Radio Eats Mice

The 1930 Talkartoon Radio Riot becomes increasingly bizarre as it goes along. The final scene is wonderfully warped.

Three little mice are listening to a scary story on the radio. They poke their heads through a blanket on their bed. The holes disappear and their heads are left floating in the air.



Their tails want help.



Then the radio eats the mice!



But it gets stranger. The radio picks the mice’s tails from its teeth, lays them on the bed and takes a bow.



No, that’s not the end of the cartoon. The mice’s heads come out of the radio horn and zoom toward the camera.



Van Beuren did this kind of thing as well, but this might have been the first cartoon where this happened. This also may be the first cartoon to parody the NBC chimes. It was the third Talkartoon to be released (Feb. 15, 1930), behind Noah’s Lark (Oct. 26, 1929) Marriage Woes (Dec. 21, 1929), according to Motion Picture News of Jan. 25, 1930. Billy Murray lends his voice in several places. Max H. Manne, who had been the manager of the Roxy Theatre in New York, is credited as “musical advisor.”

London Bridge is Falling Down

Does this really need an introduction?

Playing With a President

Former U.S President Harry Truman appeared on the Jack Benny show on October 18, 1959, but that’s not the whole story.

A future president wanted some publicity thanks to Benny, too.

Before the Truman show even aired, Vice-President Richard Nixon “demanded” equal time. And Jack gave him time. It wasn’t quite equal, but it gave the Republican good publicity.

First came this story in the Associated Press on October 14, 1959.

TRUMAN ON BENNY'S SHOW; NIXON WANTS EQUAL TIME
By JAMES BACON
(AP Movie-TV Writer)
HOLLYWOOD (AP) — Ex-President Harry S. Truman turns up in an unlikely place next Sunday: guest star on a comedy show.
Jack Benny, his host, says he has a demand for equal time from Vice President Richard M. Nixon.
"I wrote him back that he's not eligible for my show until he makes president," Benny quipped.
Benny and Nixon have been friends for years.
FRIENDLY WITH BOTH
"I'm neither a Republican nor a Democrat," said Jack in explaining why he is so friendly with leaders of both parties. He said Nixon had written him congratulating him on the show business coup of snagging the former President of the United States as a guest star. "Some of my friends have advised me that I should demand equal time," Nixon wrote Benny.
"I think he was kidding," said Jack.
A reporter asked Benny how he managed to get Truman to appear with him.
"Actually," replied Benny, "I didn't ask him. He asked me."
Some months ago a columnist asked Benny if he intended to use the same old guest stars seen on most of the big TV shows.
OFFBEAT STARS
"My answer was that I was seeking offbeat guest stars such as Mrs. Jimmy Stewart and I might try for Harry S. Truman The story got printed but I really had no intention of asking the former President of the United States to appear on a comedy show.
"One day Mr. Truman called me and asked: 'What's this I read about my appearing on your show? I'm ready anytime you ask me.' " Benny and the former President once did a benefit violin-piano duet for the Kansas City Symphony.
"He was so grateful to me for helping out those musicians that he was eager to do something for me. I told him that I do benefit concerts all the time, I love to do them. He owed me nothing."
But when Truman agreed to be on the show, Jack suggested that the Truman portion be taped in the Truman Library at Independence, Mo.
Benny said he and the former President had only one disagreement during the taping.
"I wanted to keep it dignified and Mr. Truman is worried about my getting laughs," Benny laughed.

Benny agreed. Nixon didn’t appear on his TV show, though. This United Press International story of November 21, 1959 fills us in:

Benny Plays Fiddle, Nixon Accompanies

WASHINGTON, Nov. 21 (UPI)—Vice President Nixon ended a politically significant week tonight by playing a duet with Jack Benny—sometime music partner of former President Truman.
Nixon supplied piano accompaniment for Benny’s violin before an audience composer of many of the nation’s political writers at the National Press Club. The tune was one of Mr. Truman’s specialities—the “Missouri Waltz.”
Benny, a featured entertainer at the press club’s President’s Black Tie Ball, explained that he had written Nixon to congratulate the Vice President on a “wonderful job” on his trip to Russia. In reply, Benny said, he received from Nixon a note saying “After your program with Truman, I demand equal time.”
Benny gave Nixon his chance, and then breezed through a speeded-up version of the “Missouri Waltz.” Nixon’s judgement on the performance, as pronounced to the other guests, was: “All of us should stay in our own rackets.”

