Mouth in Minnie the Moocher

A witch comes flying at the theatre audience in Minnie the Moocher, a 1932 Fleischer short that exists to highlight the title song as sung by a rotoscoped Cab Calloway as a walrus. (At least, I think it’s a witch. I don’t think it’s Minnie).

Disney for a year or so on either side of 1930 had characters swallowing the camera. It kind of happens in this Fleischer short, except in this case, the mouth has two uvulas that wail before the pictures vanishes into blackness.



The camera pulls back to reveal the blackness is now a cave from which Betty and Bimbo emerge.



Willard Bowsky and Ralph Somerville receive animation screen credits on this one.

Plain Speaking About Plainfield

Plainfield, New Jersey got almost as much publicity on the Jack Benny radio show as Waukegan, Illinois.

Waukegan was Benny’s home town. Plainfield was Mary Livingstone’s home town.

Well, that depends on which Mary Livingstone you’re talking about.

The character Mary Livingstone was from Plainfield. She was played by Sadye Marks, who then legally changed her name to her character’s name. Miss Marks wasn’t from Plainfield. She was born in Seattle and grew up in Vancouver in Canada.

Benny liked blurring lines between reality and show biz on his show; when the Benny show was broadcast from Vancouver in 1944, he threw out 12 years of Plainfield and admitted Mary was back in her hometown. It was never mentioned again; it was back to Plainfield for the radio version of Mary.

The confusion encouraged some false memories, as revealed in this story from June 2, 1959 in the Courier-News of Bridgewater, New Jersey.

Millions Think So, But ...
Jack Benny's Wife Not from Plainfield
Millions of Americans have heard of the Queen City through a woman who never lived here. She's Mary Livingstone, Jack Benny's "fan from Plainfield, N. J." The whole thing is a 27-year-old radio and television gag that has been popping up periodically ever since Benny, the popular comedian, first used it in 1932.
The story goes this way:
In 1932, his first year in radio Benny had a sketch with a part in it for a fictional fan named Mary Livingstone from Plainfield, N. J. She was supposed to ask the comedian for his autograph.
"It was just a couple of lines," Benny recalled. "But we couldn't find a girl to read it right. I asked Mary (her real name was Sadye Marks, and he had married her in 1927) to help out. She did. Then she wasn't on the next week, and the fans started writing like crazy wanting to know when that girl from Plainfield, N.J. was coming back on the show."
So Mary came back. And from then on she and Jack—born Benjamin Kubelsky—built up by occasional mention the legend that she was a former department store clerk from Plainfield.
She was a department clerk. But in Los Angeles, not in Plainfield.
"In fact," Benny once said, the Plainfield gag "is one of the very few things on our program that isn't basically true. Once in a while," he added, "we get a letter from someone in Plainfield claiming they remember Mary's folks and where she lived."
(Although there are several Livingston—without the "e"—families in the area, only one lives in Plainfield, according to the telephone directory. And Dr. and Mrs. S. R. Livingston of 650 W. Seventh St. have occasionally received phone calls from persons who want to talk with Mary Livingstone.)
Why did Benny choose Plainfield for his bit part?
"We used Plainfield," he said, "because it is close to New York and the name of the seemed just right for this particular character.

There’s no false memory when it comes to Mary’s first appearance, though it was more than “a couple” of lines. It’s quite true that the character was not on the following show (Jack was doing two a week when Canada Dry sponsored him in 1932-33) but returned the following week. Other than Mary when developed “a sore throat” or “the flu,” which seemed to happen more often than anyone else in radio, she continued to be a regular character until she finally told Jack in the early ‘50s to let her stop appearing. She missed some weeks and the rest of the time she pre-recorded her lines, at times in an unenthusiastic monotone. The fake Mary may have been a fan. The real one was a very reluctant star.

Why We Like Cartoons

Cartoons make me happy. I’m sure they make you happy, too (well, good ones, anyway). I don’t need some professorial psychoanalysis to tell me this.

However, I guess someone did. Here’s an unbylined article that appeared in newspapers starting on December 24, 1930. I wonder if this didn’t come from the Warner Bros. PR department. The first Looney Tunes cartoon had been released about eight months before this story appeared.

“Bosco” was the character’s preferred spelling by the studio into 1931.

