Tralfaz Wednesday Theatre: Santa and the Fairy Snow Queen

Some Christmas specials are television evergreens—A Charlie Brown Christmas, Alastair Sim’s version of A Christmas Carol, that one about the kid getting his eye shot out. Doubtless you can name others you annually look forward to once a year.

Then there are others that don’t quite make it.

One was produced a man known for screechy and preachy 1950s films about a world filled with child molesters, addicted teenagers, mangled bodies caused by car crashes, and general mayhem and violence.

Sid Davis was John Wayne’s stand-in. He hit up the Duke for $1,000 to film the beware-of-perverted-strangers opus The Dangerous Stranger, designed to be shown in schools and by civic groups. It was available for purchase in January 1950. The money rolled in and Davis made a nice career feeding on the paranoid side of the decade.

But before he got in the strident mental hygiene film business, he produced a Christmas film. It looks like Wayne financed this one, too. In true Sid Davis fashion, it is bizarre.

Santa and the Fairy Snow Queen was written and choreographed by Robert Niel Porter, a Springfield, Missouri native who was a 1942 graduate of Santa Cruz High School, where he starred in the play “The Ghost Flies South.” After serving in the navy in the South Pacific in World War Two, he established a children’s theatre, producing his own plays, and had written and directed 40 children’s shows on television in Los Angeles¹. Porter and a former chorus boy and singer named Jack Perry collaborated on musicals and other shows for a number of years. He also appeared in several feature films, and perhaps it is there he met up with Davis. Porter appeared in Queen as a toy soldier, billed as “Bob Porter.” He died Aug. 28, 2005².

Porter copyrighted Santa and the Fairy Snow Queen as a one-act play on January 7, 1949, which had been performed at the Assistance League Playhouse in Los Angeles the previous December 21st. The film version was made that year as there was a showing at the Budlong Avenue P-TA on December 15, 1949³, though it wasn’t copyrighted until 1951. That year, Queen was picked up a number of television stations for Christmas-time broadcast, including WENR-TV in Chicago, WATV in Newark, WTAR in Norfolk, Va. and WBRC-TV in Birmingham.

The film was distributed by Encyclopaedia Britannica Films which eventually made it part of a four-programme package for television distribution; in 1956, it was through Trans-Lux Television⁴, the same people who brought you the made-for-TV Felix the Cat cartoons. Queen was a minor success. At least 35 stations bought the package⁵; WVET in Rochester purchased the colour negative for a three-year period⁶.

The question is “why”? Maybe the answer was “desperation.” Even Felix’s magic bag of tricks wouldn’t be able to turn this from being a steaming pile of “what the....” The show opens with a “brownie” named Snoopy who twirls and swirls for no particular reason, talks down to the viewers and continually whinnies like a horse (it’s supposed to be laughter).

The embarrassing performance comes from stage and TV actress Rocky Stanton, who grew up in Phoenix as Rochelle Costanten. In early 1950, she went from a brownie to a pixie as she was hired as “Miss Pixie” for KECA-TV’s “Sleepy Joe” show⁷ and played Gleeper on the “Mr. Do Good” (formerly “Santa’s Workshop”) children’s show, originally on KTSL⁸. She later, as Rocky Rau, became resident director of the Ana-Modjeska Players in Anaheim and passed away on April 10, 2003 at age 78.

Santa is played by Edmund Penny, a USC grad and World War Two vet who appeared on Dr. Christian on radio, and wrote and produced plays. The other title role, with some kind of off-and-on accent, is enacted by Margot Von Leu, about whom I can find nothing and my guess is her last name is a contraction. And Audrey Washburn (baby doll) was a dancer and the older sister of actress Beverly Washburn, who appeared with Jack Benny on radio and TV and is still with us today.

Anyway, enough of the background. See how much of this you can take. I can’t get past the first few minutes. I recommend you watch Davis’ Keep off the Grass or The Bottle and the Throttle for its pro-police messages. The Duke would be proud.

---

1 Santa Cruz Sentinel, Oct. 27, 1973, pg. 25^↩
2 Los Angeles Times, Aug. 31, 2005, pg. B11^↩
3 The Southwest Wave, Los Angeles, Dec. 15, 1949, pg. 33^↩
4 The Billboard, Nov. 10, 1956, pg. 9^↩
5 Broadcasting, Dec. 25, 1956, ph. 48^↩
6 Variety, Dec. 5, 1956, pg. 54^↩
7 Los Angeles Evening Citizen, Jan. 23, 1950, pg. 18^↩
8 Los Angeles Mirror, July 28, 1949, pg. 35^↩

Twirling Edible Leg

Woody Woodpecker pretends to be Santa (70 days before Christmas, according to the calendar) in an attempt to chow down on the food at Wally Walrus’ ski lodge in Ski For Two (1944).

