Humanettes

Walter Lantz constantly cried to the trade papers about the small sums of money that exhibitors wanted to pay for his cartoons. In a way, you can’t blame him. Though he personally never seemed to be hurting for cash, the Lantz studio closed twice before 1950 and ideas had to be put on the shelf, presumably due to a lack of capital.

Lantz had proposed opening a studio in Mexico. It never happened. He talked about a cartoon feature. It never happened. And he and producer Edward Nassour proposed creating four-reel pictures combining live action and clay figures. It never happened, either.

The trade papers talked about the latter plan, and so did United Press in this story from early 1945. Considering the success of George Pal’s Puppetoons (Sutherland and Morey were also working on stop-motion shorts), it’s too bad Lantz wasn’t about to bring the plan to fruition.

'Humanettes,' New Movie Medium, Being Perfected
By MURRAY M. MOLER
HOLLYWOOD, Feb. 14 (UP) — Cartoonist Walter Lantz, the gent who fathered "Woody Woodpecker" after some of the long beaked birds dug holes in his studio roof, is working on a new cartoon medium—"Humanettes."
Lantz, who has been giving legs and voice to pen and ink figures for more than 15 years, thinks the new medium will go places.
"It's a natural for entertainment cartoons, definitely something new," he predicted; "but it's even better as a device for turning out top notch, highly interesting educational films."
Educational films. Those two words are in the back of Lantz' mind in practically all his activities now.

"We'd done only a few educational shorts before the war," Lantz recalls.
"But since then we've turned out 20 educational pieces for the navy, illustrating better methods of doing a lot of business with planes and torpedoes."
Making those pictures—combinations of cartoon figures, plastic models and live talent—has taught Lantz and his 50 artists—more and more of them women, incidentally—a lot of lessons.
"These educational films can teach more in two reels than can be put across in a two-hour lecture or in half a dozen books," he contended. "So they're really going to be the thing after the war."
There's a strong possibility that before the war is over, Lantz will be given the task of -turning out some cartoons on American life for government release to South American and European countries. That's where the Humanettes will come in.
What are they? Well, we saw the one experimental reel that Lantz and his staff already has made. It's a process discovered by a young artist named Edward Nassaur and perfected by the new team of Nassaur and Lantz.
The figures are clay models, carefully sculptured according to scale. In orthodox cartoons, a drawing is made for each frame of film. For the Humanettes, a separate group of clay figures will be turned out for each frame. That's a lot of figures for the seven minutes of the average cartoon.
"It's a complicated, painstaking and expensive process," Lantz admitted. "But with these figures we get much more depth and perspective.
We can place the lights better behind these figures than we can with flat drawings.
"With the clay figures modeled for each frame, we can achieve a smoothness of action that's impossible with puppets, the only similar medium that's been tried."
The reel we saw had definitely achieved that smoothness, and the colors—it was a technicolor job—were much more distinct than in most cartoons.
Lantz hopes to start turning out Humanette cartoons, for entertainment, before too long. He's just arranged for new studio space.
"We'll probably combine, with the aid of a process screen, the Humanette figures and live talent," he said.
"Some of the figures undoubtedly will be some of our old established—'Swing Symphony Cartune' personalities."
These personalities are led by Andy Panda, Oswald the rabbit—and Woody Woodpecker.

Despite the announcement, the Humanettes were put on hold. Temporarily, at first. Lantz talked about them in another U.P. story that year. This came out of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette of May 16, 1945. This is another column where Lantz explains why Pat Matthews’ great Miss XTC character from “Abou Ben Boogie” and “The Greatest Man in Siam” suddenly vanished from screens.

