Death Comes to Homer the Hunter

So you think cartoon characters who are shot and killed come back to life in the next scene? Not in Tex Avery’s “Field and Scream.”

The gag is a hunter is wearing an outfit to ensure hunters know he’s not wild game. It’s obvious to all but Homer, the incredibly stupid hunter. Here’s the cautious hunter being shot to death.



Homer’s such a moron, he thinks what he shot had antlers. He demonstrates to a friend on a nearby bluff. Homer becomes a victim of karma. Just a few of the drawings.



Even the star of the cartoon, Ed, dies at the end.

The animation’s by Grant Simmons, Mike Lah and Walt Clinton. Designs (uncredited) by Ed Benedict.

Hollywood in New York

Radio stations in the Golden Age of the ‘30s and ‘40s had three sources of programming. They could create their own, of course. They could work out a contract to affiliate with a network. Or they could buy transcription discs containing full or partial programmes from a production company.

Production values on a syndicated programme weren’t generally anywhere close to something you’d hear on NBC or CBS simply because the production companies didn’t have big money sponsorship like the networks. But one company gave it a try by ponying up the cash for the occasional ‘A’ list guest.

Kermit-Raymond Corporation came up with a show in 1944 called “Hollywood’s Open House.” Originally, it was in conjunction with Motion Picture magazine. Two parted company apparently in 1948 but the show carried on for a while after that. “Hollywood’s Open House” was good enough to land a Thursday night slot on the flagship NBC station in New York City from December 1947 through May 1948 opposite Henry Morgan on ABC and Bob Crosby on CBS.

Syndicated programming rarely caught the attention of Herald-Tribune syndicate radio writer John Crosby, but he took a look inside “Hollywood’s Open House” in a column published on April 6, 1948. He seems to have had a little trouble with its title.

Radio In Review
By JOHN CROSBY
A Bit Of Everything
“HOLLYWOOD OPEN HOUSE,” a transcribed syndicated program is on all counts rather difficult to explain.
In the first place it hasn’t a great deal to do with Hollywood. It is produced and transcribed in New York at a CBS theater.
In the second place, it is heard in New York over WNBC, which with superb disregard for the facts that it was “transcribed earlier specifically for presentation over WNBC at this time.”
The program is heard over 203 other stations at a variety of times.
In the third place, you never know from week to week whom you will run into on this Hollywood house party which takes place in New York at CBS for broadcast over an NBC station.
“HOLLYWOOD House Party” is a variety program on you may hear almost any combination of acts short of performing seals. The only steady contributors are Jim Ameche, brother of Don Ameche (who sounds just like him), and Ray Bloch's orchestra, a terribly noisy aggregation.
Jim introduces, Ray accompanies. The rest of the show is provided by the guests, who may be—depending on what week you’re listening—Jack Benny, Bert Lahr, Zero Mostel, Roddy McDowell, Hildegarde, Marlene Dietrich, Basil Rathbone, Freddie Bartholomew, Martha Scott, Rolond Young, Milton Berle, Lucille Ball, Jack Pearl or a bunch of people not nearly so well known.
NATURALLY with such diverse talents no two of these programs sound much alike. Here is a summary of one of them which I don't claim as typical:
Zero Mostel delivered one of his comic monologs, and a very good one, on the relationship of the brain with the rest of the organism. (That’s as close as I can come to describing it.)
Freddie Bartholomew, the former child actor, then into a tragic scene from David Copperfield. Mr. Bartholomew, as I recall, played the child David in the movie years ago and it’s nice to see he has been graduated to the adult role. It’s a bit difficult under any circumstances and particularly difficult following one of the zaniest comedians in the business.
This program was rounded out by Monica Lewis, a very gentle singer, complaining of the heart-break caused her by the man she loved. As I remarked earlier, this is a variety show.
ANOTHER Hollywood Open House consisted almost entirely of Bert Lahr’s engaging nonsense.
“Eight goes into 50—no, it doesn’t. I must have missed a hypotenuse. According to statistics, people would be better off if they’d never been born, but that seldom happens to people.”
Still another one comprised of an elfin drama about the ghost of a man who had been murdered hundreds of years earlier presumably for whimsy.
As a matter of fact, it’s pretty good variety, though I’m not sure it’s pretty good radio. The only constant ingredient in Hollywood Open House is surprise.
TWO SMALL EVENTS of elusive significance:
1.—The Ogden Nash influence creeping into singing commercials has produced:
“Call for Cuticura.
It’s fragrant. It’s purah.
2.—A juvenile quiz and information program called “Mind Your Manners” has replaced “Coffee with Congress” at 9:30 a.m. Saturdays.

