Much has been said about the geometric shapes and camera angles in Chuck Jones’ “The Aristo-Cat” (1943) when the spoiled housecat (Claude) realises the butler he has been tormenting has walked out on him.
There’s an interesting effect that adds to the cat’s discombobulation from the audience’s perspective. After some smear drawings (Ben Washam?), the cat runs toward the camera, then turns into a profile. Jones then had the camera enlarge the drawings of the cat to make it larger and bring it into the foreground. Claude doesn’t run closer to the audience. He’s actually running in place; it’s all a camera trick.
The cartoon marks the debut of Claude and the head-game-playing mice, Hubie and Bertie.
“How I could use some of that fuzz today,” Jack Benny read, and then quipped to the studio audience on Fred Allen’s show “I could use a good joke today, too.”
Benny’s character was so well defined, you’d think it would have been easy for writers of other radio shows to come up with gags for him when he made guest appearances on them. But sometimes, they just fell flat. Benny was smart with his persona. He might do a cheap joke, followed by a toupee joke, followed by “39” joke, followed by a noisy Maxwell. He wouldn’t do five minutes of cheap jokes. That was overkill. He knew comedians in the ‘30s—Jack Pearl and Joe Penner, for example—who relied on a small number of catchphrases and then faded from the airwaves when audiences got tired of the same lines.
Jack appeared on Philco Radio Time, starring Bing Crosby, on March 3, 1948. He’s featured in two scenes of almost nothing but Benny being cheap. The routine works because of the payoff at the end and a creative bit where Jack calculates the value-per-nickel of selections in a jukebox (he did the same thing on his own radio show, in the ‘50s, I believe). The New York-based PM favourably reviewed the show and ended it with an adept summation. This appeared in the March 9th edition. The picture below is from the show (but not from PM), with Breneman to the left and Der Bingle in the centre. Sara Berner reprised her Benny show role as Gladys Zybyzko, but being a mere supporting player, wasn’t deemed big enough for the photo.
Benny Gets a Hundred Laughs With a Nickel
By SEYMOUR PECK
Stinginess, not ordinarily a trait we admire, has become one of Jack Benny's most attractive qualities.
We would not want him to change, possibly because we sense that Benny has grown into something we so rarely find in radio—a complete personality, so full-grown and familiar that it is a pleasure to come across him each week and watch what situations his stinginess, his little vanities, his petty foibles will lead him into this time. He is pretty much of a human being to us and very much of an old friend.
Making a guest appearance on the last Bing Crosby show, Benny worked the miser routine again for a whole half hour, and it still seemed fresh and amusing as ever. Lines that were less than funny per se became delightful when illumined by Benny's special personality.
Benny was out with his girl friend, Gladys Szabisco. "Maybe it's the moon, maybe it's the stars," said Benny, "but I want to say something to you I've never said to any girl before."
"What's that?" asked Gladys.
"I'd like to buy you a drink," said Benny. Hardly a panic as jokes go, but it brought a howl from the studio audience. It was the laughter of recognition; they knew all about Benny and his smallness and here it was again for them to laugh over.
Benny takes Gladys into Tom Breneman's restaurant. He orders a glass of muscatel. Will the lady have the same, asks the waiter.
"No," says Benny, the personification of generosity, "bring the lady her own glass of muscatel."
Benny gets up to play something on the juke box.
"Bing Crosby . . . naaaah," he says, examining the titles. "The Andrews Sisters . . . gee, there's three of them . . . the four Mills Brothers . . . the Ink Spots I wonder how many spots."
But Gladys wants Crosby, so Jack starts to put a nickel in for the Crosby record. Suddenly he hesitates.
"I was just wondering . . . Gladys, all these people sitting around, do they hear it, too?"
"Yes," says Gladys.
"Honestly," says Jack with indignation, "some people go through life listening to the other fellow's nickel."
The machine starts but gets stuck. "It's gotta play," says the incredulous Benny, "my nickel's in there." He asks the waiter to get Breneman.
"Breneman stepped out," says the waiter.
"Stepped out?" says Benny accusingly, "he sneaked out." Benny decides to go right to Bing Crosby about the whole thing. Bing says ha can't do anything about getting Benny's nickel back.
"If you put a nickel in a jukebox to hear me play the violin and you didn't hear me," asks Benny, now would you feel?"