Lantz Says Don't Go Saying Those Characters Are "Drawings"
By Virginia MacPherson
United Press Hollywood Correspondent
Hollywood, May 15.—Walter Lantz, who’s been making animated cartoons for 30 years, gets mighty indignant if you refer to his characters as "drawings." They're real people, he says. And he plans their careers as carefully as if they were Clark Gable or Hedy Lamarr.
"There's no reason why a cartoon character has to make a big splash and then fizzle out," Lantz insists.
"If you're careful with the type of roles and billing you give 'em, they can live for 15 or 20 years. Look at the funny papers, he says. "Bringing Up Father" has been going for something like 50 years. And "The Katzenjammer Kids" are tickling their third generation of readers.
That's the kind of career Lantz has in mind for Andy Panda, Woody Wood pecker and Oswald the Rabbit.
"Animals can be made just as real as humans," he said. "Give 'em natural gestures and expressions and put 'em in real-life situations and first thing you know people forget all about the pen and ink stuff."
That theory backfired on him once, though. Seems he made a cartoon character too real and the censors told him it was too sexy. The drawing was of a shapely young lady named “Miss X-T-Cy.” And the Hays office objected to the voluptuous way "Miss X-T-Cy" wiggled her hips when she walked.
Drawn From Life

"The funny part about it," Lantz explained, "was that the drawings were made from a real live actress. She walks that way on the screen all the time. But we had to remake a third of our cartoon to calm down the lady’s hips." And when you think how it takes four months to make a cartoon that's a lot of fuss over a lady's hips.
The censors give him trouble on some other items, too. Never, again they told him, can he draw a Mexican peon without shoes. The government of Mexico, mindful of its growing importance in the world, is afraid people will think their country is poverty stricken. "And wouldn't a Mexican peon look silly with shoes," Lantz snorted. "So now I just don't draw Mexican peons any more."
He's careful about putting train sequences in his cartoons, too. Can't have any porters. At least, not colored ones. Says the Negro race got together and decided they were being ridiculed in cartoons.
"Yep, the Hays office watches us like hawks," Lantz said. "Even the real movies can do things we can't. Maybe that's because we cater to the kids."
Lantz started making animals walk and talk in 1916, some six years before Walt Disney began experimenting around with his barnyard characters.
“But Walt got the jump on us all a few years later," he said. "He got exclusive rights to put out his cartoons in color. And the rest of us had to wait around three years and gnash our teeth until his contract with Technicolor ran out."
Lantz has been making the kids happy and their moms and pops too ever since. And it keeps him busy thinking up new characters.
"But we stumbled on a dilly the other day," he said. "We haven't thought up a name for him yet, but he'll be based on the goony bird our soldiers and marines have been finding on the Pacific islands."
He's got another idea that's going to have to wait until after the war, but he thinks it'll start a tricky new third-dimensional process. He calls these characters his "Humanettes."
"They're thousands and thousands of clay figures," he said. "Only instead of animals they're human beings. And we can really make 'em look natural."
Says he wouldn't be at all surprised if he discovered a new Lana Turner in clay. Only he's gotta think up some way to let her wiggle her clay hips without bringing the censors down on his neck.

The goony bird made it into one Lantz cartoon, but the Humanettes never made it into the studio’s release schedule. Eddie Nassour didn’t give up on the idea of Humanettes. Whether they actually appeared on screen in unclear, but Variety in 1954 reported that Nassour had shown them off two years earlier—“full blown puppets operated from an electronic panel board” is how the trade paper described them—but did nothing with the concept afterwards. In the meantime, Lantz carried on making cartoons, losing a great staff when he was forced to shut down for almost a year and a half around 1950, and augmented his theatrical cartoons with a TV show before finally closing shop in 1972.

Joint Wipers

Horse-drawn wagons and water towers on top of apartment buildings. That’s part of the urban landscape in the Tom and Jerry cartoon Joint Wipers, released by Van Beuren in 1932.

Our heroes are plumbers who can’t stop an expanding series of leaks in the building. They finally go up to the roof and try to repair the tower, the pace quickening. They fail. The tower bursts. I like how Tom and Jerry are turned into a bunch of lines, and have Xs for eyes like you used to see in comic strips way back when.