If you’d like to hear an episode of the show, here’s one courtesy of Rand’s Esoteric OTR, a fine web site with many old syndicated radio programmes. One of his listeners found this show was heard on WNBC on December 18, 1947.

Zipping Along

Blue mesas and cinnamon coloured cliffs. Phil De Guard and Maurice Noble at work in the Roadrunner cartoon “Zipping Along” (released 1953).

Shock of the Seven Chickens

Animated cartoon characters in the silent days sprouted question marks and exclamation marks on appropriate occasion, just like their counterparts in the newspapers. The practice died out on all but rare occasions in the sound era.

A really neat exception is in a very unexpected place—a Jay Ward cartoon. In the Fractured Fairy Tale “The Seven Chickens,” the narrator’s words “The prince was shocked at what he saw” are followed by the prince showing it on the screen by turning into punctuation. You can see the third and fourth drawings have question and exclamation marks in different thicknesses. They’re shot in a little cycle so the punctuation appears to be vibrating.



I wonder if Gerard Baldwin animated this cartoon. The mouth movements remind me of the work he did at Hanna-Barbera prior to coming to the Ward studio.

George Burns' Eulogy to Jack Benny

There may not have been closer friends in show business than Jack Benny and George Burns.

They hung out together when they were both rising vaudeville stars in the early ‘20s. They both made the jump to radio, then to Hollywood. They golfed together, they pulled practical jokes on each other. And when Jack Benny’s funeral took place on a sunny Sunday afternoon in late December 1974, Burns got three sentences into his eulogy, started crying and couldn’t finish.

Well, in a way, he finished the following day. Here’s a column from the National Enterprise Association. It appeared in newspapers January 17, 1975.

George Burns Remembers The Late Jack Benny....
BY DICK KLEINER
HOLLYWOOD—(NEA)—It was the day after they buried Jack Benny.
George Burns, his friend of more than a half-century, had broken down when he tried to deliver a eulogy at the funeral services.
But now he felt like talking. It wasn't easy, still. Tears came softly to his eyes and his naturally creaky voice broke from time to time. But still there seemed to be almost a compulsion to speak of his—and our—great friend.
Burns had gone to his office that morning as usual. He seemed to feel a need to resume his ordinary routine. The office was cold. Burns sat in his overcoat, clutching it around him and shivering. He lit up an enormous cigar.
At first, we talked of other things. He has a new record album out, a two-record set selling for $25 that he hopes will become a collector's item. It was recorded when he made a one-man concert appearance at the Shubert Theater here.
But the subject both of us wanted to discuss—Jack Benny—was always there. When the talked veered around to the current state of comedy, Burns plunged in.

