Volcanic Tom

There are some neat bits of acting by Jerry in the early Tom and Jerry cartoon “The Bowling Alley-Cat” (1942) is one of them where the mouse is almost balletic in the opening few minutes. And Joe Barbera pulls off a nice gag with Tom where Jerry twirls and throws the cat by the tail from the slippery bowling lane into an ash tray which forms a volcano over him.



Tom pops up from the top of the “volcano” then spits up a pipe.



Tom gives a head shake take that takes up almost a foot of film. 14 drawings; a little over half a second.



And then a one-eyed look.



Unfortunately, no animators are credited on this cartoon, nor is the fine background artist.

Tom and Jerry were at their peak in the 1940s. Once the designs started flattening out and becoming cheaper looking, the characters lost a lot of their personality. Adding little ducks, little mice, little birds and a suburban couple didn’t really help.

Porky's a Drip

Pick a favourite Bob Clampett cartoon, you ask? Forget it. Impossible. But I’ve always loved “Porky in Wackyland” since I was a kid, especially when the Do-Do rides out on the Warner Bros. shield. There’s so much bizarre stuff to look at.

Here are a few frames from just one scene where Porky turns into a drip. The Do-Do lures him into the entrance of a shaft.



And out a faucet somewhere in Wackyland.



The drip (part of which splashes away) reconstitutes into Porky.



Izzy Ellis and Norm McCabe get the animation credits. There’s no story credit.

It's in the Bag

Was there ever an interview where Fred Allen was happy?

We’ve posted the handiwork of a number of newspaper columnists here who—rather easily, it seems—got Fred to gripe about any one of a number of the same old things. And I’m reminded how Fred told readers in Treadmill to Oblivion how annoyed he was when his radio show was expanded to an hour, then annoyed when it was contracted back to a half-hour several seasons later. He bent ears of columnists about network radio in general but then griped that shooting movies sucked compared to the fun of radio.

In the column below published October 17, 1944 in papers subscribing to the National Enterprise Association service, Fred grumbles about the method of making movies. As usual, he expresses amazement that absurdities of a given situation are accepted and allowed to flourish. The movie in question was “It’s in the Bag.” Its satiric concept (expressed only basically in this column) is very funny on paper. The film itself isn’t as funny. The one time I saw it, I got the impression it was a movie that was trying to be funny while relying heavily on the familiarity of radio characterisations to get laughs. I kept wondering when a scene would end and the plot would lurch onward.

The column, by the way, seems incomplete. It doesn’t come to a conclusion, it just ends. But that’s the way I’ve found it in five different papers, so I guess that was the columnist’s intention.

