Rudy Zingler

Many, many people who worked on Warner Bros. cartoons never got credit on the screen in the 1930s—even animators.

Painter Martha Sigall wrote a wonderful autobiography with her memories working for Leon Schlesinger and mentions names of artists who were unknowns to the public. They include Harold Soldinger, Murray Hudson (who had worked at Iwerks), Lewis Cavett (who we profiled in this post) and Rudy Zingler, who you see on the right in a photo from Martha’s book.

Let’s hear from Zingler.

The Olympian of Olympia, Washington interviewed him about his animation career in a feature story published November 27, 1983.

Rudolf Alfred Zingler returned to the Pacific Northwest after getting out of the cartoon business. He was born in Germany in 1905, grew up near Kendall, Washington and graduated with brother Hans from Columbia Valley Elementary in 1922. The two attended Whatcom High in Bellingham and received diplomas in January 1926. During his time at high school, his car bashed into another one carrying students and he ended up paying $25 bail when police discovered he didn’t have a license. His car ran over him on a farm somewhere east of Ferndale in 1930 (whether it was the same car is unknown). He got married in Everett in August 1927. In August 1928, he filed for divorce, claiming his wife was addicted to alcohol and cigarettes and had deserted him. She counter-sued. (He won his case).

When Zingler arrived in Los Angeles isn’t quite clear. The Everett Directory for 1926-27 shows he was working in the Great Northern Railway shops; his father had a sewing machine business there. In 1928, the store moved to Bellingham as Rudy was assistant manager of it. In 1930, he was crossing the border into Vancouver and listed as his employer “F. Miller.” Zingler was a bellhop in the 1933 San Francisco Directory. He was living in San Francisco when he re-married in May 1936, and apparently graduated from art school that year. An interview in the Tacoma News Tribune in 1983 said he was hired by Disney in 1937 for $14 a week. He was gone from California by 1948, as he appears in the Directory for Kelso, Washington that year.

Zingler has misremembered a few dates. The Disney strike was not in 1939, and Hollywood Steps Out was released in 1941, not 1947. He takes credit for the caricatures in that cartoon which I always thought were created by Ben Shenkman. How he met Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera at either Warners or Disney is a mystery. The first Roadrunner-Coyote cartoon was released in Sept. 1949 and though Zingler was back in Washington State a year before then, it could take two years for a Chuck Jones-unit cartoon to go from a story session to a theatrical release. And while Zingler says he “drew” characters in Snow White, it doesn’t say whether he was animating, assistant animating or in-betweening. However, it’s an interesting, first-hand perspective of that period of animation.

He drew our favorite cartoon characters
But life in Hollywood was not a pretty picture to Rudy Zingler
Story by Glenda Helbert
Photos by Brian Saunders
Bugs Bunny and Snow White. Porky Pig and the Roadrunner.
Rudy Zingler helped build our favorite childhood cartoon memories.
As an animator for Walt Disney Studios and later for Warner Brothers, he worked during the golden age of animation in the 1930s and 40s, when every move was captured with painstaking detail, and cartoon characters swaggered and breathed and glided across the film like living creatures.
But that was years ago. Rudy Zingler moved from the smog of Los Angeles to the green grass of his home state. He's retired now, and spends his days doing odd job construction work for friends and trying his hand at sculpture, an art form beloved by him, but one for which he has not had time since he was a young art student.
It’s a life that’s worlds away from the life he led as an animator, who knew and worked with Walt Disney and many other best and bright talents that ventured to California to get into glittery movie business.
The first step on Rudy's road to Hollywood began with horses, wild horses that once galloped free on the deserts of Eastern Washington.
“I was born with a pencil in my hand,” Rudy said, but it was those horses that roamed near Soap Lake where his family settled in 1914 that inspired his pencil to draw with furious intensity, capturing every beautiful move.
“We children loved it, but Dad hated it,” he said of the place they lived where there were not only wild horses to draw, but Indians too, and coyotes and wide open spaces in which to play, roam and dream.
It’s not suprising [sic] that his father, Alfons Zingler, hated the life. Rudy was born in Breslau, Germany, in 1905, and the Zinglers came to America in 1913 so his father, an agricultural professor, could study irrigation systems in Eastern Washington for a year and then return to prepare a paper on his findings.
But World War I broke out, the Zinglers could not return hom, and they found themselves stranded in a peach orchard near Soap Lake. His father was reduced to manual labor, a man who was a well-to-do member of the respected professional class in German society, who spoke seven languages and was used to being waited on by a house full of servants. That however did not stop him from doing what needed to be done. He put in a grim year working in the peach orchard. When work grew hard to find he built a covered wagon and in the winter of 1915 moved the family to Deming, Wash. lt was a 350-mile trip that required a trek over Snoqualmie Pass, on road then little more than a cow trail.
Rudy still has a drawing he sketched at age 10 of that trip, the family huddled together on the wagon buckboard, his father’s hands steadying the reins. They arrived at their destination in a snowstorm.

