Proud As a Duck

Fleischer cartoons always found time to stop the plot for a gag, sometimes quick, sometimes extended.

Here’s a routine from “I Yam What I Am” (1933) where Indians are firing arrows at ducks in a pond. Some of the arrows land on a duck’s butt. He’s outraged at first, but ends up as proud as a peacock (as “Turkey in the Straw” plays in the background).



Seymour Kneitel and William Henning receive the animation credits.

Mickey's Perspective

A couple of perspective drawings from Just Mickey (1930).



Suddenly, the curtain in the background changes. These are consecutive frames.



They could just have easily called this cartoon Few Gags. Mickey spends most of the cartoon playing the violin. Uh, yeah.

A $1,000,000 Violin

During World War Two, a reluctant Jack Benny handed over his beloved Maxwell car to the scrap drive. Of course, this was only a gag on the radio. But Benny really did contribute to the war effort, performing for soldiers around the world (sometimes in oppressive conditions) and emphatically plugging war bonds on his programme.

One of Benny’s fans contributed a little something, too. A million dollars.

Well, perhaps we should qualify this a bit. We can’t say for certain that Julius Klorfein was a fan of the Benny show. One of a number of press reports revealed his adult offspring were. Regardless, Klorfein achieved some brief fame when he pledged to buy $1,000,000 in War Bonds. In exchange, he got a violin that Benny played on the air, on stage and as a child.

Klorfein was a little embarrassed by all the sudden attention, as you can see in this story from the New York Herald Tribune of February 23, 1943. He was one of those self-made success stories that Americans love—a poor immigrant who, through hard work, became a rich man and then gave back to his country.

Benny’s Fiddle Puts Purchaser In the Limelight
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Julius Klorfein, Who Paid Million in Bonds for Relic, Is Loath to Talk About It
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Julius Klorfein, the man who created a sensation early yesterday at Gimbel Brothers’ war bond rally by pledging himself to buy a million dollars worth of war bonds for the right to acquire Jack Benny’s old violin, submitted reluctantly to his first press interview in a lifetime of anonymity.
Mr. Klorfein, a genial, quiet-spoken man of fifty-eight, who is present of Garcia Grande Cigars, Inc., with offices in the Empire State Building, sent reporters scurrying to their files after he made his record offer, only to have them discover with amazement that there was not a single mention of his name in any of the accredited sources.
No Time for “Who’s Who”
“I never went in much for publicity,” Mr. Klorfein explained apologetically last night in his penthouse apartment at 411 West End Avenue. “I’ve just spent my life working hard and building up my cigar business, and I guess I didn’t have any time to get in Who’s Who or What’s What or anything like that.”
Jack Benny’s old violin, the same fiddle the radio comedian played in Waukegan, Ill., when he was a youth, and played again almost twenty years later last month in Carnegie Hall, lay in Mr. Klorfein’s lap as he spoke. Mr. Klorfein gazed at it fondly and strummed one of the strings.
Asked whether he was a violinist, Mr. Klorfein smiled. “If I was a violinist I wouldn’t be able to buy a million dollars worth of war bonds,” he said cryptically.
Mrs. Klorfein, who married her husband thirty-three years ago when he was manufacturing the first Garcia Grande cigars in the window of a little shop in South Brooklyn, had to urge her husband to tell the reporter something about his life.
Cigar Maker at $18

There was not much to tell, Mr. Klorfein said. He came to this country from Russia more than forty years ago. At eighteen he was sitting in a window making cigars and devising the formula for the Garcia Grande. The business grew, because the cigar he blended was mild and inexpensive. Soon there were factories making millions of Garcia Grande. Soon there were factories making millions of Garcia Grandes. Soon he was raising shade-grown tobacco in Connecticut, packing tobacco in Cuba, manufacturing cigars in Puerto Rico. Later he was a member of the Stock Exchange and the owner of valuable Manhattan real estate, including the twenty-story apartment building where he now lives.
“My hobbies are work and finance,” Mr. Klorfein said. “I am active in many Jewish charities, and once I backed a Broadway show, but it was a failure. That’s about all there is to tell.”
Wife Buys Some, Too
He added as an afterthought, “My wife bought some bonds at the Gimbel party, too. How many was it, dearest?” he asked Mrs. Klorfein.
Mrs. Klorfein said it was only $175,000 worth—a mere bagatelle compared to her husband’s purchase. “But, of course, I’ve been buying war bonds all along,” Mrs. Klorfein explained.
She told the rest of the story. There have three children, two sons, Boatswain’s Mate First Class Arthur Klorfein, of the Coast Guarrd, and Jerome Klorfein, and one daughter, Mrs. Maxwell Rapoport.
Mrs. Klorfein had just returned from a neighborhood public school, where she obtained her ration books. She is active in war work as a member of the American Women’s Voluntary Service, and is a hostess at the Stage Door Canteen and the Merchant Seaman’s Club.
“It was very exciting at the Gimbel party,” Mrs. Klorfein said proudly. “When my husband’s million dollar offer was announced for Mr. Benny’s violin the auctioneer asked if anybody would top it. There was a hushed silence and then a lot of applause. My husband stood up and bowed. It was the first bow Julius ever took.
$2,775,925 Bonds Sold
Including Mr. and Mrs. Klorfein’s $1,175.000, a total of $2,775,925 in bonds were sold at the rally which started shortly after midnight in the spacious Gimbel’s bargain basement. Admittance to the rally, which was conducted by the American Women’s Voluntary Services with the assistance of the War Savings Staff of the Treasury Department, was $750, the price of a $1,000 war bond.
Gimbel brothers contributed several items to the auction sale to match Mr. Benny’s “Love in Bloom” violin—so called because that is the only tune ever to have been played by the radio comedian on the instrument.
Billy Rose, theatrical producer, pledged purchase of $100,000 in war bonds for a letter written by George Washington dated July 28, 1780, and a man who asked that he remain anonymous pledged $100,000 in war bonds for a Bible which belonged to Thomas Jefferson.
Mrs. Myron C. Taylor, co-chairman of the rally committee, announced that $750,000 in war bonds were sold for admittance to the rally.
Danny Kaye, star of “Let’s Face It,” was auctioneer and master of ceremonies. Music was by Meyer Davis’s orchestra. Brief speeches were made by Frederick A. Gimbel, managing director of the store; Bernard F. Gimbel, president; Mrs. Alice T. McLean, founder and president of the A.W.V.S.; Mrs. Douglas Gibbons, chairman of the war savings staff of the A.W.V.S.
Frederic Gimbel, in a short address, referred to the rally as “the world’s greatest bargain sale.” He quoted Hitler as saying: “A department store is a monument to decadent democracy,” and added: “All I can say is that this is the best answer of democracy to Hitler.”

