Your Money Or Your Life

One of the most famous routines on radio was this:

Robber: I said, “Your money or your life.”
Jack Benny: I’m thinking it over.

Jack did it a number of times, and his fans likely know the exchange happened at the end of an episode when the hold-up man not only took Jack’s money, but a package with Ronald Colman’s Oscar. This set up a story-line for a number of shows where Jack tried to borrow someone else’s Oscar to replace it.

The running gag sounds perfect. Stunningly, it was not the original intention of Jack and his writers.

The Colman episode aired on March 28, 1948. A week before, the second half of the Benny show was taken up with Jack addressing his Beverly Hills Beavers boys club on the advantages of thrift. The show ends with the self-satisfied Jack walking and singing to himself “For I’m a jolly good Beaver,” followed by the final commercial.

But that isn’t how it was supposed to end.

Many of Jack’s scripts for American Tobacco are on line. The “final” script for this episode is one of them, and it shows the stick-up routine was supposed to be on this show after Jack started singing. It’s crossed out in grease pencil. You can see the pages below and click on them to enlarge them.


Both George Balzer and Milt Josefsberg, who were there when the dialogue was created, never mentioned it was supposed to be the conclusion of the Beavers episode.

Here’s Josefsberg’s recollection from his book on Jack and his show:

The joke was first aired on the radio program of March 28, 1948. It was actually created accidentally, and John Tackaberry and I happened to be the midwives. We were writing a program where Jack was supposed to have borrowed Ronald Colman's Oscar and then a crook stole it from him. This was to lead to programs on subsequent weeks when we'd do shows with other Academy Award winners as guest stars, with Jack borrowing each one's Oscar and returning it to the preceding week's guest — but always leaving him one Oscar behind.
As we started to write the scene with the holdup man, I paced the floor while Tackaberry reclined on the sofa. We threw a few tentative lines at each other, none worthy of discussion. Then I thought of a funny feed line but couldn't get a suitable punch to finish it. I told this to "Tack," saying, "Suppose we have the crook pull the classic threat on Jack, 'Your money or your life.' Jack will get screams just staring at the crook and the audience — and if we get a good snapper on it, it'll be great."
Tackaberry seemingly ignored me. I kept thinking of lines and discarding them as mediocre or worse. Finally one line seemed better than the rest, and I threw it at him, half-confidently: "Look, John, the crook says, 'Your money or your life,' and Jack stares at him and then at the audience, and then the crook repeats it and says, 'Come on, you heard me — your money or your life?' and Jack says, 'You mean I have a choice?' "
Now frankly that wasn't too bad an answer, but Tackaberry made no comment, good or bad. I got angry and yelled, "Dammit, if you don't like my lines, throw a couple of your own. Don't just lay there on your fat butt daydreaming. There's got to be a great answer to 'Your money or your life.' "
In reply, Tackaberry angrily snapped at me, "I'm thinking it over."
In a split second we were both hysterical. We knew we could never top that.

Why did the routine get cut from the Beaver show? Was it because the show was running late? That seems quite possible. And considering all the effort that went into the bit, there was no way the writers were going to abandon it entirely; they had found places for cut dialogue before. As it turned out, the Colman episode was the better place for it. Using it there opened up a potential for weeks’ worth of gags, more so than the Beaver episode. Benny and the writers took full advantage of it.

You’ll notice in the March 21st show, the crossed-out lines indicate Benny Rubin was supposed to play the hold-up man. Benny had a small-time hood voice that was perfect for it, But when the routine appeared on March 28th, the actor was, instead, Eddie Marr. Why the change? All we can do is speculate. This was not a good period for Rubin. On March 17, he was ordered by a Los Angeles Superior Court judge to pay $80 a week to his separated wife and seven-year-old daughter. Rubin had been dumped by Eagle-Lion, where he had been dialogue director for 16 months, and tried to make ends meet with radio comedy appearances (his last gig, he told the court, was for $50 working for Abbott and Costello).

The routine ended with the revelation that Colman put up his chauffeur to “steal” the Oscar to teach Benny a lesson. Marr appears as the chauffeur when the gag finally played out in a funny episode including one of Jack’s tall tales (though the funniest thing may have been a botched sound effect).

