The Friziest Tex

It just wasn’t in Tex Avery to be Friz Freleng.



See these cutsy-ootsy mice? Wouldn’t they be at home in a mid-1930s Freleng cartoon? (My guess is this scene was animated by Virgil Ross, who later spent what he recalled were some good years in the Freleng unit). The girl mouse-in-love even has a squealing Berneice Hansell voice for added sentiment. They even sing the title tune together in a strolling dance.

No, Tex, no! Don’t drink the Kutie-pie Kool Aid! Even if you did animate Bugs Bunny selling the stuff years about 2½ decades later.



Hurray! We’re saved! Now we’re in for fun. Irv Spence is here with some crazy expressions for the Three Ratz Brothers (a parody of the Three Ritz Brothers of vaudeville).



Sun visors are a convenient way to change the light colour projected to the stage.



More Ratz Brothers. He’s crying because he hasn't got a hat (from the song of the same name, which is what is being sung during most of the sequence).



Not only do we get the obligatory title song, we get the Ratz Brothers doing even more singing.This doesn’t strike me as Tex’s approach to a story at all. And the basic plot goes back to the Harman-Ising days—in a store, the bad guy kidnaps someone’s girl-friend. The boyfriend and others gang together to get rid of the villain. There’s cycle animation of applause that gets reused. All very Freleng-like.

Want radio references? Avery drags out one he used in A Gander at Mother Goose (1940)—the Listerine slogan “Why doesn’t someone tell me these things?” A mouse under a cowboy hat yells “Buck Benny rides again!” with an Andy Devine mouse (played by Danny Webb?) pulling up a farmer’s straw hat and adding “Hello, Buck!” When the green-faced rat is captured, he turns to the camera and says “Tain’t funny, McGee.”



For some reason, during one sequence, George the boy mouse woo-hoos like Daffy Duck. Daffy had only appeared in one cartoon when A Sunbonnet Blue was released. The personality change doesn’t make sense, but I guess Avery liked it, so in it went.

Avery decides to end the cartoon with a photograph of a baby bonnet and booties. He’d use a variation on the procreation ending at MGM on Little Johnny Jet.

As for voices, Mel Blanc joins the others already mentioned. I haven’t a clue who’s playing George.

Avery’s animators at this time consisted of Spence, Virgil Ross, Sid Sutherland and Paul Smith. 1937 was a year of change for the Avery unit. Chuck Jones and Bob Clampett went over to the Ub Iwerks studio where Looney Tunes were being contracted out. When Clampett took over, Bobe Cannon left Avery to work for him. Elmer Wait was promoted to animator but soon died. Spence didn’t stay too long. He left for MGM when it set up its cartoon studio in 1937 and stayed there until he left for Animation, Inc. in the mid-’50s.

Jerry Beck once interviewed Friz about Tex, mainly about leaving Warners in 1941. Here’s a portion of it, from Animato! 18, Spring 1989.

FF: When he got over to MGM he was a very unhappy man, because Bill [Hanna] and Joe [Barbera] took over. He was second banana, no matter what he did. He tried desperately. I look at his cartoons and see elements of desperation.
He was afraid to do subtle things. Tom and Jerry had that. They had little personalities, and subtleties, and things like that. Of course they had the broad gags - they were stealing part of Tex's stuff, the broad stuff.
He was a fun guy to work with. Everybody liked Tex, but Tex was so insecure. I felt about his cartoons that he overdid them because he was so insecure about them. He couldn't do a subtle cartoon. If he did something, it had to be twice as strong as anybody else, because he was insecure about what he was doing.
It seemed like he never came up with a strong personality after he left Warner's. Tex was so anxious to please he was overdoing everything. He should have come up with characters like Bugs Bunny, things like that...
But I think he created a kind of contemporary art with that desperation, when you look back. His stuff was nothing I admired.

JB: What's great is that your stuff and Tex's stuff is different. It's different, and yet they're both funny, and they both use the cartoon medium to its potential.

FF: Well, you put your own personality in. Tex was a very introverted man. I think he had real family problems. You didn't know Tex; I never knew him outside of his outer skin.

Getting back to Warners, Tex went back and forth from black-and-white to colour cartoons during 1937. He directed some of Porkys and another mouse cartoon (Ain't We Got Fun) before coming up with his excellent fairy tale parody, Little Red Walking Hood, far and away the most fun short he made that year.

