Confusions of a Nutzy Smear

It’s really tough judging how good of a director at Warner Bros. Norm McCabe could have become. “Daffy’s Southern Exposure” is a funny cartoon by any standards but, more often than not, McCabe got saddled with stories that were heavy on war-time references or outright propaganda and not much else.

“Confusions of a Nutzy Spy” (copyright January 30, 1943) could have been a pretty good cartoon but it suffers because of the characters. Porky’s a clueless dope. His dog is a sneezing dope. The bad guy has a goofy German accent which hardly makes him threatening. Don Christensen gives us more of a situation than gags (other than bad puns in the opening). Oh, well, we beat the Nutzy in the end and that’s the only thing that mattered to the producers and distributors.

While Chuck Jones and Frank Tashlin get praise for experimentation, they weren’t the only Warners directors using stylised backgrounds and odd camera angles. McCabe has them here, too, thanks to layout man Dave Hilberman. And some of the animation’s pretty good, despite the fact McCabe wasn’t working with A-list animators.

Here’s a great take when the Nutzy realises the bomb-in-a-briefcase he threw away has been retrieved by Porky’s dopey dog. First, the realisation.



Then the anticipation.






Now, the big take.




McCabe engages in some smears as the Nutzy juggles the briefcase around before throwing it away.






Izzy Ellis gets credit for the animation. Cal Dalton was in the unit as well but I couldn’t tell you who else (Jack Carey?) was there.

Irving Fein

Who came up with the phrase “Quick as a flashlight”?

If you said Samuel Goldwyn, you’d be wrong. The answer is Samuel Goldwyn’s assistant publicity man in the 1940s, Irving Fein. Fein admits he made up Goldwynisms because it would get Goldwyn’s name into the papers, not that Goldwyn really needed much help.

Fein’s best-known employers didn’t help getting publicity, either. They were Jack Benny and George Burns. When each of them died, Fein was the one who gave the confirmation to the media.

Fein died last Friday morning at the age of 101.

Some super-agents don’t mind being in the spotlight themselves. Here’s an interview with Irving Fein in the Wisconsin State Journal, November 3, 1963. You’ll notice how Fein’s still in there punching for his client; he turns it from an interview about Irving Fein into an interview about Jack Benny. But we learn about Fein, too, though it doesn’t mention he was hired by CBS in March 1950 to run a west coast promotion bureau and then put in charge of radio publicity on the coast in June 1952—all while still employed by Jack’s company.

