Party With Jay Ward

Who’s the greatest cartoon producer?

When it comes to promoting cartoons, the answer has to be Jay Ward.

Ward’s cartoons were irreverent and silly. So were his promotions. Ward may have loved the publicity stunts as much as his cartoons.

Here are some examples in a syndicated “Under Twenty” column that appeared in papers starting August 9, 1963. The column’s sub-head “For Teenagers Only” is bunk. Jay Ward cartoons are for everyone with a sense of fun, humour and iconoclasm.

Jay Ward Is Crazy Party Giver
By John Larson
A constant question comes to mind when one knows Jay Ward: “Is there a private, out-of-show-business, non-wacky individual behind all the nutty doings of the bouncing and jovial character?”
Jay Ward, creator and producer of “Bullwinkle,” is the only man who really knows that answer. No matter how many times one sees him, the only side shown is one even more wacky than the characters in “Bullwinkle.”
He won the reputation of being the nuttiest party giver and promoter since P. T. Barnum built his circus. For example: Not long ago in New York Jay gave a “Coming Home Party” on the Campus of Columbia university.
Asked why he said, “Because I’m leaving for California in the morning.” Had he gone to Columbia? “No, the only college I attended was Moose U. in Moosylvania.”
A couple of years ago a section of Hollywood's Sunset Boulevard was roped off for a block party celebrating the unveiling of a statue of Bullwinkle. Directly across the street is a huge statue of a girl rotating for advertising purposes. Jay had the Bullwinkle so constructed that the statue rotates in perfect unison with the scantilly clad “Sahara Girl.”
Meanwhile back at New York, as they say in westerns, Jay threw a picnic at the Plaza, one of New- York’s most plush hotels. So many people turned up that they ran out of picnic baskets. The hotel wasn’t too happy with the picnic idea, but their management screamed a shrill “NO” when Jay suggested they import ants from the country to attend the picnic. “After all,” he said later, “What’s a picnic without ants?”
Last March Jay took over a small coffee house and held a Gala New Year’s Eve Party. Six-foot long hero sandwiches and spaghetti were served and New Year’s Eve was celebrated at four different times between 11 o’clock and 3:30 in the morning.
“I couldn’t spend New Year’s with my New York friends last year, so I decided to do it in March. Even the weather cooperated. It snowed that day!” “On the drawing boards,” Jay told us, “is a Jailhouse Jamboree. New York is tearing down one of its jails and we have arranged to have dancing in the cells and refreshments served from the magistrates desk in the courtroom.”
In September . . . Jay’s new syndiated series “FRACTURED FLICKERS” (syndicated through Desilu) will be simultaneously premiered on Broadway and in Hollywood, in a true silent-movie tradition, Rolls Royce, of ancient vintage containing celebrities decked-out in 1920’s regalia, will pull up to the theatre entrance, and old-fashioned movie cameramen and directors will shoot newsreels on the sidewalk, amidst the blare of 1920 jazz bands and on-location crystal set radio interviews. A silent-screen star party will follow on stage.
Also planned is another “first” in motion picture history—a “Coney Island Film Festival.” A 10-car train will be rented from the subway to carry people back and forth between New York and the festival. On view, of course, will be Jay’s “Fractured Flickers. These consist of old, silent movies re-edited with the most insane words and sound effects dubbed in. “They’re for young adults. Young adults are people all the way up to 85 who have forgotten to laugh.”
What is the real Jay Ward like? We still don’t know. “The world,” he says, “is a pretty serious place. I feel that people are entitled to a laugh to break the monotony. The parties? I think everybody gets a kick out of an off beat party, that’s why I like to give them.”
The truth of the matter is that nobody, but nobody has a better time at one of Jay Ward’s parties than Jay Ward!

Locking up Bimbo

I’ve always liked how characters come out of nowhere in Fleischer Talkartoons. They may be inanimate objects that grow hands and a face, or something that just comes out of nowhere and gets into the scene.

In Bimbo’s Initiation (1931), Bimbo walks over some manhole covers while whistling, but then falls in an uncovered hole.



The nearby manhole cover become alive and jumps into place, while a mouse with a padlock rushes into the scene, locks the cover (digging up the pavement to do it) and joyously runs away. His ears make it appear he’s a New York City relative of Mickey. Or maybe one of those Van Beuren mice.



The city backgrounds are always a treat in these cartoons, with boarded up businesses and crooked, melted lampposts. The background artists are never credited.

