Rockabye Clarinet

Chilly Willy was never better than in The Legend of Rockabye Point (1955). With Tex Avery directing and Mike Maltese writing the story, how could it be otherwise?

The cartoon follows a pattern: a polar bear stealing fish tries to be silent so he doesn’t wake a guard dog. Chilly Willy interferes. The noise wakes the guard dog who bites the polar bear. The bear sings/plays “Rockabye Baby” to put the dog to sleep. Repeat cycle.

Maybe the best gag is when Chilly Willy sticks a clarinet in the dog’s mouth so the snores play the instrument and wake the dog. The frames below tell the story. I like how Walter Lantz’ musical director, Clarence Wheeler, goes from a solo clarinet playing “Rockabye Baby” to a loud Dixieland band playing the substituted song.



The dog taps the bear to get his attention. But he doesn’t get a chance to bite him; the polar bear bashes him with the clarinet and he runs out of the scene.



Don Patterson, La Verne Harding and Tex’s former MGM animator Ray Abrams are the credited animators (Patterson worked at MGM but not in the Avery unit).

By the way, I think the sheet music for “Rockabye Baby” is fairly correct, though the copy I have in that key is in 3/4 time, not 6/8.

He Might As Well Be 39

We all know Jack Benny wasn’t really 39 all the years that he claimed to be. And while it was a gag, it did serve a real-life purpose. It made him think young, and that kept him healthy.

At least, that’s what he claimed. There are all kinds of stories that Jack was an intense worrier and had a night-stand filled with medicines (though he doesn’t appear to have used them).

I’d love to find his full interview in Today’s Health, but you can get the gist of what he said in this column by Ida Jean Kain in the Rockland County Journal-News Sept. 22, 1961. It’s good advice for us all.

Good Recipe for Staying Young
Middle age is not the same time of life for everyone, birthdays notwithstanding.
Take Jack Benny, for good example. He’s been 39 now for going on 29 years. That’s really an excellent record, and even better psychology.
In the spring, a story in “Today’s Health” about this durable comedian is certainly well worth quoting.
“That ‘only 39’ gag my writers came up with was just about the best thing that ever happened to me,” Jack Benny reports. “The cliche, ‘You're only as old as you feel,’ happens to be true. I feel young and as far as I can find out, I’m healthy.”
What, in this comedian’s opinion, is most important to keeping young . . . diet, exercise, or mental attitude? It’s the latter. “To stay young in heart, think as young people do. Look forward, never backward. Work instead of worrying,” he summed up.
This actor does minimize the physical aspects of keeping young and vigorous. “To stay young-looking and keep healthy, you have to give some thought to it and work at it,” he added. Mr. Benny gets regular outdoor exercise. And he watches his food intake. “This is important and it's not likely that you can keep your weight where it belongs without counting calories. You can’t have three chins and look young.” So he controls starches, sugar, and fats. He uses sugar substitutes and drinks skim milk. He keeps his weight controlled even though he has stopped smoking.
It’s well known that this veteran comedian has more energy, vitality, and bounce than performers half his age.
We all need to think young and banish our phobias about aging. Then the extra years added to our life span can he added to the best years of living. We often think we might like to be younger if we could know all we know now. Well, in a wonder way science has made this miracle come true. So let us think of 50 as the high noon of life. Actually middle age can be an elastic period from 40 to 70.
When we lose our enthusiasm, we begin to grow old. When we stop learning, we start aging. When we stop using our bodies, the aging process catches up with us fast. Since there is no physiological age at which we must stop all activity, there is no age at which we “must’’ grow old. This is by no means the same as hanging on to youth for dear life, but rather to keep our zest for living fully.

Has Jay Ward an Offer For You!

No idea was too outrageous or ridiculous to promote The Bullwinkle Show on NBC. At least in the mind of producer Jay Ward, not NBC. Ward insisted the network found ways not to promote his cartoon series.

Ward, somehow, found a way to convince United Press International to let him fill in as a columnist and make a completely bogus offer. (Hmm, on second thought, maybe it wasn’t completely bogus. Ward came up with the damndest stunts). I, for one, would welcome a Jay Ward Film Festival. Even if Smash Brugal wasn’t able to come. This made the wire August 9, 1962.

