Ham and Peking Duck

Chinese acrobats see that Cubby Bear is looking for talent in Fresh Ham, a 1933 Van Beuren cartoon. You can see they’re speaking in what are supposed to be pictographs.



They’re actually pretty good. They play music. They tumble in the air. Cubby is impressed.



Uh, oh. Out of the swirls comes the “fresh ham” of the title; a washed-up Shakespearean duck that keeps showing up to audition.



The ducks pounce on him. Cubby has had enough. The trap door takes care of them and a twisted combination of ducks runs out of the cartoon.



Steve Muffati and Mannie Davis get the “by” credit. The guy with the raspy voice plays the ham actor.

Catching Up With Bob Hope

There was a time Bob Hope was funny. And there was a time when he wasn’t.

Hope’s rise to fame may have been as a result of the movie The Big Broadcast of 1938 (in which he sang “Thanks for the Memory” for the first time), but he became a superstar through the “Road” pictures with Bing Crosby, his endless tours of military spots during World War Two, and his radio show where he could stop things with an ad-lib that was likely funnier than anything his writers came up with.

As he moved into the 1970s, it seemed like he was going through the motions with his comedy films, and his TV specials became larded with college patriotic marching bands, cheerleaders, non-actors, sweetened audience reactions, and far-too-obvious attempts at deciphering Barney McNulty’s cue cards. Hope, perhaps unfairly, was labelled an over-the-hill war-monger, but if you watched him on TV in the later years, it was clear he was past his prime and should bow out, gracefully or otherwise.

Here’s a Hope interview from September 25, 1966. In my opinion, Hope had jumped the you-know-what by then; his TV shows from the early ‘50s could be pretty funny.

Woe to the Golf Ball! Hope's Mortal Enemy
By BOB ROSE
Special Press Writer
HOLLYWOOD—About the only thing Bob Hope is mean to, outside of Bing Crosby, is a little white sphere on a patch of green grass.
"Ah, golf. That's where I get rid of my aggressions. That ball is my enemy and I attack it. Makes my psyche better. And of course, everybody's concerned about that," he says.
We here talking about the many sides of Bob Hope—comedian, father and Public Good Guy No. 1—over lunch in his dressing room on the set of his new movie, "Eight on the Lam."
"Mama sent this over," Hope said, pointing to a roast capon, dish of fresh peas and salad. "She doesn't like me to eat that commissary food. Oh, how right she is."
After Hope awkwardly hacked away at the bird ("Hmm. I better stay away from brain surgery.") And served his publicity man (Bill Faith. That's right, Hope and Faith) and me. The conversation then turned to his comedy nemesis Bing Crosby. "A really great guy," said Hope.
HOPE HAS been doing his put-down gags about Crosby since their first radio days. The comedy ritual is 30 years old and, frankly, Hope gets a little tired of it some times.
"But people want me to throw some gags at Bing. They are disappointed when I don't."
And you wonder if he could stop if he wanted to:
"Let's see, I first met Bing back in 1932 when we appeared on the same vaudeville bill. He was known as the Cremo cigar crooner. Cremo cigars! Well, I guess he fixed them. They aren't around any more."
Some other, more shapely, figures out of Bob Hope's past will appear with him on his first of five television specials of the year on NBC on Wednesday, Sept. 28. His staff managed to round up 15 of his former leading ladies gals like Lucille Ball, Joan Fontaine, Hedy Lamarr, Signe Hasso, Joan Collins, Virginia Mayo, Vera Miles and, of course, Dorothy Lamour (11 Hope movies, including 7 "On the Road to Morocco" etc., etc.). plus his present leading ladies, Jill St. John and ("wait a minute, how did she get in here?") Phyllis Diller.
HOPE'S 51ST movie, "Boy, Did I Get a Wrong Number," which co-stars Miss Diller, is doing well in its second run around the movie houses. His 52nd, "Eight on the Lam," also stars Miss Diller, Jonathan Winters and Jill St. John.
"It's nice to get a picture out now and again," Hope says. "I like to remind people that I began as a paid comedian."
Hope does so many benefits and so much USO touring, the requests he gets for even more days than there are in a year. But he has a business side too. On the phone to an agent, he said:
"Yeah, but let's see if you can't get them to come up with some more scratch. Standing ovations are fine, but you can't put them in the bank."
But just a few days ago Hope donated a $500,000 tract of land for the new Eisenhower Medical Center near Palm Springs.
HOPE, now turned 63, celebrated the 25th anniversary of his first USO show, at March Field, by doing another at the same spot. He also is planning his umpteenth Christmas show for the troops overseas ("I get more out of it than the kids. The experiences are unforgettable").
Despite his go-go life, Hope has found time to take a big part in the raising of his four kids.
"Delores is a wonderful mama."
One daughter, Linda, is in Japan finishing a documentary ("she's $20,000 over budget already; I'll be ruined"); another, Nora, works in public relations at NBC; a son, Kelly, 18, is expected to go into the service soon.
The oldest son, Tony, 25, was admitted to the bar in California a few weeks ago, and both parents were proudly on hand at the ceremonies.
"I think it's important to have an attorney in the family," Hope quipped. "You've seen my act."

