Hare Splitter Smears

Smear in-betweens show up in three scenes of the Bugs Bunny cartoon Hare Splitter, directed by Friz Freleng.

In the first scene, Bugs and Casbah both rise up from their holes (on platforms) with flowers they each intend to give to Daisy Lou. Bugs notices Casbah’s bunch is bigger than his.



The rest of the scene contains fine expressions as the two rabbits go back into their holes to emerge with larger gifts, ending with the annoyed Bugs bringing up an anvil to drop on Casbah's head.

Bugs then spends a good deal of the cartoon pretending to be Daisy Lou to give the woiks to the dopey Casbah.

Bugs is on Daisy Lou's porch. He sees something.



There's a cut to Daisy Lou coming up the sidewalk. Bugs looks around then runs out of the scene.



Of course, Casbah thinks Daisy Lou is Bugs and she takes care of things (off-camera).

Virgil Ross, Gerry Chiniquy, Ken Champin and Manny Perez animated the cartoon, released in September 1948. This is the first Freleng cartoon with a solo story credit to Tedd Pierce after Mike Maltese moved to the Chuck Jones unit.

The music under the opening credits is Don’t Take Your Love From Me by Henry Nemo in a tempo a lot quicker than what you’d normally hear it sung in.

Magoo's Payoff

Pink and Blue Blues starts off with Mr. Magoo mistaking a fish bowl for a television and a fish for Esther Williams, and spends the remainder of the cartoon mistaking just about everything for something else.

Bill Scott weaves a robber, a child being baby-sat, a dog and a tube of toothpaste into the plot, so at the end, police show up to arrest a robber and praise Magoo for being “right on the job.”

Through it all, we get non-stop chatter from Jim Backus. It would impossible to make a silent Magoo cartoon.

In one gag, Magoo mistakes his cuckoo clock for a pay phone.



This sets up the final gag of the cartoon. Magoo has already mistaken a burglar for a police officer. At the end he mistakes a police box for the same officer.



The camera trucks in to show the cuckoo bird reacting to Magoo with a familiar sound. Then Scott adds a nice touch by having the 78 nickels Magoo has slipped into the clock pour out like a jackpot from a one-armed bandit.



To be honest, I was going to talk about another Magoo cartoon, but it had more of the same “almost-blind old guy mistakes stuff” and endless dialogue from Backus, all surrounded by flat backgrounds.

It must be me. Magoo was an incredible popular character, employed to sell light bulbs and beer. The commercials I generally like, and some of the Magoo theatricals I enjoy, but I just can’t get excited about others. And don’t get me started on the TV “Magloo” series after Hank Saperstein took over the studio.

This short was released in 1952. It was directed by Pete Burness, who maintains a good pace throughout, with designs by Ted Parmelee and credited animation by Rudy Larriva, Phil Monroe and Tom McDonald.

Laugh-In's Englishman

Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In burst forth onto the scene at the start of 1968 and made stars of the regular cast members.

Well, almost all of them.

As a Toronto newspaper asked in 1983, whatever happened to Roddy Maude-Roxby?

Unlike other players on the show, it doesn’t appear he was interviewed in print at the time it rocketed in the ratings, and he was the only regular besides Larry “Hogan’s Heroes” Hovis who didn’t return for a second season (Eileen Brennan was supposedly a regular in the first season, but didn’t appear every week).

In 1969, Maude-Roxby was back on television in England. He was a performer in the six-episode London Weekend Television series The Complete and Utter History of Britain, written by Terry Jones and Michael Palin, soon to be of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Jones was quoted in “The Pythons” (Thomas Dunne Books, 2003) he was very frustrated that Maude-Roxby would constantly ad-lib and never learn lines.

As well, Maude-Roxby was signed in May 1969 (according to Hollywood Citizen-News) to voice the villainous English butler in the Disney feature The Aristocats. It would appear much of the rest of his career was on the stage, which is where he came from (in New York, he appeared in a comedy directed by Mike Nichols) before joining the Laugh-In gang.

