Waah! I'm Offended!

These days almost every comedy routine you do will offend somebody or other.

Oh, this is not something I just thought of. This is a quote from 1957 by no less a comedic authority than Steve Allen.

Yes, the thin-skinned have always been with us, screwing up their faces in reddened outrage. Maybe the type of situation that bothers them has changed, or the morality behind their indignation, but they’ve always been there to try to quash thoughts and words. And I doubt that will ever change.

Here’s Allen’s editorial from August 16, 1957. He was filling in for Herald Tribune News Service columnist John Crosby that day.

Everybody’s An Expert
The letter was typed on official-looking stationery, the usual column of names that nobody ever reads, running down the left side of the sheet. “You must realize,” the writer lectured, “that not all motorcyclists are delinquents.”
I realized it.
What had occasioned the protest was a comedy sketch in which I had worn leather jacket and motor cycle boots as a member of a new vocal quartet, “The Four Punks.” I knew the letter was coming before the skit was ever aired, because these days almost every comedy routine you do will offend somebody or other.
Perhaps a few words about the philosophy of humor might be in order, therefore, if only to lighten the burden currently placed on the secretaries of television comedians. You see, friends out there in televisionland, comedy is about tragedy. By that I mean that most of the things we laugh at are disasters of one degree or another, either actual or make-believe. What are jokes about? They're about fat people, skinny people, dumbbells, small hotel rooms, drunks, sexual problems, high prices, war, marital tensions, laziness and well, as Christian tradition lists them: pride, covetousness, lust, anger, gluttony, envy and sloth.
PERFECTION UNFUNNY
In other words, there's nothing amusing about perfection. Things are funny in some sort of loose relation to how far they fall short of perfection. There may not be laughter in hell, but there couldn’t possibly be any in heaven.
Almost every comedy sketch, therefore, either makes father look like a goof, portrays a fighter as punchy, makes an old-maid seem man-crazy, a motorcycle cop gruff and rude, a drunk an object of laughter or some other character selected from real life appear ridiculous. You are perfectly at liberty to protest about all this and to say there's nothing amusing about any of it, but it should be explained that the only way you could be completely satisfied is for the networks to fire all the comedians, which, now that I think of it, isn't exactly in the realm of science-fiction.
It will be more productive, of course, to live with the reality of the problem, to appreciate that humor is a gift of the gods that enables us to multiply magically our sometimes meager fund of material joy.
So, bus drivers, don’t waste time writing to Jackie Gleason. School teachers, don’t bother to complain about Our Miss Brooks. Firemen, don't—especially this late in the century—start complaining about Smith and Dale's fire house sketch. Presley fans, Bob Hope doesn’t see your angry post-cards; Liberace-lovers, George Gobel has a staff of secretaries who handle your protests and who know that Liberace himself loves to hear co medians do jokes about him.
MAJORITY AMUSED

Me, I’m fascinated by people and I like to hear them ticking, so I’ve given the matter a bit of study.
I've learned that when a TV comic jokes about cowboys, Indians, undertakers, hillbillies, the Brooklyn Dodgers, Lawrence Welk or what-have-you, he's usually amusing 20 or 30 million people, but making a handful of other people quite angry. And do you know what these angry folks always do when they write to Jack Benny or Red Skelton? They always start off by telling him that the offending joke or sketch wasn't funny. The guy's writers get maybe fifteen hundred dollars a week and they've been studying humor for perhaps 20 years, but there's some druggist out in Keokuk who can confidently assure them that a particular routine wasn't funny.
There's a profound lesson to be learned here, I think. You and I can smugly assume that we're superior to our theoretical pharmacist, but the point is, we are the druggist in Keokuk. We all think we're experts on humor. We don't claim to know a thing about architecture or deep-sea diving or playing the zither, but we all pose as authorities when it comes to the artistry of Sid Caesar.
This is not to say, of course, that all TV and radio sketches are hilariously funny. Once in a while a routine doesn’t succeed, but the first people to know it are the performers and the writers, just as the people who understand when a new air plane is a failure are the pilot and the draftsmen.
We all must learn, I think, never to say "Wally Cox isn't funny." Those few of us who are not amused by Wally must say "He is not funny to me." And once we’ve learned about the subjectivity and objectivity of comedy we just might be able to apply our lesson to the fields of politics, morals, religion, philosophy and the dear, delicate business of living with each other.

Mystery Mouse

A mysterious little girl mouse flashes on the screen for one frame in Robinson Crusoe Jr., a less-than-inspiring effort by director Norm McCabe.



Who is it? We soon see. It’s “Snooks.” Writer Mel Millar tosses in a bunch of gratuitous network radio references.



This scene has Daddy (Mel Blanc) telling “Snooks” (Sara Berner) they must get off the ship. “Why, daddy?” asks Snooks, exactly in the manner of Baby Snooks on Fanny Brice’s popular NBC show. The answer is a parody of a line from the movie You Can’t Take It With You : “Well, confidentially, it sinks.”

