A Very Merry Christmas 2012 From Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog

Merry Christmas to all - and to all a Good Night! Cheers!

Those Darn Mayans

We all know now that on the morning when the Mayan in charge of the calendar woke up, his wife refused to have sex with him, his kid whined unrelentingly before starting a pointless argument - and then his bosses complained about the design of the calendar!

Burt Bacharach Day

The Columbia Shorts Department, Part One

I'll admit it. I'm a sucker for comedies produced by the Columbia Shorts Department. Qualified to start a 12-step group for Men Who Love The Three Stooges Too Much? Yes.



Ted Okuda and Edward Watz' book The Columbia Comedy Shorts has done a super job of documenting the history, the back stories and content of every darn 2-reeler the authors could track down (and it's amazing just how many they did track down).



Still, even with Ted n' Ed's fine book, the comprehensive research found on The Shorts Department AND this listing from the Turner Classic Movies website, Mr. Blogmeister is tossing his best dilapidated, dog-eared Three Stooges fedora into the ring and presenting the following overview of Columbia's 25 years of classic comedy shorts - with, of course, the inevitable film clips to illustrate.

Columbia Pictures, Harry Cohn's "Little Poverty Row Studio That Could", did not produce their own comedy shorts in the early 1930's, but had been a very active distributor, especially in animation. At one point, the studio distributed both Walt Disney cartoons and the series from the animation studio Columbia Pictures organized under de facto producer - and husband of the prolific and pioneering silent era animation distributor Margaret Winkler - sales executive Charles Mintz.



At the Charles Mintz Studio, veteran animators Ben Harrison and Manny Gould had been cranking talkie Krazy Kat adventures out for Columbia release as early as 1929.



Ex-Fleischer Studio artists Dick Huemer, Sid Marcus and Art Davis headed a second production unit, which had been busy making the Toby The Pup cartoons for RKO, and launched the Scrappy series in 1931.





While Disney's Mickey Mouse and especially Silly Symphonies cartoons were groundbreaking, ambitious and beautifully animated, the Mintz Studio product proved more in the darker New York style of Fleischer, and could often be both imaginative and outré.





In 1934, the Mintz Studio began production on the Columbia Color Rhapsodies series, their entry into the "let's ape Disney's color Silly Symphonies" sweepstakes. While there are enjoyable and entertaining Columbia Color Rhapsodies, the move to "make 'em cute" and emulate the Disney approach had the effect of muting the studio's strengths - originality, surrealistic abandon and cartoony weirdness - while magnifying its weaknesses (frequently nonexistent storylines).




Having distributed some live-action shorts as well, most notably Larry Darmour Productions' low-budget Mickey McGuire comedies (starring Mickey Rooney), no doubt Columbia Pictures chieftain Harry Cohn was itching to compete with the big boys in the comedy short subject market. Cohn hired Jules White and Zion Myers to get the new comedy shorts department up and running in 1933.

The department's first films included the Musical Novelties series, and 2-reel comedies starring Ziegfeld Follies comic (and W.C. Fields cohort) Leon Errol, the bespectacled, ubiquitous character actor Walter Catlett, vaudeville star Lou Holtz and the team of Mack Sennett Studio comic Charlie Murray and George Sidney

The rubber-legged, double-jointed, boozed-up, ever-philandering Errol, most recently in the wonderfully titled Three Little Swigs, was concurrently starring in comedy shorts for Paramount, Vitaphone and Columbia.



Leon started his sporadic starring vehicles for the Columbia Shorts Department with Hold Your Temper. After starring in such strikingly bizarre and funny Columbia comedy shorts as One Too Many and Honeymoon Bridge (both written by ex-Sennett actor/screenwriter Harry McCoy), Leon would move on and headline a long-running series for RKO Radio Pictures (note: the hoodlum on the right in the following frame grab from Leon's RKO comedy The Cactus Cut-Up is character actor Emil Sitka, a future cornerstone of Columbia and especially Three Stooges 2-reelers).



George Sidney & Charlie Murray, the stars of the popular The Cohens & The Kellys feature comedies for MGM and Universal, headlined one of the Columbia Shorts Department's first series.



The last of the George Sidney & Charlie Murray mini-series, Back To The Soil, was released theatrically on August 10, 1934.



