A Change of Scenery

An interesting but jarring effect shows up in the early Terrytoon By the Sea (1931). A mouse is driving his car in the city and makes a left turn. Suddenly, the background drawing changes. The last two frames are consecutive.



The cartoon’s story involves a cat in love with a mouse, who is stolen away by the heroic mouse in the frames above.

That's What You Think, Brother

Dumb-Hounded was one of Tex Avery’s “wild take” cartoons, where he came up with variations on huge reactions of horror by the wolf (voiced by Frank Graham).

Here’s the first. Wolfie thinks he’s escaped from Droopy (played by Bill Thompson) but realises he hasn’t after he walks into the dog, who says “That’s what you think, brother.” These are consecutive frames. Notice the outlines of Droopy and the wolf at the end. That was used for a mid-air body vibration effect.



The wolf leaps into mid-air, churns his body and takes off to the door to escape. He’s foiled.



And things get crazier after that.

Irv Spence, Ed Love, Ray Abrams and Preston Blair animated the cartoon.

Garry Marshall's Landlord Evicted by NBC

He gave Blansky’s Beauties to the world.

I’m sure that’s not how Garry Marshall would want to be remembered. Anyone who paid attention to credits on TV in the 1960s and early ‘70s would have seen his name on “The Odd Couple” (along with at least two other Marshalls) and “The Dick Van Dyke Show.” And, of course, he went on to even bigger things (and a few stinkers).

It was 50 years ago that Marshall and writing partner Jerry Belson became producers. Mirisch-Rich had recently formed to get into the TV business. Their first three network nibbles were “The Rat Patrol,” a cartoon series called “Super 6” and a comedy called “Hey, Landlord!” The latter was put in the hands of Marshall and Belson, along associate producer Bruce Johnson. All were around 30. Proctor and Gamble bought a full sponsorship. A flotilla of people involved in the Van Dyke show came over to work on the series (Rose Marie had a guest spot). 11 additional episodes were ordered by the network in October and six more in January. But despite being sandwiched between Walt Disney and “Bonanza,” the show got killed by Ed Sullivan and “The F.B.I.” and it was pulled before the end of the season.

All I remember about the show is there was a staircase. That’s how much of an impression it made on a nine-year-old viewer (I haven’t seen it since). So it was interesting peering around trying to find some old newspaper clippings about Marshall and running into a few stories about this show instead. So here they are. Both are from September 10, 1966.

Brownstone Is Locale Of Hutchins Comedy
By CHARLES WITBECK
HOLLYWOOD—If "Dick Van Dyke Show" fans feel lost this day night group of extraverts, they should try catching "Hey, Landlord," with Will "Sugarfoot" Hutchins and Sandy Baron, NBC's new Sunday night comedy slotted between "Walt Disney" and "Bonanza."
While the "Van Dyke" series charted the problems of a successful TV writer and his delightful wife, "Hey, Landlord" drops down an age notch to watch the reactions of a young, naive, would-be writer, Woody Banner (Will Hutchins), inheritor of a beaten-up New York brownstone, and his roommate Chuck (Sandy Baron), the flegling comic, a pragmatist who prefers action to dreams except when it comes to paying rent or helping out with antiquated plumbing.
Each week Woody and Chuck check want ads for jobs to launch careers and to pay for the upkeep of the brownstone apartment house. In a sample episode, Woody lands a writing job with a toy company seeking material for a talking toy crow. This situation sets up humorous scenes of the two men trying to dream up gags for the crow, and it lets the writers take playful pokes at the big money toy market and some of its silly products.
Job And Home
Like the "Van Dyke Show," "Hey, Landlord" moves back and forth between job and home. In the Banner apartment house reside all sorts of goofy and tenants: a scatter-brained, sexy TV weather girl, Pamela Rodgers; a lovely Japanese airline stewardess, Miko Mayama, and a bedraggled widow, Ann Morgan Guilbert, with her 6-year-old brat. The pilot episode featured a crazy photographer played by Michael Constantine, and the producers liked him so much, Michael has been added to the cast. The Banner brownstone has ah open end—whenever new characters score highly they'll simply be brought back as new tenants. By the end of the season the battered dwelling may house more occupants than the Waldorf Astoria.

