If My Friend Rocky Was in There

A lot of cartoons used the idea of crooks giving up to police so they wouldn’t be abused any more by the main character. None did it better than Bugs Bunny’s “Bugs and Thugs” (released in 1954), which was a reworking of the earlier “Racketeer Rabbit”. It’s the one with the famous scene where Bugs hides the crooks in an oven, turns on the gas and then pretends to be an Irish cop, asking “Would I throw a lighted match in there if my friend was in there?”

Friz Freleng’s animators could produce really subtle expressions and there are some fine ones in this scene. But my favourite part is the brushwork and the multiple eyes as Bugs changes places as he switches roles. Give credit to Art Davis and his assistant.

You know the scene. The “cop” is at the door. Bugs races to the oven to play himself.




Here he is changing spots to be the cop again. These are consecutive frames. They take up less than a second of screen time.












Bugs finishes his line as the cop and backs up, getting set to twirl into position as himself.












Bugs always has a great look of joy when he’s pulling a fast one.

We can’t skip the match part. See Bugs’ expression and how he anticipates the explosion. The drawings start on twos, the last three last only one frame each.











The animators may be Freleng’s best crew, even with Gerry Chiniquy gone. They’re Davis, Virgil Ross, Manny Perez and Ken Champin.

A Parade of Jack Benny, Part One

The January 10, 1954 broadcast of the Jack Benny show featured this bit of dialogue:

Rochester: We just got a copy of Parade magazine and your picture is on the cover.
Jack: Parade magazine? Oh, yes, yes. And my picture’s in color, isn't it?
Rochester: Uh, huh.
Jack: How do my eyes look?
Rochester: Green.
Jack: Green?
Rochester: There’s a spinach ad on the other side of the page.
Jack: A spinach ad?
Rochester: When you hold it up to the light, it looks like you’re peeking through a hedge.

Parade was a magazine supplement with all kinds of feature articles and pictures that appeared in Sunday newspapers. It published a rather lengthy biography on Jack, divided over two consecutive editions. In 1954, there were no books about Jack’s life; the piece in Parade may have been the lengthiest to date (Life and Look also did feature stories about him).

We’re going to present it in two parts, just as Parade did. Unfortunately, I don’t have decent copies of the photos that accompanied the article, including a fine tux-clad photo of Jack on the front cover, so I’ve added some other ones. There’s a photo of Jack and Marilyn but not this one.

So sit back, relax and pretend you’re with a Sunday paper of many years ago.

The Secret Life of Jack Benny
How old is he? What’s the story behind his violin-playing? Is he stingy? …Here are the answers in his own words.
By SID ROSS

