The Timeless Pepper Gag

It goes back to Felix and Disney's knock-off version of the cat in the silent film days. The old pepper/sneeze gag (my guess is it was in comic strips before that).

Here is how it unfolds in Warners' Prince Violent (1961). Bugs Bunny is fed up with Viking Sam's elephant shooting boulders into his castle with his snout. The poses below are fun. Well, I like them.



Dave Detiege's story has some other old favourites in the comedy. They all still work.

Here’s an inside gag on the opening title card: the Warners shield. Hawley Pratt had been moved up to co-director at this point; Willie Ito was the layout artist with Tom O’Loughlin painting backgrounds.



And here's a pun that some of you might not get.



Back in the days of network radio and pre-network television, watch companies sponsored time-checks. One was Gruen. Ages ago, E.O. Costello put up a site devoted to explaining dated references in Warners cartoons. It's a little dated itself, but still useful. You can find it by clicking here.

Tralfaz Sunday Theatre: McGillicuddy

We mentioned yesterday that Hugh Harman Productions made cartoons for the military during the war. Some of them for the U.S. Navy were similar to the Private Snafu cartoons the Warner Bros. studio animated for the Army. In this case, the bumbling marine was named Private McGillicuddy. The animation jumps from pose to pose in places, much like Hanna-Barbera’s first Ruff and Reddy cartoons, except there is some overlap. You can watch five of them below.

The director was possibly George Gordon, who was mentioned in the trades as directing health and sanitation films for the Navy. The studio’s production designer at the time was Bruce Bushman. The music is likely by Clarence Wheeler, who was signed by Harman in August 1944. I shouldn’t have to tell you who supplies the voices on these. The Hollywood Reporter of May 3, 1945 claimed Jack Benny okayed his hiring after reading the script, which is odd as he was not under exclusive contract to Benny. Then, again, it was claimed for years he was allergic to carrots, which wasn’t true either. Publicity is publicity,



Late note: Devon Baxter says Harman was interviewed about these. Gordon directed and Cal Howard provided stories.

The English Loved His Drawling Legs

Jack Benny and his writers never wasted a lot of potential material. They managed to wring laughs out of all kinds of things.

One was Jack’s sojourns to the Palladium in London. Afterwards, listeners to his radio show would hear gags about how Jack ridiculously puffed up opinions about his performances. The fact was the English enjoyed Jack as much as American audiences.

He set sail for England after the end of the 1947-48 season, the first time he had appeared there since 1931. The United Press reported he got a ten-minute ovation from a capacity audience on opening night. Beverly Baxter reviewed it for the Evening Standard of July 23, 1948 and took a nationalistic slight at something rather innocuous.

