Honeyland Backgrounds

“One of the most beautiful colored cartoons I have ever exhibited. Pleased adults as much as kiddies. Advertise this one big,” said one small town theatre owner writing in the Motion Picture Herald about the Harman-Ising MGM cartoon Honeyland.

The colour apparently masked the fact this was more of the same old stuff from Hugh and Rudy. Cute child-like insects frolicking while a female chorus chirped a song in the first half, bad old meany kidnapping the girl and getting beaten up by the good guy and his friends (butt puncturing a must) in the second half. It’s the same story they’d been doing since 1930, just with better production values (including filling scenes with characters for the sake of filling scenes with characters). The cartoon drags on for ten minutes.

Here’s a frame grab from the opening scene. You can get a good idea why the colour was praised.



The backgrounds are very well rendered. Here are some, though a few of them are chopped off at the sides because you can’t get a clear look at them.

The barrel and objects in front of it are on cels on top of the background.



None of the artists are credited, including the one responsible for these backgrounds.

A Popeye Conundrum

So Popeye punches a log and then Bluto in Axe Me Another (1934).....



.... the log splits into wood for a baby chair .....



... Bluto lands in it and starts crying like a baby ....



.... then Popeye and Olive feed Bluto spinach ...



... Wouldn’t this make Bluto super-strong so he could beat up the two of them and get his revenge?

Seymour Kneitel and Doc Crandall are the credited animators.

Groucho Wouldn't Do It Again

A game show without flashing lights, screaming audiences, multiple zooming cameras or even a tote board? You couldn’t make one today; producers demand all that extraneous TV tumult.

That description, however, fits You Bet Your Life. You couldn’t make the show today anyway, because it featured the one thing that made it what it was—the late Groucho Marx. Even he couldn’t duplicate its success when the show was reworked in 1962 into Tell it to Groucho. (The less said about the Cosby You Bet Your Life, the better).

Those old black-and-white You Bet Your Life shows still holds up. Witty insults never go out of style. Groucho was a master.

The show was still on the air in 1958 when this wire service profile of the-one-the-only was published. It capsulizes his life story. Would he live it all over again? Anyone who knew Groucho would know his answer.

