Being Backus

UPA’s Mr. Magoo cartoons had sight gags (in more ways than one), but what really benefited them was the vocal performance of Jim Backus.

How much of the dialogue was improvised is unclear, but Backus could go from sweet to annoyed to emphatic. He gave Magoo’s personality some colour amongst endless sketchy backgrounds and a continual inability to read signs.

The TV writer for one of the newspapers in Memphis gave a short report on Backus and Magoo in its edition of September 5, 1961. He didn’t actually speak with Backus. Charles Collingwood did. The writer simply relayed parts of their conversation from the September 1 edition of Person To Person on CBS. There is a mention of how Backus was making his big money from Magoo—not on the cartoons, but on a series of animated commercials for General Electric light bulbs. It ran for several years and we can only imagine the Thurston Howell-like residuals they brought in.

The column ends with words about prime-time cartoons that were to start the 1961-62 season. The trend came and went quickly. As prime-time programming, it was a failure. However, reruns on weekend mornings were welcomed by kids everywhere and kept the characters living. And making money for their owners.

In T-V Cartoons, Voice Comes First
By ROBERT JOHNSON, Press-Scimitar Staff Writer
When Person to Person cameras peered into his home the other night, Jim Backus answered a question which had never worried me it all, but which in retrospect seemed interesting.
Jim had one of his greatest successes as the Voice of Mister Magoo, the near-sighted little bumbler who won an Academy Award and is now one of the busiest salesmen in the commercials.
The question: Which comes first in an animated cartoon, the figure or the voice?
It’s the voice, said Backus. He gets a script, studies it then puts his part on tape. The pen-and-ink fellows then have to do the hard part— matching the animation to the voice.
Altho I have been around cartoon studios numerous times, I had somehow just always taken it for granted that they made the cartoons, then the actors match the voices in.
Saves Actors a Lot of Work
The way they do it not only makes sense, but it must save the actors who are voices for cartoon characters a lot of work. It's almost like working radio, with a script there to read from.
Backus was one of the best subjects Person to Person has ever presented, I thought. He is not the biggest of stars, but certainly he has been a successful one, and financially he must be far ahead of some of the glamor faces which grace the magazine covers.
At least, judging from the luxury apparent in the Backus home, and the first view we got of him walking through some manicured grounds which might have gone well with Windsor Castle, and two servants who appeared on cue, being a cartoon voice has done quite well for Backus.
The only trouble, he said, is that he works so hard to be able to afford his luxury that he seldom gets a chance to enjoy it. It even costs money to be on Person to Person, he said wryly, because his wife had their home redecorated and got new drapes.
But Backus also has another gold mine—the residual payments he gets from I Married Joan, one of the first successful situation comedies. The series has been rerun numerous times in this country, is now in the foreign market, which is turning out to be important for t-v film makers just as it was for the Hollywood feature film makers. The series turned out even more popular in England than in this country, Backus said, because in England the idea of a judge being kept on even keel by a somewhat haywire wife was even more ludicrous, because the English hold their judges in somewhat more awe than we do, and the aggressive wife is not so common.
Wears His Success Well
Backus is one of those happy-go-lucky fellows who seem to be able to have success and still do what they want and continue to be highly individualistic in personality—altho sometimes in their moments out of the public eye they are not quite as happy as they seem.
Backus is a strong, unconventional personality. He still wears suits, in Hollywood, and says that his swimming pool is rectangular, not one of those exotic shapes. He was an interesting subject for Person to Person, despite the stilted stiffness which so often pervades this program, because he insisted on being himself. He is humorous without effort, and he had a driving energy. He and Mrs. Backus write in their spare time, turned out one book, "Rocks on the Roof," and are now working on another, which he was persuaded with difficulty from not titling "Son of Rocks on the Roof." He says they have discovered the ideal collaboration arrangement. In bed.
I shall miss Person to Person when it leaves us after this summer run of shows which were made some time ago. It is interesting to see the surroundings in which well known people live.
10 New Cartoon Series Coming
The cartoon voices will really come into their own this fall, because among the major trends in programming cartoons are making a strong showing.
There will be at least 10 new cartoon series coming on, largely as the result of success of The Flintstones, Huckleberry Hound, Yogi Bear and Rocky and His Friends.
The cartoons have undergone a big change from the old format, when cats banging mice around and then getting caught in the vacuum cleaner, etc., was the standard procedure.
Sometimes I have watched curiously as Heckle and Jeckle or Bugs Bunny set various characters on fire, lured them over cliffs, banged them with clubs, etc. It seems like concentrated sadism.
But the trend now is toward sophistication, toward derisive satire. Yogi Bear and Huckleberry Hound have more adults than children watching, and the appreciation of Huckleberry has become a sort of highbrow status symbol.
Arnold Stang as Top Cat
Top Cat, from Screen Gems, which will debut on ABC at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Sept. 27, is from the Hanna-Barbara Studios, which have had the Yogi Bear, Quick Draw McGraw, Huckleberry Hound and Flintstones hits in three years. The voices include some of the most successful character actors, with Arnold Stang in the title role, Allen Jenkins, Maurice Gosfield (he was Doberman in the Bilko show), Marvin Kaplan, Leo De Lyon and John Stephenson.
Beatrice Kaye, the singer, will be the voice of Alvin in The Alvin Show, based on the chipmunk recording stars.
Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll (Amos and Andy), whom I would have thought would be content to sit around and count their millions, will be the voices of Calvin and the Colonel, a cartoon about a bear and a fox.
Now Screen Gems, which seldom moves except from strength, announces a new technique called Tri-Cinemation. The company has made a deal to produce a series in which life-like dolls, described as "exactly like human beings, down to the most precise detail, from the wrinkles in the skin to the inflection of a finger," will be made to move on film.
People—who needs them? Except for the voices.