BY ERSKINE JOHNSON
NEA Staff Correspondent
Working in the movies annoys him, Fred Allen groaned. If it wasn’t for those green hermans, he would rush right back.to New York and make with the jokes on the radio. That’s fun, he says. Working in the movies isn’t.
So today we give you Fred Allen’s primer of minor Hollywood annoyances titled, “What the Heck Am I Doing in the Movies?”
There is, for example, Hollywood’s quaint little habit of saying everything is great. That annoys Allen.
“They shoot a scene,” Fred said, “and the cameraman says ‘Great!’ The sound man says ‘Great!’ The director says ‘Great!’ The assistant director says ‘Great!’
“And then what happens? They put the picture together and it stinks.”
Fred was talking into n telephone the other day for a scone in his new flicker “It’s in the Bag.” It was a very intimate scene.
“So I looked up for a second and I’m looking right into the face of a sailor who is visiting the set. We both get a shock and I forget all my dialog.
“You can’t move around in front of the camera,” Fred moaned. “You have to stay in focus and you can’t spoil the lighting. The perfect actor in Hollywood is one with rigor mortis in his body and a neon head.”
QUIET PLEASE
An airplane flew over the sound stage. The soundman yelled, “Airplane!” and director Richard Wallace stopped Allen in the middle of the scene.
That annoyed him. “The roof of this sound stage is so thin, he said, “that we have to stop shooting every time a sparrow walks across it.”
Rushes annoy Allen. “There’s no use seeing them,” he said. “Everybody says ‘Great.’ I like to wait until the picture is finished and get the full impact all at once." Getting up at 6 o’clock in the morning annoys Allen.
“Today I got up at 6 o’clock to crawl through a window. They shot the scene of me crawling through the window at 2 p. m. I lost eight hours sleep. And will the scene be in the picture? No. They’ll cut it out after the first preview because my fanny is out of focus.”
Matching up scenes shot several weeks apart annoy Allen. “Two weeks ago,” he said, “we filed a scene outside an opera house. I was mad about something. Next week we’re going to film the rest of the scene—where I rush into the joint—and I’ll have to remember how mad I was three weeks ago so it will match.”
Fred plays the owner of a flea circus who thinks he is about to inherit 12 million dollars from his favorite uncle. Instead, he is willed five antique chairs and a phonograph record. He sells the chairs, then plays the record. His dead uncle speaks to him from the record, saying he was murdered and revealing that $300,000 is hidden in one of the chairs.
MEATY PLOT—WITH RIBS
Allen’s problems in retrieving the chairs from their new owners is the film’s plot. Gangster Bill Bendix has purchased one of the chairs. Jack Benny has another one. The Benny sequence has promise of being the year’s funniest film scene.
Allen poses as the president of a Jack Benny fan club, saying he wants the chair as a memento for their club house. Although flattered, Benny refuses to sell the chair but finally agrees, for a handsome fee.
There are plenty of ribs. When Allen asks for a cigaret, Benny points to a 15-cent cigaret machine in his living room. When Allen has to use the telephone, Benny asks him if he has a nickel and leads him to a telephone booth in the hall.

A Tale of Two Terrys

It’s kind of funny that someone would interview Paul Terry at the dawn of sound cartoons about the use of sound in animation. Terry didn’t want to get into sound. Leonard Maltin’s Of Mice and Magic reveals that a dispute over switching from silent cartoons caused him to quit the studio he co-founded to set up his own company with Frank Moser in some kind of partnership with Audio-Cinema. However, reality must have struck him, or there was another reason he quit the Fables studio, as Terry’s new company never made a silent cartoon. Audio-Cinema seems to have vanished from the scene in 1931 (Terrytoon’s Bill Weiss told historian Leonard Maltin how the sheriff came to the door one day to shut down the company) and Moser was eased out in 1936.

Terry’s cartoons of 1930 are typical of what was coming out of New York at the time. Little dialogue to slow down the pace. Characters and things morphing into other things. Body parts as musical instruments. Dancing skeletons. Ethnic stereotypes as gags. Terry cartoons also featured angular layouts of cityscapes which still look neat. Oh, and lots of mice. Why mice? Terry addresses that in this news story that appeared in papers around June 23, 1930.

