Apple For Teacher

Blackboard Jumble (released by MGM in 1956) is full of warmed over Tex Avery gags and reused Tex Avery animation with modern backgrounds by Fernando Montealegre.

One gag starts out with the world’s longest doorknob handle but turns into a bunch of stuff exploding in the southern wolf’s face, the same thing that happened to Spike in one of Avery’s Droopy cartoons earlier in the decade.



Irv Spence has an animation credit on this cartoon, along with journeymen Bill Schipek, Herman Cohen and Ken Southworth. Ed Benedict is the layout artist and Daws Butler provides uncredited voices.

Despite this being called a Droopy cartoon (and Bill Thompson’s greeting in the opening credits), Droopy doesn’t appear.

Fishy Piano

Flip the Frog’s quasi-Mozart piano playing inspires a statue holding a goldfish bowl to come to life and toss droplets of water like flower petals.



A hungry fish strolls into the scene.



The statue starts drinking the water. The fish starts sweating. In water!



The fish flies into the cat’s stomach. We get more of the Iwerks studio’s endless irradiating lines. And smoke coming out of the cat. Smoke?



Maybe it’s a smoked salmon. Yuk, yuk, yuk. Hey, that’s funnier than just about anything in this tedious cartoon.

This is The Music Lesson, a 1932 effort from Ub Iwerks.

Batfad

Batman was the most fun there was on TV for a brief period in the mid-1960s. The villains were crazy or calculating and, therefore, a real menace. Alfred was unflappable. Aunt Harriet was clueless and dithering. The Batmobile had a neat design. Words like “Zowie!” suddenly appeared on the screen. And you had a day to guess how Batman and Robin would get out of their seemingly-fatal predicament (ABC, in a stroke of genius, aired two-part episodes on Wednesday and Thursday nights).

The series became a monster fad. Newspapers wrote about it being a monster fad. Newspapers rewrote stories about it being a monster fad.

Here are a couple. The first is from the Cincinnati Enquirer of March 19, 1966 and gets into the business of Batman. It makes you wonder about shows today that spend fortunes on merchandising and then the show flops. It also makes you wonder why “experts” are so humourless. The second one is mainly from the Orlando Sentinel of January 12, 1967. A few other papers ran a longer unbylined version. Other newspapers earlier in the month had a similar syndicated story by Gretchen Carroll with some of the same words and many of the same quotes of Adam West. Judging by reactions in the story it’s evident some people took the show waaaaay too seriously.

Yes, the Batfad died for a time as the pundits predicted. The show killed itself by casting Milton Berle as a villain that wasn’t The Joke Stealer and Ethel Merman who was known to be evil only to Ernest Borgnine. And the Batman-as-the-Pied Piper episode showed the producers gave up on any premise of adventure or suspense and just went with the ridiculous. As a kid, I was insulted. But almost 55 years later, the series still has a following. As well it should. Where else can you get an accomplished actor like Burgess Meredith quacking and yelling “Bat boob!”

Batman?? What About Your Goldfish, Dad??
BY LOYALL SOLOMON
Enquirer Business Writer
Hey Dad, the next time Junior dons his Batman sweat shirt, combs his bangs down over his eyes, slams the front door and heads for that stripped down hotrod with the bullet hole decals, think before you groan and wonder, "What is this younger generation coming to?"
Remember the racoon coat, the ukelele, the hip flask and the Stutz Bearcat? Take heart, because the Dynamic Duo probably will fade into history Just like the racoon coat, the uke, the Stutz and the nickle goldfish from Woolworths that you swallowed by the handful.

