Better Than Joe Cook

In show biz, money talks. And here’s what money was saying in 1932.

In the March 8th edition of Variety that year, it was revealed Jack Benny was making $2,000 a week to play at the Palace in New York City. By contrast, Joe Cook (photo to the right) was pulling in $5,500.

Today, you’d probably say “Joe who?” But back then, Joe was a bigger, more in-demand comedian than Benny.

Radio changed that. Benny jumped into the newish medium of network radio two months later. No doubt he looked at that same column and saw radio stars Amos and Andy were pulling in $7,500 a week for personal appearances. Despite some early sponsor turmoil, Benny became a hit. His popularity meant he could charge more to appear on a stage. He soon passed bigger vaudeville stars like Cook.

That’s one of the points Sidney Skolsky makes in a feature story on Jack that appeared in the New York Post in 1941. From what I can tell, it was rare for a newspaper gossip writer to devote a whole column to one person (magazines were a different story), but Skolsky set aside his entire space in one edition to Benny, giving the comedian’s life story in the process. In fact, he used some of these same words in a 1931 syndicated column and again in 1937.

Sidney Skolsky Writes...
Tintypes
HOLLYWOOD Jan. 16.
Jack Benny, according to the official radio survey, is not only the No. 1 comedian, but he is the leading performer on radio. He is doing pretty good in pictures also.
His latest, "Love Thy Neighbor," in which he co-stars with another radio comedian, Fred Allen, is doing big business throughout the country. So good, in fact, that he is under contract to two studios, Paramount and 20th Century-Fox, to make pictures.
There was a time in the early days of the talkies when he made a couple of pictures and was given his release, considered through in pictures. He didn't start off with a bang on radio either. A couple of sponsors let him go before his style of program caught on.
In fact, if you listed the best comedians on Broadway in 1931, and were asked to name who would he tops in 1941, you wouldn't put Benny above any of these: Al Jolson, Ed Wynn, Eddie Cantor, Lou Holtz, Joe Cook, George Jessel, Frank Fay, W. C. Fields and Groucho Marx.
They all ranked higher than Jack Benny in vaudeville and in musical comedy. Benny was never the headliner on a hill with any of those names. But Benny's method of comedy is paying dividends now.
He says: "Even in those days in vaudeville, when I was a master of ceremonies, I always liked to have a reason for introducing the next act, or for telling a joke. I didn't think it should be as easy as 'on my way to the theatre tonight, etc. . . .' And I always tried to be the poor guy who was in trouble, that the other fellows picked on."
These points are today the basis for his radio show. He is the poor guy who's in trouble. And his show has continuity and believable characters.
He says: "I work harder with my writers trying to find a legitimate reason to go from one section of the program to the other than I do on the gags."
On the radio he has fun with the statement that he hails from Waukegan. He was born in Chicago on St. Valentine's Day, 1894. His parents went to Chicago so he could tell people he was born in a big city.
He is 5 feet 9 inches tall and weighs 155 pounds. His hair is gray and thinning. When broadcasting he wears glasses. He has blue eyes.
His first job in the theatre was as a doorman. Next he became a property man. Then he became a violin player (oh, you don't believe it, Fred Allen!) in the theatre's orchestra conducted by Cora Salisbury.
When the theatre closed, he and Cora went into vaudeville. They did a violin and piano act. Then he didn't play the fiddle for laughs.
He toured in this act for about four years, never getting to New York. While doing this act, he didn't speak a word of dialogue on the stage. If there was a curtain speech to be made, Miss Salisbury made it.
He had to join the navy to speak on a stage. During the World War he was in the navy and was put into the Navy Relief Society. This organization put on a show called "The Great Lakes Revue." Here Benny spoke for the first time on a stage. He was ordered to do so.
So he came out of the World War with a violin, some chatter, and the courage to do a single act in vaudeville.
He is married to Sadie Marks. She was not connected with show business. She worked in the hosiery department of a department store. Yes, she is the Mary Livingston on his radio show.
He generally starts work on his Sunday program on Tuesday. He sits with his two writers, Bill Morrow and Ed Beloin, and they discuss what the show should be about. The first writing comes out of these conversations. The program is generally written by Friday afternoon. There is a "run through" of the script on Saturday at the studio, and on Sunday, before the broadcast, there is a complete rehearsal. He stages the show. He wants to become a movie director.
The word he uses most is "marvelous." Everything he likes and describes to a person is "marvelous." When he was in vaudeville he used this adjective to describe almost every act. A letter he received from a fan caused him to be careful how he used the word. The letter read: "Enjoyed your performance very much. Like everything about you but the word 'marvelous.' Am sending you a list of words you can use in the place of marvelous. Except for that, Mr. Benny, you are marvelous."
Despite his popularity as "Buck Benny" on the radio and in pictures, he has never been on a horse except at Santa Anita.

