Radio's Smart Dummy

There was a time when the most popular show on network radio starred someone who wasn’t real.

Charlie McCarthy was an invention of ventriloquist Edgar Bergen, who took advantage of the fact that radio was a sound medium. On radio, you couldn’t see that Charlie was a ventriloquist’s dummy. But you could hear the sarcasm and insults McCarthy directed at every man in his path (with movie starlets, his behaviour was predictably different), so he sounded like any real, flesh-and-blood person who came through the radio speaker. People say that ventriloquism shouldn’t have worked on radio. It’s very simple. No one listening thought of Bergen and McCarthy as a ventriloquist act or, at least, filed it in the back of their minds. They thought of Charlie as someone who was larger than life.

Bergen was blessed with Zeno Klinker, Keith Fowler (a drinking buddy of Charlie’s on-air nemesis, W.C. Fields) and other fine writers who managed to avoid making McCarthy’s invectives sound forced, as well as his own quick-wittedness to add his own when the occasion suddenly presented itself.

Someone noted for barbs was Herald-Tribune critic John Crosby. He continually aimed at overused and obvious premises, trite plots and inane dialogue which filled Old Time Radio. The 1946-47 season arrived. On a Monday, Crosby gave a qualified passing grade to the low-key Ethel and Albert. The next day, he decried Judy Canova as non-inspirational. The following day, he turned to his old friends Bergen and McCarthy. Crosby had his perennial favourites—Jack Benny, Fred Allen and Henry Morgan (who he reviewed that week) to name some—and Charlie McCarthy was on the list. But Crosby had no reservations about telling the big stars they stunk. He did that in the following column:

MCCARTHY is IN SEASON AGAIN
By JOHN CROSBY
NEW YORK, Sept. 11.—The flame trees are turning scarlet on Fire Island, the Atlantic feels like shaved ice, and the smell of wood smoke is in the air again. On a recent Sunday night, like the smell of burning leaves, came another small but unmistakable sign that Autumn is almost here.
“Why are you late?” inquired Edgar Bergen of that small razor-tongued hedonist whose voice is familiar to about 70,000,000 Americans.
“Because I didn’t get here on time,” said Charlie, who hasn’t changed a bit.
“Why didn’t you get here on time?”
“Because I was late. You want to go around again?”
Lordy, lordy, I said to myself, I’ve been treading water all summer long and at last land is in sight. The McCarthy show was the first smart comedy program I’ve heard in what seems like forever. If I get a little hysterical, ignore it; I’m over-wrought. In fact, I’m fed up with Summer, let’s face it. I’m tired of wet bathing suits and sand in my hair and Flynn’s bar and grill. I’d like a martini, very dry, at the St. Regis and I want to wear shoes again, the leather kind, and I wish Fred Allen were back.
SHARP AS EVER
Charlie was in rare form. He’d intended, he said, to spend the Summer improving his mind but spent most of it improving his technique. And his technique, one of the most subtle and sure-footed in radio, is as sharp as ever.
After considerable meditation, Charlie tells Bergen he plans quit radio. “You don’t know what you’re saying,” says Bergen. “Oh, yes, I do. I read your lips.”
Bergen points out that quitting radio is a serious step but Charlie is adamant. “I decided I’m getting no place and you’re helping me.”
“But, Charlie . . .”
“No no no no no no. I say no and that’s final. I’m using my veto power. I’m walking.”
“But you mean so much to everyone.”
WHAT’S SATAN'S PAYROLL?
“Especially you. You get your pound of flesh for 75 cents.”
“But if you left radio, what would you do? Remember, Charlie, Satan has work for idle hands.”
“Yeah? What does he pay?”
I’ve heard better dialogue but one thing every McCarthy show has is a distinctive McCarthy flavor. Charlie is a rounded, fully developed character with more flesh and blood than a dozen Abbott and Costellos. Over the years, Bergen has endowed this small self-possessed cynic with a heart and a soul as well as a highly articulate set of vocal chords. Charlie is America’s Pinocchio.
I’ve never been a Mortimer Snerd man. Snerd, it seems to me, is one joke, endlessly repeated. But, in my new benign end-of-summer moody my feeling changed toward this slack-jawed imbecile who is only barely conscious he is alive. Mortimer, in case you hadn’t heard, spent the Summer in school. It came as a great shock to him to discover that school has been out all Summer, though, he said, he’d become a little suspicious when he won all the games at recess.
Guest star on the McCarthy program on that Sunday was Jimmy Stewart who proved again that movie stars, particularly one who has been in the Army for five years, shouldn’t get mixed up with the experts in front of a microphone. Mr. Stewart, bless his shy, wide-eyed American soul, was just plain awful and, if he didn’t have such a fine war record, I’d tell him so.

