Swing You Sinners!

“Swing You Sinners” is an amazing cartoon. It was produced by the Fleischer studio in 1930. It’s leaps and bounds above animated shorts made just a couple of years earlier, and even the Terry and Van Beuren cartoons of the same year look crude by comparison.

Bizarre images just keep morphing one after the other as the story flows along like a nightmare. Ted Sears and Willard Bowsky get the animation credits but I’d love to know who else worked on it.

Here’s just one little example. Bimbo escapes from a barn, which grows feet and follows after him. The creepy characters who threatened him inside the barn now poke through and do it outside.



My thanks to Devon Baxter for the screen grabs from one of the greatest cartoons of all time. I’ll take it over anything by Disney any day.

Skunk of Tomorrow

As best as I can tell, Tex Avery either came up with the spot-gag cartoon format or moulded it into such a success that other studios tried to do it as well. And Tex Avery imitations are always pale indeed.

Mind you, Tex had some real misses with the format, too. The last in his sub-set of “Tomorrow” spot gag films—“Farm of Tomorrow” (released in 1954)—was dubbed by Avery historian Joe Adamson as “Perhaps the unfunniest cartoon ever made” (evidently Joe hasn’t seen Columbia’s “Tangled Travels”).

The cartoon’s of interest to see how Avery treated limited animation; a good portion of the cartoon consists of static shots of outlined characters on a background drawing while Paul Frees narrates. The gags come in a variety of corn qualities (it is a farm film, after all). Here’s one involving a smello-meter to determine the freshness of eggs.



Uh, oh. A bad egg conks out the machine.



The egg is swept down a chute.



And here’s the reason for the bad egg smell.



The skunk toddles off with its nose in the air and it’s on to the next gag.

Ed Benedict was the designer and his buddy Joe Montell painted the backgrounds. Mike Lah, Walt Clinton, Grant Simmons and Bob Bentley got animation credits. Incidentally, Avery’s first spot-gag cartoon was “The Isle of Pingo Pongo” (1938), written by Canadian-born George Manuell. His last was “Field and Scream” (1955), with the story by Heck Allen.

The Soffin Dwilfin Dwang Man

Novelty show business acts catch the public’s fancy for a while and then fade away. One that made a splash on radio and the movies in the late ‘30s involved a man who casually answered questions with his response unexpectedly veering into nonsense. Something like “I bought a new car the other day but the fizzlestan was a clidden lugat in the snornenfuss.”

If you can follow that, you can follow this squib about him in Variety of January 24, 1920.

Next week's bill at Keith's Colonial, New York, contains the names of Nat Nazarro Company and Cliff Nazarro Company, two distinct acts. Neither is connected with the Nat Nazarro turn now touring the Orpheum Circuit. The Nat Nazarro turn at the Colonial next week, is the father of the performer presently playing at the Orpheum, Oakland, and who also conducts a vaudeville agency with offices in the Strand Theatre Building. The Cliff Nazarro (Cliff Robbins) turn, which also appears on the Colonial bill, includes Gertrude Cogren and Ernest Ferita, produced by the agent in opposition to his son. The agent was granted a divorce recently and the son given to his mother.

The comedian in question is Cliff Nazarro. He sang, he danced, he joked—no different than countless others in vaudeville—but he hit on a gimmick. He became well-known for his double-talk act. You can hear it as the emcee in the 1938 Warners cartoon “The Penguin Parade” (early animation research that claimed Nazarro voiced Egghead was incorrect). As for the confusing story above, there were a father and son, both named Nat Nazarro, with separate vaudeville acts. Cliff Nazarro wasn’t really a Nazarro at all. He was born Cliff Robins on January 31, 1904 in New Haven, Connecticut. The New York Dramatic Mirror reported in December 1919 that Nat the Father had discovered him and would be changing his name “for stage reasons.”

Here’s a unbylined story from the Syracuse Herald-Journal from November 14, 1940 crediting Nazarro with inventing his unusual form of stage conversation.

