Colonel Bleep Blasts Off

Once upon a time, there was a company in Florida that made animated commercials. Soundac Productions decided to try for something bigger—a cartoon series for television.

There weren’t too many examples to follow. The adventure series NBC Comics (1950) was little more than still drawings with an intoning narrator. Crusader Rabbit (also 1950), produced by Alex Anderson and Jay Ward, was a narrated adventure series with humour but very little character animation.

Miami wasn’t near the television capitals of New York City or Hollywood/Los Angeles, but Soundac decided to give it a go in 1956. That’s the year a cartoon called “Man Hunt on the Moon” was copyrighted by Soundac’s general manager Robert D. Buchanan, but the man behind it all was the company’s production manager, a former animator named Jack Schleh. The cartoon starred “interplanetary investigator” Colonel Bleep and “space deputies” Squeak (a puppet) and Scratch (a caveman) battling the evil Dr. Destructo.

It doesn’t appear the cartoons aired in 1956. Variety reported on June 19, 1957 that 78 half-hour episodes (in colour) were being readied for syndication, with Richard Ullman of Buffalo signed to find stations willing to air them. Newspaper TV listings show the half-hours began airing on WGR-TV in Buffalo every Monday evening as of September 23, 1957; I can’t find anything earlier. The last listing for the series I could discover was in early 1973.

Schleh chatted with historian Jerry Beck. Schleh designed the characters and directed the cartoons. There may be little animation and the stories may be pretty basic (they were aimed at younger children who loved outer space) but the designs are neat and some of the movement short-cuts were imaginative.

But there was another artist involved. Fran Noack was the art director for Soundac. Long after retirement, he was interviewed by the Fort Meyers News-Press. He doesn’t take any credit for Bleep, other than he “drew occasional concept art.” What’s interesting is he claims to have been responsible for “The Weather Man,” which employed pose-to-pose animation (if you want to call it that) as some happy tunesters sang a jingle before George Fenneman announced a vague, one-line weather prediction (“Rain, and cooler”). They’re cute in their own way and you can find them on video-sharing sites.

Here’s the story from August 10, 2012.

On TV screen, his creations came to life
Cape Coral artist created some of TV’s early cartoon characters.
By Charles Runnells
Scratch the Caveman, Colonel Bleep and The Weather Man: Fran Noack knew all three of them well.
An exhibit of Noack’s paintings opens today at The Alliance for the Arts, but the Cape Coral man is best known for the TV cartoon characters he created, designed or otherwise helped bring to the air in the 1950s.
As art director for Miami’s Soundac TV Film Productions, Noack created TV weather mascot The Weather Man and drew occasional concept art for the ground-breaking “Colonel Bleep” series—the first TV cartoon broadcast in color.
“We beat (animation studio) Hanna-Barbera by several months,” said Noack, 86, sitting in his Cape Coral living room. “We felt pretty good about that one.”
Noack’s best-known creation is The Weather Man, a triangular cartoon character who appeared on TV weather reports. The animation was syndicated to TV stations across the country.
Noack doesn’t have any original art of The Weather Man—he says most of it was stolen from a studio van in the ‘70s—but he doodles his creation on the back of a notepad: Googly eyes, bulbous nose and a weather-vane-shaped hat.
“He’d pull out an umbrella sometimes,” he said. “Or it would start snowing on him.”
The Buffalo, N.Y., native helped form Soundac after graduating with an art degree for Albright-Knox Art Gallery. He and four other men set up shop in a former Miami truck stop and soon found themselves shooting TV commercials and cartoons.
“We were just boys right out of art school,” Noack said. “We decided to do this grand thing and create a world of entertainment.”
Wife Peggy even got to act in a TV commercial for the Buffalo Evening News newspaper.
“That was quite an adventure for all of us,” she said about starting up the studio. “We were all kids. I was just 20.
“They had big ideas back then. They were going to rule the world.”
The studio started out with a $10,000 TV commercial for an olive oil company. That led to more animated commercials—sometimes with live action mixed in—for companies and products such as Good & Plenty candy (he designed an alien character), GE, Mountain Dew and Pan-Am Airlines (Noack created a cartoon owl for those commercials).
Villain battler
The studio’s biggest success was “Colonel Bleep,” a kids cartoon about an alien who battles villains such as pirate Captain Patch and master criminal Doctor Destructo. The cartoon short ran from 1957 until the early 1970s.
Noach says his involvement in “Bleep” was minimal, but he did concept sketches of side-kick Scratch the Caveman and also occasional designs for minor characters such as a zebra and a hippo.
“I did a couple of sketches (for studio head Jack Schleh and the cartoon’s creative team),” he says. “Sometimes he used them, and sometimes he didn’t. But, really, it was his baby from the word ‘go.’” “Colonel Bleep” was a milestone in the history of TV animation,” said Andrew Farago, curator for the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco.
“It introduced color,” Farago said. “Making that innovation was very important.”
The animation on “The Weather Man” and “Colonel Bleep” was very limited, Farago said.
“You can see that if you watch them on YouTube,” he said. “They were working on a very tight budget, obviously.”
Noack can’t recall all the details from his animated TV creations in the ‘50s. He’s foggy, for example, about he exactly he dreamed up The Weather Man.
“It’s been a long time,” he laughed. “And I do so much afterward. This is something I did when I was a kid.”
At its height, Soundac employed about 30 people and created ads and TV shows that appeared nationwide.
He and his family—Peggy and four sons—eventually moved to Key Largo and lived there 30 years before moving to Cape Coral in 2002 for medical reasons. His son, Kevin, also lives in the Cape.
Noack says he’s happy, after all these years, to be remembered for his 1950s cartoons. His colorful, Tropics-inspired paintings are being displayed in the Foulds Theatre lobby at the Alliance. “This is a total surprise,” he laughed. “I’ll have my 15 minutes of fame. And then, all of a sudden, they’ll say ‘Fran who?’”
People don’t made many cartoons like Noack’s anymore. He said he loved modern computerized animation, but he misses that old-style animation—drawn by hand, frame by painstaking frame.
There’s magic in a simple pen, paintbrush and paper.
Anything can happen.
“It’s that instant when you pick up the paintbrush, before you actually start, that makes all the difference,” he said. “I’ve probably changed it three or four times in my head. There’s a lot more freedom.”
Noack draws and paints as much as he can.
“I’m blessed with a gift,” he explained. “And I’m going to use it until I can’t lift up my pen.”
He smiled.
“The studio lamp is still burning,” he said.

