Stan Lee, This Generation's Homer

People today are trying to put into words what Stan Lee meant to the comic book industry. Some, I hope, will succeed.

I won’t even try. I have never read a Marvel Comic book (nor one from DC). I have no interest in superheroes, though I watched Batman and the Canadian-voiced Spider-Man cartoon series of the ‘60s on TV (the latter is where I first saw Lee’s name). About all I know about him is from the very opinionated fandom surrounding superhero comics/films and his personal soap opera played out in the entertainment press (and will, perhaps, continue despite his passing today at age 95). Whatever I could say would sound trite, obvious and inadequate.

Instead, I will pass along the earliest interview in the popular press with Lee I’ve been able to scope out. It’s by Dean Pope of the Philadelphia Inquirer of March 17, 1966. His legions of fans, I hope, will find his quotes of interest.

ZAP! POW! Comics Sweep Princeton
PRINCETON, March 16
NOT even the Ivy League could escape.
Before you could say ZAP or POW the craze for comic book heroes had taken over Princeton University and Spider-Man and The Incredible Hulk were big men on campus.
A hard core of about 70 Princeton students demonstrated their devotion to the superheroes by turning out for a two-hour comic session last week featuring one of the Nation’s top comic publishers.
The meeting was sponsored by the Merry Marvel Marching Society, one of the several organizations on campus devoted by comics, and the speaker was Stan Lee, editor and writer of Marvel Comics.
Lee has been in the comic book business 25 years, but only recently have his publications come into their own, he said. “When we switched to superheroes five years ago the boom started for us,” he said.
The superheroes include the Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, The Incredible Hulk, Mighty Thor, Captain America, the X-men, Iron Man, Sergeant Fury and His Howling Commandoes and Dr. Strange.
The Princeton audience seemed to agree ecstatically with everything Lee said, which may be one of the reasons his company sold 45 million comic books last year compared to a mere 13 million five years ago.
“We think of Marvel Comics as the 20th century mythology, and you, Mr. Lee, as this generation’s Homer,” a Princeton junior told the speaker.
“I’ve always thought my education was based on the comics,” said an English major. “They were always set in some way out place like Crete or the ruins of Ankor Watt. That’s what stimulated my intellectual curiosity and sense of history and adventure.”
The student then asked Lee why he didn’t have an archeologist with superpowers to go along with his assortment of radioactive teenagers and Norse gods. “We could have a plumber with superpowers and it would sell,” the editor answered.
* * *
Lee said he felt “like a father” to his comic creations. “I pretend I’m Shakespeare,” he said. “Right now comics are the lowest art form in peoples’ minds. I’d like to fit them to equality with the movies. Then I’d be the Segei Eisenstein [sic] of comics.”
Lee said the usual method for creating a comic story is for the writer to give the artists a plot, the artists draw the panels, and then the writer fills in the dialogue.
He said sometimes new characters get slipped in by artists. “I marvel that everyone doesn’t copy our methods,” he said.
The comics publisher defended his industry as “the only media appealing to college students and soldiers which doesn’t emphasize sex. True, there’s a certain amount of ‘action or violence,’ but that’s to make the stories exciting,” he said.
Lee said comics used to sell predominantly in the summer but with a rising market among students and soldiers sales are now steady throughout the year. “We’re so ‘in’ that we haven’t reached the general public yet,” he said.
But Lee added new people aren’t coming into the industry like they should.
“I don’t know where the new people in comics are going to come from,” he said. “All those in it now are old and there are no bright young artists coming from places like the School of Visual Arts in New York where they used to study cartooning for the comics.”
Tom Tulenko, president of the Merry Marvel Marchings Society, said many other Princeton students are avid comic readers in addition to the 60 or 70 in formal club chapters. He and his twin brother Tim have been devotees for years and have hundreds of comics piled in their dorm room.
“Very few freshmen join,” he said. “Most of the guys wait until they get to be upperclassmen before they really get into this stuff.”

Waffles at the Piano

“Devoid of logical continuity and with very few gags” is how Film Daily described the 1932 Van Beuren cartoon The Last Dance. But, realistically, isn’t that how you can describe a lot of Van Beuren cartoons?

Sure, it may not make a lot of sense, and it may not be funny, but it has dancing fish and a radiator being played like an accordion.



It has a dancing hat rack, one of those big-headed parrots that pops up in some early ‘30s Van Beurens and a bird cage played like a banjo. The fox looks like he’s wearing a party hat over his nose.



