Rockabye Anvil

For Tex Avery, The Legend of Rockabye Point was a natural extension of a number of cartoons he made at MGM. One character tries to force another character to make noise and wake a third character who inflicts some kind of violence on the second character. Rock-a-bye Bear and Deputy Droopy are examples.

When Avery moved over to the Walter Lantz studio, he tried it again with The Legend of Rockabye Point. It’s a typical Avery cartoon in that it barrels along and as soon as one gag ends, the next one begins. In one, Chilly Willy tries to drop an anvil on the sleeping guard dog. These poses tell the gag.



Mike Maltese got a story credit in this cartoon but it’s really no different than the MGM “noise” cartoons written by Heck Allen. Don Patterson, Laverne Harding and Ray Abrams are the animators.

Hello, TV Station? I'm Offended

Oh, how thin-skinned we are these days! How overly sensitive! How easily offended! Not like the “politically incorrect” old days, right?

Um, guess again.

Let’s go back to 1957 and read what one of TV’s fast-rising stars had to say about what things were really like back then. This column appeared in This Week, a newspaper magazine supplement. It was published October 27th.

Jokes You Won't Hear On TV
By GEORGE GOBEL (As told to Leslie Lieber)
It's getting tough for a comedian to make a living, says Lonesome George. There are so many taboos he's going crazy but—oops, that word's frowned on, too!
There's a comfortable old show business wheeze according to which all comedy is simply a new twist on seven basic jokes. Well, this is your old friend Lonesome George mixing that bromide with a grain of salt. Maybe back in the good old relaxed vaudeville days comedy was hitting on all seven basic-joke cylinders. But not on ulcer-row television it isn't. No Siree, Bob.
You see, television has grown so cautious about treading on people's toes that the seven original jokes have been whittled down to one—and I can't rightly remember what that one is at the moment. Eliminate bald heads, mothers-in-law, buck teeth, toupees, bowlegs (dangerous because the sponsor's wife may be bow-legged), Neapolitan dialects, doctors, nurses, shyster lawyers, chiropractors, southern senators, psychiatrists—and what have you got left to crack jokes about?
Well, I'll tell you what I've got left: my wife. Alice. Thank the Lord that Alice and I have a private understanding. She belongs to an extinct species of humanity which never joined a protective organization dedicated to writing scathing letters to comedians. If Alice suddenly decided not to let me crack jokes about her, I'd have to fall back on pantomime tomorrow.
Now don't get me wrong. I think it's wonderful to live in a country where big, powerful networks have to pay attention to the little guy's likes and dislikes. That's enlightened democracy. But a TV comic nowadays needs the soul of a seismograph to know where the next rumble of public wrath is coming from. We have to be verbal tightrope walkers.
Listeners' squawks have already put the kibosh on many comedy routines. Jack Benny and the late Fred Allen had to stop calling each other "anemic" during their famous running feud because anemic people's blood boiled at such levity and their angry letters blasted the networks sky-high.
On a recent Jerry Lewis coast-to-coast hoedown, some of the hilarity revolved around a toupee which got entangled in telephone wire. In came the letters, including one sizzler from a man in the business reminding all and sundry that 250,000 men wear hair pieces. So now NBC takes a very dim view of toupee humor.
All you have to do in television is upset one sensitive soul and you're in Dutch. You probably remember that imaginary Brooklyn dunce named Melvin that Jerry Lewis used to burlesque with broad, drooling parody. Well, a Brooklyn mother telephoned the network to tell about her son. His classmates kidded and embarrassed him because his name was Melvin just wasn't fair, she wailed. And that one small voice in the wilderness (excuse me, Brooklyn) rapidly knocked Jerry Lewis's Melvin off TV as a regular performer. A couple of Sid Caesar's rough-edged characters were silently overhauled behind the scenes due to public demand. Remember Sid's portrayal of a roistering, slang-slinging truck driver? It took just one tart letter from trucking interests to drive that shabby chauffeur off the NBC highway. Of more recent vintage was Caesar's characterization of a mop-haired, thick-spectacled bop musician named Mr. Cool Cees. Perhaps you may have noticed that in his later appearances, this "cat" no longer wore his grotesque spectacles: a note from the Maryland School for the Blind did the trick.
Once the Jackie Gleason show was rehearsing a skit about a schoolteacher. Two hours before broadcast time, Gleason, in a terrible stew. called his directors into a huddle. They didn't know why, but he insisted on removing the rather drab actress playing the school marm role and replacing her with a beautiful blonde.
"I knew from experience," Jackie told me later, "that if we didn't have a real knock-out playing the school mistress part, the PTA would hop down my throat for discouraging girls from becoming teachers."
On the Garry Moore show some time back, Durward Kirby introduced a sketch entitled "The Happy Postman," a dyspeptic lettercarrier who never cracks a smile. Immediately thereafter, mailmen on the CBS route got hump-backed carrying sacks of irate letters from their own colleagues all over America. Result? "The Happy Postman" returned to the air the following week wreathed in jolly smiles.

