Red, Wolf, Doors

There’s an eight-second scene in Little Rural Riding Hood where the country wolf is chasing after country Red creating a series of doors in a room in the process. Director Tex Avery had done multiple-door chases before, but not this quick and elaborate.

Here are some of the frames to show you the order of the instant doorways. Scott Bradley plays a hasty version (with a key change) of “The Bear Went Over the Mountain” during this scene. The horn players probably wanted to kill him afterward.



Grant Simmons, Walt Clinton, Mike Lah and Bobe Cannon are the credited animators, with Rich Hogan and Jack Cosgriff sharing the story credit.

The Purveyor of Peace

For a period of time, Jack Benny had time reserved near the end of his programme for a public service announcement. It would get chopped if the show was running late.

There were some about preventing fires, another about the Big Brothers organisation, but the most interesting ones were pleas for tolerance. If I recall, two similar ones were aired, one read by Jack and another by Don Wilson.

I doubt Jack wrote them—he had professional writers, after all—but I’m the sure the sentiments were his.

Jack was honoured for his promotion of brotherhood in 1955 at the 18th annual dinner of the Massachusetts Committee of Catholics, Protestants and Jews. His goodwill award described him, in part, as “An admirable and lovable humorist whose humor has always been friendly, kindly and humane, never marred by ridicule of race, creed or class...A generous giver of his resources and talents in the entertainment of our Armed Forces in distant lands and in the promotion of divers good causes in our own land.” The Boston Globe of May 6, 1955 reported “Benny’s witty opening remarks delighted the audience and then he turned serious.”

Among the media covering the event was The Daily Worker. You know, the organ of the subversive people that would bring down America. Anyway, the paper published a larger part of his acceptance speech than I’ve found elsewhere. It gives a nice insight into the beliefs of the off-air Benny. It was published on May 10, 1955.

Jack Benny Pleads for Peace, Brotherhood
BOSTON.—Jack Benny, radio and TV star, received a citation at a brotherhood dinner of the Massachusetts Committee of Catholics, Protestants and Jews the other night at the Hotel Statler in Boston. The dinner was attended by 1,400 religious, educational, business and political leaders of Massachusetts.
In his address to the organization, Benny made a plea for the furtherance of efforts to foster goodwill and brotherhood in this country and abroad.
“While your organization has been pounding away at discrimination since 1936, ironically, your cause was give[n] its greatest impetus during the last war. When men are fighting and dying together, color and creed become relegated to their proper place of importance. A soldier lying on a battlefield does not care whether the hands that lilt him onto the stretcher and carry him to safety are white or black. Nor in the hospital does he ask whether the life-saving blood he is getting came from a Catholic, a Protestant or a Jew. A bullet has no name on it—it merely says, ‘to whom it may concern.’
“These lessons that our millions of servicemen learned during the last war they brought borne with them. And they have become ambassadors in your cause. But I think we and they should redouble our efforts at this time, because there may not he anyone left to profit from the lessons of the next war.
“We are all proud of the great strides that have been made in this direction in this country of ours. Much remains to be done. But the seed is planted, and the tree is growing. And I feel that care and attention will bring it to its ultimate flower.
“Therefore, I would like to suggest that we look beyond the oceans that border our land. We’re living in a world in which tension and the threat of war seem to be the order of the day. And yet we all know that the vast majority of the people in the world do not want this, do not like this, and that they, like us, long for the peaceful pursuit of happiness.
What a day it will be when s brotherhood encompasses the world, when nations look upon each other with a friendship and understanding that we are now attending among our people in this country, when greed, distrust and suspicion are eradicated, when this organization of your is disbanded because it has no further work to do. What a day it will be when people of all nations, as well as colors and creeds, grasp hands and walk forward together in happiness, security and dignity. That day, we are hoping, will come.”

How They Made Gulliver Travel

The Fleischer studio had come a long way from the start of the 1930s, when a cartoon mouse would jump out of an old geezer’s beard and yell “All’s well!”, to the end, when a little cartoon man in a feature film would stroll along a darkened street and yell “All’s well!”

Gulliver’s Travels had its world premiere on December 18, 1939 at the Sheridan Theatre in Miami Beach. The film may have been the crowning achievement in the Fleischer studio’s history, considering the immense amount of work involved, though, to be perfectly honest, I prefer the early ‘30s cartoons instead.

The feature was followed closely in the trade papers and Paramount did what it could to get publicity in the popular press—in fact, it worked out a sponsored broadcast of the premiere carried on 52 CBS stations.

Good Housekeeping magazine ran a feature story on the film in its February 1940 issue, complete with colour pictures. The writer is prone to exclamation marks and repeating complete names, and her telling of the creation of the characters is a little too pat to be credible (every instant brainstorm is a winner). It’s nice to see some of the staff members named in the article, but Dave Fleischer’s name is nowhere to be found. It’s Max all the way.

A Giant Comes to Town
By Mary Hamman
“A GIANT on the beach! There’s a giant on the beach!” It is Gabby, the garrulous Town Crier of Milendo, galloping lickety-split through the sleeping capital of Lilliput. Windows fly open, heads pop out. An old man with a stocking cap draws his shutters and clamps them fast. A lovely lady swoons on her balcony. A wizened crone with an ear trumpet mutters petulantly: “I can’t hear him. What’s he saying? What’s happened?”

