Ape Mouth

There’s not a lot of mountain music in the 1933 Warner Bros. cartoon I Love Mountain Music. There are some western musicians and Will Rogers at the start of the short, and an ice skater twirling around to the title song in the middle. Things then switch to Hawaii, then Switzerland (okay, it has mountains).

The last third of the cartoon involves some crooks robbing a cash register, with the good guys ganging up to catch them.

This is a magazine-covers-come-to-life cartoon, so we get the ringleader chased by “Ping Pong” from the pages of “Screen Play” magazine.

There’s another of those familiar gags when a character comes right at the camera and swallows it, which probably looked better in theatres than on the small screen.

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Friz Freleng and Larry Martin are the credited animators.

The version of this cartoon in circulation has an odd iris-out at the end, followed by an urchin who does not appear in this short exclaiming “So long, folks!” Was this tacked on from another cartoon?

Asian Avery

A cymbal is kind of the same shape as an Asian conical hat, so Tex Avery tosses that into a gag in Magical Maestro (1952).

I’m certain sure anybody reading here knows the plot of the cartoon. Mysto the magician gets revenge on opera star Poochini (who refused to hire him) by impersonating the singer’s conductor and transforming him into various things. In this case, the cymbal turns him into a jabbering Oriental stereotype.



He dances around and sings in dialect. I don’t know the name of that tune; Bob and Ray included it on one of their NBC radio shows.



Poochini snaps out of it and discards the "hat" and kimono, then carries on with his solo from The Barber of Seville.



Avery had tossed in the same kind of gag in Bad Luck Blackie (1949).

Rich Hogan is the credited story man, with Grant Simmons, Mike Lah and Walt Clinton animating the short, and Johnny Johnsen supplying the backgrounds. Keith Scott has discovered the man singing the Chinese song in this scene is a comedian named Frank Ross.

Tralfaz Sunday Theatre: Ken the Wolf Boy

Don Messick’s voice can be heard on beloved Hanna-Barbera cartoons series starting with the very first series, Ruff and Reddy (1957). But that isn’t the only studio where he found work.

You can hear Messick in Spunky and Tadpole, which started appearing on TV screens in the late ‘50s. He and Roger Roger’s stock music theme song are probably the best things about it.

But he also dubbed voices for something called Ken the Wolf Boy.

There are people who get positively giddy and go into obsessive and minute detail about what, at one time, was called Japanimation. I am not one of them. The only background about this series I shall pass along from the August 5, 1964 edition of Variety.

Toei's 'Wolf Boy'
Acquired by MCA Tokyo, Aug. 4. In its first acquisition from Japan, MCA-TV purchased 26 episodes of a b&w animated cartoon series called "Ken, the Wolf Boy" from the Toei Motion Picture Studios for distribution globally, except Japan, Korea and Okinawa.
The kids' adventure series, dealing with a kind of Junior-league Tarzan, has been nicely rated on Nippon Educational Television (NET), where it has been running for about four months.
Toei now has another set of 26 episodes in production, but it remains to be seen if MCA will also buy these.
The initial purchase was on a flat basis with no time limit. It may be the first of its kind in this market; previous acquisitions by international distribs are believed to have been made with little or no advance coin with the distrib hoping to reap commissions from potential sales. Since some of this (product has not yet sold abroad and has therefore yielded no income to the producers—although exclusively tied up overseas—the Japanese are naturally much more receptive to flat buys.
It's understood that other Japanese product is being screened by MCA execs In New York and Hollywood, as well as in Tokyo.

The Guardian’s Jasper Sharp reported in the April 11, 2018 issue that Isao Takahata got his first cartoon directing job on the series.

Long-time reader Chris Sobieniak has alerted me to a full half-hour of the series posted on-line. What shocked me is there is another familiar voice. “That can’t be Daws Butler,” I said to myself. Well, yes, it is. I don’t know who the woman is voicing the kid and ridiculously doubling as adult men.

And who thought a good name for a wolf-boy was "Ken"?

I’m afraid I can’t sit through this. I’m sure there are some who can. Sorry, Don.

Has Jack Got a Rumour

When gossip magazines have written about someone for 20 years, it’s likely difficult trying to find something new to publish.

Evidently, this was the situation the Radio-TV Mirror found itself in.

The magazine gave Jack Benny its Best Comedian in Radio award in 1952. At that point, he had been in radio for 20 years. What could it write that was different?

Cleverly, one writer found a way. Rather conveniently, a “rumour” surfaced that Jack was going to quit radio.

While network radio was slowly sinking into the sunset, Jack had no intention of getting out radio. Even at the end of his radio run in 1955, attempts were being made to keep his show on the air. By then, the sponsor money wasn’t there.

