Dance of the Roast Duck

A weird, cross-eyed version of Bimbo takes to the stage along with the roast duck he’s supposed to be delivering to a customer in “Dizzy Dishes” (1930). Note the kitty chorus.



The roast duck takes on a life of its own, as just about everything does in a Fleischer cartoon. It dances.



It lays an egg and gives birth to another roast duck—which dances, too. Inspired stuff.



Eventually, Bimbo and the duck get chased by the customer who ordered the the roast bird, which eventually flies out of the cartoon.

Dave Fleischer is generally given sole credit for gags on the Fleischer cartoons. Grim Natwick and Ted Sears got the animation credits.

Thanks to Devon Baxter for the screen grabs.

Roll Up the Door

Tex Avery’s impossible humour in “Lonesome Lenny” doesn’t wear itself out because it’s a lot of fun to see how Tex executes it.

Here’s a familiar looking gag, pulled off at the usual breakneck pace. Screwy Squirrel goes through a door. But he’s able to roll up the door so Lenny crashes into it.



The gag being finished, the door is back to normal. Lenny opens it and moves on to the next gag.



Heck Allen was Avery’s writer on this one. Ed Love, Preston Blair, Walt Clinton and Ray Abrams are the credited animators.

Voice of Benny

Some time ago, Tim Lones sent us a note about a Jack Benny radio appearance in 1930. It was in connection with a post here debunking what Benny claimed for years that his first radio broadcast was on the Ed Sullivan show in 1932. Tim mentioned a programme called “Voices From Filmland.”

We stumbled across an ad for the show featuring Benny, which you see to the right. It appears Benny only made a guest shot on the broadcast of January 20, 1930. Unfortunately, I haven’t found anything which specifically states what Benny did on the programme.

The show was broadcast over CBS. The Buffalo Courier-Express of January 12, 1930 describes it thusly:

Voices from Filmland, which began January 6th, originates at KHJ in Los Angeles and presents each Monday evening at 7.30 o'clock (Eastern standard time) music by the Los Angeles Biltmore orchestra, the Biltmore Trio and the M. G. M. studio orchestra, as well as bits from current talking motion pictures. With each program several well-known movie stars will appear.

The debut date may have been incorrect or incomplete. There’s a listing for a “Voice of Filmland” broadcast on a Tuesday morning in June 1929 on a Pittsburgh station.

“Voices From Filmland” aired opposite “Roxy and His Gang” on NBC-Blue and “Piano Twins” (Lester Place and Robert Pascocello) and “Back of the News In Washington” (Elliott Thurston) on NBC-Red. It seems to have been broadcast live from the West Coast; in 1930, few shows did because of the availability and cost of broadcast-quality lines.

The show didn’t last long. The last broadcast was on April 7th.

Oswald Fades Out

Starring cartoon characters come and go, just as starring actors do in live action. There probably weren’t too many movie-goers in the 1940s lamenting the disappearance of Tom and Jerry (Van Beuren version) or Columbia’s Scrappy or Iwerks’ Flip the Frog. They may not even have noticed.

But at least one person was paying attention to the fading animated stars of yester-years. Here’s a little column by Robbin Coons, who spent part of his newspaper career with the Associated Press, and some of it as a freelancer in Hollywood. This is from November 24, 1943. I’m particularly pleased to see a mention of Lantz animator Pat Matthews. Individual animators, especially outside of Disney, didn’t get much recognition back then.

