The Living Rocketship

It’s just an ordinary rocket ship, built by a bunch of mice out of things around the house.



But wait! It has eyes! It’s alive!



This is from Little Buck Cheeser, a 1937 cartoon by Hugh Harman and Rudy Ising released after they left the studio. In it, Cheeser (played by Berneice Hansell) and his mousey friends zoom to the moon to see if it’s made a cheese. It is. But the space ship fights any attempt to stop and land.



Breaking free of a line attached to a toilet plunger stuck on a mound of green cheese, the rocket ship lands in a smelly lake. It has eyes but evidently no nose as it has to read a sign (in perfect English) to realise where it is.



It squirms and struggles but finally frees itself before blowing up in an effects animation explosion and plummeting, on fire, out-of-control with the frightened mice on board.



“Aw, this’ll be a cop-out. It’ll be a dream,” I can hear you saying. Yes, that’s the plot. That’s even though at no time in the cartoon does Cheeser look tired, let alone fall asleep.

No animators are credited. The score is by Scott Bradley.

Hugh Downs

Will someone be able to find a match to “A hundred box” on the puzzle board that was behind number 24? We watched to find out. And so did the man who hosted this particular TV game show.

Hugh Downs had many jobs over his career on TV, but I think of him most as the host of Concentration, where Paul Taubman’s Wurlitzer organ cheerfully doodled out tunes under descriptions of “a hundred box,” a trip to Bermuda, golf clubs and other prizes contestants had won. And everything was held together by the smooth, low-key Downs, who never seem to be bothered by anything during his long career on television.

He may have been relaxed but he once caused a panic back in his radio days. Billboard reported on July 11, 1942:

He Believed It
DETROIT, July 4.—Memories of Orson Welles’s “Invasion from Mars” were involved in the Detroit Police Department Saturday when an inspector tuned in to WWJ’s Yawn Club in time to hear announcer Hugh Downs tell the world, “Somebody has stolen studio A.” Said inspector promptly sent two detectives to the station to investigate, and they had the staff badly puzzled till an engineer recollected the phrase over the air.
Check-up showed Downs had come in early for his show, got off the elevator at the wrong floor, found Studio A wasn’t there when he tried to walk into it—and later mentioned the incident over the program.

Downs’ road to Concentration, thence to the Today Show, 20/20 and other ventures began in humble small-town radio. In 1940, he was chief announcer at WLOK, Lima, Ohio¹ before making his way to WWJ. He ended up in the Army briefly in 1943² then signed up with WMAQ, the NBC station in Chicago, after his discharge.³ During his time there, Downs caused another unexpected panic. Here’s the Chicago Tribune’s version from July 5, 1947.

Fourth Brings a Star Gazer Down to Earth
Hugh Downs, 26, spent a quiet Fourth yesterday in his apartment at 1644 Farwell av., wishing that his neighbors would [1] learn the difference between a telescope and a bazooka, or [2] mind their own business.
Downs, an announcer for the National Broadcasting company, said the pitfalls in the path of an amateur astronomer are many—chiefly bashful ladies and irate husbands who don’t realize that the telescope is focused on infinity and is useless as an aid to boudoir glimpses.
It Does Ulcers No Good
“But this was the first time I’ve become tied up in the bazooka angle,” Downs said. “And, believe me, I trust it is the last! These encounters with the law during the middle of the night neither help my hobby nor my ulcers.”
About a year ago he took up astronomy as a hobby and started building his own telescope, which has a six foot tube tube, bound with brass.
About 1 a.m. Thursday he lugged the contraption into his yard and started studying the craters of the moon. “There I was, minding my own business, 238,857 miles away from Farwell av.,” he said.
“The next thing I knew there was a flashlight in my eyes. I caught a glimpse of a policeman’s uniform and star, and he yelled, ‘Don’t fire that thing!’”
There’s a Limit
“Don’t fire what thing?” Downs asked.
“That bazooka,” said the cop. “That’s going too far with this celebration business. A bazooka packs the wallop of a 155 mm. cannon. You’re not going to fire it on my beat.”
After a confused discussion of the destructive power of a bazooka, the proper way to celebrate independence day, the craters of the moon, and the nosy neighbors who had complained about the bazooka firing in the first place, Downs convinced the policeman and then spent 30 minutes explaining heavenly wonders to him.
“My wife, Ruth, and our year and a half old son, Hugh Raymond, have nicknamed my scope ‘The Bazooka’ and they aren’t giving me much peace about it,” Downs said. “When all the furore dies, maybe I can go back to my hobby.”

Television was being developed in Chicago in the 1940s and the NBC radio people found themselves doing double-duty on the new medium. Downs was one; he had experience at the city’s first station, the independent WKBK. In 1951, he was hosting a half-hour, daily noon-time sustainer called Your Luncheon Date ⁴. Chicago had been a big network radio hub, so why not be the same for television? Starting January 1952, Downs’ show was seen across NBC⁵ for about 13 months before being chopped during a revamp of daytime programming.⁶ Downs carried on on local television.

