Size Matters?

Woody Woodpecker was remarkable in the hands of Paul J. Smith. He could change size throughout the cartoon just to accomodate a gag.

Take “Tree’s a Crowd” (1958), for example. Woody’s small enough to come out of a set of teeth.



No, wait. He’s the size of a human head.



But, at the end, he’s as tall as the rear end of a bus.



Could Bugs Bunny do that? Or Daffy Duck? Hardly! But they weren’t directed by Paul J. Smith.

Bob Bentley, Les Kline and Don Patterson receive animation credits.

I Told You There Ain’t No Ghosts

A basic, but neat, little trick is used in a fight scene in the Popeye cartoon “Shiver Me Timbers!” (1934).

Popeye, Olive and Wimpy mix it up with some ghosts. The drawings of multiple heads and body parts are nice to begin with. But instead of using them in some kind of cycle, not only are the drawings mixed up a bit, and shot on both ones and twos, the drawings are in positive and negative. It’s an efficient use of the artwork and looks like the fight is flashing on the screen.



Williard Bowsky and Bill Sturm receive the animation credits. Of note is this is the first cartoon where the opening title card reads “Adolph Zukor presents”. It wasn’t until many years after childhood that I learned that Adolph Zukor had nothing to do with the making of these cartoons.

As usual with an early Fleischer Popeye, the gags in the climax fight come at you quickly. Popeye kicks some bony skeleton butt to the tune of “The Stars and Stripes Forever,” which is always a plus for me. Is it any wonder kids liked Popeye over Mickey Mouse? It’s like comparing Elliot Ness to Lassie.

Pre-Strike Tales from Disney

Isn’t it great to hear stories from people who worked on the old theatrical cartoons, especially before World War Two? Some people have had the foresight to interview June Patterson, known at the Disney studio as June Walker. She’s the widow of Ray Patterson, who’s probably best-known for his animation on Tom and Jerry. You may have seen her name as June Patterson in the credits of the old Grantray-Lawrence Spider-Man cartoons from the ’60s.

Here’s the first of a three-part interview with her. You should be able to click on the other two parts after the first one is finished. There’s about three minutes of introductory material.



June’s mother worked as a bookkeeper at Disney and a cousin was Les Clark, one of the Disney studio’s first animators. She and Ray married in 1944. It was long union, ending with his death on December 30, 2001.

In trying to find out about their wedding, I found Ray’s marriage certificate—to his first wife.



Remarkably, Antoinette Love wasn’t related to any of the other Loves in the animation business at the time. She was from Fort Smith, Arkansas. Harry Love (at Mintz) was from New York City and Ed Love (at Disney) from Pennsylvania. It’s unclear when she and Ray divorced; they were still together in the 1940 Census.

Hurrah to the folks at The Corner Booth for conducting this interview and preserving first-hand animation history.

Oh, Rochester!

As the television years wore on, Jack Benny’s gang that made his radio show so great slowly broke up. Phil Harris left the show before it ever got to the tube (he was replaced by Bob Crosby, which is like replacing a neon sign with an LED light). Mary Livingstone didn’t want to do television and appeared only rarely. Dennis Day started showing up only occasionally as he had growing outside interests (and Jack went to a weekly show). That left announcer Don Wilson and Eddie Anderson as Rochester.

Judging by the reaction he got from the audience, Rochester was second only to Benny himself in popularity on the show. Everyone could cheer for—and identify with—a poorly-paid, put-upon employee who kept putting one over on his boss. All vestiges of racial stereotyping were eliminated from his character within a few years. I imagine Jack’s brushes with racism (a hotel where the cast was booked refused entry to Anderson, for one) had something to do with it; ridding him of black clichés made the subtle point to bigots that Rochester was no different than anyone else.

Here are a couple of newspaper columns on Anderson, both from United Press International. The first is from April 25, 1960, the second from November 15, 1968. Anderson addresses the racial aspect in the latter, speaking of those who had their eyes and ears solely fixed on his basic role on the show instead of how he played it.

