Cinderella Swirl

Cartoon actors get typecast, too. Witness this review in Variety of August 21, 1934.

Betty Boop
“Poor Cinderella”
10 Mins.
Paramount, N. Y.
Paramount
Color cartoon by the new process with firm tones and practically no bleeding, but a lack of tints in the colors. Conventional story of Cinderella other than that Cindy is Betty Boop at her boopiest. Good stuff for the children around holiday times and carrying a catchy melody for a theme song, but not the knockout it was intended to be chiefly because the main character is unsuitable. Sound very poor. Chic.

The reviewer didn’t seem to want Betty in a cartoon unless she was dealing with letches coming onto her as inanimate objects sprung to life for little bits of odd business. This cartoon’s in the Disney vein. But using a one-shot female character instead of Betty just wouldn’t have worked. And when you’re using colour for the first time, wouldn’t you showcase your star?

I’m very surprised the reviewer didn’t mention the 3-D effects during the short which are spectacular. Here are the background drawings from when Cinderella runs away after the clock strikes 12.



After the transformation, the scene changes from the ragged Cinderella to the prince in the palace (who sounds like he read his lines from the back of the room). The transition from one scene to the next involves a setting swirling behind the animation. Here’s one complete turn.



Seymour Kneitel was the head animator on this short.

Boogie Woogie Bunny

Bugs Bunny and a mouse play boogie woogie in “Rhapsody Rabbit.” I like how Boogie Woogie Bugs sticks out his tongue (Virgil Ross animation?).



Bugs traps the mouse.



Ross, Gerry Chiniquy, Manny Perez and Ken Champin are the credited animators.

It Pays To Be Ignorant

In 1959, as network radio sputtered toward its death, CBS melded some familiar elements into a show called “Funny Side Up.” It featured Kenny Delmar and Parker Fennelly basically reviving their “Allen’s Alley” characters under new names (with Delmar substituting Texan jokes for Southern jokes). They were two-thirds of a panel engaged in scripted banter on material sent in by the audience, pretty much like the premise of the parody quiz show “It Pays To Be Ignorant.” “Funny Side Up” wasn’t funny. It was flat.

Astute critic John Crosby hit on the thing that made “Ignorant” such a fun show to listen to. It was tightly-scripted but seemed out of control. The show’s tempo was manic. Wheezy old or obvious jokes didn’t get a chance to lie there—unlike the sedate, suburban proceedings of “Funny Side Up.” They were like a Tex Avery cartoon: set-up, ridiculous punchline, on to the next set-up before anyone has a chance to realise it’s an old groaner.

Here’s Crosby’s review from June 18, 1946.

