Becoming A Wolf

Tex Avery (and writer Heck Allen) have some old favourites in store for you in Big Heel-Watha (1944). There’s Johnny Johnsen’s scenic background painting with overlays which the camera pans to start the cartoon. There’s the sexy girl wiggling her hips.



You know what that means in a Tex Avery cartoon—a wolf gets overcome with lust and can’t control himself. The variation this time—native Indians turn into wolves (and back).



The natives rush out of the cartoon, leaving behind Big Heel-Watha, who’s an old favourite, too, because he has Droopy’s voice. His bulbous nose will be transplanted onto a pilgrim in Jerky Turkey a year later.



See the teeth and curved upper lip. Ed Love at work. (I imagine Preston Blair did the Princess).

Anyone know whose phone number Hollywood 4-3211 was?

Silhouette of the Cactus Kid

Peg Leg Pete puts the El Adobe Café into darkness in The Cactus Kid, a 1930 Mickey Mouse short. We get a couple of silhouette drawings interspersed with cycle gunshot effect animation.



The cartoon has butt and crotch pain gags and Mickey playing a piano. In other words, a typical 1930 Disney cartoon. There are some cactus overlays and a shelf-on-the-bar overlay which, I guess, was elaborate for the time it was made.

Declared the Motion Picture News: “Good cartoon. MICKEY is a cowboy in this and rides to a saloon to make love to a rodent senorita. The villain enters and there is considerable fun. It averages well with others of this popular series, and has a sufficient number of laughs to please most audiences.” Variety decided: “For any house that wants to add novelty, comedy and a sure-fire audience-pleaser here's a pip rolled into six minutes. They don’t get into the Paramount [Theatre, a Columbia house in New York] by mistake and Walt Disney and his associates have combined pen and sound effects for beaucoup laughs.” Mickey Mouse was still in his heyday.

Goldfinger Knows Nooothing

Ridicule is a weapon. And some 20 years after the end of World War Two, America was still fighting the Nazis, except using ridicule.

It was called Hogan’s Heroes.

Well, it’s a stretch to call the main supporting “enemy” characters Nazis. Werner Klemperer’s Colonel Klink and John Banner’s Sergeant Schultz were reluctant German soldiers at best. Klink was a father’s disappointment who wanted his ego fed, Schultz seemed to hope the war would end any minute so he could go back to his toy shop. (Banner liked kids in real life; Richard Dawson remembered how Banner would come over and play with his children). But there was a menacing Nazi threat in the plot almost every episode which somehow got ignominiously defeated.

Klink and Schultz were really cartoonish characters, so that’s perhaps why I liked them. Both Klemperer and Banner’s fame came from the series, though Klemperer was also known as the son of outstanding conductor Otto Klemperer. Both actors came to North America to escape Nazism during Hitler’s rise. I suspect their roles (as well those of a number of Jews in the cast, especially Robert Clary) gave them great satisfaction that they posthumously stuck it to Adolf.

Banner was interviewed a number of times while the series was running. Here are a pair of syndicated newspaper columns, the first from the National Enterprise Association of October 1, 1965, and the second from the Los Angeles Times News Service from September 1st the same year.

One more series used Banner’s talents, but it only lasted 13 weeks in 1971. It was The Chicago Teddy Bears, and included Marvin Kaplan, Art Metrano and Huntz Hall in the cast. He was only 63 when died in 1973 of a stomach rupture while back in his birthplace of Vienna.

John Banner Ate His Way to a New Role
By ERSKINE JOHNSON
HOLLYWOOD (NEA)—Jackie Gleason, at 254 pounds, has lost his title as the biggest comedian on television.
The new champ, at 260 pounds, is John Banner.
Banner is the Vienna-born actor who plays the comedy role of Sgt. Hans Schultz in CBS-TV's "Hogan's Heroes." Background of the show is a World War II German prisoner of war camp and Hans is a bungling Nazi sergeant.
Banner "blames" his obesity on the good cooking of his French wife, Christine, who he claims is the world's best cook. "But of course, he adds, "I am a great lover of food. Until I met and married Christine, however, I really didn't know how or what to eat."
Until he met and married Christine, he laughs, "I was the leading man type—I weighed only 178 pounds."
The story of the leading man who became a portly character actor because of his wife's cooking was just one ironic note to be found this day on the set of "Hogan's Heroes."
The company was filming camp compound scenes on a movie back lot where the city of Atlanta was built, and burned, for the movie, "Gone With the Wind." Over the "southern" soil the Nazi flag now waved.
Over "southern" soil prop men also had scattered salt to double for German snow. For the winter scenes members of the cast were huddled in heavy wool overcoats—and perspiration dripped from their faces as if they were melting ice.