"Good, honest jokes live forever," he said, exhaling a fogbank of blue smoke. Look at Jack Benny. Nobody knew how great he was until he passed away. I knew him for 55 years but even I didn't know how great he was until he was gone." He wiped a tear away from his eye.
"There was something magic about Jack. Everything he created—the old Maxwell car, the 'stingy' jokes, 'Jell-o Again,'—all that lived for all of us as though it were real.
"The pauses. The look. The nerve he had when he used to go next door to the Colmans to borrow a cup of sugar.
"Even if he told a bad joke, he made it work for him. I remember one show when he told a bad joke and he said it couldn't be a bad joke because a great writer, Norman Krasna, had written it. So he told it again. And the next week he repeated the whole thing and, within a few weeks, he had a whole thing going about that bad joke.
"As Bob Hope said at the funeral, when Jack Benny got on the stage, he owned it—and he did."
Another pause. Another tear. Another big drag on the cigar, perhaps for reasons of security.
"When I met him, he was already a great monologist. His opening joke was this. He'd come out holding his violin and he'd just stand there. A long pause. Already he was a master of the long pause. Then he'd say to the orchestra leader, 'How is the show up to now?' And the orchestra leader would say, 'Fine.' 'Well,' Jack would say, 'I'll stop that.' "
Another puff.
"He was a gentle man. And his humor was as gentle as he was.
"He used to use his violin the way I use this cigar—as a prop, as a kind of comedian's security blanket. But he tried to get rid of it. He wanted to be able to stand up on the stage without it. I remember the first time he tried to go on without it. It was in Schenectady, New York. He told two jokes. Nobody laughed. So he quick borrowed a violin from the orchestra and he was all right after that.
"He never said a mean thing. Jack's idea of being mean was this. Once we saw a certain comic work. I asked him what he thought of the comic. Jack said, 'Well, he's great but I just can't laugh at him.'
"Without Jack Benny, the show will go on, but there will be a big hole in it. It just won't be as good. There's one good thing, though—Jack Benny will stay alive as long as any of us live."
That was the eulogy George Burns was too choked up to deliver at the funeral. It all spilled out of him, as though he had to say it.
Burns himself—he'll be 79 this month—is in good health. He takes pretty good care of himself.
He doesn't work very hard any more.
He says he will never retire but he's taking it easier. He still does some TV guest shots and speaks at a lot of dinners and he's in his office every day.
But his working day, ordinarily, is brief—from 10:30 a.m. until noon. Then he goes over to the Hillcrest Country Club, has lunch and plays bridge for a couple of hours every afternoon.
"Then I go home and have a nap," he says.
Even at such a tragic time, the Burns humor cannot help but sneak out. We were talking about young comedians.
"What do you mean by 'young?' To me at my age, Don Rickles is a kid, Milton Berle is a juvenile and Shecky Greene is just getting started." He says he does some talk shows, now and then, and he likes doing them "because they're easy to do—I can do them sitting down."
But the flashes of humor were fewer than usual, understandably. The death of Jack Benny was too close, too real.
"Everybody I know," says George Burns, "is dead."

How to Act With Dinky Doodle

Combination animation/live action cartoons became a rarity after the introduction of sound in the late 1920s, but they were fairly common not too many years earlier. Walt Disney had his Alice Comedies, Max Fleischer’s masterful Out of the Inkwell series brought the world Ko Ko the Clown and Walter Lantz interacted with a boy named Dinky Doodle and a dog named Weakheart for J.R. Bray.

Lantz was born in 1899 and had a remarkable career in animation. He started at the age of 16 in New York and eventually moved west, took over cartoon operations for Universal at the dawn of sound, and carried on until 1972 when he closed his studio. Lantz acted as a kindly (though a little stiff) host of The Woody Woodpecker Show when it debuted on television in 1957. He interacted with Woody but in a far less elaborate way than he did with Dinky 35 years earlier. Lantz and his A-list star were never in the same shot that I recall; the scene would cut from Lantz solo to Woody solo over a photographed background. Lantz was actually far funnier as a silent film actor.

The New York Evening Post revealed how Lantz did it in the silent cartoon era. This unbylined article (with part of the last sentence missing) was published October 18, 1924.

Animated Cartoons May Seem Easy to Make, but It’s Different Behind Scenes
Walter Lantz, Young Old-Timer in Game, Shows Your Correspondent How Life Is Put Into Comedy Characters
DID YOU EVER WONDER how they make these animated cartoons that you see in comedies on the screen? Oh, sure, you say—they make a big bunch of drawings and photograph em one at a time. Tedious Job, to be sure, but nothing very complicated about it.
Uh-huh, that's right as far as it goes: but there's a lot more to it than appears on the screen. We've been watching these animated cartoons for years as they've flickered across the silver sheet, and one day this week the brilliant and highly original thought came to us: why not find out how they're made?
So we trekked uptown to West Forty-sixth street and went into conference with a clever young man at the Bray studios. His name is Walter Lantz, and he's been making these comedies ever since Bray started them lo! these many years ago. He is now working on a new series of cartoons built around a character called "Dinky Doodle" which he has originated.
To start with, Walter makes up a "scenario," which is a bunch of small pencil drawings giving the main idea of the action. These are then turned over to the assistant artists who make india ink drawings of them. BUT—and there's where they short-out—if, for instance, the characters body is in the same position during several feet of film, and only the head moves, then the drawings are made of the head alone in the various positions.

