Animation legend Bob Clampett was born in San Diego, California on May 8, 1913, and his early life was influenced by newspaper comic strips and movies featuring Harold Lloyd, Lon Chaney, Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., and similar classic actors. He loved cartooning and even drew some published cartoons featuring Mickey Mouse for his school's publications and a local merchant's newsletter.
Officially, Bob began his professional career just after graduation as an animator on the very first Merrie Melodies animated short made by Harman and Ising in 1931 for Warner Brothers' “Lady Play Your Mandolin.”
For a time, he was teamed with the even more legendary Tex Avery on the Looney Tunes animated shorts, and my good friend and animation historian Jerry Beck often said that Clampett was the one who “put 'looney' in Looney Tunes.” Visit Jerry's animation related site at Cartoon Research.
In September 1978, I got to sit with Clampett for hours in his Seward Street studio, and some of the more outrageous stories about working at Warner Brothers with Chuck Jones and Bob's popular creations, Beany and Cecil, appear in my newest book, Animation Anecdotes.
Yet his connection with Disney precedes his work in animation.
In January 1930, Carolyn “Charlotte” Clark had an idea of how to use her sewing talents to make some money during the Great Depression. She had been making a living selling cookies and novelties.
She sent her 14-year-old nephew, Bob Clampett, to the Alex Theater in Glendale, California.
The young teen sat through three consecutive full showings in order to see a Mickey Mouse short several times so he could sketch Mickey Mouse. There were no illustrations of Mickey Mouse available at that time other than on an occasional movie poster.
In the dark with his sketchbook and pencil, he had to sit through the newsreel, featurette, main feature, and other material just to see the cartoon again and again.
From those sketches, Clark made the first stuffed Mickey Mouse doll. Clampett's father advised Clark to get Walt Disney's permission before she started making and selling them.
He drove her to the Disney Studio. Both Walt and Roy loved the doll. They rented a house near their Hyperion Studio that was later nicknamed the “Doll House” for Clark to work on making the doll in three different sizes.
Young Bob Clampett earned 30 cents per doll stuffing each one with kapok and brushing off the excess. Clampett's father became the head salesman.
Originally, the dolls were purchased by Walt and Roy to give to friends, business acquaintances, and special visitors to the studio.
“Walt Disney himself sometimes came over in an old car to pick up the dolls,” Clampett recalled. “One time, his car loaded with Mickeys wouldn't start, and I pushed while Walt steered until it caught and he took off.”
After a photo of Walt with one of the dolls appeared in Screen Play Secrets magazine in 1930 and several newspapers, the demand for owning one of the figures by the general public became overwhelming. Stores were swamped with calls from customers wanting a doll just like the one they saw in the photos.
By November 1930, Clark was producing 300 to 400 dolls a week to be sold at two large Los Angeles-area department stores, May Company and Bullock's, for $5 each. The department stores only paid $2.50 per doll, so it made an amazing profit. Clark had to employ six full-time seamstresses to meet this goal.
As mentioned, Clampett moved on after his high school graduation to pursue a career as an animator. His distinctive exaggerated style was loved by audiences. Soon, he was promoted to the role of director, where among other things, he designed characters, directed voice recording sessions, wrote songs, helped develop the storyboard, assigned animators (like actors) to particular characters or sections, and then supervised their work.
At Warners, Clampett was responsible for creating and directing two short cartoons that parodied Disney feature films.
“Corny Concerto” (1943) parodied Disney's Fantasia (1940). Clampett replaced noted musicologist Deems Taylor with an unshaven Elmer Fudd, who introduced two segments. One featured Bugs Bunny and Porky Pig in a woodland setting set to the music of “Tales of the Vienna Woods.”
Porky, accompanied by his hunting dog, are tracking Bugs—and all three are shot by a squirrel. While Porky and the dog mourn a supposedly dead Bugs Bunny, they pull aside Bugs's hands from his expected wound, and it is revealed that Bugs is wearing a brassiere and is very much alive.