The radio references aren’t over. When the ship shoves off, Porky emulates Kate Smith by waving “So long, everybody.” Friday has Rochester’s voice, while a parrot is waiting for the $64 question like the contestants on Take It Or Leave It. Incidentally, if you want to learn more about old radio references, E.O. Costello’s “Warner Brothers Cartoon Companion” is still on line. It’s been around since the days of Lynx and other DOS-based web browsers. Confidentially, it doesn’t...well, you know.

Vive Risto is credited on screen with animation; John Carey and Izzy Ellis are here, too. The backgrounds are by Dick Thomas; they have the same scratchy grass that he painted at Hanna-Barbera years later.

TV Terry Bear

Time for our Terry Checklist:

A fun Carlo Vinci walk cycle? Check.
Cymbal clash after a character crash-lands? Check.
Drum thump sound after a character falls? Check.
Terry Brake Squeal™? Not this time.
Terry Splash™? Check.
Phil Scheib running music with saxophones and strings? Check.

Oh, and we can’t leave out...

Crazy Jim Tyer straight-ahead animation? Double check.

This could describe dozens of Terrytoons but the one on the list today is Papa’s Little Helpers (1951). Papa hooks up a wire to a TV antenna but those scampish Terry Bears have plugged the other end into an electrical socket. What wags! You know the end result is tailor-made for Tyer’s type of animation.



Doug Moye is Pa Terry Bear. I wish he would have been given more grumbling dialogue. Is Dayton Allen doing the other voices?

There’s an enjoyable inside joke in the last background painting. The Bear family gives up on TV, and with great satisfaction lope to a theatre where Mighty Mouse and Heckle and Jeckle cartoons are playing. No doubt 20th Century Fox patted Terry on the back for that ending.

He Saw the Other Notre Dame

What better way to get free publicity for your season-opening show than a newspaper article?

Jack Benny returned to the airwaves after the summer break in 1937 on October 3rd, the same day this little story appeared in the Pittsburgh Press. It’s supposedly written by Mary Livingstone, but as it’s in character, my guess is someone in the NBC publicity was responsible for it (note the mention of the Red Network).

Jack and the gang did kibbitz about their vacations. It’s not the strongest show. No wonder Jack wanted to try something different with the “Blue Fairy” debut show several seasons later.

By the way, if you’d like to read about the season, check out Bill Cairns’ site. Unfortunately, there aren’t reviews for all the shows, including this one, as they weren’t available on-line when the site was put up.

Mary Pokes Fun at Jack
Looked for Irish Stadium in Good Old Paree
By MARY LIVINGSTONE
That old wheeze about travel broadening one certainly holds true in the case of my husband, Jack Benny. His tailor is working day and night now letting out all of his suits.
But we really had a marvelous vacation in Europe, in spite of the fact that I never could succeed in dragging Jack past those Parisian sidewalk cafes. He said they reminded him so much of New York.

We didn't arrive in London in time for the coronation and I really was quite disappointed. That is, I was until we saw a newsreel of the affair the third time Jack took me to see his picture, "Artists and Models." Maybe we didn't miss so much, after all.
I was really proud of Jack when he took me to see Notre Dame in Paris. But my illusions were shattered when he asked the guide where the stadium was.
In Rome we went to see Nero's shrine. As we stood before the tomb of the emperor, Jack couldn't resist a quip. Although he tried to look serious, he remarked: "Poor Nero! I wonder if he could have played The Bee as well as I can?"
Coming home on the boat, a steward asked Jack if he wanted to take a chance on the ship's pool. "Sure," Jack replied, "but how can I get the darn thing home if I win it?"
But, why go on? Just tune in over the NBC "red" network Sunday nights and you'll hear all about the trip. That is, starting tonight. I haven't the slightest doubt that Jack will find a way to work most of the gags into the script. He better get them in quick, because I'm working on a new Labor Day poem for Christmas. After all, I wasn't on the air Labor Day, but I will be on Christmas, if our sponsor doesn't get wise to Jack's alleged humor before then.

The World of Oz Is a Very Funny Place

Canada’s first animated series for TV wasn’t altogether Canadian.

Crawley Films was a company based in Ottawa that made industrial films and commercials. Some of its work was animated. But then it was hired in 1961 by a small American company called Videocraft to help it jump into the expanding TV animation industry by animating a series of short cartoons called “Tales of the Wizard of Oz.”

Even though this was a huge undertaking for Crawley, Videocraft’s selection of a Canadian company was smart. Canada and the U.S. share a border and a language (for the most part) and the cheaper Canadian dollar meant production costs would be lower. And American studios had been complaining there weren’t enough trained animators and related artists in the U.S. due to the glut of TV work. Conversely, Crawley would never have been able to make a profit on animated cartoons exclusively for Canada; the country was too small. It needed the U.S. and other international markets.

The Oz cartoons are pleasant enough, and there are occasional bits of gentle satire and neat short-cut animation. The abstract backgrounds are a nice touch. And I like the voice work; of course, Videocraft used many of the same Toronto actors when it became Rankin-Bass.

The National Post of February 17, 1962 gave feature space to Crawley’s animated venture and the wire service provided a neat little story about an attempt to shoehorn some political satire into one of the cartoons. Unfortunately, we can’t reproduce an accompanying picture of some of the staff at work.

