Making a Puppetoon

Stop motion animation should seem primitive today but there’s still something warm and touching about the best of the films made by George Pal for Paramount. Pal moved on from shorts when they simply got too expensive to make.

His Puppetoon technique won him an honorary award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1944. Calling his series “Madcap Models” was purely alliterative. There wasn’t really anything madcap about Pal’s work, certainly not in films such as Tulips Will Grow and John Henry and the Inky-Poo.

Pal’s main character is viewed as an unfortunate stereotype today. At the time, nothing would have been thought of it. Jasper is involved in telling the story of the Puppetoons to a United Press reporter in an article published on July 20, 1945.

PUPPETOONS' RESENT TRADE COMPARISONS
George Pal Gets 'Oscar' For Three-Dimensional Movie Shorts.
By ED BARLOW.
United Press Staff Correspondent.
HOLLYWOOD.—(UP)—Hollywood's only wooden-headed Academy Award winner became highly indignant when I suggested he might someday surpass Pinocchio.
"Who's this character pistacchio? Never heard of him! Who starred him and what'd he do?" Jasper and his crow-packin' friend the Scarecrow were really mad now.
"Well—uh—he was a puppet, you see, and he wanted to lose his strings, and uh—that is—"

"Well, sho 'nuff, boy, do you see any strings on me anyhow?" the Scarecrow was wielding an oversized razor so I agreed he was absolutely stringless.
When I had assured them they made Pinocchio a piker, the stars of George Pal's "Puppetoons" sat down and gave me their life histories.
Seems there is—are—thousands of Jaspers. Just as animated cartoons use a separate drawing on celluloid for each movement, Pal builds a separate wooden figure or puppet. Twenty-eight leading ladies are needed for one complete wink of an eye.
Every figure and all the scenery, props and settings are turned out by hand. It is the third-dimensional effect thus created that won Pal a special "Oscar."
Script writing and composition of music are the first steps in one of these productions. Then miniature sets are created, exact in every detail, by skilled craftsmen.
"Tellim about the paint, the paint, the paints," squeaked the bobbing crow. Seems the paint room is a nerve-center of the Pal studios.
"Yawsuh, all of me is gotta be painted exactly the same way with all them lines in just the same place or ah jumps around like ah had strings," commented Jasper.
Arms and legs are made of flexible materials and animated by men who have developed a skill for maintaining registration with every movement.
All the tricks of stage lighting and color can be employed in the technicolor "Puppetoons," since everything is three-dimensional.
"Whatchyall mean with this here third-digressional hocus-po-lukus. I ain't no digressional scarecrow. I is a Democrat."
Music, dialog and sound effects are recorded in advance and the action inserted later to insure perfect synchronization in the finished film.
"Cawt, cawt, camera. Look at that hunk of junk, willya?"

The camera isn't the regular three-strip technicolor affair, but a specially-designed job. Exposures are made on a single negative thru varicolored filters by means of a color wheel on the camera. A special attachment permits variation of length of ex posure on each screen frame, and the color records are separated on a special printer and made into the finished product.
Small lens apertures, much as used in still photography, aid in creating depth of field and the extra dimension effect.
"There y'all go with the digression stuff again."
Pal's stars really should speak with a Dutch accent, since they got their start in Eindhoven, Holland, where the Puppetoon idea got its start under sponsorship of large advertisers.
Pal, an architecture graduate and artist, trained a large staff of specialists in Holland and soon had the largest animation studio outside the United States.
Then he was brought to Hollywood by Paramount.
One part of the Pal studio is blocked off nowadays, with a sign proclaiming it the business of Uncle Sam only. Some of Jasper's distant cousins are being used in army training and educational films bearing top hush-hush ratings.
"Yeah, and you tell this here peanutsio or whoever not to go a-triflin' around in our territory or we'll splinter him like a toothpick—yah heah us?"

Pal’s last short was Rhapsody in Wood (1947), ending up with seven Oscar nominations in total for his Puppetoon releases. Pal then jumped into feature films. He received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1960 and passed away in 1980 at the age of 72.

A is for Atom

A is For Atom won at least nine awards for the John Sutherland studio as it propagandised how atomic energy was great for all humanity.

Tony Rivera, formerly of Disney and Lantz, and later of Hanna-Barbera and UPA, was the designer for this animated short, with art direction by Gerry Nevius and Lew Keller. Characters in this cartoon are drawn with huge atom symbol heads living in Element Town. Narrator Bud Hiestand explains the elements are numbered according to how many protons they have in their nucleus.

The animation shows Hydrogen has one proton, oxygen has eight, gold (“he’s rich,” explains Hiestand, hence the tycoon outfit) with 79, and uranium with 92. He’s the heaviest in protons, so he’s depicted as heavy.



Hiestand then reveals there are families of atoms with the same protons, but different numbers of neutrons. We see the uranium family, the tin family popping up from inside their home, while the tentative aluminum, all alone, quickly falls back into its coffee pot.



The film was copyrighted in 1952 but was released theatrically the following year. General Electric paid for its making, with Arnold Gillespie and Emery Hawkins credited with animation and MGM veteran Carl Urbano as the director.

Spike Punctured

Some years ago, the U.S. Library of Congress decided to put Daredevil Droopy in its collection. Maybe they wanted a cartoon full of Tex Avery’s standard gags, because there’s not a lot that’s really inventive here. He and gagman Rich Hogan pulled out the “Timmmm-brr” routine, the explosion/blackface bit, the shot-a-hole-through-the-body gag, the wrong-thing-falls-after-sawing joke. You’ve seen them all before.

