Friday, 21 June 2013

Buzzard Swirls

Swirling lines to indicate action in cartoons are always lots of fun. I’ve never been quite sure if they’re handled by an effects department or how they’re indicated to the ink and paint department. But they’re interesting to look at in freeze frame.

Here are some from the Woody Woodpecker cartoon “Puny Express” (released in 1951). Buzz Buzzard becomes a swirl for eight frames before he clobbers Woody. Here are some of the drawings.



Ray Abrams, Don Patterson and La Verne Harding receive the animation credits. In the comments, Mark Kausler helpfully informs you which of the three was responsible for this.

Thursday, 20 June 2013

Hey, Taxi

If I had a choice of one Droopy cartoon to watch, it’d be the wonderful Western “Drag-a-Long Droopy” (released 1954). The gags keep coming one after another and they’re funny even if you’ve seen the cartoon a thousand times and know they’re coming.

Here’s a favourite. Droopy jumps from the second storey of a saloon onto his burro and escapes from the wolf.



The wolf tries it and misses the horse.



He moves the horse to where he missed. He now lands where the horse was before.



He solves the problem by suddenly hailing a cab.



Ray Patterson, Grant Simmons, Bob Bentley, Walt Clinton and Mike Lah get on-screen animation credits.

Wednesday, 19 June 2013

The One, The Only, You Bet Your Life

The quiz show scandals claimed the lives of plenty of shows rife with phoniness. But one game show with an element of fakeness was untouched because no one cared.

That show was “You Bet Your Life.” The actual quiz part wasn’t fake, but the contestant interviews that took up a good portion of the programme were at least semi-scripted.

Critic John Crosby explained why no one cared in this 1950 column. It’s the same reason you wouldn’t care today. The show is just plain funny.

Groucho on Television Just as Funny As Radio—Only More Moustache, Cigar
By JOHN CROSBY
NEW YORK, Nov. 21.— The Groucho Marx television show, “You Bet Your Life,” is identical with the Groucho Marx radio show except that television adds the moustache, the cigar, the eye-glasses, the wildly rolling eyes, the ferocious eyebrows and the rest of Marx’ disheveled countenance.
Groucho is an expert at the use of all these personal props and they contribute a great deal to the humor of the program. There is a certain loss, though. The Marx show originally acquired fame as the quickest and best ad lib operation in the business. It became less and less of a quiz show, which is all right with me, and more and more a gag show. However, the ad libs began to sound too round, too firm, too fully packed to be quite ad libs.
NOT QUITE REAL
Television has taken this process even farther. “So you’re a photographer,” Groucho asks a pretty lady contestant. “If you were covering a murder, what would you do first?”
“I’d shoot the corpse.”
“That’s redundant. What’s the next thing you’d do?”
“I’d shoot the witnesses.”
“You’ve shot everyone in sight. Who do you work for, Tripod—a magazine or Murder, Inc.?”
As you can see, it sounds a little too practiced, a little too forced, to be quite real. Still, Groucho, an expert at milking lines till they’re dry as sunbeams, gets more out of that material than you’d believe possible.
FEMALE FAGIN, EH?
“I had a hobby hooking rugs?” one girl told him.
She got a long, eloquent look.
“You had a hobby hooking rugs?” inquired Groucho. “Where from—department stores?”
“I got so good at it, I started to teach.”
This time Groucho put the cigar in operation, twirling it, puffing it, all but swallowing it. “A Fagin—teaching little children to hook rugs.”
And so on. Groucho can belt a pun around for minutes at a time without it ever touching ground. I’m prepared to believe he can do this extemporaneously but I somehow can’t quite believe the contestants can handle their straight lines without prior warning.
SPECIAL OPERATION
Of course, the Marx TV show, like the radio show, is a rather special operation. It is film recording, which is to say it isn’t kinescope. That means it is filmed in front of a studio audience and the filming can go on as long as possible. Then the editors get to work, cutting out the dull spots, and making both Groucho and the contestants appear at-their best. They still sound as if they'd been rehearsing. TV has imposed its curious requirements on Marx and his producers, the main requirement being that the contestants be reasonably fetching to look at. (Groucho has a lot of assets but good looks are not among them.)
Parading in front of the cameras you'll find a lot of pretty babes, who are not over-burdened with information. You never needed an awful lot of information to run up a pretty good score on the Marx show. However, the current crop of pretties, especially selected for television, I presume, don’t seem to have any information at all tucked away in their handsome noodles.
HAD NO IDEA
The other night the contestants had no idea where Gettysburg was or the names of the capitals of Austria or Cuba. Two pairs of contestants wound up broke, whereas the old radio contestants used to average a hundred bucks or so apiece. Fortunately, the quiz angle doesn't intrude much.
“You Bet Your Life” is fundamentally a tour de force for Groucho—his moustache, his sliding walk, and his puns—and it’s a very funny show—even if they do rehearse those ad-libs. Ultimately, I expect, the ad-lib show will end up with four high-priced writers and a full two weeks’ rehearsal. They might even teach those pretty blondes where Gettysburg is.