There Alfons Zingler found a job building railroad beds, and after a few years he moved the family to a farm near Sumas, and in 1921 to Bellingham so that the children could attend high school [photo to left]. When Rudy graduated, his parents, who were delighted with his drawing talent, encouraged him to attend art school.
Rudy moved to San Francisco, where he studied fine art and sculpture at the California School of Fine Arts. He also picked up a teaching certificate at the University of California, in case he couldn’t find a job in the field of his choice.
But even in those Depression times, Rudy found California truly to be his land of opportunity. His first wife Frances, who he met and married there, had a brother who invited him to join the staff of Foster-Kleiser Ad Agency, one of the most prestigious ad agencies in the country at that time.
But Rudy had other ideas. He had heard that the Disney Studios in Hollywood were growing like fury. Disney was in the midst of producing a feature-length animated film “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” and he was advertising for animators.
Rudy had one thing going for him to get that job. He had an art degree, and Disney required his animators to have art degrees. But it was one thing to be an fine artist and quite another to be an animator.
“You’ve got to be an actor yourself,” Rudy said. “You can jump a rabbit over a fence many ways.” You had to feel the moves before you could draw the moves.
“A lot of people told me I’d never make it as an animator,” Rudy said, and a lot of artists tried and failed during a grueling three-week trial period that Disney animators went through to prove their stuff. Rudy didn’t know the first thing about animating, but in those three weeks he watched and listened and learned enough to land the job.
He started out doing backgrounds for Mickey Mouse film shorts, but was soon was drawing the characters who bounced through those backgrounds.
“I had to. Disney was so far behind on the Snow White project, that if you couldn’t produce, you were out,” Rudy said.
Rudy drew the prince, Dopey the dwarf and some of Snow White's scenes for the film which went on to become an international success. It represented one of the biggest gambles in the career of Walt Disney, an artist with some ad agency experience who had gone bankrupt trying to start his own film ad company in Kansas City. Disney began his cartoon-making career by moving to Hollywood in 1923 and going into partnership with his brother Roy.
Before the project was finished Disney, was heavily in debt, the film which was to have taken two years to complete took four because of Disney’s mania for perfection. Not such a good artist himself (the primitive, early Mickey Mouse cartoons are from Disney's own hand), he hired top flight animators to put his ideas into motion, and he wanted them done exactly as he envisioned them, Rudy said.
Many a drawing was rejected before it suited Disney’s tastes, and for the animators that often meant working day and night to keep up. To make a cartoon character move effortlessly on the screen requires thousands of drawings depicting every subtlety of those walking movements.
Put together and run at high speed on film they produce the walking motion. It took 16 drawings to make Mickey Mouse take one simple step, 24 drawings for each second of a cartoon character’s movement.
Animators were expected to draw 25 feet of drawings a week, Rudy said. One second, or 24 drawings, represents a foot.
To meet standards meant doing many more drawings to animate a character. For example, when a character took a step, not only his feet moved, but the body moved up and down, the coat flapped in the breeze, arms moved, facial expressions fluctuated and the grass the character was walking through waved around him.
It was a far cry from today’s cartoons in which the only part of the character’s body that is moving is his feet.
Rising costs forced the frozen images of cartoons, Rudy said. It became too expensive to pay for the thousands of extra drawings and hours of work needed to add all the extra movements that resulted in a better quality cartoon. If an work was rejected at Disney’s studio he was expected to redo it plus keep up with the regular workload demand. Sometimes those rejections came not because the work wasn’t first rate, but because Walt Disney was having a bad day.
“He was not consistent with his criticism,” Rudy said.
He recalls the struggle of his friend Paul Smith, one of most talented animators, to get the dancing Hippo in the cartoon film “Fantasia” to move to Disney’s requirements.
Smith created the hippo over and over again, her ballet-shoed hooves moving to the strains of classical music. He worked on the hippo for a year, his work rejected over and over by Disney.
Smith was sick of the whole project, and after a final rejection decided to submit the very first drawings that he had made of the hippo for approval. They were accepted, and he was asked why he didn’t do this quality of work in the first place.
“I did,” Smith said.
There were lots of red faces in the studio that day, Rudy recalled.
Working with talented people like Smith made the frenetic work bearable.
At Disney and later at Warner Brothers studios he rubbed elbows with the likes of Mel Blanc, the voice of Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig and Daffy Duck; with Bugs Hardaway, the originator of the Bugs Bunny character; Mike Maltese, creator of cartoon character Pepe le Pew; and William Hanna and Joseph Barbera, animators who later founded their own successful cartoon production company.
His move to Warners in 1939 was prompted by a strike of Disney Studio workers. Everyone walked out, the studio closed down for three months, and some of the reasons were Disney’s harsh ways of handling employees.
Those were the days of the yellow dog contracts, Rudy said, a worker hired for six months, working till his pay scale reached a certain level, then his contract was torn up and he was fired.
Zingler was incensed enough seeing this sort of treatment take place to become one of the founders of the Screen Cartoon Guild.
At Warners Zingler went on to create some of his most memorable cartoon characters.
He helped originate the Roadrunner, that speedy cartoon character who was always leaving Wiley Coyote in the dust.
“I laughed myself sick doing it," he said. The writers in the gag department, whose job it was to think up the funny lines of the characters, kept the place in stitches. They would climb on chairs and fake an eagle swoop, or trip a tumbling fall, spitting out the lines and honing them to match the movements of the characters.
Rudy also drew caricatures of famous movie stars for the Warners animated film “Hollywood Steps Out,” released in 1947. The exaggerated likes of stars such as Cary Grant, Greta Garbo, Clark Gable, and Joe Brown flowed from his pen, and for each one he had to obtain an approval from the star before it could be used. Most liked what they saw, even though sane of the drawings harshly exaggerated the stars most prominent facial features.
Bing Crosby was the only one who didn’t take to Rudy’s caricatures. “I practically had to do a portait [sic] of him to get his approval,” Rudy said.
The death of his father prompted Rudy to give up the life of a Hollywood animator. Alfons Zingler had established a sewing machine retail store in Longview, and mother Eleanor wanted him to take over the business.
It was the opportunity he needed to follow through on his plan forming in his mind for some time. The plan was to move home.
“I hated Los Angeles with a passion,” he said.
The smog and the crowds and the stressful fast pace of life were becoming too much for him. Divorced now and ready for a change, he took his mother’s offer.
It didn’t work out though. After a year of running the business he found he was no good at selling sewing machines, and so he sold the store and went to work for his brother who ran an appliance business in Tacoma. But Rudy still was where he wanted to be, back in Washington, and there was an added bonus. While running the sewing machine store, he met his present wife Delores, who ran a barbershop next door. [They married in 1951].
When Rudy retired they built a home on Mason Lake, and lived there for 14 years, and started a home security patrol business. They moved to Olympia two years ago when they decided the property tax on their lakefront property was too high.

