Friz vs Tex: A Study in Taxis

Streamlined Greta Green (1937) and One Cab's Family (1952) aren’t the same cartoon but they share some of the same elements.

The first cartoon was directed by Friz Freleng. After various auto gags, the plot focuses on a little boy car named Junior who wants to be taxi, not a touring car like his dad. He goes to a soda fountain/gas station, drinks some ethel, then decides to race a train and beat it at a railway crossing.

The second cartoon was directed by Tex Avery. After various transposition gags humanising cars (a spark plug is a “first tooth”), the plot focuses on a little boy car named Junior who wants to be a hot rod, not a taxi like his dad. He goes to a gas station, drinks some ethel, then decides to race a train and beat it at a railway crossing.

They both feature a point of view shot of the train going across the crossing. Friz continues to cut to a side-by-side viewpoint after the little car beats the train. Tex just keeps the point of view shot going because his action is much, much faster. Eventually he cuts to an overhead shot.

Here’s Friz. Notice Junior’s eyes are always looking up at the train. I don’t know how his hat stays on with the speed he’s going.



Here’s Tex. Notice Junior’s eyes are always looking up at the train.



The plots get close to the climax. Out of gas. Then Junior gets smashed at the level crossing. Cut to a hospital/garage exterior. First Friz, then Tex.



There’s a large difference in the stories here. In the Freleng cartoon, Junior is joy-riding on his own at gets hit. In the Avery cartoon, Junior’s dad races to protect his son from the train. He runs out of gas on the crossing. Junior goes back to push him off the tracks to safety, and then gets ploughed by the train. A father is completely absent in the Freleng short.

In the end, both Juniors continue to rebel. Friz’s goes racing after the 515 once again and beats it at the crossing. As he gives a “nyah” to the train, a second 515 mows him down. There’s a blackout and we see the dazed car. But Friz surprises us by panning over to the train which is a complete wreck.

Avery’s car simply lifts up its hood to reveal it still has a souped-up hot rod engine. Further racing adventures no doubt await. I like Friz’s ending better.

There is no story credit on Streamlined Greta Green. The first one on a Warners cartoon wouldn’t be until later in the year—and then one of the two animation credits was taken away. This, however, was part of the era when a storyman was picked out of a pool, or maybe pitched a cartoon to a director. Rich Hogan and Roy Williams helped Tex gag One Cab’s Family.

Some footage of the 515 came from Bugs Hardaway’s 1934 cartoon Rhythm in the Bow and would be re-used by Frank Tashlin later in 1937 in Porky’s Railroad.

Avery’s cartoon reuses as a gag he put on the screen in 1938’s A Feud There Was. A chicken and a cow are blown up into the air and turn into ham and eggs (preceded by a plate) when they fall to the ground. In One Cab’s Family, the chicken and cow are run over by the little car.

Friz’s voices are supplied by Berneice Hansell (as Junior), Martha Wentworth and Mel Blanc (two lines), while Tex employs June Foray and Daws Butler (Junior is mute). There’s a neat version of the title song in the Freleng cartoon, but I don’t know who is singing it.

Is one cartoon better than the other? It’s not really fair to ask that. Avery would have made his cartoon differently in 1937, while Freleng would have made his differently in 1952. Both have enjoyable moments. Perhaps at this late date, we should just accept them as they are.

All Fowled Up Background

Dick Thomas paints a rather prosaic farmyard to open All Fowled Up, a 1955 cartoon that was sort of by the Bob McKimson unit.



This cartoon was started in 1955 and used two animators from the Chuck Jones unit, Dick Thompson and Keith Darling, as McKimson’s unit was being laid off for almost a year.

Bottled Stars

The Van Beuren studio loved the idea of a pencil that draws things that become alive so much, they used it twice in 1932. The first cartoon was Magic Art with an anonymous cat and dog, and the second was the Tom and Jerry short Pencil Mania.

The last two minutes of Magic Art have an extended stream-of-conscious gag. The dog draws footprints which go marching off the screen to the right.



Cut to the cat. The footprint approach him, stop, some boots rise of them, and then a bum with a bottle of cheap hooch (possibly the kind Van Beuren animators drink) rises from them.



The bum leaves the bottle, descends back into the boots, which march away. But the cat can’t open the bottle!



Problem solved. The cat draws a pig with a curly tail that can be used as a cork screw. The pig is not happy. It bolts down a road, with the cat holding onto the bottle stuck in the pig’s tail, the dog holding onto the cat.