On Gabby races, bawling his terrifying message: “There’s a GIANT in Lilliput!”
That giant, of course, is Gulliver, and the scene is from Max Fleischer’s newly completed, full-length animated cartoon, Gulliver’s Travels. Testy, pompous, and enormously funny, Gabby is a born actor, as his first movie venture shows! His fellow Lilliputians, a nation of pick-edition men and women (the guards of the Royal Palace, chosen for their enormous height, proudly boat that not one of them is under six inches tall!), are also singularly gifted.
Although they are creations of ink and paint and celluloid, you can almost hear the hearts beating in their haughty little chests. Almost you’re convinced that real corpuscles scurry through their tiny veins!
If you’ve read Gulliver’s Travels you may remember that Gulliver, a shipwrecked English seaman, swam with the tide to a strange shore and collapsed on the beach. When he awoke, he found himself bound hand and foot with slender ropes. All about him were frightened and wide-eyed groups of tiny men and women. But once he had convinced them that he meant no harm, he stayed in Lilliput for many happy months. He tells us that he was able to hold the Lilliputians’ horses and coaches in the palm of his hand; that he could stand astride their grandest castles, and pluck their noblest warriors from the seas!
When Max Fleischer decided to make an animated cartoon of the famous voyage, he re-read Gulliver. “Humph,” he said to himself, “the fellow’s self-centered, to say the least. I wonder how the poor Lilliputians felt when Gulliver picked them up by the scruff of the neck and dangled them on his thumb?” Right then and there Max Fleischer decided that his movie would present the Lilliputians’ version of Gulliver’s saga.
“Gulliver’s had his say. It’s time for the little men to speak up,” said Mr. Fleischer. “I’ll take a five-inch citizen-of-Lilliput’s view of the adventure!” Now, after a year and a half’s work, the little men speak, and it’s through their eyes that you see Gulliver, the man-mountain, the stupendous giant.
Max Fleischer’s New York studio was not equipped for making long films, so eighteen months ago he moved to a brand-new, one-story, air-conditioned studio in Miami. It winds around a patio shaded by palms and fruit trees. Inside, large, bright rooms are labeled: “Inkers,” “Opaquers,” “In-Betweeners,” and “Animators.” The writers work in adjacent bungalows, and there is a special soundproof room in which the “voices” are segregated. The voices, as you might expect, are a group of noisy and humorous men and women, who earn their bread and butter by speaking for various cartoon characters. In this room they can rehearse, utter shrill bird cries, and otherwise amuse themselves between recordings on the sound stage.
Mr. Fleischer took a staff of two hundred and fifty artists, technicians and writers to Florida with him and engaged about three hundred and fifty artists in Miami. For a year, all six hundred have been working in shifts, night and day, on Gulliver’s Travels.
Both men and women go to the studio wearing slacks, shorts or playsuits. Outside it is furnace hot, especially during the summer months; but inside it’s always pleasantly cool. The New York members of the Fleischer staff have acquired automobiles, suntan, white bungalows laden with vines, and a taste for coconuts. Kitty Pfister, film editor, says it’s so lush and tropical in Florida, she’s afraid to stand still for fear she’ll take root and start blooming. But they’re all grateful to Gulliver for transplanting them!

A cartoon begins with a script, and a script begins with store conferences. The first weeks in the new studio were devoted to mass meetings in Fleischer’s office. Bill Turner, head of the script department, and twenty or more of his assistants thrashed out every angle of the story with Max.
“Who do you suppose found Gulliver?” Bill Turner asked at the very first meeting. “He’s the hero of our story, I should think!”
Someone reached for the book, but Fleischer stopped him.
“Gulliver doesn’t tell who found him,” he said. “After all, Gulliver didn’t wake up until the Lilliputians had already tied him down. And quite an engineering feat that must have been, too!”
“I know!” said Bill Turner. “The Town Crier found Gulliver!”
“Of course,” Fleischer agreed. “It was a stormy night, and the Town Crier was sleepily making his round—”
“Singing ‘All’s Well,’” someone put in, “and in rather a bored voice, I’ll bet. He was sure nobody’d be about on such a gloomy night, and doubtless he wanted to go home himself—”
“When suddenly,” Bill Turner picked up the story, “he bumped into something. Some huge object was stretched on the beach. The Town Crier raised his lamp—”
“It was a finger,” said Fleischer, “a human finger he’d bumped into, and, lifting his lamp, he saw five giant fingers spread fanwise on the beach, and attached to a human hand about twice the size of a full-grown Lilliputian! Lifting his lamp still higher—”
“He saw the giant! Oh boy!” cried Bill Turner. “What an opening!”
“What’s the Town Crier’s name?” Fleischer asked.
“His name?” Turner considered for a minute, then announced authoritatively: “His name is Gabby, of course! He was born with the gift of gab and knew, and told, every happening in Lilliput back to, and even before, the First Great War with Blefuscu.”
Thus was created Gabby, Town Crier of Milendo, the Capital of Lilliput, and the hero of Fleischer’s cartoon.
At the next story conference it was decided that Gabby had not been stricken dumb with terror on spotting the giant, though many a lesser man might have been, but had run lickety-split though the town, crying: “There’s a giant on the beach! There’s a giant on the beach!” And he successfully roused the whole population.