The song “A Sunbonnet Blue (And a Yellow Straw Hat)” was written by Irving Kahal and Sammy Fain and © June 24, 1935. The score includes some Stalling stalwarts: “Put On Your Old Grey Bonnet,” “Japanese Sandman,” “Little Old Fashioned Music Box,” “The Lady In Red,” and “Freddy the Freshman (The Freshest Kid In Town)” in addition to aforementioned unchapeau song.

Here’s the great Billie Holliday singing the title song.

Swirling Rooster Fight

Parental chickens? Look no further than Hugh Harman and Rudy Ising at MGM.

There was Barnyard Babies (1935) and One Mother’s Family (1939) . The latter cartoon has one of those little-chick-that-doesn’t-fit-in concepts that forms the basis of The Little Bantamweight (1938).

In this one, Papa Rooster immediately trains his newborns to be boxers; fighting roosters were apparently acceptable entertainment during the Depression. One son, though, is timid and wants to play and suck on a lolly pop. Papa’s not too impressed, especially when the others are shadowboxing while the wimpy one is making shadow pictures.

Though circumstance, the boy is forced to battle the champ and after accidentally swallowing some linament, he’s turned into a mighty He-Rooster and wins the match.

The best part of this cartoon are swirls, multiples and thrashing movement. Unfortunately, the version of the cartoon I can find is loaded with DVNR which erases all kinds of lines on characters.



The swirls and the little runt roster is on top of the champ.



No animators are credited here; Scott Bradley doesn’t warrant a mention for the score.

This cartoon was released on March 12, 1938, the last delivered to MGM by Harman and Ising before Metro decided to set up its own cartoon unit under Fred Quimby. Because Quimby couldn’t manage the studio politics, he was forced to bring back Hugh and Rudy, this time under individual contracts, for another go of it.

Tail Vs Penguin

Tex Avery made two cartoons with Chilly Willy and they’re both very good. The first is I'm Cold (1955), where Chilly tries to steal a fur coat (or just any old fur) from a warehouse being guarded by a watchdog with a real deadpan Southern accent (Daws Butler).

Along the way, Willy gets the idea of chopping off the dog’s furry tail. When he first tries to do it, the dog is a step ahead of, and has it crammed in a milk bottle.



In this scene animated by Don Patterson, the penguin’s attempt to cut off the tail is thwarted by the dog blowing into his thumb, which rolls and unrolls his tail like one of those party favours with the paper that unfurls like a snake when you blow into it.



“This is a lot of fun, man,” says the dog to the audience.



Chilly holds down the tail but gets caught in it. The dog then blows into his thumb, unfurls the tail and Willy zips into the milk bottle.



The gags flow into each other very nicely in this cartoon. Clarence Wheeler’s score is also a plus. He uses musical effects in time with expressions and has a little flute piece for when Willy is running. There are places where there is silence except for an observation from the dog. Everything on the soundtrack fits together.

Ray Abrams and La Verne Harding join Patterson as animators on this short.

George, Gracie, Gildy

George Burns and Gracie Allen moved from vaudeville to radio to television fairly seamlessly. I enjoyed them on TV more than their radio show. George’s “stage manager” routine where he talked to the audience was a novel approach, and gave him a chance to be more than a straight man.

The TV version seemed a little more tightly organised as well. On radio, Gracie had sundry friends who would pop by on an irregular basis. TV pretty much stuck to the Burns, the Mortons and Harry Von Zell. Radio had Bill Goodwin, who was fine. But for a while the show had a second announcer (Tobe Reed). It didn’t need two.

And somehow, Gracie’s screwy logic seemed more plausible when you could actually see her saying it.

In the middle of September 1946, the big shows were returning from their summer vacation. Here’s columnist John Crosby looking at Burns and Allen in his column of September 18, 1946.