The pig breaks free. Cut to the cat trying to get something out of the bottle. He gets smoke. The bottle sails into the air and stars come out of it.



The cat and dog are delighted. Then the bottle crashes on the cat’s head, then the dog’s. The two are unconscious are stars swirl around them to end the cartoon.



This is why I like the early Van Beuren cartoons. They’re just so warped. Who would come up with a plot like this? A bum sprouting out a boot and leaving a bottle behind? What would Walt do? Not that!

Much like Tom and Jerry (the human ones), these two characters have no personality. They’re just there to be part of the bizarre proceedings.

John Foster and Harry Bailey get the “by” credit. Gene Rodemich adds another highlight—he has an uncredited girl jazz singer belting out “I Ain’t Got Nobody,” which the Mills Brothers did in a Screen Song the same year at Fleischer’s. Hear a version of it below.

McLean's Failures

After a while, you had to feel sorry for McLean Stevenson.

He left a top-rated show because he wanted to be a star. And viewers quickly rejected his attempts. Three of them. He became the butt of jokes. The jokes became the butt of jokes (on SCTV’s “The William B. Williams Show).

Television is such a crap shoot. Being popular doesn’t mean you’ll have a successful series because so many things are involved, including writing and cast chemistry. A good time slot and promotion from the network help.

Stevenson knew his first show was doomed. Here he is in a wire service story, January 2, 1977.

Will Mac Finally Make It?
By Vernon Scott
HOLLYWOOD (UPI) — McLean Stevenson, who looks and suffers like the guy next door, doesn't work at this illusion. He is, indeed, the prototype of the average schnook.
At least that's how Mac sees himself.
Mac is back with his own half-hour series playing much the same character he did for two years on Doris Day's sitcom and for three years in "M*A*S*H"—the nice guy beset by problems with which he can almost cope.
Stevenson himself regularly faces almost insurmountable confrontations.
JUST getting "The McLean Stevenson Show" on the air was enough to give most actors a terminal case of the bends.
It started with deceptive simplicity. After two years of Doris Day and a like sentence in "M*A*S*H," Mac wearied of ensemble acting in situation comedy.
He was prevailed upon to devote another year to "M*A*S*H" while NBC waited in the wings with a pair of hot producers ready to role [sic] an exciting variety show.
"Before we could get the variety show going, the producers split up and NBC dropped the project," said Mac during a rehearsal break at the network. His basset-like face mirrored a long acquiescence to the fickleness of fortune. "I was left out in the cold.
"But NBC still wanted me. They signed me to a one-year contract. I did a variety special which might have worked into a weekly series. But it didn't pan out."
THE SHOW, in fact, was panned on all sides. Mac unconsciously gave a perfect imitation of a man whose undergarments are too tight.
"So I wound up doing guest shots. I made a nice weekly income on talk programs and game shows. Last spring they brought this situation comedy to me."
What they brought him was almost a mirror. Stevenson could see himself as Mac Ferguson, a midwestern hardware store owner assailed on all sides by vexations large and small.
In his new series Mac is bedeviled by a snide old mother-in-law, a loving wife, an oversexed teen-age son, a divorced daughter and two grandchildren.
"We shot the first seven episodes," he said. "Then NBC changed program executives. The new guys didn't like one of the actors and replaced him with another.
"THEY scrapped the first seven episodes and started from scratch. Do you know what that does to a cast!
"Still, we weren't too upset. We thought we had plenty of time because we were going on the air in January. Suddenly they told us we had go on Dec. 1.
"We've been working morning, noon and night ever since. The minute we finish a show it's on the air. We're running as fast as we can. Nobody knows when or if we'll ever catch up."
Happily, Stevenson is accustomed to adversity. He invaded the nightclub field last year as the opening act for Glen Campbell at the Las Vegas Hilton.
He was as successful on stage as he had been in his variety special. Mac's not a stand-up comic. He doesn't sing, dance or do card tricks. After a few performances things went so badly he informed the hotel he was quitting.
"BACKSTAGE I said I was packing and leaving immediately," Stevenson recalled. "Then Baron Hilton, president of the Hilton chain, came to my dressing room to ask why I was leaving.
"I spent an hour raving about how I didn't like what I was doing, my act was terrible and that I was quitting. Mr. Hilton asked me one favor to go on stage the next show and repeat exactly what I told him.
"That's what I did. I got laughs you wouldn't believe. I was on for almost an hour. Fortunately, Mr. Hilton taped the performance. I ran it back, patched it up and it became a hit opening act. I quit for different reasons on stage every night. The audience loved it."
Stevenson and Campbell, moreover, drew record breaking crowds.
Mac sees himself as the classic man caught in the middle, a chronic victim of circumstances.
As Lt. Col. Henry Blake in "M*A*S*H," Mac was confounded by the troops. Now as Mac Ferguson, he is at the mercy of a feckless family.
"I chose to play Colonel Blake as Everyman instead of making him a buffoon," Stevenson said. "I'm doing the same thing with Ferguson. He tries to cope.
"The truth is, it doesn't take, much acting on my part. Both Blake and Ferguson are really me."