Want to Gain Stature? Order ‘Jay’s ‘Genuine Film Festival
EDITOR'S NOTE: Guest writer Jay Ward, zany producer of The Bullwinkle Show, offers to sponsor a film festival in an American City.
By JAY WARD
Written for UPI
Hollywood—With film festivals the rage of Europe these days, how would you like to have a genuine film festival right in your city?
That's right—an actual film festival in your own home town with all the trimmings: half-clad starlets, all-night parties, drunken producers—everything!
Nothing can add sophistication and stature to a town like a film festival. Look what film festivals have done for towns like Cannes and Venice. Who ever heard of those places before?
Now, Jay Ward Productions is offering any town in the United States its own film festival! Here's all you have to do:
ONE—Show an honest and sincere interest in motion pictures and buttered popcorn as an art form.
TWO—Get your city council to appropriate $750,000 to Jay Ward Productions as a token of good faith.
THREE—Redecorate your largest movie house at a cost of not less than $60,000, name it the Bullwinkle Hall of Cinema Arts, and donate it to Mr. Ward.
In return, Jay Ward will:
ONE—Visit your town himself with a galaxy of top name stars that will make your unsophisticated head spin! Irmgard Blatz, Smash Brugle, Emma Maude Hupp, Cynthia Dengue, and Fenton Burnie, to name a few!
TWO—Provide a 75-watt searchlight, without the likes of which no festival would be complete! (You supply the bulb.)
THREE—Persuade the eminent actor George C. Scott to wire your nominating committee, declining any nomination he might receive!
FOUR — Graciously accept the invitation of your town's leading citizens to spend the duration of the festival as their guest.
FIVE—Provide coveted "Golden Bullwinkle" trophies to be presented to best actor, best actress, best picture, best twister, etc. Mr. Ward will sell the trophies to the winners at the very reasonable price of $17.95, including, tax. Additional trophies will also be on sale in the lobby, for anyone who would care to buy one.
In addition, Jay Ward will offer the following great films as entries in your film festival:
"Twist at Nuremberg," "Ambush at La Dolce Vita" (Italian), "Gidget Goes Hungarian," "The 3 Stooges Meet the 4 Horsemen of the Apocalypse," "Tamara Tell Me True" (Russian entry), "Son of Cleopatra," "The Seventh Strawberry" (Swedish, directed by Ingmar Birdman), "Ben Hur Strikes Again!"
What will a Jay Ward film festival do for your town?
ONE—Make it famous as a mecca of culture.
TWO—Give you an excuse for getting bombed every night for a week!

That Baby's Coming Right at Us!

A story with a crying baby flies right at the audience in Shuffle Off to Buffalo, a 1933 Merrie Melodies cartoon produced by Hugh Harman and Rudy Ising with animation credits to Friz Freleng and Paul J. Smith.



This sort of “camera swallowing” was common in the late ‘20s and into the ‘30s at the Walt Disney studio, whence Harman, Ising and Freleng came.

What storks and babies have to do with Buffalo, I don’t know.

Other than the title tune and the opening theme “Get Happy,” the only song is “When I’m The President” by Al Lewis and Al Sherman.

How to React to Finding Gold

Here’s a Tex Avery take from Detouring America (1939). Tamer and slower than when he picked up the pace after arriving at MGM in 1941.

Avery uses five drawings for the miner to wag his head as he stretches backwards while the arm holding the nugget stretches forward.



The head wags back another four drawings. Avery’s animator resists the temptation to use the same drawings in reverse order.



Here’s the extreme drawing of the eye pop. There are two in-betweens before it. Avery holds it for two frames.



This takes up 13 drawings, about a half-second of screen time. Remarkably, Avery would make this sort of thing even faster in later years. And funnier.

Ham Hamilton gets the animation credit on this cartoon. I don’t know how long he was in the Avery unit.

Unexpected TV Goof-ups For Posterity

Dick Clark Productions made a tidy sum from people loving other people’s mistakes.

Clark is not only the man known for hosting American Bandstand and producing The $10,000 Pyramid. He brought the world a very popular show in the 1980s called TV’s Bloopers & Practical Jokes.

The idea was no more Clark’s idea than rock and roll was. Making fun of radio screw-ups from old broadcasts goes back to the Jack Benny radio days; a couple of shows revolved around Benny pulling out a transcription and lecturing his staff on their mistakes (who then heard the sound of Benny making his own). In 1954, Jubilee Records released “Pardon My Blooper” with the sound of “oops!” from various radio and TV shows (some in the series of LPs were controversially re-created). Perhaps that’s where Jack Paar got the idea of devoting part of his Tonight show of December 31, 1958 to showing things that didn’t quite go right on the air. Here’s a story about it from the Associated Press wire service dated January 7, 1959. (The photo to the right is Paar; the one to the left is Jack Lescoulie).

