Gene Gene

“Pandemonium and puns” doesn’t begin to describe The Gong Show. To be honest, The Gong Show defies description.

Years ago, Jim Backus and Henry Morgan had gone on the air with competition shows featuring the most amateurish amateurs who were utterly clueless about how bad they were. Neither show lasted long. Then came the late ‘70s and The Gong Show. Viewers stared in disbelief at what they were watching. The basic contest was overshadowed by odd, sometimes pointless acts, with an emcee whose behaviour was so bizarre that you wondered if he just didn’t care or had been introduced to some white powder just before air-time.

Occasionally, the nonsense was interrupted by Count Basie’s Jumpin’ At The Woodside and the camera cutting to a guy shuffling to the music on stage as the audience erupted louder than just about anything on TV at the time (and maybe before and after). Everyone started dancing. Minions off-stage joyously threw stuff at him. The whole thing lasted maybe a minute. His act that wasn’t an act was loved by the sane and not-so-sane. And that’s how the world was exposed to Eugene Patton, known better as Gene, Gene the Dancing Machine.

Gene’s death this week has been confirmed. He was 82.

He was the fourth of five children born to John and Beulah Patton. His father was a street worker in Oakland, his mother worked as a maid. In 1969, he joined NBC as a technician and retired in September 1997.

Someone in September 2003 posted a story about Gene from Pasadena Weekly on that increasingly irrelevant cubbyhole of the internet called Usenet. It’s a wonderful story. Gene deserved it. Read it below.

Movin’ on With a new set of feet, the always upbeat Gene ‘Dancing Machine’ Patton busts some new moves
By Joe Piasecki
A celebrity, a family man and a role model to hundreds, Gene Patton is certainly no ordinary guy.
He still lives in the same modest Altadena home he bought more than 30 years ago, even though Patton, now 70, captured the eyes of America moving and grooving as “Gene Gene the Dancing Machine,” a regular on the infamously wild 1970s television phenomenon known as “The Gong Show.”
On that program, regulars like Patton joined amateur acts that often crossed lines of talent and taste, and performers would be cut off when celebrity judges hit a massive Korean gong with a rubber mallet to signify the end of the act.
The former John Muir High School janitor rose from behind the scenes as his union’s first black prop man to the status of “national hero,” as the show’s producer and host, Chuck Barris, put it in his book “Confessions of a Dangerous Mind,” which recently turned into a Hollywood blockbuster.
It seems anyone who has known Patton will tell you that he never complained about anything, and maybe that’s what really makes him so remarkable.
Two years ago, Patton lost both his legs to diabetes in a long and painful process that could have broken anyone’s spirit, a struggle that recently ended in triumph when “The Dancing Machine” learned to walk again.
At one point in the process, plagued with excruciating pain for weeks while recovering from surgery, with scars that it seemed would never heal, it was Patton’s famous good attitude that probably saved his life.
“I didn’t know that there were 10 or 15 people there dying of cancer. … You think, man, I’m not doing bad at all. All that’s wrong with me is I’m getting a little shorter,” said Patton, who finally took his first new steps earlier this year with the help of life-like feet fitted to his shiny steel prosthetic legs. “For him to get up and walk is amazing,” said 24-year-old Merissa Haddad, a physical therapist at USC’s Pasadena Rehabilitation Center who has been helping Patton walk for a month and a half.
In fact, while learning to walk again, the always upbeat Patton took time out to lend his support to others going through their own traumas.
“He’s just a beautiful man, a great person. If you’re down or sad he’s one of those guys who can bring your spirits back to life. Knowing that a man can do that [fight to walk again] and call someone else … it’s amazing,” said five-time world champion pro-boxer Johnny Tapia, who Patton supported as Tapia recovered from a near-lethal drug overdose in January.

