Clampett and the Wolf

The name “Bob Clampett” conjures up wild cartoons at Warner Bros. and possibly the animated Beany and Cecil Show which aired on ABC in the early 1960s. But there were a number of years where Clampett’s fame involved puppets.

His Time For Beany show became a hit in California and was eventually kinescoped for airing on a syndicated basis elsewhere. Clampett responded by creating more puppet shows. The great irony is they were all killed off by cartoons, including his own. More and more old theatricals became available and it was easier and cheaper to programme them with a live-action host instead of a full-cast puppet show.

Here’s Clampett in an interview published November 14, 1954, talking about his various puppet programmes and his earlier career. He’s taking credit for creating Bugs Bunny and did for a number of years until a howl from some of his former co-workers and diligent research by pioneer animation historians. Almost a year after this interview, his puppeteering would be reduced to appearances on the KTTV morning show (with Bill Leyden and then Del Moore), though he managed to get briefly get Willy the Wolf back on the air in a 15-minute evening show in 1957.

Beany’s Creator Makes Bow With a Puppet for Adults
BY CECIL SMITH
Television is a world in upheaval. It is filled with creative forces continually attempting to extend its dimensions, to burst it out of its standard orbit.
One of the more successful of these forces is a man who has created a world within the world of TV—a world peopled with puppets. He's Bob Clampett, father of Beany, Cecil the Seasick Sea Serpent, Dishonest John, Thunderbolt, Buffalo Billy and a host of other characters more real to children than Ed Sullivan and Groucho Marx are to their elders.
And last Monday Clampett sent a gesticulating orator named William Shakespeare Wolf into your living rooms, and in his own way created a new extension to his world the first puppet show for adults.
This was the fourth Clampett show to reach the air. Three of his shows are on daily, Buffalo Billy at noon, Thunderbolt at 6 p.m. and Time for Beany at 6:30, all on KTTV (11). The new show, Willy the Wolf, is a weekly half-hour on the same station, seen each Monday at 8:30 p.m.
"Curiously," says Clampett, "Willy was my first show, the first I created for television. That was in the dark days right after World War II when I was working in the garage behind my home wondering where the next meal was coming from.

"Willy had been in my mind for years. I grew up around Hollywood. Lived next door to Chaplin as a boy and used to see him playing his violin on his front porch. And I knew actors in the old Christie comedies, the horse operas lots of actors.
“There was one actor who used to parade up and down Hollywood Blvd. reciting Shakespeare to all who would listen. I used to watch him as he strode along in his great, black cape, thundering out the words of the Bard. He was the germ cell of Willy.
"The actor later became very famous. His name's John Carradine."
Clampett, a big, jovial man with horn-rimmed glasses and close-cropped hair, grinned broadly and added: "I'd like to have John meet Willy on the show and let them throw soliloquies at each other."
Clampett from boyhood set his sights on being an artist. He attended the old Otis Art Institute and sold his first drawing to The Times.
Leads to a Job
"They printed it in full color and another newspaper immediately gave me a job," he said.
He worked as a newspaper artist for awhile and then joined the Disney staff of cartoonists. He left Disney to go to Warner Bros. where he created the animated character Bugs Bunny.
"Bugs had more of the element I wanted," says Clampett. "His was really an adult humor.
"I started doing Bugs in the 30s but even then, long before George Pal came to this country, I was working with puppets. I was thinking of movies then, of course. I wanted to use puppets to give more depth than the flat screen of animated cartoons. I filmed a puppet show in my spare time but it got me nowhere.
TV Natural Medium
"Then television appeared. I immediately saw it as the ideal showcase for my puppets. But it took a long time to convince television of it."
Clampett quit Warner Bros. in 1946 to "get ready for television." He first rented an office but soon was unable to keep up the rent and retreated to his garage. Here Willy was born and later Thunderbolt and Beany. Their births were ignored "by the growing TV industry. As a matter of fact, for three years television firmly turned thumbs down on the ideas in Clampett's fertile brain.
Beany finally went on the air in February, 1949 on KTLA (5). Its success was immediate. In no time, half the youthful population of Southern California was trotting about with propellers on their heads and talking familiarly of sea serpents.
Last year, the show moved to KTTV and Thunderbolt and Buffalo Billy joined it. And now Willy.
Clampett first produced Beany with a staff of four, which doubled as actors, directors, set designers, costumers, everything. Today, in a big sprawling wing of KTTV where all the Clampett shows are produced, the staff has grown to 25, but the same spirit of everybody taking a hand in everything persists.
"We're like a little theater group," says Clampett. "Take the actors. Our principal voices, Walker Edmiston, Don Messick and Erv Shoemaker, are voice artists. They rotate in all the roles, one week playing Cecil, the next doing Beany. Each plays 50 or 60 characters, All three will play Willy at one time or another. "You remember when Stan Freberg left us. He'd been so closely identified as the voice of Cecil people thought the show would fold. That was ridiculous. Stan was good but all of my people are good. They have to be."
Day Begins at Home
Clampett's schedule begins at his house every morning. Writers, actors, set designers gather for a conference, usually on the shows they will do that day. By 10 a.m., everyone is at the studio. Buffalo Billy is in rehearsal. At noon it goes on. Then rehearsals for Thunderbolt and Beany begin.
Each show has its separate permanent set. The actors work behind the set with the puppets, which fit like gloves over their arms. Willy, of different. He's a life-sized-like puppet and works with real people, mostly girls, as his foils.

