Dennis Day, Black Sheep

It’s hard to think of Dennis Day, the innocent foil of the Jack Benny show, as a “bad boy.” Mind you, a “bad boy” in the 1930s was a bit different than it is today. Back then, it could mean skipping class and not listening to your parents. Day did both.

Both Benny and Day had something in common. Both had parents that hoped their child turned out differently. Benny’s parents wanted him to be a virtuoso concert violinist. Day’s parents wanted him to be a lawyer. Both wanted to do, and ended up doing, something else.

The American Weekly, a newspaper magazine supplement, profiled Day in its September 25, 1949, using the “bad boy” angle as a ‘40s version of clickbait.

Mamma’s Boy
It's a New Role for Dennis Day, but He Likes It and Hopes It Fits
By Paul I. Murphy
COMPLETELY submissive to his overbearing radio mother, tenor-comedian Dennis Day is known as the perfect mother's boy by his millions of listeners.
One of his best fans knows better, however.
She's Mrs. Patrick McNulty, his real mother.
A far-cry from her radio counterpart, small, mild-mannered Mrs. McNulty had her hands full raising young, riotous Dennis. In fact, it's still hard for her to believe that the one-time black sheep of the McNulty clan is really such a success, especially in the role of the mother's boy.
Dennis Day was born Eugene Patrick Dennis McNulty in New York City's Bronx, on May 21, 1918.
From the start, Dennis was different from his brothers. As babies, they were gentle and quiet. Dennis would bellow and persistently shake his crib for attention. Mother was worn out catering to his demands.
The other McNulty boys were studious.
Dennis hated school, and cut classes.

His brothers planned their professional careers early. Dennis brushed aside thoughts of business.
"About the only time I can get Dennis to obey is to threaten to take him out of the choir at St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York City," Mrs. McNulty explained to his teachers at the parochial schools he attended. Friends sympathized with his parents, because he was frequently in trouble.
"Dennis doesn't seem to have the respect for our judgment that his brothers have," she would say.
While his brothers studied their lessons, Dennis was running around.
Once he failed to return home for several days.
"Dennis, if this happens again," his father told him, "I'll order you out of this house forever."
Several months later he left home again. He worked as a waiter, bellhop and pin-boy to make money to pay for singing lessons.
Upon the pleadings of his mother, he returned home again.
It was a major victory for Mrs. McNulty when she got him to attend Manhattan College.
"Who wants to be a businessman?" he told his mother. "I'll go to college, but someday you'll probably regret forcing me."
His marks were good, although his attendance was poor. On his days away from college he earned money, to continue his singing instructions.
The McNultys knew nothing about his labors to further the career he dreamed of. All they knew was that he was cutting classes too often and their hard earned money for his education was being squandered.
Every career his parents mapped out for him he refused.
"I could never be happy as an attorney or a business executive," he told them.
“Don't you want to follow the successful examples set by your brothers?” his father asked.
"Perhaps I can find success as a singer," Dennis said.
His parents were shocked.
"Don't you ever listen to the advice we give you, Dennis?" Mrs. McNulty asked.
After much pleading, the McNultys finally persuaded their son to attend law school.
But Dennis hated every day he pored over legal books. Music was running through running through brain and fingers.

His girl friend, pretty Peggy Ellen Almquist, sympathized with his ambitions.
"Don't you think you should listen to your parents' advice, though, Dennis?" she asked. "They want to see you become a success."
"That's just it, Peggy," he replied. "I could never be a succeess at anything but singing. I want to make my parents proud of me, particularly mother. That’s why, someday I’m going to prove to them that I'm not such a failure after all by becoming a successful vocalist."
Several weeks later Dennis read that famed singer Kenny Baker was retiring from the Jack Benny program, and that auditions were being held to select his successor.
Dennis couldn't raise funds to audition. So he did the next best thing. He borrowed $2 from a friend to make a recording of his voice.
Playing a hunch, he sent the disc to Mary Livingston, in care of the Jack Benny program. Wanting a short, catchy radio name, he used Dennis Day. Mary listened to the record.
Before it was half finished, she had Jack listening, too.
The Bennys were so impressed that a telegram was sent to Dennis. It said that auditions were being held up until he could arrive in Hollywood for a try-out. Unknown to his family, Dennis put on a drive among his friends for transportation fare to the Coast.
That was 1939.
Dennis was hired almost immediately, and has been a permanent fixture of the Jack Benny program ever since, in addition to his own coast-to-coast show, "A Day in the Life of Dennis Day."
Eventually young McNulty changed his name legally to Dennis Day.
In 1948 he changed the name of Peggy Ellen Ahlmquist to Day, too, following his time in the U. S. Navy.
Today Dennis Day earns $10,000 a week for personal appearances plus another $100,000 a year from radio, recording and mimic jobs. Now his brothers work for him, helping to manage his profitable interests.
"But the most important thing of all is that I have proved to mother that her black sheep wasn't so black after all," says Dennis.
"That's why I decided before I went on the radio that I would play a mother's boy on the air. I always wanted to be mother's favorite. I hope I have earned that title now.
"You see, a bad boy learned that it pays off to be a good boy."
To that Mrs. McNulty nods her smiling approval.

