La Frenche Phonee

Fake French was pretty much mandatory in Pepe Le Pew cartoons, and we get a pile (un pile) at the start of Past Perfumance (1955). It’s set in a Paris movie studio in 1913.



Thus we get Rin Tin Tin (a play on “n’est-ce pas” is on the left).



Clara Bow.



Mack Sennett. (The “Quiet” sign, I presume, is a bit of intentional irony).



David Butler was a Warner Bros. director at the time this cartoon came out. He left to become an independent producer by 1956.



“Chimps Elysees” is today’s groaner from writer Mike Maltese.

The movie sets are fairly stylised. Phil De Guard painted the backgrounds from Bob Givens’ layouts. Maurice Noble was still at John Sutherland Productions when this cartoon was made.



The characters are a mix of stylised (you see some above) and standard designs (Pepé, the cat).

Miss...Uh...Who?

The people in Hicksville are so ignorant, they don’t know anything about the star they are welcoming to their town. That’s revealed at the end of Tex Avery’s Page Miss Glory.

Look at the straw hat guy on the far left. He makes a motion with his hands outlining the figure of a curvaceous beauty. It seems everyone in Hicksville thinks Miss Glory is some kind of Jean Harlow-like knock-out.



This is reinforced in the Art Moderne dream sequence.



The payoff is it turns out Miss Glory is a child star with a squealy Berneice Hansell voice and a Jack Benny catchphrase. Play Don!



As you likely know, the art for the dream sequence was dreamed up by Leadora Congdon. You can read more about her in this post.

The Not Rawther Amusing Lunch

Jack Benny would try to accomplish a simple task but get hamstrung by waitresses, store clerks, cab drivers and all manner of people. That was the fake Benny on his radio and TV show.

Actually, it happened to the real Benny, too.

Here’s a newspaper column from October 8, 1947. All Jack was doing was trying to have a peaceful lunch and conduct an interview. But he ended up with nothing but headaches. To be honest, some of the things here could have been incorporated into a radio script. You have to feel sorry for him.

In Hollywood
By ERSKINE JOHNSON
NEA Staff Correspondent
HOLLYWOOD, Oct. 18. — Jack Benny was taking a beating.
You expect it on his radio show and in his movies but it was rather surprising to find Jack squirming in the No. 1 booth at Mike Romanoff's (where three tiny pieces of Irish stew meat, an onion the size of a grape and a potato the size of a marble cost $2—coffee 25 cents.)
Jack was trying to tell me about his summer vacation motor trips, but Mary Livingstone kept butting in.
Mary wasn't there. She was home and Jack was trying to get her on the telephone. Three times he got up and called and always the line was busy.
Jack was boiling. "I can never get my house," he whimpered. "Mary is always talking on the phone. She talks for hours. Sometimes it's Gary Cooper's wife. Or Mrs. William Goetz. Or Claudette Colbert. Mary talked to Mrs. Goetz in New York once for two hours and 20 minutes."
BUT NO AUTOGRAPHS
THEN there was Simpson.
I didn't catch his first name, but Simpson was wearing short trousers and a bored expression and looked to be about 10 years old. Mike himself brought him to the table, so Simpson must have been important. Mike hardly ever speaks to people unless they make $5000 a week or more.
Mike introduced Simpson to Jack and said:
"He's from England. He's heard you on the air." "Oh," said Jack. "So you're a fan of mine? Well, well, WELL."
Simpson continued to look bored and said: "I find you rawther amusing."
Jack squirmed behind a $3 plate of something or other.
"RAWTHER, amusing?" his voice cracked.
"Yes," said Simpson, who just stood there, not asking for an autograph, or anything.
"Well, well, WELL," said Jack. "I guess I better telephone Mary again." Jack went past Simpson like a hot rod.
Simpson stood there for a moment and then Mike led him away. Later, I saw Mawster Simpson toying with a double chocolate ice cream sundae with the same wild abandon with which he greeted Jack.
LINE IS BU-U-USY
JACK came back and said, dejectedly:
"She's STILL talking."
Jack looked relieved, though, at the absence of Mawster Simpson.
He told me about driving to Chicago and up to Canada this summer with Frank Remley, the guitar player with Phil Harris' band. Remley is Jack's favorite traveling companion—"Mary wouldn't drive from this booth to the next one."
Jack and Frank stayed overnight in little towns and talked to little people and ate breakfast at 6:30 one morning at the home of a small town newspaper reporter in Utah and had a whale of a good time.
Maybe he'll make another movie, Jack said.
"When I find the right story. Studios keep sending me scripts about beaten down characters but they never seem to be my type. They're for Dennis Day—not me." Jack got up to telephone Mary again. She was still talking.

