Well Oiled Backgrounds

It’s been a while since we looked at some of Fred Brunish’s backgrounds for the Walter Lantz studio, so let’s check out some from “Well Oiled” (1947). They’re not as sharply detailed as you’d find in, say, Paul Julian’s work at Warners, but they’re certainly effective enough for the Lantz cartoons.



Every once in a while, Brunish threw in something for the boss. Here, he’s advertising Lantz’s comic books.




The backgrounds are part of the gag, as Officer Wally Walrus (voiced by Jack Mather) screams after gas-thief Woody Woodpecker (voiced by Bugs Hardaway). Their cars do a loop-de-loop, then screech off the side of a cliff.



Time for one of Hardaway’s sign puns. “Tukar Garage.” If Hardaway were writing cartoons today, he’d use it for the name of a rapper.



Brunish has light reflecting of the hood of Wally’s car.




Parts of a longer background. Brunish has part of the fence closer to the foreground; it’s in pastel shades of pink and white.



Some of the Lantz artwork is stashed away at UCLA and it’s too bad it’s not scanned and put on line. Then you’d be able to see Brunish’s backgrounds unobstructed. There are several paintings of various buildings on the service station lot that are quite enjoyable. Here’s part of one with Woody in the foreground.

The Lantz studio closed down temporary at the end of the 1948. Brunish was back when it re-opened in 1950 but not for long. He died of cirrhosis of the liver on June 25, 1952, age 49.

A Parade of Jack Benny, Part 2

A week ago, we posted the first part of a two-part profile of Jack Benny from Parade magazine, a Sunday newspaper supplement, published January 10, 1954. Today, we bring you the second part, published January 17, 1954.

The photos accompanying this post aren’t from the original Parade article; it’s be nice if they were around to view.

* * *

U.S. RADIO editors recently voted Jack Benny the greatest radio personality in die last 25 years. Now he’s a TV star. What keeps this 60-year-old man on top? Here's the second half of a two-part story on the man behind this amazing success.
By SID ROSS

