Why Leon Schlesinger Fired Buddy

You’d think the first place anyone wanting an interview about cartoons would go, circa 1935, was the door of the Walt Disney studio. Disney had the name, Disney had the prestige. But that wasn’t the case for one Hollywood columnist who decided to talk to Leon Schlesinger.

Alice L. Tildesley worked for the Philadelphia Ledger, which syndicated several full-page stories with photos for papers every Sunday. Tildesley generally did puff stories on Hollywood items appealing to women—fashion, hair, romance and the like. But she interviewed Leon Schlesinger for one column, perhaps because Leon came from Philadelphia. Then she decided to a whole page on the making of animated cartoons and the bulk of the spotlight went to Leon.

I’ve only been able to find one paper that ran this particular story, The Baltimore Sun of June 20, 1937. Judging by the rare references to Tommy Turtle and Oliver Owl, one suspects the story was written maybe even a year before and banked for publishing at a more convenient time. Unfortunately, I can’t view the full text, let alone the photos, so the version you see below may not be complete. Still, as Leon died in 1949, before he could be interviewed by animation historians, this story is about as good as we’re going to get. It’s likely the only time anybody spoke much about “Page Miss Glory,” other than director Tex Avery, who didn’t like it. Or the less-than-winsome Buddy.

Stars Without Temperament
There Is One Set Of Actors In Hollywood That Never “Crabs” About Parts Or Clothes They Don't Get Upstage, Try To Hog The Camera And, Best Of All, Pay No Taxes
By ALICE L. TILDESLEY
HOLLYWOOD. THIS is a story about motion-picture actors who have no morals clauses in their contracts. They are never temperamental, never keep the director waiting, never argue with the make-up man or drive the wardrobe designer crazy because they can’t wear green, won’t put on calico, or don’t think the dress is as smart as Marlene Dietrich’s last outfit. None of these incredible actors ever upstages each other or attempts to hog the camera. They don’t descend on the publicity director and storm because there are no stories about them in the paper today. Most startling item of all: They don’t crab about their income taxes!
NOT ANGELS
No, they’re not angels. They're cartoon characters.
In spite of their perfections, they are like regular picture actors in that they can rise from obscurity to stardom, they can fail to register on the screen, they get fan mail—or don’t—
and they make fortunes for their producers.
“Personality is what counts, whether in a cartoon character or in Greta Garbo,” said Leon Schlessinger [sic], producer of “Looney Tunes” and “Merrie Melodies.” “Porky the Pig is a good example. He was a minor character in a cartoon but his stutter and his expressive face—or should I call it a countenance?—attracted so much attention that I said: ‘Star him!’ after the first preview. Now Porky has his own starring vehicles specially written for him.
NO PERSONALITY
“What makes personality is as much a puzzle to me as it is to any producer of films starring human actors, however. Once we used Buddy, a little boy who seemed to have comedy possibilities, as a character in a cartoon, but on the screen he was negative. We tried several times to pep him up, but he seemed to go flat, he couldn’t develop personality, so we let him out.”
In major studios some attention is paid to the comments of critics, the tenor of fan mail, etc., concerning new players. This is just as true in cartoon studios.
“We had a monster in one picture,” Mr. Schlessinger related. “We thought him quite a minor menace, but we had letters complaining that children who saw him had nightmares. The monster received his notice that same day, and since then scary creatures are barred from our cartoons.” You never hear of the Wolf bringing suit because the Three Little Pigs got top billing; you never read that Mickey Mouse has gone to Europe after a dispute over salary, or that Oliver Owl has walked off the just because he doesn’t like the camera man. All these things happen at major studios.
SOME TROUBLES
Yet now and then a cartoon comedy gets under way, with as many as seventy drawings completed, and then goes blah. “‘There’s nothing in that story,’ I decide,” said Mr. Schlessinger. “We haven’t the right slant on it, so we put it away. After a few months or a year, some one on the staff gets a new idea, and we rearrange the scenes, add to them and have a hit.
“No one ever destroys a drawing, once it’s made, for you never know when it can be used. Sometimes we use a sequence from an old picture, just as stock shots of floods, fires, trench warfare, and so on are used and reused in regular films. We merely change the background or reverse the action.”
LOOK AND STUTTER
Andy Devine’s appeal to film fans seems to be his earnest look and his stutter. Imagine creating a cartoon star from a bodyless stutter!
“There's a boy on the lot, doing props for Warner films, who has an uncontrollable stutter,” said the producer. “It was from him that Porky the Pig got his voice. The boy can’t talk to order, so we record his lines first then draw Porky to conform to the [stutter].
“Our stock company—we have company just like the human ones on the major lots—consists of Beans, Oliver Owl, Kitty, Ham and Ex and Tommy Turtle. A middle-aged woman who works on the lot as dressmaker does Kitty’s voice. It’s her own natural voice, but it sounds like that of a very small girl.”
A cartoon studio often gets actors to imitate actual well-known voices. A crooner in a recent cartoon did a perfect imitation of Bing Crosby.
THE FARMYARD
“Farmyard characters are funnier than human characters in a cartoon,” Mr. Schlessinger pointed out. “Making our crooner a rooster, the honest farmer a black crow, the deceived maiden a bantam chicken, adds to the comedy of the old story of the farmer’s daughter and the city slicker.
“Not long ago, we decided to do something definitely different. A girl from Chicago showed me some ultra-modernistic sets she had designed which she thought could be used as backgrounds for a sophisticated cartoon. In order to show off the sets, we had to use human characters and have the camera shoot the sort of angles Busby Berkeley made famous. The idea was novel and the result original, but somehow it was not so funny as if animals, fowls or insects had been used.”
STORY CONFERENCE
A cartoon begins in a story conference. Mr. Schlessinger, his three directors and the staff assemble to discuss ideas. The ideas are drawn, not written, and are talked over in sketches. The musical tempo is decided upon, the musical score written, the art director creates the sets or backgrounds and the animators draw the characters. Then each scene is drawn, transferred to celluloid, which is first inked, then painted, then photographed. As many as thirty animators may work on different scenes of the same picture, so each animator receives a sketch of every character in several poses and must conform to these sketches.
FELLOW-PIONEERS
Hugh Harman and Rudolph Ising, who were pioneers with Walt Disney in the cartoon field, when all three shared a garage-studio in Kansas City and produced locally distributed films, have advanced in ten years in Hollywood from a one-room office to an extensive plant of their own, employing 335 people. Bosko, a small Negro, is Harman-Ising’s oldest cartoon character.
“In the beginning,” explained Mr. Harman, “you could hardly toll whether Bosko was a child or an animal, but with the passing of years he has evolved into a real and believable character.”