The critics’ attitude toward Huckleberry Hound and Yogi Bear was fairly consistent. They, and parents groups, cried against what they saw as too much violence in old theatrical cartoons (and Three Stooges shorts, for that matter). Yes, there were dynamite explosions and, yes, Quick Draw McGraw would shoot himself on occasion. But these were different. They were less frenetic than the old Warner Bros cartoons and seemed a lot less painful than what Famous/Paramount had been pumping out. The characters were amusing, clever or funny, so they got a passing grade.

The idea of “protecting” children from seeing cartoon characters engaging in slapstick violence strikes me as pointless. So does emasculating animated characters to become educators for whatever causes parental pressure groups want. Let funny characters be funny.

More Hidden Warner Bros. Gags

There’s nothing wonderful about Those Were Wonderful Days, a Merrie Melodies cartoon made not too many months after Leon Schlesinger built his own cartoon studio from scratch after a flap with sub-contractors Hugh Harman and Rudy Ising.

This one is another 1934 Warners cartoon that uses the standard-issue 1890s stage melodrama as the peg for its plot after the first half is taken up with gags in a saloon of the era.

Example? Beer steins sprout fish lips and sing along to a player piano tinkling out the title tune.



Having already lost interest in this stale effort, I wondered if there would any examples of inside jokes on background signs. I was not disappointed.



You can see on the left of the frame above that writer Tubby Millar is into the cut-plug tobacco business. Whether “Higgin’s” in the background refers to Bill Higgins, I don’t know. The Los Angeles City Directory for 1933 gives his occupation as a “cartoonist” and the following year, he is listed as a “studioworker,” but doesn’t say where. His 1940 draft card reveals he was at MGM. He got animation screen credits on cartoons for John Sutherland Productions in the 1950s. Higgins was a native of Muncie, born in 1911, and died in California in 1991.



Ah, ha! There’s a partly-obscured poster for “Charlotte Darling’s Burlesque Queens.” At the time, she would have been in the ink and paint department at Schlesinger’s. She was an early union activist and secretary of the Screen Cartoonists Guild in 1937. She testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee and you can read her testimony here.

This cartoon ends with the villain happily bidding us “So long, folks!”



Sound technician Bernie Brown is the credited supervisor on this short, with animation credits going to Paul J. Smith and Don Williams.

The cartoon seems to have been restored for television. We hope this means a home video release.

Speedy Cat

It’s been said the increasing pace of the action in Tex Avery cartoons at MGM rubbed off on the studio’s Hanna-Barbera unit.

