No Yen To Be a Hen

Not one person thinks there’s something insane about substituting a rabbit’s brain for a chicken’s brain in the Bob McKimson short Hot Cross Bunny.

See more here.

Groucho, Zeppo, Chico, Harpo and Birdo

Sometimes, it takes forever to get to anything mildly amusing to happen in a Silly Symphony.

See more here.

Did You Hear the One About...

A symbiotic relationship bloomed between columnists and stars. Columnists needed to fill space. Stars needed publicity.

Read more here.

Fedora! For Dora!

It’s taken almost 11 years to post something about My Green Fedora, a Friz Freleng effort released in 1935.

Read more here."

Electric Woody

Woody Woodpecker comes up with an evil idea in Solid Ivory.

See more here.

Jack-Rabbit and the Beanstalk Backgrounds

What do things look like in Giant Land?

Find out in this post.

Betsy Cola Hits the Spot

Fans look back at the Golden Era of network radio with affection but columnists in the day did not. Radio was crass and witless, they told readers time and time again. Read more in this post.

A Van Beuren Cartoon is About to Start

I’ve always liked the opening of the Van Beuren cartoons with various animals swaying in time to the music, with the leopard getting clunked on the head and his tail twanged.

See it here.

A Mouse, Said the Mouse

A mouse who has terrorised a lion into insanity scratches his head.

See more here.

How To Be a Yellow Jack (Benny)

One joke, two people. One person laughs. Another person gets offended.

That’s something which happened to Jack Benny in 1938.

Read more here.

Man Alive!

UPA never lost sight of its roots. Its industrial films continued to win praise and its TV commercials were influential in the way they looked and sold products.

See more here.

Don't Monkey With Monkeys

A Day at the Zoo (1939) features Gil Warren as a narrator but there are always gags in a Tex Avery cartoon where dialogue is unnecessary.

See more in this post.

For Better Or Worser Backgrounds

The opening shot of the Popeye cartoon For Better or Worser (released in 1935) is a pan up the sailor’s apartment building. I can’t snip it together properly, so you’ll have to look at it by floors—first floor, second floor, third floor.

See more here.

A Talk Show For Mary Hartman's Town

“Only the certifiably embalmed will fail to laugh out loud several times along its outrageous way,” is how the New York Times ended its review of a summer replacement show in 1977.

Read more here.

Dog and Cat Fight a la Tyer

In The Helpful Genie (1951), director Connie Rasinski cuts to a shot of a dog and cat being told by their owner (played by Dayton Allen) to behave. They don’t.

See more from the scene here.

Bugs' Fingers

There were great finger artists at Warner Bros. Ken Harris and Virgil Ross both did an expert job of Bugs Bunny moving and twisting his fingers. And someone in the Frank Tashlin unit could do it, too.

See more in this post.

I Had Four Wives

Ol’ Buck Benny needed to do more than blaze a six-shooter if’n he were to rout those mangy varmints on the other networks.

Read about it here.

MGM Odds and Ends Part 2

The middle 1940s were pretty much a golden time for the MGM cartoon studio.

Read about it in this post.

Getting Burned

Hey, how about a good, old-fashioned crotch burning?

See more here.

Hugh Harman's War Against War

If Hugh Harman surpassed Walt Disney at any time during his career, it would have been with his anti-war cartoon Peace on Earth, released after Europe had plunged into war in 1939.

See more here.

Johnny On Johnny and Tonight

Johnny was the King of Late Night.

Read more here.

Orchestra From Another World

If all of Ub Iwerks’ cartoons had the imagination behind the Willie Whopper short Stratos-Fear (1933), who knows how much longer he would have been in business.

See more here.

I'd Love To Take Orders From You Backgrounds

I’d Love to Take Orders From You (1936) has director Tex Avery doing a Friz Freleng cartoon—a young boy and his father, with danger vanquished and a twist ending.

Read more here.

The Quizzical Youth

What was Jack Benny doing 100 years ago today?

Read more here.

Heeza Funmaker

Before Felix the Cat, Farmer Al and Koko the Clown came Colonel Heeza Liar, the product of the J.R. Bray studio.

Read more in this 1916 story.

A Hunting We Won't Go

A comic relief hunting dog pulls his head out after getting it stuck in a tree, and then starts throwing punches like a boxer until he snaps out of it.

See more here.

Julius Shoots Up the Place

Julius the Cat blazes his two guns to make the rescue in Alice in the Wooly West, a 1926 Alice comedy.

See more here.

Amazing

You didn’t have to be the Amazing Kreskin to predict one thing with certainty in the 1970s—the Amazing Kreskin would show up somewhere on TV.

Read about him here.

Buck Egghead Rides For the First Time

The best part of Egghead Rides Again is he never rode before. This was his first cartoon.

See more here.

Wile E. Catote

Tedd Pierce and Bob McKimson borrow a Wile E. Coyote routine in the 1958 cartoon Cat’s Paw.

View it here.