Fractured Flickers

This was the funniest program ever on television. We used watch it lying down so we wouldn't have any place to fall. My stomach would hurt from laughing after every half hour show. My favorites were: Two German Shepherds in "Froth and Foam: King of the Mad Dogs"; Stan Laurel (before he teamed with Oliver Hardy) as Sherman Oaks in "Minute Mysteries"; and the salute they made to a different U.S. city in each show. Some of their car commercials were hilarious, too. Hans Conreid was a perfect host for this, and very funny himself.

I would really like to see this program come back (as reruns). I hear a lot of criticism about TV shows from the 50's and 60's, but this show was much funnier than anything on now, or in the last twenty years.

I watched this show during its initial 1964 run (as a small child) and after forty years could still remember specific funny lines and scenes. Imagine my delight when I read that the entire series of 27 episodes was to be released on DVD.

I have now watched about half of them with my 14-year-old son, and we are enjoying them just as much as I did as a kid...except now I get more of the jokes. (Same story with Rocky & Bullwinkle, from the same zany group that did FF.) Sure, there are some "clunkers" (including a couple of too-long segments where the narrator is trying hard to do a Bob Newhart-style monologue), but every episode contains some laugh-out-loud moments. Hans Conreid is the perfect host, and the other voice-over talents (Frees, Foray, Scott) are in top form.

FF is the forerunner of What's Up Tiger Lily?, LA Connection's "Mad Movies," Kung Pao, etc. and more consistently inspired than any of them. That's because they knew when to stop a gag, and could jump to something completely different when necessary. Commercial parodies, zingers about 60s politicians and celebrities, surreal wackiness...it's all here and all collected in a 3-DVD set! Oh, and did I mention all the celebrity visits from people like Rod Serling, Zsa Zsa, Fabian, etc?

We were all familiar with that Jay Ward-Bill Scott sense of humor when FF made its debut in the Autumn of 1963. After all, just about everybody watched ROCKY & FRIENDS, which became THE BULLWINKLE SHOW for Sunday evening colorcasts on the NBC Television Network. It was an instant success with our crowd, and we tried not to miss it.

It is understandable why Silent Film Purists would pan FF. It was quite irreverent to the well known,but now in Public Domain, Silent Film actors. Each fracturing made use of the most outlandish comments and sound effects. They were added to absurd story lines. The end result was as fast a moving half hour as was on the small screen, ever.

The "fracturing" of each film made the names of such luminaries of the silent screen as John Barrymore,Douglas Fairbanks, Gloria Swanson, et al.,now familiar to a new generation. The titles of the great works of the era were also brought to the forefront. After a season of FRACTURED FLICKERS, we were all given a sort of class in the Silent Cinema. I can testify that our family, as well as other kids in neighborhood, were interested in the "Old Time Movies" after that season. We were interested to either rent or buy copies.

We suppose that it was like taking a little honey or maple syrup to get the medicine down.

Of all the Jay Ward productions this was FAR AND AWAY MY FAVORITE!!! Rocky and Dudley and George and all were great, but this is the show that every week would set me off laughing. The voice-overs had a wild free-wheeling style that felt like spontaneous jokes flowing out of their heads -- though of course they were scripted to match the wonderful visuals. These were either a brilliant re-editing of a single movie, or a fantastic hybrid of dozens of them, reassembled to tell an entirely new story. That sort of work requires a prodigious visual memory and a great sense of humor. And Hans Conried was the perfect cherry topping it all off.

Now despite what the cranky Mr. Vogel says below, this show introduced me to silent movies, the same way I first learned classical symphonic music through Warner Bros. cartoons. The distinctive look of the early film stock, cinematography, and acting is now so closely associated with the pleasure centers of my brain that whereas most people can now barely tolerate black and white anymore, I don't even need the incidental music and can sit in pure silence for hours just treating my eyes to silent movies. Thanks to Jay Ward, I like flickers, even unfractured.

I caught this little gem very briefly on Ha!, what would become Comedy Central, in the early 1990's, weekly at the ungodly hour of 2 AM on Mondays. But, I made sure to watch it as long as they showed it. Which wasn't long, but, I still remember it today.

If you're familiar with What's Up Tiger Lily, Dynaman, Samurai Pizza Cats, Kung Pow: Enter The Fist, or Tokyo Pig, the premise will be familiar. They take old silent pictures and recut them for comedic effect, with new soundtracks provided by some of the best voice actors of all time. Even the series host was one. In the final analysis, a show such as this must rest on whether the scripts are funny. And, with writers from such shows as Rocky And Bullwinkle and Get Smart, it succeeds. Thankfully, I was able to tape some of my favorite shorts when Ha reran them. Mine are the same as most everyone else who remembers this series: the one about Zorro, the one with the Applegate murders, with an unlikely list of suspects, including a monkey and a surprised and infuriated looking Hans Conreid.

So, it's hard to find, but, if you know someone who has these, beg, borrow, or steal their tapes. You can sure do worse with 30 minutes of your time, by far!