“There was this Tasmanian Devil of mine,” director Bob McKimson once recalled. “The executive at the studio, Ed Selzer, said to stop making them, that this character was too obnoxious. So after two of them I stopped. Then one day, Jack Warner called him in and demanded, “What happened to the Tasmanian Devil?”
Maybe a half-dozen radio comedians could be guaranteed to be found hovering in the top ten of the ratings during much of the Golden Age, especially in the ‘40s. Several of them became institutions as the decades churned on, including one man who never really had a regular show on television.
Fans of old radio know all about the Benny-Allen feud. But what about the Benny-Benny feud?
Producer George Schlatter and comedians Dan Rowan and Dick Martin combined to put Laugh-In on the air. After a rather unpleasant split, both sides tried to recreate it. And not very successfully.
It’s a comforting sight to tourists and local residents alike, standing firm at 8218 Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood.
The name Suspense conjures up images of radio of the 1940s. But there’s one Suspense broadcast of September 1949 that conjures up images of 1970s sitcom television.
These days, the internet seems full of people who are prepared to tell you who animated what in old cartoons.
The question for Jack Benny in the late 1940s was—when are you getting into television? More and more stations were signing on and, crucially, more and more sponsor money was taken from radio budgets and dumped into the far-more-expensive visual medium.
In an increasingly corporate, HR-department world, maybe the practical joke has become a thing of a past.
J. Edward McKinley popped up everywhere on 1960s comedy shows as kind of an impatient businessman. It seems that’s how he began his acting career.
Allied troops around the globe took a brief break from World War Two by enjoying one of the top comedians of their time in front of them on stage.
Tennessee Tuxedo and His Tales was one the first made-for-Saturday-morning cartoon series, but unlike the old theatricals and refugees from other time slots, they weren’t altogether entertainment cartoons.
