Mohawk Moose

Tex Avery’s sense of humour and sharp timing shine through in that great Western cartoon Homesteader Droopy.

Here’s a great little sequence where many of the gags are familiar but Avery strings them together perfectly. It starts with a gun battle between the cattle baron wolf and Droopy. The bullets from Droopy’s gun shave the wolf’s hair into a Mohawk.



The wolf retaliates but misses Droopy. Instead, his bullets give a Mohawk to a moose head on Droopy’s cabin wall.



Avery holds the shot of the moose. He waits just long enough to surprise his audience by having the moose demonstrate he’s alive. The timing couldn’t be better.



The moose gallops off, seeking revenge.



The wolf reacts. Avery makes the reaction more effective by moving the cel of the wolf around the background for a bunch of frames.



The wolf tries to escape. Avery surprises us again. Not only does the wolf not go into the barn, he folds up the doors like a piece of paper after the moose runs inside.



A great satisfied look.



Before the audience has a chance to think, the doors unfold and the moose emerges like he’s coming up from a cellar. He and/or his layout artist (Ed Benedict perhaps) give the moose a great pissed off look.



We all know what’s going to happen next, so Avery gets laughs by pausing on the pose of the mangled moose antlers.



The moose, having done his animated duty, disappears from the cartoon as the wolf flies into the next gag sequence.



Bob Bentley joins Grant Simmons, Mike Lah and Walt Clinton in animating this cartoon.

Golfing With a Cat

Let’s see. In The Invisible Mouse (1947), Tom hurts Jerry by clobbering him with a book. That’s it. Jerry hurts Tom by, well, all kinds of ways. Most of them happen because the home they live in happens to have a chemical set resting on a countertop (doesn’t every home?) that Jerry uses to turn himself invisible.

The cartoon has a series of golf club gags at the end. The invisible mouse bashes Tom in the you-know-where (Joe Barbera loved butt-hurt gags), then crunks a bulldog on the head, who grabs the club and takes it from there.



The cartoon ends with Jerry becoming visible again by drinking chocolate milk.



I don’t know where Ken Muse was, but he’s not credited on this cartoon. Ed Barge and Irv Spence are, along with Bick Bickenbach and Don Patterson, Ray’s brother.

Here's Morgan

Henry Morgan loved insulting radio advertising. Especially his sponsor’s advertising. He scoffed at anything that slightly smelled of an outrageous or silly claim. And audiences loved it.

There were actually three Henry Morgans. The first one had a 15-minute radio show that consisted of him grumbling about assorted subjects in an almost stream-of-conscious way; he was guided by his own scribbles about what he noticed that day. Then he graduated into full variety show mode, with stooges, an orchestra and an announcer, where he could aim his displeasure through dialogues and sketches. And then there was the TV panellist Morgan who occasionally looked happy to be there. But the satire was gone, replaced with a kind of lack of interest.

Here’s a profile of Morgan from the New York-based radio magazine, Tune In. It was published in the August 1946 issue, before Morgan was signed for his variety series on ABC that began in September for Eversharp. He was still doing musings and quasi-editorals at the time over the ABC flagship, WJZ, where he landed after leaving Mutual the previous year. If you’ve never heard Morgan’s shows—and you should take a listen to them—this gives you an idea of his jaded sense of humour.

Here’s Morgan
RADIO'S BAD BOY MAKES SPONSOR-SPOOFING COMMERCIALS PAY OFF
By GORDON D. BUSHELL
HISTORY three times has known the name of Morgan—Morgan the pirate, Morgan the financier, Morgan the sponsor-baiter. The pirate and the financier are of yesterday. Today's Morgan is in 100,000 ears, poking 100,000 ribs and sending cash over 100,000 counters.
For Morgan's faithful listening audience, 6:45 p. m. EST, is the most refreshing radio-time of the day. Before Morgan went to war, his program was on at 5:45. Now he has a better spot, when most families are at their evening meal.
Probably the most popular lines Morgan's broadcasts are those in which he ribs his sponsors. He is a pleasant relief from the usual commercial harangue to hear Morgan make light of his products and gibe at his sponsors. People enjoy the unusual in his humor and gasp at his daring.
For example, he played a commercial recording for a wine company. During the playing he kept up an uncomplimentary commentary. At the conclusion he asked, "Now where do they expect to get with that? It might sell one bottle—in forty years, Why don't they let me do it my way? But no, some agency sold them that, so they think it's good."
Morgan's system is very effective. His commercials are never tuned out. They're too funny to be missed. They come in unexpectedly. They are never long. They do their job because they get the product into the consciousness of the listener by tickling his funnybone. There's good will for Morgan's products because of Morgan's wit.

