Earth Calling Bugs Bunny

Bugs Bunny goes into fits after landing on the moon in Haredevil Hare.

Chuck Jones cuts from pose to pose, holding the drawings on screen for different lengths of time. Here are a dozen of them.



Ben Washam, Lloyd Vaughan, Ken Harris and Phil Monroe are the credited animators. There’s some really great colour work on some of the opening backgrounds by Pete Alvarado.

This cartoon is the first to feature the tiny Martian and his dog.

Mike Maltese pulls out the Bugs-switches-dialogue routine in this one (best remembered as “Rabbit Season/Duck Season”) when the rabbit manages to switch “Oh, no, I won’t/Oh, yes, you will.”

Trade magazines of the period will tell you this cartoon was released on this date in 1948. As we’ve mentioned before, if a Warners exchange got a cartoon before the official release date, a theatre could book it and screen it. That’s what happened to this short. A theatre in Atlanta advertised it was showing the cartoon on July 22, 1948.

Starmaker Benny

If you’re a fan of Jack Benny, you probably know his regular cast—Mary Livingstone, Don Wilson, Phil Harris, Rochester and Dennis Day. They weren’t world-famous before joining Jack’s radio show. They were afterward.

Granted, Harris appeared in an Oscar-winning short and had one of many band remote shows on network radio. But his character as a semi-literate party animal came from Benny’s writers. Wilson had been a West Coast radio personality, mainly as a football announcer brought east by NBC. Again, Benny and his writers took the standard characteristic they had given to two previous announcers—a sponsor buttinsky—added a joviality (which seems to have been natural to Wilson) and jokes about his weight to create a whole new Don Wilson.

There were other people who got their fame through Jack, and not necessarily people who were regulars on his show. The entertainment columnist for the North American Newspaper Alliance named a number of them in this Sunday feature article of March 27, 1955. The story about the Harris-Faye show is new to me. Harris and his wife had replaced Cass Daley on The Fitch Bandwagon before, essentially, taking the show to a new sponsor and changing its name.

Comedian Jack Benny Also Develops Stars
By SHEILAH GRAHAM
HOLLYWOOD, (NANA) — Leigh Snowden, a beautiful blonde with a highly provocative walk, had been in Hollywood for six months trying to crash television or motion pictures when she finally landed a walk-on role on a Jack Benny TV program and—boom! She was an overnight success.
With all due respect to Leigh's talent and charms, this parlay from obscurity to Benny to success is an old story. Everyone knows Jack as a great comedian on radio and TV, but few ever think of him as a talent finder and star-maker. But let's look at the record.
To go back to Miss Snowden. This delectable Memphis belle worked in San Francisco as a model before coming to Hollywood to make her big try. She got a couple of video bits, made the rounds of the studios and went through the routine of trying to meet casting directors and win auditions and screen tests. Nothing happened, as is the case with 99 of 100 such girls, even those as beautiful as Leigh.
Then Benny did a TV show originating from the San Diego Naval Base, and he needed a beautiful girl to walk across the stage during the show. Selecting Leigh for the part, he expected a reaction from his sailor audience—but even Benny was surprised at what happened.
Girl Stops Show
Leigh walked across the stage on cue—and stopped the show completely. Ten thousand Navy men whistled, stomped, cheered and shouted until Jack brought her back on and introduced her. The results of her appearance were magical.
All the motion-picture studios became interested. Universal-International signed Leigh to a contract and now a rumor is current in Hollywood that three of the studios have banned her agent because they feel he didn’t give them a fair opportunity to bid for her talents.
The same old Benny magic worked on behalf of Gisele MacKenzie, a very talented singer, musician and actress. Gisele sang on radio for a couple of years in Hollywood after arriving from Canada, but she was just another singer. Then Jack hired her to go on tour with him and wherever they played Gisele was one of the show's high spots. Jack discovered she had a fine talent for comedy as well as singing and he talked his sponsors, Lucky Strike cigarettes, into putting her on their “Hit Parade" TV show.
Gisele did very well, audiences liked her, but there was nothing spectacular about her success. Then Jack brought her out to Hollywood for a guest appearance on a recent TV program and boom! It happened again. Now the whole country is talking about her great talent and the movie studios are after her.
"I might not have talent myself," Benny says, “But I sure can pick ‘em.”
Developed ‘Rochester’
“Rochester,” of course, is the classic example of what happens to those lucky enough to become associated with Jack. As Eddie Anderson he had kicked around show business for years, getting small movie jobs and touring the country with vaudeville units. Then Benny needed an actor to play a Pullman porter for one show and Eddie got the part. Little by little, Jack worked him into the show as his raucous-voiced butler, the famous “Rochester.”
Jack took Frank Parker, a completely unknown singer, and made him famous. When Parker left the show Jack discovered another unknown, Kenny Baker, and made him into a bigger star than Parker. Then Baker left and Jack looked for still another new singer. His wife Mary was responsible for his neat discovery, according to Jack. She heard an audition record made in New York by a young singer named Eugene Patrick McNulty. At the time Jack sent for him McNulty was making a fast $12.50 a week but within a year he was famous as Dennis Day.
The famous Sportsman Quartet was just one of a hundred singing groups around Hollywood when Jack hired them to do a gag singing commercial—the first of what has since become a main feature of the show.
Fred Allen says that “Jack Benny isn’t really cheap—it's just that he's got short arms and carries his money low in his pockets.”
Really Generous
It’s a funny line and a part of the Benny myth, but actually, Jack is one of the most generous men in show business. And he swears his interest in new talent is definitely not because he can get unknowns cheaper than established players. When Phil Harris, for many years his orchestra leader, was going to start his own radio show with his wife, Alice Faye, Jack let Phil keep the whole show package. He not only gave Phil full ownership, but even got NBC to give him the choice network time following right after the Benny program.
When established stars like Claudette Colbert, Barbara Stanwyck and even Marilyn Monroe want to do a TV or radio appearance to perk up their popularity, where do they go? To the Benny show—every time if possible. Even the entrance of such a fine dramatic actor as Ronald Colman into radio and television was caused by Jack. Colman and his wife, Benita Hume, made guest appearances on Jack's radio show and boom! The usual happened.

