Worstistatsootstuh....

Animated commercials were extremely popular in the 1950s, and cartoon studios popped up in New York, Los Angeles and elsewhere to make them.

Storyboard was one of them. It was set up by animator John Hubley and layout artist Earl Klein.

A number of spots made by the company became famous, including one animated by Art Babbitt for Heinz Worcestershire sauce. It was a commercial about a commercial, where the oh-so-smooth announcer becomes ruffled as he butchers the product’s name. It was clever premise based on the idea people in the U.S. couldn’t pronounce “Worcestershire” properly.



The announcer shoos away the camera. Cut to a photo of a dinner featuring the sauce. Believing he has things under control, the scene cuts back to the animated announcer beckoning the camera. He gets the name right, but holds up the wrong product.



Now he gets the right product, and can’t pronounce the name again.



According to a number of different sources, this spot was made in 1954 and was produced by Stan Freberg for the Maxon agency in Detroit. That is apparently Freberg's voice as the announcer.

Tail Fail

Chilly Willy plots to cut off a watchdog’s tail in I'm Cold, a 1955 short for Walter Lantz.



Something’s wrong.



Chilly tries again.



Something’s wrong again. Chilly reacts.



Director Tex Avery pans over to the dog. “Smart. Brains,” says the laid-back dog, reminiscent of his Southern wolf at MGM. Note the change in the eyes. This scene prepared Don Patterson for limited animation at Hanna Barbera as only the eyes and mouth move. The left arm (which seems a bit detached from the body) is on a separate cell and held during the dialogue.



Ray Abrams and La Verne Harding animated on this short as well. Ray Jacobs is credited with “Set Design” so perhaps he did both layouts and backgrounds. Clarence Wheeler’s sparsely-arranged score, with a piccolo, musical effects and even “Pop Goes the Weasel” played by a jack-in-the-box really works well in this short; a full orchestra like Avery could employ at MGM wouldn’t have been as effective.

Mirror Images

The Mickey Mouse short The Whoopee Party (1932) has a lot of cycle animation dancing, and Uncle Walt manages to fill the screen with the left side being the mirror animation of the right side.

Some examples.



There is also some animation where characters dance in unison.



It’s cool seeing furniture come to life and dancing, but the cartoon’s pretty lame otherwise. There’s no story at all, Pinto Colvig’s constant Goofy laugh gets grating after a while, and the mirror animation strikes me as a cost-saver.

Wilfred Jackson directed this one.

Laird Cregar of the 1960s

The Batman TV show got silly when Victor Buono showed up.

Until then, the villains on the show may have been a little over-the-top, but they were still menaces. The Riddler was crazy and liable to do anything. The Penguin and Joker were a little more calculating. Catwoman slinked around to try to challenge and defeat Batman’s moral turpitude.

But King Tut was just ridiculous.

A university professor gets bumped on the head, believes he’s King Tut and surrounds himself with people who buy that? Yeah, sure.

Still, 10-year-old me liked Victor Buono. At least he seemed to be having fun on the screen, unlike someone like Rudy Vallee, who was just boring.

I knew nothing of Buono’s background. I doubt many 10-year-olds at that time had seen him try to keep up opposite Bette Davis and Joan Crawford.

This feature story is from the Charlotte News of April 24, 1964; pre-Batman of course.