From Crosby there is only a long silence.
"Well, let's take another example . . ." says Benny.
Finally Crosby concedes. ."You do have a legitimate beef," he admits.
"Oh, Bingsy," says Benny, melting.
"I'll tell you what I'm going to do," says Crosby. "You put a nickel into the jukebox to hear me sing a song. I'm going to sing it for you right now."
"Hmmmmmm," says Benny. The longest, most disgruntled hmmmm in the whole world.
"You mean instead of giving me back my nickel, you're going to stand there and sing that song for me?" asks Benny.
"Yes," says Crosby.
"How can one guy be so cheap?" cries Benny.
● ● ●
Well, Benny's been like that for years now, but it was still great fun. Amidst all the hue and cry for new material and more original comedy, I think we would all be content for Jack Benny to be stingy forever.
Not too many teenaged boys have stage names, but you see one in the picture to the right. He was born Lionel Lazarus Salzer on March 22, 1924 in Brooklyn. His claim to fame is being one of the best cartoon voices in New York in the mid-1950s.
By the 1950s, Terrytoons were at the bottom of the barrel when it came to theatrical animation. Owner Paul Terry didn’t care. He had no incentive to make them look or sound better. 20th Century Fox wanted them, paid to release them, and Terry made money from them. Then CBS wanted them, so he sold the network his studio and made even more money. Fortunately there were enough creative people at Terrytoons that some of the studio’s cartoons were entertaining.
Soon thereafter came a chap named Gene Deitch, who took over production at the studio while fending off corporate sharks. His theatrical Terrytoons are a mixed bag, too, but maybe his best achievement was the production of a series for CBS-TV called Tom Terrific.
Tom wasn’t Bugs Bunny funny where the bad guy was embarrassed, ridiculed and bashed around. But the cartoons were amusing in their own way. I always liked the contrast between the buoyant Tom and the laconic Manfred. I’m sure suburban and small-town kids watching the show knew at least one lazy dog in the neighbourhood like Manfred. And much like the morphing of the theatrical cartoons made in New York in the 1920s and early ‘30s, the Tom Terrific cartoons featured a funnel hat had that could conveniently change shapes; kids watched to see what creative things Tom would do with it to get out of trouble. It was a charming and imaginative series, made on what looks like no budget. And, to get back to the point of this post, the voices were all provided by Lionel Wilson.
Wilson’s work wasn’t always directed at children. In 1944, he appeared in the comedy Good Morning, Corporal, which PM decreed “the dirtiest show that has hit Broadway in many months.” Most of Wilson’s work through the ‘40s and ‘50s appears to have been on the stage, and at tent shows in Skancateles, though he did some local TV acting as well. He landed a role as the son’s friend in the soap opera “They Live in Brooklyn” which debuted on WPIX in July 1950. And in 1953, he appeared in an adaptation of the Broadway show Janie on WOR-TV.
Wilson’s hiring for cartoon work is a bit of a surprise, if only for the fact that Deitch was enamoured with the versatile Allen Swift and seems to have used him for everything. But Deitch related once how, when he was overseeing things at UPA in New York, Wilson showed up for an audition for a commercial and bowled over everyone with his range and talent. So when Deitch toddled over to Terrytoons, Wilson easily found work (as did Swift).
Wilson came to animation just late enough that when he passed away from pneumonia in 2003, stories were written about him in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and the Associated Press; guys like Arthur Q. Bryan died long before kids who devoured cartoons on TV grew up to be nostalgia adults. This is what Variety wrote about him in its obit.
Lionel Wilson, actor-writer perhaps best known to baby boomers as the voice of funnel-topped Tom Terrific in the same-named cartoon shown on TV's "Captain Kangaroo," but whose work spanned six decades on the stage and TV as well as in print and recordings, died April 30 in New York of natural causes. He was 79.
He made his Broadway debut at 14 in "Dodsworth," and was featured in "Kiss and Tell," "Janie" and "The Fragile Fox."
He toured with Gardner McKay in "The Fantasticks," played Bud Frump in a tour of "How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying" and was featured in "Matinee Theatre" on TV's old Dumont Network.
