Jumping Jerry

Jerry leaps into the air in A Mouse in the House (1947). Some random frames (Jerry is on ones).



Don Patterson and Dick Bickenbach join Ken Muse and Ed Barge as the credited animators.

Little King Designs

The Van Beuren studio wanted to make good cartoons. I really think they did. The studio put out money to buy established properties—and that couldn’t have been cheap—instead of relying on their own characters like Tom and Jerry or Waffles the cat.

They bought the rights to Amos ‘n’ Andy, probably the most popular show on the radio at the time. They even got the stars to supply their own voices. Yet the cartoons were so amateurish looking only two were made and the deal with creators Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll ended up in a lawsuit.

Then they bought the rights to Otto Soglow’s The Little King. The character lasted 10 cartoons and that was it. He wasn’t funny or wry or whimsical. He was, as you might expect in a Van Beuren cartoon, inexplicably weird.

I’m still trying to figure out the plot of Art For Art’s Sake (1934). About the most interesting things are the character designs, based on Soglow’s newspaper artwork. Feet? Who needs them! I like the opening where the guards on the wall look like cardboard cutouts instead of real people.



And there’s a skeleton. Why? Because it’s a Van Beuren cartoon. It doesn’t have to make sense.



George Stallings directed the cartoon and Jim Tyer gets an animation credit. Win Sharples supplied the music.

Dancing For Laughs

One of the segments in the early part of each week’s Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In was the cocktail party, where some of the players would appear as various characters and spout one-liners in between groovy music bridges.

Not only did Arte Johnson and Ruth Buzzi show up, so did a number of anonymous women who weren’t part of the cast but would take part in the dialogue (Dick Martin always seemed to have one hanging around him).

It appears either NBC or executive producer George Schlatter’s office sent out a publicity package about them to newspapers for entertainment section fodder. The San Mateo Times of February 6, 1971 printed it, among others. (One paper gave the story a byline and moved the dateline to New York).

One of the dancers should be familiar to game show fans because, about a year later, she ended up on The New Price is Right. Janice Pennington stayed on the show until 2000.

Here's how—
Like to join 'Laugh-In' players?
HOLLYWOOD — There’s more than one way to become a member of a zany show such as "Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In," and some of the dancers seen in its cocktail party segments prove the point.
One day earlier this season, for example, some behind-the-scenes executives of the show (colorcast Mondays, 8-9 p.m.) lunched at a Burbank, Calif., restaurant located between their offices and the Warner Bros. studios. They noticed that their hostess, an attractive young lady with long, red hair, had an unusual walk. She explained it was the result of her years as a ballet dancer.

"Oh, a dancer," came the response, "you ought to try for a cocktail party spot on 'Laugh-In'." She did — and now the girl, Pat Doty, from La Jolla, Calif., is in the program’s party scenes.
On another occasion, a brown-skinned beauty with long, black hair walked into the "Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In" office to retrieve some photos of herself, left in the hopes they would win her an audition. They didn’t. But her visit did. She was spotted and has worked in about half of the party scenes presented since September. She’s Betty Carr, a full-blooded Cherokee whose Indian name, Gilaki, means "brown dove." Born in Asbury, Mo. (population: 140), she moved to California with heir family, graduated from San Diego State College and has a Masters Degree in Theatre Arts. She teaches educational theatre.
For Millie Knight, who gives the impression of being Eartha Kitt’s kid sister, a door literally opened at NBC’s Burbank headquarters — the studio door off the hallway separating Studio 4 (home base for "Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In") from its soundstage twin, Studio 2 (site of "The Don Knotts Show"). One day, during a break in the Knotts show, the cast scattered. One dancer followed the sound of throbbing music, ventured into Studio 4 and watched a cocktail party segment. She dug the scene and eventually auditioned. That’s how Miss Knight, a native of New Orleans who has never had a dance lesson, became a member of the Studio 4 cocktail party set.
Ar for the other girls — there’s Jeannine Barrett, 6-feet-l, a former Miss California and before that a 4H Club girl; Sandahl Bergman, a long-legged Swedish girl who was named by her mother after the heroine of a novel; Connie Kreski, Playboy Magazine’s 1969 Playmate of the Year; Janice Pennington, next April’s Playmate for the same magazine. There’s baby-faced actress Lisa Moore; Mexico City socialite Carol Richards; Sandra Ego, an actress of American Indian extraction who was born in New Mexico.
Although the avenues which led to "Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In" may be different for these girls, they all have a ball at television’s unique cocktail party.

