It Won't Stay Buried!

Mike Lah animates a nice little scene in Garden Gopher (1950) when Spike tries to bury a bone, but the title character keeps pushing it back to the surface from his home underneath. Finally, he jumps on top of the bone to push it down. The unseen gopher pulls it down and Spike smashes onto the ground. Here are some of the drawings.



I wish I knew who the assistants were in Tex Avery’s unit at the time; Bill Higgins might have been one. Walt Clinton and Grant Simmons also animated on this cartoon.

Hot Dogs, Discoveries and a Batfink

An awful long time ago, there was an educational children’s show on Sundays on ABC called “Discovery.” I never saw it for a number of reasons. It co-starred a man named Frank Buxton. A number of years later, there was another educational children’s show on Saturdays on NBC called “Hot Dog.” I watched bits and pieces. It featured, among others, Jo Anne Worley from “Laugh-In” and that drew me into the tent. It had a quirky format and also featured a man named Frank Buxton.

Some years after that, I was poking around a used book store (long replaced by a huge commercial/residential building) and spotted a yellow hard-cover book called “The Big Broadcast.” It was like an encyclopaedia of old-time radio shows, packed with stock photos, transcriptions of commercials and catch phrases, and little essays on various aspects of radio, such as comedians. Remember, this was in the days before you could look up stuff on-line. That book is about 4½ feet from me and I still read it when my vision’s up to it. It was no doubt educational to those who saw it for the first time. It was co-written by a man named...well, you know where this is going.

The three Frank Buxtons I’ve mentioned were all one person. And he did a lot more before any of this.

The sad news has come in that Frank Buxton died yesterday.

He was very close to producer/cole slaw-hater Mark Evanier; I’m sure Mark must have something up on his blog as I bang together this post.

After graduating from Syracuse University in 1952, Buxton became a professional TV director and an amateur comedian. His TV direction career suddenly ended when his station was virtually forced off the air by the FCC in 1958. The Buffalo Evening News’ Sturgis Hedrick reported on January 28, 1959 that Buxton was out but not down:

Frank Buxton’s success in New York is nothing short of incredible. This former WGR-TV and WBUF producer-director landed his first professional job as an entertainer Dec. 15 in New York’s sophisticated Blue Angel. Now he has come up with a starring role in the Feb. 4 Armstrong Circle Theater on CBS-TV. He’ll play a disc jockey who happens to be on vacation in Nova Scotia at the time of last fall’s mine disaster.

He got some congrats for his first appearance as a TV comic on the “TV Guide Awards Show” in March 1960; the NBC special poked fun at television audiences. He was also the voice of Alpine cigarette commercials on radio and TV, and appeared in funny commercials for a car company during the 1960 World Series broadcast.

In May 1961, FCC commissioner Newton Minow gave his television-is-a-vast-wasteland speech, complaining especially about children’s programming, and television reacted. On October 1, 1962, ABC responded by debuting “Discovery ’62.” Buxton, age 28, was picked as the host; he had already produced the Peabody award-winning “Know Your Schools.” It was a 25-minute show airing at 4:30 p.m. weekdays, and moved into a Sunday slot for an hour the following season.

Praise was heaped on it. It got all kinds of press, too. Here’s a feature article on Buxton and the show from the Greenfield Recorder-Gazette, May 4, 1963.

“Discovery ‘63” Travels World For Material
By RUTH E. THOMPSON
If you're a nine-to-fiver (work day, that is) you've been missing out on one of the most informative — and entertaining — shows on the air. It's ABC-TV's "Discovery '63" (Mondays-Fridays, 4:30 PM, New York Time) hosted by Frank Buxton.
But come autumn the network is going to remedy that. It's changing "Discovery" to a one-hour format and moving it to Sunday afternoons. Sort of giving equal time to fathers, mothers, uncles and aunts instead of limiting its bounty to the seven-to-twelve (years-old, that is) group.
-o- -o- -o- -o-
THE SHOW HAD been on the air only two months when it won the Thomas Alva Edison Award as "The Best Science Television Program for Youth" ....and yet it isn't a science program per se! It's an "everything" program. Among the topics it's tackled are medicine, American Indians, Eskimos, armor and sportsgear, picture writing, silent movies, how to choose a puppy, how to train a police horse, gardening and money.
Recent "Discovery" guest Astronaut Walter Schirra in advising youngsters not to commit themselves too soon to science careers, accidentally summed, up "Discovery's" guiding philosophy. After cautioning, "not everyone can be an engineer or a scientist," Schirra said: "you should realize there are classical studies, there are arts, there are many, many professions, many fun-things to do besides pure science."
And if Schirra summed it up, host Frank Buxton epitomizes it.
Buxton majored in radio and television in college and minored in zoology and English. After pocketing one degree from Northwestern. University and another from Syracuse University he Went to work as a producer" then reversed the usual procedure and switched to acting in 1961 (with the Australian touring company of "Bye Bye Birdie.")

