Why Woody Wouldn’t Warble

If nothing else, Walter Lantz was pretty astute.

He left Universal for United Artists, but when it turned out not to be a better deal, he stopped making theatrical shorts for about a year, built up some capital from reissues of old cartoons, and when he was in a better financial position, went back into production.

His only problem is his budgets had to be tighter than ever. He found one way of doing it, and solved two problems at the same time. He made Woody Woodpecker a pantomime character. That saved money, and made the cartoons more attractive to foreign exchanges.

Here’s Lantz chatting about it in a 1951 story by the Associated Press. Interestingly, it speaks of Grace Stafford as Woody’s voice. She certainly didn’t voice Woody in the theatricals prior to 1950; perhaps she was doing it in commercials.

This was published on March 22, 1951.

WOODY WOODPECKER'S PLIGHT
By GENE HANDSAKER
HOLLYWOOD (AP) — Woody Woodpecker has lost his voice. Not his raucous laugh — the soundtrack for that is the speeded-up voice of the wife of his creator, Walter Lantz. But no longer will Woody talk. And in pantomime, oddly enough, he's as funny as ever. Maybe funnier.
The expense of dubbing in foreign translations for exported prints inspired Lantz to try a wordless Woody. It costs about $1,500 to hire actors and pay technical costs of changing dialogue to, say, Italian, French, or German. With foreign restrictions on profit exports, that might be more than Woody would return.
The rascally red bird is popular also in Switzerland, Spain, Japan, the Scandinavian countries, Argentina, and India. Sometimes foreign-language subtitles were used, but Lantz thinks they interfere with the action. He's against too much talk even in feature pictures.
"We've all seen pictures that talk, talk, talk," the veteran cartoon producer said. "With less dialogue and more pantomime and acting, they'd be better pictures."
Lantz, 51 and graying, with friendly direct blue eyes, has produced about 700 movie cartoons in 35 years. That includes 55 Woody Woodpeckers in the last decade. The inkwell character was suggested to Lantz by a real woodpecker that woke him up by drumming on the roof of his week-end cabin. Woody's first appearance was as a supporting character to Andy Panda, but he soon stole the show.
Lantz, dissatisfied with his former releasing arrangement, recently took a year off from producing Woodies. Now he has signed a new contract for six a year with Universal-International and is redecorating and streamlining his studio for a busy output.

It’s a shame Handsaker’s story is so short. But he got a few chances to talk to Lantz again. Here’s a brief mention in his column from January 26, 1952.

Chit-Chat from Hollywood
By GENE HANDSAKER
HOLLYWOOD (AP)—If anybody boils at those middle commercials on TV shows, it's mild-mannered Walter Lantz. Says the producer of Woody Woodpecker and other screen cartoons:
"I don't know, what could be more disturbing. You're watching a drama. Some guy is all ready to be knocked off. Then another guy comes on and starts talking about ice-cold beer. This spoils the mood, and they don't pick it up again. I'm becoming a radio fan again-—because of TV commercials."
Lantz is turning out one-minute commercials plugging a soft drink and car equipment But he hopes they'll be used only once per program—and not in the middle. Incidentally, his cartoon star is just like the human variety when it comes to television. A releasing contract with Universal-International keeps Woody Woodpecker off TV.

Let’s pick up Handsaker again in 1967. By now, Woody was talking on screen again (with Grace Stafford’s voice) and had been since 1952. Lantz was still releasing cartoons to theatres and had managed, starting in 1957, to put Woody on TV in a half-hour show in which he was the host, to the delight of all kinds of kids. Woody was selling cereals for Kellogg’s on TV and bread for Butternut in print. There were comic books and merchandise to help add to the Lantz coffers.

Lantz’ career dated back to the silent era and he was honoured a number of times for his decades of contributions to animation. This Handsaker story was published May 21, 1967. You’ll notice the “Woody creation” story above now mentions that canard about a honeymoon. Lantz (and Gracie) related it time and time again for the rest of their lives. It simply isn’t true.

