He Can't Stand Noise

“Shuddup! Quiet! Don’t knock so loud! There’s one thing I hate, and that’s NOISE!” yells Joe Bear at Spike after opening the door in Rock-a-Bye Bear.

You can’t appreciate the timing by looking at a few frames, but you can see where animator Grant Simmons starts and then goes to the extremes of the bear shouting at Spike. Notice Spike following along with him, and reacting.



Walt Clinton and Mike Lah also animated this cartoon for Tex Avery, released in 1952 by MGM. Pat McGeehan is the shouting bear.

Good Night For NBC News

News has to be factual. That’s a given. But it has to be something else. News is a story and it has to be told in a way—aurally or visually—to grab someone’s attention. There’s little point in having a good, valid piece of information that is ignored.

One of finest news story-tellers was David Brinkley.

Brinkley didn’t have a booming voice; it was almost a mumble. He wasn’t a telegenic young guy that news consultants pushed on stations once upon a time. He was a clever writer, witty and occasionally sardonic, someone you wanted to hear.

Broadcasting is a funny thing. Very good people can be let go simply because someone in charge likes someone else better. That’s what happened with David Brinkley. John Cameron Swayze was anchoring the Camel News Caravan on NBC in 1956. The higher-ups at NBC didn’t like Swayze for whatever reason. They did like a couple of newsmen they saw anchor the political conventions that year—Brinkley and Chet Huntley. Swayze was out after October 26th. Huntley and Brinkley were in. (Camels were out, too. The new newscast was sponsored by Studebaker-Packard, Sperry Rand and Miles Laboratories).

Here’s an unbylined feature story about Brinkley published about two weeks after his debut, giving his life story to date as well as revealing a small setback.

Brinkley's First Newscast Was Almost His Last One
NEW YORK, Nov. 10. — Commentator David Brinkley's first network broadcast almost was his last. During a report of a news event of extraordinary interest, he mispronounced a word, and he says, needlessly, while millions listened.
Now the co-editor (with Chet Huntley) of "NBC News," Brinkley is still embarrassed about the early slip. "It was one of the broadcasts that followed the death of President Franklin D. Roosevelt," he recalls. "I mispronounced 'cortege' in 'funeral cortege.' I don't know why, for I knew the word.
"I heard about it immediately. So many people were listening in. It's very bad to mispronounce a word on the air. I was embarrassed, NBC was embarrassed, and I thought I was finished."
Certainly no one would have predicted, back in 1945, that David Brinkley would become one of the most highly praised news commentators in 1956.
He Was Surprised
Brinkley, a 36-year-old North Carolinian, was almost unknown in a national sense before the political conventions which he reported as one of NBC-TV's anchor men (Chet Huntley and Bill Henry were the others). Although he had been with NBC News for 13 years, he was hailed by television critics as a fresh new personality, a wit, a man of "few but well-chosen words."
Brinkley could hardly have been more surprised. The critics, it seemed, were praising him for being simply himself. He is naturally taciturn. "I don't talk a lot any time," he said, "I've always been really pretty shy." Even now, he said, he is acutely embarrassed when he has to broadcast before an audience that he can see.

