Becoming the King

There’s some shape shifting but not a lot that’s interesting in the Betty Boop cartoon Chess Nuts (1932). Two chess piece kings turn into Bimbo and a bad guy with designs on Betty. Here are a few frames.



Shamus Culhane and William Henning are the credited animators.

How Harry Von Zell Became a Character

Quick—name the announcer on “Peter Arno’s Whoops Sisters.”

The correct answer is Harry Von Zell.

The “Whoops Sisters” wasn’t quite the highlight of Harry’s career. It aired in 1930, in the days when Harry was a staff announcer at CBS, one of a number working the night shift. The same evening as the “Whoops,” by the way, Von Zell announced “Ted Fiorito and His Hollywood Gardens Orchestra,” “The Columbia Male Chorus,” “Gold Medal Fast Freight” (with the Wheaties quartet and Gold Medal organist), “Will Osborne and his Orchestra” and “The Cotton Club Band.” In between were other shows announced by Don Ball, David Ross, Bradford Browne and George Beuchler.

It’s hard to say what the highlight of his career was. He announced for Fred Allen and Eddie Cantor in the ‘30s, starred in a series of comedies for Columbia in the ‘40s and appeared on television with George and Gracie in the ‘50s. The lowlight was probably the night he mangled President Herbert Hoover’s name on a special network broadcast; at least that’s the most famous one.

Von Zell was an assistant paymaster for a railway when he fell into radio at age 16. He sang and played instruments on a number of Los Angeles-area stations starting in 1922, managed an outlet called KMTR in the late 1920s and moved to KGB San Diego in 1928. He soon had a stroke of fortune that changed his career.

Here’s a feature story in the Long Island Press of Sunday, July 18, 1937, outlining Von Zell’s radio career (although skipping the Whoops Sisters) to date.

Radio's Handy Man
Meet Harry Von Zell, Who Made Even Allen Laugh
By BOB SMITH
FOR years the sportswriters have made a point of getting together at the close of the major league baseball season for the purpose of awarding honors to various players.
Although popularity polls are frequent enough, radio has never seen fit to honor its best all-around man. But most critics, if their writings are to be taken seriously, appear to favor the nomination of Harry Von Zell as the air's foremost candidate for general utility honors.
If Harry were suddenly to start calling himself "Mr. Versatility" or "Man-About-the-Mike," few would be justified in disputing his prior claim to such a monicker. The man not only can, but does, everything. He writes, sings and acts; he announces, directs, produces, performs as master-of-ceremonies; he is an expert judge of talent, a powerful yet pleasing air salesman and glib ad-libber. He's practically a one-man show.

