beamjockey: Drawing of Bill of the Heterodyne Boys by Phil Foglio. (Default)
Sudden thought: Does the vaudeville routine "Slowly I Turned" ridicule a victim of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder?

Have we at last reached the point where comedy routines have their own (carefully analyzed, but quite unfunny) Wikipedia articles? Yes. Yes, we have.

The Three Stooges do it as performers-within-a-performance in Gents without Cents. This is the version I remember from my childhood, and it has the best-timed violence.

The best performance I have found is Frank J. Scanell, as a comic hired to teach "a burlesque act" to Lucille Ball. It startes at about 0:50 in this clip, and runs to 6:00.

Lou Costello does it with Sid Fields. Somewhat sloppy.

An aged Moe Howard reprises the old routine with Mike Douglas(!) in 1973. Extremely sloppy. The novelty of cameos by Roger Miller and Lee Meriweather Julie Newmar does not really improve it.

Another thought: This routine must surely be detested by anyone who must tell people that he or she is from Niagara Falls...
beamjockey: Drawing of Bill of the Heterodyne Boys by Phil Foglio. (Default)
One thing about Google's Life magazine photo archive, which is both annoying and intriguing, is that the captions and tags don't always reflect a picture's subject very accurately. I keep returning to this collection to find novelties among its millions of images.

I was looking for photos by Allan Grant, who did lots of Hollywood work for Life, and I came across over 200 images labeled cryptically "Beane Tv Act."

I recognized them as portraying the popular (but now-obscure) puppet show Time for Beany, created by Bob Clampett. Clampett was a former Warner Brothers animator and director who seized upon the new medium of television and dragooned two voice actors, Daws Butler and Stan Freberg, into serving as his puppeteers. The program ran from 1949 to 1955.

You will know Daws Butler as the voice of Yogi Bear and about a million other Hanna-Barbera cartoon characters. You will know Stan Freberg as the creator of a long string of hit comedy records, and a longer string of immensely funny TV and radio commercials.

But you can search the archive for Freberg, Butler, and Clampett without turning up any of these pictures. Perhaps Google will eventually incorporate a way of crowdsourcing tags or captions for these images.

Freberg has said that the show was physically demanding because the diminutive Daws was stretched on tippy-toe reaching his puppets above the level of the stage, while Stan hunched his tall frame over to avoid being seen by the camera.

The show also gave rise to a vogue for propeller beanies among Fifties children.

In the following decade, Clampett produced a cel-animated Saturday morning show using the same characters, and recycling many of the same puns.
Daws Butler and Stan Freberg
Daws Butler and Stan Freberg
, puppeteers on Time for Beany. Left to right: Beany, Daws Butler, Captain Huffenpuff, Dishonest John ("NYAH-ha-ha!"), Stan Freberg, Cecil.

Freberg & Butler in a seltzer-soaking scene
Cecil gets soaked in the face, and Stan and Daws try to avoid getting caught in the crossfire, as unidentified man operates seltzer bottle.

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beamjockey: Drawing of Bill of the Heterodyne Boys by Phil Foglio. (Default)
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