Benny and Azusa

Name Mel Blanc’s most famous words in cartoons, and they’d have to be “What’s up, doc?” Name his most famous words in radio, and they’d probably be “Train leaving on Track 5 for Anaheim, Azusa and Cuc-amonga.” Blanc first called the stations on January 7, 1945 and the gag kept right on going into the TV years.

It’s a matter of comedy fact that strange sounds are funny. So are words. “Smith” isn’t funny. “Krankenschpooler” is funny.

People get very protective about the name of their community, even if it sounds funny. And so it was for some of the burghers of Anaheim, Azusa and Cucamonga who felt their towns were being ridiculed. That wasn’t the case at all. Their towns had odd names, though they were unwilling to accept that, and the names got laughs. As the train-caller routine became a running gag, it got instant laughs.

Here’s a piece from The Independent of April 20, 1956 where the townsfolk of Azusa weigh in.

Benny’s Humor Lost on Azusans
City Is Still Butt of Gag
By RAY DUNCAN
In Azusa a dying job is clinging to a town that is very much alive. The town is still enjoying an ancient gag about itself that it never did think was very funny.
This is the joke. “Anaheim, Azusa and Cucamonga.”
Get it? A lot of people don’t when you pin them down after they stop laughing at it.
“Out-of-town people drive into my place,” says Azusa service station manager Don Johnson, “and they ask what town this is and when I tell them, they laugh and say, ‘Are you kidding? You mean there really is such a place? I thought it was just on the Jack Benny show.’
“Some yell from their cars, “Hey, which way is Cucamonga?” and fall back convulsed by their own wit.
“So this is Azusa,” others say. “I was expecting a hick town, a whistle stop, like it is on the radio.”
But station agent Amos Hanke said, “I often see them laughing on the bus as they go through, but there’s nothing really funny about town. It’s very nice. We all take it seriously.”
“It still gets a laugh,” sighed another Azusan, “but I never could see it myself. Anaheim isn’t funny, and neither is Azusa. What makes them seem funny is Cucamonga on the end. But still, Cucamonga wouldn’t seem quite as funny if Anaheim and Azusa didn’t come first."
“If Jack Benny told you often enough that Pasadena is a funny word,” said another Azusan, “it would gradually get to be a funny word.”
“People used to come out here just to see what Azusa is like in real life,” said railroad station agent R. W. Lewis. “That was when the big trains stopped here. They don’t stop now.”
NEITHER DOES the gag. For more than a decade Azusa has been facing the fact that it is part of one of the greatest long-running jokes in modern history. Citizens reported yesterday that the gag is slowing down just a little with age.
“But that joke helped put us on the map," says Cornelius Smith, often known as “Mr. Azusa” because he has been a leader here for 50 years. “We got together and we made Jack Benny honorary mayor of Anaheim, Azusa and Cucamonga (he paused to smile at the famous phrase) and I guess Benny is the only man ever to be made honorary mayor of three cities at once.”
In Rhode Island a newspaper columnist once complained that Anaheim, Azusa and Cucamonga “have absolutely no legitimate reason for being known anywhere outside Los Angeles County.”
Mr. Azusa wrote a fiery reply pointing out that Anaheim is in Orange County, Cucamonga is in San Bernardino County, and only Azusa is in Los Angeles County—and set the man straight on some other things too.
“Chambers of Commerce from all over the country have phoned us and wired us asking how we managed to get so many mentions on the Benny show,” Smith says.
“Opinions differ on how it all started. A few weeks ago in Pomona a frost warning broadcaster named Floyd D. Young was quoted as saying that the tri-city gag was inspired by his nightly reading of temperatures. Smith of Azusa denies this.
Most of Jack Benny’s gag writers have changed since the 1940’s even if his gags haven’t, but one veteran is Sam Perrin who yesterday remembered it like this:
“We had decided to do a show in the L.A. railroad station, and we were sitting in the station a couple of days beforehand, kicking the idea around, George Balzer and I, and we heard this train caller sound off, and we decided it would be good to have some funny names called out on the show. We made a list of the funny town names we could think of, and tried them out in combinations, and we finally narrowed it down to you-know-what.”
Anaheim, Azusa and Cucamonga aren’t even on the same railroad line, but in radio-TV a joke is more important than geography.
A COMMON question from travelers through town is, “Where did they ever get a name like Azusa from anyway?” A common answer is, “Azusa means everything from A to Z in the U.S.A. AZUSA Get It?”
“There actually is almost everything from A to Z here. when you stop to think about it,” said service station manager Johnson. “There’s Aerojet, and the Angling Club, and Azusa Rock and Sand Co., and . . .”
He couldn’t think of anything here that started with Z. Azusa has no zoo and therefore no zebra, but civic honor is saved by public spirited citizens like Henry Zeka, Dorothy Zerell, Norman Ziser, Raymond Zitney, Ivan Zuber and Dalila Zepeda.
The Chamber of Commerce is mystified abou the origin of the word Azusa, and only mentions some possible Indian meanings like “watering place” and “place of contented people.”
But if you go to the library you can find three reference books on California place names, all of which say Azusa probably derives from Askuska-Gna, an Indian word meaning “skunk place” or “place of the skunk” or just plain “skunk hill.”
That controversy has never been aired by Benny. On one program, he sent Rochester out to see how things were in Anaheim, Azusa and Cucamonga.
“I’m in Azusa now,” Rochester phoned back on the air. “All these other towns are blaming each other for being on your program so much. Anaheim is blaming Azusa, Azusa is blaming Anaheim, and Cuca is blaming Monga.”

