R.I.P. Harry Morgan

Officer Bill Gannon has finally retired. Others around the web will write about Col. Sherman T. Potter, but I choose to pay homage to Mr. Morgan's second-best remembered role.

I interviewed Mr. Morgan in 1998 for my book, My Name's Friday. Until that time it had never occurred to me that simply writing a book about Dragnet might be credential enough to speak with some of its participants.

Back then, Kenneth Starr's investigation into President Clinton's indiscretions was in full bloom, and during a press conference, Mr. Starr made a comment that, like Sgt. Joe Friday, his interest was for "Just the facts, ma'am." "Let's don't have politics, let's don't have spin... let's let those facts come out." A writer from the National Enquirer thought it would be make a good story to get opinions about this from people involved with Dragnet in some way. He contacted Harry Morgan and, as I'd announced on badge714.com that I was writing a book on the show, he contacted me. When our interview was over, he graciously gave me Mr. Morgan's telephone number.

I think it took me at least a week to work up the nerve to dial it, and two or three messages left before we finally connected. Truth be told, I wasn't sure what to expect. I hadn't seen him on screen in quite a while, and the last time I did, I thought he'd looked pretty wan. I wondered if age had dimmed his faculties in some way.

I needn't have worried. The man was an absolute delight. He shared some marvelous anecdotes about working and socializing with Jack Webb, and even remembered doing some of the earliest Dragnet radio episodes. (Seek out The Big Book from 1950, where he portrays a scoutmaster attending a seminar that Friday and Romero are giving on keeping pornography out of schools.) He was well-aware that he'd been Webb's second choice (Ben Alexander had just been hired for Felony Squad), and considered Webb's acting and directing styles "fascinating." He was also free with his opinions about different aspects of the show. My favorite quote was this one:

Jack and I wore the same clothes for the whole damn series. The same suit, the same shirt, the same tie, the same... well, maybe not the same underwear. But nobody ever said, 'Jesus, don't you guys ever change clothes?' It's funny how little an audience will notice.

Since confession is good for the soul, I might as well explain that Mr. Morgan did not "write" the Foreword for my book. I asked him if he'd be interested in doing so, and he graciously declined. However, when I asked if I could compile some of the more pertinent quotes about his work with Webb, and use that as a Foreword, he was agreeable. I sent him a draft; he made one correction, and that was that. When it was published, I mailed him four copies of the book: one for him and one for each of his three sons.

Interviewing Mr. Morgan, and experiencing the gracious way he treated me, gave me the confidence to seek out other folks who'd appeared on Dragnet or in Webb's movies, or who worked behind the scenes. As it happens, those interviews really made the book as successful as it was, and I'll always be grateful to Mr. Morgan for the jump-start.

In particular, though, I'm grateful that Harry Morgan said "Yes" to Jack Webb when Ben Alexander had to say "No." Thanks for being Bill Gannon, Harry.

"Okay, Rudolph... Full Power!"

Mister Magoo's Christmas Carol debuted two years' before, but Rankin-Bass's Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer is the earliest Christmas special I remember. "The most famous reindeer of all's" story premiered on December 6, 1964 as an entry in General Electric's Fantasy Hour, a series of color specials that aired on Sunday afternoon. Someone has posted the original opening and commercials (featuring Santa's elves) from that first appearance to YouTube:

The closing includes a couple of nice shots of the voice cast. Jerry Beck, at his invaluable blog Cartoon Brew, has identified them. The first photo shows, from left to right, Janice Orenstein (Clarice), Paul Kliegman (Donner and the reindeer coach) and Paul Soles (Hermey). From left to right in the second photo: Soles, Billie Mae Richards (Rudolph), Carl Banas (Head Elf and Spotted Elephant) and Alfie Scopp (Charlie-in-the-Box).

I'd forgotten that this wasn't a prime-time entry, but its popularity ensured that it would become one for Christmas Future. It received a lot of press back in 1964, and more than one reviewer opined that we would see Rudolph annually... as indeed we have.

To all my readers: May you have a Merry Christmas and a Happy and Prosperous 2011. And to quote from the Christmas special I didn't see first, May God Bless Us, Every One.

TV Needs Cartoons!

Here's a relic from TV's Golden Age that survived well into the cable/satellite era:


In this digitally restored hi-def world, title cards from defunct TV film distribution firms are all but extinct. Ironically, the fact that they lived this long just demonstrates the apathy that subsequent owners held toward their animated property. Cartoons were so trivial, it mattered not they were heralded with company names that not only weren't yours but also long-since shuttered. In the case of Associated Artists Productions (a.a.p.), it was bought by United Artists Television in 1958 (and actually became u.a.p. in trade ads). UA held the pre-'48 Warner Brothers and all theatrical Popeye cartoons, which had been a.a.p.'s most profitable prize, right through its 1981 merger with M.G.M., until Ted Turner acquired most of the library five years later. Even after Warners got their cartoons back in the '90's, the antiquated openings weren't excised until the studio's home video division started work on the Looney Tunes Golden Collections.

