Golden Era Anathema

[LizzieMaine]

Hope's early movies -- where his screen character was the "craven wise guy" persona he created for radio -- were consistently good. But when he got too old to pull off that character convincingly, he never developed a consistent characterization to replace it, and eventually he gave up trying.

The real problem with Hope as a comedian was that he was essentially a lazy comedian -- not a lazy *performer,* mind you, given the whole globe-trotting Friend of The Troops deal that basically consumed the last two-thirds of his career, but a lazy *comedian.* If you listen to his radio work -- which was the foundation of everything else he did for the rest of his life -- you'll find that he settled into a very predictable routine very early on, and never tried to stretch beyond that. He tells jokes -- and with the possible exception of Milton Berle, nobody ever "told jokes" on a stage better than he did -- but he's basically satisfied to do nothing more than that. He's a mediocre sketch comic, and he depends far too much on stooges like Jerry Colonna and Vera Vague to carry the program along. When you hear one of his shows, you've pretty much heard all of them.

Hope's career could have gone a very different direction. Before he became the "Bob Hope" that everyone remembers, he was an effective romantic light comedian in movies. Watch him with Shirley Ross in "The Big Broadcast of 1938," especially the bit where they duet on "Thanks For The Memory," and you see just how much talent Hope had as both a straight actor and -- amazingly -- a singer. It's an achingly beautiful performance of a sort you never saw from him again once he decided who "Bob Hope" was.

 

[GHT]

Abbot and Costello. Yes, they're talented burlesque-style comics, and they have a couple of good bits, but the bulk of their work is hacky, repetitious, and especially in the "Abbot's Moustache" era, completely without any sense that they themselves enjoy their work. Their radio show makes me want to push an icepick thru one ear and out the other. When you have to bring in Joe Besser to stooge for you because you can't carry the show yourselves anymore, it's time to quit.

Abbot & Costello made it the British shores, I never saw anything funny, yet Bob Hope and Bing Crosby were almost compulsive viewing.

Robert Taylor. A generic pretty-boy actor who thought he was far better at what he did than he ever actually was.

When your parents give you the name: "Spangler Arlington Brugh," it won't roll off the tongue in Hollywood.

"The New Look." Someone should have done the world a favor and garroted Christian Dior with the billowing sleeves of a frothy organdy blouse. And the male equivalent, "the Bold Look," is just as ridiculous. The postwar period was the nadir of fashion.

That's true, but compared to today's slob appearance even post war clothes are preferable.

Pretty much any American car made between 1954 and 1961. Lumbering chrome-splattered sauropods that epitomize everything wrong with the postwar era.

There might be one or two who would argue about that, I wouldn't. But I do think that those gas-guzzling jukeboxes with their fins and chrome have a kind of "Americana" about them.

"The Lone Ranger." It's a kids' show, written for a kids' mindset, and every one of its more than 2000 episodes is exactly like every other. And yet it's considered the epitome of "old time radio" by people who've never heard of Arch Oboler. (I also hate the phrase "old time radio.")

If you have ever seen the British version of The Lone Ranger, namely, Robin Hood, you would swear that other than the costumes and time setting, the shows are one and the same. I wonder which one is the plagiarist?

And while I don't "hate" the music of Glenn Miller, it's certainly not my first choice. After all the Artie Shaw and Benny Goodman and Duke Ellington and Count Basie and Charlie Barnet and Coleman Hawkins and Larry Clinton and Fats Waller records have been listened to, maybe a side or two of Mr. Miller will be OK.

The rich seem of popular music of that era came from African/American source, their talent bordered on genius, but those musicians never got the credit for which they so deserve.

 

[tonyb]

Hope's early movies -- where his screen character was the "craven wise guy" persona he created for radio -- were consistently good. But when he got too old to pull off that character convincingly, he never developed a consistent characterization to replace it, and eventually he gave up trying.