Something else not mentioned is the money-or-your-life routine originated in the minds of Jack’s earlier writers, Ed Beloin and Bill Morrow, in the radio show broadcast November 24, 1940. In this one, Jack is robbed outside of Don Wilson’s home, where he is forced to wait because Wilson decided he didn’t want the whole gang to “barge in on the little woman.” Jack’s response to “Gimme your dough” (the crook doesn’t say “Your money or your life”) was to rant on and on to the robber about how he had suggested to Don to call his wife in advance, and Wilson ignored him, and that’s what led to his misfortunate situation.

This particular version was repeated on the Benny TV show of January 15, 1956. Joe Downing plays the robber; Rubin appears as a cab driver.

Kathy Fuller-Seeley mentions there was another robbed-while-walking episode of the Benny show, going back to the General Tire days on May 11, 1934. Only part of the broadcast is available, but Kathy is doggedly going through the early Benny scripts. They’re being published in a series of books by Bear Manor Media. You can find out about them here.

How Cartoons Are Made – 1930

Disney has always dominated discussions about animation. There was a minor bit of hoopla amongst critics in the early 1950s about the “anti-Disney,” UPA, but by the time I was growing up in the 1960s, it was long forgotten. It took “Of Mice and Magic” to bring some knowledge of other cartoon studios to public knowledge; film publications of the ‘70s were doing the same thing to a more academic group.

There were many articles on cartoon studios during the sound era of theatrical cartoons, some of which were designed to satisfy the curiosity of how they were made.

Below is a story from the Los Angeles Times, dated April 13, 1930. It was published elsewhere. Most of it is about Disney, with a brief list of other studios. Several are not mentioned. Harman-Ising and Iwerks were just starting out, as was Paul Terry on the East Coast, whose first release was in February that year.

This was transcribed on the old GAC site in May 2009.

COMICS MEAN HARD LABOR
Creator of Mickey Mouse and Other Animated Cartoons Works Harder Than Composers
BY JACOB COOPER
A comic-strip artist and a master musician go into a huddle, and—Presto!—we have the animated sound cartoon. Or, rather, this is an abbreviated picture of what goes on in the little studio which hugs the small, green hills on Hyperion avenue, where Walt Disney directs the lives and fates of those droll zoological which his fertile brain creates.
Walt, you know, is, among other things, the daddy of Mr. Michael Q. Rodent, otherwise and affectionately known to his screen public as Mickey Mouse.
Besides the latter, Disney also produces the Silly Symphony series, and after seeing the involved process which goes to make up this one-reeler, it would be safe to wager that it carries behind it more anguish of soul a work-day minute than Tschaikowsky labored under during the creation of his Symphonic Pathetique.
PAINSTAKING DETAIL.
There is more than a keen sense of the humorous needed in the production of this type of opus, although this is one of its main ingredients. There is infinitesimal, painstaking detail to be done on the part of the thirty some odd persons engaged in the studio. Consider the fact that it takes about 6000 drawings to make up one reel of film, and you have an idea of just what these many people are doing. They must possess an understanding of movement involving every situation in which the human or animal body may find itself—an authoritativeness surpassing Michelangelo’s on the self-same subject. Then every person is expected to contribute to the fund of gags and droll situations as the ideas occur to them—and they are funny to the point of tragedy.
On the whole, the entire procedure is somewhat on the same order as any company may use in production of the over-famous back-stage revue. There is the scenario, in this case both written and drawn, in which the scenes are laid out according to the tick of the clock. The sets are drawn on pasteboard. The background of a scene need never be recopied; it is only the characters which move that have to be put through their copius [sic] gestures. These are first drawn on thin paper—one drawing for each frame of the film—and are then traced on a sheet of transparent celluloid. The celluloid drawing is then filled in with the necessary blacks and whites and superimposed over the background which has been placed under a hanging camera.
The cameraman’s job is no grind; far from it. He can only click one frame at a time and at this rate hardly ever exceeds an output of fifty feet per day.
There is very little cutting to be done on this type of film; it is almost in sequence when the exposed film is removed from the camera.
SOUND PREARRANGED
Then comes the musical and sound part. This has all been prearranged even before the drawings are made. In fact, many of the subjects are based on a musical idea. But this is no job for a thoroughly canonical musician. He must suffer to see Liszt made ludicrous, Bach a buffoon, and Debussy delirious. Whistles, horns, drums and perversions of the human voice add to this barnyard bedlam and Mickey Mouse and the Silly Symphony venture forth into the world equipped with the utmost in risible accoutrements.
Then, lest we forget, there are the other cartoons which help fill our moments of frivolity. Two others are being produced in Hollywood: Mintz's "Krazy Kat," and Walter Lantz's "Oswald"—the latter being originally the creation of Walt Disney. It is rumored that Van Beuren's "Aesop's Fables," which now claim New York as their habitat, will move out to Hollywood. The eastern metropolis also sends forth Max Fleischer's "Talkatoons" and "Song Cartoons," declaiming and warbling into the world.