The rest of the information in the magazine’s gush-job was nothing new. Most of it seems accurate. Whether the mother quotes are, is your guess. The story of how Mary got on the radio was oft-told but not true. The script for her debut exists and her real name is on it. And Jack was born in Chicago, not Waukegan as he said frequently.

Jack Benny — Mr. Showbusiness Himself
By PAULINE SWANSON
EVERYBODY loves a rumor. And a guaranteed gasp-provoker going the rounds in Hollywood at the moment is that Jack Benny—Jack Benny!—will quit radio for good to devote all his time to television.
It’s a monstrous notion. Jack Benny, after all, is radio, on the top for at least eighteen of the twenty years he has been hello-ing everybody within earshot on Sunday nights—some 25,000,000 everybodies, at latest count.
Two thousand of his show business pals crowded into the New York Friars Club last November, on the occasion of his twentieth anniversary on the airways, to call him the greatest—Mr. Show Business himself. You readers of Radio-TELEvision Mirror have been voicing this sentiment in your own way, year after year voting him your Favorite Radio Comedian.
Why, Jack Benny even has an Act of Congress to guarantee that the 7 P.M. Sunday night hour on the air is his forevermore.
Jack Benny quit radio? It’s a nasty rumor, and it shocks everybody—everybody, that is, who doesn’t know Jack Benny.
His close friends aren’t. Most of them have known Jack for almost all of the 43 years he has been in show business (he’s been entertaining people, you know, for four years more than the 39 he grudgingly admits to—Who’s Who says he’s 58). Friends have seen him do some crazy things. Crazy like a fox. Like quitting vaudeville, when nobody could top his earnings or his audiences, to take a flyer in the new “talkies”—then as immature and brassy a medium as a lot of people think television is today. Like quitting films in turn, when he had an ironclad, gold-lined contract for something approximating life, to go back to the stage because he couldn’t stand being cut off from direct contact with the audience, with the people out there in front.
And, of course, everybody knows by now the legend of Jack’s third big walkout—when he left the stage where he commanded a weekly salary in four figures and the biggest, brightest lights on the marquee, to “go into radio.”
Legend by now, too, his first broadcast back in 1932—a guest shot, for free, with Commentator Ed Sullivan. Jack walked up to the terrifying mike, his jitters concealed by dint of heroic effort, and said, “Hello, folks. This is Jack Benny talking. ... There will now be a brief pause | while you all say ‘Who cares?’”
Twenty-five million of you cared, it turned out ... Jack Benny floated, with apparent ease, to the top of the heap again. Radio was his. His mother, had she lived to see it, would have been pleased. It was she who had dinned into her young son’s head the maxim he has lived by: “It is not enough, Benny, to be good enough. It has to be as good as you can make it.”
The last words she said to him, as he sat beside her deathbed, were: “You'll keep on studying.”
A new medium, new techniques, a whole field of younger, fresh competitors ... of course he would have to accept the challenge, and never stop “studying” until he had licked it—not just when it was good enough, but when it was as good as he could make it.
Mrs. Kubelsky would have understood. So, for the record, does the other woman who has molded Jack Benny’s life . . . his wife for twenty-five years, Mary Livingston.


