As mentioned in our post on the 1960 episodes for The Mr. Magoo Show, the UPA animation
studio was in dire financial straits after its failed Mr. Magoo feature film 1001 Arabian Nights in 1959. The Magoo
disaster prompted then UPA owner Steve Bosustow to sell the enterprise to
producer Henry G. Saperstein, who attempted to reverse the studio's financial
fortunes by focusing on television, first with The Mr. Magoo Show and the following year with a series based on
comic-strip hero Dick Tracy. But what UPA wound up producing bears little
resemblance to the comic strip on which it was supposedly based because the
Tracy character (voiced by respected character Everett Sloane in a complete
waste of his talents) basically serves as a dispatcher and clean-up man who
delegates each case to one of his four subordinates--a British bulldog named
Hemlock Holmes who sounds like Cary Grant, the cartoon equivalent of Mickey
Rooney's Mr. Yunioshi named Joe Jitsu, an overweight policeman named Heap
O'Calorie who sounds like Andy Devine, and a low-budget version of Speedy
Gonzales named Go Go Gomez. Tracy has no role in bringing the criminals, all
but one taken from the original Tracy comic strip, to justice, as if he has
been kicked upstairs to a desk job after decades on the street.
The savage reviews the series has received on imdb.com are
well-deserved: the episodes, like those for The Mr. Magoo Show, appear as if written by the 5-year-old audience for which
they are intended and are based on the premise that repetition and slapstick
are the foundations of humor. Thankfully each episode is just under 5 minutes
in length, but UPA churned out a staggering 130 episodes for the 1961-62
season. As a syndicated series, these episodes could be aired at the station's
discretion, presumably collated with cartoons from other sources on a single
children's program with a local host. Each of the four crime-fighters has a
signature gag that is repeated in every episode. Hemlock Holmes is
"assisted" by a group of bumbling policemen dubbed The Retouchables
(an obvious dig at the popular Untouchables)
who behave like the Keystone Kops, always dashing off on their assignment
without Holmes who has to run after them pleading with them to stop, grab on to
the back of the car or helicopter they are using, and then crashing through the
window of said vehicle when they finally do heed his call to stop. Joe Jitsu's
gag is to use his jujitsu skills to slam villains on the ground while saying
"Excuse please" and "So sorry." Heap O'Calorie constantly
tries to steal fruit from Tony's market before consulting nonverbal beatnik
Nick for the location of the criminals he is after, and then subdues the crooks
by bouncing them with his large belly. Go Go Gomez, who did not appear until
the 62nd episode in the series, simply runs fast.
As has been documented elsewhere, not only does the Hemlock
Holmes character mimic Cary Grant, but several of the villains also impersonate
well-known Hollywood voices: Flat Top resembles Peter Lorre, B.B. Eyes imitates
Edward G. Robinson, and The Brow is a vague James Cagney. But the spoofs on
popular culture on The Dick Tracy Show
seem rote compared to other programs like The Flintstones and Rocky and His Friends--they
provide little entertainment for adults other than a glint of recognition and
lose their punch by being repeated in every episode. Even one-time gags such as
a jewelry store named Tiphoney's instead of Tiffany's seem to be throwaways.
Trying to make a comedy out of the comic-strip Dick Tracy is
an odd choice. Though Tracy would grow to be a favorite with young readers, the
original Chester Gould strip could be graphic and somewhat realistic in its
depiction of violent criminals. In Gould's prototype for the strip, Plainclothes Tracy, the mob boss uses a
blow-torch to burn the feet of a double-crosser in order to get him to talk,
and in the initial story that debuted in 1931 Tracy and his fiance Tess
Trueheart witness her father murdered by a pair of robbers who invade the
Trueheart delicatessen. But in the UPA cartoon, no one ever dies despite being
blown up repeatedly, tossed off high buildings, or involved in head-on
collisions. Bullets never penetrate flesh. Like any other children's cartoon of
the era, violence has no permanent consequences, suggesting to impressionable
minds that violence is only a gag in which no one ever gets hurt. Tracy and
comedy also failed to gel in Batman creator
William Dozier's unused 1966 live-action pilot, though Dozier insisted the
series would not have the camp factor that made the Caped Crusader so popular.
The other element working against the animated Dick Tracy is
the brevity of each episode, which prevents any real plot development and
constricts the episode to a series of slapstick gags. While series such as The Flintstones had its share of gags,
its 30-minute format allowed for some semblance of story development, and Rocky and His Friends, later renamed The Bullwinkle Show, used a serial
format that broke a longer story into bite-size installments that were
sequenced through multiple 30-minute episodes that included shorts with their
other rotating cast of characters Dudley Do-Right, Sherman and Peabody, and Fractured Fairytales. In short The Dick Tracy failed to take advantage
of any of the original comic strip's strengths and settled for cheap laughs
that became cheaper through constant repetition. Gould's upright crime-fighting
hero deserved better.
