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Hiya Kids!! A 50's Saturday Morning
R0 - America - Shout! Factory Review written by and copyright: James Teitelbaum (15th June 2008). |
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The Show
 This is a fun set of four DVD's, each of which contains a selection of episodes from mid-century kiddie shows. Many of these programs aired for years or even decades, but the episodes presented here are all examples from the early to middle 1950's. Each disc is arranged as if following a Saturday morning television schedule; the DVD remote's cursor highlights various times (7:30, 8:00, etc.) as episode selections are made. Given this concept, it is extremely surprising that there are no vintage commercials between the shows. There are hundreds of hilarious and nostalgic commercials out there - most of them in the public domain, and including them here would have seemed to be a natural choice. There are also no cartoons on the set, which is interesting - I think that a lot of people associate Saturday morning television with cartoons, but apparently that was not the case back in 1954. Overall, there is a combination of classic moments, fun nostalgia, and painful tedium on this set. Highlights are the funny kids on "Juvenile Jury", "Sheena" (which stars cult favorite actress and model Irish McCalla in the role that made her famous), the ultra low-fi unintentional hilarity of "Captain Z-RO", Paul Winchell's trip to the moon, the last five minutes of "Andy's Gang", and selected bits of "Time For Beany". Pinky Lee has his moments, and I have to admit that "Kids and Company" was a quality production. "Flash Gordon", "Annie Oakley", "Cisco Kid", and "Roy Rogers" all have their fans, but I found all of these episodes to be a little bit thin on plot or too cheap looking to be truly entertaining, but not quite weird or bad enough to make them funny in the realm of camp appeal. The "Roy Rogers" would have benefitted if his cool Sons of Pioneers singing group had appeared, and Flash would have been better if one of the more classic actors had been in the role - Buster Crabbe for example... but he was playing the role a few decades earlier in an era when the theatrical serial was in its heyday. This includes the following shows: - "Kukla, Fran, and Ollie" (29:15), Ollie has a deep philosophical conversation with Kukla, Fran, and some other puppets about the nature of classifying things. Kukla declares himself an unclassifiable individualist. - "Howdy Doody" (29:05), A puppet, a cowboy, and a seriously freaky and creepy clown entertain a bunch of kids parked on some bleachers. Where is Krusty when you need him? After the clown beats up the cowboy, some kids get to play ukuleles. - "Lassie" (25:46), After two boys become blood brothers, Gramps helps them build a treehouse. The boys have a falling out, and reconcile. The titular dog has nothing to do with the story at all. - "Annie Oakley and the Bicycle Riders" (26:19), Annie apprehends two thieves who smuggle their loot in a shipment of bicycles, and then force a pair of old west Tour de France rejects to smuggle it out of town. - "Flash Gordon: Deadline at Noon" (25:56), Queen, Max von Sydow, and a football star Flash are all missing from this incarnation, but we do have a plot about an epidemic of exploding planets, and time travel back to the 1960's several years into the future for 1950s television viewers. - "Ding Dong School" (29:24), An intolerable show for very little kids in which a ghastly old woman talks to the camera as if she were directly addressing the kids watching, and then waits for the kids watching to answer, thereby having some sort of virtual conversation with her viewers. We learn how to make soap bubbles, how to bounce a ball, and are treated to a storybook about a turtle before being told that Kix cereal is good for us. - "Time For Beany" (29:39), This is yet another puppet show, directed by Bob Clampett of Looney Tunes fame. A hunter and a clown go to the fifth corner of the Earth to look for a giant white "gor-illey-ya". The very un-PC "headhunter" that they encounter is the best thing on the whole disc. - "The Paul Winchell Show" (29:23), Paul is a hep bachelor, complete with smoking jacket and cravat. He isn't connecting with the little girl he is babysitting, until he whips out his big wooden dummy. Yeah, it is another puppet; Paul is a ventriloquist who even sings duets with his doll while stroking the little girl's hair. Creepy. Then they go to the moon the see if the moonies have Christmas. No sign of Jack Skellington, but there is a funny Camay commercial rolled into the episode. - "The Roy Rogers Show" (25:42), Roy, Dale, and their other pals (all wearing bright white hats), defeat a bad guy in a pitch-black hat, who aims to steal $50,000. This is significantly more ambitious than the guys that Annie Oakley took down, who were only after $30,000. - "Captain Z-RO" (25:14), The Captain and his kid assistant Jett are putting the finishing touches on their new creation, Roger the Robot. Roger looks like a water heater with some conduit poking out of the sides and bottom. En route to Venus, Roger gets a little buggy because his older cousin Robby is cooler (and got to hang out with Anne Francis), so he runs amok, which means going to San Francisco and helping the cable car drivers out. The Captain lobotomizes his creation in the nick of time. - "Rootey Kazootey Club" (29:03), Another freaking puppet show, and a particularly cloying one. A puppet called Poison Zoomack points his very powerful magnet at Rootey's Kazootey, and things degenerate from there until Mister Deedledoodle saves the day. Who thehall made up these names? This one was sponsored by Power House candy bar, and also includes a fun commercial for Bishop's Home Style Nut Fudge. - "Winky Dink and You" (28:38), Winky is a cartoon on a little screen that clumsily interacts with the host in real time. Said host, Jack, stands behind a transparent screen that he can draw on as he addresses the children viewing the show. He encourages the