SOUND HELPS ANIMATED ART
By DAVID P. SENTNER,
International News Service
Dramatic Editor.
NEW YORK.—“Sound has helped the animated cartoon more than it has any other type of moving picture,” said Paul Terry, one of the pioneer creators of the animated cartoon, in an interview today.
Terry was the first to use animals as characters throughout a moving picture cartoon. “In the early days of animated cartoons, the mere fact that a drawing moved satisfied us. Then came emphasis on the quality of the story, next came ‘gags’ and the following development was the speeding up of the pictures.”
Every exposure in an animated cartoon must be drawn by hand. Then they are run together under the moving camera eye.
“We used to think 1200 drawings was a lot of work,” continued Terry. “But now 5,000 drawings are used in a picture and since cartoons became audible, the new method evolved is highly complicated.
Terry makes rough drawings to outline the story. The scenario, along with a chart showing the running time of each gag, then goes to Philip A. Scheib, orchestra conductor, who writes the musical score, makes individual orchestral arrangements and the various sound effects to be made in conjunction with the music.
With the use of a stop watch, a chart is made showing the exact time in, which the characters are moving, when the pause comes in a dance step, and how long a vocal note is held by a character—all to the fraction of a second.
The orchestra records the music on one strip of film while the drawings are photographed on another strip. To a third strip of film with a sound track, the sound is transferred first, and then the photography is transferred, completing the sound-on-film process.
Terry said he favored the use of a dog, cat and mouse in his cartoons, as the public was more familiar with these domestic animals than any others.
He pointed out that a commercial advantage of producing animated cartoons was that they are mostly sound, music and movement, so that they did not have to be changed for foreign markets as in the case of ordinary moving pictures.
“Our idea is to have the music so closely interwoven with the cartoons that one tells the story as well as the other,” said Scheib, the orchestral part of the team. Terry was born in San Mateo, Cal. He was formerly a newspaper cartoonist in Portland Oregon, San Francisco and New York. Fifteen years ago he started making animated cartoons. He originated the “Aesop’s Fables” series, made the “Farmer Alfalfa” animated cartoons and produced the first “Krazy Kat” series. Now he is blending sound with those thing-a-majigs for Educational Pictures.

Terry was part of one of the earliest brother combinations in commercial animation. John Terry animated for a time but chose to express himself in newspaper comics. He came up with a Lucky Lindy clone named Scorchy Smith. He didn’t draw Scorchy for long. Terry was infected with tuberculosis and died in 1934. This story and accompanying photo are from the Monitor-Index and Democrat, Moberly, Missouri, July 26, 1930.

Noted Artist Draws New Strip of Flying Adventures
Adventure is no stranger to John C. Terry, creator of Scorchy Smith, the story of a boy aviator’s daring exploits, which will appear as a daily strip in the Monitor-Index, beginning Monday.
A colorful career in the west, a host of exciting experiences in rugged mountain country and a keen interest in aviation combined to arouse Terry’s enthusiasm in creating the story of Scorchy.
Although Scorches fearless piloting and narrow escapes are fictitious, Terry places them, in realistic settings, of which he gained intimate, first-hand, knowledge through following the precarious trails of the Rockies during his youth.
Pioneer in Animated Cartoons.
Terry first won national fame as one of the pioneers in producing animated cartoons for movies. He is a brother of Paul Terry, creator of the animated “Aesop’s Fables” and the two have been recently associated in the production of animated drawings synchronized with sound.
Before entering the movie, business, John C. Terry was a cartoonist on a number of leading metropolitan newspapers in New York, San Francisco and other western cities. He participated in several notable political campaigns in the western copper districts while acting as staff cartoonist on a Montana newspaper.
Made Memorable “Beat”
In 1906, he won credit for a national picture “scoop” by sending out of the city the first photographs of the San Francisco quake and fire. He was spending a vacation near San Francisco when news of the disaster-reached him. Rushing to the scene, he obtained some excellent pictures and by a devious route, managed to place them on a train for Anaconda, Mont., where he was associated with the Standard at the time. The pictures were distributed from Anaconda to newspapers throughout that section and it was several days before any other photographs became available.
Similar thrilling experiences, his fertile brain and genius for vividly depicting action and breath-taking suspense are reflected in Terry’s latest creation,' find, the one he regards as his outstanding production, Scorchy Smith. Watch for it every day in the Monitor-Index.

Aw, Come On Horsie, Whoa!

You know the gag in Bugs Bunny cartoons where Yosemite Sam can’t get his horse (or camel, or elephant, or whatever) to stop and pleads with it to “whoa”? It originated with the Sheriff Deadeye character on the Red Skelton radio show. But Oswald the Rabbit had an interesting variation on the routine back in the silent days. In “The Fox Chase,” Oswald yells at his horse, with his yelling spelling the word “Whoa.” The letters fly through the air and hang in front of the horse. When the horse ignores them, the ‘A’ develops legs and the word runs in front of the horse. Then the ‘W’ develops hands that push against the horse to make him stop.