Dance Music For One

In Cellbound, escaped con Spike is hiding inside the prison warden’s TV trying to avoid detection and is forced to become the programming the warden wants to watch.

“Hmmmm, yes. Dance music,” says the monotone Warden. Spike scrambles to play all the instruments, moving up and down or sideways in the set whenever he makes a change.



Cut to a shot inside the set.



The gag topper is the emotionless warden dancing like crazy to the Dixieland music. You can see some frames in this post.

Tex Avery started the cartoon but his unit was disbanded. This was finished up by the Hanna-Barbera unit’s animators under Mike Lah. It was released in 1955, two years after Avery was fired.

What? Me Worry, Bugs?

Yosemite Sam got laughs when he tried to look casual by playing jacks while Bugs Bunny refused to react to a possible explosion in Buccaneer Bunny (1948). So writer Warren Foster tried the gag again in Hare Lift (1952). This time, he expands the gag by having Sam start off by playing with a yo-yo.

This is a weaker cartoon than the other but Sam has some good expressions, finally panicking as it looks like the plane he and Bugs are on will crash, as the rabbit steadfastly won’t prevent it.



Manny Perez, Ken Champin, Virgil Ross and Art Davis are the animators in this short for director Friz Freleng.

The Price is Right . . . But What Next?

When did Bill Cullen find time to sleep?

There was a period in the 1950s where he was up at dawn to go on the radio in the morning then, after he finished, moved to another studio for The Price is Right an hour later, and appeared on television in the evening twice in a week on a quiz show and a panel show. (Whether he was on Monitor on NBC radio on weekends at this point, I don’t know).

Let’s go back to 1959 and see what United Press International had to say about Cullen. The quiz show scandal was still burning but Cullen and The Price is Right weren’t even singed. Cullen’s show didn’t involve huge cash jackpots, in fact, someone might win five sheep (yes, that was a prize). Perhaps the winner could have given them to Cullen to count so he could get some shut-eye.