Any grumblings about Jack’s jokes certainly weren’t official. Publicity is publicity, after all. He had been made honorary mayor of the three towns in January 1946 (sparking a forgotten feud with Abbott and Costello). Azusa hosted Jack Benny Day on behalf of all three on June 15, 1965. Newspaper stories don’t reveal if he arrived by train. It would have been a shame if he didn’t.

Minerva Pious

If anyone remembers Fred Allen any more, it’s for the Allen’s Alley portion of his radio programme, where four characters would joke up issues of the day. Fans can name the characters—Mrs. Nussbaum (Minerva Pious), Senator Claghorn (Kenny Delmar), Titus Moody (Parker Fennelly) and Ajax Cassidy (Peter Donald). They made such an impact that people have forgotten they weren’t the original residents of the Alley in 1942 and only spent two years together. The actors who played the last three characters were relative newcomers to the Allen show.

Pious, however, was with Allen in the earliest days, and she actually gets an on-air credit on the debut of The Hour of Smiles on March 21, 1934, which was the brainchild of the ad agency of Allen’s sponsor at the time. The other regulars were Irwin Delmore, Lionel Stander, Jack Smart and Eileen Douglas, though Walter Tetley whenever Allen needed a child voice. Pious was doing her Nussbaum Jewish dialect even back then and was well respected for the variety of accents she could master.

The Lowell Sun of August 16, 1934, carried a short biography about her, something unusual for a stock player on a radio show.

How Minerva Became a Star
“How,” repeated tiny Minerva Pious, reaching up to pull a thread oft the reporter’s cuff, “did I become a radio character actress?”
“Yes,” said the reporter, walking down the stairs six steps so he could be on a level with her eyes. “And how did you learn all those dialects?”
“Well, booblitchka, I’ll tell you,” Minerva said. “Ich war in Moscow geboren et quand j’ai dix ans je quitto La Russie et viens aux Etats Unis, et, signore questa patria....”
And out of it all, the reporter, who was something of a linguist himself, gathered an unusual story.... not the least unusual part of which was the fact that Miss Pious, who is a character actress on Fred Allen’s Wednesday evening Town Hall Tonight program, probably owes her successful position in radio today to the fact that she forgot in the middle of a performance and was fired.
The performance was not acting, however. It was playing the piano for a radio singer. Miss Pious, who always prided herself upon her ability to remember notes, would, under no circumstances, have the music before her at the piano. In the middle of a performance one night her memory failed her. She was fired.
This ended her work as accompanist and started her on a career as a character actress. The singer who fired her—Harry Taylor—is none other than Harry Tugend, Fred Allen’s assistant and director of Town Hall Tonight, and when the Allen group was looking for a woman who could do Russian dialect, In January, 1933, Tugend remembered little Minerva Pious, who wasn’t a perfect accompanist, but was a native Russian. She has been with the Allen group ever since, speaking all the European dialects, including the Scandinavian.
Miss Pious was born in Moscow, March 5, 1909. She had her first stage experience as a child walk-on in an opera in which her father sang the baritone lead. She went to school in Moscow, Vienna, Paris, and in various American places after her parents brought her to this country.
Before going into radio she played character bits on the New York stage and worked in the editorial department of a large national and international news syndicate. She also
played in German and French dramatics in Salzburg.
In person, she belies her rather powerful, husky voice. She is exactly five feet tall, and has brown eyes and dark hair. She likes bridge and tennis, and has published songs, poetry and prose. Believe it or not, Minerva Pious is really her name and she is really Russian.

The article engages in that fine show-biz tradition of shaving some years off someone’s age. Pious spent her teenaged years in Bridgeport, Connecticut where she appeared in plays from 1919 into the early ‘20s. The picture of her in this post is from a Bridgeport newspaper 1920 and is certainly not of an 11 year old. U.S government record show she was born on March 5, 1903. Newspaper articles reveal her father, Abraham M. Pious, brought the family from Odessa, Russia to New Haven, Conn. in 1905, then moved to Bridgeport five years later (115 Roosevelt Street) where he operated the Park City Candy Manufacturing Company.

Oddly, while her hometown paper profiled her brother Billy (a prominent dentist), the only longer story it published on Pious—and it didn’t even run her obit—was the piece on December 21, 1947. There was a picture accompanying it.

