A Piece of Mickey Tail

In an era of smart-ass cartoon characters of Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Woody Woodpecker and Heckle and Jeckle, Walt Disney had an idea—let’s make more Mickey Mouse cartoons.

One wonders what Disney was thinking in 1951. Perhaps he saw the success—and accolades—UPA’s “Gerald McBoing Boing” had recently received and figured the time was right to spotlight a non-rambunctious character who could be child-like if need be. At any rate, the plan—if there really was one—was short-lived. The lion’s share of the studio’s shorts weren’t the mouse’s share; they starred Goofy or Donald Duck.

Here’s Disney talking about it in a feature story with the Associated Press. The most puzzling thing about the Story According to Disney is something else entirely. It’s his comment that Mickey had not been drawn with a tail in years. I fully admit I’m not conversant in the Disney shorts, but I looked at copies of “Mickey’s Garden” (1935) and “Mickey and the Seal” (1948). He has a tail in both. So I don’t know when Mickey was tailless.

The photo accompanying the story is a publicity shot of “Pluto’s Party” (1952), directed by storyman Milt Schafer. Perhaps appropriately, a tail enters the plot.

Mickey Mouse, One-Time Film Favorite, Hits Comeback Trail
By JACK QUIGG
Hollywood, March 3. (AP) — Mickey Mouse, all-time international movie favorite, is hitting the comeback trail. He’s getting his tail back, too.
After ten lean years, the fabulous rodent, who in some 125 films has played scholar, great lover, cowboy, explorer or medieval knight with equal aplomb, is set for a new series of starring roles. “We never really dropped Mickey,” says Walt Disney, who created the tiny dynamo 22 years ago and made a fortune off him. “We just kind of drifted away from him.”
The toast of the world 15 years ago, Mickey began taking a back seat to other members of the Disney cartoon family in 1938. That was the year Walt made his first feature-length fantasy, Snow White. That year also marked the emergence of Donald Duck as a rival. Disney’s crew, which once turned out 15 Mickey Mouse starrers a year, cut back to three or four. Donald, Pluto and Goofy, who broke in with Mickey, became famous in their own films. Dumbo, Bambi and the Three Caballeros stepped into the limelight in elaborate feature pictures.
Was ‘De-Emphasized’
Disney says Mickey was de-emphasized, not because his popularity waned but because he’s tricky to handle.
“Only my top men are good enough to work with Mickey,” Disney says (he’s always done Mickey’s voice himself). “Because he’s a nice, sympathetic character, not a natural comedian like Donald. It takes a lot of ingenuity to write a story for Mickey.”
During the war the little fellow became a complete casualty; Disney was devoting 85 per cent of his production to special armed forces projects. Mickey has made only four or five films since.
With his comeback in four cartoons this year, many of the younger generation will be meeting Mickey for the first time; and they'll be seeing him with a tail. Maybe you’ve forgotten that Mickey has been tailless for more than a decade.
When Walt first drew him he was a skinny little tyke. His only clothes were a pair of shorts and shoes and he had a tail. But for one reason or another, Walt can’t remember exactly why, they lopped his tail off.
Why tack it on again?
“We came to realize,” Walt says, “that he’s not as cute without it. It’s an expressive thing. I remember he used to twirl it when he was nervous or angry. It carries him through action smoothly, gives him balance and grace.”
There have been other changes through the years. As he aged, Mickey graduated to long pants. They gave him a shirt. Once spidery, his limbs thickened and his body assumed a pear shape. His eyes, formerly dots, were given lids. In the new series he’ll have eyebrows.
Mickey wasn’t Disney’s first love. The first was a cat. The second was a rabbit named Oswald. But Walt wasn’t quite satisfied. He wanted to make improvements and when the company he worked for said no, he launched his own business.
The first two mouse cartoons didn’t make much of a splash. The industry was being turned topsy-turvy by a new element—sound. Walt took his third Mickey to New York and had it synchronized for sound. They premiered Steamboat Willie at the old Colony Theater in New York in 1928 and the mouse was famous.
There never was a more versatile fellow than Mickey. He’s been a tailor, a steam shovel operator, fire chief, cop, musician, magician, inventor, football hero, polo player, farmer, whaler, tourist, hula dancer, scientist and gas station attendant.
He's been around the world—to Argentina, Alaska, Africa, the Alps, Arabia, Brazil, even to Gulliver’s mythical Lilliput. Once he got going there was no stopping him.
His piping voice was translated into ten foreign languages. He had fan clubs in 50 countries. His likeness was given a choice spot in Mme. Tussaud’s waxworks in London. He got into the Encyclopedia Brittanica and got Disney into Who’s Who. He won Disney an Academy Award and countless other accolades. And his face appeared on armed forces insignes and on hundreds of commercial products.