Maude-Roxby wasn’t only a comedian. One of Australia’s newspapers, The Age, of October 10, 1968 revealed:

Roddy has a connection with Melbourne and indeed with this newspaper dating back to 1947 when he came to Australia with his brother, Chris, who worked as a cadet journalist on “The Age.”
For a short period during the three years the brothers stayed in this country, Roddy drew a weekly cartoon strip—Bulgy the Frog—for “Junior Age” know in those days as “The Age” Junior Section.
He also appeared in a local children’s radio series. When the brothers returned to England, Roddy enrolled at the Royal College of Art.
Apart from his work in the theatre, in cabaret and on television, he has exhibited his paintings (described as abstract-cum-figurative) in London.

The closest thing to a biography about him I’ve found is in the Ottawa Journal of April 9, 1977. He was part of a four-man improv comedy group that was brought to Canada from England at the behest of the Ottawa Board of Education drama consultant. We’ve snipped out extraneous copy to focus on Maude-Roxby’s past.

Theatre Machine
Wheeling and dealing in free-form comedy
By Jean Southworth
Journal Arts Writer
When Roddy Maude-Roxby was studying at the Royal College of Art in London, England, in the late 1950s he found that his main interest lay in theatre. His imaginative work with the student drama group at the college led to a professional engagement in a West End revue, One to Another, and he has been involved in theatre ever since.
He now is active in a group called Theatre Machine which has developed a unique type of improvisational theatre. He and two other members of the group, Ben Benison and Richardson Morgan, arrived in Ottawa this week for a series of high school and university appearances. They will conclude their visit with a public performance in the University of Ottawa's Academic Hall next Saturday at 8.30 p.m. John Muirhead, the fourth member, was unable to make the trip because of commitments, in London. ...
Roddy Maude-Roxby was born in London but grew up in Somerset and attended Brambletye School in Devon. When he was in his early teens he produced two books containing stories and drawings for children. On leaving school he went to Australia with his two brothers. He got some acting experience there through working for a children's newspaper which sponsored a radio program. When he returned to England he did a period of national service and took up art studies.
He explained in an interview that there was a connection between the Royal College of Art and London's Royal Court Theatre, which had become primarily a "writers' theatre". When he staged Beckett's Endgame at the college, for instance, he was able to borrow the dustbins which had been used in the original Royal Court production of the play.
During the 1960s he took part in various plays at the theatre in Sloane Square. These included the original productions of N.F. Simpson's One-Way Pendulum and Joe Orton's Erpingham Camp, and a production of Chekhov's The Three Sisters in which Glenda Jackson, Marianne Faithful and Avril Elgar played the title roles. He said the Simpson play received unfavorable reviews when it opened in Brighton but it was a success at the Royal Court. ...
Some years ago Maude-Roxby performed in New York with The Establishment, a company based in the Soho section of London. He went on to Hollywood to appear in the Laugh-In TV series. He also spoke the part of the butler in the Walt Disney animated feature film The Aristocats.
During 1973-74 he played in Habeas Corpus, with Alec Guinness, at the Lyric Theatre in London's West End. He appeared in Relatively Speaking at the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield in 1975 and returned there last fall to play Professor Higgins in My Fair Lady.

The Establishment appeared once on TV. A one-hour special, written by Peter Cook, aired on March 30, 1964, taped in New York and broadcast on WNEW-TV and at least two other stations in syndication. Maude-Roxby, Peter Bellwood, Francis Bethencourt, Carole Simpson and non-Brit Alexandra Berlin appeared in satirical sketches that targeted heterosexuality, which seems pretty daring for 1964. Kay Gardella of the Daily News said Maude-Roxby “was at his best portraying a confused cabinet minister called upon to explain why he was seen dressed in nothing but a Masonic apron waving a speckled trout over the heads of two kneeling persons. His description of an art film, ‘Adam and Eve,’ was for [far] more suited to the bistro environment than TV.” The New York Times reported an hour and 45 minutes was taped, and four-letter words were the first thing taken out to bring the revue to time.

