סנדלרים

Jewish stereotypes from New York’s garment district appear in a familiar ethnic gag in Jolly Little Elves, a 1934 Walter Lantz cartoon based on the Shoemaker and the Elves story.

Mr. Kitzel hasn’t been invented on radio yet, so we don’t get a Yiddish-sounding “Hmmm...could be!” like in cartoons a few years later. But we get a shrug and one elf marks the shoe as kosher.



The Lantz-o-pedia on-line gives the following credits that are not on the cartoon: Story and Lyrics, Walter Lantz and Victor McLeod; Artists: Manuel Moreno, Lester Kline, Fred Kopietz, Bill Mason, and La Verne Harding; Musical Score: James Dietrich. Berneice Hansell sings the doughnut song.

The cartoon was Lantz’s first in colour (not counting The King of Jazz inserts) and was nominated for an Oscar.

What’s New is Old Again

It’s simple marketing. If people want chocolate ice cream, then companies will make chocolate ice-cream.

Radio’s a consumer product, too, so if people want game shows, then companies will make game shows.

That basic fact eluded noted radio critic John Crosby, who complained about new shows debuting in the fall sounding like shows that were already on the air.

But in his column of August 12, 1946, he rightly takes the networks to task for their spin, as they claimed entertainment shows are really public service broadcasts. Just because Superman “teaches” kids right from wrong doesn’t make it an educational show.

“Shows of Tomorrow”
Every year “Radio Daily,” a trade publication, issues a “Shows of Tomorrow” edition, a hopeful title though it rarely ever lives up to its name. This year is no exception. Some 700 radio programs are listed in the current edition and, after running through as many as possible, I am able to report that radio tomorrow is going to be pretty much like radio yesterday or, for that matter, radio ten years ago.
Most of next year’s entries are just old shows with new names. Sometimes even the names are reminiscent. Musical programs head the list with 120 entries. Next come dramatic shows with murder and family stuff dividing fairly evenly. Also listed are forty—count them—forty quiz shows and countless other give-away programs which will next year present housewives from Weehawken, Missoula and Buffalo with an impressive array of iceboxes, nylon umbrellas, and form-fitting girdles.
* * *
“Radio Daily” has also assembled statements from representatives of all four major networks to defend the depressing array. I found myself in disagreement with all but the spokesman for the Columbia Broadcasting System. Let’s take him first.
C.B.S. news coverage has long been the most complete and most imaginative on the air. Yet it’s heartening to note that Lyman Bryson, counselor on public affairs at that network, views the C.B.S. performance with a distinct lack of complacence.
“All too often,” says Mr. Bryson, “radio offers clouded, incomplete or distorted reflections of the domestic scene . . . The superficiality of our informational public service is at times astonishing . . . News reporting through the media of radio should go far beyond the news itself . . .”
This is certainly sound doctrine, but beyond that, it reveals a welcome state of mind. The C.B.S. news bureau has won so many accolades it could very well rest on its oars. Still it is dissatisfied with its own performance and will try to do better.
* * *
I should like to contrast the spirit of that statement with that of C.L. Menser, vice-president in charge of programs at the National Broadcasting Company. Among other things, Mr. Menser said that give-away shows “meet the public interest”—a nice phrase—because there is a Cinderella aspect to them which appeals to listener and participant alike.
Broadcasters, I find, are extraordinarily ingenious at explaining the success of a program after it succeeds, but not nearly so ingenious at trying out new, and possibly equally successful formulas. I have grave doubts about Mr. Menser’s statements on give-away programs. Radio, it seems to me, is just going through a phase that newspapers got out of their systems twenty years ago. Most of us remember when newspapers gave away encylopedias and Frigidaires to gain circulation. Publishers started shying away from this sort of come-on when they found out the circulation lasted only as long as the gifts. The best way to build circulation in a newspaper is to build a good newspaper. The broadcasters will discover the same thing. But not next year.
* * *
Phillips Carlin, vice-president in charge of programs at the Mutual Broadcasting System, holds a theory on public service programs almost as illuminating as Mr. Menser’s theory on give-away shows. Mr. Carlin implies, without actually saying, that a public service program is any program which interest, diverts, or enlightens the listener. In that category, he places “Superman,” “Leave It To The Girls,” “Juvenile Jury” and, of all people, Gabriel Heatter [photo, left] “who kept millions of war wives and mothers in hope—which he sold tubes and bottles.”
I agree with Mr. Carlin that “Juvenile Jury” and “Leave It To The Girls” are original and entertaining programs, but I disagree that they’re public service programs or anything near it.
I you’re still seeking a definition for public service, Mr. Carlin, you might ponder my own. A public service program is one that elevates the public taste, informs the public mind, or stirs human emotions on some issue worth being stirred about. A program that merely diverts is not in that category no matter how worthwhile as entertainment.
“Is it public service,” asks Mr. Carlin, “to cheer up old men and widows with comedy or must we ask them to keep tuned while we dramatize the life of an ant eater?”
You don’t have to dramatize the life of an ant eater, Mr. Carlin. But how about restoring the “Newsweek” program which dramatized little-known news stories? It was both instructive and entertaining, despite which it was bounced off your network several months ago.