“Surely he went to tell the king,” said Bill Turner, and everyone agreed that he had indeed made a special trip to King Little’s palace to inform His Majesty that a giant had come to town.
It was also unanimously decided that Gabby had personally organized and directed the binding up of the sleeping giant’s body. Gabby, the ingenious, had suggested that the workmen dig tunnels under Gulliver’s back and carry ropes through those tunnels and hurl them over his monstrous chest by means of the very rock catapults that the Lilliputians customarily used to defend their North Wall from attack by the folk of Blefuscu.
As the story conferences proceeded and the script took shape, it became obvious that Gabby—garrilous, bossy, braggart—was nabbing the lion’s share of the drama for himself, although some other Lilliputians did manage to put up a fight for star billing. King Little of Lilliput and his beautiful daughter Glory; King Bombo of Blefuscu and his son, Prince David; King Bombo’s spies, Snitch, Snoop and Tell; and Twinkletoes, the cross-eyed carrier pigeon, inserted themselves into the script and challenged Gabby’s supremacy. Gulliver, the giant, came to life, too, and was found to be a most benevolent gentleman with his enormous heart definitely in the right place. But in spite of keen competition, Gabby looked to be a modern David who would overcome Goliath and steal the show!
When all the principals were safely down paper, full of life and vigor and loud with words, Seymour Kneitel, chief animator, and his assistants, where asked to make convincing sketches of them.
“Gabby should be short and dumpy,” said Mr. Kneitel, and he began to draw squat circles on his pad. “his feet should be flat and his head large!”
“He has a bulbous nose,” said an assistant.
“His hair is unruly,” added another.
“But his eyes are big and brown,” said Edith Vernick, the only woman animator on the staff. “You can’t be too mean to Gabby!” Miss Vernick has a tender nature, and she cherishes lost causes. She’s in favor of making Popeye prettier, too, and for years she’s been trying to give Olive Oyl a more seductive figgah! “Princess Glory is the glamour girl of Lilliput,” said Seymour Kneitel, “and I wonder what her dimensions should be?”
“Ideally,” said Miss Vernick, “she’d be about three and a half inches tall. That would make her about one and twenty-nine one-hundredths of an inch three the middle, with an ankle—” Miss Vernick bogged down at this fraction.
“We’ll draw it,” Mr. Kneitel said, “but we’d better not try to compute it.”

When all the principal characters of Lilliput had passed arduous screen tests—“Make Prince David thinner,” “King Little’s mustache should be longer,” “Give Gabby bigger jowls,” “King Bombo has a fatter tummy,” the staff shouted, as the little people went through their paces day after day until they’d all been okayed—Mr. Fleischer started to hunt for a living Gulliver to act as model for his artists. Sam Parker, announcer of Station WIOD, broadcast for tall, dark, handsome candidates. One day Seymour Kneitel went to the radio station to look at the letters and photographs Mr. Parker had received. And there in the broadcasting studio he found the perfect model for Gulliver—none other than Sam Parker himself!

Mr. Parker was delighted to pose for Gulliver, and thereafter he was called “the modest giant”—the man who didn’t know that he was tall, dark and handsome. Next, voices had to be found for the characters. Jessica Dragonette was chosen to be the voice of Princess Glory, and Lanny Ross became the voice of her lover, Prince David. Sam Parker supplies a deep, resonant, giant voice for Gulliver. Colvig Pinto [sic] was chosen to speak for Gabby, the picture thief. Pinto was the voice of the Munchkins in The Wizard of Oz, of Grumpy in Snow White, and is the broken-down Maxwell car you hear wheezing and chugging through Jack Benny’s radio program.
Jack Mercer supplies the voice of King Little. And though his Imperial Majesty of Lilliput might be much upset to hear it, Jack Mercer also provides the voice of Twinkletoes, the cross-eyed pigeon, neighs for a troop of tiny horses, and is the voice of King Bombo’s chief spy. Moreover, he is habitually the voice of that ruffian and cartoon favorite, Popeye, knowledge of which might make even a minuscule king cross!
Then the real work began. Characters and key scenes in the drama had been drawn. Voices had been chosen. The script was complete. But what of the music, the pictorial backgrounds, and the actual animation?
Victor Young locked himself in a room with a piano to compose a symphonic score. Leo Robin and Ralph Rainger started batting out songs. They wrote Gabby’s “All’s Well” song and the national anthems of Lilliput and Blefuscu. In the picture these anthems are responsible for war between the neighboring nations. King Little wants “Faithful” sung at the wedding of his daughter, Princess Glory, to Prince David of Blefuscu, while King Bombo, monarch of that land, wants “Forever,” his own national anthem. Neither King will capitulate, and they decide to fight it out.
Gulliver intervenes, stops the war and the two anthems are blended together to make a song soufflé—and, incidentally, a happy ending.
These events take place in splendid miniature settings. Robert Little, Louis Jambor, and Shane Miller filled sheets and sheet of paper with backgrounds. They drew the Royal Palace and the streets of the metropolis, Milendo; they sketched interiors and exteriors, bight daylight sets, and dreamy moonlight scenes; they sketched the Throne Room and the barbershop, the Princess’ balcony and the Prince’s distant palace. In all, 125,000 background drawings were required for the picture.
Esther Dayton, head of the in-between department, kept hundreds of artists huddled over their drawing boards for months on end. (She reports that during the year twenty thousand headaches were treated in the first-aid room, and that’s not counting her own.) The in-betweeners make the thousands of almost identical drawings that cause the figures to move and live on the screen. Mob scenes are hardest to animate, and Gulliver’s Travels is full of mob scenes. Almost a million drawings were used in the picture, and four tons of color were applied to the black-and-white outline sketches by the artists who work in the opaquing department.
So now Gulliver makes his bow in a feature-length animated cartoon. A giant comes to town, but this time he doesn’t have things all his own way, because the Lilliputians win most of the acting honors—and the major part of your sympathy, besides.