Mickey, of course, made a real comeback, but I’m sure Disney didn’t know about it at the time he talked to the AP. In 1955, “The Mickey Mouse Club” appeared on the air, with Mickey as a friendly host. Mickey didn’t have to worry about comedy or carrying a cartoon short, All he had to be was genial, and that was his strong suit by then. The same thing could be said about Mickey’s voice when he hosted his own show starting a few years later.

A Hidden Saloon Owner

The story goes that MGM cartoon producer Fred Quimby wanted Hugh Harman to produce funny cartoons like they were making at Warner Bros. So Harman made “The Lonesome Stranger” (1940), even though he had no interest in that style of cartoon. Its puns and surreal gags remind one of a Warners cartoon of that era. And so did some of the posing. Here’s Harman emulating a mouth exaggeration popularised by Tex Avery.



Mel Blanc adds some familiar voices to allow for a further comparison with the Warner cartoons. But because this is a Hugh Harman cartoon, there’s character movement all over the place. It seems like the whole cartoon is animated on ones so Harman can show off how fluid his animation can be (ie. just like that unspeakable Walt fellow). Warners was quite content to use twos unless necessary so the visuals of this cartoon don’t really look like a Warners cartoon, despite the similarities.

You’ll see an inside gag in the background. The saloon is run by Willie Hopkins. Hopkins was one of the original layout people hired by Quimby when the studio opened in 1937. Like Harman, his career went back to the silent days, but a bit further than Harman’s.

Willie D’Artigue Hopkins was born in Scotland on November 9, 1884 and emigrated to the U.S. in 1904, marrying Georgie King of Delaware and settling in Philadelphia by 1905. His first child died at birth, his second at age 11 months, his third survived into adulthood. His 1918 draft card lists him as “sculptor, Universal Film Co.” and living in Los Angeles. He was one of the first workers in clay animation, releasing “Miracles in Mud” every other week as part of the Universal Screen Magazine starting in late 1916. Hopkins, inexplicably living in Dallas, patented his process with a Charles L. Sudmann in 1916. In 1919, he was the art director for “Everywoman,” a Bebe Daniels-Monte Blue film released by Paramount, and was responsible for the palace sculptures in Douglas Fairbanks’ epic “The Three Musketeers” (1921), including a 5 1/2-foot bronze bust of Charles I. In May that year, an unbylined piece in the Evening Independent of Massilon, Ohio revealed Hopkins had begun a production company and had toured ten countries with the idea of making 26 “short features each depicting the native surroundings of a famous poet, author or composer.”

In 1930, he and his wife, who was under a nurse’s care, were still in Los Angeles, but by January 1931, Film Daily revealed he was working in the special effects department at Paramount in New York. His wife was buried in Los Angeles in October 1934 and Hopkins re-married. He and his new wife Marion T. (a doctor) are listed in the 1938 Los Angeles Directory not far from filmdom’s Gower Gulch (they were on Gower between Sunset and Hollywood Blvds). His occupation is “artist.” The 1940 census lists him as “technician, motion picture studio.” He never received credit on a single MGM cartoon; none of the layout people did for many years.

Hopkins died in Los Angeles on August 29, 1949. By then, Metro was releasing real Tex Avery pictures. It didn’t need uninterested Hugh Harman’s fakes.

The Thrifty Tex

Tex Avery re-worked and re-used gags over and over, and his spot gag cartoons of the ‘50s were no exception. All of them seem to have a mother-in-law joke, including the fine “Field and Scream.” Two of them refer to “The Thrify Scotchman model.” You know, Scottish people are cheap. Yuk, yuk.


The Car of Tomorrow


TV of Tomorrow

This may give you an idea how involved Avery was in gagging his cartoons—“Car” was written by Roy Williams and Rich Hogan while “TV” was written by Heck Allen. I doubt they came up with the same “Thrify Scotchman model” term independently. That Western the Scotsman is watching got some mileage, too. It’s a running gag throughout “TV” and surfaces in “The Three Little Pups” and “Drag-a-long Droopy.” A thrifty use of gags.

