Barn Dance

Lem and Daisy Goon square dance in a barn in Tex Avery’s The Hick Chick (1946).



The background is by Johnny Johnsen.

I don't know if this is a Preston Blair scene, but he, Ed Love, Walt Clinton and Ray Abrams are the animators.

Sex, Shoes, Benny, Burns

Jack Benny talking about s-e-x?

Well, not quite.

After Jack got out of the weekly TV business, he produced and starred in a number of TV specials; he was working on one at the time of his death in 1974. One was named after Dr. David Reuben’s famous book “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask” (substitute “Jack Benny” for “sex”). Reuben even appeared on the special (picture to the right).

The sketches didn’t really rise above the tepid kind that filled variety shows of the era. The highlight may have been Phil Harris barging in like he used to do in the radio days (in fact, they repeated a routine about Doo Wah Ditty from a radio show).

Yes, the special skirted around the sex subject (or, more accurately, Reuben’s book), but it came up in promotional interviews, too. Here’s one from February 22, 1971 (the special aired March 10th).

Jack Benny Says Nude Scene in 'The Graduate' Was Sensational
By MARILYN BECK
When I visited the NBC rehearsal of "Timex Presents Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Jack Benny—But Were Afraid to Ask" I never expected Jack and I would end up in the network commissary talking about sex. Somehow it just didn't fit the Benny image.
One of the guests on Jack's March 10 NBC special is Dr. David Reuben, author of the best-selling "Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex—But Were Afraid to Ask." Which just naturally led Jack into easy discussion of the universally popular subject, although he did allow, "I don't know why everyone's so preoccupied about it. Most everything you need is common sense."
It's rather a gas to hear the 77-year-old comic, who's so famous for his prim and proper "W-e-e-l-l!" stage line, says he thought the nude scene between Anne Bancroft and Dustin Hoffman in the "Graduate" was a classic, "Absolutely sensational!"
Not only does he keep up with today's films, but he's pretty darn hip when it comes to the best-selling sex manuals. His thoughts on "The Sensuous Woman": "Awful! Simply a waste of time! I think it's a hoax, secretly written by a man for gullible women."
Jack was getting so warmed up to his subject that when I reminded him, after an hour, that the crew was expecting him back at rehearsal, he joked, "Oh, let them wait a while and if they complain I'll have two choice words for them, both of which can be found in Sensuous Woman."
W-e-e-l-l! For goodness sake, Jack, you'll, shatter all the myths!
Actually, the idea of the NBC special was to unveil the man behind that famous myth. From what I could catch at rehearsal, you end up with some awfully funny moments, including Lucille Ball playing a Goldwyn Girl and Jack a lecher in one skit, but at fade-out the real Jack Benny still stays pretty well hidden.
"We even had to cut the skit that shows I'm not a cheapskate," he said. "I guess we'll have to save that for another show."
Jack's not the typical star who knows little about his projects until rehearsal time. He takes active part in the writing, the casting, the final editing.
"Usually I can tell at first draft if it's going to be a good show. But this one was different. I didn't feel really confident until Lucy, George Burns, Phil Harris, Dr. Reuben all came into rehearsal raving about their bits."
Jack went into rigorous preparation for the show the day after returning from a 12-day ocean cruise to Acapulco. His wife, Mary, didn't accompany him on the trip, "Because she hates that sort of thing, all that lying around in the sun."
About his marriage to Mary Livingston, his one-time professional partner, he says, "We've been together 44 years now, and each year keeps getting better, happier for us."
Those who know the Bennys know at least part of the reason for their happiness. He's a very real, very warm, very nice man.

I suspect what you’ll read below was originally contemplated as George Burns promoting the Benny special. But Burns is always full of stories, and they’re far more readable than pushing a TV show, so the column only has a brief mention of the special. This appeared in papers February 19th.