Iwerks' Horseman

There’s an interesting animation effect in The Headless Horseman, a 1934 ComiColor short by Ub Iwerks.

There’s a dissolve to Ichabod Crane sitting at his desk, reading the book about the title character. As the background pans slowly to the left, the animator turns Crane and his desk. You can’t get the full effect through these screen grabs but you can see where the body starts and where it ends up.



The chalkboard is out of focus, adding some depth. The same effect is used elsewhere in the cartoon, though public domain prints are so washed out, you can barely see the nighttime scenes. Iwerks pulled this off using a jury-rigged multiplane camera.

Perhaps these ComiColor shorts will get restored some day, but no amount of restoration can fix the lacklustre story and stiff animation in this cartoon. Carl Stalling gets a credit for the musical score, which is quite good.

Bugs Meets a Genius

Some terrific pantomime highlights Operation: Rabbit wherein Bugs Bunny outwits Wile E. Coyote, super genius. There’s a knock at the door. Bugs looks at the audience while Wile E. maintains an air of superiority.



“Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Wile E. Coyote. Genius.”



Bugs tries to fit a word in. Mr. Genius won’t stop talking.



Bugs has a look of mocked shock when Wile E. informs him he is going to eat him.



Wile E. won’t stop talking about how great, nay superior, he is.



Mr. Genius still appears smug and self-confident after Bugs shuts the door on him. Now the fun is watching how Bugs takes him apart.



Mike Maltese has lots of inventive and off-beat things in these Bugs/Wile E. adventures. I like the collapsible door that, no doubt, Wile E. invented. Gad, he’s such a genius.



Your credited animators on this cartoon are Ben Washam, Ken Harris, Lloyd Vaughan and Phil Monroe.

Busy! Busy! Busy!

Billy De Wolfe did not disappoint me.

The first time I watched the Rankin-Bass Frosty the Snowman cartoon, De Wolfe’s precise staccato delivery was easily recognisable. I wondered if De Wolfe would say his catchphrase “Bu-sy, bu-sy, bu-sy.” He did not let me down.

I don’t know when I heard him say it for the first time. It might have been on Phyllis Diller’s TV show that started out as The Pruitts of Southampton. It might have been on That Girl. It might have been on whatever incarnation of The Doris Day Show he was on (it seemed to me it changed settings and casts about four times). Or it might have been on a sitcom about a radio station which I have to be prodded to remember that it existed.

We’ll get to the latter in just a moment. First, let’s take you to June 18, 1941. The New York Sun’s “Cafe Life in New York” column came up with a lovely biography of De Wolfe, who was making a name long before a TV or even movie career.

Some Career Notes on Billy de Wolfe, Young Impressionist at the Rainbow Room.
By MALCOLM JOHNSON.
Those elusive big time "breaks," which performers are always seeking and seldom finding in show business, are coming to Billy de Wolfe at last, as a result of the solid success he has achieved at the Rainbow Room, where he is currently a star attraction with his original and amusing characterizations and impressions. When the lightning of good fortune does strike an entertainer, usually after long, lean periods, it often brings a deluge of offers. The irony of this is that the entertainer can look back wryly, on times when it was impossible for him to get any kind of job at any price, whereas, suddenly, overnight, he has more prospective jobs than he can take.
In the case of Billy de Wolfe there is a double dose of irony, for before the war he had been a favorite on the stage and in the smart cafes of London and other resorts of Europe. But up until recently he had been unable to get a real break in New York. His engagement at the Raleigh Room of the Hotel Warwick last winter gave him his first chance uptown. Prior to that he had appeared here only at Jim Riley's Greenwich Village Inn in New York, where he received good press notices but limited popular approval. The Hotel Warwick served as his springboard to the Rainbow Room and public acclaim in this aristocrat of the supper clubs.

