Rube Goldberg in Space

I've never been much on John Dunn's writing or Chuck Jones' Tom and Jerry cartoons, but I kind of like a Rube Goldberg-inspired gag in "O-Solar-Meow" (1966).

It takes place on a space station. Jerry, in some kind of mechanical mouse-mobile, drives over a fuse which sets off a rocket and, well, you can see the rest. The girl cat calendar is pure Jones. The face on the punching bag that feels the pain is a nice touch, too.



Ken Harris, Ben Washam, Tom Ray, Don Towsley and Dick Thompson animated this with Abe Levitow directing.

He Interviewed an Idol

Jack Benny’s Second Farewell Special proved, though no one knew it at the time, to be the last. A Third Farewell Special was scripted but never shot—Jack’s pancreatic cancer became too much and he died before it could be made.

It’s a little amazing to think that in 1974, Jack was turning 80, his fatal cancer was secretly spreading, but he maintained a schedule that should have worn out anyone. He made the newspaper rounds plugging his special, in addition to performing concerts and appearing on stage (which also required media publicity via interviews with reporters).

By 1974, Jack was in a position where there were now reporters—perhaps a majority of them—who had grown up with him on radio; his show began in 1932. One of them worked for the King Features Syndicate and cobbled together this feature story published in subscribing papers on January 23, 1974. It has a nice, personal feeling. If you’re wondering, John Goudas was also an actor on stage and television in New York. He died in 2008.

Jack Benny Maintains There's No Formula for Comedy
BY JOHN N. GOUDAS
TV Key, Inc.
NEW YORK (KFS)- Jack Benny was recently in town to drumbeat his latest TV outing, "Jack Benny's Second Farewell Special," airing on NBC tomorrow night.
When I started to talk with him, I must admit I reacted like an autograph-seeking fan who had been granted an audience with his idol. My reaction surprised me at first, but I soon realized how natural it was. After all, one of my earliest recollections is my father asking us to cut down on the noise on many a Sunday night so that he could listen to Mr. Benny on radio (that's TV without the pictures). The Sunday radio lineup included Fred Allen and Eddie Cantor, but it's Jack Benny's unmistakable delivery that echoes in my head.
As I grew a little older, I joined my father in listening to Mr. Benny trade one-liners with his gallery of radio regulars— innocent Dennis Day, rasping Rochester, pompous Don Wilson, sweet Mary Livingston, and wise-cracking Phil Harris.
Then as I was graduating from grammar school, we got our first TV set and there was Jack Benny, in living black and white, holding court as usual — playing the inevitable straight man for everything from a squad of baton twirlers to a group of roller-skating chimps.

So, you can see how it took all the sophistication I could muster when I arrived at his hotel and was introduced to Jack Benny, in person. The first thing he did was offer me a cigar and excuse himself to go into the bedroom to call his wife Mary in California (the Bennys have been married 47 years). He returned a few minutes later and as he walked across the room, I couldn't help thinking to myself, "He really does walk that way. Rich Little isn't exaggerating."
I asked him what he and his old pal, George Burns, would be doing on his special (Redd Foxx, Johnny Carson, Dinah Shore and the De Franco Family join him, too).
"George and I do something a little different. We play statues in a Roman fountain. I think we've got a good show, but you don't always know what's going to work and what isn't. Even after all the years I've been in show business, there's no formula for comedy."
Since Benny's career ranges from vaudeville to video, I asked him what he thought of today's comics. He thought for a second and answered, "I like Woody Allen very much. He's not only a wonderful comedy actor, but he writes and directs his movies. That takes a lot of talent."
I took this opportunity to ask him about one of my favorite films, "To Be Or Not to Be," which starred Benny and Carole Lombard. I detected a gleam in his eye when I informed him that "To Be Or Not to Be" was currently playing on a double bill in a movie house in Greenwich Village.
"Ernst Lubitsch, who directed "To Be Or Not to Be," was one of the best directors in Hollywood," said Benny. "When he called to ask me to appear in the film, I said yes. He said, 'But you haven't even seen the script,' and I told him I didn't have to if he was going to direct it. In those days, comics seldom, if ever, got to work with great movie directors."
When I asked Benny what he had lined up for the immediate future, he said Frank Sinatra was throwing him a big birthday party on Feb. 14 — when he will turn 80 — believe it or not. As for retiring, it's the farthest thing from his mind... he has plans for a concert tour in Australia and more TV appearances.
After all, institutions like Jack Benny are as much a part of the American scene as the Statue of Liberty and Mount Rushmore.

Max Fleischer Tells His Story

The production of the feature-length cartoon Gulliver's Travels by the Fleischer studio was accompanied by a huge raft of publicity. Some focused on the cartoon itself, some focused on the studio.

Here's a feature story on Max Fleischer published by This Week, a newspaper magazine supplement, on December 10, 1939. The stock photos accompanied the article.