The Groucho Rags-to-Riches Story
Kicked Into Acting, Pushed Into Fame
By Hal McClure
Associated Press Writer
HOLLYWOOD, Oct. 4—Two middle-aged men watched a young fellow bound into the men's grill at a swank Beverly Hills country club. "Wouldn't you like to be his age and starting all over again" sighed one.
"I can't think of a more revolting idea," snapped the other. "I've been through life once and that's enough for me. I hope to live for many years, but if I knocked off tomorrow I wouldn't have any kick coming.
"I wouldn't go through the whole damn thing again for all the money in the world."
The speaker was Groucho Marx. At 63, he stands at the top of a remarkable career, recognized as one of the nation's great wits.
He has a pretty young wife, a rambling nine-room home in Beverly Hills and all the money he'll ever need.
On Sept. 25, he began his 12th season as combination quiz and quip master on "You Bet Your Life" (NBC-TV), a job he calls one of the softest snaps in show business.
But it was a long, rough road to the top for Groucho. Small wonder he doesn't want to go back. He once said:
"I was kicked into acting by my mother and if I hadn't been, I'd now be on relief. I've always been terrified of dying broke or of being a failure."
Groucho was born Julius Marx in New York City. He was the third son of a poor Alsatian immigrant and the ambitious daughter of a German magician.
Minna Marx—everyone called her Minnie—dedicated her life to pushing her sons into fame in the show business. Her brother, Al Shean, was a member of the Gallagher and Shean vaudeville team and Minnie loved the theatre.
She saw to it that Chico (Leonard) took piano lessons. Harpo (Arthur) learned to play the harp himself. The family was poor and only Zeppo (Herbert), the youngest son, reached high school.
Young Groucho wanted to be a doctor. He loved reading and enjoyed being by himself. But he made his first stage venture just before his 11th birthday, serving a brief hitch in Gus Edwards' Kid Troupe.
Four years later, in 1910, Minnie Organized the Three Nightingales—Groucho, a tenor and a girl. When Harpo joined them, they became the Four Nightingales. "The Four Vultures would have been more like it," says Groucho.
After " countless whistlestops, tank town theaters and dirty saloon dressing rooms, the Four Marx Brothers act—Chico, Harpo Gummo (Milton) and Groucho—was born.
It was spanked into a comedy act one dusty day in Nacogdoches, Tex.
A runaway mule started a minor riot outside the Marx makeshift theater and the audience left them flat to join the fun. The infuriated brothers began a frenzied burlesque of Texas and Texans. The pandemonium inside the theater soon became greater than that outside, the audience returned to investigate and stayed to cheer.
The madcap Marx brothers broke up during World War I. Harpo and Gummo enlisted while Groucho and Chico entertained at the camps. After the war, they resumed their careers. Zeppo replaced Gummo in the act.
Their musical, "I'll Say She Is," was a smash hit. Then came “The Coconuts,” and "Animal Crackers."
Their first movie was a film version of "The Coconuts" in 1929. Following rapidly were "Animal Crackers, "Monkey Business," "Horse Feathers," "Duck Soup," "A Night at the Opera" and "A Day at the Races."
These early pictures—their best—had one thing in common: Uninhibited zaniness.
Groucho's trademark was a perpetual stoop, ill-fitting frock coat, waggling cigar, furiously wriggling eyebrows and a knowing leer. His clarion call was "Never give the sucker an even break."
Groucho spouted a barrage of horrendous puns, scathing insults and non sequiturs, such as this one: Man: I met a lady inventor the other day. Groucho: I'm glad he invented ladies.
But critics and fellow comics rate Groucho far above the run-of-the-mill comedian who relies heavily on situation gags and writers. Groucho is a real wit, a master of the geniune ad lib.
His meeting with Houdini the magician is show business legend. Houdini, performing the then new trick of threading a handful of needles in his mouth with his tongue, called on a nondescript little man in the audience to come on stage.
“Do you see any needles or thread hidden under my tongue?” asked Houdini. The volunteer peered intently into the magician's mouth, but did not speak. "Speak up," commanded Houdini. "Tell what you see." "Pyorrhea," declared Groucho brightly. The audience roared.
But in the middle 40s, Groucho's fortunes took a downward turn. The Marx brothers had scattered. Groucho's last radio show laid an ostrich-sized egg. His last movie, "Copacabana," excited no one.
His comeback started on a Bob Hope benefit radio show. During a comedy routine Hope dropped his script. Legend has it that Groucho promptly stepped on it. Marx denies this.
But what followed was one of the funniest ad lib bits in radio history. Producer John Guedel was in the audience and offered Groucho "You Bet Your Life." The TV show went on in 1947 and was an instant success.
Guests on the show come in for the barbed side of Groucho's flashing tongue, but they expect it. He once asked a professional wrestler if wrestling bouts were fixed.
"That's just a dirty rumor," cried the wrestler.
"How many dirty rumors have you wrestled lately?" asked Groucho.

Boots Make You Nuts

Snafu is driven insane by endlessly sorting military boots in Three Brothers (1944). Some dry brush and multiples highlight the frames.



The Friz Freleng unit animated this cartoon.

Is Your Husband a Worm?

Tex Avery was a great gag switcher. He had a little stockpile of gags and he’d make variations on them throughout his directing career at both Warner Bros. and MGM.

One was the explanatory title card. It was a parody of those disclaimer cards in movies that read something like “All characters in this photoplay are fictional. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.”

Here’s the one that opens The Early Bird Dood It!.



