Beaky and the Bambino Bee

Buzzards aren’t associated with Italy. So why is it that Mama Buzzard in The Bashful Buzzard speaks-a with a vaudeville-style “Atsa-a-matter-for-you” Italian accent-a? Pasta fazool!

Well, if we may venture a guess.

Warner Bros. cartoons are full of radio show references. You likely know that the lead character in The Bashful Buzzard is a takeoff on Mortimer Snerd on the Edgar Bergen radio show.

But I suspect Mama Buzzard is, too.

There was an actress making the rounds in Los Angeles in the 1930s who did an Italian dialect character. Here’s an example from the Hollywood Citizen-News of July 17, 1934.

“Mrs. Pasquale,” or, if you prefer, popular comedienne on KFWB’s “High Jinks,” will be featured with the Californians over KFWB from 7:30 to 7:45 p. m. She certainly has a line of chatter!

KFWB certainly had its own connection with cartoons, besides corporate ownership, because people who worked there like Robert C. Bruce and Arthur Q. Bryan were hired to supply voices for the Leon Schlesinger studio on the Warners lot.

Keith Scott’s terrific research points out the Franco Sunday night Hi Jinks show was hosted by Johnny Murray, who Rudy Ising called hiring for main characters in Merrie Melodies, including Foxy and Goopy Gear. As well, the programme included Jack Clifford, the hard-of-hearing-sheriff, a character voice that got mushed together with Kenny Delmar’s Senator Claghorn and became a certain, I SAY, became a certain cartoon rooster. Rooster, that is.

Back to our story.

Urecal’s Italian dialect was recognised enough in the mid-‘30s for her to make personal appearances; we note one in 1934 presented by a Legion post in Los Angeles in 1934 where she “delighted an audience of 500 with her Italian characterization and impersonations.”

Does it seem probable that Bob Clampett, noted aficionado of radio references, wanted a familiar accent in one of his cartoons, and this was one of them?

By the time the dialogue for The Bashful Burrard was recorded (the cartoon came out in 1945), fine dialectician Sara Berner seemed to be brought in to handle the female adult voices. No need for Urecal, who had been in the movies for several years. Berner could do the job just as well.

Let’s get to the actual cartoon. There’s some great expressive work we’ve posted about before. The scene with the farmer and the cow in mid-air is lots of fun (Manny Gould, I imagine). So is the perspective animation in the sequence with the flying dragon chasing Beaky.

Perhaps one of the better-known moments is when Beaky is “bringing home a baby bumble bee” (to the melody of “Arkansas Traveler”).



Cut to a close-up of the little bee and his angry mother. Despite the buzzing, it’s really a silent action scene. You can't dislike animation like this.



As you can see in that last frame, Clampett wastes no time. Action is continuous. Clampett alternates between a fast pace, a slow pace and movement within dialogue scenes.

This is another cartoon where the credits have been Blue Ribboned. The second Beck and Friedwald book gives the story credit to Mike Sasanoff. The story includes a Dumbo reference, a Lassie reference and ends with a catchphrase from The Great Gildersleeve radio show.

The animation credit was apparently rotated to Bob McKimson. I am told Dick Thomas did not paint the backgrounds. Here is one in a perspective view when Beaky's brothers are overhead scoping out their targets.



Besides Berner as Urecal as Mrs. Pasquale, Kent Rogers is Edgar Bergen as Mortimer Snerd. Keith Scott points out (in Animato! Issue 37 and later in his two-book set) that Rogers died in a training exercise in July 1944, so this gives you a bit of an idea of when the soundtrack was recorded. The cartoon was officially released September 5, 1945.

Urecal died of a heart attack in 1966 at the age of 71. At that point, if she was remembered it was for starring in a TV version of Tugboat Annie in the early '50s. She had appeared on Petticoat Junction just a few months before her death.

