Perspective Pig

Porky Pig, in an airplane, chases a fish in Plane Dippy, the third short by director Tex Avery released by Warner Bros.



For a while at Warners, Tex tried to make things interesting visually with various camera angles and perspective animation. In this short, the chase is done in cycle animation for a bit, with both the fish and Porky’s car coming toward the camera. Some random frames.



As far as I know, this is the first Warners cartoon where Virgil Ross got screen credit for animation, along with Sid Sutherland. Chuck Jones and Bob Clampett were also animating in the unit.

Bernie Brown’s score is full of “I’d Love to Take Orders From You” (military scenes) and “When I Yoo-Hoo in the Valley” (the significance is lost on me). Joe Dougherty is Porky in this one and we get to hear Berneice Hansell’s annoying squeaky giggle.

The Motion Picture Herald gives two different release dates for this short, Dec. 21, 1935 and Jan. 4, 1936. The earliest screening I’ve found is at the Majestic in Abilene, Texas on Dec. 29th. It wasn’t copyrighted until the following April.

UPA Fudgets

Fudget’s Budget won first place in the animated short subject category at the Venice International Film Festival in 1955. Donald Heraldson, in his book Creator of Life, A History of Animation (1975, Drake Publishers), describes the animation gimmick employed:

“Fudget’s Budget” used backgrounds that were psychologically interlaced with the animation — graph paper. Family members would come and go, like stock market statistics, by vanishing in and out of the graph paper backgrounds.

Here’s an example from the start of the cartoon. George Fudget is formed from a question mark on a title. He is a straight line that expands to human outline form (one drawing every two frames).



Irene Fudget comes into the scene in between lines on a graph. We’ve skipped some drawings but you can get the idea of how the animation worked.



An article on future styles in animation in the April 1959 edition of the British Film Institute’s Sight and Sound points out

Movement now rarely involves the whole figure...In Fudget’s Budget (’55) a couple twice get up to dance, “because they enjoy it,” then return to sit completely motionless at their nightclub table. This deliberate alternation of stylised movement and total immobility can be used to obvious satirical effect.

Yet the article isn’t altogether praising this type of movement, calling the limited animation in UPA’s Ham and Hattie series “humourless stiffness.”

Pamela Anne King, reporting on the Edinburgh Film Festival in the October 1955 issue of Films in Review proclaimed Fudget’s Budget “an ideal cartoon for this inflationary decade” but admitted the Scots in the audience didn’t really get it because the short was “a bit too tangibly American.” And Ernest Callenbach, in his review of Flebus in the spring 1959 edition of Film Quarterly, termed Fudget’s Budget “UPA’s last creative gasp.”

The cartoon was directed by Bobe Cannon, straying away from his seeming preference for shorts starring children. He co-wrote the cartoon with Tee Hee and Tedd Pierce. Adam Abraham, in his superb book When Magoo Flew noted:

Hee’s own financial troubles inspired the film, which presents Mr. and Mrs. Fudget as neon-outline figures on ledger paper to suggest a world composed of numbers and sums. Hee worked closely with Jules Engel to accomplish the film’s look.

George Bruns provides an old-time, barroom-like piano score that is jaunty enough to lessen any pretensions the film may have had. Gerry Ray, Alan Zaslove and Frank Smith are the credited animators.

Texas Welcomes Jack Benny

Jack Benny joked in the 1940s that “they loved me in St. Joe.” 20 years later, he could change the name of the city to “Austin.”

The cancellation of Benny’s weekly TV show in 1965 gave him a chance to do something he really liked—play his violin with symphony orchestras. In February 1966, he embarked on a three-city tour in Texas, playing in Austin, Fort Worth and Corpus Christi. The papers in Austin seem the most enthused; they had stories about Jack’s show almost daily for several weeks.

We won’t reprise all of them. I’m just going to pick out a couple. This one, from the Austin American of Feb. 20, 1966, gives you an idea of Benny’s schedule. It was more than a news conference and a concert.

