A Harman-Ising Pipe Dream

The MGM cartoon “Pipe Dreams” (released 1938) has everything you’d expect in a Harman-Ising cartoon—creative character designs (some extremely over-rendered), perspective and effects animation, an awful lot of movement, protagonists that sing with cutesy voices and no credits to tell viewers today who did what. It was in production when Metro decided to cut its ties with the Harman-Ising studio and, instead, establish its own cartoon division.

Three little monkeys suck on a pipe and are cast into various lands of characters made up of things associated with smoking—cigarette packs for railway cars, horses made of pipe cleaners, and so on. A lot of imagination was employed. One sequence lands the monkeys in front of a copy of the book Tobacco Road and things switch to a rural scene, complete with square dance. Here are some of the designs. The horse’s body is made up on chewing tobacco which the horse chews on.



Maybe the best characters are some cigar hoboes who engage in a little explanatory song and dance.

Variety reported on Jan. 26, 1938: “Metro will release the Harman-Ising cartoon short reeler, 'Pipe Dream,' on Feb. 5. Number is 10th in the series of cartoon releases of the company for 1936-37,” then on April 23rd: “Three Metro shorts, 'Pipe Dreams,' 'Little Bantamweight' and 'Rocky Mountain Grandeur." were selected for Queen Elizabeth and King George as the screen fare for 12-year-old Princess Elizabeth's birthday party, according to a cable yesterday from Metro's London office to studio execs.”

The cartoon was titled “Smoke Dreams” during production in April 1937; one wonders if the intention to feature the song Smoke Dreams which Arthur Freed and Nacio Herb Brown wrote for the 1936 MGM movie After the Thin Man, but I don’t believe it’s on the cartoon’s score, which sounds like a Scott Bradley original.

The Last of the Red-Hot Five Year Olds

Few people today can say they starred on a network radio show in the 1920s. One of them was a young blues singer who is known to millions of TV fans in her role as Sally Rogers, the comedy writer who kept trying to land a steady boyfriend.

We’re, of course, talking about Rose Marie. In 1928, she was appearing on stage—at age four—when she was spotted by someone at WPG, the city-owned radio station in Atlantic City. By October, she was co-starring on an evening programme (apparently a short-lived one) called “Joyous Juveniles” along with a boy soprano named Andrew Braun. Rose Marie wasn’t one of those pat-the-kid-on-the-head, ain’t-she-cute acts. She really could belt out the blues. She graduated to network radio before 1930. Newspaper radio columnists treated her seriously.

This story is from the Central Press wire service (note the CP at the bottom of the accompanying picture) and published in the Schenectady Gazette on April 30, 1930.

Lower East Side of New York Gives Tiny Star of Film to Radio
Baby Rose Marie Knows 70 Jazz Songs; to Go in "Talkies."
By ALMA SIOUX SCARBERRY
NEW YORK, April 29.—Dame Sophie Tucker bills herself "The Last of the Red Hot Mammas." But she hasn't reckoned with Baby Rose Marie.
For two years we have heard Rose Marie on the air, have seen her in vaudeville and occasionally in a talkie short. Her voice and manner in her act are totally unlike that of a child. Deep, hard-boiled, coon-shouting, uncanny, so pathetically unlike a little baby girl that, in a woman's heart at least, it stirs a maternal resentment. The other day Rose Marie played hostess for an "interview. We met her with curiosity, prepared to find that she was a child several years older than she was billed.
A Busy Five-Year-Old
But she isn't. She is a little slip of a five-year-old with dark brown hair, almost black Latin eyes, kiddish teeth, wide apart, and, like the average healthy and mischievous youngster, always stirring like a little busy bee.

