Hey, let's have us another Bob Clampett cartoon! This one is also from World War II. It's called Falling Hare and sources say it was released on either October 23 or 30 of 1943. Most of the animation is by Rod Scribner, Robert McKimson and Bill Melendez, and all of the voices (both of them) are by Mel Blanc. During production, the film was called Bugs Bunny and the Gremlin but Mr. Disney was developing a gremlin feature at the time. That film was never completed but he somehow persuaded Leon Schlesinger, whose studio was then making the cartoons for Warner Brothers, to change the name of the Bugs Bunny cartoon you're about to watch. Go ahead and watch it.
Well, if you've been watching the elections, you deserve six and a half minutes of something that has nothing to do with politics…six and a half minutes of something wonderful. You deserve to watch A Tale of Two Kitties, the Warner Brothers cartoon that introduced Tweety…and also two cats named Babbitt and Catstello who sound amazingly like Bud Abbott and Lou Costello. Mel Blanc, who often appeared with the non-feline versions, supplied the voice of the Costello Pussycat and also did Tweety, who did not have a name at the time. The Abbott imitation was done by Tedd Pierce, who was one of the storymen who wrote gags for the WB cartoons. He often turned up in them as a voice actor, as well.
The film was directed by the great Bob Clampett, even though you won't see his name on it. This is from a "Blue Ribbon" print of the cartoon, meaning that it was a reissue, put out a few years after the fact with new title cards. (The cartoon was originally released on November 14, 1942.) This was one of the films Bob was really proud of…one of the ones he often ran at festivals and lectures in the seventies. Somewhere in this article, I wrote about an incident that occurred one time when he ran it at a show I helped organize.
Rod Scribner and Robert McKimson were the main animators and I think that's all I have to tell you about it.
Fred and Barney selling Welchade Grape Drink. Alan Reed does the voice of Fred. The dinosaur's sounds, the dialogue by the vendor and the voice of Barney all come from Mel Blanc. More than that ye need not know…
Here's an early commercial for Kellogg's Froot Loops with Mel Blanc doing the voice of Toucan Sam. (I think that may be Lucille Bliss doing the two baby toucans but it's hard to tell.) A little later on, someone decided that T.S. should sound like Ronald Colman and his voice was thereafter done by Paul Frees. After Mr. Frees passed away, a couple of different folks imitated him imitating Ronald Colman but for the last decade or so, it's been Maurice LaMarche doing the honors. We'll be back right after this brief word from our non-sponsor…
Here's another one of the Private Snafu cartoons that the Warner Brothers animation operation produced during the last World War. For some background on this series (and another cartoon) see this earlier post.
This one is entitled "Spies," it runs four minutes and it was released in August of '43. It was directed by Charles M. "Chuck" Jones and written by Ted "Dr. Seuss" Geisel, Phil Eastman and the gag men then working on the Warner Brothers cartoons. Carl Stalling did the music and even incorporated a few lines of "Powerhouse," which was the tune he usually used whenever there was machinery or anything mechanical. In this short, it's heard as Snafu melts the padlock in his brain with whiskey.
Mel Blanc provided all the voices, including those of Snafu and Hitler. Mel did a pretty good Hitler, don't you think?
Here's a brief interview with Peter Cullen, a fine voiceover performer. Peter played Venger on the Dungeons & Dragons cartoon show (which'll be out on DVD in December, they're now saying) but his big animation role was Optimus Prime on The Transformers. Wise people now doing the live-action movie of that property have seen fit to engage him again…because it just won't be Optimus Prime if it doesn't sound like Cullen.
There's an unfortunate tendency in the movie business to think of voice actors as not real stars. If Mel Blanc were still around and they were making a big Bugs Bunny feature — especially if it was live-action and therefore a bit removed from the old context — there'd be some studio exec who'd say, "Hey, can we get Mel Gibson to do the rabbit's voice? Or one of those Wayans Brothers?" What they don't realize is that the character is the star and the voice actor is an integral part of the character. They also don't realize that voice actors are stars, too. In fact, they're big stars…huge stars.