Luncheon Given At Universal For Walter And Gracie Lantz
By GENE HANDSAKER
HOLLYWOOD (AP)— Walter is 67, gray-fringed and shy. Gracie, 63 and jolly, kids him about the bags under his blue eyes.
"Walter was born with his eyes packed to go somewhere."
"No," he corrects merrily: "They've only been that way since I was 3."
One of Hollywood's happiest teams—in marriage, work and play—Walter and Gracie Lantz will be honored at a Universal City Studios luncheon next Wednesday for: —
—Their combined century in show business, and;
—Twenty-five years of their Woody Woodpecker animated cartoons, inspired by a bird that disturbed their honeymoon and has made them million-dollar rich.
Lantz, a son of Italian immigrants and onetime $10-a-week New York newspaper copyboy, got into cartoon animation at 16 and is the only pioneer still active in that field.
The former Grace Stafford entered vaudeville at 12 with her father, a blind pianist, and became a theater, radio and film actress. Of Irish descent, full of impish humor, she has been Woody Woodpecker's raucous voice for 17 years and cracks: "I'm the oldest woodpecker alive."
The Lantzes, introduced at a party, were married in 1941. A woodpecker that drilled holes in the roof of their honeymoon cabin—and that Walter couldn't drive away—inspired Gracie's suggestion: Make him a cartoon character.
"So I gave Woody a secondary part in my next Andy Panda, already a star for four years," Walter recalls. "The New York distributors said, 'You must be out of your mind; this raucous bird will never go.'
"But the preview crowds roared. Woody stole the picture and has been a star ever since."
Woody outshone other Lantz characters—Oswald Rabbit, Charlie Bear, Gabby Gator, etc.—and was the emblem of countless U.S. fighter planes in World War II. The Woodpecker Trail, a U.S. highway from Florida to North Carolina, bears Woody's likeness on its signposts urging careful driving.
Kay Kyser's "Woody Woodpecker" record, with Harry Babbitt cackling the vocal, led the hit parade for 13 weeks.
With 32 studio employes, Lantz produces 13 new Woody Woodpecker cartoons and reissues seven a year for theaters in 73 lands. A weekly Woody television show is seen in 200 U.S. cities. Walter makes his preliminary sketches.
Lantz, associated with Universal since his late friend Walt Disney left there in 1928, analyzes Woody's appeal: "He's a mischievous, likable person who does things we'd like to but mustn't."
Work requires only four or five hours a day for Lantz, who says: "You've got to have hobbies."
His include oil paintings— mostly still-lifes, which sell, to his amazement, for $500 apiece—fishing, with Gracie, who once landed a 110-pound sailfish with light line—and golf, which they both play.
"We're always having fun," says Walter, and Gracie echoes: "We enjoy everything—even catastrophes."
Golfing at Las Vegas when they heard the 1961 Bel-Air fire had destroyed 460 homes including theirs, they ordered drinks and the most sumptuous meal of their lives.
Walter is president and Gracie vice president of Walter Lantz Productions, Inc. As for any thought of retirement he says: "As long as I can entertain children, I'll keep going."

Lantz finally ended theatrical production in 1972. He crunched the numbers. It took him too long to see a substantial profit on new cartoons. He was content to have Universal release his back catalogue to theatres and make his money that way.

By every account I’ve read Walter and Gracie Lantz, especially during their senior years, were pleasant and delightful people who truly loved their cartoons and the effect they had on both kids and adults (even though the stuff in the last half of the ‘60s and in the ‘70s was completely forgettable).

Handsaker had a chance to chat with the Lantzs again. We posted it here. We’ve got more of Lantz’ comments from his retirement years we’ll save for a future post.

Try the Eel For a Meal

All kinds of great scenes highlight Daffy Duck’s debut in Porky's Duck Hunt (1937). One starts out with something you’d expect from Tex Avery—a sign to act as a helpmate to those in the theatre audience who can’t quite follow the action.



And in case we still don’t quite get it.



Daffy decides to have eel sushi for lunch.



Now comes the fun part.



Whenever you get annoyed about how Daffy’s character was reduced to being an angry, incompetent foe in some unfunny cartoons with Speedy Gonzales, instead think back to this cartoon, and let your memories of drunken fish singing “Moonlight Bay,” Porky pulling out the script or Daffy sliding around the closing title card overcome you. This is a great comedy that holds up 80-plus years after its release.