As usual in Hollywood, the shooting schedule calling for the outdoor winter scenes fell on one of the year's hottest days. The temperature was 89 degrees. John Banner's background is just as eyebrow lifting. This jovial man now playing a Nazi had fled from his native Vienna to the U.S. when Hitler's army marched into Austria.
In 1942 he joined the U.S. Army, taking his basic training at Atlantic City. While there he posed for an official army recruiting poster (widely used at Easter time) of a GI kneeling in prayer in church with hands clasped and rifle resting on his chest.
The accent John brought from Vienna has limited the acting he learned in Zurich to German, Russian and French characters. He has always wanted to appear in a western because of his theory that many of the first settlers in the west were German, some with heavy accents and some with no knowledge of English at all. "I have talked to many TV and movie producers and directors about this," he says. "They all agree with me but they all tell me, "The public wouldn't accept it! I wonder."

Viewing TV
Sgt. Schultz to Make Debut in CBS Series
By HAL HUMPHREY
HOLLYWOOD—John Banner is a 270-pound Austrian-American actor who has made almost an entire career of playing sputtering comic German soldiers.
His latest movie role was as the German sergeant with James Garner and Eva Marie Saint in "36 Hours." On Sept. 17 the TV audience will see his debut as Sgt. Schultz in the new CBS comedy series, "Hogan's Heroes."
Like many actors, Banner resents being type-cast, but not to the extent that he will pass up a steady job.
"This fellow Schultz on 'Hogan's Heroes' I'm very happy with. It's a miracle I got, the part at all. Everything seemed too perfect," he says.
IT WAS MORE than happenstance which got Banner off on his soldier character. A Czech by the name of Hasek had written a novel called "The Brave Soldier Schweik," which Banner had read.
Schweik was a World War I Austrian private, a hapless fellow who was drawn into trouble in spite of himself. Banner saw Soldier Schweik as a great type to copy as an actor.
"I believe it's wonderful to be able to laugh about militarism," says Banner.
He might have added that it is even necessary to laugh about it every so often if we are to remain sane. Part of his family and many friends were victims of the Hitlerian scourge which swept Austria while he was acting at Schauspielhaus in Zurich, Switzerland, under a two-year contract.
Following the Anschluss, Banner escaped through Switzerland to the United States in 1938.
IT WASN'T long after arriving here that Banner found himself a soldier in the U.S. Air Corps, and in a rare flash of military perspicacity he was made a supply sergeant.
"But this was a different army. I remember how amazed I was at being able to gripe about everything I didn't like and was told I could even write a letter to my congressman. In Germany I would have been shot for just thinking such a thing," adds Banner, laughing.
As Sgt. Schultz in "Hogan's Heroes," Banner is playing a German guard in a prisoner of war camp and becomes an unwilling ally of the American prisoner Col. Hogan (Bob Crane) and his men through fear of being sent to the Russian front.

