UPA Clipping File

When was it the critics began raving about cartoons made by UPA, and bestowing on them the mantle of The New Disney? Perhaps the most important, and widely-circulated, hosanna came from the The New York Times on December 21, 1952, when another newspaper’s editorial column noted:

Bosley Crowther, New York Times motion picture critic, recently credited UPA, headed by 41-year-old Steve Bosustow, with “Imposing what amounts to the spirit and style of modern art upon the traditionally romantic and restricted area of the movie cartoon.”

Crowther, though, wasn’t the first one.

Stories in the popular press about the studio were understandably few when Bosustow worked out a commercial release for the company’s cartoons. Hedda Hopper had these words about UPA in her column of December 5, 1950.

James Thurber’s cartoons and short stories will be brought to the screen by United Productions of America in a full-length picture with John Houseman producing and John Hubley as supervising director. The picture will be partly live action and partly cartoon. The animation characters will include Thurber’s famous seal and bloodhound. Stories under consideration are “You Can Look It Up,” “The Unicorn in the Garden,” “The Topaz Cuff Links Mystery” and “Mr. Preble Murders His Wife.”

“Unicorn” was the only one made, and then as a short. Perhaps the studio’s perennial money troubles quashed any other plans.

By the time of Heppa’s little blurb, UPA had released the first Mr. Magoo cartoon, “Ragtime Bear.” Yet it wasn’t until “Gerald McBoing Boing”—and its Oscar nomination—that critics and columnists noticed what UPA was doing and started dragging out the Disney comparisons. We reprinted Aline Mosby’s United Press column of February 22, 1951 HERE. And you can read Gilbert Seldes’ review in the Saturday Review from May 31, 1952 by going HERE. As you might expect if you know Seldes’ reputation, he delights in a bunch of the studio’s releases to date.

Just as Mickey Mouse’s popularity gave birth to stories about the man who put him on the screen, so reporters became curious about the head of the UPA studio once little Gerald won his Academy Award. Here are a couple of stories about Steve Bosustow. First, from the Associated Press of October 12, 1952.

Hollywood
By GENE HANDSAKER
HOLLYWOOD — A mild-mannered, slender man with brown eyes, heavy black brows, and the unpronounceable-looking name of Stephen Bosustow has quietly upset the movie-cartoon business.
Most film funnies are still content to involve mice, cats, dogs, and birds in frantic battles and chases. (And who's complaining? Not us fans.) But Bosustow (bo-SUSS-toe) has given cartoons a new concept, new technique, new story-ideas.
His “Gerald McBoing-Boing,” about a little boy who spoke in sound effects, won an Academy award. Another favorite character from his drawing-boards is “Mr. Magoo,” a near-sighted, potato-nosed little man who always comes out on top but never knows how close he has come to disaster.
His techniques are suggestive of some modernistic works of art. Backgrounds contain only the bare minimum of props and scenery. A sidewalk crowd of people is drawn in outlines only, with just the central character — and the ladies’ handbags!—filled in.
“We caricature human situations rather than try to be realistic about them,” Bosustow says. “First we reduce a chancier to the simplest form, and then the action. You get your point over faster, funnier, and with greater impact.”
His firm, United Productions of America, occupies a modest, modernistic building in Burbank. Bosustow, 40, a one-time trap-drummer, poster artist, and Disney animator, employs six units artists, each headed by a director. Six to 15 artists work in each unit.
The place is thriving, with sketches of cartoon projects thumbtacked to walls, and Bosustow’s stable of ink characters is growing. His “Jolly Frolics” series, six a year, deals humorously with such subjects as rivalry between a brother and sister and parental over-protection.
Another project for UPA is the preparation of cartoon sequences inserted in other studios' live-action feature films. Eight sequences link the episodic action in “The Four Poster,” which, stars Rex Harrison and Lilli Palmer. In a Dan Dailey-June Haver film, a Bosustow cartoon will depict a small boy’s dream.
Bosustow wants to produce a feature-length film himself, possibly Don Quixote or a James Thurber story. He says: “We’ve brought into the industry a modern approach to art and have proven that cartoons can be made for adults. The cartoon field is in its infancy.”

This story comes from the Oakland Tribune, Saturday, May 22, 1954.