It has Waffles the cat (with lashes at the top and bottom of his eyes) singing the Roy Turk-Fred Ahlert song “Why Dance” to an unidentified girl cat.



And it has a bear character with one of those weird stares at the camera. If this were a better copy, you’d see the stars in his eyes. I like how his ears and tail look like little stubby cactus plants.



John Foster and Manny Davis are responsible for this short, with Gene Rodemich cobbling together the score.

Trouper for the Troops

It’s doubtful few people think that living in the jungles of Melanesia is the way to spend a summer. But some fighting forces during World War Two didn’t have much of a choice. That’s where the enemy was, and that’s where the military brass told them to go.

There were a few who did make the choice to go there, and into other danger spots around the world. They were entertainers, doing their part to help the morale, and maybe sanity, of the people in uniform.

Among them was Jack Benny, who arrived in New Guinea on July 14, 1944 with Carol Landis, Martha Tilton, Larry Adler and June Brunner. They were greeted on their arrival by Special Service Officer Captain Lanny Ross. Jack was no slacker during the war. He also toured Africa, Europe and the Middle East with a unit while the Allies’ battled together.

There were reporters as well. George Lait of the International News Service caught one of the Benny shows in New Guinea. He wrote in the August 2, 1944 edition of Variety, in part:

Benny is making all the jungle camps where it stops raining long enough for his hour-and-a-half show. Hospitals, outdoor stages, and the rear end of trucks serve the troupe, and each performance has been seen by audiences so huge and so enthusiastic that even the Shuberts would be satisfied.
Benny opens the rapid-fire vaudeville-type revue as m.c., and never was funnier, even when he had Rochester at his side instead of a couple of bushy-haired Papauan natives...
Then comes Landis—gorgeous in a revealing costume—and the GIs soon. She sings, tells gags alone and with Benny, and kids the boys who shout wisecracks from the audience. Her smash bit is a love scene with Benny, whose kiss is apparently so hot Carole faints, and is carried off-stage by a burly MP (his is the best job in the Army). There’s talk around, though, that Miss Landis swooned for an entirely different reason. Benny, it’s said, just loves onions... The flash finale is a rendition by the whole troupe (even Benny) singing Harold Rome’s “Hup Hup,” from “Stars & Gripes,” with scattered audience participation. It leaves the crowd satisfied and happy.
Benny’s comedy holds the show together and gives it a speedy pace which the old Palace could well envy. His monologs are filled with local gags, and uses bits of pidgin (native manner of speaking English) and draws howls with pitch-and-toss banter to the audience.

More touching, perhaps, is Robbin Coons’ Associated Press press column on the show. He published highlights of a letter from an American soldier who caught the Benny show. More on the letter in a moment. The earliest I can find this version is in one small paper’s editorial section of September 13, 1944. (The photo below came from the INS and is cropped).

Jack Benny Plays, Gags For Troops In Pacific
By Robbin Coons
HOLLYWOOD—Pvt. Woodrow Boone writes from the Pacific:
"Grabbed a chance to make one of Jack Benny's New Guinea appearances at the base hospital this afternoon. . . . We got there by 1:30 on a dusty truck. The hospital is a series of long sheds on a hilltop. There are very tall, slender trees on and beside the hill, reaching above the level of the outdoor theater. The walking and wheelchair cases were already there. . . . Jungle fighters, anxious for a two-hour furlough with folks from home. . . . A blue-and-gold streamlined bird flitted high in the branches and a white parrot flew by. . . . Our own brigade "swingphibian" orchestra marked time in prelude. . . . Three poker games were under way. We made conversation, admired the nurses, and waited. . . .