As promised, below you can read Crosby’s remaining four columns of the week. They are about shows lost to time. On August 13th, he griped about an American programme and one brimming with flag-waving. He looked at programs aimed at helping WW2 veterans on August 14th. He wondered on August 15th about whether radio was just noise, and on August 16th he looked at continuing drama series based on real events. Click on them to make them larger.

Smoke Tricks

Porky Pig meets a tough kid smoking a cigar in Wholly Smoke, a 1938 cartoon from the Frank Tashlin unit.

The tough kid pulls off some smoke tricks, creating a target and landing a bull’s-eye; pulling a rabbit out of his hat, and fashioning a duck that flies away.



It’s Porky’s turn. The arrow spears him in the butt and the duck lays an egg on him (writer George Manuell skipped a rabbit joke). Carl Stalling plays “The Merry-Go-Round Went Down” through all this.



Bob Bentley is the credited animator.

The Rubber Hose March

It’s Rubber Hose Time at Disney, something the studio got away from because it wanted its cartoons to look “real.”

In The Barnyard Battle (1929), there’s a 24-frame cycle of a long-legged soldier marching in place while mice stream into a tent behind him.



The only name in the credits is “drawn by Ub Iwerks.”

Fred Allen With Guests Jack Benny and Mary Livingstone

Fred Allen’s guests on Town Hall Tonight on February 26, 1936 were Jack Benny and Mary Livingstone, a number of months before the accidental start of the Allen-Benny feud (at 2 p.m., the billing changes to the Benny-Allen feud).

I considered transcribing the script but thought “28 pages? Are you nuts?”

As I am not nuts, or at least have not been clinically diagnosed as such, I have uploaded a copy of the script for you to read. This is courtesy of Kathy Fuller-Seeley, the Benny chronicler who visited the Boston Public Library years ago and snapped pictures of the pages that were pasted in a scrapbook.

You will see that dialogue has been eliminated. My guess is it was for time, not due to network or sponsor censorship.

In case you’re not familiar with the cast listed marginally in the script, here you go:

HARRY is Harry Von Zell, the jovial announcer whom Allen turned into a comic actor.
JOHN is John Brown, one of too many actors caught in the blacklist in the 1950s. His most popular role was likely Digger O’Dell on The Life of Riley.
JACK until page 13 is Jack Smart, later J. Scott Smart, radio’s The Fat Man. He was typecast.
SMART starts on page 15. See above.
MIN is Minerva Pious, who was Mrs. Nussbaum in the Allen’s Alley segment, which wasn’t invented until 1942.
DOUG is Eileen Douglas, who died in 1938. She doesn’t do very much in this show and disappears after page two.

Charlie Cantor doesn’t appear at all in this week’s show.

Mary shows up on page 12 and Jack on the following page. They take up almost all of what would normally be Portland Hoffa’s spot on the show. They also appear in the sketch later in the broadcast.

The half-hour station break with the NBC chimes is on page 27. As there are only 28 pages, it means Allen pretty much ad-libbed the second half of the programme, which was taken up mainly by his weekly amateur show.

You can click on any of the pages to make them larger.

Joe D'Igalo

You’d like to think people who worked hard through the tedium of animation in the age of theatrical shorts lived to be a ripe old age and in good health.

Some did. Others, not so much. Their minds were intact but their bodies gave out.

That was the case of journeyman Joe D’Igalo, formerly of Disney, Warners, Fleischer and one of the big industrial studios in the Midwest. Boxoffice magazine of January 20, 1969 put out a brief story on his retirement to Carlsbad. He moved to Texas in October.

Joseph Marbelle Igalo (the "D'" was added later) was born in Santa Fe, New Mexico on October 25, 1898. He served in the U.S. Army in World War One. In 1930, he was employed in Chicago as an artist for the Atlas Educational Film Company (he was married in Chicago in 1928). But he decided to try his hand at theatrical work and was hired by Walt Disney. He moved to the Walter Lantz studio and was evidently loyal to Tex Avery. When Tex was hired as a director by Leon Schlesinger, D’Igalo, Virgil Ross, Sid Sutherland and Cecil Surry all left Lantz to work with him at Warners. Surry left for MGM while D'Igalo moved into the Frank Tashlin unit before quitting to work for the Fleischers. He was back in Los Angeles in 1944; the Voters List simply reads “artist.” Within five years, he was back in Chicago.