Noack died in 2016. Schleh passed away in 1993. For the record, the narrator on Colonel Bleep was Miami TV newsman Noel Tyler, who died of a heart attack in 1963 at the age of 48. Oddly, his obituary doesn’t mention the cartoon series at all.

Naturally, Jerry Beck has more about the cartoons on his website and we visited the cosmic colonel before in this post.

Today’s Changing Lesson

You’ll sometimes see in cartoons when a character has an expression and then the director cuts to a different shot and the expression isn’t the same.

It happens with backgrounds, too.

Here’s an example in the Ub Iwerks cartoon Mary’s Little Lamb. The lamb escapes from the old crone teacher by jumping into a stove. The teacher pulls out the lamb covered in soot. Look at what’s on the blackboard.

Cut to a different shot of the pair. Look at the blackboard now. The stove has conveniently vanished and there is now part of a map on the wall.

The cartoon comes to a less-than-rollicking end by the crone spanking the lamb. The soot is now transferred from Mary’s lamb to the teacher. That’s the gag.

Mary’s Little Lamb was one of ten ComiColor shorts released independently in 1935. Carl Stalling scored it. No animators are credited.

Endless Woody Chase

Ed Love animates a good chunk of the middle part of Walter Lantz’s Wet Blanket Policy (1948), including a scene where Buzz Buzzard chases Woody Woodpecker around an office desk.

There are 18 drawings animated on ones. The cycle lasts for a couple of circles around the desk. Here it is, slowed down in an endless loop.



Love doesn’t get screen credit but there are scenes where Buzz’s mouth has the same shape as Mr. Jinks and Huckleberry Hound cartoons Love worked on. Ken O’Brien and Les Kline are the credited animators, with Lionel Stander perfectly supplying Buzz’s voice.

Robert Clary

The Nazis gave him and his family ten minutes to get their belongings before being loaded into a cattle car and transported to a concentration camp where children were killed by gas.

It’s a far cry from bumbling German military officers in Hogan’s Heroes, but it’s part of the real life of the man who played French Resistance fighter Louis LeBeau on the series, Robert Clary.

The TV comedy had nothing to do with concentration camps, or their atrocities, but it always had the same message every week: Nazis are real losers.

In the last decades of his life, Clary had another message he took to college campuses and anywhere people would listen—that the Holocaust was no myth, no exaggeration. The people who said otherwise weren’t there. He was.

The story of how Clary came to the United States after being liberated from Buchenwald in 1945 was reported by “I.K.” in the San Angelo Standard-Times, Nov. 20, 1955. By then, Clary had some modest fame from his work in the “New Faces” revue in New York, where the breakout star was Eartha Kitt.