On a more recent show Moore interviewed Denise Lor, the show's singer, who was playing a fashion model just back from Europe. The big joke of the skit was that Miss Lor had allegedly discovered that Queen Elizabeth would be wearing blue denim next season. CBS was deluged with letters from outraged fans of royalty. The thing took on the tone of an international incident when phone calls from Canada started pouring in.
But royalty isn't the only area where feeling runs high. If an aspiring young TV comic asked me for my most valuable piece of advice I'd say: Beware of the Dog! Beware of the Cat! Beware of all Animals! Put one on your show and you're a dead duck and a cruel ogre to half the nation.
On the Martha Raye show, Nat Hiken wrote a skit in which a tiny canary's chirp was annoying someone. A shot was heard offstage. Then a pitiful peep. Then silence. Next day boom! Bird watching societies everywhere were mad as wet hens. Many vowed never to tune in Martha Raye again.
One day about a year ago I hired a swayback horse for my show. We paid him $150 to stand around all day and eat gourmet hay. During the show my side-kick, Pat Buttram, told me that if I bought the spavined steed I should never ride him down a main highway.
"His stomach's so low it wipes the white line right off the highway," he told me.
Well, believe it or not I got 150 complaints from outraged swayback-horse lovers for waxing jocose over a poor animal who "probably got that way working for mankind."
Doing a skit which pokes the slightest fun at some powerful organized group brings an almost certain rebuke. You can't base your humor on a dishonest lawyer or an inefficient cop. All law-enforcement officers must be four-square on the side of the law.
In addition to these taboos, there are, of course, a few words on the unusable list. The networks discourage a comic's use of the words "crazy" or "idiot." "You're goofy" is all right because it isn't a psychological term.
Cut-up Dick Shawn prepared a clever ditty for his TV appearance which had cute rhymes on "schizophrenic." The ever-alert chief of NBC's Continuity Acceptance department, Stockton Helffrich, took the position that the song tended to make insanity sound like a big joke. Shawn changed the lyrics.
Only bebop musicians are allowed a certain leeway, with jive expressions like "Crazy, Man!" "It would be foolish trying to strait-jacket Dizzy Gillespie into shouting "Silly, Man, Silly!" says Mr. Helffrich.
Sometimes it's the sponsor rather than viewers who hamstrings the comics. On one cigarette program, for instance, no performer was allowed to use the word "lucky." You had to use the word "fortunate."
At the same time I'll be the first to admit that a TV comedian ought to exercise sensible restraint in picking his gags. There are things that just don't make good kidding. Any comic has memories that make him squirm—the things he wishes—somebody else had said. Let me cite a couple from my on checkered career.
With the best of intentions I stirred up a nice hornet's nest on my Labor Day show a year ago. For a sign-off I wanted to give a safe-driving plug. Unluckily, I chose to deliver my message with irony: "This is your old friend. Lonesome George, leaving you with this thought: the National Safety Council predicts there'll be 480 traffic deaths over the holiday weekend. Up until this moment only 103 have been reported. . . Now some of you folks just ain't trying!"
Was that a mistake! If there were fewer accidents than usual that weekend it was because an awful lot of drivers stayed home to write me the nastiest batch of letters ever to come down the chute. For that blooper I deserved to have my knuckles rapped real good. Next time I won't trust sarcasm to put a serious point across. As the National Safety Council says, I'll jibe carefully.
Another time when discretion proved to be the better part of valor was at a rehearsal of my own TV program. I was to open with the following monologue: "Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, and a special warning to Gypsy violinists playing in Hungarian restaurants: Men! Don't close your eyes while playing. You may get resin in the goulash or back into a flaming sword and sear your shish kebab."
Touchy Subject
Now in retrospect that looks innocent enough. But we stopped rehearsal for an hour to thrash out with network and agency vice-presidents whether we should put it on the air or not. We decided to kill it: Russian tanks were rolling through blood-soaked Budapest that day. Under those circumstances, even Hungarian goulash became too political for TV banter. Khrushchev killed my shish kebab joke that night. As reread it now, I have to admit that this was one casualty the Free World could afford.
I wish I had used a little more self-censorship on another occasion when the frantic quest for laughs again led me onto forbidden ground. Everything had gone along swimmingly on the show. Then came that leave-'em-laughing sign off:
"This is your old friend Lonesome George leaving you with this thought: contrary to popular belief, happiness can be bought. On your way home tonight why don't you stop and pick up a fifth?"
Unlucky Whopper
Well all I can say is that I bought very little happiness with that whopper. It temporarily lost me more friends across the nation ("we thought you were a nice guy— but") than I care to count. And it gave me a real scary lesson in one of TV's primary laws: be careful how you use giggle-water to get a laugh. And one final word of warning: if you think you can make up an outlandishly sounding fictitious name for some character and then involve him in imaginary scrapes, you've got another guess coming maybe even a lawsuit. Sometime ago, my gag writers and I dreamed up an escapade involving a fictitious businessman. We conjured up a name we knew no one could possibly have and did the sketch. Right after the show there was a livid long-distance call:
"What are you trying to do to me?" a man yelled. His name? Precisely the same as the fictitious one we'd made up. He threatened to sue the program.
So I guess I'll sign off. This is your old friend Lonesome George leaving you with this thought: If I run out of jokes on my up-coming show, you'll know why. We'll have lost Alice. The End