We're Doing Nicely in Animation
Our Cartoons Now Show in On TV Screens in the U. S.
By AUDREY GILL
OTTAWA—Although visitors to Canada frequently profess to find this country lacking in artistic expression, we are doing very nicely in one of the world's most competitive artistic fields—animated cartoons.
The evidence: An Ottawa firm.
Crawley Films Limited, is creating a rejuvenated and refurbished version of the children's story “Wizard of Oz” for world distribution.
Crawley Films has signed a contract with Videocraft International of New York to make a series of 130 five-minute cartoons about the Wizard. Value of the contract: $250,000. The contract contains an option allowing for another 130 episodes, but this depends on sales.
The Wizard is being seen on American television already—45 episodes have been delivered to Videocraft and Crawley is working on number 60. It must produce 10 episodes a month to keep to the tight schedule. Canadian rights to the series have been sold to Telefilm of Canada Ltd., Toronto, film distributors. It will offer the cartoons to CBC or CTV networks.
Recruiting the largest crew of artists ever assembled in this country (45 are working full-time on the Wizard) was a big headache for producer Tom Glynn. The majority of his crew are Canadian and consist of: eight key animators, seven junior animators, two background artists, 16 tracer-painters, three checkers, one sound-track reader and six animation) camera men.
The oldest and largest producer of sponsored motion pictures in Canada, Crawley has had a small animation department for many years. Putting together 100,000 pieces of artwork, however, was a project never before attempted in Canada.
In 23 years, Crawley Films has made over 1,000 motion pictures for business, industry, government and television. Their first diversification into entertainment films was the 39-episode RCMP series which has been sold in Canada, England, Australia, Argentina, Iran, Rhodesia, Peru and other countries. Crawley's documentary 13-episode series "St. Lawrence North" has been sold by the CBC in Italy, Australia and West Germany, with other sales pending.

"A serious drain on Canada's finances is the steady, unhindered flow of film dollars to Hollywood, New York, London and Paris," says Graeme Fraser, vice-president of Crawley. "The Canadian producer is fortunate to get 15% of his costs from the Canadian market. He must produce for the world—and in competition with the world's best."
Here's how the Wizard is made:
Script is written by Videocraft writers in New York. "They keep adding new characters all the time." moans Tom Glynn.
Sound track is made in Toronto by an independent producer—Bernard Cowan. Lead voices are Larry Mann, Paul Kligman, Alfie Scopp, James Doohan and Pegi Loder. Drawings and film prints are done at Crawley Films, by a complicated process. The first job is to work out a camera "master sheet" which, in effect, is a schedule co-ordinating background, sound, dialogue, and cartoon action.
From this, the animator knows how many cartoon frames are necessary to have his character say a particular piece of dialogue, or go through a particular action.
Having decided upon the number of necessary drawings, and the substance of them, the key animator makes rough pencil drawings of the extremes of action: and junior animators fill in the details—they make mouths and feet move, and, by consulting the master sheet, fit the movements into the dialogue.
Each sequence is then enlarged to fill in the exact time allotted to it.
The pencil drawings are then traced onto transparent sheets and the drawings are painted in, in color.
The next step is to relate the character drawings to the background which is painted on a separate sheet against which they are to take place.
This is done by placing the character drawings on top of the background drawings, and photographing them together. Action is secured by changing the character drawings, and photographing each change. The backgrounds are changed as the characters move from place to place.
Crawley handles the final job of superimposing the sound track on the film strip and of making prints for distribution.
Now that the Wizard is well under way, the next project at Crawley is another "first" for the company—a full-length feature film. Crawley has bought the film rights to Hugh MacLennan's "Barometer Rising" and will be looking for backing as soon as the film script is finished.

They Fight For See-Saw In Oz Film
CP Ottawa Bureau
OTTAWA—The original L Frank Baum book, "The Wizard of Oz," is about a little Kansas girl named Dorothy who is blown by a cyclone into the mystical Land of Oz.
Dorothy's adventures in Oz, and those of her friends—the tin woodman who spends his time looking for a heart (being tin, he is "heartless"); Dandy, the cowardly lion who searches for courage; Socrates, a scarecrow who looks for courage [sic]—made up the substance of a whole series of "Oz" books which charmed generations of children.
The Crawley film series tells the original story and adds up-to-date trimmings.

Example: In one episode, the "Munchkins," inhabitants of Oz, become "North Munchkins" and "South Munchkins" who threaten to fight each other over possession of a see-saw.
The quarrel is taken to the "Oz Nations" which is referred to as the "ON".
At the ON, other "Munchkins" get into the act. One character is a red (the series is in color) "East Munchkin" who punctuates his speeches by banging his shoe on the table. Another piece of sand in the wheels of the ON is a yellow-slant-eyed "Southeast Munchkin."
Finally the see-saw is cut into two pieces, and everybody is unhappy. The episode isn't intended as a parallel satire on the UN—the viewer is free to find his own analogies, and the episode is intended to amuse.

The Living Rocketship

It’s just an ordinary rocket ship, built by a bunch of mice out of things around the house.



But wait! It has eyes! It’s alive!