Robert Clary Finds U S Likes French
Talent-scouting is one of the perennial hobbies of thousands of people who like to acquire their own favorites before the publicity mills get to work, and there is increasing evidence that Robert Clary (it’s pronounced “Rohbair") is enjoying one of the most spontaneous word-of-mouth buildups nationwide that any new performer has had in years. A native Parisian (he was born in the Ile-St.-Louis district), Clary was hoping for a start in the amusement business when war broke and he wound up in a prison camp.
Postwar France was hardly a happy hunting ground for new talent in the singing line (old talent was having plenty of trouble, too), but Clary found some inconsequential work including singing with a band at the Olympia Hall in his native city.
Here he was fortunate to be heard by the American violinist and orchestra leader Harry Bluestone, who became the first of the talent scouts to sing the praises of Clary. In fact, he sang them so well to the young man himself that the latter agreed to record two songs in English, which he now manages handily (with a pleasant flavoring all his own), but at that time didn’t know at all.
These opened the way for West Coast nightclub engagements (Bluestone is well oriented in Hollywood circles), followed by exposure to the sophisticates who patronise such New York nighteries as the Village Vanguard, the Blue Angel and La Vie en Rose.
In turn came an opportunity in the show called “New Faces” and, most recently,” the chance to distribute his art nationally via an Epic disk titled appropriately Meet Robert Clary.” In it he performs a mingling of French ("Fleur Bleue,” “Un Rien Me Fait Chanter" and “La Route Enchantee”) and American (“Have You Met Miss Jones?,” “Hoops" and “Out of This World")–songs with an ingratiating blend of Gallic charm and a Negroid-influenced vocal manner which is hard to resist.
A shortish, compact French type, Clary now affects a crew cut which gives him a decidedly jaunty air and the adolescent appeal without which no popular balladeer can succeed these days.
If having all the ingredients is the secret of success, Clary is practically there already. He also draws Steig-Iike pictures, whose reproduction adds to the merriment of his album.

Success on television followed Clary in the 1960s. After Hogan’s Heroes, he had regular roles on soap operas.

But then he decided he had to speak out. Here is a portion of a story from the St. Louis Jewish Light, April 24, 1985.

CLARY SHARES EXPERIENCES
By CAROL B. LUNDGREN
Executive Editor
Robert Clary folds back his sleeve, revealing the crude concentration camp tattoo A-5714, and spews forth a staccato of images about his harrowing Holocaust experiences.
Sobbing children gaining only false security by desperately clinging to their mother's hand; rancid bits of food stolen from pigs who had rejected them; wretched rags wrapped around feet to protect them from the stinging cold—Clary does not merely talk to his audience; he takes them on a wrenching journey with him.
He unabashedly admits that it is not vanity which prompts him to tuck his glasses into his pocket when he delivers a speech. Rather, he fears that if he sees his listeners cry, he will cry with them. Clary, 59, is most well-known as Louis LeBeau, the French prisoner of war in Hogan's Heroes. Now it is debatable whether he is seen more often as the hilarious chef in Hogan television reruns or as a Holocaust survivor on the lecture circuit.
St Louis was a stop last week on Clary's itinerary—a criss-cross of cities probably only he and his agent can decipher. As the Wolf-Najman Memorial Lecturer, he addressed an audience of 825 at this year's Yom Hashoa Commemoration, held at Temple Shaare Emeth and sponsored by the St. Louis Center for Holocaust Studies of the Jewish-Community Relations Council.
Clary, who turns over his fees to the Simon Wiesenthal Center, places a strict stipulation upon his speaking engagements. He must be booked to speak to high school students in addition to adult groups.
While here, he was whisked from place to place. Four-hundred students from Parkway, Pattonville, Mehlville, University City and John Burroughs high schools packed the Loretto-Hilton to hear him; he spoke to the upper grades at the Central Agency for Jewish Education's Jewish Community High School He also managed to offer his time to the media; a full slate of newspaper, television and radio interviews crowded his agenda.
Just being an actor or a lecturer alone implies a hectic, energy-sapping life style. But Clary has coupled them in an overly complicated schedule of his own choosing. And if the name Robert Clary draws a bigger crowd than usual to events focusing on the Holocaust, then all the better to hear about an era which must never be forgotten.
Clary admits that he was fatigued before his lecture here; he had delivered two in Baltimore earlier the same day. But if he was tired, it was imperceptible to his audience, who watched as tears filmed the eyes of the diminutive Frenchman as he was living a role rather than playing it.
Clary is well-prepared for the inevitable question how could a survivor act in a humorous series about German soldiers during World War II. He sees no anomaly in the situation, strictly differentiating between his part as a POW from that of a death camp inmate and between the Luftwaffe and the SS. "No one in their right mind could do a situation comedy about concentration camps," avers Clary, who was in every episode but one of the classic show, filmed from 1965-71.
In an interview with the Jewish Light and in his passionate speech, Clary said that until four years ago, he did not discuss his 31-month death camp ordeal. It was not fear of pain for himself or others—that he elected silence. Although he was afflicted with nightmares, "it was not eating me alive," he attests. Instead, he wanted to take his suffering, fold it up into a tight bundle, set it aside and "get on with living again."
What then turned him into such a vocal advocate of Holocaust documentation and education? A resurgence of anti-Semitism and a spate of books and tracts denying Hitler's attempt to systematically exterminate the Jews, he replies. Clary saw, and continues to see, cemeteries being desecrated; restaurants and movie houses being bombed; professors hiding behind the guise of scholarship making a mockery of what he endured firsthand.
It is ironic then that the final "slap on the face" which catapulted Clary into the forefront of the Holocaust lecture scene was not an anti-Jewish incident, but a documentary film, Kitty Returns to Auschwitz, in which a survivor takes her son back to the scene of her incarceration.
It was then that Clary realized that "30 or 40 years from now there won't be any survivors" to refute those who deny the Holocaust and to remind the world that anti-Semitism, if left to fester, can burst open into another Holocaust.

