Fern Fan Dance

Nobody in Hicksville knows who famous hotel guest Miss Glory is, including Abner the bellhop.

He approaches a matron and asks her if she’s Miss Glory. She snootily ignores him but then finds that her dress has been torn off because he’s standing on it. Fortunately, some ferns are close at hand.



Now the matron turns into a fan dancer.



Spotlight, please.



She alternates between enjoying her dance and being stiff and upper-crust.



Her undergarment has no patch.



Now it does.



She suddenly shocks herself with the realises she’s fan dancing. She quickly turns coy to end the scene.



Tex Avery directs this art moderne short, an unusual pick for Leon Schlesinger considering Tex was new at the studio and this is far from his usual gag style. Despite that, it’s got some humour and a tidy little plot, though the designs are the stars in this cartoon.

Bob Clampett, Chuck Jones, Virgil Ross and Sid Sutherland are the animators, with Bobe Cannon and Cecil Surry assisting.

Now I Will Make a Black Eye Appear

Popeye employs something a little less than magic to get revenge for deadbeat Bluto splashing mustard on his face in We Aim To Please (1934).

That’s nothing, watch this, Popeye indicates. First we see that he has nothing hidden in his towel. You can follow the gag.



I’ve liked the title song ever since I saw this cartoon 60 years ago (Music by Sammy Timberg, lyrics by Jack Scholl). Interestingly, there are whole stretches where no background music is heard at all.

Willard Bowsky and Dave Tendlar receive screen credits for animation.

Roasting Benny

Show biz people moved from New York to Los Angeles, so it was only appropriate that parts of show biz should move with them. So it was the Friars Club was started in California by Milton Berle and his compatriots in 1947.

The Friars were known for their roasts. Broadway and trade reporters sanitised their coverage of the events back East and the same thing happened in the West. The way they were reported, they were as harmless as a radio comedy show script.

Jack Benny was the victim of the first Hollywood Friars roast; it seems to me he was the “guest of honour” as the same kind of testimonial dinner in New York years earlier. Here’s how it was reported by the Newspaper Enterprise Association on July 7, 1947.

Jack Benny Is 'Honored' Guest At Friars Fete
BY ERSKINE JOHNSON
HOLLYWOOD (NEA)—Fred Allen would have been drooling. All of Jack Benny's friends were insulting him at the first stag beefsteak dinner given by Hollywood's new Friars Club. (Jack consented to appear only after being assured that he wouldn't be charged for his dinner.)
The speaker’s table looked like a million-dollar movie cast—George Burns, Danny Kaye, Groucho Marx, George Jessel, Sam Goldwyn, Eddie Cantor, Parkyakarkus, Orson Welles, George Murphy and Pat O'Brien. The greatest wits in show business, plus the nit-wit—Benny.
Benny was the Friar's first victim—the questionable guest of honor in what will be a series of roast dinners with Jessel as roastmaster.
Jessel started things off by telling a Benny anecdote and then adding. "I was married but I can't recall to whom at the time."
Eddie Cantor just couldn't insult his old friend and praised him instead. So Jessel insulted Cantor.
"It's easy to wax sentimental," said Jessel, "when you haven't got any jokes."
But everyone else ripped Benny to shreds. "They charged 85 cents to see Benny's last movie, 'The Horn Blows at Midnight, " said Groucho Marx, who then added, "They charged it but they didn't get it."
Fred Allen, of course, wired from New York: "There isn't a beefsteak big enough to cover the black eye Jack Benny has given show business."
Jessel introduced Sam Goldwyn as "Hugo Goldwyn, the man who makes all those mistakes in English but when he makes pictures we should make such mistakes."
Pat O'Brien thought Goldwyn's speech about Benny was much too sentimental. "It sounded," said Pat, "like the 'Best Tears of Our Lives.' "
Orson Welles cracked that the only reason Benny was guest of honor was to remind movie makers of Benny's existence.
But Orson got it, too. Jessel introduced him as the "distinguished everything. When we called up Orson to join us he told me, 'I'll be there, I'll cook the dinner, dress the room, make all the speeches, and clean up.' "
Benny took it all with a smile. "This," said Jack, "is not a spot for a suave comedian."
Jack thought it was a mistake to appoint Bing Crosby as a Friar dean. "He isn't here tonight." said Jack. "In fact, he didn't even send in a transcription."
Jack looked at Sheriff Eugene Biscailuz of Los Angeles and quipped: "He looks like a sheriff in a Pine and Thomas picture."
The Friars just moved into their new clubhouse—the onetime Clover Club where Hollywood folk once lost thousands at the dice and roulette tables. "We were a little late to opening," said Jessel. "It took us three days just to get the dice out of here."

