Jack-Rabbit and the Beanstalk Backgrounds

What do things look like in Giant Land? Judging by the background artist in Jack-Rabbit and the Beanstalk (1943), olive green with half-dead trees and rocky mountains.



Here’s a panorama from one scene that’s panned left to right.



It seems carrots—giant ones at that—can grow in such a desolate place. Note the diagonal shafts of light.

In one shot, Bugs is surrounded by giant carrot. But when director Friz Freleng cuts to a shot further back, the carrots are replaced by a giant. How does that happen?



This is one of the Warners cartoons with an immobile figure that’s rendered with shadows and textures that you can’t get with an animated drawing. You’ll see some in Bob Clampett’s The Great Piggy Bank Robbery as well.



Who is the artist? Paul Julian was still away on wartime work so I imagine this is the work of Lenard Kester.

Betsy Cola Hits the Spot

Fans look back at the Golden Era of network radio with affection but columnists in the day did not. Radio was crass and witless, they told readers time and time again.

Perhaps that’s why critics loved Fred Allen. He made fun of the crassness of radio and did it in a high-brow way; critics seemed to think of radio as beneath them. Allen took music from operas and operettas (can there be anything more high-brow?) and concocted parody lyrics making fun of his target.

Allen spoofed or joked about radio commercials on many shows. One guest starred Lanny Ross who sang on radio and in movies but was not really in the category of a popular singer, such as Dick Haymes, Tony Martin or Frankie. He fit in more with the high-brow crowd.

Here’s what happened on their broadcast of December 1, 1946; I don’t believe it’s on the internet. This is from PM of December 4th. Some of the references may be lost on readers today. I’m surprised Allen didn’t employ the famous “nickel” Pepsi Cola jingle of the day for Betsy’s song; the meter is exactly the same. Perhaps Standard Brands couldn’t get permission or didn’t want to pay the money to use it. The last-mentioned song fits in one of Standard’s two products that Allen plugged.

“Irium” was an ingredient in Pepsodent tooth paste. Adler’s Elevator Shoes were advertised by a man shouting “Now you can be taller than she can!” Grossinger’s was a resort in New York’s Catskills Mountains. I admit the manly/patriotic All-Bran bit eludes me.

Fred Allen Tips the Met Off On How to Get Rich Quick
By SEYMOUR PECK
I hope Edward Johnson and the other bigshots of the Metropolitan Opera were listening to Fred Allen last Sunday. For Allen, touched by the Met's financial troubles, offered them a sure-fire way to get into the big money. Allen's advice: be like radio, get sponsors, lots of sponsors.
Allen even showed the Met how to do it in an opera written by himself and Irving Caesar, titled El Commerciale. El Commerciale put new words to music from the famous operas, and managed to get in 25 commercials in the ten minutes it took to act out.
Here, then, is how an opera might sound at he Met if the Met were run like radio:
El Commerciale is the story of Mr. Cola (played by Lanny Ross) and his five daughters. Three of the daughters are married, but Mr. Cola is trying to find husbands for the other two. He sings (to the tune of O Evening Star):
I have five daughters—two unwed,
One men adore—and one they dread.
One is a beauty, men all say,
The other one frightens men away.
I lie awake, my nerves are shattered,
Tums and Aspirin, I've tried all brands.
If only a man would pop the question,
He'd have a wife and she'd be off my hands!
Papa Cola's beautiful daughter, Betsy, enters. She sings (to the tune of Caro Nome):
Betsy Cola is my name.
I'm that celebrated dame.
You have heard of me a lot.
I'm the gal what hits the spot.
Betsy and her three married sisters worry over their ugly sister, Mirium (to the tune of the Habanera from Carmen):
Poor Mirium! Poor Mirium!
Why don't you use a little Irium!
Mirium answers:
For Irium, it's too late, chums.
My teeth are gone and I have only gums.
Along comes a suitor for the hand of Betsy, played by Allen himself. To the majestic, impassioned music of the Ride of the Valkyrie from Wagner's Die Walkure, Allen woos the fair maiden:
I just came from Barney's!
I just came from Barney's!
My suit comes from Barney's!
It's size 33!
My shoes come from Adler's!
My shoes come from Adler's!
My shoes come from Adler's!
Now I'm taller than she!
My hat is from Knox, dear.
The ring has two rocks, dear.
It's from a Cracker-Jack box, dear.
You can tell at a glance.
Slip these rings on your fingers,
I'm not one who lingers,
We're off to Grossingers,
The land of Romance!
Before Mr. Cola will let Allen marry Betsy, he questions him (to the music of the Quartet from Rigoletto):
PAPA: Have you ever tasted Kellogg's Bran?
ALLEN: No, I've not.
PAPA: And you dare to call yourself a man?
ALLEN: Yes, so what?
PAPA: Just imagine, ladies, if you can:
Here stands a man who hasn't tasted Kellogg's Bran!
ALLEN: Sad my lot,
I eat Wheaties, though.
PAPA: Then there's hope.
ALLEN: And Wheatena, too.
PAPA: He's no dope.
But you'll never know, no,
you'll never know what
Kellogg's Bran can do,
You can’t be an American,
For no American will go
without Kellogg's Bran!
Allen promises to try Kellogg's Bran, whereupon Papa Cola consents to his marriage with Betsy. What about poor unmarried Mirium? To the tune of the Sextet from Lucia, Allen tells her he sees "a ray of hope" if she will "use a cake of Lifebuoy Soap."
Then he and Betsy leave for their honeymoon (to the Soldier's Chorus from Faust):
Now on their honeymoon, he and she,
Off on a life of economee,
Their bags packed as merrily they flee
To Niagara Falls, with 48 balls of Tenderleaf Tea!
"Gad," said Allen, contemplating all the sponsors he had gotten into his little opera, “this will be bigger than the Make Believe Ballroom.”
What is the Met waiting for?

