He's My Hero

Daffy Duck is ecstatic Dick Tracy (in his comic book) has nabbed the criminals. There’s a fun scene where Daffy leaps around for joy. Here are some frames.



“Oh, boy! If I could only be Dick Tracy, I’d show those gooney criminals,” says Daffy, swinging his fist to punch out some crooks. He punches himself into dreamland instead.



The Great Piggy Bank Robbery is full of the kind of energy you’d find in Bob Clampett’s shorts for Warners. It was the last he completed for the studio. He began work on Bacall to Arms, but left and it was finished by Art Davis. Neon Noodle and the rest of the Chester Gould-esque villains were released to theatres, according to Boxoffice magazine, on July 27, 1946. The cartoon didn’t appear at the Strand (a Warners theatre) in New York until the end of August, but was screened at the Strand (a Warners theatre) in Altoona, Pa. on its release date.

Manny Gould, Rod Scribner, Izzy Ellis and Bill Melendez were the credited animators.

Jack Benny Every Week

Leave it to George Burns to explain why his buddy Jack Benny changed his mind about television.

Benny was trepidatious about going into video, even in the 1930s, according to one article we’ve reprinted here. By the end of the ‘40s, television was inevitable. Jack started out slowly. Occasionally, he’d express a worry that a weekly show would overexpose him. But that changed in the 1960-61 TV season when he showed up on home screens every seven days.

This story in the Los Angeles Times tried to find out why.

All Work Is Really All Play to This Jack
BY CECIL SMITH
LAKE TAHOE—Around the lake last week, the gag was that Jack Benny was fiddling while Tahoe burned.
It was an obvious gag because Jack opened his only night club engagement of the year at Bill Harrah's sumptuous South Shore club as the huge Donner Lake forest fire blacked out the lake resorts, Reno and much of northern Nevada. With emergency generators the opening went off as scheduled with Jack in his usual superb form, assisted by a sprightly Australian singing lass named Diana Trask and a lavish show built around Leighton Nobel's orchestra.
Well of Talent
Blackout or no, fire notwithstanding, the audience loved Jack onstage (he will be at Harrah's twice nightly through Sept. 7). And I among them, applauding as loud as any. But at the same time marveling.
Marveling at the enormous well of talent and energy that is Jack Benny.
At 66, he's at the top of his profession, one of the world's great funnymen, honored throughout the world. And he's working harder than any kid on a corner dancing for pennies.
As a matter of fact, this year Jack is taking on the biggest television assignment he's ever tried he's embarking on the perilous seas of doing a weekly comedy show.
While Jack did weekly comedy on radio for two decades, he's never tried it on television. Matter of fact, Jack has always treated TV tenderly.
He entered it in very easy stages, like a fat woman entering a swimming pool—first sticking a toe in to do four shows back in 1950, gradually increasing the load until he was doing a show every other week for the last few years (he alternated weekly with George Gobel last year).
And weekly television has been a graveyard for many a great comic. I flew here to find out from Benny why he wants to chance it, why he wants to work this hard.
I found him on the day before his opening bouncing through the crowded casino as happy as a teenager with a cut-down Ford.
"I went down in my dressing room," he said, "to try and learn my lines for the show. And what did I do? Practiced the fiddle the whole time I was down there."

"About the weekly show, Jack ..." I began.
"Practicing the fiddle for my concerts. Isn't that funny? Here I'm opening a show tonight. And I've got the TV show beginning in October. But what am I rehearsing for the symphony concerts?"
“The weekly . . .”
"I don't do the first till November. I'm doing four of them in November—Indianapolis, Cleveland, Cincinnati and Baltimore. They are my real kicks, you know. And for no money."
About That Show
"Jack," I said. "Television, Jack. The weekly TV show."
"What about it?" he said.
"Why?"
"You know, it's easier. It's actually easier. We put 10 of them in the can for next season. Filmed them before an audience at Desilu in the live manner, using three cameras. Did them back to back. And it was easier.
"Something happens doing a show a week. You get into a kind of groove. You develop a rhythm. You don't seem to be pressing so hard, not trying to make every show the greatest show you've ever done. And I think they're better shows."
"But a weekly show," I said, "is the toughest work in the world. Why take it on?"
"I had three choices," Jack said. "I could go on doing the show every other week. I could do six specials and let it go at that But I chose the weekly show ..."
Work Defined
Somebody said that Mr. Benny was wanted at rehearsals and Jack dashed away after his violin.
George Burns, Jack's great and good friend who was here for the opening, looked at me thoughtfully and murmured:
“This isn't work. The thing Jack's doing. It's not work. He loves it.
That's Work
"Work is sitting round Hillcrest flapping your arms wondering what to do till dinner. Work is haunting an agent's office, wondering when you'll get on a bill. Work is playing a split week in Schenectady for an audience that yawns at you.
That's work.
"The thing Jack's doing is something he loves to do for an audience that loves watching him do it.
“That’s not work—that's functioning in the world. That's living. That's what Jack's doing—living."

