60s Popeye: Autographically Yours, my King Features Popeye Encore!

You are not imagining things! At least not this thing. Finding all my reviews of King Features Popeye cartoons of the 60s let me discover the ones I had not reviewed. And, better, I discovered that some of the ones I had not reviewed have been posted to King Features’s YouTube channel of “Classic Popeye”.

This short, and three others, were in what they bundled s “Episode 42”. This episode was, for some reason, marked private for a long while, until I forgot about going back and checking. At some point it became public again so I can bring you these four shorts. The first one up is Autographically Yours.

It’s from 1961 and is another Paramount Cartoon Studios short. So Seymour Kneitel gets credit as both producer and director. The story’s credited to Carl Meyer and Jack Mercer. And now, let’s watch.

This is another cartoon where Popeye and Brutus/Bluto compete by showing off spectacular skills. Paramount’s team had done this a hundred thousand times in the three decades leading up to this. The stunts even hearken back to the earliest Fleischer Studio shorts. Shooting the eagle out of a gold dollar, and having it fly off, is the sort of thing that wouldn’t stand out in 1934. Popeye shooting a match to light it, and using the falling match to light his pipe, would also fit. It’s also a startling moment of Popeye using his pipe as a pipe. He mostly used it to toot or to inhale spinach. Actually suggesting smoking feels transgressive, especially in a cartoon made-for-tv. Eventually Brutus decides to try doing something stupid, risking everyone’s life. In this case it’s accidentally letting out a hungry lion. Popeye wakes, eats his spinach, and saves the day. All right.

What makes this stand out, and intrigue me so, is the setup for this. Seeking the autograph of movie-star Popeye is a vaguely UPA-styled kid. As far as I know he doesn’t appear in anything else. It would’ve been very easy to cast Olive Oyl as the autograph-seeker and I’d love to know why she wasn’t. I’m sure the 1951 version of this cartoon would have.

But then Brutus/Bluto’s motivation would have been easy. He’d be hitting on Olive Oyl. Here he’s driven by a jealousy that feels more mature. He wants the acclaim that Popeye gets, noting that in all those pictures that “Marathon Cartoon Studios” makes, Popeye’s written to win. That doesn’t mean he isn’t as amazing as Popeye. It forces us to think of Popeye and Brutus as actors playing the parts of themselves. It’s a motivation you could imagine driving the “real” behind-the-scenes Brutus.

You can really see this kid bonding with Popeye over their experience having chins that reach way the heck far out.

I doubt that Meyer and Mercer were thinking to write a story about struggling against the roles we play. They happened to hit one, though, and it usually works for me. (I credit watching The Muppet Show while young. The show was about half about performances and half the nonsense that goes into those performances.) Brutus wanting to be celebrated circles that. There is some kind of irony when he asks himself what the writers would have him do, forgetting his complaint the writers make Popeye look good. It’s at least a starting point for someone trying to rebel against his lot in life without yet having the tools for it.

Another neat bit which makes this short stand out: Brutus and Popeye start out as friendly, as they do many shorts. But they end as friends too, Brutus even being a fan of Popeye’s. That’s much more rare, especially if we discount shorts such as Fightin’ Pals where their fighting is key to their friendship. I don’t think I’m overly crediting the novelty in appreciating seeing Brutus from an unusual angle that doesn’t feel out of character.

I’m also interested in the choice to have Popeye and Brutus being on set for a Western. I suppose that reflects the then-popularity of Westerns. And that making their ‘show’ a Western justifies their being able to do any stunts, including gun tricks, automatically. I wonder if it’s an unconscious acknowledgement that it’s kind of weird Popeye the sailor has like sixty cartoons where he’s a sheriff or a cowhand or at least living in the desert or prairie. Probably that’s more subtle than the writers were thinking, but it is a coincidence that adds depth to the story.

I’m glad I can start this review encore on an up beat like this.

60s Popeye: Bottom Gun, containing one (1) more Old West cartoon

So stop me if you’ve heard this one. It’s a 1960 Jack Kinney-produced cartoon, with a story by Raymond Jacobs. And it’s got Popeye and all in the Old West, Popeye facing down a gunslinger played by Brutus. You’re wrong. This is not Pest of the Pecos. This cartoon has animation direction by Rudy Larriva, instead of Harvey Toombs. Let’s see what a difference that makes. Here’s Bottom Gun.