In the meantime, NBC programming mogul Pat Weaver was fiddling and fussing with a daytime show that finally made its debut on March 1, 1954 as Home. Downs wasn’t on it at the beginning; the show starred Arlene Francis and experts on gardening, shopping and other around-the-house concerns. But the show broadcast the first network colorcast originating from a Chicago station on June 23, 1954 with Downs conducting the interview.⁷ It wasn’t long before he was in New York as a permanent member of the Home team.

Next was Concentration. Then came Jack Paar. Downs was Paar’s announcer on the Tonight show and left in the lurch when Paar got into a hissy fit with NBC and walked out on his audience on February 12, 1960. Downs had to take over and straddle the line of not siding with one against the other (though Downs explained that evening he had not been an NBC employee for some time).

Here are a couple of puff pieces that found their way into newspapers at the time. The first is a syndicated column dated March 26, 1961, the next a United Press International story dated July 24, 1960.

Hugh Downs Attains 'Personality' Status
By MARGARET McMANUS
Hugh Downs, a regularly featured attraction on the Jack Paar show, is a member in good standing of the Paar Family Plan.
One of the rudimentary requirements is loyalty to the leader and here the genial Downs scores well.
Naturally Downs was a quietly agreeable aide in Paar's army in the recent war between Paar and Ed Sullivan concerning the inflammable matter of guest fees.
• • •
DOWNS, HIMSELF, is no slouch in the matter of money. It is reliably reported that from his duties on the Paar show, from his daily NBC daytime television show, Concentration, and from the weekly nighttime version of the same show, which begins on Monday, April 17, he accumulates close to $250,000 a year.
Born in Akron, O., raised in Lima, Hugh Downs began his career at the age of 18 on a 100-watt radio station in Lima. Before he was 20, he saw the station increased to 250 watts, became its program manager with three announcers working for him.
• • •

IN 1941, he moved on to Detroit, and after Pearl Harbor he attempted to enlist in the Navy, the Coast Guard and the Air Force. Nobody would take him because he is color blind. Just as he accepted that fact, he was drafted, 123d Infantry, heavy weapons company.
Downs had a brief, unfortunate career in the Army. He was a part of that ill-fated experiment, at Ft. Louis, Wash. [sic], to condense the 13 weeks basic training into four weeks. Downs and half the trainees collapsed from exhaustion and, after several weeks in the hospital, he was medically discharged without ever really seeing any service at all.
"My career in World War II seemed doomed to disaster," he said. "It was quite disturbing. When I was on my way home, I thought I was glad to be out of it. When I got home, I found I wasn't. For about a year I kept having psychosomatic illnesses," Downs says. "I thought I was completely shot physically."
• • •
HE RETURNED briefly to Detroit at the end of his Army service, but then went to Chicago where he was an NBC staff commercial announcer for 11 years. He was in Chicago when NBC was looking for a new face for the "Home" show with Arlene Francis. He was one of a number of out-of-town announcers called in to audition.
Downs won the audition; was on 900 hours of Home until it went off the air in July 1957. On a hot, muggy, midsummer's night, the same month, same year, he started with Paar on his opening show. He started as the show announcer and in months had made the elusive transition from announcer to "personality."
• • •
HUGH DOWNS, at the age of 40, is no longer an announcer. He is a "personality," precisely what he wants to be.
"It is my theory that to be a 'personality' is the best thing you can be on television," he said. "A 'personality' is not talent, so it can't burn out, nor can it be overexposed.
"There is a fantastic kind of security in it. They can always find somebody who is better looking than I am, or who has a better voice, but who can they find who is a better Hugh Downs? I don't want to be anything but myself."
• • •
DOWNS, WHO loves the water and boats and sailing, has been married for 17 years to the former Ruth Shaheen, who was a radio producer for NBC when they met in Chicago. They live in an eight-room apartment on Central Park West in New York and have a 15-year-old son, named Hugh, but called H. R., and an 11-year-old daughter, Deirdre, called Deedee.
Hugh Downs is an intelligent man, very knowledgeable, practical, tolerant and kind.
"I call myself an unreasonably happy man," he said.

