Yesterday here, we got to talking about comic actor Hugh Herbert who made a brief appearance on a Spike Jones TV show. That's Mr. Herbert you see above left and as I mentioned, replicas of him turned up in many cartoons. There he is above right as the King in Mr. Disney's 1938 Mother Goose Goes Hollywood. His trademark "hoo hoo" sound was evident in the early Daffy Duck and some say he inspired Curly of The Three Stooges, who was also something of a cartoon.
Back in the seventies when I was writing comic books of Bugs Bunny and Daffy and Woody Woodpecker and such, I occasionally was asked to do little appearances in classrooms, mostly for kids under the age of eleven, to teach them a little about cartoons and about how to draw. I did it because it was educational…for me. And also, I liked those rare times when I was in a crowded room and felt like I was probably the best artist there.
One thing that intrigued me was that as I drew Bugs and other Warner Brothers superstars, the kids would call out lines from their favorite cartoons…and without having the slightest notion of who the people were, they'd be doing impressions of Jerry Colonna, Hugh Herbert or other stars of the day who had their likenesses and catch phrases "borrowed" for Looney Tunes. I actually heard a seven-year-old kid doing Hugh Herbert at a time when a lot of adults didn't know or had forgotten.
Speaking of the Stooges as I was, Mr. Herbert spent the last nine or ten years of his life starring in short comedies for Columbia Pictures, working with the same folks who made the Stooges shorts there. They also employed a lot of the same sets and gags and actors. This one is Get Along, Little Zombie and the black guy, Dudley Dickerson, was in a number of Stooges shorts playing, as black folks did in those days, a wide array of servants and pullman porters.
He was pretty funny with whatever they gave him even if he had to do those now-cringe-inducing Amos & Andy readings and always looked terrified of something. He pretty much steals the short from Herbert but Hugh has enough to do that you should be able to see why he was a popular performer…