Rudy said he doesn’t miss his Hollywood life one bit. It was nice to be associated with such talented people, but the fast-moving life that went with it wasn’t worth it.
He’s always enjoyed the outdoors and now he spend[s] as much time working and playing out in the fresh air as his heart desires.
He stays in touch with his old animator buddies in California, although there aren’t many still alive. The ones that are alive wear thick glasses, the result of eye damage caused by years of staring into bright light tables as they drew cartoons on transparent sheets of celluloid.
“I got out just in time,” Rudy said, his unlensed clear gray eyes crinkling around the edges with a smile.
(Glenda Helbert is a staff writer for The Olympian)

The biography skips the fact that after he and Dolores were married in Washington State, they moved back to California for a few years where he taught art at the Folsom Prison. It also missed out on his UFO sighting, reported to the News Tribune in September 1950. He also drove a school bus and piloted the Mason Lake fireboat.

Zingler was in a nursing home in Olympia when he died of heart problems on January 10, 1985 at age 79.

Coming To Bat...

Baseball being America’s Pastime, it’s a subject ripe for spoofing in animated cartoons. No doubt you’ve seen Baseball Bugs, Porky’s Baseball Broadcast, Tex Avery’s Batty Baseball and others.

The earliest one may be The Ball Game a 1932 Aesop’s Fable from the Van Beuren studio. It stars insects. Here’s one coming to the plate.



The fly lifts its head. Why it’s none other than (as of 1932) the greatest ball player of them all, Babe Ruth. You can tell by the pig nose. The Bambino was unflatteringly drawn with a pig face in Ub Iwerks’ Play Ball (1933).



Being an insect, he has a bat for each pair of “arms.”



Now it’s time for some Van Beuren strangeness. Because Babe has more than one bat, the pitcher calls in his infielders and outfielders and they all have balls to throw at home plate. Some are regulation white. Others are grey. The Sultan takes his swats.



Babe goes into his home-run trot, tipping his cap to the fans. Suddenly, he is pelted with baseballs.



The Van Beuren staff decides to end the cartoon with one of their chaos scenes. Hundreds upon hundreds of balls are thrown in cycle animation at stick-figure fans, who run from the stadium.



What’s the score? We never know. There’s no attempt at a story in this cartoon, let alone building to a game-winning climax. It simply boils down to this: “Let’s do a baseball cartoon with bugs. Who’s got some gags?”

John Foster and George Rufle are in the credits. Gene Rodemich has a good helping of Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler’s “I Love a Parade” (from the 1931 Cotton Club show “Rhythmania”) and “In a Shanty in Old Shanty Town” by Ira Schuster, Jack Little and Joe Young. I’d love to know the melody Rodemich uses when the first bug is up to bat and is stung by the mosquito with the ball. As you likely know, Hugh Harman and Rudy Ising used “I Love a Parade” as the basis for a 1932 Merrie Melodies cartoon. You can hear the song below.

The Elf Nailed It

The Peachy Cobbler (released in 1950) is set up the way Tex Avery seemed to like to do cartoons. There’s the bare framework of a story crammed with a lot of quick gags, in this case without any real dialogue. He and writer Rich Hogan throw in a running gag as well.

It’s their take on The Shoemaker the Elves tale. (Friz Freleng did the same thing with Holiday For Shoestrings in 1946, though that cartoon had classical music to tie it together).