Ten years ago, I posted D’Igalo’s obit on the Golden Age Cartoon forum. It’s by Judy Gotterer of the Santa Fe Reporter, Aug. 19, 1987. D'Igalo died July 29th. You will see why Disney hired him.

Early last May, Joe D'Igalo touched his paintbrush to paper and stroked in the tiny facial creases in the portrait of a young Indian woman; he dipped his brush again, and the watercolors glided across the sheet in shades of the pale nuanced skies sometimes seen in New Mexico.
Even at the age of 88, D'Igalo was still painting with energy and control, as he had thoughout a long career as an artist and illustrator, a career that included several years as an animator for a friend named Walt Disney. But on May 12, he collapsed in a fall at his home. Though he was not injured in the fall, he never seemed to recover. He was placed in a local nursing home, and there, on July 29, he died of what was termed "natural causes."
Blanche D'Igalo, his wife for the last 10 years of his life, remembers her husband as a man who was "always kind and soft-spoken." She speaks of a near-idyllic marriage, the second for both. Because both were childless, they were able to focus their attention on each other and their hobbies, without the distractions of grown children. And because D'Igalo was retired when they married, the couple enjoyed an easy life together, traveling, gardening and taking care of their home. But before that final tranquil decade, his wife notes proudly, D'Igalo had a full and exciting career.
A native Santa Fean, D'Igalo discovered his artistic talent early, and did some illustrations for The New Mexican, Santa Fe's daily newspaper, as a very young man. He served in the U.S. armed forces during World War I, and when it was over, and he was in his 20s, he left Santa Fe to seek wider opportunities.
He enrolled in the Art Institute in Kansas City, Mo., and while studying there he took a job with the Kansas City Film Advertising Co. A fellow worker was a young man named Walt Disney, and the two struck up a friendship, based largely on their mutual interest in the animation of characters on film.
When D'Igalo graduated from the Institute, he took a job making educational films in Illinois, and in 1928 he married his first wife, Ann Boyd. Then in 1930 Disney offered him a job in Hollywood, and D'Igalo took it. He worked for Disney as an animator, and stayed on for several years, through the production of the historic "Snow White," the first full-length animated cartoon, which was released in 1938.
And of course, reports his widow, "he worked on Mickey Mouse and Minnie Mouse through the years." In fact, at D'Igalo's 88th birthday party last November, a small family gathering with his brother and sister and their spouses, Mickey and Minnie adorned the birthday cake.
After leaving Disney in the late 1930s, D'Igalo went with Fleischer Studios, then in Miami. He worked there on two other full-length animated films, "Gulliver's Travels" and "Mr. Bugs Goes to Town."
He spent the last 20 years of his professional life, 1949 to 1969, with Wilding Studios in Chicago, making educational films and films used in training by the military services. After his retirement he moved to Abilene, Texas; and in 1976 his first wife died.
In 1977 D'Igalo remarried. For the next several years he and his wife moved from place to place, making homes in Texas, Nevada, New Mexico and Arkansas. Then in 1985 they moved permanently to Santa Fe, because they liked the climate here and enjoyed being close to other family members who lived in the city.
D'Igalo’s life, and that of his wife, during their 10-year marriage, was filled with hobbies: painting, photography, gardening, and astronomy. He loved having a beautiful lawn and flowers, says Mrs. D'Igalo; and only a couple of weeks before the onset of his final illness, the two of them were working in the garden together. And until his final two-month illness, he continued to take photographs of landscapes and of wildlife, and then made paintings from them, often adding images from his mind's eye—a clapboard house, a red barn, a cluster of animals, geese in flight. He also encouraged his wife to begin painting, and served as her instructor—even after his last illness caused him to move to Casa Real nursing home.
D'Igalo's final illness began on May 12, with a fall that occurred just as he was about to begin work on a painting. "He had fallen many times before," his wife recalls, "and had never broken any bones, and he didn't break any bones this time, either. It was as if he had run out of energy."
In addition to his wife, D'Igalo is survived by his sister Stella Schwanke and her husband, Jack, of Santa Fe; his brother Lorenzo Silva and his wife, Julia, also of Santa Fe; and by many nephews and nieces, nearly all in the Santa Fe area.

I’ll spare you a list of D’Igalo’s cartoons; you’ll have to take your chances with the fan-puts-up-data websites. Suffice it to say he’s one of almost countless old-time animators who deserves a little bit of the spotlight.