George Cannata

One of the crimes of the Golden Age of Animation is a decision by someone at Warner Bros. to shear off the original credits of a cartoon when re-releasing it as a Blue Ribbon (this policy was later changed). Unless original prints or title cards turn up, we don’t know who got animation or story credits. A great example is From Hand to Mouse, where a title card turned up and the credited animator is Ray Patin! As far as anyone knows, it’s the only time he was credited at Warners.

On rare occasion, a pre-Blue Ribbon credit is mentioned in a review in a trade publication. To the right, you see Showman’s Trade Review’s look at The Stupid Cupid in its Dec. 30, 1944 edition. It tells us the animator is George Cannata, whose name doesn’t appear on the Blue Ribbon release of Sept. 1, 1951.¹

Cannata was only credited on one other Warners cartoon (that we know of), and that’s The Swooner Crooner, also released in 1944.

If there’s anyone who is puzzle in the Golden Age of Animation, it’s George Cannata. That’s because his son, George Baldwin Cannata, went into animation and publications also refer to HIM as George Cannata, as well as George Cannata, Jr. So which one is which? That’s the puzzling part.

This post may gum up things even more. I can’t guarantee everything here is correct; I suspect others have looked into this and can provide corrections and insight in the comments section. We’re pretty positive we have the right guy through World War Two.

George Henry Cannata was born in Union City, N.J. on July 8, 1908 to Alexander and Margerite Cannata. His father was an insurance salesman. In 1910, George and his mother lived with her parents in Weehauken then, in 1920, the family resided in Cliffside Park, N.J. In 1926, the Cannatas were in Glens Falls, N.Y.; George was working with his father in the local Met Life office.² That’s also the year he got into animation, as he was in town from New York for the Christmas holidays and would be making “a trip to the movie colony in California to do special film work.”³



John Canemaker’s book on Felix the Cat contains the photo above of the staff of the Pat Sullivan studio, circa 1926. Cannata is the little guy way in the back.



This 1928 photo from the roof of the Sullivan studio gives you a better shot of Cannata. He is second from the left, between Rudy Zamora and Hal Walker (Al Eugster and Tom Byrne are to the right).

