There are lots of natal anniversaries at this time of year for luminaries this blog and blogger are crazy about. Kicking off the Happy Birthday list: British stage, screen and radio actress Madeleine Carroll, star of British and American movies, including The 39 Steps, Secret Agent, The Prisoner Of Zenda and My Favorite Blonde, who chucked a lucrative and successful showbiz career for the callings of humanitarianism and international activism, born on February 26, 1906. The life story of Madeleine Carroll is covered in detail by John Pascoe's book Madeleine Carroll: Actress and Humanitarian, from The 39 Steps to the Red Cross.
The comedy kings born on February 26 include Tex Avery.
That's right, Tex Avery, a.k.a. The King Of Cartoons, the ringleader of Termite Terrace who brought Bugs Bunny from bucktoothed chortling grotesque to the suave Oscar-winning rabbit.
Turns out this blog somehow overlooked TWO February 26 birthdays. First and foremost, forgot all about the great New Orleans pianist, vocalist, songwriter and entertainer Fats Domino (1928-2017), who brought the boogie woogie riffology of pianists Albert Ammons and Meade Lux Lewis into 1950's rock n' roll and led countless music lovers to his fellow New Orleans entertainers Professor Longhair, Allen Toussaint, Dr. John, James Booker and The Meters. Here's an excerpt from the American Masters documentary Fats Domino & The Birth Of Rock & Roll.
My favorite TV program in the early 1970's, hands down, was Johnny's.
Love the Pops & Johnny rendition of the 1930 Louis Armstrong & Jimmie Rodgers recording of Blue Yodel #9!
As Fats Domino did, Johnny Cash had an extended career, stretching into the 21st century. For more on the man in black's music, check out the Johnny Cash Archive on YouTube.
All of the above stalwarts born on February 26 (and several more who, unfortunately, slipped our minds - Godfrey Cambridge, Erykah Badu, Marilyn Michaels, Alan Bridge, Bob Hite and Mitch Ryder) merit mucho thanks and appreciation for making the world a better place.
MLB spring training has started in Scottsdale, not far from where the Arizona Diamondbacks play, but all I can think of is that episode of The Munsters in which Herman swings the bat.
Significantly less big-budget than Pixar's recent baseball-related TV series WIN OR LOSE but equally satisfying is Pantomine Pictures' funny and satiric Roger Ramjet.
The Roger Ramjet cartoons were produced back in the 1960's halcyon days when MLB Hall Of Famers Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, Roberto Clemente, Frank Robinson and Mickey Mantle were tearing it up on the diamond.
The knowledgeable and entertaining Toon Heads at Anthony's Animation Talk reviewed a lesser known albeit genuinely charming classic from the Looney Tunes Merrie Melodies archives, HOBO BOBO (1947), directed by Robert McKimson.
Friz Freleng and his talented crew made several outstanding baseball cartoons.
Arguably the greatest of all animated cartoons about the sport is BASEBALL BUGS (1946), still unsurpassed after all these decades.
Not as well known but also wonderful is Freleng's 1936 Merrie Melodie The Boulevardier From The Bronx.
Its star is a rooster variant on flashy St. Louis Cardinals pitcher Dizzy Dean.
When the topic of baseball comes up, the first person from the world of entertainment one thinks of is Buster Keaton.
Knowing Buster's love of the game, it seems rather amazing that Buster did not devote an entire feature film to baseball. Hollywood legend has it that the first question in a job interview with Buster Keaton Productions was "do you play baseball?" One imagines an incredible action-packed comedy feature co-starring Buster with his mentor Roscoe Arbuckle, Roscoe's ever-acrobatic and quadruple-jointed nephew, Al St. John, and the ever-menacing Big Joe Roberts as the umpire.
That said, this entry from Buster's mid-1930's series of Educational Pictures comedy shorts, One Run Elmer, threadbare budget notwithstanding, has its charms. It's impossible for Keaton to be anything but fascinating onscreen.
Another baseball-loving movie comedian was vaudeville star, singer and rubber-legged eccentric dancer Joe E. Brown.
He's best known today for his key role as "wild and crazy guy" Osgood Fielding III in Some Like It Hot (1959).
Joe both worked as a broadcaster for the New York Yankees and starred in immensely entertaining baseball comedies, Elmer The Great and Alibi Ike.
The latter is my favorite of the two and a terrific showcase for the gangly but athletic comic.
Trying to cheer up, mostly unsuccessfully, the pissed-off and snowstorm-addled reprobates at Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog are watching Toby The Pup cartoons.
