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The Life and Times of Colonel Stoopnagle: Part 3, Going It Alone |
In 1937, the unthinkable happened; Taylor and Hulick parted company. Neither man ever publicly discussed the
reasons, although it could be reasoned that Hulick grew weary of always playing
‘second banana’ to
"Col.
Stoopnagle is making the first of a series of scheduled lone appearances on the
[Rudy] Vallee program calculated eventually to build him up along the route
taken by Bob Burns, Charlie McCarthy and Joe Penner. The colonel's backers and advisers hope to
make Stoopnagle a staple character rather than the many-voice mimic he has been
in the past..."[1]
Further
broadening his exposure,
In
January of 1938, Stoopnagle and Italian news announcer Lisa Sergio were crowned
that year’s ‘King and Queen of Winter’ by Lowell Thomas at
“Leave it to Col. Stoopnagle to rescue a dying
duck and make it suitable for the king's taste.
The jovial
If the Colonel keeps up this pace until
the Allen return, Fred should find a tremendous following for "Town Hall
Tonight" when he takes charge again October 5...”[2]
“A
straw is stuff that you drink a soda through two of them.
A
clock is something they have in an office so you can tell how late you wish you
weren't in the morning, what time you go to lunch before and come back after,
and how long before you can start stopping work and begin to end the day's work
by stalling along until.
The
Pacific Ocean is what the
Afternoon
is what if you were out late last night, you'd better hurry or you won't be up
until.
A
fortnight is a thing that, in an English play, somebody hasn't seen Lord
Plushbottom in a, practically.
Gasoline
is stuff that if you don't use good in your car it won't run as well as if.
The
dickens are things that, in a new car, for the first 500 miles you shouldn't
drive like the.
Some
of this was completely lost on the average radio audience, while others
demanded more. Often he’d treat his
audiences to a fairy tale or fable told in spoonerism, a favorite routine he’d
return to over and over for the rest of his career. Perhaps one of the reasons for
"Whimsy is what I want to do more
than anything else, but I have to sort of sneak it in -- it's not
commercial. Generally, the sponsors
prefer jokes because they hit more people.
Whimsy may miss a lot of folks but those it strikes are highly amused
and remember it. People still write me
about bits of whimsy they heard on my program years ago."
Film
studio Astor Productions obviously saw marketability in
Astor Productions 10 minutes
Packed with wholesome, solid laughs, this
short is the first of a brand new series, well conceived and calculated to
spread mirth among even the most serious of pix fans. Basically, it employs satire as its principal
weapon, delineating common human-interest attributes in a most uncommon
way. Blazing new trails in humor, this
initial subject is the stuff audiences will invariably like, and the series,
featuring Colonel Stoopnagle, will, assuming that subsequently produced reels
keep to the standard of the inaugural one, gain rapid popularity. Colonel Stoopnagle is highly amusing via both
action and voice. The several sequences
were all swell gags, -- that of the telephone booth; the kid singer; the
senator; and particularly the rousing household hint footage. It's a "natural" for all pix
theaters and all strata of fans.
This is the second of the Colonel
Stoopnagle series of a total of 12 to be released by Astor Productions during
1938-39. Its content is highly humorous,
with the clownish Colonel giving a riotous "spiel" on camera
secrets. This is followed by a grand
sequence titled "Do you get proper exercise?"; an episode dealing
with an operatic star; "Polo Made Simple"; and a finale of the
Colonel on a roller coaster. Footage is
both funny and clever, and its only disappointing side is that it is not at
least twice as long. Laughs come in
rapid order from first to last.”[3]
In
1939
Stoopnagle: If you bought apples at two
cents each and sold them for a nickel, how would you still lose money?
Answer:
If I had a hole in my pants pocket.
Quixie Doodle proved to be one of
Also
in 1941,
Throughout
the 40’s,
“Wonder how many listeners recognized the
voice of F. Chase Taylor who pinched-hit for the vacationing Lowell Thomas on
WJZ last night. In case you didn’t, Mr.
Taylor was the portly
Following
his lengthy stint on the Quixie Doodles
program,
The
following year, in 1944,
“It’s too bad that no one ever called the
late James Joyce’s attention to Colonel Stoopnagle. For I’ll bet anything that the great Irish
writer would back up my opinion that this radio comedian and writer is a Great
Man.
“Which means, of course, that the Colonel
slays me. And that in his fine stream of
consciousness chatter and in his playing around with word origination, his only
peer is James Joyce -- or have you forgotten that word which stands for the
noise of thunder on page 1 of Finnegan’s Wake? (An admirer of Joyce, I mean this
seriously.)...”[5]
Fred
Allen, who wrote the foreward for
Another
book, Father Goosenagle (
Talk
began to circulate that there would be a revival of the Stoopnagle and Budd
program, without Budd Hulick. By this
time, his former partner had been off the air for a year, and
In
the meantime,
“CBS after much experimentation with Col.
Stoopnagle, following the chism of the team he formerly comprised with Budd
Hulick, has finally evolved upon a format for this funster which should, in due
time, place him back on the top rungs of the radio comedy ladder.
“The web has not stinted with the budget
nor with the talent in molding a new airline life for this veteran. He has been given some topflight material,
situations and support by writers Dave Schwartz and Peter Barry, and producer
Herb Polesie, one of the better ether pilots.
As a result, Col. Stoopnagle is a folksy guy giving advice and taking a
little himself -- sound programming audience-wise and, ere long, commercially
as well.
