In 1921, Aesop Said...

Jay Ward and Bill Scott’s “Fractured Fairy Tales” and their cousin Aesop’s Fables are still great fun to watch, but the idea for the segment really wasn’t that original.

Back in the silent cartoon days, fairy tales were spoofed in Pathé’s “Aesop’s Fables” series under the direction of none other than Paul Terry.

Terry doesn’t get a lot of love these days. He spent as little as possible to make repetitive cartoons, too many with characters only die-hard fans would remember. He restricted Paul Scheib’s music scoring. He got rid of the great Bill Tytla to save money and waited out employees during an ultimately failed strike in the late ‘40s. He never gave animators or actors a screen credit. He promised Manny Davis and other long-time employees a share of the money when he cashed out. They didn’t get a penny when CBS bought the Terrytoons studio.

Yet it was a different story in the 1920s. It’s a familiar quote that Walt Disney aspired to make cartoons as good as Terry’s Aesop Fables.

The trade papers anxiously awaited Terry’s newest endeavour. Motion Picture World of June 4, 1921, gave a plug. There appears to be some Pathé butt kissing here. How could the writer call the Fables “realistic” with a straight face?

Aesop’s Fables for Release in Animated Form Beginning June 19
At last the rich mines of picture material contained in Aesop's Fables have been suitably developed for popular screen use. This interesting information comes from Pathe Exchange announcing an arrangement with Fables Pictures, Inc., for the weekly release, beginning June 19, of a series of "Aesop's Fables Modernized," in the form of animated cartoons by Paul Terry.
The first Pathe release will be Cartoonist Terry's up-to-date adaptation of the fable of "The Goose That Laid the Golden Egg," which has an honored place in the popular literature of every civilized race and country. It will be followed at weekly intervals by other equally familiar Aesop subjects. The Pathe release schedule shows "The Goose That Laid the Golden Egg" followed successively by "Mice in Council," "The Rooster and the Eagle," "Ants and the Grasshopper" and "Cats at Law.”
It is reported that when the Pathe Exchange authorities viewed the first half dozen or more of these "Aesop's Fables Modernized" they were of one mind with Fables Pictures, Inc., regarding their intrinsic screen merit and popular appeal. Many exhibitors and picture patrons will remember Paul Terry as the cartoonist of the "Farmer Alfalfa" series, which won speedy accceptance a few years ago; also the "Terry Burlesques," animated cartoon travesties of popular screen features.
Those who have been present at projections of Paul Terry's Aesop adaptations appear to agree, it is said, that they are superior to anything of the kind heretofore produced. The comic action of the animal and bird characters is said to be so realistic as to cause the beholder to forget that it is all obtained by the animated cartoon process; moreover, that the modern exceedingly laughable dramatization in pictures and the force of the moral are just as "Aesopian" as in the immortal originals.
The obvious vast advantage of the screen utilization of material so universally familiar, and so highly relished, as the fables of Aesop has been the motive for many attempts to make it effective. Usually they have failed, it is said, through inability to seize the comic spirit inherent — though seldom emphasized — in these ancient classics in which human conflicts are illuminated in the words and actions of familiar animals. In other instances an attempt at modernization has not been accompanied by sufficient creative invention to make the screen fable-drama complete. The use of mechanical animal figures — since there is no "school of acting" of proved efficiency in the case of ducks, geese, donkeys, roosters, wolves and other inhabitants of barnyard and forest — has seemed to be unsatisfactory. So it has remained for Fables Pictures, Inc., to present Cartoonist Paul Terry's solution of the problem — for distribution by Pathe.

The publication, a week later, reported the cartoons had been booked throughout the Keith circuit, arguably the largest theatre chain in the U.S. at the time, as it operated (with the Orpheum) a huge number of vaudeville houses.

The first of Terry’s Fables was a success, judging by this review in Exhibitors Herald of July 9, 1921.