Family and friends are amazed at his constantly joyful disposition.
“He takes everything better than any guy I’ve ever seen,” said Darrell Evans, who spent 20 years in Major League Baseball and grew up with Patton watching his games at John Muir and Pasadena City College. Evans’ mother, Ellie, still lives in his childhood home, just a block away from Patton.
“The only way we got through it was he kept his spirits up,” said his daughter, Carol, 49, one of eight children Patton has raised.
But it’s friends like Evans and many others, including just about anybody who works or has worked at NBC, that Patton gives credit to.
“I always had a bright outlook on life, but let me tell you, it’s everybody pulling for you,” he said.
Dancing over the line
Not everybody was always pulling for Patton, who battled intense racial discrimination and hatred for much of his early life.
“If I would have been agreeing with the man upstairs, I wouldn’t be in the position I’m in,” said Patton of racial prejudice.
Born in Berkeley at the height of the Great Depression, Patton grew up in a place unlike the better-known Berkeley of the 1960s—“a very conservative, funny-style town,” he called it.
Throughout his time at Berkeley High School, he and other students were largely prevented from playing sports and participating in other activities. As early as age 17, Patton faced several physical attacks and couldn’t get hired for any job because his high school sweetheart and eventual first wife, Carol Larson, was white.
“It was hard on both of us. The weather was bad—there was a lot of pressure on us,” said Patton of life with Larson, mother of two of Patton’s living daughters.
“The priest wouldn’t marry us in a Catholic Church, so we got married by a justice of the peace,” he said.
Though they’d stuck it out together for years, the couple divorced and Patton moved first to Mt. Washington to live in the home of his grandparents, and later to where he currently lives in Altadena after marrying Pasadena resident Doris Prince.
Prince came from the first black family in Pasadena, with ancestors who started the first black business here and even greeted touring presidents.
In 1964, Patton became a janitor at John Muir High School. There he became a role model for the kids, and the city’s biggest advocate for teen athletes, such as Evans.
“He was probably the biggest supporter of athletics at the school and seemed to enjoy it as much as anybody,” said Evans, who still visits Patton during holidays.
Patton remembers driving college recruiters to the playing field to see Evans play, and traveling with the team to support it.
“He was always around Pasadena sports. He never met anybody that didn’t like him. He’s a wonderful human being,” said longtime friend and former vice president of the International Boxing Association Bob Case, who met Patton at Muir.
It was at Muir that Patton would get his big break when he met Bob Carroll, who taught shop and technology classes in the school’s auditorium and would eventually land him his first job in television.
“That guy would quit sweeping and start leaning on his broom,” recalled Carroll. “He started asking questions and from then on he was sitting down being part of the class. Later, I said to him, ‘Jeez, Gene, you got too much on the ball.’”
Carroll, responsible for a few TV landmarks himself, enrolled Patton in PCC night classes for “technical theater,” and eventually gave him a recommendation that sold the International Alliance of Theatrical and Stage Employees Local 33 on their first black union member in 1969.
Carroll had worked on the technical crew for one of the first remote television news broadcasts, the April 1949 attempt to recover 3-year-old Cathy Fiscus from an abandoned San Marino well. He also did electrical work on Klaus Landsberg’s remote live broadcast of the May 22, 1952, atomic bomb test in Los Alamos. He was the first to use the moving “follow spot” light, a technique that landed him a job with Bob Hope.
“He’ll take the heat and give it right back,” Carroll told union supervisors of Patton.
Gene soon started working in the NBC electrical shop, then as a prop man on “Laugh In,” and later “The Richard Pryor Show,” “Sanford and Son” and “CPO Sharkey.”
“You walked into the place and some people were cold and some were beautiful, you know,” said Patton, who retired in 1997 after 28 years in the union, several spent with Johnny Carson and Jay Leno on “The Tonight Show.” “The majority of these guys bent over backwards to help me,” he said.
And then there was the money.
“I went out to NBC and after that became permanent I took a leave of absence from the school district, and that first week I made more on stage than I made all month working for the school district,” said Patton.
Still the same guy
“One day, during rehearsal, I saw Gene dancing by himself in a dark corner. The huge stagehand never moved his feet — just his body from the waist up. He was terrific,” wrote Chuck Barris in “Confessions of a Dangerous Mind” of his idea to put Patton on stage.
“He said I was such a good dancer he had to name me twice,” said Patton of Barris.
The rest is history.
“You watched him on TV and he made you laugh, and you wanted to get up and dance with him,” said Ellie Evans, a neighbor to Patton for more than 30 years.
“I used to just stare at the TV and crack up, like, what is this? I didn’t understand that people were watching him and knew who he was,” said Patton’s daughter, Carol, who remembers women asking for his autograph when they shopped around town.
“But he has one of those personalities … he knows everybody everywhere, so we’re used to that. That’s how we grew up with him. So when he started dancing I didn’t feel the difference because his personality didn’t change. He already had all that personality and knew all those people and did all those things.” Gene recalled advice he got from Richard Pryor, who he befriended as a prop man on “The Richard Pryor Show.”
“Don’t never let this business take that smile off your face, that twinkle out of your eye, and come in between you and your family,” he recalled Pryor telling him.
“He never changes his friends, he never changes his surroundings. We just enjoyed the ride,” said Carol.
And so did Gene.
As “The Gong Show” show got wilder and wilder, Barris would join “The Dancing Machine” in his wild gyrations as Patton’s fellow prop handlers would pelt them with props from off-stage.
“One time they threw a basketball and it bounced right off my head,” said Patton.
Barris recalls that taping in his book, writing that things got so wild everybody started throwing their jackets into the audience and singer and entertainer Jaye P. Morgan “ripped open her blouse, popping her tzts out on coast-to-coast TV. … Immediate consequences occurred to several of the cast. Gene Gene was the first victim. Jaye P’s tzts caused The Machine to take his eyes off an incoming basketball. The pass caught him full-force in the nose, making him bleed profusely.”

