One of Those Corny 'B' Pictures, Eh?

Screwy Squirrel is about to clobber Meathead the dog when his cartoon is interrupted.



In another great routine, Red Riding Hood and the wolf come out of nowhere to interrupt the action. Screwy explains to the wolf he’s in the wrong cartoon—with the assistance of the previously-seen title cards pulled out of nowhere.



The whole routine is topped when Screwy and Meathead briefly inhabit the world of Red Riding Hood, with none of its characters anywhere to be found.

Heck Allen helped Tex Avery with the story in this one.

Falsetto Frolics

Ever wonder how Mickey got his high voice? The answer may be in eight consecutive drawings from “Plane Crazy.”



Mickey doesn’t actually cry in pain during this part of the picture. Music and sound effects pretty much tell the story.

Broadway Benny

Jack Benny disliked the song the world associates with him, “Love in Bloom.”

Well, so he said in an interview with the Associated Press in 1963. And elsewhere, long after his radio days when he adopted it had ended.

He had nothing against the song’s writers, Leo Robin and Ralph Rainger. In fact, he had them on his show twice and handed them laughs as his violin butchered their songs “Let That Be a Lesson To You” (show of July 7, 1936) and what became Bob Hope’s theme “Thanks For The Memory” (show of March 6, 1938). But the song was a love song, and Jack didn’t see how the lyrics applied to a comedian. They didn’t, of course, but there’s something funny about lousy violin playing during what’s supposed to a romantic song. So it really did fit him after all.

Here’s the story we mentioned above. Jack was making a Broadway appearance, so the A.P. found it worthy of an interview.

Jack Benny's Broadway Return Done on a 'Hunch'
By WILLIAM GLOVER
NEW YORK, Feb. 4 (AP) — "I had a feeling," says Jack Benny who is coming back to Broadway, "that if I didn't do it this time, I just never would."
And if that sounds mildly mystical—well, Benny is a great believer in hunches. His career, the noted television comic asserts, has been filled with impromptu payoff events.
"Everything that's happened has come about by accident."
For several years, the man from "Waukegan has been noodling notions about appearing once more on the White Way stage that he last visited in the 1931 Earl Carroll "Vanities."
"Each time I'd say I'd do it—and then didn't."
Obeying his impulse this time, Benny begins a six-week engagement Feb. 27 at the Ziegfeld theater in a variety revue. It is the longest in-person stint he has set, although there have been a number of concert appearances, and "about a million banquet speeches."

THE THEATER GUILD show is an expansion of a program which he displayed several months ago for two weeks in Las Vegas.
"I go to Vegas mostly for kicks—and when you do something for kicks, you better be great," he points out.
"You see, I get stage-struck every so often, and people keep sending me scripts of musicals and plays. But with TV commitments, the only kind of play I could do would be one written for me and that I would own.
"Then I could go into it for a few weeks, have someone replace me, and come back the next chance I got. But nobody is going to write a play like that for me."
With all of his television shows recorded for the rest of the season, Benny put his name on the line for the Ziegfeld date.
The original intention was to call the revue "Life Begins at 39." But the star, who will actually be 69 on Valentine's Day, felt some fans might be misled into thinking it was a play with a plot So the title is simply "Jack Benny in Person."
APPEARING WITH HIM are Jane Morgan and several other entertainers, and a preliminary warmup opens in Toronto Feb. 11. "At this point I don't really need any rehearsal," says the comedian, "we could go on tomorrow."
After the run, he vacations for a fortnight, then starts shooting next season's video series. If the show hits big, he'd like to curtail video to some extent thereafter for a cross-country tour. Why all the work?
"Well, Mary—she'll be along for the opening here—thinks I work too much sometimes, but she's got a feeling that if I rested too much, I'd get restless. So do I."
Turning to some of the happy accidents that have shaped his merry image, Benny calls such items as reputed stinginess, that renowned feud with Fred Allen and his "Love in Bloom" fiddling all the results of chance.
"IF WE'D DELIBERATELY set one of those things up, the sting would have died in four weeks," he declares.
Mention of that theme melody brings another confession.
"I despise that song — and I always have, because it has absolutely no meaning for me."
Much better, he adds, would be mastery of "All the Great Violin Classics." Just before pausing to chat, he was hard at rehearsal of a Henry Wieniawski concerto.
"I'll never master that as long as I live," sighed the thwarted maestro.