This is from Little Buck Cheeser, a 1937 cartoon by Hugh Harman and Rudy Ising released after they left the studio. In it, Cheeser (played by Berneice Hansell) and his mousey friends zoom to the moon to see if it’s made a cheese. It is. But the space ship fights any attempt to stop and land.



Breaking free of a line attached to a toilet plunger stuck on a mound of green cheese, the rocket ship lands in a smelly lake. It has eyes but evidently no nose as it has to read a sign (in perfect English) to realise where it is.



It squirms and struggles but finally frees itself before blowing up in an effects animation explosion and plummeting, on fire, out-of-control with the frightened mice on board.



“Aw, this’ll be a cop-out. It’ll be a dream,” I can hear you saying. Yes, that’s the plot. That’s even though at no time in the cartoon does Cheeser look tired, let alone fall asleep.

No animators are credited. The score is by Scott Bradley.

Hugh Downs

Will someone be able to find a match to “A hundred box” on the puzzle board that was behind number 24? We watched to find out. And so did the man who hosted this particular TV game show.

Hugh Downs had many jobs over his career on TV, but I think of him most as the host of Concentration, where Paul Taubman’s Wurlitzer organ cheerfully doodled out tunes under descriptions of “a hundred box,” a trip to Bermuda, golf clubs and other prizes contestants had won. And everything was held together by the smooth, low-key Downs, who never seem to be bothered by anything during his long career on television.

He may have been relaxed but he once caused a panic back in his radio days. Billboard reported on July 11, 1942:

He Believed It
DETROIT, July 4.—Memories of Orson Welles’s “Invasion from Mars” were involved in the Detroit Police Department Saturday when an inspector tuned in to WWJ’s Yawn Club in time to hear announcer Hugh Downs tell the world, “Somebody has stolen studio A.” Said inspector promptly sent two detectives to the station to investigate, and they had the staff badly puzzled till an engineer recollected the phrase over the air.
Check-up showed Downs had come in early for his show, got off the elevator at the wrong floor, found Studio A wasn’t there when he tried to walk into it—and later mentioned the incident over the program.

Downs’ road to Concentration, thence to the Today Show, 20/20 and other ventures began in humble small-town radio. In 1940, he was chief announcer at WLOK, Lima, Ohio¹ before making his way to WWJ. He ended up in the Army briefly in 1943² then signed up with WMAQ, the NBC station in Chicago, after his discharge.³ During his time there, Downs caused another unexpected panic. Here’s the Chicago Tribune’s version from July 5, 1947.

Fourth Brings a Star Gazer Down to Earth
Hugh Downs, 26, spent a quiet Fourth yesterday in his apartment at 1644 Farwell av., wishing that his neighbors would [1] learn the difference between a telescope and a bazooka, or [2] mind their own business.
Downs, an announcer for the National Broadcasting company, said the pitfalls in the path of an amateur astronomer are many—chiefly bashful ladies and irate husbands who don’t realize that the telescope is focused on infinity and is useless as an aid to boudoir glimpses.
It Does Ulcers No Good
“But this was the first time I’ve become tied up in the bazooka angle,” Downs said. “And, believe me, I trust it is the last! These encounters with the law during the middle of the night neither help my hobby nor my ulcers.”
About a year ago he took up astronomy as a hobby and started building his own telescope, which has a six foot tube tube, bound with brass.
About 1 a.m. Thursday he lugged the contraption into his yard and started studying the craters of the moon. “There I was, minding my own business, 238,857 miles away from Farwell av.,” he said.
“The next thing I knew there was a flashlight in my eyes. I caught a glimpse of a policeman’s uniform and star, and he yelled, ‘Don’t fire that thing!’”
There’s a Limit
“Don’t fire what thing?” Downs asked.
“That bazooka,” said the cop. “That’s going too far with this celebration business. A bazooka packs the wallop of a 155 mm. cannon. You’re not going to fire it on my beat.”
After a confused discussion of the destructive power of a bazooka, the proper way to celebrate independence day, the craters of the moon, and the nosy neighbors who had complained about the bazooka firing in the first place, Downs convinced the policeman and then spent 30 minutes explaining heavenly wonders to him.
“My wife, Ruth, and our year and a half old son, Hugh Raymond, have nicknamed my scope ‘The Bazooka’ and they aren’t giving me much peace about it,” Downs said. “When all the furore dies, maybe I can go back to my hobby.”

Television was being developed in Chicago in the 1940s and the NBC radio people found themselves doing double-duty on the new medium. Downs was one; he had experience at the city’s first station, the independent WKBK. In 1951, he was hosting a half-hour, daily noon-time sustainer called Your Luncheon Date ⁴. Chicago had been a big network radio hub, so why not be the same for television? Starting January 1952, Downs’ show was seen across NBC⁵ for about 13 months before being chopped during a revamp of daytime programming.⁶ Downs carried on on local television.

In the meantime, NBC programming mogul Pat Weaver was fiddling and fussing with a daytime show that finally made its debut on March 1, 1954 as Home. Downs wasn’t on it at the beginning; the show starred Arlene Francis and experts on gardening, shopping and other around-the-house concerns. But the show broadcast the first network colorcast originating from a Chicago station on June 23, 1954 with Downs conducting the interview.⁷ It wasn’t long before he was in New York as a permanent member of the Home team.