AESOP'S FABLES
(PATHE)
Paul Terry, the cartoonist, has awakened new interest in the ancient Greek classics, by his clever animation of the Aesop's fables. The first to be shown in Chicago was "The Goose that Laid the Golden Egg," and if succeeding pictures of this series are as funny as the first, their success is assured.
At the new Adams theatre, where this one was shown, it met with hearty approval. Terry has taken the familiar story of the farmer and his greedy wife and with a few deftly written titles, and his "gimme" cat, made as delightful a one-reel subject as has flashed across the screen in some time. The animation is good, the photography excellent, and he gets a laugh without striving for it in every' scene. Let us have more of these unique cartoons.

Moving Picture World, reviewing The Ants and the Grasshopper in its July 21, 1921 edition, declared “Paul Terry has done some excellent work in this fable,” and proclaimed the cartoon “just as amusing and instructive as the three earlier members of this series.”

“More of these unique cartoons,” theatres got. Through the 1920s, Terry pumped out one a week, 52 cartoons a year. But that would soon have to change. Nowhere in these stories is there any mention of the man who had the money behind the Fables studio—Amedee Van Beuren. Sound arrived in earnest in 1928 and Van Beuren wanted to add it to the Fables cartoons. Terry didn’t. Terry soon found himself out of work.

Van Beuren carried on with the no-longer-noiseless Fables under the banner of Van Beuren Productions. Terry set up his own studio—by now, he had no choice but to include a soundtrack—first with partners and then on his own, releasing his cartoons through Educational Pictures, which was swallowed up by 20th Century Fox. Fox exchanges continued to send Terrytoons to theatres well into the age of television.

Terry died in 1971. His Fables will live on, if a fund-raising campaign is a success. They won’t be altogether silent; musician Charlie Judkins will provide his usual well-thought-out piano accompaniment to these pictures. You can find out more about the project at this site.

Botox Boy

The American Humane Association may have loved it, but Columbia’s A Boy, a Gun and Birds still has that weird factor that a lot of Screen Gems cartoons couldn’t shake.

The studio already had Scrappy, but I guess they decided he should be restricted to black-and-white shorts and not the higher-budget Color Rhapsodies, so a new boy character was invented.

It’s bad enough Sparky’s nose looks like a pig snout but, in what’s supposed to be a touching scene of remorse and sorrow, he has a 1940 version of botoxed lips. They form creepy shapes as he jerks his head around during his monologue to the bird he’s shot. Some of the drawings are held for seven frames, some for only one frame.



This short was another example of “We can make cartoons as good as Walt Disney.” The screen is full of flying birds for the sake of flying birds because, well, Disney would have lots of them, too. There are shadows (Chuck Jones loved those in his Disney period). There’s even a Disney-like fly-in-formation-under-the-crotch joke.

Note some insight into the origin of this short in the comment section.

Other than the Humane people, trade paper reviewers thought the short was fair at best.

Ben Harrison directed the short with Manny Gould getting an animation credit. Joe De Nat found plenty of public domain music to put in his score. The short was copyright December 18, 1939, but released on January 12, 1940 and turned into a Columbia Favorite re-release on November 26, 1953.

Doggone Explosion

The scenes in Doggone Tired (1949) alternate between light and dark, so director Tex Avery has to employ a subtle use of colour.

At the end of the cartoon, Avery reprises a gag—an explosion when Speedy the dog blows out a candle (the first time, it was actually a stick of dynamite. This time, it’s an actual candle).



It’s tough to tell looking at stills, but in these five consecutive frames, Avery goes back to a night-time blue. You can see it if you look at the dog’s hands. (On the screen, five frames whip by in less than a third of a second).



Bobe Cannon, Walt Clinton, Grant Simmons and Mike Lah are the credited animators, while Louis Schmitt designed the character. Rich Hogan and Jack Cosgriff sat in on gag sessions with Avery.