Burns Talks About Benny
By TOM GREEN
Gannett News Service
HOLLYWOOD — George Burns sat in his office with a cup of coffee and the inevitable cigar and talked about the miserly concert violinist.
“Jack Benny,” said George Burns, “is working more now than he did last year. The older he gets, the more he works. He's two years older than I am and I wouldn't do it.”
Burns, who is 75 and seems to be enjoying the luxury of semi-retirement, had just completed a guest appearance on 77-year-old Benny's second television special of the Season for NBC, "Everything You've Ever Wanted to Know About Jack Benny, But Were Afraid to Ask." It airs Wednesday, 9-10 p.m.
"I don't know why he does it," says Burns. "He just loves the business."
There's nothing offhand that Burns can think of that he'd like to know about Benny that he doesn't already know. The two have been friends for well over 40 years.
"There's some things I'd like to forget," he smiles.
He met Benny while he was dating Gracie Allen, his late wife and show business partner for more than three decades. Benny started dating a girl who was rooming with Gracie. That was before he met Mary Livingston.
"He was doing a good single then. He was making $400 a week, which was a good salary. He was doing stingy jokes even then. When Jack was young, stingy jokes were fun. They came from Scotland. Jack made being stingy a national institution. Now the Scots make jokes about Jack Benny.
"The first time I met him, actually, was on the phone and we were disconnected. That made him laugh. Up until then. I didn't know I was a comedian."
Burns has done his share of having fun on stage with Benny's well-known eccentricities, but he is obviously very fond of the man.
"Just before we taped this show, Jack had two wisdom teeth taken out. He felt bad. He came in with an overcoat on. But as soon as he got to the script he forgot about it. There was that vitality. When they called off the rehearsal at 1 p.m., he said if that was all he was going to take a violin lesson. And he did."
Benny's enchantment with the violin makes Burns smile, too.
"He's mad about it. The other things he does are just a sideline. His big therapy is the violin. There's nothing that Heifetz has that Jack doesn't have, but when they play it's an entirely different thing. If Jack didn't play, he'd be just like Heifetz.
"When he bought his Stradivarius. I was there and Isaac Stern came over. It didn't sound like they were playing the same fiddle. Jack knows how good he is. He plays fast numbers so if he misses a few notes, no one knows."
Burns doesn't even try to keep up with Benny's work pace.
"Why should I?"
He maintains an office and he comes in at 10:30 in the morning and is gone by noon.
"I do about six shows a year, a few talk shows and a few commercials for a bank. You couldn't pay me to get back into weekly TV. I'd like to play Las Vegas four weeks every two years."
Besides Burns, the television show guest stars John Wayne, Lucille Ball, Phil Harris and Dionne Warwick, along with Dr. David Reuben, author of "Everything . . . About Sex." Bob Hope makes a surprise appearance.
Burns likes to tell this story to illustrate what makes Jack Benny laugh:
In the early days when he was working with Gracie, the two of them and Jack had the same agent, Tom Fitzpatrick. Fitzpatrick was a very religious man, one who didn't have the heart to tell an act that it had been laid off. Instead, he would start shuffling in his desk drawers. It happened to Burns and Allen one day. "The minute he did that, you knew you were fired."
Burns ran into Benny out on the street right after getting the news.
"Are you working?" Benny asked.
"No," said Burns. "He looked in his drawers."
The line wiped Benny out and he stood there and laughed while a crowd of 30 or 40 people stopped to see what was going on.
"He finally went into a shoe store and bought a pair of shoes he didn't need."
Burns, of course, is keeping up with his singing.
“I'm a natural-born singer. I enjoy my singing. I've never walked out on myself.”

The Captain's Inside Jokes

These two in-betweens likely don’t strike you as being from an MGM cartoon.



This is from Mama's New Hat, a 1939 Captain and the Kids short directed by an uncredited Friz Freleng.

There are some names in the cartoon, buried in the background. As a side note, I could have sworn I posted this some years ago but I can’t find it, so away we go.



If you check the door, you'll see Fred Quimby's name. The name on the awning refers to Bob Kuwahara, who must have been an assistant or in-betweener at MGM. He was an animator for Terrytoons in later years.