Next was Concentration. Then came Jack Paar. Downs was Paar’s announcer on the Tonight show and left in the lurch when Paar got into a hissy fit with NBC and walked out on his audience on February 12, 1960. Downs had to take over and straddle the line of not siding with one against the other (though Downs explained that evening he had not been an NBC employee for some time).

Here are a couple of puff pieces that found their way into newspapers at the time. The first is a syndicated column dated March 26, 1961, the next a United Press International story dated July 24, 1960.

Hugh Downs Attains 'Personality' Status
By MARGARET McMANUS
Hugh Downs, a regularly featured attraction on the Jack Paar show, is a member in good standing of the Paar Family Plan.
One of the rudimentary requirements is loyalty to the leader and here the genial Downs scores well.
Naturally Downs was a quietly agreeable aide in Paar's army in the recent war between Paar and Ed Sullivan concerning the inflammable matter of guest fees.
• • •
DOWNS, HIMSELF, is no slouch in the matter of money. It is reliably reported that from his duties on the Paar show, from his daily NBC daytime television show, Concentration, and from the weekly nighttime version of the same show, which begins on Monday, April 17, he accumulates close to $250,000 a year.
Born in Akron, O., raised in Lima, Hugh Downs began his career at the age of 18 on a 100-watt radio station in Lima. Before he was 20, he saw the station increased to 250 watts, became its program manager with three announcers working for him.
• • •

IN 1941, he moved on to Detroit, and after Pearl Harbor he attempted to enlist in the Navy, the Coast Guard and the Air Force. Nobody would take him because he is color blind. Just as he accepted that fact, he was drafted, 123d Infantry, heavy weapons company.
Downs had a brief, unfortunate career in the Army. He was a part of that ill-fated experiment, at Ft. Louis, Wash. [sic], to condense the 13 weeks basic training into four weeks. Downs and half the trainees collapsed from exhaustion and, after several weeks in the hospital, he was medically discharged without ever really seeing any service at all.
"My career in World War II seemed doomed to disaster," he said. "It was quite disturbing. When I was on my way home, I thought I was glad to be out of it. When I got home, I found I wasn't. For about a year I kept having psychosomatic illnesses," Downs says. "I thought I was completely shot physically."
• • •
HE RETURNED briefly to Detroit at the end of his Army service, but then went to Chicago where he was an NBC staff commercial announcer for 11 years. He was in Chicago when NBC was looking for a new face for the "Home" show with Arlene Francis. He was one of a number of out-of-town announcers called in to audition.
Downs won the audition; was on 900 hours of Home until it went off the air in July 1957. On a hot, muggy, midsummer's night, the same month, same year, he started with Paar on his opening show. He started as the show announcer and in months had made the elusive transition from announcer to "personality."
• • •
HUGH DOWNS, at the age of 40, is no longer an announcer. He is a "personality," precisely what he wants to be.
"It is my theory that to be a 'personality' is the best thing you can be on television," he said. "A 'personality' is not talent, so it can't burn out, nor can it be overexposed.
"There is a fantastic kind of security in it. They can always find somebody who is better looking than I am, or who has a better voice, but who can they find who is a better Hugh Downs? I don't want to be anything but myself."
• • •
DOWNS, WHO loves the water and boats and sailing, has been married for 17 years to the former Ruth Shaheen, who was a radio producer for NBC when they met in Chicago. They live in an eight-room apartment on Central Park West in New York and have a 15-year-old son, named Hugh, but called H. R., and an 11-year-old daughter, Deirdre, called Deedee.
Hugh Downs is an intelligent man, very knowledgeable, practical, tolerant and kind.
"I call myself an unreasonably happy man," he said.

Varied Interests Keep 'Civilized' Downs Busy
By DOC QUIGG
NEW YORK (UPI)—"Some men are born great. Some achieve greatness. And some have greatness thrust upon them, as in the cases of Caesar Augustus, Harry S. Truman, and Hugh Downs."
Downs, a character so highly civilized that he's sometimes referred to as "TV's renaissance man," threw back his head and chortled mightily when told the jape quoted above. It was inserted by British comedian Michael Flanders into his recent Broadway hit show as a commentary on the Jack Paar February television walkout that left Downs all alone by the microphone.
"That's really funny," Downs said. "I'll have to tell it to Jack."
Although Downs catapulted to fame in recent years as the side-kick of the star on the Jack Paar show, he actually entered the broadcasting business 22 years ago as a radio announcer in Lima, Ohio.
"It's kind of weird," he recalled, "but the fact is that I was looking for a job all over town—they were hard to find then—and there was nothing for me and I finally stopped at the radio station and asked them what you had to do to become an announcer.
Gets the Job

