon, are the newcomers, with only 11 years to their credit.
A few minutes after 10 o’clock recently, after the men had settled down, Jack began reading his opening monologue. He added pauses and it sounded as if he were on stage or doing a radio show. At the end he said, “It isn’t long enough.”
Writer Sam Perrin nodded, and said they’d fix that up and Benny continued. Dennis Day began reading about how he thought this was the opening show for the season. Jack explained that he had already done the opening. Then Dennis read: “Well, I’ve got to hand it to you, you’ve sure got a lot of guts,” referring to the fact that Benny had the gall to do an opening without Dennis.
Benny almost fell out of his chair laughing at this line. The others joined in, but Benny’s guffaw was the biggest. The reading went on with the writers and Don Wilson laughing here and there.
When they came to a commercial involving a bagpiper dressed in kilts, Benny questioned a line about the raising of kilts. Jack wondered whether it was in good taste and the writers offered substitutes. It wasn’t decided what would be done.
“We’ll fool around with this later,” said Sam Perrin. Jack nodded and then decided to kid Perrin. “Let’s fool around with it now. It’s my show.” There was more laughter and the reading continued.
At 10:35 o’clock Jack read the last line on page 33 and then got up and walked around. “This is a very good show roughly,” he said. “It’s too long but all our shows are too long at the reading.” While others were talking and he was thinking, Jack pulled a few dollar bills from his pocket. He counted them, put them back in his pocket, said a few words and went into his office.
Sitting behind his desk in an office covered with plaques, Jack talked about guests like Arthur Godfrey, Joey Bishop, the James Stewarts and Dan Duryea.
“We’re also going to do a show about Fatso (Don Wilson) since he’s been with me for 27 years and I think it’s very funny.”
Jack was going to have his wife Mary Livingston on the opening program, but Mary was very nervous about it, and finally Jack told her she didn’t have to do it. It was a huge relief to Mary who never does a live show, or a taped one for that matter, so it is doubtful if fans will see Mary at all this season.
Switching over from a twice-a-month show to a weekly series isn’t bothering Benny a bit. “We have 11 shows in the can already,” he said, “and we’re not panicky.” Jack will even do three concerts in Cincinnati, Indianapolis and Cleveland. While talking about the concerts, Jack suddenly got an idea and rushed out of the room. He wanted to make sure plugs for the concerts would be put in the shows the week before.
Idea First
“I’m glad I thought of that,” he said, re-entering the room. He sat down and leaned back. “Care for a cigar?”
I shook my head and Jack continued.
“You know my writers prefer doing a weekly show. It keeps their hand in. The reason isn’t financial. They’re paid the same amount regardless.
“Also this year we’re not doing any specials. Those took a lot of time."
Asked if the Marquis Chimps would be back, Benny smiled. “Maybe, if we can get the right approach. You know the good thing about that show, the one with the chimps, was that the rest of the show was good. If only the monkey had been good we would have had a lousy show.
“Our problem as always is to find the right thing for the guest. If we can’t, we don’t do it. With those writers the idea comes first and then the guests.”
The company men are working harder this year, but they don’t show it. Benny says he isn’t running any faster this season than last.
“I still get out to play golf,” he says. “If I can keep those guys off my neck.”

Gordon wrote jokes for Benny, but Benny had a little joke about him. He dubbed Gordon and partner Hal Goldman “the new writers”, and still called them that even 20 years later when they were writing Jack’s TV specials.

Goldman died in 2001. As for the “old” writers, George Balzer passed away in 2006 and Sam Perrin in 1998. They had written the radio show with John Tackaberry, who died in 1969, and Milt Josefsberg, who passed away in 1987. Gordon’s death this week, in a way, marks the end of an era for Benny’s still large fan-base, and reminds us that character-based comedy can stand the test of time, even from that brief period known as the Golden Age of Radio.

Keeshan and Cartoons

As someone who parked himself in front of the TV mornings and afternoons throughout the 1960s, Captain Kangaroo wasn’t really my style, even as a young child. Too low-key. Not funny like Brakeman Bill and Crazy Donkey playing old cartoons and kibbitzing on Channel 11. The Captain didn’t keep my attention but, being a cartoon fan, I’d watch Tom Terrific.

Sure, Tom didn’t have the smart ass-ery of a Bugs Bunny. But the imaginative transformations and uses of Tom’s funnel hat (reminiscent of the silent Felix the Cat changing his tail into something else) and the irony of having a laconic “Wonder Dog” was enough for me to tune in. And Crabby Appleton’s a clever name for a villain; I appreciated clever writing even then.