Associated Artists had acquired the cartoons on March 1, 1956, so the company was an ongoing concern for only two years after the titles were created. Yet the name lived on, year-after-year, decade-after-decade.

In truth, a.a.p.'s cartoon product was the summit of a long, hard climb for animation on TV. Theatrical 'toons of some nature were racing across home screens almost from the start. And they were, for a time, one of television's most desirable commodoties. In April 1953, The Billboard proclaimed: "Stations in general appear to be buying cartoons today at a faster clip than ever before. According to best estimates, there are about 650 cartoons in TV distribution altogether. It would seem that the market could comfortably support as many as 1,000 cartoons, if not more. But at the moment, there is not another foot of cartoon in the offing." In an in-depth article two months' later, Billboard would revise the figure upward to "about 800," but with a qualifyer: 90% of the total dated to the silent era.

When Official Films licensed the original Felix the Cat library in early 1953, it was big news: there were reportedly around 200 titles in the Cat's canon. The problem was, since the films were nearly all silent, not every title was in fit condition for release. Official was only able to scrape together 35 Felix cartoons, supplementing the package with 50 other titles from its existing library. Nevertheless, sales were brisk; Official booked $15,000 from six stations during its first week of marketing.

So which cartoons entertained the first television generation, and who provided them... and why?

To begin with, it's helpful to remember that, in the silent days through the first talkie decade, no major Hollywood production company had its own cartoon division. Animation was handled by contractors, most of whom hired established artists, then aligned with a studio. Felix the Cat was owned by producer Pat Sullivan, who released through Margaret Winkler (1923-25), then Educational Pictures (1926-28) and finally Copley Pictures (1928-30). Walt Disney, after leaving producer Charles Mintz, was aligned with Pat Powers (1928-30), then Columbia (1930-32), United Artists (1932-36) and R.K.O. Radio (1936-56). Mintz was aligned with Universal (1927-29), then Columbia (1929-40). Walter Lantz provided Universal with cartoons after Mintz was released. When Ubbe Iwerks left Disney in 1930 to try independent production, he went with Powers, who subcontracted some of Iwerks' product to M.G.M. and released the rest through his own Celebrity Productions. In 1930, Leon Schlesinger contracted with two other renegade Disneyites, Hugh Harman and Rudolf Ising, then sold their cartoons in turn to Warner Brothers. Harman and Ising would leave Schlesinger in 1933 to release through M.G.M., who in turn dumped Iwerks, who ended up taking on contracted work for Mintz and Schlesinger before giving up and going back to Disney. Paramount Pictures aligned itself with Max (Out of the Inkwell) Fleischer around 1927, then took control of his studio fifteen years later. Amadee J. Van Beuren had been in the cartoon business since the early 1920's and his studio's work was distributed by Pathe, which later merged with Radio Pictures and the Keith-Orpheum theater circuit to become R.K.O. Radio; when that studio signed Disney, Van Beuren closed up shop. Paul Terry had been a Van Beuren contractee, went independent in 1928 and released his "Terrytoons" through Educational Pictures, then went directly to Educational's distributor, 20th Century-Fox.

Now, if you thought that was confusing, let's discuss what happened to the cartoons!

Two batches - the substantial Van Beuren backlog, which included Terry's work for the company, and the less-sizable Iwerks canon - had passed through various hands after those companies folded in the 1930's. Commonwealth Film and Television Inc. got the Iwerks films, as well as a good chunk of the Van Beurens, albeit mostly the silent ones. Unity Television Corporation got many of the Van Beuren talkies, such as Cubby Bear and (the human) Tom & Jerry; so did Official Films for their home movie division, although this didn't stop them from offering them to TV, along with The Little King and Rainbow Parades (retitled "Merry Tunes" for b&w broadcasting). Sterling Television got ahold of the most ancient silent 'toons - the Mutt & Jeffs and Bobby Bumps' and Out of the Inkwells that had been sold to theaters on a states right's basis back in the late teens/early twenties, and signed a distribution deal with the granddaddy of cartoon production, John R. Bray (first employer of Fleischer, Terry and Lantz, among others), who'd discontinued theatrical animation by 1921!

The earliest batch of post-1940 cartoons to reach the air were the Superman shorts produced by Fleischer and Paramount's Famous Studios between 1941-43. Superman's parent company, National Comics, had acquired the shorts contractually, then sold them to Flamingo Films in May 1951, when the latter company licensed the distribution rights for a forthcoming Adventures of Superman TV series. When the live action series got a nationwide sponsor, Kellogg's cereals, Flamingo had to pull the cartoons from TV until a suitable sponsorship arrangement could be made (see article), lest the character become exclusive to two competing products.

