Orphan Toon Musings #3: Jeepers Creepers! It's...Mel??

Foreword from Your Humble Toonkeeper, Rachel Newstead:

Will Rogers said it better than I ever could: "It ain't what we don't know that hurts us--it's what we think we know that ain't so..."

The power of suggestion is an amazing thing--if we're told the same thing long enough, we begin to believe it, no matter how unlikely or implausible it is. And until just a short time ago, I'd have sworn before a Senate subcommittee that Pinto Colvig voiced the practical-joking ghost in the 1939 Bob Clampett Looney Tune JEEPERS CREEPERS. That's common knowledge, isn't it? Isn't it? I mean, who am I to disagree with every film and animation resource in the known universe?

So convinced was I that when Kevin wrote to me at 1:00 this morning suggesting otherwise, I attributed it to sleep deprivation on his part.

But now....I'm not so sure. He could be right.

Or is the power of suggestion merely pulling my mind the other way?

My communications professor in college had a term for this feeling: "cognitive dissonance." Or it could just be the cold medicine I took a few hours ago...

I won't try to make up your mind for you. Read what Kevin has to say and decide for yourself. Just don't blame the cognitive dissonance on me.

He's Not There!

By Kevin Wollenweber

Well, perhaps in the future, we should put up a full review for this cartoon, but there has always been a misconception about the ghost’s voice in the classic LOONEY TUNES cartoon, “JEEPERS CREEPERS”, starring PORKY PIG.

I’d read a post from a while back on a blog called RANDOM SEMICONSCIOUS MUSINGS (a fairly interesting blog, by the way) with all kinds of uncut classic cartoons to enjoy. The blogger, a fellow named Larry, emphatically states that the voice of the ghost in JEEPERS CREEPERS is Pinto Colvig.

While Colvig did do the occasional voice for the studio during this period, the voice of the ghost (especially when singing) is Mel Blanc, stealing Colvig’s thunder for the moment and doing the voice almost spot on.

I will go on record and say that Colvig might have been more entertaining as the voice of this ghost and would have added his own usual muttering inflections, even adding his own sound effects. Yes, you know that Pinto is on when you get that farting car noise when a character is taking off in some sort of rickety vehicle—you can hear this sound in so many of the cartoons that he took part in from his tenures with Disney and MGM as well. You know it is him doing this noise because you can hear him cough as the “voice” of the motor being choked. If you want to hear a tour de force performance by Mr. Colvig, seek out the performance as Old Doc Stork in one of my favorite MGM wartime cartoons, THE STORK’S HOLIDAY. You will hear this noise I’m referring to as well.

That Mel can almost ape a Colvig performance is truly a testament to his voice talents, but, as the saying goes, “close enough but no cigar!” If you’re in doubt, please, sit down sometime with both voices, Mel’s ghost in this cartoon and, perhaps, the voice that Colvig *DID* do for the lead character in that cartoon that featured The Hobo Jugtown Gadget Band or the voice of the lovelorn dog in another Warners toon—I’m sorry; it’s late and I forget its title right now. Only Pinto could neatly do Pinto, and I hate to see him misrepresented.

Don’t get me wrong; JEEPERS CREEPERS is a brilliant cartoon, and I like its often excised (on TV airings, anyway) ending gag as the iris closes. Hopefully, we will see it and other missing Porky cartoons on DVD real soon.

Postscript: So, is Kevin right? Well, I can only say this: I've always been able to tell when Mel does a "dumb" or "goofy" (with a small "g") voice, as it often tends toward the "Barney Rubble"-ish. To my ears, the ghost sounds closer to "Red Hot Ryder" in BUCKAROO BUGS--a classic "dumb" voice that's indisputably Mel's--than Colvig's Goofy. Indeed, as Kevin said, it's especially evident when the ghost is singing.

Judging from the comments on Larry's blog, it appears Kevin isn't the only one who disputes the accepted "facts." That's a great relief to me--I never liked suffering cognitive dissonance alone.

Tags: Jeepers+Creepers, Mel+Blanc, Pinto+Colvig, cartoon+voices

Orphan Toon Musings #2: The Restorations and the Flames

By Kevin Wollenweber

Well, what I’m about to say is opinion and, partially, fact as told to us on “STU’S SHOW”-- from Shokus Internet Radio--with guest animation historian Jerry Beck, who is constantly and delightfully full of mostly good news; as he was regarding the forthcoming *TWO* POPEYE THE SAILOR DVD sets and LOONEY TUNES GOLDEN COLLECTION, VOL. 6, all from Warner Brothers Home Video. Yes, we shall have *ALL* the beautifully restored black and white cartoons from the true golden age of the spinach-eating sailor man by Christmastime, so “Season’s Greetinks to yous all!!” To supplement this release of all or mostly black and white cartoons, for you POPEYE completists, there will be an all-color “POPEYE & SONS” set of the more recent reinvention of the more kid-friendly version of the character, but as usual, I digress…

The LOONEY TUNES GOLDEN COLLECTION 6 set boasts (and I do mean proudly boasts) some amazing goodies, not the least is which that there will be *MORE* cartoons per disk, 19 to be exact!! Oh boy!! And we’re even getting some wartime shorts, including “RUSSIAN RHAPSODY”, but that was the only title that was leaked out at this particular time on this particular broadcast. Just the fact that there will be four packed disks with 19 cartoons on each is leaving me speechless!!

Now, unfortunately, for the bad news leaking from Hollywood around the Universal Studios fire. Up front, of course, we’re sorry to hear of the injured people in this blaze. I’ve no record of the human casualties and all I can say is that I hope they were few and that there were no deaths.

However, we are talking about damage done to the classic vaults here. Outside of what jerry had mentioned, a friend of mine had told me that he heard from a reliable source that the original old master recordings of Bing Crosby were completely destroyed. All Universal has left, now, are the digital transfers that were made of the stuff, and these appeared on a four-CD box set that I’m lucky enough to own. If you are fans of the earliest swooner crooner recordings, you should seek a copy of this box on Ebay. Sadly enough, now, one will never, ever be able to go back into the vaults and do further restoration on the muddier recordings.

Regarding other old films and cartoons, well, I’ve no real news except that it is possible that digital recordings, like those found on the first two WOODY WOODPECKER & FRIENDS cartoon collections were indeed destroyed. “So,” you might be saying, “just go back in and find the negatives and do the recording all over again!” That’s easier said than done. While some folks at Universal were generous with their time and effort to get the finest possible prints and even clean up what looked a little rough around the edges, such recording and smoothing out cost big bucks, and such spending, again, to do the same job and make sure that there could be a WOODY WOODPECKER VOL. 3 is just not a high priority. Work had already been done to restore some of the stuff in the vaults, and it is now thought that some or most of that work had been incinerated. Jerry’s overall comments about the damage had its question marks, but he was outlining just how the video arm of Universal could look at projects like this with the cost of restoration of the overall buildings and other working areas and whatever other damage was done staring them in their pocketbooks. It has also been found that Universal has been lax in protecting from such fires. There were very few extinguishers and other problems that I don’t quite recall now, so all we now have are the already available video volumes of very early camp classics and old films that were neatly restored before this tragedy happened.

Let’s hope that Jerry Beck, on his Cartoonbrew.com blog sets me and everyone else in the news media straight on any inaccuracies here, but it is truly a shame that any entertainment company’s highest priorities do *NOT* include the vaults. Jerry had praised the company for being so daring as to let him do whatever he pleased with the WOODY WOODPECKER & FRIENDS sets. He did slyly remark that he wished that Warners’ people had the same attitude about *THEIR* animation vaults, but one thing you *CAN* say about Warners (and that Jerry Beck did indeed say) is that, regardless of how insensitive the films can be from our distant past, Warners protected and nearly restored it all, or they are allowing for restoration at some point, if they can be convinced of its profitability!! Universal is willing to let collectors have what they want, but they don’t really do much in the way of protecting their properties, and the fact of this fire proves my point—and, again, these are my opinions, not necessarily fact!! Those who want the whole story should check out “STU’S SHOW” on www.shokusradio.com. The show itself was enjoyable. I only wish I heard the whole show upon its first live run because I certainly was aching to call in as I listened to the rerun!!