Bill Nolan

Bill Nolan was an animation pioneer who, among other things, is credited with inventing the long background that could be slid under animation, and redesigning Felix the Cat to make him rounder and, presumably, easier to animate.

He’s also a bit of an enigma. He was directing for Walter Lantz until 1934 and then he left in October for what Variety termed “a nervous condition.” He surfaced at the Charles Mintz studio in April 1936, was the head animator for Mayfair Productions, which completed the first Skippy cartoon for United Artists by July 1937, was signed by Oct. 2, 1937 by the brand-new MGM studio to work on “The Captain and the Kids” series before moving to Florida to work for the Fleischers in 1939.

There are a few newspaper clippings out there about him that fill in a bit of his background. First this story from the Long Branch Daily Record of February 27, 1917.

LOCAL CARTOONIST IS WINNING PROMINENCE
William C. Nolan, a nephew of Kerin J. Nolan, one of the youngest cartoon artists doing newspaper and magazine work, who is well known in this city, where he has resided for two or three years at the Nolan cottage in Garfield avenue, is fast winning recognition among the older workers in comic art.
Mr. Nolan, who is 23 years old, is a New London, Conn., youth. His first published cartoon appeared in the Waterbury Herald and dealt with license conditions in the town of Plainfield, where he at one time resided. His anti-booze-cartoon attracted the attention of the Connecticut State police and officials of Plainfield, and as a result the town received the greatest shake-up in its history.
His next effort was a series of the means of breaking up school board graft in Plainfield. It meant the abolishment of graft and placing the schools on a higher plane. It was at this time that young Nolan saw the possibilities offered by comic art, and he left a good position to start work with Barre, the celebrated International cartoonist, who was then doing work for the Edison Company in animated cartoons.
Later Mr. Nolan joined the International film service to animate Powers' famous Joys and Glooms, and Krazy Kat, originated by George Herrimen. [sic] He is now animating the great Mutt and Jeff series. Besides this work, Mr. Nolan has done considerable magazine and newspaper work. The Waterbury Herald, in its editorial section of February 18, publishes a double column half-tone cut of Mr. Nolan, together with a brief history of his young career.

Long after Nolan’s death, the Asbury Park Press of March 7, 1971 profiled him in its series on New Jersey pioneers. It goes more deeply into his background, but glosses over the portion after he left Universal. It also skips the “Bill Nolan Newslaffs” series he made for F.B.O. starting in 1927.

Bill Nolan (William C.) was not only the first Monmouth County resident to become an animator of movie cartoons, he was one of the first in that industry's history.
Best known for his famous film feline, "Krazy Kat," Mr. Nolan was to animate during his 50-year career Mutt and Jeff, Felix the Cat, Francis the Mule and nearly every other comic strip character that moved from newspaper to movieland exposure.
It was at Long Branch that Mr. Nolan was introduced to the idea of becoming an animator and for 15 years he produced the drawings for "Krazy Kat" there.
Bill Noland [sic] was born in Connecticut in June 1894, but was raised and educated in Providence, R.I. He was to relate later with a wry grin that "one of the most dreaded periods in school was that devoted to art."
"I could not draw a line until I was out of high school."

