Piano Bites Mouse

Before Mickey Mouse became bland with an uncomfortable chuckle, he was actually a fun character. Here he is beating up a piano in the “The Jazz Fool” (1929). He even spits tobacco juice on it. Tobacco? Walt! Think about the children!!



The piano exacts its revenge. Look! Another butt attack joke. Walt loved those. I swear there was one in every Disney cartoon for a while.



The animation is credited to the great Ub Iwerks.

Three Little Bops Opening

Friz Freleng has the title of the cartoon dance onto the screen before our eyes.



And they bop to the music. There are 14 frames in this cycle. What you see below is pretty much the speed of the cycle in the cartoon.



Bob Matz gets his first animation credit. Hawley Pratt uses his stylised designs for the characters while Stan Freberg sings along to Shorty Rogers’ music which owes a lot to “Rock Around the Clock.”

'Emmy' Awards Fail to Reflect Hollywood's Taste

There’s always a complaint about the Emmy Awards. Among the gripes is some person or show should have been nominated and wasn’t.

I suppose the complaint isn’t a new one, judging by this United Press column published just after the awards ceremony 60 years ago. Some of the comments are interesting. Bob Crosby was in the cast of the Jack Benny radio show during its last few seasons. He didn’t pick Benny. Carson’s selection is no surprise; he told the world for years he was a huge Benny fan. Ann Sothern may have loved Lucy in 1956 but several reports say the two of them had a falling out after several appearances on The Lucy Show ten or so years later.

This story was published March 28, 1956; the title of this post was the headline in one newspaper which ran the story. See if you agree with the picks.

Stars Pick Dramas as Favorites
By VERNON SCOTT
UP Hollywood Correspondent

HOLLYWOOD, March 27 – Ever wonder which television show the stars prefer?
United Press conducted a poll among motion picture and TV stars to determine the most popular show and performer on the air. The results were surprising. In few instances did the stars agree with the result of the recent “Emmy” award show. Phil Silvers, winner of three “Emmys,” didn't get a single vote from more than 50 personalities polled.
Many players refused to name a favorite for fear of stepping on the toes of close friends. One studio, MGM, requested its stars not be polled. Television performers were asked to name favorites other than their own shows and co-stars.
Three things stood out in the polling: preference for dramatic shows over comedy, panel or variety programs; wide divergence of favorites; eastern shows over western offerings by more than 10 to 1.
No one show greatly outdistanced the others. For the record, here are the results.
Favorite show—“Studio One.”
Favorite performer—Perry Como.
Bing Crosby, a Como fan, said, “Old Perry can sing for me any time.” Art Linkletter and Gale Storm also were counted in the Como forces.
Bob Hope named Sid Caesar—second in the voting to come—as his favorite, saying, “He is one of the real giants of the industry.” “Emmy” winner Lloyd Nolan also voted for Caesar.
Among those plugging “Studio One” were Lex Barker, Kim Novak, Mickey Rooney, Julie Adams, George Nader. Runner-up for favorite show was “U.S. Steel Hour” with such devotees as Eve Arden, Bob Sterling, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz.

George Gobel cast his vote for Martin and Lewis. Jerry and Dean, in turn, said they spend their TV time watching all comedy shows. Jerry speaking: “We watch everything. A comic has to know what’s going on in order to keep his material fresh.”
Sports fans include William Bendix, Gobel, Bill Holden, Jimmy Durante, Gordon MacRae, Aldo Ray and Cleo Moore. Said Cleo, "some of the greatest comedy can be seen in wrestling matches. I've picked up lots of acting tricks from those characters.”
Ann Sothern is a “Lucy” fan. Jack Benny voted for Burns and Allen. Johnny Carson voted for Benny. Tab Hunter and Bob Crosby picked Jackie Gleason.
Robert Ryan and Errol Flynn cast their votes for Groucho Marx. Ginger Rogers picked “This Is Your Life,” and Edgar Bergen chose “The $64,000 Question.”
But the shows that turned up most often were: “Omnibus,” “Goodyear Playhouse,” “Robert Montgomery Presents,” “See It Now,” “Kraft Theatre.
Favorite among panel offerings was “What’s My Line.”