The Early Crusader Rabbit

Crusader Rabbit didn’t appear on television until July 15, 1950, but newspaper readers got a sneak peak at him a year earlier.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch published a picture article on him in its issue of April 3, 1949.



What’s interesting about these drawings is while the design looks like the TV Crusader, the story in the panels is entirely different. Crusader seems to be on a crusade to keep kids safe.



There’s no Rags Tiger or any bad guys, and no adventure.



The text accompanying the drawings:

A NEW cartoon character has been created for children’s television movie shorts. He is Crusader Rabbit, who energetically copes with a variety of difficulties, some of them facetious. In one series of films, he has a serious purpose—the teaching of playtime safety practices. In the safety crusading he plays opposite a little boy who gets exposed to several of the typically harrowing hazards of childhood. Each time the little boy is preserved for the next episode by nick-of-time appearances of Crusader Rabbit, whose rescues serve to dramatize dangers for children in familiar surroundings of home, yard and street. The cartoons, animated by a process developed for television, are produced by Jerry Fairbanks Productions.

Even though Crusader hadn’t appeared on TV when this article appeared, he was in development as early as January 1949. You can read more about the start of the series in this post.

Green-Eyed Cat

Tom thinks he’s been shot by a bird in Kitty Foiled (it’s really Jerry dropping a light, which makes a gunshot sound when it hits the ground).



The best part of this sequence is the green circles in Tom’s eyes.



Joe Barbera tops it with a parody of coin-flipping George Raft in Scarface (1932), who is gunned down at the end of the film.



Irv Spence, Ken Muse, Irv Levine and Ray Patterson receive the animation credits in this cartoon. Can anyone point out Levine’s scenes?

A Typical Car by Tex

No one was making new cars in the U.S. in 1945. There was a war on, after all. Well, that doesn’t include Tex Avery, who united with writer Heck Allen in one of his favourite car gags.

“When out of the night, which was 50 below,” says narrator Frank Graham in The Shooting of Dan McGoo, as a limo winds its way down a snowy road into a clapboard town.



The limo pulls up....



....and keeps pulling up....



....and keeps pulling up.



Ah! It's finally arrived. Along with one of Avery’s signs.



I don’t know when Avery first used the stretch limo gag (was it Milk and Money at Warners?) or how often he used it, but it feels like it pops up in a number of his cartoons. It takes up about seven seconds of screen time to pull up in this cartoon.

He Wasn't Disco Peter Cottontail

Was there ever a more uncomfortable TV performer than Daryl Dragon?

Dragon is better known to the world as the Captain half of the Captain and Tennille, who turned a Neil Sedaka/Howard Greenfield song called “Love Will Keep Us Together” into an insanely-huge chart-topper in 1975.

The chirpy song quickly led ABC-TV to sign them to a contract to host a variety show in 1976. Boss Fred Silverman predicted big things, no Big Things, for them. Silverman apparently didn’t predict that Dragon came across on the tube as someone who wanted to be anywhere else but on the tube. Combine that with obvious jokes about Dragon’s hats and Silverman decided by January 1976 the show needed a new producer, a new director and less of the Captain and his wife in comedy sketches. (Freddy insisted the ratings were fine as far as he was concerned, but what else is he going to tell reporters?).

No one was more relieved that the show was cancelled than Mr. and Mrs. Dragon.

Daryl Dragon died a week ago. Three people in show business passed away the same day, all age 76. We didn’t post about Dragon then lest the blog turn into an obituary column, so we’re posting this today. It’s an Associated Press article from July 8, 1977 with the Captain and Tennille’s perspective of the cancellation of their show, the broader perspective of the demise of variety television with music stars, and at least one insipid idea their writers tried to foist on them.

