Check and Compare

“So, Yowp,” you’re saying, “You’re a famous celebrity with insider connections. What’s this Tex Avery Blu-Ray disc going to look like?”

Well, dear reader, the disc is going to look something like this:



Except it’ll have writing on the label and... Are you laughing yet?

Okay, okay. Tex would have done that gag better. Anyway, Jerry Beck has passed along some screen grabs. You can guess which one is the restored version. The other comes from a dub I have of the French five-disc DVD set that came out a while ago.



Hound Hounters



Dumb-Hounded

Certainly there’s nothing wrong with the versions I’ve been watching (and using for posts on this blog), but it’ll be nice to see them looking better.

You can read more at the Animation Scoop site.

Forbush Franks Are Frankier Franks

Bob Elliott and Ray Goulding had to make some adjustments when NBC signed them to do a 15-minute daily radio show in 1951. Their exploits on WHDH in Boston went for a half an hour. And much of it was ad-libbed so the show tended to go all over the place at times.

The NBC programme was tighter. Phoney commercials and sketches were scripted—the network’s censors would have demanded it—but reworked satiric concepts and even pieces of dialogue that Bob and Ray used in Boston. There were a couple of short, cheery musical breaks by an in-house combo, much like on WHDH.

But in 1951, the money was streaming away from radio. Television was taking ad dollars. Talent went from radio to TV. Bob and Ray did, too. They weren’t altogether successful. They were working incredibly long hours as they were still on radio, and continually shoved around to different time slots until the network gave up on them.

TV Guide profiled them after their departure from the Channel of Chimes. Its anonymous critic was like most others; (s)he appreciated Bob and Ray. The critic is right. Elliott’s Arthur Godfrey (Sturdley) was perfect; you’d almost swear it was Godfrey (Goulding’s Tony Marvin wasn’t as good. Marvin was a booming bass. Goulding couldn’t intone that low).

If you are not familiar with their radio work (though I think the writer is describing the NBC TV show), this gives you a great idea of their kind of humour. Like Jack Benny, I enjoy them better on radio than television. Unlike Benny, I don’t think they really mastered TV because their material strikes me as aural rather than visual.

This was published September 25, 1953. The fuzzy pictures accompanied the article.

No Pizza Pies
Bob and Ray’s Humor is Milder, Much Milder
ONE THING can be said about the satirical team of Bob and Ray: they are hardly a household word. Possessed with a sly, tongue-in-cheek impudence and a healthy disregard for some of the more sacred items of our times, the spoofers have about the same general appeal that might be accorded a Bach fugue or a T.S. Eliot couple. As one network official explained it, “What Arthur Godfrey’s got, Bob and Ray ain’t.”
Even the hoards of star-struck bobby-soxers who can leaf through their smudged autograph books and show you signatures of the entire Aldrich family, every panelist on Juvenile Jury (including its alumni) and a few page boys to boot, will admit that two fellows named Bob Elliott and Ray Goulding have somehow escaped their attention.
Unless tipped off in advance, an uninitiated viewer watching the Bob and Ray brand of straight-face humor for the first time might just furrow his brow in bewilderment and switch channels. Other folks, who realize Bob and Ray are making exquisite fun of some of their favorite television performers, are apt to turn the dial in protest. Still others, who prefer their humor broader, don’t care for Bob and Ray for the same reason they don’t care for rutabagas.
The boys themselves realize that rating-wise they’ll probably never crash the upper atmosphere populated by the Lucys, the Berles and the other chosen ones.