Movie Cartoon Expert Predicts Rosy Future
By THERESA LOEB CONE
“The time isn't far off when theaters will show as many full-length animated movies as those with live actors,” says Stephen Bosustow. If anyone can make this rather startling prediction, that man is Bosustow. He’s the organizer and president of United Productions of America (UPA) and he has advanced cartoons in a spectacular fashion these past few years.
As a matter of fact, UPA has plans in the hopper for several feature-length cartoons right now. They've completed George Orwell’s “Animal Farm,” hope to do Milne’s “Winnie, the Pooh,” some of the Thurber yarns, Gordon Jenkins’ “Seven Dreams,” and a musical comedy, for starters.
Speaking in San Francisco’s Museum of Art Thursday night on the “Revolution in the Animated Film,” the tall, dark and very handsome Mr. Bosustow also presented a program of 10 UPA cartoons, many of which have the power of enticing audiences into movie houses where the feature offering might not be so attractive.
TREMENDOUS APPEAL
Some of the program’s items were “Gerald McBoing-Boing,” “Christopher Crumpet,” “Unicorn in the Garden,” “The 51st Dragon,” “Rootie-Toot-Toot” and “Madeline,” all fairly familiar to moviegoers as typical UPA fare—vastly amusing in an adult fashion, yet having at the same time tremendous appeal for children. Not shown was an even more familiar UPA character, “The Great Magoo,” presently being afforded festival treatment at Oakland’s Globe Theater.
Bosustow, who has made such strides in his field, is still in his early forties but has behind him over 20 years of movie making experience. He has tried his hand at all phases of movie production—writing, cutting, music, etc. But principally he is known as an artist who abandoned what is known as a “serious” art career long ago in the understandable interest of wishing to eat regularly and be housed satisfactorily.
Canadian-born but transplanted with his family to Los Angeles when he was 11, Bosustow was an art major, got a job with the old U.B. Iwerks’ studio working on “Flip the Frog” cartoons in the 1930’s. Next he was on the Universal lot with Walter Lantz. Then on the list of Bosustow’s bosses was the king-of-cartoons, Walt Disney.
WORKED FOR DISNEY
Bosustow (it’s pronounced just like it’s spelled, if that’s any help) stayed with Disney for seven years, writing scripts, doing story sketches, helping with the first animation on “Snow White” and providing most of the story adaptation on “Bambi” and “Fantasia.”
But in 1941 he was a victim of a Disney Studio payroll slash and went to work for the production illustration department at Hughes Aircraft. He was also teaching industrial art at the same time. His drawings attracted the attention of Frank Capra and children's story writer Ted Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss.
The up and coming cartoonist then did Army and Navy training films. By war’s end he launched UPA on the way to fame, fortune and Academy Awards.
100 ON PAYROLL
The original organization boasted eight on the staff of a payroll that now has reached 100 They have two studios, one in Hollywood, one m New York, do not confine themselves to theater shorts or full lengths, for that matter.
They’re doing TV commercials, and documentaries for industrial firms. Heywood Broun’s story “The 51st Dragon,” by the way, was the first cartoon written assignment for TV, was originally shown on the Ford Foundation’s Omnibus program.
Bosustow’s talk was the seventh in the “Arts in Cinema” series which will take a break for the summer, will be resumed in September.

And here’s Bosustow again, in a TV column by the Associated Press dated December 15, 1956, on his major TV endeavour that ended in an unfortunate failure.

‘Boing Boing’ Show Features All Cartoons
By BOB THOMAS
HOLLYWOOD (AP)—A new kind of show debuts on TV Sunday afternoon. It is all-cartoon, unsponsored and simply wonderful.
The name of it is “The Boing Boing Show” on CBS. Do you remember the little boy in the Oscar winning cartoon short who spoke only in sound effects like “boing” and “ah-ooga”?
Well, Gerald is the emcee of the show, and his noises are interpreted by Bill Goodwin. Together they introduce a variety of subjects. On the first show are Gerald’s own story, a treatment of the life of the French artist Dufy and two songs done in hilarious style.
Sold On Project
The series has been put together by United Productions of America Pictures, Inc.
CBS is so sold on the project that it is putting the show on without a sponsor. It shouldn’t be sponsorless long.
The guiding force behind the show is U.P.A. President Stephen Bosustow, whose imaginative ideas have revolutionized first the cartoon industry and then TV commercials.
The U.P.A. technique of wacky immobile characters against impressionist backgrounds was born of necessity, he told me.
“When we started out with the company in 1943 we couldn’t afford the expense of trying to make cartoons look like live action,” he said. “We had to invent new methods that were cheaper. What we developed wasn’t new; it had been done for years in magazines and by cartoonists like Virgil Partch.
Native Of Canada
Bosustow was born on Victoria, B.C., and sought his fortune in Hollywood as a musician and cartoonist. Laid off at Disney’s in the movie depression of 1941 he was unable to find work at other studios. So he deeded to start his own. Two years later, his dream came true.
U.P.A. struggled along making training films and cartoon shorts, then burst into prominence with characters like Boing Boing and Mr. Magoo. It has since helped bring with and imagination to TV commercials.
“About 40 per cent of the work in our studios here and in New York and London is in commercials,” said Bosustow, a tall, good-looking man with a dark mustache. "With this as a basis, we have been able to branch out into other fields such as the CBS show. Our next plan is to make all-cartoon features.”