He Originated ‘Double Talk’
Cliff Nazarro Writes Own Movie Ticket Now
Although motion picture producers are sticklers on insisting that actors speak their lines as written, there is one player in Hollywood they don’t dictate to. In fact they tell writers just to leave his speeches blank and tell him to go ahead and say what he wants to.
The man is Cliff Nazarro.
And, to top it all, Nazarro, famed as the "double talk man," usually doesn't know what he is going to say until the cameras are turning and the sound equipment is recording.
Director Mitchell Leisen, for whom Nazarro toiled recently, told him when he started to work:
“You're a photographer. You take a picture of Ray Milland for Claudette Colbert as a part of the plot. You'll have a big camera and an assistant.”
Out of that Nazarro manufactured his scene, putting In his own speeches. Every time the director ordered another filming of the same scene for the picture, "Arise My Love," Keith-bound Thursday, it was different from the one before because Nazarro couldn't remember what he'd just said, and nobody cared, anyway. Whatever he said was bound to be all right, and guaranteed not to make sense.
Nazarro has an odd record. He introduced the slang expression, "double talk," into the American language. One day he was on the stage, introducing a couple of performers. He was master of ceremonies.
“It came to me like a flash just to talk about anything,” Nazarro says, “and that’s what I did.”
That was in 1927. His brand of humor has flourished ever since and has been responsible for countless imitators, none of whom has lasted very long.
He introduced his strange, rambling form of talk on the radio in 1935. A short time later he worked with Jack Benny in Paramount's "Artists and Models Abroad," and this started it in motion pictures.
Nazarro was born in New Haven, Connecticut, 35 years ago. He quit in the first year of high school to go to New York City and start his stage career. He worked first in "Katy's Kisses," a play which lasted 16 weeks. After a term in stock companies and another in radio he came to Hollywood in 1935.

Jack Benny must have liked Nazarro because he dropped the double-talker into his radio show off and on for about five years from the end of 1936.

Here’s a little more about Nazarro by the New York Post’s Earl Wilson, published March 7, 1942.

Even His Money Double-Talks for Cliff Nazarro
He Made Approximately Flamas Soffis Stormis Dollars—and 19 Cents—in Films
By EARL WILSON
Cliff Nazarro, the movie double-talker, a sawed-off little fellow who wears long-collared Hollywood shirts, but wouldn’t put portis on the portisan on the stamportis even if his critics do say so behind his back, had come to town, so a Post reporter went up to interview him after being promised he wouldn't talk double.
"What's cookin?" asked the reporter, in perfect English.
"Plenty," said the shrimp. "I'm a success. I'm in the money. Out of my double talk movies 'You'll Never Get Rich,' 'Blondie Goes to College,' and 'Pardon My Stripes,' I have earned approximately flamas soffis stormis dollars and 19 cents. If you use that figure, be sure to say it's just an estimate."
Why He Loves the State
"What are you doing here now"?

"Appearing at Loew's State, a theatre I love because of a helpful thing that happened right after I left New Haven to be an actor. A woman leaped up in the audience and damned if she didn't zinta stillit in front of everybody, straight at me. I yelled and she dwillit doffer zint. Still with the formdin, of course! Was I mortified! But it helped me to be a better actor."
"How long did it take you to get over it?"
"Till about six years ago." He grinned fiendishly recalling his start toward success. "I was in Frisco, singing with Meredith Wilson's orchestra, and I got to ribbing a piano tuner. "I would say to him very severely, 'Listen, you have a habit of leaving a soffin on the keyboard when you finish, and every time I start to sing, it dwilfins. Now damn it, watch yourself.' He told the manager of the radio station I was a swell guy but drank too much and the manager asked me about this crazy talk of mine.
We decided to try it on the air, and that was the first time double talk was used commercially."
Actors Used to Talk
"Where did you get the idea?"
"Actors always used it as a rib, but just among themselves. John Barrymore told me his father had heard it when he was young. Some actors would go into a restaurant and say 'Gimme one sorfa with two zatins and a small zeatus on the side, and a demi-tasse.' The waiters would go crazy. But nobody ever used it on the general public till I tried it in Frisco."
"What's the secret of using it successfully?"
"Inflection, largely," he said. "My imitators use words like portis, portisan and stamportis, but I just say things like soffin, dwilfin, zunt, dwang and talis. They're not words. Portis, partisan and stamportis are words."
"What sort of words?"
"Double-talk words."
"What do they mean?"
"Nuthin'."
"What do soffin, dwilfin, zunt, dwang and talis mean?"
"Nuthin! They're not words."
Now Take His Own Case
Nazarro said he hoped that had cleared it up, but if it hadn't, take his own case.
"Every night before I go to bed," he confided, "I go out in the garage and in one corner there's a dalafoss and I open that up and bring out my old soffanis and read it carefully. On page 946 in very black type it say, 'Never sodin the dwilge or you'll lose it' and they'll do it to you, too, every time.' It's a good thing to remember. When I was making that Mickey Rooney picture, 'Stablemates,' that very thing happened to me. I’ve since heard there's one in Greenwich Village, down around 9th St."
Just to make for further clarity, Nazarro said his real name is Cliff Robbins and that he took the name of Nazarro at the insistence of Nat Nazarro, the agent, who was able to get more for his services as a singer by passing him off as his son. Show business thinks of him still as the agent's son.
Writing Double-Talk Concerto
He is now 38 and he and his wife are adopting a child. They have a home in Hollywood, where he is writing a double-talk concerto, tentatively titled, "Don't Ever Leave the Cranchin or the Drongins Will Get You in the End."
"It's a modern colonial with 10 big rosebushes in front, and inside, right in front of the stairway, almost immediately under the chandelier, there is a phenomenal thing—a sorgin dimita flam. It's a beauty, and most people, including some prominent engineers, think it was caused by our lighting system.
"If not that," he shrugged, "then by the drongins."