While a star that was a wooden dummy proved not to be a problem on radio, television was a bit of a different matter. Radio listeners already envisioned Charlie McCarthy as a living, breathing, talking, walking character, not something sitting on a guy’s knee. That made it a little difficult to build a televised comedy/variety show around him. Still, Bergen and McCarthy found a place on the TV game show “Who Do You Trust” (sitting at a desk was the only thing necessary). The pair retired in the mid-60s, only to return to the stage five years later (sitting on a stool was the only thing necessary). He announced his impending farewell to an audience in Las Vegas in 1978. It really was “farewell.” Bergen died two weeks later on September 30th at the age of 75. Charlie moved to the Smithsonian, showing his lasting impact he had on American culture.

Note: Crosby’s next column dealt with a special show on Mutual with a unique framing device: the “Unknown Soldier” of World War Two rose from the grave and discovered how little the world had progressed in the year since peace was signed with Japan, thanks to greed, hypocrisy, racism and and the prospect of atomic war.

Hipster in Shock

Hipster John races to see Mary and is shocked to find she’s obese with piles of kids and diapers in “Symphony in Slang.” Here are the first five drawings of his reaction, on five consecutive frames. No Wolfie eye pops in this Tex Avery cartoon.



Variety’s lone note about the cartoon is on August 5, 1949:

John Brown, radio "trick voice" man, will present three different characters in the new MGM Technicolor cartoon, "Symphony in Slang."

It was released June 16, 1951.

Mike Lah, Walt Clinton and Grant Simmons are the animators in this cartoon.

Wake Up Fox

Loan shark Hudson C. Dann gets woken up by Woody Woodpecker knocking on his door. He flails around his arms and legs.



He jumps over his desk...



... and rushes to the door. There are plenty of outlines, pretty standard for a Woody cartoon around this time.



Frank Tipper gets the only animation credit in “The Loan Stranger” (1942).

That's a 1942 Hudson C. Dann. And this is a 1942 Hudson sedan.

A Benny Warm Up

Jack Benny’s radio show may have been pretty funny, but he didn’t trust his studio audience to watch it cold. Like many other shows, there was a warm-up before the curtain went up.

Many newspaper articles described Benny’s broadcast, but here’s one from 1940 that talks about the pre-broadcast. George Tucker was a syndicated columnist based in New York. Benny broadcast from the Big Apple on April 21th, 27th and May 5th. This story was published in the Poughkeepsie Eagle News of May 7th so, presumably, Tucker was in the audience for one of those three shows.

Dennis Day had joined the show in the 1939-40 season. It seems odd on Tucker’s part to assume the audience didn’t know what Rochester looked like as Eddie Anderson had appeared in movies and there was plenty of newspaper publicity revealing his real name.

