A Tour of the MGM Cartoon Studio

These photos are from the September 1940 edition of Short Story, a (dare we say?) short-lived MGM publication plugging its short films to exhibitors.

I’m sure you’ve seen some of these pictures before. “W.D. Burness” is better known as Pete Burness.

Frank and Freberg

What? Stan Freberg and Frank Nelson together?!

Among many things, Freberg was known for his extremely creative radio and TV commercials. Here are four. Nelson assists in the first pair.

A three-page article in the 2 December 1964 edition of Sponsor magazine confirms Billy May’s Orchestra is backing them, with help from Jud Conlon’s Singers. I think Bill Baldwin is the announcer in the third spot. I would love to know who the singer is in the second ad.

Cue in past 18 seconds of LP crackle.

The Lennymobile

Another one of Tex Avery’s long cars, this time in Lonesome Lenny (1946), winding its way through Johnny Johnsen’s background art.



Walt Clinton, Ed Love, Preston Blair and Ray Abrams are the credited animators.

Pelican Pranks

Flip and whatever his frog girl-friend is named escape from a pelican in Puddle Pranks (1930).



Whoa, Mr. Pelican! Those eyes don’t belong to Flip.



The pelican fights to stay alive in the fish’s body. Eventually, it shoves its feet to the lake bed, still inside the fish, and forces the fish to walk away.



Ub Iwerks gets the only credit on this cartoon, which is already behind Mickey Mouse in terms of design and humour.

We Switch You Now to Bob and Ray

Time for another Bob and Ray post. No introduction is needed other than this appeared in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, November 10, 1952.

AFTER LAST NIGHT
By Will Jones
Bob and Ray Wow Stag Party
If I had to arrange some entertainment for a stag party, NBC's Bob and Ray would be about the last act I'd think of getting. So there was a stag party last week, and somebody got Bob and Ray for the featured entertainment, and what happened? They were great.
They didn't bring along a single special stag party joke, either. They used the same gags they use for housewives at 10:30 a.m. daily on KSTP-NBC.
The two flew to Minneapolis from New York to appear at a dinner party of the Association of Manufacturing Representatives. They made the trip as a favor to their sponsor, Colgate-Palmolive-Peet.
Before they ever got to the party, the gags started. When they landed at Wold-Chamberlain, they had one of their famous kits for Gov. C. Elmer Anderson.
THIS ONE WAS a Governor's Kit. In it were peanuts ("goobers for the gubernatorial race"), some of those paper noisemakers that kids blow in each others' faces at parties ("party favors"), a small fence ("for sitting on or straddling") and a deck of cards, some poker chips and dice ("for the party").

They also brought along an impressive leather-bound book stamped "Important State Business." Inside was a comic book.
At the party, in the Radisson ballroom, they did things like "Dr. O.K., the Sentimental Banker," their takeoff on Dr. I.Q.
Sample question: "I reside in the Empire State building. I invented the peanut butter sandwich. I tried nine times to go over Niagara falls in a barrel. I am the father of infantry drill regulations. I was the 42nd president of the United States, Who am I?"
They speculated on what doctors' radio commercials would sound like if doctors were allowed to advertise: "With every examination one free probe!"
THEY REPEATED a hilarious post-election interview with a public opinion pollster that they had done earlier in the day on Dave Garroway's TV program.
In that one, Ray, as the pollster, concludes that his election predictions were wrong because he had his field men asking improperly phrased questions: "We were asking the people, 'Do you like to watch sports or would you rather participate in them?' We should have asked who they were going to vote for."
He also concluded that his sample hadn't been adequate. His staff had questioned 18 people, "mostly women and children."
Besides their daily program on NBC radio and their twice-weekly TV appearances with Garroway, Bob (Elliott), and Ray (Goulding) have a records-and-chatter program that runs for a couple of hours every morning. It's heard only in the New York area.
"WHEN WE GET an idea, we play around with it on the early-morning program. Then when we think it's right, we use it on the network," said Bob.
"Most of the time we don't use a script. That pollster bit, for instance. We tried it out on our morning show. Then we did it three times for Garroway, and each time it was different.
"It kept getting better and better. We'll do it again tonight at the dinner, and I suppose it'll be still better." Bob does the impersonations, such as Dr. O.K., and Arthur Stirdley [sic], their version of Arthur Godfrey. Ray does the voice of Mary McGoon, a regular in their cast of characters.
"Whenever we interview some jerk, though, I'm always the jerk," said Ray.
Since their success on NBC, Bob and Ray have hired three writers "who think pretty much the way we do" to write some of their sketches.
But whenever they're ribbing some well-known radio or TV program they said, they never use writers or, for that matter, a script. They work out the basic idea between them and then just let it happen.
Day Brightener: Bob and Ray gag about a cowboy named Tex who is from Louisiana. Why Tex? He didn't want to be called Louise.