Is Buono Too Good?
Real Sweet Guy
By EMERY WISTER
News Entertainment Writer
Is 300 pound Victor Buono too good for the likes of modern-day movies? He may be. His insistence that filmmakers follow a strict moral code in scenes in which he appears may cost him his career.
"I've lost several good parts because producers couldn't see things my way," says Buono. "And frankly, I expect to lose more."
Buono is the fat fellow who played piano for Bette Davis in "Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?" He won an Academy award nomination for his role and could scarcely have hit the screen with more impact had he jumped into a kettledrum.
Buono didn't win the award, but the nomination helped him sew up the title role in an upcoming tingler called "The Strangler."
NOW WE COME to the meat of the story. The script called for Buono to step into a boudoir and throttle the scantily-clad lady occupant.
"Huh-uh," said Buono. "I won't do it."
"Of course you will," soothed the picture's producer. "what do you think you're in the picture for?"
"I'll do it," said Buono, "but not until she puts on some clothes."
"She can't do that," the producer argued. "This picture is based on a case in Boston and every one of the strangler's victims were nearly nude when killed.
"Well, this one's not going to be," said Buono. "Either she puts on a robe or she doesn't get strangled."
And with that he stalked off the set and retired to his dressing room. Fifteen minutes later came a knock on the door. He could return to the set. He had won his argument. The lady, a blonde named Davey Davison, had put on her robe and was waiting for Buono's firm grip of death.
"They had to give in to me—that time," said Buono later. "I was holding up production and it was costing them money. But I don't think they've forgiven me yet."
VICTOR BUONO, a Shakespearean actor before he turned to the screen. is trying to hold the tide against the onrushing salacious films in Hollywood. In short he is a conscientious objector in the midst of the morality revolution now taking place on the screen.
Pressed by shocking and sometimes distasteful foreign films on one side and innocuous TV shows on the other, Hollywood is squeezing out a brand of entertainment that contains a few elements of both. And Victor Buono, known as Hollywood's practicing Christian, is trying to hold out.
He insists he is not a prude. "I think the proof of that is in 'The Strangler' itself," he said. "I'm still a sex maniac in the picture. But it all depends on how you do a scene like that. There were some things at which I had to draw the line in sheer conscience."
BUONO'S STRUGGLE began shortly after he started work in the picture.
"That argument about the girl in the scanties was nothing to some squabbles we had before production began," he said. "I made them eliminate some scenes from the picture."
By the time the strangling scene came around the picture had been half completed. The producer couldn't afford to argue too much with Buono about it. He put a heavy mark against the big man in a little black book and told him to get on with it.
"I don't think I would have got away with it if it hadn't been for that Academy Award nomination," said Buono. "Aside from the billing and the money it's wonderful what one of those things will do for you.
"But it's no guarantee of success. I've already lost several good parts because the producers couldn't see my way and I expect to lose more.
"With pictures going wild it's a serious situation for me and I don't mind admitting I'm worried about it."

Buono relished villainous roles. He was cast in a pile of them, including one in a 1977 TV series. He talks about it in this interview published August 25th

Buono's heft helps his menace
By Bob Thomas
Associated Press
LOS ANGELES – What is so menacing about fat men? Sidney Greenstreet, Laird Cregar and other bulky males proved to highly effective as film heavies—a term that aptly fitted their profession.
Victor Buono carries on the weighty tradition in today's Hollywood. Ever since "Whatever Happened to Baby Jane" (1963), he has earned a handsome living as menace of more slender leading men and women.
"I don't mind at all," he says airily. "The heavy is usually an interesting character, he moves the story, and his misdeeds teach a lesson. What's more, he usually has the best lines."
The Buono craft will be seen on NBC Television this fall with "Man from Atlantis," a series that may ptacate the public's hunger for sci-fi fantasy, as evidenced by "Star Wars." Handsome Patrick Duffy is found dying on an ocean shore. Navy doctor Belinda J. Montgomery discovers his problem: the poor man is from a water-breathing civilization deep in the sea. She repairs his gills and from then on the series really gets fantastic.

"I'm a semi-regular on the series; you might say an 'irregular," Buono explained in his MGM dressing room. "I appeared in the pilot film as Mr. Schubert, a madman who plays the cello in Schubert quartets between schemes on how to take over the world.
"In one of the plots I try to melt the polar cap with microwaves, the same device you use to make tuna-melts in the kitchen. My main aim is to force Pat to help me in my schemes, since he is a superior critter. So the first 45 minutes of the show I am in the ascendancy; in the last 15 he takes over.
"I always have magnificent plans to take over the world. The only trouble is that I hire certifiable nitwits to carry out my directions."
Buono, 39, seems to be enjoying himself in this amiable nonsense, and why not? Wasn't he King Tut in "Batman"? And Carlos Maria Vincenzo Robespierre Manzeppi, the menace of "Wild Wild West"? Not to mention Bongo Benny in "77 Sunset Strip."
"One of the things I like about 'Man from Atlantis," said the actor, "is that there are no guns, no knives, no gratuitous violence. There is some rough stuff, of course, but not with recognizable weapons.
"I am not anti-gun, but I am anti-handgun. A rifle was invented for shooting long distances in order to acquire food. A handgun was devised to kill human beings at short range."
Victor Buono grew up fat in San Diego.
"I recently came across a photograph of myself at eight, and I was heavy even then," he remarked. "It has never bothered me, though when I got up to 355 pounds a while back, I felt fat for the first time.
"Then I went off to Honolulu for a 'Hawaii Five-O' and in Hawaii you don't feel like eating. I went down to 320 and felt rather uncomfortable. Now I stay at 330." At six feet four he doesn't look that heavy.
The heft helps his menace, he believes, and so does his beard. He wears one that circles his face like an eskimo hood. "Without the beard my face looks like a blue-eyed omelet," he explained. "It's a picture of total innocence. And that's terribly bad in my line of work."