Out of the Inkwell
Max Fleischer upset an inkwell on the rug 20 years ago, and out poured a host of movie stars: Betty Boop, Popeye and, now, the famous globe-trotting Gulliver
by Frederick James Smith
Max Fleischer is the unknown man of the movies.
Out of an inkwell he manufactures fantasy—turns out an exact amount of that elusive thing of dreams each week. And he is as fantastic as anything he creates.
Fleischer was one of the first men to make drawings move, to give life to pen-and-ink characters. For twenty-two years he has been amusing the public with animated cartoons. Today he is head of a $1,250,000 motion-picture studio, a colossus of cartoons. Yet when he steps outside of the studio, that fantasy built he is just a gray-haired little man of five feet, five, whom nobody knows.
It was Fleischer who produced the Out of the Inkwell comedies and Ko-Ko the Clown. It was Fleischer who did Betty Boop and Popeye, who produced those animated lures to mass-audience—singing the melodies with the bouncing ball. And it is Fleischer who has made the newest feature-length picture of ink, color and celluloid, Gulliver's Travels. By all contemporary standards he is entitled to a whole corps of yes men to follow him around his studio—but he goes alone. Nobody opens doors for him. His employees just say hello and Max nods politely.
Fleischer's pictures have made many box-office millions. But he always does his personal shopping on the installment plan—says he can't save money, even though he never bets on the horses. He spends it all working out eccentric ideas, such as a mechanical ash tray or a trick inkwell. And any scheme to improve cartoon comedies interests him vitally.
Fleischer has twenty-eight patents for cartoon devices. He heads one of the two biggest animated-cartoon "plants" in the world. The other belongs to Walt Disney. Fleischer's studio occupies a complete city square in Miami, Florida, and employs 650 people. And it all started in a Brooklyn apartment.
That was twenty-two years ago. Two or three years before that Winsor McCay had made the first animated cartoon ever created, presenting "Gertie, the Dinosaur." McCay used it as part of a vaudeville act—and aroused a lot of skeptical laughter when he predicted that animated cartoons would someday take their place with human films in the movie houses of the country. It was Gertie who inspired Max Fleischer to follow his ink-and-celluloid career.

Born in Austria, Max had been brought to this country at the age of four. He had studied art at the Art Students League and mechanics at the Mechanics and Tradesmen High School in New York, while working as copy boy at two dollars a week on "The Brooklyn Eagle." He had advanced quickly to the art department of the "Eagle," and moved on to the post of cartoonist. In the same department was J. R. Bray, another pioneer in making cartoon films. The two talked over their ideas, worked together nights trying to perfect them. Finally, after a year, a 150-foot cartoon comedy was turned out Fleischer took it around to a movie distributor, who looked it over with interest.
"I'll buy one a week," he announced. Sadly, Max told him how long it had taken to make the 150-footer. The distributor lost interest. But Fleischer went back to work and devised a way to produce a hundred feet every fourth week.
Two of his brothers, Dave, then a photo-engraver, and Joe, a mechanic, were his helpers, and their workroom was the parlor of the six-room apartment in Brooklyn where Max and his wife lived. One night the boys spilled a bottle of ink on the rug. Mrs. Fleischer had gone to bed, so the movie-makers quietly shifted the rug around until the ink-spot was hidden under the piano. Mrs. Fleischer discovered it eventually, but, anyway, it gave the boys a name for their movie: "Out of the Inkwell."
The Fleischer boys kept their jobs, but they also kept working in the parlor at night, perfecting speedy methods of animating drawings. The World War interfered for a time. But even while he was in the Army at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, Max worked out a cartoon that showed recruits what happened when they pulled the trigger of their rifles. It was most effective when run off in slow motion.
After the Armistice the brothers went to work in earnest Fleischer produced two feature-length animated-drawing films—some years before Walt Disney's Snow White. One, called Relativity, explained the Einstein theory by way of drawings. The other, based on Darwin's theory of evolution, was made at the time of the William Jennings Bryan-Clarence Darrow battle in the famous Scopes trial in Tennessee.