JACK BENNY has become as much a part of America as pumpkin pie. For years, he has delighted millions by portraying himself as a rich skinflint. What’s behind that stage mask Benny wears? In a two-part story beginning today, PARADE reveals the secret life of Jack Benny, once described as a man “with a great talent for doing nothing—brilliantly.”
***
HOLLYWOOD
THE TIME has come to ruin one of the oldest jokes on the airwaves.
Jack Benny, who has been convulsing millions of people for more than 20 years with his deadpan claim to be 39 years old, will celebrate his 60th birthday next month.
And, now that Benny is admittedly taking on the role of an elder statesman of comedy, perhaps the time has come to explode the rest of the illusions he has fostered during an unparalleled career before the microphones
But, if you’re like the hat cheek girl Jack ran into at the Earl Carroll cafe here not long ago, you won’t like it. Years of listening to the Sunday evening Benny program had convinced her that Jack was the world’s stingiest man
So she was stunned when the comedian tried to give her a dollar as he left the restaurant. The girl handed the money back and pleaded, Please, Mr. Benny, Please leave me some illusions.
In the interests of truth, however, it must now be divulged that Jack Benny is not only a generous man in private life, but is also a better than good violin player.
In fact, there was a time back around the turn of the century when the Kubelsky family in Waukegan, Ill. had visions of seeing their son, Benny, step onto the concert stage in white tie and tails. They were encouraged by the fact that one of the lad’s favorite books was the Horatio Alger epic, “Phil The Fiddler.”
When Benny in his early teens began to show marked dislike for both schoolwork and serious violin practice, the Kubelskys were distressed.
Opened a Saloon
Meyer and Emma Kubelsky had both come to Chicago from Europe with their respective families. They met and married there, and then settled in Waukegan where they had friends.
“I think Dad started in as a peddler,” Jack recalls. “Then he operated a saloon. It was the toughest saloon in Waukegan, and my mother never liked it. One day a man came into my father’s saloon and wanted a drink. The man was drunk, and so my father refused to serve him. The outraged customer picked up a billiard cue and laid my father out cold. That was the end of the saloon business. After that he ran a department store and then a haberdashery.
We always lived in cheap houses. I remember one was a flat over a butcher shop. Business was never very good. We were never very poor, but we never had it too good.”
As in many Orthodox Jewish families, music was held almost sacred by the Kubelskys. So when Meyer Kubelsky brought a half-size fiddle home for his six-year-old son, Benny, he expected it to be used with reverence.
“It was a cheap fiddle, says Jack. “I took lessons from a guy named Professor Harlow, a big, old, bald-headed man who charged a dollar or two for lessons twice a week. Later I used to commute to the Chicago Musical College to study with a man named Hugo Kortchak.
“I can recall that all my teachers thought I’d make a fine violinist if I’d only practice. When I was 15 my father bought me an imitation Amati, a pretty good fiddle. I think he paid $75 for it. I’ve used it for 45 vears.
But you know my mother didn’t live to see any thing good come of me. Maybe if I had practiced hard I’d have been something before she died
Modest Start
ACTUALLY, Jack’s years of sawing away at the violin were far from wasted. They opened the door of show business.
He started in a modest way by playing parlor concerts for friends. When he couldn’t get a real audience he would set up eight or more chairs in the empty living room and perform. And when his long-suffering but devoted grandmother came out from Chicago for visits, Jack played to her
“I’d make out the living room was a theater, and I’d put on shows for her,” he recalls. “I’d play the violin and say some lines. Never comedy though. I always wanted to be the straight man, the guy in the straw hat and classy clothes.
“We had a legitimate theater in Waukegan. I tried to go to all the shows. I started off in what you might call show business by working in the Barrison Theater as in usher then as a stagehand. I got no pay in either job. But to me it was wonderful, the whole stage atmosphere.
“Finally I got a job playing in the orchestra pit when I was 15. I think I got paid $8 or $9 a week. Before that, I played in a kid orchestra in stores on Saturday afternoons. I’d make $1.50 an afternoon. I also used to work with Hapke’s Orchestra out in Libertyville on Saturday nights for $2 or $3 a night.
By the time Jack, still in knicker pants, landed in the orchestra pit his mother was quite upset at the way things were going. The clincher came when Jack was expelled from high school for sneaking off to play at matinees
“I wish I could have had both education and success,” Jack says now. “But somehow that doesn’t seem to work out. There are very few college graduate comedians. The college grads just don’t have that ‘ain’t quality,’ as Will Rogers used to call it.”
Aside from his excursions into show business, Jack was a fairly normal, healthy child.
“I never got into any scrapes,” he says, “because I couldn’t lick anybody. I never did much in athletics except play baseball with the kids. I played every position except catcher. I guess I was a tiny bit shy—and sensitive. I was never very good at anything, and I wasn’t ever the life of the party type. This I’d never been even today.
Jack s real start in the entertainment business came when he was 17. The Barrison Theater closed down. So Cora Salisbury, a vaudeville entertainer who was leading the pit orchestra decided to go back on the road. She took 17-year-old Benny along.
The act was called “Salisbury and Benny—From Grand Open to Ragtime.” Jack’s dreams were fulfilled. He first appeared on the stage in a posh, double breasted blue suit and, later, in a fancy white suit. He was a smooth straight man.
“In this act I played a medley of grand opera tunes and also ‘The Rosary’ under an amber spotlight,” Jack says. “Then Cora and 1 would do a ragtime melody with a little humor in it I'd flirt with the girls in the box seats while playing my violin.”