It was for Mary, really, that Jack in the early thirties took his first flyer in films. They lived a normal life for a while. They had a house—rented, but it stayed in one place—and they actually went to bed at night for a change, and got up in the morning! Mary was in seventh heaven, until she began to feel that Jack was not. “You'd better go and see Mr. Mayer,” she said, “and tell him ‘thanks so much but I quit.’”
He did.
Mary’s place in the radio show came about even more accidentally than her bit in the vaudeville act. An actress failed to show up for a broadcast, and Mary was on.
That was twenty years ago, and Mary has been a fixture on the show ever since. ‘ It could have been twenty minutes ago to Mary’s stomach. She has never gotten over her stage fright, her show-time jitters—original source of her now famous giggle.
Mary would have begged off radio years ago if Jack—and their audiences—had permitted it. Now, especially, that their daughter Joan is a Stanford freshman, all pal and no problem, Mary would like to be free to enjoy their new comradeship.
Mary could see Jack go into television—and without her—without a pang. And the rumors that he might don’t shock her one bit.
And, let it be said without further ado, they don’t shock Jack.
They couldn’t, inasmuch as he started them!
From the day he made his first TV appearance—those first shows, incidentally, may have delighted the audience, but they didn’t satisfy Jack; they weren’t “as good as he could make it”—Jack has hammered at everybody who would listen to him that he is fascinated with television.
“It’s like going back to the theatre .. . you know you make contact .. . the audience is there,” he says.
It’s the old, intimate show business again, and Jack Benny feels thirty-nine again, experiencing it. But there are a few problems. A sponsor, a contract ... to say nothing of his high-powered and highpriced staff. Some of them have been with him for eighteen years. And TV doesn’t pay their kind of prices.
It wouldn’t surprise anybody who really knows Benny if Jack made the leap, anyway, and shelled out the money himself to keep his co-workers in the style to which they have grown accustomed.
People who buy the picture of Jack Benny—which he has created himself, of course—of the nickel-pinching skinflint, who exacts a lawn-mowing as well as a solo for Dennis Day’s weekly twenty-five dollars, would simply never believe that Jack Benny is unmindful of the importance of the dollar. They would never believe he could exchange radio’s lush profits for television’s comparative peanuts cheerfully once he was convinced that, in the new medium, he could entertain more people more effectively. But it’s true.
Some of his greatest shows he has done for considerably less than nothing—in Iran, for instance, and Egypt, and Sicily, Italy, New Guinea, Australia, the Marianas, the Marshalls, the Gilberts, the Solomons and Kwajalein, where he took his troupe during World War II. Ask any G.I. if Jack Benny was funny under front-line pressure? And even they, probably, wouldn’t believe the actual fact that Jack spent $100,000 of his own money in telephone line charges in order to be able to get the show to them.
But he did; entertainment is giving.
Last summer, he took a troupe to Korea—when many a younger, hardier man was begging off—traveled 30,000 miles in everything from a jeep to a helicopter, slept— no more than four hours a night—in a dirt-floored tent, and gave.
He came home, a friend says, “Looking like hell broken physically and mentally.”
But he caught up on his sleep, told the world that it was the greatest experience of his life and he would go again at the drop of a hat.
He talked of nothing but “those wonderful guys” slugging it up and down Korean mountains.
And their wonderful jokes.
Their jokes—just as on the air it’s always Rochester, or Phil Harris, or Mary, or Dennis Day who grabs off the big laugh, while the boss brings down the house with “We... ll.” A great entertainer, Jack Benny.
A giver.
And once he decides, if he does, that he can give you more on television than on radio—which has called him the Greatest and made him rich—you’ll be seeing him regularly in your living rooms.

Preston Blair Speaks

Comparisons of theatrical cartoons and TV cartoons are quite unfair, and I’ve tried to avoid making them on my two animation blogs. It’s indisputable that there was more time and money to make cartoons for theatres. Television also required a lot more content; a half-hour had to be filled, not seven minutes.

That didn’t stop Preston Blair from weighing in.

Blair had a lengthy career in the industry that we’ll get to in a minute. First, here are his comments to the Louisville Courier-Journal of Oct. 8, 1970. By then, Blair had been out of theatrical animation for more than 20 years. His unit at MGM (with Mike Lah) had been disbanded to save some money, and Blair decided to move to Connecticut where he had his own studio, took on work for his brother at Film Graphics (Rodney, 1950), and later worked for former MGM animator Jack Zander on TV commercials (frames below).

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 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 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 in the animators or of the people in the business." He said 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 it 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.

Blair returned to California, where he died in 1995. The Santa Cruz Sentinel of May 21 had an obituary.

Memorial services will be June 4 for award-winning Disney animator Preston Blair, who died April 19 of heart failure at Dominican Hospital. He was 86.
Born in Los Angeles, he and his late brother, Lee, worked on several Disney classics, including "Fantasia."
Mr. Blair went to Pomona College and then studied at the Otis Art Institute and then Chouinard Art Institute, now the California Institute of Arts.
He moved to Soquel in 1992.
Mr. Blair began his animation career by drawing Oswald the Rabbit for Walter Lantz at Universal Studios. He later worked at the Charles Mintz Studio drawing Krazy Kat animated cartoons. In 1937, he joined the Walt Disney Studio.
Mr. Blair's contribution to "Fantasia" included the animation of key scenes in the "Sorcerer's Apprentice" sequence, where Mickey Mouse falls asleep and dreams of directing the ocean waves, and "The Dance of the which featured the tutu-wearing Hyacinth Hippo.
He also worked on Disney's "Pinocchio" and "Bambi."
His brother's wife, the late Mary Blair, was also a Disney artist.
Mr. Blair saved many of his original sketches, which were among 156 of his drawings displayed in a 1981 exhibition on Disney animation at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.
During World War II, he moved from Disney to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, where he worked with legendary animation director Tex Avery. He animated "Red Hot Riding Hood."
Mr. Blair wrote two books, "Cartoon Animation" and "How to Animate Film Cartoons" and they sold more than 1 million copies. A third book compiling the texts of his earlier works, was published last year.
In 1949, he moved to Westport, and produced animated commercials and educational films. As an independent animator, he worked for Hanna-Barbera, creating episodes of "The Flintstones" series.
He returned to California in 1984, settling in Carmel and developing animated systems for teaching reading.
Mr. Blair held five patents on creations in interactive video technology.

