I shot an Arrow into the air

I finished watching the fourth and final serial in what I could refer to as “the Horne of Plenty,” provided I was given to atrocious puns.  (As it turns out, I am—so there you go.)  It’s The Green Archer (1940), a rousing fifteen-chapter romp that might well be the yardstick on how to measure a cliffhangers fan’s tolerance for James W. (this one is frequently cited for heresy because in one chapter, some of the henchmen while away their idle hours playing tiddlywinks) Horne.  Major confession time: I enjoyed Archer more than the other three serials I’ve watched over the last several days, simply because it aims for something different (eschewing the typical “mad-genius-taking-over-the-world” plots of many cliffhangers) and because of its “everything-but-the-kitchen-sink” approach (hidden rooms, passageways, secret identities, fistfights, gunplay, poison gas, plot twists, etc.).

Although The Green Archer is based on the famed mystery novel by Edgar Wallace (and was in fact filmed previously as a silent chapter-play in 1925) it bears only a passing similarity to the novelist’s work.  The 1940 serial tells the tale of egomaniacal villain Abel Bellamy (James Craven), a twisted genius who frames his brother Michael (Kenne Duncan) for a crime Mike did not commit, thereby gaining control of Garr Castle, the ancestral home of the Bellamy clan.  Abel has put the smackdown on the castle—previously a thriving tourist attraction—because he’s using the edifice as his headquarters for a major criminal empire (and I do mean major—he’s got enough henchman for three Republic serials), and when Michael’s wife Elaine (Dorothy Fay) comes a-snooping around looking for evidence to clear her spouse, Abel locks her in a secret room and holds her captive.  Two houses down, Elaine’s father Parker Howett (Forrest Taylor) and sister Valerie (Iris Meredith) set up light housekeeping, along with Michael’s bosom chum Spike Holland (Victor Jory), an insurance investigator convinced that Abel is not the paragon of virtue he seems to be.  Whenever Spike, Valerie or any of the other good guys find themselves in peril, they can count on the masked hero The Green Archer to bail them out of a tight spot; said Archer being the legendary but mysterious do-gooder who protects the Bellamy family in times of crisis.

Once again, actor Jory serves out his serial sentence with stoic dignity and grace; a lesser thespian might be tempted to gag it up in the role of the hero, but Vic takes on his assignment as if it were written by the Immortal Bard himself.  No, the honors for scenery chewing go to Columbia’s number-one serial baddie James Craven, who avails himself to several helpings of scenery du jour like a hungry fat man at Golden Corral.  Craven’s Bellamy is apoplectic with frustration over the idiocy of the men in his employ—though in all honesty, Team Black Tiger of The Shadow fame make Bellamy’s henchmen look like Rhodes scholars.  No one did villainous rage like Craven, who could be wonderfully over-the-top in vehicles like Captain Midnight (as Ivan Shark) but for some reason seemed a bit subdued outside the studio (he’s the alter ego of the Purple Monster in Republic’s The Purple Monster Strikes…and a bit of a nebbish in the part).  Another performance I enjoy in Archer is our old pal Jack Ingram, who plays a hood named “Brad” (Brad?) in Bellamy’s employ disguised as The Green Archer…only he keeps getting mistaken for the real Green Archer, and frequently takes a pummeling from the other goons working for boss Bellamy (a thug named “Dinky” in particular).

Archer also has some really eye-popping chapter endings.  Among the perils Jory’s character faces: a room rapidly filling with water, another room with a spike-covered ceiling, and my particular favorite, a room that loses its floorboards one at a time to reveal a raging inferno below.

There’s just something irresistibly goofy about Columbia serials: I love how the fistfights do away with all that choreographed nonsense prevalent in Republic’s output and end up just being unorganized donnybrooks with fists flying and the sound effects making smacking sounds regardless whether a stuntman has hit his mark or not.  The heroes of Columbia cliffhangers also seem to be able to take on six to eight guys in one of these melees, and are only knocked out when (this is always shown in close up) one of the goons hits the hero with a heavy object (sap, gun butt, potted plant, etc.)  If I have any nitpicks with Archer, it’s that once again it suffers from the elephantiasis that is a Columbia chapter-play and should have been trimmed to twelve chapters before rolling off the assembly line.  (Oh, that and the fact that I figured out who the Archer was in the first chapter.)  Though my serial mentor Laughing Gravy doesn’t care for Archer, I enjoyed every cotton-pickin’ insane minute of it—and if you’re capable of allowing a little levity creep into your choice of serials, I think you will, too.

