What? Me Worry?

Stories abounded in print at the time about how Jack used to worry all the time in the days of network radio. Evidently TV changed that, judging by this story in the Philadelphia Inquirer of October 27, 1957.

During the ‘50s, Jack’s show wasn’t on every week, but he was still busy on TV. He periodically hosted a show called Shower of Stars for the Chrysler Corporation. In fact, that was the programme where his 40th birthday was celebrated (and soon forgotten).

The story gets into ratings. Jack occasionally got testy when interviewers asked him about them when he was opposite Maverick, which had numbers that kicked Jack out of the Sunday 7:30 p.m. timeslot at the end of the 1958-59 season. He’s more relaxed about them here (Sally didn’t last the full season).



No Private Worrying For Jack Benny
At ease when off-stage, he finds it profitable to do all his worrying in front of the camera
BY HARRY HARRIS
TRADITIONALLY, public funnymen are private worry-warts. Punchinello to Pagliacci at the drop of a curtain. CBS' Jack Benny, a versatile switch-hitter—from stage, screen, radio and TV to concert hall and "The $64,000 Question," with equal ease—reverses this hallowed procedure, too.
Jack does his worrying—about his age, his finances, his appearances—for all to see, hear and enjoy. The real Benny, however, is blithe and unruffled. Other TV comics may head, neurosis-ridden, for the hills. Other frequent visitors to TV screens may shiver and shake at the idea of "overexposure." Other program hosts may fret over the tightening guest star market. Not Benny.
"I love TV," he told us enthusiastically, "just love it. I don't know how other comics feel about the medium, but we have so much fun with it. Ours aren't worrying shows. There are no ulcers. We even have fun during the writing and during the rehearsing."
So while other members of the laugh-it-up fraternity are carefully limiting their video visits, Jack's launched on a 1957-1958 season that will include 10 live and six film Sunday night half hours, five hour-long "Shower of Stars" assignments, guest shots with Gisele MacKenzie, Danny Thomas and others, and—if suitable scripts come along—a drama or two.
The first "Shower," Thursday at 8:30 P. M. on Channel 10—with Carol Channing, Fred MacMurray, the Lennon Sisters and Jimmie ("Honeycomb") Rodgers in attendance—will have a Western theme. "Buck Benny" rides again!
On Western bandwagon
Although George Burns is his closest friend, Jack denies that this spoof of the all-over-the-channels cowboy sagas will be part of Burns' announced campaign to "laugh Westerns off the Air."
"We're doing it only because audiences are so Western-conscious these days," he said. "We used to do the Buck Benny things before there were TV Westerns—or TV." Jack denies he shares non-cowboys' widespread cowboyphobia, even though one of his every-other-Sunday competitors, ABC's "Maverick," has been showing surprising strength in the ratings, galloping past Steve Allen and closing in on Ed Sullivan.
As for published reports that Frank Ross, Joan Caulfield's husband and producer of her "Sally" series, deliberately asked NBC to schedule "Sally" against Benny, on the theory that, after eight seasons, it was time for Benny's TV popularity to start slipping, Jack only shrugs.
He doesn't "sweat out" the ratings after each show, he said, "but sometimes they call me and tell me." For his second show of the season, Oct. 6, the Trendex scoreboard was: Benny, 24.9; "Maverick," 14.7; "Sally," 10.1.
Benny admits he was pleased. "You've got to see that your first two shows are good," he said. "The first one is always the weakest, because lots of people don't know you're back on. But if the first two are OK, people say, 'It looks like he’ll have another good year. "
He's not planning any radical changes from past seasons to combat his new Sunday night competition. "I figure that would be difficult for me," he said. "I just go along trying to have good shows. If the opposition is tough, there's nothing I can do about that.
"You can't buck everything. Of course, I wish nobody at all was on against me, but . . ."
He's not planning to stress audience-luring, big-name stars, either, though last Sunday he played host to Hal March. That was a follow-up to his gag visit to "The $64,000 Question" earlier this month, when he quit and demanded cash after answering the first, or $64 question.
"No," he grinned, "$64 wasn't bad for 10 minutes' work." (Actually, he returned the money, chipped in by various people on stage.) "We're always looking for things to do that will furnish a couple of shows. Last year it was my Carnegie Hall concert and the concert with the Philadelphia Orchestra. This year it's The $64,000 Question'."
Ginger Rogers appears on his first film show of the season, next Sunday, and Van Johnson on a later film, but Jack's guest star policy is, "We sort of think of people as we go along."
Guests no problem
He doesn't worry about the guest shortage this season, he adds, because "Our shows can be written without guest stars.
"Besides, I can always get wonderful people like Dennis Day, Rochester and Mel Blanc when I need them. There's only one member of our old radio gang I can't get to do a live show with me."
Who that?
"My wife Mary!"