RADIO IN REVIEW
George Burns and Gracie Allen
By JOHN CROSBY.
NEW YORK, Sept 18.—I caught up with the new Burns and Allen program a week late, which for me is unusually prompt. As a matter of fact, I tuned in with some trepidation, because when I heard them for the last time last Spring, Burns and Allen were showing signs of wear. George was trying, as I recall, to get a part in a Western motion picture. George had taken over Gracie's zany personality and Gracie was playing it straight. It didn't fit either of them very well.
In the new show (NBC, 8.30 p.m., Thursday), Gracie is again attacking windmills with her wide-eyed, misdirected energy. Perhaps my judgment has been weakened by too many Summer comics, but I thought it was pretty funny. When I tuned in, Gracie was explaining a theory that would absolutely eliminate crime.
"How would you stop it?" inquires George.
"Well, the minute a man commits a crime, they put him in jail."
"That's a mistake?" says George.
"Well, sure. You meet a poor class of people in jail."
"Oh."
"I think every American family should adopt a criminal."
George doesn't think much of this idea, but Gracie plunges into it with zest. She goes to City Hall and asks a guard where she can locate a nice, house-broken criminal.
"Right here at City Hall,” says the guard.
"Oh, I don't mean THEM," says Gracie.
"I mean the jail is right here in City Hall."
Gracie invades the office of the warden. "I'd like to rehabilitate one of your burglars, please."
"Come again," says the warden mildly.
Gracie explains patiently what she is up to, but the warden says she can't get a criminal out of jail unless she puts up bail.
"Oh, I didn't know they cost money. Well, have you got a good burglar for $4.98? I'll go to $5.95 if he's in good condition."
"Lady," says the warden, "you can't spring any of these crooks for less than a hundred bucks."
"Why that's outrageous. I'll take my business to another jail."
"Tell you what. We got one we'll spring for nothing—Big Louis."
"Why for nothing?"
"We got nothing on him."
"Oh, I couldn't take him home in that condition."
It's the old Gracie, all right. She puts a sort of lyric enthusiasm into misapprehension. The world, to Gracie, is a beautiful place, though she suspects she is the only sensible person in it. By mid-winter I may be a little tired of It, but right now I’m glad she's back.
I'm used to her.
And that brings us another old peeve. Radio is a habit. In spite of one of my sourpuss friends who refers to it as an "acquired distaste,” I get used to people and pretty soon find myself forgiving their sins on the basis of old friendship. Any one who has read this column any length of time has probably noticed how polite I am to the veterans to Jack Benny, Fred Allen, Amos 'n' Andy, and the rest.
Many of them have been in show business for 30 years and I respect their grey hairs, even their grey routines. They devoted years to developing those routines in vaudeville and on the stage. When they came to radio, they were fresh personalities and highly skilled entertainers. If the bloom has worn off, it’s because they have been imprisoned by their own popularity in the same routine. They have been beset by so many imitators that the routines seem threadbare, even in the original. They have not failed radio. Radio has failed them.

The same week, Crosby at looked Hal Peary’s series The Great Gildersleeve. This appeared in print September 20th.

RADIO IN REVIEW
The Great Gildersleeve
By JOHN CROSBY.
NEW YORK, Sept 20.— "The Great Gildersleeve," one of the most masterful bits of eclecticism in radio, has returned to the air at a new time (NBC, 8.30 p.m., EDT. Wednesdays) to bring great, rejoicing into the hearts of his many, many fans. I am one of the more lukewarm members of the club. Gildy doesn't stir any very violent emotion in me one way or another.
I like many of the characters in the small town of Summerfield, hut I don't quite trust Summerfield as a community. Possibly this is because I don't know where it is. Leila, that dripping honey chile, appears to be from the South, though I suspect you will find more Leilas in the Pennsylvania drug store at 45th Street and Broadway than you will in Georgia. Then there's Peavey, the druggist, whose every line is a whiff of old New England, probably Vermont.
As for Throckmorton P. Gildersleeve, the vain, bumptious, touchy head of the cast, he appears to be out of Frank Morgan by Booth Tarkington—in other words, of mixed blood. I like his tantrums and his foolish, little boy pride. I can't say much for that laugh, which must be one of the oldest comedy tricks in the theatre.
"The Great Gildersleeve" has borrowed fairly thoroughly from tried and true characters all over the place—the theater, books, movies and the slick magazines but it has been a pretty shrewd job of borrowing. The characters have a diversity that keeps the program moving.
My own favorite character on Gildersleeve this program is Peavey, the druggist, whose nasal tones are perfectly adapted to his dialogue.
"How are you?" Judge Hooker asks him at one point.
"I'm holding my own.”
"How's your wife? Enjoying good health?
"Well, she has it, but I can't say she's enjoying it."
Peavey sticks his neck out about as far as the late Calvin Coolidge at a press conference.
Within the very precise and narrow limits of this type of radio comedy, the writing and direction are almost perfect. I don't quite believe in Leila, but I must admit she's consistently herself.
"Ah'm re-ally exhausted," she moans to Gildersleeve when she returns from her vacation.
"How about a good-night kiss?"
"Mercy, Ah'm so exhausted ah re-ally wouldn’t enjoy it."
Whatever else you can say about that, it’s comedy of character rather than gag-writing, and that alone is a healthy influence in radio. The pace of the program is leisurely and it's usually soundly constructed. The sound effects are wonderful and the advertising is unobtrusive and in excellent taste.
In spite of all that, I am frequently just a little bored by Gildy and his friends. They have been going on and on so long that they have become becalmed in my imagination. Now and then when I'm listening I find my attention wandering. I guess Throckmorton just isn’t my sort of person. I don’t know why, but he seems to be pasted together out of old magazines and books and to me he’s never quite come alive.

