The Woody Woodpecker cartoon “Round Trip to Mars” (1957) opens with a couple of transitional backgrounds by Art Landy. With a quick pan, the...

Willie Whopper’s Spite Flight borrows a lot from Willie Whopper’s The Air Race (both 1933) . But the premise of the later cartoon revolves...

Listening to the calm, even voice of Jack Benny on the radio or TV, you wouldn’t get the impression he worried a lot. But he did. It was fai...

Say what you will about his cartoons, but Paul Terry had a long and successful career in the animation business. It wasn’t until the 1940s...

A self-explanatory gag from Alice Gets Stage Struck (1925). Was this the first use of this gag? Tom Stathes writes to say the earliest v...

Fred Brunish (1902-1952) was Walter Lantz’s sole background artist in the last half of the ‘40s and into the early ‘50s; at least he was the...

Almost nothing about The Beverly Hillbillies was subtle. Even the supposedly ordinary characters on the show were over the top. (A case can...

A wonderful twist comes at the end of Rabbit Hood (released in 1949), which features a running gag of the dopey Little John insisting in rh...

In the late ‘40s and early ‘50s, a company made newsreels for television called “Telenews Digest.” One of its weekly efforts in July 1951 in...

Jack Benny had a long list of personality traits and characters on his radio and TV show that his writers weaved together like a variety of ...