In other cases, you know what’s going to happen before the scene ends.

The cartoon is a variation of The Chump Champ, where Droopy and Spike compete against each other, except that one has a far better ending. Here’s a gag which needs nothing from me to set it up, other than the observation that Spike’s snicker was, more or less, borrowed by Hanna-Barbera several years later for a number of its doggy characters.



Grant Simmons likely animated much of this scene. Mike Lah and Walt Clinton are the other animators with voices by Bill Thompson, Pat McGeehan and Billy Bletcher pulled out of the archive for the ending.

Hip 10-Year-Olds With No Caramel Corn

The world needs more creative, off-beat humourists. Unfortunately, we have one less. Or is that one fewer?

Buck Henry has passed away. No doubt he could take the first paragraph and turn it into a sketch about grammar Nazis, perhaps defeated by the forces of Allied illiterates.

I first noticed his name on Get Smart as one of those 10-year-olds he talks about in an article below. The show, at first, was a brilliant satire on spy films. As life went on, I noticed Henry’s name tacked to comedy that was usually very interesting to watch.

He started out in improv, a place with a new kind of comedy, a place not littered with fat wife jokes or seltzer bottles, and moved along from there. This feature story from 1963 is a nice indication of his sense of humour.

Says He Dreamed It Up
Gag Writer Claims Drive To Clothe Animals Is Hoax
By VERNON SCOTT
PALM SPRINGS, Calif., March 14 (UPI)—A nation-wide "drive" to clothe animals was unmasked Thursday as a hoax perpetrated by television gag writer Buck Henry who posed as G. Clifford Prout Jr., but who genuinely is Buck Zuckerman of New York. All three are one and the same man—Zuckerman.
Resting in the desert sun at a resort hotel where he is registered as Buck Henry, writer for "The Garry Moore Show," he said: "I had no particular reason for dreaming up the Society for Indeceny to Naked Animals (SINA)."
Henry, who as Prout picketed the White House, in an attempt to dress animals decently, says, "everything fell illogically into place."

"I did it partly to amuse Buck Henry, but Prout takes it all very seriously. I know Prout quite well. He's a great guy. I wouldn't say he's eccentric, but has the qualities of most men his age (32) only more so."
Playing it straight-faced, Henry-Prout-Zuckerman said he believes zealot Prout has as much right to be taken seriously as anyone else.
"He's very sincere about Sina. He no longer is shocked by seeing unclothed animals. He just feels a deep chagrin and suffers moral pain when seeing naked animals."
Newspapers, television news shows and periodicals took Prout seriously during his campaign to clothe animals, much to the amusement of Henry-Zuckerman. Asked if he was a split personality, Henry refused to answer.
He admitted seeing the movie "Three Faces of Eve" but said, "I found it very hard to believe." The picture dealt with a woman who had a three-way split personality.
"I am Buck Henry most of the day. But if I'm operating as Prout it is at a definite time and place. He operates very efficiently. Zuckerman and Henry overlap," he said. "Zuckerman is necessary for Buck Henry's sense of the past."
Gagster Henry-Prout-Zuckerman said he would return to his home on New York's 56th Street within a few days, but has every intention of continuing Prout's campaign for discouraging nudity among animals. He also threatened trouble for the individuals who have put out a record titled "SINA" with which he (Henry and or Prout) does not have any connection. "Neither does Zuckerman," he concluded wryly.

He spoke a little more about his hoax in this feature piece from July 20, 1966. The last line is particularly relevant today.

Buck Henry Takes Comedy Seriously
By DONALD FREEMAN
Copley News Service
HOLLYWOOD—"I think I will now say something shocking" said Buck Henry, a comedy writer who resembles a Wally Cox after vitamins and who's story editor of the "Get Smart" series. "Shocking, but true. It is simply this—you cannot do good contemporary comedy and still secure the 45 through 65-year-old age group audience."
That is at least a moderately shocking observation not even tempered by a smile. Buck Henry, as the old line goes, is very serious about comedy.
"IF YOU must make the older group understand the jokes," Henry went on, "it imposes certain rules that a absolutely dilute your grade of humor. They aren't dumb these people—they are however in a different bag. They're not tuned into contemporary comedy. These people having reached a certain age and often a certain economic plateau are established well-fed contented and above all nice people—except where comedy is concerned.
"To begin with they do understand solid dirty jokes or very bland clean ones. They've been nurtured on and delight in Lucille Ball, Red Skelton, Berle and the others, all of whom can be very funny—but the one thing they also do is they assiduously avoid making any comment on the real life around us In that sense they are totally un-hip.
"TELEVISION shows are getting hipper," said Henry "Maybe not better, but hipper.
"My parents and their friends of similar age watch our show 'Get Smart.' And they really don't understand it—ah, but 10-year-olds understand the hip stuff we do instinctively. What Maxwell Smart says is for hip grownups. What he does however the funny moves the wild takes—that's for the kids."
An actor - comedian turned writer, Buck Henry is now in his mid-30s, a wry and bespectacled deep thinker who has churned out scripts for Garry Moore, Steve Allen and That Was the Week That Was. Buck is also a graduate of Dartmouth where he insists he developed a deep and abiding fear of snow.