Fleischer's greatest success, however, has been by way of short comedies. Successful cartoon characters frequently are accidents. A minor figure steals the picture, much as a bit player often walks off with a screen drama. That is how Donald Duck emerged from a Mickey Mouse background. Betty Boop was just such an accident. She appeared as an incidental figure in the background of a cartoon cabaret scene, and stole the show. That was in the boop-a-doop era, and the public demanded more of Betty. She became a star, and lasted as long as the boop-a-doop era. Fleischer became interested in Popeye because one of the elevator boys at the New York hotel where he lived waited each night for a comic sheet presenting the spinach specialist. Fleischer says he came to like Popeye because "he'd fight for peace, go to jail to uphold uphold the law."
The Fleischer plant now turns out thirty-eight one- and two-reel animated comedies a year. Besides Popeye, there is the Hunky and Spunky series about two mules. And for the last year and a half they have been working on Gulliver on the side.
Fleischer likes to explain why he made Gulliver's Travels. "Every adult is still a child at heart," he says. "They are sorry they have been told there is no Santa Claus and they would like to say, 'You're wrong, there is a Santa Claus—and there are elves and witches and fairies.' People want to believe in fantasy because it is an escape from the hard realism of the world."
When Fleischer started work on Gulliver's Travels some 7,000 sketches were prepared. Before the studio got through over a million drawings had been made, of which some 200,000 show in the final print. When Fleischer moved his studio to Florida from New York last October, two hundred specialists in the making of cartoon comedies went with him. Some had been twenty years in his employ, at least twenty-five had been with him twelve years, and forty for better than seven years. There are eighty animators alone, besides specialists who supply the voices and music, inkers, colorists, technicians, mechanics, cameramen and minor workers.
A five-day week is the rule, with a minimum pay of eighteen dollars for beginners. Fleischer never will give a raise to anyone on request. He's stubborn that way but he will do it frequently of his own accord. The chief animators and their assistants are almost all men. They earn between $65 and $350 a week. In all America there are less than five hundred qualified, able animators.
Top artists at the plant are Louis Jambor, Shane Miller and Robert Little. It was Jambor who hit upon the fantastic background that is used for Gulliver's Travels. It is actually made up of coral formations that he discovered about Biscayne Bay.
One of Fleischer's younger brothers, Dave, is really his partner in making comedies. Dave sees things in terms of laughter, Max in terms of fantasy. Max is shy and retiring, avoiding publicity. Dave, on the other hand, will enter a restaurant and start clowning with the orchestra leader. As production head of the studio, Dave supplies a lot of the comedy ideas.
Besides Dave, Max is surrounded by three other brothers. Louis is head of the music department, Joe directs the machine shop, Charles supervises the repair staff.
Fleischer moved his studio to Florida because he believed his workers would be more creative, as well as happier and healthier in tropical surroundings. He thinks they need, as he puts it, "loose clothing so your imagination can work." We walked into the patio of his studio and saw a lot of his girl employees sitting about in tropic pajamas and shorts. It was noon hour. Max obviously was pleased. "So!" he chuckled. "Healthy and happy. You see, all a matter of clothes." But he himself comes to his Miami studio as formally dressed as if he were on his way to a Wall Street directors' meeting.
Fleischer worked out every detail of the studio himself. The whole plant is air-conditioned and there is indirect lighting throughout. Fleischer's own office looks like a drugstore. That's because he is eternally experimenting with the effect of various chemicals on celluloid, ink and film. "In my spare time," as he puts it.
His only concession to Hollywood ideas in his studio is a system of loudspeakers. An announcer calls the name of anyone wanted for anything important. "I had to do it," he apologized. "Efficiency." As he was talking, the loud-speaker began calling his own name. We called his attention to it. "Yes," he sighed, with a shrug, paying no further attention whatever to the voice of efficiency.
Away from his studio and his inventions. Max Fleischer seems a little lost. You suddenly notice his gray hair and his graying mustache. "I was born with the mustache," he says, a bit vaguely.
Fleischer dislikes riding in a car unless he drives himself. He considers himself the perfect driver. "Nobody thinks of the gas or the oil or the gears." he explains, "except me."
He admits one general enemy—doctors; and he loves to put things over on them. Recently physicians have been demanding that he rest. He says yes, and gets to the studio next day at eight, staying on to five in the afternoon.
The doctors insist that he put something into his stomach every three hours. He has a habit of forgetting to eat, when he gets started working on an idea. So his secretary pursues him about the studio with a watch and glasses of buttermilk.
The fantastic Fleischer touch is as apparent in his home as in his studio. Located on Meridian Avenue in Miami Beach, his house is a seven-room Spanish-type air-conditioned bungalow. The place is illuminated at night by blue floodlights. Maybe that is his touch of whimsey. Fleischer's own study, small and cozy, is crowded with books of fairy tales.
Fleischer is very fond of music. On social evenings at home he gets together with several old friends who play the piano and violin, shyly plays the mandolin or guitar himself, and makes records of the result. Later he sits by himself for hours, listening to the records.
Max has been married for some thirty years. "Happily married?" we asked. He seemed puzzled. "Isn't that what marriage is—for happiness?" he asked. He has a son, Richard, at college, and a daughter, Ruth, who married his chief artist, Seymour Kneitel.
The Fleischers are all proud of their little, soft-spoken, pioneering Max. They understand his reticence and his dislike for publicity. Through the years they have pulled for his success. And they are happy in his skill with this vast, magic business which started with a spot on a Brooklyn parlor rug.
"That spot," sighs Fleischer. "I suppose you must mention it, what? My wife almost has forgotten it."

Gimme That Wool

A pretty ugly wolf robs a sheep of his wool in the Walter Lantz Red Riding Hood spoof "Grandma's Pet" (1931).

I love the pathetic sheep who gets kicked in the butt and out of the scene. The wolf then struts around like a fancy dude, only to find a roach or beetle or something he flicks off the coat (it then scoots off in perspective toward the camera and out of the cartoon). The drawing is crude-looking, like something out of a 1920s Aesop's Fable, but the scene is still funny.



Early sound Lantz cartoons mean fun cartoons. There's a great scene with a baby tree spanking the wolf. Just compare that to the humourless, almost unwatchable junk the studio was making in 1971.

Manny Moreno along with Tex Avery, Ray Abrams, Les Kline and old-timer Vet Anderson animated this cartoon.

The Turn-Tale Wolf Backgrounds

Dick Thomas was responsible for the background art in the Bob McKimson unit for the first number of years it was in operation at Warner Bros. (He had been in the Bob Clampett “Katz” unit in the late 1930s).