Maude-Roxby had one more crack at a regular TV series in the U.S. Jay Sandrich directed him in a pilot for a proposed show based on the 1967 movie To Sir With Love (Hari Rhodes played the Sidney Poitier part from the movie, Maude-Roxby had the role of a French teacher). It was not picked up, but CBS aired the half-hour on April 19, 1974.

Laugh-In liked to have a Brit component every once in a while. Monte Landis appeared in the pilot but when it became a series, Maude-Roxby was brought in. Writer Jeremy Lloyd was part of the cast for a year, and Richard Dawson also appeared on the show. Then there was Judy Carne, the former co-star of Love on a Rooftop, who tired of the show and left after periodic appearances in the third season. Maude-Roxby moved on to other endeavours before that.

It's Not What You Think

There should be a drinking game where you glug down something every time someone in a Bosko cartoon says “Ain’t that cute?”

In The Tree’s Knees (1931), we get it twice in a little over three minutes.

After the second time, something falls from the sky and lands on our hero.



Cut to the bird above. No, Bosko, it’s not what you think.



I guess it’s tree sap.

Inevitably, Frank Marsales plays Otto Rasbach's Trees in the background, and we get Walkin’ My Baby Back Home, then Joe Burke and Al Dubin’s Dancing With Tears in My Eyes when a waltzing weeping willow is, well, you can guess.

Friz Freleng and Ham Hamilton are the credited animators.

Copies from battered old Sunset Productions prints are better than nothing, but it’s a shame that’s the way we have to see much of Bosko’s Warners career.

Sinatra Kills Me

Tex Avery marries the old “skunks always smell in cartoons” idea with the gag about Frank Sinatra being incredibly thin but attracting bobby soxers in Little 'Tinker, a 1948 MGM release.

There’s a scene where an old woman rabbit goes youthful and nuts for Frankie, finally leaping into the air and crashing into ground. A falling tombstone ends the scene.



Jokes about a scrawny Sinatra abounded on comedy/variety shows on radio, even during his guest appearances. One routine in 1950 had Jack Benny ask him what he had for lunch. “A raisin,” replied Sinatra, adding “Boy, am I stuffed!”

Animation in this cartoon is by Bill Shull, Walt Clinton, Grant Simmons and Bob Bentley. No writer is credited.

Comedians Stay Out of Brawls, Says Jack Benny

Do comedians have happy lives?

The public Jack Benny said “yes.” At least in 1952.

Later in life, Benny admitted he had his emotional ups and downs, confirmed by manager Irving Fein in his Benny biography.

He talked with the United Press about the life of a comedian, and nixed the idea of an autobiography. It turns out he started one and hefty portions of it were used in Joan Benny’s book about her life with her father. The ad next to the article is there for decoration, and to show that Jack and Arthur Godfrey shilled for the network's TV-manufacturing subsidiary in the press. Its failure is a whole other story.

