Deborah Kerr

I was not the world's biggest fan of Deborah Kerr. In the '50s and early '60s she was the most prestigious actress in Hollywood, the automatic choice for any Oscar-baiting film and herself an almost automatic Oscar nominee (though she didn't win any). But for that reason, a lot of her career consists of the airless, static "prestige" pictures that infested Hollywood in the post-television era. And there's something a little airless and static about some of her performances in these movies; sometimes she could seem too unspontaneous. When she played two parts that had previously been filmed by Irene Dunne -- in The King and I and An Affair to Remember -- she suffers by comparison with Dunne's naturalness and vitality.

That said, Kerr was always at least good and sometimes more than that. Her early work in British films, especially for Powell and Pressburger in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp and Black Narcissus, has the very liveliness and naturalness that her American work didn't have; she was by no means the first or the last English actor to do better work in her own country. (Even her best later film, The Innocents, was actually a British production with a British cast and crew.) And even in her U.S. period, she could loosen up if she had the right director; in An Affair To Remember she adapted well to Leo McCarey's trademark improv (remember her improvising "What? I don't know, I thought you said something" with Cary Grant), which a lot of serious actors -- Paul Newman, for example -- couldn't do.

Ain't Got Much To Say...

But TV Shows On DVD has a few more news items of moderate interest: Universal is getting closer to finishing The Rockford Files as they've announced a release for the fifth of the six seasons (and, for you Sopranos-o-philes, David Chase's last season with the show), and Miller/Boyett retooling buffs can check out the original dead-end jobs of Larry and Balki when WB releases the first 28 episodes of Perfect Strangers (after those first two seasons the show was re-tooled, their jobs got better and the Ernie Sabella character was dropped).

Enough Is Too Much!

I got my Looney Tunes Replacement disc today. For those who don't know what I'm talking about: disc 4 of the Looney Tunes Golden Collection Volume 2 had a transfer glitch that caused several cartoons to receive "interlaced" transfers, which makes them choppy and shuddery on many TVs and computer screens. They corrected it and you can get a replacement copy by calling 1-800-553-6937. Anyway, I now can watch "I Love To Singa" without it looking like crap on my TV, coincidentally just in time for a DVD set of The Jazz Singer that also includes "I Love To Singa" (since it's a cartoon takeoff on that movie).

I think this is one of those cartoons that's been elevated to historical classic status by popular opinion. The critics and animation historians rarely mentioned "I Love to Singa" as a seminal Warner Brothers cartoon, but anyone who ever watched the pre-1948 cartoons on local stations recalled "Singa" as one of the best cartoons they'd ever seen. I remember seeing it in the middle of one of those dispiriting blocks of pre-1940 Merrie Melodies, the type that gave pre-1940 cartoons a bad name (after twenty minutes of round, bouncy characters singing songs you'd never heard of, you'd long for a Daffy/Speedy cartoon). I was hooked; this was clearly an "early" cartoon yet it grabbed my attention, made me laugh and sing along, and just felt totally fresh and modern in a way that most '30s cartoons did not.

If you go through the archives of alt.animation.warner-bros you'll find that seemingly every other week there was someone writing in to ask "what's the name of that cartoon with the owl who sings 'I Love To Singa About the Moon-a...'", and of course the first episode of South Park refers to this cartoon and the song. It is, really, the first Warner Brothers cartoon that needs no historical excuses: it's not great for an early WB cartoon, or great because it broke new ground, it's just great because it never fails to be a huge hit with audiences.

As for why this cartoon grabs so many people, I think it's a cartoon that combines strong storytelling (even if the story is largely cribbed from The Jazz Singer) with a modern satirical style. It's not a gag cartoon, like most non-Disney cartoons in the '30s, and it's not a purely musical cartoon, like a lot of the Merrie Melodies; it's a story/character cartoon like "The Three Little Pigs," but with a Tex Avery edge to the humor.

Re: Carol Bruce

Following up on my previous post, someone has posted two clips of Carol Bruce in her prime as a singer:



Her sultry voice seems to have gotten raspy rather more quickly than it should have; by Do I Hear a Waltz she sounded very different, even though she was in her 40s. Her early drop to an "older"-sounding voice may have contributed to the fact that she often seemed to play characters who were older than she actually was.

I'll also note that her casting as Julie in the 1946 revival of Show Boat -- the first revival of that show -- helped change the casting of the part. It had been written for Helen Morgan, a high soprano; after 1946 it's mostly been a part for lower-voiced singers like Bruce.