In one scene, Woody gets ready to munch on a turkey leg. The frames tell the story. I like how the leg becomes a swirl of lines.



What I don’t like is the horrendous DNR in DVD set of Woody cartoons put out some years ago. It’s great to have them available, but there’s no excuse for the frame below.



Santa needed to give someone some video restoration lessons for Christmas.

Don Williams and Grim Natwick are the credited animators for director Shamus Culhane.

Hair Raising Gnome

Here’s a cute gag from Disney’s Santa’s Workshop (1932), where gnomes stand at Ford-like assembly lines and do their little job to put together toys for kids.

One of them frightens a little girl doll with a spider to enable her to get curly hair.



The scene was animated by Ben Sharpsteen. We can thank The Journal of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers for that. The April 1933 included the photos below as part of an article on how cartoons were made.



The article was written by Bill Garity, who was picked up from the Disney discard pile by Walter Lantz. You can read it at archive.org.

Tralfaz Sunday Theatre: King Calico

There was a time when puppet shows were big on TV. They didn’t have to be sophisticated in the early days—not much programming was—they just had to connect with children.

One of the many puppet shows was one from Chicago called “King Calico.” It was developed in the early 1950s by Johnny Coons, who moved to California toward the end of the decade and voiced cartoons for ex-Chicagoan Sam Singer and ex-Chicagoan Hank Saperstein's version of UPA. In fact, the king sounds suspiciously like Salty the Parrot in the Singer version of the Sinbad cartoons.

The show debuted on December 24, 1951 from 5:45 to 6 p.m. on WENR-TV, replacing “Uncle Mistletoe,” another Coons programme. It aired Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, unsponsored.

Variety reviewed it January 9, 1952.

“King Calico” is a pleasant little puppet offering, that should find an okay receptions from the kiddies. The tri-weekly show also should garner approval from parents, because of its soft treatment and playdown of slambang violence that marks so many other moppet-angled stanzas.
Story line evolves around the activities of King Calico and his court, which includes a rag dog, raccoon, donkey and mouse. With puppeteers Warren Best and Angelo Antonucci working in tandem there was plenty of action on show seen (2), as there were as many as four characters on the stage at once.
The voices are all handled by Johnny Coons, it’s a large job, but he carried it off expertly. Thanks to his adept projection, each mitten character is invested with a distinct personality. Session is introed by Doris Larson in neat fashion.
Show is backgrounded by some highly attractive sets designed by Bill Newton. Good “mood” music is supplied by Adele Scott at the electric organ.

Ed Skotch was the director and Ray Chan wrote the series at the outset.

By February 20th, Variety reported it was winning the ratings wars. But it was an expensive show to produce and the station was ready to cancel it when it picked up a sponsor for two of the three weekly shows, starting April 2nd (Variety, March 29. 1952). By August, it had moved to WNBQ, Monday through Friday, was being filmed in Ft. Wayne, Indiana, and made available to NBC’s Midwest network. After filming 65 episodes, “King Calico” ended its first run and showed up in syndication.

There’s no date for the episode below.

A Brief Profile of Rochester and Eddie Anderson

There’s an episode of the Jack Benny radio show that opens with Rochester engaging in one of his duties—making breakfast for the boss. The problem is Rochester has eaten all the ham, eggs, bacon and waffles. His solution—pour milk over some beets and if Mr. Benny isn’t wearing his glasses, he’ll think it’s strawberries and cream.

The ruse is a success, to the delight of the studio audience (though the boss decides to skip breakfast).

Eddie Anderson’s character worked so well because he was supposedly put upon, but he always got the better of his employer. He smoked his cigars, read his diary, had parties where friends drank his booze, and could see through his BS about his age, romantic prowess and musical abilities. Listeners and viewers could identify with that, they like to think they’re superior to their boss.

There was more to it than that, as time progressed. Like the audience, Rochester liked his boss and occasionally would work in concert with him to pull off something. When television rolled around, you could see there was a friendship between the two.