Bosustow did move into features. One of them, anyway. A Middle Eastern version of Mr. Magoo was somewhat shoved aside in a story surrounding Aladdin, a princess and a Wicked Wazir in “1000 Arabian Nights” (1959). But it was the studio’s real last hurrah. Director Pete Burness left unhappily during the feature’s production and perennial money troubles finally resulted in UPA being sold to Hank Saperstein. By then, the giddy critics at the beginning of the decade had long let the bandwagon play on without them.

Truce Toothbrush

There isn’t a lot of outrageous animation in “The Truce Hurts” (1948), a cartoon by the Hanna-Barbera unit for MGM. Well, not counting a blackface gag. The stretchy-est piece comes in some cycle animation of Tom brushing Jerry’s teeth.

It reminds me a lot of Irv Spence’s work at Warner Bros. before he went to MGM. He did kind of a face stretch like the one on Jerry in “Little Red Walking Hood” and seems to me Spence animated characters who were cross-eyed and with an overbite.





We get multiples of Jerry as he dashes off camera for breakfast.



The credited animators on the reissue print are Spence, Ken Muse, Ray Patterson and Ed Barge.

How Do I Know It's Friz

Popular books, popular products, they all came to life in Warner Bros. cartoons. They all had a sameness. Books or products would sing and dance, some evil force would sneak in (generally to kidnap a female character) only to be vanquished by the joint action of the singers and dancers. Iris out. “That’s all, folks!” If you were lucky, you’d see some celebrity caricatures as a bonus.

Many of those cartoons had something else in common—inside references to members of the studio’s staff. They’d be on spines of books or in names of products, placed there by background artists. Until home video came along, no one noticed (except maybe Jerry Beck when he wrote his book on the cartoons in 1981). Now, viewers can sit at home, freeze frames of cartoon DVDs and see for themselves.

Amongst parodies of real products (including Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, Flit Bug Spray and Uneeda Biscuits) are a bunch named after Scheslinger studio staffers in the Friz Freleng cartoon “How Do I Know It’s Sunday” (1934). Let’s see what we can find.



Ray Katz, Leon Schlesinger’s brother-in-law, was kind of a studio manager. It also appears he made refrigerators on the side.



An Eskimo boy who is the hero of the picture leaps to grab a roll of paper towels. You can see he passes Pratt’s Dog Biscuits. Whether Hawley Pratt was briefly at Schlesinger’s at this time isn’t known. He started at Disney in 1933 if he wasn’t working for Leon, people who did would have known him.



As the boy drops, he passes a box of Friz’s Shredded Coconut. The first reference to Friz Freleng, the cartoon’s director.



The evil flies in the cartoon are going right for the Russian rye bread and avoiding Friz’s Salad Dressing. “Lofa Bread” is probably the funniest bad pun in the whole cartoon.



We get two of them in this frame. Armstrong’s Prune Cider Winegar is named for Tom Armstrong, who was in charge of the studio’s story department in the mid-‘30s. Norm’s Soda Crackers could be for musical composer Norman Spencer. I think animator Norm Blackburn had left for the Iwerks studio by the time this cartoon was made. Note: the consensus in the comment section is that it’s Norm McCabe, who I didn’t realise was at the studio that early.



The General Store in this cartoon is also a convenience store. Friz’s Pretzels are right next to Ben’s Brew, named for Ben Hardaway, who ended up directing cartoon after Tom Palmer was fired in 1933 and before Tex Avery was hired two years later.

So who is the background artist? No one ever talked about the background people in the Warners’ cartoons before the late-‘30s other than Chuck Jones and he blew them off as no-talents. Art Loomer was in charge of the background department at one time and former Kansas City and Los Angeles newspaper cartoonist Griff Jay worked under him. It’s possible one of them worked on this cartoon and provided enjoyable little in-jokes throughout the mid-‘30s, but we may never know.

There He Is

Game show emcee Tom Kennedy once called him “the guy that taught all of us about this business of hosting.” Kennedy made the statement in 1983 but by that time, it had been about two decades since any TV giveaway quiz had been hosted by the man he was talking about, Bert Parks.

