"Kukla, Fran, and Ollie" is online!

Monday reading #34

Monday Reading is my weekly recommendation of something I’ve found thought-provoking or fascinating. Sometimes it is about something I have read. Sometimes it is about television or food or music or projects I care about supporting. Sometimes I do not send it on Monday. Please share with anyone who might like the vibes!!

On New Year’s Eve Day, I took myself on a date to the Chicago History Museum for a special screening of some recently restored episodes of the NBC/ABC show Kukla, Fran, and Ollie, a live-action musical puppet sketch show that was almost entirely ad libbed. The Chicago History Museum holds creator Burr Tillstrom’s archives, and the program was made up of episodes recently digitized.

If you’re a Jacqui Shine completist, you know that I wrote about it for Slate in 2015 (big ups to Friend of This Newsletter & editor Dan Kois!). Forgive me for quoting from it to bring you up to speed:

The show’s conceit was simple: It revolved around the antics of the Kuklapolitan Players, a theater company made up of one human—radio actress and vocalist Fran Allison—and a dozen puppets, all of which were animated by the show’s creator, Burr Tillstrom. The puppets talked and danced and sang on a small stage while Allison stood in front of it and talked and danced and sang with them.

The plots usually involved planning for the company’s upcoming performances. They staged re-enactments of The Mikado and Shakespeare’s plays, historical pageants, and an original presentation of St. George and the Dragon, which they performed with Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops. (Ollie, a dragon puppet, had a starring role.) One of the show’s running gags was that Ollie was always quite eager to stage a puppet show—they themselves, of course, were not part of a puppet show—and occasionally convinced everyone to try using marionettes. It was quirky—mostly improvised, in fact—charming, and unlike most everything else on television, then and now. Even as other shows contributed to the creation of the formulas that still dominate the industry, Kukla, Fran and Ollie avoided them entirely.

Anyway, at the time I wrote it, the show wasn’t available online—I had to get some DVDs via interlibrary loan! Since then, funding from the Jane Henson Foundation, the Burr Tillstrom Copyright Trust, and some crowdfunding has allowed for the transfer of all 700 episodes to digital file formats, and it’s all (or soon will be) available for free on YouTube, including the episodes I watched (which had originally aired in December 1951).

I honestly don’t know what to suggest, but here’s The Mikado. There’s a pair of 15-minute episodes from 1952 in which two of the characters, Buelah Witch and Madame Ooglepuss, get their hair permed. Here’s a pretty famous episode that aired shortly after the show received a mention in Look. You could do worse than just picking some episodes that aired around April Fools’ Day (1950, 1951).

It’s just so gentle and fun and weird. I went through the show’s files at the Chicago History Museum when I wrote the story ten years ago, which includes a ton of fan mail. This letter, written when the show was ending, was my favorite: We like you so much. I do not want you to leave. It is a statement of loss and grief and love that I think about all the time. It’s what my 4 year old nephew would have said when I had to leave his house to come home to Chicago this afternoon if he wasn’t studiously pretending I wasn’t going: I like you so much. I do not want you to leave. Same, bud.

Anyway. More soon!