In some ways, television isn’t all that different than 60 years ago. Today, if someone tries something new and it’s a success, imitation versions choke the broadcast air. So it was with “You Bet Your Life.” Fred Allen had a quip show with contestants. So did Herb Shriner. And Edgar Bergen. And Johnny Carson. Carson’s lasted awhile but none had the success of the one, the only Groucho.

Tuesday, 18 June 2013

The Helpful Help

One of the fun things in silent cartoons is when characters, Felix the Cat especially, took question or exclamation marks, or words, and turned them into something else that furthered the plot.

Here’s a great example from the Oswald cartoon “Oh, Teacher” (1927). Oswald’s girl-friend has landed in the lake. She yells “HELP” and her words form the word. The word travels in the air to Oswald, the “p” kicks him in the butt, the “h” points to where his girl is, then Oswald pulls down all the letters and rides the word like a horse. Pretty clever, even today.



As usual, Walt Disney was the only one to receive screen credit and he didn’t draw a thing. However, Mark Kausler reports that Friz Freleng worked on this scene. Thanks to Devon Baxter for the note.

Monday, 17 June 2013

Questions about Book Revue

Bob Clampett’s “Book Revue” screams along at such a pace that you don’t have time to ask yourself questions. Such as:



Who are these people? Yes, that’s Daffy Duck as a quasi Danny Kaye and Little Red Riding Hood. But who’s the second Daffy with the witch hat in the background? The other two background characters kind of appeared in the short. There’s the Durante caricature, but now he has hair. And there’s one of the Frankie-loving bobby-soxers, except now she has breasts.



And what are those little things that are dancing around Daffy and Red? Where did they come from? And why is there a cut in the visuals (but not in the soundtrack) and they’re suddenly gone? Well, I guess we’ll never know. But the cartoon is a lot of fun. Animators who got credits are Bob McKimson, Rod Scribner, Manny Gould and Scribner’s ex-assistant, Bill Melendez.

Sunday, 16 June 2013

The Non-Menace Dennis

Jack Benny’s show started out as a musical-variety one and when it finally went off the air 23 years later in 1955, about the only vestige of variety was Dennis Day’s solo—and Day wasn’t appearing on every show at that point. The enjoyable band numbers were eliminated and even the sketches disappeared for long periods of time as the show evolved into a sitcom about a radio star and his cast. That left only Day’s song to give a short pause in between acts and a break for the writers’ brains.

Day was a real find, having been hired after Kenny Baker deserted the show for $2,000 a week with Texaco (and then, apparently, soon complaining he only got four minutes of air time to sing). He had virtually no radio experience but grew into Baker’s role in the show, and then evolved it into much more because of his gifts for comedy. He eventually parlayed that into his own, and quite lesser, programme “A Day in the Life of Dennis Day” starting in 1947.

Here’s a syndicated newspaper piece from 1943. Robbin Coons worked at one time for the Associated Press; he penned a feature story on Day for the Radio-TV Mirror several years later. Day’s first broadcast with Benny was October 8, 1939. He lasted until April 23, 1944 before being inducted into the U.S. Navy the following day, then returned on March 17, 1946. The final Benny radio show was May 22, 1955 but Day continued with him through the television years.

