Curious Puppies and Mind-Gaming Mice

“Over the past few years,” wrote Alex Ward in the Washington Post in 1974, “there has been a steady rejuvenation of interest in animation, focusing first on Walt Disney, but since broadening to encompass others like Max Fleisher [sic] (creator of Betty Boop), pioneer Winsor McCay and the zany crew at Warner’s: Tex Avery, Bob Clampett, Bob McKimson, Friz Freleng, Michael Maltese and Chuck Jones.”

Animation fans today are so fortunate a number of people who loved cartoons decided to start researching them back then. They pretty much started from scratch to piece together the history of animated cartoons and the people behind them. They laid the foundation. Then knowledge built upon knowledge. We reap the benefits of those pioneer historians today.

One advantage they had back then was an awful lot of the people who had major roles in making those cartoons were still alive and (if they were willing) could be interviewed.

The January-February issue of Film Comment magazine was devoted to animation. Joe Adamson wrote a story with quotes from the likes of Maltese, Maurice Noble. Space was devoted to Richard Thompson’s essay on Duck Amuck. Greg Ford put together an elucidation on the Warner Bros. studio. And Thompson and Ford got together to interview Chuck Jones.

Jones seems to have been the perfect interview. He was intelligent and articulate, he spent a long career in animation starting in the early ‘30s, and he lived until 2002, giving him plenty of opportunities to get his thoughts and recollections in print. Jones later wrote two books on his time at Warners (with detours into his personal life) and a collection of his interviews saw print.

I’m not going to reprint Ford and Thompson’s entire work. Instead, I’ll post what Jones had to say about some of his minor characters—the two curious dogs and mind-gaming mice Hubie and Bertie.

The dogs? Ehh. They don’t do a lot for me. I’m not sure if I’m supposed to laugh at their misfortune or feel sorry them. About all these do is sniff around looking for stuff and then try to get out of trouble. Pluto did it first at Disney. Herbie and Bertie are a different matter. They’re great characters. They’ve got great dialogue and insane ideas, thanks to the clever mind of Mike Maltese. And you can laugh at what they pull on Claude Cat because it’s so outrageous (eg. nailing an entire room to the ceiling).

What did Jones think? Let’s find out.

Q: Certain themes started emerging the very first year you began to direct. In Doggone Modern [1938], those two early dogs of yours, the boxer and his puppy pal, were pitted against the absurdities of technology, much as all those "Acme" devices would later backfire on the Coyote in his quest for the Roadrunner. The two dogs got trapped in a modernistic house-of-the-future.
A: That's right. They wandered in, and the place had a robot broom that would sweep up anything, regardless of what it was.

Q: And the dogs had to dodge the robot broom, to keep from getting swept up themselves. You did a remake of the same film about a decade later, this time starring your mice characters Hubie and Bertie [House Hunting Mice, 1947], which seems to be such an incredible improvement on the original Doggone Modern.
A: Well, the style of background was completely different in the two cartoons. In the first few pictures I worked on, we used a man by the name of Griff Jay, who was an old newspaper cartoonist—and he did what we'd call "moldy prune" backgrounds. Everybody used the same type of thing back then—Charlie Johnston [Johnny Johnsen] drew backgrounds for Tex Avery, and he was an old newspaper cartoonist too.
Q: But the biggest difference between the two films is in the starring characters. The situation is the same, a pair of characters being victimized by the crazy electronic house devices, but Hubie and Bertie in house hunting mice are active and fully developed characters, while the dogs are far too passive—they just don't have a chance.
A: No, they don't. The dogs don't really amount to anything. They just walk around and get mixed up in all the gadgetry. But they don't demonstrate any real human reactions, none that we can recognize anyway, beyond a sort of generalized anxiety. The characters aren't really established, so you don't care about them. You do care about Hubie and Bertie, though.
Q: They're real personalities. It's so much more exhilarating to see them respond to the machinery, occasionally react against it, and at odd times even triumph over it. There's a marvelous sequence where Hubie and Bertie succeed in temporarily outfoxing the robot, remember? Unlike the two dogs, they finally realize that this f***ing broom is going to whiz out and sweep up the debris, regardless of purpose, and so, this time, the characters make use of the fact and consciously try to wear the robot out. They turn on an automatic record ejector that shoots out discs and shatters them against the wall, the records fly and break into pieces, and the robot, invariably, has to come out and sweep up, again and again. Also, there are shots, with the simulated editing, of a missile sailing past intercut with a quick insert of a character, just watching it go by.
A: That may have been generated from a fascination with tennis matches, and such intercutting effects would often make the scene work. It also demonstrates that you could get an object to look like it's moving a hell of a lot faster with editing. And eventually, I began to add shadows of the missile flying past; this happened very often in the "Roadrunner" films.

