Please, No More Fleas

Tex Avery’s first flea-on-stage was in Hamateur Night (1939), a fine Warner Bros. short. Avery demonstrates some fine timing as a flea performer drops through a trap door after a lousy act and the emcee (and the audience) waits and waits and waits for it to land.

Years later, Avery gave us The Flea Circus (1954), where he followed his usual method of having as many variations of a gag that he could fit in. In rapid succession, we get flea performance gags, with the insects as little dots on a stage.

In this one, Tex and writer Heck Allen reuse the idea of a flea performer dropping. This one is a dancer, tapping away to “Old Folks at Home/Swanee River” until (s)he falls through a crack in the floorboards.



Unfortunately, Avery’s in way too much of a hurry. There’s a slide whistle, a glass crash sound, the curtains close with a plop and it’s on to the next act. In Hamateur Night, the drop wasn’t the gag. The gag was how long it took the flea to crash-land.

Other gags:



A flea marching band. It marches.That’s the gag.



Flea acrobats that form various shapes. The last one looks like an outline of Red.



A flea sword swallower hiccoughs to complete the act.



A flea pianist falls into a spittoon with a splash.



Then we get to the point of the cartoon—the flea clown (who sounds like Droopy and sings “Clementine” like the future Huck Hound) is brushed off by la femme flea danseuse as being a, well, a clown, after being booed by the audience.

MGM seems to have had an obsession with French-accented characters in the mid-‘50s; Tom and Jerry cartoons feature one, too, all voiced by Francoise Brun-Cottan. She is Fifi the flea in this short. Avery, for reasons known only to him, attempted sappy love stories on occasion, though he tries to end them with an outrageous gag (in this cartoon, one he used in Little Johnny Jet, released in 1953).

Maybe some people find the cartoon charming. I’ll take Hamateur Night, thanks.

Mike Lah, Walt Clinton, Bob Bentley and Grant Simmons provided the animation.

Margie

The 1950s were filled with sitcoms but I never warmed to very many of them, even the ones that remain incredibly popular today.

And it seems some of the stars of the 1950s were left behind there. Bob Cummings never got a series in the ‘60s. Eve Arden did, but her show never reached the heights of Our Miss Brooks. Same with Stu Erwin, reduced to an occasional role on a series that was cancelled after a year.

Then there was Gale Storm.

The woman with the improbable name (it was fake) had two sitcoms in the ‘50s, the second more popular than the first. They ended up in reruns in the next decade, but Storm never attempted a new series.

At the start of 1952, Storm wasn't sitting around. The Hollywood Reporter had stories about the production company she and husband Lee Bonnell operated, and that she had signed with James Schwartz Preoductions for a series of religious films. Finally, on May 20, the Reporter announced she would be co-starring with Charlie Farrell on the summer replacement My Little Margie. The series was quickly assembled as it debuted on June 16. A number of critics complained about the writing and situations of the debut episode, but the show climbed in the ratings and sponsor Philip Morris found a permanent place for it on the schedule.

Storm had settled into the role when the Detroit Free Press printed this feature story on May 24, 1953