Much About Clutch

I’ll just go ahead and say it. Clutch Cargo is creepy. I don’t know if it aired on any channels I watched a kid, but it would have been too weird to attract me if it had.

Clutch, for those of you who don’t know, is classified by many as a cartoon and, it is in a way. The drawings don’t move. Instead, film of human lips reciting dialogue is super-imposed over the drawings.

I ran across the trade ad you see to the right and it inspired me to write a few things about Clutch and its producer. As I started researching I discovered—and I shouldn’t be surprised about this—cartoon historian Jerry Beck has already posted an interesting little history on his blog. Read it HERE. Frankly, it’s far more entertaining than what you’ll read below.

Getting TV cartoons on the air in the 1950s and early 60s was octopussian in nature. There were always a bunch of connected tenticles. In the case of Clutch Cargo, there were George Bagnall, a company called Cambria Studios and inventor Edwin Gillette.

Cambria came about in 1956. Jack Schwartz sold his Equity Studios to a man named Richard Brown “who will operate it as Cambria Studios on a rental basis” (Variety, Jan. 18, 1956). Brown seems to have intended it to operate as a live action studio. The Fund for the Republic, bankrolled by the Ford Foundation, commissioned a five-minute historical series with the filming to be done at Cambria, with Ed Gillette handling the cameras (Weekly Variety, May 9, 1956). Gillette held a number of patents, and one of them was for a process which photographed composite talking pictures. You can see the patent HERE. Somewhere along the way, this process acquired the name “Synchro-Vox” and, it would seem logical to assume, Gillette talked to somebody at Cambria about the studio using it. Apparently, he soon had his chance. Weekly Variety reported on November 14, 1956.

‘Capt. Fathom’ in Tint
Cambria Studio Inc. and New Vistas Inc. will combine to color-film a new telepix series, “Captain Fathom,” according to Dick Brown, prexy of Cambria. Series, about a skindiver, will be aimed at both juve and adult markets.

Things get a little confusing here. Captain Fathom was the name of a Cambria cartoon series in 1965 that used the Synchro-Vox technique. The aforementioned programme may have been a live action show starring Buster Crabbe; Weekly Variety of Feb. 7, 1957 mentions such a show was being produced by Cambria. But it may have been a different show altogether. Billboard of September 9, 1958, well over a year and a half later, talks about the Crabbe show and we learn for the first time about Clutch and Synchro-Vox.

Bagnall Associates Pitches Anthony, 'Davey Jones' Pix
NEW YORK-George Bagnall Associates is pitching two new properties for TV, with Les Anthony handling ad agencies here.
"Davey Jones," half-hour adventure series, stars Buster Crabbe as an ex-Navy demolition expert engaged in salvage work.
"Clutch Cargo," a cartoon strip with a new lip-sync process, is a five-minute serialized cliff-hanger.
Both properties are being produced by Cambria Productions.

Bagnall had kicked around for awhile. He was treasurer of the Fox Film Corporation in 1930, moved to Paramount in 1941, and later landed at United Artists as vice president in charge of production. He was on the board of the Motion Picture Relief Fund for 45 years, serving as its president for a time, and received the Jean Herscholt Humanitarian Award from the Motion Picture Academy in 1967. More relevant to our story, Bagnall set up his own distribution company in 1952 hoping to get in on the television syndication gold mine. His experience with animation came in 1957 when he bought the rights to distribute the original, Jay Ward produced, Crusader Rabbit cartoons to TV stations. Evidently, he was looking for more animation to sell; several companies were making good coin brokering deals for old theatrical cartoons to stations.

In the meantime, an animator named Clark Haas came up with the concept of Clutch Cargo. Somehow, he hooked up with Cambria and Gillette’s Synchro-Vox, and Bagnall came on board to distribute the 130-episode series (Cargo’s companion Spinner, incidentally, was voiced by Margaret Kerry, who was Richard Brown’s wife).

Bagnall’s sales team hit the road. By August 25, 1959, Variety reported the company had done a half million dollars in business on Clutch. Broadcasting magazine of August 31, 1959 broadcast the happy news:

George Bagnall & Assoc. Inc. (tv film distributor), Beverly Hills, Calif., has sold Clutch Cargo, a cartoon comic strip using the Synchro Vox system of interposing human lips to drawings, to more than 15 stations. The Stations include WPIX (TV) New York, WFIL-TV Philadelphia [purchased in January], WNHC-TV New Haven, WGN -TV Chicago, KTTV (TV) Los Angeles, WWJ -TV Detroit, WIIC (TV) Pittsburgh, WEWS (TV) Cleveland, WKBN-TV Youngstown, KFRE-TV Fresno, WNBF-TV Binghamton, KOVR (TV) Stockton, WREX-TV Rockford, WJRT (TV) Flint. Other sales were made in Phoenix, Tucson, Tampa and Eureka, Calif.
Clutch Cargo has 26 stories consisting of five episodes a story.