"Presently two jeeps and a command car drive up behind the theater. The crowd rises, sees no one, settles back. From the right side front row, I see behind the stage a heavy-set, grey-haired, brown-faced civilian in gunmetal tweeds, polo shirt, and red-striped necktie, and I know there'll be a show. Jack disappears into the special service shed for a few minutes; the band continues; we wait.
"Then very casually, swinging a curled swagger stick . . . walks out the greatest trouper of them all, Jack Benny. "Hi ya, fellas!" he says, and all, who can, rise and give him a loud welcome. We gather 'round. One hand reaches out to remember how a red necktie feels. Jack pulls out his shirttail zoot-fashion to let 'em see what that looks like too. One of my buddies from Ohio had said, 'I don't give a damn about seeing Jack Benny I just wanna see a civilian suit!'
"Jack ad libs, autographs my hat, tries it on and mugs for the audience . . . jokes with the orchestra members. . . . By that time the mike is fixed, and Jack takes the stage, more at home than ever. . . . "All the lusty GI jokes. . . . Then he introduces Martha Tilton. She sings; the crowd goes wild. She sings again and again. Blonde Carole Landis comes on in a summer frock that fits like it should in the right places. . . . There are Fred Allen jokes, Errol Flynn jokes, and Roosevelt jokes. . . . Carole asks Jack to pretend he's Robert Taylor, and they do a love scene.
"Jack wants to accompany Martha on his violin, but she won't let him. Larry Adler plays a dream of a Beethoven number on his harmonica. . . . More jokes, more songs. Jack begs to accompany Larry on his violin no soap. . . . I see appendectomy cases in the audience holding their sides and trying hard not to laugh. Pretty, petite pianist Jane Bruner almost steals the show with an ad lib about Jack's violin. Jack and Larry drift into a duet. . . .
"Then comes the finale. Five hard-working American artists together on the stage, bringing a touch of the good old U.S.A. to those of us who are far enough away to see what we're really fighting for the right to laugh, the right to enjoy life."

Reporter Coons wasn’t the first to publish this. It comes from A Private’s Journal, published in full in Billboard on August 26, 1944, with a dateline of Sunday, July 30th. Coons simply edited it for public use; after all, who outside the industry ever read Billboard then?

Some of the stuff Coons left out is worth quoting.

Pvt. “Hepcat” Swartz, the drummer, wears a perennial shaved-headed, cue-ball hair-do, and Jack wants to know what kind of hair tonic he uses. The piano-player, named Nolan, is from Waukeegan, and Jack says “I went to school with your father—or was it your grandfather?”
We ask about Rochester. “He had to take a summer job to pay expenses.” Dennis Day? “He left me to join the navy. “For 50 bucks a month?” some O.I. Joe asks. “That’s a damn sight more than I paid him.” ...
All the lusty G.I. jokes that start getting hairy-chested at the point of embarkation, and reach full-blown maturity in direct proportion to their nearness to the front line. . . . “I was surprised to find that very few of the South Pacific islands look like they did in the movies; I haven’t seen a single one that looked like I thought it would. In fact, there’s not a goddamn island in the Pacific that even slightly resembles a Hollywood set. The crowd roars.—“I had a slight touch of dysentery while we were in North Africa. I think you-all call it the G.I.S.”

Coons left off the end of Boone’s story, with its tribute to Jack Benny, who gave selflessly of himself to entertain the troops.

Some G.I’s who came to New Guinea didn’t get a chance to see you, Jack; some others who did may never go back to tell the folks at home about it, but none of us will ever forget you, trouper. You’re Will Rogers without his cowboy hat; you’re Mark Twain without his cynicism; in fact, if you’ll excuse the pun, Jack, you’re the 20th Century “Twain”—Unlimited!
Keep pitchin’, soldier!

Why Woody Wouldn’t Warble

If nothing else, Walter Lantz was pretty astute.

He left Universal for United Artists, but when it turned out not to be a better deal, he stopped making theatrical shorts for about a year, built up some capital from reissues of old cartoons, and when he was in a better financial position, went back into production.

His only problem is his budgets had to be tighter than ever. He found one way of doing it, and solved two problems at the same time. He made Woody Woodpecker a pantomime character. That saved money, and made the cartoons more attractive to foreign exchanges.

Here’s Lantz chatting about it in a 1951 story by the Associated Press. Interestingly, it speaks of Grace Stafford as Woody’s voice. She certainly didn’t voice Woody in the theatricals prior to 1950; perhaps she was doing it in commercials.

This was published on March 22, 1951.