Says Ray, perhaps a little too pessimistically, “I’d guess that only one person out of 80 likes us.”
The guess seems to be a bad one. Bob and Ray don’t have a tremendous following, but it is a decidedly loyal one and certainly not as sparse as Ray indicates. Most of the critics praise the boys. The trade itself considers them far more clever than most of the comics working on the TV circuit. Their fans can quote them endlessly. At first NBC was thoroughly sold on the pair, despite the fact that prospective sponsors stayed away in droves. Relations between the boys and the network “steadily worsened,” as they say in the trade, and recently they signed a contract with ABC.
Bob (he’s the shorter one) and Ray seem to derive most relish from kidding radio and television, their bread and butter. Cigaret commercials are among their pet targets. One memorable spoof was the “Forbush Frankfurter Test” in which four franks were disrobed of their castings to prove which was rounder, firmer, etc. Not only was “Forbush” a clear winner, but the makers of “Forbush Franks” debunked other frankfurter claims:
Bob (holding up a frankfurter): Frankfurter A claims to relieve gout, embolism, near-sightedness, itchiness and fleebus.
Ray: The makers of Frankfurter B claim it is kinder to the F zone—F for frank, F for further. Yet 339 out of 340 physicians testified there is no such zone. Bob: “Forbush Frankfurters” claim nothing. Proof positive that “Forbush Frankfurters” are the best made.
For over a year Bob and Ray pounded away at cigarette comparison tests. Sample:
Interviewer (Bob): I see, sir, you are knocking a chip off the old block.
Ray (in carpenter’s garb): That is correct.
Bob: Tell me, sir, have you ever seen me before or have you receive remuneration for this interview.
Ray: I have never seen you before nor have I received any remuneration for this interview.
Bob: Which chip off the old block would you like to knock off first—ours or yours?
Ray: I’ll try yours first. (He proceeds to knock a chip off the block.)
Bob: Now, will you try our block, sir. (Ray complies.) Now, sir, you have knocked an old chip off your block and off our block. Which do you prefer?
Ray (enthusiastically): Oh, yours. Your chip flew more gracefully. And its [sic] milder—much milder.
The boys have run the gamut of soap operas, so that practically no soap is safe from their ribbing. Some of the Elliott-Goulding epics have unmistakeable counterparts—Mary Backstayge, Noble Wife; Hartford Harry, Linda Lovely, Helen Harkness, Sob Sister, and Mr. Trace, Keener Than Most Persons. Although the sponsors of the show were none too happy, the cast of “Mary Noble, Backstage Wife,” never failed to tune in the Bob and Ray parody of their show. The boys saw to it that even the plot lines were strikingly alike.

Bob and Ray’s take-offs on overstocked sales, special offers and kits for all purposes have drawn a shocking number of serious replies. Listeners have written to “I Want to Keep Up With the Joneses,” NBC, New York, to obtain a phony TV set equipped with antenna “to show off to your neighbors.” They have taken the boys up on offers of cracked phonograph records (“they were dropped just a few inches off the delivery truck.”), sweaters with the letter “O’ on them (“if your name doesn’t begin with “O” we can have it legally changed for you; sweaters come in two styles, turtle-neck or V-neck. State what kind of neck you have.”), deep freeze lockers, “deep enough to accommodate a family of four.” The Kind Hunter’s Kit was offered for “softhearted people who love to hunt but hate to kill.” It contained bullets that drop to the ground and are packed with vitamins for the animals.
In an effort to find the right spot for Bob and Ray, NBC shunted the boys around, spotting them here and there. Some of the program switches were unfortunate. The team’s initial dip into TV was stormy. When the popular Kukla, Fran and Ollie were cut to 15 minutes, Bob and Ray were given the vacated spot. Which, of course, outraged K.F.O. fans to brand the two radio comics as puppet-haters. They departed this early evening show a few months afterward. When the boys finally landed a sponsor on a late-evening program, they ran into agency trouble or sponsoritis. It seems the men who sign the paychecks didn’t dig their comedy stars and asked them to dish up a more obvious form of humor. “Throw pizza pies at each other,” was one of the suggestions. After 13 weeks, when option time rolled around, Bob and Ray left the show by mutual consent.
The team is probably best remembered for its regular guest stints on Dave Garroway’s morning show, Today. Garroway, a B. & R. fan, would solemnly introduce the two and the boys conducted interviews, with Bob generally handling the straight lines and Ray providing the answers.
Although their own ratings are modest, Bob and Ray have no qualms about spoofing some of the TV performers who boast tremendous audiences. Their favorite target is Arthur Godfrey—or, as portrayed by Bob—“Arthur Strudley [sic] and His No Talent Scouts.” Dressed in a sailor suit, a First World War aviator’s hat and strumming a ukulele, Bob gives a devastating impersonation—complete with “by gollys” and informal Godfrey-type commercials for “Metchnikoff’s Caviar Teabags.”
Their take-offs on Ed Sullivan (“We’ve flown in from the Middle East for their first American performance the only two-man Arabian drill team in the world. Let’s give the boys a warm New York welcome.”); Ed Murrow (“See It Now and Then”); Dragnet (“Fishnet”) and the Stork Club (Ray in a one-sided conversation with two store dummies), rank as unequaled television.
Like caviar and rutabagas, Bob and Ray don’t appeal to all tastes. But lots of people consider TV’s top satirists as pretty wonderful fare. Now if the Elliott-Goulding fandom can only convince the right people that ratings don’t mean a thing . . .