If Buono was interviewed about his experience working on a cult TV show, I haven’t been able to find it. He didn’t have a lot of time to talk about it. Buono was found dead of a heart attack in his home on New Year’s Day 1982. He was 43.

A Title On the Ocean Wave

Hugh Harman and his staff came up with a unique way to open one 1931 Bosko short.

Bosko Shipwrecked! opens with animated lightning and then credits fading in. There’s the sound of wind in the background.



The letters become like descended surf and the setting soon reveals Bosko’s ship being tossed in the ocean.



Bosko, his ship and his mate are tossed around for a good two minutes of barely-gagged action (there’s an all-too-typical butt-pain gag) to the sounds of J.S. Zamecnik’s “Storm Music No. 10.” When Bosko washes up on shore until the lion shows up, the mood drastically shifts and we hear “Happy Little Tune” by Max Rich and Tot Seymour. Listen to a version of it below.

Drunks at MGM

Friz Freleng, by all accounts (mainly his), did not enjoy working on the Captain and the Kids series at MGM. But someone did, judging by one scene in A Day at the Beach (1938).

A barrel of hooch that has somehow found itself on the aforementioned beach rolls into the water during a tug-of-war between the aforementioned Captain and Kids. The contents gurgle into the sea.



Only a few frames after the barrel sinks, drunken fish pop out of the ocean, hiccupping courtesy of Mel Blanc. Here are a few frames.



Down they come.



One last hiccup.



There are some fun scenes of an octopus, tortoise and clams hiccupping upward as the soundtrack plays “How Dry I Am.” The cartoon opens with “By the Sea.”

No animators are credited on the short, just Supervisor Friz.

A Little News From Waukegan

Jack Benny constantly and consistently promoted Waukegan, Illinois as his home town. But by the time he started in radio in 1932, not only had it been years since he lived there, his father had moved to nearby Lake Forest.

This did not stop the local papers from proudly hailing him as one of their own. Jack’s pull was big enough to have one of his movies, Man About Town, premiere in Waukegan.

In many stories, there was just a brief mention of him in connection with radio or movies. Here are a couple of little longer ones, both from 1934 when Jack began broadcasting for General Tire. The News-Sun printed this on May 19.

Jack Benny City’s Contribution To Radio World, Will Star In Picture
Comedian Scheduled To Leave In Two Weeks To Start Film In Hollywood, Cal.
Jack Benny of radio fame, who has helped put Waukegan and Lake county on the map in the radio world, has signed a contract to star in a film for United Artists, according to reports today. Mary Livingston, his wife and radio partner, will go with him and they will continue their Friday evening broadcasts from Los Angeles, it is understood.
Jack is scheduled to leave for the movie city, Hollywood, within two weeks to start on the picture, according to Larry Wolters, writer of movie star gossip.
Benny's father, Mayer Kubelsky, was for years a tailor in Waukegan but now resides in Lake Forest when he is not in Florida. He recently returned from the south nicely tanned and visited the News-Sun office to extend his thanks for the favorable publicity his son has been receiving. It is Jack's success which has made it possible for his father to enjoy life and spend the winter months in Florida.
The radio star is well known locally having played the violin as a boy on the stage of the old Barrison theater here. He was then considered a boy prodigy on the fiddle but he drifted away from playing as he grew older and established himself as one of the leading comedians of the country. The violin gets little attention nowadays.
Benny was in Waukegan only a few months ago and visited friends here, spending a good deal of his time with Julius Sinykin, local clothier, who has known Jack for many years.