Fred McAlpin was MGM's sound editor. A few of his effects found their way into cartoons made by the Hanna-Barbera studio after MGM closed.



The “Harris” reference is puzzling as I don’t know of a Harris who worked at Metro. Ken Harris was, of course, at Warner Bros.



Here we come to a reference to character designer Charlie Thorson. The term “pansy” isn’t exactly complementary (Thorson was married with a small son). By the time this cartoon was released, Thorson would be gone from MGM.

He was a Canadian who had moved to the U.S. in 1934. He got a job with Disney. Thorson’s biography tells how he was working on two cartoons at the Harman-Ising studio in May 1937 that were to be part of the Disney release when he got a confidential invitation from Quimby. MGM was going to dump the Harman-Ising studio and make its own animated shorts. Thorson signed with Metro on June 7, 1937, several months before the studio actually opened.

Thorson became disillusioned with the factionalism at the new operation and wrote his feelings in a letter to Quimby on April 15, 1938, saying how displeased he was with the quality of the cartoons. He quit the studio a month and a half later and went to work for Leon Schlesinger, designing Sniffles for Chuck Jones and a rabbit for the Hardaway/Dalton unit. Next, he found work with the Fleischer studio in Miami and in 1941 with Terrytoons in New Rochelle. He later joined Dave Fleischer at Columbia/Screen Gems and then designed for George Pal’s Puppetoons. Thorson returned to Canada where his sugary-cute drawing style became obsolete. He died in Vancouver in 1966.

Boogie Woogie Army

A training dummy comes to life and turns things around for a soldier in the 1941 Walter Lantz cartoon The Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy of Company “B”.



This short was nominated for an Oscar, perhaps because of Darrell Calker’s score. It can't be the gags. Bugs Hardaway and Lowell Elliott are responsible for a story about an army that beats up bugle boys and goes back to sleep while reveille is playing (at least, I think that’s what they’re doing).

Lantz pushed this through production. The Hollywood Reporter disclosed on April 9, 1941 that Lantz had purchased the cartoon rights for the song, then on July 30th the short was already before the cameras.

Alex Lovy and La Verne Harding get the animation credits. Danny Webb supplies his froggy voice while Hot-Breath Harry is, I suspect, played by one of the singers.

Thirsty Tulips

Betty Boop waters her plants on her penthouse as she sings “Penthouse Serenade” by Jason and Burton.

First, she waters the dirt in her plant box and tulips sprout.



Now she pours from her watering can and the tulips drink the water. The last one grabs a glass, lets Betty fill it and drinks from it.



Willard Bowsky is the only credited animator in Betty Boop’s Penthouse (released 1933).

Willie Or Won't He

In the less-than-halcyon days of quiz shows, contestants were coached on how to give the correct answers. On at least one show, though, they were coached on how to sound like they were giving the correct answers.

That show was a panel show. To Tell the Truth featured someone of renown and two people pretending to be him/her. Four show-biz people on the panel had to guess which one was the real person.

The show would have been a disaster if the two phoneys were left to wing it. They got some help. One of the show’s staff members was Willie Stein, a former songwriter. He explained to his local newspaper how they found the fakes. This story is from the Yonkers Herald-Statesman, October 25, 1960.

