Unglamorous Glamour Manor

Jack Benny had a fruitful symbiotic relationship with members of his cast, even the secondary members. They made fun of Benny and made Benny’s show funnier. That, in turn, increased their fame so they were able to parlay it into their own shows, all in 1946. Phil Harris was one. Dennis Day was another. Mel Blanc was another. But a former member of Benny’s cast also launched an attempt at radio stardom that year.

Time proved Benny and Kenny Baker didn’t have much of a symbiotic relationship. Benny carried on for years after Baker walked out on his show, replacing him with someone who had far more talents. Baker’s career began an irreversible decline, slow at first before wearing out his welcome on Fred Allen’s Texaco show. “Glamour Manor” was Baker’s last hurrah on radio and the odds were against him from the start.

“Glamour Manor” debuted in June 1944 with Cliff Arquette in a dual starring role (one being an old woman). The show was tinkered with several times with new casts, vocalists, announcers (one was Robert C. Bruce of Warner Bros. cartoon narrator fame) and even locations. Arquette apparently finally had enough and quit in June 1946. That resulted in another reshuffling. Baker was brought in with a brand-new cast, though some were familiar to listeners as he played on his old connection with Benny. Don Wilson was his announcer and Sam Hearn reprised his role of Schlepperman. In fact, Benny showed up for a guest shot on October 3, 1946. But it simply didn’t work and the show signed off June 27, 1947.

What was wrong with the show? In fairness to Kenny Baker, you can’t blame him. You can blame the writers for coming up with jokes that would be at home in small-time vaudeville and clichéd, one-dimensional characters (and, frankly, this describes most of the sitcoms in the Golden Days). The types had been around radio so long that if someone described the character to you, you could probably guess who played the role. If you read the description of Miss Biddle in the review below, you can’t help but think of Elvia Allman. But dour critic John Crosby of The New York Herald-Tribune didn’t blame the writers, either. This is from December 20, 1946.

Radio Review
Such Young, Young Men
By JOHN CROSBY
The fascination of naive and extremely literal young men has so thoroughly gripped the people who produce and sponsor radio programs that it deserves, I think, some looking into. I’m not quite sure who started it all but I suspect Jack Benny must shoulder much of the responsibility and it’s a heavy responsibility.
A good many years ago Benny employed on his program a young tenor named Kenny Baker. Besides singing, it was also Baker’s task to be dumb, timid, excessively innocent and a sort of permanent butt of a lot of good-natured jokes. Above all, he provided an excellent foil for the aging, grasping, cocky Benny. Baker was then replaced by a young man named Dennis Day. The advantages of this substitution remain, at least to me, obscure. Both young men (though Baker can’t be so young any more) are tenors with identical qualities. Both react precisely alike to the same stimuli. Both have the same dewy personality. In fact, if any one can distinguish between the two, he has a sharper ear than mine.
Although he still appears on the Benny program, Day has a new program of his own called “A Day in the Life of Dennis Day,” (NBC, 6:30 p.m. Thursday). Baker has HIS own program “Glamour Manor,” which appears, God save the mark, five times a week (ABC, 9 a.m. Mondays through Fridays). This makes a total of seven programs a week of fresh young male innocence or enough to keep Hollywood gainfully employed for a couple of years.
TYPICAL YOUTH?
If it hadn’t been going on so long, I’d call it a trend. The way things are, you might call it a sort of fast-frozen belief in radio circles that Baker and Day epitomize young American manhood. On the basis of five years in the Army, I find this belief difficult to share. The young men I met were considerably more hep than either Baker or Day and I met only one young man who fainted dead away when a pretty girl spoke to him. This custom made him rather more of a curiosity than a typical American male.
All the above is a rather circuitous introduction to “Glamour Manor,” one of the heaviest daytime shows on the air. In addition to Baker’s tenor voice and girlish innocence, the program boasts Harry Lubin’s orchestra, a competent cast, and Don Wilson, an announcer who has provoked more, though not necessarily better, jokes about fat men than Falstaff. About one-third of the program is devoted to Baker’s singing in his pleasant tenor to Lubin’s music.
The rest of the proceedings revolve around the goings-on at “Glamour Manor,” a hotel which Baker runs and in which his girl-friend, Barbara, is employed.
OTHERS ON BILL
Barbara is the Great American Girl Friend as opposed to, let us say, the Great American Kid Sister, who is Judy Foster, somebody else entirely. In addition to these two, there is a Jewish dialect comedian named Schlepperman and a Miss Biddle, one of those elderly snobbish ladies who chases men and never catches them and who says at one point: “I’d like to have a neck like a giraffe and a head like Charles Boyer. I’ve always wanted to have a long neck with Charles Boyer.”
To give you the smallest possible example of the proceedings at “Glamour Manor,” the other day an old college friend of Kenny’s named Russel Green, a conceited, handsome mug, showed up at the hotel and threw everyone into an uproar by making a pass at Barbara. Every thing worked out all right when this character came down with lead poisoning from one of Miss Biddle’s pies.
TIMOROUS KENNY
More important than the plot in these programs is Baker’s character. To give you some idea just how arrested is Baker’s development, I offer the following samples of his dialogue. At one point he says to Barbara: “Look, there’s a mouse!” Then KB runs. At another point when Schlepperman tries to reason with him as he picks up a gun and looks desperate. Baker says: “Don’t worry; there isn't any water in it.” Now, just one more: “Gee, I didn’t know he’d tell his father I broke his yo-yo.”
The other jokes are almost uniformly awful but I’m afraid most of them will have to be forgiven. After all, this is a half-hour show, five days a week. The jokesmiths must be suffering from a severe case of combat fatigue. I have only one suitable for exhibit.
“I became a singer,” says Kenny.
“I didn’t know that. I thought you were a tenor.”
Copyright 1946, for The Tribune