Cannata was rooming in a place on West 143rd Street in Manhattan in 1930⁴ and working for Max and Dave Fleischer. Shamus Culhane, in his book Talking Animals and Other People, states that when most of the animators left in May 1930, Cannata and others were suddenly promoted to temporary animators and told they would get permanent jobs depending on how well they did on Swing You Sinners. “Even cocky little George Cannata was subdued,” Culhane observed, and went on to say:

George Cannata was a problem both for me and [Bill] Gilmartin, the production manager. Barely five feet tall, he was like so many short men: feisty and defensive. Apparently he had been somewhat neglected as a child. According to George, his mother had been Woodrow Wilson’s secretary, and it seems she had little time for George during his childhood; at least, that was George’s version of his background.
He always wore a hat while working, because newspaper cartoonists did that, and George thought of himself as a very serious cartoonist. He had snappy drawing style and could easily have created a comic strip except for one thing—George was indolent.
Anyone who was late more than once a week received a little printed card from Max. There was a space for comments from Max, and another area for the reason for lateness. One time, Max sent George a card and wrote in his space, “Slipping?” George’s response was, “No, sleeping.”

Cannata got a screen credit on one Fleischer short, the Screen Song I Wonder Who’s Kissing Her Now, copyright 1930 but released in Feb. 1931. He spent the 1930s back and forth between both coasts. Cannata was hired by Walter Lantz and animated the Pooch the Pub cartoons The Athlete (Aug. 1932), The Butcher Boy (Sept. 1932), The Crowd Snores (Oct. 1932), Cats and Dogs (Dec. 1932) and The Merry Dog (Jan. 1933).⁵

Cannata married M. Dorothy Baldwin in Los Angeles on June 25, 1932.⁶ Daughter Dolores was born in California in 1933, but George Jr. was born in New York City after the family returned there by 1935.



The photo above from the Motion Picture Herald of April 11, 1936 shows the newly-expanded staff of Terry-Toons.⁷ Cannata is in the front, second from the left.⁸

When Cannata returned to the West Coast is unclear. His WW2 Draft card registered on Oct. 16, 1940 says he was employed at the Walt Disney studio in Burbank; the Census that year said he had only completed the first grade of high school. He and Dorothy are found on Voters Lists in the Los Angeles area from 1942 to 1950.

Cannata animated Baggage Buster with Goofy (Apr. 18, 1941), then after his stint at Warners worked on cartoons at Famous Studios in New York—Just Curious (Sept. 1944), Gabriel Church Kitten (Dec. 1944) and Magicalulu (Mar. 1945).⁵

Cannata’s name can be found on the credits of the John Sutherland Productions auto-of-the-future film Your Safety First, the studio’s great oil industry-sponsored outer space cartoon Destination Earth, Working Dollars (all 1956) and The Story of Creative Capital (1957, screen credit to the right).

Things start to get a little murky now. Business Screen Magazine of May 15, 1958 reports:

George Cannata has joined Robert Lawrence Productions as Storyman and Creative Designer. He most recently was employed with Ray Patin Productions in Hollywood and prior to that was with TV Spots. He studied art at the Instatuto Allende in Mexico and graduated from the Chouinard Art Institute in California. His paintings have been exhibited on several occasions at the Los Angeles Art Museum.

Is this Cannata or his son, who would be about 22 at this time? The Lawrence operation was based in New York and, as mentioned above, there’s no indication Cannata ever got past the first grade of high school. The New York Cannata was cited in 1959 at the International Advertising Film Festival at Cannes for designing a Lestoil commercial.⁹ He also co-designed a pilot for a half-hour animated kid series for Lawrence called “Toy Box Time” with animation by Grim Natwick, and voices by Sid Raymond and John Astin.¹⁰ I’m not convinced this is Cannata, Sr.

Back Stage of April 6, 1962, reports George Cannata was an employee of the fairly-new Ed Graham Productions in New York. That’s Jr., as the same trade paper about a year later gives the suffix, stating he was now working for Pelican Films.¹¹ Ed Graham produced the Linus the Lionhearted series, where Jr. was a designer. The younger Cannata had got his start at MGM¹² and he and his wife Agnes ended up at Elektra Film Productions in New York,¹³ where he won an award for the famous animated “Talking Stomach” commercial for Alka Seltzer.¹⁴

Meanwhile, George Cannata is credited on the 1967 Spiderman TV cartoons. These were made at Grantray-Lawrence in Los Angeles. As George Jr. was on the East Coast at the time, it seems this was George, Sr. And in 1974, Cannata is called the head of FilmFair’s Animation department. He designed an Eastern Airlines commercial for Gus Jekel’s company using Disney characters.¹⁵ Jr. was still in New York¹⁶ so this, again, is George, Sr. And his name appears on various series at Hanna-Barbera along with other old-timers who had worked on far better things in years past.