Here’s an example from Mouse Cleaning (1948).

Tom’s been told by the maid to keep the house clean. In one scene, he realises eggs are going to fall from the air and splatter on the floor. The first drawing is held for ten frames.



Then he realises what’s about to happen. He scrunches down, then the take (with alternating drawings).



Tom scoots out of the scene.



Here’s the speed of the action. These frames are back to back. The first has Tom leaving. He’s already back in the second frame.



The usual team of Irv Spence, Ken Muse, Ed Barge and Ray Patterson receive the animation credit on screen. No background or layout artist are credited, but we could be viewing the work of Bob Gentle and Dick Bickenbach (to be honest, I don’t know which MGM cartoons were laid out by Gene Hazelton).

Everything is Beautiful?

The early 1970s may not have been the Golden Age of Variety Shows, but there were sure an awful lot of them on television then.

It wasn’t only comedy stars like Carol Burnett, Flip Wilson and Redd Foxx who got their own hour-long fun-fests. It seems that all kinds of people with hit songs were handed their own variety extravaganzas.

Two singers of novelty songs back then were Jim Stafford and Ray Stevens. Both of them were crossover artists, getting airplay on MOR, rock and country stations. A broad demographic led to larger potential audiences, so both were inked to TV contracts.

Stevens had appeared on Andy Williams’ show. So it was he was Williams’ summer replacement in 1970.

By then, he had cut several hit records over the course of eight years, made guest shots with Johnny Cash, Dean Martin and Glen Campbell, and hosted the Grammys, but his producers decided to go with a gimmick that he was unknown to TV viewers. His series was called Andy Williams Presents the Ray Stevens Show??? (with three question marks).

Here’s a bit of background from one of the newspaper syndicates, published around June 17, 1970; the show debuted on the 20th.

Ray Stevens Replaces Andy in Show
By CHARLES WITBECK
HOLLYWOOD — Who is Ray Stevens?
This question comes up every Saturday night on the Andy Williams summer replacement series, kidding the young, sleepy-eyed host Stevens, who happens to be the author of the top-ranked pop tune, "Everything is Beautiful."
Judging from the first two shows, Stevens enjoys playing the unknown. He beams when the cast interrupts a line of dialogue, and pretends to take punishment as the piano lids bang down on his fingers at least during the hour, allowing Ray to cry out in anguish after much sucking in of air.
The Georgian composer acts as if he were just one of the performers, not the star. The "put-down" approach was adapted by producers Allen Blye and Chris Beard [sic] after Stevens taped four Andy Williams guest spots during the winter, receiving a "totally favorable" mail response, beating out runner-ups [sic] Don Ho and Jonathan Winters.
"We figured the humorous angle was the only way to go," says Blye. "Ray isn't sexy and handsome like Glen Campbell. He's cute and has a sense of fun. Later, we learned he was a deep, deep kid judging from his new album 'America, Communicate With Me.' "
While viewers are in the dark over Ray Stevens, the pop music business knows the singer as a dependable source of record hits. Beginning with "Ahab, the Arab," in '62, Ray, out of Clarksdale, Ga., knocks them out year after year —"Mr. Businessman," "Harry, the Hairy Ape," "Gitarzan," "Along Came Jones."
"I have 15 years of classical piano behind me," Ray said, flying into Hollywood from his Nashville home for a round of publicity interviews. Wife Penny, with big saucer eyes and a handsome curved nose, sat quietly by, listening.
The songwriter spends half his time at the piano, playing with ideas. The lyric or the tune may come first, it doesn't matter. When something pleases, a few notes are jotted down on paper and put inside the piano bench. Overflow goes into a big chest. Or, Ray will write a melody, and tape it on a cassette for safekeeping.
One morning the composer started turning pages of a rhyming dictionary, and in a few hours, a novelty piece, "Gitarzan," emerged. "I sung it to a friend over the phone," Ray told me. "He said it was nice. Then I stuck it away in the piano bench. Two years later we moved and I found the song again. It pays to move now and then."
The Stevens’ songwriting career began at the age of 17 when he gathered up his nerve and went to Atlanta contacting music publisher Bill Lowery. Ray played one song, and Lowery politely offered encouragement. In a few days, the novice was back with another, "Silver Bracelet," and this improved piece earned Lowery's backing and led to a contract with Capitol Records.
Nowadays Stevens writes, arranges and produces his own product. "I junk from 75 to 80 per cent of my ideas," he estimates, "and keep about 20 per cent. Only five per cent turn out to be any good."
So far the writer shows a sensitive ear for his own work. 1968 was a vintage year with two hits and two misses, and '70 may equal the high with "Everything Is Beautiful," riding along at a million-and-a-half sales during a recession, a Broadway score for "Johnny Appleseed" in the making, and his serious album, "America, Communicate With Me" due in August, a "poetic, arty inside view of the country about dope, Vietnam and the man in the street." "I like to think I'm a sounding board," says Ray "I want to be known as a singer of the people. I don't want to turn my songwriting into an ego trip, to think everything I do is good."
And that is the aim of the summer show — keep Ray in his place. Avoid the big head, laugh at the star.