Benny and CBS president Jim Aubrey got into a disagreement in the 1963-64 season. Jack was upset Aubrey put Petticoat Junction as a lead-in to his show. Aubrey wasn’t going to let some old star tell him how to schedule the network. Benny moved to NBC where he was killed in the ratings by Gomer Pyle and was finally cancelled in 1965.

Jack went back to occasional specials—praising the concept of not being on every week—and appeared in them, to loads of good publicity, until he died.

The Man Behind The Scrappy Scenery

The Little Match Girl is, arguably, one of the finest animated shorts to come out of the Charles Mintz studio for release by Columbia Pictures. Animated in part by Emery Hawkins, it was nominated for an Oscar. The suffering of the child in this cartoon has brought some viewers to tears, while others feel unhappy endings are inappropriate for cartoons (but just fine for live-action feature films).

Credits are maddening incomplete in the first decade of sound cartoons. Hawkins receives nothing on screen for his work in this 1937 release. Art Davis is given the animation credit, Sid Marcus was responsible for the story adaptation and Joe De Nat, as usual, provided the music. And that’s it.

But we do know who painted the backgrounds for this acclaimed short, and others of that period at the Mintz studio, thanks to an article in the Lancaster, Pa. Sunday News of July 17, 1938.

Joe Gavan was a young artist whose career in animation seems to have been brief. Let’s look at the newspaper article about his work on the West Coast, which also goes into other parts of his career. It also describes a title card eliminated when Columbia cartoons were reissued years later.



