Drilling a Gag Into an Audience

How far can we stretch a gag? That seems to be the difference between Deputy Droopy and Tex Avery’s other “don’t make noise” cartoons.

Droopy fires up a blow-torch to heat up a hand drill.



How long can Avery and writer Heck Allen keep this going? First, the short bandit grabs the hot drill. He hands it to the tall bandit so he can run outside and yell (and not disturb a sheriff as try to rob his office).



The tall bandit now realises he’s holding the drill. Out he goes, but not before giving it back to the short bandit.



The short bandit now feels the heat. He hands the drill back to the tall bandit, who stands immobile with a pair of pliers so he doesn’t get burned (the only thing that moves is his right arm).



Tex keeps things going. The short bandit runs back into the sheriff’s office and the tall bandit uses the pliers to hand him back the drill.



That pretty much finishes the gag. It’s on to the next one.

Avery and Mike Lah get co-director credits on the cartoon as Avery and almost all his unit were laid off in March 1953. Lah stayed behind to finish this cartoon and “Cellbound” with animators from the Hanna-Barbera unit—Irv Spence, Ed Barge, Ken Muse and Ray Patterson.

Really Limited Animation

The stories weren’t much, the animation was minimal, dialogue was non-existent (see comment below), but Colonel Bleep has the distinction of getting on the air before anything Hanna-Barbera put on TV. The series appeared on September 23, 1957 on WGR in Buffalo, almost three months before H-B’s Saturday morning show Ruff and Reddy on NBC. The station ran a full half-hour of the cartoons early Monday evening.

Bleep were made at the Soundac studio in Miami. The animation consisted a filled-in blurry outline followed by a pose. Sometimes, the drawings went from pose to pose, being held on screen while a narrator intoned. The last drawing you see below was held for 30 frames, longer if consider only the effects animation changed between the last two drawings.

Soundac cut out animation by reusing cycles (especially effects) or drawings themselves, and by holding a drawing while moving the background.

The studio decided all its characters would have thick outlines (presumably the better to read on black and white TVs, especially if the reception produced a ghosty picture). They made up for the lack of animation with interesting poses. In Scratch and His Feathered Friend, you can see consecutive drawings for various scenes, again held for various lengths of time.



Regarding the studio, Billboard of June 24, 1957 reported:

Soundac Productions of 2133 N. W. 11th Ave., Miami, Fla., has added 2,500 feet of new executive offices and art production rooms. The new facilities have been constructed around an exclosed patio and heated swimming pool for the convenience of out-of-state agency friends who fly down for a day or two. In this way, they can combine business and pleasure without leaving the premises. Currently the company is producing a series of 78 color animated half-hour shows. The series, titled, “The Adventures of Colonel Bleep,” is being readied for the syndication market.

It had been making commercials; some of the company’s clients in 1955 were Howard Johnson’s, Pan Am, Sohio and Sylvania. It operated under the eyes of Jack Schleh, Robert D. Buchanan and Bob Biddlecomb. In 1965, the studio also produced one of the more laughable (and we don’t mean funny) cartoon series when it signed a deal with Trans-Lux to distribute The Mighty Mister Titan..

We’ll profile one of the men behind the series in a future post.

Johnny Carson’s On His Way

Depending on your age, Johnny Carson is still the King of Late Night Television. As the TV has changed since Carson’s retirement from The Tonight Show in 1992, that opinion likely won’t change.

Carson came up through the ranks, hosting the game show Who Do You Trust? [sic] before being tapped to replace Jack Paar in 1962. Interestingly, both men were Jack Benny protégés.

TV Guide watched his career blossom, and came up with a feature story in its issue of September 3, 1955 after Carson got a surprise break. The story has no byline. Unfortunately, the black-and-white photo below ended up in the gutter between two pages so the middle part of it is missing.