Fred Quimby—The Authorised Story

Fred Quimby could lift a pencil. But he couldn’t draw a cartoon with it. Yet he spent years in charge of, or overseeing, cartoon operations at MGM.

If you think about it, it’s a wonder Quimby kept his job. In 1937, Metro decided to have its own cartoon studio on the lot instead of relying outside on contractors (first, Ub Iwerks, then Hugh Harman and Rudy Ising) for animated shorts.

Things became a disaster. Animators hired from New York didn’t get along with the ones from West Coast. Harry Hershfield and Milt Gross were brought in the run things and were quickly shoved out. Studio politics got so bad that Friz Freleng wasted little time in getting back into his car and pointing it at Leon Schlesinger’s ratty building on Van Ness and Fernwood. Quimby was forced to bring back Harman and Ising, who he didn’t want in the first place. This was all in about two years.

What kind of executive runs things that way? Well, a guy who had owned a theatre, been a film salesman and was without any apparent artistic creativity.

Quimby’s office must have been built on a pile of horseshoes. Somehow, two of Ising’s underlings—a failed director and an ex-writer for Terrytoons—were allowed to make their own cartoon that became a huge hit and an Oscar nominee. Quimby gave Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera their own unit to make more Tom and Jerrys and rack up Oscars (granted, he was opposed to the idea of a cat and mouse series at the start). Then he had the good fortune of picking up an at-liberty cartoon director named Tex Avery. Oh, and a strike over at Walt Disney’s allowed him to populate his studio with top new animators—Ken Muse, Ray Patterson and Preston Blair among them.

We profiled Fred C. in this post, but Metro did it, too, in the April-May 1940 edition of Short Story, the studio’s magazine dealing with its short subject programme. It conveniently ignores Quimby’s arrest in 1921 on a charge of illegal interstate transport of film (something that would be absolutely ridiculous today, given technology).

One wonders which radio network wanted him to “take charge of television development” as there was only one experimental station west of Chicago and a handful in the eastern states. And if he supervised “Gray’s Elegy,” he supervised it out of existence because it never got finished (animator/historian Mark Kausler got a first-hand story on that from Hugh Harman).

Quimby retired around the start of 1956—likely for health reasons—and died in 1965 at the age of 79.

HE STICKS TO SHORTS
THIRTY-FIVE years ago, a lean, lanky lad of fourteen jogged contentedly over the plains of Montana, alone except for his spotted pony. It was an unusual animal, but no more unusual than the boy. For other boys his age were riding horses now. In this country a boy waited for the day when he could own a man-sized horse with even more anticipation than his Dude cousin did his first pair of long trousers. His friends often taunted him because his pony couldn't keep up with them. But the boy was loyal. His pony was short but it was substantial and it got him there just the same. He decided to stick to his pony.
Still a ponyboy at heart, Fred Quimby has been figuratively riding a short horse ever since. Today he is foremost among Hollywood's altogether too few champions of the screen's little short subject. And if he was determined about his pony, he's stubborn as a mule about his shorts.