The Caped Crusader and his Holy Smoking sidekick Robin burst onto the American [scene] a couple of months ago just like James Bond, Agent 007, did last year, just like Davy Crockett did before that and just like the hoola hoop before that.
The popularity of the scourge of evil-doers was strongly demonstrated Wednesday night when all of the TV networks gave live coverage to the Gemini 8 flight and plight. Officials of the American Broadcasting Co. and affiliate stations were swamped with thousands of calls from irrate [sic] viewers who preferred Batman to Gemini.
WKRC-TV, the Cincinnati ABC affiliate, received "several hundred calls" with News Director Tom Jones answering 180 of them personally. Only three were complementary. The rest? "We want Batman."
But while it may be only a brief fling, Batman will leave a monetary mark on the nation and will be responsible for quite a wad of currency changing hands. In fact, quite a wad already has changed hands—Batman sweat shirts. Bat decals, plastic models, costumes, just to mention a few items.
Just like James Bond, Davy Crockett, the hoola hoop and others. Batman is a fad that caught the public's fancy. And since American industry is geared to provide what the public wants, industry immediately jumped on the band wagon ... or is it bat wagon.
Within a matter of days after the first Batman program premiered on TV a variety of Batman sweat shirts, T-shirts with Batman decals, model Batmobiles and other such items hit the market. More than 500 items have been licensed for public distribution.
What's behind this sudden clamor for such commodities? Two members of the University of Cincinnati faculty, a sociologist and a psychologist, were just about as perplexed as the rest of the public.
"Actually Batman seems to be a part of a trend toward the atrocious—the worse the better," said Miss Gail Williams, a member of the UC Sociology Department staff. "The program is drawing crowds of adult viewers who seem to be using it as a conversation piece," she added.
Following closely on the heels of James Bond, Batman seems to be another "hero" who resorts to gadgetry instead of brain power when he finds himself in a tight spot, the sociologist commented. "In the Bond movies and books it seems that when the spy finds himself in trouble he whips out a new gadget I think people are watching Batman to see how long it can last and just what new gimmick he will come up with next," Miss Williams said.
To her, the trend toward anti-intellectual entertainment seems to be growing. "With the Bond series it appears that sex and sadism in over doses is very tolerable," Miss Williams said.

Dr. R. J. Senter, a member of UC's Psychology Department staff, commented that it is his feeling that many adults began watching Batman on TV because of their memories of their youth when they followed the adventures of the Dynamic Duo in comic books. "It is a fad and just what spurs a fad, I can't explain," said Dr. Senter. "If I could predict fads I woulnd't be in this business," he added.
Both Miss Williams and Dr. Senter feel that the Batman fad will be short lived. "While Batman does appeal to a wider age span, I don't believe it will last as long as some of the other fads lasted," Miss Williams said. And Dr. Senter added that in his opinion Batman could fade out just as rapidly as he came into sight.
Another UC staff member, Dr. George E. Hartman, head of the Marketing Department, pointed out that the speed with which manufacturers hit the market with Batman items shows that industry is becoming better prepared each day to jump quickly into production when public demand is expressed. "I am very sure that it can't last much longer," Dr. Hartman said but he added that Batman has proved a point for American industries in showing that they can jump on the bandwagon very quickly.
"This is an era of change. Most marketing organizations are better able today to grab the ball and run with it when the time comes," he said. And, he added, many organizations are becoming pretty good at predicting just what the public may come up with next in the way of fads.
Marketing groups are predicting that Batman merchandise sales will hit between $75 and $80 million before the year is out.
In 1965 James Bond items sold to the tune of slightly over $50 million. The problem is growing for many retail outlets as to "Just how many Batman sweat shirts (or Batman models, or Batmobile models) should we order? How long is this craze going to last? Do we order 300 or 3000?"
Pity the poor department store buyer who stocks up with 10,000 Bat masks on Friday and Monday finds that Batman is "out" and the Green Hornet is "in."
And who's to say that if Batman looks like a fairly permanent feature that the Green Hornet or the Shadow or Wonder Woman or even Felix the Cat won't be the next big demand.

Caped Crusader Ends First Batyear
By SANDRA HINSON
ABC's "Batman" celebrated its first anniversary on the network beginning a three-part episode guest starring The Joker (Cesar Romero) and The Penguin (Burgess Meredith) and Venus (Terry Moore).
Last night's episode was par for the parody. The Joker called Batman the Caped Cabbage Head and the Caped Creep and Robin, the Boy Blunder. He called himself the Master of Maudlin Mockery.
The three-part adventure will be a dabbling in astronomy. In the first segment The Penguin was little more than The Joker's assistant. He was a foul fowl set up as a decoy while The Joker set out to steal items listed on the Commissioner's Rare Art Map (for the sign of the Ram).
First he nabbed the rock 'n' roll rage of Gotham City the Twins. Then he broke up a performance of opera singer Leo Crustash (for the Lion and the Crab), and stole a rare statue representing Virgo the Virgin. Terry Moore was a voluptuous Venus who carefully followed Joker's dictate to maintain "the larcenous mind in a limber body."
Batman, however, solemnly maintained that she may be a nice girl deep down inside but she has fallen in with bad company-and probably had a rotten home life to boot.
Though the series set itself a rigid pattern that very first night last year, it's certainly inventive in its corny play on words and many of its devices and, taken in small doses, maintains a fair amount of comic interest.
STAR ADAM WEST has been stunned by the success of the show. "This has been the most exciting year of my professional life," he says. "I felt sure it would be successful, but I wasn't prepared for everything that's happened since—it still surprises me."