The Many Shapes of Tom

Mice Follies is a Tom and Jerry cartoon where Joe Barbera tries to get gracefulness and humour out of ice skating.

In one scene, Tom chases Jerry and the little mouse (I don’t know what name he was using at this time) on skates. Tom jumps. He goes high. He goes low.



Tom self-congratulates himself. Evidently he hasn’t watched Wile E. Coyote because he should know what happens next.



Why is that ironing board out? Oh, right. There’s no maid any more to clean up the house.

Two scenes later, Tom becomes a sled.



Scott Bradley fills the soundtrack with Tchaikovsky’s “Sleeping Beauty Waltz.”

The credited animators are the usual crew—Ken Muse, Ed Barge, Ray Patterson and Irv Spence. No doubt Al Grandmain handled the effects animation. Bob Gentle painted the backgrounds. Said the Motion Picture exhibitor “This has excellent musical and sound accompaniment, as well as novel drawings and effects. GOOD.”

The cartoon was released in 1954 but copyrighted a year earlier.

Bimbo Can't Escape

Swing You Sinners is filled with almost non-stop nightmarish imagery and is one of my favourite Fleischer cartoons.

Bimbo finds himself in a graveyard, with ghosts and gravestones singing accusations against him before escaping to a warped farmyard and being chased by all kinds of creatures.

In one scene, the grass opens up and a huge mouth comes out, while headstones advance toward him and form a square around him.



Bimbo jumps to escape. Cut to him grasping and then climbing to the top of a tall pole. “Oh, no!” wails Bimbo. A tombstone grows, develops a face and responds, “Oh, yes.” Bimbo drops to the ground.



And it’s on to the next scene.

Ted Sears and William Bowsky are the credited animators.

Shamus Culhane remembered the cartoon very well. He wrote almost two pages about it in Talking Animals and Other People, saying he, Al Eugster, George Cannata, Seymour Kneitel and William Henning (as well as Bowsky) were suddenly promoted to animators and this was their first cartoon. Culhane felt Grim Natwick should have received a credit for all the work he did on it.

It was released Sept. 24, 1930.

The Actor Who Was Munster, Not Monster

Frankenstein’s monster isn’t scary.

Not when it’s a look-alike version played by Fred Gwynne.

The Munsters was a sitcom where the characters were inspired by old horror movie characters. They didn’t behave like them, they just looked like them, and acted normally. That was the comedy.

Gwynne, Yvonne De Carlo and the others squeezed two seasons and a feature film for fans only out of the idea in the mid-1960s. That was enough for reruns in those days, and they ensured Gwynne would be associated with the role until the wire services wrote his obituary. And, as Gwynne noted to newspaper columnist Holly Hill in 1974, “it’s putting the kids through school.”

Herman Munster’s appearance wasn’t Gwynne’s first stereotype role. While a member at Harvard’s Hasty Pudding Club in May 1949, he played Pablo, a shoeless, lazy Latin American. In July the next year, he was a member of the Brattle Theatre Company, where he appeared with John Carradine in a production of “Julius Caesar” (as a soothsayer). Two weeks later, the company mounted a comedy starring Zero Mostel. “Fred Gwynne got a flurry of applause for his playing of an almost simpering idiot,” reported the Boston Globe.