It seems Dragon was as distant and enigmatic off-camera as he was on, according to Tennille’s memoire released in 2016. Yet Tennille remained close (or as close as anyone could get) to him after their divorce and she was with him when he died.

Show's end pleases singing duo
By PETER J. BOYER
LOS ANGELES (AP) — When television discovered that Sonny and Cher drew good ratings In prime time, tube executives were ecstatic. Here, they thought, is a mother lode of potential family hour filler; thus was born the bubble gum song-and-jokes variety show format.
Executives weren't sure whether it was Cher's navel or the couple's musical talents that brought in the viewers, but that didn't really matter — Tony Orlando and Dawn, Captain and Tennille and Donny and Marie Osmond were quickly drafted to come up with shows of their own.
The plan, like so many television ideas, sounded better than it worked. It turned out that folks really were tuning in to see Cher's navel, and after they had it memorized, well, the talents of the famed divorced couple didn't quite sustain them.
BUT PERHAPS THE the worst consequence of the soft-pop variety show was experienced by the musicians-turned TV performers themselves. Tony Orlando couldn't buy a hit record; Sonny and Cher might have bought Sonny and Cher records, but nobody else did; Donny and Marie didn't suffer as much in sales and neither did the Captain and Tennille, but ask that latter couple what they think of TV variety shows and then cover your ears. The Dragons think television may have been worse for them in terms of their music than for the others.
"It was hell," says Toni Tennille, the pretty, smiling half of the teenybopper's notion of the ideal couple. "Because of television we didn't have time to write. We'll never do another series in our lives, at least till I'm 55 and do a Dinah Shore talk show. It was really hell. It was not fun."
"It can be fun," says Daryl Dragon, the inevitable captain's hat pulled down over his eyebrows. "But I'll tell you what's wrong — variety shows are all based on formulas. They say, 'Well, let's do it like Donny and Marie, that show's successful.' They've never come up with a variety show that's different."
The Dragons think that television may have been worse for them — in terms of their music careers — than for the others.
"See, Donny and Marie, Sonny and Cher were just kind of 'hit and miss' singles artists," says Toni, "every now and then they'd get a hit single, but they never really were big album artists. We have been. People have come to expect quality stuff from us, and we didn't have time to write."

THEY THINK THE PROBLEM is not that pop singers can't transfer successfully to TV but that "the networks are brainwashed into a certain format," Daryl says. "Yeah," Toni joins in, getting excited, "you have to have certain guests on because they draw. They were going to take our last two shows and make them SPECIALS," pronouncing the last word with disdain.
“And that’s real cute. They wanted one to be an Easter special (“What’s wrong with the Easter Bunny? Daryl jokes). And as an opening number, they suggested a disco version of "Here Comes Peter Cottontail!"
"That's what Donny and Marie do, and there's nothing wrong with it," Daryl says.
"Right," Toni chimes, "but Donny and Marie can get away with it ... they're kids. I said, 'Look, you've got The Brady Bunch and Donny and Marie, they can do Peter Cottontail disco, that's not our thing."
IT WAS RIGHT ABOUT at that time that Captain and Tennille realized you can't be serious about your music and have a weekly television series too. They dream about the ideal music series featuring guests like Linda Ronstadt and The Eagles but in the meantime, they've returned full-time to their real vocation, "recording artists, definitely, that's what we are."
Their series, by the way, was dropped by ABC; and the Dragons couldn't be happier.
The pair, both former members of the Beach Boys, are back in their roles as pop stars. They're in the middle of a back-breaking 90-city tour and they are also back in the charts with a new album, "Come in From the Rain."
"Our new album is almost platinum," Toni says, "So as far as I can see, television hasn't really harmed us."

Speedy Bimbo

Speed lines in 1932? That’s what you’ll see in that year’s Betty Boop’s Bamboo Isle as Bimbo pilots his motor boat.



By the way, Irving Berlin wrote a song in 1920 called “My Little Bimbo Down on the Bamboo Isle.”

Seymour Kneitel and Bernie Wolf are the credited animators. The Royal Samoans make a live-action appearance.

Don't Touch That Film!

A baby alligator desperately wants to be nursed by its mother pig (a stork mixed up the delivery).