The real problem with Hope as a comedian was that he was essentially a lazy comedian -- not a lazy *performer,* mind you, given the whole globe-trotting Friend of The Troops deal that basically consumed the last two-thirds of his career, but a lazy *comedian.* If you listen to his radio work -- which was the foundation of everything else he did for the rest of his life -- you'll find that he settled into a very predictable routine very early on, and never tried to stretch beyond that. He tells jokes -- and with the possible exception of Milton Berle, nobody ever "told jokes" on a stage better than he did -- but he's basically satisfied to do nothing more than that. He's a mediocre sketch comic, and he depends far too much on stooges like Jerry Colonna and Vera Vague to carry the program along. When you hear one of his shows, you've pretty much heard all of them.

Hope's career could have gone a very different direction. Before he became the "Bob Hope" that everyone remembers, he was an effective romantic light comedian in movies. Watch him with Shirley Ross in "The Big Broadcast of 1938," especially the bit where they duet on "Thanks For The Memory," and you see just how much talent Hope had as both a straight actor and -- amazingly -- a singer. It's an achingly beautiful performance of a sort you never saw from him again once he decided who "Bob Hope" was.

Early success has ruined many a talent. I don’t know if that’s more true of popular entertainers of more recent times, but we could easily rattle off the names of many a one-time big-name rock ’n’ roll act now doing what amounts to an oldies revue on the tribal casino circuit.

 

[Nobert]

The phenomenon I call 'Little Boyism.' The half-saccharine, half-thuggish notion that a proper boy is a rambunctious, destructive and inherently indolent urchin, who lives for nothing but roughhousing and lazing away by the ol' fishin' hole. This junior version of toxic masculinity is partly still with us today, but the notion that this is what a young male is supposed to be, and any who did not live up to it were not regular, normal boys seems to have been swallowed whole by some, back in the day. You see it to varying degrees in J.R. William's cartoons, the Penrod books, and a lot of pop culture d'epoch. The prime exemplar may be Arthur Godrey's What is a Boy? a song I put in a category that a friend of mine once dubbed "Music of Ipecac."

And Glenn Miller's In the Mood may be one of the most boring songs ever written (if you can call kyping a Wingy Manone trumpet riff and turning it into a whole song writing).

 

[Zombie_61]

...If you have ever seen the British version of The Lone Ranger, namely, Robin Hood, you would swear that other than the costumes and time setting, the shows are one and the same. I wonder which one is the plagiarist?

The Internet says Robin hood predates The Lone Ranger in print by approximately 550 years, which sounds about right.

 

[LizzieMaine]

The phenomenon I call 'Little Boyism.' The half-saccharine, half-thuggish notion that a proper boy is a rambunctious, destructive and inherently indolent urchin, who lives for nothing but roughhousing and lazing away by the ol' fishin' hole. This junior version of toxic masculinity is partly still with us today, but the notion that this is what a young male is supposed to be, and any who did not live up to it were not regular, normal boys seems to have been swallowed whole by some, back in the day. You see it to varying degrees in J.R. William's cartoons, the Penrod books, and a lot of pop culture d'epoch. The prime exemplar may be Arthur Godrey's What is a Boy? a song I put in a category that a friend of mine once dubbed "Music of Ipecac."

And Glenn Miller's In the Mood may be one of the most boring songs ever written (if you can call kyping a Wingy Manone trumpet riff and turning it into a whole song writing).

The interesting thing about that "Good Bad Boy" trope is that when Mark Twain kicked it off with "Tom Sawyer," he set it in the 1840s, as a fond look back at a fast-vanishing era. J R Williams and H. T. Webster, in the 1930s, set their boyhood cartoons in some nebulous "good old days" turn-of-the-century world. In the seventies, the world was overrun with nostalgic reminiscences of 1950s youth. Today, the Back in My Day crowd waxes its nostalgia for the '70s and 80s to a gleaming acrylic shine. That's a hundred and fifty years of old men yearning to be eight again, and knowing they'll never be.

Women, by and large, don't do this. I remember what it was like to be a kid, and I wouldn't be a kid again if you forced me at gunpoint. I don't know any women who romanticize girlhood or imagine that it was somehow a purer, more wholesome, more "regular" time. We go thru our "Little Women" stage, sure, and all right-thinking girls imagine they'll grow up to be Jo, even though most us end up being Meg, but it's not carried on to the extent that "regular boyhood" is fetishized. Somewhere a gender studies major is working up a very interesting paper on this topic.