First Quimby had to sell himself on short subjects. That was back in 1913 when he operated a movie emporium in Missoula, Montana. Then he began his everlasting job of selling them to others, taking charge of the Denver and Salt Lake City territory for Pathe, the industry's largest shorts producers at the time. Even in those days the exhibitors smiled when Quimby sat down to expound about the importance of shorts. Nobody took shorts that seriously they told him. But they did condescend to buy a few and their disparaging attitude only served to stiffen Quimby's resolve to defend these belittled little pictures against all odds.
Within three years Quimby's singular sincerity about shorts had carried him to the post of general manager and member of the Pathe board of directors. In 1924 Fox Films called upon him to reorganize and enlarge their short subject activities. And in 1927 when Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer decided to establish a short subject department under the guidance of the best qualified executive in the industry Fred Quimby was the logical choice for the job.
Today as manager of the Metro shorts department, he has achieved the longest career on record in the short subject field. Others have used shorts freely and frankly as only a stepping stone to the larger rewards in the realm of feature pictures. Quimby has had such opportunities too. He has turned down better jobs than some of his friends were ever offered. Not long ago one of the big radio networks prevailed upon him to take full charge of television development. His friends chide him when he passes up these opportunities to escape from shorts much as they did about that pony. But his answer is just the same — he'll stick to shorts. By this time he's pretty well stuck with them. He's made shorts his hobby as well as his work. And he's happy about the whole thing.
Certainly the short subject needs a Quimby — or preferably a number of Quimbys — today more than ever before. Where he used to fight for shorts against features, to get increased budgets for production and corresponding larger revenues from exhibitors, he now has to fight against double features. In fact, the advent of double billing all but wiped out the shorts entirely. They have been scorned by critics, spurned by exhibitors, scoffed at by industry wiseacres and slighted by nearly everyone concerned. Through it all, Quimby's job has been a discouraging and a thankless one but his abiding faith in shorts remains unshaken.
The principle upon which Quimby bases his belief in shorts can be very simply stated. He believes that quantity does not make quality — in entertainment any more.
On the other hand, he contends that it is very possible for a ten-minute short to leave a greater impression on an audience than a two-hour feature, just as a good short story is often remembered longer than a dozen novels. He likes to recall that Lincoln's 250-word Gettysburg address still lives while the 14,000 word oration delivered by Everett on the same occasion was forgotten the next day. By the same token, he believes that many feature stories could be improved by producing them in shorter form. Particularly he deplores the Hollywood system of buying stories originally written as shorts and stretching them into features. It is the same idea, he reasons, as pouring water — and cold water, at that — into a good cup of coffee.
Quimby is currently devoting his special attention to the birds and bees of the animated cartoons. Foreseeing the present popularity of this type of short, Quimby persuaded Metro to become the first and only major Studio to operate its own cartoon plant. Believing that the surface of cartoon potentialities has hardly been scratched, he seeks to introduce new ideas into the field. To this end he has for the past two years supervised the cartoon experiments of co- producers Hugh Harman and Rudolph Ising, a notable example of which was the widely acclaimed "Peace on Earth." Here for the first time the cartoon turned its satire on a serious and timely topic in order to show the futility of war. "Gray's Elegy," a far cry from the ordinary cartoon themes, is now in production.
Man and boy, Quimby's career has been characterized by his ordinary stick-to-it-iveness. He still indulges his boyhood appetite for chewing gum and candy, keeps his desk stocked with the stuff. His absorbing interest in shorts calls for long hours at his desk and leaves little time for outside interests. He arises at 6:30 every morning, invariably goes straight home from work. He is shy, sensitive and sentimental, still knows how to blush. He has been playing golf for years but is still taking lessons. Occasionally, he finds time to go to the races where he always bets — you guessed it — on the littlest horse on the track.

Spring is Here Again

Winter is threatening trees in the Van Beuren short Spring Antics (1932).



But behold! The sun is rising. After winking at us, it warms up. It’s tough to see in this poor-quality transfer (aren’t there better ones out there?) but some kind of long-tailed imps with devil horns are stoking coal into the sun’s burner. Gene Rodemich plays a knock-off of the “Anvil Chorus” in the background.



Old Man Winter melts. That means spring is here again!



There’s usually odd fun in a Van Beuren cartoon. This isn’t as odd as some of them are, but we get a swishy goose, a groundhog’s shadow kicking the groundhog back into its burrow, an animal of indeterminate species tapping a microphone like the NBC chimes and conducting with its tail, and some Disney-like dancing (though not animated nearly as well).