Have a listen, and let’s hope that we can “never say never” regarding a third set and future volumes of WOODY WOODPECKER AND FRIENDS. It’s too soon to stop now!!

Tags: Universal+Studos, fire, Looney+Tunes+Golden+Collection, restoration

The Lion In Black and White, Part Two

Ach! Der Captain Is Having A BLUE MONDAY (1938)

Review-Synopsis by Rachel Newstead

Blue Monday
Release Date: April 2, 1938
Director: Bill Hanna
In Short: Cap's having a bad day--but when he faces off against household appliances, he learns things can be far worse...

In his entire career Bill Hanna never once put pencil to animation paper, yet for years he was considered one of the top animation directors in the business. The shelf full of Oscars in Fred Quimby's office would attest to that--he and his collaborator Joe Barbera would bring in seven of them, a total exceeded only by Walt Disney.

Yet long before he met Barbera, he'd already come close to perfecting his skills. Others may have drawn better than he, but Bill Hanna was the master of the exposure sheet, that graph-like piece of paper that times every action, every syllable of every word of dialogue, down to the single frame. As any comedian will tell you, timing is the difference between a good gag and a gut-bustingly funny one, and Hanna knew that instinctively. It did help, however, that he had two of the best teachers he could possibly ask for.

Hanna drifted into the Harman-Ising studio around 1932 as "basically a cel washer", according to an account in Michael Barrier's Hollywood Cartoons. It was anything but easy work, but in the depths of the Depression, better than anything else available--and there wasn't much available. Eager to learn, it didn't take him long to move into other aspects of the business. As he recalled, "....I used to get in there early and sweep and wash cels. That didn't keep me busy, so I painted cels...." (Barrier 289).

He soon became the head of the inking and painting department, gradually moving from there into timing the cartoons. Hugh and Rudy had been among the first (if not the first) to use exposure sheets to synchronize sound, using a rudimentary version of them while making BOSKO THE TALK-INK KID. Hanna, who had some background in music, merely adapted that knowledge to the timing of animation (as had colleague Friz Freleng). Hanna later said:

"...and I used to get [the songs] down on bar sheets and do the timing....they had
exposure sheets, but they didn't know how to put the notes down and get the values,
like a sixteenth note, an eighth note, a quarter note...all of that, which I understood....
(Barrier, 289).

As Harman and Ising's schedule became more hectic, they gradually transferred more and more control over the timing of the cartoons over to Hanna. By the time he followed them to MGM, he was accomplished enough to direct an entire cartoon (he was the uncredited director of the 1936 Happy Harmony To Spring).

Though initially loyal to his bosses after they'd parted with Leon Schlesinger, Hanna nonetheless jumped at an opportunity to direct at the new MGM cartoon studio in 1937--along with fellow employees Carmen "Max" Maxwell and Bob Allen--while still technically in the employ of Harman and Ising. According to Barrier, he merely followed the example set by his employers: Hugh and Rudy had done the same thing while working for Disney. They were, in part, responsible for Disney's loss of his Oswald the Rabbit character to Charles Mintz; while still working for Walt, they helped Mintz set up a studio where they could make Oswald cartoons without Disney's involvement.

As a new director in a new studio, Hanna was charged with the CAPTAIN AND THE KIDS series; he was as enthusiastic about it as Freleng had been, but as we'll see, Hanna did far better than expected at that disagreeable task, giving what otherwise would have been "one-note" characters a sense of life. The characters--and even some inanimate objects--do more than move. They breathe. They think.

This is "Cap's" cartoon, all about his frustrations with the ordinary--such mundane things as putting on pants and shoes, or dealing with balky household appliances with a mind of their own. Both fate and machinery conspire against poor Cap in this cartoon--with the usual cataclysmic results. Thanks to Bill Hanna's timing, we can not only take delight in seeing it coming, but feel Cap's pain as everything--literally--comes crashing down around him.

"No buttons on der ding-busted pants!!"

As the scene opens, the Captain is engaged in his favorite pastime: sleeping. He's lying in bed, covers down and long underwear exposed, snoring away. Ah, but it's too good to last: the alarm goes off--rather loudly and violently, in fact--and for a second or two the scene shifts to Mama downstairs yelling, "Captain! It's time to get up!"

As expected, this has little effect on Cap. When the alarm rings again, he's barely aware of it, mistaking it for a telephone ("hello, hello--yah, dis is der Captain...."). He's roused out of his stupor only on the third ring--and he's not pleased. He flings the alarm clock on the floor, but (unknown to him, naturally) it lands in his pants, which are hanging on the bedpost at the foot of the bed.

Grabbing the pants and still not fully conscious, Cap methodically puts them on--one leg, then another--and pulls them up around him, only to hear the ringing of the clock from behind him. He jumps slightly and turns to his right--nothing. It rings again; this time he looks to his left--nothing. When he sits down, he jumps back up when he feels the still-ringing clock rattling around in the seat of his pants. He stumbles around with one leg in the air trying to twist the pants around and succeeds in shaking the clock out through the pant leg. Heaving a frustrated sigh, he puts on one shoe, then another, only to find that the clock has now taken residence in his left shoe. Juggling both shoe and clock in the air for a moment as the clock continues to ring, he throws the clock off-camera--or thinks he has. With an annoyed expression as we hear an off-camera crash, he goes to put his shoe on again, only to discover he's trying to put the clock on the bottom of his foot.

Above: In this series of stills, we can see how Bill Hanna's timing mines humor from the "simple" act of putting on a pair of pants--simple for anyone but Cap, that is...

Cap disgustedly tosses the clock to the floor; this time it doesn't land inside any other articles of clothing, fortunately. Since putting on his shoes didn't prove very successful, he decides to forgo that for a moment and button his suspenders. He tries once, only to have it snap back in his face; the same thing happens when it tries it again.

He quickly discovers why--the button on the waistband has fallen off. "So," he says, his temper gradually rising from "dormant volcano" to "nuclear meltdown": "no buttons on der pants!! Dot's it! Dot's all der troubles! Dot's der whole troubles! No buttons on der pants! VOT KIND OF A HOUSE IS DIS ANYVAY?! MAMA!"

As he screams, he holds up his buttonless, suspenderless pants with both hands, storming out of the room. Cut to a shot of him heading down the hallway toward the stairs, still bellowing "Mama!" At this point, he's pretty much forgotten he also has only one shoe on. (Heaven and Hanna only know where he threw the other one). He's also quite unaware that the alarm clock he threw away is right in his path--he tumbles down the stairs, creating a rising cloud of dust when he lands.

Cut to Mama at the stove in the kitchen as Cap tumbles through the kitchen door. Turning toward the half-dressed, apoplectic figure on the floor, she says, "Hmmm...good morning, Captain? Vot's der trouble?"

"'Vot's der trouble?'" he thunders back. Vot's der trouble--der WHOLE DOD-GASTED HOUSE IS DER TROUBLE! No buttons on der pants..." (he grabs a handful of buttonless pants to emphasize his point). He's so beside himself he sputters almost incomprehensibly, gesturing in the air: "Der clock...and den...NO BUTTONS ON DER PANTS! Der window and der... and de..de..NO BUTTONS ON DER DING-BUSTED PANTS!"

Slamming his fists down on the table (only slightly disturbing the pancakes Hans is absorbed in eating) Cap says, "Vot kind of a house is you running anyvay? Slamming his fist down again--which deposits Hans' pancakes on top of Cap's head--he screams, "Vot kind of a housekeeper is you? I-I-I was...the clock...d-d-d-...he babbles as Hans merely continues to eat his pancakes from the top of Cap's head. (Obviously a child for whom these morning tirades are as much a part of the morning routine as brushing his teeth).

Hans stuffs several of the pancakes in Cap's mouth, but that doesn't silence him--it doesn't even slow him down: he continues to unintelligibly mutter and fume as he raises his fists in the air (which, of course, sends his pants down to his ankles).