Willie Stein Seeks 'To Tell The Truth' But Teaches Six Persons A Week To Lie
By HONEY JOAN ALBERT
For a man who pledges to tell the truth, Willie Stein is in a funny business. As associate producer of CBS TV'S panel show "To Tell The Truth," it's his job to teach six people a week to lie about everything they can.
It's not really as bad as it sounds because it's all a game and everybody knows it — everybody except Polly Bergen, Tom Poston, Kitty Carlyle and Don Ameche. They're the panelists on the show who try to guess who's what he says he is and who isn't. The whole idea comes across better in the watching than in the telling.
"Many odd things have happened to me looking for imposters," said Mr. Stein, who lives at 15 Manor House Drive, Dobbs Ferry. "If I see someone walking down the street, or just sitting quietly in the subway, I'll approach him and tell him I can use him on television."
The "approach" system doesn't always work so well. Once he saw a lady boarding a bus he thought would be perfect as "a side partner for a store detective. When he told her so, she headed for the policeman on the corner. Mr. Stein walked quickly in the other direction.
Another time, he almost followed a girl into the locker room of Hunter College for Women in New York City. This time a policeman volunteered his services without ever, being asked. It didn't take too long before Mr. Stein began to carry credentials and avoid the line, "Do you want to be on television?"
"Finding people, briefing them, and preparing them for the show is a very intricate business," he explained. "We work only from week to week because it takes that long- to get everything in readiness."
The week's show has its beginnings on Wednesday and Thursday evenings when the staff gathers to submit names of the central or "real" characters. People will write in to make themselves available but this practice is not encouraged as it is on Truth's sister shows, "I've Got a Secret," and "What's My Line."
From Magazines, Newspapers
"A man might write that he shot down 30 Japanese planes in the war, but we once had on the show a man who shot 3,000 enemy soldiers and received the Congressional Medal of Honor. "We find out about people like this from magazines and newspapers, Mr. Stein explained.
Finding people in the flesh isn't so hard to do because the staff will make it its business to gather in the places which will attract the type of person needed. An "outdoorsy" person with a ruddy complexion might best be found at a football game, for example. "When we set out to select the three spots each, week from the big pot. we must remember that we're aiming for balance and appeal for all," Mr. Stein cautioned. If we have a serious personality we'll balance him with a man in the next spot who will appear amusing to the audience. There are 750 people who will be watching in the studio."
The next step for Mr. Stein is to draw up a list of the kind of people he needs, with all the physical characteristics carefully stated. Then the staff is on its own.
Interviews Thousands
All day Monday and Tuesday, he interviews people five or ten minutes at a time—so he must size them up accurately and quickly. He sees approximately 50 people a week but the staff takes pictures of each prospective contestant so the files are jammed with thousands of photos. Mr. Stein, in the four years he's been with the show, estimates that the number of candidates he's spoken with has also run into the thousands. Sizing them up gets more accurate all the time.
"The first quality I look for, even before appearance, is intelligence," said Mr. Stein. "I try to determine accent and background also. Similarity to the essential character isn't important, in fact, we stay away from people who are too similar."
Tuesday evening, the wrangling begins again, not for the central characters who have already been chosen, but for the imposters. After they are decided upon, Wednesday is set aside for the briefing sessions. The central character will lecture on his profession to the others, and Mr. Stein, thanks to a bout with the encyclopedia the night before, will fill the gaps. He learns a lot of things that way.
Never Reject A Candidate
"We never totally reject any one candidate," Mr. Stein said. "If we don't use someone for one show, we'll hold him over for another so that everyone who comes to us may eventually be used." He recalled the case of one girl initially selected for a partner to a champion swimmer. She was rejected four more times and finally showed up as a dog-shower.
Friday, the show is ready to go with everyone supposedly knowing how to say that he is what he isn't, with a straight face and a head filled with details about someone else's life. It's a foregone conclusion that every contestant has a good memory.
Everyone except a memory expert, that is. Once Mr. Stein chose one as a partner to a spy in World War II. The expert called before show time to say he had forgotten where he was supposed to be and what time he should be there.
"Goofs" Could Fill Book
The "goofs" that have occured on the show could fill a book. Once a girl who had to stand on a platform wailed that she was afraid of heights, with some minutes to go for show time. Mr. Stein told her to take off her high heels and march — she did — trembling, but the panelists never knew.
"Another time, we had on a Siamese princess with a hard name to pronounce. The first imposter stumbled, the real princess had the intelligence to stumble too, and the third panelist did the same. The show was saved," Mr. Stein said.
Rarely do people refuse to be a contestant, unless business committments prevent. They can win up to $333 and no one goes home with less than $50 because each time a panelist casts an incorrect vote, it's $250 for them. It pays to be a convincing liar.
In recent shows, Mr. Stein has lined up such teams as the man in charge of the animal quarantine station with a carpet designer and a cocoa bean buyer, a baseball trainer with an ice skating instructor and a parking lot owner, and a collector of funds for an advancement society and Garry Moore's assistant.
Records 'Private Hits'
Mr. Stein isn't new to television, or even radio. He had experience in both media as a parody and special material writer for some five shows in 10 years. And most people remember Nat King Cole's "Orange Colored Sky" which he penned 10 years ago. He can claim the credit for 60 records, even though he describes them as "private hits."
Larry, 7, and Judy, 16 months, may well follow in their dad's footsteps. He's convinced they have an ear for music. He's proud of them and of his wife, Ruth, whom he married 12 years ago. They're looking for a new home in the vicinity, and they'll probably take with them their "go away" mat, but they don't mean it.
Mr. Stein was born in New York City, and earned his degree in advertising from night school at City College of New York. Dobbs Ferry residents four years, the Steins are active in the Parent-Teachers Association, the Greenburgh Hebrew Center, and participate in community drives. Mrs. Stein is a member of Hadassah and a recent chairman of the cancer drive.

