Pop Up Rabbits

“Delightful whimsical satire on Johann Strauss and the composition of his famous waltz, ‘Tales of the Vienna Woods’,” is how Variety termed the George Pal Puppetoon “Mr. Strauss Takes a Walk.”

Strauss turns into a human metronome at one point in the cartoon but the most interesting part to me was how rabbits popped up out of the ground. Not out of a hole. They just grew up out of the ground. And they obey the rules of squash and stretch. These are eleven consecutive frames.



This wasn’t Pal’s only encounter with the noted composer. He finished work on “Bravo, Mr. Strauss” around the start of 1943 and was so busy, a third sound stage for him was being built. Within five years, his stop-motion shorts got too expensive to produce.

Shooting a Haunted House

George Pal tries a bit of an elaborate camera move in “Jasper and the Haunted House” (1942). The camera is looking down onto the main floor of the old mansion. Then it trucks down and curves in to a head-on view of the front entrance. It doesn’t quite work. It’s bit much to combine that with the stop motion animation and the little sets that Pal’s staff built. The camera jerks, though you can’t tell that looking at the frame grabs below.



Pal’s name is the only one on the credits, so it’s tough to say who worked on this. Film Composers in America by Clifford McCarty reveals the score was done by Eddison von Ottenfeld, who was using the name William Eddison. Variety says little about the short, other than this in its August 28, 1942 edition:

George Pal closes his studio today to provide annual 10 day vacation for all employees. Producer just completed the Puppetoon short, 'Jasper and the Haunted House' for Paramount release. Pal heads for his cabin in the high Sierras.

The short’s national release was on October 23rd. It was the first Puppetoon of the 1942-43 season.

Bartholomew Puppetoon

“The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins” (1943) brought George Pal an Oscar nomination (it lost to MGM’s “Yankee Doodle Mouse”) and lots of praise. In 1946, the Film Daily was still touting it as the best of the Puppetoons. It still has a great deal of charm

The short was based on the 1938 short story by Dr. Seuss. The characters and sets don’t have a Seussian look but they’re nonetheless extremely attractive (in the book, Bartholomew kept removing the same style hat; in Pal’s version, each hat is different). Unfortunately, Pal and Seuss were the only people to get credit on the film so who was responsible for their design and for the layout of the picture isn’t known. But here are some of the sets, a few of which have some of the stop-motion characters blocking a full view.



Billy Bletcher is the king and the executioner and Robert C. Bruce is the narrator. As for Bartholomew, it might be Dix Davis, one of the top juvenile radio actors on the West Coast at the time.

Hoola Boola

George Pal’s Puppetoons were a sensation in the 1940s. Seven of them were nominated for Oscars and spawned stop-motion animation elsewhere, particularly at the Sutherland-Moray studio. Pal had to end production in 1947 because the Puppetoons became too expensive. Animation studios simply weren’t making enough money because theatres only wanted to pay low rentals on their films.

Pal never put credits on his shorts so whether he did the actual layout/staging, I couldn’t tell you. But it was really ingenious at time. I really like some of the work in “Hoola Boola,” released by Paramount in 1941. Castaway Jim Dandy lands on an island and falls in love with native girl Sarong Sarong. He’s captured by cannibals and put in a pot to be cooked. Suddenly, there’s lightning. The scene cuts to an up shot of the horned monument where something appears.



There’s a close-up of a large mask, twirling in dance. The shot cuts to Jim Dandy in the pot. Little creatures sprout up in front of him then start to dance.



Then they run toward the camera and chase away the natives. What are they? I have no idea. But I sure admire the sets. Pal even has some of the characters rendered in silhouette.



The mask walks toward Jim Dandy. You know what’s coming. It’s Sarong Sarong in disguise, saving her man.