HOLLYWOOD.
TWENTY-TWO YEARS ago a vaudeville comedian by the name of Jack Benny leaned close to a microphone in a New York studio and said: “Hello, folks! This is Jack Benny. There will be a slight pause for everyone to say, ‘Who cares?’”
The very next day an advertising agency offered Jack $1,500 a week to go on the-air in a show selling ginger ale. Benny accepted.
Since then, millions of Americans have counted the Sunday night lost when they did not get a laugh out of Benny. Now they’re watching him on TV.
This success, which has brought the comedian untold riches, fame and admiration, has raised an intriguing question: What makes Benny funny?
The answer isn’t simple.
For one thing, Benny doesn’t look funny although a critic described his face as “the most expertly used instrument in the world of entertainment.”
Actually, Benny, who will be 60 next month, looks like a successful, middle-aged businessman. He is still vigorous enough to play golf (although not very expertly) and young enough in spirit to call his wife of 27 years “Doll.”
And, unlike many of the bright stars in show business, Jack Benny pursues an off stage life which is as quiet and regular as your next door neighbor’s.
He lives with his equally famous wife, Mary Livingstone, and their adopted daughter, Joan, a Stanford University student, in an 11-room Beverly Hills house which he bought in 1937. The house, a richly furnished, two-story brick building, bristles with antennas feeding at least six TV sets. It takes a staff of five or six-steady servants to run it, partly because Jack is baffled by anything mechanical.
One day, he was holding a conference with his writers at home. It was chilly. Jack rang for the butler, but nobody came.
What Button?
“GOSH,” he said, “it’s the butler’s day off. I don’t know how to turn up the heat.”
“Don’t you have unit heat? It works by buttons,” a writer said.
“Buttons? What buttons? Gee, fellows, I don’t know," Jack confessed.
So the writer looked around. There, right on the wall in the room where they were working, he found the buttons. One of them turned on the heat.
That, incidentally, is about as close as Jack Benny will ever come in real life to the rich, bumbling skinflint he portrays over the airwaves.
ORDINARILY, Benny is not even amusing in conversation. Off the stage, he gets more pleasure out of laughing at other comedians than sparkling himself. George Burns, for example, can cause Jack to double up by just saying, “Hello.”
“George Burns is my oldest and closest friend; he’s been that for 30 years," says Jack. “As you probably know, I’m his greatest audience. I laugh at everything he says. I think that George Burns is the funniest man in show business.
“But our friendship never stopped George from playing tricks on me. Once we were walking out of the Palace Theater together, and he told a joke. I was walking down the street laughing when I suddenly realized George wasn't beside me. I turned around to see him with a crowd of people. He was motioning toward me and saying, ‘Look at that idiot walking down the street laughing to himself.’”
Even if Benny isn’t good at cracking jokes away from the microphone, his sense of humor, his ability to laugh at himself as well as others, has been a great asset to him.
Because of it, the atmosphere surrounding the Benny shows has always been relaxed despite the fact that Jack spends some 60 hours a week working on them. “I’ll never get ulcers from my work,” says Jack, “and neither will anybody else associated with me.”
The shows are whipped together by four writers—Sam Perrin, George Balzer, Milt Josefsberg and John Tackaberry—with Benny acting as sort of a head writer. (He also uses two free lance writers on occasion.) Generally, everybody sits around a table, comfortably relaxed. Jack starts the ball rolling with a pleasant: “All right now, quiet everybody—let’s go.”
What usually emerges from these sessions is another “situation” comedy which presents a scene in the life of Jack Benny—the stingy rich man who lives next door to the Ronald Colmans, drives an ancient Maxwell car and overworks an underpaid valet, named Rochester.
Although none of these things are in the least true, Jack never discourages any flights of fancy his writers may have in building up this character. On one occasion, the writers were knocking themselves out making up a scene where Jack was supposed to take Rochester’s tonsils out in an emergency. What was the emergency? Jack would have to give Rochester a day off if he went to the hospital.
“I don’t think we can go that far,” said one of the writers.
"Let's leave it in," Jack said. “That’s just what a stingy so-and-so like me would do.”
But even the polished scripts these writing sessions finally hammer out aren't funny. Irving Fein, a Columbia Broadcasting System executive, says, “Jack doesn’t tell jokes. On paper the show itself is baffling; it isn’t funny or humorous.”
Critics Speak
THEN WHY do people laugh at Jack Benny?
For years, critics and other experts in show business have been toying with this question. Fein puts it this way: “It’s the Benny character, the voice, the inflection, the gesture, the timing.”
And not long ago Richard Watts, Jr., New York drama critic, called Benny's timing the "unexcelled knowledge of the use of the significant pause."
But perhaps the best analysis of the Benny humor has come from Great Britain. Here’s a sampling of the reactions to Jack’s show at the Palladium in London last year . . .
The London News Chronicle: “Impeccably tailored and blandly vague, he displayed once more that unique talent for doing nothing brilliantly of which he is the supreme master.”
The London Evening Standard: “There is a rumor about . . . that Jack Benny is a great clown. This is a dreadful slur on his reputation. Mr. Benny is not a clown at all; he is a straight man or stooge, and possibly the subtlest in the history of comedy . . . He is the duck's back; others pour the water...”
If there is any answer to the question of why Benny is funny, it would seem to be a combination of two techniques: (1) a good-humored acceptance of the role of fall-guy; and (2) a superb delivery of his lines. Frequently, Jack gets his biggest laugh by merely clearing his throat or saying, “Uh.”
Started in Navy
JACK’S career as a comedian started back in World War I when a man named Dave Wolff cast him in a comedy part in a Navy show. “Wolff liked the way I read the lines in rehearsal and he kept building up my part,” says Jack. “He was the cause of my starting to talk on the stage. I loved the idea. I evidently had good delivery and timing. I enjoyed getting laughs; I felt I was more than a violin player.”
Up till then Jack had made his living as a straight violinist in a vaudeville act.
And every once in a while Jack still seems to suffer a guilty feeling about turning his talent into clowning. Recently, he bought an $1,800 violin to replace the $75 one his father gave him 45 years ago.
He used this instrument just last winter to play as soloist with a 60-piece symphony orchestra on his TV show.
After he left the Navy, Jack started out on his own with an act he called “Fiddle Funology,” and later “Jack Benny, the Aristocrat of Humor,” and still later “A Few Minutes With Jack Benny.”
“I didn’t ever knock myself out,” Jack says. “I never really knew why people laughed, with jokes like one I always told: ‘I took my girl to the movies and there was a sign on the marquee—The Woman Pays. So, my girl bought the tickets.’
“Some of my jokes from then I still use today, and they get laughs: Things like: ‘I was going to buy my girl a Packard car for Christmas but it took too long to deliver, so I bought her some handkerchiefs.’ I don’t know, it's still funny.”
Evidently people thought so, because Benny rose steadily in vaudeville. By the time he turned to radio, he was making $1,500 a week as a star in Earl Carroll’s “Vanities.”
Jack’s present stage personality and the routine he uses emerged gradually through the years. He used a “dumb kid” as a foil in vaudeville days (Mary was one of them after their marriage). Recent “dumb kids” like Kenny Baker and Dennis Day have turned into successful entertainers in their own right.
On the whole, Jack is very happy about the way things have turned out for him. Although he has played dramatic parts on occasion in the movies, he has had no desire to become a serious actor.
“I don’t ever want to do anything serious. All I want to do is make people laugh," says Jack. “It’s business, and I've never felt I had a mission. I want to continue more or less as I have. I don’t want to retire. I’ll try hard not to ‘go down,’ but, if I have to, well, I will. I’ve got an awful lot to be thankful for.”
Even so, there is one little favor Jack is still hoping to get out of life. He would like his wife to take a kindlier view of his violin playing.
In all of their 11-room house, there is only one place where Mary allows Jack to practice his music—an upstairs bathroom. “She doesn’t want to hear me play that blasted fiddle,” he complains.