HOLLYWOOD
By Robbin Coons
HOLLYWOOD—Some of the greatest actors in our town get through their entire careers without squabbling over money, billing, or roles.
They do exactly as they're told, all the time. They’re never jealous of each other. They’re never in the scandal columns. They don’t get divorces and they don’t have fist fights in night clubs. They’re a movie producer’s delight and joy—these creatures compounded of ink and paint and imagination for the screen cartoons.
But even in this realm of fantasy, actors who ride the crest of popularity today may be tomorrow’s has-beens.
• • •
OVER at Walter Lantz’s cartoon studio, looking over some of the new work there, I glanced at the little board on which, in neat lines and squares, the producer outlines his year’s shooting schedule. I looked in vain for any mention of that old friend named Oswald the Rabbit. “Oh,” explained Walter, “he’s there—in ‘The Egg-Cracker Suite.’ We use Oswald in just one a year now, for Easter release.”
Predominant on the schedule were the “Swing Symphonies,” which are based on current or forthcoming (Lantz hopes) song hits: “The Greatest Man in Siam,” “Abou Ben Boogie,” “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy of Company B,” and so on. Andy Panda (who, I suspect, is the animal who booted Oswald down the chute) is down for three appearances, and an upstart named Woody Woodpecker grabs four.
It’s sad about Oswald, who was bequeathed to Lantz when Walt Disney left Universal in 1926 to go on his own, but less sad than the fate of the first cartoon characters Lantz worked on, when he began in 1916. They were cartoons based on a couple of comic strip characters who have long been off the screen entirely. Oswald at least has been put to clover, like an honored veteran.
• • •
AT Leon Schlesinger’s, the Intrepid Bugs Bunny has all but sidetracked Porky Pig, while at Disney’s Mickey is no longer the fair haired Mouse because the obstreperous D. Duck gets first quack at everything.

Lantz had on display a new creation, a glamour girl of the ink-and-paint pots, the heroine of “The Greatest Man in Siam.”
“Maybe,” said Walter, “she’ll get to be a pin-up girl and we can star her again.”
Maybe so—but Pat Matthews, the young artist who created her, was at his drawing board working on another tasty dish in a hula skirt. Maybe the girl from Siam was headed for Oswald the Rabbit’s clover field already.

Oswald was pretty much relegated to comic books after “The Egg-Cracker Suite,” though he did appear on TV for a period when Lantz sold 179 of his aged cartoons to television in late 1954. Thanks to animation historians, interest was revived many years later as people got to see some of the old Oswald cartoons until he was finally purchased by Disney and made another part of their vast product line.

As for Matthews’ Miss X, she ran afoul of censors, according to Lantz, and was dropped after only two entertaining cartoons. And while other cartoons were on the horizon with starring characters, none were more popular for Walter Lantz than a certain woodpecker.

Kitchen of Tomorrow

An MGM cartoon featured the house of tomorrow, today. No, it wasn’t Tex Avery’s “The House of Tomorrow” (1949). It was “Inside Cackle Corners,” released by the studio on November 10, 1951. Strictly speaking, it wasn’t an MGM cartoon. It was produced by the John Sutherland studio and made for Harding College as an educational film to tell Americans how great capitalism was, with wealth and happiness for all.

Boxoffice magazine reviewed it thusly in its edition a week after the release:

Inside Cackle Corners
MGM (Cartoon) 9 Mins.
Very good. The law of supply and demand is examined in a humorous vein. Mrs. Consumer is a steady customer in one shop until she is lured away by more progressive merchandise and lower prices in the store across the street. The first merchant discovers that his competitor’s success is due to re-investing profits. He does the same thing and wins Mrs. Consumer back. In Technicolor.

At the end, we see Mrs. Consumer’s modern home (part of the foreground is on an overlay), where a piping-hot dinner for the whole family automatically. An electronic gadget decides on its own that a dinner for three is in order. It beams a light to a box on the wall, a table comes out from a cupboard, stops under something that automatically drops place settings and food on it, then scoots into a cooker, then into the living room where, in an end gag, the family is watching wrestling on TV.



Art direction is by Gerry Nevius and Ed Starr. Animation credits go to Phil Monroe, late of Warner Bros., Arnold Gillespie, Bob Bemiller and Armin Shaffer, formerly of Disney. More top radio talent is in the cast; Herb Vigran (who narrates) and Frank Nelson should be easily recognisable. So should the other two voices but I can’t name them.

“Inside Cackle Corners” isn’t really as fun as some of the other Sutherland entries for Metro; “Make Mine Freedom” (1948) is far more visually interesting. This was the final cartoon from the studio released by MGM. Sutherland carried on to make some stellar industrial films.

