Fashionable Fur Filtched

A familiar gag ends Tex Avery’s Christmas cartoon One Ham’s Family (released nowhere near Christmas in 1943). There’s been a violent fight off-screen between the Mean Widdle Pig and the Big bad Wolf disguised as Santa. The noise awakens Junior’s parents who come downstairs to investigate and discover a huge mess. But they forget about it when Junior offers his mother a Christmas present.



Mother Pig opens the parcel. “A fur coat!”



Mother models the fur, and reveals a bandaged tail—the same bandaged tail the wolf had before the fight. “Why, this coat is just what I need,” she exclaims.



The half-naked wolf jumps into the scene, grabs his fur and says “You and me both, sister.” The wolf is a sound-alike for radio’s Great Gildersleeve, and turns to the audience makes out with the Gildersleeve laugh.



With that he bounds out of the pig home carrying his fur.



He reaches in and slams the door shut. Avery’s shot moves quickly in on the door so we can easily see the sign gag to end the short.



Avery uses the “corny” routine later in Red Hot Riding Hood, The Shooting of Dan McGoo and Swing Shift Cinderella (complete with a cornstalk).

Junior was inspired by Red Skelton’s Mean Widdle Kid character on radio, but he also has some Bugs Bunny in him by telling the audience “I bang and crash him like this all through the picture.” And then there’s the pie-baking scene that’s similar to Bugs’ cake-baking sequence in Rabbit Hood some years later.

Kent Rogers is the Skelton pig and the Gildersleeve wolf. Pinto Colvig does a combination of Disney’s Practical Pig and Andy Devine as the father and Sara Berner is the fur-less mother.

Mister Rogers

The world would be a better place if we listened to Fred Rogers.

He may have been the kindest, calmest man in children’s television programming. He always came across as trust-worthy and caring.

Before his long run on PBS (starting in the network’s NET days, with the house logo I always liked), he was on the CBC. The Mother Corp specialised in low-key children’s shows in those days. There was The Friendly Giant. There was Chez Helene. A little more boisterous was Razzle Dazzle with Howard the Turtle. And later came Mr. Dressup.

The CBC version was called Misterogers. It debuted on October 15, 1962 (check your local listings for time). It appears the network sent out a news release because I’ve found the same unbylined story in several Canadian newspapers days before the first airing.

Fred Rogers, of CBC-TV’s Misterogers puppet show for children, makes no attempt to hide himself or his lip movements as he talks for puppets on the TV screen.
It is his philosophy that children should not be fooled, even though his program is set in a fantasy neighborhood where most of the neighbors are puppets.
“From the beginning, I want young viewers to know that this is a land of make believe. We are all playing. The human link helps children put the fantasy in its proper perspective, yet they still believe in the fantasy characters,” he says.
His show, Misterogers, will be seen Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays at 2:30 p.m. beginning Oct. 15 on the CBC-TV network.
Most of the “neighbors” are puppets, except for Rogers and a live guest who assumes a neighborhood character role.
Misterogers evolved from a program, called Children’s Corner Rogers had in Pittsburgh for seven years. He introduced his first puppet, a tiger named Daniel. “The tiger was so warmly received by viewers,” says Rogers, “I decided to increase my puppet population, and it’s been growing ever since.”
Puppet characters appearing in Misterogers include King Friday XIII, Daniel Striped Tiger, a family of talking furniture, Lawrence Light and his wife Lydia Lam-Light, Philodendron and his wife Rhoda, his talking gramophone, and a book worm that lives in an encyclopedia.
Other neighborhood characters popping in and out of the series include Edgar Cook, Lady Elain Fairchilde and her husband Cornflake S. Pecially, X Owl, Henrietta Pussycat, Nine Nice Mice, and Grandpere who lives in the Eiffel Tower.
Fred Rogers started composing music even before he mastered his multiplication tables. He received his Bachelor of Music degree from Rollins College, Florida, and composes all the music for his show as well as writing the lyrics and script.

Rogers’ stay in Canada was short. He quit the CBC and returned to Pittsburgh in 1964, and the show went off the air in July. The Canadian network wasn’t through with him. The Montreal Star of March 17, 1965 reported he was now part of the Canadian School Telecasts that aired weekdays starting at 10 a.m. Rogers evidently shot the episodes in Pittsburgh. It was a short run, the Gazette reported the show would be on only four more weeks. In the meantime, the CBC had been syndicating the show in the United States starting in 1964.