The Whole World Loves a First Class Mistake
By CHARLES MERCER
New York (AP)—Many people admire polished performances, but the whole world loves a booboo. Television had its share in the year—just past—and can look forward to more as long as people remain human.
TV performers sometimes confide in close friends their most embarrassing moments in the air. But it took Jack Paar to rebroadcast his to the entire nation.

Paar's memorable slip was the wayward commercial in which a medicine bottle blew its top and sprayed the entire panel of the program. Paar's coverup remark, as he dried his face: “I told you this was the most powerful pain remedy on the market.”
By re-showing the kinescopes of some of his booboos on his NBC-TV New Year's Eve show, Paar may have started a new programming trend. There's certainly a backlog of material to draw from.
There was, for example, the production of "MacBeth" in which a stage hand was caught on camera as he set up a cauldron and thereby became the play's fourth witch. There also was the production in which an actor frantically labored to light a fire and finally gave up with a muttered “Damp wood!”
The most commonplace goofs are slips of the tongue, such as “I Love Loosely” or “NBC Prevents Pinky Lee.” One announcer who meant to say “We're down to our last pack of cigs” heard himself saying, “We're down to our last sack of pigs.” Nearly everybody has heard about the slip by a radio announcer of decades ago who said, “And now the President of the United States, Hoobert Herver.” NBC commentator Chet Huntley was thinking of that slip when he introduced Herbert Hoover Jr.: “And now to the rostrum, where we’ll hear Herbert Hever . . . Hoobert Hover . . . Hoober Hooper . . . er, Her-vah . . . Herbert Hoover Jr.” People frequently think the cameras are off them or the show ended before the moment has arrived.
At the end of the puppet show, “Art Carney Meets Peter and the Wolf,” not long ago, a figure rose and ran across the stage before fade-out. ABC President Oliver Treyze, watching the program, yelled, “Fire that man!” He couldn’t, because the man was not an ABC employee. He was master puppeteer Bill Baird, who thought the show had ended.

Jack Lescoulie also thought he was safely off camera after he finished a men's undershirt commercial. As he playfully tickled a shirt dummy under the arm, he looked up to find the camera still staring relentlessly at him.
On the "Today” show a cake was knocked over and the frosting ruined just before it was to be used on a commercial. A prop-man rushed out to a nearby drugstore, bought a container of foam shaving cream, and gave the cake a tasty-looking but soapy frosting. All would have been well if Dave Garroway had not taken an unrehearsed, unscripted bite. His grimace of disgust was seen across the country.
No anthology of goofs would be worthy of the name if it left out the commercial on the Paar show in which an actor demonstrated an electric shaver.
Zsa Zsa Gabor, sitting beside Paar, murmured, “it will cut him.”
Paar was understandably disturbed. “It will not!” he shouted. “It won't cut anything.”

That's Not Quiet

Tom is suspicious when he hears growling noises coming from a bulldog that’s he’s drugged in Quiet Please. It turns out to be Jerry imitating the dog.

The best part of the Tom and Jerry cartoons was the expressions. Check out Jerry’s below.



This cartoon won an Oscar. Ray Patterson, Irv Spence, Ken Muse and Ed Barge received animation credits. The effects animation, according to the March 25, 1947 edition of Business Screen magazine, was by Bob Bemiller.

The Sexy Cow

If June Foray were with us, she’d be celebrating her 101st birthday today. Alas, she died just before she could turn 100.

Let’s celebrate for her instead. Here’s a syndicated newspaper column from February 17, 1962. Misspelled names have been left intact.

