Morale Boosting Benny

Summer vacation? Not for Jack Benny in 1943.

He spent it entertaining soldiers with his troupe overseas through the USO.

Even when he returned, he wasn’t through helping the fighting men. Daughter Joan Benny outlined it in her book, but one of the stories below talks about how he tried to give assurances to the mothers of soldiers in the war zone.

The first two stories are dated September 30th; the second came from the New York Times.

Jack Benny Returns From Overseas Tour
NEW YORK, Sept. 30. (UP)—When Jack Benny landed in Italy to entertain troops, he stepped from his plane and announced, “I’m Jack Benny.”
A surprised major looked at him and asked: “What in the hell do you think you’re doing here?”
Back from a 32,000 mile tour overseas the comedian said at a press conference today that the one night stand in Italy wasn’t on the schedule until he and harmonica player Larry Adler and singer Wini Shaw arrived to find an audience in Sicily had moved ahead.
Benny found that Arabs, who frequently were in the audience at Algiers, were appreciative listeners. “They’ll laugh at anything,” he said.
He found good food in the camps and gained 15 pounds while playing 150 shows in Central and North Africa, the Persian gulf area and Sicily.

Benny Troupe End Overseas Air Tour
Comedian and Itinerant Unit Visited Camps in Africa, Egypt, Persia, Italy
Jack Benny and his troupe of itinerant players are back in town after a ten-week air tour, under the auspices of United Service Organizations-Camp Shows, of American Army camps behind the front lines in Africa, Egypt, Iran and Italy.
They were the first entertainers to follow the Allied army from Sicily into the “toe” of Italy, and landed in the comfortable belief that Allied commanders were expecting them, when they weren’t; but they went through safely with good luck.
Mr. Benny returned to La Guardia Field Tuesday night, with Miss Wini Shaw, stage and screen singer, and Jack Snyder, pianist of the Yacht Club Boys, who joined the troupe in North Africa after completing an eight-month tour. They left Larry Adler, harmonica virtuoso, in London, and the fifth member, Miss Anna Lee, film actress, in Algiers, where she remained with another USO-Camp Shows troupe under Adolph Menjou, one of fifty shows now entertaining American fighting men abroad.
Trip “Like a Vacation”
Miss Shaw and Mr. Benny told yesterday about their experiences at the Camp Show offices, 8 West Fortieth Street. They say it had been like a vacation, and that they had seen places like Aden, Bengasi, Cairo and Iranian sections that “we would never see except in a war.” They praised the morale of the troops, but Miss Shaw, who “talked to the boys” at every stop, said with considerable emphasis that American relatives at home ought to stop writing gloomy letters to their me at the front—her other remarks on this score were blue-pencilled by an officer-censor at the interview.
Both spoke in glowing terms of what Army doctors and nurses were doing at the front and at hospital stations, as unsung heroes, saying that not once did they hear the tired, overworked nurses, voice the desire to come home. They expressed the wish that newer motion pictures could be sent to Army detachments abroad. Remarked Mr. Benny: “In Iran, according to the current films, Shirley Temple hadn’t been born yet, and Francis X. Bushman had just won the popularity contest.” Miss Shaw, who is going back soon, said the soldiers were annoyed by the ban on record transcriptions, which keeps them short of disks.
The troupe played an average of two shows a day, sleeping in camps, leaving early the next morning for the next stand, and trying to cover as much ground as possible, so that no unit would miss getting entertainment.
Mr. Benny said regretfully that they had to miss some Army units, and he is advising directors of the USO-Camp Show organization on routings to overcome faults in the system.
Both Mr. Benny and Miss Shaw were tanned by the Middle East sun. Mr. Benny was in a hospital in Sicily for a few days, but quickly recovered from a bad cold, and he said the army food “all the way” had been so good that he would have to take off fifteen pounds for his next picture.

This last story is from the Boston Globe, October 10, 1943. Every time I see Larry Adler’s name mentioned in connection with the war effort, I get angry about how he was blacklisted and forced to leave the U.S. for good.

Setting that aside, you can’t help but appreciate the extra things Jack did when he didn’t have to.