Peck’s PM was a left-leaning paper which, to no great surprise, was viewed as a hotbed of Commies and Pinkos by scare-mongers in the U.S. government. Peck was convicted of contempt of Congress in March 1957 for not revealing names of Communists to a Senate subcommittee. He was employed by the New York Times at the time and continued to be until his retirement. He was killed by a drunk driver in a head-on crash on New Year’s Day 1985.

A Van Beuren Cartoon is About to Start

I’ve always liked the opening of the Van Beuren cartoons with various animals swaying in time to the music, with the leopard getting clunked on the head and his tail twanged.



If you look at old prints of the cartoons featuring this, you’ll notice tops, bottoms and sides chopped off so you can’t even see some of the characters. I can’t remember the reason for it now. But for you fans of Blinky Owl (or whatever his name is), Steve Stanchfield had transferred some of the Van Beurens for DVD/BluRay from original 35mm prints with the whole frame visible.

The timing is really odd, but on the screen, it works. Some drawings are on fours, some on threes, some on twos and some appear for one frame. There are 14 drawings in a 36-frame cycle. I’ve turned it into an animated gif below. The box with the title jiggles more than I would like, but it’s because I had some problems and the frames are not from the same cycle. Also, I’ve copied the duplicate frames instead of using each of the 36 frames. Still, you can see the movement of the animals, which is the main thing, at the speed in the actual cartoon (in this case, The Office Boy).



Who drew the sequence may be something lost to the ages.

Thanks to Steve Stanchfield and his group for restoring these cartoons.

A Mouse, Said the Mouse

A mouse who has terrorised a lion into insanity scratches his head. “There’s one thing that still bothers me,” he confides in the audience watching The Slap Happy Lion as the camera pulls back and another mouse scampers into the scene. “How could anyone be afraid of a mouse?|



The little mouse goes “Boo!” just as the big one did to the lion all through the cartoon.



Anticipation and take.



The big mouse now becomes as afraid of a mouse as the lion did and runs out of the cartoon.



The little mouse doesn’t get a chance to give us a reaction line to end the cartoon. The iris closes as the other mouse runs into the distance.

Walt Clinton, Ray Abrams and Bob Bentley animated this 1947 MGM release by director Tex Avery. Heck Allen assisted with the story.