"Since Rock N' Roll Went Clean"

Every so often I self-indulgently post song lyrics that I wrote and can't use anywhere else. (Not very often, though, so don't worry.) This is one I wrote for a spot in the One, Two, Three musical I wanted to write; since it took place in 1961, I thought it was worthwhile writing something about the music of 1961 -- the bland, post-'50s, pre-Beatles rock n' roll. The rhythm of this may be incomprehensible without a tune, but anyway I like some of the jokes about early '60s music, though it could use some more specific references.

----

GIRLS
Oh, tell us, Fraulein Scarlett,

What songs do you sing with your friends?
Won't you give us a list
Of the twists that you twist
And each new weave and bob
We have probably missed?
We're jealous, Fraulein Scarlett,
You know all the musical trends,
So, tell us, Fraulein Scarlett,
The rock-n'-roll music that sends.

BOYS

American music, American music rocks!
American music is full of electric shocks!
We do all the dances we see on the TV box!
Hopping in socks!

BOYS & GIRLS
We're zealous, Fraulein Scarlett,
We shake till it gives us the bends.

Rock n' roll has no shame
And it sets us aflame.

SCARLETT
But today's rock n' roll
Is a whole different game.

GIRLS & BOYS
Was ist das? Was ist los?

SCARLETT

I'm explaining it badly.
Won't you gather in close
While I try again?

GIRLS & BOYS

                  ...Gladly!

SCARLETT
America two years ago
Was in the worst of binds,
'Cause rock n' roll had seized control
Of all the teenage minds.
In sixty-one, we still have fun,
But less offensive kinds.
The army came for Elvis,
Little Richard came to Jesus,
And so we looked around and found
A softer sound to please us.


Since rock n’ roll went clean,
Since rock n’ roll went clean,
Music is preachy
But bouncy and beachy,
So everything’s peachy keen.

Oh, yeah,
Everything’s peachy keen
Since rock n’ roll went clean.

GIRL
Clean, clean, clean.
Keen, keen, keen.

SCARLETT
Since rock n' roll broke through
To something bland and new,
Kids who were shameless
Are perfectly blameless,
‘Cause rhythm became less blue.
Oh, yeah,
Dancing is less obscene
Since Rock n’ Roll went clean.

GIRLS & BOYS

Woo, woo, woo.

Doo, woo, woo.

SCARLETT
All the hits of the week
Are so pretty and meek,
Just give your baby an
Album by Fabian,
Maybe she'll kiss your cheek.
We won’t hop to a song
If the message is wrong,
So baby, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on,
But don’t come on too strong.


GIRLS
Doo-wah!


BOYS
Oo-wah!


SCARLETT
Since every single teen
Is part of a machine,
Folks like Chuck Berry
Seem terribly scary,
And probably very mean.
Oh, yeah,
That new Frankie Valli
Is right up our alley,

Which means a finale
For tall girls named Sally,
Since rock n' roll
Got more heart, less soul,
And went clean.

BOYS & GIRLS
What's become of the joys
Of your dangerous noise?

GIRLS
Rock that's not rock-like
With rhythm that's clock-like
Will never arouse the boys.

BOYS
Did the law of your land
Cause hot bands to be banned?

GIRLS and BOYS
What made this come on, come on, come on, come on, come on?

SCARLETT

You just don't understand.
We're in a different key,
More fancy and less free,
Happily turning
To high-level learning
Or golfing at Burning Tree.
Oh, yeah!


GIRL
You no longer back out
Of doing your duty,
You'll cast Wolfman Jack out
And squash Tutti Frutti.

BOY
Your dangerous hormones
Are starting to shrivel,
So singers, no more moans;
You want something civil.

SCARLETT
Oh, yeah,

Everything's peachy keen,
The bopping and hopping
Is finally stopping,
And when we're not shopping,
We're mostly do-wopping,
America's future is brighter,
'Cause music is so much politer and whiter
Since rock n’ roll went clean.

Carol Bruce

The actress and singer Carol Bruce died at age 87. She was in one of my favorite cult musicals (Do I Hear a Waltz?) and one of my favorite TV shows (WKRP in Cincinnati), so naturally I think she was great. Her singing/acting career went all the way back to the '30s, and at the age of 22 she got her big break in Irving Berlin's musical Louisiana Purchase, where she played the role that all musical comedies had: the woman who doesn't have any actual role to play in the show but is there because she has a great voice and can belt out some big numbers. (Ethel Merman got her start in parts like that, and Susan Johnson was the undisputed champ when it came to that kind of role.) She had the title song and the inevitable fake-gospel number in act 2, "The Lord Done Fixed Up My Soul." When Oscar Hammerstein assembled a young cast for his 1946 revival of Show Boat, she got the part of Julie, which Helen Morgan had played on Broadway and in the film.

Later on her voice got darker and hoarser and she put it to great use, specializing in playing sophisticated, attractive middle-aged women, like the role of Fioria in Do I Hear a Waltz?