Cut to the front doorway as Mama hands the kids their school books and shoos them out the door: "Come, come, kiddies, qvick, qvick, off to der school...and remember, good mit divisions!" (I've played this line three times and that's what it sounds like to me...maybe Kevin can come to the rescue again). She swells her chest as she prepares to really let Cap have it.

But Cap isn't ready to listen to anything. "Dot's der last straw!" he rages. "No buttons on der pants...." <he pauses only a moment to pull his buttonless pants back up> "Vot kind of a housekeeper is you? Vot kind of a house is you running anyvay?"

For Mama, them's fightin' words. Cut to Mama standing face-to-face with Cap as she jabs him in the chest. "Well, 'Mr. Wisenheimer', if YOU don't like der way I'm running the house, den YOU run it!" she yells back, jabbing his bulbous nose for emphasis. She then shoves a broom into his hands, plops a dusting cap on his head, and throws her apron on top of that before she stalks out of the room.

To the sound of military music on the sound track, the Captain stalks after her, broom in hand; marching to the front door, he yells after her, "Vell all right! I VILL run it!!" Slamming the door, he shatters the window, sending shards of glass everywhere (that should give you an idea of the catastrophe to come).

Cut to a view of Mama on the sidewalk through the broken window: "And remember, vise guy...dis is der vash day!" Cap merely pulls the shade down and growls. "By Jiminy, I show her how to run der dod-spotted house!" he remarks as he marches toward the staircase. Calling upstairs, he yells, "Inspector! Inspector!"

We hear Cap speaking as we fade in to a shot of him and the Inspector standing in the upstairs hallway. He's handing the Inspector a number of cleaning implements. "Yah, dot's vot I said!" Cap tells him. "Today I'm running der house! So get busy!" (Well, he knows how to "delegate", that's for sure). Cap snaps into a stiff military pose and leaves the poor Inspector to his task, heading back downstairs. (Note: the vacuum cleaner in the background near the railing already looks as if it has a human face--anyone care to wager on the likelihood of its devouring the poor little Inspector? I'm laying even money.)

The Inspector timidly inspects the vacuum cord--as if he's not quite sure what to do with it--and plugs it into the wall. The machine, easily twice his size, immediately starts up and creeps toward him, sucking up every object in its path (including a feather duster lying in front of it, and a good portion of the rug). Cut to a medium side view of the Inspector and the demon machine as it edges toward him--he nervously kicks it, hoping that'll stop it. No such luck. He backs away slowly, then breaks into a run as the vacuum goes on the loose. Unfortunately, his avenue of escape is blocked by a wall.

Now the insane machine tries to suck the beard off the Inspector's face, followed by his shoe. Cut to a shot from the vacuum's point of view as the Inspector continues to stand with his back toward the wall. Everywhere he tries to go, the homicidal vacuum follows. It grabs ahold of his beard again: the Inspector frees that, only to lose both his shoes. Thinking a peace offering might help, he presents the vacuum with a bouquet of flowers from a nearby vase (I love this bit, incidentally--it shows just how simple-minded the Inspector is). It does no good--it merely sucks that up along with everything else--and almost takes the Inspector's arm with it. The same goes for the vase the little guy desperately offers--and the umbrella. (Do I sense a pattern developing?) Not content with those mere trifles, it next goes after the Inspector's coat--the Inspector runs frantically in place trying to get out of its grasp. He pulls free--for the moment--and stands in the corner panting heavily as we fade to...

...the washing machine downstairs, putting away to the "Irish Washer Woman's Jig" (it looks like one of the earliest electric models popular at the time, essentially an open tub with a wringer). Quite obviously Cap's handiwork, since various articles of clothing are spilling out from underneath the closed lid. (It wouldn't surprise me if he sat on it to get it closed, as with an overstuffed suitcase.)

Speaking of "overstuffed," our self-satisfied Captain stands proudly with his hands on his hips, remarking "By Golly! Dot's what I call 'housecleaning'!" (I had a few words in mind, too, but not that). Cut to a shot of Cap walking over to the sink. There are enough dishes for two families in the sink, and Cap's going to stack every single one of them in one neat little pile--tower, really--while he turns on the water. It's not quite so easy, though, as the massive stack stubbornly refuses to stay put, threatening to topple over at any second. Keeping one hand on the quivering, ceiling-high stack of plates, he quickly turns on the water with the other. Once accomplished, that hand zips back to add reinforcement to the Leaning Tower Of Dishes. There's only one tiny little matter Cap forgot, though--the soap.

Steadying the dishes with one hand again, Cap slowly inches along the counter toward the soap flakes, never once letting go of the tottering stack. He's actually successful, grabbing the box with one quick swiping motion. He shakes the box to see how full it is, for a split second letting go of the pile; his hand zips back in place just as the dishes are about to fall on his head. He's neglected to shut off the still-running water, though, and as he shakes the box a second time, the sink overflows onto the floor.

Before he can stem the rushing tide, though, we hear a pounding at the door and briefly cut to a hand knocking from the outside. Cut back to Cap, one hand still on the dishes, and spilling enough water on the floor to float the Ark. "Vait a minute!" he yells.

As if there weren't enough calamities already, we cut to a shot of the wall phone ringing. The pounding at the door continues--and Cap still hasn't shut off the water. "Vait...hold der...vait!" the now very flustered Captain yells again. Shaking the box of soap (which only succeeds in getting flakes all over the floor--there's so much water anyway, he might as well wash the dishes there) he absently moves his other hand off the dishes so he can better struggle with the box. Unfortunately, he happens to stick his foot in a nearby mousetrap. Naturally, when he grabs his foot in pain, he lets go of the dishes, and every single dish breaks over Cap's head--except one. Throwing aside the trap in frustration, he grabs for the one unbroken dish left in the house and angrily decides to smash it, too. But there's a reason it won't break--it's metal. When he throws it down, it simply bounces off the floor and hits him in the face.

Figuring that throwing it might produce better results, he flings it in the air; but like a proto-Frisbee, it does a U-turn near the ceiling and hits poor Cap in the head before he can get up from the waterlogged floor. Picking it up, he throws it toward the one place he figures it won't come back--through the kitchen window. Of course, he smashes even more glass in the process.

That proved no more successful than the first effort, as it comes back again to hit him in the head. As he lies on his stomach on the floor, he fails to notice his loose suspenders are getting caught in the washing machine's wringer. As he watches the stubborn plate clatter on the floor in front of him, he realizes his clothes are snagged. He tries to make a run for it, but once the suspenders stretch to their absolute limit, he can only helplessly run in place on a throw rug before being dragged back to the continually chugging machine.

He makes a break for it again, thinking he can get some leverage this time. He lunges for a nearby china cabinet, grabbing every available drawer. Every single one gets pulled out as he frantically grabs for them. Next trying the cupboard portion of the cabinet, he grabs ahold of the very bottom shelf, but only manages to bring the contents (as well as the entire cupboard) down on him.

His suspenders snap back, slamming into the washing machine and spilling out its contents--pants, socks, and unmentionables fall on him like rain. The machine then decides to exact its revenge on Cap for abusing it, and grabs him with the plunger mechanisms (used to beat the dirt out of the clothes). With both plungers stuck to the top of his head, he gets bounced up and down several times and knocked around before freeing himself from the machine's clutches. But it's not quite through with him--one of the plungers grabs ahold of his massive rear end and flings him around, upside down, like a rag doll. "Inspector! Inspector!" he screams.

Ah, yes, the Inspector--we forgot about him, didn't we? He's still upstairs, tussling with the vacuum. And by all appearances, losing: he's down to his underwear by now, and the infernal thing won't quit. He's still struggling to keep his beard from being sucked in. He fails--not only does his beard get sucked in, so does the rest of him (I'd like to know who manufactured that thing--it sort of makes the Oreck vacuum look pathetic).

Cut to a view of the vacuum "looking" down on the poor Captain in the kitchen through a grate in the upper floor. It's apparently no more pleased with him than the washing machine was, since it starts sucking up every item of clothing the washing machine had scattered about--then eventually Cap as the suction attracts his suspenders. Fortunately, the ceiling acts as a barrier. But Cap, not willing to leave "bad enough" alone, pushes on on the ceiling to free the suspenders, which have been sucked up through the grate--and pulls down not only the vacuum, but most of the second floor.