Exclamation Mark

The cat in Ventriloquist Cat really hates dogs. He says so — on a wooden fence in his neighbourhood.



What’s odd is the cat makes an exclamation mark. Then he goes back and dots it. But there’s already a dot there.



Maybe he’s doing it to express an air of finality.

Tex Avery’s crew on this is Grant Simmons, Mike Lah and Walt Clinton, with Johnny Johnsen painting the backgrounds and Rich Hogan assisting with the story. The cat’s ventriloquist voice is by Red Coffey, the duck voice in the Tom and Jerry cartoons and, later, Biddy Buddy the duck at Hanna-Barbera.

Slappy

There was a great to-do in the early 1960s about black comedians working in front of white audiences.

Writers in Esquire,Jet and other publications covered everything from significance to content to Uncle Tom-ism.

It’s not a subject that can be discussed adequately within the confines of a blog post, but I thought I’d pass along this story from the Atlanta Daily World, August 12, 1962, to give you the flavour of the times, especially in the U.S. South. It’s a profile of nightclub comedian Slappy White.

Slappy is pretty complementary in print, but also seems a little hung up on money. Unlike some of the people he mentioned, he never really made a home in television, though things might have been different if the Soul, the black version of Laugh-In, had taken off in 1968 (he was in the pilot).

It appears some words have been dropped by the typesetter, who also has mistaken “velvet rope” for “velvet trope.”

Comic Monologist Slappy White Laughs At Himself And The World
By MARION E. JACKSON
Slappy White loves to laugh at the foibles of himself as well as the rest of the world. He has been doing just that for twenty years and he has no intention of stopping. The mile-a-minute comedian has used the lay ‘em in the aisles philosophy to project himself into the top-salaried brackets of the world’s toughest profession.
Born Melvin White, Sept. 27, 1921 in Baltimore, Md., the funnyman of the velvet trope circuit, boasts of the cleanest material in show business.
Slappy was in Atlanta, Tuesday en route to New Orleans, La., where he will become the first Negro to play the exclusive Playboy Club there. He will do a solo act without musicians or stage props. Under Louisiana law while performers can not appear on stage with Negro entertainers at the same time.
TO OPEN UP WEDGE
Why is Slappy playing under such an arrangement? “I felt I had an obligation to not only myself but my race to open this wedge. I plan to use sophisticated material which will poke fun at much of the segregation which whites have used against my people.
“By playing in New Orleans in an exclusive club for the first time, perhaps I can get the story over regarding the sensitivity of my people in face of the stereotype and myths which they have been used against them by whites.” [sic]
Slappy has been featured in Playboy Clubs in Chicago, Pittsburgh, New York and Miami, but this is his first booking in New Orleans. Elsewhere Playboy clubs are non-segregated, but all operate on a membership basis.
Having just completed an engagement at the 500 Club in Atlantic City, worked for several weeks on his material for his Crescent City engagement with his comic writer, Eugene Perrett.
NO DICK GREGORY GAGS
“I haven’t used any jokes of the Dick Gregory type in years. While I used to bug audiences with jokes along the Gregory line, I have long ago adopted a different line. I tremendously admire Jackie (Moms) Mabley, and I wrote one of the introductions to her records, I do not copy or use any of her material. The same goes for Nipsey Russell, for whom I have tremendous admiration, Redd Foxx, Pigmeat Markham, Flip Wilson, Willie Bryant, Timmy Rodgers, Hattie Noel and others who are making it big, but I am smoewhat [sic] a loner when it comes to material, timing and style.
“I’ve found out that being a comic is a tough business and unless you can crack the exclusive clubs, where the big money is being made, you’re wasting time. There simply aren’t enough Negro clubs and theaters where you can pick up the money that is paid in Las Vegas, Miami Beach, New York, Chicago and San Francisco, to name a few cities where I’ve gone over big.
LAVERN BAKER’S HUSBAND
Slappy was formerly married to commedian [sic] Pearl Bailey. A few years ago, they were divorced and he was re-married to Lavern Baker. Of Pearl Bailey, Slappy tells: “She has a wonderful talent and is one of the few stars in the United States in the $25,000 a week class. Pearl ranks among the 100 highest paid night club stars in the country.
“Lavern Baker was making it big in the rock ‘n’ roll field playing one-nighters throughout the country. She was making money and had several best-selling records on the jukebox. However, I encouraged her to enter the night club field and she’s going over big. She has not had a hit record in several months, but her earnings have doubled since she’s playing the exclusive clubs. That’s where the big money really is, and she’s finding it out. Living on a hit record is a risky business, but you can go on and on in the night club field. Come to think of it, just has [sic] Billy Eckstine, Lena Horne, Sammy Davis, Jr., Billy Daniels and Diahann, Diamita Jo. Carroll and Eartha Kitt had a hit record and make thousands a week?”
JOKED ON ALBANY
Slappy poked fun at the Albany fiasco. He tells: “I was passing through Albany and a cop gave he a ticket for speeding while I was fixing a flat tire—I offered him some money and he said, ‘Do I look like a crooked cop?’ I said don’t know, but there’s no music and you are standing there doing the twist. He said, ‘I am going to take you to jail,’ so off we went. He put me in a cell with 11 beds. I wanted to see which one was the softest, so I tried them all. As I laid down at the head of each bed, I read, ‘Martin Luther King, Jr., slept here, here, here, here, here and so on. If Martin Luther King, Jr. goes to jail one more time they’re going to make him fight Floyd Patterson for he’ll have a better record than Sonny Liston.”
It was as a candy boy at the old Royal Theater in Baltimore that Slappy was first exposed to show business. There, he saw the great acts of the day, including Sandy Burns, Dusty Fletcher, Abbott and Costello and Red Skelton, while working 20 hours a day for $6 a week.
Slappy played his first white night club in 1957, when Dick Gregory was still working in the Chicago Post Office.
His lone Atlanta appearance was in 1950 at the Waluhaje Apartments, where he appeared with Dinah Washington.
RENEWED ACQUAINTANCES
While renewed acquaintances with B.B. Beamon at his Auburn Avenue restaurant and brought him greetings from Lavern Baker. The celebrated comic monologist also clowned with the kitchen staff before eating his favorite salad.
Later, Slappy visited Tommy Tomblestone, Allan McKellar and his Mercury Recording Company outlet in Atlanta. He plans to return to Atlanta following his three-week engagement in New Orleans.
Incidentally, it was in New Orleans that White played his first white club, The club owner hired him sight unseen, because then Slappy had no photographs to send he was believed a Caucasion [sic]. When White showed up the owner wanted to call the whole thing off, but couldn’t reach the agent through whom the comic had been hired.
The sheriff ordered Slappy to have a separate dressing room set up from the white band and the owner provided him with a rented trailer in back of the club. It was so lavish that the members of the band moved in with him.

