As Paul Frees’ relaxed voice lulls us into a sense of contentment, as Scott Bradley’s flutes and strings play a light version of “Over the Rainbow,” and as the camera languidly moves along a background painting, Tex Avery sets us up for his first joke in “T.V. of Tomorrow.”
Suddenly, TV antennas pop into view, filling the screen, showing how television had come to dominate 1950s small-town America.
Avery was now experimenting with his version of limited animation, so the only movement in the first 20 seconds of the cartoon involves overlays and camerawork.
There’s no background credit on the cartoon. Johnny Johnsen was Tex’s background guy, but I can’t help but wonder if someone else (like Joe Montell or Vera Ohman) was responsible for this because of the more modern design.
Grover Groundhog shines a lamp against the wall as a spotlight and does a snappy little song and dance at the start of “One Meat Brawl” (released 1947). Grover does a nice little double twirl to Warren Foster’s and Carl Stalling’s “A Groundhog and His Shadow.”
Let’s see...tiny skull, big jowls. Must be a Bob McKimson cartoon. No animators are credited.
I haven’t had a TV set at home for years. I don’t miss it. Well, I’d miss it tomorrow because there’s a great programme coming to television that would give me some incentive to get a set if it showed something like this more often.
Turner Classic Movies is presenting what it calls a “very special evening of programming features 28 cartoon shorts grouped by respective creators/studios.” Don’t expect the overly-polished efforts of Walt Disney’s feature film artists or the slam-bang fun and lippiness of Bugs Bunny. These are cartoons of an earlier time, ones that wouldn’t normally appear on television.
There will be three separate programmes. One elucidates on the cartoons of Winsor McCay, the man credited with being the Father of Animated Cartoons. To call McCay “a newspaper cartoonist” would be true, but wouldn’t give you any hint of his amazingly intricate work found in the Little Nemo colour panels in the Sunday comics of 100 years ago. McCay literally tried his hand at making pictures move on the movie screen, and set in motion the animated cartoon business. A number of McCay’s films (or their partial remains) from before and after World War One will be screened, augmented by comments by John Canemaker, who authored a beautiful book on McCay’s work a number of years ago.
While McCay provided the spark for the industry, John Bray figured out how to make animation a business by cutting labour and costs to be able to churn out cartoons on a regular schedule for a variety of studios. He lined his pockets by acquiring patents for various parts of the animation process, and unlined them on legal fees to try to enforce them. Bray eventually gave up theatrical cartoons and moved into educational movies. The Bray theatricals can still entertain, almost 100 years after their creation. A number of them will be shown, with Tom Stathes guiding viewers through them. The world needs someone like Tom Stathes. He’s spent a good portion of his young life trying to collect and preserve silent cartoons. So many silent films have been lost to the ages. Efforts have been made over the years to locate and preserve silent features and two-reel comedies. Cartoons have, with a few exceptions, been dismissed as an inconsequential piece of film history. It is good to have Tom and his band of friends looking out for them.
Finally, there will be a showing of cartoons produced by the Van Beuren and Ted Eshbaugh studios. Eshbaugh spent ten years developing a colour process that was ready in 1932. But the movie industry wasn’t ready for Eshbaugh. The big studios had all the cartoons they needed. So Eshbaugh’s efforts were mainly in the commercial area, though he teamed with Van Beuren for some shorts.
Van Beuren was at the bottom of the ladder of New York City’s theatrical animation studios. Its pre-1934 cartoons weren’t as polished looking as the Fleischer shorts, let alone anything out of Disney. The idea of a clearly defined plot escaped its staff. The studio died in 1936 and its work drifted into the public domain. Still, it came out with some cartoons that have their own special, indescribable appeal. An interesting array of Van Beurens will be shown, with the on-camera assistance of Steve Stanchfield. Steve is Van Beuren’s hero. He dragged the studio’s shorts out of obscurity, had them painstakingly restored, and then made them available on DVD for the world to view and appreciate.
