The Big W

It may not be the greatest comedy of all time, but “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World” (1963) may be one of the most fun, thanks to the hammy cast. A great cast it is, too, full of wonderful movie, radio and TV veterans who somehow were crammed into one film. Plus, how can you dislike a movie where Milton Berle continually gets bashed with Ethel Merman’s handbag?

And who better to steal the opening scene than Jimmy Durante? Here’s a full version of a column that appeared in papers of July 1962, a full year before the film was released, about his role in the epic comic adventure. The photo is courtesy of NEA and was sent to paper with the column.

Film Has Slapstick . . . With Message Yet?
By ERSKINE JOHNSON
Hollywood Correspondent
Newspaper Enterprise Assn.
PALM SPRINGS, Calif., July 7 (NEA) It was as gooey and as slick as the custard in one of Mack Sennett's old throwing pies. It was slapstick but it had, substance — there was a message under the meringue.
Stanley Kramer of Movie Messages Unlimited was delivering it under the title, "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World." With a $6 million budget and a 133-day shooting schedule he had Mads to spare.
With the message came a pie in the face with a banana peel on the sidewalk. With the largest cast of comedians ever assembled in a film, it was greed — with laughs.
Greed consumes the good, the decent and the noble but it is funny, funny, funny, funny.
It was also "The Treasure of Sierra Madre" with laughs — with Sid Caesar turning a hardware store into a shambles, Mickey Rooney and Buddy Hackett beserk in an airplane, Jimmy Durante as a bank robber, Ethel Merman as Milton Berle's heckling mother-in-law.
The cast sounded like a meeting of the Screen Actors Guild.
There was Spencer Tracy as a police captain plus all the others — Jonathan Winters. Edie Adams, Dorothy Provine, Dick Shawn, Phil Silvers, Terry-Thomas, Eddie (Rochester) Anderson, Jim Backus, Peter Falk, Paul Ford, Barbara Keller, Arnold Stang, Alan Carney.
Kramer's films (Judgment at Nuremberg, The Defiant Ones, On the Beach, etc.) had delivered more messages than Western Union but this time he had promised "Something a little less serious."
The greed message would be abridged, on a slapstick, in a mad, hilarious chase for buried treasure. Audiences could laugh all the way to the fadeout as the funny men of movies and television became engaged to calamity and then wed to disaster.
As Kramer directed early scenes here for the film with Caesar, Berle, Merman, Rooney, Hackett, Edie Adams, Dorothy Provine and Winters, the stars became more and more aware of another message.
It was the message that Kramer is an uncompromising perfectionist.
After a long Saturday of rehearsing and filming parts of a scene involving, all of them 115-degree temperature on a desert highway, he announced to his film editor:
"Don't print anything we shot today. We'll start fresh, from the top, Monday morning." It was throwing $20,000 (the daily cost) to the desert winds but he said the words with cool patience.
It was a long scene with complicated, argumentative dialog about how the $350,000 treasure, if found, would be split between them. In a way, it sounded like a meeting of Mickey Rooney's creditors, with confused Mickey telling Sid Caesar at one point:
"Sure, I know, you'd rather have one fourth than two-eighths."
Between rehearsals. Buddy Hackett chuckled to us: "I'm going to hire Mickey as my accountant."
For eight hours in the heat they rehearsed, became confused, became unconfused and blew their lines. But all the sweat left nothing on film as Kramer blew the whistle.
Jimmy Durante finally landed in front of a camera for that actor's delight — a big emotional death scene. It wasn't "Camille" but it was true to the code of Laugh Week. Jimmy had the last laugh even after his last breath.
He kicked the bucket both emotionally and literally.
Five top comedians, what's more, had to stand by, frozen-faced and without a line of dialog, while The Nose and the bucket shared the camera lens.
Casting Jimmy as Smiler Grogan, a bank robber whose death in an auto-gone-over-a-cliff triggers a mad rush to find $350,000 in buried cash, was offbeat enough for "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World."
But Jimmy kicking that rusty old bucket as his leg stiffens in death was an obstreperous clue to the reason for all the "Mad's" in the title of Stanley Kramer's $6 million comedy.
It was funny, funny, funny, funny.
The bucket as kicked by Jimmy in the William and Tania Rose script started clanking down the rocky mountainside with the camera following it all the way. Down and down and around it went, prodded now and then by special effects in some outlandish gyrations.
Jimmy even had time to get up from his "death bed," dust himself off and watch the old bucket clatter until it was out of sight.
"Now dere," said Jimmy, "is a death scene.'
The witnesses to his death and the bucket caper were Sid Caesar, Milton Berle, Buddy Hackett, Mickey Rooney and Jonathan Winters. But they didn't laugh, anv of them, until Jimmy grinned:
"Yes, sir, how about dat. Who needs one of them method dramamine coaches."
How Jimmy's speeding automobile landed him in its twisted wreckage as a highway statistic for the film was something new for the screen, too. There was a day when a movie stunt man would have been lined to drive a car at top speed, then leap from the wheel at the cliff's edge like Jimmy Dean did in that game of "chicken."
But the guided missile age, has come to movie cars-over-the-cliff, too. The spectacular crash, at 60 miles an hour, was radio-controlled with a dummy at the wheel and a camera in the car's back seat. The camera w«s encased in a shatterproof sphere, like those installed in airplanes for after-crash instrument readings.
Four other cameras at various angles caught the car's plunge off the highway for what will be the opening scene in the film. No penny saver, producer-director Kramer filmed the sequence four times with four autos purchased at a used car lot.
The radio-electronic system worked so well that only one of the cars missed its "landing" mark, end then by only a few feet from a starting line 550 yards from the cliff's edge.
It's a short, short, short, short World, too: Contact lenses come as sun glasses, you know, and Edie Adams was wearing green ones for her hours in the sun on location here . . .
Irving Berlin paged Ethel Merman for his new Broadway musical, "Mr. President," but at the time she was planning a European tour in "Gypsy." "So," says Ethel, a bit sadly, "he rewrote the show and then my tour was canceled."