This season, for the first time, the radio moguls have taken cognisance of Von Zell's diversified abilities and have given him the opportunity to stage his own programs; run them from A to Z. It's the opportunity he has been waiting for. Seldom, if ever, under the present-day system of network programming, has there been a show which so completely bears the stamp of one individual, for he has been given absolute free rein to present his Sunday night half-hours over the Columbia network as he sees fit.
The fact that he first got into broadcasting in the days when three not-too-widely separated stations constituted a network and a speaker could fill the air for 20 minutes gave this ex-collegiate football star and one-time professional prizefighter a chance to learn radio thoroughly. Before anyone heard of Major Bowes, Harry made his microphone debut on an amateur program conducted by a small station in Southern California. The station had put out calls for ambitious singers, and friends of Harry's at the bank where he was employed kidded him into entering his baritone voice in the contest.
THE station officials didn't think much of his vocalising, and to this day he has managed to evade contracts from the Metropolitan Opera. But they did like the rich timbre of his voice and offered him an announcer's post.
In those days, of course, an announcer did a little bit of everything—helped out by playing the piano while the circuit that was to pick up the dance music from the hotel was being repaired, chatted aimlessly to fill up the gap while the soprano from the local music school was primping in the corner so she could look well to the unseen audience which probably consisted of her pupils and three guys named Herman, sat at the controls if the engineer decided that he had a previous date with his girl and couldn't be bothered coming to work.
If Paul Whiteman had not decided to go to Hollywood and make the picture, "King of Jazz," the chances are that you would never have heard of Harry Von Zell. The roomy dean of American music was under contract for a coast-to-coast commercial series at the time. Ted Husing, his regular announcer, had made the cross-country trip with the Whiteman organization, but other duties prevented his staying in what is jokingly referred to as the land of perpetual sunshine, for the entire shooting period. So they had a series of competitive auditions which Von Zell seemed to have had no trouble winning.
But when Whiteman was finished with his cinematic chores and was getting ready to come East, Von Zell balked at the idea. He was happy in California and doing all right, thank you. He finally wilted under the pressure of Paul's weighty arguments.
IT WAS only after he became nationally famous as an announcer that Von Zell again received an opportunity to renew the development of his other talents. For several years he was one of the aces of the Columbia announcing staff and his many regular assignments on important programs and special events kept him pretty well tied down. In the fall of 1935 he was offered a post with an advertising agency. He accepted the job and from then on, freed of routine activities, he was able to expand his all-around usefulness.
Through an odd twist of what for lack of anything else your correspondent calls fate, Harry became one of the air's outstanding characters. A voluble individual, he gets a terrific kick out of telling stories. He likes himself best when he has a chance to use dialect or do impersonations. One noon back in 1935 Harry was doing his stuff to a tableful of musicians, production men and other studio attaches in the Radio City drug store. Gloomy-faced Fred Allen was paying for his daily supply of aspirin. A series of hearty guffaws hit his ears. Since laugh-making is his business, he cast a searching eye on the noisemakers and picked out the interloper. Von Zell had just gotten off his punch line.
Allen made a mental note and when Von Zell appeared at dress rehearsal a couple of days later to read his commercial announcements on Town Hall Tonight, he found that Fred had written some lines for him. Harry was reticent—not too reticent, mind you—to turn thespian, but he did so with a slight amount of sarcastic pressure from the lanky Yankee. Von Zell soon became a regular member of that unappreciated band of actors, those scare-crows in the fertile field of drama, the Mighty Allen Art Players.
IT WAS Walter O'Keefe and later Phil Baker who developed Von Zell into a surprisingly effective comedy foil. During Baker's rehearsals at the CBS Playhouse on Sunday mornings, Von Zell frequently sent the cast into chuckles by reading a serious line in a ridiculous manner. For a while nobody did much about it but last October Harry suddenly introduced a new voice. It struck Baker's fancy. Phil's ability to spot potential stooge material is a show-business legend.
The following week Baker's writers penned lines to fit the hilarious intonations Von Zell had exhibited and the amazing character of Professor Eggplant was born. He is a daffy old duffer next to whom a crazy-man is as rational as a Harvard professor.

When Jack Benny was in New York to settle the "Bee" feud with Allen, he promised to drop in on the Colonel and Budd's program. The day he planned to come over to their studio to exchange cracks with them he was having the Mayor of Waukegan as a guest on his own show. They planned to do a schoolroom skit, reminiscing about their boyhood days. It was the week-end that the terrible school tragedy occurred at New London, Tex.
BENNY decided that any reference to schools, no matter how general, had no place on a comedy show then. He had to cancel his projected visit with Stoop and Budd in order to rewrite his own script. Which emergency left Colonel Stoopnagle with about half a script to write and almost no time to do it. Harry Von Zell saw his opportunity. In his spare time he had composed a little gem entitled "Murder on Honk Street," a typical Stoopnaglian script. He offered it and it was accepted. But it was too long to do in one show, so the Colonel decided to present it as a two-part serial. Well, you know the rest. It made such a hit with listeners that "Honk Street" ran for 10 weeks. Harry had to write it every week, and for the first time in seven years Stoopnagle was using material prepared by someone else.
AND that singing voice we were inclined to make a sport of is really not so bad. As a matter of fact we witnessed an audition that Harry gave for an important national advertiser several months ago. The show features Von Zell, the Vocalist. The prospective sponsor liked it a lot, but the deal fell through because the only available time for the new show conflicted with one of Harry's previous assignments, a commitment he could not fall down on.
When Phil Baker's patrons were looking around for a show to replace the accordion-squeezing jester while he spent a summer vacation frolicking in front of Sam Goldwyn's cameras, an imposing list of headliners was presented to them. Over and above these they chose Harry Von Zell to stage his own program during the warm-weather.
Of course, Harry is on the spot. But he loves it. It's a rare opportunity for him because the responsibility of the show is entirely his—writing, direction, production, securing guest talent, announcing and serving as master of ceremonies. Radio Row is particularly heartened. The trend in recent seasons has been for sponsors to raid Hollywood and the Broadway stage for their headliners; and the microphone regulars—the boys and girls who are on day in and day out and who really constitute the backbone of the whole radio industry—are pulling for Harry this summer. If he succeeds, it means that they may not always be the forgotten men and women of the air.