His Munster role overshadowed his first starring on television opposite the New York-shot Car 54, Where Are You?. Reported columnist Erskine Johnson in 1965: “Gwynne says he was eager to play something different from Sgt. Muldoon. He jumped at the Munster role. ‘After all,’ he says, ‘television doesn’t offer much variety—doctors, lawyers, private eyes. I figured the show would be a hit’.”

An excellent summary of his career to date came from the typewriter of Ben Gross, the Daily News TV reporter in his Sunday feature column of January 10, 1965:

He’s a Lovable, Grotesque Munster
Fred Gwynne, Harvard Man and Former Funny Cop, Talks of TV, Art & Money
By BEN GROSS
Lovable, Fred Gwynne is a living contradiction. A posh Groton and Harvard man, he won fame as a funny dumb cop in Car 54, Where Are You? And this season he is starring as the lovable, grotesque Herman Munster in CBS-TV's off-beat comedy series, The Munsters (Thursdays, 7:30 P.M.).
A highly cultivated, at times morose, fellow with a marked strain of mysticism and a mordant wit, he can discuss art, drama and poetry with the assurance and knowledge of an expert. Yet on television this tall and analytical actor has made his reputation in roles which, to put it mildly, are not exactly intellectual.
Dining with him at Jack LaRue's restaurant in Southern California's Studio City, I found him at first to be in an uncommunicative mood. A bit grumpy, in fact.
However, after I had asked him why he, an actor who once had played a great deal of Shakespeare, was now appearing in the new but by no-means subtle situation comedy, the dam of silence cracked and a stream of talk poured forth.
What's Art?
"The explanation is simple," he said. "You see, I don't make the mistake of confusing art and business. Being in a TV series is fine and ours is a very good one. But art . . . well that is something else again."
"Okay," I came back. "What is art?"
"It's when you take something that God has put on this earth and heighten it. You find art in the cave drawings, in ancient Egyptian civilization and the Chinese brush painters. "Of course, if you're going to apply the highest standards, many famous painters of today would fail to qualify," he continued. "Take Picasso. He's the world greatest idea man, Madison Avenue-wise, but he certainly is no great artist."
"But coming back to TV," I remarked, "why the sudden vogue this season for monster shows yours and ABC's The Addams Family."
Not at all surprisingly, Fred commented that he thinks The Munsters is by far the best of the two. "It's the only monster series with already identifiable characters: mine, a Frankenstein sort of fellow and Al Lewis' kindly Dracula-like creation.
"But answering your question as to why such shows have come on this season . . . I suppose it's because no one really thought of doing them before."
The Right Answer
Incidentally, appearing as the friendly monstrous character is no easy job. To put on his make-up requires two-and-a-half hours every day.
"How do your children react to seeing their father in this guise?" I asked.
"I have two, you know, a boy and a girl, 10 and 11," Fred said. "My daughter has the right answer. She tells her friends: 'My father earns money that way and that is why I can go to the fine school I do.”
Fred Gwynne, the son of a stockbroker, is a native of New York, but spent a goodly portion of his youth in South Carolina, Florida and Colorado. After attending Groton, one of the swankiest of prep schools, he served as a radioman on a subchaser in the South Pacific during World War II.
Before that, he had made his debut in Shakespeare's "Henry V” and studied with the famous portrait painter, R. S. Merryman. Then after his discharge from the Navy he enrolled in New York's Phoenix School of Design. However, before completing his course, Fred decided to finish his education at Harvard.
"While there I joined the repertory company at the Brattle Theatre of Cambridge, and after graduation in 1951, I stayed with them for two years," he told me.
Fred made such a hit as Bottom in Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream" that he decided to try his fortunes on Broadway. There he appeared in numerous successful plays and later also in Elia Kazan's movie, "On the Waterfront."
Joined Ad Agency
"During a lull in engagements, I joined an advertising agency, J. Walter Thompson, and among the things I worked on were the Ford commercials," he recalled. "But what I wanted to do, above all, was to act, and on the day I quit the agency, I got a call to appear in the Broadway musical, 'Irma La Douce.’ Then, of course, came TV with Car 54."
A versatile actor and painter, Fred has also written and illustrated two books, "What's a Nude?" and "Best in Show," the latter for children.
"Although you still paint, you are now primarily an actor," I pointed out. "Why did you choose that as a career?"
He Was Discouraged
"Oh, I intended to become a full-time painter," he said. "But in art school I was discouraged. And, as a matter of fact, I was also discouraged when I tried to attend a school for acting, the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York.
"I tried to audition, but the teacher who passed on applicants told me, 'You are too tall for the theatre.’ I, however, insisted on an audition and finally got one. After that he said to me, 'Okay, I'll take you, but I still say you're too tall for the theatre.’ Then he smiled. 'But then I also once told Ezra Stone that he was too short. And look what a success he made!”
Holywood's [sic] a Machine
"Anyway, I didn't go to the Academy. Instead I went to Harvard on the GI Bill."
"As a New Yorker have you become accustomed to working in Hollywood?" I asked.
"Yes, though eventually I intend to return to New York," Fred said. "As for Hollywood, it's just a gigantic machine, but I like it as much as Mt. Kiscoe or the Bronx."
"Can TV ever replace the theatre for an actor?" I queried.
"It depends on how old he is. If he's over 30, no; if he's under 30, yes.”
Good Tunes
"As a man who used to be a copy-writer in an ad agency, what do you think of those singing commercials?" I wanted to know.
"Well, I can tell you this: Considering the state of popular music today, you can hear some of the best tunes in TV on those commercials."
"You're also a writer. So tell me why is it that so many famous authors when they come to Hollywood seem to lose their ability to write good stuff? Even the late F. Scott Fitzgerald and William Faulkner couldn't do it while out here."
He pondered for a moment. "It's because they confused art with business. When you do business, you do it for money. When you do art, money doesn't matter," said Fred Gwynne.