A ‘Beatnik’ of the 1920s Comes Home
By ELIZABETH GOULD
(State Journal Staff Writer)
“Guinea pigs,” the campus called them irreverently.
“They were the beatniks of their era,” Irving Fein, who was of them, says with a twinkle.
They were the students of Dr. Alexander Meiklejohn’s famous experimental college which existed on the University of Wisconsin campus from 1926 to 1932. One hundred twenty male students— all of them intellectually superior, most of them determined individualists—lived and worked together in their own dormitory, studying Greek and Roman civilization the first year, American society the second, before they were absorbed into the university proper.
Set apart from the rest of the school as they were, they were regarded by many of their contemporaries as wild-eyed eccentrics.
Heads J and M Productions
There is nothing of the eccentric about Fein today. Lean and casually well-groomed, with a hearty laugh, an easy manner and a tolerant twinkle in his eye, he is the executive producer of the Jack Benny program and the president of J and M (for Jack and Mary) Productions. He now lives in Beverly Hills, Calif.
He came back to Madison last week for the first time since 1939 to visit his daughter Patricia who entered the University as a freshman this fall and is living in one of the new private dorms.
“It’s like the Beverly Hilton,” her father says, shaking his head. “Those kids don’t need all that luxury.”
His Room Shrinks
He himself paid a nostalgic visit to Adams hall to look at his old room there.
“I remembered it as about twice as large as it is,” he grinned. “But the furniture’s the same—same metal desk, same kind of bed.
“My friends advised me not to come back. You know Thomas Wolfe and ‘You Can’t Go Home Again.’ But in spite of all the changes around here, a lot of it looks the same. And it still looks like a great school to me. It is a great school—one of the greatest in the county. [sic] I’m glad I sent my daughter here.”
Fein, whose family home was in New York, went back there after leaving the university and got a job with Warner Bros, doing advertising and publicity. After being transferred to California, he worked for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and later for Columbia Pictures.
In 1947 he and Jack Benny founded a company which was sold to the Columbia Broadcasting System, and Fein became vice president of CBS in New York, in charge of advertising and promotion [in 1955].
The J and M Production Co. came into existence in 1956 and, besides the Benny show, has produced “Checkmate,” the Marge and Gower Champion show, the Gisele MacKenzie show, and Wayne and Shuster’s “Holiday Lodge.”
The famous comedian who has built much of the humor of his programs around jokes about his own penuriousness, emerges as a warm, generous, and intensely loyal person, as Fein talks of him.
“A lot of people—and not just in the entertainment world—once they’ve made money, are inclined to forget their old friends. But not Jack. And a lot of stars, at the end of the season, will fire the whole crew of writers and start fresh next year. Not Benny. Two of his writers have been with him for 20 years, and the other two for 14 or 15.
They’re still the new writers.
Raised $3½ Million
“And did you know he’s raised almost 3 ½ million dollars for charity as soloist with the big symphonies—most of it for their pension funds? He loves doing it, Of course, he’s no Heifetz, but he’s a pretty able musician, for all his clowning, and when Isaac Stern wants to raise some money, he calls on Jack. They charge $100 a ticket, and that includes an invitation to a party for Jack afterward, so everyone has a chance to meet him.”
Hartford, Conn., Fein said, was raising money for a new music school and was offered a $400,000 contribution by the president of the Fuller Brush Co., on condition that the city could match that amount. A single concert, with Benny as soloist, raised $438,000 in one night.
Concert in Milwaukee
Fein left Madison Tuesday to join Benny in in Pittsburgh, where he was to play a concert this
week. Then come concerts in Minneapolis and Milwaukee, which will be the end of the concert appearances with the big city symphonies, although there are at least 500 requests from smaller communities.
“We’ll do the Milwaukee concert Nov. 10,” Fein said, “and we'll be out late at the party afterward, then up at 6:30 to catch a plane for Hollywood, and we’ll rehearse that afternoon for a show that’s on the next week. That Benny’s remarkable. He’ll be XX in February, but he acts and work like a 39-year-old fellow.
A sparkle came into the Fein eyes, as he thought of that next Sunday date in Milwaukee.
“Makes it kind of convenient,” he laughed. “With Homecoming Nov. 9 (Saturday) in Madison.”
After all, a man who has a daughter here at one of the greatest schools in the country should get back to visit when he can. Especially since he’s proved to his own satisfaction that you can go home again.

Of Jack’s wife, Mary Livingstone, Fein told the Archive of American Television: “she was a nice lady.” The admiration wasn’t mutual. Livingstone and her brother Hickey Marks were livid to learn a few weeks after signing a deal to write Jack’s biography that Fein had already done the same thing. They refused to mention Fein in their book, despite the fact he had been Jack’s personal manager for almost three decades and began working for him in 1947. And the actor who said “Yeeeeeeees?” on Jack’s show said “No” when it came liking Fein. Frank Nelson felt Fein wasn’t quite honest in his version of the Benny biography and accused the J & M boss of shaving his paycheque to save money.

However, you can hear Fein’s thoughts for yourself. The aforementioned Academy interview can be found HERE. One click and you’re there as quick as a flashlight.

Random M-G-M Cartoon Clippings

The Tom and Jerry series at MGM couldn’t have been more successful. And it had a far-reaching effect. If directors Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera had flopped with the cat and mouse, do you think they’d have built up enough capital and fame to open their own studio in 1957 and set the course for made-for-TV animation?

Hanna and Barbera never got on-screen credit for the first short in the series in 1940, but that year, an Associated Press reporter ferreted out the information that they, and not Rudy Ising (credited on screen) were responsible. It’s intriguing to speculate who leaked the info to the wire service. Producer Fred Quimby’s re-hiring of Ising (and Hugh Harman) in October 1938 after MGM dumped the Harman-Ising studio the year before must have been uncomfortable at best. No doubt, Quimby would be quite happy to promote someone else over Ising, especially if he could imply that he discovered the Oscar-winning directors.