He Has A Picture Of It
Joe Gavan Pursues His Art For Backgrounds Into Hollywood’s Famous Cartoons
After three and a half years hobnobbing with Hollywood stars—such as Krazy Kat, Scrappy and others—Joe Gavan is still able to talk for three consecutive sentences without saying “terrific” or “colossal.”
That’s quite an accomplishment, even if he hadn’t done anything else. Which he very definitely has.
Joe is one of a growing colony of Lancastrians transplanted to movieland, including comedian Bob Burns, radio announcer Bob Longenecker, of Lititz, and others.
Visiting Relatives
Joe has spent the past several weeks visiting his brother, Frank N. Gavan, and his wife at 61 Cottage avenue in Millersville.
You’d think he’d be glad to get away from the celluloid world for while, if you didn’t know Hollywood and you didn’t know Joe.
Joe’s one constant companion, however, is his notebook. In it you’ll find sketches of just about anything a movie director could ask for. And as Joe will testify, movie directors are likely to ask for anything, including a design for a bench in the Ephrata Cloisters or the "hex" sign on a Lancaster county barn.
Anyway, Joe will be fortified with a lot of Lancaster scenery when he heads back for the cinema center of the universe in a few days.
Watercolors Of County
He’ll be able to impress the Hollywood bigwigs, for instance, with watercolors and sketches of the old covered bridge at Williamson’s park, and with pictures of classic Lancaster barns and farmhouses.
"Everybody’s an expert out there,” he explains, "and you've got to be an expert on everything to get along with them.”
Every one of the tricky titles to animated short subjects produced by the Charles Mintz studios for several years has been the work of Joe Gavan. Maybe you remember “Bluebird’s Baby,” which started out with the title written across a blue-checked baby blanket decorated with safety-pins. Or "The Little Match Girl," the studio's masterpiece to date.
Cartoon Sets Elaborate
"Sets” for the cartoons, although they're only on paper, are just as elaborate to prepare as a full-size movie stage. Joe spent a full week doing just one of the highly-detailed and colorful backgrounds for the “Match Girl."
While he’s still very much involved in the doings of Scrappy and Krazy Kat, Joe is also taking a large interest these days in the more involved careers of Rhett Butler and Scarlett O'Hara.
For, like all the rest of Hollywood, he’s got the "Gone With the Wind" bug. His bug, however, is likely to get him farther than most of the boys who are just hoping.
Joe has actually been working on the picture, spending weeks in research on accurate interiors and exteriors for the picture's acts. He hasn’t really landed a job with the show, but with the pages and pages of neatly sketched dropleaf tables and ladderback chairs and pillared mansions he has prepared, he feels ready to go in and corner whoever’s running things and say, "See here—“
Aims At Big Features
That never-falling notebook of Joe’s, crammed with drawings he made years ago and brought up to date with a series of watercolors painted within the past few weeks in a swing around the nation, is the springboard he hopes will take him from the cartoon studios into the art side of big feature pictures.
Not that the cartoons are anybody's snap stuff, though. When Donald Duck cavorts across the street in search of trouble, the picture looks simple enough from where you sit. But back of that little scene is a whole aspirin-box full of headaches for hundreds of people.
Take the average Krazy Kat cartoon, for example. They're the ones on which Joe has been working, among others, for the duration of his stay in Hollywood.
Through Long Process
Krazy starts out as a ghostly critter sketched on an evanescent background in a conference of directors. That fuzzy picture goes from the conference where the theme of the picture and the appearance of the characters are determined, to the head director’s assistant.
He makes the picture a little more distinct—and hands it to HIS assistant. This fellow has the dirty work of actually drawing in the scenes as they ought to be, but the real detail of the intermediate pictures is handled by other subordinate assistants.
The actual artistic end is handled by Joe Gavan and his associates. They do the color backgrounds against which the action takes place, and on which so much of the impression of the picture depends.
The motion of the characters is poured in by another roomful of cooks—girls who draw the thousands of separate pictures which must be made so that the figures will dance or walk or beat each other across the ear in smooth continuity.
1,500,000 Drawings
The average color cartoon which takes only a couple of minutes to show is likely to consist of perhaps 1,500,000 separate drawings. The studios figure about fourteen drawings to the “beat" of music, ninety beats to the foot of film, and 1,200 to 1,400 feet of film. And since each figure has to be done separately, you can do your own arithmetic for a mob scene.

The whole thing is set to music, in the Mintz studios’ case, by Columbia pictures—and then it’s sent back for the preview.
"If three out of the three hundred studio people at the preview applaud, we know we have a success," Joe says.
After working with it for months the studio is generally so heartily sick of the cartoon that the whole staff is ready to pull it into little pieces the minute it flashes on the screen. But they’re their own worst critics, and they can always be sure the movie public Is going to like it a lot better than they do.
Designing backgrounds has been Joe's big job In Hollywood. But the background he's designed for himself is no less interesting.
Has Stage Txperience [sic]
He's a graduate of Lancaster Boys' High school and Franklin and Marshall academy. He's breezed through art schools at Harrisburg, New York, Chicago, and two at Los Angeles. He worked for nine months in New York doing displays for the Chicago World’s Fair, and he and his brother designed and built the scenery for Lancaster’s 1935 Welfare pageant. While working for a scenery building firm in Harrisburg, Joe painted and set up fourteen stages in Pennsylvania, including two In Harrisburg, and as many more in Ohio and several other states.
In Hollywood he's been enlarging his invaluable portfolio with water-colors and sketches made in the great museum of the University of California, where furniture and costumes of all nations and periods are on display.
And Magazine Covers
He's also been doing magazine covers and layouts for a new movie magazine published (at large financial loss, so far) by Hollywood people in search of something other than the dirt-and-scandal type of publication. So Joe's heading back to Colossal-town with a rumbleseat full of Lancaster county on paper, just in case. And if you see a familiar-looking farmhouse or buggy in G. with the W., blame Joe.

Joseph Bernard Gavan was born in Lancaster on October 22, 1910. By 1940, he was out of the animation business. The April 1940 Census gives his occupation as “advertising, motion pictures” (at Cartoon Films, Inc., perhaps?) while his Draft Card the following October states he was employed at the May Co. in downtown Los Angeles. He married in 1942 and again in 1945, and spent part of the late ‘40s living in Hawaii. By 1950, he was divorced again and working in advertising in Los Angeles. His watercolours continued to be exhibited.