Here’s some of his work in The Turn-Tale Wolf (released in 1951). I love the pin-ups and the pillow stuffed through the broken window in the wolf’s run-down home.



Here’s part of an interior of the home the sissified version of the wolf lived in with his mother.



The layouts in this cartoon were supplied by Pete Alvarado.

An Odd Affection For Turkeys

The ultra rich are generally not sympathetic people in television comedies, but there was one notable exception: Mr and Mrs Thurston Howell the III on Gilligan’s Island.

It would have been easy to have made them snooty and snobbish; Jim Backus’ Howell character descended from an earlier character on radio that was. But instead Howell and his wife Lovey came across as people who had fun with their money, kind of like we picture ourselves if we were rich. Natalie Schafer’s Lovey strikes me a woman who felt born to be an enthusiastic party-giver.

Schafer apparently knew a little something about wealth. Her father was a Manhattan stock broker. In 1930 (see picture to the right), she was living on her own and was hardly a star, but she had a maid. She was always well dressed off-stage; various newspaper articles about her when Gilligan was on the air involve fashion.

The first mention of her acting I can find is in a Jewish newspaper in September 1920; she was 19 and appearing at a benefit in New York for cardiac children. In 1926, a newspaper article mentioned she was an actress leasing an apartment on East 53rd Street. The following year she was in a stock company in Atlanta. By 1930, she was on Broadway, as well as appearing in the Vitaphone Varities short Poor Fish, shot at the Warners Bros.’ Flatbush studio. She signed up for a play in Los Angeles in 1933 where she married actor Louis Calhern (shaving eight years off her age on her marriage license), then spent time on stage in New York and Boston.

We’ll get to how she landed on one of the most critically-panned sitcoms in a moment. First, a couple of stories from the New York Herald Tribune about her career. Interestingly, she’s never quoted in these columns. She’s paraphrased. This is from April 26, 1942.

Natalie Schafer in Hit Show At Last, but Misses Turkeys
By Nathaniel Benchley
DID you ever think what a marvelous interview you could have with an actor who hated the stage and everything to do with it, and who had taken it up only on the insistence of his family, while secretly he longed to follow in his father’s footsteps and be a lawyer?
He would be the kind who, during his moments off stage, would sneak back to his law books (which his family had forbidden him to keep) while his old father and mother sat out front and beat their palms raw for an encore of his last act, an impersonation of Lionel Barrymore. His big break would come during a courtroom scene in his third year on Broadway, when a district attorney in the audience would notice his natural flair for the law and he would be offered a trial job in the Circuit Court of Appeals, which he would conduct so successfully that after a few seasons he would grow a beard like Charles Evans Hughes’s and would be able to support his parents. But you will say, I am dreaming. True.
Our subject for today, Miss Natalie Schafer, has absolutely nothing in common with the person described above, other than that she is different from the general run of actors and actresses. Different, that is, in that she didn’t appear in her high-school dramatic plays, work as a chorus girl and under-study until her Big Chance came along. She just stepped into a feature role in a play and has been doing feature roles ever since. Like, for instance, her present part as Alison DuBois in “Lady in the Dark.” Only her plays have not always been as successful as “Lady in the Dark.” Some of them have been outright flops—but that’s giving away the plot.

Instead of studying at Stockbridge or Mme. Ouspenskaya’s, Miss Schafer got her early training the hard way, by teaching drama to small children. She had never had any acting experience herself, but she had a working idea of the way people ought to act, and by teaching it to little girls she had a chance to see what her ideas looked like. She also had a chance to do a good bit of acting, since she would act out all the parts to give the children the idea.
In short, it was a dream set-up, since she had a happy group of children who did nothing but copy her and who were not old enough or experienced enough to get obnoxious about their acting. And there is, Miss Schafer assures us, that is more obnoxious than a child actor who is turning prematurely ham. So, after about a year of this, she reasoned that she was a seasoned actress and started out in search of a part. This took six months and ended by proving that you should never be truthful about your age.
She ran across Charles Wagner, who was casting plays for stock, and when he asked her how old she was she added five years to her age, just to be refreshingly different. Wagner, a firm believer in astrology, looked up her supposed number in his little book and found that she was just full of good luck, so hired her on the idea that she would be a good omen for the show. How the show fared is not recorded, but it was certainly a good omen for her.
She played stock for ten weeks and then popped right into a leading role in “The Nut Farm” with Pat O’Brien and Wallace Ford. Then she was in a little number called “Ada Beats the Drum,” after which came an unspecified number of full-blown turkeys. In one season she was in four different plays, which, by counting up the rehearsal time and subtracting that from the length of a season, you can see made each play run on an average of three-and-a-half days, not including matinees.
Curiously enough, Miss Schafer has an odd affection for turkeys, since they give a girl a chance to play a lot of different parts in quick succession. When she is in a hit that lasts for three months or more she begins to get restless and longs for the good old days when you had an appointment with a casting director on the day following your opening night. Contrary to make actors who on a moment’s notice will drag out press clippings of all their successes, Miss Schafer likes to remember her flops, because they were so interesting.
Now, however, she seems to be saddled with a permanent hit, so she casts around for other things to keep her busy between performances. She is sincere and energetic in her desire to make some sort of contribution to the war effort, and it was only after it was firmly explained to her that coastal patrol ships are manned by men only that she settled on a non-combatant activity such as the Theater Wing Canteen.