The mother pig stops it with her hoof.



Now comes a horrible edit job. The mother pig begins talking to the alligator in five drawings animated on twos (less than a second of screen time) before an abrupt cut to a baby cat and an old mouse.



What happened? The cartoon’s director, Bob Clampett, told historian Jerry Beck that the pig was supposed to say the opening line of the old Blondie radio show which went “Ah, ah, ah! Don’t touch that dial!” but the movie censor office ordered it cut out. Why the studio didn’t excise the preceding ten frames along with the gag line, I don’t know.

Animation credits go to Rod Scribner, Manny Gould, Bill Melendez and Izzy Ellis. Oh, the cartoon is Baby Bottleneck.

The No. 1 Foil

“Why spoil with success” must have been Jack Benny’s motto.

He kept the same writers for years. They kept writing the same type of material for years. And audiences kept eating it up for years.

Jack let Bert Resnik of the Long Beach Independent Press-Telegram drop in as he was about to get ready for another television show. This short column was published on November 17, 1963. This was during Jack’s final season for CBS, though it had already been announced he was leaving for NBC the following season. He was also about six weeks away from headlining a show at Harrah’s in Lake Tahoe, with the Lettermen, Moro-Landis Dancers and Leighton Noble’s orchestra. Unfortunately, the cover photo referred to in the story is unavailable.

As for retirement, Jack was true to his word. He worked until cancer stopped him in 1974.

Jack Benny Foil For Jokes
For 14 consecutive television seasons, Jack Benny has been the butt of endless jokes.
“It’s better for my particular show if somebody else has the lines,” said Jack.
“I never figured it out. I felt it.”
The comedian had just come from a script-reading of one of his upcoming CBS-TV Tuesday night programs.
I sat through that reading-rehearsal and became aware, again, that Jack was the No. 1 foil. Everyone else seemed to have the yaks.
* * *
ON THE AIR, you sometimes lose sight of the fact that Jack is the butt.
His facial expressions, his timing, his gesture reactions somehow are funnier than the spoken lines.
In rehearsal, Jack laughs more than anyone else, probably getting it out of his system so he can dead-pan it for the actual show.
Make no mistake. If Jack is the butt of all the jokes, it is his own doing.
“I think it’s much funnier for Dennis Day to get funny lines off me than me off him,” said Jack.
“I create a situation where I deserve what they give me.
“That’s one of the reasons the South never resented Rochester—because I deserved the insults.”
* * *
JACK PLANS ON continuing to deserve insults.
“I never want to retire,” he said.
It would be too strenuous because, right now, Jack figures he has it made time-wise.
His writers have been with him so many years, they know what he’ll accept. This minimizes rewriting and editing.
Rehearsals have an easy rhythm, no pressure, no tension, just fun.
Jack figure he actually works only works about 13 hours a week, which gives him time for golf, listening to good music and collecting paintings such as the Peckstein canvas on our cover.
“I think George Burns has the perfect answer when someone asked him if he was going to retire,” Jack said.
“George answered, ‘I’m too old to retire.’”
* * *
AT 69, JACK, ALSO, is too old to retire.
He’s not worried about compensation.
In television, you’re only in competition with yourself,” said Jack. “If only every other show was good, that’s what they’d expect. But if you have eight good shows in a row, people expect a ninth.
“Maybe you can call that being in a rut, but it’s a good rut. Rut means groove.”
Jack admits there have been a few “ninth” shows which he personally didn’t like.
He hated one in particular, postponing and postponing the air date. It finally aired and “everyone raved” about it.
Benny, once again, was happy the joke was on him.

Cowbells, Saxophones and a Rabbit

When the era of sound cartoons began, characters weren’t exactly filling theatres with chatter. Instead, animation producers concentrated on making music and sound effects that were coordinated with what was happening on the screen. That was novel enough for the audience and it also eliminated the need to animate dialogue.

Mickey Mouse’s “Steamboat Willie” and Fables Studio’s “Dinner Time” had appeared in theatres equipped for sound towards the end of 1928. The Associated Press decided to do a story at that time on how cartoonists put the sound in sound cartoons. But the wire service didn’t approach either Walt Disney or Paul Terry. Instead, it contacted either Universal or George Winkler, as its story centres around Oswald the Rabbit. Oswald not only didn’t talk, his cartoons were still silent. According to the Universal News of January 12, 1929, the first sound cartoon prints were just being made (the first sound Oswald was “Hen Fruit,” released on February 4th).