Jack Benny Says Comedians Don't Have Time For Grief
By EDITH KERMIT ROOSEVELT
HOLLYWOOD, Dec. 2—(UP)—Jack Benny said Tuesday comedians are the goody-goodies of show business because they don't have time to get into mischief. "You don't find as many comedians getting divorces, signing papers they wish they hadn't or getting in night club brawls," he said. "You know why? We work too hard."
Benny said his love life had never been a problem. He's been happily married to the same woman for 26 years. Motion picture actors, he said, don't work every day. They have lots of time between pictures—and while they're making them. But comedians, he said, are on the go every moment. Benny himself, when he's not working on his CBS television show, is giving countless numbers of benefit performances.
HE SAID he even wakes up at 3 a.m. to write material for his shows. He doesn't leave it all to his writers.
"That's the headache with comedians—getting new material," he sighed.
"A guy like Jimmy Durante is such a lovable guy he doesn't have to worry so much as the rest of us," he said. "But getting new gags is always a problem—except for Milton Berle, of course," he wisecracked.
Another reason Benny gave for comedians being happy-go-lucky in their private lives is "we aren't intellectuals. I don't think a college man would make a good comedian," he said. "You've got to be down-to-earth in this business. You can't be highbrow."
THINKING too much gets a lot of people into trouble, he commented.
Benny said he guessed most people would say he had lived a rather dull life.
"Now that the life story of Eddie Cantor's being made into a movie and Tallulah's a best seller, they're telling me I should write the story of my life," he said. "But I don't want to. First place, it would be conceited to do it and then there's nothing to write about. I was never really down on my luck. Ever since I started it was a slow steady rise, earning more money every year."
Benny said the only trouble he ever had was once when he had pneumonia.
Although he came from a poor family, he said, he always had enough to eat and wear and his dad encouraged him in show business.

As a side-note, the Edith Kermit Roosevelt who wrote the column was not the former First Lady of the U.S. Teddy’s wife died in 1948. This was one of their granddaughters. She gave up show business reporting within two months of writing this story and found employment with a paper in Yreka in northern California. In 1954, she was back at the United Press in its Washington, D.C. bureau and later because a self-syndicated columnist. She died on July 22, 2003 in Miami.

That Ain't the Way I Heerd It

In the mid-1930s, when theatrical animation on the West Coast had reached the point where studios needed professional actors to voice their characters, they had a ready-made talent pool at radio stations.

It was not only still a time of dialects but the rise of impersonations, as someone imitating the voice of a talking picture or vaudeville star got laughs on the air.

One of these radio actors who got side-work in cartoons was Bill Thompson.

His show business career started as a boy. Here’s a pretty good radio career summary from the Hollywood Citizen-News, March 10, 1952.

‘OLD TIMER’
Bill Thompson Does Various Characters
Millions of listeners to NBC radio's “Fibber McGee and Molly Show" know him as Wallace Wimple, shy, henpecked little man who studies his beloved bird book when not dodging his "big, fat wife, Sweetyface."
Or, as the Old Timer, who repeats old, trusted jokes at the drop of a hat.
Or, as Horatio K. Boomer, whose pockets are constantly crammed with all manner of strange devices.
Or, as Nick Depopolis, past master of the old Greek art of English mispronunciation.
Or as Bill Thompson, 'off-mike.'
Or, if there's a need for formal identification, William Henry Thompson, Jr.
Whoever or whichever, Mr. “Bill’s Good Enough" Thompson is one of the cleverest and most versatile young men in the business of radio dialects.
Brown-eyed Bill was literally born into show business — and practically smack on an international border. Shortly before his birth, his mother, then on a vaudeville tour in Canada with his father, was obliged to return to Terre Haute, Indiana post-haste, so Bill could be born in the United States. They arrived just under the wire!
Young William Henry's first stage appearance came six weeks later, when he was carried onto a Terre Haute stage by his proud and beaming papa. And hardly two years had gone by before Bill began his professional career with his parents by doing a tap dance with their act.
Even attendance at Chicago's Lemoyne Grammar School and Lakeview High School didn't keep the active young man off the stage. Each year, until he was 12, he toured the variety circuits with his mother and father, fitting into their set by dancing and telling dialect stories and jokes.
One of the high spots of his public appearances came in 1919 when he was awarded a citation by Secretary of the Treasury Carter Glass, for having sold more than $2,000,000 in Liberty Bonds!
In 1934, while an usher at Chicago's Century of Progress Exposition, gleeful Bill won an NBC audition and was put under contract to the network. His first appearance on a network show was on the National Farm and Home Hour.
After playing various radio shows in the Windy City for two years, Bill joined the ''Fibber McGee and Molly" program. He's been with the popular network show ever since, except for a two-year cruise in the Navy, from 1943 to 1946.
Today, Bill's greatest interest outside his radio activities is his work with the Boys Club of America.

