Scrappy is calling everyone, inviting them to his party.
What’s that?
Oh, it’s Joe E. Brown.
Roscoe Ates stutters his affirmation that he’s coming.
You know who they are. In the ‘30s, apparently only men could be in the same bed together.
Even Zeppo’s invited (with Groucho, Chico and Harpo).
Durante and, I guess, Marie Dressler.
She vants to be alone with her deco living room wall.
Haven’t a clue. Well, maybe I do. John D. Rockefeller? He throws coins onto the floor later in the cartoon.
Einstein is a genius. His phone is in his hair.
They loved Ghandi jokes in ‘30s cartoons. He’s on roller skates later in the cartoon.
World leaders. Wait! He’s inviting Mussolini?
Aw. Al Capone can’t make it.
It’s a shame this version of Scrappy's Party (1933) is so digitally fuzzy. There are people you can’t make out, and a nice line of them moving left, facing the camera, coming through Scrappy’s door. We get Will Rogers twirling a rope and Babe Ruth swinging a bat to “Hold That Tiger”.
Sid Marcus and Art Davis are the animators and Dick Huemer gets the story credit, though there really isn’t a story. Learn more about Scrappy at Harry McCracken’s site.
Time to see the drybrush work of the MGM cartoon department in Deputy Droopy, as the bad guys tie up the title character.
The next two frames are consecutive.
The next two frames are consecutive.
Daws Butler and Tex Avery supply the voices. The cartoon was started by Avery in 1953 and then his unit was shut down. Mike Lah took over directing and Walt Clinton joined members of the Hanna-Barbera unit in animating the short from Ed Benedict’s layouts.
Someone who was Batman didn’t want to be, and someone who wasn’t Batman wanted to be.
The huge, sudden fad that exploded in 1966 when Batman became a hit resulted in all kinds of things. First is this wire story from April 3, 1966. It appears (are you ready for this one?) Batman had it with jokers!
Mrs. Batman Lives With Cat in Detroit
By PHIL THOMAS Associated Press Writer
DETROIT (AP) - You won't believe this but Batman is a woman with a Southern accent. And her Robin is a gray cat named Smokey.
"I'm not going to change my name, but I am going to get an unlisted telephone," Ann Batman, 29, said Saturday.
"Ever since that television program started I've been getting about 10 telephone calls a day. But I figure this Batman stuff will die out in a couple of months and then they'll leave me alone."
Mrs. Batman, a divorcee, is the only Batman listed in the Detroit telephone book.
"When these kids first started calling me and asking to talk to Batman I went and looked in the telephone book for other folks named Batman," she said.
"I wanted to see if they were being bothered, too. But I was the only one and I get all the calls." Mrs. Batman, whose Batmobile is a red 1964 sedan, is a restaurant manager. She lives alone in an apartment with her cat.
She said she came to Detroit from Fayetteville, N.C., about eight years ago and that her 9-year-old daughter was staying at Fayetteville with Mrs. Batman's mother, Mrs. Beulah Worrell.
"It's mostly little kids that call and ask for Batman, but I've had a few teen-agers call. I hang up on the older ones because I know they're kidding me.
"The little ones I just tell that Batman isn't in at the moment. I tell them I'll tell Batman they called when he gets in and that seems to make them happy.
"One boy called me and said he had a picture of Batman and could he bring it over and get it autographed. I told him Batman wasn't in and I didn't know when he would be. He never called again."
Mrs. Batman said she takes a lot of kidding about her name.
"Whenever I go somewhere I have to give my name, the people give me that 'are you kidding?' look. It happens at the laundry, at the bank and all over," she said.
Mrs. Batman said her name never had caused any difficulty until the Batman television program went on the air.
"I do not watch Batman," she said firmly. "And I never will. I've been kidded so much because of him that I never want to see his program."
I have not been able to trace Mrs. Batman past this particular story. There’s only one man, Chief O’Hara, who can find her and free her from the notorious vines bearing the evil fruits of crime... sorry, I got into a 1966 flashback there.
Now the story about another woman. This appeared on the wire November 11, 1966. Some you will be disappointed there is no photo accompanying this one as it’s about a topless waitress. I hope she got her acting career together. I wonder if “Ruby Diamond” was a stage name.
N.Y. Batgirl Undraped Crusader
NEW YORK (AP)— A girl who wore a Batman mask and nothing much else above her waist joined two other topless waitresses in an East Side Manhattan supper club Thursday night.
The latest addition to the newly-emerged ranks of topless waitresses here identified herself as Miss Anita Batgirl and said, "I've been in show business for eight years and I want very much to become a dramatic actress."
