No, the Third Banana isn't dead...

...but it's not feeling at all well. I'm short on time, especially in the wake of Hurricane Ike, and worse, my DVD player has fried itself which is putting the kibosh on new video content (sorry Geoff). Until I can scrape together the cash for a new DVD player, I'd like to draw your attention to some of the new Third Banana-y content now available at archive.org.



Lady of Burlesque (1943). Nothing against Pinky's 50s kidvid, but he's much more fun when playing to adults. He even gets the fade-out here. I can remember when I was willing to shell out good money for a crappy VHS copy of this film just so I could watch Pinky Lee in his burlesque prime and now here it is FREE on the internet. You kids today have it soooo easy.



Poor Daddy (1929). How's this for a rarity; a 1929 silent Chinese comedy feature. Poor Daddy is actually more of a melodrama than a proper comedy. Pretty fascinating but don't expect belly laughs. English and Chinese intertitles.



King Kelly of the USA (1934). In its original incarnation with Trem Carr at the helm, Monogram was easily Hollywood's most daring Poverty Row studio, producing mid-budget adaptations of literary classics such as Jane Eyre and Oliver Twist and slick crowd-pleasing dramas like The Avenger. King Kelly of the USA is probably Monogram's comedy masterpiece and, with its expansive sets, large cast, and clever script, could easily pass as an RKO or Paramount product. The giveaway is that Monogram's stars are the other studios' second-stringers, skilled stalwarts like Edgar Kennedy, Ferdinand Gottschalk, and Franklin Pangborn. A nice fit with other "crazy kingdom" movies of the early 30s (and it seems like Edgar Kennedy is in almost all of them). Probably unique for Monogram, King Kelly also boasts a brief animated sequence (around 20 minutes in) and if limited made-for-TV animation existed in 1934, this is precisely what it would look like. Anyone know who's responsible?

Yoo-Hoo! It's Me!!

Sure.. I like thoughtful, understated comedy as much as the next guy, but I reserve a special place in my heart for comics like Pinky Lee. Was there ever a harder working entertainer? He wasn't exactly clever, nor was he original, but he was completely genuine. Even the lisp was his own, albeit exaggerated for effect. He was a cyclone, more hyperkinetic than Jerry Lewis, yet still amazingly controlled thanks to loads of talent and decades of experience in burlesque. Kids loved him, adults reviled him. Milton Berle spitefully quipped at a star-studded dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria that "if a bomb hit this joint, Pinky Lee would be a big hit", an odd comment considering that Pinky was a big hit at the time, with kids, at least, and Pinky seemed quite content with that.

Pinky Lee's Circus Time, aka The Pinky Lee Show (1954)

The legend persists that Pinky's uncanny gusto finally caught up with him, resulting in an on-air stroke. Not true, of course, but his tireless show-must-go-on attitude did cause him to ignore a nasal drip that was gradually poisoning him. In 1955, as a result of the infection, Pinky collapsed on live TV during one of his songs, an unimaginably shocking sight for millions of his young fans. His schedule of six shows a week plus personal appearances couldn't have helped his condition much. As a result of his collapse and absence from the air as he recuperated, the story arose that Pinky had died. The networks apparently felt that he might as well have. In their books, Pinky had become a Grade A "risk". In 1957, NBC pressed Pinky into service as the host of The Gumby Show.. for a fraction of what he had been earning before (Pinky claimed a take-home pay of approximately $34 a week). It was a smaller, more intimate program, and Pinky reasonably scaled back his style, but only by degrees. In this final episode of The Gumby Show, Pinky plays the xylophone, sings, tap dances, and is still giving every bit of business 200%. A professional to the end.