Varied Interests Keep 'Civilized' Downs Busy
By DOC QUIGG
NEW YORK (UPI)—"Some men are born great. Some achieve greatness. And some have greatness thrust upon them, as in the cases of Caesar Augustus, Harry S. Truman, and Hugh Downs."
Downs, a character so highly civilized that he's sometimes referred to as "TV's renaissance man," threw back his head and chortled mightily when told the jape quoted above. It was inserted by British comedian Michael Flanders into his recent Broadway hit show as a commentary on the Jack Paar February television walkout that left Downs all alone by the microphone.
"That's really funny," Downs said. "I'll have to tell it to Jack."
Although Downs catapulted to fame in recent years as the side-kick of the star on the Jack Paar show, he actually entered the broadcasting business 22 years ago as a radio announcer in Lima, Ohio.
"It's kind of weird," he recalled, "but the fact is that I was looking for a job all over town—they were hard to find then—and there was nothing for me and I finally stopped at the radio station and asked them what you had to do to become an announcer.
Gets the Job

"They told me to come back Friday and I said I couldn't, so they handed me a piece of copy and asked me to read it right there. I did and the boss, who had been listening, came out and said: 'You know, that was very bad, but—and he actually said this—'Big oaks from little acorns grow.' So I was hired." Downs leads a life so full of great number of interests that it's hard to see how he crams himself into a 24-hour day. He skin dives. He reads books on history and science in conveyances and while eating. He builds hi-fi sets, keeps up with astronomy and other weighty sciences (in the past years he build two telescopes himself), and composes music.
He has a record album out called "An Evening With Hugh Downs" on which he sings folk songs. His book "Yours Truly, Hugh Downs," which he wrote over the last 2½ years and which contains his ideas on broadcasting, will be published in October by Holt, Rinehart and Winston. He's working on a magazine article on conservation.
He frequently makes speeches at dinners and other affairs ("everybody knows I like to talk"). This week he gave the opening lecture in a New York University series for graduate students and teachers on "Culture and America," speaking on the role of communications.
Next month he will be doing summer stock for a week, appearing in "Anniversary Waltz" in Warren, Ohio.
16 Hours a Week
In addition to these things, and others like taking care of a wife and two children, he works. Nobody in this country exceeds his present average 16 hours a week of commercial broadcasting on a major network. His own daily NBC-TV game-quiz show "Concentration' accounts for 2 1/2 hours, the Paar show nine hours, and his weekend stint on the NBC radio "Monitor" lasts four hours. That's the regular schedule, and his extra appearances average a half to one hour a week.
Perhaps the Downs quiet good nature in the midst of the hectic life is helped along by knowledge that his income tops $100,000 a year.
Perhaps, also, it is due to his immersion in study. His yen for learning began when he was 5.
"My father told me the distance to the moon, instead of saying it was made of green cheese. That's why I always answer kids seriously when they ask me things."

All this would be enough of a career for anyone, but Downs had a lot more ahead; 20/20 may have been the biggest part of it. He really was an anchor of not only Today, but network television’s early years. And he probably saw puzzles solved and gave away more “hundred boxes” than anyone else on TV.

---

1 Broadcasting, May 1, 1940, pg. 55^↩
2 Broadcasting, Jan. 11, 1943^↩
3 Broadcasting, May 24, 1943^↩
4 Variety, May 23, 1951, pg. 41^↩
5 Variety, Dec. 26, 1951, pg. 29^↩
6 Variety, Feb. 20, 1952^↩
7 Chicago Tribune, June 24, 1954, pg. C6.^↩

What's He Doing There?

When cartoons change from scene to scene in what should be continuous action, character positions should try to match so things look seemless, not jarring.

The people at the Van Beuren studio didn’t worry about that kind of thing.

There’s a good example in Runaway Blackie, where a little goat with a design similar to Cubby Bear tries to hitch a ride. There’s no attempt to make the scenes match up.

These are consecutive frames. Suddenly, Blackie is at the side of the road, which is now curved, on a hill, and decorated with telegraph poles.



Two more consecutive frames. Blackie instantly changes locations. He’s standing on a culvert or something like that.



The culvert disappears. So do the cars. And the telegraph poles. Yes, these are consecutive, too.



This is a disappointing cartoon because there’s very little of the usual Van Beuren weirdness (the hitch-hiking sequence has one weak gag about cars being afraid of each other), but plenty of Van Beuren incompetence. Harry Bailey gets the “by” credit. The raspy voice guy has several roles, including the talking moon (or is it the sun?).

Are People Funny?

Audience participation shows were the reality shows of their day.

They featured real people put in a contrived situation where the audience could laugh at their obvious discomfort (reality shows added to that a large heap of self-centered jerkishness).

Art Linkletter hosted two hardy audience-participation perennials on radio and TV—People Are Funny and House Party. He was so popular he had regular programmes on both CBS and NBC; even Arthur Godfrey only stuck to one network. It seems to me House Party was one of the final shows of what was left of the CBS radio network in the late ‘60s.

Let’s see what columnist John Crosby said about one of Linkletter’s stunts in his column of July 15, 1946. Perhaps because it doesn’t demean the young couple involved (too much), he seems to have liked the stunt’s creativity.

