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. “Round Table Discussion” aired on Wednesday, October 18, 1950 at 7:00 PM on NBC. Video is available on the official KFO YouTube channel.
What happened: Fletcher Rabbit is here with a package for Kukla. It contains a shiny ornament that just looks like Kukla. I swear, Christmas starts earlier and earlier every year. There’s also a present for Dolores, who is taking a nap right now. Beulah accepts the present for her, a pillow reading “Dolores is a good girl.” Dolores also receives a little knitted hat from a woman in Brooklyn.
Cecil Bill arrives in a Sherlock Holmes hat and coat, but keeps his distinctive role of speaking. This was apparently an anonymous gift. Fletcher sings about the sadness of being a mailman and never getting any mail himself. Fran meets up with Cecil Bill to admire his Sherlock outfit. Fletcher translates for him off-stage, noting that he’s been dusting the piano keys for clues.
We finally get two of the title characters talking as Ollie pops in from lunch, during which he enjoyed a roundtable discussion. He also has a nice hat. Ollie is now bent on making the show educational, so everyone can learn from it. Fran agrees to go along with his plan to have “some kind of forum”, which Ollie dubs a “squaretable discussion.”
Colonel Crackle pops up to suggest that at least two members of the troupe leave in case “the fur begins to fly.” This discussion is going to be so intense they need a designated survivor. He and Madame Oglepuss drive away in their 1950 Ford. The panel discussion begins with Kukla, Fran, and Ollie, with Kukla in a nice little hat. Fran has selected a topic randomly from the bookshelf and decided on the topic of “The Little Red Hen.” She starts reading from the book, and is frequently interrupted by Kukla and Ollie, offering their literary interpretation. Leave it to the professionals, guys.
Kukla and Ollie get into an argument about the nature of the little red hen, which continues even after Fran tries to keep reading. They get in a fight, and Ollie rips off Kukla’s hat and toupee. Fran notes that this is just like everyone talking over each other on panel shows. Instead of continuing, she decides to sing “So this is Love.”
What I thought: This episode of KFO is a parody of something that hasn’t come up much in our viewing sample so far: the public-affairs show. Early TV often hosted remarkably intellectual roundtable discussions on political and literary issues. This would peak later on in the decade with series like Omnibus, but by 1950 we already had The Johns Hopkins Science Review and Meet the Press as well as shows with titles like Author Meets the Critics and The Week in Review. Eventually, this type of show would be shuttled off to PBS where they could be not watched in piece.
The existence of these shows could make early TV seem like a golden age of earnest, high-minded public discourse. In truth, the shows were mostly made for cheap to fill up less lucrative timeslots, such as Sunday afternoons, or to run against popular programs on other networks. When the FCC came calling, networks could point to this educational programming as proof they were doing a public service by enlightening the masses.
While we’ve reviewed some documentary and educational programming here at ECP, I don’t think we’ve had a panel discussion, so I can’t judge how accurate KFO’s parody is. In the segment Kukla and Ollie are constantly interjecting their ideas about what the author really meant, almost a parody of close reading that reveals the absurdity of analysis by applying it to a simplistic pre-school text. (Some might say this blog is a parody of close reading, but I ensure you, it’s entirely in earnest.)
This approach is broadly in line with what was happening in academia in the 1950s. Modernist-influenced close reading dominated, which demanded exhaustive formal analysis of a text to reveal the true genus of the author who wrote it. The next half-century of literary studies would be a fervent opposition to this approach, but in many ways it is still the mainstream understanding of critical analysis. Today, a panel discussion at an academic conference might instead talk about how the Little Red Hen disrupts heteronormative epistemology or provides us new ways to think about the climate crisis.
Last time out on KFO I speculated about whether Beulah’s quest to prepare for Halloween would be an ongoing plot thread. It isn’t really present in this episode, although we do get a reference to her arrest, and Dolores is under the weather from her excursion. But t does seem as though many of the characters are thinking about yesterday’s events. Call it continuity in thought, if not in plot.
Coming up next: Now that the discussion’s over, everyone’s just happy.
The Eternal Couch Potato 