Skunk Takes a Dunk

You can be assured of one oddball pose in an Art Davis cartoon. Here’s one from Odor of the Day, where a skunk battles a bulldog.



Lloyd Turner’s story has a dog trying to fend off a skunk’s smell to stay in the skunk’s bed. Eventually, the dog retaliates by spraying perfume on the skunk. Some reaction drawings—



Both the dog and the skunk end up in a frozen lake to gets colds so they can’t smell the other.

Emery Hawkins, Don Williams, Bill Melendez and Basil Davidovich are in Davis’ animation crew.

Listening to Benny

“Did you hear Jack Benny’s show tonight?” Fred Allen would ask on the air to Portland Hoffa, and then proceed to use Benny’s own material to set up jokes that left his audience laughing in recognition.

CBS moved Allen’s show to Sunday nights after Benny on March 8, 1942, and so long as Allen had a show on the radio, that’s where he remained (Allen’s last broadcast was in 1949). And he kept a close ear on Benny.

The Chicago Times’ Don Foster evidently sat in on one of Allen’s listening sessions. He wrote about it in the second of a two-column series dealing with Allen that appeared in the paper on November 12th and 13th, 1947. Here are the columns.

NEW YORK.—It’s Fred Allen’s gag about vegetarians living to be 90 and then getting run over by a meat truck. The payoff is that Fred himself is now a vegetarian. The comedian is going meatless, has quit smoking and spends all day Monday in bed (the latter on doctor’s orders) to try to get ahead of his high blood pressure.
Fred is also autoless---has never owned one, in fact, and doesn’t expect to own one, even though he’ll be working for an auto sponsor starting Jan. 4. He insists there’s nothing unusual about this.
“I was on the air for Sal Hepatica for years,” he reminds you, “but I never took Sal Hepatica. Do you think all the people who work in the vegetarian store where I buy my food are vegetarian? I go into a Radio City drugstore and see most of them sitting at the counter eating hamburgers.”
A fellow TIMES columnist, Earl Wilson, and this radio reporter were discussung various and sundry topics with Allen after his NBC broadcast Sunday night. The topics which Allen took up and disposed of in devastating order included a couple of Allen’s pet gripes—radio ratings and studio audiences. We asked him how he was bearing up under his new Hooper rating, which has him in a tie with Bob Hope for first place.
“Ratings don’t mean anything,” said Fred. “They call a couple of guys in Minneapolis and that determines your standing. I’ve been doing the same kind of show for 15 years. Why should I suddenly be at the top?
“We simply try to do an intelligent program week after week because we assume that the radio audience has some degree of intelligence.”

ALLEN has no patience with comedy shows that go in for school boy slapstick in an effort to wow the audience. They’re an insult to the listeners’ intelligence. Furthermore, the practice of tailoring shows to please the people in the studio has all but ruined radio comedy, Allen believes.
It has ruined it for the whimsical type of humor that Stoopnagle and Budd were once famous for, like the time Stoop and Budd were taking inventory in a yacht store and found they had only three yachts left. This type of whimsy depends for its laughs entirely on situation and dialogue, and Stoop and Budd turned the yacht episode into an extremely funny comedy sequence without resorting to any form of slapstick, said Allen. By the same token a medium that has become so conditioned to studio-audience reaction has shut the door on the writer of the James Thurber brand of whimsy. Radio comedy, Allen believes, was never meant to be played before a visible audience.
He recalled the broadcast on which he appeared with Knute Rockne just before the great Notre Dame coach took off on the flight that was to end in his death. Allen and Rockne were guests on John B. Kennedy’s program originating from a Broadway theater. A glass curtain separated the principals on stage from the theater audience. The audience could hear the program on a loudspeaker in the theater’s auditorium but the audience’s laughter and applause was not audience on stage and did not go out over the air. “It was an eerie thing,” said Allen, “to look out and see those people laughing and applauding without being able to hear them.”
But that is the way he believes it should be. If a comedian must have an audience to play to let it be a silent audience as far as the performer and the listening public are concerned. If he can’t hear the applause and the laughs, the comic won’t be so tempted to try to get bigger and better laughs by mugging his way through the program.
The comedy show that is “must” listening with Allen before he goes on the air Sunday nights is the Jack Benny program. But more about that tomorrow.