George Henry Cannata died in Los Angeles on February 8, 1978. There was no newspaper obituary.

---

1 The US government's Copyright Catalog for that year only lists director Frank Tashlin, musical director Carl Stalling and writer Warren Foster^↩
2 Glens Falls Post-Star, June 28, 1926^↩
3 Glens Falls Post-Star, Dec. 27, 1926^↩
4 1930 U.S. Government Census^↩
5 The Animated Film Encyclopedia, Graham Webb, 2nd ed., McFarland & Company, Inc., 2011^↩
6 New York records show the marriage license was granted in that state>^↩
7 Paul Terry is wearing glasses, front and centre, between animator Jerry Shields and musical director Phil Scheib^↩
8 This is before Van Beuren closed in June that year, so Carlo Vinci, Dan Gordon, Joe Barbera and others from that studio are not in the photo^↩
9 Television Age, May 16, 1960^↩
10 Variety, July 13, 1960^↩
11 Back Stage, March 29, 1963^↩
12 Back Stage, Dec. 8, 1978^↩
13 Back Stage, Sep. 29, 1967^↩
14 Back Stage, Apr. 12, 1968^↩
15 Back Stage, Jan. 11, 1974^↩
16 Back Stage, Dec. 1, 1973^↩

Tony Bennett Conquers the Early 1950s

The name “Robert Q. Lewis” won’t come to mind when you think of someone who created icons in show business.

But you can give him a small amount of credit for the career of one Tony Bennett, one of the great singers of the 20th Century.

Bennett’s career went back long before Lady Gaga and San Francisco. Dorothy Kilgallen wrote a bit about him in her “Voice of Broadway” column on March 24, 1950.

A lad named Tony Bennett is the latest show business Cinderella. A commercial artist from Astoria, he appeared as “Joe Bari” on the Robert Q. Lewis TV show last week, and was seen by Bob Hope, who had a video set in his dressing room at the Paramount [Theatre in New York].
Hope called the studio, invited the young performer to do a couple of songs in his 10 o’clock show that night, and renamed him Tony Bennett when he introduced him to the audience. Tony stopped the show, did five encores, and signed to accompany Bob on his current personal appearance tour—at the rate of $1,500 a week. He is just 22, and seems destined to skyrocket from here on in.

By coincidence, Bennett was the mystery guest on What’s My Line? on Oct. 18, 1964. Dorothy and the rest of the panel didn’t guess him (Robert Q was not on that week).

Things happened pretty quickly for him. By early April 1950, Columbia Records had signed him, and he had been inked to perform in two places on the CBS schedule with Rosemary Clooney—on the 15-minute radio show, Stepping Out, and on TV on the game show Songs For Sale, hosted by Jan Murray. He was replaced on the latter by Richard Hayes. On the former, Variety’s critic decided “Bennett has a slightly metallic tenor, and sings with more vim than style, with too many open tones. But his style is engaging and quite satisfactory for such numbers as ‘I Can’t Give You Anything’ and ‘I Wanna Be Loved.’

This wire service column of Aug. 31, 1950 profiled Bennett to date:

RECORD RENDEZVOUS
By OWEN CALLIN
International News Service Record Critic
HOLLYWOOD, Aug. 31 (INS)—We have had several requests from readers around the country to tell them something about Columbia's new singer, Tony Bennett. Seems as if the new baritone is creating something of a sensation in some quarters so here is what we know about him, lads and lassies:
There isn't much spectacular about Tony's rise. Six years ago when he was a 17-year-old student in commercial art work in New York he decided that singing was to be his life's work. So he began canvassing local night clubs for a chance to audition. Finally one of the owners relented and Tony caught on with his unique style of delivery.
After a round of niteries in New York and New Jersey he joined the armed forces to fight in World War II. He transferred to special services at the end of hostilities and sang with touring GI bands. After he returned to New York he began playing the bigger niteries and was becoming known to radio and TV audiences.
Bob Hope heard him on "The Show Goes On," a TV program starring Robert Q. Lewis, and was so impressed he invited him to be a guest artist on his Paramount Theater show. Scheduled to do two numbers, Tony stopped the show and had to do five. Hope took him on tour and Columbia signed him to a singing contract. . . and there you are, fans.