He returned to Lancaster for the last four years of his life and died there on March 24, 1974.

Playing My Theme Song

Lucky. Rabbit.
The Lucky Oswald Rabbit.
Nicest. Rabbit.
That You Ever Knew.

Those are the opening lyrics to Walter Lantz’s theme song for the Oswald cartoons, sung by Oswald himself in Mars 1930.

Oswald sings his song to, presumably, the King of Mars, and accompanies himself on an odd plant with hands growing out of the ground. I suspect Pinto Colvig and others are making the tooting sounds coming from it. The song and some of the artwork of Oswald come from animation an earlier 1930 cartoon, Africa.

The duck-billed, lion-maned king’s body bops up and down to the music, swings his hips (like Mickey Mouse in The Opry House), and then he dances left to right across the Martian landscape in a 12-drawing cycle, animated on ones.

The king’s body separates into three parts and the top and bottom kick around the ball-shaped middle part for a while before the body goes back together.

Cut to the next scene with a wonderfully-designed, musical-instrument character that strolls right to left playing “Yankee Doodle” (yes, on Mars).

Gerry Geronimi, Manny Moreno and Ray Abrams get animation credits, with Tex Avery, Pinto Colvig and Les Kline in smaller letters underneath. The always-helpful David Gerstein has found the Oswald lyrics are by Bernie Grossman and the melody by Walter Lantz’s composer Jimmy Dietrich. Lantz and Bill Nolan share the director credit. For a while in 1930 and 1931, they were going for single-word titles of their cartoons. This was one of three Oswalds released by Universal in December 1930 (Africa and Mexico were the others).

There is more on the cartoon in this old post.

Up To Mars

Two cartoons with wonderfully weird Martian landscapes made appearances around the same time in the early days of sound. Oswald the rabbit went to the planet in the Universal short Mars (released Dec. 29, 1930; copyright Jan. 5, 1931), while one of the many versions of the Fleischers’ Bimbo landed there in Up to Mars (released Nov. 22, 1930; copyright Nov. 20, 1930).

The Motion Picture News wasn’t altogether happy with it. A review on its release date says: “Good, But Misses. Dave Fleischer didn’t do as well in this Talkartoon as the subject matter would have permitted. His Mars figures are amusing, but only in a mild way when the opportunity to make them really fantastic was there awaiting execution. However, this will get by nicely.

Regardless, there’s imagination behind the mushrooms, castles, tree stumps and teepees which populate the landscape.



You think Bimbo is drawn by different animators in these frames?



It’s tough to see on this low-res video file, but there’s kind of a tree with gloves at the end of each branch in the background. It reminds me of something you’d find in Bob Clampett’s great Porky in Wackyland (1938).



Some great Martian designs. There are “reversal” gags. The log saws the saw in half, the crook gives valuables back to someone and a letter doesn’t fit in a mailbox, so the gooney character puts in the mailbox inside the envelope.



Eccentric dancing on Mars. The twins have candles on their heads, similar somewhat to characters in Bimbo’s Initiation (1931). Another Martian has no body, but legs with minds of their own and detach from his hands.



Guards with lightbulb noses.



I’d love to know more about the nonsense song they’re singing (Oh, for a cue sheet!). How many songs rhyme “consommé” with “Mandolay” and “Oy vey!” and include the words “Nabisco” and “Toronto”?

One more character.



Unfortunately, the background artist is unidentified. Rudy Zamora and Shamus Culhane are the credited animators.

Have You Heard The One About...

Pop culture references always provide laughs.

That was certainly true in the days of old-time radio comedy shows. The new “step-down” Hudson? Prime gag material. The government creating two Thanksgivings because of politics? Same thing. La Brea Tar Pits? Los Angeles studio audiences guffawed over that.

It’s no wonder, then, that every comedy writer put those into the mouths of their on-air bosses. So what if every other show used the same jokes? Laughs were guaranteed.

Unoriginality may not have bothered audiences, but it bugged critic John Crosby. His syndicated column of November 15, 1946 doesn’t exactly lament the obsolescence of one joke at the hands of the U.S. government, and goes over some favourite topics that filled the comic airwaves.