MISSING FROM HOME --the star turns of ENGLAND
On Monday of this week Mr. Jack Benny, of the U.S.A., arrived at the Palladium with his radio colleagues, Mr. Phil Harris, Miss Mary Livingstone and Miss Marilyn Maxwell.
A great crowd assembled to give them welcome, and Mr. Val Parnell was able to congratulate himself again on the great success of his star-spangled season.
Mr. Benny, with his drawling legs, his wistful imperturbability expression, and his pleasant voice, is a considerable artist. Anyone who can reduce the vast spaces of the Palladium to the intimacy of a morning room must be taken seriously. Nor was he content merely to reproduce the personal badinage which a corps of script writers supply for his weekly radio programmes.
It is true we heard about his meanness, and his age, as well as his low opinion of Mr. Fred Allen—all pleasant reminders of his war-time programmes—but he did try to brings us into the picture. I liked particularly his explanation of why he had left Claridges and gone to the Savoy: ”They're so stuffy at Claridges that you've got to be shaved before you can go into the barber shop.”
BRAVO, BENNY
WHEN he asked Miss Livingstone, who, as all Western Civilisation knows, is Mrs. Benny, to sing a kissing duet with Mr. Harris we had a glimpse of his powers as a mime. Utterly effortless, and with the very minimum of movement and expression, he conveyed what might be described as the commercial torment of a producer who has placed his wife in another man's arms. Let there be no mistake about it. The Big Shot in the Benny Show is Jack Benny.
Nevertheless Mr. Harris is a notable American import. He is one of those big, nimble-footed men with enough vitality for a battalion, and possessed of a contagious sense of fun. In fact, a perfect foil to his senior partner.
But now I must mention something creditable yet disturbing in connection with Mr. Harris. He had just completed a number when he leaned over the microphone and said words something like these: "Ladies and gentlemen, last week Jack and I discovered a dancing team of two English boys. We think they're fine and I hope you will think so too. So let's give a big hand to these English boys."
IN OUR TEMPLE
THERE was nothing but generosity in the Harris gesture, but it sounded in my ears like a colonial governor introducing a pair of dancing coolies at his garden party. Here in the Palladium, the shrine and temple of British variety, we are asked to give a hand to two of our own countrymen. Not for them our discrimination or criticism, but just—kindness. After all, Mr. Parnell, who is a most able producer, cannot escape his share of the responsibility. Week after week the headliners arrive from New York or Hollywood, thus proclaiming to the listening world that there are no stars in the English skies. Yet it was in this very theatre that the late George Black put British variety on a pinnacle again after it seemed to have gone into a hopeless decline.
It may be that our music hall artists need a New Look. Certainly the Americans have proved that they do not have to descend to “blue jokes” and embarrassing gestures to draw the crowd. The excuse is made that in the provinces a comic cannot survive unless he gives the people vulgarity, and that possible it is not to have one version for the provinces and another for London.
Let the case of Sid Field be the answer. He was a favourite for years in the provinces before Mr. Black discovered him, and he never trafficked in dirt.
I am sorry that, the pleasantries of Benny and company should have me into this serious vein, but periodically, in politics and the arts, there has to be a campaign to revive a pro-British feeling in Britain. Clearly this such a moment. Perhaps Mr. Phil Harris lit a beacon in Oxford-circus.

The Observer of July 25 had these words:

Jack Benny
ON Monday, to the delight of a packed house, the Palladium became a temple for the worship of visiting film stars. Jack Benny, the presiding deity on the stage, disarmed us immediately by remarking that he knew he looked much younger on the screen! Mr Benny is not a red-nosed comedian; he is a charming, polished, comic actor with a deceptively easy style and cumulative effect. He jokes gravely in a deliberate, lazy voice, and—rare feat among funny-men—he listens beautifully. He gives an air of spontaneity to a cunningly-arranged act; this includes Phil Harris, who is so full of himself he quite fills the theatre, and is great fun. But though his associates stand in the limelight, it is Mr. Benny, with deprecating shrug and resigned expression, who always manages to be at the centre of things. He and his company are here for two weeks only; Nota Benny. P.F.

As for the rest of the cast, Dennis Day appears to have taken most of the summer 1948 off; he was heard in the Disney film Melody Time. Don Wilson stayed in Hollywood as his wife headed for Hawaii; she divorced him next year. Eddie Anderson went on the road, including a trip to Canada. We’ll have more on that next weekend.

The Incomplete Hugh and Rudy

Ah, Hollywood. Land of Make Believe.

Not just on the screen but in print, too. There were all kinds of movie magazines, with concocted P.R. stories. There were gossip columns with publicity plants. And studio publications designed for in-house readers weren't always forthright, either.

For a brief time, MGM published “Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Short Story,” with reviews and stories about films and people who worked on the company’s shorts. That included cartoons, and the issue of November 1939 profiled the directors Hugh Harman and Rudy Ising.

Don’t expect any real journalism here. Harman and Ising were at MGM—the studio that got rid of them in 1937 and set up their own cartoon operation—because of Fred Quimby’s mismanagement. Having watched as New York and California animators clashed, and having gone through two studio managers, he was forced to re-hire Harman and Ising to produce and direct cartoons, this time on MGM’s payroll.