At first she sat primly in a chair as she had no doubt been told to do and confided:
"I got a little brother Frankie, nine months old. Gee, he's a swell kid. I was only three when I started to sing. Frankie sings now—honest, he does. He sings 'blah-hh—blah-hh.'
"You know where I live? Why, on the lower East Side, between Avenue B and C. I got about a hundred kids to play with. I like to play out on the street. Once I went to kindergarten for a day, but mama had me all cleaned up and a bad kid stepped on the back of my shoes and I went home and I said I don't want to go back to that dirty school and mama says she guesses I'm right—and I ain't gone back neither."
She showed that she could write "Baby," but the Rose Marie stumped her and she printed it laboriously. That is all she knows of her three Rs. She does not read at all. However, she knows the words and music of more than 70 jazz songs, and can sing them with all the "It" and come-hither motions of a warbling Clara Bow. She never forgets a song once she has learned it.
Father Was In Vaudeville
Her father is Frank Curley, an Italian, formerly a hoofer and banjo player in vaudeville.
She is scheduled to go to the coast for a little while to play a lead in Victor Herbert's "Babes in Toyland" in the talkies.
When asked what she was going to do with all the money she is earning, the child looked surprised.
"Buy dresses, of course. What else is there for a woman to spend money on?"
"You might buy an airplane," it was suggested. But she shuddered.
"Get me up in one of those awful ole crates? Not muh!"
She likes dancing and monkeys.
"Not live ones. Just fakes."
Baby Rose Marie's money will soon take her family out of the lower East Side—into what? It will be interesting to observe the career of this strange little child prodigy. Her repartee is as old as her voice. Somehow, we wish they'd have waited a few years.

Going back to the start of this post, you may be wondering what happened to Rose Marie’s co-star on “Joyous Juveniles,” Andrew Braun. Quite a bit, and far from the realm of show business, if the research is correct. His full name was Andrew Josef Galambos-Braun. He was born in Hungary in 1924. He and his parents Josef and Margaret arrived in the U.S. in early 1927, by February he was already singing on WIP Philadelphia. He joined the U.S. Army Signal Corps in World War Two. Braun, or Galambos as he came to be known, was later an astrophysicist and a philosopher who wrote extensively propounding a society run in some ways on libertarian lines. Both he and Rose Marie had come a long way from a little studio in Atlantic City at the dawn of network radio.

Egging On a Trout

We’re told a hungry trout will always go for eggs in Tex Avery’s Field and Scream (released in 1953). A trout proves it. And a fire even burns under water.



And it’s on to the next gag by Avery and Heck Allen.

Walt Clinton, Grant Simmons and Mike Lah animated this cartoon. The narrator is unknown.

Punny Products

Warner Bros. managed to get some mild humour from making fun of familiar names of celebrities, reading material and stuff you could buy at the store. Friz Freleng’s September in the Rain (1937) is one of those cartoons, you know, where stuff comes alive when humans aren’t around.

Let’s head to the grocery store and see what we can recognise.



Do people still put blueing in clothes? Writer Tedd Pierce doesn’t seem to have had a particular blueing product in mind here. Akst and Clarke’s Am I Blue? is heard in the scene.



Old Dutch Cleanser. The most creative thing in this gag is Carl Stalling working the Dubin-Warren tune ’Cause My Baby Says It’s So into a Dutch clog dance tempo.



Cigarettes galore. Camel, Domino, Tareyton, Lucky Strike. Tareytons were made by the American Tobacco Co. but Tareytowns are from the fine people at the Hoboken Tobacco Co. Tareyton’s motto “There’s something about them you’ll like” has been parodied on the pack. There’s also a Park Avenue cigarettes with an ersatz coat of arms in this cartoon. I don’t get the reference. Pall Mall maybe?



Bon Ami cleanser has a little chick on the label, too. The proud little worm is inching along to In the Shade of the Old Apple Tree.



Note the phoney Shreaded Wheat and Uneeda Biscuits boxes have a faked version of the Nabisco symbol (the oval with the double cross on top). The girl with the umbrella singing By a Waterfall could be found on cans of Morton Salt. The gag was used earlier in the Freleng cartoon How Do I Know It’s Sunday.



