A great animator and an old friend of mine, Berny Wolf, has just passed away at the age of 95. Berny had a long career in cartoons that included stints with Paramount, Max Fleischer, Ub Iwerks, Disney, Tex Avery and Hanna-Barbera. Historian Mark Kausler lays out the broad strokes of Berny's animating years in this piece over at Cartoon Brew and I don't think it's even close to complete. I seem to recall Berny telling me, for instance, that he worked for Van Beuren and (briefly) for Paul Terry. It would probably take less time to list the great cartoon studios where Berny never worked.
His credits are, of course, amazing. Just having animated on Pinocchio, Fantasia and Dumbo puts you up there in a rarefied strata of cartoon history. But you'll notice Mark's quick bio jumps from the fifties to the eighties and I can fill in a few of the missing years there. For instance, Bern worked closely with Walt Disney designing attractions for Disneyland, most notably some of the first walkaround character costumes. Through a series of companies he set up, Berny made those and produced industrial cartoons and educational materials for a wide array of clients.
In the seventies, his firm was called Animedia and it was located over on Riverside Drive in Toluca Lake, doing art services — some, animation-related, some not. Among many other projects, he produced hundreds of employee training films for the Toyota company and also handled all the graphics and design work for Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. When I edited and wrote Tarzan comic books back then, I did so through Berny's company. I also worked with him on some cartoon mascots for the Olympics, some educational materials involving the Woodsy Owl character, and a couple of animated commercials. He couldn't find anyone else to storyboard one of the commercials before the deadline so, though admittedly rusty, he sat down and drew it himself. It showed he still had it. Even though he'd been away from the drawing board for years, he was still a terrific cartoonist.
He proved it again a decade later when he folded Animedia and went back to animation where (he said) he was happier in every way except financial. Along with the shows Kausler mentions, Berny produced a series for Hanna-Barbera called The Paw-Paws. In the nineties, when he himself was in his eighties, he did some directing work on Garfield and Friends and other shows for Film Roman.
We had a brief e-mail correspondence a few years back and then he suddenly stopped writing. Soon after, his website disappeared and I heard no more from him. The last message he wrote me said he was "...working on some drawings and limited-edition cels." I hope he got some of them done for he really was a great artist. He told me more than once that he'd always regretted he couldn't make the same kind of living as a cartoonist that he made when he produced those training films for Toyota.
Here's a classic cartoon Berny worked on in 1933, when he was a mere lad of 22. In fact, you'll even see his name in the opening credits. It's "The Old Man of the Mountain," one of the Betty Boop cartoons made at the Max Fleischer Studios that utilized the skills of the great Cab Calloway. As you watch it, please think of Berny Wolf...a helluva talent and a true gentleman.
I mentioned someplace here — I forget where — that my taste for sugar and all things sweet has declined since my big weight loss. (And by the way, for those of you who have money riding on this: I am within ounces — ounces! — of being 100 pounds below my highest-ever weight.) Recently, I told you that I'd tried a few of my favorite cookies and found the sensation pleasing but nowhere near as wonderful as it once was.
This prompted several of you to write and ask, "So what is your favorite kind of cookie, Mark?" Well, one of you asked but I decided to seize the opportunity to, at long last, discuss something substantive on this weblog. Above is a photo I just took of an example of my favorite cookie. I have been eating these — not continually, despite what my need for Gastric Bypass Surgery might indicate — since I was about four years old. And you know something? I have no idea what they're called. I've never known.
They're sold in practically every delicatessen in the galaxy. The above specimen — which met its happy demise only seconds after the above photo was taken — was purchased at Canter's Delicatessen on Fairfax and maybe even baked there. For more than fifty years — half a freaking century — I've been buying these all over, mainly by pointing into a display case and saying, "The ones with the colored balls on top." There must be a better name for them than that...and yes, I've tried asking the employees of the various delicatessens. No one has ever given me a genuine answer. They usually say something like, "Oh, those are the ones with the colored balls on them."