Here’s an unbylined story from May 30, 1943. This version of her life story is a bit different; it talks about attending acting class. The story doesn’t reveal it was the Merrill School in Mamaroneck, New York, and Schafer studied diction and dramatics under Katharine Cornell.

Actress in Seventeen Failures Before She Landed in Hit Show
NATALIE SCHAFER, who comes on stage to complicate the second act of the comedy “The Doughgirls,” is a record holder of sorts, for she has appeared in seventeen plays which never achieved a run of more than a few weeks before she had the pleasure of unpacking her trunks backstage at the Lyceum and settling down.

Miss Schafer is not advocating repetition of her own rocky road, but she feels that it is becoming more and more difficult for beginners to get actual theater training and she is grateful for the many parts she had before she hit her long-run stride several seasons ago in “At Home Abroad.”
Miss Schafer’s career nearly ended with her first appearance. After her graduation from dramatic school her first job was that of one of the “stars” of an Atlanta stock company. The other (and genuine) stars were Madge Kennedy, Walter Connolly and Sidney Blackmar.
In their first play, a yacht on which they were all traveling collided with an iceberg and all passengers rushed on deck to take the lifeboats. When Miss Schafer did so she entered calmly buttoning white kid gloves with a boutonniere in the jacket of her tailored suit and a dashing veil on her ultra-smart hat. That was not particularly good characterization, but the thing that brought gales of laughter from the audience; gales which grew and grew, was that where her skirt short have been was only the briefest pair of pink panties.
Having started as a “star,” Natalie felt it beneath her to accept anything except featured roles, and in rapid succession and in far-apart places she found herself in and out of the aforementioned seventeen failures. It was not until she went into the Chinese fantasy “Lady Precious Stream” that she had a taste of a near-hit.
Miss Schafer works at the Stage Door Canteen as a dish washer on Sunday nights.

Now we jump to when she appeared on Gilligan’s Island. The Los Angeles Times syndicate likely published this. It is from November 7, 1965. Stunningly, she decided to try out for the role of Mrs. Howell because she thought it would be a flop.

Miss Schafer Is Eversharp
by ALEENE MacMINN
Television may have cast Natalie Schafer on a desert island (Gilligan’s Island), but that’s just not keeping her from living it up in grand style. She plays the wealthy socialite Mrs. Thurston Howell III (wife of co-star Jim Backus). And as such, she just about “out characters” the other characters in the CBS comedy series.

Week in and week out, you’ll find Natalie romping across the island in the zaniest of get-ups and for that, she can take credit.
“The original idea was to have Mrs. Howell dress in tweed skirts, sweaters and low-heeled shoes,” explained Natalie, “but I’ve never worn low-heeled shoes in my life. And tweed skirts are too scratchy.
“So I decided Mrs. Howell should wear mad clothes—crazy hats, slacks with ruffly tops, gloves and jewelry with sports clothes. And pearls. At first the producers and writers were aghast and they fought the idea. But I finally won.”
Natalie does her own shopping for the clothes she wears on the show. And now that the series is in color, she’s looking for even crazier costumes. She even wanted to borrow one of Hedda Hopper’s hats for an episode. But Hedda balked.
The actress, who studied costume designing before becoming a performer and who in private life is quite a fashion plate, openly admits that after a year she hasn’t adjusted to working in a series. “The idea of being tied down has always terrified me. I love to be free to travel . . . to wait for that phone to ring to tell me about a new play, a movie role, TV in Paris.”
Why did she settle down on Gilligan’s Island? “Because I didn’t think it would last, and besides the pilot was made in Honolulu. Now, I really have to fight myself to keep from getting bored.”
And how does she accomplish that? “Well,” she replied, “I’m spending my free time on the set doing needlepoint. Right now, I’m working on a piece that says ‘This Too Shall Pass.’”

‘This Too Shall Pass’ doesn’t describe Gilligan’s Island; I’m sure it must still be playing on some channel somewhere. Natalie Schafer may have had an odd affection for turkeys, but she misjudged one that gave her her most famous role.

Arctic Oops

Hanna-Barbera cartoons were known for repeating backgrounds. How many times did you see Pixie and Dixie running past the same living room table over and over, or Quick Draw McGraw chasing someone past the same cactus? While such a thing has been ridiculed by some, or warmly loved as nostalgia by others, it wasn’t something invented by Hanna-Barbera, nor a cost-saving measure. After all, background drawings can only go a certain length. The idea is to be able to match two ends of a background so it can be repeated in a pan shot.

The practice was observed even at the venerable Walt Disney studio and an early example is in “Arctic Antics” (1930). There are cases at Hanna-Barbera (and I can think a really egregious example at Walter Lantz) where the background ends didn’t quite match and the scene would seem to jump on screen.

Note the ice floes and the thick edge of ice rising from the water in these two consecutive frames. It isn’t a matter of the film being contrasty; you can clearly see they’re different (though similar) drawings.