“…as haunting to superstitious minds as a ghost…as inevitable as a guilty conscience…”

There are going to be a good many Shadow fans that will react to the James W. Horne serial The Shadow (1940) like an allergic-to-strawberries-rash…but since this is my blog, I’m here to tell you I’m not one of them.  I personally think, after watching all fifteen chapters, that Shadow is one of the best Columbia cliffhangers I’ve seen (keep in mind that I have oodles and oodles of their serial product to go through) even though it’s derived more from the pulp stories than the radio show (for instance, the Shadow can’t cloud men’s minds to make himself invisible…but the villain of the piece can with a narrow beam of light)…and to be completely honest, the plot is straight out of The Spider’s Web (1938).

You have a metropolis menaced by a mysterious, masked villain called the Black Tiger (in Web, it’s the Octopus) who seeks to take over all of the city’s industries by terrorizing its powers-that-be.  The hero is a scientist/criminologist whose secret identity as The Shadow (in Web, it’s the Spider) gets him in Dutch with both the authorities (who suspect that he and the Black Tiger are one and the same) and the underworld.  Naturally, to keep tabs on the underworld he must don another disguise (in Web, it’s Blinky McQuade): that of Lin Chang, an Asian antiquities dealer.  (Let me just say that those of you horrified by Sidney Toler or Peter Lorre’s performances as Asians need to take a gander at star Victor Jory’s Lin Chang—a character that makes Charlie Chan and Mr. Moto the very picture of political correctness.)  He is assisted by his confederates, Margo Lane (played by Veda Ann Borg…who I actually like in this part, even though I usually associate Borg with floozy roles) and Harry Vincent, Cranston’s wheel-man (played by Roger Moore…and not the one you’re thinking of).  If I had to nitpick, I wished someone had eliminated the Vincent character—popular in the pulp stories—and substituted Moe “Shreevy” Shrevnitz instead.  (“You was wantin’ somethin’, Mr. Cranston, you was wantin’?”)

However, the major difference between Web and Shadow is that the latter refuses to take itself too seriously—the goons working for the Black Tiger are among the most inept henchmen in serial history, which provides some wonderfully comic moments; my favorite is in Chapter 9—“The Devil in White”—when the Tiger’s chief henchman, Flint (played by TDOY fave Jack Ingram) tells his fellow thugs: “Now listen, men…we’ve got to do something—he’s really gettin’ mad!”  (I know it doesn’t play funny in print, but Ingram’s performance has a sort of “Will you guys stop pissing around?” quality to it.)  Much has also been said about the uninventiveness of the cliffhangers, a goodly portion of which consist of the ceiling falling down on Cranston/Shadow at each episode’s end.  Sure, this is undeniably funny and off-putting to those who shun comedy in serials…but I like how these events act as violent comic punch lines, similar to Wile E. Coyote tumbling off a cliff or Daffy Duck getting his face shot off by Elmer Fudd.  By contrast, the thugs in the Spider serials (well, Web, anyway) are pretty ruthless customers, despite the fact that they can’t seem to hit the broadside of a barn.  (The speculation on this is that the serial’s producers were ordered to downplay the violence as a result of rulings by the Hays Office.)

But the strengths of Shadow are many, chiefly Jory’s performance in the title role.  (He not only has a great voice, he can do the Shadow's laugh...which is more than Orson Welles could ever do.)  Jory was apparently banished to this serial by the studio for some slight or troublemaking he caused, and it’s a shame that Columbia didn’t punish him more often because he really grabs hold of the role and refuses the temptation to do shtick with it (he reminds me a bit of Basil Rathbone, who would have been the ideal choice to play the Shadow though that would in all likelihood not have happened).  I also like the serial’s brisk pacing; despite its fifteenth-chapter length it never gets boring (this might be due to the fact that director Horne would often direct scenes of people running or driving in slightly sped-up fashion…or as Laughing Gravy so memorable put it, “People moving as if their asses were on fire”)—and the effective atmospheric backdrop of a city under siege by sinister forces is grade-A. Though the identity of the villain is pretty easy to dope out, the ride there is nothing short of entertaining.