Daily Variety helps us where the lack of credits doesn’t. It reported on March 3, 1941 that shooting had begun and the story was written by Peter O’Crotty, the first of five the ex-Warners gag-man was contracted to write for the studio (the ever-restless O’Crotty quit after less than two months at the studio). On April 24th, the short was reported to be in the cutting room. On June 24th, final editing was done. Variety revealed the short used “7,000 puppets. Thurston Knudson directed the music, consisting of ‘Aloha’, ‘Tomi Tomi’, ‘Hilo March’ and drum rhythms furnished by Augie Goupil” and his Royal Tahitians. There’s no word who supplied the voices.

The Disney of France is Hungarian

Books continue to be written about Walt Disney today, showing people are still fascinated by him and his evolution from a cartoon producer to, as some put it, a visionary.

Studio publicity started with Mickey Mouse in the late ‘20s but slowly switched to Disney himself by the early ‘30s as the focus moved from a funny mouse to colour cartoons, then feature cartoons, then experimental musical cartoons, then live action/animated features. There was always something new for Walt to tell columnists with space to fill, and tell them he did, no doubt making sure they put only one ‘s’ in “Disney.”

While his films may have been new, Walt himself was old news, so reporters interested in animation went looking for something different to tell (no wonder UPA was embraced by the media when it came along). And they found it in unassuming George Pal. Better still, it was wartime so reporters could work in a patriotism angle.

The Hollywood reporter for the National Enterprise Association seems to have used a comparison between Disney and Pal as an excuse to give Pal’s biography in a column released to newspapers for April 6, 1943. As he found, there really isn’t much about the two to compare.

Around Hollywood
BY ERSKINE JOHNSON
NEA Staff Correspondent
George Pal and Walt Disney are the only film producers in Hollywood these days who are not worried about where their next actors are coming from.
Disney draws his leading men. Pal carves them out of wood.
The draft, food and gasoline rationing, the increased cost of living, higher taxes, frozen salaries and three pairs of shoes a year don’t mean a thing to Pal’s puppets and Disney’s cartoon characters.
In fact, their business is booming.
Pal has been so successful with his color puppetoon shorts that he’s about to produce his first full-length feature, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”
Pal’s color puppetoons are similar to cartoons except that, instead of flat drawings, he uses small actual miniature sets and wooden figures six inches tall. It takes about 3,000 of them to provide the animation for a one-reel short. Like animated cartoons, the illusion of movement is accomplished by photographing the puppets, one after another, on the miniature sets.
It’s a slow, tedious job. A one-reel short, running seven to eight minutes on the screen, requires a shooting schedule of 22 weeks. All the puppets are carved by hand. Twenty-four separate puppets have been used just to show a character walking a few feet. A kiss—which lasts for but a moment on the screen—takes 48 hours to produce. A wink or a smile requires from 10 to 15 different heads.
When one of Pal's heroines gives the eye to the hero, 28 different leading ladies must be carved, each in a different position, starting with eyes wide open till they are closed. Each of these is painted by hand. Each line must be drawn in exactly the right place, else the lines would jump nervously on the screen.
PRODUCTION PROBLEMS
You can see now why Pal’s first full-length feature is going to be quite a job. He figures a year and a half production schedule, a “cast” of 65,000 individual puppets and a cost sheet of nearly a million dollars.
George Pal is young, only 34. He was born in Budapest, but now he’s an American—thanks to Adolf Hitler. His parents were traveling entertainers. He graduated as an architect from the Budapest academy, but no one needed a young architect. So he took a job as an animator for a Budapest film company, later moving to Berlin as chief of UFA'S cartoon production department.
Then, as the Nazis rose to power, the Gestapo started snooping around Pal's home, and following him on the streets, because he was a foreigner and he fled to Prague. In Prague, he hit upon the idea of painting faces on cigarets and using them as puppet actors. But no one was interested in the idea.
So he went to Paris and immediately sold his cigaret actors to a French tobacco company for advertising films. In less than a year, he was carving puppets out of wood, and became the Walt Disney of France.
In 1939, worried about the impending war, Pal and his wife and two children sailed for New York, where Paramount studio soon gave him a contract to produce 12 puppetoon shorts a year.
SUBJECTS VARY
Pal’s films range all the way from ridiculing the Nazis he hates—the Screwball army which rusted and fell apart in “Tulips Shall Grow” — to his next films, a delightful juvenile story, “The Truck That Flew,” and further adventures of Jasper, the little Negro boy who just can’t stay out of watermelon patches.
While Walt Disney employs hundreds of animators, Pal has a staff of only 45, mostly skilled woodworkers. His studio is a converted garage which looks more like Santa Claus’ workshop than a film factory.
But there’s nothing wooden about the nickels he’s bringing into the boxoffice. And he’s proved once again that there’s always something new under the Hollywood sun—this time that stars aren’t always born — some are hewn.

