Three-Headed Goose

Screwy Squirrel sprouted multiple heads in a fear take in Screwball Squirrel and Happy-Go-Nutty (1944). So why can’t Gandy Goose in Who’s Who in the Jungle (1945)? Consecutive drawings.



Screwy’s funnier. But you already knew that.

How To Treat A Guest Star

Television was new and scary for many of the big stars in Hollywood who weren’t contractually banned from the small screen. They were used to the comparatively leisurely pace that film work offered, but also concerned about the future of the studios with people simply staying home to watch entertainment. They didn’t want to make a false step.

The Jack Benny Program may have been the best outlet for them. For one thing, Jack made sure the guest stars got the laughs. For another, some had already been on his radio show, so they were familiar with how he worked. And for another, he had a big audience and large exposure didn’t hurt.

The Los Angeles Times talked to Jack about his use of guest stars in a story published Dec. 20, 1953. The article has an answer for something I wondered about. I’ve heard the radio show on October 10, 1948 where Jack announced at the end that the Colmans didn’t appear that night “due to unforseen commitments” but would be on in a couple of weeks. He never gave a reason on the air but this story explains it.

Benny and his writers used the Colmans so well. Even when they weren’t on, the script would refer to them and they’d still get laughs. Occasionally, the Colman’s butler Sherwood (usually played by Eric Snowden) would appear on the show, making it seem to the listeners that the Colmans were right there when, of course, they weren’t.

Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall gave a very funny performance on Benny’s radio show. As for the television show mentioned in the article, not all the critics were kind. For one thing, the picture died on the coaxial cable so easterners only got sound. The West Coast edition of Variety opined “It was not one of Benny’s better shows.” Variety editor Abel Green and Jack Gould of the New York Times disliked the fact the show’s sketch portion featured Bogie plugging the sponsor’s product. Donald Kirkley of the Baltimore Sun was even more disdainful, sniffing “Mr. Bogart was so much dead wood, sullen, unfunny, and out of his element.”

Benny Demands Parts Fitted to Guest Stars
BY WALTER AMES
When Jack Benny first became a top figure in the entertainment field as a radio comic he established his own creed that could serve well as a pattern to other producers in the interest of better televiewing.
“Fit the star to the part, not the part to the star.”
That’s all it says. But its meaning is so powerful it has helped establish Jack as the man to be seen with on television these days.
Top Stars Appear
Among the top names in the entertainment industry who consented to appear before the video cameras first with the Waukegan comic are Claudette Colbert, Ben Hogan, Barbara Stanwyck, Mr. and Mrs. Jimmy Stewart, Marilyn Monroe, Humphrey Bogart and Isaac Stern.
There may be more but at lunch the other noon Benny managed to recall these as definite “firsts” on his TV shows during the last three years.
“I have to have an idea before I even think about trying to get a guest star for my show,” Benny began. “This way they are protected by a script and I’m protecting my own show at the same time.”
Wrong Way Around
“Most producers get into trouble by hiring name stars for shows and then finding they have no material with which to exploit their talents. It isn’t fair to the viewers and it certainly isn’t doing a performer’s career any good to have to stumble through a weak situation.
“Why one time I was offered Clark Gable free by his studio for a guest spot. The only requirement was that we plug his new picture. It was a great chance but I turned it down because I had no script ready that would put Gable at ease on the show. Imagine, me, tightwad Benny turning down Gable for free. People said I should have my head examined. Maybe I should have.
Bogart Much Sought
It is a well known fact around Hollywood that both Ed Sullivan and Milton Berle were hot on the trail of Bogart for his TV debut. He was a valuable piece of property and both Easterners had the bulging checkbooks out and in working order.
But Bogey decided he wanted to play it safe in television. He put all his eggs in one basket with Benny for his TV debut and the reviews more than justified his faith in the old maestro.
It has been the same situation with the other stars who chose the Benny routines for breaking into TV. All said they felt at ease with Jack and knew he would give them more than an even break in material.

In the early days of his radio career, Benny had his writers bring Rochester on for one broadcast. That was when Benny was moving his family and radio show to California. Rochester was supposed to be a Pullman porter on the train. It was the luckiest day of Rochester’s career because the public clamored for more and Benny solved the problem by hiring him as his valet.
A situation arose where an English-speaking couple could be used in the script. Benny asked Ronald Colman and his wife, Benita, if they would do the part.
Material Changed
“Ronnie had just come off a guest spot with adverse reports,” recalled Jack. “He did not want to do my show but I persuaded him to try it. I guess he has been one of my most faithful guesters ever since. He knows now that I’ll never call him unless the part is right for him.
Once he advertised the Colmans as his Sunday guests but at the Saturday rehearsals Jack had a feeling that something was wrong with the script. He couldn’t put his finger on the trouble and finally suggested that Ronnie and Benita take a raincheck. They agreed and that night an entire new story line was written without the Colemans. Jack finally solved the problem, corrected the trouble and two weeks later the Coleman’s [sic] were back on the show.
“My show is built around characters who have become so well established that the audiences look forward to hearing them again and again,” Jack pointed out.
“If they don’t show up on one show, people tune in again to hear them on the following show. But there’s always a familiar voice around to satisfy the audience while they’re waiting.”
Mary Severe Critic
Jack confided that he doesn’t expect his wife, Mary, to do very much more radio with him.