Of the other three columns that week, we looked at the Sept. 19th story on Mel Blanc here. September 16th involves commercials, elocution and other odds and ends, while his column the next day looks at the inanity of quiz shows, particularly one hosted by Warren Hull, who emceed games on early network television. Read them below.

No Yen To Be a Hen

Not one person thinks there’s something insane about substituting a rabbit’s brain for a chicken’s brain in the Bob McKimson short Hot Cross Bunny.

This being a 1948 McKimson, it means the doctor is waving his arms around. Every time he says “rabbit,” he put his fingers by his ears and wiggles them.



Bugs Bunny is the rabbit involved. Naturally he objects to be turned into a chicken. At the end of the cartoon, the scientist, purely for plot purposes, puts on a metal cap and he and the hen reverse personalities. Bugs does a bend-down laugh that I’m sure I’ve seen in other McKimson cartoons.

Manny Gould, Chuck McKimson and Phil De Lara are the credited animators.

Groucho, Zeppo, Chico, Harpo and Birdo

Get on with it, Walt!

Sometimes, it takes forever to get to anything mildly amusing to happen in a Silly Symphony. In The Bird Store (1932), the audience is treated to nothing but singing birds for about two minutes. Finally, get we get some funny shaped birds.



And then the only celebrity reference in the picture.



I don’t know when the Marx Bros. first appeared one way or another in a cartoon, but this certainly must be one of the earliest.

Did You Hear the One About...

A symbiotic relationship bloomed between columnists and stars. Columnists needed to fill space. Stars needed publicity. What better way than for a star (well, their PR people) submitting a joke to a print reporter to finish off a column with a little fun?

It happened all the time, once upon a time. Sometimes it seems odd. One never thinks of Alan Reed as a comic, but I’ve read a bunch of old columns that go “Alan Reed says...” followed by a somewhat corny observation about mothers-in-law or bosses or some such thing.

Jack Benny found his name in print the same way.

A nice gentleman named Phil Wala has collected a bunch from the early ‘30s, before Jack was appearing on radio. We’ve found a few others prior to that. They all come from Walter Winchell, back before he became rabid and vengeful, destroying friendships in his path. I think the one about Frank Fay was closer to truth than humour. Evidently, straight vaudeville was considered dead in 1930. And though we still use “Brits” and “Yanks” as contractions today, others employed once upon a time aren’t deemed as tasteful any more.

Winchell’s stuff showed up on various days depending on the newspaper, so these dates aren’t all accurate for all newspapers.

December 28, 1928
Jack Benny, vaudevillian, brings back the one about the student who was on the university football team, but was never allowed to participate in any of the games for three years, being on the bench all of that time. One day the captain gathered the eleven in the clubhouse and warned them that they had to win the game. "It is imperative, he yelled, "our good name is at stake."
Then he looked around and observed the lad who warmed the bench for three years sitting in a box of resin.
"What the hell's the big idea, sitting in that resin?" he asked. "You don't think I want to slip off that bench in such an important game, do you?" was the retort.

February 13, 1930
Jack Benny telegraphs that during his travels west he discovered a vaudeville theater still open in Duluth!

April 27, 1930
It is Jack Benny’s tale of the heavily-insured old man who left his young bride while he went on an ocean trip. The shop was wrecked and all hands drowned except the heavily insured old husband.
A month later when he was delivered at an English port he cabled this message: "I was the lone survivor of a shipwreck. Please break the news gently to my wife."

June 1, 1930
Eddie Conrad and Jack Benny were talking about rival comedians in Hollywood.
"Howz Frank Fay doing out there?" asked Conrad.
"Very good," was the retort, "but not nearly so good as he thinks he's doing."

June 5, 1930
JACK BENNY, the two-a-dayer, tells the one about the drunk who zig-zagged into a third rate restaurant and clapped his paws madly for some service.
A waiter, whose right leg was shorter than his left, suddenly appeared.
"I'm in a hurry," hiccoughed the stew, "Just bring me a swish sheez "shandwish."
The waiter with the gimpty leg gimped away, bobbing up and down on his crippled stem.
"Aw!" bellowed the impatient drunk, "if you have to go down shtairs for it—then the hell with it!"