“The Sponsored Marriage”
On Friday night Art Linkletter, one of the busiest as well as one of the noisiest masters of ceremony in radio, told a young couple on the threshold of wedlock that the chances of a marriage being a success were only fifty-fifty, according to current statistics, whereas the chances would have been much greater than that 100 years ago. He then proceeded to outline a stunt that would win this couple $1,000, courtesy of the General Electric Company, if everything went well.
Before we get into the stunt, which is a honey, I should like to interject a plaintive query. Are there any statistics on what Henry Morgan refers to as “The sponsored marriage”? What are the chances of success of a marriage arranged, or at least paid for, by the General Electric Company? G.E. proudly boasts that its refrigerators last a lifetime, but do its marriages last that long? A G.E. phonograph is easy to manage and a wonderful companion in the home—but what about a G.E. wife? Has she the latest single-action disposition impervious to heat, cold and hard times? Is her complexion guaranteed stainless? Is she an automatic self-starting housekeeper? Is she dew freshened? Well, no matter.
* * *
The stunt Mr. Linkletter outlined was this: A new movies [sic], whose name I didn’t catch, has as its setting an Oregon valley 100 years ago. Since marriages were so successful 100 years ago and since the motion-picture company is paying good money to Mr. Linkletter to publicize its product, Mr. Linkletter decided that it would be a fine idea if this young couple had their honeymoon in the same Oregon valley.
The couple would be outfitted just like the pioneers of 100 years ago, the bridegroom in a coonskin cap, buckskin jacket and moccasins, the girl in a sunbonnet, gingham dress and high button shoes. They would drive to the valley in a covered wagon drawn by oxen and pitch their tent beside a bubbling stream. “Do you know how to bake bread?” Mr. Linkletter asked the bride-to-be.
“Oh, no,” gasped the girl.
“Well, you’ll find it much easier over an open fire,” observed Mr. Linkletter, and turned to the prospective bridegroom. “Do you know how to milk a cow?”
“Oh, no.”
“Well, try the overhand double-crostic method,” said the master of ceremonies, and presented the young man with a 100-year-old flint-action squirrel gun with which to shoot game.
* * *

Incidentally, the $1,000 prize is not theirs just for taking part in this adventure. They must find it. The first clew [sic] to its whereabouts was a fishhook. The bridegroom must catch a fish with the hook, find the nearest forest ranger and give it to him, and the forest ranger would give him the second clew. The couple must find the $1,000 before Wednesday. After that it will diminish $50 daily.
The couple were married at 7 p. m. on Friday and whisked by plane to Oregon, where they were feted at a banquet in their honor by the Governor of Oregon, and then pushed off to their honeymoon valley aboard the covered wagon.
Best wishes to you both, folks, and I devoutly hope you find the $1,000 before Wednesday. When you do, tear off $50 of it and mail it to me and I shall send you by return mail three sample radio columns and my own free booklet entitled “How to Be Happy Though Unsponsored.”
* * *
Romance has always been a highly profitable enterprise, and it seems to me this sort of radio program is the latest phase in the long history of the romance industry. Many, many years ago Alexandre Dumas pere ran an immensely successful romance factory in Paris. Dumas outlined his plots and then turned them over to the hired hands to fill out the dull details. The products of this factory, notably “The Count of Monte Cristo” and “The Three Musketeers,” are still widely sold.
Then Hollywood stepped in to improvise a far more efficient means of romance manufacture, and the authors turned to anger in place of love for their plots. But in these realistic times, it is increasingly difficult to identify oneself with Clark Gable or Loretta Young.
Hence, the sponsored marriage program, which brings you a skillful blend of romance, lavish gifts and adventure. It’s easy enough to identify oneself with this young married couple who are people just like you and me. Vicariously, we go along on the Oregon honeymoon. Vicariously, we are making bread over an open fire, milking the cow overhand and double crostic, and looking for that thousand clams. Today the press agent has supplanted the author and the script writer as the purveyor of dreams.
Incidentally, the name of the program on which you can follow the married couple’s quest for gold is “People Are Funny” and you’ll find it on WEAF 9 p.m. on Fridays. The program emanates appropriately from Hollywood, which is inhabited by some of the funniest people on earth.

Now, the rest of the week’s Crosby columns. He takes another crack at John J. Anthony on July 16th, muses on running routines and characters on July 17th, parodies singing commercials on July 18th and includes John J. Anthony again on July 19th on radio shows he wouldn’t regret leaving the air.

Carl Reiner and TV Comedy

80 years ago, a theatre production was held up in Rochester, New York until an actor from New York City could arrive. The big city! It all sounds very important until you realise that the actor was a teenager. His name was Carl Reiner.

You can read about it in the column to the right from the Rochester Democrat, June 20, 1940. Reiner was less than two years out of Evander Childs High School and already had a budding career as an actor/announcer on WNYC New York.

Reiner did so many things so well over his years in entertainment that it’s probably impossible to agree on what he’s best known for. His two years in stock in Rochester have faded into obscurity. Television truly made him famous. While he hosted a couple of network shows in the late ‘40s (one was basically a fashion show), it wasn’t until he hooked up with Sid Caesar that a national audience got to know him.

Here’s a short career summary from Sid Shalit’s column in the New York Daily News of October 23, 1951.

