50 Years of the Future

It’s only natural that a blog named for the best character on “The Jetsons” should mention the cartoon series’ 50th birthday today.

“The Jetsons” was an animated catalogue of what people of the post-war era thought the future would look like, based on what they’d read and seen in science magazines, world fairs and even TV ads and paid industrial films. It was an era of consumerism and “The Jetsons” featured amazing products of the future one could buy to make their life easier, most of them based on concepts that had been kicking around. Of course, there was a down side, too. Some of those new-fangled things didn’t work or blew up. George Jetson got caught in traffic jams worse than anyone dealt with in 1962. And he put up with a boss who had never heard the term “anger management.”

The show was one of the first that ABC broadcast in colour, though that wasn’t really much of a selling point. I watched the series in black-and-white until the early ‘70s and I suspect I was no different than a lot of kids back then. It would have been odd growing up and seeing these interior backgrounds in colour. If I had to guess, I’d say they were by Dick Thomas.







“The Jetsons” failed in prime time because of numbers—more people watched “Disney” on NBC. Once reruns moved into kid-time on Saturday mornings, it flourished. Years later, it resulted in the Hanna-Barbera studio’s new owners bringing it back with far less entertaining new episodes and a movie that’s best left forgotten.

During the show’s original run, Joe Barbera was the front-man for pre-premiere newspaper stories. But here’s one published 50 years ago today in the Long Beach Independent Press-Telegram that quotes Bill Hanna. Only once. The story sounds as if it’s based on a press release by Arnie Carr’s publicity department.

Bert’s Eye View
By BERT RESNIK
TV and Radio Editor
George Jetson fed the micro-tablet newspaper into the reading machine and pressed buttons until he got to the sports page.
There was a picture of the coach of the local football team George pressed another button.
“We’ll moider ‘em,” said the voice of the local coach.
George grinned and absent-mindedly flicked a few cigarette ashes on the rug.
An electric-seeing-eye vacuum cleaner came buzzing out of its wall cabinet, sucked up the ashees and discreetly returned to its niche.
George glanced out of the window and noticed the smog. He pressed a button and his Sky Pad Apartment immediately rose 1,000 feet above the smog.
AN IMMEDIATE RISE to popular acclaim is hoped for George and the rest of “The Jetsons” by his creators, Hanna-Barbera Productions.
“The Jetsons,” a futuristic cartoon-situation comedy a la “The Flintstones,” makes its debut in Color at 7:30 p.m. today on channel 7.
The Sunday series is about a family living in the year 2062. An average family, it has the ordinary astro-age conveniences available to middle-class families.
There is for example, their nuclear-pellet-powered space car which gets 40,000 miles to the pellet. (Economy cars get 60,000 miles per pellet.)
There is the dog-walk, a treadmill which periodically serves up fire hydrants.
A pneumatic tube is used for transporting the children to and from school.
Occasionally the wrong child is returned, but there’s no major problem. Just simply press a reject button until the right child shows up.
* * *
AN UPCOMING episode will feature an anti-gravity dance floor that permits the dancers to gyrate on the ceiling.
An astro-age rock-and-roller, Jet Screamer, will bellow:
“I know a swinging place out on the edge of space.”
He’ll introduce a new dance, the solo swivel, which may be the successor to the twist.
Hanna-Barbera Productions feel “The Jetsons” are bringing a new twist to television with its comic astro-age outlook.
Those who have been associated with the series—the same professionals involved in the production of “The Flintstones”—think “The Jetsons” should move ahead faster in the ratings than the caveman cartooner.
This would be quite an accomplishment for “The Flintstones” were practically an overnight success.
Bill Hanna shares the enthused optimism about “The Jetsons” but isn’t personally going out on any prediction limb.
“You just can’t say until the guy in front of the tube watches it.” he said.
For the guy in front of the TV tube—even though it isn’t pneumatic—also has a reject button.

And here’s another newspaper piece that reads like filler supplied by Carr’s people.