That’s more or less what he did in this AP column dated June 2, 1944.

Hollywood
‘Oscar’ Goes To Author Of Cartoon
By FRED QUIMBY
(The producer of the Academy Award Winning Cartoon, “Yankee Doodle Mouse” writes today for Robbin Coons. This is the fifth in a series by award winners.)
HOLLYWOOD — Like Jennifer Jones and Paul Lukas, there were two other Hollywood stars who won an Academy Award this year. But little was said about them. Withal, each mail brings requests for their photos. They’re known from Teheran to Terre Haute — from Paraguay to Podunk.
>Success is theirs yet these stars work for nothing. They are never given a vacation — they never complain. Actually, they don’t even know the meaning of the word “temperament.” Neither are they ever bedecked in sable or ermine, nor do they attend the swank night clubs, albeit they were born in a bottle!
* * *
Yes, they emerged from an ink bottle, Feb. 10, 1940. Though christened “Tom Cat” and “Jerry Mouse” they are more familiarly known to millions of fans as just “Tom and Jerry.” Their introduction to the world was in the cartoon “Puss Gets the Boot.” Men, women and children laughed as the brash, bullying Tom tortured the meek mite, Jerry, through the early stages of the film, but the rascally rodent managed to master the situation before the end.
Were they gifted with vision, Tom and Jerry would see their prototypes in the men who direct them—Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera. As is customary in cartoon production, humans first enact the roles of their pen-and-ink creations, thus aiding the animators who draw the animal characters. Hanna is the smirky, blustering Tom Cat. He stands before a mirror and muggs to his heart’s content. Barbara is the Jerry Mouse. With exaggerated facial contortions, he is submissive to Tom's harrangues—while the story is in preparation.
* * *
In reality, neither Hanna nor Barbera is an exhibitionist. Rather would you regard them as the type to inherit the earth, were you to meet them socially. The boys joined my cartoon staff in 1937 as story and layout men. Their ability was soon discernible and promotion to the directorial ranks followed.
We were all very proud of Tom and Jerry for the award—the first ever won in Academy competition with Walt Disney. Could they have made an acceptance speech, I’m sure they would have said, with typical Hanna-Barbera modesty, “Thanks, folks. It’s a great honor. I guess we were just lucky.”

Hanna and Barbera might have been modest, but Fred C. wasn’t. The way some newspaper stories read, you’d swear Quimby himself was at a light board crafting all those funny scenes. There was never a mention of guys like Irv Spence or Ray Patterson. Quimby loved leaving the impression he was a creative force. One 1957 review of “Invitation to the Dance,” the Gene Kelly experimental film that combined animation and live action, wrote “Kelly dances a nimble series with cartoon characters executed beautifully by Fred Quimby, William Hanna and Joseph Barbera.” The words “Mike Lah” were nowhere to be found. Lah was the one apparently responsible for the serpent dance.

Quimby is not only creative but happy-go-lucky in this syndicated news story of July 7. 1947. By all accounts, neither term could be applied to him in real life.