"They told me to come back Friday and I said I couldn't, so they handed me a piece of copy and asked me to read it right there. I did and the boss, who had been listening, came out and said: 'You know, that was very bad, but—and he actually said this—'Big oaks from little acorns grow.' So I was hired." Downs leads a life so full of great number of interests that it's hard to see how he crams himself into a 24-hour day. He skin dives. He reads books on history and science in conveyances and while eating. He builds hi-fi sets, keeps up with astronomy and other weighty sciences (in the past years he build two telescopes himself), and composes music.
He has a record album out called "An Evening With Hugh Downs" on which he sings folk songs. His book "Yours Truly, Hugh Downs," which he wrote over the last 2½ years and which contains his ideas on broadcasting, will be published in October by Holt, Rinehart and Winston. He's working on a magazine article on conservation.
He frequently makes speeches at dinners and other affairs ("everybody knows I like to talk"). This week he gave the opening lecture in a New York University series for graduate students and teachers on "Culture and America," speaking on the role of communications.
Next month he will be doing summer stock for a week, appearing in "Anniversary Waltz" in Warren, Ohio.
16 Hours a Week
In addition to these things, and others like taking care of a wife and two children, he works. Nobody in this country exceeds his present average 16 hours a week of commercial broadcasting on a major network. His own daily NBC-TV game-quiz show "Concentration' accounts for 2 1/2 hours, the Paar show nine hours, and his weekend stint on the NBC radio "Monitor" lasts four hours. That's the regular schedule, and his extra appearances average a half to one hour a week.
Perhaps the Downs quiet good nature in the midst of the hectic life is helped along by knowledge that his income tops $100,000 a year.
Perhaps, also, it is due to his immersion in study. His yen for learning began when he was 5.
"My father told me the distance to the moon, instead of saying it was made of green cheese. That's why I always answer kids seriously when they ask me things."

All this would be enough of a career for anyone, but Downs had a lot more ahead; 20/20 may have been the biggest part of it. He really was an anchor of not only Today, but network television’s early years. And he probably saw puzzles solved and gave away more “hundred boxes” than anyone else on TV.

---

1 Broadcasting, May 1, 1940, pg. 55^↩
2 Broadcasting, Jan. 11, 1943^↩
3 Broadcasting, May 24, 1943^↩
4 Variety, May 23, 1951, pg. 41^↩
5 Variety, Dec. 26, 1951, pg. 29^↩
6 Variety, Feb. 20, 1952^↩
7 Chicago Tribune, June 24, 1954, pg. C6.^↩

What's He Doing There?

When cartoons change from scene to scene in what should be continuous action, character positions should try to match so things look seemless, not jarring.

The people at the Van Beuren studio didn’t worry about that kind of thing.

There’s a good example in Runaway Blackie, where a little goat with a design similar to Cubby Bear tries to hitch a ride. There’s no attempt to make the scenes match up.

These are consecutive frames. Suddenly, Blackie is at the side of the road, which is now curved, on a hill, and decorated with telegraph poles.



Two more consecutive frames. Blackie instantly changes locations. He’s standing on a culvert or something like that.



The culvert disappears. So do the cars. And the telegraph poles. Yes, these are consecutive, too.



This is a disappointing cartoon because there’s very little of the usual Van Beuren weirdness (the hitch-hiking sequence has one weak gag about cars being afraid of each other), but plenty of Van Beuren incompetence. Harry Bailey gets the “by” credit. The raspy voice guy has several roles, including the talking moon (or is it the sun?).

Are People Funny?

Audience participation shows were the reality shows of their day.

They featured real people put in a contrived situation where the audience could laugh at their obvious discomfort (reality shows added to that a large heap of self-centered jerkishness).

Art Linkletter hosted two hardy audience-participation perennials on radio and TV—People Are Funny and House Party. He was so popular he had regular programmes on both CBS and NBC; even Arthur Godfrey only stuck to one network. It seems to me House Party was one of the final shows of what was left of the CBS radio network in the late ‘60s.

Let’s see what columnist John Crosby said about one of Linkletter’s stunts in his column of July 15, 1946. Perhaps because it doesn’t demean the young couple involved (too much), he seems to have liked the stunt’s creativity.

“The Sponsored Marriage”
On Friday night Art Linkletter, one of the busiest as well as one of the noisiest masters of ceremony in radio, told a young couple on the threshold of wedlock that the chances of a marriage being a success were only fifty-fifty, according to current statistics, whereas the chances would have been much greater than that 100 years ago. He then proceeded to outline a stunt that would win this couple $1,000, courtesy of the General Electric Company, if everything went well.
Before we get into the stunt, which is a honey, I should like to interject a plaintive query. Are there any statistics on what Henry Morgan refers to as “The sponsored marriage”? What are the chances of success of a marriage arranged, or at least paid for, by the General Electric Company? G.E. proudly boasts that its refrigerators last a lifetime, but do its marriages last that long? A G.E. phonograph is easy to manage and a wonderful companion in the home—but what about a G.E. wife? Has she the latest single-action disposition impervious to heat, cold and hard times? Is her complexion guaranteed stainless? Is she an automatic self-starting housekeeper? Is she dew freshened? Well, no matter.
* * *
The stunt Mr. Linkletter outlined was this: A new movies [sic], whose name I didn’t catch, has as its setting an Oregon valley 100 years ago. Since marriages were so successful 100 years ago and since the motion-picture company is paying good money to Mr. Linkletter to publicize its product, Mr. Linkletter decided that it would be a fine idea if this young couple had their honeymoon in the same Oregon valley.
The couple would be outfitted just like the pioneers of 100 years ago, the bridegroom in a coonskin cap, buckskin jacket and moccasins, the girl in a sunbonnet, gingham dress and high button shoes. They would drive to the valley in a covered wagon drawn by oxen and pitch their tent beside a bubbling stream. “Do you know how to bake bread?” Mr. Linkletter asked the bride-to-be.
“Oh, no,” gasped the girl.
“Well, you’ll find it much easier over an open fire,” observed Mr. Linkletter, and turned to the prospective bridegroom. “Do you know how to milk a cow?”
“Oh, no.”
“Well, try the overhand double-crostic method,” said the master of ceremonies, and presented the young man with a 100-year-old flint-action squirrel gun with which to shoot game.
* * *

