Tex's Missing Gag

There’s a gag you likely won’t see if you stumble across Tex Avery’s Happy-Go-Nutty on the internet. You might even notice there’s been a cut and can probably guess what the missing gag is.

Meathead the dog paints a bomb like it’s an apple. Screwy eats just like an apple. Well, if he can do it, Meathead thinks he can do it. Wrong. It turns into a bomb.



Yeah, it’s the old blackface gag. Scott Bradley plays “Swanee River” in the background (he even uses a banjo) while Meathead adopts a raspy Rochester voice.



This kind of gag wasn’t original with Avery. You can find it in Wheeler and Woolsey’s Diplomaniacs (1933). Avery kept using these blown-up/blackface bits periodically; there’s one in Garden Gopher (released in 1950).

Is this Ed Love’s animation? He worked on it, along with Preston Blair and Ray Abrams.

Hot-Cha-Cha in the Cold

Blizzards, downpour, lightning, twisting wind. It all hits the Aleutians, Isles of Enchantment, in a 1945 cartoon starring Private Snafu.

After the storm, the camera pulls back. “My gracious!” says the narrator who isn’t Bob Bruce, “Such conditions are almost unbelievable.” The scene now includes a walrus in the foreground. The walrus turns around the reveal a familiar face and catchphrase.



“Never-de-less, dat’s the conditions dat prevail!” says the Jimmy Durante walrus (played by Mel Blanc). Unfortunately, he didn’t end with a Durante-esque “Hot-cha-cha-cha!” He makes a repeat appearance at the end of the short.

This spot gag/travelogue cartoon was made by the Chuck Jones unit at Warners.

The Song That Wouldn't Die

Jack Benny’s writers loved running gags and milked them as long as they could.

One concept they came up with was Jack writing a wretched song that he thought was tremendous and trying to peddle and publicise it everywhere. The gag began in the radio days on September 30, 1951. It petered out later in the season but, on occasion, Benny would continue to joke about it.

Benny really did write the lyrics for it. His musical director, Mahlon Merrick, composed the music.

Something else Benny’s writers loved doing when television came along was to rework old radio scripts for the visual medium. And they decided to bring back Jack’s song.

United Press International covered the story. This column dates from December 26, 1963.

Jack Benny's 2-Bit Song To Be Reborn
By JOSEPH FINNIGAN
HOLLYWOOD (UPI)—Professional skinflint Jack Benny is still trying to unload that two-bit song of his on a gullible public. Jack's tune, "When You Say I Beg Your Pardon, Then I'll Come Back to You," is the hallmark of bad musical composing. It's a vocal jawbreaker with lyrics which would need to be sung by a mouth twice the size of Martha Raye's.
Benny has owned this musical turkey for more than 15 years. It was born on his old radio show, died the miserable death it deserved, and was reborn several times on his television series.
The song has been killed consistently by people of taste. However, it refuses to die. And if it ever did. Jack would refuse to bury the melody.
Song Is Bomb, Jack Knows
Deep down inside, Benny knows his song is a bomb. But he intends to bring back "When You Say etc." again on CBS-TV Jan. 14. The comedian won't sing his song though, for the simple reason that he can't. Jack's lack of singing talent is rivaled only by George Burns, who set horticulture back 1,000 years with his rendition of "Red Rose Rag."
During a steak luncheon recently, Jack reviewed the history of his song since its unfortunate inception.
"It was purposely written lousy," said Jack, indicating that poor lyrics gave the song charm. "We always get a pretty funny show out of it."
To indicate how durable the song has been during the years, Benny recalled some formative musicians and others who tried to lend it some class. The list includes Frank Sinatra, Lawrence Welk, Danny Kaye, George Burns and Groucho Marx. All failed.
Now Benny has hired the folk-singing trio of Peter, Paul and Mary to sing it. When they find out how bad that song is, they'll wish they had used their last names.
Publishers Interested
During the years, Jack's song has gained enough notoriety to interest publishers. They have seriously asked Benny to allow them to publish it. He has refused.
"The publishers heard us plugging it all the time." Jack explained. "And those were the days when they were publishing lousy songs."
Jack said there is one hope for his song a language other than English.
"The Guadalajara trio sang it once in Spanish," he said. "In Spanish it sounds pretty good." He might have added: "To everybody but those who understand Spanish."