A Balanced Meal of Cartoons

In 1926, he was a student artist and journalist at Redlands High School, winning fifth prize for his Orange Show poster (it showed orange trees and a farmer holding a box of golden oranges against a background of mountains). He beat fellow Redlands student Elmer Plummer, who went on to work for Walt Disney.

In fact, he did, too, after graduating from Pomona College in 1933, getting additional training at the Otis Art Institute and animating Oswald the rabbit at Lantz/Universal and Krazy Kat and Mintz/Columbia.

A little labour unrest disrupted things at Disney, so he was among a number of animators who were hired at MGM. He’ll be remembered for animating the starring character in Red Hot Riding Hood.

By now, you should know we’re talking about Preston Blair.

Blair left California in 1949 and made a home in Connecticut. He made some animated industrial shorts for his brother Lee in New York and took on outside work, including animating at least one episode of The Flintstones (“The Social Climber,” November 17, 1961 according to Lew Gifford’s column of that day in Back Stage).

I suspect Hanna-Barbera’s Stone Age series wasn’t to his liking. He joined the “children must be educated by cartoons” crowd, as we read in this story in the Louisville Courier-Journal, published October 8, 1970.

Animator Is Critical of Cartoons
By IRENE NOLAN
Courier-Journal Staff Writer
Preston Blair, who is in the business of making cartoons, has some definite ideas about Saturday morning television fare. He thinks it leaves much to be desired.
Blair, an animator who was in Louisville yesterday for the dedication of WKPC-TV's new building, thinks one might compare what happens on Saturday morning television to turning a group of children loose in a supermarket and having a rating service analyze what they chose to eat. The result, he said, would be carbonated beverages, popsicles, ice cream and candy.
What Blair would like to see happen, and what he would like to help happen, is "not give the kids a diet of spinach and celery" but a balanced meal.
A balanced meal, he thinks, would include animated cartoons that are still entertaining, but that have an educational message.
Blair and his long-time friend, Allen Blankenbaker, director of film graphics for WKPC, would like to see the educational television get into the Saturday morning cartoon market and compete with commercial television for the child's attention.
Blair describes himself as "from the enemy camp." He has never done any work for educational television, but concentrated his efforts on commercial ventures. He is a former feature animator for the Walt Disney Studios, where he worked on sections of "Bambi," "Fantasia," and "Pinocchio." Among his other well-known works are several episodes of "The Flintstones." He now owns a production company in Connecticut, where he lives with his wife and son.
He thinks animating for the "Saturday morning shows" is "wasted talent."
Blankenbaker indicated that he has always been interested in educational cartoons for children and now plans to make use of the new equipment and Blair's knowledge of "what the children want to watch."
"This (the station's new building) should be a place that would serve as a springboard to do children's programming that is both entertaining and educational. Up to now such things have been done on a local level but now we can do it nationwide."
Blair said that the state of Saturday morning television is "not the fault of the animators or of the people in the business." He said the problem is "just that it is such a large business . . . backed by the toy companies who are afraid to sponsor anything but what the children demand."
Blair, who has a lively face with a twinkle in his eye, feels his most interesting work was the animation of the hippos in "Fantasia."
"The interesting thing about Disney animation is that it is all researched with live action. For the hippos we photographed heavy ballerinas in action to see what hippos dancing would look like."
(At this point Blair advised the writer that she might say that studying the live action of girls was often hazardous for animators. One animator studying a girl in the role of Snow White, "succumbed and married her, but no, I didn't marry one of the heavy ballerinas.")
Blair said that animating cartoons takes more time than most would expect. A half-hour episode of the Flintstones usually took three months to produce and most feature-length cartoons take three or four years.

The years ticked on and toy companies continued to find ways to market their wares, sometimes in syndicated half-hour shows that have gripped former kids with nostalgia. There were less-than-subtle “message” series. For Blair, cartoons became left in the past. He returned to California in 1984 and settled in Carmel, where he developed animated systems for teaching reading. He held five patents for video interactive video technology. Teaching seemed to be on Blair's mind, considering the how-to books on animation he wrote that are still recommended to students.