The Show For People Slightly Weak in the Head

Critics hated Gilligan’s Island.

Don’t take my word for it. Read just about any newspaper column in 1965 about the show. They all pointed out critics hated the show.

I’ve tried to find even one columnist who didn’t. I have kind of succeeded. Donald Freeman of the Copley News Service admitted he watched the show, even though he found little good in it.

He wrote two columns about Gilligan in 1965, plus one after interviewing with Natalie Schaffer. We’ll bring you the first two.

This one appeared in papers around March 21, 1965.

Ridiculous, But Nevertheless Still Tops
By DONALD FREEMAN
Copley News Service
ACCORDING TO the latest Nielsen ratings, a CBS comedy show called "Gilligan's Island” now roosts in third position, tied with “The Fugitive,” giving it status therefore as one of the undeniable hits. How do you explain It? How do you explain hula hoops?
“Gilligan’s Island,” to put it another way, is this year's “Beverly Hillbillies," the comparison being apt all down the line.
Like its predecessor, this slice of nonsense fixes a group of ridiculous people in a ridiculous situation wherein they perform ridiculous antics. And next to “Gilligan’s Island," let me add that “Beverly Hillbillies” shapes up as advanced Noel Coward.
They share something else, these two epics—both “Hillbillies” and “Gilligan's Island” come on with a theme song that eloquently, step by step, states the premise of the series in its lyrics. They do this, you see, because our power of retention—yours and mine—is so severely limited. Or possibly—this is the more plausible theory—because the premise of “Gilligan’s Island” is so easily forgotten.
AS THE SONG explains, these weirdly assorted people set out on a cruise and a storm sets them instead on an uncharted island named for one Gilligan, the captain’s mate played with endearing idiocy by Bob Denver.
Playing Hardy to Denver’s Laurel is Alan Hale Jr. as the captain. Laurel and Hardy imitations are big this year, with Jim Nabors and Frank Sutton doing just that each week in “Gomer Pyle”—and that is meant as a compliment. In attempting to analyze “Gilligan’s Island,” I find myself wrestling first with my notes, which are largely incomprehensible—
“Count number of times Hale bumps into Denver is one message I seem to have jotted down here.
“Gilligan’s Island," clearly, is two-reeler silent comedy with dialogue as well as a kind of witless version of the Marx Brothers (never confuse mere motion with action, Hemingway once advised. This show has plenty of motion). THE NONSENSE that transpires on “Goilligan’s Island” may stir up some laughter If you are a child or unsober or slightly weak in the head.
Having thus caviled, I will now confess that I have occasionally laughed at “Gilligan’s Island” because I am slightly weak in the head—that is what television does.
Laughing at “Gilligan’s Island” is a secret, solitary, vaguely shameful vice on a level with handicapping the thoroughbreds behind a volume of Toynbee. If you were applying for a job, it is unlikely that under Hobbies you would list "secret laughing at ‘Gilligan’s Island’.”
Mostly I laugh at Jim Backus who wanders about the island as though it were his digs on Long Island Sound, doing a reprise of his old radio character, Hubert Updyke, the richest man in the world.

One person who strikes me as a man who never met an interviewer he didn’t like was the mastermind behind Gilligan’s Island, Sherwood Schwartz. He was 94 when he died in 2011, and always praised his creation. This story appeared in papers around July 24, 1965.