Sedaka Isn't Back; He Never Left

An 81-year-old man is trying to cheer us up as we attempt to deal, as best as we can, with a worldwide pandemic.

He’s not just any 81-year-old man. He’s Neil Sedaka.

A number of singers/musicians known better to boomers than anyone else have been showing up on social media to give us one more rendition of songs we first heard many years ago.

I was a teenage disc jockey when I played Neil Sedaka on the air. That was 45 years ago, give or take a few months. And that was during Sedaka’s second career; 15 years before that he had huge pop hits. The songs were almost like commercial jingles. Bouncy. Fairly predictable chord changes. Easy and simple lyrics. But record stores racked up huge sales with them. They were radio’s dose of fun.

Today, Sedaka has been getting hits on his hits. He’s put up little medleys on social media of songs familiar to a generation, with warm and friendly introductions.



We’ll take a little intermission and give you a chance to read a review from the Fort Worth Star-Telegram of August 22, 1975. Sedaka talks about his comeback and how it happened.

Today's Music
'Sedaka's Back' on Album Tour
By GARRY BARKER
The bright silver banner suspended above the stage at Six Flags' Music Mill Theater said it all in a nutshell:
"Sedaka's Back!"
Neil Sedaka, who's had a land in writing some 75 gold records since 1959, made a spectacular recording comeback last year with "Sedaka's Back" on Elton John's Rocket Records label.
Already Sedaka has scored three hit singles off that LP with "Laughter In the Rain," "The Immigrant" and his latest, "That's When the Music Takes Me."
ARTISTS ARE MINING gold from it as well. The Captain and Tennille scored with "Love Will Keep Us Together," Andy Williams and the Carpenters took "Solitaire" and Maria Muldaur has recorded "Sad Eyes."
His two shows at Six Flags last Friday night packed the outdoor theater to overflowing and saw a horde of young people push against the stage hoping to shake his hand. Backstage, a relaxed Sedaka said the latter really amazed him.
"If my 12-year-old daughter saw that she wouldn't believe it," he said.

Sedaka lives in New York with his wife and two children and presently is on an extended tour of the United States.
An immediate eye-catcher are the two gold medallions he wears, which he said were presents from Elton John and John's management.
"It was Elton who convinced me to release my come back album in America," he said.
Sedaka and his new Rocket album is due to be released Sept. 22. It's called "The Hungry Years," after one of the songs on it.
"It's similiar to the last album," Sedaka told me. "Phil Cody and Howard Greenfield are on it and Robert Appere is the producer again."
SEDAKA RETIRED FROM performing in 1964, after a string of hit records that included "Happy Birthday Sweet Sixteen," "Breaking Up Is Hard to Do" and "Calendar Girl," which is his favorite from the old era.
He quit because "I felt I had seen the world and I just wanted to get away from it all, relax and write."
His knack for hit songs certainly continued. He's been in on composing such standards as "Puppet Man" and "Workin' On a Groovy Thing."
When did he know it was time to get back to performing?
"When music became fun again," he said. "When artists such as James Taylor and Carole King (his old friend from high school) started showing up on the charts."
Later this year Sedaka will be appearing on the "Tony Orlando and Dawn" and "Cher" television shows.
Would he like to have a show of his own?
"Yes!" was the immediate reply.
With a warm and gracious personality and a string of hits that won't quit, Sedaka has an excellent shot at that last one.

Well, our intermission is over. Back to the performance. Bless you, Neil Sedaka.

Bowling Alley Mouse

Jerry moves Tom's tail out of the way so he can get a clear run down a lane in Bowling Alley-Cat (1942).



Here's Tom's take-off. Note the slight movement. These are mainly animated on twos. I like the big-eyed in-between.



A sudden stop. A couple of expressions.



There are no animation credits on this short, but I guess Pete Burness, George Gordon and Jack Zander provided animation. See Mark Kausler's comment. He knows the MGM animators better than anyone.

Come Up and See Oopy Some Time

Is there a Columbia cartoon, outside of The Little Match Girl, that isn’t bizarre?

Take for example the 1934 short Scrappy’s Toy Shop. Through the whole cartoon, Scrappy’s little brother is a destructive jerk, finally using a doll’s panties as a slingshot to knock down Scrappy with a cannon ball.

But that’s not the bizarre part.