Blair died of heart failure on April 19, 1995 at the age of 86.

6,504,385,632

Prisoner Spike decides to dig himself out of prison in Cellbound (1955), a Tex Avery cartoon finished up by Mike Lah.

20 years passes and Spike has finally counted his last spoonful of soil: 6,504,385,632.



The gag topper is nobody in the prison has noticed the huge pile of dirt outside his window.



Lah and designer Ed Benedict were the last of the Avery unit to work on this cartoon. The animators all came from the Hanna and Barbera unit—Ken Muse, Irv Spence and Ed Barge, along with background artist Vera Ohman.

Do They Love the Cop on the Beat?

I’m still not quite sure what to make of the opening of Magic Mummy, a 1933 Van Beuren short.

It opens with officers Tom and Jerry listening to a duet on the police radio, little hearts of love floating up from them.



Cut to a pair of policemen singing “The Cop on the Beat, The Man in the Moon and Me” and, um, well...



Cut to policemen dancing with inmates as music is bashed out on the piano.



There’s absolutely no attempt at realism. Look at how the cop’s fingers are bent back. He rolls around while playing; his eyes look something out of a 1915 comic strip. It’s third-rate animation for 1933 but it’s pretty fun. Give me this over the phoney Disney that the studio was putting out a couple of years later.



The song is there to pad for time. It’s not an essential part of the story, which involves a skeleton grave-robber. But disjointed stories are nothing new at Van Beuren.

The cop singers are played by Reis and Dunn, vaudevillians and radio artists, who appeared onscreen in a couple of Fleischer Screen Songs. Artie Dunn later played organ with The Three Suns group.

Margie Hines is the girl singer in this, the Van Beuren raspy voice guy is the Svengali character, and Gene Rodemich supplies another fine score. Here is a medium-up tempo version of the song.

I Don’t Want to Be Stereotyped

Let’s face it. If a TV audience likes a character, they want to see the actor playing that character do it until they get tired of it—if they ever do. Some actors have a problem with this, even though they know it’s pretty much inevitable. But instead of accept it, they complain.

One such actor was Ray Walston.

Before the first month of My Favorite Martian was over, he was already griping about stereotyping. And he kept complaining to reporters who would listen. I’ve found another newspaper story from 1964 where he did it. And one from 1978. And another from 1996. That’s even though he had just won an Emmy for his fine work on Picket Fences, which wasn’t even close to the crash-landed Martian of 30-plus years earlier.

Around the start of 1964, it seems every wire service columnist talked to him—Bob Thomas of the AP, Vernon Scott of UPI, Dick Kleiner of NEA, Charles Witbeck of King Features.

We won’t reprint those. Instead we’ll pass along a couple of different syndicated pieces. The first one appeared in papers beginning October 6, 1963.

Ray Walston Has to Live With Holes in His Head
By FRANK LANGLEY
NEW YORK—There aren't many people who need a hole in the head. Ray Walston is one of them. In fact, Ray has two holes in his head and they have him a bit worried.
As the title star of "My Favorite Martian," he wears a pair of antennae that periodically rise from his scalp in periscope fashion, which Ray explained "is a basic part of any Martian's make-up.
"But they pose a big problem for me," he continued in earnest. "We all know of many actors who have taken long-run roles, or who have become associated with an individual character, and haven't been able to divorce themselves from that image.
"A producer hears the actor's name and says, "Sorry, but I'm not looking for an Abe Lincoln today, or 'I'm looking for a doctor, not a cowboy,' or 'Sure you can kill, better than any actor I know, but can you kiss? I need a lover, a good kisser, not a killer.
"Being typed is the biggest fear of an actor. So imagine my problem if this show is a big success, and it looks like it will be. When I'm finished with it, producers will be saying, 'Ray Walston? Sure I know you, you're the guy with the holes in his head. Sorry, but I got no roles for a guy with holes in his head today.' "
Seeks to Improve
Although Walston spoke this thought earnestly, he did so with the devilish personality so well remembered from "Damn Yankees" and "South Pacific."
Actually, there are few circumstances in Walston's professional career that give him cause for serious fear. Perhaps the biggest is the fear that his busy career keeps him from improving his art.
As one of a group of Hollywood residents who remain devoted to the legitimate theater and stage crafts, Ray formed the "Theater East," made up of several actresses and actors who get together weekly to perform for each other. They criticize each other and help each other either to maintain a pitch or advance a step or two in the never-ending search for additional skills.
To the average movie-goer or TV viewer, the name of Ray Walston implies broad comedy. Few people know he got his start in a production of "Hamlet" with Maurice Evans and also appeared in a Broadway production of "Richard III."
His devotion to his craft, however, is not what some people would call a devotion to "serious theater" but rather a seriousness towards the theater and his part in it.
A less professional aspect would certainly have typed him a long time ago. On the contrary, he bounces from role to role, from "The Apartment" to "Convicts Four" to "Wives and Lovers" to "My Favorite Martian."
"Some of my friends," he admitted, "thought I was getting into a rut when I accepted the Martian. But I don't believe that. Although it means playing the same role week in and out, the potential for a variety of situations is so great that if offers not only an interesting challenge but an opportunity to try new techniques, new tricks, and maybe learn a thing or two."
If Ray Walston is going to learn a thing or two, I for one would certainly like to know what they will be. Any man who can learn to live with a pair of holes in the head, and like it, has graduated, in my book.