Rabbit Transit Smears

“Ptoo!” I say to people who don’t like the three Bugs Bunny-Cecil Turtle cartoons because there’s supposedly some kind of “rule” that “Bugs has to win all the time.” Given the context of the story, people shouldn’t expect Bugs to win because the hare didn’t in the fable the cartoons use as a starting point.

All three have much to enjoy. The final one, “Rabbit Transit” (released in 1947), has some wonderful acting by animator Virgil Ross in the opening scene; watch how he moves Bugs’ body and fingers. And Virgil tosses in some of his smear animation. Here are three frames from later in the cartoon.



Who better to comment on this kind of effect than animator Greg Duffell? He wrote on Facebook:

Virgil Ross (who animated the scene displayed) did similar transition effects in this general period. I gather they are based on examples starting in THE DOVER BOYS. There is a formula to how Virgil did these. The effect usually takes 3 frames. Frame 1 is a slight stretching out of the first key, frame 2 is much like the example provided here which is basically a full stretching from between the start and destination pose, and frame 3 is a slight stretching out of the destination frame 4. Each drawing is photographed for one frame each. This technique was largely abandoned by all units by 1950. LONG HAIRED HARE uses this technique for the conducting sequence, to particularly good effect.

Here are a few more smear frames.



The scene toward the end when the angry Bugs is trying to get at the turtle has some great poses, too. I’ll get to that in a future post.

Convict Concerto Take

There’s no director credit on the Woody Woodpecker cartoon “Convict Concerto” (released 1955) but it’s apparently the last cartoon Don Patterson supervised at the Walter Lantz studio. Patterson, Ray Abrams and Herman Cohen get animation credits. Here’s a realisation take when Woody hears the dumb cop tell him (as if he couldn’t figure it out on his own), the crook inside his piano is a killer.



It’s not as wild as takes in other Patterson cartoons but this one was written by Hugh Harman (misspelled in the credits) who wasn’t exactly enamoured of wild takes. I suspect the story behind Harman’s hiring at the Lantz studio for this one cartoon (Lantz displaced Harman and Rudy Ising on the Oswald series more than 25 years earlier) is far more interesting than anything in this cartoon.