"SOME PEOPLE ask me how we can be funny about a prison camp in the war, and I say to them how was it possible to write about two little old ladies who killed 12 men and buried them in the basement and make it funny? Well, somebody did, and it was called 'Arsenic and Old Lace.' We will always be able to laugh at someone flaunting authority," Banner maintains.
In addition to his blimp-type German, Banner has played a variety of Russian and Hungarian types. Now that he's been a naturalized American for many years, however, he is a bit piqued at the number of foreign actors imported for roles in American movies.
"For some reason," Banner says quite seriously, "Hollywood would rather take in foreigners. Now I could have played Goldfinger, but not, they brought over Gert Froebe, who did it well, but there were people here to do it.
"I saw 'Moraluri,' and I find they brought over four German actors for that one. Why is that? I can't work in England or most other countries because they don't want American actors," Banner adds, disgustedly.
Couldn't he work in Germany a while, then wait for American producers to rediscover him, I asked facetiously.
"Sure, in Germany I can work, but they don't make pictures there. There is no money," Banner sputters. Of course, if Hogan's Heroes clicks with the 1100 Nielsen rating families, and the sponsors' wives have no serious objection to Sgt. Schultz, Banner can be happy he is an American actor with a Viennese accent he can parlay into German, Russian, Swiss or South Slabovian.

Whose Rabbit is it Anyway?

Francois (Mel Blanc) tells rival chef Louis that the Bugs Bunny is HIS in French Rarebit, a 1951 Bob McKimson cartoon.

Note the positions of the fingers in this scene.



Then the emphasis.



Rod Scribner, Emery Hawkins, Chuck McKimson and Phil De Lara are the credited animators.

Expectorating For Your Convenience

Goats generally eat everything in an animated cartoon, but not in the Toby the Pup short Hallowe’en by the Charles Mintz studio. In this scene, a goat chews on a table, but spits out the wood to form a little footstool it can rest on.



The goat finishes the scene with a little comedy bray (is that what goats do?).



The scene is sandwiched in between animation of Toby playing the piano as various animals sway. Toby’s finger technique is excellent considering this is a 1930 cartoon. It’s actually a fun little short, with a witch pulling the skeleton out of a bird and other things like that. I suspect these frames are from a Thunderbean restoration.

Dick Huemer and Sid Marcus get a “by” credit “in collaboration with Art Davis.”

The Majority Rules at the Writers Table

Wonder no longer if you were curious about how Jack Benny’s writers put together his radio show. A shortened explanation is outlined in this 1947 syndicated story.

As a side note: I found one version dated October 17th in the “Daily Dialings” of the Latrobe Bulletin written by Alice G. Stewart. Two weeks later, the same story appeared, word for word, written by Leon Gutterman of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. Either someone wrote under a pseudonym or some pilfering was going on.

HOLLYWOOD—“The play's the thing” has been a truism ever since Shakespeare first said it—and now, more than ever, it applies to radio programs.
Jack Benny is a firm believer in the adage and one of the reasons for his tremendous popularity is the fact that he was one the first comedians in radio to unfasten his bankroll to lure top writers to his show.
The four happy lads who help Jack entertain his 25,000,000 listeners every Sunday night at 7 (EST) are Sam Perrin, Milt Josefsberg, George Balzer and John Tackaberry. Not only do large salaries keep these boys content, but the privilege of working with the keen editorial mind of Jack Benny and the fact that the comedian is one of the nicest men in show business, all contribute to making the Benny gang “one big happy family”.
The routine of fashioning a Benny script differs from that of most other programs. After the regular Sunday broadcast, Jack and his four writers meet in the script room and lay out the rough outline of the next week’s program. Monday is vacation and on Tuesday, Perrin and Balzer get together and start working on one part of the show while Josefsberg and Tackaberry write another part.
In the meantime, Jack Benny is thinking of the show as a whole and they all get together early Thursday morning to get down to the serious business of the first script. With Benny acting as a fifth writer and editor, the show is written, line by line and scene by scene, while Jeanette Eymann, the script girl, takes the script down in shorthand.
Although Jack Benny can insist on handling his program any way he sees fit, realizes that no one is infallible and always concedes to the majority opinion on a difference of opinion.
By Saturday at noon, the script is in good shape and the entire cast, along with producer Hilliard Marks, sit at a round table for a reading and timing. Benny and the writers spend the rest of the afternoon in the script room editing, polishing and very often re-writing, since a funny scene on paper can very often be dull when read.
On Sunday, the cast reads the new and fairly final script before a microphone at NBC where it is carefully timed. The comedian and his writers again huddle to cut or add to the script so that it will be exactly twenty-nine minutes and thirty seconds from the time that you hear “Hello folks, this is Jack Benny” to the closing, “We’re a little late folks, goodnight”.