Bobe Cannon and Virgil Ross are the animators credited on screen but Bob Clampett, Chuck Jones and (I suspect) Sid Sutherland employed their craft on this one.

An Anvil Gag From Walt Disney

“When was the first anvil dropped onto someone in a cartoon?” you may be asking yourself. I’m afraid I don’t have the answer, but it goes back to the silent era.

In fact, that gag staple of the outrageous Tex Avery was used before him by the guy who is thought of as the polar opposite of Tex—that “illusion of life” man, Walt Disney.

Of course, there was a time before Uncle Walt wanted his animators to caricature real life. He went for the gag, like anyone else. In the 1927 cartoon Alice the Whaler, Walt pulls the old anvil gag (or maybe the new one, depending on when it was first used). What’s interesting is props appear and disappear during a scene on deck with a monkey. He’s pulling a rope. At least, he looks like he is. Then the rope fades in. He tugs at the stuck rope. Down comes the anvil. Bam! Then the anvil fades away.



This cartoon’s hit and miss. There’s a gag where a parrot eats musical notes. Yeah, that’s it. But there’s a bizarre one where a mouse shoves a plunger or something down a hen’s throat and forces eggs out of the other end.

I imagine Ub Iwerks, Hugh Harman and Rudy Ising animated parts of this one.

Fibber, Johnny O and the Best of Intentions

Intentions don’t always turn out to be practical or viable, as one discovers when they blog.

One of the things I wanted to do on Tralfaz was post some of the early columns by John Crosby, radio critic of the New York Herald Tribune (and its syndication service), considered by many to be the tops in his field at the time. There’s are a couple of problems, one which Variety mentioned in a column in 1946—readers may never had heard the shows Crosby talked about.

In looking over his five columns for the week of May 20, 1946, only one deals with a show that’s familiar to fans of old time radio, Fibber McGee and Molly. Another involves a long-running audience participation programme that’s obscure today called Ladies Be Seated. The other three are completely meaningless today: one critiques a WOR programme called A Voice in the Night, another talks about summer replacement music shows on some New York stations, the other counters radio misconceptions by the head of the Republican National Committee.

So long, intentions. I’m only going to transcribe the first two.

Fibber McGee and Molly had a spot on the radio dial starting in 1935 and ending after NBC unceremonious dumped it in 1959. By then, it had been stripped of virtually all its elements and was merely Fibber and Molly kibitzing in an empty studio for a couple of minutes on Monitor. No music. No Harlox Wilcox shoehorning in commercial mentions, no stooges to interact with.

Crosby wrote on May 20, 1946 about what made the show a success though, I would again add, the interaction with likeable secondary characters played a huge role.

Radio in Review
By JOHN CROSBY
Don Quinn Vs. Sinclair Lewis
The most popular program on the air today, according to both the Hooper and Co-operative Analysis of Broadcasting, is Fibber McGee and Molly, which, as practically every one must know by now, may be heard every Tuesday at 9:30 p. m. over WEAF and the National Broadcasting Company. There are several dozen other shows which imitate the Fibber and Molly formula as closely as possible, but none shares this show’s immense popularity.
Fibber and his cynical wife Molly are upper middle-class types that may be found in any small city. They know every one in town from the barber to the Mayor well enough to call them by their first names. Fibber has a finger in every one else’s affairs, meddles in politics, and become extraordinarily petulant when he fails to make the Elks barbershop quartet.