Curiously, his first job after he was graduated from high school was in the art department of a Providence department store. One day, while killing time, he started to copy a poster in the store. An artist passing through was startled by the youth's native talent and urged young Nolan to study art seriously.
So Bill enrolled in a Providence art school which prepared him for a job with a N. Y. newspaper as a sports cartoonist. While working on the paper he continued to study art. His heavy schedule impaired his health and he was finally forced to stop work for awhile to go away for a rest.
All during his boyhood Mr. Nolan had spent summer vacations with his grandmother, Mrs. Mary Nolan, at her home in Long Branch. Therefore, it was there he went for his health. In the year that he moved permanently to the Shore (1914), he met a summer visitor at the beachfront, Raoul Barre, inventor of animated cartoons. Mr. Barre persuaded the young artist to enter the animation field.
Mr. Nolan turned to the new medium with enthusiasm and for the next 15 years was to draw "Krazy Kat" at Long Branch. The only interruption was during World War I when he served with the Navy.
After the war Hollywood emerged as world capital of the movie industry. There is where careers were made and already established careers were furthered. So in 1929 Mr. Nolan went to the West Coast to work for Universal Studios for whom he drew "Oswald the Lucky Rabbit."
From then until his death in 1954 Mr. Nolan worked as animator and creator of cartoons. During these 50 years he drew his famous cartoon characters more than 7 million times, he estimated shortly before his death.
He once explained that an animated cartoon of average length generally ran to 500 feet of film. To have the animation run smoothly required 16 drawings for each foot of film.
Not long before his death Mr. Nolan said "Movie cartoons are still tops, having completely put the old movie-comedy out of business. But I will not hazard a guess as to how long they will last."
It was not long after that that TV began to run the neighborhood movie theater out of business. But since then TV has attracted large audiences for the animated cartoon with its children's programs. Undoubtedly Mr. Nolan would be delighted to see his creations being rerun for a new generation.
In 1915, at Long Branch, Bill Nolan met Miss Viola Golden, a resident of the city, whom he married. They had two sons – William C. Jr., now an advertising executive in San Francisco, and Thomas, a physician in Greenboro, N.C.
Mrs. Nolan returned from California after her husband’s death and now lives in Long Branch.

Francis the Mule, you’re asking. Yes. Let’s give you a bit of insight into it from this portion of a story in the Wisconsin State Journal of February 16, 1958. It actually deals with a local industrial filmmaker who worked with Nolan in Hollywood and reveals Nolan and (I guess) George Nicholas opened an industrial company after World War Two which seems to have closed around Nolan’s death.

