He Got It

Is it just me, or does every gag in Bunker Hill Bunny (released 1950) seem familiar?

The cartoon was written by Tedd Pierce, who certainly borrowed one routine from an earlier Bugs Bunny cartoon directed by Friz Freleng.

In this short, Yosemite Sam (who says “Ahoy!” like he did when he was a pirate, except he’s a land-dwelling Hessian in this one) pitches a cannon ball at Bugs.



Two ends of a Bugs “surprise” take.



Bugs rushes back into the fort to emerge with a baseball bat to swat the cannon ball. In Freleng’s cartoons, he always seems to change into appropriate clothing for the gag and does it here.



A typical Freleng take with little realisation lines around the head.



Sam pulls a baseball glove out of nowhere. “I got it! I got it! he yells, going back on the ball.



The gag is on the flag that is raised after the cannonball explodes.



It’s a variation of gag from Baseball Bugs (released 1946). Mike Maltese got the writing credit but I can’t help but think he and Pierce were a team at that point.

Carl Stalling borrows from “Freddy the Freshman” by Cliff Friend and Dave Oppenheim for the background music in this scene.

More NOISE!

The nameless little dog begins his attempts to get Spike to make noise and get thrown out of the bear’s home in Rock-a-bye Bear (MGM, 1952).

Spike is relieved he got rid of a picture of a sexy girl without making libido-induced sounds and goes to sit down. You know how Tex Avery did this in several cartoons. To avoid making noise, a character runs outside into the distance where he lets go, then returns and the next gag follows.

Here are some frames that give you an idea how the first gag went down.

If I had to guess, Mike Lah animated the indoor scene and Grant Simmons was responsible for the outdoor scene. Walt Clinton is the third animator. Johnny Johnsen painted the backgrounds.

Rich Hogan and Heck Allen both get a story credit. Hogan left animation when Avery took time off at MGM to deal with personal things. Allen was re-hired after some time with Walter Lantz (he said Fred Quimby fired him several times so he went hunting for work elsewhere).

Life Begins at 39

Here’s yet another of seemingly-countless biographies of Jack Benny that appeared in feature sections of newspapers over the years. This one comes from the Long Beach Independent of Dec. 11, 1955.

It’s very accurate, though you could quibble on some minor points. The photos accompanied the story.

FOR JACK BENNY
Life Begins at 39
By Terry Vernon
Independent TV-Radio Columnist
THERE IS ONLY one man in show business who is 39 years old yet was born in 1894. He is, of course, Jack Benny. He has been riding on that 39-years-of-age gag for so long that most people have forgotten how many years have gone by since that Feb. 14 in Chicago when Benny Kubelsky was born.
Benny has won every signal honor that entertainment can bestow . . . except one. That one is the golden statuette of "Oscar," symbol of supremacy in the world of motion pictures. This despite the fact that he has done scores of films in Hollywood and also made “The Horn Blows at Midnight." He still hopes to capture an "Oscar" some day one his own merits.
Waukegan, Illinois, is duly, recognized as Jack Benny’s home town, but he actually resided there a comparatively few years. When Benny was 16, he and Cora Salisbury, pianist at the Barrison Theater where Jack worked after school, teamed and went on the road playing vaudeville dates in adjacent towns and cities. Later he teamed with a Chicago pianist, Lyman Woods, and this pair began to gain fame. They toured as far West as Seattle and even played an engagement at the famed London Palladium. But Benny, as such, was still just a fiddle player.
WORLD WAR 1 interrupted his theatrical career, so he made the most of it and joined the Navy. Stationed at Great Lakes Naval Training Station, he took part in the famed Great Lakes Revue to raise money for Navy relief. This was the birthplace of the man who has become a legend in comedy on the vaudeville and Broadway stages, radio, movies and television. It was during one of the productions that Benny tucked his faithful fiddle under hls arm and, began to talk. This unusual procedure wowed the sailors and before long his talk was more important than his fiddling.

