A Tale of Turkisher

He’s the guy Carl Stalling didn’t talk about.

Stalling told Milt Gray in an interview published in 1971 that he composed for the Ub Iwerks studio for parts of 1931 and 1932 before returning in summer of 1933 and staying until the studio closed in 1936. Stalling said he had no assistant at Iwerks; he did everything including the arranging.

So who, then, is Art Turkisher?



In the photo of the Iwerks studio above, published in Leonard Maltin’s Of Mice and Magic, you can see men standing in front of pillars. The one on the right is Stalling. The one on the left is Turkisher, who received music credits on (as best as I can discover) six Iwerks cartoons, all released in 1934.

The Brave Tin Soldier, April 7
Insultin’ the Sultan, April 14 (Willie Whopper)
Reducing Créme, May 19 (Willie Whopper)
The Queen of Hearts, June 25
Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp, August 10
The Valiant Tailor, October 29

It should be noted some Iwerks cartoons didn’t have a music director in the on-screen credits, such as the first ComiColor short, Jack and the Beanstalk, released December 23, 1933. In a few cases it is likely because, as music historian James Parten has pointed out, the background music consists of phonograph records (eg., 1935’s Balloonland).

It turns out Turkisher was far more than a music composer and eventually had several different, and diverse, careers. Unfortunately, his obituary in a Palm Beach, Florida newspaper reveals little. It is two lines long and says nothing about his life. It only mentions survivors and that he died after a long illness on January 30, 1993 at age 79. He and his wife Irma “Judy” Turkisher had been living in the little city of Atlantis.

The longest bit of background I’ve been able to find about him comes from the Poughkeepsie Evening Star of February 23, 1940, announcing a concert:

The Paeff Quartet for Strings and Piano, which will be heard on Tuesday night, Feb. 27, at the Jewish Center, 54 North Hamilton street, is the only ensemble of its kind in this country devoted to the piano quartets of the classic and contemporary composers. The concert is scheduled to start at 8:15 o'clock. . . .
L. Arthur Turkisher, cellist and composer, has toured throughout this country as soloist with the major symphony orchestras. A graduate of the Institute of Musical Art in New York, he brings a great wealth of knowledge to the music, at hand. He recently discovered the Shostakovich quartet and arranged for its premier performance on Royale records.

But thanks to government records, a few clippings and city directories, we’re able to piece together a bit more. Laci Arthur Turkisher was born Christmas Day 1913 in New York City to Edward and Helen Czukor Turkisher. His parents came to the U.S. from Hungary in 1907. His family was musical. Arthur’s father was a cellist, music teacher and composer, and crafted stock scores for silent cartoons. Interestingly, the 1940 Census has his father living in Miami with the occupation of “Musician, sound studio.” It is tempting to think Edward was working on the Fleischer cartoons, especially since he and Fleischer composer Winston Sharples both worked on the score of a documentary 10 years later.

Turkisher was performing in public when he was almost 15, giving a violin recital in 1928, according to the New York Herald Tribune of December 16th that year. But more germane to our tale is a listing in the 1933 New York Directory, which gives Turkisher’s occupation as “employee, Fleischer Studios, Inc.” Turkisher was assisting Lou Fleischer in the music department with scores. By that time, Grim Natwick had left Fleischer’s to animate on the West Coast for Iwerks. Berny Wolf, Al Eugster and Jimmie Culhane followed. It’s not out of the realm of possibility that one of them suggested to Carl Stalling or Iwerks himself that he hire Turkisher. However it happened, Turkisher was at Iwerks’ Beverly Hills studio the following year.

Why did Turkisher leave Iwerks? Of Mice and Magic states that some staff members were laid off in 1935 while others quit because of tight money. Producer Pat Powers pumped a lot of promotional money into the Disney-imitating ComiColors, but prints were rented on a state’s right basis, meaning the Iwerks studio couldn’t expect the kind of money for them as it would receive from a release by a major, theatre-owning distributor (such as MGM, which handled Iwerks’ Willie Whopper shorts). It could be that Turkisher left at that time, but the answer may be lost in the past. Whatever the reason, the studio closed in 1936. In May 1937, he was back in New York where he married Irma Jurist. Her father Simeon was, for a short period after World War Two, a copyist for Paramount’s Famous cartoon studio; afterward the father and daughter were both caught up in the HUAC investigations. It would appear that Art and Irma divorced prior to 1944 (her passport that year lists her as single) and at some time, Turkisher married someone else named Irma (who went by “Judy”).

Besides a few cello concerts, the only other musical reference to Turkisher I can find after departing Iwerks is in the June 1943 edition of the Radio Mirror, which reprinted the sheet music for one of his songs.