Unlike the Three Stooges comedies, the George Sidney & Charlie Murray series remains the definition of "rare and hard-to-find"; only the most dyed-in-the-wool film collectors, classic comedy geeks and professional archivists have seen them since their original release in winter 1933-1934.



Several Sidney & Murray shorts were directed by Jules White. One, Fishing For Trouble, co-stars Walter Brennan and 1920's Christie Comedies star Billy Dooley, A.K.A. "The Goofy Gob", in one of his very few talkies.



Murray & Sidney did appear in the following Paramount Pictures Hollywood On Parade short, entering at 8:03. This seems to be the only readily available bit of theirs in a sound film other than a cameo as Cohen & Kelly in The Stolen Jools.



However, the series that would inadvertently spawn the Three Stooges comedies - and very likely prompt way more than Three Little Swigs from Harry Cohn - was the studio's Musical Novelty series, directed by songwriter Archie Gottler.



Rhyming dialogue, showgirls, goofy songs and goofier plots were the order of the day in these ultra-campy 1933-1934 shorts. The following Musical Novelty, UMPA, the second film in the series, stars Jack Osterman, a.k.a. The Bad Boy Of Broadway. Its music will be quite familiar to anyone who has seen the fifth Musical Novelty short (which includes the first appearance in a Columbia 2-reeler by The Three Stooges), Woman Haters, more times than they care to admit.





Now that Woman Haters, released on May 5, 1934, just happens to be the first of 190 Columbia shorts starring The Three Stooges, just arrived from MGM and no longer working with Ted Healy.



The Three Stooges personalities - and those of perennial Columbia 2-reeler supporting players Bud Jamison and Monty Collins - are pretty well delineated even in this Archie Gottler Musical Novelty short. All handle the rhyming dialogue and singing with panache. Woman Haters is a personal favorite, as vivacious co-star Marjorie White shines and the sheer incongruity of Moe Howard crooning gets me laughing every time.



Arguably, the most significant thing that happened to Columbia Pictures during the 1933-1934 season was the runaway box-office success of Frank Capra's sprightly Depression-era screwball comedy, It Happened One Night, released theatrically on February 23, 1934. To say It Happened One Night was an enormous hit would be an understatement; it won the Academy Award for Best Picture, made Clark Gable a megastar and earned the studio tons of money.



Just how the influx of do-re-me at the height of The Great Depression specifically impacted the Columbia Shorts Department we cannot empirically say, but the next thing you know, prominent comedians were signed and several more series were added to the Musical Novelties on the Columbia Pictures release schedule - and we'll take that up in Part Two.

Next Saturday At Foothill College: 20th Anniversary Psychotronix Film Festival

Yes, indeedy do, as this poster by festival co-producer Psychotronix Scott Moon proclaims, on this coming Saturday, December 15, flying in the face of everyone's better judgment yet again, the KFJC Psychotronix Film Festival returns to besmirch the hallowed halls of Foothill College's Room 5015 from 7-11PM!



Now what does Psychotronix mean, anyway? Good question!



"Psychotronix" is a variation on Michael Weldon's absolutely essential book, The Psychotronic History Of Cinema, which remains the one and only source covering all varieties of under-the-radar B-films: monster movies, exploitation, horror films, science fiction, rock 'n' roll revues, etc.



Reacting against the very idea of devoting a screening to one director, one genre or one series, our 16mm celluloid concoctions expand the concept by adding a few more ingredients to the celluloid cauldron. For starters, we like snack bar ads and kidvid gone wrong, terribly wrong.




Also included in the delirious mix: weird cartoons, 1930's comedy shorts, vintage TV commercials, silent film clips, well-meaning but awkward educational films, Scopitones and Soundies.



There will very likely be at least one clip from the festival's inspiration, Mr. Ernie Kovacs.



Our modus operandi: throw a wide variety of footage from different places, genres, techniques or time periods together for no apparent reason. If we can establish a subject link or a Monty Python-esque visual or verbal link between the segments, great, but this is not absolutely necessary. Or to make a further Python reference, this could be called the "And Now For Something Completely Different" approach to film programming.



As far as content goes, the more obscure, the lower the budget, the more under-the-radar, the more pointlessly bizarre, the better.



We consider the evening a smashing success when the audience starts heckling the entertainment before the projection lamp goes on.

Why I Don't Read Superhero Comic Books

Although, come to think of it, maybe Sigmund Freud, Karl Jung or Wilhelm Reich in tights wouldn't have been so bad - NOT! The very thought would have sent Mr. Reich back into the orgone box for three days!