Rochester was a little different than the other main characters. The very nature of the show meant it had to have a bandleader. It had to have an announcer. It had to have a vocalist. But it didn’t need to have an off-stage butler. But, as you can read in this light TV Guide profile from the edition covering the week of August 25, 1955, audiences wanted the Rochester character, so Benny found a place for one (though I’m personally sceptical Hilliard Marks played a role in it). Photos come from the article.

Jack Benny’s Man ‘Rochester’
He’s a Gravel-Voiced Comedian Who Rarely Uses His Real Name
On the Monday before five Negro actors assembled at in Hollywood to audition for a part as a Pullman porter in a Jack Benny radio broadcast. The script called for Benny, en route from New York to Los Angeles, to fret about the time the train would reach Albuquerque, N. M. For answering his fussy inquiries with the information that there was not, and never had been, an Albuquerque, the porter was to receive $50, the standard fee for reading a few jokes on one show.
Of the five aspirants, one or two actually had worked on Pullmans, and four had portrayed porters. The part, however, fell to the fifth man, a stocky, gravel-voiced 31-year-old singer and dancer named Eddie Anderson, whose only connection with trains was that occasionally—while touring in musical reviews—he overslept and missed one.
Anderson’s grunting of “Albuquerque! There you go again!” every time Benny stopped him in the aisle, drew such enthusiastic fan mail that he was brought into a later script as the waiter in a Western barroom, serving a tourist named Benny.
But Jack could not go on riding trains and dining out forever, so the writing staff (including Hilliard Marks, now associate producer of the Benny TV show) hit upon the device of moving Anderson into the Benny household. As Rochester Van Jones, a name concocted by Marks, Anderson became valet to the world-famous “miser.”
Until then, the chief feather in his cap had been the role of Noah in Warners’ 1935 version of “The Green Pastures”—“just a doll of a part,” he recalls. But “Rochester” was to turn him into an American institution.
Just how well-known Eddie has become in the past 18 years is attested by the fact that no one uses his real name. To waiters at the Hollywood Brown Derby, he is “Mr. Rochester.” When he signs an autograph, it is with a flowing “Rochester.” On the Queen Elizabeth, en route to the London Palladium with the rest of the Benny troupe four years ago, titled Englishmen vied for the privilege of getting into snapshots with “Mr. Rochester —Jack Benny’s man, y’know.” And a few months ago, in San Francisco, Anderson was approached on the street by an Oriental citizen who peered at him and asked respectfully: “Mr. Lochester?”
Anderson is in the unique and contradictory position of being a domestic servant who makes upwards of $75,000 a year, a set of circumstances he sometimes appreciates most expansively. His wardrobe for that trip abroad in 1951, according to a member of the Benny company, was a sartorial delight—a change of costume for every event in the voyager’s day. Eddie says he spent $25,000 on a custom-built sports car with which he once won a gold cup in a Chicago auto show. And, until two years ago, when his wife fell ill, he indulged a number of spectacular hobbies—a scale-model railroad in the basement of his four-bedroom-and-swimming- pool home in Los Angeles; a 36-foot cabin cruiser on which he made 500- mile fishing trips to Mexico; a private stable of nine horses which he raced at every track in the country until he sold them a few years ago.
One, Burnt Cork, ran in the 1943 Kentucky Derby, finishing last, a defeat soon avenged by another, False Clue, bought from Alfred Vanderbilt. One fine day at Del Mar, False Clue paid $239.40 for $2, a triumph that landed his owner in hot water with theatrical cronies. “I didn’t know the horse was running,” he says, “and when I walked in backstage, everybody like to cut me dead, because I didn’t tell them.”
One of four children, Anderson hawked newspapers and firewood on the streets of Oakland and San Francisco until, at 13, Fanchon and Marco discovered him singing for pennies in a hotel lobby. They put him in a vaudeville unit, but he toiled in many an obscure theatrical vineyard for the next 18 years. One road company he joined in 1924 had to pawn its scenery to meet a payroll of $1 a night for everybody, including the star.
Today Eddie shares his expansive Georgian house with his adopted son, Billy Anderson, and Billy’s wife and baby daughter. The late Mrs. Anderson’s son by a former marriage, Bill held the world’s record for high and low hurdles before he became a professional end for the Chicago Bears.
Since his wife’s death, Eddie has dropped the staff of servants he once maintained, as well as such one-time business interests as a share in a parachute factory. “With Mamie gone I’m sort of at loose ends,” he says. “About the only thing I’m interested in is producing a Western movie with a Negro cast. I’ve got a script about a colored marshal who really existed. This isn’t Gary-Cooper Western. It’s history.”