Evidently a number of TV viewers couldn’t keep their “high-concept” shows straight. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised by this syndicated piece from November 24, 1964, but I’ve read enough stories about fans running up to stars and not having any clue what they’re talking about. And I agree with Walston about the satiric angle.

‘Favorite Martian’ Ray Walston Mistaken For Star Of ‘Mr. Ed’
By DONALD FREEMAN
Copley New Service
HOLLYWOOD – RAY WALSTON, who fulfills the title role in My Favorite Martian, was saying that television popularity has its most curious offshoots.
"For instance, I stopped at a bar one night and one of the drinkers looked at me. There was a glimmer of recognition. Obviously he knew me from somewhere. Then he snapped his fingers. ‘Hey,’ he said, ‘Aren't you Mister Ed?’
"And that," shrugged Mr. Walston, "is fame.”
Fame also is the people who approach Walston and, knowing his other-worldly prowess on the series, urge him to practice his Martian sorcery: "Read my mind. Make me disappear." Or the kids who spot Walston behind the wheel of his car and yell. "Hey, there goes the Martian. Blast off!" Or the ones who say: "Shoot up your antennas."
RAY WALSTON is an intense, worldly, congenial actor a very unactor-ish actor and he's delighted with the burgeoning success of My Favorite Martian. Still, he views the show with cool professional detachment.
"It's not just a kid's show, you know," he said. "Since most people have only one set, the parents tend to watch what the kids watch. And once the parents are exposed to our show, they like it. We want to run for five years and I suspect we will.”
Walston occasionally wonders if the show couldn't display more bite. "We don't have as much social commentary as I'd like," he said, puffing a cigar. "Consider my role. Here we have a super-intellect, 8,000 years ahead of the earth people. Well, he could make some interesting comments on our contemporary culture. Sometimes we pull it off.
"Remember the show where we spoofed bureaucracy? What better thing to fall on the ears of the young than to hear the truth, in amusing form, about the stupidity of bureaucrats."

Ray Walston died in 2001. If you look at the headlines for his newspaper obituaries, what do you think they mentioned?

Sorry, Ray. It wasn’t South Pacific.

Cartoon Rule 219: Hypodermic Needles Stab You

Yes, folks, whenever a cartoon character has a hypodermic needle, you know what’s going to happen.

Here’s an example from The Tree Surgeon, a 1944 MGM cartoon under the direction of George Gordon. The cartoon stars a donkey as a doctor trying to cure the ills of a tree that doesn’t want to get a shot. He shakes the surgeon off a limb.



The vitamin somehow turns the donkey into a quasi-tree.



About half-way through the cartoon we learn a termite is causing all the woes for the sick tree. It ends with the donkey again turned into a tree and the termite getting set to snack on him. I was going to say another Cartoon Rule is “termites always win,” but that wasn’t the case in the Woody Woodpecker short Termites From Mars.

Arnold Gillespie, Mike Lah and Ed Barge are the animators here. No story or background credits.

Changing the Push

“Why don’t we see anything about Hippety Hopper on your blog?” asked absolutely no one.

