This is the very first serial I can ever recall seeing on a Sunday afternoon. I remembered (and still remember) only bits and pieces of it, most especially the evil Sombra's always calling up the spirit of her even more evil father, who really looks like he belongs in a Three Stooges two-reeler.
Move up in time to 1956. On the late night Steve Allen Show, Steve introduced a comedian named simply "Theodore", who was quite simply hilarious in a monolog that lasted about 8 minutes. Theodore gave "concerts" of what was called "disconcerting humor", and a very short time after the Allen appearance, a friend and I went to see a complete show of his at, of all places, Town Hall, in Manhttan. To this day, I have never laughed harder than I did for the near-two hours he held the stage, a phantasmagorical presence who scared you and made you double over with laughter at the same time. He was billed under the simply name 'Theodore'. Later, however, he added to it and became "Brother Theodore", leading a back-to-nature movement at his concerts, which in time became NYC coffee house presentations on Saturday nights at midnight. We went to some of those, too.
During all of this time, I never even knew his last name, and then another friend, watching this 1947 serial, told us that the villain in the show, played by one Theodore Gottlieb, was actually the current local coffee house favorite, Brother Theodore. Around this time, I was living at the Ansonia, and one day I got onto an elevator with - who else? - Brother Theodore (he could never be misidentified; nobody looked or sounded like Brother Theodore). I spoke to him for a moment and he seemed rather disturbed to have been recognized at all, so I retreated quickly and never got to ask him about his pre-Theodore acting career. Looking at it now, he seems to have appeared in a number of films (good ones, too, like THE STRANGER and THE THIRD MAN) but always in little more than walk-ons. His role in THE BLACK WIDOW is by far the most substantial one he ever essayed in Hollywood. And now I've learned that that Steve Allen appearance may have been his first-ever TV appearance, but that he later - in the 1970s and 1980s, appeared many times on the Letterman show, with Johnny Carson, etc., yet I never heard of him again after that Ansonia elevator meeting.
Just putting this in to remind everyone how strange an interest in actors can be, when I can remember the same actor from two entirely different periods in his career, both very meaningful to me at the time, and never have realized (for a good 30 years or more) that my recollections of what I thought were two memorable performances were simply recollections of the same performer in two separate stages of a career, neither of which I could possibly have associated with the other.
Anyway, there was an LP out in the late 1950s recorded at that Town Hall "Concert of Disconcerting Humor", and if you ever see it (maybe it's come out on CD), don't pass it up. It is unique, as indeed was Brother Theodore. His motto was, "As long as there is death, there is hope!" Now, just how unique can a comedian get?