“Theme of this new show, heard at 10:30
p.m. Wednesday nights, is ‘How To Be Happy, Though People...”[7]
Things
began to happen for
“I was too far ahead of time with my
stuff...In a way, the comedy of Henry Morgan and Milton Berle is similar to
what I did fifteen to twenty years ago...My satires emphasized the light and
whimsical side, however. Then there were
the inventions and mixed up dialogue...The sponsors liked the stuff, at least
until their branch managers throughout the country started writing in wanting
to know what it was all about. Before
long I would be working for someone else.
It’s tough being a pioneer. There
are some nibbles from sponsors and if the public continues to show signs of
wanting more of the whimsy, I’ll be ready to go. I like to do it.”[8]
But
after his summer as star of The Colonel,
“We have nothing to fear. The country is in good hands when the young
folks today take over. Today is an age
of frankness. Frankness is a mark of
decent parents and decent kids. This is
a lot more wholesome than the taboos of 30 years ago.”[9]
In
1947,
Another
of
For
about a year, Polacheck recounts, he was busy directing outdoor and remote
sporting events and the like. But it
wasn’t long before CBS decided that television was indeed going to catch on,
and the network began planning popular programming. The network had its experimental television
production studio and offices located in a large, unused section of Grand
Central Station in 1948. One of the
first programs to reach serious production stage was a children’s show to
feature actor/dancer Buddy Ebsen telling stories to kids on his front porch, an
elaborate, costly set. The program was
to be broadcast for 15 minutes at five p.m., Monday through Friday. Charles Polacheck remembers that an executive
with the network had a "better idea," that the program should be
broadcast for an hour on Saturdays.
Ebsen, who suddenly realized that his 75 minutes of airtime per week was
being reduced to an hour, balked and abandoned the project. This left CBS with a very expensive piece of
scenery, Polacheck says, and nothing to do with it. But even after trying
another concept with comedy duo Mason and
CBS
executive Jerry Danzig approached Charles Polacheck with the offer to direct a
program to feature the porch and Colonel Stoopnagle. Polacheck was negative from the start,
advising
The
program, to be titled Colonel Stoopnagle’s
Stoop, would feature F. Chase Taylor using the same type of material he was
then currently using in his newspaper columns, "cobbled together"
into a script. Polacheck was still
dubious, thinking it an "awful idea."
And the biggest blow of all was that CBS was refusing to allow the
program to be performed before a studio audience. Still, Polacheck got along well with his
star, finding
A
‘demo’ was planned, whereby the program would be performed and ‘piped into’ the
front office for network executives to see.
Polacheck "went through the motions" of directing the
Colonel’s program, and when it was over slid the script into his back pocket
and walked directly from the control room into the executive office...where he
found the network’s big-wigs "still aching from laughter. They thought it was the funniest thing they’d
ever seen." Polacheck began to
wonder if he’d misjudged the whole thing.
That
following Monday night, Polacheck and Stoopnagle went through the program once
again. Only this time, it was broadcast
to the public. The new station manager
was present that night, and for several days was very cool toward the director. One day, he summoned Polacheck into his
office. Taking
"It
was the least funny comedy show I’ve ever seen," Polocheck remembers of Colonel Stoopnagle’s Stoop, 50 years later. He insists that Stoopnagle’s humor had been
best generated by his interplay with Budd, years before. The director, incidentally, moved over to the
Dumont Network where he became the first producer/director of the
groundbreaking science fiction show Captain
Video. He eventually ended up at NBC
where he was associated with, among other projects, the venerable soap opera The Edge of Night.
By
1949,
"The trick introduction flashes
Godfrey himself on screen giving the pitch for his talent display and
crusade. Then the celluloid Godfrey and
Stoopnagle in person have a spot of dialog.
The screen isn't all that answers back to the colonel. He reads letters that give him back-talk,
commits Spoonerisms (a kind of back-talk) and puns outrageously. Example: referring to two girls, "You
can't have your Kay and Edith, too!"
Indeed,
with television about to become a force to be reckoned with, one can but wonder
what role
In
May of 1950,
“Tonight the world of fun and laughs is
bidding farewell to Colonel Lemuel Q. Stoopnagle. Today, in
And
the Hartford Courant ran the
following tribute, which sums up
“Colonel Lemuel Q. Stoopnagle is
dead. And so, at fifty-two, is Frederick
Chase Taylor, the former business man and broker who created radio’s well-known
nonsense-peddler. Like Charlie McCarthy,
Colonel Stoopnagle promptly eclipsed his creator, and began to live a mad life
of his own.
“On and off for 20 years the Stoopnagle
personality produced confusion, surprise, and sometimes sheer delight as it
cavorted over the airwaves...
“Yet, if Colonel Stoopnagle dealt in
nonsense as a commodity, he offered his appreciative public more than
that. His humor was never contrived at
anyone else’s expense, and in its wild fits and starts it was always
unmistakably his own. He was more than a
comedian, as the term has come to be used in our age of assembly-line humor. He was a satirist. He derived great amusement, which he passed
on to others, from the foibles of mankind.
“...The mad inventor was not the man of
the century. He didn’t even have a major
influence on his times. But he did find
an inexhaustible source of humor in the commonplace, and he made countless listeners
laugh without anyone’s being hurt by it.
That in itself is a worthy epitaph.”
[1] Reed, Rod.
[2]
[3]
The
Film Daily, 6 September 1938.
[4]
[5] Zwart, Elizabeth Clarkson. “Col. Stoopnagle Persuades Reviewer That He
Is a Great
[6] Hulick continued working within the entertainment industry, and died in Florida on March 22, 1961 at age 55.
[7] ‘Sten.’
Variety, date unknown.
[8] “The Whimsy He Introduced On Air Is
Catching On Again.”
New York Times, 1947.
[9] Himle, Norman. “Stoopnagle Grilled Here.”
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Page created November 13, 2006. Copyright 1998-2005 by Richard D. Squires. |