Runaway Rocks

The First Bad Man (from the cartoon of the same name) scares away homesteaders. This being set in the Stone Age, the homesteaders live in a rock.



They hear the sound of the bad guy.



The gag here is the husband and wife get inside their “home” and are able to lift it and run away into the distance.



The camera sits on a shot of the background. What’s director Tex Avery got planned now? Ah, an outhouse gag.



Outhouse gags show up in Bosko and Flip the Frog cartoons, but I don’t know when Avery first used one.

Tex told author Joe Adamson the cartoon “wasn’t bad.” Part of the cartoon uses the same basic concept as The Flintstones: modern day living is transposed into the Stone Age. Ed Benedict designed the characters in both this cartoon and the Hanna-Barbera TV series, though the latter went through Dick Bickenbach and some other hands before ending up on the screen.

By the time this cartoon was released in 1955, Avery had been gone from MGM for more than two years and, in fact, was out of theatrical animation for good.

Bell Hoppy Background

The establishing shot of Bell Hoppy, released in 1954, starts with a quick pan down a background drawing by Dick Thomas. Director Bob McKimson doesn’t seem to want to waste any time; the camera’s already panning when the scene fades in.

Thomas started out as one of the new, young background artists at Warner Bros., working first in Bob Clampett’s unit making black-and-white cartoons in the late ‘30s. By this time, he was paired by layout artist Bob Givens.

McKimson’s unit was disbanded before Warners shut down its cartoon studio for the last six months of 1953 and wasn’t reassembled when the studio reopened in January 1954. There was some question whether there would be a third unit at all (Friz Freleng and Chuck Jones headed the other units). But it was reactivated several months later with Thomas returning, but McKimson finding himself with a new animation crew and layout artist. Givens eventually returned and the two left for Hanna-Barbera in 1959, though Thomas stopped first at Disney to work on Sleeping Beauty.

Thomas’ last credit at Warners was Dog tales, released in mid-1958

The Sweetheart of Lucky Strike

There were two Canadian singers associated with Jack Benny over the years. One was Gisele Mackenzie, who appeared on stage with him in Las Vegas and popped up on his radio and TV shows on occasion.

The other was Dorothy Collins.

The odd thing about their on-air relationship is they never interacted, to the best of my knowledge. In the radio days, she was in a studio in a completely different building singing whatever version of the Lucky Strike jingle the sponsor wanted in that particular season. When the show was transcribed, she simply cut the song and Don Wilson’s pre-recorded spiel would be inserted in between. There were rare mentions of her in the radio dialogue; Jack revealed on one show that Polly the parrot (Mel Blanc) was a huge fan of hers (Mel responded by squawking the jingle).

After her career with American Tobacco, she was featured on one of the incarnations of the TV show Candid Camera. She was only 67 when she died in 1994.

TV Guide had a charming profile of her in its edition of April 17, 1953. It doesn’t mention the Benny show but one of Jack’s TV broadcasts is the setting for a sidebar to the story showing yet another example of one of the pitfalls of going on the air live.