There’s no animator credit on the cartoon. The title card reads “A Winkler Production by Walt Disney” but Disney wasn’t drawing anything by then. Reader Devon Baxter says the animator is Ham Hamilton.

What's Droopy Doing in There?

What’s Tex Avery’s most outrageous take in “Northwest Hounded Police”? There’s probably no answer to that one; fans have their own favourites, I’m sure. But one of the most outrageous ideas in the cartoon is the fact that Droopy is hiding in a lion’s stomach.



Heck Allen gets the story credit. The animators credited are Walt Clinton, Ed Love, Ray Abrams and Preston Blair.

And since we did it last time we posted about this cartoon, we’ll do it again. Check out Brandon Lyon’s blog for some clipped-together background pans from this cartoon.

Laurel and Hardy and the Tie Fight

It’s an intriguing idea—a brand new series of Laurel and Hardy routines at the dawn of network television. Would it have worked in an era of neo-vaudeville by the likes of Berle, Cantor and Wynn, surrounded by commercial interruptions?

One thing is for certain. Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy wouldn’t have been considered an anachronism in 1950, considering many people today became fans of the boys by watching their old films on television a long time ago. They were—and I don’t know how much argument I’ll get by stating this—the greatest movie comedy duo in history. They might have been able to overcome TV’s need to grind out endless new material, quickly, using less-than-advanced technology. They might not have been able to overcome age and health; I suspect that’s part of the reason they did so little television in the first place.

Still, they had plans to get into the new medium, as the following column from the NEA syndication service attests. It appeared in newspapers around November 27, 1951.

HOLLYWOOD CHATTER
By ERSKINE JOHNSON
HOLLYWOOD (NEA)— Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, the screen’s laugh champions of the ‘30’s who upset the champs-never-come-back legend in the ‘50’s when 300 of their old two-reel comedies popped up on television, are as the movie ad writers say, “together again.”
For the first time in five years they’ll be on your neighbourhood theater screens this winter in a feature comedy, “Atoll K.”
And they’re being deluged with TV offers.
They’re not making a dime out of their two-reelers, filmed between 1926 and 1941 and currently riding the crest of the video channels. Hal Roach made a $750,000 outright sale of the old celluloid when the boys weren’t looking.
But while it hurts in the wallet it’s inflated their morale.
“A whole new generation of kids have discovered us,” Hardy beamed.
“And not one kid has said, ‘Gee, you guys sure have aged,’” Laurel grinned.
When will they become TV regulars now that they’ve been de-mothballed and Stan has recovered from the serious illness which put him in a Paris hospital for three months this summer?
“When we can do it on film,” Hardy whimpered. Laurel echoed Hardy:
“We want to get off on the right foot and when it's live you never get off the left foot.”
There are no big casts and no big flossy production numbers in the blueprints for new Laurel and Hardy comedies whether they are for TV or movie theaters.
“It will be the same situation comedy,” Hardy made it clear, “with one set and no more than two or three other actors in the cast. We have to be together. Split us up and put us with other people and we’re gone. Everything that happens to us happens in a little corner.”
Laurel, as usual, will be supervising and helping write the scripts.
“It has to be visual stuff,” he said. “Too many radio writers are writing radio gags for television, which is a visual medium.
“We’ve been accused of being temperamental because we want to supervise our stuff,” Hardy let it fly. “Well, that’s not true. We just know what’s right for us. We refused to do a picture for a certain producer at Fox. He called us to his office and said:
“ ‘Sit down. boys, and tell me what you don’t like in the script.’
“We asked him, ‘Have you read it?’
“He replied:
“ ‘Well, no, I’ve been a busy man lately.’
“That’s when we quit. How can you do a movie when the producer hasn’t even read the script?”
Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis may clown it up off stage, but you’ll never catch Laurel aim Hardy in a mad routine unless there’s a camera pointed at them.
“We worry about people thinking we’re fresh,” Hardy explained it. “Every time we go to a formal dinner party we see people looking at us as if to say, ‘I wonder when they’re going to start throwing the butter patties?’ But we never do and never have.” “We started something once,” Laurel remembered with a grin.
Hardy remembered, too.
It was at an MGM formal dinner party at the Roosevelt Hotel after the Hollywood premiere of Lawrence Tibbett’s “The Rogue Song.”
“The Who’s Who of Hollywood were there,” Hardy said.
“A really snooty formal affair,” Laurel added.
“Suddenly a drunk walked up to me,” Hardy said, “and pulled off my bow tie with the crack, ‘I can do that comedy, too.’
“Well, after I’d had a couple of drinks I looked up this character and grabbed his tie. It was on an elastic. It snapped back and rocked the guy on his heels. He got mad and pulled off the collar of my shirt. Then Stan started grabbing and everybody got into the act.
“Buster Keaton was in tatters and even Louis B. Mayer pulled off a couple of ties.” But offering pranks at the studio—uh-uh. Laurel and Hardy take their work too seriously.
“A guy once got pushed into a pool at the Hal Roach studio. He sued me and collected $500,” Laurel sour-faced it.
“You know something? I was on the set but I didn’t push the guy.”
“The funniest thing that ever happened at the Roach studio when we were working there,” Hardy remembered, “was when a laundry truck backed into the same pool. Roach was mad as h—. It killed some of his goldfish.”