Following the path of Rudy Vallee and Frank Sinatra (with Johnny Ray and the Beatles to come), the bobby-sox brigade latched onto Bennett. Newsweek referred to it at the end of a feature story in its October 1951 edition.

Now 25, Bennett is getting the full treatment, complete with fan demonstrations reminiscent of the early swooning Sinatra days—to which he responds with enthusiasm, and in the fervor of his delivery sometimes even unknots his tie (see cut). While making personal appearances recently in Brooklyn, he was mobbed by some 2,000 eager female fans, and at his opening at the Paramount last week, the first 500 girls to appear got red roses, presented by Tony himself. And handkerchiefs in his breast pocket now carry the message “Borrowed From Tony Bennett.” If they are going to be consistently swiped, better that they provide a tangible reminder of their owner.

The same month, the Associated Press examined the Bennett phenomenon.

Teen-Agers Have New Crooner In Queens-Born Tony Bennett
By ADELAIDE KERR
NEW YORK, Oct. 13. (AP)—The teen-agers have a new crooner crush—Tony Bennett—who is new in more ways than one.
He came up almost unheralded this year, when his records “Because Of You” and “Cold Cold Heart” made a nation-wide jump to the top of the best-seller list.
Eighteen months ago Tony was singing for $75 a week in a Greenwich Village night club— not even a name to the teenagers who buy 75 per cent of the “pop” records. He had made a phonograph record or two and they sold pretty well—but no stardust settled on him.
Then, in September his records zoomed to the two top spots in the billboard popularity poll. He headlined at the Paramount Theater to the tune of $3500 a week. His personal appearance at a Brooklyn department store brought the bobby soxers out in droves.
What happened?
Not Handsome Anymore
People, whose bread and butter depends on their guessing right on this kind of thing, tell you Tony not only has the voice, but he also has the look. It’s a new look—typical of a new trend in crooners: the hero isn’t handsome any more.
This is not to say that Tony is hard on the eyes. Far from it. He has dark, wavy hair: green eyes, a wide smile and a compact virile body, but he’s no six-foot Adonis. He looks more like the boy next door. He acts that way, too. No fuss. He’s no clotheshorse, either. Some one has to keep a close eye on his clothes. Even when they get him all fixed up, he still just looks like the boy next door.
Not all Tony’s fans are bobby soxers. Boys like him, too—and among the fans who beat their palms when he sang at the Paramount were many with silver in their hair.
When Tony sings, the listener—especially if he is a teen-ager—lets go all the stinging problems that plagued him like mosquitoes and sinks into a rosy cloud. His girl may be mad at his math lesson staring him in the face, his father roaring up the stairs. All these are as nothing. The room is filled with throbbing, pulsating, palpitating rhythms, the voice now swooping to purple pathos, now soaring clear and strong.
Just An Individual
Tony has his own explanation of his rise to success. "I learned In my army days how much people long for love,” he says. “And that’s what I try to give out. That—and the impression that I’m just an individual like them.”
His mother tells you Tony had singing on his mind from the time he was a tyke. Once she took him to hear Al Jolson and On the way home they stopped it her sister’s house. The two women had been chatting awhile, when a loud silence warned them Tony was busy somewhere out of sight. They found him in his aunt’s bedroom, perched in front of the dressing table before an empty powder box, coated with powder from head to foot.