Dorothy Collins’ Success Key: Listen For Opportunity’s Knock
DOROTHY Collins is now riding the crest of success and she did it all without one use of the “go-getter” formula.
“The only time I ever really tried for anything,” the demure blonde star of Hit Parade and the Lucky Strike commercials said, “I didn’t get it.”
It was about the darkest hour for the 26-year-old singer who is now one of America’s best-known women. The Raymond Scott Quintet, with which she had been a featured vocalist in Detroit, had disbanded. Scott had come on to New York to direct the Hit Parade orchestra, succeeding his brother, the late Mark Warnow. Dorothy was at loose ends.
“I auditioned for a job in one of the New York night clubs,” Dorothy said ruefully. “It was the first and only time I ever went after a job. And I didn’t get it.
“I just didn’t know what I was doing. They didn’t want me. They wanted someone like . . . well, like Marilyn Monroe or perhaps Jane Russell.
But in two weeks from that dark day, she landed one of television’s most coveted jobs, without ever dreaming it was possible.
“Raymond had been commissioned to write a jingle for the Lucky Strike people,” she related. “He asked me if I would sing the words on the sample recording he was making. My name wasn’t mentioned. It was just a way of getting the lyrics across.”
This was the first of the new jingles for the cigarette form and the basis for the idea of staging commercials with all the trappings of a musical comedy.
But the agency people liked that anonymous voice as well as they did the jingle. They signed Dorothy Collins to introduce it. When Hit Parade was introduced on TV in the summer of 1950, she was featured in the carefully staged commercials.
Her winsome charm caught the fancy of TV audiences across the national and she was moved up almost immediately to be one of the Hit Parade principals, along with Snooky Lanson and Eileen Wilson.
Dorothy’s recipe for success is now this simple: “Just be around when lightning strikes.”
Interviewed in the brain factory of Batten, Barton, Durstine and Osborn, which handles the American Tobacco Co. account, Dorothy proved as sincere and unaffected as when she was plain Marjorie Chandler back in her native Windsor, Ont.
She is still able to giggle on occasion and to say, after revealing that she likes to do “sad love songs” best:
“It’s the first chance I’ve had to do dramatics. I guess it’s gone to my head.
Has Mobile Face
Dorothy is exceedingly gifted along this line with an exceedingly mobile face. Someone has estimated that she uses 47 changes of expression in a 35-second commercial.
“Dorothy,” one ad executive said admiringly, “does everything but wiggle her ears.”
This involves hard work. Dorothy works out the expressions as carefully as a choreographer arranging a dance.
“The things we strive for are naturalness and sincerity,” Dorothy says, “and that’s not easy when you’re giving a performance.”
Makes Film Versions
She learns each routine until it becomes automatic, so that she can do it without a thought. “With all the things going on in the studio during the commercial,” Dorothy explains, “you’d never be able to do it, if you had to think about it. I like to know it so well that I can be thinking of a thousand other things and it just pours out by itself.”
She now makes film versions of the commercials which are used on Robert Montgomery Presents, in addition to the one or two live spots on Hit Parade.
Her career has braced her for surprises. She sang first at 12 in a Windsor theater contest. She sounded a lot like Judy Garland and won first prize. A Detroit radio station invited her to sing on its children’s hour. When she was outgrowing that, Raymond Scott came along and invited her to sing with his Quintet. Then TV came along and invited her to be one of its stars.
She changed her name from Marjorie to Dorothy at the outset of her career. “Dorothy was my sister’s name and I like it.” Then she changed her last name to Collins because this made two Dorothy Chandlers in the family “and it got to be confusing.”
Her crowning success was the Dorothy Collins blouse, and she made that score, too, in her approved indirect method.
Some Movie Offers
She hasn’t had many ambitions beyond her present Hit Parade contract, although she has some Hollywood offers. At the moment she’s concentrating on furnishing her new Babylon, L.I. home.
Married last summer to Raymond Scott, she is still happy and thrilled with homemaking. It’s a big house and they’re trying to furnish it with individual early American pieces.

“It’s really three houses in one,” Dorothy explained. The man who built it moored his yacht there and he started with a garage, kitchen and bathroom.
“Then he built a house onto that, so the outside wall of the first building is the inside wall of the second. Then he built a third house and tied them all together.”
Works on Records
But as far as Dorothy is concerned be it ever so rambling there’s no place like home. She hopes to do something with photograph records, but she plans to do it all within her four (or is it 12?) walls.
A few years ago, Scott bought record-manufacturing equipment to put out his own line of master works. The venture failed, but the equipment remains.
“Now,” Dorothy says, “we’ll make our own records at home and offer them to the Decca people.”
It’s a nice way to work, and it may very well click. After all, things like that happen to Dorothy Collins.

Dorothy’s Longest 25 Seconds
This was Dorothy Collins’ worst moment on television. She was to do a live commercial from New York at the end of the Jack Benny show from Hollywood. She learned two versions—a 34-second spot and a one-minute commercial. And she knew them all perfectly.
The director ordered the short version. At the last second, the Benny show closed early and the director yelled: “The long one.”
“I did the short one,” Dorothy recalls, “then stood looking at the camera for the longest 25 seconds in television.”

The Test of Leon Schlesinger

“I’ll try you on one cartoon,” Leon Schlesinger told Tex Avery, who was bumming around looking for a job after Walter Lantz let him go. And in 1936, that seems to have been Leon’s policy, confirmed by an article that appeared in various newspapers about that time. (Film Daily announced in January a new Avery unit had been formed, then reported in August that Schlesinger had signed Frank Tashlin after he directed Porky’s Poultry Plant).

There’s no byline attached to this story, so its source is unknown. This version appeared in the Hackensack Record of July 8, 1935. “J. Patton King” is a fancy way of saying “Jack King,” the former and later Disney man. Riley Thompson was an animator who received some ‘30s screen credits. Ralph Wolf wasn’t credited at Schlesinger’s but his name was later purloined by Chuck Jones at Warners in the 1950s for a Wile E. Coyote lookalike who failed to capture sheep. Considering Leon’s background was vaudeville promotions and theatre management, it’s not surprising he can’t explain some aspects of film production.

