As Bob Clampett’s reign at Warner Brothers Cartoons was coming to an end in the first half of 1945, a very talented young man was brought in to do voices. As his autobiography says, he took a bus to Hollywood, went straight to a talent agency, and was promptly hired by Warners. This man was Stanley Freberg, the first in a wave of upstarts who would begin proving that just because Mel Blanc had been the only distinctive voice actor in Hollywood for years didn’t mean he’d always remain so.
The Warner directors were taken by the 18 year-old Stan Freberg’s versatility and quickly began regularly casting him. He recorded his first voice for Bob Clampett for the ill-fated For He is a Jolly Good Fala, a cartoon that was immediately aborted after President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s death on April 12, 1945. It was replaced in the studio pipeline by Bacall to Arms.
The scrapping of the cartoon did not hinder Freberg’s productivity. Even before FDR’s demise, Clampett had cast him for one of the titular Goofy Gophers (one of the director’s last projects for the studio). Chuck Jones had also used him for Bertie in Roughly Squeaking and he voiced Grover Groundhog in One Meat Brawl for Bob McKimson.
Well before all of this, Clampett had been planning to leave Leon Schlesinger’s studio. He was negotiating a possible supervisory position in the Screen Gems cartoon department in early 1944, but that deal fell through. The following year, after Schlesinger sold his studio to Warners, Ray Katz and Henry Binder, Clampett’s friends and Schlesinger’s old partners, became the new (and final) Screen Gems producers. Clampett was able to secure a job as a creative supervisor and story head. Which was all to the good. Clampett was working without a contract his final month at Warners (meaning he could leave when he wanted, or be let go when Ed Selzer, Schlesinger’s successor, wanted).
Clampett never directed at Screen Gems, where he might have made an actual difference. He only wrote his own stories and gave his input to others. He was also responsible for getting Stan Freberg over to do voices at the studio (as well as Dave Barry). Freberg is heard in numerous Screen Gems cartoons of the period, such as Boston Beanie and Wacky Quacky – both trainwrecks that bely any description beyond “a schizoid’s point of view.”
Freberg also did an uncanny impersonation of Peter Lorre for the 1947 Color Rhapsody, Cockatoos for Two, which Clampett wrote and was directed by Bob Wickersham. Amazingly, this was not the first time Freberg did the Lorre voice for a cartoon with Clampett’s involvement.
The first time was for the timeless Daffy Duck classic, Birth of a Notion, a cartoon that was originated by Clampett and Warren Foster and ultimately directed by Bob McKimson. Clampett’s departure was certainly abrupt, as the April 28, 1945 recording sessions for both Birth of a Notion and Bacall to Arms indicate (Davis was announced as Clampett’s successor May 7th). Three cartoons he started had to be largely finished by Davis (Bacall and The Goofy Gophers) and McKimson (Notion).
I can’t help but wonder if Cockatoos for Two was Clampett’s way of pining over losing Birth of a Notion, not just because of the Lorre caricatures, but because the Columbia cartoon features a homing pigeon (voiced by storyman Cal Howard) that acts like Daffy Duck. It’s not as though we viewers were deprived of anything. Notion as directed by McKimson is surely one of the heights of 1940s animated cartooning.
You will note that Freberg is directed very differently in these two cartoons. In the Warner cartoon, Freberg is doing a more subdued, menacing Lorre, as seen and heard in a film like Mad Love (in which Lorre does play a mad doctor). In the Columbia cartoon, Freberg is directed far ‘cartoonier,’ akin to Lorre’s much less serious roles in films like Arsenic and Old Lace.
A comparison of the two cartoons also reveals how studio dynamics can affect talent. There’s no sense of any missed chances in the Warner cartoon, even though it was taken over by a radically different filmmaker. While he routinely did amazing things before, the most Clampett can do in the Screen Gems system is wander aimlessly, hoping one one of his ideas will hit the bullseye rather than misfire. (And even then, the best thing in the cartoon, “I must have a new taste sensation!”, is only so because of Freberg’s delivery.) Screen Gems turned what could have been a laugh-riot at Warners into something mildly amusing and creepy.
Oh, and I should take note, this particular transfer is incredibly rare, as no complete set of elements on the cartoon exist in the Columbia Pictures vaults. I discovered, and transferred, an original 35mm nitrate IB Technicolor print of Cockatoos for Twolast year and shared images. Sadly, the opening credits and last few seconds of this print were clipped, so I’ve used footage from a B/W 16mm print. Still, it’s amazing it was in the shape it was, given it had been sitting around for 65 years. I now present that reconstruction here for the world, for free.
