Once again, Martha Sigall explains it all:

For more Martha, buy her book Living Life Inside the Lines.

Is anybody following the official Chuck Jones blog? Because fans of Chuck should be! Chuck’s daughter, Linda, has been posting a fascinating series of letters that he wrote to her when she went off to boarding school in 1952. Even though a lot of the details are mundane, the value of sharing these letters is immense. They offer a totally new personal perspective on how Jones handled being a father at a time when he was also at the top of his game. There are also some great animation-related bits sprinkled throughout the letters, like his thoughts about working on the Roadrunner/Coyote shorts:

Been slamming through another Coyote and Roadrunner, as I may have mentioned. These are sort of money-in-the-bank type pictures. We don’t have to worry about establishing a premise or continuity or character development much or trick backgrounds. Everything’s pretty open. Just sit down and start drawing and when all the gags are roughed out, arrange them according to pace, so’s the picture will build in tempo, find myself a strong gag to end on and I’m in business. Timing is a snap because no dialogue and there’s no worry about making it too long, because I can time the gags as I go along and use just as many as I need. All in all, life could be very simple and maybe a little bit dull if all I had to do was direct coyote and r.r.s.

Read Linda’s intro to the series and then check out all of the letters. Start at the back with the first post if you want to keep proper chronology.

I don’t have the mp3’s of these recordings, but the sleeves are too cool not to share. Click thumbnails below to see larger images.

Brew reader Hiland Hall sent in the front and back sleeve of a rare Mel Blanc promotional recording (below left and center) with nifty unidentified artwork. It’s hard to believe Blanc had to pitch himself like this - he must have been the world’s most famous voice actor at the time. UPDATE: Steve Worth at the Asifa-Hollywood Animation Archive posted the audio from this record here.

Below right is the cover of some bizarre kiddie record I got off one of my daily visits to the LP Cover Lover blog. Check that out regularly for the coolest in oddball albums.

I will be off the internet for most of the next four days, enjoying my holiday weekend at Cinecon (the classic movie festival at the Egyptian Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard). Cinecon specializes in screening rare films and recent studio restorations not available on DVD, TCM or anywhere else.

King Kelly of the USA (Monogram, 1934) is the kind of offbeat B-movie Cinecon would show - except that this film can be found easily on DVD, as it is one of hundreds of Hollywood orphan films that have fallen into the public domain. It’s not a particularly good picture (though co-stars Edgar Kennedy and Franklin Pangborn have some funny scenes, and they’re always worth watching), however it has this curious animation sequence about 18 minutes in.

Here, Broadway singer Guy Robertson (starring in his only film) tries wooing co-star Irene Ware in song, with a little help from his table cloth drawings. The animation looks familiar, but I can’t quite place who did it. Bizarre in a fun way - check out the mouth action - very much like something a New York studio would do. It certainly isn’t from Terrytoons or Van Bueren. Anyone want to take a guess who’s behind this… Ted Eshbaugh? Les Elton?

WOW! A real rarity today. It’s A Nose, an animated short from 1966 directed and designed by Mordi Gerstein (who prior to this had worked at UPA). The film is based on a surreal piece of satire by Russian writer Nikolai Gogol, and was produced at Jack Zander’s NY studio Pelican Films. There’s some impressive bits of animation in the film, which shouldn’t be a surprise considering that Emery Hawkins and Jack Schnerk are credited as animators. Nowadays, Gerstein is illustrating children’s books, including the well-received The Man Who Walked Between the Towers.

(Thanks to Mordi’s son, Aram Gerstein, for posting the film onto YouTube.)

Ehhh, What if…

(Thanks, Tim Lawrence via Facebook)

For the sake of film history, I’ll occasionally seek out odd bits of animation contained in obscure Hollywood movies and post them here - so you don’t have to. Previous postings in this series included Dave Fleischer in Trocadero (1944), and the Leon Schlesinger animation sequences in When’s Your Birthday? (1937) and She Married A Cop (1939).

Today’s clip (below) is three sequences bunched together from United Artists 1943 screwball comedy, Hi Diddle Diddle. Leon Schlesinger provided a bit of animation at the beginning of the film (looks like McKimson animation to me, but I’ll defer to the more knowledgeable experts in our readership) and a cartoon bit in the last scene. The clip in the middle, coming in the middle of the film, sets up the end gag: An egotistical opera singer (silent screen actress Pola Negri, in a comeback role) has wall paper depicting a cartoon Richard Wagner and his family. In the final sequence, Adolphe Menjou, who’s been drinking, imagines the cartoon images (looks like from Freleng’s unit) on the wall paper coming to life and running away from the awful singing of his family (including “good witch” Billie Burke, seated at the piano bench). You don’t want to know what leads up to this; you don’t want to see this movie. It’s pretty bad. Even the animation stuff is rather lackluster. But here it is, for those of you who were ever wondering about this relatively rare sequence:

The entire flick can be seen on 50 Movie Pack: Classic Musicals, a DVD boxed set from Mill Creek Entertainment, which I recently snagged for $9. at Big Lots. The aforementioned Trocadero is on the set, as well as King Kelly of the USA (1934) which has a really odd animation sequence - which I will posting very soon.