How To Be a Yellow Jack (Benny)

One joke, two people. One person laughs. Another person gets offended.

That’s something which happened to Jack Benny in 1938.

The Benny radio show, especially in the 1930s, specialised in movie parodies. Reading between the lines, Benny must have received permission first from the studio that made the movie. One was on October 9, 1938 when he did a send-up of the dramatic movie “Yellow Jack,” released earlier in the year. The Greenville, S.C. News had a preview.

Jack Benny, Fugitive Of Resort Mosquito, Is Air 'Yellow Jack'
Jack Benny, a fugitive from a summer resort mosquito, will present his own version of the film success, "Yellow Jack," during the broadcast with Mary Livingstone, Kenny Baker, Don Wilson, and Phil Harris' orchestra over the NBC-WFBC network today at 7 p. m. Jell-O is the sponsor.
With the presentation of this epic of the Cuban swamps, the Benny theater project will launch another of its seasons of dramatic repertoire designed to replace the Punch and Judy show. At present Benny is too busy squashing the rumors that he will play the title role in "Yellow Jack" to make comment on his season's plans. Every since Jack posed as the leader of the dwarfs in "Snow White," he's been avidly searching for another vehicle in which he can be called "Doc." Therefore, Jack magnanimously leaves the leading role of the sergeant to Phil Harris, to play Doctor Jack, the insect killer.
In addition to making his season's bow on the program, Andy Devine, the only member of the Benny gang who appeared in the film version of "Yellow Jack," will tackle the dual duties of playing a soldier and acting as technical advisor for the Benny drama. He will head a squad composed of Kenny, Don, and Rochester. Mary Livingstone will play the nurse whose fondness for Doc Benny is exceeded only by her affection for the rest of the soldiers in the medical corps.
Kenny Baker, who recently had a little trouble in Mayor Andy Devine's Van Nuys traffic court, will sing "I Used To Be Color Blind." Phil Harris and the orchestra, with an eye to getting in solid with the boss, will play "What Have You Got That Gets Me?" from Jack's new picture "Artists and Models Abroad."

Cliff Nazarro and his double-talk routine make an appearance, and Frank Nelson is the dispatcher on a police radio. But who played the mosquitoes? That question obsessed syndicated columnist Tom E. Danson, who apparently went to the producers of the Benny show find out. He reported back in his Radiologic column of October 8th, after reviewing Bette Davis’ performance on air in Arch Oboler’s “Alter Ego”:

Another Milestone Reached
Another milestone has been passed, another hurdle overcome. Almost too much progress has been made in radio this week. It never rains but what it pours . . . or something.
First we have a sponsor actually allowing a dramatic actress to wax dramatic in a manner intelligent to radio. Now we have soundmen discovering how to simulate the ZZZZZzzzzzzzzz of billions of mosquitoes. Think of it! Whatll they do next?
Achievement Result of Jest
As something of a paradox, this remarkable achievement might never have been made possible at this early date if Jack Benny, in a display of jest, hadn’t scheduled for this Sunday a radioized version of “Yellow Jack.”
As everyone knows, the villain of the piece is a jabbing, germ-laden mosquito of the finest Cuban variety. And all he has to say in the script is, “ZZZZZzzzzzzzzz.”
Noise Easy To Make
Now to make a “ZZZZZzzzzzzzzz” on a typewriter is a very simple procedure. You merely push the shift key down and jab at the spot marked “Z” until you get tired, then you release the shift key and jab some more. And you get XXX (oops, slips dont count) ZZZZZzzzzzzzzz. Simple, eh? But Mr. Soundman found it not so easy a task for radio. Sometimes I feel sorry for those poor devils. He tried vocal gadgets, electric vibrators, buzzers, door bells, cow bells—but none sounded like mosquitoes. Particularly those of the Cuban variety.
Radiomen Are Pioneers
But was he stumped? Certainly not. Radio is a virgin field. Its constituents are pioneers. Here was a job to be done, and he done it, sans fanfare. When you hear the Benny broadcast Sunday, the sound of the mosquitoes will be made by a small wooden frame over which has been stretched dozens of little rubber bands. The soundman will wave this frame up and down in front of the mike, and out of your loudspeaker will swarm billions of mosquitoes. Not just any old mosquito, but those of the Cuban variety. Radio marches on!