Along came a Spider

For the next few days, I’m going to be jotting down random thoughts about some of the cliffhanger gems in the oeuvre of James W. Horne, the veteran comedy director and prolific serial helmsman whose work has frequently created tendentious dissension among chapter-play fans.  Fortunately, Horne’s first assignment (which he co-directed with Ray Taylor…who presumably kept Jimmy’s excesses in check)—The Spider’s Web (1938), a serial based on the popular pulp magazine hero—is generally received with favor by those both pro- and anti-Horne…not only it is considered his best cliffhanger but it is also in contention for the best serial to come out of Columbia’s stables, a studio that tried like Avis but unfortunately churned out some embarrassing (and not only that, boring) stinkers.

Future Strike It Rich host Warren Hull (who also starred in serials as the Green Hornet and Mandrake the Magician) plays Richard Wentworth, a master criminologist/scientist who agrees to help a frustrated police force (presided over by Commissioner Kirk, played by Forbes Murray) capture the Octopus, a mysterious masked villain heck-bent on destroying the industrial infrastructure of an unnamed but big honkin’ metropolitan city in a desperately insane bid for raw, unchecked power.  (Sort of like Dick Cheney…but warmer.)  Assisting Wentworth are fiancée Nita Van Sloan (played by Columbia’s “Queen of Serials,” Iris Meredith), chauffeur Jackson (Richard Fiske, the poor sap driven to distraction by the Three Stooges in their 1940 two-reeler Boobs in Arms), a butler named Jenkins (Donald Douglas), and Ram Singh (Kenne Duncan), a turban-wearing “warrior” adept at knife-throwing but for most of the serial’s running time spouts cryptic proverbs and calls everyone “Sahib.”

Wentworth’s gang are in the serial (granted, they do on occasion pull his fat out of the fire in tight moments) primarily because they’re carryovers from the pulp stories but for the most part the criminologist does all right for himself with two secret identities.  The first is costumed hero The Spider, who not only strikes terror into the hearts of evildoers but is mistrusted by the forces of law and order, who are convinced that not only is he working against them but that he may, in fact, be the Octopus his own self.  Because “The Spider” is not particularly chummy with the criminal element, Wentworth must don a third disguise as two-bit lowlife Blinky McQuade, who nevertheless is a pal to any other losers he encounters.

The Spider’s Web is undeniably a rip-snortin’, slam-bang actioner, filled with impressive stunts (and the fight sequences aren’t too shabby, either) and a suspenseful plot that features great cliffhangers…that are, unfortunately, spoiled due to Columbia’s unfortunate habit of “telegraphing” future events with their ill-advised codas at the end of each chapter.  The performances are also good, particularly Hull and Meredith’s—it’s a shame that Meredith’s services couldn’t be retained for the 1941 sequel, The Spider Returns; actress Mary Ainslee takes on the Sloan role, and though I suppose you could argue that the fact that Nita has been waiting three years to march Richard down the aisle for the rice-and-old-shoes routine—with precious little success—it still doesn’t excuse Ainslee’s often irritating approach to the part (she’s a bit of a detriment, to tell the truth).  Hull and Duncan returned to reprise their roles (though Duncan’s Ram Singh really gets shunted to the background in Returns), with serial vet Joe Girard (the geriatric Major Steel in Captain Midnight) as Kirk and Pete Smith Specialties star Dave O’Brien (Captain Midnight himself) as Jackson the wheel-man.  (I like O’Brien’s approach to his role; it’s not entirely winking-at-the-audience but he doesn’t skimp on the tongue-in-cheek either.)  This time, the Spider takes on the Gargoyle (a better villain than the Octopus, in my opinion—though his identity is fairly obvious), a meanie who’s out to put a monkey wrench in the burgeoning defense industry (even though we’re technically not in the war yet, there’s still a ton of propaganda in this baby).  In all honesty, I thought Returns was every bit as good as Web, but there are scores of people who disagree with me.  There’s a scene in Chapter 6 (“The X-Ray Eye”) in which the Gargoyle spies on his henchmen…only to learn that they’re throwing a little office party, complete with drinks and floozies.  (One Serial Squadron member told me he and a friend fell on the floor laughing at this.)  Hey, when your head goon is played by Anthony Warde—the hardest working henchman in the serial business—shouldn’t he be entitled to a little R-and-R every now and then?  If you prefer your serials with a much smaller laugh quotient, then Returns will definitely not be your particular meat.

