Radio: The Week in Review

The good guys on TV last week were, as usual, giving the bad guys their lumps. As millions of youngsters watched in beady-eyed fascination, Roy Rogers (with the help of Dale and Trigger) got the drop on some slow-witted fur thieves; Hopalong Cassidy (with help from his younger brother ) corralled a batch of badmen who had holed up in a gold mine; the Lone Ranger (with help from Tonto and his horse Silver) outwitted a pseudo-Englishman and won an inheritance which —naturally —he promptly donated to a worthy cause.

Meanwhile, out in the cold reaches of outer space, a band of interstellar cavemen were put to flight just as they were about to burn alive Vena, the beautiful navigator for Rocky Jones, Space Ranger; a bearded, mad scientist was certain to be thwarted by right-thinking Captain Video who, as the press release puts it, is an unbeatable “combination of Einstein, King Arthur and Marco Polo,” and Space Patrol’s Commander Buzz Corry was zooming through the cosmos intent on reforming the almost limitless supply of villains with his soul-washing Brain-O-Graph.

Comics & Westerns. TV’s swarming children’s shows are designed to ensnare the growing urchin almost from the moment his infant eyes begin to focus. One of the best shows is reserved for the very youngest: NBC’s Ding Dong School, featuring Dr. Frances Horwich and making life easier for mothers and their pre-school young. From here, the moppets are expected to progress by easy stages through Du Mont’s Magic Cottage, ABC’s Smilin’ Ed’s Gang to NBC’s Pinky Lee Show and the bedlam of Howdy Doody.

Few adults are sufficiently strong-fibered to watch these last two shows : Pinky Lee is an ex-burlesque comic who wears a funny hat and lisps a succession of feeble jokes (Sample: “You mean I’ve got to be a spy?” “Don’t mince words.” “Oh —a mince spy!”). Pinky laughs maniacally about the commercials and spends a good deal of time hugging reluctant children dragged from his studio audience. Howdy Doody is the sort of show that can be heard five miles on a clear day without benefit of transmitter. Currently, while its star Bob Smith is convalescing from a heart attack, Howdy features bewhiskered Gabby Hayes, who describes himself as “an ornery ol’ coot” and adds little coherence to the muddled plot.

By the time a child is nine or ten, he is apt to find these shows “too babyish” for his more sophisticated taste and will turn to space serials, westerns or the shows borrowed from the comic strips, e.g., Superman and Joe Palooka. Today’s children get a great amount of their TV entertainment from the old movies that enchanted their parents when they were moppets: most kid shows include a few reels of ancient Charlie Chase comedies or animated cartoons that date back to the 1920s. One cartoon series, Crusader Rabbit, was made especially for TV.

Though not fully animated and lasting only 3½ minutes to an episode, it is a widely popular feature on such local shows as Manhattan’s Children’s Theater starring Ray Forrest. Big Top and Super Circus supply acrobats and trapeze acts; some of the Saturday morning shows include education films dealing with the home life of otters and salmon. The CBS dog show Lassie is soon to get a canine rival in ABC’s filmed Rin Tin Tin. ABC’s Kukla, Fran & Ollie is seen every weekday, but its gentle humor probably has a larger audience among grownups than kids.

ABC hopes this month to expand children’s TV horizons with Disneyland, a series of 26 hour-long programs ranging from science to Indian Fighter Davy Crockett. The only other new development may come from NBC, which is considering a series on the underwater adventures of skin divers. Flamingo Films, a TV producer, thinks it may have found the answer to expensive animated cartoons: last week Flamingo signed a contract with Television Corp. of Japan. U.S. writers will forward their plots to Tokyo, where they will be animated and filmed by Japanese artisans (whose pay is lower) and then returned to Manhattan for sound recording.

Wisteria & Decay. On the drama front, TV last week went regional with a vengeance. Two shows dealt with the decay-and-magnolia theme of the Deep South.

On ABC’s new Elgin Hour, Massa Robert Cummings tried valiantly to save his old plantation from a flood, keep his ex-waitress wife at home, and bail out his amoral brother-in-law who had a tendency to shoot upstate troopers. On NBC’s Lux Video Theater, there was plenty of hysteria mixed in with the wisteria as Massa Zachary Scott kept mooning about the veranda of his columned home while trying to make up his mind between a daughter of the Old South and a Northern hussy. On Robert Montgomery Presents, Paul McGrath played a Yankee who couldn’t choose between his ever-loving wife and a Central European charmer, while CBS began the run of a new series, Climax, with an examination of the manners and morals (both terrible) of Southern California. The Climax play was based on Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye, and starred Teresa Wright and Dick Powell who played the tough private eye as if he were trying the impossible task of parodying Mickey Spillane. Climax lost what little connection it had with reality when one of the corpses —unaware that the camera was still on him —slowly got up and crawled away.

Night Fight. CBS and NBC had a new set of Trendex rating figures to look at last week. On Monday night, CBS’s I Love Lucy, the No. 1 show of the last three years, returned to the air. The episode was not topflight Lucille Ball but proved good enough to score 46.8 against 15.8 for NBC’s Medic. The big surprise of the evening was CBS’s December Bride, a run-of-the-mill situation comedy starring Spring Byington. On its first appearance, Bride won a big 31.4 rating, nearly double that of NBC’s competing Robert Montgomery Presents.