Felix and the Bell

Felix the Cat was one of the great actors of silent film. Otto Messmer and his crew at the Sullivan studio developed an attractive, imaginative character rich in emotion. And toward the end of the ‘20s, Messmer put him in increasingly unusual settings.

One cartoon I like is ‘Astronomeous’ (1928). Felix, for reasons that aren’t all that clear, fires a harpoon which lands on a cyclist going around the rings of Saturn. Our hero then finds himself punted to Mars.

The New York animation studios were known for their morphing animation into the early ‘30s. Felix turned things (including body parts) into other things. Here’s a cute little scene where curiosity creates a question mark, which hangs in the air, and Felix uses it, a Martian mushroom and his tail to create a bell that he rings.





The crescent moons in the atmosphere is a nice touch.

There’s a lot of cycle animation. Some of it is pretty obvious but some is used to good effect, like when the letters of the word “DONG” change shape.

Felix took a rest for awhile when the sound era came in, with the exception of a couple of ho-hum cartoons for Van Beuren, and then returned with a revised format, a cute little theme song, and even less elaborate animation in the late ‘50s in some made-for-TV cartoons that are liked by many today who grew up with them.

A Puss’ Booty

The cartoon delivers on its title. It’s called “Puss N’ Booty.”



Yup. There’s a puss. And a booty.

This 1943 Warners cartoon features more of Frank Tashlin’s experimentation with layouts. The evil cat slinks toward the camera in perspective and his body fills the whole frame. There’s a quick cut to the cat creeping away in perspective and then sitting down, watching the bird in the distance.

Tashlin fills the cartoon with jagged camera work and low angles, as if parts of the film are shot at the cat’s level. And there’s the angular, deco-style house exterior and interiors that Tashlin loved, apparently drawn by Dick Thomas.

Cal Dalton gets the sole animation credit. Izzy Ellis and Art Davis would have been in the unit as well. Dave Hilberman worked with Tashlin and I’ll leave it to the experts to definitively say he did the layouts on this cartoon.

Meet George O’Hanlon

George O’Hanlon’s life might be summed up by his entry on the Hollywood Walk of Fame web site. The page on George can’t make up its mind about when and where he was born. Events somehow always seem to have conspired against poor George, and not only in the roles he played. Perhaps the only difference is in real life, nice guy George O’Hanlon finished on top.