All these "Van Dyke" traits in the Sunday night comedy come as no surprise when one checks the list of credits. Producers Garry Marshall and Jerry Belson used to write for the Emmy laden show, while director Jerry Paris learned his trade on the series.
Another member of the distinguished alumni is Ann Morgan Guilbert, formerly neighbor Milly, now the exhausted widow. And, at the top of the credit pyramid, is executive consultant Sheldon Leonard, the man who launched "Dick Van Dyke Show" and managed to keep it on the air after those initial shaky six months. For Will Hutchins, "Hey, Landlord" is a gift from heaven. The sandy-haired Phi Beta Kappa cast as the slow-moving, simple western hero in "Sugarfoot" for three years, finally gets a break in status.
Even though Hutchins still receives fan mail on "Sugarfoot," he has been given short shrift by Hollywood casting people who look down on the crop of Warner Bros. TV actors noted for bringing in all that money during the mid-50's. Up for an "Alfred Hitchcock" TV part a few years ago, Hutchins was asked by producer Norman Lloyd to read the entire script before being accepted. Lloyd simply felt unsure of Will's acting abilities because he wore a Warner Bros. label.
Hutchins Doesn't Shuffle
In the role of intelligent, naive, 21-year-old Woody who is trying to find himself after graduating from Ohio State, Hutchins can at least erase that Warner Bros. stigma. Will doesn't shuffle as Woody, he says some funny things and makes pertinent observations. He is even quiet and appreciative in certain key scenes, playing a normal young man who doesn't have to kick clods for laughs.
His co-star Sandy Baron, cast as the fast-talking, effervescent comic Chuck who performs everywhere for nothing, is playing a role he knows by heart. Sandy started out In the comedy business as a bus boy and waiter in the Catskills, watching the standup comics perform, and he had confidence right off the bat.
"I knew I was funny at the time, but delivering one-line jokes wasn't my racket," says Baron. Instead Sandy bought monologues and then found his niche improvising material in the off-Broadway theater hits, "The Premise' and "Second City." Dramatic roles followed "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" and this spring's "Generation" with Henry Fonda.
"I used to think getting a TV job was a sell-out," admitted Sandy, "but work has changed my mind."
Baron Learning Business
Now, Sandy is learning the filmed TV comedy business playing a familiar part, and he's taking lessons from the best pros in town. Says Sandy about overseer Sheldon Leonard: "He will frighten you. He does a great Indian war dance. He watches you perform, and then he will come up and begin with 'I would like it if...'."
Says Leonard, concisely summing up "Hey, Landlord":
"This is the story of three musketeers, but with two."

Pamela Rodgers? Was she on it? I only remember her as a replacement cast member on “Laugh-In” before vanishing from TV. But “Landlord” gave Rogers her first regular role. Several different interviews with her saw print; this one was found in the Binghamton Press; I suspect it’s a syndicated piece.

Pamela Turns Up the Heat As Hey, Landlord! Regular
New York—Everybody talks about the weather but once they get a look at Pamela Rodgers as a stunning weather reporter, they will change the subject.
Pamela, a striking beauty, co-stars as slightly scatter-brained TV weather girl Timothy Morgan on Hey Landlord!, a new half-hour comedy series dealing with the life, times and tenants of a venerable New York brownstone, showing in color NBC and Channel 40.
A former "Miss Texas," Pam went directly from the stage of the Miss Universe Beauty Pageant to the stages of such top night spots as the Hotel Sahara in Las Vegas and New York's Copacabana as a dancer and ultimately to the sound stages of Hollywood.
As recently as 1965, just three years after graduation from Jesse H. Jones High School in her hometown of Houston, that she made her film debut. She has since appeared in The Man From U.N.C.L.E. and The Donna Reed Show as well as such motion pictures as "The Silencers," "Three on a Couch;" "Doomsday Flight" and "The Oscar."