Seven of the 12 Toby cartoons remain in the lost film Twilight Zone. The Tobys are less gritty in design and sensibility than the Scrappy series, and in some sequences resemble Ben Harrison and Manny Gould's contemporaneous Krazy Kat, also produced by Charles Mintz.
Alas, the Toby The Pup cartoons were so unloved that several in the 12-entry series remain lost almost 100 years later.
One urban legend goes that producer Charles Mintz was so incensed by the failure of the Toby cartoons to score a boffo Mickey Mouse style mega-hit for RKO Radio Pictures in 1930-1931 that he had all the original 35mm negatives and prints buried! That's a great story, but seems unlikely. . .
Produced by the Charles Mintz Studio for RKO Radio Pictures release, the Tobys were made by the same crew that subsequently produced Columbia's Scrappy series.
That crew would be led by the highly imaginative Dick Huemer, supported by his fellow ex-Fleischer animators Sid Marcus and Art Davis. The jaunty musical scores were by Joe De Nat, who re-used the Toby The Pup opening a few years later as main title theme for Columbia's Color Rhapsodies.
Huemer, who ultimately spent three decades working for Walt Disney Productions as part of a prolfic story writing team with Joe Grant, regarded his Mintz Studio cartoons as dreadful at best, an embarrassment. No surprise there: he subsequently worked on Pinocchio and Fantasia.
In this writer's cartoon-crazed opinion, the Tobys equal or surpass the wacky Fleischer Studio hijinx from the same period and also rival the contemporaneous Disney cartoons for animation technique, early 1930's "rubber hose" style.
Serge Bromberg of Lobster Films has found heretofore lost Toby cartoons with French titles. Hence, it is possible to compare two versions of Toby in The Museum.
The Toby cartoons never got distributed to U.S. television and were largely unseen for several decades. They were mentioned in Radio Pictures' print ads, presumably with some expectation that the cartoons would give Mickey Mouse at least a bit of competition for the Depression-era moviegoing audience.
Watching a very odd entry from Republic Pictures' low-budget Jerky Journeys series brings to mind the topic of very odd animated cartoons. We'll start with the most inexplicably odd but hilarious cartoon from Tex Avery's lengthy career, the Walter Lantz opus SH-HHHHH, supposedly based on a popular - and very odd - comedy recording (The Okeh Laughing Record).
Ted Eshbaugh's classic cartoons, especially his 1933 take on The Wizard Of Oz, are wonderful while invariably a bit odd.
Ted Eshbaugh's oddest cartoon may be his Cinecolor tale of a truly abominable snowman. The title character is not a nice guy!
Arguably both among the oddest but most beautiful animated cartoons is John Hubley's "Frankie & Johnny" sendup and ultra-stylish post-modernist musical Rooty Toot Toot.
Entirely on the other side of the artistic spectrum is this very odd one-shot Aesop's Fable from the Van Beuren studio, frequent producers of the oddest of the odd from early 1930's Cartoonland. It's primitive. weirdly imaginative and weirdly compelling; saw the audience at one of the Psychotronix Film Festivals give the 1933 cartoon, as well as Eshbaugh's The Wizard Of Oz, a rousing response.
The only cartoon to feature a caricature of Oscar Levant and also spoof the Information Please radio show, THE HERRING MURDER MYSTERY is another favorite. Dun Roman, later of Jay Ward Productions, directed this wonderfully odd musical one-shot with originality and panache.
Another very odd one-shot from the Columbia Color Rhapsodies series, THE DISILLUSIONED BLUEBIRD, is a calypso musical. The main character is a jerk - that may be why this cartoon is a one-shot - but the music carries the day.
Less musical but also clever and definitely odd is the film noir spoof Flora, just one of a slew of very odd cartoons written with perverse glee by wacky Screen Gems Studio storymen Cal Howard and Dave Monahan.
Do we have favorite post-1940's cartoons that precede Futurama and the first SNL bits by Robert Smigel's TV Funhouse but follow Super Chicken, Tom Slick and George Of The Jungle? Yes. Several were produced by Marv "Bambi Meets Godzilla" Newland and International Rocketship Limited.
Especially love SING BEAST SING, which features excellent work by several all-time favorite animators and a tres cool soundtrack by Chess Records stalwart Willie Mabon. Is the character of Vern a young Tex Avery?
The music is just one of the amazing singles Willie waxed for Chess way back when.
How can one follow a fabulous cartoon like that? By going to Chicago, not for Second City troupe improv comedy, modern jazz (especially The Art Ensemble), Cubs baseball or Da Bears but for some serious blues, courtesy of the great Willie Mabon and Hubert Sumlin.
Willie and Odie Payne toured Europe and rocked the house wherever they played back in the 1970's.
