On the Dana Gould Hour podcast, I told the story of how I discovered, long after we'd begun dating, that my girl friend was related to one of my favorite performers, Spike Jones. Here's Spike and his orchestra in the movie, Thank Your Lucky Stars.
When I worked at Hanna-Barbera in the late seventies, I enjoyed talking with a film editor there named Earl Bennett, who had once been a featured musician in Spike's band under the name "Sir Frederick Gas." One thing he talked about was how, when they did a scene like this in a movie, the audio was all pre-recorded and they had to mime playing to it. This was not an easy thing for some musicians to do but it worked because Spike had such precise timing, Watch…