The Old Pepper Gag

So what if Tex Avery borrowed from himself? He’s still funny.

The Legend of Rockabye Point (Lantz, 1955) uses the same structure as Rock-a-bye Bear and Deputy Droopy that Avery made earlier at MGM. One character tries to get another character to make noise and disturb a third character; the other character runs outside to a distant hill to make the noise and not disturb anyone.

I still like Rockabye Point. The gag variations are inventive, Avery moves things along at a brisk pace and Mike Maltese, who got a rap for not being strong at story structure, puts together a very tidy tale.

Here’s the old pepper/sneeze gag. Chilly Willy tries to get the polar bear to wake the guard dog. The shapes on the bear are fun.



The bear gallops up the hill. Clarence Wheeler plays a familiar bar from “The William Tell Overture.”



The sneeze. Avery has some of the drawings on ones, others on twos. I like the stretch in-between.



With a nice look of satisfaction as he turns, the bear rushes back to the ship for another round with Willy.



Don Patterson, Ray Abrams (who was in his unit at MGM at the start) and La Verne Harding receive the animation credits. Dal McKennon is the uncredited sneezing voice actor.

Little Red Riding Claws

Red Riding Hood is the evil one—as the wolf tells it in court, anyways—in The Trial of Mr. Wolf, a 1941 cartoon from the Friz Freleng unit written by Mike Maltese.

Red has a wonderful evil look. Besides a bit of dry-brush, I love her claw-like fingers.



Dick Bickenbach is the only animator who gets credit but Gil Turner animated the wolf’s childish ballet (Devon Baxter ID). Herman Cohen and Manny Perez were also in the unit at the time. Freleng directed some terrific cartoons when Yosemite Sam was invented later in the ‘40s but this one is just as funny.

Hawaii Welcomes Jack Benny

Television and movie studios weren’t exactly friendly in the early ‘50s, so it was a real coup when Marilyn Monroe guest starred on Jack Benny’s TV show opening the 1953-54 season.

Benny was ideal for any skittish studio. He deliberately made his guest stars look good, and there would be no shortage of plugs during the course of his show.

The show’s basis came from a trip that Benny and his wife Mary Livingstone took to Hawaii with George Burns and Gracie Allen (Marilyn didn’t make the trip). Benny’s and Burns’ clout was so big that the Associated Press reported on June 26th that they were going to Hawaii on vacation.

TV Guide did a photo article on it. Below are some of the pictures that made the publication.



The TV Guide copy: Two of the Nation’s greatest comedy teams, George Burns and Gracie Allen and Jack Benny and Mary Livingstone, spent vacations together at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Honolulu. When George and Jack hit the beach, all Hawaii braced itself for a new high in comedy antics. But it turned out that, when clowning for their own amusement, the million-dollar comedians do just about the same stunts as the rest of us. The cameraman caught a fair sampling. As George said to Jack: “We’re here just for fun. What do they want us to do, bring our writers along?”



The island’s newspapers covered the trip; they loved stories about big stars coming. During their stay, Benny got off the best line to a reporter, talking about hula lessons aboard the Lurline, the ship he and Burns took to Honolulu. Neither Jack nor George indulged but Benny related how Eddie Cantor did at one time and “looked like a Mack truck backing into a Jaguar’s parking place.”