Wait, it gets worse. (As impossible as it may seem). The vacuum--which like any demonic being, is apparently immortal--still runs, and it's landed right smack into the tub of the washing machine. With, of course, the predictable result--it sucks up every drop of the water, its bag expanding to the size of a weather balloon before it bursts.

Pieces of clothing and what used to be furniture drop down right in front of the camera. The finally-expired vacuum hangs suspended from some undetermined object up above that miraculously escaped the damage. When the hail of debris clears, the camera pans around the perimeter of what used to be the kitchen--it now looks like it could qualify for Federal disaster aid. And in the doorway, hands on hips, is Mama.

"Vell, Captain," she says. "Just vot kind of a house is YOU running?" Cap, who'd been blown by the explosion into the oven (his head poking up through the range top) can only blubber "No buttons on der ding-busted pants..." The Inspector, sitting on top of the stove next to him, dabs Cap's eyes with his beard--but when Cap tries to blow his nose on it, he quickly yanks it away as we gratefully exit this pathetic scene.

I suppose they can look on the bright side--they'll get maid service at the hotel they're going to have to stay in until the house gets rebuilt. And if Mama is smart, she'll insist the Captain buy a belt before she lets him back in the place.

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

As we've already seen, for most of the animators, the first two years of the MGM animation studio were an insecure, uncertain, tense period best left forgotten. Shakeups in management and conflict between contentious New York and California factions (each with their own vision of what the studio's creative direction should be) threatened to bring down the fledgling studio before it had a chance to really begin.

For Bill Hanna, on the other hand, it was a training period, a chance for him to learn how to make truly funny cartoons. His mentors Harman and Ising had never been laugh-out-loud funny, but he would make good use of what he learned from them--and his work would reach stellar heights once teamed with a born gag man like Joe Barbera.

Where Milt Gross got laughs out of things larger--and sillier--than life, Hanna (much like Chuck Jones at Warner's) would glean them from the subtle and the seemingly insignificant. Certain segments in this cartoon take an unusually long amount of time. The opening scenes in which Cap fumbles with his alarm clock, then finds himself fighting with it as he tries to put on his pants, then his shoes, then his suspenders, take well over two minutes. It didn't seem that long to me, since I was too engrossed in this poor fellow's plight. We've all had days we wish we could live over, days which, despite all efforts, just go completely wrong. The sequence works because it's just exaggerated enough to be funny, and just real enough for us to relate to it. Just watching the contortions Cap puts his enormous body through is funny enough.

It takes a skilled comedian to get laughs from a mute character, and Hanna did an extraordinary job with the Inspector, normally a very nondescript personality. He seems childlike here (though his size certainly contributes to that) almost a Laurel to the Captain's Hardy. (I could easily imagine Stan Laurel doing something along the lines of the "flower" routine with the runaway vacuum cleaner). Here, one can easily see the genesis of the sort of gags we normally associate with two other characters (also mute) that would later gain Bill Hanna fame--Tom and Jerry.

When the great Tex Avery finally arrived, and the direction of the studio veered back toward the larger and the more outrageous, Hanna was able to adjust to the new sensibility, yet retain the subtlety of timing in certain scenes that made you believe his characters were able to think. HEAVENLY PUSS comes to mind--the scene in which Tom is desperately trying to secure Jerry's forgiveness at the last minute is classic because it's almost Avery-like in its exaggeration, but subtle enough for genuine emotion to show through. Done too fast, the emotions in the facial expressions wouldn't have read; too slow, and the sense of "cartoony" exaggeration would have been lost.

Viewed from the perspective of one who's seen more than 50 years' worth of TV sitcoms, the "men take over the housecleaning chores" plot really seems like the most overused, contrived situation imaginable--and it was probably hackneyed even in 1938. But Hanna takes that old plot into new areas of absurdity; the damage Cap does to Mama's house makes what Ricky Ricardo and Fred Mertz do to Lucy's kitchen (burying it in a virtual tidal wave of rice) seem almost almost normal. Yet as absurd as it is, it comes across as the logical consequence of the Captain's windy pomposity, because we got to "know" him at the beginning. And we got to know him because Bill Hanna gave us just the right amount of time to do it.

Tags:

Captain+and+the+Kids, MGM, Bill+Hanna

Orphan Toon Musings: The Two Harveys

Gazoo image from Topthat.net; Little Dot image

from The Harveyville Fun Times

Korman and Comics: Remembering Two Harveys

by Rachel Newstead

So long, Gazoo....

In reflecting on the recent passing of Harvey Korman, I couldn't help but think how much I took his work for granted--particularly in animation. He was simply there, playing a stock Hanna-Barbera villain (whether comic or serious). Or more notably, The Great Gazoo, the tiny exiled alien from the planet Zatox, charged with "helping" those two Stone Age "dums dums" Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble. And I didn't even appreciate that at first.

In so many of the sitcoms I saw when I was growing up, it seemed the main character continually harbored a Big Secret. Wilbur Post had a horse that could talk, but he couldn't tell anybody. Darrin Stephens was married to a witch, but couldn't tell anybody. Astronaut Tony Nelson had a sexy genie living with him, whom he kept in a bottle in his living room and...well, you get the idea. At times I felt like yelling at the screen, "Just tell them already and get it over with!"

Inevitably, The Flintstones would succumb to that irritating trend: now Fred and Barney were saddled with a Big Secret--and they couldn't tell anyone if they tried. Gazoo, you see, was invisible to everyone but the two "dum dums" he served (and yes, children and pets--but Dino, Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm, conveniently unable to talk, weren't liable to spill the beans either). This of course set up the kind of awkward situation I had a hard time sitting through, whatever the show: something weird would happen that would cause Fred and Barney to hem and haw nervously to the wives, forcing them to improvise a weak and implausible explanation. It happened so often I came to hate it--but I couldn't completely hate Gazoo, thanks in no small measure to Harvey Korman.

As I've come to discover on numerous occasions, the passage of time can do strange things. Not very long ago I viewed the "dreaded" sixth season of The Flintstones for the first time in years, and discovered it was nowhere near as bad as I remembered. Fred, in the earliest episodes of the series, was a malcontent: grouchy often for no discernible reason, seldom learning from his mistakes. Wilma was caustic and nagging, always ready with a put-down--it makes one wonder why two such people would be attracted to each other in the first place. The sixth season changed all that--now, Fred could be as childish and ill-tempered as ever, but usually would come to realize he was wrong.

Gazoo was often instrumental in helping him realize that: in "Boss For A Day," he gives Fred a chance to live life as his boss does--and discovers after an exhausting, humiliating day that it's nowhere near as cushy as he'd dreamed. Gazoo "helped" not by granting every wish, but by making Fred and Barney reaalize what they really want.

It would have been nowhere near as effective if anyone other than the inimitable Harvey Korman had voiced the character. Korman as Gazoo could, in the course of a single sentence, could be alternately peevish (as in the innumerable times he's awakened from his nap by the "dum dums,") silly (there's a slight giggle to his voice when he tells Fred and Barney, "I'm not only unreliable, but I'm a bit of a kook...") and pompous (you could feel the disgust when he's berating Fred especially.) Gazoo could be sympathetic as well, his normal stuffy-English-butler cadence softening when he somehow manages to do a good deed.

Typically self-effacing, Korman never considered himself much of a voice artist, as he says in a 2004 interview for the Archive of American Television (he starts talking about his work for Hanna-Barbera some 18 minutes in) . But the fact he could do so much with one characterization puts him in the same rank as Daws Butler, Mel Blanc, and June Foray--and the world of animation will be much poorer without him.

Wendy, Little Dot and the Gang

The other "Harvey" about which I have fond memories is Harvey Comics, prompted by an innocent e-mail question from Kevin. He asked me if I'd ever read them, and got back far more than he bargained for.