NBC Comics, Part 2

Television went through an awkward period between its experimental days of the early 1930s and the movement of radio stars to the new medium about 1948. Stations were filling time during the World War Two years with crude, low-budget—and long-forgotten—shows. They knew something was better just around the corner. It was a matter of preparing and waiting.

Syndicators got ready for the explosion of television licenses by coming up with programming proposals. Several of them involved cartoons. But not even the limited animated, Saturday morning kind; that would have been too expensive. Instead, the idea was not to have any animation at all. Cartoons would be just that—panels like in newspaper cartoons.

Two companies with the same name and same idea got to work. Viewers started hearing about it in 1945. Here’s a wire service story.

Artist Launches Two Comic Movie Firms
HOLLYWOOD, March 23 (UP)—Artist Steve Slesinger today announced formation of Tele-Comics, Inc., of New York, to reproduce nationally known syndicated and original comics for 16-mm. distribution and television.
Slesinger also announced launching of another producing company, Telepictures, Inc., of Hollywood, which will produce 16-mm. film in conjunction with a children’s books publishing firm.

Some specifics about how the cartoons worked were revealed in Advertising and Selling magazine that year.

Comics telecast
To test the adaptability of the newspaper comic strip to television, an experimental series was begun recently by Hollywood’s W6XYZ under a short-term contract with NEA.
Labeled by Fred S. Ferguson, president of NEA, as only an experiment to test out the possibilities of television as a syndicate market, the “Telecomics” test puts eight NEA Sunday pages on the air for a half-hour weekly. Panels, unanimated, are separated and transferred to film without balloons. Background character voices dramatize the dialogue, while a narrator supplies supplemental explanation and sound effects are added. The comics being used are “Boots and Her Buddies,” “Freckles,” “Brenda Breeze,” “Our Boarding House,” “Captain Easy,” “Carnival” “Mr. Merriweather” and also “Otis.”

The concept continued to germinate. Here’s a newspaper story from April 24, 1946:

It’ll Soon Be Telecomics
By SAUL PETT
Distributed by International News
“Telecomics”: A group of air-minded experts have come up with an idea for televising Sunday's favorite comic strips the same day they appear in newspapers. As prevued before the American Newspaper publishers association, the comic panel first appears on the television screen without the blurbs. Then, as a narrator begins to tell the story and assumes the voices of the various characters, the blurbs pop up in their right spots. In the case of the "Little King" by O. Soglow, the narrator will have little to do except explain the actions of the lordless little guy.