“We’ve been tricked by cleverness!”

Laughing Gravy, who tears the tickets in half at the must-read classic films website In the Balcony, has alerted his loyal readers to a pair of cliffhangers available on DVD and currently being offered sporadically on eBay by a company calling itself Restored Serials.  Both of these serials are widely available from other dealers, but the Restored Serials versions feature slightly superior prints of two fan favorites: The Spider Returns (1941) and The Adventures of Sir Galahad (1949).

Returns is a sequel to The Spider’s Web, a 1938 chapter-play considered by many serial fans to be the best that Columbia Studios offered.  It was directed by James W. Horne, a man whose name is anathema to about fifty percent of serial aficionados…and a godsend to the other half.  Horne’s experience as a veteran comedy director (among his resume you’ll find Laurel & Hardy’s The Bohemian Girl and Way Out West) had a tendency to drift into his cliffhanger productions, often devising bits of intentional comedy that die-hard serial fans have denounced as the work of the Devil.  (In my opinion—and I stress that this is my opinion only—comedy can only help a serial.  Horne directed Captain Midnight, one of my favorite entries among Columbia’s prolific serial output.)  One member of the Serial Squadron, who vehemently disagrees with my comedy cliffhanger thesis, nevertheless told me in a chat session last night that if I continue to cling to my theory I will positively adore The Spider Returns.  Despite our disagreement, I value his judgment and am looking forward to seeing it.

Galahad is pretty much what the title implies; a romp with the famed Knight of the Round Table (played by future Superman George Reeves) and his quest to recover the sword known as Excalibur.  It has its detractors and defenders and while I haven’t viewed it yet, any serial that attempts to do something different always gets a vote of confidence from me (though Who’s Guilty almost put the kibosh on that).  Hopefully I’ll get a chance to slip it into the DVD player soon, but this evening I turned my attention to another serial purchased from Restored Serials, Republic’s The Crimson Ghost (1946).

Republic Studios’ reputation as the go-to guy for cliffhangers is, of course, legendary among serial fans—though I’ll risk blasphemy here and state that while some truly fine chapter-plays were cranked out from the “Thrill Factory,” some of them were so bad they made Columbia and Universal’s product look like masterpieces.  Many of the post-war Republics are like this; you can find a nugget among the dross but you have to look mighty hard.  Well, look no further than Ghost—an engaging little vehicle that moves at breakneck speed with energetic stunts and unique chapter endings to compliment its first-rate cast and script.

Professor Chambers (Kenne Duncan) is a scientific genius who’s developed a device known as the Cyclotrode, designed to detect and repel atomic-bomb attacks which he intends to use for niceness instead of evil.  Unfortunately, a costumed villain known as The Crimson Ghost has other designs on Chambers’ toy, and he kidnaps the good professor, placing him under his power by placing a “control collar” around his neck that will make the scientist bend to his will.  (It also repels fleas and ticks for up to three months…but as far as heartworms go, he’s on his own.)  Chambers’ protégé, scientist and criminologist Duncan Richards (Charles Quigley), has his hands full over twelve chapters trying to stop the Ghost’s diabolical scheme, his identity unknown but is suspected to be one of four professors at a nearby university to whom Richard reports in each chapter.  Dunky is also assisted by his lovely assistant, Diana Farnsworth—played by none other than Linda Stirling, a.k.a. “Queen of the Serials.”

