A Friendly Ghost? Shay It Isn't so!

Remember that cartoon where Casper went up and said “hello” to someone who reacted with a take of terror and shouted “A g-g-g-GHOST!”?

Yeah, it didn’t happen often, did it?

To quote Leonard Maltin in Of Mice and Magic: “Casper was the most monotonous character to invade cartoonland since Mighty Mouse. It seemed as it every Casper cartoon followed the same story line, with only minor variations.”

However, Mr. Maltin also admits the animation on the Famous Studios cartoons was generally good and the backgrounds were often superior going into the early 1950s.

Here are some frames from a take in The Ghost of the Town (1952). You can see the anticipation, a head shake and then the extreme.



The animator keeps the take from being static by moving the eyes in every frame before they go back into the cabbie's head.

For the record, Jack Mercer’s taxi driver doesn’t say “A g-g-g-ghost!” He just says “A ghost!”

Izzy Klein is responsible for the story, and it is pretty well structured. Casper, for some reason, is in a ghost army, and kicked out by a tough-guy sergeant (Jackson Beck). Being dishonourably discharged, Casper goes to the city in search of friends, and is hailed as a hero for rescuing a baby from a burning apartment tower.

The cartoon cuts to a TV set where the news is reported by Walter Winchell, voiced by Sid Raymond.



Casper is invited to appear on (now, remember the name of this cartoon) Toast of the Town, which was the original name of The Ed Sullivan Show. Sullivan appears in some rotoscoped footage which is more stiff than the real Sullivan on camera.



Keith Scott, author of a book on cartoon voice actors, essential for any fan of old theatrical cartoons, says it actually is Sullivan doing the voice as a gag.

As for Casper, I thought Cecil Roy was the voice, but according to Graham Webb’s The Animated Film Encyclopedia, it belongs to a boy actor named Alan Shay. When he became Casper, I have no idea. Passaic News-Herald staff writer Arthur F. Lenehan met Shay at the birthday party for a child actress and reported on it on the Oct. 17, 1949 issue. Shay’s windy list doesn’t mention Casper.

“My name is Alan Shay,” said one little man with an expansive manner. “I’m Little Nick, who does those Nedick orange drink commercials you hear every day.”
“How do you do, Little Nick?” I said.
“I also have worked on the Helen Hayes Show, Calvalcade [sic] of America, and The Strange Romance of Evelyn Winters, among others. In television I’ve appeared on the Ford Theatre show, Celebrity Time, Martin Kane, Private Eye, to name a few. I’ve also done two movies and four Broadway shows. Spell my name right, will you?”

Actually, “Alan Shay” wasn’t his name. And he wasn’t the original voice of Little Nick. Dick Leone was, but because his voice changed, 11-year-old Shay replaced him in March 1949.

Shay spoke about Casper many years later, in an article in the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel of May 23, 1995. He sounds a little more modest with age. If there is an earlier reference to Shay as Casper, I haven’t found it.