In the 1960s, Von Zell spent a lot of his time stirring up fears of Socialism and Communism in front of Republican and various community groups, as well as being active on the AFTRA board. He was still on camera periodically; he even hosted the Tonight show in 1968, and slid into commercials for a savings and loan company in the ‘70s. Von Zell died of cancer on November 21, 1981 at the age of 75, still remembered as one of the great announcers and foils of network radio.

The Bad Guys Do a Stretch

Tom Morrison basically rips off Tex Avery’s Droopy in Pride of the Yard (1954) where Percival Sleuthhound is everywhere no matter where two escaped cons go.

One thing Avery didn’t have was an animator who drew characters with spaghetti-like limbs and a take where heads shrink and malform.



Jim Tyer never got credit on any of Terrytoons for years. Nor did Carlo Vinci, Larry Silverman or any other animator.

Yes, this cartoon includes the beloved Terry Splash.

How To Swallow A Kitten

The bulldog in Bad Luck Blackie swallows the little kitten. And then swallows him again. Yes, the gag is impossible. That’s what makes it funny (along with Tex Avery’s fast pacing).



Louie Schmitt was still in the Avery unit when this cartoon was made, along with Preston Blair, Walt Clinton and Grant Simmons. Schmitt and Blair would soon leave and Mike Lah and Bobe Cannon would be placed in the unit. It was released January 22, 1949.

Benny and Conn

Jack Benny didn’t start out on radio as a 39-year-old cheapskate who drove a Maxwell. Benny’s character was built, block by block, over a period of years.

Benny started out in 1932 as a standard-issue master of ceremonies. If you’ve heard his first show, available in sundry spots on the internet, you won’t recognise it. Slowly, the comedy came to dominate and Benny and his writer Harry Conn began morphing Benny into a “character” version of Benny, having him become the fall guy from the underlings on his show.

The Benny show, despite some sponsorship turmoil, was a hit with viewers. And someone came to resent that.

Harry Conn.

Conn came to believe if it weren’t for him, Benny wouldn’t be a star, though Jack had been quite successful in vaudeville in the later half of the ‘20s and into the ‘30s. Conn wanted more money. Conn wanted more credit. And finally, he walked out on the show in March 1936 and Benny let him go. Conn wrote for a couple of other shows, and then tried to prove to everyone he was the power behind the throne by starring in his own stooge-filled programme. It quickly died, and Conn’s writing career petered out.

It wasn’t like Conn was completely anonymous. Benny mentioned him (and thanked him) on occasion on his show, and there were items in the trade and popular press referring to him (Conn liked generating his own publicity). Here’s a piece from Reeve Morrow’s radio column in Red Book of April 1935, when Benny and Conn were still getting along, and the show was still based in New York City.

MAN BITES DOG
SIT around any of the Broadway cafés some night around two A.M. and listen to the boys talk—the comedians and the gag-men—and you will realize what news this is. Beside it, the old classic “Man bites dog” is about as newsy as a gangster getting nailed on an income tax evasion.
Here is a real, live, breathing example of a comedian giving a writer some credit for the success of a program. And a writer giving the credit right back to the comedian. In public, and in print!
Jack Benny declares the chief reason he has clicked so sensationally in radio is because he has a good writer.
And the writer, Harry Conn, declares: “Some of the best things I turn out don’t read funny—it’s the way Jack delivers them. Benny is a master of inflection, and he has the uncanny ability of making thie most commonplace things sound amusing.”
What can you do with people like that? It defies all the conventions.
But they do succeed in turning out one of the top shows on the air.