Baked Potatoes and Traffic Lights

It’s an era we will never see again. The days of young comedians wearing themselves out for little money, travelling to small towns across North America, with the hope that they will rise to fame and fortune. The days of old comedians sitting around reminiscing about their days as young comedians, having built and maintained friendships over a lifetime, the poverty of small-time show business their common bond.

There’s something cheering about the long friendship of Jack Benny and George Burns. Not because both were talented men who brought instant smiles or laughs to their audiences. Not because Hollywood seems to be an ego-driven place where nobody really likes or trusts anyone else. It’s because you’d like to think that people you like, like each other.

George and Jack met in vaudeville. When radio brought them fame, their families socialised together. They exchanged visits on each other’s shows, both on radio and television. George sprinkled his various books with Benny anecdotes. And when Jack died in 1974, George replaced him in the movie version of “The Sunshine Boys,” winning a Best Supporting Actor Oscar in the process.

Here’s George Burns about Jack Benny in an Associated Press interview in 1973. It’s supposed to be about Burns but it’s more about Benny. When anyone in the entertainment world gives up a chance for free publicity to give it to their buddy, that’s friendship. And the comedian in George must have realised the story would be funnier that way.

‘Stay With Show Biz’
George Burns Still On Stage
By MARY CAMPBELL
AP Newsfeatures Writer
NEW YORK, March 20 (AP) — George Burns has some advice for young people starting in show business: “Stay with it. But,” he adds, “I think if they don’t make it by 77, they should go into some other business.”
Burns, for years best known as straight man for his wife Gracie Allen, at 77 is more or less starting a new career. He has a recording out, “A Musical Trip with George Burns,” and he gave his first concert as a singer in New York's Philharmonic Hall. The record originally came out, with then-current hits of the Beatles and Rolling Stones, etc., in 1968. Burns says sales of the reissue prove that he was ahead of his time. “Then, nobody bought the album except my sister Goldie and I had to buy it back from her the next week.”
Things are different now than when he was young in show business, Burns says. Then, before radio or TV, a song might take three years to become a hit and equally as long to fade away. A person might stay in vaudeville for years, never realizing whether he had talent or not, while today a recording can come out, sell enough copies so the artist has enough money to retire and the next week disappear so he has to write a new song to remain in the public eye.
He wouldn’t want to be retired, Burns says, or even semi-retired, which he decided he’d try a few years ago. “You get old too fast. “Jack Benny just bought $30,000 worth of rosin. We’re going to stay around. We’re booked.”
George Burns and Jack Benny have been friends more than 50 years. How have they stayed friends? Easy, Burns says. “He tells me I’m a great singer and I tell him he’s a great violinist.”
Burns recounts a usual Los Angeles day’s routine. “I get up early, have orange juice and coffee, smoke a cigar to loosen up my vocal chords. I go to my office at 10:30. At 12 I quit. I go to the Hillcrest Country Club for lunch. I sit at a round table with Danny Thomas, Groucho Marx, Georgie Jessel and Jack. We fight to get on sometimes.
“I play bridge until about 4:30. I go home and have a little sleep until 6. I get up, have a few martinis, have dinner, go out sometimes, sing a lot. It’s a nice life.”
Money was never his goal, Burns says. “I just loved show business.” He says Jack Benny is the same way, more interested in the small discoveries of daily life than in money. “If he signed a contract for $1 million, it wouldn’t interest him. He came to the club one day all excited; he'd found a restaurant that gives four pieces of butter with a baked potato. And he doesn't eat butter.
“One other day he came in looking all excited. He’d signed a contract down-town in Los Angeles. Maybe it was for $1 million. He said, ‘I came out of the parking lot, turned on Wilshire Boulevard, and if you go 27 miles an hour, you miss every red light!’”
The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show ran, after vaudeville, for 17 years on radio, then nine years on TV. Gracie died in 1964. The TV reruns seen these days hold up so well, Burns says, “Because the character Gracie played was so believable. The jokes sound fresh, even now.”