Billboard magazine covered early television in depth, including the rise of non-animated cartoons. Steve Slesinger’s company inked a deal then went shopping for an ad agency to snare a sponsor, a practice that came from network radio in those days. This is from the edition of April 19, 1947:

A radio-television package deal which may set the pattern for future video sales was set last week when NW Ayer agency took up an option for the Zane Grey comic strip, King of the Royal Mounted, for use over both media. Deal was set with Telecomics, Inc., which owns and controls the comic strip’s rights. Option primarily covers tele rights to King, serialized in five-minute takes, but also gives ultimate sponsor the right to bank roll a 15-minute radio strip made from King if sponsor so desires. Telecomics veepee John Howell stated his firm's desire to stress the video possibilities precludes splitting the package to permit separate sale of radio rights to bidder interested only in that medium.
Should the deal work out satisfactorily, it may mark a new method of marketing packages during video’s long transition period, whereby sponsors interested in purchasing radio rights will be able to secure them only as a bonus to a television deal.
Ayer took the option on behalf of all its clients, feeling the deal offers possibilities for several, and a chance for simultaneous sponsorship by some local outfits in different cities. Telecomics already has completed filming about 150 five-minute television episodes of King, with production continuing. Only one sample radio show has been cut to date.
Technique involved in producing the filmstrip also is heralded as ushering in new potentialities for television sponsors. David Gudebrod, manager of Ayer’s motion picture and television bureau, expressed his enthusiasm by saying it may “greatly ease current agency-sponsor video problems.” Aside from audience participation and sports shows, he said that most video today costs too much for what a sponsor can get out of it. Films for television also cost too much for most sponsors, what with studio, technical and talent expenses involved.
Technique used for King, however, reportedly introduces new methods at costs far below those of the past.
Process used by Telecomics makes use of special optical effects, camera movements, fades, dissolves and wipes which give the semblance of animation without using expensive animation technique. Cartoon characters’ conversation is via traditional balloons, as in newspaper, with words dissolving in and out.

One of Ayer’s clients that was interested in sponsorship was Kellogg’s. Of course, the cereal company invested heavily in animated TV cartoons a decade later with the Hanna-Barbera and Lantz studios.

Billboard of November 22, 1947 featured a lengthy story on the players in TV cartoons of the day, and a battle between two companies named “Telecomics, Inc.”

NEW YORK, Nov. 15—The rush to package cartoon and comic strip programs for television this week threatened to turn into a stampede, with five organizations readying funnies for video. Latest to enter the field was Jimmy Saphier, Coast agent who handles Bob Hope, Herbert Marshall, Man Called X, Date With Judy and other properties. Saphier this week gave the first New York showing of several semi-animated juvenile cliff-hangers filmed in Hollywood by a new outfit called Telecomics, Inc. This firm now joins such others beating the agency bushes or readying shows: Television Corporation, United Features, New York Daily News Syndicate and another firm, also called Telecomics, Inc., which is a subsidiary of Stephen Slesinger Productions. Edgar Bergen also has a hand in the comic pie with a set of animated characters called Telekins. Conflict over use of the Telecomics name this week drew a protest from the Slesinger subsidiary, which may be a prelude to legal conflict over its use. John Howell, veepee of the firm, said they have been protected both copywise and titlewise for nearly a year, and intend to investigate any transgression of the rights.
Samples Shown
Saphier said his version of Tele-comics, Inc., was organized by two former Disney animators. A demonstration of of Saphier’s sample films at National Broadcasting Company (NBC) revealed a couple of blood and thunder juvenile serials titled Kid Champion, a fight opus, and Jim Hardy, Ace Reporter.
A change of pace was the cartoon version of Anatole France's classic story, Our Lady’s Juggler. Semi-animation process had drawings change about once per second, with some held longer or shorter, according to the dialog. Sound strip behind the cliffhangers had voices impersonating the characters dramatizing the action, while the France story was told by a narrator.
Described as a combination of comic strip and radio serial techniques, Saphier’s shows featured original characters, unlike the newspaper comics offered by several other firms. But Saphier said his outfit, too, might attempt to secure newspaper comics should he find any demand for them. His shows will have 12 minutes of story and three minutes of commercial and will be turned out for weekly showing. Cost to sponsor for rights for each 15-minute saga will be about $2000 for use in eight video markets. Saphier said that should sponsor demands require, he would produce daily five-minute episodes or tri-weekly 10- minute shows. Delivery can be promised four weeks after signing of contracts, with commercials prepared according to specifications.
Name Comics Signed
Perhaps the most significant announcement of progress came from Century Television Corporation of which Smith Davis, station and newspaper broker, is president. Century has lined up an imposing list of name comics for exclusive representation in video, including Ham Fisher’s Joe Palooka, Chicago Sun’s Barnaby Clifford McBride’s Napoleon and Uncle Elby, Bell Syndicate’s Mutt and Jeff and about 20 other well-known characters. Initial plans call for selling rights to these characters for use in one-minute animated film commercials, but Century also plans to enter production in January on a sample 10-minute film based on Joe Palooka. Two salesmen currently are making the agency rounds.
The Telecomics, Inc., firm, an outgrowth of the Stephen Slesinger organization, already has prepared a joint radio-television deal around King Features’ King of the Royal Mounted, with purchaser of tele rights acquiring an option on radio rights as well. Unlike all the others, this version uses the traditional comic strip balloons for dialog. Sound is optional. Show will be available to one sponsor only for all video markets and may be had in five or 10-minute version. Five-minute show with sound track costs $500, while silent version with script for reading by local announcer is $250. Ten-minute sound version is $1000, while silent-script cost is $500.
United Features comics are represented for video by Ed Reed, of the New York office of The Des Moines Register-Tribune syndicate. These, including Lil’ Abner, Nancy and about 10 others are available both for use in commercials or as programs.
The New York Daily News Syndicate, which controls such comics as Moon Mullins, Little Orphan Annie, Gasoline Alley and Harold Teen, is understood to be preparing video shows based upon these characters. First rights likely would go to the News’ own New York tele outlet which will open next spring, with subsequent rights in other markets undoubtedly to be made available to sponsors or stations.