Scrappy comes to, then Oopy puts on the doll’s hair, sprouts lipstick and eyelashes, sashays over like Mae West and comes on to his own brother. Scrappy smirks and drifts off into dreamland. Is he dreaming of Mae West? He’s a prepubescent child!



If the credits are to be believed, Sid Marcus wrote the story.

Sorry for the fuzzy frames. This is the best the internet has to offer.

Verna Doesn't Fuss With Old Age

Between the time she was Dennis Day’s mother and Fred Flintstone’s mother-in-law, Verna Felton was the comedy highlight of a TV show starring Spring Byington called December Bride. Felton played Byington’s best friend Hilda Crocker, and got some of the best lines. She even got to do physical comedy.

Felton wasn’t exactly an ingénue when the show debuted in 1954. She had been on the stage at the turn of the century and spent a good part of the next three decades in touring companies, especially one based in Western Canada (Felton’s son, Lee Millar, was born in Vancouver).

Here’s an unbylined newspaper feature story from May 9, 1958, one of those “age is just a number” pieces.

Life Begins at 60 Plus For TV's Verna Felton
"Tarnation! What's all this fuss about old age?" asks Verna Felton, who takes the role of Spring Byington's accomplice in TV's "December Bride" series. "Just because the calendar says you've hit the mid-century mark, you don't just stop living.
"It seems to me that getting on in years would be enjoyable. When else in your life can you have such freedom? At 60 plus you can first begin to do what you please. There are no more responsibilities to growing children, home and family."
Reason for Rating
Verna Felton who approaches her seventieth year, has provided some of the most entertaining moments in the "December Bride" series. She is one of the reasons why the comedy series has been so highly rated in the past years.
She credits her spirit of youth to Walt Disney, Spring Byington and the roles she has taken in the entertainment world. "Without all three I might have become a doddering old woman," she says. Her voice, once described as a cross between Tallulah Bankhead, Wallace Beery and Ethel Merman, has been used for many of Mr. Disney's cartoon characters. "It's hard to be "old" when working for Mr. Disney," she says. "And working with Spring Byington—she's younger than me, you know—one has to keep herself going. Can't let a youngster like Spring get ahead of me."
Because she has always been cast as a mother, older woman or grandmother, Miss Felton has learned to keep her youth. "After playing Dennis Day's mother, Bob Hope's mother and Red Skelton's grandmother, anyone would start feeling ancient even when she left the program. I simply reverse attitudes after every role and I've been young ever since," she says.
Off Screen Humor
As humorous off screen, as on, Verna couples her amazing youth with dry wit that keeps the crew and staff in a state of helpless laughter during the long hours of filming the show.
Often, she is the butt of harmless practical jokes which go on continuously, sparked usually by Harry Morgan who plays Pete Porter, the caustic next-door neighbor.
Verna, who has more pep than a sixteen-year-old cheer leader, believes that she was destined for comedy. "With the start I had—she played Little Lord Fauntleroy in her first stage appearance—how could it be anything else?"
Born in Salinas, California on July 20, 1890, the brown eyed silver-haired actress augments her radio and TV careers with occasional motion picture parts. She drew critical praise for her role as the neighbor in "Picnic."
Away from work, she enjoys her swimming pool and loves to spoil her pets. She has three cocker spaniels, a big grey cat named "Veronica" and a talking parakeet which answers to the name of "Mama's Baby Bird." The delights of her life are her grandchildren, the two children of her son Lee Miller and his wife Edith. The amazing quality about Verna Felton is that she never ages. "I do add a few wrinkles, but that's about all. It's a shame that so many women seem to slow down for no reason once they grow old."

This short story from November 16, 1957 illustrates the dangers of live-to-film.

Verna Felton Loses Cue In Coffee
by RON BURTON
HOLLYWOOD (UP)—Shop talk: Verna Felton, a clever actress with a habit of putting cue lines in 1,001 places, received a setback the other day in the course of a CBS-TV show in the "December Bride" series.
The place this time for her cue line to help her remember her lines was in a coffee cup. It was part of the set, and Miss Felton wrote in the memory-jogging line with a crayon. The only trouble was that when the crucial time came, she looked into the cup and saw the line no longer just coffee. She drank the coffee but there was still no cue line.
It seems the prop man had filled the cup, and the hot coffee had melted away her crayoned words.

Tinkering ended Felton’s career as Hilda Crocker. Pete and Gladys was spun off when December Bride went off the air. Felton and Harry Morgan moved over from the old show, but then a “Gladys” had to be added. Cara Williams was hired for the role. She was to be the comedy star of the show; there was no need for Hilda, who was shuffled off after one season because creator Parke Levy didn’t feel there was a logical reason for her to be part of the plot.