And it had never occurred to him that, like Will Rogers, he has the knack of penetrating to the humorous heart of things without wounding and without pretense or bombast. Throughout his broadcasting career, Brinkley has resolutely refused to play the solemn, all-knowing pundit's role. "A person on the air commenting is not there because he is smarter than other people," he said. "Millions of people looking on are smarter than I am. My job is simply to give them information that perhaps they didn't know. But this doesn't give me any reason to be a smart aleck."
David Brinkley, born in Wilmington, N.C., is tall, slender and inclined to stoop. His brown wavy hair is worn closely cropped, his eyes are blue, his eyelashes are so short as to be almost invisible. He gives the appearance of being totally relaxed. His speaking voice, while pleasant enough, is a run of-mill baritone. There is not an urgent or a strident note anywhere in it.
Worked For UP
After his graduation from the University of North Carolina as an English major, Brinkley went to work for the United Press for three years. He worked for United Press in Atlanta, Birmingham, Charlotte and Nashville, but remarks, "I was only 20 years old and I wasn't much good."
He served in the Army briefly — was released because of impaired hearing after a rifle was fired too close to his ear. Romance propelled him out of the U.P. and into broadcasting. "I was working in Charlotte and making $15 a week and I wanted to get married. Marriage was tough at that price. I'd been writing radio copy for U.P. so in 1943 I went to NBC in Washington and got a job for $60 a week."
His first NBC job was writing newscripts for Newscaster Kenneth Banghart. Sometime around 1945, William R. McAndrew, manager of the Washington news room for NBC (now Director of News for the network), encouraged Brinkley to become a newscaster. "He put me on in the early mornings so that nobody would hear me. But I'd still rather write than anything else. It's the only thing I claim to be able to do." He writes all his own scripts.
Tricky Spot
Brinkley has been Washington correspondent for NBC for five years. He believes he had his biggest television audience when President Eisenhower announced from the White House, following his heart attack, that he would run again. "He talked about 17 minutes and I had to fill in 12 minutes. It was a difficult spot to be in. I had to be careful of every word."
His toughest assignment, however, he says, was the Army-McCarthy hearings which he reported for N.B.C. for three months. "I had to take 5 or 6 hours of film that we'd made during the day and get the highlights of it on the air in from 3 to 6 minutes. And it was a very controversial subject. It nearly killed me." Again with Chet Huntley and Bill Henry, Brinkley provided a running commentary on the election. They broadcast from Studio 8-H in New York, with the assistance of a multimillion dollar array of I.B.M. and Tele-register equipment.
Brinkley and his wife, the former Ann Fischer, live outside Washington in Montgomery County, Maryland. They have three children: Alan, 7; Joel, 4, and John 1 1/2.

Huntley and Brinkley soon took over the name of their newscast and outdistanced CBS’ Douglas Edwards in the ratings (leading to Edwards’ replacement with Walter Cronkite). Huntley retired in 1970 and Brinkley carried on until the network that so badly wanted him to replace John Cameron Swayze didn’t want him any more. He left for ABC in 1981 and led a classy and thoughtful roundtable Sunday morning interview/commentary show that, arguably, became the industry’s leader. He retired in 1997 and enjoyed life for six more years before passing away a month shy of his 83rd birthday.

In a 1992 interview, Brinkley summed up himself thusly: “I've simply been a reporter covering things, and writing and talking about it.” That’s not true, if I may be allowed to editorialise. He was more than that. He was an inspiration to many, many young journalists, instilling them with the belief that news must be related correctly and well. It’s something needed society needs today, and always will.

The End of the Ocean

Walt Disney sure did love those butt gags. Or, should we say, “shore did love” because The Beach Party (1931) has Clarabelle Cow on shore thinking she’s drowning.



Mickey throws an inner tube to help her. It encases her butt. A wave comes up and....



“By the Sea” plays in the background in a good portion of the cartoon, and includes a scene of Pluto briefly tussling with a crab. Disney would make that sort of thing more elaborate as the ‘30s wore on.

Fly Fight

Porky Pig is attacked by a fly in Porky and Gabby (1937).



The tent collapses on the two of them and the fight continues.



Bob Clampett and Chuck Jones made this cartoon when Leon Schlesinger contracted some work out to Ub Iwerks’ studio. There’s no real Iwerks influence in this, but there are lots of speed and motion lines.

Tralfaz Sunday Theatre — Not See It Now

Bob and Ray made fun of radio. Soap operas, crime shows, commercials, even station IDs. It got them from Boston to NBC in 1951. From radio, they moved on to making fun of television. Along the way, they also hooked up with a copywriter named Ed Graham, Jr. and together formed a production company that also made fun of things.

Here’s a piece of their handiwork from 1960, making its public debut to Blair TV regional managers at a meeting in New York on February 12th.

“See It Hear It Learn It Now” begins as a parody of Ed Murrow’s “Person to Person” TV show where he sat in a chair, smoked, and lobbed innocuous questions to a celebrity on a TV set. It moves along to make fun of the Army-McCarthy Hearings, then makes a reference to something that’s obscure today—the Mr. Magoo cancer PSA film “Inside Magoo” (1960). Slyly, they do their Arthur Godfrey/Tony Marvin routine; cleverly, Marvin is shown with gold cufflinks as he was known at the time as extremely being well-dressed. Mary Magoon made an appearance, too, as do Bob and Ray’s most famous animated characters, beer moguls Harry and Bert Piel.

There’s more, too (including references to the 1959 World Series and the Edsel, and a number of characters heard on the Bob and Ray CBS radio show of the day) but we’ll let you fans watch and enjoy.

While Goulding-Elliott-Graham was known for animated spots (and Graham went on to produce the animated “Linus the Lionhearted”) but the drawings in this film are static.

