More Van Beuren Heads

Time for some more zooming heads from a Van Beuren cartoon, this time from Midnight (released Oct. 12, 1930).

The storyline is basic. A revamped version of Farmer Alfalfa is trying to sleep but is awoken by a quartet of cats singing “Ida.” To stop them, he calls in the dog catcher, who releases a pile of dogs into his back yard (the dogs beat the crap out of the cats in cycle animation). But then Farmer Al can’t sleep because the dogs start singing to the “Sextette from Lucia.” A Jewish stereotype kicks him in the butt several times, which causes the farmer to go insane, as he dances and sings along with the doggie quartet.

The singing causes him to rise into the air.



Uh, oh. He realises he’s falling to the ground.



After watching the thud to the ground, the dogs resume singing.



They stop and everyone turns to the camera.



Here’s the zoom for two more notes. You’ll notice how the background goes black. You can’t tell with one frame, but these zooming heads always stopped and alternated two drawings, one with wavy lines and one without to animate the vibrato.



After holding the characters, their mouths resume their zoom toward the theatre audience.



John Foster and Mannie Davis get the "by" credit.

Borrowing

Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera weren’t above re-using and borrowing, even before opening their own studio. The Tom and Jerry series went on and on and, after a while, new ideas get harder and harder to find. So Bill and Joe populated the cartoons with an annoying duck. And because of the Oscar win of The Two Mouseketeers (1952), Bill and Joe went to the well two more times with cartoons that had a French Revolution-era setting and morphed Nibbles into an annoying French accented little mouse. They were nominated for an Oscar for Touche, Pussy Cat! (1956), then tried again in Royal Cat Nap (released in 1958).

It wasn’t only this setting that was re-used. There’s a gag that dates back to Puss Gets the Boot (1940), Jerry and Nibbles throw dishes from high up, and Tom catches them every which way to stop them from breaking.



In Royal Cat Nap, Tom runs outside to a nearby hill to deposit the chinaware.



Hey, wait a minute! Isn’t this a Tex Avery gag?

Well, yes. After all, Bill and Joe borrowed Tex’s snickering dog concept (turning it into Muttley) and made his Southern wolf into a dog (Huckleberry Hound). In this short, Jerry spreads Tex tax onto the floor. Tom stifles his noise so he won’t wake up the King, running outside to the hill to scream. This is right out of Tex’s Deputy Droopy and a few other of his cartoons, except Tex and Heck Allen came up with variations to build on the gag.



Remember how Avery and Mike Maltese had Charlie the polar bear play “Brahms’ Lullabye” to put a watchdog to sleep in The Legend of Rockabye Point? Tom pulls the same stunt here with the King.



The animators of this undistinguished short are Ken Muse, Lew Marshall and Carlo Vinci, with backgrounds by Bob Gentle and layouts by Dick Bickenbach. By the time this cartoon was released, they were all working for Hanna and Barbera making Ruff and Reddy for NBC.

The Senator, I Say, The Senator

Fred Allen returned to the airwaves on October 7, 1945 after a year away for health reasons. He changed networks (NBC from CBS), sponsors (Standard Brands from the Texas Co.), and supporting players. Newspaper stories and ads (like the one to the right) mentioned a change in Allen’s Alley, but omitted the most significant change of all.

Listeners were told Parker Fennelly (Titus Moody) and Irving Kaufman (one half of the songwriting team of McGee and McGee) would be replacing Alan Reed (Falstaff Openshaw) and Charlie Cantor (who had left the show before it went off the air and was replaced by Greek dialectician Pat C. Flick as Pablo Itthepitches). There was no mention of the character that would outshine all of them.

Scott Smart had been at the first door in the Alley as Senator Bloat. Smart left the show when it signed off in June 1944. Allen found another politician, one he could hang a “Southern superiority” routine on. That was actor Kenny Delmar, whose Senator Claghorn became an instant hit. Delmar doubled as the show’s announcer and tripled for a while as one of the other singing/songwriting McGees. The pair didn’t last long and Reed returned at the start of 1945.

Claghorn wasn’t altogether an Allen or Delmar invention. He had a different name, and without the Dixie gimmick, on The Alan Young Show. The sponsor, in an incredible display of stupidity, ordered Delmar’s Councillor Cartenbranch taken off the show.

Here are a couple of stories giving some background. This is an unbylined feature piece from the Port Clinton Herald and Republican, Jan. 4, 1946.

The Senator Is Really Announcer Ken Delmar on Fred Allen Program
NEW YORK, N.Y.— Our loudest, most articulate legislator, “Senator Claghorn”, is otherwise known as Ken Delmar, announcer on the Fred Allen show, and although he sounds mighty southern he was born in the land of the bean and the cod.
“That’s Massachusetts, son, that’s Massachusetts."
The "Senator”, called by admiring columnists "that pro-Confederate windbag”, is fast becoming a national figure. His manner of interrupt himself constantly to ejaculate “I say," and then repeating what he said before to drive home his gags, is being copied the country over.