Here is her solo number from Do I Hear a Waltz? (1965), "This Week Americans" (music by Richard Rodgers, lyrics by Stephen Sondheim). Playing Fioria, the worldly owner of a Venetian pensione, she welcomes her American visitors by attacking all the other nations; the character despises American provincialism but cynically plays up to it to make her guests happy. (Later in the production she attacks Americans for her latest round of English guests; this reprise isn't included here.)

And here she is on WKRP (the episode where she visits the station and gets drunk) singing "Someone to Watch Over Me":

Grudge Matches I'd Like To See: Friends vs. That '70s Show Kids

Who wins a fight between two groups of six: the FRIENDS (Ross, Chandler, Joey, Rachel, Monica, Phoebe), six young people from a popular '90s sitcom who sit around on a couch and ingest a drug (caffeine) or the kids from THAT '70S SHOW (Eric, Hyde, Kelso, Fez, Donna and Jackie), six young people from a popular '90s sitcom who sit around on a couch and ingest a drug (marijuana)?

This is a six-on-six fight, so the '70s kids don't get any help from the additional characters. Which is a good thing for the Friends, because Red Forman could crush them all single-handed.

Comrade DeCarlo Is Counterrevolutionary

Stupid Comics catches Archie comics scrubbing the very existence of Dan DeCarlo when they reissued one of his stories in 2003.

Esultate!

YouTube has some excerpts of the tenor Mario Del Monaco singing Verdi's Otello. Del Monaco was the leading Otello of his time, but his singing of this role -- probably the greatest tenor role in all of opera -- takes some getting used to.

He was an unremittingly loud singer; he had a gigantic voice and he was always trying to show it off, so he would just show up and bellow all night. The fact that he could be as loud at the end of the evening as at the beginning was part of what endeared him to audiences. But of course it makes his recorded legacy very wearying, because when you're listening at home you don't want a guy shouting at you for three hours. (Del Monaco's fans have claimed that he was better on live bootleg recordings, but he really wasn't, mostly -- it's just that the miking is more distant on those recordings and doesn't put him right in your ear all the time.) Christopher Raeburn, a producer for Del Monaco's record company Decca, said that Del Monaco always wanted to stand right next to the microphone and sing into it, and finally they had to turn off the microphone in front of him and record him with a hidden mike a few feet away. Franco Corelli, who came along and surpassed him as the most popular Italian dramatic tenor, was more willing to shade his voice or sing semi-quietly.

But while Del Monaco wouldn't be my first choice for most roles, I can see and hear why he was the great Otello of his day, and I honestly can't think of anyone since then whom I'd prefer in the part. There was one point in Otello -- the love duet at the end of act 1 -- that Del Monaco usually had trouble with (he'd often alternate between crooning and shouting). But the rest of the part calls for unremitting intensity and passion, and that's what he could bring to it. His physical acting was unsubtle (and unlike Corelli, who never sang Otello, he didn't have leading-man looks), but, again, very intense and often frightening when it needed to be.

The two singers who made the biggest impact as Otello in subsequent years were Jon Vickers and Placido Domingo. But Vickers, while certainly intense, had a tendency to over-intellectualize his performances (especially in Italian opera, where he didn't seem quite comfortable). And Domingo has never had a big enough voice for the part; he's done well with it, but out of intelligence and experience, not necessarily appropriate casting. Otello isn't really about intelligence or a reasoned approach; it's a fast-paced, ferociously intense opera and none of the characters are very smart, except Iago. (If Othello and Desdemona and Cassio weren't idiots, the whole thing would be over halfway through.) For a visceral experience, you need a native Italian singer with a huge, powerful voice and unrelenting intensity. So I appreciate Mario Del Monaco for those qualities.

One thing Del Monaco always did well was Otello's entrance arioso, which establishes Otello's heroic side in 40 seconds of very difficult music. (One thing I love about Verdi is that he can do in 30-40 seconds what would take any other composer about five minutes.) A smaller-voiced tenor can get through this music, but it takes a real dramatic tenor to really thrill the audience with it.



And, at the end of the opera, he's still loud, still intense, still unsubtle and still quite exciting:

"My Mother Didn't Raise Me to Be a Heating Pad!"

I've always liked this Peanuts strip (from 1960), because I have a soft spot for moments when authors parody their own most famous lines. In this case, it's not exactly self-parody, just sort of the other side of the coin -- if happiness for us is a warm puppy, that doesn't mean the puppy is happy.

The D.A.

I'm glad to see that someone (not me) has finally added a Wikipedia entry for TV producer Danny Arnold. Since there's already been a biography of Nat Hiken, Arnold is the TV behind-the-scenes person whom I think would be the most interesting subject for a biography, as a comedian and jack-of-all-trades showbiz guy who became a very important and influential showrunner.