This story appeared in newspapers 90 years ago today and gives you an idea of how basic and primitive it all when theatres were still deciding if sound was a fad or if it was worthwhile installing audio equipment.

How Oswald The Rabbit Is Given His Vocal Chords In The Talkies
By WADE WERNER.
Associated Press Feature Writer.
Hollywood. Cal., Jan. 5.—(AP)—It is the very darkest middle of the night and the great studio sprawls like a town of fantastic shadows between the dry river bed and the barren hills. One supposes there is a night watchman somewhere on the lot; but apparently he does not see the dim figures slinking one by one toward a barn-like structure, each carrying something, and each disappearing through the same small door in the building.

Heading away from the studio they might have been taken for burglars escaping with their loot; but under the circumstances it is more reasonable to guess they are conspirators of another sort. The interior of the building is dimly lit, but by mingling casually with the crowd one can see very clearly what they carried in: Two saxophones, a galvanized iron wash tub half full of tin cans, a cornet, a tuba, a clothes wringer, three phonographs, a school bell, several cowbells, a hand-operated alarm gong, three sizes of electric bells. Innumerable tin, brass and wooden whistles, many assorted pieces of wood and metal, half a dozen panes of window glass and a metal cylinder of compressed air.
Obviously these are not the paraphernalia of arsonists or dynamiters; and besides, even In the dim light, the conspirators have a jolly look. It begins to look more like preparations for an old-fashioned charivari. Before one can ask who was married, however, the head conspirator explains everything:
"Our job tonight," says he, "is to synchronize Oswald the Rabbit."
Oswald, one learns, is the pen-and-ink hero of an animated cartoon which, in keeping with the modern craze for screen sound, must be embellished with music and noise-effects. Six musicians, skilled in leaping nimbly from tune to tune in harmony with the action on the screen, take their places under one microphone. Another microphone hangs near the table where all the bells and whistles are spread. A large man in overalls sits near the tubful of tin cans with a wooden paddle in his hands, as if waiting for the cauldron to boil; the other conspirators stand here and there between the microphones, ready to make the right noises at the right times.
They rehearse with the picture running on the screen in front of them. As the main title of the comedy appears on the screen the orchestra leaps into an overture, while the other sound-smiths stand tensely waiting for their cues.
When the opening scene discloses Oswald sleeping in his bed, the orchestra dodges quickly Into a cradle song, while a lad within whispering distance of a microphone snores rhythmically and another specialist imitates the squeaking of the bed by running sole leather through the clothes wringer. After each rehearsal the recording engineer In the sound-mixing booth, who hears all this as it will sound to an audience, suggests improvements.
And again and again the mixed symphony of harmonies and discords is rehearsed; then, "This is the picture, boys," and they go through it once more, with the sound-recording apparatus registering everything on celluloid.
Along about sunrise the sound-smiths call it a night and go home, tired and hungry, but with a little glow of pride at the thought their artistry has made it possible for the world to hear as well as see Oswald the Rabbit.

How To Reference Another Cartoon Studio

Major Twombly is getting his butt handed to him by wild African animals in The Major Lied ‘Til Dawn.....



....so he does the only logical thing a cartoon character would do. “By Jove,” he says to the camera, “if it’s good enough for that sailor man, it’s good enough me.”



Warner Bros. ripped off the Popeye spinach routine, but it couldn’t rip off Popeye’s theme without paying one of Paramount’s music publishers, so Carl Stalling plays some fanfare instead.



Pop culture alert!! The cartoons plays around with the Lucky Strike cigarette slogan “With men who know tobacco best, it’s Luckies two to one!” Lucky Strike sponsored Jack Benny on radio for over a decade. One of Benny’s sound effects men was Gene Twombly.



The story credit in this 1938 cartoon went to Rich Hogan, under the direction of Frank Tashlin. Writer Tedd Pierce voices the major.

So it is that Tashlin steals from Dave Fleischer, who took replaced Tashlin at Columbia a few years later. The world is a circle.