Shouts As A Kid ‘Make’ Rochester
By RICK DU BROW
UPI Hollywood Writer
HOLLYWOOD (UPI) _ Eddie (Rochester) Anderson, Jack Benny’s brash stage valet, says he got the gravel in his voice that has earned him a fortune by trying to out-shout other newsboys as a youth.
“We really hawked newspapers when I was a kid in San Francisco,” said the impish, 54-year-old Anderson, who was born in Oakland, Calif.
“We thought that the loudest voice sold the papers, which wasn’t true, of course. Anyway, I ruptured my vocal chords from straining them.”
Wearing old work clothes and puffing on a cigar in his large, comfortable home, Anderson said:
“In the early days it looked like I was a gonna be a singer, but I wouldn't force that on anybody now.”
Anderson, now a little hard of hearing, lives with his wife, Eva and their three children — Stephanie, 7, Evangela, 3, and Edmund, 2.
He’s been with Benny for 23 years.
“I auditioned for him a week before Easter in 1937,” he said.
The audition was for the part of a railroad porter for a broadcast dramatizing Benny’s move to California from New York with his family.
The public loved “Rochester,” asked for more — and Benny’s writers wrote a script in which the comedian hired him away from the Pullman Co.
“Eventually, it might work into a steady job,” Anderson joked.
According to Anderson, the reason for Benny’s continued success on his CBS show is his forethought.
“He has a talent for planting a situation that will catch on and pay off maybe a year later,” he said. “It’s uncanny. And he knows his exact image to the public.
“Once, on radio, he got the idea for people to send in letters on the subject of ‘Why I hate Jack Benny.’ It might have been dangerous, but it worked out wonderfully.
“As for me, I enjoy my part to this day. I enjoy the situations and the family ties, you might say. I get a lot of pleasure out of the show.”
Nevertheless, said Anderson, he wouldn't mind having a show of his own.
“I certainly haven’t — and wouldn’t — divorce myself from Jack," he said, "but I think I could be fitted for a situation comedy.”
Anderson is one of Hollywood’s genuinely funny characters.
And nothing bothers him.
On his first broadcast, he showed up at the studio in while tie and tails with a top hat and an Inverness cape draping his shoulders.
And when a horse he owned won a race, he showed up at MGM studios in the costume of a Kentucky colonel and insisted that everyone call him Colonel Rochester.
"But I have pretty good common sense,” he said. “I didn’t marry an actress.”

In Saturday Television Special...
Benny and Sidekick Rochester Reunited
By VERNON SCOTT
HOLLYWOOD (UPI)— “Rochester!”
The name was invariably bleated with frustration for three decades by Jack Benny on radio and later television.
Comedian Benny made the name more famous than the municipality in western New York state. At the other end of Benny’s cry was Eddie (Rochester) Anderson whose social life and drinking habits were the despair of his boss.
After almost four years apart, Benny and Rochester will be reunited Saturday night in a television special, “Jack Benny’s Bag.”
It’s a new, hip format for Benny. The jokes will be more “in,” the dialogue “with it,” and the pace faster. But Eddie Anderson will be a part of the fun.
Hadn't Seen Benny
“Before we taped the show I hadn’t even seen Mr. Benny,” Rochester said a few days before airtime. “He’s so busy traveling and doing concerts we just don’t have time to get together.
“It was good to work with him again. I remember the first time I appeared on his radio show— it was Easter Sunday of 1937.”
Anderson, his black face full of humor, refused to say if he was older than Benny: "If he says he’s 39 years old, then you gotta say I’m about that age, too.”
Eddie Anderson is a loose, happy man who is disturbed only by other black people who accuse him of having been an Uncle Tom during his years with Benny.
Today’s activist–oriented blacks in show business are disdainful of Negroes who played subsurvient roles to white men in the old days.
But they forget Anderson was that Eddie co-star on Benny’s shows and got as many laughs as the Waukegan Wonder, frequently topping him with a quip.
Never Uncle Tom
“I never played an Uncle Tom,” Anderson said, “Because the scripts always called for me to get the best of Mr. Benny.
“The fact that I played a valet had nothing to do with Arthur Treacher played those roles and nobody ever criticised him for it.”
Now that Benny appears mostly on the road in concerts or as a single guest star. Anderson has gone into semi-retirement. He has done a couple of video commercials and a movie.
He fills his spare time as an assistant trainer of horses at Hollywood Park for the harness racing season.
At one time Eddie Anderson earned more than a thousand dollars a week. He worked hard for it and spent it with abandon.
While he is not in financial straits, neither is he the richest performer in semi-retirement.
“Everything’s fine with me,” Anderson concluded. “And it makes me happy when total strangers take the time to greet me with a big, ‘Hello, Rochester.’”

The Frustration of Cartoon Research

No, the title of this post has nothing to with Jerry Beck’s wonderful web site, which is putting up a lot of fine historical information about various cartoon studios you probably haven’t seen before. This post has to do with dead ends and missing links while trying to learn a little more about the Golden Age of Theatrical Animation and the people involved in it.