Symphony Benefit With Jack Benny
By KAY POWERS
If you had your "druthers" between lounging around a California swimming pool and playing golf at a fancy Beverly Hills club—or packing your best bib and tucker and trodding the old showbiz boards after more than 50 years of same—what would you do?
Silly question, isn't it? Almost anyone would choose the easy life, especially if he were listed in Dun & Bradstreet and Who's Who and had plenty of hard-earned money laid aside from just that kind of living. And that's the category in which Jack Benny falls—wealthy and eminently successful.
Unless you are both deaf and blind, you know by now that Jack Benny is coming to Austin—tomorrow, in fact. Why? After more than fifty years of footlights and funnin' around, why is he coming to Austin, Texas instead of taking it easy back home?
Because Jack Benny happens to love good music, and because he knows that today, more than ever before, good music has to compete—with television and movies, with good and "sick" nightclub comedians—for the audience which it must have for survival—and too often comes up on the minus side of the ledger.
Jack's been in television and movies. He has been one of the good nightclub comedians. He still likes good music, and he thinks that a whole lot of people do, too. So this happens to be his personal way of promoting it. "Symphonies always operate to a deficit," says the famous comedian who made jokes about penny-pinching and parsimonious thrift standard among his colleagues, "so I just try to help them pay their bills and maybe get ahead a little." His modus operandi is ridiculously simple and completely charming. He plays a benefit concert with a symphony and instead of taking maybe 40 per cent or even 60 per cent of the boxoffice, he gives it all to the symphony with which he is playing. Clever, isn't it? And so very nice!
A comedian with a violin is something to see—and even more, something to hear. Comedian Jack Benny with his $40,000 Stradivarius violin is something you will see one time, and one time only, here in Austin. You'll never see it on television—unless, perchance, Jack can figure out some way in which it can be done solely for the benefit of symphony music and not for the benefit of a sponsor!
Jack's schedule for his Austin visit is a rigorous one. He'll arrive at Municipal Airport at 12:27 p.m., to be met by Austin Symphony officers, Mayor Lester Palmer and members of the City Council, members of the Longhorn Band (can they play "Love In Bloom," I wonder?) and a whole bunch of Austin citizenry who have loved the comedian with the wide baby-blue eyes through many years of radio, television and movies.

It will be "Buck Benny Rides Again" when Texas Ranger Captain Clint Peoples presents Jack with a genuine Texas Ranger hat. Then Mayor Lester Palmer will designate Tuesday, Feb. 22, as Jack Benny Day in Austin, re-name Congress Avenue "Jack Benny Avenue" and show Benny the street sign which will be placed at the front of the Capitol on that broad avenue in recognition of same.
From his red-carpet arrival at the airport, Benny will be escorted by motorcycle police to his Austin quarters, the Presidential Suite of the Wilbur Clark Crest Hotel. He will hold a news conference there, in the Madrid Room, at 2 p.m. and will rehearse shortly thereafter with some members of the Austin Symphony.
At 7:30 Monday evening, Illinois-born Benny will be made an honorary Texas citizen by Gov. John Connally at a dinner at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Richard F. Brown. He will also be presented his own personal Texas brand, the "Lasting 39," with a branding iron and registration papers for the brand by Huber Hughes, president of Dillard's of Austin.
The day of the concert will be a busy one for Benny, too. A full rehearsal with the orchestra will occupy most of the morning (he's a serious musician, even if in his own words he's not a "real" musician). He will see a bit of the LBJ Country and get some rest Tuesday afternoon.
Curtain time for the benefit concert is 8 p.m. Tuesday and Jack will be in the star's dressing room at Municipal Auditorium even before Maestro Ezra Rachlin leads the Austin Symphony Orchestra in "Merry Wives of Windsor" overture, the first number on the program.
Just before the house lights dim after intermission, take time to look around you and notice that there is a full house. Some of the audience will have paid as high as $100 for seats. Some will have paid $3.50. But the applause will all sound the same and applause is what makes the man on stage know he's touching base.
Wherever you are applauding from, Jack Benny and the Austin Symphony will love you for it.

The press reported the certificate stating Benny was an honorary Texan gave his age as 39.

You should be able to discern Jack’s generosity from the story above, but instead of me reprinting the review of the Austin concert (I should point out a snowfall that evening hurt attendance a bit), let’s give you another example from the pages of the American. This was published Feb. 21. As a former high school newspaper and radio reporter, I can empathise with this woman and appreciate Benny’s kindness.

Cub Reporter Gets a Scoop
Sentimental Over Benny
By JERRI VEIDT
Staff Writer
Others in Municipal Auditorium Tuesday night will applaud Jack Benny for his truly great comedic talents and near great musical abilities.
Not me. I'll be remembering a Sunday morning too many years ago when Benny went out of his way to be nice to a stringy haired 16-year-old college sophomore.
My radio class assignment had been to get an interview with the famous comedian as he left the Wichita, Kansas, airport.
Armed with the college radio station's only recorder (an old wire job), I appeared at the airport one hour ahead of time. And nearly went back home.