Turkisher enlisted in the U.S. Navy in April 1943 and rose to the rank of Radarman, First Class, before being discharged in October 1945. The Manhattan City directory of 1949 discloses that Turkisher was in the diamond business; he moved to White Plains by the early ‘50s where he and his wife enjoyed golf (she potted a hole in one) and he was involved in a minor car accident in May 1965. Soon after this, there are several newspaper stories stating that Turkisher was now running a 64-car fleet of taxis out of the Bronx; the New York Times of January 16, 1968 reported the cab company had been organised by his father-in-law, and that Turkisher took it over upon the old man’s death in 1953, giving up his jobs as a diamond importer and film editor/producer in the process.

When he and his wife retired to Florida is unknown.

There’s little to say about Turkisher’s work at Iwerks. Much of his first cartoon was done in verse. The huge success of “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?” in the Disney cartoon The Three Little Pigs seems to have inspired studios to plunk original songs in their cartoon shorts in the hopes it would mean a wolf-like financial windfall. The opening lyrics for Turkisher’s tune:

Hammering away at his desk all day
Sits a toymaker working on his toys.
Soldiers bright and neat
Now the set’s almost complete
So to bring lots of fun to little boys.

Those lyrics aren’t exactly Disney calibre, are they? And all they do is mimic what the audience can see on the screen. Turkisher includes “Parade of the Wooden Soldiers” in the score, as well as “Taps” when the spirits of the soldier and his girl-friend rise to Toy Heaven after being burned.

In Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp, there’s a nice folk music feel in places, with Turkisher including a guitar (and, I believe, a celeste) in the orchestrations. Again, part of the cartoon is treated as an operetta, with some dialogue almost being sung. He tosses in the NBC chimes twice strictly as a pop culture reference as there is nothing about radios on the screen. The first minute and a half of Reducing Créme features variations on the opening title theme. Turkisher seems content to let his melodies play out; when the shrunken Willie is chased by the cat on the table, there’s no change in tempo or orchestration, a kind of rhythmic dance piece just carries on whatever the action is on the screen, then it’s back to the Willie theme before nice little percolating tune when the cat is after Willie on a roller skate.

In essence, Turkisher’s music is for strictly for mood; no wonder Iwerks or Powers or maybe Stalling thought it was just as easy buying records and playing them in the background of future shorts. Still, it’s no worse than some of what was being composed for cartoons in 1934, a period of animation whose scores deserve wider examination.

That Trick Never Works

“Hey, Rocky, watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat,” says Bullwinkle. You know the routine. Anything but a rabbit comes out.

If you watch the animation frame by frame, you’ll see multiples of Bullwinkle’s gloves as his arm moves.



How do you get Bullwinkle to read better in the scene? Simple. Just eliminate Rocky. Poof! He’s gone



More multiple gloves.



Bullwinkle gracefully wiggles his fingers.



The animation of these “Special feature” intros is a lot better than what’s in the actual cartoons. I presume they were done in Los Angeles instead of the nascent ValMar studio in Mexico City.

Smearing the Soldier

Popeye punches Bluto against a wall so hard he bounces back in the “highlights” cartoon I’m in the Army Now” (1936).



The action goes faster and faster until Bluto becomes a blur in multiples and Popeye’s forearms turn into smear animation.



Since this is mainly a compilation cartoon, only Dave Fleischer’s name is on the credits.

By the way, I love how Olive Oyl decides she wants a man in a uniform, so Popeye rushes to join the Army. Uh, Olive, isn’t Popeye wearing a uniform?

Martin Sans Rowan

Dan Rowan and Dick Martin were nightclub comedians who made it big—monster big—in 1968 with Laugh-In. They had been together maybe 15 years at that point. But Martin had a brief solo career as actor which was pretty much doomed from the start.

Lucille Ball wanted to move on from I Love Lucy so she bought the right to a book about a divorced woman raising her family, assembled a cast and began shooting The Lucy Show. The problem was TV viewers were accustomed to seeing—and, I suspect, wanted to see—Lucy get into and out of scrapes with her best pal and pull one over under the disapproving eye of the male authority figure. You know, just like on I Love Lucy.

So any similarity between Lucy’s show and Irene Kampen’s book soon disappeared. Before long, Lucy and Vivian Vance were pulling shenanigans while television’s most dour man, Gale Gordon, groused, burned or shouted. What else did the show need? Nothing. So Lucy and Viv’s kids disappeared. And so did the next door neighbour who kind of, may have been, sort of was, Lucy’s boy-friend. He was played by Dick Martin.

Why did he leave the show? “They obviously didn’t need me,” he told the Archive of American Television. And if you watch any of those first episodes, you may wonder why he was even there. (A notable exception was an episode where, silent-film style, Lucy played a 1920s flapper trying to mooch a meal in a restaurant/tavern, with Martin as the waiter).

But Martin never knew any of that was ahead when he talked about his new job, and his pairing with Rowan, in an interview with the King Features Syndicate. This feature story appeared in newspapers on February 26, 1963.

