It’s Hummer Time Backgrounds

The Bob McKimson short “It’s Hummer Time” (Warner Bros., 1950) is known for the somewhat sadistic penalties a cat is forced to pay by a bulldog (“No! Not happy birthday!”). But the cartoon opens with some attractive backgrounds over which the hummer (ie. a hummingbird) swoops.



The hummingbird reads the slogan of Arrid Deodorant.



The bird zooms up to the bird bath. You can see how the animator has stretched him.



Dick Thomas painted the backgrounds from layouts by Cornett Wood.

Remember, Doc, Keep Smiling!

Happy Easter, Bugs! Three consecutive frames from “Easter Yeggs” (released 1948).



The only credited animators are Izzy Ellis, Dick Bickenbach and Chuck McKimson.

And here’s Elmer Fudd’s Easter home. Layout by Cornett Wood, background by Dick Thomas.

QTTV and the Irvin Jay Story

There are a couple of inside jokes at play in the Bob McKimson cartoon “Video Wabbit,” which opens with Bugs Bunny reading an ad looking for a rabbit to appear on TV.



You’ll notice the address of the TV station is 1351 North Van Ness. That was the address of the Warners cartoon studio. But by the time this cartoon was released in 1956, Warners had moved its studio to Burbank. Warners turned the old Van Ness building into—a TV station. But the station was KTLA. QTTV was a smirking reference to KTTV, the Los Angeles Times’ station which had brought Angelenos the fine programming of the Du Mont Network.

Here’s Bob Thomas’ rendering of the QTTV building which bore no resemblance to the old Warners cartoon studio on Van Ness. Layout by Bob Gribbroek.



Incidentally, this is one of the two cartoons where Irvin Jay filled in for Treg Brown as the sound cutter. Irvin Frederick Jay (Sr.) was getting close to 50 when he worked on this short. He was born September 27, 1908 in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, the third child of William Harrison and Elizabeth S. (Weber) Jay. His father was a bookkeeper who later became treasurer of a bond company. Around 1915, the family moved to Miami. Jay’s aunt was acclaimed director Lois Weber and he moved in with her and his grandmother in Los Angeles, likely by 1927 when the Times reported he attended the opening of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. Jay was employed in 1940 as a sound cutter as a motion picture studio (and making more money than his father at the time). Whether he was Brown’s assistant or had come over from the main Warners lot for a brief time to work on cartoons, I don’t know. He died in Los Angeles on April 29, 1981.

Cat-Tails Background

“Cat-Tails For Two” is the first Speedy Gonzales cartoon, evidently thought of by director Bob McKimson as a one-shot character, like the crow in “Corn Plastered” (1951). Speedy was rescued a few years later by Friz Freleng, redesigned by Hawley Pratt and sent on his Merrie Melodies way to the podium at the Oscars. That assured Speedy of his continued appearances in cartoons, eventually to be bastardised into a ridiculous and boring series with Daffy Duck in the mid-‘60s. The less said about those cartoons, the better.

The short opens with a pan over a dockside background, painted by Dick Thomas from Bob Givens’ layout.



“Cat-Tails For Two” was the final cartoon released by Warners for the 1952-53 season (August 29, 1953). If you’re curious about the origin of the name Speedy Gonzales, feel free to check out this book on the web. The term was known on the Great White Way; Walter Winchell reported in his column of December 2, 1952 that “Paul Hartman was In and Out of ‘Two’s Company’ so fast the Lindians are calling him ‘Speedy Gonzales.’”

Thanks to Matt Hunter for some memory-jogging background for this post.

Arch in the Latin Quarter

If you’re going to set a cartoon in Paris, you’d better have an appropriate opening. And that’s what you get in Bob McKimson’s “French Rarebit” (1951). Gene Poddany plays ‘Latin Quarter’ over the opening titles and then Milt Franklyn changes the arrangement for the start of the cartoon, which features a fairly literal drawing of the Arc du Triomphe.



Layout man Cornett Wood has the arch set at an angle. The background was painted by Dick Thomas.

Animator Mark Kausler informs me Wood had a storefront under the Hollywood Freeway on Cahuenga Blvd. where he taught drawing into the late ‘60s. Indiana’s Laughmakers, The Story of over 400 Hoosiers by Ray Banta reveals the following:

Cornett Wood went on from John Herron Art School of Indianapolis to become one of the animators for the fabulous Walt Disney production, Fantasia. The feature released in 1940 was called “a tribute to the brilliance of Walt Disney’s staff of artists and animators.” It involved a series of visualizations of musical themes. Wood worked as an effects animator at Disney from March 7, 1938 to September 12, 1941.