I'm Flabbergasketed

Hollywood made a couple of movies about Al Jolson and one about Eddie Cantor. It’s a shame it didn’t do the same thing with Jimmy Durante.

Jimmy’s life had enough drama and atmosphere to make a good film (especially with a little dramatic embellishment). So it’s a shame that some studio didn’t work out a deal when it had the chance. Durante’s biography was written in 1949 by one of W.C. Fields’ drinking buddies, Gene Fowler, and United Press columnist Virginia MacPherson learned an option on it was being pursued in Tinseltown. She talked with Durante about it. A couple of things about her column are interesting. One is that she, like everyone else it seems, wrote Durante’s quotes in his dialect. The other is that Durante didn’t get a cent from the sale of any books. Fowler got it all. That just doesn’t seem quite fair. Dem’s da conditions dat prevail, I guess.

MacPherson obliquely refers to the fact that Larry Parks played Jolson on the screen because Jolson was too old. The immortal Keefe Brasselle was Cantor for the same reason. But she’s right. Who else could play Durante but Durante?

The column is from 1949.

‘Flabbergasketed’ Jimmy Watches ‘Schnozz’ Sales
By Virginia MacPherson
HOLLYWOOD, Dec. 23. (U.P.)—Jimmy Durante whose life story “Schnozola” has hit the best seller lists already, says he’s “flabbergasketed” anybody’d shell out three bucks to read about him.
“I really am,” rasped the little guy with the big beak. “An’ dat’s a fack. It’s sold more ‘n 50,000 awreddy . . . Imagine! All does people gittin’ on de inside o’Durante.
“I’LL BE ENTERTAINING at the Greater Los Angeles Press club. Maybe I oughta take a few copies down ‘n peddle ‘em, huh?”
Jimmy doesn't get a penny of the proceeds from all this—those go to author Gene Fowler and the publishing firm.
“But what I’m gittin’ outa dis, honey,” he twinkled, “couldn’t be bought wit money.”
DURANTE SPENT months “spillin’ my heart out” to Fowler, who lolled in an easy chair, turned on a wire recorder, asked a question now and then, and just listened happily while the “Schnozz” spun his yarns of the old days in show business.
“I didn't have any idea what he was gonna put in," Jimmy added. “To tell de troot, I t’ink he left out a lotta good stuff.
“AND I DON’T like the pitchas he put in. A lotta dem are just gags. Day don’t belong in a book like dat. But what the heck . . . It’s a helluva good writing job.
“I’ve read it free times myself awreddy. And dere’s parts of it dat jist make me cry. Jeez, it sure brings back the memories . . . it sure does.”
IT’S PROBABLY gonna bring him a lot more ‘n that. MGM, 20th-Century-Fox and Paramount studios are scrambling for the rights to put it on the screen.
"Dis story’s gotta be told,” Jimmy nodded. “Not on accounta Durante. Heck, dere’s more about Lou Clayton in it dan there is about me.
“But it’s a nice story about me and my Missus and Eddie Jackson and Clayton... all the people who've been wit’ me fer years. It’s a kinda family story. Make a good pitcha, I betcha.”
THE MASTERMINDS are already looking around for a young feller to play Durante’s part. At which point MacPherson, the No. 1 Durante fan in these parts, will register an official complaint.
All the “Schnozz” needs to look 20 years younger is a little hair. What he’s got left is white and kind of wispy. But Mac Factor’s wig experts could remedy that in two shakes.
HE WAS NO BEAUTY when he was 16 and he’s no beauty now. But the same old gleam is still here.
“Da’s ‘cause I’m still havin’ fun,” Jimmy says modestly.
“And I’ve kept me shapely figger. No bulges around Durante’s diagram.”
No sir, the idea of anybody else playing Durante is something we don’t even like to think about. It’d be nothing short of heresy.

Real Gone Brushwork

A bunch of things go into making “Real Gone Woody” (1954) the best cartoon made by Paul J. Smith. Mike Maltese’s story helps. So do some neat backgrounds by Ray Jacobs. Woody’s pretty attractively drawn in the first scene (though the action isn’t all that exaggerated). There’s some great use of brush strokes to indicate speed. Here’s the fight scene with Woody and Buzz. The characters go in a spin cycle with outlines and brush lines.



Then Woody zooms over to Winnie.



The characters become nothing but lines in the climax at the end when Woody and Buzz each grab Winnie and pull her into their cars. Here are a few examples. I like the surprised reaction of Woody in third drawing below. He has his leg up.