WOODY WOODPECKER'S PLIGHT
By GENE HANDSAKER
HOLLYWOOD (AP) — Woody Woodpecker has lost his voice. Not his raucous laugh — the soundtrack for that is the speeded-up voice of the wife of his creator, Walter Lantz. But no longer will Woody talk. And in pantomime, oddly enough, he's as funny as ever. Maybe funnier.
The expense of dubbing in foreign translations for exported prints inspired Lantz to try a wordless Woody. It costs about $1,500 to hire actors and pay technical costs of changing dialogue to, say, Italian, French, or German. With foreign restrictions on profit exports, that might be more than Woody would return.
The rascally red bird is popular also in Switzerland, Spain, Japan, the Scandinavian countries, Argentina, and India. Sometimes foreign-language subtitles were used, but Lantz thinks they interfere with the action. He's against too much talk even in feature pictures.
"We've all seen pictures that talk, talk, talk," the veteran cartoon producer said. "With less dialogue and more pantomime and acting, they'd be better pictures."
Lantz, 51 and graying, with friendly direct blue eyes, has produced about 700 movie cartoons in 35 years. That includes 55 Woody Woodpeckers in the last decade. The inkwell character was suggested to Lantz by a real woodpecker that woke him up by drumming on the roof of his week-end cabin. Woody's first appearance was as a supporting character to Andy Panda, but he soon stole the show.
Lantz, dissatisfied with his former releasing arrangement, recently took a year off from producing Woodies. Now he has signed a new contract for six a year with Universal-International and is redecorating and streamlining his studio for a busy output.

It’s a shame Handsaker’s story is so short. But he got a few chances to talk to Lantz again. Here’s a brief mention in his column from January 26, 1952.

Chit-Chat from Hollywood
By GENE HANDSAKER
HOLLYWOOD (AP)—If anybody boils at those middle commercials on TV shows, it's mild-mannered Walter Lantz. Says the producer of Woody Woodpecker and other screen cartoons:
"I don't know, what could be more disturbing. You're watching a drama. Some guy is all ready to be knocked off. Then another guy comes on and starts talking about ice-cold beer. This spoils the mood, and they don't pick it up again. I'm becoming a radio fan again-—because of TV commercials."
Lantz is turning out one-minute commercials plugging a soft drink and car equipment But he hopes they'll be used only once per program—and not in the middle. Incidentally, his cartoon star is just like the human variety when it comes to television. A releasing contract with Universal-International keeps Woody Woodpecker off TV.

Let’s pick up Handsaker again in 1967. By now, Woody was talking on screen again (with Grace Stafford’s voice) and had been since 1952. Lantz was still releasing cartoons to theatres and had managed, starting in 1957, to put Woody on TV in a half-hour show in which he was the host, to the delight of all kinds of kids. Woody was selling cereals for Kellogg’s on TV and bread for Butternut in print. There were comic books and merchandise to help add to the Lantz coffers.

Lantz’ career dated back to the silent era and he was honoured a number of times for his decades of contributions to animation. This Handsaker story was published May 21, 1967. You’ll notice the “Woody creation” story above now mentions that canard about a honeymoon. Lantz (and Gracie) related it time and time again for the rest of their lives. It simply isn’t true.

Luncheon Given At Universal For Walter And Gracie Lantz
By GENE HANDSAKER
HOLLYWOOD (AP)— Walter is 67, gray-fringed and shy. Gracie, 63 and jolly, kids him about the bags under his blue eyes.
"Walter was born with his eyes packed to go somewhere."
"No," he corrects merrily: "They've only been that way since I was 3."
One of Hollywood's happiest teams—in marriage, work and play—Walter and Gracie Lantz will be honored at a Universal City Studios luncheon next Wednesday for: —
—Their combined century in show business, and;
—Twenty-five years of their Woody Woodpecker animated cartoons, inspired by a bird that disturbed their honeymoon and has made them million-dollar rich.
Lantz, a son of Italian immigrants and onetime $10-a-week New York newspaper copyboy, got into cartoon animation at 16 and is the only pioneer still active in that field.
The former Grace Stafford entered vaudeville at 12 with her father, a blind pianist, and became a theater, radio and film actress. Of Irish descent, full of impish humor, she has been Woody Woodpecker's raucous voice for 17 years and cracks: "I'm the oldest woodpecker alive."
The Lantzes, introduced at a party, were married in 1941. A woodpecker that drilled holes in the roof of their honeymoon cabin—and that Walter couldn't drive away—inspired Gracie's suggestion: Make him a cartoon character.
"So I gave Woody a secondary part in my next Andy Panda, already a star for four years," Walter recalls. "The New York distributors said, 'You must be out of your mind; this raucous bird will never go.'
"But the preview crowds roared. Woody stole the picture and has been a star ever since."
Woody outshone other Lantz characters—Oswald Rabbit, Charlie Bear, Gabby Gator, etc.—and was the emblem of countless U.S. fighter planes in World War II. The Woodpecker Trail, a U.S. highway from Florida to North Carolina, bears Woody's likeness on its signposts urging careful driving.
Kay Kyser's "Woody Woodpecker" record, with Harry Babbitt cackling the vocal, led the hit parade for 13 weeks.
With 32 studio employes, Lantz produces 13 new Woody Woodpecker cartoons and reissues seven a year for theaters in 73 lands. A weekly Woody television show is seen in 200 U.S. cities. Walter makes his preliminary sketches.
Lantz, associated with Universal since his late friend Walt Disney left there in 1928, analyzes Woody's appeal: "He's a mischievous, likable person who does things we'd like to but mustn't."
Work requires only four or five hours a day for Lantz, who says: "You've got to have hobbies."
His include oil paintings— mostly still-lifes, which sell, to his amazement, for $500 apiece—fishing, with Gracie, who once landed a 110-pound sailfish with light line—and golf, which they both play.
"We're always having fun," says Walter, and Gracie echoes: "We enjoy everything—even catastrophes."
Golfing at Las Vegas when they heard the 1961 Bel-Air fire had destroyed 460 homes including theirs, they ordered drinks and the most sumptuous meal of their lives.
Walter is president and Gracie vice president of Walter Lantz Productions, Inc. As for any thought of retirement he says: "As long as I can entertain children, I'll keep going."