War Orphan Here for New Leg;
Minerva Pious, His Benefactor
Cassino—a name that will live in American military history for years upon years.
Pious—the last name of a radio comedienne from Bridgeport who has kept America chuckling for years and years.
How these two names have become related is a story that makes Minerva Pious a truly person, was revealed in New York just last week.
Cassino was the place where Ernie Pyle wrote his most famous dispatch—the story of the company commander who died in the assault on the Jerries entrenched in a hilltop cemetery.
And Cassino was the setting for the story of the di Lillo family and their 11 year old son Guiseppe, who is now 12.
Family Wiped Out
In the Allies’ advance of April, 1944, Guiseppe was the sole survivor of a large family. Dead were his father, his mother, eight brothers and one sister. And little “Joe” himself had lost his right leg—but lived.
His case is typical of the thousands of war orphans in Europe today, and compassionate Americans are doing something about it.
One of those is Minerva Pious, the ex-Bridgeporter who plays “Mrs. Nussbaum” on Fred Allen’s NBC radio show.
Miss Pious joined other Americans in bringing to this country five war oprhans—and Guiseppe is in New York now as her charge. He will remain here until Miss Pious can get him a new leg, and then he will return to Italy under funds supplied by the comedienne and administered through the Foster Parents’ Plan for War Children, Inc., on Manhattan’s 42nd street.
Guiseppe is a bright lad who gives the impression of being quite reserved and shy, but actually has made many friends in New York. He wants to earn his own living, and through the foster parents’ plan he will be taught a trade. Before the shooting war came to Cassino, he roamed the hills tending sheep alone with other members of his family.
When he returns to Italy—after getting his new “natural action limb”—he will certainly have a warm spot in his heart for Minerva Pious and the other kindly Americans who are making a new life possible for him.

Just like Allen, Minerva Pious didn’t really make the transition to television. She appeared on a show with Gertrude Berg (of “The Goldbergs”) in 1948 and two decades later was part of the CBS soap “The Edge of Night.” Other than that, she seems to have only showed up on interviews looking back at network radio.

Pious died in March 16, 1979 at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York.

Dippy Diplomat Outline

A bunch of Walter Lantz cartoons in the mid-1940s used an outline effect to indicate movement. Here’s one from “The Dippy Diplomat,” a 1945 ahort directed by Shamus Culhane. These are consecutive frames.




During this part of the footage, Culhane alternates outline drawings on one frame with fully-rendered characters in the next.

Grim Natwick and Pat Matthews get the animation credits in this one.

Scaredy Cat and Fake Cat

Tex Avery’s eye-popping takes are well-known to any cartoon watcher, especially since they were imitated by just about every other studio for awhile. But Tex had a scare-take with fur standing on end. He used it as a running gag in ‘Ventriloquist Cat’ (1950).

The story (by Rich Hogan) is pretty simple. The mangy cat that appeared in Avery’s cartoons around this time is picked on by Spike the dog. The cat finds a ventriloquist’s kit and uses it to throw his voice, leading Spike into a bunch of funny, familiar Avery gags. The takes are on ones, as the characters hover and shudder in mid-air. Some of the takes have two different drawings of fur on end, others have four.

Eventually, the cat makes Boyer-type love to Spike disguised (rather poorly) as a cat. Spike’s cat head comes off. Time for the take.



Spike chases the cat past some dogs. Spike tries to convince the dogs he’s a dog, too, but the cat keeps throwing his voice into Spike’s mouth. The dogs get set to pounce. Cue the take.



The cat meow-laughs because he conned the dogs. The dogs suddenly hear the cat meowing and go over to get revenge for being suckered. Cue the take. Whoever the animator is then has the cat turn 180 degrees in perspective and zoom out of camera range, being chased by the pack of dogs.



Dashing up a telephone pole, the cat realises he’s not safe. That’s where the dogs chased Spike. Cue the take.



Mike Lah, Grant Simmons and Walt Clinton are the credited animators.

The Month of June (Foray)

If there was anyone on the face of the Earth who could possibly have the distinction of winning an Emmy award for the first time at age 94, it would be June Foray.

And she did it tonight.

She won for Outstanding Performer in an Animated Program.

One would think that she would have been nominated long before this. After all, her career pre-dates the Emmys. It even pre-dates network television, considering her years on radio. The trouble is she’s a voice-over artist, working off-camera in commercials and guesting with cartoon ensembles, and that doesn’t really fit any of the Emmy categories.

There is no possible way you have spent your life without hearing June’s voice. Interestingly, her roles that everyone remembers today are not found in a nice little biography in an Associated Press story of November 3, 1967—Witch Hazel for at least two cartoon studios; Rocky the Flying Squirrel, Natasha and Nell Fenwick for the Jay Ward studios; Talky Tina on “The Twilight Zone.” Oh, and Cindy Lou Who in “How the Grinch Stole Christmas.” I’m sure you have your own favourites.

Remarkable Vocal Range
June Foray Specializes In Dubbing For Babies, Birds, Stars - Witches, Too
By GENE HANDSAKER
HOLLYWOOD (AP) – She’s a tiny thing, with auburn hair, sparkling eyes and a remarkable vocal range—for babies and birds to sexy dames, doting grandmas and cackling witches.
For 20 years a frequent cry from Hollywood producers with feminine-voice problems has been, “Get June Foray.”
She earns $250 an hour and 11 probably Hollywood’s top woman practitioner of the obscure trade listed in her modest 2 lines in the Motion Picture Almanac: voice specialist.
Good On Imitations
Ann Sheridan died before she could rerecord dialogue for her last television show that extraneous noises had ruined in the sound track.
Miss Foray, after listening carefully to Miss Sheridan’s voice, did the rerecording matching the words to Ann’s lip movements.
“Sometimes the producer will add dialogue after the star has gone, say, to Europe,” said June. “It’s cheaper and quicker to have me do it than bring her back.
“And a lot of young actresses whom I can’t mention do a lousy job and they call me in to pull them out of the soup by replacing their voices. How did they get the job in the first place? Because they look good.”
Its Constant Effort
On a “Rawhide” she rerecorded the entire dialogue of one week’s guest star. It taxes Miss Foray, who works almost constantly, to remember all the voices she supplies, especially in television.
“I’m Axis Sally in ‘12 O’clock High,’ Knothead and Splinter on ‘Woody Woodpecker,’ and I’m all over the dial on the Saturday cartoon shows.”
Her voice changes as she describes various roles: “I do French girls, Cockney accents, Svenska, and ah do Suth’n dialects.”
The secret is “having a good ear and flexible vocal cords.”
Born in Springfield, Mass., Miss Foray came to Hollywood with her parents at 17 and started a local radio show, writing and playing all the parts, then graduated to network radio.
She lives in suburban Woodland Hills with her writer husband, Hobart Donavan; two terrifying friendly great Danes weighing a combined 345 pounds and a withdrawn, 14-year-old cat named Henry.
Miss Foray supplies nearly all the witches’ voices used in Hollywood. Pat Buttram once asked her to do one over the telephone when he had a local radio program.
“When I got through doing that cackling, hee-hee-hee voice,” she recalls, “there were 15 people standing around the phone booth wondering what this nut was doing.”