O’Hanlon received his star on February 8, 1960, the same day as Morey Amsterdam. At that point, his star was very much in the past tense. His big career break came when he was cast as the lead character in Richard L. Bare’s “So You Want to Give Up Smoking” (1942). Warner Bros. released it, and that led to a series of one-reel comedies from 1945 to 1956.

It’s interesting to read Bare’s comments at the outset of the series. He envisioned it like the Pete Smith specialties at MGM—a comedy instructional short with voice-over narration and sound effects. Evidently, Bare and/or O’Hanlon realised they’d be funnier if they were done in live action with dialogue, and the two produced 63 films ranging from average to extremely funny and clever (O’Hanlon was later a vice-president of Richard Bare Productions).

Here’s what Bare had to say about the series in this 1946 column by the Associated Press:

By BOB THOMAS
HOLLYWOOD, June 22.—(AP)—You are about to see yourself in your full folly on the screen. That is, if you are the average Joe McDoakes.
Joe is the start in a series of one-reelers that ex-G. I. Dick Bare is making for Warners. A list of titles gives you an idea of how you will be cast: “So You Think You’re Allergic,” “So You Think You Need Glasses,” “So You Want to Keep Your Hair,” “So You Want to Stop Smoking,” “So You Think You’re Neurotic,” “So You’re Going to Have a Baby” and, of course, “So You Want to Be in Pictures.”
In the “Hair” reel, Joe McDoakes, played by comedian George O’Hanlon, washes his head in the shower with laundry soap, brushes his tresses with a stiff brush, then notes his hair is falling out. He visits an authority, his barber, who tells him to rub his scalp. Another barber tells him never to rub his scalp. A third tonsorial expert tells him to always wear a hat; a fourth, never to wear a hat. He finally goes to a specialist who gives him a super-duper treatment. Guess what happens to Joe. Just call him “Baldy.”
The conclusion is that there’s no cure in view for falling hair.
In the “Allergic” reel, Joe suffers from the sneezes. He tries all types of medicine, atomizers, shots and what have you. His house is hermetically sealed and all possible sneeze-sausers are removed—including a floral painting. Finally Joe discovers he’s allergic to his wife’s dandruff.
Needless to says, Joe feels like a jerk for having wasted his dough on the quack cures. What Joe should have done, said Dick, was to let science discover his allergy and then stay away from it as much as possible.
The writer-director-producer had a good deal of difficulty selling his idea to the studios. It was feared the “smoking” film would antagonize the tobacco industry. However, he now has carte blanche to do just about anything he wants. In “So You Think You’re Neurotic,” Dick will parody both “Spellbound” and “The Outlaw.” And “So You Think You Can Beat the Horses” does a takeoff on “Lost Weekend.”
“The purpose of these 10 minute films is to discourage the average guy from quack remedies,” Dick said. “The films are not training films, but they are education.”
Dick actually goes into deep research before making any of the films. “After I finished reading up on neurotics,” he said, “I found I was the most neurotic guy in the world.”
Just an average Joe McDoakes, eh Dick?

One of the McDoakes shorts in 1948 was “So You Want to be on Radio,” where everything goes wrong as Joe innocently tries to win a few prizes. And that almost sums up O’Hanlon’s luckless simultaneous radio career. Billboard of March 20, 1948 reveals O’Hanlon’s agent had made an audition record adapted from one of the McDoakes shorts and was shopping it to Old Gold for possible radio or TV sponsorship. O’Hanlon finally landed on radio on November 9 that year and the circumstances sound like something that would happen to McDoakes. The debut was delayed a month for some reason and not only was it on the last-place network, Mutual, the show couldn’t even find a sponsor. It was pitched to Colgate that month (as a radio or TV property, according to Billboard), but there were no bites. In January, Mutual announced the show’s cancellation.

Things looked up for O’Hanlon’s radio career, though, on April 30, when the show was picked up as a summer replacement for Alan Young, with Tums as the sponsor. Ad agency Dancer, Fitzgerald and Sample picked it up for around $3,500 (Billboard, May 7, 1949) with plans to run it from July 12 to October 4 (Tuesdays, 8:30 p.m. Eastern). “Me and Janie” (her last name wasn’t ‘Jetson’) had a top supporting cast in Sheldon Leonard, Lurene Tuttle, Willard Waterman and Marvin Miller, with Don Wilson as the announcer. Sam Chase reviewed it in Billboard of August 6th. In part, it reads:

A moderate entertaining bagatelle is this latest show featuring George O’Hanlon. It is another in the long line of situation comedies based on the well-meaning guy who somehow always gets things all balled up with his job and his wife, but everything always turns out to be semi-satisfactory by the stanza’s conclusion...The humor was all lightweight, with nothing to titillate the lazy listener’s thinking apparatus. But the net effect was harmless to any age group and won’t do any obvious damage to NBC’s prestige. On the other hand, its possibilities as a year-round show seem limited.