A lot of his work was ahead of its time: the early episodes of Bewitched certainly were, as I've explained before on this site; his Thurber-based sitcom My World and Welcome To It was one of the great one-season wonders; his failure The Wackiest Ship in the Army (loosely based on the movie of the same name) appears to have been a pre-M*A*S*H attempt to combine service comedy with serious war drama. And then there's Barney Miller, which in many ways was one of the oddest and most iconoclastic shows ever to become a mainstream hit (and the first successful cop show where the cops were the most interesting characters). He also seems to have had a knack for improving shows he was involved with; in the years when he was running That Girl he made it into a much better show than it originally promised to be in its first season. The title "producer" of a TV show was a position that meant, or could mean, a lot of different things at that time, but Arnold made it mean something close to the modern position of showrunner, in that any show he produced would start to show aspects of his style (so his episodes of That Girl show some of the same obsessions he'd worked through in Bewitched, and I just watched a That Girl where he introduced a huge number of the cops-in-drag jokes he'd later bring to Barney Miller).

The other biography-worthy aspect of Danny Arnold was that he appears to have been somewhat rage-filled and maybe a bit nutty. Few people who worked with him seem to have been terribly fond of him as a person. Theodore Flicker, who is credited as the co-creator of Barney Miller, despised Arnold; director John Rich, who helped Barney Miller get picked up after the networks turned down its weak pilot presentation film, got into an argument with Arnold and left after two episodes. And when Rich took his name off the second episode, Arnold took the director's credit himself (is that even allowed under union rules?). His all-day, all-night rewrites on Barney Miller drove the cast to distraction and finally made it impossible to continue shooting the show in front of a live audience, because he never had the scripts ready in time. One of the few people he seems to have actively gotten along with was Marlo Thomas, and, as I've said in an earlier post, it appears that they liked each other because they were both impossible for anyone else to get along with.

Arnold's apparent breakthrough success, Barney Miller, was actually the end of the line for him; he never had another successful show. So a biography would have a clear, if slightly depressing, trajectory to it. There may not be all that much to know about the guy apart from what is mentioned here and on Wikipedia, but then again maybe there is.

Here is Arnold making a cameo on That Girl as a harried television producer.

Jungle Book Smarts

I agree with Michael Sporn that The Jungle Book is not one of the better Disney movies. It reminds me of Alice in Wonderland in that they were adapting stories that weren't truly adaptable, and so the movie became a series of vignettes with very little coherence as a whole. But whereas in Alice the vignettes are truly brilliantly animated and designed, the Xeroxed, corner-cutting look of The Jungle Book doesn't hold my attention. (The Xerox process combined with the digital monkeying of the "restored" DVD version makes it look like somebody went over the whole film with a giant eraser.)

I don't know if I can agree with him about voice acting, though:

The singers killed it. By that I mean, the character of Baloo became more Phil Harris and less Baloo the bear. Louie Prima’s King Louie was more Louis Prima than anything you’d find in the African setting. George Sanders was more of an actor than a personality, and he offered Shere Khan a character that Milt Kahl was able to build on. Sterling Holloway as Kaa was also more an actor than a personality, and he played what was asked of him. Ollie Johston was able to develop on it.

Animated features try to continue in the same vein. Voices like Robin Williams or David Spade or Eva Gabor are not going to make the animated character better. It’d be more interesting to have unknown voices that are well cast. Peter Pan, Snow White, Bambi and Cinderella. Lady & The Tramp, Alice, Pinocchio are all brilliantly cast features.

Now, it's true that many animated features go overboard with celebrity stunt casting. But I don't think that's what happened in Jungle Book, even if it did have more big-name actors than Disney's other features. All the main actors except Louis Prima are character actors, supporting players, who happened to have really distinctive voices. The casting of Phil Harris, a popular radio personality, is no different than the popular radio personalities Ed Wynn and Jerry Colonna in Alice; George Sanders may have ben better-known than Hans Conreid (Captain Hook), but Hans Conreid was stil a guy who, at the time, was better-known as an onscreen character actor than a voice actor. And when you go into later actors -- well, Robin Williams, Eva Gabor and David Spade wer all well-cast, good choices in my opinion. As are many other people who have done animation voice acting without a lot of background in voice acting.

Celebrity casting is bad when the actor becomes more important than the character, so that the animators are just animating to the actor's personality rather than finding the character. This happens: it happened when Disney re-used Phil Harris in two other movies and just recycled his Baloo character, and it happens a lot with today's non-Pixar animated movies. But there is often a good reason for casting a celebrity, because these are often people who become famous because they're good actors, or have distinctive voices. And you need good actors with distinctive voices in an animated film.