The Boney Horse

Van Beuren cartoons had a skeleton fixation. At least that’s how it seems. After Walt Disney made The Skeleton Dance in 1929, Van Beuren cartoons created some three thousand miles away started featuring skeleton gags.

At least there’s a reason for one in the 1930 musical cartoon Oom Pah Pah. One of the songs is the 1903 hit “Any Rags?” There was a time in New York City when someone in a horse-drawn cart would shout “Any rags?” at passing buildings and people would drop rags out the window onto the cart. The song memorialising this custom included the lyrics “Any bones?” In the cartoon, the horse collapses in a pool and re-emerges as bones.



As the song continues, the horse melts again and re-emerges with his head facing the cart.



The horse rights its situation by pulling its head through its butt and back into the normal position.



Since someone will mention it, “Any Rags?” was also heard in a Fleischer cartoon of the same name in 1932.

Gene Rodemich supplied the score while John Foster and Harry Bailey supervised the animation part.

Wile E. Coyote Loses in 20 Frames

The following frames almost read like a Mike Maltese storyboard. They’re from one of the gags in Beep, Beep, a 1951 Roadrunner cartoon.

Like all of Maltese’s best gags in the Roadrunner series, you don’t exactly know what’s going to happen to Wile E. Coyote, but you know something’s going to go wrong. In this case, the blueprint that opens this gag sets up the audience (and Wile E.) for a surprise. It envisions Wile E. as a tightrope walker, aided by Carl Stalling placing “She Was Only an Acrobat’s Daughter” in the background score. Tightropes are tight, right? Not this time. We’ll let the artwork do the talking.