The General Tire version of the Benny show debuted on April 6. Don Wilson was Jack’s new announcer, Don Bestor now led the orchestra, with Mary Livingstone and singer Frank Parker holdovers from his series for Chevrolet. The News-Sun of April 25 gave a roundup of reviews.

FINE TRIBUTES TO JACK BENNY
Radio Editors Of Various Newspapers Give Big Hand to Waukegan Star.
Radio editors of American daily newspapers speak their opinions frankly about the important coast-to-coast radio programs that are on the air. If they don't like a program, they say so, very distinctly. If they do like it, they say that, too.
Here are some of the editorial expressions of opinion that appeared in representative American daily newspapers as Jack Benny of Waukegan opened his series for General Tire:
New York Sun: "Jack Benny's salary on that Friday night broadcast is reported to be $4000 a week. We think he's worth it."
New York Evening Post: "Jack opened his new commercial series last night and put on a very funny half hour that won more than its quota of laughs without telling jokes . . . We anticipate substantial amusement to be derived from the Benny-Bestor conversations." Cleveland, Ohio, News: "Don Bester has his band on the Jack Benny program. Don and Jack are old pals having been on the stage together. Bestor’s arrangements are often the fine on the air.”
Newark, N. J. Star-Eagle: "We saw Frank Parker, radio’s romantic and talented tenor, in New York just after he had signed the contract as soloist with Jack Benny's new show and he was as gratified as we were. He likes working with Jack and Mary Livingstone. Don Bestor’s orchestra will be on the new series and the show promises to be a hit."
Columbus, Ohio, Dispatch: "One comedian with whom we can find no fault, possibly because he permits other entertainers to tell his jokes, is Jack Benny."
Akron, Ohio, Beacon Journal: “If I were king of radio, I’d encourage programs as Jack Benny's comedy.
Camden, N. J., Courier: "Good news! There’ll be no uncertainty to whether Jack Benny remains on the air! Benny has just been snapped up by a rubber manufacturer."
Wilmington, Del., Star: “To top off the evening, what could be better than Jack Benny with Mary Livingstone and Don Bestor’s orchestra?”
Pittsburgh, Pa., Post Gazette: "It’s nice to set Jack Benny, Mary Livingstone, Frank Parker and Don Bestor lined up on that new program."
Newark, N. J., Evening News: "Maybe that top rating that Jack Benny got as a radio comedian by radio editors of the country means something, for Jack has just signed a new contract. Jack will have Mrs B.—Mary Livingston— with him as usual, and Frank Parker."

Jack had one special broadcast heard in Waukegan—and elsewhere—in 1934 in lieu of his regular half hour. On June 1, he was part of an hour-long a “Century of Progress Radio Invitation” that originated from the Chicago World’s Fair and was broadcast across the U.S.; KFI aired it beginning at 6:30 p.m.

It began with Bill Hays announcing from Chicago: “Ladies and gentlemen we are going to cut in on our Chicago World’s Fair program for a few minutes to bring you the General Tire comedian, Jack Benny. Jack and Mary did a routine from Hollywood but were supposedly on a train travelling there (Jack had moved the show from New York to shoot Trans-Atlantic Merry-Go-Round). Besides one of Mary’s poems, the show’s unknown highlight was the first appearance with Benny of Frank Nelson. Instead of playing the “Yehhhhs?” man, he portrayed Clark Gable. Jack’s old buddy Benny Baker also appeared a native American selling a Pullman blanket.

You can see from the ad to the right that a few of Benny’s old colleagues also appeared on the broadcast, but from the Fair site in Chicago.

Judging by the Associated Press’ radio listings, if regular programming had taken place that evening, Waukegans would have been able to pick either Jack on the NBC-WEAF (Red) Network, a string symphony orchestra on the NBC-WJZ (Blue) Network and Phil Spitalny’s Ensemble on CBS. Somehow, in Waukegan we don’t think Spitalny would have had a chance, even with Evelyn and her magic violin, and Jack playing his un-magic one.

Ray Goes Krazy

Not being a Disney-phile, I associate Ray Huffine’s name with the Walter Lantz studio, where he took over from Ray Jacobs. His first cartoon was U-113 Hunger Strife (1960), directed by former Disney veteran Jack Hannah (title card to the right) and he continued to work for Lantz until a year before his death. Huffine was in Hannah’s unit with animator Al Coe at Disney and when the studio broke it up, the three ended up at Lantz.