“She’s my greatest critic but she just doesn’t care about doing any acting,” he said. “If I want to know whether a show has been good or bad, I just have to talk to Mary for a few seconds. She puts me straight. She’s real tough and certainly knows all there is to know about show business.”
Just to prove that the Benny influence works both ways, guess who will be Bing Crosby’s guest when Crosby makes his first filmed solo appearance on television Jan. 3? None other than Jack himself. Crosby could have had his pick of guest performers but he came up with the old master. To borrow a phrase from a Crosby competitor, “Bing could be sure with Benny.”
Benny does his next television show next Sunday. He’ll feature his usual New Year’s Eve type show on KNXT (2) at 7 p.m. He’s also set to make an appearance at the Times’ National Sports Award Dinner Dec. 28 in the Cocoanut Grove. Who knows, maybe he’ll bring a real surprise guest with him.

Making Cartoons is Fun

1961 was the great boom-and-bust year for prime-time animated cartoons. The success of The Flintstones, which had debuted on ABC the previous year, had the networks playing copy-cat. CBS aired The Alvin Show, while ABC added Top Cat and Calvin and the Colonel to the line-up. All were brand-new. All became a night-time bust. As for NBC, it decided to repackage an old ABC non-prime time show with some new elements. So it was the network broadcast The Bullwinkle Show.

Bullwinkle’s slot wasn’t really prime-time, or at least certainly be considered that today. It was 7 p.m. on Sundays, opposite the second half of Maverick and the first half of Lassie. The people at Neilsen reported by season end that families preferred the real dog over the cartoon moose. It was their loss.

Keith Scott’s essential book The Moose That Roared chronicles how NBC simply couldn’t be bothered promoting the show. So producers Jay Ward and Bill Scott plugged it themselves, and probably more creatively than anyone at the network could. With Ward’s contention that television was “just one big hunk of blandness” (Variety, Aug. 2, 1961), they sent out comedy mailers and flyers under the irreverent “Operation Loudmouth,” unveiled a Bullwinkle statue on Sunset Boulevard with ridiculous pomp and hit the newspaper interview circuit.

Here’s a feature story from the King Features Syndicate’s TV Key service. The most interesting comment is at the end, where Scott decrees that Jay Ward Productions was keeping out of the animated commercial business. That didn’t last. In fact, their long campaign making Cap’n Crunch spots pretty much kept the company afloat.

Subliminal Show Moose Is Cartoon Star Now
By CHARLES WITBECK
Preceding the Walt Disney color show on Sunday nights at 7:00 p.m. in the fall over NBC will be a new color animated cartoon series, the Bullwinkle Show. Bullwinkle is a moose, a character from ABC's afternoon cartoon series, Rocky And his Friends, a flip and rather sophisticated show nobody saw except kids who apparently liked the animal characters very much.
Jay Ward and Bill Scott, producers of Rocky, called it their "subliminal show." It was on the air, but no one seemed to know about it. Rocky was just below the TV threshold of consciousness. A Des Moines TV reviewer caught the show once by accident at 5:30 p.m. and labelled it "a delightful surprise."
Scott and Ward can now put away the "subliminal" label, because grownups as well as kids will look in on Bullwinkle while waiting for the Disney hour, and the waiting will no doubt become a habit. The two young producers are confident. "We know we're funny," says Scott. "The problem has been to get air time when someone can see us."
The two men take the blame for not getting an animated cartoon show on TV earlier. "We didn't make a major sales effort," says Scott. "We didn't go around banging doors and pushing. We were too busy making shows. Suddenly we learned there is a tremendous difference between sales acceptance and public acceptance."
It appears sponsors and ad men still don't think too much about the sales power of animated cartoons. Huckleberry Hound and Yogi Bear helped break down their resistance. "It was a touchy area," said Scott. "No one in the agency world knew a good animated cartoon from a bad one. There was no reference point. Now they're getting educated."
The high cost of animated cartoons was another point. But Scott and Ward have figured out a way to get around that. They have a tie-up with a Mexican firm where costs are 25 per cent cheaper and most of their animation is done south of the border.
"They're turning out a show and a half a week. Our efficiency is up," says Scott. "There are only ten or twelve Americans in the whole operation down there."