The AP version of the story adds:

The occasion for the performance was the annual president’s ball of the club, honoring William H. Lawrence, a correspondent for the New York Times.
Benny also played the violin with the noted violinist Isaac Stern on a program which included metropolitan opera stars Dolores Wilson and Robert Merrill. Benny was presented with the Laurel Leaf Award of the American Composers’ Alliance for promotion of symphonic music.

Benny had emceed the D.C. radio correspondents dinner in 1953, at which Nixon was present.

Nixon and Benny met again, notably in 1961 where the ex vice-president handed Benny a plaque at an American Israeli Foundation dinner to mark the creation of a violin scholarship in Benny’s name. And in 1969, Jack greeted the now-president at Andrews Air Force base after Nixon’s eight-day tour of Europe.

As far as we know, Harry Truman didn’t ask Benny for a response in rebuttal, but you can read about his musical escapades with Jack HERE and HERE.

O'Gulliver

The Hanna-Barbera studio wasn’t only spending 1967 plying kids with Squiddly Diddley and the Impossibles. It was making cartoons that kids never saw. Nor were they supposed to.

The studio had set up an industrial unit several years earlier, making films for businesses and corporations. One of its industrial cartoons that year was for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and entitled The Incredible Voyage of Mark O’Gulliver.

Its message of “let business police themselves/less government oversight” was something you would have found in an animated short by John Sutherland Productions in the late ’40s and early ’50s. In a way, this is a Sutherland cartoon, as John’s brother Ross was employed by Hanna-Barbera overseeing its industrial operations. Some of H-B’s other industrial pictures at the time were Another Language (AT&T), Wings of Tomorrow (Boeing), the acclaimed Time For Decision (American Cancer Society) and Advertising 1967, starring Fred Flintstone, Barney Rubble and a disembodied woman’s hand pushing Busch beer.

The industry-friendly Business Screen Magazine, in its June 1967 edition, profiled O’Gulliver, with the drawings below.

A Humorous Parable on the Problem of BIG Government
U. S. Chamber of Commerce Pictures a Congressman's Visit to "Animalia"
THE Government of the United States is the biggest entity in the country today. It is the biggest employer. Biggest borrower. Biggest lender. It is the biggest landowner, the biggest tenant. It is the greatest single customer of this country's industrial production. It is the biggest in almost everything — and it is getting bigger all the time.
Starting with these ominous facts, the Chamber of Commerce of the United States, in association with Hanna-Barbera Studios, has produced an immensely amusing, but highly-significant film. The film's story takes the form of a humorous parable, in which a mythical U.S. Congressman. Mark O'Gulliver, becomes shipwrecked on a remote Pacific isle — among a community of hilarious animals whose society, unfortunately, is all too similar to our own. For in trying to find his way back to civilization, Mark O'Gulliver encounters all the frustrations, the obstacles, indeed, the paralysis which results from stuffy bureaucracy.
Serious Note Beneath a Light Approach
The 25-minute color film, an animated cartoon titled The Incredible Voyage of Mark O'Gulliver, is most entertaining. The animation is superb and the animal-characters are delightful. But, for all its humor and wit, the film poses some ominous questions about Big Government. As originally conceived, our society was to embrace a range of interests so vast that no one interest or branch of government could become the dominant power. This concept was embodied in our system of checks and balances, as everyone knows.
But times have changed. and the composition of government has changed also. The administrative tasks of government have become so immense that a gigantic bureaucracy has grown up within the past fifty years.
Now, a bureaucracy possesses certain features which automatically make it a hazard. First of all, a bureaucracy is hierarchy — a pyramid of authority, with power transferred from the pinnacle down toward the broader base. Second, all activities are governed by fixed, written rules. And finally people are hired to perform certain specialized functions which are impersonal and supposed to lie outside the political realm. All of this leads to inflexibility.
The hazards of this kind of organization are vividly portrayed in the film. We see, for instance, how government by the true legislative process has become eroded with government by bureaucratic fiat. And the film illustrates other pitfalls inherent in big government: decision-making reduced to thoughtless routine; the self-perpetuation of bureaucratic inertia.
Where to Obtain a Print of This Film
The film may be used by local chambers of commerce, business groups, trade associations, schools, unions, church and civic groups interested in public affairs. It has been cleared for television showings.
Prints and full information may be had from the Audio-Visual Department of the Chamber of Commerce of the United States, 1615 H St.. N. W.. Washington. D. C. 20006.