ASKED WHY he thought he got the "Discovery" spot for which over 100 actors had auditioned, Frank — a refreshing, unaffected person — crumpled bonelessly in a chair and mused, "perhaps because my own interests are so diverse. I'm not show biz you know." Maybe not but in his one year of acting (before the highest-quality, and currently most expensive, daytime television production swallowed him whole) Buxton managed to appear in stock with such name stars as Buster Keaton, Eva LeGalliene and William Lundigan.
"I have an attic mind," he explained further. "There's lots of junk there, lots of things to draw on. We don't work from full scripts here, you know, just sort of outlines so I can toss in something stupid of my own." His own, yes. Stupid, no. He's invariably right on the nose.
There's no time these days for Buxton to do any acting on the side (or even guest panel shots) for the demands of this one show make him the busiest emcee in the business. Not only do "Discovery" topics range widely, so do its locations. (The show is noted for its original film.)
-o- -o- -o-
FRANK HAS gazed through a telescope in the desert and peered through a microscope in a New York laboratory, wandered through Tivoli Amusement Park in Denmark and broadcast from underwater in a Seaquarium tank in Florida. He's kept talking cheerfully while a runaway ocelot climbed and leaped around the set. Nervous? "No, I like animals, I know how to handle them." There was a time in the desert with a rattlesnake, though. No he wasn't afraid of the rattlesnake but in cooperating with the snake's handle to calm critter (it too had got away and was on the loose) Frank with the camera grinding away moved gently back — right onto a cactus.
"The time I really looked like a goof ball, though — a dead elephant — was the Square Dance show. Fortunately Ginny (co-star Virginia Gibson) made up for it. She was right in her element, music and dancing."
The show's other co-star, a velvety-eyed bloodhound named Corpuscle came in for some praise, too. "He rehearses hardly at all. His initial reactions are so wonderful to catch when we get him on a new set or location. He's great with his fans, too. When we're out on the job he lets children come up and pat him. He's an intelligent, sweet, wonderful individual."
-o- -o- -o-
FRANK IS pretty nice to his own fans, too. He answers every letter himself by hand because "I wrote a radio program once when I was a child and I'm still waiting for an answer."
So the little girl who wrote, "I've saved $1.98 to buy a frame for your picture," and the 80-year old man who said, "I travel again with you," or the teacher who says "my entire class watches," will all get holographs.
And for that part of the mail that asks for one or another programs to be repeated, the producers have an answer. They've just commenced a series of carefully edited “Best of Discovery” re-runs.
And for the future where will "Discovery" go next? Well, we're told, maybe to Japan, maybe even to Moscow. And after THAT, what will they find to do? "Don't worry, waved Frank in parting, "we're certainly not going to run out of subject matter. The Universe is too big."

Discovery won an Emmy, and Buxton busied himself with a daytime game show called “Get the Message” (he eventually gave up hosting in favour of Robert Q. Lewis), followed by the one-season Peabody-winning “Hot Dog,” co-produced by Lee Mendelson of the TV Peanuts specials.

One of his other loves was old-time radio. His “The Big Broadcast” was a 1972 update of a 1966 book co-written with Bill Owen; the great Henry Morgan provided the foreword. Here’s an Associated Press article talking about the original. It ran November 24, 1967.

Buxton to Relive Heyday of Radio
By JERRY BUCK
NEW YORK (AP) – Big time radio has been dead now for about 18 years, but it is not forgotten by those who grew up during its heyday.
One man who remembers it and loves it, and even longs for its return, is Frank Buxton.v Buxton describes himself as a tape nut who has preserved thousands of hours of old radio programs for — well, certainly not for radio's return, but for the enjoyment of hearing the familiar voices just once more.
“Fred Allen was like a god to me when I was growing up,” he said.
Buxton, a radio and television personality, and author of “Radio's Golden Age,” will attempt to bring back a little of the old flavor when he teams up with Bill Cosby in January for a five-minute, five-day-a-week radio comedy program.