Layouts are by Bob Gribbroek, with the backgrounds by Phil DeGuard (note the brighter colours and less abstract designs than what Maurice Noble came up with by the end of the ‘50s. Phil Monroe, Ken Harris, Ben Washam and Lloyd Vaughan are the credited animators for Mr. C.M. Jones. Also on the soundtrack are “Grand Galop Cromatique” by Franz Liszt (Freleng used it in Holiday For Shoestrings); Raymond Scott’s “Dinner Music for a Pack of Hungry Cannibals,” the old stand-by “Shortenin’ Bread” and a favourite for Roadrunner cartoons, Smetana’s “Bartered Bride.”

The Life and Times of Jack Benny, Part 6 of 6

The Show. It was priority 1, 2 and 3 for Jack Benny. He concentrated so much that, at times, he’d walk past family or friends and not even notice them because he was deep in thought.

The New York Post looked at the writing of the Benny TV show in the last part of a series of articles on Jack, published on February 9, 1958. It also talks about the next priority in Benny’s later life—his love of violin playing. There’s also an interesting quote from Mary Livingstone about their marriage; if I read it correctly, she credits Jack with keeping them together by putting her in his act—even though she always insisted she hated performing. At this point she hadn’t retired; she did it later in the year after Gracie Allen quit.

The Jack Benny Story
By DAVID GELMAN and MARCY ELIAS
ARTICLE VI
For the better part of 64 years it has been Jack Benny's custom, or rather his compulsion, to rise and greet the new day at about 6 a.m., no matter what time he went to bed the night before. (What strengthens him in the pursuit of this hardy regimen possibly is the assurance that he doesn't have to go out and look for a job.)
After dressing in neatly pressed slacks, sports shirt and lounging jacket, he stops in the kitchen for a bracer of orange juice (he frequently dines in the kitchen with the servants, who adore him) and sets out on his long morning walk through Beverly Hills.