If you’re curious about what the film looked like, you can view it below at the 6:44. Carl Urbano, one of the original Tom and Jerry animators for Joe Barbera and Bill Hanna in 1940, is the director. Art Scott, whose career took him to Disney, his own studio and Bob Clampett’s Snowball before arriving at Hanna-Barbera, wrote the film, while UPA veteran Bob Dranko is the designer. Interestingly, the studio didn’t get Ted Nichols or Hoyt Curtin to write the score. It was put in the hands of Dean Elliott, who was writing music for the Chuck Jones’ Tom and Jerrys.

There are no voice credits, but you’ll recognise Don Messick, Allen Melvin, Hal Smith and John Stephenson, who does a poetic not-quite sing-speak at the end.

I should warn you someone has spliced in unrelated films throughout this version. You can see and hear Joy Hodges sing “Daddy” which should be familiar to lovers of cartoons.

Shooting the Symphonic Slider

A duck gets caught in a dog’s trombone slide in the 1945 Walter Lantz classical music short The Poet and the Peasant. The duck’s head gets jerked around in perspective at the camera.



The duck has has enough.



The dog doesn’t get shot to death. His eyes are open. They later turn to face the audience.

Dick Lundy directed this, though it has some un-Lundyesque quick cuts in the sequence at the end, where a fox tries to catch a cross-eyed ballerina duck. Paul Smith and Les Kline are credited animators, but I suspect Pat Matthews and Grim Natwick also worked on this.

Naval De-Feet

Occasionally, an animation checker will miss something and part of a character’s body will disappear for one or two frames.

In Porky the Gob (1938), the captain’s shoes lose their shadow and turn a lighter colour, then the feet disappear altogether for one frame.



Carl Stalling liked putting J.S. Zemecnik’s work in his scores in his first year or so at the studio “Traffic” is heard several times on the sound track, and there’s a good portion of “Battle Music Number 9” at the end. And there are the usual Warners’ sea-going favourites, such as “Song of the Marines” (Warren-Dubin). I think that’s Danny Webb doing a deep voice for the captain at the start.

Garry Moore's Revelation

As trite as this sounds, the host of I’ve Got a Secret had a secret. At least, it doesn’t appear to have been common knowledge at the time the show was on the air.

Garry Moore revealed it to King Features Syndicate writer Harvey Pack in a story published March 9, 1963.

Moore had been on a network for 20 years at that point. In 1943, NBC quickly needed a replacement show, so Moore was hired and then paired with Jimmy Durante. The odd combination worked. Moore left in 1947 to branch out on his own, and he eventually was pulled into the Goodson-Todman stable, hosting Secret and then a revived version of To Tell the Truth before retiring. Moore died in 1993, 50 years after he first went on the air for Camel cigarettes. His cigarette habit did him in.

Moore Beat Speech Handicap
By HARVEY PACK
Many years ago in the city of Baltimore a 15-year-old boy who was destined to be one of America's highest paid TV personalities told, his friends, "If you call my house and there's no answer . . . it doesn't mean I'm not home. I never answer the phone because I can't say hello." Today, Garry Moore says more than "hello" to millions of fans every week and his loquacity is one of the key factors in his success.
"I stammered from the time I was 15 until I was 16 and a half," explained Garry, "the reason I couldn't answer the phone is that 'hello' is one of the hardest words for a stammerer and I just avoided it by not picking up the receiver. With my friends I wasn't so bad, but with adults I was terrible."
Ironically enough, even at that time Moore wanted to be an actor. "I knew it was impossible," he continued, "but it was similar to a crippled boy dreaming of being a ball player."
Garry doesn't try to analyze what caused the affliction, but he does admit that he was a poor student at the time and his older brother and sister ranked quite high in their class, a fact which psychologists would undoubtedly list as a cause. "The stammering didn't help my studies and vice versa," Garry theorized. "But in spite of my poor scholastic record, the headmaster of my high school wrote an article some years ago explaining that many miserable students are simply children who do not fit into the mold that is demanded by educators. He listed me as an example."
The cure was not affected by speech therapy, but by the theater. "A friend of mine was trying out for the school play and he had me accompany him as a friendly witness," said Garry. "They asked me to read a few cue lines and I found that when I wasn't responsible for making up the speeches, I was able to talk in front of an audience without stammering. They gave me the lead in the play . . . I was a big hit and every body was proud of me. I never stammered again."