The mystery element of Ghost—who is the person behind this costumed creep?—is one of the things that makes the serial so entertaining; Republic cleverly concealed the villain’s identity by having the Ghost played by a stuntman (Bud Geary) and voiced by several actors—one of which is I. Stanford Jolley, who receives fourth billing even though he has a tiny role as a man posing as a government-appointed psychiatrist.  The plot is also top-notch, Quigley is a likable (if slightly stiff) hero, and Stirling is always lovely to look at…though I prefer to watch her in cliffhangers in which she has more to do, like Zorro’s Black Whip (1944) and The Tiger Woman (1944).  I like how the serial’s plot contains a few interesting twists: one of the major characters snuffs it in the third chapter, and there’s a nail-biting sequence where Quigley attempts an operation on Stirling to remove a “control collar” bestowed upon her by the villainous Ghost.  (Previous attempts to remove these collars ultimately result in the deaths of the unfortunates.)  There are also some first-rate cliffhangers (my favorite is in Chapter 10, “The Trap That Failed,” in which a truck containing Stirling and one of the professors crashes through a wall of a warehouse and off the pier to the water below—I saw the warehouse and just assumed that the Brothers Lydecker would end up blowing it to smithereens) and slam-bang action sequences (Quigley’s stunt double steps off a wall in order to leap upon his opponent in the first chapter), and the ‘rents (who ended up watching it with me) enjoyed it as much as I did; Mom in particular, who was enchanted by the fact that her childhood hero, Clayton Moore, played the Ghost’s chief henchman.  (Hey—any serial that lets Moore appear not only in a gas mask but a surgeon’s mask, allowing the serial’s viewers to shout out “Who IS that masked man?” is aces in my book.)  Mom and I were also reduced to hysterics by the time of the twelfth chapter, in which the villains are subdued with the help of a ferocious dog named…wait for it…”Timmy.”  (“Get ‘im, Timmy!”)

During the viewing of Ghost, Mom started complaining that the only serials she ever sees Clayton Moore in are the ones in which he’s the bad guy.  (I guess she forgot about Jesse James Rides Again, which we watched back in January.)  If I can figure out what I’ve done with Perils of Nyoka (1942), I’m going to try and put that one on for her later this week—but if I’m unable to locate its whereabouts, we’ll have to settle for the too-boring-for-words Jungle Drums of Africa (1953).

Chapter 2-15: Atom Man vs. Superman

Previously on Thrilling Days of Yesteryear:

Against my better judgment, I told the GM this morning that I could be persuaded—if necessary—to sit in on the first four hours of the audit to make certain these two were up to speed on the changes.  (I had also been asked by the full-time auditor at the La Quinta on 204/I-95 if she could sit in as well.)  Lord knows I did not want to do this, and in fact I was praying that the GM would say “Hell, no” because I’m already swimming in enough overtime to incur the wrath of his boss.  No such luck.  He’s given me the greenlight.

Why do I have a bad feeling about this?

So I arrived at work last night around nine-ish, and I’m making major preparations to finish the pre-audit in time so that Little Miss Weekend Warrior, Dreads and the I-95 auditor can benefit from my aggravations with our new Nite Vision system this past week.  At 9:45 p.m., one of the individuals manning the front desk answers the phone and on the other line is Dreads.  She tells him she will not be in this evening.

What followed was a high-pitched primal scream that broke the sound barrier, emanating from yours truly.  I knew she was planning to dick me over—I should have seen it coming.  Dreads worked for us once before as a front desk clerk before agreeing to move up to the assistant head of housekeeping position and being transferred to the Southside La Quinta.  She was relieved of her duties when she phoned the GM one Sunday morning five minutes before her shift to inform him that she couldn’t come to work that day…a pattern that she had established on several other occasions.

I take the front desk person who spoke to Dreads into my confidence, and instruct him to call the GM, telling him that he needs to let our GM know that there is no way on God’s green earth that I will work out the rest of the audit—that is not what I agreed to, and if necessary I will walk the hell out right now.

Co-worker phones the boss, who chats with him for a minute or two, and then asks to speak to me.  “It’s a good thing you agreed to come in tonight,” he says weakly.

“Listen—I’m serious about this.  If that dame thinks she’s going to get away with this, she’s nuts.  I am not going to…”

He cuts me off and tells me I’m “jumping to conclusions.”  He’ll find someone else to finish out the shift.  (As it so happens, he talks my co-worker into it—my co-worker is a bit of a night-owl anyway—and because I really appreciate him stepping in and taking the bullet, I buy him a bacon cheeseburger and fries from Denny’s later that morning.)  The GM then lets me in on the knowledge that he also feared that Dreads would be a no-show as well.  Apparently Dreads is scheduled to go on a cruise beginning Sunday night, and the GM has the Big Balls in Cowtown to remark that the AGM (assistant general manager) at Southside was concerned about this because that meant the relief auditor would have to work six days straight.