More UPA Critic Snobbery

It wasn’t until “Gerald McBoing Boing”—and its Oscar nomination—that film critics noticed what UPA was doing and started dragging out the Disney comparisons. We reprinted Aline Mosby’s United Press column of February 22, 1951 HERE. But here’s a syndicated piece dated April 5, 1951 with snootery at its finest.

Strictly Personal
Harris Says Animated Cartoon Can Be Good
By SYDNEY J. HARRIS.
BEST THING I’ve seen in the movies in months has been a new kind of animated cartoon called “Gerald McBoing Boing,” put out by a couple of bright boys who broke away from the dismal Disney influence.
“Gerald McBoing Boing” is witty and mature—and yet absurdly naive enough to appeal to children. I went with a little boy of 10, who laughed so hard I had to take him to the bathroom. Or maybe he took me.
I have long insisted that the animated cartoon has become a debased product since its early years. It is rarely funny, and never original—specializing instead in sadism of the lowest order. The tiresome chases and repeated brutalities represent a libel on the whole animal kingdom.
Now United Productions of America—the impressive company title of the two lads who created “Gerald McBoing Boing”—is planning to do James Thurber’s “Men, Women and Dogs” as an animated cartoon, with a commentary by the master himself.
As a comedy art form, the animated cartoon has tremendous possibilities which have been scarcely scratched so far. There are scores of stories not adaptable to live action that would bring a new era of intelligence and taste to this imaginative field.
Offhand, I can think of St. Eupery’s “The Happy Prince,” Wilde’s “The Nightingale and the Rose,” Twain’s “Jumping Frog,” and a dozen of Saki’s superb “Beasts and Super Beasts” stories. In our time, E. B. White has written some charmingly thoughtful fairy tales.
The crime of the animated cartoonists has been that they confuse simplicity with stupidity. A child’s mind is simple, but not stupid; it wants what it can easily understand (don’t we all?), but it must be something worth understanding. “Everything,” said the Red Queen, has a moral, if you only know where to look for it.”