Dwight Newton of the San Francisco Examiner wasn’t impressed. His review appeared on July 3, 1970. Let’s face it. If you’re doing an Al Jolson joke in 1970, you’re stretching.

A Cornball from Canada
Ray Stevens, an amiable, soft-sell, composer-singer from Nashville, Tenn., is Andy Williams' summer television replacement. Though Ray is a big noise on records ("Mr. Businessman," "Ahab the Arab," "Everything Is Beautiful," etc.), he was, until the summer series began, the Mr. Nobody of television.
Andy had hosted him a few times; that was about it.
Andy tried to get Ray's show off to a talked-about start with a continuing "Who is Ray Stevens?" gimmick. For instance: Andy appeared on last week's show for about four seconds. In response to the question, "Who is Ray Stevens?" Andy mumbled: "Didn't he use to be Stella Stevens?"
In another cameo bit, Bill Dana solemnly observed: "Ray Stevens will be remembered a long time after Al Jolson is forgotten, but not until then."
Two such quips were cute enough but when two dozen more in the same vein were sounded off, the name of Ray Stevens became a pain in the ear. The whole show became a pain in the neck. A shame because Ray is affable and magnetic. He is a highly skilled contemporary pop musician.
His competency was evident whenever he and his piano closed in on a ditty such as last week's "A Catchy Little Tune" . . . "when it had no place to go, it became the closing number on a rock and roll show.")
Tomorrow night Stevens will vocalize the instrumental sounds on his self-written "Freddy Feel-good and His Funky Little Five-Piece Band."
* * *
STEVENS IS a product of our new times. His show is a product of infantile asininity. Never in his lowest depths did Andy Williams have to cope with such a clanging clutter of disorganized guck. One guy never performs but takes thousands of bows. Sketches are performed by sacks and bags. Gags are fired like flack in an air raid. The girls are pretty, the jokes are pretty bad.
The show is stitched together like a poor man's "Laugh-In." Correction: Make that a beggar's "Laugh-ln." Because the show is running on a beggar's budget. The show is produced at Toronto, Canada, for two reasons: (1) Any show can be produced much, much cheaper in Canada than in Hollywood. (2) Any show produced in Canada is not subject to Canada's new quota restrictions on U.S. Television shows.
Stevens' two continuing "star" guests are Lulu from Scotland who bounces through most of the scenes, and Mama Cass Elliot who does her thing and vanishes. Last week she was a frog making a fly vanish by swallowing it ("rib-bit rib-bit.")
* * *
THE FINALE and show-stopper of last week's program was a rousing rendition of "Happy Days Are Here Again" treated as a spiritual — "Jesus walks, "Wash my sins away," "Happy days." As the closing credits rolled, Stevens was on his feet, bustling through the audience, shaking hands, kissing girls.
Ray Stevens has the stuff that Andy Williamses are made of. That's why Andy brought him into the Williams stable. But can Stevens survived [sic] the cornball goings-on of the summer series? It is doubtful that Andy could.

Dirk MacDonald of the Montreal Star was less charitable in his review of Aug. 15.

