The Golden Age of Radio: June 26, 2015

Max Schmid's The Golden Age of Radio (WBAI, 99.5, 7-9 PM Sundays) this Sunday was a fund-raiser, but also had time for tributes to Peg Lynch, who died on July 24, and two important radio personalities who were born on July 26:  Gracie Allen (1895) and Jean Shepard ((1921).  WBAI does not have underwriters or corporate sponsors of any kind, raising money exclusively from their listeners.

Peg Lynch is sometimes credited with inventing the sitcom, by now a rather decadent format.  But her show, Ethel and Albert (it ran from 1944 to 1950) was not about nothing, but rather about  how important and symbolic even the smallest things can be.  Schmid played a later version of the show, The Couple Next Door, from 1957, script by Lynch (she wrote all her shows) in which the car keys are lost in the snow and then when they are found there is no car:  it had been brought in for repairs and no one had bothered to pick it up. As John Dunning wrote in The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio (Oxford University Press,1998), "Entire episodes could be consumed with the principles standing at the kitchen sink, talking and doing the dishes." and the humor came from the interplay of the stars, Lynch and Alan Bunce, not from glib one-liners.

Then from Schmid, came George and Gracie, from 1940, in which George Burns tries to talk Gracie out of running for President (the symbol of her "Surprise Party" was going to be a kangaroo with a baby in its pouch, the slogan "it's in the bag.").  Burns and Allen had brought their vaudeville act to radio and even the addition of numerous bit players and singers did not keep the act from becoming rather tired, though Gracie, in the brilliant manner of Stepin Fetchit, used her daffy persona to deploy her underlying intelligence. 

I first encountered Jean Shepherd in Playboy, which ran his amusing stories on a regular basis when I was an adolescent.  Then when I came to New York for college I started to listen to his monologues on WOR, until he went off the air in 1977, coming on WBAI in the 90's to read his stories.  Many of these monologues are quite dated, though they are fascinating artifacts of the 60's and 70's.  But when he concentrated on stories of his childhood I find his monologues funny and moving, whether they actually happened or not (irrelevant, just as with Knausgaard's stories).  This Sunday Schmid played a program from July 15, 1966, in which Shep rides for the first time on the roller-coaster called, for some reason nobody knows, "The Bobs," in River View amusement park, with a wonderful evocation of the combination of bravado and fear felt by a teen-ager.

Scooby-Doo

The other animated show my daughter (who will be four in September) likes is Scooby-Doo.  The Boomerang channel shows two versions of this show, both from Hanna-Barbera, Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! (1969-86) and What's New, Scooby Doo? (2002-2006).  There is little difference between the shows except that in the later version there are cell phones and laptops and more (insipid) songs.  The plots of the shows -- or should I say the plot, since they are all the same and as rigid as a Noh drama (to which there are actually similarities, including humans masquerading as ghosts) --are how a bunch of kids exposes monsters who turn out to be crooks trying to scare people off so they can cash in one way or another. When the culprit or culprits are exposed they always blame "those meddling kids."  Fred, Velma, Daphne and Shaggy, with their dog Scooby-Doo always run from the monster until they figure out how to trap and expose him (or, less often, her).  I think what appeals to children about this show is the helpful and intelligent dog, who can "talk" to a limited extent, and the fact that a group of kids are not too scared to solve a mystery that baffles adults.  The group consists of the beatnik Shaggy, the all-American Fred, the glamorous Daphne and the nerd Velma, who is always losing her glasses.  In other words, most kids can identify with one or more of these characters.

The animation in these shows, like others from Hanna-Barbera, is cheap and crummy.  It is done by a process called limited animation, which means very limited and repetitious movement:  a good portion of each show consists of the same shots of the lead characters running to or from something, matted against slightly changing backgrounds,  Obviously most kids don't care much about the quality of the animation; my daughter loves to see which supernatural phenomenon the gang is going, in their van call The Mystery Machine, to solve.  The monsters are only moderately scary and I think my daughter always feel reassured that the kids will solve the mystery and the bad guys will be exposed, i.e, there is order and justice in the world.