'LITTLE MARGIE' RUNS INTO BIG TROUBLES
Gale Finds TV a Stormy Business
BY BETTELOU PETERSON
Free Press Staff Writer
Television can be hard on a girl.
In just over a year of playing "My Little Margie,' Gale Storm has met more hazards than a lady wrestler. She's had her nose broken, suffered a brain concussion and fainted from fright.
The fractured nose occurred when a bit player slammed a door in her face, the concussion was the result of a hit in the back of the head with a camera boom, the faint happened when a huge, balloon exploded in her face.
BUT FOR ALL the bad luck, Gale couldn't be happier than playing Margie. It was just over a year ago that Hal Roach, Jr., producer of the series, showed her the script of the proposed show in which she would play Charles Farrell's daughter. She liked the character of Margie immediately.
In June, 1952, when "Margie" replaced "I Love Lucy" for the summer, the critics landed on it and almost universally condemned it. But Gale said she "had a right feeling about the show."
It turned out she was right. By the end of the summer Margie had moved up to number three in the ratings. The public liked the show so well the sponsor moved it to a new spot on Thursday and started a radio version of the program. This year, Margie, both on radio and TV, will stay on during the summer.
BRIGHT-EYED Gale Storm is a lot like impish Margie off camera. But where Margie can't quite decide on her favorite beau, Gale is a dignified young matron. And where Margie can't quite make-up her mind about a career. Gale always had her eye on acting.
She was born Josephine Owaissa Cottle in Houston. Tex., in 1923 the youngest of three boys and two girls. Her middle name, given to her by a sister, is Indian for bluebird.
In 1939, at 16, she entered a national radio contest, "Gateway to Hollywood." The two winners were to receive movie contracts.
GALE DIDN’T care too much whether she won or not until she saw Lee Bonnell of Indianapolis In the boy's division. She says now, “I just knew he would win, he was so handsome. I wanted to win so I could meet him."
Lee did win, and so did Gale. Both were placed under contract by Universal Studios. In two years, on Gale's 18th birthday, Lee proposed and they were married.
Almost immediately, he was called into service and served four years in the Coast Guard. When he returned to civilian life, he went into the insurance business where he has been very successful.
TODAY THE Bonnells have three sons, Philip, 10, Peter, 7, and Paul, 6. They live in a white stucco ranch style house furnished in early American style. It's located in Sherman Oaks in San Fernando Valley near Los Angeles. Gale was recently elected mayor of Sherman Oaks.
Gale's TV filming and radio show keep her busy, but she leads a busy home life too. She enjoys cooking. (Her favorite dinner is ham, black-eyed peas, mustard greens and cornbread, a reminder of her Texas upbringing.)
ON SUNDAY, SHE teaches Sunday School at her San Fernando Valley church. She started six years ago with a kindergarten class and now teaches juniors.
Weekdays she uses any spare time she has taking singing lessons. Some of her movies were musicals, but she has an eye on opera.
Recently, she sang the lyric soprano role of the maid in Gian-Carlo Menotti's "The Old Maid and the Thief," presented by the Los Angeles Conservatory of Music.
Other times, she indulges in her hobby of oil painting. And it's not unusual to find her on a Saturday afternoon playing softball with her boys.
Gale Is five foot four inches tall, weighs 111 pounds. Her own brownette hair photographed too dark for television, so she is now a strawberry blonde. She'd rather young girls didn't know this because her fan mail shows the girls like to copy Margie's coiffure.

“Liked the character of Margie immediately”? Well, not quite. The passage of years allows one to tell a story that wouldn’t go over well at the time. Storm told the Copley News Service in 1974 that she didn’t like the script for the pilot because she “thought it smacked just a tiny bit of incest.” Producer Hal Roach, Jr. agreed to make some changes.

After her second show ended in 1960, she got out of the business because she “was tired.” Storm ended up performing on stage and raising her kids.

But there were problems, as she admitted in an interview with United Features, published Nov. 25, 1979.