Stein once told New York magazine how he almost tackled a 6-foot-10 man on Lexington Avenue, and asked him if he could come on the show as an imposter for NBA star George Mikan. The man replied “I am George Mikan.”

He left the show some years before it went off the air (temporarily) in 1968. Among his later stops was the daytime version of the David Letterman Show. Stein died of cancer in 2009 at the age of 92.

Watch Out For That...

“I’m the guy that’s going to catch the fox,” says Willoughby to the theatre audience viewing his cartoon, “because I know every tree in this forest. Every single tree.”



About 12 frames later....

>

Willoughby isn't fazed, though. He points to the tree he just galloped into and says, very earnestly, “There’s one now.”


This scene is from Of Fox and Hounds (1940), where Tex Avery has decided to turn Bugs Bunny into a fox and Elmer Fudd into a dog. The TV station in my area that ran Warner Bros. cartoons when I was a kid may have broadcast this one more than any other. I like Willoughby (“I ain’t so dumb,” as he and director Tex Avery switch a running gag at the end). Friz Freleng made a Bugs vs fox hunting dog cartoon a few years later. It has its moments but I still like this one.

Dave Monahan and Rich Hogan were Avery’s story team at the time.

Happy 90th Jack Benny

Jack Benny likely never thought that people could listen to his first show 90 years after it aired.

But they can.

It was on this date in 1932 that the Canada Dry programme debuted.

The show does not feature the Jack Benny you would expect to hear. There’s no Mary, Rochester, Maxwell, age 39, vault, or Frank Nelson going “Yehhhhhs?” All that was in the future.

The show seems to have been designed as a co-starring vehicle with Jack and George Olsen’s orchestra. Olsen played musical numbers and Jack joked between them. The first broadcast had no audience at a studio in the former roof garden of New York’s New Amsterdam Theatre. Benny’s patter came from his vaudeville appearances.

Unlike other comedians, Jack was hired to be on the air twice a week, on Monday and Wednesday nights. Radio chowed down pretty quickly on his Orpheum routines. The only solution was to get some help, so Jack hired writer Harry Conn.

Something started to happen. Jack moved away from monologues, instead kibitzing with the NBC staff announcer as well as Olsen and his vocalists. Parody plays were added. Commercials for Canada Dry were somewhat dismissive of the soft drink.

