How to Animate a Very Rainy Day

A torrent of work awaited effects animators at MGM working on the Hugh Harman cartoon A Rainy Day (1940).

Papa Bear is coyly repairing his home’s roof. A storm approaches. There are five different shades of blue in each of the five drawings below. The last one also contains lightning. Harman also inserted white and black cards to add to the fierceness of the storm.



You can see the torrent of rain develop.



Cut to a closer shot.



Cut to Papa Bear on the roof. Note the variations in colour; the third frame is another lightning frame.



I don’t envy the effects animator who had to animate all this water.



Harman loved lavish, expensive animation. The opening title isn’t just a card. It’s a rain barrel with water pouring into it from a drain pipe, leaving a wake as it lands, with a wave effect over top of the letters in the title.

No animators are credited. In fact, Harman’s name is the only one in the cartoon.

How To Quiet A Mouse in Technicolor

A colour swirl indicates speed in The Unbearable Bear, a 1943 cartoon from the Chuck Jones unit at Warners, starring the blabbermouth version of Sniffles the mouse.

(Any version of Sniffles is obnoxious, but let us not get sidetracked).

At one point of the plot, a burglar fox convinces Sniffles he’s Robin Hood, and he’s robbing the safe in his home (where two bears live) to give to the poor. Sniffles stops his patter long enough to twist the dial of another “safe” to get more money. Except the safe is a radio (which plays “Frat,” a Carl Stalling favourite that no radio in 1943 would be playing).

The fox is worried the radio will wake Mrs. Bear so he turns into a swirl to stop the sound—from both the radio and Sniffles.



Bobe Cannon is the credited animator. Rudy Larriva, Ken Harris and Ben Washam were in the unit as well. Mike Maltese wrote the story.

A Fish Story

The name Suspense conjures up images of radio of the 1940s. But there’s one Suspense broadcast of September 1949 that conjures up images of 1970s sitcom television.

On the TV version of the programme was the play “Lunch Box.” And one of the starring actors was a 28-year-old named Abe Vigoda.

It’s hard to think of Vigoda as 28. He reached real fame in his mid-50s, although he seemed older than that. Vigoda spent a good deal of his time on the stage on both coasts until he was named for Barney Miller, which became an ABC winter replacement series in 1975. By the start of the second, they were already talking about giving him his own show.

Here are a couple of pieces about Vigoda’s fame from the King Features Syndicate. The first appeared in papers around October 22, 1975.

Abe Vigoda's 'Fish' Is Caught in Spinoff on TV
By CHARLES WITBECK
TV Key, Inc.
HOLLYWOOD – (KFS) – One of the good things about "Barney Miller," ABC's Thursday night police comedy, is Detective Fish (played by Abe Vigoda).
Fish the worrier, the pessimist, the veteran detective among the young bucks in New York's Precinct 12, whose old bones ache for retirement, has struck a chord with fans.
Ever since the police comedy starring Hal Linden opened last winter, Fish caught the eye of critics and viewers who were charmed by Abe Vigoda's gentle, but tired old cop. Fish seems real to cops, kids and worn-out husbands. Currently his picture hangs in the Beverly Hills police department because local detectives say they can relate to the TV character, a first in their memory.
"I am being recognized frequently in my middle age," says Abe Vigoda. That's the status for a New York actor who has played straight man for Jimmy Durante and Ed Wynn, performed Shakespeare for Joe Papp, and portrayed Abe Lincoln for Carl Reiner over a 25-year period.
Now gentle Abe is about to vault into rarefied territory. His character Fish will have a show of his own. First comes the spinoff on "Barney Miller" this fall. Then, if all goes well, "Fish" will be on the air in January. Unlike other stars in spinoffs such as "Rhoda," "Phyllis," "Good Times," etc. Abe Vigoda will continue to portray Fish on "Barney Miller," and in the new series. Fans won't be gypped by Fish's leaving town to tape or film his own series. It's also possible "Fish" might follow "Miller" on the air, but that's a matter of conjecture at this stage.
The emergence of the New York character into a TV personality at age 54 is a pleasurable thing to watch, particularly because the soft-spoken Vigoda never expected a thing like this to happen.
True, Abe's career took a sudden leap when he landed the role of Mafia chief Tessio in "The Godfather" movie, his first Mafia role by the way. Though he was raised in New York's Little Italy, Abe felt ill at ease walking the streets following "The Godfather" run. "I actually feared for my life," he recounted recently. "People gave me the oddest looks. They thought I was a gangster."
"The Godfather" made Hollywood casting offices aware of Vigoda. But most only considered Abe to be another gangster actor. Eddie Foy III, however, learned that Abe had played comedy for Carl Reiner and asked him to come out to play a shyster in "The Sandy Duncan" series. Watching Vigoda steal comedy scenes as an accident victim in a neck brace, Foy realized Abe was just the man to play Fish in the "Barney Miller" pilot.
In Hollywood casting offices, the thinking is neat and categorized: comics play comedy, dramatic actors stick to the straight stuff, and nobody crosses over. It's ridiculous but people seemed amazed that Abe's Tessio could delight fans playing an old, worried cop. For a man who has performed Shakespeare and Strindberg, this is child's play.
But, oh, the attention is nice and so is the money.' "Fellini wants to see me," says Abe.
"And Fish has changed my position in New York. I can go back during hiatus and be a star on Broadway, and I can help people get work now. I never dreamed I could ever do that."