Psychological Appeal Of Cartoon Comedies Explained
Antics Of Characters Contrary To Established Laws Of Reality.
The appeal of the cartoon type of comedy has become so universal that it has piqued the curiosity of psychologists as well as of motion picture producers. The explanation of the public liking for cartoon comedies is of an unusual nature.
Leading psychologists declare that people are always interested in anything that acts contrary to the established laws of nature and their own sense of reality. The mystic tricks of magicians always find a ready audience. One must remember that the average layman attends the theatre to enjoy the things that take him away, for the time being from the humdrum happenings of everyday life. By means of animated cartoons, which have become so popular, the artist is able to present situations which by the very nature of their unusualness, enable the audience to lift itself for the moment, out of this life into the land of make-believe.

A good example of this is evidenced in the "Looney Tunes" series of Vitaphone song cartoons. In one of the releases, Bosco, the central cartoon figure, whistles for his auto which comes running to him to the tune of a popular song. In still another of the series is shown a brute of a hippopotamus rendering popular selections on a guitar. The "Looney Tunes" cartoons are devised by Hugh Harman and Rudolph Ising with a special musical arrangement by Frank Marsales.
The cartoonist is allowed great opportunity for imaginative skill. The more fantastic, the more unusual the antics of his characters, the better chance for success the attraction has. The element of impossibility and surprise in animated cartoons is a feature greatly appreciated by audiences. Added to the highly amusing though impossible situations, the use of music and sound effects, well synchronized, have probably done more to popularize the cartoons than any other factor.
The increasing popularity of the "Looney Tunes" series as well as other animated cartoons of like nature, bears out the contention of psychologists and the experience of exhibitors that the antics of cartoon characters are relished by the public because of the element of surprise, due to their improbabilities, and the amusing manner of their presentation.

Takes of the 1920s

Here he is, that noted silent film star—Walter Lantz.



Long before Lantz hosted the Woody Woodpecker Show on TV, he co-starred on screen with his cartoon creations Dinky Doodle and Weakheart (a dog) in a series of animated shorts for Bray. Lantz’s acting won’t evoke memories of Buster Keaton, but it’s serviceable for a cartoon.

Tex Avery may have been noted for exaggerated takes but the man who was his boss on two occasions was doing it back in the mid-‘20s. In Just Spooks (1925) there are a bunch of imaginative ideas. Here’s a big eye take. Unfortunately, Lantz doesn’t start with small eyes and make them huge in four or six frames. Instead, he does a fear take with two drawings alternating, one with wiggly lines. Carlo Vinci was doing the same thing more than 30 years later at Hanna-Barbera.



There is a growth take. It’s pretty good but the timing isn’t crisp. Lantz cuts away from it too soon with the characters still in mid-air. Here’s how it starts and ends.



Clyde Geronimi gets screen credit as Lantz’ assistant.

The Crook Jumped Over the Moon

You know a gag is coming but what’s it going to be?

Disappointing, it turns out.

In the climax scene of the ComiColor short The Brementown Musicians (1935), the animals tossed out by a farmer return to save him from burglars. In some cycle animation, the donkey kicks the identical crooks out the door and into the night sky.



The first couple sail over the moon. You get the feeling a gag is being set up. Why would it be happening otherwise?



Here it is. The moon swallows one of the burglars, then spits him out. That’s the gag.



Iwerks must have decreed his cartoons be filled with radiating lines. They all have them. The moon sprouts them in this scene.



Iwerks and musician Carl Stalling are the only ones with credits on this cartoon, which has could have had whimsy, but didn’t.

Ethel and Yvonne

No amount of Shark Repellent Bat Spray could kill the shark over which Batman jumped entering its final TV season. The first sign of a toothy creature swimming toward the series was the addition of Batgirl. 11-year-old me realised in 1967 it was a ratings gimmick. The next sign were the villains that simply couldn’t be taken seriously. Milton Berle? Oh, come on. Ethel Merman? She wasn’t evil. Well, maybe she was to Ernie Borgnine. All you saw on the TV screen was Ethel Merman, not a character. The worst was the episode with the pied piper/mechanical mice. I had turned 12 by then and just rolled my eyes. Any sense of adventure or suspense to keep kids tuned had been tossed out by the producers, who just seemed to be amusing themselves.

Ethel and Batgirl were used as selling points for the coming season. Here’s a story from the National Enterprise Association from August 31, 1967 quoting the Merm and Yvonne Craig, who played Batgirl. The columnist doesn’t have any idea who Batgirl’s character is. And Merman eventually did play Dolly Levi.