The nicest story comes from the front page of the Honolulu Advertiser, July 22, 1953. Read it below. Some of the husband/wife dialogue sounds like it came from a Benny radio show, but it didn’t.

Jack Benny Has Reunion With Former Violin Teacher Here After 45 Years
By BOB KRAUSS
A gag caught up with Jack Benny yesterday and turned out to be a sweet old man with long white hair and a violin under his arm.
For years, Benny has been telling his public that he studied fiddle under the great Prof. Hugo Kortschak. A lot of people who didn’t know anything about music would listen to Benny play and get a big laugh.
Well, there really is a violin teacher named Hugo Kortschak. He's got soft musician's hands and dreamy eyes and a gentle smile. He really did give Jack Benny lessons—45 years ago in Chicago. Now. at 69, he’s retired and lives in Honolulu.
YESTERDAY, HE put on his best cloth cap, locked the front door and took his tiny wife down to the Royal Hawaiian hotel to meet one of his former pupils.
On the way to the hotel, Mrs. Kortschak politely asked a few questions so she wouldn't embarrass Mr. Benny by knowing so little of his work.
"What does he do?" she asked.
"Have you listened to him on the radio?" I said.
"Yes, I believe I heard him once but I didn't know it was he because he was talking. Doesn't he play the violin anymore?"

"WELL, HIS program is mostly talking now," I said.
"What sort of a program is it?"
"It's a comedy program."
"For children?"
"No, it's supposed to be for adults."
Truth of the matter is, Mr. Kortschak had lost track of his pupil until just the other day. Matter of fact, for years he had no idea a radio, movie and TV comedian named Jack Benny had once studied under him.
Other professors—at Yale University where he was professor of violin for 29 years—would tell him this comedian had mentioned his name over the radio. Finally, Mr. Kortschak learned that a youngster named Benny Kubelsky, a former pupil, had taken the name of Jack Benny.
"HE PROBABLY would have gone far," Mr. Kortschak said of Benny Kubelsky. "He showed a lot of promise, no question."
When we got to the hotel, the first thing Mr. Kortschak said to 59-year-old Jack Benny was, "My, you've grown!"
"Well, Prof. Kortschak," Benny said, "I expected a much older person. It was 45 years ago, wasn't it?"
"Yes, a long time."
"You must have been much younger than I thought you were. I was just 15 at that time. "Weren't you teaching at the Chicago Musical College?"
"Yes, yes."
"You know, I still play. Bought a good violin not long ago so now I practice a little every day. I can remember when I was crazy to be a concert violinist. But I'm like most golfers. I like to play but I never practice. You're the last teacher I had. I got into show business somehow and never studied violin since."
BENNY AND Mr. Kortschak chatted for a while about music and Benny's new violin, a French Vuillaume. A little later, everybody shook hands and the Kortschaks went home.
Mrs. Kortschak said she was very favorably impressed with her husband's former pupil, even though their conversation was considerably interrupted by Benny fans who wanted to take pictures.

Gracie had a surprise birthday party thrown for her during the trip. She and Mary flew in to Hawaii while their husbands came by ship and stayed after they left, no doubt to do some shopping. It would appear Jack was soon busy with his writers with some inspirations his vacation left behind.

He Wasn't Quite Mickey

Who has “all the comic seriousness or a Harold Lloyd, the lightning agility of a Douglas Fairbanks, and the grotesquely funny feet of a Charlie Chaplin”?

Would you believe Flip the Frog?

That’s how an English movie trade publication termed him in its edition of May 15, 1930. Mind you, the writer hadn’t seen a Flip cartoon because none of them had appeared in Britain as yet. He was taking the word of a publicity release.

From what I can tell, more has been written about Flip in recent years than when he was actually appearing in theatres. That gives you an idea of the impact he had at the time.

The Motion Picture News reported on February 22, 1930 that Ub Iwerks would be making the cartoons in colour and black and white “in the next few weeks” under the auspices of Celebrity Productions, “current distributors of the Disney cartoons. Definite releasing arrangements subsequently will be announced” with a monthly release beginning “on or about March 1.” Film Daily had the roughly the same story the day before.