Danson was having a little fun with it all, but the send-up was no laughing matter for Si Steinhauser of the Pittsburgh Press. He griped about it the day of the broadcast and then again in his column of October 11, 1938, subtitled “Radio Comics Forget Tradition Of the Theater, ‘Keep It Clean’ – Offensive Gags On Headline Programs.”

And to Jack Benny, a fellow whom we applaud and admire as America's Number One comedian, we can but comment:
"We're astounded that you went through with your radio version of 'Yellow Jack," a burlesque of the story of Major Walter Reed and his associates who died that they might save others from yellow fever.
"At the Walter Reed General Hospital, Takoma Park, Md., during the World War, thousands of maimed American boys were cared for. Some had no eyes, no hands, no feet. Yet they whispered prayers of thanks that they were cared for in the greatest military hospital in the world, a structure erected as a memorial to Walter Reed and his comrades, who had died in line of duty.
"For weeks during the war the Stars and Stripes remained at half-mast at Walter Reed as hundreds of men gave their last gasp there. Years have passed since then, but the memories of those days will never dim. They weren't funny. Nor, to us, was 'Yellow Jack.'
"An appropriate part of your broadcast, we thought, was your remark: " 'Mosquitoes sting.' And Mary's reply: 'So does this program.' "

Well, I liked. Call me an entophobist or some such label if you want. By the way, I don’t know about the wooden frame, but the script for the episode states that Blanche Stewart and Pinto Colvig played mosquitos. Colvig, the voice of Goofy in the Disney cartoons, was the original voice of Jack Benny’s Maxwell before beating it to Florida and the Max Fleischer studio.

Man Alive!

UPA started out as an industrial filmmaker during World War Two and veered off into entertainment cartoons in the late 1940s because company head Steve Bosustow wanted to explore all avenues of income. Its stylishness and dependence on human characters and human foibles won all kinds of fans weary of cartoons awash in frolicking young creatures and smart-ass talking animals.

But UPA never lost sight of its roots. Its industrial films continued to win praise and its TV commercials were influential in the way they looked and sold products. Saturday Review Cecile Starr writer looked at one of its institutional shorts—Man Alive!, made for the American Cancer Society in 1952.

The look of UPA cartoons always seemed pretentious in most of its theatrical shorts, but I really like it here. The animation is by Cecil Surry, Phil Monroe and Rudy Larriva, all ex Warners people. So is Art Heinemann, who co-designed this with Sterling Sturtevant. Backgrounds are credited to Bob McIntosh, Boris Gorelick, Jules Engel and Michi Kataoka. It’s directed by Bill Hurtz. Bill Scott and Bill Roberts toss an inside joke into their story; the main character is named after UPA director Ted Parmelee.

M A N  A L I V E . Produced by United Productions of America for the American Cancer Society, 47 Beaver St., New York 4, N. Y. Available for free loan and for purchase. (10 min., color animation)
Leave it to UPA to make a cancer film that adds up to good health, good sense, and good fun. This cartoon makes the most of animation's multiform possibilities, artistic as well as educational, and it doesn't waste a precious moment of its brief running time.
The point is that when something goes wrong, it's better to consult an expert than a quack. Ed Parmelee is a man who believes in short-cuts. When his automobile develops a peculiar knocking sound, he tries to pretend nothing is wrong. When it finally stops running, he tries a few "guaranteed" remedies first, then takes the car to a back-alley mechanic. When finally he goes to a reputable service station, the engine is so banged up it has to be replaced entirely.
This same Ed Parmelee has stomach-aches more often than he likes to admit. Ed knows he should see a doctor for a real check-up, but he's afraid to because something might be wrong. He might have cancer. After he reviews his experience with the auto, and after his wife makes an appointment for him with a reputable M. D., he catches on to the idea that it is wise to do the best thing first instead of last. He learns the real symptoms of cancer, and he learns that when something seems wrong the only person to get proper treatment from is an expert.
Local and state cancer groups have been doing remarkably well in having their films brought to the public eye, and with this film they stand a better than ever chance of winning audience applause. "Man Alive" makes a lively and sensible addition to any kind of adult film program.