Stars in Hollywood are judged by how their movies gross. If you're in a movie that takes in $600 million, you're a bigger star than someone who was in a movie that took in a measly $300 million. If you're in a number of movies that take in a lot of money, you're a bigger star that someone who's in a lesser number of movies with lesser receipts. Stars are hired and they command top salaries because of their past grosses.
Now…suppose you fed into a computer the cast lists of all the movies and cross-indexed that with the grosses. Wouldn't it be interesting to see who was in the cast list of movies that had collectively grossed the most money? Can you guess where I'm going with this?
Here are the box office grosses going back a couple of decades for my pal — and maybe the best voiceover actor ever — Frank Welker. If you go by this, he was the number one grossing actor of the nineties, ahead of Tom Hanks, Samuel L. Jackson, Robin Williams or Bruce Willis…and I'll bet the total for Frank is, if anything, low. He was in a lot of movies for which he did not receive credit. (Okay, so some of his standing is due to sheer volume. When you only work one or two days on a movie, you can be in a lot of them. But it's still an interesting way of looking at the situation.)
And it's also kind of neat to note that Stan Lee is, at the moment, #20 on the Box Office List for this decade, ahead of Ben Stiller and Eddie Murphy.
Hey, whadda ya say we watch a cartoon? The Private Snafu shorts were made between 1943 and 1945, mainly to be shown to our fighting men overseas. Some were a bit educational and some were intended to drill some message into the soldiers' heads…but all were intended to be primarily entertaining. To that end, the War Department allowed the filmmakers to be a little more adult in their humor. Bob Clampett, one of the directors who worked on them, said that they became a repository for many of the jokes they dared not put into the cartoons they were making to be shown in American movie theaters.
Frank Capra had the original idea for the series and Theodor "Dr. Seuss" Geisel was their main writer. There is some dispute as to how much of Geisel's work made it to the screen and how much was supplemented by gag writers at the Leon Schlesinger cartoon studio, aka Warner Brothers. Schlesinger got the contract — which was originally expected to go to Disney — by underbidding Walt, then he turned the project over to his staff of directors: Clampett, Chuck Jones, Friz Freleng and Frank Tashlin. Mel Blanc supplied the voice of the hapless Private Snafu, who sounded very much like Bugs Bunny.
This one is entitled Booby Traps and it was directed by Clampett and released in January of 1944. The narrator you'll hear is a man named Robert C. Bruce, who usually narrated travelogues for a living, and who was used by the Schlesinger/WB studio whenever they did a travelogue parody, which was often for a while there. The cartoon will teach you a lesson that we all learned well from later Warner Brothers cartoons; that you should never, ever play "Those Endearing Young Charms" because the last note of the first line is always hooked up to explosives. That joke certainly did not come from Dr. Seuss.
We pause now for a commercial interruption. The Flintstones, who you'd think would know better, are still selling Winston cigarettes. Alan Reed is the voice of Fred, Mel Blanc is Barney Rubble and the little bird, and the voice on the record is Paul Frees in what I suspect is the first time he was ever connected with a Hanna-Barbera product. We'll be right back after this message…
Before there was Dick Cheney, Elmer J. Fudd held the title of World's Most Famously Inept Hunter. Mr. Fudd was in that select (pre-Simpsons) group of cartoon characters who managed to become immortal without being either a super-hero or an animal. There were many reasons for this but the main one was probably Arthur Q. Bryan, who originated and performed the addictive Fudd voice. Over at Animation World Network, Martin "Dr. Toon" Goodman provides a much-needed historical overview of Bryan and of Fudd…the man and the myth. Go read it and then come back here and I'll try to clarify the matter of Elmer Fudd's other voices.
Back so soon? Okay, fine. After Bryan died in 1959, Mel Blanc became the main voice of Elmer Fudd. Dr. Toon cites the oft-repeated story that Mel had to be convinced to take on the role because Mel didn't like doing impressions of others. I don't think that last part is quite true. Mel did lots of impressions throughout his cartoon career, including Lou Costello in A Tale of Two Kitties and radio actor Kenny Delmar in every single Foghorn Leghorn cartoon.