There's no doubt that Batman's overnight sensation was a national phenomenon. The Batmobile, the Batcave, the Batarang, the Caped Crusader and Dynamic Duo are terms that have become part of our popular jargon.
In the first few months following the show's premiere, the country was inundated with Batmania. Everything came up Batty.
Discotheques took up the Batusi, saloons featured the Batini, and Batwigs or Batcuts plus Batdresses were a rage. By April, there were more than 150 Batman products in toy stores, and youngsters everywhere sported Batman capes, T-shirts and complete costumes. Neil Hefti's "Batman Theme" was so successful that five other Batman records were soon on the market.
In Moscow, Pravda took heed and, predictably, branded the caped crusader "The representative of the broad mass of American billionaires." At home the super-hero was called either "camp" or "pop," although the description invariably set off arguments as to just what it meant.
On March 16, the unexpected difficulty with the Gemini 8 flight caused "Batman" to be frequently interrupted by news announcements. Across the country a storm of protesting viewers jammed the ABC switchboards.
The next morning, the Minneapolis Star ran four photographs from the show on its front page—and Astronauts Armstrong and Scott requested that the show be re-run since they, too, had missed it.
A Congressman wrote to Executive Producer William Dozier to request that seatbelts become an integral part of the Batmobile—having missed the episode where Batman cautioned Robin on just that subject.
When an automobile club criticized Batman's "reckless" driving, the caped crusader took to TV to defend his driving speed and stress his safety precautions, and have since taken care to fasten their seat belts.
And when a Columbus, Ohio, billboard company recently put up an enormous "Batman is Dead" sign as a gag, Sigma Pi Fraternity immediately sent pickets out to protest.
On the show itself, Hollywood's top stars flocked to the casting office for special guest villain roles. Stellar villains have included Cesar Romero, Burgess Meredith, Shelley Winters, Cliff Robertson, liberace, Anne Baxter, Otto Preminger, Frank Gorshin," Julie Newmar, Carolyn Jones, Art Carney, Van Johnson, George Sanders, Michael Rennie, David Wayne and Maurice Evans. In addition, such people as Jerry Lewis, Tim Conway, Sammy Davis, Sonny and Cher, Dick Clark and Phyllis Diller have done "cameo" roles.
How has all this affected the cast?
Both Adam West and Bart Ward have made frequent pubic appearances and have been seen in person by thousands of people. Says West, "I have always wanted to sign professionally and Batman afforded me the chance. I have sung onstage in San Francisco, New York, New Orleans and Detroit, as well as on The Hollywood Palace and The Milton Berle Show."
West has also cut a single record, "You Only See Her," with an album in the offing. Burt Ward also cut a song, "Boy Wonder, I Love You," and the personal popularity of both performers has soared. With the TV series and the feature film "Batman" currently breaking records in England, their popularity continues to expand. Multiple film offers await their convenience.
West continues: "The thing that pleases me most about the show is that I feel it is getting better. The comedy has always been pretty broad, but it is becoming more and more satirical, and I think that assures it a lively place in television entertainment. With episodes like 'Hizzoner the Penguin', which spoofed every phase of elections, I think the show is making a social statement, in a nutty kind of way at any rate; we've still got a lot to offer."
In addition to the overwhelming popularity of the show, all concerned were honored this past year with an Emmy nomination for the best comedy series. Quite a lot to celebrate.

She Has Oomph

“Hello, Ann. How’s the ‘Oomph Girl’ tonight,” enquires Eddie Robinson of Ann Sheridan (known as the ‘Oomph Girl’) in Hollywood Steps Out.

Being the Oomph girl, she responds as you might expect. “Oomph, oomph, oomph,” she tells Edward G. Notice her hands.



There’s a pause. But she’s not through. “Oomph!” she adds and startles Eddie in the process.



The original titles for this are hiding somewhere. We know Tex Avery directed this, Carl Stalling scored it, and the backgrounds are by Johnny Johnsen. The celebrity designs came from assistant animator Ben Shenkman and voices are supplied by (I presume) Kent Rogers, Mel Blanc and Sara Berner.

Snafu on (Kitchen) Patrol

The camera pans down a huge mound of potatoes and stops at the bottom, where Private Snufu is griping as he cleans a frying pan.

That’s the opening of Gripes, apparently the second Snafu made at the Warner Bros. studio as part of the “Army/Navy Screen Magazine.”

This was the work of Friz Freleng’s unit (there’s a hidden Friz reference in the letters of an eye-chart), where Manny Perez, Jack Bradbury, Gerry Chiniquy and Dick Bickenbach were among the animators. I don’t know whether Lenard Kester was responsible for potato mountain or the other backgrounds.