Benny scholar Kathy Fuller-Seeley has discovered that within eight weeks, Jack was talking about hiring someone to handle the show’s volume of mail. But it doesn’t appear all that many stations were airing it. A check of newspapers for May 2, 1932 is a little maddening. One version of the Associated Press radio schedule sent to member papers had outdated listings, with two 15-minute shows in the Benny time slot. However, the following stations were scheduled to run the first Canada Dry programme:

WJZ, New York
KDKA, Pittsburgh
KWK, St. Louis
WMAQ, Chicago
WBZ, Boston
WLW, Cincinnati
KOIL, Council Bluffs, Iowa
WREN, Lawrence, Kansas
WJR, Detroit
WKCR, Cedar Rapids, Iowa
WSM, Nashville
WBAL, Baltimore
WHAM, Rochester (second half only)

Charles E. Butterfield, radio writer of Associated Press, promoted the new show in his column of May 1, so word of it reached people who might have to haul in a distant station to listen to Jack.

The show aired on the NBC Blue network. It was the less prestigious of the two NBC national chains. Jack was not heard on the West Coast until Canada Dry moved the show to CBS in October 1932. No Canadian station picked it up, either. The Ottawa Citizen of May 2 opened its “On the Air Tonight” column this way:

Jack Benny, as master of ceremonies (m.c. or emsee) in screen productions which were usually flops, could always make us laugh no matter how terrible the picture. About the most ingratiating of his tribe, Jack injects his laughs slyly into the continuity, never spoiling a sense of intimate nonsense with the audience. Now he’s on the air, premiering a new series with George Olsen’s orchestra from NBC-WJZ at 9:30 p.m.

The day after the debut, Ben Gross’ column in the New York Daily News called it “a delightful melange of fun and music.” A week later, he was more enthusiastic. “WJZ’s 9:30 program, with George Olsen’s Orchestra, Ethel Shutta and Jack Benny,” wrote Gross, “has qualified as one of our brighter radio attractions. The Olsen music is first rate and so is the Shutta warbling. Benny has surprised many, including this eavesdropper, by the deft manner in which he handles the master of ceremony assignment. And the secret of it all is that these performers inject an informal, spontaneous note into their divertissement.”



Some trivia notes:

● The announcer for the first 15 shows was Ed Thorgerson. He went on to voice sports newsreels for 20th Century Fox, and challenged DuMont’s Captain Video and NBC’s Kukla, Fran and Ollie for viewers as the 7 p.m. newscaster on New York’s WPIX, Channel 11. He died in 1997.
● Not counting the opening/closing theme, there were seven musical numbers in the first programme. At the end of Jack Benny’s radio run in 1955, the band had no number and there was no song if Dennis Day didn’t appear.
● The night before the broadcast, Jack took part in a National Variety Artists’ Fund show at the Met. George Burns and Gracie Allen handled some of the m.c. duties. On May 7, Jack returned to the Met to perform in the Friars Club annual frolic.
● People with future Benny connections were on the air the same evening. The announcer of “Parade of the States” on the NBC Red network was Howard Claney, who pushed Chevrolets when the car company sponsored the Benny show. Also on the Red network was the A&P Gypsies, featuring vocalist Frank Parker, who had a two-year career with Benny. And beaming out that evening from KGO San Francisco was Phil Harris’ orchestra, which spent more than 15 years with Jack.

You can listen to the first programme on the media player below.



As a Tralfaz special feature, author Kathy Fuller-Seeley, who is annotating and commenting on the Benny show's first scripts in a series of books, gives us her insights in the raw interview below. Apologies for the distortion; turning down the level on the mike simply cuts the volume but not the over-modulation.

Late note: For reasons I do not understand, there is visual break-up playing this on some browsers. However, you don't need to see me anyway.

Pigging the Cab

Porky Pig develops a huge mouth to imitate Cab Calloway singing “Chinatown, My Chinatown” in Porky at the Crocadero, a 1938 cartoon made by the Frank Tashlin unit. Calloway could be pretty animated (pun not intended) on stage in this era.



Volney White is the credited animator. White later went back east to work for Paul Terry. Joe D’Igalo and Bob Bentley were in his unit. Lew Landsman wrote the story.

Tashlin pulls off more of his fast-cutting in this short, with six different backgrounds in about three seconds as the Crodacero manager runs after Porky.