Ethel Merman Bids Broadway ‘Good-Bye’
By DICK KLEINER
Newspaper Enterprise Assn.
HOLLYWOOD — Batman, this coming season, has lost an episode but gained a daughter. The Caped Crusader — or, if you prefer, The Riotous Rodent — will only be on ABC once a week. But this year, there will be a Batgirl on the premises.
Not only that, but producer Howie Horwitz is going ahead snagging off unexpected guest stars to spice up the proceedings. One such is Ethel Merman, playing a character named Lola Lasagna. She did a two-parter, working with Burgess Meredith (The Penguin) and she had a batball.

“That’s what I want to do from now on,” Miss Merman said, still full of enthusiasm. “Just do different things. I did a Tarzan in Mexico and loved it. And I loved this.”
The greatest Broadway musical star of them all has turned her back on the Broadway musical stage. For good, she says.
“No more of those long runs for me.” Ethel says. “I wouldn’t do another Broadway musical for anything. I turned down ‘Hello Dolly’ and ‘Mame’— that ought to prove I’m serious about it.”
She wouldn’t mind a drama—something like “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”—or perhaps a limited-engagement musical. But more than anything, she wants a television series. No more big musicals, though.
“I don’t think much of Broadway musicals these days,” she says. “They’ve changed. Why, some of the performers these days won’t even do matinees. Imagine that.”
A girl who would gladly do a Broadway musical is Yvonne Craig, the delightful young actress who is the new Batgirl. In fact, she’s Batgirling it this year in the hopes that this will lead to something — like perhaps a musical.
Yvonne Craig has two of the three talents needed for the musical stage—she is originally a ballet dancer and now an accomplished actress. As for the third, singing, she’s studying.
Actually, Yvonne took the Batgirl part for two reasons — she wanted recognition (“I’ve done many guest shots, but people never put the face and name together”) and credit cards.
As a free-lance actress,” she says, “I could never get a credit card. They figure that free-lance actresses are not good risks. The only way I got a gasoline credit card is because a friend let me put down that I was a part-time secretary with his company.”
Yvonne Craig spent three years with the Ballet Russe, so she knows what she's talking about, entrechat-wise. And if you have a daughter thinking about ballet — or if you're thinking about ballet for her — Yvonne’s ideas are worth considering.
Yvonne didn’t start studying dancing until she was 14, which runs counter to the old theory that the younger a girl starts the better.
“I think,” she says, “that it can be harmful to start too young. If I had a daughter and she was built right — loose — I wouldn’t start her until she was about 12, ten, perhaps. But no younger.”
She also has a theory that ballet schools should teach a course in anatomy along with dancing. A dancer, she believes, should know about the muscles in her body and how much punishment they can take.
So practice dancing, work hard, learn about muscles — and maybe you, too, can be a Batgirl.

Judging by that story, Yvonne was quite happy to get her name in print. We transcribed one interview she did in this post. Here’s another one, published September 19, 1967. I don’t know which syndicate employed the columnist who wrote it. Again, fame seems to be of great importance to her.

Batgirl Is a Lively Little Lady
By FRANK LANGLEY
NEW YORK — There are some people who are just too darned pretty in real life to be adequately captured by a camera.
Yvonne Craig is one of them.
The Lively little (5’4”) lady, who has launched a new phase of her career as Batman’s Batgirl (“they call me the Bat Broad on the set") really doesn't need the smooth delicate facial features, the unassuming teenage lips or the handsome mannerisms of the uncluttered mind, to be classified a true beauty.
These things serve mainly as a frame for the loveliest eyes since Elizabeth Taylor popped on the scene many a moon ago.
And surprisingly enough, behind those absorbing orbs, there is a brain to match.
“I have a pretty face,” Yvonne admitted, “but it is a face without a name.
“In television, you can work steadily on any number of shows and when you’re seen, you’re forgotten. I’ve had guest parts in a dozen or more series but I’m still unknown today.

“That’s what I like about the Batgirl role. After I’m seen in this, my face and my name will become associated and there’s nothing more important in show business.”
Yvonne was offered a series role in a show, The Mothers In-Law, dominated by two potent personalities, Eve Arden and Kaye Ballard.
“Of course I wanted to do it,” she admitted, “but I could see that it would be little more than an entrance and exit situation. In the end I would still be a face without a name.
“I think and hope the show will be a great success, but I also think my chances will be better with Batgirl.”
Yvonne has an added opinion for which the Girl Watchers of America should be grateful. She despises the modern fashions that have “made the bosom and the waist obsolete.”
“I think the women of America are so diet conscious today because we have gone through an era where waists have been practically unknown. “With all these tent dresses and straight up-and-down fashions, women haven’t had to worry about the lines of their figures. And the result is a waistless society.”
And that is another area in which Yvonne excels. For whatever else viewers will think of the new Batgirl, they must admit to a man that she cuts a striking figure on the show.