Oh, yes, that is an inside gag at the end. The guy doing the Murrow impression is Mike Baker, a former newscaster on the Mutual network. He annoyed CBS in 1957 by doing some voiceovers in the Murrow style for the Hoffman Beverage Company via Grey Advertising.

The Waukegan Whiz of Television

You never know when a newspaper is going to need to fill its space with a story about a celebrity, so film studios and TV network publicity departments came up with specific and generic stories with stock photos about their stars.

I suspect what you’re about to read came from the CBS publicity department. It appeared in various lengths in newspapers from the start of 1953 to the second half of 1954. This is the longest version I can find.

It’s a profile of Jack Benny, talking about his career and his family, not promoting anything in general. You Benny fans will have seen these details before but will be happy to read them again.

Television Viewers Find Jack Benny Fits Frustrated Character He Created On Radio
Jack Benny, who for 18 years on radio has created solely through his voice one of the greatest of comedy characters, entered America's living rooms “in the flesh” when he made his debut on television October 28, 1950.
And the millions of delighted fans who saw him on television for the first time found he fitted exactly the money pinching frustrated lovable laughmaker they so vividly imagined him to be.
Jack Benny made four broadcasts from New York during the 1950-51 season. He launched his second season, November 4, 1951, in a transcontinental broadcast originating from the CBS-TV outlet, KNXT, in Hollywood.
Benny in 1932 was one of the first of the major comedians to make the changeover from vaudeville to radio. Vaudeville was going out and big time radio was coming in.
Benny bumped into columnist Ed Sullivan one night in a Broadway restaurant. Sullivan (now host of CBS-TV's "Toast of the Town") asked him to appear on his radio program the following evening.
"But I don't know anything about radio," Jack protested. "Nobody does," Sullivan replied.
Immortal Line
Benny offered to give it a whirl gratis and on this first broadcast of his life introduced himself with an immortal line: "This is Jack Benny talking. Now there will be a brief pause for everyone to say 'Who cares?'"
Millions did care as Benny soon found out. The same year, 1932, he had a sponsor and a network program. He was a sensation from the start.
On television as on radio, Benny is the central figure in what historians of comedy call the classic insult method. It goes back to Aristophanes.
His knack of building unknown personalities into stars in their own right is well known. Dennis Day, Eddie Anderson, who plays Rochester, and Phil Harris are notable examples. And his sense of timing has been underscored by critics—a quality which contrasts strangely with the dither he works himself into in preparing his scripts. He sweats out the lines which appear to flow effortlessly and merrily over the air.
Although a battery of top gagsters whip together the raw material, Benny does the final editing, unifying and polishing. To keep the lines fresh, he cuts rehearsals to the minimum. And during the broadcast he rarely ad libs, but stops the show and howls with unrestrained laughter when others put over an unscheduled nifty.
Child Prodigy
Waukegan, Benny's home town, is a suburb of Chicago. His father, a haberdasher, insisted on violin lessons at an early age and Jack was a child prodigy in Waukegan.

One of Jack's early triumphs was playing "The Bee," a short violin piece that has been the butt of Benny jokes on the air for a decade. "The Bee sparked his famous radio feud with Fred Allen. A moppet in an Allen skit which was a take-off on amateur programs played the song and Fred commented afterward that it was Benny's old vaudeville specialty. "Only eight and you already can play 'The Bee'," Allen joked. "Why Jack Benny ought to be ashamed of himself."
The next week Benny, on his own show, indignantly declared he could produce four persons who would attest that he had played "The Bee" at the age of six. And the feud was on.
"The Bee," by the way is not "Flight of the Bumble Bee," but a piece composed by Franz Schubert but not the Franz Schubert. Seems confusion is the word for Benny.
At 13 he was a fiddler in Waukegan's leading dance orchestra and a regular on the Barrison Theater orchestra, a lone knicker-bockered figure surrounded by grown-ups. Since his teachers recall him more vividly for his wisecracks, it wasn't surprising that Jack quit school before he was 17 to team up with a vaudeville pianist named Cora Salisbury.
Jack billed himself as Benny K. Benny and at $15 a week toured Midwest theaters with his partner. He didn't tell jokes, but he drew laughs by sawing away at his violin with the little finger of the bow hand extended affectedly while his eyes followed in mock curiosity.
Jack joined another pianist named Lyman Woods and their tours took them, at the outbreak of World War I, to London's famous Palladium. They broke up and Jack joined the navy.
In a navy revue, Jack played the fiddle without much success until one night when he paused to make a few wise cracks. The crowd roared and Benny the comic was born. Thereafter, Jack was penciled into the show as Issy There, the Admiral's Disorderly.
After his discharge, Benny returned to vaudeville and to avoid confusion with another fiddling comic, Ben Bernie, he adopted the Jack Benny tag.
He worked with the greats in the vaudeville heyday and went on to the Earl Carroll and Shubert shows on Broadway.
His movie debut was as auspicious as his radio bow. A talent scout spotted him in a Los Angeles theatre in 1929. Benny got the lead in "The Hollywood Review," clicked big, and has been starred in a number of pictures since, including "Charley's Aunt," "The Horn Blows at Midnight" and "George Washington Slept Here."
Benny and his wife, Mary Livingstone, have been stage and broad casting partners for 20 years. She was Sadye Marks, a salesgirl in a Los Angeles department store when they were married in 1927. She recalls that he practically had to drag her onstage to make an actress out of her. But it was not long before she became an invaluable ingredient in the Benny fun formula.
The Bennys have a beautiful home in Beverly Hills and their home life has been a happy one. Their daughter, Joan Naomi, adopted at the age of four months and now married, is the joy of their lives.
As practically every Benny fan knows, Jack is the exact opposite in private life to the penurious, protesting character he plays on the air. He is notorious for his over-tipping. His genial manner and friendliness have made him one of the most popular figures in Hollywood.
Benny gets little time off to play, what with television schedule, weekly radio show and business interests, but when he has an hour or so to loaf he's usually out on the golf links.