Young Man With A Grin
JOHNNY CARSON HOPES IT'S HERE TO STAY
With many a rataplan on the publicity drums, CBS has launched 29-year-old Johnny Carson as the first network comedian to do his show from Hollywood since an old man of 35 named George Gobel.
The inevitable comparison of Carson and Gobel doesn’t seem to be bothering anybody except TV columnists, who dearly love to make such comparisons.
Carson, a straightforward young man with a pleasant grin which gets a lot of mileage on and off his Thursday night show, fields the Gobel question with the ease of a shortstop throwing out a slow runner at first base.
“We expected to be compared to Gobel,” he admits. (Carson invariably—and refreshingly—uses the editorial “we” when referring to his show, an apparently unconscious compliment to his staff.) “We’re both low-pressure; we both underplay. Gobel is the hottest thing in the field right now, so naturally anyone coming along with even an approximation of his style is going to be compared to him.
“But frankly, we don’t think viewers look at it that way at all. If you entertain them, they’ll stay with you. If you don’t, they’ll tune you out. We think it’s as simple as that.”

Carson is a tall, lanky lad with a boyish appearance that makes him look even younger than he is, a fact which may drive somewhat more venerable funnymen like Jack Benny to hold their heads in their hands and groan softly.
The same Mr. Benny, however, is on record as having stated publicly—not once, but several times—that Johnny Carson is CBS’ hottest young comedy prospect in years.
When Red Skelton bopped his head against a non-breakaway breakaway wall during rehearsal one day last winter, Carson received a hurry call to fill the breach. “All the way into the studio,” he says, “I kept trying to remember sure-fire gags. It was all so fast, I really didn’t have time to get into a nervous tizzy.”
It was Benny who led the raving afterward. “Great,” he kept insisting, buttonholing everyone in sight, “just great. The kid is great.”
Support like this never hurts. CBS, which had been toying with Carson, suddenly got serious about finding a format for him. Egged on by Benny (“No wonder they can’t sell him—he’s too good, too intelligent—they’re all looking for pie throwers”), the network put him on the air June 30, complete with two sponsors, and the fate of young Mr. Carson was thenceforth squarely up to the viewers.
Aside from a natural flair for the quieter kind of comedy, Carson is both a listener and a worker. Besides shouldering the burden of being a young comedian tossed into the network whirlpool, he plays an important part in the writing and casting of the show, chores which are generally full-time jobs in themselves.
Right off, Carson and his writers decided to concoct the show strictly on a week-to-week basis. “We’ve got to avoid the trap of doing the same sort of sketch or routine on every show,” he explains, with the business-like air of a brush salesman outlining the year’s product. “We parodied Person to Person and What’s My Line? on our first two shows, for instance, but then we skipped parodies for a while. If we’d done many more, the audience would start looking for them—and how many shows can you parody? We’ll do them as the occasion demands. But not too often.”
He also plans to go easy on the husband-and-wife sketches. “That’s an even worse trap,” he says. “You’ve got to do that sort of thing brilliantly at this point, to get away with it at all. We’d rather keep trying to make the show as different as possible.”
Carson does plan, however, to use his wife, Jody, on the show on what might be called an irregularly regular basis; and, until he signed singer Jill Corey for an eight-week stint, she was the only girl with any reasonable expectation of sticking. Carson already had run through several singers trying to find one who fitted, and even considered using a different one every week.
“Who knows?” Johnny says almost cheerfully, when queried about plans for specific dates. “We may not even be on the air by that time.”

Carson was born in Corning, Iowa, moving at the age of 8 to Norfolk, Neb., where he later made himself a small reputation as a mail order-tutored magician and ventriloquist. He had a hitch in the Navy during World War II, went through the University of Nebraska on the GI Bill and got his early TV experience, beginning in 1948, on WOW-TV, Omaha.
An old family friend, CBS-TV producer Bill Brennan, talked him into coming to Hollywood. Carson moved in 1950. He and Jody, whom he met in college and married in 1949, now have three young boys—Kit, five; Ricky, three, and Cory, just pushing two.
Carson spent his first year in Hollywood as a staff announcer with the local CBS station, KNXT, meanwhile working up a format for something of his own. In the fall of 1951 he started a local show, Carson’s Cellar. It lasted 26 weeks and was pronounced reasonably successful. Later, CBS gave him a crack at emceeing a summer show, Earn Your Vacation. He did all right. He also continued writing on the side, including monologs for Red Skelton—and that was one thing that didn’t get knocked out of Skelton’s head when he hit that breakaway-proof wall.
He hollered for Carson, and Carson came running.
Which is as good a way as any for a young comedian to be pushed into his own show these days.
“I have sent Red,” Carson says gratefully, “a large bottle of aspirin.”