The other segment set to the music of “Blue Danube” features a young Daffy Duck playing an ugly black duckling joining a flock of white swans. The mother swan does everything she can to get rid of the little black duck, but when her babies are taken by a vulture, Daffy goes to the rescue and is eventually accepted as a member of the family.
Clampett was also responsible for the very much still-controversial cartoon short, “Coal Black and De Sebben Dwarfs” (1943). It is a modern parody retelling of the Disney version of the timeless classic with black caricatures.
The wicked queen sends the seven dwarfs to murder “So White” (aka “Coal Black”), but the dwarfs are charmed by the young girl and join the U.S. Army instead. When Prince Chawmin's (sic) kiss can't awake “So White” after she eats a poisonous caramel apple on a stick, it is Dopey's all-American pucker that makes her pigtails stand up, unfurling into small American flags.
Clampett had been studying the exaggerated black caricatures in the book Harlem As Seen by Hirschfeld by cartoonist Al Hirschfeld, whose design work inspired animator Eric Goldberg's interpretation of Aladdin's genie.
Clampett had also gone to see a Duke Ellington revue in Los Angeles called “Jump for Joy.” After the show, Bob went backstage and talked to the musicians and performers. When they found out he did Warner Brothers cartoons, they wanted to know why black people were not used more often in them.
Bob decided to make a “black” cartoon. At the time, people were talking about Carmen Jones, an all-black version of the famous Carmen opera. Bob looked around for another classic familiar story that could be given a “black” twist. He settled on Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
Bob went to the Club Alabam along with some of his animators, including Bob McKimson, and they immersed themselves in the culture. Some of the performers and musicians were invited to the studio to comment on the work in progress and give suggestions.
Vivien Dandridge, sister of famous blues singers Dorothy Dandridge, did the voice of Coal Black. Her mother, Ruby Dandridge, did the voice of the wicked queen. Louis Armstrong wanted to do the voice of Prince Chawmin' but was booked on tour. He suggested drummer Zoot Watson for the part.
When it came time to do the score, Warners balked at hiring outside musicians and paying extra money. Musical director Carl Stalling sat down with Bob and the black musicians, and carefully prepared a score that would try to capture the authentic jazz/blues flavor.
In the end, probably more was spent on rehearsals than it would have cost Warners to use the black musicians in the first place (some of the score, most notably the trumpet solos, were done by black musicians).
Eddie Beal and his orchestra did end up recording the music for the final kiss sequence. Herb Jeffries, one of the prominent black musicians, always spoke proudly of the cartoon and his work on it.
When the cartoon was released, everyone, including black audiences, enjoyed the cartoon—and today it is considered a classic, especially for its use of music.
However, changing attitudes toward black civil rights has now made this cartoon, like Disney's film The Song of the South, a problem, and it has been placed in the 1960s on Warner Brothers “Censored Eleven” list. The list is consists of 11 Warner animated short cartoons that the company will never release in any form, especially for television and home media, because of what is considers offensive material for modern-day audiences.
Exaggeration is the core of animation, and the love and praise for the film that you may never be able to see comes from its skilled artwork, its depiction of blacks in uniform defending our country, and its respect for jazz and swing music—and more importantly, it was funny.
The exaggeration was no more extreme than other cartoon characters, and Coal Black is depicted as intelligent, independent, and sexy. The name of the cartoon was changed from “So White and De Sebben Dwarfs” for fear by producer Leon Schlessinger that it was too close to the name of the Disney film, and Walt might get upset.
It is obvious that Walt must have seen the film at least once, because he did watch competitors' cartoons, and was puzzled by the humor in another so-called “racist” cartoon series from Warners: Inki by Chuck Jones with a non-speaking mynah bird, constantly popping up unexpectedly while being hunted by a small black boy.
However, Walt never commented on “Coal Black and De Sebben Dwarfs” to the best of anyone's memory. Nor did he comment on the other Clampett parodies.
In my book, Animation Anecdotes, I tell the story of how there was a Los Angeles film festival scheduled for 1979 that was going to show the film, and the Black Panthers, a militant black nationalist group, objected strongly, so it was removed from the screenings.