Fish was grumpy and so was Abe Vigoda. He wanted his spin-off; he didn’t really want Barney Miller any more. So Fish debuted and Vigoda hung around on Miller toward the end of 1977 and walked away.

Fish lasted two seasons on ABC. Vigoda explained his hopes for the show in this story published February 3, 1977.

Abe 'Fish' Vigoda Nets a New Series, Airing Saturdays
By CHARLES WITBECK
TV Key, Inc.
HOLLYWOOD (KFS) – "Barney Miller's" glum old-timer, detective Fish, is finally retiring — into a show of his own, simply titled "Fish," airing now for ABC on Saturday nights.
Saddled with aching feet and the creeping despairs of longevity, Fish has been yammering about retiring ever since "Barney Miller" went on the air two years ago. Abe Vigoda's sour yet gentle detective finally makes his move because Miller fans — cops, kids, grownups — dig the old geezer, realizing his is a bona-fide character, not the usual phony Hollywood concoction.
Fish became so popular last year that series producer Danny Arnold whipped up a husband-and-wife pilot for Abe. Character actor Vigoda went through with the project, but knew at first glance the setup was all wrong — playing an Archie Bunker hardly fit his low-keyed, understated style.
Producer Arnold, who personally directs Vigoda in "Miller," has rectified his error with a second format in which the retired detective and wife Bernice (Florence Stanley)] supplement pension checks by becoming house-parents for juvenile delinquents.
At present, the State of New York provides a house, a resident psychologist and funds for the care of delinquents. In the new comedy, Fish and wife qualify as house-parents and move out of their apartment with their furniture into a battered town house to supervise a batch of young troublemakers. Anything to escape being a night-watchman sounded good to Fish, who dreaded the prospect of becoming a mere watchdog pounding a beat to get by.
Though the detective is an innocent about his new occupation (it may be mentioned that Fish has two grownup daughters, so the man qualifies for the job), the wise old detective firmly believes that "deep down children are not born bad." A good home life, stability and care are the keys in his mind.
"Fish works best in ridiculous situations," says Abe Vigoda. "This is a comedy. Out of reality comes humor. Fish won't change one whit as he attempts to cope with the kids. He will go to the bathroom in the middle of the night to find a boy in his favorite spot. He will be harassed and provoked. Asked to kill a rat in the house, he will demur, saying the light is too poor for a shot."
Appearing in 16 out of 22 "Barney Miller" shows this season, Abe Vigoda began taping the new series in mid-January, and will return to the 12th Precinct for the closing Miller show to air in March. If the new project is a success, Fish will be retiring for good on "Barney Miller."
Born and raised in New York, Abe Vigoda claims he knows all about street life and kids growing up in the big city. On his own, Abe went back to New York recently, took a subway up to Harlem to query the current crop of teen-agers hanging around on street corners.
The kids recognized Abe from the show, wanted to see his gun, and wanted to get an acting job. They were smoking, and weren't about to stop just because Abe Vigoda said it was bad for them. But they also answered questions. Most of them came from broken homes, few had eaten lunch, or had a dollar in their pocket. "They seem to lie a lot, yet they were basically good kids," said Abe. "Now our cast of kids come from New York. They know the sounds and the rules of street life. They're real."
As for Fish, well he won't change for Saturday night. Abe describes his detective as "a hypochondriac, always complaining, but when faced with a situation he takes over. He's a pessimist because of too many disappointments, too many hopes never realized. 'Who wants to bother?' is his dictum. Yet he's always in the thick of things."
The detective turns out to be a composite of several people in Abe Vigoda's life. Fish's humor comes from Abe's mother. A police officer Vigoda played handball with in Brooklyn continually complained about his feet, so that went into the role.
Judging from the enthusiastic response by the visiting press to a 10-minute presentation clip on the show, "Fish" may be a midwinter hit. Better tune in and watch gentle Abe, a one-footed tap dancer, become a TV star at 61.