She's Tops Doing Voice of Sexy Cow
By CHARLES WITBECK
King Features Syndicate
Hollywood—There's a little lady in Hollywood with a unique talent—when it comes to sounding like sexy cows no one in town can touch her.
Tiny, 4-feet, 11-inch June Foray is a member of a small group of small actors, all ex-radio performers who make a good living doing voices for commercials and TV animated cartoon shows.
Because of their size, these talented voices were in deep trouble in the early fifties when television almost destroyed radio. Even with lifts in their shoes the voice actors were too small to land parts in motion pictures and panic set in.
A few like Mel Blanc, June Foray and Dawes Butler sneaked in TV commercials, but jobs were scarce. Today, with the booming commercial field and TV cartoons, the voice actors are reaping gold.
June Foray, for instance, does three or four recording sessions a day. She's a sexy cow for a dairy commercial, then she switches to a tired housewife dying for a couple of cans of chow mein. June plays so many parts, she finds it hard to distinguish her voice sometimes. "People who know me can spot me," she says, "but I have trouble myself."
On the Sunday night Bullwinkle show June plays Rocky the hero, and Natasha, a sexy, evil woman, a Charles Addams type. Recently fans saw June in the flesh on the Stan Freberg Chinese New Year's Eve Show as a nasal sounding housewife in a chow mein commercial.
June is a Freberg follower and rolled off the female voices in "St. George and the Dragonet" and "The United States of America." Walt Disney will page her to do little girls and then he'll change pitch for a Calvin and the Colonel TV episode. June even dubs voices for dramas like Thriller when a call goes out for a New England telephone operator.
It all began in Springfield, Mass. when her mother enrolled June in dramatic school. "At 6 I had a low, sexy voice," said June, so she was told she had talent.
June's idea of heaven is to be 5 feet 3. "I stopped growing at the age of 13 and I developed such an inferiority complex," she said. "I felt people took me out because they felt sorry for me. I felt sorry for me. I didn't want to be petite."
In radio she met other small people and finally stopped worrying about her height. The group worked steadily changing voices many times a day on different shows like "Smile Time" with Steve Allen, "Corliss Archer," "Red Ryder" and "Screen Director's Playhouse."
A few of the taller radio actors like Hans Conreid, Bea Benedaret and Mel Blanc didn't have to stand on boxes and jumped into the infant television business.
Today, this same group comprises the voice business in Hollywood. Not a single newcomer has cracked the tight little ring. "It's a shame," admits June, "but there's no proving ground for youngsters with talented voices. The old pros have a corner on the market."
There's a reason for this. Costs have risen and ad agencies want voice actors who can, do a number of parts and do them quickly and efficiently. The pros, like June, can be counted on for a quick, effortless, expert job. Why bother to experiment when sufficient talent is on hand? This applies not only to agencies, but to TV studios and record companies.
There is a good deal to be said on voice acting benefits. Money from residuals comes pouring in, the work is varied and abundant, and an actor has all the privacy of an average citizen. This last part pleases Miss Foray no end. Married to writer Hobart Donovan, June lives quietly and says with a smile that she's quite an intellectual. Her moments away from a mike, she spends reading or gardening.
"I'm really a woman of the soil," she said. Maybe that's why I can sound like a sexy cow."

Cartoon Bambino

Babe Ruth likely wasn’t impressed with how he was caricatured in the Ub Iwerks’ cartoon Play Ball (1933). He has a pig nose.



Ruth did have thin little legs like you see here.



The cartoon stars Willie Whopper, who was prone to tall, unbelievable tales. In this one, Willie leads the Cubs to a World Series victory over the Yankees (we said “unbelievable”) and, at the end, is in a ticker tape parade superimposed over live action footage. But Babe’s in the car with him, even though he lost the game! Well, it is Babe Ruth we’re talking about.



The kid characters all have adult voices and Willie opens things by hitting black men on the head in a circus target game. One of them has a head designed like Bimbo in the Fleischer cartoons.

This was apparently the first Willie Whopper released. It got favourable reviews in the Motion Picture Herald: “A very timely cartoon on baseball that kept everyone interested and laughing.—Erma L. Raeburn, Arcade Theatre, Newell, S.D.” “Good cartoon and that's unusual.—Mayme P. Musselman. Princess Theatre, Lincoln, Kan.” “A good cartoon.—D.E. Fitton, Lyric Theatre, Harrison, Ark.” “This is a very good cartoon comedy with Willie as the hero of a ball game. These cartoons seemed to be improving and they are more entertaining. Running time, 8 minutes.—J. J. Medford, Orpheum Theatre, Oxford, N. C.”

Willie was gone a year later. MGM dropped the Iwerks studio in favour of Harman-Ising.

Squared Circle Benny

There was a knock on Jack Benny when he started his career that his gags weren’t “television”. Some critics seemed to think verbal gags were bad because they were “radio” gags and that TV should be littered with sight gags to take advantage of the media.

Jack did have problems with making some of his familiar routines “television” gags. The start-up of the Maxwell and the trip to the Benny vault were far more effective on radio. The listener could imagine what was happening better than any set decorator could devise (even if money was no object).

Still, Jack’s TV writers were his radio writers, so dialogue gags were natural—especially on those shows where they revamped old radio scripts.