There is nothing startlingly different about this type of comedy. But, it appears to me, Don Quinn, who has written the show for the eleven years it has been on the air, knows his small cities more intimately that any other radio writer. Born and brought up in Grand Rapids, Mich., the son of the city manager, Quinn has first-hand knowledge of the make-up of a small American city and uses that knowledge wisely. Jim and Marian Jordan, who play Fibber and Molly, know their small cities, too. They are the most celebrated natives of Peoria, Ill.
Simplicity Plus Shrewdness
The average man in a small Mid-West community is a more complex personality than he first appears. His simplicity is always qualified by a deep shrewdness. His frequent bumptiousness is counter-balanced by a rich vein of humor. And, after all, his preoccupation with making the barbershop quartet is not less real and no more preposterous than that of many city slickers with making Winchell’s column.
By merely skimming the surface, I think most other radio writers on this theme miss the boat. Life in a small American city is not a collection of homespun jokes; it is, in fact, an intricate web of old feuds, lifelong friendships, local custom, and highly complicated family relationships. My own home town, Oconomowoc, Wisc., is a community of only five thousand persons, but it is as full of explosive cross-currents and power politics as was Versailles at the time of Louis XIV.
Mr. Quinn appears to realize this better than does any of his contemporaries. He is not, of course, writing a serious treatise on small city life but he is shrewd enough to make comedy of the genuine elements of that life rather than the city slicker’s comic strip conception of it. His Fibber is vain, loquacious, and frequently fatuous, but he is also shrewd, good-natured and very human.
Dialogue is Genuine
Let’s drop in for a moment at 79 Wistful Vista. Fibber is discussing the downfall of a local politician who was unseated by a man who waved a newspaper at his horse. “Ah, the power of the press,” says Molly. Fibber discusses the issues that marked a recent political rally. “Councilman Zimbelprang,” said Fibber, “spoke very highly of the American flag.”
There are not terribly funny gags, but they’re certainly genuine. They have an air of innocence and good nature about them that you might find in the conversation of any intelligent couple alive to the ludicrous elements of small-city politics.
Later the couple visit city hall and Molly inquires: “Who are all these people hanging around the corridor?”
“My dear,” says Fibber, “that is one of the great mysteries of all the city halls in the country. There is a theory that these people are just left over from the crowd of excavation watchers.” As the son of a city manager, Quinn knows his city halls.
Quinn’s scripts have a great many other qualities, but I’ll have to go into them some other time. Right now I have space for only one more thought on Fibber and Molly. When historians of the future write the story of the small Mid-West American community they would be well advised to read a couple of Mr. Quinn’s scripts after they finish the works of Sinclair Lewis. Lewis and Quinn are poles apart. The truth about the American small city lies, I should say, somewhere in between.

The following day, Crosby turned his attention to Ladies Be Seated, yet another programme centred on embarrassing people live on the radio. It was hosted, for a time, by Johnny Olson, who people today think of as a game show announcer. Olson kind of fell into that role on television after hosting shows on radio and early TV, some of them with his wife Penny. I’ve always loved Johnny O., but I’ve never been a fan of laugh-at-this-guy-we’re-turning-into-an-idiot programming. Crosby wasn’t either. Crosby seems to have stared at his radio in disbelief that something like Ladies Be Seated would even be broadcast.

Radio in Review
By JOHN CROSBY
How Not to Spell Meringue
The audience participating show is a sort of opiate of the housewives which afflicts the air waves far too much of the daytime hours. Because so much broadcast time is now devoted to these shows, I can’t ignore them entirely, but they make a tough subject for review.
For some time I have been staring, bewitched, at my notes on a program called “Ladies, Be Seated.” The program simply defies rational comment so I give you instead a simple description.
When I tuned in, the audience, which is largely composed of housewives, was singing in a variety of keys a song whose closing lines were, “Ladies, be seated, and we’ll all have a wonderful time.” A numbing experience for the ears.
* * *
Like virtually all these programs, this one trafficked heavily in young married couples. On this day the master of ceremonies, a hearty fellow named Johnny Olsen [sic], plucked from the audience two such couples—one married two days, the other married five.
They were asked to judge a fashion show, which neither couple had done before. While a bevy of Billy Rose showgirls paraded by, the bridegrooms attempted to describe the costumes.
“Looks like she just got out of a zoo,” said one.
“Well, she’s got a lot of feathers on,” remarked the other.