“Radio was a powerful force in our lives,” he said. “It was the sole source of entertainment in our lives for many of us during the depression. And it was free during a time when we needed something free.”
As an example of radio's force he cited Orson Welles' program on “The War of the Worlds,” that in 1938 drove some people from their homes and convinced many others that the earth war being invaded by Martians.
“It was beautifully done. It was an absolute documentary approach,” Buxton said. “The war jitters at the time helped it go over.”
What is behind radio's mystique?
“I think for one thing the past is always remembered as better than it was,” Buxton said. “And for another it's possible to recreate or find all the artifacts from the days we were growing up, from comic books to the old movie serials.
“But the one thing that's missing is radio. It's not possible to turn on your radio and recreate the past unless you're a tape nut like I am.
“It’s impossible to describe to a child what radio used to be like. Radio was a theater of the mind. You made, the hero what you wanted him to be. No one had to paint a castle for you because you did it much better than you own imagination,” he added.
Buxton also explodes a few of the myths about radio.
The story has long been repeated that Kato, the valet for “The Green Hornet,” was Japanese until World War II, then turned overnight into a Filipino.
“That story's apocryphal,” he said. "Kato was referred to as a Filipino almost two years before Pearl Harbor.”
Another myth is that of Uncle Don, the host of a New York children's program, who told the kiddies goodby and then, thinking he was off the air, added, “I guess that'll hold the little——
“That never happened,” Buxton said, “but after I wrote about the myth in my book I got three letters from different parts of the country saying it had happened to their own local versions of Uncle Don. I believe it's tricks of memory.”

Did I mention Buxton was a sitcom writer, too? Among his accomplishments was the script for one of my favourite episodes of The Odd Couple—when Oscar and Felix appear on “Password.” If I recall, he also wrote several episodes in the early period of Happy Days.

Frank Buxton had one other career. As odd as it seems for someone involved with Peabody-winning children’s programming, he starred in a syndicated TV cartoon show, the stiffly-animated Batfink. The series by Hal Seeger Productions was originally distributed in early 1967 by Mission Productions, the TV arm of WHAM-O, the toy maker, before Screen Gems took over to sell the show in more cities and cash in on its exclusive merchandising rights. A deal had closed to sell Hanna-Barbera to Taft Broadcasting, meaning Screen Gems needed to find new cartoon characters to push. Suffice it to say, I have serious doubts that Batfink won a Peabody. Incidentally, after finishing Batfink in June 1967, Seeger turned its attentions (according to Variety) to producing cartoon series called Wilbur the Wanted and Mr. E. Whether Buxton was involved in these, I don’t know.

You can go to Frank Buxton’s web site to learn about him and I see Mark Evanier does have some thoughtful remembrances in this post.

The Wolf's on the Beam

Man, that Goldilocks is cookin’, Jackson!

Goldie gets into a jitterbug with the wolf from the Red Riding Hood story in Goldilocks and the Jivin’ Bears (1944).



But Goldie’s keen to the scene. She uses her dance moves to choke him, bash his head to the ground, and then send him flying.



The Motion Picture Daily reviewed the short on October 5, 1944 thusly:

"Goldilocks and the Jivin' Bears"
(Warners)
The three bears are a trio of 'red-hot jivesters, strictly on the beam' and Red Riding Hood is a jitterbug. The bears arrive at grandmother's with Goldilocks and the wolf is led through a wild jitter routine which literally leaves him limp. Meanwhile grandmother escapes from the cupboard where the wolf has put her and she puts the finishing touches on the wolf with a groovy rendition of the Lindy Hop. Fairy tales haven't lost their appeal. This is a mirthful cartoon. Running time, 7 minutes.

Ken Champin gets the rotating screen credit as the animator—that is, if you could ever find a version of this cartoon with credits.

Ring in the New

About the only gag in the Popeye cartoon Let’s Celebrake (1938) is a visual/verbal pun on a neon billboard involving Father Time and the Baby New Year. I guess it’s lost of those who have never seen a wringer washing machine.