Upon hearing the passage read back to him, Patton only laughed.
“Jaye P., she’s a sweetheart. Everybody loved Jaye P. because she was so funny and raunchy. She would flash upstage so nobody in the audience could see her, but all the crew could. … But I got hit with so much stuff,” he said.
Patton recalls how he and Barris shared a love for funny hats. But as for Barris’ recent claims of acting as a CIA agent since the early 1960s, he didn’t have much to say.
“If he was, he had the best cover in the world,” said Patton. “I heard through a guy across the street before the book came out, and thought, if that’s what he was doing, I didn’t want to know nothing about it.”
Family, friends, God
The joy of Patton’s successes came hand in hand with personal tragedies over the years, but he always kept dancing. During his rise to TV stardom, Patton’s two oldest sons were murdered, one at Hollywood Park in Inglewood, the other in Texas, and his third-oldest son died of a drug overdose.
Their pictures hang on the walls of his home, but in a different place from his photos with longtime friends, celebrity acquaintances such as Shaquille O’Neal, Jay Leno, the Doobie Brothers’ Michael McDonald, astronauts, athletes and just about anybody he’s worked with over the years.
“We’ve been a very close-knit family with the tragedies we’ve had. It’s brought the family closer together,” said Patton of his children and eight grandchildren, ages 3 to 31.
“They were there at the big turnaround in my life.”
That big turnaround, the loss of his legs, was actually a 10-month ordeal that started when he dropped a heavy box on his toe.
That toe triggered an internal infection caused by diabetes that cost him first his right toe, then his foot, then his leg up to the knee. Then it cost him his other leg.
“The hardest part of it was I didn’t want to be a burden on anybody. I blame nobody for my situation or for any other situation. But I don’t want to see nobody have to suffer behind it,” he said of his illness.
In the meantime, Patton got around in a wheelchair as best as he could and inadvertently stood up for disabilities rights.
Last year, the Weekly reported Patton’s discovery that all the handicapped parking spaces had been removed from the Pasadena Macy’s store parking lot and replaced with a sign saying the space was for police parking only, a situation that police knew nothing about and Macy’s staff immediately corrected when pressed by reporters.
Last November, he received a $1,100 check from Macy’s corporate headquarters as part of a settlement.
Meanwhile, Patton credited his long-term recovery to family, friends, his doctors and a couple of ladies who helped him find God. When Patton’s youngest daughter, Bonnie, told members of her church, The Refuge Christian Center on North Lincoln Avenue in Altadena, that her dad was sick, they not only prayed for him, they came over to the hospital, then to the house, to do it.
“We showed him a lot of love. We just loved on him,” said Annette Nobles, an outreach counselor at the church for more than 15 years. “We encouraged his heart to help him walk again. … He’s a beautiful man, always on the upbeat.”
It only stood to reason that Patton’s first steps outside of a hospital would be into the church.
Naturally, he credits everyone but himself for his positive attitude.
Walking again took a lot of work, said physical therapist Haddad, with constant setbacks, mechanical adjustments to his new feet and steel legs, and a lot of stress on his mind and body.
After six weeks with his new legs, “Gene Gene the Dancing Machine” walks again, with the aid of canes or parallel bars.
And he’s only getting better.
“It takes a lot to recover from something like that,” said Haddad, but “Eugene’s got it and he’s got such a great heart. For him to have gone through it all and still carry smile on his face … he’s so inspiring, loving when he comes in. He never leaves without a great big hug, a kiss and a thank you. We can all learn from him.”