You have to be pretty starved for something to do to have to expose yourself to most of television's summertime programming.
No longer is it the mere problem of reruns filling the humid hours; the networks have realized that some degree of originality just might be useful at this time of year.
Realization and implementation, however, are two entirely different beasts. In terms of variety shows, we seem to have little to draw us to the set in the evenings. The bulk of the summer programming is so damned bland that you'd be better off digging out the antiquated Viewfinder. Those still pictures of Niagara Falls can be mighty entertaining, after all.
The goals of the Canadian Radio Television Comission [sic] hardly have been achieved by CTV's highly-publicized production of such programs as The Ray Stevens Show. It was a senseless substitute for Andy Williams. I'm sure the Canadian-content cause was set back five years by the overworked techniques used on the Stevens' hour.
As far as I'm concerned, Allan Blye and Chris Beard should stay in California, for all the imagination they brought to the Toronto-produced show. It was a second-rate American program. stamped "Made-in-Canada.” It doesn't fulfill the CRTC's stated objective, by my reasoning, CTV’s Murray Chercover notwithstanding.
The gimmickry of the Stevens' show was nothing less than appalling. It probably was tremendous a couple of years ago with Laugh-In — and Blye and Beard have won Emmy awards for their work — but it most certainly has paled. [...] Allan Blye, meanwhile, said this about the Ray Stevens show in an interview with Cynthia Gunn for THE STAR.
"It's difficult to simply describe the show. We have two people who do everything they do from inside burlap sacks. We have one young boy who's 24 years old, who we've dubbed The World's Greatest Comedian ... we have the Swamp Girl who appears a number of times on our show.
"We also happen to have Ray Stevens, who's the star of the show . . .”
The Stevens' program came off as a bore, caught up in fanciness.

A number of newspaper articles made a comparison to Laugh-In. That couldn’t have been accidental. Chris Bearde was a writer on the show. So were Stevens’ writing supervisors Jack Hanrahan and Phil Hahn. One of the other writers was a young man who appeared after the end credits of the first show—a young man who had worked with producer Allan Blye on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour—Steve Martin (complete with arrow through his head).

Cynthia Lowry of the Associated Press noted in a column the night of the debut that NBC’s deal called for eight programmes and two repeats. The series was never picked up for the fall. Stevens continued recording, climbing the charts in various formats in 1974 with “The Streak.” He’s been inducted into a number of music halls of fame. His attempt at variety TV never hurt his career.

You can view the debut episode of his show below.

If It Got Laughs the First Time...

The almost-uproariously funny Cool Cat strolls past a mechanical pink elephant in his 1967 debut cartoon.



Inside the elephant is Colonel Rimfire, who pops up and says “I tought I taw a puddy tat.”



Well, Tweety got laughs with the line. 20 years earlier.

Writer Bob Kurtz evokes more old Warner Bros. humour, this time from the Chuck Jones unit. Cool Cat decides to “split the scene” and exits stage right (oh, right, that was another cartoon “cat.”). Instead of following him, the mechano-elephant, for whatever reason, retreats to Larry Hanan’s flowery background and jumps.



It turns out Colonel Rimfire and the elephant fall over a cliff. Why? Well, the coyote got laughs with it. Except Jones and Mike Maltese did a lovely job of setting up the cliff-drops in the roadrunner shorts. This comes out of nowhere.



Can anyone name which Roadrunner cartoon this artwork was pilfered from?

Alex Lovy might as well be named “Colonel Misfire” for directing this sorry excuse for a cartoon. There was so much wasted talent involved, including Kurtz and Larry Storch. Veteran animators Volus Jones, Ted Bonnicksen, Eddie Solomon and La Verne Harding are credited. Lovy must have brought sound effects with him from Hanna-Barbera, as Hal Geer edits them into the sound track.

Word is that Warner Bros. is not planning to follow up the "Blew Up" movie with a feature starring Cool Cat.

Shocking a French Poodle

Crazy Mixed Up Pup (1955) has a plot only Tex Avery could think up. A human is given dog plasma and a dog is given human plasma, which results in both taking on each other’s characteristics. They continue to switch back and forth.