One gag involves an elf hammering nails in the bottom of a shoe, with an assistant handing him the nails. Then they run out. The extremes below speak for themselves.



Avery and Hogan go back to an old favourite to end the short—a catchphrase from the Kitzel character ten years earlier from the Al Pearce radio show where the bird/elves shrug and say “Mmmm...could be!” (At the time this cartoon was made, Mr. Kitzel had been on the Jack Benny show for about four years and the catchphrase had been abandoned).

Walt Clinton, Mike Lah and Grant Simmons are the animators.

How A Snooty Rich Woman Helped Sara Berner

Radio actors in the Golden Age had to be versatile. That was one way to get steady employment. When you could only hear them and not see them, performers didn’t get typecast. Frank Nelson, Joe Kearns and Elliott Lewis were equally at home on comedy and dramatic programmes.

There were specialists, too, who could spout in different dialects, celebrity impersonators, animal noises or vocal effects.

Sara Berner mastered various accents and celebrities. It helped her land work on radio and in animated cartoons. Director Bob Clampett called Berner “an important voice artist at Warners” and “our female Mel Blanc.” Tex Avery’s recollection was Berner and other actors got $75 a session, with an extra $5 if they did more than one character.

Besides this, there were novelty records, too. Berner managed to attract enough attention that she was given a starring role on her own radio show in 1950-51, though it quickly fizzled. She also had personal and health problems in the ‘50s after marrying her ex-manager.

We’ve reprinted articles on her career before, but let’s give you a few more. This piece is from the Oregon Statesman of Feb. 26, 1937. Major Bowes had a radio amateur hour (later taken to television by his protégé, Ted Mack) which netted him a small mint. He hired his best contestants and put them in little troupes that travelled all over the U.S. to perform in theatres.

Bowes Unit Will Come Next Week
Sara Berner, Who Failed as Salesgirl, One of Stars in Troupe
She mimicked the customers in a department store. So the manager fired her.
But today Sara Berner, young brown-eyed, good-looking brunette, appears before thousands of persons, travels throughout America and makes more than five times the weekly salary she earned as a saleslady—by mimicking.
She entertains Salem theatre fans with Major Bowes all-girl unit which comes to the Capitol theatre for one day only on Friday, March 5.
Miss Berner studied drama two years at Tulsa University in Oklahoma, but family reverses forced her to quit college. Department store salesgirl . . . fired for mimicking . . . New York . . . Job in department store . . . stage frightened amateur broadcasting to millions of listeners . . . a nod from Major Bowes . . . show-girl . . . that's the Horatio Alger story of Sara Berner to date.
With 15 other clever talented young women on the same bill, the Bowes all-girl unit promises to be outstanding among stage presentations.

Keith Scott’s Volume 2 on cartoon voice actors points out Berner’s first role at Warner Bros. was in Daffy Duck in Hollywood (1938) as the hen with the Katherine Hepburn voice. You can hear her at MGM, Columbia and elsewhere. More on that from this feature story published May 1, 1946.

Sara Berner Known As The Voice in Behind Scenes Of Movies
By HAROLD E. SWISHER
Motion Picture Editor of United Press Radio
If Sara Berner had paid any attention to the adage about good little girls should be seen and not heard, she might have got an “A” in deportment, but she would have missed out on a career.
As things have turned out Sara is always heard, but never seen. Which is a pity, because she's a pert and petite redhead, with shining brown eyes.

Long before anybody thought of giving Frank Sinatra the title, Sara Berner was known around Hollywood as the voice. That's because she has been the voice for everything from little Jasper in George Pal’s Paramount Puppetoons, to the tauntingly vocal fish in The Road To Utopia.”
Miss Berner became a career girl by what seemed at the time an unhappy accident. It was 10 years ago and she was a youngster working as a salesgirl at the stocking counter of a Philadelphia department store.
One day a pompus dowager came in, showering snooty syllables all over the place. Sara couldn't resist doing a satirical take off right on the spot. The lady overheard, and the little clerk made a quick sprint to her boss, quitting a split-second before she could be fired.
Next day she went into radio, working 12 hours a day at station WCAU.
Today Miss Berner makes 300 dollars for a one-minute appearance weekly on a top comedy program (the Jack Benny show) where she does a stint as Mabel Clapsaddle, a gum-snapping switchboard operator from Brooklyn. Her chores as Jasper’s voice in “Jasper in the Jam,” and other puppet features, net her a comparably pleasant and rewarding sum.
Of course she hasn’t a thing in the world to cry about, but Sara bawls like baby for a series of radio transcriptions advertising a diaper service.
Among other things, this versatile mimic has been the voice of Universal's Andy Panda, and of Daisy Mae and Pansy Yokum in the “Li’l Abner” series of Columbia cartoons. She has provided voices for dogs and cats, cows and chickens, skunks and foxes, snakes and pigs.
Many’s the fan who delighted in telling about the camel in “The Road To Morocco” who turned to the audience and said: “this is the screwiest picture I’ve ever been in!” That was Sara.
With her talented vocal chords, and somebody else’s art work, she danced with Gene Kelly in “Anchors Aweigh.” She was the mouse, of course. She’s Jerry in the Tom and Jerry shorts, too.
But Jasper is Miss Berner’s favorite assignment. Originally Jasper’s voice was recorded by a little negro boy. But time passed and one day his voice cracked and changed midway through a Jasper film. Then Sara took over.
Only once since the Philadelphia accident has Sara been perturbed -by one of her vocal creations. That was when she did the speaking chores for a vulture. To her horror and consternation, when the vulture spoke from the screen, the voice that emerged was an all too-perfect mimicry of her hardboiled landlady of that time. It’s hardly necessary to add that she has since moved.
And her most valued treasure is a cigaret lighter presented personally by Canadian Prime Minister MacKenzie King as a token of Canadas gratitude for a series of victory loan shows she did in the dominion.
To the rest of us her top treasure appears to be those versatile vocal chords.