The thought of Laurel and Hardy, Buster Keaton and even little Louis B. Mayer in an anarchic tie-pulling match is as funny as anything put on film. If you can picture it, it proves just how good Laurel and Hardy were.

Don't Look at This

How many reactions can you get from one routine? If you’re Joe Barbera coming up with a story in the glory days of Tom and Jerry, you can get a bunch of them.

Take “Mouse Cleaning” (1948) for instance. It’s another one of those shorts where the housekeeper threatens to toss Tom out of the house if something happens and Jerry ensures that something happens. In this case, it’s messing up the house. Jerry puts fountain pen ink in a bucket of water Tom’s using to clean the last mess. Tom then realises what’s happening.



Leonard Maltin used a drawing just before the last one in Of Mice and Magic to show Tex Avery’s influence on the Hanna-Barbera unit.

Unfortunately, there seems to have been a deliberate decision NOT to release this cartoon in the coming chronological Tom and Jerry DVD set for collectors. Presumably, it’s because the cartoon has a Stepin Fetchit routine at the end. As usual, Thad Komorowski ably and succinctly sums up the situation on his blog.

It’s a Bull Cycle

Here’s an animation cycle from “Strong to the Finich,” where youngsters from Olive Oyl’s Health Farm for Children are threatened by two bulls and Popeye uses (what else?) spinach to punch them punchy.

Each punch twirls a bull into a little circle in the air. The circle cycle animation’s on five drawings on ones. Observe the bull to the left.



And you can talk all you want about how Disney used weight and movement, but the Fleischers knew about it, too. You see how part of the bull’s mouth is held back by gravity vs. the force of the blow.

This 1934 cartoon shows you the rut the Popeyes got into by the ‘50s. You knew what was coming. Bluto conned Popeye, bashed him senseless, then came on to Olive. Her screams result in Popeye somehow eating spinach and kicking Bluto’s butt, then singing a plot-appropriate verse of his theme song. There’s no Bluto here, Popeye’s theme doesn’t play during the fight scene or even during the climactic spinach eating (“You’ve Got to Be a Football Hero” is featured on the soundtrack) and it’s not full of endless chatter. Instead we get a stool that toddles over to Olive so she can sit on it, a dead sapling that morphs into an apple tree (then the apples morph into pineapples and bananas), and a kind of indistinctive “Our Gang” group of kids, complete with a little black boy accepted as an equal by the others (but no girls).