It’s a change from Popeye and Bluto beating the crap out of each other.

Seymour Kneitel and William Henning get the screen credits for animation.

Happy 1934!

From Holiday Land, 1934 Columbia cartoon animated by Art Davis and directed by Sid Marcus.

Most of Them Are Gone

Tributes flowed in the press when Jack Benny died on December 26, 1974. We’ve reprinted some. Here’s another, this time from the Geneva Daily Times of January 14, 1975. It’s more a eulogy to the past, really. I suspect many readers felt the same way as the writer. Interestingly enough, most of the people on the list appeared at one time on the Benny radio show, including one Spangler Arlington Brugh.

The great radio comedians
By JOE COOKE
(Mr. Cooke is a former Times reporter and desk man.)
When I learned of the passing of Jack Benny, my favorite comedian, I knew that sometime I would write a column about him and about some of the radio, television and movie people I have seen over the years.
Benny of course had no equal in his field. After his death the newspapers, magazines and TV-radio covered his life and accomplishments in detail. All I can add is that years ago his time slot on radio was a must for us. We waited with interest his "Jello again. This is Jack Benny." We wanted to hear from him and his sidekicks — Mary Livingston, Dennis Day, Rochester, Don Wilson, Phil Harris, the man who played department store floorwalker or sometimes a railroad car conductor, and all the others.
Jack's miserliness was on stage only. He was really very generous with his money, it has been said he gave over a million dollars to charity.
What can an ordinary fellow like me say about Benny? We, Laura and I, loved him because he could brighten up our day, our whole week, no matter how difficult things may have been.
Who can forget his running feud with Fred Allen? His famous imaginary railroad, the "Anaheim, Azusa and — Cucamonga?" His dungeon, with moats, wild animals, creaking doors, sirens and burglar alarms, for his money? Whatever became of the gas man who went downstairs to read the meter and never was seen again? Where is his Maxwell automobile now, whose wheezy engine noises were made by Mel Blanc? Do you remember Benny's violin lessons and the anguished French music teacher, also played by Blanc?
These remembrances come out of my own memory, from the radio and TV shows we had seen. I'll never forget them. But actually no one could really imitate the true Benny, with his bland expressions of surprise, pain or pleasure. He could say the one word "Well!" with an intonation that always brought down the house. We of the older generation who were fortunate enough to know radio in the early days thank Benny for many happy hours. His was one of the few radio shows that was made over, intact, into a TV show, without change of cast, plot or meaning.
Jack Benny's death made me think back on some of the other theatrical highliners I had seen over the years, most of whom are now gone.
I mentioned Fred Allen. How well I remember his "Allen's Alley" and the queer characters who lived on this mythical street. I also remember his feud with Jack Benny, each one maligning the other on the air, but the best of friends otherwise. Fred's real name was John Florence Sullivan, a source says.
My father loved to listen to the late Eddie Cantor's radio show and so did I. Eddie was a song and dance man, of course, but also a comedian.
I grew up with Boris Karloff in his various roles as Frankenstein's monster, mad scientist and other weird characters. I saw him gentle down until when, before his death, he played mild loveable parts sometimes. But he always had that rather sinister lisp when he spoke which I never forgot.
A sinister triumvirate, all now deceased, included Humphrey Bogart, Peter Lorre and Sidney Greenstreet. The trio later added Lauren Bacall who became Bogart's wife in real life.
I like to remember the suave, immaculate appearance of the late Adolphe Menjou, a man of the world it there ever was one. But he didn't come from Paris, London or New York. He was born in Pittsburgh.
A great humorist I really can remember because he didn't die until 1935 was Will Rogers. He had the homespun dialogue down pat, but with a needle in it that could hurt. I saw him on the stage once when he was playing with Ziegfeld's Follies in New York. He talked sense with a twang while he twirled his lariat expertly.
The late Robert Taylor was my idea of a man about town, although he played other roles in the movies too. Somehow, to me at least, he seemed a little out of place as a working roustabout in dirty clothes. I saw him as a matinee idol, dressed in the height of fashion, with at least one lovely lady on his arm. I love Taylor's real name — Spanger Arlington Brugh.
Do you remember Ronald Colman, always fashionably dressed and with a delightful British accent? He came by the accent legally since he was born in Surrey, England. He was one of Jack Benny's friends, both on and off the screen. They had some fine skits together.
Other comedians, now gone, come to mind. Bert Lahr, with his funny laugh, Lew Lehr, another comic of great talent. And one of the tops in the field, Ed Wynn. Ed, if I remember correctly, was called the fire chief because his show was sponsored by an oil company. Ed did something I always wanted to do — he talked through the commercials and said what he thought of them, disbelieving some of the statements. I find myself doing that today as I watch current TV shows and listen to the high pressure commercial messages.
All this has traveled away from Jack Benny. He needs no kudos from me.