I definitely read them. Voraciously, in fact. At the age of ten, I had a rather extensive collection of them: Little Dot, Little Lotta (a character that could never appear in comics today), Richie Rich, Wendy, even Sad Sack. (Hey, that's what comes of being a military brat).

Strange as it may seem, I've always had a certain fondness for Little Dot. Often dismissed as a "one-note character" for her single-minded obsession with dots, she was quite real to me; I could relate to people with quirky obsessions, as I had (and still have) a few of my own. At age ten, it was typewriters--anything that printed letters, really: label makers, stamp pads, stencils, mimeograph machines, you name it. I loved the smell of typewriters: that subtle mixture of machine oil and ribbon ink. I loved the clacking of the keys, the ratchet noise of the carriage. I'm quite sure I started writing so I'd have an excuse to use one. Thanks to Little Dot, I felt a little less weird about it--if she could love something as silly as dots, why couldn't I love typewriters?

The Harvey comics celebrated "diversity" before the term was coined--a pretty, "good" witch could live with three evil aunts and the variety of supernatural creatures around her; a "friendly" ghost could live with three, shall we say, more "traditional" ones. A kid who's ridiculously rich could have friends who liked him for himself, not his money.

Yet they could still be disturbingly backward: one Little Dot story made me furious when I first read it nearly forty years ago. One of Little Dot's aunts (she had a surprising number of aunts and uncles, enough to warrant their own comic) was apparently quite the intellectual, and it was interfering with her social life--any potential boyfriend was intimidated by her, as he'd no sooner get two words out before she'd start spouting all sorts of arcane information. Dot showed her she had to "play dumb" to get a man: when she started feigning ignorance, guys started to notice her. In the last panel, Dot winks to the readers, saying that was the truly "smart" thing to do.

Even though this story was dated even then--it must have been written in the fifties and reprinted in the early seventies--it angered me. The whole idea of a woman having to "play dumb" to soothe the male ego was abhorrent to me even at age ten. A little girl who loved dots was perfectly acceptable, but not a grown woman with a mind? That's not a great lesson to teach young girls, and even worse, it gives them the idea they have to manipulate males to get what they want.

Such antiquated thinking, however, was the exception and not the rule--in the Harvey world, the "odd" had a home. In another Little Dot "aunt and uncle" story, she goes to visit an uncle who's a Tarzan type--he lives in the woods, wears an animal skin, and swings through the trees. The folks outside the forest think he's some sort of "wild man", a menace; even Dot has her doubts about him. But when Dot visits his treehouse home, she discovers he's actually a writer, who lives as he does because it helps him write adventure stories. In a Harvey comic book, appearances were deceiving.

They could be adventurous, too. While the "Richie Rich" stories fulfilled my childish fantasy of being able to buy whatever I desired, I also found that his money could take him anywhere. He could fly off to distant lands on a moment's notice in his private plane; more often, though, he found excitement closer to home.

In one story I still vividly remember, Richie and his friend Gloria went exploring in the basement of his mansion, and discover a strange, long-forgoten vehicle--something like a mining car, that ran on rails. They soon learn that it can take them to parts of the mansion they'd never seen before--in different parts of the world. In the end, they discover it was all a dream--or was it? In the last panel, as they're remarking how such a thing couldn't really be possible, we see the long-abandoned mining car, covered in cobwebs, off in a corner.

As with the first Harvey discussed here, Harvey Comics is, sadly, no more. Sales began to lag in the seventies--ironically, at about the time I first became interested in them--and issues were quietly dropped. Occasional digest issues would appear through the eighties, only to completely disappear by 1994.

But just as Harvey Korman will live on in countless movies and cartoons--not to mention segments of the unforgettable Carol Burnett Show--so too will the other Harvey: classic Harvey comics stories are available in bound volumes on Amazon.com. May future generations be entertained as much by both Harveys as I was.

Tags:

Harvey+Korman, Gazoo, Little+Dot, Harvey+Comics

The Lion In Black and White

It's Der Ding-Busted Captain and The Kids In MAMA'S NEW HAT (1939)

Review-Synopsis by Rachel Newstead

Mama's New Hat
Release Date: Feb. 11, 1939
Director: none credited (see Concluding Thoughts)
In Short: When the kids' gift for Mama gets destroyed, they "borrow" another. But the rightful owner won't give it up so easily...

It was the first comic strip worthy of the name, creating a visual shorthand for "the funnies" that's still used today. Born at the end of the 19th century, it's still in newspapers--if not nearly as many as in its heyday. For more than sixty years, it appeared in two different versions--distributed by two rival syndicates--thanks to one of the strangest legal loopholes in history. It made the transition to theatrical animation not once, but twice--neither of them successfully.

The Captain and the Kids--or to use its proper title, The Katzenjammer Kids--was the creation of 20-year-old German-American cartoonist Rudolf Dirks, first appearing on Dec. 12, 1897 in William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal. Loosely based on a series of children's stories Dirks remembered from his childhood (Wilhelm Busch's Max und Moritz) Dirks' Americanized version was nowhere near as stern, violent or moralistic as Busch's stories--but filled with the sort rough, vaudevillian slapstick that was almost as bad. Ron Goulart in The Funnies suggests it was heavily influenced by the eye-poking antics of Weber and Fields (who apparently inspired The Three Stooges as well). As a strip with German characters created by someone of German extraction, it proved quite popular among immigrants, many of whom were already familiar with the original Busch stories. The name "Katzenjammer", meaning literally "the yowling of cats" perfectly described the chaos occurring within the strip. Objects were continually hurled through the air, and figures were constantly in mid-run: the strip was "animated" long before it ever reached the screen, thanks to Dirks' loose, quick drawing.

From the beginning, the strip featured the little hellions Hans (the dark-haired one) and Fritz (the blond one), along with Mama Katzenjammer, who more often than not was seen spanking them at the end of every strip. (There was also a Papa Katzenjammer originally, but he disappeared after the arrival of the Captain.)

The Captain arrived--having been shipwrecked--around 1905 as a boarder, followed closely by the Inspector (originally a truant officer sent to rein in the kids, but who for some reason stayed.) It would be these two characters who would bear the brunt of Hans and Fritz's constant pranks from then on.

Why it came to be known as The Captain and the Kids is a rather strange, complicated story. According to the "official" account given by United Feature Syndicate years after the fact, around 1914 Dirks decided he wanted to take a year off to travel and paint. The Journal agreed on the condition that he create a backlog of strips to cover his absence; this Dirks attempted and found impossible, and embarked on his vacation without official approval:

....Cablegrams and Journal correspondence followed me all over the continent requesting
that I send in more drawings. I mailed in Sunday pages for about six months. Then I
accepted an offer from the New York World on the condition that I would not begin until
my contract was cleared with the Journal. Meanwhile, the latter paper sought to
secure a restraining injunction against my working for the Pulitzer interests. When the
case was heard, I was declared the loser. My appeal, however, brought a reversal of
that decision, allowing me to work for the World but leaving the title of The Katzenjamer
Kids with the Journal. (Goulart, pg. 53)

A much simpler--and more likely--explanation would be that the World offered Dirks substantially more money. Deserting a Hearst paper for a Pulitzer one was an unusual move, as the traffic of cartoonists usually went the other way. Dirks would not have jumped ship, surely, unless he were to be well-compensated.

The injunction and court decision were certainly true, leading to an odd compromise: the Journal would hire a new artist, Harold Knerr, to draw his own version of the strip as The Original Katzenjammer Kids (to let readers know theirs was the "real deal", when in fact the opposite was the case). When Dirks' version of the Kids first appeared in the World, it contained no title (Dirks originally identified them by the German-inflected "Here Dey Iss!") In early 1915, he began calling the strip Hans and Fritz; during World War I, in response to the rabid anti-German mood of the time, the name was changed to The Captain and the Kids. (Goulart suggests it may have been

because it sounds like "The Katzenjammer Kids", if one says it fast enough). That name stuck, and under that name, it would make it to the screen in the early days of the MGM cartoon studio.