The drawings are then placed over a glass under which is a bright light. On top of the drawing is placed a thin sheet of celluloid. The body of the character is traced on the first sheet, then the head in its different positions is traced on other celluloids. If other characters appear in the same scene, they are also traced on other sheets.
Now we go to the photographing room. The camera is suspended about three feet above a table on which a bright light shines. The celluloids are placed in position, one over the other to the depth of three, the photographer presses a foot pedal, and the camera clicks once—one "frame," or small square of film, is thus exposed. The celluloids are then changed to the next position and the process repeated.
Sometimes as many as 4000 drawings are made for a film of about 900 feet length, and often three different sets of celluloids are used, one atop the other, so you can figure what a job it is to keep changing them, and what care must be used to keep them in proper rotation. But that, you say. is pretty nearly the way you imagined it. Aha! but wait! How about the new wrinkle you've seen, of having the cartoon characters in the same film with a real man? Walter Lantz gets effects from this method which are so real that they'll amaze you when you see them. In one scene, for instance, he walks across the room with Dinky Doodle and his dog, Weakheart, perched on his upraised arm. First, he has a regular movie made of himself walking across the room with his arm in the proper position. Then he draws the character, puts them on the celluloids, and combines them with the movie of himself.
Walter himself is a likable lad whose eyes have little humor-wrinkles in the corners. Although an oldster in the game, he is of, as they say, more or less tender years. He has a straightforward way of talking to you, and he speaks of his work with the sureness of knowledge. Animated cartoon making is the simplest thing in the world to him, and indeed it looks not very complicated when you see it from a theatre chair, but when you get behind the scenes [it is a different thing] again.

My thanks to Tom Stathes for the frames you see in this post. Tom loves and collects silent cartoons and people like him are needed to ensure those old shorts are catalogued, preserved and, best of all, screened. Please visit Tom’s site HERE. I was going to come up with a bad pun based on the name “Weakheart” and the term “faint of heart” but, as Tom might suggest, sometimes it’s best to remain silent.

Aesop Said...

The first Aesop Fables sound cartoons ended with a little moral, claiming it was written by Aesop hundreds of years ago. In true Van Beuren studio fashion, the moral never had a lot to do with the actual cartoon which preceded it. But they can be amusing nonetheless.

One I like is at the tail of “A Close Call” (1929). A mouse recites the moral—“All’s well that ends well.” A nearby dog with a bandaged tail (An “end.” Get it?) has an ear that morphs into a hand and pulls out the stubby tail into a healthy long one.



Then the dog clouts the moralising mouse with the tail, laughs, and runs into the distance.



You can tell the animator worked on silent films a scant year earlier. He animates “Ha ha” on the screen, which really isn’t needed because you can hear the dog laugh.

Harry Bailey and John Foster get a “By” credit on this short.

Bashing the Walrus

Woody Woodpecker isn’t the only character to get his licks in against Wally Walrus. A bathing bird does in one cartoon, too.



This was from Wally’s one appearance in the Andy Panda series, “Dog Tax Dodgers.” Jack Mather voices Wally and I imagine the bird is Grace Stafford. Walter Tetley is Andy. LaVerne Harding and Pat Matthews get the animation credits; I doubt Harding did the face-smack you see above (late note: Severin Murray identifies it as a Matthews scene).

Fame From No Locks or Looks

To your right, you see a picture of a birthday party in Binghamton, New York in 1927. At the bottom right, you’ll see a six-year-old guest you would only recognise if he were bald, wore glasses, and was being harassed by Morey Amsterdam playing Buddy Sorrell.

Yes, it’s Richard Deacon.

He grew up in Binghamton, where his father was a floor appliance salesman. He was in several different organisations, including the Boy Scouts, and appeared in high school plays. Remarkably, he wasn’t the only member of his class to move to Hollywood. A fellow actor was a young man named Harvey S. Bullock, who made a very comfortable living for himself writing situation comedies, animated and otherwise. And in 1939, Mr. Deacon was a panellist on a student-run version of “Information Please.” One of the other teenaged panellists was named Rodman Serling. Yes, that Rod Serling.