Hedda Hopper wrote in her column that the Friars should have recorded the “tributes” and sold the recordings to stag clubs for $1,000 to go to charity. Jack was as baudy as everyone else that evening.

He was lauded by the Friars a number of occasions; one of his roasts was (necessarily) edited and put on television, sponsored by Kraft as a special replacement for the Kraft Music Hall (from these dinner, a non-Friars series of specials was developed for TV starring Dean Martin). Jack served a term as abbot of the Los Angeles Friars organisation which fell apart through legalities and other problems in 2008.

Can You Guess the Gag?

Puny Express was the first cartoon Walter Lantz made after his studio shut down for a period around 1949-50; the Hollywood Reporter of August 9, 1950 said Lantz was hiring animators, painters, inkers and background artists to work on shorts under a new contract with Universal-International. The same publication reported on December 8th that Puny Express was being delivered to Universal that day. It was released January 22, 1951.

Lantz brought back animator La Verne Harding and scenic painter Fred Brunish, and used stories that Bugs Hardaway and Heck Allen had in the works before the shutdown. Dick Lundy said he timed this cartoon as well. If so, the pace is a lot quicker than what he was doing pre-shutdown.

The cartoon doesn’t feature the fine acting you could see in the late ‘40s shorts released by United Artists cartoons courtesy of Fred Moore, Ed Love and Ken O’Brien, or the quirky action of Pat Matthews. There isn’t really time for it anyways. It’s, more or less, a chase cartoon. Woody Woodpecker is hired as a Pony Express mail deliverer. Buzz Buzzard is the villain trying to rob him (and, judging by wanted posters, kill him).

Lantz made the characters silent in the first few cartoons of his new Universal release because, Associated Press columnist Gene Handsaker reported, it saved $1,500 per session on redubbing for international release. (Of course there was another way around this—hire your wife to play the starring character. It’s keeping the money in the family). The lack of dialogue is awkward in a couple of places in this cartoon. At the beginning, Woody is getting bounced around by the pony he’s riding (but not in the rest of the short). He stops and looks at his behind. He really should say something in reaction here but just carries on again. Later, when Woody tries to convince the pig running the express office to hire him, he gesticulates. Why doesn’t he just tell him instead of playing charades? This kind of thing works well with Felix the Cat and others in the silent era (a time when Lantz made his first cartoons) but it just doesn’t fit here. And how I miss the evil growl that Lionel Stander gave to Buzz in the ‘40s.

Hardaway and Allen aren’t above pulling off old gags. One is when Buzz screeches to a stop at a railway crossing. He looks both ways. You know exactly what’s going to happen.



There’s a “horned toad” pun that reminds of me something Tex Avery would use (see the school crossing gag in Lucky Ducky). But the short just kind of ends. Woody and Buzz go back-and-forth grabbing the mail bag. There’s no plot resolution and not much of a build-up. There’s an explosion, Woody grabs the bag and runs off into the distance along the railway tracks. The end.

There are some good designs. Buzz has a comicly annoyed black horse that uses a fly swatter to get rid of flies. Again, the movement is not elaborate but the scene plays well enough. In fact, Woody got a new design. His “hair” resembles a pompadour instead of being straight back, so the old opening animation by Emery Hawkins had to be replaced. It would be modified again in the next short, Sleep Happy, with Woody pecking out his name.

In addition to Harding, Lantz re-hired Ray Abrams, formerly of Tex Avery’s unit of MGM and an earlier Lantz animator, and brought in Don Patterson (1957 photo, right), the older brother of MGM animator Ray Patterson. Don had been employed at Metro until the Lah-Blair unit was disbanded in 1948; his whereabouts before he was hired at Lantz are unknown but he likely was at a commercial studio (he and Ray Patin had an animation school in 1933 based out of Patin’s home). Others came and went but these four stuck with Lantz through the 1950s (Harding and Patterson were hired by Hanna-Barbera at the end of the decade).

Among the talent lost during the shut down was musical director Darrell Calker. Lantz brought in Clarence Wheeler, who had scored a number of shorts in the '40s, including George Pal’s Puppetoons. He began in radio in Chicago in 1932 with Variety calling him “an unknown musical arranger.” Some of his scores for Lantz were fairly inventive. He opens and closes this cartoon (excluding the titles) with a self-composed theme.