Talk about chutzpah.  “I notice she never displayed that kind of concern when she was working over here and scheduling me for six days in a row,” I remarked through clenched teeth.  He tries to weasel out with an explanation on how the Southside’s relief auditor is on some sort of disability but at this point in the conversation I have ceased to care.

Naturally, the rest of the evening did not go as planned.  Miss Weekend Warrior also failed to show (in fact, I believe they tried to call her to come in for Dreads, with no luck) and the planned midnight audit was stalled when I learned that no one—despite my mentioning it to at least three individuals that morning—had bothered to make sure that the rooms for a group that was in-house would all be routed to the same folio.  (Yes, I ended up having to do this.)  Then I learn from my new best friend at the front desk that we still have three more rooms to rent (the housekeeper who cleans at night failed to bring this to my attention, though in her defense I was sort of busy at the desk selling a bunch of rooms we were stuck with because no one cancelled the 6pm arrivals) and so we were trying frantically to rent those before closing out the day.  At 1:30am, I get a call from the I-95 dame that the reason she missed her midnight appointment was that she drove her car into a ditch (I didn’t ask; apparently her driving skills are legendary as well as atrocious).  I tell her that if she can find a way to the motel she can still witness the audit since I’ve not been able to start it yet.

I ended up clocking out around 3:30am, which is when I sashayed over to Denny’s to buy breakfast for myself and my front desk colleague.  I then secured a cab about an hour later, stumbling into the house about 4:55.  By that time, I wasn’t in the mood to sit down with pen and paper and chronicle the events of Chapter Two of Atom Man vs. Superman (1950)—instead, I just put the DVD on and started to watch the rest of the serial until its completion.  Let’s be honest—I have no idea what the next round of Saturdays are going to be like (I think it’s safe to say Dreads won’t be pulling down any more shifts at either location, and that they’ll find some prized schmuck to fill in on Friday nights…to quote Dick Powell, “Yours truly will likely get a chunk of it”) and while I have made every attempt to emulate the ways of my serials mentor, Laughing Gravy (watching a chapter a week) I’m failing miserably at it.  My craving for instant gratification has necessitated the cancellation of Saturday Morning Serials for the time being, and from now on cliffhangers will be devoured in one full gulp.

There are, however, some loose ends to tie up.  I’ve stated in the past that I’ve thought the first Superman serial was the superior chapter-play…but after re-watching Atom Man, this statement doesn’t hold water.  Atom Man is a better serial, though it’s not without its faults.  To start off, the whole Atom Man character—dictated by the plot to be a decoy persona for arch-nemesis Lex Luthor (Lyle Talbot), who is pretending to go straight—is completely unnecessary.  Talbot spends a great deal of screen time resplendent in black choir robe and a helmet that looks like a cross between a champagne bucket and ornate planter, and he speaks with an accent that sounds like a bad Bela Lugosi impression.  The character comes across as totally embarrassing and ridiculous—if they needed to include Atom Man, they should have used the one from the radio Superman that was played by Mason “With a name like Smuckers’, it’s got to be good” Adams.

The other debit in Atom Man is that its interesting plot peters out much too quickly—though this could be due to Columbia’s infuriating habit of padding out material over fifteen chapters, when twelve would have sufficed.  The major scenario—Luthor invents a device that will scatter Superman’s atoms hither and thither through out outer space—gets underway in Chapter Eight, and concludes around Chapter Ten.  This leaves five more chapters of the same-old, same-old shenanigans: Luthor’s henchmen are able to commit crimes and vanish from the scene thanks to coins with a special alloy in their pocket.  It would have been better to shuffle the series of events so that the Man of Steel’s trip into “the empty doom” was featured in Chapter 13 or 14.

Apart from all this, Atom Man is a fun (good, but not great) serial; one of Columbia’s best, in my humble opinion.  The cliffhangers are better than those in the previous Superman outing, the characters more engaging (though the source material has more to do with that than anything) and there are some nicely nuanced throwaway bits to lighten up the proceedings.  There’s a priceless scene where Clark Kent (Kirk Alyn) helps Lois Lane (Noel Neill) blow out the birthday candles on her cake with his “super breath” and Perry White is featured in a funny running gag in which he pulls out a stogie but can’t find a light.  Atom Man also contains one of my favorite jokes in a cliffhanger: Lois tells Jimmy Olsen (Tommy Bond) that they must return to Metropolis (whose destruction has been threatened by Luthor) to “write the story—even if it’s our last.”  “I’d rather read about it!” is Olsen’s hysterical reply.

