Of Snake and Bears

The Iwerks cartoon stock company crone with a beehive hairdo gets stuck in a tree and threatened by a rattlesnake in “Phoney Express” (1932). Flip the Frog shoots and misses.



Instead, the bullet shears off the beehive. Down comes the old crone, followed by the beehive landing back on her head. The snake’s expressions are great.



Flips shoots at the snake again. Instead, a bear falls out of the tree. What was it doing up there? Being convenient to the plot, I guess. Look! It’s the ubiquitous radiating lines! (in one Iwerks cartoon, I gave up after counting 30 separate times they were drawn).



The bear chases Flip and the crone. He fires his gun and when the smoke clears, there are two bears. He fires again. Now there are four. And reused animation.



The chase ends inside a cave. We don’t see the fight, just stars and puffs of smoke coming out of the cave’s entrance.



Flip and the crone emerge proudly wearing bearskin coats. Three of the four bears come out, embarrassed they’re in their long underwear. The fourth bear is more, um, bare than that. Enough with the radiating lines!



There are never animation credits on the Flip cartoons. I imagine Grim Natwick’s work is probably seen somewhere here.

A Forest of Eds

Here’s part of a reaaaaaaly long background from Tex Avery’s “Field and Scream” which you’ll have to click on to view. Multiple Eds (named for designer Ed Benedict) are hiding behind the trees and rocks on overlaid cels waiting to bag a deer.



Johnny Johnsen was still painting backgrounds for Avery when this cartoon was made.

Why Benny Helps

Jack Benny supported a number of causes over the years. He’s best known for his support for symphony orchestras and their homes, playing benefit concerts for them all over North America.

He was also one of a number of comedians who raised money for the state of Israel. The country awarded Eddie Cantor its Medallion of Valor in 1962. No doubt that’s what’s being referred to in this story in the Canadian Jewish Chronicle of April 18, 1962.

The article’s second-last paragraph explains, in a few words, why Benny’s radio and TV character was so popular.

JACK BENNY TELLS HOW HE BECAME INTERESTED IN ISRAEL
By FRED SILVER
IT WASN’T Sunday—it wasn’t a television show. What was Jack Benny doing there?
Eddie Cantor was supposed to be there. His seventieth birthday and the Israel Bond organization was going to honor him with a medal.
Jack said Eddie Cantor wasn’t well and asked him to come instead. Called him on the phone. “Jack, you are the greatest comedian in America.”
“I knew he was saying that just to get me to go,” said Benny.
“Why don’t you get Jessel?” asked Benny.
“Jessel!,” screamed Cantor—“he makes too many speeches. You know one of James Mason’s cats died and when Jessel got through with the funeral oration, what didn’t that cat do for Israel! Like Sophie Tucker said, some rabbis become comedians, but Jessel is the case of a comedian who has turned rabbi.”
“Why don’t you call Danny Kaye?” asked Benny.
“I did,” said Cantor.
“Hm-m,” said Benny.
Jack Benny got interested in Israel when he was sent to entertain the troops around Greece, he got leave to visit Tel Aviv.
Then Cantor asked him for a contribution for Israel.
Jack Benny took out a check blank and signed his name. “Eddie,” he said, “you fill in the sum.”
Eddie Cantor wrote in $25,000.
Benny is stingy only on television.
“I’ve been making so many speeches for Israel bonds,” Jack says, “they are beginning to call me the Jewish George Jessel.”
Jack says he would be a better violinist if the golf courses around Beverly Hills were shut down.
His ambition had been to be a violinist. His father gave him a violin and a monkey wrench. “Plumbing is a good business, too,” he said. Jack didn’t do anything with the monkey wrench. He played around with the violin for some time. In his first theatrical role, in a melodrama called “From Opera to Ragtime,” Jack played the role of a suffering violinist. In the Navy, too, he appeared as a fiddler when his battleship put on a musical revue, but he found he got more response from his words than from his tunes.
Back in civilian life, he was billed as Bennie K. Benny, but this was often confused with Ben Bernie, the name of a performer of some national renown, so the name was changed to Jack Benny.
In Hollywood, they say he is a great worrier, that he “lives on coffee and finger nails,” but his sponsors never worried about him and millions of people find him a weekly tonic.
He seems soft and easy like music. He is famed for his time sense of timing his pauses. Timing is very important in music and the violin may have helped him to that.
He works hard to get that smoothness. He doesn’t simply assign the job to his writers. They sit down together for days and slowly hammer it into shape.
Jack Benny says that in his role he seeks to “encompass about everything that is wrong with everybody.” The people see themselves in a mirror. He restores them to their humanity.
Jack Benny has a deep sense of humanity. That is why he is so ardent in his work for helping build Israel.