Jack earned $15 and expenses each week. From that time on—with a few interludes—Jack rose as steadily and undramatically as a banker. His stage career is completely without the usual Hollywood touches.
He Sold Clothes
SALISBURY and Benny broke up in about two years when Miss Salisbury’s mother fell ill. Benny went back to Waukegan and sold suits in his father’s store until he joined a piano player named Lyrnan Woods. Benny and Woods made up to $200 a week on the Orpheum Circuit until Jack got word his mother was dying
“I got home just a couple of days before she died,” Jack remembers. “I guess she was still disappointed in me. I had a great love for my mother.”
Jack enlisted in the Navy at the Great Lakes Naval Station near his home. He soon found himself in the Great Lakes revue. He played his first comic part—“Izzy There, the Admiral’s Disorderly.”
When he was mustered out a few weeks after the armistice Jack struck out on his own. He changed his name legally from Benny Kubclsky to Jack Benny.
Jack started out in a little Chicago theater at $125 a week. “I was kind of nervous going out there alone for the first time,” he says. “1 came out wearing a tight fitting suit and a little sailor hat. The stage was dark then the lights went up and there I’d be with my back to the audience, practicing scales on the violin. Then I’d turn around and say—‘Well, I guess I'm on’—and I’d play the violin and make a few jokes of the monologue type Well, gradually I started adding more jokes and playing less violin.”
By the time Jack got booked into the Palace in New York, he was making $250 a week and just using the violin for a prop. Shortly after that, he teamed up with the famous Nora Bayes They toured across the country to California (with Jack’s income rising to $450 a week) where Jack met a girl named Sadie Marks.
It was the beginning of Jack Benny’s big romance, the kind of romance that is even rarer in show business than Jack’s banker-like career For Jack Benny is still married to Sadie Marks who is known to the world as Mary Livingstone.
THE BENNY romance is no secret, of course. But few people know that Mary once hated Jack. The night they really met, as Jack puts it now, he had a date with Nora Bayes.
But for some reason Nora couldn’t make it. So Jack called Mary’s sister, Babe, and her husband, Al Bernovici (who also had a violin act). Babe persuaded Mary to go on a double date.
It took persuading because Mary, who was selling hosiery in a Los Angeles store, not only disliked actors in general, but she scorned Benny in particular. Mary remembered the night years before when Jack visited in the Marks family home in Vancouver, B.C., while he was touring with the Marx Brothers.
“Zeppo Marx invited me to come to dinner at the Marks’ house,” Jack says. “I thought it was going to be some big party and 1 got all dressed up. I came there and found a 12-year-old girl, Mary—who insisted on playing the violin for me because I was company. I didn’t want to hear any 12-year-old play a fiddle. I was bored—and showed it. Mary was very mad at me that time and she remembered it all those years. I didn’t give her a tumble. When I met her that night in Los Angeles, she reminded me of it.”
But, despite Mary’s reluctance, they had a good time. “We danced and ate and danced some more, and I had a feeling that she liked me a little bit,” Jack says. “I realized right off the bat, here was a girl with a great sense of humor. Besides, she was very pretty—and a good listener. 1 don’t think I tried to kiss her goodnight that time; she was going steady with another fellow then.”
Jack went back on the road. He didn’t keep in touch with Mary until he met Babe in Chicago. She told him Mary was engaged.
“I didn’t want to get married, but I didn’t want Mary marrying anybody else,” he explains. “I suggested that Babe call her sister up and ask her to come east for a visit. When Mary came to Chicago, I asked her to marry me.
“I took her to visit my Dad in Lake Forest, and in the living room I asked her the question. It was kind of sudden—I think it took her by surprise; but she said yes. She really wasn’t sure she should do it. She was engaged to someone else, after all.
“Well, we set the date for Sunday. But then I knew if we waited too long it might not happen. So I said, ‘Let’s get married right away.’ I didn’t even have a ring for her. I used my mother’s ring. We got married on Friday, Jan. 14, 1927. Mary wasn’t sure until the last minute that she’d go through with it. Just before the ceremony she wrote her fiance in California, saying: ‘By the time you get this, I may be married ...’ “I’m glad I did it this way. I didn’t want to lose her.
Mary didn’t know what hit her. She was a pretty bewildered girl. I was kind of dazed, too—it was tough for me to realize I was actually married.”
“The first year was rough—for Mary. She was often lonely. But I don’t think that Mary and I ever had a fight all the years of our marriage big enough to cause us even to think of divorce. Each year after that first year got better. Mary always wanted children, but for some reason or other we never got around to it, so we adopted Joannie. Right after that, Mary became pregnant, but she lost the child. The doctors said it wouldn’t be good for her to try any more . . .
Wanted More Children
“WE SHOULD have adopted more children; we were just negligent. I’ve missed not having more. As a matter of fact, I’ve wanted another daughter—and also a son . . .”
By the time, Jack and Mary were married, he was definitely “big time.” He was doing a 12-minute spot in Jake Shubert’s “Great Temptations.”
After that came another session of vaudeville (during which he first got Mary into his act as a “dumb kid”) and then an $850 a week contract with MGM to appear in “The Hollywood Revue of 1929.” Jack left Hollywood to become one of three stars in Earl Carroll’s “Vanities”—at $ 1,500 a week.
But Jack got fed up with touring. So he asked Carroll for a release. “I went back to New York without a job,” he says. “Vaudeville was kind of dead by now.
“At that time Ed Sullivan had a radio show in which he was using guests. I don’t think he was paying for the guests; I didn’t get paid. I sat with Sullivan and prepared the little ‘spot.’”
The little “spot”—Jack Benny’s first words to radio audiences went like this: "Hello, folks! This is Jack Benny. There will be a slight pause for everyone to say, ‘Who cares?’”
That was in 1932. Many people did care. And millions more care now.