Lantz finally ended theatrical production in 1972. He crunched the numbers. It took him too long to see a substantial profit on new cartoons. He was content to have Universal release his back catalogue to theatres and make his money that way.

By every account I’ve read Walter and Gracie Lantz, especially during their senior years, were pleasant and delightful people who truly loved their cartoons and the effect they had on both kids and adults (even though the stuff in the last half of the ‘60s and in the ‘70s was completely forgettable).

Handsaker had a chance to chat with the Lantzs again. We posted it here. We’ve got more of Lantz’ comments from his retirement years we’ll save for a future post.

Try the Eel For a Meal

All kinds of great scenes highlight Daffy Duck’s debut in Porky's Duck Hunt (1937). One starts out with something you’d expect from Tex Avery—a sign to act as a helpmate to those in the theatre audience who can’t quite follow the action.



And in case we still don’t quite get it.



Daffy decides to have eel sushi for lunch.



Now comes the fun part.



Whenever you get annoyed about how Daffy’s character was reduced to being an angry, incompetent foe in some unfunny cartoons with Speedy Gonzales, instead think back to this cartoon, and let your memories of drunken fish singing “Moonlight Bay,” Porky pulling out the script or Daffy sliding around the closing title card overcome you. This is a great comedy that holds up 80-plus years after its release.

Bobe Cannon and Virgil Ross are the animators credited on screen but Bob Clampett, Chuck Jones and (I suspect) Sid Sutherland employed their craft on this one.

An Anvil Gag From Walt Disney

“When was the first anvil dropped onto someone in a cartoon?” you may be asking yourself. I’m afraid I don’t have the answer, but it goes back to the silent era.

In fact, that gag staple of the outrageous Tex Avery was used before him by the guy who is thought of as the polar opposite of Tex—that “illusion of life” man, Walt Disney.

Of course, there was a time before Uncle Walt wanted his animators to caricature real life. He went for the gag, like anyone else. In the 1927 cartoon Alice the Whaler, Walt pulls the old anvil gag (or maybe the new one, depending on when it was first used). What’s interesting is props appear and disappear during a scene on deck with a monkey. He’s pulling a rope. At least, he looks like he is. Then the rope fades in. He tugs at the stuck rope. Down comes the anvil. Bam! Then the anvil fades away.



This cartoon’s hit and miss. There’s a gag where a parrot eats musical notes. Yeah, that’s it. But there’s a bizarre one where a mouse shoves a plunger or something down a hen’s throat and forces eggs out of the other end.

I imagine Ub Iwerks, Hugh Harman and Rudy Ising animated parts of this one.

Fibber, Johnny O and the Best of Intentions

Intentions don’t always turn out to be practical or viable, as one discovers when they blog.

One of the things I wanted to do on Tralfaz was post some of the early columns by John Crosby, radio critic of the New York Herald Tribune (and its syndication service), considered by many to be the tops in his field at the time. There’s are a couple of problems, one which Variety mentioned in a column in 1946—readers may never had heard the shows Crosby talked about.