The NET House

NBC had the best TV IDs. Shows opened with a kaleidoscope peacock and closed with letters snaking across the scene with the network chimes quickly playing in the background.

My second-favourite ID when I was a kid was not from one of the commercial networks. We got it on a somewhat snowy signal from a hundred miles away. It was for NET, which was National Educational Television. I was disappointed when it became PBS in 1970 because the animated closing ID was dumped.

This post is a little weak because I’d love to give you a history of the ID. I do not know when the animated version first appeared, nor can I find what company animated it. However, I can provide some frame grabs.

Three rectangles separately slid onto the screen, then individually turned to become the network initials. They scrunched together and the words National Educational Television popped above the letters. The words turned into a bar, which became the roof of a house, complete with TV antenna on top.



The animation was accompanied by electronic music and a voiceover. Moog logos were a big thing starting in the mid-‘60s. The cue is a piece called “Plenipotentiary” by Eric Siday, who wrote a fair bit of music for commercials, as well as the CBS colour ID bed and the ABC News title used in 1966.

A colour version was made a number of years later (we only had a black-and-white TV in the ‘60s).

Reader Brandon Pierce points out the house made an appearance in the opening of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood when it moved to the NET network.

If anyone has a reliable source with information about this animated ID (ie. something without the word “Wiki” in it), let me know.

Felix's Journey

The best Felix the Cat cartoons have something inventive going on. In Doubles For Darwin (1924), Felix goes into a trans-Atlantic cable office, flicks the switch to “South Africa” and gets sucked into the Magnavox.



Felix makes his way inside an underwater cable, stopped briefly by a swordfish that saws the cable. Felix bends his “sword” and carries on.



Cut to a receiving station. Felix is still inside the cable, which is attached to a printing contraption.



The Morse code on the ticker tape swirls to form letters in plain English.



The operator drops the tape on the ground. The letters “Felix” rise from it and morph into the cat.



There’s no credit for the animator. I await the day when we get a restored set of some of the great silent Felix cartoons.

I'll Cut You Down to Size

Somehow, it’s a crime that Bosko was available on up-to-date home video way back when but only selected shorts can be viewed on DVD. Setting aside the fact that Bosko set up the whole Warner Bros. cartoon empire, his better cartoons are enjoyable. I certainly like the gags better than the ones Mickey was given in some of the Disney shorts at the same time.

Ride Him, Bosko! (1932) has the fun ending where live-action Rudy Ising, Hugh Harman (and Ham Hamilton?) can’t figure out how Bosko’s going to rescue Honey, so they all go home leaving Bosko looking perplexed at the camera.

A gag that seems slightly used but is still amusing is when a rifle (firing like a machine gun) cuts a walking wiener dog down to size. His ten-gallon hat remains aloft until he shrinks and then lands on his head.



In the meantime, there is a fight going on in silhouette in the window of the Red Dog Saloon.

There’s some reused cycle animation to keep the budget down.

Friz Freleng and Norm Blackburn get the screen credit for animation.