Hound vs Hound

A bulldog unexpectedly tries to make time with George disguised in a dog suit in Tex Avery’s “Hound Hunters.” He turns around them trots right into the face of a huge dog.



Avery pulls back the camera so we can see the take.



The bulldog kind of dog paddles in mid-air before galloping away.



Ed Love, Walt Clinton, Ray Abrams and Preston Blair get the animation credits.

Ridin’ to Rigor Mortis

The opening scene of “Wild and Woody” (1948) shows the Walter Lantz studio at its best. Woody is gesturing as he rides a pony, singing “Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie.” He’s expressive. He drops down to lay on the horse during part of the scene, then forms his fingers like guns and flips them around. Top animation. It’s by Disney veteran Freddie Moore. Here are some frames.



The pony’s attractively designed and has a cute little trot cycle. Part of it is on twos at the start but then is completely animated on ones. Darrell Calker’s score complements the action nicely. Even the usually-flat Bugs Hardaway may never have sounded better than when he crooned the opening tune. And Lionel Stander is the best cartoon villain next to Billy Bletcher. He’s great as Buzz.

Ed Love and Pat Matthews receive the animation screen credits. Lantz had Disney’s Ken O’Brien besides Moore at the time as well. And La Verne Harding. A great animation team with director Dick Lundy and newly-acquired gagman Heck Allen that, unfortunately, was gone not too many months later.

No Swearing Now

Big mouth, little head? Must be a Bob McKimson cartoon. Here’s a scene from “Paying the Piper,” released in 1949. Manny Gould at work?



The cat’s about to say something he shouldn’t. A convenient hand saves the ears of the movie theatre audience. The first drawing looks like something from a Bob Clampett cartoon.



Gould, John Carey, Chuck McKimson and Phil De Lara get the animation credits.

A Portrait of Fred Allen

When Fred Allen died on March 17, 1956, there was a great outpouring of respect for his work—and a few attempts to tell the story of the “real” Fred Allen.

Allen didn’t have the reputation as a warm man. He wasn’t someone audiences could really identify with like Jack Benny, or, rather, the character on radio Benny played. People tuned in to Allen to hear him turn a phrase or stick it to deserving targets, like politicians and radio management.

Radio columnist John Crosby was a great admirer of Allen’s, perhaps they both hated the triteness, phoniness and incompetence of the radio industry, both on and off the air. Both were based in New York. Crosby interviewed Allen a number of times and got to know him pretty well. Here’s his tribute to Fred Allen, the person, in his column of March 21, 1956.