You Silly Goose

I was going to start off this post with a comparison between “Brokeback Mountain” and “Cowboy Cabaret,” but it’s a stretch at best and clichéd at worst. About as clichéd as the swishy goose in the latter, a 1931 effort of the Van Beuren studio.

The cartoon has all those things you love about Van Beuren—four singers with conjoined mouths, a woman doing the Black Bottom, a barbershop quartet, a Gene Rodemich score (though this wasn’t one of his more inspired works) and absolutely no story (with an ending that, well, ends). About all it’s missing is singing skeletons. As a bonus, you get a chorus line of women with huge hips.

Oh, yes, and the hand-on-hip swisher. Here are some frames. The goose kisses the cowboy, who becomes a little less masculine as a result. The goose, having reacted in ecstasy, rotates its “come hither, boy” rear end and bats its eyes in a piece of cycle animation. I’ll bet this wouldn’t have made it to screens after Code enforcement was tightened in 1934.



Finally, characters off-screen and the Van Beuren gag writers have had enough. The characters dispatch the goose and cowboy by throwing stuff at them and it’s on to the next gag.



John Foster and Mannie Davis are credited.

Shrinking Pupil Take

Chuck Jones liked employing a take where a character’s pupils grow wide then shrink to tiny dots. It happens twice in the Bugs Bunny/Wile E. Coyote cartoon “Operation: Rabbit” (released by Warner Bros. in late 1951, regardless of what web sites say).

Here’s one of them. The smug coyote thinks he’s thwarted a dynamite explosion by putting out a fuse only discover the stick has a fuse on the other end, too.



And here we are later in the cartoon when Super Genius realises a steam locomotive is headed directly toward him.



I am likely in the minority, but I love the Bugs vs. Wile E. cartoons. The Roadrunner vs. Wile E. shorts bored me as a kid and they were a cue to go the kitchen and get something. The Roadrunner was a nothing. Who cares about him? Bugs, on other hand, was battling intellectual snobbishness. You wanted to see Bugs win over the patronising jerk. And the dialogue helped because it took the sameness out of the “plan-fail-stare-boom/splat” that happened again and again in the silent Roadrunner pictures.

Lloyd Vaughan, Ben Washam, Phil Monroe and Ken Harris are the credited animators on this.

Were Bob and Ray a Success?

If you think about it, no one had a more odd career than Bob Elliott and Ray Goulding after they left local radio for the Big Time in 1951. Critics loved them and they had a loyal fan base. But management never seemed to know what to do with them. NBC shoved them around all over the place on radio and TV. They seemed to work incredibly long hours. But they never really stayed in one slot long enough to develop a large audience.

They also rose to fame at a time when just about everybody who was anybody was transported from dying network radio into TV. Bob and Ray’s humour wasn’t of the baggy-pants variety show, or of the honey-the-boss-is-coming-over sitcom, which was about all you saw on the tube then. They may have been a little bit early for television.

Here’s a piece from the Philadelphia Inquirer of June 30, 1952 about one of their TV efforts. Audrey Meadows had been in the supporting cast but left and had been replaced by Cloris Leachman at this point.