It’s hard to say how many of these comics got on the air. And the two Telecomics companies carried on with the same name; the 1951 Broadcasting Yearbook shows Slesinger’s company on Park Avenue in New York and Don Dewar’s on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood.

Surprisingly, some of Dewar’s comics are available for viewing on the internet. First, “Danny March.”



Here’s “Space Barton.” The voice of the narrator and the bad guy should be familiar as the narrator on many Warner Bros. cartoon travelogue parodies—Robert C. Bruce.



And this is “Kid Champion.” Bruce is the bad guy again.



P.S.: The first reference to cartoons on TV I’ve found is in the September 11, 1944 edition of Broadcasting Magazine. The pertinent part of the story is: “Patrick Michael Cunnings Teleproductions, recently organized Hollywood television film production group . . . has set up an experimental television cartoon studio under Robert Clampett, supervisor-director of Warner Bros. cartoon productions.” What Clampett accomplished, or even if he got programming on the air, is unclear. It was still too soon for TV animation. Yet Clampett soon made his mark on television with his “Beany and Cecil” puppet show and, finally, by 1960 got into the TV animation business for a brief time.

Kissed a Cow

The highlight of any of the Red cartoons at MGM is the nightclub scene, where we get to watch Tex Avery and whoever’s writing with him figure out how many different ways to come up with takes for the wolf. But, of course, Avery gives us more than that.

I’ve always liked the cow kissing gag in “Little Rural Riding Hood” (1949), probably because of Pinto Colvig’s great delivery as he states the obvious to the audience. A few drawings of the rubbery wolf:






Grant Simmons, Walt Clinton, Mike Lah and Bobe Cannon get the animation credit here.

This was the last of Tex’s Red cartoons. Considering the way it whips along and tosses gags and routines at you before you know it, perhaps he felt it couldn’t be topped. And he’d probably be right.

Dr Jekyll and Mr Mouse

There’s an awful long set-up before we get to the transformation scenes in the MGM cartoon “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Mouse” (1947). Tom spends over a third of the cartoon trying to keep his milk away from Jerry.

There are plot holes you can drive the proverbial truck through in this cartoon but there are still some fun things. Scott Bradley’s pounding music when the transformed Jerry stomps toward Tom sounds like anything but a Scott Bradley score. There’s a great use of colour (and shadow) in the scene where Tom’s mixing the poison. And there are the transformation drawings.

Ken Muse, Ed Barge, Mike Lah and Al Grandmain get credit on this. One wonders whether Grandmain, who I understand was an effects animator at one time, handled at least some of the transformation drawings. Here are a few after Jerry drinks the milk mixture. The brushwork is admirable.







And here’s the first time he changes back. Some drawings are simply brush lines to indicate Jerry, some are jagged heads, a few are full body drawings. The explosion at the end is interesting. A frame of solid colour (yellow, blue, etc.) is interspersed with an animation drawing.







Why a mouse likes milk in the first place, why the milk mixture didn’t turn the fly that drank it into a musclebound fly and how Jerry knew even the approximate formula recipe are questions you can ask yourself and ignore, because you’ll never get an answer. Enjoy the drawings instead.