The Other Side of Jay Ward

A real estate agent isn’t exactly the kind of person you’d think would make a good cartoon producer. But Jay Ward was. He surrounded himself with incredibly creative people who made him laugh and produced some of the funniest TV cartoons ever. And, by all accounts, his own sense of humour was off-the-wall and inventive, so he fit in with his staff perfectly.

Keith Scott’s wonderful book “The Moose That Roared” goes into great detail about Ward’s life and foibles. But I found a story that Keith didn’t include and it shows a facet to Ward that doesn’t get a lot of light in the book. This is from a front page column in the Abilene Reporter-News, November 30, 1962.

PAGE ONE
By Katharyn Duff
BAIRD—Jay Ward is a very funny man who lives in California. He is a producer of the Bullwinkle show and, as a side stunt, the promoter of “statehood for Moosylvania,” a mythical land he would make the “52d state.”
He’s the sort who gives people the lock to the city—since others give the key. He has stickers, buttons and songs about Moosylvania.
(Sample, to the obvious tune; “How are things in Moosylvania? Does the fetish swamp still fester there? Does it still give off the pungent smell of Muscatel and sweaty grizzly bear? . . .”)
Jay Ward is a very funny man, a busy showman. He is also a very warm and gentle man.
This is about a quiet visit he paid last week to a little Baird girl.
* * *
Linda Dill is a senior in Baird High School. She fell in love with the Bullwinkle nonsense when it came along, and since she has marked artistic talent, she made some tiny dolls to represent the characters, wrote a script for them and let them “perform” for various Baird classes.
One day, she bundled up her Bullwinkle dolls and mailed them to Jay Ward.
That started a friendship-by-mail. Jay wrote that the dolls were on exhibit in his Hollywood studio. He sent Linda a Bullwinkle clock and a battery-operated Bullwinkle figure. Linda, in turn, got up a “petition” in Baird seeking statehood for Moosylvania.
Then it developed that Jay Ward would be in Dallas for a show in mid-November and he wrote an invitation to Linda to drop by if she could. Linda would have but six-weeks exams conflicted and she had to decline the invitation.
* * *
On Wednesday evening last week a long distance call came to Baird from Jay Ward at Dallas. He asked to speak to Linda. Then he learned.
Linda is deaf, her mother told Jay, so the message would have to be relayed.
That was the first Jay knew that his young friend is not as others. Spinal meningitis when she was 6 left her with handicaps. She is deaf, has speech impairment and is confined to a wheelchair.
* * *
Jay Ward’s call to Linda came on a Wednesday evening.
Jay Ward himself came on Thursday—came in all the glory of his “Bullwinkle Wagon,” a panel car painted to resemble a circus wagon, came complete with all sorts of gifts and gadgets from “Bullwinkle.”
He came to talk with Linda, via her family, and to visit.
He set off an assortment of devices to make music for the little girl. “Linda may not hear it, but let’s wind it all up for her anyway,” he said.
Jay Ward put on a very special show for Linda.
Then he bent and kissed Linda’s hand and got in his Bullwinkle Wagon and drove back to Dallas.
He left behind a little girl “orbiting a rainbow,” her mother says.
He left behind, too, his offer to send Linda through any college she might choose—and offer her family thinks it cannot accept.
* * *
“I don’t know Jay Ward’s height,” Linda’s mother says, “but he was ten feel tall when he bent and kissed Linda’s hand. . .I don’t know, either, when the Department of Health will get us for I don’t think that hand has been washed since. . . .
“There’s something pretty wonderful about a person who will take the time to make a little girl happy, isn’t there?”
And, except for the noisemakers, it was all done quietly. No publicity.
Jay Ward, Linda’s family learned, is more than just a very funny man.

I wish I had a happier answer to the question “Whatever happened to Linda?” Linda Dill died December 9, 1968, age 23. But it’s nice to learn her life was made a little brighter by a man with a nutty sense of humour who also had a serious, caring side, too.

Mickey Plays the Pig

From “Steamboat Willie” (1928). I wonder if Uncle Walt did this once.

The Robot's After Flip!