Jack’s not quite correct about the publishing, unless it was done after this article was written. Merrick was a member of BMI and the song was published by what I presume was a Merrick company, Palisades Music. My guess is it had to be published so it could be used on television.

This was, to the best of my knowledge, Benny’s song’s swan song. It first appeared on TV on the January 9, 1958 edition of Shower of Stars in which, just as in the radio days, Benny tries to convince several people to sing it, including Tommy Sands and an old vaudeville colleague, Ed Wynn (who does a dramatic recitation). The writers dredged it up again for a Benny show in 1961, where they do a switch on the radio gag about dishes breaking every time Jack talks about giving 50 cents to a bum. In this case, playing the song opens windows. In 1962, he forces Lawrence Welk’s orchestra to play it (Jack, on his violin, repeats the old off-key/give-me-an-A bit), but Welk ruins Benny’s plans by turning the song into a polka (with the wonderful Madge Blake dancing with Mr. Wunnerful).

As funny as the Welk show is, my favourite version is from the radio show. Honorable mention goes to the Danny Kaye/Groucho Marx/Frank Sinatra/Sugar Throat travesty where the song morphs into something that sounds like a combination of The Chords and the Ink Spots. But the most enjoyable one to me is when Jack dreams a symphony orchestra is playing it at Carnegie Hall. Mahlon Merrick both satirises overblown arrangements but treats it straight as well with some beautiful string work. Maybe Jack’s lyrics were “a bomb” but Merrick’s music shows he really had great composing and arranging skills.

Something New: Cels!

How many of the artists connected with animated cartoons in the silent era are forgotten?

One of them is Bert Green.

You can read a short biography at the New York Public Library site. Green was animating Krazy Kat cartoons in 1916 and working for Pathé five years later, the same year he had a 14-minute vaudeville act with his cartoons.

In a post on Jerry Beck’s Cartoon Research site, chronicler Jim Korkis reveals Green was employed at MGM “sometime in the late 1930s and early 1940s,” though the 1940 U.S. Census has him back in New Jersey and cartooning for magazines. He had been in Hollywood, though; in 1933 he went on the Hal Roach payroll and in 1936 Variety reported he was working with former animation director Greg LaCava on the Universal lot.

Green died on October 4, 1948. He was 63.

He chatted about making cartoons move in this syndicated newspaper story of August 26, 1921.

Making Animated Cartoons Is the Modern Man's Job
By JAMES W. DEAN.
NEW YORK—If Job were alive today he would probably surrender his crown for patience to the makers of the animated cartoons.
The astonishingly life-like action portrayed by outlined figures on the screen is obtained by drawing a series of pictures, photographing each one separately and in sequence and projecting them on the screen.
"You can't get any more out of cartoons than you put into them," says Bert Green. He animates maps and charts and other things that would appear only as dry statistical subjects on the screen for Pathe News.

Pathe maintains a complete mechanical plant for turning out cartoons and animated diagrams.
The operator touches an electrical button for the "shot" of each separate drawing. Often the camera is standing on its head for the shot.
The photographed drawing is withdrawn and another substituted. This operation is repeated several thousand times to make a reel that will run six to eight minutes on the screen.
Winsor McKay, some eight or ten years ago, drew 1,000 drawings and moved them in succession before a motion picture camera to illustrate a day in the life of “Gertie, the Dinosaur.”
This modern Job's job is no longer entirely a one-man job. The cartoonist create the scenes, characters and incident. But the details of action such as a man running of falling are made by his assistants, called “animators.”
Formerly the entire figure and the scene represented were re-copied for each drawing. This seemed to be necessary for a complete negative.
However, a recent invention obviates that labor. It is called the celluloid sheet. It is sufficiently transparent for photography through it.
Thus, if only the head, the arms or the legs move, only the part that move has to be re-drawn. The main part of the character and the "set" remain under the camera lens.
The animator must be so proficient that the lines of the changed part will join with the unchanged lines.
Many tricks have evolved from camera animation. Some of them are the pen that moves across the screen with no hand to guide it, the ink blot that resolves itself into characters, the monkey's tail that sweeps across the screen and leaves the artist's signature.
The latter is employed by Paul Terry who is animating Aesop's Fables.
Animated cartoons have acquired a place on the screen of importance equal to that of the strip comic in newspapers.