Beginning in the 1950s, he focused more on voice work, including TV commercials and cartoons. Besides Tom Terrific, he voiced Tom's pal Manfred the Wonder Dog, and just before his final illness he voiced Eustace the Farmer in Cartoon Network's "Courage the Cowardly Dog."
He penned a mystery thriller for the stage based on the novel "Come and Be Killed," which toured summer stock and starred June Havoc and Signe Hasso, and he wrote children's stories, including "The Mule Who Refused to Budge," released by Crown Publishers and which featured Wilson reading the stories on accompanying CDs.
He also read dozens of other children's books for the Listening Library including "Chicken Little," "Chocolate Fever" and "Commander Toad in Space."
At the time of his death, he had just completed editing his memoir "... And Also in the Cast."
A brother survives.
Wilson was also the voice of Sidney the elephant, another of Deitch’s good creations at Terrytoons. Sidney featured Cleo, a giraffe that sounded like Carol Channing. That was Wilson, too.
Here’s a Tom Terrific adventure for you, complete with Wilson singing the theme song. Too bad there’s video interlacing.
A bank robber tells Woody Woodpecker to keep playing while he hides in a piano in Convict Concerto (1954). The piano, Woody, the con and an incompetent cop incredibly drop from the sky into a prison yard. Lantz cartoons in the first part of the ‘50s featured thick ink lines on teeny characters at times.
The piano and characters all land in time to the music, with the force of the landing bouncing things back into mid-air.
Cut to a close-up. The shots match.
And like the spirit of Bugs Hardaway was hovering over writer Hugh Harman, the cartoon ends with a character going insane. Some of Woody’s expressions as the camera fades out (he’s still playing the unattached keys but is getting piano music out of them anyway).
The soundtrack features Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2, a favourite of animation directors. It is featured in Bars and Stripes (Mintz/Columbia, 1931), Dipsy Gypsy (George Pal/Paramount, 1941), Rhapsody in Rivets (Warners, 1941), Rhapsody Rabbit (Warners, 1946), The Cat Concerto (MGM, 1947) and The Magic Fluke (UPA/Columbia, 1949).
Ray Abrams, Don Patterson and Herman Cohen are the credited animators on this one. Patterson is also supposedly the director. Why he wouldn’t get screen credit, I don’t know, as he did elsewhere when he directed and animated. The Lantz studio was in a state of flux around the time this short would have gone into production. Mike Maltese had just arrived at the studio to write and Tex Avery was on his way to direct. Not only was Don Patterson demoted, the directing team of his brother Ray and Grant Simmons was about to leave, or had left, Lantz to open their open commercial studio. (The assumption is false that they made cartoons for Lantz under Grantray-Lawrence; the studio didn’t exist at the time).
This was Harman’s only writing credit for the studio.
Some shapely-legged chorines dance in a Western bar to “Ida (Sweet As Apple Cider)” in the Tom and Jerry cartoon In the Bag (1932). Except they aren’t chorines at all. They turn out to be twin cowpokes.
The dance movements are well defined in this sequence, but the arms whip around like rubber bands. There’s no skeletal structure (a Disney cartoon it ain’t).
The title refers to a bag of money Tom and Jerry get for capturing a desperado. It turns out they don’t get either.
I wish I knew more about Gene Rodemich’s score for this cartoon. Once the bad guy makes his escape from the saloon to when Tom rides into the forest, you might recognise the great 1906 hit “Cheyenne” which Carl Stalling tossed into a bunch of Warner Bros. cartoons. Play the version by Billy Murray below.
How many times have you said “Enough already!” when you’re on-line and see that’s someone’s still joking about something that’s been milked to death? Perhaps you’ve used a stronger phrase.
Like the aforementioned milk, pop culture has a time limit before it starts to go sour and is replaced by something else. It happens in music, it happens on television and it happens with humour. If it didn’t, we’d still be listening to Alma Gluck records, watching The Des O’Connor Show and laughing at Earl Butz jokes.
But some people just don’t recognise when something is past its best-before date. And that was the complaint of eye-rolling radio critic John Crosby in a column of May 5, 1948.