The show lasted three months. He tried again 1½ TV seasons later in a patented Norman Lear right vs left plot. This wire service story is from September 20, 1978.

Stevenson ready to bounce back
By JERRY BUCK
AP Television Writer
HOLLYWOOD (AP) — Three years after he left "M-A-S-H," it looks as though McLean Stevenson has finally gotten the break he's been looking for.
He stars in the new CBS comedy "In the Beginning," which premieres tonight at 8:30, playing a conservative Catholic priest who finds himself in confrontation with a liberal and liberated nun played by Priscilla Lopez. They're thrown together to run a storefront mission in the inner city.
The series, from Norman Lear's T.A.T. Communications Co., looks good, with the skillful blend of comedy and relevant issues that has been Lear's trademark. It also looks good for Stevenson, a long, lean actor with a facial expression somewhere between inquisitive and puzzled.
After "M-A-S-H," he suffered one disappointment after another. On "M-A-S-H" he was Lt. Col. Henry Blake, the commanding officer of a frontline hospital of medical misfits. He left after the third season, but says he does not regret the decision.
"A long time ago I gave up thoughts of security," he said. "I once worked for an insurance company. They didn't pay you much money but you knew where you'd be at 65.
"In 1961 when I got into show business, I gave up any idea of security and thought of opportunity. I haven't had a year yet when I haven't made more money than the year before. If I'd stayed with 'M-A-S-H,' I wouldn't be making a third of what I'm making here."
He said he enjoyed his creative relationships with the people of "M-A-S-H" and said his complaint was with the studio management then running 20th Century-Fox. "The year we started ‘M-A-S-H’ the sum total of all our salaries was less than what they paid Yul Brynner for 'The King and I,'" he said. "It folded quickly, but 'M-A-S-H' is still running strong."
He signed a contract with NBC for a variety show, but other than a special, nothing came of it. He was left with little to do except appear on the "Tonight" show.
Then NBC excavated an unsuccessful pilot called "The Prime of Life." It was retitled "The McLean Stevenson Show" and it gave new meaning to the word dismal.
"It was 1952 television," he said. "It was 'Ding dong, honey, I'm home.' It was a dated show. It was intended to be a contemporary show dealing with the problems married people in their 40s face. But, hell, the problems of today are the same as the 1940s. It was 'Ozzie and Harriet' again."
When his contract at NBC expired, he took time off to think. He said, "I went to the top of the mountain to re-evaluate what I wanted and what it was all about.
"I had begun to become a personality rather than an actor. I didn't want to do any more junk or things I didn't believe in. I told my agent I just wanted to be an actor. No more package deals. Just a good series. And, I wanted to deal with people with established records who knew instinctively what was best for me." Three days later, Lear asked Stevenson to come in for a talk.
"We talked for 15 minutes. He said he'd just gotten this script and had read the first scene and decided I should play the priest," Stevenson recalled.
CBS bought the series on the basis of a pilot, but a large portion of that was later changed.
"Now you know immediately who we are," Stevenson said. "It was belabored in the pilot. A lot of the religious jokes are gone. Now, instead of jokes about religion we have jokes about the actions of religious people."
"It's a perfect character for me," he added. "I can become him. It doesn't become an acting problem for me."

The show was even more of a failure than the first one. It was cancelled after about a month.

Remember how Bullwinkle J. Moose tried to pull a rabbit out of a hat? “This time for sure!” he’d exclaim. And it didn’t work. Stevenson likely felt that way about series number three. This is from the Los Angeles Times news service, January 25, 1979.