Animator Jim Pabian recalled to historian Mike Barrier: “Quimby told me he didn't want to have anything to do with Hugh, but he took him because Rudy wouldn't sign without him.” Quimby was honest about it with columnist Hedda Hopper, who quoted him on August 4, 1940 that “They [Harman and Ising] could never work together and both of them are so high in the clouds they haven’t any idea of what money means.” Nice tact and diplomacy, Fred. The two were still working for him when he said this. Indeed, the puff piece in “Short Story” suggests Quimby had to step in to keep them on budget because they over-animated everything.

On top of that, before this piece was even published, there was still politicking going on. Having lost Friz Freleng over the unrest, Quimby put Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera in co-directors’ chairs. Ising told Barrier he got “fed up” with Hanna and Barbera “because of the conniving they were doing with Quimby.”

There is no mention of Hanna or Barbera in the feature story below; though the first Tom and Jerry short, Puss Gets the Boot, was well into production.

Animating  MOTHER NATURE
IF YOU hear of a couple of young men being picked up on Hollywood Boulevard for obstructing traffic while escorting a lowly katydid across a busy corner, it’s an odds-on bet that they will be Hugh Harman and Rudolph Ising. And you may be sure that their gallant deed will not be motivated by a maternal attitude toward insects or a desire to preserve entomological specimens. Rather, and admittedly quite selfishly, they will be merely furthering the development of their business interests.
It seems that Mr. Harman and Mr. Ising are two of Hollywood’s leading figures in the serious business of making cartoons for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. And insects, their habits and customs, are good and valuable assets in this peculiar business.
The Messrs. Harman and Ising have been working in this sphere of fantasy for some fifteen years now, and the theories they have developed over this period of years indicates that there is more to the business of making animals imitate humans than appears on the surface (or the screen).
At present, Harman and Ising are working separately on the M-G-M lot. Their films appear on the screen either as a Hugh Harman or Rudolph Ising preduction. Yet, they have to be considered as a team. Each always knows what the other is doing and they constantly exchange advice.
Their personalities are as different as Garbo’s and Judy Garland’s but their minds are like twin motors. Ising is quiet, serious, dark and built like a fighter. Harman is an easy talker, perpetual smiler, and small and wiry.
They make pictures for those folks who like to drink from the fountain of youth which is just about everyone alive. This fact, they state, is why adults like cartoons of animals acting like humans in a world of fantasy. Their reasoning is that, as children we all live in a make-believe world in which we want to believe that everything is possible, even talking animals, fairies and elves. From that world, they point out, we are plucked and set down in a school where we begin to be drilled in realities. Thereafter, everything is brutal fact.
For this reason, fondness for cartoon fantasy is a throwback to childhood. Harman and Ising still have that child psychology and hope they never lose it.
Although they do use human characters occasionally, animals are their popular stand-bys, also for definite reasons. “Through animals, humans can be caricatured more expertly,” they state. “Animated cartoons stress the faults and limitations of persons rather than their strong features. To an audience, it is like looking into a strange world, yet recognizing themselves and their acquaintances.
“The public would rather see animals do human things than human drawings do the same. Every animal, unless played for comedy menace, can be made to look lovable and cute. There is also the advantage of being able to give our animal characters all of the individualities in actions and thought of animals plus the same actions and thoughts of humans. We really have a two-barreled gun to shoot.”
There is still another vital reason for using animals. This is the limitation of reality placed on the actions of any human cartoon character. As they explain it, “We need both elementary things and exaggeration. Animal cartoon characters have the same advantage clowns have over straight actors. If we are to be absolutely human with a real-life character, we cannot stretch, twist or otherwise distort the face or body. The mere unnaturalness would make that character ugly. But the same distortion with an animal looks pleasing. Recall how clowns go to great extremes by painting their faces. They aren’t real, but everyone loves a clown.”