“Keep your eyes off the girls and on the costumes,” warned Mr. Olsen, who never speaks much lower than a scream. “Go ahead, describe her while she tries to entice you with her lovely costume and—shall we say—her personality.”
One of the husbands responded to this invitation with a low whistle, which perhaps described the girl more aptly than the dress.
“Two days married and he’s speechless,” yelled Mr. Olsen, and presented him with a thermos bucket. The other people got nylon raincoats.
After the fashion parade came the selection of the singing housewife of the day. Several of the housewives sang a phrase or two of “Pack Up Your Troubles In Your Old Kit Bag,” and the audience selected the winner by some criterion which eludes me. The singing housewife of the day was awarded a lapel watch, a corsage, and a man’s watch.
* * *
The nub of the “Ladies Be Seated” program comes very close to the end of the half hour. Mr. Olsen gleaned several more young couples from the audience and outlined a quiz contest in which, to quote Mr. Olsen, “the wives must hit the answer or the answer hits the husband.”
The first question was: What are the two elements contained in water? I was under the impression that every one who completed eighth grade knew the answer to this one but it developed, neither housewife had any idea. Since the wives missed the questions, the husbands got hit with the answer, This consisted of the husbands breaking bags of water over each other’s heads. Then, Mr. Olsen asked the girls to spell “meringue,” as in lemon meringue pie. The first one spelled it “merine”; the second got as far as “m-a- and then gave it up as an impossible task. Therefore, the husbands obligingly pitched lemon meringue pies at each other. I’m not making this up. This actually went on.
In the general hilarity that followed the spectacle of two men smearing each other with lemon meringue, I missed the third question. Whatever it was, it got the right answer: the second one missed. The husband of the second thereupon had a feather pillow broken over his head to add, as it were, a sort of icing to his drenched and meringued exterior.
As a reward for all this he was given an umbrella. It seems scarcely worth it. How, I keep asking myself did he get home from the broadcast looking like that? The only suitable conveyance for a man covered with feathers is a rail. I shouldn’t be at all surprised if sponsors of “Ladies, Be Seated” took him home that way.

Below, you’ll find the week’s other three columns (22nd through 24nd) if you are really interested.

As mentioned above, the intention was to occasionally give you a roundup of some of John Crosby’s early columns. As not mentioned above, the other problem is as of this writing (and this was written way back in January), I no longer have access to the source material and it doesn’t appear it will return. As stated off the top, intentions don’t always turn out to be practical or viable.

Ring Her In

What was Krazy Kat’s girl-friend’s name in the Mintz cartoons? Someone out there must know.

Here she is in the 1931 short Svengarlic (the title character eats garlic through the cartoon). Krazy is an artist who has brought her up to his studio. They kiss and morph into a wedding ring.



Krazy’s eyes turn into rubbery telescopes later in the cartoon.



Ben Harrison and Manny Gould are the only people to get credits besides Joe De Nat, who composed the musical score. Mendelssohn’s “Spring Song” is one of the background tunes.

Longnecker

Who says there’s nothing worth watching in a Buddy cartoon? How about these perspective drawings in Buddy’s Bearcats when the ticket seller at the baseball park tries to haul back in an obese customer?



Even better quality screen grabs wouldn’t save this 1934 cartoon. One gag is a guy watching the ballgame through a knothole in the fence swaying his butt for, well, who knows why? A wiener dog comes up against him and lets the guy’s wagging butt scratch his back.

Jacob Henry Ellis’ 1921 song “The Drum Major” is heard behind the ticket seller scene. Norman Spencer’s score also includes: “Out For No Good” from the 1934 Warners’ feature 20 Million Sweethearts (during the aforementioned rear end scene and elsewhere), “Hit Me Again” (A. Wrubel), “The Campbells Are Coming” and what I guess is a Spencer original song during scenes selling hot dogs and pop, and announcing the starting battery.

What? No Ad-libs?

Radio grabbed the big vaudeville stars and then the movie industry grabbed the big radio stars and transported a fair percentage of them from New York City to Hollywood.

Among them was Jack Benny. For all intents and purposes, his New York radio career ended in 1935. He returned east for about 3½ months in 1936 but, realistically, the only time he went back to New York was for personal appearances, a film premiere or, later, to do his first television shows (there was no cable from Hollywood to send them to the network at the time).

Benny’s film mix-it-up with Fred Allen, Love Thy Neighbor, premiered in New York in 1940, so Benny and his cast went back for a week. He had spent three weeks in the city earlier in the year when Buck Benny Rides Again debuted in Harlem.

