Dad Gum Varmint

Rabbit Every Monday (1951) has an extended sequence involving bubble gum which Bugs Bunny uses to plug Yosemite Sam’s rifle. I like the look in Sam’s eyes as he’s about to fire.



Blam! Sam’s trapped in a bubble that Bugs blows over a cliff. I always like the “how did this happen” look Sam has when things don’t go right. Since you know Carl Stalling well enough, I don’t need to tell you what song is being played by a muted trumpet in the background.



Sam manages to blow himself and the bubble back up to the top of the cliff. You know what’s going to happen next.



Part two of the gag involves throwing a rock down Bugs’ hole. Problem: there’s gum attached to it.



Manny Perez, Ken Champin, Art Davis and Virgil Ross are the animators. For some reason, there’s no story credit on this cartoon. Warren Foster and Cal Howard get co-writing credits on the next cartoon Friz put into production.

Directing Jack Benny

If you mention Fred de Cordova’s name, you’ll probably think of Johnny Carson. After all, he called the shots on the Tonight show for 22 years. But before he did that, he was the producer/director of Jack Benny’s TV show for seven years.

Fred talked about Jack in his book Johnny Come Lately, published in 1989. He said Benny “was in a class by himself” and talks about how he and his wife socialised with Jack and Mary. But he was interviewed about Jack much earlier. Here’s a piece from the King Features Syndicate, published August 14, 1961. You kind of get the feeling the columnist would like to have some kind of dirt, any kind, and was annoyed he was getting anything but.

TV Keynotes
Jack Benny and Brook Go On Forever
By HAROLD STERN
Frederick de Cordova, the producer-director of CBS’ perennial comedy hit “The Jack Benny Program,” faces a problem almost unique in the quixotic world of television. He must at all times be certain that there is no major departure in what has been a successful format.
“People wouldn’t stand for any changes in Jack,” Fred told me, “so we find we must have a wide variety of shows carefully contained within certain basic limitations. Jack realizes that to stand still in this business is to go back. We have to be careful that he doesn’t go too far forward too fast. We try to keep the show changing as much as possible within the framework of the character and it takes an enormous amount of work to make it look so easy and so casual that it seems as if the entire show were nothing but fun to do.”
“I’ve been directing comedians since 1931,” he continued, “and there’s nobody who’s quite the perfectionist that Jack is. Even after a show is finished, edited, dubbed and ready to go he’ll insist on loking at it again and he’ll find some way to improve it. No amount of work is too hard for him. He’s a magnificent editor of written comedy as it appears on the screen and he’s completely objective about himself as a performer.
‘A Real Champion’
“Jack’s a real champion,” De Cordova went on. “He’s 67 now and he’ll go on as long as there’s a Jack Benny. I think we’ll all give out long before he does. And do you know that if they approached me now and told me I could pick anywhere else to work, but not with Jack. I wouldn’t know where to go.
“The technical end of the show gets easier from year to year,” he added, “but the writing and directing get harder. We try to alter the method of telling the joke but basically we are still faced with the problem of remaining in the context of the character. Jack’s philosophy is: if it begins to get easy, it isn’t going to be funny.