A Seuss-like rhyme does open the short
Where K.P. makes Snafu a very poor sport.

A Look Back at Jack by Dennis Day

If there was anyone who owed his career to Jack Benny, it’s Dennis Day.

Don Wilson was a big-time network sports announcer before being hired for Benny’s show in 1934. Phil Harris starred in an Oscar winning short and had several radio shows with his band (and vocalist Leah Ray) before hooking up with Benny in 1936. Eddie Anderson had appeared high in the credit roll of cast members in a number of movies.

But Day had been a singer on a couple of somewhat obscure local radio shows in New York City using his real name. Benny and his writers built a whole character for Day after being hired in 1939, then fine-tuned it and brought out talents beyond singing that Day may not have known he had. (Stories indicate Day became a pretty savvy businessman, too).

He always expressed his gratefulness to Benny in interviews. Here’s a great example published April 30, 1982 in the local paper in Twin Falls, Idaho. Benny had been dead for over seven years at this point.

Loyal friend
Singer Dennis Day still considers Jack Benny one of best
By STEPHANIE SCHOROW
Times News writer
TWIN FALLS — Even when singer Dennis Day was pushing 40, he was always "that kid" to Jack Benny, his show-business mentor.
For 25 years, on radio and then on television, Day played the naive youngster to Benny's exasperated senior.
"Even up to the very end, he'd say, 'That kid drives me nuts,'" Day recalls.
It's a lasting tribute to the cheapskate comedian that former sidekicks like Day continue to lavish praise on Benny's humor, timing and style.
"When I say Jack and I were like father and son, I mean it. You see, he adopted me, so he didn't have to pay me." Or so Day would say on the show.
Day, who is appearing with banjo player Scotty Plummer today, Saturday and Sunday at Cactus Pete's casino in Jackpot, is eager to discuss the Benny legend.
"There's very few (comedians) able to approach Jack Benny. There's no question he was a master of timing."
As an illustration, Day can't resist launching into the famous skit when a mugger puts a gun to Benny's back and growls, "Your money or your life."
"Wellll, (pause) I'm thinking."
Day, born Owen P. "Eugene" McNulty in New York City in 1917, was fresh out of college when he auditioned for the Jack Benny Show in 1939. He had done some radio shows and sent in tapes of his songs to Benny, who was looking for a replacement for singer Kenny Baker.
He first was signed on a two-week contract, and the character of his domineering mother, played by Verna Felton, was introduced until the young man achieved enough confidence on his own.
Day became a regular on the show, along with Eddie "Rochester" Anderson, Mary Livingstone and Don Wilson. He later appeared frequently on Benny's television show.
Day also had his own radio show for five years, "A Day In the Life of Dennis Day," and his own TV show, which ran from 1952 to 1954.

The still-powerful tenor singer now performs standards, Irish songs and old favorites at conventions and nightclubs throughout the country. He recently toured with "The Big Band Show," along with Harry James, Gordon MacRae and the Ink Spots.
Day also has begun lecturing, mostly to women's clubs, about radio, early TV and Benny.
He answers the inevitable question about whether Benny was really as cheap as he appeared. "Jack had to be the exact opposite. He was the easiest man in the world to work for.
"I never saw him lose his temper except once to a bit player. Thirty seconds later, he went up to him and said, 'I didn't mean it."
Day's own zany image on the show never bothered him. "I was always the silly kid. On stage, I was silly and naive and downright stupid."
Yet, there was always "logic" in his lunacy, "logic to answer the needs of Jack Benny," Day says. The audience found "I could be silly and stupid, and yet accept the fact I could still sing beautiful songs.
Moreover, the dumb-kid routine only worked with Benny. "You couldn't do that silly character with someone else."
Making the transition from radio to television also brought strange reactions. Previously, people had imagined his visage, now they saw it.
"There were either those who thought I'd be short and fat, or tall and slim with hay seeds coming out of my ears."
Day says Benny's Everyman brand of humor continues to win followers in a new generation. "They still love that timelessness about him.
"After all, he was the butt of all the jokes. He was the straight man for us. I always got the better of him. So did Rochester."
He becomes momentarily somber when he recalls how shocked he was when Benny died in 1974. "It doesn't seem possible it's been that long a time."
The father of 10 children and grandfather of eight, Day plans to continue performing. "After all, this May 25, I'll be eligible for Medicare, by George."
But still ringing in his ears before every performance is the familiar command, "Sing, Dennis."

Forget Banking. Draw Gabby Instead

An animator getting paid the same as a bank president?

Really?