Barney's In The Army Now

Barney Bear spent his entire career in cartoons getting put upon. In “The Rookie Bear” (1941), Barney’s name comes up in the military draft and he thinks he’s going on a holiday when he’s actually been inducted into the U.S. Army (it’s all a dream, with Rudy Ising’s writer providing a twist at the end).

Barney looks around his new tourist digs and backs into a mounted machine gun, which he sets off by accident. Here are some of the drawings. They’re used several times in the scene.



Barney stumbles away and into the next disaster when mortar cannon go off.



The cartoon only bears Ising’s credit, so we’ll leave it to the experts to say who worked on it (note Mark Kausler’s comment about this scene). I understand the narrator is Gayne Whitman, who did narration work for RKO on some military shorts when the war really got going. He also wrote and narrated the Popular Science shorts for Paramount in the late ‘30s. I’ll happily be corrected on that.

An Early Elmer Fudd Loss

Bugs Bunny wasn’t exactly wild in “A Wild Hare” but his personality is fully-formed in the cartoon and set the pattern for all that followed.

Bugs got awfully chatty in the 1950s—no doubt because writers like Warren Foster and Mike Maltese could come up with clever dialogue—but in this cartoon, Bugs doesn’t speak for a good couple of minutes as director Tex Avery lets subtle movement drive the humour.

A good example is at the opening of the cartoon where Bugs’ fingers behave like humans in swiping Elmer Fudd’s carrot bait and then discover his hunting rifle. The next sequence has no dialogue, either, as the unseen Bugs and Elmer play tug-of-war with the gun. Bugs lets go of the gun. Notice how Elmer almost tumbles over backward, losing his balance. Warners animation had come a long way since Buddy five years earlier.



Elmer realises his gun has been tied up in a bow. The take isn’t as crazy as Avery’s bug-eyed wolf at MGM a couple of years later, but it’s still effective.



You can see the annoyance in Elmer.



He tosses away the gun and it’s on to the next gag.

Virgil Ross, Sid Sutherland and Bob McKimson are among the animators in this great cartoon; Ross was the only one to get screen credit.

Not Really 10 Years of Benny

There seems to have been a problem when it came to Jack Benny and adding years. Jack claimed to be 39 long after he had passed that age. And he celebrated his tenth year in radio before it happened.

Somehow or another, the start of his tenth season in 1941 morphed into ten complete years for publicity purposes. NBC celebrated it by throwing him a huge dinner (part of which was broadcast in a special programme), while Variety devoted part of its April 30, 1941 issue to Jack. It wasn’t altogether altruistic; it sold space for congratulatory ads.

Here are a bunch of articles dealing with his life and career, with some one-liner tributes as well. And I’ve included some of the full-page ads. Jack had done several shows with the Quiz Kids around this time, hence the reference. And whoever paid for Rochester’s ad (he had his own quarter-page) seems to think he talked like Amos ‘n’ Andy.