Crosby’s column was kind a two-parter. The first dealt with the latest comeback by Phil Baker. Baker had been a top vaudeville comedian in the 1920s, whose routine involved getting heckled by a stooge he planted in the audience. He was among the top comics who jumped into radio within about 18 months of each other. Baker beat Doc Rockwell, Harry Richman, Walter O’Keefe, Julius Tannen and Phil Cook in an audition for a variety show for Armour that began in March 1933 and, at $3,700 per broadcast, was the most expensive programme originating from Chicago at the time. The ‘30s rolled on, but Baker fell out of the top echelon of radio stars. He reinvigorated his career at the end of 1941 when he took over from Bob Hawk as the host of a game show on CBS.
The second part of the column involved a Crosby favourite, the jaded Henry Morgan, who vocalised his distaste for a lot of the things Crosby didn’t like about network radio. Comedians, beginning with Jack Benny, made fun of their sponsors. Morgan went further. He was on the scale between utter disdain and contempt. Benny was joking. Morgan seemed deadly serious. Not coincidentally, Morgan didn’t keep sponsors very long. One of them was Standard Laboratories, for a brief period between January 29 and June 24, 1948 (the contract was for 52 weeks). Variety gave the debut a “here’s the problem with it” review, believing Morgan’s satire was not always polished and he only had enough good material to last 15 minutes instead of a full half hour. Crosby found some different problems.
Here’s the review.
Radio in Review By JOHN CROSBY
New Quiz, Old Morgan
There’s a new quiz show on the air, if any one is interested, called “Everybody Wins.” There is nothing else new about it except the candor of its title. Everybody has always won on these things but this show brings the matter out in the open. The chief distinction of “Everybody Wins” is that it restores Phil Baker to the microphone and, on the basis of his opening performance, that isn’t much of a distinction.
Baker seemed hostile not only to “Everybody Wins” but also to quiz shows in general and quiz contestants in particular. This feeling is by no means confined to Mr. Baker, but it’s a little surprising to find him sharing it since he’s been mixed up in this form of activity for quite a spell. For years he asked people to take it or leave it on the show of that name and finally left it himself, presumably because he could no longer stomach handing out $64 to the curious people who infested the place. Yet here he is back again passing out cash to people he gave every evidence of loathing. Some macabre compulsion, probably.
Because of his long layoff, he was also a little out of touch with the current fashions in jokes. There was one about Easter bonnets and an even more belated gag about Howard Hughes, two topics which have been laid aside temporarily by the more hep comedians.
About all else you need to know about this show is that listeners send in five questions. If a contestant gets them all right, the listener who sent in the questions gets $100. If the contestant gets them all wrong, the listener gets $100. Everybody wins all right. That’s enough on the subject.
Whenever you consider people with an apparent loathing for their profession you run squarely into Henry Morgan. One of Morgan devoted fans once told me he had bought an Eversharp Schick razor in spite of the scorn with which Henry treated it. He begged me not to tell Morgan about it, fearing he would lose the comedian’s respect. I believe he bought it at an obscure little drugstore in Harlem where he wasn’t known. Probably asked for it in whispers. I’m not altogether sure it’s the function of a comedian to put the product that pays the bill into this position. I don’t say he has to sell the product exactly but I don’t think he should try to prevent people from buying it.
On his new program, which is new only in that it’s at a different time and under different sponsorship, Mr. Morgan has to some degree curbed his dislike of consumer products. He still delivers commercials but he remains extraordinarily aloof from them. His detachment from the marvels of Rayve Cream Shampoo—even while he’s talking about them—is as marvelous and complete as that of Edgar Bergen from Charlie McCarthy.
Mr. Morgan, one of the most talented and least manageable comics on the air, has been a little spotty this year. I bring it up only because I’m fond of the boy and this hurts me worse than it does him. Morgan has gained ease and polish as a performer but the scripts are partly bright, partly terrible and partly just tired.
For quite a while now, for reasons not apparent to me, Mr. Morgan has been carrying on something called the “John J. Morgan Trouble Clinic,” a satire and quite a vicious little one on John J. Anthony. This would be a noble project if Mr. Anthony were still on the air. But he isn’t. (Or if he is, he’s out of my range.) There must be fresher idiocies to parody than that one.
Also, Mr. Morgan has developed quite a crush on Phil Silvers, who’s been present four times this season. Seems to me a man who’s been around that long should lose his status as guest star and take his turn at the bathroom like every one else. I have nothing in particular against Mr. Silvers, but his appearance four times indicates a lack of imagination somewhere.