The Hearst version had already done so--in 1916, Hearst created the International Film Service, through which he would commission animated versions of his strips--such as Krazy Kat and Bringing Up Father--in addition to The Katzenjammer Kids. (Animated by Earl Hurd, under the supervision of J.R. Bray). They did not prove profitable, however, and the IFS quickly folded.

No one held out much hope for the attempt to adapt Dirks' version to animation some twenty years later--least of all Friz Freleng, lured from Schlesinger by Fred Quimby to direct the series. (As I recounted in my review of ROMEO IN RHYTHM some time back). Joe Barbera would later refer to them as "animated Huns"; in interviews late in his life, he would say it was the worst possible timing to debut a series with characters speaking in mock-German dialect just as Germany was about to lead Europe into another war.

A good point, certainly--audiences gave the series a cold reception, and the series was stopped after just 13 cartoons (two of which, PETUNIA NATURAL PARK and THE CAPTAIN'S CHRISTMAS, were filmed in Technicolor--the rest were originally released in sepiatone to cut costs). The strip, however, was still widely popular during this period, due to the inexhaustible imagination of Dirks. In the years since the move from Hearst, the family found a new home in the "Squeegie Islands" (with the expected stereotypical island natives) and a new recurring menace in the form of one Long John Silver. He would, in fact, figure prominently in the animated series (perhaps best of all in THE CAPTAIN'S CHRISTMAS) even though the island locale was not a feature of the MGM cartoons.

MAMA'S NEW HAT was the last of the series, and quite possibly the best. As was typical in the MGM version of Cap and family, the kids' demeanor has been softened here. Far gentler than the feral brats of the early comic strip, they create havoc not out of meanness or spite, but because they simply wanted to do something nice--buy their Mama a new hat for Mother's Day. Of course, what happens is a perfect illustration of the saying, "The road to hell is paved with good intentions..."


"My little angels..."

We open with a view of a sign in a store window: MOTHER'S DAY--BUY HER A GIFT. This fades to a display window showing various household items: pots, pans, a washboard, dishes and so on (ve-e-e-ry funny, guys--my mom would kill me if I gave her something like that). The camera tracks past another display window showing various hats for sale; we see Hans and Fritz emerge from the store with a gift-wrapped package, presumably one of the hats. (If they know what's good for them). Hans skips along ahead of Fritz with the package, but fails to see the brick on the sidewalk in front of him. He trips and....falls right into a huge mud puddle in the street. He juggles the package in the air to try to keep it from falling in, but at that moment Fritz falls right on top of him--and the package. They emerge covered in mud, and the package is a soggy, ruined mess.

As the boys don't have the money for a replacement, they're stuck for an alternative--until they hear the whinnying of a horse off-camera. They see an old nag admiring herself in a mirror, wearing a hat which--by a lucky coincidence--just happens to be identical to the one the boys intended to give Mama. The horse bats her eyes and adjusts the hat here and there, picking up the hat with her ears and moving it to a new position. Cut to the boys, still in the mud puddle: Fritz starts whispering to Hans, and it doesn't take a genius to figure out what they're planning. They sneak up over to the horse, trying to appear nonchalant; Hans points off-camera to try to divert the horse's attention and makes a grab for the hat. The horse notices, and the boys return to their nonchalant pose. They back up slowly, then zip around the corner, so fast the letters from the store sign fall off the window.

The horse eyes them skeptically and resumes admiring herself in the mirror. The flower on the hat droops--turns out the boys switched hats, giving her the ruined one they bought for Mama. becoming angry, the horse throws the hat down, stomps on it, and goes off in pursuit of the boys at full speed. She pursues them around a corner....

....and we cut to a shot of the horse charging down the middle of the street at full gallop. But the camera pans over to a sign saying THIS IS NOT A THROUGH STREET, so we know that disaster's ahead for the horse. Avoiding one potential disaster, she gallops furiously off in the other direction (a slight corner-cutting move here: it's just a "flipped" image of the previous running sequence). Skidding to a stop, she starts sniffing the ground like a bloodhound.
Fade to the boys and Mama at home: "Aaaah, ain't dot sweet--buy Mama a new hat for Mama's Day!" she says. "My little angels!" As she says this, little halos appear over the boys' heads as they bashfully stand there. In a nice little "impossible" cartoon gag, she lifts up the halos and kisses each boy on the head.

Mama turns and admires herself in the mirror: "Mmmmm....not so bad," she says. She imagines herself as glamorous; for a moment her reflection in the mirror transforms to an image of Greta Garbo.

"Vait until I show Mrs. Hamburger my new hat--vill I burn her up!" she says to the boys, grabbing her parasol.

We wipe-dissolve to the outside as Mama comes down the stairs, then cut to the horse, still sniffing around in pursuit of the stolen hat. (She even sniffs a fire hydrant, like a dog, only to be scared off by the sound of a yelping dog from off-camera). She skids to a stop and continues sniffing along the ground--at that moment, Mama happens to pass by in the distance. Cut to a closeup shot of Mama--the camera tracks in closer on the hat. The horse sees it, and happily gallops off after it. She follows closely behind Mama, trying to grab the hat with her teeth; but before she can snag it, Mama disappears down an open manhole. Strangely, Mama doesn't even notice. The camera tracks over to a loading platform coming up from underground, from which Mama emerges.

The horse then appears in front of Mama, and the two of them go into a sort of dance-like routine as the horse tries to grab the hat and Mama ducks. (To the tune of "The Mexican Hat Dance" on the sound track). Mama goes underneath the horse to escape her, only to have the horse move in front of her again, snapping at the hat. They whirl around in a brief tussle; the horse ends up with the hat on her head--for the moment. They whirl around again, and this time Mama has the hat. Mama runs off camera....

...and we dissolve to a shot of the horse running after her at full speed, then to a long shot of Mama and the horse running along the road beside a picket fence, back toward Mama's house. (Fairly fast timing for this era). We cut again to a view of the open doorway from inside as Mama runs toward it. She slams the door just as the horse hits it. Cut to the horse outside--her head vibrates with a "boing" sound from the impact with the door.

The horse pounds on the door with her hoof, then runs off to prepare to run inside. Mama opens the door as the horse barrels through the living room, up the stairs and out of of one of the upstairs windows (a gag used in more Warner's, and later MGM cartoons, than I can count. Tex Avery would use a similar gag in SWING SHIFT CINDERELLA--only a good deal faster). We don't see the horse do this--the camera follows from outside, and we hear the galloping and racket on the sound track.

The horse lands on the roof of the neighboring house and slides slowly downward, kicking up roofing tiles as she goes. We cut to a shot of Mama's open cellar door--the horse falls through, landing in the basement. Various pots and other junk fly up through the door as the horse lands.

Dissolve to a shot of the horse creeping up the basement steps as she heads into the kitchen, accidentally hitting an empty milk bottle in the doorway in the process. The milk bottle bounces down the stairs--as we cut to a shot of the doorway from the kitchen, the horse cringes in anticipation of the inevitable impact--it doesn't crash right away, so she stands listening with her ear pointed toward the doorway. When it finally does crash, the startled horse jumps through the air onto a cabinet. Sighing in relief, she climbs down and continues her pursuit as the scene fades.

The next scene shows the horse sneaking toward the kitchen door as Mama comes through wearing the hat--quickly, the horse hides with her back to the wall. She again snaps at the hat, but the surprised Mama ducks. The chase is on--but the horse is having a bit of difficulty, as her hooves get caught in the area rug in front of the door. She rolls up more and more of the rug as she scrambles to get free, pulling Mama with her. Once freed, the two of them start off after one another again.

Cut to a scene of the horse chasing Mama through the living room and up the stairs, with Mama scrambling on all fours. When she reaches the top just ahead of the horse, she slides down the bannister. She sails through the air and into the hallway, where she and the horse pursue each other around and around a set of two doorways (also similar to a gag Avery would later use). They continue this routine several times until Hans and Fritz emerge from a center door with a cane to trip the horse. The horse trips and falls, but Mama's still going, running right over her. The boys quickly snatch the horse and pull her inside the room.