“One interesting thing about Jack,” De Cordova continued his hero worship, “is that he’ll throw away a script that’s been written for a guest and postpone the guest’s appearance if the script doesn’t come off the way he thinks it should. So far, we’ve got 12 of next season’s shows in the can and among our guests are Ernie Ford, Jane Morgan, Shari Lewis and Dimitri Tiomkin. We have Raymond Burr in what I consider to be an outstanding comedy show.
“The opening show of the season will be taped in New York and will star Phil Silvers. The second show will come from Waukeegan, Ill., and will serve as the dedication show for the new Jack Benny High School. Then we’ll start to use the shows we’ve finished.
Trip to Australia
“We’ll also use the James Stewarts again,” De Cordova added, “and we have a script ready for Roberta Peters. There’s also the possibility of a combination business and pleasure trip to Australia for personal appearances and television. Jack likes to do four or five tape shows and spread them through the season so that he may get topical once in a while.”
Fred was appalled at the low survival rate for stand up comics in television. Other than Benny, Skelton, possibly a few performances by Hope and maybe Bob Newhart, there are no comics left on the medium which once spawned them.
Aside from the Benny Show, Fred is happy at the lengthy association he had with another great comedy series, the Burns and Allen Show. He rates both George Burns and Jack Benny as giants in the comedy field. He also did December Bride for four years and was surprised it got that long a ride from what he termed an innocuous idea. During the coming season he’ll slip away from Benny every once in a while to do a few shows for the new “Hazel” series and for the new “Hathaways” series.
“These are great days,” he said with a smile, “for a fellow who’s doing well in comedy. The creation of a brand new comedy idea that’s good is a feat of some proportions and I’ve turned down a number of shows because I didn’t feel there was anything I could contribute to them.”
Likes TV Work
He also indicated that though he occasionally receives scripts, he has no desire to go back to Broadway, where he got his real start in show business. He also doesn’t care to return to feature films (“I get more fun out of television.”)
“I’m snobbish about television,” he insisted, “but unlike most other snobs, I’m snobbish on the side of TV. I get first crack at the best guest stars in the business because we make our guests look good. We haven’t changed our writing staff in 13 years.
“If you ask me, I have only one real problem with the show,” he concluded. “Our guests are often required to insult Jack and some of them can’t bring themselves to do it. Last year Joey Bishop couldn’t go through with it and it sometimes takes brute force to get some guests to insult Jack. Say it as if you mean it, he’ll snap at them and then he’ll go into his long take and instead of insulting him, they’ll break up and they’re useless for hours.”

The Battle For Cartoon Airtime

Every once in a while, some cartoon fan will say “They should have made a cartoon series with J. Evil Scientist or Maxie Chickenhawk” or “Why didn’t they spin so-and-so off into his own cartoons?”

There’s a pretty good reason. Several, actually.

While fans view cartoons as entertainment, the people in charge of making them see things a little differently. A cartoon studio manufactures little films it wants to sell. To do that, it needs to find a distributor for its cartoons. The distributor needs to find enough TV stations to run the cartoons to make a profit. TV stations only have a limited amount of air time and need to run something that’ll bring it the most revenue. Now picture a whole bunch of studios and distributors all trying to do the same thing, fighting for the same limited air time.

And all this is contingent on whether there are enough animators around to make the cartoons in the first place.

Obviously not everything is going to make it.

1961 was a year of glut. There was a glut of potential cartoon shows on the market. Hanna-Barbera had been incredibly successful with The Huckleberry Hound Show and The Flintstones. Others wanted a piece of the action. Here’s Weekly Variety of February 1, 1961 explaining the situation.

Off-Network TV Cartoons Seen Syndie Natural
Pattern of a network ride followed by a syndication run will grow to further embrace made-for-tv cartoons is the forecast of some savvy vets in the cartoon field.
Reason for this predicted pattern stems from a number of factors:
1. Unless a syndicator has an established character, or a pre-sold property, he has a tough road to hew in the market-by-market route.
2. There are currently about 30 cartoon making now the market-by-market rounds, with only about one out of 10 of the newbies successful, according to some estimates.
Plenty of product isn’t felt in the seven station markets such as N.Y. and Los Angeles, but in the three station situations, the very markets which are needed to put a syndie show in the break-even or profit margin.
Success of “Flintstones” in the adult category, and other kiddie cartoon shows on the webs assures a growing supply from that source. There also is the national spot field, closely akin to networking, now riding with the success of “Huckleberry Hound,” et al. When these shows come down the pike into syndication, they will have a wide acceptance.
In syndication, new cartoon properties with established characters, such as “Popeye” and “Mr. Magoo,” are doing fine. Others are finding the field tougher, although a few of the other newies also are successful.
Last two years has seen many new made-for-tv limited animation cartoons placed on the market. For a period, with the supply of theatrical oldies drying up, there was a real need to fill it. That vacuum in syndication now is said to have been filled to a large extent.
One of the big bottlenecks in distribution is the less than four-station market situation prevailing throughout the country. Cartoons usually are sold on a two or three-run basis to station, with unlimited plays. In the less than four market situations, once the stations have bought their limited cartoon needs, new packages just go whistling for want of an outlet.
A made-for-tv cartoon without a highly recognized character can make gross from $5,000 to $8,000 per five-minute episode the first time around nationally, in a successful sell. Others fall short of that mark.
Overseas potential for many cartoons is severely restricted if there’s too much violence in the series. Overseas markets are much more severe about violence in kiddie shows than their counterparts in the U.S.