After Fish got cancelled, it was expected Vigoda would return to Barney Miller. Money took care of that. The show’s producers wouldn’t give him enough of it, so Detective Fish stayed retired.

Vigoda spent the rest of his life being undead. “People” magazine wrote a story in 1982 about “the late Abe Vigoda” and it became a joke for years that Vigoda was still alive. He kept death-watchers in Suspense for a while. He died in 2016.

The Wolf Has a Blast

Blowing the pigs’ brick house down doesn’t work, as we all know from fairy tales, but when pups instead of pigs are involved, other methods need to be tried.

The big bad Southern wolf tries dynamite.



The wolf runs around the back of the brick house and waits for the explosion. The Droopy pup pops a paper bag.



The wolf goes back to see the result of the explosion he just heard.



The wolf observes to the audience watching him: “I’m goin’ to tell you somethin’ right now, man. That there’s a pretty smart li’l ol’ dog in there.” Note how he points with his head toward the window indicating the pup inside.



Director Tex Avery and writer Heck Allen didn’t end the scene with a gag used elsewhere (think Garden Gopher. They didn’t have the remnants of the bag blow up. The scene just fades after a couple of eye blinks accompanied by Scott Bradley’s solo piano.

Walt Clinton, Mike Lah, Grant Simmons, Ray Patterson and Bob Bentley are the credited animators on The Three Little Pups (1953). Vera Ohman is responsible for the stylised backgrounds.

Stairway to the Skeleton

They sure loved those circular stone stairways in Van Beuren cartoons. The Little King had one. Cubby Bear and Tom and Jerry cartoons had them. And Don and Waffles escape on one inside a pyramid in Gypped in Egypt (1930).



It looks like the stairs are animated turning while Don and Waffles are animated in a cycle, appearing to climb them. This particular staircase has an end. When Don and Waffles reach the top, the staircase slides into itself and disappears.



Skeletons figure prominently in this cartoon, and there’s a skeleton elevator operator, wearing a little cap. Unlike your usual skeleton, he has whites in his eyes.



He slides the gate closed and up an obelisk they go. Animation of the elevator fades in. The skeleton is smoking a cigarette.



Van Beuren cartoons aren’t finely crafted, and they’re not really funny, but the best of them have random weirdness that makes them likable. This cartoon has a camel that gets murdered, an attempt at piano playing with fingering that’s pretty legitimate, a sphinx that zoom up to our heroes, and something with twirling eyes that chases them at the end. I’ll take this over fuzzy-wuzzy squirrels and happy chirping birds at Disney any day.

Jack, Mary, Radio and Things

The question for Jack Benny in the late 1940s was—when are you getting into television? More and more stations were signing on and, crucially, more and more sponsor money was taken from radio budgets and dumped into the far-more-expensive visual medium.

Once Benny worked out a deal to begin occasional TV shows starting in 1950, the question changed to—when are you getting out of radio?

TV Guide mulled over that question in its issue of February 5, 1954. It turns out Jack had one more radio season left in him, but abandoning the medium wasn’t altogether his idea. Despite attempts reported in the trade press, no sponsor would come up with the money needed to put the show on radio for 1955-56.

Mary Livingstone pretty much left the programme in the last season. Whenever she did show up, it was either on a re-run, or from a tape recorded in the Benny mansion that was spliced into the broadcast. In the latter case, either Jeanette Eymann, Jack’s script secretary, or his daughter Joan would fill in on stage for the studio audience and read Mary’s lines. Joan later made a number of non-dad TV appearances and added her thoughts to fill out her father’s autobiography. It’s an excellent book I would heartily recommend.