It was Fred Allen who named him "Senator Claghorn" after he heard him talk like that.
Born in Boston, Kenneth Delmar was brought to New York City with his family as an infant. He toured the country as a child-prodigy, vaudeville performer, and did blackface, drama, comedy, anything.
During the depression he abandoned the stage and went into the importing business mostly olives and other foodstuffs, with his step father for a number of years.
But Ken was always the "life of the party” and liked to make people laugh. He broke away from the olive business by opening a dancing school where he met his wife who was the ballet teacher.
Finally a radio audition at a local New York station netted him a $20 a week job. Soon after that he was asked to make a network audition for a commercial show and was so nervous that he couldn’t read the script.
So Ken told jokes in dialect. He even imitated W. C. Fields whom he’d seen in a movie the night before — and that was exactly what the director wanted. Ken got the job and held it for seven years.
Curley-haired, spectacled 33-year-old Ken was first called to Fred Allen’s attention by Minerva Pious (Mrs. Nussbaum) who thought he was so clever that Allen ought to know him. Allen, who knows a good thing when he hears it, caught right on.
He doesn’t even care when "Senator Claghorn” yells at him, "that was a joke son, that was a joke. Don’t let them get by you, son.”

Delmar explains Claghorn’s origin in Marvel Ings’ radio column of The Capital Times of Madison, Wisconsin, March 24, 1946.

A PICTURE STORY of Allen’s Alley appears in the April issue of Pic magazine. It features the newest Alley resident, Senator Claghorn, portrayed by Ken Delmar. There are also sketches of

Minerva Pious, Parker Fennelly, Alan Reed, Fred Allen and Portland Hoffa. The picture story includes interesting quotes from all the characters on, NBC-WIBA’s Fred Allen show.
The bombastic Senator Claghorn may sound more southern than shortnin’ bread, but he was born in Boston 34 years ago. His family came to New York City when he was an infant, and he picked up that repetitious talk from a Texas farmer.
The Texan gave Ken Delmar a lift in his rickety car once when the then undiscovered senator hitch-hiked to California. Hour after hour, the rancher spouted about his ranch: “I’ve got 500 acres, 500 that is, of the best grazing land in the country. I say, son, the best in the country, you understand." Ken never forgot it.
He entered radio in 1936 on a local New York station, the same year that he married Alice Cochran, with whom he opened and closed a dancing school. Prior to that he worked for a short time with his step-father in the importing business. As a child, he played in the D. W. Griffith motion picture, “Orphans of the Storm."
Versatile is a word applied to Delmar, who, in addition to being Claghorn and announcer on the Fred Allen show, is also protagonist for jazz as emcee of the RCA Victor show also heard Sundays over WIBA. He’s also announcer on at least four other important network programs.
The Delmars live in Manhattan and have a son, Kenneth, Jr., age four, who likes to imitate his father.

Delmar was a fine actor, appearing on The Cavalcade of America, The Columbia Workshop and other dramatic shows, but Claghorn was his best-known role. It vaulted him into a starring role (as the Senator) in Eagle-Lion’s “It’s a Joke, Son,” and resulted in Mel Blanc modifying his voice for Foghorn Leghorn (it originally was based on a sheriff that appeared on Blue Monday Jamboree and other West Coast-based radio programmes of the early ‘30s).

Allen apparently felt Claghorn had run his course and gave Delmar a Russian character to make fun of Soviet braggadocio and lack of freedoms. Sergei Stroganoff never caught on with the audience (his name was changed after a $50,000 lawsuit was filed by a real person with the same name) and the Senator continued to appear off and on until Allen went off the air in 1949 (the real Sergei N. Stroganoff was an accountant who died in Cedar Grove, N.J. in 1965).

There was life in the Senator afterward. Delmar appeared as a Claghorn knock-off on Broadway in Texas Li’l Darlin’ and then again as a Texas oil man on the CBS radio quiz show Funny Side Up. Into the 1960s, Delmar gave motivational talks and appeared at sales conferences as the Senator. And there was a re-creation of the Alley with Min Pious, Parker Fennelly and Peter Donald on Les Crane’s Nightlife late night show in 1965, again on PBS in 1972, when Delmar had retired to West Palm Beach, and again on WBZ Boston in 1975 (Delmar’s appearances in the Alley would not have heard on that station as it was a CBS affiliate).

The Senator was a Dixiecrat, but Allen was no partisan political humourist—he had Delmar take cracks at President Truman now and then. These days, jokes involving American politics bring out an extreme nastiness and cruelty in far too many people (especially on “social” media). I’d like to think audiences can still laugh about Senator Glass being “broken up,” Senator Byrd “ravin” and Senator Aiken “back,” spoken by a character so loyal to his part of the country, he only drank from Dixie Cups and refused to wear a Union suit.

Kenny Delmar, who brought the Senator to life, would tell you it was all a joke, son. And he told them very well.

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.