But, as we mentioned, there had to be a viable market for cartoons, meaning finding airtime on enough stations to make producing them profitable. That wasn’t easy. Not only were cartoons competing against live-action syndicated programming, networks were trying to take up more and more affiliate time to make their programming more attractive to buyers. And the networks themselves were flooded with distributor/studio pitches for “the next Flintstones.” Here’s Weekly Variety again from June 21, 1961.

Everybody’s Got a Cartoon Series, But Webs Less Than Enthusatistic
Everybody and his brother seem to have a cartoon series for sale and airing during the season after next. This would suggest that the only thing that might slow boom in animation is the somewhat less than enthusiastic response of the networks.
One network source unhappily estimated that in the last few weeks, some 20 cartoon ideas, storyboards, rough sketches and film “samples” had crossed his desk. Among those making the rounds of ’62-’63—since the coming season’s programming is already inked and, because it takes at least nine months advance warning before an animator can successfully or comfortably turn out a full series are:
An idea for an Edgar Bergen-Charlie McCarthy cartoon, ditto Fibber McGee and Molly, “Duffy’s Tavern” and Frances Langford and Don Ameche, all of which have their roots in old radio formats or old radio personalities. Then there is “Shrimp,” a sample being peddled by William Morris, a Jay Ward-Bill Scott entry based of Sampson and Delilah, and two King Features; “Krazy Kat” and “Barney Google.”

“The Three Stooges,” now seen on local tv via live-action syndication (taken from the old theatrical short subject library), is also being proposed to ABC, CBS and NBC.
While there are to be several new half-hour animations on the networks this coming fall, the webs have decided to move cautiously in preparing additional shows of this genre for seasons beyond that. Among other fears, the networks say they’re afraid they’ll again kill a good thing (cartoon shows have been reasonably successful so far) by overexposure.
Meantime, Coast producers are pouring out about $35,000,000 worth of product, none of which is included in the list of 20 or so subjects designed for network airings in ’62-’63. Most of the Hollywood product appears to be for the immediate consumption by the networks or in syndication to the tv stations. Beyond Hollywood’s present output, there is a thriving animation business in N.Y., headed by Peter Piech’s Production Associates of Television and his Leonardo TV Productions, which right now have “Rocky & His Friends,” “The Bullwinkle Show” and “King Leonardo” in network time slots. Piech is associated with Jay Ward Productions in some of his ventures.

The bottom fell out of the cartoon market by the end of 1961 as all new animated series failed in prime time. Within a few years, studios would regroup and take aim at the one time period when people watched cartoons enough to reap profits—Saturday mornings.

Wonderland in Kansas City

In 1955, Walt Disney opened Disneyland. 32 years earlier, he opened Wonderland. Kind of. Alice’s Wonderland was the name of his first live action/animation project designed to land a contract. He signed with Margaret Winkler.

Walt appears in the short as a cartoonist.



I believe that’s Hugh Harman at the right.



More animators. That may be Walker Harman in the baseball cap. Is that Max Maxwell in the back? The cat remains unidentified.