Steve will be rolling out some odd ones. A particular favourite is “Rough on Rats” (1933). It’s very much like a Merrie Melodies cartoon made by Harman and Ising: there’s a song, a few gags, a bad guy shows up, and then the second half of the cartoon has characters ganging up and beating the crap out of the bad guy. There’s an attempt at Disneyism, too. The starring kittens frolic like real kittens would (one jumps around on its front legs with its hind legs in the air) but they’re drawn without any Disney finesse. “Silvery Moon” is more in the Fleischer style with bizarre characters, a dream/nightmarish atmosphere and one of the voices of Betty Boop (Margie Hines, I suspect) crooning a neat little tune.
The Van Beuren cartoons were among the first ever seen regularly on TV. W2XBS (WNBC) in New York aired them as early as 1940. When commercial TV took over the living room from radio in the early ‘50s, they were seen in homes until AAP flooded channels with Popeye and Bugs Bunny a few years later.
It’s nice to see them return, even for a night, to entertain and provide a bit of education to discerning viewers about early theatrical animation. I can’t watch it, but you can view it for me. Check local listings for times.
It’s pure bunk that Jack Benny’s first appearance on radio was with Ed Sullivan in 1932, something the comedian claimed for years. But the earlier broadcasts we’ve been able to discover were on obscure shows, so perhaps they didn’t matter. After all, Benny landed his own show soon after he dropped in on Sullivan, not the previous shows.
For those who don’t know, before Sullivan was a stiff TV variety host, he was one of a number of newspaper columnists who did a show biz show on the radio.
Here’s a Sullivan column from October 27, 1947, long after Benny was established on radio (and before Sullivan’s huge success on TV). Sullivan shows that you do have a second chance to make a first impression.
Ed Sullivan On Today in New York
First time I ever saw Jack Benny at the Palace Theater, on Broadway, his poised nonchalance rubbed the wrong way. Here, I resolved, was the most conceited performer ever to play the fabled theater. Backstage, after the show. I confided this opinion to Abe Lyman, forgetting that the hollering Mister Lyman is hardly the type in whom to confide.
“Jack ain't conceited,” roared Lyman. “That's a bum rap, Eddie.” . . . The stentorian tone of Lyman bounced all over the backstage area. The acrobats came to the door, the elevator man looked in. . . . Benny didn't come in, fortunately.
The years were to prove Lyman was right, because Jack Benny and this reporter became the dearest of friends. Tuning in Sunday nights to his program is one of the most pleasant features of the week.
In 1932, Jack Benny made his first radio appearance on my program, just as Jimmy Durante, George M. Cohan, Jack Pearl, Jack Haley, Florenz Ziegfeld made their debuts on that airer.
Even then, Benny kidded himself, as he does now. “Hello, folks,” he said in 1932. “'This is Jack Benny. There will be a short pause for everyone to say ‘Who cares?’” Then he did a routine about his Hollywood picture and I remember this much of it: “It's a mystery picture. I'm found dead in the bathroom—and it’s not Saturday night.”
He never relaxed that attitude. Others could be cocksure, aggressive, fast talkers, but Jack Benny insisted on his writers creating situations in which he emerged as stingy, not overly brave, a middle-aged guy trying to be young.
To underscore these characteristics, he is surrounded by sharp, cynical Mary Livingstone, likeable braggart Phil Harris, naïve Dennis Day, quick-witted Rochester, bland Don Wilson, likeable little Artie Auerbach, with the pickle in the middle and the mustard up on top.
Benny is known in the profession as “the greatest audience” in show business. George Burns. Fred Allen and Larry Adler are his favorite comics, but he loves them all, and Jack Waldron is high on his list. . . . Their ability to get off rapid-fire ad libs convulses Benny, and he'd rather be with them or spend an evening with witty Bill Goetz than pretty nearly anything else.
We all grew up with cartoons on TV. We couldn’t get enough of them. Worthless old theatrical cartoons suddenly found a new audience—millions of children watching them over and over and over. Ratings were huge. Ratings = money. Money = more and more companies getting into the cartoon business to get a piece of the action. Suddenly, new cartoons were made especially for TV. Networks bought them. Stations bought them. More ratings, more money, more companies.
For every success story like AAP, which originally syndicated the Warner Bros. and Fleischer Popeye cartoons, there were other cartoon distributors which wallow in obscurity, their cartoons forgotten or unseen. One such company was run by Phil Davis.