Baby Rose Marie

Everyone knows Rose Marie from ‘The Dick Van Dyke Show’ and fans no doubt have heard that she was at one time “Baby Rose Marie”, the child singer. But they not might realise how long ago that was.

Here’s a really cute Associated Press photo and story from 1930. Rose aspired to be Helen Kane.

NEW YORK, May 14.—(AP)— “Boop oop a doops” fall from the lips of Baby Rose Marie like a grown up.
Just about radio’s youngest hot tunes dispenser, this wee lady, can brag of the fact that in five and a half years she has climbed quite a way. She's a staff artist for NBC and has been starred with no less a broadcast personage than the feminine-adored Rudy Vallee.
But to her Rudy’s just another man. She admits he is likeable, but he doesn't give her the same thrill that she gets listening to Amos ‘n’ Andy.
With an ambition to grow up and be like Bebe Daniels of the movies, Rose Marie is attaining the background. She has been in vaudeville and has made talkie shorts. She opened her radio career nearly a year ago at WPG, Atlantic City.
The first song of her present repertoire of 90 was “Sorry,” which she learned three years ago. She remembers it, too, and can sing it as the composer intended.
Her mother, who is a pianist, teaches her the songs. The mother sings a line, and Rose Marie repeats it until she can do so without aid. The matter of tunes comes natural.
When she is preparing to go on the air, only 15 or 20 minutes are required for rehearsal, according to her dad, who is Frank Mazetti and who was known as Frank Curley when in musical comedies.
Father also says that the young lady always minds. In reciting her early history he declared she walked at ten months and could talk distinctly when only a year old. Her age is not sufficient for school yet, but when she is ready she is to have a private tutor. She has been to kindergarten only, in addition to some professional instruction.
At that her education is considerably further advanced that most girlies of her age. She can write or print her own name, and can spell about 50 simple words.
Appearing before the microphone, she uses the gestures her father taught her for her stage work, and just sings without a thought of the millions credited to the listening audiences. She always sleeps eleven hours a day, and except those few nights when she has a later program is in bed by 9.
You see, she’s a normal kiddie, and her greatest delight is to get out with the children of her New York neighborhood and romp and play. They treat her as one of them and not as an outstanding radio artist, with a microphone salary, a sum far beyond their imagination.
“I just love to sing on the radio,” the tiny miss declared. “I don’t think much of opera, and when I tune in I like to hear songs, you know, about boopa doops.
“And I want to live on a farm some day, for a while any way.”

One Gribbroek Evening

The Warner Bros. cartoons succeeded because of an incredible blend of talents, many of whom get short shrift because they’re overshadowed by others. Bob Gribbroek is one.

While layout man Maurice Noble got all the plaudits from Chuck Jones (who seems to have been mesmerised by either extremely literal or stylised art and little in between), Bob Gribbroek plodded away for him before Noble arrived, and after he left, providing some fine work that deserves more attention.

Jones’ “One Froggy Evening” (1955) is championed as one of his masterpieces, but while Jones and writer Mike Maltese get all the credit, nothing is said about Gribbroek’s very effective settings (compare that to “What’s Opera Doc?” which continues to result in hosannas rained upon Noble). Let’s take a look at them, as constructed by Phil DeGuard.










Soon after this cartoon, Gribbroek found himself working for Bob McKimson in what the director described as his “unit of drunks and queers” and remained at the studio until it closed. Jones must have thought highly enough of him because Gribbroek worked for him at M.G.M. until retirement a year or so later.

Wet Blanket Policy Backgrounds

The Oscar-nominated ‘The Woody Woodpecker Song’ made its debut in “Wet Blanket Policy” (1948), and that’s why the cartoon has achieved a level of fame. But the rest of the cartoon is enjoyable; the late ‘40s Lantz shorts benefited from what you could arguably call other studios’ castoffs. Setting aside Bugs Hardaway’s flat delivery as Woody, the voice work is first rate; Buzz Buzzard was never better than when he was supplied with an evil growl by Lionel Stander.

And then there are the distinctive backgrounds of Fred Brunish. They’re far sketchier than you’d find at other studios but they always seem to work. Brunish always exhibits a good grasp of light, highlight and shade as well. Here are a few of his cityscapes from “Wet Blanket Policy.”