Q: Another thing wrong with the two early dogs that appeared in Doggone Modern and a couple of other films at the time: there seemed to be some question as to what movements were defined for them. They were very naturalistically drawn, but their movements seemed to confuse human-like and canine actions.
A: That's why there wasn't any character, because what we were trying to do was to find out how the hell a dog moves. Just how he moves, and nothing much beyond that. That's when I was fighting the anthropomorphic idea of movement. They were modeled with back-legs like dogs, but nobody really knew how to move them properly. The result was that they looked rather awkward.

Q: Sometimes you have entire cartoons set up around the idea of gravity. In Mouse Wreckers [1948], for instance, you have a whole string of gravity gags, the coup de grâce being the upside-down room sequence.
A: An earlier gravity gag in that cartoon is when Claude Cat is pulled through the house by the rope, which is triggered by the mice pushing the heavy boulder off the chimney. And remember? Claude would get pulled into stacks of dishes, around bannisters, under tables. Gravity is the simplest thing to use if you don't happen to have any other tools at hand.

Q: Mouse Wreckers seems to us to be a major cartoon because of the controlling factors of the film are always kept off-screen. Your two mouse characters, Hubie and Bertie, are stationed on the chimney playing architectural mind-games on poor Claude Cat, who's alone in the house below. The mice reconstruct his entire room, and when Claude wakes up, he doesn't know whether these things are really happening or whether he's hallucinating it all.
A: In the later M-G-M remake, Year of the Mouse [1965], the cat finally realizes that the mice are provoking these disasters, and at the end he catches the mice.
Q: Yeah, it's a moral ending, where the earlier Warners film has an immoral ending.
A: Oh, well, I like immoral endings better. Forgetting the Tom and Jerry, the purpose in Mouse Wreckers was that the cat never realized exactly what was happening to him. And it was based on an actual happening. This upside-down room did exist: some English duke or something has a weird sense of humor, and at his parties, when someone would pass out, he'd haul 'em in there and everyone would look through the holes in the walls and watch them come to. And people would do exactly what the cat did: they'd try to crawl up the wall or something—particularly someone with a dreadful hangover, you can imagine how hideous that was.
Q: The second-to-last image of that cartoon is amazing. It's just Claude's eyes, with the cat being driven totally insane, cowering at the top of a tree, and the leaves falling away just enough to reveal those eyes.

A: In that picture I used a different thing: the eyes were handled almost like a pair of animated breasts—did you notice that?
Q: Yes, the pupil came out of the ball of the eye, like a nipple. The fear registered in Claude's eyes in amazing, as he looks from side to side.
A: Phil Monroe did a good job on that.
Q: When Claude is in the upside-down room, on the ceiling that he thinks is the floor, trying to keep his balance by digging his claws into the ceiling, the camera turns around and goes upside-down with Claude; it's fascinating. I wonder if you were trying to show the force of gravity through motion alone, and without the standard visual presentation of what's up and what's down.
A: Well, Claude opened the bottle and the liquid flowed up, while if it were shown from your viewpoint it would naturally flow down. And I wanted to show what he felt. Actually, Charlie Chaplin used something like that in the opening airplane sequence of the great dictator, when he's piloting his plane upside-down. And the same series of gags are in the Porky Pig cartoon Jumpin' Jupiter [1955] when they lose their gravity. There I didn't have to turn the camera around, obviously, since it was in outer space. I just used a little sign that read: "You are now entering a low gravity zone."

The interview may be more than 40 years old but there is still a lot of information in it I have not read elsewhere. Someone has graciously put the issue of Film Comment on-line and you can read it by going to this site.

The Almost Return of Miss X

Pat Matthews left his mark at the Walter Lantz studio by animating a couple of cartoons with “Miss X,” Lantz’ equivalent to Red in the Tex Avery cartoons at MGM. Miss X waving her butt while dancing in see-through pantaloons was a bit much for theatre owners, even during the WW2 years, and Lantz dropped her from his cartoon roster.