In a column a couple of weeks earlier, Johnson revealed: “George Pal’s latest Puppetoon, “Star-Studded Stampede” will be a satire of “Star-Spangled Rhythm” with puppets of Goddard, Lake, Hope and Crosby. Someone else realised the value of animation publicity, too.

George Pal and Sex

A couple of months ago, we posted about George Pal, maker of the imaginative Puppetoons released by Paramount in the 1940s. I’ve dug out another newspaper piece on Pal, this one from 1945. It was written about the time a new season of shorts was hitting theatres, beginning with ‘Jasper and the Beanstalk’ on October 19.

Producer Pal Explain How Wooden Puppetoons Work
By VIRGINIA MACPHERSON
Hollywood, Oct. 25. (BUP)—Producer George Pal is our candidate for the man who works harder than anybody to put sex in the movies.
Usually it’s a simple thing for an actress to wiggle her torso. But when Pal’s ladies do it that means 25 extra wooden figures.
Pal is the ex-architect who turns out Pal’s Puppetoons, those little three-dimensional people.
It takes, he explained today, 14 different puppets to show one step.
Just the same. Pal thinks he’ll keep on using his bosomy ladies with the shapely legs.
“I tried one out in one of the Jasper puppetoons,” he said. That was the first time we’d ever had a fling at wooden sex. And she seemed to go over quite well.
And he makes that statement, he grinned, just a few days before the Hollywood chamber of commerce will present him with a bronze plaque (we still think it should, be wooden) commemorating his five years in Hollywood and his long record of clean entertainment.
“But when I say I’m going to keep sex in I don’t want you to get the wrong idea,” he explained. “Because every puppetoon we turn out has to be passed by the censors first.
Started in Hollywood
Pal has been working with “his little blockheads” for about 12 years now. He started out in Holland as an architect. Then he decided drawing animated cartoons would pay better.
“But it didn’t,” he said. “At least, not much. So I started carving out my puppets and making three-dimensional cartoons of them.
The puppets went over big with the advertising companies.
“Then five years ago, I got an offer from Hollywood,” he said.
“Then one day I, was sort of doodling away,” he said, “and I hit on the idea of a little colored boy. We called him Jasper. Then we got a colored scarecrow and perched a crow on his shoulder.”
From there on in Pal was in business. Right now he’s turning out a new puppetoon every six weeks.
It takes about 3,000 different puppets for a seven-minute short, and about 22 weeks to draw whittle, shoot and record it.

Someone knowledgeable about Puppetoons can comment about what short involving a “bosomy lady” he’s talking about. I wonder if it’s ‘Hatful of Dreams,’ released earlier in 1945. Boxoffice magazine gave it a “superior” rating in its review.

One of the most colourful and imaginative of the series to date, this subject shows how Punchy, a pathetic little ragamuffin in love with his unattainable Judy, is given a magic hat by a cab hose. The hat’s magic transforms its wearer into whatever he or she secretly dreams of being. Thus, the spavined, knock-kneed nag becomes a Derby winner. Punchy becomes Superman, and others who do the magic skimmer undergo a surprising change. After many complications, the nag gets back his hat, Judy gets her Punchy and Punchy gets—more Punchy.

