What I watched: An episode of the early children’s show Kukla, Fran and Ollie. The series starred the titular Fran Allison, with all other roles being played by series creator and puppeteer Burr Tillstrom. “Nightclub Circuit” aired on Wednesday, September 20, 1950 at 7:00 PM on NBC. Video is available on the official KFO YouTube channel.
What happened: Colonel Crackie starts off the show with a little speech, promising us that there’ll be something enjoyable tonight. He tells us that tonight’s show will be a response to the current popularity of Westerns, and sets the scene in “cattle country.” Ollie emerges, wearing a cowboy hat and affecting a great Southern drawl. His partner Kukla pops up, but is a little confused as to his role. Ollie’s an oil baron and Kukla’s a cattle rancher, not a cowboy, although I’m not sure there’s a practical difference. They’re lonesome cousins.
Kukla proposes they go out to New York to get something to eat. Why does nobody ever try that in The Lone Ranger? Kukla heads down to the General Store and greets the owner Fletcher. They break character a bit. Kukla wants to hire a car so that they can go in style, and Fletcher happens to be the local Ford dealer, allowing for some anachronistic product placement.
They take the car to New York, and see a nightclub. The main attraction is Madame Glockenspiel, portrayed by a hair-down Fran. She sings a jazzy version of “You Are My Sunshine.” Kukla runs into Fletcher again, who just happens to have also travelled to New York and is overly familiar towards them. Kukla and Ollie blow him off and head over to another club.
Fran is also performing here, as a starstruck French singer. She talk-sings her way through a rowdy multilingual song. Ollie is upset that they can’t get away from her. Kukla wants to head over to Carnegie Hall, and Kukla agrees, as he wants to hear something operatic. Always high class, this show. Fran appears again, in a flowery hat. She sings an aria that abruptly turns into a folk song about the mighty rushing rivers of the West. I heard that’s how Woody Guthrie got his start.
A despondent Ollie wants to go back home. However, they’re overjoyed to see their old friend “Frances Allison”, in a bonnet and polka-dot shirt. She sings a truly down-home jitty, and Kukla and Ollie join in. They remind us to buy a Ford before closing the show.
What I thought: “Nightclub Circuit” opens by telling us that this is going to be a Western show, just like the others that were popular on television at this time. Indeed, cowboys were making up a huge portion of kids TV in 1950. On this blog,I just got done writing about The Cisco Kid, and am well familiar with The Lone Ranger, The Gene Autry Show, and the Western-themed Howdy Doody. Western B-movies, while outside the scope of this project, were common, easy-to-license programming for off-primetime hours, with the Hopalong Cassidy shorts in particular being a favourite of kids. So even a very young audience would be familiar enough with the tropes of the Western.
It’s a little surprising, then, that what we get is not a TV Western, or even a parody of a TV Western, but a distinctly Kukla, Fran, and Ollie version of an Old West story. In this story, the cowboys do what everyone else wants to do in the KFO universe: they go into the city and see a show. I suppose that these are modern-day cowboys, living in a rural area but still able to rent a 1950 Ford. It’s like The Power of the Dog.
The back half of the episode, after an improbable Ford plug, is essentially an excuse for Fran to appear in a bunch of outfits and do a bunch of songs, not that I’m complaining. There are actually some impressively quick changes here, where Fran is off-screen for less than a minute. The episode provides a rough tour of the genres of stage show one might expect to see in this era, from jazz to opera. Once again, we’re reminded that in this period, or at least in the world of KFO, nightclubs are associated with performances, not lust (or at least not entirely lust.).
In a sense, I wonder if this episode is symbolic of what Kukla, Fran, and Ollie saw itself doing in the television landscape. It took an audience typically more interested in cowboys punching out troublemakers and introduced them to ballet, opera, and all other kinds of “high” art. At the same time, the show’s warm humour helped it avoid feeling like good-for-you edutainment. As in other episodes, “Nightclub Circuit” makes the adult world more approachable for children, and perhaps for adults too.
Coming up next: It’s going to be another week off for holidays and list-updating, then we’re back to the Kuklapolitans with a feud between Fran and Beulah.
The Eternal Couch Potato 