OCCASIONALLY he writes a a few "Get Smart" scripts but mainly he edits, revises, sharpens, inserting a punch line here, a straight line there, along with his special tilted point of view. He is, as they say around the city room, a shirt-sleeve editor and now he sat in his office at Paramount Studios and mused about television.
"Take situation comedies," Buck said, lighting a cigarette. "Situation comedy has degenerated into an endless stream of lovable characters we can identify with. Pretty creepy. 'Get Smart' is a so-called sitcom but I think its funnier than the other sitcoms because we either do jokes or we do story—there are no fill-ins, no caramel corn. Often we're wrong but at least our jokes are real jokes. It's real comedy. 'Peyton Place' has no real drama. It's manufactured nonsense with unreal people."
HENRY'S face assumed a mock apologetic look. "Once last season," he confided, "I wrote a whole 'Get Smart' show just to get in one pun which is pretty crazy, am I right? I'll set the scene, Smart is on a ship whose captain is named Grauman. It so happened that Grauman has an Oriental servant who follows him around.
"Maxwell Smart spots the captain and the servant together for the first time and he says, 'so that's Grauman's Chinese? Imagine a whole show just for that one pun!"
With Buck Henry it is very easy to imagine just that, for Mr. Henry, whose imagination knows few bounds, is the fellow who once assumed the name of G. Clifford Prout and conducted a campaign to clothe our domesticated animals. As the head of the Society for Indecency to Naked Animal,s Henry as Proud turned up—with properly controlled indignation — on a number of programs, including Jack Parr's and Dave Garroway's. He was interviewed and quoted and incredibly believed. Supporters flocked to his cause.
"Why did you do it, Buck? I asked.
"Because at the time I was unemployed and it seemed like fun," he replied. "It was outlandish and outrageous but people assumed I really did want to put pants on dogs. Is that crazy? What I was really doing was telling people to think twice when some loony comes along."

You will not be surprised to learn Kliph Nesteroff interviewed Henry. Read it over here.

Veola

At the age of 6, she was known as “The Wild Rose of KHJ.” A few decades later, you could hear her on the Jack Benny radio show, playing perky French governesses, sales clerks from Alabama or sexy women, who got knowing laughs from the audience whenever a reference was made to her, um, physical appearance.

She was Veola Vonn.

Well, at least she was for a time. Before that she was billed as Viola Vonn, and when she appeared on KHJ radio in Los Angeles in 1924 she was named Vyola Von. It turns out they were all stage handles.

There were other names, too, thanks to holy matrimony. Vonn married radio actor Hanley Stafford in 1940 after he was involved in a rather messy divorce. The witness at their wedding was another actor, Frank Nelson. She and Stafford remained wed until he died in 1968, then Vonn married Nelson two years later (just after his divorce). That lasted until he died in 1986.

A little detective work using on-line government data has revealed a bit more background. To the right, you see Brazilian documentation stating her father’s name was Frank Von Frankerberg. Actually, that’s not correct. His last name was Von Frankenberg and his actual first name was Ingo, though he later went by Frank. He was a salesman from Pine Bluff, Arkansas who married one Rose Kerner in November 1917. Only Rose was better known, according to Variety at the time, as Peggy LaRue of the Reisenweber Revue, “The Girl With the Perfect Figure,” so Veola came by her show biz talent quite naturally.

Her parents remained in New York while he she headed for Hollywood; she was already in motion pictures when she began her regular appearances on KHJ. She could dance (a Los Angeles Times photo shows her dancing a buck-and-wing on the hood of two-tone Auburn) and in the ‘30s she was singing in clubs before Eddie Cantor put her on his radio show as Mademoiselle Fifi in 1937. Her French accent was extremely convincing, and she found steady work using it (and other accents) on network radio. After the death of Blanche Stewart, she began acting as Mary Livingstone’s stand-in on the Benny radio show.

Vonn’s press people decided to get hopping in 1953 as a number of short newspaper articles about her appear. We’ll pass along a few. The first is from March 12th.

Learning To Speak English Language Like Frenchwoman Pays Off For Film Actress
By BEN COOK
United Press Staff Correspondent
HOLLYWOOD — (UP) — The trick is not to speak French as the French would speak it, but to speak English like a Frenchwoman.
That is the system that paid off, anyway, for Veola Vonn, who parlayed a high school course in French into a successful radio career, and now into a screen career.
She never could seem to make any real headway when she studied French in high school at Los Angeles. But she did learn to toss in a "oui, oui" now and then and to shrug her shoulders and gesture the way an American thinks a Frenchwoman ought to.
She even fooled Charles Boyer, who mistook her for a real, honest-to-goodness French gal. It was one of her proudest moments.
"He began talking French to me," she recalls, "and I answered him in English—with accent, of course. I was doing fine until he asked me what part of France I came from."

In South Seas Film
Miss Vonn is displaying her stock in trade once again in an important role as a French hotel owner in "Sulu Sea," a Warner Brothers picture starring Burt Lancaster and Virginia Mayo. She plays the aunt of three teen-age nieces, and, instead of guarding them from a three-way romance with the worldly Lancaster eggs them on in true French theatrical tradition.
Veola entered radio 10 years ago on an Eddie Cantor program and since then has displayed her delightful French accent on nearly every big radio show. So well established is she as a French comedienne that radio script writers simply jot down, "a Veola part," when they want to describe a French character.
"Sulu Sea" is her second picture. Her first was "The Big Sky," in which she showed she could look as well as sound, authentically Gallic in the role of a French barmaid.
Miss Vonn was born in New York and is the wife of Hanley Stafford, radio actor who for years played the role of Baby Snooks' father.

It would appear Veola met with a gaggle of reporters toward the end of the year. Both the National Enterprise Association and United Press took the same angle in their stories. The first appeared in papers around December 22nd as part of a column on a number of celebrities, the second is from November 19th.