Berner revealed to a Los Angeles Daily News columnist that at WCAU, she was given a 15-minute show that was written by Arthur Q. Bryan, who you know as the eventual voice of Elmer Fudd.

Unfortunately, Berner ran afoul of someone who was normally very dedicated to his cast—Jack Benny. I read a short blurb about it once, but found the specifics in Paul Price’s column in the Daily News of Jan. 18, 1954. Jack was generally dedicated to his cast but would stop calling in someone if they annoyed him. Berner played one of the telephone operators for the final time on radio on Dec. 27, 1953. She was replaced, first on Benny’s TV show.

Benny’s vault doors close on Sara Berner
Those massive doors on Jack Benny's famous vault were creaking so slowly yesterday that they prevented Sara Berner, the original "Mabel Flapsaddle,” from appearing on Jack's TV show.
You might say she was shut out at the safe.

Sara, who originated the character of the gabby telephone operator on Benny’s show some 12 years ago and so far as I know has played Mabel ever since, was dropped from the cast at practically the last minute.
It must have been practically the last minute because Sara’s appearance was widely publicized by the CBS press department until late Friday afternoon. Then there was a sudden switch in plans and the CBS press corps got on the telephone to say that Shirley Mitchell had been substituted.
So. if you missed a familiar face yesterday and thought “Mabel Flapsaddle” looked a little different, here’s the inside story.
SARA NOW, she’s the real flip, talky one and Bee Benadaret [sic] plays the other operator—was called several days ago to do the Benny show. Unfortunately, nobody talked money and Sara assumed she was to get her regular salary for a guest spot.
Somebody on the Benny show, however, assumed otherwise and Sara was offered approximately $250 below her asking price. "That is fine, but not for me,” was Sara’s attitude and who can blame her? After all, in a sense, she represents "Mabel Flapsaddle,” and besides how much difference can $250 make to a major production such as the Benny show?
It was a deadlock, and on Friday Producer Ralph Levy made the switch to Shirley Mitchell. Well, it’s all in a day’s work, but some persons might think that 12 years’ service and identification with a character is worth an extra $250 on an occasional TV show.
Especially when you figure that the budget on the program, excluding air time, must go to $30,000.
Sara took it all in stride, however. She said:
"Well, it’s only money.”
See Jack? Or should it be, see Ralph Levy?

Actually, it should be “See Jack?” There’s no way a casting change like that would be made without Benny’s approval.

Mitchell was Mabel when the character appeared on radio again on Feb. 14, 1954 and until the series ended. Berner was hired only once more for Benny’s radio show, and that was to play the nasal singer in a 1955 episode.

Work dried up. She was in fair condition in hospital in early September 1969 and died just before Christmas, without any notice from Variety or The Hollywood Reporter. Nor any wire service, as best as I can tell. Berner was a fine comic actress and impressionist. She deserved better. At least over the last number of years, as people become interested in the people on radio and in cartoons who made us laugh, Sara Berner is getting some belated recognition.

What a Lion

Ed Love employed a little trick in the 1950s at Hanna-Barbera to make the animation look fuller. He’d animate different parts of a character, with two frames per drawing. But he’d animate one part in one frame, and a different part in the next frame (while holding the first part). That meant each frame looked different, like full animation.

Kind of the same thing is being done in this scene from the Captain and the Kids short What a Lion! (1938). The difference is there are two characters. The Captain moves in one frame, the lion moves in the second, the Captain moves in the third and so on. This means there’s constant movement, even though each character doesn’t always move.

Here are some consecutive frames to give you an idea. It also shows how unexaggerated takes were before Tex Avery started pushing them and other directors copied him. First, the take. Bill Hanna directed this cartoon (Ed Love has nothing to do wth it), and holds the Captain staring at Hans and Fritz off-screen for nine frames. The anticipation works like this three times: (1) Captain. (2) Lion. (3) Hold. The ninth frame is the first one below. The next drawing is held for two frames and the third drawing is held for a frame.



The take contracts and we’ll give you the next six frames. You can see how the characters alternative movement.



As the lion’s movement is ever so slight, let me slow down the animation so you can get a better look at it.