‘Price Is Right’ Host Gets Quiz of His Own
Bill Cullen Has Hectic Schedule But Says it's Easy; He Uses Different Personalities
By FRED DANZIG
NEW YORK, July 25 (UPI) — Just every time Bill Cullen gets into a taxi cab, the dialogue goes something like this:
Cabbie: Hey, I know you. You're Bill Cullen.
Cullen: That’s right.
Cabbie: (Chuckling) Is the price right?
Cullen: I'll let you know when I see the meter.
Cabbie: Tell me, Bill do those winners on ‘Price Is Right’ have to pay taxes on what they win?
Cullen: Yes. They add the fair trade value of the prizes to their income.
Cabbie: How do I get my wife on the show?
Cullen: Tell her to send away for tickets. We pick all our contestants right out of the audience.
"I get the same questions every time," said the boyish-looking host of NBC-TV’s "The Price Is Right." "And not only from cab drivers. When I’m walking along the street, I sometimes get stopped and that's the conversation.
"I think we’re in a rut," said Cullen, whose rut also finds him serving as a panelist on CBS-TV’s "I’ve Got A Secret" and chief waker-upper on a four-hour early-morning NBC radio show.
His "on the-air" schedule keeps him around the mike for 25½ hours each week and gets most hectic on Wednesday when he does "Price" and, a half-hour later, "Secret.
It sounds hectic, but Cullen says it’s all very easy. “There is no rehearsal required for any of my shows. ‘Price’ runs itself. I come in 45 minutes before, learn where learn where I'm to stand, the names of the models, the prizes and the commercial cues. The radio show? No work at all. I just talk," he said.
"I use completely different personalities on the different shows. On radio, it’s early morning so I'm quiet. If any humor is there, it's in a low key. On daytime TV, I work about two pitches higher. On night-time TV, I'm another pitch higher. For ‘Secret,’ I'm in between.
"Sometimes," said Cullen, “I catch myself starting too high, so I adjust. I guide myself by the studio audience. I think I've developed a sixth sense that enables me to tell how the audience feels about the contestants, the prizes, or me. I can adjust to meet their feelings."
That sort of perception comes with experience, and Cullen has it.
Born in Pittsburgh in 1920, he started out to become a doctor, decided It was too tough and went into radio. After serving an apprenticeship in Pittsburgh, he came to New York with CBS radio in 1944. Two years later, he took over the "Winner Take All" show, his first quiz. been running quiz and games shows ever since and insists that there's nothing else he'd rather do.
Many of his TV fans are unaware that Cullen walks with a limp, the result of polio when he was a youngster. Cullen makes a point of not walking around while on camera.
"Price," which offers its viewers a chance to win valuable prizes by guessing price tags, averages around 20 million postcards a week. "There's something about guessing prices," Cullen said. "Everyone thinks he can do it. I’ve seen sophisticated people—bankers, lawyers, professors—really get involved with our game."

Actually, the cab driver asked Cullen a pretty good question. Did winners pay taxes? And what is “fair trade value” anyway? For the answers, we go to this feature article from the Associated Press, also from 1959.

When ‘The Price Is Right,’ Uncle Sam Gets His Share
By CHARLES MERCER
AP Movie-TV Writer
NEW YORK (AP) — What do people do with the prizes they win on television shows?
Usually they enjoy them. Positively they pay federal taxes on them.
Some prizes are sold — to friends or strangers — when the winner can't use them. There even are instances where an unusual prize has launched its winner into a new hobby or business.
These are among the things one learns from looking in on one of the most popular—and generous— of the giveaway shows, "The Price is Right” (NBC-TV, Wednesdays).
Although a winner must pay taxes on all prizes, none of the winners cited by the program reports any tax problems. Anyone who wins a new refrigerator, for example, is happy to pay the tax on it. When prize values rise into the thousands of dollars, the method is to sell some of the prizes to pay taxes on the others.