The problem with such criticism is not that the writer wants cartoons to reach more rarefied intellectual levels; there’s nothing wrong with that. And there’s nothing wrong with young Gerald. The problem is that champions of UPA engaged in a wanton dismissal of any other forms of animated entertainment. Time has shown there’s nothing wrong with Bugs Bunny cartoons—generations of children and zillions of dollars in Warners’ coffers have irrefutably proven that—but intellectuals circa 1951 seized on UPA to denigrate any animation that didn’t appeal to their aesthetic level. They steadfastly refused to consider, let alone accept, the proposition that there was room on the screen for all kinds of cartoons.

Fortunately, and deservedly, the critics’ love affair with UPA was short. At least, I’ve never seen anyone equate Oscar Wilde to “Ham and Hattie.”

Into the Inkwell

Any child of five should easily be able to grade the Popeye cartoons. At least, as a child of five, I did. The ones with the opening and closing doors at the beginning were the best. They had a flow of funny little things going on, warped stuff like buildings and furniture in the background and John Philip Sousa quickly pumping away as Popeye humiliated and beat the crap out of someone.

These, of course, were the Fleischer studios Popeyes. They vanished from local TV in my area around 1967, never to return to my childhood. Years later, they were released on DVD, and seeing those doors open and close again bring back happy memories. But the DVD versions have something I never saw as a kid.

The television rights to 234 Popeye cartoons were sold by Paramount in mid-April 1956 to PRM, Inc., a shell parent company for Associated Artists Productions that re-did the titles, getting rid of all those nasty references to Paramount. In the process, it cut off stop-motion animation at the end of the first eight Popeyes where the iris out turned into an inkwell.




The titles faded into view as the inkwell flipped up, and the inkwell top did a little spin and landed in its proper place.







It’s a shame they did away with this ending. It’s distinctive and it’s an appropriate tie-in to Fleischer’s silent-era past with the imaginative Out of the Inkwell cartoons.

Chopping off the ending wasn’t the most egregious abuse these cartoons suffered. That was when they were colourised and re-filmed. The shades of grey enhance the originals and adding colour completely ruined the atmosphere. Fortunately, you can now see them again as they were originally made, with the neat little inkwell included.

Deputy Droopy and the Cat

I’m not crazy about most of Ed Benedict’s really flat character designs in “Deputy Droopy.” But I sure like the bizarre scraggly cat.

The cartoon is one of several Tex Avery directed where characters run outside to make noise so they don’t disturb someone sleeping inside. It’s late in Avery’s theatrical career where one gag seems to flow right into the next.

Here’s the bit: the one bad guy rests in a rocking chair to recover from the last gag. Droopy moves a sleeping cat’s tail under the chair. Don’t you love the kitty eyelashes to add innocence and cuteness?



The other bad guy anticipates what’ll happen. Would anyone but Tex Avery try a take like this?



Yup, it happens.



The other bad guy runs to the rescue.



The cat doesn’t like the gag.



Gag’s over. The bad guy dumps the cat, ending its animation career, and it’s on to the next gag.



Avery was not only gone from MGM when this cartoon was finally released, his unit had been let go before the cartoon was finished. So the Hanna-Barbera unit animators were brought in, hence credits go to Ray Patterson, Irv Spence, Ken Muse, Ed Barge and Lew Marshall in addition to Walt Clinton. Mike Lah co-directed. Anyone want to pick out Muse’s and Barge’s animation of these kinds of character?

