Let's take a minute and watch Bucky Beaver sell Ipana toothpaste. Most of these ads were produced by a special division that Mr. Disney had in his studio during the fifties. It produced commercials, many of them with animation and graphics that did not fit the established Disney look or quality of movement. A gentleman named Charles A. Nichols — everyone called him "Nick" — was the main director there, having earlier distinguished himself as the director of some of the better Pluto cartoons. Like many animation folks of his generation, Nick closed out his career working on Saturday morning cartoons for Hanna-Barbera. (He also directed for Ruby-Spears. Remember that story I told here recently about one of the first cartoons I wrote and how its voice director was rude to actress Janet Waldo? Well, Nick was the animation director of that particular cartoon. Had he also directed the voices, he would have been much nicer to Janet.)
Another animation vet who worked for a time for H-B was Tex Avery. In fact, Tex and I briefly shared an office at the studio. Once, I eavesdropped as he and Nick got into a friendly argument about Disney's commercial division. I wish I could recall it in better detail but basically, Tex was needling Nick, telling him that that was where Walt stuck artists because they weren't good enough to work on Sleeping Beauty or because they were in need of a good spanking…or both. Nick knew Tex was ribbing him but he still repeated, over and over, that the commercial crew was full of talented people and that it was encouraged to be more experimental. With television becoming an increasingly important marketplace, Walt wanted to see if his people could do limited, lower budget work that would be acceptable as Disney animation. (The premise, I guess, was that the commercials didn't count as Disney animation since they were commercials and since most people didn't know what studio had done them.)
Tex had nothing against doing commercials. He'd done an awful lot of them, himself, including the Raid spots like the one I posted here not long ago. He was just having fun kidding Nick and imitating an imaginary Walt Disney bellowing, "We can't put Nichols on the important stuff. Put him in the garage where we make commercials for bran flakes!" Later, when Tex wasn't around, Nick admitted to me that there was a little truth to the joke; that Walt did stick some people in that department to keep them away from the work he cared about. I'm pretty confident Nick was not one of them.
Anyway, that's what came to mind when I came across this clip you're about to watch. The announcer you'll hear at the beginning is Jimmy Dodd, who was the adult host of The Mickey Mouse Club. And the voice of Bucky Beaver is Jimmy Dodd sped up a little. Here's Bucky trying to get us to brusha brusha brusha with the new Ipana…
