Knock Your Teeth Out

Not one but two toothpastes are parodied in Tex Avery’s “Batty Baseball” (1943). The batter bashes a long fly to centre field towards an advertising sign.



“Toothodent” and “Delirium” are slight changes from Pepsodent which contained Irium, something not found on the Table of Elements. “The Smile of Glamour” comes from the slogan for Ipana toothpaste, which promised “the smile of beauty.”



The ball hits the sign.



And the teeth drawn on the sign fall out.

Ray Abrams, Preston Blair and Ed Love are the credited animators.

Flying Fish and Whitecaps

Corny visual puns are handled several ways in old cartoons. Bugs Hardaway just plastered one in front of viewers and let it stand on its own as if it was really funny (and, generally, it wasn’t). Tex Avery and his writers liked sticking one on the screen, then commenting on it afterward as a topper. Bob Clampett and his storymen used a set-up line then the pun happily appeared. Some good examples are in “Pilgrim Porky” (1940). It features Porky captaining the Mayflower over the Atlantic from England to America.

There’s a shot of Porky looking onto the water. Bob Bruce’s narration: “On our leaside, we sight a group of flying fish.”



Cut to the “flying fish.” Carl Stalling plays “Man on the Flying Trapeze” in the background.



As a topper, we see they’re pulling a sign. Stalling plays “Umbrella Man” in the background.



No, I don’t know the origin of “Eat at Joe’s.”

Next scene, Bruce’s narration: “Suddenly, without warning, the sea becomes turbulent.”



“The waves grow choppy.”



“And whitecaps appear.” The narrator is proven correct when the waves tumble down from the sky and form little white cloth caps. Stalling plays an up-tempo wheezy version of “Put on Your Old Grey Bonnet.”



I liked the flying fish pun better. The fish have wide grins Clampett gave to just about every semi-crazed character back then.

Warren Foster wrote the cartoon and Norm McCabe received the only animation credit.

None of the Acting is Real

Two groups loved the Quiz Show scandals. Politicians were ecstatic. It gave them something to denounce and talk about high-road stuff like “the good of the American people.” Never mind the Cold War, something had to be done about “The $64,000 Question” (which had already been cancelled). And newspaper writers were happy, too, as it gave them a shot to bark about the shallowness of television, in between their paper’s horoscopes and Broadway gossip columns.

CBS president Frank Stanton announced on October 16, 1959 that the network would take “a fresh, hard look” at all its programming, and that viewers would get assurances that everything they saw would be “exactly what it purports to be.” Stanton told the New York Times in a story published four days later the crackdown would include canned laughter and applause.

The TV columnist for the National Enterprise Association couldn’t resist having a little fun with Stanton’s proclamation. He wrote a column where he extended Stanton’s new guidelines to the nth degree. It appeared in papers starting November 2nd.

This Honest John Thing Could Become An Absurdity
By ERSKINE JOHNSON.
NEA Staff Correspondent
HOLLYWOOD (NEA)—The TV reform wave had brought requiem for the last of the quiz shows and had sent all the laugh machines to the sea bottom. Taped shows no longer were hailed as “live” and not one typewriter was turning out clever ad libs.
All cue cards had been burned and announcers no longer signaled audiences to applaud commercials.
The TV network’s firm words were still in force: “We are going to ban anything that purports to be what it isn’t.”
TV was still in the spasms of “Operation Honest John,” which had spread to all networks. Vice presidents had become private eyes for a TV Central Intelligence Agency and the flow of telegraphed reports and “Top Secret” pouch deliveries was keeping the TV central intelligence staff working round the clock.
THE “HONEST JOHN” crusade had brought many changes to TV, and more were to come. The top staffer at C.I. issued his first order of the day: “Producers of ‘Lassie’ are hereby ordered to make public announcement that Lassie is a he, not a she. Refusal will result in immediate cancellation.”
Then the C.I. topper leaned back in his chair and reviewed the reform progress to date.
One western, about to be cancelled, had used real bullets on its final show. There was talk that the hero, who had been outdrawn, would be awarded a special Emmy, posthumously, for his contribution to “honesty.”
Jack Benny had agreed to stop saying he was only 39.
Contestants on the Groucho Marx show no longer were screened and given gags tailored to them before they were brought before the cameras.
“Gunsmoke” now carried a “special note” for viewers.
“Chester’s limp is simulated as a dramatic device.”
Walter Brennan’s limp as Grandpa in “The Real McCoys” likewise was explained.
ONE CONTESTANT on the Arthur Murray Party had been exposed as a student of a Fred Astaire Dancing School.
Whenever “Maverick” or “Riverboat” used studio stock shots these words flashed on the screen:
“This scene first appeared in a 1938 movie.”
Stunt men were now being given screen credits as doubles in all the-fight scenes.
“You Asked for It” was demanding open hearings on two charges.
One viewer had accused the show of giving its audience something no one had asked for. Another viewer had charged he asked for something and didn’t get it.
Marilyn Monroe had been cancelled as a “Person To Person” guest because she insisted on wearing make-up. “No make-up,” TV ordered. When she insisted, Marilyn had been replaced by Perry Como.
Faced with being himself, Perry came on like the bull in the china shop, revealing he is a nervous wreck and not one bit relaxed.
"This is the real me," Perry said, and it was like the night the dam broke.
IN HOLLYWOOD, Fredric March had discarded his bald wig and five inches of padding for his William Jennings Bryan role just before the start of filming on “Inherit The Wind.” The make-up trickery, the TV boys had ruled, would keep the movie off the late, late show in 1980.
At public confessionals, this had happened:
John "Lawman" Russell admitted the gray streak in his hair was for a “dramatic” reason—housewife appeal. George Jcssel explained his toupee, “You wouldn't recognize me without it.” Oscar Levant laughed about his ailments — “I’m just sick, folks, not sick-sick.”
But TV C.I.’s work was going on. The C.I. staff topper looked at the day’s schedule. It lead off with: “Check possibility of checks bouncing on ‘The Millionaire’ and investigate network quizlings now writing dialog for crooked sheriffs.”
It was a real mess, folks.

The mention of “Person To Person” may have been intended as a joke, but it mirrored a comment made by Stanton in his Times interview that the show wasn’t what it appeared to be. A disclaimer was actually put on it one evening telling viewers the questions were rehearsed. All this enranged host Edward R. Murrow, who felt Stanton was telling the American people he was dishonest. But that’s a story for another time.

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.