Screening TV
Bob and Ray Succeeding In Difficult Task of Satire
By MERRILL PANITT
Of all the various kinds of comedy, satire is the least likely to succeed with a mass audience. Henry Morgan proved that a number of times by failing to click with a whole succession of radio and television shows.
Morgan's sometimes harsh burlesquing of the current scene won him a large group of fans—large, but not large enough to satisfy sponsors who think in terms of millions of viewers.
TWO UNINHIBITED LADS
The cause of satire on TV now is in the capable hands of Bob Elliott and Ray Goulding, a couple of uninhibited lads who have long since inherited the Morgan radio audience. They've tried TV before without too much success but are back in a Saturday night half hour on NBC stations—including Channel 3 here.
It may be that Bob and Ray will have better luck than Henry Morgan. Their satire is broader and often funnier than the Morgan brand. They also have a knack of kidding without seeming bitter.
TAKEOFF ON DRAGNET
Last Saturday night, as an example, they did a takeoff on Dragnet, which is easily the best TV crime program. Their version was called Fishnet, and was a very funny hunk of business.
Aping the rapid-fire, monotone delivery of the Dragnet cast, Bob and Ray—assisted by Cloris Leachman—dramatized "a true story from the files of the Gloucester, Mass., police department." The names of all characters were revealed, by the bye, "so that their relatives might suffer."
'KILLER' FINALLY GIVES UP

This was the case of a fish killer, a man who had fired a sawed-off shotgun 20 times at close range and murdered a fish. It was the fifth such killing in a week.
Needless to say, the killer—Bob—finally gave up, but not until every pat phrase from Dragnet had been used, including, "Blood all over the place," "What do you think," and "I'm innocent." He confessed after the smelliest third degree in history, during which a waitress reeled off the names of scores of fish dishes on her menu and finally thrust a live lobster into Bob's face to prove he hated fish.
Another high point in last Saturday's show was a miniature program produced to increase the sale of stamps in post offices. It opened with Ray, dressed in a page-boy's box cap, intoning, "Call for Philatelics, call for Philatelics!”
NEW STAMP INTRODUCED
After Stamalong Cassidy had told kids to be sure to try a roll of three-cent stamps for dessert, Bob and Ray introduced a new series of stamp creations to the tune of "A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody." A scantily dressed girl would parade out with her face framed in a stamp outline. As she paraded, one of the two comics would intone:
"Miss three cent stamp.
"Petite and sweet — designed for the working man.
"And the elite.
"She's beautiful, demands inspection.
"Wouldn't you like her in your collection?"
SOME FUNNY, SOME NOT SO
There were other sequences—some funny, some not too funny. The one during which Ben Grauer sang a song in Spanish while typing, answering phones, and being a busy convention reporter, was one of the funny ones.
TV's got to have some good satire to balance all the slapstick comedy of the regular season. Bob and Ray seem to have the formula. Let's hope they make the grade with a sponsor and a regular once-a-week program during the cool weather.

Dogs Catch On

The cat laughs and mocks at the stupidity of a pack of dogs in Tex Avery’s “Ventriloquist Cat.” The dogs suddenly realise they’ve been had. Check the poses. Grant Simmons is responsible for the first drawing.



The dogs chase the cat from the horizon past the camera.



You can view the hair take before the chase at this post.

Pop Up Rabbits

“Delightful whimsical satire on Johann Strauss and the composition of his famous waltz, ‘Tales of the Vienna Woods’,” is how Variety termed the George Pal Puppetoon “Mr. Strauss Takes a Walk.”

Strauss turns into a human metronome at one point in the cartoon but the most interesting part to me was how rabbits popped up out of the ground. Not out of a hole. They just grew up out of the ground. And they obey the rules of squash and stretch. These are eleven consecutive frames.



This wasn’t Pal’s only encounter with the noted composer. He finished work on “Bravo, Mr. Strauss” around the start of 1943 and was so busy, a third sound stage for him was being built. Within five years, his stop-motion shorts got too expensive to produce.

Plug Plug Plug

Plugola on radio comedy shows was good for everyone, it seems. A company got a free plug. Audiences got laughs. Writers got freebie gifts in return.

