Regifting Christmas Cartoon Goodies

These have been corralled from various parts of the internet, so I’m regifting them to you as an early Christmas present. The great drawing with the Fleischer characters in a stocking comes from the Cartoon Research blog via Thad Komorowski. I believe the Jim Tyer drawing at the bottom was posted by Milton Knight. The caricature of Ub Iwerks surrounded by signed is by Dick Bickenbach, who moved on to Warner Bros. and MGM before helping to start up the Hanna-Barbera studio.

Do Not Open Until...

“Hysterical Highspots in American History” is one of those cartoons which, as the old joke goes, could be sued for false advertising. A lot of early-‘40s spot gag cartoons are really painful.

The short has a Christmas gag buried in it. Also buried in the background drawing are the initials of Walter Lantz and Alex Lovy. What or who “B.C. INS” is your guess. Someone at the International News Service, perhaps?



Lovy and La Verne Harding are the credited animators. Bugs Hardaway came up with the groaners.

Santa Sings to Scrappy

Santa Claus at a Thanksgiving party? Making an alcoholic toast to a little boy? That’s the scenario we get in “Holiday Land,” a 1934 Columbia cartoon where producer Charles Mintz tried to do his best Walt Disney impression. There’s Technicolor (two-strip only), there’s a sunrise revealing tweeting birdies, there’s sentiment, and there’s special musical material.

Scrappy dreams that every day is a holiday, and is led by Father Time into rooms with Christmas, New Year’s Day, Easter and Thanksgiving celebrations. Scrappy is beckoned into a party at a long table (with a bottle of champagne prominent in the foreground), as revellers, with swaying glasses, chant the following song (is it a Joe De Nat original?):

Come, we call, each Tom, Dick and Harry
Come on and be merry and happy!
Fill your glass with laughter and folly
And chase melancholy away!

Laugh, laugh, ah-ha-ha-ha!
Sing, sing, tra-la-la-la!

Come, we call, and make life worth living
Our thanks we’ll be giving today.

Santa gets the “laugh” line.



A toy (?) kangaroo pops out of a box in Santa’s sack to “sing, sing.”



Then three joeys pop out of individual pouches to “tra-la-la-la” on the soundtrack.



The cartoon was nominated for an Oscar along with Walter Lantz’s attempt at mimicking Disney with colour and song, “Jolly Little Elves,” while Disney countered with “The Tortoise and the Hare” (guess which cartoon won?).

Here’s a lovely version of the opening title card.



This is from a print owned by Steve Stanchfield. You can read a bit more about his hunt for it on Jerry Beck’s Cartoon Research blog.

A Musical Interlude

Sure, there are the Beatles and Elvis Presley. But did anyone have more influence on popular music—at least one month of the year—than Bing Crosby?

His version of Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas” in the 1942 movie Holiday Inn became a monster hit. It sold more singles than any record in history. More importantly, it begat an entire Christmas music industry as songwriters got out their pens and used them to try to dig for their own Yuletide gold.

Some of them found it. Soon came “The Christmas Song,” with its chestnuts and open fire, released on disc in 1946. Johnny Marks scored big with “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” three years later. By 1954, there were so many new Christmas songs annually, Billboard magazine put out a list. See how many of them you know.



Evidently the mambo was the Craze of ’54, as there were more mambo Christmas tunes than there had any right to be. And there were novelty songs, too. How can you not love titles like “Santa and the Doodle-Li-Boop” or “Too Fat to be Santa Claus” (especially since the lyrics have a reference to King Farouk)? My personal favourite is “I’m Gonna Put Some Glue Around the Christmas Tree,” which—and you’ll want to know this—was also recorded by Joel Grey and released on the Majar label. Eartha Kitt released a sequel to her 1953 hit “Santa Baby.” And the Pennsylvanian’s Teen Trio sounds like an act on “SCTV” (without bothering to research it, I imagine they were part of Fred Waring’s musical aggregation).

So, let us play disc jockey. Here’s John Greer and “We Wanna See Santa Do the Mambo.” It’s a little repetitive but there are some roots of rock and roll buried in here.



Here’s a version of “Dig That Crazy Santa Claus.” This isn’t the one on the Billboard list. It’s by Oscar McLollie and his Honey Jumpers on the Modern label. Dig that sax solo! I imagine radio stations playing Eddie Arnold, Kitty Kallen and Russell Arms wouldn’t have been playing this.