After which, he found himself at the Schlesinger studio.

Wood was born September 12, 1905 and died in Los Angeles on May 16, 1980.

Incidentally, if you want to learn more about the Latin Quarter (the area in Paris, not the song by Warren and Dubin), drop by this web site.

A Bick and Some Chicks

Frank Tashlin doesn’t have anyone cradling large milk bottles against their chest like he did with Jayne Mansfield in ‘The Girl Can’t Help It’ but you don’t have to look far to find a sexual subtext going on in his cartoon ‘Swooner Crooner.’ Well, maybe it’s more aptly deemed a sexual sub-subtext because the cartoon’s all about female fertility (though no offspring result). Hens that were laying eggs for Porky suddenly stop when a Frank Sinatra rooster shows up. The early ‘40s stereotype of Sinatra gets played up—frail and not terribly manly. You know, someone who wouldn’t induce fertility in women.

Then along comes the Bing Crosby rooster, who casually arouses the hens into renewing their fertility and pumping out endless stacks of eggs. The Hens Can’t Help It. And who better than the Ol’ Groaner? His wife Dixie Lee had four sons by the time this cartoon was released in 1944.

(You’ll notice I’ve avoided any comment about the use of the word “lay”)

We get a bra and panties joke.



And then there’s the famous “between-the-legs” shot as the camera pulls back to demonstrate another of Tashlin’s fixations—camera angles.



In the finale, the crooner roosters prove to be so hyper-masculine when combined, they even make men (or, rather, a male pig) fertile like a female chicken.



Nice use of coloured filters in the shot. Presumably, Tashlin handled his own layouts. Historian Graham Webb says Dick Thomas did the backgrounds.

Of course, Sinatra and Crosby don’t supply their stand-ins’ singing voices. Tashlin didn’t have to look far to find his Crosby. He used Dick Bickenbach, who was animating for Friz Freleng unit but ended up in the Tashlin unit. Bick toddled off to MGM in 1946 to replace Harvey Eisenberg doing layouts for Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera, then stuck with the pair when they opened their own studio.

Bick sang for his wife’s mixed fraternal group and in a church choir—he came from a fairly religious background—but he was also a vocalist on radio before he got into the animation industry. The newspaper back home in Freeport, Illinois published this story on January 12, 1926:

RICHARD BICKENBACH TO BROADCAST SONGS TONIGHT
Richard Bickenbach, son of Fred Bickenbach, formerly of Freeport and now a resident of California, will be on the air tonight and doubtless many of his friends in this city will listen in. The young man is to broadcast several songs from station KTBI, Los Angeles, between 11 and 12 o’clock, Freeport time, tonight. He is said to have an excellent voice and has been heard over the radio several times in the past few months.

Bick was born August 9, 1907, so he was 18 at the time. He lent his Crosby-esque tones to several other cartoons, if the voice experts are correct. He died June 28, 1994. You can read more about him here.

An Egg Scrambled Background

Here’s the kind of thing people never noticed until the advent of home video when they could stop scenes and peer at them for a bit.

In the Warners cartoon ‘An Egg Scramble’ (1950), Prissy the Hen escapes from a house with her precious egg that a housewife was about to boil. She thinks the cops are after her. She runs down the street and hides in a garbage can. There’s a cut to another scene, then back to Prissy jumping out of the garbage can and running down the street some more. Only the two garbage can scenes don’t have the same background.




I suspect this was done because Prissy runs across a street and to the steps of a rundown old building. Having both scenes on one background would have made for a long drawing, so two different backgrounds are used instead. Who would notice?

The layouts are by Cornett Wood and the backgrounds by Dick Thomas. I’m led to believe they were both in the Frank Tashlin unit when Bob McKimson took it over in the mid ‘40s.

The animators in this one are Phil De Lara, Chuck McKimson, Bill Melendez, Rod Scribner and Emery Hawkins. I suspect the animator of the Prissy in the first scene above is different than the one in the scene below, where there’s a fluid take and then Prissy cradles the egg like a football with one hand, uh, wing and the other to the front.

There’s an inside joke with a store called “Foster’s Fresh Eggs” (Warren Foster wrote the cartoon). My favourite background can’t be clipped together but here’s the end of it. There’s a farm road with a barbed wire fence in the foreground, and barns and stacked wheat in the background. The countryside abruptly ends at the city limits and there are cars, buildings and a strip club on a corner.



Bea Benaderet plays all the different hens in the cartoon though, inexplicably, Prissy’s voice is her’s in a couple of scenes and Mel Blanc’s in the rest.