Clary appeared in his own biographical film, made on a low budget at Kent State University in 1988.

His death today at age 96 gives yet another opportunity of life for his story, which must never die.

Allen Swift

He uttered the immortal phrase "Dicky Moe!" (from the cartoon of the same name) but, fortunately, that is not what actor Allen Swift is noted for. Swift was a mainstay in the Total TeleVision stock company, and won roles as Odie Cologne on King Leonardo and the wonderfully villainous Simon Bar Sinister on Underdog (a personal favourite).

His larynx was one of the busiest on the air in New York at one time, even before Total TV formed in the early ‘60s. He appeared in almost countless TV and radio commercials. Here are three articles about him, all from 1956. I don’t recall him voicing Herman the Mouse but reader J. Lee in Texas pointed out when this post originally appeared on the GAC Forum that Arnold Stang spent time away from New York shooting The Man With the Golden Arm and Swift could have filled in then. Reader Ken Layton in Olympia, Washington says Swift did work for the Famous Studios, lending a voice in the 3-D Casper cartoon Boo Moon (1954).

These columns are before Total TV, before his buddy Gene Deitch cast him in his Czech-made Tom and Jerry cartoons, before WPIX-TV gave him the rank of Captain Allen Swift and told him to show kiddie viewers some Fleischer Popeye cartoons. The first column is from the McNaught Syndicate, dated April 12.

LOOKING SIDEWAYS
By WHITNEY BOLTON.
NEW YORK.—No man can have truck with Broadway and Madison Avenue for long without getting stray wisps of report concerning a modern Leonardo da Vinci who whisks his way through the worlds of theater, writing, music, TV, radio and puppeteering with the greatest of ease and. apparently, without working up a sweat.
It was never in my mind to track down this prodigious New Yorker, but fate tossed us together in an Irish snug the other afternoon where to the consternation of all employees in sight we both happened to be drinking tea. The proprietor was beside himself, where I left him when I sought out Allen Swift, whose only claim to attention at that point was that he was as militant about his tea as I was.
Swift was sitting in a padded booth and giving his whole attention to the tea, when I brought my cup over and said: “As a fellow iconoclast in this snug, may I sit with you for mutual protection?” He laughed and said, sure, and that was that.
Many Activities.
Introductions followed. He was Allen Swift, writer, painter, composer, magician, man of 1,001 voices, comedian, sculptor, director, producer, puppeteer and tea drinker. I told him his name sounded like the title for a boys’ adventure series; “Allen Swift and His Atomic Speedboat,” “Allen Swift and His Space Boat”—things like that. He said, yes, it did, but since it didn’t happen to be his real name, what did it matter?
How does a man of prodigious attainments start? Well, obviously, to get it all in, he has to start early. He started at 8 years of age when, in one sudden winter swoop, he began acting and painting. When he was 10 he began winning prizes for painting first prize in the annual Wanamaker art contest for children.
“The acting part just sort of happened,” he said, “I got a job acting.”
The late John Barrymore scarcely could have claimed more, for his starter. He got a job acting.
When Swift was 12, he saw a magic performance by Galli-Galli, the Egyptian who gets baby chicks out of empty brass cups. This so inflamed Swift that although he didn’t have a cent with which to buy magic show equipment, he went home and in three weeks became a child prodigy at sleight of hand and even made some home-type apparatus, based on his intellectual solution of how certain tricks were done. He turned out to be right. His home-made apparatus was as good as the kind he could have purchased—if he had had any money.
Became a Poet.
At 14 he was in the High School of Music and Art, a New York school reserved for talented young who have demonstrated their ability. It isn’t enough to dream. You have to demonstrate. He became poet laureate and editor-in-chief of the school’s magazine, and one issue won first prize in a national contest for school publications.
Feeling restless and a little empty, he passed his freshman year by organizing a dramatic group, directing it and presenting it in a play of his authorship. He went down to mid-Manhattan, rented one of the largest auditoria in town, put the show on and had a net profit of $538. Which is more than a lot of professional groups make. He told the management of the hall that he was 22—not 14—and somehow they believed him.
Since then he has been on Broadway, appeared in more than 1,000 radio and TV shows, paints with Raphael Soyer and makes a sprightly dollar for himself doing all the voices on some of those TV commercials you see in cartoon form—he can speak anything from a British Duke to Brooklyn waterfront, with animals, fowl and Martian in between.
What is left with the other 90 idle minutes in each 24 hours? He has got his foot in NBC’s door with an idea for creating a school for comedians. The young, he says, have no training ground since the demise of burlesque and vaudeville. Consequently, few young comics are coming along to displace the aging ones. He sees this as a gap to be filled if buffoonery is to survive. The lovely thing about New York is the odd and fascinating people you can meet over a cup of tea.