Catastrophobe

Everyone laughed at how Jimmy Durante butchered the English language, Durante included. It wasn’t an act. Radio listeners and TV viewers knew it. Durante’s genuineness was one of the reasons for his lasting popularity. Journalists, on the other hand, are proponents of correctness in language, mocking misplaced modifiers and decrying dangling participles (and ridiculing the kind of alliteration you’ve just read). But even journalists liked Durante’s meat-grinder effect on the vernacular. And one grouchy newspaper radio critic in particular. The New York Herald Tribune’s John Crosby took advantage of the Durante-Moore show 1946-47 season opener to wax Durante’s occasional failure to maintain any resemblance of command of the King’s English. Or any other English but his own. This column is from October 12, 1946, one of several he wrote about the Durante show over the next seven or eight years. Radio Review LANGUAGE A LA DURANTE By JOHN CROSBY One of the distinguishing characteristics of American English, says H. L. Mencken in “The American Language,” “is its impatient disregard for grammatical, syntactical and phonological rule and precedent.” Possibly the most impatient breaker of new ground and old precedents is that amiable, fuzz-topped, snaggle-tooth, elephant-beaked, philological explosion known as Jimmy Durante. Durante has violated the language so mercilessly and for so many years that Mrs. Malaprop may yet lose her title and a mangled word may well become a Durante, just as a telephone became an Ameche. The lovable Schnozzle, it seems to me, has established a far more convincing claim to the title than Mrs. Malaprop. Offhand, I can think of only one true malapropism—“You go first and I’ll precede”— whereas I can muster up a dozen Durantes, all of which are far more inventive than anything conceived by Richard Brinsley Sheridan. Maybe it’s wrong even to mention Mrs. Malaprop in the same breath with Durante, who improves the old words rather than misues them. Jimmy, in fact, assaults the language with such dignity and self-confidence that it is sometimes a question whether he is not right and every one else wrong. A “catastrophobe,” for instance, seems a more plausible and descriptive word than catastrophe. A catastrophobe would be a more calamitous calamity than a mere catastrophe, just as anything “colossial” is far larger than the merely colossal. An “exhilirator” certainly sounds as if it would make an automobile go faster than an accelerator. VIOLENT LANGUAGE Under Jimmy’s editing, language assumes a violence it never had before. Chiefly because the Durante personality requires expression beyond the reach of ordinary English. Nothing routine ever happens to Jimmy. On one of his recent broadcasts, Durante told of stoppin’ his town and country jeep for a red light. And what did he find in front of him—a lady driver! That would be only a mild irritant to anyone but Jimmy, who lives in an atmosphere composed of one-third oxygen and two-thirds exclamation points. By the time the lady finished powdering her nose, the light had changed from red to green three times, and Jimmy had a terrible time “keepin’ my impatience from runnin’ amuck.” There is no such thing as a stock phrase in Jimmy's vocabulary, and if he lives long enough there may not be a stock phrase in anyone else’s. "Woman the lifeboats! "Woman the lifeboats!” He roared on one of his programs. “You mean man the lifeboats,” said his partner, Garry Moore. “You stick to your hobby and I’ll stick to mine!” howled Durante. KIDDING THE LANGUAGE On another occasion, in a duet with Moore, the pair sang the following couplet: “You’re going to the dogs, that’s easy to see. “That’s too much like work. The dogs’ll have to come to me.” Jimmy is really kidding the language, particularly the trite and pompous sections of it. On his new and considerably revitalized program (C.B.S., 6:30 p.m. Pacific Time, Fridays), Durante pricks many other pretensions besides those of language. On one broadcast Jimmy made a shambles of the whole decorating profession when he came to grips with “the upholstered mind” of a decorator named Heathcliff. “I told him I didn’t want a naughty pine wardrobe, Chippydale chairs and drunken Fife furniture,” yowled Schnozzle. He was explaining at the time about his living room: “When you step on the carpet you sink six feet—no floor. “My house,” boasted Jimmy, “is composed entirely of rooms.” IT’S SHARP-TOOTHED The new Durante show is far more sharp-toothed than last season’s. On it, Durante has been letting his impatience run amuck at radio quiz shows. "Which would you rather have—Lauren Bacall or a box of palmettos?”—“How many in the box?”; the men of distinction series—“He’s a ‘seven up’ man—he can count up to seven”; and “Queen For a Day.” There are possibly a few too many straight gags, which put constrictions on the Durante personality, but not enough to be bothersome. Jimmy still has trouble with his pianist. “Stabbed in my obbligato by a fortissimo!” he’ll howl when asked for that note (“what a note!” and get the wrong one. And he still sings those dizzy songs in that foghorn of a voice. If you're tired of those same old words day after day, you might try the Durante-Moore show. To put it in Jimmy’s own phraseology, dere’s a million guys on the radio who speak English, but Jimmy’s a novelty. I must confess I’m puzzled by Crosby’s reference to “the new Durante show,” mainly because so few of Durante’s shows with Garry Moore are in circulation to see what he means. I’ve found nothing to indicate anything about the show was new. It had the same sponsor, announcer and vocalist as the previous season. The only change had been made in March and that was in time slots. The real change was the following season. Moore left the programme voluntarily and Durante went through a ridiculously large number of sidekicks over the next three years—Arthur Treacher, Victor Moore, Don Ameche and Alan Young. It’s a shame Garry Moore didn’t stay. Working with Durante showed off his talent far better than anything he did afterward. And the Schnozz never found a radio partner as good as The Haircut; Victor Moore’s whiny little voice just grates after a while. But both Durante and Moore moved into television and carried on with great success. Separating them, as the Durante dictionary would say, was no “catastrophobe.”