McKimson Meets the Tazmanian Devil

“There was this Tasmanian Devil of mine,” director Bob McKimson once recalled. “The executive at the studio, Ed Selzer, said to stop making them, that this character was too obnoxious. So after two of them I stopped. Then one day, Jack Warner called him in and demanded, “What happened to the Tasmanian Devil?” Warner fumed that he’d better tell me to make more because there were boxes and boxes of letters coming in about the character. So, I made about three more after that.”

McKimson, it seems, liked trying out new characters, so he developed the Devil character some time before his unit was disbanded for a year starting in February 1953. But it’s not because he had been to a zoo and looked at one. In fact, he had never seen one. His son Bob Jr. has related how the animal’s name came up in a crossword puzzle, then asked the people in his unit to come up with a possible design for one. He melded them together and came up, thanks as well to a story written by Sid Marcus, with a character that caught the attention of movie-house cartoon lovers.

There’s no indication that Bob McKimson, who died in 1977, ever saw a Tasmanian Devil. But another McKimson did.

Chuck was one of the four animators in his brother’s unit who worked on the first Devil short, Devil May Hare (released in 1954). Jump ahead several decades, when historians started writing favourably about the Warners cartoons, fans enthusiastically devoured any information (and cartoons) they could find in that pre-internet era, and companies started selling re-creations of cels of the shorts. Some of the animation old-timers were around to go on publicity tours for them. Chuck McKimson was one (his older brother Tom went with him on occasion).

So it was that Chuck McKimson ended up in Australia and came face-to-face with you-know-what. And in Tasmania, too.

The Age newspaper in Melbourne witnessed the historic meeting and wrote a couple of stories. First up is one from April 28, 1998. The story is a little presumptuous claiming McKimson and Chuck Jones “are the last survivors of a golden age of animation.” For one, there was Bob Givens who was the layout artist on that first Tasmanian Devil cartoon.

Art for Fudd and profit; ANIMATION:
For the men of "Termite Palace", working for Warner Brothers wasn't work. It was art.
By GREG BURCHALL
They called the place "Termite Terrace"; the run-down building on the edge of the Warner Brothers' film studio lot where, every day, a group of artists met to flay, stretch, clobber, slice, dice, perforate and blow up some of cinema's most endearingly durable characters.
"It was great fun, it wasn't like going to work at all," recalls animator Charles "Chuck" McKimson.
"And we certainly weren't thinking that what we were doing was art."
McKimson and his brothers Bob and Tom, were, with Chuck Jones, Fritz Freleng [sic] and Bob Clampett, part of the legendary Warners' animation team that turned out a string of classic cartoons in the 1930s, '40s and '50s that featured such timeless characters as Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Foghorn Leghorn, Elmer Fudd, Speedy Gonzales and the Tasmanian Devil.
While the characters live on in re-run land, McKimson and Jones are the last survivors of a golden age of animation that, in its visual wit and subversive scenarios, still gives The Simpsons and Ren and Stimpy a Road Runner-paced run for their money. But it's a catch-up game for the merchandising money.
Buying and selling original animation art work - characters hand-painted on to clear plastic cells, storyboards and limited-edition prints - has become big business over the past 15 years.
For early collectors, it was simply a matter of exploring Warner Brothers' dumpsters. The studio burned most of its orginal artwork in the '60s to make way for more storage space.
Most of the available artwork comes from the links created for the re-release of the 'toons on TV.
"We threw out tons of the stuff," says McKimson.
"We never imagined anyone would ever want it.
"We never even thought the films and characters would have such a long life. We were just going from picture to picture and having a good time."
Luckily, the McKimsons were quite the hoarders and a lot of their personal art has been preserved, including the pen-and-ink originals of an unpublished children's book from 1931.
Robert McKimson junior now runs the family business, which has the exclusive licensing rights to the Warner Brothers' characters.
"I'm the 10-per-center, I'm not creative in the way Dad, Tom and Chuck were," he laughs. "They were natural-born artists who were drawn to animation, which was a new, exciting medium back in the '30s.
"The jam sessions, where they would sit around the office, throwing ideas at each other were the stuff of legend."
Out of such a session came the Tasmanian Devil. McKimson confirms that it was born of the need to introduce a new character, "but we'd just about drawn every other animal under the sun". Crossword puzzle fanatic Robert senior had recently come across a reference to the aggro marsupial.
"We did a lot of research on that one, we all went away and did some drawings and pretty much came up with a similar-looking thing," says McKimson. "The boss didn't like it much, said it was too mean - no charm - nothing for the kids. Well, we never made any of those pictures for kids, we made them for adults. Fact was, we made them for ourselves."
The Devil's manic personality attracted its own following, however, and another four classic films were created around it.
The work was labor-intensive, involving 14 months of writing, recording, drawing, inking, painting and photographing to produce one six-to-seven minute cartoon. McKimson says a room of about 50 women were kept busy with the paints, as the artists churned out up to 25 feet of animation a week.
"Today's animation is fine for what it is," says McKimson. "Labor costs being what they are, you'll never see that much work going into the art again. What the computer can achieve now is amazing, but still fairly limited.
"We'd really get involved with those characters while we were drawing them."
* A Celebration: the Magical Art of Warner Bros. is at Silver K Fine Art Gallery, 1092 High Street, Armadale, until 24 May. Charles McKimson will meet fans and sign work there on 9 May from 1-4pm.

