The Name Game

We all love Wile E. Coyote, the long-suffering Road Runner chaser. But, uh, what does the "E" stand for?

I guess I don't know. I mean, none of the cartoons directed by Charles "Chuck" Jones and written by Michael Maltese ever said. Only a couple of them ever even said his name was Wile E. Coyote.

But it has just (this morning) been brought to my attention — thank you, Devlin Thompson — that more than a thousand websites say the Coyote's middle name is Ethelbert. The source for this is a 1973 story that appeared in the comic book, Beep Beep the Road Runner, published by Western Publishing Company under its Gold Key imprint. This is noted by Jon Cooke over on this page and as he also reveals, it was the question/answer to the Final Jeopardy question on the 1/18/07 episode of the game show, Jeopardy!

In the story, which was called "The Greatest of E's," Wile E. Coyote realizes he doesn't know and gathers together some of his relatives to answer the question. One is an uncle named Kraft E. Coyote who informs him and the world that the "E" stands for Ethelbert. That is, as far as I know, the only piece of fiction licensed or otherwise blessed by the Warner Brothers company that ever said such a thing.

This raises one of those moral issues that has no firm answer. What makes something like this an "official" fact in the world of animated cartoons? I mean, we know Bugs Bunny is named Bugs Bunny because…well, we just know. But what is the name of the frog that sings and dances in the Jones-Maltese masterpiece, One Froggy Evening? It's Michigan J. Frog, right? Apparently…but that name appears nowhere in the cartoon. As I understand it, the moniker was coined years later when there was some merchandising interest in the character…or maybe when W.B. decided to try and generate some merchandising interest. Chuck or Mike may have come up with it then or someone at WB may have and then Chuck and Mike endorsed and used it…but anyway, that's the frog's name. I suppose. I mean, if the guys who made One Froggy Evening didn't argue the point, who are we to say it isn't?

For that matter, even if some "fact" appears in a cartoon that doesn't make it inviolable. There were WB cartoons where Sylvester the Cat could talk and was owned by Granny. There were others where he couldn't talk and was Porky Pig's cat. Quick: If I asked you, "Who owns Sylvester?," you'd probably forget about all cartoons to the contrary and say it was Granny, who also owned Tweety. There were Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck cartoons where for no apparent reason, those characters lived in other eras. Elmer Fudd had a couple of different middle initials in different shorts and characters' appearances were often changing and we could list hundreds of other inconsistencies. The films weren't intended to have an airtight continuity from one to another. Some "facts" were meant to be forgotten.

It was the same with the comic books. Western Publishing licensed the right to do comics of those characters for around thirty years, and the editors at Western thought of the comics as separate entities from the cartoons. The Donald Duck that Carl Barks and others wrote and drew for Western's Disney comics was not exactly the same Donald Duck that appeared in the Disney cartoons. They adapted the character, rethinking and redesigning him for a different medium. (It's a funny thing: When I was a kid and read Bugs Bunny comic books, I always "heard" the wabbit's dialogue in Mel Blanc's voice from the shorts. But when I read a Donald Duck comic book, I never thought that duck spoke with the voice Clarence Nash supplied for Donald in his cartoon appearances…maybe because I understood so little of what the animated duck said and I could read every syllable of the comic book Donald's word balloons.) In some ways, the Donald of the comics was the same character but in others, he was a different but similar creature. And I never quite related the Mickey Mouse of the comic books or strips to any of his animated appearances.

While Western was doing the Warner Brothers-based comics, they changed a lot of the characters to make them — they thought — more workable for print media. They didn't think matching the cartoons closely mattered because, for one thing, those films weren't on TV every week then. During the forties and early fifties, they weren't on TV at all. Many of the kids who bought the comics rarely, if ever, saw the animated shorts and certainly didn't see them over and over and over, like they would in later years. So it didn't matter a whole heap if the comics matched the cartoons; only that they worked as comic book reading experiences. Back then in the Bugs Bunny newspaper strip, which was read by millions, Elmer Fudd rarely appeared and I don't think Yosemite Sam ever did…but Sylvester was a regular. He was a hobo who wasn't owned by Granny, didn't chase Tweety Birds and who had a British accent. Someone thought it made for a better strip that way.