One New York columnist complained Benny didn’t say anything amusing after getting off the train at Grand Central Station. His comments are on an earlier post on the blog. The reporter for PM said basically the same in his story of December 14, 1940, but explains why he’s not bothered about it. And he gives you an indication how incredibly popular Jack was then.

Benny Can't Ad Lib ... Not Even a Burp
Jack Benny et cie. (Mary Livingstone, Phil Harris, Dennis Day, Don Wilson and Rochester) arrived here the other day from Hollywood for tomorrow night's premiere of the Benny-Fred Allen picture, Love Thy Neighbor, at the Paramount. Last night, an hour before Benny was scheduled to broadcast for Jello from NBC's Ritz Theater (WEAF 7), West 18th St., outside, was jammed with humanity.
For this lone New York broadcast some 10,000 persons had asked to sit in a theater which seats only 700. For this one broadcast an estimated 34,000,000 persons throughout the U. S. A. were sitting at their radio sets.
There is no doubt about it. The nation's choice as the funniest man in the land is Jack Benny, a silver-gray, fattening, 46-year-old ex-vaudeville violinist and patter man from Waukegan, Ill., who now collects about $12,500 a week from the radio.
The funniest thing about all this is that Jack Benny (born Benny Kubelsky), a big, fingernail-biting fellow who also chews two-for-a-quarter cigars (Santa Fe's), is not a funny man at all.
One night, when Fred Allen was ribbing him unmercifully in a joint broadcast, Benny came through with perhaps the only good ad lib he ever got off. And that was born of despair. "If I had my writers here," Jack moaned, you wouldn't talk that way to me."
"Benny," concluded one Harry Conn, who used to write gags for Jack, "couldn't ad lib a belch after a Hungarian dinner."
But despite Benny's lack of humorous spontaneity, one fact should be noted here. There is nobody in the whole, wide variety world who can time a gag or two-time a double take the way Jack Benny can.
The formula for the Benny show has seldom varied in the six years it has been on the air for Jello. Phil Harris poaches on Jack's romantic preserves, Rochester loses the house money in a crap game, the quaking old Maxwell collapses whenever the drive it into the script, and when Jack's ego reaches a zenith, Mary Livingstone, Jack's wife (nee Sadye Marks) punctures it.
That's the way Harry Conn devised it nine years ago, when Jack first took to the air for Canada Dry. And that's the way Bill Morrow and Ed Beloin, present senior and junior writers of the Benny entourage, have kept it.
In real life, Benny, who probably retains about $7000 a week after paying the cast, is the same sort of fretful, unsatisfied guy he is on the air.
He plays no sports, but when he is home in Beverly Hills he goes for walks with his trainer. His major delight is his six-year-old adopted daughter, Naomi Joan.
Naomi Joan calls him Old Daddy Jack.

Booting a Puss and an Animation Career Into High Gear

Puss Gets the Boot changed the MGM cartoon studio forever. But not right away.

The cartoon was released on February 10, 1940. It wasn’t on the studio’s 1939-40 twelve-release schedule unveiled by Variety on October 9, 1939. It was on the schedule by December (Showman’s Trade Review, Dec. 2, 1939) and the cartoon was profiled (with cel set-ups) in the January-February 1940 issue of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Short Story, an internal magazine (which trumpets it as “Rudolf Ising’s latest cartoon” and calls the characters “Jasper,” “Pee-Wee” and “the housekeeper”). It’s clear the cartoon was ready before the start of the year.

What else is clear is that someone at MGM decided to allow a former storyman from Terrytoons and a failed MGM director to make a cartoon, at the very least on a trial basis. At the time, the Metro cartoon division was rife with politics and turmoil. I’d love to know exactly how it was that Hanna and Barbera became directors.

After Puss was released, Variety announced on March 23rd that Hanna and Barbera would receive their own unit and leave Rudy Ising’s. Their first cartoon was to be Swing Social, without Tom and Jerry (it starred fish in blackface); it was one of the 12 cartoons announced the previous October.