You can hear what Mrs. Pasquale sounded like below. Cartoon fans will recognise the first song before Urecal's routine with emcee Don Wilson.

Nosey Rescue

A dachshund with a German accent places an order at a kitchen window in Dizzy Dishes (1930).



Being a Fleischer cartoon, something has to sprout a face, or arms and legs. In this one, the dog’s nose gets caught in the slide-down door of the window. Never fear. It grows arms and legs and rescues itself, presumably returning to the dachshund.



The cartoon's credited animators are Grim Natwick and Ted Sears (see comments for more).

Yeah, I know, Betty Boop. But my favourite character is the dancing roast chicken.

Clobbered By a Star

Attractive characters with heads and bodies based on circles? Maybe at Disney, or Harman-Ising, or Lantz. But not at the Paul Terry-Frank Moser studio in 1930.

In Jumping Beans (1930), a mouse rides a horse. Even in this low-resolution version, we can see the odd, impossible contortions of the valiant steed.



We interrupt what plot there is for a gag. The horse bucks off the mouse, and is quite pleased as he gallops out of the scene. The usual stars develop over the unconscious mouse’s head.



A crow flies into the scene from a distance.



Being a cartoon crow, he whips out some mallets and starts playing the stars like a xylophone.



One of the stars doesn’t like being bashed, so it flies up and rams the crow in the butt and out of the scene. It develops an angry face.



You can count on the 1930 Audio-Cinema versions of Terry cartoons to include:

● Lots of cats and mice. And we mean lots.
● Characters riding or marching.
● An elephant in a gag.
● Characters running into the distance.
● Lots of cycle animation. And we mean lots.
● A song.

The lyrics at the start of this one:

Male Mouse: Hello, hot tamale, how are you today?
Female House: I’m okay, sweetie, in my hot tamale way.
Male Mouse: I’m your boy-friend, lover, and it’s you I’d like to see.
Female Mouse: So, make it snappy, honey, and before we (something or other).

Well, I think they’re the lyrics. The guy in falsetto is singing for the woman, and the soundtrack is about 100 years old. They are wearing sombreros but neither has a Mexican accent.

Motion Picture News of Oct. 25, 1930 grumbled:

Jumping Beans
(Terry-Toon—Educational)
Weak Cartoon
THIS is pretty shy on laughs or funny gags. As the title indicates it is a Mexican border affair, built around the effects of eating jumping beans. Terry has turned out so much better stuff that this one suffers plenty by comparison. Can’t handle it much. Running time, 11 minutes.
Use with good support

The Film Daily had a different opinion. Its review from Oct. 26:

“Jumping Beans”
Educational. Time, 9 mins.
Neat Cartoon
A Paul Terry-Toon exploiting a cowboy hero who feeds the villain jellybeans with disastrous but hilarious consequences. The incidental music by Philip Scheib is real harmony, and enhances the funny cartoon antics and increases the laugh voltage. Clever animation, up to the standard of this series.

Harrison’s Report of Nov. 8, 1930 says it was 5½ minutes and released Nov. 2.

Cigars, Cards and Gadgets

Ernie Kovacs is considered a genius with a unique kind of humour by many. Fortunately, some of his work was preserved and is available on discs for home viewing.

Examination of his comedy seems to have been a byproduct of his sudden death in 1962. In checking through newspaper columns about him in the mid-1950s to his death, writers seem to have focused on his lifestyle instead of his on-camera entertainment. There were plenty of stories about his expensive cars, his 20-room New York City apartment, and his spending. That includes on cigars and gambling.

Two columns that came out within days of each other in February 1960 dealt with his love of gadgets. First up, is this syndicated offering.