Pair of Film Stars Win Academy Award But it Means No Raise in Pay for Them Because They Are Cartoon Characters
By VICTOR GUNSON
Central Press Correspondent
HOLLYWOOD — Not every Academy award winning star gets fame and fortune—and an oversized swimming pool.
You get a day by day account of the doings of the Ingrid Bergmans, the Greer Garsons, the Ginger Rogers, the Spencer Tracys and the Jimmy Cagneys.
But what about Tom and Jerry?
They are the heroes of an animated cartoon which won an Academy award for their bosses. Besides that, like Mickey Mouse, Minnie Mouse, Pluto the Pup and Donald Duck, they have brought many a laugh to millions of youngsters—and oldsters, too.
Because they are “Oscar” winners, it is well to look behind the curtain to see how Tom and Jerry come into being as you see them on the nation’s screens.
The studio has been releasing cartoons for many years, but it was not until 10 years ago that a building devoted to this sole entertainment field was erected. Occupying 12,000 square feet, the two-story structure houses a personnel of more than 200 persons, each a specialist in his particular field, since cartoon production is a highly creative art.
Of this number, 110 devote their time to Tom and Jerry.
* * *
JUST LIKE Joan Crawford has Jerry Wald as her producer, Tom and Jerry have their guiding genius, too. He is Fred Quimby, a happy gentleman with a full head of hair and a sense of humor.
Tom and Jerry have their own directors as well. They are William Hanna and Joseph Barbera. Both are comparative youngsters but veterans in the cartoon field.
Like any other screen production, the first step in making a cartoon is writing the story.
Unlike any of the others, the authors do not bother with a manuscript. Instead, they rough out their stories in picture form, one panel after the other, and tack them up on a large board.
Quimby likes to be sure of the action, just like he might be if he had Humphrey Bogart or Errol Flynn, so frequently he has co-directors Hanna and Barbera go through parts of the action.
When the trio is satisfied, the animators enter the scene.
Animators take a look at the drawings—or story. Then they go to work making hundreds upon hundreds of separate pictures, each slightly different from the other. This is so when they are later photographed on a strip of film and run through a projection machine, they look as though they were moving.
This film—it is called a story reel in the trade—offers excellent opportunity for each member of the staff to study the story minutely.
It requires more than 16,000 drawings, each photographed separately, to complete an eight-minute cartoon.
* * *
HEAD ANIMATORS draw only the principal sketches, while their assistants, the “in-between workers,” complete the continuity of the scene.
For example, a sequence may require Tom to walk from one side of a room to the other. The head animator makes sketches of Tom as he enters and as he leaves. The “in-betweeners” then fill out the rest of the pictures.
As he works each animator constantly has in front of him master drawings of Tom and Jerry as well as all the other members of the cast. This is done so no artist will start drawing characters to suit his own ideas.
* * *
KEY MEN are those layout artists who plan the backgrounds and plot the action; the technical advisers and the musical director, who is not only a musician and composer but a man long experienced in cartoon procedure.
Sound technicians on cartoons must be the top of their trade. Split-second accuracy is required in giving sound to the little animated figures.
Then there are the people who give voice to the dialogue.
After all the pictures have been put on paper, a group of women artists trace them with water colors to celluloid. They become the finished product when they are photographed on regular movie film.
The cartoon producers admit they have a lot of problems. But, they have one big “break.” Their stars never are afflicted with temperament.

Hanna and Barbera got other mentions in the popular press during their MGM years, but not all that many. Disney got the P.R. by ably spinning each feature release into something new and, therefore, worth writing about. MGM was in the shorts business, and shorts weren’t exactly high in the box office food chain. Here’s a clipping from United Press dated April 16, 1949.

Censors Frown on Nudes—Even in Cat Cartoons
HOLLYWOOD, (UP)—A buxom movie queen lolling in bed isn't the only item that gets axed out of the movies. The long arm of the censors reached out to the love life and hip wiggles in the cartoons, too.
The two guys who create Tom and Jerry, the Oscar-winning cat and mouse, sigh they have to worry about slipping gags past the censors just like the big directors do.
“We have to be careful about Jerry kicking Tom in the backside. Those gags don’t get by so much any more,” says Joe Barbera, who writes and directs the cat and mouse series at M G M with William Hanna.
Tom and Jerry usually don’t wear a stich of clothes in their movies, unlike Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. But in “Springtime for Thomas” Tom had to crawl into trousers while he yowled his love to a lady cat.
Tom wears goatskin pants and Jerry a Robinson Crusoe outfit in their next movie. But Barbera and Hanna undressed them in a hurry so the 125 animators wouldn’t have to draw clothes in all the 15,000 “frames” that make one cartoon.
Once the Johnston office turned thumbs down on a scene in a cartoon, not of Tom and Jerry, which showed a dog sniffing at a man disguised as a tree.