So what did the Captain think of all those cartoons on kids shows on the other channels? This syndicated newspaper story of November 19, 1961 may give you an idea. As a background note, the prime-time line-up that September/October saw the debut of three animated shows—‘The Alvin Show,’ ‘The Captain and the Colonel’ and ‘Top Cat.’

Captain Kangaroo Deplores Lack Of Good TV
By HARVEY PACK
Bob Keeshan is responsible for 312 hours of children’s programming a year. As Captain Kangaroo he is perhaps the only performer in TV who complains bitterly that he has no competition.
“A few years ago my show was hanging by a thread, but the parents came to our rescue and we were renewed. Now we're loaded with sponsors, tops in our time slot and pointed at with pride, but we’re still alone in our field. It’s frightening to realize that American children are being abandoned by network TV to cartoons, westerns and violence.”
Off screen Bob runs a rather large organization known as Keeshan Enterprises which is dedicated, in addition to making money, to the type of programming that Captain Kangaroo personifies. They endorse products, make records, book concert tours for the Captain and prepare the daily adventures in the Treasure House.
“The show is actually run by the parents,” Bob said. “If the mail indicates that something is particularly well–received we try and give it more time on the show. As far as endorsing products goes, that's a delicate matter.”
I asked Bob how he feels about the flood of cartoon shows now dominating the so-called adult-kiddy market. “I love cartoons and I think it’s an unexplored field as far as TV is concerned. My only regret is that a few of the current films will set TV cartooning back ten years. After all, this is a commercial business, and the success of ‘Flintstones’ started the cartoon gold rush and when all the new ones fail. . .it’ll be almost impossible to sell a cartoon to TV.”
Keeshan was one of the first to develop a cartoon for TV. His ‘Tom Terrific,’ made in association with Terrytoons, has been a Treasure House standby for years. In a few months he intends to introduce “Lariat Sam,” a Western satire which the kids will laugh at and understand.
All the publicity for the very successful cartoon shows claims that their secret is that the kids are excited while the grown-ups laugh at the comedy,” Keeshan said.
“Perhaps that’s why they’re all failing this year. A cartoon should be designed for either adults or youngsters and not for both.
“If you ask me, our youngsters are being exposed to too much ‘adult’ TV. All day, while the preschool child is sitting in front of the set waiting for mommy to finish her chores. TV feeds him a steady diet of reruns. When they grow up their idea of marriage will be ‘I Love Lucy,’ which is great for laughs but hardly a true picture of life.
“As far as the westerns go they teach the kids that there is only right and wrong. . .no middle ground or compromise . . .and most problems can be worked out by a six shooter.”
About four years ago CBS cut Captain Kangaroo down to 45 minutes and filled the time with a world news program. This season the network finally realized that preschool youngsters would rather have another 15 minutes with the Captain so the quarter hour was returned to them.
“We try and present the show to entertain the older children before they leave for school as well as their younger sisters and brothers,” explained Bob. “It’s really quite simple. If we have something on science or serious music we always use it early in the show while the older youngsters are still with us.”
Now in his eighth year as the Captain, Bob fully expects to be the Captain for the children of his present fans. New, ready-made audiences are being created for him by the ever-increasing birth rate, and all of his plans center around the children.
“All I want to do is continue what I’m doing to the best of my ability,” Bob said. “And all I ask of television is not to let me do it alone. The networks owe it to the American people to provide decent, planned entertainment for children during the 5-7 time period when there’s nothing on but cartoons and two-reel comedies. TV’s potential for reaching children must be explored, not exploited.”

One wonders if Keeshan truly believed people would grow up to believe Lucy Ricardo was the epitome of American motherhood (still, she was never a neglectful or harmful mother, was she?) or that they can’t discern the difference between television westerns and reality. And “cartoons, westerns and violence” were kids’ programming long before television; they were all featured in Saturday matinees at local theatres.

Keeshan, like many others, believed television should be a medium of information and education. There’s certainly nothing wrong with that. Unfortunately, many believe that’s all it should be. Kids, like adults, need fun escape, too. Just as there was a place for ‘Playhouse 90’ and ‘Gilligan’s Island’ on TV, so there was a place for ‘Tom Terrific’ and ‘The Jetsons.’ And there still is today.

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.