The U.S National Library of Medicine posted this information about Man Alive! on its website in 2014:

When in 1952 the American Cancer Society (ACS) released the movie Man Alive!, it was trying something new. For the first time an educational short about cancer combined cartoons and comedy. Earlier cancer films had had their comedic moments, and cartoon animation had been used before 1952. But Man Alive!. . . was the first to mix them both throughout. Clowning and cartoons had come to be a way of controlling cancer.
Part of the reason for this innovation was the audience the ACS hoped to reach. The movie was one of a growing number of educational films that targeted men, supplementing the traditional focus of the organization on women. The problem was that the ACS was not convinced that the sorts of motion pictures that worked for women would also work for men, and it began to experiment with new approaches that it hoped would better appeal to its new male audience. Man Alive! was one of these experiments, and its success (it was nominated for an Oscar) helped the ACS come to believe that the antic-humor of cartoon animation was crucial to its efforts to persuade men to accept and adopt its approach to cancer. Movies aimed at women occasionally used animation and humor, but throughout the 1950s only films aimed at men made consistent use of both together.

Fortunately, the much-missed Michael Sporn posted a Life magazine article and a link to set-up drawings.

Even better, Thunderbean Animation obtained a 16mm print of Man Alive!, cleaned it up, and posted a version on line. Thunderbird’s Steve Stanchfield wrote about it here and linked to the video. Bravo, Steve and crew. Thunderbean has two sets of 1950s industrial cartoons you should consider owning.

Don't Monkey With Monkeys

A Day at the Zoo (1939) features Gil Warren as a narrator but there are always gags in a Tex Avery cartoon where dialogue is unnecessary.

There isn’t any in a scene with an old woman and a monkey until the very end. She reads a sign telling people not to feed the moneys. She looks around then does it anyway. The indignant monkey throws back the food and yells, “Hey sister! Can’t you read?”



There are some good puns and some cringing ones. Mel Millar is credited with the story and Ham Hamilton gets the rotating animation credit.

For Better Or Worser Backgrounds

The opening shot of the Popeye cartoon For Better or Worser (released in 1935) is a pan up the sailor’s apartment building. I can’t snip it together properly, so you’ll have to look at it by floors—first floor, second floor, third floor.



Dissolve to Popeye in his kitchen, as a jazzy version of “No Place Like Home” plays. There’s lots to look at here.



As usual, the background artist isn’t credited. Seymour Kneitel and Doc Crandall are handed animation credits.

A Talk Show For Mary Hartman's Town

“Only the certifiably embalmed will fail to laugh out loud several times along its outrageous way,” is how the New York Times ended its review of a summer replacement show in 1977.

There were mixed feelings in the critical world about Fernwood 2 Night. It satirised the left, the right, the obliviousness of the average American and so much more. It remains one of my favourite shows of all time.

Still there were people who thought “You can’t make fun of something *that* way.” One was the Associated Press’ Jay Sharbutt. Here’s what he wrote several days after the show’s American debut on July 4, 1977.