YES, IT’S CORN, BUT GOOD!
By JOHN CROSBY
NEW YORK, Sept. 6.—In a book on fashions, I once recall reading that a particular fashion in, let us say, women’s clothes was ridiculous 15 years after it was introduced, quaint and amusing 50 years later, and a classic 100 years later.
It doesn't take that long for a joke to become a classic. The jokes in "It Pays to Be Ignorant” already have all the attributes of the classic, although I don't suppose these jokes are more than 20 years old. But, like Greek statuary, they follow a rigid pattern laid down by the early masters, and through the years have acquired the yellowed and nostalgic patina of old marble.
This satire on quiz programs is still as corny as Iowa in August and doesn’t pretend to be anything else. It’s a lot of fun, too, if you like that sort of thing. Perhaps I’d better give you a sample of the goings-on in “It Pays To Be Ignorant” and let you judge the program for itself.
GRAND GAGSTERS
Tom Howard is quiz master and he is flanked by a battery of experts, consisting of George Shelton, Harry McNaughton and Lulu McConnell. All four are veteran vaudevillians steeped in the wisdom of Joe Miller. If they know anything else, they keep it a deep secret.
Mr. Howard plucks an amateur from the audience and asks him a skull-cracking question such as “How many stories has a three-story house?” Before the poor man has a chance to open his mouth, the experts start throwing gags around like Indian clubs.
“Is the house for rent?”
“If you don’t know where the house is, why don’t you tell that to the people? I’m going to report you to the APU.”
“I once built a house in the country.”
“Well, you built it all wrong. It’s upside-down.”
“No wonder I keep falling off the porch.”
“Let’s get back to question,” yells Howard. “How many stories has a three-story house?”
“My sister in Kansas City has a four-story house.”
“Well, that’s another story.”
FAST-FIRED CORN
So far as I know, no one ever answers any of these questions. Suddenly, Mr. Howard remembers the amateur, or non-expert, who, I guess, simply shifts from one foot to another while this bedlam goes on. The amateur is given a prize of $25.15 and 204 cigarets for no apparent reason, but that shouldn't astonish any one who has ever heard a quiz program.
“It Pays To Be Ignorant” would be unbearable if it didn’t move so rapidly. Before you have a chance to detect the ripeness of these antique gags, three more come shooting through your loud-speaker.
“I was a comedian in a hospital—I kept the patient in stitches.”
“I've been married for fourteen years and I’m still in love. If my wife ever finds out, she’ll kill me.”
“I have a nice girl now—her name is Bottle.”
“I bet she’s a corker.”
“What do you expect for Father’s Day?”
“The bills for Mother’s Day.”
“What lives in a henhouse?”
“Is it for rent?"
These gags are delivered in a rich medley of accents. Howard has a voice like a hoarse bullfrog. Miss McConnell’s voice will remind you of a gravel chute in full operation. As for the amateurs, they simply sound bewildered.

For CBS, it didn’t pay to be ignorant. The network had been airing the show on Friday nights at 9 but looked at the ratings and suddenly replaced it on February 1, 1946 with a sitcom written by Abe Burrows called “Holiday and Company.” The numbers were even worse. “It Pays To Be Ignorant” returned May 2nd. The show began in 1942 as a sustainer on WOR/Mutual, bounced to CBS and then over to NBC, where it finished out its run on radio in 1951. The show premiered for a short run on television on WCBS on June 6, 1949 (opposite a movie on NBC and “Doorway to Fame” on DuMont) and there were TV revivals in each of the next three decades (the 1951 effort on NBC featured the original cast). By the way, to the right you can see the ignorance of one of the radio fan magazines. The misidentified cast depicted is from another show, “Can You Top This?”.

You can listen to an Armed Forces Radio edited version of some ignorance from 1943 below.
IT PAYS TO BE IGNORANT AFRS SHOW

The Magic Fluke

In Tex Avery’s brilliant “Magical Maestro,” a magician uses his magic wand to turn opera singer Poochini into various demeaning guises (child, western singer, Hawaiian chanter). Several years earlier, the UPA studio put out “The Magic Fluke,” where a magician’s wand turned into various things in the unwitting hand of Lips Fox and starts doing stuff to the orchestra.

The animation’s well-timed and gags are set up very well. Things build to a climax. A bass turns into a woman and the bow becomes a saw. (Is this Pat Matthews’ animation?)



Pigeons fly out of the tuba.



A triangle becomes a coat hanger that suddenly attracts the triangle player's evening wear.



Violins become long rabbits that, in probably the goofiest gag ever seen in a UPA cartoon, start la-la-la-ing that old cartoon workhouse, Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2.



The fox turns his orchestra members into rabbits, then erases them with the wave of the wand.



Finally, with some spectre rabbits floating from the end in mid-air, the wand expires.



The cartoon was nominated for an Oscar but that didn’t matter to the Capital-A artists at UPA. The short featured the two things many people at the studio despised: funny animals and slapstick violence. So such things vanished from the studio’s cartoons.

There’s a great post about the art of this cartoon on Michael Sporn’s blog.

That Cat Can Play!

Another gag from “Bad Luck Blackie”...

Kitten tries to escape from the menacing bulldog but runs down a back lane instead.



Kitten is cornered. He blows the whistle.



Black cat crosses the bulldog’s path.



Instant bad luck. Piano falls on bulldog.



Kitten plays the dog’s teeth like a piano. Look at the expressions on the kitten. Tex Avery and his animators were masters.