A LOCAL HAUNT
THE FRIENDLIEST GHOST YOU KNOW IS ONE OF US
By ROBERT NOLIN
Casper the Friendly Ghost is alive and well and living in Plantation.
As a stockbroker.
Sometimes he gets nostalgic for the old days, his old studio haunts, the crowds of autograph seekers. But time has diminished his fame. Now it's the granchildren who want to see the old cartoon videos, or co-workers who want to hear his signature song.
Alan Schreiber, the flesh-and-blood incarnation of 'toondom's blithe spirit, readily obliges. He strains to replicate the high, sweet notes of his ghostlier days.
"I'm Casper the Friendly Ghost, the friendliest ghost you know. I romp and play, sing and dance all day ... " Schreiber begins, then halts. "I don't remember the rest of it."
That's understandable. It was almost 50 years ago that Schreiber, then a professional child actor in New York, supplied the voice of the original Casper. In about a dozen cartoons he uttered such memorable lines as: "Hi, Mr. Frog, how are you?" or "I don't want to hurt you, I want to be your friend."
Now Casper, the specter of the past, has become cinema's spook du jour.
A high-tech, Steven Spielberg-produced film, Casper, opens on Friday across the nation. The would-be summer blockbuster recounts the origins of the roly-poly ghost and his adventures involving a little girl, hidden treasure and three grouchy ghouls: uncles Stinky, Stretch and Fatso.
The new movie reawakened memories for Schreiber that were previously just footnotes to a career in which he bore the stage name Alan Shay.
During the late '40s and early '50s, Casper cartoons based on the comic-book figure were screened before feature films, along with serials and newsreels. Schreiber, now 57, was already an accomplished child actor ("I was always cast as a crying orphan") when he answered an audition to play the baldheaded Casper. His high-timbred voice - sweet, pleasant, emotional - got him the job.
Acting since age 6, Schreiber had landed leading kid parts in four Broadway plays. The Casper role was just another gig. "All you had to do was be able to read," Schreiber said. "You'd walk into the studio, they'd hand you the script and you'd go to work."
Schreiber read only Casper's lines. Other characters' lines were read individually and edited in later. "I never really knew what the thing was about until I went to the movies," Schreiber said.
He took home a whopping $30 per cartoon. "But I never saw the money," Schreiber said. His mother, Lucille, used it to pay for his private school.
But to a 12-year-old, being noticed was better than money. "I think what I liked most was the recognition of the fans," Schreiber said.
Still, stickball and football on the streets of New York City's West Side were more appealing than possible stardom. "I never had that feeling that I was a big shot, I just felt good about what was happening to me," Schreiber said. "I didn't have a care in the world."
Then Schreiber's voice changed. At about 17, he decided to give up showbiz, go to college and get a "secure job."He followed in the footsteps of his father, Moe, and worked in finance. Now, though he's a vice president at the Smith Barney investment firm, traces of singing commercials from his days as a child actor still rattle around Schreiber's head. He can recite snatches of jingles for Cream of Wheat, Nedick's candy bars and Bosco chocolate drink.
"I get kind of nostalgic when I think about it sometimes," Schreiber said. "It was a fantastic time of my life."
Schreiber is eager to see the Casper film when it opens - he's still enough of a trouper to want to check out the competition. "I'd be curious to listen to the voice," he said.

It’s bad enough Shay never got a screen credit for his work as one of Famous’ Studio’s most popular characters, but $30 a session is scarier than any Casper cartoon. The kid was robbed.

Shay was born in Brooklyn on July 12, 1937; his father Moe Schreiber managed a food store. As best as we can tell, he’s still living in the Sun Belt.

Just to wrap up about this cartoon, Steve Muffatti and Morey Reden are the credited animators. Anton Loeb did a fine job with the backgrounds, especially the blue-ish nighttime ones.

Whoopee For Goopy?

Goopy Geer had the potential of being a big cartoon star.

Warner Bros. wanted musical cartoons made from songs it owned. One song was by Herman Hupfeld, copyrighted at the end of 1931, called “Goopy Geer: He Plays Piano and He Plays By Ear.” Here’s a song about an actual character. He was ripe for being turned into a cartoon character by the Harman-Ising studio (while pushing the song at the same time).

But Goopy doesn’t seem to have inspired the studio’s writers or director. In Goopy’s 1932 debut, there’s a scene of Goopy running around a piano. If that’s a gag, I don’t get it.

In fact, not only is Goopy not in entire sequences of his own cartoon, Hugh Harman and/or Rudy Ising didn’t even bother with all-new animation. Scenes were re-used of a gorilla waiter weaving around, a wide-mouth hippo and drunken horse from a cartoon made the previous year called Lady, Play Your Mandolin.

Goopy doesn’t even supply the main vocal for the cartoon. That’s done by a kitten in ill-fitting high heels singing “I Need Lovin’.”

Another scene has hat racks coming to life to dance. Here are the poses as they get into position. I like how the upper hat peg turns into a cigar.



The racks high-step in unison.



They tap a little bit.



And (are you chortling?) one kicks the other in the butt.



Keith Scott tells us Johnny Murray is Goopy. Friz Freleng and Ham Hamilton are the credited animators.

The other two cartoons starring Goopy don’t feature him playing a piano (by ear or otherwise). He’s a mountaineer in Moonlight For Two and a court jester in The Queen Was in the Parlor. All three Goopys were released in 1932 and were three of four consecutive Merrie Melodies. (The other cartoon, It’s Got Me Again, was nominated for an Oscar). Goopy made a cameo appearance in Bosko in Dutch (1933), then disappeared.

Well, actually, Goopy didn’t disappear altogether. In November 1932, a 15-minute show called “Goopy Geer” was heard on KMBC in Kansas City. I figured it must have featured someone playing the piano in character. After a little digging, I spotted this photo in the March 25, 1934 edition of the Kansas City Journal. The caption reads: “The man with the reclining tendencies is His Royal Laziness, Goopy Geer, whose nimble fingers and drawling voice are heard on KMBC each week day afternoon at 1:15 o’clock. Ted Malone, who announces Goopy’s program, is shown in his usual routine two seconds before program time. Goopy’s specialty is composing impromptu melodies out of four or five musical notes his listeners send in. Paul Sells, well known Kansas City pianist-accordionist-conductor, portrays the sleepy piano pounder.”