When WW2 rolled around, he was a corporal who headed to Washington, D.C. for a laboratory technician's course at the U. S. Army Medical School. His acting career resumed after the war, including a three-month tour with the Barn Theatre in Porterville, California.

While Deacon was a regular supporting player on Charlie Farrell’s summer show in 1956, his fame really came—sorry, “Leave it to Beaver” fans—when he took on the role of the humourless Mel Cooley on “The Dick Van Dyke Show.” Newspaper columnists suddenly took notice of him, and he was featured in stories by several different wire services and syndicators through the decade. There are some really interesting ones—Deacon wrote one himself that’s amusing—but I’ve only picked three. The first is from 1963. It’s ironic in that Deacon played the underling (and brother-in-law) of variety TV star Alan Brady, who was exposed as a toupee-wearer in a memorable episode.

Dick Deacon, TV’s Yul Brynner, Admits Bald Pate Big Boost in TV Career
By JOSEPH FINNIGAN
HOLLYWOOD, May 27 (UPI)—Richard Deacon is an actor whose career improves as his hair gets thinner.
MOST ACTORS shudder at the thought of a bald head setting upon their shoulders. They devise various kinds of wigs to cover balding skulls. Where the hair is thin, makeup men will douse the head with black greasepaint. Usually an actor sees his career’s length in a direct ratio to the rate of hair fallout. When the hair is gone, they fear, so is the acting career.
Not so with Deacon. As time passes by and his hair disappears, Richard's popularity increases. For the past 2 years, Dick has played a bumbling television producer on CBS-TV'S "Dick Van Dyke Show."

“I’VE BEEN BALD since I was 17-years-old," says Deacon. "In high school I had a father image. Other kids used to ask my advice about whether or not they should neck on the first date."
Dick didn't know the answers, of course, but what he told his classmates had a ring of authenticity because the words originated under a balding and mature appearing head.
Deacon has a little hair around the sides of his head, Just enough to give him the appearance of' a bushy haired Yul Brynner.
“I’D RATHER BE a character actor than a leading man,” he said. "I play roles which I think you might call deskmanship. They're people who are behind a desk or counter and play God for a minute. Everybody knows the pompous hotel clerk who takes himself too seriously."
Some of Hollywood's biggest stars have hairline problems. There are those who won't be seen in public without a wig. It would be unthinkable for them to appear wigless on screen.
I CAN UNDERSTAND the young leading man who wears a wig," said Deacon. "He has an image to keep up. But I ask those other guys, ‘who do you think you're fooling.’ Everybody in this business knows who’s wearing a headpiece.”
Deacon says baldness hasn't hurt his chances of working in Hollywood.
“I work very little with a hairpiece,” he said. “Once I was appearing with Dr. Frank Baxter. He’s so bald that the producer asked me to wear a hairpiece so they could tell us apart.
“I imagine I wouldn't have gotten started acting and worked as much if I had hair. If they want me to have hair I just paste it on.”

This column from the National Enterprise Association appeared April 4, 1964. Deacon worked with his old classmates. Bullock co-wrote at least one Van Dyke show. And Serling hired him for a “Twilight Zone,” showing he was capable of more than comedy.

Tall, Bald And Ugly
Deacon Plays Good Guy Up
“Against A Lot Of Nuts”
Hollywood—(NEA)—Meet the man who “knows a lot, but just can’t think of it.”
The name is Richard Deacon—the deadpan funnyman who turned a stare into a career.
The weekly Dick Van Dyke show on CBS-TV took Deacon out of the "What's-his-name?" game audiences play with character actors. Almost everyone knows him now not only by face, but by name.
As Mel Cooley, the television producer of dubious talents who constantly heckles Dick, Rose Marie and Morey Amsterdam, the "tall, bald and ugly" Deacon has it made.
The Descriptive Quotes are Deacon's and he's still amazed about his zooming career.