Winkler ordered six Alice Comedies from Disney due to the strength of this short film. Winkler’s only remembered by die-hard old-time animation fans. I think the Disney name is a little better known.

Jack Hannah as Tex Avery

Walter Lantz kind of had a Disney unit for a while around 1960. Jack Hannah was directing, with Roy Jenkins and Al Coe animating, Al Bertino and Dick Kinney supplying stories and Ray Huffine working on backgrounds. For that matter, Paul Frees provided voices. The problem is the cartoons aren’t really very funny. Hannah doesn’t sound packed with incentive at Lantz. “Once you’ve been at Disney’s, it’s just a job,” he once remarked.

Still you can find stretches of good animation in some of Hannah’s cartoons. And he tried some Tex Avery style takes in Doc’s Last Stand, a 1961 cartoon featuring all of those named above. Doc, who is supposed to be a rogue and conman but comes off as drab, tries to sell his cohort Champ the bulldog as a squaw to a rich American Indian. After a bit of assistance from perfume and bash on the head, the brave gets all excited about “her.” It looks like Hannah saved money by flipping some drawings.



Hannah would leave Lantz in 1962 but not until he inflicted the Beary Family on unsuspecting cartoon lovers.

Calliope Man Bernie Green

Henry Morgan’s radio show had an unsung hero. Not an actor. Certainly not a sponsor or an ABC executive. It was musical conductor and arranger Bernie Green.

There couldn’t have been a more perfect musical fit for Morgan than Green. Acidic humourist Morgan gave him a musical spot and then apparently allowed him to do whatever satiric came to his mind. Green’s ideas were brilliant. On one broadcast, he conducted his symphonic arrangement of the “Pepsi Cola Hits the Spot” jingle. Green was an ABC staff musician, so when Morgan moved to NBC, Green stayed behind, though his arrangements were still heard on the Morgan show. He ended up being the musical director on TV for Mr. Peepers, Caesar’s Hour and the Garry Moore Show, plus provided musical cues for Al Brodax’s Cool McCool cartoon series. He also recorded a couple of albums of space-age pop for RCA, including one named for MAD magazine (with Alfred E. Newman on the album cover).

Here’s Herald Tribune syndicate critic John Crosby, a fan of Morgan’s, speaking about Green and the job of supplying snippets of music for network radio shows. It was published September 15, 1949. Green died in 1975 at the age of 66.

RADIO IN REVIEW
By JOHN CROSBY
MAN ON A BRIDGE
That blast of music you hear—a bridge as it is known in the trade—just after the District Attorney says: "This is no suicide, Jenkins. This is—mu'dah!" has to be, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, written.
One of the experts in this highly specialized field is Bernie Green, A. B. C. staff conductor. Green, who will be remembered by Henry Morgan devotees for his dizzy arrangements on that program when it was on ABC, has been writing musical bridges for radio programs these eighteen years. Most of them ran from eight seconds to a minute. One day he looked in some despair at the pile of music he had written and asked himself if he were going to spend his life doing four measure cues. The next day he sat down and started work on a symphony. Had a terrible time. The first movement was roughly eight minutes long or about four times the length of even the longest music cue. Once over that hurdle, the symphony came more easily. He hopes to have it performed this year by the ABC symphony.
There are as many cliches in radio music as there are in the rest of radio, Green says. A narrator, as any radio listener knows, always has music in the background while he's telling you that it's the next morning and Stella spent a sleepless night worrying about the mortgage. When the music stops, the next scene begins. Mystery programs, soap opera and more ambitious radio drama, each has its own music cliches, and an experienced radio listener can tell you what sort of program he's listening to by the music alone. A real expert in the field can tell by the music alone not only what has happened, but what is going to happen.