WHAT MAKES BENNY FUNNY?
Next week’s PARADE will take you behind the scenes to show how the deadpan comedian’s voices are born—and why they’re funny.

Cartoon Commercials 1955

Cartoons are for kids? TV commercials should have shown that was a lie in the 1950s. All kinds of products—many of them not aimed at children—were sold in the decade, thanks to animated ads.

The ‘50s were not only the decade of the Golden Age of Television, but the Golden Age of Animated Television commercials. For awhile, the airwaves were filled with them. Brand-new little animation studios popped up on both coasts to fill the need. And they were a boon to animators looking for a little extra work, or any work at all. It was either Bob Givens or Virgil Ross who once remarked the studios were lined up on Cahuenga Boulevard and you could get work by walking down the street.

Cartoon commercials were being made by Shamus Culhane in the late ‘40s (Ajax Cleanser) but it took until 1955 for someone in the popular press to write about them. The column below seems to be under the impression that Storyboard, Inc. came up with the concept of the animated spot; Billboard magazine about the same time talked about how Storyboard was following the lead of UPA. And the column couldn’t reveal the fact that John Hubley left UPA under the noxious cloud of the Blacklist.

The column appeared in papers October 12, 1955.

TV Cartoon Commercials Score Hit With Audiences
By ALINE MOSBY
United Press Hollywood Writer
HOLLYWOOD (UP) — At Judy Garland’s TV debut, the “star” that drew the most applause from the studio audience was a new 30-second cartoon commercial that ends, “It’s a F-o-r-r-d!”
These animated commercials have become one of the biggest entertainment hits on the home screens along with Davy Crockett and Lassie.
The TV ad has raked in as many fan letters as live performers get. George Gobel hollered, “It’s a F-o-r-r-d” on his TV show. Milton Berle, also with a different sponsor, got a laugh with the line on his recent fall debut. Newspapers used the line in cartoons when the Ford wage strike was settled and when Whitey Ford of the New York Yankees starred on the mound.
While Lying Awake
The commercials—and many of the other whimsical cartoon pitches now flooding TV—are made by a new company, called Storyboard Inc. It’s headed by John Hubley, who once helped create such movie cartoons as “Gerald McBoing Boing.”
Hubley quit movies to make TV cartoon commercials and was such a success he now has a staff of 35 and a flood of imitators.
The Ford cartoon was born on a warm June night in 1954. A Hubley assistant, Bob Guidi, was lying awake at home when “'I got the idea of having the character spell out the brand name with his mouth, to stretch the word.” Hubley drew the original “story” line.
In 16 months of business, Storyboard Inc., has collected 21 awards for its cartoon commercials. The best known is the Ford cartoon showing a bird playing a phonograph record with its beak.
Takes Three Months
“Our commercials have the entertainment touch,” explains the company’s production manager, Les Goldman.
Another popular cartoon commercial shows a TV announcer who cannot pronounce “Worcestershire” sauce.
Storyboard “casts” its commercials as if they were super-colossal movies. Comedian Jim Backus and Hal March of “The $64,000 Question” are the voices of many characters. Famed progressive jazz musicians Andre Previn, Oscar Petersen, Shelly Manne and Shorty Rogers play the background music.
Each 60-second commercial takes three months to make and costs $10,000.
The Ford cartoons have reaped the most fans. Spike Jones has a musical called “It’s a Fraud.” And it's reported, says Goldman, that Norway, land of lakes and fjords, wants to buy a similar commercial to proclaim, “It’s a…” You finish it, I can’t.

Les Goldman, who soon went to work for George Blake Enterprises, is better known for forming a production company with Chuck Jones to make Tom and Jerry cartoons for MGM in the ‘60s. And you’ll note the Flintstones didn’t invent the idea of the beak of a bird as a record player needle.

I couldn’t even begin to name all the little commercial studios that appeared for a time in the ‘50s. Howard Swift of Columbia opened Swift-Chaplin. Arnold Gillespie of MGM helped open Quartet, later run by Mike Lah of MGM. Tex Avery was at a place for a number of years called Cascade. The major West Coast studios all eventually started commercial divisions. Here are some trade ads for some of the others.

Before the Flintstones

What does this…



…Have in common with this?



Other than they’ve about cavemen who wear orange leopard skins, the correct answer is that they were both designed by Ed Benedict.

The top drawing is, of course, of Fred Flintstone. The bottom is from the Tex Avery cartoon “The First Bad Man” (1955). The writers on “The Flintstones” came up with household item/Stone Age transposition gags. Avery and writer Heck Allen tried a bit of a different approach. A couple of these are classic Avery gags; the “long distance” one goes back to Avery’s days at Warners.







The animators are Walt Clinton, Ray Patterson, Mike Lah and Grant Simmons, and Johnny Johnsen drew the backgrounds. Clinton worked on the original Flintstones series as a layout artist. June Foray provides an uncreditted voice.

And if you wondered where all those clothes came from, Avery and Allen provide the answer.

Scaring Betty Boop

When Carlo Vinci worked at the Hanna-Barbera cartoon factory in the late ‘50s, he used to draw a fear or shock take with two drawings—one of them with all kinds of things standing on end. The drawings would then be alternated, one per frame, until the effect sunk in.

Vinci no doubt picked up the idea animating in New York. The same effect appears in the Betty Boop cartoon “The Impractical Joker” (1937). Betty is scared by obnoxious Irving’s snake-in-a-pipe.




Tom Johnson and Frank Endres get the animation credits. Tom and his wife Marina both worked at the Fleischer studio (the 1940 U.S. Census lists him as a director and her as a checker). Frank and his wife Ann also both worked at the studio. You can read about him at Bob Jaques’ fine site here.

How $weet It Is

“When you’re hot, you’re hot,” sang Jerry Reed. And he ought to know. His Smokey and the Bandit buddy Jackie Gleason could have told him.

There was a time that TV networks would sew up stars, and then wonder what to do with them while the contract slowly ticked away. Gleason wasn’t the only one.

Leslie Lieber was the television editor for “This Week,” one of many magazine supplements available to newspapers that wanted to pay for it instead of compiling their own Sunday edition feature section. He crunched some numbers and reported back on June 7, 1961.