NEW YORK.—The first order of business on Sunday evenings for Fred Allen and his cast of funmakers is to gather in one of NBC’s audition rooms on the eighth floor of Radio City and listen to the Jack Benny program from Hollywood. This is at 7 p.m., New York time, an hour and a half before Allen himself goes on the air.
Allen thus keeps track of what he fellow feudist is up to and in case Mr. Benny tosses off a wisecrack about Mr. Allen the latter can return the favor with an appropriate jest on his own program at 8:30 (EST). But it’s not entirely a matter of checking on Benny. The Allenites listen, as much as for any other reason, because they seemingly enjoy the Benny program. It elicits some hearty chuckles from the Allen case, including the Chief Wit himself.
Last Sunday night when we were on hand to listen with them the first arrivals were the two secretaries whose job at this stage is to keep a watchful eye on the Allen scripts. One by one the denizens of Allen’s Alley drifted in: Ajax Cassidy (Peter Donald), Senator Claghorn (Kenny Delmar), Mrs. Nussbaum (Minerva Pious), Fred and Portland arrived 10 minutes after Benny went on and Peter Donald gave Fred a quick fill-in on what had gone before.
FIRST the boss of the Alley shed his topcoat and suit coast and seated himself at the head of the long mahogany table in shirt-sleeved splendor, the only male in the room in this state of working comfort.
The belated arrival of Titus Moody (Parker Fennelly), the program’s sound effects man, and the two producers—one from NBC and one from the advertising agency—completed the gathering.
In the opening of the Benny script, Benny, Phil Harris and Dennis Day were at a drugstore counter trying to decide what to eat. Dennis’ crack, “I’ll have a dish of ice cream with a strip of bacon on it,” evoked a laugh from the Allen cast, as did this bit of dialogue: “Do you,” asked Jack, “have any hot chocolate?” Waiter [Mel Blanc]: Here’s a Hershey bar and a match.

The comedy situation on the Benny program was this: Phil and Dennis decide to frame Jack by having Dennis, impersonating Ronald Colman, invite Benny and his lady friend [Sara Berner] to a masquerade party at the Colmans. Benny, attired in full cowboy regalia, and his companion come pounding on the Colman door after Ronnie and his wife have retired. After letting the party-goers in the Colmans decide to slip out the back door and leave the home to Benny and his girl friend. The situation up to that point had developed some hilarious possibilities, but from there to the finish, nothing happened. The ending was rather lame in view of the promising beginning.
THE consensus of the Allen cast was that the Benny program got off to a good start but dissipated the effect toward the finish.
“The beginning was very funny,” commented Fred, “but it’s hard to sustain.” He spoke as one comedian who understood what a fellow comedian was up against in his efforts to keep the program funny from start to finish.
Then the Allen cast, grouped around the table with Fred, got down to the business of giving their own script a final reading. The guests for the evening—Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy—were not present, so Peter Donald read their lines as well as his own. The script reading out of the way, the cast sat around and chinned for a while.
Peter Donald, engaged in picking dog hairs off his blue serge suit, inquired: “Does anybody know where I can get a dog with blue serge hair?”
The talk turned to show business and of one individual, who isn’t exactly rated as a Boy Scout in money matters, Allen observed: “They’re going to bury $100,000 with him just to test it—to see whether you can take it with you.”

Allen continually moaned about having a studio audience, yet he played to them, too. He’d refer, or talk, to them occasionally in ad-libs. And then there was the time he had Jack Benny’s pants removed on stage, solely because he knew the audience would scream uncontrollably, and make the routine funnier. (Though I must admit I don’t know how Benny could possibly have stayed completely on mike while stooges were taking off his clothes. Wouldn’t he have moved around a lot?).