John Foster and George Stallings get the “by” credit. The score is once again supplied by Gene Rodemich. If anyone can name any of the tunes here, or let me know if the plumbers song (“We’re glad that we are plumbers”) is a novelty tune of the era, please comment.

The Glacier Cracks! No Escape!

Daffy Duck concocts a growing tale of disaster (thanks to the writing of Warren Foster) that he relates to the standard Bob McKimson dog in Daffy Duck Hunt (1947).

About all you need to know is Porky keeps putting the presumably dead duck in the home freezer to keep him fresh until dinner. That’s why Daffy is wearing gloves and a scarf (it’s cold in there). The duck jumps out and spins a story about mushing through an arctic blizzard and being stopped by a falling glacier.

Here are some of Daffy’s expressions as he plays toward the camera. Note how the in-betweener calms down the duck into his normal proportions at the end.



Manny Gould, Phil De Lara, Chuck McKimson and Jack Carey get the animation credits.

Cutting Off Ed Murrow

Before Edward R. Murrow became an unassailable symbol of truth, honesty and integrity, he was a mere mortal, a man who became a broadcast journalist when the need arose. Murrow made his name with his riveting, on-scene descriptions of the Battle of Britain, and then sealed his reputation in his clash against demagoguery cloaked in the form of an overly-ambitious junior Senator.

No one today gives a thought about reporters being heard and seen live from anywhere in the world or newsmakers appearing electronically. Around the outset of World War Two, it was a very different situation. Newscasts consisted of a newscaster reading. That’s it. No sound of people in the news, no cutaways to reporters on the scene. The technology didn’t really exist to do it otherwise.

War changed that. CBS instituted a World News Roundup in 1938 where correspondents from various parts of the world joined anchor Bob Trout via shortwave to forecast more gathering war clouds. When the war began, the sounds of the Battle of Britain were brought into living rooms by Murrow, eloquently and descriptively, never a word wasted. And it was live.

Here’s an example of Murrow’s mastery of the English language, transcribed in the progressive newspaper PM in its October 21, 1940. Today, it’s astonishing to think someone with the stature of The Great Murrow would be chopped off the air. But, rightfully, he was treated no differently than any other CBS correspondent. He was allotted ‘X’ amount of time on the air and then it was another newsman’s turn.

Columnist John McManus adds something about a Mutual Broadcasting news report by Sigrid Schultz, one of the few women reporters working on an international level at the time.