“It was actually Ben Bernie who caused me to change my theatrical name,” says Jack. “I used Ben K. Benny as my stage name until Bernie became quite popular. Feeling there was too much similarity and anyway (with a sly look and twinkle of the baby blue eyes) I didn't wish to, you know, make Ben look bad by overshadowing him . . . you know . . . I changed my name to Jack Benny.”
THERE IS LITTLE doubt but that Ben K. Benny, Benny Kubelsky or Jack Benny would have overshadowed anyone regardless of name. He has no peers in his chosen field of comedy and because he keeps his shows flexible insofar as format is concerned, no other comic can copy him for any length of time.
After getting out of the Navy and starting out on his own in the vaudeville theaters he played a little fiddle, told some jokes and acted as emcee for the stage shows in whatever theater he was playing. This work gave him that wonderful sense of timing that no other comic possesses to such a degree. He learned that the spoken word can be important but that the unspoken word oftentimes carries more punch.
He headed for New York and wound up doing musicals for the Schuberts and Earl Carroll. This was his stepping-stone to Hollywood and a movie career that is remembered chiefly for his work in “The Hollywood Revue” for MGM.
BUT IN BETWEEN pictures he had nothing to do except draw a salary and Benny is not noted for inactivity.
This might account for the fact that he wandered around town and met Mary, who was Sadye Marks, salesgirl at The May Co. He and Sadye hit it off and in January 1927 were married in Waukegan at the apartment of an old friend of Jack.
Then back to Broadway and a role in an Earl Carroll musical where he was doing very well. Fact is, he turned down $1,500 per week (big money in those days) in the road show company in order to enter radio. In the early 30s, some may recall, radio was coming into its own. Amos n' Andy were household words and movie houses stopped the film so patrons could hear the latest in the life-story of the two favorites; Stoopnagle and Bud [sic] were big-time comics; Eddie Cantor had taken the plunge and Burns and Allen, Fibber McGee and Molly and many other old vaudeville teams had turned to this new medium.
“If they can do it, I can,” thought Benny, so in early 1932 he agreed to take a guest spot on "The Ed Sullivan Show." He had bumped into columnist Sullivan in a Broadway restaurant and Ed asked him to do the job.
"But I don’t know about radio,” stated Jack.
"Nobody does,” said Ed.

BENNY DECIDED to take the flyer, and that next night walked up to the microphone, and said: "This is Jack Benny talking. Now there will be a brief pause for everyone to say ‘Who cares?’.”
Apparently a lot of people cared when he got through for shortly thereafter he was on the air with a sponsor and began to grow into the biggest comedian the world has ever known. His first bankroller was Canada Dry Ginger Ale but through the years he has been identified with many another sponsor. Probably his most famous sponsor was General Foods and Jack altered his usual opening by saying, “Jell-o again, this is Jack Benny talking" and to this day, twelve years later, many people still believe he is sponsored by Jell-o.
Benny developed his own material for those early shows, worked out the gags and gradually drifted into the format he now uses consistently. It is one that makes him the hapless boob, the man with human frailties who has the same faults shared by many others . . . and also the money lover and penny pincher.
IN ONE OF HIS EARLY shows he had Mary come on as a girl from Plainfield, N. J., who’d read poems and make wise-cracks. This was to be a one-time shot but the public clamored for more and Mary Livingstone became a regular part of his shows.
When Jack gained popularity in radio it was natural that movies would beckon him and he signed a contract. This meant moving his radio show to California so he planned to make the transition on the air. In one of these shows the Benny gang were aboard a train and the Pullman porter was portrayed by Eddie Anderson. This, too, was a one-time only shot but the public so loved “Rochester” that Benny hired him and made him a star in his own right. Don Wilson joined the Benny gang in 1934 as announcer and became so much a part of the show that he has been under contract to Benny ever since.
IN THE YEARS that have passed Benny has started many others out on careers. Frank Parker, who has reappeared on the air with Arthur Godfrey, was one of the first of a series of tenors who were an integral part of the Benny format. Others have been Kenny Baker, Dennis Day, and, while Dennis was in the service, Larry Stevens.
Benny always has music on his shows, and the orchestra leader becomes a part of the act. This technique is now being copied by other comics and most noticeable is John Scott Trotter on the "George Gobel Show.” The men who had led the bands on Benny’s shows include Ted Weems, Frank Black, Don Bestor, Johnny Green, Bob Crosby and probably the most famous, Phil Harris, who had bigger parts in the show than did the others and made more out of his roles.
Looking back through the years Benny still gets the biggest kick out of the “feud” he had with his good friend Fred Allen. There was a time when every set in the nation was tuned to Benny's show one night and then to Allen's to hear the interchanged of insults between the two comics.
The feud started out when Fred Allen did a takeoff on an amateur show. He hired an eight- year-old violinist and the boy played “The Bee." Allen quipped, "Only eight years old and you can play 'The Bee,' why Jack Benny ought to be ashamed of himself."