Polly Wants a Good Writer

A lot of Columbia cartoons just don’t make sense.

In Polly Wants a Doctor (January 1944), Polly doesn’t want a doctor at all. She doesn’t want crackers, either. She meets up with a goat, who eats junk and only junk. “Roughage,” you know. The goat offers Polly unappetizing garbage. Polly isn’t keen on the idea. But, in the very next scene, Polly’s eating the stuff without any objection.

Then the goat feeds her a phonograph/radio. But it operates just like a telephone; the goat talks to an operator to get music to play. Polly, for some reason, turns into the shape of an airplane when an airplane news broadcast comes on, then crashes on top of the goat.



The scene turns black and then the camera follows some kind of shaft. Now the final gag. The goat and Polly are upside down in China, eating rice with chopsticks. No punch line. That’s it. Cartoon over. The audience really did get the shaft.



Why does the goat want to eat real food now? And, oh, skip it. Dun Roman’s responsible for the story but it’s like six different people were put into separate rooms and asked to come up with a sequence, and then they were all glued together.

Keith Scott says comedian Jerry Mann is the parrot and Byron Kane (not John McLeish) is the goat who invites Polly for “luncheon” to...try out recipes? Why? Oh, well. It’s best not to ask and move on to the next cartoon.

Catdog. Or is it Dogcat?

There are nothing like some good fight swirls and multiple heads. Take, for example, Porky in Wackyland (1937). It turns out to be a conjoined cat and dog.



After a brief rest stop, the fighting carries Porky right into a nearby tree-like thing.



Izzy Ellis and Norm McCabe are the credited animators. This was my favourite Porky Pig cartoon when I was a kid but it vanished from the local TV stations around 1968 with all the other black and white cartoons.

Look For the Big Red Letters on the Box Again

Some Jack Benny radio fans will tell you they liked the Jell-O years better than the Lucky Strike era. The shows weren’t really quite the same. The Lucky Strike Shows settled into a sitcom format and the pace really slowed down. Jack wouldn’t think twice about having three or four seconds of nothing but sound effects in the sitcom era. In the Jell-O period, certainly in the ‘30s, he’s be using that time to crack as many jokes as possible.

Despite the creativity of many of the musical spots for the cigarette maker, Jell-O may have fit the Benny show better. It just seemed natural for announcer Don Wilson to bubble over with enthusiasm about those “six delicious flavours” (Jell-O may have had as many repetitive sales lines as Lucky Strike).

Somebody at General Foods must have thought so, too. It decided to pick up Benny’s sponsorship in the later TV period (the two didn’t exactly part amicably in the radio days). Here’s a column about it from June 3, 1962.

Benny was quite correct at the end. He finished his career doing specials and worked until cancer killed him in 1974.

