360 Bugs

Bugs Bunny divests a South Seas island of all the enemy soldiers, and rhapsodises that it’s so peaceful and quiet.



Bugs’ mood changes. He’s angry because he can’t stand peace and quiet. Animator Virgil Ross (I think) has him do a 360 degree turn, then follows up with some smear drawings.



Gerry Chiniquy got the screen credit for animation in Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips (1944). By the 1960s, it wasn’t on TV screens, certainly not where I lived. We could still boo the Nazis, though.

Buck Benny and the Buck Private

Stars, big and little, toured military camps stateside, appeared at bond and war stamp drives in Canada and the U.S., and performed in sometimes horrible conditions to boost the morale of troops overseas during World War Two.

One was Jack Benny.

Jack went beyond all of what you’ve read. He wrote and even called families of service members once he got home to tell them their boy was okay. This was revealed in his autobiography (co-written with his daughter). But it was a story told at the time as well, as you can see by the newspaper column below published November 28, 1943.

This Story Concerns 2 Swell Guys
By DOROTHY MANNERS
Special to THE DETROIT TIMES
HOLLYWOOD, Nov. 27.
THIS is about two swell guys—Jack Benny and Pvt. Billy Van Grove Jr.
Jack, you already know and perhaps it is as well if you accept this as an introduction to Pvt. Van Grove, before we start reading his mail.
He is 22 years old and the son of the William Van Groves of Los Angeles. Billy has been in the service about a year and is based in Central Africa with the air forces. Lately, Billy has been writing letters home, most of them about Jack Benny, and here is what he has to say:
‘What Excitement!’
“Sunday, July 27.
“The story that’s going around is that Jack Benny arrives soon to put on a show for us. What excitement! I doubt if I’ll get close enough to him to ask a favor—but if I do, ma, I’m going to give him a note to you.’
“I feel almost like I know Jack Benny, because both of us are from Los Angeles and when you are miles and miles from home that makes you feel close to a guy.”
“Tuesday, July 29.
“First, let me tell you that if some one calls you and says he is Jack Benny, don’t act too surprised because it will really be—Jack Benny. I did get close to him and we got talking long enough for him to take down your number and to promise to call you.
“Of course, I feel pretty good about that, but I noticed he took down quite a few numbers. That was yesterday, the day, Jack, Winnie Shaw, Larry Adler (who is just about the best harmonica player in the world) and Anna Lee put on their show for us. It lasted two hours and Benny really outdid himself. How the GIs loved it. We talked all through the night about it and this morning the fellows can talk about nothing else.
“Today Jack ate dinner with us in the enlisted men’s mess hall and he was even funnier, being himself, than he was in the show. He used the regulation mess kit to eat out of, and afterward, he went outside to wash his equipment in the trough provided for that purpose.
“He made quite a ceremony out of getting all the food out of the cracks and crevices of the kit and kept kidding: ‘I’d never eat if I had to do this every day.’
“Guess you don't think this is funny but then you and dad have never eaten out of a GI mess kit.
“If you see any of the neighbors and folks I know I wish you would tell them about Benny and how much his visit here meant. And there are thousands and thousands of guys who feel just the way I do—and right now, thanks to Jack, I’m feeling mighty good.”

The Detouring Lizard

Director Tex Avery, writer Rich Hogan, animator Paul J. Smith and composer Carl Stalling all get credits on the 1940 Warner Bros. cartoon Cross Country Detours, but there are several whose names don’t get mentioned at all.

Background artist Johnny Johnsen and actors Mel Blanc and Sara Berner may be the most prominent, but there is one person who appeared in this cartoon who got a blurb in the popular press.

Well, sort of appeared.

The Los Angeles Times of August 27, 1939 reports:

Casting of the week: Marcia Eloise, a strip-teaseuse from the downtown Follies, answered a call to model for animators drawing a “Looney Tune” cartoon at the Leon Schlesinger studio.

First, we see a “shy little deer” with a sexy walk strolling away from the camera. I suspect Miss Eloise posed for that. Note: I suspect incorrectly. Thad Komorowski has a negative of the reference footage and says it's someone else.



Later, the narrator (identified by Keith Scott as Lew Marcelle) says “Here’s a lizard which, as you all probably know, sheds its skin once a year. Let’s watch this interesting procedure.”



Avery tops the gag.



Avery spoke about the gag to author Joe Adamson in his tremendous book Tex Avery King of Cartoons. Avery said “We Rotoscoped her action to fit the lizard. Shaped the lizard like a girl, too, took off her skin and she was just a lighter green. It got a great laugh, too.” Avery then admitted he didn’t think lizards shed their skin at all, but they “planted the gag” when, during the story meeting, they didn’t figure a snake would work.