Incidentally, the $1,000 prize is not theirs just for taking part in this adventure. They must find it. The first clew [sic] to its whereabouts was a fishhook. The bridegroom must catch a fish with the hook, find the nearest forest ranger and give it to him, and the forest ranger would give him the second clew. The couple must find the $1,000 before Wednesday. After that it will diminish $50 daily.
The couple were married at 7 p. m. on Friday and whisked by plane to Oregon, where they were feted at a banquet in their honor by the Governor of Oregon, and then pushed off to their honeymoon valley aboard the covered wagon.
Best wishes to you both, folks, and I devoutly hope you find the $1,000 before Wednesday. When you do, tear off $50 of it and mail it to me and I shall send you by return mail three sample radio columns and my own free booklet entitled “How to Be Happy Though Unsponsored.”
* * *
Romance has always been a highly profitable enterprise, and it seems to me this sort of radio program is the latest phase in the long history of the romance industry. Many, many years ago Alexandre Dumas pere ran an immensely successful romance factory in Paris. Dumas outlined his plots and then turned them over to the hired hands to fill out the dull details. The products of this factory, notably “The Count of Monte Cristo” and “The Three Musketeers,” are still widely sold.
Then Hollywood stepped in to improvise a far more efficient means of romance manufacture, and the authors turned to anger in place of love for their plots. But in these realistic times, it is increasingly difficult to identify oneself with Clark Gable or Loretta Young.
Hence, the sponsored marriage program, which brings you a skillful blend of romance, lavish gifts and adventure. It’s easy enough to identify oneself with this young married couple who are people just like you and me. Vicariously, we go along on the Oregon honeymoon. Vicariously, we are making bread over an open fire, milking the cow overhand and double crostic, and looking for that thousand clams. Today the press agent has supplanted the author and the script writer as the purveyor of dreams.
Incidentally, the name of the program on which you can follow the married couple’s quest for gold is “People Are Funny” and you’ll find it on WEAF 9 p.m. on Fridays. The program emanates appropriately from Hollywood, which is inhabited by some of the funniest people on earth.

Now, the rest of the week’s Crosby columns. He takes another crack at John J. Anthony on July 16th, muses on running routines and characters on July 17th, parodies singing commercials on July 18th and includes John J. Anthony again on July 19th on radio shows he wouldn’t regret leaving the air.

Carl Reiner and TV Comedy

80 years ago, a theatre production was held up in Rochester, New York until an actor from New York City could arrive. The big city! It all sounds very important until you realise that the actor was a teenager. His name was Carl Reiner.

You can read about it in the column to the right from the Rochester Democrat, June 20, 1940. Reiner was less than two years out of Evander Childs High School and already had a budding career as an actor/announcer on WNYC New York.

Reiner did so many things so well over his years in entertainment that it’s probably impossible to agree on what he’s best known for. His two years in stock in Rochester have faded into obscurity. Television truly made him famous. While he hosted a couple of network shows in the late ‘40s (one was basically a fashion show), it wasn’t until he hooked up with Sid Caesar that a national audience got to know him.

Here’s a short career summary from Sid Shalit’s column in the New York Daily News of October 23, 1951.

Ssergorp—Progress Spelled Backward . . . Anyone who feels aggressive about the high wages being dragged down by some TV performers better not run across Carl Reiner, one of the important comedy props in NBC's Sid Caesar-Imogene Coca setup.
Reiner made it the hard way. In order to pay his way through dramatic school, he worked for $12-a-week as a shipping clerk in New York's garment center. Through his own ingenuity, hard work and perseverance, Carl explains, his next job, as a machinist's helper, paid $8 a week.
After eight months of drama school, at the age of 17, he played in a little theatre group opposite Virginia Gilmore. It was terrific experience, he admits, both at acting and going hungry—seemingly two basic requisites for stardom. He performed every night but didn't get a dime for this work. Nor did anybody else in the company. But flushed with success and youth, Carl got uppity one day and demanded a salary. He snapped up the first offer of a $1 per performance. He was the top salaried actor in the troupe.