Since his engagement at the Rainbow Room professional and public Interest in him has reached a boiling point. Two motion picture companies—Universal and Warner Brothers—want screen tests of him. George Abbott, the producer, is interested in him for a role in a forthcoming musical, "A Young Man's Fancy." Representatives of the Shuberts have been up to see film twice, with a view to featuring him in their musical, "Crazy House." He also is being considered for a role in a new Cole Porter musical, "Let's Face it," which Vinton Freedley will produce, starring Bert Lahr and Martha Raye.
Moreover, De Wolfe has been booked for four weeks at the Strand Theater, starting August 14, and for a return engagement at the Rainbow Room in October.
FIRST JOB.
"Of course it is gratifying," De Wolfe said. "Especially when I can look back to the time I got my first job on the stage. I had been working as an usher in a vaudeville theater in Quincy, Mass. Wages, $7.50 a week. I had always fancied myself as an acrobatic dancer, practicing at the school gymnasium and getting my ideas from acts I had watched at the theater."
On Sunday morning at a rehearsal young De Wolfe secreted himself in a dark corner of the stage and went into his dance when the stage band played "Limehouse Blues." He danced through three choruses, unaware that the leader of the band was watching him from out front. At the conclusion of the dance the leader called out: "Say, you are all right I didn't know you were on the bill."
De Wolfe had to confess that he wasn't a dancer, but an usher. The upshot of the incident, however, was that he was offered $50 a week to join the band's act. He accepted promptly and played with the act for four months.
Then the owner of the Quincy vaudeville house, who had first employed him as an usher, brought De Wolfe to New York, convinced that he had a future in show business. A local producer put together a straight dance act called "Billy de Wolfe and Femmes," which toured for months with no startling success. His next act was with two girls, a dancing trio known as "De Wolfe, Metcalf and Ford." It lasted for five years and played all over the United States and Europe. When the act finally broke up De Wolfe started out as a single, and it was then that he began to add satirical impressions to his dancing routines. He played all over England and France, was a favorite of the London supper clubs and then landed a featured role in the Cochran musical show, "Revels In Rhythm," which ran for over a year in London. Other English shows, like the touring company of "Shout for Joy" and "Bing Boys" followed.
He returned to the United States about two years ago, after eight years in Europe, and played at various places outside New York.
Billy de Wolfe was born in Boston of Welsh parents who were visiting Boston at the time of his birth. He spent his early childhood in North Wales, then his family came to the United States to live, settling first in Boston and then in Quincy, where Billy attended high school.
In his turn at the Rainbow Room De Wolfe has returned to some of his earlier dance routines, in addition to regaling his audiences with his comedy impressions of cocktail lounge types, cheap night club acts and showgirls who give the impression that they are vastly superior to their audiences. His sketches are accurate, based on thorough knowledge and personal observation.
"You must have seen a lot of third rate night club shows to be able to get them down so perfectly," we suggested.
"Seen them!" Billy de Wolfe snorted with a good-natured grin. "I've been in them!"

The Sun reported on his return engagement in the “Cafe Life in New York” column on October 11, 1941, which gives you a better idea of his impressions and characters.

Billy de Wolfe Heads New Entertainment at the Rainbow Room.
By MALCOLM JOHNSON.
Headed by Billy de Wolfe, the talented comedian and impressionist, the new show at the Rainbow Room is Grade A entertainment, a combination of good music, laughs and graceful, stimulating dancing.
De Wolfe, making his second appearance at the Rainbow Room, supplies the comedy in abundance. His first engagement established him as a favorite with Rainbow Room audiences, and in this second appearance De Wolfe brings some fresh new impressions, together with the numbers with which his followers are familiar and which have proved highly popular in the past. He once more demonstrates his versatile talents as a one-man theater, into which he injects a sly note of satire. He introduces Noel Coward characters, does vivid and humorous impressions of Boris Karloff and takes you to a cocktail lounge, where you meet so many unusual people. Mrs. Murgatoyd, for instance, who doesn't frequent cocktail lounges, but who is there for this one, her wedding anniversary.
Mrs. Murgatoyd is both a pathetic and humorous character, and the tightness with which De Wolfe depicts her indicates that he is a shrewd, observing young man.

The strength of De Wolfe’s act resulted in a movie contract in 1943. The war interrupted his career, but he returned to Hollywood. Movies, in turn, gave way to television. Here’s a syndicated column from October 29, 1967, one of a number that profiled him after landing his first major role.

Billy Manages Laughs DeWolfe Plays Station Boss
By STAN MAAYS
HOLLYWOOD — Billy De Wolfe was in New York about to appear on Merv Griffin's show when he received an urgent call from his agent in Hollywood. They wanted Billy for a Dick Van Dyke show.
"I can't possibly come because I've just pressed all my suits," complained Billy in his usual perplexed manner. This little episode serves to illustrate one of the "momentous" decisions that can shape one's career.
FORTUNATLEY for Billy, he gave the matter further thought, changed his mind and headed west — pressed suits and all. He was cast as a snobbish dog groomer in the Van Dyke episode — the role that won him an Emmy nomination — and that led to his present part in CBS-TV's "Good Morning World."