This is why, for instance, the Road Runner in comic books differed so much from the Road Runner in cartoons. When I was a kid enjoying both, I was puzzled. I'd seen Road Runner cartoons. They were tough to come by then but I'd caught one or two and in them, there was one Road Runner and one Coyote and neither spoke. In the comics, the Road Runner not only spoke, he spoke in rhyme. He had a name — Beep Beep — and in some stories, he had a wife and a family of either three or four youthful road-running kids. The Coyote spoke too, though not in rhyme, though that didn't bother me as much. The Coyote had spoken in a couple of non-Road Runner cartoons.

I wondered aloud back then if the folks who made the comic books had ever viewed one of those hard-to-see cartoons — but of course, they had. As I learned much later, Michael Maltese wrote many of those comics and the early ones were drawn by Pete Alvarado. Pete handpainted all the backgrounds for the first Road Runner cartoon, Fast and Furry-ous. Almost all the other writers and artists who did the comics (Phil DeLara, Don R. Christensen, Warren Foster, et al) had worked for the Warner Brothers cartoon studio, if not in Jones's unit then right down the hall. They knew that in the cartoons, the Road Runner didn't talk — in rhyme or at all and it had been a conscious decision to change it for the comics. The editors and creators had also decided to not worry about consistency from comic book to comic book. In some, there was a Mrs. Road Runner and four kids. But there were several years there where the wife and one of the kids disappeared…except that every now and then, they'd inexplicably turn up for a story or two or in a reprint sandwiched in among new adventures.

So as far as I'm concerned, it's no more a "fact" that the Coyote's middle name is Ethelbert than it is that the Road Runner is named Beep Beep, has a wife and kids and speaks in doggerel. It said the "E" stood for Ethelbert in one comic book story but that's just one obscure comic book story…and even the guy who wrote it didn't intend it as anything more than one joke on one page of one story in one issue.

How do I know this? Because, as some of you may have guessed by now, I was that guy. I wrote that story. I think I was around twenty years old at the time. I'm pretty sure, by the way, that that one was conceived in a lecture hall at U.C.L.A. while I was simultaneously jotting down script ideas and feigning attention to what a tedious Anthropology professor was teaching. Mike Maltese had been occasionally writing the comics in semi-retirement before me…but when he dropped the "semi" part, I got the job and that was one of the plots I came up with. For the record, the story was drawn by a terrific artist named Jack Manning, and Mr. Maltese complimented me on it.

Still, I wouldn't take that as any official endorsement of the Coyote's middle name. If you want to say the Coyote's middle name is Ethelbert, fine. I mean, it's not like someone's going to suddenly whip out Wile E.'s actual birth certificate and yell, "Aha! Here's incontrovertible proof!" But like I said, I never imagined anyone would take it as part of the official "canon" of the character. If I had, I'd have said the "E" stood for Evanier.

Today's Video Link

Here's another Raid commercial. I don't think Tex Avery directed this one. I'm including it mostly because the parody of the song, "M.T.A.", is so bizarre.

I think the one word the mouse yells — "Raid!" — is Mel Blanc — probably lifted from the track for another Raid commercial — but you can't always be certain with one word. I'm more intrigued by who the singer is. Is that Glenn Yarbrough of the Limeliters? Or is it someone doing a great Glenn Yarbrough impression? And "M.T.A." was a hit for the Kingston Trio. I think the Limeliters performed it occasionally and may even have recorded it…but why have Yarbrough (or someone imitating him) perform a commercial parodying a rival group's hit?

I don't expect answers to any of this. I just think it's strange…or at least, strange enough to be Today's Video Link. You might as well click. It's only forty seconds.

Today's Video Link

After he stopped making wonderful theatrical cartoons, director Tex Avery made funny animated commercials for a while. This is one of a long series he did for Raid, house and garden bug killer. Raid hunts bugs down like radar and kills them dead. And what's more, Raid won't oil-stain draperies or furniture. Not only that but outdoors, Raid won't harm plants. Isn't it wonderful?

The voice of the smaller bug is Mel Blanc, the voice of the larger bug is Paul Frees, and I'm guessing it took them a long time to record this spot. Maybe three minutes. I believe the announcer is William Schallert, who somehow managed to be on every TV show made in the sixties at one time or another. I don't know why they didn't just have Paul or Mel do all three parts but I guess they had a little cash to throw around on these. When I worked with Tex years later, he told me he made three times as much money doing a 30 second spot like this as he had for directing all seven minutes of Little Rural Riding Hood or Bad Luck Blackie or any of those great cartoons.