The blue-ribbon entertainment stars on this page are members in good standing of an exclusive TV brotherhood: they’ve all been paid fabulous sums of money, upwards of $25,000,000, by TV networks for doing absolutely nothing.
The Columbia Broadcasting System, for instance, has been legally bound to pay Jackie Gleason $100,000 for each of the past five years and will hand out a million more to their roly-poly sponsor-magnet by 1970, even if the great man takes it into his head to pull in his professional horns and spend the next decade snorkling off the Bahamas.
In 1951 the equally-charitable National Broadcasting Company contracted to pay $60,000 a for 30 years to Milton Berle, alternately revered at that time as Mr. Television and Mr. Tuesday Night.
Although both Berle and Gleason have been fantastic money-earners for their respective employers, the fiscal folly which endows them for life is not purely a gesture of sentimental gratitude. They, and other big-time beneficiaries on this page, are known in television as “hot properties.”
Early in the fat fifties, whenever a TV network’s delicate thermostatic gauges indicated that a performer was “getting hot,” the reaction was almost automatic — the network signed the star to an exclusive high-salaried guarantee and then no rival network could ever get their mitts on him!
The talent panic-button had been pushed loud and clear back in 1947 [sic] in what will always be remembered as “Paley’s Midnight Raid.” In that year showbiz history was made when a posse from CBS spirited Jack Benny away from NBC, where he had mistakenly been thought to be securely tethered. CBS signed NBC’s top sponsor-bait to radio’s first million-dollar contract amidst a blaze of photographers’ flash-guns. Over the years Benny’s desertion lost NBC untold millions in sponsor money and alerted all the nation’s networks to clasp “hot properties” to their bosom with hoops of gold.
Ten years ago, for instance, when money still grew on TV antennas and the network’s talent cupboards were frighteningly bare, NBC made sure their gilt-edged Phil Harris would never leave them. They guaranteed him better than $50,000 a year over a period of years. Unfortunately Phil Harris never even got a program of his own and has made only guest appearances singing expensive versions of “That’s What I Like About The South.”
We tried to reach Mr. Harris by phone to ask him if he was unhappy to be artistically stymied by his fabulous contract. We were told he was out on the Thunderbird golf course adjacent to his Palm Springs estate the first time we called, and fishing for Columbia River salmon with Bing Crosby the second time.
Wally Cox, the erstwhile “Mr. Peepers” of a few years back, seems very content, however, to bury himself with a luscious long-term NBC contract, the kind some of his confreres might consider a trap. Wally has been getting $50,000 a year on an eight-year contract since Peepers closed in ‘55. He's obligated to pay NBC off by appearing on programs mutually agreed upon. But so far that’s only meant one other series plus a couple of guest shots on the Hope and Paar shows.
The happy country boy
“Security is very nice. I have no series but I’m very happy with the NBC arrangement,” says Wally Cox, a country-boy at heart, as he serenely surveys the cattle roaming over his 100-acre farm.
In the early ‘50’s Red Buttons was the biggest thing in television. At the end of the 1955 season, however, he was dropped. To be on the safe side, the National Broadcasting Company signed him up for a year at $75,000 to “do three spectaculars.” But Red was never called on to deliver.
NBC paid Shirley MacLaine $300,000 for her services through the 1958-59 TV season. But there just weren’t enough spots to use her, and Shirley wound up collecting some $30,000 for each of her appearances. “NBC must be hard up for talent,” shrugged Shirley nonchalantly.
It isn’t often that either network meets a star who, no matter how much he or she loathes being artistically fenced-in, will let the corporation off scot-free. Such a doll was Imogene Coca — and NBC could kiss her for being so nice. In 1954, shortly after the demise of the Sid Caesar show, NBC prudently signed Imogene Coca to a million-dollar contract which guaranteed her $100,000 annually for ten years. A year later, Miss Coca offered to walk away from the contract at no cost to NBC in order to enjoy more artistic freedom.
Her offer was gratefully accepted.
Big deal for budget beavers
What being released from such a disbursement means to network budget beavers may be gleaned from the following statistics: a TV chain seldom makes more than five per cent on its gross. If you guarantee a performer $100,000 a year and then can’t put him to work you have to sell $2 million worth of business just to pay him his salary. (Or maybe it’s those deadhead salaries that keep the profit margin down.)
NBC undoubtedly used Coca’s unexpected $900,000 moratorium to meet the guarantees of other life-in-clover payrollees such as Jimmy Durante, Jerry Lewis, Jerry Lester, Martha Raye, the late Fred Allen and Robert Montgomery — some of whom paid off handsomely on NBC’s investment while others either begged off or were bought off their contracts.
Although many network investments fizzled, some paid off dazzlingly. When Phil Silvers wowed Broadway audiences in “Top Banana,” CBS bigwigs sniffed paydirt. After the show finally closed they gave Silvers a lucrative guarantee, shut him up in a creative hot-house with another high-priced risk talent — writer Nat Hiken — and gave them six months and $150,000.
But out of that whopping down-payment in faith and hard cash came one of TV’s most lovable, profitable, and indestructible “hot” properties — Sergeant Bilko, alias Phil Silvers.
Are the long-term, pay-if-you-work, pay-if-you-don’t contractees unhappy and frustrated at receiving so much unearned increment?
“They're about as unhappy, restless, and unfulfilled as any man can get with $100,000 a year flowing into his bank account,” says a former high CBS official.
We've just made another telephone call to Phil Harris’s house in Palm Springs to ask him point-blank how unhappy he is about his NBC yoke. This time Mr. Harris was back from fishing, but he still wasn’t home. He’d gone to the Santa Anita track. So we still don’t have any idea how unhappy he is. –The End

After the story was written, Gleason made a comeback with a Miami Beach-based variety series. Cox went on to voice “Underdog” and warm the upper-left hand seat on “Hollywood Squares.” Harris voiced a couple of popular animated Disney features in between rounds of golf. Shirley MacLaine and Jerry Lewis had huge success in film and likely didn’t look back on their TV careers. Imogene Coca co-starred in “It’s About Time.” Okay, so not all of them were raving successes. But it’s interesting to note that many of the stars who had been handed a paid semi-retirement were still in demand when they decided to go back to work. It just proves they were really stars all along.