In this scene, Rover acts like a human and pats Fifi, the other pet dog in the house. "Hi, Fifi. How’s my little old French poodle?" says Rover.



The first drawing below is held on 20 frames, then comes the take.



This was the second of the four cartoons Avery directed for Walter Lantz before he got out of commercial animation. Don Patterson, La Verne Harding and Ray Abrams are the animators.

The male voices are supplied by Daws Butler. The dog voice is another of his takes on Ed Norton of The Honeymooners, and even says "You're a good kid" to Maggie, just like Norton did to his wife Trixie.

A Weighty Matter

The Jack Benny radio show didn’t just develop over the course of a season, with a Maxwell, and age 39 and trains leaving for Anaheim, Azusa and Cucamonga showing up in the dialogue. That took years, something a show on TV would never be given the time to accomplish.

Jack debuted in May 1932. There was a revolving door of NBC and CBS staff announcers assigned to the show. Any attempt by Benny to build a comedy character around them was pretty much impossible.

When Chevrolet picked up his show the following year, Jack started with Howard Claney, who was replaced with Alois Havrilla. The carmaker dropped his show in 1934 and Benny was forced to find another announcer when General Tire decided to sponsor it.

That’s when Don Wilson won an audition and began a lengthy association with the Benny show, taking the jump into television with Jack in 1950. He had started in radio in Denver as a singer, and ended up working at several radio stations in Los Angeles, and hosting a transcribed comedy/variety show called The Mirth Parade. He was best known for calling the Rose Bowl game. That got the attention of NBC executives in New York, who transferred him back east, ostensibly as a sports announcer.

Don continued doing what Claney and Havrilla had been doing—interrupting dialogue to shoehorn a word in about the sponsor. But Wilson had something else Benny could hang a comedy peg on—his size.

Some might call it fat-shaming today, but Wilson seemed to take it in stride and got his licks in at Benny in response.

When the show became televised, audiences could see Donsie was hefty but not obese. I’m no expert on the television version, but it seems things shifted and Wilson was called to do sillier things on camera (and, out of nowhere, was father to an adult son).

Here’s Don talking to one of the newspaper syndicates in a story published on March 4, 1962.

Don Wilson: Large Bones
By DONALD FREEMAN
Copley News Service
HOLLYWOOD—28 years with the Jack Benny troupe, Don Wilson’s size is certainly no state secret. Everyone knows that the cheerful announcer-actor with the mellifluous voice is —well, ample. His bulk, in fact, has proved one of the more durable props on the show.
"Actually, I am not fat at all," said Wilson, smiling broadly as he slid into a booth at an airport restaurant. "It is true that I have a large bone structure. But, if you want the truth of the matter, I only weigh. . . . .” An airplane droned overhead at that moment, drowning out Wilson’s voice.
“What was that?” I cried, leaning forward. "What was that again?"
Weight A Comic Myth
"Let me put it another way," said Wilson, his expression bountiful. "My weight is one of those comic myths that take hold. But no one, down deep, believes the myths they laugh at.
"No one really believes that Jack Benny is so penurious, for instance no one really believes that he drives a Maxwell or has a butler named Rochester or that he keeps his money hidden in a vault."
"And your —er, size," I put it, that kind of a myth, too?"
"Absolutely," Wilson said, defiantly jutting out his chins. "But I couldn't be happier about it because it gives Jack a chance to make a lot of jokes and it's given me a pleasant living at my profession."
"How much," I asked, "did you say you weigh?"
Wilson raised a interruptive finger. "See those people over here," he said, "at that table by the window." A cluster of diners had spotted Wilson and several of them smiled by way of recognition, Wilson waved back, also smiling.
Wears A Triumphant Look
Now Wilson turned to me, a triumphant look on his good-natured face. "I'll tell you what they're saying over there right this minute," he said. "They're saying, 'My gosh, Don Wilson must have lost a lot of weight.' Wherever I go, that's what people say to me.
“I have to explain that I haven't lost any weight at all. Besides the fact that the TV camera adds a few pounds, with all the jokes they've heard about me on the Benny show, people assume that I must weigh at least 350 pounds."
Wilson laughed at the outrageousness of the thought, his chins dancing again. "And then it's a big surprise to these people when they see me in person."
"I suppose, that I have been the subject of more fat man jokes than anyone in show business. When I think that Jack's writers have used every fat man joke in the world, they come up with another one. I remember one line where I tell Jack that I had gone on a diet and taken off 25 pounds. Jack gave me that dying calf look of his and he said, 'You haven't lost weight, Don. Turn around. You've just misplaced it.' "
Scales Are Challenged
A few minutes later, we left the restaurant and Mr. Wilson approached a scale. "Now," he said, inserting a coin, "this should prove my point. Fat, indeed."
"What does it say?" I asked, but, as he turned, Wilson accidentally blocked my vision. He quickly stepped off the platform.
"When a scale is out of order," Wilson demanded, innocently, "wouldn't you think they'd at least put a sign?"