Big help, lady. Tell me something I don't already know.
Once, in a deli that didn't look like it did any baking, I asked the woman who waited on me (who turned out to be the owner) if they made them on the premises. She said no. I said, "Great. Now, when you order them from your supplier, what is it you order? What is the name you give them that results in them delivering those cookies to you?" I was excited because I thought I was on the verge of a breakthrough...a revelation for the ages...the best-kept secret of one or more centuries...
She said, "I don't know...I ask them to send more of those cookies with the colored balls on top."
I'm not even sure what the colored balls are called. They aren't "jimmies." Those are long, not round. Some people seem to call the colored balls "nonpareils" or, in this case, "rainbow nonpareils." However, "nonpareil" is also the name of a cookie that is usually chocolate with white balls all over it so I'm guessing that isn't a popular name for the colored balls themselves. I've seen the colored balls sold in the cake decorating section of the market as "rainbow sprinkles" or "confetti" or even just "cake decorations," the last of these suggesting that even the people making them didn't know what to call them. But I've also seen all those terms applied to pastry adornments of other shapes and sizes.
There must be a word that denotes just the round variety. And there must be a name that you could use if you wanted to call a baker and tell him to whip up a batch of cookies like the one in the picture above. Someone...please...tell me what it is and don't toy with me. Not about this. If you write me that it's "the cookies with the colored balls on top," so help me, I'm going to add you to my Spam list and bounce all your e-mails from now on.
Today, we discuss what I think is one of the most gloriously illogical scenes ever in movie history. It's from the 1931 Marx Brothers movie, Monkey Business. Watch it and then let's unpack what happens in it...
Let us review. The boys are stowaways on an ocean liner. They have no passports so they can't get off the ship. Zeppo gets hold of the passport of the great French entertainer Maurice Chevalier and somehow knows that the bearer of it can prove it's his by singing one of Chevalier's songs. Well, that's an obvious assumption now, isn't it? I mean, how else would the customs guys verify that the holder of a passport was indeed that person? They'd expect him to perform his big hit tune, right? So to get off the boat, all four Marxes are going to have to pretend to be someone they're not.
This is not quite ridiculous enough so let's make it worse: Since they have only the one passport, they'll all pretend to be the same person. Not only that but they're all going to pretend to be a well-known celebrity that none of them resembles in any way.
The Italian guy's going to tell them he's Maurice Chevalier. And after that doesn't work, the rude guy with the mustache and no French accent whatsoever is going to tell them he's Maurice Chevalier. Even the guy who doesn't talk is going to claim to be Maurice Chevalier...and he's really got a surefire plan. First, he'll bolster his chances of getting through by throwing around all the papers on the Customs Agents' table like a maniac. That will surely make the officials more likely to believe he's Maurice Chevalier. Then he'll mime to a record, assuming they won't notice the phonograph under his coat, nor wonder about the sudden appearance of musical accompaniment from nowhere. And then to really convince them, he'll mess up all their papers again and rubber stamp the customs agent's bald head. If that doesn't prove he's Maurice Chevalier, nothing will.
(And that's really the point of the whole scene: Nothing will. Harpo's chances of getting through aren't all that much worse than what Zeppo tried, which was to actually impersonate Maurice Chevalier.)
It's the perfect summary of what was wonderful about the Marxes. After spending the first half of the movie doing everything possible to avoid the security personnel on the liner, not one of the four brothers pauses to wonder if it's a good idea to go up to the ship's police and all claim to be someone that none of them could possibly be. Even after the plan has completely failed three times, Harpo doesn't hesitate to try it...and I think it yields one of the most beautiful, wonderful scenes anyone ever put into a movie. Because you can go through life doing things the logical way or you can do them the illogical way. Should you decide to do something the illogical way, the way that is almost certain not to work, you might as well make it all as illogical as humanly possible. If that isn't the best advice in the world then my name isn't Maurice Chevalier.
September 15, 2006
