“A demure little eyeful, endowed her characterization with appeal and coquetry” is how the Los Angeles Times described the performance of a young singer in a musical comedy at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre in March of 1940.
Your long-running TV show is going off the air. What do you do?
There are a couple of inside jokes in What Makes Us Tick, a 1952 John Sutherland cartoon produced for the New York Stock Exchange.
Not only was Jack Benny’s death front page news, papers made space for sidebar stories, too. That’s how beloved Benny was to millions of people when he passed away December 26, 1974.
We can get a glimpse back at what the four main American networks were running on Christmas Day 80 years ago. The Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor a few weeks earlier, so several of the New York stations were now on the air all-night.
What was Jack Benny doing 50 years ago at Christmas time? Working, naturally.
Mel Blanc made probably the most remarkable physical comeback of anyone associated with the radio or cartoon industries.
TV workloads. Bob Hope. A new, old violin. Those were some of the topics Jack Benny discussed with syndicated columnist Earl Wilson, who made a trip out to Hollywood.
Frank Tashlin went from directing Tom and Jerry at the Van Beuren studio to directing Jerry Lewis and Jayne Mansfield, but he made some stops in between—including a couple involving stop-motion films.
There was a running gag in the mid to late ‘40s on the Jack Benny radio programme about Phil Harris and Dennis Day having two shows; both had their own sitcoms in addition to their weekly Benny appearances.
George Burns and Gracie Allen moved from vaudeville to radio to television fairly seamlessly.