For Benny It Was Big Time Or Nothing; He Wasn't for Coalminers
By ROBERT J. LANDRY
In 1910 Jack Benny was a theatre usher in Waukegan, Ill.
During the war he was in the U. S. Navy.
Somewhere along the early path he seriously played the fiddle in a dance orchestra.
In 1918 there was a two-act, Benny and Woods, which seems to be lost in the debris of theatrical records.
By 1921 Benny was doing a single, breaking in at Procter's 5th Avenue.
From 1921 onward his career was steadily progressive, spreading outward from vaudeville to include Broadway musicals, films and, finally, radio.
His previous obscurity, the lack of identification prior to the sudden click In vaudeville, gave rise to the legend that Benny was never on the small time but sprang, full-born like a Greek god from Olympus, to strut on the big time.
'THROW-AWAY DELIVERY'
Actually, there is grounds for the legend. For in substance and style Benny was 'big time or nothing.'
His style was subdued, his delivery one of the first examples of modern 'throw-away,' He was poised, unhurried, seemingly effortless.
From the earliest days he was also an 'afterpiece' comedian. One of his earliest exploits was appearing in the lineup of a group of Arabian tumblers, hiding his identify altogether in costume but gradually working into a laugh routine.
Old time lovers of vaudeville remember with nostalgia the week Nora Bayes was on the bill with Benny at the Palace. The by-play when Benny stepped into Miss Bayes' act was of a smartness seldom encountered today. The pair were virtuosi of vaudeville crossfire.
Thomas J. Fitzpatrick, then and now a vaudeville agent, handled Benny for years. Significantly Fitzpatrick also handled Burns and Allen, Barry and Whitledge and other slick acts of the day.
Benny was preeminently a holdover act. He stayed weeks at a time at the Palace, New York, or the Orpheum, Los Angeles.
It is doubtful if Benny's vaudeville routines were ever written down into formal scripts. He was not an ad libber, in the general sense. He prepared his stuff ahead but changed it frequently, infused it with topical allusions.
But he sounded ad lib. That was one clue to his artistry as a vaudevillian.
He was what used to be known as a natty dresser. His only props were a cigar which he didn't smoke and a fiddle which he didn't play.
He was not a night club performer, although he did do a spell at the old Little Club. During the gin-gargling era of prohibition he demanded too much attention and quiet. The dives patronized by the bon ton of the twenties weren't big timey enough for Benny.
Benny could play the Joliets and the Sioux Citys and adapt himself but there were levels that were definitely not for him. Once he appeared before an audience of coalminers. They gaped and Benny gulped.
Benny was in George S. Kaufman's 'Bring on the Girls' which brought on the moving men in three weeks.
His early broadcasts for Canada Dry weren't marked off as the greatest event in that company's history. He was also-ran for that honor with 'Information, Please' (years later).
CANCELLED BY DETROITER
A Detroit motor nabob gained a sort of oblique fame in the early thirties by dropping Benny on the grounds he wasn't funny.
Benny represents himself on the air as a tightwad. In four and a half years he paid one gag-writer, Harry W. Conn, $170,000.
Benny used to drop in for coffee at the old Wolpin's in Times Square.
His favorite waitress was an old-timer, May Stewart, who knew every actor, agent and booker in the Keith office. Years after Wolpin's demise Benny with his agent, Sam Lyons, went into another restaurant, looked up, saw May. Still rushing java. Under the cup when he left the restaurant May found a $10 bill.
Both Paramount and Fox contracted for the comedian not long ago, an unusual situation for Hollywood.
Benny has used several changes of radio writers. But Bill Morrow and Eddie Beloin have been with him for five years.
General Foods (Jell-O) has negotiated a series of unique contracts with him. The latest carries him into 1942 and assures him, as an actor, that his prize time spot, Sunday, 7 p.m., on the Red, goes with him to his next sponsor.
Benny is, like all good troupers, very audience-conscious. He never rehearses his air routines in front of Phil Harris musicians. They are part of his audience, too. And he likes to see them laugh.
That's part of the reason he doesn't like re-broadcasts. The freshness is partly gone, the lassitude of familiarity may set in. (Vaudeville actors always loathed audiences, especially kids, that sat around through more than one show.)
Down front at the Hollywood studio when Benny goes on the air every Sunday night are such regulars as Mary Livingstone's sister, Benny's lawyer and his brother-in-law, Myrt Blum.
POUNDING PACE
Benny's radio tempo has always been the fastest in the comedy race and only Bob Hope in the last couple of seasons has attempted anything like the same pounding pace.
Benny married outside the profession but ultimately eased his wife into the act. The outsider, Mary Livingstone, began surprising vaudeville old-timers and then radio with the expert timing of lines.
Benny exploits running gags to make dozens of laughs sprout from one root. A recent example revolving around a pet bear is 'where is the gas man?' It sounds anything but funny but all America convulses. On another occasion he used the plaintive complaint, ‘I told you to phone the little woman.’
The Benny formula established situational comedy on the air. ‘Joke-tellers’ were corn when the Benny formula began to flower.
INFUSES NOVELTIES
Periodic infusion of new showmanship elements keeps the Benny program from lagging. Perhaps his greatest program developments of recent seasons were (1) the pseudo-feud with Fred Allen, (2) the discovery and embellishment of the flip Negro butler-stooge Rochester (Eddie Anderson) and (3) the current exchange with Lou Cowan's Quiz Kids of Chicago and Alka-Seltzer.
On May 9 in Hollywood at the Biltmore Bowl 1,000 celebrities will salute Benny's 10th year (beginning) in radio. Clarence Francis of General Foods, Chet LaRoche of Y. & R., and Niles Trammell of NBC will toast the comedian.
Amos ‘n’ Andy were the symbol par excellence of radio's starting-down-the-boulevard period. The blackface pair achieved radio's first big, class line-jumping audience. It is the distinction of Benny that he has been the comedy king, the giggle-master of the great years of fabulous expansion that took radio from the startling omens of 1930-33 to the astonishments of these latter years.
Along the way Benny, the next-to-closer of the Palace, became, thanks to radio, one of the great personalities of his era.