Things pep up a little more than half-way through the cartoon with a quartet (frog, turtle, bear, squirrel) singing the song you hear below.

John Foster and Manny Davis get the “by” credit.

Sic the Sicko

What does a war dog (Allied variety) do when he sees a picture of Adolf Hitler?



Yes, we get the inevitable Buy Bonds plug, too.

Ken Muse, Pete Burness, Irv Spence and Jack Zander are the credited animators on the 1943 release War Dogs from the Hanna-Barbera unit at MGM. I want to say this is a Muse scene. Frank Bingman is the narrator.

How To Get To a Rooftop

All the stock company players on the first season of Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In had been kicking around for a while, but when I tuned for the first show, there was only one I recognised—Judy Carne.

Being an avid sitcom viewer at the age of 9, I had seen her in Love on a Rooftop, which co-starred Peter Deuel. About all I remember about it is Rich Little was in the cast and I was waiting each week for him to do his John Wayne impression, which finally happened in one of the later episodes. The fact that I don’t remember much more about it maybe explain why it lasted only a season (or maybe after 55 years I just forget stuff).

Carne did a pile of interviews at the time the show was on. Two of them are below, one from the Associated Press’ TV columnist from August 5, 1966, and the other from the West Coast entertainment reporter for the National Enterprise Association, who would never get away with the line “But you know how women are” today. It appeared in papers starting around January 15, 1967.

Being charged 10 cents for a phone call was probably one of the smallest problems in Carne’s life. Her marriage to Burt Reynolds wasn’t a pleasant one, she enjoyed drugs a little too much, and she never reached the heights of Laugh-In after leaving the show in somewhat of a huff. She died in 2015.

But let’s look back to when her career started taking off.

Judy Carne Gets Third Try At TV
By CYNTHIA LOWRY
AP TV-Radio Writer
HOLLYWOOD (AP) — There is a widely held belief among actors, undoubtedly fostered by budget-minded producers, that any regular employment in television, no matter how dismal the series, helps s fledgling career.
"Forget it," commanded Judy Carne, who encountered her leanest days after her two frail comedy barks foundered in network channels with all hands aboard.
Judy, who had replaced Julie Andrews in the London production of "The Boy Friend," was imported five years ago to play the young English girl in the ill-fated "Fair Exchange."

Then, a couple of seasons back, she had a part in "Baileys Of Balboa," another disappointment. Now she is a co-star in ABC's upcoming young-marrieds comedy, "Love On A Rooftop."
But it was not previous experience that won her a third chance, it was an elimination contest that started with 20 girls, among them Nancy Sinatra. And Judy worked hard, with a coach and a recorder, to eliminate her native British accents.
The elimination process for "Love On A Rooftop" was a real ordeal. After the 30 girls had been arbitrarily reduced to four, each girl was subjected to a "personality test." This involved sitting down in front of a camera to be interviewed by a director who had a bit of free time.
Ultimately she was told she would probably be the choice — but only for the pilot episode of an unsold program, maybe a week's work. Then came two months while they were testing for the boy who would play her husband — a difficult time when she could not take any acting jobs that would tie her up for more than a few days at a time.
This went on from September until they finally shot the pilot one week in December.
The series is built around the adventures of a young $85-a-week apprentice architect and his bride (Judy), an uninhibited art student. The aim of the show is to capture some of the kooky quality of, say, "You can't take it with you," which would be nice.
Judy, separated from husband Burt Reynolds (who is starring in New York in his own new ABC series, "Hawk") rides to work on her motorcycle and spends networking hours taking singing lessons and keeping up her dancing.

Outspoken Star Has Problem
By ERSKINE JOHNSON
HOLLYWOOD (NEA) — Judy Carne ordered a steak "with a great big baked potato and lots of butter please." Then she talked about her weight problem. It is the fault, she said, of ABC-TV's "Love on a Rooftop" in which shes playing newlywed Julie Willis.
She started the series last summer at a nice, well-curved 112 pounds. The curves are still there but she's down to 103 pounds and . . .
"Just look at me," she said. "I've taken to wearing high necked sweaters because I have a very active face when I act and my veins show. You should feel my hip bones. They show too."
It's all because of the filming schedule, Judy says.
"I'm up at 5 a.m. and don't get home until 7 p.m. By then I'm too tired to eat so I just have a glass of hot milk and fall into bed."
Across from you at luncheon, red-haired, vivacious Judy doesn't look like a girl who should be worrying about her weight. But you know how women are. Nine pounds — up or down — is a crisis.