Stevenson's glad about turning in his collar
By HOWARD ROSENBERG
HOLLYWOOD — "I'm glad I'm not playing it any more," said McLean Stevenson about his role as a priest on the defunct CBS series, "in the Beginning."
"That damned collar was killing me."
A comedy about a priest and a nun who run a ghetto street mission, "In the Beginning" was canceled this season after only six episodes, becoming the second Stevenson -starred series to get early defrocking. The first was 1976-77's "The McLean Stevenson Show" on NBC, now only a fitful memory to its star, who insists that two successive cancellations are not a personal rejection by the public or even a mortal blow to his psyche. "Having been a hospital supply salesman and having sold insurance, I was used to that."
Undaunted, Stevenson is now plunging forward with his second series and T.A.T. production of the season, NBC's "Hello, Larry," premierlng Friday.
It's a comedy about a radio talk show host, a single parent rearing two adolescent daughters, a not unfamiliar TV refrain. "It's just a complete flip flop of 'One Day at a Time' (with the same executive producers, Perry Grant and Dick Bensfield)," said Stevenson, "and I am now the Bonnie Franklin of the men's world."
Actors are known for gushing about their projects of the moment, even obvious duds, and Stevenson now admits he "was lying" when he once spoke glowingly of "The McLean Stevenson Show." But he says his stated affection for "Hello, Larry" is genuine, and he does seem to fit comfortably into its premise.
Stevenson himself is a divorced father of a son, 21, and daughter, 8, and radio, after all, is sort of show biz. "This is closer to what I really know about than anything I've ever done," he said.
After the cancellation of "In the Beginning," Stevenson was planning an extended vacation, he said, only to be coaxed into making "Hello, Larry" by T.A.T. president Norman Lear. Insisting money was not his motivation, Stevenson maintains, however, he's being paid the third highest T.A.T. salary ever, behind only Carroll O'Connor and Jean Stapleton, and that his contract guarantees him one director for the entire run of the series, regular hours and no stage mothers on the set. Moreover, he said NBC has promised "Hello, Larry" eight exposures before being pre-empted.
NBC president Fred Silverman "won't pull the chain fast," Stevenson says, emphatically. "If your show has any kind of hope, he'd move you to a new night," But wasn't it Silverman who recently "pulled the chain" on the entire slate of first-season NBC series? Stevenson quickly recovered. "But there weren't any good ones," he added.
It was Silverman, then the CBS programming chief, whose refusal to give up on "MASH" extended the life of a superb series and kept Stevenson employed as Col. Henry Blake, a role he played three seasons before moving on to what he believed would be greener pastures. "I'd been in the business for 14 years and paid my dues."
Stevenson signed a development deal with NBC, where plans for a variety series fell through, but then along came "The McLean Stevenson Show," which he himself ridicules, calling it a cut above "My Three Sons."
On the other hand, "In the Beginning" was simply a well-intentioned series gone awry, Stevenson said. "First of all, it was intended to be a 9:30 show with total emphasis on a street nun and a conservative priest. They (T.A.T.) felt, and I agreed, a nun and priest could get info some of the kind of problems as a Starsky and a Hutch, inside people's heads, where there are problems."
Instead, the series was slotted at family-oriented 8:30 p.m. "and so we had to get a bunch of goony kids in there doing all this stuff and I got to do pratfalls," said Stevenson. "It got very watered down, very sitcomy, and I ended up doing church jokes, because that's all we had left."
Even without a series, Stevenson says he could live comfortably on writing comedy, performing on talk shows and in clubs and collecting residual checks. So no sweat if Silverman does pull the chain on Larry and his daughters.
"Fifteen years from now," he said, "who's gonna care?"

And as Stevenson kept being cancelled, M*A*S*H carried on. He got one more shot at stardom in 1983 with Condo. That’s right. Gone after 13 weeks.

Stevenson died in 1996. At least he could say one thing. He never did After M*A*S*H.

Small Screen Same as Big Screen

Tex Avery’s T.V. of Tomorrow may have been onto something. There’s a gag about the ubiquitousness of Westerns on the tube. At the time the cartoon was released in 1953, there was only one Western in prime time, The Lone Ranger on ABC. In the 1958-59 season, ABC had three of them on Sunday night alone. There were at least two Westerns on the prime time schedule every evening.

So perhaps T.V. of Tomorrow is predicting the 1958 season. A viewer gets angrier and angrier as he turns the channel and each station is running a Western. He punches a hole in his picture tube and heads to the Rialto movie theatre to get away from Westerns.

He sits down. A romantic title appears on the big screen. Suddenly he turns all coy, with a batting of eyelashes that Chuck Jones would love.



