The Elmer Davis News

This is an example of more or less "by rote" cut and paste, conducted on an WW2-era radio broadcast.  A five-minute commentary was chopped up into beginnings of sentences, ends, and neither beginning nor end.  The pieces were re-connected in random order, according to a "beginning-middle-end" arrangement.  (A couple minutes of content was lost because one of the sections ran out of pieces, which stopped the matching process.)  Minimal editing.

 

William S Burroughs did a lot of cutup like this, except with newspapers and scissors.  We'll be doing something for his birthday next week,  so this seemed at least like a kind of warm up.

 

Elmer Davis News (3:06)

 

 

"Watch out for that cashy soap arop!": Examples of Doubletalk

The professional voice-people who were drawn to Radio in its early days (ten years before the Talkies)  took a lot of pride in their elocution.  

 

And the demands of the new medium were for perfection.  Little wonder, then, that silliness, the antidote to too much control, quickly sprang up in the form of Bad Announcing.  

Bloopers are part of this kind of fun.  So is doubletalk: obliterating meaning with a string of word-like noises.  Which is not exactly the same as babbling. 

Doubletalk started appearing in movies and cartoons in the late nineteen-thirties. Jackie Gleason in All Through the Night, 1941:

 

 "I said the karastan on the tagabue is a very serious problem- to say nothing of the lara sang fay!"

Good doubletalk should contain articulated word-like sounds, if not actual words.  This is more difficult than muttering gutterals, like Fred Flintstone cursing-- it needs to sound coherent, while remaining gibberish.  

 

That's probably why another rule is, mix it with actual words.  The listener should be kept wondering as long as possible, is this person unintelligible or actually scrambled, in an almost Dada kind of way.  The illusion of veracity counts a lot with language, whether it's understandable or not.

 

I've assembled a few examples.   

 

The first is from a 1941 Jack Benny radio program.  Notice how Lefty weaves normal words with word-like sounds.

 

 

"Fightin' a guy inside a faucet."  You have to wonder where that came from.  Maybe this dialog is developed from some kind of Deliberate Misperception method (as used in James Thurber's "The Day the Dam Broke", "The Admiral on the Bicycle" and others), where the mis-heard phrase is fed back as dialog, unaltered. 

 

Our next example is from the cartoon,  "Fifth-Column Mouse"  (1943):

I should probably mention, the words here are no more than my attempt to cast coherence over the whole thing.  Who knows if they even had a script?  

 

Although it seems pretty necessary; in a way, it's following the same cognitive mechanics as Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky, which hijacks the usual verb-adjective-noun structures of language to make what sense it can.  There's enough real words in there to mean...something.  If you can pull them out.  

 

It's no coincidence that most of our examples are from Warner Brothers cartoons.  This is a radio phenomenon, and Warners was closer to Radio than any other studio.  All their voice people worked in it, and the cartoons were an incessant source of catch-phrases and general show-biz lingo, as in our next example, "The Penguin Parade" (1938).

 

 

So then, they bring him back for more announcing.

 

Here's my theory: all three of these examples- the Fighter, the Mouse, and the Penguin- are done by one man.  No idea who.  I think it was this one guy in radio, who had the routine all worked out- compiling them from more coherent phrases, and writing these things.  And going on the radio with them.    

 

There might be at least one more cartoon with the same character.  The most obvious way forward would be an examination of Tex Avery's 1930s output at Warners.  Maybe more to say on this later.  

Building Code has 4 new artifacts

  

Our "Building Code Under Fire" collection has picked up four additions.  You can find it here, or through the link to the lower right.

Frequently-confused Character Actors

 

 

No, not Grady Sutton.  That's actually what he did for a living.  

 

We're talking about actors who are similar in appearance to other actors.  Ever since that moronic Google page a few months ago, where everyone (including women) was "Roy Jenson", we've been considering the necessity of helping future generations of researchers and fans avoid some of the easier mis-identifications.  As follows:

 

 

 

 

Norman Leavitt & Guy Raymond

    This one holds a special place with me, because of my own faulty identification, years ago, on IMDB.  (It's Leavitt that briefly appears as Shelley Winters' dentist in Wild in the Streets.)

