TV OR NOT TV

Captain Video was cheaply done, yet there were shows which did television worse. New York City was full of radio actors in those days, desperately scrambling for rapidly disappearing jobs. Some TV producer came up with the bright notion of simply doing a radio show on TV. This remarkable idea gave birth to the oddest and most irritating television program to pollute the airwaves this side of The Best of Regis Philbin. The show used standard radio play techniques: actors standing or sitting around a table reciting their lines into microphones while a technician produced appropriate sound effects and an engineer mixed in the scoring. Of course, television demands more. It has a visual aspect The audience cannot be permitted to see a few actors sitting around a table yakking into microphones, yet the show could not afford sets, costumes and props, all of which are costly. Therefor, to give the audience something to see on television, cartoon drawings were displayed depicting the action.

Marshall MacLuhan would have loved this show. MacLuhan would point out years later that radio requires listening, which entails active participation by the audience, while TV viewing is passive. Passive viewing of the still pictures collided with the need to actively listen to the actors and the sound effects. I often felt as though the real show were taking place behind the still pictures which some fool had accidentally placed in front of the camera.

The show serialized the raw adventures of a tough detective in The Big City. The detective, whose name was something similar to Spike McElvy or Knuckles Flanagan, spoke fluent Cliché and packed a heater loaded with six little friends whose job it was to say who was boss. Notwithstanding his "roscoe", Knuckles spent much of his time getting the living bejabbers punched out of himself. He got into one fix after the other. Every week -- every single week -- the hero was savagely beaten and left for dead by this or that gang of no-gooders. Getting thrashed senseless seemed to be this guy's job. If Knuckles had wandered into Saint Patricks' Cathedral, the choir would have mugged him to a pulp. Every dame he met betrayed him at the first opportunity -- all of them. Mother Theresa would have two-timed this guy. Every friend double-crossed him. When not being badly used by the weaker sex or roughly manhandled by the stronger, Knuckles killed large numbers of usually unarmed people by plugging them full of lead. It was the only reasonable response he could make to the world created for him by the sick, twisted writers of this radio/television hybrid.

There was little on television in those days, particularly in late afternoon which was the time slot allotted to this show. We kids watched the Knuckles program just before dinner. The format tortured us. The comic book-like drawings stubbornly held their ground while my sister, older brother and I shouted "change the picture!" at the tube. A drawing might depict the bad guy pointing a gun at the back of the detective-hero. It would remain on the box unblinking while the action moved on to a fist-fight and then the arrival of the cops and the girl kissing Knuckles just before telling the cops that he (Knuckles) was the bad guy, thus betraying him in time for the closing credits. For the first time -- but not the last time -- in my life I found myself suffering Dantesque torments voluntarily. I had the option of doing something else, something constructive, perhaps. Instead, I watched the Knuckles Flanagan show. Like an alcoholic to the bottle, I was drawn to it, driven by an irresistible need to waste time in a painful, self-destructive way. My sister and my brother suffered from the same affliction. I have never been able to reason why.

TV entertained the children of the 1950's with a large array of puppets. The earliest puppet show I remember was Lucky Pup. This show's original premise was odd: a little dog puppet wins a miilion dollar prize at a carnival and two sinister characters plot to trick the doggie out of the money. The two bad guys were named Foodini and Pinhead. They soon became so popular that Lucky Pup himself and the grief about the prize money were quickly dropped from the show, although the Lucky Pup name was illogically retained. This show was of a Punch-and-Judy format in that there were no live actors to play off the puppets and it specialized in violence. Foodini was a magician and Pinhead was his lowly assistant. Pinhead's job seemed to be to serve as a target for Foodini's rage. Foodini was easily enraged and constantly beat Pinhead with sticks. I'm not sure what this show was trying to teach us. Perhaps it was trying to say that in this world there are Foodinis and there are Pinheads and it's better to be a Foodini. This was the same lesson that the schoolyard bullies were teaching me at that time in the real world. I didn't need to see it acted out on television.

Most puppet shows featured live actors playing Ed McMahon to some puppets' Johnny Carson. Rootie Kazootie, Andys' Gang, Howdy Doody, and Kukla, Fran and Ollie all used this tack. Most were done before live audiences, although Andys' Gang was filmed. This last show featured the most interesting puppet of them all -- Froggy. Froggy was summoned by Andy Devine, the shows' host, by incanting the immortal conjuration "Plunk your magic twanger! Frogg-EE!" A loud boing, a puff of smoke and presto! -- Froggy would appear saying in a husky voice and conspiratorial tone "Hiya kids! Hiya, hiya!". We kids loved Froggy. We could tell immediately that Froggy didn't give hoot we if brushed our teeth after every meal or washed behind our ears. This puppet was on our side. He wasn't going to hold forth on the importance of fair play like Rootie Kazootie. Froggy would deal from the bottom of the deck to his own mother to win a game of Old Maid. Hardly a week would go by without Howdy Doody droning on about honesty being the best policy or some such drivel. Froggy knew that the most important thing was not to get caught.