Questions And Answers On ABC-TV’s ‘The Jetsons’
Who dreams up the futuristic gadgets seen in “The Jetsons”?
Three occupants of the “think room” at Hanna-Barbera Productions devote full time to this project.
What have been some of their best brainstorms?
The Peek-a-boo Prober Pill, a tiny diagnostic device that televises — with commentary —- after it is swallowed by a patient; a miniaturizing machine used by Jetson’s boss to shrink shipments of Spacely Space Sprockets and shipping charges; the fooderacycle [sic] unit that instantly prepares and serves any menu selected from its card index.
How many drawings are used in “The Jetsons”?
More, than 12,000 individual drawings (cells) go into each half-hour segment.
How many man hours does each segment require?
A total of 16,000, including all production departments such as dubbing, recording, lab and musicians.
How did H-B happen to follow up their Stone Age “The Flintstones” with a series set 100 years in the future?
The 2060’s setting was one of the ideas proposed when H-B decided to make their first cartoon series with humans instead of animals. It was rejected in favour of the prehistoric Flintstone setting because the idea seemed “too far out” a couple of years ago.
What is the major difficulty in making “The Jetsons”?
Keeping a hundred years ahead of the present due to the scientific breakthroughs being made.
Is there an example of this?
The long-legged bug shaped Moonwalker now in production for moon exploration. On this Joseph Barbera comments that if one of his artists had submitted such a sketch a couple of years ago, he would have thought he was crazy.
How are futuristic sounds for the series made?
With electronic devices and from a sound effects library containing more than 5000 sounds, from “Snores and Shivers” to “Poofs and Pops.”

“The Jetsons” had a great opening. There’s that jumping theme song by Hoyt Curtin and his band and the memorable close-up shot of Earth from outer space, with overlays of drawings to simulate a 3-D effect.





Suddenly, the sound of drums and horns and the shot cuts to a starry black exosphere with moving geometric shapes in the foreground.









The blue skies and space needle buildings of Orbit City quickly fade in, and then the Jetson family zooms toward the camera twice. We get to meet the family. There’s perspective animation during the opening which Hanna-Barbera almost never used in its cartoons because of the cost.



Elementary schools used to have tall windows like this. About 1910.



What?! Cash? In the future? Those three guys in the “think room” aren’t thinking.



We didn’t have “malls” in the early ‘60s. We had “shopping centres.” So that’s what the Jetsons have.



The name “Tralfaz”, at least as it applies to Astro, was heard in the episode “Millionaire Astro.” This is a scan of a cel from that episode, featuring Tralfaz’s dog house that’s on the masthead of this blog. The colour isn’t quite the same as what you’ll see on the cartoon DVD.

One wonders if Bill Hanna, Joe Barbera and their talented artists ever expected “The Jetsons” to last this long. The show’s half-way to 2062, the year its set in. It might just make it there.

Jack Benny Checks Out the Pin-Ups

Jack Benny’s career as a comedian started while he was in the Navy during World War One, so it’s perhaps appropriate that he would have been among the stars traipsing around entertaining soldiers during World War Two. He did it at camps and bases in North America and, more importantly, overseas.

Jack didn’t have an astounding film career, but he did work with a number of funny and attractive leading ladies. He was also quite the ladies’ man before (and some say after) he settled down with Mary Livingstone. So it seems fitting that Jack should be the one interviewed about soldiers overseas and the ladies they want. Jack’s findings may be surprising.

The following feature story was printed in Every Week Magazine, one of those Sunday newspaper supplements. It’s dated June 11, 1944. The author has an annoying habit of using Jack’s given and surname throughout the story.