They start it each week on Thursday, with a session in Benny’s apartment. Conn outlines his ideas. Benny paces the floor, chewing and puffing on an oversize cigar, emitting smoke and “gags” in a constant stream. Some are good; some are bad: but the average is amazing. His secretary, Harry Baldwin, by some mysterious sixth sense, knows what to take down and what to leave out.
The show goes into rehearsal—but never in the presence of the orchestra. Benny figures that a spontaneous audience reaction is vital to his type of comedy, and he times himself according to the way the people in the studio behave. If the orchestra had heard the comedy before the broadcast, they would know just when to laugh—which would be forced, and fatal to spontaneity. Jack Benny depends only upon the comedy material itself for laughs. He never wears costumes, never indulges in visual “business” for the sake of the few hundred people in the studio forsaking the millions of listeners outside.
Benny, along with such masters of comedy as Chaplin and Butterworth, never forgets that popular sympathy goes to the underdog. He always gets the worst of the deal, the “dirty end of the stick”—until the last moment, when he comes out on top.
His method of presentation is unique, suave and subtle. And to Jack Benny, along with Ben Bernie, go the honors for making the commercial announcements a pleasure. Benny kids his sponsor and the product, and makes you like it. His programs carefully avoid the long-winded commercial “plugs,” uttered with a ponderous solemnity, so that the world may be saved for better mileage, better digestion, or better marks in school for little Junior. Commercially, he proves that the touch can carry a heavy sock!
Tune in on him Sunday night at seven over the Blue network. He is more than ably assisted by his wife Mary Livingston as his chief stooge; Frank Parker, whose tenor voice has never gone off the gold standard; and Don Bestor and his orchestra.

As you have read, there was no Phil Harris, no Dennis Day, no Rochester, let alone an underground vault, anything or anyone played by Mel Blanc, no feud with Fred Allen, no Frank Nelson shouting “Yehhhhhhhhhhhs?” All this was developed by other writers (and Benny) after Conn was gone. Conn can certainly be credited with helping to develop the Benny show, but it really didn’t become what we remember it to be until he left.

Academic Kathy Fuller-Seeley has expertly and contentiously researched and documented Conn’s role on the Benny show and how they broke new ground together in a very excellent historical treatise which I urge you to read here.

The Story of Max

I’ll say it up front. Max the 2000 Year Old Mouse stinks.

Yes, I realise there will be some who will howl in anger because they watched the cartoons when they were four and are nostalgic about them. But they really do stink. The bulk of the action is a camera panning over still drawings as the fine Bernard Cowan narrates, interspersed with some barely moving mouse animation involving “humour.”

The men responsible for these were the same guys who brought you Fritz the Cat—Steve Krantz and Ralph Bakshi.

I’ve found two lonely articles about the series from when it was being produced, both from New York-based weekly Back Stage. The first is from March 7, 1969.

“Max, The Mouse” In Krantz House
“Max, the 2,000 Year Old Mouse,” a unique new series of fifty two 5-minute cartoons combining education and entertainment, has been placed in production by Krantz Films, Inc., it was announced by Stephen Krantz. First sales of the series, scheduled for the Fall season, have been to Kaiser Broadcasting for their stations in Philadelphia, Cleveland, Boston, Cincinnati and San Francisco, and to KCOP in Los Angeles. Created by Ralph Bakshi of Krantz Animation, Inc., the new series is a merger of entertainment and educational material designed for pre-schoolers to fifth graders. All of the background for the series will be taken from original photographs or authentic drawings, paintings, prints and lithographs of historical happenings.

How did Krantz and Bakshi get to this point? Well, let’s back up a bit.

Krantz left a programme director job at WNBC-TV in New York to work for Screen Gems. After eight years, he quit in September 1964 to set up his own company, Krantz Films.¹ Krantz had spent three years as general manager of Screen Gems of Canada, and he hoped his company would “increase the amount of Canadian production suitable for sale around the world.”²

A deal was soon worked out to produce a colour, half-hour cartoon series based on the Wilhelm Busch characters Max and Moritz, with voices apparently to be recorded in Germany.³ It doesn’t appear to have gone anywhere. Krantz then inked a contract for Western distribution outside the U.S. for four TV shows owned by Trans-Lux Television Corp., including Felix the Cat and Mighty Hercules made-for-TV cartoons.⁴