The Bitingmobile

There are some very nice expressions (and shapes) by the cars in one scene of Ragtime Romeo (1931), when Flip the Frog won’t allow a large sedan to pass him.



Flips gets even when his car spews sooty exhaust at the vehicle behind him.

Only Ub Iwerks gets a title credit on this cartoon.

Quail! Rabbit! Quail!

“Bugs Bunny could have been a bird,” Tex Avery once said. No, Tex, he couldn’t. The proof is the dismal cartoon The Crackpot Quail (1941).

Avery took Bugs Bunny and turned him into a bird. He then took Elmer Fudd and turned him into a dog.

During the first encounter between the hunter and huntee, the dog comes to a Fudd-like late realisation. “Wait a minute!” he exclaims. “You’re a wabbit quail!”



The quail speaks into the dog’s ear. “Ya know, doc,” he admits confidentally, and then screams “I am a wabbit!You’re right!”



The quail takes off, ballet style, just like Bugs did in A Wild Hare



The dog, by the way, debuted in the enjoyable Of Fox and Hounds (1940). In this cartoon, he loses the “George” routine that Avery loved (and others copied). He’s really a proto-Meathead, the dopey dog in the Screwy Squirrel cartoons and, in a way, the quail is a primitive Screwy. There are no outrageous gags like you’d find in a Screwy cartoon. Instead, we get an incredibly boring scene involving the quail licking down its comma-shaped crest and an irritating, repetitive quail whistle. This one’s a real miss on Avery’s part (and that of his writer Rich Hogan).

The Great Prohaska

The most over-the-top actor on Gilligan’s Island was one whose face you never saw.

He appeared in several episodes, jumping around, grunting and gesticulating wildly, or giving a stop-and-sweep-the-head stare take.

He was a gorilla. Okay, he was a guy dressed in a gorilla suit. His name was Janos Prohaska. He always struck me as hammy but his appearances were always funny.

Prohaska showed up when the script called for a large comic relief animal. He used to play a bear as well; I remember he was on an episode of The Lucy Show. He appeared on other shows I simply can’t recall about 50 or so years after the fact.

Either he had a good agent or made good copy because TV Guide profiled him years and years ago. On a whim, I hunted in some old newspapers and discovered a few articles on him. I’m going to reprint the earliest one I spotted, from the Atlanta Constitution of November 1, 1959. This was pre-Gilligan and it seems Prohaska was on dramatic shows at the time. He seems wistful that he never got a crack at TV stardom. Considering TV was on the cusp of airing shows starring a housewife witch, a reincarnated car-mother, an astronaut-loving genie, and a crash-landed Martian, maybe he could have carried a full half-hour.