In looking over his five columns for the week of May 20, 1946, only one deals with a show that’s familiar to fans of old time radio, Fibber McGee and Molly. Another involves a long-running audience participation programme that’s obscure today called Ladies Be Seated. The other three are completely meaningless today: one critiques a WOR programme called A Voice in the Night, another talks about summer replacement music shows on some New York stations, the other counters radio misconceptions by the head of the Republican National Committee.

So long, intentions. I’m only going to transcribe the first two.

Fibber McGee and Molly had a spot on the radio dial starting in 1935 and ending after NBC unceremonious dumped it in 1959. By then, it had been stripped of virtually all its elements and was merely Fibber and Molly kibitzing in an empty studio for a couple of minutes on Monitor. No music. No Harlox Wilcox shoehorning in commercial mentions, no stooges to interact with.

Crosby wrote on May 20, 1946 about what made the show a success though, I would again add, the interaction with likeable secondary characters played a huge role.

Radio in Review
By JOHN CROSBY
Don Quinn Vs. Sinclair Lewis
The most popular program on the air today, according to both the Hooper and Co-operative Analysis of Broadcasting, is Fibber McGee and Molly, which, as practically every one must know by now, may be heard every Tuesday at 9:30 p. m. over WEAF and the National Broadcasting Company. There are several dozen other shows which imitate the Fibber and Molly formula as closely as possible, but none shares this show’s immense popularity.
Fibber and his cynical wife Molly are upper middle-class types that may be found in any small city. They know every one in town from the barber to the Mayor well enough to call them by their first names. Fibber has a finger in every one else’s affairs, meddles in politics, and become extraordinarily petulant when he fails to make the Elks barbershop quartet.

There is nothing startlingly different about this type of comedy. But, it appears to me, Don Quinn, who has written the show for the eleven years it has been on the air, knows his small cities more intimately that any other radio writer. Born and brought up in Grand Rapids, Mich., the son of the city manager, Quinn has first-hand knowledge of the make-up of a small American city and uses that knowledge wisely. Jim and Marian Jordan, who play Fibber and Molly, know their small cities, too. They are the most celebrated natives of Peoria, Ill.
Simplicity Plus Shrewdness
The average man in a small Mid-West community is a more complex personality than he first appears. His simplicity is always qualified by a deep shrewdness. His frequent bumptiousness is counter-balanced by a rich vein of humor. And, after all, his preoccupation with making the barbershop quartet is not less real and no more preposterous than that of many city slickers with making Winchell’s column.
By merely skimming the surface, I think most other radio writers on this theme miss the boat. Life in a small American city is not a collection of homespun jokes; it is, in fact, an intricate web of old feuds, lifelong friendships, local custom, and highly complicated family relationships. My own home town, Oconomowoc, Wisc., is a community of only five thousand persons, but it is as full of explosive cross-currents and power politics as was Versailles at the time of Louis XIV.
Mr. Quinn appears to realize this better than does any of his contemporaries. He is not, of course, writing a serious treatise on small city life but he is shrewd enough to make comedy of the genuine elements of that life rather than the city slicker’s comic strip conception of it. His Fibber is vain, loquacious, and frequently fatuous, but he is also shrewd, good-natured and very human.
Dialogue is Genuine
Let’s drop in for a moment at 79 Wistful Vista. Fibber is discussing the downfall of a local politician who was unseated by a man who waved a newspaper at his horse. “Ah, the power of the press,” says Molly. Fibber discusses the issues that marked a recent political rally. “Councilman Zimbelprang,” said Fibber, “spoke very highly of the American flag.”
There are not terribly funny gags, but they’re certainly genuine. They have an air of innocence and good nature about them that you might find in the conversation of any intelligent couple alive to the ludicrous elements of small-city politics.
Later the couple visit city hall and Molly inquires: “Who are all these people hanging around the corridor?”
“My dear,” says Fibber, “that is one of the great mysteries of all the city halls in the country. There is a theory that these people are just left over from the crowd of excavation watchers.” As the son of a city manager, Quinn knows his city halls.
Quinn’s scripts have a great many other qualities, but I’ll have to go into them some other time. Right now I have space for only one more thought on Fibber and Molly. When historians of the future write the story of the small Mid-West American community they would be well advised to read a couple of Mr. Quinn’s scripts after they finish the works of Sinclair Lewis. Lewis and Quinn are poles apart. The truth about the American small city lies, I should say, somewhere in between.