This is the last cartoon Hanna directed until he was paired with Joe Barbera in 1939 to create Puss Gets The Boot, technically under the supervision of Rudy Ising. Barbera remarked that Ising “didn’t want anything to do with it” and “deliberately removed himself from involvement in the film.” But that’s a story for another time.

Just as Joe and Bill weren’t given screen credit on Puss, none of Hanna’s artists got screen credit for What a Lion!.

Smearing Daffy

Daffy Duck hands a gun to a bull to kill himself in Mexican Joyride (released Nov. 29, 1947), another fine cartoon from the Art Davis unit.

There’s some great smear animation in this scene. The in-betweens are animated on twos.



Bill Melendez, Herman R. Cohen, Basil Davidovich and Don Williams are the credited animators.

There’s some really expressive animation of Daffy near the beginning which I suspect is Melendez’ work.

Dave Monahan wrote the story. Tom McKimson handled the layouts and the backgrounds were by Phil DeGuard. I believe this was the last Warners cartoon with McKimson’s name on the credits. He was replaced by Don Smith.

Despite what trade publications and ads say, “Joyride” is one word on the opening titles, not two.

Art Imitates Life

Jack Benny was not an unmarried man with a valet named Rochester and a boarder named Mr. Billingsley. That was the phoney, on-the-air Jack Benny.

Yet there were parts of the Benny radio show that were true. He did grow up in Waukegan, Illinois. Mary Livingstone did have a sister named Babe (née Ethel). Rochester (Eddie Anderson) did race a horse named Burnt Cork in the Kentucky Derby. Phil Harris did like to imbibe once in a while.

This means there are occasions whether a listener wonders whether something that happened on the show has a basis in fact. One example is on the broadcast of October 12, 1941. The dialogue goes:

Jack: Don, have you heard any reports on our opening program last Sunday, you know, comments, reactions and so forth?
Don: Why, yes, Jack. Some people seem to like it very, very much.
Jack: Uh huh.
Don: Some people thought it was fairly good.
Jack: Uh huh.
Don: And some people...
Jack (interrupting): Well, yes, sir. Well, Don, I thought the press was exceptionally nice this year. For instance, PM gave us a lovely notice. In fact, you could almost call it a rave.
Mary: Tell him about the Daily News.
Jack: Yup, PM said our opening program was really a humdinger. Very nice, don’t you think?
Don: Oh, wonderful.
Jack: And Radio Guide liked it and Billboard, the theatrical paper, seemed to think we had a hilarious show.
Mary: Tell him about the Daily News.
Jack: Mary, it just so happens that Ben Gross, radio editor of the News, didn’t like the program and he’s entitled to his opinion. I have no hard feelings toward Ben.
Mary: You haven’t, eh?
Jack: No.
Mary: Then why did you try to get Errol Flynn to beat him up?

It’s very safe to see Jack didn’t sic Flynn onto Ben Gross. But was it true? Did Gross pan the opening show? Did PM give it a rave review?

Here is an instance when radio imitates real life.

PM gave Jack’s show almost two-thirds of a page, including a photo—the programme was broadcast from New York, the newspaper’s home base. Here’s the article, unbylined, from October 6, 1941, the day after the broadcast.

King Benny Rides Again
VENDOR: Hot dogs, hot dogs. . . . Get your red hot dogs here. . . Hot dog, old timer?
MR. BENNY: Yes. . . .Give me two. . . .
VENDOR: Yes sir. . . . D’ya want the reg’lar, or the king size?
Thus, in his typical topical vein, the nation’s favorite mummer of Americana, Jack Benny, returned to his 30,000,000 weekly listeners last night (WEAF 7), with a sur-fire [sic] skit that might have been entitled Mr. Benny at the Ball Game, or Down In Front.
Except for a characteristic opening-night nervousness, from which Jack genuinely suffers after nearly a quarter century in show business, the Benny show last night was just what the 30,000,000 want: a spate of discomforture for Jack, the penny-pincher; acid comments by Mary Livingston [sic]; a few well timed phone calls from Rochester, the oppressed but irrepressible valet; a song, a dance, and a hearty sales approach from 200-pound [sic] Don Wilson, the Jello announcer. You might say that Jack Benny, in his 11th radio year, and starting his eighth season for Jello, was in mid-season form.
Some listeners may have noted, however, that last night's Jello program lacked the intimacy that is its hallmark. That was because last night's broadcast came from the full-sized, 800-seat Ritz Theater in Manhattan (it will next week, too), whereas the Benny programs originate ordinarily in a 300-seat NBC studio in Hollywood. There, the studio audience usually finds itself part of the show; in Manhattan, Benny the Phenomenon has to strut the stage.
The reason NBC sets Benny up in a big studio whenever he can be lured to Manhattan is the unprecedented demand for broadcast tickets. This year's requests haven't been counted up yet, but last year, for his broadcast from Manhattan in the spring, there were 50,000 requests for the Ritz Theater's 800 seats.
Jack is notoriously the most fretful and nervous of all the big-timers, and he was even "nervouser and nervouser" last night. After the last rehearsal, which ended about 6, he paced up and down back as though ducking a hot-foot. He lighted cigars that were already lit; his eyes had a faraway look; he sat down, then got up.
When he finally went on the air, this nervousness continued for a while. He perspired; his hands and his script trembled as though he were an amateur; he lip-read all the others' lines and nodded with the punch lines. After the first 10 minutes of the show, this stopped. The laughs relaxed him. At the sign off, he even said good night to his daughter Joan, out in Hollywood.
Although the standard radio contract runs in multiples of 13 weeks, and the usual radio season is for 39 weeks. Benny this year is doing only 35 broadcasts. He can, if he wants, take off two weeks later in the season. He has also eliminated the repeat broadcast for the west coast, thus ending a long-standing radio custom traceable to the differences in east coast and west coast times. Instead of repeating, in person, the Benny program is now rebroadcast by transcription.
Jack, who is paid $18,500 a week (out of which he pays all hands on the program, including the band and maestro Phil Harris), is the only performer in radio who has the foregoing privileges. He won them last year after a long battle with General Foods, makers of Jello.
The fight got so far advanced that when it looked as though lack and Jello wouldn't get together, NBC did an unheard-of thing, they gave Jack, the comic, the option on the NBC-Red (WEAF) 7 p.m. Sunday time segment. This was the first time in radio history that a performer, and not a sponsor, got an option on broadcast time.
What prompted NBC to this unprecedented action was its desire to continue its hold on the 30,000,000 listeners who tune Jack in Sunday nights. Furthermore, Jack still has that same time option; it means he is still boss. As one General Foods rep-representative [sic] observed wryly:
“Jack can fire us almost any time he wants to.”