“I’m Al Jolson," he called his mother, and burst into song.
Between that day and this lay a long, hard stony road. Tony was born Anthony Dominick Benedetto, son of Mr. and Mrs. John Benedetto in Long Island City. His father died when he was small and his mother shouldered the job of supporting her three children by working as a dressmaker in a factory. Tony attended the high school of industrial arts In Manhattan with the idea of becoming a commercial artist. But he still loved to sing, and while he was in school, he sang in some small nightclubs.
War Veteran
“I worked also as a press association copy boy,” he says. “All day long I ran around with papers.”
Tony served as GI during World War II, sang in some army camps, made a hit, determined to concentrate on singing and came home to pound the pavements looking for work. For years he made little headway. He sang a number of night clubs, but he was no big shot.
Then Raymond Muscarella, a Brooklyn business man, heard him sing, decided to manage him and got some bookings. Bob Hope heard him by accident, invited him on his Paramount Theater show and took him on tour for six days. Mitch Miller, head of Columbia Records popular record division, asked him to cut a record and guided him in producing more.
The first records made no history. Then, all at once, his popularity began to snowball. Now he is scheduled for appearances in Washington, Miami and Chicago theaters and the night club bookings are piling up. “He’s just different,” says one of his entourage in a puzzled voice. “This guy reads books.”

The soxers and boys grew up, styles in music changed (drastically), but Bennett still had a fan base, and added a new one as younger people discovered his old songs. (He even appeared on SCTV, singing "The Best is Yet To Come"). Despite being a victim of cruel Alzheimer's, he was still able to perform until two years ago. He was 96 when he died. Bob Lewis and Bob Hope picked a pretty good unknown for their spotlights.

The Return of Carlo's Cat

When you have a nice piece of animation that hasn’t been seen in seven years, why not re-use it?

That was the attitude of Mannie Davis at Terrytoons when it came time to make the Heckle and Jeckle cartoon King Tut’s Tomb in 1950. The magpies ended up trapped inside an Egyptian pyramid. Say! That sounds familiar to a cartoon Davis made in 1943 called Somewhere in Egypt starring Gandy Goose and Sourpuss. It contains some of Carlo Vinci’s best animation for Paul Terry involving a dancing girl cat. So Davis decided to haul the drawings out of storage and put them on the screen again.

Drumming cats.


Somewhere in Egypt


King Tut’s Tomb

A mummy turns out to be a dancing girl cat.


Somewhere in Egypt


King Tut’s Tomb

Gandy dances with the cat. Heckle (or Jeckle) dances with the cat. Because the magpie is shorter, Vinci has had to account for that in the cat’s right arm.


Somewhere in Egypt


King Tut's Tomb

The Heckle and Jeckle cartoon borrows a gag and some drawings from the earlier cartoon involving a skeleton fireman and his Egyptian hounds. In both cartoons they bash into our heroes, water from buckets lands on one (with the Terry Splash) while the fireman’s skull lands on top of the other.


Somewhere in Egypt


King Tut's Tomb

A take. Then the skeleton takes back his head.


Somewhere in Egypt


King Tut’s Tomb

Vinci never got screen credit for any of his work at Terrytoons. Nor did any other animator until Terry sold the studio and CBS hired Gene Deitch.

Phil Scheib’s Egyptian dance cue is heard in both cartoons.

TV of Yesterday

Watching cartoons when I was a kid 60-plus years ago, there were things in them you never saw in real life any more. One of them was a candlestick phone. No one had one in the 1960s, but they were in cartoons and old movies.

Here we are in 2023 and there are plenty of things I was used to see in 1963 that young people today have likely never seen in real life. One of them is the dial phone that replaced the candlestick phone.

There are plenty of other examples in the ironically-named T.V. of Tomorrow, released in 1953. The cartoon opens with a gag about TV antennaes. When was the last time you saw a house with one of those?

The TV of tomorrow is apparently still a box, with a black-and-white screen, and knobs in front that a viewer has to walk to the set and turn. If I were a six-year-old today, this would probably confuse me, too.

There’s also a gag about something else that’s obsolete: horizontal control. Sets that weren’t receiving the signal properly would have the picture roll up to the top of the screen. Tex Avery and Heck Allen’s gag here is that the viewer rolls up as well.

The gag keeps going with the annoyed viewer holding onto a hassock so he won’t roll up. It doesn’t work. His eyes roll up instead.



Ray Patterson and Bob Bentley were added to Tex’s usual ‘50s crew of animators: Grant Simmons, Mike Lah and Walt Clinton. Paul Frees is the narrator, except when John Brown shows up in the "two-bit gambler" gag. Backgrounds are by Joe Montell, judging by the dotted flower blooms at 1:31.