Veola Vonn Says Seductive Voice Beats Oomph Shape
By ERSKINE JOHNSON
HOLLYWOOD (NEA)—A Hollywood radio actress, hailed by Jack Benny and Edgar Bergen as "the girl with the most-undressed voice on the air," insists that a plunging contralto is more important to a woman's sex appeal than a plunging neckline.
"Voice seduction," says Veola Vonn, "is much better than a 38-inch bust. Marlene Dietrich could quote racing odds and still sound inviting."
A regular on the Benny, Bergen and other top CBS radio shows from Hollywood, Veola's theory is: "Too many would-be femmes fatales stress the wrong thing They're more interested in undressing themselves than their voices. Many an illusion has been shattered when a walking dream attempts to be a talking dream."

VEOLA MAKES IT PAY
'Undressed Voice' Cloaked by Radio
By VERNON SCOTT
HOLLYWOOD (UP)—The name Veola Vonn is not well known, but her sultry voice has paved the way to a sparkling income in radio because, as she says, "A plunging contralto is more important than a plunging neckline."
Described by Jack Benny and Edgar Bergen as radio's most "undressed voice," Veola is well qualified to discuss physiques. She has a neat 38-inch measurement herself.

Too many would-be temptresses stress the wrong thing," according to Veola. "Gals are more interested in the measuring tape than in scales musical ones. Seductiveness begins and ends with a woman's voice as far as I'm concerned."
THE POLISH-Hungarian actress says many illusions have been shattered when so-called "walking dreams" turn out to be nightmares the minute they open their mouths. Veola, who uses a variety of dialects as a regular on the Benny program and other radio shows, once received a marriage proposal from a Frenchman who heard her as a sensuous Parisienne maid on the Benny program. She never studied the language.
"That just proves the importance of the sound of sex," Veola smiled. "No matter what the nationality, language, accent or dialect, the voice is still the thing. That sound has got to be there."
TO PROVE her point, Veola thought a minute and came up with a good example Marilyn Monroe.
"That gal has one of the sexiest figures in the business, and she has a vocal coach working to make her sound like she looks. And Lauren Bacall spent hours yelling at the top of her lungs until her voice was husky enough to suit Howard Hawkes who directed her first picture."
Summing up her theory, Veola says, "A girl with a good figure and no voice just can't make the grade. But give any kind of a gal a sexy voice and men will forget about her shape."

Vonn’s first appearance on the Benny show was January 25, 1942 as a French maid. By the time the radio show signed off in 1955, she was standing in for an increasingly absent Mary Livingstone and taking parts in playlets that Mary would have done in earlier years.

Vonn was born on July 27, 1918 and died in Glendale on October 28, 1995.

Fleischer Turtle Drum

The Fleischer studio’s love of makeshift gadgets manifested itself yet again in the Betty Boop cartoon Zula Hula where Betty and Grampy crash-land in the jungle and are threatened by Zulus (or is it Zulas?).

Grampy finally invents some musical instruments which get the natives dancing, diverting their attention so our heroes can make their escape in a monkey-propelled helicopter.

My favourite animation is of the mouth movements of the natives when Betty and Grampy arrive and of one dance scene where the shaking bodies turn into wavy lines. But there’s also a funny little scene where a frightened turtle is turned into a drum with a wrench beating on him thanks to a jury-rigged conveyor belt.



This cartoon is a great example of dialogue not matching mouth movements.

One theatre in Alabama debuted this cartoon along with the feature Ali Baba Goes to Town on December 13, 1937, eleven days before its “official” release date. Zula Hula was submitted for Oscar consideration but was not one of the final selections.

I’ve only been able to find one reference to the term “zula hula” that doesn’t involve this cartoon. A 1935 story in the Pittsburgh Courier reports on a basketball game involving the New York Rens, and calls them the “Zula-hula-skirted wonders of the court” (they had beaten the Celtics 7 out of 11 games). I haven’t seen any pictures indicating the players dressed in hula skirts as they took on white teams, but I’ll stand corrected.

He's in There!

Bugs Bunny points out where he is hiding to the big bad wolf in Little Red Riding Rabbit. After several misfires, it turns out Bugs actually is hiding where he’s pointing.

Through the magic of frame grabs, you can see at least one frame where Bugs is in two places at once.



Two Bugs.



Bugs runs out of the frame.



Mike Maltese got the story credit, and the same type of gag was used several times at Warner Bros. by different writers.

Manny Perez gets the rotating animator credit in one of Friz Freleng’s most enjoyable cartoons.

Cartoon Logic and Hugh Harman

Who can make a cartoon from a C-list studio interesting? Mark Kausler, that’s who. An example is to the right: Van Beuren’s Rough on Rats; his commentary can be found on-line.

He has done the same thing with A-list studios, too, as you would know if you’ve heard his DVD commentaries on early Tom and Jerry cartoons at MGM. No endless giggling. No wild fanboi theories masquerading as fact. No attention-seeking ranting. Just very easy-to-listen to explanations about cartoons and some of the stories behind them and who made them.

Mark has expanded well past the seven-minute short mark into a feature-length podcast interview. He’s been interviewed by animator Bob Jaques and historical writer Thad Komorowski about a subject Mark knows a lot about—pioneering animator/director/producer Hugh Harman. Mark was a personal friend of Hugh’s in later years so he has a treasure trove of first-hand information about Disney silents in the 1920s, the start of Merrie Melodies at Warners and the attempt to out-Disney Walt Disney at MGM in the 1930s.

In the podcast, he talks about the Harman-Ising partnership, Harman’s lean years (Ising was living in Bel Air; Harman was bumming cash). He has stories you probably have never heard before. The one that caught my attention was a lawsuit Harman and Ising launched against Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera over Ruff and Reddy.