You’ll notice the picture of Jack as Buck Benny. His series of Buck Benny sketches ended at least 15 years earlier, so the photo is an odd choice. It’s almost as if the editor picked the picture first and then wrote the start of the story around it. As it is, the story seems to be a collection of random items about Jack, not an actual narrative with a point to it.

HEADIN’ FOR A NEW RANGE?
JACK BENNY, still riding along on an even keel at the pinnacle of his career, is perhaps the least pretentious star show business has ever known. He’d as soon throw a wad of paper at a script girl as shake hands with the Queen of England, and he’s done both. The script girl and the Queen, to him, are two very likable human beings.
If there can be a secret to any man’s success, Benny’s lies in his enormous capacity to enjoy his work. He takes it seriously, but never to the point of undermining either disposition or health. He plays golf, shooting in the high 80’s and never worrying about the time he might have shot a 79. When, as he occasionally does, he feels that he has to get away from it all, he merely piles into his car and takes off.
When he works, he is a perfectionist. He spends as much time on his radio show today as he did ten years ago when radio was king and he was its crown prince. And he gets as much fun out of it.
Oddly enough, Benny’s wife, Mary Livingstone, suffers miserably through the whole business of a Jack Benny show. A mainstay on the radio show almost since its inception, she has no conception of herself as a star, dislikes publicity and would give her left arm to get out of it. She loves show business for Jack, hates it for herself. “This,” she says defiantly, “is absolutely my last season.”
May Abandon Radio
Jack himself is reluctant about returning to radio next year. “If the sponsor wants me to do TV every other week, that will be the end of the radio show.”
Benny thus far hasn’t found it at all difficult to come up with a TV show once every three weeks and feels at the moment that every other week won’t be any harder. “The ideas just seem to come,” he says. “We never point deliberately for a ‘great’ show. And if one does happen to come off better than most, we don’t knock ourselves out trying to top it. We just do ’em as they come along.”
Papa Won’t Push
If Benny has a major interest aside from show business, it is his adopted daughter, Joan, now 19 and a junior at Stanford. He and Mary have made it a policy from the beginning to keep her in the background and to let her grow up in as normal surroundings as possible. She has appeared on two or three of Jack’s radio shows and on one TV show, but the decision has always been hers. Benny is proud of his daughter and sure she can make her own way without undue help from him.
Perhaps the master of comedy timing onstage, Benny offstage can bumble along with the best of them. He frequently forgets names and is honest enough to become covered with confusion instead of trying to ad lib his way out with a funny line. The funny line, in fact, has never been Benny’s forte. He is more the introvert, a quiet man content to let things ride and preferring to have his audiences seated out front rather than gathered around him at a bar. Unlike most comedians, he invariably thinks the other fellow a very funny man and is known among his cohorts as “the best audience in the business.” With Benny in the front row, a comedian is guaranteed a belly laugh on even his worst jokes.

A Peachy Pear of Gags

In an increasingly corporate, HR-department world, maybe the practical joke has become a thing of a past. It was common at animation studios back in the theatrical days, and some of them got quite elaborate.

We have the tale of something that happened at the Warner Bros. studio. It’s a shame the participant’s name isn’t known at this late date. But first, a gag pulled on someone in the live action film world. This was related in the National Enterprise Association’s Hollywood column starting around April 3, 1940.