Dennis Day Won Radio Fame All Because of an Appendectomy
By ROBBIN COONS

HOLLYWOOD, June 4 — Just for a change, I’m turning today to a fellow who isn't the type. His name is Dennis Day, and—he can correct me if I’m wrong—I think he’s an actor by mistake.
That's all right, anyway, because he’s a singer first and an actor only because—well, because he’s a singer. You’ve been hearing him on the air with Jack Benny for four years now, and seeing and hearing him in an occasional movie, like “Powers Girl” or the one he's doing now, “Sleepy Lagoon” with Judy Canova.
He says he has a lot of ham in his make-up, but it doesn’t show. He says that’s why, back in New York when his dad and mother didn’t want him to take up such a flighty business as singing, he decided he’d be a lawyer. He even went to law school, and might have finished if an appendectomy hadn’t broken up his course and turned him back to yodeling.
He says he has the ham. It doesn’t show because he looks, talks and acts so much like a good, clean, family youngster who somehow got mixed up with the show world and, much to his amazement, is part of it.
Dennis Day turned 26 the other day. The reason you keep on hearing him sing, instead of hopping to a bugle call, is his family. He’s one of six children, is sending two of them (already enlisted in naval reserve) through college, and is taking care of his aged and ailing parents. He doesn’t know how much longer his deferment will last—but he does know that, traveling some 25,000 miles about the country with the Benny show, appearing at three or four camp shows a week, and broadcasting from military bases, he has never had any wisecracks tossed at him by service men.
Dennis (real name Dennis McNulty) was introduced on the Benny show as a naive, breathless kid, the butt of many jokes. He still plays that character today, though he is in fact neither breathless nor naive. You might call it naive that he was, at one time, paying out 30 per cent of his earnings to three different agents, but that’s show business, and slicker, older guys than Dennis have found themselves similarly peddled wholesale.
* * *
Dennis started singing when he was a boy, the only one in his family, who had the gift. He sang in the glee club at Manhattan College, but it wasn’t until after appendicitis ended his law studies that he tried seriously to make a living with his songs. When Kenny Baker left Benny, Dennis tried for the spot — and nearly passed out when Benny, in person, came to hear him. Benny gave him a round-trip ticket to California to further auditions, and that was four years ago. He still calls Jack “Mr. Benny.”
If Dennis Day were “the type,” he’d be parading his talents in front of the boss constantly. As it is, only recently Benny heard him tell a dialect joke—dialect having been a quiet specialty of his for years—and that’s why he’s doing it on the air now.

Saturday, 15 June 2013

The Cat and Mouse of Bill and Joe

The complaint’s been raised that for many years people only thought of Walt Disney when they thought of animation. It’s entirely logical. Besides the fine animation, Disney’s features of the ‘40s all had some kind of gimmick that was exploitable by the popular press. Meanwhile, the other studios punched out short after short, and shorts had long become the stepchild of the money industry. And, to be honest, after 14 years of Popeye cartoons, Popeye isn’t really a news story any more.

But there were exceptions. Here’s a story from the Hollywood columnist for the North American Newspaper Alliance in 1950 about the cartoons which grabbed the attention of the Oscar people—MGM’s Tom and Jerry. And it’s one of what became a long line of stories portraying directors Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera as underdogs who overcame everything to rise to fame (in TV years, one of the things they overcame was MGM).

A few of the dates are wrong and, in the literal sense, Tom did drink and smoke. But certainly not in the context of being part of his character like in movie dramas, which is the contrast Hanna wanted to make.

The column also shows how things have changed. There’s no mention of violence that set off nanny groups in the ‘60s and ‘70s (members of which likely saw the cartoons as children) that resulted in the emasculation of all kinds of old cartoons for TV. And while letters from two young people are excerpted, there’s nothing to hint the cartoons were solely the province of children. There’s also an interesting comment about the maid character. Perhaps it’s what led to a brief, though indiscernible full shot on “Saturday Evening Puss” later in the year. This column appeared in papers starting around on January 20, 1950.