Poor interviewers make themselves the subject. Jaques and Komorowski never do. They ask a question and get out of the way to let Mark tell his stories.

You can hear the podcast below. Mark comes in after a three-minute introduction. You can also go to the Cartoon Logic page and find links to previous podcasts. There should be at least one subject of interest to people who want to learn more about the history of animated cartoons.

Sitting In With Jack Benny

What was it like going to a Jack Benny Jell-O broadcast? The answer is in this newspaper story from May 10, 1937.

The reporter managed to have a chat with Jack afterwards. Perhaps the most surprisingly thing is Jack’s claim that when his radio show started in 1932, most of his material was made up. That would be a surprise to Harry Conn, who developed the show with Benny until he quit/was fired about a year before this article saw print. Perhaps Mr. Benny wanted to wash any thought of Mr. Conn out of his mind. Regardless, he has an interesting theory about sophisticated city comedy vs. rural hokum comedy.

The broadcast, by the way, was on April 25th. There was one for the East Coast and another for the West Coast in those days. There’s no mention of a second broadcast in the story, nor a warm-up prior to each show.

When Jack Benny Talks, 27,200,000 Listen
No. 1 COMIC OF THE AIR GETS A MILLION A YEAR FROM FILMS AND RADIO
Fred Allen's Bosom Enemy Tells Brundidge How He Plans Broadcasts — Big Problem Is Comedy Subtle Enough for Farm Belt Folks, Not City Sophisticates.
All Gags and Chatter Are Written and Revised, but Only One Rehearsal Is Held Hour Before Performance — How Jack Met and Married Mary Livingston.
BY HARRY T. BRUNDIDGE.
Copyright, 1937, by St. Louis Star-Times.
HOLLYWOOD, May 10.— His name is Benjamin Kirselsky [sic]—Jack Benny to you—and he is the world's number one radio entertainer. His radio sponsors pay him $12,500 a week (not stage money) and out of this he has only to pay the men who write his programs. Paramount Pictures pay him $125,000 in a lump sum for his every production and his 1937 income will top $1,000,000.
Under the system of rating radio stars, now accepted as authentic, he is on the top spot with 34 points; each point represents 800,000 listeners and according to this system some 27,200,000 persons hear Benny every Sunday.
On a recent Sunday I went to the little theater in the NBC studio to watch him stage his program, which had been rehearsed for the first and only time an hour before. Benny hates rehearsals, says they take the punch out of a program. "My rehearsals are the worst in the world," he told me. "If they were good I'd be worried about the regular broadcast."
The little theater was packed to capacity. Tickets to broadcasts are not sold; all are given away to applicants, usually weeks in advance. (You apply in January and get a ticket for a May show.) Because tickets are hard to obtain, the visible audience is always one that is highly appreciative, ready to laugh at a joke they heard grandpa tell forty years ago. But the boys and girls on the stage at ALL broadcasts do NOT depend on the spontaneity of the audience. Someone on the stage at EVERY broadcast gives the audience the cue and laughter is turned on and off with a mere wave of the hand.
AS I settled down in the "wings," to watch the performance, Jack Benny, the star; Mary Livingston, his wife; Phil Harris, the orchestra leader; Don Wilson, the announcer, and others of the cast took their places on the stage. Michrophones [sic] were at strategic points. Each member of the cast has a copy of the script because nothing is memorized; everything is read from a script that has been prepared by professional writers, and approved by the advertising agency which represents the sponsor, and by officials of the broadcasting company. Now and then there is some extemporaneous joke or comment, but that is infrequent.
The stage manager, stop watch in hand, watches the seconds tick away. Then, with a long sweep of his arm he indicates that the program "is on the air."