And here’s Betty Johnson’s touching plea, in waltz time, for Santa to give her Eddie Fisher for Christmas. Apparently Santa listened to a similar request a few years later from Liz Taylor.



One of the records on the list is still heard around the holidays after making its debut in 1954. Perry Como’s “There’s No Place Like Home For the Holidays” was recorded November 16th and hit number eight on the charts. Como had been on radio through the ‘40s and eased into television quite nicely. He and Andy Williams vied for the title of “Relaxed Musical King Wearing a Sweater” at Christmas time on TV for years.

So if you get sick of the endless barrage of overplayed Christmas tunes that arrive earlier and earlier every year, take heart that there are some hidden old gems on the internet that appeal to almost every musical taste. Now, where’s that Red Buttons song?

No Maxwell For Christmas

Just about everyone loves the festivities of the Yuletide season, and just about everyone loves a parade. So leave it to Hollywood to combine the two, and throw in big stars at the same time.

Here’s a United Press story about the 1940 Santa Claus parade in Hollywood. Jack Benny took part but without one of his favourite props. And I imagine if Santy didn’t come home that night, he was probably having a snort or ten with Jack Barrymore.

HOLLYWOOD SANTA.
Typical Movie Parade Despite the Cold Wind.
By FREDERICK C. OTHMAN
Hollywood, Nov. 23 (U.P.) — Christmas came to Hollywood last night on the wings of a gale which nearly removed Santa Claus’ whiskers, gave the bathing beauties goose pimples, ruined Dorothy Lamour’s hair-do, and blew pieces of palm fronds into the eyes of 300,000 celebrators.
Heralding the great day a full mouth ahead of time were brass bands and a lady with a calliope, all tooting away at “Jingle Bells.” Bob Hope traveled down Hollywood boulevard in a driverless automobile! Jack Benny rode in a bogus Maxwell towed by a horse, and John Barrymore put his arms around Santa Claus atop a three-story float, which was said to have cost $25,000.
Down Hollywood Boulevard, whose every lamp post had been covered with a tin Christmas tree, marched the welcomers of Christmas in November. Moving with them were traveling searchlights, and in front of each light was a drum majorette and her band.
Edgar Bergen rode in a car wired for sound and made wisecracks via Charlie McCarthy, while Fibber McGee and Mollie lolled on the cushions of one of the most magnificent limousines in the west. Behind this masterpiece of motordom came the employes of the Wistful Vista Finance Company, with shotguns to keep an eye on their property.
The celebrated Leo Carrillo rode his horse. Smiley Burnett, the cow-opera comic, nearly fell off his. Andy Devine also had a horse, and so did Irene Rich. And about the only star in town who wasn’t on hand was Dick Powell, who had a cold.
Bob Burns drove a six-horse team of Percherons; Gracie Allen shivered under a blanket, and Rudy Vallee was the only citizen for miles around in a dinner jacket.

Benny’s Maxwell provided the only crisis of the evening. He promised to ride in one with his trusty Rochester at the wheel, but the nearest thing his agents could find was a one-cylinder Brush, manufactured in 1907. Rochester studied its manipulation during a quick lesson in a parking lot, but Benny’s bosses said, “No sirree, Christmas or no Christmas, we aren’t going to risk damaging a valuable piece of properly like him.” So they hitched a horse to the machine and Benny rode in safety.
Behind him came Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes, complete with meerschaum pipe, which he didn’t light because he said it was too strong. And then marched the angels with the pink noses and an unidentified platoon of gents in red suits and gold hats. And finally came Santa Claus himself, shouting greetings on a loudspeaker against the cold wind from the sea.
He rode upon a two-seater shay, attached by strings of electric lamps to four solid silver reindeer. The whole works was perched upon a mobile mountain of white gypsum. In the rear seat sat Santy and Barrymore in a Homburg hat; in front were Miss Lamour and Vallee. From above came imitation snow, puffed from a gold smokestack.
That ended the parade and started one of the most superb traffic jams ever devised by the hand of man. At an early hour today Mrs. Santa Claus said her husband still hadn’t come home, and anyone who thinks this sounds a little far-fetched has plenty of time to come see for himself; there’ll be more of the same every night until December 25.