Now came a huge break. Krantz jumped on the super hero craze and inked a contract with Marvel in March 1966 to animate its characters. RKO signed a million dollar contract with Krantz for 195 six-and-a-half minute cartoons featuring Captain America, Sub-Mariner, The Incredible Hulk, The Mighty Thor and Iron Man.⁵ The Grantray-Lawrence studio in Hollywood made some of the cartoons⁶ but Shamus Culhane in his autobiography Talking Animals and Other People pointed out his staff at Paramount animated The Mighty Thor while four studios in Hollywood handled the remaining cartoons. Unfortunately there were production problems under rookie director Chuck Harriton.

Krantz wanted to break into live-action programming. A half-hour series starring Ella Fitzgerald and Duke Ellington was in the works⁷. His next animation venture was in conjunction with Cracked magazine and called The Flipsides. It was a half-hour show filmed in Australia, featuring cartoon rock groups in three, 6½ minute adventures. A pilot film was made.⁸

All this led up to Krantz’s biggest TV success. He sold Spider-Man to ABC in January 1967 with Grantray-Lawrence handling the animation.⁹ As anyone familiar with the show knows, the voice tracks were cut in Toronto and featured veteran actors well-known in Ontario’s capital. But Krantz was working on another cartoon series with a Canadian connection. By March 1967, trade ads were being taken out announcing Rocket Robin Hood was in production. Not only were the voices Canadian, the animation was made in Toronto as well at a hastily-expanded Al Guest Animations under the eye of executive producer Shamus Culhane (Variety reported on May 24, 1967 that Culhane had been appointed head of animation at Krantz Films). Somehow Culhane avoided mentioning this part of his career in his book. It’s no wonder. Rocket Robin Hood is embarrassingly bad, though it did provide work to Canadian animators. Being produced in Canada meant the series qualified as Canadian content, ideal for sale to both the CBC and British television. The latter had a quota on American imports, which likely was Krantz’ incentive to have it animated under the Maple Leaf flag.

Rocket Robin Hood was Krantz’ idea, and he apparently was nuts about outer space. He announced production would begin in March 1968 on a feature called Space Pirates of Treasure Island, very loosely adapted from the Robert Louis Stephenson novel, in co-production with the Toei Company in Japan and starring American actors (sorry, Bernard Cowan).¹⁰ He also had three live-action shows in the hopper.

Around this time, Ralph Bakshi took over as executive producer and director of Krantz Animation, Inc.¹¹ (Krantz Films was sold to another company which Krantz later bought). Culhane was operating his own company by June 21, 1968.¹²

This pretty well brings us up to 1969 and Max. Back Stage of May 30, 1969 did a follow up story.

Krantz’ 2nd Version of “Max” For Schools
A second version of “Max, the 2,000 Year Old Mouse,” the new series of 5-minute cartoons combining education and entertainment, will be produced for schools only, it was announced by Stephen Krantz, Pres. of Krantz Films.
The series, for national distribution to schools to be called “The Childrens’ Museum,” will be exactly the same as its TV counterpart with the exception of its central character, an animated mouse observer, Max, who will be eliminated from the school version.
This the series of fifty two 5-minute history lessons, with backgrounds consisting of original photographs, paintings, prints and lithographs of historical happenings, will be presented for schools only with a voice-over narration only.
The appointment of a major distributor in the educational film field for “The Childrens’ Museum” will be announced shortly. The TV counterpart has already been sold in more than twenty cities for the Fall season.

A week later, Krantz Animation announced a commercial/industrial division called “Ralph’s Spot” with Bakshi in charge.¹¹ Within a couple of years, Krantz and Bakshi would combine to shake the preconception of animation-as-children’s-entertainment with Fritz the Cat.

Culhane, by the way, reappears on the scene in 1972. He was the producer-director of 104, 4½ minute cartoons called The Wonderful World of Professor Kitzel. The series was produced by MG Films run by Marvin Grieve, a one-time salesman for Krantz Films. There was a Toronto connection here, too. The voice of Max, Paul Soles, provided the voices for Kitzel, while Paul Kligman, who played J. Jonah Jameson on the Spider-Man cartoons, was one of the writers (along with former Paramount cartoon designer Gil Miret).