Cartoon Man Likes It Here
By DONALD DAVIES
(State Journal Staff Writer)
Bill Williams is an aeronautical engineer turned cartoonist, brick-maker turned talent scout, and former neighbor of Clark Gable, turned resident of Madison. He's also practically turned the Williams' home at 3422 Lake Mendota dr. into a small film studio and his family into a most loyal movie-making unit.
Williams is a producer of animated commercial films—"cartoons that tell or sell"— and lives in Shorewood on the shore of Mendota in preference to Hollywood, mecca of most producers of animated films.
He came to Madison for the first time in August, 1934, to direct an industrial film for Gisholt Machine Co. It was to take four or five months, so he decided to bring his family with him and temporarily close his Hollywood animated film studio.
The Williams family has been back in California only about three months in the past three years.
"Each year in the spring we go back to Hollywood to visit relatives and friends," Williams said "In about a month, we've had our fill of the hustle and bustle of Hollywood and are happy to come back to our home here.
"To give you an idea of what I mean," he said, "it used to take about 20 minutes to drive the 14 miles from our home in Encino to the studio in Hollywood. There was one stoplight.
"Today it takes 75 minutes and stoplights are all over the place. It gets ridiculous. It takes all day to get a suit to the cleaners."
And cartoonists—who most times sit within arm's reach of 130 to 200 bottles of paint—worry about things like that.
Williams, a native of Kansas City who dropped into the cartoon business purely by accident, said that his youthful ambition was to become an aeronautical engineer—so he did. He graduated from Curtiss Wright Technical of Aeronautics in Glendale, Calif., now California Aeronautical Institute, worked for Lockheed aircraft industries, and then went with Timm Aircraft in 1941 to help design Navy trainers.
"The Navy needed illustrated handbooks to go with the aircraft for training purposes," he explained. "I had drawing experience and liked the work, so I was given the job of hiring a group and getting handbook production under way."
As the war knocked the movie cartoon industry out of business because of film priority, Williams was able to hire four or five cartoonists to illustrate the booklets. One of these was Bill Nolan, former head of Universal International's cartoon studio and pioneer in the cartoon business. He created the old-time, cartoon favorite, Oswald the Rabbit, and the fabulous Walt Disney worked for him once.
Another was Cliff Arquette, who today is the homespun Charlie Weaver of radio and television fame who recently scored a big hit on Jack Paar's "Tonight" television show.
"Those two years were the greatest," Williams said. "We talked cartoons most of the time. This was my education and there was no course or school that could have given me the same basis in animation."
Engineering gave way to cartooning and film work in Williams' life. In 1944 with the training manuals completed, he went into the Navy to help produce visual education movies and service films, using much of what he had learned about animation.
After discharge in 1946—"wanting to do nothing but loaf for a year"—Williams decided he'd like to design and build his own home—"and have a big happy time doing it," he added.
[deleted portion of story]
At the same time, television had created a big demand for commercial cartoons and animated films. In 1949, Williams, Bill Nolan, and Nick Nic[h]olas formed Williams-Nic[h]olas Animated Productions in Hollywood, which closed in 1954 when Williams came to Madison and brought key personnel with him.
During these years, the firm did some work for the movies. Nolan became technical director on the series of "Francis" movies, about a talking mule, and the show, "Rhubarb," about a cat which inherited a baseball team. Nolan was the person responsible for making Francis talk.

Nolan died during a stay at the Sawtelle V.A. Hospital in North Hollywood on December 6, 1954. He was 60.

Note: My thanks to Devon Baxter for discovering the middle clipping and making it available.

Ha, Ha! The Radio's Dead!

Oswald the Rabbit Foxy deals with a recalcitrant cow and a runaway streetcar in Trolley Troubles Smile, Darn Ya, Smile!.

Yeah, there are some similarities between this 1931 Merrie Melodies short and the Disney cartoon made four years before. The one big difference is sound, and the peppy theme song by Charles O’Flynn, Jack Meskill and Max Rich. Smile, Darn Ya, Smile! was published by De Sylva, Brown and Henderson at the same time as the hits Just a Gigolo and Walkin’ My Baby Back Home. It was doing well in sheet music sales in May 1931, according to Variety, so this cartoon would have lent an extra push.

Another big difference between this and the silent Oswald cartoon is the cop-out ending. It turns out Foxy is only dreaming he’s in an out-of-control streetcar, and falls out of bed. His radio serenades him with the theme song, arms out like Al Jolson. His reaction? He kills it with a bedpost and laughs as the iris closes.



Yeah, as if your dream is the radio’s fault.



So long, folks! Well, not quite. There were two more Foxy cartoons before he vanished for good.

Abe Lyman’s Brunswick Recording orchestra apparently recorded the music track. I wonder when and where he did it. He wasn’t spending a lot of time in Los Angeles in 1931. At the time of the cartoon’s release, he was on the bill at the Palace in New York and had begun broadcasting over CBS via WABC.

Fake Cow, Real Milk

Cartoon studios of the 1920s and very early ‘30s had a fascination with mechanical horses which I’ve never understood. Why not draw a real horse? In cartoons, a character can do anything.

Walt Disney took the idea further in 1927 with The Mechanical Cow. Yes, it’s a robot cow with a broom for a tail that lives in a two-storey wooden building with Oswald the rabbit.

Oswald makes money selling milk from the cow. In one scene, he pulls a tank, kind of like those glass balls that used to be at the top of gas pumps, out of the animal, uses the broom tail to fill it up, then connects a hose-like teat to a baby hippo’s mouth and drains the milk from the cow.



Live action films in the late ‘20s liked mechanical animals, too. A Society Circus (1929) starring Arthur Lake included a mechanical hippo.