Sheldon Leonard and writers Bill Persky and Sam Denoff agreed unanimously on Billy for the role of Roland B. Hutton, the stuffy radio station owner. "I STILL think of Sheldon as a gangster, you know," whispers Billy, looking over his shoulder warily. "It's difficult to be at ease around him. Once in a while he laughs and says, ‘Ver-r-r-y good, Billy,’ and that I find comforting."
This is Billy's first series. He really hasn't done too much TV, aside from an occasional talk show. He made one pilot film, and from the way he fondly recalled the format, we can all share his sorrow over its not being sold.
"IT WAS CALLED "Plotkin's Prison," and we did nothing but laugh while making it," he grinned. "Don Rickles played the warden, a com-m-m-plete bungler. As the aristocrat among prisoners, I was continually upset over his activities. ‘Wilcox! What on e-e-earth are you doing now?’ I'd shout." Billy said each prisoner had his own individually furnished cell.
"Word got around about the outlandish fixtures we had, and people like Sinatra came by just to see the sets," he added. "IT’S A SHAME it didn't sell. I understand objections were raised about the way we pictured prison life. Now isn't that silly — and in a half-hour comedy? What a pair Rickles and I made."
Despite his marvelous characterization of Mrs. Murgatroyd, the tippling housewife, Billy doesn't drink at all. And that's the reason he'll never play night clubs on the road.
"They (the patrons) want you out at their tables for a drink, or you're forced to sit around musty dressing rooms between shows," he complained. "I HAVE a thing about dressing rooms, you know. I call 'em canvass lean-tos. That's why I only work in hotel supper clubs. You can go up to your room and relax between shows."
Reflecting about his "Good Morning World" role, Billy added, "I'm really featured in two of the first 13 shows, but I've been promised more to do later. However, the exposure will do me good, my agent tells me, even if the series fails.
"Say . . . I wonder if our show's too polite? After watching "Mothers-in-Law" the other night . . . piano in the swimming pool and all those wild things . . . . hmmm?" That's Billy De Wolfe, being his usual complaining self.

Whether the exposure helped him is anyone’s guess. His work in films years earlier with Doris Day did, and she found a place for him in her TV sitcom as her boss.

De Wolfe’s last role was for Walt Disney, spending his time around a shirtless Jan-Michael Vincent and a fully-dressed Tim Conway (whew!) as the head of a college in The World’s Greatest Athlete. Lung cancer claimed him in 1974 a year after its release, but to the end, De Wolfe’s on-camera career was, well, insert catchphrase here.

Cue the Old Jokes Again

Cavemen used to drag their women along by the hair. Whether it’s true, I don’t know, but that was the impression given to us kids back in the 1960s.

Tex Avery and Heck Allen take advantage of this as they roll out some clichéd gags in The First Bad Man (MGM, 1955). “Men had no trouble with their women in them days,” the narrator informs us, as a parade of pulled people passes by. “Exceptin’ the back seat drivers.” We get the nagging wife stereotype, with the wife (June Foray) growling at her man “Slow down. Turn left. Watch that car. Slow down. Yack, yack, yack. Blab, blab, blab. Yack, yack, yack!”



“Well, doggone! Newlyweds,” says Tex Ritter as they come into view. You know what’s next. You’ve seen it in before in Avery cartoons. 1950s Nightclub comics loved the joke too: “Uh, oh. The mother-in-law.”



The most off-beat part of the scene is, what I’m assuming, are not a husband and wife. However, they, and everyone else, are designed by Ed Benedict.



Walt Clinton, Ray Patterson, Mike Lah and Grant Simmons are the credited animators. Johnny Johnsen painted the backgrounds.

Shoeshop Celebrities

Columbia’s The Shoemaker and the Elves has everything a 1935 colour cartoon had—an original song, fairy tale characters and really mild gags.

Oh, and it has celebrity caricatures, too.

There’s a scene where shoes on a conveyer belt land on top of an elf (fuh-nee!). Another elf jumps in a pair of shoes. Look who it is!



Perhaps writer Art Davis showed his opinion of the gag by having Chaplin whisked out of the cartoon with a cane.



Next gag, another elf jumps into some shoes.



Then the elf lets his hair down. He’s Greta Garbo!



The cartoon involves a shaky shoemaker who, as a male chorus tells us over the opening titles:

This is the tale of a brother
As poor as a poor little mouse
Though his cupboard was bare
He was willing to share
All that he had in the house.

The shoes (some of them have holes in the bottom and are not stitched together properly) are the reward for the shoemaker taking in a hungry poor boy. He sings at the end: “Stay here, be my son, there is work to be done.” Yes, a touching tale of child labour is ahead.

Sid Marcus gets the animation credit with Joe De Nat supplying the music. This was the third Color Rhapsody made by the studio, and in a red-green colour process.

Commercials, Golf and Yet Another TV Special

Gaggles of reporters—or whatever a plurality of reporters is—tended to descend on Jack Benny around St. Valentine’s Day every year to chat with him about his birthday, which fell on the same day. In 1969, it coincidentally fell around the time of one of his TV specials, giving another reason to do a column on him.

Here’s what the Associated Press’ Cynthia Lowry had to say about him in her daily piece on February 13, 1969. It’s another example of Jack talking to the media while wearing a bathrobe. There are no real surprises here, other than some comments about the Texaco spots he (and his Maxwell) did. Incidentally, none of the specials he did after this fell near his birthday.