Rich Hogan is given the story credit on this cartoon. Daily Variety reported on June 24, 1942 that Hogan had joined the MGM staff. Either the trade paper was late with the news or Hogan was working on this on the side. This was Avery’s first cartoon in production at Metro, and he arrived at the studio in 1941.

About Being 40...

Jack Benny turned 40. Twice. Once in real life in 1934, and then on television in 1958.

The television “40” was quickly forgotten and Jack went back to being 39. During the 1950s—Benny’s character began being 39 for the first time in 1948—Jack insisted 40 wasn’t a funny number, but 39 was. He insisted it again after turning 40 on TV. (As if plagued by a bad omen, the day before the 40th birthday show, Eddie Anderson suffered a mild heart attack and his lines were awkwardly reassigned to Andy Devine, who made two entrances; evidently the script couldn’t be changed in time).

Jack talked with the North American Newspaper Alliance about his 40th birthday, violin playing and dealing with looking at Mel Blanc. This story appeared in the Indianapolis Star on June 22, 1958.

Jack Benny, Master Of Pause, Blank Stare
By BILL FISET
HOLLYWOOD (NANA)—Jack Benny swung open the door of his home and was all savoir faire.
“Come in, come in,” he said grandly. He was wearing a brocade silk dressing gown. His shirt had french cuffs and gold links showing at the wrists. His cigar was aromatic.
Experts credit Benny with the greatest sense of timing of any living comedian. “Timing is the ability to pause for the precise interval to get the most out of a joke before saying something else. It’s also knowing when to emphasize a word or when simply to stare blankly at the audience. It’s making the utmost of a situation.
Do you consider yourself a good violinist, Mr. Benny?
(No answer. Instead you get a sort of haughty look. Finally “Well . . . Really!” This is timing.
He doesn’t consider himself a top violinist. People go to his concerts to see a comedian, he says, not a violinist. “The humor is that I’m playing the best I can.”
How does it feel to be 40 years old?
(Here you get a doleful, silent stare that lasts perhaps five full seconds. Then: “In real life? This is timing.)
He “turned 40” on his TV show because he figured it would be a good way to bring his old entertainer friends together before the camera.
“Now I regret it. The age of 39 is a funny age. It’s a funny number. There’s something about 40 that isn’t funny.” He’s 64 in real life.
WHEN YOU do a “live” show, don’t you worry breaking up laughing when you shouldn’t?
(Here you get a blank, expressionless stare and a long pause. This isn’t timing. Benny’s thinking.)
“It’s all right to break up laughing if it’s genuine. I hate to see someone break up, shoulders shaking, if they’re putting it on. As for me, I simply can’t look at Mel Blanc when he’s on the show. Just looking at him I laugh.
“Then Phil Harris—when he throws in an ad lib, I start laughing. You can always tell those ad libs. The camera isn’t on the person who makes them because the cameraman doesn’t know they’re coming.”
One more question. How does it feel to be 40? Do you feel older?
(The blank look. The customary five-second pause. Then: “How about a drink?)
This isn’t timing. It’s savoir faire.

Whistle, That's My Work

We know so little about people who lent their voices to animated cartoons in the Golden Age. Unless their name was Mel Blanc, they were rarely credited before 1950.

Here’s a story about a woman I had never heard of before. It’s from the Santa Cruz Sentinel of August 10, 1939. She worked for a number of studios, in shorts such as Flowers and Trees, and features such as Bambi.