Seymour Kneitel and Doc Crandall get the animation credits. Olive here is pre-Mae Questel.

Julius Tannen is the Key to Success

The Dean Martin Roasts on TV were a direct descendant of the Friars’ Club testimonial of top stars of show business going back over 100 years. The Dean Martin affairs were edited, soundtrack-sweetened (sometimes poorly) and corny; the only joy in watching them today is to see some old-time stars in the same place. The Friars Club affairs were private and featured the kind of humour you’d expect from men in private; you couldn’t put it on the air, though it’s probably tamer than some stuff on cable TV today.

So it was the Friars put the obscene gear to Jack Benny in 1963. Broadway columnist Earl Wilson was invited and reported on it. As much as he could, anyway. It’s interesting to read the Friars toned it down during their tributes to Lucy Ball and Sophie Tucker. I’m sure both could have taught the men a few four-letter words.

For years, Jack related how he started telling jokes on stage while in a revue during his time at the Great Lake Naval Training Center. But he tells a bit of different story here and bringing up the name of someone he emulated he never talked about anywhere else that I know of. Wilson’s column was published March 29, 1963.

It Happened Last Night
By EARL WILSON
NEW YORK – The Friars fried Jack Benny and had him for lunch a few noons ago—he was honor guest at a stag-party salute at the Astor where, by accident, six or eight printable lines slipped into the speeches.
“Jack doesn’t have an enemy in the world—he’s out-lived them all,” claimed Marty (Hello Dere) Allen.
“Sorry your contemporaries couldn't be here,” mused Joey Adams. “Harry Lauder, Douglas Fairbanks Sr.’s father . . .”
“There’s nobody in show business hotter than Jack, except Lenny Bruce,” explained Harvey Stone.
Roastmaster Johnny Carson casually mentioned Jane Morgan, Jack’s co-star at the Ziegfeld, and from then on the talk was masculine.
Top men in show business, millionaire manufacturers and merchants, leading editors and reporters—but no clergymen!—took time out to hear the humor that was not for feminine ears.
The Friars only soften their phraseology when they roast a lady—Sophie Tucker, Martha Raye and Lucille Ball make up the exclusive group saluted thus far.
George Burns, Harry Hershfield, Al Kelly and Harry Delf, veterans all, boasted of knowing Jack for ages. But youngsters Woody Woodbury and Charlie Manns bragged they didn’t know the old miser.
“Let’s all put $5 on the dias and retire him,” proposed Marty Allen.
Occasionally a speaker forgot to mention Jack and spoke only of himself. Red Buttons digressed to speak of his California community property divorce—“that’s when your wife gets half and her lawyer gets the rest.”
Arthur Godfrey groaned that he didn't have the right sort of improper jokes. Nor did Woody Woodbury.
“You’re going to have a meteoric disappearance from show business," Carson told Woodbury.
(“I went over,” Woodbury confessed later, “like an expectant mother in a bikini. I was as out of place as a male nude model in Playboy.”)
Jack doubled up with laughter the whole luncheon. Reminiscing, he said in his response that he really started as a violinist.
He began telling jokes by imitating great monologist Jules Tannen [sic] whom he deliberately copied. He remembered that the late Jack Lait, reviewing his first Broadway appearance, said:
“Evidently he has seen Julius Tannen, but not often enough . . .”

Tannen was still alive when the roast happened, but the obscure Charlie Manns (who died in 1971) likely wasn’t the only one who had never heard of him. Tannen’s career dated back to the turn of the century and he reached the pinnacle in the ‘20s—he emceed at The Palace in New York City. But Jack Benny did what Tannen didn’t. He adapted to change in the entertainment world. While stand-up star Tannen was reduced to playing bit parts in movies after vaudeville died, Benny parlayed his emcee job on stage into a hosting gig on radio’s The Canada Dry Program. The rest was history. He may have started off as a Tannen copycat, but he became something far greater on his own.