Back in the States, the June 23, 1965 edition of the Pittsburgh Press reported Misterogers’ Sunday Show would air for a half hour on WTAE, Channel 4, as of Sept. 19, while a ten-minute Monday through Friday version would begin Nov. 15. Judging by newspaper ads, the Joseph Horne Co. paid costs to air them. Whether these were old CBC broadcasts, or new ones filmed in the U.S., or a combination of both, is unclear.

Rogers told TV Guide in September 1968 the show ran out of production money in summer 1966. American backers stepped in. On November 21, 1966, he returned to WQED, Channel 13 in Pittsburgh, with a half-hour Misterogers’ Neighborhood, originally seen at noon and 4:30, as Emilie Brontesaurus brought a lion cub to visit with Mr. Rogers. The Joseph Horne Co. took out an almost full-page newspaper ad to herald the show. Along the way, the Sears, Roebuck Foundation awarded him a $150,000 grant (then another in August 1968) and the Neighborhood was seen on WGBH in Boston and other NET stations.

This profile was published in newspapers beginning December 14, 1967.

World of Children Shown On Unique TV
By RUDY CERNKOVIC
PITTSBURGH (UPI)—Fred Rogers slipped unobtrusively into a rear seat of a classroom in a Pittsburgh elementary school. His presence did not go unnoticed long.
A boy sitting nearby recognized him as the conductor of “Misterogers’ Neighborhood,” a children’s program shown five days a week over WQED, the first community-supported educational television channel in the United States.
“My teddy bear lost his ear when I put him in the washer,” the boy later told Rogers.
“Sometimes that happens with toys,” Rogers said. “Did your mother sew it back on? You can do things like that to toys, and sometimes doctors can do it for people.”
Studies Children, Environment
The visit to the school was a routine event in Rogers’ study of children and their environment.
“Misterogers’ Neighborhood” is a creation of a mind that under stands the special world of children. The program deals with everyday situations and problems children face—the doll that breaks, fear of the dark, the arrival of a new baby, going to a hospital or taking a bath.
Rogers, tall, lean and soft spoken, believes television is an intimate medium, which can deal with the inner needs of children. To help children learn about their world, he seeks to create a real atmosphere which they can recognize and relate to their lives.
“We try to learn from children,” he said. “We don’t super-impose our own ideas upon them. We treat them with respect, because they are individuals who are growing up. We try to give them on our program an environment in which they can feel accepted as they are. Once accepted, they can begin to grow.”
Communication Important
“We are serious about communicating with children, it’s a real mission with us.
“We divide reality from make believe. We understand childhood fantasy and deal with it in a real way. In the neighborhood of make believe, everything is possible.
Rogers says many children’s television programs today appall him.
“They convey an excess of violence, as well as stifle the child’s imagination by forcing him into the role of a passive, fearing spectatator,” he said. “So few programs really reach into the child’s world.
“The first thing I’ve done in preparing children’s programming is to listen with my ears and eyes, even with my nose, to know what is appropriate for them.
“I’m committed to doing good children’s programs, working and playing with them face to face and then building programs and writing songs and stories for them. I don’t want anything else.”
Puppets Participate
There are several puppet characters in “Misterogers’ Neighborhood.” King Friday the 13th is very proper and pompous. Daniel, a striped tiger, who is tender and tame, lives in a clock. Grandpere is a warm, human character who gives the right advice.
The set for the show includes a living room and a kitchen. “Most families, regardless of how rich or how poor, have kitchens, and children can associate their environment with the program,” he said.
At present the show is taped for viewings in 19 cities and is highly popular in Boston where 9,000 people waited in line last year to greet Rogers on a personal appearance.
Currently, Rogers is preparing a new series of programs for National Educational Television (NET) which will be beamed over 120 stations beginning next February.
The father of two, Rogers is an ordained minister of the United Presbyterian Church. He earned a degree in music at Rollins College in Florida.
In preparing his programs, Rogers consults with Dr. Margaret McFarland, associate professor of psychology of the University of Pittsburgh’s School of Medicine.
“Young people tend to respond to ‘Misterogers Neighborhood’ as though it were an interaction between themselves and Rogers,” she said.