Sherwood Schwartz: Man Behind A Successful Myth
By DONALD FREEMAN
Copley News Service
SOMEONE suggested recently that the real star of “Gilligan’s Island,” that crazy mixed-up comedy, was one of the tallest leprechauns who ever punched a typewriter. a producer-writer with the liltingly mellifluous name of Sherwood Schwartz.
But Mr. Schwartz, a man of startling plasticity whose expression can change in a twinkling from that of a genial professor to a disbarred lawyer, sidesteps the compliment.
"No, it's the idea that’s the star of our show,” said Mr. Schwartz the other day, sitting in shirt-sleeved splendor in the cubicle that serves as his office at CBS Studio Center. "The idea, the concept—a deserted island suddenly inhabited by seven diverse types. That’s the star.”
Mr. Schwartz goes back 25 years in the comedy business, having started out as a writer on the Bob Hope Show in radio. Most recently he was on Red Skelton's staff. He has, you would say, a general idea of what makes people laugh. A touch of truth helps, he points out.
"All right, take the first show of the coming season,” Mr. Schwartz said. "It's called ‘Smile, You're On Mars Camera.' Crazy Idea? Yes, but timely. The camera has a soft landing on Gilligan's Island—but the scientists believe it landed on Mars. Enter the sub plot—Gilligan is gathering feathers. Who knows why? But Gilligan is gathering feathers and soon everybody is wearing feathers, a sight the camera faithfully records.
"NOW THEN,” Mr. Schwartz continued, rubbing his hands with glee, "sitting in their labs the scientists see all these crazy people in feathers.
"Ah, they all say exultantly, so that's what life is like on Mars. Wild, yes?”
Wild, yes.
I mentioned the critics and the reactions to "Gilligan's Island" and Mr. Schwartz shrugged. "Well, the critics didn’t enjoy the show when we first came out," Schwartz noted. "But there's more public than there are critics. Next year the Intellectual critics will probably take another look at ‘Gilligan’s Island’ and then they'll write learned treatises on our 'social satire on many levels.'
"Maybe the professors will look for deeper satire. All I want is for everybody to have a little fun and not get gray-headed. The first time I explained my idea of the island and the people to a bunch of agency executives I happened—just happened, mind you—to use the word 'microcosm,' a world in miniature, which is what 'Gilligan's Island’ is.
"There was a hasty shuffling of seats and a tentative clearing of executive throats. A MICROCOSM? ‘Mmmmm,’ said one. ‘Isn’t that too lofty?’ To think that somebody once considered ‘Gilligan’s Island’ too ‘lofty!’” I asked Mr Schwartz if he had acquired his idea from "Robinson Crusoe.”
“Once the idea of the island occurred to me,” Schwartz said, "I recognized the universality of the concept. And then I did some research into ‘Robinson Crusoe.’ I learned it's been translated into 63 languages and that it’s the 16th top selling book of all time.
"EVERYBODY has said to themselves, ‘What would I do If I were left on a deserted island?’ I've said it myself. Not lately . . . but I have said it "Now the question arises, when someone like Wrong-Way Feldman lands on Gilligan's Island, why doesn't he return from civilization later with a rescue party? Good point, except that Wrong-Way Feldman, as you'll recall, is not internationally known for his sense of direction.”
What is the source, the wellspring of the popularity that “Gilligan’s Island" has enjoyed?
"We appeal to everyone,” said Mr Schwartz. “The kids love Bob Denver as Gilligan. Jim Backus and Natalie Schafer hit the sophisticates. Tina Louise and Dawn Wells are girls.
"A touch of reality, however, is very important. When the scientist on the island uses sea water, copper pennies, coconuts and bobby pins to recharge a battery, kids went to their science teachers. ‘Does that work?’ they asked. ‘Sure,’ the teachers said.
“Comedy,” said Mr. Schwartz, "fortified by truth.”

Gilligan’s Island was silly. Critics didn’t like silly. They wanted clever. But, sometimes, people want silly. And the characters were likable.

The internet tells me, right now, you can pay just under $3 to watch the Skipper hit Gilligan with his hat. Paying good money to watch something you may have seen for free 60 years ago? Sherwood Schwartz would be laughing at that.

Your Beatin' Heart

Tom’s captured Jerry in Kitty Foiled (1947). Let’s bring in the heart-pounding joke, says Joe Barbera.



Jerry tries to shove the heart back to where it should be.



Barbera uses the joke later in the cartoon with a bird helping Jerry. We get a butt version.