The Bullwinkle characters will sound familiar because people like Edward Everett Horton, Hans Conried, radio Gunsmoke's Marshal Dillon (Bill Conrad) and Paul Frees do many of the voices.
"We go for actors," says Bill Scott, who is the voice of Dudley DoRight, the noble mounted policeman. "It's like picking out the fish for your guppy tank. What we look for is a community fish to join our group."
Like Rocky and His Friends, the Bullwinkle Show will use a narrator, so the stories and action can jump around easily. "If the narrator is up in the recording session, everything falls into place," says Ward. "If not, we have a hard night. If the actors are down, we just turn out the lights and go home."
Scott and Ward record at night so they can make use of busy actors. "We seem to use short ones," says Scott. "A magnificent golden backwash of people who can't do anything else because of their height." These are veteran radio actors, who wanted to be actors, but were too small. Radio was the only place where they could make a living.
"From 1947 to 1953, things were really tough on the radio voice people who were having trouble in their own industry and could no longer count on the movie cartoon business which went down the sink," says Scott. Residuals on commercials saved them, and now the voice people are in great demand, and reaping the dividends. People like Dawes Butler [sic], Paul Frees, Mel Blanc and June Foray find gold in their mailbox most mornings.
To Scott and Ward, the main fun is making cartoons. They bumbled along with people they liked, avoiding the commerce of commercials. "They're extremely lucrative," says Scott. "That's why we don't do them."
Scott used to write a few and that was enough for him. Now with a Sunday night time spot, both men can put their minds back on their animals. Sales resistance, imagery and other double talk can be a part of the past maybe.

A Contract With Warner Bros.

“And I am an actor!” proclaims Daffy Duck in Duck Soup to Nuts. Note the expression of thespian superiority.



“I have a contract with Warner Bros.,” he informs Porky Pig. And he whips it out. Note the position of the hands (well, if a duck had hands).



Boxoffice magazine reviewed the cartoon in its issue of May 27, 1944:

Amusing. Erratic Daffy Duck completely confuses Porky Pig when it appears that Daffy will decorate Porky’s table as the result of a duck hunt. Pleading for his life, Daffy exhibits his histrionic talents, but Porky is unimpressed. The story idea and the dialog are the high points in this reel, with modern slang bringing forth much laughter.

Any cartoon with an erratic Daffy Duck is a funny cartoon. Tedd Pierce was responsible for the story, with Dick Bickenbach getting the animation credit (Manny Perez, Gerry Chiniquy, Virgil Ross, Ken Champin and Jack Bradbury were also animating for Friz Freleng around this time).

Fish Fry Fun

Shamus Culhane didn’t worry too much about matching shots at times during his directorial stint at the Walter Lantz studio. Here are a couple of cases from Fish Fry, released in 1944 and nominated for an Oscar.

These are two consecutive frames. The action isn’t even close.



For some reason, Culhane decides to cut to a closer shot when the cat realises he’s about to club a bulldog. These consecutive frames look like they were done by two different animators. Darrell Calker’s soundtrack doesn’t emphasize the switch, the music just toodles along, which makes the change even more abrupt.



Emery Hawkins really does a great job in this cartoon. Here is his work (and his in-betweener, I imagine) earlier in the cartoon when the cat gets frustrated that he can’t trick Andy into giving him the goldfish. Lionel Stander does a terrific job voicing the cat.



Fish Fry lost to the Tom and Jerry cartoon Mouse Trouble. The other nominees: Swooner Crooner (Warners); How to Play Football (Disney); And to Think I Saw It on Mulberry Street (George Pal); Dog, Cat and Canary (Columbia) and My Boy Johnny (Terrytoons).

Daily Variety reported on December 8th, 1943 that Lantz had put the cartoon into production along with a Woody Woodpecker short called Snow Bird. My guess is it became Ski For Two.

She Always Knew It Was Comedy

Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In was pretty much an overnight success after NBC plopped it into its schedule on Monday, January 22, 1968. The show’s supporting cast was considered an overnight success, too, (“Yesterday, they were unknown,” read a Boston Globe story) but they had all paid their dues in show biz for a number of years.



Jo Anne Worley had been a regular on a few TV shows after starting out in a Billy Barnes revue in the late ‘50s. It played 48 weeks in Los Angeles before jaunting to New York. She was a player in Merv Griffin’s cast in one of his talk show efforts, got a part in Bill Dana’s ill-fated Las Vegas talk show on Ollie Treye’s “fourth network,” and had appeared on one of Joey Bishop’s sitcoms. Of course, none of them had the impact of Laugh-In.