"The producer of the show even sent me to the studio hospital for some B12 shots. And you know what the studio sent ME the bill for them. I marched into the producer's office with that bill and said, 'Look, you ordered these shots.' It was a mistake and the shots were charged to the production."
Judy was nettled about the bill, she said, because of two regular deductions the studio makes from her paycheck as the star of "Love on a Rooftop."
And she frowned the news:
"You won't believe this — and I wish you would print it — but the studio (Screen Gems) charges me 10 cents for telephone calls and $4 a month for parking my car on the lot. I'd really be mad except I figure I'm lucky to be in such a good show. It's a lot of fun and so well written."
Judy is just as outspoken about other things, such as the personality test she took on her way to winning the TV series despite two previous series, "Fair Exchange" and "The Baileys of Balboa." The test was scriptless with Judy just being herself and answering questions asked off camera by a director.
"He asked me about my most embarrassing moment," Judy laughed, "and I told him, 'It's right now— this test. I've never been so embarrassed in my whole life'." That's our Judy.

Surprise Fur Escape

Chilly Willy comes up from a hole in the floor to steal a fur to keep warm in I'm Cold. The frames tell the story.



As a post-script, Chilly honks the dog’s nose.



Don Patterson, La Verne Harding and Ray Abrams animate for Tex Avery. The cartoon was released by Universal International in 1954.

Cats A-Weigh

Sylvester gets kicked around by the giant mouse in Cats Aweigh (1953).



Phil De Lara, Chuck McKimson, Rod Scribner and Herman Cohen are the credited animators.

Heckling the Heckler

Jack Benny used to get it from all sides on the during broadcast of his radio show—from clerks (Frank Nelson), his cast (Mary, Phil, etc.), other celebrities (Ronald Colman, Claude Rains and so on). But he apparently got it before the broadcast as well, at least if a story in the October 15, 1936 edition of Broadcasting magazine.

Maybe it’s me, but I have trouble believing the story. Benny liked a joke and always seemed to have a good sense of humour about himself. But I guess I have to take the writer’s word about it.

The story came after Broadcasting published this in its October 1st edition:

Benny's Levity
"KIDDING" the sponsor and the product has long been Jack Benny's successful stock-in-trade. The comedian for Jello, who resumes his Sunday shows on NBC-Red Oct. 4, with no objections from his sponsor, is going to do some tall kidding of the radio business in his latest movie The Big Broadcast. He plays the part of an advertising agency official staging a series of programs, of which Gracie Allen is sponsor. In the cast also are Bob Burns, Bing Crosby and Sam (Schlepperman) Hearn.

That prompted this letter the trade paper printed:

One on Benny
To the Editor of BROADCASTING:
I note in the latest issue of your magazine a short item concerning Jack Benny's propensity for kidding his sponsor. With the reading of the item I was reminded of my apprenticeship in radio as a page boy at Radio City.
It was the custom of Jack Benny to introduce to his studio audience the cast of the program. This generally took place about five minutes before broadcast time. Of course the introductions were of a humorous nature as befitted the comedian.
One of the page boys was always stationed just inside the door of the studio and Jack Benny would invariably include him in the introductions as "the Student Prince" (the uniforms of the pages made the appelation amusing). Of course the page would be the subject of the stinging laughter of the audience which was not only disconcerting but also rather humiliating (who likes to be the butt of a joke?).
I determined that even at the risk of my job I'd put a stop to it. Forthwith I saw to it that I was standing within the door at the time of the introductions. When Benny introduced me to the audience in the usual manner I waited until the laughter died down and said "thank you Mr. Cantor". The "house came down".
Benny threw down his script and started after me . . . Don Wilson, his announcer, laughed till the tears ran down his face and was still laughing when the program went on the air. I didn't lose my job but I did start a regime of heckling the heckler. At every opportunity Jack Benny suffered from the subtle ridicule of the page staff.
DORIAN ST. GEORGE,
WLVA, Lynchburg, Va.
Oct. 3, 1936

Somehow, I can’t see Jack Benny doing something as unprofessional as running off the stage and into the audience stands, unless it was a joke. But it seems appropriate that even the pages would heckle Benny, albeit before he took to the air.