Ah, what’s a Warners cartoon without Al Jolson in blackface? His Cream of Wheat box kind of has the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval on the side. Blackface doesn’t have the seal of approval these days, so Jolie, Aunt Jemima and the energetic Gold Dust twins and Fats Waller caricatures (doing a pretty swinging version of Warren and Dixon’s Nagasaki) in the cartoon aren’t culturally appropriate these days.



Log Cabin Syrup, a General Foods product. It advertised for a bit on the Jack Benny radio show in the hitchhike spot.

Other songs in this Freleng musical are You’re the Cure For What Ails Me by Dubin and Warren (during the snake charmer/toothpaste scenes), The Campbells Are Coming and My Old Kentucky Home.

Tralfaz Sunday Theatre – The High Sign

Today, we present Buster Keaton’s great 1921 short for Metro, “The High Sign.” It was still playing in New York City a year later. Variety’s review:

THE HIGH SIGN
Buster Keaton's latest Metro twin reeler is the comedy relief at the Capitol this week. Eddie Cline collaborated with the star on the story and direction, producing an interesting slapstick comedy.
Keaton has but to continue at the present rate and he will become a valuable adjunct to any film program. His stuff is original, and always consistent with the story thread he maintains. No haphazard bits for him, always ringing them in legitimately.
A secret society is out to blackmail August Nickelnurser for $10,000 or inflict capital punishment on him. Keaton is engaged by the victim as the bodyguard and by the secret society as their emissary in carrying out the death threat. He decides to protect him and double-cross the "dirty dozen" that comprise the Buzzards. A cross section of a house with numerous trap-doors and secret exits makes for some fast rough and tumble work, Keaton eventually annihilating the would-be assassins.
That old timer, Al St. John, is alloted a bit in the comedy. He is the only familiar in the support. St. John at one time was also Fatty Arbuckle's running mate in the corpulent comedian's two-reel output, later doing some feature work on the Fox Sunshine lot. He ought to be taken in hand by someone. He suggests untold possibilities.
Outside of that the comedy is all Keaton. The star predominates and to good purpose. Abel.

Exhibitors Herald revealed the woman in the film is Bartine Zane.

How To Do Comedy

All the great comedians found what worked and stuck with it. The Jack Benny, George Burns and Bob Hope of 1940 were pretty much the same, when it came to delivery at least, as they were in 1970.

Benny revealed in interviews in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s that aging and familiarity modified his material. Maxwell jokes weren’t funny any more, he decided. Jokes about being 39 didn’t really work, he felt. Perhaps he was wrong. When he died in 1974, obituaries referred to his phoney age and phoney car as traits that were all too familiar to current audiences.

Here’s a feature story which ran in weekend newspaper supplements on January 13, 1973 wherein Jack gives a pretty good assessment of his comedy.

Jack Benny Outlines His Philosophy Of Humor
By JACK BENNY
Written for TV Scout
I hate to tell jokes.
Something told me when I first talked on the stage that I must never be a one-liner comedian. I knew I must get into something like a routine and when I need to go from one routine into another I must do it so gracefully that the audience never realizes that I switched.
My upcoming show, “Jack Benny’s First Farewell Special,” sponsored by RCA on NBC-TV on Thursday, Jan. 18, for example, depends, for the most part on situations. You can imagine the situations that can arise with Bob Hope, Johnny Carson, Flip Wilson and Dean Martin on the program.
Many times I've been asked to explain my philosophy of humor. Well, I toy with the faults or frailties of man.
Now, every family has one stingy guy. Then there’s the braggart or the guy who thinks he’s a great sex symbol. I make myself into all of these and make people laugh without out-and-out jokes. You can do it with a little innuendo.
Let me try to explain it this way: If I were giving a dinner for you and another person in a restaurant and you whispered to the other guy: “You better leave the tip because I’m afraid with Jack,” without my even being in it, it’s funny. It’s not as funny anymore, however, if I left a cheap tip. That would be 15 years too old. So, the only advancement is to stay with what you’ve done all your life but improve it by being sophisticated with it and by suggestions. I cannot emphasize too strongly the need for constant improvement in material.
I cannot do a stingy role that is not smarter than what I did 10 years ago. It’s not funny now if we left the table and I gave the waiter a nickel. It will only be funny if it were wild. Say the waiter, knowing how cheap I am, tipped me instead.
Oh, sure, I will tell a joke once in a while if I think it’s a great one and I think the audience hasn’t heard it. As soon as the joke is told I will immediately return to my regular routine.