Van Beuren Jungle

Don and Waffles run into weird, made-up creatures in the jungle in Jungle Jazz (1930).

It’s typical fare. Waffles stands there while Don goes through gyrations of fear. He twists his body around when he sees one fuzzy ball.



Another with horns pokes his head into the foreground and shows off his teeth. Waffles shakes in a cycle.



Oh, and there are large spider-like things with skulls for heads in this jungle, too. Waffles twirls around and runs out of the scene.



The cartoon ends with a quartet of animals singing, with their heads zooming toward the camera.

John Foster and Harry Bailey get a "by" credit, with Gene Rodemich supplying the score.

Old Glory

Leon Schlesinger heeded the call of his country and of the Warner brothers, who decided in 1939 that patriotic films were needed, by rushing the Merrie Melodies short Old Glory through production.

Schlesinger told the United Press the idea for the cartoon was his and it came to him in March. The Hollywood Reporter revealed on June 3rd the film had been shipped to New York.

Boxoffice magazine’s reviewer wasn’t impressed, opining in its edition of June 17, 1939 “Probably the first animated capsule of Americanism handled in a manner which will make exhibitors wonder why they have to pay for it. It’s strictly flag waving and has only bits of fine cartoon work to recommend it.” But in the same issue, Ivan Spear called it “a noteworthy and highly commendable contribution to Hollywood’s still unofficial Americanization campaign,” adding it was “light, but topnotch, entertainment.”

Trade papers at the time stated the release date was going to be July 4th. But you can see an ad to the right for a theatre in Pittsburgh which showed the cartoon starting Friday, June 30th. (At two theatres in Chicago, it opened on July 5th with Eddie Robinson’s Confessions of a Nazi Spy).

Some of the rotoscoping in the cartoon is distracting because the animation could be more fluid, and I’ve always been creeped out by Patrick Henry’s teeth after he pulls out a sword (why is he carrying a sword?) and stares at the camera like he’s half insane.

Chuck Jones directed the cartoon and mimicked shots in live action films where the camera looks down or looks up at the action. (I do not know who the layout artist was).

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Jones made sure he had shadows on clothes and faces in all kinds of scenes.

Jack Warner wrote about his studio’s patriotic two-reelers in a United Press story at the time the cartoon was released. He didn’t mention Old Glory, possibly because it was only released by Warners, not made by the studio. But he said “I feel it is high time that the people in the United States of America think in terms of fostering peace between each other in our own land. We should also aid in the abolishment of all the mercenary and selfish preachings of hate among our citizens.”

You can read Schlesinger's comments about the cartoon in this post.

Tralfaz Sunday Theatre: Fred and the Chevy Spies

Bill Frawley was immortalised as Fred Mertz, thanks to “I Love Lucy” which, I imagine, has never been off television since 1951.

Frawley doesn’t seem to have been able to escape the name “Fred” until he was cast in “My Three Sons” in 1960. In our last Tralfaz Sunday Theatre post, we spotlighted a 1959 industrial film where he and Vivian Vance played Fred and Ethel, though the short was careful not to give them a last name.

The late Daws Butler’s friend Joe Bev has discovered yet another industrial film where Frawley again plays a guy named Fred with no last name. It’s called “What About the ’61 Chevy’s?” and was produced by Jam Handy, a company out of Detroit that had made commercial films for Chevrolet going back into the 1930s.