People buy what he sells even if they don't need it. One New Jersey man, after listening to Morgan's program for a week, went out and bought eighteen of Morgan-advertised razor blades, this though he uses an electric razor. His wife, a dignified middle-aged woman, has become a confirmed after meal gum chewer, During last year's basketball season, an average height player asked in a shoe store if Morgan's "Old Man" Adler sold elevator gym shoes.
Though Morgan is tremendously popular with his listeners, he is in constant trouble with his sponsors, naturally. They vacillate between fear of what his gibes may do to sales and knowledge of what they've done in the past. They resent his occasionally almost forgetting to mention a product he's paid to discuss for one minute. Some quit him. Some quit and return. Adler shoes quit twice. Now they are a Morgan steady—and there are no more complaints.
Morgan used to listen to sponsor's complaints, then go right on in his own way—now he doesn't even listen. He has devised a fool-proof system of avoiding angry sponsors. He moved, keeping his new address and phone number a secret. The only way a sponsor can get a message to Morgan is to call their agency, which in turn calls the network, which in turn calls the only person who knows Morgan's number.
She then calls Morgan, if the complaint hasn't died out, and relates the sad story to his unsympathetic ear.
Morgan has his own philosophy about radio commercials. "What do people care about where and how a product is made?" he asks, "They just want to know if its good. My stuff is good, so I tell them that—that's all." Morgan continues, "The trouble with the average sponsor is that he is just average, I know more about radio advertising than the guys in the business." The fact that Morgan's line was taken on, copied by other announcers during his absence in the army proves that there are those who agree that his style is effective.

Complaints about Morgan, who is known as radio's bad boy, also comes from another quarter—the network officials. Morgan takes them collectively and individually over the coals on the air—next day reports their protests to the public. His remarks about public characters or American institutions bring floods of boiling letters to harassed officials, often threatening suit. Angry listeners, never able to locate Morgan, barge in and berate officials.
Morgan does not bring on these complaints intentionally or out of sheer perversity—he's just himself, unpredictable. His humor is not restricted to the commercials. From the moment he comes on the air, the zany is in order. He may introduce his program by blowing into the mike, or by announcing a campaign which he is backing—"Equality Week—a week when men must be considered equal to women." He urges women during this week to remove their hats in elevators, to offer cigarettes to men, to give up their seats to men in subways, to blame all auto accidents on men drivers.
Inane records have an important place on "Here's Morgan." They are played at any point in the program for no reason at all. He has the most unique collection of records in the world, and he conducts a never ending search for new ones. But, he never plays a record through because whole records bore him.
It is not unusual for fans to send him crazy records. Recently he received an Arabic record from a G.I. who heard he was back on the air. Morgan, himself, doesn't know what this one is all about. "It might be a couple of foreigners swearing at each other for all I know," he says.
Morgan has originated a hundred different days, weeks, towns, products and schools. On one program he introduced "Unknown Mother of Her Country Day"—the day they take nylons and make coal out of them. He is the discoverer of the town of More. "There are only two housewives in that town so when you see an advertisement that says 'More housewives recommend—,' you know it's these two women who live in More, Nebraska."

Morgan started a school for doctors who don't practice medicine—they just pose for ads. "Incidentally," says Morgan, "one of my doctors has invented Gonfalon's Enormous Liver Pills, because he discovered that there are some large livers—they're not all little."
Occasionally Morgan entitles his program "Time Marches Sideways." That night is devoted to reading and "analyzing" newspaper clippings which completely contradict each other. He also has "political night" and "Children's Advisory Service" night. Once Morgan told all frustrated children to bang their heads against the wall.
One night as Morgan read fan mail, a P.S. on a fan letter said "Please excuse pencil, but they don't allow any sharp instruments around here." A few months later (Morgan's always late with mail) he wrote back "Please excuse typewriter, I just ran out of blood."
Another time a listener sent in a petition to Morgan asking him to have it signed by all the people he knew in order to have Avenue of the Americas changed back to 6th Avenue. Over the air Morgan explained, "I dragged your petition to various saloons around town and everybody I talked to said "Oh, for Pete's sake! Then we'd have another beer. Well, you know how it is."
Henry Morgan is not strictly a gag man; a fact which causes his employers to have graying hair. It is not unusual for him to discuss some very ticklish subject. Officials tell him to layoff, but Morgan is seriously concerned about current happenings, so occasionally he sneaks a little philosophy into his humor.
He attacks the army for commissioning incompetent men, he urges that Brotherhood Week be a year-around enterprise, he suggests that people try to understand Russia and work toward international cooperation. This last has lost him some listeners—people immediately accused him of being a communist. "Today you're either a communist or a fascist," sighs Morgan. But he shrugs it off and goes on advocating what he believes is right. While he discusses the 10-cent subway fare and labor problems, his mail proves that his audience listens to his humorous philosophy.
Henry Morgan was born in New York City in 1915 of mixed parentage—man and woman. His radio career started at 17 when he was hired as a pageboy by WMCA at $8 a week. In a few months he applied for a job as announcer. "Much to my surprise they hired me." At seventeen and a half he became the youngest announcer in radio. He received $18 a week.
Shortly, he was engaged as a network newscaster, but was fired within five weeks because he could never reach a broadcast on time. From then on Morgan covered many radio jobs in many cities. His innate humor, his free lancing at the mike drew the attention of New York officials who decided to try his line out at nothing a week on part of Superman's time. Morgan had three nights and Superman had three nights a week. "Imagine me with that big lug" he groans. When Superman moved to an earlier hour Morgan took over the full six nights, acquired sponsors, and began to draw money—$100 a week. At this point, war and the army broke in.
"Here's Morgan" returned to the air less than a year ago, after over two years' absence. Currently on the air five nights a week at 6:45 with two shots on Thursday (the second at 10:30 p.m.), he makes considerably more money than he used to—"not yet a $1000 a week."
Morgan's script, if it can be called that, is written by Morgan about four hours before he goes on the air. It is always two pages in length. Sometimes he finds himself a few minutes short, or a few minutes over his allotted 15 minutes. This always confuses him. "Getting off the air is the toughest thing I have to do. When people ask me how I do it, I answer, I don't know—they think I'm kidding."
Most of Morgan's scripts are merely a series of notes and reminders, but his interviews are carefully written out. Interviews require a good deal of precision and I haven't time to pause to think of questions and answers." So when Morgan interviews Negative Sam, the Realty Man, or the housewife who is worried because her husband does come home early, it's thoroughly rehearsed.

