Tarrying Terry Hare

There’s no animation credit on A Hare-Breadth Finish, a 1957 Terrytoon, but let’s see if you can guess who animated these two scenes below.

Stretchy, elastic, super-thin rabbit.



Smash! Two drawing vibration.



Shrink and stretch take.



The tortoise slowly walks over him, scrunching down on various body parts. The hare comes to and looks at the theatre audience.



There are some bits that are clearly inspired by Tex Avery and Warner Bros. cartoons (especially the ending) but there’s only one Jim Tyer.

The Old Log Gag

Tex Avery and Bob Clampett used the old hollow log/cliff routine. Hanna-Barbera borrowed it for the first TV cartoon starring Yowp (Foxy Hound-Dog with Yogi Bear, 1958). But Art Davis used it, too, in Nothing But the Tooth, as gag writer Dave Monahan extends it as far as he can.

The cartoon centres around a stupid Indian wanting to scalp bald Porky Pig. Porky runs through the hollow log and then chops a section off it.

We know what the gag is going to be; the Indian’s going to come through the log and drop. We just don’t know how Davis and Monahan are going to pull it off.



Nope. Doesn’t happen here. The Mohican sticks his head out of the log. “Thought I was going to a fall, didn’t you?” he says to the audience.



The Indian continues his journey. Surprise! Now we all discover Porky chopped out a second portion. Down goes the Mohican.



The satisfied Porky strolls off, only to meet up with his injured adversary, and zooms back through the log. Yes, you can guess what will happen.



Porky lifts himself out of the log and continues his stroll. Oh, oh. He forgot about the second cut.



In a lovely bit of timing, we hear Treg Brown’s drop-whistle sound for about three seconds, then a thunk. There’s a quick pan down to the gag topper. It turns out the log isn’t over a cliff like it is in other cartoons. Porky’s not impressed.



Some of the cartoons that Davis directed have an odd feel and pace to them but this one moves along like your average Warners cartoon.

Monahan did a handful of cartoons at Warners after he returned from the war. He also wrote for Columbia/Screen Gems. By the time this cartoon was released, Columbia had closed its cartoon department and the Davis unit had disbanded. Monahan went into live action, mainly doing commercials (including some for the Warners commercial television division) before moving to MGM-TV.

Bill Melendez, Don Williams, John Carey and Basil Davidovich receive the animation credits on this short.

She Couldn't Stand Jack Benny

One of the great gimmicks of radio comedy—and surely it paid off with increased ratings—was the “I Can’t Stand Jack Benny contest.” It started December 2, 1945 and ended on January 27, 1946, with Ronald Colman reading the winning entry by Carroll P. Craig Sr. the following week.

The various poems and statements sent in became the property of Benny so, naturally, newspapers were loath to publish anything but the winning verse announced on the radio. However, we do know a bit about one of the other entrants, thanks to dusty old newspapers.

The Detroit Free Press reported on January 28, 1946:

Detroit Girl Wins $1000 for Radio Gag
Miss Joyce O'Hara, of 1014 Dragoon, a semi-invalid poetess whose contributions have appeared occasionally in Malcolm Bingay's "Good Morning" column, Sunday night was named winner of $1,000 in War Bonds in the "Why I Can't Stand Jack Benny" radio contest.
MISS O'HARA'S reasons were adjudged third best among 277,000 entries. Miss Wanda Morley, of 1518 Pennsylvania, was one of 51 winners of $100.
The contest started Dec. 2 on the Jack Benny broadcast over a national network. Judges were Fred Allen, Goodman (Easy) Ace and Peter Lorre.

No, the Free Press didn’t publish what she wrote; it would have needed permission from Benny’s people. We therefore can’t tell you what she penned. However, we can tell you Miss O’Hara was a serial contest entrant and had some experience on the radio.

She was born Joyce Elizabeth Campbell in Michigan on April 14, 1907. At the age of 11, she was run over by a car after running into the street, and the driver couldn’t stop in time. Nonetheless, that didn’t stop her from taking up highland dancing when she attended Northern High School. In 1926, the Free Press published her picture with the caption about she was working hard to win a round-trip to Europe offered by the local Shrine temple.

Campbell graduated in 1927 and left Detroit to begin studies in music at Lake Forest, Illinois. She returned to Detroit because we find her in 1930 appearing on the Disabled American Veterans show with Helen Lewis and her Merrymakers over WMBC. In 1933, she had her own 15 minute show on WEXL. Then tragedy struck again. From the Free Press of June 21st that year:

Miss Campbell, twenty-two-year-old torch singer whose professional name is Joyce O'Hara, suffered head and spine injuries in an automobile accident as she was returning from a Royal Oak broadcasting studio Tuesday afternoon. When the car in which she was riding, driven by Andrew McDonald, 1014 Dragoon Ave., was struck in the rear by the automobile of S. V. Rose, 2967 Boston Blvd., she was hurled against the windshield. Treated by a private physician, she was taken to her home, also at 1014 Dragoon Ave.

Joyce was now spending her time entering contests and writing poetry. She won $5 for answering a Free Press poll about what picture she liked best in 1936. In 1938, she was one of the first 50 winners of a Detrola Pee-Wee radio in a contest sponsored by Fleet-Wing Gasoline. And in 1951, she picked up $5 from the paper in “type trick contest” for “The Night Before Christmas.” It appears to have been a typewriter version of ASCII art. In between, she entered the Benny contest and who knows how many others.

She later moved to Los Angeles where she died on February 12, 1979.

As mentioned above some of her other poetry was published in the Free Press and picked up by newspapers across the U.S. Allow me to reprint one from December 21, 1934. We can imagine this might have been the style she used in her entry to the Benny show.

"The Ladies."
Who are their best friends
The fair sex wonder
As cosmetic jars
They daily plunder.
They powder their noses
And tint their nails,
Platinum their hair,
To be elegant frails.
They bathe and diet,
They fuss and fume;
Just one wrinkle
Would prove their doom.
But what do they do
For their very best friends
Who keep on the run
Till the long day ends?
Always so faithful,
Never asking dues,
Wearing short stockings
And too tight shoes.
Who takes them out,
Willing and spry,
And when they are ready
Brings them home on high?
Whence comes their help
When morals slide?
It's their trusty feet
That walk home from a ride.
Never faltering
Through mud, rain or sleet
A woman's best friends
Are her two little feet!
Joyce O'Hara

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.