The action moves faster and faster and so does Clarence Wheeler’s score. Smith has the camera pull in and then things stop for the plot twist.

The animators are La Verne Harding, Bob Bentley and Herman Cohen. Harding stayed with the studio for many years, the other two were journeymen.

Cat-Tails Background

“Cat-Tails For Two” is the first Speedy Gonzales cartoon, evidently thought of by director Bob McKimson as a one-shot character, like the crow in “Corn Plastered” (1951). Speedy was rescued a few years later by Friz Freleng, redesigned by Hawley Pratt and sent on his Merrie Melodies way to the podium at the Oscars. That assured Speedy of his continued appearances in cartoons, eventually to be bastardised into a ridiculous and boring series with Daffy Duck in the mid-‘60s. The less said about those cartoons, the better.

The short opens with a pan over a dockside background, painted by Dick Thomas from Bob Givens’ layout.



“Cat-Tails For Two” was the final cartoon released by Warners for the 1952-53 season (August 29, 1953). If you’re curious about the origin of the name Speedy Gonzales, feel free to check out this book on the web. The term was known on the Great White Way; Walter Winchell reported in his column of December 2, 1952 that “Paul Hartman was In and Out of ‘Two’s Company’ so fast the Lindians are calling him ‘Speedy Gonzales.’”

Thanks to Matt Hunter for some memory-jogging background for this post.

No Shock Comedy

The Jack Benny show tried something novel on its season-opening broadcast of 1949-50. It had the Benny cast and incidental players talk about him for the first 22 minutes before Benny himself appeared on the show. The writers built up the gag so Jack’s appearance came as an unexpected, but inevitable, surprise.

Not everyone liked it. The novel show was panned by a columnist for the New York World-Telegram for not being “surprising.”

Frankly, she didn’t know her typewriter ribbon from a hole in the ground.

Harriet Van Horn doesn’t seem to have understood either audiences in general or the Benny show in particular. She appears to have been another culture vulture who detested much of radio and television, but was quite willing to accept a good salary covering them.

You can read her column below. It’s from the December 4, 1949 edition of the Pittsburgh Press, which would have been responsible for the sub-headline about a “girl columnist,” which strikes me as superfluous and an unnecessary put-down based on gender.

Jack Benny Slapped Down For Late Start on Radio
Comic Is Given Verbal Spanking By Irate Girl Columnist
By HARRIET VAN HORN
It’s traditional in the theater that the star make his (or her) entrance only after the proper atmosphere of expectancy has been created.
A tingling hush, and almost tangible tension—and on sweeps the great one! It’s a fine moment in the theater, in its way every bit as exciting as that glorious split second just before the curtain rises.
In radio, fine old traditions have been mightily abused. One night Jack Benny, returning for what must be the 100th year in radio, postponed his entrance until seven minutes before the end of the show. By then it didn’t matter a thought that prompts the irreverent sequitur: would it matter if he hadn’t come on at all?
No, I don’t think it would have. After all these years the Benny show runs by automatic pilot. Namely, the familiarity all listeners have with the established characters and their established responses. Pavlov’s dogs, obediently drooling when the master ran the bell, demonstrated no more faithful adherence to the principal of the conditioned response than do members of Mr. Benny’s company (Not to mention the studio audience).
There is almost no spontaneity left in the program. Its pattern, plotted on a graph, would change scarely at all, week after week, year after year. One can almost envisage the jokes being turned out a full season in advance, Willow Run style. Faithful designs by experienced hands.
But where is the “shock” element, the swift and stunning surprise that’s half of every laugh?
I find it not, except occasionally in the remarks of Dennis Day. Here is one of the funniest men in radio. Listening, nobody at my house managed more than a bored smile—until Dennis and his shrewish mother came on.
She said “This year, Dennis, I think you should insist that Mr. Benny pay you in American money.” Seems she found it inconvenient to run down to Mexico to cash his checks.
Dennis protested loyally. Had not Mr. Benny come to his rescue when he was ill and needed an operation? “Yes,” conceded his mother, “but I still think you took a chance letting Rochester take out your appendix.”
There followed numerous jokes about Dennis’ incision being held together with scotch tape. Surprisingly, each one seemed funny. Other repetitive jokes, such as the one about Mr. Benny buying everybody a dinner at the Brown Derby, gathered only moss. When he finally made his entrance—having driven to the studio on a sight-seeing bus with the most noxious, offensive conductor I’ve ever heard, on the radio or off—Benny revealed that he’d forgotten his script. Left it on the bus.
He had no cause for alarm. Mary, Dennis, Phil, Rochester and all the rest of the cast could manage without him indefinitely.