Jack Benny had great Christmas shows on both radio and TV. Mel Blanc’s performance was usually the highlight. Here’s his final one from radio, broadcast December 5, 1954. The best part of this show is Bea Benaderet going crazy at the end; she never got to cut loose like this on “Petticoat Junction” or “The Flintstones.” Frank Nelson, Sheldon Leonard, Veola Vonn and Artie Auerbach made appearances as well.

The Critic Who Didn’t Like ‘A Charlie Brown Christmas’

There were three things that I thought as I watched “A Charlie Brown Christmas” in 1965—that I had read some of the routines in the Peanuts strip in the paper, that the music was really odd for a cartoon and that I could read the lines better than some of those kids.

But that was all minor. I really liked the special. I was a big Peanuts fan at the time. I had put together scrapbooks of Peanuts comics I had cut out of one of the city papers. I even convinced my dad to let me use his reel-to-reel tape machine and put up a mike next to the TV speaker to record the Christmas special.

“A Charlie Brown Christmas” won a Peabody, launched seemingly endless hours of Peanuts on TV, and was beloved by everyone.

Okay, not everyone.

I’ve gone back through a bunch of newspapers to see, after its debut 49 years ago, what the critics thought. And the TV columnist for the Associated Press, who had panned a Danny Thomas special in her previous column, wasn’t charmed by the animated Charlie Brown.

Cartoon Cuties Lose Some Of Charm on TV
By CYNTHIA LOWRY
AP TV-Radio Writer

NEW YORK (AP) — Worried Charlie Brown, aggressive Schroeder, insecure Linus — all the inhabitants of the delightful, satiric comic strip by cartoonist Charles Schulz were participants in a Christmas special on CBS Thursday night.
And by some reverse magic, the moment the little pen-line characters were animated and moved off the printed page, and acquired voices, they lost most of their special, piquant charm.
Thus “A Charlie Brown Christmas” became an explicit demonstration of the sad truth that some good things are better left alone—particularly in cases when about half their charm is in the eye of the beholder and in his imagination, too.
Charlie Brown was an infinitely sadder, appealing and sympathetic little character when his admirers were able to fill out his personality with some of their own doubts and fears. Lucy’s destructive manner and bossy ways were much more deadly when the readers were able to identify her with humans of their acquaintance.

With that, the writer turned her attention to weekend pro football games on the tube for the rest of the column.

However, United Press International’s counterpart had a different opinion, though much of his column looks like it comes from transcribing the plot from a CBS news release.

‘Charlie Brown Christmas’ Gets Good Point Across
By RICK Du Brow
HOLLYWOOD (UPI) — The comic strip known as “Peanuts” staked out a claim to a major television future Thursday night on CBS-TV with a half-hour animated special about the commercialization of Christmas.
The program, “A Charlie Brown Christmas”—named after one of the chief characters in the strip—was referred to by CBS-TV as “The first of a planned series of Charlie Brown holiday specials,” and the idea of similar encores is thoroughly welcome.

In brief, Thursday night's offering tried, with humor and gentle world-weariness, to recall the real meaning of Christmas. The executive producer was Lee Mendelson, who was responsible for the network documentary “A Man Named Mays,” about Willie Mays, and the director of animation was Bill Melendez, with the production being made in cooperation with United Feature Syndicate.
The plot, so to speak, of Thursday night's half-hour is indicated as follows: “Everywhere Charlie Brown goes the shadow of commercialism and greed obscures what he knows exists somewhere, if only he can find it: The real Christmas.
Plot Thickens
“In desperation Charlie visits Lucy, the little girl ‘psychiatrist,’ who prescribes ‘involvement’ in the holiday activities and appoints him director of the neighborhood Christmas play. Thrilled by the idea of being leader of the pageant, Charlie soon finds only added disillusionment as his little friends concern themselves with pleas to Santa Claus, money-making schemes and rock ‘n’ roll carols.”
Well, you get the idea. And Charlie Brown, Lucy, Linus, Snoopy the dog, Schroeder and the others were on hand to flesh it out And Charles Schulz, creator of “Peanuts,” did the writing, which was a very smart move.
At one point, Lucy tells “Beethoven wasn't so great. Have you ever seen his picture on bubble gum cards?” At another point, asked what she really wants for Christmas, Lucy answers: “Real estate.” And another time she notes that it's well known that Christmas is commercial, and that it is run by a big Eastern syndicate.
Needless to say, Charlie Brown finally gets his message across. But, as might be expected, that crazy-silly-wonderful dog Snoopy was the scene-stealer every time he appeared — playing the guitar, mocking Lucy or dancing like a swinger. His doghouse, by the way, was wildly decorated with all those ugly lights and blinking designs that human beings also have been known to use on their homes at Christmas time.