As for the “weak finish” on the Benny broadcast, the writers didn’t have much of a choice. They logically ended it with the Colmans invading the Benny home in a case of turn-about.

My thanks to Kathy Fuller Seeley for supplying these columns.

She Missed Glory

Perhaps the most puzzling credit on a Warner Bros. cartoon is the one you see to the left, where Leadora Congdon is revealed to be responsible for the streamlined designs in the 1936 short Page Miss Glory. She was never credited in any other cartoon, anywhere. Her name isn’t bandied about by historians or retired staffers at any cartoon studio. She’s a complete mystery.

Well, maybe not.

A few diehard diggers have found bits and pieces over the years. Some time ago on this blog, we quoted Leon Schlesinger in a syndicated story in the Baltimore Sun of June 20, 1937 about the cartoon.

Not long ago, we decided to do something definitely different. A girl from Chicago showed me some ultra-modernistic sets she had designed which she thought could be used as backgrounds for a sophisticated cartoon. In order to show off the sets, we had to use human characters and have the camera shoot the sort of angles Busby Berkeley made famous. The idea was novel and the result original, but somehow it was not so funny as if animals, fowls or insects had been used.

So with this limited information about Chicago in hand leave us, like Snooper and Blabber, set off a detec-a-tive prowl through history.

One thing one quickly learns in research is not everything out there is altogether accurate. Names are misspelled. Dates vary. But we eventually find a clue.

To the right is a little clipping from the Chicago Tribune of March 15, 1919. It’s one of a handful of brief reports on the teenaged Leadora, all of them involving dancing of some kind. With a check of census records we discover that Leah Congdon is listed as living with father Albert B. mother Emma. Her father is recorded a salesman for a canned food company. But we have to go to Canada for our next clue. It seems that Leadora’s father ended up in Winnipeg, Manitoba for a period of World War One. Witness the document below.



The immigration document states that Leadora was living in Chicago (with relatives, perhaps). However, she did spend some time in Canada, as you can see in the 1921 Canadian Census for Chatham, Ontario, which is something like 50-some-odd miles from the U.S. border with Detroit. Movement across the Canada/U.S. border was not difficult back then, even to live or work.



The immigration document above reveals that Leadora was born in Syracuse, New York. So what does a virtual trip to Syracuse tell us? Well, the Post-Standard happened to publish an obituary in its November 1, 1965 edition, despite the fact Congdon had not lived there for years and years.

Mrs. Osborn Dies at Home
Mrs. Leah Dora Congdon Osborn of Forest Lake, Ill., a native Syracusan who had done design work for Walt Disney, died unexpectedly at her home at Forest Lake, a Chicago suburb. She was in her 60s. Born in Syracuse, she and her family moved from here while she was in their early years. Her husband, Tech Osborn, who died two years ago, was in the printing business. He is credited with being the inventor of the process of printing color designs on oil paper. Surviving are a step-son, Tech Osborn of Forest Lake; her father, Albert B. Congdon of West Palm Beach, Fla.; and two aunts, Mrs. Fred R. Lear of Syracuse and an aunt in Florida. Services will be 2 p.m. Wednesday at Forest Lake, with burial in the same community.

Walt Disney? She worked for Walt Disney? Maybe. Maybe not. It’s altogether possible the terms “cartoons” and “Disney” were used interchangeably; we’ve run into other newspaper stories where the writer gets studios mixed up. The Chicago Tribune has a brief funeral announcement for her on the same date but doesn’t reveal exactly when she passed away.