"If I didn't wear glasses and have 40 yards of unpaved road on my head, I probably wouldn't be working at all," he said.
His specialty of frustrated characters, in both movies and television has given him his first starring role in "The Brain Center at Whipples" on "Twilight Zone" (CBS-TV, May 15).
Deacon plays a factory owner who replaces all his human workers with robots and makes an unexpected discovery about automation. With critics of automation worried about people going out of style, Deacon feels "there is more truth than fiction to the show."
The stare that started it all for Deacon dates back to one of Jack Benny's television shows several years ago.
Deacon was hired to react, with a stare, to one of Jack's corny jokes. Jack stared back and Deacon just stood there, saying nothing and finally outstaring him. Well, it went on for five minutes and the audience laughed so loud that Jack invited Deacon back for two more "staring" appearances.
With his second guest spot, word got around to telefilm and moviemakers and everyone suddenly came up with a “Richard Deacon-type role.”
The parts ranged from beatnik to barber to professional men such as doctors and lawyers. "They are all frustrated," says Deacon. "They are good guys up against a lot of nuts."
Actors usually become frustrated when type-cast. But there is no frustration in Deacon's frustration.
"It is all alleviated when I cash those lovely checks," he says.
A bachelor, Deacon was born in Philadelphia.
He came to Hollywood, and television, in 1950 after World War II service, a college drama course and a year with a traveling stock company.

The last story is from July 23, 1968. Being from that era, it can’t explain the real reason Richard Deacon remained a confirmed bachelor.

Richard Deacon, Lifelong Bachelor, Will Play Kaye Ballard's Husband By VERNON SCOTT
UPI Hollywood Correspondent
HOLLYWOOD (UPI)—Richard Deacon, the bald and pompous character of the defunct "Dick Van Dyke Show," will be seen this fall as Kaye Ballard's husband in "The Mothers-In-Law" series replacing Roger C. Carmel.
Presumably he will be no less bald or pompous than before.
Deacon is a lifelong bachelor who luxuriates in his freedom to the dismay of married friends.
Says Deacon: "Something intuitive has prevented me from marrying. I was engaged three times, and I've seen two of the girls since. And am I lucky."
Deacon, clearly, is as much a character off-screen as he is on.

He has a girl friend whom he has known for 12 years. They date regularly and have a mutual agreement not to marry.
The actor and his girl friend have dinner at intimate little restaurants and attend occasional movies. But Deacon prefers to have her visit the house and cook for him there.
He lives in Beverly Hills. His home is a two-bedroom, two-bath modern with den, living room and a separate maid's room.
Lacking live-in help, he has filled the maid's room with rocks. Deacon is a rock hound who shops around Beverly Hills specialty shops for semi-precious stones. He takes them home, polishes them in a machine and mounts them on standards.
"They're very decorative," Deacon explained defensively. Real rock hounds find their prizes on the nearby desert, but Deacon is not one to do things the hard way.
He has decorated his canyon home with French provincial and antique pieces collected during the past 10 years. His touch with colors is such that visitors are constantly asking for the name of the professional interior decorator who "did" his house.
Aside from collecting rocks, Deacon's only other hobby— and perhaps of necessity—is cooking. He prefers a large steak Chateaubriand marinated in bourbon and soy sauce.
The recipe was given him by Rock Hudson who got the original from the late Tyrone Power.
“I don't exercise at all,” Deacon says proudly. “I've given up the beach because I'm not bathing suit size anymore.”
Deacon does, however, travel around the west to such scenic spots as Yosemite for long weekends.
His hours on the show require him to be on the set by 10 a.m. and he is usually home by 7 p.m. four days a week. On the fifth day they shoot the situation comedy in the evening with a live audience for NBC-TV.
Back at home he wears commodious robes not unlike togas, and sandals. Frequently his outfit includes a medallion around his neck.
Deacon is a nonconformist and proud of it. But in Hollywood so is everyone else, and Deacon blends into the atmosphere.

Deacon was only 63 when he died of a heart attack. The food and lack of exercise don’t appear to have done him much good in the long run. But he seems to have enjoyed life, a far cry from the dour Mel we’ve seen on the screen for 50-some-odd years.

It's All Just a Film, Folks

The climax of “My Favorite Duck” (1942) is interrupted when the film breaks.



Another inventive gag by Mike Maltese in a Chuck Jones cartoon at Warners. The animation credit went to Rudy Larriva.