Miss Van Horn decries the lack of spontaneity on the Benny show but then praises the routine between Dennis Day and his mother (played by Verna Felton), ignoring the fact the scene isn’t spontaneous in the slightest. Each word has been, like everything on the Benny shows except the occasional ad lib, carefully checked over and weighed by Benny and his writers. There is no “shock” element any more than there is a “shock” element in a performance of The Tempest or La Scala. The audience knows what they’re going to get. That’s why they go to see the performance. Radio is no different. I doubt Miss Van Horne would compare a theatre audience watching The Importance of Being Earnest to Pavlov’s dogs for reacting predictably to scenes it is intimately familiar with. After all, it’s the uplifting THEATRE, not something common like, ugh, radio.

The challenge the Benny show met—and won—year after year after year was to have enough familiar elements that they didn’t need to be part of each broadcast, and when they appeared, to make them a bit different to surprise the audience. Benny had to have learned from someone like Joe Penner, who had three catchphrases and after burning out the audience with them, had nothing else. Of course the conductor (played by Frank Nelson) is “noxious.” That’s the idea. He’s supposed to conflict with Jack. The conflict is the comedy.

Miss Van Horn apparently never really understood the job of a radio/TV columnist. She once complained to Esquire magazine about the prospect of reviewing “I Love Lucy” or “Gunsmoke” 20 times. Didn’t she understand that isn’t the job of a columnist? One writes about a subject if they have something to say about it. They don’t write about a TV show solely because it’s a TV show. If “20 times” is another bit of her facetious exaggeration, like her crack about the Benny show being on “100 years,” it falls flat.

If anything, Benny’s writers proved the remark of her opening sentence, not disproved it. Jack made his entrance “after the proper atmosphere of expectancy has been created.” His audience was delighted with the surprise. Jack didn’t abuse “fine old traditions” at all. He reaffirmed them.

The Cameraman Who Wrote a Cartoon

He wrote one cartoon and vanished from Hollywood forever.

The Leon Schlesinger studio began expanding its release schedule in 1937 and that meant it had to hire cartoon writers. And it hired them from everywhere. Dave Monahan ran into Tedd Pierce and got a job. Ernie Gee was a high school buddy of Bob Clampett’s, hired after Howard Baldwin came from somewhere but wasn’t to Clampett’s liking. Warren Foster had worked for the Fleischer studio and came recommended by assistant animator Mike Maltese. And then there was Fred Niemann.

Niemann’s name appears on one short—“Now That Summer is Gone” (1938), directed by Frank Tashlin. Then, he vanishes, never to appear in connection with animation in Hollywood again.

So what happened?

We’ll get to that in just a moment. First, some biographical notes compiled from census and other U.S. government records and some clippings from various newspapers.

Fred Stepina Niemann was born March 14, 1912 to Fred William and Ida M. (Stepina) Niemann, who had become married in Chicago in 1909. The Niemann family owned a prosperous table-making company. One of Niemann’s uncles apparently killed himself in 1905 after shooting a woman who may, or may not have been, his wife. Another uncle was sued for $50,000 by a woman for breach of promise. Niemann’s dad deserted his mother and she won $50 a month in a divorce in October 1916, though census records in 1920 list her as a widow. She married George Griffiths, a construction company owner, before 1930. Niemann went to the Boys’ Latin School, Culver Military Academy and Brown University. He married Laura Leppler in Wilmette, Ill. in 1935. They were still in Chicago in September 1936. By then, Niemann had his own business, Fred S. Niemann Productions, specialising in (as the Brown Alumni Monthly put it) “films for business and television,” even though all of Chicago’s pre-1939 experimental TV stations had signed off for good. There’s nothing to indicate any of Niemann’s films had anything to do with animation. Regardless, something induced him and his wife to move to the West Coast, and the pair are mentioned in a social story in the Los Angeles Times on Feburary 8, 1938.