Talented Whistler Captivates Audience At Caroline Swope School; Whistled 'Snow White'
By Laura Rawson
Dainty, petite and graceful as the feathered friends she so perfectly imitates, is Marion Sevier Darlington, who captivated the hearts of the Caroline Swope Summer school assembly period yesterday morning and again at the faculty banquet last evening, in Hotel Palomar.
In a little chat with the charming whistler I learned she has always loved music, but most decidedly did not like to practice her piano lessons when a small girl. So her mother secured a good whistling teacher for her (as she loved to whistle) and she showed such decided talent, that her gift was recognized by those seeking entertainment of this type. It was while she was concert whistler over the radio with Raymond Paige's orchestra that invitations from the big moving picture companies came to her. Since then she has been in great demand for radio and sound effect artist in addition to her concert engagements.
"Snow White" Whistler
She took the solo part of the little bird in "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" and whistled in all of the groups of bird songs in the same picture. She also whistled the bird sound effects for Walt Disney's first color cartoon and academy award, Flowers and Trees" and in many others of his cartoons. She was also soloist on the Disney Mickey Mouse Radio Show.

Mrs. Darlington whistled bird sound effects for Harmon-Ising's "Chinese Nightingale" [frame to the right]. She also gave the radio adaptation of the "Chinese Nightingale" for the same company over a national hook-up.
She did the bird work in the Charles Mintz cartoons, "Dr. Blue Bird," "The Blue Bird's Baby," etc., and whistled in many other cartoons and feature pictures for Warner Bros., Universal, M.G.M., Iwerks, etc., including Bing Crosby's vehicle, "Dr. Rhythm."
Mrs. Darlington presented a program on Treasure Island at the California state convention of the California Federation of Music Clubs.
Accompanying the whistler yesterday was Onalee Repp Arey of Long Beach, who provided a lovely piano background for the sweet whistler.
Besides the lovely bird calls, Mrs. Darlington is called upon to imitate crickets, bees, bluejays, grouse and other tiny beasties needed to complete accurate true-to-life pictures. The talented little artist goes happily whistling through life, giving much pleasure to all fortunate enough to hear her.

Marion Sevier Darlington really was a whistler; the 1930 U.S. Census lists that as her occupation. She also taught music. She married Keith Darlington in 1930, he left her a widow in 1937. She married again in 1942. Her throat was evidently much in demand, as the Los Angeles Times published a story in 1943 referring to her as a “concert bird singer” and the star attraction of a show at the Redlands Bowl. The same year, she warbled “White Christmas” at a party at the Long Beach City Hall.

Marion packed up and moved to Arizona and that’s where the Christian Science Monitor caught up with her on January 22, 1965.

Marion Pratt Whistles at Her Work
By Margaret Davis de Rose
Sedona, Arizona
Some people whistle in the dark; some people whistle while they work, but Marion Darlington Pratt’s whistling is for the birds.
To children and even some adults, the animals in Disneyland appear so natural it is hard to tell the actual from the make-believe. And the birds sound just as we’ve heard them in our gardens or in the woods. But it is Marion Pratt’s fantastic imitative whistling that makes the bird calls.
When Marion was a little girl, instead of singing joyously she always whistled. They day her parents took her to a professional whistler, Marion knew what her career would be.
Her understanding parents allowed her to enroll in the Agnes Woodward School of Artistic Whistling in Los Angeles.
Disney Calls