Next is from the International News Service, June 20:

Assignment America
By PHYLLIS BATTELLE
NEW YORK (INS) — If you know a small child with vast potential for being an actor, there are two things to do about it.
1.) Don't tell him he’s a genius,
2.) Lock him in the basement.
“It always amuses me when a parent says, ‘now watch Johnny, he’s a natural actor’,” says a trained actor named Allen Swift.
“All kids are natural actors and mimics. Before the parents botch up the job and give them inhibitions, they’re good . . .
“But the worst thing parent can do is to think they have a little genius on their hands, and promote him into becoming a professional. Because I’ve never seen a child actor who didn’t turn out to be mixed-up and obnoxious!”
Mr. Swift is not speaking with the traditional jealous, sour-grapes attitude of an adult actor who has thrown away too many scenes to child stars. He is speaking as a 32-year-old gent who thought he was pretty great at the age of eight and was—fortunately—put in his place.
That was in 1932 when an aunt in Philadelphia took him to see a double-feature movie starring, in order of appearance, Maurice Chevalier, Will Rogers and Zazu Pitts.

“On the way to the soda shoppe afterwards,” he remembers, “I had a strange experience. I felt inside me that I could talk like Chevalier and Pitts and Rogers. I waited for awhile till I was sure I could do it—kids can convince themselves of anything—and then popped out with an imitation.”
His aunt looked startled. It was “eerie,” she said ecstatically.
His father was not so impressed. Any time Allen would start to mimic a movie star or family friend, he was suppressed with the words “everybody can do that if they want to.”
And so, in the quiet of his own room, Allen Swift practiced glibly to himself—not achieving the applause of the throngs, but achieving perfection, instead. He is known today as “the man with a thousand voices.”
Also an actor, song-writer dramatist and painter, Swift gets his lucrative income from radio and TV. On both media, he is the “voice” behind such famed and fascinating personalities as Mighty Mouse, Howdy Doody, Dinky Duck, Herman the Mouse (“I’m known particularly in the rodent field”) and many unusual sounds on radio-TV commercials.
When the UN planned a show for which they needed the voices of FDR and Winston Churchill, Swift was the man they called upon.
“I’ve evolved my own theory on simulating voices and dialects,” he says. “It is a complex one—involving analyzing the personality of the subject before you try, with:
your own vocal chords, to imitate his voice. The most difficult voices to mimic are the average non-characteristic, ones. Naturally.
“It’s like a caricaturist’s art. The more perfect the features of a person, the more tough it is to capture him in caricature.”
Swift says there is no such thing as a “normal voice.”
“The important thing in the voice of a person is that it must go with his appearance and personality. For instance, a big man with a high and weak voice has a voice that jars. Keep your voice in line with your personality and it is pleasant to the listener.”
Swift said my voice was okay.
“Technically, I’d call it a ‘woman’s fog voice,’” he smiled.
“Fits the personality very well.”

And finally from September 13:

Man and Mouse is Voice of Yogurt
By WILLIAM EWALD
United Press Staff Correspondent
NEW YORK — Allen Swift is both a man and a mouse. In fact, two kinds of mouse.
He is also a tea kettle, a coffee pot, a gurgling sink, Howdy Doody, Dinky Duck, several species of bird and the voice of Yogurt.
You probably hear Swift’s voice echoing through the confines of your living room more frequently than any other TV personality, but the chances are you never recognize it. The reason—Swift’s voice assumes as many shapes as salami.
“I do voices, all kinds of voices, any kinds of voices,” said Swift today. “I’ve played in more than 1,000 network radio shows—mugs, old codgers, kids, everything. I’ve done more than 50 different characters on “Howdy Doody,” including Howdy Doody himself.
Does Movie Cartoons
“I do movie cartoons—Herman the Mouse, Mighty Mouse. Also just about all the voices for UPA cartoons in the East.
“But my principal activity right now is TV film commercials. As far as I know, there isn’t anybody who can do as many kinds of voices as I do.”
Within the past few weeks, Swift, 32, has provided the voices for more than a score of the commercials you’ll see on your home screen this season. Among others—two brands of cigarets, a hair tonic, a watch, a soft drink, a beer, an instant coffee, a razor blade, a spaghetti, a macaroni, a candy bar and a five-day deodorant pad.
Swift is a specialist at providing a voice for objects. He has done such things as houses, kitchen sinks and three-way lamps.
“What I do is try to identify each object with some kind of person,” said Swift. “You take a perking coffee pot—it’s got a big, deep, hearty kind of personality, so you give it that kind of a voice.
British Tea Kettle
“A tea little is different. A tea pot is quite delicate, very British with a hiss in its articulation.
"Now, a three-way lamp is a little more difficult. You have to do it with voice level — low and dull for a low light, medium rasp for a medium light and then light and happy and high-pitched for that bright light.”

Allen Swift was born as Ira Stadlen. The “Allen” part of his stage name came from Fred Allen, showing his excellent taste in comedy (for his part, Allen’s real name was not Allen, but John Florence Sullivan) and went to school in Bensonhurst. He died at age 87 in 2010, leaving behind performances as a plunger for Drano, Dwight Eisenhower (dubbed voice) in the movie The Longest Day (1962), a fill-in Howdy Doody, and as a cartoon sailor who alternately mumbled and shouted “Dickie Moe!”