It’s not a bad cartoon overall. Lantz produced some solid shorts in the ‘50s but their numbers evaporate as time goes on.

No Skunk For Bunny

Tex Avery was known for outrageous cartoon takes but he didn’t use them all the time.

In Little ‘Tinker (released 1948), the lovelorn skunk stops in mid-air when he sees a female squirrel.



Gag: eyelash beckons the skunk to “come hither.”



As Cartoon Rule 514 states that skunks must smell at all times, the skunk’s floral gift wilts and then the girl squirrel sniffs and reacts.



You can see the first “smell” take is pretty mild. Avery’s building things up, which makes things funnier. He’ll get more outrageous later in the cartoon.

Now the gag.



Bill Shull, Grant Simmons, Walt Clinton and Bob Bentley are the credited animators. Ex Disney artist Louie Schmitt designed the characters.

Triangles, triangles

A novel way of opening a cartoon can be found in the Ub Iwerks ComiColor short The Headless Horseman.

If you know the story of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” you’ll know it involves a love triangle. After the opening titles, the characters are introduced in triangles and interact with each other.



The short tries to be creative with 3-D effects. Parts of the background move at different pan rates, so that makes the scenes look less like a flat newspaper panel. There’s one where Ichabod Crane’s desk turns, which was pretty good for its time. There’s no dialogue so Carl Stalling’s score has to create the mood.

The cartoon was in production in June 1934 and was the first of the ComiColors to be released, via States Rights, for the 1934-35 film season on October 1st.

Florence Halop

Short with huge glasses and a voice from a Brooklyn frog pond. That’s how everyone remembers Florence Halop, who had a short but memorable career on Night Court in the mid-‘80s.

That’s not how she looked about 30 years earlier, when she played the mother on Meet Millie. What you saw on screen back then wasn’t what she looked like, either. She put on 40 pounds of padding for the role, as she had barely turned 30 and looked more like the character she had been playing on Jimmy Durante’s radio show in the late ‘40s, Hot Breath Houlihan.

And she certainly didn’t look like she did when she appeared on a 15-minute show on WSGH in Brooklyn in 1929. That’s because she was six.

Halop’s role on Durante was so well-known, the characters in the book, movie and TV series “M*A*S*H” could play with it when referring to Major Margaret Houlihan.

She was busy on radio in the ‘40s, being a regular on several shows, including Passion DiMaggio on the Jack Paar show. Her best known role was that of Miss Duffy on Duffy’s Tavern. Halop amusingly recalled once how critic John Crosby referred to her as “the Grover Cleveland of Miss Duffys in that she is the only one with a split administration.” She took over the role after the first Miss Duffy, Shirley Booth, divorced her husband, Duffy creator Ed Gardner. She found Gardner a little too difficult to get along with and quit, only to return several years later after a revolving door of actresses in the part.

Here’s a story from one of the newspaper magazine supplements of December 12, 1943. Halop’s age is legitimate. Child and teenage stars were known to shave a few years off and keep them off through adulthood (Arnold Stang, Walter Tetley, Janet Waldo) to improve their employment chances. Well, for a while. Three years later, a New York Daily News story has only aged her by a year.

The New Help at Duff’s Tavern in Florence Halop
SHE'S a Dead End Kid sister—she played Mae West at the age of 12.
She's the new Miss Duffy of Duffy's Tavern: Florence Halop, pert, 20, red-haired, green-eyed, microphonic mimic and character actress.
Brother Billy Halop was a Dead End Kid of Broadway and Hollywood fame and his career moved the family from New York to California. Florence went to law school there but didn't let the wherefores and whereases interfere with getting before the camera with her brother and with Bonita Granville.
But before that, she had gotten herself off to a fine start in radio at the age of 5 by singing on "The Children's Hour" and falling off her platform in the middle of it, thereby furnishing her own sound effects.
At 12 on the March of Time program she did Mae West and skipped lightly from that to Shirley Temple all in the same night.
Before joining Duffy she was heard with Colonel Stoopnagle, and on the Kate Smith hour.
Out of hundreds of auditioners for the Miss Duffy part to replace Shirley Booth she won by an accent—Brooklyn, of course.
Florence says the funniest experience she's ever had in radio happened in Duffy's Tavern—and she'll probably say that again and again. Archie (Ed Gardner) was roughing up one of the guests—this time Orson Welles, who was tossing the words with Archie, but sitting down, for he had a broken ankle. Welles was monkeying around and Gardner suddenly ad-libbed—"for a guy with a broken ankle you certainly step on a lot of laughs."
Her biggest thrills, she says, came when working with Arturo Toscanini and the NBC Symphony orchestra, and when doing a dramatic sketch with Madame Schumann-Heink. Her hardest part was being a cold-blooded killer on "District Attorney" while she gave her audience chills, she was running a fever of 102 degrees.
With her background in radio Florence is really in good condition to take on the unpredictable Archie. If she studies hard on his latest outburst, his "Duffy's First Reader," she should be able to hang on the required number of rounds. If he says toe-may-toe, she knows he just means a dame, but if he raises his eyebrows and lowers his voice a half octave with toe-mah-toe, why that's a dame from Park Avenue, according to lessons in grammar from his Reader. Vice versa to Archie is a reversible vice (he has something there), semipro is a ball player paid half of the time, maggot is a person of rank—as "a big financial maggot." Yes, she'll have a good time!