And speaking of butts, there's a butt walk by Tom.



Ken Muse, Ed Barge, Irv Spence and Irving Levine receive animation credits in this short.

A Goofy Golf Swing

I’m not a Disney fan. The endless product hype, studio superiority complex and self-love, including the deification of Walt Disney and “princesses,” has annoyed me for decades.

Other than some of the earliest Mickeys, about the only other Disney shorts I enjoy and will watch over and over star Goofy, all of them directed by Jack Kinney. Motor Mania is a great cartoon and will ring true to viewers so long as there are jerks on the road. And the “how-to” cartoons are good, too.

Tex Avery had some funny stick figures in Porky’s Preview (1941). Kinney employs some in the Goofy cartoon How To Play Golf (1944). A stick-figure version of Goofy appears to show him fix his really bad swing.



The stick-Goofy steps through the maze of stick-golf clubs to go over to provide some instruction.



Not only does the animator give us Goofy multiples and dry-brush, the blue background is treated like paper that the stick-Goody falls through, creating a hole.



This is sure better than some unintelligible duck who needs anger management squawking at some chipmunks.

At least Paul “Woolworth” Terry gave his directors a screen credit in 1944. Mr. Tiffany Disney didn't.

A Few Words About Phil Harris

Phil Harris started his career with Jack Benny as just another bandleader and ended it as a unique character that followed him the rest of his life.

Jack spent his early years at odds with the guys who led the orchestra on his show—in one, he and whiny-voiced Frank Black had a duel—and it was no different when Harris replaced Johnny Green. The studio audience in the early Harris shows seems awkward as Jack is petty and childish toward him; the laughter is very uncomfortable at times. But Benny and writers Bill Morrow and Ed Beloin were no dummies. They decided to expand on the lady-killer aspect they had given Harris’ character and turned him into a relaxed party hound, one who reveled in bad jokes, cheerfully self-congratulated himself and was oblivious to his inability to spell or read.

This was a new kind of character on radio. Benny and the writers had to be careful not to upset the network by glorifying drinking. Harris was never, ever drunk on the show. Effects of any imbibing were commented on some time after the fact, all of them ridiculous. How much of this reflected this real Harris has been debated; but he loved the easy lifestyle of hunting, fishing and golfing. And he was known to have a drink or two.

This improved Harris was loved by listeners. When he married Alice Faye, he still had his eye for the ladies, but more characteristics were piled on. Their young daughter was smarter than he was and commented on his preening and extreme self-confidence. He parlayed all that into a show of his own, first as a summer replacement for Kay Kyser, then as a permanent replacement for Cass Daley on The Fitch Bandwagon. Walt Disney picked up on the easy-going, carefree part of the Harris character about 20 years later and started casting him in feature cartoons.

Here are a couple of random Harris stories. The first one is part of a column in the Lincoln Sunday Journal and Star of November 27, 1949.

Radio In Review
BY REX L. GRIMMELL
PHIL HARRIS is a very busy man every Sunday evening. He not only appears on succeeding programs, but must dash from one studio to another to do it. He is featured on the Jack Benny show at 6:00 over CBS and then stars in his own NBC show at 6:30.
Since the two studios lie three-tenths of a mile apart on a crowded thoroughfare, this would seem to pose a problem. But, through the co-operation of Jack Benny, Harris appears during the first half of the former's show and is free to leave by 6:15.
It then takes him about four minutes—via the parking lots which separate the studios—to reach the rear door of the NBC building. Thus, by 6:20, he is on his own stage performing the all-important task of "warming up" his audience. Next year will be different. Because of the heavy competition of the CBS Sunday night lineup, NBC is planning to switch Harris to Tuesday nights. There, his audience will be all set up for him—he'll follow Bob Hope and Fibber McGee and Molly.

If you’re wondering about the distance from NBC to CBS, check out this map.