Goopy survived on KMBC into May 1936. By then, Harman and Ising had left for MGM, and the replacing studio had gone through some other lame starring characters until Tex Avery decided a little pig had possibilities and made him the solo star of The Blow Out.

Now, for your listening pleasure, a jaunty instrumental version of the song by Jimmy Grier’s orchestra.

Cycling Hillbillies

Friz Freleng turned out some really uninspired cartoons in the mid-1930s. One of them was When I Yoo Hoo (1936).

Poor Friz was hamstrung with having to shoehorn a Warner Bros.-owned song into his Merrie Melodies. In this case, the choice was “When I Yoo Hoo in the Valley,” written by Henry Russell and Murray Martin. Whether it was heard in a Warners feature before the cartoon was released, I don’t know. It did show up afterward, in Republic’s 1940 "puttin'-on-a-show" musical-comedy Village Barn Dance, sung by Scotty Wiseman and John Lair, with a cast that included Don Wilson, Vera Vague, and Scotty and Lulubelle.



The lyrics pretty much forced Freleng and the writing staff to put the cartoon in a hillbilly setting, which makes it a natural for a send-up of the Hatfield-McCoy feud. Tex Avery did the same thing in A Feud There Was (1938), but he found some funny things to put in it. This one is just weak. One gag is a clod-dancing cow is wearing a flour sack for underwear.

Friz even reverts back to the days at Harman-Ising when Warners cartoons had cheering crowds in cycle animation. He does it a couple of times in the cartoon. Here’s an example. Sixteen frames on ones. It’s been slowed down to see the drawings better.



We again pass on the reminder from Jerry Beck that cartoon release dates in the Golden Age were official in name-only; if a cartoon came in to the exchange before then, theatres could show them. The release date for When I Yoo Hoo was July 26, but newspaper ads show the cartoon was shown in Salt Lake City as early as June 20. The ad to the right is for a theatre in Tyler, Texas, on June 28. Who’s this Bogart guy?

Norman Spencer (with his ever-present woodblock) is responsible for the score. Interestingly, the fight sequence doesn’t have Spencer taking the title song and double-timing it, like he did in other cartoons. He tosses in “The William Tell Overture” and Von Suppe’s “Poet and Peasant Overtre,” which fit quite well.

Bob McKimson and Don Williams are the credited animators in this short. I couldn’t tell you what scenes they did. Someone miscalculated the animation to the background in one scene. The fight referee with an accent that comes and goes (I think it’s Tedd Pierce in a kind of falsetto) is supposed to be standing on the mat of the ring. His feet, though, are a little below it.



Now, for your listening pleasure, here are Scotty and Lulubelle singing the title song from a 1939 recording.

Laughs From a Rolling Pin

Only one comedienne made the Radio Stars list of “the nine greatest women in radio” in 1934. Twenty years later, she was still making audiences smile, but now on television. The laughs only stopped when she decided it was time to get out of show business.

We’re talking about Gracie Allen.

Nanette Kutner’s piece on Gracie read:

She may be light, she may be flimsy, but she too has her definite place. Gracie Allen is without a doubt the foremost of all radio comediennes. She set the style for Portland Hoffa, for Mary Livingston. Here again radio proved its microscopic tendencies. For years Burns and Allen had been in vaudeville and for years Gracie rattled off the same sort of nonsense she gives you over the air. Yes, vaudeville audiences laughed at her. They laughed politely. But they never laughed the way the radio public did after they once heard that funny little voice of hers. Radio does things wholeheartedly and never, never by halves. It picked up that voice, tossed it into the air, chuckled over it, adored it, and made Gracie Allen the queen of goofiness. If there is a why to it all, here it is: The average person likes to think he is smart. Gracie Allen never fails to give him this opportunity. She caters to the superiority complex in every audience. They love to catch her mistakes . . . to anticipate them . . . to outsmart her. She is the sop for their conceit and Gracie Allen, with one of the keenest minds in radio, knows this. Contrary to the nutty character she portrays, she is nobody’s fool.

Through the ‘30s and into the ‘40s, somebody found a great way to get publicity for Gracie Allen. First she began showing up unexpected in the middle of other radio shows looking for her brother (NBC finally objected to a CBS star getting publicity at their expense). She was the subject of a movie based on a book—The Gracie Allen Murder Case. And in 1940, she stumped across the U.S. in a phoney bid for the U.S. presidency as a candidate for the Surprise Party (and “wrote” a syndicated newspaper column simultaneously).