Unfortunately, there’s nothing in this cursory detective job to indicate how she knew or met Leon Schlesinger or convinced him to use the lovely streamlined art in one of his cartoons. However, we are able to ascertain what she was doing later in life. That’s again thanks to an obituary. The Post-Herald stated Leadora’s husband (nicknamed Tek, also the name of their son) died in 1963. Sure enough, the Tribune reported on December 18, 1963:

Arthur C. Osborn
Funeral services for Arthur C. Osborn, 66, of Forest drive, Forest Lake, Lake county, who died Monday in his home, will be held at 11 a.m. today in the chapel at 53 S. Old Rand rd., Lake Zurich. He and his widow, Leadora, operated Lea-Tek studios, doing commercial photographic work, from their home. He retired in 1960 as an employe of U.S. Printing and Lithographic company in Chicago, and in 1939 as an army major. Besides his widow, he is survived by a daughter, Mrs. Susan Keagy; a son, Ted [sic]; and three grandchildren.

The 1940 U.S. Census for Chicago gives Leadora Osborn’s occupation as “artist, advertising.” The Tribune also published a story in 1960 announcing a one-woman art exhibit of her’s. She and Osborn married in 1937; she had been married to Robert O’Hair, Jr. in 1928. The 1930 Census lists her occupation as “artist, commercial art co.” Again, this is for Chicago. I have found no evidence of her living in Los Angeles under any of her surnames.

No, this is not an attempt at a complete biography. It’s merely a few notes to give us a bit more information than we knew about Miss Congdon before.

I’ve always liked Page Miss Glory, though director Tex Avery baldly told historian Joe Adamson: “Forget it. It was lousy.” The designs and layouts in the dream sequence are very good and Avery finds room for some funny gags. Read a post about the cartoon here and young Steven Hartley’s opinions back when he was a 15-year-old blogger here

Ollie Hogs the Ending

A familiar caricature ends the festivities in The Timid Toreador, where our hero pig’s hot t-teh-tee-tamales vanquish a bull in the ring.

Porky has the traditional hats of victory tossed on him from the spectators.



Then he morphs into someone familiar to end the cartoon.



Since someone will mention it, Porky disguised himself as Oliver Hardy earlier in the year in You Ought To Be in Pictures.

For some reason, Bob Clampett and Norm McCabe co-directed this cartoon. Clampett left his unit and took over the Tex Avery’s, but that wasn’t until after July 1941, so I’m at a loss to understand why the two directed this one. Izzy Ellis gets the only animation credit.

Hacking For a Birdie

Tex Avery spends most of What’s Buzzin’ Buzzard? having the two main characters try to kill and cannibalise each other. Here’s a 14-drawing cycle from one scene.



Here’s the cycle slowed down.



Ray Abrams, Preston Blair and Ed Love are the credited animators, using designs by Claude Smith. Johnny Johnsen, as usual, supplied the scenic mesas and plateaus. Scott Bradley plays “Shortnin’ Bread” a lot on the soundtrack.

More Than The Riddler

Who was your favourite Bat-villain? (No, I will not accept Bob Kane as an answer).

I’m talking about the TV Batman show here, the one that never explained how a direct phone line could be installed in a secret cave without some Ma Bell cable layer knowing it was there and spilling the beans.

Especially toward the end of the series, some arch-criminals were more hammy than threatening. The original major villains were the best. To my young viewing sensibilities in 1966, the most unhinged was Frank Gorshin. His Riddler had that odd cadence to his voice that left you with the impression he wasn’t all there.

Naturally, way back then as a nine-year-old, I didn’t know anything about Frank Gorshin. Fortunately, TV Guide and other magazines came along that let people know about the background behind some of the actors on the show. It was then I discovered Gorshin was an impressionist, a skill which he never got to exhibit against the Caped Crusader. And, unfortunately, being the Riddler overshadowed all his other many talents.

I’ve found a pile of newspaper clippings about Gorshin from his time on Batman, but let me post a couple which pre-date the show so you can learn a bit about him and his attempts to make his career grow. This first one is unbylined, and comes from the Binghamton Press, November 10, 1962.

