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. “Destination Moon” aired on Wednesday, October 11, 1950 at 7:00 PM on NBC. Video is available on the official KFO YouTube channel.
What happened: Kukla and Ollie are looking through the telescope, which isn’t helped by Ollie holding it in his mouth and dropping it. Kukla asks if the moon is really like it is in the movie Destination Moon. Ollie takes the opportunity to play science teacher, referencing a recent Life magazine article about the galaxy. Ollie offers to tell more about the moon if Kukla tells him about flying saucers. This is how all scientific conventions work, I assume.
Fran comes in to join the conversation, and Ollie comes up with the idea of putting on a play about going to the moon. He also wants to add “more romantic type roles” to the story. They come up with the names Luther (Kukla), Lena (Fran), and Lionel (Ollie) for their trip to Luna, and Ollie and Kukla both volunteer to be in love with Fran. Ollie nixes the love triangle by making Kukla her brother. Presumably a young George Lucas was watching taking notes.
We jump into the action, with both Ollie and Kukla wearing makeshift space helmets. Lionel wants to prove himself by making the trip before he marries Lena. They hide the truth from her for a moment before their silly hats give them away. Lena wants to come on the trip, but there’s only room for two. She’s sad, but not too sad to join in a song about “Leaving for Luna.”
Meanwhile, Buster Rabbit and Cecil Bill are working at a radio lab on Earth. They get a strange signal, and have to call in Beulah to interpret it. It’s a message from Lionel and Luther, who are stuck on the moon without fuel to get back. They all apparently know Lena, and call her in. Beulah breaks the news while working in some insults to the two men. Once again, Lena soothes her feelings through song, this time a slower and sadder number. Beulah then pitches her on a new Ford car, which will help take her to the moon. Even car salesmen don’t normally exaggerate that much.
Wielding both space helmets (one with a bow) and the old car prop, Lena and Beulah travel to the moon, singing “Leaving for Luna” again. On the moon, Lionel and Luther are unhappy, with Lionel launching into an operatic lament for Luna. Fortunately, Lena arrives with the Ford to save them. They sing about how nice it is to be back on Earth. Burr even dons the space helmet for his usual sign-off.
What I thought: This is the second episode we’ve seen in our project that relates directly to the 1950 movie Destination Moon, after the Hollywood behind-the-scenes show City at Night. This is probably just a weird coincidence relating to what shows have survived, but it’s an unusual footprint for a movie that was successful but not a massive hit. By contrast, 1950’s top-grossing movie, the Cecil B. DeMille epic Samson and Delilah, hasn’t been mentioned in any of our programs, and indeed has mostly been forgotten. There’s almost something charming, in this day and age, about two programs talking about a moderately successful sci-fi film several months apart.
I haven’t watched Destination Moon but, based on my exhaustive study of its Wikipedia page, it seems to be a strange artifact. It was based on a book by legendary sci-fi author and weirdo Robert A. Heinlein, who imagined that space travel would be taken up by private corporations instead of governments. (In this, as in other things, he may have been an inspiration for the Bezoses and Musks of the world.) The film was an earnest attempt to depict what space flight might actually look like, roughly a decade before Russia put a man in orbit and John F. Kennedy pledged to put one on the moon.
The Kukla, Fran, and Ollie episode “Destination Moon” is not really about any of that. Instead, the episode uses the movie’s rough premise to jump into its own style of extraterrestrial adventure. The fantasy, while presented as a spontaneous bit of imagination, is surprisingly developed, with character names, a romance, props, and catchy songs. It fully embraces the romantic aspects of space travel while gently poking fun at them at the same time.
The thing that makes “Destination Moon” great is that, even though the story the gang comes up with is silly, it’s still a good story. The plot element of Ollie’s Lionel feeling he has to prove himself before he’ll be accepted by the one he loves is a meaningful one, and there’s a surprising poignancy to his dialogue, even if it’s a romance between a puppet and a human on a show within a show. A lot of KFO‘s let’s-put-on-a-play episodes are mostly about backstage chaos, but there’s a genuine commitment to this one that makes it work even when the climax is Fran driving a car to the moon.
Ultimately, this is one of my favourite Kukla, Fran, and Ollie episodes I’ve seen, and one that reflects the show’s best quality: its ability to completely transform itself into something else for half an hour. (It also envisions a space prpogram that has much more significant roles for women than the real one would decades later.) So, while I may or may not ever watch the movie Destination Moon, I’m glad it inspired this fantastical puppet show.
Coming up next: We stick with the Kuklapolitans for the potentially much more controversial “Columbus Day.”
The Eternal Couch Potato 