The TV Guide article mentioned above concludes:

For Rogers, his life-long goal to “create an atmosphere where children are accepted and allowed to grow” has gained national attention, with the results beginning to show. As one mother put it: “When Misterogers looks out from the television screen and says, ‘You're a very special person and I like you just the way you are,’ my little boy, who has big ears, glasses and an unruly cowlick, just beams. He accepts himself and feels stronger for it.”

Considering the bullying and bigotry in the world, nothing better could be said to an innocent and doubting child than “You’re not worthless.”

Fred Rogers is gone, but it’s a message that is needed today.

Bedtime for Sniffles Backgrounds

Bedtime For Sniffles has a low-key charm that makes it one of Chuck Jones’ early directoral successes.

The story is simple and logical, and Sniffles’ behaviour is natural and understandable. The plot is that Sniffles decides to wait up for the arrival of Santa Claus but, as time passes, he becomes sleepy.

The cartoon was released about a month before Christmas 1940. At that time, Paul Julian was responsible for Jones’ backgrounds with John McGrew providing scenic layouts. They try to avoid stagey settings. Here’s an overhead shot.



During 1939 and into 1940, Rich Hogan and Dave Monahan got alternating story credits on Jones’ cartoons, with Bob Givens’ name added in the rotation between them several times. Hogan has the screen credit in this cartoon, but you can see Julian managed to put Monahan’s name into the cartoon. (Monahan moved into the Freleng unit credit rotation before going into the service in World War Two).

Shots looking up and down at Sniffles' radio.



A pun in the background, logical for the Sniffles home.



McGrew and Julian put this background scene on an angle.



Cartoon Rule No. 5214 says “Things inside a mouse home must have been repurposed from elsewhere.” Thus, we get eyedroppers as hot and cold water taps and a hollowed-out walnut shell as a garbage can. Jerry of “Tom and” and, later, Pixie and Dixie did this all the time, where a thimble would be a bedside table, that kind of thing.

Here’s a lovely shot that Jones pans left to right. The bed is made from an Acme comb, and is on an overlay. There are punny college pennants. You can click on it (and any pictures on the blog) to enlarge it.



The final shot is a pan to a window. The window frame is on an overlay, allowing the artist to animate Santa and his reindeer in silhouette to come into the picture to end the cartoon, as the Sportsmen Quartet sings “Joy to the World.”



There always has to be a Grinch or Scrooge out there. The anonymous manager of the Park Theatre in North Vernon, Indiana opined to the Motion Picture Herald of Dec. 7, 1940: “Merrie Melodies—One of the poorest in this series of cartoons. Very appropriate for Christmas season, however.”

Well, I’m neither a Sniffles nor Christmas nor deliberately-paced early-Jones aficionado, but this is a well-made, gentle short that holds up, even today.

How To Make a Christmas Tree

Nothing says Christmas than a cartoon starring a Depression-era orphan in a shack unexpectedly getting presents from Santa Claus. Harman and Ising made one of those cartoons in The Shanty Where Santy Claus Lives (1933). And the Mintz studio did it a few years later in Gifts From the Air.

Much like in the Fleischers’ Christmas Comes But Once a Year, where Grampy invents toys from household items for kids in an orphange, the waif in this Columbia release creates a make-shift Christmas tree from things around the tumbledown home. First, a tattered umbrella.



Now, ornaments made from bubbles, including a star at the top.



A kitty cat conveniently shows up. The orphan rubs his fur to create static electricity, plugs the cat’s tail into a barrel and lights the tree. Hey, it’s better than Herman shoving a motionless Katnip’s tail into a light socket to do the same thing as in Mice Meeting You (1950). The electricity around the bubbles is hard to see in this pixilated video file.



This Color Rhapsody was copyrighted on December 22, 1936. While the official release date was January 1, 1937, a few theatres got it on their screens before then. The ad to the right is for a movie house in Ft. Worth on Christmas Day. The Ritz in San Bernadino showed it two days earlier with Bing Crosby’s Pennies From Heaven (an orphanage was in that one).

Ben Harrison came up with the story, with the animation credit going to Manny Gould. My guess is the song by a female trio as the boy is looking at toys in a shop window is a Joe De Nat original (“It’s Christmas time, it’s Christmas time, the glad time of the year. With lots of toys for girls and boys to bring them Christmas cheer” and so on). De Nat adds “O Come All Ye Faithful” and the inevitable “Jingle Bells” to the score. The cartoon ends with “Auld Lang Syne.”