Davis wasn’t a cartoonist, he was a writer-producer. His son was David Davis, who produced a bunch of successful sitcoms for MTM Productions. The two of them worked together on that series beloved by fans of 1928 Porters—“My Mother the Car.” He evidently saw the success of TV cartoons and jumped in.
In 1961, Davis created and wrote a sitcom pilot for Screen Gems satirising the space race called “Astronuts” (Richard Donner was hired to direct). Evidently he liked the punny title because he used it again. Kind of. Here’s Daily Variety from May 3, 1963.
Animation Of Pilot ABC Films Ordered Being Done In Yugo
Phil Davis leaves next week for Yugoslavia to film the pilot of a half-hour adult cartoon series, "The Astromutts." Animation will be done at the Zagreb studio with live symphony music and in Eastman color. Voice track will be made in Hollywood with featured actors. Davis previously produced the cartoon series, "Hound For Hire," in the same studio and it is now in syndication
Who appeared on the voice track? From Variety again, May 13th edition:
Len Weinrib has been set to do vocal role in "Astro-Mutts," cartoon strip being produced by Phil Davis for next fall. Series will be made in Yugoslavia.
You may know Lennie from his work at Hanna-Barbera a number of years later or his guest shots on ‘60s sitcoms. Lennie was a busy guy around this time. Among other things, he was the comic in Eve Arden’s act at the Sahara in Las Vegas (the comedian in the lounge at the time was a chap named Rickles). He was also an accomplished voice impersonator of J.F.K. and did the President in two satirical LPs released in 1962 by Capitol. Lennie once joked about Astromutts: “It must be a dog’s life behind the iron curtain.”
Davis wrote the words to the Astromutts theme song (music by Herman Stein and Harry Green) and it was copyrighted on May 7, 1963. It was almost two full years before we hear anything more about the proposed series. Davis’ copyrighted a 26-minute episode entitled “Operation Moonshot” (in Eastman Color) on March 23, 1965. Whether it ever appeared on TV or in theatres, I have no clue. I’m sure someone reading does and can fill us in.
Davis’ cartoon career evidently dates back to 1959, and this is where his other series mentioned above comes in. Daily Variety reported on November 27th of that year that Davis had “formed Cinemagic Internationale, a new company to make animated cartoons for television. Films will be produced at the Zagreb Studios in Yugoslavia, and voice tracks will be done in Paris with American actors. First series of 89 tele-films is titled ‘Hound for Hire’ and deals with adventures or a private-eye dog. Davis left for New York yesterday, and arrives in Paris Dec 2 en route to Yugoslavia.”
He evidently needed additional backing as the trade paper reported on March 9, 1960 that he and Arthur Epstein “have formed Cinemagic Corp. International to produce ‘Hound For Hire,’ animated tv series, in Europe for distribution in the United States. Initial batch will be 52 segs of from five to seven minutes each. It concerns a basset hound who plays a deadpan private eye.” By March 26th, Davis had written words and music for a children’s album based on the yet-to-be-made series. On April 6th, the paper announced he and Epstein had left for Europe to supervise the final processing then revealed on November 9th that the first 13 cartoons had been completed.
Why Zagreb? A headline in the May 18, 1960 Variety says it all: “O'Seas Animators Supplying Yanks; 50-75% Cheaper.” Actually, the March 20, 1960 edition of Sponsor magazine said the cartoons were produced in Yugoslavia and France, and processed in Germany and England. Here’s an episode of “Hound For Hire.” Good luck watching it to the end.
Cartoon studios of the late ‘20s and early ‘30s loved taking advantage of the huge theatre screen and animated characters in extreme close-ups. The Van Beuren studio’s version was the zooming head, where a singing animal would zoom its head toward the camera and give us a few tuneful bars before the head resumed its rightful place.
Here’s an example from “Foolish Follies” (1930) where animals are performing in a casino.
John Foster and Harry Bailey get the screen credits.
“It looks like McGrip’s famous spitball,” says announcer John Wald in the Tex Avery cartoon “Batty Baseball.” And indeed it is, in a literal sense.
Fortunately, there’s a spittoon in foul territory in the infield.
Avery’s original bunch of MGM animators—Preston Blair, Ed Love and Ray Abrams—get the animation credits, at least in the edited version that was on laser disc a number of years back (you can hear the edit in Scott Bradley’s score over the credits). See the comments for the animator ID from the man who knows these old MGM cartoons.
