How to Move a Bleep

Hanna-Barbera wasn’t the only TV cartoon studio around in the late ‘50s but its product may have been slicker than the others. Sam Singer was churning out “Pow Wow the Indian Boy,” Beverly Hills Productions came out with “Spunky and Tadpole” while Shull Bonsall manoeuvred Jay Ward and Alex Anderson out of their own property and created new episodes of “Crusader Rabbit” through his company, TV Spots (and distributed by his Regis Films).

And then there was Colonel Bleep.

Outer space was big in 1957, and a TV film commercial producer in Florida decided to take advantage of it. Soundac Productions created “Colonel Bleep,” starring an alien in a space helmet, a puppet cowboy named Squeak and a caveman called Scratch. By mid-1957, it was ready for syndication by Richard Ullman of Buffalo (Weekly Variety, June 19, 1957). Future research is needed to discover when it first aired, but it debuted on WGR in Buffalo on September 23rd. It was still running on WNBC in New York as late as 1971 (on Saturday mornings, to no surprise), but the series’ heyday was in the late ‘50s.

The cartoons certainly had their own graphic style which many people appreciate today. The animation? Well, let’s be kind and say the characters jerked from pose to pose, though they seem to have been stationary a lot of the time. On occasion, characters moved through a kind of smear animation with brush lines. Here’s a good example from one of the cartoons. These are consecutive drawings.

Ken Harris of Lower Slobovia

College-age Ralph Phillips is told in the U.S. Army short “Drafty, Isn’t It?” (1957) that all his buddies in the army won’t “look like a bunch of Lower Slobovians.” And there’s a shot of them. The cartoon was made by the Chuck Jones unit at Warners. Whether they’re caricatures of the Warners cartoon staff, I don’t know, but usually when there’s a gangly guy with a long nose and buck teeth, it’s Ken Harris. And there’s one of those here. (Abe Levitow and Dick Thompson got the other animation credits. Levitow was tall and dark).



There’s a neat hidden reference in a picture on Phillips’ bedroom wall. Note the signatures on the cast. One is “Linda.” Can it be a reference to anyone but Chuck Jones’ daughter, Linda?



You’ll also see the names “Joe” and “Bill” on the cast. I know what you’re thinking. Well, the cartoon has a 1957 copyright date so it’s likely it was made either around the time Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera had been fired by MGM or had set up their new studio. My guess is it’s a coincidence but I’d like to think of it as a little tribute.

But Mademoiselle Zuzu...

Alas. Poor Oswald doesn’t have the money to see Mademoiselle Zuzu’s performance in “Bright Lights,” a 1927 Disney cartoon.



He rests his hand on her poster, dejected. Unfortunately, his hand is on Mlle. Zuzu’s butt. The poster-Zuzu comes to life, gets embarrassed and changes positions.



Patrick Malone’s Disneyshorts.org credits the animation on this to Hugh Harman and Ham Hamilton.

Oswald Finally Celebrates Christmas Again

It looks like it’ll be a happy holiday for Oswald and his friends in the 1927 cartoon “Empty Socks,” produced by Walt Disney. The drawing has (not surprisingly) a Harman-Ising feel to it, doesn’t it?



Wait a minute, you Disneyphiles and silent cartoon lovers are saying. Isn’t that cartoon missing? Apparently not. News reports say it has been tracked down to an archives in Norway, all but a portion in the middle of the short.

Now if only the world could get a look at it.

My thanks to Morten Eng for letting me know about this discovery.

Paul Kligman, Actor, Author and Reindeer

Go ahead. Call me a humbug. But I have never warmed to any of the Rankin-Bass stop motion shows, including the grand-daddy of them all, “Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer.” But I sure like the voice cast.

Every once in a while, I hear grumblings about “cheaper Canadian voice talent,” as if it’s somehow inferior to the hundreds of people in Southern California on the audition circuit for cartoon roles. Well, “humbug” I say to that. The huge legions of fans of “Rudolph” sure don’t complain about the actors as they cozy up to their TVs every December to enjoy Romeo Muller’s tale of the bullied outcasts who become admired in the end. The fans don’t complain because the actors come up with an enjoyable performance.

In every major Canadian city, there’s a little group of people that seems to get 90 per cent of the voice work; commercials, voiceovers and so on. And Toronto of the 1960s was no different. Many of the same actors in “Rudolph” lent their voices to other animated series, such as “Spider-Man” and “Tales of the Wizard of Oz.” It’d be tough to pick a favourite from that group. Carl Banas was wonderfully versatile and, according to people I know who worked with him on radio, a very funny and unassuming man. Bernard Cowan had a nice matter-of-fact, straight narrative delivery (his character voices sounded like Bernard Cowan trying to do character voices). But the guy I like best is Paul Kligman.

Kligman brought life to those cheesy-looking Spider-Man cartoons as the perpetually-annoyed J. Jonah Jameson. Like just about any voice artist in Toronto then, Kligman had acted in dramatic radio on the CBC. He spent some years in Vancouver before he realised the thing many actors in Vancouver eventually realise: jobs are limited so you have to go to a bigger city. So off he went to Toronto.

Here’s a story from the Ottawa Citizen of November 7, 1953. As you might expect, it dwells mainly with the all-important Theatre.