Slappy went on to appearances on stage in Vegas (for a time, he partnered with Steve Rossi), on TV with former partner Redd Foxx (on both Foxx’s sitcom and variety show) and on turntables (comedy records were still big then). He died of a heart attack in 1995 at age 73.

Can I Borrow a Cup of Gags?

Pigs in a Polka is expertly timed by director Friz Freleng to Brahms’ music, including the obligatory scene where the Big Bad Wolf huffs and huffs but can’t blow down the pigs’ brick house.

Instead, there’s a gag.



Warners wasn’t above re-using routines. The gag comes from Tex Avery’s A Gander at Mother Goose, released three years earlier in 1940.



Later, it’s revealed Big Bad Wolf has a wind-up record player stashed in her shawl disguise.



A similar gag popped up in 1933 in the Van Beuren cartoon Fresh Ham, a good Cubby Bear cartoon.



There’s no writer credit on this Blue Ribbon release of Pigs in a Polka, though apparently the original credits exist.

Shock the Cat

You get electricity zapped through you every time you pick up the end of a power cord, right? You do if you’re in a Columbia cartoon.



Here’s the Screen Gems version of the gag from Big House Blues, released in 1947. The mouths change shape so the shot isn’t static.



The animation is generally good in the late Columbia cartoons. Grant Simmons and Jay Sarbry get the animation credits. Animator Roy Jenkins came up with the story. Directed by Howard Swift. Bill Weaver was the layout guy on the Rhapsodies when this cartoon was made.

Eddie Kilfeather’s music during the chase scenes has no urgency. It’s finger-snappin,’ toodle-looin’ happy. And it’s arranged for maybe seven pieces. There’s no full Warners or MGM orchestra at Screen Gems.

This is the last Flippy the canary cartoon. In fact, the cartoon studio had been closed for good when this came out.

Iris the Bride

“Whaddya want, Mac?” screeched the drug store waitress at Jack Benny.

She was new amongst Jack’s secondary cast in the early ‘50s, but Iris Adrian had been around a lot longer than that.