When did Clutch first appear on TV? The Los Angeles Times reveals he became part of KTTV’s Lunch Brigade with Sheriff John on October 19, 1959. He’s on Philadelphia’s channel 6 on March 30th introduced by Sally Starr (who had just finished running 55 minutes of Popeye cartoons). The earliest we’ve spotted him is on New York City’s channel 11 on Monday, March 16th at 5:25 p.m. immediately after Abbott and Costello.

For the record, Clutch was voiced by announcer Richard Cotting. Emil Sitka, a well-loved secondary player to Three Stooges fans, supplied accents and what he called “eccentric voices” and the ubiquitous Hal Smith can be heard as well.

Sponsor magazine of July 11, 1960 mentions this interesting Clutch tie-in:

Ideas at work:
• Humanitarians all: WTRF-TV, Wheeling, W. Va., turned its gimmick "Clutch Cargo Humanitarian Award" legit. The tv station and local police department honored a parking lot attendant for "service beyond the call of duty" (he permitted an officer to store his rain gear on the lot) . The award became so well known that the two decided to make it really mean something. First recipient was a 12-year-old who saved a friend from drowning.

Clutch Cargo remained on the air for several more years. Variety reported in September 1963 the “TV comic strip” was syndicated in 90 markets.



The success of the ultra-cheap Clutch enabled Cambria to put several more Electro-Vox series on the air. Space Angel (1963), with animator Hi Mankin supervising, featured artwork by Alex Toth, Doug Wildey and Warren Tufts, all of whom went to Hanna-Barbera to toil on Jonny Quest. In fact, Cambria took Hanna-Barbera to court for $1,050,000 in 1965, claiming the Quest series “uses, copies and appropriates substantial parts and portions of Cambria’s ‘Clutch Cargo’ and its pilot film, ‘Captain Fathom,’ including their principal cartoon characters.” There’s really no comparing the shows.

The year was a busy one on the drawing board for Cambria. Not only did Captain Fathom hit the airwaves, so did an animated version of The Three Stooges (producer Norman Maurer was Moe Howard’s son-in-law). These series required honest-to-goodness animators, and veteran Chic Otterstrom was among them. Read more (or is that “Moe”? Nyuk, nyuk) about the show on this blog. Cambria, incidentally, had a co-production deal with Canawest Film Productions of Vancouver to film a Three Stooges feature film. It was budgeted at $250,000 and to be shot in two weeks in Vancouver (Canawest was one of the studios where the Beatles cartoons were made).

Like the other TV studios, Cambria had projects that were announced in the trades but never quite got off the ground. From Variety, January 19, 1965.

Cartooning Arquette's Weaver' Character
Cliff Arquette's " Charlie Weaver" character will become a cartoon to be produced by Cambria Studio for its kidult series. He will portray his Mt. Idy caricature in letters from his mother.
Joe Cutter and Dave Detiege are scripting the pilot and Clark Haas is the art director. Art Rush set the deal for Arquette.

And from Broadcasting magazine, February 13, 1967...

Animated World War I
A new adventure cartoon series in color, The Golden Eagle, is being produced by Cambria Studios, Hollywood, for distribution by the Trans-Lux Television Corp. Initial episodes of the series, which is based on exploits of World War I flying aces, are expected to be ready by March in time for the NAB convention and TFE '67, a Trans-Lux official reported.

Trans-Lux was no stranger to cartoons. It put the “bag of tricks” version of Felix the Cat on the small screen, as well as that Greek god with iron in his thighs, The Mighty Hercules.

Cambria seems to have relocated to Canada. Richard Brown was based in Vancouver by the late ‘60s and working on a number of deals for TV films, some involving children’s adventure stories. He joined Animation Filmakers Corp. in 1972 which absorbed Cambria. Clark Haas, the man behind Clutch Cargo, died in 1978. Brown died in 1993 (the cartoon’s director, Phil Booth, died in 1960). Meanwhile, the worldwide TV rights to Clutch and Space Angel were acquired in 1974 by Entertainment Corp. of America. Whether anyone actually broadcast them has yet to be discovered. The show remained a campy, fuzzy memory for some boomers, including Conan O’Brien, who decided the Synchro Vox technique would be something really funny for a segment of his late night TV. Suddenly, people were talking about Clutch again and the maligned series ended up on DVD in 2005.

