Television's Successes

What makes a TV show a success?

There’s no one, specific answer.

In 1963, one columnist looked at three shows that had been on the air for quite some time—two Goodson-Todman game shows, and Jack Benny’s weekly prime time sometime-variety show—and did brief examinations of each. To sum up, all three shows had things going on that kept the viewer interested.

The situation didn’t stay the same. Garry Moore quit I’ve Got a Secret, Benny’s show was cancelled in 1965 and What’s My Line suffered the same fate a few years later.

Perhaps it’s no coincidence, but I’ve heard from quite a number of Benny fans who enjoy the original What’s My Line. Benny appeared on the show as a mystery guest, as did Dennis Day (and, of course, Fred Allen became a panellist until his death in 1956).

Two Guessing Games, Benny, “Indestructable”
By ERSKINE JOHNSON
Hollywood Correspondent
Newspaper Enterprise Assn.
HOLLYWOOD (NEA) — “The Indestructibles” of television—the 10 longest-running, regularly scheduled television programs—include two guessing game shows: “What’s My Line?” and “I’ve Got a Secret.”
Their long-running success is a combination of deeply planted roots dating back 13 years for “Line” and 11 for “Secret” and, above all, ordinary people. It is the constant parade of people—people with offbeat occupations and in offbeat situations—which has given both shows their great success.
Television fans say so, and so do Mark Goodson and Bill Todman, the creators of both shows.
Says Goodson:
“The real entertainment comes from watching people as themselves, placed in a format which creates a tension. It is the competition that exists between panel and the opponent. In turn, the viewers at home identify themselves with panelist and opponent in some fashion.”
Added fillip for “What’s My Line?” includes the weekly mystery celebrity, the good-natured John Daly, the sharpness of its veteran panelists in playing the guessing game.
These draw the publicity. But it is the show’s guests, ranging from lady plumbers and girdle manufacturers to a cow manicurist, a man who blows himself up with dynamite at county fairs, a girl who sells life insurance for chickens, an 11-year-old boy who writes a column of advice to parents—these are the people who intrigue outdoors and in the home, a its weekly loyal audience.
Incredible Confessions
Ask Chester Feldman, producer of "I've Got a Secret," the reason for the success of his show, and he says:
"I can tell you in two words—Garry Moore."
On that I'm sure the fans of Garry will partially agree. But again, it is people and their competition with panelists. The people who guest on the show make confessions as incredible as the occupations turned up on “What's My Line?”
They have included the 100-year-old man on his honeymoon . . . a Holstein cow that had quints . . . the girl who announced she was becoming Mrs. Tommy Manville (he reneged and she sued) . . . the man who squeezed a hard-boiled egg into a milk bottle by building a fire inside . . . Merle Oberon dressed like a fashion model in a $9.95 outfit.
Such are the stars of “I’ve Got a Secret” who guarantee the show an always-curious audience.
Tied with “Line” at 13 years of regular television exposure is Jack Benny. He wears as well on home screens as he did on radio for 18 years before the coming of test patterns. Many other radio personalities failed in the visual switch, but Benny walked into the electronic picture zone without altering either himself or his show.
As he says, “I had no show to alter. We’ve always been different every week.”
His long-established character of the fellow who hates to part with a dime, who won’t admit his right age, and who vocally delights in the blueness of his eyes was as tailor-made for television as radio.
“It is the character,” Benny says about his success. “Everyone knows someone like the fellow I play. The jokes aren’t that important, and we try to do everything in good taste.”
There are other keys to Benny’s success—letting others get laughs while he deadpans—others such as announcer Don Wilson, who has been with him for 29 years; Rochester, for 26 years, and Dennis Day, for 24 years. They know the Benny character as well as two of the show’s writers, Sam Perrin and George Balzer.

Running Butch

In Chips Off the Old Block (1942), Butch the cat gathers orphan kittens in a vase and runs away with it, trying to hide them from the mistress of the house. As dramatically loud music by Scott Bradley saws away, the cat doesn’t run in a straight line. That’d be kind of boring, right? So he runs toward and away from the camera in perspective.



The woman is rotoscoped in scenes where she’s reading, but there are other places in the cartoon where parts of her body are made up of nothing but outlines and dry brush to make her movements look faster.