Adrian left Hollywood where she grew up to become a show girl as the Depression hit. She left Broadway to return to Hollywood, where she had a steady career in movies with titles like Too Many Blondes and Gold Diggers of 1937. Benny hired her and pretty soon, TV producers had her typecast as a hardboiled waitress.

Her career in the ‘60s took her far away from the land of leggy, plumed dancers. She was hired to appear in squeaky-clean Walt Disney family comedies like The Shaggy D.A. and The Love Bug. But she was also a regular in Ted Knight’s quickly-cancelled 1978 sitcom where he played the owner of an escort service. I suspect her lifestyle in New York might have made her aware of such establishments in real life.

Here she is in part two of a feature profile in the Charlotte News published May 24, 1975 (Click here for Part 1). She talks about her time with Jack Benny and how Jack’s wife played a role in her career. The photo below accompanied the article.

‘I Was Always Getting Wed’
By EMERY WISTER
News Staff Writer
HOLLYWOOD — Iris Adrian wears a diamond ring on her hand and the gem itself looks as big as a silver dollar.
"You can call it a wedding ring if you want," she said. "I was always getting married, I would get lonesome for some guy I missed and I'd marry another.
"My first husband was worth $60 million or so he told me. He forgot to mention his grandmother had already left her money to someone else.
"Then I married another guy. He expected me to support him so that ended right away. Then there was a third marriage in their somewhere.
“I MARRIED my fourth and present husband, Fido Murphy, 23 years ago. This marriage wasn't any better than the others. We should have got rid of each other right away but we just got used to each other.
"I guess we got on because he was on the road most of the time. He still is. He's a coach to the Chicago Bears professional football team. I don't travel with him. He doesn't want me.
“There was one rich man I liked. He had millions and I really should have gone ahead and married him and to hell with honour.
"He finally married a dame with big feet. If there was one thing I couldn't stand it was a man whose feet were smaller than mine and his were."
Iris Adrian was dancing in high school when she was in the ninth grade. That's when she quit.
"I couldn't see much sense to it," she recalled. "What did I have to learn about George Washington's habits for? So I just dropped out of classes altogether."
"BUT WHILE I didn't want to study, I didn't mind working. Once I was sweeping the sidewalk in front of my house and a Hindu man called me a pig. He thought it was disgraceful that a woman should be doing that kind of work.
"I used to own a lot of real estate. At one time I owned four houses, but sold them. People were beginning to think I was some kind of madam."
It must have been 30 years ago that the late Jack Benny's wife Mary Livingstone called her on the telephone and asked her to go on Benny's stage show. This was after Benny's radio show had gone off the air.
Iris agreed and she and another actress were teamed as the Landrews Sisters, a takeoff on the Andrews Sisters, then, a top singing team.
"I stayed with Benny about 30 years," she said. "I guess he was about the nearest person to God I ever knew.
“He used to say to me 'why can't you think of me as just a boob and not a star?' But I never could. When he died I felt a little alone without him. We went all over the world together, saw every place worth seeing with him."
IRIS ADRIAN started young and, in her own words, tried to stay young. She was about 15 when she got her first job in Fred Waring's show.
"They called the show 'Rah-Rah Days.' I got the lead when Dorothy Lee became ill. That must have been about 1929."
Then came New York and later Hollywood and people like George Raft, Ray Milland, the Marx Bros. She can't remember it all but she does remember a man named Jimmy Durante.

“I could write a book about him. I remember he used to date a girl named Harriet Fish. Once he gave her a fur coat and a day or two later it was stolen. In those days men were accused of giving a girl a coat and then hiring some thug to steal it.
"I LOVED New York in those days. There weren't so many people in the world and it seemed like I knew everybody in town. Walter Winchell, Ed Sullivan and all those fellows would come to the restaurant where I liked to eat every night. Today I don't know anyone. And today's living has done something to men. They stopped cheating on their wives. They found TV is better.
"I don't go to the movies any more. I don't like 'em any more, and besides I'm too busy being interviewed about the good old days.
"Jack Benny gave me a wonderful party when I was 60. I don't mind telling my age. Like I said, I'm 62, and I don't look on my age as some disease I've contracted. If I say I'm 42, people will say 'Who does this old bag think she's kidding?' So then should I say, well, I'm really 48 and if you don't believe it, I'll punch you in the nose.
"Most people don't know this but Jack Benny contracted diabetes when he was just 56. It was the best thing that could have happened to him. It made him keep his figure and he was active right up until the time he died at 80."
TWICE A MONTH, Iris Adrian can be found standing in line at the unemployment office collecting a check for $180.
"Many of the old stars won't do this, but I'm going to do it. I get $90 a week but in order for me to collect, I still have to earn about $3,000 a year. I was offered a television series but I don't want to start that now. I'm not running out of money but out of time. You have to do something with your life when you're young.
"I don't want to go back to New York now. I don't know anybody there. All my friends have either died or gone to the chair.
"I never had any children, not by any of my marriages. I didn't want any. All the time I was married to my millionaire I was afraid I'd get pregnant and be stuck with him and the baby. I had to take care of mother and grandmother and they were enough for me."