A trivia note about Max: many fans noticed the cartoons had the same opening and closing theme as the Siskel and Ebert movie review show Sneak Previews on PBS. It was from the Capitol music library, and written by Bill Loose, Emil Cadkin and Jack Cookerly.

By now, you’ve probably spent more time reading this post than you ever did watching those Max cartoons. I’m going to toss in one more thing. John Canemaker, in his essay on Bill Tytla published in Cinefantastique, Winter 1976, talks about the ex-Disney animation legend in his final years:

While in California [in the early 1960s], Tytla tried to sell a cartoon film idea he had been planning for five years, “Mousthusula, the 2000 Year Old Mouse,” and for which he had made many charming and vigorous sketches, but there was were no takers . . .
While in the hospital for a “routine prostate operation,” Tytla had another stroke and was unable to speak or write for weeks after. He tried to print words during this period and even managed to draw some additional Mousthusula sketches, but these drawings are sad to see—scribblings of a giant who had lost the power.

Did someone steal the idea for Max from Bill Tytla?

You decide.

---

1 Weekly Variety, Sept. 23, 1964, pg. 37.^↩
2 Weekly Variety, Oct. 7, 1964, pg. 28^↩
3 Weekly Variety, Nov. 25, 1964, pg. 30^↩
4 Back Stage, May 28, 1965^↩
5 Broadcasting, March 21, 1966, pg. 58^↩
6 Weekly Variety, March 23, 1966, pg. 48^↩
7 Weekly Variety,, May 11, 1966. pg. 34^↩
8 Back Stage, July 22, 1966, pg. 3^↩
9 Weekly Variety, Jan. 25, 1967, pg. 26.^↩
10 Weekly Variety, Feb. 28, 1968. pg. 20^↩
11 Back Stage, June 6, 1968, pg. 17^↩
12 Back Stage, June 21, 1968, pg. 7^↩

A Changing Woodpecker

Shots don’t always match in cartoons when scenes change.

Here are some examples from Misguided Missile, a 1958 Woody Woodpecker cartoon. Someone on the Walter Lantz staff seemed to like to draw Woody more squat and angular than others. These are consecutive drawings. Woody’s taller in the second frame. The guy with the newspaper has longer fingers in the first drawing and the bench (and its shadow) aren’t the same from drawing to drawing.



The next two frames are consecutive as well. Director Paul J. Smith cuts back to the stubby-legged Woody artist. Woody changes size and position and the guy’s hand is suddenly back holding his newspaper.



Bob Bentley and Les Kline are given the screen credits for animation on this cartoon.

Two Points

A bull head-butts matador Flip into a basketball net in Bulloney (1933).



Now one of those gags that disappeared as the ‘30s wore on. The numbers on basketball scoreboard are living and a ‘2’ runs and jumps into place.



The cartoon ends with a group of vicious bulls apparently turning into cows and trotting away. Now that’s bulloney.

Darren the First

Was there ever a show with more replacement actors than Bewitched?

There were two Louise Tates, two Gladys Kravitzes, two Darrin’s fathers and, of course, two Darrins.

Dick York played the original and far superior Darrin Stephens. His departure from the show in 1969 couldn’t be helped, though the decreasing numbers of fans didn’t know the reason until years later.

York was part of a group of actors who made the rounds in Chicago in the radio days before moving to New York. He once recalled he appeared on three radio soaps every weekday, Rosemary, This is Nora Drake and Young Doctor Malone. “I was three different characters—a good guy in the morning, a very bad guy in mid-afternoon and an inbetween guy in late afternoon” he once told columnist Erskine Johnson.

Here’s a story from King Features’ TV Key column of May 8, 1965, when Bewitched was in its first season. York reveals he was surprised at the audience the show attracted.

