Yowp

The snow in the The First Snow (1947) lasts only 24 seconds, which isn’t much of a first snow. But director Mannie Davis doesn’t want to block our view to the real purpose of the cartoon—a fox chasing around some...

What’s 1999 going to be like? It’s going to have creepy music on the beach, a golden-coloured Seattle car and dad will be Wink Martindale. And it will be narrated by Alexander Scourby. The Philco-Ford Corporation...

Seven years ago, this blog featured Flintstones Sunday comics from 1964. Unfortunately, I stopping finding readable copies so there were no posts for four months. Lately, I accidentally found a source with the four...

The Benny-Allen feud wasn’t just for radio and motion pictures. The venue shifted to newspapers on occasion. Fred Allen couldn’t resist getting in his phoney digs at Jack Benny whenever a reporter or columnist...

The most stylish theatrical cartoon series of the 1960? Can it be anything but “Chimp and Zee”? Well, of course it’s the Pink Panther. (Sorry to any Chimp and Zee fans out there). In a way, the series is an...

“Symbolic of this cold alpine region,” says narrator Bob Bruce over artwork of high mountains by Johnny Johnsen, “is the brave and faithful St. Bernard dog, ever on the alert in search for lost travellers.” We...

America and Johnny Carson may have discovered Flip Wilson when he appeared on the Tonight Show in 1965 but, as is usually the case, he had been around before then. In the late 1950s, he was on stage at clubs in Florida...

Ben Washam treats us to more stretch in-betweens in No Buddy Atoll, a 1945 Snafu cartoon for the Army/Navy Screen Magazine. Snafu and a Japanese naval officer inspect each other’s dog tags then both realise who the...

Tangled Television (1940) isn’t really about television. There wasn’t much on TV in 1940 worth parodying so, instead, about half the cartoon is about tuning in to Africa and Italy instead of a TV show. Mind you, we...

It started with Rochester singing “Blues in the Night,” and when he got to the line “From Memphis to St. Joe,” Jack Benny interrupted with a wistful comment about how they loved him there in the vaudeville days....

Trying to dig up information about animated cartoons decades after the fact is like solving a jigsaw puzzle. The pieces have to fit. Sometimes you don’t have all the pieces. When they do fit, it’s quite satisfying....

Ed Love has some strong poses throughout Drooler’s Delight (1949), the last cartoon he made for Walter Lantz, and the last before the studio closed for well over a year. Director Dick Lundy holds the poses, too. The...

In the 1950s, there seems to have been a pecking order when it came to blonde starlets. Marilyn Monroe was at the top—waaaaay at the top—followed by Jayne Mansfield, and then followed by Mamie Van Doren. All three...

Screwy Squirrel pulls off the old “move-the-hole” gag in his debut cartoon, Screwball Squirrel (1944). Naturally, Meathead the dog dives toward the hole that Screwy dove into—but it’s not there now. There are...

Leon Schlesinger’s cartoon studio was a mess not long after it opened in 1933. Leon hired animators Jack King and Tom Palmer from Disney, and appointed Palmer the studio’s production manager. Palmer was a disaster....

Many a theatre and concert hall were saved in North America because of fund-raisers featuring that not-quite violin virtuoso, Jack Benny. One of them is the Orpheum Theatre in Vancouver, the "new" Orpheum...