Life at the Charles Mintz Studio

An office boy once claimed he was responsible for the Charlie Mintz cartoons making it onto the screen. Which may explain a lot about their lack of quality.

Actually, the office boy was kidding, and I suspect everybody at Screen Gems worked long and hard. But the Columbia releases don’t really show it. In the Mintz years, there were some funny cartoons at the outset in the ‘30s; who can dislike a cartoon with opening animation of an elephant playing his trunk like a saxophone? But by the time Mintz died at the end of the decade, something had gone haywire. The studio relied on show biz caricatures, and plots were someone undeserving got harassed. Even Mel Blanc’s voice work lacks amusement as he reads lacklustre dialogue. He yelled too often.

Things didn’t improve before the studio closed in November 1946, having been taken over by Columbia. Some animation was expertly done but there were too many cartoons that left you wondering “What did I just watch?”

Despite this, there were talented people and some of the cartoons shine through.

Here are a couple of stories about the Mintz operations. There were actually two studios in the ‘20s. Mintz’s brother-in-law George Winkler made Oswald shorts in Caligornia for Universal until it decided to sign a deal with Walter Lantz. In New York, another team made Krazy Kat cartoons. Mintz combined everyone on the West Coast in early 1930 and formally merged both corporate studios the following year.

This first story appeared in newspapers starting January 18, 1930.

Animated Cartoons Explained
NEW YORK—Animated cartoons form one of the most interesting novelties upon the screen. They represent an entirely different technic from the ordinary motion picture. The cartoon and the feature film both commence with a scenario and from that point diverge into different channels.
The Winkler Film Corporation from whose studio the famous Krazy Kat Kartoons issue is the oldest company in the industry devoted exclusively to the production of animated cartoons. For over fifteen years under the supervision of Charles B. Mintz, president of the concern, animated cartoons have been created in the Winkler Studios of New York and Hollywood. During that period nearly every animator of importance has worked for the firm at some time or another.
The Krazy Kat Kartoons, now being released by Columbia Pictures Corporation, are the creations of Ben Harrison and Mannie Gould. The two men work together plotting the antics of the educated feline and after having arranged a complete continuity turn it over to a staff of twenty animators, who make the separate drawings that go into the film.
It takes approximately 9,000 separate drawings made with pen ink to produce a six minute cartoon. Twenty men work for four weeks perfecting the extraordinary athletic maneuverings which go into these few minutes.
The introduction of sound has brought certain changes in the animated cartoon in the way of speech, synchronized scores and sound effects so elaborate that the drawings must be more carefully made in order to fit the music closely. Under Joe DeNat, musical director, a ten piece orchestra prepares and executes the musical score while four effect men under the direction of an expert in queer and unusual sounds provide the incidental noises. When the drawings are completed, they are filmed a drawing at a time. The completed animated action film is then synchronized with the speech, effects and music.

Here’s a feature story from the Los Angeles Evening Citizen News of May 28, 1936. The photos accompanied the article. It’s a shame these are scans of photocopies of the newspaper, not the actual photos. My thanks to Devon Baxter for supplying them.