The real reporters were there. Newspaper men leaned importantly against walls or slouched in chairs. Real radio interviewers clicked impressive banks of switches and tested microphones. It was frightening.
I had only an old carbon mike with a too-short cord and a beat up recorder—the case still showed it had originally contained apples. Besides, I didn't know where to plug the thing in.
Soon Benny and his troupe arrived at a side door escorted by a retinue of city officials.
The press hadn't seen him but I couldn't move.
Benny watched the scene for a moment or two and then turned those startling blue eyes on me. I grinned weakly.
Ambling slowly out of the doorway, Benny began heading my way. The reporters saw him and scurried to circle around him. The entire circle kept moving until he was in front of me.
"Hi," said the familiar voice. "I'm Jack Benny. Who are you?"
"I'm Jerri Whan and I go to Wichita [My radio class assignment had been to] University and I'm supposed to get an interview with you but I can't remember how to turn the recorder on," I said tearfully.
Benny turned to the reporters. "Hey I've got an important interview here. How about leaving us alone for awhile? I'll get to you fellas later."
And I did get that interview.
Not only with Benny but with the rest of the entertainers—Rochester, Phil Harris, Vivian Blaine and the Wier[e] Brothers. That old wire recording still has the place of honor in rows and rows of tapes made since.
Funny I hate sticky, sentimental "I Remember" stories. But I get sentimental over Benny.

Interestingly, at the time of that teenaged interview, Jerri Veidt’s family owned a radio station that broadcast the Benny show on Sunday nights. She died in Dallas in 2003.

The Texas swing wasn’t Jack’s only tour that year. He dug out his revue, including singer Wayne Newton, and performed to delighted audiences in the U.S. It’s clear reading newspaper stories of the last decade of Jack Benny’s life, that he was one of the most beloved entertainers around.

Haaallo

Tex Avery experimented with deadpan characters before he invented Droopy at MGM. One was the emotionless m.c. in the Warner Bros. cartoon Hamateur Night. He talks slowly and deliberately from the side of his mouth.



Avery pulls a switch on us at the very end. The m.c. gets the audience to judge the amateur they like best. Egghead, who was pulled off the stage every time he tried to perform, gets wild applause from the audience. Suddenly, the m.c. reacts with a couple of takes.



The reason? Avery cuts to the audience. They are all Eggheads.



The laconic-until-the-penultimate-scene m.c. is played by Phil Kramer, whose casting by Tex Avery had to be deliberate, as he rarely appears in Warner Bros. cartoons. In fact, I associate him with Famous Studio’s shorts of the mid-‘50s as you can hear the exact same voice there. In fact, Kramer only had one voice. His own. It was a low-key whine.

Keith Scott’s research has determined he voiced three cartoons at Warners. I’ve found a newspaper blurb from mid-1939 reporting he had been hired to narrate Slap Happy Valley and a trade paper mention of his work on The Painter and the Pointer, both for Walter Lantz.

Phil Kramer was one of those people who kicked around Los Angeles radio in the 1930s, before and after the big network programmes came from New York and took over the local airwaves. In 1934, he appeared on KHJ’s Friday Frolics with comic actress/singer Elvia Allman. The two were also on the syndicated 15-minuter Komedy Kingdom (You can hear Allman on a number of Warners cartoons, including Avery’s Little Red Walking Hood).

Kramer later got regular roles with Joe Penner, on KFWB’s The Grouch Club and with Al Pearce. Other Warner Bros. cartoon actors inhabited these shows as well, including Mel Blanc and Arthur Q. Bryan. A couple of other clippings note his supporting role in 1940 in a show called Ann of the Airlines, co-starring Robert C. Bruce, the main narrator of Warners cartoons for years. A column from 1944 mentions he was on a show with Johnny Morgan, sponsored by Ballantine’s. That’s a sampling.

The Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle of April 8, 1938 profiled him.

The Story of "Butch Shmutch,” Radio's Newest Comic Star
Phil Kramer Wins Radio Fame With His "Hallo Joe" On Joe Penner Programs; Movie Career Next
By DICK CHASE
Hollywood Correspondent of Seven Arts Feature Syndicate
It's a long hop from the Borsht Circuit to a spot on a radio coast-to coaster, but it's not so hard if you have one of those hail-fellow-all-wet whines and an irrepressible bent for kidding, like Mr. Butch Smutch—in real life Mr. Phil Kramer. Known universally and respected deeply by every youngster who ever turned a dial to Joe Penner's radio show, Kramer is pretty much of a favorite with the college crowd too. Since coining that sarcastic "Hallo Joe" greeting—in a way one of the neatest bits of counterfeiting in radio—he has been stamped definitely as a Man With a Voice.
It's about ten years since Phil was playing vaudeville in the East, and it was then that he made that famed string of summer resorts in the Adirondacks patronized by the most kosher element of New York. Under his belt he had several years of experience as a private secretary in a Wall Street coffee importing firm. He also had a flair for shorthand acquired alongside Billy Rose, with whom he went to school during the Lower East Side-Bronx days, as well as an undefinable quirk that made him do screwy things in a crowd that caused people to laugh.
Man of Many Talents
Besides these, he had a distinctive style at the piano, which always helps. When his ability to entertain casually, without premeditation, got his name linked with compliments, his career in the Bourse was ended . . . Then we find him in such New England spots as Camp Wah-kee-nah, a resort for Jewish boys in Bristol, N. H. Here he was on the payroll to entertain kids, and grown-ups as well, and he devoted himself to finding out what it is that makes people laugh.
It was at Wah-kee-nah, by the way, that Moe Berg of the Chicago White Sox and Eddie Wineapple of the Yanks, were serving as counsellors in those days. And down the road a piece the Marx Brothers had their summer home. All in all, Phil was in pretty good company. In 1930, after a few years of this sort of trouping, the doctor prescribed a change of climate, which brought Kramer to Los Angeles.
Work in plays, a movie short with Norman Foster, and variety shows kept him busy intermittently, in the best tradition. Notable parts were in stage productions of "Talk of the Town" and "Once in a Lifetime." In the latter there was a new face—Miss Rosalind Russell's, who since has gone places too.
"Radio Needed Kramer"