By the end of World War Two, mentions of Nazarro in the entertainment section of the newspaper involved what was on TV on The Late, Late Show. The former Cliff Robins died in Ventura, California on February 18, 1961, largely forgotten. That’s a stiffalada crassenfoss.

How To Spell, By Olive Oyl

The Fleischer studio animators seem to have loved whipping around Olive Oyl’s spaghetti arms and legs. They did it really creatively in “You’ve Gotta Be a Football Hero” (1935). The fickle Miss Oyl decides to become a cheerleader for Bluto’s team. She contorts her body to spell “Bluto.” The animator actually put each letter on the screen, and the drawing of the letter and Olive-as-the-letter alternate for a few frames before the next letter is formed.



Willard Bowsky and George Germanetti get the on-screen animation credits. The theme song was written by Al Sherman, Buddy Fields and Al Lewis.

The Chaplin Cat

The Little Tramp is alive and living in feline form in “Pent-house Mouse,” the first Tom and Jerry cartoon made by Chuck Jones. Tom scoots around a corner (coming and going) just like Chaplin’s famous silent film persona.



Jones and Mike Maltese came up with the story. What’s interesting about this short is, unlike the Roadrunner cartoons the two made at Warners, there’s no break in the storyline. There’s no blackout between gags. It’ll all one long sequence in real time until the very end, when there’s a cut to Jerry relaxing in Tom’s deck lounge chair.

I just can’t warm up to the Tom and Jerrys made by Jones. In fact, to me, the best part of this cartoon isn’t the animation or the designs—it’s the score and orchestrations by Gene Poddany. I especially like the harp used when the lettuce leaf covers Jerry; it’s a fine contrast to the horns on either side of it. Poddany is truly underrated.

Bucky and Pepito

Broadcasting boils down to money. Companies (I hesitate to call them broadcasters) will put something on the air, no matter how mediocre, because it’s cheap. They don’t think viewers will notice.

Thus it was that a wretched cartoon series called “Bucky and Pepito” was still seen on TV screens (and we suspect only few of them) in New York City in 1970.

Of course, trade ads described them a little more glowingly. One proclaimed the series: “America’s newest favorites, in a group of imaginative animated five-minute cartoons in color and black-and-white. The gay and sparkling adventures of two small boys whose laugh-laden escapades will captivate audiences young and old!”

Many of us can thank YouTube and Jerry Beck’s Cartoon Dump for even hearing about these cartoons. I never saw them in the ‘60s when I picked and chose where the TV set would be tuned for animated adventures. They were the product of Sam Singer, who foisted several cartoon series on the world that were all known for the über-cheapness. And the lack of dollars shows on the screen. Add to that inept and oddly-plotted stories and you have several hours of bad cartoons: 52 of them, about eight minutes in length.

Variety proclaimed on November 26, 1958:

Governor TV's New Animated Cartoon Segs
Governor TV has signed on a new group of fully animated cartoons. Transvideo Artists [sic] is producing a series of 52, five-minute shows for the moppet mart called "Bucky and Pepito," in color, and the first seven are already completed. Governor boss Arthur Kerman closed the initial deal for the animations with WHDH-TV, Boston. The flicks are being produced at the rate of two a week, with all 52 pegged for completion by spring.

And a Variety ad on December 3rd screeched: "FREE GIVE-AWAY! Available to a limited number of early subscribers - 200 hand-painted stills of Bucky and Pepito and their friends."