Englishman Baffled by Labels
Canned Goods Never Turn Our as Named, His Pals Make Sure
By PAUL HARRISON
HOLLYWOOD — The entertainment factories have come out of their taxation doldrums and things are beginning to hum again. The mood of the town is chipper. And one of the most encouraging things is that people are beginning to play jokes.
The joke I like best involves a methodical little Britisher who works in the technical lab at United Artists. A thrifty man he has been in the habit of bringing two sandwiches to the studio each day. He supplements these with a pint of milk and a can of fruit bought at a grocery across the street and he lunches at his desk, in which he keeps a can opener, paper napkins, a glass and a spoon.
One day some of the other technicians called him out of the buildings just before he began his lunch. During his absence, another joker took the label off his can of plums and put it on a can of beans which he left on the desk. When the Englishman was ready to eat plums and found beans, he went to the store and got his money back. The grocer said such things can happen, but that they were very rare.
Decides to Share Story With England
But they weren’t rare. It went on like that. The next day the Englishman opened a can of peaches and found tomatoes inside. When he was drooling in anticipation of nice crisp pineapple, he got spinach. After buying apricots, he came up with a spoonful of salmon.
The jokers had visited the grocer, explained the gag, and promised to pay for all rectified “mistakes.” The Englishman wasn’t angry, though; he was amused and amazed at what he considered an example of American carelessness and inefficiency. After a week of encountering misbranded merchandise, he decided to write a humorous article about it for a London magazine. He rather fancied the result, and read it to his pals in the lab before mailing it.
Next day he went to the grocery and bought a can of peaches, wryly remarking that it was probably soup. By the time the boys had switched the label to another can, he actually did have soup. But floating in the soup was something else— a little glass tube. Inside the tube was a note, and the note was signed (presumeably) by the editor of the London magazine. It read:
“I don’t believe a word of it.”
The little technician goes around telling people about this astonishing experience, but of course nobody will believe him.
Boy Is Kidded, Gets Better Job
At Leon Schlesinger’s cartoon studio, some of the boys thought up a rib that lasted two weeks. A youngster there handled thousands of sheets of celluloid, the “cells” on which animations are painted. He had to dust and stack them, and on dry days the dusting caused small sparks of static such as you can generate from a cat.
So somebody told him that this was very dangerous work, because the celluloid might ignite and explode and blow the whole studio to Kingdom Come. The only precaution said the gagster was to ground himself.
They got a long piece of wire and wrapped one end around the youngster’s bare right leg, under his trousers. The other end was tossed out the window and connected to a water pipe that came from the ground. The fellow worked that way dragging the wire around, carefully reconnecting himself whenever he came in. People from other departments would drop in to watch him and comment on his bravery. In that way everybody, got to know the kid and like him, and the other day he was given a better job.

Slapping the Bass Bottom

A little combo plays a number while a bird wearing a derby makes a home out of drumsticks in The Fowl Ball, a 1930 Walter Lantz cartoon.

One of the players is a frog that slaps a bass. He turns the bass around during a bar break, rips down its “pants” and starts slapping its bottom. The bass grows a head and starts crying.



The cartoon ends with Oswald the rabbit and frog musicians inside a pelican's stomach.

I don't know the name of the number that takes up the first part of the cartoon.

Deems Fudd

Freeze-frame some animation and what looks like flowing movement under director Bob Clampett reveals a raft of quirky poses.

Here are some random frames from the opening of A Corny Concerto (1943), where Elmer Fudd fails miserably at being concert music commentator Deems Taylor a la Fantasia, thanks to a dickey that won’t stay down.

Only the Clampett unit would have a character with his hands down his pants.



Clampett cuts to a closer shot. Fudd’s hands are the best part of this, but there’s also a continual flow of facial expressions.



Bob McKimson is the credited animator on screen. Dick Thomas is the background artist.

Television's Anti-Parking Meter Crusader

J. Edward McKinley popped up everywhere on 1960s comedy shows as kind of an impatient businessman. It seems that’s how he began his acting career.

McKinley had a knack of finding interesting ways to get publicity. Witness this wire service story from 1951:

Radio Station Sells 30 Seconds of Silence
HOLLYWOOD, Calif., Jan. 26 (INS)—A Southern California radio station—KMPC—boasted today that it had sold thirty seconds of silence.
The unusual sale was chalked up by Ross Mulholland, doing a daily campaign for the March of Dimes on his show Thursday.
J. Edward McKinley, co-owner of the Chef Saw Manufacturing Co., dropped in to add $10 to Mulholland’s March of Dimes. But instead of asking for ten dollars worth of music, he asked—and got—$10 worth of complete silence.

The not-yet-actor’s next PR effort involved parking meters. Well, some parking meters. It’s one of those things that just about anyone can identify with. A wire service picked up McKinley’s populist crusade and put it out on May 10, 1958.