So far do Harman and Ising go in making humans in their stories absolutely normal, that they usually photograph a real person in action. They did this for the character of Goldilocks in “Goldilocks and the Three Bears.” But the character that created the biggest sensation was the dancing fairy for “The Blue Danube,” a beautiful interpretation of a musical mood which told the story of how water babies, birds and animals gathered blue for the famous river. A real dancer posed in action. Then artists, being artists with an eye to beauty, drew a fairy with wings but without clothes. Oh, they gave her long Godiva-like hair, but realism went too far in some cases as the hair swayed. The result was considerable erasing later.
As long as cartoons are strictly fantasy, the unreal is valuable, but never possible with human characters. Hence, the two point out, a real character can never be a prolonged cartoon star—eventually all the limitations will be used up and the character will begin repeating his adventures because he can’t do impossible things which animals can do. They realized this when “Goldilocks” was made. The heroine of the fairy tale, for cartoon purposes becomes just a stooge for the bears. Harman is now making more with the Bear Family, treating them as a counterpart of the Hardys. Papa Bear is the main character, patterned after a cross between Edgar Kennedy and Oliver Hardy, with Beery’s voice. He is a “fall guy,” unemotional, suppressed, lazy, slow-moving and continually irritated by events that mount to the unbearable.
The next Bear picture will be “The Bear Family,” in which they again do the unconventional. The subject will open with a hand sketching Papa Bear. Gradually, the public will see how he is made to move and then he goes into his story. Papa Bear will also be treated as an unwilling actor on a stage through the use of a heckler, always brought in merely by his shadow looming from an “audience” and an off-screen voice.
This will be followed by “A Rainy Day” and an untitled fourth now in preparation (it takes eight months from story idea to completed subject). “A Rainy Day” will illustrate one of Harman and Ising’s basic principals—always base fantasy on realism. Papa Bear tries to repair a tiny hole in the roof, eventually wrecking the roof. As a storm comes up, the shingles blow away, fonming themselves into billowing waves, into which the bear plunges and starts swimming.
“Unreal? Sure!” Harman and Ising say. “But, we are creating a realistic storm behind all this and the burlesque touch will be accepted. We always avoid absurd tricks for our animal characters. The day is past when a cartoon cat could convert his tail into an airplane propeller and fly away. It once was funny. Today, the public, even in a world of fantasy won’t go for it. However, in ‘One Mother’s Family,’ a hawk is given all the characteristics of a zooming airplane. That is natural.”
If there is one outstanding prerequisite for a successful animated cartoon producer, what is it? Both Harman and Ising have the same answer—constant observation.
These two chaps are expert observers. They continually find themselves watching leaves blow in the breeze, cloud formations or water flowing to the sea or insects plodding along in their own peculiar fashion always to be able to put this movement in drawings. They are great believers in mood in backgrounds.
But, at the same time, they observe eccentricities in persons and animals and often find themselves staring. That’s because they are continually watching for ways to idealize types and characters.
This observation of animals, birds and insects has made every living creature have serious life to them. All their artists feel the same way and some are so imbued with this feeling that they would never kill even a poisonous spider or snake.
Harman and Ising read omnivorously for ideas, background, social causes and character study, seeking impressions rather than cold facts. For instance, the average man reads of the Palomar telescope to learn amazing details. Ising read of its ability to pierce the Milky Way and immediately got an idea. The result is his story, now in work, of the three little kittens who lost their mittens and were sent to bed without any supper. Hungry, they visualize the Milky Way as actually of milk, cream, butter, ice cream and whipped cream. So up in a balloon they go for adventures among milk products.
The two listen to the radio, mostly to study voices because voices are important in their work. Music occupies a great part of their home-life. To them music is action and color. They can’t play any instrument, but music gives them impressions. The Hungarian Rhapsody represented a perfect sunset to Ising and he drew it. Harman tells of playing one record for hours, trying to capture a pictorial mood. It happens frequently and always the following day his head is dizzy with the tune.
They are constantly striving for something different. Pictorial beauty frequently sweeps them away and they must be brought down to reality again by a guiding hand which happens to be Fred Quimby, the practical member who is in charge of the cartoon department.
Harman and Ising have probably the largest and most frequently-changing cast of cartoon characters in the business. That is because they continually experiment. If a star is created—as in the case of Papa Bear—they make a few more with him.
Having no strict star characters, they don’t have to work a certain one into every cartoon. The cartoon star system also holds the danger of finally killing a character. To keep a cartoon animal in character, he must have type which means he has limitations that eventually will consume every logical situation for him.
Both Harman and Ising agree that the tastes of the public are in a state of constant flux. The development of national and international events, they assert, subconsciously reacts on the majority of people. Producers of motion pictures with human actors are well aware of this and it is only logical, they contend, that cartoon producers must also take it into consideration. An example of this is the present talk of M-G-M)’s cartoon department “Peace on Earth,” which, while remaining in the realm of fantasy, is as timely as a current newsreel. The story concerns itself with a situation in which all humans have been killed in a series of wars, leaving animals as the sole inhabitants of the earth. The film is a sharp satire of a current event which is uppermost in the minds of the public. An old squirrel, a prototype of the late Chic Sale with all his provincial mannerisms, wisdom and homey philosophies, is called upon to create fantasy out of grim reality.
Tom Turkey will be Harman’s next introduction. He’ll be human, all right—a small-town “slicker” in mail order suit and yellow shoes. He’s the peppy fellow everyone knows, the guy who has an answer for everything and never seems to learn a lesson. Surrounding him will be a “stock company” of fowls representing small-town folk. At the same time, Ising is readying a little calf character for introduction in “Home On the Range.” This character will be given the power to reason and the mother-child love will be played up. It will stay away from slapstick and the calf will do no such un-real things as scratching his head.
What of the future of cartoons? Well, both Harman and Ising sincerely believe that animated cartoons eventually will express other emotions than the basic ones now used, but this will depend on technical advancement. They believe pathos, tragedy, love, drama, suspense and many other emotions will someday be as easy to express as comedy and irritation are today.
“After all,” they say, “animated cartoons have come a long way. Why, it was only ten or twelve years ago when pen and ink figures only moved. Today our cartoon characters really are individuals.”
Yes, Harman and Ising are experts in fantasy but they also have common sense; they picked a field in which their actors show very little temperament.