THE NEXT WEEK Benny came back on his own show to disclose indignantly that he could produce six persons who would verify that he could play "The Bee” at the age of four. This feud gained space in national magazines, front pages of newspapers, and other comics even joined the act.
Back in Hollywood Benny began making movies again and included in this group were such releases as “George Washington Slept Here,” “Buck Benny Rides Again,” “Man About Town,” “To Be or not to Be” and “The Horn Blows at Midnight.”
In 1950 Jack Benny began his career in television. “The Jack Benny Television Show” was seen Saturday, Nov. 11, on KTTV 11 at the time the station was a CBS affiliate. He was a sensation from the start and has handled TV very carefully without jeopardizing his popularity.
Grandfather Benny now lives quietly in Beverly Hills with Mary, and all he has to do is work out his television shows, rehearse, entertain and occasionally play some golf. His adopted daughter, Joan, and her husband come to visit whenever possible and then 39-year-old Jack Benny becomes 61-year-old Grandfather Jack.

Animating the Beatles In Vancouver

A short stroll along Burrard Street south of Davie Street in Vancouver’s West End reveals some fairly newish apartment towers and small shops. A half century earlier, the stroll would come across a different scene. The major film studios had sales offices in one building. There was a radio station where I had been employed four decades ago. And a little further down the street, there was a TV operation to which was attached the city’s animation studio.

If you think of animation in Canada, what comes to mind are several studios in Ontario—Nelvana being a fairly major player at one time; Crawley Films, which produced Videocraft’s Tales of the Wizard of Oz; and Trillium Productions, makers of Rocket Robin Hood, a series which somehow has fans despite its wretchedness. But Vancouver was the home of Canawest Film Productions, one of those (gasp!) runaway operations that accepted subcontracts for entertainment cartoons.

This being Canada Day, and having spent the majority of my life living not too far from the site of Canawest’s studio, I thought I’d post a little bit about it, as I suspect you are familiar with some of the animation turned out there. Several feature articles appeared in the local press over the ‘60s and ‘70s, but I’m only going to select two that outline the opening and closing of the studio.

First, a Canadian Press wire service story from November 5, 1964.

Cartoon Kind to Viewer
By VERN LACEY
VANCOUVER (CP) — Gordon Reid decided last year that the intelligence of the public is being insulted by television commercials.
So the television station manager started producing animated cartoon commercials designed to entertain rather than irritate as they deliver their sales pitch.
His station KVOS-TV (B.C.) Ltd invested $60,000, hired 14 more staff and established Canawest Film Productions. The television station is U.S.-owned and located in Bellingham, Wash., 40 miles south of here while Canawest is classified as a Canadian company located here. KVOS beams for B.C. markets.
Twelve profitable months and dozens of cartoons later, Canawest has customers across Canada and in the U.S. Pacific Northwest.
Mr. Reid says he decided to produce the cartoon commercials after he realized that even he, the station manager, was sick of some commercials.
"They just give the public credit for any intelligence . . . there was no originality.”
On the drawing board at Canawest now is an advertisement for hunting licences on sale at Alberta treasury branch offices.
The scene is a bank with dozens of people scurrying across the floor.
Suddenly a moose gallops past the wickets chased by a hunter.
No one in the bank seems surprised.
Moose and hunter return across the screen and a bank employee casually asks the hunter whether he has a hunting licence.
Hunter and hunted comes to a screeching halt. The hunter buys a licence and away they go again.
The commercial ends with the sound of a shot.
Depending on the time and talent involved, cartoons such as this cost from $2,000 to $8,000.
Production of the cartoons is a full-time job for four cartoonists. One minute of film time requires 1,440 to 2,880 separate drawings, says cartoon production manager Tom Ashdown.
Mr. Ashdown says his men are so good that each can sketch one cartoon character and all four sketches look identical.