Gets Chance to 'Go Straight'
Frank Gorshin, one of the country's best known impressionists, began his career as a singer.
However, it is neither as a singer nor an impressionist that Frank has received his highest praise, but as an actor.
That talent will be most apparent to viewers of "The Fire Dancer" episode of Empire, in which Frank guest stars with regulars Richard Egan, Terry Moore, Anne Seymour and Ryan O'Neal, airing in color Tuesday on NBC-TV and Channel 40 at 8:30 p. m.
He doesn't remember a time when he was not entertaining somebody somewhere. While still in high school in his home town, Pittsburgh, Pa., he earned his living singing on weekends at special functions in Pittsburgh and the surrounding area for various civic and private organization functions.
It was while serving in the Special Services unit of the Army, when he was 20, that Frank first began to do impressions. It started when a fellow GI commented that he bore a strong resemblance to actor Richard Widmark.

For some years Frank had been "fooling around" with impressions of James Cagney and Al Jolson but never thought of doing anything about it professionally. However, with a little encouragement from his army buddies, Frank began to work on them.
Many people have commented on the fact that Frank seems to look like the people he is impersonating. For someone with as distinctive an appearance as Frank Gorshin it is not easy to "look like" some of the people he mimics. And Frank does not think he does.
He says "I once looked at a group of pictures of me doing impressions of people like Jolson, Rod Steiger, Charles Laughton and so on, and you know something? I though every picture looked like me."
He attributes his ability to "assume the attitude" of the person he portrays, in addition to perfect mimicry of the voice, with the reception he receives. Just before Frank was to be discharged from the Army, he got a pass to go to New York City for a weekend. Making the most of the opportunity, Frank walked into an agent's office, convinced him it would be worth while watching him perform, and for almost an hour did his complete "act," as he had been performing before GI's in Europe with his Special Services unit.
The agent was so impressed he signed him immediately, and before Frank's leave was over, he was cast In a motion picture, "The Proud and the Profane," in which he played a small role.
However, it was not until he was cast as the beatnik motorcyclist in the film "The Bells Are Ringing" that Frank really began to be noticed. In the few years since that time he has appeared in 15 major motion pictures; performed his act in some of the top night clubs in the country as well as on the Ed Sullivan Show and the Steve Allen Show on television, and was the recipient of critical acclaim for his guest star role on The Defenders last season.
It is as Billy Roy Fix, in Empire, that Frank has an opportunity to show what he can do as an actor. He will neither sing nor do impersonations. It is a straight dramatic role, and Frank feels it is the best show he has ever done.

This story is undated as well. It’s from the Gloverstown Leader Herald, March 30, 1964.

Talented Mimic Hopes or More Acting Roles NEW YORK—Frank Gorshin who stars in next Sunday's "Show of of the Week" on NBC entitled "Jeremy Rabbit, the Secret Avenger," told me four years ago when he was guesting on a Perry Como Show that a he wanted out of life was stardom and he wouldn't settle for anything less.
Four years have not dimmed. his ambition, but Frank now understands that one can make a pretty good buck in show business without the name in lights bit and all the anxieties which generally accompany it. "But I still want the top," he explained, "because you can't go on in this business if you settle for what you have."

Gorshin shares top billing with George Kirby as the two best mimics currently doing variety acts. The difference is that Kirby does not want to be an actor while Gorshin has had a modicum of success as a dramatic actor and finds the "mimic" tag a stumbling block in his quest for roles.
"As soon as I walk in a lot of directors say something like, 'oh . . . he's the mimic' . . . and I'm eliminated before I read," says Frank. "If they'd stop and think, they'd realize that mimics have to be exceptional actors before they can possibly create the illusion of mimicry."
Frank, who can do about 100 impressions, does a facial imitation of all his stars which have the audience applauding even before he does the voice. But this, according to Frank, is a complete fraud and only works because Gorshin is an accomplished actor.
"People say I look exactly like Kirk Douglas or Burt Lancaster when I imitate them," he explained, "but if I did those faces without an introduction the audience would think they were looking at Frank Gorshin contorting his face. It's a stage trick."
From Out of Nowhere
When Frank decides to honor a star by adding him to the Gorshin collection, he studies the performer's work and sees if the voice comes to him. Sometimes, it comes out of nowhere, as it did with Marlon Brando.
"I tried to do Brando for years," he said, "and I couldn't get it. Then, one day, when I wasn't even trying I was suddenly talking like Brando and here it was. I have enough voices to do a TV show like Sullivan's five or six times a season without repeating a voice. I'm doing less and less of Cagney," concluded Gorshin, because anybody at a party can do a Cagney simply by saying, 'You dirty rat.' This hurts me because it's my best imitation.