Green has done his best to get away from the cliches and to compose some really original and descriptive music bridges. When "The Fat Man" went on the air three-and-a-half years ago, Green got together an orchestra which was all woodwinds and percussion instruments to give the program a distinctive tone color. When the Fat Man came on he was preceded by a short tuba solo, suggestive of his girth.
When "The Clock," a real horror number, went on the air, Green contributed possibly the most original part of it. He achieved weird musical effects by using a combination consisting of four percussion instruments, two harps and two pianos. Weird as this was, it didn't work out well because no instrument could hold a note. Green got around this by dropping one percussion instrument and adding four French horns. The effect is still pretty weird.
Green had a real field day on the Henry Morgan show. He had an idea that music could be just as entertaining as comedy and some of his arrangements were little classics of comic music. As a parody on two-piano teams, he wrote a "Concerto for Two Calliopes." One of the calliopes was a moth-eaten old job which had been lying around NBC since the death of "Showboat." ABC bought the other on from a bankrupt carnival. The NBC calliope had fourteen pipes missing, so Green blithely worked around them.
Green's latest project, which may or may not be heard on the network this fall, is a program called "The Laboratory of Dr. Bernie Green." This one, which has been auditioned twice on the air, opens with what Green describes as "the distilled essence of all horror programs" dragging chains, a crowbar opening a wooden crate, a groan, a maniacal laugh. This is meant as a musical description of Bach turning over in his grave. The rest of the program would very likely drive Bach into doing just that.

Vermin Time

Here’s a different frolicking mouse cartoon than the Tex Avery/Warners one we told you about yesterday. It’s When the Cat’s Away, a 1935 Harman-Ising short for MGM.

The mice take a little break in the cartoon, when the hero mouse activates a pump which lets out drops of water that land with a Latin beat in a pan.



What’s that behind the cockroach powder?



It’s a cockroach! And he’s singing (are you surprised?) “La Cucaracha.” And what’s that behind the scrub brush?



Yes, a whole chorus of roaches!



And still more of them.



And a pair of Latin dancing cockroaches.



That roach powder isn’t very effective, is it? Come to think of it, the place is infested with roaches and mice. Who’d want to live there?

This cartoon has a lot of similarities to Harman-Ising’s work at Warners: lots of singing and dancing, a menace that shows up half-way through and is vanquished (although not by a gang this time, just the hero mouse), and a chirping, off-camera, female chorus (could it be the Rhythmettes, the same one heard on Warners cartoons?).

There are never any credits on these early Harman-Isings at MGM.

Not Taking a Stab at it

Johnny Mouse is about to be stabbed in the butt, but is rescued by a typical Tex Avery gag in The Mice Will Play (1938).



“Don’t do that!!” screams a woman in the “theatre audience” watching this cartoon, who stands up and waves her hands.



“Aw, we never have any fun,” say the disgusted boy mice (all played by women), who throw away the hypodermic needle.



This isn’t one of Avery’s best by a long shot, but it’s been preserved by the Library of Congress. I don’t think his heart was in it, doing a cartoon about cutish (Charlie Thorson designed?) mice, even though the cat at the end decides to wait for Susie Mouse to get pregnant so he can eat her offspring.

Sid Sutherland received the animation credit.

Peroxide That Polar Bear!

How does a movie studio publicise its latest blockbuster, other than buying advertising and supplying theatres with one-sheets and maybe a promotional kit?

Let’s find out.

I’m not so sure this United Press story from 1939 about ideas to push a Jack Benny movie is tongue-in-cheek. Maybe this really happened as reported. You never know in Hollywood. Certainly all the Paramount publicity people mentioned in it were real. For the record, they were Terry DeLapp (department head), Ed Churchill, Jean Bosquet, Don Ashbaugh, Kathleen Coghlan (fan magazine publicist), Don Chatfield, Bert Holloway, Don King, Steve Brooks, Ralph Hustin, Gretchen Messer (fashion editor) and Edward Mills.