kids to draw on their own "magic window" at home. Great gimmick here; the kids had to get their parents to buy a "magic window", or a piece of cellophane that would cling to the front of a television screen, and draw on it along with Jack's drawing. One can only wonder how many kids whipped out Sharpies and started scribbling on the telley without having first installed the "magic window". Still, nice precursor to the interactive nature of the internet. - "Super Snickers and Three Musketeers Circus" (29:21), A middle aged clown either sells candy bars between presenting circus acts, or presents circus acts between selling candy bars. - "Andy's Gang" (23:03), A totally creepy bear of a man greets some kids by making them promise to buy Buster Brown shoes before sitting down to read a story about Indians (not yet Native Americans, by the way). The camera leaves our narrator, who doesn't seem like someone I would want to leave alone with children, and fades to a dramatization of the Indian fable. This fable, acted (naturally) by a bunch of pale faces, is not quite as hideously embarrassing as it could have been, and takes up most of the show's running time. In the last five minutes, Andy talks to a puppet frog, who conjures a real orangutan to the set. The ape starts talking to Andy in the best moment on disc three. - "The Cisco Kid" (24:42), This one is the only thing on the entire set presented in color. Cisco and Pancho rescue a woman from her evil cousin, an actor who wants to cheat her out of her inheritance. - "Sky King" (26:18), A young blind boy is present at the scene of a crime. His seeing-eye dog runs off, following the perpetrators into the wilderness. The Sky King jumps into his Cessna, and flies off into the desert canyons to set things right. - "The Magic Clown featuring Zovello" (two episodes, 14:12 and 14:19), A bunch of kids in fezzes sing along with a clown who appears to be from Queens. He proceeds to do some magic tricks with wet wads of paper while selling the kids Turkish Taffy. This one appears to be local television from New York, and has an even more low-budget feel than some of the other very cheap looking shows on this set. - "Kids and Company" (26:15), In a presentation that must have been shockingly exotic for the time period and demographic, a percussion-heavy mambo band warms up the audience for the introduction of the "kid of the year", who turns out to be Jimmy, a lad who had undergone several spinal operations. In between selling Red Goose shoes, the host begs for clothes and furniture for the homeless. A young pianist performs a rather flashy "Sabre Dance Boogie" on the piano, and other kids show off their singing, dancing, and yes, baton twirling skills. - "Juvenile Jury" (25:41), Geritol sponsored this show featuring five kids aged 4 to 10 who sit on a panel and give solutions to problems sent in by adult viewers. If you are a fan of little kids innocently saying unexpected and silly things, then this is the show for you. Adults who submitted questions were awarded handsome Underwood de-luxe typewriters. - "The Pinky Lee Show" (27:50), This guy is the template for Pee Wee Herman, a weird man-child in an ill-fitting suit. If you ever wondered where Paul Reubens gained inspiration for the Pee Wee shtick, look no farther. Pinky is maybe a better dancer than Pee Wee, unless of course the song at hand is Tequilla. An interlude featuring marionettes of a blackface minstrel and a dancing skeleton accompanied by organ music is pleasantly surreal. Actually, if you like organ music, you'll love this whole boxed set, since most of these programs are pretty low-budget, and they all seem to have hired an organist rather than a full band for music. Molly Bee gets to sing a song clad in a dress by Junior House of Milwaukee. - "Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, in: The Rival Queen" (25:27), Lovely Sheena and her pals Bob and Chimp thwart the efforts of some escaped convicts, who want to start war between two "native" tribes, so as to steal the tribal treasure while the combatants are distracted. Sheena is not on screen nearly enough, but if you want to see a Cockney reject hypnotize a chimpanzee, this is the show for you.
Video
Aspect ratio, of course, is full screen 1.33:1, there is an extremely broad range of video quality here. Some of the shows are fairly clean, but none look amazing. Many of them are plagued with scratches, dust, melted frames, and other damage. A lot of the early telecines that were used to record these old shows are extremely soft. There are black "halos" around a lot of the characters on screen, and on a few of the oldest programs, it appears that the film has warped, so there is distortion to the shapes of the images on screen. However, as a sampler of the possibilities present in preserving classic kiddie television, this set might prove to be a good method to gage customer demand. Let Shout Video know which segments you like the best, and perhaps they'll release restored collections of the most popular shows.
Audio
Presented in English Dolby Digital 2.0 mono, it seems that little attempt was made to clean these old shows up, so quality varies widely. All of the audio tracks are in their original classic television mono. Audio quality changes radically from show to show, but it is never spectacular. "Roy Rogers" and "Juvenile Jury" are especially bad, but given the age of these programs and the fact that very little restoration was done, this is no surprise. There are no optional subtitles available on these episodes.
Extras
There are no extras at all on this set. As mentioned above, I would have like to see some commercials between the shows (a few of the shows do have ads from their sponsors embedded into the running time). An occasional commentary from either surviving stars or from television historians might have been cool too. A little booklet gives a one-paragraph history of each show, with air dates.
Packaging
Packaged in slim amaray cases housed in a cardboard slip-case.
Overall
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