“From the heart of the jungle comes a savage cry of victory!”

And of course, that cry (“Aaaaaahhh-o-ahhhh-o-ahhhh-o!”) belongs to none other than Tarzan—Lord of the Jungle—the famed literary creation of author Edgar Rice Burroughs. Introduced in the October 1912 issue of All-Story magazine in the first of nearly two dozen novels, Tarzan has become a pop culture phenomenon, enjoying a lengthy career in movies, comics, television—and of course, radio.

Tarzan made his radio debut in 1932 in a transcribed syndicated serial, broadcast thrice weekly (it began on New York’s WOR September 12) and regarded by many as the first major syndicated radio serial. Loosely based on the 1914 novel Tarzan of the Apes, it attempted to stay faithful to the source material—though there were a few embellishments. It’s a familiar story: Lord and Lady Greystoke, marooned on an African coast, are killed by a band of savage apes who decided to adopt their infant son. He grows to manhood as the “Lord of the Jungle,” and later encounters the Porter expedition where Jane Porter teaches him English and becomes his main squeeze. The role of Jane on this serial was played by Joan Burroughs (daughter of the author), and her husband James Pierce portrayed Tarzan. (Rampant nepotism!) Among those in the serial’s supporting cast: Gale Gordon, Frank Nelson, Jeanette Nolan, and Hanley Stafford. OTR historian John Dunning has high praise for Tarzan of the Apes, noting that it was “distinguished by robust story lines and commensurate sound effects.”

The serial ran a total of 286 episodes, but was discontinued in March 1934 because Burroughs felt that it had drifted too far from his novel. He assumed more control of the plot and the production in two follow-ups: Tarzan and the Diamond of Asher (1934) and Tarzan and the Fires of Tohr (1936), also transcribed and syndicated in serial form (thirty-nine chapters in each). In these serials, the part of Jane was written out—daughter Joan was sidelined by pregnancy during production—and Burroughs’ son-in-law Pierce also took a pass, so the role of Tarzan went to actor Carlton KaDell.

The ape man kept a low profile on radio for close to fifteen years after Tohr, but he resurfaced in yet another transcribed series in 1950 from Commodore Productions, who at that time was celebrating much success from its series, Hopalong Cassidy. The new Tarzan also began life as a syndicated show, but was quickly snapped up by the West Coast Mutual-Don Lee network beginning January 4, 1951, and then later enjoyed a run over CBS from March 22, 1952-June 27, 1953 on Saturday nights for General Foods/Post Toasties. Former child star/Let’s Pretend veteran Lamont Johnson essayed the role of the jungle lord; Johnson would later become famous for his work behind a movie camera, with films like The McKenzie Break (1970), The Last American Hero (1973), and Cattle Annie and Little Britches (1981) to his credit.

It is this particular incarnation of Tarzan that I listened to last night, and I have to admit, it’s better than its Commodore pedigree would indicate. In “Tarzan and the Lipigor” (3/7/53), the Lord of the Jungle wages a mighty battle with his cholesterol levels and…no…just a sec…that’s not right. That’s Lipitor. A lipigor is a stranger lion-panther-gorilla hybrid (probably should be spelled “lipagor”), created by a most assuredly insane scientist, Dr. Sabina Meadows. Oh, she starts out sane early on in the program, even assisting Tarzan in ridding a native village of its termite problem—but by the program’s final third, she’s dabbling in those things “man was not meant to know.” (I guess the fact that she’s named “Sabina” should have tipped me off.)

Program two is “Tarzan and the Hot Rod Kid” (3/14/53), which involves Jerry Cromwell, a juvenile delinquent who gets into trouble only because his successful bidnessman of a Dad has no time for him (think James Dean and Jim Backus in Rebel Without a Cause). He meets up with His Jungle Lordship and helps him fend off Bedouin bandits attacking a defenseless village. Okay, perhaps my description of both episodes are a tad on the snarky side, but they’re actually fairly well-written (from the pen of Bud Lesser), and Johnson acquits himself nicely in the Tarzan role. I found it interesting that the legendary ape man is portrayed as an educated, English-speaking man rather than the monosyllabic muscleman played in the movies by Johnny Weissmuller.