Thanks to Keith Scott and Mike Barrier, both of whom provided research material for this piece. Steve Stanchfield, Collin Kellogg, Jerry Beck, and Fredrik Sandstrom helped make the film reconstruction a reality.
I missed posting this in time for Oscar night, but rather than talk about Seth MacFarlane’s performance, let’s turn back the clock to another historic Oscar controversy…
It was once lovingly called “The Great Controversy of 1946.” Two cartoons, by two different studios, with the same story and similar gags: a character’s piano recital is disturbing a mouse’s residency in the piano, set to Liszt’s “Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2.” One got the Oscar, the other wasn’t even nominated. How did this happen? Was it pure coincidence? Was it someone’s idea of a joke? Was there a genuine leak to the other studio?
Joe Adamson wrote diligently about the controversy over twenty years ago in his excellent book, Bugs Bunny: Fifty Years and Only One Grey Hare on pages 140-41:
Tex Avery was a witness when the folks at Technicolor, evidently stressed out, delivered one day’s Rhapsody Rabbit footage by mistake to the MGM cartoon unit, apparently confusing it with a disturbingly similar Tom & Jerry cartoon, on which Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera were then pinning their Academy Award hopes for 1947. When Bugs Bunny came up on the MGM screen, it was Hanna and Barbera who were disturbed first: pa reject much like theirs was apparently closer to completion over at Termite Terrace, and it was clearly going to be an Oscar contender for 1946. The Tom & Jerry cartoon, finally titled Cat Concerto, was rushed through the studio’s production process and put up for Academy consideration in the spring. That year’s crop of animated short-subject Oscar contenders was screened for the Academy, and then it was Friz Freleng’s turn to be disturbed.
“When they drew the rotation out of a hat,” [Freleng] remembers, “my cartoon was run after theirs, unfortunately for me. And the audience thought I stole from them. They got a nomination for it, and I didn’t. But I felt that was one of the outstanding things I had done. I enjoyed doing it.”
“The idea of having the cat play the piano was fascinating to me. So we decided to go ahead with The Cat Concerto, and do the Second Hungarian Rhapsody. We happened to have under contract one of the best pianists in the United States at the time, a famous concert pianist. His name eludes me at the moment, but he loved doing it.”
[…]
“It was at a screening for the Oscar nominees. We [Cat Concerto] played first. When it came on, people were laughing like hell, and when the lights came on, Freleng was mad as hell. Then it [Rabbit Rhapsody] played, and the action was similar: Bugs walked up in the tailcoat, flipped it up, sat down, warmed up the hands, looking arrogant, all exactly the same. In ours, Tom, the cat, disturbs the mouse, and in his, Bugs, the rabbit, disturbs the mouse. Ours ended up as one of the five [Oscar] finalists, and people had the feeling that he [Freleng] was ripping off our cartoon, but he said, ‘No, no, no, I never saw your goddamned lousy cartoon!’”
“I really believe that [it was a coincidence]. Freleng had a sense of humor, we just thought the same, and our gags were the same.”
“[But…] What’s a rabbit doing with a mouse?”
Neither party seems to be accusing the other of plagiarism, although Barbera is certainly planting some amused skepticism by suggesting that Tom and Jerry are the more natural fit for this scenario. But the T&J cartoon’s concept is arguably just as absurd: why is Tom, who has been established as a house cat in all prior entries, suddenly performing at Carnegie Hall?
But arguing which cartoon is funnier/more original does not answer the question: was it plagiarism, or just a coincidence? I believe I can firmly establish it was the latter, beyond the fact that neither Freleng nor Barbera contested otherwise.
Adamson’s account also states that Terry Lind painted her backgrounds for Rhapsody Rabbit in April 1946, and that animation was well underway by that point. This is true, and it corroborates with the new documentation I and other historians have uncovered since Adamson’s book.
In general, a classic Hollywood cartoon’s soundtrack was recorded after the animation had been completed or nearly completed. In certain cases, when the music dictates so much of the action, it would be recorded first. The dates procured from recording records at both studios reveal the following:
2 February 1946
Pianist Jakob Gimpel was recorded for Rhapsody Rabbit (and paid $250).
8 April 1946
Pianist Calvin Jackson was recorded for The Cat Concerto.
8 June 1946
Mel Blanc recorded his dialogue for Rhapsody Rabbit(and paid $125).