Anderson spoke for a number of years about producing but it doesn’t appear anything came about. He was still talking about it in an interview with the Copley News Service a year before he died at the Motion Picture Home in 1977, age 71, a little over two years after Benny’s death.

Mickey's Going to Sing

Walt Disney and his musical director Carl Stalling seem to have mastered sound on film pretty quickly. Steamboat Willie (1928) is still a fun movie to watch, but the “sound” part is pretty much restricted to coordinating music with the action on screen.

Disney realised it couldn’t stop there, especially since Paramount was pushing Max Fleischer’s Screen Songs in early 1929. So it was Mickey sang, too.

This story in the Los Angeles Times of August 29, 1929 not only talks about Mickey Mouse’s singing debut (in Mickey’s Follies) but what other studios were doing about sound.

Oddly, the article mentions two East Coast studios but only lists one (the Fables studio run by Paul Terry). We’ve mentioned the Fleischers already. There’s nothing about the Krazy Kat shorts being made by Winkler/Mintz. Felix would return to the screen later that year, thanks to a contract with Copley Pictures, with sound that seems more an afterthought than anything else. Pat Sullivan’s opposition to spending money on sound (shared by Terry) resulted in Educational Pictures ending its relationship with him. That may have cost Felix his career on screen as Mickey became animation’s golden boy, er, mouse.

TALKIE IDEA STRIKES ANIMATED CARTOONS AND FILM ANTICS TURN VOCAL
BY MURIAL BABCOCK
When animated cartoons must go vocal the drawing masters must work overtime.
The theme song and business of letting the shadows about seems to have passed to the studios of the motion comic strips.
“Mickey Mouse,” a favored character of these thing-a-ma-jig films, is going to sing in his next screen effort.
Perhaps Mickey’s voice will ring out clear and true for the total time space of one minute. Walt Disney, Mickey’s fond creator, conveys the astounding piece of information that 700 drawings will be required to reveal the contraction and expansions of Mickey’s throat in the simple act of getting the song out of his system.
These muscular movements of the throat and body must occur in such a fashion that they synchronize perfectly with the notes and words of the theme song, projected, of course, by a human voice double.
Just a matter of rhythmics and mathematics, explains Mr. Disney glibly. In fact, “you write the music to fit the drawings and the drawings to fit the music.”
Animated cartoons, as it may or may not be known, are simply a series of black and white sketches one sketch to each different posture or movement of the stiff-legged characters. A cartoon runs from five to six minutes. It may contain five to six thousand drawings, projected as such a speed that the whole seems a piece of continued action as if from humans.
COMPLICATES BUSINESS

The business of adding vocal histrionics to the film antics of Mickey and his confreres, Oswald the rabbit, and the farmer and the cat of Aesop’s Fables series complicated considerably animated cartoon construction.
Perhaps that is one reason why at present there are in existence only four cartoon studios, two on the west and two on the east coast.
The two local production units are the independent Walt Disney studio, found in a small one-story friendly appearing stucco building at 2719 Hyperion avenue, and the Walter Lantz studio at Universal Picture Corporation. Aesop’s Fables are produced in the East and released by Pathe.
Disney not only turns out the Mickey Mouse films, but recently launched what he terms his “Silly Symphony” series. The first of the latter, named “The Skeleton Dance,” was recently shown at the Carthay Circle Theater and proved a sensational success, taking about as much applause on the occasion of the premiere as the feature itself. The film depicted grotesque skeleton characters dancing weirdly to music of a symphonic—at times—nature.
His studio, small though as it is, employs eight artists, a musician and various technical assistants. Disney himself studied cartooning at the Academy of Fine Arts in Chicago, went almost directly into picture work, and has maintained his present studio about six years.
VETERAN OF CARTOONS
Walter Lantz at Universal, now turning out the “Oswald, the Rabbit” series, is a veteran of the animated cartoon production. From him was gleaned the information that the first motion picture drawings were produced by J.R. Bray in 1914, and had to do with the antics of “Col. Heeza Liar.” About the same time Windsor McKay [sic] made a series about a so-called prehistoric dinosaur animal called “Gertie.”
Lantz was responsible for the first combination cartoons, that of a human appearing on the screen with the black and white figures.
He did much work at one time on the “Heeza Liar” series, originated a “Dinky Doodle” group, in which nursery rhymes were parodied, and sketched what was known as the “Un-natural History” series. Among these were such classic short fun films as “How the Elephant Got His Trunk,” “The Leopard’s Spots,” “The Cat’s Whiskers” and others.
Most of these have long since folded their wings and passed into oblivion as have more recent efforts, such as “Out of the Inkwell,” from the pen of Max Fleischer, and “Felix the Cat,” as well as a number of films based on newspaper comic strips.
The advent of talking pictures and the subsequent necessity for vocalizing the inanimate figures is blamed for the passing of the once popular strips.