My recent experience with Raymond Jacobs-penned shorts set me up to expect a sloppy cartoon. Not only that the story might not quite hang together. A lot of the King Features Popeye shorts lack story logic. I mean, like, the weird edits and scenes held a bit too long to make sense. Not so, though. This is much closer in spirit to Pest of the Pecos. So much closer it even copies the joke about Wimpy being the undertaker, and offering a lay-away plan.

This time around, Popeye isn’t the marshall. He’s a chicken farmer. And Brutus the Kid isn’t a particularly wanted desperado, although he is a notorious gunslinger. He’s also hitting on Olive Oyl, who hits back, with sacks of sugar. Popeye challenges him to a duel, but sets up a surprise. A cheat, if we’re honest: he pours enough molasses into Brutus’s holster that there’s no getting the gun out. Great credit to Popeye for thinking his way out of danger, This generates a lot of funny scenes, too, as Brutus fails to get his gun out. He eventually rips off his pants and gets himself knocked out.

Brutus looks to the camera, dazed and baffled. He’s pulled his pants off and stands with his long shirt draped over his stocking-clad legs.

Thing is, especially with Popeye shooting all the time, it gets to feeling unfair. It makes Brutus hapless, in much the way Marshall Popeye was in Pest of the Pecos. It’s hard not to sympathize with Brutus, who doesn’t get to look dangerous. (Granted, since Popeye takes about 800 shots without most of them even appearing on-screen, he’s not dangerous either.) When Brutus comes back, furious at his humiliation, it’s hard not to sympathize.

Sometimes I feel I write these looking for things to call “wrong”. Here’s a story that sets out a decent premise. It carries the story forward sensibly. It’s got a big center piece showdown with two solid joke setups. Popeye and Brutus stepping toward each other and then missing one another, with Popeye falling into a puddle, is great. The long sequence of Brutus trying every possible way to get his gun out is good too. And here I am sulking that the moral balance of the cartoon feels off. Still, Brutus deserves to be beaten, but he needs to be a bigger threat first.

What’s Going On In Alley Oop? Why were the giant crabs pinching people? March – June 2021

The Chrabs were on an alternate Earth, Universe 881, not by their own will. They would pinch people to death as they could not bear being around arguments and had ended up in a most argumentative universe. It turns out to be Ollie Arp’s fault, for once.

This should catch you up on Jonathan Lemon and Joey Alison Sayers’s Alley Oop to late June 2021. If you’re reading this after about September 2021, there’s probably a more up-to-date plot recap here. Thanks for reading.

Alley Oop.

28 March – 19 June 2021.

I last checked in with Alley Oop as he and the gang prevented the murder of Lady Worthington. They’d gone back in time a little bit to catch Clifford, her butler and secret criminal mastermind. They send Clifford to the universe where everyone is butlers “and definitely not all murderers!”. In her gratitude, Lady Worthington admits she had wanted to steal their technology, but what the heck. Also, she already has a time machine, “from a wild-haired farmer with a penchant for inventing”. That would be Doc Wonmug’s clone of Albert Einstein.

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Jonathan Lemon and Joey Alison Sayers’s Alley Oop for the 15th of April, 2021. So when I first read this I didn’t notice the guys in barrels, and just took it at face value that Alley Oop had robbed a general store. Yeah, the dialogue doesn’t support that but I read a lot of comics, I can’t pay attention to the words too. It’s a small shame we didn’t see Alley Oop getting the clothes since the eagerness of his victims to comply could have been a sign of what the gimmick this Universe was. But it’s not like it took forever to get to that point either. This was a quickly-told story.

The new, and just-wrapped-up, story began the 12th of April. The gang chooses to explore the mysterious Universe 881, an unexplored and locked universe. (Its password is “password123”.) It looks like an Old West themed world. Alley Oop gets some clothes by going up to some guys and demanding their clothes. They’re happy to comply.

It turns out everyone in this Old West town is happy to comply. Amicable. Someone accused of cheating a poker game denies they could ever value a game over their friendship. An actual showdown turns out to be competitive dancing. The locals don’t ever fight, over anything, because they don’t want to die. Also, on this Earth, if you fight, the Chrabs come out and pinch you to death.