Interestingly, the Associated Press did a story on the unknown Hanna and Barbera. The premise seems odd. The author says people saw Rudy Ising’s name on the screen but wondered who designed the characters. Wouldn’t they think it was Ising? Weren’t these the same people that thought Walt Disney was the driving force behind all his cartoon shorts because his name was the only one on the credits? We printed part of the story on the Yowp blog some years ago. We’ve found a longer version since. It appeared in papers starting May 5, 1940.

New Cartoon Enters Movies
By HUBBARD KEAVY
HOLLYWOOD, May 4 (AP)— A very entertaining cartoon making the rounds now deserves some belated attention. Its title is "Puss Gets the Boot."
One gets so accustomed to seeing the "credits" at the beginning of pictures, looking for names of neighbors and fellows we have met, that when there are no names he is curious and a little disappointed.
The credits for "Puss" are conspicuous by their absence. At the beginning, it says a man named Ising produced the picture for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer but more than one person wondered who conceived the characters and the plot and directed the story and, in addition, told it with such simplicity that it will not confuse children—nor bore adults.

The answer is a pair of young fellows, Joe Barbera, who used to work in a bank in New York, and Bill Hanna, who started his film career as a janitor in a cartoon studio the day after he got out of high school.
From now on, because "Puss" is so good, Joe and Bill are a team of producers and they will have their names in large letters on every picture they make.
GET LARGE JOB
They expect to turn out six a year, which is a large undertaking, though they do have "inkers-in" and animators and photographers to perform the routine of giving life and illusion to thousands of little drawings.
Joe, who is 29 years-old, is one of the few who is both artist and story constructor. He had sold some drawings to magazines in New York while working in the bank. He went to a film-cartoon factory when the bank, for reasons of economy, reduced the number of its employees. That was five years ago.
DOESN'T DRAW MUCH
Bill doesn't draw much, but he's done about everything else in film cartooning. He and Joe, working at sundry tasks in the one-reel department, complemented each other so well that the boss, Fred Quimby, put them in the same cubbyhole office. Joe and Bill now are working on their fifth picture and the way they get them up is so unusual that it demands telling.
With their feet on their desks, they begin tossing ideas and suggestions back and forth. Bill may say, being one who prefers colloquialisms, "That's swell," or if it isn't, "That smells." Joe is a neat, precise fellow who works with his coat on, a handful of sharpened pencils and a fine regard for the King's English.
ONE SKETCHES, ONE TALKS
Barbara sketches while Bill talks. In four or five weeks, they have a rough draft—in black-and-white sketches—of the picture they intend to make. They have the sketches filmed, which is a new technique and their own idea, and thus they have a preview of the story before getting into, the expensive part of production.
One-reel cartoons cost from $30,000 to $35,000. These "rehearsals" cost about $3,000 and Joe and Bill say, with the time and effort they save by "getting rid of the bugs" first, they're able to effect quite a savings. Their finished cartoons average about $25,000. In the cartoon business, they speak of "arty" pictures which stress color and odd camera angles and freaky stuff, as "cloud effects."
SCENERY IS SECONDARY
Joe and Bill pick simple characters as the cat and the mouse in "Puss" and animate them against simple, unpretentious backgrounds. The "actors" never get lost in a maze of scenery, something which will give their pictures an unconscious appeal to the younger customers. And, says Joe:
"The idea is to make them funny. The purpose of the cartoon is to make people laugh. That's all we're trying to do."
Joe and Bill don't give a hang for "cloud effects." They can have more fun on the good old terra firma.

What did reviewers have to say? Most liked the cartoon.