I realize and understand the objections to famous actors taking work away from full-time voice actors. But the other side of this is that many animated features require a different kind of voice acting from the kind that professional voice actors provide. A lot of cartoon voice acting is a little exaggerated and broad, because that's what's required for television and short cartoons. But to sustain that kind of acting over a whole movie can become difficult, especially when the movie has a lot of serious moments. So the ideal thing is often to find an actor with a really good voice who can use his or her own voice, or something close to it, and sound "natural" in a way that traditional cartoon voice acting is not. There's a reason why Disney usually saved the June Foray, Bill Thompson type of actors for smaller or more comic roles ("Squaw no dance! Squaw get-um firewood!") and gave the lead roles to people who might be fairly well-known but weren't necessarily animation pros (like Cliff Edwards, Walter Catlett, and other people that the audience sort of knew at the time).

Two Bunch-Related Thoughts

I did a piece on the Brady Bunch were-they-or-weren't-they-lesbians story, and it left me with two random thoughts about a show that I didn't really like that much, even as a kid, but which I respect in a weird way.

1. I'm increasingly convinced that the secret of Sherwood Schwartz's success is his ability to create shows that are, quite literally, timeless -- they don't exist in any particular time or era. Gilligan's Island is the ultimate timeless show: the jokes were considered dumb at the time and they're dumb now, but they're timeless jokes (hitting someone on the head with a coconut will always be a laugh-getter), the character types could come from any era at all. If it weren't for the occasional '60s reference you'd never be certain when it was made. The Brady Bunch is dated by the clothes and hairstyles, but otherwise it exists in a hermetic, generic world that could represent an idealized version of family life at just about any time. And all the jokes are, if fairly lame, also fairly durable.

Most show have a way of getting stuck in their own time; you watch Friends and hear a joke and immediately know, just by the way the joke is constructed and delivered, that it's from the '90s. And even shows that don't try to be timely wind up incorporating all sorts of then-current cultural trends and fears. The evil genius of Sherwood Schwartz is that he managed to create shows that are eternally irrelevant, and therefore eternally relevant.

2. I'm not the first person to notice that Eve Plumb stumbles over her line before the famous "Marcia, Marcia, Marcia" line ("All I hear at school all day long is how m... great Marcia is"). I'm always kind of glad when things like that get left in. Today, even shows that pride themselves on being semi-improvisational will not use takes where somebody is on the verge of forgetting or missing a line, but I think that as long as the actor recovers and doesn't make a full-fledged mistake, those little moments of hesitation can make a scene work better.

'90s NostalgiaPalooza!

Oh, man. "Weird Science," the TV series, comes to DVD on January 1. Fortunately it's the first two seasons (13 episodes each) together -- fortunately, because the second season was better than the first.

I've written before about why I liked the "Weird Science" show. It had a better cast than the movie, and almost everybody who wrote for it now has a job on Desperate Housewives or The Office or something like that. But most importantly, this was one of my favorite guilty-pleasure shows of the '90s and I hereby make a New Year's resolution to buy this thing. I hope it sells well enough to bring out the third season, which was the best; the fourth season, which was uneven, and the final season, which was... kind of bad.

Best line from any of the 26 episodes included in this set:


(Gary and Wyatt need to think of a plan to save themselves from their evil clones made from bubble gum.)

GARY: I've got it! Let's do that thing we did to that guy that time.
WYATT: Good plan!

(They run off together and save the day.)

BACHELOR FLAT (1962), John Williams, and So On

I recently obtained a widescreen copy of Frank Tashlin's Bachelor Flat (1962) with Terry-Thomas and Tuesday Weld. It's not on DVD and it was never on laserdisc or VHS, but apparently the Fox Movie Channel showed a widescreen print one time (I think they've reverted to showing it in fullscreen, though).

Andrew Sarris called this Tashlin's best movie, but I think it has too many flaws to live up to that billing. Tashlin complained about being forced to use Richard Beymer for an important part and about the fact that the movie was cut down too much before the release, and you can definitely see where the cuts were made (Celeste Holm's part almost disappears from the movie because her scenes all end abruptly). Tashlin turns in some weaker-than-usual gags and and borrows very heavily from other movies like his own Susan Slept Here (Tuesday Weld's juvenile-delinquent act is all borrowed from Debbie Reynolds in the earlier movie) and Hawks' Bringing Up Baby (there's an extended gag about a dog burying a dinosaur bone).