Morgan is often asked where be gets his interviewees and how large a staff of actors he employs. His stock answer is "I have a staff of 20, each of whom gets $100 a week."' Actually he has no staff; does all the voices himself.
Morgan claims that no one except kids will admit to listening to his program. Adults when asked usually pass the buck, "My little boy listens and of course I heard some of what you say." But an examination of Morgan's mail reveals dentists, doctors, lawyers, engineers and business executives as well as kids among his listeners.
When not criticizing or praising, fans ask Morgan what be looks like and "do you act like that off the air?" Some express a desire to see Morgan in television. To this Morgan grimly shakes his head. "I want television the other way 'round. I'd like to see my listeners in action; batting their kids around, chewing gum, or shining their boots with a polish I plug."
Morgan is good looking, of average height and weight, and is abounding in restless energy. He doesn't sit still two minutes consecutively. An intense person, Morgan works hard on his program. He never permits a studio audience. The few times he did allow this, he felt that it hurt his show—he just couldn't let go and be himself.
A meticulous dresser, Morgan goes daily to the Astor barber shop. There he has corralled the only silent barber in the business, John Hindenberger. "He talks German and I don't," says Morgan explaining the blissful barber shop silence. "Furthermore, I like the er on his name. If he ever drops it, I'll quit him."
Morgan has a girl friend, "the ninth most beautiful girl in New York," but she's smart so they argue too much. "That's the trouble with getting married. If they're smart you argue; if they're dumb you can't stand them. I guess I'll I stay a bachelor," he explains.
But this Morgan, Henry Morgan, sponsor baiter, is entrenched in the ears of his listeners—he makes them laugh and he makes them buy. He is a hair raising, nerve wracking, indispensible boon to his sponsors, who have found that there's good will for Morgan's products because of Morgan's wit. So everybody's happy over Henry Morgan—even the sponsors.

From the Mountains To the Desert

The Woody Woodpecker cartoon “Round Trip to Mars” (1957) opens with a couple of transitional backgrounds by Art Landy. With a quick pan, the scene goes from a city to a mountain, and then from a mountain to a desert.

I tried snipping the frame grabs together to give you a panorama, but it won’t work. So here are some of the frames from the second transition.



No layout artist is credited.

Shamus Sighting

Willie Whopper’s Spite Flight borrows a lot from Willie Whopper’s The Air Race (both 1933) . But the premise of the later cartoon revolves around Willie winning an air race to get money to pay Mary’s mortgage.

With the help of a large swarm of bees, Willie wins and vanquishes the villain.



Let’s get a closer look at who signed the mortgage.



Culhane? Hmm. I wonder who that could be.

Well, it’s one way to get your name in a cartoon when it’s not in the credits.

He Worries Before Every Sunday Night

Listening to the calm, even voice of Jack Benny on the radio or TV, you wouldn’t get the impression he worried a lot. But he did. It was fairly well known in Hollywood and written about on occasion in columns.

That’s part of the focus of this article in the September 1941 edition of Modern Screen magazine. Jack made movies on a regular basis in the mid-‘30s and into the ‘40s, so movie magazines covered him. This is one of several feature stories that appeared over the years in Modern Screen. The stock photos accompanied the article.