The press had a few stories on Worley from before she hit it big; some were in the Indianapolis Star, as she was from Indiana. That’s where this first story comes from, in the issue of December 4, 1966.

LONG WAY FROM LOWELL
By FRED D. CAVENDISH
SINCE JO ANNE WORLEY packed her dreams and left Lowell, Ind., the town has never had it so good.
Miss Worley, through her zany, nostalgic comedy, has put Lowell on national television alongside Mount Idy and Waukegan, into night clubs from coast to coast and into the columns of major newspapers. Through it all, Lowell, as Jo Anne might wryly remark, has maintained its bucolic lackluster.
Not so Miss Worley. She has changed from the young woman who cried herself to sleep during her first two months of "show biz" into a confident, long-lashed bouffanted performer who out-brasses New Yorkers. She has changed from a girl as unknown as Lowell itself, to a Broadway personality, recognized on the street, met by fans in the dressing room and toasted as a member of Merv Griffin's TV family.
Hometown Recognition
Even the folks in Lowell (southern Lake County) are awakening to the harangue of Jo Anne's husky voice and are commenting by mail (some of which may find its way into Worley routines).
"I get back to Lowell seldom, usually only when I go coast to coast or when I work Chicago," says Jo Anne.
Her family still lives in Lowell. Otherwise, there's little reason to return.
Jo Anne never captured a part in a Lowell High School play, although she appeared in some all-school skits. Yet, ironically, Lowell High has presented a Jo Anne Worley drama award since 1964.
"I was thrown out of Glee Club for being too gleeful," Jo Anne recalls.
She was chosen Comedienne of her freshman class, but the honor went to others thereafter.
During her Lowell years, Jo Anne was quiet about show business dreams, alluding vaguely to nursing and teaching and other unflamboyant careers.
"I always knew," she says, "but in Lowell you don't say that. Even my folks didn't know. But I always knew it was comedy."
And so it is.
In the cast of the off-Broadway Mad Show, Jo Anne romps through charades on the human parade based on Mad Magazine, frantic enough to make Alfred E. Neumann himself ask: "Who, me?"
To audiences at Upstairs at the Duplex, a darkly painted club in Greenwich Village which she calls "this darling dark cradle," she offers samplings of her wit, complete with a foot-square cigarette lighter, a four-foot strand of red glass beads and a copy of the Lowell Tribune. She may tell them about her Lowell farmer boy friend, who picked her up in a McCormick Reaper, wore white overalls and was known as Lawrence of Lowell.
"The World's Greatest"
She tapes Merv Griffin shows before an audience which usually contains a delegation of her fan club, holding aloft signs proclaiming: "Jo Anne Worley, the world's greatest."
In her spare time, she auditions for Broadway plays: "It's a big battle," she quips. "I want to do the part they don't want me to do it ... "
She has cut two major records. One is the score of the Mad Show, and the other is Our Wedding Album, a satire of the recent Washington nuptials which brought dry comment from the White House.
She does TV commercials, most of which have appeared only in the New York area. For six months she was Carol Channing's stand-by for Hello, Dolly.
For change of pace, she takes routines as brassy as New York and as folksy as Lowell into Chicago, San Francisco, Pittsburgh and Bermuda, and she has gone on the road in summer stock with Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Moat Happy Fella, Wonderful Town, Naughty Marietta, and Mikado.
The Hometown Scene
Meanwhile, back in Lowell, her father, Joseph Worley, calmly continues painting houses, as he has for years. Her grandparents, Mr. and Mrs. Frank Worley, who just celebrated their 68th wedding anniversary, probably are better known around town than Jo Anne. For years they operated the Little Store, a tiny candy shop a block from the grade school where kids came for penny treats.
"You know," Jo Anne recalls, "We used to get all the stale candy. To this day I can't stand those peanut butter sticks."
But there were better days 'ahead. Jo Anne worked at Roberts Cafe, a truck stop southwest of Lowell, and saved her money to try show business. When the time came, she entered summer stock because, although she was set on a stage career, she knew absolutely nothing about stage procedure.
A Frightening World
At Nyack, N.Y., she found the show business world so frightening she cried herself to sleep nightly for two months. But there she met a professor from Midwestern University, Wichita Falls, Tex., who offered her a drama scholarship.
After two years of study, she moved to the Pasadena Playhouse theater-school and eventually to Hollywood and the Jerry Lewis Comedy Workshop. "That was a big deal, because he was my idol," she says.
Although destined for comedy, Jo Anne's first stage role was in The Robe. Even more unexpectedly, she successfully auditioned for a singing role as a joke. Never having sung professionally (and without the training of the Lowell Glee Club) she landed the part of Ruth in Wonderful Town. After that came Katishaw, another singing part in Mikado. Then came a year of voice lessons.
Trouble In Gotham
Jo Anne hit New York in a Billy Barnes revue which bombed.
"On opening night in the summertime, the electricity failed," Jo Anne explains. "The circuits were out all over. We held the audience two hours and, of course, the air conditioning was out, too." The show ran a week.
With the National Touring Company of Carnival, Jo Anne replaced Kaye Ballard, who she resembles, in the role of Rosalie. After 1 1/2 years she returned to New York as Carol Channing’s stand-by.
As last Christmas approached, Larry Siegel and Stan Hart, both regular contributors to Mad Magazine, conceived and wrote a tour de farce based on the magazine, with the intention of playing it before college students home for the holidays.
A Long "Short Run"
"Most everybody took the parts because it would be a short run," says Jo Anne.
But as the Mad Show shaped up, backers decided to expand it and try for a regular run. The show opened last January, still is going strong and, according to one New York critic, the Mad Show could run forever."
The revue has bizarre chatter, unbelievable costumes and such catchy tunes as Eccch, and Hate Song. Jo Anne has the stage alone for the vocal, The Gift of Maggie, in which she finds that a zealous relative sent her as a Christmas gift a religious book cover with a sex novel inside.
The show warns you to Beware of Hoof and Mouth Disease, points out that J. Edgar Hoover Sleeps with a Night Light, and pleads to Stamp Out Bennett Cerf.
Lowell In The Spotlight
For her club appearances, Jo Anne writes her own equally wild material, often referring to Lowell: "I was the only person who ever left Lowell—voluntarily." She once hired a writer who, for $500, turned out only one line she used: "Lowell was very small and quiet. We were cut off by a snowstorm for a week—and nobody realized it."
"Now I write my own stuff," says Jo Anne. This includes song parodies and material for giving familiar tunes a twist. "Try to remember," she begins singing, and forgets all the words.
She may go on making Lowell famous, but it's doubtful the town ever will get her back.
"Show business is my life," she declares. "It gets to the point where you can't turn it off. It's impossible."