Ssergorp—Progress Spelled Backward . . . Anyone who feels aggressive about the high wages being dragged down by some TV performers better not run across Carl Reiner, one of the important comedy props in NBC's Sid Caesar-Imogene Coca setup.
Reiner made it the hard way. In order to pay his way through dramatic school, he worked for $12-a-week as a shipping clerk in New York's garment center. Through his own ingenuity, hard work and perseverance, Carl explains, his next job, as a machinist's helper, paid $8 a week.
After eight months of drama school, at the age of 17, he played in a little theatre group opposite Virginia Gilmore. It was terrific experience, he admits, both at acting and going hungry—seemingly two basic requisites for stardom. He performed every night but didn't get a dime for this work. Nor did anybody else in the company. But flushed with success and youth, Carl got uppity one day and demanded a salary. He snapped up the first offer of a $1 per performance. He was the top salaried actor in the troupe.

This was only the beginning of the Carl Reiner saga. From $1 with Miss Gilmore, Reiner aspired to greater and dramatic heights—and snagged a summer stock job in Rochester. This one made him the envy of theatre people—room and board. Then followed success. He was re-signed for the following season for room and board—PLUS $1 a week. Practically lolling in the lap of luxury. Carl's days were happy ones indeed. Nights he took strenuous walks so that Morpheus could overcome the pangs of hunger.
At the age of 20, Carl joined the Army in 1942 and was assigned to Hawaii as a teletype operator. When Maj. Maurice Evans arrived there with his GI version of "Hamlet," Reiner auditioned for him, using routines he had perfected at recreation halls. Carl then toured the South Pacific for a year and a half in revues which he wrote—room and board and $21 a month.
Financially on the upgrade, Reiner's Army experience landed him the road company lead in “Call Me Mister.” He was all of 23, and then came two lush jobs in “Inside, U. S. A.,” and “Alive and Kicking,” in which he met Max Liebman, producer-director of the Caesar-Coca TVer. Reiner signed with Liebman last year and gave up all outside pursuits to concentrate on video. As Arnold Stang would say, “What's to envy?”

Reiner is arguably better known (thanks to reruns) for creating The Dick Van Dyke Show, which I’ve always considered a breakthrough for television. Beloved as 1950s sitcoms are amongst many people, they always seem steeped somewhere in network radio. Precocious kids, somewhat ditzy dads, boy-crazed teenagers, mom-as-the-reality-anchor. It had all been done and done again. Van Dyke had a well-balanced cast with stories that were (for the most part) pretty plausible.

But Reiner wanted comedy that was even more true-to-life. He referred to one show in this interview published January 21, 1968. In a remarkable coincidence, the show was turned into an American series that was also a landmark of television—and co-starred Reiner’s son.

Carl Reiner Might Start New Trend
By HAL HUMPHREY
Television loves to wallow in its trends. This season it's the longer shows like old movies that have been getting the higher ratings, so for next season everyone in the industry is talking about what someone has dubbed the "long form."
Half-hour shows are a thing of the past, say the experts. It's the 90-minute and two-hour shows the public wants, and the planning boards are full of such projects.
"Someday, though," says writer-producer-comedian Carl Reiner, "somebody will do a new half-hour situation comedy he's been dying to do, and it will be a hit and there'll be nothing but talk about the trend toward half-hour situation comedy."
Carl, by the way, believes the half-hour comedy shows have done themselves in and that the long-form shows had nothing to do with it.
"I'd rather watch the Merv Griffin Show than any of the situation comedies on TV today," says Carl. "These talk shows like Griffin's are more honest, and exposing the viewer to them has made him see how unreal the half-hour comedies are. We've got to get back to more honesty in our situation comedy. I felt we even strayed away from it in the Dick Van Dyke series later."
Carl was the creator of the Dick Van Dyke Show, produced it and wrote many of the scripts until the last of its five years on the air. This season he and Sheldon Leonard are executive producers of the comedy series Good Morning World, a show which Carl says he would rather not talk about at this time.
"Did you know that in England the BBC has a situation comedy series about a bigot?" asks Carl. "That's the kind of thing I mean when I mention honesty."
The series Carl refers to is called "Till Death Us Do Part" in which a liberal long-haired son-in-law of the Garnetts fights constantly with Alf Garnett (the father) over such subjects as premarital sex and the race problem. It has kicked up quite a bit of pro and con reaction among British viewers and critics.
Meanwhile, as Carl points out, our situation comedies are mostly hewed from the old boy-meets-girl formula of early Hollywood, and the situations resulting are just as tired and impossible.
"The best shows we did on the Van Dyke series," says Carl, "were those I got by asking myself, 'What's happened to me lately?' or getting the writers to ask themselves the same thing. One of our writers stuck his toe in the bathtub faucet and got it caught there. The plumber had to be called. It was a wild thing and turned into one of the best shows ever done in the series.
Carl's inspiration for the Van Dyke show came from his own years of working with Sid Caesar on the old "Show of Shows." He says the writers on that hour series had so much fun that it was a pleasure to get up and go to work every morning, so Carl decided to do a series about comedy writers, although most of his colleagues thought he was nuts.
Carl might even be the one who winds up with another inspiration for that half-hour comedy mentioned here earlier which would set off the trend toward the "short form."