What follows — save for the scripts in the hands of the performers — looks exactly like a scene from a musical comedy. Don Wilson, the announcer, introduces the program by naming it and saying it is starring Jack Benny, with Mary Livingstone and Phil Harris and his orchestra. The orchestra opens the program with "Hallelujah, Things Look Rosy Now."
The number is completed. Wilson steps close to the nearest mike.
WILSON: Spring's the time to wake up and live . . . swing into the new tempo ... go places and do things ——"
As the announcement (or plug) is finished and the music fades, Benny reads from his script:
JACK: Hey, Mary, come here. Don't you love the way Phil wiggles around when he leads the orchestra? Look at him.
MARY: Yeah! If he could only see himself. (She giggles.) He sure is cute though, isn't he?
JACK: Yes, but he doesn't have to show off so much. After all it isn't television.
WILSON: Jack, quiet, your microphone is open.
JACK: What?
WILSON: Everybody can hear you.
JACK: Oh, I'm sorry.
(MUSIC UP AND FINISH.)
CROWD: (Applause.)
THE foregoing is direct quotation from the script. Even the crowd's cue is written in! But why the applause at that point? Ask the script writers— I don't know!
With the broadcast at an end, there was a mad rush of musicians, spectators, electricians and others to gain the street; Benny, his secretary, Harry Baldwin, and I joined the milling mob, battled through the perennial autograph seekers and finally reached the seclusion of a booth in "The Grotto," next door to the Melrose avenue studio.
"Maybe I ought to feel a little impressed with myself for within a few days — May 2 — I will celebrate my fifth year on the air," Benny said. "But as a matter of truth I am far more impressed with radio than with myself. I've made some strides in those sixty months and may be a bit more polished on May 2 when I give my 287th broadcast, than I was on my first, but radio has moved ahead so rapidly that in the same period I feel my own progress has been that of a snail on a treadmill by comparison.
"In common with other so-called funny men on the radio five years ago, most of my stuff was made up as I went along. We didn't spend much time working over a script for we figured that if a joke was bad we could think of something on the spur of the moment that would make it a lot better.
THAT was a fallacy. Many times as we stood before the mike our brains wouldn't think up anything and many times the jokes we did think up were more feeble than those they replaced. That is one of the improvements comedians have made. Scripts are written by experts, far in advance of a program, read, revised, worked over and, usually, revised again after a rehearsal.
"Compare the picture of my first broadcast with the one we did this afternoon. In the first broadcast I had an audience of forty or fifty persons jammed into a small corner of a studio that wouldn't have held twenty in comfort — if everyone breathed right. Then I was in a glass cage, separated from the audience. While radio listeners could hear the suppressed giggles of my visible audience, I couldn't. I had to watch the audience through the sheet of glass and wait until they closed their mouths so I could go ahead with the next joke. I got to be a great lip reader, but since I wanted to be a comedian and not an interpreter, I had the glass taken out and the sounds let in. When others found that this idea worked without blasting the microphone off its foundations, they did the same thing, and we haven't been bothered by glass partitions since."
"There were other odd little customs in broadcasting five years ago. The first time I stepped up to a mike I was told that if I so much as moved my head, the listeners would be unable to follow my words. I did a lot of broadcasts with my head glued to one spot in front of the microphone, and I suffered from chronic stiff neck. Today I can stroll all over the stage, virtually go out for a walk during a broadcast, and still be picked up by the small mikes now in use, for they have been made that flexible and sensitive. The NBC trademark letters would have to be made small enough to hang on a woman's charm bracelet to find the mikes we actually use today.
"My hope is that for the next five years radio will decide to amble along at the leisurely pace we comics have taken so that we comics can make the advances that radio has made."
BENNY, five feet, eleven inches tall, well groomed, with blue eyes, brown hair, and weighing 160 pounds, has a far-away look in his eyes and goes off into daydreaming trances. In one of these he elbowed me and returned to mere earth with, "I beg your pardon—what were you saying?"
WAUKEGAN, ILL., was my birthplace," said Benny," and the date was 1894. I was a St. Valentine's Day present. Father was a haberdasher in Waukegan and I grew up with a collar and shirt under one arm and a fiddle under the other. It's the same fiddle which Fred Allen has been discussing for weeks — discussing whether I can play it. Pop thought that as a haberdasher's clerk I would make a good fiddler, but orchestra leaders put that thought in reverse, so I decided to go into vaudeville with a monologue and a fiddle. Theater managers, listening to me, decided pop, the orchestra leaders and myself were all nuts because, as a monologist, I was a good fireman or deckhand on a boat.
"We got into the war and I left vaudeville flat and joined the navy. I thank the navy. Were it not for the sailor suit they gave me at Great Lakes I still wouldn't have the nerve to try to get away with what I have been getting away with ever since. That sailor suit gave me a lot of confidence because people respected wartime sailors; they were supposed to be hard guys.
"The war ended and I went back into vaudeville. More and more I cheated on fiddling and leaned heavily on nonchalant chatter. It got so I was being paid good money just for idling through fifteen minutes of monologue.
"Eventually I worked up to $2,500 a week and I'm frank to say I was making almost as much or more at $2,500 a week than I'm making now — and that goes for everything I'm making. I do not pay off the stage show out of my income; I pay only my writers. But Uncle Sam with his income tax law is the guy I'm really working for.
"I told you before the broadcast about writers — the important thing is that a writer should know what is bad. If he can select the good from the bad he's a genius. You can take my word for it. The bad material is what hurts.
MOST writers try to be ultra-sophisticated and in the attempt, forget that with the coming of the automobile, the radio, and the motion picture, city limits were all but wiped out. The line between the urban and the suburban today is so fine as to be almost indistinguishable. There's no such thing as a 'hick' any more and the 'small' town has vanished. The Missouri Ozarks farmer demands an ever higher grade of entertainment — and a newer joke — than the New York City broker, because the Ozark fellow spends more time at the radio, listening, than does his city cousin and knows all the answers.
"Comedians used to say 'It will be great for the hicks in the sticks but Broadway will give you the horse laugh.' Now the comics assert: 'Broadway and Hollywood will giggle but toss it out — it won't get by in the sticks.'
"No longer do the so-called horny-handed sons and daughters of the man with the hoe weep at such songs as 'You Made Me What I Am Today;' they're too busy singing Robin and Rainger love songs, and they're swinging about the barn to the tunes of Benny Goodman and Phil Harris and can't be bothered with 'Turkey in the Straw.'
I SHALL illustrate my point. We had a gag that laid them in the aisles in New York. Here it is:
" 'Q. Who was the lady I seen you with last night?'
" 'A. What were you doing in that part of town?'
"But you should have read the fan mail from the farms, villages, and small towns; letters that topped that gag in 100 different ways, and all old.
"The Burns and Allen program is one of the most popular on the air and it couldn't be that without the warm following of fans in the rural districts. I happen to know that their fan mail shows that one of their most rib-tickling gags was appreciated far more by their rural listeners, than by the so-called city folks. Here's the gag: Milton Watson was leaving the Burns and Allen program and after the usual build up, Gracie told Milton to kiss her goodby. There were a series of torrid kisses and then:
GRACIE: Goodbye GEORGE. I'm going with Milty.
"Modern?
"To be successful, on the air you have to write up to the small towns and rural districts, not down. The greatest mistake a comedian can make is underestimating the intelligence of the audience. Those who make that mistake don't last long. They're too lazy to dig up new material, or too dumb to understand that people in the 'sticks' also enjoy subtle humor."