When you think of June, you don t think of her subbing in for other actors. The TV Scout column of October 10, 1960 revealed she did it for Sherry Jackson in a episode of “Surfside Six” to make the character sound sexier. Here’s another Associated Press piece from January 24, 1960.

Seldom-Seen Actress Gets Top Salary
By JAMES BACON
AP Movie-TV Writer
HOLLYWOOD (AP)—One of the best paid actresses in Hollywood is seldom seen on the screen.
She is attractive June Foray, who dubs voices for other actresses—sometimes the leading lady.
In one film, a well known actress was cast opposite a deep-voiced male star.
“When the picture was completed,” June recalls, “the producers found that audiences would have laughed the leading lady right out of the theater. Her voice was way too high and squeaky for the lower registers of the male star.
“I was called in to dub the whole picture.”
June makes plenty from movies and television but her biggest income is from commercials on radio.
“I make as much for a half hour’s work on a radio commercial as I could for a full day’s work as a visible actress,” she says. “Sure, it does something to your ego but when those residual checks start coming in every time the commercial is replayed, your ego is soothed so nicely.
“At those prices, I can’t afford to be seen on the screen."

You can read a couple of other old newspaper stories about her HERE and HERE.

In honour of June’s Emmy win, here she is in an interview with the Archive of American Television, in snippets discussing her career. There are 11 of them; I hope they’ll play one after the other.

Buck Benny and Ernie Bilko

If you had to name the top three sitcom stars of the 1950s, they’d have to be Lucille Ball, Jackie Gleason and Phil Silvers. That’s even though Gleason’s “Honeymooners,” as a half-hour show, lasted a mere 39 episodes.

You can’t help but think of Silvers as a fast-talking conman. That describes his character as Sgt. Ernie Bilko on “The Phil Silvers Show,” elsewhere on television (such as “The Beverly Hillbillies”) and in that old comedians’ romp “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.” But, of course, Silvers had roles long before that in film and on the stage. And after four years (1955 to 1959), he was anxious to try something else. So he came up with a TV special, written by Bilko’s creator, Nat Hiken, where he’d play a western not-quite-hero. And a special role was found for a man whose shows had just come off winning Emmys two years in a row—Jack Benny. Jack, of course, had his firmly established character that followed him to the grave. But he had some western parody experience as Buck Bunny, first on his radio show in the ‘30s, and then in a feature-length movie.

The special aired May 7, 1960 and was re-run on July 29, 1963. After the first showing, Cynthia Lowry of the Associated Press called the sketch’s climax “the nicest thing that happened on TV in months.”

Here’s a feature article by syndicated newspaper writer Charles Witbeck, from the Troy Record of April 30, 1960. It gives a nice behind-the-scenes look and deals with Silvers’ frustrations with the film industry.