Within a week of the special, CBS announced it would broadcast two more Peanuts half-hours sponsored by Coca-Cola, one about baseball and the other possibly about the Great Pumpkin.

Incidentally, “A Charlie Brown Christmas” wasn’t Charles Schulz’s first go-around with the holiday season. In the December 1963 edition of Good Housekeeping, there was an “exclusive bonus book” called “Charlie Brown Christmas Stocking.” And Variety announced on October 27, 1963 that World Publishing would be out with a book called “A Charlie Brown Christmas,” conveniently available for purchase after the charming TV special aired. After all, what’s Christmas without making a buck?

Noses For Christmas

It’s Christmas-time during the Depression and the Little King decides to do something nice for the holidays by bringing home a couple of hoboes in “Pals” (1933).

They press their noses against the window of a toy store to watch a dancing toy. The gag is the funny shapes the noses make against the glass. The trio get their noses stuck and have to pull them away with a pop.



Jim Tyer gets the animation credit.

Van Beuren made cartoons starring Otto Soglow’s silent character for a little under a year before he was swept off the screen by new management at the studio.

Merry Christmas To Kitty (Again)

A typical Famous Studios mouse is shocked to see Santa at the window in “Mice Meeting You” (1950). The mouse shrinks and then stretches. The holly leaves in the background get in the way of the take.



Ah, but it’s not Santa at all. It’s Katnip!!! Don’t worry. Cousin Herman will come to the rescue and fill the cartoon with the spirit of the holidays. Like pouring boiling coffee down the cat’s throat. Ho! Ho! Ho!



This is the cartoon which infamously ends with Herman plugging Katnip’s tail into a wall socket and illuminating the lights strung over the seemingly-dead cat. I get all misty-eyed just thinking about that touching memory of Christmases past.

Bob Jaques, who is unimpeachable when it comes to this topic, identifies this cartoon as being made by the Tendlar-Golden-Reden-Taras unit.

The No-So-Jolly Christmas of the Second Amos Jones

Favourite Christmas specials pop up on TV year after year after year, but the idea didn’t originate in television. Annual Christmas broadcasts were a fixture on radio.

One of the most popular was on “Amos ‘n’ Andy,” where Amos touchingly interpreted The Lord’s Prayer to little Arbadella. It was heard annually beginning in 1940 and was so popular that producers decided to feature the recitation on the “Amos and Andy” TV show in 1952.

Popular the routine may have been, but the TV version of “Amos ‘n’ Andy” was a lump of coal in everyone’s stocking—CBS’s, which owned the show and put it on TV as it did most of its other radio hits; the black community, which was fed up with the dialect humour and stereotyping of characters as schemers or deadbeats; and the actors on the show themselves, who quickly became untouchable due to their association with it.

There was no possible way series creators Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll could appear on TV in character in blackface (instead they acted as consultants). So African-American actors were hired. Alvin Childress, who played the video Amos, explained to Ebony magazine in October 1961 that he refused to dress in loud, ratty clothes and that Gosden, who originated the role in 1927, ended up being tossed off the set for good. Gosden complained Childress’ co-star, Spencer Williams, wasn’t reading his lines in a minstrel-sy dialect like Amos and Andy would. Williams snapped that he ought to know how black people talked because he had been one all his life.

Childress and Williams’ changes weren’t enough. The name “Amos ‘n’ Andy” carried too much racial baggage. Childress related the irony to Ebony, no doubt with some frustration, that a Los Angeles school teacher told him “I likes the Amos ‘n’ Andy show, but I don’t like the dialect you uses.” Pressure on sponsors resulted in the last show being filmed in November 1954, and it was tough for Childress to find acting work. Residuals? What actor in the early ‘50s thought of reruns? The cast got them for only 21 episodes, nothing more, as the shows kept re-running around the world. Childress had to spend one Christmas toiling in a post office instead of reading to an actress playing Arbadella.