It’s a lightweight comedy, the kind that seemed very popular in that era. Fred hires an all-female detective agency to spy on Chevrolet and get the lowdown for him on the soon-to-be-available 1961 Chevys. Unfortunately, Vance doesn’t make a cameo appearance (probably to the relief of Frawley) and none of the characters is named Ethel. But there is a “Lucy” connection. The film was directed by Jim Kern, who not only helmed a pile of “Lucy” episodes, but was behind the camera for “My Three Sons” in the mid-‘60s.

The main female detective is played by singer/dancer Barbara Perry, who married animator Art Babbitt. She appeared as Morey Amsterdam’s wife on a couple of episodes of “The Dick Van Dyke Show.” Dancer Arlene Avril, stage actress Maryanne Cohan, cover girl Toni Hesse and Hartford Agency model Dorothy Dollivar get screen credits as well. The story may be a little odd in places, and the parts demonstrating the cars a little dull, but the score is enjoyable, thanks the work of veteran Jam Handy composer Sam Benavie.

Carmichael

Maybe the oddest character to populate the Jack Benny radio world was one that wasn’t human.

For a while, Jack had a pet polar bear named Carmichael.

The bear showed up on the February 12, 1939 episode. The plot was that someone sent him to Jack as a birthday present. It was never determined who. Not that it really mattered. Carmichael didn’t actually appear on the show all that often and was pretty much gone by 1942. He was basically a vehicle for the writers to give Rochester something to say in his weekly phone calls on the show. When the writers ran out of Carmichael gags, they simply stopped using him.

Ed Beloin and Bill Morrow must have had a thing for animals. They stuck Jack with an ostrich, a camel and a horse. None of them were funny and none lasted long; the camel appeared in one episode (actor Stan Freberg annoyed Jack in rehearsal and was never hired again).

For a time, the radio audience liked the incongruousness of Jack owning a polar bear, so Morrow and Beloin capitalised on it by sticking Carmichael into the plot of the feature film Buck Benny Rides Again. This became fodder for the media, with newspaper reports of brown bears being dyed white, and people actually mailing bears to Jack (evidently some were live). One report said Carmichael was going to be cast in the Benny-Allen picture Love Thy Neighbor (instead of a bear, they got a turkey).

There were other problems, as the weekend newspaper supplement Screen and Radio Weekly revealed in its edition of January 14, 1940.

JACK BENNY: Villain
Of the Bear that Was Not There
By Jon Stokes
MENTION Jack Benny's name on the Paramount lot if you want to see a lot of people scowl. Sure, Jack's a comedian and is supposed to make people laugh. But he doesn't at Paramount. Not when there's even a single talent scout around. To them, the name of Jack Benny spells the name of a well-known headache tablet. The most recent reason is Carmichael.
Carmichael is more than the bear that won such a following on Jack's NBC broadcasts that Paramount decided to put him in a picture, "Buck Benny Rides Again." Carmichael personifies a Benny penchant as pleasant to the talent scout as a rasping file is to the teeth. It's a penchant for making stars out of personalities that just don't happen to exist.
Now, just when or where Mrs. Benny's boy Jack picked up his yen for invisible talent along the highway of life is as much of a mystery as why the bee didn't sting him the first time he picked up a fiddle to try to imitate it. We won't go into Benny's merits as a violinist here. Fred Allen is better qualified to tend to chilling any of Mr. Benny's hot fiddle airs. When it comes to taking the musical sting out of Mr. Benny's bee, Mr. A. is better than a surgeon's lancet. We will, however, go into the case of the invisible Benny door knock.
Anybody, even Rudy Vallee, can make a tree like Charley McCarthy pay dividends, to say nothing of making stars out of flesh-and-blood people. But even Walt Disney can't make millions of people hold their breath waiting to hear a knock on the door. And that's exactly what Mr. Benny did the first time you heard the familiar rap and heard Benny say "Come in." And then the phrase that came to be a veritable household word, "Mr. Benny, I wish to take this opportunity . . ." WELL, that's how Mr. Benny started making stars out of ghosts, and even the late spook expert, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, could never get as many people to give a rap for a rap.
Flushed with his early success, Mr. Benny went on to a 1921 Maxwell. He made it sound so real even the cynical Mr. Allen almost fell for the junk heap and bought it sight unseen. Mr. Benny didn't lose a cent on that Maxwell. Neither did Allen, thanks to providence. But Benny's sponsor did.
Mr. Benny's listeners wanted to see the Maxwell, and said so by the thousands. The sponsor wanted to keep selling them his products, so he had to invest in a 1921 Maxwell, which cost more than you think because 1921 Maxwells are almost as rare as Finns in Moscow.
Which brings us pretty close to the problem that confronted Paramount with Carmichael. We'll get to it as soon as we explain the enigma that is Mr. Benny. We won't say it under oath, because it might be just another Fred Allen canard.
The story is, however, that Jack likes invisible stars because he doesn't have to pay them any money to go on the air. If he doesn't have to pay them, he doesn't have to open his purse. And if he doesn't have to open his purse, there's no chance of his ever losing that moth. It's the granddaddy of all moths, they say. Jack's had it in the purse ever since he caught it in Waukegan at the turn of the century, a very rare specimen. All of which, to Paramount spelled "c-a-t-a-s-t-r-o-p-h-e."
For many weeks before he went to work on "Buck Benny," Mark Sandrich had been listening to the Benny broadcast and soaking in Benny personality and Benny gags. As prominent on the program as Rochester, and provoking almost as many laughs, was a polar bear. Its name was Carmichael. We've got to get that bear in the picture, mused Mr. Sandrich. Next day there was an executive memo on the desk of the top talent scout. "Sign Carmichael for 'Buck Benny Rides Again'." And then the fun started in earnest, with an exchange of memos that must have run something like this:
From talent scout to Mr. Sandrich: "Investigated Carmichael and found he's a bear."
From Sandrich to talent scout: "I know he's a bear. I said sign him."
From talent scout to Mr. Sandrich: "Impossible to sign Carmichael. He doesn't exist."
From Sandrich to talent scout: "Frank Capra found Shangri-La. You find me a Carmichael."
MR. SANDRICH didn't say “or else . . .” But the same day telegraph wires and long-distance phones began getting hot Stanley getting his orders to find Livingstone in darkest Africa showed no more zeal. Paramount was out to find a double, for Carmichael or bust. Specifications: "a 200-pound polar bear, gentle enough not to hurt Mr. Benny, smart enough to appreciate the fact that Rochester wasn't an enemy bear and eat him up.
For five months the search continued. The only reason Paramount didn't send an expedition to the North Pole is that the animal trainer advised against it. The picture would be finished before the bear could be trained. And Buck Benny alive was worth more than a polar bear that looked like Carmichael. He was worth so much, in fact, that Paramount wouldn't trust him to stay on a real horse in the Santa Claus Lane parade on Hollywood Boulevard. He was mounted on a ferocious white animal taken from the window of a wholesale saddle shop in downtown Los Angeles. Resplendent in a silver-mounted saddle and bridle, the animal nevertheless was made of the same stuff as the now famous horse of Troy.
A couple of weeks ago, an ageing and graying Mark Sandrich sat in front of his desk and sadly surveyed the marvelous scenes he could have shot with Carmichael had there been a Carmichael to shoot. He was almost ready to give up the whole business when his secretary, Trudy Wellman, rushed in with the speed of a tropical dawn. "Mr. Sandrich, they've found him," she said.
"Dr. Livingstone, I presume," was what she swears Mr. Sandrich answered.
"No, Carmichael!"
"Carmichael?"
"Yes, Carmichael."
And there, before Mr. Sandrich's unbelieving eyes, a few days later, stood 200 pounds of polar bear doing everything but winking at the script girls and asking for a love scene in a sarong with Lamour. HIS name was Mischa, but not for long in the town where the only handicap to success is a gal's real name. He came from Clinton, Conn., but, naturally, by the way of the South Pole.
The talent scout kept his job, Mr. Sandrich's hair turned back to black and Rochester began to get slightly pale. After all, working with an invisible bear on the radio and working with one you can feel, and one that can feel you, on a movie set, are two different things. So everybody but Rochester was happy at Paramount but still nobody is smiling when you mention the name of Jack Benny.
The day after Carmichael was found, there was a new character introduced by Mr. Benny on his NBC program. Jack bought it for a Thanksgiving turkey and meant to invite all his friends to dinner, until Rochester discovered the bird laid eggs as big as a football and hid its head in the sand. Fans began writing in and asking for the name of the ostrich. Jack named it Trudy, in honor of Trudy Wellman. Yesterday the talent scout received a memo from Mr. Sandrich:
"I'm giving you a head start. Sign Trudy, the ostrich, for Jack Benny's next picture. I know Trudy doesn't exist, but Frank Capra found Shangri-La, so you find Trudy."

The Littlest Giant

More, more, more! I want to see more!

John Sutherland Productions churned out some pretty attractive and imaginative animation/partially-animated short films for industrial customers in the late 1940s and the 1950s. They were big-wheel industrial customers with money to spend on top-quality work. Sutherland was able to wave plenty of cash at artists from MGM, Disney, Warner Bros. and even UPA to get them to make pro-corporate films.

Some have surfaced on line over the years, but every time I peer through old issues of Business Screen Magazine, I realise many of the Sutherland cartoons must be hiding in film cans somewhere.

Sutherland took out full page ads to push his cartoons, usually explaining what awards they won or how widely seen they were. In the publication’s 1957 Review, some ads feature a “Film of the Month.” One that got profiled twice in ads was The Littlest Giant. You can see the design work in the frames below. Fairly average stuff for the mid-1950s. The copy below came from an edition of Business Screen published in 1957.

That it takes a special skill to present economic information in a memorable and highly entertaining manner is demonstrated in "The Littlest Giant," latest National Consumer Finance Association film produced by John Sutherland Productions, Inc.

"The Littlest Giant" (13 1/2 minutes; Technicolor: animation) shows how important consumer finance is to the national well-being by pumping more than 3 billion dollars into the country's economic blood stream every year and by making it possible for the consumer to buy goods and services out of future income, thus increasing both the individual and the national standard of living — already the highest the world has ever known.

Designed for distribution to schools and colleges, this film is also scheduled for a highly successful general public audience acceptance via television and motion picture theatres. Additionally, prints will be made available all over the U.S. for community group screenings, civic and service clubs, churches and the like.

"The Littlest Giant" is an excellent example of the way in which economic information can be made concise, understandable and entertaining when experience and professional craftsmanship is applied to the problem. This motion picture, produced by the studio with the greatest number of credits for successful economic education films, is another example of the Sutherland touch.

This film won the National Consumer Finance Association "Chris" award at the Columbus Film Festival.

Business Screen also reviewed the film in its issue of December 15, 1956.

When the Average American Needs Help
A Financial Hand for Mr. Smith
A Lesson in Credit from the National Consumer Finance Assn.
Sponsor: National Consumer Finance Association.
Title: The Littlest Giant, 13½ min., color, produced by John Sutherland Productions, Inc.
This film joins two other motion pictures in the NCFA film program, Every Seventh Family and Who Gets the Credit. Like its forerunners, The Littlest Giant seeks to show the important role of the state- regulated small loan company in our economy.
Little, animated Edgar Q. Smith is shown in the title role of the average consumer, whose mass makes up the most important giant in the land. Smith, like most of us, lives on his fellow man's confidence—credit. His bills come monthly, his house is mortgaged and he buys his car on time. And when he needs cash, down he goes to one of the 9,000 small loan offices and takes out one of the ten million small loans processed every year.
Does he pay a pretty sizeable interest? You best he does. The NCFA explains this by illustrating the cost of making small "retail" loans, as against the cost of making a whop ping big "wholesale" loan to the Big Deal Corp.
And don’t forget, the film says, that if it weren’t for the friendly small loan office on the corner, the loan shark would have easy pickings.
The Littlest Giant tells a complex story, but with animation and an easy continuity it simplifies the basically complicated story of finance, rate strictures and the historical background of the consumer finance company.
Modern Talking Picture Service will distribute the film, as it does other NCFA pictures.

