What I watched: An episode of Parade of Stars, a comedic short. It starred Fanny Brice and Habley Stafford, and aired on CBS on June 10, 1950. The episode is available to view on the Internet Archive.
What happened: We open with an ad for Popsicles, which I just learned is a brand name. We are then introduced to a beleaguered dad and his daughter Snooks, who insists on having a big chocolate rabbit for Easter. They go into a store, and he buys her a Popsicle. She wants him to buy the “soda jerk.” More product placement happens.
We get back to the “action”, with the father taking Snooks to a museum to learn about art. The museum apparently has the Venus de Milo in it, whose armlessness and nudity alarms Snooks. This leads to a joke about burlesque shows, which I’m sure the kids loved.
They do some jokes about evolution and “the missing link”, who looks like Snooks’ Uncle Louie, and the artist Whistler. They then start looking at an off-screen mural featuring gladiators being devoured by lions. This upsets Snooks, but not for the reason that.he thinks. We’re then invited to sing along to the popsicle jingle by following a “red dot.” It’s a black-and-white medium, guys.
What I thought: This is one which firmly fits into the historical-interest-only bin. In this case, the historical interest is one of the few on-screen appearances of Fanny Brice. Brice was chiefly a radio comedian, best known for her character Baby Snooks, a bratty little girl. (She’s also known as the subject of the Barbara Streisand musical Funny Girl.)
From this fifteen-minute short, it becomes obvious why Snooks was a radio character and not a film or television one. Seeing a grown woman acting like a sugar-crazed six-year-old is more uncomfortable than funny. It feels a bit like the viewer has stumbled into someone’s fetish play. The lack of an actual audience, and the cheapness of the sets, makes the whole thing come off eerie.
Even if it was just a voice, or an appropriately-aged actress, I’m not sure I see the appeal of the character. Sure, it’s a decent satire of the way kids can be annoying, but it mostly does this by being even more annoying than a kid at their worst. There are a couple decent punchlines, but the character is far too grating to make them seem worthwhile.
Judging from the incessant commercials for Popsicle, Parade of Stars was mostly aimed at children. I wonder how kids watching this would have reacted to the Baby Snooks act. Would they have identified with the character, thought of her like their bratty younger siblings, or thought of it as grownups having a joke at their expense? Overall, I ended up thinking of this episode as another forage into the world of extremely crummy children’s entertainment, putting minimal and annoying material between as many ads for sugary treats as you could get away with.
I haven’t been able to find much information on what Parade of Stars was like as a series. Based on the intro, I guess this was sort of a cut-up variety show — skip the host, and just give a different act their own fifteen minutes every episode. That format could work, but this episode really makes the series seem like the most rudimentary kind of network filler.
Fanny Brice would die of a cerebral hemorrhage less than a year after this episode. Watching her act, I’m reminded of the episode of Marvelous Ms. Maisel that features Jane Lynch as a gimmicky 1950s female comedian. She says that for a woman to be funny she had to be turned into a thing. I don’t know much about Brice, but those words certainly come to mind now.
Coming up next: Speaking of crummy kids’ shows, it’s once again Howdy Doody Time.
The Eternal Couch Potato 