It's No Fun To Be Funny
By Hugh Roberts
THAT TOP-SALARIED RADIO COMIC JACK BENNY'S A MARTYR TO THE CAUSE OF LAUGHS!
"Look," said Buck Benny, the pride of NBC, "couldn't you change the title a little? Like 'It's No Fun to be Funny Except Once in a While When They Fall for a Gag You Didn't Think Was So Hot or on Sunday After the Show When You Feel Relaxed and Want to Stay Up All Night?' No? Too long, huh? Why don't you use initials?"
Benny's reputed one of the most brilliant worriers in the business, a non-stop nail-chewer, a chronic crosser of remote bridges, the pessimist par excellence. He even worries over the charge of worrying. Unable to refute it, he tries to play it down, as witness his attempt to tamper with our title. Get him cornered, and he'll admit that he worries exactly as much as he ought to worry, no more, no less. "If I didn't," he explains, still on the defensive, "I'd be in the ash can."
There are those who would have you believe that, shorn of the capacity to harass himself, he'd pine away. In proof of which, they offer a story of the days when he formed the fiddling half of a vaudeville team. One morning the phone jangled him out of slumber. His agent was on the line reporting an engagement. Only half awake, Jack heard the name of a town thirty miles away and mumbled okay. At the booking office later, he learned that another state boasted a town of the same name, that it lay some three hundred miles from Broadway, and that he'd committed himself to board a train for the hellhole that night.
He returned to the hotel, packed violin and bag and marched like a herald of doom into the room of his friend, George Burns, where the gang forgathered. There he paced for two hours, biting his digits and the dead end of a cigar, fulminating on the eccentricities of agents who couldn't talk English, city fathers who lacked the wit to invent their own names for their own one-horse burgs, phones that rang or didn't, trains that moved and stopped, jackasses who went into vaudeville for a living. At the end of two hours, Burns picked up violin and suitcase, deposited them in the hall, propelled his friend out by the back of the neck, locked the door and yelled, "Now enjoy yourself."
Legend has it that the last heard from Jack was a plaintive, "All right for you — " floating back through the transom as he trudged trainward.
He says it's a canard. I found him at Twentieth Century-Fox, his head in Kay Francis' lap. Recumbent on a garden bench, the capacious skirts of "Charley's Aunt" fell back from his trousered legs where he'd crossed them. Kay's white hand cradled his gray-ringleted wig. Gorgeous in rosy chiffon, sparklers at ears and throat, she bent to kiss him. One. Two. Three. Cut! She lifted her head. He stayed where he was. "Again?" he suggested. He didn't seem to be worrying.



As a matter of fact, he can take his movies in stride. They hand him a ready-made script. If a scene isn't right, they do it over. Physically wearing, he still considers movie-making a lazy man's dream of paradise compared with the nervous strain of putting on a radio show. For that show he's responsible — to NBC, to Jell-o, to the agency, to his cast, to millions of listeners. It's his baby, his headache and his crown jewel. He's built it into a national institution of six flavors, which he carries on his back. To the world at large he is J-E-L-L-O.
All week long the show goes on in his head. You may think you see him driving his car or swallowing his dinner. Actually his mind is writhing somewhere in gagland. A friend buttonholes him in a parking lot. Jack mutters an absent excuse me, I didn't mean to bump you. Mary's private game is to count how many times she can ask him a question before he hears it. The record to date is thirteen. They were in bed one night, Mary reading, Jack thinking. She closed the book and asked him to turn out the lights. He got up, touched the switch and went back to bed drawing the covers round him. Her wild burst of laughter finally roused him to awareness.
"What's the matter?" he cried in alarm.
"The lights," she could only whimper between spasms. "You went to the switch — and got back into bed — and the lights are FULL ON!"
'Seven days and six nights of the week are haunted, leaving one evening clear. With the termination of the second broadcast on Sunday, Jack's spirits soar, and he wants to stay up all night. First to be sure, there are always post-mortems. "They could have laughed more," he glooms.
"Everybody else liked it," says Mary firmly. "Don't take it so hard."
"We just played to millions of people, that's all," he mutters.
To Jack, nothing short of sensational is good. Mary's approach is more equable. "They can't all be tops." Even if she doesn't persuade him, she calms him, restores his perspective. In that respect — as in others — he thinks she's just the right woman for him to be married to.
On Monday the shadows begin to draw in. Jack and his writers, Bill Morrow and Ed Beloin, have drawn up a brave platform which includes these planks: we won't get into a stew — even if by Thursday we've raised no idea, we won't yell omigod, it's going to be Sunday — what we've done before we can do again, and to hell with defeatists. The sole weakness of this platform lies in the fact that it doesn't work, Jack's the first to topple off. "He gets that look on his face," grins Morrow. "It's the look of a man who averts his shuddering gaze from a bottomless pit marked, 'No show this week.' The fact that there's always been a show brings no comfort. Next Sunday opens wide its gaping maw, and the cupboard's empty."
BUT suppose the boys show with an idea on Monday. If Jack's on a picture, it's Monday night. He got to the studio at eight for make-up and left at six-thirty. He's already done a normal day's work. He's tired. But that's his own lookout. It's not NBC's fault that he's a movie actor, too. His sense of responsibility's razor-sharp. It's up to him to see that neither job suffers by the other. If the time ever comes when he can't handle both by his own standards, he'll fade himself out.