Limited it was, but you can blame Niles Trammell at NBC and, indirectly, Bill Paley at CBS for O’Hanlon’s radio career ending. Paley had been raiding NBC of its stars and president Trammell was determined to sew some of them up before Paley got to them. So he worked out a deal in October with Fanny Brice and Dancer, Fitzgerald and Sample, who promptly put Brice on the air for Tums and left with O’Hanlon with a stomach ache caused by unemployment and more McDoakes-like hard luck.

Television should have been a land of opportunity. ABC looked at a kinescope of an O’Hanlon pilot in 1950. It passed on the show. Three years later, Bare and O’Hanlon were at it again with “Real George,” with O’Hanlon as “a slightly befuddled young department store employee who plausibly gets in and out of trouble.” Phyllis Coates, Bare’s off-screen wife and McDoakes’ on-screen one, had a part, and so did Ray Collins in his days before Lt. Tragg on “Perry Mason.” The William Morris Agency shopped it around. No sale. Warner Bros. gave him one final shot at a starring role in 1956, hoping to sell Joe McDoakes as a TV sitcom since the series of theatrical shorts was ending. No takers. O’Hanlon’s marriage broke apart in 1952 and it took him until 1955 to land a regular on-screen role, inheriting “The Life of Riley” neighbour role of Calvin Dudley abandoned by Tom d’Andrea. O’Hanlon started writing for TV—he co-wrote the McDoakes shorts—and that’s how he started making his living. But it’s clear he wanted to act. A unbylined newspaper article of November 25, 1960 quotes him:

“I’m always identified with McDoakes,” says O’Hanlon, “which would be fine if the studio would just re-issue the films. But as it is, I’m sort of a McDoakes without portfolio — and without pay.”

O’Hanlon wrote himself into several Sothern shows but his other TV appearances seem few and far between, according to newspaper listings. He did a ‘Cheyenne’, appeared on ‘Make Room For Daddy,’ did a guest shot with the immortal Keefe Braselle on ‘The Red Skelton Show’ and even ended up on the panel of ‘Pantomime Quiz.’ He had his own quiz show on KTLA starting in March 1957 called ‘Behind the 8-BaIl.’ Variety panned the show. Clucked the trade paper: "KTLA must have figured this an answer to Tom Duggan. Who asked?" He then went into a film production company with stand-up comics Tommy Noonan and Peter Marshall. Yes, the ‘Hollywood Squares’ Peter Marshall. Surely you remember their 20th Century Fox hit ‘The Rookie’ (1959)?

But O’Hanlon had also found work, albeit limited, in cartoons. It was an odd career choice for someone who could only do one voice—his own. The John Sutherland studio hired him for several shorts and, more significantly, Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera had him play the part of George in the weak 1958 Tom and Jerry short “The Vanishing Duck.” He auditioned for the pair in 1960 for the part of Fred Flintstone, and lost. Two years later, he auditioned for the part of the head of the Jetson family and lost again. But the actor wasn’t suitable so the role was cast again. This time, O’Hanlon won. And the unsuitable actor who was originally George Jetson? He was the man inducted on the Walk of Fame the same day as O’Hanlon—Morey Amsterdam.

Even a Joe McDoakes script couldn’t have ended any better than that.

If you want to know more about the McDoakes series, there’s no better place to go than this web site run by Facebook friend Steve Bailey.

Who Needs Paint Anyways?

Let’s see. Characters that are outlines. Cigarette-shaped heads. Walls represented by a signs in the background. If it’s a 1950s commercial, it could be just about any studio. But if it’s a theatrical cartoon, you can pretty well guess which one it is.

Here’s an example of the limited animation of UPA. This background is from “Gerald McBoing Boing’s Symphony” (1953). The heads are on cells. They turn to follow Gerald as he comes toward the camera from the buildings in the distance, turns and then proceeds across the drawing. The bodies don’t move.



If you’re curious, the pastel blue sign in the background reads ‘Carmel.’

The designs are by T. Hee, while the colour schemes were worked out by Jules Engel and Michi Kataoka.

I Wanna Easter Egg

Nothing quite conveys the message of Easter than a bratty kid bashing Elmer Fudd’s head that’s been decorated as a candy egg.



This is from the 1947 Warner’s cartoon “Easter Yeggs.” You should recognise the early Bob McKimson directorial style. The credited animators are Dick Bickenbach, Chuck McKimson and Izzy Ellis. Thad Komorowski reveals this is a Bick scene.