Parks made his name in radio in New York, as did people like Bill Cullen, Gene Rayburn, Bud Collyer and Art Fleming. And while all of them had high-profile game show gigs in the 1960s—along with others such as Allen Ludden, Merv Griffin and Peter Marshall—Parks wasn’t among them. Even Dennis James, another pioneer from late ‘40s television, still appeared on camera to give away an Amana Radarange to some lucky contestant. Parks, instead, settled for the job that brought him his biggest fame—hosting the Miss America pageant. His somewhat flamboyant emceeing mien was a natural fit for something based on fashion, musical numbers and fake royalty (until he was fired after 1979). For viewers, once a year of that was fine. But five times a week? Evidently the 1965 audience had seen and heard enough of his somewhat overwrought and campy manner to hosting.

But Parks was a fixture on 1950s television sets at various times of the day. And before that on radio, he used his dramatic build-up style of announcing to pull away Fred Allen’s audience on “Stop the Music.” Let’s pass on a couple of pieces on Mr. Parks. First, let’s go to July 1, 1951, when Parks’ career was at its peak. This is from The American Weekly, a Sunday newspaper magazine supplement.

How Bert Parks Got Into Television
TWENTY years ago people were saying commercial radio was in its infancy, and so was Bert Parks, practically. He was 16 when he won a radio singing contest in his home town, Atlanta, Ga., and landed a job announcing, at $7 a week, at station [W]GST.
When he was 18 he heard that Columbia Broadcasting System was preparing to audition announcers in New York. Applicants were supposed to be over 21, have two years of college to their credit and a fair knowledge of foreign languages.
“My score was zero minus on all counts,” he recalled the other day. “But, I went to New York, lost out on the audition test, went back to Atlanta $50 a week. Seems like I’ve been talking into microphones and telephones ever since.”
THERE was one interlude, however, that kept Bert Parks quiet. He joined the Army in World War II, rose to the rank of captain on Gen. Joseph Stilwell’s staff and was sent behind the Japanese lines with a wire recorder as his chief weapon.
“I wasn’t to be seen or heard for three weeks,” Parks said. “I made up my mind that if and when I got back to New York I’d make up for it.”
A few months after his discharge he did start making up for his enforced silence.
Bud Collyer, an announcer friend, persuaded the producer of a new quiz show, “Break the Bank,” to let Bert act as master of ceremonies for one performance. After that one trial, Bert Parks had a steady job on the show.
When “Stop the Music” went on the air over the American Broadcasting Company chain three years ago, it seemed only natural for Parks to take over the MC and telephoning chores there, too, and he has been with the sensationally successful program since.
Came television and Parks was ready and equipped. He had good looks, a good voice and poise along with experience gained by acting as straight man and singer on Eddie Cantor’s radio show and master of ceremonies for Xavier Cugat.
The young man who had been muted for three weeks in the Pacific during the war found himself one of the busiest talkers in the world.
He had his “Stop the Music” radio show Sunday nights, sponsored by Old Gold Cigarettes and Admiral Corp., over ABC, and the same sponsors kept him busy Thursday nights over ABC-TV.
“Two years ago,” Parks said, “when ‘Stop the Music’ first went on television, we tried to telecast the regular radio program but it didn’t work. You can’t sacrifice sound for sight on radio so we started separate shows.
“At first, on TV, to introduce a song having to do with bubbles, for example, we’d blow bubbles from a clay pipe. Then we hired writers to think up sketches that would integrate our songs. They gave me more things to do, like clowning, dancing and comedy. Then the ham in me came out.”
“Those two hour-long shows should have kept the average young man busy, but Bert Parks proved he wasn’t average.
His first big radio program, the quiz show called, “Break the Bank,” had convinced observers that he would be the perfect MC for the NBC-TV version of the show on Wednesday nights. With his thick black, glossy hair and a white-tooth smile, he was a living, breathing and talking advertisement for Ipana toothpaste and Vitalis hair tonic, products of Bristol-Myers, sponsor of “Break the Bank.”
The program still left him with some idle hours during the daytime, he thought, and when General Foods decided, he should have his own daytime program he agreed wholeheartedly. And so The Bert Parks Show was staged over NBC-TV three afternoons a week; 30 minutes every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. On this one he didn’t have to give anything away, except his energy, his singing, talking and dancing talents.
Bert Parks has given away more than $2,500,000 in cash and merchandise on his quiz shows, radio and TV, to people who have been able to recognize and identify mystery melodies and answer other questions. But the only thing he ever won for himself was the singing contest in Atlanta at 16.
HE CAME close, however, last year when he went to a charity ball where an expensive automobile was raffled off. Instead of tickets, keys were sold at the door; the winner to be the holder of the key that unlocked the car. Parks was approaching the auto with his own key when a lady said:
“Try my key, for luck.”
She won.
Parks was thinking about the incident the other evening while driving from New York to his home in Greenwich, Conn., where he gets to spend two days a week with Mrs. Annette Parks, the pretty wife; two-year-old Annette Parks, equally pretty, and twin sons, Jeffrey and Joel, five years old.
A motorcycle cop drew alongside, motioned him to the curb and wrote out a summons for speeding. Then the policeman wanted to know what Parks did.
“I’m in radio and television,” Parks said.
“That so?” the cop asked, remounting his motorcycle. “Selling many?”
When he got home Bert Parks was still talking (to himself), saying something to the effect that he had given away more radio and television sets than the cop had ever seen.