Sometimes Ed and Bill come in with a piece of junk. They may have labored and brought forth a mouse. Or they may not have labored. Jack doesn't say, "That stinks," or "What the hell have you been doing with yourself?" He knows the writer's temperament and the problems of writing — that ideas don't come ready to hand like bricks, that the creative mind works in its own way its wonders to perform and may be active even while it's loafing.
He has, besides, the disposition of a lamb, which he excuses on practical grounds. "If you holler and scream at them," he says, "you put them in a mood where they can't write." Instead of screaming, he says, "Well, I don't know, let's try something else." Instead of hollering, he nibbles his nails — a habit Mary has tried to break by scolding, George Burns by derisive mimicry, manicurists by appeals to his vanity. Jack hangs his head and goes on biting. Or he chews gum. That's a sign that he's reached the end of his rope. When his eyes stare and he stuffs three sticks of gum into his mouth oblivious of what he's doing, Morrow and Beloin reach for their hats, murmur, "We'll fix this up and see you tomorrow," and beat a retreat.
Only once in the five years they've been working together has there been a blow-up, and that was due to a misunderstanding. Jack thought the boys, sore at something he wasn't responsible for, had gone on strike. His wrath stemmed from the pain of friendship betrayed, and whether he or they were more astonished by his tongue-lashing, they still can't decide. It's safe to say, though, that Jack was the ultimate victim. When the thing was cleared up, he wore sackcloth and ashes for weeks.
Once they have a workable idea, it should be smooth sailing. Not with Jack. He may think it's funny, but that doesn't prove the audience will. He may laugh his head off, but he's not paid to make himself laugh. He's a perfectionist aiming to top his last mark. When he doesn't succeed, it's not for want of trying. The man at the dial sits forever on Jack's shoulder. In the final analysis that's the guy he works for — and to make it harder, he makes the guy tough. "He won't say, 'They can't all be firecrackers.' He'll say, 'Did you hear the Benny show last night? Boy, was it foul!'" So Jack sifts and weighs and explores and rejects and tears apart. "You've got to sell back to him again and again," says Morrow, "what he's already accepted and laughed at. That way we get a refining process that's invaluable."
THE revue, "Pins and Needles," included a sketch called "Cream of Mush." A radio tenor sings a song which the agency hacks to pieces in its high resolve to please all comers. The sun can't be "red" because people don't like the word. It can't set in the West, because Easterners might be offended. Like all good travesties, this one holds a germ of truth. Policy apart, Jack's a softie who can't bear to hurt feelings. He keeps his ears peeled for phrases which might wound the susceptibilities of one group or another. When through all his guards something slips in, he dies. One evening he was supposed to be dining his cast. He told them they ate too much. "What did I invite here, a bunch of starving Armenians?" Letters came protesting the assumption that Armenians don't eat as well as the next race. "It was just a fill-in line," moaned Jack. "We could have skipped it and never felt the difference." That old saw, "He spends money like a drunken sailor," was construed by cranks as an affront to the navy. Even Jack conceded this too preposterous to worry about.
With a secretary taking notes they work all week. A run-through rehearsal is called for Saturday noon, its chief purpose to note cast reaction to the lines. If they don't laugh, figures Jack, nobody will. He watches them closely, asks no questions but draws his own conclusions. All through the pleasant Saturday afternoon, while people who have no radio programs play, he and his writers revamp the script. Sometimes they make wholesale changes, sometimes they snip jokes here and add others there. Jack goes home and tries the gags out on Mary. Then he broods in bed and forgets to turn out the lights.
Sunday rehearsal directed by Jack brings its own crop of headaches. He's a stickler for punctuality. Rochester's late. The boys and girls have plenty to tell each other. They won't settle down till Jack gets mad. The expression his madness takes is, "Now really, fellows — " or, "Well, gee, after all, girls, let's get together." The extreme duration of his madness covers two minutes. He decides he's really sore at Rochester. The company watches him when Rochester shows. He knows they're watching. He opens his mouth to bawl and grins instead. "I can't help it," he apologizes. "It's his face."
Which doesn't mean that they don't jump through hoops for him. They know that being funny's a serious business. In the end they give their all for dear old National Broadcasting, Jell-o and Jack. But each is responsible only for himself. They just walk in. Jack's been working all week. He has what they call Sunday-morning jitters. Everything bothers him. He rubs his nose, pulls at his ear, mauls his chin. He's got to shape script and players into a crack performance. Nervous as a jumping bean himself, he's got to avoid making the others nervous, with an eye trained on the idiosyncrasies of each. Mary, for instance, is always bad at rehearsals. If he corrects her too often, she gets mixed up. Dennis Day is best left to read as he pleases. He has his own style. Interfere with it, and you wind up with no style at all. Phil Harris is the champion line-blower. Jack loses patience sometimes. Then he kisses the top of his head and says he's sorry.
They rehearse till shortly before the first broadcast. Three-thirty in summer, four-thirty in winter, to hit the East Coast at half past seven. When Jack steps out for his preliminary breeze with the studio audience, he's the picture of bland self-possession, but the picture lies. The reason he appears so early is to keep from going nuts with suspense.