Harris seems to have settled down to a family life in Palm Spring with Alice and the kids (he forsook a television show) when he and Bing Crosby (or whomever) weren’t armed with reels after elusive trout or British Columbia salmon. There was a time before that he, like Benny until his death, took to the road to put on some shows. In August 1940, he and his band appeared in Fort Worth, Galveston and Amarillo. At the time, he was appearing in a half-hour late-evening music show on the Texas Quality Network/Mutual Broadcasting System. Philsie was front page news in these towns. The paper in Lubbock even announced the time of his brief stop at the local Santa Fe station. This story is from the Galveston Daily News from Aug. 12, 1940.

Phil Harris Delights 15,000 With Concert
BY BOB NESBITT.
Phil Harris, fugitive from Jack Benny's Jell-O program and the nation's No. 1 band leader in the eyes of many Galvestonians made yesterday afternoon memorable on Galveston beach with another of his swing concerts which delighted possibly 18,000 people who gathered at the beachfront center around the Buccaneer Hotel and Murdoch's pavilion.
The personable, smooth-talking orchestra maestro was neatly attired in a tan coat, gray trousers, sport shoes and red socks, but he soon got around to shedding his coat and loosening his tie.
It wasn’t too hot, though, for the crowd, fortunately shaded by the tall, majestic Buccaneer, was cool.
But Harris who apparently had more fun than anyone else more fun than anybody else, chooses to lead his easy-to-listen-to hand by the jump and jive method rather by the less strenuous process of wielding a baton. That he should shed his coat soon was inevitable.
Not only that, but he had many of his audience swinging to his rhythms — moderately, of course — shortly.
Though booked as a swing concert for the enjoyment of alt who could crowd within ear's range of the canopied bandstand on the upper deck of Murdoch's, the occasion was actually Harris’ home-coming from the minute Mayor Brantly Harris (no relation to Phil) introduced the leader and his band to the crowd as “a man who is as much a part of Galveston as the sea breeze, the beach and the one-piece bathing suit.”
After experiencing difficulty edging himself to the microphone through the rows of closely arranged chairs on the bandstand, Galveston’s genial, portly chief executive presented the famous bandsman with a special card as Galveston's ambassador of goodwill.
The mayor set a record for himself by saying not a word about Galveston's pleasure pier plans, but this may have been just an oversight on his part.
Responding, Harris, who is now nationally known as comedian Jack Benny's irrespressible and ungrammatical stooge over the nation's airwaves on winter Sunday nights, said that he owes a lot to Galveston because it was here he got his real start to success about nine years ago and that it was in Galveston too that Jack Benny first called upon him to appear on the Jell-O program.
Starting with a tricky arrangement of "The Wolverine Blues," the Harris aggregation made the hour between 4:30 and 5:30 appear very short indeed. Aided by Ruth Robin, girl singer, and Harry Stevens, banjoist-singer from Georgia, Harris put on a fast-moving show.
Although his orchestra was at its best, Phil was even better. A smooth artist before the microphone, he seemed to enjoy himself thoroughly yesterday afternoon and the audience ate it up.
Best of all was Harris' presentation of several of the songs for which he is best-liked here. These included "My Galveston Gal," a nationwide hit in 1933, "That's What I Like About the South," and "Nobody."

Less than five week later, actress Marcia Ralston was granted a divorce from Harris, claiming he never took her anywhere and “embarrassed her” socially. His marriage to Alice Faye ticked away for more than 50 years until his death in 1995.

His departure from the Benny show in 1952 was under circumstances that may be considered cloudy because there were several explanations at the time. One was Harris now had an exclusive contract with NBC which covered television; Benny was on CBS. Another was radio was dying; the big sponsors moved their money into television and cut radio budgets, including salaries. Harris wouldn't talk about it at the time. Bob Crosby was brought in. He had a very low-key CBS television show. He was very low-key with Benny. Benny didn't need low key. He needed Phil Harris. His radio show was never quite the same.