The Eyes Don't Have It

Chuck Jones’ cartoons were known for characters with facial expressions but Tex Avery turned a pair of eyes into a character.

Mysterious eyes watch the detective trying to solve the murder in “Who Killed Who?” The detective realises something is up. The eyes try to hide to avoid detection but it doesn’t quite work. I like how the eyes stretch in realisation they are trapped then bang on the door.



The gag takes all of 11 seconds before Avery segues into the next one involving a ghost behind the door. Avery and writer Rich Hogan have picked up the pace from their work at Warners.

You Can Be The Next La Verne Harding

There was a time, I suppose, when young men dreamed of wearing a tilted fedora, a bottle of gin in their desk drawer, inking out their characters that’ll be as popular as Maggie and Jiggs and then head out for an afternoon at the racetrack.

Way-back-then, I imagine there was plenty of competition for work as a newspaper cartoonist (judging by piles of ads for cartoon schools). Jobs must have been few; it wasn’t like Chester Gould or George McManus (photo, right) were going to be quitting any time soon. But there was a more lucrative option, as Weekly Variety pointed out in its issue of February 12, 1935.

Animated Cartoon Prod. Is Now The Big Coin for Sketch Artists
Hollywood, Feb. 11.
No longer do American youths, who save their pennies for a correspondence course in cartooning, aspire to become newspaper strip artists or India ink commentators on current affairs. Their ambitions now are to get in with one of the cartoon comedy outfits where salaries are several times that paid by newspapers.
Aspirants for jobs in the various cartoon producing studios are as plentiful as contest winners trying to crash Hollywood's gates. They come here with their correspondence school sheepskins and samples of their work, neither very artistic, but the embryo artists are filled to the brim with hope.
Salaries for animators in pictures are way up. Walt Disney has animators on his stuff who draw up to $300 weekly. Walter Lantz at Universal, Harmon-Ising [sic], Leon Schlesinger, Charles Mintz, Paul Terry and others have artists who receive up to $250 weekly. Lowest salary for an animator is around $75 weekly. That's about average for a newspaper drawing board athlete.
Top salary goes to the animator, who draws the master figures, perhaps one out of every six figures. Lad who fills in the middle figures is lower in salary and lowest paid man is the chap who draws figures in between the other two, necessitating little change in action or position of the subject being drawn.
Though it would seem that draughtsmanship is the most essential requirement in making cartoons, it is not. Most important is the ability to get feeling into the drawing. If the feeling is there and the drawing poor, a good artist can take the rough spots out. No matter how good the artist, if he’s short on feeling, i. e., acting ability with a pencil, he is less valuable to his employers.
Kids who feel that they have the knack to become animators usually start as tracers, tracing the original drawing onto isinglass at $20 a week. From there they work up, or out, as the degree of ability might be.
Background artists are in a different category. They have nothing to do with animation, draw only the backgrounds. Their salaries run around 150 weekly. They are usually better artists than the animators but lack imagination.
Only one femme has made good as an animator, Laverne Harding at Universal. An art student and later a teacher of art, she joined Lantz’s outfit and made good. Usually women are too artistic to become animators. However, they are often keen producers of backgrounds.
In Hollywood about 300 artists work on animated cartoons. About a third of them have come from newspapers. Rest are graduates correspondence echo is, a few from art schools. All studios making cartoon subjects maintain their own school to wise up the youngsters on what is necessary for animation.

What the writer means by “too artistic to be animators,” I’m not sure. A number of animators studied fine art or sculpture; Carlo Vinci and Bill Tytla immediately come to mind.

Despite the “look at the money!” aspect of the story, it was only two years later the Fleischer studio was crippled by a strike over pay, and six years before Disney was ripped apart by the same thing.

Alan King on Benny

Tributes were seemingly endless after the death of Jack Benny on December 26, 1974. Newspapers ran more than wire service reports; their own columnists and even editorial writers would memorialise what Benny meant to the world.

Newsday did something else. It talked to comedian Alan King about Benny. King appeared on Benny’s TV show in the ‘60s and roasted him on a special in the ‘70s. But their relationship went beyond that. King talked about it years later in one of his books, and he talked about it in a column in Newsday two days after Jack’s death. King’s sentiments were universal, but he coupled it with a personal story.