Despite his poor scholastic showing, Garry was extremely well read and actually began his professional career as a writer. He has never forgotten his adolescent affliction and to this day he is quite active in the National Hospital for Speech Disorders.
"They do a remarkable job today," said Garry. "I don't really understand all their methods, but I get a kick out of going down there and watching these people get up in front of a class and try and talk. I was invited to address a group one night and I was introduced by the teacher, stepped up to the front of the room and said, 'I . . uh . uh . . mmm . . wouwou . . . wou . . .' I completely regressed and, for the first time in 25 years, I was unable to talk. The students laughed because they thought I was trying to be funny, but it actually took me five minutes to regain my composure."
The emcee of I've Got a Secret seen on Channel 12 Monday nights, has never kept his teenage stammering a secret and, as a result, he is constantly visited by parents whose youngsters have speech defects. "The pattern is always the same," said Garry. "The mother or father comes in to see me dragging the child behind them. The parent asks the child to tell Garry how good he is—say in sports—and before the kid has said one word the parent steps right in and takes over the explanation. They won't let the youngster get in one sentence without interrupting. When I tell the parent to wait outside, I always find the child loosens up and begins to speak much better.
"I think parents should examine their own methods of bringing up their children before classifying their offspring as candidates for speech therapy. In many cases, particularly very young children, it's simply a matter of the mind moving faster than the mouth and the impatient parent can actually aggravate this condition into a speech impediment."
As every viewer knows, the boy who won the lead in that Baltimore high school play has had no trouble getting work. His variety show — which spawned talents like Carol Burnett, Allen & Rossi and, more recently, Dorothy Loudon—will be back again next season on CBS. He doesn't seem to mind the strenuous schedule of a weekly one hour show, plus I've Got a Secret and a daily radio program.
When you ask him whether he's sorry he didn't do a film show and therefore lost out on the big fortunes performers have made by selling their old shows for syndication, the onetime stammerer proves himself a true ham by saying, "When you're on film nobody comes up to you the next day and tells you that the show was great . . . or even lousy. You sacrifice the excitement of the business and that's an awful lot to give up."
And to think . . . he once couldn't say "hello."

Sheep!?

Favourite Droopy? That’s easy. It’s Drag-a-Long Droopy (released in 1954). The “moo-moo-baa-baa” and “hey, taxi” scenes are as funny as anything Tex Avery did.

There are some great expressions, too. There’s the underplayed little burro who casually moseys along. And there’s the cattle baron, who has a dishevelled take when he’s told (by a worried cow) that sheep are on the way. This is one of the in-betweens.



Ray Patterson was added to the Avery unit for this cartoon, which had Grant Simmons, Walt Clinton and Mike Lah animating, along with Bob Bentley.

Headlines

Ub Iwerks had a thing for emotion lines radiating from characters’ heads. You could almost turn it into a drinking game, but you’d pass out before the first minute of a cartoon was over.

These frames are from the first 17 second of Nurse Maid (1932). And there are more and more of these expression-lines through the whole cartoon. And in the next Iwerks cartoon. And the next. And the next.



The Iwerks cartoons love those irradiating lines, where everything stands still, except for two frames of different lines that are alternated. Here’s an example with the Iwerks Crone. I’ve slowed it down a bit.



Iwerks used these effects until his last cartoon, the tedious Happy Days (1936). I don’t know about his later shorts for Columbia, but you don’t find them in the two that were released as Warner Bros. cartoons that were, more or less, Bob Clampett cartoons.