The kitten plays a quick, amateur version of “Yankee Doodle Dandy.” One wonders if Scott Bradley would have preferred Chopin or something else a little grander.

Jack Benny Goes Home

The continual mentions of Waukegan, Illinois should have telegraphed to radio listeners that Jack Benny loved his home town. And Waukegan loved him back. A centre for the arts and a junior high school in Waukegan are named for him. One of his homes in the city has been preserved. And there’s a statue in his honour.

It’s unclear how often he ever got back home, but it happened during the spring of 1946. Benny appeared on the Quiz Kids show, based in Chicago (he did a series of shows with them in 1941 as well) and made a side trip north to Waukegan.

Here’s the Chicago Tribune’s radio columnist from June 9, 1946. Apparently, trips with Frank Remley weren’t out of the ordinary for Jack; the two were great friends for many years.

WHAT A RADIO COMEDIAN DOES FOR A VACATION
Benny Visits Folks Here, Golfs, Drives, Talks
BY LARRY WOLTERS
Every summer two dozen of radio’s top entertainers vanish for three months or so. Where do they go? What do they do? Well, Jack Benny, radio’s best known worrier, is relaxing in Chicago with not a care in the world--at least nothing more serious than a guest appearance on the Quiz Kids show tonight.
Benny is taking it easy. He’s been visiting with his sister, Florence Fenchel, and father, Meyer Kubelsky, in Chicago. And he spent a couple of days golfing and reminiscing with old friends in Waukegan. He smoked countless cigars and drove all around in his convertible Cadillac. Benny is daffy about motoring. And tomorrow he will start driving back to the west coast to rejoin his family with Frank Remele, guitar player in Phil Harris’ band as companion. Benny expects to do a lot of loafing and looking on the way back. He wants to visit Colorado Springs, the Grand Canyon--and anything else that attracts his attention.
Gives Up Fretting
Benny confided that he has learned a lot about enjoying himself the last couple of years. He doesn’t even fret about the script any more--or not much. He’s got a stable of capable writers, he’s back near the top of the ratings and the critics have been cheering him for some of the best satire of the season.
A pro has got Benny all heated up over golf and he’s on the courses a lot. He shoots in the low 80s. "I’ve got something new to do," he mused. Bill and Harry Schwartz threw a golf party for him at Waukegan. Others in on it were Syd Block, Ollie Elmerman, also old friends.
Jack also visited with Julius Sinykin, in whose home he and Mary Livingstone were married, and his cousins, Mr. and Mrs. Clifford Gordon, Ben Gordon, and Ben Richman.
Goes to the Plays
Even on vacation Benny doesn't forget about the amusement world. Last week he saw "Anna Lucasta," Katharine Cornell in "Candida," and Russel Crouse and Howard Lindsay’s "State of the Union." He saw "Lucasta" and the latter play in New York and enjoyed them so much that he went again.
Benny has a yen to do a Broadway comedy and Crouse and Lindsay are conjuring up some ideas. Whether the play will come off in one year or five remains to be seen. It’s in the talking stage now.
As to his next season’s radio show Jack says it will follow much the same pattern as last year’s--consistent characterization; guests only when you can fit them perfectly into the mood of the show. Last year the Ronald Colmans were on the Benny show five times--made such a hit that a radio show may be built around them.
Defines an Ad Lib
Benny doesn’t agree that a comedian ought to pay much attention to looking for good gags.
"All you need to know is when a gag is lousy," he said, "and get rid of it."
Benny found time, also, to define a radio ad lib: "Know what you're going to say, but make it sound like you don’t."
After getting back to the coast Jack and Mary plan three weeks of golf at Del Monte. Next, Jack will make a quick trip to either Berlin or Tokyo to entertain GI’s and then he goes to work on a new picture about the life of Jack Benny tentatively titled "Always Keep Them Laughing."
And that's a summer’s vacation!

Censor That Woody!

The Walter Lantz studio managed to survive the ups and downs of the cartoon business until 1972 when the operation finally shut down. Lantz could have continued making cartoons—there was still a demand for them in theatres—but it was more profitable for him just to have Universal re-release his old ones.