As for the cartoon, no animators are identified, just Walt Disney in a Winkler Production.

The Vast Wasteland of Beverly Hills

On May 9, 1961, FCC Commissioner Newton Minow declared that television was a vast wasteland. A year later, the number one show wasn’t a live drama. It wasn’t a series of concerts at Carnegie Hall. It wasn’t an examination of the world through the cameras of the National Geographic Society.

It was The Beverly Hillbillies.

The wasteland was intact.

Critics were either unimpressed or wrote off the show as fluff. But viewers didn’t.

The question was—why? Don’t television watchers want something enlightening, elucidating, enriching, something other than a vast wasteland?

The answer that critics don’t want to accept is “no.” No, people don’t want that. If they did, there never would have been a Jersey Shore. There wouldn’t have been a Beverly Hillbillies for that matter, either.

Let’s go back to 1963, the Hillbillies’ second season as people tried to divine why the show attracted such a huge audience. This story appeared in papers around the beginning of November 1963.

So How Come the Hillbillies?
By TERRY TURNER
CHICAGO DAILY NEWS SERVICE CHICAGO
So how come “Beverly Hillbillies” can be the nation's favorite television series, picking up this season where it left off last year?
This is the question being asked most often these days, now that the first big ratings of the new year are out.
The question usually is asked with an air of bewilderment, and accompanied by an incredulous expression and a shaking of the head.
It's as if to say the republic is doomed; and we are faced with the decline and fall of the American civilization. What nation that makes Hillbillies its favorite television series can survive?
Then come the theories.
Beverly Hillbillies is a satire of the usual television situation comedy, a magnificent spoof that should stamp out the format forever. Proposed here last season, the theory mercilessly was demolished by producer Paul Henning, who reported:
"Oh no. We're just having fun. It's not a satire. We just want to provide some escapist entertainment."

“Beverly Hillbillies” represents a return to the age of innocence, a reminder of the nostalgia for the past we think was ours.
“Beverly Hillbillies” is corn and America loves corn.
“Beverly Hillbillies,” with its characters of an affectionate innocence, enables every television viewer to feel benevolently superior.
The log cabin myth translated to television.
The American dream that every son can grow up to be a Beverly Hillbilly.
The unconscious yearning for a simple life in which the simple, good folk triumph over the complexities of the modern civilization.
The translation of the American idiom that is best reflected in its folk simplicity, as witnessed by the current rage for the basic honesty of folk music, to the television screen.
All right, all right. . . .
Let us study a recent survey made to determine not the basic popularity of a series but, instead, how many persons are familiar with a program and say it is one of their favorites. Compiled by the Home Testing Institute, Inc., and titled TVQ (for Television Quality), the rating has some interesting observations. Beverly Hillbillies, it turns out, is second in the top 10, to Bonanza. In other words, Bonanza may not be the top-rated program on television but its the favorite program. (Figure that one out.)
The TVQ rating then breaks down the rating to age groups and it should come as no surprise to discover that “Beverly Hillbillies” is, by far, the top-rated show among children 6 to 11 years of age. It also is popular with youngsters in the 12-to-17 age group.
In television homes throughout the nation, the younger viewers are asking, demanding, whining, sniveling for parents to turn to CBS Wednesdays to see the funny Hillbillies and ratings go up. No force on earth can resist that kind of pressure. Besides, the show is funny, no matter what you say. It's funny.

The Associated Press chatted to the show’s creator, Paul Henning, about why people wanted to see the hill folk every week more often than dad-blamed revenooers snooping around for a still. This is from June 15, 1963. There’s a short profile of Henning as well, though it bypasses his local radio work that went back at least to 1934.

