Cartoon Rule 219: Hypodermic Needles Stab You

Yes, folks, whenever a cartoon character has a hypodermic needle, you know what’s going to happen.

Here’s an example from The Tree Surgeon, a 1944 MGM cartoon under the direction of George Gordon. The cartoon stars a donkey as a doctor trying to cure the ills of a tree that doesn’t want to get a shot. He shakes the surgeon off a limb.



The vitamin somehow turns the donkey into a quasi-tree.



About half-way through the cartoon we learn a termite is causing all the woes for the sick tree. It ends with the donkey again turned into a tree and the termite getting set to snack on him. I was going to say another Cartoon Rule is “termites always win,” but that wasn’t the case in the Woody Woodpecker short Termites From Mars.

Arnold Gillespie, Mike Lah and Ed Barge are the animators here. No story or background credits.

Changing the Push

“Why don’t we see anything about Hippety Hopper on your blog?” asked absolutely no one.

Well, I suspect someone likes those Giant Mouse cartoons. I’ve learned, to paraphrase Art Linkletter, fans love the darndest things.

Background painter Dick Thomas seems so uninterested in Bell Hoppy (released in 1954) he can’t keep the spelling of “Push” on a fence board consistent from scene to scene to scene.



Director Bob McKimson inherited animators from Bob Clampett who seem to have been given leeway to go as much over the top as they wanted. McKimson knocked that out of them after a few years. There are still a few of scenes I like in this one, mainly when the dopey cats hear a bell and rush into the frame to beat up Sylvester. This one takes five frames. Nice dry brush here, ink and paint department.



Another good scene is when Sylvester gets the cowbell over the “mouse.” His expressions are good but I can’t help but think what Rod Scribner (or Manny Gould if he had been in the unit then) could have done if they had been let loose. Scribner animates on this cartoon, along with Phil De Lara, Chuck McKimson and Herman Cohen. (Late note: Thad Komorowski tells me this is Scribner's scene).

Tedd Pierce wrote the cartoon and supplies an incidental voice; I’ve always liked his voice work at Warners. He borrows the Harpo Marx mirror bit and tosses it into the plot.

Carl Stalling picked Julie Styne and Sammy Cahn’s “That Was a Big Fat Lie” for the cue under the opening credits.

De-Corning America

At the start of network radio comedy, you had Ed Wynn pulling off routines he had done in vaudeville. Almost 20 years later, at the start of network TV comedy, you had Ed Wynn doing them all over again.

Fred Allen certainly thought comedy was retrograding and griped about it in the early ‘50s. But Jack Benny didn’t think so. He felt just the opposite. He might have been right.

Wynn’s show didn’t last terribly long on television. Even the King of Television, Milton Berle, wore out his welcome after a few years. The loud, hyper Jerry Lester was dumped from late night TV and eventually replaced with the calmer, more intellectual Steve Allen. New people with a different way of expressing humour were coming along: Nichols and May, Bob Newhart.

Ironically, Benny was one of the old-timers who stuck around but his show depended on situation and characters than old comedy banter.

Here are his thoughts in a syndicated column from 1950.

Americans Getting Smarter About Jokes, Benny Says
By PATRICIA CLARY
Hollywood, Sept. 6. Americans are getting smarter all the time, Jack Benny said today. They don't think mother-in-law jokes or Benny's nickel tips are funny any more. Audiences have been decorned, Benny said, since he started in radio 19 years ago.
"We're a lot more sophisticated than we used to be. We know all about everything. We demand new and better entertainment," he said. "The mother-in-law joke was practically the foundation of radio. Now it's just corny.
"I used to use jokes about my leaving a nickel tip when I should have left a quarter. Now I've established the stingy character, and it's still funny, but we have to be subtle about it."
Benny took his wallet out of the deep freeze and took us to lunch at Romanoff's, the most expensive place in town, where everything's gold-plated from the customers to the rest rooms.
He's not really stingy. He didn't wince a bit at thawing out $3 for a plate of hash.
Benny himself had an egg. He's watching that waistline. Benny will go back on the radio Sunday over C.B.S. for his 19th straight year--the longest stretch of any radio comic. What people think is funny has changed so much since then, he said, that his first show would smell from here to Cucamonga.
"Hello, folks," he introduced himself in 1932. "This is Jack Benny. There will be a slight pause for everyone to say, 'Who cares?'"
The comics who got all the howls in those days romped on stage, said, "A funny thing happened to me on the way to the studio," and fired jokes as if they were reading straight out of Joe Miller.
"People were used to that and had to be educated to accept anything better," Benny said. "A few of us led the way with situation comedy. Now they don't like the corny old jokes. They've been decorned, you might say."
Benny's first shows were so new they kidded the sponsor and satirized commercials.
"I did everything Henry Morgan 'introduced'," he said, "except get fired."
After kidding talking commercials, he kidded singing commercials. This year, keeping pace with the public, he kids television commercials.
It’s tough figuring out what's going to be funny each year and sometimes a guy gets a bit ahead. Like the time 20 years ago Benny appeared on the London Palladium stage wearing a business suit.
“They'd never seen a comedian who didn't wear baggy pants,” he said. “The show was half over before they caught on I was funny anyway.”

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.