And this is a good example of a mismatched background from frame to frame. It’s noticeable on the screen, unless you’re spending your time wondering why Mickey Mouse is now a polar bear.



There’s a really jerky piece of cycle animation in this cartoon that looks like a drawing was misnumbered. And there’s a part of the cartoon where a penguin disappears (the scene is animated on twos, so the penguin vanishes for two frames). Likely the average viewer didn’t notice the on-screen blip.



The cartoon is little more than animals walking, sliding or dancing to the beat of the music. There’s absolutely no plot and only the very mildest humour. Meanwhile, in New York, the Fleischers were making funny, warped cartoons. You know which ones I’ll take.

The Old West Drive-In

The Old West isn’t so old in some cartoons; it always seems to have out-of-place modern inventions. Such a cartoon is Homesteader Droopy.

“In the vast emptiness of the great desert, the search for food was a never-ending problem,” says narrator Paul Frees. We see bleached bones of dead steers. The background quickly pans to a modern drive-in, with a sign in alternating neon light.



The animators in this short are Mike Lah, Grant Simmons, Walt Clinton and Bob Bentley.

Larry Stevens

Lightning never strikes twice in the same place, the old saying goes. And sometimes, it’s true. You could ask Larry Stevens.

When singer Kenny Baker left the Jack Benny show just before the end of the 1938-39 radio season, he was replaced with a complete unknown, thanks to the keen ear of Mary Livingstone. The newcomer’s name was changed to Dennis Day. He turned out to be a great find. Not only could he sing, but Jack and his writers discovered Day could act and do a few impersonations and dialects that were more than passable for Benny’s comedy purposes. When Day left to join the U.S. Navy in April 1944, Mary tried to do it again, or at least she was given credit on the air. Another complete unknown was hired the following November to replace Day.

She should have remembered the lightning.

Larry Stevens certainly could sing. Hedda Hopper revealed in her column of November 4, 1944.

Larry Stevens, who was christened Dave, and who begins singing with Jack Benny, used to assist at the Turnabout Theater, helping with puppets and singing the Snake Song with Mr. Noah. He was applauded nightly. Then at Cocoanut Grove, when a spot-light was turned on him, he got up, sang it—and four more songs. Then Freddie Martin remarked, "Who knows? Perhaps tonight a star is born." It was that night one of Benny's spies heard him.

Stevens actually hadn’t appeared on the Benny show when the column was published. In fact, Hopper broke the news about the hiring in her newspaper space on October 25th. Then she reported on November 17th that Stevens had signed 12-record contact with Victor. It seemed that he was on his way.

There was only one problem. Stevens’ job description on the Benny show required more than singing. He had to act. And it soon became evident to Benny’s people, ad agency or NBC that Stevens either couldn’t, or they didn’t think he could. Within a month, one show had Dennis sending a letter to Larry, but it was Mary Livingstone who read it, not Stevens. A sketch on one broadcast had Stevens give a total of one short sentence. And on a show toward the end of Stevens’ tenure, he sang a song without any introduction and then disappeared. Someone wasn’t happy with him. Variety reported on April 11, 1945: “High on the scuttlebutt list is replacement of Larry Stevens on the Jack Benny show by Don Reid, who has been thrushing with Jack Kirkwood.” Benny was quoted in another publication on June 10th that Stevens was staying and the only person who could replace him was Dennis Day. And that’s what eventually happened.

Perhaps the situation might have worked out better if the writers had done the same thing as the earlier writers when Day joined the show—used a buffer character to take most of the on-air load and help him get settled in. Actually, Verna Felton playing Stevens’ mother the exact way she played Dennis’ mother could have been pretty funny. Instead, Stevens was left to mouth a few golly-gosh-Mr.-Benny type lines, sing for two minutes, and do little else.

Day returned to the show on March 17, 1946. The previous week on the air, Jack wished Stevens well on his future endeavours. One radio columnist back East speculated Stevens would be easily picked up by another show because he was as good as anyone else out there. It never happened. Radio didn’t want Larry Stevens. (He tested at 20th Century Fox, though). So he packed his bags and went on a theatre stage tour, the Benny cachet fresh in the audience’s mind. But the tour ran out, as all tours do.

However, before we get to more of Stevens’ post-Benny career, let’s pass along the one feature article we found about him while he was still on Jack’s show. It was published in Radio Life, the fine Los Angeles radio magazine, on January 7, 1945. Those of you who are up on your Benny know how he was “discovered” according to the radio show. That’s outlined in this story. Larry comes across as a sincere young man in this piece; his feelings seem very similar to Dennis Day’s in interviews in 1939 after Jack and Mary plucked him out of a New York radio programme.