Harman’s stay at MGM ended on Apr. 5, 1941. He gathered some loyalists and opened his own studio. Fortunately, war work came along to keep it occupied. Ising left on October 5, 1942 to take over the Army Air Force’s animation unit on the West Coast. Neither of them regained the stature in the industry they held in the 1930s at Warners, then MGM.

One of their projects was for television, and this led to a clash with Hanna and Barbera. Los Angeles Daily News columnist Steve Ellingson was watching his wife sew one day, and wondered if the idea of sewing patterns could be adapted to woodworking. So he came up with U-Bild Woodworking Plans. The picture you see to the right (with local NBC TV star Barbara Logan) is from his column of June 5, 1952. Two of the patterns for wooden lawn ornaments are of two little dogs. “They’re television actors and were loaned to us by Harman-Ising, the popular animated cartoon studio,” wrote Ellingson. Their names were Ruff and Reddy. Yes, the same names as Hanna and Barbera’s first TV stars.

Ising didn’t think it was a coincidence. The Hollywood Reporter of June 30, 1958 reports he sued. There is little about the Harman-Ising “two dogs” version, other than listings in the Daily News for KNBH’s Junior Theatre at 6:30 p.m. Wednesdays in July and August 1951 (opposite Bob Clampett’s Time For Beany on KTLA). Three episodes were made, and Broadcasting magazine reported on Jan. 29, 1951 they were being distributed by Sterling Television (and produced by a New York company; there was no mention of Harman or Ising). KOB in Albuquerque promoted 20-minute episodes called “The Treasure” and “The Diamond.”