The boys, taking the pose of a fashion designer, then are seen trying to bribe the horse with alternative hats (the dialogue, which is speeded up, is almost indecipherable on this copy, so I'm not going to attempt to transcribe it here). The horse stares in the mirror as the boys put a variety of hats on her head, all of them more ridiculous than the last. (One bit of animation, in which the horse lifts an overly-large hat from her eyes with her hoof, looks like it was retraced in GALLOPIN' GALS). One of the samples is a Napoleon-style hat; the horse strikes a goofy Napoleonic pose while "La Marsellaise" plays on the sound track. (Mama owns that? Must really belong to the Captain, I'm guessing). It's quickly snatched form her head and replaced with a cowboy hat as the music switches to Western-style, then by a football helmet as "fight song" music plays (if that's Mama's, she has an interesting past). One of the boys waves a pennant over the horse's head.

Note: Kevin, ever helpful, with ears far better than your humble toonkeeper's, says the dialogue Hans and Fritz say as they're trying hats on the horse goes as follows:

“Would Madam care for the latest from Pah-ree?”

…And then another hat…

“Or maybe you would prefer a Suzanne Pah-poo cree-a-shun (creation)”

…And another…

“a Napoleonne…”

…And another…

“…Buck Benny?”

…And another…

“…Or should you ever go to college,…”

Thanks, Kevin. Because I missed that particular bit of dialogue, I failed to make note of the "Buck Benny" line (a reference to Jack Benny's then-current movie Buck Benny Rides Again).

We then fade to a montage of the various hats being tried on and rejected--pretty ambitious and Harman-Ising-like for cartoons supposedly done on the cheap. The scene then dissolves to a shot of the horse looking like an equine Mae West, with a large plumed hat, a corset, and boots (on all four feet). She exits through the wrong door, however, and we hear an off-camera splash. Cut to a shot of the horse in the bathtub with a confused Captain. Cap swats at the horse and misses; the horse goes underwater and re-remerges behind him as he looks down into the water; she pushes him down and a stream of bubbles come up as the Captain gasps for air. He comes up again with the bath brush on his head--he takes it and scares the horse out of the tub, waving the brush at her.

The horse scrambles to keep her footing on the wet floor and crashes through the closed door, landing in the hallway. Meanwhile, Mama is still running around and around in circles, in one room and out another, as she was when the horse was chasing her. The horse stands just outside the second door as Mama comes through, snapping at the hat--this time she manages to grab it, flipping it onto her head. As Mama comes through the second door and notices what's happened, the horse gallops off-screen, and the scene cuts to the living room.

The horse quickly ducks into the coal chute, followed closely by Cap in his bathrobe--Cap tries to follow, but is a little too hefty, getting himself stuck. Cut to the basement--the horse slides down the coal chute and through the air toward a nearby wall, where she crashes. She knocks loose a can of glue which empties on her rear end. She doesn't notice, because she's too busy trying to get the coal bucket off her nose. We cut quickly to the still-stuck Cap, then back to the horse, still trying to remove the bucket. In doing so, she kicks the wall behind her, which dislodges an old electric fan from the shelf, which attaches itself to her glue-covered rear. She manages to get the bucket loose, but the momentum propels her into the coal bin, fan still attached. The horse, now covered in coal, blindly reaches up and turns on the main electrical switch, which immediately starts the fan. This creates a black whirlwind which sends coal everywhere, including through the coal chute where Cap is still struggling to free himself. Coal shoots through the living room as an astonished Mama looks on.

She tries to free Cap herself, pulling on his legs as coal continues to fly around. Meanwhile, down below, the force of the fan has made the horse rise in the air, lifting her out of the coal pile. She gets propelled through the coal-chute opening and backward toward a living-room table. The combination of the fan and table resemble an airplane (recalling a gag involving Bruno in THE OLD HOUSE) and zooms just over Mama and Cap's heads. We then cut to a quick shot of the horse zooming through the air past the stairs--backwards--and another of Mama and Cap quickly trying to get out of the way. But rather than swoop over their heads, the horse comes up underneath them--they end up sitting on top of the soaring table as it zooms out of control.

They turn and head the opposite direction as we cut to the boys, who turn tail and head into the next room. Cut to an exterior window, which the horse crashes through--now Mama, Cap and the kids are along for the ride as the horse gains altitude.

Of course, the cord is still attached, and as they go further and higher, they pull the electrical wiring off the side of the house and nearby utility poles. The wires are pulled from the poles in rapid succession, which eventually causes a generator from the local power station to get pulled with them. The building is destroyed, while the generator gets stuck between two branches of a tree. The force frees it, and now the combination of horse, table, fan, and family has a generator trailing behind it. As the wire gets pulled taut, everyone falls to earth to the sound of an airplane in a crash dive. Mama, the kids, Cap, and the horse land in a circular clothesline, while the horse's hat lands on a tree branch just out of everyone's reach. The wire lands on the remaining intact power lines and starts to make sparks; this starts the fan again and propels them around and around in circles. They each try to grab the hat from the tree--like merry-go-round riders reaching for the brass ring--as the cartoon irises out. Maybe Hans and Fritz should consider getting Mama candy or flowers next Mother's Day...

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

Kevin speculated, in his response to my review of JITTERBUG FOLLIES, that Milt Gross was the uncredited director of MAMA'S NEW HAT. Given the way the cartoon builds to such a riotous, anarchic climax, this may well be true. If Gross did direct this cartoon, he succeeded in portraying utter chaos and destruction more effectively here than in JITTERBUG FOLLIES: it's more like an Avery cartoon than any MGM effort would be before the arrival of Avery. As with Tex's cartoons, it builds slowly until it reaches a level of all-out mayhem.

But it seems to me there are other influences at work. Friz Freleng was also at MGM at the time, and could easily have had input--the pacing throughout most of the cartoon is reminiscent of Warner's cartoons of the same period. It also not only looks forward to the era of Tom and Jerry (particularly the scenes of destruction inside the house) but backward to the era of Harman and Ising. (There are obvious parallels with Hugh and Rudy's MGM Boskos, as I've already mentioned). Those seeking a "missing link" between the old MGM and the new will find it here.

Thus ended the early, shakedown era of the MGM cartoon studio. It's a bit sad, really, as the CAPTAIN AND THE KIDS animators were really starting to hit their stride. In THE CAPTAIN'S CHRISTMAS, they start portraying characters with real dimension--we discover in that cartoon that stock villain John Silver has a human side. He creates presents, Grampy-style, for the heartbroken Hans and Fritz when he thoughtlessly ruins the kids' Christmas after destroying their Christmas gifts in a childish rampage. As we've already seen, the kids aren't one-dimensional brats, either--the disastrous events of this cartoon are only indirectly their fault. They had no way of knowing how obsessed the horse would be in getting her purloined hat back, and they did have altruistic motives. While this seems a dramatic departure from the comic strip, by the thirties Dirks had started to make them less destructive and more philosophical--though still incurable pranksters. According to Ron Goulart, dialogue became more extensive--perhaps even too much so--as the kids would prattle on and on about their views of the world around them. At the same time, the action in this cartoon seems a pretty faithful translation of wild, early years of the comic strip--it's filled with the sort of action I always imagined the strips to have, and once it gets going, it doesn't stop.

As with KATNIP KOLLEGE, the CAPTAIN AND THE KIDS cartoons were an acquired taste for me: my first experience of them came courtesy of the LATE NIGHT BLACK AND WHITE series on Cartoon Network in the nineties, and at the time I was less than impressed. They seemed, for one thing, too slow, too deliberate--but then, I hadn't yet seen them all. As I began to see more of them, however (particularly such wonderful efforts as THE WINNING TICKET, with its running gag of a woodpecker trying to attack John Silver's wooden leg) I began to appreciate them more. The voice work from the likes of Billy Bletcher as the Captain and Mel Blanc as John Silver, elevated the cartoons beyond the ordinary and made them a pleasure to watch.

Michael Barrier, unfortunately, wasn't similarly impressed. In his book HOLLYWOOD CARTOONS, he had this to say about the MGM cartoons of this period:

...[Director Bob] Allen in particular wanted Disney-style animation, but the animation
in the Captain and the Kids cartoons evokes Terrytoons instead: it is active, amiable
and utterly superficial, the sort of animation that speaks of haste and a
low tolerance for revisions. (288-89).