It Could Happen to Him!
By Betty Mills
Young Larry Stevens Never Had A Lesson in His Life, Thinks he Owes Singing Break to Luck
THEY SAY that the story of Cinderella only happened in a fairy tale—and that was a very long time ago. They say that Hollywood is no land of magic—that's another fairy tale, too, dreamed up by press agents. But somebody forgot to account for the story (all true too!) of young Larry Stevens, Jack Benny's new singing discovery.
Larry is the twenty-one-year-old, handsome six footer who was introduced to the coast-to-coast Jack Benny audience early in November. His script introduction was as Aladdin-like as his real introduction to the ether waves. Guesting that night on the Lucky Strike show was Dunninger, the “master mentalist”. Written into the script as reading Benny's mind and assuming Jack was looking for a singer to replace Dennis Day, now in the United States Navy, Dunninger advised him to hasten to a filling station at the corner of Third and La Cienega where he would find the answer to his prayers. Jack, accordingly, found singer Stevens as the station's attendant, and listening to him sing while he worked, offered him the job. Poor Jack had been 'auditioning' everybody on the program, even John Charles Thomas and Frank Sinatra, only to find they were already working. Funny as this may seem, it's even funnier to realize that Larry's introduction in the script was almost based on truth. It nearly happened that way.
“Golly, it's so wonderful, I have to pinch myself to see if I'm awake,” enthused Larry. “I just can't imagine this happening to me—why, I'm just like anybody else.”
Is Different
Looking at Larry over a small table in one of NBC's deserted script rooms, Radio Life decided that in spite of what he says, he isn't like everybody else. He's different because of what he calls his “gift”—his high baritone voice. He's different because he is that success story that happens to one out of a million people.
On February 23, 1923, Larry was born in San Francisco. When he was a one-year-old, his family moved to Los Angeles, where they have lived ever since. Larry, his brother, mother and father, used to form their own quartet and sing for pleasure. Although Larry never had any music lessons, his mother, who once sang professionally, encouraged him to develop his voice.
He lived a very normal childhood, went to Fairfax High in Los Angeles, where he was more interested in athletics than singing, and appeared in all of the school's extravaganzas. From high school he went to work for the Turnabout Theater, opening with it in 1941 as a puppeteer. Although he longed for a singing career, he was contented to wait and gain experience through singing with the Turnabout's chorus. This lasted for a year. Then came the managership of a filling station—yes, the same one at Third and La Cienega.
This lasted until he was called into the Army Air Forces in 1943. He was discharged seven months later when his father died, and he became the sole support of his family.
Happened at Grove

Larry went to work in a defense plant—and then it happened! One night he and a party of friends went to the Cocoanut Grove where maestro Freddy Martin conducted a weekly bond drive, "Melodies for Uncle Sam," via the Blue network. If one bought a bond he was entitled to perform in any way he wanted. Larry sang—and a star was born. The audience wouldn't let him sit down, and he sang encore after encore. Agent Lou Irwin asked him if he would like to meet Mary Livingstone, who was in charge of finding a new singer for the Benny show. Mary liked Larry and wanted Jack, who had just returned from overseas, to hear him. He was signed and now fills the singing spot.
“Mary and Jack are the most wonderful people in the world. I owe everything to them,” he smiled. “I have always listened to their program and finding myself a part of it is almost unbelievable.”
Asked if he were scared on his opening night, he laughed and said “Sure,” but guessed everything went well. With the exception of the fact that he is a high baritone instead of a tenor, he fills the traditional role of Benny singers. He is red -headed, has blue eyes, and weighs 165 pounds. He prefers sport clothes and wishes he could always wear the old pair of blue jeans he has had for years.
He likes to relax on the dance floor or over a gin rummy game. He doesn't smoke or drink and is a regular member of the Hollywood Presbyterian Church where he used to sing in the choir. Larry likes to read although he has no favorite authors, and is fond of all types of music.
Foremost in his thoughts is the security of his family. His mother, his brother, who attends UCLA, and he live in a house in Beverly Hills. His ultimate ambitions are to own a convertible Cadillac and a motor boat—and maybe someday to act.
But he is so thrilled over his present good fortune that he plans never to worry, but let fate have its way. Bing Crosby is his idol, although he thinks Sinatra is good too. He thinks it's "swell" that he can meet the people that he's heard about all his life.
“Hey, let's go have a hot dog. I love hot dogs, eat 'em every day. You do like them, don't you?” he questioned, jumping up. “Yeah, I love 'em with everything and a great big generous helping of onions. See, I'm no different from anybody else!”

Eventually, Stevens ended up back in radio. He moved to Chicago for a 15-minute show on WBBM weeknights at 10:30 p.m. starting in February 1948. He was gone in two months. Back to Los Angeles he trekked, appearing in Billy Gray’s Band Box. This was the time television was taking off and looking for talent. In September 1949 he landed on a 15-minute show called “Campus to Campus” on ABC that ran just prior to weekly college football games. That gig was gone by November. He began working at the Oasis, a black nightclub, with Scatman Crothers emceeing. Billboard proclaimed “he’s as out of place as a ballet dancer at a hoedown.”

Stevens was hired to host a 15-minute morning TV show on Tuesdays and Thursdays on KNXT in December 1952. The station moved him in January to a half-hour on late Sunday afternoons, a timeslot he held for three weeks before the show went off the air. Ruefully noted Variety in an edition the following November: “singer Larry Stevens is running an employment agency in Beverly Hills. That’s show business.” He didn’t appear on TV again until 1956 when he landed a regular job on Hal Davis’ variety show on KHJ, though it’s unclear how long that lasted.

