Spinning Wolf

Some intelligent animation fan once postulated that MGM’s Tex Avery wasn’t really making fun of Walt Disney with his Disney-esque cartoon openings (such as in Red Hot Riding Hood), he was making fun of MGM’s Hugh Harman and Rudy Ising.

That may be right.

Mind you, Hugh and Rudy had one goal—to make Disney-type cartoons. Lots of cute animals, scenes full of them, with one hopelessly helpless child or child-like character that gets rescued dramatically. Lots of animation on ones; let those lesser studios animate on twos (the same drawing is photographed for two frames of film). Lots of titles with “little” in them—Two Little Pups, The Little Mole, The Little Bantamweight, and Little Gravel Voice.

You or I could write the plot for Little Gravel Voice (released in 1942). A little donkey is rejected by all the other animals in the forest because of his noisy braying. Boo hoo hoo, he cries. But then a hungry wolf shows up. In Disneyland Harman-Ising-Land, wolves eat donkeys. This one can’t because he can’t handle the sound of the donkey.

Ah, what about all the other animals in the forest? I don’t need to tell you. You already know. No spoiler alerts are necessary here. The wolf goes for a little chipmunk cowering in a hole. But the altruistic donkey rushes to the rescue. Just as the wolf is about to grab the little creature, he senses the donkey, who now realises his gravelly braying will stop and completely unhinge the wolf.

Here are some of the drawings of the wolf, spinning, flipping and twirling because of the hee-hawing. The animation is top notch.



The wolf bashes his head against a rock. That makes him insane, so insane he jumps off a cliff to his death.



The animals the donkey has saved reject him—but only temporarily. They all feel sorry for the blubbering donkey, and surround him. He looks astonished. Then delighted. He brays. Now the comedy. The animals tie his ears into his mouth so he can’t make any noise. The little chipmunk kisses his nose and rests peacefully on his head as the iris closes. Aww.



Oh, yes, a war is on, so Buy Bonds!

By this time, even sleepy Fred Quimby figured that cutsy-wootsy was out, and harder humour was in. Rudy Ising turned away from kiddie creatures of the woodlands and created Barney Bear. But MGM’s stars were now a cat and mouse. Even Walt Disney had trouble toppling them for an Oscar for a while.

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.