Tex's Other Rabbits

You all know about Tex Avery and Bugs Bunny. Tex had another couple of rabbits who weren’t as lippy but were still fun. They’re the two magician’s bunnies he featured in 1952’s Magical Maestro.

They pop into scenes at will. The effect seen on a big screen is terrific. In one scene, the evil magician turns baritone Poochini into a Hawaiian war dancer. The rabbits leap from either side of the frame to dance in unison.



One of the things Avery and writer Rich Hogan had to do was come up with different ways for Poochini to turn into something and then back into his regular outfit. Several gags involve something sweeping past the singer to reveal he’s wearing a tux again. In this scene, it is the Hawaiian lei. These frames give you an idea.



Mike Lah, Walt Clinton and Grant Simmons are the credited animators. I can’t tell you who designed the rabbits. Gene Hazelton maybe?

Hyde and Go Tweet Titles

Theatrical animation studios were slowly winding down as 1960 approached, but there were still plenty of creative people working in the business.

Here’s an idea I really like. The titles to Friz Freleng’s Hyde and Go Tweet (1960) are enscribed on windows on a building. Items appropriate to each name are seen inside the windows. You’ll have to click on this to see it better.



The scene then pans right to another building where Sylvester is resting on the window ledge outside the office of Dr. Jekyll. This was the third and final “Jekyll” cartoon made by Friz Freleng; the other two were Doctor Jerkyl’s Hide (1954) and Hyde and Hare (1955).

You’ll notice there is no writer credited on this short. The internet says it was written by Mike Maltese. He had left for Hanna-Barbera in November 1958, so he either wrote this before he left or did it under the table. Or the internet could be wrong. It could happen, you know.

Late note: Thad Komorowski's research is that Freleng wrote this himself, hence no writer credit.

Roy Glenn

Eddie Anderson’s Rochester was a hugely popular part of the Jack Benny radio show. Most of his interactions on the show were with Benny character—natural, considering Rochester was a live-in employee—but in the 1950s, the programme’s writers expanded on it.

They gave Rochester his own straight man.

The Benny show had grown up by that point that the era of blacks with cartoonish voices and silly names was out. An actor with a serious bass voice was cast, and perfect for the role of Rochester’s buddy Roy. He was Roy Glenn.

Benny was remarkable in that he didn’t hover all over his show. He trusted Anderson to be the focal point of whole scenes on the air before showing up, knowing there would be laughs. A number of these scenes involved dialogues with Roy, who set up Rochester’s punch lines.

On the show, Benny also treated the Roy character with respect. If Roy did some housework, Jack avoided being cheap. Roy would get paid decently, perhaps the only character on the show that was. (The cheap gags could come out Rochester’s mouth as a commentary on the situation, ensuring audience laughs).

Glenn had been on the Benny show before this, either playing a porter or a waiter. Jack also used him as a stand-in for Anderson; at least one rehearsal recording exists of him playing the Rochester part.

In his later years, Glenn played the father of both Sammy Davis, Jr. and Sidney Poitier, who had been an understudy in New York when Glenn was on stage there in the ‘40s.

Glenn had put in his time before being hired for the Benny show. His obituary on the front page of the Los Angeles Sentinel revealed his made his stage debut at age 17, singing in the chorus of the Mayan Theatre in Los Angeles in a show with Juanita Moore and Rex Ingram. His film debut was with Mario Lanza in “The Flame of New Orleans,” followed by “The Jackie Robinson Story.”

He talked about film roles in one of a series of columns on Hollywood by the Pittsburgh Courier. This was published July 30, 1960.

Roy Glenn Feels More Negro Writers Equals More Negro Parts in Movies
BY CHES WASHINGTON
HOLLYWOOD—Pittsburg, Kan.-born Roy Glenn, one of the first-rate and most versatile of our actors, offers a somewhat different approach to the problems facing Negro performers and their lack of work in Movietown. Roy said our biggest need to get more parts, is writers.
"If the writers put Negro characters in their stories, the directors will put Negro performers in the pictures," he believes.
“Take, for example, the case of "Raisin the Sun," new being filmed," he says. "Just look at the tremendous amount of work for us that has come from that stage version, and now the film play.
"I think we have the talent, so the writers are our biggest need," he added.
Roy, the man with the booming, imposing voice, came to Los Angeles, Nov. 25, 1920. He got his first big break in the movies in "Lydia Bailey."
GLENN IS CURRENTLY working in the new film, "Raisin in the Sun." But prior to that it has been almost a year since he got a screen call, which is typical of most of the Negro performers . . . with few exceptions. However, Roy gets lots of work in television film and series.
"My best teachers were directors," Roy said, when asked about his steady improvement in his acting ability.
Glenn thinks that the studios use white actresses to play the role of fair-complexioned colored girls because we don't have a topflight fair Negro girl who is top-rated. And that's why they use white girls they already have under contract, he explained.
But Roy asked us to reiterate:
"Our greatest need is writers . . . good ones . . . like the author of 'Raisin in the Sun,'" he concluded.