Selling the Woodpecker Way

Walter Lantz played a waiting game that surely paid off.

Various theatrical cartoon studios gradually inked deals in the 1950s to get their old—and in some cases, almost worthless—animated shorts on television. Lantz worked out a TV distribution deal in February 1955 Matty Fox of Motion Pictures for Television for 149 of his black-and-white shorts.¹ KNXT alone paid a quarter of a million dollars to air them.²

But Lantz had cartoons that were more valuable: shorts in colour featuring his number one star, Woody Woodpecker, one of animation’s A-listers. Lantz waited for the right deal. And he got it. Kellogg’s, through its ad agency Leo Burnett, closed a $7,000,000 deal in June 1957 with ABC to sponsor five shows in the 5 to 5:30 p.m. half-hour—and one of the them was The Woody Woodpecker Show.³ It was a 104-week, non-cancellable contract.

Lantz was ecstatic. He proclaimed the deal “is more than any exhibitor will ever give.” And he claimed the TV series wouldn’t take away from theatrical releases, saying the show would “make people more conscious of cartoons. I don’t see how they can do anything but make people want to see more of our characters in theaters.”⁴

Woody made his TV show debut on October 3, 1957. Lantz decided to steal an idea from the Disneyland Show. If Walt Disney could host a TV show, Walt Lantz could host a TV show. Said Weekly Variety in reviewing Lantz’s small screen debut: “He’s a pleasant man, but hardly a polished performer, though since when do kids need the kind of polish adults demand in adults?”⁵

Agreed. Lantz was a little stiff and forced, but there is some charm in his interaction (though not on screen together) with his cartoon star. Reviews can be nice, but dollars are better for a cartoon studio that had been struggling financially for at least a decade and had to shut down for over a year. Kellogg’s sponsorship of Woody brought all kinds of publicity and cross-promotions (which translated into $$$$), like the ad you see below.



Broadcasting magazine reported on April 14, 1958:

Motorola Joins Kellogg Contest
Motorola, Inc. retailers are participating in the Kellogg Co.’s multi-million dollar “Woody Woodpecker Picture Puzzle” contest involving a tie-in deal with Corn Flakes and offering high fidelity portables as merchandise prizes. The contest, starting in mid-April, is being promoted on seven Kellogg tv programs (Woody Woodpecker, Superman, Buccaneers, Sir Lancelot, Wild Hickok, Name That Tune, House Party) and the hi-fi units will receive audio and visual mention during the commercials. Hi-fi dealers will use Woody Woodpecker point-of-sale and window displays to tie in with the national promotion and appliance store traffic will be directed to Corn Flakes boxes for entry blanks and details. First prize is $2,000 cash and a portable hi-fi in fibre glass. 700 other hi-fi units also will be awarded. Reportedly 17 million direct-mail pieces will be sent to consumers.

Kellogg’s decided to drop ABC for the 1958-59 season and buy time on individual stations on a syndicated basis.⁶ The line-up of shows was modified to include Hanna-Barbera’s new half-hour cartoon series The Huckleberry Hound Show (The Quick Draw McGraw Show was added to the “Kellogg’s Network” for 1959-60). Woody Woodpecker and his sidekick Walter Lantz remained. Why? Because Woody sold cereal. Here’s an example:

Capsule case history: Bob Simpson, the local Norfolk sales manager for the Kellogg Co., working with Mike Schaffer, merchandising and promotion director of WAVY-TV, set up a special merchandising campaign to supplement an extensive tv spot schedule on that station. The schedule consisted of sponsorship of three local kid shows: Quick Draw McGraw, Mondays, 5-5:30 p.m.; Woody Woodpecker, Tuesdays, 5-5:30 p.m.; and HuckleberryHound, Thursdays, 5-5:30 p.m. Result: WAVY’s efforts secured a major breakthrough for distribution of Kellogg’s cereals in the local Belo Chain Stores, one of the largest chains in the area. “We have had the best sales increase in the Norfolk market in many years,” Simpson told WAVY. In a letter to Mike Schaffer, C.P. Davidson, division sales manager for Kellogg, wrote “Business in the Norfolk market certainly shows the extra sales help we’ve been getting is definitely paying off. We hope to increase our programing on WAVY.⁷