FROM start to finish of the show, he's tense. No, you'd never guess it. Airy and casual you'd call him, but his eyes are everywhere and his wits work at frantic speed. He ad libs to cover a blown line or a gag that doesn't get a laugh. But timing is of the essence of comedy, and he must decide within a split second whether an ad lib will do more good than harm. In the wrong place, it may bring one laugh and kill the next four or five — which makes for bad arithmetic and worse clowning. If a gag hits unexpectedly, he beams at Morrow in the control room. He's got the kind of mouth whose corners curl naturally up. Mary watches it. When the corners go down, her heart goes with him.
The broadcast over, his face tells the whole story. If he thinks it was bad, he looks like the end of the world. "In one minute," says Morrow, "he's a thousand years old." The boys follow him to the script room. The rest grab a sandwich and return to stand by for rehearsal. There's another show at seven-thirty for the West. "Let's pep it up," says Jack. They throw out the stillborn jokes, rack their fevered brains for sure-fire laughs and in drastic cases have been known to rewrite a whole scene between broadcasts. Jack hates the words "good enough." "Nothing's good enough," he says, "but the best."
That's the principle on which he builds his show. One thing he doesn't worry about is his Crossley rating. Of course it's pleasant to be first, and if he slipped way down, he'd take the hint, exit and devote his worrying to golf. But if another show went ahead of his, he'd be listening to it, swelling the Crossley by one. When Bergen and McCarthy topped him, he made fuel of their triumph for his own program. "We can't be better than someone who's better than us," he argues. "The most we can do is to be as good as we can, and let the Crossley rating take care of itself."
He even worried about the testimonial dinner given by NBC to celebrate his ten years in radio. He tried to talk them out of it. The prospect of acting as a butt for verbal bouquets terrified him. Not till Rudy Vallee got up and sounded off with, "Who's this bum Benny with his ten lousy years in radio? I've had fifteen, where's my dinner — ?"— not till then did Jack pop into chortles of joy and relax for the evening.

The Funny Business of Mighty Mouse

Say what you will about his cartoons, but Paul Terry had a long and successful career in the animation business.

It wasn’t until the 1940s that Terry finally had some A-list characters. No matter that Heckle and Jeckle had personalities borrowed from Woody Woodpecker, or that Mighty Mouse was a rodent derivative of Superman. Kids liked them and once TV came along, their cartoons ran for ages. And, to be honest, I’d rather watch Heckle and Jeckle sing and wreck a house than some piece of “art” like UPA’s Baby Boogie.

A columnist with the Toronto Globe and Mail came up with this piece on Terry and his studio for the paper’s edition of December 10, 1945. It doesn’t look like he interviewed Terry. The column reads like it was re-written from a news release from 20th Century-Fox about their coming attractions. Still, it’s nice to see the Terry studio getting a bit of publicity.

Rambling With Roly
By ROLY YOUNG
If you have a small son who likes to do nothing better than draw amusing animals, don’t stop him. And, above all, don’t tell him that it is an impractical way to spend his time.
Paul Terry, who is grown up in years and business ability, but who takes a child’s delight in watching over the Terrytoon animated cartoons that issue from his organization to thousands of theatres every week in the year, has proved that sort of thing eminently practical. By keeping at it for 30 years, he has made it pay, both in the financial sense and in the rewarding pleasure of working at a job he likes.
Terry is one of the true pioneers of “this funny business,” as he has named it, and he is currently celebrating the 30th anniversary of his advent in screen cartooning. It is also the thirtieth year for 20th Century-Fox, distributors of Terrytoon cartoons, and by mutual agreement they are making it a joint celebration.
Starting out in 1915 with a little boy character whom he called “Little Herman,” Terry has brought to life hundreds of humanized animals in the course of releasing such tremendously popular series as his “Aesop’s Fables,” and through the creation of such heroes as “Gandy Goose,” “Smoky Joe,” the horse, innumerable cats, lions, wolves and mythical beasts. Perhaps the most influential and popular character he has ever invented, and the current Terry preoccupation, is a muscular combination of chivalry and derring-do, “Mighty Mouse.”