Phil Silvers Returns To Stage In Western
HOLLYWOOD — Phil Silvers, decked out in a black Stetson, black leather jacket and pants, walked up the street of a western set at Universal Revue Studios, and his spurs kicked up a little dust.
Silvers was Sheriff Bissell, the Silver Dollar Kid. His cuff links were silver dollars and dollars were strung around his hat band. He was the most cowardly sheriff in the wild west and he was about to have a shootout with Chicken Finsterwald, another coward played by Jack Benny.
The two comedians were filming a scene for the Silvers’ Special, “The Slowest Gun in the West,” CBS, Saturday, May 7. Silvers walked about 40 paces from Benny and then turned. Benny peered up the road.
“Where are ya, I can’t see you?” he said.
The camera began grinding and Silvers said, “you four-flushing coyote, you draw.”
Benny replied, “No, you draw.”
Another Angle.
The “you-draw” dialogue went on for quite a while and then the scene was shot from another angle as the two cowards threatened each other for hours in the script.
In the next shot, with most of Hollywood’s top TV villains standing aghast in the background, Silvers shouts threats at Benny and Jack comes out of a barn, takes a big pause and says: “I’m calling you, B-Bustle.” He meant to say “Bissell” and Silvers laughed so hard at the miscue he almost tripped on his spurs.
“That’s thirty dollars you cost me, Jack,” he yelled. “Learn your lines, learn your lines.”
High On the Show
Silvers is putting up his own money for this show and says he won’t let anyone dog it on his dough. He has Nat Hiken, the man who first wrote the Bilko shows, doing the script, a take-off on all westerns.
“You don’t know me very well,” said Silvers during a break. A crew man took Phil’s fake glasses, the ones he uses during the film shows, but I’m high on this. It’s funn-ie. It’s not just kidding westerns. We go further. Now when I see a killer going for his guns, I use a little Freud. I say: ‘Look at those hands! Those hands were meant for love, not to kill. You want your mother.’”
Funny Script
The script is pretty funny. Author Hiken has the yellow bellied, four-eyed sheriff ducking all gun fights, even giving up his girl when a tough gunman wants her. The Silver
Dollar Kid is more interested in organizing needlework classes and picking up needle skills from a plump Indian squaw. Most of the laughs go to Silvers, who is the most vocal western hero ever seen on TV. Jack Benny has a relatively small part, coming on in the last part as the only gunman more cowardly than the Kid. Benny, as Chicken Finsterwald, shot an old lady in the back to become a legend.
While Benny and Hollywood villains complete the cast, not a single member of the Bilko group turns up. Doberman is strangely missing from this show.
“Doberman’s living like people think I live,” said Silvers. “He has the yachts, drinks the wine, chases the girls. I miss all his excuses. He had better excuses for blowing lines than anyone I ever bumped into. He was El Top.”
.Next Silvers and Benny were out on the street again for another “you-draw” sequence. Phil was within eyesight range. While the cameras were being reloaded, Silvers said to Benny: “Hold up a piece of wood.” Benny, whose holster strings tied around his pants accented his thin legs, held out a piece of wood. Silvers drew his gun and shot twice vocally. Benny dropped the wood and then as an afterthought, said, “I should have grabbed my hand in pain, you poor shot.”
“Now take two pieces of wood Jack,” called Phil, “I’ll show you how deadly I am with a gun.” Benny just looked at him. The two men seemed to enjoy playing kids again.
Then there was a sequence in which Silvers was to ride a horse. Now Phil had never been on a horse, or so he said. A photographer thought of having Phil stand on a chair in an effort to get on the nag, but a wrangler wouldn’t have it. He felt the horse would be nervous about the chair.
Back to Earth
Silvers finally mounted the animal. He looked around and blinked. “The air is different up here. Let me down.”
Back in a chair, Silvers talked about working in Hollywood. He made movies years ago at 20th and was never a big hit. He should be one now in the cinema.
“I don’t know,” Phil said. “Mervyn Le Roy let me read ‘Wake Me When It’s Over’ and I wanted to do it before someone else grabbed it (turned out Ernie Kovacs did). You know why I lost out? When the producer heard, about me, he said, ‘we don’t want him. He’s in TV. Remember what happened to Liberace.’”
With that Silvers rolled his eyes and shrugged. “It’s different out here. You get out in the warm sun, you sit back in one of these chairs and you don’t care much what happens.”

Silvers was busy with his own production company in the ‘60s (it produced “Gilligan’s Island”) and failed in a new sitcom where he played, well, you can guess, but he returned Jack’s appearance on his special by popping up on the Benny TV show in 1962.

What Walt Disney Learned From Snow White

Here’s a full-page feature story that ran in Every Week Magazine, a Sunday newspaper supplement that apparently was put together by the National Enterprise Association. That’s who Paul Harrison worked for, and he’s the author of this piece that I found in the Laredo Times of January 16, 1938.

A couple things surprised me here. One is that Paramount got in the way of a Rip Van Winkle feature that Disney was planning with Will Rogers. One wonders if Rip was suggested as a feature to the Fleischer studio during its Paramount release (there was a short, “Popeye Meets Rip Van Winkle,” in 1941). The other is Disney’s pledge he had given up on combination live action/animation features. He was making them by the mid-‘40s. So much for that.

At least two other wire services released feature stories on “Snow White” the same day. One has Uncle Walt busy at his desk. It appears his P.R. people were even busier.

The pictures below accompanied the original Harrison article. I don’t know anything about the guy who drew the long shot of Snow, the Prince and the dwarves. It almost looks traced.