And that was more or less the end for Pinky Lee on TV. In 1965, he starred in a weekday revival of The Pinky Lee Show on ABC, but the 7:30 AM timeslot doomed it to a short run. Pinky also complained that he had no creative control, although it must have been becoming increasingly difficult to determine exactly who he was trying to reach even if the show had been ideal. It was now a decade since his heyday. The curtain was coming down fast, not just on Pinky, but on the entire breed of performer that he exemplified. He had survived longer than most because he had taken refuge in children's television where his style could still be appreciated for what it was, but now even that was changing beyond recognition. I can barely imagine a still-popular Pinky Lee on TV in the latter-half of the 60s, doing stock gags about hippies and rock n' roll, but I'm just as sure that he'd have given it the same old 200% had he the opportunity. But when it was over, it was over.

22 minutes and 54 seconds of Tootsie Roll commercials from The Pinky Lee Show and Winchell-Mahoney Time.

Pinky Lee appeals to the least jaded part of me, the part that can still enjoy terrible puns and the sight of a man playing the xylophone while tap dancing. Say what you will about him and his over-the-top style, the guy was the real thing, something his postmodern progeny Paul "Pee-Wee" Reubens certainly wasn't (nothing against Paul Reubens, mind you. He wasn't Pee-Wee and it was the cognitive dissonance in the wake of the scandal that wrecked his career as a pseudo-children's entertainer). I find something deeply disturbing in the idea that a Pinky Lee couldn't survive a second on today's network or cable TV without adopting the requisite degree of pre-packaged, thoroughly dishonest cynicism that has become de rigueur even for children's entertainment. Have we really gone too far down the road? In an age where snark passes for wit and unthinking skeptical posturing has supplanted genuine critical thought, an entertainer as skilled, as driven, and as basic as Pinky Lee would be a breath of fresh air.. to me, anyway.

Comedy wirelessness

"Funny new show"? Well, one out of three isn't a total loss. Jack "Baron Munchausen" Pearl's 1936-7 series for Raleigh-Kool was, indeed, a show. Ah, I shouldn't be so cruel. This was Pearl's final attempt to retain what little popularity he had left after his 1932-3 pinnacle for Lucky Strike, and it does have its moments. Pearl would work steadily in radio for the next 18 years, but it was all downhill after this. Including the "Vas you dere Sharlie?" tag in the ad was akin to saying "More of the same!", a mistake considering that audiences were not only tired of Pearl's limited bag of tricks, they were about ready to toss over "vaudeville"-style radio and its requisite catchphrase comedy altogether. Pearl's Raleigh-Kool series would last until June 25, 1937 and would be handed over to Tommy Dorsey entirely after Pearl and straightman Cliff Hall, were kicked to the curb. In my humble opinion, Pearl stands as one of the greatest cases of wasted talent in the history of American comedy; probably the finest dialect comic of his time undone by a neurotic adherence to a tired formula that he believed to be the "key" to his success. Pearl desperately needed management he never received. He was doing his Munchausen shtick to the end, closing out his radio career with a quiz show entitled The Baron and the Bee in 1953-4. You can hear a 1937 episode of Pearl's Raleigh-Kool Program for free here courtesy otr-cat.com. Cliff Hall reminds me of a proto-Bud Abbott.

Click thumbnail. No, not that one!
The one on the screen, you fool!

And for your further enjoyment and edification, here is the entirety of the page that ad was culled from. Radio Guide was, of course, the forerunner of TV Guide, and what treasure troves of information these old magazines are, especially for classic comedy obscureologists such as myself! For instance, if it weren't for this particular issue of Radio Guide (week ending Dec 26, 1936), I would never have known that burlesque comic and future kidvid host Pinky Lee was the star comic of Joe Rines' Dress Rehearsal (Sundays at 11:30 AM), thus finally explaining this radio-themed publicity photo of Pinky I found on Ebay a few years ago. What other blog brings you fascinating information like that? Hah?? Damn straight!

The Sins of Pinky Lee

click on the thumbnails for the full-sized images, you filthy degenerates!