Husband George Burns related that ratings for the radio show had dropped off, so he came up with a solution—he and Gracie would stop being single. They would play a married couple, a fake version of themselves. Comparing shows of the ‘30s with the ‘40s, Gracie is still off-beat but is a more mature character. Instead of silliness or a non sequitur, Gracie would respond to a line with something kind of related to it, but it either made no sense, or had a double meaning. And when the show migrated to television, Gracie’s character seemed more real. You could actually see her having the conversation that she put off the rails.

I wish I could find more interviews with Gracie talking about her career. A few are out there. Here’s one from 1941 which appeared in papers in early November.

Gracie Allen Is Funny When She's Serious
By ROBBIN COONS
HOLLYWOOD—The company was coming in from the back lot to resume shooting on Stage 12.
Gracie Allen was in a portable dressing room having her hair done. The sign on the door said "Mr. Post”, and it all seemed very fitting for a professional scatterbrain to be ensconced in the wrong quarters.
But Gracie knew everything was not as it should be.
"Would you mind waiting a minute,” she called out. "My house isn't here yet. I think it'll be over soon."
I didn't mind at all. I was thinking how wonderful it was that a movie actress, especially a professional "dizzy," couldn't talk in somebody else's “house,” especially when Mr. Post—William Post of the stage—wasn't around. But that was how it was, and just what you'd expect from Gracie.
Gracie seldom is "in character. She's never looking for her "long-lost brother," and she doesn't give uproariously dumb answers to civil questions.
Gracie came out and we found a couple of fancy chairs from the set, uncovered them, and sat down. Just then, with a great rumbling and creaking, a little tractor rolled in pulling Gracie’s "house" but Gracie now felt that we were comfortable enough and could talk, even without a house around us.
"Mr. and Mrs. North," she said, was really the second picture she'd done without George (Burns), her husband. She made "The Gracie Allen Murder Case." remember, and George wasn't in it. Now, as then, she felt funny and lost the first few days of shooting, having no George around. George was busy working up their radio act, and be came over to the set often.
By this time, I was trying to stifle unruly, quite uncivil laughter, and several others within earshot were not bothering to stifle it. It's the Allen voice that's always in character high and babyish, evoking risible pictures of the lame brain that is Gracie’s air and screen character.
"It's really quite a help," laughed Gracie herself. "I can get by with more things. Crazy hats. The crazier the better, because people just laugh and say—'Oh, it's Gracie!’ If I make a faux pas, as I often do, I'm forgiven. Oh, it's just Gracie. There was a time when I could walk into a store and order a couple of yards of blue ribbon and the clerks would laugh and giggle as if I'd said something really funny.
"That doesn’t happen so much now—maybe they're more used to me. But I had a funny experience in New York once. We had a cook who was so wonderful at pastries and she asked me to buy her a rolling pin. So I went to Macy's and asked for one and before I knew it the clerk was giggling and telling all the other clerks and I was in the middle of a gathering crowd. Suddenly it dawns on me that they're shrieking because Gracie Allen is buying a rolling pin—for George!"
Gracie had to excuse herself then to do a scene with Postman Lucien Littlefield outside by her apartment mailbox. She rattled on about how excited she'd been since they (the Norths) found a murdered man in their liquor closet last night. This caused Postman Littlefield to do a double-take.
It caused me to slip quietly to the door, happily hysterical because the Allen voice, at least, is always in character.

Fans got more of Gracie than she wanted to give. She kept trying to retire. She finally convinced George to let her leave show business in 1958.

She talked about two years later to an Associated Press reporter. I cannot find a version with a byline. It appeared in papers starting at the end of September.

