Wild! I always assumed that “Gravy ain’t wavy” from Smokey Stover was just another one of the writer’s non-sequetors.
Well, I was just guessing at that. If they hadn’t had the two boys, I’d have doubted they ever had sex.
Maybe they were adopted.
Not that EWM but of interest: Exploding White Mice - Wikipedia
From there:
“The band’s name was taken from a scene in the 1979 film Rock ‘n’ Roll High School, where a laboratory mouse spontaneously explodes upon exposure to music by the Ramones.”
That’s gotta be a reference to the T&J cartoon, right?
I once read that the cast of Mork and Mindy were irked somewhat by how the dialogue in the show was apportioned. Whole sections of an episode’s script would simply say MORK DOES HIS THING, and Williams would improvise to fill the time.
I expect the situation was exacerbated when Jonathan Winters joined the cast. I’m amazed the other characters got any lines at all.
Listening to Buckley talk was like sitting through a Poli Sci lecture!
It may be a reference to the song Sgt. MacKenzie, with the lyric (in Scots dialect), “Lay me doon in the caul caul groon,” which translates to "Lay me down in the cold cold ground.:
In those old cartoons they liked to use celebrities who had characteristics that were easy to identify. Hugh Herbert wasn’t as famous as, say, Cary Grant, but all the animators had to do was show someone pressing his fingers together while saying, “Hoo Hoo.”
Other ones who were easy to caricature include:
Ned Sparks (deadpan expression, sardonic vocal delivery)
Joe Penner (catch phrase “Wanna buy a duck?”)
Joe E. Brown (very wide mouth)
Edna May Oliver (tall, thin, lined oval face, pursed lips)
I once attended a lecture he gave. He spoke like that all the way through, with that weird, tentative style of his. But he certainly was erudite, with a highly diversified and elegant style.
I also liked the way he avoided cliches. Instead of using the then-popular line “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you,” he said “Even paranoids have enemies”.
The problem is, of course, that our philosophies differed, something that was grounded in our not having a shared set of starting postulates. It was the same experience I have reading a piece in his National Review – I’d start out with that beautiful prose and logical arguments, and suddenly come to a point where our viewpoints diverged and I’d just watch him sailing over the edge, unable and unwilling to follow.
Yeah. Very bright dude in thrall to a very broken worldview.
As I learned here on the SCMB, the Smokey Stover phrase came first and Wavy Gravy (of the Hog Farm, etc.) came second.
How the hell did a pun name like “Beaver Cleaver” ever get approved?
The censors must have really been asleep on that one!
Over the years (decades?) I have found this website useful for explaining some of these now-obscure references in Warner Bros. cartoons:
Of course they had no conception of being able to sell the rights to their work for “home media.” The only “home media” of the day was limited to the very wealthy or the very powerful-in-Hollywood, who were able to buy copies of movies as well as theater-grade projection systems.
Most filmed entertainment was made with the ‘certain knowledge’ that it was ephemeral. An interesting party game might be made of guessing the way creative decisions would have gone, had the creators envisioned VHS and its successors…
There may not have been home media in the sense of VCRs, laser discs, DVDs, et cetera, bu they were certainly aware of television by the 1930s. Disney, so I’ve read, was already contemplating color broadcasts by the time they were trying to buy the rights to properties like Mary Poppins (which weren’t acquired until twenty-odd years later).
Warner Brothers Executives had nothing to do with. They just needed product to put in their theaters. Audiences expected a cartoon with a show, so they provided them. It was the creators at Termite Terrace who made the cartoons, and they wanted to make the best possible cartoons. They weren’t even all that interested in pleasing the audience – they made them to please themselves and no one higher up than Leon Schlesinger bothered with them.
“I don’t want it good, I want it today!”
But would they have been popular in the first place without the topical jokes?
On the other hand, some of these cartoons were winning Academy Awards. There must have been at least some inkling that appreciation for the work would outlive the creators.