We wonder when a forward-thinking studio will come out with a feature film CGI remake of Clutch Cargo. Some fans may complain about computer generated versions of their old favourites being vastly inferior to the originals, but we suspect there’s no possible way to make Clutch worse than it was.

Pedigreedy

Felix the Cat tells an audience of the hoi-polloi some tall stories about his ancestors in an attempt to join their private social club in Pedigreedy (1927).

This gag’s pretty straight-forward. I love how the Pharaoh in 1000 B.C. has a pistol. And why he splits apart into pieces while he dances is something that escapes me.

A Tail Of One Gag

“If you take a big bite out of any one thing,” Paul Terry opined in 1970, “that’s plagiarism and you’re a thief. So, we used to have a saying, John Foster and I, ‘Never steal more than you can carry.’”

Foster was the story chief at Terrytoons through the ‘30s and ‘40s. In one of his cartoons, he borrowed the old paint-a-scene-on-something-the-good-guy-runs-through found a few years earlier in Tex Avery’s Jerky Turkey (but popularised later by Wile E. Coyote). Here’s another familiar one in Felix the Fox (1948).

Dimwit the dog chases Felix into some bushes. The drawings tell the story.



If you’re an Avery fan, you’re saying “Hey, wait a minute!” and know what cartoon Foster “carried” this from.



It’s from The Screwy Truant, released in 1944.

Arthur Q

All the years he was hunting wabbits, Elmer Fudd’s voice actor was never identified on screen. Countless kids grew up in the ‘60s and ‘70s thinking it was Mel Blanc, because Blanc’s name was the only one that appeared in the title cards.

But it wasn’t Blanc. It was radio actor Arthur Q. Bryan, at least pretty much up until the time of his death. Kids of the ‘40s may have known Bryan was Fudd because he used the exact same trick voice on a number of wadio, er, radio shows, especially in the regular role of Waymond Wadcwiffe on Al Pearce’s show. Bryan had been on a show in the late ‘30s called The Grouch Club, and it’s probable someone at the Leon Schlesinger cartoon studio heard him on it, catapulting him to freelance animation work.

Bryan was a busy actor, lending his voice not only to comedy parts, but dramatic roles on Lux Radio Theatre. He even played a network censor on the Orson Welles Show in 1944 before being shown the door and replaced by John Brown (Ray Collins, a Welles favourite, lost his role to Jack Mather at the same time). Bryan’s most famous radio character was born on March 16, 1943 when he showed up in Wistful Vista as Doc Gamble on Fibber McGee and Molly. He stayed in the part until March 22, 1956 when the show’s format was reworked as strictly a dialogue between Fibber and Molly. He came down with gastritis later in the year.

Long before Fibber and cartoons and even Hollywood, Bryan was a young singer in New York. The New York Sun of September 20, 1930 profiled him.

ARTHUR Q. BRYAN, the chief announcer at W O R, was born in Brooklyn, N. Y., in 1899, which he says makes him today of a ripe old age. At the age of eighteen years he began the study of singing with an eye to a concert career. It developed, however, that necessity demanded that his aspirations along these lines be shelved, with the result that his vocal talents were displayed only in various church choirs.
In 1924, Mr. Bryan went to Scranton, Pa., where he worked in the coal mines for the long space of six days quite long enough for him to be prejudiced against that sort of position forever. He returned to New York city and secured a position with a well-known insurance company, incidentally the same which once sheltered Lewis Reid.
The singing persisted, however, and he finally got into radio over both WEAF and WJZ, and was heard in a number of programs including the Seiberling Singers and the Jeddo Highlanders. This was followed by eleven weeks in the show business singing with an octette in “Follow Thru.”
About this time he heard talk of Reid’s leaving WOR and more as a joke than with any seriousness went there and took an audition for an announcer. The joke, however, turned into a position and since then his air activities have been manifold, from singing and a speaking part in Main street for dogs and birds. Mr. Bryan writes the Moonbeam verses and reads on the Choir Invisible. He particularly enjoys working with Uncle Don and thinks him one of the finest characters on the air.
As an afterthought only, he is not married!