The Twirling Tom Cycle

Jerry’s anger causes him to develop super-human, er, mouse strength in the penultimate scene of “The Milky Waif” (1946). He swings Tom around in a cycle that takes up a half feet of film and a third of a second.










The animators listed are Ed Barge, Ken Muse and Mike Lah. Mark Kausler, who knows better than anyone, says this is Barge’s work. It looks like Lah after this when Tom is bashed by the garbage can lid then begins to feed milk to the orphan mouse but I don’t pretend to be an expert on picking out animators.

Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera later re-worked this cartoon for TV as “Nice Mice,” except the milk-hungry orphan taken in by mice Pixie and Dixie is a kitten.

By the way, did Joe Barbera have some kind of spanking fetish? The orphan mouse is spanked in this cartoon. I just finished watching “Professor Tom” (1948) and there’s spanking there, too. In both, the animals sprout human-like butts with cleavage. And that doesn’t even take into account the cartoons from the Hanna-Barbera unit featuring someone being stabbed or hit in the butt.

If My Friend Rocky Was in There

A lot of cartoons used the idea of crooks giving up to police so they wouldn’t be abused any more by the main character. None did it better than Bugs Bunny’s “Bugs and Thugs” (released in 1954), which was a reworking of the earlier “Racketeer Rabbit”. It’s the one with the famous scene where Bugs hides the crooks in an oven, turns on the gas and then pretends to be an Irish cop, asking “Would I throw a lighted match in there if my friend was in there?”

Friz Freleng’s animators could produce really subtle expressions and there are some fine ones in this scene. But my favourite part is the brushwork and the multiple eyes as Bugs changes places as he switches roles. Give credit to Art Davis and his assistant.

You know the scene. The “cop” is at the door. Bugs races to the oven to play himself.




Here he is changing spots to be the cop again. These are consecutive frames. They take up less than a second of screen time.












Bugs finishes his line as the cop and backs up, getting set to twirl into position as himself.












Bugs always has a great look of joy when he’s pulling a fast one.

We can’t skip the match part. See Bugs’ expression and how he anticipates the explosion. The drawings start on twos, the last three last only one frame each.











The animators may be Freleng’s best crew, even with Gerry Chiniquy gone. They’re Davis, Virgil Ross, Manny Perez and Ken Champin.