Later that same day, the group met with Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley (who was black). When they said they had spent the day at a screening of Bob Clampett cartoons, Bradley responded that Clampett was responsible for his very favorite cartoon of all time, but he had only seen in once while in France during World War II: “Coal Black and De Sebben Dwarfs.”
Clampett felt restricted by animation and the studio system, so he explored his other childhood interest: puppetry.
He created a very popular children's puppet show entitled Time for Beany in 1949. Comedian Groucho Marx was a huge fan, as was scientist Albert Einstein.
In 1962, Clampett produced an animated television series for ABC using the characters of the young boy Beany, who wore a beany cap with a propellor, and his friend, a seasick sea serpent named Cecil.
In an interview with animation historians Milt Gray and Michael Barrier, Bob Clampett revealed a very special encounter with Walt Disney himself when the puppet show was at its peak:
“I was good friends with Walt's niece, Margie Davis. She invited Uncle Walt and me to one of his grandnephews' birthday parties. I brought a basketful of Beany and Cecil toys and merchandise. And Walt walked in with an armful of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck toys.
“It so happened that Walt's own grandnephews were such great fans of my Beany and Cecil TV show that they ran around all day wearing Beany caps, playing with Beany balloons and games, with Cecil and Dishonest John puppets on their arms, giving the D.J. laugh, 'Nya ha ha!'
“Well, Walt's eyebrow went sky high. But, of course, it was no time at all until he went on the air with his Mickey Mouse Club and wonderful Disneyland TV program. And I'm sure that his grandnephews thereafter wore nothing but Mousekeeteer caps.”
On the animated version of Beany and Cecil, Clampett decided to parody the popular Disneyland television program in an episode entitled Beanyland.
Clampett's original pun-filled story was later adapted for the April-June 1963 DELL Beany & Cecil comic book, which was illustrated by Willie Ito, an artist who worked for Disney Feature Animation back in the 1950s.
In the comic book version of this episode, there is a much more detailed map of “Beanyland.” And it features a “Rock and Roller Coaster” and a “Go-Man Chinese Theater” decades before Disney actually built those attractions in Florida.
The story premise for the animated cartoon was that Beany and Cecil were going to the moon to create a perfect theme park with a “20,000 Leaks Under the Sea” ride, a Matterhorn, a train ride, and much more.
Their constant nemesis, Dishonest John, was already on the moon in hopes of making a fortune shipping the moon's cheese back to Earth. Of course, wherever there is cheese, there will be mice, who are the residents of the moon.
When I interviewed him, Bob remembered:
“ABC got very upset about 'Beanyland' because of course, they had been running the 'Disneyland' television program and other Disney programs and they didn't want to make Walt mad because there were some legal things going on where Disney was leaving ABC. 'Oh, you can't have a caricature of Walt Disney in there saying, 'I'll make this my Dismal Land'!' I'd answer, 'Where's Walt Disney in there? The character with the hook nose and mustache is my long time villain Dishonest John. Everybody knows who he is.'
“My original version of “Beanyland” was very, very funny because it was such a tongue-in-cheek satire on Disneyland even as to the way they worded their advertising.
“Beany would say stuff like 'Look, what he's doing to my creamy, dreamy Beanyland!' and that made fun of those peanut butter commercials that sponsored Walt's show.
“I had Dishonest John packaging the moon as cheese and bringing it back to Earth to sell it. On the package, I had the word 'Krafty' and ABC was afraid the Kraft Cheese Company would sue them.
“It was those kinds of things they censored and so much more for seemingly no reason. As Captain Huffenpuff said about Beanyland: 'This place wasn't built by a mouse; it was built for mice!'”
I know for a fact that Bob Clampett held Walt Disney in high esteem and used him as a business model in creating a brand. That's why those “Beany and Cecil” cartoons had in the song “A Bob Clampett CartooooOOOooon!” so that people would associate those cartoons with Bob just as people associated Walt with Mickey and the gang.
It continues to fascinate me that there are so many connections between Disney and so many other things and people like Bob Clampett.