Joking With Jim Tyer

Here’s a wonderful tale by Howard Beckerman for Back Stage published April 13, 1984. It starts out talking about the TV show The Duck Factory, a comedy in which nobody was interesting, let alone funny (the series died after 13 episodes and two Emmys for artwork). The column then morphs into a great little remembrance of Jim Tyer.

In recent years, some indignant cartoon fans have decided to defend the honour of Terrytoons from people who point out they’re not all that good. Jim Tyer has become their patron saint. When just about any other animator drew a take, they’d quickly build it and let it stay on the screen long enough for it to register as funny. Not Tyer. He was quirkier. His spikey-yet-rubbery takes were more in the form of silly movement, and in some scenes it seems he tossed in that kind of animation just for the hell of it. You’d never see it anywhere but a Terrytoon.

Tyer was employed for a time by Walt Disney so he certainly should have been able to come up with the fluid, intricate acting Uncle Walt wanted, but his way was more fun to him. Animation directors Gene Deitch and Ralph Bakshi have good things to say about Tyer. And so does Beckerman, a former Terrytooner, in his column. The only thing wrong with it is it isn’t long enough. I could read pages and pages more about Jim Tyer.

(Tyer, as a side note, was born in 1904. He must have lied about his age to get into the military or someone made a mistake. His obituary in the Bridgeport, Connecticut Post states he was a World War 1 Navy veteran, and further reports he was the naval escort on the U.S.S. Olympia for the Unknown Soldier's return from France and the first man to walk the honour guard at the Unknown Soldier's grave, all in 1921. Yet in 1920, he was a plumber at age 16, working for his brothers in Bridgeport. In 1924, he was employed by Southern New England Telephone. He vanishes from the Bridgeport Directory for three years then re-appears as a cartoonist in 1928).

Animators as Personalities
By Howard Beckerman
A short time ago, it was suggested that I meet with actor Jack Gilford to discuss a character that he was to portray in an up and coming television sitcom. I don’t know the name of the show or whether or not it will ever make it to the tube, but it was to be about life in a cartoon studio and the storyline included an old time animator, the character that Gilford was to undertake.
Jack Gilford is known for his performances in “A Funny Thing Happened On The Way to The Forum,” “Once Upon A Mattress,” “The Tenth Man,” “Catch-22” and numerous other Broadway, film and television productions. I spoke with this fine, veteran actor on the phone and we made a tentative agreement to meet. I thought that I might supply him with some background on the personality types that passed through the animation studios of New York and Hollywood.
Gilford left for the coast to film the shows before we could talk further. The producers, I am sure, must have made arrangements with some animators to include cartoon segments in the program. Perhaps they even arranged for Gilford to absorb some information about the nature of animation and its practitioners. I am truly sorry we did not have that casual meeting and I still think of some of the bits of past and present information that I could have shared with him.
Though the day to day thrashing out of a cartoon is not always a humorous enterprise, there have been many funny incidents and even funnier personalities who made up the crews at the various theatrical studios. Paradoxically, animation production is a group effort performed by solitary workers. Each animator slumped over a light board flipping drawings is lost in a world by himself. At each new twist of development of the sketched action the animator feels the thrill that comes from this solitary creative process. In time to the flipping pages you can almost hear them saying to themselves, “I’m a genius, I’m a genius!”

