{"id":79328,"date":"2023-05-08T00:01:08","date_gmt":"2023-05-08T07:01:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cartoonresearch.com\/?p=79328"},"modified":"2023-05-07T22:00:56","modified_gmt":"2023-05-08T05:00:56","slug":"whens-your-birthday-1937","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cartoonresearch.com\/index.php\/whens-your-birthday-1937\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cWhen\u2019s Your Birthday?\u201d (1937)"},"content":{"rendered":"

More specifically, when is Bob Clampett\u2019s birthday? Today would mark his 110th, so to honor Clampett\u2019s anniversary, here is a special treat: an animator draft\/breakdown video of Bob\u2019s first directorial job in animation!<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>As mentioned in the write-up for Porky\u2019s Badtime Story<\/em>, before Bob Clampett began supervising Looney Tunes<\/em> for Leon Schlesinger, Clampett planned on leaving Schlesinger\u2019s. Clampett hoped to produce a series of animated films based on John Carter of Mars<\/em>, derived from a series of novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs. Burroughs and his son John Coleman supported Bob\u2019s vision, but MGM\u2014the project\u2019s potential distributor\u2014suggested a series based on Tarzan of the Apes, already a hit film series for Metro. <\/p>\n

During July and August 1936, Clampett, now out of his contract with Schlesinger\u2019s, worked with John Coleman Burroughs to assemble a crew of artists\u2014including Chuck Jones as a head animator\u2014for their new studio, incorporated as \u201cTarzantoons.\u201d<\/a> But, Clampett grew unenthusiastic over the proposed Tarzan<\/em> cartoons and withdrew from the project altogether. Leon Schlesinger contacted Clampett to rearrange his contract, promising a higher salary and a chance to direct whenever a vacant directorial position appeared. That autumn, Schlesinger assigned Clampett to direct an animated Technicolor segment for a live-action feature, When\u2019s Your Birthday?<\/em> <\/p>\n

The production draft for the animated segment seems to indicate that animation began on September 27, 1936, insofar as the third week of footage counts includes a tiny written indication of \u201cOct.\u201d above the ninth of the month. Alternately, the drafts list the finish date\u2014just under two months later\u2014as December 15, suggesting a start date of October 27, and the notion that the handwritten \u201cOct.\u201d could be in error.<\/p>\n

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Henry Taylor<\/p><\/div>When\u2019s Your Birthday<\/em>, released by RKO Radio Pictures, starred Joe E. Brown as Dustin Willoughby, an aspiring prizefighter and staunch believer in astrology. The animated segment comprises the opening scenes, in which an off-screen professor explains significant zodiac signs before the viewer travels through the planets up to the heavens, where the symbolic figures dwell. The professor\u2019s narration throughout the cartoon sequence adopted a type of Greek dialect comedy that was popularized in radio and on screen in the 1930s, especially by comedian George Givot\u2019s \u201cGreek Ambassador of Goodwill,\u201d a character familiar to audiences; in When\u2019s Your Birthday<\/em>, the narrating professor emits Givot\u2019s signature catchphrase, \u201cHow d\u2019ya like dot?\u201d Voice artist and historian Keith Scott theorizes that Henry Taylor, a member of the impressionist trio The Radio Rogues, provided the Givot imitation in the segment; the announcer heard in the first few seconds is unknown.<\/p>\n

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Another current-media reference follows when the professor spins the astrological chart like a carnival prize game, delivering a \u201cround-and-round\u201d spiel derived from The Major Bowes Amateur Hour, then a popular radio talent show. (A pop-culture nod also occurs when the professor\u2019s speech briefly alludes to the Chicago World\u2019s Fair, otherwise known as A Century of Progress World\u2019s Fair, which operated from May 1933 until October 1934.) <\/p>\n

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Young Bob Clampett at work<\/p><\/div>In his new role as director, Clampett drew the segment\u2019s character layouts and animated the principal scenes of Taurus the Bull arrogantly lording over the other astrological symbols. Clampett engaged his colleagues Chuck Jones and Bobe Cannon on the assignment. Cannon, like Clampett, took on a new position for the project: rather than just being tasked as an in-betweener for Jones, Cannon was also dispensed a few scenes to animate and in-between singlehandedly, in perhaps his earliest-known work as a full animator.<\/p>\n