Some time ago, I became curious about Mickey Batchelder, one of the cameramen at the Walter Lantz studios and whether he was related to Warren Batchelder, who animated at Warner Bros. and, later, DePatie-Freleng. Batchelder isn’t a common name and it would seem more than coincidental that two Batchelders worked in Hollywood animation, especially considering studios were not unknown to have various combinations of family members employed. And I thought there was a bit of a family resemblance between Mickey, who you see above in a shot from The Woody Woodpecker Show from 1957, to Warren, the fellow with the glasses in the bottom left corner of photo you see to the left of the Friz Freleng unit from 1940. Warren finally became an animator in the later part of the ‘50s after being an assistant for many years, part of the time to Virgil Ross.

Sitting in front of a computer far away from Hollywood isn’t the ideal place to do Hollywood cartoon research. And I can’t draw on personal recollections as I am not an old-time animator who knew the people who worked in the Golden Age. But some information is available on line and you have to put it together. Occasionally, it’s like the old game show “Concentration” where you couldn’t see all of the puzzle but had to try to guess what it was anyway. Let’s start with Warren. The Social Security Death Index reveals he was born April 18, 1917 and died in Malibu on February 12, 2007; a posting on the Big Cartoon Database (likely a reprint of a union news item) at the time confirms it. He’s easy to track down in the 1940 Census. I’ve edited the picture below to take out unnecessary information.



You can see that he’s living at home with his parents, J. Lloyd and Zana Batchelder. It shows his mother was born in California and his father was from Illinois. Specifically, J.L. was from Batchtown, named for his father William Warren Batchelder (obviously Warren’s namesake). The 1930 Census again has the three of them together. I can’t find them in the 1920 Census. But I have found the Marriage Certificate for James Lloyd Batchelder and Zana Cushing. It’s dated August 5, 1916 (note that Warren was born 8½ months later). It was the first marriage for both, so neither of them previously had children.

So how does Mickey fit into this? A check of Census records doesn’t show any Mickey or Michael Batchelder, so I wondered if it was a nickname. And that seems to have been the case. Michael Broggie’s book Walt Disney’s Railroad Story (2006) is one of several sources which points out Mickey Batchelder worked in the camera department at Disney (Mickey? Disney? Aha!). And an edition of Walt’s People by Didier Ghez reveals C.W. Batchelder wrote The Multiplane Manual for the Disney Studio in 1939.

There’s only one Batchelder who fits Mickey’s description. Here’s the 1940 Census record for Clyde W. Batchelder.



It seems safe to assume Clyde and Mickey are one and the same. But something doesn’t add up. Clyde is listed as 33 years of age, and Warren’s parents had only been married 24 years. So Warren and Clyde of them can’t be brothers. In addition, Clyde’s Death Index entry reveals his mother’s maiden name was Husted, and earlier Census reports show his parents were named Nathan and Laura. Yet I received a note this week from reader Charles Brubaker quoting both Mike Kazaleh and Mark Kausler as stating the two were brothers. Both are unimpeachable sources when it comes to animation, having worked in the industry for quite a number of years.

So I’m not quite sure what to think. Unfortunately, newspaper obituaries for Clyde (who died in 1960) and Warren are inaccessible, at least to me. Such is the burden of a researcher and the limits of the internet.

At any rate, Warren Batchelder gets credit by some critics as being the best animator in the Bob McKimson unit after the Warners studio moved into gear again following the 3-D shut down in 1953. And Mickey’s part of a fun “How Cartoons Are Made” series seen on the Woody Woodpecker Show which was more interesting and entertaining than some of the cartoons themselves.

King Philippe the Floppe

UPA’s “Punchy De Leon” features a king with an outrageous design by Bill Hurtz. He’s almost all head and much of that is his mouth.



Here are a few of the frames of some smear animation of the king grabbing an earthen jug and exclaiming “Magnifico!” Did Pat Matthews worked on this? (Late note: see the comments for the answer)



Look at the different positions of the Fox’s fingers. The designs may be stylised, but the movement’s not.

The king orders the Fox and Crow to get the Fountain of Youth. Just one of the drawings.



This was the last Fox and Crow cartoon. UPA decided it would rather make stuff like “Ballet-Oop” and “Bringing Up Mother.”

Stereotypically Tex

Blackface transformation gags wound up in several Tex Avery cartoons, mostly at MGM (“Droopy’s Good Deed” being a good example). But he put one in his very first official directorial effort, the Warners cartoon “Gold Diggers of ‘49” (1936).

Generally with Avery, an explosion turns someone into a minstrel show stereotype. In “Gold Diggers,” it’s the exhaust from Porky and Beans’ car.

We start with a pair of Chinese dogs (from a laundry, where else?)



Along comes the car and the smoke.



And, now, they’ve become Amos and Andy, complete with “awa, awa” catchphrase.



