A Tyerd Cat

A cat running from an ordinary mouse? That’s the animation that opens the Mighty Mouse cartoon A Cat’s Tale (1951). It may be an ordinary mouse, but the animation’s no ordinary animation. Some random (albeit fuzzy) frames.



Jim Tyer’s animation is even crazier when the cat locks and bolts the door of his cave. We'll do a post on that some day.

Tyer never got screen credit. None of the animators did until Gene Deitch arrived toward the end of the decade.

There’s some mighty cross-promotion in this cartoon as several scenes feature Mighty Mouse comic books.

Here I Am in the Fifth Row!

Tex Avery erases the line of what’s on the screen and what’s in the movie theatre in the end gag of Cinderella Meets Fella (1938).

There are Averyisms throughout the cartoon, but the ending has the Prince following the original fairy tale and showing up at Cinderella’s house. The plot veers off into Averyland again, when instead of having Cindy try on the slipper (which disappears after an earlier scene), the Prince looks at a note. The artist goes for fleshy, fingernailed hands.



The Prince is inconsolable until a shadow appears on the screen. It’s Cindy in the theatre watching him in the cartoon (that she’s actually in). She leaves the theatre and rushes onto the screen.



Reunited, the Prince and Cinderella both leave the screen for the theatre through the closing iris to watch the coming newsreel. End of cartoon.



There’s plenty of familiar Avery to go around. The fairy godmother enjoys her gin (we see the bottle, but she doesn’t drink from it). The radio talks back to Cinderella. She gives out an advertising slogan before turning it on. We get Jimmy Fidler’s catchphrase “And I do mean you!” spouted as a post-script by the evil step-sisters with the NBC chimes lightly in the background. The Prince, of course, is based on comedian Joe Penner (the impression is by Danny Webb). Avery resisted the temptation to have him screech “You naaasty man!”

The Motion Picture Herald of July 23, 1938, was impressed, though I don’t think the dancing qualifies as “jitterbugging.”

Outstanding Cartoon
Hardly classically reverential in its treatment of the hallowed and ageless fable of the little slavey girl who meets a Prince Charming boy is this jazzed up version from the iconoclastic pen of Leon Schlesinger but even the youngster most ardently devoted to the fairy fable lore will lose his bewilderment in witnessing the desecration of one of his favorite tales in gales of childish glee. The free hand of the artist has drawn Cindy's magic fairy godmother in screwball shades and the soundman has given the curly haired heroine a set of "Betty Boopish" vocal cords. As for the glamorous and dashing Prince, the female contingency in the audience will be startled after admiring the "Snow White" edition of the royal gentleman to witness the "goofy" picturization of the princely chap in this cartoon. The famous ball scene is reduced to a jitterbug session. The finale finds the romantic couple at a neighborhood showplace. However, the drawings, taken in the insane spirit in which they are sketched, will produce an hilarious audience response and should flavor any programme with a welcome touch of amusing nonsense. The technical makeup of color and musical background provide excellent help in creating the atmosphere for the subject. — Running time, seven minutes.

By the way, the same year as this cartoon, Bunny Berigan came out with a B-side called “When a Prince of a Fella Meets a Cinderella.” Coincidence? Mmmmm....could be. Oh, wait, Avery skipped that radio catchphrase in this one.

Virgil Ross was the credited animator. Sid Sutherland, Paul Smith and Irv Spence were Avery’s other animators at the time. Cinderella is Berneice Hansell. Mel Blanc is heard, and the godmother could be Elvia Allman.

Let's Try the Artificial Sweetener Angle

There are just so many things you can write about a star when there’s really nothing new to talk about.

In Jack Benny’s case, I suppose that speaks well toward his longevity in show business, but once he settled into television, it proved to be a challenge for columnists. After all, he had been on the air for so long, what possibly could be said about his coming fall season that hadn’t been said before?

Such was the challenge of the New York Herald Tribune’s TV columnist, who rose to the challenge in her paper’s edition of October 8, 1958 (the column was syndicated as well). She managed to find something.

Jack Benny's Not Stingy with Time
By MARIE TORRE
NEW YORK — JACK Benny is in New York on a business trip to extend an annual hello to his sponsor, his CBS boss Bill Paley, and members of the press. The practice has paid off in good will.
Benny's attention to the amenities of public relations, not to mention the fact that he's a helluva comedian, has kept his sponsor (Lucky Strike) happy for 15 years and has enabled the comedian to enjoy the status of top dog at Mr. Paley's network. As for TV reporters . . . well, naturally, they're flattered no end when a CBS man calls and says "Jack Benny is coming to town and he wants to talk to you."
Normally, it's the other way around. And sometimes, to the frustration of a reporter tracking down a performer in the headlines, we find the star doesn't want to talk to us.

But Benny has never minimized the value of publicity, and he's always ready to talk — even when he has nothing new to say. When he was asked about "changes" in his TV series, for instance. Everybody in TV, you know, feels the need to refurbish every other year or so.
"Changes?" Benny echoed over the breakfast in his hotel suite. "No, I'm not changing anything. There's nothing to change. I don't have a format. The situations hinge on the guest personalities, and since the personalities are different in each show, each situation is different.
"Frankly, we're all very happy with the way things are. The sponsor's happy, too. Do you know that in 15 years, I have never had any criticism from the sponsor about the commercials I integrate in the script. Not once. Every year Paul Hahn — he's the president of Lucky Strike, you know — comes to California with his wife and we all get together for an evening. First thing Hahn usually says is, 'Well, your shows have been great,' and then we all go out and have a good time."
In the interests of an "angle," we turned the subject to his wife, Mary Livingston, inordinately TV-shy last season.
"Oh, I have an awfully hard time putting Mary to work," Benny said, "she gets nervous when she works. She loves show business as an observer, but not for herself. Unless I come up with a show idea which positively requires her appearance, she won't do anything."
The subject of Mrs. Benny yielded nothing in the way of news; maybe he had some fresh opinions on the inability of other TV comedians to match his lasting success.
"Well, like I always said, and I don't mean this to sound egotistical," Benny answered, "I've got it made. I was lucky. Twenty or more years ago I stumbled on the idea of playing a cheap character and it's good enough to last a lifetime. It's good because it's a composite of every thing that's wrong with human beings. Everybody has an uncle who's stingy, or a coward or who thinks he's a great violinist. The identification factor is there, if you know what I mean.
"But I can see where TV is tough on the other comedians. They have to create new situations and characters all the time. I notice that whenever comedians refer to their troubles in TV they invariably mention me as the exception. All I have to worry about is to keep my show from stinking."
Our attempt to uncover something new about Benny, incidentally, wasn't a total loss. At the breakfast table, he announced he was on a health kick and he produced both a bottle of sucaryl and a tin of "non-fattening butter" (some form of margarine, actually) he had brought all the way from California. The products, however, weren't used under the most effective circumstances. The waiter had forgotten to bring milk for the berries, whereupon Benny shrugged, sprinkled the non-fattening sucaryl on the berries, devoured a slice of toast with non-fattening butter, and then with delicious abandon, poured very-fattening cream on the berries.

Cartoon's Cavett

One of the many fun sidelights of watching Warner Bros. cartoons from the ‘30s and ‘40s is to spot gags that are not designed for the theatre audience. They were made by the artists for their own self-amusement. Paul Julian especially seems to have liked scrawling staff members names on backgrounds he painted for Friz Freleng. In other instances, staffers appeared in caricature, such as in Page Miss Glory (1936), where we see part of Tex Avery’s unit as farmers.

These were never meant as actual gags except in one instance that I can recall. In Hollywood Steps Out, the panning camera stops at a table where Henry Binder and Leon Schlesinger are sitting. The Merrie Melodies theme plays in the background. A rough cut was screened for Schlesinger on April 23, 1941, and The Hollywood Reporter of the next day suggested the gag was done solely to surprise and kid their boss.

There’s a really obscure in-joke in Fagin’s Freshmen, a cartoon from the Hardaway-Dalton unit released in November 1939. Observe the name in these backgrounds (artist unknown).



The reference is to Louie Cavett. I don’t know whether he was an assistant animator, an in-betweener or another kind of artist, but I do know one thing about him—the poster reading “Do you need money?” was on the mark.

“He was a loan shark,” the late Martha Sigall recalled. She revealed he would loan money and charge interest. Her comments came on a commentary track over a Schlesinger gag reel which features a voice saying “Do you need money? See Louie Cavett.”

Here’s what little we can tell you about Cavett (accent on the last syllable; it’s not pronounced like Dick Cavett). He was born on April 2, 1914 in Los Angeles. Where he went to art school is yet to be found, but he’s listed on the 1934 city directory as a commercial artist. The 1936 Voters List gives his occupation as “cartoonist.”

He was married in July 1939 and still working at Schlesinger’s. But he didn’t stay much longer after that. He was gone by late January 1940. His 1940 draft card reveals he was employed by Norris Stamping. Cavett was called up in 1943 and died in a military training exercise in North Carolina on January 6, 1944. His death certificate states he died instantly and accidentally of a fractured skull after parachuting.

He never received screen credit; by 1939 the only artists who got their name on a title card were animators and even then it was one and on a rotating basis. But we are happy to point out that Louie did get his name projected in theatres thanks to this cartoon.

Pop Goes the Cat

You’d think the natural reaction would be to run when you get into trouble. But not Tom in High Steaks. Twice he’s just sat there chewing his nails and then lets out a big grin.



Mind you, if Tom ran away, there wouldn’t be much of a conflict in the plot unless something impedes him.

Director Gene Deitch or his animators doted on spikey coloured rings for impact in these Czech-made Tom and Jerrys. The rings litter this cartoon. One example:



Tom’s anger-challenged owner (voiced by the fine Allen Swift) forces cola (aka “kola”) into Tom.



Unmatched shot. These are consecutive frames.



The camera work is really odd here. The camera slowly trucks back, which makes perfect sense. But then the camera suddenly goes back to the position it started and begins to truck back again. The scene is 12 frames before the cut and looks really jerky because of this.

More impact rings. Actually, the second one isn’t. The body merely stretches up (it doesn’t snap) but we get the jagged ring anyway.



To add to the strangeness, the score is full of reverbed jazz that changes time signatures, though parts fit the action nicely (such as the idling car at the end of the cartoon). And fans of the Tod Dockstader “Boinng-nng!” will not be disappointed.

This was the fourth of the 13 Tom and Jerrys produced for MGM by William Snyder. Vaclav Bedrich gets an “animation direction credit.”

I'm Comin'

Petey Parrot’s mother (played by Elvia Allman) runs to the rescue of her son, who is drowning after a storm wafts its way over a lake.

“I’m comin’!” she yells. Suddenly, her run turns into a finger-wagging strut and she starts singing “I’m comin’ ‘cause my head is bendin’ low.” Then she resumes her run, desperately shouting “I’m comin’!” again.



This cartoon was shown over and over when I was a kid and I always liked this gag because I knew the song (“Old Black Joe”) and it somehow seemed right the parrot should turn buoyant and briefly sidetrack into its lyrics.

Tex Avery has another “interrupt” gag in the cartoon when the noisy, talkative parrot stops, pokes his head at the audience and says “Ain’t I the talkin’est little guy?”

I understand Petey is played by child actor Robert Winkler. It would appear (and none of this is confirmed) he was born February 18, 1931 in Los Angeles. It looks like he went to Santa Monica City College and gave up acting in the late ‘40s. If he’s still around and reading this, he’s more than welcome to post a comment.

The Logic of TV's Gracie Allen

George Burns and Gracie Allen took their radio show to television, and made it even better.

It wasn’t just because of Burns’ decision to stand at the front of the stage and set up the situation by talking directly to the audience. I think it’s because Gracie came across as far more human when you actually see her carrying through with her odd ideas.

What was clever about Gracie is somewhere in her thought process, there’s a kernel of logic that prompts her motivation but it detours in some illogical direction.

(As a side note, I also like Harry Von Zell on the TV version. He wasn’t a great actor but he played off George and Gracie very well).

The series was nominated for nine Emmys over eight years and could have carried on longer if Gracie hadn’t retired in 1958. She was taking heart medication at the time, and a heart attack claimed her life in 1964.

The Associated Press published a feature story on the Burns and Allen show on April 24, 1954. Burns wrote a number of books; anyone who has read them will recognise some of the things mentioned in this extended column.

Gracie Not Really Crazy, Just Comic, Says George
By BOB THOMAS
HOLLYWOOD, April 24 (AP)—After 31 years in the business, George Burns and Gracie Allen are drawing their biggest audiences ever—and there it no sign of the show closing.
the husband-wife team comprises one of the most unique acts to the business. George is hailed as the best straight man going. Gracie has become the trade mark of the dumb female. But there is method in her madness.
"Gracie is not really crazy," analyzes George, speaking of his wife's TV character. "If she were, we couldn't get a day's work. "Gracie has a sort of illogical logic. To her, everybody else is a little nuts, and after listening to her, you think maybe she's right For instance, a cop will tell her he's tired because he has been pounding a beat all day. She'll say, 'That serves you right; you should get married and let pour wife do the cooking.'
"She will put the salt in the pepper shaker end vice versa, explaining that if she picks up the wrong one, she'll be right. Or she'll shorten the lamp cords in order to save electricity. That's the way her mind works.
"There must be women like that. She must strike a reminiscent chord with people or the show wouldn't be as popular as it is. As a matter of fact men often write or tell me their wives are just like Gracie. All I can say is that I'm wasting $5,000 a week paying writers to create such a character if those men have the same type of wife at home."
George, on the other hand, is very much like his TV self. He's an easy-talking fellow with a droll sense of humor that makes him a favorite companion of other Hollywood comedians. His best friend, Jack Benny, starts laughing whenever George opens his mouth. He has often called Burns the comedian's comedian.
What's more, George actually likes to sing to real life. "I'm always getting up at parties and singing a few old songs," he says. "I can never understand why everybody leaves the room."

The Burns and Allen show is filmed every Wednesday in an aged studio to the heart of Hollywood.
On the set just before lunch one day, the stars were playing a scene in the familiar Burns living room with Harry Von Zell and Larry Keating. It looked very much like a movie set except there were only two cameras and a smaller crew of workers.
They shot an involved comedy scene in one take and George strolled off to lunch at a small bar on Santa Monica blvd., a block and a half away.
As we walked, George told about their strenuous routine. He works on three shows at once—editing the last one, shooting the current one, and helping to write the next one. Writing is the tough spot, he says. He spends much of the weekend on the script, conferring with Director Frederick DeCordova on Sunday mornings. The show is rehearsed on Tuesday and shot the next day.
"We never shoot the script from beginning to end," he explained. "We have to do it in pieces and then put it all together. It's not too bad that way. We know the continuity because we have rehearsed it the day before."
Gracie's week is not much easier. She has her clothes to plan and a great deal of memorizing to do. "Her lines are hard, because she's often playing straight for herself," George added. "She'll have lines like 'I said this and then he said that,' etc. There's no one to feed her a cue. Also, her lines are so wacky they take a lot of memorizing."
Despite their heavy schedule, George and Gracie find tune to go out a couple of nights a week and entertain often at their Beverly Hills home. And George generally lunches and exchanges jokes at the comedian's round table at Hillcrest Country Club with such gagmen as Harpo and Groucho Marx, Benny, Lou Holtz, Phil Silvers and Danny Thomas. We arrived at the dimly-lit bar and George ordered a Gibson cocktail and a steak—"and bring a sharp knife."
He said they make 40 half-hour films a year, grinding out one each week. I asked him if he found the routine wearing.
"No, I thrive on it," he replied with a smile. "I think it's much easier to do a show every week than every other week or once a month. You get into the swing of things and. maintain a pace."
"Material? Sure, it's hard to get. But you have to keep turning them out. Something amazed me the other day. A comedian with another TV series told me he was laying off for a week because his writers didn't produce a script!
"Can you imagine that? Would you fail to put out a newspaper because the reporters didn't feel like writing?"
He added philosophically: "I say you can handle any job as long as you like your work, and I've always lived show business." His life certainly proves that. Born Nathan Birnbaum in New York 58 years ago, he started singing in saloons with other kids before he was 10. In succeeding years he became a trick roller skater, dancing teacher and vaudeville comedian. While playing in New Jersey he met a San Francisco girl who had flung and danced with her three sisters and in an Irish troupe.
That was Gracie. Since George was losing his partner, he invited Gracie to join his act. She accepted.

"I could see her natural flair for comedy from the start," he remembered. "We began with me as the comedian. But she got all the laughs with her straight lines! So I made myself the straight man and let her carry the comedy."
Three years after they formed the act they were married—Jan. 7, 1926 in Cleveland. They scored in vaudeville and transferred their zany comedy to radio. After a decade of success on the air lanes, their popularity began to slip.
"The radio show wasn't going very well," George says. "We were still doing the man-woman kind of comedy we had done in vaudeville. There was no indication in the act; we were married. Gracie was always making a play for the singer or the orchestra leader, and people began to resent it. They figured she was too old for that.
"So we tried a story line on the basis, that we were married. The entire nature of the act changed. We worked out natural situations that people seemed to like. The show picked up again."
The idea for the TV format came during a lunch with CBS bigwigs, including President William Paley.
"We'd like to have you and Gracie get into television," Paley remarked.
"It sounds fine," Burns replied, "but what kind of a show would we have?"
"Well, I've always read about what a great job you do with monologues at the Friars' Club and other places," said Paley. "I'd like to have the chance to see you do something like that."
So it was decided to have George play a sort of one-man offstage Greek chorus who knows what the TV characters are going to do and tells the audience about it in a wry manner. The device is considered by many professionals to be the best format in TV comedy. And it worked for George and Gracie.
As Burns was finishing up his steak , medium-well, I asked whether he thought the show could wear out its welcome by appearing every week.
"I don't think there's any danger in our case," he replied. "If we were actors appearing in a different role every week—yes. But we play ourselves. People get used to us and seem to like us."

Swinging the Sultan

In the climax battle between good and evil in Insultin' the Sultan, our hero Willie Whopper swings the nasty sultan by the beard. The stretch snaps the beard off (with stars representing pain).



The sultan spins and morphs into a barber pole, losing his clothes along the way before crashing into a pillar in his palace.



The sultan morphs again. Look! He’s one of those favourites of early ‘30s animated cartoons, Mahatma Gandhi.



A mounted goat head on the wall turns and bleats at him. Now that’s comedy!



Bernie Wolf and Grim Natwick are the credited animators. Art Turkisher supplies the score.

A Podcast For Fans of Old Animation

There’s everything right with a podcast that tackles the subjects of
a) The Van Beuren studio that made amateurish, oddly-plotted cartoons.
b) The short-shrifted Art Davis unit at the Warner Bros. studio which made cartoons with their own feel but still came up with top-flight shorts starring Daffy Duck and Porky Pig.

These were the most recent topics at the Cartoon Logic podcast hosted by Thad Komorowski and Bob Jaques. They added Charlie Judkins on the Van Beuren cast to lend his insights about the studio. Listeners got an excellent look at part of the animation situation in New York City in the mid-20s in addition to the (somewhat) rise and fall of Amadee Van Beuren’s cartoon enterprise (he made live-action shorts as well).

The Van Beuren cartoons aren’t funny like a Bugs Bunny cartoon. The best of them trot along and then something strange would come out of nowhere. They also have the benefit (well, until he got fired) of music by bandleader Gene Rodemich. There was no attempt to score to the action on the screen. Rodemich would set a mood with popular tunes of the day, with the action taking a breather for a song. Unfortunately, the cartoons simply didn’t compare well to the ones put out by other studios and an attempt at boosting them under new studio head Burt Gillett turned out to be too little, too late. The studio was shut down by R-K-O.

As for Art Davis, he seems to have been given a ragtag group of artists (including Bill Melendez, who later put the Peanuts specials on TV) and, eventually, a couple of rookie story men then told to come up with Warners cartoons. There’s something quirky about Davis’ output, but they created some very enjoyable shorts. The last, Bye Bye Bluebeard, written by Sid Marcus after the rookies were fired (one being Bill Scott of Bullwinkle fame), had some fine visual touches. But the studio decided it could not afford the expense of four units, so Davis’ was shut down. A shame, in the minds of many Davis fans.

Bob and Thad touch on much more than this, and in a far more intelligent way than I just have. You can catch their Van Beuren podcast at this link, which can also direct you to their Patreon page.

Oh, and for those of you who want to hear one of the songs heard in Van Beuren’s Magic Mummy, here’s a 1932 version by the Dorseys.

Whoopie!

Cycles? We’ve got a bunch of them in I Like Mountain Music, a 1933 Warner Bros. cartoon.

Prohibition hadn’t quite ended in the U.S. when this cartoon was released, but a congressman is celebrating nonetheless. He’s waving his pint of beer and yelling “Whoopie!” in 24 drawings. Other cycles in the same scene are of different length. Sherlock Holmes waves his magnifying glass in 12 drawings, a boxer claps his gloves, a Chinese man thrusts his fists into the air and a showgirl claps her hands in eight frames while George Arliss (left of the congressman) claps in four frames.



Yes, the congressman loses the squares on his vest in one frame.

This is actually a 36-frame cycle. There is a 12-frame hold on the congressman after he finishes raising his beer.

Friz Freleng and Larry Martin are the credited animators.

Though it seems to have been omnipresent in Warners cartoons, the song I Like Mountain Music was heard in only eight of them.