Tuesday, August 05, 2014
Club Car Special
Got out ahead of the onrushing publishers for once, and felt a rather desperate need to touch base with Polistra and friends. The non-graphic world is getting dry and gray. Color is necessary!
We're listening to a rather strange radio series from the late '30s: Club Car Special. This was a dramatized version of a few humor columns from the previous week's Hearst newspapers. Hearst "humorists" were highly paid: O.O. McIntyre was making $200k in those years, equivalent to $4 million today. But they weren't funny or sharp or perceptive. Much as I hate to diss my old homie Will Rogers, he was the least funny and least wise of the bunch. Apparently his "humor" consisted of saying uninteresting things in a western dialect.
Nevertheless, this program enhanced and decorated the mediocre humor with cheerful and clever acting. Above all, the music was purely wonderful. A small brass ensemble played fast and lively with the 1930s articulation that has been completely lost since. Pulled you into the luxurious world of a private railroad car.... or at least your vision of such a car, since you'd never been in one. [The best articulation and worst humor are in this episode.]
After you'd listened to the dramatic version of a Will Rogers joke or a Milt Gross cartoon, your experience of reading Rogers and Gross in the paper was bound to be richer. Radio enabled you to build a sensory world around the written word.
I suppose the nearest modern equivalent would be videogames built around books, providing 'synergy' between the two forms.
We're listening to a rather strange radio series from the late '30s: Club Car Special. This was a dramatized version of a few humor columns from the previous week's Hearst newspapers. Hearst "humorists" were highly paid: O.O. McIntyre was making $200k in those years, equivalent to $4 million today. But they weren't funny or sharp or perceptive. Much as I hate to diss my old homie Will Rogers, he was the least funny and least wise of the bunch. Apparently his "humor" consisted of saying uninteresting things in a western dialect.
Nevertheless, this program enhanced and decorated the mediocre humor with cheerful and clever acting. Above all, the music was purely wonderful. A small brass ensemble played fast and lively with the 1930s articulation that has been completely lost since. Pulled you into the luxurious world of a private railroad car.... or at least your vision of such a car, since you'd never been in one. [The best articulation and worst humor are in this episode.]
After you'd listened to the dramatic version of a Will Rogers joke or a Milt Gross cartoon, your experience of reading Rogers and Gross in the paper was bound to be richer. Radio enabled you to build a sensory world around the written word.
I suppose the nearest modern equivalent would be videogames built around books, providing 'synergy' between the two forms.Labels: Danbo
¶ 3:23 PM