The second half of the cartoon features something Columbia seems to have loved to put into its cartoons—radio star caricatures. Cantor, Bing, Bernie, Whiteman, Wynn and several others are here.

Motion Picture Exhibitor’s review of the cartoon in 1937 says “...a little boy gets a lot of fun out of some broken down toys. He prays and then believes the toys come from heaven.” Unless something has been edited in the re-release prints posted on-line, there’s no praying.

Wait a minute! What happened to the train and the elephant between scenes?



Mintz’s other Christmas time cartoon is the Art Davis-directed The Little Match Girl (1937) though there’s a Christmas sequence in the Scrappy-sans-Santa short Holiday Land (1934). (If I have missed one, leave a note in the comments).

Tralfaz Sunday Theatre: Tim Conway and Ernie Anderson

Before he cracked up Harvey Korman on The Carol Burnett Show, before he bumbled around with Joe Flynn on McHale’s Navy, Tim Conway had another partner in comedy.

Conway was a writer/director/actor on two TV stations in Cleveland in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, hooking up with an announcer and host named Ernie Anderson. Anderson ended up as Carol Burnett’s announcer after Lyle Waggoner left but is maybe better known as the voice of ABC-TV (“The Loooooove Boat” a specialty).

With the Yuletide season upon us, what better way to celebrate than with Conway and Anderson together on some short spots for Ohio Bell. They hold poses at the end for a voice-over tag.

He Banished the Blues

Jack Benny had several stage names before Benny Rubin (so goes one version of the story) suggested Ben Kubelsky change his name to Jack Benny. He had been using Ben K. Benny prior to this, but apparently Ben Bernie complained about the similarity and Jack adopted the name he was to use for the rest of his life. (One of the Salt Lake City papers announced Bernie was coming to the local Orpheum when it meant Benny).

Jack’s act was popular with pretty well all the newspaper critics. Let’s see what some of the papers had to say in 1920. One of his tours that year took him on the Orpheum circuit across Western Canada and down the West Coast. The Marx Bros. were on the bill with him until San Francisco, rejoining him when he was held over for a second week in Los Angeles.

Incidentally, following Benny and appearing at the Pantages in Vancouver starting April 1 was “just a young fellow trying to get along.” He was a juggler and ventriloquist named Fred Allen.

Ben Benny, the violinist, will offer his repertoire of operatic excerpts and popular selections calculated to banish blues. He will play and gag in such a way that he will keep his audience thoroughly amused until like Oliver Twist, they will ask for more. It is Benny’s ambition to prove that a violin in capable hands possesses a sense of humor. Winnipeg Tribune, Feb. 21, 1920

Ben K. Benny plays sweetly on the violin and talks even better. He was one of the best numbers on the show. Winnipeg Tribune, Feb. 24, 1920.

A violin is meant for something besides difficult concerns. In the proper hands it possesses a sense of humor. Of course, these must be the hands of a comedian as well as a musician and this is just what Ben.K. Benny is. He plays a little, gags a great deal and keeps his audience thoroughly amused. Just to show that he is really a musician he plays one operatic number, but the rest of the time he occupies the stage is devoted to banishing blues. Calgary Albertan, Feb. 26, 1920

A few minutes with Ben K. Benny only make the house wish it could have an hour with him and his violin and patter. Victoria Times, March 6, 1920.

A few minutes with Ben K. Benny with his violin will prove an acceptable offering. Benny can play his violin seriously, but he prefers for the moment to get comedy out of it. He plays a little, sings a little, but all the while his act is one that is meant for banishing blues. Vancouver Sun, March 6, 1920

Ben K. Benny makes himself most popular. A violin is his only companion and this he turns into a comedian. He intersperses trick playing with classical numbers, dispensing entertaining patter all the time. Vancouver Daily World, March 9, 1920

The “few minutes with Ben K. Benny” were all too short. He plays the violin well and is a still better comedian. His comedy is new and never forced and the big applause he received was merited. Daily Province, Vancouver, March 9, 1920.

Ben K. Benny, a talented boy with a violin and the gift of comdy offers an exceedingly entertaining turn. Ben looks like the twin brother of the accordeon [sic] “nut” we heard here last week. Vancouver Sun, March 9, 1920 (The accordionist, by the way, was Phil Baker)

Ben K. Benny gets all there is to get out of a violin, interspersed with a clever line of patter. Daily Province, Vancouver, March 12, 1920.