Man About Manhattan
By GEORGE TUCKER
NEW YORK, — Sometimes Jack Benny’s broadcasts are even funnier to look at than they are to hear. The reason for this is a half hour of unprogrammed foolishness that takes place just before the show goes on the air. This is the conditioning period, during which the principals run up and down the sidelines “warming up” and getting the “feel” of the house. They have to do this for the same reason that a pugilist shadow boxes and flexes his muscles before climbing into a ring. If they didn’t they would go in “cold,” and perhaps off balance.
Benny is a study in well-practiced nonchalance during this period. He strolls about, wisecracking with people in the audience, pausing occasionally to render a “sonata” on his fiddle. Showers of coins fell at his feet when these impromptu renditions were given in New York. Benny calmly pocketed the change and said, “Thanks, pals.”
● ● ●
There is at all times just the right amount of happy confusion to be observed—Phil Harris arranging or passing out music, Don Wilson seeing that everyone has a script, Dennis Day sitting down and then getting up and crossing the stage to try a more comfortable chair. Rochester, the gravel-voiced guardian of “Carmichael,” remains out of sight. This is smart showmanship, because the audience is wondering where he is and what he looks like. It is a slick build-up for an important character. Finally, when he is called forth to take a bow, the audience fairly screams. Rochester has a good comedy bit for this introduction. He sweeps into view and bows very low, almost to the floor, to Benny, who in turn bows just as solemnly to Rochester. Don Wilson also bows to Rochester, but Rochester snubs him, sweeping off-stage with his head in the rafters. This is good for a tremendous exhibition of feet-stomping by the audience. Frequently, as you listen by the radio, the cast itself appears to be engulfed with laughter at its own miscues or shortcomings. These sessions are not faked. Don Wilson may read a line backward. Jack may muff a gag. Phil Harris may confuse Mary Livingston with Dennis Day. When this happens everyone on stage breaks down. It is a situation conducive to hysterics, and the audience can no more escape the general hilarity than the actors themselves.
● ● ●
Seeing Dennis Day, the embarrassed young tenor who always says “Yes, please?” when “mister” Benny speaks to him, makes you realize what a mighty big difference just a few breaks and a little time can make. A year or so ago he was singing on a minor local radio station, and absolutely nobody seemed to care. I bet most of you have pictured Dennis as a blond. You’re wrong. He is slight and thin, and black-haired, and not too tall.
Rochester’s amazing popularity focuses attention on that small but growing company of Negro entertainers on the stage, and in radio and the films who are proving their worth and establishing themselves as credits to their professions as well as their race. There are quite a number of them of late. Watch for a boy named Nicodemus in “Louisiana Purchase.” There is Maxine Sullivan, who isn’t new but she is certainly young, and she has been riding high since she first took the low road to Loch Lomond. You could name any number of youngsters like these who are following the trail so carefully blazed by Bill Robinson, Ethel Waters and others who have done more to help their kind than the pronouncements from a thousand pulpits.

He's Not Sam-tastic

Cartoon aficionados are known to shudder when the name “Sam Singer” is mentioned. Singer had a chance to build a TV animation empire but the cheapness and overall shoddiness of his cartoons got in the way.

Screen Gems, the TV unit of Columbia Pictures, was looking to make money off television animation. And it thought it had something in Singer’s “The Adventures of Pow Wow.”

Pow Wow the Indian Boy does not, as the internet would have you believe, date its origin from a show that debuted on WNBT New York on January 30, 1949. Radio Daily’s special August 1949 edition list of shows available for syndication includes the following:

Pow-Wow
A different, exciting children's series, with family appeal—real North American Indians in full regalia and feathers! Present Indian tribal life, customs, manner of warfare and woodlore as the Indian roamed and lived in America before the Colonists took over the country. Adventures are dramatized in real settings as the story-teller unfolds the tales.
Availability: Live Talent.
Running Time: 30 minutes.

The listing says nothing about cartoons, little Indian boys or Sam Singer. The show was produced by a company called Video Events. It eventually changed time slots and went off the air after the broadcast of April 14, 1949. Singer wasn’t in New York at this point, anyway, he was back home in his native Chicago.

Singer was born on August 27, 1912 to Abraham and Ida Singer. Karl Cohen’s Forbidden Animation reveals he worked for Disney and other Hollywood studios (the 1940 census shows him in New York; he was working for Terrytoons) before returning to Chicago in the late ‘40s. Starting on November 15, 1948, he did all the animation for a puppet show called “The Adventures of Mistletoe,” the animation being achieved by switching from one camera to the next that were focused on different drawings. By early 1950, he was producing a similar 15-minute daily show called “Paddy the Pelican,” featuring Newt the country store owner, Mr. Nosegay and the same rudimentary animation. The show was picked up by the full ABC network from September 11 but axed within five weeks, though it continued to pop up locally on WENR Chicago. A survey by John Meek Industries showed Paddy placed third in the hearts of high-income children (Broadcasting, July 10, 1950).