Fibber McGee and Molly originated in Chicago. When Jim and Marian Jordan were signed to a film contract by Paramount in 1937, they moved the show to the West Coast. And there it stayed. Thompson came along.

It would appear, if I’m reading Keith Scott’s books properly, Thompson’s first cartoon was for Walter Lantz in Arabs With Dirty Fezzes in 1939. He took his Horatio K. Boomer voice to Warners Bros. for two appearances as W.C. Fieldmouse opposite Little Blabbermouse. Then, it was to MGM, where Tex Avery cast him as Adolf Wolf in Blitz Wolf and then as Droopy in Dumb-Hounded; that voice was more-or-less the same as Wallace Wimple's.

The story above indicates Thompson enlisted for war duty; a feature article in the June 5, 1945 edition of the Akron Beacon Journal stated he entered naval training at Great Lakes in February 1944 and became SP (A) William Thompson, U.S.N. The story went on:

The "A" in his navy title does not mean "Actor" . . . He is a part of the athletic department of the navy . . . originally commanded by Gene Tunney . . . which is similar to the Special Service corps of the army . . . His job as a physical instructor is putting men through athletic drills and entertaining.

Thompson had to put his radio and cartoon careers on hold. It’s thought Tex Avery himself voiced Droopy during the interim. Fibber brought in other characters instead of trying to duplicate Thompson's voices (though the old-timer was originally played by Cliff Arquette).

He returned to radio and cartoons after the war, finding a good chunk of work in features and shorts for Walt Disney in the 1950s. Radio was dying and NBC slowly dismantled Fibber McGee and Molly until all that was left were the two title characters. He had to find a new career.

Thompson had other interests, as we learn in this story from the Ft. Worth Star-Telegram, March 25, 1962. It's interesting the columnist would know about Droopy. Thompson never received screen credit for the role and this was a time before animation history books

Old Timer Known for Aid To Boy Clubs
BY ELSTON BROOKS
The announcement said W. H. Thompson Jr. of the Union Oil Company would speak on "Juvenile Decency" at the First Methodist Church meeting of the North Side Kiwanis Club—and it certainly didn't sound like amusements column fodder.
But that wasn't just W. H. Thompson up at the rostrum Friday. It was Wallace Wimple and Horatio K. Boomer and the Old Timer and Nick DePopolous—and even Droopy, the hangdog pup of the Metro cartoons.
Bill Thompson, one of the most famed voices in show business, has been hitting the luncheon club circuit full-time in behalf of his beloved Boys' Clubs of America ever since Fibber McGee and Molly dropped their Tuesday night stranglehold on network radio in 1956.
"IT'S NOTHING NEW, this work for Boys' Clubs," he told us in his rarely heard normal voice. "I was doing it for 20 years before I quit showbusiness. Three days a week it was radio, four days it was work with Boys' Clubs."
Oddly enough, Thompson has never had a boy of his own, nor a "mean ole Sweetie Face," as Wallace Wimple used to describe his wife. At 49, Thompson still is a bachelor.
"I guess it's that I always wanted to be a Texas Ranger when I was a kid back in Indiana. But you can't always go on a police force, and I found out I could help in other says back when we did the Fibber McGee show in Chicago. "I saw a need for club activity for boys—not just gangs. I’ve been in the work ever since, continuing it when we moved the show to Hollywood."
• • •
TODAY, THOMPSON is public service representative of the Union Oil Company, a West Coast firm that allows Thompson to make his good will talks around the country. Herbert Hoover has appointed him national director of the Boys' Clubs of America, and Thompson, in turn, is elated at landing his old boss, Walt Disney, on the board.
"I did a lot of work for Walt," the diminutive, red-haired actor recalled. "I was the voice of the white rabbit in 'Alice in Wonderland,' and Mr. Smee, the pirate, in 'Peter Pan,' and the Scotty in 'Lady and the Tramp' . . ."
"And, of course, Droopy, the pooped pup," we reminded.
Thompson laughed, and came up with his most famous voice: "That's pretty good, Johnny, but that ain't the way I heerd it. The way I heerd it, one feller says to the other feller, sa-y-y-y, he sez . . ."
We felt obligated to ask another question, because the Old Timer rarely finished one of his stories. We asked him for a match—and got the response we were hoping for.
"Match, match, let's see," said Horatio K. Boomer in that W. C. Fields voice. "Here's a poem I wrote once, and a check for a short beer. Well, well, whaddya know? No match."