Suddenly, the music changes. It’s the William Tell Overture, punctuated with gunshots. Here’s the man’s reaction. Avery’s given up on the huge eye takes from the 1940s (at least for this cartoon).



Cut to the screen. It’s the same Western that was on all the TV channels.



Tex and storyman Heck Allen bring back the Western as their closing gag.

Ray Patterson, Bob Bentley, Grant Simmons, Mike Lah and Walt Clinton are the animators with the uncredited Ed Benedict handling designs. Your narrator in this short is Paul Frees.

Wrap the Girl

A sign for Reynolds Wrap morphs into a little girl designed by Gene Hazelton at the start of his minute-long, 1950s TV spot. Here are the drawings; most are on twos.



Grant Simmons is the animator for the Grantray-Lawrence studio. My thanks to Mike Kazaleh for the film and the ID.

Benny to the Rescue

The star of a prime-time TV show didn’t know he was on the air. That’s because he was dead.

In August 1977, CBS decided to haul out and run old black-and-white episodes of The Jack Benny Show. The show left the network in 1964 and Benny had died in 1974.

For the record, the episodes involved Jack’s Maxwell going missing, the night he refereed a wrestling match, a visit to his vault with Treasury agents and the last show to feature his violin teacher, Prof. LeBlanc.

Why did CBS try such an unusual programming move? A syndication service decided to find out. This story appeared in papers starting August 30, 1977.

Jack’s old TV show continues to pop up, making the rounds of nostalgia cable channels whenever a new one is invented where he can fit their programming.

Pulled up CBS Ratings
Jack Benny Show' scores
By BRUCE BLACK
Gannett News Service
CBS' recent four-part retrospective of "The Jack Benny Show," which the network aired Tuesday nights this summer, was a real treat for TV viewers.
For old Jack Benny fans, it was a chance to once more watch the comedian go through some of his most memorable routines. For younger viewers, it was perhaps their first and only opportunity to see for themselves why Benny had become a legend in his own time.
We were grateful for the chance to again see some of his wonderful old shows, but we were more then a bit curious about what prompted CBS to put him back on the air.
For an answer, we sought out CBS programming vice president Harvey Shephard.
He explained that the 8 to 9 p.m. Tuesday slot had been a problem for CBS all season, with "Tony Orlando" and "Who's Who" failing to draw an audience. "They were against the strongest combination in television: ABC's 'Happy Days" and 'Laverne and Shirley,' " he said.

When "Who's Who" went down the drain in May, CBS revived the old "Family Holvak" series, which had bombed when it first appeared a couple of seasons back.
Shephard defended this selection. "When 'Holvak' originally aired, it had a mid-20s share (usually a show needs a 30 share to survive), but it was against formidable competition and had nice press notices," he said. "Also, there seemed to be a change in public tastes—family shows like 'Eight is Enough' and 'The Waltons' have been doing very well, so we thought there might be a market now for 'Holvak.' "
"Holvak," which debuted May 31, disappeared at the end of July, leaving CBS programmers wondering what to put on for the next several weeks.
Since retrospectives like NBC's 50th anniversary show and CBS' "When TV was Young" special had received high ratings, Shephard said: "We concluded there seemed to be some sort of desire, maybe nostalgia, for TV shows from the '50s and '60s."
CBS thus decided to bring back an old show, "a classic," to run during August. "We did not want to go with a youth-oriented show," he said, "We wanted something to appeal to adults. So we started exploring ideas about what we could schedule."
"You mean you were all sitting around a conference room and somebody said, 'Hey. How about Jack Benny?' " we asked.
"That's about right," Shephard replied.
In its first week on the air in August, "The Jack Benny Show" drew a 26 share. That's not great, but it was one of the best performances of anything CBS had had on in that time period. In subsequent weeks, though, the show slipped to a 20 share, which was the same as the network had been doing with 'Who's Who,' 'Holvak,' and 'Orlando.'
We asked if the success of the first Benny re-airing meant CBS might revive other old series for one-night shots.
"Perhaps we'll do it again," he said. "We're looking into it. We might run an episode of a series as a special broadcast." We hope that CBS does battle to bring back some of the best shows from days gone by.
There are a number of truly fine comedies and dramas lying in storage vaults that could, if dusted off, provide contemporary viewers with 30 or 60 minutes of excellent entertainment. CBS has recognized this. Perhaps the other networks will, too.