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. “Fixing the Floor” aired on Tuesday, September 26, 1950 at 7:00 PM on NBC. Video is available on the official KFO YouTube channel.
What happened: Kukla wordlessly props up a winch on the front of the stage and starts cranking it. He also has an angled ruler. He tries to wedge a piece of wood in the winch and fumbles it, giving me instant flashbacks to high-school shop class. He sings a surprisingly operatic tune about following your guiding light. Cecil Bill finally shows up to help him, including producing a giant saw, which draws laughter from the crew. (I guess it’s only really giant in proportion to the puppets.)
They try to whittle down the edge of the board with a smaller blade. Kukla explains that they were fixing the wall last night, but Ollie got too dizzy after looking through the telescope and had to walk. Fran shows up looking for some strawberry Sealtest ice cream, with Kukla reminding her to mention the product name. He also asks Fran to bring the contraption they’ve been using to travel back and forth from the sub-basement.
Ollie finally makes his way up from the ruined mailroom to announce that he’s come up with a new business model. He’s going to take expensive hats and copy them. I think some people in New York are still doing this. Fran thinks this is dishonest, and is still cranky about missing her strawberry ice cream. Ollie shows her a photo of the moon’s surface, presumably not taken from his telescope, and says they’ll all be going there sometime soon.
Kukla is also tired, because he’s been missing his cereal. Probably shouldn’t have been keeping that food in the mailroom. Fran threw it out thinking it was sawdust. Beulah pops up, and is surprisingly peppy, saying that she loves remodelling. She has a “do-all” device that she says can answer any question, and Fran asks her about the ice-cream. However, Beulah gets her dress caught in the gears, and Fran has to help her, genuinely cracking up.
Finally, Kukla surfaces with the strawberry ice-cream, and Fran is happy again. Ollie rejoins them, finally bringing the title trio together. Ollie says he’s going to put in parquet floors all over the place, and make the hats in between. Fran is exasperated, but says “I guess if you did everything write, you wouldn’t be Ollie.” She sings about waiting a month of Sundays for Ollie. Fran, he’s on every night. But it’s a very nice song. Burr Tilstrom has Kukla give him a haircut in a remarkably brave bit of puppetry during the sign-off.
What I thought: After last week’s various ice-cream-related feuds, we have another mini-storyline on Kukla, Fran, and Ollie, with the broken floor that was an out-of-sight gag in yesterday’s episode being the main topic of concern. Of course, as is common with KFO, the nominal plot gets a little lost amidst character-based gags and performances. By the end of the half-hour, I don’t think they’ve fixed the floor. The next episode is labelled “Cinderella”, so this may be the end of the story, but we’ll have to see. It’s not exactly Lost, but it’s more continuity than grown-up shows were doing at this time.
I’d like to focus this recap a little bit on Fran Allison’s performance, and more broadly what she does for KFO. When watching , I was struck by the way Fran kept moving her head to look at one of the puppets when they were talking, and then look back to the audience. It’s a small gesture, but it cuts to the hart of a common issue with TV and stage blocking. When people talk to each other, they generally face each other (unless you’re a weird autistic no-eye-contact guy like me), but a performer always wants to face the audience or camera. This leads to conventions like the shot-reverse-shot scene (not available to a show like KFO with a fixed camera) as well as a lot of side or three-quarters conversations.
Fran’s motion of turning to look at the puppets is a kind of compromise between realism and theatricality. As the only human performer, it’s her job to make the puppets feel real to the audience, and she never treats Kukla, Ollie, and the rest as anything less than humans. By turning back to the screen, she also invites the audience into the conversation. It’s a small thing, but on such a minimalist program it’s crucial.
It must have been strange for Allison to not just act alongside a bunch of puppets but have it be a decades-long run that would define her career. Allison also acted on radio, most notably on Chicago show The Breakfast Club, where she played spinster “Aunt Fanny”, and would go on to host a talk show. Her career never left Chicago, but this was a time when one could have national broadcast career in the Second City. None of it — the puppets, the radio show, being based out of Chicago — would be possible in another decade.
Ultimately, the job of acting is to get the audience to believe in something they know isn’t true. Working on television, with puppets, adds an additional level of difficulty. But Kukla, Fran, and Olllie makes me feel like these pieces of cloth are actual people that I know, and they really might be struggling to fix a floor back there. Fran Allison and Burr Tilstrom’s performances are crucial to that sense of reality.
Coming up next: The Cisco Kid rides again.
The Eternal Couch Potato 