TV’s grumpiest columnist found Parks an easy target, stating that the Parks daytime show was a perfect example of what was wrong with television. But even he couldn’t dislike the man. This is from September 25, 1951.

Radio In Review
By JOHN CROSBY
The Expansive Bert Parks
I can spot a trend as well as the next fellow, I keep telling myself, and the trend I have spotted—stand back, men, this is dynamite—is Bert Parks.
Bert Parks on Stop The Music. Bert Parks on Break The Bank. Bert Parks on a thrice-weekly afternoon show which is aptly named the Bert Parks show.
Some years ago the trend was Arthur Godfrey. Arthur Godfrey Time. Arthur Godfrey and His Friends. Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts. Fears were expressed, during this phase of Mr. Godfrey’s expanding economy, that he eventually would engulf all the Columbia Broadcasting System.
I was looking forward with some alarm to reviewing Young Dr. Godfrey, Our Gal Godfrey, Godfrey Goes A-Shopping and the rest of them. But the Godfrey expansion was finally halted conceivably by the antitrust laws. Now we have the Bert Parks menace.
This has got to be stopped. I can’t be looking at Bert Parks all the time. My blood pressure is high enough as it is. Where Mr. Godfrey confines himself to one network, Mr. Parks is generously distributed over two, NBC and ABC.
This seems only fair. Mr. Parks, who also emcees the Macy parade from time to time just to keep from perishing of inactivity, is a personable, high-voltage operator with a grin you can read by.
He originally sprang into prominence by giving away Cadillacs, mink coats and a 12 year's supplies of shaving cream on Stop The Music.
You might think this is easy, but it isn’t. Parks can give away $20,000 with a flourish that no one else has ever quite matched. It's too bad, I keep thinking, that Parks wasn’t born a Rockefeller. Then all those millions could have been distributed in full sight of all of us on television.
Parks would have passed the moola around in bundles of $1,000 bills while buzzers sounded, lights flashed and Betty Ann Grove sang Millionaires Are Hard to Find in the background.
But let's stop woolgathering. Somewhere during his charitable activities, it was discovered that Parks had a distinct flair for comedy, a passable voice and, after taxes, a $40,000 personality, which is quite a lot of personality in the surtax brackets.
This led to the afternoon show, an enterprise in which Parks doesn’t give away so much as a can of sardines. His hand wanders absently to his pockets now and then, but then he remembers and gets back to business.
THE AFTERNOON show is a very pleasant half-hour, and certainly an ambitious one for afternoon TV. It is awash with gimmicks and elaborate song cues. And it is so strikingly informal that, as a gesture of respect, you ought to remove your shoes while watching it.
In the middle of a song, We Joined The Navy To See The World, Parks and his sidekick, Bobby Sherwood, a reformed band-leader, will arrange to have a near-sighted admiral walk overboard—“We lose more admirals”—and then go right on with the song.
It’s a prank, really, rather than comedy but then TV comedy is getting awfully prankish.
On the Parks show, they play the pranks on one another, Parks shooting arrows at Sherwood, Sherwood shooting them back. One of the chief victims is Betty Ann Grove, one of the fairly permanent members of Parks’ entourage, who has been asked to do everything except ride elephants to put a song across.
She’s a remarkably good-natured and terribly agile girl and so far has escaped serious injury, though I wouldn’t gamble a farthing on her if I were an insurance company.
Like Parks, she is talented in all directions—songs, dances, gags—and, I expect, she could run the roulette tables in an emergency, too.
My only complaint about Parks—and, for that matter, about his show—is that he is occasionally overwhelmed by his own cuteness.
Come to think of it, the whole industry is obsessed with that word “cute”—everything’s got to be cute now—and I wish they’d cut it out and grow up.
After all, television is five years old now. It’s a big boy.

A dozen years later, columnist Jay Fredericks bemoaned Parks’ demeanour on audience participation shows “in which fat ladies from Brooklyn or Cedar Rapids, Iowa, take part.” But he announced he was tearing up his membership in his self-instituted “Keep Bert Parks Off Television” club because “on the Johnny Carson show, Bert Parks served as a master of ceremonies on what must have been one of the wildest, most confused and unintentionally funniest half-hour segments ever seen on television — the premiere of the multi-million-dollar extravaganza ‘Cleopatra.’”