Mary Hartman Spin-off tacky
By JAY SHARBUTT
LOS ANGELES (AP) – The late Lenny Bruce was frequently tasteless and frequently funny. A new show, “Fernwood 2Night,” is only half that. It’s frequently tasteless. At least its first two chapters are.
It’s Norman Lear's 13-week summer series that opened July 4 as a follow-up to his “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman,” which closed Friday.
The new daily venture, syndicated to about 30 markets, is a spoof of TV talk shows like “Tonight” on which Johnny Carson occasionally stars. It is set in mythical Fernwood, Ohio, on mythical Channel 6.
Its star is Martin Mull, the fine satirist, guitarist and foe of the last decade's folk music. He plays Barth Gimble, a glib, smirking host who is on the lam from the law in Miami, site of his last TV show.
(Mull once played Barth’s brother, Garth, who in a rousing “Hartman” episode fatally impaled himself on an aluminum Christmas tree.)
The first “Fernwood 2Night” served mainly to introduce the regulars, including Barth, who nervously works on a day-to-day contract.
The others are his vacuum-headed co-host Jerry Hubbard (Fred Willard) and middle-aged Happy Kyne (Frank DeVol). Happy runs a four-piece band which sounds as if it uses leftover notes from Art Linkletter’s House Party. Happy also shamelessly plugs his hamburger chain, the Bun n' Run.
So far, so good. But one opening-day guest was a classical pianist in an iron lung. Another was a befuddled motorist, of Jewish heritage, booked to show Fernwood's mainly Anglo-Saxon residents what a real Jew looks like.
Barth introduced him and decried prejudice and stereotypes of Jews. His announcer later told the guy: “You look just like the rest of us. It’s as plain as the nose on your face.”
After this and the iron-lung pianist, I was surprised they didn’t bring on a blind Sicilian to dance the tarantella in a china shop.
On the much milder Show No. 2, in a segment called “Bury the Hatchet,” they brought on a Catholic priest and his non-Catholic parents. Seems they wanted him deprogrammed from a cult, the Catholic Church.
His verge-of-hysterical mother sobbed: “We want our son Joey to be taken away from the Catholics and to be given back to us so we can clear his mind of all that silly mumbo-jumbo.”
Audience applause gave the nod to the padre. The losing parents got free eats at "Home of Hotcakes" and a choice of a deluxe garden rake or ''two pounds of Mix-N-Match nails and screws."
This is called piercing social satire. But there were some actual funnies, like the MirthMaker version of disco-dom's "Shake Your Booty" in Western Swing Polka style, and a 5-year-old torch singer's "I Didn't Know the Gun Was Loaded."
Ditto the guest professor who, having studied harmful effects of synthetic fibers, opined: "Leisure suits cause cancer."
But such nifty goods were swamped by the deliberately tasteless wares, gross outs, if you will, that seemed aimed at starting protests pouring, publicity pumping and ratings rising.
I suspect such will happen as word of the shocking things they get away with on “Fernwood 2Night” gets around. But nightly outrage can wear thin, and I bet severe Nielsen droop will occur within three weeks.
It’ll happen this way: Reasonably massive gripes by offended viewers in Week One; an ominous lull in Week Two and, in Week Three, a small but fetal sound that goes, “Ho-hum.”

One writer spent more time talking about the star than giving his opinion of the show. This appeared in the Newark Advocate, July 9, 1977.