That wasn’t the end of Paddy the Pelican or Sam Singer. In 1955, a Hollywood company called Medallion Productions ended up with the rights to the cartoon portions of the old show and was selling them (five stations had purchased them by year’s end). Singer doesn’t appear to have been associated with Medallion (according to 1955 and 1957 Radio Annuals). He pops up with another company soon afterward called Tempe-Toons. The money men appear to have been a couple of property developers and would-be fight promoters. And together they landed a deal not only with Screen Gems but with CBS which, at the time, owned Singer’s former employer Terrytoons. Here’s Variety’s story from January 16, 1957:

Tempi-Toons Into ‘Kangaroo’ TV-er
A new cartoon series, made by Tempi-Toon [sic] and distributed by Screen Gems, has been inked for network airing by CBS-TV for slotting in its midweek “Captain Kangeroo” show. The deal, the first to be made since the Jerry Hyams moveover from HygoUnity to Screen Gems as syndication head, calls for the delivery to CBS-TV of 26 Tempi-Toon cartoons, each running five-and-a-half minutes.
CBS-TV will air the 26 in all its markets, except those in 11 Western states, where Screen Gems will syndicate the cartoons, especially made for tv to appeal to children of pre-school age up to the third grade. Although the series is being made in-color, the CBS deal calls for black-and-white telecasting. The net has a 90-day option to pick up the balance of the 52 episodes. CBS' exclusivity in the current deal prohibits telecasting by competing stations in the same time period slotted for the CBS airing.
Principals in Tempi-Toon production outfit are Leo and Walter Minskoff and Sam Singer, creator of the central character, Pow Wow, an Indian boy. CBS deal was disclosed as Hyams, who, with his associate Bob Seidelman, sold their HygoUnity outfit to Screen Gems, prepared to hold his first series of sales meetings of the now unified HygoUnity-Screen Gems syndicated sales force. The initial meeting is slated later this month.

52 Pow Wows were made. Columbia wanted more cartoons—but that wasn’t good news for Sam Singer. Joe Barbera, in his autobiography My Life in Toons explains what happened when he and Bill Hanna went knocking on doors in 1957 to try to land a TV cartoon producing deal.

When we called on Screen Gems, they were already working with a cartoonist named Al Singer [sic] — no relation to the lightweight boxer I had emulated in high school — who was developing a crude series revolving around a character named Pow Wow the Indian Boy. By necessity, Singer’s cartoons were cheap—and they looked it. On a meager television production budget, Singer operated out of a cavernous loft space, which he tried to make more impressive by deploying his handful of animators across the entire space: a desk here, another here, about a mile away, another a few more miles into the distance. His operation looked like a very small archipelago lost in a very big sea.
Well, how could it have been any other way? It cost between forty thousand and sixty-five thousand dollars to make a single Tom and Jerry. Screen Gems was offering the sum of $2,700 for five minutes. No wonder Pow Wow the Indian Boy looked like hell and Screen Gems was unhappy with it.

Hanna and Barbera pitched a series named Ruff and Reddy. And they agreed to make the first two cartoons, according to Bill Hanna’s autobiography, for $2,800 apiece. Oh, and they gave Screen Gems the merchandising rights to any characters that Hanna and Barbera might develop. From that spawned a cartoon empire (and a nice merchandising windfall for Screen Gems, thanks to the yet-to-be-invented Huckleberry Hound, Yogi Bear and Flintstones). In the meantime, Screen Gems continued to, at least in mid-1958, offer for TV syndication its old theatrical cartoons, including 81 Scrappys, 75 Krazy Kats and 52 Phantasies, as well as 93 Aesop Fables.

