Most of the 1940s radio programs that I enjoyed were the melodramas for adolescents and adults. The Lone Ranger. Green Hornet. The Shadow. Sky King. The Whistler. Sgt. Preston of the Yukon. Many were programs that my father liked, too. The only children’s program with funny animals that I listened to regularly was The Buster Brown Show with Smilin’ Ed McConnell’s Gang, notably Midnight the Cat, Squeaky the Mouse, and Froggy (“Plunk your magic twanger, Froggy!”) the Gremlin. On the whole, I did not like the children’s programs because they felt patronizing and they were not very dramatic.
I am bemused today to see that practically all of the “old-time radio show” information is about Andy Devine, not Smilin’ Ed McConnell. Devine must have come along after I stopped listening to the program.
When my family got its TV set in 1950, all of us watched the handpuppet Time for Beany religiously, with Cecil, the sea-sick sea serpent. Of course, so did the rest of America. Including Albert Einstein, reportedly.
I was never much into children’s records or, come to think of it, many things made for children. I already mentioned reading my father’s Philo Vance mysteries and my mother’s Perry Mason mysteries before I entered elementary school. The Nero Wolfe and Charlie Chan mysteries were also favorites. (I cracked up when I later learned, while in college, that an early talkie movie was made of The Black Camel, with the handsome, clean-cut all-American youth played by Bela Lugosi.) I made do with whatever was around our house. I wore out many of my parents’ records of classical music. Liszt’s 2nd Hungarian Rhapsody was a favorite. One of my parents (I don’t know which) had a book script of the 1931 Broadway satirical musical by George & Ira Gershwin about late 1920/early ‘30s politics, Of Thee I Sing, and when I was five or six I would march around our house chanting, “Wintergreen for President!” and “He’s the man the people choose; Loves the Irish and the Jews!” In my teens I did buy a Disney children’s record of “Never Smile at a Crocodile” because I learned that it was a song that had been cut from “Peter Pan”.
Now that you mention it, I can’t find out anything online about the 1910s Three Billy Goats Gruff books, either. Maybe I’ve misremembered and it was a single children’s book of the Norwegian folk tale rather than a new series. I’ll look into this.
ACG’s Hi-Jinx, yes! “Teen-Age Animal Funnies”. The Hepcats with Tommy Katt and his main squeeze, Kitty, Heppity Hopper, their grumpy high-school teacher Professor Weirdbeard (a goat), and more. Dan Gordon’s art; he was another moonlighting 1940s animator, from the Fleischer/Famous studio. That’s one that I missed as a child; I picked up most of the seven issues at the early San Diego Comic-Cons while they were still cheap.
You will love “Rabbit Hill”. I have to check at the library’s website and find out if Robert Lawson’s books are still as popular as they were in the 1950s.
I think that most, if not all, of the Crusader Rabbit merchandise was based on the 1959-61 color TV cartoons by Shull Bonsall, not the 1948-51 black-&-white cartoons by Alex Anderson & Jay Ward. By then I was in college and no longer watching children’s TV. In 1982 I wrote a two-part article on Crusader Rabbit for Comics Scene: “2 ½ Carrots Tall; TV’s First Animated Cartoon Star”. (Comic Scene #6, November 1982, and #7, January 1983.) This gave me an opportunity to interview almost everyone who had worked on both series. (Not Jay Ward himself; he declined to be interviewed.) Boy, everybody HATED Shull Bonsall (or refused to discuss him at all), and he didn’t have much good to say about them, either. He had retired from the entertainment/animation business and was the foreman on a ranch in Chatsworth when I tracked him down.
Most of the 1940s radio programs that I enjoyed were the melodramas for adolescents and adults. The Lone Ranger. Green Hornet. The Shadow. Sky King. The Whistler. Sgt. Preston of the Yukon. Many were programs that my father liked, too. The only children’s program with funny animals that I listened to regularly was The Buster Brown Show with Smilin’ Ed McConnell’s Gang, notably Midnight the Cat, Squeaky the Mouse, and Froggy (“Plunk your magic twanger, Froggy!”) the Gremlin. On the whole, I did not like the children’s programs because they felt patronizing and they were not very dramatic.
I am bemused today to see that practically all of the “old-time radio show” information is about Andy Devine, not Smilin’ Ed McConnell. Devine must have come along after I stopped listening to the program.
When my family got its TV set in 1950, all of us watched the handpuppet Time for Beany religiously, with Cecil, the sea-sick sea serpent. Of course, so did the rest of America. Including Albert Einstein, reportedly.
I was never much into children’s records or, come to think of it, many things made for children. I already mentioned reading my father’s Philo Vance mysteries and my mother’s Perry Mason mysteries before I entered elementary school. The Nero Wolfe and Charlie Chan mysteries were also favorites. (I cracked up when I later learned, while in college, that an early talkie movie was made of The Black Camel, with the handsome, clean-cut all-American youth played by Bela Lugosi.) I made do with whatever was around our house. I wore out many of my parents’ records of classical music. Liszt’s 2nd Hungarian Rhapsody was a favorite. One of my parents (I don’t know which) had a book script of the 1931 Broadway satirical musical by George & Ira Gershwin about late 1920/early ‘30s politics, Of Thee I Sing, and when I was five or six I would march around our house chanting, “Wintergreen for President!” and “He’s the man the people choose; Loves the Irish and the Jews!” In my teens I did buy a Disney children’s record of “Never Smile at a Crocodile” because I learned that it was a song that had been cut from “Peter Pan”.
Now that you mention it, I can’t find out anything online about the 1910s Three Billy Goats Gruff books, either. Maybe I’ve misremembered and it was a single children’s book of the Norwegian folk tale rather than a new series. I’ll look into this.
ACG’s Hi-Jinx, yes! “Teen-Age Animal Funnies”. The Hepcats with Tommy Katt and his main squeeze, Kitty, Heppity Hopper, their grumpy high-school teacher Professor Weirdbeard (a goat), and more. Dan Gordon’s art; he was another moonlighting 1940s animator, from the Fleischer/Famous studio. That’s one that I missed as a child; I picked up most of the seven issues at the early San Diego Comic-Cons while they were still cheap.
You will love “Rabbit Hill”. I have to check at the library’s website and find out if Robert Lawson’s books are still as popular as they were in the 1950s.
I think that most, if not all, of the Crusader Rabbit merchandise was based on the 1959-61 color TV cartoons by Shull Bonsall, not the 1948-51 black-&-white cartoons by Alex Anderson & Jay Ward. By then I was in college and no longer watching children’s TV. In 1982 I wrote a two-part article on Crusader Rabbit for Comics Scene: “2 ½ Carrots Tall; TV’s First Animated Cartoon Star”. (Comic Scene #6, November 1982, and #7, January 1983.) This gave me an opportunity to interview almost everyone who had worked on both series. (Not Jay Ward himself; he declined to be interviewed.) Boy, everybody HATED Shull Bonsall (or refused to discuss him at all), and he didn’t have much good to say about them, either. He had retired from the entertainment/animation business and was the foreman on a ranch in Chatsworth when I tracked him down.
Ah, memories …
Fred Patten