Radio listings in the New York City papers show Bryan at WGBS in New York as far back as June 1926 with a ten-minute show early every Thursday evening. He sang. By March 1928, he had a 15-minute morning broadcast at WEAF as a tenor soloist, and was announcing at WOR by April 1930. Bryan quit WOR on September 19, 1931; Variety reported he was going to freelance. If that was the case (“quitting” in radio can mean something else), he quickly changed his mind. He was hired on October 31st by WCAU, the CBS affiliate in Philadelphia, to announce, write and sing. In December 1932, he joined the staff of WIP-WFAN but returned to WCAU the following June to write the CBS network show Bill and Ginger while still appearing on WIP for several more months. Bryan remained in Philadelphia until May 1935 when he returned to New York where WHN employed him to work on, among other things, a variety show with M.C. Ted Claire. His New York radio career ended in September 1936 when he announced he was going to Hollywood. Billboard of October 3rd reported Bryan “leaves the movie lots to join the Par pix scripters”; it sounds like he went West to try his hand at acting first before Paramount hired him as a writer. That didn’t last long. In December 1936, Variety revealed he was now at KFWB, along with Gil Warren, who also later provided his voice on Warner Bros. cartoons.

Bryan was profiled in the Los Angeles publication Radio Life on May 12, 1946. It’s interesting Bryan should tell the writer he didn’t want a starring show. He had already starred on Major Hoople, a summer replacement show in 1942. And waaaaay down below, you can see a reference to his cartoon role.

ARTHUR ? BRYAN
We Found Out What Mr. Bryan’s Ambition Was, But He Refuses to Tell One Well-Kept Secret
By Joan Buchanan
Tuesday, 6:30 p.m.
NBC—KFI, KFSD
Sunday. 8 p.m.
NBC—KFI, KFSD

ARTHUR Q. BRYAN is one comedian without a “Hamlet” complex! “In fact,” Arthur admitted, “I don’t even like Shakespeare—except for ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’—it’s nice and wacky.”
“There’s just one role I would love to play—and what a part that is!” he continued. “It’s the lead in ‘Harvey’.”
On a trip last year to open the War Loan drive in Toronto, Arthur managed to go to New York and in ten days he saw seven plays. Frank Fay in “Harvey” was one—the one that Arthur can’t forget. Arthur is morose about his chances ever to play the part because Joe E. Brown is winning new acclaim in the West Coast company and Bing Crosby has been mentioned for the picture. However, if the chance ever presents itself—Arthur will put in his bid to play the part of Elwood P. Dowd, the lovable inebriate whose closest friend is an invisible, six-foot rabbit.
“What makes you desire the ‘Harvey’ part above others?” we wanted to know.
“Well, it’s wonderful fantasy, and it’s so terrifically sympathetic. Of course anyone who plays it will have to do it the way Frank Fay does, because he does it perfectly,” Arthur answered.
Arthur Q. is equally enthusiastic, however, about his part as “Doctor Gamble” on the “Fibber McGee and Molly” show. “Don Quinn (writer of the show) is wonderful,” he said. “Every part he writes is a good one. ‘Doctor Gamble’ is a real person—when I step up to the mike to do the ‘doctor’ I feel subconsciously that I am him. Don Quinn studies the character and your voice and writes for you. I feel that the characters on the show are all drawn by him and we just sort of aid and abet him.
“For instance, when the ‘McGee and Molly’ show was in Toronto, nobody knew or cared what our real names were. In the morning when I’d come down into the hotel lobby, people would say, ‘Good morning, Doctor’ . . . ‘How are you this morning, Doctor Gamble?’”
Prefers Comedy
Arthur admits that he enjoys doing comedy more than any other type of role. “I think most comics really enjoy being comedians,” he confided, “because of the instantaneous response to humor. We revel in laughter and can actually have fun with the audience. That's something you don’t get in drama. I guess a comedian has to have a touch of conceit to be a good comic—but perhaps I shouldn’t say that!”
“Is it harder to make people laugh or cry?” we wanted to know.
“I really don’t know,” Arthur admitted. “I do know that some audiences can be awfully hard to play to, though. Sometimes at rehearsal we actors will double up laughing at what we think is a hilarious script. Then we hit a cold audience—and murder! Dead silence!”
Arthur hasn't always been a comedian—he started out to be a singer and revealed that “singing was my first choice for a career, and once you’ve been a singer you never quite get it out of your system!” He has started to study classical singing again just to keep in practice. He’s an enthusiastic record collector and to date has about 2000 records—symphonic and concert, largely vocal. Arthur was (and still is) a tenor. He sang in light opera, did many Gilbert and Sullivan roles, sang in the Broadway show, “Follow Thru,” and on many radio programs. Locally he has appeared in the light opera festivals in “The Merry Widow” and “The Vagabond King.”
He loves the stage because “it’s so phoney! Such marvelous opportunities for hamming.” And likes radio because you never know what you’re going to be doing next.
“How would you like a show of your own?” we ventured.
No Show of Own!
“I’d hate it,” Arthur replied cheerfully. “Too much to worry about, and I happen to be crazy about everybody I work with. Never been in such a pleasant organization before.”
Arthur's been in radio for 22 years now and has done dramatic roles besides comedy, "We figured it out on the ‘McGee’ show that the radio experience of the cast figured out to over 180 years," he claimed. Arthur’s most recent picture was the Rosalind Russell starrer, “She Wouldn't Say Yes,” and of course he is still immortalizing the easily hoodwinked hunter in the Warners’ “Bugs Bunny” cartoons.
“By the way,” we inquired, finishing things up, “what does the Q. in Arthur Q. Bryan stand for?” Arthur looked cunning. “I haven’t told anybody that in twenty-two years, and I don’t think I’ll start now.”
“Aw—why not ?” we protested. Arthur laughed. “ ‘Cause that way--everybody always asks me!”

You needn’t ask what the “Q” stood for. Unlike Robert Q. Lewis, whose name purely an invention, Bryan had a middle name. Here it is on his World War One draft registration.



Bryan’s last appearance in a Warner Bros. cartoon was in Person to Bunny, released April 1, 1960. Bryan never saw it. He died on November 30, 1959 at the age of 60.

Late note: Voice actor and historian Keith Scott sends the following clarification:
[I]t was Avery who was the one who wanted Bryan for his cartoon DANGEROUS DAN McFOO. He spoke at a college lecture once of how he listened to THE GROUCH CLUB and heard Bryan as a regular (he played "The Little Man") on that...also said he and others would go and watch radio shows at KFWB on the Warner lot a few buildings away from the cartoon facility on Sunset. He saw Blanc doing his News of the World skit and knew of him before he ever used him.

M Is For the Million Laughs Tex Gave Me

“Lucky Ducky” features the great “Technicolor Ends Here” gag, but Tex and writer Rich Hogan fit in a bunch of quick gags during the extended chase scene.

Here’s one. The duck’s on the run through a pair of trees.



The dogs are in pursuit (in their motorboat on dry land).



The big tree protects the little tree, as Scott Bradley plays “Mother” on the soundtrack.



Tex liked surprising his audience from beginning to ending of his pictures. Unfortunately, re-issue prints of “Lucky Ducky” have the original ending chopped off. Film collector and researcher Jim Tucker came across an original print and reported his findings to fellow historian Jerry Beck. Read about it HERE.

Yes, The Post

“Not ‘The Gezundheit!’” “Not ‘William Tell!’” “Not ‘Roll Out the Barrel!’” You probably have a favourite amongst the penalties inflicted on Bob McKimson’s generic cat in a couple of cartoons involving a bulldog. One is “Early To Bet,” featuring the Gambling Bug (played by Stan Freberg).

Here are a few frames (the drawings were used more than once) of the bug attacking the cat and the cat’s reaction.



Emery Hawkins, Rod Scribner, Charles McKimson and Phil De Lara receive the animation credits.

They Couldn't Stand Him

Running gags are a staple of comedy, but Jack Benny’s writers tried stretching that to running scenarios embracing part or all of a radio season. So we were treated to Jack warring with the Sportsmen Quartet (1946-47), Jack and the missing Oscar (1947-48), Jack and the echo (part of 1948-49) and Jack the songwriter (1951-52).

The most successful running routine had to be the “I Can’t Stand Jack Benny” contest, which took up part of the 1945-46 season. The idea was brilliant. It was a way to get the Benny audience involved in the show and, at the same time, get publicity.

Radio Life magazine of February 3, 1946 explains what happened.

They “Can’t Stand Jack Benny” because . . .
By Evelyn Rigsby
Fourteen years ago, Jack Benny pulled a comedy switch in radio. Instead of having a cast full of stooges, he became a stooge for his cast; instead of telling jokes on the other fellow, he let the other fellow turn the joke on him.
A few weeks ago Benny pulled another switch. This time, instead of conducting a contest on “I like Crunchy Munchies (or) Soapsy Sudsies (or) Itsy Bitsies in fifty words or less together with a box top or reasonable facsimile” contest, he launched a “Why I Can’t Stand Jack Benny” deal with no tops, no wrappers, no facsimiles—no, not even a strand from a 1945 model Benny toupe. It was a contest to satirize all contests, an insult routine to end all insult routines.
But to fifty-three winners it will pay off in $10,000—a first prize of $2,500, a second of $1,500, a third of $1,000 and fifty added awards of $100 war bonds each.
Proof that the radio fans can go along with a gag was the mail response, which, it is estimated, will finally tabulate at between three and four hundred thousand letters. Final judges Fred Allen, Peter Lorre, and Goodman (Easy) Ace will name the winners.
Almost Called Off
There’s an interesting story behind this contest which, it is claimed, will break all records for any such competition ever held in the state of California. A few months ago, Benny’s writers presented the idea as a sequence for one program, suggesting that the $10,000 of which the radio Benny character had been robbed was really a publicity stunt. While the sequence was being “kicked around” someone said, “There are 130 million people in the country, but only thirty million listen to you, Jack. So one hundred million people must hate you. Say! There’s an idea. Why don’t you run a contest—a legitimate contest, “Why I Hate Jack Benny?”
“Why not?” replied Benny. “Only it’s no good to use the word ‘hate.’
This is just the time when we’re trying to eliminate that four letter word from the national and international vocabulary.”
At this point the contest idea was almost abandoned until someone came up with the substitute wording “Why I ‘Can’t Stand’ Jack Benny,” that carried the germ of the idea, but took the curse off the hate notion.
Enlarge Staff
The contest was announced on the December 3 [actually, 2] program and ran three weeks and one day, ending Christmas Eve. To handle the anticipated replies. Benny rented a shop in an off business street in Beverly Hills—some space that could be spared for a month. He figured six girls, working without too much pressure, could handle perhaps 20,000 letters a week.
By the end of the second week, the mail was 150,000 for seven days and it was necessary to add three girls to the day staff and to put on a night staff of nine workers who hurried into the room at nightfall like little gnomes, slit open the letters, and segregated them as to categories for the workers coming in the morning to read.
About half of the replies came in rhyme. As for the reasons people can’t stand Benny, they were divided between stinginess, ill-treatment of Rochester, ill-treatment of Fred Allen, fiddle-playing, and miscellaneous. In the miscellaneous category was a certain group which seized the contest as an opportunity to write nostalgic and “Hello, I haven’t seen you in a long time” letters. Some letters went even so far as to include foot notes telling Benny they really loved him and that he shouldn’t take the entry reply as anything more than a chance to latch onto same money—as who wouldn’t, including Jack Benny?
The accompanying box contains quotes which were chosen while the contest was still in progress and which were picked because they were typical replies. Some, sent in by Benny’s friends, were not trying, to compete, but were intended as gags. Radio Life will print the winning answers.

Radio Life also published some losing answers. Actually, some were gag responses by some of Jack’s show biz friends. These were found in the same issue. Detroit Tigers star Hank Greenberg was a running gag on the show that year, heard moving to third base whenever Jack listened to play-by-play baseball. Tom Breneman had a morning show on ABC catering to elderly women, who filled his studio audience. He tried on their funny hats and gave them orchids; Jack was an honorary pallbearer at his funeral.

WHY SOME CAN'T STAND HIM
I can’t stand Jack Benny because my husband won't miss his program, then we are late for church. He'd rather miss his chance to heaven than to miss Benny's program. —E.H.R., Glenarm, Ill.
I can’t stand Jack Benny because he’s had me on third base since the World Series, and I want to come home! —Hank Greenberg.
Sincerely regret St. Joe residents can’t qualify for contest. We still love you here. —H.B., St. Joseph, Mo.
I can’t stand Jack Benny because he doesn’t play more violin solos on his program—Napoleon Bonaparte, (P.S. My two roommates, Julius Caesar and General Grant, prefer Fred Allen’s singing—but they’re crazy! N.B.) —Capt. A. J. H., Portland, Ore.
I can’t stand Jack Benny because he obviously hasn’t read my book. —Dale Carnegie
I can’t stand Jack Benny because he puts rocks in his pockets when he weighs himself to get more for his money’s worth. —J.O., Waukesha, Wis.
I can't stand Jack Benny because, while he continually talks about “good old Waukegan,” he was smart enough to leave and never come back. —F. F., Waukegan, Ill.
I can’t stand Jack Benny because he's always disguising himself as an old lady to get a free meal at “Breakfast in Hollywood.” Worse yet, he won an orchid and I had to kiss him. —Tom Breneman.
I can’t stand Jack Benny because he is giving $10,000 in prizes to people who can’t stand him and I like him so much I don’t stand a chance to win. —M.E., Erie, Pennsylvania.
I can’t stand Jack Benny because four years ago he took the role of Charley’s Aunt away from me. —Lucille Ball.
I can’t stand Jack Benny because he’s so young, so firm, so fully, packed, so free and easy with his purse. That is, I don’t like him too because my great grandmother told me when she was a little girl Jack used to give her a new Indian head penny if she would go to bed when he carne to see her older sister. —Mrs. C.H.O., Spokane, Wash.
I can’t stand Jack Benny because he is the type of person who would swear he had no relatives if you asked him “Brother, can you spare a dime ?” —L.C.H., Denver, Colo.
I can’t stand Jack Benny because I have no sense of humor. —M. C., San Leandro, Calif.
I can’t stand Jack Benny because I saw him mature from a man to a boy. —Fred Allen (who isn’t even eligible, as he is a judge.)
I can’t stand Jack Benny because he’s tight as an olive jar when you’re having a party. —H. T., Glenside, Penn.
I can’t stand Jack Benny because he’s too much like a close friend of mine, and by close I do mean Bergen! —Charlie McCarthy.
I can’t stand Jack Benny because I can’t stand Fred Allen; I can't stand Fred Allen because I can’t stand Charlie McCarthy. In fact, can't stand Charlie. I can't stand any of these sissy dummies who sit on a knee and use their noses for talking. Give me a HE-MAN like Joan Davis. —S.Y.C., Clifton Forge, Pa.

Benny’s real-life popularity ensured the contest got plenty of publicity. Arthur Godfrey, according to Variety, got chastised in mid-programme by management for mentioning it on his morning show; the Redhead was on CBS at the time while Benny was on NBC. Variety wrote a think piece on not only whether the whole contest was a bad idea (with the potential of contest losers getting upset and no longer listening), but whether reading the winning entry was wise (Fred Allen, according to the publication, felt it should be kept off the air). In fact, Variety reported on February 6th that Benny himself, and not the Benny “character” was “disturbed when a Los Angeles suburbanite won his capital prize” but doesn’t say why. The item seems odd, considering Benny continued to milk the Can’t Stand Contest on his show for a number of years. And it seems silly to not read the entry. Benny’s huge audience was, no doubt, dying of curiosity to know what it was.

The winner was submitted by Carroll P. Craig, Sr. Craig’s poem was more than funny. It had a ring of truth, and I’m sure that’s why it was selected.

He fills the air with boasts and brags
And obsolete obnoxious gags.
The way he plays his violin
Is music’s most obnoxious sin.
His cowardice alone, indeed,
Is matched by his obnoxious greed.
In all the things that he portrays
He shows up my own obnoxious ways.

It was read beautifully by maybe the finest actor Benny ever had on his show, Ronald Colman, who after finishing it, added to his wife: “You know, Benita, maybe the fellow that wrote this letter is right. The things that we find fault with in others—are the same things that we tolerate in ourselves.”

Carroll Piper Craig was originally from Altoona, Pennsylvania, born on December 26, 1896. His father was a lawyer. The family moved to Harrisburg where Craig enlisted in service in World War One. In 1940, he was living at 735 Radcliffe Avenue in Pacific Palisades, working as a draftsman for the Douglas aircraft factory in Santa Monica for about $2,900 a year. You see a fuzzy photo of him from a poor scan of Radio Life to the right. He died in Los Angeles on June 12, 1958.

Perhaps one other thing to mention about the contest is it brought about the invention of the character of Steve Bradley, Jack’s P.R. flack, who thought up ridiculous and impossible stunts to create publicity. He appeared only rarely after the contest ended. Bradley was originally played by Dick Lane, then resurfaced as “Dick Fisher” and then again as Bradley in the ‘50s, voiced by Hy Averback. Lane was an actor in short films in the ‘30s and worked on a number of radio shows in the ‘40s, usually as some kind of fast talker. As much as I like Averback, he was far inferior to Lane in the role. Lane had a distinctive voice and delivery which became eventually famous in Los Angeles as the voice of professional wrestling and roller games.

You can hear the winning entry read. Click on the arrow for the February 3, 1946 Benny show. The poem is at the 25:38 mark.