Winners pay on what is known as the fair market value of a prize—not its announced value. That is, articles are evaluated by an objective commercial appraising source acceptable to the Internal Revenue Service.
The program denies it helps winners sell superfluous prizes. “Winners don’t have to shop around to dispose of prizes they don’t want,” a spokesman said, "Instead, people contact them.”
When Paul Jones of Simpsonville, S.C., won an elephant, he was contacted immediately by an animal dealer who wanted it. Jones also won an airplane which he shipped home and tried to learn to fly.
"But after a half dozen lessons at the local airport, I decided I'd never make a flier,” he reports. "So I sold it to the airport and used the money for a house at the beach.”
Mrs. Jewel Blasinghame of Baytown, Tex., told "The Price is Right” what she did with a $6,000 swimming pool:
"I always wanted a house in a summer home development near Baytown. I sold my swimming pool to the owners of the development in exchange for a $2,000 lot and $3,000 cash. My new home now is going up right near the pool. It’s still my pool because the new owners are charging admission and I get a percentage.”
Among other things Mrs. Blasinghame won a 1928 Rolls Royce which she sold to an old car enthusiast from Middletown, Pa. "He had been looking for a '28 Rolls since the war, and finally saw just what he wanted when he watched me win it on the show. He phoned immediately and I sold it to him. That car had been sitting 12 miles away from his home all those years."
Speaking of cars, Michael Podrachi of Taylor, Pa., received a new $5,500 auto on the condition that he and his wife went directly from the stage of the show to Anchorage, Alaska. He also won a station wagon. A railroad worker, he has started an electrical contracting business on the side—enabled, he says, because he has that station wagon to carry his equipment.
And speaking of business careers, the aforementioned Paul Jones, a Simpsonville furniture salesman, won among many other things an ice cream vendor's cart. He has informed the program that he got a vendor's license and a stock of ice cream—and has a pleasant side business.
Other Joneses the program has kept up with include Mrs. Elinor Jones of Lawrence, Mass. Among her many prizes were 22 pieces of luggage. What do you do with 22 pieces of luggage?
"Luggage has become the family's favorite wedding and graduation gifts," she says. "Every time we have a major family gift occasion, we take out another piece of new luggage."
Like Mrs. Jones, Mrs. Hazel Varner of Columbus, Ohio, gets pleasure from seeing others use her "Price Is Right" boodle. Among her prizes was a $600, 12-volt, battery-powered toy truck. Although she has so children herself, the kids in the neighborhood get a kick out of riding it.

Bill Cullen has always been my favourite game show host, and he was the favourite of many, many others, including the people he worked with on The Price is Right. One of the show’s cameramen revealed in a 1961 newspaper interview that, normally, the stars give the crew a gift at Christmas. Instead, the crew gave Cullen a present. And I’ll bet he didn’t have to guess the manufacturer’s suggested retail price.

Concerto in B-Flat(tened Hand)

“Five Academy Awards is a Quimby Record” is what the Motion Picture Herald proclaimed in its March 22, 1947 edition. Number 5 had just been handed out for The Cat Concerto.

Quimby, of course, didn’t lift a pencil. Ed Barge, Ken Muse and Irv Spence animated the cartoon from Joe Barbera’s story and Bill Hanna’s bar sheets.

Tom and Jerry were always very expressive in the 1940s. Here’s a good example after Jerry is woken up by Tom’s piano playing. Jerry is curious, then annoyed, and then slams down the lid on the piano.



Some of Tom’s pain animation. While he opens his mouth, there is no scream on the soundtrack.



Cut to the visual gag.



The cartoon won more than an Oscar. It was honoured as the Best Color Cartoon at the World Film and Fine Arts Festival in Brussels in June 1947. In the meantime, Hanna, Barbera and their animators carried on filling out the MGM release schedule.

Mickey and the Stars

Movie caricatures abound in Mickey’s Gala Premier (1933), where they all come to see the mouse’s newest cartoon make its cinematic debut at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre.

Sid Grauman is even caricatured (along with Mae West).



There are so many celebrities in this cartoon, it’d take forever to list and show them all.



You can see Mickey’s cartoon has the stars rolling in the aisles. Groucho Marx, Marie Dressler, Joe E. Brown (the large mouthed one), Harold Lloyd, Charlie Chaplin and Oliver Hardy are here; I suspect that’s supposed to be Jimmy Durante with the big nose in the background.