Pin-Up Favorites Abroad
By Dee Lawrance
HOLLYWOOD
Women with men overseas should love Jack Benny.
Women whose husbands, sweethearts, sons and brothers are on any of the fighting fronts should be very grateful to Jack Benny.
Because he’s the first entertainer to visit the boys and come back with a truly encouraging word to the girls back home.
Jack Benny feels, and backs up his feeling by having checked every barrack he came near on his travels, that pin-up girls are greatly overrated.
If any of you women have ever gazed enviously at a well-turned ankle on a movie starlet; wished you could boast of the same set of curves in the same places; yearned to be as pretty in the picture you are sending your “him”—just forget it.
So says Jack Benny, and he’ll oven thump his fist on the table for emphasis. Jack’s not the violent type, so you can see how much he means it when he says:
“The real pin-up girls of the American armed forces are the home girls. For every cutie I saw tacked up on barrack walls, pinned inside tents, pasted in planes and ships, I saw at least 20 pictures of the girls they left behind.
“By that,” amended Jack Benny, and the laughter lines around his gray eyes crinkled, “I don’t just mean sweethearts, either. In fact, wives—no matter how long a guy has been married —don’t get any competition from the smoothies from Hollywood in a pictorial manner. And kid sisters and mothers are right up there, matching the others in popularity.”
When you think of soldiers and pictures, you must never forget the wallets. Returning actors and actresses who have spent any time overseas all remark up on the readiness of G.I. Joe to haul out snapshots to show. In fact, more and more movie stars are sending fan pictures designed to fit in a wallet.
“The wallet pictures they carry,” continued Jack Benny, “feature home girls, first and foremost. And here’s a message to all wives, mothers, sisters, sweethearts—get as many pictures taken as you can, pictures of yourselves, of the house, of friends, of places and things he knows—and send them to him.
“You’ll never know, until you have been there and lived with our boys, just how much your pictures will mean. A snapshot can come in for an awful lot of attention when you’re sitting around waiting to go into action. They mean more than any of us will ever know.”
Having settled the hash of the pin-up girls, Jack Benny relented and admitted that there were pin-up pictures to be seen in the camps he had visited.
“Mostly,” he qualified, “when the boys haven’t got girls of their own, though. And there you will see Annie Sheridan’s lovely face plastered all over the place. Rita Hayworth is another favorite. So is Maria Montez—the boys like her for the exotic costumes she wears in her films. And Betty Grable, of course.”
Speaking of Betty brings up an amusing anecdote from Jack Benny’s trip some months ago which took in Egypt, Nigeria, the Sudan, Arabia, Iraq, Iran, Persia, Sicily and South America.
“In Brazil,” he said, “I arrived just after the news of Betty Grable’s marriage had reached there. And everywhere I went the soldiers said: “Grable can’t do this to us—a fine thing, that lovely creature going off and getting married!
“As a matter of fact, when any of the glamor girls, whether it's Rita, or Betty, or any of them get married, the boys make a great thing of it—and get a lot of fun moaning about their bad luck in losing still another gal to wedded bliss.”
Right now, Jack Benny is working on plans for another trip overseas. The popular comedian feels, as do all entertaining personalities who have gone overseas on visits to our forces, that there is nothing now as important. On his last trip, Benny’s troupe was composed of Anna Lee, a songstress named Wini Shaw, and the famous harmonica player, Larry Adler.
“The girls,” Jack recalled, “were amazing. Not a whimper out of them at hard conditions, traveling difficulties, strange places to stay.
“They took everything like a man and were, on the whole, much less complaining than many a man I have known. Place either of them on a camel, in a jeep, plane, truck or just on their own feet, and they went along beautifully. Don’t ever try to tell me the gals can’t take it. I watched Anna and Wini—and I know!”
Just taking it and not making a fuss is only the first requirement of an entertainer in far-off camps and outposts. Just as important, perhaps even more so, is the ability to laugh and talk with the lonely men, to make them laugh and talk with you.
QUESTIONS about the home folk—with emphasis on the feminine gender—led all the
other questions the boys shot at the visitors from home.
“Chiefly, they asked whether they looked as pert and pretty as ever,” Jack Benny went on.
“ ‘Do they wear bows in their hair and how short are their skirts, and how about their stockings—are they having a hard time getting them?’ they would ask.
“They wanted to know, the ones who had been in longest, how food rationing had affected life at home. Was the rationing of gas a hardship? They showed a tremendous concern for the happiness of the ones they had left behind—and you should have seen the satisfied faces, the smiles, when we assured them the home folks were fine, and behind them 100 per cent.”
Anyone who has ever gone on one of those extended trips with an entertaining troupe knows the difficulties and hardships of them They are constantly on the move. Hardly a day passes without miles put behind the troupers, never a day passes without at least two shows. You can’t be a slouch and go on one of these trips.
Yet Jack Benny said it was a rest for him.
“For 33 years,”he explained, “I have been on the radio. One program a week, performed
twice, 52 weeks a year. And for each program you have to write 12 pages of jokes, out of which 15 pages have to be good—or you’re out.
“Then there have been movies in between to make. It keeps a guy busy. And so you can see why the tour was a rest —and why I want to be allowed to make another trip as soon as I can.”
In a few months he will be seen again—playing an angel. “The Horn Blows at Midnight” might be the title for any sort of picture, particularly a serious one. Yet the fact that it stars Jack Benny guarantees that it will bring a spot of gaiety to a war-torn world.