Here's the spot…

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Jim Backus

Folks are writing to remind me of a couple of other animation voices that Jim Backus performed in his career. He was in a Disney short called Plutopia that was made in 1951 and while doing the Magoo cartoons for U.P.A., he also appeared in a couple of that studio's non-Magoo cartoons. I still find his employment record in the field rather unusual. From the forties through the sixties, the "talent pool" for cartoon voicing in Hollywood was pretty small and anyone who was good enough to get repeat work from one studio was routinely working for many studios. Paul Frees reportedly once remarked that Mel Blanc's exclusive contract with Warner Brothers was a good thing for other voice actors…because if Mel hadn't had that deal, he would have had all the jobs in town.

They don't seem to be anywhere on the Internet but there are some hysterical audio recordings floating about of Mr. Backus doing his Mr. Magoo recordings. Reportedly, his deal called for pretty low money but Jerry Hausner, who directed the sessions, had it in his budget to take Backus out before and fill him with liquor. If you factored that in, Backus was apparently pretty expensive talent. Sometimes, Hausner overfilled and his star would require dozens of takes, venturing deep into filthy terrain. The joke around U.P.A. was that if business ever got bad, they could stop making cartoons and just release the voice session tapes as "party records." They'd have made a fortune.

For a while, the official Jim Backus filling station seems to have been a restaurant called The Smoke House that's still in business over in Burbank, right across from Warner Brothers. Someone should write an article about the role this place has played in the history of comic books and animation. U.P.A. was right next door and many other animation studios were close enough that it became a major lunch spot and watering hole for cartoonists. In fact, the editors from Western Publishing (Dell Comics, Gold Key) would frequently lunch there because some of the artists drawing their comics were working days at the studios and editorial business could be transacted there — scripts or checks handed out, artwork turned in, etc. — over a meal. Also of course, everyone liked the food there…especially the garlic bread, which is still quite wonderful.

Hanna-Barbera was not far away and when I was working there, I'd lunch at least once a week at the Smoke House. I always ran into other folks in the cartoon business there — often, Bill Hanna or Walter Lantz — and sometimes saw Jim Backus. He wasn't doing Magoos at the time but he'd be at the bar, tossing back a cocktail and joking with everyone. You'd hear the distinctive laugh of the Nearsighted One cackling throughout the restaurant and I always meant to go over, buy him a beverage and just thank him for being Jim Backus. Somehow, I never felt it was the right moment. Years later, when we started Garfield and Friends, I tried to hire him for a voice job but his agent said the man's health was just not up to it. Another one of the many "waited too long" experiences that we all have and regret so.

From the E-Mailbag…

David Cook read the previous item about the Aladdin-type movie with Phil Silvers in it and writes to ask…

There's a Fifties Bugs Bunny cartoon with a genie who is more like Phil Silvers than anyone else. Did that tie into this movie?

I don't see any particular connection. Phil Silvers doesn't play the genie in A Thousand and One Nights and I don't recall any plot similarities, although the time frame isn't far off. A Thousand and One Nights came out in 1945 and the Bugs Bunny cartoon you're recalling — A Lad in His Lamp — came out in October of 1948. A very rough rule of thumb on Warner Brothers cartoons of this period is a year lead time from when the gag men were writing the film to when it reached theaters. But I still don't think one had anything to do with the other.

The most interesting thing about A Lad in His Lamp — and here I go veering off on trivial tangents again — is that the voice of the genie was done by Jim Backus. He's not credited, of course, but it's definitely him and it may have been his screen debut. He was a radio actor before then and this was a full year before the first Mr. Magoo cartoon appeared.

What's odd is that Mr. Backus gave this wonderful performance as the genie in that cartoon, and then became a cartoon voice superstar as Magoo…but never really did anything else in cartoons; not until 1974 when Filmation turned Gilligan's Island into the first of two animated series. Backus was constantly doing animation voicing during the interim but only as Magoo. Maybe it was because he was so prolific as a film and television actor…but you'd think Warners would have used him again or Disney would have had him play a role in some movie or something of the sort.

Nope. In a 41-year career doing cartoon voices, Jim Backus seems to have played only four roles: The genie in that Bugs Bunny cartoon, Quincy Magoo in hundreds of cartoons, Thurston Howell III in The New Adventures of Gilligan (1974) and Gilligan's Planet (1982) and Gamun the Rat in a 1984 feature, Enchanted Journey. Backus was the only other actor besides Mel Blanc to regularly receive credit on animated theatrical shorts…but in four decades, he voiced fewer characters than Mel usually did in one cartoon.