The Death of a Joke
On Oct. 14, the day President Truman announced the end of price controls on meat, a joke died. The meat shortage joke, which had carried many a comedian through the summer and fall, went to its reward. There are so few jokes on the air that it deserves an obituary. No historian could possibly have a complete collection of all the meat jokes but here are a few from my private collection that weld have to do without from now on.
Bob Hope show: "You have to be a contortionist to buy meat these days. You have to be under the counter and over the ceiling, at the same time."
Fred Allen show: "I hear people are going over to Canada just to eat meat." "Yes, today to get a steak you not only have to have money. You have to have a passport."
Jack Haley show: "How thin are your lamb chops?" "We have to put suspenders on the paper panties."
Joan Davis show: “My customers are so hungry they're snapping at the ducks on each other's discharge buttons."
Fred Allen show: Sen. Claghorn: "Down south we eat anything we can overtake."
Bob Hope show: The Democrats had to do something about meat. The Republicans were ready to cook their donkey for them."
While the meat-shortage joke will leave a great hole on the air, there will be plenty of jokes left to last us through the winter. Below I have arranged a file of them under their respective subject headings. There are enough there, I think, to keep any comedian warm through May.
Fountain Pen Joke
Joan Davis show: "I'm too young to die. I've got a fountain pen with a lifetime guarantee."
Titus Moody on the Fred Allen show: “I been down in the well—writing a letter."
Jack Benny show: "Could I have your autograph? Just step over to this bucket of water. I want to try out my new fountain pen.”
Tommy Manville
Bob Hope show: "The theaters are so close together in New York so Tommy Manville won't have to walk so far when he's shopping."
Same show: "He has a new contract—selling rice to Tommy Manville."
Humanities Joke
Rudy Vallee show: "You are a member of the human race?" "Yes, but I haven't paid my dues."
Judy Canova show: "I'm only human." "You're exaggerating."
Red Skelton show: “Three times my mother had to buy me back from the dog catcher."
Judy Canova show: "You know when I was four years old my father took me to the zoo." “What happened?" "They rejected me."
Anatomy Joke
Breakfast. in Hollywood show: "And here's Jack McElroy, an outstanding figure. Most of it stands three feet out ahead of him."
Hildegarde show: "What's a woman—a rag, a bone, a hank of hair." Woman: "If you're speaking of me, you left a few things out."
Eddie Cantor show: "What are those strings hanging from your shoulders?" "Those are my arms."
Marriage Joke
Eddie Cantor show: "My best friend ran away with my wife and I miss him."
Petrillo Joke
Eddie Cantor show: "I’ll never forget, marrying an orchestra leader. He said I do. Then I said I do. Then Petrillo pronounced us man and wife."
And, of course, there’s always Joe Miller. If you think Miller is dead glance at some of these specimens:
Johnny Morgan show: “What do you think of bathing beauties?” “I don’t know. I never bathed any.”
Red Skelton show: “I was so nervous I put my pants to bed and hung over the chair all night.”
Duffy’s Tavern: “That was one of my father’s jokes.” “What are you—one of your mother’s?”
Judy Canova show: “Grandpa ain’t opened his mouth in three days.” “Why not?” “Willie hid the cuspidor.”
Eddie Cantor show: “You’re lucky to have a new washing machine. All you had before was that old tub.” “Sir, you’re speaking of the woman I love.”
That ought to get us through the winter. This summer we can look forward again to Brooklyn Dodger jokes (“Brooklyn is a ball club entirely surrounded by alibis.”) and bathing suit jokes (“My bathing suit cost $100—the material was $600 a yard).

The rest of the Crosby columns for the week.

November 11th: the familiarity of the concept of Dennis Day’s new sitcom is analysed. We’ve transcribed it at the bottom of this old post.

November 12th: two shows about dealing with problems, one realistic and the other a garden-variety soap opera.

November 13th: odds and sods, including irony about one of the most popular commercial jingles of the late 1940s—the Chiquita banana song.

November 14th: a look at the new cast of the Kraft Music Hall with the departure of Bing Crosby to ABC and recorded shows, and a blackface show on Mutual based in the South.

You can click on them to make them easier to read.