A capacity-crowd of about 150 persons — mostly middle-aged men — were on hand in the Crystal Room on East 54th Street to be served drinks by the three waitresses who wore only silver-dollar size pasties and some costume jewelry above the waist.
Two of the waitresses Wednesday night showed up in the club in their topless uniforms and quickly were given summonses to appear in court Monday to answer to charges of a city administrative code violation.
They were identified as Ruby Diamond, 27, and Mery Rooney, 24, both blondes.
The subpoena servings only briefly interrupted the girls on their rounds, and they continued working after the incident.
"We started taking reservations for Thursday night an hour and a half ago and we're sold out already, a club spokesman said early Thursday afternoon.
The club is owned by a woman.
Meanwhile, the police declined to say what they were up to.
"We're looking into the situation — from a distance," said Chief Inspector Stanford Garelik.
We can only guess whether the waitresses served while doing the Batusi.
These were mere minor Bat-blips that barely showed up on the radar in 1966. Kids were paying more attention to the show.
Mash together Little Boy Blue, the Big Bad Wolf, Mary and her Little Lamb and a freelance scarecrow and what do you get? An Ub Iwerks ComiColor short. The second-to-last one, in fact.
Little Boy Blue (1936) has almost nothing to do with Little Boy Blue. We get to the plot about half-way through. The wolf kidnaps a sheep of the standard Iwerks design, and a scarecrow tries to rescue it. The scarecrow has its head ripped off in the fight, but a mounted ram head lands onto of him (!) and he butts the wolf out of the cartoon.
In the first half, we get a black sheep dancing because, well, it’s a musical cartoon. Then he decides to scare the other lambs by disguising himself as a wolf. He winks at the camera in case anyone watching isn’t in on the coming gag.
He frightens them all right. But they laugh after he reveals himself. The first time. The second time, they’re still afraid. Why? This cartoon is enough of a mess that it’s best not to think about it. The sheep doesn’t even get a comeuppance. He is scared by the wolf and runs away, never to appear again in the cartoon.
The same haystack you see in the above scene is used earlier in the cartoon. The Boy Blue and Mary designs are re-used from earlier ComiColors. Even the Philadelphia Exhibitor pointed out the sameness of the ending.
I like some of the anonymous background art at Iwerks. This old house is typical for an Iwerks fairy tale but it looks fine, other than this is taken from a beat-red public domain print.
The ComiColor shorts are on Thunderbean’s lengthy list of cartoons it has rights to restore. How long it’ll be until you see Little Boy Blue in real blue could be some time. But if the cartoons look as good as the remainer of Thunderbean’s stock, then the wait will be worth it.
A knock at the door. A wolf’s arms twist around before he decides to see who is there.
Now the running gag. A mama duck pokes the eyes of the wolf as she hunts for her duckling-in-an-egg.
The door slams into the wolf and flattens him. He clatters to the floor.
The scenes are from Frank Tashlin’s Booby Hatched, released by Warners in 1944. Izzy Ellis gets an animation credit, while Warren Foster wrote the story.
Jack Benny had a very good idea of why he was a success. He expounded on it for years in the press. Here’s an example from March 10, 1963. The writer was the TV editor for the San Diego Union, which was evidently hooked up with the Copley News Service.
CALLS THIS BEST SEASON Self-Knowledge Benny Asset
BY DONALD FREEMAN
HOLLYWOOD, Feb. 24 (CNS) — "This is the greatest season I've ever had" said Jack Benny as he relaxed in his studio dressing room. His mood was reflective, light-hearted, even merry.
And why not? After 30-odd years of radio and television, the Benny shows this season have indeed hit a high water mark. As for Benny himself, he is that rare bird among the comedians — he is shrewdly detached, an expert at the difficult art of self-appraisal. He doesn't, moreover, use a superlative lightly. It was significant that he saw fit to repeat this particular one.
"The greatest season yet," Benny went on, nodding agreeably. "Each year our shows have always been a little better but this year we've had more new things, new ideas. Not that I thought in other years we had a bunch of lousy shows—that we've never had!"
By way of emphasis, he stared a characteristic Jack Benny stare. Then resuming:
"I happen to have a theory about this business — you should never press. Never try to top yourself. Once you try to top yourself, you start straining. "MY KIND OF COMEDY lasts because, one, I try not to strain and, two, because my character — the Jack Benny character — includes a composite of all the faults people may have, all the human frailties. He's stingy and vain and insecure — insecurity is based on stinginess which is the fear of the future. Who isn't afraid of the future?