The Riddler was the debut villain when Batman began airing in January 1966. A story in the Saratogian on the 8th of that month quoted Gorshin as saying “I’m playing the guy straight down the middle, as seriously as possible. I visualize the Batman villains as Shakespeare did his badmen.” (The story also revealed he had turned down the lead in The Double Life of Henry Pfyfe. It didn’t have quite the impact of Batman).

Gorshin was quickly brought back to appear in another two-parter. But I recall reading during the run of the show that he was tired of the role and wanted to do something else. Whatever the reason, John Astin was completely miscast as the Riddler for one, two-part episode in season two before Gorshin returned in season three. A story in the Binghamton Press, July 9, 1966 talks a bit about it.

Gorshin Emerges From the Unknown
By MIMI MEAD
Special Press Writer
New York—A nasty rumor has been going around the country, smiting the hearts of the little ones with sorrow and confounding the high hopes of the campy set. The rumor was to the effect that Frank Gorshin had decided to give up being The Riddler on Batman and turn his attentions exclusively to impersonations and singing on the night-club curcuit.
All may now rest easy: Frank has no intention of leaving the show or the role. He is a thoroughly accomplished entertainer and a superb impersonator, bat it was the Riddler that pushed him over the top.
"I'd been around for a long while," he commented the other day while in New York for a gala Bat show at Shea Stadium. "Over ten years people get to know the face and they sort of think, 'oh yeah' when you appear, but the Riddler was the final catalyst that made me known everywhere, and by name. It's been quite a whirl, and I'll stay with the show as often as they want me — if I have the time," he added in an off-hand way, striking a Bat lover's heart with the icy fingers of doubt.
* * *
BY HAVING the time, he means that he is now involved in a hectic and pressured schedule. He is currently taping guest appearances for a television series next season, and starring in "What Makes Sammy Run" in Los Angeles for two weeks.
"That's a funny one," Gorshin remarked with the lopside smile for which he has become famous. "I play a 65-year-old man in the first episode of the new show, T. H. E. Cat, and then in the beginning of 'Sammy' I'm 19 years old. It's great: when we were taping, I was 19 in the morning and 65 at night." Frank was "discovered," originally, by Steve Allen, who found him working for peanuts in a small Los Angeles nightclub. He was doing some of his incredible impressions of celebrities, and within two weeks he was doing them on television before millions of people.
From then on, it has been upwards all the way until at this point he has done more than 70 guest shots, both dramatic and variety, including The Defenders, Show of the Week, Combat, Alfred Hitchcock, Andy Williams, Jack Parr [sic], Sammy Davis, Jr., and on and on and on.
* * *
"I'VE BEEN offered several TV series," he said, punctuating his conversation with the pointing finger-jabs used by the Riddler, "but I'm not interested. I've been offered two Broadway shows, but I don't want to constrict my endeavours, if ya know what I mean. I am not 'planning' anything in my career. I want to enjoy the fruits of my labors."

