Milt Schaffer had the golden pencil. As the principal artist for a famed Walter Lantz Productions story duo during World War II, he capably planned and drew quite a number of cartoons. The other half of that duo, Ben “Bugs” Hardaway, was in theory the “story director,” according to Schaffer, but if Bugs was the outright alpha then Milt was at least the diligent beta whose talent was the quiet engine that kept those storyboards rolling along.
Circled left, Bugs Hardaway – Circled right, Milt Schaffer
Lantz knew what a keen talent Schaffer was and he hired him at the beginning of 1942, just as the United States was formally entering the war. At that point, the story team included Chuck Couch too, but it seems that Couch was moved aside after only a month or two. For the next four years, all the cartoons at Lantz were dreamed up by Hardaway and Schaffer, taking shape in a series of story panels, mostly drawn in black pencil, though often with some colored pencil embellishments.
Hardaway roughed in some poses and was known for inventing painfully corny puns and crazy characters, but Schaffer was the superior artist of the two. Culhane felt that Schaffer was a mitigating presence who kept Hardaway’s coarser instincts in check. Despite that opinion, Schaffer himself never expressed any discontent about working with his story partner.
In fact, judging from this excerpt from a 1981 interview by Joe Adamson, he found their collaboration to be productive and useful: “Not everybody works that way, but it was—coming out of entertainment stuff—it seemed quicker when you worked with two people. You could knock this stuff around and then it was just faster, and you’re trying everything instantly; instant trial of every idea and then it plays back or it doesn’t, so that’s why a lot of people worked that way.”
There was an interesting dynamic that soon came into play, with Culhane taking a lot of creative liberties with the material that proved divergent from the boards on account of his experiments (some inspired by Eisenstein and other film theorists). For a much fuller presentation of this conflict, be sure to visit the Laband Art Gallery in Los Angeles, where my exhibit Woody Woodpecker & The Avant-Garde is in the final week of its run. As a continuation of the book passage above, Culhane noted:
“After we made a few pictures together, we managed a truce. I recognized that Bugs did have a raw kind of humor, and Milt could manage to eke out a story line most of the time; and both accepted the fact that my fast cutting was being enjoyed by the audience. We managed to put together several better-than-average cartoons.”
Schaffer even described Hardaway as “grumpy and sardonic” and also “hard-nosed” against Culhane, but they seemed to make an agreeable story team. If anything, Hardaway—who was a conservative veteran of the First World War—viewed Schaffer more favorably than the artistic and political liberals in his midst: Culhane and his creative co-conspirator Art Heinemann (who later worked at UPA).
A publicity still from the Hardaway and Schaffer boarded “The Greatest Man In Siam” (1944). Click to enlarge.
During their four years developing stories together, Milt Schaffer ultimately wanted to return to Disney, and on one occasion he had seemed to have the chance, but Lantz put the kibosh on his exit. Lantz’s secret card that allowed him to retain the deeply talented Schaffer was a “war priority” status that kept studio employees from easily switching jobs. Then, by 1946, with the war won, Schaffer exercised his right to go back to Disney.
A lot of classic Lantz cartoons owe a debt to the collaboration of this story duo, yet one of the more bizarre stories involves the very beginning of their work together, just after Chuck Couch had departed and they were still working in a concrete structure on the Universal lot, with a necessity to move to the Lantz studio’s new location along Lankershim Boulevard, according to Schaffer:
“So when it was finished we just moved up there. I remember when we were gonna move we had a brand new story up on the boards—there would be like three of those boards—and so on Saturday they said put everything you got in a box. So Bugs and I unpinned the story and we put a rubber band around everything and we gave it to Gladys and we said, look, we don’t want to just lay it in this cardboard box, let’s put it in the safe, so she did.”
Of course, what seemed like the safest place to put those storyboards did not pan out that way. Everything (pencils, erasers, sharpeners, supplies) that Bugs and Milt put into those boxes turned up delivered to their new office space, but when they opened the safe—voila!—the boards for the entire cartoon were simply gone. Did someone take them, thinking they were valuable because they were kept inside a metal safe? No one ever found out and they were never recovered.
Said Milt Schaffer (which rhymes with “safer”): “I had to sit there for the next two weeks and redraw everything from memory.” And, I’ll bet that when he left the studio and went back to Disney in 1946, he took all his valuables in nothing more than a plain box.