Craig did as well as she could with the Batgirl role. She’s more fondly remembered today, I suspect, than in 1967 because those 11-year-old boys that didn’t see a need for her on the show figured out the reason later in life.

How to Turn a Car Inside Out

Puns, parodies and impersonations fill the screen in Tex Avery’s Thugs With Dirty Mugs, a 1939 short for Warner Bros., but there’s an impressive little scene involving the bank robbers’ getaway car.

It turns a corner. There are some frames where the car is tipped on an angle as Avery goes for a cinematic effect. Someone in his unit had to be able to draw a car convincingly for this.



The gag is the car skids to a stop and the force turns it around—and inside out. These are consecutive frames.



Sid Sutherland is the credited animator (or was until a Blue Ribbon re-issue in 1944). Jack Miller got a writer credit.

Follow the Bouncing Cop

Warren Foster came up with two great foils for Bugs Bunny—Rocky and Muggsy, the bank robber and his henchman, after director Friz Freleng tested the gangster idea in some other cartoons.

Bugs and Thugs (1954) includes the well-known scene about Bugs, Rocky and Muggsy in the stove, a variation on a bit Mike Maltese came up for Freleng in Racketeer Rabbit (1946). The former is the funnier of the two cartoons, but there are some nice bits in the latter.

In one sequence, Bugs calls police to tell them he’s got the bank robbers. Muggsy drags him out of the phone booth and shoves him in Rocky’s getaway car (“A 1952 Acme...Straight 8...Overhead valves!”) and drives away, with Bugs still on the phone.



The next gag is a still obvious. It’s one of those coming-through-the-phone gags. As the car zooms farther away (off camera) the cop Bugs was talking to is pulled through the phone from the police station. I’ve always liked how he bounces on the pavement and somersaults out of the scene.



This cartoon was made before the six-month 3-D shutdown at Warners in 1953. The animators are Virgil Ross, Ken Champin, Art Davis and Manny Perez.

Joan Benny on Her Dad

Columnist Vernon Scott posed the question “What is Jack Benny really like” and tried to get the answer from his daughter Joan.

Years later after her dad’s death, she put the answer into a book, along with parts of an autobiography her father had set aside. It’s excellent reading for any Benny fan.

Here’s what she had to tell Scott of United Press International. This was published Christmas Day 1962.

Daughter Assesses Jack Benny
By VERNON SCOTT
UPI Hollywood Correspondent
HOLLYWOOD (UPI) — What is Jack Benny REALLY like?
Not even his own daughter can provide the answer.
Joan Benny Rudolph, the comedian’s adopted daughter, spent the better part of three weeks touring the country in an attempt to enlighten the populace on the subject of parent Benny.
The pretty, blue-eyed young woman was hired by a public relations firm to spread the news that papa’s show had been switched from its traditional Sunday night television slot to Tuesday nights. But more interest was evidenced in Benny the homebody than Benny the comedian and sometime violin player.
"Daddy was surprised and somewhat indifferent when he learned I was going to be a press agent for his show," Joan said. "But he was pleased when he saw what a good job I did.
"My biggest problem was trying to explain what Daddy is really like when he isn’t performing. There just isn't any answer to that.
"He’s just like every other father, I guess.
"Daddy isn’t funny around the house. He doesn’t try to be. I know Milton Berle, Bob Hope and Red Skelton are funny when they aren’t performing, but Daddy’s different.
"Actually, he is very much the same kind of person he is on the show, except, of course, he isn’t a miser and he doesn’t drive a Maxwell. Daddy is never on when he’s at home. My mother (Mary Livingstone) is a little nervous, but not Daddy."
Joan is divorced and the mother of two children. She lives in Beverly Hills and sees her parents frequently.
"Daddy and I are very close, and we're both fanatic Dodger fans. We go to a lot of the games together.
"And I must say I approve of the way my parents raised me. I was unaware of being different from any of the other kids when I was a child. I really didn’t know I had very famous parents. Of course most of the other kids in Beverly Hills have famous fathers and mothers, too. It wasn't until I went to Stanford to college that people made any fuss over me."
Only once did Joan attempt to take advantage of her father’s position. In the old days his writers held conferences in the Benny home, plotting out weekly shows.
“One day I asked the writers if they would put together a script for me for my valedictory address from grammar school,” Joan recalled with a smile. “Well, they wrote one for me but it was so full of jokes I was afraid to read it for our graduation exercises. So I had to sit down and write a speech of my own.”
As a press agent Joan visited 16 major cities in three weeks. In each metropolis she was met by a CBS-TV representative who set up press conferences.
“I enjoyed myself, but there wasn’t enough time to really see and enjoy the cities. All I can remember about most of them was the long ride from the airports to my hotel rooms — usually about 45 minutes.
“I don’t have any plans for becoming a full-time press agent,” Joan concluded. “I’m happy enough being a mother. And if I ever discover what the ‘real Jack Benny’ is like I’ll let you know.”