For a period of a few years, no comedian seemed to take advantage of this more than Jack Benny. He had a sure-fire laugh formula based on his character being cheap. Someone on his show would mention a product, then Benny would joke that the mention would result in him getting the product for nothing. One show topped it by turning it into one of Benny’s great running gags that always came out of nowhere—Frank Nelson played a man who interrupted a scene later in the show by delivering the product.

Script writer Milt Josefsberg explained in his book about the Benny show that situation wasn’t quite as it played out on radio. Benny would rarely take advantage of the plug, he said; the company getting the freebie would generally send alcohol to the writers.

It seems the idea of inserting plug-gags on a radio show didn’t always originate with its writer. Witness this interesting column that appeared April 8, 1948:

Radio Full of Ad Plugs Sugar-Coated as Gags
By ALINE MOSBY
United Press Correspondent
HOLLYWOOD
The radio shows are getting so shot full of sneaked-in ads, disguised as gags, that you wonder how they have time for the commercial the sponsor is paying for. These plugs most listeners don't know about.
They hear Jack Benny make a crack about which end of a Studebaker you get into. Or Bob Hope spiel about somebody who combs his hair with a Mixmaster. They yak at the gags and figure the trademarks got there by accident.
Not in this bright commercial age. . . . The plugs are out-and-out ads. But neither Benny and Hope, their writers, nor the networks get paid for 'em. The only guy who does is the "script plugger." He takes dough from companies to get their names mentioned in a gag on a radio show.
Gift-Sending Part Of Ad Plugging
Script pluggers, we always thought, were mole-like characters who pulled slick deals with customers in the back booths of dim bars on Vine St. We found one sprinting around in broad daylight.
"This is strictly on the up-and-up," says Joe Gardner.
"We do not," he added indignantly, "pay writers to plug our clients in their scripts. Of course, we send them gifts, but that's just to cultivate their good will . . ."
He operates this way: He takes a script-writer for the Benny show, say, to lunch.
"Got a great gag on a Studebaker," he barks to the writer, and tells it to him. The gag's good. The writer says thanks, he'll use it.
"Everybody's happy," beams Mr. Gardiner. "My client gets a plug on a radio show that would cost him thousands if he bought it as a sponsor. He gets the plug for practically nothing—just the few hundred he pays me.
"The writer's happy. He has a good gag and a bottle of scotch I send him. Benny likes the gag, too."
Free Merchandise Helps Get Plugs
Hey, what about the networks, we said. After all, they're in business to get paid for the ads they broadcast, aren't they?
"Sure, the radio boys raised a fuss for a while," grinned Mr. G.
They shut up, he whispered, after the "script pluggers" began furnishing free merchandise for give-away shows. If the radio folks had to buy all the prizes they hand out to giggling contestants, they'd be out a few million bucks a year.
The give-away show is where Gardiner operates best. He loads 'em down with prizes like ball-bearing lipstick (for making-up under water), things to bake potatoes in atop a stove, egg beaters with low and high gears, shoulder pads for coat hangers, etc., etc.
Each time the master of ceremonies gives one of these treasures away, he lovingly describes it. The lady gets her prize that the show didn't have to pay for, the company gets a cheap plug, and Gardiner collects his commission.
There's only one guy who doesn't profit by this neat arrangement—the sponsor who pays for the show. Why he hasn't kicked up a storm yet, we don't know. Once the sponsor of a give-away show took a test. The ladies in the studio audience were asked to tell what the show advertised. Each carefully listed the brand names of all the fantastic prizes. Not one remembered the company that only shells out several thousand dollars a week so the housewives can win those things!

The most famous plug on the Benny show likely occurred on November 27, 1949:

JACK: And Rochester, the evenings are getting chilly so don't forget to plug in my General Electric blanket.
ROCH: Boss, boss, we haven't got a General Electric blanket.
JACK: We've got one now. (laughter and applause) I'm (ad-libs) oh, brother, will my home be full of General Electric blankets. (resumes script) I'm going into the den and read now.
ROCH: Are you gonna walk or shall I drive you in a Cadillac?
JACK: Let's not over-do it.

That's (Crash! Boom! Tinkle! Zorp!) Oswald

Sound in cartoons was still a fairly new concept in 1929. The Adirondack News explained how it worked in this syndicated piece published February 9, 1929.