What Walt Disney Learned From Snow White
By Paul Harrison
HOLLYWOOD
BACK in 1928, when Walt Disney introduced the little character which subsequently became the world’s No. 1 rodent, that single-reel cartoon, “Steamboat Willie,” was made for less than $1000.
Disney's first full-length feature, “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” now ready for national release after four years in production, has cost nearly $1,300,000 to date. All the duplicate Technicolor prints which must be made for exhibition in theaters will add another $300,000 to the total.
“We’ve worked hard and spent a lot of money, and by this time we’re all a little tired of it,” Disney said. “I’ve seen so much of ‘Snow White’ that I am conscious only of the places where it could be improved.
“You see, we’ve learned such a lot since we started this thing! I wish I could yank it back and do it all over again.”
And right there you have a pretty fair idea of why Disney is Disney, why he has received more prizes, citations, plaques, medals, scrolls, certificates, foreign decorations and other tributes than anybody else, probably, in or out of Hollywood. His name is synonymous with artistic integrity. He believes that “Snow White” is a good picture and that critics and public likely won’t notice many of the faults, partly because no film ever has been made with which it could be compared. This is of no great comfort to Disney, though, because he doesn’t like an undiscovered fault any better than an obvious one.
He said, “I hope it makes a lot of money so that we can go ahead. But whatever happens, I’m going to get out our second feature, ‘Bambi.’
“You couldn’t possibly realize all the things we had to learn, and unlearn, in doing ‘Snow White.’ We started out gaily, in the fast tempo that is the special technique of short subjects. But that wouldn’t do; we soon realized there was danger of wearing out an audience. There was too much going on. A feature-length picture has to deal in personality and character development instead of trying all the time for slapstick and belly-laughs.”
THAT few people know is that “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” was begun as a one-reeler. That was about the time of the “Three Little Pigs,” when Disney craftsmen were busy with other fairy tales, among them “Hansel and Gretel” and “Babes in the Wood.” “Snow White” had been a favorite story with Disney ever since his newspaper carrier-boy days in Kansas City, when he had seen the silent version starring Marguerite Clark.
Here in Hollywood he several times had given quite a bit of thought to making a feature-length animation. Mary Pickford wanted him to produce “Alice in Wonderland,” with herself as Alice, but with all the other characters hand-drawn.
“She was also going to put up the money,” Disney recalled. “Golly!—I can still remember how awed we were when we figured that it would take $400,000 or $500,000 to do a good job. It wouldn’t have been too difficult in black-and-white—just a lot of intricate process shots. I worked out a plan. Then Paramount came along with a production of ‘Alice,’ and that knocked out our idea.”
Another time, Disney revealed, he and Will Rogers conferred on a filming of “Rip Van Winkle,” with the little men to be done by animators. Paramount wouldn’t release its rights to the story, so nothing happened.
“I’ve got that combination flesh-and-ink idea out of my system now,” Disney said. “After this we’ll work only to develop our drawing and advance our own medium. And it is a medium, not a novelty. It’s capable of conveying some pretty heavy emotional stuff, as we found out in ‘Snow White.’ I wouldn’t be surprised if you’d cry a little with those little fellas. I hope so, anyway.
“We’ve had a few touching sequences in some of the short subjects. Remember the one about the mouse that wanted to fly, and the fairy gave him a set of bat wings? The poor little guy was in a hell of a shape, being neither mouse nor bird nor bat. All the animals laughed at him until the fairy came and took his wings away, and after that he was happy just being a mouse. Lots of people have told me they got a tremendous emotional boot out of that little story.”
Disney believes that “Snow White” is the sort of story that just couldn’t be done convincingly with human actors. Casting difficulties, especially with the dwarfs, would have been insurmountable. Paradoxically, you see, the purer fantasy of drawing lends a stronger feeling of reality.
“Snow White” also was the sort of story that refused to be tossed off in a single reel of eight minutes. The studio staff took more than ordinary delight in developing the ingratiating characters of the dwarfs. And the story department was torn by dissension when conferences were held to pare the tale down to short-subject dimensions. Pretty soon Disney realized that here was the material—action, comedy, emotion and suspense—for a venture in feature production.
Not even the statistical-minded publicity department can estimate the effort that was poured into the project. It has been a labor of pride for an organization in which everybody is young and where the big boss is called “Walt” to his face.
Disney must be the proudest of all, but he leans far backward in an effort to be matter-of-fact. He said, “It’s no wonder we have a different sort of feeling here; we’re an entirely separate little industry. In our work, we have nothing in common with Hollywood people, and we don’t live the Hollywood life.
“You take an ordinary studio and it’s full of people doing those things that are necessary for them to get ahead. There are executives who know nothing at all about making pictures. They worry about the prices of picture company stocks. They’re in it for the dough. In this outfit, every nickel’s worth is owned by my brother and myself.”
To safeguard their balance, and as a precaution against head-swellings, the studio’s myth-makers never see the articles written about their work. Disney himself sees only digests of significant critical opinion, and no fan mail except excerpts containing suggestions.
WITHOUT hoopla and with some misgivings, Disney launched “Snow White” on an initial appropriation of $250,000 and a staff of less than 100 people. His first release date was equally optimistic—early in 1936.
No great technical obstacles were encountered. The increasing delays and mounting costs mostly were due to discoveries of possibilities for improvement. Then they’d go back and make changes. The multiplane camera, developed at a cost of more than $50,000, was one of the improvements. It is a device which permits the photographing of characters and backgrounds on different plattes, exactly as players and props stand out in perspective on a stage.
Not only because of her voice, but her face and figure, Snow White herself was the most difficult member of the cast. This is Disney’s first representation of a normal human being. She had to be beautiful, and graceful in movement. At the same time, she had to be fairly simple in design because elaborate detail in facial lines and coloring produces a jittery image on the screen.
Snow White also sings. There are eight musical numbers in the picture and all are the work of Frank Churchill and Larry Morey of Disney’s staff. “Some Day My Prince Will Come” is the picture’s theme song.
So attached have Disney’s men become to the dwarfs, through years of developing individual personalities for them, that he has been petitioned to keep the little characters alive in future pictures. But Disney says no, they’ll have served their mission and he doesn't want them chiseling in on the popularity of his established stars.
The grotesque little men already have proved that they're expert scene stealers, and the studio animators have had a hard time suppressing some of them. Even now, for example, Disney is worried lest Dopey walk off with the picture, or at least with more than his due share of audience attention. Dopey is voiceless and wears oversize clothes. He’s always up to something with the mad singleness of purpose that makes Harpo Marx appealing.
DOC is the pompous, jittery, self-appointed leader of the band. Watching rushes of the film, Disney soon discovered that Doc was stealing scenes by the old familiar stage trick of “fly catching.” That is, he was making too many motions with his hands.
Happy is a fat little man with a perpetual smile and a cheery voice. Sleepy is always yawning, talks little, but is smarter than the others realize. Real boss is Grumpy, who’s actually teader-hearted but pretends to be opposed to everything, especially “wimmin an’ their wicked wiles.” Bashful is shy and fidgety, and poor Sneezy suffers terribly from hay fever, always managing to kerchoo at embarrassing times.