Rachel Newstead reviews the cartoon HERE.

“30” For 60 Minutes’ Mike Wallace

You can see him leaning in, setting up, going in for the kill.

Mike Wallace: They say you’re the father of our country.
George Washington: Some do, yes.
Wallace: They say you’re a man of integrity and high character.
Washington: I’d like to think so.
Wallace: They also say you never chopped down a cherry tree, it’s a myth, it’s a lie. True?

Mike Wallace was known for making people squirm as he got to the bottom of things. He became a hero to viewers on ‘60 Minutes’ (and acquired historic ratings) for trapping sleazoid rip-off artists with their own words. Not too many year earlier, he had a reputation for pointed—sometimes, too pointed—questions on his late 1950s one-on-one interview show on ABC. But long before that, back when he was still Myron Wallace and based in Chicago, he hosted a radio show called “Is it Fact or Fiction?” where, aided by a team of researchers that did the real work, he busted historical myths about Pompeii, the pilgrims, Sir Isaac Newton and even George Washington and the fabled cherry tree.

Wallace died this weekend at the age of 93, and the reputation he’ll leave behind to many is that of being a seeker of truth through a mire of BS. No higher accolade can be given to a journalist. And that’s travelling a fair distance for a man who spent part of his career hawking Elgin compacts on “You Bet Your Life.”

Perhaps no one else had a more prestigious debut on network radio than Mike Wallace, though the series seems stodgy and dull to most modern listeners. This newspaper clipping from February 7, 1939 reveals:

Myron Wallace, a University of Michigan undergraduate, will be added to the Information Please board of experts for the WJZ broadcast Tuesday at 8:30 p. m., in a test of the old and the new. Franklin P. Adams, one of the regulars of the board of experts, is a Michigan old grad of the class of 1903. Clifton Fadiman, the program’s ruthless master of ceremonies, will single out the two Michiganlanders with his questions on any and all subjects. John Kieran will be on hand as the other regular and Oscar Levant as the other guest for the occasion.

This may have been the only time Wallace appeared on a programme and the term “ruthless master of ceremonies” was applied to someone else. Wallace acquired a reputation, long before ‘60 Minutes,’ of being an attack dog. Here’s what an unbylined piece in the Kokomo Tribune, dated April 26, 1957, had to say, as it went on to give a biography to date:

‘Mike Wallace Interviews’ To Make Debut on WTTV Sunday
Mike Wallace, whose much-talked-about “interviews in depth” will be brought to a nationwide ABC-TV audience starting Sunday (9 p.m., Channel 4), has brought to the interview type of television program a unique combination of dramatic suspense and almost surgical candor that gives viewers the feeling they are watching a real-life drama in which the characters reveal themselves to the full.
Perhaps the people best qualified to evaluate Wallace’s interviewing technique are those who have appeared with him before the TV cameras. Here are some sample opinions:
Elsa Maxwell: “I appeared on the show to correct the erroneous impression that I am paid to give parties ... I was not embarrassed in the slightest by the questions, even those on sex. I love a good, frank, adult talk ... Before the show Mr. Wallace offered to send one of his staff to discuss our questions and answers. I declined the offer, preferring to go on cold . . . I could fight back and I did.”
Faye Emerson: “There are no indiscreet questions—just indiscreet answers.”
Mr. John, celebrated milliner: “I enjoyed being on the show. I’d go on again tomorrow. Once a person goes on the show he leaves himself wide open and if he feels he has been victimized, it serves him right.”
Walter Slezak: “Mike Wallace is a tough customer and I wanted to take him on. have some fun with him ... I have no skeleton to hide, so it wasn’t in the least embarrassing.”
Abe Burrows: “The reason the program goes so well is that Mike listens to what his guest says and follows it up. Most interviewers on the air try to be clever. They don’t listen.”
Mary Margaret McBride: “Mike has great charm. His real interest in you is what makes the show so good.”
Behind Wallace’s emergence as the most arresting and incisive questioner of program guests is a 17-year background in network broadcasting—as newscaster, emcee, announcer and interviewer.
Myron (“Mike”) Wallace, born in Brookline Mass., on May 9, 1918, and a graduate of the University of Michigan, has been in network broadcasting since 1940, when he worked in Detroit as announcer and narrator of such programs as “The Lone Ranger” and “Green Hornet.” In 1941 he moved on to Chicago to announce “Ma Perkins,” “Guiding Light” and other five-a-week programs, in addition to conducting a regular newscast for the Chicago Sun-Times.
He joined the Navy in December, 1943, and served in the Pacific as a Submarine Force communications officer, and later as officer in charge of radio entertainment at Great Lakes. He returned to commercial radio in 1946, acting in and announcing a variety of programs. For a period of five years, he was known around Chicago as “Mr. Radio.”
Wallace launched his television career in June, 1951, as host of “All Around the Town,” a series of remote pickups from points of interest in New York. This was followed by an interview program which ran for two years, during which he had 2,000 guests. He has been active in every phase of broadcasting, from drama to quiz shows, parades, elections and conventions.
Important radio-TV credits include the TV series “Adventure,” of which he was co-host with Charles Collingwood in 1953; “Stage Struck,” an hour-long radio documentary on the theater in 1953 and 1954, tape recordings of which are preserved in the Library of Congress; the “Weekday” radio program, which he co-hosted with Margaret Truman and later with Virginia Graham; TV’s “The Big Surprise,” of which he was emcee; “Mike Wallace and the News,” a nightly TV news show, and “Nightbeat,” the prototype of “Mike Wallace Interviews.”