Tom and Jerry Provide Headaches
By HAROLD HEFFERNAN

HOLLYWOOD—Tom and Jerry, those ever-resourceful, indestructible cat and mouse heroes who’ve been feuding in MGM’s cartoons for the last nine years, are excruciatingly funny to millions of theatre-goers the world over—but they bring sleepless nights aplenty to the two young fellows who created them.
If you think human stars have a corner on problems pertaining to public approval, you’ve overlooked the technicolored Tom and Jerry. Their fan mail is delivered in bushel baskets.
One little girl, a cat owner, wrote that she resented Tom, the cat, being so mean to Jerry, the mouse. She received a prompt reply explaining that Tom and Jerry are the best of friends and that while they play jokes on one another it’s just to provide fun for the fans.
Another wrote that she was “going crazy” because the head of the Negro maid never was shown.
“You show her body but her head is always out of the picture,” she protested. “I’ve just got to know what she looks like.” This young lady received a special drawing of the maid.
“You now have the only portrait ever made of this fine character,” she was informed. “We don’t show her in the cartoons because we don’t want to detract from Tom and Jerry. Besides, it would add work which is something to which most cartoonists are not addicted.”
An instructor in a religious institute in Philadelphia wrote that Tom and Jerry pictures are “a welcome relief from all the depressing psychological dramas.”
Modest but still proud of their unparalleled achievement of winning five Oscars in the last six Academy competitions, Joseph Barbara and William Hanna, creators of Tom and Jerry, are an unusual pair.
Joe is a handsome boy from Brooklyn. Tall, with curly black hair and dark eyes, he is good looking enough to be over on Stage 16 appearing opposite Judy Garland, instead of working at a drawing board. Joe is the city-type boy and he spends his idle time in New York.
Bill Hanna, also good looking, is a leisurely guy who wears glasses, speaks slowly, usually with a grin, and refuses to be hurried. He’s a native Californian and escapes to the desert or mountains whenever he gets the chance.
Joe and Bill share a large but non-fancy office in an upper floor of the two-story building which houses the 80 workers who turn out 16 cartoons a year, nine of them starring Tom and Jerry.
Joe’s and Bill’s flat top desks are shoved together. After discussing a new adventure for their heroes, Joe makes rough sketches of the action involved and tosses them across to Bill. When they have agreed on the final action, Joe makes detailed sketches of the characters and the action. Bill then starts these on a human production line that refines them to the final step, photography.
It was back in 1940 that MGM, unable to find suitable characters for a new cartoon series, brought Barbera from New York, teamed him with Hanna, and waited for results.
“We took two cartoon characters so old that they had been discarded by everyone else,” said Barbera, “a cat and a mouse. However, our first picture clicked, and we’ve been turning them out ever since, about 70 altogether, so far.”
“Something that probably doesn’t occur to the average theatre-goer,” said Hanna, “is we adhere strictly to the producers’ screen moral code. Tom and Jerry neither drink, smoke nor swear. Tom never even gets close to a girl cat. There are no suggestive movements.
“The only time there was even a hint of romance was in ‘Spring Fever’ [“Springtime for Thomas”] in which Tom serenaded a lady cat—from a safe distance—with a bull fiddle. In another picture he imitated Charles Boyer’s voice in talking with a lady cat. Some thought this was going too far, but we took the chance and nobody complained.”
Neither of the originators of Tom and Jerry started out in life as an artist. Bill Hanna majored in engineering at Southern California, but when he left the university halls to discover a world overflowing with engineers, he got a job in a studio cartoon department as a janitor. He has performed every task connected with screen cartoons.
Joe Barbera had a job in Wall Street. He survived the depression, but in 1934 the brokerage firm for which he worked dejobbed the unmarried men and Joe was on the street. Joe began submitting cartoons to Collier’s, the Satevpost, and other magazines, and then joined the Terrytoon company. In 1934 MGM brought half a dozen men west, Joe among them.
Barbera and Hanna probably play to a larger audience than any other producers. About 64 Tom and Jerry cartoons are always in circulation, and, since 280 prints are made of each cartoon, about 18,000 separate T. and J. cartoons are running constantly someplace or other around the globe.
Like most studios, MGM is coy about quoting figures, but says each cartoon cost about $30,000. Thirteen Tom and Jerry adventures are currently in production. It takes from a year to 15 months to complete one.
Each of the seven-minute subjects incorporates from 18,000 to 25,000 drawings and utilises as many of seventy-five backgrounds, or settings—more than were used in "Gone With the Wind."
Tom and Jerry have a big advantage over most of their rival cartoon characters. They rarely talk. Their language and pantomine is universal, so there is no dubbing of foreign languages for release abroad.
At the moment, Joe Barbara and Bill Hanna have their fingers crossed trying not to think about the fact that Tom and Jerry, with their starring film, "Hatch Up Your Troubles," are seeking their sixth Academy victory.
"We do all the worrying," grinned Joe. "Tom and Jerry have all the best of it. They don't fuss about a thing—they just dive into the ink bottle and take a nice relaxing swim until they're ready for another adventure."