Benny Busy Phoning "Moms" of Servicemen
Jack Benny, home from the battle fronts, is as busied as ever for the men overseas. He's phoning "Moms"—many "Moms." For his pockets and his duffle bags overflow with the telephone numbers of American mothers he was asked to "call up."
"Just tell Mom I'm fine, they'd ask me. Most of them were very young. It kinda got you," the comedian said.
But he was full of enthusiasm for the men "over there" and the reception they gave him.
Benny, 12 pounds heavier and fitter than his fiddle after 10 weeks of constant travel, played to service men in such places as the Middle East, Africa, Sicily, Iceland, and in the first American show there—Italy. The N.B.C. comedian describes his trip to 32,000 miles as the greatest vacation of his life.
With his first broadcast of the season coming up today, he was met in New York by his leading lady, Mary Livingstone (his wife in private life), and his daughter, Joan. The remainder of the Benny regular cast joined him a few days ago to get ready for the big event which will be played to a studio audience of service men at N.B.C.’s Vanderbilt Theatre. After Oct. 17 the cast, including Rochester, Phil Harris, Dennis Day and Don Wilson, will return to Hollywood.
On his shows in far-off places Benny said he was most frequently asked to do old routines the boys remembered from his programs. “They all know how cheap I’m supposed to be and they all ask about the Maxwell,” he chuckled.
The Benny troupe, which included Anna Lee, actress; Larry Adler, harmonica player, who also helped Jack write some of his camp shows; Jack Snyder, pianist, and Wini Shaw, singer, played two or three shows a day on the tour. They also visited hospitals in every camp they touched. Benny paid particular tribute to the doctors and nurses and said that despite fatigue they seemed always cheerful, just as the men were.
The only near-mishap of the trip the comedian could recall came in the vicinity of the Persian Gulf when their plane could not make its scheduled landing because of recurring sandstorms. “Otherwise,” said Benny, “we had no trouble.”

Jack made other stops during the war. He was in the South Pacific. In 1945 he, Ingrid Bergman and others performed in Germany (those are the photos with this post). Of course, he took his radio show to various military camps and assisted with Victory Loan drives in Canada. And he persevered during a tour in the Korean War zone in the ‘50s with Frank Remley and Errol Flynn but admitted when he got home it was too tiring for him to do it any more.

Regardless, Jack performed (in more ways than one) his duty during war-time. It couldn’t help but boost morale.

Bugs' Dream is Yours

Bugs Bunny wasn’t exactly a feature film star, but Warner Bros. took him out of shorts for a couple of movies. He was featured in animated sequences of Two Guys From Texas and My Dream is Yours, both starring Jack Carson.

Publicity departments came up with press kits for all features. They included print ads, ideas for theatre lobby displays, promotional tie-ins, newspaper copy, phots and even 24 sheets (not the actual billboard ad, but a picture of one that could be ordered).

Here are a few things about the eventual-Oscar-winning rabbit contained in promotional items sent to theatres.

This was a lobby display used by a theatre in Philadelphia.

This is fairly self-explanatory.

Tie-ups? Promotions? How about this? A Bugs doll. Coincidentally, just like the one in the movie.

And a little something for the newspaper comic section.

And those poor newspaper entertainment writers! They need help—and Warners gave it to them with copy they could drop into their columns. It’s a shame there’s no reference to director Friz Freleng, who was responsible for the animation portion.

If you want to see the full press kit, check it out here.

It's a Yowpcast!

Keith Scott is more than an impressionist and the voice of Bullwinkle after Bill No Relation Scott died. He wrote a marvellous book on the Jay Ward cartoon studio (“The Moose That Roared”) and now he has written something that six-year-old me would have bugged my dad to buy 60 years ago.

“Cartoon Voices of the Golden Age” not only talks about the people who spoke on animated cartoons in the ‘30s through ‘60s, but gives a capsule version of the rise and fall of almost every major studio and how they dealt with sound, including music and editing.

Keith and I chat in the video below. I didn’t get a chance to ask half my questions before time ran out. Sorry fans of the Iwerks studio or Dal McKennon. But all that stuff is revealed in his two-volume set.