And what of Ben Gross’ review? Here is it from the same date.

Jack Benny aired his premiere from New York City, with Mary Livingstone, Rochester, Phil Harris, Dennis Day and others of his legendary company on hand (WEAF-7). For the first time, a transcription instead of a an [sic] "in person" rebroadcast was used for the West Coast. I mention this first, as I dislike having to come to the point, which is simply this: Last evening's show was not up to Jack's old standard. And the fault was not in the star, dear Brutus, but in the material. For his initial venture of the season the boys who pound the typewriters were below par. But Jack is a fellow who quickly remedies such defects. The chances are he'll be back next Sunday with a whale of a show.

It turns out Gross was listening to Mary and Jack’s dialogue about his critique, and he commented on it a week later in his column:

Those of you who heard Mary Livingstone last evening know that, just because we didn't like Jack Benny's show last week, he had tried to sick Errol Flynn on us. And you know what Flynn does to columnists! So, come to think of it, we had better be careful this morning . . . But all kidding aside, Jack's second broadcast (WEAF-7) was a great improvement on his first. It had plenty of laughs. The script was still not up to the high mark of last season and the cast still seemed a bit nervous. But the show's getting into stride and by next week, it should be up to its old form.

Incidentally, neither Radio Guide nor Billboard had a review of the show in their issues which hit stands on October 11, the only editions after the first show and before the second. So it appears, in this case, art imitates life. Sometimes.

Bill Lava

Carl Stalling was the master of musical directors for Warner Bros. cartoons, incorporating pieces of classical music, Raymond Scott’s compositions, and the-title-fits-the-scene popular songs to weave scores that have become fixed in the minds of millions of people. His arranger, Milt Franklyn, followed pretty much the same template. Frank Marsales, in the Harman-Ising era, put bouncy versions of tunes from Warner Bros. musicals into the background of cartoons. Norman Spencer and Bernie Brown (if Brown actually wrote music for the cartoons) provided serviceable accompaniment, despite the use of a back-beat woodblock that bordered on obsessiveness.

That brings us to Bill Lava.

Lava gets dumped on by some Warner Bros. cartoon fans because of his sparse orchestrations and less-than-melodic scores. Lava used far fewer of the Warners’ musical possessions than any of his predecessors. He was hired to score the cartoons after Franklyn’s death. One Sylvester-Tweety short, The Jet Cage (1962), features both composers, with Lava finishing the cartoon after Franklyn died.

Yet Lava shouldn’t be judged on cartoons alone, especially when the studio that employed him was past its prime. He had a fine career providing music for features and shorts. He wrote the theme song for F Troop, a stirring march that bore no resemblance to what sounds like budget-saving instrumentations on his cartoons.

William Benjamin Lava was born on March 18, 1911 in St. Paul, Minnesota; his father Abraham was a cotton broker specialising in bedding textiles who had emigrated to the U.S. from Poland. In 1916, the family was in Chicago. In 1930, Lava was employed as a railroad clerk. He studied at Northwestern University, writing for the university’s commerce magazine, and arrived in Hollywood in 1936; the Los Angeles City Directory in 1937 lists his occupation as “musician.”

The Hollywood Reporter of Aug. 2, 1937 mentions he supplied songs for Republic’s Sea Racketeers. Lava was responsible for more music for Republic and is mentioned as the “arranger for Joe Reichman’s orchestra” in the Jan. 26, 1938 edition of Variety. The Los Angeles Daily News of March 26, 1940 talks about his “pleasing music score” for Courageous Dr. Christian, produced by Stephens-Lang for RKO, while the Citizen-News of Sept. 11th that year reports he conducted a 92-piece orchestra in an original score for an industrial film for the Department of the Interior.