An interesting example is a show late into the Benny TV run in 1962. The whole first half is, more or less, two scenes of dialogue. The second half has a good percentage of sight gags. As you can see in the newspaper story below, Jack was the one who came up with the visual routines, not his writers.

Jack and the writers also took a huge gamble. After the opening scene with Maudie Prickett doing a role that likely would have been played by Elvia Allman on the radio show, the rest of the show features (to the best of my knowledge) amateurs—four wives of celebrities and two wrestlers. Their performances could have easily come off as flat, but they’re not bad. About the only other professional in the show is Roy Rowan, the radio announcer who plays a ring announcer. (Veteran Charlie Cantor is also credited. He’s not in the version of the show on-line, so perhaps he used his punch-drunk voice in the deleted middle commercial).

Jack’s stunt man should have got a credit of some kind. He takes a bunch of falls and does a nice nip-up in the wrestling scene.

I would like to have seen KTLA wrestling announcer Dick Lane hired to do something on the show; Lane had played Benny’s publicity agent on the radio programme and was pretty funny. However, he may never have been considered by the writers or perhaps there was a TV conflict.

The TV Key column from King Features Syndicate talked about the making of the episode. This appeared in newspapers on December 3, 1962.

TV Keynotes
Benny Laughs It Up at Rehearsal; He’ll Referee Wrestling Bout
By CHARLES WITBECK
HOLLYWOOD — When Jack Benny entered his Beverly Hills office for a morning reading of his Tuesday, Dec. 11 CBS show, he was neatly dressed. Normally for reading sessions Jack doesn’t worry much about his appearance, but he walked in with a bouncy step and pretended surprise when he saw Mrs. Phil Silvers, Mrs. Kirk Douglas, Mrs. Groucho Marx and Mrs. Milton Berle sitting with scripts on their laps.
The ladies were to play themselves in a sketch about a charity function in which Benny is not invited to donate his services as a comedian. Benny is very upset at the omission and forces the girls to let him do something for their show — namely referee a wrestling match.

After a little chit-chat with the ladies, a report on a dream he had about song writer Sammy Cahn and a few jokes with two bull-necked men sitting at the opposite end of the room—wrestlers Count Bill Varga and Gene Le Bell—Benny was ready to begin the reading. Count Billy had already memorized his lines and didn’t have a script, but Jack gave him one anyway in case of changes.
The reading went along smoothly with the ladies having an equal share of lines—no favorite in this script. The only interruptions ether came from Jack laughing over a gag, or one of the writers chuckling. The four writers—George Baker, Sam Perrin, Hal Goldman and Al Gordon—seemed to take turns laughing, and it perked up the reading. Announcer Don Wilson’s big bray also boomed and Count Billy needed his script after all.
Jack’s Second Thoughts
At one point Benny read two lines, laughed, and then had second thoughts. “I don’t think I can be that cheap,” he said. “If you want laughs, you’d better be,” countered writer George Balzer. Benny let it go and the reading continued. Thirty minutes was all it took, and the ladies, plus the wrestlers, read as well as the pros. The most talk centered around a change in a commercial involving a sight gag switch.
Then Benny stood up and walked about the room, pulling his ear occasionally. “Fellas,” he said to the writers. “I think we ought to switch the ending.” He outlined his idea of a windup with himself and the two wrestlers, and it sounded better than the original. The writers bought it.
Benny also wanted to add business in his role as a referee in the charity wrestling match. He saw laughs as he climbed through the ropes, stumbling into the ring, and he had visions of the two hulks tossing him out of the place. Jack wasn’t going to let such golden opportunities pass by.
Jack seemed pleased with the whole show idea. He would have pretty wives of celebrities to insult him in the first part, and scenes with the wrestlers would bring the big boff laughs in the last half. The switch at the end gave it another boost.
Wives Not Nervous
None of the wives appeared to be nervous about doing the show. Mrs. Kirk Douglas comes from Denmark and was hesitant about her slight accent, but was assured it wouldn't matter a bit.
After the reading Benny spent 15 minutes posing for a still photographer with the four wives. “Normally,” he said. “I don’t go for the crazy ideas suggested for pictures. However, I like this one.”
Then Jack sat down in front of rolls of green stamps and prepared to pay off the wives. Apparently ideas to show Jack’s stinginess never run out.
Posing with the wrestlers was very simple. Count Billy merely grabbed Jack's coat lapels and the famous Benny pained expression appeared. Sold.
“All right,” said Jack, winding up the business. “Everybody out.”