This minor milestone didn’t impress the Motion Picture News. “Strictly speaking, it is not as good as some of its predecessors, but it certainly contains plenty of laughs,” critic Raymond Ganly opined in the Sept. 14, 1929 issue. “One of the weak spots in the film is the injection of a theme song sung by Mickey Mouse; it seems rather flat.” Ganly did like the scene where cats crash through an outhouse roof “and a pig runs out with his pants down. Can you imagine? Movie audiences relish this sort of screen fun.”



Indeed, they did love Mickey in 1929. News reported on Nov. 23, 1929:

Cartoons Held For Long Runs
Hollywood. — Disney Cartoons are on the programs of four Fox West Coast Theatre extended runs locally at the present time. "Mickey's Follies" has been at the Carthay Circle for nine weeks with "They Had To See Paris"; “Springtime," a Silly Symphony cartoon, is at Grauman's Chinese with "Sunnyside Up"; "Jungle Rythm" [sic] is on the supporting bill with "Flight,” at the Fox Palace; and "Jazz Fool" is current at the Criterion with "Dynamite."

The mouse’s sudden popularity spurred the animation business. Warner Bros. was convinced to ink a deal with Hugh Harman and Rudy Ising for a series of Looney Tunes (after something happened to an earlier deal with John McCrory for Buster Bear cartoons). Ub Iwerks was convinced to ink a deal with producer Pat Powers to make Flip the Frog cartoons for MGM. Paul Terry set up his own operation after being fired from what was soon renamed the Van Beuren studio. Charlie Mintz consolidated operations by moving his Krazy Kat studio to the West Coast, and signed with RKO to produce the Toby the Pup series. And there was the abortive effort by Romer Grey to bring Binko the Cub to audiences. All of this was in 1930.

But Disney wasn’t going to rest. Colour and then features were on the horizon. He would continue to be the industry leader.

Now, Our Tea Time Movie

Love spot gag cartoons? Love stereotypes? Love bad puns?

You’ll get your fill of all that in the Columbia/Screen Gems short Wacky Wigwams (1942). “Look! It’s a scalper!” shouts the narrator (Frank Graham must have been off that week) as a typical Indian brave performs a typical dance, then jumps to the camera. “Say, doc,” he asks the theatre audience, “wanna buy a couple of seats on the 50-yard line?”

Some of the other gags are even more obvious.

There’s a bit of animation I quite like. It’s on twos and a little hard to see in this fuzzy dub. “I wonder what concoction this old witch doctor is brewing,” says the narrator, as a native raises, lowers and twists his gnarled fingers. The fingers are even in perspective, though you can’t tell here, as they come closer to the camera. Excellent work.



“Ugh, ugh. What-um you cook-um, chief?” asks the narrator (speaking the language of the Hollywood tribe). After a pause, the medicine man lifts his head, and responds “Spot of tea, old thing?” The head remind me of something you might have found in a ‘40s Disney cartoon, not surprising since many of the Columbia artists in 1942 had left Uncle Walt after the strike. I particularly like the half-closed eye.



Yes, the “Cherokee strip” gag you see on the poster to the right appears (rotoscoped maiden), there’s the old reference to Mischa Auer’s “confidentially, it stinks” line in the Frank Capra feature You Can’t Take It with You, with Dave Barry providing the voice, and an alligator that sounds like Rochester (I guess that’s Barry, too).

The original credits listed Alec Geiss as the director and Volus Jones as the animator, with music by Paul Worth. Showman’s Trade Review of Dec. 6, 1941 reports the short was written by Frank Tashlin. This got re-released several times as a Columbia Favorite, including as late as September 1963, according to a print ad for the Chilliwack Drive-In (the feature was The Kettles on Old MacDonald’s Farm). I used to go there as a boy but, somehow, I don’t recall Wacky Wigwams.