Before Disney, Huffine was employed by Charlie Mintz. He was interviewed by his hometown paper, The Montana Standard, which published this story on February 8, 1934.

Ex-Butte Youth Discloses Secrets of Krazy Kat and His Companions of Screen
How Krazy Kat and that comic strip boy-character, Scrappy, are sent through their capers across a motion picture screen to amuse theater-goers throughout the nation was explained yesterday afternoon by Ray Huffine of Los Angeles, a former Butte youth who made good in the movie capital.
Mr. Huffine, art editor of Butte public high school's annual, The Mountaineer, in 1923, now is manager of the background art department of the Charles B. Mintz Cartoon studio, which distributes Krazy Kat and Scrappy cartoons through Columbia Pictures. With his wife, a California young woman enjoying her first visit to the Treasure state, he has been spending a two-week vacation at the ranch home of his parents, Mr. and Mrs. Walter Huffine, near Bozeman. The two will leave by car this morning on their return to Hollywood.
At his room at the Leggat hotel yesterday the young artist exhibited a number of samples of his work, and explained that his position with the studio was similar to that of the director of the scenic department of the average motion picture plant.

"My three assistants and I prepare the setting or background for the cartoons," he said. "There are from 40 to 50 scenes in a 7-minute, 700-foot cartoon, and it takes about 13 days to complete a set of backgrounds. We put out 13 sets of each cartoons, or about 26 pictures a year."
Guiding Krazy along his adventurous course is not so simple a task as it appears on the screen, Mr. Huffine pointed out. First, the continuity and “gags" are worked out, and then the music is filled in so that the story may be timed and the characters animated to each musical beat.
After this, ''animators," using thin sheets of paper over a strong light, trace out the characters in the extremes of action, such as at the start, high point and finish of a jump. "In-betweeners handle the tedious detail of drawing the thousands of intermediate films, of which as many as 10,000 are necessary in one film.
These characters, in their 10,000 changed position[s], are then photographed over the appropriate backgrounds prepared by Mr. Huffine and his staff. "In pictures where Scrappy appears to be dashing along past a variety of scenery," Mr. Huffine said, "the figure actually is remaining in the same spot and the background, in the form of a long roll or panorama, is moving past instead."

Huffine’s watercolours were exhibited in the Los Angeles area; one October 1937 showing at a bookstore was announced in a newspaper story, with word that he was now employed by Walt Disney. Another in 1942 was for the war effort; it raised money for the Red Cross. A story in the Nov. 1942 edition of Screenland revealed he painted Disney characters on the walls of the girl’s bedroom in Dennis Morgan’s home.

The most interesting story about Huffine appeared on the wire in 1940. I can’t find the original story, but came across this re-write on the woman’s page of the Miami Daily News of Nov. 29, 1940.

Ideas born through necessity are often the most lasting. For instance, here's a story of how a color came into being sent by the United Press. A jar of Mrs. Huffine's boysenberry jam has made history. It all happened like this: Ray Huffine—Mrs. Huffine's husband—was sulking and fuming around his studio room one day. The studio happened to be one of those on the Walt Disney lot in Hollywood. Mr. Huffine is an animator for Disney.
This particular day Huffine was baffled completely in his search for a new and different color. He needed it for a certain layout in the Beethoven "pastoral" scene of Fantasia. Fantasia was then in the making.
So he paced the floor munching all the while at sandwiches from his lunch box, and, occasionally, dips into the jam jar. That was all the inspiration he needed. He smeared a delicate boysenberry wash over the background and results were highly satisfactory. The celluloids shot over the background didn't stick to the jam, either.
And so Mrs. Huffine's boysenberry color takes its place with the herb - root - berry - vegetable tints of the old masters.

Huffine was born in Missouri on October 12, 1905. After graduation, he was a bookkeeper for a glassware company in Butte in 1925, living at the YMCA. Disney evidently paid him well; the 1940 Census shows he had a maid. He took time away from animation during the war, working as a ship builder. If you see the name Charlotte Darling or Charlotte Huffine in animation circles, that was his second wife. They were married in 1959. His first wife, Beulah, ran a ballet studio. He died November 4, 1967.