Halop took a break from supporting roles on radio shows (The Falcon, Gangbusters) to visit Florida. We learn a bit more about her in this story in the St. Petersburg Times of May 19, 1946.

“HELLO, BIG BOY”
Blond Florence Halop, Star Of Screen. Radio Visits City
Florence Halop—vivacious blond actress-model of radio, stage and screen—has two kinds of "personalities:" The type Johnny Mercer sings about and the witty charm that makes for conversational laughter and popularity.
She brought both of them with her to St. Petersburg for a short vacation and at the moment she has most of the 14-year-olds at Admiral Farragut academy acting in their "Best Foot Forward" menner [sic]. She and her mother are visiting Joel, 12-year-old Farragut cadet and Florence's younger brother. Her big brother is Billy Halop, famous "Dead End Kid" of stage and screen.
RADIO is the main medium which has transported Miss Halop's talents all over the nation and the world. She is the second "Miss Duffy" of Archie's Tavern. She was Kay Kyser’s commedienne and originator of the “Oh, your father's moustache!” line. She made "Hello, Big Boy" a favorite salutation when she appeared on the Ballentine show as a "low down sexy dame. She had comedy spots on the Maizie show with Ann Sothern recently, and plays often on “Mr. D. A.” programs and on “Mr. and Mrs. North.”
"I was a sneaky murderess with a southern accent on the North show one night and Joel wouldn't write to me for two weeks!" Florence laughed.
She credits her success in radio to something called "the breaks," but a brief look at her career reveals the important presence of hard work and good sense.
FLORENCE began following Billy to radio shows at the age of four, and soon began reading parts herself. When she was 10 she became the voices of "characters," Shirley Temple and Mae West on the old "March of Time" cast under Orson Welles' leadership.
When Orson formed his famed Mercury theatre, Florence joined and played in plays from ancient Greek to modern ones. She became a great admirer of Welles, declares him "misunderstood." She says, "He acts like a ham and a conceited genius because it's good publicity, but he's really wonderful and very loyal to his old friends."
Florence was strictly dramatic (from Ophelia to Topsy) until she began farce comedy on Kate Smith's bond tour five years ago. After that her zany characterizations highlighted the Col. Stoopnagle show (remember "Veronica Puddle?") and she became man-crazy "Miss Duffy" when Shirley Booth left Archie's Tavern.
IT WAS ON ARCHIE'S show that Florence became friends with Bing Crosby, the only person ever to throw her "out of character." It seems that Crosby, famous for ad libbing, changed a "What did you say?" to something like "Dig me another load of that wack, Jack" and Florence doubled into convulsive laughter. Other favorite stars are Errol Flynn ("not what he's painted") and Peggy Knudsen, Warner Bros, actress.
Florence returns to New York soon to resume radio acting and fashion modeling for Columbia and Mutual. She hopes to find a higher niche on the legitimate stage and make her face as well known as her voice and her acting ability.

Betty Grable clashed with Halop on the set of the picture Spring Reunion (1956). Perhaps that’s why Halop took a couple of years off before appearing on The Untouchables in 1959. Occasional TV work followed—she got into the commercial business in the mid-‘70s by appearing as a character in Top Ramen Noodles ads—before a regular role on St. Elsewhere came along, followed by Night Court. She died after only 20-some-odd episodes.

Halop spent virtually her entire life in show business. It sounds like she enjoyed every minute of it. Listen below to an interview she did with broadcaster Chuck Schaden in 1976.