Brunish would occasionally work in a cross-promotion for the Lantz comics in his backgrounds. You can see it in the final drawing above. Whether he worked on the comics, I couldn’t tell you—it doesn’t appear he ever drew characters—but it wouldn’t have hurt his relationship with the boss.

The Rochester Riot

Eddie Anderson’s Rochester was arguably the most popular character on Jack Benny’s radio show, next to Jack himself. If you listen to the on-location war-time broadcasts, Anderson gets huge cheers, even more so than the carousing ladies man Phil Harris, the type of man a G-I might aspire to be. But everyone could identify with Rochester, the underpaid working man who still managed to get one up on his boss, time and time again. The underdog with the funny voice.

Rochester’s popularity unintentionally caused a riot, and not with the negative connotations associated with race (unfortunately, the matter of colour continues to swirl up in almost every discussion about Anderson’s character). In reading the stories from May of 1940, it appears collegians were looking for an excuse to be rowdy, a kind of mind-set that produces things like Vancouver’s Stanley Cup riot. Here are a couple of stories about the Rochester prank that went wrong.

Seven Students Arrested; ‘Kidnaped’ Jack Benny Comedian.
Cambridge, Mass., May 1—(AP)—The first riot of spring occurred last night in Harvard Square and seven Harvard students were arrested for disturbing the peace. They were fined $5 each today in district court.
The riot, which embodied all the usual features of Harvard Square spring disturbances, apparently developed from a combination of the warm evening air and the fact that a group of Massachusetts Institute of Technology students put one over on the Harvards by “abducting” Eddie “Rochester” Anderson, Negro comedian on the Jack Benny radio program.
Rochester, scheduled to appear at a Harvard smoker, turned up instead at the Delta Kappa Epsilon house at M. I. T., after being persuaded by a group of Dekes to leave his plane at Providence, R. I., and motor to Cambridge.
The comedian thought he was at Harvard until two hours later. The riot, which found some 200 students milling around in the square, followed soon after, giving police quite a workout for about an hour.

Riot Follows M.I.T. Kidnap Of Harvard Smoker Guest
“Rochester” of Jack Benny’s Radio Program Held Till Early Morning; Eight Sons of OI’ John Wind Up in Hoosegow
CAMBRIDGE, May 1. (INS)—Eight Harvard students were arrested today during a riot that followed the kidnaping of “Rochester,” Negro radio and stage comedian with Jack Benny, by Massachusetts Institute of Technology pranksters from a Harvard freshman smoker.
Riot Call
More than 2000 youths from both institutions battled and then set upon 50 Cambridge policemen summoned by a riot call.
Police hats were snatched, occasional blows were struck and water was dropped from dormitory windows as study-weary boys (?) attempted a drive on Radcliffe college, a girls’ Institution.
Police drove a wedge into the milling crowd near Harvard square, dispersed the students and arrested the eight. They were charged with disturbing peace and gave these names, Royce McKinley, 19, John Buchanan, 22, Nicholas Slatterly, 24, Richard N. Brill, 18, Henry Maclog, 18, Wm. Savage, 21 and Charles C. Beaman, 23.
The Negro valet comedian, whose real name is Eddie Anderson, was met at Providence, R. I. airport by Tech students who said they were a Harvard reception committee. Instead of taking him to the Harvard smoker, they took him to the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity house at Tech. There he entertained and was entertained until nearly morning, finally being taken by an automobile caravan to the Harvard smoker at Memorial hall.

Rochester shone even more after the war. The Benny show became more of a sitcom, a comedian’s life-as-comedy, and as the line between the “radio show” and “home life” blurred, Rochester became more and more a part of the on-air proceedings. When television took over, Mary and Harris were gone, Don Wilson was reduced to buffoonery and Dennis Day remained being silly. Rochester became more the voice of reality as well as turning into Jack’s closest friend. And the friend of the audience, too.

NBC Comics, Part 1

So what was the first cartoon series made for television? It depends on what you mean by “cartoon.”

A number of news articles came out in 1957 stating that Hanna-Barbera’s “Ruff and Reddy” was the first made-for-TV series. Of course, that wasn’t quite the case. “Crusader Rabbit” had debuted in syndication in 1950; it first appeared on KNBH in Los Angeles on Tuesday, August 1 that year. But there was another series that gets talked about, though people know very little about it.