Tribute Paid To Kindness of Fred Allen
By JOHN CROSBY
NEW YORK, March 21-- Under a dour exterior, Fred Allen was the kindliest man imaginable. Swarms of out-of-work actors descended on him regularly for handouts which were never refused. There was one actor who put the bite on him every Sunday after church. One Sunday the guy didn't show up and Fred got so worried he went looking for him.
The radio feud between Jack Benny and Fred Allen was legendary, but actually the two men were close friends and their admiration for each other was boundless. But this didn't prevent them from heckling each other unmercifully on stage. Once Benny was appearing on the Paramount stage and Allen sat in the front row and hurled one witty insult after Another at his old friend. After one quip, Benny, non-plussed, waved a $20 bill at the audience and offered it to anyone who could top Allen's last gag. Instantly Allen was on his feet, topped his own gag with a better one, and walked up and claimed the $20.
Fred was a wit's wit. There is not a humorist alive who did not admire him extravagantly, but none imitated him because they couldn't. His was a wonderfully original and well-stocked mind and he had the gift of bringing two frightfully irrelevant things into the same sentence. It was the humor of the ludicrous and a very penetrating wit it was but it does not reproduce well.
His humor was very much of the moment. I remember having lunch with Fred once just after the first atom bomb had gone off at Bikini and had proved to be a bit of a dud. I asked him if he'd heard the broadcast and he said, "Yes, nothing disappeared but the OPA." Well, the OPA had gone out of existence that weekend and it was a very funny remark then, but it doesn't make much sense today. I bring it up only as an example of the way Fred could take two totally unrelated subjects and combine them into one fast quip.
Even his prose style defied imitation. He had a horror of cliche and every sentence that came from his lips hid a newly minted freshness that was unique, even among very literate men. To him, even "hello" or any other ordinary salutation was a cliche and he avoided any form of routine greeting. He'd greet you, on say, a hot day with: "It's so hot out I could take my skin off and sit around in my bones."
In his early days he billed himself as the world's worst juggler and he just about was. He'd keep dropping the Indian clubs and to cover his confusion he'd make wisecracks that would convulse the audience. Actually, Fred was the last of three great American humorists who started the same way. The other two were W. C. Fields, who was a little better juggler than Fred but still no world beater, and Will Rogers, whose rope act was pretty fair, but not much better than that. All used wisecracks to cover their inadequacies with the props and grew into national institutions.
Fred's death came as a particularly terrible shock to me because he took such very good care of his health. He didn't drink or smoke and his diet was of such austerity that rabbit would find it dull. In fact I always thought he'd live to be 103. He had high blood pressure and he had consulted so many doctors and read so many books on the subject he knew more about it than they did.
Any sort of new medical fad would receive his most earnest attention. Once in Florida he stumbled on a cult that believed in fasting as a cure-all for everything. People subsisted on nothing but distilled water for weeks. Fred was fascinated by the project and its effect on the patients.
He was a very simple liver. For decades, although he was a millionaire, he lived in a little apartment on West 38th St. He used to eat lunch every day at the corner drugstore. He never owned a car and never learned to drive. It wasn't parsimony; it simply that luxury didn't mean anything to him. He never got away from the common people and he had a wide acquaintanceship in his little neighborhood with delicatessen store proprietors and local cops.
His kindliness was fabulous. Once a delicatessen store proprietor, a friend of his, lost his liquor license because gamblers had been hanging out there. Fred bought the place, got a liquor license in his own name and turned it over to his friend to run. At the time of his death he was working on his autobiography and he kept looking up old friends of his vaudeville days for material. Every time he found one of these old chums, most of them down on their luck, it cost him the price of a new suit. He loathed sham of any sort and he considered the broadcasting industry, which made him famous, full of it. He always regarded network executives as overgrown office-boys and he was incessantly battling them.
"If the United States can get along with one vice-president, I don't know why NBC needs 26," he once said. Among his other pet dislikes were Hollywood and Southern California. "It's a nice climate," he remarked of California, "if you're on orange."
He also took a dim view of agents and he once remarked of his agent: "he gets 10 per cent of everything I get except my blinding headaches." Years ago Fred was a pretty good drinker, averaging a bottle a day. The day prohibition was repealed he stopped drinking entirely, claiming that he'd drunk so much poison that the good stuff would probably kill him.
The end was sudden. As John Huston remarked after the death of his death: "He was too good a man to be sick. When the time came, he just died."

NBC took a bit of time for their own tribute to Allen. It came on the hour-long sustaining programme “Biography in Sound.” It was first broadcast on May 29th then rebroadcast on December 18th. You can hear the later broadcast by clicking on the arrow. It was written by Earl Hamner, who later created “The Waltons.” I believe the staff announcer giving the ID at the start is Radcliffe Hall and at the end is Vic Roby.

It’s All About Me

Jack Benny had a pretty nice radio show in 1936. He’d been on the air for four years, had grabbed the attention of the radio audience with his newsreel spoofs and send-ups of feature films. A revolving door of singers, bands and recognisable supporting players was starting to stabilise a bit. But the show started making leaps and bounds once one thing happened—Jack Benny got a new writing staff.

Jack had no choice. His writer left. And his writer explained why in a note to the Albany Evening News, published on August 25, 1936. In reading it, one is struck by how Conn seemed to think everything revolved around him, that he was the key to the Benny’s show success. And it’s a little ironic of Conn to point out how stars keep clippings when he was the one reading them. The newspaper clippings aren’t the focus of the story. But the newspaper columnist has decided newspaper columns are worthy of being the headline.