Today's Video Link

If you enjoyed yesterday's clip with Mel Blanc and Johnny Carson, you'll probably like this one of Mel Blanc with his longtime employer, Jack Benny. You'll even get to hear the English Horse impression again.

This runs ten minutes and it's from Benny's last TV show of 1956. The first half is Mel playing an impersonator of animal sounds. Note that he and Mr. Benny have a bit of trouble getting through it without breaking up.

If you want to stay tuned for the second half, you'll see some (not all) of a bit Benny did with "The Landrews Sisters." There's an interesting bit of history to this piece. It was originally written for Benny by a writer named Harry Conn, who authored all the early Jack Benny radio programs. Jack did some version of it throughout most of the live performances he did from about the mid-thirties until the last times he played Las Vegas in the seventies. The name of the act kept changing to keep up with the times. Near the end, they were called The Smothers Sisters.

The three ladies in the video are, left to right, June Earle, Iris Adrian and Muriel Landers. I don't know anything about Ms. Earle but Iris Adrian had a long career playing wisecracking waitresses and chorus girls. (She was the waitress that Walter Matthau flirts with in the delicatessen in The Odd Couple.) Muriel Landers had a long career playing fat girls and was even a regular briefly on Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In. She was so often cast when they needed a fat girl that casting agents used to refer to those as "Muriel Landers roles," which was a nicer way of saying, "Get me a fat girl."

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Today's Video Link

This video is badly edited but there's enough good stuff in it to make it linkworthy. It's an appearance Mel Blanc made with Johnny Carson, demonstrating pretty much the same voices he did on every talk show appearance he ever made. Even the bit at the end where they pretend Johnny's throwing a curve at him is an old bit but, hey, it's Mel Blanc. There's a reason he was the top voice guy in the business.

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Today's Video Link

I actually never saw this before I spotted it on YouTube. It's the opening to the 1988 Yogi Bear Show and it's made up of clips from classic Yogi cartoons (many of them from the feature, Hey There, It's Yogi Bear) and a pleasant, newly-recorded rendition of Yogi's theme song.

Joe Barbera always resisted when people asked him to name his favorite character. It was the one they were currently working on, he'd say. But I'm convinced that if you'd strapped him down and pumped him full of sodium pentothal, he'd have told you Yogi was his fave. A couple times, we got to talking about that bear and you could always see the man's face light up. It was the only Hanna-Barbera character I ever heard him imitate. Of course, some of that may have been because Yogi was the studio's first superstar.

J.B. and I had an interesting conversation one day about Yogi. In some of his cartoons, Yogi is a real operator, largely in control of the situation, able to con tourists out of their pic-a-nic baskets and to snow the Ranger and not get punished. In others, he's something of a victim, unable to escape from Jellystone Park or getting repeatedly blasted and mauled by the crew of a movie shooting in the park. I generally preferred the competent con artist Yogi and wrote him that way whenever I wrote him…but I had to ask Mr. B. why the inconsistency.

He was startled by the question and admitted he'd never noticed the change. At the same time though, he acknowledged it was a valid observation and he began puzzling it out. After a pause, he said something like, "I think the problem was that we weren't used to doing cartoons for television then. We'd been doing the Tom and Jerrys and you never worried about that kind of thing because no one ever saw the films again. They ran and then they went away so if you had a funny idea, you just did it. Once we got established in television, we learned that these things would be rerun over and over so you had to be consistent from one to another."

That sounded like a good explanation to me…and as I type it here, it occurs to me that it may also be a partial answer to a question I was asked the other day on Shokus Internet Radio. A caller asked why Barney Rubble's voice changed so much from week to week during the first season of The Flintstones even when it was still Mel Blanc doing it.

Anyway, here's the opening to the '88 Yogi Bear program…

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Today's Video Link

I have in the past linked to several of the Private Snafu cartoons produced for the U.S. Army during World War II, primarily by the same folks making the Warner Brothers cartoons. Less well known is that that studio (Leon Schlesinger's company) also did a few shorts in a series for the U.S. Navy. It featured a a sailor named Mr. Hook and his voice was supplied by Arthur Lake, who was then appearing on-screen and on radio as Dagwood Bumstead in the Blondie series. Very little is known about the Hook series other than that Hank Ketcham, who later created the Dennis the Menace newspaper strip, was among the writers.