You see, my method of slow talking is in sharp contrast to the styles of such great comedians as Bob Hope, Jack Carter or Milton Berle. I cannot talk as fast as these comics anymore than they can talk as slowly as I do. Jack Carter does material in 10 minutes that would last me an entire season. But, I can’t talk like that.
Many people give me credit for having very good timing. But, even a fast-talk comedian — any good comedian — must have good timing. You can have timing on different things. But if you lack timing, then you might as well forget the whole thing.
Of course, let’s not forget one thing — and I always have the right answer when people say to me: “Jack, you don't need great material. All you have to do is say something and stare at the audience.” I say, how long do you think I could stare after a lousy joke? You know what would happen? The audience would stare back at me and I’d better get into the next joke or routine as soon as possible.
It is not true that because I stare I get laughs. When I stare I better stare at the right place and at the right time because nobody is that good. Nobody living can go on with bad material. The most important thing in the world right off is good material.
That’s why I love writers — good writers — and I give them full credit. I want to be with them all the time they are writing. I want to steer it one way or the other. Once they hand me good material, then I know what to do with it.
As for the new, young comedians who are entering show business today, I give them a tremendous amount of credit. In our day we had schools. They haven’t got it today. Our schools were vaudeville and burlesque. Don’t forget I went all through vaudeville, which meant I had a chance to be lousy before I was good. I could play South Bend, Ind., in vaudeville and I could be bad and who would know it? Only those people who came to the theater. But, maybe by the time I returned to South Bend I would have improved because I was playing vaudeville.
George Burns recently put it beautifully: “Today there’s no place to be bad” — and he’s so right.”

Animating Cartoons, 1935

Just how are those animated cartoons made?

Feature stories in newspapers answered that question over the years. One of them was courtesy of EveryWeek Magazine, one of many Sunday supplements found in papers.

This one was pulled out of the Ogden Standard Examiner of May 12, 1935. It’s interesting to see the reference to (and picture of) La Verne Harding, the only woman animating in Hollywood. For whatever reason, there’s no reference to the Fleischer studio, though the Paul Terry-Frank Moser operation makes the list (Van Beuren is snubbed as well).

It’s surprising to see Ed Benedict’s name in the list of the top animators. I don’t know if anyone could pick out Benedict’s animation in a cartoon. He spent the majority of his career in design and layout, first on industrial/commercial shorts in the ‘40s, then at MGM and Hanna-Barbera in the ‘50s. Ham Hamilton’s name is mentioned. Hamilton’s work has been praised by a number of people, including Chuck Jones, but I gather he had some personal difficulties.

The artwork that accompanied this story looked great in a broadsheet but it a little difficult to cut up for blog use, so you’ll see a lot of dead space.