    What can you say about Norman Leavitt, Wally of the eponymous Filling Station, and so much else. 240 appearances in a 32-year career, 7 or 8 a year.  (I was watching 1948's The Big Clock last night, and guess who was there in the first five minutes, asking an expository question.)  His final gig was a gravedigger on Quincy in 1978.

    Guy Raymond is known to Star Trek fans as the bartender in the Tribbles episode.  He might be the only Old TV Guy named "Guy".   

 

 

Ed Binns & Frank Maxwell 

    Gruff guys from another generation.  Both made good army men; Binns' take in Fail Safe is downright chilling, and Maxwell was Rockford's old commanding officer in Korea.  

 

 

 

Ed Peck & Thomas Browne Henry 

    They may have looked like eagle-beaked military types, but neither of them played it much.  Peck was in the Star Trek where they go back to 1967 and kidnap a jet pilot (not the Gary 7 episode).  Henry's supposed to be an admiral in Earth vs the Flying Saucers, but he seems to be wearing Army tans.

Bill Zuckert & Stafford Repp 

    What's this?!  TWO Chief O'Hara's?  Pandemonium!  Seriously, can you tell which one was in Batman?

    It's Repp.  Zuckert got more work, though.  He was Columbo's boss in a couple episodes, random card player in The Cincinnati Kid, a judge in Perry Mason with the beatnik painter/professional cartoonist.  Had a longer career.  We're big fans of Zook's around here, because he was in Radio!

 

James Seay & Jack Warden

    This isn't a particularly common error, since Jack Warden's a known actor of the higher rank.  Still, he did a lot of TV-Guy work until he hit it big, and if you were watching the 1953 film "Captain John Smith and Pocahontas", you might think that one guy was him.  It's not.

John Forsythe & Carl Betz

    A classic example.  I'm not sure they could tell the difference in the 60s.  Forsythe was the phone voice of "Charlie" on Charlie's Angels, but that show is known for the confusion it spawned about David Doyle, who played the character "Bosley", and the actor Tom Bosley, who had nothing to do with the show. (I refer you to the Onion's story.)  Mr Doyle finally had to issue a statement.  I mean, Mr Bosley.  

 

 

 

Irene Tedrow & Anne Seymour

    You may run into trouble with these two.  A brief glance at their curricula vitae reveals they worked a lot of the same shows.  

 

 

Mike Mazurki & Max Rosenblum

On accounta the way these two gents always played lugs.

 

And finally, our own Old TV Guy avatar, Olan Soule and his doppelganger, Not-Olan Soule.

    Not-Olan appeared in at least one episode of The Rockford Files, he even spoke a few lines, but the actor was not credited.  I hate when they do that.

Olan in the 60s

     

 

    Of course, we could say that Olan was an old man by the time Rockford was on, and this younger guy would obviously not be him.  Or we might, if we keep informed by selfless free websites, like this one.  

 

     

    So, welcome to our annual non-membership drive!  May we send you a tote bag?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Nockley Files, Part 1

You may recall Arthur H Nockley, American broadcaster and spiritualist, best known for his pirate radio broadcasts from Lake Michigan in the 1940s.  

 

We recently obtained a collection of the "Moment of Inspiration" commentaries he broadcast every morning, while starting the transmitter for a large mid-western radio station, until they caught him.  (He was merely supposed to announce the usual FCC statement at the start of the broadcast day.)

 

Besides being very brief, most of them are fragmentary; Nockley's archive was presumed lost when his broadcasting studio (a converted tugboat, the Trudy) sank in a storm, only to be located by researchers decades later.  

 

 

These recordings were recovered from a waterlogged box containing Dictaphone belts.  Next, they'll be painstakingly assembled and cleaned; that's our job here at the institute. 

 

Our first example is inexplicable, but won't take much time.  He apparently just flipped open the microphone at the transmitter one morning, and started babbling away.  Listeners were stunned.

 

Play (1:14)