Cinema Quarterly praised the use of Hollywood caricatures, while one theatre owner called the picture “The best to date” in the Motion Picture Herald. Film Daily of September 30, 1933 revealed comedian Jerry Lester, later of Broadway Open House fame, imitated seven voices in the short, including Maurice Chevalier, Jimmy Durante, Ed Wynn and Eddie Cantor.

The Million-Dollar Fiddling

I suspect you never got a chance to hear Jack Benny give his violin concerts for charity. The various newspaper clippings that have been posted here give the impression his act didn’t change in format. But he did tweak it as the years went by. After all, most performers wouldn’t want to do the same routine word-for-word (or note-for-note) for several decades.

Here’s a story from the Herald Tribune News Service. It’s dated April 7, 1959. The writer was the syndicate’s music critic. When the Herald Tribune folded, he went to work for Columbia Records as director of editorial services.

Jack Benny Fiddles to the Tune of $1,600,000
By JAY S. HARRISON
NEW YORK (HTNS)—The picture of Jack Benny the violinist is funny to everybody except Jack Benny. Not that he fancies himself a Heifetz or a Stern—he knows well where his fiddle limitations begin and end. But he really loves his instrument, loves music too, and everywhere he is doing what he can to prove it.
In the past several years this proof has taken the form of a series of concert orchestras in which Mr. Benny as violinist soloist, occupies the entire second half of the program. In this exalted capacity he has already been heard in New York, and on Wednesday he has his first return engagement: he is to perform with Leonard Bernstein at the Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall in a benefit concert for the orchestra's pension fund.
Thus far, Mr. Benny has had similar engagements with the orchestras of Philadelphia, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Kansas City, Washington and Toronto—in other words, many of the world's leading ensembles. And if you think there's anything hilarious about that, consider that in less than a dozen appearances Mr. Benny's ticket sales have exceeded $1,600,000, every dime of it having gone to charity or into one of the orchestral pension banks.
For his part, Mr. Benny is as happy as a bird-dog about the whole thing, since it allows him to play for people who are willing to pay for the privilege of listening. He was very serious when he spoke about it last week. "If I had one wish," he said, "If I had an Aladdin's lamp, I would ask for a year as a great concert artist—no kidding. One year of glory, that's all. You know, it's gotten to the point where I enjoy my concert schedule even more man my TV schedule. Every orchestra in America has asked for me and I hope to get around to them all. The thing that I like about my performances is that what I do fits me and wouldn't fit anyone else. It makes me sort of musically unique.
A New Number
"Sure, my act is always the same. I get out there and play and I'm lousy and that's funny. The humor of the act—except for a few new bits I've inserted—is basically what it was when I first started a few years ago. But I've just broken in a new fiddle number in Washington. I've thrown out the Mendelssohn Concerto; I got sick of it after three years; I couldn't stand it any more. So now my 'big' piece is Saint-Saens 'Introduction and Rondo Capricciosco.' You see, I've got to find works that allow me to do comedy routines and that's not so easy. I'd like to find a replacement for Sarasate's Gypsy Airs,' too—I'm tired of it. But I can't get one.
"Oh, yes, I've also added a new gimmick for my encores. First I do Schubert's 'The Bee,' the number that was supposed to have started the feud between Fred Allen and me. Then I do an imitation of three famous violinists. The orchestra breaks up."
Critics Love Him
According to Mr. Benny, he has discovered in his short career as a virtuoso that the best audiences are those with the highest degree of musical literacy. At first, when he gave concerts for charity, he often dealt with audiences that had never before attended a symphony event; later, when he switched to performing for the benefit of orchestra pension funds, the response of the regular subscribers was far greater.
"But actually," he said, "the laughs are pretty much the same, and they generally come in the same places. I expect that. What I didn't expect is that the critics would all love me. I thought surely one of them would say 'It's funny, but who needs it.' That's never happened.
Lest there be any be any misunderstanding about the nature of Mr. Benny's concerts, it should be mentioned that they are by no means haphazard or improvised. The day before they take place the violinist meets with all key men who will share comedy sequences with him and they are briefed on exactly what they are to do. On the morning of the performance the whole orchestra is assembled, and the act, from beginning to end is scrupulously rehearsed. Before all of this, Mr. Benny has been busy practicing.
A Real Strad
"I do practice, you know," he said earnestly. "I've got a real Strad and work on it. The trouble is that I began practicing when I was sixty-two, after forty years of not having touched the violin. It's hard to get your fingers going after a lapse like that. In the beginning, Mary made me practice in the bathroom —well, anyway, the acoustics are good there. But now that I've improved. I've been let out."
Has he improved? Has he learned from his guest-shots something new about the violin? These questions were addressed to Mr.Benny; his press agent answered them. "He has, was the firm reply. "He plays sweeter now. And his tone sounds better." "In that case," asked Mr. Benny, "why do they say it stinks?" The subject was dropped. There was a moment of silence.
Pathos
Then: "After my last concert here l returned to the coast on a plane with Mike Todd. He was reading my reviews and laughing. He asked me, 'Why do you think you're such a success?' I said, 'The joke that gets people is that I've got enough guys to play big numbers in front of a great orchestra. That's what's funny; that I'm so bad and so assured.' 'No,' Todd said, 'it's the damned pathos of the thing that gets them. What fractures the audience is that you think you're good enough to play a concert and the conductor and orchestra are going along with you not to hurt your feelings.'" To me," Mr. Benny conceded, "that's a pretty a shrewd analysis. "