St. George, incidentally, had passed a junior announcer’s course for pages at NBC and had appeared on several dramatic shows. The network assigned him to WLVA. He was reassigned to WMAL, Washington in 1937, where he took part in some experimental TV broadcasts in February 1939. St. George was transferred to the Blue Network when it split off from NBC in 1942. He was doing news and commercial programme announcing on WJZ (going from D-Day coverage to the quiz show Fish Pond). In 1956, he left broadcasting to go into agency work. A year, he made his way to Cleveland and became a commercial voice and PR flack for Carling Brewery. He died on March 2, 2004.

Whether Mr. St. George ever met up again with Jack Benny is unlikely, but Variety reported how he once got trapped in a control room. It seems a loose screw on a door was doing some heckling of its own.

How They Made Clutch Cargo

Quick! What TV cartoons were printed on Eastman Reversal Color Print Film, Type 5269? Give up? Why, Clutch Cargo of course!

Only a real film geek would want to know that, and they would have found it in the March 1962 edition of American Cinematographer magazine.

There are things in the cartoon world that attract people for reasons I will never understand. If I enumerate them, someone will get upset. But I will say one is Clutch Cargo. If you’re a fan, fine. But I don’t get it, even in a “it’s-so-bad-it’s-good” way. And if you’re a fan, you’ll probably appreciate the American Cinematographer article below. Sorry for the low res pictures. You can read more about Clutch in an earlier post.

AUTOMATION IN ANIMATION
Some ingenious devices that impart the illusion of motion to artwork are used in producing the “Clutch Cargo” cartoons for television.
By TOM PICKENS
CAMBRIA STUDIOS, producers of the “Clutch Cargo” TV cartoons, refer to the show as “television’s first comic strip.” This is because, although the cartoons possess “full movement,” the action is less costly to produce than when conventional animation techniques are used. Cambria employs some unique mechanized methods to simulate animated cartoon movement in the “Clutch Cargo” series.
With Cambria’s system, elements of artwork are given motion mechanically wherever possible, rather than by the single-frame exposure method usually employed for animated cartoons. The producers aim to avoid conventional or “full” animation as much as possible. Episodes in the series are regularly turned out which contain as little as 12 per cent single-frame animation photography. Nevertheless, the illusion of fairly smooth and continuous movement is a remarkable feature of these films.
The illusion of full movement in the “Clutch Cargo” show is created through a series of technical tricks that are both ingenious and economical and for the most part, guarded secrets of Cambria Studios.
Among them are:
1) Methods of superimposing live effects over cartoon scenes while the camera is in continuous operation.
2) Incorporating working, three dimensional models with artwork on a live-action basis.
Frequently, cartoon sequences in “Clutch Cargo” are filmed at speeds of 24 frames per second, using live action techniques. As few was [sic] two or three animation cels may be required for a single take. This makes it possible to produce “animated” cartoons for a fraction of the cost of full animation.
Such production economies have not hurt the consumer acceptance or popularity of “Clutch Cargo.”

By the fall of 1961, the series was appearing on some 80 TV stations around the country, both in color and black-and-white. The show has an estimated 23 million viewers weekly, ranging through all ages and heights of brow.
Although limited animation is employed, “Clutch Cargo’s” creators insist that they are not making animated cartoons.
“We’re making comic strips for television and this is a completely different form of expression,” says Dick Brown, Cambria’s president and executive producer.