Parkers’ ‘Good Shepherd’
HOLLYWOOD (AP)—J. Edward McKinley hates parking meters that run too fast.
So much so that he is conducting a one-man campaign against them along Sunset Boulevard.
His crusade began a year ago when police tagged his car for overtime parking. He checked the curb parking meter and found that the meter was a cheater.
McKinley, a salesman, took the ticket to court. A judge, impressed by his defense, dismissed the case on the technicality that the ticketed car was registered not to McKinley but to his wife.
McKinley then declared an all-out war on parking meters. He ranged up and down the boulevard and found most of the meters ticked faster than his trusty wrist watch.
Flush with success, McKinley said yesterday that he is expanding his crusade to include parking zones whose colors have faded.
“I spotted a while passenger-loading zone on Whitley Avenue,” McKinley said. “The paint was more than 50 per cent rubbed out, making the zone invalid.” The average motorist hasn’t the time to go to court over minor traffic violations, McKinley contends.
“People are just paying their fines like sheep,” he said.

The publicity got McKinley on television. On October 6, 1958, he starred in an episode of Police Station, a 30-minute drama produced by KTLA in Los Angeles. McKinley explained the circumstances in a wire story on June 5, 1960.

McKinley Slated For Films and TV
HOLLYWOOD (AP)—J. Edward McKinley built a $2 parking ticket into a $25,000-a-year acting job.
"It's crazy," McKinley says. "One day I grabbed a parking ticket off my windshield and a few weeks later I was an actor."
He fought and beat the rap on the parking ticket. Appearances on television news and interview shows followed because of the uproar over the case.
"Next thing I knew," he says, "the movie producers were calling up making me offers to act in straight dramatic shows."
McKinley appeared in 51 television shows and motion pictures. Among the TV shows have been "Alcoa Presents," "77 Sunset Strip," "Mr. Lucky," and "Colt 45." He has played lawyers, judges, crime bosses and scientists.
He still is hanging on to his sales promotion business and owns part of an oil company in Colorado.
He's still interested in traffic tickets, promoting a plan for night traffic courts so that the working man can fight tickets.
McKinley, who hasn't got a ticket since he went into acting, has taken nine citations to court and lost but one.

Besides cameras, courtrooms continued to beckon McKinley. This is from a southern California paper of December 20, 1960:

Former President’s Nephew Scores Ninth Time In Court
By DAVE HOLLAND
Valley Times TODAY Staff Writer
J. Edward McKinley has done it again. For the ninth time in 11 tries, the grand nephew of former President William McKinley has beaten a traffic ticket in court.
McKinley, 6909 Oporto Dr., Hollywood, was accused Monday in Burbank’s Municipal Court of making an illegal U-turn on Riverside drive near its intersection with Valley street, Burbank.
When the incident took place last Oct. 9, McKinley didn’t believe it was illegal.
He told Judge Edward C. Olson why he didn’t think so yesterday. The judge apparently agreed. The defendant deserves the benefit of the doubt, Olson said, then added, “Not guilty.”
“It was those same two words that started me on my new career three years ago,” McKinley said. “I’m an actor now and have appeared in 67 TV shows since then all because I appeared in court on my own behalf and won.
The 44-year-old, graying man told this story:
“It all started when I found a meter violation ticket on my car. I insisted that it was the meter’s fault, not mine. The meter was fast and I proved it with a stop watch.
“Sam Taylor, traffic department director for Los Angeles, said that was one meter in a 1,000. We picked out 15 in a row, timed them all, and found more than half of them to be fast. I won the case.”
From the notoriety he received during the trial, McKinley was asked to appear on different television shows, including the Groucho Marx and the Paul Coates programs. A quiz show followed, then others. Finally someone talked him into tackling a dramatic part rather than just guesting on TV.
His first part? A defendant on Night Court. His last? A U.S. Senator on Stagecoach West. His next?
“I think I’m ready to play a lawyer,” McKinley smiled.

Besides being an actor and a traffic meter challenger, McKinley turned to record production. The Hollywood Reporter informed readers on May 25, 1962:

J. Edward McKinley, appearing in Otto Preminger’s “Advise and Consent,” has been signed by Del-Fi Records, Hollywood, to produce three new singles featuring comedian Jackie Curtis. McKinley has had his own compositions published and recorded in the past and will be a record producer for the first time.

I keep thinking of McKinley as the perennial client on Bewitched. Apparently, he appeared on ten episodes.

McKinley died in 2004. Part of his obit is posted to the right. Evidently, playing opposite Dick Sargent brings wealth as McKinley not only lived in Beverly Hills, he had a collection of classic cars. We presume none of them ever got a parking ticket.