Other Harman-Ising projects included a live/animation combination series starring Emmett Kelly that CBS was considering in 1956. The Conejo News of July 27 described it this way: “Emmett Kelly never speaks and when he takes an orphan boy [played by eight-year-old Terry Rangno] under his wing the only way he can answer the boy’s many questions about the circus is through his ability to draw cartoons. In each instance the story will evolve from a cartoon drawn for the boy by Emmett Kelly.” The story names the technical staff, but no animator. Rangno was, rather optimistically, signed to a five-year contract.

Harman and Ising’s names appeared in Hedda Hopper’s column on May 20, 1958. A deal had been set up in the U.S. with Toei Motion Picture Co. and Kyoto for production of several pictures. Kyoto was said to be “affiliated with Harman-Ising.”

Harman died on November 25, 1982. Ising passed away on July 18, 1992. They both got recognition in the public press for creating the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies for Warner Bros. Said Clampett about Harman: “He was one of the truly great pioneers of animation. At the time he started there was hardly any animation, just silent films. You might say that some of their MGM films were in every respect equal to Disney. They all started with a very crude medium and with Walt did the most to bring it to greatness.”

Fight Club Popeye

Popeye was invincible after eating spinach, so the Fleischer staff found ways to make it backfire.

In Can You Take It (1934), Popeye leaps into a Fleischer version of the fight club and (non-twisker) punches the guy to his right. The fighters are in a circle and fall like dominoes. But the force of the punch is so strong, Popeye gets knocked down, too.



He punches the guy on his left. Same result.



Finally, Popeye hits on a solution by hitting the wooden floor with his fist. Perspective animation follows.



The music in the background is “You’ve Got to Be a Football Hero,” though there are no footballs in sight. Myron Waldman and Tom Johnson get the rotating screen credits. The cartoon was made when Bonnie Poe was playing Olive Oyl.

The Prude Vs. Tex Avery

Swing Shift Cinderella's fairy godmother waves a wand and TA-DA! Tattered clothes turn into a mink fur.



The Avery wolf flips his lid. See the multiples and brush work.



Avery adds to the take with growing eyes.



Preston Blair, Ed Love and Ray Abrams are the credited animators.

The Exhibitor concluded “This is an attractive entry that draws a few good laughs, and is generally amusing. GOOD.”

But someone was upset about it, and wrote the Showmen’s Trade Review. The letter was published in the Sept. 1, 1945 edition.

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer recently released a cartoon entitled "Swing Shift Cinderella," which most certainly is not suitable for children to see—and I doubt if few adults appreciated it. It is hard to understand how Metro would place the MGM trademark on such a disgusting piece of film.
The story was given over completely to a so-called “wolf” and a strip tease artist wiggling and squirming like a hula dancer. It was anything but entertainment or constructive to the minds of adolescents.
I am a small town operator, managing several central Illinois theatres. We constantly battle whistlers who have been taught by cartoons and features to whistle at a good-looking girl who makes her appearance on the screen. They have been educated by the motion picture industry itself by reason of the fact that often a sequence will show a soldier or possibly a civilian whistling at a girl going down the street, or in a night club, and in various other circumstances. Naturally if the youth sets this on the screen, he feels he has a perfect right to do the same thing because he is "educated" along this line by the pictures.
Often times, in a serious part of the feature, a beautifully dressed girl will make an appearance, and someone will let out a whistle, which kills the effect of the particular scale. We have fought this practice by paying bonuses to ushers who catch a whistler of this type; and of course, he is promptly given a good lecture or, in some cases, asked to leave the theatre. Motion pictures in the making should take these things into consideration; and I am sure that no box-office value would be disturbed by merely leaving out the whistling sequence in any particular picture.
Referring back to the "strip tease" cartoon Metro released—they were and are primarily made and shown for the children, and should in no way be suggestive or downright dirty as was the ease of "Swing Shift Cinderella." Adults, naturally go for cartoons too, but they are not impressed by "cheap dirt" if they have children of their own.
As mentioned above, I am a small town operator and seldom feel the urge for writing suggestions or criticising the efforts of companies who have been very successful and their important executive heads. However, when I look at a cartoon, referred to in this article and when I hear patrons, particularly the bobby-seeks group, whistle and I know that it was promoted by the screen itself, "blow my top" and sit down and write a letter, getting the heated steam out of my system.
Most of my letters are never mailed; and I am not sure I will mail this one. On the other hand. I think I will. Maybe it won't do any good, but at least have the satisfaction of "telling" them a thing or two. "Out of the mouths of babes" sometimes comes a fertile and suggestion.
Samuel T. Traynor
Gm. Mgr.
Bailey Enterprises,
Princeton, Illinois