Ben K. Benny uses a violin to advantage in putting over his monologue. His “line” is new and his playing good. He shared honors with the headliner for applause Sunday. Seattle Star, March 15, 1920.

Ben Benny is a likable young chap of ingratiating personality who tells stories, mostly about a girl he claims in Seattle. When he plays San Francisco next week the girl will have moved to Portland. She’s a nice enough girl, according to Ben, but her family has its faults. “Whenever you see two men talking on a corner and one of them looks bored to death, the other one is her brother,” explains Ben. For commas and periods and exclamation marks in his chatterlogue Benny fiddles delightfully. Leone Cass Baer, Oregonian, March 22, 1920

Ben K. Benny says that he is the brother of Phil Baker, who was here last week, and since he is quite as amusing as Baker and has all the tricks of voice and expression, why dispute him? He has a good line of rapid comedy. San Francisco Chronicle, March 29, 1920

Ben K. Benny, with his violin and a battery of witty remarks, also proved a popular feature, drawing down several encores. Oakland Enquirer, Apr. 5, 1920

Ben K. Benny Heads Orpheum Bill
Ben K. Benny gives Orpheum audiences a few worthwhile minutes this week with his violin and comedy chatter. Benny has a monologue that gets across big and a personality that makes him many friends. Sacramento Star, April 12, 1920

Ben K. Benny took possession of the audience with his pleasing personality, his captivating smile and last but not least his whimsical way of playing the violin. He wanders along chattering the way, with a stop now and then to draw a strain or two of music from his fiddle. Sacramento Union, April 12, 1920

A few minutes with Ben K. Benny are sufficient to bring out his ability as a comedian and trick violin player. In his more serious moments he gives evidence of his skill with the bow. Sacramento Bee, April 12, 1920

The good-looking Ben K. Benny has lost his baby stare and acquired a monologue since we saw him last, but he still plays the violin to a flirting obbligato, or vice versa, just as you please. Ask the girls on the front row. Anyhow he stops the show. Los Angeles Times, April 20, 1920

Phil Baker wanders on and off the stage the entire program, just as a bad boy from a good family should. He plays the accordeon a bit, chats a while and gets the laughs generally. He assists Ben K. Benny and his violin, although Mr. Benny is well able to take care of himself with his stories and foolishness. Los Angeles Record, April 20, 1920

Ben K. Benny is still popular with his violin and line of stories. Los Angeles Times, April 27, 1920

There’s always one in the crowd who disagrees. After Los Angeles, Jack moved to the next spot in the circuit: Salt Lake City.

Ben K. Benny plays the violin a little and talks endlessly. He would add to his act materially if he were to play more. Deseret News, May 6, 1920

The anonymous critic liked all the other acts.

Jack carried on with stops in Denver, Lincoln, Omaha, Kansas City (where he finished the season) and a few others according to ads in local papers. Variety’s weekly round-up of vaudeville bills isn’t altogether complete as it does not mention, for example, the Orpheum in Victoria, B.C. which, at one time, was where acts bought booze and tried to get it through customs into the Prohibition-strangled U.S. via Seattle. Not always with success.

The following September 13 when he appeared in the Monday matinee at the State-Lake in Chicago, after a stop at the Orpheum in St. Louis, he had a new name. So it was that Benny Kubelsky’s career as Jack Benny began.

Being a Cartoon Musician

Is there any doubt that Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf was the most popular song written for a cartoon short in the 1930s?

It was composed by Frank Churchill with Ann Ronell. Churchill went on to write “Heigh Ho, Heigh Ho,” “Whistle While You Work” and “Some Day My Prince Will Come.”

It would seem there would be no better person to talk about cartoon music to Tempo magazine than Churchill. This feature story is in the January 1938 issue.