Bloody Woodpecker

Cartoon characters have been used over the years to shill products—think of Woody Woodpecker and a certain cola. And they’ve also been used in the field of public service.

You can think of Woody Woodpecker again.

The impression I’ve always had of Walter Lantz is a friendly man, interested in his community (and constantly finding ways to cut down on expenses). It would appear he was approached to make a cartoon to encourage people to donate blood, and agreed to use his star character in them. Whether he did this from the goodness of his heart or charged for them is unclear. As the story below doesn’t state it was done for free, I would suspect Lantz got a cheque.

The artwork for this cartoon is, no doubt, in the Lantz archives at UCLA. The PSA itself, sadly, isn’t on line. All we can do is post this little news story wherein Lantz talks about how cartoons are made and the expense thereof.

It’s a little surprising to read musical director Clarence Wheeler had a 24-piece orchestra at his disposal (being paid at union rates). One of the 1950s Woodys he scored has little more than a small Wurlitzer organ in the background.

The story was published by the North American Newspaper Alliance on January 11, 1953; I haven’t found a version with a byline. Universal had released What's Sweepin' not too many days before this. It was directed by Don Patterson; the frames in this post are from that short.

Woodpecker Appeals For Blood
NEW YORK (NANA)—Woody Woodpecker, dear to juvenile addicts of animated cartoons and comic strips, is the first to do his stuff in the cause of humanity.
Perhaps you saw Woody on the screens of movie houses of the nation, performing under auspices of the Red Cross, in its appeal for blood. The little act occupied only 1 1/2 minutes, yet was compelling.
Creator of the nation's "laugh-bird" is Walter Lantz, current producer of Woody, Wally Walrus, Buzz Buzzard, and others, whose early pictures include The Katzenjammer Kids, Happy Hooligan, and Krazy Kat.

SHORT AS WOODY'S performance was, 45 artists from the Lantz studio in Los Angeles and an orchestra of 24 pieces were required to prepare it for screening.
Included also were several actors engaged to supply the woodpecker and other associates with voices. Hollywood actors supplement their incomes appreciably through talking the way ducks and walruses and mice and other cartoon subjects probably would talk, if they could. Pay depends upon what they have to do, but even the reader of a few lines receives $100. As for an actor of vocal versatility--four or five voices--rich is his reward.
Forty drawings, says Lantz, are required for a scene occupying 1 1/2 seconds.
"And a picture costs us $75 a foot, with that foot lasting two-thirds of a second. So," said Lantz, "you can see the process of shooting a cartoon is expensive. But," he added, "what with the sales to exhibitors and my cartoon books circulating 30 million annually, we happen to be able to stand production costs and make money besides."
WHY HAVE SO subjects of great popularity in past years either vanished from the screen, or appear only at long intervals?
"They have been killed off," Lantz said, "through too long and too frequent showings. Even Mickey Mouse, appears only occasionally these days. We have to watch for that. In the case of Woody Woodpecker, we limit him to seven pictures yearly. As time goes on we will have to reduce this number. Yet, after a complete 10-year lapse, we find our old pictures welcomed by a new generation."

A complete cartoon play, Lantz pointed out, involves at least 7,000 drawings and 100 persons of various capacities. Ten years are required for development of a new animated cartoon. Sound effects? Four to five hundred different voices, noises of various sorts, and other effects are used in every cartoon. There will be 600 or 700 drawings in every sequence of film play.
"Of course," said Lantz, "animated cartoon birds, animals, the like are accepted by kids as real. I just had word from Hollywood that the volume of Christmas mail addressed to Woody Woodpecker already has exceeded an estimated 15,000."
Walter Lantz, preceded in the animated cartoon and comic-strip field only by the late Winsor McKay [sic] and by the author of "Terrytoons," was born in New Rochelle of Italian parentage. He attended local public schools and later studied art at the Art Students League in New York. Of course, he loves animals and birds. He has a house full of them in Los Angeles.