Worley had garnered enough attention in 1966 to be cast as the star of a TV pilot called Who’s On First about a lady baseball manager (it didn’t sell).

Laugh-In wore out its welcome after a couple of seasons but staggered on with new cast members and a war between Dan Rowan and executive producer George Schlatter (Schlatter lost). This Associated Press stories appeared in papers on May 17, 1970. Worley had decided to quit after three seasons.


Exit ‘Laugh-In,’ but Jo Anne Worley’s Still Laughing
By GENE HANDSAKER
Associated Press Writer
HOLLYWOOD (AP) - Jo Anne Worley, the big, boisterous, good-looking loudmouth on "Laugh-In," is the latest drop out from the Rowan & Martin television series.
Emulating Goldie Hawn, who won an Oscar for a supporting role in her first movie, "Cactus Flower," and England's Judy Carne, the sock-it-to-me girl who has returned to the stage, Miss Worley reasons: “The show has been so good to me and for me, that I’m now in a position to do other things.”
Her own TV series is being planned at Warner Bros. for next year, she'll guest star on Andy Williams’ shows and others, match wits regularly on “Hollywood Squares” and this fall appear with Woody Allen, Tom Smothers and Jonathan Winters on an NBC Saturday children’s series, “Hot Dog.”
For the month of July the singer-comedienne is booked at the Sands Hotel, Las Vegas. She has had movie offers "but so far nothing really yummy." She may make a return appearance or two on "Laugh-In" next season "like visiting the family."
Besides general clowning at full vocal throttle on "Laugh In", Miss Worley has been its specialist in “chicken jokes.” She thinks calling hogs, cows and chickens as an Indiana farm girl helped develop her powerful voice.
Besides—"When you're out on a farm you don't have neighbors, right? So when you're growing up your parents aren't always going ‘Sh! Sh! Quiet!’ You can go out and scream and holler and yell as much as you want to. And if you want to call somebody you really have to project. My whole family screams."