Glenn had to deal with tragedy. His mother Lela was shot to death while kneeling in prayer in during an evening service in her church in 1958. The bullet was fired during a bar fight across the street.

His obituary in the New York Amsterdam News of March 20, 1971 didn’t mention the Benny show, nor his breakthrough emceeing job on KTTV’s Sepia Spotlight series in 1954, nor a 1955 dramatic and singing performance on a racial-equality episode of Medic. But it did refer to a controversial show.

Glenn was on the CBS-TV version of Amos ‘n’ Andy. Despite the casting of skilled black actors, the programme had acquired a lot of baggage from its blackface radio days. Black activists weren’t happy with what they saw as bad-influence or over-the-top characters though, by all accounts, actor Tim Moore enjoyed playing the blustering con artist, the Kingfish. What did Glenn think of attempts (eventually successful) to shame it off the air? His obituary story in the New Amsterdam News of March 20, 1971 has the answer.

Roy Glenn Dies In California
By SARA SLACK
Veteran actor in 42 films Roy Edwin Glenn, Jr., was buried Wednesday in Inglewood Cemetery in Inglewood, California surrounded, to the end, by those he loved most, members of his family and show business colleagues. He was 56.
He died Thursday evening in his art-filled home in Los Angeles' fashionable Baldwin Hills section. During his seizure, a doctor was called. He summoned an ambulance, but Glenn was dead when the ambulance arrived.
He had said for several years he had a heart condition. Friends in Los Angeles said he had been dieting and exercising heavily in preparation for a role in an upcoming film. Monday, they said he complained of having severe chest pains.
A memorial service was held for him Tuesday night at the Harrison and Ross Mortuary in Los Angeles. Last year he was elected national recording secretary of the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists. Six AFTRA members served as honorary pallbearers.
Serious Study
A native of Pittsburgh, Kansas, Glenn first wanted to be a draftsman and later decided to become a lawyer. Possessing great talents for playing the piano and singing, he headed his own singing group in high school. Members remained together and went on to star in supper clubs and appear in films.
His first acting opportunity came on a WPA project when he was given a role in the Federal Theatre production of “John Henry.” He then began serious study winning spots on radio, in movies and on television. He has appeared in numerous TV commercials over the past three years.
His superb acting talents were first brought to public atention when he played the role of Maribeau, the general with the livid scars, in the film, “Lydia Bailey.” He is well-known for playing the role of the prosecuting attorney in the TV series “Amos ’n Andy." The show was removed from the airways after numerous civil rights groups objected to the stereotypes played by the Black cast.
His Reaction
Asked his reaction to the show’s being banned by Blacks, Glenn answered:
“I disagree with these critics. Many of our people act just like Amos and Andy. That program, in part, was a true portrayal of many of us.”
Glenn was probably best known on Broadway for his appearance in the long-playing “Golden Boy" and in motion pictures as Sidney Poitier’s father in "Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner.” His lists of acting credits includes [sic] forty-two films.
He is survived by a wife, Mrs. Roy Glenn, Jr.; a son, Darryl Ward Glenn, who lived with him; a daughter, Renatta Darlene Glenn of Detroit; another son, Roy Glenn, III and five grandchildren.

The validity, and possible negativity, of any kind of stereotypes and whether they should be seen or shunned is far out of the scope of this blog. Suffice it to say that having a black character on radio or television who was as a friend and ordinary guy, especially in days of segregation in some parts of the U.S., was something positive. It is a credit to Jack Benny that he recognised it, and still managed to turn it into comedy.

Moo-re on Early Animated Commercials

A study of theatrical cartoons is only scratching the surface of the animation business in the Golden Age. There were many other companies that made animated educational and institutional films and even commercials on both coasts.

Theatrical animated cartoons began on the East Coast, and I think readers here know a little something about the New York studios of the sound era—Fleischer/Paramount, Van Beuren, Terrytoons. But there were many smaller studios as well, especially in the 1950s as television demanded animated commercials. Not all of these studios restricted themselves to cartoons. They made live action films, slide films, and even stop-motion films. Anything to keep in business.

One company that spanned several decades was Caravel Films, Inc. In fact, they were part of a TV cartoon series, but we’ll get to that in a minute. Among Caravel’s seemingly countless number of short films were cartoon ads.

Caravel goes back to 1921. An article in a 1957 volume of Business Screen magazine talks of a 1938 film for the American Can Company starring 80 puppets called Jerry Pulls The Strings. It doesn’t mention the firm’s first cartoon film, but an article in the March 8, 1939 reports Walter Lantz Productions was suing Caravel for $2,490 owed on a commercial cartoon made in 1936. Lantz was evidently a subcontractor; his studio animated Boy Meets Dog (1938), which was produced for Bristol-Myers by Caravel.

One of the studio’s animated commercials was profiled in the July 15, 1941 edition of Business Screen. The short doesn’t appear to be available for viewing on line, but the article gives us a summary. One of the names (besides Elsie’s) may be familiar to you.