IDEA PARLEY IS HELD FOR BENNY FILM
How Press Agent and His Aides Map Attack Is Disclosed.
By Frederick C. Othman
United Press Hollywood Correspondent.
HOLLYWOOD, Oct. 20.
We were in the conference room at Paramount today where the publicists were deciding how to make America conscious of a motion picture entitled "Buck Benny Rides Again."
This film will feature a radio star named Jack Benny, a polar bear called Carmichael, and a dusky comic named Rochester.
Boss Press Agent De Lapp and a dozen helpers were mapping their attack upon the public.
Mr. De Lapp: "We don't want to overlook this Mr. Rochester. And we might even go to Reno for the premiere to cash in on the dude ranch stuff."
Mr. Churchill: "We can't find us a Carmichael. Polar bears are hard to tame."
Mr. Ashbaugh: "I know a trained brown bear named 'Big Boy.' Couldn't we peroxide him?"
Mr. Bosquet: "They whitened two tigers for the last Anna Mae Wong picture."
Mr. Churchill: "It's dangerous to paint a bear."
Mr. Holloway: "Are any of the girls set yet?"
Mr. De Lapp: "Not yet, but there'll be four of 'em. And the Abbott Dancers. They ought to be swell for roto leg art."
Miss Messer: "They'll be wearing summer clothes. We've already got a tieup with a manufacturer."
Mr. De Lapp (in an aside): "Where's Johnny Engsted?"
Mr. Brooks: "He's out looking for a stained glass window."
Mr. De Lapp: "Oh."
Miss Coghlan: "The fan magazines should go for some Easter art."
Mr. De Lapp: "Let's get Benny in a jackrabbit roundup."
Mr. King: "Maybe we can have a picture of a jackrabbit pulling Benny out of a hat."
Mr. De Lapp: "Well if we can't get a live Carmichael. we'll have to have a stuffed bear for the stills."
Mr. Brooks: "There isn't a stuffed bear in Hollywood. We've looked."
Miss Coghlan: "I understand Benny is afraid of horses."
Mr. Brooks: "Anyhow he has agreed to sit on a horse, if we can find one that can rear safely."
Mr. De Lapp: "What about Benny's Maxwell auto?"
Mr. Huston: "Maybe we can find a guy named Maxwell who will sue Benny for defaming the family name."
Mr. Mills: "Let's get Benny to write a magazine story on how to tame a polar bear."
Mr. Holloway: "What we need is a good layout of Pratt Falls."
Mr. Del Valle: "Can't we get a by-line story by the bear on how he became a star?"
Mr. Ashbaugh: Let's send Frank Buck out to get us a bear. He oughtn't to charge too much."
Mr. Del Valle: "A picture showing Benny being thrown off a mechanical horse should be funny."
Mr. Mills: "If we can't get a bear, we ought to have a bear rug anyway."
Miss Coghlan: "We must start a nation-wide search for the oldest Maxwell."
Mr. Holloway: "Then we can get Benny to speed in it down Hollywood boulevard and have him arrested."
Mr. Chatfield: "I've got an idea for a giveaway, aluminum coins that say 'one buck.'"
Mr. King: "I believe we should get a double for Benny to be bucked off a horse for the Paramount newsreel. They ought to go for that."
Mr. Bosquet: "If there's anybody in the cast about to get a divorce, they ought to have him do it in Reno, "while the picture is in production."
Mr. De Lapp: "Unless we can talk him out of it, altogether."
The boys went on from there, far into the night. They hold these idea meetings at the start of every picture and a stenographer takes down each word they say. Then the hair begins to fly. Woe is the actor who balks at co-operating.

Shouts for UPA

“What was all the shouting about?”

That was the rhetorical question Leonard Maltin wrote in Of Mice and Magic when it came to the UPA cartoon studio. It was rhetorical because it set up the response from critic Gilbert Seldes, writing in the May 31, 1952 issue of The Saturday Review. Maltin published excerpts of the article but we’ll reprint it in full below.