Cartoon Comedy Scores
How They are Written And Synchronized
by Frank Churchill
(As told to Charles Gant)
THE music for a cartoon comedy is planned when the story is prepared and written, before the cartoons are drawn. I start by getting together with the writers—“story men,” we call them—in a conference in which we sit around and discuss the plot and its characters. The music must suit the characters emphasized in each scene or sequence and the next step is to lay out a “break-down” in which the sequences are separated into footage-shots. The secret of synchronization, one of the most important items in our type of work, where the characters usually perform in rhythm with the music, is merely a mathematical problem. We know how many frames of film fall to the bar of music and write the music accordingly. Of course, this method has its difficulties, but nothing that can’t be overcome with knowledge and experience. It is a matter of timing the tempos and rhythms to correspond with the proper number of frames of films.
It is possible to use any kind of time 4-4, 2-4, 6-8, even 5-4, providing the fundamental beat is kept in synchronization with the proper number of frames. When this is done it is a relatively simple matter for the animators (those who make the series of drawings that give movement to the figures) to keep their characters in time with the music. For example, a horse is to gallop with his hoofs moving in time with the music. The animator contrives that the horse’s movements coincide with the required number of frames and there’s no chance for error.
Recording

The music may be recorded without even seeing the picture, though we often make piano soundtracks to use with the rough tests just to check up. In recording, the conductor, and many of the musicians wear earphones, through which they get a beat supplied from a mechanical device which supplies a beat adjusted to fit with the film when it is run. The rhythm section always wears earphones.
Composing
When I joined the Disney company, about a year after the advent of sound-pictures, it was customary to use excerpts from familiar—often too familiar—sources. I was engaged to adapt music of this kind and discovered very soon that it was impossible to avoid hackneyed themes of the well known “spring song” and “flower dance” type. It was sometimes difficult to synchronize these themes with the action, so I started composing original scores. Since that time I have batted out some 75 complete scores, not to mention countless sequences discarded because of changes in the picture during production, which necessitated turning out new music to go with the new sequence. For me, writing has become easier as the time went by, each score seeming to supply ideas which could developed rapidly for the next one. After a number of years of this kind of work it gets to be just another routine job to the writer who spends so many hours a day at it, but I believe I find the work as interesting as that of any of the studio music writers. However, when I’m through with the day at work I rarely feel like attending a concert or listening to the radio. I’d rather sit down to a game of poker or go to a prize fight.
Songwriting
For the score of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, I did, in addition to most of the background music 10 songs (lyrics by Larry Morey), two of which were cut out of the picture but which will be published along with the others. Some of these I wrote as much as three years ago when we first started work on Snow White. Tune writing has always been easy for me. It’s just a knack, I guess, that some people have and others don’t.
One of the best known studio composers, who has turned out some outstanding scores, can’t write a tune to save his life. I have some tunes among the Snow White songs that I think arc pretty fair melodies. One of the best I wrote in five minutes. If some of the Snow White songs go over as well as I hope, I may devote more time to songwriting in the future.
Recording Musicians
The musicians we use for recording dates have to be thoroughly schooled men, all-round performers who can “cut” anything at sight, and in addition they have to be handy at putting in the odd effects we use in cartoon music, and doing them in the right way. The cartoon comedy music calls for the same high degree of ability necessary for any studio musician and often a little more. Many of the odd effects you hear in cartoon comedy music sound as though they had been produced by novelty instruments, and while we do use “jug bands” and other novelty instruments at times, many of the effects are just standard instruments playing the “trick stuff” we write for them. A knowledge of how to write these effects into the music, and an ability on the part of the musicians to play them, are important features in this kind of work.

The “Studio Briefs” item referred to in the photo reads:

Reorganization of the music department for Universal’s Walter Lantz productions (Oswald Rabbit Cartoons) brought in Nat Shilkret as musical director, Frank Churchill (see Page 6) as composer, Frank Marsales as arranger and sound technician. Lantz office said purpose of new set-up was to give productions musical background of the highest possible character. It is also rumored that Shilkret has contract for music on an ambitious series of commercial cartoon pictures to be sponsored by a toothpaste company.

Lantz seems to have decided to cough up a good deal of money around this time, also hiring Burt Gillett to direct and Willy Pogany to paint backgrounds.

Why Churchill left for Lantz after Snow White may be told in some Disney history book, but Lantz began to have money troubles and Churchill returned to write for Dumbo and Bambi. The stress of work, perhaps coupled with alcohol, got to him. ”My nerves have completely left me,” he wrote in his suicide note to his wife. He died May 14, 1942, age 40. Neal Gabler’s book on Disney says:

Always sorrowful and sensitive, he had no doubt been further depressed by Walt’s ongoing dissatisfaction with his work on Bambi. (Churchill had written a great score for the “musical circle of Hollywood,” Walt griped, but one that was monotonous and did not provide the excitement the movie needed.)
Churchill’s last request was that “Love Is a Song,” which he had written for Bambi, be dedicated to his wife, Carolyn, who had been Walt’s personal secretary from June 1930 to January 1934, when she married Churchill. But even that was denied since the song had already gone to the publisher.