Flip’s fiendish robot is coming for him in “Techno-Cracked” (1933). Nice layout.



Flip decides to kill him with dynamite…



…which the robot eats. A kaleidoscope effect shows the dynamitic indigestion.



Naturally, the robot quickly adjourns to a nearby outhouse but explodes as he, for reasons I can’t fathom, does a belly-flop in front of the door.



The Iwerks studio was downplaying the fact Flip was supposed to be a frog. He’s simply billed as “Flip” in the opening title animation by now.

Elusive Radio Success

Not-altogether-bright husband. Long-suffering wife. Anxious teenaged daughter. Precocious younger son. Loud boss. Misunderstandings. Mix them all together. How many family comedies of the Golden Age of Radio does that describe?

Too many.

I’m not a big fan of most old-time radio situation comedies. Jokes were obvious. Situations were contrived. Characters behaved unbelievably. There were exceptions, of course, but it was easier for writers to take the same old stuff and adapt it for another show. That way, networks could introduce “new” comedies but they would still have an air of familiarity for the audience (and sponsors, who preferred the tried-and-true).

One of the successful comedians of comedy short films in the second half of the ‘40s was George O’Hanlon. For more than 50 years, he’s been known for the role he played in 24 half-hours that were shown over and over and over on Saturday mornings. He was the voice of George Jetson. But almost 20 years before that, he starred in the clever Joe McDoakes “Behind the Eight Ball” series for Warner Bros. The premise? Joe failed to accomplish the goal of the title of the short (eg. “So You Want to be a Cowboy”). What made them fun was the satire going on around the plot. The best ones were pretty clever. Their success hatched the idea of developing some kind of radio sitcom around O’Hanlon’s talents. But it didn’t pan out.

For one thing, O’Hanlon’s show was picked up by the Mutual network. Mutual was a low-financed co-operative venture, known for detective shows, mysteries and 15-minute kid serials (like “Superman” and “Tom Mix”). It didn’t go in for comedies. Yet the network aired O’Hanlon after a month-long delay and with no sponsor. And it sounded like more of the same old sitcom. Here’s a review by John Crosby that appeared in papers around November 30, 1948, a few weeks after its debut on November 9th. Evidently, he wasn’t a viewer of Warners’ shorts.

Radio In Review
By JOHN CROSBY
The Apoplectic Boss
George O’Hanlon, the head man in a new comedy show on the Mutual Broadcasting System (8 p.m. Tuesdays), is described as a motion picture star, though his name has left no imprint whatsoever either on my memory, a faulty instrument, or on this newspaper’s files, a fairly comprehensive collection of human achievement.
This, of course, is nothing to be held against George and may even be a point in his favor.
The program, a new one, over which he presides, dogs the footsteps of “Blondie” closely and in some respects has overtaken the older comedy. It’s a domestic comedy with office overtones. These are two places, the home and the office, where comedy, at least on the radio, runs rampant. I HAVE NO objections to this folksy approach to our times except that, in practice, it presents a dreary picture of the average man’s life. George—and Dagwood, too, for that matter—perpetually are ground between two tyrannical forces—the boss and the wife—and, while this may be an accurate reflection of middle-class existence, it’s hardly a pleasant one.
In my opinion which on this question is warped beyond repair, the O’Hanlon show is a slight improvement over “Blondie” in that George’s wife is just as dim witted as he is.
This puts the sexes all even—one of the few occasions in radio where the menfolk get a break like that.
GEORGE WORKS for something called the Lamb Paper Box Co., an organization chiefly distinguished by horseplay, intrigue and utter incompetence.
This must have been the outfit that packed all those overseas gift boxes for the soldiers during the war—the ones in which the toothpaste usually tangled interestingly with the marmalade.
The head of the Lamb Paper Box Co. is an apoplectic individual named Harry Lamb, who talks entirely in baseball metaphors like Tallulah Bankhead.
“I’ve got you down for three errors,” he will howl at a delinquent employe, usually George. “Nobody is touching second base around here. Over here, Team! Into the huddle. Our competitor, Amos Hogg, has stolen a base. Someone here has been tipping him off to our signals.”
His metaphors, you’ll notice are almost as confused as Bill Stern’s and not nearly as informed as Miss Bankhead’s.
THE COLLEGE SPIRIT around the Lamb Paper Box Co. even has generated a team song which the employes in moments of crisis gather around to sing.
I took the words down with the idea of introducing it at the next songfest at Bleek’s, but I must have left them in my other pants.
In spite of the magnificent esprit de corps of the Lamb Paper Box Co. and of the exhortations of Mr. Lamb himself, who possesses much of the truculence of the late Knute Rockne, the team play is pretty spotty.
The man who was selling the signals to the opposition is a character called Beechwood, a heel. When he isn’t selling out, George, who isn’t corrupt, just stupid, is usually kicking the Lamb Paper Box Co. a little closer to bankruptcy.
THESE monkeyshines—you get more plot in five minutes than in half an hour of Jack Benny—are just a little elfin for my taste, but there are those who might find them reasonably amusing. When George isn't in trouble at the office, he’s in a jam with his wife, and here again Beechwood offers free advice and assistance to the detriment of all concerned.
The best that can be said of the jokes is that they are good-natured. (“Do you know Fleischmann’s Yeast?”— “I didn’t even know he was west.”) . . . .
Considering the limitations of these gags, the cast performs splendidly. O’Hanlon, incidentally, is a sort of cross between Jimmy Stewart and Eddie Albert, if you can imagine such a thing, and is quite a pleasant fellow.
There is one other thing about the Lamb Paper Box Co. that disturbs my social sense. Good old Harry fires virtually the whole staff every 10 minutes or so.
This just isn’t possible under the present administration, old man. There are union rules, contracts, and all sorts of underwater obstacles in the path of the good old-fashioned apoplectic employer.