And what of Sam Singer? He went on to develop more lame cartoons, such as “Bucky and Pepito” (1959), “Courageous Cat and Minute Mouse” (1960, through Tele-Features) and “Sinbad, Jr.” (deal firmed in 1964 with AIP through Vulcan Animations). In a familiar story, the animation chores were taken away from Singer and handed over to Hanna-Barbera by May 1965. As for Pow Wow, he was still available in 1974 from Trans America Film Corp.

Here’s the only Pow Wow cartoon that appears to be on-line in English these days. You’ll notice Tom Baron and Ed Nofziger’s names in the credits. They later worked for Larry Harmon Productions making Bozo and TV Popeye cartoons. One of Pow Wow’s writers was Bugs Hardaway. It was his last job before his death in 1957. And the music is from the same Capitol Hi-Q library used by Hanna-Barbera. The first cue is ZR-53 COMEDY MYSTERIOSO by Geordie Hormel, followed by L-75 COMEDY UNDERSCORE by Spencer Moore, with L-1147 ANIMATION-MOVEMENT (Moore) after the drum solo, L-1154 ANIMATION COMEDY (Moore) when Pow Wow is at the steps, ZR-46 LIGHT MOVEMENT (Hormel) when Pow Wow fires the arrow to the end of the cartoon. All the cues are on one album. Who needs to pay for a whole library? Not Sam Singer!

Rabbit and Costello

Elmer Fudd quits cartoons in “The Big Snooze” (1946). Bugs begs him to consider. “T’ink what we’ve been to each other. Why, we’ve been like Rabbit and Costello. Damon and Runyon. Stan and Laurel!” Note the crooked fingers in the last drawing. Bugs does that in a number of drawings in this scene.

Who wrote the lines? Beats me. The writer and director aren’t credited. The director is, of course, Bob Clampett. The writer could have been his buddy, Mike Sasanoff, who quit cartoons to go into ad agency work. I do like the play on Damian and Pythias. The credited animators are Manny Gould, Izzy Ellis, Bill Melendez and Rod Scribner.

Jay Ward Backgrounds

Backgrounds in the Fractured Fairy Tales produced by Jay Ward hewed to the two-S principle: “stylised” and “sparce.” Sometimes, a coloured card sufficed in medium shots.

Here are some stylised backgrounds from “Son of Rumpelstiltskin.” You won’t find these in a Disney cartoon.



This cartoon was contracted to TV Spots, the studio owned by Shull Bonsall, who had grabbed ownership of “Crusader Rabbit” from Ward and Alex Anderson. Bob Ganon was the supervising producer and Bob Bemiller was the studio’s director, but I couldn’t tell you who was responsible for the backgrounds. TV Spots later spun off Creston Studios, responsible for the King Leonardo and Calvin and the Colonel series.

Radio That's Zany and Sometimes Purplish

“The feeling that all this has been heard somewhere before hung heavy thru-out the premiere,” wrote Billboard’s Sam Chase in giving a pretty lukewarm review to a new radio quiz show in 1947. It turned out Chase couldn’t have been more wrong. The show was “You Bet Your Life,” and it spawned a different kind of radio, and then TV, quiz show—where the game wasn’t as important than the dialogue between the witty host and the somewhat befuddled contestants. It spawned similar shows because of the one, the only Groucho.

Groucho Marx’s career hadn’t been going a lot of places for a while by 1947. He made some movies that Marx Brothers fans would rather forget. He starred on a radio show (“Blue Ribbon Time”) that didn’t put him anywhere near the Benny-Hope-Skelton echelon of air performers. But Hope’s producer, John Guedel, and Marx put together a formula that worked. A formula based on wit. It was a far cry from toothy Bert Parks screeching “Stop the music!”

Groucho was known for many things in the Marx Brothers films. One of them was his greasepaint moustache. When “You Bet Your Life” reached television (where it really took off after bouncing around on three radio networks in four seasons) in 1950, Groucho had real lip-hair. If you thought he grew it strictly for television realism, guess again. Here’s an Associated Press column from December 1, 1948 which reveals he had already done it, and why he did it.