Mr. Traynor has an unusual definition of the term “strip-tease” as no clothing is even partially removed by Red in this, or any of her cartoons. If the concept of sexual attraction bothered him so much, why did he book the cartoon? It’s not like Red was making her cinematic debut.

Fred Quimby paid no attention to the complaint and Avery made three more films starring Red.

Matrons Need Radio, Too

Something for everyone could be heard on the air during radio’s Golden Era. That included matronly women who flocked to radio studios for some fun and attention.

In New York, Johnny Olson and Dennis James (on TV) hosted audience participation shows featuring (and aimed at) women approaching their golden years. In Los Angeles, the duty was taken on by Tom Breneman.

His Breakfast in Hollywood show on ABC had enough of a following that a movie was made around it in 1946. The show was ripe for parody as well.

John Crosby gave his assessment in his syndicated column of February 18, 1947 (drawing to the right from the Los Angeles Daily News.

RADIO IN REVIEW
By JOHN CROSBY
The Man Who Tries on Ladies’ Hats
Wolcott Gibbs, a parodist of great skill and no mercy, speaks his mind on the art of parody in the preface of his book, "Season in the Sun." "Successful parody," he says, "demands a great many things from the writer: . . . It should contain a certain amount of real criticism of what the author is saying as well as his manner of saying it . . . Real parodies are not written on grotesque books. For one thing it would be superfluous since they are parodies to begin with, and for another there is no particular entertainment in it for the writer, since intelligent criticism prefers to have something rational to criticize."
That is possibly a sensible criterion of parody for literature but it’s rather too austere for radio. If a program had to be rational before it could be parodied, most of Fred Allen's parodies on radio would be ruled out automatically, In fact, if Allen adhered to any such criterion, his choice of material would be so severely limited he'd have difficulty getting through a thirty-nine-week season.
• • •
Fortunately, Allen has devised his own methods of burlesquing the grotesque, methods which are, at least to me, thoroughly satisfying. Not long ago Allen did a parody on Tom Breneman's "Breakfast in Hollywood" (A. B. C. 11 a. m. E. S. T. Monday through Friday) a program which no one in his right mind could possibly accuse of rationality. It is Mr. Breneman's custom to end this program each day by pinning an orchid on the oldest lady in the audience. In the six years he has been on the air Breneman has dredged up some fairly decrepit specimens of humanity. In parodying this curious monkey business, Mr. Allen went Breneman one better; he produced a lady of such extreme fragility that the weight of the orchid snapped her spine.
I thought it was hilarious, and still do, though it meets none of Mr. Gibbs's standards. As I see it, it’s perfectly possible to parody something that is already inherently ridiculous but only by taking it to outrageous limits. In the case of Breneman's "Breakfast in Hollywood." it requires more imagination than I possess.
This is one radio program which I have carefully side-stepped for months, simply because it defies criticism. It even defies explanation. Over a period of five months I have amassed a great many notes on this program, but they are of little help. They appear to consist almost entirely of the names of ladies of uncertain vintage, many of them from Amarillo, Tex., whose hats Mr. Breneman invariably tried on. I can't conceive of any one being interested in these ladies' names even if I had their telephone numbers, which I haven't.
• • •
There isn't a great deal else to the program. Mr. Breneman simply wanders from table to table at his restaurant in Hollywood, saying 'Hello, who are you?" The lady replies nervously that she is Mrs. Dorothy Z. Brockhurst, of East Orange, N. J. After a little coaxing she may be persuaded to add that this is her first trip to California; she's visiting her daughter-in-law, Mrs. Beulah M. Hodgins, of Santa Barbara, who has two children of indeterminate sex; she wishes it wouldn't rain so much in California—tee hee—and she'd like to say hello to her husband, Richard X. Brockhurst, back in East Orange. Right here Mr. Breneman patches away the microphone. It's against the rules of the Federal Communications Commission to deliver personal messages over the radio. Though the ladies are fully aware they are being naughty, they never stop trying and they frequently succeed.
What entertainment value this has for the listener is one of the dark, inscrutable mysteries of broadcasting. There is no music on the program and the few jokes that are attempted reach a level of idiocy almost beyond mortal comprehension. ("Why is a midget sailor like a short order of mashed potatoes? Because he's just a little gob.")
There's also some nonsense about a wishing ring, but I'm too tired to explain it even if I understood it, and I don't. Mr. Breneman's habit of donning ladies' hats is too well known to require further amplification. However, the screeches of laughter which this spectacle provokes have such an unearthly duality that they deserve some special comment. It is a louder, brassier, more strident, more raucous and infinitely more terrifying noise than the squealing the bobbysoxers used to deliver at Frank Sinatra's broadcasts, An unusually sensitive friend who heard this shrill and terrible din said he detected in it note of horrible panic. The same sort of lunatic laughter, he is convinced will rise to the heavens the day the world comes to an end.