Jack Benny to Note 39th Birthday Again
By CYNTHIA LOWRY
NEW YORK (AP) – By mid-afternoon Thursday, the world's youngest 39-year-old violinist had been so busy answering telephone calls and being interviewed by relays of journalists that he was still in pajamas and dressing gown. The debris of a late breakfast still occupied a table in the living room of his hotel suite.
Jack Benny, born in Waukegan, Ill., on Feb. 14, 1894, will be celebrating his 39th birthday again on Friday. The birthday is a milestone but since Jack has an NBC special coming up Monday, it seemed less important than making sure Benny fans would tune in.
"When you do a few specials as I do—like one a year," explained Jack, with his own brand of earnest, blue-eyed salesmanship, "you’ve got to make sure that they—the audience—remember when you are on. It's different, of course, when you have a weekly or even a monthly show."
Frets About Appearance
The comedian, after 75 years mostly spent in show business, still frets about his appearances on television as much as a kid with his first booking. "What are you doing in all those gasoline commercials?" was a question asked by several interviewers.
"When it comes that way I know they are after something," said Benny with utter seriousness. "I just ask them why they don't ask me what Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Bob Hope and I are doing in all those commercials. I'll tell you this: It was a fabulous offer and the company was interested in a lot of things. I wouldn't have touched them unless the company had been interested in sponsoring my special. Besides, I love doing them—they relate to me and they make people laugh. So?"
Looks About 50
Benny looks like a man in his 50s. He works, he estimates, about six months out of the year on TV shows, charity concerts, club dates, and even an occasional tour. The rest of the time he spends playing what he calls "dreadful golf" in Los Angeles or Palm Springs. His wife, Mary, accompanies her husband on his many trips only when he expects to be away from home for a prolonged period. They moved into an apartment several years ago but "Mary felt cooped up," and they expect to move back into a Beverly Hills house again soon, they also have a home in Palm Springs. His health is excellent.
Jack will fly back to Los Angeles today for a small birthday gathering at home, followed on Saturday by a bash thrown by the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences—not for his birthday but for his 20th anniversary in TV.

Curious Puppies and Mind-Gaming Mice

“Over the past few years,” wrote Alex Ward in the Washington Post in 1974, “there has been a steady rejuvenation of interest in animation, focusing first on Walt Disney, but since broadening to encompass others like Max Fleisher [sic] (creator of Betty Boop), pioneer Winsor McCay and the zany crew at Warner’s: Tex Avery, Bob Clampett, Bob McKimson, Friz Freleng, Michael Maltese and Chuck Jones.”

Animation fans today are so fortunate a number of people who loved cartoons decided to start researching them back then. They pretty much started from scratch to piece together the history of animated cartoons and the people behind them. They laid the foundation. Then knowledge built upon knowledge. We reap the benefits of those pioneer historians today.

One advantage they had back then was an awful lot of the people who had major roles in making those cartoons were still alive and (if they were willing) could be interviewed.

The January-February issue of Film Comment magazine was devoted to animation. Joe Adamson wrote a story with quotes from the likes of Maltese, Maurice Noble. Space was devoted to Richard Thompson’s essay on Duck Amuck. Greg Ford put together an elucidation on the Warner Bros. studio. And Thompson and Ford got together to interview Chuck Jones.

Jones seems to have been the perfect interview. He was intelligent and articulate, he spent a long career in animation starting in the early ‘30s, and he lived until 2002, giving him plenty of opportunities to get his thoughts and recollections in print. Jones later wrote two books on his time at Warners (with detours into his personal life) and a collection of his interviews saw print.

I’m not going to reprint Ford and Thompson’s entire work. Instead, I’ll post what Jones had to say about some of his minor characters—the two curious dogs and mind-gaming mice Hubie and Bertie.

The dogs? Ehh. They don’t do a lot for me. I’m not sure if I’m supposed to laugh at their misfortune or feel sorry them. About all these do is sniff around looking for stuff and then try to get out of trouble. Pluto did it first at Disney. Herbie and Bertie are a different matter. They’re great characters. They’ve got great dialogue and insane ideas, thanks to the clever mind of Mike Maltese. And you can laugh at what they pull on Claude Cat because it’s so outrageous (eg. nailing an entire room to the ceiling).

What did Jones think? Let’s find out.

Q: Certain themes started emerging the very first year you began to direct. In Doggone Modern [1938], those two early dogs of yours, the boxer and his puppy pal, were pitted against the absurdities of technology, much as all those "Acme" devices would later backfire on the Coyote in his quest for the Roadrunner. The two dogs got trapped in a modernistic house-of-the-future.
A: That's right. They wandered in, and the place had a robot broom that would sweep up anything, regardless of what it was.