Bits in radio were helpful, but not the real thing. One afternoon, to get a laugh at a party, he phoned the J. Walter Thompson agency and informed the switchboard operator delicately but forcefully that radio needed Phil Kramer. The young lady on the hardboiled end of the line was so impressed by the revolving whirr in Phil's tones that she passed the word along. A couple of hours later a voice with an executive sting to it called Phil back . . . From then it was easy. His first big spot was with Burns and Allen. After three months with that hare-brained family circle he was hired by Joe Penner [right]. The turning point in his career came one night when Penner was in a haunted house, quaking with fear but determined he would stay in the place to win a $50 bet. There was a noise. Penner, shaking, cried: '''Who's there?" . . . This was Mr. Butch Smutch's cue. "Hallo, Joe," he drawled. "I'm the skull over here in the corner." . . But the studio audience was convulsed with laughter before he had finished the sentence. After the show, Penner sought him out. He liked the way the "Hello, Joe" had gone over with the audience. It would be kept in the show.
Single, living unostentatiously, Mr. Butch Smutch may soon be seen in pictures. And after two years of life with the dizzy people that Mr. Penner is so intent on "smashing," it may a pleasant change.

Piecing together biographies takes a bit of work. The 1940 Census shows Kramer was living with other show folk in the St. Moritz Hotel; he made $2,400 in 1939. His age is given as 40. Considering he was once a typist and a pianist, only one person matches those occupations with the same parents in various government documents. We can safely say Philip Kramer was born to Solomon and Julia Kramer on October 12, 1899. He was a typist for the Adams Manufacturing Co. at the end of World War One. In 1942, he was employed by the Russell Seeds ad agency across from NBC at Sunset and Vine. Its big client was Brown and Williamson Tobacco and sponsored Flagg and Quirt, an NBC Red network show he appeared on. He enlisted in the Army on September 1, 1942 and was discharged the following February 6, 1943.Radio Daily reported he did five shows immediately on returning then went to work for Douglas Aircraft.

When he returned to the east isn’t clear, but at the end of 1945 he had recorded Happy the Humbug for radio syndication with New York actors Jackson Beck, Mae Questel and Frank Milano. In 1948, the Gagwriters Institute of Palisades Park, New Jersey gave an honorary degree to him and Arnold Stang as “Doctors of Stooge-ry”; he was on the Slapsie Maxie Show at the time. That year, he was hired by Famous Studios for a Popeye cartoon. He pops up in NBC-TV programme publicity releases until 1960. He was also the voice of CBS-TV's stop-motion promotional character, Mr. Lookit, in the mid-50s.

Kramer died in Weehawken, New Jersey on March 31, 1972.

Scaring a Woodpecker

A Fine Feathered Frenzy is, in a way, Don Patterson’s version of Tex Avery’s Northwest Hounded Police, made eight years earlier. In that cartoon, the bad guy can’t escape from Droopy, and Tex gives him outrageous takes every time the wolf runs into the dog.

In this cartoon, Woody Woodpecker can’t escape the obese “Gorgeous Gal,” who wants to snare him in her mansion as a husband. Woody reacts with takes that were as outlandish as anyone ever got in the ‘50s at the Walter Lantz studio.

At Hanna-Barbera, Carlo Vinci used to draw a fear take that consisted of two alternating drawings, one with the character in a jagged outline. The same thing happens throughout this short.



Woody looks in a hand mirror and sees Gorgeous Gal behind him.



Woody tries to get away again.



Happy Homer Brightman borrows a gag from Avery’s Red Hot Riding Hood (1943). Tex’s animators use more panache than Patterson’s.



Patterson handled some of the animation himself, with Ray Abrams and Herman Cohen also assigned to his unit. Soon, hed be replaced in the director’s chair by Tex Avery.