To pass on to pleasanter aspects, Morgan’s weekly tilts with that tired, perennially distrustful Gerard (Arnold Stang) are a joy; Bernie Green’s orchestra, which behaves like a drunken player-piano, massacres popular music even more convincingly than Spike Jones. And, of course, there’s Morgan himself who, after two years, still manages to avoid the comedy cliches of all the other radio comedians. But he’d better be careful not to develop his own cliches.
1948 wasn’t the best year for Morgan. Besides Rayve dropping his show, his movie So This is New York didn’t do well at the box office and his TV show, being broadcast from Philadelphia because ABC had no facilities in New York yet, was abruptly cancelled because of television’s first technicians strike.
And Morgan also lost his announcer during this period. Charlie Irving sounds a lot like actor John Brown to me, but Morgan’s sponsor thought he sounded like someone else. From Weekly Variety of March 24, 1948:
Too Much Morgan
After two years with the Henry Morgan show, Charles Irving has been dropped as announcer because "he sounds too much like Henry Morgan." Two replacements were hired. Bob Sheppard to read the commercials and (after exhaustive auditions) Doug Browning to do the opening and closing announcements and play stooge bits. Doug Browning was dropped after one broadcast, and Glen Riggs now has the assignment. Decision to replace Irving was made by the client, Rayve shampoo, and the agency, Roche, Williams & Cleary, after an analysis by comedy consultant Ernest Walker indicated that Morgan "lacks identification" and that his and Irving's voices sound similar at times.
Incidentally, Morgan didn’t take Crosby’s advice. He dragged out another parody of Mr. Anthony on his broadcast of Oct. 1, 1948. You can hear it below. Cartoon fans should recognise the woman who plays Big Sister-in-Law in the soap opera sketch and the distressed woman in the John J. Anthony parody.
Ed Love adapted to Hanna-Barbera’s limited animation system when he arrived at the studio in 1959, having worked at Disney in the ‘30s, and for Tex Avery and then Walter Lantz (under Dick Lundy) in the ‘40s.
His early TV cartoons had an interesting style. There would be movement almost every frame, although not like at MGM where he’d make a complete character drawing on a frame. At H-B he might move an arm on one frame. The next frame, the head would move. The next, an eye and an arm might move. Most of the other animators generally held drawings for two frames.
Love did the same thing in what I’m presuming was a freelance assignment for Chuck Couch in the early ‘60s (I cannot find a copyright date for the film). Talking of Tomorrow was an industrial film for Bell Telephone. It appears Love was handed the assignment of animating the nefarious uncle (voiced by, I think, Jerry Hausner) who calls his nephew hoping to steal some ideas. I’m not going to try to show off Love’s animation style. Instead, here are some of the poses he (and perhaps his assistant) came up with.
Corny Cole and Tom Yakutis are responsible for the designs, which have moved away from the flat, stylised ‘50s characters into something in tune with the early ‘60s.
“This modern stove is equipped with a clear-view door so you may look into your oven,” narrator Frank Graham tells us in Tex Avery’s House of Tomorrow. “Yes, sir,” he adds, “looking through this little window, you can see everything.”
A broiling turkey in the oven hears the last sentence.
The turkey looks down, realises it is naked, then quickly covers its giblets. Or something like that.
Finally, the aghast turkey ensures it gets privacy.
Grant Simmons, Mike Lah and Walt Clinton are the credited animators.
Word association time: what comes to your mind when I say “Jack Benny” and “impression.”
You probably think about Rich Little. For years, an impression of Benny was in his act. Of course, he wasn’t the only one. As far back as the 1930s, KFWB announcer Jack Lescoulie did an impersonation of Benny; he even did it (uncredited) on a tribute to Jack’s 10th anniversary on radio on NBC on May 11, 1941.
Many other impressionists must have done Benny, considering his fame. But none could have had a more unusual path to the comedian than Bob Blasser.
Blasser was a native of Fred Allen’s home town, Boston. After graduating from high school, he studied at a Catholic seminary, but dropped out to attend Boston State College and then taught English in high school. Teaching didn’t pay a lot, so he did impersonations in commercials and at parties. Then he hit on an idea to get noticed.
It’s related in this syndicated newspaper column of December 3, 1963.