All that said, I was very glad to get a copy because a) I loved this movie when I saw it as a kid, and b) It's the last truly "Tashlinesque" Tashlin movie, the one that really feels like only he could have made it. All his other subsequent movies were either Jerry Lewis vehicles (which, since Lewis produced them, are as much his movies as Tashlin's) or work-for-hire projects for aging stars (Bob Hope, Doris Day, Danny Kaye). Bachelor Flat is a real Tashlin movie right down to the crazy fade-outs -- here and in Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter, Tashlin always has the screen fade to blue or green or red instead of fading to black. And he has Tuesday Weld and Terry-Thomas, both of whom make up for Richard Beymer's miscasting. You can tick off the Tashlin elements: the bad-taste risqué jokes involving a teenage girl (Weld), the cartoony chases, the sympathetic middle-aged woman (Holm), the gag about how bad old movies look when they're shown on TV (Beymer tunes in to watch a black-and-white movie, and the screen immediately distorts).

It also is the last Tashlin movie to have one main satiric theme running through it, the way all his best movies do. Here it was, in Tashlin's words, about "The difference between us and our British cousins." The Terry-Thomas character, a prudish, reserved British professor teaching in California, unexpectedly finds himself treated as a sex symbol by women because they find his British reserve and good manners and sartorial good taste (the running gag of the film is that he constantly carries an umbrella around, even though he's in California) irresistible. The Beymer character admits that no girls are interested in him; they only want Terry-Thomas -- and the joke is that you can kind of see how this would be true, because while Beymer's character is younger and more conventionally handsome, he's also kind of a clod. Terry-Thomas for his part is just put off by American aggressiveness, and finally is convinced by Beymer that the only way to turn off American women is to become an aggressive, lecherous drunk -- that is, a typical American. It's very much of its time, of course: even two years later, post-Beatles, you couldn't have made a movie about inhibited England vs. vulgar America.

The other thing I noticed about the film was the musical score, by the young John Williams (or "Johnny" Williams as he was billed at the time). The score is described in more detail at this John Williams fan website, but it's quite an impressive score, especially for a comedy. As Terry Teachout has pointed out, comedies don't usually have particularly good scores. For many years they barely had scores at all (most sound comedies in the '30s and '40s just didn't use music except in sentimental or action scenes). And big-name composers would hardly ever work on them; at Fox, Alfred Newman almost never did comedies, and neither did his friend Bernard Herrmann; Newman usually handed comedy scores to Cyril Mockridge, who cobbled together scores based on familiar public-domain tunes. John Williams in the '60s was one of the few composers who really specialized in comedy, and his scores for movies like this or Guide For the Married Man were a lot funnier and more imaginative than most; in fact, I like his early comedy music better than most of his bombastic post-Star Wars scores.

Here's a dialogue-free scene from Bachelor Flat which is carried by Williams' music, and also contains some Hitchcockian angles (a reminder that Tashlin always wanted to do a serious thriller, but he could never put such a project together).



This next scene doesn't have any music except for what Williams referred to in "chords for cuts to brassieres," but it features one of the most Tashlinesque shots ever: a woman on a vibrator/reducing machine eating a huge piece of chocolate cake, all the contradictory American obsessions (they're health nuts and junk food addicts) rolled into one. The woman, Francesca Bellini, was an ex-dancer who was also used around this time by Jerry Lewis in The Ladies Man and by Lewis and Tashlin in Who's Minding the Store? I don't know if they had bigger plans for her, but anyway she wasn't heard from again after a few TV guest shots.



And Williams also came up with some funny music for the dog burying the dinosaur bone -- which, as you can see, is a little bigger than in Bringing Up Baby. The shot of the dog pushing the bone across the beach was, Tashlin said, his parody of CinemaScope. Specifically, early CinemaScope movies had a lot of gimmicks to fill the entire wide screen, and this scene is just a slight exaggeration of some of the stuff that "serious" 'Scope movies used to do.

1954 Article on Looney Tunes Composer Milt Franklyn

Another old article I came across on Newspaperarchive.com was from the Long Beach Press-Telegram, August 15, 1954, about Warner Brothers cartoons composer/orchestrator Milt Franklyn, who was a Long Beach resident at this time. It's not much of an article -- too few direct quotes from Franklyn, and it doesn't mention that he'd only just been promoted to full-fledged composer a year before this article was written (he was Carl Stalling's orchestrator before that). But still, it's one of the few articles ever written about a WB cartoon guy when the studio was still open.

-----



Long Beach Press-Telegram, Sunday, August 15, 1954

Daffy Duck Dances to His Music
By Vera Williams

You know Bugs Bunny, who asks, "What's up, Doc?"

You know Porky Pig, Daffy Duck, Sylvester the cat, Tweety the bird, Pepe LePew the skunk that speaks with a French accent, and Elmer Fudd, who can't pronounce his "r"'s?

You know the background music for their antics -- imitative, interpretive music that now is lilting, now is mournful, and that sounds like a worm is crawling when a worm IS crawling?

Milton J. Franklyn, 5340 El Prado, Park Estates, who with his wife Charlotte moved to Long Beach last November from Lido Isle, writes that music. He not only composes it but he orchestrates it.