The following day, Crosby turned his attention to Ladies Be Seated, yet another programme centred on embarrassing people live on the radio. It was hosted, for a time, by Johnny Olson, who people today think of as a game show announcer. Olson kind of fell into that role on television after hosting shows on radio and early TV, some of them with his wife Penny. I’ve always loved Johnny O., but I’ve never been a fan of laugh-at-this-guy-we’re-turning-into-an-idiot programming. Crosby wasn’t either. Crosby seems to have stared at his radio in disbelief that something like Ladies Be Seated would even be broadcast.

Radio in Review
By JOHN CROSBY
How Not to Spell Meringue
The audience participating show is a sort of opiate of the housewives which afflicts the air waves far too much of the daytime hours. Because so much broadcast time is now devoted to these shows, I can’t ignore them entirely, but they make a tough subject for review.
For some time I have been staring, bewitched, at my notes on a program called “Ladies, Be Seated.” The program simply defies rational comment so I give you instead a simple description.
When I tuned in, the audience, which is largely composed of housewives, was singing in a variety of keys a song whose closing lines were, “Ladies, be seated, and we’ll all have a wonderful time.” A numbing experience for the ears.
* * *
Like virtually all these programs, this one trafficked heavily in young married couples. On this day the master of ceremonies, a hearty fellow named Johnny Olsen [sic], plucked from the audience two such couples—one married two days, the other married five.
They were asked to judge a fashion show, which neither couple had done before. While a bevy of Billy Rose showgirls paraded by, the bridegrooms attempted to describe the costumes.
“Looks like she just got out of a zoo,” said one.
“Well, she’s got a lot of feathers on,” remarked the other.

“Keep your eyes off the girls and on the costumes,” warned Mr. Olsen, who never speaks much lower than a scream. “Go ahead, describe her while she tries to entice you with her lovely costume and—shall we say—her personality.”
One of the husbands responded to this invitation with a low whistle, which perhaps described the girl more aptly than the dress.
“Two days married and he’s speechless,” yelled Mr. Olsen, and presented him with a thermos bucket. The other people got nylon raincoats.
After the fashion parade came the selection of the singing housewife of the day. Several of the housewives sang a phrase or two of “Pack Up Your Troubles In Your Old Kit Bag,” and the audience selected the winner by some criterion which eludes me. The singing housewife of the day was awarded a lapel watch, a corsage, and a man’s watch.
* * *
The nub of the “Ladies Be Seated” program comes very close to the end of the half hour. Mr. Olsen gleaned several more young couples from the audience and outlined a quiz contest in which, to quote Mr. Olsen, “the wives must hit the answer or the answer hits the husband.”
The first question was: What are the two elements contained in water? I was under the impression that every one who completed eighth grade knew the answer to this one but it developed, neither housewife had any idea. Since the wives missed the questions, the husbands got hit with the answer, This consisted of the husbands breaking bags of water over each other’s heads. Then, Mr. Olsen asked the girls to spell “meringue,” as in lemon meringue pie. The first one spelled it “merine”; the second got as far as “m-a- and then gave it up as an impossible task. Therefore, the husbands obligingly pitched lemon meringue pies at each other. I’m not making this up. This actually went on.
In the general hilarity that followed the spectacle of two men smearing each other with lemon meringue, I missed the third question. Whatever it was, it got the right answer: the second one missed. The husband of the second thereupon had a feather pillow broken over his head to add, as it were, a sort of icing to his drenched and meringued exterior.
As a reward for all this he was given an umbrella. It seems scarcely worth it. How, I keep asking myself did he get home from the broadcast looking like that? The only suitable conveyance for a man covered with feathers is a rail. I shouldn’t be at all surprised if sponsors of “Ladies, Be Seated” took him home that way.

Below, you’ll find the week’s other three columns (22nd through 24nd) if you are really interested.

As mentioned above, the intention was to occasionally give you a roundup of some of John Crosby’s early columns. As not mentioned above, the other problem is as of this writing (and this was written way back in January), I no longer have access to the source material and it doesn’t appear it will return. As stated off the top, intentions don’t always turn out to be practical or viable.

Ring Her In

What was Krazy Kat’s girl-friend’s name in the Mintz cartoons? Someone out there must know.

Here she is in the 1931 short Svengarlic (the title character eats garlic through the cartoon). Krazy is an artist who has brought her up to his studio. They kiss and morph into a wedding ring.



Krazy’s eyes turn into rubbery telescopes later in the cartoon.



Ben Harrison and Manny Gould are the only people to get credits besides Joe De Nat, who composed the musical score. Mendelssohn’s “Spring Song” is one of the background tunes.