I’m not putting the Weissmuller films down, you understand—they are fun to watch, in a guilty-pleasure-sort-of-way. But I was really impressed with the radio Tarzan—it’s aimed at the kids, but adults can enjoy it—and I think you will be, too.

“Oh, they cut down the old pine tree…”

The Bashful Bachelor (1942) was the second of six Lum and Abner feature films released by RKO Pictures from 1940-46, and after watching it last night, I must admit that it’s the best of the ones I’ve seen so far (this opinion is subject to change, of course). It definitely comes a lot closer to capturing the feel of the radio series than the previous Dreaming Out Loud (1940), due no doubt to the larger contribution of creators Chester Lauck and Norris Goff (they are given story credit on the film).

The film features several plot threads: one involves Lum (Lauck) attempting to woo his girlfriend Geraldine (ZaSu Pitts) by thinking up various scenarios in which to portray himself as a hero, and the other concerns a horse, Skyrocket, Abner (Goff) acquires (by “swapping” with some gypsies) that the two men later enter in the County Sweepstakes horse race. A third plot details Lum giving Abner a note of a marriage proposal to present to Geraldine, but Abner—who’s wearing a cheap pair of glasses for which he’s also “swapped”—hands the note instead to the “Widder” Abernathy (Constance Purdy), who threatens to sue the hapless Lum for breach of promise if he backs out of the wedding. I won’t give away the ending, of course, but if you’re familiar with similar story threads from Amos ‘n’ Andy and The Great Gildersleeve the conclusion won’t surprise you much. (The bit where Lum, Abner and Cedric experience problems after buying eyeglasses from a vendor probably originated from a similar story arc on the radio show as well.)

Two of my favorite characters from the radio show are featured in this movie—Cedric Weehunt and Squire Skimp. Cedric was the resident Clem Kadiddlehopper/Mortimer Snerd of Pine Ridge, and though he was voiced in the radio version by Lauck, he’s portrayed here by the great comic character actor Grady Sutton. I have to admit, though, I was a little disoriented hearing Sutton imitate Lauck doing Cedric; Sutton usually speaks in a much higher and softer hick-oriented tone as witnessed by his appearances in the Hal Roach Boy Friends two-reelers (High Gear, Air-Tight) and classic W.C. Fields films like The Man on the Flying Trapeze (1935) and The Bank Dick (1940). But that aside, he makes a perfect Cedric, and he would appear twice more in the role in the L&A features Goin’ to Town (1944) and Partners in Time (1946). Actor Oscar O’Shea essays the role of Skimp, Pine Ridge’s resident con man/huckster, a part voiced by “Tuffy” Goff on the radio show—while I think O’Shea does a fair job (he encores in the next L&A movie, Two Weeks to Live) he’s not quite capable of capturing the role as well as Goff did in the radio version. There’s also a brief appearance from Uncle Henry Lunsford, but the IMDb does not credit the actor playing him.

Other standout performers include Louise Currie as Skimp’s niece Marjorie (Currie is probably best-remembered as a heroine in classic serials like The Adventures of Captain Marvel and The Masked Marvel), Irving Bacon (previously seen in Dreaming Out Loud), and longtime Jack Benny Show stooge Benny Rubin as the eyeglasses pitch man. The direction is by Malcolm St. Clair (who would encore with Two Weeks to Live), an accomplished comedy film director who once worked at the Mack Sennett studios during the silent era and later went on to direct several of the Stan Laurel-Oliver Hardy 1940s features at 20th Century-Fox. I was sort of intrigued in that ZaSu Pitts (Geraldine) is presented as a love interest for Lum in this film, but on the radio show (in the 1949-50 season) she was used for more comic effect, with Lum fending off her constant attempts to march him down the aisle. I was also pleased with the transfer of this film to DVD; although it’s a beat-up public domain copy, it’s still in better shape than the previous Dreaming Out Loud. If you’re a Lum and Abner fan like me, I guarantee you will enjoy it.