MY BIGGEST thrill in radio was when a guy in the Ohio state penitentiary, about to be electrocuted, wrote and told me he was very much interested in my feud with Fred Allen, over the subject of whether I could really fiddle. He wrote that he wanted to know the outcome of that feud before sitting on the hot seat. Allen and I both wrote to him and told him how the feud would end. The next week the guy got a commutation of his sentence to life imprisonment and wrote us the Ohio prison inmates had a hearty laugh on the two of us because they knew all along that our feud was bound to end that way.
MY LIFE has been mostly work. I never did anything last night that the world was crazy about the next day. Nothing I ever said tonight was commented on tomorrow. It has just been a procession of programs. I've spent twenty-five years climbing up the greasiest ladder that was ever greased and believe me, you can slide down a damned sight faster than you can climb up.
"My routine hasn't changed. I'm doing the same thing on the air to day I did when I was a master of ceremonies at shows in the Orpheum Theater in St. Louis.
"My most exciting experience on the radio was the night of March 14 in New York. Fred Allen and I had been going after each other for three months and on that night we got together, threw away our scripts and went after each other, tonsil to tonsil.
BENNY, now making his eighth motion picture, was preparing to leave and I reminded him he had told me nothing of Mary Livingstone, his wife.
"Sorry," he said. "I met her in Los Angeles. She was a sales girl in a department store and was pinch hitting for a girl with whom an actor friend had made a date for me, but who failed to show. Mary kept the date and, although I didn't know it, I fell in love and that fact didn't dawn on me until I wrote to her sister and learned Mary was engaged to a guy in Vancouver, B. C. I suggested a trip to Chicago. Mary came to Chicago and I proposed and was accepted. We were married on Friday instead of Sunday because we both figured if we waited until Sunday the wedding probably would never take place.
"Would you believe it, we've been married ten years and six months and it only seems like ten years?"

Twurtling Norm

He was a disc jockey who admitted he accepted payola. He was a promotions man for an amusement park that was reorganising after bankruptcy. Then he set his sights on something completely different—making an animated feature film with no experience in cartoons.

And he succeeded.

His name was Norm Prescott.

You know him best as the co-owner of Filmation. But before he bought a 40% stake in the struggling animation company from Lou Scheimer, he came up with the idea for a feature film with a completely goofy concept: he would take Pinocchio and put him in a modern-day setting in outer space.

It took Prescott some time to get the puppet-boy back from the cosmos and onto theatre screens.

In 1960, Daily Variety had been covering testimony at the U.S. government’s payola hearings; Prescott had quit his job at WBZ Boston in July 1959 and testified it was in disgust for accepting $10,000 from various record pluggers. After a short-lived job as a promotional guy for Embassy Pictures, he took a job at a theme park but decided to get into animation production on the side. The trade paper reported on August 10th that he was getting into the cartoon business. A longer version of the story appeared a week later in Variety out of New York.

Norm Prescott's European Animation Film Project
Boston, Aug. 16.
Norm Prescott, former disk jock on WNEW, N.Y., and WBZ, Boston, and former veep with Joe Levine's Embassy Pictures Corp., on "Hercules" and "Hercules Unchained," is now veep in charge of exploitation of Pleasure Island, the $4,900,000 family amusement park in Wakefield, Mass. He's also going into animated film production.
Prescott, who has set up Norman Prescott Productions, flys to Brussels Sept. 9 to supervise start of production on his first full length color Cinemascope animated film, which will also be a tv pilot. As yet untitled, the film deals with a new cartoon character adventure series.
The film is being made in Zurich, and Prescott will spend three weeks in Europe with his animation director and is bringing his own music, dialoge and sound effects track, story board and pre-directed exposure sheets with him.
He plans to launch the production immediately and get the cells into work. He hopes to make several European deals for the "film with several meetings set up, and will have the film ready by Jan. 1, 1961, for Easter release in the U.S.

Variety later reported on jaunts to Denmark and Switzerland where the animation was supposedly going to be done. Boxoffice magazine gave an update in its May 21, 1962 edition. Prescott’s promotional concepts may be more hilariously outrageous than anything dreamed up for his Filmation cartoons.