For roughly seven years - from 1948 through '54 - that was the state of the cartoon on TV. There were a couple of primitive made-for-TV animated shows, namely Crusader Rabbit and Jim & Judy in Teleland, but no one was in any hurry to invest in TV cartoon production on a grand scale, not when puppet shows like Howdy Doody and Rootie Kazootie were doing just fine. Although one New York area station was making a strong case to the contrary.

Robert Paskow was the film programmer for WATV, Channel 13 in Newark, NJ. WATV usually ran seventh of the seven NYC-area VHF stations in ratings, a poor signal being the least of its problems. But one Channel 13 show was outpulling everyone else, even NBC's Howdy Doody: Junior Frolics, a cartoon program. Paskow began buying up all the cartoons he could get his hands on months before WATV made its May 1948 debut. By '53, he held about 650 titles; no other station in the U.S. had more. Paskow was such a good customer, he received permission from the distributors to edit their negatives, removing racial gags and adult imagery, which helps explain why so many silent cartoons that survive today are incomplete.

Film industry titans, poised for a theatrical exhibitor backlash, watched closely in the fall of 1954, when Disney dipped his toes into TV with a weekly series on the ABC network, Disneyland. Of course, Uncle Walt turned to his cartoon library from time-to-time in order to fill that hour. Disney suffered naught from his TV excursion, and studio execs quickly discovered that widescreen had lessened the demand for pictures filmed in the standard aperture ratio; in short, theater owners couldn't care less if TV bought up the old films. That December, there came a break in the animation dry spell. In separate deals, Columbia and Universal parted with some of their black & white material. Hygo Television bought Charles Mintz's Krazy Kat and Scrappy cartoons from Columbia, which totaled 156 titles, and Motion Pictures for Television got 179 Walter Lantz cartoons, mainly Oswald the Rabbit, but also Pooch the Pup, Willie the Mouse and Meeny, Miney & Moe. Paskow snapped up the Hygo package for Junior Frolics before the ink on the press release had dried.

Two months later, Guild Films acquired 191 Looney Tunes from Warners. These were the black & white Schlesinger titles from 1930-43, mainly featuring Porky Pig, Bosko, Buddy and a handful of Daffy Duck. Warners' asking price was $1.2 million dollars (half up-front, half due in two years) plus 40% thereafter. Guild, which netted over a million in sales after the first year, didn't suffer on their end. More importantly, the deal marked Warner's entry into television.

Finally, in December 1955, the dam burst. U.M.&M. - which was a combine of two movie advertising sales forces (United Film Service and Motion Picture Advertiser Service) and one TV film distributor (Minot TV) - bought Paramount's pre-'48 backlog of short subjects, which included 614 Fleischer and Famous cartoons (all except Popeye the Sailor, which was withdrawn pending further negotiations with King Features Syndicate, who owned the character... sound familiar?). Within a single year, the cartoon marketplace had doubled... but the best was yet to come.

Associated Artists Productions got Warner's pre-'48 color cartoon library as of March 1, 1956, along with what was then considered the prize: the pre-'48 WB features. The company also got the live action shorts, but never saw a need to distribute them, so profitable were the first two packages. Moneys earned by a.a.p. in the first half of the year enabled them to sew up the Popeye rights during the second. Bugs Bunny was cool, but the Sailor Man took TV by storm. Suddenly the highest-rated local kid's shows were those that included Popeye. In effect, a.a.p. had doomed everybody else's cartoon libraries, for only they had the stars. Nobody cared much about U.M.&M.'s Screen Songs, Color Classics or Noveltoons, and their only true "celebrity" - Betty Boop - was 99.9% black-and-white (and the best of her work was too risque for most kiddie shows). The monochrome issue eventually caught up with all the other distributors, although Popeye's star power carried his b&w output well into the '80s.

By the late 1950's, the writing was on the wall. As major studio features killed the haphazard movie packages of TV's first decade, so too did big cartoon stars doom the animated shorts of ancient days. M.G.M. put their backlog into syndication. CBS bought Terrytoons outright. Kellogg's picked up Woody Woodpecker and other Lantz stars for nationwide saturation over ABC in '57, and two years' hence, Mattel got the post-1949 Famous cartoons that had been sold to the Harvey comic book company, also placed on ABC. The final bell tolled in 1958, when M.G.M.'s former producer-director tandem of Joe Barbera and Bill Hanna contracted with Columbia's TV unit, Screen Gems (which had introduced its own cartoon backlog the year before, with relatively few takers) for a made-for-TV cartoon show, Huckleberry Hound. That led to a plethora of spin-offs and successors, including made-for-prime time cartoon sitcoms: revolutionary then, commonplace today.