Walt Gives Credit

I’ve never been very impressed with Jack King’s work as a director at Warner Bros. in the mid-‘30s. But I sure like his caricatures of fellow staff members when he was at Disney that were published in the June 20, 1931 edition of The Motion Picture Daily. Best of all, King even made drawings of the Assistant Animators.

Uncle Walt and composer Frank Churchill got caught in the gutter between pages so you can’t see all of them. But you can click on the photo of each page to view the rest.




Since I’m not amongst the throng of Disney experts, I was quite surprised to see the names of several people associated with the studio among the assistants. Frank Tipper, George Grandpré and Cecil Surry all moved on to the Walter Lantz studio; Surry and Grandpré spent some time at Warners, as did Joe D'Igalo, Carlos Manriquez (many years later) and Dick Marion, who got screen credit on TV animation as Dick Hall. Chuck Couch worked for Lantz, too. Of course, the best known out of the bunch on that page is likely Roy Williams because of his television work in the 1950s on “The Mickey Mouse Club.”

Seeing the caricatures is fascinating because Disney had a reputation of never, ever, giving anyone credit for his cartoons, certainly not after Ub Iwerks left to start his own studio in 1930. But not only are they seen (so to speak) in the Daily, there are short biographies on them in one of the articles. Some are gags, as you’ll be able to tell. The paper says three copy editors and two proof-readers fixed all the typos but I’m sure you’ll spot at least one glaring one.