$3,478,492 FOR BENNY TIME
Jack Benny got $1,500 per broadcast for his first radio sponsored series (Canada Dry, 1932). Today General Foods on behalf of its Jell-O product pays Benny $17,500 a week. Out of both figures, the smaller and the larger and 10 years apart, Benny paid for the writers, the supporting cast, the stooges, etc. Benny was among the first of the 'package shows' which are bought by advertising agencies and sponsors because of their self-starting, self-driving showmanship. Benny and his aides are first of all a producing unit.
Estimates are hazardous on Benny's personal earnings over the 10-year period since the radio build-up assured him his niche in pictures (see Arthur Ungar's account of the many false beginnings of that career from 1929 onward). Benny may have made less and had a lot more expenses than, say, Major Bowes so far as radio was concerned. But his film duties have now become a lush source of income.
Jack Benny is, of course, one of the actor-millionaires of his generation. (He did well in vaudeville, jumping up from $150 around 1921 when he first became a single to around $1,250 as a next-to-closer.)
In the following table, prepared by VARIETY'S Information and Research Service, summer replacement program costs (he was NBC except for 1932-1933) have been subtracted from the annual totals (wherever necessary), so that the dollar volume actually applies only to the Benny show in person.
1932....Canada Dry $133,968
1932....Canada Dry 71,838
1933....Canada Dry 32,568
1933....Chevrolet 211,252
1934....Chevrolet 111,053
1934....Gen. Tire 203,314
1934....Jell-O 90,266
1935....Jell-O 373,091
1938....Jell-O 205,296
1936....Jell-O 122,328
1937....Jell-O 401,095
1938....Jell-O 509,191
1989....Jell-O 518,355
1940....Jell-O 494,859
T o t a l . . . . $3,478,492



Films Had Hard Time Deciding That Jack Benny Was Boxoffice
By ARTHUR UNGAR
Hollywood, April 29.
Waukegan's ‘first ranking citizen,’ Jack Benny, came to filmdom's starring circles the hard way. Benny came to pics from vaude. Metro used him as a master of ceremonies in the ‘Hollywood Revue of 1929.’ He was no b.o. cyclone. He had plenty of top-seasoned film names surrounding him in the east. His main job was through a trick camera shot pulling Bessie Love out of his pocket. It did not help Jack in the cinema belt. He was new to the biz. His smart quips and wisecracks were not in line with film requirements, the tops thought. So he went back to vaude.
In 1930 Metro tried him again in 'Chasing Rainbows.' Charlie King, Bessie Love and Marie Dressler were the names. Benny was brushed off In a VARIETY review:
Jack Benny was a humorously dry stage manager. Poor Jack, though a good lookin' guy and a shrewd showman, was handicapped. He was not a young Lothario, and therefore was just a sustainer of audience interest so far as the pic was concerned. He worked in a couple of shorts, that meant nothing much, nor did a job he did for Tiffany in the summer of 1930 in 'The Medicine Man.'
Hollywood just had a lapse of memory so far as Jack and his talents were concerned. They saw no reason for figuring out how this showman would fit into the cinema picture, so Jack again headed east.
Then radio via the Canada Dry Program discovered him. He got around $1,500 a week for the chore and paid his writers out of it and probably took care of the Mary Livingstone coin, too.
JUST IN THE CAST
Later he hit around Hollywood again and did some Vitaphone shorts, also a pic 'Mr. Broadway" in 1933 for Broad way-Hollywood production. That one featured Eddie Sullivan, Johnnie Walker and Josephine Dunn. Walker directed it. He had a lot of screen and vaude names and our hero was just mentioned with Mary Livingstone as among those in the cast.
Along came Edward Small in 1934 and gave Jack an m.c. job in 'Trans-Atlantic Merry-Go-Round.' Pic was not much, but Jack got an okay notice for his toil.
Then gradually Benny became more popular on the radio. Metro having a ‘Broadway Melody of 1936’ to make figured Benny now had a little draught through his radio and cast him in this picture. With his value potent Benny topped the featured cast. In it he played the role of a columnist and with dramatics entwined in his role he took a couple of socks on the button from a young guy named Robert Taylor. In its notice on Benny's performance VARIETY said:
'Benny's usually decisive delivery is punchy, but it might be a good idea to give him an assignment which won't let him wind up with an apple and a morning paper for the finale.'
So Benny still had not arrived as far as films were concerned. He was just being used to draw them in as a result of his radio rep which was becoming more and more important. However, Metro knowing it had a good thing in that direction tried him again. He was a star this time in an opus called 'It's in the Air,' made late in 1935. Cast support was none too strong. Neither was the picture. It had plenty of laughs, but it was too slow to get anywhere in the coin taking belt.
PARAMOUNT SIGNS HIM
Along came 1936 and Paramount, too. They saw that Benny really meant something. That in meaning something, something must be done in preparing material for Benny that meant something. Studio got close to Benny. It knew that he was a showman, and that a showman knows how to sell himself as well as the merchandise he has to deliver. First chore to prove the fact that the guy from radio meant something was in making ‘Big Broadcast of 1937,’ which was released in October, 1936.
This was a sock picture. It had in the cast with Benny, George Bums, Gracie Allen, Bob Burns, Martha Raye and a lot of sure-fire talent. Paramount then knew it was right, the Benny method of thinking was right, also the Benny box-office value, too, as by this time he was the No. 1 guy in radio. It followed through with another Benny hit on top of this one, ‘College Holiday’ being released just around the Xmas holidays of 1936, and then with a one-a-year until the present time.
NOT GREEN-EYED
Benny throughout his entire film career never was jealous of anyone or his ability. He always figured showmanship and consequently managed to develop talent both on radio and in films that was helpful to him in both branches of the biz. Phil Harris, who was his orchestra leader, became an important cog through the Benny buildup and got into pictures as well, and is now reaching the point where he will top the cast of an ‘Ice Follies’ picture for RKO. Then Eddie Anderson (Rochester), who was one of the Fanchon & Marco unit standby's, also appeared on the scene with Benny. He hit instantaneously in both films and radio. Don Wilson, who was an Earle C. Anthony announcer around here at $75 a week, got into the Benny camp. He was given his chance, has been a featured player in Harry Sherman pictures that Paramount now releases, and is even desirous of spreading his acting historionics [sic] to more film work.
Those seven pictures that Benny has made for Paramount since 1936 have been both helpful to Benny and those who worked with him as well as the coffers of the company.
His last Paramount release brought Fred Allen to play opposite him in 'Love Thy Neighbor,' after a long radio 'feud' between the two. And Allen, too, thought Benny was great, compared with comics and others he had chored with in pictures. Result, Allen was the guy who sponsored the present Jack Benny 10th Anniversary in VARIETY. And that's the story of Jack Benny to date, outside of the job he starts at 20th Century-Fox May 14 in "Charley's Aunt,' and then another chore for Warners.
It took radio to make Benny important in pics, and films should be mast grateful for Benny.



Bill Morrow and Ed Beloin Admit Benny Is Useful
By JACK HELLMAN
Hollywood, April 29, Gags are where you find them, And who should know better than Bill Morrow and Ed Beloin, who have been dreaming them up for years for Jack Benny and his Jell-O cohorts.
But where to look for them is still the moot question. They've tried every corner of the continent sailed the blue Pacific and hied away to odd places in quest of the elusive spark to touch off a comedy situation or a running gag.
The frightening bugaboo is staleness and milked-dry locale. When inspiration doesn't come they start looking around. Close-by Palm Springs seems to be a favorite haunt with the gagsters and with the head man along ideas seem to come easier and they can whip out a script in good sitting whereas three or four days are required to keep the repartee flowing smoothly.
Ask the team where they have the best success and they'll let go with a gag, but not the answer.
‘If we knew that,’ puts in Beloin (he's the one with hair on his turret), ‘our worries would be over.
Why we'd just go there and that's all there would be to it. No headaches, no fears of ulcers, no more corrugations in the brow.’
The boys will admit, however, that Palm Springs holds some attraction for them. There's only one attraction for a gag writer, and that's where the gags come as fast as the beads of perspiration. Whether it's the cacti, the balmy air or the remoteness from civilization, so-called, they know not.
If They Only Knew
‘If we knew then our worries would be over,’ sighs Morrow. ‘Hey, that's my line,’ interrupts Beloin.
‘Yeh, but ain't we a team?’ and that puts that ripple to rout.
Truth be told, they're probably the non-scrappingest writing team in the biz. That from those who know them well. They're the highest salaried combo spinning gags on the air and it's their smooth-working teamwork that has helped produce such astonishing results.
It's really a triumvirate that whips up those chuckles, week in and week out (with 13 off for the summer). Headman Benny, his writers admit, is sort of useful. ‘He can spot a gag a mile away and make a spot piece of biz run on and on,’ chirped Morrow, ‘One of us picks a piece of funny business out of the cold air and once it's warmed over by Jack it's ready to go into the script And it's generally a sock. He can call the turn on them as fast as we dream them up.’
One might say that 10 years on the air must have taught him what the public likes and what rolls around like an egg. That's no more so than trying to name a few others, on the air much longer, who're still trying to woo that winning formula. Benny captured it almost from the start.
Gag-writing, Morrow and Beloin will tell you, is serious business. It's an occupation like digging ditches or packing apples. When mental inertia sets in that's when it realty puts one back on his heels.
‘When putting those gags together comes hard and your head is spinning, that's when we know we're in a tough racket,’ sez Morrow. Benny knows it as well as they, and that's when one reads that the trio has packed up for Palm Springs, or New York, or Honolulu.

Tributes, Hollywood Style, Poured Out and on Fellow Radio Artiste
Hollywood, April 29.
John Barrymore — 'Jack Benny should have the luck with his writers that I've had with my wives. Egad, he'd still be playing 'The Bee' on Waukegan street corners for the Salvation Army.'
Bob Burns—'Ten years! Why I used to break in my act in two weeks'.
Frank Morgan—'There are comedians in the radio business who won't let making less money and rating lower in the Crossley stand in the way of their congratulating Jack Benny on the 10 years he's managed to stay on top. We've learned to take our Angostura bitters with the sweet.'
Irene Rich—'Has it been 10 years? What did he do before Rochester?'
Jim Jordan (Fibber McGee)— 'Ten years, hey? With or without a toupee?'
Jerry Colonna—'You could be taking delightful naps every afternoon in your own clothing store in Waukegan now, but you had to go and open your big mouth. Now you'll probably have to stay in radio 10 years more. Disgusting, isn't it?'
Bob Hope — "Congratulate Jack Benny? Certainly. He deserves it After 10 years in radio he's still got his stomach.'
Bing Crosby—'Any comedian who can stay on the radio for a decade without alluding disparagingly to my horses deserves the world's greatest tribute.'
Rudy Vallee—'What other man could make us eat Jell-O and like it? What other man could have a bear eat a gas man and make us think it's just good clean fun? What other man could be so funny with only Rochester. Andy Devine, Mary Livingstone, Phil Harris, Don Wilson, Dennis Day and the best gag writers in the business to help him? The Sealtest cast salutes Jack Benny.'
Fanny (Baby Snooks) Brice—'Congratulate Jack Benny? Why, daddy?'
Al Pearce—'Happy days, supersalesman, and no returns, I hope, I hope, I hope.'
Amos ‘n’ Andy—'After blowing out candles on nine other birthday cakes you ought to know enough not to get too close. Hair will stand only so much singe. Good luck.'
Hedda Hopper—'It took him 10 years to work up to being a Quiz Kid.'
Edgar Bergen—'Ten years! He should have gotten life.'

Pinto the Sound Effects Man

The 1930s and ‘40s may have been the Golden Age of Sound Effects.

Radio networks had specialised and very inventive technicians who concocted just about all the effects live while a programme was underway, employing all kinds of things and making them sound like something else; crinkling cellophane to simulate a small fire, for example.

And animation studios of the same era had their sound effects geniuses as well, personally creating odd noises to fit whatever was appearing on the big screen. Treg Brown at Warner Bros. may be the best known. But there was another craftsman of noise in the business who is known better for something else.

Pinto Colvig was, for a period in the ‘30s, the one-man sound effect department for Walt Disney. You know him best as the man who voiced Goofy. Colvig had quite an amazing career, before and after animation. His name appears in the credits of the earliest Walter Lantz cartoons; Colvig could draw and he could write a story. He ended up at Disney before jumping on September 30, 1937 to Fred Quimby’s new MGM studio to come up with gags and sound effects. He didn’t last long. In June 1938, he was hired to do the same thing in the Warners cartoons, then bolted to Miami the following year where he was employed by the Fleischers on the Gulliver’s Travels feature. In the early ‘40s, he was back in Hollywood employed both at Disney and MGM before being tabbed as a kids show host on TV and the voice of Bozo on Capitol Records, all before 1950. (The photo to the right comes from this site).

Here’s a neat little piece on Pinto by Frank Daugherty, published in the Christian Science Monitor on November 7, 1937. It also touches a bit on the MGM cartoon studio, outlining how animated cartoons were made. Sorry the photocopies of the photos are so poor.

Pinto Colvig and His Trade Are Odd Even for Hollywood
Special to The Christian Science Monitor
Hollywood, Calif.
Pinto Colvig, and Pinto’s trade, are two of the most curious things Hollywood has ever produced. The tools of Mr. Colvig’s trade consist of two old pie tins, a hand vacuum cleaner, two water buckets, two laundry plungers, a battered old clarinet and a battered old set of drums, some 50 or 60 other miscellaneous musical instruments, including a jew’s harp, hand organ and ocarina, and an array of penny whistles that might make a unit for a museum.
But first, an introduction to Pinto. He began on the vaudeville stage, was graduated to cartooning, went with a circus, and landed in films when he made one of the earliest animated cartoons, “Pinto’s Prisma Comedies.” He gave up drawing cartoons, however, when he discovered his greater value to them. Without much effort, and without any outside aid, Pinto could—and did—imitate practically any natural sound and give it an added fillip that made it immediately and irresistibly funny.