How did a man like this get hooked up with the Leon Schlesinger studio? Was it because Schlesinger and brother-in-law Ray Katz had family in Chicago? Did he try to pitch an industrial film partnership with him? After doing all the research you’re reading here, I decided to look at the one cartoon where Niemann got credit. It’s on a DVD with a commentary by animation historian Mike Barrier. I should have listened to it first because it would have saved me some time; Mike had already dug into the subject some years ago (he interviewed Tashlin, for one thing) and came up with some answers.

[Niemann] worked for several different directors but he and Tashlin were certainly the ones that hit it off the best. Fred was not your typical cartoonist. He was from a very wealthy Chicago family and attended Brown University. He was movie-smitten and came to California hoping to become a cameraman but union restrictions kept him out. Fred and Frank Tashlin were extremely different people from very different backgrounds. Tashlin was from New Jersey and worked as an errand boy in cartoon studios in New York and they found each other very compatible and remained friends. Fred did not work at the Warner Bros. studio more than a year or so and then he went back to Chicago, started his own motion picture company and had nothing more to do with animation.

By 1940, Niemann was divorced, and living with his mother and step-father in Chicago where he owned a commercial photograph business. He got engaged on New Year’s Eve 1940 but his fiancée married someone else in 1941. Niemann had other problems dating back to his stay in California. The Daily Globe of Ironwood, Michigan published this story on December 15, 1944:

ARREST FRED NIEMANN ON CHARGE OF FRAUD
Fred S. Niemann, 32, of Chicago, arrested by Ironwood police Wednesday on a fugitive warrant for check fraud in Los Angeles, was placed on $500 bail bond in Ironwood municipal court before Judge C. C. Keeton Jr. yesterday. Being ill he was taken to Runstrom’s hospital where he is under police guard.

Charges were withdrawn by police in Los Angeles the following month and Niemann was off the hook.

In Chicago, Niemann resumed making industrial films. Among the titles I’ve been able to find—“Skid Row,” a documentary of Skid Row Chicago produced about 1950; “The Church Moves In” (1950), a documentary about the work of the Chicago Christian Industrial League in a run-down part of Madison Street; “The Vicious Circle” (1951), tracing the downfall and rehabilitation of a man who used alcohol to attempt to escape from reality, “The Choice is Yours” (1952, 23 minutes), featuring young people questioning a science teacher about alcohol and “Behind the Skyscrapers.” The latter three were produced for the Women’s Christian Temperance Union.

Niemann died in Chicago on March 29, 1997 at age 84. His Chicago Tribune obituary refers to his work “as a gag writer and story man with Merrie Melodies Cartoons.” The sad thing is he only got one credit, and it was removed from the screen when the titles were lopped off in 1947 and the cartoon was re-issued as a Blue Ribbon. Fortunate, we have historians like Mike Barrier who had the foresight to talk to many people involved in the Golden Age of Animation—famous and obscure, some who are no longer with us—who can provide us with some insight into the people who made those wonderful little films.

Popeye Killed Harpo

In “Sock-a-bye Baby,” Popeye tries to keep New York City quiet so the baby in the pram he’s taking care of can sleep. The topper is none of the loud city noises (cars, construction, a ship’s horn) will wake the child but the drop of a pin will.

The gags are really good and the violence is funny. Oh, and there’s a celebrity caricature. Popeye kills him with one punch.



Harpo develops a halo and he and his harp ascend to wherever Jewish vaudeville harp players go in the afterlife.

The best gag is an old one. Felix the Cat used to travel through radio wires in silent cartoons in the ‘20s. Here, the force of Popeye’s punch travels through a radio outside a store, and all the way into a city in the distance where it comes through the microphone and knocks out the singer, who’s belting out a version of Johnny Green’s “Out of Nowhere.”



Sammy Timberg has a nice violin arrangement of In “Rock-a-bye Baby” over the credits. Seymour Kneitel and Doc Crandall get the animation credit.

Retrieving Larrimore

“Easy, Rover. That’s no way to retrieve a duck,” says Daffy to Larrimore the Dog in “To Duck or Not to Duck” (1943). “Look!” And Daffy then flips under him and grabs the dog’s mid-section (which sags under the weight) by the beak. Here are a few of the drawings.



Then Daffy throws him to the ground. A few more drawings. Fine rubbery animation here.



Chuck Jones made some fine Daffy cartoons in the ‘40s before he changed the duck’s personality to a bitter fall-guy, er, fall-duck. I like the old Daffy better. Tedd Pierce wrote the story.

There’s some interesting smear animation in this cartoon from Bobe Cannon, who gets the only animation credit.