The incomparable theatrical cartoon movie expert Daniel Goldmark deserves thanks for this post, alerting me that a number of old music publications are available on-line, albeit behind a paywall.

I don’t want to end this post with a suicide, so here’s a low-resolution photo from Tempo of July 1934. This may be the only shot of Carl Stalling with Art Turkisher. It shows they worked together on films at Iwerks.


The copy accompanying the photo reads:

ARTHUR TURKISHER
Born in New York City, Turkisher is the youngest musical director in any motion picture studio. Prior to his coming to Hollywood he was employed in the New York Paramount Studio, where he assisted in the scoring of pictures when sound was first adopted in the studios.
He has appeared with the Columbia Broadcasting Company and secured an assignment at Fleischers to assist in the technical direction and synchronizing and scoring of animated cartoons. He has acted as musical director on more than 130 pictures.
For the past fourteen months, he has been employed by UB Iwerks as musical director for scoring and arranging, and directed many Flip the Frog,” “Willie Whopper and “ComiColor” cartoons.
Turkisher is a concert cellist.

CARL STALLING
Born in Lexington, Mo., Carl Stalling had his own orchestra in Kansas City for ten years, during which time he specialized in the pipe organ which he played in conjunction with his orchestra work in Kansas City, Chicago and other cities in the Middle West.
Stalling joined UB Iwerk’s [sic] animated Pictures Corporation studio in Beverly Hills about three years ago and has created innumerable scores for animated cartoons, many of which have been played over national radio networks, this with particular reference to his original musical creation of “The Little Red Hen” which was played over the Pacific Coast network on an average of twelve times a day for a period of three weeks when the picture was released.

Turkisher never got screen credit on Jungle Jitters (released July 28, 1934). He seems to have had the same relationship with Stalling that Milt Franklyn did when Stalling replaced Norman Spencer at the Schlesinger studio.

Turkisher was back in New York by 1938 as he was on the executive of AFM Local 802. You can read more about him in this post. One thing not included is a piece from the Santa Barbara Morning Press of July 3, 1934:

Mr. and Mrs. Frank Morley Fletcher of Los Angeles are the guests of Charles Hinman Graves for a few days. Mr. Fletcher, well known for his color prints done in the Japanese manner, but essentially a portrait painter, has just refinished a life-size canvas of James Culhane, prominent moving picture director, and Mrs. Culhane. His portrait of the young Hungarian ‘cellist, Arthur Turkisher, given its first public showing in Los Angeles recently, was enthusiastically received by critics in the southern city.

Culhane and Turkisher worked together at Iwerks.

Hearing the Dover Boys

The Dover Boys is yet another Chuck Jones cartoon where oodles has been written about it (including by Jones himself on numerous occasions) being some kind of animation breakthrough.

It also includes a hoary gag that dates back to the silent cartoon days, when a written word would come out of a character’s mouth.

The scene focuses on the Dover Boys’ arch-enemy Dan Backslide (“coward, bully, cad and thief”) playing a solo game of pool inside a haze of cigarette smoke.



Backslide draws himself up (with a little dollop of cloud on top of his head), puts his hand to ear and exclaims “Hark.” Just like in a Felix the cat cartoon from the 1920s, the letters of the word come out of his mouth before floating upward and out of the scene.



One of the things this cartoon is known for is its stretch in-betweens. Here are a couple of examples in this scene.



I wonder how animator Ken Harris felt about the buck teeth on Backslide, since the character is a caricature of him.

Reviews of this cartoon at the time of release (Sept. 19, 1942) didn’t wax on and on about Chuck Jones’ employment of limited animation. Here are two from the Motion Picture Herald:

This is a college satire in a big way and definitely should get its share of laughs from your audience as it did from ours.—Thomas DiLorenzo, New Paltz Theatre, New Paltz, N. Y.

I report one short every five years (only because of exceptional merit or the very opposite). This is of the latter variety. This is a poor one in the midst of a fine series of cartoons.—L. V. Bergtold, Westby Theatre, Westby, Wis.

Tedd Pierce receives the story credit on screen, while it was Bobe Cannon’s turn for the rotating animation credit.