If you are up for it, you can hear the Oct. 2, 1946 show below.

Breneman was 47 when he died in 1948. One of his pall bearers was Jack Benny, whose writers borrowed from Breneman’s show when elderly Martha (played by Gloria Gordon) gave Jack an orchid and told him he had to kiss her.



As for Crosby’s other columns for the week:

Monday, February 17: How radio in that land of Commies, the U.S.S.R., has something in common with radio in that land of freedom, the U.S.
Wednesday, February 19: Radio writing in Hollywood, especially for comedy shows.
Thursday, February 20: Part two on the life of West Coast radio writers.
Friday, February 21: How the radio stars in Hollywood get around.

You can click on them to read them.

Boom

The makers of silent films didn’t rely on the theatre pit orchestra to provide sound effects. Like title cards to make the plot understandable, words would appear on the screen to indicate sounds.

Here are good examples in Felix Turns the Tide, a war picture released not too many years after fighting in the trenches of France and Belgium. The word “BOOM” is formed as a cannon is fired by a rat and lands in a trench filled with cats. The cartoon depicts non-comedic death as the cat soldiers are thrown into the air by the bomb blast.



As a side note, “BOOM” appears on rare occasion in sound cartoons. Tex Avery's Blitz Wolf (1942) is one. A really late example is the opening of Rocky and His Friends (1959).

The visual highlight of this short may be the depiction of the war. There are silhouettes, black and white cards in between the action to give a flashing effect, alternating black and white backgrounds, and an animated explosion where the smoke fills the screen. Unfortunately, the versions of these films on-line are murky, as if an old print was recorded onto a VHS tape.

Felix was a huge star and deserves better treatment.

Moving Picture World of Jan. 13, 1923 opined that, even then, “many will be able to anticipate” the ending of the cartoon.

The short was released on Oct. 15, 1922. Felix was distributed on a States Rights basis by Margaret Winkler. There were new Felixes every two weeks. The others around this time (from the Motion Picture News):

Felix Gets Revenge, Sept. 1, 1922
Felix Wakes Up, Sept. 15, 1922
Felix Minds the Kid, Oct. 1, 1922
Felix on the Trail, Nov. 1, 1922
Felix Lends a Hand, Nov. 15, 1922
Felix Gets Left, Dec. 1, 1922
Felix in the Bone Age, Dec. 15, 1922
Felix the Ghost Breaker, Jan. 1, 1923
Felix Wins Out, Jan. 15, 1923

Other than Winkler and Pat Sullivan’s names, there are no credits.