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Clampett also used Cal Dalton, from Friz Freleng\u2019s unit, to handle different scenes. Dalton had animated for Romer Grey and Ted Eshbaugh in the early 1930s, and at Harman-Ising, between stints at Schlesinger\u2019s; Clampett might have felt the sequence could be finished quickly by a seasoned animator.<\/p>\n

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This gag drawing of production manager Ray Katz using Chuck Jones as a punching bag parallels scene 27 of Saggitarius punching Taurus in a similar fashion, suggesting this was drawn during the segment’s production.<\/p><\/div>Besides Bobe Cannon, three other in-betweeners are listed in the When\u2019s Your Birthday?<\/em> production papers. John Carey, an assistant animator, appears as \u201cCarey,\u201d working under Cal Dalton. Next, an artist credited as \u201cDrling\u201d, as the shorthand reads in the draft, worked on Jones\u2019s scenes. This might be Keith Darling, suggested by Darling\u2019s animator credit in The Night Watchman <\/em>(1938), Jones\u2019 first cartoon as a director at Schlesinger\u2019s. Finally, the third in-betweener, credited as \u201cSeal,\u201d is Don Seal, confirmed in a letter from John Coleman Burroughs to his father, dated July 31, 1936. The letter also specified that Seal had been Clampett\u2019s assistant at Schlesinger\u2019s when Clampett was an animator for Tex Avery.<\/p>\n

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In comparing the production draft and the final sequence, we find that several scenes of full animation are absent in the feature. The draft cites the finished sequence as comprising 349 total feet\u2014nearly four minutes, whereas the segment in the film contains only about two-and-a-half minutes of completed animation. It is possible that RKO, or the producers of When\u2019s Your Birthday<\/em>, made edits to the sequence before the film\u2019s release on February 19th, 1937. Processing three-strip Technicolor elements for a four-minute sequence might have been a handicap between the completion of its animation in December and the film\u2019s release\u2014a possible explanation for the excised scenes. In the currently circulating black-and-white version, there is a jump splice between the camera zooming through the planets in scene 2 and the establishing shots of astrological heaven in scene 4; a scene involving the Milky Way initially occurred between these shots, as listed in the draft.<\/p>\n

\"\"In scene 27, Taurus enters from the right and is knocked to the ground by a prizefighting Sagittarius. The draft shows that in deleted scenes 25 and 26, Taurus was to have endured attacks from a pair of twins resembling Gemini. Scene 26\u2019s description of a machine gun and a fairy goose spinning Taurus around a merry-go-round might hint at why the bull dizzyingly spins into the frame in scene 27. The finished sequence ends in scene 27A of the defeated Taurus; however, it seems that additional footage, reflecting a later portion of the feature, had Taurus regaining his strength and fighting the Zodiac signs, one after another. Ultimately, these scenes are missing in the film\u2014or at least in the version that survives today. <\/p>\n

Clampett gave John Carey, like Bobe Cannon, a promotion from in-betweener to animator with at least two small bits of animation in the fight, but Carey\u2019s footage was excised in the editing process. But, as noted in one of my previous write-ups, Carey would emerge as a full animator not long afterward, with a scene in Badtime Story<\/em> when Porky and Gabby \u201cquietly\u201d punch the time clock at their workplace. <\/p>\n

\"\"Samuel Wineland, credited for the musical score in When\u2019s Your Birthday<\/em>, peppers the animated sequence with \u201cWhen The Moon Comes Over the Mountain,\u201d a hit tune popularized by its co-writer Kate Smith in 1931, and the \u201cToreador March\u201d from Georges Bizet\u2019s opera Carmen, commonly used for bullfighting scenes in animated films. When Sagitarrius readies his arrow with the boxing glove, the professor notes the archer\u2019s resemblance to William Tell\u2014naturally, Rossini\u2019s \u201cWilliam Tell Overture\u201d plays in the background. <\/p>\n

As previously noted, the cartoon sequence in When\u2019s Your Birthday<\/em> was initially released in Technicolor, contained within a black-and-white film. Unfortunately, the archival holdings of the original film elements are currently unknown, with only black-and-white copies, presumably intended for its television presentation, accessible. Perhaps this will change someday, letting viewers appreciate Bob Clampett\u2019s first directorial work in its original Technicolor form.<\/p>\n