The middle of five children—her parents are now divorced and remarried—Jo Anne Worley ("rhymes with whirly") grew up on a farm near Lowell, Ind. She earned Christmas money by scavenging corn missed by the mechanical harvester, and selling the ears to a granary.
In high school she saved tips and pay earned as a truck stop waitress near her home to enroll, after graduation, at a summer theater in Nyack, N.Y. She'd seen the ad in Theater Arts Magazine in the school library.
"My father said, 'You're going to pay THEM?' I had no training but a lot of guts. I wanted to see what show business was. I was an apprentice, paid them for room and board. I swept, painted scenery, made props and played one of the men in 'Mr. Roberts' and one of the teachers in 'Picnic.'"
The experience brought her a drama scholarship to Midwestern University, Wichita Falls, Tex. Afterward came the Pasadena Playhouse, the Billy Barnes Revue, night clubs, TV guest spots and, three years ago, an audition for the then a-borning “Laugh-In.”
Jo Anne wasn’t always brash.
“As a little girl I was very introverted. I read a lot of books and things. But in adolescence I broke out. In high school I was voted the school comedienne. “I’d gotten my first laugh in the fifth grade in our two-room grade school. The teacher was calling down a boy, ‘Don’t you get smart.’ I said, ‘Isn’t that why we come to school—to get smart?’ That was the first time I felt the thrill of laughter.
The corn-fed girl grew into a big woman, now early-thirtyish, brunette, with dark chocolate eyes. "I'm 5-feet-8½, but with hair and heels a good 6 feet. I'm 135 pounds and 40-28-40. Big but well-proportioned."
Still unmarried, Miss Worley says: "I keep trying. I think it's the business I’m in, show business. I don't meet eligible men. They're either already married—somebody's already glommed 'em off—or they'd like to do my hair.
"The only eligible men left are divorced men, and they're usually burned and bitter."
“Then there are the divine sick-o’s. Egomaniacs, in show business, who can’t see anyone but themselves.”
She has a current steady date, “a divine gentleman,” actor and composer Roger Perry, but she says there are no immediate prospects of marriage.
She enjoys cooking—"being from a farm, very basic things like bread, cookies, pies, meat and potatoes. And fudge. We made fudge every day."
And buying clothes. "Bargains that I love. Things I enjoy wearing, that turn me on."
She thinks her progress in show business since leaving the farm is partly from not telling, her friends then that she wanted to be a star.
"If you vocalize you let it go the energy that is needed to do something. If you hang in there for a while you're bound to have some ability. You learn your craft."
Back in Lowell High School she was “thrown out of the glee club for being too gleeful. I was always cutting up.”
Now, she is pleased to reflect, there is the Jo Anne Worley Drama Award, given regularly at Lowell High.


Worley appeared periodically on TV after jumping off the sinking S.S. Laugh-In but found herself performing more and more in front of live audiences on the musical stage. She was still performing about a year ago and spending time helping animals in distress. Laugh-In was a lesser show after she left and television is lesser, too, without her on it.

Milking the Milk Bottle Gag

Tex Avery made a few “don’t-make-noise” cartoons but Deputy Droopy was a little different than the rest because he had two guys trying to avoid being loud, so he could milk his gags longer. One guy is the centre of the gag, then the next guy follows.

You know how this works. The sheriff is having a nap in his office. The bad guys want to rob his safe. Droopy tries to get the bad guys to make noise to wake him. In this sequence, Droopy places a lobster (convenient, isn’t it) on the chair of one of the bad guys. The other bad guy captures the noise in a milk bottle and lets it loose on a nearby knoll.



Gag’s not done, son. The second bad guy shows up to milk it.



Walt Clinton from Avery’s unit animated this, along with the Hanna-Barbera unit (Ed Barge, Ray Patterson, Ken Muse and Lew Marshall). No doubt this was the result of Avery’s unit being laid off in March 1953. Tex stayed behind for a bit to finish up what cartoons he had in production.

Singing, Van Beuren Style

Aw, come on. You just love those conjoined mouths in Van Beuren cartoons when a trio or quartet sings. Like this one in the Tom and Jerry cartoon Pencil Mania.



Here are the tomato, potato and banana singing “Yes, We Have No Bananas” in harmony and a couple of frames as they get closer together.



Conjoined mouths and zooming heads are Van Beuren specialties, though we’re spared a zooming head in this cartoon.

You’ve got to love the meandering story in this 1932 cartoon. It starts with a dancing cow (does anyone know the name of song in the background?) and somehow morphs into drawings of fruit coming to life as humans and playing out an 1890s melodrama. But, it’s a Van Beuren cartoon, so does it matter? There are some nice morphing gags and an engaging score by Gene Rodemich.

Cerfing With Jack Benny

Columnists always seem to be so chummy with the stars. It might have been true. In New York, show biz writers and the stars seem to have hung out in the same drinking spots.

Bennett Cerf was a high-power publisher in New York. He supplanted Hal Block as the resident punster for years on What’s My Line. He penned a syndicated newspaper column. And he seems to have known Jack Benny well enough to have a few rounds of drinks with him (Jack, I understand, was a light drinker at best).

Here’s Cerf’s column (it was called, sigh, “The Cerfboard”) of August 2, 1953 consisting of a smattering of short pieces involving Jack and the questionable caricatures you see below (Hope looks like Jolson, Burns looks like Mel Brooks and Eddie Anderson resembles Hal Smith).