You’d think drawing cartoons on model would be a requirement, not a major accomplishment.

Canawest got a real boost the following year. Two years after that, the studio convinced Hanna-Barbera it could get quality animation from Vancouver without relying on all those expensive (read “union”) artists on Cahuenga Boulevard. But almost all booms go bust, and such is what happened to Canawest. The problem had nothing to do with artists or American animation contracts. The blame lies, as it often does, with federal politicians and bureaucrats, protecting a Toronto magazine.

Michael Bennett’s film column in the Province newspaper of June 30, 1977 reported the end was near.

Canawest going, but not forgetting
The credits read like an obituary for some forgotten Hollywood studio interred beneath a shopping plaza somewhere off La Cienaga Boulevard: The Beatles, Abbott and Costello, and Wait Till Your Father Gets Home television cartoons, a syndicated series called The Canadians, the best English-language commercial in the country (1968), an ABC Mystery Movie, Canada's equivalent of an Oscar for a film called Way of Wood that was shot in five languages.
The mourning this time, though, isn't on the passing of Republic Pictures of another age. It's merely a dress rehearsal, because the largest commercial film producer north of Los Angeles and west of Toronto won't be clinically dead until New Year's Eve.
Canawest Films is still warm, winding down the years of bizarre adventure and equally confounding relations with the federal government. With irony peculiar to Canada, the legislation that killed the company was supposed to nurture the kind of work it has been doing since 1961.

As a Canadian subsidiary of KVOS-TV in Bellingham, which in turn is owned by the bottlers of Coca-Cola, Canawest got caught in the hysteria of the Time-Reader's Digest debate—which somehow equated cultural sovereignty with advertising revenue—when the intent of Bill C-58 was merely to help Maclean's newsstand sales.
Unfortunately, KVOS was lumped in with three stations beaming into Toronto from Buffalo (without so much as a dummy corporation registered in Ontario) when the House of Commons committee decided to include border broadcasters in the statute.
When it was passed late last year, despite the reasoned amendments proposed by the Senate banking committee, KVOS income was effectively cut in half because any money spent by its Canadian advertisers would no longer be deductible as a business expense. (Most corporations at roughly a 50-per-cent tax level. In the old days, if a company spent $1 to advertise on KVOS, 50 cents of it would be paid for by taxes, or rather the lack of them. Now the whole dollar comes out of the client's pocket.)
The only way for Channel 12 to stay competitive was to cut expenses—and rates for commercials—and Canawest was an expensive, expendable showpiece of good corporate citizenship. The inequities of the legislation, all too apparent to the people who drafted it, still rankle Dave Mintz, president of KVOS (B. C.) Ltd., who gets tired of defending the obvious.
"In the 10 years between 1965 and 1975, in terms of capital expenditures, payroll tax, personnel expenditures in Canada from KVOS, the film companies and others created by the reinvestment of profits—approximately $75.5 million came back into B. C.,” he says.
"That compares to exactly zero for every other station serving Canada from the other side of the line."
The problem Canawest confronted for 15 years was the sort of creative parochialism associated with government and cities like Toronto: If it doesn't happen there, it doesn't happen.
"We brought $500,000 a year here from the U. S. in industrial films, documentaries and that's all going back to Hollywood," says Mintz.
"We had work in Alberta and Saskatchewan (through Canawest-Master Films in Calgary) and those jobs will go east. What nobody in a position to do anything seemed to realize was that this was our contribution to Canadian-content production, because we couldn't make it like the other television stations."
Whether the honorable members were looking for a more quixotic affirmation of the "national fabric" or a more esoteric motivation, Bill C-58 became perhaps the first law in Canadian history to be proclaimed without change from its original draft.
Canawest has lost money, a lot of it, trying to provide something the country doesn't seem to want. Animation, despite the deficit financing by KVOS of several projects from Hanna-Barbera, remains an American art form, advertising agencies package most of the major commercials for television nowadays, and producers rent cameras, sets and sound stages rather than accumulate an inventory that would cost $750,000 to replace.
“If we were doing this in Toronto or Montreal, we wouldn't own a stick of equipment," says Mintz. "Out here, you have to, and keep people on staff 52 weeks a year."
It makes for high-priced memories—for actors waiting for an audition call from the Playhouse; grips, gaffers, inkers and electricians, who worked on a 30-second spot for B. C. Hydro or filmed the completion of the highway though the Darien Gap or got scared out of Zaire.
Canawest started simply enough: three guys in a cramped studio trying to put the merchandise in the best light. Before long, they were doing slide shows, film strips, and—with some help—live commercials with live performers, filming testimonials to the Alberta Wheat Pool, the Alberta centennial (featuring Burl Ives) and travelogues for Vincent Price and a show called If These Walls Could Talk.
Then there was the Canawest initiation into "the weird, wonderful world of animation" in 1965 when King Features needed The Beatles series in a hurry to go with the T-shirts, lunch buckets and wrist watches. A small group of artists and assistants did seven episodes. England and Australia got the rest.
By 1967, though, Saturday-morning television was more than the Hollywood animators could handle. Hanna-Barbera had gone to the networks in February with 11 ideas, expecting to sell four or five of them. ABC, CBS and NBC bought nine, and all of them had to be ready for the second week in September.
"They remembered The Beatles series and asked us if we could get that crew back together," says Andy Anderson, president of Canawest, "but by that time, they were scattered all over the world.
"We ended up flying people in from Yugoslavia, England, Czechoslovakia and Spain. Good animators are a rare breed."
Anderson hired students right out of art school, housewives bored with the limitations of creative meals, anyone who could draw, paint or mix the inks. Canawest even started an animation training program with Canada Manpower, and for almost a year, classes of 20 or more painted the muscles of Samson, the waves of Moby Dick and the slapstick gestures of Abbott and Costello.
There were 150 people alone working on the Wait Till Your Father Gets Home series. The next year, nothing. The comic-strip panic was over, and by the time the Canawest comptroller figured it all out, the lessons had cost $80,000.
Canadian television, too, was either hit, miss or apathetic, an attitude Mintz had encountered in Ottawa back in 1970 when he suggested KVOS would bankroll the scripts, and even some productions, given some government encouragement. "No thanks," he was informed, "we're not interested."
When Global Television was formed, though, Anderson put the hard sell on a series about the country getting to know itself, called The Canadians.
Look, he told Global, you're back in Toronto and there's this vast, enormous thing called Western Canada, particularly B. C., because you've got to get over those mountains, which form at least a psychological barrier.
Somebody liked the idea and Stanley Burke, the voice from the past of The National, put together a news magazine that visited a pirate on Vancouver Island, a whistle farm where the owner tests the kind of things you hear from boats and trains, and a couple of longhairs who mass-merchandised the artifacts of the Age of Aquarius and had to adjust to uncomfortable wealth.
Global collapsed into bankrupt reorganization shortly afterwards, and by the time Canawest got through with the receivers, The Canadians ended up costing the company $125,000.
"We wanted to use Canadian talent, technicians and labs to produce syndicated programs good enough to at least make their money back," says Anderson, "but the government steadfastly refused to be interested. "Maybe it felt it was being bribed . . . I don't know . . . I've given up reading people's minds."

For locals of a certain age, the idea of Andy Anderson hiring animators is funnier than any of those Hanna-Barbera cartoons they made. Anderson spent his career as a news anchor on KVOS-TV.

Fortunately, the demise of Canawest didn’t end Vancouver’s animation industry. People like Marv Newland, Gord Stanfield and Bob Jaques and Kelly Armstrong brought their own talents to drawing boards and on to screens. But all this is a stroll for another day.

Daffy Duck Take

Here’s a great telescope take by Daffy Duck in Art Davis’ What Makes Daffy Duck (1948). These are consecutive drawings, animated on twos.



Bill Melendez, Basil Davidovich, Emery Hawkins and Don Williams are the credited animators.

Hot Music

Musicians run wild at the end of one of Hugh Harman’s tributes to the black stars of Hollywood in Swing Wedding (1937). Harman made several swing cartoons turning Cab Calloway, Fats Waller, Louis Armstrong and so on into bullfrogs. The vocal imitations are extremely good.

They launch into a version of “Running Wild” that is so hot, the thermometer bursts. In this scene, Harman wipes in the musicians several ways in the background as the mercury rises.



The music is so hot, everyone is driver crazy. Fats and the other caricatures bash and destroy their instruments or each other.



A trumpet player smashes his instrument into a syringe in a rather unfortunate scene.



Louis Armstrong Frog takes in so much air, he floats into the lake and enjoys a rest in the water as the scene fades to end the cartoon.



Only Hugh Harman and Rudy Ising have their names on the screen. No animators or singers are credited. Even Scott Bradley's name is absent, though copyright documentation from the time shows he wrote the opening theme.

Do You Remember Joan?

In 1946, Motion Picture Daily voted her “Radio’s Queen of Comedy” for the fourth year in a row.

Who was it?

It wasn’t Gracie Allen. It wasn’t Penny Singleton (Blondie). It wasn’t even Barbara Jo Allen (Vega Vague).

It was none other than Joan Davis.

Today, if she’s remembered at all, it’s—ironically—for a television series called I Remember Joan. The “I” in this case was Jim Backus. By that time, Backus’ TV-squeeze had been de-crowned as Queen of Comedy by the main squeeze of another titular “I.” This “I” in this case was Desi Arnaz. I think you know who we’re talking about.

The start of the 1946-47 radio season didn’t go all that well for Davis, if reports in Variety are any indication. First, CBS boss Bill Paley rejected a storyline involving an amnesiac Davis only remembering serial numbers from “lucky bucks” (a contest gimmick involving real dollar bills in circulation). Agency Young and Rubicam moaned seven scripts would have to be tossed out.

Then sponsor Lever Brothers felt Davis was costing too much, which may be the reason announcer Harry Von Zell was replaced over the summer with Frank Bingman, competent, but a big step-down from a comic actor like Von Zell (vocalist Andy Russell also left Swantown, the setting for the Swan Soap programme). And a blurb in the trade paper reported in October “Some guy with a cackly laugh parked right under the audience pickup mike at KNX and almost ruined Joan Davis' Coast repeat. He got more and longer laughs than the mike-siders.”

That guy (perhaps it was Eddie Cantor) may have loved Davis, but she has never really done anything for me. Her show has the familiar one-note characters heard elsewhere on radio. Still, Variety liked her season opener. Even cynical critic John Crosby had good things to say about her, but not so much the ridiculously contrived plots of her show, or the unceasingly repetitious commercials. (Some papers in the syndicate did not mention the soap's name; free advertising, you know).

Here’s Crosby’s column from the Herald Tribune syndicate, Nov. 27, 1946.

RADIO IN REVIEW
By John Crosby
The Plot Thickens
The rules and regulations for female radio comics are now fairly well established and more or less undeviating. The radio comedienne must be brassy voiced, energetic, full of unpredictable enthusiasms and mildly sex-starved, though not enough to get into difficulties with the censors. Joan Davis (CBS 8:30 p. m. Mondays) does not violate these precepts to any great extent but is possibly a little better at it than her contemporaries.
The Joan Davis show is situation and, in a sketchy way, character comedy of a sort that will remind you strongly of Mack Sennett. Most of the characters might have walked right out of the Sennett comedies. Also, there are a lot of policemen around and Miss Davis usually gets mixed up with them. Surrounding Miss Davis, whose outlines you must recognize, are her Cousin Cornelia [played by Verna Felton], an irascible, dictatorial lady who thinks Joan is a nincompoop and says so; Cousin Selenus (I think that's how it's spelled), who is a nincompoop; a rich girl called Barbara Willoughby, who is a sort of female Hubert Updike 3rd; a man who never finishes a sentence; and Wally, Joan's boy friend.
I mention all these people because I'd like to make a synopsis of a Joan Davis plot, all of which are as thick as molasses and almost as wildly improbable as some of Shakespeare's comedies. On a recent program, for instance, Miss Davis, who runs a restaurant on this show, gets into an argument with Cousin Cornelia and later blurts out something about an accusation that “cut Cousin Cornelia like a knife.” Somehow this is construed as meaning she has cut Cousin Cornelia with a knife. Just about this time, Cousin Cornelia goes back to mother or anyway goes someplace else. Then—now follow along closely here—Miss Davis buries some old bones from her restaurant kitchen in her backyard. Well, sir, just about this time Wally decides to go fishing and while digging for worms, he comes upon the bones.
Now pay attention, it starts to get complicated here. Miss Davis has been having some sort of mental disorder and has called in a psychiatrist, who diagnoses it as Cousin Cornelia trouble. He teaches her to say, "Cousin Cornelia is no more,” as mental therapy. Then Wally (are you still listening?) comes in and hears this curious sentence and you can imagine the reaction of a man who has just dug up all those bones. Murder!
Stick around, this is just beginning. A casual acquaintance drops in and leaves his gorilla skull with Joan. (I don’t know where he got it either; just something kicking around the house.) Well, Joan puts it in the hall closet where she keeps all her skulls and there Wally comes on it. “Yow!” he howls, “Cousin Cornelia! I’d recognize that face anywhere."
So he buries the skull to protect his beloved, but a dog digs it up and then Miss Willoughby, a snob about homicide, calls the police. Miss Davis is charged with murder but Cousin Cornelia shows up in the nick of time to fix everything until next week, same time, same station. As you'll notice, there is almost as much plot as “Gone With the Wind,” all in half an hour. Another plot in my Joan Davis collection revolved around a Cadillac she won in a limerick contest. The license plates were inadvertently placed upside down which made it a hot car. Again she landed in the hoosegow, and that's enough about plots for now.
* * *
Miss Davis performs these shenanigans with humor and a certain amount of style. She is a sort of female Bert Lahr without that great man's zest for the ridiculous. Her special knack is vast and startling range of emotions. She can jump from rage to tears to glee all in one sentence. If the material us a little ridiculous, the blame is not entirely hers.
Incidentally, Miss Davis is sponsored by Swan Soap, which is one of the marvels of the age. This soap has so many virtues that one announcer can't handle all of them. He is assisted by a Greek chorus of housewives. It goes something like this:
ANNOUNCER: There is a difference between an ordinary fiddle and a fine handmade violin. Yes, there is a difference in soaps, too. As one housewife says . . .
FIRST HOUSEWIFE: Swan is an utterly different soap.
ANNOUNCER: Yes, Swan is an utterly different soap.
SECOND HOUSEWIFE: My face feels so fresh, so bright, so young after using Swan.
THIRD HOUSEWIFE: My face feels so different when I use Swan.
FOURTH HOUSEWIFE: I can always be sure of this—Swan agrees with my skin.
FIRST HOUSEWIFE: Swan is an utterly different soap.
ANNOUNCER: Yes, friends, Swan is an utterly different soap. No other soap can give you all these advantages. Yes, it rinses away so thoroughly. And it lasts longer, too, because it doesn't leave excess soap dish goo. Yes, friends, Swan has everything, or almost everything. The only claim they don't make is that it’ll get the dirt off.

As for Crosby’s columns during the rest of the week, Tuesday the 26th looked at a Mutual show called “Broadway Looks Back.” Another Mutual programme grabbed his attention on Friday the 29th. Newsman Gabriel Heatter’s claim to fame is the phrase “Ah! There’s good news tonight.” Mutual seems to have spun that into a feature news programme with Heatter dispensing happy or touching stories. On Thursday, the 28th, Crosby relates an unusual broadcast about a humanised sound effect on a dramatic anthology series on ABC’s “World Security Workshop.” Ray Bradbury was one of the writers. You can listen to one episode here and learn more about this interesting series.

Kathy Fuller-Seeley suggested to me a few years ago it would be nice if Crosby's early columns were available someplace. We have transcribed or screen-shot them from the New York Herald Tribune on this blog from Day 1 to November 30, 1946, with the exception of sound effect column below, which comes from an Ottawa newspaper as the Herald Tribune for that date is missing pages on-line. They are on the John Crosby link to the right. And you can click on the three below to read them.