In fact, well before Bryan's death, Mel did a few Elmer lines in the 1950 Daffy Duck extravaganza, The Scarlet Pumpernickel. He also occasionally picked up a line in a cartoon where Fudd was otherwise voiced by Bryan. (Best example: In What's Opera, Doc?, when Elmer yells "SMOG!," that's Mel. Tapes were recently found of Bryan recording the same line so apparently director Chuck Jones wasn't happy with how Bryan did it and had Blanc redo it at a later session.) Bryan was commuting a lot to New York during the fifties, appearing on TV shows that emanated from the East Coast, so he was not always available.
Elmer and Arthur
That was presumably why Bryan did not do Elmer's voice in the 1958 Pre-Hysterical Hare. The role was played by comedian-impressionist Dave Barry, and you can read about Mr. Barry here. As you'll see there, Barry told me he also did Elmer in a couple of kids' records. Elmer is in a couple of the WB records produced for Capitol in the fifties but they all seem to be Bryan. In one though — "The Bugs Bunny Easter Song" — Bryan does Fudd's voice and Bugs Bunny is voiced by Barry.
As Goodman notes, Bryan's last performance as the Mighty Elmer was in the 1960 Person to Bunny. There was apparently some talk among the creative folks of just abandoning the character after that but Warner Brothers quickly vetoed that notion. For obvious reasons, they didn't care for the precedent of losing a valuable merchandisable property just because someone had died. What would happen when Mel went?
They not only insisted Fudd continue but that he be uncharacteristically featured in some cartoons. So Elmer lived to appear next on The Bugs Bunny Show, which was produced in 1960 for ABC Television, and in some Kool-Aid commercials that ran initially in that program. In these, he was occasionally voiced by Blanc but mainly by Hal Smith, who's best known today for his role as Otis the Town Drunk on The Andy Griffith Show. Smith also played Elmer in the two theatrical cartoons in which Elmer was starred. These were the 1960 Doggone People and the 1961 What's My Lion? (Blanc's in both and the latter also features Herb Vigran, who I mentioned in the previous item here.) and then Mel seems to have had the role to himself until his death in '89.
Some history books say Daws Butler did Elmer's voice after Bryan died…and Daws also said so, too. To date though, no one seems to have figured out where this performance might have appeared. Daws was an honest guy with a good memory so the logical conclusion is that he recorded a soundtrack for something, perhaps for Pre-Hysterical Hare, and it was discarded.
And that's pretty much all I have to add about Elmer Fudd…especially since I just noticed it's 2:30 in the A.M., which is no time for an allegedly grown man to be posting Fudd history on the Internet. Sweet dweams, my fwiends.
Bob Thompson was one of the great composers and arrangers of fifties pop music and also of commercial jingles. In the sixties, he wrote the music for a fun little record album called That Agency Thing, which was kind of an audio musical about the ad agency business. I gather it was mainly intended as a showpiece for the writing of Alan Alch, who wrote the sketches and lyrics. Mr. Alch was also a noted writer of jingles and TV themes (he composed the theme song for the Chuck Connors show, Branded). Together, they produced this catchy record that utilized the vocal skills of some top voice actors of the sixties — Byron Kane, June Foray, Paul Frees, Howie Morris and Herschel Bernardi. And yes, the mention of Mr. Bernardi in the previous item is what reminded me that I wanted to link to this.
I'm generally against the downloading of record albums on the Internet but since Mr. Thompson's company has put That Agency Thing on his website, I guess it's okay. You can listen to it or download it here.
Also, Bob Bergen (the current voice of Porky Pig) calls my attention to this page where one can listen to many an episode of The Mel Blanc Show, a radio program that Mel did in 1946 and 1947. As Bob notes, it's fascinating to hear so much of Mel flexing his comedy and vocal skills.