The real Eddie Albert, incidentally, went on to work with the producer of the McDoakes shorts, Dick Bare, on “Green Acres.”

The George O’Hanlon Show struggled along until March 1, 1949. It was replaced the following week by “The Casebook of Gregory Hood” but returned as a summer replacement. O’Hanlon and Bare tried unsuccessfully to bring McDoakes to TV (Warners stopped making the shorts in 1956), where it should have worked. O’Hanlon spent the next few years making occasional on-camera appearances (and voiced a cartoon or two for MGM) but made his money writing. He had to be good at it as he was hired by the picky Jackie Gleason. He didn’t get a starring role again until George Jetson came along after an unsuccessful audition a few years earlier at Hanna-Barbera for the part of Fred Flintstone. O’Hanlon loved the Jetson role. In 1989, he fought poor health to come into the studio to record his lines for a Jetsons movie. He finished the last sentence, had a stroke, was taken to hospital and died.

So it was that George O’Hanlon became known for being a not-altogether-bright husband with a long-suffering wife, two kids and a loud boss. Not from radio but from cartoons. The main difference between the two was George Jetson was surrounded by funny futuristic gadgets in the kind of satire of modern living that had made his Joe McDoakes shorts fun. Sometimes, an extra ingredient in the comedy makes all the difference.

A Funny Feeling Comes Over Him

Bugs Bunny can just sense gold. At least he can in “14 Carrot Rabbit,” another fine Friz Freleng cartoon.

Our hero gets twisted, twirled, crunched and multipled into various shapes as he goes into his gold fit (the animation gets used three times in the cartoon). Here are some of the drawings.



I like how Sam is blinking his eyes while peering from the background.

Virgil Ross, Art Davis, Manny Perez and Ken Champin get the animation credits (Gerry Chiniquy was out of animation at the time this cartoon went into production).

You Moved, Didn't You?

“Dumb-Hounded” (1943) is littered with the shock-takes that Tex Avery became known for. Takes build upon takes. Here’s how Avery gets from one surprise drawing of the wolf to the next one. Two in-betweens featuring brush strokes.



The final drawing is left to establish by being exposed on seven frames, then Avery moves the wolf around some more.

Here’s a fun in-between drawing that shows up for one frame.



No animators are credited, though I understand they are Irv Spence, Preston Blair, Ray Abrams and Ed Love.