Gale Storm Marks Return To TV After Long Absence
By Marilyn Beck
When Gale Storm showed up on the 20th Century-Fox lot to film the Nov. 3 segment of “Love Boat,” it marked her first TV acting appearance in 19 years. It was also going to mark, her friends assured her, the road to other work. “They said," said Ms Storm, “that I was sure to be asked to guest on ‘Fantasy Island,’ because both series are produced by Aaron Spelling and Leonard Goldberg. Well, I'm still waiting to be asked — and am I ever available!”
Ms. Storm had been the darling of the airwaves in the '50s when she starred first in “My 'Little Margie,” and then “The Gale Storm Show” — filming a total of 269 half-hour films in a period of eight years.
On "The Gale Storm Show,” she portrayed a social director on a luxury liner, and considers it fitting that her return to TV should be aboard the “Love Boat” ship. And, she doesn't consider it at all peculiar that she's had to wait so long to make what she hopes will be her comeback trip.
“I don't blame anyone. People don’t see you working, so they assume you don’t want to work. I’ve been doing a lot of dinner theater engagements around the country, but nothing here in Hollywood. In Hollywood, they pretty much forgot about me.”
She also has spent much of the last five years trying to cure herself of alcoholism — a subject she mentions when she raises a glass of water to her lips, and a few drops fall on her lap. “When I used to drink vodka martinis, I was always telling people I spilled most of them. Of course, I didn't,” she said with a laugh.
What she was, she says, was “a very careful drinker. By that I mean I would never drive if I had been drinking, would never drink at work, because I have always respected my profession too much for that. And, oh, I was always careful never to drink in front of my three grown sons or my teen-age daughter.”
It was when she was alone or with her insurance agent-husband, Lee Bonnell, that Ms. Storm let her pretenses down and began to rely more and more on drink.
“I can't pinpoint any traumatic experience that got me started on alcohol,” she said. “I had absolutely no excuses — I had a wonderful supportive husband, a family who cared for me. And that made me feel worse. I was filled with guilt shame and disgust.”
She recalled that “until about five years ago, I had never been more than a social drinker. In the last five years, I spent time in three hospitals for alcoholic help — with absolutely no results. The feeling of shame and disgust got worse. Then, in January of this year, I went to the Raleigh Hills facility in Oxnard, Calif.”
She was discharged from that alcoholic rehabilitation center on Feb. 6, and “things have been wonderful ever since,” she said. So wonderful that — overcome with a sense of wanting to share her good fortune with others who might be suffering from alcoholism — she volunteered to cut a commercial for Raleigh Hills.
That commercial has been airing since August, and she said with a merry giggle, “It's amazing — the response. People I know said they never had any idea, even my own publicist.
Lauren Tewes plays the social director of ABC's “Love Boat,” and as Ms. Storm pointed out, “Well I was the Lauren Tewes of the '50s.”
Stepping back into the TV scene she left so long ago, Ms Storm. reveals “brought with it quite a few qualms. I didn't expect that it would. I told myself, ‘Certainly someone with your experience isn't going to get butterflies.’ But I did get them! They went away fast, though, because everyone in the cast, in the crew, was so terribly, terribly nice.”
More than anything else, the “Love Boat" guesting reminded her of how nice it was to work somewhere just a short drive from her Tarzana home.
“Out-of-town dinner theater performances have been wonderful experience,” she said. “You settle into a town for seven or eight weeks, and there’s usually a lovely condominium or apartment at your disposal.
“And my husband he's wonderful. He always manages to commute to wherever I'm appearing. But we both agree that it would be lovely.” The smiled ebbed, but her eyes still twinkled with delight as she added, “What has pleased me most, have been the strangers who've approached me to say my message has helped them.”
The 55-year-old actress still makes a weekly trip to Raleigh Hills, “for reinforcement. And because, well, sometimes new patients are so insecure, and it helps them to speak to someone who’s made it. Besides, I feel I owe the Raleigh Hills people so much. They took away my shame — taught me that alcoholism is a disease — one I could overcome.”
She considers it somewhat ironic that it is a commercial on alcoholism that has given her her greatest degree of fame in the last 19 years. After the long span of years since she last starred on TV she said, “I find it hard to believe that people remember me. That maybe someone, well, that anyone would be excited about meeting me.”
Cast Seemed Excited
She did get a kick out of the fact that the "Love Boat” team seemed excited, indeed, about meeting Gale Storm, and that “Lauren Tewes acted as if I were someone special.” If life could be settled, if I could drive to a Hollywood studio every day, if I could have another series, perhaps.”
And if not her own series, then at least some regular work on other performers’ shows.
“I'm ready! I’m willing! Let the town know that I’ve never been more available!” she said.

The Love Boat harboured guest stars who had seen better days, ones whom the elderly viewers may have been surprised were still alive. Storm ended up shooting three episodes, and continued with stage work, and a little bit of television. She went into detail about her boozing in a 1981 autobiography.

Bonnell died of a heart attack in 1986 and Storm re-married two years later in a ceremony covered exclusively by The National Enquirer. In her final two decades, she was more a “do you remember” subject in newspaper columns than anything else. She died in 2009 at the age of 87, with her son telling reporters she had been delighting in receiving mail from fans until the very end. The ‘50s were gone, but My Little Margie was not forgotten.

Gophers, McCabe-Style

The elements were there, but Norm McCabe and his writing staff just couldn’t pull it off.

Art Davis (and, I guess, writer George Hill) invented some heckling gophers in The Goofy Gophers (1947).

Tedd Pierce and Chuck Jones came out with a couple of mice, one a Brooklyn sharpie, the other a dullard, who terrorised a cat in The Aristo Cat (1943).

McCabe tried both concepts a few years earlier in Gopher Goofy (1942).

It has familiar elements from Warner Bros. cartoons—a character happily copying Jerry Colonna saying “Something new has been added!”, a human character with a red nose (a la Elmer Fudd in A Wild Hare and other cartoons), characters talking to the camera (“Keep your shirts on, folks. Us gophers go through this all the time), and Carl Stalling loading up the soundtrack with “42nd Street.”

McCabe and writer Don Christensen also pull a variation on a Maltese gag from The Heckling Hare (1941) where a dog crushes a tomato but thinks he’s killed Bugs Bunny. Here, the farmer thinks he’s crushed one of the gophers.



Here’s the punch line.



I really want to like Norm McCabe’s cartoons. Really I do. But most of them are full of blah characters and weak jokes. None of the characters in this short do anything for me. The farmer is a zero and the gophers don’t have the wit of Hubie. The dummy says, out of nowhere, “I miss Central Park.” What? Why? Lame characters equal lame cartoons.

This was a Looney Tunes cartoon. The series still featured Porky Pig in the opening and closing titles, but Leon Schlesinger had given up any pretense that the LTs were a showcase for the pig. Porky d-dee-uh-doesn’t appear anywhere in this short. It might have been stronger if he had been the farmer and got some decent dialogue.

Izzy Ellis is the credited animator and Dick Thomas remains uncredited as the background artist.

Wheely Birds

Stretch diving exits were a staple at Terrytoons, where a character would jump into the air, chug its feet around then stretch into thinness and zip off frame. Jim Tyer did it. Carlo Vinci did the same thing at Hanna-Barbera.

Here’s an example where from Magpie Madness (1948) where Heckle and Jeckle’s feet develop wheels before diving off-screen. The dog follows.



There’s really nothing all that exciting in this cartoon. Cymbal crashes, drum thumps, Phil Scheib’s up-and-down-the-scale chase music, a lot of sampling of "Listen to the Mockingbird," it’s all here. We miss the Terry Splash.

Tralfaz Sunday Theatre: Charlie's Haunt

By 1958, 55-year-old Edgar Bergen had wound down his radio career and was appearing in night clubs, at paid business engagements and occasionally on television.

He also found time to bring out Charlie McCarthy and Mortimer Snerd for a film project.

This wasn’t a feature for one of the big studios. Charlie’s Haunt was a half-hour film on safety, funded by Bell Telephone and produced by Jerry Fairbanks Productions.

The Library of Congress catalogue summarises it this way: “When off-the-job accidents increase alarmingly in a small town, Charlie McCarthy and his friends haunt people who act carelessly and therefore help to prevent accidents.”

The summer 1959 of the Bell Telephone Magazine reviewed the film this way:

STILL ANOTHER GOOD EXAMPLE of the system-wide interdepartmental approach is the Bell System movie, “Charlie’s Haunt,” in which safety ideas of all departments were coordinated. The picture was produced in 1958. “Charlie’s Haunt” is devoted primarily to promoting off-the-job safety. Included in the cast are Edgar Bergen, Charlie McCarthy, and Don Wilson.
In the picture, men and women employees of the various departments are shown performing their work safely; but away from the job they engage in similar activities with much less regard for safety. As the story unfolds, Edgar and Charlie, in their inimitable way, keep emphasizing the basic theme of “taking safety home.” While it is reasonable to expect that this will be done, the fact that it is not is well illustrated by the much larger number of accidents that occur to employees when they are off the job. . .
“Charlie’s Haunt”. . .this year received Award of Merit certificates from the National Committee on Films for Safety.”

Various publications reveal the film was shown at employee meetings, before community groups and PTAs, in elementary school classrooms, at Boy Scout affairs, and even in a kiddie programme at the Lincoln Theatre in Massillon, Ohio in 1964 (it was billed in one showing with It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World).

Bergen’s face wasn’t the only familiar one. The Los Angeles Citizen-News of August 21, 1957 reported: “Jack Benny’s genial pal Don Wilson has been signed by Producer Jerry Fairbanks to play himself in ‘Charlie’s Haunt,’ a public service film for American Tel and Tel shooting in color. Picture, which stars Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy, is under the direction of Robert Florey.”

Yes, the same Robert Florey who directed Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932), God Is My Co-Pilot (1945) and The Beast With Five Fingers (1946).

There’s a cast list on the credits, but it’s not complete. A pre-Dobie Gillis Sheila Kuehl is easily recognisable in the opening. And Mr. Smedley with the lawnmower (who has no dialogue) toward the end of the picture is character actor Herb Vigran.

Edward Paul, Fairbanks’ resident composer, comes up with a nice tongue-in-cheek score.

This looks to have been dubbed off a VHS tape, so it’s murky, but still watchable.

I still wonder if they came up with the punny title based on “Charlie’s Aunt” then built the film around it, or the other way around.

That's P-A-L-M...

Palm Springs was a getaway for show bizzers, but it was actually more than that for Jack Benny.

He broadcast a number of his radio shows from the resort and, reportedly, when Mary Livingstone got annoyed at the writers showing up at the Benny home to put together a show, they’d drive to Palm Springs to get it done.

The Palm Springs News of January 14, 1942, came up with a story (and a photo which we can’t reprint) about a writing session for the broadcast of January 18th. What’s interesting is nobody knew at the time their work would not air that Sunday. Two days after this story was published, Jack’s co-star in To Be or Not to Be was killed in a plane crash. Benny was so upset about Carole Lombard’s death, he refused to go on the air that weekend. A musical programme with Jack’s musical arranger, Mahlon Merrick, Dennis Day and the Sportsmen Quartet, introduced by Don Wilson was substituted.

Jack Benny's Next Week Show Born In Steam Bath Here
Scripters Sweat Out Gags In Terry Hunt’s; Benny's Show Biggest On Radio; Facts On Show & Benny
Jack Benny’s radio show for this week was born last Monday night in a rock steam bath. The show’s basic plot and gibes on the much-heckled Benny were scribbled down on some steam-soaked notes by script writers Bill Morrow and Eddie Beloin, with assistance from Harry Baldwin, Benny’s secretary.
It all happened in the rock steam bath at Terry Hunt’s health unit here, when the merry lads gathered to cook up some gags. The room temperature was 150 degrees. Wag Morrow, with merely a towel about his manly hairy figure, and perspiring bucketfulls, said somewhat weakly:
Benny Gets It
“We’re in here to get some gags. And also because we always have trouble with the show’s Finnish."
“That’s right,” said Beloin. “We’re cooking three eggs for the show instead of laying them."
One of the lads then said something about Benny always getting them rooms in a hotel WITHOUT a bath and they HAD to come to Terry Hunt’s to get clean. This was all sort of mumbled amid the heat and perpsiration [sic].
Doll & Dollface
Then amid the heat and all they figured what Benny & gang would do next week. Of course, Benny has a lot to do with shaping up the program. Then there is the highly vocal partner in the show, Benny’s wife, Mary Livingstone, a one-time stocking clerk in the May Co., L. A. nee Sadie Marks. A smart asset to the show, Miss Livingstone often depresses her fellow workers by the firmness she exhibits in advancing her convictions.
Benny calls his wife “Doll”; she calls him “Dollface.” They’ve been married since 1927, have a 7-year-old daughter named Joan Naomi.
11 Million Families
Benny today is the biggest voice on radio, omitting Franklin Roosevelt, who’s considered an amateur. Silver haired, with a smooth witty tongue, he has a Crosley rating of something near 42.4. His Jello show audience is estimated at 11 million families. General Foods, who make Jello, spend almost three-quarters of their advertising budget on Benny & Show. For his 35 half-hour shows over N.B.C., Benny this year will take in some $630,000. After he pays for orchestra, gagmen, announcer & cast he’ll have a net of some $350,000. Almost $200,000 of this goes out in taxes. Travelling expense are further deducted.
All Tires Okay
This is Benny's 8th year with Jello, 11th on the air. His real name is Benjamin Kubelsky, which he changed to Ben K. Benny, then to Jack Benny because of confusion with Ben Bernie. As a kid in Waukegan, Ill., Benny fiddled in juvenile orchestras. His parents’ hope wax he would become a concert violinist. He teamed up at 17 with a pianist named Cora Salisbury and plunged into vaudeville. He discovered his gift for ingratiating patter when doing a recruiting show for the Navy, 1917, which he’d joined. Today he has a 15-room French Colonial mansion in Beverly Hills. And despite last week's show, ALL the tires are reportedly on his car.
March Field Show
Besides radio, Benny takes in almost $100,000 for a picture. His last film finished two weeks ago, a United Artists release and Alexander Korda produced is “To Be Or Not To Be.” It's rumored he’ll do another soon for Warner’s. The Jello air show is planning a trip to New York some two weeks now to do a couple of shows and return via the Great Lakes region where they’ll toss in a show or two. The March Field show last week was called a success by the cast, who found the army boys extremely quick getting the gags. Benny said afterwards he regretted he couldn't give more of them for the boys in the camps.

The paper had a couple of other mentions of Benny in the same issue; one columnist admitted he or she backed into Benny’s car at the Racquet Club, where he answered the phone in the steam room. The same columnist mentioned Dennis Day sang “A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody” at a local club—with Dick Foran! (It must have been impromptu).

Benny attended MGM producer Joe Pasternak’s wedding while he was in the city.

The other Palm Springs paper, the Desert Sun, may have published something but the January 1942 issues are not available. The newspaper came up with a different story about the Benny writers, published February 20, 1942.

Benny Writers Go For Horseback Riding on Desert
Enthusiastic horseback riders now are Eddie Beloin and Bill Morrow, writers for the Jack Benny radio program, and their wives, as result of the efforts of Jack Best to interest them in the sport.
Best, local swimming instructor and organizer of the popular C-Circle B Club for youngsters of Cub Scout age, took the Beloins and Morrows on a horseback trip to Andreas Canyon last week and the winter visitors loved it.
Neither Beloin nor Morrow had ridden before. Now they are so enthusiastic about it they have bought Western apparel and are anxious to go on many rides when they return to the village again. Both are interested in the work of the C-Circle B and were sworn in as honorary members with due ceremonies at the meeting last Thursday.

Benny and his various teams of writers got good mileage out of Palm Springs. They dredged up and re-worked their “Murder at the Racquet Club” sketch, featuring early sound era star Charlie Farrell, mayor of the city and owner of the aforementioned club. The Christmas shopping show was set in Palm Springs one year. One episode had the police chief stick it to Jack after a long gag set-up involving Mary bobbling her lines and saying “grass reek” and then there was the time Jack and Rochester tried to hide the fact from Polly the parrot they were going you-know-where, only to have their ruse spoiled by a spell-the-words radio announcer (played by Benny Rubin). The city was more than a holiday haven. It was another element of the humour that kept the Benny show on top on radio for years.

The Life of a Talkartoon

All the talk of A.I. replacing everything and anything isn’t new.

Witness this article in Popular Mechanics of July 1931 after a staff writer toured the Fleischer cartoon studio. Whether this “artificial sound” method was ever used at Fleischer’s, I don’t know, but I certainly don’t recall any cartoons without an actual orchestra providing background music.

Regardless, it gives you an idea about how the Talkartoons were made.



How Artificial Voices Are Given Film Funnies
ALL NATIONS LIKE ROBOTS
8,000 Drawings Required for Seven-Minute Reel.
AN ARMY of unpaid actors dance, sing and cavort in theaters throughout the civilized world every night, performing superhuman feats that bring forth tears and laughter.
Their seven-minute performance costs about $20,000 and weeks at labor on the part of 100 people.
These robot actors have given birth to an industry capitalized at four million dollars, and they boast 100 million followers all over the globe. They are flesh-less actors but nobody denies them life.
In a breathtaking shift of scenes, the hero swings a lariat and lassos a running locomotive; in an auto race he makes Colonel Campbell's roaring "Bluebird" look like a snail; sailing an airship through the sky, he wipes his brow with the moon as a handkerchief, and commandeers Mars to protect him from the sun’s rays; with one stroke, he slays the great dragon, and in the next stroke conquers the vicious octopus.
Animated cartooning is a hand-made industry; every detail of the action must be drawn out laboriously by artists. From 16 to 24 drawings are necessary to complete one action such as the winking of an eye or the throwing of a rope, and from 8,000 to 10,000 drawings are necessary for a seven-minute reel.

But invention has recently come to the aid of art and will soon make the animated cartoon movies more wonderful to behold, more breathtaking and more awe inspiring. A long painstaking search to find a method of creating synthetic sounds on film has recentty been rewarded by a patent to the Fleischer studios, which supplies Paramount with one "talkartoon" each week.
THE method is really a system of "fingerprinting" sounds, whether they be made by voice or by mechanical device. By first making sound tracks of all the letters In the alphabet, then combining these sounds into words, It has been possible to create characteristic patterns for letters, words, musical notes, and other specialised sounds. Synthetic dialog and synthetic music can now he inserted at precise places in a film, so as to carry out the story. The artist with his pen and brush and magnifying glass enters into the scheme. By magnifying the sound track of a given voice, the artist is enabled to reproduce all or any part of it by copying the horizontal lines and shadings. The drawing ran be reduced optically and printed photographically on a film sound track.
So, by dispensing with paid entertainers, costly orchestras, studios and elaborate machinery, the talkartoon producers can economize on overhead.
FOR example, an artist will be able to examine a photographic sound track made by any individual, and create therefrom either dialog or vocal music. In a new series of experiments now under way, the research staff hopes to develop a method of making to order any instrumental or vocal music, in solo or orchestral form. When filmed and sound tracked, the series of drawings would be ready for the projector.
When the moving picture was in its pre-sound days, the whole animated cartoon industry might have been purchased for a mere $250,000. Spectators were inclined to regard such entertainment as a form of moving picture trickery. But with the aid of sound, the handmade movies achieved a huge popularity. They appeal alike to the Chinese coolie and Alaskan Indian. But sound multiplied production costs to the extent where producers were driven to beg aid from inventors. To make the sound record on a film in the usual way involves great labour, time and expense. The orchestra must rehearse painstakingly; special sound experts are employed. Besides, sound records frequently have flaws, and sometimes a voice or dialog may accidently be omitted.



ANOTHER invention designed to make animated cartoons more natural is a machine which combines two kinds of action on a single print. Thus it is possible to film a background of a busy street, using the ordinary camera. If it is desired to show a robot actor making his way through traffic, the machine combines the two films, one showing the moving vehicles and the other the cartoon actor.
The end product is a single film which portrays a mythical character crossing a real street. The separate actions are so well controlled and co-ordinated that movie fans are mystified.
This invention opens a whole new realm for animated moving pictures. The artist is saved all the labor incident to drawing in a moving background, and the producing cost is reduced proportionately. Hence we find film funnies progressing swiftly and offering manifold opportunities for man’s imagination.
The ordinary photographic camera can reveal only the external activities of man. The animated movies attempt to film what goes on inside the brain. In the short career and in the success of this new industry, its backers have suddenly discovered what passionate interest men take in the picturizations of the brain. What thought do we have on entering a graveyard? An animated carloonist thinks that a dance of skeletons would depict the scene in some people's heads, and that is what he draws.
Earthbound men have often thought of flying through the air on feathered wings. The animated cartoonist brings this thought to life and actually shows how a man imagines he would fly if he had the wings of a bird. The troupe of robot actors leap out of a magic lantern after millions of scratches have been made on sheets of paper.
The original drawings are made in pencil. Then the actors move to the inking department where artists design their clothes; every drawing is traced with ink on celluloid. They are colored in various shades of gray, white and black.

In their costumes the actors march to the filming room to be "shot," The camera is suspended over a table. The robot actors, face up, are placed beneath the lens and photographed in their various poses and moods. Frame by frame, the photographer records their pictures. This method of grinding out film is much slower than the ordinary one used by moving-picture lots.
FOUR cameramen turn out only 1,000 feet of animated movies each week. That means each operator can film only five feet per hour. The finished reel is 1,000 feet long, but one-third of this footage is cut out in editing. Hence, the seven-minute reel showing in the theater measures between 600 and 700 feet, costing from $20 to $30 per foot.
The United States is the home of the animated cartoon and at present practically monopolizes production. Windsor McKay [sic], the cartoon, is said to have made the first successful effort at causing handmade pictures to move across a screen, but he never patented the idea, so that now the basic principle is used freely by half a dozen studios whose yearly productions average about 150 reels.
In the synchronization department, the orchestra conductor and his musicians follow the cue sheet and interpret in tunes and dialog what the cartoonist has imagined. Using hundreds of queer contraptions, the “effects men” can simulate the laugh of the moon, the gurgle of a brook, the fall of rain, the noise of a comet, the roar of a locomotive, the dance of a snail and the wheeze of a walrus.
Amng the studio’s domestic hardware, one finds sandpaper, tinfoil, washboards, toy trains, bricks, bats, building blocks, egg beaters and electric fans. The orchestra leader faces a screen across which the robot actors jump, walk and dance. His musicians face him and follow his directions at the precise moment.
The popularity of film funnies is explained by one producer who paraphrases the old Chinese proverb: "A good cartoon is worth a thousand words." At a time when cartoons were "stills" and consisted of only one drawing, the old proverb held good. But now that cartoons are animated and it takes 8,000 of them to complete one film, the producer argues that one reel is worth 8,000,000 words.

A LEADING animated cartoon producer says that the robot is tending to become more and more simple in his makeup. The present trend, he thinks, is toward more imaginative action. The cartoonist aims to give us impressions of the life around him, not illustrations of it. The imaginative picture is impossible any other way.
Movie cartoonists have made capital of the fact that animals have an intense human appeal. Bimbo and Mickey, two famous characters born in inkwells, are now better known than a good many actors in the flesh. A picture of Bimbo would be as readily recognized in China as in the United States.
The role of the artist becomes more and more important as the film funnies achieve greater popularity. In forthcoming productions more artists will be necessary, since no machinery so far invented can make a cartoon character go through his antics.

The Talkartoon series began in 1929 with Noah’s Lark. Betty Boop pretty much took over the series, which ended in 1932 with The Betty Boop Limited. The cartoons are full of imaginative little gags and are generally great fun to watch.

You can read the article here.

Three-in-One Dinosaur

You Van Beuren cartoon fans reading this will know, in the early ‘30s, the studio loved to mush the mouths of singing quartets together to form one mouth.

The studio liked to do the same thing with bodies.

Here’s a good example from the middle of Stone Age Stunts (released Dec. 7, 1930). Three dinosaurs lumber onto the stage of a saloon to engage in a ballet (with a wood block sounding every time their feet hit the floor).



Suddenly, for no reason, they mush into one dinosaur with three heads, which shout “Rah! Rah! Rah!”. The conjoint dino plops down on the ground exclaims “Hey!” to end the performance. Why? Because it’s a Van Beuren cartoon. It doesn’t have to make sense.



The summary from The Motion Picture Herald, which rated this one “Good”:

A considerable amount of originality makes this Aesop Fable highly entertaining, combining modern civilization with cavemen days. The prehistoric mouse and his sweetie are having a gay time in a cabaret located in a skyscraper mountain when it catches fire, and the brave firemen, elephants who spray water through their trunks, save the lovers.

I don’t know how much “originality” there was in the designs of Milton and Rita Mouse.



George Stallings and Eddie Donnelly are the credited animators, with music and dance synchronisations by Gene Rodemich and Jack Ward, who later worked for the Fleischer/Famous studio. The melody over the opening titles is “I Just Roll Along.”

In case you want to travel back to 1936, you could rent this short from the YMCA Motion Picture Bureau, 347 Madison Avenue, New York, for $1.25 a day (in 16 mm.).