Mr. Bergen, by the way, will be a panelist on one of the Cartoon Voice panels I'm hosting at the Comic-Con International in San Diego. We have a good crop of actors who will be demonstrating how they do what they do. If you've never attended one of these, you've missed some of the best panels at the convention. Don't continue to make that mistake.
A quick one today. It's Mel Blanc's commercial for the American Express card.
Mel told me that it got him more recognition (in terms of people knowing who he was visually) than everything else in his career combined. He also said that it made it impossible for him to use any credit card anywhere without people making remarks. If he used his American Express card, they said something about it — "So this is the famous Mel Blanc American Express card!" And if he used a Visa or MasterCard, of course, they said, "What's wrong? You leave home without it?" But he was very happy he'd done the spot. Here 'tis…
In 1964, the Post cereals people — who practically owned Saturday morning TV, advertising-wise — decided to stop having their commercials interrupted by irrelevant programming. They funded a series called Linus the Lionhearted, starring the character who was then famous only for appearing on the box and in the commercials of their cereal, Post Crispy Critters. In fact, the whole show was filled with faces that adorned Post cereal boxes and ad campaigns…Lovable Truly the Mailman was selling Post Alpha Bits, Little So-Hi appeared for Post Rice Krinkles, Rory Raccoon was the spokesanimal for Post Toasties and Sugar Bear was always hawking Post Sugar Crisp.
Oddly enough, the series was not bad at all…cleverly-written and well-animated…at (reportedly) a budget three times the size of what Hanna-Barbera was then spending to make a cartoon. The great animator Irv Spector was in charge of production and it shows. He also tapped Hoyt Curtin, who did such a fine job providing music for H-B shows, to do the honors for Linus.
And they got some great people to do voices. Sheldon Leonard, best known for his on-screen gangster roles and his behind-the-scenes producer status on The Dick Van Dyke Show, The Andy Griffith Show and many others had been portraying Linus in the commercials. He kept on doing so and brought along Carl Reiner to voice many of the supporting characters. I'm guessing they also had something to do with the occasional appearances on the show by Jonathan Winters, who popped in, usually to play an evil giant in a So-Hi cartoon. Most of the other characters were voiced by Bob MacFadden (who was sometimes referred to as the Mel Blanc of the New York cartoon voice community) and Gerry Matthews, who did the Bing Crosby imitation as Sugar Bear.
Linus the Lionhearted made it through its first season or two without too many people wondering aloud if it was good to have a kids' show where it was difficult to tell where the commercials stopped and the entertainment content began. The show shifted to ABC in '66, by which time no new episodes were being made. By 1969, the F.C.C. was cracking down on children's shows that blurred the line between ads and programming, and that pretty much was the end of the Linus the Lionhearted series even in reruns. Years later, this policy was reversed, which made possible the infomercial, televangelists and shows funded by toy companies to promote their wares, such as G.I. Joe and The Transformers.
Featured here today is the opening to the Linus show, followed by a commercial spot. Leonard does the voice of Linus and I'm not sure who did the voice of Billie Bird, the obnoxious fowl who hangs around with him. Carl Reiner did the voice of Billie in some cartoons but that's not him. It may be Ed Graham, an ad agency guy who produced the series and who turned up in several episodes playing different characters. It might also be Jerry Stiller who, with spouse-partner Anne Meara, provided occasional voices. Lovable Truly, So-Hi and Rory Raccoon are all voiced by MacFadden and Sugar Bear was, as noted, Gerry Matthews. Oh — and if you listen to the theme song, you may pick out one of the singers…the legendary Thurl Ravenscroft, who provided the voice of Linus's arch-rival, the other great cereal-selling jungle cat, Tony the Tiger. Let's roar…
What we have here is a clip from The Tonight Show for January 23, 1974. Johnny Carson's guests that night included Jack Benny, Mel Blanc, Maria Muldaur, Dr. Irwin Maxwell Stillman and Jim Henson…and this is Henson's spot with Kermit the Frog. You can see a bit of Benny at the end.