"Active" and "amiable" they are, but to compare them with Terrytoons is an unforgivable cheap shot--to both studios. Terrytoons, as we've seen in THE MAGIC PENCIL, was capable of imagination, and the animation of Jim Tyer made the cartoons far funnier than they would be in the hands of someone more "traditional." If the CAPTAIN AND THE KIDS cartoons need be compared with any New York studio at all, I'd compare it with the Fleischer cartoons of this period, with their fluid animation, rich gray tones, detailed backgrounds, and their "anything can happen" approach. MAMA'S NEW HAT certainly has the best mechanical gag of any cartoon outside the Fleischer studio at the time, as we saw with the homemade "airplane" bit. Bill Hanna, Joe Barbera and Tex Avery would surpass this level of work in time, but these cartoons compare favorably with any of their era.

After this cartoon, Harman and Ising would return to the studio, gleefully jettisoning several works in progress by Milt Gross. But things wouldn't be quite the same--there was a new crew, and a new attitude toward cartoons which crept into Hugh and Rudy's work (as we've seen in ROMEO IN RHYTHM, released about a year and a half later). The CAPTAIN AND THE KIDS series was a noble experiment, clearing the path for Tom and Jerry, Droopy, and company--and the accolades MGM would receive because of those characters.

Though its time on screen was brief, The Captain and the Kids' run on the comic pages certainly wasn't--Dirks would continue to draw it until his retirement in 1958. It would be continued by his son John until United Feature Syndicate discontinued it in 1979. Ironically, it was the version begun by Knerr that proved the more durable--like The Captain and the Kids, it suffered through a couple of name changes: for a brief time during the First World War, Knerr's verison of the Kids briefly became Dutch, with Irish names! From 1918 to 1920, Hans and Fritz were Mike and Aleck Shenanigan, and the strip was known as the The Shenanigan Kids. After 1920 it would revert to simply The Katzenjammer Kids--its original title under Dirks--and is known by that title to this day. Since 1986, "The Katzies" have been drawn by Hy Eisman, a veteran of the King Features "bullpen". Though nowhere near what it once was (the slapstick has been toned down considerably) it endures, syndicated in 50 newspapers (and online). To last from the horse-and buggy era to the age of the internet is a pretty remarkable achievement for any cartoon; may the animated version live on in the hearts of new generations as well.

The Katzenjammer Kids today, as drawn by Hy Eisman (excerpt © King Features Syndicate)

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"Wearin' Off The Green," Indeed

By Kevin Wollenweber

The burst of energy seemed to come from nowhere, but it did.

Perhaps far too soon for MGM, which seemed to make its mark up ‘til that point with Disney-like cartoons: beautiful, fluid pieces of animation, but Disney-like, nonetheless. When Milt Gross happened on the scene, perhaps it should have been at Max Fleischer’s studio, not slicker, aristocratic MGM. Judging from this previous review, it seemed as if the pacing and character design were not exactly what MGM was looking for, although the cartoons themselves were great ideas.

The second one, “WANTED: NO MASTER” is especially good, even though it really doesn’t feature all the elements of the original comic strip. It is true that, if all elements of that previous comic strip-as outlined in Rachel’s earlier review--were all retained, I really think that a success could have been made of this proposed series. Even the usually versatile Mel Blanc couldn’t haul this out of the dumper with a variety of wacky voices; but then again, perhaps Mel’s natural ability to turn vocal comedy in cartoons on its ear was also being stifled by those at the studio who just didn’t understand why cartoons should be created at all!

As duly noted, the singing of the hippo dubbed Madame Lizzie Swish hits one like fingers scraping along a chalkboard. Yet, you are stunned by the grotesqueness of the character designs throughout, a sign that wilder times were ahead for MGM studios. If all had just cooperated with Gross (despite his supposed overbearing demeanor) Gross’ material could have easily been that incredible missing link between the slick style of the West Coast and that grittier, welcome antidote of East Coast animation a la the Fleischer or Van Buren studios, that sometimes incorporated the talents of true jazz legends to score their cartoons.

Oh, Scott Bradley did what he could to add as much brass that was needed, but Simple Simon, in NO way, sounded like Benny Goodman OR any member of his band. But then he is, after all, Simple Simon, right?

Oh, there I go again, over-analyzing, but you get the idea. This is actually the first truly unsettling, "non-musical musical" to come from MGM studios. Yet, they weren’t always good at making lack of talent really, really funny, even in their live action films. MGM films were slick and stunning. Even the cartoons made the viewer gasp with awe, even if the stories for some were almost non-existent in favor of spectacle.

You’d almost think that Milt Gross would be a welcome addition to the staff, but, again as outlined previously, none of the animation staff could really stand his single-vision attitude. It is true that, amid the long history of live action major motion pictures, one single-minded vision, uncompromised, ended up catapulting a film to major top drawer status, no matter how much feelings got hurt in the process; yet, the animated cartoon has almost never risen to that level and, at that period, the template was still unfortunately Walt Disney. Milt Gross was fighting against the odds on the West Coast, and in animation in general.

Even the Fleischers were starting to lose that edge, partially due to the Hays Code’s diminishing the power of their one truly lovable little vamp, Betty Boop. Disney had secured his hold on the industry and artists were consistently forced to emulate the man--even if they wanted to be more influential, and saw the art form as producing far more than cute little fuzzy animals. Why Milt Gross did not instead head over to Warner Brothers--where Carl W. Stalling would take hold and truly show that he and his orchestra could keep up with the increasing speed and zaniness of the cartoons as the 1940’s dawned, and a whole new age took hold and eventually eclipsed Mr. Disney and gave him pause for thought about use of true cartoon logic and comedy--is anybody’s guess.

Perhaps Milt Gross had apparently alienated enough people? I don’t know--and not wanting to just assume here, I’ll leave this for historians more knowledgeable than I to fill in the blanks. Those who succeeded him at the studio, just as color came back to the lavish MGM cartoons, weren’t nearly as wacky until Tex came aboard; and, with his amiable nature, made people change their outlook on the future of animated cartoons--even eventually influencing Mr. Bradley into speeding up those scores a bit to follow the quicker pace and scene-changes throughout each subsequent animated project.

Milt Gross is not to be forgotten, though. It is unfortunate that actual credits are too vague around the cartoons of this period, because some believe that Gross also had a hand in some of the CAPTAIN & THE KIDS cartoons of the time. I would guess that, perhaps, Milt Gross might have directed titles like “MAMA’S NEW HAT” and “THE CAPTAIN’S CHRISTMAS” (previously reviewed on our podcast over the Holiday Season) the first being the final black and white cartoon for the CAPTAIN & THE KIDS series, and the second being the first color title, and second-to-last cartoon in which we’d ever see these characters--with MGM having by then considered the series a failure. It might have been Gross who allowed the comic strip characters to go out with a bang, and that is worth something.

“JITTERBUG FOLLIES” is available on the set of MGM films starring the Marx Brothers, but we have yet to see the cartoon fully restored and we have yet to see “WANTED: NO MASTER” anywhere at all. Both are truly worth a look and listen as ours are only critical reviews--we're not trying to be the final word! These are worthy bits of the wonderful tapestry and colorful characters that produced and starred in the world of animation. The stories need to be told! Let’s get the stuff on DVD real, real soon! I think that MGM celebrates some sort of anniversary this year; I know that Warner Brothers is also doing some celebration as well. Let’s give all this stuff at least one last hoorah!!

Rachel is very much correct in that the rougher humor of folks like Milt Gross was an attempted turning point, but perhaps a bit too soon. His co-workers, Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera would quickly rise above him, and retain a slight hint of the elements that Gross brought to the table.


.But the pace seemed slower, and easier for the staff to take in going forward, until the way was more easily paved for the flamboyant entrance of the easy-going--but sometimes almost as harried--Mr. Fred “Tex” Avery well into the return to color. I just wish that Milt Gross had found a home by this time, too.

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