The cartoon does raise questions like: why do the kittens look like Butch? Is he the daddy? Is that why they were left in a basket on the doorstep? Why aren’t kittens with their mommy cat?

Yes, it’s pointless to try to make sense of a cartoon designed to be seen maybe once by someone in a theatre as they’re being urged to buy War Bonds.

The director of the cartoon was Bob Allen, with animation credits to Al Grandmain and Carl Urbano. I will bet you the final scene is animated by Pete Burness. He has the same “beard” that, as Mark Kausler points out, Burness gave to Tom in Puss Gets the Boot (1940)



It would appear, by my reading of the timeline, that this cartoon was made after Hugh Harman left the studio. There are no credits on MGM cartoons until this one. Jerry Brewer and Allen both directed at least two cartoons, then it seems producer Fred Quimby bypassed them and went outside to hire Tex Avery to direct in September 1941. MGM’s studio was rife with politics from the beginning. Bringing in someone from outside, even someone as brilliant as the Oscar-nominated Avery, couldn’t have soothed anyone’s ambitions. Allen, a fine designer, left in October 1942 to work for Harman (though in Mike Barrier’s Hollywood Cartoons, he says the two were not on speaking terms in 1938). Brewer decided to use his middle name and wrote for radio, television and films—including The Incredible Mr. Limpet—as Jameson Brewer. He died in 2003.

MGM loved putting Donald Duck’s voice in cats. The original Tom in The Alley Cat (1941) had one and the same actor voiced Butch in this short (no, it is not Clarence Nash). I’d have to listen closer but my wild guess is Martha Wentworth is the housewife.

That's Not a Dog

Babbitt hypnotises the Costello mouse into thinking he’s a dog in The Mouse-Merized Cat, then sics him on the housecat keeping watch over the kitchen.

The cat is petrified and prays when he hears the barking, then looks down and sees it’s a mouse.

Here are some of the drawings in the take.



This is a Bob McKimson cartoon that doesn’t look like a Bob McKimson cartoon. There’s loads of energy and plenty of silly stuff. It has a beautiful opening as the camera trucks in from the stratosphere on the Earth, finally ending at a mouse hole, where self-aware Costello tells Babbitt “the people are here.” Tedd Pierce does a fine job playing Babbitt.

Art Davis, Don Williams, Cal Dalton and Dick Bickenbach are the animators and I imagine Bick is supplying a singing voice here as well.

Mary is Flip

Ub Iwerks’ writing staff borrowed their own gag from the Flip the Frog cartoon School Days (1932) and put it in Mary’s Little Lamb (1935).

Mary is late for school so she sneaks under the desks of her classmates to avoid being caught the standard Iwerks old crone, who is a teacher in this cartoon.



Mary casually says “Hiya, teacher!”



Hey, wait a minute! They didn’t just re-use the gag, they reused the animation.



In fact, the cycle of kids playing outside the school opening of School Days is reused here, as is the teacher ringing the school bell. Those are just the scenes I checked; I’m sure there are more. The Flip cartoons were out of circulation and probably forgotten by audiences, and the ComiColor series that Mary was in was about to die.

The Satire That Blooms in the Fall, Tra-La

Fred Allen added an air of culture as he sliced and diced stupidity and banality. He’d set it to music.

Allen must have had a great love for Gilbert and Sullivan. He employed the melodies of “The H.M.S. Pinafore” in one of his parodies (starring that noted singing artist Leo Durocher). And in taking aim at a favourite target—radio and advertising executives—he confiscated the score of “The Mikado.”

Another favourite target was NBC censors, and they must have sputtered in self-important indignation when they saw the script for the Radio Mikado. Allen was forced to make changes. Nothing was obscene. It was all about profits. Suppose sponsors heard this ridicule and took their business away from the National Broadcasting Company.

The show aired October 13, 1946. The next morning, Ben Gross of the Daily News said “It just didn’t come off because the lyrics were corny and fell flatter than Lou Costello doing a prattfall [sic].” But the Herald Tribune’s John Crosby championed the show in his syndicated column of the 18th. And because NBC’s script deleters couldn’t do anything about him, he published what Allen would have said if he had been allowed to say it (on the programme, “hucksters” became “brains”).

Crosby didn’t transcribe the jingle parody by the DeMarco Sisters which managed to include Chiquita Bananas, Pepsi-Cola, Adler Elevator Shoes and LS/MFT, but stuck with the meat of the parody.