The first indication of Flip I can find in the popular press is in the Brooklyn Standard Union of February 26, 1930.

New Films Flip the Frog,
Ub Iwerks Latest Cartoon
By BURKE HENRY
Only a brash reviewer would take it upon himself to analyze the antics of “Mickey Mouse” or the concatenations of the “Silly Symphony,” animated cartoons. Oftimes the cartoons are the only lively events on the program when the feature films fall into the doldrums.
Now comes the announcement that Ub Iwerks, who has been associated with Walt Disney, is to become a producer on his own and for his independent series has chosen animated sound cartoons in color as well as in black and white, to be entitled “Flip the Frog.”
“A frog more nearly represents a human being than anything else in all nature,” Iwerks, speaking from the wisdom of his twenty-eight years of age, declares: “A frog may be the epitome of laziness or lightning-like action as suit his erratic impulses.”

In the Birmingham News of February 24, 1932, Ub’s tale of how Flip was created sounds in league with the stories Walt Disney related over the years about how he invented Mickey Mouse.

TADPOLE INSPIRATION
Flip The Frog Grew From National Early Start
In most countries frog legs are a delicacy enjoyed only by the epicurean who is also the possessor of a fat purse. In all countries where frogs abound, they are (in various states of health) to be found among the treasured possessions of small boys. It remains, however, for the artist U. B. Iwerks to recreate the frog into a signal for mirth for cinema audiences throughout the world in his “Flip the Frog.”
Iwerks first became acquainted with the potentialities of humor in the frog some twenty years ago, when in school he casually slipped a tadpole down the shocked neck of a more studious classmate. The result was untold merriment for all pupils except for the shocker and the shocked Young Iwerks was made to sit in the corner and sport a dunce's cap, following which his rather stern father was obliged to pay a visit to the teacher. It presented a serious problem to youthful Master Iwerks. Says Iwerks concerning this: “It is not therefore remarkable that when I decided to extend my drawing board activities to include the movies, I should have thought of Mr. Frog.”

Back to 1930: the rise of Mickey Mouse and the Silly Symphonies had the major studios itching to release cartoons. Warner Bros. signed with Harman-Ising. Educational signed with Paul Terry and Frank Moser. RKO signed with Charles Mintz to make Toby the Pup. That left the studio where there were more stars than there were in Heaven—MGM. And Celebrity’s Pat Powers had the good fortune to ink a distribution deal with Metro. MGM began showing off something to do with the cartoons at the studio’s convention in Chicago around May 20th. It found space for Flip in advertising its wares in the trades for the 1930-31 season; this ad was in the Motion Picture News of June 14th.

So just when did Flip appear in theatres? There’s no answer in the pioneer reference book Of Mice and Magic; Leonard Maltin and his researchers merely list copyright dates. The Los Angeles Evening Express of May 2, 1930 reported:

FIRST COLOR CARTOON
The first all-color talking cartoon has been completed and is ready for release through Celebrity Productions. It is titled “Fiddlesticks” and is the first of the “Flip the Frog” series being produced by U. B. Iwerks. This subject was done entirely in the new Harriscolor process with recording by Cinephone.

Exhibitors Daily Review revealed on May 7th that European rights had been sold ten days after Flip was announced in the trade press. MGM staged a sneak preview of its shorts—where it happened is not reported—but the same paper of August 14th gave a mixed opinion. “Synchronization that is nearly perfect. Mr. Bullfrog is okay.”

Motion Picture News reviewed Fiddlesticks in its issue of August 16, 1930 and in later editions gave that as the release date. Where it was playing is unknown; the Los Angeles Times does not list it in movie theatre ads. The reviewer wasn’t impressed. Under the heading “Same Old Stuff,” he opined:

AND Fiddlesticks to you, Mr. Producer, for being so much like the rest of the cartoonists who have no more sense of originality than cartoon characters have life.
This one, while expertly produced and set to music, has the same line-up of stuff as every other cartoon (but with few exceptions) in the current season’s group. There’s too much sameness in all of them. New ideas are needed, and needed badly. Will get by on a bill needing a light touch.