There were three or four Hook cartoons made. This one is called Tokyo Woes and it reportedly was directed by Bob Clampett, though I don't see a lot of his style evident in it. Apart from Hook, all the male voices are Mel Blanc, including the cameo of the Sad Sack character that Mel was then performing on radio. The female voice appears to be that of Sara Berner.

I guess I should warn you before you click that this is an extremely racist, Japanese-hating cartoon. Okay, you've been warned. Go ahead and click.

Today's Video Link

Don't click below unless you're prepared to watch fourteen minutes of vintage commercials, starting with Rocky Graziano playing an old sea captain who sells Sugar Crisp. Later on, you'll hear comedian Jack E. Leonard as a mailman who sells Post Alpha Bits and a spot with Rory Raccoon (who I think is voiced by Mel Blanc with a "speed up" assist) selling Post Toasties Corn Flakes, plus there are a lot of great ABC promos and Marx toy commercials and things that may make you say, "Hey, I remember that one…" But don't click 'til you're ready.

By the way: I think a couple of these are repeats from other recent compilations to which I've linked. Don't complain. It's free.

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Today's Video Link

Today, you get another one of those slightly-randy Private Snafu cartoons which the Warner Brothers Animation Department whipped up during World War II to entertain our troops and deal with possible morale problems. Mel Blanc provides all the voices for "The Home Front," which was directed in 1943 by Frank Tashlin. Tashlin, who went on to write and direct live-action features with the likes of Bob Hope and Jerry Lewis, was a pretty good cartoon director who's never quite received his due. (For more on the history of Pvt. Snafu, see this post.)

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Today's Video Link

Whadda ya think? Wanna see another one of those Private Snafu cartoons that the Warner Brothers guys produced during World War II? Okay, just for you: Snafuperman is unusual in that it references another studio's films — the Superman cartoons being produced for Paramount we've been watching here lately — and even uses a few bars of the theme song for that series, presumably with their permission. This one came out in 1944, directed by Friz Freleng. Mel Blanc did most of the voices but there are a couple of lines in there from Tedd Pierce, who was one of the WB gag men and an occasional voice actor. (One other example: Pierce did the voice of the Bud Abbott type cat in "A Tale of Two Kitties," which we linked to here.)

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Today's Video Link

It's cartoon time! This is Fresh Hare, a Bugs Bunny cartoon directed by Friz Freleng. It was released on August 22, 1942 and as you can probably guess, Mel Blanc is doing the voice of the Wabbit and Arthur Q. Bryan is doing the voice of the Fudd. Michael Maltese is credited with the story but I believe this was from the period when every gag man on the premises collaborated on the story and then they just rotated who got screen credit. Have a nice time…

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Today's Video Link

We need a cartoon here, I think. This weblog doesn't feel right without a cartoon on it once in a while. This is A Day at the Zoo, a Warner Brothers cartoon directed by Tex Avery and released on March 11, 1939. There are no credits on this print but if there were, they'd say that the animation was done by Rollin Hamilton and that the story was by Robert Clampett and Melvin Millar. Clampett was already directing his own cartoons by this time and I have no idea why he received story credit on a Tex Avery cartoon. Voices were by Mel Blanc and Dave Weber, with Gil Warren as the narrator. Dave Weber, who also went by the name of Danny Webb, was the guy they usually called in when they needed a celebrity voice impersonation in those days.

That's about all you need to know right now. Enjoy the cartoon.

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Today's Video Link

We seem to have a Theme Week going here, the theme being "Warner Brothers cartoons directed by the late 'n' great Bob Clampett." This is A Corny Concerto and it was the WB team's response to Disney's Fantasia with Elmer Fudd assuming the role that Deems Taylor filled in the Disney film. Mr. Fudd displays somewhat more charisma than Mr. Taylor.

Fantasia, in case you're interested, had its world premiere on November 13, 1940. A Corny Concerto came out in August of 1943…and you have to wonder if by then, most people who saw the parody even knew what it was a parody of. Fantasia was not terribly successful so a lot of folks didn't see it. Others had probably forgotten it by the time the Clampett version appeared. Still, it's a pretty funny film even if you don't know the Disney effort.

Arthur Q. Bryan provided the voice of Fudd. Since Bugs Bunny has no dialogue, this makes it (I think) the only Bugs cartoon produced during Mel Blanc's lifetime that didn't require his services. Let's take a look at it.

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