“Varied” Is The Word For Actor Paul Kligman
“Variety” is the first adjective you think of for the talent of Winnipeg-born actor Paul Kligman, whose name appears so often in the cast lists for CBC radio and television productions from Toronto: but when you consider the comic and serious stage roles he has carried in Vancouver and Toronto, as well as all the villains, buffoons, strange-accents imports and plain ordinary Canadians he has portrayed on the air, you begin to get a picture that borders on versatility.
Kligman, now 30, the father of two small children and (since March), the owner of a new house in the Wilson Heights northern suburb of Toronto, has been in show business for 17 years—on a full-time basis only since he moved to Toronto from the West in 1949.
Before that he led a double life over a period of many years, earning a living primarily as a salesman (shoes, groceries, clothing, furs, in turn) and supplementing this with a less dependable revenue from radio and stage work.
Produced Dramas

At the University of Manitoba (which he attended for two years—1941-42) he acted in or directed such plays as The Man Who Came to Dinner and Waiting For Lefty. Then he produced drama and variety shows for the RCAF. First from Winnipeg, then from Vancouver, he was heard in many CBC drama productions during and after the war and in Vancouver he put in six (summer) seasons with the Theater under the Stars, cast usually in “heavy comic” roles (he stands five-foot-eleven and weighs 240 pounds).
For the 1952 season he returned to Vancouver from Toronto to do The Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz, Senator Billboard Rawkins in Finian’s Rainbow, Frosch in Die Fledermaus and the Burgomaster in the Red Mill—just a sample of the musical comedy experience which stands to his credit.
On the CBC, particularly when he was in Vancouver, he has appeared often as the villain in melodramas. During and after the war he was much in demand, because of his facility with German and other “dialects”, for “filthy Nazi” parts. There have been many other similar roles like that one for him in CBC plays, and most recently, on TV, he portrayed the villainous type in The Duke in Darkness.
As for dialects, he can talk natural understandable English through many foreign-language filters and this is one of the abilities that often make him the obvious choice for a special role, otherwise difficult for the producer to fill.
He is “fluent” in English as it might be spoken by men whose native tongue is Russian, Italian, German, Yiddish or French. (His own ancestors were Russian Jews). For the CBC Wednesday Night production of Jacobovsky and the Colonel he carried the leading part with a convincing suggestion of Polish-Jewish origins; he was Papa Bonaparte in The Golden Boy on Ford Theater and on the stage in Vancouver—and who doesn’t recall the odd characters who used to stumble into the Wayne and Shuster Show when least expected?
Interested In The Theater
His interest in the stage is not confined to the musical-comedy field. A member of the founding board of the Jupiter Theater in Toronto, he played in two of that group’s productions—Aristophanes in Socrates and Slick in Crime Passionel. He was Jack in Wayne and Shuster’s Mother Goose production which was seen at His Majesty’s in Montreal and the Grand Theater in London in 1951, and heard later on CBC Wednesday Night.
One of the things he likes about radio and TV (and he says he’s never been happier in his life than during the last few years of concentrated effort in those fields) is that “no two jobs are alike.” And a glance at his recent record of recent activity serves to explain this. He is Mayor McTaggart in Jake and The Kid, Stanford Van Crump in Public Eye series of take-offs on the Dragnet-type program; gets frequent “straight” Canadian roles on Stage 54, Ford Theater, CBC Wednesday Night and Cross Section; and he appeared with his singing sister (Libby Morris) in the light comedy series Libby with Paul. On TV, he was Josh Smith, the Mariposa hotel proprietor in the Sunshine Sketches, and amateur geologist Gideon Spillet in Jules Verne’s The Mysterious Island. One of his forthcoming radio appearances will be in Esse Ljunghs production of George Orwells 1984 for CBC Wednesday Night on November 18.
Off the set and away from the studio, Kligman gardens with relish and works at his collection of Jewish folk lore of all kinds. A hobby he hopes eventually to have more time for is the making of copper pictures. But nearly all his time is devoted to his acting work. “There’s no room for fooling around in this business,” he says. It has to be worked at, talked about all the time—just like any other profession.”
Having by this time acquired considerable experience in TV as well as radio, he is in a position to compare the two media from the play’s point of view. Work in TV has had the effect of “completely relaxing me in radio.” After the tremendous concentration of effort the player must put into a single TV performance, radio looks easy he says, and there is a great danger of the quality of a player’s radio work suffering if he does not deliberately “pull up his socks,” and remind himself that although he can read his lines from a script (instead of having to memorize them) there is still the other side of the coin—the fact that he must project his voice and role entirely with his voice and that he is deprived utterly of visual contact with the audience.
After noting Kligman’s flair for dialects and character roles, and his excellent sense of timing which fits him so well for comedy parts, it may come as a surprise that one of his strongest points is what producers call a fine natural voice with a distinctive intonation—the sort of voice that will fit happily and modestly into a documentary rather than a dramatic setting, and stand in clear contrast to other voices. Strangely enough, this quality is none too easy to find—so Kligman scores again, this time with what would appear to be the commonest of commodities—an ordinary Canadian voice.

The story is incorrect about Kligman’s birth. He was born in Romania and came to Canada with his parents in 1923 when he was nine months old. When he was about eight, his father opened a grocery store across from Winnipeg’s Leland Theatre. Perhaps that piqued his interest in acting. Kligman later wrote a fictional account of his dad in the book It All Ends Up In a Shopping Bag.

The story shows Kligman had an early connection with Wayne and Shuster. He was part of their stock company (along with announcer Bernard Cowan, the long-time voice of “Front Page Challenge”) on numerous specials on Canadian TV into the 1970s.

Kligman died in Toronto on August 25, 1985. Like many voice actors, his work lives on. And so long as there are TV Christmas specials, you’ll be able to hear Kligman every December.

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.