The biography isn’t quite correct, according to the late Martha Sigall in her enjoyable book Living Life Inside Between the Lines. Her squib on Blair:

Preston Blair designed the character Red Hot Riding Hood. This character caused quite a sensation. Preston, his wife, and baby lived across the street from where my family and I lived on Fernwood Avenue in Hollywood. Although I worked at Schlesinger’s and he worked at MGM, we would always talk about the cartoon business and what was happening at each of the studios. He was a wonderfully talented animator and a great friend. I felt so bad when the state of California bought his home to make way for the Hollywood Freeway. I was happy to see him again when I was added to the MGM staff. After his leaving MGM, it was many years later, in 1985, that I saw him again upon his being honored by the Motion Picture Screen Cartoonists for his fifty years in animation. By the way, Preston got his start in animation at the Romer Grey studio, and he, like Ken Harris, had to pay Romer a weekly sum of money to be able to work in the studio to learn how to animate.

About the dancing scenes in Red Hot Riding Hood, Tex Avery told Joe Adamson in that great book Tex Avery, King of Cartoons:

Preston Blair did the whole thing; he was very clever on anatomy and dances. He wouldn’t let anyone else touch her! He did all the girl sequences. He’d gained a lot of experience on FANTASIA, he did a lot of the dancing of the crocodiles and the elephants. He had a touch for dancing. And he couldn’t dance worth his tail —big, lumbering guy! But, boy, he could really make em dainty.

Blair recalled a "contract dancer" was brought in for the Red follow-up cartoon The Shooting of Dan McGoo. He told historian Mike Barrier he used footage of her for "bits and pieces" of his animation. As for some of his work in the Avery unit, he recalled, "I would use a lot of Claude Smith's [character layouts] just verbatim [as animation drawings]; there was no sense in doing anything [else] with them."

One day, I hope to be able to read Mr. Barrier’s entire interview with Blair (and many others).

Blair did attempt to get a TV cartoon series on the air. Little is known about it, but an animated Honeymooners series was one of the projects of his company. It’s a shame the idea never got picked up. Unlike Blair’s opinion of Saturday morning series, I don’t think this would have been a case of “wasted talent.”

Neon Mouse

Through the 1930s, directors of Merrie Melodies were forced to spotlight a Warner Bros.-owned song in a cartoon. I can’t help but wonder if Tex Avery was distracted by trying to figure out a way to incorporate a song into The Mice Will Play (1938). The short is earth-bound by some pretty weak material (though the ending is good).

Here’s an example. A mouse living in an experimental lab drinks some neon liquid.



Yeah. That’s the gag. Not even the mouse spelling out “Eat at Joe’s” while flashing like a neon sign. This might have been considered high comedy for the weak-sister Hardaway-Dalton unit, but Tex liked adding something extra, something odd that came out of nowhere. This gag is obvious. What else could happen in a cartoon after drinking that stuff?

As for the music, Avery and the writing crew settled on turning things in the lab into big band/boogie woogie musical instruments, with Johnny, Susie and the preacher all playing solos instead of speaking the usual wedding dialogue.

Jack Miller is the credited story man, with Sid Sutherland handed the rotating animation credit.

November Flies By

What’s the best turkey dinner cartoon without the word “yams” in it?

This is all very subjective, but my answer is Holiday For Drumsticks from the Art Davis unit.

Daffy Duck craves all the food for a turkey that hillbillies want to fatten up for Thanskgiving, so he eats while forcing Tom to do athletic stuff to sweat off the weight. There’s an imaginative scene where the passage of time is shown by Daffy and the turkey irising in and irising out while letters and numbers form in the distance (a solid blue background is originally a star of pain when Tom hits a cross-bar) and swoosh forward out of camera range.



Davis pulls off a great bit of timing in one scene. He has the hillbilly slowly reaching for his rifle (animated on twos), then grabbing it and shooting it, which takes up five frames. The barely moving arm emphasizes the quick movement that follows.

Milt Franklyn comes up with a clever arrangement of Sunny Skylar’s “All the Time” over the opening titles. Since the cartoon is called Holiday For Drumsticks, it opens with a drumstick against a cymbal (score by Carl Stalling).

Lloyd Turner is credited with the story. Emery Hawkins and Don Williams animate along with Bill Melendez and Basil Davidovich.

We Canadians have already celebrated Thanksgiving so we send best wishes to our friends and readers in the U.S.A. today. We’ll have posts to mid-December.