CAROLYN SHAFER, research chief: “Was born of poor but dishonest parents, in Indiana by special permission of Will H. Hays. Came to California to become physical culture teacher, but discovered there were more dumbells in movies than in gymnasiums. Also a tendency to plumpness made be a poor advertisement for my chosen profession. Have spent years of study trying to determine whether Mickey Mouse sleeps with his whiskers inside or outside of the bedcovers.” 
FRANK CHURCHILL: “I was born in New England, but somehow escaped a Puritanical conscience. Came to Los Angeles at the tender age of four and am still hanging around. Started as a plumber at the age of twelve until I read in a magazine where some one guaranteed piano playing in twenty lessons. After receiving my diploma from the post office I immediately went to work at $16 a week in a Main Street picture palace. I’m still up in the dough. At present I’m trying to write musical scores for cartoons.” 
DICK LUNDY : "I was born in or around the locks of Saulte St. Marie, Mich., at a very young age. At the age of four I visited Detroit for about ten years, where they made me go to school. I then got the wanderlust and after seeing several towns in several states I landed in California on a box car one foggy morning in 1921. I received my art education at Venice High School and was graduated from there in 1926. Since that time I have been called battery-man, chauffeur, banker, real estate salesman, and various other names. Since 1929 until now I have been having the happy experience of seeing Mickey Mouse do the right thing at the wrong time.”
EARL DUVALL: “Born June 7, 1898, in a front room across from the Navy Yard, Washington, D. C. Public schools too difficult . . . entered business college. Big success at fourteen as page for U. S. Senator Joseph Weldon Baily of Texas. Joe got in bad with Senate and Mrs. Duvall’s son joined the regular army. Served during the war at Hazelhurst Field, Mineola, New York. After the war hooked up with New York World and then entered art department Washington Times. Later with Washington Post, Bell Syndicate, New York. Came to California for no reason whatsoever and Walt gave me a job. Married, have one son and hay fever.” 
BERT LEWIS : “Born in St. Louis, Mo. Played at Philharmonic one year. Scored many pictures such as “Pollyanna,” “Woman,” and others. Organist at various theatres before coming to Walt Disney.” 
BURT GILLETT: Like Hal Roach born in Elmira, New York, and we were both brats in the same school room for years. .Served my apprenticeship in life as a newspaper reporter and cartoonist. Ten years of writing and animating in Mutt and Jeff, Inkwell, Fables and Felix the Cat. For the past two years have been helping to put the laughs and life into Mickey Mouse and Silly Symphony.” 
HAZEL SEWELL: “Head of the inking and painting department. Am Walt’s sister-in-law and they say a successful wife and mother besides running the traceing dept.” 
BILL GARRITY : “They call me the chief sound man, and I make all the noise around the studio. Being Irish I enjoy being a very jolly sort of a companion for the sound stage.” 
BILL COTTRELL: “Born 1906 South Bend, Ind., of English parents. Learned to speak English in 1910. Went abroad in 1920. Sentenced to salt mines in Siberia for soaping royal wind shield of Czar Nicholas’ carriage. Escaped to California in 1923. Attended Occidental College in 1920. Awarded consistent freshman medal 1926, ‘27, ‘28, which included a paid vacation at Lincoln Heights, the third year. Two years behind the crank at Disney’s camera and has never been in focus yet.” 
GILLES DE TREMAUDAN : “Am called Frenchy for short. Born in Manor, Saska., Canada, because my folks lived there. Graduate of Franklin High School in L.A. Two years playing at art at Otis Institute. Expect my career as animator to end with each preview.” 
FLOYD GOTTREDSON : “I have it on good authority that I was born in Utah. (No, Mormons don’t wear horns.) Played hookey from art education by mailing empty envelopes to my correspondence school. My facial attributes are a composite of striking resemblances to Calvin Coolidge, Bull Montana and Richard Barthelmess. (Ed. Note —Please enclose 25c. for all fan photos, to be mailed direct from Walt Disney Studio.) Awarded aluminum medal by four Marx Brothers for inventing collapsible jail with removable bars in 1928. Worked as projectionist until Will Hays organization discovered what was wrong with the industry, then suddenly decided to become a cartoonist after 19 years at the drawing board have decided to take up art. Employed by Walt Disney for the past two years, and as long as Mickey pays the grocery bill I can’t kick.” 
WILFRED JACKSON : “I was born in Chicago but moved before I could join Al Capone. Did the next best thing by settling in Glendale. Always had a yen for cartooning and after leaving Otis joined up with Mickey Mouse and have been making a living ever since.” 
JOHN CANNON: “For no good reason I was born in Terre Haute, Ind., the son of a boilermaker. The reform school was too crowded so I enrolled in Venice High School. I failed in everything but necking. Walt Disney gave me a job leading the animals out on the sets. I married a home town girl and now that there are to Cannons we can make BOOM BOOM, and soon there may be some little cartridges running around, being proud of their POP !” 
JACK CUTTING : “Fell off a rose bush in Central Park, New York, about 1908. Later transplanted to California soil. Am being carefully cultivated in the Walt Disney nursery. Started career as cartoonist by playing on the Mickey Mouse baseball team. This naturally lead to animation.” 
RODOLPH ZAMORA : “I was born in Mexico City. My dreams were to become a respectable dope fiend, but I could not accomplish this so I lost all self respect and became a cartoonist. I lived at the expense of Pat Sullivan and now Walt Disney carries the burden.” 
DAVID HAND : “I was born in the shadow of my father’s brick-yard at Plainfield, N. J. Visited Plainfield High School. Tried lumber-jacking in the North Woods. No soap! Studied cartooning under Orr and DeBeck at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts in 1917-18, and while there located my future wife. Started animating Andy Gump in Chicago 1919. Fascinated by easy work and big money decided to stick. With Bray Studios, Out-of-the Inkwell, Eastman Educational Films, and now Walt Disney’s Mickey Mouse and Silly Symphonies.” 
TED SEARS : “Born : Pratt Falls, New York, in 1900.
“Educated in pool rooms.
“Youngest graduate of Elmira Reform School, ‘09.
“Married Eva Tanguay in 1913.
“Two children, Lew Cody and George Bernard Shaw.
“Favorite sport : Murder.
“Batting average : 237.”
BEN SHARPSTEEN : “Born in Tacoma, Wash. Graduated from agricultural college but gave up agrarian pursuits to help out Uncle Sam’s Marines during the war. Marine life made me so lazy I couldn’t bear the thought of hard work again so I became an animator, joining the old International Film Company in New York. Work as an animator on old Mutt and Jeff cartoons and on Fleischer’s “Out-of-the-Inkwell.” Twice deserted the ranks of animation for newspaper and commercial art. Guess I am too old to make another change so will stick to animating as long as it sticks to me.” 
W. NORMAN FERGSUON : “I was born on the East Side of New York in 1902. Played games in and out family entrances of saloon on Second Avenue until chased by bartender. Sold newspapers on Fifth Avenue at the age of ten. Had ambition to become fireman but moved across the bridge to the wide open spaces of Brooklyn and decided to be a cowboy instead. Was transferred from public school to high school in Brooklyn by mistake and much to every one’s surprise became a stenographer. But consistent misspelling forced me to draw pictures for a living. And then came Mickey Mouse, with whom I have been associated in California for the past two years.” 
EMIL FLORHI : “Chief cartoonist for Judge for many years. Art Director for Once a Week (now Collier’s Weekly). Installed color system for the New York Sunday World. Studied portrait painting in Munich, also landscape. Painted portraits of four different Presidents of the United States and various movie stars here and well known brokers and society people of New York. I can paint equally as well with my toes as my fingers. My greatest ambition has always been to paint the princess of an African king, but I have never had enough cash to get to Africa.” 
LESLIE CLARK: “Born only in 1907 due to the bashfulness of my fond pater. Received early education at the corner saloon in Bingham, Utah. Entered the department of the Peoria City Street Service in 1919, which later afforded opportunities for many follow-ups, including a position of beach combing on the sands of Venice. Began my art career designing labels for tomato cans which enabled me to later break into other branches of artistic endeavors such as decorating tire covers. At present I am with animated cartoons.” 
JACK KING : “I was born in Birmingham, Ala., where Al Jolson first heard the name of ‘Mammy.’ I became restless at the age of four and decided to become a millionaire. In 1914 I worked with Barre, who was starting work in the animating field. Along came 1917 and the U.S. joined the Allies. Years after the Armstice I was driving a truck which ran into a Ford. The man driving the latter turned out to be one of the world’s greatest humorists. His name was Walt Disney. Of course Walt’s ambition was to get even with me for running into him. so when he formed his Mickey Mouse organization he sent for me. I’m putting one over on Walt though and am enjoying it.” 
THOMAS PALMER : “I was born in New York under the signs of prohibition and Tammany Hall. The urge to draw substituting the proverbial spoon in the infant's mouth, I decided to be a bleck shipp. After studying life drawings at the Academy and various other social clubs. got tired of looking at contours and drifted into commercial business. The lure of the flickering funnies was irresistible so I entered the animation business with Mutt and Jeff. Then worked with Oswald the Rabbit, until Mickey asked me over to his studio.”