Wallace evidently picked on more than his guests. He and wife Buff Cobb hosted a late-night interview show starting in June 1950 from Chez Paree in Chicago. She once ended up with a broken toe because she kicked him too hard under the table over something he did.

One story the obits likely won’t have is this somewhat amusing one from the ‘Along Chicago Radio Row’ column in The Garfieldian, January 30, 1947.

Nick O’Time
Announcer-newscaster Myron Wallace could have qualified as a track star Friday evening when he sprinted out of the Balinese room at the Blackstone hotel, coatless and with dinner napkin in hand. For the first time in his radio career, Mike was so busy enjoying himself that he almost missed his 11 p.m. “Myron Wallace and the News” broadcast on WMAQ.
With ten minutes to reach the studio, he did some fast moving while his wife called the studio to have an elevator waiting and a stand-by announcer on hand. Half an hour later he returned to resume his dinner—still with napkin in hand.

Accurate? Seems so. And Mike Wallace wouldn’t have had it any other way.

John Tackaberry, Psychopath

There was a local radio columnist, back in the network days of the ‘40s and early ‘50s, who griped about the La Brea Tar Pits. He had nothing against the tar pits themselves. He just didn’t want to hear them on network radio comedies, with audiences guffawing after every reference. He hated references on radio shows that only the studio audience, being locals, would get.

There’s another way of looking at it. Listeners weren’t dumb. In a lot of cases, they either had a good idea what the reference was about, or the name was funny in itself (does anyone really need to know where “The blue goo of the La Brea Tar Pits” is when bus tour guide Frank Nelson rattles it off on the Jack Benny show?). So they went along with the gag, even if they lived in New York City, like syndicated columnist John Crosby.

Here’s Crosby’s gripe, printed February 25, 1947, as he takes aim at Benny’s writing staff: John Tackaberry, Milt Josefsberg, Hal Goodman and Al Gordon.