The Cherry Man and his Sea Serpent

It’ll probably never be written, but someone should objectively tell the tale of Snowball, the studio set up by Bob Clampett to make Beany and Cecil cartoons in the early ‘60s.

In theory, Snowball could have grown to become another Hanna-Barbera. The studio had some very good talent. But it had an extremely short life-span. Animator Fred Kopietz spoke to historian Mike Barrier about money troubles, assistant editor Pete Verity remembered the almost-impossible deadlines and network meddling. And then there was the matter of timing. Clampett put ‘Beany and Cecil’ on the air in early 1962 during the boom in prime-time animated cartoon shows. But as soon as the first failures sunk in the ratings, networks quickly looked to other kinds of programming.

Here’s a syndicated newspaper feature dated March 4, 1962 where Clampett talks about the show and why he feels other prime-time cartoons failed. Interestingly, Clampett is pretty deprecating about his work at Warners. And if success followed the Beany and Cecil puppet show because he “threw away the script,” it naturally follows that the success was due to the ad-libs—by puppeteers/voice actors Stan Freberg and Daws Butler, meaning Clampett had nothing to do with it.

By CHARLES WITBECK
HOLLYWOOD — ABC has ushered in another cartoon series on Saturday nights at 7.00 p. m. entitled “Matty’s Funnies with Beany and Cecil.”
*
“Matty’s Funnies” used to be a collection of old cartoons. Now it has teamed up with Beany, a little boy with a propeller on his beany, and a friendly, semi-stupid sea serpent called Cecil. As puppets in Los Angeles during the pioneer days of TV, Cecil and Beany were quite the rage. Even grownups got home early to pat their kids on the head and catch the show. Creator Bob Clampett used to throw out scripts and have the puppets talk up for the benefit of the grownups during most of the half hour. The next morning fans called into praise or damn the proceedings, so Clampett knew where he was going. Cecil, a hand puppet with a very mobile cloth face that screwed up in a most engaging way, was a celebrity equal to the Lucky Strike marching cigarettes. While Kukla, Fran and Ollie had the east coast sewed up, Beany and Cecil were LA heroes.
The puppets have become cartoon characters and in five minutes initiate heroics that used to take Bob Clampett six weeks to tell. In other words, the chit-chat for grownups has disappeared, this cartoon series is strictly for kids.
*
And that’s why Clampett, a man who looks like he'd just gotten out of bed, isn’t worried about the series’ success. “ ‘Top Cat,’ ‘Calvin And The Colonel’ (Bob has other names for them) were aimed too high,” he says.
Bob is going to ignore the adult class and concentrate on the population explosion of unending youngsters. “We’ll have a whole new audience every year,” he says, meaning an audience range of from six to 11. It can go lower. Clampett’s year and a half old daughter, Baby Ruthie, can sit through five cartoons without wandering, and his five-year-old boy, Bobbie, can say all the names of the Clampett characters.
Would Clampett list a few? Bob nodded and pulled out illustrations of Go Man Gogh, a painter with a mobile wrist: Flora the Clinging Vine, a girl-like plant who goes for Cecil; Jack the knife; Normal Norman; Davy Crickett and his leading lady bug; Careless the Mexican Hairless; a lobster called Snapsie Maxie; The Boo Birds; and Lil Homer, a baseball playing octopus who cavorts in the little leagues under the sea. There’s Twinkle Twinkle, the starry-eyed starfish: the town of Los Wages; So What and the Seven What Nots. And that's only the beginning. In case you didn’t get the idea, Mr. Clampett likes names.
*
The Saturday night show of five minute cartoons is billed as “The cleanest show on TV.” The reason — a Cecil bubble bath will be on the market along with other toys like Dishonest John games and a Cecil jack-in-the-box. The sponsor is a toy maker and he has nine months to capture the Christmas market with his cartoon characters.
Clampett has been a cartoonist and gag men since the age of 15. He spent 15 years learning his trade at the Warner Bros, cartoon division. “I was low man on the totem pole over there during the thirties.” he said. “The cartoon division was above a grocery store and I spent most of my money buying bags of cherries.” At noon, young Clampett joined the cartoonists at the drug store counter. “We filled up most of the seats,” he said, “and when a stranger deigned to sit with us. We would put on a little show. The fellas used to burp with great skill, and we often put on a small concert for the stranger, working down the counter from right to left. Few stayed to finish their meal.”
During this time Clampett dreamed up “Tweetie” and thought about Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck and Elmer Fudd during working hours. “I tried every gag that came into my head,” said Bob. “Most of them were terrible, but it was the only way to learn.”
Clampett used to preview his cartoons in seven Los Angeles theaters and reactions would change from place to place. “Some jokes would be a dud even where and we were forced to take them out,” he said. “I learned to make many changes, but in general I wrote what I thought was funny.”