The series theme song was copyrighted on December 5, 1958 with music by Gerald Dolin and lyrics by Johnny Holiday (Daniel Siegel). “Bucky and Pepito” was copyrighted by Samsing Creations on April 15, 1959 (and in black and white). Radio-TV Daily, a New York publication, announced in 1959 (date unknown):

With the sale of the “Bucky & Pepito” series to three stations in major markets this week, the Governor Television Attractions' color cartoon films are now showing in 25 markets. The new sales of the "Bucky & Pepito" series were to NTA-TV, here; WGN-TV, Chicago; and KCOP-TV, Los Angeles.

And the Los Angeles Times of December 30, 1959, announced Bucky and Pepito were part of KCOP’s Webster Webfoot Show, starring Jimmy Weldon and his duck puppet. One of the earlier 25 stations was KOAT Albuquerque, which began broadcasting a 15-minute show with the cartoons (but not every weekday) starting October 12th.

Eventually, the cartoons were syndicated by Medallion Television Enterprises and then Golden Arrow Films of New York.

The reason for the post is because of an e-mail I received from Christopher Kennedy about Hanna-Barbera background artist Venetia Epler. She apparently worked on “Bucky and Pepito” and, better still, retained some storyboard drawings. They were posted on this web site. I’d never seen them before, so I pass them on to you. No, I haven’t any idea who drew them.



There may be some of you out there who have never had the experience of watching Bucky and Pepito. Well, here’s your chance, thanks to Cartoon Dump. You may recognise a few names on the credits. Ed Rehberg animated for the Fleischers in the 1930s. Ken Southworth’s name appears on Lantz and MGM cartoons in the ‘50s. Sid Glenar’s studio handled the photography; he worked at the Mintz studio in the ‘30s. And while Holiday got credit for the music supervision, he didn’t write the cartoon “score.” Fans of the Capitol Hi-Q library and Huckleberry Hound cartoons will recognise the first cue as “TC-202 Eccentric Comedy” by Bill Loose and John Seely. Be warned. You won’t find Huck’s charm or humour here, just his stock music. Skip to the 3:54 mark to watch the cartoon.



The fine animation historian Harry McCracken has called Singer “The Ed Wood of Animation.” I don’t necessarily agree. Granted, Wood’s films were incompetently made to the point of hilarity. But Wood buried in them a social conscience. “Glen or Glenda” was a plea for tolerance. “Plan 9 From Outer Space” was a plea for peace. “Bucky and Pepito” was a plea for syndicators to buy cheap-looking cartoons.

Benny on Burns

Not long ago, the blog featured George Burns telling Jack Benny stories. Today, we have the reverse.

This is half of a column (the other half is not Benny-related) from one of the newspaper syndicates. It appeared in papers starting November 22, 1964. The photo accompanied the story.

TV Notebook: Jack Benny Says He's Not Such Easy Audience
By JOAN CROSBY
Newspaper Enterprise Assn.
New York — (NEA) - Jack Benny, busy defending himself against the charge that he is such an easy audience he'll laugh at the answer to the question "Why does the chicken cross the road?," reached for his coffee cup and took a long draught. "As soon as they get those supersonic airplanes that can fly from Los Angeles to New York in one hour, I'm going to start hopping to New York to get a good cup of coffee, said the veteran entertainer.

Benny sighed in joy, and explained that it was a tough rap, being considered a good audience.
"I am a good audience if someone is funny. But if I go to a night club, and someone isn't funny, and I'm sitting at a prominent table, I have to keep a silly grin on my face, because I know everyone is looking at me and saying, ‘He's such a good audience. It's murder.’"
Jack, whose long-running television show has moved to NBC-TV this season, chuckled as he thought of some of the lines for which he has been a GREAT audience. They came from George Burns, a man who does break up Jack.
"One time Burns and I were in a swank Beverly Hills restaurant. Now, George is a man who thinks that anything that is very hot if it is supposed to be hot, is great cooking. He ordered soup and said to the waiter, ‘I want the soup so hot that if you can carry it in, I don't want it.’
"Another time we were at a dinner party given by George and Grade Allen, God love her. Dinah Shore arrived late, upset because her daughter, considered by Dinah to be the best child in the world, had been naughty.
She apologized for being late, saying ‘My child was just so bad I had to punish her.’
"George took the cigar out of his mouth, knocked the ashes off the end, and said, ‘Dinah's idea of punishing her child is to sing her the chorus of song not in the Top Ten.’"