“I’ll certainly be doing something for TV again. It’s the biggest force in the entertainment business, so one doesn’t decide not to do TV.”
At present Carl is busy preparing a movie called "Baggy Pants," which is about an old-time comic, and Dick Van Dyke will play the role. Next month (Feb. 11) Carl hosts an NBC-TV special, The Fabulous Funnies, a tribute to the comic strips.
"In one part I sing the Little Orphan Annie song. I used to love Orphan Annie in the funnies, but I didn't know then,” says Carl, laughing, “that she was a fascist.”

What else did Reiner do? So much. We haven’t even talked about his “2000 Year Old Man” routines with Mel Brooks. Or “The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming” and his other films. There were minor accomplishments, such as his voice work on Linus, the Lion Hearted, his appearances with (and scripts for) Dinah Shore in the late ‘50s. His game show work as a panelist (The Name’s the Same) and a host (Celebrity Game). His surprise turn as Gepetto in a TV adaptation of “Pinocchio.” Oh, and he wrote books, too.

Then there were all those Emmys. Reiner was a big winner. And so were we, thanks to what he created for our entertainment.

The Eyes of Fuzzy Wuzzy

1940s Columbia cartoons are great examples about how you can steal stuff from all kinds of great studios and directors but still come up with seven minutes of screen fare that makes no sense.

I would have written about Kongo Roo (1946) years back but Thad Komorowski did such a perfect job in a review on a blog post in 2008 that nothing more needed to be said (alas, the post is long gone).

In this cartoon, writer Cal Howard borrows from both Warner Bros. cartoons and Tex Avery but finishes off the cartoon with something that makes absolute no sense to put that true Columbia stamp on it.

In one scene, hunter Fuzzy Wuzzy (played by Jack Mather?) hides in a kangaroo’s pouch. They both look at each other and then we get an Avery-like telescoping eye-take before the two characters slam into each other and Fuzzy Wuzzy goes back in the pouch.



There’s actually some good timing from director Howard Swift and decent animation. But I still can’t figure out why a cartoon not set in the Congo is named “Kongo-Roo” or what kind of ethnic accent the ostrich (it can’t be an emu, it puts its head in the ground) has, among a bunch of things.

Ain't We Got Cycle Animation

Ain't We Got Fun (1937) feels like a Friz Freleng cartoon with all the singing/dancing little animals but it’s actually by the masterful Tex Avery.

Buried amidst the proceedings is a piece of cycle animation when the abusive mice are throwing eggs at the old man who owns the house. 16 drawings take up one second of animation.



Here’s an endless loop of the cycle, slowed down from what you see on the screen. Notice the weight and balance on the main mouse.



The original screen credits state that Bob Clampett and Chuck Jones animated this. A Tex/Clampett/Jones team should have come up with something screamingly funny. This isn’t. But it has its moments. The lady mouse asking the elevator operator where the mousetraps are is the best line, and the self-satisfied look of the mouse with the cop whistle (coming after he couldn’t whistle a warning) is one of those comes-out-of-nowhere gags.

Yes, Virginia, There is a Carmichael

There were people who believed that Jack Benny actually had an overworked, underpaid help-of-all-trades named Rochester. And Eddie Anderson apparently didn’t want people to think otherwise.

At least, that’s if you wish to believe what he told the October 1950 edition of Radio and TV Mirror. Anderson kind of stays in character through the interview, but he also lets readers know it’s all in fun as he talks about the real Jack Benny as well.

Rochester was a unique character on radio. He was the hired help who only behaved like it when absolutely necessary. He smoked Benny’s cigars, ate Benny’s food, wore Benny’s clothes, partied in Benny’s house, sabotaged Benny’s violin and zinged one-liners at him like the rest of the cast. He did to his boss what, I suspect, listeners would do to theirs if they had the courage. By the time Benny was on TV regularly, they were more like an old couple than boss and employee. Judging by audience applause, Rochester was the most popular person on the show next to Benny.

NO BOSS—NOT ME
The toupee, "The Bee", the perpetual age of thirty-nine, the Maxwell—put them all together and they spell Jack Benny. Here Rochester brushes away the moths and takes you into the vault to show you what's truth, what's fiction concerning his boss
as told to GLADYS HALL

Editor's Note: What's the real story behind Jack Benny? Where does myth leave off and man begin? Millions of Benny fans want to know — the editors of Radio Mirror decided to find out. The logical person to ask, of course, was Benny's man Rochester. And the logical person to send was ace interviewer, Gladys Hall. Such a collaboration was bound to reveal one thing, and here it is — the real story behind Jack Benny.