First Full-Length Animated Feature by Norman Prescott Almost Ready

BOSTON—Norman Prescott, for 13 years Boston’s leading radio and TV personality, and now executive vice-president of Pleasure Island, 79-acre family fun park at Wakefield, Mass., has announced the near completion of his first full-length animated feature film “Pinocchio’s Adventure in Outer Space.” Two years in the making, the production is now being completed in Europe.
Prescott started in the film business with Joseph E. Levine’s Embassy Pictures as vice-president in charge of the television and music departments. While with Embassy, he became interested in the animation phase of the business and, after a year and a half, left to set up his own production company producing animated features.
With Fred Ladd, writer-director of television’s “Greatest Fights of the Century” series, he formed Prescott-Ladd Productions. The producers spent six months at the Hayden Planetarium gathering latest government space data plus authentic pictures and drawings to be used as backgrounds in the film for authenticity. Martin Cadin, writer of more than 100 books on space, and foremost authority on the subject, currently science reporter from Cape Canaveral for WNEW, New York, was hired to act as technical adviser.
FILM HAS THREE SONGS
The picture has three songs entitled: “Goody Good Morning,” “Doin’ the Impossible,” and “The Little Toy Shop.” The cast includes the voices of Arnold Stang; Jess Cain, morning radio personality WHDH, Boston; Minerva Pious, radio’s famous “Mrs. Nussbaum” on the Fred Allen Show, and other New York radio voice personalities.
The new film, under the name of Prescott-Ladd Productions, will be the first Boston-based film production in the animated field with offices in New York. The new company is of special interest to Bostonians, not only because Prescott is a local man, but also because many other Boston figures are involved in it.
Prescott says he chose “Pinocchio” as the hero of his story because as a child he recalled that the wooden character would not be involved in future adventures of a continuing kid since the author had written only one story. Knowing that millions of other children must feel the same way spurred Prescott to create the idea of projecting the wooden puppet into the year 1962. Ladd wrote an original screenplay immediately based on the space theme.
Commenting on the picture, for which a Boston press reception and screening is now being arranged, Prescott said: “With so many films being made on sex, violence, perversion themes and not enough wholesome attention being given the youth of the world, this film could not be an ordinary science-fiction picture, but, rather, is based on entertaining science fact and educational material.”
PLANS BOSTON PREMIERE
Prescott plans to premiere the animated film in Boston with a daytime word premiere for children from all over the world with the help of UNICEF.
According to plans now being worked out, children will be flown in from many European countries to the U.S. to attend. Plans are also being made for Lassie and Dennis the Menace, Jay North, to head special premiere parades in Boston with Bozo, the Clown, Rex Trailer and other Boston television personalities participating. Also special science contests are planned for airing over television with the winning boys and girls going to Washington to meet the President, and visiting Cape Canaveral.
Already in production is a second animated feature, as yet untitled, Prescott revealed, for which Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen have completed two songs and are currently finishing up two eight additional songs in Hollywood.

The second feature was a version of “The Wizard of Oz,” which had a gestation period of more than a decade.

Since we have heretofore spared you a summary of Ladd’s odd plot, suffice it to say it begins with Pinocchio’s punishment by being turned into wood again. To be returned to human state, he must go into outer space where he meets up with a space turtle (or twurtle as the movie calls him) named Nurtle played by Arnold Stang. They take on a space whale named Astro (not to be confused with a space dog named Astro owned by the Jetsons). “Based on entertaining science fact and educational material.” Yeah, right, Norm.

Daily Variety reported on October 25, 1962 that sound editing was being done on “Pinocchio.” The national version of the paper published on the 31st went into a bit more detail.

Offbeat Scoring in N.Y. For Denmark-Animated 'Outer Space' Feature
Boston, Oct. 30.
Boston-based producer Norman Prescott returned here from Europe, where he put the finishing editing touches on his animated film feature, "Pinocchio's Adventure in Outer Space." Film is a 75 min., animated wide screen, Eastman color production.
Scoring of the picture and sound effects will be completed at Titra Sound Studios, New York. Scoring will take an estimated three months because of the intricate electronic sounds to be created. Arrangements and original sound track will be done entirely with tympani and electronic music creating an unusual sound effect for the outer space sequences.
Walter Scharf, who just completed the Jerry Lewis picture, "It's Only Money," will do scoring. Picture was made in Denmark. It will be ready for summer release, 1963.
Prescott said he had completed a deal in Europe with Editions Du-Lombard, Belgium, for publishing, printing and distribution of hard cover, soft cover and comic books, based on the film, for distribution throughout the world in 18 languages.
Prescott said he has not shown film to any distribs yet, and will await its final completion before doing, so.

Sound editing was still being done as of July 1963, according to an edition of Variety that came out that month. Then there was silence. Prescott was continuing to work on Oz, he had worked out a deal for a Marx Brothers TV series that never got made (Mike Maltese was hired to write it) and had bought into a new company called Filmation that was doing some work on Oz. Finally Variety reported on August 4, 1965 that Universal had agreed to distribute the feature at Christmas time.

Why the delay in Pinocchio’s release? I’ve not been able to find an explanation. It could be distributors just weren’t interested or they couldn’t reach terms with Prescott and Ladd. Universal would appear to be an odd choice. It was still releasing shorts from Walter Lantz (I shudder at the idea of a Beary Family feature). And Pinocchio has nothing to do with Christmas.

Reviews were mixed. Parents’ Magazine gave the movie its medal for December and rated it “very good” for children 8 to 12. Howard Thompson of the New York Times noted “some pretty, imaginative colored backgrounds, moving along with an easy sense of fun for the space-minded young...a trim, winning little package aimed at the small fry.” Variety’s “Robe” wasn’t terribly impressed, stating “The occasional sci-fi sections (and a very good pre-title sequence) are considerably better than the original character depiction” and called the screenplay “simple, direct, and unimaginative.”

What about a sequel? “Robe” continued: “Possibilities of follow-ups are indicated by final comment that ‘you haven’t seen the last of Pinocchio.’ Depending, obviously, on percentage of turnover at the ticket wicket. It is doubtful that Disney has any reason to worry.”

There was no sequel or prequel. Prescott was suddenly busied with an offer received by Filmation to make a Saturday morning animated Superman series. It aired starting in the fall of 1966 and was a huge hit. Filmation followed it with an even bigger success—the first of a bunch of cartoon series starring Archie.

Nurtle the Twurtle and Astro the Whale are still waiting for their comeback.

As for Walt Disney, Variety’s edition of November 24, 1965 had this huge faux pas:

Houston Dome Screen: 185 Feet By 65 Feet
Houston, Nov. 23.
World’s largest motion picture screen will be installed at the Domed Stadium here during the Christmas holidays for the world premiere showing of Walt Disney’s “Pinnochio in Outer Space.” There is a possibility that Disney might be here for the premiere activities.

Somehow, we think Uncle Walt took a pass on this one.