The two trades published occasional squibs about Lava. With the war on, Lava contributed to musical propaganda, co-writing “Let’s Take the Blitz Out of Fritz” (Variety, Oct. 21, 1942). He also spoke at a music conference at the Carthay Circle Theatre, discussing his score for Warners’ I Won’t Play. At the same conference, speaking about music for cartoons, was Scott Bradley, who elaborated on his scores for Bear Raid Warden and Dance of the Weed (Reporter, Oct. 26, 1944). Lava was on the staff of Warner Bros. at this point providing music for features and shorts, including the Joe McDoakes series starring George O’Hanlon.

He was involved in an unusual recording in 1946. Columbia released a single featuring the Hollywood Presbyterian Church choir performing “highly stylized” versions of “The Lost Chord” and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” with a solo by Warners actor Dennis Morgan (Ft. Worth Star-Telegram, Mar. 10, 1946).

Radio beckoned Lava as well. On June 3, 1949, he began work as musical director (uncredited) of a new dramatic series about police work starring Jack Webb (Reporter, June 1). No, Lava did not write the well-known Dragnet theme. However, he did compose an opening/closing march featuring horns and a timpani that may have inspired Walter Schumann’s theme that debuted in the third episode.

A “musical poem” entitled “The Young Fox” was a Lava composition and debuted Nov. 5, 1950 at John Burroughs High School, performed by the Burbank Symphony.

With television now a big deal, Lava and N. Gayle Gitterman formed Allegro Productions in June 1951, with offices at the Goldwyn studios. The Reporter said the pilot for a special agent series (Special File, starring Dick Travis) was to be shot in a month. In October, the Los Angeles Times reported on casting for Allegro’s Voyage of the Scarlet Queen (starring Kim Spalding and Sean McLory), which had been a radio show on Mutual. The idea was to cut records with the series’ stars. Allegro ran into trouble. A show called Lives of the U.S. Rangers was cancelled before it even began filming; Lava blamed the “inability to secure certain conditions that were deemed essential,” according to the Reporter in Aug. 1951. Allegro went bust and Lava opened Telescene Productions, announcing a 15-minute filmed travelogue TV series called Beauty Is Where You Find It (Variety, Dec. 9, 1953) with James Brown as narrator-reporter (Reporter, Jan. 8, 1954).

In the meantime, he also scored his first cartoon, though not for the studio where he was on staff. He composed the music for UPA’s Fuddy Duddy Buddy (released Oct. 18, 1951). Britain’s Monthly Film Bulletin declared the music “witty,” a term never applied to his cartoons for Warners.

Lava joined seven other composers on the staff of Universal-International (San Bernadino County Sun, Oct. 31, 1954), though he was still at Warners writing music for theatricals and television. He also provided his first music for Walt Disney Productions in the short Stormy the Thoroughbred (released March 1954).

Starting with part of The Jet Cage, Lava scored about 60 Warners cartoons up to Snow Excuse (released May 21, 1966). Former Walter Lantz musical director Walter Greene took over for about a year, then Lava returned to compose music for Quacker Tracker (released April 29, 1967) until the studio closed for good in 1969. A few of the cues from the Stalling era returned, including “When My Dreamboat Comes Home,” “I Like Mountain Music,” “It’s Magic” and “April Showers,” but Lava compositions were responsible for the bulk of the scores.

Perhaps his best-known work was on the aforementioned Warner Bros. TV series F Troop which aired between 1965 and 1967. Lava spoke about the Old West sitcom in an article (possibly an ABC handout) that appeared in the Sacramento Bee of Jan. 22, 1967. He pointed out while actor James Hampton played the inept Fort Courage bugler, the sound actually came from the horn of session musician Larry Sullivan. “The only way I can get Larry to play bad,” Lava revealed, “is to break him up. While he’s recording I whisper something funny in his ear, or I tickle him. You’d be surprised at the crazy results. The best ones go on the finished sound track.”

After F Troop completed its run, Lava set up another company in the fall of 1968. Orbit Productions was based out of the home of partner George A. Summerson and was part-owned by Warner Bros. cartoon effects animator Harry Love.

Lava died of a heart attack on February 20, 1971. He was 59. Samuel H. Sherman, writing in Variety of April 7, 1971, lamented Lava’s loss as shrinking the ranks of veteran film composers, equating him with Max Steiner, Victor Young and Dimitri Tiomkin. The tribute noted he was self-taught, his career as a band arranger in the Midwest in the 1930s, his arrival in Hollywood to work under Nat Shilkret at RKO, mentioned he was working at the time of his death on a Disney feature on the Calgary Stampede and a pilot for Treasury Dept. with David Janssen. And while it referred to “a wide variety of major features” at Warners, some without screen credit, his work in animation was overlooked.

Those who find his Warners cartoon scores grating may think that’s not a real loss, but Lava’s time at the studio and his longevity in Hollywood deserve to be recognised.