Jack Benny To Quit Night Spot After 12
By HAL HUMPHREY
HOLLYWOOD—That familiar sing-song salutation, "Jell-O Again," will be bouncing off your walls again next fall. That is, it's familiar to you if you were born sometime between the Johnstown Flood and Atwater Kent's invention of the horn loudspeaker on top of the radio to replace earphones.
When Jack Benny first called out "Jell-O Again" on his radio show in 1934, it also marked the birth of what now is what called we integrated commercial. After eight years of Jell-O's sponsoring Benny, radio audiences got so used to it that many Benny fans still think he's peddling the shimmying dessert.
Now that they've had a free ride for all those intervening years, the Jell-O people are signing on for co-sponsorship of Benny's TV show next fall. Maybe they figured it's time to get a booster shot.
"In the old radio days there were six delicious flavors," Benny recalls. "Now they have 12."
YOU MAY have noticed there how automatically Benny slipped in that word "delicious." His brain has been washed, too.
Benny and his writers worked out all kinds of elaborate gags for Jell-O's middle-of-the-program commercial on radio. When Benny was Jesse James, his brother Frank (Don Wilson) warned him not to shoot until he counted to six. "Okay, okay—strawberry, raspberry, cherry, orange, lemon and lime," counted Jesse. On another occasion, Dennis Day was lost in the desert for days without food but was ready to pass up Benny's roadside oasis unless he served Jell-O.
On his initial TV show for Jell-O next September, Benny intends to have a kind of homecoming welcome for his ex-sponsor. It probably won't be as big as the writers would like, because executive producer Irving Fein (who is paid to worry) is afraid the insurance company sponsor who picks up half the tab for Benny's show might not appreciate any undue treatment for Jell-O.

Besides celebrating his 30th year with his own air show (he started in 1932), Benny will have another "first" next season. He is leaving his Sunday night spot for the first time in 12 years of TV. Benny moves to Tuesday opposite Dick Powell's drama series and "The Untouchables." Those are tough competitors, but at least he starts even with them at the same hour.
"This season I've had 'Bonanza' against me. It started a half-hour ahead of my show, and who is going to switch over to something else in the middle of the show? One Sunday I decided to watch 'Bonanza' myself, and do you know what? I never went back to my show," said Benny, while a CBS man with us at the time almost broke down and wept.
Benny makes it a point not to worry about ratings or critics who each year insist that Benny keeps doing the same old thing. Had he worried or panicked over them, Benny might never have survived as one of the country's top comics and personalities.
"Should I suddenly become a spendthrift character because some critic says he is tired of me playing a tightwad?" Benny wants to know. "If I did, the critic might be happy, but my fans wouldn't. I've heard critics ask how Bob Hope has lasted so long, when all he does is one-line gags. They miss the point that Hope has a characterization all of his own, a kind of Peck's bad boy approach to everything he does. A comedian has to have a characterization to last."
BOB NEWHART, Joey Bishop, George Gobel and many other of our newer comics might ponder that advice that is, if they want to be operating as comics 30 years from now.
When a comedian has been around as long as Benny, it's always a standard question to ask if he's thinking of retiring.
"I've got two more seasons on my current contract," said Benny. "After that, I'd like to freelance. You know, just do a few specials each season, and maybe a movie. I'll never really retire."
He can't now, because as Phil Silvers once observed, "Jack isn't a comedian, he's a way of life."

Among the Benny/Jell-O tie-ins at the start were these ads in the Sunday comic sections of newspapers. This is from April 11, 1937.

Popeye the 3-D Man

“Extra!” shouted the theatre ads. “Two reels!” “Technicolor!”

Those were some of the words used to entice people to come in and see Popeye the Sailor Meets Sindbad the Sailor. It was “officially” released on Friday, November 27, 1936, but it was screened by theatres before then; the Paramount in New York first showed it on the 18th with Mae West in Go West Young Man.

Being a two-reel cartoon was historic; employing full Technicolor (which only Walt Disney could legally do until mid-1936) enhanced its appearance tremendously. But one other thing audiences noticed couldn’t be described very well in a newspaper ad. It was the Fleischers’ wonderful 3-D effect, with backgrounds really looking like they were in the distance. Cartoon lovers noticed it 30 years later on black-and-white TV screens. As a kid, I marvelled at it. It was a major achievement for the Fleischers who, unfortunately, didn’t have the PR machine of Mr. W.E. Disney which left the world with the impression that Uncle Walt was cartoondom’s creative genius.

The background effect must have aroused the curiosity of movie goers at the time, as a newspaper article was syndicated describing how it was done. This appeared in the Mexia Weekly Herald of December 18, 1936. It didn’t publish an accompanying drawing but another paper did.