The Herald Tribune didn’t quite tell the whole story. A wire service piece from the St. Petersburg Times of May 23, 1943 quotes Klorfein:

“Benny’s violin has caused me a lot of grief,” he said. “Actually I didn’t bid on it. I had previously subscribed for one million dollars in bonds during the February drive and somebody thought up the stunt of tying the violin in with the purchase.”

Klorfein wasn’t finished. He bought three million dollars more in bonds by September.

After the war, Klorfein busied himself with large real estate and stock exchange deals. He died at his home in New York on November 27, 1958 at the age of 79. The Associated Press obituary mentions how he arrived in the U.S. from Poland with $35 sewn into his clothing, and his activity in several Jewish philanthropies, but nothing about Jack Benny or violins. Somehow, I suspect Mr. Klorfein would have liked it that way.

My thanks to Kathy Fuller-Seeley for passing along this clipping.

Oswald Posters

If you’ve looked into the history of old animation, you likely know the story behind Oswald the rabbit. He was created by Walt Disney in 1927 for films released by Universal. What Walt apparently didn’t realise is that when you work for someone, what you produce belongs to the someone. That meant Universal owned Oswald. With that in mind, Charlie Mintz, who had contracted with Disney to make the Oswald cartoons that he sold to Universal, raided the Disney staff in 1928 and started making Oswald cartoons himself, leaving Walt and Ub Iwerks to come up with a mouse we all know today.

What Mintz thought was a smart business move blew up in his face when Universal turned around and decided it wanted Walter Lantz and Bill Nolan to make its cartoons. Lantz, by his own account, was in tight with Universal boss Carl Laemmle. So Oswald moved to the Lantz studio in 1929.

Universal’s in-house magazine published these full-page ads for Oswald in 1933-35. Oswald had gone downhill by that point. Like most characters in the early ‘30s, he sang and danced and did things while weird stuff happened around him. That became passé. He became pretty watered down and Lantz started looking for new starring characters to take his place. But these ads are pretty attractive. One isn’t actually for Oswald but has a rabbit design similar to what Oswald ended up looking like in the later ‘30s.

It's Mouse Man!

The Great Piggy Bank Robbery is full of freeze-fame fun, like a lot of Bob Clampett’s colour cartoons for Warner Bros.

Here’s Duck Dwacy after following the tracks to discover Mouse Man. A couple of stretch in-betweens.



And later in the scene. Consecutive drawings.



Bill Melendez, Izzy Ellis, Rod Scribner and Manny Gould get animation credits in this Clampett tribute to/parody of Dick Tracy (and to Fibber McGee and Molly at the end).

Fish Bites Cat

The little fish in the Andy Panda cartoon Fish Fry can certainly take care of him/herself from a moth-eaten looking alley cat trying to catch it. The fish’s look changes from worry to determination.



The fish knows what to do.



Then comes the best gag in the cartoon. The fish is sympathetic toward the cat’s pain (and miraculously speaks without moving its mouth). He responds with an even bigger bite which sends the cat soaring into the air (layouts by Art Heinemann). Shamus Culhane directed this Oscar-nominated short. I can’t help but think he would have picked up the tempo on the second bite if he had made this later when everyone’s cartoons gained pace.



This is all La Verne Harding’s work. She and Emery Hawkins were given animation credits; he does a terrific job in this cartoon as well.