Swingin' Bat

Bats in the Belfry (1942) is an unusual cartoon in that the rhyming dialogue is in verse.

The large bat character comes down to the audience in perspective animation. Here are some frames.

Yes, there's a comic relief slobbering mute character (other than hiccoughs) like you might find in a Disney story.

According to the renewal entry in the 1970 copyright catalogue, Pinto Colvig wrote the dialogue. You can hear his voice (and hiccoughs) throughout the cartoon. According to a 2000 issue of the Comics Journal, Jerry Brewer directed this, though Rudy Ising’s name is the only one on the credits.

On Your Mark! Get Set! Bang!

Bugs Bunny experiences a momentary setback when he’s dressed in Olympic runner drag in 14 Carrot Rabbit, a 1952 Warners cartoon from the Friz Freleng unit.

Sam fires his gun like a starting pistol and shoots Bugs in the butt. Here are a few of the reactions.

Gerry Chiniquy has left the unit, so the animators in this cartoon are Manny Perez, Virgil Ross, Ken Champin and Art Davis, with Irv Wyner painting backgrounds from layout man Hawley Pratt. Carl Stalling’s “What's Up Doc?” is the song over the opening titles. The cue sheet is dated September 18, 1951, five months before the cartoon was released.

Let Me Entertain You

She sat in her Hollywood square, rather benignly. I had no idea why she was famous, and I was at an age where someone would have had to explain it to me.

She was a guest on other shows, too, like “The Pruitts of Southampton.”

Little did pre-teen me know she had not only appeared in movies, she was the subject of one.

She was Gypsy Rose Lee.

Considering the censorship (outside of burlesque shows, that is) of the 1930s, ‘40s and ‘50s, it’s a wonder that Lee had any kind of mainstream career. But she was no dummy. This United Press story from 1937 provides a bit of insight.

Gypsy Rose Lee Cast in Full Fledged Movie Role
By FREDERICK C. OTHMAN
HOLLYWOOD, March 27 (U.P.).—Today we have with us Miss Gypsy Rose Lee, a full-fledged motion-picture star in a Technicolored epic of the Far North called "Belle of the Yukon." It wasn't always so. We remember and Miss Gypsy remembers when the Hays office said her name was mud. The censors said worse than that. They said any movie with the name of Gypsy Rose Lee In the title never would get their seal of purity. They said no strip dancer could flaunt her name in the movies that came from Hollywood. This was embarrassing for Miss Gypsy. She'd just finished a stint of tossing her scanties into the $6.60 seats on Broadway (the time was 1937) and 20th Century-Fox had signed her as a movie actress.
The decision of the blue-pencil boys was embarrassing to the studio, too. It had to revise its official biography of Miss Lee into a colorless document concerning a Miss Louise Hovick. This Miss Hovick (still Gypsy Rose, but in plenty of clothes) appeared in four pictures as a villainess. Then she left Hollywood.
Writes Detective Novel
There seemed to be no room in the movie business for the classiest stripper burlesque ever produced. She went to New York. Time passed. There were pictures in the magazines showing her selling the spangles off her costume to War Bond buyers. She got another job in a big-time show.
Then, to the amazement of everybody, including herself, she wrote a detective novel, "The G-string Murders." It was a little rip-snorter. It soon became a best seller. The movies bought it, of course, and turned it into a picture but they couldn't use Miss Gypsy's title. The blue-noses might kick. They called it "Lady of Burlesque," and it was no great shakes as an epic of the cinema.
Gypsy Rose, the authoress, was encouraged. She immediately wrote another detective story of low life In the Southwest, called "Mother Finds a Body." We read this book with Interest; so did thousands of others. It concerned murder in a tourist camp and strip-dancer ladies.
By now the artiste that made the Minsky brothers famous was a literary notable. So help us, the long-haired ones started giving her literary teas. And pretty soon Miss Gypsy was publishing autobiographical sketches about her life with mother and sister, in that sophisticated weekly, the New Yorker. Good sketches they were, too, something in the vein of Clarence Day's "Life With Father."
Hired for Movies
By last year the celebrated writer was star of a New York show called "Star and Garter." We paid five and a half hard-earned dollars last Summer to see this performance. It was money well spent. Miss Gypsy kept on most of her clothes most of the time and sang some songs which she, personally, wrote. Good, loud songs.
So a few weeks ago an outfit called International Pictures hired Miss Lee to star in the movies. She was out entertaining soldiers at the time but she got here as quickly as she could and at this writing she's in there with such fellow thespians as Dinah Shore, Randolph Scott, Bob Burns, Charles Winninger and Bob Armstrong. She gets top billing like this:
G-Y-P-S-Y   R-O-S-E   L-E-E. Box-car size.
The Hays office hasn't let out one single peep. We don't get it. We'll call upon Miss Gypsy and see if she has an explanation.