Matthews left Lantz around 1948 to work at UPA. Besides theatrical cartoons and TV commercials, UPA made industrial shorts; that’s how the studio got its start. One of them was The Sailor and the Seagull, a 1949 short for the U.S. Navy to sell sailors on reenlistment. This was before UPA decided limited character movement was the right movement; the short features lovely, flowing animation that you can find in its earliest theatrical shorts for Columbia.

There’s a dream sequence which feature Miss X-ish harem girls. Were they animated by Matthews? I’d like to think so. He should have been at UPA at the time.

Here are some frames. I wish the resolution was better than this.



There’s an inside joke at the end of the cartoon. It features the names of UPA staffers, likely some of the ones who worked on this cartoon. Matthews’ name isn’t among them, though.



Bobe Cannon was a director, Willie Pyle and Jack Schnerk were animators, Bill Hurtz was a designer, Jules Engel got credited for color, Herb Klynn was eventually the studio production manager who later founded Format Films. There are no credits on this cartoon.

It also features some early cartoon voice work by Daws Butler as the seagull and a few other characters. The McGinty character in the frames above is played by John T. Smith, using the same “What, no gravy?” voice heard later in Chow Hound from Warner Bros.

Plane Dumb

Plane Dumb is plain dumb.

I’m referring to the 1932 Van Beuren cartoon which is almost close to unwatchable.

Okay, I understand the plot. Tom and Jerry are disguising themselves to go into Africa. But why do they have to speak with those stereotype voices to each other when they’re not in Africa yet?

Well, the answer is the cartoon was supposed to star a black vaudeville team named Miller and Lyles. The plan got scrapped because Aubrey Lyles became ill (he died on July 28th that year), but the Van Beuren studio didn’t scrap the soundtrack; it just changed the two to Tom and Jerry. Of course, the theatre audience watching the cartoon didn’t know any of this and may have been puzzled if they had any interest on what was happening on the screen.

Even worse, Tom and Jerry don’t say anything funny. It’s as if their sound was the gag. The trouble is, there was nothing novel about the voices; they’re not much different than Amos ‘n’ Andy who had been on the air for about four years at this point; Miller and Lyles themselves were in vaudeville before World War One.

And then there’s a scene with an octopus. Why is he kissing Tom? And why is there no impact when Tom hits him. The less-than-skilled Van Beuren cartoonist simply has the arm sweep down, and there’s a sound effect and a few lightning bolts and stars. Oh, well. Van Beuren is not your sign of quality.



The octopus turns into a spanking wheel, spinning in mid-air. That may be the funniest thing in the cartoon. He dives into the ocean and the plot jerks along.



For added weirdness, the opening title animation is superimposed over cycle footage of a waterfall. Why? Who knows. It’s a Van Beuren cartoon.

John Foster and George Rufle get screen credit. Gene Rodemich again supplies the background music. I’ve drawn a blank naming the songs in it (see the comment section).

Dances Better Than Sabu

This is a post about Morey Amsterdam. To the right, you see a picture of Sabu. There’s a reason. Morey will explain why below.

Amsterdam’s big fame came The Dick Van Dyke Show, which began airing in 1961. He’d been the star of his own show, one of the first variety stars of early modern network TV. Nobody remembers it because it was on the CBS and then the Du Mont network almost 70 years ago. And it didn’t have the advantage of being rerun over and over like Van Dyke because any versions of the show that existed would be on kinescopes and not considered airable.

Here’s Amsterdam in an unbylined story in the Salamanca Republican-Press published July 14, 1962 when the Van Dyke show was building an audience thanks to reruns. The reference to Bobby Kennedy deals with the president’s brother when he was U.S. Attorney General and conducting all kinds of investigations.

