Fernando Montealegre was among the first staffers at Hanna-Barbera, jumping over from MGM where he started as an assistant animator and became a background artist. In keeping with the times, his work on Mike Lah’s Droopy shorts (in Cinemascope) at MGM are quite stylised.
It’s a tribute to Jack Benny’s acting skill that people actually believed what they heard on his radio programme.
Jack Benny constantly and consistently promoted Waukegan, Illinois as his home town, with the local papers proudly hailing him as one of their own.
Not being a Disney-phile, I associate Ray Huffine’s name with the Walter Lantz studio, where he took over from Ray Jacobs.
Fred Allen returned to the airwaves on October 7, 1945 after a year away for health reasons. Newspaper stories mentioned a change in Allen’s Alley, but omitted the most significant change of all.
Jack Benny joked in the 1940s that “they loved me in St. Joe.” 20 years later, he could change the name of the city to “Austin.”
There are people who appeared on TV screens so often at one time, it was almost impossible to remember when you first saw them.
UPA’s animated TV commercials are full of striking and appealing designs, interesting movement, with a gentle dash of humour.
For years, the Jack Benny show, on both radio and TV, featured a routine where Jack and his gang took a train from a station where he was verbally harassed.
Over at Warner Bros. cartoons, writer Tedd Pierce figured there were shows on the air that could stand a gentle kidding.
Jack Klugman won a pair of Emmys for playing Oscar Madison on The Odd Couple. Surprisingly, they weren’t his first.
Jack Benny was a hit wherever he went. Despite being on radio and TV in the first half of the 1950s, he was able to get away to appear with his act in public.
What’s that, you say? I haven’t written about June Foray for a while?