Lantz had money troubles at various times over the years. And he ran afoul of censors. Pat Matthews’ Miss X character appeared in two musical cartoons in the mid-40s before being banished. And he had other troubles, too. Here’s Hedda Hopper to explain it in a column from 1954, suggesting even in the uptight world of the ‘50s, the limits on Lantz were kind of stupid.

Looking at Hollywood
Censors Draw Line on What Movie Cartoonist Can Sketch
BY HEDDA HOPPER
HOLLYWOOD, Nov. 29-If you think Jane Russell, Marilyn Monroe, and Ava Gardner give studio bosses headaches, take a gander at Woody Woodpecker. Poor Woody-he can’t even milk a cow in a cartoon unless Bossie wears a skirt. La Russell’s snaky hips and Gardner's cause producers migraine but Walter Lantz, the comic woodpecker creator, has never been allowed by the censor’s office even to let Woody kiss a girl. O, yes, girls can kiss Woody. He can’t say "gosh," but he can

say "golly." However, he’s not allowed to have a human girl friend, a human cartoon girl friend, that is. . . . Lantz wanted to do a take-off on Audie Murphy’s "To Hell and Back" and cooked up a cartoon angle to have Woody starring in "To Heck and Back," but the production code boys nixed the word "heck." . . . These problems roll off Walter like water off Woody’s bill. Lantz is a pioneer of animated cartoons. "When you understand the reason for censorship stricter than any held over glamor girls," says he, "you relax. Tho adults love them, cartoons are for kids and we’ve got to bend over backward."
WALTER IS CELEBRATING his 25th anniversary with Universal-International, and recalls many headaches far worse than censor snooping. He once conceived the idea of a series called "Seeing Stars" in which top Hollywood personalities were caricatured. The stars loved it, but when their agents started demanding 10 per cent, Lantz put the series in the deep freeze.... Then there was the cartoon "Hollywood Bowl," in which the expressive hands of Conductor Leopold Stokowski were shown getting stuck in a woman’s hair curlers. The maestro didn’t think it funny. He threatened suit and the picture was shelved. But when U. I. signed him for a top role in Deanna Durbin’s "100 Men and a Girl," he reconsidered.
DISNEY, the master himself, headed the committee which organized the anniversary celebration for Lantz. Neither looks upon the other as a competitor. They figure that any good cartoon which entertains is good for the other guy’s business. . . . Their friendship goes back a long way. Disney, who worked at Universal when Lantz came to head up the animation factory, was preparing to go independent and scare up some money to finance a little brain wave called Mickey Mouse. Disney left on his drawing board a character named Oswald Rabbit which Lantz re-designed somewhat, copyrighted, and made the king of his animal kingdom. . . . Lantz is fighting against the horror comics. He sees no reason in the first place to call them "comics" because they re not funny. By no stretch of the imagination does he think they belong on the same news stand with the animal comics by himself and Disney.
IT COSTS AS MUCH per foot of film to make a 6 minute cartoon as it does to make a big picture at a major studio. Making 13 cartoons a year at a total cost of $35,000 each, it takes Walter four years just to get his production costs back on each comedy. This doesn’t include the cost of buying and equipping a studio. So let that he a lesson to aspiring caricaturists who want to storm Hollywood and start pecking out the old money juice from the same tree Woody does.

Nyah, Nyah

Harman and Ising fill the screen with characters in “Poor Little Me” (1935). Note the little kitty to the right.



The kitten stops in the centre of the screen then has a message for the theatre audience watching him.



This is another short that adheres to the cartoon principle that skunks must stink at all times.

No animators are credited in the 10-minute faux Disney effort.

No Peanuts For You

A baby with a cowlick gets annoyed with an elephant reaching its trunk under a theatre seat and eating his peanuts. He solves that problem.



This is from “Stopping the Show,” a 1932 Betty Boop cartoon where Mae Questel gets to show off her impersonation skills (which, I suspect, landed her a job with the Fleischer cartoon studio to begin with).