To the left is an ad from the New York Daily News from Flip’s first appearance in the Big Apple; he premiered on October 3, 1930 (Fiddlesticks had already played a few weeks earlier in Ithaca, New York). Motion Picture News of October 11th reported the theatre grossed $14,000 the first week with Flip on the bill, and in the same issue, previewed the Flip short The Barbershop, praising the ending but pointing out “Except for an element of sameness common to all cartoons, it clicks nicely.”

The animated amphibian continued to show up in theatres, not so much in the media except in the occasional newspaper story that had a paragraph listing theatrical cartoon characters. Variety’s review of The Milkman on July 12, 1932 didn’t mince words: “An insipid and lazily penned cartoon. Easiest the most economical way is to be repetitious so the youngster in this just keeps on dropping milk bottles.” This is the cartoon where the delivery van horse sings the word “hell” and is about to do it again when Flip crashes a bottle on his head.

Flip ran into trouble with the censor in Virginia. The Hollywood Reporter revealed in Fire, Fire, Iwerks was ordered to eliminate a scene where Flip hits another frog over the head with a chamber pot.

Somewhere along the way, it appears Flip stopped being a frog. The MGM opening title card changed from “Flip the Frog” to just “Flip” by the end of 1932 (in The Music Lesson?) and remained that way until the series was dumped. MGM announced on June 27, 1933 that its largest shorts schedule in history would include 13 Willie Whopper cartoons. After 38 shorts, Flip disappeared.

Well, not entirely. Official Films and Blackhawk Films released at least some of the cartoons for the home film/service club market in the 1940s. In the 1950s, the shorts appeared on TV along with Molly Moo Cow, the human Tom and Jerry and other forgotten 1930s stars of the B-list studios. Then animation historians came along in the 1970s and pieced together the history of Flip and the Iwerks studio (Mark Mayerson’s history of MGM cartoons for The Velvet Light Trap in 1978 included a capsule Life of Flip.

And there were later inspirations. Take, for example, the revelation in the New York Times in 2013 that a Lower East Side bar had a cocktail named after Flip, a gin-cucumber mix sweetened with St. Germain, for $12. The Guardian Angels Catholic School in Stittsville, Ontario, staged a carnival in 2014 where contestants use a mallet to send a fake frog named Flip flying into a pot (as best as we can tell, it wasn’t a chamber pot).

Many of the Flips appeared in 1999 in the two-volume DVD set “Cartoons That Time Forgot” in various states of wear. We hope, for the sake for frog and quasi-frog cartoon fans everywhere, the full series of shorts will soon be available.

Note: My thanks to Thunderbean and Jerry Beck for the higher-quality frames you see here.

Wooden Shoes Are Xylophones

Jerry’s magic pencil can create all kinds of things, even if they don’t make much sense. Then again, Pencil Mania is a Van Beuren cartoon, so it doesn’t have to make sense.

Jerry shaves wood off his pencil to create wooden shoes. Then he grabs Tom’s hat (and pulls his nose for no particular reason), touches it with the pencil and out come some kind of bird.



The birds play “Where, Oh Where, Has My Little Dog Gone?” with their bodies. The shoes sound like xylophones. The birds, for added Van Beuren incongruity, wear hats and smoke cigars.



“Rag Doll” by Nacio Herb Brown opens this cartoon when Tom and a cow whose portrait he is painting are dancing. The cow vanishes very early in the cartoon.

John Foster and George Stallings get a “By” credit with the music, as usual, under the superintendence of Gene Rodemich.

Brainstorm

A mangy cat wants to eat, but all there is in the kitchen is a puny, emaciated bird. But then he sees this:



Then the cat gets a brainstorm. Naturally, since this is a Tex Avery cartoon, the word is used literally.



What’s the brainstorm? Back to the bottle.



This truth in advertising sets up the plot of one of Avery’s fan-favourites, King-Size Canary, released in 1947. Heck Allen supplied gags; Bob Bentley, Ray Abrams and Walt Clinton are the animators.