According to the Mrs. Freud, Jung and Reich, such a sight would have, most assuredly, proved far superior to that excruciating song parody performed at the 1973 Psychotherapists Convention "you're still a Jung man, bayyyyyy-beee woh oh - don't waste your time." OUCH!

The Psychotronic Paul Credo

Psychotronic Paul, admittedly, is not that good at the first directive in this equation - but remains excellent at the second!

San Francisco Benefit For Norton Records On December 16

Among the many businesses that got absolutely hammered by Hurricane Sandy was quintessential indie audio and video reissue label Norton Records. Sad to say, their Brooklyn warehouse was flooded and masters were destroyed.

Norton Records has fans and friends all over the world, and the San Francisco contingent will present a benefit show at the Elbo Room, 647 Valencia (between 17th and 18th Streets) on Sunday, December 16.

The festivities will feature DJ's Ruby White and Sid Presley, the sublime go-go dancing of The Devil-Ettes and classic rock n' roll by the following bands:

Roy Loney And The Phantom Movers
Overwhelming Colorfast
The Chuckleberries
The Tomorrowmen
Rue '66 (formerly The Cat Heads)

Doors open at 2:00 p.m. and bands hit the stage at 2:30. Suggested donation is $7-10. Pay the ten bucks, support a worthy cause and have fun in the process!

How I Feel About The Day After Thanksgiving

More interested in undergoing a colonoscopy without anesthesia than in braving the traffic and the raving shopping hordes today, dag nab it I'm staying home on Black Friday - and shall enjoy Psychotronic Paul's Choices For Post-Turkey Day Entertainment!

Happy Thanksgiving 2012 - Enjoy This Crap-tastic Cartoon!

Yes, indeedy, I am thankful for lots of things, especially the miracle of still drawing breath on Thanksgiving Day of 2012 . . . and yet, unquestionably, no matter how you shake it, I Positively Loathe A Parade.





Now one thing Mr. Blogmeister does like very much is bad cartoons - and nobody, not Terrytoons, not Columbia, not Van Beuren, made more singularly crap-tastic cartoons than Famous Studios (A.K.A. the zombie-like remnants of the great Fleischer Studio).



So today's guilty Thanksgiving pleasure is this 1950 Paramount Noveltoon featuring a turkey with the voice of Herman The Mouse and a farmer voiced by Sid Raymond (Katnip The Cat).



Post-1946 Famous Studios cartoons astound with an unparalleled ability to totally screw up every single joke from first frame to last - and this one, alas, directed by the great Disney animator Vladimir "Bill" Tytla, is no exception. They even blow the "running off the film sprockets" gag stolen directly from Tex Avery! HOW DO THEY DO IT?



Now just why Tytla, the ace animator of ace animators, a draftsman of draftsmen who actually taught young artists how to animate, was hired by Famous to direct Popeye cartoons. . . hoo boy, that we'll never know!



Even given all the smack talk I have just done about Famous, animation buffs can see pre-1947 Noveltoons - the good, the bad, the ugly, the merely pedestrian and (thankfully) the cartoons that carry on the unique Fleischer style - on an excellent DVD set by Steve Stanchfield and Thunderbean Video.

Burt Bacharach Day

The Sad End Of Twinkie The Cake

Ode To A Plastic Guitar

The following instructions tends to support my theory that, while you can safely place your cat or dog (depending on their individual hardiness) on the radiator, it's definitely not a good place for your guitar.



Oh, boy - with my plastic Maccaferri guitar, now I'll be able to play like this guy!

This Blog Celebrates Veterans' Day With Abbott & Costello!

Thanks, veterans! Thanks, Bud and Lou!

The Hard Science Behind Psychotronic Paul Film Programming

Post-Election Laughs From Chris Rock & Monty Python

Just Because. . .

There may be such thing as too much fun, but there can't be too many color shots of the great stage and screen actress Vivian Leigh.

Congrats To The 2012 San Francisco Giants!

Congratulations to the 2012 San Francisco Giants, who swept the heretofore mighty Detroit Tigers to earn their second championship in three years.



The ceremonial parade down Market Street takes place at 11:00 A.M. Pacific Standard Time.



While there are many people who don't go for professional sports in any way shape or form, IMHO, even the momentary diversion from daily life problems one's favorite team and game can provide is a wonderful thing.