There was, at one time, an event which brings back wistful memories to those old enough to remember called “The Saturday Kids Matinee.” Local theatres had special programmes for kids consisting of a bunch of old cartoons, some live-action shorts (usual the Three Stooges) and maybe an episode of a serial. TV eventually killed the concept. Alas!

Here’s a column from Madison’s Wisconsin State Journal of April 4, 1953, giving a free plug to a matinee. No doubt part of the information came from an MGM handout. Why else would Fred Quimby get credit?

TOM AND JERRY, funmakers from the MGM cartoon studio, will celebrate their 13th birthdays and their sixth “Oscar” award with two parties Monday at the Orpheum theater.
Tom and Jerry were “born” when Fred Quimby produced their first picture, “Puss Gets the Boot,” in 1940. They became stars at the film’s first showing, when a preview audience laughed long and applauded heartily.
With that sound in their ears, Quimby and Co-Directors William Hanna and Joe Barbera laid plans for a long-range future for the cat-and-mouse team.
So far, there have been 96 Tom and Jerry pictures, and 20 more are in various stages of production on the MGM drawing boards—which produce 11,200 different camera setups for each cartoon comedy. Each release plays about 22,000 bookings in the United States’ 15,000 theaters, figures which indicate many repeat bookings.
Last month. Tom and Jerry won their sixth “Oscar” with “Johann Mouse,” a Viennese caper with Tom playing Strauss music for Jerry’s dancing.
At Monday's parties, the Orpheum will show 25 Tom and Jerry cartoons — three hours of films. Cousin Henry of WISC will be master of ceremonies, and a big bir day cake will be on display in the theater lobby.
The parties will start at 10 a.m. and 1 p. m., with doors for the first one open at 9 a. m.

Fred Quimby was gone by 1955. So Bill and Joe don’t share the credit for their cartoons in this United Press story from somewhere in September 1955.

Cat, Mouse Hold Oscar Honor Record
HOLLYWOOD (UP) – Which performers have won the most Academy Awards?
Nope, not Bette Davis, Frederick March or any other living actor.
The champs are a cat and mouse—“Tom and Jerry.”
Those cartoon characters have copped seven golden statuettes — more than any performers in the business.
Behind this game of cat and mouse are a couple of easy-going, good-nntured guys named Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera who have worked together for 18 years. During that time they've turned out 125 “Tom and Jerry” rib-ticklers for MGM.
“We’ve been working across a desk all that time and never had a beef,” Joe said happily. “I don’t think there’s another team in town ,who can say that.”
“When we started out with Tom and Jerry, mice and cats were strictly passe,” Bill put in. “Thanks to Mickey Mouse and Felix the Cat.”
“Yeah,” Joe laughed. “Cartoonists were going crazy looking for other animals to use—giraffes, zebras, dodo birds and gosh knows what.”
“We decided to stick with the cat and mouse idea because you don’t have to waste time getting into the story. The minute the cartoon starts with the cat chasing Jerry the audience understands the situation”
“What’s more,” Bill added, “The mouse is the eternal ‘little guy’—getting picked on by everyone. Besides, mice and cats are known the world over. We never use much dialogue and foreign markets are as good as domestic releases.”
Barbera and Hanna take 18 months to turn out a single seven-minute picture.
“Of course,” Bill said, “we have several in production at once. Each film contains about 57,000 drawings, which means a total output of a million and a half individual drawings a year.”
How do cartoonists dream up their laugh-getters?
“We sit across from one another and kick around ideas until we get something of a story line. Then as we go along we make faces and expressions we want the characters to have—while one of us makes a face, the other pencils it down.”
“People think we're crazy when they come into the office. They find a couple of grown men making faces at one another and speaking in sound effects,” Joe said.

Within two years of this story, Hanna and Barbera followed Quimby off the MGM lot, along with the rest of the cartoon studio’s staff. The doors were bolted. Metro had become penny wise and pound foolish, deciding all it had to do was spend a few bucks making prints of old cartoons and watch the money roll in. It never counted on the huge windfall television could have provided from the sale of future MGM cartoons. It was a point gladly proven by another studio, one run by Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera.

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.