Gwynne wore blue-green make-up as Herman, which was a challenge because the series was shot in black and white. Karl Silvera was his make-up man, and told the Tulsa World in 1964 Herman’s head was built with rubber stuck on with a special cement, with castor oil partly responsible for the colour. “This color makes the face look dead and pasty in black and white,” said Silvera. “That’s what we’re shooting for.” World columnist Chuck Wheat observed: “Green skin almost makes the most healthy eyeballs in the world look like fugitives from the liver cartoon. That plus purple lipstick make for rather startling appearances.”

Like others known for their regular TV performance as a stand-out character, Gwynne had some troubles afterward. “Producers look at me as Herman and that don’t bode me too good,” Gwynne told the Hartford Courant in 1975. But the American Shakespeare Theatre ignored that and he appeared on stage as Big Daddy in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Sir Toby Belch in Twelfth Night and then as the Stage Manager in Our Town authored by Thornton Wilder, who was teaching at Harvard when Gwynne attended.

He was only 66 when he died in 1993. His Associated Press obituary concluded with an admission from a 1982 interview: “And I might as well tell you the truth. I love old Herman Munster,” he said. “Much as I try not to, I can’t stop liking that fellow.”

Shadows and Silhouettes

Creating a spooky or scary mood in a cartoon can be done through voice or music. But since we are talking about an animated cartoon, another way to accomplish it is through the artwork.

In Claws For Alarm, layout artist Maurice Noble and background painter Phil De Guard employ shadows and silhouettes to create a discomfiting atmosphere. Some examples:



Writer Mike Maltese and director Chuck Jones elect to let the audience know who will be trying to kill Porky—sadistic mice.



A keyhold-shaped shadow. Very imaginative.



Sylvester bashes Porky with the butt of a rifle to knock him into woozy-land, then shoves the pig in their car and zooms away to escape the would-be killers.

Or did they? Cut to the final shot of the car’s speedometer.



A perfect science-fiction-style ending by Maltese.

This is the second cartoon in the Jones Porky/Sylvester horror trilogy. The first was Scaredy Cat (1948) and the third was the outer-space-themed Jumpin’ Jupiter (1955).

Jones has a full contingent of animators on this one—Ken Harris, Abe Levitow, Ben Washam, Lloyd Vaughan and Dick Thompson. Though the film was released in May 22, 1954, it was formally copyrighted on June 6, 1955, despite a 1953 date on the opening titles.