BENNY IN BLOOM
JACK BENNY entered the CBS broadcasting studio in Hollywood recently with his bag of golf clubs slung over his shoulder. "Oho," quipped Georgie Jessel, "I see you've got a date with Eisenhower." Jack thought this was very funny and laughed. That established him immediately as practically unique. Very few important comedians laugh at other important comedians. Very few, in fact, even bother to listen.
The two comics who break up Benny by merely opening their mouths are George Burns and Danny Kaye. Rochester slays him, too. Like the day after the Walcott-Marciano fiasco, on which Rochester lost a bundle. "Do you think Walcott will ever fight again?" asked Benny. "Boss," answered Rochester, "he will if I run into him."
JACK was still sawing away on his fiddle in the two-a-day when he first met Mary Livingston toiling in a Los Angeles department store. For years, the details of their swift romance have been built into a running gag on their radio program, with the name of the store repeated over and over again.
This is the kind of publicity for which most outfits would pay thousands. A rival emporium, in fact, told them they could set their own price for substituting its name for the one where Mary actually had worked. They refused, of course. Mary's former boss, however, remains blissfully unaware that he hasn't exactly overwhelmed the Bennys with appreciation.
He even complained to an associate, "Imagine that Jack Benny not being able to give me tickets at the last minute to his TV show after all the times he's mentioned my name on the air!"

BOTH MARY and Jack are balmy over golf. They take lessons from Ben Hogan at the new Tamarisk Club in Palm Springs. I hope they'll do Mary more good than the course in automobile driving for which she and Barbara Stanwyck once enrolled. When the two girls felt they had achieved a certain degree of proficiency, they arranged to drive toward each other, and meet halfway for a victory luncheon. The traffic proved heavy, however, and neither dared stop in the midst of it. Nor did they feel equal to making a U-turn until they reached traffic circles.
Result: they passed each other three times without being able to do a thing about it, and utterly frustrated, put their cars away and signed up for additional lessons.
THOUGH Jack Benny's fanatical nursing of a buck is wildly exaggerated in his radio characterization, his sense of values has never been upset by great success. At a fancy night club in New York, a bill for $57 for a single round of drinks sent him moaning into the streets. His companion was even more completely undone. "What are you kicking about?" demanded Jack. "I paid the tab, didn't I?" "I know," agreed the companion (who happened to be myself), "but I reached for it."
One old crony who really stopped Jack cold borrowed two dollars from him at the stage door of the Roxy, promising to return it promptly. Six months later, Jack received this note from him:
"I've really hit it rich, Jack. Got me a great job and am engaged to a banker's daughter. Happy days are here again. Am enclosing one dollar. Will send the other as soon as possible."
THE LAST STRAW. Jack Benny not only laughs at his confreres, but cues them into repeating their best stories. It was at his insistence that Jesse Block, of the famous team of Block and Sully, told us of their appearance at the London Palladium, where Miss Sully suddenly discovered that her necklace was missing. "Don't worry," soothed Block. "There are no gangsters over here. All we have to do is summon Scotland Yard."
In due course, exactly the kind of character they were expecting turned up from the Yard complete with walrus mustache, derby, rolled umbrella and black notebook. They heard nothing from him for 24 hours. Then Block was told he was calling. "What did I tell you?" he exulted.
When he returned to the dressing room, Miss Sully demanded, "Has he found my necklace?"
"On the contrary," answered Block glumly. "He's lost his umbrella." – BENNETT CERF

The Appeal of Quincy Magoo

You can talk about Gerald McBoing Boing and “Rooty Toot Toot” all you want, but UPA’s biggest success was an almost blind old man.

Mr. Magoo had remarkable staying power. During his theatrical life, he starred in TV commercials for G.E. and a couple of beer companies, as well as a public service message. In the ‘60s, he moved into TV syndication, headlined the first television cartoon Christmas special, and then appeared in series in both prime time and Saturday mornings.

After a while, the misreading-sign/mistaking-things-due-to-blurry-vision gags got really, really tiresome. But in his early theatrical days, Magoo could be entertaining. Many of the reasons are elucidated in this article in the British publication Picturegoer dated November 1, 1952. One big reason that doesn’t get mentioned, as it is focusing on art and animation technique, is the voice work of Jim Backus. Magoo is a little grumpy in the earlier cartoons, buoyant and optimistic as the ‘50s wore on.

The scan of this issue wasn’t very good, but the fuzzy cartoon frames are kind of appropriate for a guy who has trouble seeing.