The Emotional Infant

The audience isn’t everything. It’s the only thing. That’s why it was unconscionable for Jack Paar to walk out on his Tonight Show audience on February 11, 1960.

It wasn’t as if Paar was the first emcee to have problems with NBC. Fred Allen famously feuded with a certain cadre of the network executive and, one night, was cut off the air. Allen never threw a tantrum and stormed out during his show. He knew the audience is the only thing. Bruised egos aren’t. Allen was quickly rewarded for his professionalism as scorn and ridicule was piled on NBC, which was embarrassed by the resulting universal bad publicity.

(As a side note, if you want to hear a blistering satire of Paar, check out any of Bob and Ray’s routines involving Hack Park and Eustace Dove, a thinly-veiled reference to Paar’s announcer, Hugh Downs. The B & R shows were broadcast on CBS radio around this time).

I stumbled across John Crosby’s take on all this; he may have been TV’s most celebrated critic by this point. This was his column for February 15, 1960. The opening reference is to the quiz show scandal. Paar, for some reason, continually used the phrase “dear hearts” on his show. “I kid you not” was a Paar-ism as well.

Never a dull moment, eh, dear hearts? We just get Charles Van Doren safely laid to rest when Jack Paar takes what may be the most celebrated walk since Alfred E. Smith’s. Mercifully, the medium is never static and its effect on personality is devastating.
My own position in the affaire Paar, in the remote event that anyone cares, is that Jack Paar is an exciting personality, a man of conviction who restored a bit of television’s gee-what’s-going-to-happen-next? quality. But — let’s face it — Paar is also an emotional infant. In walking out on his own show, he was acting like a 6-year old.
The particular joke that caused all the rumpus is not worth the excitement —- at least the version I heard, though Paar has a way of making dirty jokes even dirtier — but the frank fact of the matter is that NBC had to draw the line somewhere and they elected to draw it there. NBC has a responsibility in this matter. Paar’s material has been getting pretty blue. The network has been getting complaints.
“In the exercise of its proper responsibility to the public, NBC deleted this passage because they considered the passage in bad taste.” You can’t quarrel with that statement. The final responsibility is NBC’s. The network would be remiss if it had evaded its responsibility. While NBC might have picked a better line to get tough about, it could not properly back down, having once taken a stand, and I think Paar was wrong to make an issue of it.

It’s hardly as if great principles of free speech were involved. Paar has always been given enormous latitude in the show—which is one of the reasons for its success. There’s not a comedian in the business who has not had jokes snipped out by NBC censors, a tradition that goes way back to Fred Allen, Eddie Cantor, Rudy Vallee. And there’s not a one who didn’t complain bittered and many times justifiably. But they didn’t walk out. They went on anyhow and made the best of it which is the show business tradition.
Still, it’s easy to be sensible on the sidelines. The pressures of this business are monumental and Paar managed to keep his show operating week in week out for 3 years. No wonder he blew his top. An hour and three quarters a night. It’s a frightening job and the measure of Paar’s ability to do well can be best gauged by the fact that nobody else did it half so well when he took a vacation.
Some prickly, electric, vibrant quality dropped out when he was away—even though it was largely the same show, and largely the same people. Paar always assumed everyone was after him; he never let down his guard—and he had a tongue like an adder—and this meant everyone else kept his guard up while he was on the premises. Meanwhile, the pressure, the fame, the attacks in the press (many of them justified, many of them not) were beginning to unsettle him. He was—as Frank Sullivan once said of John O’Hara—“the master of the fancied slight.” He could detect an insult where none was intended at 5 miles.
I caught only the very end of the act as Paar was beginning to choke up and say that NBC had been “swell” to him and he’d been pretty wonderful to NBC too. “Nothing in his life became him like the leaving it,” I fell to thinking, largely because it was so magnificently inappropriate. “To throw away the dearest thing he owned as ’twere a careless trifle.” Well, that part’s true enough. Paar always does that. He gets so high in the world and then he kicks himself in the teeth.
If this issue hadn’t cropped up, he’d have created another one. He’s a thin-skinned guy. “Dear hearts, I kid you not.” — but he sure as hell kids himself.

You Know What...

Tex Avery’s animators came up with a pretty expressive bull in Señor Droopy, proving there’s more to Avery’s cartoons than big-eyed takes.

The runty Droopy is easily pushed around the bull, who views him as a pest rather than a combatant. Finally, Droopy breaks down, realising he’ll never win the bullfight and achieve his dream of meeting MGM actress Lina Romay, whose picture is on the cover of a fan magazine he carries around.

The bull goes over to see what Droopy is looking at. The drawings tell it all. I love how the bull (voiced by Avery) pounds the ground with his fist-like hoofs in uncontrollable laughter. And the angles on the bull’s head in the second drawing are great.



The insult imbues Droopy with super-human strength. He gives his credo to the bull: “You know what? That makes me mad” (re-used in Homesteader Droopy, released in 1954). Droopy dispatches the bull.



Bobe Cannon, Walt Clinton, Preston Blair, Mike Lah and Grant Simmons are the animators in this 1948 short. Anyone know if this is Blair’s work?