‘Cheapest Man’ Gave Both Life And His Money
By ALAN KING
Special to Newsday
“Your money or your life!”
Not very funny, but it was the straight line to the biggest laugh in radio history. After spending 35 years developing an image as the “Cheapest Man in the World,” Jack Benny was walking down a dark radio street when a holdup man appeared and threatened: “Your money or your life!”
Jack didn’t answer. After one minute (you see, he was thinking about it), the audience started laughing. After his two minutes of silence they roared.
Strange, but that’s what Jack Benny’s comedy was all about. It wasn’t what he said. It’s what he didn’t say that was important.
But to a young comic of 16, it was what Jack Benny did say that was important. Whenever Jack was in New York, he'd come to see me at the famed Leon and Eddie’s on 52nd Street. And he always asked me to join his table.
“You were great,” he would say. “You’re gonna make it big. Stay with it.”
Always words of encouragement. And always treating me as an equal. He was my idol. And he became my friend. Always words of encouragement.
He never failed to call me after my TV show just to tell me that he was watching, and he enjoyed. He’d call collect.
His opening line was “Well, you don’t want me to destroy a legend, do you?”
Cheap? He was the most giving man I ever knew.
He appeared all over the world at benefits for charity, no matter what the cost. Many years ago he flew from California to appear with me for the Nassau Center for Emotionally Disturbed Children in Syosset, N.Y.
His opening line was: “I flew all the way from California because I figured it was cheaper than sending money.”
Two days later he sent a check for $5,000 to the center.
Your money or your life. Jack Benny gave up both to make this world a happier and better place. I’ll miss him.

Merry TeXmas

The closest Tex Avery got to a Christmas cartoon was One Ham's Family (released in August 1943), where the mean widdle pig outsmarts the wolf (both played by Kent Rogers) dressed as Santa.

There’s lots of expressive movement in this one. Note the (phoney) glee of the pig as Santa tells him his gift is in the bag. The pig jumps up and down, pulls himself back and strolls into the bag.



In a high tie-toe, the wolf makes his escape. Naturally, the pig’s not in the bag.



Avery and writer Rich Hogan use no dialogue in the rest of the scene. It’s not needed. The drawings tell the story.



Preston Blair, Ray Abrams and Ed Love are the credited animators.

And, now, from the best cartoon director of all time comes this seasonal message.



Card courtesy of Devon Baxter

Must Be Santa?

Wally Walrus can apparently hear Darrell Calker’s orchestra playing “Jingle Bells” on the soundtrack of his own cartoon. He peers out the door of his Swiss Chard Lodge and is shocked by what he sees.



Cut to Woody Woodpecker disguised as Santa, whipping a disguised moose, in “Ski For Two” (1944).



Don Williams and Grim Natwick are the only credited animators. Lantz seems to have used six, plus effects guy Sid Pillett, in each of his cartoons around this time.

Christmas Cartoon Ads

Ads from the Motion Picture Herald. We posted some of these from Film Daily a few years ago. Uncle Walt's ad department was stretching things with Mother Goose Goes Hollywood.

The Golden Age of Full Page Cartoon Shorts Ads dates from just after the start of sound to when Disney released Snow White. Shorts weren’t deemed a money-maker after that. They certainly weren’t by the end of the war for studios or exhibitors.

The Shanty Where a Radio Star Lives

Celebrity caricatures were big in cartoons during the ‘30s. Even in Christmas cartoons. One appears in the Warners short The Shanty Where Santy Claus Lives (1932).

The shanty is full of toys. One tries to blow up a balloon and blows herself up instead—and turns into Kate Smith. “Hello, every-body!” was how Kate opened her radio show and that’s what the inflated toy says here.



Her version of Shine On Harvest Moon is interrupted by a couple of Scotch terriers, who give us Tony Wons’ radio catchphrase: “Are ya listenin’?”



Norm Blackburn and Ham Hamilton get the animation credits. The soundtrack includes Cuban Iceman, What a Nice Man, co-written by Joe Meyer, who also co-penned California, Here I Come and A Cup of Coffee, a Sandwich and You, well-known to any lover of Warners cartoons.

Merry Christmas To Kitty (Once Again)

Nothing brings you the warmth and cheer of the holiday season than Katnip choked by a cane against an old wall telephone, having boiling coffee poured down his throat or slammed against a wall by the force of a metal heating grate.

Yes, we’re talking about the Famous Studios cartoon Mice Meeting You where all the frozen Katnip wants is a turkey dinner and ends up unconscious with his tail plugged into a light socket to illuminate Christmas lights strung around him, while Arnold Stang sings “Merry Christmas to Kitty” (accompanied by a serene, if blasé, chorus).

I’m not a fan of Famous cartoons, but this holiday entry is one of those which makes you laugh at the fact they’ve had the audacity to put the painful violence on the screen you’ve just watched. I can picture a story meeting in a room filled with empty bourbon bottles and a bunch of guys wearing derby hats and slurring “Screw Disney” with Bronx accents. It’s as if they were using agony and torture to purge the wretched repetition of friendly ghosts, spinach-eating sailors and truant-officer-defying little girls out of their system.

And there’s some nice animation in this one, too. I wish these screen grabs weren’t as fuzzy so you could see them better, but I like the scene where Katnip rushes to the chimney, thinking Santa is coming down it (it’s actually Herman the Skiddle-Diddle-Dee Mouse disguising his voice) and then claps his hands and races to his little bed.



Dave Tendlar and Marty Taras get the animation credits, while Mike Meyer and Jack Mercer co-wrote the story.