Longnecker

Who says there’s nothing worth watching in a Buddy cartoon? How about these perspective drawings in Buddy’s Bearcats when the ticket seller at the baseball park tries to haul back in an obese customer?



Even better quality screen grabs wouldn’t save this 1934 cartoon. One gag is a guy watching the ballgame through a knothole in the fence swaying his butt for, well, who knows why? A wiener dog comes up against him and lets the guy’s wagging butt scratch his back.

Jacob Henry Ellis’ 1921 song “The Drum Major” is heard behind the ticket seller scene. Norman Spencer’s score also includes: “Out For No Good” from the 1934 Warners’ feature 20 Million Sweethearts (during the aforementioned rear end scene and elsewhere), “Hit Me Again” (A. Wrubel), “The Campbells Are Coming” and what I guess is a Spencer original song during scenes selling hot dogs and pop, and announcing the starting battery.

What? No Ad-libs?

Radio grabbed the big vaudeville stars and then the movie industry grabbed the big radio stars and transported a fair percentage of them from New York City to Hollywood.

Among them was Jack Benny. For all intents and purposes, his New York radio career ended in 1935. He returned east for about 3½ months in 1936 but, realistically, the only time he went back to New York was for personal appearances, a film premiere or, later, to do his first television shows (there was no cable from Hollywood to send them to the network at the time).

Benny’s film mix-it-up with Fred Allen, Love Thy Neighbor, premiered in New York in 1940, so Benny and his cast went back for a week. He had spent three weeks in the city earlier in the year when Buck Benny Rides Again debuted in Harlem.

One New York columnist complained Benny didn’t say anything amusing after getting off the train at Grand Central Station. His comments are on an earlier post on the blog. The reporter for PM said basically the same in his story of December 14, 1940, but explains why he’s not bothered about it. And he gives you an indication how incredibly popular Jack was then.

Benny Can't Ad Lib ... Not Even a Burp
Jack Benny et cie. (Mary Livingstone, Phil Harris, Dennis Day, Don Wilson and Rochester) arrived here the other day from Hollywood for tomorrow night's premiere of the Benny-Fred Allen picture, Love Thy Neighbor, at the Paramount. Last night, an hour before Benny was scheduled to broadcast for Jello from NBC's Ritz Theater (WEAF 7), West 18th St., outside, was jammed with humanity.
For this lone New York broadcast some 10,000 persons had asked to sit in a theater which seats only 700. For this one broadcast an estimated 34,000,000 persons throughout the U. S. A. were sitting at their radio sets.
There is no doubt about it. The nation's choice as the funniest man in the land is Jack Benny, a silver-gray, fattening, 46-year-old ex-vaudeville violinist and patter man from Waukegan, Ill., who now collects about $12,500 a week from the radio.
The funniest thing about all this is that Jack Benny (born Benny Kubelsky), a big, fingernail-biting fellow who also chews two-for-a-quarter cigars (Santa Fe's), is not a funny man at all.
One night, when Fred Allen was ribbing him unmercifully in a joint broadcast, Benny came through with perhaps the only good ad lib he ever got off. And that was born of despair. "If I had my writers here," Jack moaned, you wouldn't talk that way to me."
"Benny," concluded one Harry Conn, who used to write gags for Jack, "couldn't ad lib a belch after a Hungarian dinner."
But despite Benny's lack of humorous spontaneity, one fact should be noted here. There is nobody in the whole, wide variety world who can time a gag or two-time a double take the way Jack Benny can.
The formula for the Benny show has seldom varied in the six years it has been on the air for Jello. Phil Harris poaches on Jack's romantic preserves, Rochester loses the house money in a crap game, the quaking old Maxwell collapses whenever the drive it into the script, and when Jack's ego reaches a zenith, Mary Livingstone, Jack's wife (nee Sadye Marks) punctures it.
That's the way Harry Conn devised it nine years ago, when Jack first took to the air for Canada Dry. And that's the way Bill Morrow and Ed Beloin, present senior and junior writers of the Benny entourage, have kept it.
In real life, Benny, who probably retains about $7000 a week after paying the cast, is the same sort of fretful, unsatisfied guy he is on the air.
He plays no sports, but when he is home in Beverly Hills he goes for walks with his trainer. His major delight is his six-year-old adopted daughter, Naomi Joan.
Naomi Joan calls him Old Daddy Jack.