It's really world-class puppeteering. Henson was not a ventriloquist but he manipulated Kermit so well and gave him so much personality that you never really notice that Jim's lips are moving. (Although I always suspected that he grew the beard and mustache, which he did not have when he first began appearing on television, because they helped hide his mouth.) It's also quite charming that Kermit forgets the lyrics to his signature song…
Eleven of you have written since last night to say that I forgot one prime-time network animated show that came between the cancellation of The Flintstones (it went off in '66) and the debut of The Simpsons (it went on in '89) and you pointed to Wait 'til Your Father Gets Home, which aired from 1972 to 1974. Well, you're right and you're wrong. Wait 'til Your Father Gets Home was a Hanna-Barbera production which starred Tom Bosley as the voice of a working class guy. The show was created by the team of Harvey Bullock and R.S. Allen, who wrote some wonderful things both for animation and live, and the show was largely styled by the great magazine cartoonist, Marty Murphy. The advance publicity made it sound like it would replicate All in the Family as much as The Flintstones had echoed The Honeymooners but that wasn't particularly evident in the show when it got on the air.
It was not, however, really a prime-time network show. It was syndicated. In the early seventies, the F.C.C. instituted its Prime Time Access Rule, which forced networks to cut back on their evening programming, effectively returning a half-hour each night to local stations. This caused a flood of syndicated shows to be created for those time slots and Wait 'til Your Father Gets Home was one of them. Most of the NBC affiliates bought it and ran it Tuesday evenings at 7:30 so it may have looked like a network show…but it wasn't.
But I'll tell you what was. The messages about Wait 'til Your Father Gets Home reminded me that Hanna-Barbera produced ten episodes of a show called Where's Huddles? that ran on CBS in 1970 as a summer replacement (remember summer replacements?) for half of The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour (remember Glen Campbell? For that matter, remember Goodtime Hours?). This one was about football players and it starred the voice of Cliff Norton as Huddles, who for some reason looked but did not sound an awful lot like Walter Matthau. Mel Blanc did the voice of his buddy Bubba, and they had a kind of Fred-and-Barney relationship. This was probably quite intentional on Joe Barbera's part. Blanc, of course, was the voice of Barney Rubble and Cliff Norton had once been up for the role of Fred.
(Here's a quick trivial aside of the kind for which this weblog is famous: Throughout the development of The Flintstones, Hanna and Barbera were highly sensitive about getting close to The Honeymooners without getting too close. The original pilot had Daws Butler doing the voices of Fred and Barney, and June Foray as Wilma, and both Daws and June did the same impressions of Jackie Gleason, Art Carney and Audrey Meadows that they'd done for the Warner Brothers cartoon series, "The Honeymousers," which had been done with Mr. Gleason's blessing. It's just a theory, but probably a good one, that Daws and June were replaced because H-B was worried that the use of them would make it too easy for Gleason to take legal action. Anyway, Cliff Norton auditioned for both Fred and Barney, and I'm just wondering if they thought to call him in — and maybe if they ultimately rejected him — because his name recalled Carney's character on The Honeymooners, Ed Norton. Did they perhaps want him for Barney — he would have been great in the part — because Hanna said to Barbera, "We can't hire a guy named Norton to play a character we may have to swear in court was not inspired, even unconsciously, by a character named Norton"? Maybe, maybe not. I once startled Mr. Barbera by asking him if the name "Barney Rubble" was a conscious in-joke because it rhymed with "Carney Double." He did a Tex Avery-style double-take and swore to me that no one had ever brought that up before…but allowed as how it may have been a subliminal confession.)
Sorry, where was I? Oh, right: Where's Huddles? Well, that one was a pretty quick flop but it was a prime-time network animated show so I should have mentioned it. And now, I should get back to a script that's due.
Here's a fuzzy video clip of Peter Tomarken from Press Your Luck. What happened on this episode was that a wrong answer was given to a question about Warner Brothers cartoon characters. The producers realized the mistake during the taping and since the game had run short and they had time to fill, they arranged for a phone call from Mel Blanc to correct the record. Let's go to the videotape…