Lee lived into the permissive ‘60s, where nudity on screen and on stage was really no big deal to a younger generation. What did the world’s most famous ex-stripper think of it? She talked about it to the National Enterprise Association in a story published July 16, 1969.

Gypsy Was Real, Class Stripper
By LEE MUELLER
NEW YORK—(NEA)—Every night in a Broadway theater on 47th Street, a dozen or so young men and women lie on the stage and undress beneath what appears to be a long muslin tablecloth. Then, as the orchestra plays something appropriate for slipping out of tablecloths, the cast of "Hair" rises and stands—jaybird naked — before its audience.
The patrons stiffen momentarily, blink and then nod absently to show their sophisticated upbringing . “That's what I call tasteful nudity,” gulps a man in a tuxedo.
People never gulped like that when Gypsy Rose Lee walked offstage back in the 1930s and '40s. No sir. People whistled. In class burlesque houses like the Republic, the Irving Place and the 42nd Street Apollo, men in tuxedos stood and applauded as though they had just heard Caruso sing in "Rigoletto."
As perhaps the most famous strip-teaser produced by burlesque, Miss Lee was more tease than strip. She winked, she sang scurrilous ditties and she looked absolutely scrumptious, but all her audience ever saw was a flash of flesh as she sidled off to the wings.
There were more basic, less scrupulous characters in burlesque in those days, to be sure, but none remotely challenged the attention on-stage nudity gets today. The human body has not been so discussed since the invention of the bustle.
Now 54, Gypsy Rose Lee is amused at the uproar, sort of.
"I don't think people are seeing anything the world didn't know about," she says, smirking. "It's just that now, suddenly, people are talking about it."
As a stripper, Miss Lee—Louise Hovick to her mother—absorbed much of the lusty atmosphere that went with the bus ness. Her conversation is laced with exclamatory "What the hells" and other sundry oaths. She is not shy and, certainly, she is not dumb.
Indeed, if Gypsy was not the greatest stripper ever, she has to be the most intelligent. While girls like energetic Georgia Sothern, the tassel girls, Rose La Rose and Mimi ("I'm more Scarlett than Scarlett O'Hara") Lynne faded into the sunset, Gypsy Rose Lee stuck around, wrote a best-seller, "The G-String Murders," and then scored with her autobiography, "Gypsy," which became a Broadway hit and movie.