The Almost Forgotten All Stars

Who hasn’t seen A Charlie Brown Christmas? It was the first Peanuts TV special in 1965. Within a week of it airing, CBS announced it would broadcast two more half-hour specials sponsored by Coca-Cola, one about baseball, and perhaps one about the Great Pumpkin.

The Christmas cartoon and It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown have been perennials for over 50 years, no doubt helped by a desire by TV stations to have special seasonal programming. But the baseball cartoon kind of drifted off into obscurity.

Charlie Brown’s All Stars debuted on June 8, 1966. If you were a kid who read the Peanuts strips like I did, some of the dialogue you’d recognise from the newspaper comics (the same holds true for the other two specials). I thought it was okay but I liked the Christmas cartoon a lot more.

Critics? Well, some gave it the old swing-and-a-miss. Jack Gould of the New York Times, noted for calling The Flintstones debut “an inked disaster”, wasn’t impressed. He seems more bothered by the limited animation than anything, not understanding that the Peanuts characters are never drawn with exaggeration in the newspapers.

Cartoons obviously are going to have a place in the future of television; they reproduce beautifully in color and are certain to be enjoyed by young viewers. But their quality and inspiration will have to be much sturdier than was the case in “Charlie Brown’s All Stars” on the Columbia Broadcasting System.
The drawings themselves lacked the all-important element of humor; surely a baseball game offers rich possibilities for nonsense. And the story line was virtually bereft of the engaging twists than [sic] can make such make-believe so enjoyable. On TV the members of the “Peanuts” gang need stronger individual personalities manipulated by someone who thinks young. Last night’s filmed half hour betrayed traces of the subtle ways of the grown up.

Percy Shain of the Boston Globe called it:

“[R]eally a pretty silly caper. There was an occasional smile in the droll, erudite dialogue and in the predictable reactions of Charlie’s special coterie—half grown-up, half-babyish.
Eventually, the jokes-for-jokes’-sake, leading to nowhere, just petered out. The situations were just too fanciful to give you any rooting interest. ...
This is one game that might have been played in kiddie time.

A few columns later, Shain printed letters from annoyed viewers who disagreed with his assessment.

Don Page of the Los Angeles Times gave it “half-a-hit,” adding “As a TV special, it loses something. It is difficult to define, but it doesn’t have the delicate punch-line payoff on the tube...But the message was prolonged. And make no mistake about it, Peanuts carries a message.”