Interestingly, there’s one name the story doesn’t mention: Fred Quimby, who acted as MGM’s overseer of its cartoon studio—and picked up the statues come Oscar time. No doubt his absence in the column was welcome to Hanna and Barbera as proof they were the brains behind the award-winning cartoons, something they liked to make clear in interviews to come.

Friday, 14 June 2013

Not Quite A Pussywillow

Some people write off Tex Avery’s “The Cat That Hated People” (1948) as a “Porky in Wackyland” (1938) wanna-be because it has strange creatures that are, somehow, logically together but take it to an illogical extreme. All I know is I like both cartoons. And Tex tosses in a grass-is-always-greener message at the end where Bob Clampett’s Wackyland goes for a, well, wacky ending (similar in humour to what Avery later used in 1948’s “Half-Pint Pygmy”).

One scene has a shovel chasing a plant to put it in the ground. The shovel plants the titular cat instead. And the gag reaches its logical conclusion. The cat is watered, spouts from the ground, grows carnations, and is finally plucked from the ground and put in a vase.



Avery’s unit was in transition. Walt Clinton, Louie Schmitt, Bill Shull and Grant Simmons received animation credits. Schmitt made the model sheets.

Thursday, 13 June 2013

Popeye Shakes the Diner

There’s a neat effect that the Fleischer studio came up with to enhance the force of the impact from Popeye’s spinach-fueled violence. Here’s a great example from “We Aim to Please” (1934) where Bluto gets punched out. Notice how the diner becomes bent and twisted in the background drawing. It’s as if the blows are warping the building.



Because the two drawings of the background alternate after only several frames, there’s a nice violent flashing effect. Very clever.

Willard Bowsky and Dave Tendlar get the animation credits in this one. The title song has always been a favourite of mine.

Wednesday, 12 June 2013

Krazy Kat and Ben Harrison

It’s been awhile since I posted box ads for Charlie Mintz’ Krazy Kat cartoons from The Film Daily. So here are a bunch more from 1928. Mintz hadn’t gone to sound yet; later ads pushed the fact they were sound cartoons.



Especially pleasing is the credit given to animators Manny Gould and Ben Harrison. Gould later went on to a fine career at Warner Bros. then into commercial films. Harrison just seems to have disappeared. The 1940 U.S. census finds Harrison without any occupation, living with wife Ruth (née Hildebrand) and daughter Myrna Jean in Los Angeles, while the 1942 City Directory lists his occupation as “cartoonist.” For whom, I don’t know. Trying to piece together information about him has been trying. In 1930, he was rooming in New York City with Gould and Jimmy Bronis, who was Mintz’ production manager; the studio moved that year to California. After trying to match census records, I can only conclude he was born in Portland, Maine on November 30, 1896, the fifth child of Louis and Minnie (Berman) Harrison. His parents arrived from Russia (either from Poland or today’s Belarus) in 1884 so I suspect “Harrison” wasn’t the family name. His father was a peddler in Maine, but became an instructor of languages when the family was living in Worcester, Mass. in 1900. A World War One draft card lists Harrison as a news dealer. He was in animation in New York by 1925.

Harrison and his young daughter were involved in a lawsuit that stemmed from a car accident, apparently in mid-1939, that took more than two years to wind its way through appeal court. The 7½ year old girl was run down while crossing the street. You can read the ruling HERE. The Daily News, Huntingdon, Pennsylvania, of June 23, 1951 revealed the Harrisons were living on Long Island, New York; see Charlie Judkins’ note in the comments. When and where Harrison died, I haven’t been able to find.