Let's Give Jim Backus a Show

Today, you probably know him as Thurston Howell III or Quincy Magoo. But in 1947, before those two characters existed, Jim Backus’ main claim to fame was portraying snooty east coast millionaire Hubert Updyke III on The Alan Young Show on radio.

1947 was also the year Backus stepped out the shadows of being a much-in-demand supporting player and got his own show.

It had happened once before. From June to October 1942, Backus emceed a half-hour on CBS featuring Ambrose the talking horse (as well as singer Mary Small, the Eight Balls of Fire singing group, Jeff Alexander’s orchestra, announcer Frank Gallop and an actor called Art Carney).

This new Sunday night enterprise was on Mutual. That meant a slight problem. Mutual wasn’t a super-rich network with a big, cash-cow station it owned in New York City. It was a conglomeration of individual stations, many of them daytimers or small watters, that exchanged programmes, while shelling out money for news and technical people. Money was tight. A comedy show cost a lot of money. Backus managed to save cash by spinning records between his funny character routines. No orchestra needed. He and his wife wrote it. No writers needed. He did hire a few top stooges—Jerry Hausner and Dink Trout were on the debut show—and very versatile announcer Frank Graham.

The series began sustaining, but the papers reported a sponsor would come on board September 7 (the premiere was August 3). As far as I know, no transcriptions of this programme are on-line. Too bad. There was a funny bit on the opening show, the kind of phoney visual thing I did as a disc jockey decades ago. Backus introduced MGM star Esther Williams, KHJ soundman Art Surrence made the noise of a splash, then Backus thanked Williams for coming.

My favourite radio magazine, Radio Life, profiled the show in its October 5, 1947 edition. The photos came with the article.