July 19, 1930
Jack Benny, of "Vanities," who wasn't arrested because they didn't know him with his clothes on, says that things are getting worse in Chicago. "I just heard," he bellows, "that the gunmen out there have giyen the Chicago police 24 hours' notice to get out of town!"

March 24, 1931
Jack Benny, the nimble-witted monologist, is appearing in Baltimore this week. Last week he played one of those immense sized movie theatres in Washington. "The house was so large," he writes, "that they do not hire a manager every four years. They elect a governo !"

March 27, 1931
One of the newspapers contained a layout of photos of Mayor Walker. One showed hizzoner in a beret and bed sheet, another, on a stage coach driven by cowboys, and one pictured him in New York.
"Look," said Mrs. Jack Benny to Jack, "here's one of him in New York."
"Hmmm," hmm'd Benny, "they must have snapped that one quick."

May 31, 1931
Jack Benny tells of the two long idle vaudevillians who were growling to each other about their professional brethren.
"Show business is gettin worse 'n' worse," said the first as they ankled up Broadway through the Furious Forties, "the minute you think up a new joke or a new sit-cheeashun, what happens? Along comes some rat and he steals it from you. You can't tell a gag at the Palace any more and expect it to be yours exclusively after the opening matinee!"
As he grumbled, a messenger boy on a bike was felled by a taxi, which sent the kid sprawling.
"Humph!" growled the other with disgust, "get a load of that pirate! Chaplin got laughs with the same stunt year ago!"

June 5, 1931
Jack Benny of the Big Time says that maybe it is a good thing that the Sharkey-Carnera fight has been called off.
"I'm afraid," says Jack, "that Sharkey couldn't hit Carnera high enough to foul him."

June 7, 1931
At the Palace Joe Wong, a China lad, and his oriental act start the program.
Jack Benny, the master of ceremonies, follows the turn. "You must admit," says Benny with a poker face, "that we have an unusual act to begin the show—a Chinese act! Gosh, I always thought in vaudeville you had to have Japs or better to open!"

July 5, 1931
And it was Jack Benny who said that he a horrible dream. He dreamed Dracula ran into Jimmy Durante.
"And what happened?"
"Dracula ran like Hell!"

July 19, 1931
Jack Benny relates the one about the dialecticians, who crashed a snooty and exclusive country club which also featured swimming, fishing, boating, tennis, etc. On their first day at golf they drew the states and frowns of members, because they were attired in overalls, instead of golf outfits.
"Of all things!" they heard people say, "they do not even know what to wear for golf! What etiquette!"
The next day at breakfast, however, the members were kindlier, for the dialecticians were smartly attired in white shirts, ducks, red ties, white shoes and golf sweaters.
But their prestige was lost again when they put on silk top hats and Moe turned to Jake and chirped: "Jakey—deed you remamber to breeng de feeshing teckle?"

September 14, 1931
Jack Benny's thrust at Abe Lyman (at the Palace): "Aw, if your musicians didn't show up what could you do with that stick?

October 2, 1931
When Jack Benny, the big-time comic was in London recently he discussed Evelyn Laye, the British star, with his booking agent there.
"Her name," said the agent, is not 'Ev-lin' but 'Eve-a-lyn'!"
"But it always sounds so funny," said Benny, "to hear you all say 'Eve-a-lyn' when you mean 'Ev-lin.'"
"Please," begged the Englishman "It sounds just as funny to us to hear you Americans say 'Ev-lin.' Don't forget. After all, we came first!"

November 16, 1931 (Okay, this is from O.O. McIntyre, not Winchell)
Jack Benny tells of the dialect Bronxite who popped into a delicatessen to look around. He inquired the price of various articles, such as preserved fruits, home made cakes, roast turkeys and the like.
Finally, pointing to a hefty Kentucky ham, he asked the price. As he did so there was a violent clap ot thunder and vivid flash of lightning.
Cowering and looking upward, the Bronxite whined: "Can't I even esk?"

April 17, 1932
Jack Benny says that too many of us try to stop the show and only succeed in slowing it up.

This pretty well brings us up to when Jack’s show for Canada Dry debuted May 2, 1932. It’s conceded he got the job from his appearance on Ed Sullivan’s 15-minute show on March 29, 1932 on CBS. “Sisters of the Skillet” was on at the same time on the Blue Network while the Red Network was airing “Mary and Bob.” One of the many fish stories that grew over time was that the Sullivan appearance was Jack’s first on radio, which is poppycock. We’ve given a number of examples; one was on September 4, 1931 on the NBC Red network.