TV Keynotes
Comedian Plays Straight Role
By CHARLES WITBECK
HOLLYWOOD — "I'm really George Burns," says comic Dick Martin, talking about his role of Harry Connors, the next door neighbor on the Monday night CBS Lucy Show.
Martin gets all the punch lines for the comedy team of Rowan and Martin. He's the talkative drunk, the idiot diet expert, the fella with the two big eyes who won't shut up, as he pulls all the laughs in night clubs and on Ed Sullivan's Show, while his handsome partner, Dan Rowan, plays straight man.
On the Lucy Show, it's the reverse with Martin playing straight man for Gracie-Lucy. And what a straight man, he is—Harry gets one line every five shows so far. "The first six were written before Harry was cast," says Dick Martin who is not complaining a bit.
In episodes coming up this winter and spring Harry will have more to say. He does a couple of shows, and then goes to San Francisco for a hotel date with partner Rowan. When the two return to Hollywood a few weeks later, Martin shoots some more and takes off again with Rowan, so the Lucy Show isn't interfering with the Rowan and Martin comedy career.
Likes Character Switch
When the idea of a character like Harry Connors came up Lucy immediately thought of her old friend Dick Martin. Other names were tossed in the hopper, but Lucy could only see Dick Martin. He came in for a reading and Lucy said, "play yourself as I know you. Don't play your comedy character." Martin did and got the job.
"I like the switch in character," says Martin. "It's great for me not playing an idiot."

"There's not much you can really do with the part," says Martin. "I'm just the fella who is always around when Lucy needs him. I can't be brought in for the romantic interest—that would limit the show. Lucy has to have other dates. But none of that matters. I like doing another character and I should pay to just be with these people. You can't call it work."
Hard To Follow Script
The only work for Martin comes in saying lines as they're written. He's not used to it. "Dan and I have been working for nine years, and I don't think we've ever repeated a routine word for word," says Martin.
"Then I get a script on the Lucy Show and I'm supposed to do it exactly as written. That's a problem.
"We have a framework to work from," continued Martin. "In London's Palladium we were told 'we had a frightfully elastic script." When the two did "Babes in Toyland" and "The Red Mill" in the St. Louis Municipal Opera House, they rewrote both musicals. "We're used to working nose-to-nose," said Martin. "But in St. Louis the mikes were 8 feet apart and I felt all alone."
Summer musicals and parts like Harry Connors are efforts by the team to move out of the night club circuit if possible. The two have seen the country and Australia, and they would like to stay home and be able to work. "We carry golf clubs and a tuxedo on the circuit," says Martin. "Golf helps combat boredom, but in the wintertime life on the road is pretty dull. You can blow all the movies in a strange city in two days."
Golf is the big game among night club entertainers. They, at least, can get on a course during the week. Among all the courses Martin has played, one on the Fiji Island, a stop-over on the road to Australia, sticks out in his mind. "You have to hire three kids to caddy there," he says. "Kids pick up the balls with their feet and walk off, unless you ship them a quarter. And the fairways are narrow. One slice and you're in the oven."

Rowan and Martin have also learned from experience to play hotels rather than straight night clubs. From a financial point of view, of course. "You play hotels," says Martin "and your room is paid. That's a big saving. You can also go to your room between shows and read. Another plus. You can almost call it forced savings."
But there's no place like home, or work on a series like Lucy. Martin is getting some reading done on the set too. He's learning about self-hypnosis after watching hypnotists for half his life in clubs.
"I'm trying to learn how to sleep on planes." says Martin. "I think this book can help."
Maybe the book will help Martin on planes, but it really sounds like the basis for a pretty funny Lucy script.

One Step Ahead of My Shadow Backgrounds

It’s really unfortunate that few artists were ever credited in animated cartoons in the 1930s. It’d be great to know for certain who was responsible for backgrounds, layouts, even the animation itself.

Here are some nice, effective backgrounds for the Merrie Melodies short One Step Ahead of My Shadow (1933). Who drew them? No one today may know. The gong in the opening shot is on a cel (as is the character and his mallet), but the rest of the work is by the unknown background artist.



Hugh Harman or Rudy Ising go for an overlay with a tree in this scene. Very effective and attractive.



The layout artist has designed shots at an angle instead of a stage viewpoint in various parts of the cartoon.



The blossoming trees in the foreground are on an overlay.



More angles. The backgrounds feature tapestries, rugs and screens.



Friz Freleng and Max Maxwell are the credited animators on this short. The title song by Irving Kahal and Sammy Fain is featured hot-cha style and, as usual in a Harman-Ising Merrie Melodie, it bops along at double-time in the second half when the bad guy (a dragon) chases the good guys (the little boy and girl). The soundtrack also includes “Chinatown, My Chinatown.”

People! People!

In the opening of The Cat That Hated People (1948), the title character begins to elucidate why he is what he is. He paces, waves his arms and clenches his fists in a lengthy bit of animation with a different drawing on each frame. Look at the varied poses.



I believe the animation is by Mike Lah. Bill Shull, Walt Clinton and Louis Schmitt also receive animation credits. The cat’s voice is a growly version of Jimmy Durante played by Pat McGeehan; he did the same Durante voice in The Uncultured Vulture at Columbia.