MAYBE ONLY PSYCHOPATHS CAN WRITE RADIO SCRIPTS
It Would Seem To Be Proved In Hollywood
By JOHN CROSBY
The Nation's two most popular art forms, radio and the movies, are owned and controlled by New York front offices and New York banks, but the creative processes are all highly concentrated in Hollywood, the land of the Lotos. The centralization of culture has had a sweeping and possibly uplifting effect on our exteriors—our women’s clothes, our Interior decoration, our speech and our mannerisms, its effect on our thinking is, at best, questionable.
In the long run, radio programs and movies originate with the writers, and Hollywood is not a good place for writers. As a matter of fact, the concentration of the Nation’s best writers in any American city is hardly a good idea; in Hollywood it’s particularly bad. There is a state of mind about Southern California—not necessarily an evil one, but a pervasive one. An idea born in this balmy, damp climate comes out in pastel shades. Honeysuckle gets into a writer’s prose, sticks to the adverbs, smells up the plot. The same idea born in New York—where the subways are crowded, the gin is strong and the golf courses, for all practical purposes, nonexistent—is more vigorous, possibly uglier, but certainly sharper.
DANGER LOOMS
There’s nothing the matter with the California brand of idea (John Steinbeck is an excellent example of the pastel-shaded writer who has done magnificently with the California idea) except that, if all the writers gravitate out here, our ideas will become lopsided.
Perhaps the easiest but also the most unfair example of this localization of ideas is the Hollywood reference—that is, Hollywood and Vine, and the Brown Derby, the Hollywood smog, the Hollywood automobile accident rate. Actually, all good radio writers and producers strain valiantly to avoid this sort of thing. But the Hollywood state of mind is difficult and perhaps impossible to avoid.
A prominent radio producer pointed out nothing happens to writers in Hollywood, at least nothing resembling the experiences of people outside Hollywood. The writers’ options are picked up or dropped; their swimming pools are completed or not completed; their horses run the wrong way at Santa Anita.
STRUGGLE UNNECESSARY
But the writers are so insulated from cold, hunger and poverty that the struggle for existence, which motivates most of us, is remote. Consequently, problems of most radio programs are either very tiny (“Ozzie ate too much Christmas dinner”) or outsize (“He’s got the secret formula for the atom bomb. If don't head him off, New York City will be in ruins by morning”).
You can't make up what happens to the boy next door unless you have had some experiences with the boy next door. In Hollywood the boy next door is likely to be another writer. Radio producers, I find (at least the good ones), are as conscious of this at this as anyone else. A producer, who had better be nameless, informs me that his search for good radio writers is constant and heartbreaking. Writers, he says, are interested in their contracts and in their salaries, but not in their work. For obvious reasons, they are eager to please the producer, but an eagerness to please is hardly conducive to real creative writing.
A GROUP AFFAIR
This is the logical result of the radio writing system. Since a script is a collaborative job—with four or five writers, a producer, a comedian and sometimes the star all contributing ideas—the individual writer’s interest in the total work is not that of, say, a novelist whose novel is entirely his own. Also the writer gets no credit outside the trade in spite of the fact that no actor could exist without him.
Radio writers, I find, are neurotic, keen-witted specialists. Their appreciation of writing is highly developed. Just as an engineer sees more in a bridge than you or I, they see more in a joke you or I. Writers at a Jack Benny rehearsal, I discovered, laughed harder at their own jokes than anyone else. If there were any gags in that script (and it was a very funny script), that failed to amuse the average listener, I’m sure Benny’s writers could have explained to him with overpowering logic why the joke was funny and why he should have laughed.
They are specialists, you see, living in a world of other specialists in a land far removed from most of the people who hear them. Their contact with the is a set of figures, a Hooper or a sales chart, which tells them nothing about the hopes, the interests, the fears, the joys, the sorrows or the world outside.

Occasionally, there are references on network radio comedy/variety shows that are a little baffling but that involves time, being some 60-plus years removed from them. But Benny, Burns and Allen, Bob Hope, Jimmy Durante, they all had writers. And they all have fans even today. The psychopaths knew what they were doing.

The King and Queen of Sports

Cartoon fans have probably seen Tex Avery’s takes thousands of times, but they’re still funny. Here’s the climax of ‘The Chump Champ’ (1950), where Gorgeous Gorillawitz (Spike) cheats to become King of Sports and win a kiss from the Queen of Sports, who is behind a curtain. The curtain is lifted. Here’s the Queen.



And here’s the reaction.



Mike Lah, Grant Simmons and Walt Clinton are the credited animators. Bill Thompson, Daws Butler and (I think) Don Messick (one line as Droopy) supply voices, along with another man (one line) who I can’t identify.

The Rarest Stan Freberg Cartoon

About the only people who didn’t know what to do with cartoons in the 1950s were the people who produced them. All the film companies knew how to do was make them and distribute them to theatres. They were happy (and stupid) to rid themselves of old cartoons to television syndicators or networks who knew what to do with them—make lots of money.

The television programme businessmen realised if old cartoons could make them a windfall, maybe old children’s records could do the same. After all, the 78s and 45s had been released once and had likely wrung out most of their sales. Why not marry old records to new cartoons, ones especially made for television? They didn’t need theatrical-style animation on every frame—“NBC Comics” and (especially) “Crusader Rabbit” had proven kids would watch virtually static drawings over narration, so they were affordable to make.

However, the idea of cartoons based on children’s records seems to have had a lengthy gestation period. Former Disney animator Art Scott’s company produced Mel-O-Toons starting in 1959. But the idea goes back before that, to 1954, according to an article in Billboard in December that year. Scott, apparently, wasn’t involved at that point. But Ed Nofziger, later with UPA and Hanna-Barbera, was. So was ex-Disney animator Cecil Beard.

Here’s what Billboard had to say. It looks like Fischel had all the loose ends tied up.