Q: And the dogs had to dodge the robot broom, to keep from getting swept up themselves. You did a remake of the same film about a decade later, this time starring your mice characters Hubie and Bertie [House Hunting Mice, 1947], which seems to be such an incredible improvement on the original Doggone Modern.
A: Well, the style of background was completely different in the two cartoons. In the first few pictures I worked on, we used a man by the name of Griff Jay, who was an old newspaper cartoonist—and he did what we'd call "moldy prune" backgrounds. Everybody used the same type of thing back then—Charlie Johnston [Johnny Johnsen] drew backgrounds for Tex Avery, and he was an old newspaper cartoonist too.
Q: But the biggest difference between the two films is in the starring characters. The situation is the same, a pair of characters being victimized by the crazy electronic house devices, but Hubie and Bertie in house hunting mice are active and fully developed characters, while the dogs are far too passive—they just don't have a chance.
A: No, they don't. The dogs don't really amount to anything. They just walk around and get mixed up in all the gadgetry. But they don't demonstrate any real human reactions, none that we can recognize anyway, beyond a sort of generalized anxiety. The characters aren't really established, so you don't care about them. You do care about Hubie and Bertie, though.
Q: They're real personalities. It's so much more exhilarating to see them respond to the machinery, occasionally react against it, and at odd times even triumph over it. There's a marvelous sequence where Hubie and Bertie succeed in temporarily outfoxing the robot, remember? Unlike the two dogs, they finally realize that this f***ing broom is going to whiz out and sweep up the debris, regardless of purpose, and so, this time, the characters make use of the fact and consciously try to wear the robot out. They turn on an automatic record ejector that shoots out discs and shatters them against the wall, the records fly and break into pieces, and the robot, invariably, has to come out and sweep up, again and again. Also, there are shots, with the simulated editing, of a missile sailing past intercut with a quick insert of a character, just watching it go by.
A: That may have been generated from a fascination with tennis matches, and such intercutting effects would often make the scene work. It also demonstrates that you could get an object to look like it's moving a hell of a lot faster with editing. And eventually, I began to add shadows of the missile flying past; this happened very often in the "Roadrunner" films.

Q: Another thing wrong with the two early dogs that appeared in Doggone Modern and a couple of other films at the time: there seemed to be some question as to what movements were defined for them. They were very naturalistically drawn, but their movements seemed to confuse human-like and canine actions.
A: That's why there wasn't any character, because what we were trying to do was to find out how the hell a dog moves. Just how he moves, and nothing much beyond that. That's when I was fighting the anthropomorphic idea of movement. They were modeled with back-legs like dogs, but nobody really knew how to move them properly. The result was that they looked rather awkward.

Q: Sometimes you have entire cartoons set up around the idea of gravity. In Mouse Wreckers [1948], for instance, you have a whole string of gravity gags, the coup de grâce being the upside-down room sequence.
A: An earlier gravity gag in that cartoon is when Claude Cat is pulled through the house by the rope, which is triggered by the mice pushing the heavy boulder off the chimney. And remember? Claude would get pulled into stacks of dishes, around bannisters, under tables. Gravity is the simplest thing to use if you don't happen to have any other tools at hand.

Q: Mouse Wreckers seems to us to be a major cartoon because of the controlling factors of the film are always kept off-screen. Your two mouse characters, Hubie and Bertie, are stationed on the chimney playing architectural mind-games on poor Claude Cat, who's alone in the house below. The mice reconstruct his entire room, and when Claude wakes up, he doesn't know whether these things are really happening or whether he's hallucinating it all.
A: In the later M-G-M remake, Year of the Mouse [1965], the cat finally realizes that the mice are provoking these disasters, and at the end he catches the mice.
Q: Yeah, it's a moral ending, where the earlier Warners film has an immoral ending.
A: Oh, well, I like immoral endings better. Forgetting the Tom and Jerry, the purpose in Mouse Wreckers was that the cat never realized exactly what was happening to him. And it was based on an actual happening. This upside-down room did exist: some English duke or something has a weird sense of humor, and at his parties, when someone would pass out, he'd haul 'em in there and everyone would look through the holes in the walls and watch them come to. And people would do exactly what the cat did: they'd try to crawl up the wall or something—particularly someone with a dreadful hangover, you can imagine how hideous that was.
Q: The second-to-last image of that cartoon is amazing. It's just Claude's eyes, with the cat being driven totally insane, cowering at the top of a tree, and the leaves falling away just enough to reveal those eyes.

A: In that picture I used a different thing: the eyes were handled almost like a pair of animated breasts—did you notice that?
Q: Yes, the pupil came out of the ball of the eye, like a nipple. The fear registered in Claude's eyes in amazing, as he looks from side to side.
A: Phil Monroe did a good job on that.
Q: When Claude is in the upside-down room, on the ceiling that he thinks is the floor, trying to keep his balance by digging his claws into the ceiling, the camera turns around and goes upside-down with Claude; it's fascinating. I wonder if you were trying to show the force of gravity through motion alone, and without the standard visual presentation of what's up and what's down.
A: Well, Claude opened the bottle and the liquid flowed up, while if it were shown from your viewpoint it would naturally flow down. And I wanted to show what he felt. Actually, Charlie Chaplin used something like that in the opening airplane sequence of the great dictator, when he's piloting his plane upside-down. And the same series of gags are in the Porky Pig cartoon Jumpin' Jupiter [1955] when they lose their gravity. There I didn't have to turn the camera around, obviously, since it was in outer space. I just used a little sign that read: "You are now entering a low gravity zone."

The interview may be more than 40 years old but there is still a lot of information in it I have not read elsewhere. Someone has graciously put the issue of Film Comment on-line and you can read it by going to this site.