Jonathan Lemon and Joey Alison Sayers’s Alley Oop for the 29th of April, 2021. Garnet, the prospector-y type here, ended up being their companion for the story, and he survives through to the end even.

There weren’t always Chrabs. One day there was a flash of light and then anyone who got a little disagreeable got pinched to death. So Alley Oop and all venture into the City of the Chrabs, using a disguise that gets them arrested immediately. They’re taken to Queen Chrab. (Her name. She’s the democratically-elected president.)

Queen Chrab reveals they’re not from this universe. They’d been minding their own business. There was this flash of light, and then they were stuck in this universe. Doc Wonmug arranges to send the Chrabs back to their home Universe 7. It’s a bigger project than they planned: there’s almost a hundred million of them.

Jonathan Lemon and Joey Alison Sayers’s Alley Oop for the 1st of June, 2021. I felt it was too far off point to include but I enjoyed Queen Chrab’s complaint the 20th of May about Universe 881 not having the Interclaw. That’s “a global pinching network. Wherever you are, you can pinch anyone or anything you want!” Also the Chrabs’ whole deal reminds me of one of Jim Toomey’s Sherman’s Lagoon strips, in which Hawthorne the hermit crab gives a utilitarian argument for his pinching people.

So the Chrabs are home. Universe 881 is free of the pinching menace. Everyone can go home. It’s a brilliant success, which is when Ollie Arp, of Universe 3 appears. Ollie’s there to explain what a stupid failure that all was. He sent the Chrabs there, because the Universe 881 humans were far too violent. They were on the brink of destroying their own world. Ah, but the reign of the Chrabs must have made a lasting change in their temperament, right?

Jonathan Lemon and Joey Alison Sayers’s Alley Oop for the 12th of June, 2021. So I concede that dropping the Chrabs into Universe 881 was good for that world. But the setup does mean Ollie Arp went and kidnapped a hundred million people. Yes, you can forgive a crime committed in case of urgent need, but it’s also hard to have urgent need when you have easy control of a time machine and a universe-hopping device. I have to blame this mess more on Ollie Arp for a change.

Ollie Arp figures to try and save … whoever’s survived. He sends Our Heroes home, without charges, since they were trying to do good. And once hope, Ooola ponders whether they actually are doing any good.

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There’s not much self-examination, though. From the 18th of June what seems to be a new story starts, with a trip to the 60s to see the Moon Landing. They arrived in 1969 last week. Might know by September how that works out for everyone.

Next Week!

I had just been wondering if we’d ever see Captain Savarna again! And now Tony DePaul and Mike Manley’s The Phantom, weekday continuity, is off to find her. We’ll see how we got to that point, and how it’s working out, if all goes well next week.

60s Popeye: Pest of the Pecos, containing one (1) Old West cartoon

It’s back to Jack Kinney studios; he’s the producer and the director. Animation direction is credited to Harvey Toombs and the story to Raymond Jacobs. Here’s 1960’s Pest of the Pecos.

This is a great example of how execution matters more than originality. The plot is the first thing that pops into your mind for the idea “Outlaw Brutus messes with Town Marshall Popeye”. But it’s carried out with energy and humor enough to stay interesting.

We start with Brutus stopping and robbing a train, demanding “ten gallons of loot”, a good enough idea. I had thought Olive Oyl was on the robbed train, suggesting that she and Popeye might not even share any scenes. It’d be a rare if not unique distinction for the short. No, though; it was a woman with the same voice actor. Brutus goes to the nearby quiet town of Gravestone Flats and riles up the villagers. Olive Oyl is one of the people with complaints. Swee’Pea’s stolen lollipop riles Popeye into direct action.

Popeye makes a curious marshall here. He’s not portrayed as irresolute or anything, just a little bit not competent. That’s mostly shown by his terrible handling of his gun. He tries rolling it on his finger and drops it. He tries to shoot at Brutus, holding the pistol two-handed and looking away and still gets knocked backwards by the recoil. I understand presenting this for your cowardly-hero type, a part that Bob Hope or at least Don Adams might play. For Popeye it seems weird. It’s easy to blame this kind of thing on Concerned Parents who don’t want children imitating their heroes’ gunplay. But 1960 seems early for that, and I’m not sure that clumsy gunplay is any better. It seems to me more likely Raymond Jacobs figured it was funny if Popeye fumbled his gun.