NOW ESTABLISHED AS FACT:Rhapsody Rabbit pre-existed Cat Concerto, and the former overlapped into the latter’s production timeline.
So did that Technicolor mix-up really happen? More than likely. Something absolutely happened because both cartoons were rushed, in different ways, giving credence to the story that both studios were aware of the other cartoon’s existence.
The evidence that Cat Concerto was physically rushed through production is staggering. For starters, the cartoon features animation by Irv Spence and Dick Bickenbach, both of whom were not at the studio until mid-1946. (Spence had returned from a stint at Jam Handy’s, Bickenbach had come over from Warners. Did Bickenbach give the idea for Cat Concerto to his new bosses? I’ve heard nothing of the sort, and there’s no proof, anecdotal or otherwise.)
Furthermore, its production number of 165 indicates that it didn’t go into production until after The Invisible Mouse (163), a cartoon released in September 1947. That doesn’t make Cat Concerto‘s release of April 1947 seem too expedited. But unlike the other MGM cartoons, its musical score was copyrighted in sections, and far ahead of much earlier Tex Avery cartoons like Lonesome Lenny, Henpecked Hoboes (still under its working title Bums Away), and Red Hot Rangers, as evidenced here:
Also of considerable interest is Cat Concerto‘s copyright synopsis, with the note of “Changes 3-29-47,” indicating that the typist had viewed a print prior to this particular synopsis. March 29th was sixteen days after Jack Benny presented the Oscar to Cat Concerto. So as soon as it was released, it was touted as an Oscar winner in the opening titles, unlike cartoons that had that proclamation inserted into the credits well after the fact (like Yankee Doodle Mouse, Quiet, Please!, and Johann Mouse (though most surviving prints retain the original release titles); The Little Orphan was also always emblazoned with the Oscar stamp in its original release).
In the case of Rhapsody Rabbit, it was not rushed through production – it was pushed up the release schedule severely.
Had that not been the case, it would have likely sat on the shelf for another 15 months, and have its opening title music scored at a much later date (surviving records do not indicate when Rhapsody Rabbit‘s non-piano music was recorded). Its production number of 1040 suggests it would have been a late 1947 or early 1948 release, as it’s between Daffy Duck Slept Here (1039) and Nothing But the Tooth (1041).
What seems to have clearly happened is that Warners got wind of the accidental delivery to MGM, or at least were aware that MGM knew of their cartoon, and they pushed Rhapsody Rabbit up the backlog, swapping it with another (decidedly less ambitious) Bugs Bunny cartoon. My theory is that this cartoon was Chuck Jones’s A Feather in His Hare (production number 1023).
My reasoning? Mel Blanc recorded his lines as Bugs on June 2, 1945, and Mike Maltese recorded his dialogue as the Jewish Indian on November 17 later that year. The cartoon was not released until February 1948. That’s fairly jarring, even with all the complications of the Warner system.
Milt Franklyn’s orchestral scorings were generally recorded in production number order, with cartoons in the same number range scored the same day. The March 22, 1947 session is odd in this regard: Nothing But the Tooth (1041) was scored with A Feather in His Hare (1023). Therefore, I can offer no other explanation for this disparity other than the earlier cartoon was shoved down the assembly line, also explaining why no Bugs cartoons by Jones were released in the 1947 season.
MY CONCLUSION: I firmly believe that no one ripped off anybody and that the similarity is truly coincidental. Rhapsody Rabbit was pushed ahead on the release schedule after the majority of the work was done, while The Cat Concerto was physically rushed in nearly every department.
Piano recital cartoons were just a hot commodity that year. What isn’t brought up at all is how a third cartoon centered around this theme, with Woody Woodpecker and Andy Panda (and no mouse nor Franz Liszt), was also in the Best Cartoon of 1946 Oscar race. Musical Moments from Chopin, a Walter Lantz Musical Miniature directed by Dick Lundy, received the nomination that Rhapsody Rabbit didn’t, and was also screened for the Academy before it was released to the general public.
In hindsight, Freleng’s [justifiable] resentment seems to have less to do with the origins of the concept than the obvious Hollywood politics at play. There was always blatant ballot-stuffing at the Academy, given MGM’s many members and prestige in the industry, accounting for the cat and mouse’s seven wins (though it seems just as likely voters preferred the humbler H-B Tom & Jerrys to the more ambitious filmmakers like Freleng, Avery, Jones, Hubley, et. al.). There’s no doubt in my mind that the screening was rigged by MGM to make the Warner cartoon look like plagiarism. Afterwards, MGM began to try avoiding this kind of conflict by routinely getting what it felt was the best “Oscar bait” out to the public as soon as possible (though they found to their horror that Tom and Jerry in the Hollywood Bowl, a cartoon released a year earlier than it should have been, was nothing on Gerald McBoing Boing by the new kids in town).