CARTOONING FOR MOVIES IS HARD
Read This And Decide To Do Something Else
When young men go West (West being Hollywood to ambitious youth), they do one of three things: Try to break into the movies as actors, peddle their stories from studio to studio or attempt to sell their talents as animators.
This is about the latter group—those young men who have graduated from art schools or newspaper art departments and who are confident that they can draw animals and insects for the movie cartoons.

Once it was the ambition of those possessed of artistic talent to head for New York and there sell a newspaper comic strip to a syndicate.
Now the story is reversed. J. Patton King, Ralph Wolf and Riley Thompson, to name but a few, gave up drawing comic strips for a New York syndicate to accept flattering offers of Leon Schlesinger, producer of "Looney Tunes" and "Merrie Melodies", cartoon films.
But how is one to get into the animated cartoon business? Cartoonists would like to know.
Schlesinger hired his 60 animators via a test route. Strange as it may seem, cartoons photograph as differently as movie stars. Not even Schlesinger can explain the reason, but such is the case.
Before hiring an artist, he demands a test cartoon. This is photographed on movie film, the same as those of the employed artist. Later it is projected on the screen. If the cartoon photographs "well", Schlesinger considers the artist as a prospective employee.
To be one of the pen and ink creators of "Merrie Melodies" and "Looney Tunes", the artist must be more than a cartoonist. He must know, first of all, animation. That is, he must be able to draw 16 or more cartoons for each movement—of a character. This means that the cartoonist must know anatomy—how the foot moves, how the knee bends, how the hands move and similar anatomical technicalities.
It is not to wonder at then why so many top notch cartoonists have failed to make the grade in Hollywood.

Adding another boulder in the path of the would-be movie cartoonist, music plays an important role in drawing cartoons for the movies. Before the animator is a large sheet, divided into musical beats, which, when translated into terms of music, represents the musical score of the picture. Keeping in mind the beats, the animator finds just what the figure in the film must do, and in what sequence.
The cartoonist must never vary from these orders because the music for the film already has been recorded. In other words, the animator must draw his characters to fit the music.
Those who would be movie cartoon animators should not attempt to enter the business if they have the least tendency of becoming bored. It takes between 10,000 and 12,000 individual cartoons for one film. It takes 12 weeks to make one cartoon.
The most that the cameraman can shoot a day is 50 feet of film—photographed frame by frame. A cartoon is from 650 to 690 feet long and runs on the screen for about six and a half minutes.
Figure it out for yourself.

House of Yesterday

Remember the Tex Avery cartoon House of Tomorrow?

Tommy Morrison at Terrytoons did.

He grabbed the concept, complete with narrator, juicer and the mother-in-law and tossed them into Phoney News Flashes, released six years after the MGM spot-gagger.

“Here is one separate model which has one room for every member of the family—”



“—including mother-in-law.”



“Inside the house we find separate sleeping arrangements for Mr. and Mrs. Householder, Junior—”



“—and for mother-in-law.”



“Each kitchen is completely equipped including an all-inclusive super-juicer for Mr. and Mrs. For Junior—”



“—and for mother-in-law.”



You get the idea. Things go up-hill a bit from here; I actually liked the Cinemascope spoofs in the next scene.

As far as I can tell, Dayton Allen is using his real voice as the narrator. He later does a Durante impression.

Oh, I hope you noted the Mighty Mouse lamp in Junior’s room. Nothing like Paul Terry cross-promotion. Maybe he got the idea from his mother-in-law.

Wagon Ho Ho Ho

Droopy manages to thwart the cattle rancher throughout one of my favourite Tex Avery cartoons, Drag-a-Long Droopy (1954). The bad guy rancher jumps into sheepherder Droopy’s covered wagon, but because anything can happen in a Tex Avery cartoon, Droopy and his mule defy logic and gravity by going off on one direction and the wagon in another.



It takes seven frames for the wagon to turn into a surrey after hitting the cliff; it’s a gag Avery used in other MGM cartoons. These are two consecutive drawings.



The end result before Avery wipes into the next scene. Gritting his teeth, no doubt, Scott Bradley scores “The Old Grey Mare” in the background (various accounts have it Bradley hated old hat music in “his” cartoons).



Avery provides the voice of the wolf, Bill Thompson is Droopy while Mike Lah, Walt Clinton, Grant Simmons, Bob Bentley and Ray Patterson provide the animation in front of Johnny Johnsen’s backgrounds.