The February 1956 directory in Business Screen lists both George Gordon and Carl Urbano as its animation directors; both had been at MGM in the early ‘40s. The company made both animated and live action films (and some with elements of both). It lists as recent productions: Behind Your Telephone Bill (AT&T), The Dragon Slayer, Spray’s the Thing (DuPont, both animated), Meet Mrs. Swenson (GE; live action), The Conservation Story (Richfield Oil, some animation), Tops in Transmission (GM), The Rising Tide (Union Carbide), Beauty with Brains (GE), The Living Circle (United Fruit, part animation), Bananas? Si, Senor (United Fruit, animated), Working Dollars (NY Stock Exchange, animated), along with spots for Lucky Strike, Delsey Tissue, Kool-Shake, Zerone-Zerex, Ajax and Meadowgold Ice Cream.

Not mentioned in the list is one of the studio’s finest animated shorts released that year, Destination Earth, with designs by Tom Oreb, and the live action Voice Beneath the Sea and Egypt Reborn. As you can see, the studio was extremely busy with some wealthy corporate clients.

When I wrote this post about two years ago I said "Perhaps The Littlest Giant will surface yet. It was released on VHS with other Sutherland shorts." I now understand it is on a blu-ray set put out by Steve Stanchfield and his fine little company and available through Amazon. I have not seen it, but you should. Whatever you may think of the corporate propaganda contained in them, the Sutherland animated films are worth being sought out.

The Funny Phoney MP

At one time, humour on national Canadian TV boiled down to The King of Kensington and the occasional Wayne and Shuster special.

On national Canadian radio, it boiled down to one thing: The Royal Canadian Air Farce, which began on the CBC in 1973. It was such a success on radio that a TV version was put together a number of years later.

Canada is a country of regions. Toronto is not Vancouver and neither of them are Calgary or Halifax. They all have distinct cultures. About the only thing national that’s able to be satirised is either the CBC or federal politics. So the Air Farce had people impersonating various prime ministers and other political figures in Ottawa.

One member of the troupe invented his own.

Dave Broadfoot was, unlike the rest of the Air Farce troupe, from the West Coast, born in North Vancouver. Being Canadian, he did parodied some national stereotypes—a hockey player, a Mountie and a federal politician. And like Vancouver stage actors Fletcher Markle, Paul Kligman and Peg Dixon, and radio fixture Alan Young, Broadfoot decided to further his career by moving to Toronto. By December 1952, he was doing what amounted to a stand-up routine on CBLT’s Big Revue (the Globe and Mail’s Alex Barris compared him to Will Shriner). His career was slightly interrupted when he went overseas to entertain troops during the Korean War.

Let’s fast-forward to 1977. This feature story appeared July 6th in the Ottawa Journal and gives you a bit of an idea of Broadfoot’s head space.

MP for Kicking Horse Pass an idealist
By Peter Robb
Special to the Journal
Would you believe comedian Dave Broadfoot has three sisters who are missionaries? Or that he has worked in the St. Vincent de Paul prison north of Montreal doing volunteer work for the inmates?
To most of us Broadfoot is the creator of the characters Corporal Renfrew of the Mounties and the member of parliament for the riding of Kicking Horse Pass. However, there is another side to the man—one that is intensely idealistic.
In an interview this week after his Camp Fortune performance, Broadfoot discussed his career, his thoughts on the business he is in and the country he lives in. His career has spanned 25 years of hard work, almost all of it in Canada.
Broadfoot started his career in Vancouver in the late 1940s.