Late in life, Stevens appeared at radio nostalgia shows and at least a pair of interviews are circulating on-line. He even did a bit of performing, his vocal range much lower than it was on the Benny show. He died of cancer on April 5, 2000.

“It's like a Horatio Alger dream,” Stevens once told the New York Post about his time with Jack Benny. That description doesn’t quite fit his career afterward; he turned out to be a journeyman entertainer. Still, he wanted to perform and got the chance to do it in front of appreciative, paying crowds for a number of years. And appeared regularly on a Number One radio show. It’s more than others who had the same dream could say.

Cartoon Cars For Safety

What do Howard Morris, jazz and Methodists have in common?

The cartoon “Stop Driving Us Crazy.”

Industrial and commercial cartoons could be just as creative and entertaining as the ones shown in theatres. The 1950s were a heyday for animated commercials, with interesting movement and design. The same with industrial cartoons (made for businesses or organisations). They were generally animated in small studios by people who had worked in theatrical animation.

Below is a story from Business Screen magazine of December 30, 1959, explaining how the Methodist Church put the gears in motion to make a public service cartoon aimed at young drivers about road safety. Well, I supposed I’d better make that young Christian drivers, as the cartoon has a decided religious aspect to it. To make it appeal to young people, it eschewed old-fashioned Disney-type designs and went with the flat graphics that became popular in the ‘50s. And instead of aged public domain tunes like “Shortnin’ Bread” or old chestnuts such as “In the Shade of the Old Apple Tree,” a youth-appealing jazz combo was used on the sound track. Business Screen hailed it as a “first.”

This Teen-Age Safety Film — "the Most"
Methodist Board of Temperance Color Picture Is a Real Gasser
PROBABLY ONE of the wildest pieces of far-out jazz heard on disc in recent years is a 30-minute, practically continuous, drum solo by Art Blakey called Orgy in Rhythm.
The same Mr. Blakey who flips the wigs of the hipsters in the nation's most noted murky cellars is also the star attraction of a new film just released by the General Board of Temperance of The Methodist Church. The film, a groovy safe driving message titled Stop Driving Us Crazy, is directed to teen-agers, and no reason why they shouldn't dig it the most.

Ethical and Moral Appeal
Instead of the conventional documentary film, with warnings and safety slogans — approaches which have not proven completely effective — the film appeals to teen-agers on ethical and moral grounds. This new approach has the hearty endorsement of the President's Conmiittee for Traffic Safety and the National Safety Council, both of which cooperated in the production.
As a religious film, Stop Driving Us Crazy blazes a new trail. It is the first animated cartoon in the religious field and the first to have an original jazz score written especially for it. The drawings are frequently abstract and the message is conveyed, in some sequences, by an unusual combination of form, line, color and music.
Score By a Popular Artist
In addition to Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, who play the music, the score was composed by Benny Golson, whose new combo is currently the thing to hear in New York. Howard Morris, a TV funnyman with Sid Caesar, narrates the film.
Two of the pieces in the film, Crazy Drivin' Blues and No Time for Speed, have been recorded and are available on 45 rpm records. The National Safety Council is distributing 1,000 of these records to disc jockeys along with appropriate safe driving announcements addressed to teen-agers.
"We have no illusions that this film by itself will have any drastic ettect on teen-age driving habits," said Roger Burgess, associate secretary of the board. "What we hope to accomplish is discussion of the problem by teen-agers themselves. Ghastly pictures of wrecks, constant preaching, and attractive slogans may have had an effect but they have not done the complete job.
Cites Hope for Success

"We believe that an appeal to teen-agers on basic religious and ethical grounds may work where other appeals have failed. The vast majority of teen-agers have good religious and family backgrounds but it seems to leave them when they get behind the steering wheel. We hope this picture reminds them," Mr. Burgess said.
Stop Driving Us Crazy was written by Bill Bernal and produced by Creative Arts Studio, of Washington, D.C. It is available on rental from film libraries of The Methodist Publishing House (in many leading cities) for $6.
Purchase price, from General Board of Temperance, 100 Maryland Ave., N.E., Washington 2. D.C, is $125. TV distribution is being handled by Sterling-Movies U.S.A.

While the cartoon may have been produced by Creative Arts Studio, the people who worked on it (not mentioned in the story) were based on the West Coast. Animator Ken Mundie may be best known for “The Door,” released theatrically by Warner Bros. in 1967. He worked at DePatie-Freleng from 1964 to 1966 before FilmFair took him on as a director. He also directed an animated special featuring Bill Cosby’s Fat Albert prior to Filmation’s debasement of the character. Dick Drew animated on it. Sammy Kai had some connections with the ValMar studio in Mexico and worked for both Jay Ward and TV Spots. Bill Bernal was a reader at the Warner Bros. main studio in 1941. He worked in sales at UPA before moving to Storyboard, Inc. in 1955. These are not attempts at complete biographies. Don’t write to say “You forgot to mention...” However, I would welcome information on director Mel Emde. Incidentally, this was the first cartoon voice work (to my knowledge) by Howie Morris.

I’m sure many readers have seen this short film. If you have not, you can watch it below. This is for entertainment purposes, not to push a religious agenda.