Miltie, March and Money

Milton Berle was network television’s first huge star. Starting in late 1948, vast sales of TV sets were credited to his Tuesday night show on NBC which was slowly adding affiliates as new stations were coming on the air.

Berle was the star of the Texaco Star Theatre which he had been hosting on radio to mixed reviews and audiences. Radio was never Berle’s forte. One of his short-lived ventures was a summer replacement show on CBS that was kind of an advice show with Berle’s hokey one-liners chucked in whenever possible.

Herald Tribune columnist John Crosby reviewed it and two other summer replacement shows in his column of July 10, 1946. Bob Sweeney was a well-thought of television director in later years but at the time he was in a comedy team with Hal March, noted more for The $64,000 Question than his acting. CBS gave them a show. The third replacement was a game show that was now on ABC after airing on the Mutual network. Break the Bank starred the overly-effervescent Bert Parks, who soon took his hype to another ABC radio show, Stop the Music. Break the Bank made the transition to television. It featured prize questions that a child of five could answer but adult game show contestants couldn’t, as Crosby notes.

Three New Radio Shows
At the outset of his new program, “Kiss and Make Up” (WABC 9 p. m. Mondays), Milton Berle went on at some length about his experiences at the beach.
“Honestly, the bathing suits these girls wear,” he said. “Midriff. All mid and no riff. The lifeguard has to rescue one girl from drowning. The girl screamed twice—once because he was drowning.”
That should give you some idea of Mr. Berle, who hasn’t changed a bit since his vaudeville days. In “Kiss and Make Up,” Mr. Berle plays judge in a sort of domestic relations court. On Monday night, a couple was brought before him both insisting that the other one snored so loudly that sleep was impossible.
“You mean he’s sleeping on the inside and snoring on the outside?” inquired Mr. Berle.
After a bit more of this patter, the couple are asked to kiss and make up, hence the title of the show. The program is supposed to be ad lib, but I have grave doubts about that. One woman complained that another woman heard her order liver on the party line and then rushed down and got the liver herself.
“I got her liver, but she got my gall,” said the other female. If that’s an ad-lib, I’m John J. Anthony. From where I sat I could see the beads of perspiration on the gag writer’s brow when he dreamed that up. I’m not a Milton Berle fan, but if you like puns, you’ll hear more in five minutes on this show than in an hour and a half of Eddie Cantor.
* * *
Some time ago I remarked that a good comedian makes a half hour fly past while a poor one makes a half hour seem twice that long. I had another long half hour on Friday night, while listening to “Sweeney and March” on their new comedy act (WABC 8:30 p. m. Fridays). In this case I think the reason is that they crammed enough material into a half an hour to make two or three shows.
The program opened with one comedian talking the other one out of going to the seashore on his vacation and invites himself to go to the mountains. Then there is a sketch up in the mountains, the trip back from the mountains, and the half hour ended with another sketch about buying a used car. Any one of those sketches would have made a good half hour if treated with a little wit, but lumping them all together made the program seem endless. The program also presents Patsy Bolton, fourteen-year-old singer, who tripped through “Great Day” with a suavity far greater than her years.
As a sample of the humor on the Sweeney and March program I seem to have only one joke on my notes, though I’m sure they must have told more than that. Here it is:
“Can I get a prescription filled here.”
“Certainly not, this is a drug store.”
* * *
If you want to make some easy money you might want to try to get on the “Break the Bank” program (WJZ, 9 p. m., Fridays). This is a new quiz show with a $1,070 top prize, but I advise against trying for the whole sum. It’s a cinch to make $200 or $300.
Some of the questions asked last Friday were: “What famous document proclaimed the independence of the United States?” “Who was first in peace, first in war and first in the hearts of his countrymen?” “What is the first love song you remember?” On that last question any love song that pops into your mind serves as an answer.
The jumbo question which would have won the contestant $1,070 was: “Where was the first atomic bomb exploded?” I thought every one had heard about the New Mexico test explosion, but the contestant apparently missed his newspaper that day. He retired from the program with just $10 for his previous answers.

As we’ve promised, we’ll give you the full week’s worth of Crosby’s columns. You can click on them to see them better. July 8, 1946 was about a drama starring Orson Welles on CBS. July 9th has Crosby nodding in affirmation at the cattiness of the Mutual programme Leave it to the Girls. July 11th has Crosby mulling over three different shows, while July 12th’s column focuses on a couple of women’s programmes, one on local New York radio.