Hairpins and Ernie Nordli

Maurice Noble was lauded so much by Chuck Jones, his other layout artists at Warners through the 1950s at Warner Bros. get little attention. Jones leaves you with the impression they weren’t even on the same level of creativity as Noble. Indeed, Ernie Nordli originally came up with designs for “What’s Opera, Doc” which Noble immediately discarded when he returned to the studio.

But Nordli doesn’t seem to be a bad fit for Jones at all. Jones was into UPA-ish stylisation going toward the mid-‘50s, and that’s what Nordli gave him. He did it better than UPA at times. Here’s a nice background from “Broom-Stick Bunny” (released 1956). It mimics the UPA stylisation but still has a sense of depth.



Overtop the background are some animated bobby-pins in the air. Mike Maltese used them in the first Witch Hazel cartoon, “Bewitched Bunny” (released 1954) as kind of a running gag; in this cartoon, the pins even fall out when Witch Hazel is riding a sweeping broom by mistake. Here are some more pins atop Nordli’s background layouts, rendered by Phil De Guard.

There are a couple of places on the internet with more background work from this cartoon. The credited animators, by the way, are Dick Thompson, Abe Levitow, Ken Harris and smeary Ben Washam. Which ones drew the hairpins, I couldn’t say.






Nordli went back to Disney after his stay at Warners. When “Sleeping Beauty” finished production, the studio laid off all kinds of people and they made their way to other studios. Nordli worked on television cartoons for a bit. He died in San Francisco on April 22, 1968. He was 55.

Ballet-What?

There have been few posts here about specific UPA cartoons, despite the recent DVD release of the Jolly Frolics cartoons. The reason is because Michael Sporn has been doing a tremendous job analysing them on his blog. He’s put in a lot of effort and it’s worth looking at his examples and reading what he has to say. Check out posts on “Rooty Toot Toot” HERE and HERE, “The Magic Fluke” HERE, “Georgie and the Dragon” HERE “The Tell Tale Heart” HERE and “The Man on the Flying Trapeze” HERE and HERE.

Michael’s work doesn’t leave much for me to offer. He can show you the cartoons from the point of view of an artist who understands the various facets of how they’re put together. About all I can do is make casual remarks as the presumed audience for the cartoons, though I keep getting the nagging impression that, eventually, UPA’s theatrical cartoons weren’t made for any viewer. They strike me as seven minutes of self-indulgence, allowing UPA staff members to tell each other what ground-breaking Artists (with a capital A) they were.

I can appreciate whimsy and charm as much as anyone. Perhaps one or both is what Bobe Cannon was going for when he crafted “Ballet-Oop” for UPA in 1954. But the end result is neither. It’s just boring.

Conflict? It’s been said Cannon hated it. But stories need conflict. Not only is there no conflict, there isn’t even a sense of urgency in a battle with the clock to get the kids ready for the ballet. Nothing builds. It just happens.

The first half of the cartoon is a bunch of drawings of ballet moves, mainly feet. The second half is a ballet itself, called “The Apple Blossom and the Grasshopper” which is narrated by a cartoon character in the crowd so we can understand what we’re seeing on the screen. Sounds like that dreaded illustrated radio to me.

Ground-breaking? The studio had already made its own clichés by the time this short was out. It’s full of more spaghetti-limbed humans, like you saw in “Gerald McBoing Boing.”



If the studio could use wallpaper to indicate walls in the background, why not use a picture of someone’s hardwood floor to indicate a floor?



And if backgrounds dissolving around characters and characters dissolving around background worked in “Gerald McBoing Boing,” why not try it again? The background has just disappeared for awhile here and we get a black card. Interesting, Cannon staged part of the “Eep-Op-Ork” number on ‘The Jetsons’ at Hanna-Barbera with characters (and letters-as-characters) over a black card.



A jealous bee pounds her (it’s an all-female ballet) rear into a butterfly, who falls down. There are little sparkles. Such violence! Such animosity! Where’s the Television Action Council when you need it?



A curtain lifts on the ballet. I don’t know what effect Cannon and T. Hee were going for here.



Jules Engel was in charge of the colour selection in the cartoon, while the credited animators are Bill Melendez, Frank Smith and Tom McDonald.

Withers and Willie Whopper

If you’re of a certain age, when you think of Jane Withers, you think of Josephine the Plumber. Withers played the character on TV commercials starting around February 1963 until, well, they could still be running somewhere for all I know. It was a great concept. The idea of a lady plumber was new and Withers happily chirped the benefits of a cleanser to some clueless homebody. You couldn’t help but like her. She was picked over 102 other actresses, including Ann B. Davis.