Radio Tuners Hear London Guns, Air-Raid Sirens in Switzerland
Murrow Reports Raid From London Roof Top . . . Sigrid Schultz Tells of Nazi Invasion Plans, as Air Raid Sirens Wail
By JOHN T. McMANUS
America perched on a London rooftop last night and witnessed, with its own ears and the reliable reporting eyes of CBS's radio correspondent, Ed Murrow, the far-off thud-thud of cannon fire and the indistinct roar of Nazi bombers as London weathered one of the most savage night attacks of the war.
Then, later in the evening, as eerie background for a broadcast from Berne, Switzerland, by the Chicago Tribune’s Berlin correspondent, Sigrid Schultz, over WOR-Mutual, this country heard the sustained shriek of an air-raid siren in full cry for nearly five minutes before it finally growled to silence. Miss Schultz did not mention the siren during her talk, which she was apparently reading from a script timed to the second. But during the talk she told of previous air-raid alarms last night in Berne, “but the fog was so thick we could not tell whose planes were overhead.”
Plan for Conquest
Miss Schultz's broadcast concerned mainly a plan discussed in German newspapers for an immediate invasion of England with the German fleet covering a mass speedboat crossing which could be accomplished in 30 minutes.
The success of the plan, despite the admittedly inferior German fleet, depended on the necessity of the British fleet's being forced to scatter to attempt to cover landing places. This, according to Miss Schultz's sources, was calculated to “disturb, but not prevent” the success of the venture. The cross-Channel invasion would be aided by parachutists landing at strategic points, to hold those points until 1000 great Junkers 52s, each carrying 20 fully equipped infantrymen, landed whole battalions to take over. Miss Schultz made the interesting observation that Germany now has “parachute veterans” who know their way around from experience in previous parachute occupations.
The admitted bug in the whole plan, she quoted, was the inability to hind equipment such as tanks and heavy artillery, both vital to the success of a modern invasion.
Miss Schultz also reported that Germany, in disarming the peoples of the countries “she has occupied or taken under her protection,” had relieved the Norwegians of their beloved fowling pieces and other sport guns.
(The Chicago Tribune bureau in New York explained that Miss Schultz was in Berne at the start of a “leave of absence” from her post in Berlin, during which she intended to go to England. The tone of her broadcast was guarded, indicating that she expects to return to Berlin.)
Thud . . . Thud . . . Thud
Mr. Murrow's broadcast from the London rooftop was cut off by CBS here to bring in correspondents from other points abroad. Here is the text of his broadcast: “It's dark up here, almost impossible to see my own feet. I have no light and no watch, so I’ll just have to ask my colleagues in New York to terminate this broadcast at the end of its allotted period, or when they get tired of it. But the German attack developed tonight with great fury, particularly during the first two hours. Most of the bombing was ‘stick’ bombing rather than salvos, and stick bombing means really that they were coming down in a string of one. two, three, four, falling sometimes about a blink apart, as distinct from the salvo bombing when they all come down in a section.
"There is a bit of haze hanging over London tonight and I can see the cars passing by on the streets below just as two faint eyes that they use for headlights—very small dim lights moving slowly down the street. At the moment, as you can hear, everything is quiet. If that's disappointing to you, certainly it isn't to me. We've had a sufficient amount of noise up here earlier this evening. It's a strange feeling, standing on a rooftop in London tonight. One has the sensation of being suspended in mid-air. That haze down in the street seems like rivers of white smoke flowing down these crooked streets.
“A little earlier in the evening I saw a white ambulance pass by down below and I felt that sometime we would wake from a dream and find that the ambulance had been just a station wagon bringing someone back from a pleasant week end in the country, and when a fire engine went by with its clanging, urgent bell one had the feeling that somehow that maybe it's just a butcher wagon in a country village.
“There’s a little gunfire off to the west. One can see the flash of the guns, but it's too far away to hear them distinctly. You may be able to hear just a dull, thumping noise like someone kicking a tub. (Sound of thudding.) You can hear them very faintly. I can hear a plane moving in on my right now.”
At this point CBS cut Mr. Murrow off to bring in correspondents from elsewhere in Europe.

A Bad Luck Demonstration

A black cat is bad luck when it crosses your path. That’s the premise behind Tex Avery’s Bad Luck Blackie, which combines the idea with the “if you ever need me, just whistle” routine.

In this cartoon, a black cat takes pity on an abused white kitten and provides him with a demonstration of how the combination works. The whistle is blown, the cat trots, skips, swims, dances, etc. in front of the bullying bulldog. Something falls from somewhere up high and clobbers the dog.



Here are the consecutive frames. The dog is on a four-drawing cycle. Note how little time Tex uses to have the flower pot drop into the scene.



Rich Hogan is the story man in this masterpiece cartoon, with animation by Walt Clinton, Grant Simmons, Preston Blair and Louie Schmitt.

Birds of the Radio

Network radio quickly became part of popular culture in the early 1930s and radio stars were parodied or caricatured everywhere—in feature films, on stage, in newspapers and magazines (the great Al Hirschfeld comes to mind) and even on radio itself. There seemed to be a number of mimics in the dying days of vaudeville appearing in theatres and trying to wow an audience with their approximations of Al Jolson, Bing Crosby, Ed Wynn, Jimmy Durante, Eddie Cantor and so on. The Brown Derby had drawings of the stars on its walls.