I found this two-page spread about burlesque comic and kidvid host Pinky Lee in the Jan-Feb, 1952 issue of Hit! magazine. Hit! was one of those proto-Playboy magazines or the late 40s and early 50s that featured goofy double-entendres, poorly drawn cartoons, and dozens of dowdy looking women in baggy bikinis, all presumably extremely arousing to your average 1950s blue collar joe. What I find fascinating about this spread is that it demonstrates how Pinky was able to effectively balance his careers as burlesque top banana extraordinaire and Ultimate Kiddie TV Host without raising the ire of Mom or the censors. As the Pete Smith-style captions illustrate, Pinky, he of the permanent and pronounced lithp, was promoted as something of a naive man-child in the mold of Stan Laurel and Harry Langdon, just too damn innocent to really know what it's all about. This contrast between innocent naif and pulchritudinous damsels is what made Pinky Lee's burlesque career click and, although the irony was lost entirely when he became a children's entertainer, Pinky was, no matter what the setting, a safe and squeaky clean comic. kiddierecords.com has a fun Pinky Lee 78, Inkas the Ramferinkas, available that'll give you a good impression of the little goon's vocal style. Physically, he was a dynamo, a comic who literally knocked himself out to entertain. Be sure to check him out in the otherwise awful Lady Of Burlesque (1943) starring Barbara Stanwyck.

"Fiddle Faddle Foo"

Bill Sherman has posted an insightful review of Bert Wheeler’s first post-Woolsey feature, Cowboy Quarterback (1939), on his blog. The film sounds quite uniquely horrible, plot-heavy and cheap, with Wheeler playing against type as an idiot bumpkin. Poor Bert apparently didn’t know what to do with himself after Woolsey’s death in 1938 and neither, it seems, did the studios. He had done extremely well as a solo act for years before finally teaming with Woolsey in Rio Rita in 1929, but a decade later he was on the way out, still young and energetic but not particularly in demand. He could have coasted for perhaps another six years at RKO had Woolsey lived, but his decline was underway before his partner’s death. RKO’s attempts to keep pace with changing trends in comedy, as well as the overall rising fortunes of the studio, meant a subsequent decline in the quality of Bert and Bob’s features, and by 1938’s unfortunate High Flyers, they were clearly relegated to B status. Woolsey’s death was a convenient opportunity for the studio to cut Bert loose, but Bert almost literally had nowhere to go.. in movies, at least. He followed Cowboy Quarterback with Las Vegas Nights (1941), remembered primarily as Frank Sinatra's unbilled screen debut. Las Vegas Nights has a good reputation but it was Bert’s final feature just the same. He resurfaced in 1950 at Columbia in one of Jules White’s horrible assembly-line comedies, Innocently Guilty, a remake (like every Columbia short in 1950) of a previous Columbia short, Charley Chase’s The Big Squirt (1937). At the age of 55, Bert Wheeler looks uncomfortable going through the standard Columbia knockabaout. It’s unpleasant, to say the least.

And be sure to visit kiddierecords.com this week to download The Noisy Eater (week 46), a bizarre children’s record Jerry Lewis recorded for Capitol’s Bozo series. Lewis plays a kid whose parents throw him out of the house for being a sloppy at the dinner table (talk about your tough love). Cast out into the cruel world, Jerry only ends up offending other potential surrogate families with his poor table manners. Happily for Jerry, dinner with “a fat man and his skinny wife” (the Fat Man sounds a hell of a lot like Billy Bletcher), both cursed with table manners as poor as Jerry’s, convinces him to turn his life around and return home. His parents, either out of guilt or as a bribe, give Jerry five bucks, which of course in those days was like a million dollars. The Noisy Eater is one of four Bozo records featured this week, the others being Bugs Bunny and Aladdin’s Lamp (with Mel Blanc), Walt Disney’s Rob Roy, and a hilariously condensed version of George Pal’s Destination Moon (with June Foray, beyond a doubt). Kiddierecords.com is one of the internet’s true pop treasures, and some of the records they’ll be featuring in December look especially good; A Christmas Carol with Ronald Colman, Howdy Doody’s Christmas Party, and best of all, Pinky Lee Tells the Story of Inkas the Ramferinkas!