Lunacy still lives in Fernwood
By LEE MARGULIES
Los Angeles Times Service
HOLLYWOOD — Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman is gone but its comical spirit lives on in all its glorious lunacy and tackiness in Fernwood Tonight, the nightly talk show that premiered recently. Where else would you expect to see a pianist in an iron lung, a huckster who bills himself as a consumer advocate so he can knock the competition and push his own product, the owner of a health food restaurant who says she eats no meat “except for burgers,” a Vietnamese refugee whose book about life in the United States is called “Yankee Doodle Gook,” a scientist who claims leisure suits cause cancer?
What must be made clear about Fernwood Tonight, for those who haven’t yet seen it and may not have guessed already, is that it is a fictional talk show. The host, the announcer, the guests — they’re all played by actors working from scripted material. Zaniness prevails as they enact what the series creators envisioned as the sort of squalid talk show that a TV station in Mary Hartman’s hometown would put on.
“It's the talk show equivalent of Bowling for Dollars,” proclaims Martin Mull, the painter-turned-songwriter-turned-nightclub performer-turned-actor who stars in Fernwood Tonight as Barth Gimble, the alternately earnest and embarrassed host.
The idea for the show sprang from the fertile mind of Norman Lear, who wanted to do something new for summer rather than rely on reruns when the syndicated Mary Hartman soap opera was scheduled to take a break. He liked the concept of maintaining the Fernwood setting so the frame of reference for the humor would stay the same and characters from Mary Hartman could appear as guests.
"Much as the evening news was worthy of being lived in our stories on the fictional Mary Hartman, the conversation and small talk among celebrities and authors on talk shows can be reflected in a fictional talk show," explains A1 Burton, a vice president of Lear's TAT Communications. “We’re not spooling it we’re just doing our version of it.”
Later, of course, it developed that Mary Hartman would not be returning in its present form in the fall, so now Fernwood Tonight is bridging the gap between it and its successor, Fernwood USA.
To host the new series they chose Mull, who had played Garth Gimble, a wife beater, earlier in the season on Mary Hartman. Burton had seen his musical-comedy nightclub act and felt the style was just right. “The quality that kept coming through was how likable he was in spite of the fact that all the time he was playing an obnoxious, surface character — a guy who should be despicable but is extremely likable,” he recalls.
Lear caught the act and agreed but there was a slight problem. Garth had been killed off, impaled by a Christmas tree. So Mull was brought back to Mary Hartman as Barth, Garth's twin brother, to establish him for Fernwood Tonight. On the new show Bart occasionally makes reference to things that happened on the old one — particularly with regard to his brother's death — but a knowledge of the Mary Hartman story lines is by no means a prerequisite for watching Fernwood Tonight.
Although a newcomer to acting — Garth was his first whack at it — Mull says he is comfortable starring in the series because the character of Barth is the same persona he had developed in his nightclub act. He's cocky, cynical, sarcastic, lecherous, larcenous — “just about every bad quality you can think of but in small amounts," the actor explains. “They're forgivable because he doesn't have the strength to bring any of them out.”
Mull has taken a circuitous route to get where he is today. He earned a master's degree in painting at the Rhode Island School of Design in 1967 but made money by working as a backup musician on guitar. He began writing his own material and, after a year on the songwriting staff at Warner Bros. Records, formed a band and began to perform. Because his songs were basically comical, he says, he found he had to explain them to audiences, and through that process evolved a stage character and funny act. He has recorded five albums, including the current "I'm Everyone I Ever Loved" on ABC Records.
In the wake of a divorce, he moved to California from New York last February to continue performing and to try his hand at TV writing. The acting assignment on Mary Hartman came out of the blue a few months later and now he's caught up in it, hoping one day to move into motion pictures not only as a performer but as a writer and director too.
But first there is Fernwood Tonight (or Fernwood 2Night, as the sign on the set says), for which he has high hopes. "I think it may catch the imagination of the American people," he says. "My hope would be that it would be to Mary Hartman what Mary Hartman was to television at that time, that next step that people could really get behind."
Reaction from the studio audiences and around Lear's offices has been so strong that even before it went on the air there was talk of keeping it going beyond this initial 13-week run, perhaps to be sold separately from Mary Hartman-Fernwood USA. But no decision on the matter is expected until next month. Says Mull: "I haven't discussed this with anyone but what I'd like to see when Fernwood USA comes on in the fall is for it to run four nights a week and this would run on the fifth. Maybe what we need is a Fernwood Broadcasting Corp. It would carry all our programming: Mary Hartman, Fernwood USA, Fernwood Tonight ... and then there could be a Fernwood Today, Fernwood Tomorrow, The Fernwood Evening News ... even The Fernwood Tyler Moore Show."

Forever Fernwood (nee Fernwood USA) was a lesser show than its predecessor Mary Hartman. And Fernwood 2 Night was revamped into a lesser show. Lear wanted big name guest stars, so he moved the show out of Fernwood. He lost track of the appeal of the small-town oddballs and iconoclasts that made Fernwood 2 Night appealing. It didn’t need big names. The small ones made the show a hit.

Dog and Cat Fight a la Tyer

After an establishing shot of an antique shop in The Helpful Genie (1951), director Connie Rasinski cuts to a shot of a dog and cat being told by their owner (played by Dayton Allen) to behave. They don’t. Instead, they grow two heads and five legs.



“Here, here, stop that!” says the owner. There’s a pause in the fight, though some short movements are animated on twos. Then the dog licks the cat to show his friendship.



Jim Tyer takes up a good portion of the start of the cartoon. There’s solid animation of the dog chasing the cat, a neat take when the Genie comes out of the lamp, and a few gags you’ll recognise as variations of ones from other cartoons.