Gadgets, Guns, Preoccupy Comedian Ernie Kovacs
By STEVEN H. SCHEUER
(McClure Syndicate)
Ernie Kovacs is a guy who loves gadgets. In between stunts like apes dancing to "Swan Lake," Ernie has always had innumerable props performing odd ways, some of which went over with a dull, but imaginative, thud.
Like his shows, Kovacs' Hollywood hillside home is also jam-packed with gadgets. A huge gate at the bottom of the drive is opened electrically by pushing a button.
A visitor hears Kovacs' voice mutter, "Who's there," and then the gate swings open. On the mail-box next to the gate is a flashlight which turns on its beam in the direction of Ernie's den when the mailman deposits the mail.
"That's so I don't have to walk down the hill thirty times a day to check the mail," says Ernie.
• • •
His den, a converted garage, is the hub of the Kovacs universe. He sits at a desk when not playing poker or gin rummy at a nearby table, and communicates with the world either by writing or by phone.
The phone company must love Mr. Kovacs. His bills run around $2,000 a month as he calls London, Paris and New York without any monetary twinge.
He also has just about everything the phone company has dreamed up so far. Behind his desk, some 80 feet of wire are connected to phones, intercom systems to the main house, a radio, a record player and even a TV set. Ernie's knowledge about all these contraptions is basic. "I know that two wires leading to the function must not be crossed," he says proudly.
• • •
When he finds room for a new gadget, Ernie simply calls the phone company and says: "What have you got that's new?"
"This question has brought a stream of men bringing things like a wire recorder that answers the phone. So Ernie doesn't have to pick up a receiver, he hates that, the phone is hooked up to a loud-speaker on the wall, and all he has to do is listen.
Through his household intercom system and loudspeaker, Ernie can even hear his youngest child, Mia, age almost one, breathe in her crib. The microphone is at the head of her bed.
While gadgets have a certain pull for Ernie, so do guns. There are guns on all four walls in his den, dueling pistols, high-powered rifles like a 270 Wetherby Magnum, and old Chinese cannon.
• • •
"I've grown up with guns," Ernie explains, lighting up a big cigar. It was 4:30 in the afternoon and Mr. Kovacs had just arisen.
"I was a good shot when I was nine. I've also turned Edie (wife Edie Adams) into a pretty good shot. She never hunted before, 'til last year in Vegas.
"I took her out and put up some three-inch targets. She hit three consecutively at three hundred yards. That's like picking out the pupil of a moose's eye."
At home with his guns and phones, Ernie can sit down and write except that every few minutes a voice comes over the loudspeaker and Mr. Kovacs has to talk back. How he gets any time for his writing is a wonder.
"And then I have my gin rummy or poker as an added diversion," said Ernie.
• • •
Like his hero, Fred Allen, Kovacs tries to write most of his material. He writes his own silent commercials and the clues on his panel show, "Take A Good Look," which is sponsored by a cigar company.
He also writes 10 spots for Monitor radio a week and he has two books he must get on with for his publishers.
"About all I do is get up and get, through the bills and the mail and then I blow another day," said Ernie.
At the moment, he is looking for other writers to do his radio work. But he doesn't look too hard because he feels better with his own material.
His mother can always spot material Ernie doesn't write and she lets him know about it.
• • •
"I go on a comedy show and other writers give me their stuff. I do it, but I don't feel at ease, or feel comfortable with it.
"I just have to do it my way. You see, I don't tell jokes. I couldn't do it. I don't know how. I have to ramble on."
With the bills paid and the mail sorted and the novel put off for another day, Kovacs calls his cronies like movie director Mervyn LeRoy and a card game is in the making.
Is Kovacs as handy with cards as with comedy?
Ernie shook his head. "You have to have a killer instinct to be a food card player, and I don't have it. I just like to play."

Here’s another. Same angle, different content.