GRACIE ALLEN IS ENJOYING RETIREMENT
Hubby George Keeps On As Active Comedy Attraction
HOLLYWOOD (AP)—Comedienne Gracie Allen quit show business two years ago to let hubby George Burns take complete charge of the bread-winning.
Happy About It
She's quite happy about the whole thing.
"Unless we lose the house, the cars and the everything," she says, "I'll never go back again."
Didn't she enjoy making the dumb blonde remarks, hearing the laughter and applause explode around the team of Burns and Allen?
"I didn't know any better,” she says. "I was just brought up working all my life. I wanted to stop about five years ago, but every year George would sign a new contract.
Completely Adjusted
"I never knew how much money we got. I never thought to ask him. I must do that."
Gracie says she's completely adjusted to the quiet life.
“If they ever called me up on the stage, I would die, just die. I'm just like I've never been in show business."
And, she insists, George is doing better without her.
"Now he's come into his own,” she says. “He always gave me the funny lines and submerged his own personality."
Opened Show
George recently opened a stage show with Bobby Darin in the outdoor Greek Theater in Los Angeles.
Gracie says she was "as nervous as a hen" while sitting with friends in the audience—it’s like your child up there."
She reports the show a hit.
"He was wonderful," she says. "And besides, he is a very nice man—and I'd say so even if he were not my husband."
Retirement to Gracie means many things—visiting her children and grandchildren, "taking care of my house for the first time" although she leaves the more physical aspects to others.
Likes Good Food
"I don't like anything about the kitchen except good food that comes out of it,” she says. “And I don't dust anything. I just don't want any part of it.
"If don't want to get up early, I don't get up early. If I want to go back to bed after breakfast, I do it.
"I belong no women's groups, no anything. I don’t care to have to go someplace at a certain time. I've done that all my life—to a show, a rehearsal, to an interview.
"'Everyone says, ‘You must have a hobby.’ I don't. And it is just divine."

Gracie got out of show business because of continuing heart problems. I’m sure you know that Gracie was right. After a bit of a false start, George did just fine as a solo, carving out a nice Oscar-winning film career, writing a ton of books and promoting them on the talk show circuit, growling out old vaudeville stories peppered with corn and his sugar-throat brand of singing.

1964 was a tough year for George Burns. Long-time colleague Eddie Cantor died. So did fashion designer-cum-gossip Orry-Kelly, whom George and Gracie hung out with back in the vaudeville days in New York. And that’s the year George lost Gracie, too.

Life in the Future: 1976

Name this cartoon.



There’s a good chance you have never seen it before. It is from A Kitchen Cavalcade, a 1956 industrial short produced for General Motors’ Frigidaire division by John Sutherland Productions.

One of the fascinating things about this combination animation-live action film is it was the second short made by Sutherland in 1956 that was set in the future. The other was Your Safety First, a look at cars and life in the year 2000. This one spends part of its time in the year 1976.

Both are reminiscent of The Jetsons. But the writers of the Hanna-Barbera series weren’t the only ones grabbing science magazines and coming up with concepts of the future. It was not difficult for anyone with an imagination. As narrator Marvin Miller says in this short: “These things are based on actual trends, and following those trends to their logical ends.”

There are no flying cars in this short, but there are ones with bubble tops. They are self-driving. This gives more time for playing cards, reading the newspaper or talking to the wife on a bigger screen than a cell phone camera.



Here’s the home of 1976. No box-like condos. No Space Needle-esque Sky Pad Apartments. Like Green Acres, there’s land spreadin’ out so far and wide.



The House of Tomorrow has an indoor sandbox.



It has a push-button meal-maker. And a visi-phone. The Jetsons stole it!!! (No, they didn’t. See Marvin Miller’s narration above).



Sheets? Dishes? Use them once and throw them away. Environment? What’s that?



The boss is coming over for dinner. Just like on the...well, you know. Rosie isn’t hear to serve a pineapple upside-down cake, but there is dinner music on a concealed reel-to-reel tape machine (which isn’t much of an advancement from 1956).



And just like the you-know-whos, the bed comes out of the wall. The climate is controlled by the always-appealing “overhead radiation.” And there’s a built-in overhead television, too. Not to watch Johnny Carson, but to spy on the brat. Hey! Two people, but no separate beds!



The most gut-busting moments are in the live action parts. My favourite is when a housewife fantasizes about being in her dream kitchen. “Just as she sees herself its owner, its mistress, and its queen.” The Sutherland people resisted having a crown pop onto her head. Maybe because it would remind people of margarine.



And while the young co-ed dreams of a future by marrying the boy next door, what does he dream of? A car. Some things never change. (No doubt, it’s a concept car by film-backer General Motors).



The story is by True Boardman, who I gather also directed the live action portion. George Gordon is the animation director. The credited animators are George Cannata, Ken O’Brien and Tom Ray. Layouts by Bernie Gruver. Tom Oreb was responsible for the designs and the backgrounds are by Joe Montell, who had a futuristic pedigree working on Tex Avery’s The Farm of Tomorrow. There is, oddly, no music credit.

Sorry for the low-resolution and the reddish frames (there’s no mention of Technicolor on the print), but perhaps Steve Stanchfield will find a better copy some day and get it out on a disc with his well-restored Sutherland cartoons.

You can watch the short below, thanks to Indiana University.