"I started working amateur theatre in North Vancouver and I worked three groups simultaneously. Having just come out of the merchant marine I felt I had to make up for lost time."
But straight drama frustrated him. Broadfoot wanted to do comedy and he began to develop an act.
“In those days everybody had an act. It was the only way to do comedy. Nowadays no one does things that way, they talk about their wives or their old neighbourhood, but no one has an act worked out. Not many modern comedians can come out and relate directly to an audience, it is just not the way things are done.”
Strongly influenced by the last gasps of vaudeville, Broadfoot developed a stand-up comedy routine based on the characters he saw around him. He did office parties and banquets for a couple of years to polish his act and then he made the big move to Toronto. He began his television and radio career in 1952. Out of his first appearance on television came his most famous character, MP for Kicking Horse Pass.
"I had been watching the Republican convention of 1952 and I was amazed by the rhetoric of the whole event. Out of that came a prototype of the member for Kicking Horse Pass. But it needed a Canadian flavor, so I patterned him after E.C. Manning, who was then the premier for Alberta. He had that evangelical style of speaking that made him easy to caricature. All I had to do then was give the character a riding. Mavor Moore suggested the Kicking Horse Pass and that stuck."
Broadfoot's many years in the business has given him strong views on his fellow performers.
"There are many performers that just sit back and collect their money. I do not believe in that, for example I still do benefit shows while many performers do not.
"For a performer to be successful he has to possess intellectual curiosity. So many performers, even the biggest, lack that. There is just nothing to them.
"That is why I enjoy working with Roger Abbott and Don Ferguson and the rest of the Air Farce cast. There we are all writers as well as comedians and it is so stimulating to work with creative people like these."
Broadfoot is also moved by injustices that he sees around him. His latest act contains references to Anita Bryant and her crusade against homosexuals. He sees this as hypocritical.
"The self-righteousness that these people come on with is, well, let's just say that I think it is vengeful for the wrong reasons.
"I worked at the St. Vincent de Paul prison near Montreal when I was working a lot in Montreal, doing comedy workshops and the like for the prisoners, and how anyone could wish that anyone, including homosexuals, could be locked up in any prison is horrendous."
Finally he commented on Canada and why he has never left.
"I am intense about Canada. I am a nationalist one that firmly believes that you have to look after your home before you can help the rest of the world. "I have worked in the U.S. and in Great Britain and I have never really felt comfortable. The homesickness that I feel for Canada is absolutely extraordinary.
"That is not to say that I am pleased with the Canadian situation, especially in English Canada. English Canadians watch American television, listen to American music and retire to Florida to escape Quebec and they wonder why our country is in sad shape. I think that it is sad."

Broadfoot was named an Officer of the Order of Canada in 1983. He was 90 when he died on November 1, 2016. Location unknown. Somewhere in Canada would be the only appropriate spot.

Con-Skunk or Not

Doctor Primrose Skunk enters the Hugh Harman cartoon The Little Mole (1941) with a little introductory song, which seems based on “The Girl I Left Behind Me”:

I’m Doctor Primrose Skunk
With a line of junk
At a trade, you’ll always find me.

His suitcase pops open to create a carnival-like prize-wheel contraption. The wheel lands on a pair of glasses he gives to the title character, surreptitiously extricating a coin, and wanders away behind an overlay of flowers singing:

I get my pay
And I’m on my way
And a sucker is left behind me.

The glasses allow the little mole to actually see things clearly. So how is it “junk”? And how is the mole a “sucker”? Maybe it’s because, at the end, he can no longer see things properly and he’s happy in his self-created world caused by poor vision. Or maybe it’s because Dr. Skunk is wearing a long coat and a top hat, and carries a cane, and that’s how cartoon con-men are dressed.

Harman and his Disneyphile artists fill the screen with little animals and insects, and fairybook flowers and toadstools. Only Harman is credited.

Dr. Skunk is played by Mel Blanc. The other voice actors are anyone’s guess.