What's in the Bag, Dad?

Half-Pint Pygmy (1948) contains all kinds of impossible characters, such as a camel with a head at either end of its body, or a giraffe with two bodies and no heads.

Almost the entire cartoon is a chase, with George and Junior (they are bears in this one) racing after a teeny black African native. In one sequence, the pygmy jumps into a handbag. Director Tex Avery pulls back the camera to reveal that handbag is part of a living alligator.



Junior grabs the “bag” and takes it back to George. The alligator is not happy.



Junior tells George the pygmy is in the bag. George starts pulling stuff out of the bag to get him. You can see where the gag is below.



How can an alligator have its head in its own body? Don’t bother asking.



Tex now cuts to the next gag.

The cartoon ends with George and Junior killing themselves. That also killed their cartoon careers. This was their last MGM short.

Heck Allen helped with gags. The animators were Grant Simmons, Walt Clinton, Louie Schmitt and Bill Shull.

The Man of Television Firsts, Dennis James

You only needed one hand to count the number of television stars there were 80 years ago. That’s because in 1942, only one station was airing regular live programming—W2XWV in New York, your friendly Du Mont station.

Remarkably, one of those stars was familiar to TV viewers for many years, hosting game shows, emceeing telethons and hawking Kellogg’s Corn Flakes.

He was Dennis James, one of the smoothest, most casual people ever on the small screen. He made hosting look effortless.

A lot of “firsts” have been attributed to James, though it seems some articles expanded the number a bit over time. Research using contemporary reports reprinted on our “Old TV History” blog shows James was the first person on TV with a regular sports show. And he was the host of the first real variety show on the tube, something called Television Roof ¹. This was all back in the war years, not before, when you could legitimately call him Du Mont’s first big star (certainly one who didn’t come over from NBC like Sam Cuff or Doug Allan). When he returned from service, he was the host of the game show, “Cash and Carry,” arguably a first (John Reed King might claim that title, too).

Stories in the early ‘50s claimed James started in television on W2XWV in 1938. That was impossible. The station didn’t exist then. It was granted a construction permit by the FCC on April 13, 1940.² The station made a frantically put-together debut on July 1, 1941³, with test programmes in the evening once or twice a week⁴, though it considered its debut of regular programming to be June 28, 1942.⁵

James’ radio career began at WAAT in Jersey City in 1938. In May 1940 he moved to WNEW in New York.⁶ Meanwhile, the 1940 Census reports his brother Lou, who later directed a number of his series, gave as his occupation an insurance inspector. Dennis jumped from WNEW to television (in 1941, according to Michael Ritchie’s book Please Stand By), went to war, and became an even bigger star when he returned.

The Daily News profiled him in its TV page on November 1, 1953. By then, he had spread his career outside of soon-to-be-dead Du Mont.