They Make a Monkey Of Janos; He Likes It
A Hungarian-born actor named Janos Prohaska has an unpleasant effect on women: They usually faint when he takes his head off.
This bothers him little because, you see, it isn’t his head.
The cur[l]y-haired, 40-year-old apes monkeys. He’s been doing it from the inside of his two-piece costume for 20 years—for money.
Prohaska turns up tonight as a pickpocketing chimpanzee who works with a conman (Vincent Price) on “Riverboat.”
There isn’t a fortune to me made in such a disguise, Prohaska confided to me over a recent breakfast in Hollywood. But, he said, the “Riverboat” role did pay him $1,500.
“I am thinking that somebody could make a serial of a chimpanzee,” he said hopefully, his eyes brightening. “Like Rin Tin Tim or Lassie. You could have so much fun with it. I like to make chimp—to make fun—to make people laugh.
“Chimps like to be cheeky, to do things you don’t want ‘em to do. They think like seven-year-olds.
* * *
When Prohaska was a seven-year-old, he was amusing his friends with handstands (“I was always a gymnast”) and at 12 he started his first show. “I went to work in a side-show with a schoolmate. The announcer said we came from the Palladium. I didn’t even know where that was.” (But he later appeared in the London Auditorium).
“We then worked in theatres and night clubs. Then, in 1939, I first did my chimp act with a costume I made from goatskin.
“But the costume was no good. I couldn’t move in it. It was too stiff. But the kids liked it.”
In 1942, his partner died; in 1943, Prohaska was pacted to appear in Spain—but he only got as far as Austria. “They wouldn’t let us out of the country,” Prohaska recalled. He escaped the draft and, in 1946, wound up working for the U.S. Army’s Special Services unit—appearing for 2½ years in various centers. In the meantime, Prohaska had married (he is now separated: his wife, one-time target in a knife-throwing act, now lives in Australia, raising their 13-year-old son).
After bouncing around for years, Janos, who said he appeared on TV in Berlin in 1941, made his U.S. TV debut on the Ed Sullivan show in 1956. Since then, he’s appeared on some Westerns.
* * *
Apart from funding suitable job offers, Prohaska’s other difficulty is in making his own chimpanzee outfit.
“First I make costume of nylon but was no good,” he said. “Too stiff, too heavy, too fire-danger. Now,” said the five-foot-four muscle-man, “I have one costume. It cost me $300 and six months to make. I make with rubber, jersey, leather and yak hair. I sew with needle—even the to[u]pee I wear on my head. The feet and hands are from latex.”
When Prohaska appeared for the “Riverboat” role with his costume, the outfit weighed a lot. “But they chop off almost half the hair. Now, it weighs seven pounds,” he said.
Prohaska maintains that he has no competition for his act.
“Oh, there are a few doing gorillas here but so far I’m the only one making the chimpanzee. Others are too stiff—like robots.”
* * *
When Prohaska turned up on the “Riverboat” set, he came face to face with a real chimpanzee.
“He has armed like dot”—Prohaska demonstrated the wingspan—“and shoulders like dot”—Prohaska became bug-eyed—“and we started playing footsies. At first he do not know I am not real chimp.
“Then,” smiled the actor, “he smell my skin. Then he know, he know. . .”

Science fiction fans will know Prohaska for his work on a number of TV series.

He died in a plane crash during a filming expedition for the series The Primal Man on March 13, 1974 near Bishop, California.

Boogie Woogie WACs

Pat Matthews was known for his sexy girl characters at the Walter Lantz studio, especially his animation on “Miss X” in a pair of 1944 releases.

But there’s a nice little walk cycle of three women in uniform in Lantz’s Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy of Company “B”, released three years earlier in 1941.

Whether Matthews was responsible, I don’t know. His son told animation blogger Kevin Langley that Matthews worked on Pinocchio but got caught at the Disney strike, which started in late May 1941, and went to work for Walter Lantz. This Lantz cartoon was released in early September, so it is possible the scene is Matthews’. I honestly don’t know who else at Lantz might have animated it. (Late note: a comment below points out the cycle is re-drawn from Scrub Me Mama With a Boogie Beat, released at the start in 1941. It’s unlikely, then, that Matthews animated this).

There are 36 drawings in this strut cycle. All but two of them are animated on twos, the other two drawings are one frame each to give a bit of a hitch in the walk. Here is a middle drawing, followed by two extremes.



They don’t look like much, do they? Ah, but here’s where the magic of animation comes in. Add the in-betweens and you get something pretty neat.



Alex Lovy and La Verne Harding get screen credit for animation. Danny Webb, who was in the army and on the other side of the U.S. from Hollywood when this cartoon was released, is the frog-voiced sergeant. My guess is the black vocalists who sing the title song provide some of the character voices as well.

It’s unfortunate there are a couple of stereotype clichés in this short and mangled Amos-and-Andy English (though not as bad). It’s not a great cartoon but you can enjoy Darrell Calker’s fine brassy score. Oh, and the Boogie Woogie WACs.

The Fudd Turnaround

For a rotund guy (for a while), Elmer Fudd could sure move.