The other interesting article amongst the various stories is Walt relating the birth of Mickey Mouse. No stories of characters being grabbed from him, no train rides, no suggestions from wives, no mouse on a drawing table. We’ll have to post it with some other pictures at a later date.

High Diving Julian

Try this—picture the great cartoon “High Diving Hare” (1949) with a score by Bill Lava, backgrounds by Tom O’Loughlin and those late-‘50s box-head character designs that Hawley Pratt came up with. Doesn’t work as well, does it? It shows you how everything and everyone had to mesh to make a Warner Bros. cartoon, and how moving to a more representational style of drawing after the ‘40s didn’t make things as entertaining on the screen in some cases.

Friz Freleng played a winning hand with the early Bugs Bunny/Yosemite Sam cartoons. “Bugs Bunny Rides Again” may be my favourite, but this is among the tops. It features subtle but expressive animation, Friz’s perfect gag timing, a right amount of silliness and, of course, Sam always explodes and Bugs always wins. Oh, and Paul Julian provided great sets. I’ve always liked how he uses colour changes to simulates highlights.

I wish the opening background that’s panned was in someone’s collection and on-line. Here it is in three frames.





Julian plants a reference to Friz in the last one. Frizby is a magician appearing on the bill. Some more backgrounds.









And one background is used as a gag. Sam falls for it. Literally.



The cartoon was released in April 1949 but still playing in theatres as late as January 1951. Here it is on one of those Saturday matinees for kids. One Bugs and three Terrytoons. You remember The 3 Magpies, don’t you? And, yes, people couldn’t spell in 1950, either.

If you want to know more about the animators on this one, drop by HERE.

An Interruption Smaller Than a Breadbox

On live television, when things don’t go as planned and something accidental happens, that’s okay, When things don’t go as planned because someone unexpectedly and selfishly interrupts the show, that’s quite another.

The difference was lost on one reporter.

Last year, we featured a post marking the anniversary of someone from the audience walking onto the middle of “The $64,000 Challenge” to push his agenda. On this date 50 years ago, the same thing happened on “What’s My Line?” And one columnist thought bringing the proceedings of the show to a confusing standstill was a great idea.

TV Review
Unexpected Mystery Guest Adds to Show
By HARRIET VAN HORNE
Scripps-Howard Staff Writer
NEW YORK, Oct. 8 — The bizarre incident that enlivened (or, from the other side of the screen, disfigured) last night’s telecast of “What’s My Line,” will be regarded in some quarters as proof that the only safe shows are tape shows.
The home audience, one imagines, would disagree. Something wild and unexpected is what this aging panel show needs.
A viewer could only feel a wave of sympathy for the confused chap, who leaped from the audience to the stage, crying, “I am the mystery guest!” But my goodness, what excitement! Such mystery guests should pop in more often.
Highly Agitated
Unfortunately, I was not watching the show when this curious little contretemps occurred.
But it appears that a 37-year-old clerk seated in the audience became highly agitated when Greek actress Melina Mercouri — the real mystery guest — made her entrance.
“It’s supposed to be me!” said Ronald Melstein. And before the ushers and pages realized what was happening Melstein was on stage, on camera and on several million home screens.
Then, just as quickly, he was off. (Off to the police station, as it happened, though there are those who say he should instead have got the minimum fee for walk-on part and a word of thanks from the show’s press agent).
It was M. C., John Daly who expedited Melstein’s exit. With typical British sangfroid he simply asked for volunteers to show the gentleman to the wings. The gentleman was shown — so quickly that the entire incident, observers said, took less than a minute of network time.
Sad Little Tale
How Melstein got the notion that he was the mystery guest is, at this writing, the oddest mystery of all. One report said he’d been approached on the street by a stranger who offered him a ticket and assured him he could be the mystery guest. All in all, it’s a sad little tale.
Viewers who’ve long been weary of watching beekeepers and lady bulldozer pilots submitting to the dainty probings of Arlene and Dorothy may be hoping that the excitable Melstein will inspire What's My Line? to new heights. An occasional imposter from the audience (“will the real mystery guest please stand up?”) might restore a bit of the old zest to this Sunday parlor game.
Incidentally, last night’s was not the most disastrous walk-on in the annals of show business.
The theater’s historians are still writing about the night the great Sarah Siddons, playing Lady Macbeth, had an unexpected visitor during her sleepwalking scene. It was the callboy, bringing her the beaker of ale she’d ordered him to fetch from a nearby tavern. Instead of delivering it to Mrs. Siddons in her dressing room between the acts, he delivered it stage center.

One wonders how columnist Van Horne mistook the Bostonian Daly for an Englishman. She must have known something about him since he was a veteran newsman in his own right. But she was correct that “What’s My Line” had settled into a routine, though it lasted on nighttime network television another five years then returned in the ‘70s for a syndicated run with a somewhat lesser panel and host.

Unlike the man who walked onto the “Challenge” set, I haven’t discovered what became of the interloper at the centre of this story.

You can watch what happened below.