Billboard magazine reported in its issue of August 26, 1950:

NBC-TV Slots Four Comics in Spot Across Board
NBC-TV last week slotted a new program, “NBC Comics,” in the 5-5:15 slot across the board following Kate Smith. There will be four separate three-minute cartoons in the show—“Kid Chain,” [sic] “Space Barton,” “Danny March” and “Johnny and Mr. Do Good.” The cartoons do not use live animation but a new “stop-and-go technique.” The program begins September 18.

There isn’t a lot of contemporary information about the show. It seems to have confused some newspapers, as they listed it as “Cartoon Serials.” It was sponsored by Standard Brands through the Ted Bates agency and ran opposite “Lucky Pup” on CBS (for Bristol-Myer). It didn’t last long, and you can blame Lever Brothers. They wanted, and got, the 5 p.m. timeslot on NBC, so the network dumped the comics at the end of March 1951.

I was all set to post bits and pieces of information cobbled together about the cartoons themselves, but found researcher Jerry Beck beat me to it ages ago and discovered a lot more about them than I did. So allow me to purloin what he wrote in his book ‘Animation Art’:

TELECOMICS
Telecomics has to be considered one of the first cartoon series produced for television. However, there was virtually no animation on the show. It is just as its title suggests: a series of comic-strip style drawings filmed sequentially, with an occasional animated effect.
Early Days
Telecomics, Inc. was first formed in 1942 by a pair of Disney animators, Dick Moores and Jack Boyd. In 1945 they filmed a pilot, “Case of the Missing Finger Chapter 4, The Belt of Doom” starring Peril Pinkerton, [copyright July 31]. This led to a syndicated 15-minute television program in 1949, which consisted of four three-minute stories.
The original show contained “Brother Goose” by Cal Howard; “Joey and Jug”, a clown story by Arnold Gillespie; “Rick Rack Secret Agent,” by Miles Pike and Pete Burness, and “Sa-Lah,” an Arabian Knights fantasy drawn by A.J. Metcalf. Jack Kirkwood, Lilien Leigh and Bill Grey provided the voice-over narration. The syndicated series was distributed by Vallee Video, owned by singer Rudy Vallee, but, unfortunately, these early broadcasts have been lost.
Made-for-TV Animation
The NBC network optioned the property in 1950, re-packaging the program and hiring cartoonists Moores and Boyd to produce it. The re-named NBC Comics now earned a place in history as the first made-for-TV network cartoon program.
The NBC cartoon contained serialized of a new group of adventure comic stars. Episodes would begin with the opening of a comic book, the first page showing a silhouette of the lead character and indicating it was either part one, part two or part three of the day’s episodes. The page was then turned to show a full-screen character opening title. Each episode was approximately three-and-a-half minutes long.
“Space Barton” was the most interesting of the lot. Horace “Space” Barton, Jr. is an all-American college football star who enlists in the Army Air Corps and is chosen to test the first U.S. jet plane. He then blasts off to Mars with his brother Jackie as a stowaway a rocket ship build by Professor Dinehart, an astronomer. The adventures have them engaged in a civil war on the red planet, pitted against a faction led by a deranged Earth scientist who had preceded them to Mars.
Colorful Characters
Other Telecomics stars include Danny March and Kid Champion. Danny March was the orphaned son of a Yale man who was raised by his uncle to be one of the toughest kids in Metro City. Danny turned to detective work when he was unable to become a police officer because of his short stature. Building a reputation as a tenacious private eye, he is hired by the mayor as his personal detective to stop crime in Metro City.
“Kid Champion” is the story of Eddie Hale, a musician who was urged by his former boxing-champ father to become a boxer. When Eddie mistakenly believes that he killed killed a gas station attendant during a holdup, he teams up with a hard-luck fight manager, Lucky Skinner, changes his identity to Kid Champion and refuses to talk about his past to anyone. "Johnny and Mr Do-Right" followed the exploits of a young boy and his zany dog. One hundred and sixty-five episodes ran on NBC-TV from 18 September 1950 until 30 March 1951. Voices included Robert C. Bruce, Pat McGeeham [sic], Howard McNear, Lurene Tuttle, Tony Barret and Paul DeVall. The individual adventures were not titled, and after their network run, they again entered syndication as Telecomics.
It left TV screens in the early 1960s, due mainly to the onslaught of the Hanna-Barbera-led color cartoons, and the fact that the Telecomics had been filmed in black and white.