Withers had been a star in the movies as a child in the ‘30s and ‘40s. But before that, she had a career as a voice actress in cartoons. Regretfully, voices went uncredited back then so which specific titles Withers appeared in will never be known unless someone asks her about it. And considering it was almost 80 years ago, she might not remember. I can’t help but wonder if she’s Cookie and the baby Elmer in the first Buddy cartoon at Warners, “Buddy’s Day Out” (1933).

She talked about animation a bit in this syndicated newspaper feature dated July 14, 1935. She was nine when she did this interview.

NASTY LITTLE JANE WITHERS HAS TO BE NICE
Now That She’s to Be Star Like Shirley, She’ll Reform
By PHILIP K. SCHEUER,
—HOLLYWOOD.
By being a very nasty little girl indeed, Jane Withers diverted more comment to herself in “Bright Eyes” than reviewers allotted Shirley Temple, who was not only a very nice little girl but the star of the picture as well. Whereupon Fox—to whom both are under contract—elevated Jane to a stardom like Shirley’s; and now Jane is to be a very nice little girl too.
It is up to future audiences, of course, to decide the wisdom of this move. Not the elevation, perhaps, so much as the reformation. They will have an opportunity to judge with the release, this week, of “Ginger.”
Trifle Disconcerting
Talking to Jane is very likely to deflate an interviewer’s opinion of himself, especially if it happens to be a high one. She is, frankly, way ahead of him. That sense of superiority you get from looking down at someone smaller than yourself doesn’t work with Jane, at all, at all. Not that she’s the least bit nasty, but the mischievous expression on her face, the not-quite-hidden laughter in her eyes, are well, shall we say, a trifle disconcerting?
Harrumph!
Jane is, I am afraid, everything we mean when we say, “a born actress.” This is partly because she is a girl, feminine gender, and partly because of her training: after she was born. The training started at the age of two, when her mother took her to a hall in Atlanta so that she could do a negro recitation. Jane got up on the stage and burst into tears. It was the last, the only, time that happened.
Two Years of Broadcasts
At three, Jane won a contest and a part in Aunt Sally’s Kiddie Revue. Pretty soon she was broadcasting over WGST, doing songs, imitations and tap dances. This went on for two years. At five Jane was a veteran performer, with Hollywood the next stop. (Hollywood seemed logical because Jane had done practically every thing else.)
She came out three years ago with her mother. Mr. Walter Withers stayed behind; it was all right for Ruth and the kid to go, but he had a prosperous tire business to look after. After they got settled and Ruth was in the movies—time enough, then, to think about coming on. Jane said good-by to the college football team of which she was the mascot, sang “I’m a Rambling Wreck From Georgia Tech,” her radio theme song, on the closing program and scrambled aboard a through train with Mrs. Withers.
Didn’t Get a Tumble
There was nobody to welcome them in Los Angeles. They pestered casting directors for eight months, and never a tumble did they get. But the radio was still left. Here Jane had better luck. She was selected from several hundred youngsters to exemplify the “Nuisance” on KFWB’s weekly Juvenile Revue. This led to her being hired by the animated cartoon people to dub in the voices of the little drawn figures. She did six months of Looney Tunes, and also Willie Whoppers, sometimes imitating as many as four voices in a single reel.
Simultaneously things began to break with the studios.. Jane played small roles in "Kid Millions,” “Hollywood on Parade,” “The Good Fairy” and “It’s a Gift.” Her first Fox picture was “Handle With Care,” with James Dunn. David Butler directed. When Butler was preparing “Bright Eyes,” Casting Director James Ryan saw Jane do some of her impersonations. He rushed her to Butler, made her repeat them. That settled it. .
Like Mitzi Green five years ago, Jane is a natural mimic. She can do 37 imitations now, and the list is growing. She needed no encouragement to do Zasu Pitts, Garbo and Shirley Temple for me. As Shirley, she shrewdly stressed the cherubic smile at the end of each sentence. In “Meal Ticket,” now in production, she will perform a take-off on Harry Lauder.
The down-south accent persists with both Jane and her mother. Jane can affect other accents—French, German, Jewish. She lives quite like the rest of the children on the block, as Mrs. Withers is fond of telling you, plays marbles, skates, rides, swims and climbs fences. The only reason she hated being nasty in “Bright Eyes” was because “Shirley is so nice.” Otherwise it was fun.
Sol Wurtzel has presented Jane with a new suite of rooms (she calls it her “bungalow”) with sliding closet doors. When Jane saw the doors she cried, “Goodie! I can play elevator.” The news that “Ginger” was to be previewed elicited a “Goodie, mother! What’s the other picture?” Once a week, on Saturday night, Jane and her friends hold debates. “Debates?” I repeated. “On what?” “Oh,” Jane said, “on airplanes, the President, other Presidents — everything.” The parents act as judges.
Set of Rules
Jane abides by her own set of “rules.” Some of them:
Drink at least one glass of buttermilk daily.
“Never talk when others are talking.”
Never say, “I can’t.”
Be thankful for everything you have.
Help mother and everyone as much as possible.
Her motto is, “Anything that’s worth doing is worth doing well.”

While her “rules” may sound a little precocious, there’s no doubt Withers followed them (well, maybe not the one about the buttermilk). Interviews show her as a thankful, devout lady. And anyone who has seen her films and commercials has to admit that whatever she did, she did well.