The Winter 1985 edition 14 of Animator had a nice article about Pal. You can read it HERE.

George Pal Jumps to the Big Time

Stop-motion animation didn’t originate with George Pal, but he certainly showcased it to an audience on a regular basis with his Puppetoons through the 1940s. Without Pal, one wonders whether TV viewers would have ever seen the somewhat bizarre Gumby or various quirky Rankin-Bass specials, both with coteries of loyal followers.

Pal was an admirable craftsman and technician, taking Jack Miller’s stories and creating delightful little films.

However, there was only so far one could go in shorts. Walt Disney realised it. Frank Tashlin realised it. And George Pal realised it, too. Because of that, he achieved fame in the science fiction film world.

Here’s an Associated Press article from 1950, outlining why Pal made the jump to features. It also refers to a popular commercial for Lucky Strikes.

New Film To Show Collision Of Worlds To Be Produced By George Pal
By BOB THOMAS
HOLLYWOOD, Dec. 23.—(AP)—Not content with having flown to the moon, George Pal is now causing the end of the world.
Pal is no flying saucer pilot or evangelist. He is a miracle worker in another field—motion pictures. Born in Hungary, he studied to be an architect but graduated at a time when there were no jobs. He was fascinated with American cartoon films like Felix and the Cat and went into the cartoon field in Europe.
Soon the ambitious draftsman grew tired of the tedious work of drawing thousands of flat figures. For a novelty, he made a tobacco advertising film that featured marching cigarettes (a forerunner of today’s television ads). He began to make animated films by the use of puppets.
Pal came to America in 1939 to produce puppetoons for Paramount. They achieved success but recently he was forced to abandon them because of rising costs. This year Pal produced a film called “Destination Moon,” a fanciful but seemingly authentic account of what interplanetary flight would be like.
The film was produced for about $600,000 and is expected to bring in $3,000,000 in this country alone. ]t started a cycle of science fiction movies.
This week Pal started filming a new project called “When Worlds Collide.” It will be the ultimate in movie catastrophes, making the “San Francisco” earthquake and “The Last Days of Pompeii” seem minor-league.
“The story starts with the approach of a planet and a star toward the earth,” Pal told me.
“Many people fear that it means the end the the earth, but others do not become alarmed and claim the other worlds will bypass the earth.
“Well, the planet does bypass, although it causes huge tidal waves, earthquakes and volcanoes. After that comes the star and it strikes the earth and destroys it.”
The picture will have a human story about a group of people who believe the worlds will collide and try to make some plans for it. They devise a space ship and select 800 candidates for passengers.
“They are chosen for their mental and physical well-being and because they are best in their fields, such as carpentry, medicine, etc.,” said Pal.
“Would a newspaperman be included?” I asked.
“There might be one among the Et Ceteras,” he added slyly. “Of course there is only room for 40 people aboard, so they are chosen from the 800 by the democratic process of drawing names.”
The survivors will watch the end f the world from their space ship and then zoom on to the nearby planet, which is deemed suitable or human habitation. They carry with them enough animals and needs to start anew.
“When Worlds Collide." has no relation to the recent best seller, “Worlds In Collision,” which attempted to explain Biblical events by planetary phenomena. The Pal story was a piece of science fiction vritten by Philip Wylie and Edwin Palmer in the early 30s’. It was originally planned as a Cecil B. DeMille epic, but he never got around to it.
I asked Pal how he would be able to top “When Worlds Collide.”
“I’m not going to try," he answered. “Next I may do a picture about Tom Thumb.”

The October 1941 edition of Popular Mechanics devoted a page to how the Puppetoons worked. Click on the picture to the right to have a better look.

There are plenty of fans of Pal on the internet. Look HERE for links aplenty.

It seems to me today's computer-generated 3D kids films are attempting to replicate a similar visual effect to the Puppetoons, but without their natural charm. George Pal may not have been a stop-motion pioneer but he was one of a handful of people who was truly adept at using the technique to entertain.