From the Hardaway and Schaffer scripted “The Beach Nut”
Next week is the final week to see Woody Woodpecker & The Avant Garde. The exhibit closes November 20. Admission to the Laband Art Gallery is free. Open Wednesday through Sunday, noon to 4:00. The staff photograph above, with attention on Bugs Hardaway and Milt Schaffer, is courtesy of Michael Barrier.
Tom Klein is a Professor and the Chair of the Animation program at Loyola Marymount University, in Los Angeles. He has been published internationally and has been profiled in The New York Times for his work as a scholar of the Walter Lantz studio. He has worked at Vivendi-Universal Games and Universal Cartoon Studios. Follow him @VizLogic
In The Greatest Man in Siam, why did they had the characters in Middle Eastern/Arabian style clothing instead of the Siamese clothing that they wore in Siam (now Thailand)? Was it a Geographically incorrect error ?
The written accounts by Culhane indicate the Hardaway-Schaffer story team was not so worldly, and Shamus renders a brusque portrait of Hardaway, including the passage above about a “derisive stream of tobacco juice” dispensed against any kind of sophistication. Since it was the story team that spitballed the ideas for the cartoons, and on account of building a story around the Del Porter song “Siam”, it reasons that Hardaway-Schaffer were the ones who made this Siam in name only, conjuring instead an Arabian kingdom that really showed American styles of behavior and reflected wartime references like a “Draft Board” and “Lockheed welders”. It also used Hollywood stereotypes to paint Eastern cultures in such broad strokes—a fictional notion of “the Orient” where an Arab city might be hardly distinct from a Thai city, for example—that the result is a pastiche that really has no geographic location at all.
Milt did came back to Lantz and wrote some Woody cartoons (including some ones from Paul J. Smith’s unfortunate “legally blind period”). One that stood out for me the most was “Panhandle Scandal” (which might deemed a bit politically incorrect by today’s standards) directed by another early Lantz vet, Alex Lovy.
Speaking of Lovy, was he the actual director of “Knock, Knock”, the debut of Woody Woodpecker? If so, does that make him one of the woodpecker’s co-creators?
Excuse me, but can you explain what you mean by Paul J. Smith’s “legally blind period”.
As a person who is himself “legally blind”, I;’m curious about this.
Apparently from some sources, Smith started to develop vision problems as the years went by to the point that he could see but cannot drive. As mentioned in a previous article on this site, he had some extra help from his daughter who helped timed and edit the cartoons. As a result, the shorts started looking more and more poorly made which was very unfortunate by this point as Smith was the sole director at the studio. .
Story for “Panhandle Scandal” is credited to Dalton Sandifer.
I really need to do more fact checking.
Probably just geographical license in SIAM, but it was one of several Lantz cartoons at that time based on currently popular novelty songs by Spike Jones and his City Slickers. The band had also recently recorded a hit in The Shiek of Araby, a similar song to The Greatest Man in Siam, which could explain it. And the studio quickly followed up with ABOU BEN BOOGIE.
Besides the boards by Schaffer and Bugs, one reason the Swing Symphonies seem different to other gag-based Lantz cartoons is the input by the music department working closely with the gag men. Much of the success of the soundtracks of this period was Darrell Calker’s collaboration with the uncredited Del Porter who was a composer/vocalist and, some say, the real force and originator behind Spike Jones’s novelty band. Porter had his own music business at the time, and he contributed to BOOGIE WOOGIE SIOUX (he and band singer Carl Grayson sang and did vocal effects in the cartoon), COW COW BOOGIE (one vocalist was the Jones band’s trombonist King Jackson), and importantly Porter sang for and adapted his own song PASS THE BISCUITS, MIRANDY! into the Lantz cartoon version (and added lyrics that weren’t in the original song), and he was the original singer of the Jones version of the Siam song. Calker even got him in to sing the song in APPLE ANDY in the period when Porter broke from Spike’s band.
To me the setting of the “Siam” cartoon looks more like India than an Arabic (or for that matter Siamese) setting. At that time Universal was making a number of very successful Technicolor “exotic” adventures starring Maria Montez, usually with Jon Hall and Sabu in support. Those might have been an influence too.
Milt Schaffer wrote one of the best Woody shorts, BUNCO BUSTERS!
I am grandson of milt SCHAFFER, any info would help with biography,,
Jbentleychef@gmail.com
Bentley Justin SCHAFFER
I live in Seattle.