There was always something disconcerting about the “Beany and Cecil” cartoons to me as a kid and I never could quite pinpoint what it was. In watching them now, I think I know what the problem is. The old theatricals and the Jay Ward cartoons featured wise-cracking protagonists who deservedly got the best of their opponents. Beany was expressionless, creepily so. The Captain played virtually no role in the action. And Cecil was constantly physically and mentally abused, as if sadism is supposed to be funny. Perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise, considering how Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck were treated in a few of Clampett’s cartoons. And the stars of the supporting cartoons were lacklustre. Dishonest John was the show’s best character and even he wasn’t as over-the-top as Ward’s Snidely Whiplash, a little ironic considering Clampett was Warner Bros.’ most over-the-top director some 15 years earlier.

Still, I’ll take Beany over ‘Calvin and the Colonel’ any day. You can’t dislike a cartoon series with a jolly version of “Rag Mop.”

Charlie Jones' Charlie Dog

Animation sites and blogs aplenty are marking the 100th birthday of Charles Martin Jones today. I’ll leave to others an analysis of his evolution as a cartoon director but will remark there was a wonderful period in the mid-1940s to the early-‘50s where he didn’t try to use art to impress the viewer, he used it in an equal measure with comedy and acting, at times very subtle acting. That’s when he made some of best cartoons in Warner Bros. history.

There was no mistaking they were Chuck Jones cartoons, either. They had poses that screamed Jones. For example, would you find this shot in a Bob McKimson cartoon?



That, of course, is Charlie Dog. Though you have to wonder: Jones insisted that each of his characters represented a part of himself. Does that mean Charlie Dog represented the side of Charlie Jones that craved for acceptance but kept being rejected? Was Charlie Dog the insecure part of Jones? Did Charlie disappear from the screen because Jones’ ego overpowered his insecurity?

Oh, here I am analysing when I said I wouldn’t. Let’s look at a cartoon instead.

Charlie Dog was one of several characters developed by Jones’ writer Mike Maltese in that fine period who never became real stars. They headlined a number of cartoons before Jones moved on to something else.

Charlie’s cartoon “Dog Gone South” (released in 1950) featured some smear animation. Ben Washam and Lloyd Vaughan both animated on it and both were known for smears. Here’s one from the start of the cartoon when Charlie is kicked off a train. There’s some nice acting here, too. Charlie sniffs a flower then puts it in his hair.







Another smear.







Smear with banjo. Another fine expression in the last frame.







I like this effect at the end of the cartoon. Brush lines and multiples as Charlie zips into the scene.






Besides Washam and Vaughan, Ken Harris and Phil Monroe animated on this cartoon, along with Emery Hawkins.

Dog Trouble

More scare reaction shots of Tom, this time from “Dog Trouble” (1942).

Angry Tom is after Jerry.



Uh, oh. He sees the dog.







He runs face-first into the dog, slowly gets up, and sees the dog again.












Tom runs in one spot in mid-air before taking off, with the dog behind him.

There are no animator credits on this cartoon.