Coming out of a restaurant one day, Jack Benny handed the hat-check girl a dollar bill. But she handed it right back to him, saying, "Please, Mr. Benny, leave me some illusions!" Benny's man Rochester feels the same way.
"I like the Boss stingy," says he. "I like him the way he is on his radio show, all the way. If the Boss just suddenly became generous overnight, I'd be out of business!"
Bearing this in mind, Rochester has a lot of fun telling fibs about the Boss. He lets people think that Jack really is the character he plays on the air.
"When I'm asked — and I often am — whether Mr. Benny is really cheap, I say, 'Well, he's never hurt his arm throwing money away!' When a fan wants to know whether Mr. Benny collects anything, like stamps, for instance, or first editions, or antique firearms, I say 'Money. The Boss does very well collecting money.'
"Believe it or not, I've even been asked whether it's true that poor Dennis Day gets only twelve dollars a week for the radio show and, in addition, has to mow Mr. Benny's lawn. But I never let on that Dennis makes enough to hire a staff of gardeners and never lays hand to a lawnmower on his own place, let alone Mr. Benny's."
Rochester travels around the country with the Boss — to Waukegan which, as everyone knows, is Jack's home, to Plainfield, which is Mary Livingstone's home town and to the big cities for personal appearance tours.
"I meet hundreds and hundreds of people and most of them seem serious in believing that the Boss, in real life, is the same as the character they listen to over CBS every Sunday night at seven. And with all the work he's done building this character in the mind of the public, I feel he should stay with it. I believe his fans feel likewise.

"I know that when people ask me is there really a Maxwell, they get a kick when I tell them there sure enough is that claptrap old vintage '24 Maxwell, that I drive Mr. Benny around in that old creak, park it alongside all those Cadillacs in Hollywood, and the parking attendant wants to know if the Joad family back in town. It doesn't seem necessary to me to mention the Packard job the Boss really drives.
"And when I'm asked is there sure enough that bear, Carmichael, roaming around the set, I say, 'There sure enough is that ornery fur rug!'
"Why, if I was to let on there isn't any Carmichael or that the Boss doesn't own a toupee and has his own hair (at least some of it) and his own teeth (most of them), and that the Ronald Colmans don't live next door, it would be like finding out there isn't any Santa Claus, wouldn't it?
"In my considered opinion it would. Yet I may be wrong because, well, it's funny the way people feel about Mr. Benny. As I say, I believe they want to believe he's the character he plays on his show yet they're always trying to get the low down on him. Like hardly a week passes that a number of people don't go to the house next door trying to get the low down on the Boss from Mr. and Mrs. Ronald Colman. The doorbell of that house rings so often that the people who live there, a business couple, have been obliged to put a sign over the doorbell: 'Ronald Colman Does Not Live Here.' "

Rochester's right-hand man in keeping the Boss in his radio character is Fred Allen, who writes things like this about Jack:
"Before shoes were invented, Jack was a heel. His false teeth are so loose, they are always clicking. Jack has no more hair than an elbow. He is so anemic that if he stays out at night he has to get a transfusion so his eyes will be bloodshot in the morning."
"But," says Rochester, "you won't catch Mr. Allen letting on that when he is in Hollywood, he and his Missus, Portland Hoffa, go to dinner at the Bennys' house always once, sometimes twice, in exchange for which the Allens take the Bennys out to dinner every other night they are in town. And I try not to give away that although the Boss and Mary Livingstone are not married on the show, they've been happily married for twenty-three years. Even though Hollywood is supposed to be a wild place for divorce and rumors of divorce, there has never been a rumor about the Boss and his boss, Miss Livingstone."
Rochester has another assistant in Mary. She does her bit to keep Jack in character on the air — and in the home, too.
"The Boss likes to tell about the time right after he and Miss Livingstone were married. The Friars in New York gave a big stag dinner in his honor. It was the first time the Boss was a guest of honor and he says he felt very important. Then, right in the middle of the eulogizings, a telegram arrived from Miss Livingstone, which was read to the guests. It said 'When you come home tonight, be sure to put out the garbage.'
"But Miss Livingstone will come to the defense of the Boss at the drop of his toupee. She never wanted to be an actress. She just stepped in the show one night to help the Boss out, and after that the audience wouldn't let her go. But she prefers her real life roles of Mrs. Jack Benny, housewife, and the mother of Joan Benny, fifteen years old, to the part she plays on the air.
"Being so disposed, she doesn't go for publicity and interviews and the such. But one day she did bust loose and tell a reporter, 'My husband, Jack Benny, is the most maligned man in town — and all by his own doing. Lest any of my fiddling husband's fans believe any of this self-inflicted abuse, I'd like to go on record and say that Jack is not anemic, is in perfect physical condition, has his own teeth and hair, can play a pretty good violin, and, in my opinion, is the greatest guy in the world.' "