Ernie Kovacs Keeps Adding Rooms To Store His Gadgets
By ERSKINE JOHNSON
Hollywood Correspondent
Newspaper Enterprise Assn.
HOLLYWOOD—A mad collection of gadgets and assorted objets d'curious once enabled Ernie Kovacs to star in a half-hour TV show in which he didn't say a single word.
After visiting the Kovacs home, I know where Ernie got the idea. He lives in a world of gadgets and objets d'curious.
If a movie heroine can be a "Gidget," Ernie could be called a "Gadget." His home keeps growing all over a Hollywood hillside, collecting things as it goes, to Ernie's mock horror:
"We eventually may have to use pogo sticks to get around all this junk."
Not to be dragging in a movie plug, but “Wake Me When It’s Over” is Ernie’s latest movie and a tour through the Kovacs home leaves you thinking, “We Me When You Think It’s Finished.”
Movie Screen Outside
There's the projection room that Ernie says will go over the garage, with the screen up on the hillside, the steam room, and only Ernie knows what else, but you can be sure it will be something.
What was once a garage is Ernie's pad.
There's a balcony, a fireplace right out of an old English castle, with a dozen steak knives stuck into the soft wood mantle ("handy," Ernie explains); there's a spotlight over a poker table which has a six-inch thick polished hardware top; brass cannon on a coffee table point their muzzles directly at visitors, and a couple suits of armor stand around for use as king-size ashtrays.
Amidst it all and up to his knees in books, records, magazines, papers and cigar ashes, Ernie swivels in front of a desk that looks like it was mussed for "Person to Person."
There are four telephones, an electric pencil sharpener, a gadget to clear the air of cigar smoke, a panel of buttons to operate outside gates, recorded music, the air conditioning system.
There is an intercommunication system over which Ernie tries out his "Take A Good Look" TV program chatter on wife Edie Adams in her "pad" 260 feet away from Ernie's desk.
The cigar smoke air-cleaner is the only gadget not working at the moment. "It was giving me a sinus condition," he laughed. "It was like having my desk in a wind tunnel."
Despite the four telephones, one of Ernie's New York friends has promised to increase the number to five. "The last time he was here," Ernie tells it, "he said he wanted to give me another phone with an unlisted number just for him to call out on and to call me when he's in New York."
The panel of buttons, often covered with a foot of papers, letters, books and scripts, may have to go, says Ernie. "I'm thinking of putting in a panel with flashing lights up there on the wall, along with a pressure gauge for the new steam room."
He may be launching rockets from that desk yet. The adjoining house ends in Edie's room, some 260 feet away where things are all black and white stripes with a zebra-skin couch and a clothes closet that reminds you of the Holland Tunnel after a collision between two clothes delivery vans.
In-between are rooms and rooms, and little things like a five-foot-high world globe too big for Ernie to encircle with his arms.
“There are only two like it,” he says. “Ike has the other one. I don’t know if he fainted when he got the bill, but I did.
Ernie’s swiveling desk chair put his eyes on target of a fancy box of chocolates and he frowned. “Now why didn’t the maid take that out of here? Dust I don’t mind but a box of candy makes me nervous.
A shortage of ice cubes makes him nervous, so he has a cube-maker with a capacity of 1800 a day.
No telephone at his elbow makes Ernie nervous, too, so there's still another one in his car.
And a gadget to record his voice back at home. If all those wires get crossed, man, he's in trouble.

Kovacs moved from California to New York, despite objections from his wife, Edie Adams, who loved to work in the theatre. Ernie didn’t. “It’s overrated,” he told Bell Syndicate columnist Margaret McManus in 1961.

But his decision was based on money. He was offered movies. “Such easy work, six weeks at a clip, and for so much money,” he explained to McManus. “This has all been here while I have been knocking my brains out on television for peanuts. Why didn’t somebody tell me?”

The money was $200,000 a picture, guaranteed, plus expenses, rent money for an Italian villa, and a 25% cut of the net profits of the first of four films. Still, he had to continue to do TV to pay debts. Dutch Masters sponsored Take a Good Look, a game show where Hans Conried and other panellists had to guess at something based on a series of Kovacs sketches.

It was different. But so was Ernie Kovacs.