“Mighty Mouse’s” popular appeal is no doubt predicated on his willingness to sniff out nefarious characters and to set evil-doers to beating their way to the nearest exits, without regard to the size or prowess of his antagonist. Within the current year the “Mouse” has bested rampaging lions in a short called “The Circus”; traded sabre blows with buccaneers in “The Pirates”; thwarted a gang of Oriental thieves in “The Sultan’s Birthday,” and done an off-hand job on assorted cats in “The Port of Missing Mice” and “The Kilkenny Cats.” The above are a small instalment on the “Mighty Mouse’s” adventures for the year and only a portion of Paul Terry’s animated cartoon output.
Terry took his initial step in the field of screen cartooning in 1915. At that time he was moderately successful at newspaper cartooning; but pushed by an urge to find a job he would really enjoy doing. A chance invitation to a cartoonists’ dinner, where the famous Winsor McKay demonstrated one of the earliest cartoons, planted the seed in Terry’s brain and determined his future success.
The first Terry Cartoon featured a character named “Little Herman,” and consisted of thousands of drawings, all laboriously pencilled and photographed by Terry himself. It required a half-year of his time for production. Since that time the art has progressed so rapidly with the introduction of cartooning inventions, devices and processes (many of which were perfected by Terry himself) that the same “Little Herman” would require hardly more than a week in the modern Terrytoon plant located at New Rochelle, N.Y.
The present-day Terrytoon is the product of the work of hundreds of individual pairs of hands and dozens of brains.
A Terrytoon idea springs up “in the raw” somewhere about the beginning of the chain of processes. It goes to a story department, where a scenario is provided. Then follows a session with expert cartoonists, who provide expression, detail and incidental factors that point up the humor of the new personality. Assembly line production begins with animators, cartooners, backgrounders. As the final cartoon emerges, it obtains the services of the sound department, where noises and voices are dubbed in, and of the musical division, which is often called upon to provide original music as well as classical and popular tunes.
The Terrytoon studios are already at work on the first half-dozen of the “Mighty Mouse” productions for the coming season. Endowed by his creator with a perpetual dislike for bullies who tweak little boys’ ears, villains who molest pretty maidens, cats who pick on mice who try to lord over their own kind, and a lot of other assorted malefactors of the human and jungle society, the “Mighty Mouse” will travel to many strange countries and locales in search of malefactors for his new series of pictures. He is going international in a big way in the 1945-46 program of Terrytoons.

On hand for the “Mouse” is a Spanish adventure, under the title of “Throwing the Bull,” and one which will enable him to mingle with senoritas, matadors and “El Toro.” For his adventure in “Krakatoa,” the mouse will be taken to a South Sea setting, where he will perform no less amazing a feat than the harnessing of the power of a volcano, to save the existence of a colony of peaceful little mice.
One further extension of the mouse’s adventures carries him to the Blue Grass country in a feature entitled “My Old Kentucky Home,” with “Mighty Mouse’s” arrival coming in the nick of time to forestall a “wolf’s” foreclosing the mortgage on an aging colonel and his lovely daughter.
Still others of the “Mighty Mouse’s” adventures take him to the Far West in a picture called “Mighty Mouse Meets Bad Bill Bunion”; on a carefree adventure in “Gypsy Life,” and face-to-face with his lifetime enemies in a particularly charming and clever picture titled “Svengali’s Cat.”

My thanks to Devon Baxter for the screen grabs.

Eating Words

A self-explanatory gag from Alice Gets Stage Struck (1925). Was this the first use of this gag?



Tom Stathes writes to say the earliest version he's seen of the gag is in Bobby Bumps Puts a Beanery on the Bum (1918).

There are no animation credits.

Kiddie Koncert Backgrounds

Fred Brunish (1902-1952) was Walter Lantz’s sole background artist in the last half of the ‘40s and into the early ‘50s; at least he was the only one credited on screen. At the age of 17, Brunish was sketching fashions in New York City; ten years later, he was an advertising artist in Detroit before heading west. He worked as an advertising company art director, and acquired a patent for an automatic slide projector in 1934, before eventually getting a job at the Lantz studio around 1940.

Not all of the cartoons he is credited on made it onto the Woody Woodpecker DVD, and one is 1948’s Kiddie Koncert, starring Wally Walrus as animated by Ed Love. It opens with three of Brunish’s watercolours. In the second painting below, the orange stage curtain is on an overlay.



Thanks to Devon Baxter for the frame grabs.

The Non Beverly Hillbilly

Almost nothing about The Beverly Hillbillies was subtle. Even the supposedly ordinary characters on the show were over the top. (A case can be made that Buddy Ebsen, as Jed Clampett, was the one actor who gave a grounded performance).

Despite bouts of overacting, Raymond Bailey was convincing as banker Milburn Drysdale. So much that some people treated him like a real financial panjandrum. Witness these stories from United Press International. The first appeared in papers in late 1963.