Popeye Slams Foes Thru Fleischers Complex Invention
Gives Illusion of Depth
(Advance Feature)
For the first time, Popeye the Sailor swaggers and fights his way through a three-dimensional world of color in the two-reel animated cartoon, "Popeye the Sailor Meets Sindbad the Sailor " coming Friday to the screen of the National Theatre.
The film, longest cartoon picture yet released by any company, was made for Paramount by Max Fleischer, pioneer film cartoonist who is himself the inventor of the complex technique through which Popeye's screen world is given the illusion of depth.
To bring Fleischer's method to realization, a mass of technical problems were solved. Special lenses and special machinery were developed and involved formula to figure angles of perspective were drawn up. Yet the idea itself seems simple.
Uses Miniature Sets

Two-dimensional animated cartoons have been made, in the past, by photographing the animated characters, drawn on sheets of celluloid, against backgrounds drawn on white paper. The news system substitutes, a mimature "set" for the flat background.
It's as easy as that, in principle. But the technical problems solved to make it possible were not so simple. An examination of the machinery used indicates a few of them.
Sinbad's Island, in the new Popeye, was constructed in pie-slice sections on a huge turn-table, 12 feet in diameter, which is mounted in front of the movie camera.
Between camera and turn-table is a specially designed frame, into which transparent "cels" bearing the individual colored drawings of the characters are slipped, one at a time.
Camera Combines
Picture by picture, the camera snaps a scene which combines the figure and the background. As Popeye walks, the set behind the frame is rotated, so that scenery moves past him. At other times "props" are placed in front of the frame, so that Popeye disappears momentarily behind trees, or boulders in the Sindbad cave.
The turntable is the real secret of the “depth” feeling; always in motion, it duplicates a phenomenon of vision in nature that has been observed by every autoist driving in the open country. To the motorist, nearby things pass swiftly, while distant objects move by his machine at a slower pace. If he looks at the horizon, objects in the foreground seem to be rotating about a point just beyond the horizon-line.
Gives Same Illusion
Fleischer's turntable duplicates that imaginary wheel. Things on its rim. nearest the camera, move rapidly by. Things nearer the center pass slowly.
Fleischer developed a camera lens constructed for a "six foot infinity,” since the axis of his turntable represented a horizon vanishing point. He found formula to regulate the comparative sizes of objects on the turntable, and the askew lines of larger background objects. On the turntable, they seem grotesquely misshapes. On film, they assume squareness.
A problem of major proportions grew up around the placing of the animated figures on the celluloid sheets. They had to be arranged so that they seemed to walk on the "ground" of the set behind, and so that they increased and diminished in proper proportion of foreground.
Other Improvements
Additional refinements included putting the turntable on a geared shaft so that it can be raised or lowered at will; the camera can seem to rise into the third-dimension sky or sink to the level of the foreground.
Fleischer chose "Popeye" to make his first two-reel, full-color, three-dimension film because the spinach-eating sailor is the most popular of his cartoon characters. His newspaper friends gained by King Features Syndicate are counted in the millions; his film friends, growing daily, run into figures just as impressive.

Fleischer fans know the turntable scenics were employed in some of the black-and-white one-reelers as well, though not for great periods of screen time (unlike today’s CGI effects which continually bombard and overwhelm movie viewers). Of course, when Fleischer made its second two-reeler a year later starring Popeye and Abu Hassan, the special scenic effects appeared, arguably looking better than in the first film.

Sammy Timberg, Bob Rothberg and Sammy Lerner provided special music for Sindbad, with the animation credits going to Willard Bowsky, George Germanetti and Ed Nolan. Jack Mercer, Mae Questel and bass singer Gus Wicke supplied uncredited voices. The cartoon is still enjoyable after more than eight decades, thanks to the melding of special talents and special effects.

Imaginary Hyena

Let’s see now...boss Mr. Tailgate makes Mr. Crumpet his junior partner because he can see his son’s imaginary elephant and rival Mr. Bilgewater can’t.

But after Bilgewater tells his boss he’s off his nut, Tailgate calls on his imaginary hyena to sic him.

So why can he see an imaginary friend? And doesnt this make him eligible to the junior partner?



The imaginary hyena changes colour. Why? Beats me.



The cartoon Christopher Crumpet’s Playmate ends with the gang laughing. All that’s missing is “Roobie-Roobie-Roo!”



Frank Smith, Alan Zaslove and Barney Posner are the credited animators. Tee Hee designed the characters while Jules Engel drew the backgrounds.