Film Cartoons’ Kidisk Tie-In
HOLLYWOOD, Dec. 18.—The children’s record field is expected to achieve its biggest sales potential very shortly with the upcoming television debut of a series of animated cartoons, cued to the sound tracks from children’s records.
Record-Toons, Inc., TV film producers, have completed negotiations with Capitol and Columbia Records and acquired rights to approximately 200 kidisk selections for which a series of seven-and-one-half minute films are to be produced. Further negotiations with the other major recording companies are currently under way and are expected to be consummated shortly.
Bob Fischel, president of Record-Toons, revealed that negotiations with a number of TV film distributing organizations have been entered into with the announcement of a definite agreement to be made shortly.
Included in the block of records acquired from Capitol is music by Nat (King) Cole, Jack Smith, Van Alexander, Stan Freberg, Billy May, Jerry Marlowe, Sportsmen Quartet, Don Wilson, Knox Manning, Smiley Burnette, Paul Weston, Hal Derwin and Paul Sells.
A roster of 36 additional artists are available to Record-Toons, tho contracts have not been signed. A total of 132 selections have been made available from the Capitol catalog.
Clearances for the use of the disk sound tracks have been received from the artists involved, with Record-Toons also inking a contract with the American Federation of Musicians calling for repayment to musicians originally on the recording dates, and a 5 per cent payment to the AFM’s music performance trust fund.
Record-Toons is completing its first film, an original animated cartoon based on the Stan Freberg recording of “Dinky Pinky” on Capitol.
Additional executives of Record-Toons include Milt Feldman, producer; Jerry Marlowe, music supervisor; Ed Nofzinger [sic], art director; Cecil Beard, animation director; and Max Morgan, camera man.
Lloyd Dunn, vice-president of Capitol Records, and Hecky Krasnow, artists and repertoire director of the children’s department at Columbia, represented their firms in the negotiations with Record-Toons. Hal Spector handled details of the Columbia pact in New York for the new firm.
In addition, Record-Toons is currently planning two additional TV film series, using disk material as a basis. “Sandman,” a 15 minute teleshow tailored to urge youngsters to get to bed, and “Record-Toons Review,” a one-hour panel record discussion show, are both being scripted.

Billboard of April 16, 1955 shows Record-Toons was in the pilot stage with Fischel producing, then mentions the series no more. But the 3rd edition of The Encyclopedia of Animated Cartoons by Jeff Lenburg picks up the story.

RECORD TOONS
Legendary animator James “Shamus” Culhane produced and directed this short-lived, ultra-limited animated series of seven-minute theatrical cartoons on a shoestring budget in 1957 based on popular novelty tunes of the day. Besides serving as a creative supervisor on the series, UPA animator Ed Nofziger, best known for his work on UPA’s Mister Magoo cartoons, designed and animated the films along with fellow animators Cecil Beard, Joe Messerli (of TV’s Captain Fathom fame) and Milt Feldman, and films were drawn by animators Fred Crippen, Jack Heiter, Ed Levitt and Shirley Silvey. A few 16-mm prints that exist today are in blackand white, though it is possible the series was made in color. Listed below are known titles.
Produced and directed by James “Shamus” Culhane. Black and white. A Shamus Culhane Production.
1957:
“Dinky Pinky”; “Pepe the Possum”; and “D-O-G Spells Dog.”

Evidently, the few cartoons that were made were so forgettable, Culhane forgets to mention them in his autobiography Talking Animals and Other People.

The exact same concept appeared on TV screens several years later as Mel-O-Toons, using Capitol and RCA children’s records as narration for cartoons with lots of pans over backgrounds and bits of limited animation. They weren’t 7½ minutes like the Record-Toons were supposed to be; they were the length of the record plus opening and closing titles. And one of the Mel-O-Toons was Freberg’s “Dinky Pinky the Elephant,” released on disc about August 1953 by Capitol. Incidentally, it was written by Charlie Shows, who went on to Disney and then wrote every cartoon produced by Hanna-Barbera in its first two seasons.

You can see the UPA influence on them in the drawings below. The first is from “Noah’s Ark” and the second from “Helen of Troy.”




Time worked against the Mel-O-Toons. Between the time Record-Toons was a concept and the Mel-O-Toons were released, Hanna-Barbera opened its TV factory with limited animation that was a lot less limited than what narration-over-records delivered, and starred characters like Huckleberry Hound and Quick Draw McGraw that were funny and enduring. Mel-O-Toons was merely one of a number of inexpensive series that stations could buy to fill our their morning or afternoon roundups of cartoons dominated by AAP packages of Bugs Bunny and Popeye.

The idea of combining kids’ records and animation is still a fun one and, surprisingly, has its backers today. “Daffy Duck’s Rhapsody”, with CGI animation atop a soundtrack of an old Capitol record by Mel Blanc, hit screens this year. And someone else got the idea of augmenting the song with clips from some classic cartoons and posted it on-line.