Dennis James Is 4-Network Man
By JERRY FRANKEN
QUITE possibly the only performer in TV who appears every week on each of the four networks is an ex-sportscaster gone legit, by name Dennis James. Right now Dennis is doing 13 shows a week, all of which put him in the 90% income tax bracket—not bad for the son of an Italian laborer.
Dennis's chores include "Chance of a Lifetime" on DuMont; "Turn to a Friend," an afternoon, daily ABC-TV series and the Old Gold cigaret commercials for Fred Allen (NBC-TV) and Herb Shriner (CBS-TV). As you can see, Dennis gets around and just in case you’re wondering, he smokes cigarets and believe you me, they're O.G.'s.
Despite all these activities, though, chances are Dennis is best remembered for his announcing accomplishments at wrestling matches. It was through these that he became well known to TV viewers. The wrestling routine started a few years back on DuMont when, out of a clear sky and without any previous experience, Dennis was assigned to cover the sweaty pachyderms.
Well, Dennis didn't know a half-nelson from a potato masher, so he bought a wrestling book by Frank Gotch, a one-time champion, and went to work. For a while he did a straight grip-by-grip description but after a while he started kidding the matches and the wrestlers.
During a seemingly painful grip he'd provide a sound effect that sounded like the cracking of a gigantic peanut shell, or else do his commentary in doggerel or bawl the daylights out of one of the wrestlers for foul tactics.
Rhyming Comment Enchanted Fans
Before long, Dennis' techniques caught on big. People tuned in just to hear him kid the grunt-and groan exhibitions, and to catch his home-made verse, which frequently told viewers what to expect. Once, for example, after two wrestlers had "thrown" each other out of the ring. Dennis rhymed:
"In the ring they'll soon be back
"And then two heads you'll hear crack.
Sure enough, after the two men hauled themselves back into opposite ring corners (with much groaning and feigning of agony) they lowered their heads, bull-fashion, pawed the resin, bellowed and tore towards each other, heads foremost. After the collision both were counted out and the wrestling fans ordained Dennis as a soothsayer. He himself took a less serious viewpoint. "After a while, you just got to know what the next move was going to be," he explains, "so it gave you chance to ad lib about it."
One ad lib proved dangerous though. Happened when a "villain” (wrestlers are generally grouped as "heroes" and "villains") named Tarzan Hewitt objected to a rhyme Dennis made up about him. Hewitt has more than his share of bay-window and when during a match Dennis observed, "Look at the suet on Mister Hewitt,” Tarzan stalked over and threatened Dennis with every hold he knew.
Dennis thought he was kidding until Hewitt grabbed him later on in his dressing room, put hammerlock on him and said, applying the pressure none too gently, "Next time you mention suet, I’ll break the arm."
Hewitt wasn't the only wrestler who objected to being ribbed. Another, a hulk named George Lenihan, once lumbered cut of the ring, walked over to Dennis, lifted him up bodily, held him up in the air, grunting the while, and thee tossed him into the audience, five or six rows back. The TV cameras got all the action.
About the only background Dennis James ever had for his career as an m.c. and announcer was his ability to talk, first demonstrated in a Jersey City, N. J., high school and later at St. Peter's College. He was a champion debater and an outstanding student in elocution. Even today, at the drop of a diploma, he’ll recite the long, sad narrative poem called "Over the Hill to the Poorhouse." His recitation of that tear jerker won him a prize in high school.
In those days Dennis used his real name, which is Demi James Sposa. He dropped the Demi because his friends insisted on changing it to Dummy just about the same time he decided to forego a medical career for radio. He got job as an announcer on a Jersey City station and broke into the big time, on WNEW, New York, after he’d fluffed a commercial.
Instead of saying "I want to talk to you," Dennis said, "I want to chalk to you" and immediately covered it up by ad libbing his entire commercial around the word “chalk." His feat so impressed Bernice Judis, the head of WNEW (she helped launch the careers of Dinah Shore and Frank Sinatra, among others), that she hired him for her own staff.
Dennis got into TV through his brother Lou, who now directs Dennis's own shows. Lou worked for DuMont when it was operating W2XWV, the forerunner of WABD, the present DuMont station in New York. Dennis did every kind of show, from sports to vaudeville and eventually joined the DuMont staff.
Dennis's most hair-raising wrestling experience was provided by Gino Garibaldi, who is known for his spectacular dives in and out of the ring. He casually informed Dennis, one night, that he was going to dive into him and then, equally casually, added, “Don’t worry, though, Dennis . . . my skin is like velvet."
Sure enough, that night Gino took his dive toward Dennis and while he barely grazed Dennis's chest, he knocked Dennis to the floor, splintered his chair into smithereens and terrified everyone sitting near by. Then, to show that there were no hard feelings, Gino commented as he sauntered back toward the ring, "See, Dennis, didn't I tell you my skin was like velvet?" Dennis, still busy pulling himself together, barely managed to nod confirmation.

James continued to keep busy into the ‘70s, and landed a plumb job—host of The New Price is Right. If he had been picked for the CBS version he likely would have achieved legendary status as the show rolled on and on, year after year. Instead, it went to Bob Barker. James simultaneously hosted a syndicated nighttime version for a number of years. James was unflappable and kept each show moving nicely. He showed a sense of humour and affability. The Los Angeles Times profiled him in its issue of September 21, 1972.