Franklyn, musical director of Warner Bros., now is on his 19th year with Warner Bros. and his 599th cartoon. He'll be doing his 600th cartoon, he thinks, by September.

Currently, Franklyn is working on "Past Perfumance," which as you may guess is about the little skunk. Before that was a U.S. Air Force film, "A Hitch in Time." Just before that was "Stork Naked" and "Baby Buggy Bunny" and before that was "Lighthouse Mouse." Incidentally, he recently wrote the music for the Sloan Foundation film, "By Word of Mouse," about a foreign mouse that comes to the United States and learns about big stores and automobiles owned even by the workers and freedom to vote. The background music, he says, "sounds something like Austria... or Germany... or Sweden."

Franklyn has a piano in his study and an organ in the living room of his home. Unlike many composers, he does not "finger out" his melodies on the piano and then write them. He "thinks" his melodies before he goes to sleep. The next morning, early -- 5 a.m. -- he gets up to write them down. Later he plays them to see how they sound.

In filming cartoons, he explains, 16 drawings are needed for every foot of film and the average cartoon short is 500 or 600 feet long. The drawings then are colored and the proper backgrounds made. When the picture is finished, the music is set to the picture.

Franklyn does all of his work at home, going to the studio only to see the finished picture, or to watch the 30-piece orchestra record his music.

Starting his musical career early, he was leader of the University of California band at Berkeley and played in a San Francisco supper club. For eight years he was master of ceremonies and musical director for Fox, Loew's and Paramount-Publix theaters.

The Cisco Kid

Thanks to a collector for exhuming the rarest of all SCTV episodes: "The Cisco Kid." This wasn't actually made for SCTV, but was incorporated into the show in the third season when they were strapped for material and cast members (that was the year of Robin Duke and Tony Rosato, when most of the original cast was off trying to make it in Los Angeles). It was a long, elaborate exercise in re-dubbing a low-budget movie, a la What's Up Tiger Lily; three Second City members took a "Cisco Kid" Western and dubbed in new voices. It comes off a lot like MST3K.

The segment was created and voiced by Martin Short (Pancho) Steven Kampmann (Bart, Dwayne Muncey, Patty) and Peter Torokvei (Cisco). It's said that the three used this piece as their calling card when they, too, went to L.A. to get jobs; Kampmann and Torokvei went to work on "WKRP" (where they recycled a line from this short and gave it to Herb: "I make money, you make money and no one knows the difference") and Short got the lead on James L. Brooks' The Associates, though he came back to Canada to work on SCTV full-time after that show flopped.

The segment may be too long for the joke, but it's still worth posting here if only because it's never been included in any SCTV syndication package.

Part 1



Part 2

Why Didn't They Ask Bateman?

When they do DVD features for a TV show, the question is always which of the cast members will show up for the making-of talking-head featurettes? And which ones won't be interviewed? The point of this, of course, is to speculate on why those particular people refused to be interviewed. (Reasons include: they were out of the country or on location when the features were made; they're tired of being typecast and don't want to re-associate themselves with the show; they just don't like it any more.)

On Family Ties season 2, there are two regulars who aren't interviewed (Brian Bonsall isn't there either but he doesn't count because he wasn't on the show yet): Justine Bateman and Meredith Baxter.

Whether this means that Meredith Baxter really was pissed over not being the star of the show, I don't know. But it would be wrong not to speculate.

The people who were interviewed for the DVD set, by the way, are Gary David Goldberg, Michael J. Fox, Michael Gross, Tina Yothers and Marc "Don't Call Me Skippy" Price. And yes, there is music editing, but neither I nor the Sitcoms Online reviewer are quite certain where. In the episode where Alex has an older girlfriend, the music they dance to sounds fake and isn't in proper balance with the dialogue, so I would guess that's a substitution right there.

Bugs Bunny's Nonexistent 20th Anniversary

I'm always interested in finding old articles about the Warner Brothers cartoon studio -- there weren't many, at least not until after it was closed down, so finding one is a rare treat, even if it's not a particularly good article.

In researching something else, I came across this article from March 31, 1956. It's by Aline Mosby of the United Press (now known as United Press International or UPI) and it's about the 20th anniversary of Bugs Bunny. Except, of course, that it wasn't the 20th anniversary of Bugs Bunny; even if you define "Porky's Hare Hunt" as his debut, that only takes you back to 1938. 1956 was sort of the Warner studio's unofficial 20th anniversary of making really great cartoons, since 1936 was a key year in that respect, but it wasn't Bugs Bunny's birthday. Oh, well.

WB cartoon producer Eddie Selzer provides the interview quotes for the article; his reference to Anna Magnani is based on the fact that she'd won the Academy Award the week before (where the WB cartoon studio had picked up its first Oscar in several years, for "Speedy Gonzales").