The Los Angeles Daily News story about the casting leaves one questioned unanswered. The August 16, 1939 piece read, in part: “In a recent visit to the downtown theatre, one of the studio officials was intrigued by the talent of Marcia, and when the studio decided to put in a call for a dancer, he called the Follies management and made the arrangements.

Which “studio official” is not revealed.

You can see a picture of her from the August 16, 1939 edition of the Daily News, giving her full name (and lying about her age). A little hunting gives us a bit of information about her. The Times of July 1, 1939 states:

Another “name” artist joins the roster of performers at the Follies Theater today, when Marcia Eloise, who won nation-wide fame as the “girl in cellophane,” begins an engagement.
In 1937, Miss Eloise was signed to a seven-year Hollywood contract. She appeared in a featured role in the Allan Jones-Fannie Brice M.G.M. film, “Everybody Sing,” and also in Paramount’s “College Swing.”

The Follies had a good press agent. Several stories about their girlie shows were planted in the Los Angeles press about this time. The Times of July 10 reveals she was in the musical production “Scandals of 1939.” It tells us “Marcia Eloise, youthful, auburn-haired danseuse who begins her second week, has scheduled an unusual number that also involves intricate tap and toe steps.” Her next production, reported the Times on the 25th, was “Naughty Babies.” The Daily News of August 5 tells of “Grin and Bare It,” a “smartly paced midsummer musical revue.”

You get the idea.

November 1940 saw her perform “her novel and charming act” at the Globe Theatre in Boston, with comedian Joe DeRita on the bill.

She was born October 6, 1922 to Frank Griffin and Marguerite Gibson in Denver. An entry at Geni.com reveals she also used the stage names “Teala Loring” and “Judith Gibson.” It additionally tells the world she was the sister of actress Debra Paget. She appeared in ten films for Monogram from 1945-46.

Griffin married Eugene Bennett Pickler in Los Angeles on June 21, 1950. Her marriage certificate doesn’t give an occupation for her but that was the year of her last movie, Arizona Cowboy with Rex Allen. They lived in Norwalk, California before moving to Houston. She died in a car accident in Spring, Texas, on January 30, 2007 at the age of 84.

Zoot Take

Jerry performs a lovely little solo jive dance in The Zoot Cat (1944). The camera pans along with him as he meets up with Tom, dressed as hipster (1940s version). Tom looks ready to slip him some skin when the two realise who each other are.

Tom does a take. Jerry does a take. Then he zooms out of the picture. This is animated on ones. Jerry appears to be looking at the camera but that’s just an in-between as he turns his head.



Ray Patterson, Ken Muse, Irv Spence and Pete Burness got screen credits. Someone will tell you if this is Spence’s work.

If you’re wondering why the girl cat keeps calling Tom “Jackson,” that’s what hep cat musicians used to call each other back then. Sara Berner as the love interest lets out with a lot of ‘40s jive talk in this short. There’s more chatter in this cartoon than the average Tom and Jerry outing, much of it supplied by Jerry Mann.

The Terry Juggling Act

There’s an extended scene in the Heckle and Jeckle cartoon Satisfied Customers (1954) where a grocery store clerk slips into a crate of eggs (courtesy of a banana peel thrown by one of our heroes) and tries to catch them all so they don’t break. He even develops additional hands.



Heckle and Jeckle show their appreciation of the Jim Tyer animation by laughing and applauding as Phil Scheib’s trombones and saxes toot away in a circus-evoking arrangement.

The magpies start throwing all kinds of other stuff at the clerk who manages to save them from falling.



The cartoon opens with another fine walk cycle by Carlo Vinci. There are a couple of Bugs Bunny gags here and one lifted from Tex Avery’s Garden Gopher (did Terry end it with blackface, too?), and the ending is like something from a Max Fleischer Ko-Ko cartoon in the silent days. Fans of the TerrySplash™ will be disappointed by its absence.

Bad Movies of 1943

People seem to love lists. They also seem to love bad movies. What happens when you put them together?

You get an easy way to fill newspaper column space at the end of the year when there’s nothing to talk about.

Here’s a United Press piece published starting at the end of 1943. I’m not really a feature film person; the last time I went to see a first-run picture in a theatre was almost 40 years ago. I maybe caught five minutes of the Jack Benny feature referred to once on TV. The only movie I’ve seen in whole that’s on the list is The Big Broadcast of 1938 because W.C. Fields was in it. I can’t say it made a lasting impression. I imagine if it weren’t for the Robin/Rainger song that Bob Hope adopted, no one would remember it today.