Look at the speed lines in The Wacky Wabbit, a 1942 cartoon from the Bob Clampett unit. Clampett and his animators do something that Warners wouldn’t try years later. Elmer grabs his shotgun, then makes a stumbling, clockwise, 360-degree turn. Bugs then grabs Elmer and turns him around another 180 degrees and points with one hand, then another. It’d be considered a waste of animation by 1960 (think of the static Bob McKimson cartoons or Chuck Jones’ characters, inert except for a twitch).



I love this joyous drawing.



Sid Sutherland is the credited animator, while Virgil Ross, Rod Scribner and Bob McKimson likely animated this short as well.

Think Young, Stay Young

One of the reasons so many people were shocked when Jack Benny died was he looked not only healthy up until a few months before his death, but didn’t appear to be 80 years old, which he was.

He talked about youth to North American Newspaper Alliance columnist Cindy Adams, and talked about critics as well. Critics were generally kind to him, but he could get snippy about unfavourable reviews or low ratings. To be honest, though they are nostalgic today, at the time they aired Benny’s TV specials were really for Benny fans only. I doubt they attracted a new audience (especially followers of the counter-culture), even with overly obvious attempts to do it by booking “with-it” guests like Isaac Hayes who don’t look like they belong on the same screen with someone who had spent more than 20 years in vaudeville.

This was published April 26, 1968.

Jack Benny, at 39 Twice, Credits 'Thinking Young'
By CINDY ADAMS
NEW YORK (NANA)— At the age where he can almost celebrate his 39th birthday twice, Jack Benny is called by chums "the Jewish Dorian Gray."
Deep in the heart of his 70's, his smooth, unlined face is that of a man in his 40's. Being that I know Jack and being that I also hail from peasant stock, I asked straight out if he'd ever had his face lifted.
"No, but I'm certainly flattered you think so," he grinned. "Tell you one thing, though. If I had lifted it I'd gladly admit it. I'm in a business where I must look as well as I can. I'm not a fat clown like Buddy Hackett with a funny characteristic to fall back on or point up, so I have to try and look as well as I can.
"TO ME, THERE'S no shame in having a hairpiece or lifting your face or wearing a girdle. It's the same as fixing a broken arm or repairing a bent finger. I did consult my doctor recently about tightening the extra skin on my neck a bit, but he was against it I have diabetes and at my age he said he's prefer that I don't. If I badly needed it I'd do it, though. Meanwhile, when I'm being made up for television, we use a dark shade on my neck to make it less pronounced."
"You have your own teeth, your own hair," I said admiringly. "Tell me, what's the formula for staying young."
"Thinking young," said Benny. "In my act at the Waldorf, I have a teenage girl with me. I've always utilized youngsters. New talent gives you new life. Bob Hope and I are a toss-up as to who's the world's biggest ham. He says I am and I say he is. But the point is neither of us stop. We both keep up to date. We both travel. We both keep going. I still play as much golf as I can. Sometimes it's only nine holes but at least I play!"
BENNY'S LONGTIME manager, Irving Fein, and the Waldorf's publicity girl, Lola Priess, were shushking loudly in another corner of the suite. Benny peered over once . . . twice . . . then hollered, "Hey, . . . young lady . . . er . . . what's your name?"
"Lola," she hollered back. "Well, listen, Lola, do me a favor, will ya?" "Sure," came the returning holler.
"Shaddup," yelled Jack Benny. Then, grinning happily when everybody broke up, the professional cheapskate of radio and TV fame continued, "Of course, I have reached the point where I no longer stoop to pick up a penny. It now has to be at least a nickel."
And can a Jack Benny, at this stage in the game, ever flop on stage?
"NO, I DON'T really think so," he answered slowly, thinking about it. "My trouble is with critics, not audiences. If I've done two or three good shows in a row, they just figure it's time they rapped me, so they do. I feel that after my many years of producing good entertainment they should be more considerate, but they aren't.
"See, I know what's good for me. I know how to handle my audiences. That's why I'd be a lousy director. I'd always make everybody do things the way I'd do them because that is the only way I know.
"My comedy isn't funny on paper. It's only funny in the way I make it work. Even if my audience should be bad, they'll never know it and neither will anybody watching because someway, somehow, I'll be able to pull something out.
"Let me put it this way," he smiled. "I can always keep a show from not being as bad as some of my critics will say it was!"