Hillbillies Creator Hails From Truman's Town
By BOB THOMAS
AP Movie-TV Writer
HOLLYWOOD (AP)-When the Beverly Hillbillies failed to pick up any Emmies at the recent Television Academy Awards, the show's creator, Paul Henning, wasn't surprised.
"I thought we wouldn't win any, though I believed Irene Ryan might have had a chance as best actress," said the writer-producer. "Everyone in television is so worried these days about public opinion that they would vote for shows that elevate the industry's image."
He has no time to fret about a lost statuette or two. He's too busy fathering the season's most successful show and siring a new one to star Bea Benedaret, Petticoat Junction.
The success of The Beverly Hillbillies has amazed experts and stunned intellectuals. But it's no mystery to Henning.
"I think we stuck to what we set out to do: Make a funny show," he said, "Success in this business is 99 per cent and we had it in many ways—the selection of a perfect cast, especially.

"Also, our timing was good. The country was ready for a show like The Hillbillies, where it might not have been two years ago. I think it is the kind of humor that appeals to the broad area of America that lies outside the three major city areas. The urban people also enjoy it, but they don't want to admit it. "A government official who tours all over the country put his finger on it. He wrote us and said in the South and in small towns, people watch The Hillbillies with the shades up. In the cities they watch it, but keep the shades down."
The Beverly Hillbillies marks the emergence into public recognition of one of Hollywood's ace comedy craftsmen. As you might guess, the source of his humor is the American heartland. He was born and grew up in Independence, Mo.
Yes, he knew Harry Truman.
"I used to work in the drug store when Harry was a circuit judge," recalled Henning. "He would come in with his cronies, a lot of them his pals from the war, and they'd match nickles to see who would pay for the sodas.
"He owned a Stafford automobile which was made in Kansas City, Kan., and my brother used to repair it for him. Harry still remembers that."
Henning studied at the Kansas City, Mo., School of Law, but he found singing on radio more appealing.
He broke into bigtime radio in 1937 when he sent a script to the Fibber McGee and Molly show in Chicago. Head writer Don Quinn hired him.
He moved on to Hollywood and labored for Rudy Vallee, Burns and Allen, Dennis Day and Bob Cummings before striking oil with the Hillbillies.
Henning is medium sized, with a pleasant face thinning, butch-cut hair and a modest midwest manner. No Hayseed, he can write almost anything in the comedy line, including sophisticated comedy movies like "Lover Come Back," for which he and Stanley Shapiro won an Oscar nomination.
"Funny thing," he reflected, "When I was working on the pilot for 'The Beverly Hillbillies,' I was also working with Stanley on 'King of the Mountain,' which David Niven and Marlon Brando are doing. I had to stop and ask, 'Who Am I?' "

The show, in my estimation, started out slowly with too many “confusion” jokes (how many times can you mistake a doorbell for something else?) and, in the last few seasons, relied too heavily on multi-episode stories that, frankly, weren’t too compelling. I think the show had used up all its ideas. But it was fun and even cartoony for a while. And a show with a cat that swims and Louis Nye being over the top can’t be all bad. Even Mr. Minow should have understood that.

Feeding a Baby Cab

Just as The Flintstones transposed suburbia of the 1950s into the Stone Age, so Tex Avery transposed suburbia of the 1950s into how cars would live it in One Cab's Family (1952).

It’s time for baby’s bottle. A human baby, of course, would get milk. Baby cab gets oil. Let the clichés flow. Mom even tests the “milk” to see if it’s too hot.



This cartoon is also a tale of rebellion of the son against his father’s ways. How many ‘50s movies were made about that? The story climax in this one goes back further, and is ripped off from Friz Freleng’s 1937 cartoon Streamlined Greta Green.

The End of Wellington

Wellington the dog beats himself up out of frustration at the end of Doggone Cats, a 1947 release from the Art Davis unit at Warners.

Here he is bashing his head with the two garbage can lids he used to abuse two cats at the outset of the cartoon. Each drawing is shot twice for a 16-frame cycle.



The general consensus is that because Davis used Sylvester’s design, this is a Sylvester cartoon, even though the cat doesn’t speak, has a completely different personality (dopey but scheming) than in any other cartoon, and hangs out with some cat that appeared in no other Warners release.

Emery Hawkins animated on this short, as did Don Williams, Basil Davidovich and Bill Melendez.