Hollywood Has Fewer Big Flops; 1943 Didn't Have '10 Worst' Movies
By FREDERICK C. OTHMAN
United Press Hollywood Writer
HOLLYWOOD, Dec. 31. (U.P.) — During the last several years, on the final day of each, we have lost friends and alienated people by listing in cold type the 10 worst movies of the preceding 12 months. The day has come again. And friends, we must report, to our own amazement, that there weren't that many superdooper floperoos this year.
There was a picture called "The Youngest Profession," which would make anybody squirm. Including an autograph collector, which was what the film was about. There was a movie called "The Meanest Man in the World" and Jack Benny still is blushing for not stealing the negative and burning it before it burned him.
There were other pictures, too, which were disappointing, but they all had something in them that somebody liked. It was not always so. Maybe the boys are learning how to make movies, maybe. Because we remember some pictures that were enough to make the cash customers grovel in their loges.
BLOSSOMS SMELL

Worst of all, probably, was a film called "Blossoms on Broadway." This was produced by B. P. Schulberg, who would have known better. Shirley Ross was the star of same and it nearly ended her as an actress. John Trent made his motion picture debut in the same picture. Simultaneously he said adieu to the films. Edward Arnold was in it long enough to be labeled “box office poison” and it took him years to live it down.
Another motion picture we'd like to forget, but can't, was an epic of the jungle, called "Green Hell." This was produced by Harry Eddington for Universal studios and it concerned some sweaty white men who found themselves a beautiful girl. Then they stood around looking at her, licking their chops. Chief chop licker was Doug Fairbanks, Jr. The girl was Joan Bennett and the feature of the film was a couple of thousand lightning bugs, which blinked their headlights when the electricians pulled the switches.
There also was an epic titled "The Big Broadcast of 1938." This was the film in which Bob Hope sang "Thanks For the Memory." It also was the picture in which Kirsten Flagstad, the grand opera star, climbed a pasteboard mountain inside an ocean liner—honest—and warbled Wagner, while W. C. Fields steered the boat through icebergs with his feet. It gives us the heebies even today, thinking about it.
Well do we remember, too well, the world premiere of a mighty musical of the oil fields, titled “High, Wide and Handsome.” This was a multi-million-dollar project featuring Irene Dunne. The spotlights and the bleachers and the red carpets were on the job at the Carthay Circle Theater. Othman had on his tuxedo and the management announced that the picture was of such quality and length that there would be a brief intermission in the middle.
Came the intermission and practically everybody, including Othman in his hard-boiled shirt, walked out and never returned. We never did learn what happened to Miss Dunne. We didn’t care.
B’s UP TO TRICKS

With no trouble except a quick look at our files, we could name 50 more movies of the last few years which were so bad they constituted a crime against the patrons. Came 1943 and suddenly the level of movie productions was on a higher plane; slightly higher, anyhow.
A few of the picture producers were up to their old tricks, deliberately making deadly ones. R-K-O's series about that man, the Falcon, for instance, did not improve. Some of the big musicals, notably "Thank Your Lucky Stars" and "Wintertime," were not as good as they should have been." “China Girl” did nothing to enhance the reputation of Gene Tierney. Olivia DeHavilland and Sonny Tufts won no prizes in “Government Girl.”
Some of the war films, including “Bombers’ Moon” and “Thunder Birds,” brought no cheers. And a picture originally titled “If the Shroud Fits” was released as “Dangerous Blondes.” None of these films was a “Green Hell” or a "Blossoms on Broadway." And if 1944 is as good a year as 1943, the annual Othman compendium of the year's worst movies will go into eclipse. We hope. We honestly do.

Pre-Droopy

Tex Avery reused or reworked routines over and over again. He took the title of his Warners cartoon Dangerous Dan McFoo (1939) and reconfigured it at MGM as The Shooting of Dan McGoo (1945).

In McFoo, we see something else he saved for MGM. The camera pans across a saloon as Robert C. Bruce dramatically intones “At the back of the house, in a solo game, was Dangerous Dan McFoo (note the overlay that frames the group in the distance).



The camera trucks in to reveal the “dangerous” guy is just a little pip-squeak, kind of like Avery’s Droopy at Metro.



“Hello, everybody,” he says to the audience watching the cartoon in the theatre. Avery put the same kind of audience greeting in Droopy’s mouth at MGM.



Avery and writer Rich Hogan re-write Robert Service’s poem.

And watching his fate
Was his heavy date
The girl who was known as Sue.

Being an Avery cartoon, Sue is a takeoff of Kate Hepburn. “I’m so happy to be here. Rally I am,” she tells us.



Arthur Q. Bryan is McFoo, Sara Berner is Sue, and the animation is supplied by a group including Virgil Ross, Sid Sutherland, Ham Hamilton and Paul J. Smith.

Trolley Track Troubles

Walt Disney and his animators deal with track troubles in Trolley Troubles (1927) by taking drawings and inking them in reverse on cels.



The animation was also recycled.

Here are a couple of other drawings.



This is a cute little short. Harman and Ising reused parts of this short in the first Warner Bros. cartoon, Sinkin’ in the Bathtub (1930).