"So — we exaggerate, we make a joke of it and people recognize something of themselves.
"There's a lot of everybody," says Jack Benny, thoughtfully, "in Jack Benny."
Benny has started a run at the Ziegfeld Theater in New York — a venture that delights the vaudevillian in him. Benny played the Roxy, a movie house, in 1947; otherwise this engagement marks his first Broadway appearance since he left Earl Carroll's Vanities 31 years ago to enter radio, being introduced thereon by a smiling journalist-emcee named Ed Sullivan.
"I THOUGHT back then that maybe if things worked out, I'd have a little future in radio," Benny said, with a small shrug. "But if anybody would have said, 'Jack 30 years from now you'll still be going strong,' I'd have said, 'What are you — crazy?' But then, nobody in this business thinks they'll last. We always wonder, where will the material come from?"
" And where," I asked "does it come from?"
Benny shrugged again. "All I know is, you can't plan a character," he said. "You can't say, 'Look, fellas, let's invent this cheap vain character who drives a Maxwell, keeps his money buried in a vault and has a butler named Rochester and wears a toupee' — actually, it would be funnier if I really wore a toupee, which I don't. But all of this adds up to 'Jack Benny.'
"And that kind of a character you can't plan. If it works it works and people begin to accept everything about it — the fat announcer, the silly kid tenor. And after 30 years it all gets a little easier because people know that character so well."
BENNY PAUSED. "People have been laughing at me for 50 years now — 50 years! That's more years than I am! So I can't be too lousy a comedian. But I'm also a better editor of material than people realize. A lot of comics would last longer if they knew themselves as well as I know me."
Our conversation turned to the violin, the instrument that Mr. Benny plays with such — uh, dedication.
"Listen, I practice an hour a day on the violin," Benny said. "If I didn't practice, I'd get even worse. I used to holler at Giselle MacKenzie all the time. I'd say, 'Giselle, you can play the violin so beautifully and you hardly ever play!' It makes me sore when I think of how hard I have to work just to play lousy.
"Most people think I can play better and just play this way for a joke," Benny said, then added, resignedly, "But if I could play better, then it wouldn't be funny."
Political cartoons have existed in newspapers for generations. Animated political cartoons? A little more rare simply because of the expense in making them and the danger of offending someone in a general audience. Walter Lantz’s Confidence (1933) was an unabashed love letter to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal (an animated Roosevelt appears in it).
On the other side of the equation was The Amateur Fire Brigade—A Parable of the New Deal (1935), which ridiculed Roosevelt’s administration and policies. The cartoon was funded by a group called ‘The Sentinels of the Republic’ and the film was shown at rallies and meetings organised by it and its allied right-wing groups.
Looking at my notes, I intended on writing about this a number of years ago but got stymied because I was missing a vital piece of information—who made the cartoon? The 1935 Copyright Catalogue was silent. Fortunately, there are excellent and thorough researchers out there. Jonathan Boschen discovered it had been animated by Ted Eshbaugh’s studio in New York. Then Steve Stanchfield did a whole post on it on the Cartoon Research blog. That left really nothing for me to do. But I still have these notes so I’m not going to allow them to go to waste.
The Sentinels started making the rounds with the film by October 1935, apparently commencing with a “Safeguarding the Constitution” exhibition at the Garrick Theatre Philadelphia, with the intention of bringing it to Broadway in New York and then other cities. The Chicago Tribune claimed more than 30,000 in Philadelphia viewed the cartoon which was, it claimed, “so successful in arousing the public to the fallacies of the New Deal.” The Trib’s description in its February 1, 1936 edition:
“It shows what happens when a fire starts in Uncle Sam’s farmhouse. The New Deal fire company, headed by President Roosevelt and composed of “brain trusters,” answers the alarm. The movie pictures them as doing everything imaginable except putting the fire out.
On their way to the fire they stop for the game of “soaking the rich,” playing poker with public funds, and building a house of alphabetical blocks. Gen. High Johnson stands in front of the “old soldiers’ home” and watches his Blue Eagle fly off to become an emblem on the useless fire engine.
Finally Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes drives up in his horse and buggy and knocks down the alphabetical blocks while the American eagle routs the “blue buzzard.” Meanwhile, Miss Liberty, Uncle Sam’s housekeeper, throws a few pails of “common sense” on the fire and extinguishes it without further ado.”
It should be pointed out that the publisher of the Tribune, Col. R.R. McCormick, was a backer of the Sentinels. His paper echoed the organisation’s claim it was “non-partisan” and “patriotic.”