Cartoons got in on the fun, too. One rarely-seen example is The Big Birdcast, a 1938 Color Rhapsody released by Columbia. The impressions aren’t exactly the greatest at times but there are enough catchphrases and screen references that just about anyone watching the cartoon back then would get the references.

The cartoon opens with the song “Sing, Baby, Sing,” and cuts to a short of a canary (?) boo-boo-boo-ing the lyrics. Who else could it be but Bing Crosby? Suddenly, a rooster pops up and screeches out a scat to the melody. If you didn’t get it from the vocalisation, he leans into the camera and squawks “Hi-ya, Buck!” Yes, it’s Andy Devine. In 1938, he was best known for greeting Jack Benny the same way before taking part in a Buck Benny Western parody sketch. Devine, by the way, actually did squeal Sing, Baby, Sing on the Benny radio show.



Rudy Vallee’s hair and megaphone are recognisable in the next scene. The megaphone gets a solo.



Violin? Town Hall? Yes, it can only be a send-up of the Jack Benny/Fred Allen feud (Allen’s show at the time was called Town Hall Tonight). Composer Joe De Nat tosses in a joke of his own when the soundtrack plays the Jell-O signature when the Benny bird is introduced (Benny was sponsored by Jell-O then), followed by a scratchy version of Love in Bloom, Benny’s theme song. Says the Allen worm: “One more lesson and I’ll play The Bee.” The radio feud began over a 10-year-old violinist’s performance of that composition by Schubert, followed by a crack by Allen about Benny’s musicianship. The worm then launches into the composition after splitting up into, well, bees. The Benny bird escapes into a hollow tree and emerges in a cowboy costume as “Buck.”



The other radio feud—Ben Bernie (“the old maestro and all the lads”) and gossip columnist Walter Winchell (“this is Mrs. Finchell’s boy Walter” “with lotions of love”—Winchell was sponsored by Jergen’s Lotion).



Eddie Cantor (the bird version fits in a reference to Ida and that putt-putt-putt noise the real Cantor used to make on the air). The large bird with the tuba has a Greek accent, meaning he’s Parkyakarkus, a character on Cantor’s show played by Harry Einstein (I’m presuming the talking microphone is supposed to be Cantor’s announcer, Jimmy Wallington, though it doesn’t sound anything like him).



Ed Wynn, Joe Penner (with Goo Goo the duck), and the NBC chimes all make appearances with some more obscure parody caricatures.

Danny Webb shows up on Columbia’s doorstep to do the same Penner impression you hear in Warner Bros. cartoons. He does a number of the other voices as well. Manny Gould receives the sole animation credits.

Tralfaz Sunday Theatre – Your Blue Chip Market

Several companies used the name “Criterion Films.” One was set up by Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. in 1935. We suspect the company responsible for the following commercial film was the Criterion Films started in Seattle in 1949. Ex Disney employee Vern Witt was hired as a cameraman at that time, as was Curt Roberts of KING to handle scripts and promotions.

Standard Oil bankrolled a picture in 1951 showing the sights of Seattle. This one from 1954 touts the wonders of Los Angeles. The only credit on it belongs to Robert Tobey, a union film photographer starting in 1928 who originally worked for Technicolor in Boston before moving to Hollywood. He died in 1973. But you should recognise the uncredited narrator on this as the glorious Marvin Miller.

The film was made for the Los Angeles Herald-Express. “On the way home in the late afternoon, people have the leisure to buy and read their favourite evening paper, the Herald-Express,” Marvin tells us. Alas, television would soon make the evening paper as obsolete as the streetcars you can also see in this film.

Unless you’re a fan of Marvin’s—and he employs a nice bubbly read in this—or scenes of 1950s Los Angeles, I doubt you’ll be able to watch the whole thing.