Hillbillies Banker Has Exacting Television Role
By JOSEPH FINNIGAN
HOLLYWOOD, Dec. 30 (UPI) —Raymond Bailey has one of the toughest jobs in television, a chore which demands that he bring staid old banking principles to "The Beverly Hillbillies."
THAT'S THE equivalent of wearing lace cuffs on an Ozark mountain coon hunt.
Bailey plays the role of bank president "Milburn Drysdale" on "Hillbillies." He's the zealous protector of $25,000,000 that mountain family amassed through the discovery of oil on their down home property.
With such riches, the show's "Clampett" family moved to a Beverly Hills mansion. Bailey was waiting with outstretched hands and a stuffy, social climbing wife.
Bailey, a former sailor, laborer and shipping clerk, is currently enjoying more notoriety than ever before in an acting career that had shaky beginnings in the silent film days.

THE SUCCESS of "Hillbillies" (CBS-TV) has been remarkable. As banker "Drysdale," Bailey should rightfully share in that success. He provides the contrast needed between that new rich family and their upper crust city neighbors.
"I think we work off each other pretty well," Raymond says. "The family respects Mr. Drysdale. And they don't call his wife a snob. He is a bit of a snob but not as much as his wife."
Bailey's career got a boost with the show, a series he expects to last for a long time.
"There is a long way to go with this show," he said. "You can bring in all these personalities who live in Beverly Hills or work in the movies." Bailey's bank role might tend to offend those viewers who dislike too much formality. But if it has, he's not aware of any animosity.
* * *
"WHAT IS THERE to dislike about him," he asks. "He's a fuddling old guy, I enjoy playing him. It's a field day, comedy.
And I've played this kind of part in dozens of shows. I was the publisher in the 'My Sister Eileen' series. That part was the same type of comedy."
Whenever Bailey gets a little too uppity with his folksy depositors, he ends up on the short end, an unusual situation for most bankers.
Youngsters sometimes recognize Bailey as the video banker, and supermarket shoppers occasionally eye him at the [missing word]. On one occasion when Bailey entered a bank, the establishment's assistant manager looked up from his desk, and said, "here comes a famous banker."
He's also robbery proof. Who would ever stick up a television set?

UPI chatted with him again. This story appeared in papers starting October 23, 1965.

Banker in "Hillbillies" Believes in High Living
By VERNON SCOTT
UPI Hollywood Correspondent
Hollywood (UPI)—Raymond Bailey, the stuffy banker plagued by the antics of "The Beverly Hillbillies," is more a rustic than any member of the bizarre Clampett family.
He is, in fact a hillbilly in the literal sense of the word.
Both his homes are perched on mountain sides.
His favorite hangout is a rustic, two-story mountain cabin just off the 17th green of the Lake Arrowhead Country club. He and his Australian-born wife of 14 years, Gaby, spend summer vacations there and whatever time they can steal from the C.B.S. television series during the year.
A-frame in structure, the mountain retreat has three bedrooms, a den, a spacious basement (rare in southern California) and an enormous sun deck that runs completely around the house commanding a spectacular view of the pine-covered mountains.
On a typical day Bailey plays golf, followed by a siesta on the deck breathing air heavily perfumed by wild flowers. A couple of martinis before dinner prepared by Gaby—and then to bed.
The Bailey pets enjoy the mountains, too. A poodle named Pierre and Nicholas, a Weimaraner, chase squirrels while the Siamese cat Suki stalks birds.
During the work week, though, the Baileys can be found in a small home overlooking the San Fernando valley. It's ultra-modern and includes a swimming pool.

On a typical morning Bailey is off to General Service studios and ready for work by 8. He's home for dinner by the time it gets dark.
In the city or in the mountains, the 60-year-old actor can be found in old, comfortable clothes. His wardrobe, however, is filled with the formal banker-type attire he wears on the show.
His characterization has made him a hero with bankers across the country. Bailey is in great demand for speeches, personal appearances at conventions and the like, much as Raymond Burr, in his role as attorney Perry Mason, is besieged by law groups.
"I've been made a member of the Southern California Independent Bankers Association," Bailey says. "And I've made trips around the country to accept plaques. It's a lot of fun.”
In his youth Bailey was a bank messenger for two years, but abandoned banking as being too dull for his tastes.
A veteran of 34 years in show business, Bailey has few acquaintances among actors in Hollywood. His friends are businessmen and professional men with whom he plays bridge. They entertain casually and enjoy watching "The Beverly Hillbillies."
The graying performer answers as readily to the name Milburn Drysdale as he does to his own after four years with the C.B.S. series. He doesn't mind the association with the character and, in fact, is rather pleased by it.
Never a star, Bailey is content to roll along with the series reaping the rewards that television provides popular character actors.
"Who could ask for more?" he says.

The Beverly Hillbillies disappeared from first-run TV in 1971. I don’t recall seeing Bailey again on the screen except in reruns. He died in 1980 at his home in Irvine, California.