Walter Lantz animated a short sequence for the Universal feature King Of Jazz (released 3/30/30). The sequence is notable as the first two-color Technicolor cartoon released in the sound era (though color cartoons predate the talkie era; and Iwerks’ Technicolor Fiddlesticks with Flip the Frog, was released later in 1930). I wanted to get this clip included on the Walter Lantz Woody Woodpecker and Friends Classic Cartoon Collection’s (Vols. 1 & 2, both highly recommended, nonetheless), but legal considerations prevented it. Musician Alex Rannie (Disney, Ren & Stimpy, etc.) spotted the clip on You Tube and sent us the link, along with several historical annotations (below).

Notes from Alex Rannie: Whilst roaming around the Interwebs I discovered that someone has posted the two-strip Technicolor animated sequence from the 1930 film King of Jazz. Since I couldn’t leave well enough alone, I jotted down a few lines about the music and related references. There’s a heck of a lot of music in this three-minute piece, and a slew of contemporary musical references that would have elicited laughter from a 1930 audience. Wish they still made animated films as jam-packed with fun and wit as this one!

Music used in the King of Jazz (1930) animated sequence:

The opening is a mash-up of “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow” (a.k.a. “The Bear Went over the Mountain”) — whose origins can be found in “Malbrouk,” a French street song dating back to at least the mid-18th century — and the “Hunt Theme” (a.k.a. “A-Hunting We Will Go”), which may be based on a folk tune or part of an original work for piano entitled “A Hunting Scene” by Procida Bucalossi (published in London in 1884) which in turn may have been influenced by the tune “Tantivy, My Boy, Tantivy,” music by Thos. Costellow and words by Mr. Upton (published in London 1782-1792).

The chase proper (after Whiteman fires his shots) begins with a variation on a phrase from George Gershwin’s 1924 masterpiece Rhapsody in Blue, which was commissioned, appropriately enough, by Paul Whiteman.

(Editor’s Note: The information in the following paragraph misidentifies “The Mosquitoes’ Parade” as “The Whistler and His Dog.” Please see comments below for more detail.)

The chase continues to the Arthur Pryor melody “The Whistler and His Dog,” published in 1905. (Pryor was a composer and trombonist who played in Sousa’s band and collaborated with L. Frank Baum on a (sadly lost) opera. You can also hear shades of “The Whistler and His Dog” throughout Lady and the Tramp.)

When Whiteman opens his mouth he sings the African American Spiritual “My Lord Delivered Daniel” (which is also sung by Bing Crosby elsewhere in King of Jazz). (The animated Whiteman is voiced by Whiteman himself, with the lion’s “Mammy” (a reference to singer Al Jolson and his role in the seminal sound film The Jazz Singer (1927) provided by Crosby.) The song, which tells of the Biblical figure Daniel’s miraculous survival when placed in a lion’s den, was first published in 1872 (though was probably around many years prior).

As the lion sharpens his teeth (using his tongue as a strop) he is accompanied by “Mess Call,” a military bugle call signaling mealtime.

And when the lion returns his teeth to his mouth we hear an upbeat version of the usually melancholic theme from the Andante cantabile movement (Andante = walking tempo, cantabile = in a singing style) of Tchaikovsky’s String Quartet No. 1 in D major. (According to some sources, the celebrated melody of the Andante cantabile that famously brought Tolstoy to tears was based on a Ukrainian folk-song that Tchaikovsky serendipitously overheard being sung by a house-painter.)

In order to save himself, Whiteman tunes up his violin and launches into the Milton Ager and Jack Yellen song, “Music Hath Charms.” Like “My Lord Delivered Daniel,” “Music Hath Charms” is sung by Bing Crosby elsewhere in King of Jazz.

(Whiteman autographed his photos with the phrase “Music Hath Charmes” as early as 1922, but the song, “Music Hath Charms” appears to have been written specifically for King of Jazz.)

The title of the song comes from the English playwright and poet William Congreve’s play The mourning bride (1697): “Musick has Charms to sooth a savage Breast, To soften Rocks, or bend a knotted Oak,” though it’s more often garbled to read “Music hath charms to soothe a savage beast.”

“Music Hath Charms” is interrupted twice before it, and the animated sequence, ends.

The first time is when we see Oswald and a snake doing a shimmy. The music for this bit is “The Streets of Cairo, or the Poor Little Country Maid,” written by Sol Bloom “the Music Man” (and congressional representative) for the infamous dancer Little Egypt who appeared at the World’s Columbian Exposition (a.k.a. the Chicago World’s Fair) of 1893.

The second interruption occurs when the monkey on top of the palm tree becomes annoyed and we hear a brief snippet of “Aba Daba Honeymoon,” a song hit by Arthur Fields and Walter Donovan from 1914.

And then it’s back to the closing phrase of “Music Hath Charms” and the true story as to how “…Paul Whiteman was crowned the ‘King of Jazz’.”

The arranger of all this music was a recent addition to Walter Lantz’s staff, James “Jimmy” Dietrich (1894-1984). He was responsible for scoring a large chunk of the Lantz Oswalds (and for adding scores to Disney’s silent Oswald cartoons for sound re-issue) and would continue to work with Lantz through late 1937. While some animation reference books credit Dietrich as being an arranger for Paul Whiteman’s band who segued into working for Lantz while working on King of Jazz, his name doesn’t appear in any of Whiteman Orchestra rosters that I’ve run across and I’d be most eager to hear from anyone with additional information.