Here’s a syndicated newspaper column published in the Troy Times-Record of November 13, 1964 about his post-Amos tribulations.

“Amos” Of “Amos ‘N’ Andy” To Appear On “Perry Mason”
By HAL HUMPHREY
Hollywood—Among the cast of characters in next week's “Perry Mason” show is one billed “A Janitor.” His name is Alvin Childress, and if he has a familiar look it's because he portrayed Amos Jones in the popular “Amos ‘n’ Andy” TV series.
The series still is widely syndicated on TV stations here and abroad by CBS, but it is more than 10 years since the 68 half-hour episodes were filmed, and acting jobs for Childress since then have been few and far between.
Three years ago he found his first steady employment in the Los Angeles County Assessor's office, and last June he transferred into the County Civil Service Commission's test division.
When acting jobs were particularly scarce following the windup of production on “Amos ‘n’ Andy,” Childress tried everything—including parking cars for a while at the Beverly Hills Luau restaurant.
“I wanted to stay in California, if I could make a living, because I preferred it to New York,” he says.

Childress was first of the three lead characters to be hired for a TV version of “Amos ‘n’ Andy” by James Fonda, a CBS producer at the time, who had gone through three years and 800 auditions in his search.
CBS had bought the rights from Charles Correll (Amos) and Freeman Gosden (Andy) [sic], but they retained casting control over the TV series. “Mr. Correll and Mr. Gosden were not easy to please,” Childress recalls. “I don't think they ever got over not being able to do the TV show themselves.”
Childress helped producer Fonda find Tim Moore and Spencer Williams for the roles of Kingfish and Andy, respectively. Tim died a few years after the series was completed. Spencer has retired and lives here.
Fonda is now producer of the “Hazel” TV series. Childress says he has not heard from him since the “Amos ‘n’ Andy” days. It was the “Hazel” series, ironically, which was singled out by one of the Negro groups not long ago as a test case to get more Negroes employed in TV. The beef was squared, more or less, when Fonda was given a Negro assistant.
On the subject of more integration for TV, Childress fears that the pressure mounted by the National Assn. for Advancement of Colored People and others didn't gain for the Negro what they intended to gain.
“Now writers and directors in TV simply duck the problem by putting the blame on the NAACP,” Childress says.
He was amazed that the “Perry Mason” people would call on him or any other Negro to play the role of a janitor. Parts for menials created the stereotype Negro which NAACP asked that movies and TV desist from perpetuating.
Childress disagreed with the NAACP's similar attitude toward the “Amos ‘n’ Andy” TV series.
“I didn't feel it harmed the Negro at all,” he says. “Actually the series had many episodes which showed the Negro with professions and businesses like attorneys, store owners and so on which they never had in TV or movies before.”
Childress left his home in Mississippi and got his first job in New York with producer John Golden in a 1931 Broadway show called “Savage Rhythm.”
He developed into a fine actor and was playing the role of Noah, the bartender in the stage play of “Anna Lucasta” when Fonda tapped him for the TV series.

Childress died in a sanitarium at the age of 78 in 1986. His biggest role turned out to be anything but the racial breakthrough he hoped it would be. As Ebony put it: “For it is certain in this age of youthful protestations of sit-ins and freedom rides, Negro America is no longer amused by the buffoonery of the Mystic Knights of the Sea or the bungling machinations of such as the Kingfish.” The fact there were no other major roles for Childress says more about television (and perhaps, by extension, American society) in the 1950s than does Amos and Andy. Reading The Lord’s Prayer to a little girl at Christmas wasn’t going to change that.

$#%@$&! Shoe

On a snowy winter’s night, elves are helping a kindly old shoemaker by doing his work for him. However, since this is happening in a Tex Avery, it’s not quite the story of The Shoemaker and The Elves that you remember from childhood.

A zealous elf bashes his hand with a hammer. That brings about a not unexpected response. However, a nearby elf, with the utmost casualness, places a jar over the head of the other elf so children cannot hear the language not suitable for their ears.



Walt Clinton, Grant Simmons and Mike Lah animated “The Peachy Cobbler,” with backgrounds by Johnny Johnsen.