Mr Toad

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he Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad is an animated feature produced by Walt Disney Studios and released to theaters on October 5, 1949 by RKO Radio Pictures. It is the eleventh animated feature in the Disney animated features canon. This film was the final of Disney's 1940s "package films" (feature films comprised of two or more short subjects instead of a single feature-length story). Beginning with the next animated feature release, Cinderella, his studio would return to the feature-length stories that low income and World War II had caused a drought of during the 1940s

Blondie - The Actor

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Biography: Jeffrey Silver was the very last boy to play the part of Alexander Bumstead in the long-running and highly popular "Blondie" radio show. It's because of him, more than anyone else, that I included a "Blondie Radio Show" section to this website. He's a SPECIAL BLONDIE CONSULTANT and has contributed much in the way of information and pictures. He's also a very talented individual who, as a child actor, had a way of delivering dialogue that is beyond compare. Truly outstanding!

He made his professional radio debut in Cleveland on NBC in "The Ohio Story." He later arrived in Hollywood in August of 1948. At first, the Silvers family came to Hollywood only to summer in Long Beach. There was no thought of a Hollywood radio career for Jeff. It just all kind of fell into place. How?

Jeffrey's mother spent a day taking her mother to some of the local audience-participation programs. The thought then struck her that her son should try out for a Hollywood radio audition. His radio career flourished on the strength of his ability alone, with most of his roles resulting from word-of-mouth recommendations of actors and directors who sampled his past performances.

merry melody

Merry Melodie

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Producer Leon Schlesinger had already produced one cartoon in the Looney Tunes series, and its success prompted him to try to sell a sister series to Warner Bros. His selling point was that the new cartoons would feature music from the soundtracks of Warner Bros. films and would thus serve as advertisements for Warner Bros. recordings. The studio agreed, and Schlesinger dubbed the series Merrie Melodies.

Walt Disney Productions had already scored with their Silly Symphonies. Since cartoon production usually began with a soundtrack, animating a piece of music made it easier to devise plot elements and even characters.
Merrie Melodies closing title from the early 1960s.
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Merrie Melodies closing title from the early 1960s.

The Merrie Melodies series was taken on by Rudy Ising, one of the two animators (the other being Hugh Harman) who had worked on the original Looney Tunes short. The first of these was Lady, Play Your Mandolin!, released in 1931. Ising attempted to introduce new characters in his Merrie Melodies films, such as Piggy, Foxy, and Goopy Geer, but Foxy was so derivative of Mickey Mouse that he was dropped, possibly at Disney's urging. The Merrie Melodies shorts became largely plotless musicals or romances without any recurring characters and continued in this vein even after Ising left the studio in 1933.

In 1934, Schlesinger produced his first color Merrie Melodies shorts, Honeymoon Hotel and Beauty and the Beast, which were produced in Cinecolor (Disney had exclusive rights to the richer Technicolor process). Their success convinced Schlesinger to produce all future Merrie Melodies shorts in color as well. Looney Tunes continued in black and white until 1943.

Contractually, Merrie Melodies cartoons were obligated to include at least one full chorus from a Warner Bros. song. Warner Bros. requested that these songs be performed by name bands whenever possible, but this lasted only through the first few shorts. The policy annoyed the animators of Merrie Melodies, since the songs often interrupted the cartoons' momentum and pacing.

In the late 1930s, the animators were released from this obligation, and the Merrie Melodies shorts came to resemble more closely the black-and-white Looney Tunes series. In 1943, Schlesinger began producing Looney Tunes in color as well, and the two series became virtually indistinguishable except by their theme music and opening titles. By this time the theme music for Looney Tunes was "The Merry-Go-Round Broke Down" by Cliff Friend and Dave Franklin and the theme music for Merrie Melodies was an adaptation of "Merrily We Roll Along" by Charles Tobias, Murray Mencher & Eddie Cantor.

Warner Bros.-owned songs continued to appear in some of the shorts, however, as shown by the frequent repetition of "The Merry-Go-Round Broke Down" and "Singing in the Bathtub," as well as the music of Carl Stalling and Raymond Scott, particularly "Powerhouse".

Perry Mason

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Perry Mason on the Radio

Since his film experience with Hollywood turned out to be so embarrassing it may come as a surprise that Gardner agreed to put his hero on radio. Although his compadres advised him to aim for a nighttime, prime time slot for Mason, Gardner sold the radio rights to Procter & Gamble, the kingpins of soap, who decided to put the series on during the day. (It was these daytime radio programs, usually funded by detergent companies, that gave rise to the name "soap opera.") The Perry Mason radio series premiered on a few stations in October 1943 and in three months was playing five days a week on stations all across the country.

Gardner considered the show a kind of continuing advertisement for his books, in the same way that the Ellery Queen radio show promoted the popular detective books of the same name. But when he sat down and tried to write scripts for the episodes, he failed miserably. "As a soaper, I stunk," he said at the time. He admitted his strengths were in narrative writing and not scripting.

When the sponsors brought in another writer to punch up the Mason character, Gardner felt his control of the show (he had "veto rights") slipping away. He came to dislike the show's writing, the plots, the production, even the ads. And he must have been qualified to judge. He monitored the program every day, taking notes--not many of which were complimentary.