He returns to the house by 9 or 9:30, gets a rub-down from his masseur, showers, eats a big breakfast and drives over to his office for a four-hour session with his writers. The atmosphere at these sessions is generally devoid of any tension or (strain. As is possible only among people who have been working or living together for a long time, Benny and his writers seem to communicate by half-finished sentences and vague gestures. There is much jotting of notes and rustling of paper.
"Someone has to get the germ of the idea," says senior writer Sam Perrin. "It might be one of us or it might be Jack. Jack may say he's been to the barber's and a funny thing happened and why don't we do that.
"Often, once we get the germ and we start working on it together we lose and discard that idea completely mid from that develop a completely different idea ... It always starts from a small thing and by the time we've all kicked it around we've come up with something different and the original thought has been replaced."
"Jack always knows what he wants," says writer George Balzer. "He has a great appreciation toward writers, definitely more so than most comedians. If you give Jack a page or two of a script and he doesn't like it, he doesn't say like a lot of them do, 'It's lousy!' and throw it on the floor. He never insults the material."
"Jack is a talking comedian rather than a physical comedian," says writer Al Gordon, "and that can be limiting in TV. He's more of a class, or what I call a blue-suit comedian, to the extent that if we had him in a fight scene and he picked up a chair, even if it were a very funny bit Jack wouldn't be funny in it because it would be out of character. We know this and we have to write accordingly."
Idea Man
"Actually I think I'm pretty creative," says Benny. "Over 50 per cent of the ideas used on the radio and TV shows come from me . . . I don't mean to take anything away from the writers. They are the best in the business and I wouldn't have anything else, but we all work together so that often it's so close you can never know where the ideas come from. We don't press. We don't say let's make this the greatest show that's ever been on TV. We say let's make this a nice show.
"I do think I'm a good editor and by that I mean I can feel a pulse. I can feel what jokes and situations will go now that wouldn't have gone last year or years ago . . . I also like to do things that fit me and no one else . . ."
(One novel idea generally credited to Benny is the integrated commercial, which like every other successful gag on the show became a permanent feature of the script. As a result, Benny commercials, while sometimes amusing, were often among the longest in radio.)
After a few hours of creativity, Jack frequently takes a recreational lunch hour at the Hillcrest Country Club. There he is apt to break bread at a round-table that includes George Burns, Danny Kaye, George Jessel, Harpo and Groucho Marx and several other illustrious club members.
No one at the table can resist playing to him, but it is George Burns who finds the mark most often. Sometimes Burns merely glares at him and says, "Laugh!" and Benny roars.
On one occasion Burns issued the command but Benny said he wasn't in the mood. "I said laugh!" Burns growled. "No," George," Benny replied, "I'm not going to laugh." Burns put his face close to Jack's and snarled, "So you're gonna be tough today!" and Jack's resistance fell apart.
After lunch, Benny lights his first cigar of the day, takes two or three puffs, looks at it and mutters something like, "Heh!" and throws it away—a ritual he repeats several times in the course of a day. This is followed by a few holes of ill-tempered golf, a game he plays for the sheer frustration of it, after which he returns to his office for another script session.
His preoccupation with the show, while not intense, is constant enough so that he is apt to wake Mary at 4 in the morning and begin talking about it. It keeps him in a state of absent-mindedness to the extent that he will often fail to recognize members of his immediate family in public places. His favorite mental lapse is to double-date with friends on a given night and then ask them the following morning, "What did you do last night?"
"For years," said Mary, "before I got into bed at night I would pull the shades and turn off the lights. One night I asked him to do it for a change. The light was already out but he said, 'All right, doll (they always call each other doll)' got out of bed, pulled the shades, clicked the light switch, came back to bed, kissed me good night and turned over. The room was as full of light as if it were the middle of the day. I started to scream, 'You don't notice anything, do you! Look at the lights!' This is typical of Jack."
His concern for the show makes him poor company on vacations. Even the charms of Paris and Honolulu distracted him only for a few days before his obvious restlessness convinced Mary it was time to go home. Yet, as she points out, he will often embark on tedious cross-country trips by auto (he flies only when he's in a hurry) with cronies like Burns, Jesse Block and Frank Remley, and enjoy every long mile of the journey, arriving at his destination unshaven, fairly sleepless, and completely relaxed by therapeutic laughter. Apparently the auto trips provide the few opportunities for Jack himself to do some light-headed clowning.
As an instance, Frank Remley recalls that once he and Jack stopped overnight at a flea-ridden motel. They got up early the next morning to pack for a hasty departure.
"Very seriously," said Remley, "Jack came up to me holding a small piece of string he'd found, he said, 'Want this Frank?' I looked at him like he was crazy and said no. So he said, 'Thanks, I'll take it then.' Boy he knew he had me. I nearly died laughing."
Another happy escape for Benny is the Cedars of Lebanon Hospital where he checks in for an annual three-day rest and checkup—a gracious practice limited to Hollywood's very rich. By informed estimate, Benny is not among the movie capital's very, very rich. That is, he falls a notch below the Bing Crosby-Bob Hope bracket and probably a zero or two above the rest.
He has never had the time or the instinct for large investments. He does have some real estate holdings and government bonds, but for a man who has averaged around $400,000 yearly income for roughly 20 years (from radio, TV and a dozen financially successful movies), his wealth is not awesome. He and Mary are free spenders and not strictly in their own interest. ("This guy gives away more money every week than most people earn in a year," says Benny Rubin, "and he has a Christmas list 100 names long.")
The Bennys live in an 11-room house in Beverly Hills that is not palatial but comfortable enough for Jack and Mary and the serving staff. (Daughter Joan moved out when she got married.) The furniture is arranged so that Jack can put his feet up on something no matter where he sits and watch television on any one of the nine sets in the house. He is an undemanding lord who rarely troubles the servants with his whims, lets Mary manage all household details (he still doesn't know how to turn on the heat) and submits agreeably to the restrictions she occasionally imposes.
Unspoiled
For a number of years he practiced violin in the bathroom—Mary and Joan declared the rest of the house off-limits after stretching their tolerance to the breaking point. He uses the sitting room adjacent to Joan's bedroom now that Joan is gone. (He is in dead earnest about according his $25,000 Stradivarius the respect it deserves; moreover he now plays three benefit concerts a year in such critical places as Carnegie Hall.)