In hunting around for information for last week’s blog post about Lennie Weinrib, I came a CBS publicity drawing for one of the episodes of The Dick Van Dyke Show in which he appeared. It was attached to an Associated Press “what-is-he-really-like” piece about Van Dyke by co-star Mary Tyler Moore that was published in the Binghamton Press on July 11, 1965.
It’s hard to judge how sincere these kinds of stories are—it’s not like anyone says anything nasty in them—but I’d like to think this one’s legit. I don’t know Dick Van Dyke, but the people I know who do know him attest to what a fun and genuinely nice man he is.
The Van Dyke show holds up so well not only because of the cast chemistry but because what seems to me a dogged determination by Carl Reiner and Sheldon Leonard not to fall into hackneyed sitcom stories that were done to death in 1940s radio.
Dick Doesn’t Stand, Take Center Stage
By MARY TYLER MOORE
Hollywood — (AP) — One of the questions I’m asked most often is what is it like to work with Dick Van Dyke. And I have a feeling people don’t believe what I tell them because it sounds too good to be true.
I just can’t say that offstage, Dick Van Dyke is moody. Or temperamental. Or hard to get along with. I’m not sure he knows what those words mean.
The truth is that Dick doesn't lose his temper. He doesn’t sulk. He doesn’t throw his weight around.
He's so nice, in our hearts we know we don’t deserve him.
Someone asked Dick once if he could ever be married to me in real life. And he answered very honestly—he said no. To kid him, I asked what was the matter with me. Dick said, "I’m a marshmallow type. I’m not forceful enough for you."
I had to think that over. If Dick is a marshmallow type, it's over a steel core. He’s one of the strongest men I’ve ever known. But he’s quietly strong. (I probably need a loudly strong type.)
There are quite a few loud, strong types working to put The Dick Van Dyke Show (Wednesdays on Channel 12) together. We all sit around tossing in ideas, adding bits of action to the scripts as we go along. There’s a lot of joking and laughing and general fooling around.
Dick will be in the middle of it all. But he sits in the middle—he doesn't stand up and take center stage.
IF we’re working out a camera move that doesn’t concern him, Dick may wander off and play the stage piano. You know what he usually plays? Johann Sebastian Bach.
That's because he's learning to play the harpsichord and he practices whenever he can. I imagine we’re the only show in Hollywood that rehearses to Bach.
Dick does live up to his reputation as a funny, funny man. The great thing about working with him is that he does more hilarious things offstage than we ever have time for on camera.
We did one show in which a clothing store mannequin was part of the stage setting. During rehearsal, Dick wandered over and pretended to whisper in her ear, carrying on a great conversation in pantomime. One second he’d be a spy passing on vital secrets. The next, a mean, gossipy old woman. Then a Don Juan. It was a great performance—and one that only a couple of dozen people saw.
I’ve said this before and I’ll keep on saying it. Dick is a born artist. He’s so talented at things he's never had formal training for — dancing, playing the piano, juggling.
He makes it look as though things are easy for him. And because of this, he makes things easy for all of us who work with him, Who could ask for anything more?
Some drawings from a take by Tom at the start of the final Tom and Jerry cartoon, “Purr-Chance to Dream” (1967), directed by Ben Washam.
Sorry, but the Tom and Jerrys produced by Chuck Jones just aren’t funny. This one is no exception, despite dogs that look like ones Jones came up with at Warners in the ‘50s and animation by Ken Harris, Dick Thompson, Tom Ray, Don Towsley and Phil Roman.
There’s an inside joke in the pan of characters which inhabit Wackyland.
Tthe character in the pot has huge glasses, just like caricatures of animator Bobe Cannon. The creature (voiced by Berneice Hansell) yells “So, Bobo!”
Okay, there’s another inside joke. The character with the steaming funnels has a “W” and a “B” for Warner Bros.
And here are the other creatures.
Norm McCabe and Izzy Ellis appear in the animation credits. One unconfirmed report says the backgrounds were by Elmer Plummer, and this was the last cartoon he worked on before going to Disney and being replaced by Dick Thomas.
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