Radio Stars Watch Newspaper Comment
By THE LISTENER
Words from a very live “ghost.”
Harry W. Conn has been heard from in this column at least twice before on the subject of radio comedy programs to which he has contributed a great deal of the things that have made us laugh as we have listened to Jack Benny. For Mr. Conn was Benny’s “ghost writer,” or his script man, to be more accurate about it.
Recently, in response to a letter from Mr. Conn at Saratoga, this column invited him to stop off in Albany on his a way back from the races and talk over radio matters.
This was not possible for Mr. Conn to do, so he sent us the following letter from New York.
“SAW the article you printed in reply to letter I sent you and thank you very much. Sorry I could not stop over in Albany to see you as I came through with the “Easy Aces” (Mr. and Mrs. Goodman Ace) and they were in a hurry to get back to New York as they broadcast three times weekly and spend the other three days at the races, and they use up all day Sunday for writing. Goodman Ace does all his own writing.”
Mr. Conn says that the radio stars keep close tabs on the comments of radio columnists. Most of them subscribe to a clipping agency service and have press books as thick as a New York phone directory. Jack Benny has at least 10 books full of clippings.
“Several radio editors around the country,” continues Mr. Conn, “have carried stories on why I split with Jack Benny. Most of them were guesses when did me no good. ‘Aircaster’ in the New York Journal said that I split on account of Mary Livingstone, not giving her enough jokes. That’s not true. I gave Mary Livingstone her name and characterized her as a plain girl from Plainfield and took care that she would not overdo the character. I gave Schleppeman his name. I took care of him and he is a star today, making pictures and getting big money on another program.
“I started with Benny from his first program over four years ago. I was with Burns and Allen at the time, having started with them from scratch. Burns got me the Benny job and I got along for four years without any trouble. For a long while I worked for him without contract. The real reason why we split was on account of publicity. A writer must have this. I was not getting enough to further my interests financially, so we talked it over and decided to call it quits. There is no money in ‘ghost writing’ after you have hit your stride.
“The picture companies hire you according to your credits. For instance, Fred Allen gave his writer (Harry Tugend) credit and 20th Century Fox Films gave him a great contract. If Fred Allen had taken credit for himself, his writer could not have gotten this contract. A writer gets screen credit in Hollywood; also program credit in a show. Radio gives you nothing but what you can pick up from friendly radio editors. This season, they promise me plenty of publicity.
“I am leaving for the coast next week to organize the program that is to star Joe Penner and will let you know from time to time what’s going on.”

Conn was either being naïve or disingenuous. Certainly it would have been fair for him to get a credit mention at the end of each programme—although no radio show that I can think of was doing that in 1936—but to think film companies didn’t know who was writing and producing radio shows because their names weren’t mentioned is silly. Show business is a small world. People know people. And people had to know who was writing what was one of the top radio shows (even if they didn’t have “friendly radio editors” to remind them in columns). Conn also fails to mention a teensy fact. He left Benny in the lurch by walking out on him days before a broadcast and a script had to be quickly put together.

The columnist in Albany revisited the Conn situation on October 7, 1936 to make a couple of points, one about Conn.

HARRY W. CONN, who writes the Joe Penner scripts and used to write Jack Benny’s jokes, told this column that the main reason he quit Benny was that the latter would give him no air “credit” — that is, mention of his name as the man responsible for the comedy skits.
Last Sunday night we listened to Penner because we wanted to see if Harry Conn could completely—or even approximately — change him from the Penner of old. We found very little change and heard no air credit for Harry Conn.
If Penner really is going to be different, it will have to be from next Sunday on. He was last week pretty much the same Joe, changing a duck for a black sheep. But can any comedian really change his style? We have heard many of them on stage, screen and in radio and have yet to find one who, despite any criticism, did not go on using the same old comedy tricks.

The Conn version of Penner’s show vanished. Conn then mounted and starred in his own programme—he’d show them who the real talent was—and it died unlamented. Meanwhile, Benny got new writers and went on to bigger things. Many of the things you associate with Jack Benny today were products of writers other than Harry W. Conn—skilfully edited by Benny himself.