Oh hey, it’s my nightly anxiety dream, that’s great.

I like the energy and the tone of this cartoon. Brutus gets, as you’d expect, most of the fun bits, including a nice casual air of shooting anywhere he figures needs to be a little more riled up. And smaller jokes too, like complaining that the wanted poster doesn’t look like him. Or the wanted poster listing crimes: school marm pinching, tilting pinball machines, and income tax evasion. Won’t say anything about pinching or income tax evasion, but your debt to society is cleared when you tilt the pinball machine. You get your penalty right then and there.

Wimpy gets a job as the undertaker long enough that we can see he’s got a lay-away plan. It’s the easiest joke for the spot, but it’s not like Wimpy is going to work hard.

I still don’t understand the line of action when Brutus shot that painter’s scaffold out from under. Doesn’t matter, I suppose.

So I only just today got this Far Side comic

Like my subject line says. I’ve seen this particular Far Side now and then for thirty-plus years. It was only today, when I saw it bundled with other historical strips under the History Shmistory label, that I realized Gary Larson’s joke. This now takes, by far, the record between me seeing and me getting the joke. It was previously held by another Far Side strip, the famous “I think you misunderstood … I’m Al Tilly, the bum” incident.

So “Al Tilley, the Bum”. It was this scene at a castle rampart and the guard has thrown his spear at this hobo, and missed, and the hobo says, “I think you misunderstood” and it was like twelve years later that I twigged to how the joke was the guard thought he’d said he was Atilla the Hun. But the scene was funny already even without the name confusion, right? Anyway, nobody ask why the door sign implies they’re outside the career counseling office, OK? It’s a comic strip convention and once you notice this you’ll never enjoy a setting again, ever.

In my defense — and this applies to the Al Tilly the bum incident too — part of my slowness was that it wasn’t obvious I was missing a joke. Imagine if the caption read, “Well, Mr Smith, … ” instead. It’s a fine enough non-sequitur joke that someone might be good in sales or market research or buffalo-slaughtering. Larson played fair, of course. If the identity of the person seeking a career didn’t matter, he’d have been named Smith or Jones or even not addressed by name. The beard and ten-gallon hat were also cues, although it’s not like comic strip characters won’t have long beards or quirky fashion choices either.

I suppose it’s all a reminder that you can tell any joke you like, but you can’t control what joke the audience hears.

60s Popeye: Not much, What’s News with yous?

A bit of fun business ahead of things. Fred Grandinetti was kind enough to let me know about an essay he wrote regarding the King Features Syndicate Popeye cartoons. Grandinetti offers some information about the technical aspects of production, things like budgets and how the cartoons were received. Received by audiences, that is; they always attracted negligible interest from critics. Grandinetti also discusses the six studios which got the work, and reviews their characteristic styles. It’s a much higher-level view than what I’m doing here, but the person out there who is interested in the 60s Popeye cartoons is likely to enjoy that.

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Now to the regular stuff. It’s another Famous Studios-animated Popeye cartoon this week. Once again Seymour Kneitel is credited for story and for direction. My expectation was that the cartoon would be professionally made, with everybody on model and the movement reasonably smooth, even if the story was a bit dull. So how foiled were my expectations? Let’s watch.

We start with Popeye in the desert again. He spends a lot of time in the desert for a sailor. But he and Olive Oyl are taking over the Puddleburg Splash, newspaper for the laziest town in the world. The cartoon’s set in the Old West, although the era is only vaguely set. Mostly that Popeye writes with a quill pen. We never find out why he wants to run a newspaper, or why he picks a newspaper in a town he knows nothing about. I’m all right with that, though. I think there’s even a Segar storyline where Popeye takes ove a small western town newspaper for vague reasons. Popeye can just do that.