In the early days of whistling for Disney Productions, the cartoons were “black and whites.” Later, she did the bird sounds for their first color cartoon, “Flowers and Trees,” which won them their first Academy Award.
More pictures followed. The famous “Whistle While You Work” melody of “Snow White” called upon all Marion’s talents as she trilled, warbled, yodeled, and chirped for many species of birds.
In Walt Disney’s “True Life Adventure Series” Marion furnished the sound for live birds. In “Nature’s Half Acre” the studio had a shot of a meadow lark sitting on a fence flapping his tail up and down. The director wanted the action of the bird, plus his song, synchronized to the music. So he ran the film for Marion while she whistled an authentic meadow lark song to each flip of the bird’s tail.
Animals, Too
Marion is also the “movie voice” of many creatures, including hyenas, peacocks, parrots and chimpanzees.
“I’ve done all kinds of crazy things,” said Marion, a petite blonde. Her brown eyes twinkled. “In one of Bing Crosby’s pictures I was the ‘buzz’ for an artificial bee that zoomed around his head to the tempo of the song Bing was singing.
“In a Bob Hope picture two trained vultures followed him across the desert. With table napkins tied around their necks and knives and forks in their claws, they’d land on his shoulder presumably anticipating a juicy meal when he could go no further. My job was to make the sound effects when these clowns laughed, cried or sang.”
In Audrey Hepburn’s “Green Mansions,” Marion recalls that the bird songs had to be mystical. Many of those weird jungle noises in the Tarzan pictures were her creations, including Tarzan’s own whistle. She has even been the voice for a stuttering, tuxedo-bedecked penguin. Often, when working out-of-doors, her bird calls are so natural that live birds answer.
About five years ago, with her talented trumpet-playing husband Don, and daughter Susie, Marion moved from Long Beach to Sedona. And every Easter, Don’s trumpet and Marion’s whistle welcome the sunrise at the service held on Arizona’s Tabletop Mountain in the flaming Red Rock Country of Oak Creek.
Jungle Sounds
“I’m especially proud of my work in the addition at Disneyland of the Enchanted Tiki Room,” Marion said. “In this South Seas atmosphere where fountain plays in color, orchids sing, and the Tiki gods chant, a whole roomful of birds sing and talk. I did all the pretty bird calls as well as many of the raucous jungle sounds. Many separate recordings were made which were then blended together on a single sound track. Each bird is wire stereophonically with my calls.”

Pratt divorced and married again in 1974. She was born November 7, 1910 in Monrovia, California and died in March 1991.

They Shall Sample My Blade

Duck Amuck has always been one of my favourite cartoons but so much has been written about it, there’s nothing I can add.

Chuck Jones’ cartoons can have such subtle movement and expressions that you feel it, even if you don’t notice it. Here is the open with dramatic actor Daffy Duck in an Errol Flynn-type swashbuckler role. Phil De Guard’s background pans to the left and disappears.



A realisation take. But Jones (or whoever animated this) doesn’t just have a static pose. The plume in Daffy’s chapeau drops to add to the effect that Daffy is stunned.



Daffy turns around to inspect the disappearance of his sword-fight scenery. Again, it’s not just a turn. Daffy flattens the palm of his hand. The gesture adds to what he’s feeling.



Daffy then gives us a shrug before tip-toeing out of the scene to adjust and give the audience watching his latest cartoon their money’s worth. Daffy, if nothing else in the 1950s, fancied himself an entertainer.



I shan’t attribute this scene to Ken Harris, but my wild guess is that’s who animated it. Ben Washam and Lloyd Vaughan also get screen credit, with Maurice Noble laying out the scenes, and Mike Maltese adding his unique style of dialogue. This post has the opening credit scroll snipped together.

Swat the Teacher

One of the trade ads for Ub Iwerks’ ComiColor cartoons was better than the cartoons themselves. Film Daily may have decided Mary’s Little Lamb had “lots of laughs resulting from the confusion” but you’d be hard-pressed to find them.

The cartoon opens with Mary kind of tap-dancing to an insipid song, except she and her lamb are animated on twos while the background keeps moving. That means it looks like they slide in every other frame.

Iwerks’ standard-issue old crone design is the teacher who declares it is entertainment day in Mary’s school, part of which consists of a long swish dance by a student named Percy.

Mary’s lamb keeps horning in on the act and the crone chases it with a broom. In one scene, the gag is the teacher gets her head stuck in a drawer, the lamb swats her butt with a broom and the teacher emerges with a mousetrap on her nose. She pulls it off and is left with a long, bent nose. Yeah, the gag is the funny shape. Being an Iwerks cartoon, we get to see female underwear a lot of the time. The broom maintains a butt shape.



There’s a coal gag to end the cartoon. It’s handled pretty straight (the teacher is embarrassed yet again); any temptation to do a blackface gag was resisted.

None of the animators are credited in this 1935 cartoon and they were, perhaps, thankful for that.