For those of you who are not aware, Petrillo was the eventually-disgraced head of the American Federation of Musicians who constantly intefered in radio (and then television), threatening and initiating strikes and bans if he didn’t get his way for his orchestra members.

RADIO IN REVIEW
Fred Allen's Mikado
By JOHN CROSBY
Although radio pays him $20,000 week, Fred Allen has never conquered the suspicion that the world would be a better place if the audion tube had never been invented. In his 14 years on the air, Allen has lampooned just about everything in radio from the executives to soap opera. On his last broadcast, radio's wittiest comedian went to work on the whole industry at once in an uproarious parody of "The Mikado."
It took some doing to get it on the air. The censors at the National Broadcasting Company at first insisted that Allen drop the whole idea and come up with something else. After strenuous arguments, Allen got the parody on the air with some revisions. The opening song, "If You Want to Know Who We Are", for instance, originally went like this:
"If you want to know who we are,
"We're the hucksters of radio,
"We create every radio star,
"We're all yes men who never say no!
"We know how radio works,
"We're vice-presidents and clerks,
"Confidentially, we're all jerks.
"Yo ho! Yo ho! We're the hucksters of radio."
● ● ●
Calling a radio vice-president "jerk" on the air is an even more grievous sin than taking the Lord's name in vain. The word "babbits" was substituted, which necessitated a good deal of rewriting. The other word that went out of the original in a hurry was "huckster", an epithet which makes radio executives very nervous. It's bad enough to have Frederic Wakeman's novel of that name on the very top of the bestseller list without calling any further attention to it on the air.
Outside of that, the Allen parody went on pretty much as written except, that the comedian first had to clear his singing commercial with 13 sponsors who were either mentioned or whose singing jingles were used in part. Though it went on the air unchanged, the network executives took a long agonized look at another song, in which Allen poked fun at radio's best customer—the soap industry.
ALLEN: (Singing to the tune, "A Wandering Minstrel I")
"A wandering sponsor I.
"My product’s four-way soap.
"With the dirtiest dirt it will cope.
"It's a hundred and ten percent, lye
"On washday you should try it
"It bubbles and cleans and rinses.
"And it doesn't taste bad on blintzes.
"Housewives cannot deny it.
"It does everything—but no one will buy it."
● ● ●
By a wonderful coincidence, James Caesar Petrillo's name worked in very handily with one of the best known of Sir Arthur Sullivan's "Mikado" melodies, "Tit Willow."
"In all the excitement, there's one thing we forgot.
"Petrillo. Petrillo. Petrillo.
"First we must learn if we can or cannot, from
"Petrillo. Petrillo, Petrillo.
"If you want a musician to beat on a drum,
"Or a trumpet to toot, or a banjo to strum,
"You can't do a single thing till you hear from
"Petrillo. Petrillo. Petrillo. "
The parody came to a climax, of course, with "As Some Day It May Happen", which contains W. S. Gilbert's famous list of things that will never be missed, a list which, has grown since Gilbert's death, to include virtually every dislike known to man. Here is the Allen version:
"The day that I take over, I'll clean up radio,
"I've got a little list. I've got a little list
"Of things that upset listeners. They never will be missed.
"There's those mournful serial programs with their tragedy and strife.
“Where someone’s always dropping dead or always facing life.
"And those early morning comics who will surely drive you bats.
"Who pin orchids on old ladies and put on women's hats.
"And those weddings on the radio where the bride is always kissed.
"They never will be missed. They never will be missed.
CHORUS
He's got 'em on his list! He's got 'em on his list!
"And they never will be missed! They never will be missed!
ALLEN
"And those round table discussions with their boring, dull debaters.
"And the housewives who are morons but who yet win refrigerators.
"And those gruesome mystery programs with their terrifying plots.
"You hear three words of dialogue—the rest is shrieks and shots.
"And those hillbilly ensembles who insist on playing Liszt.
"They never will be missed. They never will be missed.
CHORUS
"He's got 'em on his list. He's got 'em on his list.
ALLEN
"And they never will be missed."
● ● ●
You can readily see why NBC was opposed to that song. If the network threw out all the programs that wouldn't be missed, there would be little left on the air but the faintly querulous voice of Harry S. Truman explaining the meat shortage.