The Other Cartoon Tom Cat

Elliot Hyman’s Associated Artists Productions flooded TV channels in the mid-1950s with Warner Bros. and Popeye cartoons. There were other syndicators with other cartoons knocking on doors of stations. But there were only so many cartoons to go around, meaning some syndication companies had to look pretty hard to find animated films if they wanted a piece of the action.

One of those companies was Cinema-Vue Corp. Bugs Bunny, Betty Boop and even the old Toonerville Trolley shorts by Van Beuren were taken by others, so Cinema-Vue had to content itself with another character. It tried to convince stations to buy Tom Puss.

The ad you see to the right is from The Radio Annual and Television Yearbook for 1959. Cinema-Vue was co-founded in March 1954 by brothers Joe and Frank Smith to produce and distribute shorts for TV. But, according to Billboard of September 5, 1955, the company quickly became moribund and the two went to work for Guild Films. The two left Guild, Frank Smith went on to manage Cinepix, a subsidiary of Astra Films, and Joe reactivated Cinema-Vue. The company decided to get into the cartoon business. Billboard of September 24, 1955 reported:

Cinema-Vue Takes Cinepix Cartoons, 1-2 Reel Comedies
NEW YORK, Sept. 17—Cinema-Vue this week took over distribution of the 100 cartoons and 100 one and two-reel comedies that had been handled by Cinepix. It is expected that the Westerns, features and other product out of the latter’s vaults will later also go over to Cinema-Vue, making Cinepix inoperative as a separate entity.
Frank Smith, who had been running Cinepix, has moved over to the new firm as vice-president under his brother, Joe.

Billboard, in a story dated October 29, 1955, said Cinema-Vue was going to package an hour-long kids show featuring Westerns, comedies (some were silent starring Charlie Chaplin) and cartoons into an hour-long show called “The Cinepix Kiddie Carnival.” The story stated the company now had 150 cartoons.

So what were these cartoons? All Billboard revealed in its January 22, 1955 was they were “from a variety of production sources and are all sound.” A Billboard story of December 10, 1955 tells that Cinema-Vue had cobbled together an hour-long “Christmas Film Festival” and two of the five cartoons were titled “Santa’s Arrival” and “Christmas Up North.”

We learn a bit more from Variety of May 30, 1956:

Cinema-Vue’s New Batch Of 52 Color Cartoons
Cinema-Vue Corp, has acquired a new group of 52 color cartoons, which added to its backlog of 350 black-and-white subjects, brings its total animated library to 402 shorts. It had acquired 150 b-w's only a week earlier. All the films go into its "Whimseyland" package. Of the 52 new color subjects, 12 of which are "Mutt & Jeff" pix, a total of 40 were acquired from Morris Kleinerman...

Kleinerman had founded Astra Films. Incestuous, this film business, eh what? He was also involved in an attempt to manufacture animated colour cartoons in 1934. He signed some distribution deals at the time.

I suspect the “Mutt and Jeff” cartoons the ones that were originally silents and later had sound and colour added.

Cinema-Vue’s next cartoon venture was a Christmas show. Reported Variety on September 5, 1956:

Yuletide Show for Syndication
Cinema-Vue Corp. is planning a one-hour special Christmas program for syndication, featuring Leon Jason's puppet character Jingle Dingle acting as host to a roster of cartoon films. Jingle Dingle currently is serving as the official weatherman on WABD's, N.Y., Sandy Becker show.

Billboard reported the show consisted of “eight novelty shorts on the spirit of Yule season and theme music recorded by Julius La Rosa and Archie Bleyer.”