Rochester himself confirms that a more generous man than Jack Benny never lived. "When he goes to a restaurant, or a night club or a drive-in," says Rochester, "he always overtips. He pays out five thousand dollars a year in tips alone, just out of the bigness of that out-sized heart of his — and to prove that he isn't the stingiest man in town. He pays the people on his show, even the bit players, more than radio actors are paid on comparable shows— that is, if there are any shows on the air comparable to Mr. Benny's show. It's still No. 1 on the networks — and that's after eighteen consecutive years!
"When the high cost of his cast is called to his attention, the Boss always says, 'I get a lot of money, why shouldn't those who work with me get likewise?' There's one instance where I don't mind revealing Mr. Benny out of character!
"But when I ask the Boss what is the definition of likewise,' he just says 'Rochester!' in such a hurt tone I say no more, I haven't the heart.
"But you can always kid with the Boss, that's the point I'm making — and did you notice that he says 'those who work with me?' This may be a small point to make but there's a big difference, for my money, between the man who says 'those who work with me' and the man who says 'those who work for me . . .'
"Another fib I tell about Mr. Benny is when I'm asked whether I enjoy hearing him play the violin to which I reply, 'By all means, no!'
"The fact is, Mr. Benny started out in life to be a concert violinist. To play the violin, and play it well, was his serious ambition and his cherished dream. He does play it well, too, or did before he started to use the instrument as just a gag. The great Jascha Heifetz once said of Mr. Benny that he has a wonderful wrist action and could have made a great violinist. Mr. Heifetz meant it, too. But since the only thing we on the show ever hear the Boss play is that awful 'Love In Bloom' and I say 'By all means, no!'
"Everyone who knows the Boss or hears him on the air admires his wonderful showmanship, his faultless timing. But no one admires him so much as those who work with him. To work with him, especially at rehearsals, is to see the Boss at his super-duperest. To begin with, he's very prompt. He's so prompt that although the rest of us are on time, he's ahead of time! He is also the most considerate man I have ever met. If the Boss wants me, or any member of the cast to meet him at an off time, it's always, 'What time will be good for you?' There's never any of this 'Be here at nine sharp' stuff.
"He just loves the show, the Boss does. He's that conscientious, that sincere about it that he never says 'Good enough' to a single line, one bit of business, unless it's better than that. He'll throw a whole script away, if he has to, and work all weekend on a new one. He works as hard on the show now, after eighteen years on the air, as if next Sunday was his first broadcast. Yet it's all relaxed, all easy-does-it, with us all having fun just like we sound like we're having on the air.
"For the warm-up Sundays, the Boss always plays his violin. Members of the cast throw pennies at him, he picks them up, puts them in his pocket and never gives them back neither — no Boss, not you!

"There's not a lazy bone in Mr. Benny's body. He is an inveterate early riser. On the Coast he gets up at seven o'clock, has breakfast in the kitchen with the cook, goes to the Hillcrest Golf Club and has shot nine holes of golf before Phil Harris wakes up enough to remember what it is he likes about the South.
"Mr. Benny wishes he could shoot below par like Bob Hope and Bing Crosby. In fact, he'd rather be sixty-fourth on the Hooper rating, so he says, and first in golf. But his only real frustration is that he didn't become a great violinist. The Boss really takes this to heart. He loves the violin. Any town he's in, if there's a great violinist playing there, he'll drop anything — even a golf club — to rush off to hear him.
"If ever I should cut loose and unveil the truth about the Boss as he is in private life, I'd speak particularly, I believe, about his home life which goes along like one of those old sweet songs he sometimes plays when he's alone, on his violin. They live a very quiet life, the Boss and Miss Livingstone. Especially quiet now that Joan, the pretty little apple of her Daddy's eye, is in boarding school. They have a circle of good friends, among which are Barbara Stanwyck and Robert Taylor, the Bill Goetzs, the Gary Coopers, and, of course, the Ronald Colmans and the Fred Allens.
"When they invite their friends over they usually run a picture in their projection room — even 'The Horn Blew At Midnight' which, in my opinion, is sabotaging hospitality. Or they play gin rummy. On trips, such as when we take the show to New York, the Boss and Miss Livingstone, or maybe it'll be the Boss and Don Wilson, play gin rummy all the way, the whole way!
"But if I want to keep Mr. Benny in his radio character, I can't go on about his home life. If I do, I'll disillusion the people who actually believe I live in Mr. Benny's house as the man's man-of-all-work I am every Sunday night on the show. Some people believe it so much they take it to heart. Like the time I had a letter from a woman trying to persuade me to sue the Boss because of the amount of compensation I get for the amount of work I do. She was so indignant, she felt so sorry for me, she said that if I'd sue she'd help pay for the lawyer!
"I didn't answer the letter. I just let the matter drop. I ain't never going to peach on the Boss, not even to my own praise and glory — no Boss, not me!"