Well, I suspect someone likes those Giant Mouse cartoons. I’ve learned, to paraphrase Art Linkletter, fans love the darndest things.

Background painter Dick Thomas seems so uninterested in Bell Hoppy (released in 1954) he can’t keep the spelling of “Push” on a fence board consistent from scene to scene to scene.



Director Bob McKimson inherited animators from Bob Clampett who seem to have been given leeway to go as much over the top as they wanted. McKimson knocked that out of them after a few years. There are still a few of scenes I like in this one, mainly when the dopey cats hear a bell and rush into the frame to beat up Sylvester. This one takes five frames. Nice dry brush here, ink and paint department.



Another good scene is when Sylvester gets the cowbell over the “mouse.” His expressions are good but I can’t help but think what Rod Scribner (or Manny Gould if he had been in the unit then) could have done if they had been let loose. Scribner animates on this cartoon, along with Phil De Lara, Chuck McKimson and Herman Cohen. (Late note: Thad Komorowski tells me this is Scribner's scene).

Tedd Pierce wrote the cartoon and supplies an incidental voice; I’ve always liked his voice work at Warners. He borrows the Harpo Marx mirror bit and tosses it into the plot.

Carl Stalling picked Julie Styne and Sammy Cahn’s “That Was a Big Fat Lie” for the cue under the opening credits.

De-Corning America

At the start of network radio comedy, you had Ed Wynn pulling off routines he had done in vaudeville. Almost 20 years later, at the start of network TV comedy, you had Ed Wynn doing them all over again.

Fred Allen certainly thought comedy was retrograding and griped about it in the early ‘50s. But Jack Benny didn’t think so. He felt just the opposite. He might have been right.

Wynn’s show didn’t last terribly long on television. Even the King of Television, Milton Berle, wore out his welcome after a few years. The loud, hyper Jerry Lester was dumped from late night TV and eventually replaced with the calmer, more intellectual Steve Allen. New people with a different way of expressing humour were coming along: Nichols and May, Bob Newhart.

Ironically, Benny was one of the old-timers who stuck around but his show depended on situation and characters than old comedy banter.

Here are his thoughts in a syndicated column from 1950.

Americans Getting Smarter About Jokes, Benny Says
By PATRICIA CLARY
Hollywood, Sept. 6. Americans are getting smarter all the time, Jack Benny said today. They don't think mother-in-law jokes or Benny's nickel tips are funny any more. Audiences have been decorned, Benny said, since he started in radio 19 years ago.
"We're a lot more sophisticated than we used to be. We know all about everything. We demand new and better entertainment," he said. "The mother-in-law joke was practically the foundation of radio. Now it's just corny.
"I used to use jokes about my leaving a nickel tip when I should have left a quarter. Now I've established the stingy character, and it's still funny, but we have to be subtle about it."
Benny took his wallet out of the deep freeze and took us to lunch at Romanoff's, the most expensive place in town, where everything's gold-plated from the customers to the rest rooms.
He's not really stingy. He didn't wince a bit at thawing out $3 for a plate of hash.
Benny himself had an egg. He's watching that waistline. Benny will go back on the radio Sunday over C.B.S. for his 19th straight year--the longest stretch of any radio comic. What people think is funny has changed so much since then, he said, that his first show would smell from here to Cucamonga.
"Hello, folks," he introduced himself in 1932. "This is Jack Benny. There will be a slight pause for everyone to say, 'Who cares?'"
The comics who got all the howls in those days romped on stage, said, "A funny thing happened to me on the way to the studio," and fired jokes as if they were reading straight out of Joe Miller.
"People were used to that and had to be educated to accept anything better," Benny said. "A few of us led the way with situation comedy. Now they don't like the corny old jokes. They've been decorned, you might say."
Benny's first shows were so new they kidded the sponsor and satirized commercials.
"I did everything Henry Morgan 'introduced'," he said, "except get fired."
After kidding talking commercials, he kidded singing commercials. This year, keeping pace with the public, he kids television commercials.
It’s tough figuring out what's going to be funny each year and sometimes a guy gets a bit ahead. Like the time 20 years ago Benny appeared on the London Palladium stage wearing a business suit.
“They'd never seen a comedian who didn't wear baggy pants,” he said. “The show was half over before they caught on I was funny anyway.”

Party With Jay Ward

Who’s the greatest cartoon producer?