Don Wilson won all kinds of announcing awards, even though Bea Benaderet once remarked how a pool was conducted every Sunday, with actors guessing which line Don would blow first. Jack took one of the mistakes on TV and turned it into a running gag on both television and radio—Wilson twisted the Lucky Strike slogan “Be Happy, Go Lucky.” Wilson’s wife Lois, who was a fine radio actress, was hired to add to the situation.

When Benny ended his regular series in 1965, Wilson wasn’t hired to announce the specials. Veteran Bill Baldwin was brought in, while Wilson only made a few guest appearances. Somehow it didn’t seem right.

Posters, Knights and Long-Johns

Here’s a buried self-reference in The Girl at the Ironing Board (1934). Check out the poster on the left side of the fence.



Poor Friz Freleng. He and the writing staff had to find a way to make this cartoon’s man-woman-love-villain-abduction-chase-(to the theme song in double time)-vanquish formula different than the others that infested Warners cartoons. And fit in a Warners-owned song. The title song comes from the feature Dames (1934) with Guy Kibbee, Zasu Pitts and Hugh (Woo-Hoo) Herbert. The film included a legitimate smash hit, “I Only Have Eyes For You.”

The staff took the song title and came up with a story about clothes being ironed (and whatever else happens in a laundry), and then married it with an 1890s stage melodrama parody, the same thing that Terrytoons ran into the ground.

But there are some contemporary references. One of the song lyrics features Mae West’s most famous misquote “Come up and see me some time.” The female clothes emulate Joe Penner by shouting “You naaasty man!” And this may be one of the most obscure radio references in a cartoon.



At the time this cartoon was made, Fred Allen was hosting the Sal Hepatica Revue. It, and his previous show, the Salad Bowl Revue, had sketches that were set in Bedlam University, the Bedlam Penitentiary, the Bedlam Department Store, and so on. This poster could be coincidental but I’d like to think not.

My favourite gag is a pun that Friz times perfectly. First, a title card.



Cut to the next scene. The card is accurate.



That’s it. It’s like a Tex Avery gag, incongruous and quick. Then it’s back to the plot.

The flaps of woolen underwear slap the tops of barrels. The gag is borrowed from We're in the Money (1933). Wasn't it re-used later in a colour cartoon?



The long johns return at the end of the cartoon. Unexpectedly, a head pops out of the top and gives us the familiar “So long, folks!” farewell.



Frank Tipper and Sandy Walker are the credited animators, with the score by Bernie Brown. The soundtrack includes “Dames” and “Shake Your Powder Puff.” Unlike the oft-heard “Shuffle Off to Buffalo” or “The Lady in Red,” this was the only Warners cartoon that used the title song.

The Mountain is Correct

“There’s gold in them thar hills!” proclaims Oswald the rabbit in Alaska (1930), a Walter Lantz production.



The mountain confirms it by opening its “mouth.” “You said a mouth-full,” replies the hill. And it’s on to the next scene.



Jimmy Dietrich’s score includes three choruses “Go Get the Ax,” sung by a prospector in Dalton’s Palace saloon, as well as “Turkey in the Straw,” “Pop Goes the Weasel” and Oswald’s theme song. Pinto Colvig supplies the singing.

Colvig, Tex Avery and Les Kline get smaller letters in their animation screen credit than Manny Moreno, Clyde Geronimi and Ray Abrams.