Perhaps it’s no surprise then that Carson publicly urged his audience to demand Parks’ reinstatement after sponsors got him fired from the Miss America pageant.

It can be argued Parks made the pageant what it was, and that it was never really the same when he left. It was first televised in 1954 on ABC, then the way-behind-in-third-place network (out of four). The hosts were Bess Meyerson and network news vice-president John Daly, also the host of “What’s My Line.” One can’t picture anything but a polite, demure broadcast from the two of them. Parks was added the following year as a master of ceremonies, bringing his overly-earnest, somewhat campy attitude to the mix. Until the day he died, virtually every news story about the pageant telecast included a chunk of space about Parks, even during his years of exile.

Bert Parks may have taught some game-show legends about hosting, but when the giveaway programme industry moved onward and left him behind, he became a TV icon instead.

Señor Droopy Swirls

Ever seen characters swirl from one take to the next? It happens in “Señor Droopy” (released 1948) where the Tex Avery wolf and a bull go at it in the ring. Here are some drawings of the characters getting stretched into the swirls.






A mass of brown brushstrokes give the appearance of spinning like a top. Soon, the swirls separate into the colour of the two characters and they stop, with the swirls vanishing. Below, you can see the outlines of the characters behind the swirls.



Avery’s animators in this cartoon are Bobe Cannon, Walt Clinton, Preston Blair, Mike Lah and Grant Simmons.

Smoked Hams Exit

Woody Woodpecker makes a dash for it in “Smoked Hams” (1946), directed by Dick Lundy. All but the last drawing are on twos.







The credited animators were Myron Henry Natwick and Stanley Casimir Onaitis.

Wonga is 104

Phil Harris would be 104 today and, if you think about it, he really had four careers. To some, he’s best-known for his work on the Jack Benny radio show which he parlayed into his own show co-starring second wife Alice Faye. But it’s not like Jack plucked him from obscurity. He had a dance band with a home base at several different Los Angeles night spots and was recording for Victor. He appeared in several films with Charlie Ruggles, including the comedy “Melody Cruise” (1933). So it was evident to Jack that Harris could act and fill a stooge role that his previous bandleaders had been handling. Harris had plenty of experience on the radio before he joined the Benny show as well. In fact, while Harris’ “two shows” was a running joke starting in the mid-‘40s, Harris was already hosting a musical show with his dance band on CBS when Jack hired him and continued to so while appearing with Benny.

No doubt Harris was happy to settle down with Benny and give up the grind of touring. The Galveston News wrote about a Harris stop in its June 15, 1933 edition; it was a big deal and the paper had a number of Harris stories over several weeks.

HOLLYWOOD HOLDS BRILLIANT OPENING WITH PHIL HARRIS' ORCHESTRA; CROWD ATTENDS
With all the brilliance, pomp and ceremony that goes with a Hollywood first-night and amid a scene of splendor and beauty, Hollywood Dinner Club opened its eighth summer season last night to a packed house, with hundreds being turned away.
It was the moat colorful and successful premier from every viewpoint in the history of the popular west end theater-restaurant. Newly decorated in rare good taste and with a new Frigidaire cooling system the smart, fashioned crowd was thrilled by the appointments and the entertainment of Manager Sam Maceo as they danced, dined and made merry within a veritable forest of flowers.
Phil Harris and his orchestra proved a sensational hit. Thin debonair young man from Hollywood is a great entertainer and his combination of musicians and vocalists provide divertisement comparable to the best seen at the club in recent years.
While Harris did not have any of the movie stars present in person, they were there in spirit. More than a hundred telegrams were displayed from big names in the picture industry who wished Phil luck in his first appearance away from California. Included in the lot were messages from Wallace Beery, Robert Montgomery, Ruth Chatterton, Maurice Chevalier, Gary Cooper, Kay Francis, Anson Weeks, Ginger Rogers, James Cagney, Edwin G. Robinson, Richard Bathelmess and scores of others. Baby Leroy, the tot in Maurice Chevalier’s “A Bedtime Story,” sent this message: “ ‘Ga Ga Goo Club,’ which means ‘Whatever Mr. Chevalier says goes for me, too.’ ”
To single out any particular number that Phil Harris did best would be difficult indeed. The-first night crowd apparently liked everything he offered and cried for more. “Tea for Two,” done with Leah Ray; “Love Tales,” a number that West coast radio critics chose three times in a row as the outstanding number of the week, “It Happened to Me,” theme song from "So This is Harris,” and “Isn’t This a Night for Love,” the theme song from the picture “Melody Cruise,” in which Harris is starred and which will come to the Martini Theater Saturday, were well received.
Harris has some fine arrangements of dance tunes and most of those played were new and taken from current New York musicals and motion picture hits.
Leah Ray, lovely in a black and white lace gown, scored an individual hit and undoubtedly will become as great a favorite here as she was in California. Though still in her teens, she is a finished artist and has a style that wins her audience without a struggle.
Phil Harris’ Ambassadors is another feature with the orchestra that clicked strongly. This trio make a nice appearance and harmonize perfectly.
If one may judge by his reception last night, Phil Harris is due for a highly successful month’s engagement here.
Harris and the band will broadcast four times weekly over KPRC, Houston, and the same outlet will be used when he begins his national network broadcasts June 23.