We get a couple jokes about how lazy the townspeople are. Best is probably Olive Oyl having to point different directions, with the local telling her when she’s pointing in the right direction. It’s also got a slick little bit of animation, when Olive Oyl points at the camera. It’s a rare break from the standard police-lineup pose. Also a nice bit of animation is the sheriff lifting his eyebrow to raise his hat. This is all accompanied by some nice languid music. I suppose it’s something from the Famous Studios music library. It’s nice getting some different stock music.

There’s more social commentary than I expect from these cartoons. The first is Popeye working out that he has to open a school, to teach people to read, so there’s demand for his newspaper. It’s a benign example of marketing into existence demand for the thing you want to supply. The second is the revelation that the people in Puddleburg aren’t unable to read out of laziness. The school Popeye builds is demolished by the Bruiser Boys, local thugs who figure an ignorant population is easier to control through terror. It’s a method of control, yeah. And it diffuses some of the conflation of laziness and stupidity that’s been in the cartoon.

Curiously, the Bruiser Boys are not Brutus. Why have original cast for this? In Dead-Eye Popeye, which I once mentioned without reviewing, Brutus and two identical Brutus-oids terrorize the western town. I’m curious if this resulted from the confusion about whether Bluto was a King Features or a Paramount-owned character.

There is an odd moment where newspaper-editor Popeye hires a cartoonist, B Looney Bologna. His panel is the chicken-crossing-the-road gag, used for generations now as the symbol for tired old humor. (I’m persuaded that it’s an anti-joke, myself.) I suppose it builds the direness of Popeye’s plight, that he can’t even use the funny pages to get an audience. Mostly it takes a spot of time for a joke about a bad joke.

Why are there arithmetic problems on the board if Olive Oyl hasn’t been able to teach anyone yet? Was she practicing?

In the climax Popeye decides that the townspeople have to learn the Bruiser Boys aren’t that tough. All right. He decides to show them that even a woman can stand up to them. … Why? I suppose they’re a bit more humiliated if a granny in a wheelchair beats them up than if the newspaper editor does it. But it’s not like they won’t be beaten up anyway. If it is important it be a woman, why not have Olive Oyl take her spinach power-up? It stands out to me that Popeye doesn’t eat any spinach this cartoon. I’m curious if Kneitel had some rationale here that got lost in editing. Or if the cartoon started out as an independent thing, or a story meant for another character, that got imperfectly rewritten for Popeye.

Altogether, it’s a decently-made cartoon. The starting point might be odd, but it follows all well enough from there. It’s still odd that Popeye and Olive Oyl would be printing up rooms full of newspapers when nobody was buying them, though. Maybe he was misled about important things by whoever owned the paper before him.

Popeye never reports a specific piece of news in this short.

The Stan Freberg Show: the final episode, with a bunch of highlights

So the 20th of October, 1957, The Stan Freberg Show came to its end. Freberg had promised to feature some of the most popular bits of the show and said he was getting card and letter from the listening audience about what to select. The show hadn’t quite given up, though: there are a couple of new bits, including what might have become running gag characters, appearing for the first time here. Still the show is mostly recreations, sometimes in abbreviated form. And of what?

Here’s the show:

Start Time	Sketch
00:00	Open. It’s no longer an episode of a brand-new radio series, but rather a clonked-out radio series. And they’re bidding a fond farewell to r-a-d-i-o. And a trick of memory. I had remembered the last episode as opening with a more busted-up theme, one with sound effects of a machine conking out, and the music losing tempo and falling out of tune. Not so, but given the show’s use of that sort of sound effect (as in the fifth episode) I’m surprised it didn’t.
00:56	Opening remarks. Freberg’s grateful to his audience, and will miss talking to people like — some character who hasn’t appeared before. A jumpy, character complaining the road’s blocked by sheep, and who follows his lines with singing the line again in a high-pitched voice. He’s a brain surgeon.
02:45	Mr Tweedly, Censor from Citizen’s Radio. Stan Freberg tries to sing Old Man River, while getting buzzed for not saying thank you and for using needlessly harsh songs and bad grammar and such. This ran in the sixth episode.
06:26	Peggy Taylor. She’s crying, not because they’re going off the air, but because Stan Freberg’s on her foot. She gives a gift, not a sleeping bag but a Freberg Cozy, and I like the idea of calling a sleeping bag a personal cozy. She sings “The Birth of the Blues”. This was done in the second show, and I’m surprised they would redo a song. A good song, sure, but it’s not like 1957 was short on radio-ready music.
10:06	Bang Gunly, US Marshall Fields. Soundtrack of a “typical” (adult) western, including sponsorship from the Eating Corporation of America. It’s truncated from the original, of course; just some examination of the fence and one commercial. This appeared on the 11th show originally.
15:20	Capitol Record. A “whole list of name” requested a performance of Day-Oh, the Banana Boat Song. It’s a bit too loud for the bongo player, who keeps insisting Freberg get farther away to be at his loudest. This appeared on the seventh show, and featured a bongo player who’d also been in the opening and closing segments of the fourth episode. I’m not surprised that St George and the Dragonet didn’t make the cut — the sketch is too long and has too big a cast, and doesn’t really condense well. I’m more surprised that Wun’erful, Wun’erful didn’t, but see the next item.
20:34	Billy May has a gift for Stan Freberg: an accordion-playing bandleader found in Balboa Bay. Reference to the Wun’erful, Wun’erful sketch from the fifth episode. In that, a Lawrence Welk parody floated out to sea. Their Welk is there to laugh at Freberg. “You don’t have to make fun of me.” “Look-a who’s talking!” Welk gets to play “a short medley based on the names of girls-a”. Mostly “Every Little Breeze Seems To Whisper Louise”, and stuff that can’t quite get going. The sketch was turned into a Capitol record, as announced the 13th show.
23:00	Package for Stan Freberg, about ten feet tall. New messenger character. The package is the Abominable Snowman. He’d been introduced the second episode. Abominable asks Freberg if it’s hard on him doing both voices like that; he admits it’s hard on him. It’s a bit of fourth-wall-breaking and plays on Freberg’s ability to shift character fast. Abominable Snowman isn’t wearing orange sneakers today, just purple, a new “ensemble”. Abominable and his wife Gladys are thinking what they could do to help the show. (Gladys was introduced, as his fiancee, in the ninth show.) “I could scare a couple of sponsors for you.” “We’ve already done that, thank you.” Abominable offers to teach Freberg how to be an Abominable Snowman, which gets to be funnier when you remember they just pointed out how he’s doing both voices.
26:48	Conclusion. Freberg admits they didn’t have time for Mr Poulet’s tuned sheep, the one sketch promised last week that they would do. Poulet and his Muppet Show-ready sketch appeared on the first episode and without the sheep turned up in the seventh show. Freberg thanks his audience, especially the press who supported the show so.
27:51	Closing Music.

My recaps of all the episodes of The Stan Freberg Show should be at this link. And now they are complete, too.

The Stan Freberg Show: the eleventh show, after a fence has been cut

The big flu of 1957 was an outbreak of Influenza A subtype H2N2, a pandemic less severe than that of 1918 (but what wasn’t?). It wsa popularly referred to as the Asian Flu. I know it mostly from a Peanuts strip in 1958 where Charlie Brown suspects he’s coming down with it, and Lucy mocks him for getting the flu six months late. Smiley Burnette was one of those prolific singer-songwriters who’d get to play the sidekick to your Roy Rogers-class performer. So that’s some things you would be expected to know for this episode, which first aired the 22nd of September, 1957.

And here’s the rundown:

Start Time	Sketch
00:00	Opening Music. Once again no cold opening.
00:50	Opening Comments. Stan Freberg is getting over the “Swiss Flu”, so as not to offend anyone.
01:15	College Football Report. Report from the BearcatPantherTigers. Stan Freberg is doing a pretty sharp impersonation of Colgate Sports Newsreel reporter Bill Stern. The setup is easy, a long buildup to a question to which the athlete gives one- and two-word answers.
04:08	Peggy Taylor gives Stan Freberg the pretext to sing Hoagy Carmichael’s “Monkey Song”. They can’t all be “Stardust”.
07:22	How an Agent Operates. Foster Pelt, agent to 64 dogs. He gets them character parts a lot: derelicts, good-natured slobs, friend of the leading child. There’s a constrained structure here, where Pelt negates any joke that Freberg might advance. That’s okay as long as it’s building to something, like the dog that plays jazz trombone. But it does also have a tone like Pelt is trying to negate the sketch.
13:35	Question from the Audience. A guy doesn’t believe in the show so far.
13:55	Peggy Taylor singing “Famous Last Words”.
17:00	Composite Preview of TV Westerns for the Fall. “Bang Gunly, US Marshall Fields” which (as usual) catches the sounds and tones and pacing of its primary source precisely. The actual radio Gunsmoke wasn’t quite so leisurely, but did run that way. It didn’t spend quite this much time establishing plot points either, but it could feel like that. The in-show sketch for “Puffed Grass” riffs on ads for Quaker Puffed Wheat (“the breakfast cereal shot from guns”) commercials. The relentless establishment of the fact the fence was cut evokes the throwaway joke at the start of St George and the Dragonet, about that 45 automatic being checked by the lab and learning that, yes, it was a gun. The close, a quick exchange with Pedro, riffs on the comic sidekick Pancho of the Cisco Kid. He’d close each episode with a corny gag. Gunsmoke was a grown-up western; Cisco Kid a kids’ one. So it is a tonal non sequitur that he should show up here.
28:12	Closing Remarks. Freberg encourages people to write for tickets and asks for something for cold, even if it’s just Dr Christian. Dr Christian was a long-running doctor’s-office-based light drama, the small-town doctor helping quarreling lovers reconcile and wayward youths straighten out, that sort of thing.
28:38	Closing Music.

My recaps of all the episodes of The Stan Freberg Show should be at this link.

The Stan Freberg Show: the seventh episode, with The Lone Analyst and more spoofs

This episode first aired the 25th of August, 1957. Yes, yes, it’s Rogers and Hart’s song.

And here’s the rundown:

Start Time	Sketch
00:00	Cold Open. Array of sound effects for the third week running; this time, it’s the outcome of the Floyd Patterson/Pete Rademacher fight. That fight happened the 22nd of August, in Seattle, and Patterson won.
00:26	Opening Music.
01:13	Introduction. Newspaper clipping. Dr Hugo Gunk claims crime could be eliminated if we put as much money into psychology as we do into police. Just the premise is a laugh line, which is a bit depressing to consider. I don’t know whether this was based on something actually in the news; “Hugo Gunk” is a suspiciously silly-but-not-quite-funny name.
02:07	The Lone Analyst. Spoof built on the analysts-rather-than-police premise. It’s set in the town of New Roces, New Mexico. This is (of course) a very close spoof of The Lone Ranger‘s sound, and its plot beats. There’s side references to other westerns, notably Have Gun, Will Travel. (The Lone Ranger was unmistakably a kid’s show; Have Gun, Will Travel a grown-up’s.) The Lone Analyst has the saddle in these parts that opens out into a couch. There’s a nice Wile E Coyote style gag about “painting a shortcut on those rocks”. It’s got a man who thinks he’s a chicken and, to extend the joke, a chicken who thinks he’s a horse. And the good solid line, “I am not a Great Dane. I am Grandpa Snider.”
11:01	Francois Poulet is back, and playing the nose flute. Comic interview with a Frenchman who speaks Hawaiian. Billy Mays is able to talk with him, converting Hawaiian to groovy-musician. Then an actual song, until his nose is caught in the flute. Very Muppet-ready sketch.
14:25	Peggy Taylor. Follow-up joke about nose flautists sneezing. Then she sings “Dancing On the Ceiling”. Strange, very different Lionel Richie cover.
17:15	There You Are. Reenactment of the Driving of the Golden Spike. Very different from Robert E Tainter’s Great Moments in History bits. Very precise spoof of CBS/CBS News’s You Are There, which presented how network news might have covered historic events. Cute bit where the story behind the pick of who gets chosen to drive the last spike is frightfully mundane. Last-minute hold-up as they’re two feet short. “We could go back to Chicago and push a little.” The trains meet. President Grant says “it appears to me they should’ve laid two tracks”. As a kid I was always bothered there was just the one track too.
23:50	The Banana Boat Song. Adaptation of the comedy record he’d already published. Features that bongo player from a couple weeks ago who found the show to be loud.
27:50	Closing Remarks. Promises next week the content of this week. Next week: St George and the Dragonet.
28:13	Closing Music.

My recaps of all the episodes of The Stan Freberg Show should be at this link.