Jerry mentioned the show was originally in syndication in 1949 but I haven’t been able to find a television station that aired it. And calling it the “first television cartoon” goes back to the definition of “cartoon.” ‘Crusader Rabbit’ had limited movement, more so than the shows Hanna-Barbera invented toward the end of the ‘50s, but there was virtually no movement of drawings at all on ‘NBC Comics.’ So, I’d probably side with the school of thought that declares Crusader the first real made-for-TV cartoon.

‘NBC Comics’ wasn’t really missed, even when it was on the air. Walter Ames of the Los Angeles Times seems to have thought mothers would like their kids to see. But another newspaper columnist, and I didn’t note the source, noted in his TV review:

The unkindest cut of the week, the scrapping of the NBC video broadcast of the U.N. General Assembly meeting with “And now it is time for the NBC comics.”

Interestingly, “Peril Pinkerton” wasn’t among the original “Telecomics” or “NBC Comics,” but it still had some life. Billboard reported, on June 9, 1951, after “NBC Comics” had left the air:

Don Dewar, prexy of Telecomics, Inc., left for a sales hop to New York, hoping to peddle TV’s first 15-minute animated five-a-week strip. He will ask for $15,000 per week for national sponsorship of the strip “Peril Pinkerton.”

It could be that Pinkerton was the cartoon Dewar was talking about in a story published by the Associated Press several months after “NBC Comics” went off the air. The old show was already in syndication, but Dewar had Moores and Boyd go back to the drawing board. And with “Crusader Rabbit” now on the air, they seem to have realised they had to up their game. In reading this, you can’t help but realise that Hanna-Barbera’s limited animation, scoffed at by many today, was a real television breakthrough in 1957 compared to what had been made for TV to that point.

Animated Subjects in Making
By Jack Quigg
HOLLYWOOD, June 9. (AP)—A new kind of cartoon—part newspaper comic strip, part animated movie feature—is being developed especially for television. It won’t be as smooth as, say, a Donald Duck film, but it’s the best TV fans can expect in the foreseeable future.
This comes from Don Dewar, former lawyer and film studio executive who now heads Telecomics, Inc., one of the few firms making cartoons for television.
Dewar and two partners, Jack Boyd, formerly with Walt Disney, and Dick Moores, veteran newspaper cartoonist, went into production a little over a year ago. Now they have a staff of 50 and are working full blast.
They found that the field wasn’t crowded. TV cartoons were virtually limited to commercials, a few silent film comedies and the Crusader Rabbit series—not much for a nation of comic book fans.
The partners started with a series for NBC. The 15-minute program was devoted to the adventures of three heroes: Danny March, private eye; Boxer Kid Champion and Rocket Man Space Barton.
It wasn't much different from a funny-paper. Characters and backgrounds were done in watercolor wash. They flashed on the screen like comic strip panels but instead of balloons with printed dialogue the lines were read by actors. Once you got interested in the story you forgot the lack of action—almost.
But the partners considered this too static. Now in a new series being readied, they think they’ve gone about as far as you can go with a TV cartoon, considering time and money limitations.
There'll be action in this one. When a character talks, his lips will move, although the rest of his face may not. He’ll walk or throw things, if necessary. Cars and trains will move. There’ll be motion, but not the continuous flowing motion of a movie cartoon.

Peril was never in peril of poor ratings. That’s because he never got on TV to begin with.

And what happened to the Telecomics? Billboard revealed in a story dated January 9, 1954 that 168 of them had been acquired for distribution by the newly-formed National Telefilms Associates, the guys who slapped an NTA logo on all your favourite Fleischer cartoons (they acquired the distribution rights to the Fleischer Superman cartoons at the same time).

But “Telecomics” wasn’t the only attempt to put cartoons on television in the 1940s. In fact, it wasn’t the only ‘telecomics,’ either. We’ll have more on that in a future post.

The Serenity of Book Revue

Leave it to Bob Clampett to lull the audience into false sense of serenity, only to suddenly splatter them with silliness, pop culture references and outrageous poses. That’s just what he does in “Book Revue.”

The cartoon opens with a shot of a book store in the evening, with a lamp on a separate cell in the foreground. The store looks photographic.



Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight Sonata’ plays peacefully over a pan of books. The one on the right is “The Life and Times of Bugs Bunny.”



The pan fades into the next scene. Then, wham! We’re hit with a drunken cuckoo, staggering and spilling his flask.



And then the cartoon really gets going.

Tom McKimson and Cornett Wood get credit for layouts and backgrounds in one of Clampett’s most acclaimed shorts (released in January 1946).