This work, which is so personal, can only be accomplished by persistent effort, and requires some kind of release. In the days of the theatrical studios where Mickey Mouse, Bugs Bunny or Popeye were the concerns of platoons of artists, it was often the practical joke that satisfied the pent up tensions.
The little tricks that were played on one another could take various forms, from the simple to the most complex. Smearing a bit of limburger cheese on the lightbulb under the desk of some unsuspecting artist could create peals of glee by the end of the day. Cutout paper shapes representing a cowboy’s spurs, deftly attached to someone’s heels as they went to the bank on payday, could bring laughter that even a small paycheck couldn’t obscure. In one studio the calm and quiet could be suddenly ruptured by a chorus of cowbells, bicycle bells and auto horns. The cacophony, emitting from noisemakers affixed to the animators’ tables, would continue for a short while and then end as mysteriously as it had begun. There was no calendar for this extemporaneous outpouring of acoustic confusion, and no one could ever predict when it might occur again.
One animator who wanted to be noticed by an attractive female employee hid himself in an oversize trash barrel. As she passed he popped up like a jack in the box, casting scraps of paper about and unsettling the startled woman. Occasionally the pranks would be turned on the general public, like the time a group dropped heated coins onto the sidewalk below, then watched as unsuspecting passersby stopped to retrieve the “hot” money.
It was not unusual for a prank to be devised around the very insecurities of the business. Lunch would often be the time for anxious discussion of the fate of a studio and its personnel. Once when the people returned from a local sandwich shop they were amazed to find that the chairs and desks had disappeared. They were ready to assume the inevitable and were prepared to pick up their final checks when they found that animator Jim Tyer had arrived back before them and had all the furniture removed from the area.
I suppose if there was one animator that I would have suggested as an image for a sitcom it would have been Jim Tyer. Though Tyer, who died in 1976, looked nothing like Gilford, he was the perfect happy eccentric to build a character on. Rosy-cheeked, bespectacled, balding and portly, Tyer was a polite and pleasant gentleman but at the same time the most fiercely puckish person you’d ever expect to encounter. He spent a lifetime in the studios, working in New York, Detroit, Miami and Hollywood, attempting to apply a style of animation that was highly personal, very funny and often against the demands of the studio director. This man, whom most of us remember as being always of middle age and looking like Skeezix’s Uncle Walt in the Gasoline Alley comic strip, could enter a reception room, bestow a bouquet of flowers on a bewildered young woman and request that she tell her boss that “the lion of the industry is here!”

Tyer could pull a prank in the most unlikely places. A street corner in a busy metropolis would be as much a stage for him as any of the dingy rooms of a 1930s animation studio. On[c]e in a lighthearted debate with a fellow artist he proceeded to tear the man’s trousers to shreds in front of surprised onlookers, and then graciously bought the bare legged victim a new pair at the nearest haberdasher. Jim Tyer could sit all day at a desk and produce a stack of delightfully whimsical drawings which when flipped would move with a distinct verve and a lack of concern for gravity and volume. While doing this he could maintain a steady flow of patter that would contain the most fantastic Alice-In-Wonderland references. There must be a hundred stories about Jim Tyer.
Will Friedwald, in an extensive, unpublished article containing interviews with many of Tyer’s associates, notes that this man who could include the most ribald bits of humor into a simple cartoon meant for family consumption (segments that either went by in a blur or were deleted before final camera), “could not bring himself to hate anyone . . because in a heart as big as Tyer’s he found no room for hate. He was a deeply religious man and every morning he would arrive from Bridgeport and stop at a local church before going to work.” He was basically a shy fellow but when the occasion called for extravagances in language he could cuss like a trooper, yet avoid offending the Deity. Even when he found time to do a risqué gag, it was always softened by his personal warm drawing style. Friedwald states that Tyer “spent his life trying to make people happy, trying to uplift their spirits and entertain them.”
If that program ever gets on the air, I for one hope that it includes a Jim Tyer-like character.

I'm Here! I'm Here!

One of the funniest entrances in a Warner Bros. cartoon has to be when the Genie appears in the Bugs Bunny cartoon A-Lad-in His Lamp (released in 1948). Bugs Bunny rubs a lamp, it shakes, and poof! There’s the Genie. Since this is before Bob McKimson “calmed” his animators into a state of inertia, the Genie waves around his arms (even flapping his fingers together when he says the word “fly”). Bugs’ expression changes from wonder to annoyance.



Manny Gould, John Carey, Chuck McKimson and Phil De Lara receive the screen animation credits.

Writer Warren Foster borrowed Jim Backus’ routine as Hubert Updyke III from The Alan Young Show for the Genie and Backus voiced the part magnificently.