Ray was a Harris discovery—at least, he gave her her singing first job—and she later married MCA and New York Jets boss Sonny Werblin.

Harris debuted on the Benny show on October 4, 1936. It look a while for the writers to get his character in place; he was kind of a jerkish antagonist to Benny at first. It really sounds painful. Eventually, they had to realise “mean” didn’t work, and that any put-downs of Jack had to be humorous, if not deserved. Harris became the self-absorbed, carefree, alcohol-friendly, illiterate braggart, one of radio’s great characters.

There was little fanfare about Harris’ arrival, nor much speculation about who would replace Johnny Green as the show’s orchestra leader. The Wisconsin State Journal of October 8th sums up all I’ve been able to find in papers of the day:

Phil Harris won the band assignment for the Jack Benny program after a long series of eliminations. Benny was unable to make his mind up as to which of three band leaders he would take and was won over by hearing Harris play in Los Angeles. Benny is also to have another new stooge in the person of Patsy Flick, who was on the Mutual network last year as a dialectician.

Band leader was Harris’ first career, radio star was his second. His fourth was voice actor for Disney as a couple of casual characters. Harris as Baloo singing “The Bare Necessities” may be the highlight of “The Jungle Book.” In between was his third career, that of doting husband to Alice Faye, amateur golfer and someone who only worked when he wanted to, enjoying the good life in between. In a way, all his careers are interrelated, and all entertaining.

Here’s Wonga Philip Harris in his best animated role.

The Rumors About Dr Seuss

The best part about the Snafu cartoon ‘Rumors’ (1943) is the flying baloneys, jabbering away over an army base. But something that’s about as fun is checking out the incidental characters that had to be influenced by the art of Dr. Seuss. That shouldn’t be surprising as he was with the First Motion Picture Unit of the U.S. Army Air Force during the last couple of years of the war. The Snafus were commissioned by the military to play for soldiers and most were animated and recorded at the Warner Bros. studio.

I’d love to point out similarly-drawn characters in Dr. Seuss’ books but my knowledge isn’t that in depth. So I’ll just put up the animation drawings instead.



Here’s the first appearance of a horn-mouthed creature as Snafu slowly starts being driven insane by rumours.



The eyelashes on the horse are like the ones you’d find on Horton the Elephant, though at least some of the Seuss characters had only three lashes.



And here’s another Horned Beaketybeast with his friends.

The Seussical animation is by Friz Freleng’s unit. I’m not sure how the Snafu cartoons were put through the system; if Ted Geisel was involved then I gather the story came from FMPU and the rest of the work was handled at Warners.

That’s Oswald

Not too many stars have their career revived at the age of 85, but Oswald the Lucky Rabbit isn’t just anyone. He was Walt Disney’s first animated success, and then made the jump from silent to sound films before a slow and steady decline. After all, what can be more demeaning than playing straight man to Charlie Chicken in comic books?

The Disney Hype Machine™ has gone all out pushing Oswald lately, most recently digging into the archives and creating a “cartoon” from some of the drawings made for one of Oswald’s first cartoons. So allow me to dig into the archives and pass on a couple of old Oswald newspaper stories.

In case you don’t know the basic story...

Walt Disney created Oswald in 1927 for distribution by Universal through Margaret Winkler’s company managed by her husband, Charles Mintz. Mintz then waved a contract at Disney’s unhappy animators and hired all but one of them, taking Oswald as well because the rabbit wasn’t Disney’s property. But Oswald wasn’t Mintz’s, either, and Charlie became an early victim of Cartoon Karma. Universal suddenly decided to dump the Mintz studio and set up its own under Walter Lantz to make Oswald cartoons. Mintz played out the rest of his years making increasingly crappy cartoons while Disney and Lantz went on to much better things.

The Syracuse Herald of March 11, 1929 reveals “Walter B. Lantz, animated cartoon artist, has arrived in Universal City to do his stuff.” Not long after that, Oswald—and Lantz—got a bit of publicity. Here’s a syndicated column dated July 27, 1929:

Screen Life in Hollywood
By HUBBARD KEAVY
HOLLYWOOD, July 26—It takes 15 or 20 men two weeks to make Oswald act for a few minutes. Oswald is that mischievous little rabbit of screendom possessing so many human qualities.
The film, “Oswald, the Lucky Rabbit,” comes under the head of “short subjects,” but to the artists and cameramen who put Oswald and his playmates in celluloid and into sounds, it is anything but a short subject.
Every time Oswald playfully pulls off his elongated ears, or throws his right paw through a window pane, it means hundreds of minute cartoons painstakingly made. One of Oswald’s adventures requires more than 6,000 individual cartoons, which make a half-reel of film. A separate series of cartoons must be drawn for every-movement.
Crew Of Artists
Walter B. Lantz, the originator, and his two assistants pencil the cartoons after the story has been written. Each draws a portion of the story. Other artists retrace the drawings in ink. Each of the 5,000 cartoons must be photographed separately and sounds to accompany Oswald’s antics are made during this process.
The popularity of cartoon comedies has grown greatly during the last few years, and now nearly every picture theater in the country has on its program either Oswald, Felix the Cat or Aesop’s Fables, to name three of the better known screen cartoons.

The absence of the name “Mickey Mouse” in that last sentence is intriguing.

The funniest story about Oswald comes in another Hubbard Keavy column, this one dated April 12, 1931. People who keep blabbing on about the 1934 Production Code and its effect on films don’t seem to realise there was an earlier Code in place with restrictions as well. That’s the centre of this piece dealing with an Oswald cartoon.

Story Conferences
Story conferences have been story conferences ever since the first movie studio came to Hollywood, but every once in a while one crops up of more than usual interest.
The movie public generally is aware that the board of censors, a rather intangible bogey that frightens the producers and the directors, recently decreed that cows in the animated cartoons should be entirely removed from the dairy business.
The pen and ink boys, who draw Mickey Mouse, Oswald the Rabbit, and the other talking cartoon characters, were in a very sad state of mind for some time afterward.
Walter Lantz, creator of Oswald, called a story conference to determine just what steps should be taken.
Hundreds of sketches were submitted and paper littered the floor.
Finally Lantz hit upon an idea. He attired Madame Cow in a Mother Hubbard frock. Her part in the picture was to run down a railroad track.
But Bossy found difficulty running in a Mother Hubbard and the artists became tired of drawing the bulky dress.
Finally, when the comic strip was about half finished, Lantz threw up his hands and moaned; “What will we do?”
“Oh, let a train hit her,” said one of his disgusted assistants.
Then—just about the time the assistant was prepared to laugh at his own remark—Lantz surprised the group.
“Swell idea,” he declared. “Change the script. Draw a train. We’ll end the whole thing in the next scene.”
And the cow, a hapless sacrifice to fashion, was just a bit too slow in leaping from the track in the next scene.

Perhaps a Lantz expert out there knows the name of the cartoon involved. “The Farmer” (1931) features a cow giving milk under a Mother Hubbard skirt, but there’s no train scene.

It’s up for grabs who might have come up with the train gag. Both Tex Avery and Pinto Colvig were working for Lantz in 1931. Either one could have blurted out a warped gag like that.

In case you haven’t seen the footage created from drawings made for “Harum Scarum,” you can play the video below. Is it the work of Ham Hamilton? Rudy Ising? Ub Iwerks? Beats me. Regardless, it’s a lot of fun and I’d rather watch this than the stuff that’s in theatres today.

Buddy and Azusa

Jack Benny wasn’t the first person to have some fun with the city of Azusa. Benny’s train-call of “Anaheim, Azusa and Cucamonga” made it into a number of cartoons (sometimes voiced by train-caller Mel Blanc) but before that, Azusa appears in the background of one of the low points of Warner Bros. animation, “Buddy’s Day Out.”

The background drawing (the artist is unknown) feature oil wells and storage tanks, so I presume the oil industry was alive in the extremely rural Azusa when this cartoon was released in 1933.



This inept cartoon was directed by Tom Palmer, who was soon fired and joined fellow ex-Disney buddy Burt Gillett in New York City at the Van Beuren Studio. Palmer’s stint at the Leon Schlesinger studio was a fiasco. If you can actually sit through “Buddy’s Day Out,” you can be thankful it isn’t longer. The obvious edits in the soundtrack leave you with the impression parts of it were cut out before it hit theatres, thus inflicting less of it on thankful theatre patrons.

Palmer is immortalised in an inside gag in the background. As Buddy and Cookie continue to drive along the road in Azusa, a side-road heads to Palmer’s place, with a sign thoughtfully helping anyone who wants to go there and tell him what they think of his cartoon.