"Neither of us," said Mary recently, "has been troubled by success. I guess we've just been lucky. There were times when our marriage could have gone wrong were it not for Jack's marvelous understanding. The smartest thing in the world he ever did was to put me in show business. I felt left out of his life. I think I was a little bit jealous of him, not of his career but of all the beautiful girls around him in shows. But he knew how to work it out and he did it by getting me into the business, so that I could understand what his life was like."
Mary worked side by side with Jack throughout the radio era and even had an independent movie career briefly, but she finally backed down under the threat of live TV. She has refused to appear in anything but filmed TV shows with Jack.
"I hate the acting part of the business," she confessed. "I always have. I like the business side, getting up shows, the production side, finding people.
"Part of the success of our lives I think is that Jack and I both knew the security of family life while we were growing up. We spend a lot of time together. Two or three nights a week we have dinner together on a tray upstairs and talk for hours about the show, world affairs, things we've read in the paper. Jack is envious of no one. He wants everything and everybody to be great—movies, TV, anything. If he sees something or someone who is great, he's the first one to become a fan."
Benny is less admiring of his own talents. He denies that he has attained the stature of "a Bob Hope or a Bing Crosby" but concedes that his accomplishments are impressive.
The Secret
"When someone asks me for the secret of my success," he says, "I get embarrassed and I say, 'Because I can't stand a lousy show.' The real reason is that I have very good writers who have been with me for years and years, and I won't have anything else. I have a very fine creative director (currently Ralph Levy), and I wouldn't have anything else. I have a cast of naturally good performers who know I don't like anything that's forced. I won't, for example, let anybody mug on my show or force the humor.
"The other thing that's helped me stay on top is that I have built up a characterization that is easy to write for and therefore, although every show may not be the greatest show in the world, we have kept, them from stinking, which is an achievement in itself." The negative tribute clearly pleases Benny more than any blunt compliment. When George Burns accosts him at a party in his living room and says loudly enough for everyone to hear: "You go lie down in a corner! No talent! Can't sing, can't dance, can't play the violin, can't even tell a joke!" Jack rolls on the floor laughing helplessly and possibly enjoying the huge irony of partial truth in these accusations.
But Burns is discreet enough to reserve for other ears his real estimate of Jack Benny:
"This guy is an Institution—and he built it all himself."
(Last of a series)

The Following Cartoon is Brought To You in Living Color

Anyone watching TV in the ‘60s will remember kaleidoscopic animation unfolding to form the NBC peacock, assuring us the “following program is brought to you in Living Color” (even on black-and-white sets). The version best-known was produced over a four-month period in 1962 by Elektra Films in New York.

There have been other animated versions of the peacock, but the coolest may be one produced for the Tennessee Ernie Ford Show sponsored by the Ford Motor Co. Whether footage still exists I don’t know, but a book called “Design in Motion” published in 1962 preserved some or all of the frames from it.

This animation was made at Playhouse Pictures. If Mike Kazaleh is around, I’ll bet he could tell you who animated it.



The peacock first appeared (non animated) on NBC in 1956; you see an ad from Variety of December that year to the right. The cast of the George Gobel Show used the newly-invented (at NBC) Chroma-Key to pop out from behind the peacock in 1957. But the Tennessee Ernie animation may be the most charming use of the network bird.

By the way, you can click on each set of 12 panels to make them bigger.