 

[Fading Fast]

The interesting thing about that "Good Bad Boy" trope is that when Mark Twain kicked it off with "Tom Sawyer," he set it in the 1840s, as a fond look back at a fast-vanishing era. J R Williams and H. T. Webster, in the 1930s, set their boyhood cartoons in some nebulous "good old days" turn-of-the-century world. In the seventies, the world was overrun with nostalgic reminiscences of 1950s youth. Today, the Back in My Day crowd waxes its nostalgia for the '70s and 80s to a gleaming acrylic shine. That's a hundred and fifty years of old men yearning to be eight again, and knowing they'll never be.

Women, by and large, don't do this. I remember what it was like to be a kid, and I wouldn't be a kid again if you forced me at gunpoint. I don't know any women who romanticize girlhood or imagine that it was somehow a purer, more wholesome, more "regular" time. We go thru our "Little Women" stage, sure, and all right-thinking girls imagine they'll grow up to be Jo, even though most us end up being Meg, but it's not carried on to the extent that "regular boyhood" is fetishized. Somewhere a gender studies major is working up a very interesting paper on this topic.

This boy seconds this: "I remember what it was like to be a kid, and I wouldn't be a kid again if you forced me at gunpoint."

 

[Bushman]

The interesting thing about that "Good Bad Boy" trope is that when Mark Twain kicked it off with "Tom Sawyer," he set it in the 1840s, as a fond look back at a fast-vanishing era. J R Williams and H. T. Webster, in the 1930s, set their boyhood cartoons in some nebulous "good old days" turn-of-the-century world. In the seventies, the world was overrun with nostalgic reminiscences of 1950s youth. Today, the Back in My Day crowd waxes its nostalgia for the '70s and 80s to a gleaming acrylic shine. That's a hundred and fifty years of old men yearning to be eight again, and knowing they'll never be..

For as long as there's been nostalgia, there's been grumpy old men yelling their "back in my dayisms" at the youth of the present. Even I've caught myself shaking my head at the modern conveniences that kids have these days, and yet I'd never say they've got it easier than I did "back in my day." The world's just as complicated now as it was 300 years ago. It's just that we have different complications. In fact, I would say that most of my "back in my dayisms" are made in jest, poking fun at the mindset of people who exclaim "those darn kids these days!"

One of my favorite things to do while watching a movie from the 1930s is to catch the old man shaking his head at the child actors whose own grandchildren now probably shake their fists screaming "back in my day!"

 

[ChazfromCali]

Hope's early movies -- where his screen character was the "craven wise guy" persona he created for radio -- were consistently good. But when he got too old to pull off that character convincingly, he never developed a consistent characterization to replace it, and eventually he gave up trying.

The real problem with Hope as a comedian was that he was essentially a lazy comedian -- not a lazy *performer,* mind you, given the whole globe-trotting Friend of The Troops deal that basically consumed the last two-thirds of his career, but a lazy *comedian.* If you listen to his radio work -- which was the foundation of everything else he did for the rest of his life -- you'll find that he settled into a very predictable routine very early on, and never tried to stretch beyond that. He tells jokes -- and with the possible exception of Milton Berle, nobody ever "told jokes" on a stage better than he did -- but he's basically satisfied to do nothing more than that. He's a mediocre sketch comic, and he depends far too much on stooges like Jerry Colonna and Vera Vague to carry the program along. When you hear one of his shows, you've pretty much heard all of them.

Hope's career could have gone a very different direction. Before he became the "Bob Hope" that everyone remembers, he was an effective romantic light comedian in movies. Watch him with Shirley Ross in "The Big Broadcast of 1938," especially the bit where they duet on "Thanks For The Memory," and you see just how much talent Hope had as both a straight actor and -- amazingly -- a singer. It's an achingly beautiful performance of a sort you never saw from him again once he decided who "Bob Hope" was.