Brown’s attitude is seconded by Clark Haas, former artist on the “Buz Sawyer” newspaper comic strip, who is the creator of and art director for the “Clutch Cargo” series. “The results we obtain aren’t comparable to conventional animation,” says Haas. “We’re someplace in between live action and drawing.”
Some indication of how “Clutch Cargo” differs from other popular TV cartoons is illustrated by the fact that only about a thousand animation cels are required to make a full half-hour show—six 5-minute segments. By contrast, it often requires a thousand cels just to create one minute of action, using the full-animation technique. A further economy is the fact all cels, which are used in each “Clutch Cargo” episode, are carefully stored for possible re-use in future episodes—similar to the way Hollywood studios stock key set-pieces for re-use in later productions.
This conservative use of animation cels is made possible through a series of new mechanized techniques developed by Cambria Studios. One of the most important innovations is a continuous action rig which allows the cameraman to shoot animation cels at live action camera speeds, and simulate almost any type live action camera shot, including trucking, dolly and pan shots.
This continuous action device utilizes glass panels on which animation cels are mounted. The panels are then moved horizontally in the lens field by motors turning at pre-set speeds. A 16mm camera photographs the resulting motion.
Using this arrangement, the cameraman can, for example, photograph one cel representing a rocket ship against a moving background of sky in continuous action at 24 frames per second. Artwork requirements are reduced to individual drawings of the rocket ship and background. Because the sky (on one glass panel) is moving past the cel representing the rocket ship, the camera records it as full movement. By increasing the number of cels, the cameraman can utilize more than one rocket ship and have them traveling at different speeds.
Further action can be added to the scene by superimposing live effects such as smoke and flame. If a rocket ship appears in the “Clutch Cargo” series spouting fire out of its tail, the fire is real. It is superimposed at the time the rocket is photographed against the moving art background of sky.
The superimposing mechanism is an optical reflection device called a “frajilly” by the company wits because it came in a box marked FRAGILE. By setting this mechanism immediately Itetween the camera and the continuous rig, a jet of fire, or any natural effect or live action which can he created in the studio, is optically super-imposed on the artwork on the action rig. The live effect is produced in an area at right angles to the artwork, and “frajilly” blends the two together for the benefit of the camera.

Artist Haas and technical director Edwin Gillette are constantly on the lookout for new techniques which will enable them to produce realistic movement on the screen without requiring additional drawings or cels. In many instances they have been able to integrate working models and three dimensional mock-ups into an action. For instance, in one “Clutch Cargo” episode with a Holland locale, the background contained a number of windmills whose arms actually turned mechanically.
Perhaps the most ingenious of “Clutch Cargo’s” many technical innovations, however, is a process called Synchro-Vox. An invention of Edwin Gillette, this process superimposes over the drawings of faces in the strip, live-action photography of an actor’s lips speaking lines. The illusion obtained is that of a talking cartoon character with life-like movement, expression and perfectly synchronized voice.
To accomplish this, an actor is first photographed speaking the lines. This film is shot through a matte which eliminates all but the actor’s mouth. The image of the moving mouth is then superimposed over the pen and ink artwork on the action rig. The cel drawings of the character’s faces used in this process are complete except for the mouth area.
Absolute voice syncronization [sic] is obtained, since the sound is recorded at the time the live-action lip movement is photographed. In conventional animation, hundreds and sometimes thousands of hand drawings must he made to create the illusion of a person talking. Cambria’s method makes it unnecessary to draw mouths to fit the dialogue.
All photography for the “Clutch Cargo” series is done in 16mm color. The film used is Ektachrome Commercial Type 7255. Release prints are processed for Cambria by Filmservice Laboratories in Hollywood. Color release prints are made on Eastman Reversal Color Print Film, Type 5269. Black-and-white releases are made on Eastman Fine Grain Release Postive Film, Type 7302, from Eastman Fine Grain Panchromatic Duplicating Negative.

The success of the “Clutch Cargo” films is underscored by the recent selection of the series for presentation in the RCA exhibition hall in New York City as an outstanding example of the quality of color television.
Each “Clutch Cargo” adventure is divided into five 5-minnte episodes. The show can be presented daily in 5-minute chapters or once a week as a half-hour feature.
With 52 half-hour “Clutch Cargo” stories completed on film, (260 five minute episodes) the fertile minds at Cambria Studios are looking for new cartoon strip ideas to introduce to television.

“Space Angel,” a science-fiction series, is next in line. There will be other new strips after this, and Cambria Studios hopes to be able to offer TV stations a full hour of animated program material daily within a very few years. This, they feel, represents maximum saturation, after which Cambria would only be competing with itself. All of the cartoons now being planned by Cambria will utilize the same mechanized movement in the production techniques that has proven so successful with “Clutch Cargo.”
The application of these techniques are not limited to television alone, according to Brown. Cambria Studios has had marked success with them in incorporating three-dimensional moving models and mock-ups in the production of films for industry and the military.
In addition, Cambria holds there are marked benefits in the use of their methods in the production of educational films, titles, and experimental movies. ■