Meet Hollywood’s Men of Action
By Dan Thomas
GET the bathing beauties out of the way—here come a flock of artistically inclined young gentlemen who just know that Hollywood has been waiting for them with open arms and bated breath!
These fellows, hundreds of them, indicate clearly the ever-increasing scope of the movie industry, the widespread appeal of today's animated cartoons.
In former days Hollywood was overrun with beauty contest winners from all parts of the world. The demand then was for beauty, not artistry. There was a premium on feminine curves. Consequently, the moment a girl was adjudged to have the prettiest dimples, loveliest legs or most alluring curves in Kokomo, she hopped a rattler for the film colony.
Today there still is the same kind of premium placed on curves—but they must be of the drawing board variety. Those of a strictly feminine nature, the kind which make men bump into lamp posts while looking in the opposite direction, are a dime a dozen in filmland now. But carefully drawn curves which, fitted together, form an animated cartoon, aren't so easy to find.
Hence the demand for animators and the constant influx of artistically inclined young gentlemen. Fresh from high school, college or an art institute, they flock to Hollywood to gain fame and fortune via the pencil route. They are the youths who used to hie themselves to the nearest metropolis to start making their marks inthe world as newspaper cartoonists and comic strip artists. Today, however, they aspire to become animators of "Mickey Mouse," "Oswald the Rabbit," "Silly Symphonies," "Merrie Melodies" or other screen cartoons.
AND they come with all the confidence and assurance that marked their forerunners who invaded newspaper offices, certain that they will presently be earning at least $200 weekly in one or another of the studios turning out animated cartoons. It never occurs to them that only through years of hard work and study can they become first-rate animators, just as years of hard work are necessary before a comic strip artist can become a topnotcher.
Generally speaking, Hollywood offers a considerably higher wage scale than an artist can expect in the newspaper field unless his work is good enough to be syndicated. Animators draw as high as $250 weekly. However, only the most talented animators ever receive the maximum salary and it takes them from five to seven years to reach that figure.
A survey of the Walt Disney studio where "Mickey Mouse" and "Silly Symphony" cartoons arc produced gives a rather accurate description of the whole animated business. With very slight variations in procedure, the same rules have been adopted by Universal, Leon Schlesinger, Charles Mintz, U. B. Iwerks, Harmon and Ising and Paul Terry, producers respectively of "Oswald the Rabbit," "Merrie Melodies," "Krazy Kat," "Flip the Frog," "Bosko" and "Terry Tunes."
Receiving on an average of 20 applications a week, with a considerable increase in that number during the summer vacation months, Disney is forced to reject most of the applicants. Only those showing genuine talent are given trials.
These men are given two weeks in which to prove their worth. They draw no salary during this time. Their duties consist of redrawing characters from old cartoons. If their work is satisfactory, they are given contracts as apprentices at $15 a week.

ORDINARILY Disney keeps from 30 to 40 men in his apprentice room. The apprenticeship lasts from six months to a year.
As a rule this class is composed entirely of young men. Seldom is a girl found among them. For some inexplainable reason, women don't make good animators. At the present time there is only one in the entire business—-Verne Harding who works on Oswald at Universal.
"I don't know why girls should be poor animators but they are," Disney declares. "Very frequently they are better artists than men but for some reason they lack the knack of getting smooth action into their drawings."
The first duty given to an apprentice is the last, step in drawing a cartoon. From him the drawing goes to the girls in the tracing department to be traced on a celluloid sheet for photographing. His job is to clean up and ink the characters as drawn by the animators and their assistants.
As the apprentice progresses he is given bits of inconsequential drawing to do. For instance, if Minnie Mouse's hat were to blow off, the apprentice would complete the drawings by showing the hat being blown away. If Bosko had to climb a stepladder, the animator might draw everything but his feet, leaving them to be put on by the apprentice.
After successfully serving his term as an apprentice, a man is promoted to the post of assistant animator. In this spot he does whatever the animator leaves unfinished. Hence, before we can go very thoroughly into his duties, we'll have to jump over and find out what the animator does.
HE is the real hub around which the making of animated cartoons revolves. Once the story is completed and the continuity handed to him, he puts the action on paper in a series of drawings.
There are 16 drawings or frames to each foot of film. However, the animator does not make each drawing. He plots the action and then sketches intermittent drawings. He may make "every other one or possibly only every fourth or sixth one, depending upon the difficulty of the action and the capabilities of his assistant.