I've always thought it was interesting that Hope sang and introduced to the world I Can't Get Started (With You) the great jazz standard by Vernon Duke & Ira Gershwin in The Ziegfeld Follies of 1936. It's usually listed as one of the top six or eight songs of all time of the Great American Songbook. It's one of my favorites.

"In a New York Times article, theater and film critic Vincent Canby said, “It was, however, sung for laughs, with (Eve) Arden making caustic comments about Mr. Hope’s passion.” Bob Hope may not have been as gifted a singer as partner Bing Crosby, but he managed to see three of his songs make the recording charts."

I love the Bunny Berigan version.

 

[Stanley Doble]

Being young may be all right if you come from a supportive family, with lots of money and are healthy and good looking. But for many of us youth was a time of illness, poverty, struggle and constant fear and worry. For me life keeps getting easier and better the longer I live.

 

[Zombie_61]

Being young may be all right if you come from a supportive family, with lots of money and are healthy and good looking. But for many of us youth was a time of illness, poverty, struggle and constant fear and worry. For me life keeps getting easier and better the longer I live.

See, that's why I've never had any real desire to find my biological parents (I was adopted as an infant). If I'd been mistreated, abused, neglected, or any of the other negative verbs/adjectives that some people use to describe their childhood, that would probably be a very different story. We were pretty far from rich, but I grew up in a loving family with parents who made sure I had food to eat, clothes to wear, a bed to sleep in, a roof over our heads, medical/dental care when I needed it, and a few toys to occupy my free time. They also taught me the values that would see me through my life. It wasn't ideal, but it could have been far worse. I could easily be one of those idiots who still complains and blames his parents for all of his problems in life solely because they didn't buy him a brand new sports car when he reached the legal driving age, but I knew at a fairly young age how good I actually had it and was grateful for the life they gave me.

 

[tonyb]

...
The Three Stooges. They are not funny. They have never been funny.

They are not as I have heard " a guy thing". I am a guy and I hate them.

If I said my favourite thing of theirs is the one where Moe grabs Curly's nose (or whom ever's) and hits his hand away, and you say that happens in all of them, you prove my point.

So, what is anathema to you?

The Three Stooges shtick was wasted on me when I was a kid, when it was on TV pretty much every weekday around the time kids had control of the viewing options — after school but before dad got home.

I was kinda baffled by what anybody saw in that brand of comedy until I got much older. I get it now in ways I didn’t then, which is not to go so far as to say I actually like it. But I get it. I understand why some people do.

 

[tonyb]

Being young may be all right if you come from a supportive family, with lots of money and are healthy and good looking. But for many of us youth was a time of illness, poverty, struggle and constant fear and worry. For me life keeps getting easier and better the longer I live.

My life got much better in my late teens and early 20s, as I grew more comfortable in my own skin.

But yeah, childhood was no picnic. Poverty, domestic violence, instability. The usual pathologies. By the time the Old Man grew up (to the extent he ever did), I was long out of the house and on my own anyway.

 

[belfastboy]

For as long as there's been nostalgia, there's been grumpy old men yelling their "back in my dayisms" at the youth of the present. Even I've caught myself shaking my head at the modern conveniences that kids have these days, and yet I'd never say they've got it easier than I did "back in my day." The world's just as complicated now as it was 300 years ago. It's just that we have different complications. In fact, I would say that most of my "back in my dayisms" are made in jest, poking fun at the mindset of people who exclaim "those darn kids these days!"

One of my favorite things to do while watching a movie from the 1930s is to catch the old man shaking his head at the child actors whose own grandchildren now probably shake their fists screaming "back in my day!"

When I was 50 yrs old I mentored a 10 year old for an hour a week during school hours. We had a running joke of me regaling him with stories from when I was his age. I am convinced he never bought a word I said as he thought I was BS'ing him. I would chide him that the only exercise you ever got was eye rolling as I spoke. The ultimate was when we discussed what happened when he misbehaved in class. He told me about having discussions with the teacher around his feelings, how others around him were feeling, how the teacher was feeling..... etc etc. I responded by telling him that in my day they just beat us. I described the razor strop they used on our hands. For once he didn't roll his eyes but responded with....."OH, yeh, I know that ...we went on a field trip to the Burnaby Museum and they had one of those straps on display. The little bugger...............

