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. “Cinderella” aired on Tuesday, September 27, 1950 at 7:00 PM on NBC. Video is available on the official KFO YouTube channel.
What happened: Kukla starts the day answering the phone, receiving a call from Lena Horne, who has just gotten in from Europe (by boat!) Lena wants to talk to Ollie, but Dolores won’t stop taking up one of the two puppet spots. Ollie and Fran eventually shows up. Ollie comes up with a great idea: they should put on a musical comedy. The only problem is that they don’t have any music and don’t have any story.
To meet the latter need, Ollie has produced a big book of stories, and asks Fran to pick with her eyes closed. She picks Cinderella, which they’ve already done before. Ollie is pleased with the selection, saying that it’s a classic plot of “Boy meets girl, boy loses girl.” (In my household, this was always followed by “Man tries to figure out what the hell went wrong.”)
Ollie says that the first person who comes up on the stage will play Cinderella. To his chagrin, it’s Beulah Witch. She hates the idea too, but he drags her to the dressing room. Using the same process, Madame Oglepuss gets drafted into being the Fairy Godmother, saying that she’ll portray her as the ingenue. This leaves the roles of the ugly stepmother and stepsisters to the main trio, with Kukla playing the mother.
Fran and Kukla both put on wigs and overly large bows. They all sing a song about how cute they are, not needing to rehearse it or anything. Kukla and Ollie both dance so much they lose their wigs. The plot goes off the rails pretty much immediately, with the sisters deciding to go on vacation instead of attending the ball. Of course, Beulah-Cinderella wants to go but can’t, a point hammered on through song.
Madame O appears as the Fairy Godmother, although Beulah mistakes her for Martha Washington. The fairy stresses the importance of “KLU”: Keep Looking Up. Beulah doesn’t even really want to go to the ball, saying she’d rather stay home and read, until someone nudges her from below. A girl after my own heart. She decides that what she really wants is a Ford car to take her to the ball. Sometimes I don’t even see the product placement coming.
Kukla and Fran are at the ball when they meet the Prince, being played by Fletcher Rabbit. Fran chats to him about baseball. After a couple of different cues, Beulah comes through in her dress, and awkwardly dances with Fletcher. The bell rings quickly, and Beulah escapes, leaving behind a giant-in-comparison slipper. The final scene takes us back to Cinderella’s house. We skip over the gruesome part about the stepsisters cutting off parts of their feet to fit the shoe, and eventually get to the Prince and Cinderella getting together. Beulah says that she’s forgiving everyone, leading to a song about a holiday celebration. Still got a couple months left, guys. Ollie thinks the show could make a Broadway run, if only they could come up with a ballad.
What I thought: This episode of Kukla, Fran, and Ollie aired about seven months after the release of Disney’s Cinderella. It’s not an adaptation of the movie, and there are no specific jokes about it. The story they tale eschews the Disney additions such as talking mice, and does its own, somewhat less iconic musical numbers. In doing so, it was working from the Charles Perrault version of the “Cinderella” folk tale that was seen as the canonical text. The animated version was just one of many retellings. There would be a TV musical version aired later in the decade, which we will get to in time, and many other adaptations, including a second Disney adaptation in live action.
It seems to me, though, that Cinderella has become a Disney story much more than it’s become a folk tale. When I first encountered the story, it was through a VHS tape of the cartoon that sat along with Sleeping Beauty and the Disney Renaissance movies in a drawer underneath our television set. I had no real knowledge that one film was 40-some years older than the others. Cinderella and the evil stepmother have become part of the Disney canon, repurposed into a thousand promotional items, no matter what their origin is. For better or for worse, I compare every version of Cinderella to my childhood experience of “Bippity Boppity Boo.”
The Kukla, Fran, and Ollie version is much slighter and sillier than Disney’s. The pleasure of the episode mainly comes from seeing familiar characters in roles from a different narrative. The humour comes in the mismatch between roles: Beulah and Madame Oglepuss, who usually play the roles of old crones, in the position of beauties, and Ollie as the evil stepmother. Unlike other KFO plays, they even make it more or less through the whole plot.
I certainly wouldn’t call this black-and-white playlet the definitive Cinderella, or recommend that it be packed in the bottom drawers of any future families. But there’s a charm to this rendition nonetheless. It reminds one that folk stories aren’t supposed to be media produced by professionals and consumed passively by an audience, but stories actively told and re-told. I could easily see the way Ollie discusses the material and divvies up roles after randomly selecting a story inspiring kids to do the same thing.
The Cinderella narrative has become an almost-universal cultural touchstone. When a sports team goes on a run of upsets, they’re a Cinderella team. Kurt Vonnegut analyzed Cinderella as one of his essential narratives that powers American culture. Just about anyone or anything that rises from humble beginnings is compared to Cinderella. But on Kukla, Fran, and Ollie, the humble stay humble. Instead, Cinderella is simply a day’s plaything, a fun narrative to do with what one will.
Coming up next: We finally get another boxing match, and it’s a big one, as Joe Louis returns to challenge Ezzard Charles for the heavyweight title.
The Eternal Couch Potato 