Well, duh. Of course it carried a message. Wasn’t that to be expected? Didn’t A Charlie Brown Christmas carry a message, too?

In fact, the reviewer for the Christian Science Monitor was quite pleased it did carry a message.

“Charlie Brown isn’t used to winning.”
Charles Schulz said that laughing last month when he went forward to receive an Emmy for the best children’s television program for 1965-66.
The cartoonist’s remark was never more evident than in the second animated “Peanuts” program brought to television Wednesday night over CBS-TV. The half-hour show was called “Charlie Brown’s All Stars,” but the story had no baseball heroes in it. Charlie Brown pitched his team’s 999th straight loss.
The program, however, was a triumph through defeat, because Mr. Schulz was able to get across some sobering thoughts while entertaining every moment. W.S. Gilbert was perhaps right when he said, “He who’d make his fellow creatures wise, should always gild the philosophic pill.”
Feels important
Charlie Brown’s defeat might have been exasperating to those who would prefer to believe that persistence and enthusiasm should rightly win laurels on the human battlefield. But Mr. Schulz is more concerned with qualities and feelings. He seems to be saying, among other things, that a man is not down and out until he admits it.

By exaggerating defeat, Mr. Schulz makes his point amusingly clear. In a critical moment, in which victory for his team becomes a sudden possibility, the exuberant blunderer dashes all hope by getting himself tagged out at home plate.
But baseball, as important as it is, isn’t all of life. What matters as much, the program implies, is that a man can keep his head when all about him are losing theirs—and so forth.
Victory in defeat
Charlie Brown does, after all, win the respect of his teammates through a noble gesture of sacrifice on his part; he won’t have the uniforms he wanted for the team if the dog Snoopy and the girls are not allowed to play in a uniformed league. They love him for that and make him a manager’s sweater out of Linus’s blanket.
The program was full of delightful bits of business, facial expressions, clever remarks. The children who read the parts enunciated clearly and got some energy and feeling into their voices.
We shall not soon forget Snoopy’s brilliant surfing in an inflated rubber raft filled with water, or Lucy and the other girls with their skateboards, or Pig Pen’s remark upon being criticized for his sordid exterior: “But I have clean thoughts.”
Mr. Schulz and staff have done it again.

Regardless of grumbling critics, the special was popular. Syndicated columnist Cecil Smith wrote in 1969 that All Stars grabbed nearly half the TV audience the night it aired that year.

Despite that, producer Lee Mendelson pulled the special from the air. An unbylined story in the Johnstown Leader-Herald of October 21, 1971 quoted Mendelson as saying “the time has come to create a new series of specials.” That meant Charlie Brown’s All Stars was being replaced with something new (Mendelson announced the same fate for It’s the Great Pumpkin, but I don’t believe it ever left the air.

The special didn’t stay off the air altogether. The CBC broadcast it in 1978 and again in 1980. It reappeared on American network television in 1982. The home video era was dawning and in 1981, the cartoon was one of a number of Charlie Browns available on RCA Selectavision Videodiscs. In 1984, Media Home Entertainment grabbed the rights to release All Stars on video cassettes (remember them?). Since then it had been available on more modern formats, including a 50th anniversary DVD in 2016 (it also aired that November on, for some reason, the Food Network), and on 4K disc in 2017.

It may not have the lustre or creativity of the Christmas or Hallowe’en specials, but Charlie Brown’s All Stars is, at least, now more easily accessible for Peanuts fans to make their own decision about it.

The Termite Terrace Termite

There are some lovely gesticulations from Pierre, the termite that destroys Porky Pig’s furniture in The Pest That Came to Dinner. Note the fingers and expressions in the close-up scene.



John Carey, Bill Melendez, Don Williams and Basil Davidovich are the credited animators in this 1948 release directed by Art Davis.

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.