Well, this finally brings us to Tom Puss. Broadcasting magazine of November 30, 1959 explains the origin of the shorts. They were originally Dutch.

Cinema-Vue Corp., N.Y., has opened a West Coast branch office at 11693 Laurelwood Drive, Studio City, Calif., under direction of Frank Smith, vice president and sales manager. The company is worldwide distributor of Tom Puss cartoon series produced by Martin Toonder Studios in Amsterdam.

Toonder, according to 1977 The International Film Guide, had been producing comics and cartoons since 1939. Tom Puss was originally a weekly comic, created in 1941.

Did Cinema-Vue manage to sell Tom Puss cartoons to any TV stations? They remained in the company’s catalogue for a number of years. One Hollywood star was certainly acquainted with them. Walter Winchell blah-ed in his column of June 10, 1959:

Mickey Rooney's new bride. Barbara Thompson, is the voice of the frog in the Tom Puss cartoon, Flickers.

It’s likely few people had any idea what Winchell was talking about. Fewer do today. But we’ve been able to, I hope, tell a bit about one of television’s most obscure cartoon series. For more, read Jan-Willem de Vries’ background note in the comment section.

McKimson Meets UPA

Here’s the drawing from the opening of “A Mutt in a Rut” (1959). Bill Butler’s backgrounds are fairly conventional for a Bob McKimson cartoon except for the establishing shot. It has a watered-down UPA flavour.



Bob Gribbroek was the layout artist.

Ace in the Hole Backgrounds

The drabness of military camouflage has been captured nicely in background art in the Woody Woodpecker air force base cartoon “Ace in the Hole” (1942).



Fred Brunish was at Lantz at the time, but I couldn’t tell you if this is his work. I think it’s safe to assume Lantz had more than one background artist at the time.

George Dane (né George Jorgensen) receives the sole animation credit. Voices are provided by Kent Rogers who, ironically, died in an air force training exercise during the war.

The World Against Jack Paar

To paraphrase the immortal Ralph Wiggum: “Jack Paar fail? That’s umpossible!”

Paar’s attitude was if things didn’t go right, it was someone else’s fault. Film career fizzled? Blame RKO. His big radio show tanked? Blame Jack Benny and the people who owned it. Can’t think of how to talk on the air with a housewife? Blame the housewife and the producers who put her on. Think Fred Allen’s a fast wit? He’s not, and blame the listener who thinks he is. Don’t agree with reporters? They’re the ones to blame.

Jack Paar was a first-class whiner and enormously full of self-pity. It’s no surprise, then, the biggest memory he left behind was when he walked out on his audience. NBC’s picking on poor little Jack Paar by censoring his joke, boo-hoo-hoo, was his attitude.

New York Herald-Tribune columnist John Crosby found the whole thing sad. He appreciated Paar’s cleverness—the thing which got him on the “Tonight Show” in the first place—but seemed forlorn over Paar’s completely unnecessary woe-is-me attitude. Here’s a column from June 23, 1950 when Paar was hosting a game show.