Seldes’ main complaint seems to have been that cartoons should look like cartoons, not the “illusion of life” espoused by Disney (something praised by critics not too many years earlier). He also favours the UPA attempts at light humour and whimsy. Certainly “Gerald McBoing Boing” was an excellent short in all facets, from colour to camerawork, while “Rooty Toot Toot” combines interesting artwork and movement, and has its humorous moments as well. Later, Magoo became more blind than bombastic and the one-shots became increasingly coy and child-like instead of wry.

But this article was written, arguably, when the studio was at its peak—and the very same day director and UPA vice-president John Hubley was fired as fall-out from the McCarthy witchhunt.

DELIGHT IN SEVEN MINUTES
THE best way to identify United Productions of America is to say: "They're the people who made 'Gerald McBoing Boing'." And the best way to identify the quality of their product is to say that every time you see one of their animated cartoons you are likely to recapture the sensation you had when you first saw "Steamboat Willie," the early "Silly Symphonies," "The Band Concert"—the feeling that something new and wonderful has happened, something almost too good to be true.
Twelve times a year UPA releases, through Columbia, one of these seven-minute masterpieces; current or soon to be seen are "Rooty Toot Toot" (based on Frankie and Johnny), "Willie the Kid" (which is a travesty of the Wild West legend), and several episodes in the career of Mister Magoo, who plunges with supreme confidence into all sorts of adventures although he is so near-sighted that he doesn't know himself in a mirror. Also on view is the film "Man Alive," a serio-comic film about cancer released by the American Cancer Society. And recently the Roxy Theatre paid UPA the significant compliment of showing "Man on the Land," a documentary prepared for the oil industry, for its sheer entertainment value.

In a sense, the UPA product is not so much new as it is a return to the first principles of the animated cartoon, those fundamentals which Disney understood and exploited more fully than anyone before him, and which he has abandoned. They are so simple that the name of the medium, animated cartoon, comprehends all the essentials, since a cartoon is a drawing that deliberately distorts certain salient features of the subject and animation is an exaggeration of normal movement or expression. As Disney has come closer and closer to photographic realism, he has subtly violated the character of the cartoon (which is a drawing on a flat surface) by giving it depth and, in a brilliant combination of art-work and machinery, has substituted movement—remarkably lifelike—for animation.
The UPA cartoons are flat; whatever sense of depth you get comes from perspective, lines drawing your eyes to a small door in the background, and by color—as the door opens you get a flash of blue in contrast to the sepia or gray of the surrounding walls. And because they use one drawing for every two or three frames of the film, instead of Disney's one for each frame, the figures move less smoothly, they have a galvanic animation.
The delight which these pictures gives is, however, not merely pleasure taken in any return to the primitive. The positive virtues of UPA are their impudent and intelligent approach to subject matter and a gay palette, a cascading of light colors, the use of color and line always to suggest, never to render completely, a great deal of warmth, and an unfailing wit. Some of the cartoons recall stock episodes—tubas grunt and Mr. Magoo steps off a girder into thin air—but the best of them are as fresh in concept as in execution.
In "Willie the Kid," for instance, the brigand on a tricycle is commiting a hold-up or a rescue in the West and a split-second later is in his own backyard dealing with his mother and a moment later is out West again. In "The Oompahs" the conventional musical instruments of animated cartoons appear—and suddenly they are engaged in a baseball game which is all spots and shapes of color dancing against the geometry of the diamond, giving you some of the enchantment of Len Lye's color experiments on film. In "Family Circus" a lesson in child psychology is taught, sympathetically and humorously, through a dream sequence in a circus.
So far UPA has released nothing longer than seven minutes for theatrical use; the company will be represented by animations which are part of the Stanley Kramer production of "The Fourposter," and a plan for a feature picture, using Thurber's "Men, Women, and Dogs," has been long considered. Past experience indicates that feature-length animations are the first step toward the decline of the imagination, but the exuberance and copiousness of the UPA talents will, I believe, protect them. To be gay and intelligent and inventive all at once is a rare phenomenon. I, for one, hope UPA goes on for ever. —GILBERT SELDES.