Today she is a respected member of the Hollywood community in Beverly Hills where she lives with two peacocks, 11 Chinese hairless dogs, numerous goldfish and several lizards.
These days, she endorses things like the National Water Institute's clean waters contest. All those poor baby seals being killed by the oil slicks and being washed up on Monterey Beach," she fumes. "Now what the hell good can there be in that?"
Animals, obviously, are important to Gypsy. Now her pet projects include a trip to England with her Chinese hairless this year to win dog shows and get the American Kennel Club to recognize the breed. "They're recognized in England," she says. "I was up all night last night with one which was having puppies. All dogs have pups at night, you know. Boy, my eyes feel like they're out on sticks."
Other waking moments are spent in more profitable activities. Gypsy has, for instance, just completed filming a comic western with Walter Brennan, Edward Buchanan and Pat O'Brien called, not altogether accurately, "The Over-The-Hill Gang."
"It's got all the clichés that ever went into a western," she explained. "It's so dear and so funny. I play a woman with a heart of gold who runs the local saloon, of course, and, no, I don't remove my clothes."
As one might suspect, Gypsy Rose Lee is fairly broadminded on the subject of undress. "I saw 'Hair' in California and liked it," she said. "I was hardly aware of the nudity. It seemed like natural development in the play."
Recently, however, Miss Lee has observed nudity not so natural.
"Topless waitresses bother me," she admits. "For myself, I'd much rather see bare bosoms on the stage than at the dinner table. For one thing, it makes it difficult to order sometimes, you know . . . 'Do you have any roast breast—I mean, duck?' or maybe you find yourself discussing 'the lovely cantaloupes on the menu' or something.
"One place here oven has topless billiards . . . now, if that isn't hazardous I don't know what is."
A now-squelched off-Broadway play gained considerable notoriety recently by displaying two actors in a rather advanced state of affection. Gypsy Rose Lee laughed at the prospect.
“All of this is just a fad,” she said, “and fads aren’t going to take the place of good theatre. I think I’d rather watch my birds than that, anyway.”

Actually, she was a touch over 54 when this interview was published, which was less than a year before her death.

I think I agree with Gypsy. Burlesque may have been tacky and tawdry at times, but at least it left a little to the imagination.

3-D Woodpecker

Walter Lantz’s Hyponotic Hick was part of the new 3-D craze in 1953, but it used techniques seen in cartoons years earlier. There are scenes with the illusion of depth is made by the foreground moving at a faster pace than the background. Tex Avery was doing this at Warners in the ‘30s. It happens a lot in this cartoon to create a 3-D effect.

Then there were characters coming at the camera, like a Disney cartoon from the late ‘20s. Here, Woody Woodpecker jumps at the camera lens, but then director Don Patterson cuts away before the woodpecker can reach it.



Later, Woody leaps again. Unlike an old Disney character, he doesn’t blacken the lens or go past it. He quickly fades out, which would seem to make 3-D less effective.

Top Cat James notes in the comments that I said nothing about the rivet scene. Actually, this one works well. Buzz Buzzard accidentally swallows a bucket of rivets and spits them out toward the camera. The drawings are on ones; director Don Patterson times it well.

Three drawings in a scene of Buzz 3-D'ing it for the camera. To me, Buzz goes forward and in front so fast, the effect is lost a bit.

You’ll notice the characters have thicker ink lines in some scenes than others.

All of Lantz’s animators got credit on this, as well as technical director Bill Garity.

According to Variety in August 1953, the cartoon was scheduled for release with Universal’s Wings of the Hawk, and “If UI continues to make 3D product, then he expects to tag along with shorts in same technique for companion pictures.” Money-conscious Lantz told the trade paper the cartoon must gross $100,000 to break even, because it would cost him approximately $60,000 when it went into release.

It turned out to be Lantz’s only 3-D short. He was looking at other things. Variety also reported the same month that Sara Berner had been hired to voice Chilly Willy, more staff had been hired and at year’s end, Tex Avery would be joining the studio. Ol’ Tex came up with some shorts far more enjoyable than Woody Woodpecker serving a summons.

Van Beuren Craziness

The early days of sound animation in New York were fun days. Stories sometimes didn’t really exist, gags were strange. The Fleischer cartoons were ahead of everyone else, but there was enough weirdness at Terry and Van Beuren that made their shorts entertaining in spots today.

They loved morphing gags in New York, even if they didn’t make sense. Here’s a fun example from The Night Club, a late 1929 Van Beuren cartoon that’s desperately in need of restoration. A cop is following a crook. The cop swirls and, first, turns into some kind of creature rotating his feet with his hands, and then a three-headed, one man orchestra. One has a round nose that grows and shrinks as he plays the sax.

There’s a switch in the next scene. The crook turns unto a spider. The cop stretches back, flips on his head and passes out. The crook laughs (with lines that would fit a silent film but were superfluous in sound) and it’s on to the next scene.

Why do the characters do this? I guess it amused the animators.

John Foster and Mannie Davis get the “by” credits, with Carl Edouarde providing the score.