Animating Cartoon Seen Snail-like in Pace
110 Specialists ‘Combine’ To Turn Out 7 Minutes Of Screen Allure
By MORTON THOMPSON
A man with a atop watch sits in his shirtsleeves at a draughtsman's desk. The ticking of metronome punctuates his pencil strokes. At the end of the board a cigaret burns unnoticed into the wood. A cartoon comedy has begun for the screen.
Five months later, 110 specialists will have developed the animated cartoon idea begun to those first nimble sketches into the finished screen product.
The man with the stop watch paces a rough draft of his ideas. He hands it to the studio’s staff of composers. Music is scored to fit each minute action.
A staff of animators continue the sketches. They leave many gaps. Dozens of draughtsmen fill in the progress of action in these gaps. A roomful of girls trace the completed drawings on celluloid. Other girls brush in color. A special camera department films the result in careful sequence. As cautiously as a surgeon times his strokes in an operation near a beating heart the cutting room crew edits the completed film. And at length, after many projections and executive conferences, the cartoon comedy is finished.
It will be set before on audience. It will run exactly 420 seconds.
Machine Precision
That is the story back of one of the cinema’s most popular short features— the animated cartoon comedy. Like a well drilled army of scientists, each move timed, each line exact, each detail as precise as a mathematical formula the work goes painstakingly and never-endingly on.
At the Charles Mintz Studio at 7000 Santa Monica Blvd., an institution which pioneered in the industry, such a picture of activity has been in progress for years.
Animated cartoons are costly. That seven minutes entertainment you saw on the screen cost from $15,000 to $22,000 to produce, Mr. Mintz disclosed.
His plant ran never satisfy the demand. Their goal is 26 pictures a year. Usually they manage to eke out 20 or 21.
Temperament Lacking
There are no problems of actors or director's temperament on an animated cartoon studio producer's mind, but there is a large staff of highly trained experts— artists if you like— working at constant tension and high speed, to be considered. And each has an inordinate pride in his work.
Mr. Mintz, for instance, will confide with a sympathetic smile that Joe De Nat, the studio composer, has a very important role to fill.
"The picture is made or marred right here in the music department," Mr. De Nat avers strongly.
Something in the same line is expressed with the same certainty by Ben Harrison, the man with the stop watch. “The picture,” he smiles confidently “is made or marred right here in the story idea department.”
And Art Davis, Sidney Marcus and Al Rose, the animators, will draw you aside to whisper that of course the really IMPORTANT work is the animator’s work and of course Eddie Killfeather, the arranger, and Bernie Grossman, the lyricist, smile tolerantly at this for they KNOW.
Credit Where Due
And over the entire scene Mr. Mintz and Jimmy Bronis, his assistant, grin benignly, “Come and see us again soon,” they urge. “Nice how the boys shoulder responsibility for the picture's success, isn’t it. We like to encourage them in their attitude. Naturally, you know, the picture couldn't get to first base without the producing staff.”
It would have made a very impressive speech if the office boy hadn't stopped us as we were leaving. He had his arms full of manuscript bundles and drawings, and he was evidently bound on some brisk errand into the labyrinth of drawing room.
"Say" he croaked “you ain't letting them big shots fool you are you? Where would they be,” he pleaded, “if it wasn't for me bringing the stuff around to them to get started on in the first place? All I gotta do is be five minutes late. Why the whole picture is made or . . .”
The man with the stop watch had already begun a new picture.

Fansites for all kinds of things have come and gone. Pietro Shakarian toiled on a site devoted to the Columbia cartoons, including post-Mintz. It’s not on-line anymore but has been preserved at Archive.org. And you can view Harry McCracken’s obsession with Columbia’s Scrappy series in our right-hand list of sites.

There are some very low res Columbia cartoons on a few of the video sites for you to check out. Perhaps some day we’ll see them treated better and DVD releases from 16mm or 35mm prints available. The demand may only be for die-hard classic animation fans, but the shorts deserve preservation and an examination by a new generation of cartoon lovers.

Is the Next Gag Going to Be Better?

Tex Avery pretty much invented the spot-gag cartoon. He got Oscar nominations for a couple. The idea was copied by every cartoon studio. It’s, therefore, really sad to see the master and inventor of the format fall so far by coming up with The Farm of Tomorrow.

For one thing, the picture smells of cost-cuts. There are plenty of static shots used to set up a gag. They’re nice-looking though. They have coloured outlines.



But the gags! Ouch. We get a bunch involving crossing a chicken with something. In this case, it’s a chicken and a parrot. It means when the chicken lays an egg, she can shout to the farmer “Come and get it!”



The best part is fans of Paul Frees, June Foray and Daws Butler get to hear their favourite voice artists.

MGM released this in 1954 after Tex had left the studio.

Cloud Choreography

It’s raining in the Flip the Frog cartoon The Cuckoo Murder Mystery (1930). Rain clouds are dancing in the sky.



They join together and twirl in a circle.



The clouds are now one semi-smiling cloud surrounded by lightning bolts.



Ah, that's how we get rain.



Ub Iwerks would have you believe he did this cartoon himself.