I Hope It's Funnier Than This One

“The Early Bird Dood It!” (1942) is one of Tex Avery’s cartoons where the parts are funnier than the whole. It’s full of typical Avery gags, but I just can’t handle the main characters (the Lou Costello whistle of the worm gets annoying after a while).

The bird chases the worm as a Scott Bradley cacophony plays in the background. They stop at a billboard. It’s advertising the cartoon they’re in.



The bird turns to the worm:

Bird: Say, I hear that’s a pretty funny cartoon.
Worm: Well, I hope it’s funnier than this one.

The worm leaps up and the chase resumes.



Here’s the title card. It’s a different colour. I don’t know if it’s the original card or from a Gold Medal reprint.



Irv Spence, Preston Blair, Ed Love and Ray Abrams get the animation credit. Frank Graham plays the bird.

The Anonymous Fibber McGee

On the face of it, it makes no sense that “Fibber McGee and Molly” never made it on television. It was incredibly popular on radio for years. It may be the only radio show that spawned two spin-offs that went on to some success on TV while it lagged behind.

But it boiled down to a few things. Jim and Marian Jordan didn’t want to compete in what they called “a killing rat race.” They certainly didn’t need the money. Marian’s health was never very good. And when the show finally did move to TV, it was 1959, seemingly generations removed from its heyday, and featured two different actors in a format not the same as what radio listeners heard for years.

Here’s an Associated Press column from 1953. Radio is already been treated as something passé. Jim Jordan talks about television and that fine byproduct of radio—anonymity in public.

Radio's Still Good Enough for Fibber and Molly, But Maybe--
By JAMES BACON
HOLLYWOOD, Nov. 21.—(AP)— Fibber McGee and Molly vow radio is still good enough for them, even though the pay is less than half what it used to be in the pre-television days.
It's well known in the trade that many a sponsor would love to convert the saga of Wistful Vista from radio to television. If ever a format were ready made for TV, the story of the bungling Fibber and his practical Molly is it.
"We'll probably do TV one of these days," promises Fibber, "but we found out on our last trip to Peoria that a lot of people still listen to radio."
Mild Humor Is Goal
When that time comes, Fibber hints that he will not try for any sock belly laughs. "It makes you too hard to watch, unless you're Red Skelton or Abbott and Costello. I hate situation comedies that keep pushing too hard for the belly laughs.
His favorite television show is "Mr. Peepers."
"That show will last because it's easy to watch," says McGee.
Although McGee doesn't admit it, television might deprive Molly and him of one of-the joys of life for celebrities. The two, despite their success, are seldom recognized.
Privacy Uninvaded
As Jim and Marian Jordan, they love to take trailer trips and fish. Fibber tells of the-time they went fishing up in northern California. They spent five days with other campers and never once were associated with their famed radio characters.
On the last day a fisherman in the camp landed a big one and asked all the others to sign a certificate so he could carry his proof back home.
"I looked at Marian and she looked at me and said, 'Why not?' since we were leaving camp anyhow. I signed it 'Fibber McGee.'
"The guy got sore at me and said, 'Why did you have to sign that liar's name? Now no one will believe me'."
Another time a friend took them to visit an Indian woman and her family near Santa Fe, N.M.
"The whole family sang and played guitars. Our friend said to the woman, Do you know Fibber McGee and Molly?' She answered 'How does it go?' "

The Jordans held on to radio as long as they could, after just about everyone else had deserted it. In 1953, “Fibber McGee and Molly” switched from a nightly half-hour once a week to a daytime 15-minuter five days a week. Then the show moved to NBC’s all-weekend-long hodgepodge called “Monitor,” a show which still has fiercely loyal fans and attracted top announcers and other talent. But Fibber and Molly found themselves like countless people in the radio business—unceremoniously dumped. Indispensable talent one day is unwanted airwave clutter the next. Such is the nature of the radio business, as anyone who has worked in it for any length of time can honestly attest. Here’s a story from United Press International from February 4, 1960 about the end of Fibber McGee and Molly.

TAIN'T FUNNY TO McGEE
Wistful Vista Pair Out After 33 Years
By Rick Du Brow
HOLLYWOOD (UPI) — Jim and Marian Jordan, radio's original Fibber McGee and Molly, are out of a broadcasting job for the first time in 33 years — and they're looking for another one.
Jim, 63, and Marian, 61, two of radio’s pioneers, are not at all happy about being let out to pasture by NBC. And they don’t pull any punches about how they were let go.
“It was just the turn of a word in August,” said Jim. “We asked them if they wanted us back the next week, and they said no. We were on a four-week notice basis anyway.
“BESIDES OUR weekly bits on the ‘Monitor’ show, we had done some things for a program called ‘Stardust,’ and apparently that ‘Stardust’ thing wasn't making money.”
Interviewed in his white, two-story home, Jim, who is stout and gray-haired, said he heard that new “Fibber McGee and Molly” series on television was a contributing factor to his and Marian’s release.
The TV series stars Bob Sweeney and Kathy Lewis.
“We heard NBC wanted to avoid confusion that might be caused by two sets of voices.
“But other shows — like ‘Gunsmoke’ — have different casts for radio and TV.”
* * * *
THE JORDANS, who met 45 years ago in their home town of Peoria, Ill., are looking for the leisurely kind of radio job they had for the last few years on “Monitor.”
“We’d like to be doing something,” said Jim. “On ‘Monitor,’ we did 10 three-minute bits a week. We did it ourselves on tape. There wasn’t much glamor and excitement, but we enjoyed it.
“We can’t do anything much more strenuous because doctors have told Mrs. Jordan to take it easy. We’ve been knocking ourselves out for years.”
Doctors’ orders are one of the main reasons the Jordans didn’t attempt the frantic pace of TV production — and originate the video version of “Fibber McGee and Molly” themselves.
At first, said Jordan, NBC wanted him and Marian to do the TV version.
“NBC bought the Fibber and Molly names in 1949,” he said. “The idea when we made the sale was that we were to continue pretty much as we had. Then the pressure started on us to do TV right away.
“But all our people and our common sense told us not to do it. After all, we were on top of the radio heap and had fine contracts — and we felt we shouldn’t do TV until it was necessary. And our doctor told us not to.
“If the business had been developed and refined in 1953 the way it is now, we might have started on TV. But there was too much emotional stress then. We didn’t know how to do it, and nobody else did either.
“THEY ALL had to learn, and a lot of them keeled over on the way. So NBC started trying to find other people to play our parts. We helped. After all, we still have a financial interest in the series.”
Jordan made it plain he misses the days when Fibber’s clogged closet, Molly’s exasperated “Heavenly days” and the shenanigans at Wistful Vista were a part of Americana.
“But we’re not retired,” he said. “We just disposed of a ranch, we’re fixing up our house and we’re planning a trip. And we’re lookin’ for work.”

You don’t retire from radio. Radio retires you. And that’s what happened to Jim and Marian Jordan. Marian died in April 1961 from her continued poor health. They never made it back on the air after “Monitor” except in reruns on old-time radio broadcasts evoking nostalgia. Truly was it appropriate that Fibber and Molly lived on Wistful Vista.

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.