But with this bounty came complacency, then neglect. Cartoons were moneymakers, sure, but hardly worth the kind of tender care that classic feature films were getting. Stories circulate about 16mm prints gathering dust in station closets because the 100 or so titles that were making the on-air rounds were good enough; no need to overtax the film guy. And the only signficance that the "a.a.p." intro held was the likelihood of seeing the zany Bugs and Daffy, not the suave rabbit or greedy, scheming duck of Saturday mornings.

As for all those other cartoons - the ones animation historians like Leonard Maltin, Jerry Beck and Michael Barrier grew up with - most of them vanished into the mist of memory, waiting only for budget-line home video to bring them back to the marketplace, mainly in worn, choppy, faded prints that had once held the rapt attention of Junior Frolics viewers... and many, many others.

UPDATE: Many thanks to those of you who shared this site on Facebook and elsewhere... never have I had an essay read by so many in so short a time. Also, I was remiss in not adding the following: To those cartoon enthusiasts that want to see what those old films looked like when they were entertaining theater audiences back in the day, these two resources are essential: Inkwell Images and Thunderbean Animation. Both have done outstanding work in restoring long-neglected titles and come highly recommended.

Here a Nyuk, There a Nyuk, Everywhere a Nyuk-Nyuk!

I've only written two books, but apparently that's celebrity enough for the privilege of mingling (mangling?) with the upper-echelon of high society. To wit: I met these three fine gentlemen at last weekend's Mid-Atlantic Nostalgia Convention in Hunt Valley, Maryland:



I'm thinking of having them rennovate my home... I'm sure they know what they're doing.

Coming this season on BETTER LIVING THROUGH TELEVISION: Uncle Miltie, Groucho, a lengthy look at early TV's use of very old movies, and other stuff that will hopefully strike your fancy as much as mine.

Many thanks for the (literally) thousands of you that have discovered this site while searching for Dean & Jerry, Arthur & Julius, Chaplin, Superman, Adam Cartwright, Joe Friday and that cute kid from the aspirin commercial (who was astonished when I told him I get hits on that 2006 post EVERY DAY).

'Til we meet again "In the Sweet Pie & Pie."

The Infamy of Redefining "Infamous" - An Editorial

This posting has little to do with television, only slightly more to do with radio and everything to do with vocabulary.

For the past two days, I've been arguing with a baseball journalist about the meaning of "infamous." Apparently its definition has changed over the years. Once upon a time, "infamous" referred to something or somebody that smacked of infamy... and "infamy" was something of an evil, vile or criminal reputation.

We've all probably heard or read President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's address to Congress on December 8, 1941, when he declared a state of war between the United States and the Empire of Japan due to the latter's sneak attack on our naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. The address began with these immortal words: "Yesterday, December seventh, nineteen forty-one: a date which will live in infamy." It was covered by all the radio networks as well as newsreels.

Most of us have heard this at least once in our lives; one can barely escape it when the History Channel decides to focus yet again on World War II. And, by the then-standard definition, what Roosevelt was saying was that the events of December 7th would take their place among the most evil and treacherous deeds known to history.

The events of December 7th were infamous. So were the events of September 11, 2001. Going backward in time, so were the sinking of the Lusitania, the mistreatment of Union soldiers at Andersonville, and the Spanish Inquisition (Monty Python notwithstanding).

A cheesy and inappropriate swimming pool situated in a major league ballpark is not "infamous," at least not by the original meaning of the word. But, as I said earlier, apparently the definition has changed. Today, "infamous" can be defined as something or someone that is famous for negative reasons. Dictionary.com ("an Ask.com service") uses this more modern definition, as does Wiktionary. Merriam-Webster’s is closer to the original meaning, although it, too, can be construed in the new way.

Language can evolve over time, no question. And I suspect "infamous" has evolved due to the exposure of President Roosevelt's address: without knowing its true meaning, people have heard the phrase "date which will live in infamy" and assume FDR is saying that December 7th will be remembered - or "infamous" - forever. There's a reason "fame" is embedded in "infamy" and "infamous," but it's due entirely to the unspeakably evil nature of the deed or person that it is describing. By lowering that standard to merely something that was a bad idea - in which case New Coke could be "infamous" - the power of the phrase "date which will live in infamy" has been diluted. Roosevelt's address has been defanged for modern audiences.

I confess that I'm guilty of misusing the word that way; in My Name's Friday, I referred to Jack Webb's 1958 LP "You're My Girl" - in which he recites the lyrics of several romantic ballads in that wonderful Sgt. Friday style - as "infamous." There was nothing inherently evil about Webb's album, although I'd wager a few die-hard Sinatra fans would debate the point. "Notorious" would have been a better choice.

I know better now, which is why I climb onto the soapbox and argue with fellow authors, sportswriters, and anybody else about this unfortunate - but not infamous - use of the word.