As you might expect, a hardly non-partisan film like this was going to eventually run into trouble. And it did in Col. McCormick’s town. It had been shown “before 40 leading Chicago business men” but an attempt to show it in public on February 10, 1936 was waylaid by the city’s board of censors, which called it “propaganda against the Roosevelt administration” and disrespectful of the president (McCormick’s paper pointed out the head of the board was a Democrat). The board’s ban lasted 24 hours and the cartoon was shown on schedule.
The door was opened for protest. The next day, the State Division of Film Censorship in Ohio barred the cartoon because it “encourages disrespect for the office of the President” (no mention of Roosevelt personally). Labour groups started lining up against it.
Then the Sentinels ran into big trouble of their own making. In mid-April, the U.S. Senate Lobby Committee received a copy of a memo from the Sentinels’ files written in connection with a campaign to raise between $360,000 and $400,000 to finance the cartoon and the exhibition. Finding the money proved to be difficult, and a New York Times April 18th version of the story stated the film was later toned down (ie. edited) because some Sentinels though the Roosevelt was being caricatured too much.
But that wasn’t the bombshell. The Committee also was given a copy of a letter from Alexander Lincoln, the president of the Sentinels, declaring “the Jewish threat is a real one...and I am doing what I can as an officer of the Sentinels” and warned of a “Jewish brigade Roosevelt took to Washington” and a “fight for Western Christian civilization” against “the enemy is world-wide and that it is Jewish in origin.” For good measure, he used a familiar tactic from the right-of-centre playbook and bashed the media. Lincoln’s correspondent responded “the old-line Americans of $1,200 a year want a Hitler.”
Incredibly, Lincoln’s response to the Committee was, basically, some of my best friends are Jewish and my comments are being misconstrued. As his entire letter was made public, people could easily see the truth.
Big business leaders rushed to jump off the Sentinels’ ship before being tarred as anti-Semitic. Alfred P. Sloan of General Motors promised to stop pumping his money into the group; Sloan’s foundation in the 1940s and ‘50s sponsored pro-business/anti-government interference cartoons made by John Sutherland Productions.
The decline of the group is outside the focus of this blog. However, the Sentinels continued to show the cartoon. The group got an $8,000 sound truck so it could be screened outdoors. A showing in Elmira, New York in May 1936 was in a public park. Brigade appeared in an auditorium the same month in Akron, Ohio. According to the Beacon Journal “The picture is the censored version over which the board of Ohio censors squabbled for weeks early this year. The ‘objectionable parts’ will be displayed as "stills" over which the state censorship laws have no control.” A Republican group in Brooklyn and another in Montclair, New Jersey unspooled the film in October 1936. Attempts to find later showings have borne no fruit.
In a twist of irony, a pro-FDR film later made the rounds called Hell Bent For Election (1944). And some of the people responsible for it ended up before a government Committee, too, which demanded names of Communists. Blacklisting followed.
You can view Amateur Fire Brigade. It evidently is the edited version, courtesy of Steve and the Library of Congress.
You can tell Shamus Culhane’s directing things in Boogie Woogie Man (1943). He’s got characters poking heads and other things toward the camera in sudden movement.
Here are some frames from one scene.
The character designs are all over the place. You have modernistic streamlined ghosts. You have a grandpappy ghost that looks like it’s out of a ‘30s cartoon and then you have huge-lipped Blacks (there’s even a lip joke) that wouldn’t have won any awards from the NAACP. (And this wasn’t the Lantz cartoon it objected to. Dancing stereotypes were apparently okay. Lazy ones like in Scrub Me Mama With a Boogie Beat were not).
La Verne Harding and Les Kline are the credited animators.
“Confidentially, folks,” Daffy Duck says to viewers of Daffy’s Southern Exposure, “I ain’t goin’ south this winter. I’m goin’ to stay around and check up on this winter business.” What he has in mind is checking out the Snow Carnival Snow Queen in the newspaper he’s reading. He shows us the picture.
Suddenly, a flock of ducks slide into the scene, and shout, just like on the radio game show Take It or Leave It “You’ll be sorry!” Then the ducks turn and fly away in perspective.
Norm McCabe is the director, with Don Christensen supplying the story. It’s one of McCabe’s most enjoyable efforts. Daffy constantly chats to the audience, he still woo-hoos and jumps around the scene, he changes emotions out of nowhere, and there are parody lyrics to the song “Latin Quarter.” He’s not an insane duck, he clearly knows what he wants, though he gets dealt a few setbacks.
Vive Risto is one of the animators along with Cal Dalton, John Carey and Izzy Ellis.