Morey Amsterdam of 'Dick Van Dyke Show' is Talented Fellow
It's quite possible someday that Morey Amsterdam will settle down long enough so that when asked to list his occupation on an official form he doesn't have to scratch his head in wonder or ask the clerk for a second piece of paper.
The extra sheet of stationery is a must for the dapper wavy-haired show business veteran because he can describe himself as a comedian, movie actor, television actor, radio performer, cellist, songwriter, nightclub impressario, gag writer, restaurant proprietor, movie, radio and television director, night club star, full-time father, part-time golfer, photographer and stock market watcher.
Ar the present time, Morey's numerous talents are confined to CBS' “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” where he teams up with the amiable Dick and versatile Rose Marie as a trio of gag writers for a mythical TV comedian named “Allan Brady.”
Viewers watching the summer re-runs of the half-hour comedy show every Thursday on CBS-TV at 9:30 p.m. discover more often than enough that Dick, Morey and Rose Marie produce more laughs for themselves than they do for their invisible boss.
“It's a funny thing," Morey was saying-over lunch, “but I've been talking to people who have made it a deliberate point to see the show a second time around to catch up on the laughs they missed - the first time because they were laughing so hard.”
Morey quickly adds that he is one of these time-tested faithful viewers.
“I watch to see Rose and Dick," he adds. “Me? I can see any time in the bathroom mirror.”
Morey's descriptive eyebrows fly up at this point. “And it's a good thing I watch that pair. They've stolen so many laughs from me that I think it's a case for Bobby Kennedy.”
But ask Morey who is the funniest comedian and comedienne and he gives full marks to the scene stealers mentioned above.
“We all have a good arrangement,” the effervescent Mr. Amsterdam claims. “We've got a great deal of respect for each other as entertainers and people. On some comedy shows the people, who give the public the impression they are buddy buddy, are about as friendly towards each other as Joe Lewis and Max Schmelling. But not on our show. We get along.”
Morey's eyebrows flashed again. “Actually, we get such a kick out of working together we'd probably do it for nothing but the laughs. If the sponsor reads this: remember I'm under psychiatric care, sir.”
A native of Chicago, Morey grew up in San Francisco. “But I stopped growing when I reached three feet” he adds, “because I liked the view from here.”
The elder Amsterdam was first violinist with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra and thought young Morey should get a classical education. Morey took up the cello and today is so proficient on it he plays to relax and also uses it as a comedy gimmick on occasions.
Morey recalls that he was always interested in show business. “I started my vaudeville career at sixteen in Chicago and ended at sixteen in that same city,” he states. But he was determined to stay in show business.
“I got a job as an usher,” he adds. “It was sort of a show business. Besides the uniform matched the color of my eyes which were yellow at the time.”
A few far sighted vaudeville house owners saw the comedy potential in young Morey, and the years that followed saw him steadily employed in clubs and cabarets.
About this time other comedians discovered the nimble-witted Amsterdam, and he was soon writing special material for them. The illustrious list of clients included Fanny Brice, Milton Berle, Jack Benny, Joe E. Brown, Eddie Cantor and Frank Morgan.
Morey felt that the greatest thing to happen to him in show business was his friendship with the late Will Rogers. The cowboy humorist took Morey under his wing and gave him some advice the comedian has never forgotten—never be cruel to anyone even in jest.
“Mr. Rogers used to write to me a lot,” Morey adds. “Mostly postcards. I've got about a hundred of them in my home. I was the only guy-in show business lucky enough to get a million dollars worth of comic material by mail.”
The year 1930 found Morey in radio. Since then, he has been in and out of that medium.
After the war he appeared on so many radio and TV programs as guest star, Fred Allen quipped: “the only thing we can turn on in our house without getting Morey Amsterdam is the water tap.”
A few years ago, former movie hard guy Sheldon Leonard and comedian Carl Reiner had an idea for a show about a trio of gag writers. They both thought Dick Van Dyke, who was then appearing on Broadway in “Bye, Bye Birdie,” would be a natural for the part of “Rob Petrie,” the safe and sane head comedy writer. Rose Marie, they agreed, would be excellent in the role of “Sally,” the wisecracking female of the trio. But who was to be the third party?
Both Leonard and Reiner concluded that they would need a man who could act, dance, sing, charm viewers out of their chairs and, above all, rattle off funny jokes like a Gatling gun.
“Sabu couldn't dance," Morey flips, “so they wound up with me.”
“The Dick Van Dyke Show" was the comic hit of last season — one of the few shows to be renewed this year.
While not working twenty hours a day, Morey spends some time with his wife, Kay, and son Gregory, eighteen, and daughter, Cathy, ten. He plays golf and takes pictures, and he adds, “stare at myself in the mirror and wonder how lucky a guy can be.”

Zcaring the Zebra

A string of fear gags greets viewers in Slap Happy Lion every time a fierce jungle lion roars. In one, a zebra calmly munching on the African veld becomes so frightened, it jumps out of its stripes and runs away. The stripes follow.



See how Avery’s animator turns the lower half of the zebra’s body, then the upper half before running into the distance. These three frames are consecutive.



Tex loved to have a tongue sticking straight out in fear drawings.



Now the zebra turns the upper half of the body. The two drawings below are consecutive.



Now the stripes.



Bob Bentley, Ray Abrams and Walt Clinton are the animators in this cartoon.

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.”