“I would rather not go into detail about it,” Felton said about her firing, telling columnist Hal Humphrey in October 1961: “I'm too old to fight. Tell my fans they'll see me soon on a Jack Benny show, and I hope some other shows, too.” Indeed, Jack Benny called her one more time to yell “Aaaaaah Shaaaaadup!” at him like in the olden days on radio. She appeared with Cara Williams (that must have been uncomfortable) on a CBS-TV special starring Henry Fonda and then Joe Barbera came calling to see if she’d yell “Aaaaaah Shaaaaadup!” at Alan Reed as Fred Flintstone.

Felton’s career was fading, though. She died on December 14, 1966, the day before the man who brought the world feature cartoon versions of Alice in Wonderland, Cinderella, Dumbo, Sleeping Beauty and Lady and the Tramp—all films she appeared in for Walt Disney.

Space Wiener

Daws Butler played a seemingly uncountable number of cartoon characters in his career. He was a star at Hanna-Barbera in its early years. MGM, Warner Bros. and Walter Lantz regularly featured him in their cartoons. He was the voice of all kinds of animated TV commercials, and even wrote some. This doesn’t include children’s records, writing and appearing on Stan Freberg’s radio shows and manipulating and voicing puppets on Time For Beany. But perhaps his most unusual role was that of Cadet Frankie Luer.

Frankie was an animated wiener. Well, barely animated. In the brief clips available of him, only his mouth moves for the most part. And while he’s in a commercial, it doesn’t appear it was a television commercial. It was shown on a makeshift rocket.

If you’re a kid, it sounds like something fun. The Torrence Herald wrote in its issue of January 10, 1957:

Jim Dandy to Offer Trips To Moon at Lomita Store

Local children will be treated to tree trips to the moon tomorrow when Frankie Luer brings his huge space ship to the Jim Dandy Market at 24911 S. Western Ave. Free trips in the rocket ship will be available from 12 noon to 7 p.m.
Built by Luer Packing Co. to entertain their young friends, Frankie Luer's Space Ship is an authentic 60-foot replica of the giant interplanetary ship of the future.
Inside its metal hull, the space ship contains a comfortable 34-seat auditorium where children are seated for their seven-minute trip to the moon. During their trip the young space travelers experience all the thrills of supersonic flight, from the first surge of power as the ship blasts off to the final bump as it lands again.
Technically, the Luer Space Ship is a mechanical and electronic wonder. The full color animated film of the trip is projected onto the front "view plate" by means of a lens device that resembles a periscope. This allows a projection space of a few feet to accomplish the same thing as a huge auditorium projection room, and adds realism to the film.
Vibrators mounted in the tail of the ship give the illusion of flight with both sound and vibration. Other unique devices on the Luer Space Ship record altitude and flight time in a series of lights that can be seen by the passengers.

Charles Pappas’ book Flying Cars, Zombie Dogs & Robot Overlords reports the budding astronauts also received a promotional pamphlet called “Frankie Luer’s Space Adventures” where the space winner joins a boy named Davey Rocket on a trip to Venus, where they meet mushroom people and see moss-covered cities. On the back of the comic was a Flight Certificate which officially certified the bearer travelled aboard the Luer space ship. Mycomicshop.com adds the 5-by-7 full colour comic was 36 pages and included instructions for making a flying saucer sandwich. It was printed by Western Publishing. Comic price: ten cents. The Catalogue of Copyright Entries reveals it was written by the Dan D. Miner Co.

By the way, the Luer Space Ship was rescued from a life-time of increasing rust. Its story is on this web site run by its co-owner. I’ve spotted ads in Los Angeles papers up to 1968 advertising the rocket’s appearance.

Getting back to the cartoon, the always enjoyable Prelinger Archives posted bits and pieces to archive.org. Parts of the first two silent films were used to make the animated plug that apparently appeared at the beginning of the “space trip.” If you want to hear Daws, click on the audio player. You might be able to get it to match up with the first part of the first video and get a better idea of what it looked like to the kids in the rocket ship.







And below is silent footage of the space trip itself. Not very exciting and the animated portions are very limited. I couldn’t tell you who did the animation.

Flying Walrus

Shamus Culhane pulls off some of his wild camera shakes in Chew-Chew Baby, where Woody Woodpecker goes in drag to humiliate Wally Walrus.

After losing his disguise, Woody sticks a barbecue fork into a love seat (note the heart) as Wally drops from the ceiling.



Up he crashes through the ceiling after some perspective animation. Culhane’s cameraman shakes things up.



Wally falls to the floor, stopping momentarily in mid-air at a stop light Woody has conveniently whipped out of nowhere. There’s another violent camera shake. The camera is out of focus for two frames. Animator Bob Jaques tells me that was not deliberate; the camera operator didn’t focus when he changed fields.



Grim Natwick and Paul Smith are the credited animators. I imagine Don Williams is here, too. Layouts are by Art Heinemann, backgrounds by Phil DeGuard and voices by Bugs Hardaway and Jack Mather.