When it comes to promoting cartoons, the answer has to be Jay Ward.

Ward’s cartoons were irreverent and silly. So were his promotions. Ward may have loved the publicity stunts as much as his cartoons.

Here are some examples in a syndicated “Under Twenty” column that appeared in papers starting August 9, 1963. The column’s sub-head “For Teenagers Only” is bunk. Jay Ward cartoons are for everyone with a sense of fun, humour and iconoclasm.

Jay Ward Is Crazy Party Giver
By John Larson
A constant question comes to mind when one knows Jay Ward: “Is there a private, out-of-show-business, non-wacky individual behind all the nutty doings of the bouncing and jovial character?”
Jay Ward, creator and producer of “Bullwinkle,” is the only man who really knows that answer. No matter how many times one sees him, the only side shown is one even more wacky than the characters in “Bullwinkle.”
He won the reputation of being the nuttiest party giver and promoter since P. T. Barnum built his circus. For example: Not long ago in New York Jay gave a “Coming Home Party” on the Campus of Columbia university.
Asked why he said, “Because I’m leaving for California in the morning.” Had he gone to Columbia? “No, the only college I attended was Moose U. in Moosylvania.”
A couple of years ago a section of Hollywood's Sunset Boulevard was roped off for a block party celebrating the unveiling of a statue of Bullwinkle. Directly across the street is a huge statue of a girl rotating for advertising purposes. Jay had the Bullwinkle so constructed that the statue rotates in perfect unison with the scantilly clad “Sahara Girl.”
Meanwhile back at New York, as they say in westerns, Jay threw a picnic at the Plaza, one of New- York’s most plush hotels. So many people turned up that they ran out of picnic baskets. The hotel wasn’t too happy with the picnic idea, but their management screamed a shrill “NO” when Jay suggested they import ants from the country to attend the picnic. “After all,” he said later, “What’s a picnic without ants?”
Last March Jay took over a small coffee house and held a Gala New Year’s Eve Party. Six-foot long hero sandwiches and spaghetti were served and New Year’s Eve was celebrated at four different times between 11 o’clock and 3:30 in the morning.
“I couldn’t spend New Year’s with my New York friends last year, so I decided to do it in March. Even the weather cooperated. It snowed that day!” “On the drawing boards,” Jay told us, “is a Jailhouse Jamboree. New York is tearing down one of its jails and we have arranged to have dancing in the cells and refreshments served from the magistrates desk in the courtroom.”
In September . . . Jay’s new syndiated series “FRACTURED FLICKERS” (syndicated through Desilu) will be simultaneously premiered on Broadway and in Hollywood, in a true silent-movie tradition, Rolls Royce, of ancient vintage containing celebrities decked-out in 1920’s regalia, will pull up to the theatre entrance, and old-fashioned movie cameramen and directors will shoot newsreels on the sidewalk, amidst the blare of 1920 jazz bands and on-location crystal set radio interviews. A silent-screen star party will follow on stage.
Also planned is another “first” in motion picture history—a “Coney Island Film Festival.” A 10-car train will be rented from the subway to carry people back and forth between New York and the festival. On view, of course, will be Jay’s “Fractured Flickers. These consist of old, silent movies re-edited with the most insane words and sound effects dubbed in. “They’re for young adults. Young adults are people all the way up to 85 who have forgotten to laugh.”
What is the real Jay Ward like? We still don’t know. “The world,” he says, “is a pretty serious place. I feel that people are entitled to a laugh to break the monotony. The parties? I think everybody gets a kick out of an off beat party, that’s why I like to give them.”
The truth of the matter is that nobody, but nobody has a better time at one of Jay Ward’s parties than Jay Ward!

Locking up Bimbo

I’ve always liked how characters come out of nowhere in Fleischer Talkartoons. They may be inanimate objects that grow hands and a face, or something that just comes out of nowhere and gets into the scene.

In Bimbo’s Initiation (1931), Bimbo walks over some manhole covers while whistling, but then falls in an uncovered hole.



The nearby manhole cover become alive and jumps into place, while a mouse with a padlock rushes into the scene, locks the cover (digging up the pavement to do it) and joyously runs away. His ears make it appear he’s a New York City relative of Mickey. Or maybe one of those Van Beuren mice.



The city backgrounds are always a treat in these cartoons, with boarded up businesses and crooked, melted lampposts. The background artists are never credited.