“The animation of this item is the usual cat-plays-with-mouse stuff with the tables eventually reversed. The coloring is fine. Humor with injected with sly ingenuity. Ideal for the children.” (Boxoffice, March 23, 1940).
“Here is a lively color cartoon which should draw chuckles from any audience. A cat plays with a mouse until the mouse becomes desperate. However, the cat is threatened with eviction if he continues to break dishes around the house, and the mouse seizes the opportunity to avenge himself on his tormentor. Very clever animation.” (Motion Picture Daily, March 5, 1940).
“The characters are three in this ingenious and really humorous Technicolor cartoon; the cat, the mouse and the menacing feet of an old colored servant. One is pleased to see the little mouse win, although the rules were not written by the Marquis of Queensbury.” (Motion Picture Reviews, May 1940).
“In this Rudolf Ising pigmented pen point of a cat and mouse game, the little rodent comes out of the fray victor over his feline tormentor. How the victim turns the tables on his tormentor results in a gay, brightly tinted and sketched bout. Especially clever is the portrayal of the smug superiority of the cat dictator.” (Motion Picture Herald, March 9, 1940).
“This is a dandy color cartoon. A very different type of humor predominates this in which a mouse discovers one way to keep an advantage over a cat. You'll like it and so will your audience.—W. Varick Nevens, III, Alfred Co-op Theatre, Alfred, N.Y. (Motion Picture Herald, March 23, 1940).
“One of the best cartoons in many months. An idea with laughs aplenty. Play it.—C.W. Davis, Rockingham Theatre, Reidsville, N.C. (Motion Picture Herald, April 6, 1940).
“As good a cartoon as you will play this season. Very funny. —A. J. Inks, Crystal Theatre, Ligonier, Ind. (Motion Picture Herald, May 25, 1940).
“The poorest of this series. Color not so good as most of them and plot below average.—Gladys E. McArdle, Owl Theatre, Lebanon, Kansas (Motion Picture Herald, June 1, 1940).

There was one other review that seemed to mean more to Metro than anyone else. Besa Short, who booked shorts for the Interstate chain of theatres, wrote the studio to ask when more of the cat-and-mouse cartoons would be coming. According to Bill Hanna’s autobiography, that’s when the studio figured the characters had better make a return to the screen.

Puss Gets the Boot was nominated for an Oscar but lost in February 1941 to another MGM cartoon. MGM then announced, as reported by Motion Picture Daily on May 20, 1941, that it was starting “an extended two series cartoon program.” One was to star Tom and Jerry. “Titles of the cartoons planned for this group are ‘Midnight Snack,’ for release this month, ‘Comrade Nix,’ ‘Fraidy Cat,’ and ‘The Girl Friend.’” Midnight Snack came out July 19th, Fraidy Cat was released Jan. 17, 1942. It’s tough to say what the other two were.

Puss was re-issued as late as the 1962-63 season, when it appeared on screens along with the Gene Deitch Tom and Jerrys.

It’s a good thing Fred Quimby listened to Mrs. Short. If he hadn’t there would have been no more Tom and Jerry cartoons, meaning there would have been no Hanna-Barbera partnership, and that meant there would have been no TV animation studio which opened in 1957 which changed television cartoons forever.

Pipe Dream Bull

A hallucination brought on by smoking a pipe is the best part of appropriately-named MGM cartoon Pipe Dreams, though it takes about a minute and a half before the plot gets there.

Characters are made out of various tobacco products. The dream begins with discarded cigar butts as singing hobos. They meet up with a bull formed out of a pouch of tobacco, a pipe, a pipe cleaner and matches (a nod to Bull Durham tobacco).



The bull chases them. The hoboes jump into a covered ashtray for safety. The bull tries to slow down to avoid crashing into it. The friction causes the match-stick feet to catch fire.



Too late.



The crash separates all the parts of the bull and there’s a quick pan to some fancy pipes where the various parts land.



This cartoon was released in 1938 after Harman and Ising had been dropped by the studio and before they were hired back after two new studio bosses (Milt Gross and Harry Hershfield) didn’t work out.

Scaredy Ghost

There’s a ghost hiding in a closet in Who Killed Who?, the great Tex Avery Detective Story. When the bulldog detective realises it’s a ghost, he shrinks and runs away.



The ghost thinks being scared is really funny, until (s)he sees a mouse. (The ghost starts out with a man’s voice but switches to a woman’s for the purpose of the next gag).



Hey, ghost! A theatre audience is watching you and can see you’ve pulled up your skirt.



Yeah, that’s right. See for yourself.



The ghost suddenly turns modest.



The cartoon has no animators credited. Ray Abrams, Ed Love and Preston Blair, I suspect.