'Bewitched' Keeping Top Ratings Intact
By CHARLES WITBECK
HOLLYWOOD — "Dear Darrin: Please send me a picture of you and your witch."
This is the kind of mail actor Dick York of the "Bewitched" series receives. He's the fellow who plays husband to Elizabeth Montgomery, the beautiful witch with the puckering lips, who is getting all the attention these days. York doesn't mind being second fiddle—as a father of five kids, he's just glad to be in a hit. And he's rather proud fans believe in the character Darrin Stephens, a man strong enough to handle a bride with such devastating powers.
"Samantha is really trying to be human," says York. "That's part of her charm."
When "Bewitched" leaped to the top of the ratings early last fall, scoffers felt such popularity was only temporary. Weekly magic tricks, they thought, would soon pall and viewers would lose interest in the loving witch and her normal husband.
But the cynics guessed wrong. In New York, for instance, viewers are considered sophisticates, yet the series has a huge following every Thursday.
York Is Surprised
"This surprises me," says York. "I thought we might catch the teen-agers and young couples, but I didn't expect to snare the city slickers. They seem to love being taken in week after week."
Right now plans for next year are hatching. York was ruminating on what avenues the Stephens couple could travel. "There's the thought we should have a child," he says, "or perhaps twins with one inheriting her mother's witching skills.
"I like the idea," Dick continued. "Can you hear me as the proud father saying, 'Will your daughter stop turning my son into a toad!' "
Could a man handle a wife who is a witch?
"I think a man would like to try," answers York. "Life would never be boring. And the children would always be amused by their mother's talents."
Wires Help Tricks
Most of Samantha's tricks are done by wires coated with "invisible paint." and they're impossible to see on film. The "Bewitched" special effects men have been remarkably successful in making objects look as if they're flying in space.
"Sometimes we have mishaps," says York. "In one scene, a tray, filled with sandwiches and rigged by wires, was supposed to pass between Samantha and her mother, Endora (Agnes Moorehead). But, just as it moved between the ladies something happened and sandwiches flew all over. At least it got a big laugh from the crew."

Actor York is in awe of the special effects men's talents. "Our tricks are becoming more complicated." he says. "The more bizarre the better says the public. We can't let up in the magic department."
However, stunts can lose their initial impact. "Most of the laughs are played off the people," says York. "And some stunts are not worth all the effort put into creating them.
"For instance, in one episode, Endora wished to help out in buying the couple a house. The two women stand in an empty room, and Endora says. 'Wouldn't a chair look nice here,' pointing to an empty space. Immediately a chair appears.
"Well, she goes through the house creating furniture and our crew is going crazy running in with chairs, tables and lamps. The idea was to furnish an empty house in a jiffy so a neighbor (Alice Pearce) could enter and do a double take. Then Alice comes on ane does the take, but none of this surprised the audience—they were in on the stunt."
Big Change For York
Playing husband to a witch is a big change from York's last series role, that of a social service worker in the ill-fated series, "Going My Way," starring Gene Kelly, which happened to be opposite "The Beverly Hillbillies" on Wednesday nights.
"True, we got shot down by the opposition," says York, "but we also had our story problems. Originally I was cast as a Protestant minister who had been a boyhood friend of Kelly the priest. Friendly barbs about our youth were supposed to take place.
"I think the producers were afraid to make this comment between two ministers, so I became a social worker. Again, I'm only guessing, but I think Leo McCarey pushed the idea as far as it could go in the pictures 'Going My Way' and 'The Bells of St. Mary's'.' "
Now safely ensconced in a solid hit, York can go home to a wife and five kids without worrying about where the next part is going to come from. As husband to a witch, he holds up his end firmly, and he's head man at home.
"With five kids in the house we always have confusion." he says, and he likes it. "But there are times when I'd like to borrow a few tricks from Samantha."

When York left the series, producer Bill Asher told the Los Angeles Times: “After five years in a part an actor wants to move on to something else—and I don’t blame him.” Asher was less than forthright. He knew Dick York was a sick man.

It was a number of years before York spoke about what was wrong with him. Here’s a story from one syndication service dated April 5, 1989 where he talks about it.