AS WEATHER GIRL Timothy Morgan, Pamela portrays a starry-eyed innocent, aspiring to a career in show business and whose not-so-innocent face and figure, all agree, portend imminent stardom.
Timothy shares an apartment with another career girl, airline stewardess Kyoko Mitsui (Miko Mayama) in a typical metropolitan brownstone landlorded by series star Will Hutchins as Woody. Sandy Baron also stars as Chuck, Woody's roommate, confidante and some-time managerial assistant.
Timothy feels her participation on the local TV weather program is affording her the exposure necessary for a start in the business. But it is back at the brownstone where Timothy attracts the most viewers thanks to her passion for the latest in such "mod" fashions as hip buggers, bikinis and mini-skirts. The fact is, considering the total male tenant contingent plus the helicopter and dirigible crews who hover over the rooftop sundeck, Timothy gets a much better audience rating when she is not working.
Wondrously, she somehow detects logic in why half the Eastern Seaboard's militaryand civilian aircraft must "practice their low-level maneuvers" smack over the center of the world's largest city but like Kyoko, her companion sunbather, she'd prefer the planes go someplace else because, "they make too much shade." As to Pamela's ability to handle her role in this, her TV series debut, among a cast of players with considerably more acting experience, co-producers Garry Marshall and Jerry Belson sum it up this way:
"It takes brains to play a scatterbrain."

Garry Marshall didn’t let the failure of “Hey, Landlord” faze him. And TV fans can be grateful for that. Blansky’s Beauties notwithstanding.

Speechless With Colour

The climax of How Now Boing Boing (1954) seems to have been an experiment in shapes and colours by Jules Engle, T. Hee and director Bobe Cannon.

Gerald, as you know, can’t speak and goes “boing boing” instead (except when he’s imitating cars, trains and so on; apparently he can’t imitate speech). In this cartoon, a professor uses a huge piece of equipment designed to unscramble overseas calls to translate Gerald’s boings (and, remarkably, into English instead of another language).

Cannon has the camera cut in and out of the animation to change the perspective a bit.



In the original Gerald cartoon, you feel sorry for the outcast little boy and are happy he triumphs in the end. In this sequel, you don’t care about anyone or the abstract shapes that take up about 25 seconds of screen time.

Gerald Ray, Alan Zaslove and Frank Smith are the credited animators.

Tell Me More About My Eyes

Bugs Bunny outsmarts himself in Bugs Bunny and the Three Bears, a 1944 cartoon written by Tedd Pierce and directed by Chuck Jones.

Bugs quickly pulls a con job on Mama Bear who is about to clobber him by complimenting her on her appearance (including her eyes).



The ruse works. Mama Bear reacts by protecting Bugs from the angry Daddy and Junior Bear. But it works too well. Mama becomes completely enamoured with Bugs. “Tell me more about my eyes,” she coquettishly asks.



There is no escape.



Finally, the panicked Bugs jumps into his hole in the ground. We hear giggling and “Tell me more about my eyes.” Bugs jumps out of the hole and runs away to end the cartoon.



Considering his reputation, I can picture Pierce getting into a similar situation with a woman.

Bobe Cannon gets the animation credit and Mama Bear is played by that fine actress Bea Benaderet.

The Hensir of Comedy

There seems to have been a fascination with how Jack Benny and his writers put together the Benny radio show. We’ve posted several contemporary newspaper columns about it. Here’s another one.

This is from Earl Wilson’s column in the New York Post of January 22, 1945. The radio show being discussed aired the night before. And “hen, sir” was part of the dialogue.