Thinking about baseball, with Thursday's long overdue tribute to the Negro Leagues and Willie Mays, who passed at 93 on June 18. Foghorn Leghorn elaborates:



What animated cartoons about baseball have we not posted on this blog before? Here's one from Famous Studios.



Terrytoons had to get their two cents in, and they did just that with this opus starring Gandy Goose and Sourpuss. In the 1940's Terrytoons-Lantz-Screen Gems tradition, this one's funnier than one expects.



Any further cartoons about baseball which this blog posted more than five years ago? Yes. Posted Tex Avery's 1944 MGM cartoon BATTY BASEBALL back in 2016, so the Statute Of Limitations means we can post it again. It's on the dark side even by Avery standards and acheived a certain immortality for a quite literal interpretation of the phrase "kill the umpire."



In the "Fleischer Studio Does It Right" department, here's a cartoon we posted here back in 2018, Popeye in The Twisker Pitcher.

The Cartoon Research website covered, as part of a comprehensive piece on the insanely busy Famous Studios in the early 1960's, the very enjoyable animated adaptation of Eddie "The Old Philosopher" Lawrence's record Abner The Baseball. Here's the original record.



The cartoon is one of the best ever produced by Famous Studios in its lengthy and checkered history. Must tip our well-worn San Francisco Giants baseball cap to the frequently clever and inventive Famous Studios director/storyman Irv Spector, Eddie "The Old Philosopher" Lawrence - and all involved in creating and researching this Abner The Baseball post (Jerry Beck, assisted by Ken Layton, Mike Kazaleh and Paul Spector) on Cartoon Research.







In the opinion of this blogger, the greatest animated cartoons about baseball were the Friz Freleng masterpiece BB and GOOFY in HOW TO PLAY BASEBALL, directed by Jack Kinney

New On DVD: Comedy Kings Roscoe And Shemp!

A 2-DVD set, The Vitaphone Comedy Collection Vol. 1 — Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle/Shemp Howard (1932-1934) has been released by Warner Archive.



To paraphrase the blurb from the new releases section of the Warner Archive website:

"Roscoe 'Fatty' Arbuckle made his triumphant return to comedy in the six sparkling Vitaphone shorts he headlines in this collection. While Fatty’s return was tragically cut short by his untimely passing in June 1933, another talent, sporting the unforgettable mug of Shemp Howard, was on the rise. In this collection you’ll witness Shemp’s path from bit player to chief second banana in the span of two short years."

Among the premier comedian-gag writer-directors of silent pictures, as well as the mentor of Buster Keaton, Mr. Arbuckle managed to recapture the spirit and fun of his Keystone and Comique comedies quite well in these Vitaphone talkies.



Here's a clip from In The Dough. The bad guys are, indeed, more than vaguely familiar to classic movie and comedy fans!



A few players - gravel-voiced Lionel Stander, ultra-goofy Ben Blue, underrated Gus Shy and former Mack Sennett Studio stock company mainstay Harry Gribbon - turn up over and over in these Vitaphone "Big V" comedy shorts, all shot in Depression-era Brooklyn. Gribbon was teamed with Shemp in several Vitaphones. I'm disappointed that none of the Big V Comedies co-starring Shemp and Daphne Pollard are on this 2-DVD set, but assume they'll be on Volume 2.

Film history note: Art Trouble, one of the Vitaphones starring Shemp and Harry Gribbon on this set, is also noteworthy as Jimmy Stewart's film debut!

The lineup is as follows:

Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle

How've You Bean!
Hey, Pop!
Buzzin' Around!
Tomalio
Close Relations (w/Shemp)
In The Dough (w/Shemp)


Shemp Howard

Paul Revere, Jr. (w/ Gus Shy)
Salt Water Daffy (w/ Jack Haley)
How D'Ya Like That? (w/ George Givot)
I Scream (w/ Gus Shy)
The Wrong, Wrong, Trail
Here Comes Flossie (w/ Ben Blue)
Pugs And Kisses
Mushrooms (w/ Harry Gribbon)
Pure Feud (w/ Edgar Bergen)
Corn On The Cop (w/ Harry Gribbon)
Ramblin' Round Radio Row (w/ George Jessel and Bonnie Poe)
Very Close Veins (w/ Ben Blue)
Art Trouble (w/ Harry Gribbon)