TV KEYNOTES Clever Mimic Wins Benny Spot
By HARVEY PACK
NEW YORK — The first of the mysterious Jack Benny phone calls was received by Jackie Gleason. "I'd like to plug my personal appearance tour on your show Saturday night," Benny said. Gleason replied he would be happy to oblige, but he had already taped his program and was leaving for a week's vacation in Florida.
The next call was to Garry Moore. Benny wanted Garry to help perpetrate a joke on their mutual friend, restaurateur Toots Shor. "We'll have dinner at Toots' place, then I'll refuse to pay the check." he suggested. "I've hired an actor, dressed as a policeman, to throw us out."
During the next few days, several of Benny's friends received similar calls. But when George Burns answered the phone and found himself talking to Jack Benny, he was understandably confused. Benny was, at the time, seated in Burns' living room.
That was the first time Bob Blasser failed to convince one of Jack's cronies that he was, indeed, the famous comic. But instead of ending Blasser's hoax, it prolonged the imposture. Blasser, a Boston entertainer with an uncanny gift for mimicking Benny's vocal mannerisms, will appear on his victim's CBS-TV show tonight. Long Chance Pays Off
"I took a long chance and it paid off," explained Blasser, a sandy-haired young man in his late 20s. "For 10 years, I tried to establish myself as a comedian. I worked in night clubs, summer resorts and local radio and TV stations all over New England. I sent press clippings, pictures, tapes and hundreds of letters to the producers of the top TV variety shows. But the answer was always the same, a polite brush-off. You know the routine, 'Don't call us; we'll call you.'"
Finally, the frustrated comic obtained the phone numbers of some 30 top television personalities—and, one by one, he called them, claiming to be Benny. The reactions were interesting.
"Gleason pal'd me," Blasser recalled. "He said, 'Gee, pal, I wish we had time to tape a spot, pal, but I hate to blow this Florida trip pal.' Perry Como was taken in, too. When I finally broke down and admitted I wasn't Jack Benny, he screamed with laughter. Then he put each member of his staff on the phone to talk to me."
Another comedian who fell for Blasser's adroit impersonation was Red Skelton. When Blasser confessed, he refused to believe it. "Stop putting me on, Jack, and tell me how Mary is," Skelton insisted. Phoned Jack Benny
Blasser's final phone call, after the George Burns incident, was to Benny himself. "He wasn't there," Blasser noted. "So I left a message for Jack Benny to call Jack Benny, which really baffled his secretary. By that time, Jack knew all about the fake phone calls. He called back and invited me out to Hollywood."
If Blasser's vocal mimicry was good before he went to California, it's even better now. For a week, he was coached by an expert on the subject, Benny himself. "We worked on words like ‘Hmmm’ and ‘Well’ for hours," Blasser said with a smile. "Jack insisted I had his reputation to uphold."
Although Blasser is delighted with the results of his brazen experiment, he doesn't want to be typed permanently as Jack Benny's alter ego. "Mimicry is a sideline with me," the improper Bostonian explained, "My real forte is satire, topical humor mixed with pantomime. The idea behind this hoax was to force people to listen to me. Now that I've got a showcase on the Benny program, I hope I'll get to do other things on the air as well."
As for Benny, he still hasn't recovered from the imposture. "At first, I was surprised by the nerve of the guy," he admitted, "Then, when I actually listened to him, I was shocked. It's an eerie feeling to hear your own voice coming out of another man's mouth."
Only one of Jack's friends, aside from Burns, insists he wasn't fooled by the hoax. That's Benny Rubin, who worked with the comedian in vaudeville, and has appeared sporadically on his show for 30 years. "I knew right away you weren't Jack," Rubin told Blasser, "because the call wasn't collect."
Blasser appeared on the Benny TV show in December 1963. He told syndicated columnist Alan Gill “They wrote me into a routine with Dennis Day, where Dennis is seeking some revenge on Jack. Then I've got three or four minutes at the end, where I do a couple of Red Skelton bits, some Frank Fontaine, Alfred Hitchcock and Liberace.”
Blasser told Gill in 1963 he had been trying to break into the national spotlight for ten years. But after he got there, he didn’t seem to want it, or it didn’t seem to want him. He made appearances on several talk shows in the ‘60s and then seems to have disappeared. During part of the time, he was taking post-grad courses at Boston College. Perhaps he achieved his goal, and moved on to something else.