He has moved over now to the Metro studios to work on the new cartoon there, “The Captain and the Kids,” from the famous comic strip, which this company will shortly release; but he was for years with Disney, and was the originator and operator of all sounds made by that third little pig in the saga of that triumvirate.
He can imitate a fish, in or out of water, a fly, a beetle, a frog, a bird, a wagon wheel, an old motor or almost anything else you can name that emits sound. Of course, like all artists, he strives to avoid direct imitation and achieve something approximating and interpretation, and it is just in this process that the fun emerges, and audiences just “naturally” laugh.
Makes Sounds First
His job now has progressed to the point where he doesn’t have to look at the drawings of the animators first to determine what sort of sounds he is going to make. He makes his sounds first now, and the animators do their best to draw something to fit them. But there was a time, of course, when the longer, harder method had to be employed.
He remembers he most difficult imitation as that of a very small bug which was to be ground under an auto tire in one of Disney’s cartoons. The bug was not to like the procedure, and was to protest with a loud bug noise. Pinto tried for days to create that bug’s noise, but without success. Then one day, having all but given up hope, he heard one of his five children making a peculiar noise with a little paper whistle, and realized in a flash that he had his noise. The paper whistle had been obtained in a package of confections, so Pinto bought up a number of boxes of the stuff, but found no whistles. He wrote to the factory—he doesn’t say, but there is a suspicion here that he hadn’t been very successful in his attempts to get the whistle from the child—and the president’s secretary wrote back to say that the whistles weren’t being made any more. She had, however, after searching the whole plant, discovered three of them in the advertising manager’s desk, and she sent them along. Today, they are Pinto’s most prized possessions.
Pinto writes his score in over the regular staffs for the musical score on all cartoons. Over a prettily sentimental bit of music, for example, he may indicate the need for a “kazoo grunt and a dull thud flam,” or a “wet plop,” or for just a “lightly squash and hit iron thud.” These words don’t mean anything to anyone else, but they are Pinto’s language for his sounds.
He is, incidentally, only one of quite a number of people who earn comfortable livings making sounds for animated cartoons. They are Commedia dell’ Arte behind the scenes, hidden pagliacci whose laughs and tears and other curious sounds are clothed in little moving drawings on the screen.

Metro’s Cartoon Plant
The new cartoon plant at Metro, of which Pinto is only a unit, is not uninteresting on its own account. Here labor some 200 people of various trades and arts whose only object is to give pleasure. “Writers” draw their “story” on some 50 or 60 squares of paper, under the supervision of a “director,” who knows both drawing and dramatic and comic story values. Once the story is approved, it is given to the animators, who draw key figures and their key positions, then pass their drawings to “in-between” men, who draw in all the action on many additional squares of paper. Girls ink these drawings on celluloid, and paint the backs of the celluloids with opaque paints.
When all this has been completed, the celluloids are given to the cameraman, who painstakingly shoots them one at a time. If each celluloid were photographed once, it would take 25,000 to 45,000 drawings to make a 700-foot picture. But as many of them are used several times over, in different “repeat” combinations, it usually takes a mere 10,000 to 15,000 for a reel of picture.

We mentioned network radio at the top of this post. Pinto Colvig’s career intersected with that as well. He played Jack Benny’s Maxwell before Mel Blanc. Read about it in this post.

Pinto was born 124 years ago tomorrow, so this is a good day to look back at a small portion of his career and his esoteric artistry.

Happy Wieners

Everything sings and dances in cartoons of the early 1930s. At least it seems that way.

In the Krazy Kat cartoon “Weenie Roast” (1931), Krazy and his girl-friend are on the beach, la-la-la-ing to “By the Sea.” Their weenie-roasting fire gets into the act. So do the weenies. The fire even jumps rope over the wieners.



There’s a Fleischer-like gag where the fire’s umbrella sprouts an umbrella of its own to protect it from the waves.



Later in the cartoon, we see happy, dancing starfish.

Eventually, cartoon characters had to do more than sing and dance but most studios didn’t seem to know what they should do instead. The Warners, Lantz and Columbia cartoons hit a real lull by the mid-‘30s. It took a few more years for boisterous new characters to show up to put life back into cartoons, though without any dancing wieners.