Bedeviled By Disease, Dick York Fights Back
By TOM TIEDE
Newspaper Enterprise Association
ROCKFORD, Mich. (NEA) — When Dick York was an actor in Hollywood, starring in the popular TV series "Bewitched," he had a supernaturally entrancing wife named Samantha. The story line was that she would get him out of the scripted predicaments" by wiggling her nose to bring about legerdemanian solutions.
Today Samantha is long gone. But York continues to call on wonderworking to cope with his dilemmas. He has fallen on real-life hardtimes. He is in fact dying of chronic emphysema here in the middle of Michigan. Yet he is still able to wiggle up an enchanting solution to the problem of facing his own mortality.
The solution is beneficence. Wiggle. York has subordinated his own terrible worries to an overriding concern for others. He believes that love is the real magic in the world, and mercy is its manifestation. So he has formed a small charitable group and is devoting what remains of his life to helping homeless people.
The group is called "Dick York Acting for Life," and York runs it out of the living room of his modest rural home. He is joined in the endeavor by his actual wife Joey and a handful of friends around the state. He is thin, frail and always out of breath, but he insists he is not too far gone to be a force for goodwill.
It's bewitching spirit, to be sure. And in this case befitting. York has been wrestling with adversity since he was born into privation during the Great Depression. He says his family was so poor it could not afford to bury a brother when he died, and so, "We had to steal into a cemetery at night to lay him to rest."
York turned to acting to escape the travail, and, at 15, starred in the CBS program, "That Brewster Boy." He went from radio into film work in the 1950s, and then became a familiar face on television during the 1960s. Besides "Bewitched," he appeared in Alfred Hitchcock's shows and on Rod Serling's "Twilight Zone." York was still battling misfortune, however. He injured his back in a Gary Cooper movie, became dependent on pain killing prescriptions, and it caught up with him in 1969. He passed out on the set of "Bewitched" that year, had to be taken to the hospital and was unsympathetically dropped from the show.

The drop soon turned into a free-fall dive. He says he could not get a job "in a school play." His savings disappeared, he ate his way up to 300 pounds, and he lost his home to the mortgage company. He wound up cleaning apartment units to try to make ends meet. In 1976, he was forced to take welfare assistance. Then there was the emphysema. York says he used to be a heavy smoker, but there were other causes too.
York says he is routinely tied to an oxygen tank. And the back pains continue. But he has passed the time when he gave in to despair regarding his condition. Now he concentrates on the misfortunes of others.
The involvement began last year when York read about a congressional rule (the McKinney Act) that was put in effect some time back to give items of government surplus to worthwhile enterprises. He then started calling government agencies in the upper Midwest to get surplus commodities turned over to homeless people in Michigan.
York says he ran squarely into stone walls at first. He likewise got entangled in bureaucratic red tape. He says people would say "yes" one day, then "no" the next, and wonder why he would ask in the first place. Eventually, though, he rallied his small organization, raised donated funds to cover expenses and got results. The results were that in 1988 York says he got enough surplus to "clothe 15,000 people head to foot." In addition, he jimmied hundreds of excess sleeping bags out of the government, and whole truckloads of cots, mattresses and blankets. He also got some food for the homeless sent to the Salvation Army in Grand Rapids.
"The plight of the homeless is everyone's problem," York says, "because any of us could be there at one time or the other. I can see myself as a guy on the street, and I think most people can do that. There's no good just looking the other way; we're going to solve this problem together, or it won't be solved." He stops to catch his breath. And to adjust his oxygen tube. And, remarkably, to smile. "I'm not going to stop with 15.000 people," he goes on. "I want to help millions. I mean millions. Before I die I would like to give clothes, food and adequate housing to every man, woman and child in the United States."
Wiggle.
The address for "Dick York Acting for life" is P.O. Box 499, Rockford, Mich. 49341.

York died February 20, 1992, helping others until he physically could not. The Grand Rapids Press told how he donated $15,000 to a group to buy and outfit a mobile kitchen to serve hot meals to firefighters and police at disaster scenes, and the money to buy 1,000 blankets to stock two trailers in case of a major natural disaster.

There were two Darrins. There was only one Dick York.

Cartoon Lunch Break

Screwy Squirrel and Lonesome Lenny interrupt their chase for a lunch. Screwy swirls in mid-air and produces a workplace picnic.



“Strong union,” is the explanation Screwy gives the audience. Evidently the lunch is mandated in their contract under the Screen Cartoonists Guild.

This was Tex Avery’s last Screwy cartoon. Ray Abrams, Preston Blair, Walt Clinton and Ed Love are the animators.