His impressions are among his labors, and he is unable to explain how they come about. Unlike many impersonators, he doesn't sit down study his subject, looking for particular gestures or tricks of the face.
"I don't look for things. It all started a long time ago, when I was a kid, and I used to spend all my time in the movies. Well, when I used to come out of the theater, for a short time I WAS whatever person I had just seen: James Cagney, George Raft, anybody. I still do it. For instance, I think of Cary Grant or Burt Lancaster and right away I've just assumed their personality. I can't tell you how I do it, because I don't know.
* * *
"BUT I'LL tell you one thing," he went on, in the nasal, staccato voice that can change so quickly to any timbre, "everybody is an individual in this world. There's nobody you can't imitate if you really want to. Even if you have a plain face, or a face with no special characteristics at all, you stand out because you are so unexceptional compared to other people. There's nobody that can't be impersonated."
Frank and the rest of the Batman gang have just finished shooting a Batman feature movie, which will have the usual gaggle of villains: the Penguin, the Joker, the Riddler and Catwoman.
"It's going to be a funny, funny show," Frank said with glee. "It's got all the same Bat stuff in it. but they've added a few things, like a Batcopter and a Batboat. It's premiering in Austin, Tex. Aug. 1, and they're hoping President Johnson will come.
"You know," he mused, "it's a funny thing about this whole Batman series. You don't need a frame of reference to enjoy it. It's the No. 1 show in Japan,for instance, and they never grew up on the comic book or saw the terrible old movies.
"It's funny. Out of all my appearances on TV, I did three—one for Naked City, one for The Defenders and one for The Doctors and the Nurses—and everybody said, 'Oh gee, you ought to get an award for that performance' and well, I sort of thought and sort of hope. But this Batman thing came along and it was the last thing in my mind, but I got an Emmy nomination. It sure is funny."

The Devil You Say

A pan to the right reveals the Devil reading and lighting a cigarette on a nearby flame at the start of the Private Snafu short Hot Spot (1945).



Friz Freleng cuts to a closer shot and you’ll see something on the cave wall that isn’t in the pan shot—a woman with her breasts exposed. That’ll keep those military boys awake!

Paul Julian is likely responsible for the background from a layout from Hawley Pratt. Hal Peary, the Great Gildersleeve, plays the Devil.

Abou Ben Bouncing Ball

Pat Matthews truly was a star animator for Walter Lantz in the 1940s, and his work deserves to be better known. He animated some wonderful dance sequences, some comic, others not.

Maybe his best-known work is on the two cartoons featuring “Miss X,” who Lantz had to ditch after because of skittish censors. The second release was Abou Ben Boogie (1944). It’s pretty much conceded by animation historians that Miss X was inspired by the singing, dancing Red, animated by Preston Blair in the Tex Avery cartoons. Matthews animated Miss X on twos (one drawing shot on two frames of film) but that didn’t hurt the movement at all.

Here are some of the drawings from the dance sequence (reused later in the cartoon; Lantz pinched pennies when he could) by Matthews. Miss X rolls Abou Ben Boogie up into a ball before her butt bounces him out of the frame.



Matthews’ Miss X dance sequence in Lantz’s The Greatest Man in Siam (also 1944) was debatably better than this, but these are sure some nice drawings. And his camel dance scene in this cartoon is tops; some of the best comedy animation ever in a Lantz cartoon. Learn more about who worked on this cartoon in this post from Devon Baxter on Jerry Beck’s site.

61. But Who Cares?

Yet another “Jack Benny: fact or fiction” feature story surfaced in the Albany Times-Union of April 17, 1955. There were some nice stock photos of young Jack you may have seen before but the copies we have are pretty much unviewable. However, we can view the text, which is transcribed below:

Brace yourself — just a little.
Jack Benny was not born in Waukegan, is not stingy, has as much hair as the next man—and is not 39.
In point of fact, Mr. Benny turned a thriving 61 on St. Valentine's day, 1955, and does not especially care who knows it.
All this, of, course, is in reference to the well-known star of stage, screen, radio and CBS television, who as it turns out is not so well known at that. Naturally, nobody ever really thought all these things about Jack. Not really.
Eh? They didn't?
You should read his mail sometime.
For example, even among the residents of Waukegan, you can get yourself a fat bet on that birthplace business, and the town, a suburb of Chicago, has actually posted the information that Benny is its native son.
But no. On that February 14, 1894, his mother was in a Chicago hospital. And the name of her infant was not Jack Benny, but Benny Kubelsky, and it still is.
Now and then radio and television audiences turn splenetic over how close Jack is with a nickel. So who you think paid for his daughter's wedding, one of the most expensive in the expensive history of Beverly Hills, California? It certainly wasn't Bob Hope.
It is true that Benny is generally considered a millionaire, but he made it. It wasn't a stashing-way process.
The toupee bit is something else again. It is one of Benny's professional conceits that he must wear them. He bears down on the subject in public appearances. But it ain't so. His hair's his own. He has a good deal of forehead, yes, but not a scalp dolly to his name.
In other respects, the real-life Benny, whose 39-plus-22 years of existence will be briefly explored in a moment, might well surprise you.
The extraordinary musical voice he employs on TV to range from bafflement to cowardice is, away from the microphone, a tiny pitch deeper than the one you hear —and perhaps 40 times firmer and more authoritative. Indeed, the change startles one not looking for it. This matter is not easy to explain, but very easy to recognize.
And there's one more thing.
He plays the violin pretty well.
In fact, to get on with the deal, he ought to. It was one of the first accomplishments he essayed after having been born, this maestro who is not truly 39.

Benny was the son of a man who had a so-so clothing store—in Waukegan, uh-huh—and supported his family in moderate style. Jack, that is, Mrs. Kubelsky, and a younger sister of Jack's, Florence, whom he mentions not at all on the air, with the result that her existence is not often suspected.
Well, Jack began ushering in a local theatre while still in grammar school, and wasn't out of knickerbockers when he began playing the fiddle in the pit. That went on through high school as well; along with membership in the high school orchestra and our hero was 15 when he became part of a vaudeville duo with a Miss Cora Salisbury. These two got around quite a lot, with Miss Salisbury succeeded in time by a Chicago pianist name of Lyman Woods.
Understand, Benny was still fiddling. There was no inkling yet that he could make his audiences laugh.
Still and all, Benny and Woods were booked into London's famed Palladium, a spot to which Benny was later to return with infinitely more fanfare.
Now comes World War I and enlistment in the Navy. Benny, through no particular desire of his own, served his hitch at the Great Lakes Naval Training Station. He was a sailor, a fund-raiser and, at last, a funnyman. He played the violin less and he talked more, which seemed to be a very smart switch.
After a while, he fiddled not a stroke and talked incessantly. The violin became a prop. That was the best combination of the lot.
At war's end, Benny became a single—show business for Just what it sounds like No partner. He was first Ben K. Benny and then simply Ben Benny. But there was a chap around named Ben Bernie, which was too close for comfort. Jack Benny was the end result.
Benny became very big in vaudeville and in revue circles.
Even got out to Los Angeles, as luck would have it, where he met a girl named Mary who was working in the big May Company department store. You know, of course, about Jack and Mary by this time.
Then something rather big happened. Radio spurted out of its crystal set incubus into loud speakers and networks. It occurred to Benny that might be for him. He debuted with Ed Sullivan in 1932, and if posterity cares to make a note, his first words on the air were: "Hello, folks. This is Jack Benny. There will be a slight pause for everyone to say, 'Who cares'".
Somebody must have cared.
Benny became not only hot but the very hottest comic giving out over the airways. And one of most durable.
He shifted his radio activities to Hollywood in time, and made a pot full of pictures while he was at it. Some were good, some not so good, and one was The Horn Blows at Midnight, an effort said to be in truth so painful to Benny that he has to make jokes about it.
And finally, television.
Not that radio was dropped or that picture making is out of the question.
But—television.
It appears to be his happiest medium.
So Jack Benny isn't 39 after all—and do you care?
And this was the fast run-through on his 61 distinguished years to date.