One animator docs not draw all of the characters seen upon the screen. For instance, in "The Tortoise and the Hare," which showed a race between these two animals, one man drew the tortoise and another the hare. After these were traced on celluloid sheets, they were placed one on top of another to be photographed as one frame of the picture.
DISNEY has about 30 animators at work. Each of them is given a certain character to draw for a particular sequence in a film. But none of them draws the same character all the time. Ham Lusk, for example, is a wizard at drawing Pluto. But to avoid letting him become too highly specialized, Disney makes him draw other characters in two out of every three films on which he works.
The theory of this is to keep every animator familiar with each of the characters used by the studio. In this way any one of them can in an emergency fill in anywhere he is needed.
As the animator completes his master drawings, he passes them over to his assistant who tackles the easier job of making the drawings to fill the gaps between them.
After the entire set of rough drawings has been completed, they are photographed and run off on the screen to make sure there are no jumpy spots in the action. Three times each week the Disney animators, assistants and apprentices are required to attend classes for the study of animation. Sometimes living models are used to demonstrate body construction and movements under all conditions. At other times motion pictures showing both humans and animals in action are run off one frame at a time to show exactly how each muscle of the body is brought into play for any given action.
This knowledge is extremely important it the animators are to inject convincing and smooth action into their drawings. For instance, if Mickey is playing the piano, it isn't sufficient to show his arms and fingers moving. Ordinarily his whole body would move to some extent and this must be shown on the screen. Disney is the only producer who conducts such a school for his employes.
“I've often been told how lucky I am not to have any stars to go temperamental on me,” Disney remarks. "It's true I never have any trouble with Mickey, the three pigs or any of my characters. But don't ever think animators can't be temperamental. Say, they can be just as bad as any star you ever saw.
"Occasionally one will have an off day on which he can't draw anything worth while. Then he has to be pampered and pulled out of his slump with all the diplomacy that would be used on a star."
Altogether there are about 150 animators, twice that many assistants and a like number of apprentices in Hollywood. Salaries for animators range from $75 to $300 per week, with the vast majority being in the $150 class. Assistants will receive anywhere from $40 to $75 and apprentices in every studio get $15 weekly.
DISNEY is said to be the only one who pays as high as $300, although all of the other studios pay their top men around $250 per week. Assistants receive about the same salary wherever they work.
Among the topnotchers in the business are Ham Lusk, Norman Ferguson and Fred Moore (all working on Mickey Mouse and Silly Symphonies), Walter Lantz, Verne Harding and Ed Benedict (all of whom draw Oswald the Rabbit), and Rolland Hamilton (chief "Merrie Melodies" artist).
"The business of animating is the most peculiar one in the world," declares Walter Lantz. "I have known artists who could draw circles around any of us but they couldn't earn their salt as animators because they had no dramatic sense.
"An animator must be more than an artist. A good artist will draw a man crossing a floor. But a good animator will put action into that walk which will bring laughs from his audience. That's because he has a sense of acting."

Woody Woodpecker Outlines

The Walter Lantz studio through a good portion of the 1940s liked outline drawings. In previous posts, we’ve pointed out several Woody Woodpecker cartoons that feature them. Here’s another example. This one is from Woody Woodpecker, the first cartoon starring the character after his appearance in Knock Knock.

At one point, the psychiatrist fox grabs Woody by the neck and shakes him a bit. Note how Woody’s expression changes when he realises he’s being grabbed around the neck. I’ve only included a few of the outline drawings.



Alex Lovy and Ray Fahringer get the animation credits on this cartoon, with Mel Blanc providing voices for Woody and the doctor.

Ah, Yes!

Pausing in the middle of a cartoon for some commentary by a character or a sign is a favourite Tex Avery routine. We find it in Who Killed Who? (released 1943), Avery’s great spoof of radio/film detective mysteries.

Cadavers fall toward the camera, initially in a 16-drawing cycle, speeding up to eight. We see 13 of them drop before a 14th stops in mid-fall and removes the gag around his mouth. “Ah, yes!” he says to the audience. “Quite a bunch of us, isn’t it?” Then the gag snaps back over his mouth and he resumes his fall (as do nine other identical bodies afterward).



Avery’s name is the only one on the credits.