 

[MisterCairo]

The Three Stooges shtick was wasted on me when I was a kid, when it was on TV pretty much every weekday around the time kids had control of the viewing options — after school but before dad got home.

I was kinda baffled by what anybody saw in that brand of comedy until I got much older. I get it now in ways I didn’t then, which is not to go so far as to say I actually like it. But I get it. I understand why some people do.

I preferred the Marx Brothers’ comedy. The word play spoke to me in a way the pure slapstick of the Stooges did not. I guess my thing with the Stooges is they are literally a one joke act.

This is why I love the original 14 episode British Office vice the eight year Or whatever 22 a season American one. One joke only lasts so long.

 

[scotrace]

Sock garters.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I think one of the reasons the Stooges tend to get tiresome on TV is that their stuff wasn't made to be watched over and over and over again. Comedy shorts in the Era were second only to cartoons as "disposable content." You were never intended to watch any given film more than once -- or, in the event of the occasional reissue, twice. The first time you see any given Stooge film you might see something it that makes you laugh, if only out of respect for the precision that had to go into the movements, but the thirtieth time you see that same film the luster dims considerably, because there's no real characterization other than "mean dumb guy dominating two dumber guys." And if a good Stooge film is tiresome after thirty runs, imagine a bad one.

The Stooges aren't the most grating short-subject film comedians -- that award has to go to Clark and McCullough, stage comics who never got the hang of not actually being on a stage. But their films weren't run to death on local TV for fifty years, so seen today they might even seem fresh.

 

[Fading Fast]

I think one of the reasons the Stooges tend to get tiresome on TV is that their stuff wasn't made to be watched over and over and over again. Comedy shorts in the Era were second only to cartoons as "disposable content." You were never intended to watch any given film more than once -- or, in the event of the occasional reissue, twice. The first time you see any given Stooge film you might see something it that makes you laugh, if only out of respect for the precision that had to go into the movements, but the thirtieth time you see that same film the luster dims considerably, because there's no real characterization other than "mean dumb guy dominating two dumber guys." And if a good Stooge film is tiresome after thirty runs, imagine a bad one.

The Stooges aren't the most grating short-subject film comedians -- that award has to go to Clark and McCullough, stage comics who never got the hang of not actually being on a stage. But their films weren't run to death on local TV for fifty years, so seen today they might even seem fresh.

Haven't watched it all yet, but interesting to see the wind-blowing-up-the skirt gag well before it Marilyn's famous effort.

 

[MisterCairo]

Sock garters.

As vintage as they are, there is just no way anyone, and I mean anyone, can look at a man's lower leg with those on and think "Now THERE'S a look"!

 

[LizzieMaine]

Whenever I see, or think of, sock garters, the first and only image that comes to mind is "Dagwood Bumstead in his underwear." Process that as you will.

Meanwhile, yet another Anathema to me -- pretty much all mainstream American popular music of the immediate postwar era. I won't even get into the puerilities of the rock-era stuff, but the reason the rock era happened at all is because the popular music of the decade after WWII was almost entirely and universally awful. The shift away from jazz-oriented, instrumentally-driven to insipid vocally-driven popular music that began during the war gave way to an army of mediocre singers with no perceptiple personality whatsoever, singing the kinds of joyless, mechanically-churned-out songs that wouldn't have been used to patch a broken window pane in Tin Pan Alley in the days of the Great American Songbook. Like so much else to come out of the early postwar era, it was a completely and utterly soulless and disposable product. Eddie Fisher, Doris Day, Teresa Brewer, Johnny Ray, Julius La Rosa, Go Away.

One of my least-favorite radio jobs was the two years I spent at a "MOR Format" station that played 1946-54 popular music almost exclusively, using a syndicated music package called "The Entertainers." I wasn't entertained at all.