The only bit of information that's semi-new is Selzer's comment that they were reluctant to do a Bugs Bunny TV show because of the fear that it might make him over-exposed and dilute his popularity. (A few years later, of course, Warners did do a Bugs Bunny Show, but theatrical cartoons were collapsing by then and it wasn't feasible to have a character do only theatricals.) The article mentions that Bugs was a licensing and marketing bonanza for Warners, but you knew that.

I think this may be the first article to mention the much-repeated story that Mel Blanc was allergic to, or at least hated, carrots. Blanc denied that he was allergic to carrots, though he did repeat the story that he had to spit them out. I wouldn't be surprised if Selzer invented the allergy part or at least threw it in to embellish the story; Selzer started out as Warners' director of publicity (where he was extremely well-liked; Louella Parsons called him "one of the most popular publicity directors in town"), and making up little soundbite stories about actors was pretty much what publicity guys did.

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BUGS BUNNY TOP MONEY MAKER FOR 20 YEARS

By ALINE MOSBY
United Press Hollywood Writer

HOLLYWOOD (UP) -- One veteran star has buck teeth, wears no clothes, is sassy and has a whining Brooklyn accent -- but today he celebrates his 20th anniversary as the boxoffice champ of Hollywood.

Bugs Bunny has been Warner Studio's top money-maker and the head of Hollywood's boxoffice poll for 20 years. No other actor can make that statement.

Unfortunately, Bugs, like Doris Day and Susan Hayward, never has won an Oscar. But his creators sigh that many a top ticket-seller never makes the artistic grade.

On Bugs' 20th birthday and 20th anniversary in pictures I dropped in at his home, the Warner cartoon department where Bugs is spoken about as if he were a two-footed veteran such as Spencer Tracy. The busy bunny shows no sign of dropping in popularity.

"We've just licensed Bugs Bunny carrot juice, carrots and waffle and gelatin molds in the shape of the rabbit," beamed Edward Selzer, chief producer of the cartoon department who is a pixie type himself.

"Bugs gets many offers to appear on TV. But if a star is on TV all the time, people get tired of him."

The racy rabbit started his film career as an extra in a cartoon, "Harem Scarem [sic]." Two years later the studio decided to star him in "Heckling Hare." Bugs was a smash.

Marilyn Monroe has changed in appearance since her first film. So has Bugs. His legs and body are longer and he's switched from tawny fur to blue-gray fur. But his personality remains the same.

"Bugs is sassy and happy-go-lucky," explained Selzer. "When we develop a story for him we select it with as much criticism and care as if he were Anna Magnani. We won't put him out of character."

Bugs appears in cartoon books and as the insignia for countless branches of the armed forces. During World War II he actually was transferred from one Marine outfit to the other -- complete with documents in triplicate. His service record with the Marines is still on file.

Bugs has starred in 146 movies, including this year's "Napoleon Bunny-Parte," and "[Roman] Legion-Hare." He appeared twice in live movies. Always the lop-eared star has the voice of Mel Blanc.

"Blanc," insists producer Selzer, "actually is allergic to carrots. So we leave his carrot munching line of 'What's up, Doc?' to the end when we record the sound. Mel tried celery and apples but nothing sounds like a carrot. Funny, but Blanc just can't stand carrots."

A Character Named "Character"

TCM showed Anatole Litvak's Blues in the Night the other day. I love this movie, which is a strange mish-mosh of every possible genre: the backstage jazz-band musical, the gangster drama, the social-problem picture, and elements of what would later become known as film noir. The songs are by Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer, including the title song, which could well be the best song ever written for a movie. The handling of what was obviously a low budget (even by Warner Brothers standards) is very clever -- the budget probably explains some of the noir-ish setups and shadows, and Don Siegel creates some great, kinetic montages that manufacture big scenes out of fast cutting, close-ups and disguised stock footage.

Unfortunately a DVD is unlikely because it has no big stars; it used mid-level WB contractees like Priscilla Lane, Jack Carson, Betty Field, Richard Whorf (later the director of The Beverly Hillbillies) and some actor named Elia Kazan.

The one thing I wish is that the songs had gotten more expansive treatment; the first performance of the title song deserves more than a minute and a half, though the way it's done is really interesting: it starts out sung a capella (this isn't a full-fledged musical, so people mostly sing in a realistic way) and the orchestra and chorus only enter when Don Siegel's fantasy montage come in. (This version edits out a little bit of dialogue in the middle of the song.)



And another song with a great Mercer lyric, full of '40s slang -- Mercer was one of the few great lyricists who really made an effort to keep up with developing trends in slang -- and preceded by another Siegel montage: