Fish Fry Surprise

Lots of rubbery and over-the-top animation can be found in “Fish Fry,” a 1944 Walter Lantz cartoon directed by Shamus Culhane.

Lionel Stander plays a scrawny cat out to eat Andy Panda’s goldfish as Andy takes his new pet home. The cat thinks he’s lapped up the fish while glugging down the water in Andy’s fish bowl.

Here’s the take after the cat pokes his tongue pokes around, feels no fish, then sees the fish still in the bowl. The animation is on twos.










Animation credits on screen are given to La Verne Harding and Emery Hawkins.

The Fall of Betty Boop

No doubt you’ll read on the internet that today is Betty Boop’s birthday, that the first Boop cartoon, “Dizzy Dishes,” was released on this date in 1930.

It may very well have been. But it also appeared in theatres before that. At the right, you can see an ad from the Decatur Herald of July 27, 1930. “Dizzy Dishes” was already appearing. And Decatur, Illinois wasn’t the only place the cartoon was playing before the alleged release date.

This wasn’t an isolated case. Over at the old Golden Age Cartoon Forum, research showed a number of the Warner Bros. cartoons the same year were in theatres before their formal release date. And, on a whim, I recently hunted down a 1946 Tex Avery cartoon in theatre ads and found it playing before it was supposed to be on the big screen.

One has to remember we’re talking about a different era than today. The first concern of a movie company today, after releasing a film, is the weekend box office take as of the following Monday, and how much more money their movie made than the competitor’s—in the same time span. So movies today can’t have an approximate opening. They have to have a definite date to be able to go head-to-head.

Years ago, shorts were thrown in as part of the deal to get a feature. There was no financial competition among them so there was no real need for them to be released on an exact date. Joe Adamson, the author of Groucho, Harpo, Chico and Sometimes Zeppo, explained the situation in a Facebook conversation (his book showed up in Philadelphia ahead of the release date):

The studio had to make a release negative, make many prints, and supply the exchange w/them ahead of the release date -- This involves labs and shippers -- but once the exchange had them, any theater that wanted or needed a short could book it, regardless of the official release date --
Like the publication date for GROUCHOHARPOCHICO, the studio doubtless set a date they were sure they could meet, then targeted an earlier date to make sure they weren't caught short, sometimes ending up with films arriving well ahead of time -- The release date, then, is the earliest date they can guarantee the picture being available to any given theater -- Make sense??
Sometimes these orders were apparently made by the chain (if the theater was part of one), and assignments were apparently done very carelessly -- When I was living in State College, Pa., the same theater showed the same print of an awful Lantz cartoon called GOPHER BROKE with every film I saw there, even DUMBO! I finally complained to the mgr., and he said the chain probably just ordered "a cartoon" and the exchange probably slapped whatever cartoon was there into the pkg. w/o giving it any thot -

In other words, a release date for a Golden Age cartoon, even in reputable trade publications of the day, is a best-guess scenario.

So let’s get back to Betty Boop, the Betty before she became a straight woman to a dog and a grandfather. Betty fit in well with the early Fleischer atmosphere, where things morphed into other things or became temporarily human. And of course, there was the sex. Like in “Betty in Blunderland” (1933). She enacts the part of Alice in Wonderland as she walks through the looking glass and falls down a shaft. Yes, her dress flies up.



She passes some women’s unmentionables.



Then uses a convenient clothespin to keep her dress down.



She falls past a kitchen setting and grabs a jar of jam.




The jam turns into the head of Ed Wynn. Betty is so shocked, the clothespin flies off her dress.



A nude statue (with a bellybutton but not anatomically correct) is conveniently in the path and the jar of Ed Wynn rests there as Betty falls past it and down to the pavement below. The recent hit “Did You Ever See a Dream Walking” plays in the background through the scene.

Doc Crandall and Tom Johnson are the credited animators.

Olive Films has recently licensed some of the Betty Boop cartoons, though apparently not ones in the public domain like “Betty in Blunderland.” The assumption is the company will release them. It’d be a shame if only part of Betty’s body of work was restored and available for fans to snap up—especially if it’s only the later, dull cartoons—but it’d be better than nothing.

For those of you who want to celebrate Betty, birthday or not, this is from a TV print of her first cartoon.

Henry Morgan and Freedom of the Press

Political commentary wasn’t the focus of Henry Morgan’s radio and TV shows. His goal was to ridicule what he saw as stupid—radio and TV shows, generally. But satirists are keen observers by nature and Morgan put his powers of observation to work in what amounts to an essay about the news media.

Morgan didn’t express his opinions on his programme. He picked a more appropriate venue. It was later that John Crosby of the New York Tribune, one of Morgan’s champions in the press, printed what the comedian had to say, verbatim and in totum, in his column of May 23, 1950.

The names have changed in 62 years but Morgan’s points and conclusion are still relevant and accurate, and restricted to no particular country.

Comedian Says His Bit About Press
By JOHN CROSBY
Henry Morgan, a sardonic, sometimes misguided, but always honest man, lumbered to his feet before reporters, columnists, editors and publishers at the annual dinner of the New York chapter of Sigma Delta Chi, the national journalistic fraternity, and delivered a speech. It lasted all of a minute and a half, a fine length for a speech, and it was a fine speech.
In that minute and a half, Morgan, one of the more thoughtful radio comedians, summarized his opinion of the American press. This is a difficult assignment for radio comedian. His listeners—reporters, columnists, editors and publishers—could crucify the man in print if they didn’t like what he said. A radio comedian needs the support of the press. He’d have great difficulty existing without it. Still, Henry spoke his mind about us freely and, while there were some barbs in this small essay, it was on the whole a flattering and (I hope) intelligent estimate. I’d like to pass it along.
COMMON KNOWLEDGE
“I was asked here this evening,” said Morgan, “mainly because it’s common knowledge that I am am authority on this stuff. A number of people here work on newspapers. That isn’t nearly as bad as what I do. I have to read them. Some people produce radio programs. I have it much worse than they do. I work for them—newspapers and radio—the two greatest influences of our time, I figure. You see before you the creature you have made. I am the average warped man.
“Because of you people in this room I believe Owen Lattimore is a Communist. I also believe he is not a Communist. Because of you people I believe F.D.R. was a genius and also that he ruined the country. I believe that there is more crime in this country than ever before and that our police are the best in the world.
MILITARY MAN
“I believe that Eisenhower would make a great President except that I have read that military men don’t make good Presidents and besides he will run if enough pressure is brought, he will not run, he can’t run, he refuses to run, he doesn’t want the job, you can talk him into it, he’s trying very hard to make it look as though he doesn't want it, he’s happy at Columbia, he’s miserable, he’s got a cold, he feels great.
“You have made it possible for me to take seven cents and buy, in one package, a new picture of President Truman, my horoscope for the day, 15 comic strips and the stock market reports. And I’ve read some terrible things about you. You work for money. Advertising dictates your policy. The department stores dictate your editorials. Don’t you think you’d be happier with some other system? Wouldn’t it be nicer to have a bureau of some kind supervise your work? Then, if the bureau didn’t like it, you could adjust or get killed.
GETTING UN-AMERICAN
“Still in all it’s better than having people point at you and say: ‘There’s a man who works for money.’ Somehow it’s getting to be very un-American to work for money. It’s also un-American not to work and to live on unemployment insurance. It’s un-American to have social security and it’s un-American to have such a small amount of social security.
I strongly suspect that this is all your fault.
“In short, you people in this room have put me, the average man, in a peculiar position. I now have to make up my mind for myself. As long as you keep doing that, as long as you keep forcing the man in the street to make up his mind for himself, that’s as long as we’ll have the only working definition of democracy that’s worth a damn.
“Thank you.”

Being Real Cheesy

I have a theory about the way they constructed stories for the early cartoons at the Van Beuren studio. They just kept throwing stuff on screen until things couldn’t get more bizarre and they ended the cartoon.

That seems to be what happened in “A Swiss Trick,” which hops along from routine to routine, featuring a shout that forms letters that decapitate a head, a train that leaps away on clouds, singing mountains and goats that butt each other in the butt. Oh, yes, and a pet swiss cheese. On a leash.



And that’s not even getting to the strange part. Tom and Jerry follow the cheese to an inn where they dance, play musical instruments and yodel, accompanied by Gene Rodemich’s usual fine score. They sneak away to get the pet cheese as a moosehead sleeps on the wall.



Mission accomplished. They eat the swiss cheese.



Horrors! They grow holes, just like the cheese. Why? Well, because it’s a Van Beuren cartoon.



That’s not the worst of it. Mice hiding in the room pop up and start chasing the cheesy Tom and Jerry. Patrons at the inn point and laugh. Cut to Tom and Jerry running away from the mice to end the cartoon.



The whole thing is just so baffling, you have to love it.

George Rufle and John Foster get the credits on this one.

To Smear or Not to Smear

My favourite part of Chuck Jones’ ‘To Duck or not to Duck’ is when the dog turns to the camera and says “There’s something awfully screwy about this fight, or my name isn’t Larrimore. And it isn’t.” Of course, Elmer Fudd’s been calling his dog Larrimore all through the picture.

But this is also a cartoon for fans of smear animation. Presumably it’s by Bobe Cannon, who gets the animation credit on this cartoon where Daffy Duck beats up the dopey Fudd in a boxing ring, though Fudd gets revenge in the end.

The gag is Daffy notices Elmer is getting “a little thin on top” and has a bottle of hair stimulant that’ll take care of it. There’s one drawing per frame through the whole sequence. You can see in the second drawing below Daffy’s head and the bottle are getting stretched wider.






There four more drawings were Daffy kind of holds in position, then the clobbering. Beautiful drawing of Daffy upon impact.






We get twelve more drawings (a half second) of the fluid running down Elmer, Daffy moving about slightly in mid air and Fudd closing and opening his black eye. Then, Daffy turns around in multiples and zooms off the scene.





The scene cuts to Daffy self-congratulating himself to the crowd. One more smear.







Ken Harris, Rudy Larriva and Ben Washam would have been animating in Jones’ unit at this time but I don’t know if someone can spot their work on this cartoon.

Jack Benny’s Musical Obscurities

Pop cultural references fade in the distance as time marches on. Newer fans of old cartoons and radio shows may be puzzled about the jokes or references in them, but they’ll eventually pick up on some of them, thanks to learning from older fans (or even the internet). But, occasionally, there are ones that have become so obscure that it takes a bit of research to figure out what the joke is.

Jack Benny had a running gag on his show of October 12, 1947 that has more to it than probably most listeners today know. Jack is talking to Rochester about the insurance policy his sponsor is taking out on him. Eddie Anderson blew the set up in one of the two broadcasts (the show was done live for the East Coast, then again for the West Coast three hours later). Here’s how it goes.

Jack: But if I’m killed accidentally, the sponsor collects two million dollars.
Rochester: Two million? Boss, you’d better hope that guy keeps his eye on the red bull’s eye.
Jack: Oh, you mean the commercial. Well, I’m not worried about that. You know, they shoot that gun in another studio way over on Sunset and Highland. I don’t even pass there on my way home.
Rochester: I know, but for two million dollars, they can make a bullet that waits for you at Pico and Sepulveda.

First, a couple of references. “Keep your eye on the red bull’s eye” was, briefly, a motto of Lucky Strike cigarettes, Jack’s sponsor. The radio ads featured the slogan, followed by the sound of a gunshot and a bell, like a target (with a bull’s eye) being hit at a carnival midway. Sunset and Highland was the home of KECA radio (it was a former Knights of Columbus Hall). Evidently, the Lucky Strike commercials for Jack’s show were done live from there in the 1947-48 season.

The obscure gag is the reference to Pico and Sepulveda. You might think Jack’s writers arbitrarily tossed together some funny sounding names, just like they did when they invented the fictitious rail-line connecting Anaheim, Azusa and Cucamonga. But that’s not the case at all. Billboard magazine had announced the previous June 21st that coming to record stores soon was the song “Pico and Sepulveda” by the Felix Figueroa Orchestra on the Ambassador label.

Felix didn’t really exist. He was really a nom de musique of bandleader Freddy Martin. Novelty songs were still big back then. This one was co-written by Julie Styne and the lyrics, more or less, consisted of names of Los Angeles streets. It was a favourite of Dr. Demento, who played it on his radio show to the delight of warped music fans.

Someone has made a novelty video with it. Watch it below.



Jack’s writers dropped in references to the intersection throughout the broadcast, including a funny one where Benny’s doctors (Frank Nelson and Mel Blanc) are watching barium go through his system and the liquid passes Pico and Sepulveda.

The writers tried to keep running with it. The following week, they made a reference to Pico and Sepulveda early in the show. Not a titter. So much for running gags.

The “Pico and Sepulveda” gag isn’t the most obscure musical reference in the show. Earlier, when Rochester is sleeping, he blurts out the words “Bloop, Bleep.” That’s a song, too. It’s also mentioned in the June 21, 1947 “coming soon” section of Billboard. It was recorded by Jack’s buddy Danny Kaye for Decca.

There’s one song mentioned in the same edition of Billboard that is, surprisingly, not referred to in the Benny show. It’s ‘Waukegan Concerto’ by David Rose on the M-G-M label. Rose was the musical director for Red Skelton for many years and had no association with the Benny show. In fact, his song never appeared on it. But it made its radio debut on May 29, 1946 on the “Holiday For Music” show on CBS, and Jack did give it (and Rose) a plug on his season closer three days earlier.

Disney’s Rivals

One of the sidelights of hype around—and success of—the release of “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” was that it gave some attention to cartoon studios other than Walt Disney.

Here’s a local story in the Syracuse Herald of March 13, 1938. It relies heavily on a feature piece done by Paul Harrison for the National Enterprise Association, but gives a good lay of the animation land at the time.

I suspect the studio with the open cheque-book being referred to is MGM, as history has shown producer Fred Quimby built his studio by making offers to people at Harman-Ising, Schlesinger, Disney and the studios in the East. As for the Fleischer feature, Max Fleischer announced on June 14, 1938 that he would make “Gulliver’s Travels” in his studio being constructed in Florida. And the story gives us a tale of the happy Disneyites drinking the Uncle Walt Kool-Aid with no hint of the bitter strike three years away.

Disney, Fleischer and Schlesinger seem to be the ‘A’ list studios in this story, with the rest deemed on the lower rungs. The latter part of the ‘30s was a period of flux in theatrical animated shorts. The Van Beuren and Iwerks studios closed, Mintz would be taken over by Columbia, Bugs Bunny, Woody Woodpecker, Tom and Jerry were on the verge of making their first films and Betty Boop would go into retirement.

Disney’s ‘Snow White’ leads Trend Toward Feature-Length Cartoon Films
Rival Studios Will Compete In New Field
Fleischer and Schlesinger Units Plan 7-Reel Cartoon Films
‘Bambi’ Disney’s Next
Six Studios Produce Cartoon Output for American Moviegoers
By Hayden Hickok
Cinema Critic of the Syracuse Herald
It was inevitable that Walt Disney should be the one to discover the rich feature material buried in the animated cartoon with his “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.” And it is equally inevitable. Hollywood being Hollywood, that all the other major studios hope to cash in on Disney’s success.
In the short period of a month after “Snow White,” began making box office history from coast to coast practically every one of Disney’s competitors announced plans for a feature-length production for 1938.
All this amounts to practically a revolution in the animated cartoon industry. For, after all these years, during which the little comic-strip characters have been bouncing and skidding their modest ways through miles of one-reel shorts, the great discovery is finally being made: Feature-length cartoons are both practical and profitable.
Disney invested $1,600,000 of his own money and kept a staff of artists and animators busy three years to prove this in “Snow White.” Moviegoers all over the country are backing up Disney’s judgment by making the cartoon drama the biggest box-office phenomena since Shirley Temple.
The next Disney feature will be either “Bambi,” a story of the deer to whom all humans were villains, or the celebrated folk tale, “Pinocchio.” Story difficulties have held up the start of “Pinocchio,” and it is understood that “Bambi” will precede it. With his huge production organization working smoothly, Disney hopes to have one or the other completed by next Christmas.
Max Fleischer, creator of the “Popeye” and “Betty Boop” cartoons, will enter the feature-length cartoon field with an untitled production in color, Paramount, his releasing company, announced this week.
Other Disney rivals are ambitious enough to expect to have animated features in the theaters by next December—yet none of them has a story, nor anything resembling the staff and equipment that Disney has assembled.
Only Warner Brothers have a man who seems capable of competing with Disney. He’s Leon Schlesinger, maker of “Looney Tunes” and “Merrie Melodies.” And Schlesinger doesn’t want to make features.
One powerful studio, Paul Harrison reports, has set out with check-book and blandishments to lure away all the Disney animators and directors who can be hired.
The response has been astonishing and to Disney, if he knows about it—heartening Confronted with fat orders from the big studio, his artists and technicians have answered with raspberries. Such a demonstration of mass loyalty is without precedent in the whole history of movie-town, the double-crossroads of creation.
Most folks who go to the movies more or less casually are nor immediately aware or any other major productions in the animated cartoon field than those of the Disney studios—the famous adventures of Mickey Mouse, Pluto and Donald Duck, the Silly Symphonies and now Snow White and her little pals.
But the fact of the matter is that at least five other studios are regularly turning out as many releases per year as the Disney organization, while several of these popular series find equally wide distribution in competition with the Disney products.
The Disney studio, in Hollywood, is the largest in the business, now that it is scheduled to produce one feature-length film a year. It is likewise maintaining its schedule of 18 short cartoons per annum—among them will be a Disney version of “Ferdinand,” Munro Leaf’s celebrated bull who wouldn't fight.
Second largest unit in the field is the Fleischer Studios in New York, home of “Popeye,” “Betty Boop,” “Screen Songs” and “Color Classics.” Fleischer employs a staff of about 250 artists and technicians, who work like a hive of bees in a building at 1600 Broadway. Business has been so good, thanks to Mr. Disney, that Fleischer is building a new studio down at Miami, which will be ready in October.
Up in New Rochelle, N. Y., there is the Paul Terry studio which produced 26 “Terry-Toons” a year. One of the original movie animators, Terry features no particular character, although Farmer Alfalfa and Puddy the Pup are the most popular this season. He employs a staff of 60 men, and works entirely in black-and-white.
Rounding out the Disney competitors are the aforementioned Mr. Schlesinger of Warner Bros.; Walter Lantz, a Hollywood unit which turns out 26 cartoons starring Oswald the Rabbit; the Charles B Mintz studio which does the “Krazy Kat,” “Scrappy” and “Color Rhapsodies” series, and the appropriately named Harman-Ising (Hugh Harman and Rudolph Ising) outfit which produces M-G-M’s “Happy Harmonies.”
Metro has set up its own unit for making a new series of “The Captain and the Kids,” based on the comic-strip characters of Dirks.

Meathead Takes

Dopey dog Meathead just can’t catch a break against Screwy Squirrel, even when logic should be on his side.

In Screwball Squirrel, the dog is armed with a handgun, and marching Screwy backwards along a tree branch as the camera pans. Screwy disappears from the shot. Meathead comes to end of the branch. There’s a surprise sign waiting for him. A tame-for-Tex Avery shock take follows.



If you analyse the gag, it makes no sense. Meathead would always have Screwy in his sight as he’s facing him while backing him up. It’s only the fact Screwy vanishes from the scene faster than the camera is panning that makes it work.

Suddenly, Meathead hears a sound. He faces the camera, looking puzzled. He turns around and sees Screwy sawing the branch to the Irish Washerwoman tune. Another take.




How did Screwy get behind him? To quote Jerry Colonna: “I don’t ask questions. I just have fun.” That’s what you have to do with an Avery cartoon. Revel in the nonsense and complete lack of logic.

Screwy saws off the branch. Meathead falls. The cruel squirrel promises to catch him in a net but pulls it away at the last minute. Screwy holds out his fingers a pinch and tells us “Just missed it.” Then he laughs in a three drawing cycle on ones. Watch what Avery does. Below are three consecutive frames.





The dog-as-brushstrokes indicates speed, and so does the fact it takes a mere two frames for Meathead to get off the ground. But what makes it even faster is Avery has Screwy laugh for 41 frames. The comparatively long laugh makes the dog’s two-frame zip into position look even quicker.

And the chase continues.

Credited as the animators are Ed Love, Preston Blair and Ray Abrams. Claude J. Smith, formerly of Disney, designed the characters. Wally Maher is Screwy. Meathead’s voice hasn’t been definitely identified.

Oh, Lightning

The pace of cartoons was moving an awful lot faster by the time World War Two ended, but Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera needed a way to show one moving faster than the rest in “Old Rockin’ Chair Tom” (released in 1948). The solution was pretty simple. The character was named Lightning. So the animator, or the effects animator, drew lightning bolts over top of what turned out to be a partial outline of the character’s body.





You can see that brush strokes are substituted for the cat’s body itself, even as a foot about to kick the mouse out of the house.

This is one of those Tom and Jerrys where the two team up against a third character; in this case, Lightning, who threatens to have them both kicked out of their cushy abode. Their solution is to have Lightning swallow an iron while he’s asleep and then pull him around with a magnet. Here are some of the violence drawings.





The great thing about the Tom and Jerrys into the end of the ‘40s is the expressions. You always know what the characters are thinking (other than the maid as you can’t see her face). And the series hadn’t yet become watered down with wayward ducks, little mice, elephants, plots based in France and flattened designs.

The animators are the H-B unit’s usual group—Ray Patterson, Ken Muse, Irv Spence and Ed Barge. I don’t who how many effects animators MGM had at this point.