Radio in Review
By JOHN CROSBY
Three years ago, a young ex-G. I. comic named Jack Paar made quite a splash in radio as the summer replacement for Jack Benny. He possessed an appealing personality, a subtle and original vein of humor and self-confidence. These qualities won him a regular winter show of his own, “The Jack Paar Show,” sponsored, by Lucky Strike, and a three-year contract with RKO to make pictures. For a 27-year-old comedian, the future looked rosy. Then the bottom fell out.
“I was the beginning of the Benny capital gains arrangement,” said Paar, now a rather bitter young not nearly so confident as he once was. “Benny had 20 per cent of the show, my agent had 10, the advertising agency had 15. I was split up more ways than Poland. The Hooper didn't justify the cost, so I was dropped.”
Madder and Madder
Things were no better at RKO. Paar made one picture and then sat on his hands for three years, getting madder and madder. He couldn't find any work in radio until recently when he took over the emcee chores on “Take It or It” from Eddie Cantor. Not long ago, he was asked whether he planned to continue on that ancient quiz show the subtle mockery which had won him general critical praise and a great many awards on his earlier show. The answer was negative and savage.
“I'm never going to do that kind of comedy again,” said Paar bitterly, “I want to work. The heck with the awards on my wall. I have a wife and a baby and a house in California. I had a lot of important people on my side. I had my chance and failed. I can't listen to John Crosby or ‘The New Yorker’ any more. You can't do it if there's nobody to listen to it. The pattern in radio is the same thing every week. I say, do a broad format like ‘Take It or Leave It.’ I know it has a mass appeal.”
He ruminated a moment, darkly, and then expressed a few forcible and unflattering opinions of reporters in general. He's convinced that a reporter will lambast him in print unless he agrees with the reporter politically and every other way. Writers, he declared, squat in their ivory towers while actors have to struggle for everything they get. And actors are more sensitive than other people. “I don't care,” he added. “You can't lose me my 13 weeks with Eversharp.” (Sponsor of “Take It or Leave It.”)
Frightened!
He dropped the subject of writers and brooded for awhile about the profession of emcee. “I don't know what I'll do. I keep dreaming of a woman saying, ‘I'm a time I housewife.’ And I just freeze. What do I say then? She's a housewife. It's frightening and I'm frightened. I hope people realize it won't be Jack Paar at his best.
Paar is not entirely happy over the recognition given Groucho Marx for his extemporaneous wit which, he claims, is turned out by three writers and is thoroughly written and rehearsed. “The best things Fred Allen or anyone has done are not extemporaneous. They're written—at 3 in the morning, usually.”
In this mood and with these attitudes, which seem hardly propitious to re-launch a career in radio, Mr. Paar a couple of weeks ago stepped into Mr. Cantor's shoes on “Take It or Leave It” where he is strictly on trial. After 13 weeks, “Take It or Leave It” will take Mr. Paar or leave him. In spite of his fears, he has been a very good emcee indeed. Somewhere between the interview and his first appearance, he has learned what to say when a woman says: “I'm a housewife.” (You jolly them along, flirt a little and laugh a lot.) He has learned to bandy witticisms with Shriners who would have been strictly on the receiving end to the old Jack Paar.
Paar still has a very engaging personality with a bit of the exuberance of Bob Hope, a bit of the winsome, naive quality of Alan Young. Occasionally, you'll find flashes of the dreamy, satiric and strikingly-different comedy which first drew attention to him. Paar can't completely suppress himself no matter how hard he tries. There's no particular point in going into “Take It or Leave It.” You must have heard it. It is one of those quizzes which are neither very hard nor very easy. More ingenuity and hard work is required to dream, up the questions for this quiz than to think up the answers.
Eversharp, I think, made a wise choice in Paar. I hope they keep him on beyond the 13 weeks as long as he wants to stay. Whether Eversharp does or doesn't I find the whole affair a little sad.

Oswald Punch

The bad guy’s fist fills the screen in “Sky Scrappers,” a 1928 Oswald cartoon.



The shot is from Oswald’s point of view.



But then the black becomes Oswald’s nose. We’re seeing things from the bad guy’s point of view.



And a couple of drawings from a woozy cycle.



Walt Disney is the only person credited.

Naked Sheep of Tomorrow

A sheep has been crossed with a pair of long underwear on the Farm of Tomorrow. It makes shearing obsolete. Here’s how the farmer gets the wool.



The drawings are on twos but the camera keeps panning.



I like how the sheep looks at the audience, turns to look at its wool, then looks at the camera again.



The background may remind you a bit of something from a Hanna-Barbera cartoon. That’s because it was drawn by Joe Montell, who worked at H-B during 1959. In fact, he painted the crosses on the grass and dots in the trees you see here in Yogi Bear backgrounds as well. When the Tex Avery unit closed at MGM in 1953, he found his way to the John Sutherland studio. Evidently he was active in the union. Witness this story from Variety, July 31, 1956:

Enter Foreign Teleblurbs In L.A. Cartoonists Fest
For first time in the five-year history of the Screen Cartoonists Guild Annual Film Festival, foreign firms will participate, sending examples of their teleblurbs, according to fest chairman Sterling Sturdevant.
Jim Pabian, director of Les Cineastes Associes of Paris, largest European outfit in the field, will attend, according to fest flack Joe Montell. Also coming over are Halas & Batchelor of London, and Dibujas Animados S.A., Mexico City, with general manager Pat Matthews attending.
Fest opens at the BevHilton on Sept. 23.