Chuck McKimson stopped in several other Australian states (Melbourne is in Victoria), including Tasmania. His meeting with the Devil was published in The Age on April 30th and reprinted in other Australian papers.

Animator meets the devil he didn't know
By ANDREW DARBY
Animator Charles McKimson was a little wary about getting close to a Tasmanian devil for the first time since he helped give it fame as an American cartoon character.
"So that's it?" he said at Hobart's Bonorong wildlife centre yesterday as a male devil snarled over a female that it then scruffed by the neck and dragged into a nuptial hollow log.
Mr McKimson stared, trying to reconcile the squat brown marsupial in the pit with the character he created with pen and ink for Warner Brothers cartoons.
"Ours is a nasty little character," he mused. Which seemed true of the real thing. The wildlife park's owner, Robert Douglas, said: "The jaw has 10 times the power of a pit bull terrier. It could snap a finger off. But it's very, very cowardly."
"Here," Mr Douglas said to Mr McKimson as he held up the female he had hand-reared. "You can pat it."
Mr McKimson, 83 and a Los Angeleno, understands the art of survival. It took a while for him to accept Mr Douglas's reassurance that the female was "a nice little girl". When they came close, she stared, Mr McKimson stared . . . and the devil turned away to snuggle into Mr Douglas's shirt.
In 1953 Warner Brothers was looking for a new character as a foil for that Oscar-winning rabbit, Bugs Bunny. Mr McKimson's brother Bob came up with the strangely named marsupial that had stuck in his mind as a crossword clue. Both Warners animators, they looked it up in a book, and with a combination of five drawings settled on the slavering monster that occasionally whirls through Bugs's life.
Mr McKimson agrees that Taz the Devil is a somewhat two-dimensional character, doing little more than snarling and spinning. Still, he says Taz is the second most popular cartoon character in the Warner Brothers stable.
That fame may spread further as the Tasmanian Government is negotiating with Warners to use the character in tourism promotions.
Mr Douglas and Mr McKimson agreed the cartoon character was just about correct. "All that noise is spot on," Mr Douglas said.
One other thing was absolutely right. The furry scraps of meat Mr McKimson watched them snarl and spit over were bits of rabbit.

To make a long story short, Chuck McKimson never returned to his brother’s unit when it was resurrected in early 1954. He found work as art director for Whitman Publishing, which had lines of books and comics, leaving in 1960 to become animation director for Creston Studio’s ill-fated Calvin and the Colonel prime-time cartoon series. The show was on the air, then off, then on again. McKimson stuck with it for all 26 episodes before being hired by Pacific Title. He died in 1999.