Allen was not above rejigging his musical parodies and reviving them later in the same season. He and Bing Crosby starred in “The Hollywood Mikado” on May 11, 1947 (Tony Martin was in the “Radio Mikado”).

Many of the versions of the Allen show available on-line are in deplorable shape. There’s a muffled partial version of the programme above that is somehow spliced together with the previous week’s season debut. And the “Hollywood Mikado” has dropouts and digital burps due to poor re-recording. Fred deserves better. Lousy audio of old radio shows never will be missed.

Puns of the Old South

Tex Avery made a whole cartoon of visual puns (1951’s Symphony in Slang) and did the same thing for a couple of scenes in an earlier cartoon (1950’s The Cuckoo Clock). But he gave it a go in the 1947 MGM short Uncle Tom's Cabaña.

Uncle Tom relates to a group of surrounding him about Simon Legree. “That no-account crook was just rollin’ in dough.” Scott Bradley’s music cue: “Happy Days Are Here Again.”



Uncle Tom: “And on top of that, he was two-faced.”



Avery pulls off a pun that probably went back to silent animation. Uncle Tom: “He was shore a low-down snake.”



Uncle Tom sounds like Will Wright doing Charles Correll doing Andrew H. Brown (of Amos ‘n’ Andy), but I don’t know who it is; that’s just a combination it sounds like to me. The sceptical little boy at the end, I imagine, is Sara Berner.

The credited animators are Walt Clinton, Ray Abrams, Preston Blair and Bob Bentley, who had replaced Ed Love in the unit (Santa Quimby fired Love over Christmas). Johnny Johnsen is the background artist, with Heck Allen working on the story.

MGM was already taking out full-page trade ads on March 2, 1945. Clinton’s model sheets are dated November 13, 1945 and the cartoon was released on July 19, 1947.

Not Quite Gene Krupa

Porky in Wackyland is one of my favourite Warners cartoons of all time. So much is going on, one thing after another.

Here, a Wackylander is playing the William Tell Overture on his nose, which is shaped like a flute. Suddenly, in one frame, a drum kit is pulled out, with the character bashing away. He moves to the piano, then switches back to his nose, now shaped like a trumpet, before the camera pans right to other odd characters.



Norm McCabe and Izzy Ellis are the credited animators in this Bob Clampett cartoon from 1938. One unconfirmed internet report says Elmer Plummer was the background artist. After this cartoon, his next stop was Disney. There were no Wackylands there.

Fine New Book About Fine Old Cartoons

This blog isn’t designed as a destination for people who want paragraph upon paragraph of analysis about old cartoons. The approach here is pretty casual. It’s me posting some frame grabs or newspaper stories I’ve found and saying “Hey, look at this.”

There are other places where you can get something a little more in depth and weighty, where something about old cartoons is propounded and you can spend your time thinking about it.

This brings us to word a new book has been published about the Warner Bros. cartoons. Jaime Weinman has written “Anvils, Mallets & Dynamite – The Unauthorized Biography of Looney Tunes” where he analyses the studio, some of its people and their attitude toward entertaining theatre audiences.

You won’t get an opinion from me about its contents because I haven’t seen the book. I’ll endorse it nonetheless because of its author. Jamie Weinman scores points with me because he’s Canadian (wave Maple Leaf flag here). Germane to the topic, though, he’s been talking about cartoons at least since the days when fans gathered on Usenet, where expert and intelligent opinions were traded back and forth. And he doesn’t pontificate with hundred-dollar words like some books that shall remain unidentified (or, I hope, begin a sentence with “and” as you have just read).

The book’s sub-title, alas, reminds me that a tombstone has been erected at the head of the grave of “Merrie Melodies.” Nobody uses the term any more. It’s as dead as Jerry Jester, or whatever the name was of the joker who appeared at the end of the “Merrie Melodies” shorts in the mid-‘30s. Today, fans have decided all the cartoons are “Looney Tunes,” even though they are not. Apparently some crappy movie is responsible. I say without erudition, “Bah!”

Anyway, this doesn’t have anything to do with the insight Jaime may have into the cartoons and their makers. What does he think about Chuck Jones? How about A Wild Hare? There’s only one way to find out, besides asking him. There are a bunch of different places where the book can be ordered on-line; a web search will easily find one that suits you.