MR. MAGOO Can’t be Ignored
Even without circuit support the latest cartoon character is catching on. And all because he is good at making mistakes
By ALAN BRIEN
The latest thing in screen heroes—he’s already a cult in America and must by now be blushing with the number of bouquets he’s picked up in Britain—is a dignified, jocular little man, inquisitive, far from handsome and almost fatally short-sighted.
He’s as far removed from the conventional screen idol at the Volga is from the Mississippi. His name is Mr. Magoo, and he is the drawing board creation of thirty-three year old, Canadian-born Stephen Bosustow and a steadily growing cartoon unit called United Productions of America. Though established as a top cartoon star among United States picture-goers, who have formed Magoo Clubs up and down the country, Mr. Magoo is known over here more by reputation than by acquaintance.
For the little man’s adventures—the first arrived in local cinemas about eighteen months ago—rely on bookings from independent British cinemas. There has been a West End season of Magoo films; thirty or so London and home counties cinemas have opened their projection-room doors to Mr. M.—yet the big three circuits have ignored him.

In many American circles you are thought too slow to bother with unless you tell of mistaking a Picasso portrait for a mirror, or the patter on a girl’s blouse for a bus map, in typically Magoo manner.
And in spite of limited distribution on this side, Columbia says that a sizeable Magoo fan mail is being received at its London office. Which rather indicates that, given wider showings, Mr. Magoo could become Britain’s pet gag of the fifties, just as the Little Audrey joke was the fashion of the thirties.
What is there about Mr. Magoo that makes him as something original and exciting, something more than a passing fancy? Well, visually he’s one-dimensional, yet he seems real—a little fellow with believable habits and tastes.
Like many active oldsters, he looks slightly ridiculous in holiday shorts, sun hat and golfing shoes. Especially when he shakes hands with a water pump and, as it creaks protestingly, mutters to his nephew, “Quaint sense of humour these mountain folks; very dry and droll” (that’s in Grizzly Golfer).
Or when he hopefully shouts, “Foot fault,” to the tennis-playing walrus in Fuddy Duddy Buddy, It is typical of his good-tempered philosophy that when he is told he has been playing with a walrus he is downcast for only a moment, then says: “A walrus, eh? Well, I like him . . . I like him.
We feel we should call him “sir” as, with homburg hat, velvet-collared coat, gouty foot and stout cane, he limps on to a swinging girder and, when he has been lowered dangerously to earth, observes to the operator: “How often have you been working a lift, son?”
His creator began cartoon-drawing in the Disney studios, was responsible for the first animations of Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs and did the story of Bambi. He was unlucky in the Disney economy drive of 1941, formed United Productions of America in 1945. Then he had a staff of six; now it is a hundred plus.

He believes that the startling success of U.P.A. in the United States is due to a policy of “allowing freedom of artistic expression, which has attracted a staff of outstanding craftsmen.”
He has created a new cartoon idiom, strangely enough, by being both conservative and experimental in technique. He is conservative in his return to the early Disney method of emphasizing the flat unreality of his drawings. While Disney now strives for a three-dimensional, photographic realism, Bosustow exaggerates and distorts to emphasize the comic essence of his cartoon personalities.
Mr. Magoo and his colleagues do not move in the smooth, articulated manner of live stars, as Disney characters do. They jerk and leap, as only animated drawings can. The technical difference is that Disney has one animation of each frame, Bosustow has one to every two or three frames.
Bosustow and his associates, John Hubley and Art Babbitt, have experimented and evolved a lively, modern style that makes any single frame as gay and inventive as a “New Yorker” cover. In the Oscar-winning Gerald McBoing Boing, for example, the screen is a canvas on which only the most important details are sketched, with a flowing, witty line, enriched by bold yet subtle washes of colour.
The eye is drawn by the composition of the lines and patterns, and held by the sudden blossoming of shapes in the primary colours against delicate pastel backgrounds. When this draughtsmanship is linked with the galvanic activity of the figures, the movement of the camera, an extraordinary effect is created—as though Van Gogh had got mixed up with Felix the Cat.

U.P.A. characters are about people more real than some of those in many a “B,” live-action film. Subjects touch upon are adult and intelligent, yet the atmosphere is never ponderous, always lighthearted, often impudent.
Apart from a number of Mr. Magoo pictures, Columbia is releasing shortly Rooty Toot Toot, a lively folk-tale based on the Frankie and Johnny ballad, which was talked about at this year’s Edinburgh’s Festival; Popcorn Story, a satirical story about the inventor of popcorn; Family Circus, the story of a little girl who is the terror of her home until her father discovers that jealousy of her baby brother is the reason for her behaviour. This line-up illustrates the point about Bosustow and U.P.A.: they have evolved a formula for animated shorts that are meant for thinking adults yet also are a great delight to the children.