You may recognise the names above. Sturdevant was at UPA, Pabian worked for Harman and Ising and Matthews was one of Walter Lantz’s best animators before moving to UPA.

“Farm of Tomorrow” gets ragged on a lot—it’s like Avery needed to fill his quota so he came up with some groaners and used limited animation—but it has its moments. Paul Frees is the narrator. A woman who’s not June Foray lends a voice and Daws Butler supplies a short line, along with another man I can’t identify.

Benny: Fact or Fiction

No wonder Jack Benny confused some people into thinking he really drove a Maxwell and was incredibly cheap. It’s easy to leave that impression when you give interviews that are a mix of real life and fake life.

Jack filled in for the radio columnist of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle on August 26, 1940 (Mary had pinch-writ in the same space four years earlier). The column—and I don’t know whether he actually wrote it—is an odd mish-mash of fact and fiction.

Poor Fellow, He Never Sees His Nice House
By JACK BENNY
Pinch-hitting for vacationing Jo Ranson.
One of Uncle Sam’s better-pressed mailmen brought me a letter a few days ago. It caught up with me at the Paramount lot so I went off in a corner where Fred Allen couldn’t read over my shoulder before finding out it was from my old friend Jo Ranson.
Jo was going on a vacation, he wrote, and went on to talk of how nice it would be to get away from home for a while. I suppose he will think me wacky just like the rest of my pals for feeling the way I do, but all that I want is to stay at home.

You see it would be a novelty for me to enjoy my home for a change. For all the good I’ve gotten out of it this year, I might just as well sell the place to Mr. Billingsley, my boarder, and rent a room from HIM. He’s there more than I am.
To begin with, I started the year by going to San Francisco for a broadcast, then over to Yosemite for the Winter sports (why I’ll never know), and then Rochester had no sooner unpacked my toothbrush than Paramount decided my gang and I were needed on location at Victorville for a couple of weeks.
Upon my return, I was just preparing to head a safari and explore the unknown vastness of my patio when my writers suddenly became obsessed with the notion they might think better at Palm Springs. So we sweltered in the desert sun every few days for the ensuing six weeks, while I learned all about my Beverly Hills chateau from a tourist who’d been by it on one of those “See-the-Stars’-Homes” trips. . . .
And I’d no sooner succeeded in talking my gang out of a trip to Catalina Island by telling them an active volcano had been discovered next door to the St. Catherine Hotel, than Paramount announced that we were to pack up and hop to New York for three weeks to attend the world’s premiere of “Buck Benny Rides Again.”
Honestly, I haven’t so much as had a chance to work out my new croquet field, and it’s been so long since I’ve played badminton on my court that the “birds” are beginning to molt.
Well, to make a long story short, I’d been back in the West just long enough to strike up a speaking acquaintance with the pantry maid, when my family emerged from three layers of travel folders and whisked me off to Hawaii.
I’m back in Hollywood once again, but things haven’t, improved. When I get home from the studio where they’re filming “Love Thy Neighbor,” I see Fred Allen in front of my eyes.
But I’m not giving up without a fight. No, sir! Confidentially, I think I've figured out a way to beat the rap. I’m going to have my house done over as a dude ranch. And before I’m through, I’ll have Mary Livingstone begging me to get away from it all and spend a few weeks at this inviting new rendezvous.

So let’s tote this up.

● Away from home in 1940. Yes on the air, yes off the air.
● Rent to Billingsley. Yes on the air, no off the air.
● Rochester is his butler. Yes on the air, no off the air.
● Pantry maid. No on the air, yes off the air.
● Family. No on the air, yes off the air.

Is it any wonder in later years, Benny interviews included a disclaimer that he played a character on the air and he wasn’t like that character. In some minds, though, that probably didn’t clear up the confusion. As today’s apologist-fans for misbehaving stars prove, people insist they “know” someone because they’ve seen him or her on the screen. Real life sometimes proves someone to be something much different.