It’s a shame both studios felt threatened by each other, because the controversy has cast an unnecessary cloud over two very fine pictures. But the research shows that this was one of those great Hollywood coincidences that was just that – a coincidence.
Considerable thanks to Keith Scott, David Gerstein, and Kurtis Findlay for their essential assistance.
Feb. 27, 2013 Update:Michael Barrier has posted a generous response, about where the influence for these cartoons may have likely come from. He also notes I may have pegged Dick Bickenbach and Irv Spence’s arrivals at MGM much later than they really happened. I confess, this is likely true. The first cartoon with Dick Bickenbach’s animation, A Mouse in the House, was in animation by January 1946, so he was certainly around by much earlier than “mid-1946”. Not exactly sure of Irv Spence’s return, though it was later.
While I would generally abhor any kind of product getting 30 1-star reviews on Amazon before it even came out, I’ve got to hand it to the fan outrage over Warner Home Video’s decision to exclude Mouse Cleaning and Casanova Cat from Tom & Jerry: Golden Collection Volume Two – it’s impressive.
For those of you who don’t know, WHV has had an aversion to including these two verboten cartoons on any kind of release in the history of dual-layer technology. They were forbidden from being included in the less prestigious T&J Premiere Collections, and they’re now being excluded from the adult collector’s market. It’s a truly bizarre move. Mouse Cleaning was actually restored from an original nitrate specifically for this release, and equally (and more so) racially insensitive titles have found their way onto various other T&J, Looney Tunes, and Popeye collections – including this very release.
Things might change. An episode of Tiny Toon Adventures was intentionally supposed to be left off the series’ third volume due to questionable content (namely a preachy, PSA-type episode that clumsily teaches kids about the dangers of alcohol), but was ultimately included due to a decidedly quieter amount of fan outrage. As for myself, I sure won’t be buying the set in its current state. I’ve bought the damn T&J cartoons enough for one lifetime; even the last volume wasn’t done right, though it was complete and uncensored.
The irony is that in the VHS era, little more than a decade ago, both of these cartoons were available, completely uncensored, on VHS compilations aimed at kids and families. It’s a shame. Casanova Cat is routine, but Mouse Cleaning is easily one of the best entries in the series. And dare I say it, its offending scene (with Tom emerging from a truckload of coal in blackface, and Mammy spying him on the porch and mistaking him for a… um…) is one of the few racially-charged gags in any film that’s actually… well, funny.
2/23/13 UPDATE: Official PR suicide note from Warner Home Video:
Warner Bros. Home Entertainment carefully monitors all content it plans for release. While undertaking a review of “Tom and Jerry: The Golden Collection Volume 2,” the company felt that certain content would be inappropriate for the intended audience and therefore excluded several shorts.
For those of you, like myself, who have been eagerly awaiting the arrival of Amid Amidi’s Full Steam Ahead!: The Life and Art of Ward Kimball, there is bad news regarding it. Amidi announced yesterday that Disney has successfully blocked Chronicle Books from publishing it. Sadly, this isn’t too far out of the ordinary with regards to how Disney, like Google, behaves as they try to have every aspect of the entertainment world under their direct control. You can read about the situation here.
The scrapping of the cartoon did not hinder Freberg’s productivity. Even before FDR’s demise, Clampett had cast him for one of the titular Goofy Gophers (one of the director’s last projects for the studio). Chuck Jones had also used him for Bertie in Roughly Squeaking and he voiced Grover Groundhog in One Meat Brawl for Bob McKimson.
Clampett never directed at Screen Gems, where he might have made an actual difference. He only wrote his own stories and gave his input to others. He was also responsible for getting Stan Freberg over to do voices at the studio (as well as Dave Barry). Freberg is heard in numerous Screen Gems cartoons of the period, such as Boston Beanie and Wacky Quacky – both trainwrecks that bely any description beyond “a schizoid’s point of view.”
You will note that Freberg is directed very differently in these two cartoons. In the Warner cartoon, Freberg is doing a more subdued, menacing Lorre, as seen and heard in a film like Mad Love (in which Lorre does play a mad doctor). In the Columbia cartoon, Freberg is directed far ‘cartoonier,’ akin to Lorre’s much less serious roles in films like Arsenic and Old Lace.