Solo for “Hubert”
In Which Alan Young's Pal, "Updyke the Third," Premieres as Star of His Own "Jim Backus Show"
By Judy Maguire
JIM BACKUS, Mutual's head-long new comedian, streaked into the control booth to pick up a script. Absently he shook hands and returned to a muttering perusal of his lines. "Uh . . . very little rehearsing goes into this show, you'll notice," he added on his way out.
During the following few hours of broadcast preparation, Radio Life "noticed" no such thing. Touring the stage with great rubber-heeled strides, slamming himself into chairs, springing up and charging for the microphone, big Backus kept himself hard at it more rigorously than the most Legreeish producer. Reading out LOUD, he went over and over his gags, while background personnel gave its solicited opinions, but suppressed his mad flamboyance to build the program "from scratch" again.
And during most of the turmoil, engineer Bob Glenn and sound man Art Surrence laconically played cards, announcer Frankie Graham went out for a cup of coffee, and producer Stu Garner (a nice quiet chap wearing glasses and a blue sports shirt) sauntered through the uproar lighting a cigarette and murmuring “Yeah. This goes on all week.”
Friends say: “Jim's a pretty gay guy.” Modifying that, we'll add, “and a worrier.” For, although he can't help being funny, has a gift for creating phrases likely to start a jabber-epidemic and can entertain crowds any size, any time, Jim expresses a seething ambition to outdo even himself on his new show. That's a hard drive for anybody, but admittedly the Backus program, which started out quite happily as it was, has continued to build to even greater hysteria through these weeks, with a panic-stricken season stretching ahead.
So Versatile
It's comedy of a rare type. Jim's 1944-originated caricature of “Hubert Updyke III” on the Alan Young show has been called by many the funniest "yock" spot in radio. With equal talent he has bolstered the Don Ameche program as a leering-eyed busboy, the Bob Burns time as a shifty-eyed brother-in-law, and the Bill Goodwin piece as a wild-eyed boss. Now, on his own show, he's everybody put together, and he's moving with unblockable velocity. The Backus running commentary is cozy and at the same time devastating. He has an answer for almost anything. Witness, replies to routine interview questions:
Talent specialty? “Sleeping . . . with or without audience.” Father's occupation? “Bookie for Mexican jumping beans.” Education? “You too can study air conditioning. Hesitation waltz degree.” Favorite book? “The Bobbsey Twins.” You get the idea.
“How long does it take you and Henny to write your show?” someone else wanted to know. (Henny, short for Henrietta, is Jim's actress-sculptress-writer wife, and his co-writer on the program). “Well, lemmee see,” the star reflected, “we plan on two days. But then maybe you sit for nine hours and write nothing but ‘THE JIM BACKUS SHOW.’ Then, of course, there's the Research. You know what I mean — the Ten Thousand Best After-Dinner Jokes of the Year, . . . the Radio, (other comedians) . . . et cetera. You know what I mean.”
Tall, good-looking Henny, one gathers, goes along with all witticisms, script or otherwise, which her exuberant spouse cares to pull. Jim affectionately terms her "The Starving Man's Sylvia Fine." Their marriage, as Jim describes it, was a melodramatic affair:
"We were married on January 14 and 16, 1943, because on Monday the 18th I was to go into the Army. We were married initially in Camden, New Jersey, on the 14th, because my mother wanted a big wedding in Cleveland on the 16th, and we weren't sure we could make it, and in case we couldn't we wanted to be sure we were married before I went into the army on the 18th. Sooo, after all that marrying and dashing around, the Army rejected me on the 18th. Seems I have a vertical stomach (no gag, really) and I have to eat five or six times a day. I wouldn't have known if the Army hadn't told me. Henny got the X-rays as a wedding gift. She says she'll make a lampshade from them some day."
Chatter like this has rightly made Jim recipient of the nomer, “Best Newcomer of the 1946-47 Season”, but actually he has been in radio for over twelve years. He graduated in 1933 from the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and returned to Cleveland stock-theatre work. An attack of appendicitis forced even less-wearing activity, so he accepted radio bits (his first, with "Lum and Abner") to pad out a period of comparative retirement.
He began anouncing [sic] over WTAN, Cleveland, soon after; then moved on to Detroit and New York. From 1936 until his "Hubert Updyke" era, he worked steadily at metropolis radio, appeared with Keenan Wynn in Broadway's "Hitch Your Wagon", and did further theatrical work in "Too Many Heroes". He's been in Hollywood broadcasting since 1946.
Contrasts
At rehearsals, Jim looks distressingly untidy. He's a big man, with the build and features of a truck-driver. His shirt yawns open at the neck, his trousers are baggy and his collar droops with a yanked-around, tired disconsolateness. But by showtime, a good dinner and grooming have achieved remarkable changes, and the star steps forward looking both prepossessing and spiffy.
The half-hour ensuing is lively with yammer and melody. Jim reels off his lickety-split humor and a non-talkative stage mate (Walt Radke) throws on the platters. Announcer Graham acts as foil, and his short, bow-tied, curly-haired appearance gives impression of a jitterbug delightedly going along with gags as though they were hep steps to the Woodchopper's Ball. Also jumping around is sound man Art Surrence, who knocks over a deafening assortment of ladders, dishpans, glassware and gongs during the thirty minutes. Just to keep the party happy, a little man, blackfaced a la Larry Parks, may tear in to make like Al Jolson, should the record choice be “California.” Or anything else can happen.
So far, studio audiences are standing the exercise beautifully . . . all praises from the press have been technicolored . . . and everybody in radio is overjoyed to see Backus make a bang with his first single effort. Briefly, it looks as though this "Solo for Hubert" should be first-rate successful for heap many seasons to come!

“Many seasons to come”? Not this programme. Backus’ show lasted until the end of the following May. It was replaced by It’s a Living, a show that spotlighted unusual professions, on June 6, 1948. But this wasn’t the only show Backus lost. He had a Thursday night show on Mutual called The Jim Backus Talent Hunt. It also ended in May, replaced with a similar programme on June 3 hosted by John Reed King.

However, network radio had just about peaked. Television was growing. Backus went on to co-host a local show on KECA with Dick Wesson, married Joan Davis, and got stranded with Gilligan on a tropic desert isle. That last one blossomed in reruns for many seasons to come.

Cheering Hot Dogs

Multi-character animation cycles take up a portion of Touchdown Mickey (1932); in fact there’s one cycle that director Wilfred Jackson re-uses.

Maybe my favourite one in the short involves a cheering hot dog vendor, with his hot dogs cheering as well. (The vendor is a pig so we can hope these are not pork hot dogs).



There are 19 drawings in the cycle. Some thought has been put into it as the vendor’s movements are animated both on ones and twos, but something moves (puffs of steam, for example) in every drawing.

Here is a slow version.



This speed is a little different than what you’d see in the actual cartoon.



No artists, as usual in a Disney cartoon of this era, are credited.