Thompson had a couple of cracks at stardom. ABC gave him a half-hour sitcom, opposite the Carnation Contented Hour and the Gulf Screen Guild Players. It lasted from March 4 to May 27, 1946 before the network cancelled it.

And then there was the lead role in an animated sitcom. He had a wife named Wilma and a neighbour named Barney, who was played by Hal Smith. Smith explained what happened in Tim Lawson’s book ‘The Magic Behind the Voices’:

Bill Thompson was a good actor, but he had something wrong with his throat. He couldn’t sustain that gravel they wanted in Fred, so Mel [Blanc] and Alan Reed started rehearsing. We had already recorded the first five episodes, and finally, we were recording one night and Bill would cough and he would stop and he’d say, ‘I just can’t keep that gravel,’ Joe Barbera was directing, and he called us in and said, ‘You know, this isn’t working.’ And I said, ‘Well, it really isn’t. It’s difficult for Bill Thompson to hang onto his voice like that because he just doesn’t have it.’ So he said, ‘Well, Mel and Alan have been rehearsing and practicing this, so I think we’re going to let them do it.’

Hanna-Barbera still had a spot for Thompson. He went on to the far less memorable role as Touché Turtle in the early ‘60s.

Thompson’s animation career didn’t last much longer. He had just turned 58 when he died on July 15, 1971.

Scary Jerry

The Lonesome Mouse (1943) is an unusual cartoon in some ways. In the early years of the series, Tom and Jerry battle each other, but when the maid comes into the room, she only yells at Tom, while Jerry hides somewhere. In The Lonesome Mouse, the housekeeper actually interacts with the mouse.

Jerry is supposed to be scaring her, but his expressions are more goofy than frightening.



Cut to the “pull up multiple skirt” gag. I don’t have these cartoons memorised so I can’t tell you which other cartoon re-used this. I’m pretty sure one of them did.



The other unusual thing in this short is there is dialogue between Tom and Jerry to drive the plot. It doesn’t seem right to have the characters talking. I thought Cal Howard was doing Tom’s dopey voice—it’s speculated he played the dog in the Screwy Squirrel cartoons and was writing for the Hanna-Barbera unit—but Keith Scott says it’s Harry Lang. Lillian Randolph is the maid, and even gets to sing a few bars of “How About You?”, written by Burton Lane and Vancouver-born Ralph Freed (his father owned a furniture shop) for the 1941 feature Babes on Broadway.

A Hole in the Ground

Ah, yes, the old cartoon gag of lifting up or moving a hole. Here’s an example from the early days of sound in Walt Disney’s The Picnic (1930).

This scene features a rabbit with one of those belly-buttons beloved in cartoons in the 1920s. and an early version of Pluto (named “Little Rover” here). The fun is in the dog`s woozy expression after crashing into the ground.



The little birds that fly around from a dot, shrink back into one, which becomes exploding lines.

There’s a lot of dancing and cycle animation in this cartoon, starring Mickey and Minnie, and that turn-of-the-century favourite song, “In The Good old Summer Time.”