This was only the beginning of the Carl Reiner saga. From $1 with Miss Gilmore, Reiner aspired to greater and dramatic heights—and snagged a summer stock job in Rochester. This one made him the envy of theatre people—room and board. Then followed success. He was re-signed for the following season for room and board—PLUS $1 a week. Practically lolling in the lap of luxury. Carl's days were happy ones indeed. Nights he took strenuous walks so that Morpheus could overcome the pangs of hunger.
At the age of 20, Carl joined the Army in 1942 and was assigned to Hawaii as a teletype operator. When Maj. Maurice Evans arrived there with his GI version of "Hamlet," Reiner auditioned for him, using routines he had perfected at recreation halls. Carl then toured the South Pacific for a year and a half in revues which he wrote—room and board and $21 a month.
Financially on the upgrade, Reiner's Army experience landed him the road company lead in “Call Me Mister.” He was all of 23, and then came two lush jobs in “Inside, U. S. A.,” and “Alive and Kicking,” in which he met Max Liebman, producer-director of the Caesar-Coca TVer. Reiner signed with Liebman last year and gave up all outside pursuits to concentrate on video. As Arnold Stang would say, “What's to envy?”

Reiner is arguably better known (thanks to reruns) for creating The Dick Van Dyke Show, which I’ve always considered a breakthrough for television. Beloved as 1950s sitcoms are amongst many people, they always seem steeped somewhere in network radio. Precocious kids, somewhat ditzy dads, boy-crazed teenagers, mom-as-the-reality-anchor. It had all been done and done again. Van Dyke had a well-balanced cast with stories that were (for the most part) pretty plausible.

But Reiner wanted comedy that was even more true-to-life. He referred to one show in this interview published January 21, 1968. In a remarkable coincidence, the show was turned into an American series that was also a landmark of television—and co-starred Reiner’s son.

Carl Reiner Might Start New Trend
By HAL HUMPHREY
Television loves to wallow in its trends. This season it's the longer shows like old movies that have been getting the higher ratings, so for next season everyone in the industry is talking about what someone has dubbed the "long form."
Half-hour shows are a thing of the past, say the experts. It's the 90-minute and two-hour shows the public wants, and the planning boards are full of such projects.
"Someday, though," says writer-producer-comedian Carl Reiner, "somebody will do a new half-hour situation comedy he's been dying to do, and it will be a hit and there'll be nothing but talk about the trend toward half-hour situation comedy."
Carl, by the way, believes the half-hour comedy shows have done themselves in and that the long-form shows had nothing to do with it.
"I'd rather watch the Merv Griffin Show than any of the situation comedies on TV today," says Carl. "These talk shows like Griffin's are more honest, and exposing the viewer to them has made him see how unreal the half-hour comedies are. We've got to get back to more honesty in our situation comedy. I felt we even strayed away from it in the Dick Van Dyke series later."
Carl was the creator of the Dick Van Dyke Show, produced it and wrote many of the scripts until the last of its five years on the air. This season he and Sheldon Leonard are executive producers of the comedy series Good Morning World, a show which Carl says he would rather not talk about at this time.
"Did you know that in England the BBC has a situation comedy series about a bigot?" asks Carl. "That's the kind of thing I mean when I mention honesty."
The series Carl refers to is called "Till Death Us Do Part" in which a liberal long-haired son-in-law of the Garnetts fights constantly with Alf Garnett (the father) over such subjects as premarital sex and the race problem. It has kicked up quite a bit of pro and con reaction among British viewers and critics.
Meanwhile, as Carl points out, our situation comedies are mostly hewed from the old boy-meets-girl formula of early Hollywood, and the situations resulting are just as tired and impossible.
"The best shows we did on the Van Dyke series," says Carl, "were those I got by asking myself, 'What's happened to me lately?' or getting the writers to ask themselves the same thing. One of our writers stuck his toe in the bathtub faucet and got it caught there. The plumber had to be called. It was a wild thing and turned into one of the best shows ever done in the series.
Carl's inspiration for the Van Dyke show came from his own years of working with Sid Caesar on the old "Show of Shows." He says the writers on that hour series had so much fun that it was a pleasure to get up and go to work every morning, so Carl decided to do a series about comedy writers, although most of his colleagues thought he was nuts.
Carl might even be the one who winds up with another inspiration for that half-hour comedy mentioned here earlier which would set off the trend toward the "short form."

“I’ll certainly be doing something for TV again. It’s the biggest force in the entertainment business, so one doesn’t decide not to do TV.”
At present Carl is busy preparing a movie called "Baggy Pants," which is about an old-time comic, and Dick Van Dyke will play the role. Next month (Feb. 11) Carl hosts an NBC-TV special, The Fabulous Funnies, a tribute to the comic strips.
"In one part I sing the Little Orphan Annie song. I used to love Orphan Annie in the funnies, but I didn't know then,” says Carl, laughing, “that she was a fascist.”

What else did Reiner do? So much. We haven’t even talked about his “2000 Year Old Man” routines with Mel Brooks. Or “The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming” and his other films. There were minor accomplishments, such as his voice work on Linus, the Lion Hearted, his appearances with (and scripts for) Dinah Shore in the late ‘50s. His game show work as a panelist (The Name’s the Same) and a host (Celebrity Game). His surprise turn as Gepetto in a TV adaptation of “Pinocchio.” Oh, and he wrote books, too.

Then there were all those Emmys. Reiner was a big winner. And so were we, thanks to what he created for our entertainment.