That unusual theory was propounded in one of a number of newspaper features in the wake of the release of Gulliver’s Travels. I suspect it generated more laughs amongst the staff at the Fleischer studio than the Gabby or Stone Age shorts they soon found themselves making.

Max Fleischer talked with the New York Herald Tribune’s Tom Waller about the genuine need for more people in the animation, and training for them. With his company making features, Disney making features and a number of studios turning out a regular series of animated shorts, Fleischer knew there weren’t enough people to make them.

Even then, drawing was just one aspect. Characters had to move and they had to show their personality through movement (including expression). The rubber hose of the 1930s wouldn’t do by the end of the decade; Walt Disney’s people had raised the bar.

(Of course, there were other parts in the animation industry. One person left banking and became a cartoon story writer. He ended up making more than a bank president. He was Joe Barbera).

This version of the story appeared in the November 23, 1939 edition of one paper; a cut down version showed up a day later in the Miami News (I cannot find the Trib’s original copy). It appears to have a dropped word which I have added.

Talent Needed For Animated Cartoon Work
Special From the New York Herald Tribune to The Dayton Daily News
NEW YORK, Nov. 23.— Only when colleges become sufficiently cartoon-conscious to recognize the value of a new course, and artistically young men and women are made to realize that “acting at the end of pencil” often pays the wages of a bank president, will the drawn characters in feature-length cartoons become serious rivals of the flesh and blood players who act today before Hollywood cameras.
This is true, according to filmdom's oldest producer of animated cartoons, Max Fleischer, who originated the “Out of the Inkwell” screen strip over 20 years ago. He declares that mass production of such long cartoons as “Gulliver's Travels” and “Snow White” and “Pinnochio” is today handicapped virtually to the point of being stymied by this dearth of men and women who can drain acting ability from system to fingertips then transfer it successfully to celluloid.

While this condition exists the American film industry, [he] reports[,] will be lucky if it can turn out two full length cartoons a year. The ones made so far have been in the process of production two years or more. So the time is not in mind—at least in the professional screen cartoon mind—when Gullivers and Snow Whites can be popped into theaters at a speed comparable to the 400 feature pictures Hollywood grinds out in the course of a single production year. In fact, opines this veteran, it may well not be until some future generation that the film industry will be able to obtain enough skilled animators; that the question of mass feature-length cartoon production and when it will start might then be answered with a degree of accuracy.
Young folks feeling around for a career, and hearing on all sides that law is over-crowded and medicine is worse, that there are too many stenographers and too much regimentation among bricklayers, have a field almost to themselves in screen animation. The jobs pay $200 a week, and up. But, reminds Fleischer, like everything else that is worthwhile, talent and technical training go hand in hand. One is worthless without the other; that why he stresses the need for many colleges to consider this field and include the essentials of it in their curriculum, making this available to all students who show promise of becoming professional animators.
In the entire world today there are less than 500 first-class animators, men who can do all of the original drawings for all of the cartoons that are projected on theater screens, reports Fleischer. Since he opened his studio in Miami, incidentally, the only branch of the film industry to become permanently established in Florida and away from Hollywood, this producer has interested local art schools to the point where they have introduced classes in animation which now have as many as 200 students. Some of these students today are working on "Gulliver's Travels," now in the last stage of production since it is scheduled to make its world premier during the Christmas holidays.

Some 40 odd class animators and as many assistants, as well as 600 other persons in various capacities, have worked on this picture which entered production in May, 1938, almost a year before the Fleischer studios moved from New York to Miami. Fleischer, himself, figures it takes between five and six years of training to become an animator and another two to four years to rate really as a master craftsman.
When youngsters start from the ground up in his plant, Fleischer makes them opaquers or in-betweeners, which identifies them generally as copyists. The pay is small and the work nerve-wracking, but every day their copy is scrutinized and they are promoted according to their persistence and adaptability. Naturally, failures are in the majority, as they are in many other walks of life. Out of an average group of 60 persons, 20 may be selected to "show what they can do" as assistant animators. Of these 20 the average that makes the grade is not over eight.
Thus, as Fleischer points out, under the present set-up the American film industry is way behind in the matter of talented animators and with little means to establish the machinery which Hollywood has, for instance, in obtaining new talent for the screen. While a talent scout ran get a fairly good idea of whether a legitimate actress will make a go of things before the camera, after simply-watching her in stage show, a talent hunter for animators—if there were such a man—wouldn't get very far by viewing some art class at work, since the best landscape artist, according to Fleischer, often would fail dismally if he were suddenly confronted with the many geometrical and action problems which are a part of every good animator's job.

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.