The Howdy Doody Show deserves special mention. It was the quintessential kiddy TV show of the 1950s'. The show came to you directly from Doodyville, USA -- a town populated by a disturbing cabal of mostly threatening puppets and a gallery of incompetent adults. The most malevolent puppet was Mean Old Mr. Bluster. He always dressed in an old fashioned three piece suit, watchfob, spats and bowler. His face was wrinkled with age and anger into a permanent scowl, he spit out his words with his lower jaw opening and closing like a gallows' trap door. His bushy gray eyebrows moved in unison with his mouth when he spoke and always settled into an angry V over his nasal bridge when he fell silent. Bluster was always plotting something which would spell doom for Howdy Doody. Doody himself -- the theoretical star of the show -- was a goofy-looking freckle-faced dude dressed in kiddy-cowboy attire who spent every blessed minute of the day staring blankly off into nothing with an idiotic grin plastered on his vacuous, characterless face. Phineas T. Bluster hopelessly outclassed Howdy.

Blusters' consuming ambition was to cause mankind to say "Good Bluster" as a greeting rather than "Howdy Doody". It is remarkable that people always seem to obsess on stupid ideas, never on good ones. Bluster often confided his nefarious plans to Flub-a-dub, a nonspeaking puppet beast, or to one of the more inane human cast members. Most often, these plans entailed being nice to Howdy before springing some sort of odious trap. Doody -- a slow learner -- was invariably taken in by this sweet treatment: "Aw, golly gee whillikers, Buffalo Bob, it looks as though Mr. Bluster's turned over a new leaf!". In the end Bluster's evil designs were exposed somehow (never by any cleverness on the part of Howdy) and Howdy would scold him by saying "Aw, golly gee whillikers, Mr. Bluster, I'm ashamed of you!" Bluster would apologize and promise to reform, but never did.

The show was nerve-wracking to watch. It served no purpose but to raise my anxiety level. It took hours for me to calm down after viewing it. Were I old enough, I would have had a few stiff drinks after watching Howdy Doody to soothe my jangled nerves. It wasn't so much that Bluster was mean that got to me, it was that the adults in the show were so powerless to oppose him. Buffalo Bob - the chief adult - was a world class wimp. He was a sap not just for Bluster but also for Clarabel, who was the worlds' most annoying clown. No Howdy Doody show was complete without Buffalo Bob getting a good hosing down from Clarabel's seltzer bottle. Clarabel was an unbelievably burdensome creature whose inevitable appearance in the proceedings I dreaded more than a trip to the dentist. Clarabel scampered anon honking a bicycle horn and micturating water profusely about the set to the screeching delight of the pathetic inmates of the "peanut gallery" -- the awful, whining, pack of nose pickers who constituted the shows' juvenile live audience. How I wished that one day Buffalo Bob would decide he'd had enough and haul off and punch Clarabel into a ruptured rag-doll heap, lying quivering amid his own teeth and lifes' blood on the floor of the Doodyville set. It was not to be.

Princess Summerfallwinterspring and Big Chief Thunderthud constituted the Howdy Doody show's salute to the Native American. Thunderthud, portrayed by an actor who would later win sudden but brief fame by intoning "Why Not?" on the old Steve Allen Show, was retarded. Of all the non-puppets of Doodyville, he was clearly the most inept. Unless one counts Clarabel as an adult, Chief Thunderthud was the first adult - perhaps the first person - whom I recognized as my intellectual inferior. It amazed me that this guy managed to dress himself and find his way out of the teepee in the morning. Thunderthud annoyed me almost as much as Clarabel. Sometimes I found myself thinking, "Hey Buffalo Bob, you're a cowboy, he's an Indian, so shoot him!" , whenever Thunderthud wandered on camera.

Princess Summerfallwinterspring was portrayed by a young actress and was a lot less offensive than Thunderthud. Sadly, the young woman was killed in an automobile accident during one Doody season and her character was quietly dropped from the show. The following fall, however, they decided to re-introduce the Indian maid. Amid much fanfare and right on the air, in front of the peanut gallery, Buffalo Bob breathlessly introduced the new Princess Summerfallwinterspring! I was excited. Just think, a new Indian Princess and in my lifetime, too. I had heard that she had been killed in car crash, but I did not really understand at that age exactly what that meant. I was more than slightly taken aback when the camera panned across Doodyville and alighted upon - a puppet. "My God! she turned into a puppet!", I thought. To this day, I wonder what they were thinking. Maybe they thought we wouldn't notice. I did. I noticed right away.

The Howdy Doody Show exasperated me, but probably did me little harm. I'll take it over the violent crud the soulless cretins in network marketing are feeding the kids today. The adults responsible for Howdy Doody simply didn't think that a world of hapless adults and ominous puppets might be unsettling to kids. Their sin was born of ignorance. The dollar-guzzling inebriates of kiddy schlock today carefully research their products. Rule number one: sell the crap. Rule number two: there is no rule number two. They don't give a rap if every kid exposed to their trash grows up like Jeffrey Dahmer. It's the bottom line that counts. The very bottom line.

FIN

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