Gag Busters in Action—Jack Benny's Brain Trust
I'm a candidate for a booby hatch today. I've survived a Jack Benny gag-rewrite session. Assigning myself to find how Jack manufactures his jokes, I hopped up to his 33d floor penthouse at the Sherry-Netherland. In an orangeish dressing gown, chewing a cigar that had gone out a long time ago, Jack faced the crowd—17 people by actual count—and asked, "Where the hell's Phil?"
Meaning Phil Harris.
Nobody knew. Mary Livington said maybe he couldn't get a cab. Rochester ran around behind a long cigar, showing off a yellow shirt and a blinding tie.
Phil arrived to chants of "Always late, always late" from the crowd, and read his part. Coming to the word "humanitarian," he innocently read it:
"Human-tarian."
One writer fell down laughing. "You don't have to write jokes for Phil," Jack said. "He reads things wrong anyway." Finally the rehearsal ended.
"Everybody scram but the geniuses," somebody in authority said. "Just the writers stay."
This your clever reporter had come to hear—the four writers, probably top joke men in the country, probably each a $25,000-a-year man, cutting and polishing the first rough script. They sagged into chairs or onto couches, with coats off and collars opened. Jack lighted his cigar—which went out. He kept chewing it. They began kicking jokes around. Jack wanted a gag about him appearing before FDR. Somebody would ask, "Did the President like you?"—and then the gag.
"Roosevelt laughed and Jimmy Byrned," said Writer George Balzer of Van Nuys, Calif., but he took it back with a wince.
"Roosevelt hasn't laughed so much since he saw Herbert Hoover," flung in either John Thackaberry of Houston, Tex., or Milt Josefsberg of Brooklyn—I forget which. They were in their '30s. The fourth writer, Sam Perrin, of the Bronx, held his script mirthlessly, but business-like. He is 40ish. Silence gripped the room. A clock ticked loudly while the geniuses thought. The script girl, Jane Tucker, waited for a witticism she could write down.
Perrin called out, "Did the President like your show? You say, 'Oh he liked it swell. He sat next to Gen. Hershey and now I'm in 1-A.'"
Jack smiled—for the first time so far. "I would put it in," he said. Jane Tucker wrote it down in her script book.
"That'll play good," one writer said. That's what they said repeatedly—it would play good.
I listened as they hauled gags out of their heads for an hour and a half, and threw most of them away. Occasionally a writer would have a paroxysm of laughter over his newest joke, yell it out, and nobody would laugh. I gave them one of my own gags. They gave it back to me. Two writers wanted to get in a gag about Col. Elliott Roosevelt's dog.
"It's a good laugh, but I hate to pan anybody, and I'm afraid of it," said Jack. Out came a joke about Don Wilson arriving late: "He lost his priority on an elevator." Out came another where Jack asked Phil Harris, "How do you keep warm—Red flannels?"
"No, Black Label."
They were running too long. Jack wanted a joke about how skinny his legs look in knickers. "You look like two champagne glasses with ridiculously long stems," one writer suggested. Another thought he looked like V for Victory upside down. But another one came up with "You have to tie knots in your legs to make it look like you have knees."
"Got that Janie?" said Jack. She had already written it down.
I was restless. But apparently loving it, they weren't. They were meticulous. For 5 minutes, they discussed a gag in which Jack complained to a waiter about an egg costing 20 cents. "What's in an egg that could make it cost 20 cents?" he said.
"Well, sir," replied the waiter, "it's a whole day's work for a hen."
The burning issue was: Shouldn't the "sir" be at the end of the sentence? ". . . It's a whole day's work for the hen, sir." I think it was Josefsberg who said "sir" after "hen" would produce a new word, like "hensir."
"Like saying, 'Somebody's at the door. Will you please hensir?'"
Our session had gone on almost two hours, and they were only in the middle. It was orderly, nobody even had a drink, and all I could think about was the new word, "hensir." Jack denied the story he has no hair—said he has hair at home he's never used. So on that I left, thinking how nice they were, and, also, how long could they stay sane?

Benny’s writers continually found ways to work old jokes into a new script, and the “hen, sir” was no exception. The new version appeared on the radio show of May 3, 1953. Jack was, in real life, appearing for several weeks at San Francisco’s Curran Theatre. On the show he complained about the price of a breakfast at the Fairmont Hotel. Only the audience didn’t get a “hen” this time. Said waiter Mel Blanc: “Well, it’s a whole day’s work for a chicken.” But joke continued:
JACK: That’s a very old joke.
MEL: Well, I thought it was funny when I heard it last night at the Curran Theatre.
Benny’s writers did it again.

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.