Kellogg’s was looking to expand its syndicated cartoon tie-in even further. A deal with Hank Saperstein at UPA to sponsor a half hour Mr. Magoo show fell apart in September 1960. The cereal maker was expected to keep the woodpecker show in the fold⁸ but Screen Gems managed to sell Leo Burnett on a brand-new, half-hour Yogi Bear series and Kellogg’s decided to drop Woody in January 1961.⁹

Perhaps Lantz should have seen it coming. Hanna-Barbera characters increasingly became part of the Kellogg’s world, with its characters adorning cereal boxes (and Snuffles selling dog biscuits for the company). Hanna-Barbera was capable of churning out dozens of new cartoons for TV while Lantz had to rely on a comparative small number of used theatricals. The studio had won an Emmy for a series sponsored by Kellogg’s (Huck). And Screen Gems had costumed versions of its Kellogg’s-sponsored characters making promotional appearances all over the U.S., creating a possible spill-over advertising effect.

Lantz still had a theatrical release schedule with Universal, so he continued to make new cartoons for movie houses, and license his characters for comic books and Golden Records. And he re-inked with Kellogg’s in 1963 to put Woody back on TV¹⁰ with 185 stations airing the old cartoons, along with “Woody’s Newsreel,” “Around the World With Woody” and a three-part “History of Aviation” starting the week of January 16, 1964.¹¹ He even came out with a limited animation “Spook-A-Nanny” TV special with a Kellogg’s contest tie-in (winners and honorable mentions were named in six different classes of cities based on size).¹²

Woody became part of the Saturday morning line-up on NBC for two seasons starting in the fall 1970 and appeared on television off and on after that, even having an extended run on Canada’s YTV in the ‘90s when he wasn’t on the air in the U.S.

Lantz’s show ran into few problems while on the small screen. One was in 1961:

Iowa State U.’s WOI-TV Ames got its programming knuckles rapped in the State House last week because it telecast Woody Woodpecker instead of President Kennedy’s Feb. 15 news conference. Asked rapper Rep. William Denman (D-Des Moines): “What kind of distorted minds think it’s more important to broadcast Woody Woodpecker than the President of the U.S.?”¹³

There was one other problem: censorship. Black stereotypes? Nope, can’t air that. Characters drinking? Nope, can’t air that. Making light of the mentally ill? Nope, can’t air that. No wonder Lantz put the Beary Family on the air. The cartoons were innocuous. And lousy.

---

1 Daily Variety, Feb. 14, 1955, pg. 2^↩
2 Daily Variety, Oct. 17, 1955, pg. 92^↩
3 Broadcasting, June 17, 1955, pg. 39^↩
4 Motion Picture Daily, Dec. 11, 1957, pg. 2^↩
5 Weekly Variety, Oct. 9, 1957, pg. 28^↩
6 Weekly Variety, June 25, 1958, pg. 27^↩
7 Sponsor, July 11, 1960, pg. 56^↩
8 Weekly Variety, Sept. 21, 1960, pg. 29^↩
9 Weekly Variety, Oct. 19, 1960, pg. 23^↩
10 Sponsor, March 18, 1963, pg. 53^↩
11 Daily Variety, Jan. 1, 1964, pg. 25^↩
12 Broadcasting, Nov. 23, 1964, pg. 50^↩
13 Weekly Television Digest, Feb. 20, 1961, pg. 6^↩

Running Down a Dog

How many frames does it take to run down an owner and his dog? Let’s find out from Tex Avery in Crazy Mixed up Pup.



The correct answer would appear to be eight. That’s how many frames it takes for the car to enter and exit the scene.



Don Patterson, Ray Abrams and La Verne Harding are the animators on this short, the first of four that Avery directed for Walter Lantz before quitting theatrical animation for good.