You’ll notice the absence of any mention of dialogue in this story. Either there wasn’t any or it was recording separately.

As the last Disney Oswald was released in April 1928 and the first Lantz Oswald appeared on screens in September 1929, this would have been the period when the Winkler studio on the West Coast were making the cartoons. The first synchronised Oswald was “Hen Fruit,” released on Feb. 4, 1929.

GHOSTLY BANDS PUT SOUNDS IN MOVIES
Snores and Snorts Linked to Pictures at Night
Hollywood, Calif.—It is middle of the night and the great studio sprawls like a town of fantastic shadows between the dry river bed, and the barren hills. One supposes there is a night watchman somewhere on the lot, but apparently be does not see the dim figures slinking one by one toward a barnlike structure, each carrying something, and each disappearing through the same small door in the building.
Heading away from the studio, they might have been taken for burglars escaping with their loot, but under the circumstances it is more reasonable to guess they are conspirators of another sort.
The interior of the building is dimly lit, but by mingling casually with the crowd one can see very clearly what they carried in—two saxophones, a galvanised-iron washtub full of tin cans, a cornet, a tuba, a clothes wringer, three phonographs, a school bell, several cowbells, a band-operated alarm gong, three sites of electric bells, innumerable tin, brass and wooden whistles, many assorted pieces of wood and metal, half a dozen panes of window glass and a metal cylinder of compressed air.
Jolly Looking Conspirators.
Obviously these are not the paraphernalia of arsonists or dynamiters; and, besides, even in the dim light, the conspirators have a jolly look. It begins to look more like preparations for an old-fashioned charivari. Before one can ask who was married, however, the head conspirator explains everything: “Our job tonight,” says he, “is to synchronise Oswald the Rabbit.”
Oswald, one learns, is the pen-and-ink hero of an animated cartoon which, in keeping with the modern craze for screen sound, must be embellished with music and noise-effects.
Six musicians, skilled in leaping nimbly from tune to tune in harmony with the action on the screen, take their places under one microphone.
Another microphone bangs near the table where all the bells and whistles are spread. A large man in overalls sits near the tubful of tin cans with a wooden paddle in his hands, as if waiting for the cauldron to boil; the other conspirators stand here and there between the microphones, ready to make the right noises at the right times.
Rehearse at Showing.
They rehearse with the picture running on the screen in front of them. As the main title of the comedy appears on the screen the orchestra leaps into an overture, while the other sound-smiths stand tensely waiting for their cues.
When the opening scene discloses Oswald sleeping in his bed, the orchestra dodges quickly into a cradle song while a lad within whispering distance of a microphone snores rhythmically and another specialist imitates the squeaking of the bed by running sole leather through the clothes wringer.
After each rehearsal the recording engineer in the sound-mixing booth, who hears all this as it will sound to an audience, suggests improvements.
And again and again the mixed symphony of harmonies and discords is rehearsed; then, “This is the picture, boys,” and they go through it once more, with the sound-recording apparatus registering everything on celluloid.
Along about sunrise the sound-smiths call it a night and go home, tired and hungry, but with a little glow of pride at the thought that their artistry has made it possible for the world to bear as well as see Oswald the Rabbit.

Climbing Mannequins

Sylvester gets ready to climb the department store mannequin tower he’s built to capture Tweety in “Bird in a Guilty Cage” (released in 1952). It’s a variation on a gag found in a bunch of Sylvester and Tweety cartoons, usually preceded by Sylvester tippy-toeing from one side of the screen to the other accompanied by Carl Stalling/Milt Franklyn’s pizzicato strings.

The layout is by Hawley Pratt and the background by Irv Wyner.

Night Owls

Bullrushes sway to the “Moonlight Sonata” to open Walt Disney’s “Night” (1930), then are joined by waves on a lake and a la-la-la-ing moon (in falsetto) as the song changes to “The Blue Danube.”

The scene switches to a pair of owls in a typical gag of the era. The male and female owls dance together, but the female draws the line at kissing. You can see what happens next. I’ve never tried to count the Disney and Harman-Ising cartoons where a character flips up a rump in contempt.



Disneyshorts.org reports seven animators worked on this.