GROUCHO DOFFS HIS FAMOUS MUSTACHE, MULLS “OTHELLO”
By BOB THOMAS
AP Movie Writer

HOLLYWOOD—Another landmark has vanished from the Hollywood scene — Groucho Marx’s painted mustache.
The famed swath of grease has disappeared from Groucho’s pan. In its place is a home-grown Anthony Eden-like brush with which the comic appears quite happy. “It might open new possibilities for me,” he commented. “Who knows — next season I might play ‘Othello.’”
The old grease mustache helped to bring him fame, but it became a monster to Groucho’s ambitions to play fairly legitimate roles, he said.
“I couldn’t play with real actors when I had it on,” he complained. “It gave an unreal quality to any scene I would be in.”
• • •
GROUCHO’S ENTHUSIASM for the new brush stems from the fact that he doesn’t like making Marx brothers pictures. Ask him how he feels about them and you get a reaction that makes you believe he was properly tagged:
“They’re murder. You go through a lot of strenuous physical labor and spend all your time worrying about new routines and writing half the dialogue.”
Then ask him about his pictures alone, such as his current “It’s Only Money?”:
“It’s burglary. I almost feel ashamed to take the money. You’re handed a script and all you have to do is read the lines.”
• • •
YOU MIGHT JUDGE from this that there will be no more Marx brothers films—which is something the boys say each time they make one. Groucho is definite about this:
“There will be no more Marx brothers pictures — except for ‘The Marx Brothers Story.’ All we have to do now is find four Larry Parkses.”
• • •
GROUCHO GREW the mustache after the Broadway flop of “Time for Elizabeth,” which he wrote with Norman Krasna. But don’t get the idea it was merely a disguise to leave town with. He still thinks the play was good and he has no kind words for the New York drama critics.
“Never have I read such venomous, vitriolic reviews,” he commented. “They seem to resent the fact that I didn’t inject my own sardonic, sarcastic character into it. After all, I wasn’t in the play—I was the co-author.”
Groucho said he was going to fight the critics, but decided not to. He’ll stick to movies and his successful air show. Concerning radio, he concluded: “That’s like stealing money, too.”

We opened this post with a quote from critic Sam Cohen. Lest you think he was completely off-base about “You Bet Your Life,” he said this toward the end of his review: “What prevented the show from falling into complete mediocrity was the energetic spieling of Groucho, whose zany, if sometime purplish comments brightened the proceedings.”

It’s debatable whether the game portion of the programme could be called “complete mediocrity,” but Groucho’s “zany, if sometimes purplish comments” are still pretty funny today. And they gave the show two Emmys and a Peabody and kept it on the air for 13 seasons.

Return With Us Now To Those Forgotten Days of Yester-Year

A newscaster of my acquaintance, a veteran of 50-plus years in broadcasting, one day came across a piece of copy from the entertainment wire in his line-up. “I’ve fixed the typo,” he told the editor. He had helpfully changed the first name of a singer to “Alex.”

The singer was Axl Rose.

That’s right. He had no idea who Axl Rose was.

I thought of that story when all the ridicule broke out over some Kanye West fan(s) being completely oblivious about who Paul McCartney is.

And I thought about it some more when I read this recent post on Martin Gram’s blog quizzing young people about pop culture icons from a day that, in some cases, isn’t in the past.

I suppose you can shake your head after reading it, but ignorance isn’t restricted to a certain age group. And if someone doesn’t have an interest in something, they probably can’t be blamed for not knowing about it.

But when you’re on social media, it’s pretty easy to use the same computer you’re on to look up a little bit of information before rushing to post that All-Important Opinion That Everyone Must Know About.

Popcorn Chicken

Buses full of mice? Must be a Terrytoon!

Here’s a gag from “Popcorn” (1931). A bus full of mice runs over a chicken in the road. The accident leaves behind some eggs. Another bus full of mice runs over the eggs. They hatch and start dancing in time to the xylophone music.



What any of this has to do with popcorn, I don’t know. Thanks to Jerry Beck for posting a nice old British print of this cartoon.