Bob Clampett and Chuck Jones receive the animation credits but we know Tex’s unit originally included animators Virgil Ross and Sid Sutherland, plus Bobe Cannon, Cecil Surry and possibly Elmer Wait. I don’t know who did the backgrounds, but the cartoon opens with a pan over a very long background, another Avery staple at Warners.

Tell 'Em Groucho Sent You...For the Reels

You can’t watch early episodes of “The Tonight Show” with Johnny Carson from New York. Same with the Jack Paar version. Nor can you view many of the bon mots of Paul Lynde and Rose Marie on many of the old “Hollywood Squares.” Why? Because years ago NBC got rid of the shows that were in an old storage facility in New Jersey. They were taking up too much room.

The same fate awaited reels and reels of “You Bet Your Life,” the wonderfully comic not-really-quiz show hosted by Groucho Marx. But it never happened. The programmes were saved because of a phone call. Read the remarkable story here from Groucho’s grandson. Marx fans can be grateful to him. I know I am.

Now if I could only find out which studio did the opening animation for the show (Late note: Mike Kazaleh has the answer in the comments).

Heavenly Puss Backgrounds

“Heavenly Puss” (July 1949) has some fine acting by Tom and the bulldog (even a Wile E. Coyote-like wave at the camera before Tom drops into Hell) but just as enjoyable are the backgrounds, greatly assisted by MGM’s contract with Technicolor.



Here’s an interior. Notice the wall is curved.



Who did the backgrounds? And from whose layouts? MGM never tells us in the credits. Dick Bickenbach was doing at least some of the layouts for the Tom and Jerry unit and Bob Gentle some of the backgrounds. But who knows who else was at the studio then.

Booting Bobby Bumps

How television has changed since the early 1950s for cartoon lovers. There are more hours of cartoons on TV in a day that anyone could watch. Compare that to June 20, 1953 when Billboard headlined a story “Kids Love Cartoon Film Shows But Few Stations Air Them.” Few aired them because the cartoons simply weren’t available to air.

The article reveals the somewhat surprising fact that “Approximately 90 per cent of the cartoons in TV are silent.” It’s inconceivable to those of us who grew up in the 1960s that there was ever a time people couldn’t sit at home and watch Bugs Bunny or Popeye. But it took some time for the owners of those cartoons to sell them to television. Before that, TV stations could only purchase cartoons that were either obscure (Van Beuren) or from the silent days.

Among the forgotten silent stars who suddenly got exposure again was Bobby Bumps. He appeared in shorts made by animator Earl Hurd for the Bray Studio. You can read more about Bobby at Tom Stathes’ site. J.R. Bray must have been giddy realising that TV offered him a chance to make money from rotting old worthless cartoon negatives and cut a deal in March 1952. Stock music from Chappell or one of the other English libraries was added to old Bray cartoons and they started appearing on TV. One of them was “Bobby Bumps and the Hypnotic Eye,” released in June 1919. The cartoon’s most interesting sequence, to me, is when two ushers boot Bobby and his dog out of a theatre and they fly through the window of a moving street car. Here are a few of the drawings (the digital pixilation makes them a little tough to view).



The cartoon ends with Earl Hurd’s signature on screen. Is it just me, or do pre-1920 smiling cartoon dogs look creepy?



Earl Oscar Hurd was born in Atchison (of the “...Topeka and the Santa Fe” fame), Kansas on February 14, 1880, the middle of three sons of Oscar S. and Georgia Anna (Moore) Hurd. His father was a contractor. The 1900 Census lists the 20-year-old Hurd, now living in Kansas City, as an “artist.” He went into newspaper cartooning there for a time.

Hurd may be best known for combining his patent on cel animation filed in December 1914 with Bray’s, meaning studios had to pay a licensing fee to use their processes until the patents expired in 1932. Hurd carried on at Bray studio in New York City for several years, though he was living in Los Angeles in 1918. Wid’s Daily of June 17, 1919 revealed Bray had “announce[d] the perfection of a new process for cartoon comedies.” Basically, Bray set up a brand-new company, dropped his Paramount release in October in favour of Goldwyn and cagily worked out a deal with Hearst to animate the International Film Service cartoons, including Krazy Kat, Judge Rummy and the Shenanigan Kids. Earl Hurd moved on to Famous Players to supervise production of the company’s educational cartoons (and took assistant Harry Bailey with him). He eventually struck out on his own and when the sound era came in, headed west and worked for, among other people, Leon Schlesinger and Walt Disney; no doubt Disney was acquainted with Hurd through his work in Kansas City. Hurd was making $100 a week for Disney when he died in Los Angeles on September 28, 1940, age 60.