BORDEN CARTOON STARS ELSIE

♦ From Moo to You, a new animated color cartoon subject starring Elsie, the Borden cow, has been completed by Caravel Films, Inc. The subject was designed primarily for widespread school distribution though some theatrical distribution is contemplated. It was premiered in Boston at the recent N.E.A. convention.
This film is distinctive in that it utilizes the highly entertaining quality of the animated cartoon in presenting a serious educational story. It deals with the elementary but fundamental economic principle — in general that services have a momentary value, and specifically the milk necessary costs more in the city than it does in the country.
Elsie Tells the Wherefore
After establishing the need for the purchase of milk for the use of a family on a picnic in the country, Susan, an eight year old girl is puzzled when the farmer from whom she has purchased a quart of milk, returns some change. In retiring to the scene of the picnic, Susan comes upon Elsie who proceeds to tell her the whys and wherefores of the change. Starting with the premises that:
"When you buy milk at the farmers door,
You pay for the milk and nothing more."
Elsie proceeds in logical sequence to review the steps and the respective costs involved in the production and distribution of fluid milk for city consumption.
By use of the flash-back we follow the steps being described by Elsie — from the health tests being performed on Elsie herself, through the country station where the milk is received, the tests performed there, transportation to the city, pasteurization, bottle cleaning, filling, capping, crating, and door to door delivery — all instructive but handled in a free and amusing manner which is peculiar to the animated cartoon technique.
The film has just been completed in the animation studios of Caravel under the direction of Jack Semple and George Rufle and with an original musical score by Sam Morgenstein.
Five Months in Production
With a running time of nine minutes, the subject has been in production for five months. Some twenty-five thousand drawings were necessary to complete its production as were the services of fifty artists, writers, and technicians exclusive of musicians, voices, and recording and laboratory technicians. Photographed entirely in Technicolor in the Caravel studios, this subject is an example of the successful application of an accepted and established theatrical medium to a specific purpose in the commercial field.

George Rufle’s animation career went back to the silent days. His hometown paper in Hanover, Pa. in 1921 stated he started in animation at age 17 in 1918, working for the International studio, the Bray Studio and then the Jefferson Film Corp. (the Bud Fisher Studio). When sound came in, he animated for both the Fleischer and Van Beuren studios. He developed a synchronising system called the Rufle Baton. Years later, he toiled on TransLux’s less-than-epic The Mighty Hercules. Rufle died in 1974.

Ads weren’t permitted on TV in the U.S. until July 1, 1941 but trade publications in 1940 report that Caravel was making “minute movies” featuring Pepsi-Cola’s two Keystone-type cops and airing them on W2XBS (WNBC-TV today). To the right, you can see a poor scan of frames from what looks like a short showing how those ads were made.

Caravel opened enlarged new studios in 1957, but caught the takeover eye of the Buckeye Corp. In 1959, it took over ownership of Pyramid Productions, a TV production company, and distribution company Flamingo Telefilm Sales, as well as commercial house Transfilm. It then bought Caravel and merged them into Transfilm-Caravel. It also consolidated its animation operations into another firm, Transfilm-Wylde Animation, before it re-formed in 1961 as Wylde Animation, Inc. Meanwhile, Transfilm-Caravel was one of several New York commercial studios that closed in 1962.

Before that happened, Transfilm-Wylde cut a deal in April 1960. Variety reported the studio would be producing cartoons for a series starring The Nutty Squirrels, some suspiciously Alvin-Simon-Theodore-esque characters created by Don Elliott and Sasha Burland that had appeared on records. Foreign cartoons would make up the bulk of each half-hour with the squirrels featured in wrap-arounds.

This is hardly a full look at Caravel and its animation. I can’t fathom the work involved, but it would be great if someone had the time to research these commercial studios, generally run by or employing veteran theatrical animators. Their work deserves to be explored.

Jazz Is Born, Columbia Style

Yes, I’m a sucker for cartoons where inanimate objects sprout hands and feet, then carry on with some bit of business.

One cartoon where you’ll find this and doesn’t quite hit the mark is The Birth of Jazz, a 1932 Krazy Kat cartoon from the Mintz studio with the story by Manny Gould and animation by Allen Rose and Jack Carr.

Jazz is born when a long-beaked stork, to the strains of “The Poet and Peasant Overture,” drops a bag down a chimney and when it lands, out pops Krazy Kat with bent top hat, Ted Lewis-style, and the classical musical heard on the soundtrack is now replaced with a pepped up version of W.C. Sweatman’s “Down Home Rag.”

We get to some fun little scenes where Krazy is blowing a sax and little saxophones jump out and do a dance, shaking their butts at the camera.



Cut to Krazy blowing a row of clarinets. The clarinets grow mouths and laugh in unison.



Although we get a neat scene of musical instruments extending from a global version of the Earth, most of the second half of this Columbia cartoon features instruments playing themselves. Manny Gould needed to vary the gags just a bit more.

No director is credited.

As you might guess, the Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 is heard, played on a piano by the ghost of Franz Liszt.