DENNIS JAMES’ CAREER
Star in a Crowded Arena
BY DON PAGE
Times Staff Writer
In the crowded game show field, Dennis James leads in gamesmanship. At one juncture in his 32-year television career (which includes early experimental programs), he starred in 13 nationally televised shows every week—a variety of games such as High Finance, Chance of a Lifetime, Stop the Music, Can You Top This, Name's the Same, Two for the Money and First Impressions. About the only thing he didn't appear on was the sermonette.
Dennis James also is one those charismatic commercial announcers with whom you identify certain products. When you think of Kellogg's breakfast cereal, you immediately picture James giving the casual pitch and ending it with his "OK?-OK!" tag line.
And he was closely identified with a leading cigaret for years, an account worth an annual salary of $350,000, which he unflinchingly gave up (along with smoking) when the surgeon general’s report was made public. In the commercial he was supposed to say, "We're tobacco men, not medicine men." "I couldn't do it with a conscience," he says.
After a long lucrative career in the game-emcee arena, Dennis James suddenly found himself phased out along with a number of his veteran colleagues. In recent times he's been doing a lot of independent, spot commercials and playing golf almost daily. The golf alleviated the boredom somewhat, but did not diminish the nervous drive to get back on the network in his familiar role.
"The networks were looking for hosts under 30," James said, sipping a drink at Lakeside Golf Club. "They'd say, 'Yes, you're perfect for the job, but we need a new face.' The trouble was, these young announcers had no place to be schooled and they gradually fizzled out."
Series Revivals
Goodson-Todman Productions this season revived one, of the most prosperous of all network game shows, giving it the new title The New Price Is Right and bringing back sort of a new, slimmed down and remarkably younger-looking Dennis James ("diet, diet and plenty of golf and sunshine").
Why the revival of these old series (I've Got a Secret is back, too)?
"Because they were great shows to begin with," Dennis said. "And with the prime-time access rule, sponsors and networks want to go with the tried and true." (James hosts the syndicated nighttime version of The New Price Is Right on Mondays at 7:30 over Channel 4, while Bob Barker emcees the daytime counterpart on CBS.)
In The New Price Is Right, he explains, the prizes are bigger and better—boats, cars and trips around the world.
Dennis James, one of TV's most identifiable personalities for more than 20 years, had to experience an incredible identity crisis before his face first showed up on kinescopes.
Born Demie J. Sposa in Jersey City, he was told to change his name when he first appeared on variety shows in the late 30s. "It sounds too Italian," he was told by one producer. "Frank Sinatra was working with me at the time," Dennis said, "but he was a star and no one asked him to change his name."
Name Mixup
James complied and upon securing his birth certificate, learned that through a mixup he was officially registered as "Theresa Sposa" (his mother's name). "That wasn't the worst of it. The certificate listed the doctor as Demie J. Sposa, MD. (Over at Lakeside, "Theresa" Sposa hits the ball 230 yards.)
As Dennis James, he bounced colorfully onto the small screen during the birth of the 50s as a sportscaster doing wrestling out of New York's musty Sunnyside Gardens. He described the melodramatic acts of early TV favorites such as Gino Garabaldi, Gorgeous George, Gene (Mr. America) Standlee and Sandor Szabo. He shaded his approach toward the female audience ("they controlled the one-TV set homes in those days") and introduced his Damon Runyon-ish ringside characters to the parlor fans, such as, "Hatpin" Mary (she stuck the wrestlers where it hurt) and "Heckleberry" Finn.
Boxing Announcer
By the mid-50s, James was the announcer for the Wednesday night fights when boxing dominated the ratings as America's most popular prime-time sport event. He still appealed to the female viewer, believing that explaining the obvious in a sports event was an "insult to the male viewer." Whenever he was pressed into the intricacies of sports parlance, he would direct his commentary to "Mother." This phrase led to another of his network game series, OK, Mother. When you're hot, you're hot.
It is interesting to note that two of Dennis James' simple ad libs ("OK" and "Mother") netted him a half-million dollars in network salary.
Before 1960, James had been named sports announcer of the year three times and personality of the year on four occasions.
"I've never been off the air in some capacity a week since 1938,” he said. "I've saved my money and could retire comfortably right now, but I'm too much of a ham and my golf game isn't what it used to be."
Through the years Dennis James always seems to be on top of the game.

On one episode of Chance of a Lifetime in the mid-‘50s, during the public service message at the end, James shouted the single word “cancer” at the camera, and simply urged viewers to send in a donation to fight it. James died of cancer at age 79 in 1997.

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1 The Billboard, July 24, 1942^↩
2 Broadcasting, July 7, 1941, pg. 10^↩
3 Broadcasting, Jan. 19, 1942, pg. 39^↩
4 Daily News, July 21, 1936^↩
5 The Daily Home News, June 27, 1943, pg. 7^↩
6 Broadcasting, May 15, 1940, pg. 52^↩