The opening and closing theme for The Dick Tracy Show was composed by Carl E. Brandt, who was
profiled in our 1960 post on The Mr.Magoo Show.
The entire series has been released on DVD by Sony/Classic
Media.
The Actors
Everett Sloane
Born in Manhattan, the son of an insurance broker and cotton
merchant, Everett H. Sloane caught the acting bug at age 7 after playing Puck
in a school production of A Midsummer
Night's Dream. After completing high school, he attended the University of
Pennsylvania for two years before dropping out to join the Hedgerow Theatre
repertory company led by Jasper Deeter until unfavorable review notices
comparing his acting to Harpo Marx led him to leave the theater and take a job
as a runner for a Wall Street stockbroker. He worked his way up to the position
of assistant to the managing partner at a salary of $140 per week until the
stock market crash of 1929 resulted in his salary being cut in half, so he
returned to acting, this time on radio. As a voice actor Sloane progressed from
playing villains on The Shadow and Buck Rogers to having regular roles on The Goldbergs and Bulldog Drummond. But his future would forever be altered when he
joined the stalwart cast of the historical-based series The March of Time on which he played a variety of characters,
including Adolph Hitler. Working on this series was where Sloane met Orson
Welles and would later join his Mercury Theatre on the Air and appear in the
famous War of the Worlds broadcast of
1938. But before that his success in radio allowed him to resume acting on the
stage as well, making his Broadway debut in Boy
Meets Girl in 1935. Sloane's association with Welles led to his being cast
in the latter's first feature film Citizen
Kane in 1941, portraying the title character's right-hand man Mr.
Bernstein. Immediately after filming Kane, Sloane appeared in Welles' landmark
Broadway production of Richard Wright's Native
Son. Sloane would appear in three more Welles features--Journey Into Fear, Lady From Shanghai, and Prince
of Foxes--but he reportedly quit Welles' production of Othello, in which he was to play Iago, because the filming was
taking too long, and the two never worked together again, with Welles making
disparaging remarks about Sloane on several occasions thereafter, even after
Sloane's death. During the 1940s he also continued to appear on radio programs
such as Inner Sanctum Mysteries and The Mysterious Traveler as well as more
Broadway theatrical productions such as A
Bell for Adano. Despite his break with Welles, Sloane was never at a loss
for work. In the 1950s he added television to his repertoire, portraying the
painter Vincent Van Gogh in an episode of The
Philco-Goodyear Television Playhouse as well as appearing on a number of
other drama anthology series. He received an Emmy nomination for his appearance
in Rod Serling's drama Patterns,
which was presented on Kraft Television
Theatre in 1956. He also began making guest appearances on a number of
shows, including Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Joseph Cotten Show,
and Climax! In 1957-58 he had a
recurring role as an investigator on Official
Detective and appeared as Andres Felipe Basilio in four 1959 episodes of Zorro. He reunited with Serling in the
Season 1 episode of The Twilight Zone
titled "The Fever" and also appeared in episodes of Thriller, Route 66, and The Loretta
Young Show in 1960. That same year he tried out his skills as a lyricist by
writing the words to The Andy Griffith Show theme "The Fishin' Hole"; though they were not used on the
TV show itself, Andy Griffith sang them on the soundtrack LP that was released
in conjunction with the program. Given his extensive experience as a radio
actor, it is no surprise that he was chosen to voice iconic detective Dick
Tracy on the 1961 animated program. He would reprise the role in an episode of
the 1965 Mr. Magoo reboot The Famous
Adventures of Mister Magoo.
In the years after The
Dick Tracy Show, Sloane continued making guest appearances on TV shows such
as Perry Mason, Dr. Kildare, Rawhide, Gunsmoke, and Bonanza. He did some voicework for Jonny Quest in 1964 and appeared in a pair of Jerry Lewis features The Patsy and The Disorderly Orderly in 1964. However, in 1965 he feared that he
was going blind and took his own life by overdosing on barbiturates at the age
of 55 on August 6, 1965. He had just completed filming an episode of Honey West which was aired posthumously.
Benny Rubin
Born in Boston on February 2, 1899, Rubin attended a reform
school in Shirley, Massachusetts and by 1914 was performing at an amateur night
where he knew legendary comedian Fred Allen. He had learned to tap dance by
watching children performing on the streets while growing up. He was part of a
touring group for a year, worked on a showboat, and also worked in burlesque
before teaming up with Charlie Hall for a vaudeville act. In 1923 he began
performing solo at the Alhambra with a routine that included tap dancing, a trombone
solo, and a stand-up shtick that was a broad Jewish stereotype that some found
offensive but nevertheless proved very popular. However, he was apparently
difficult to work with, getting fired from a 1925 Ziegfeld revue. His first
film appearances came in 1928 in the short Daisies
Won't Yell and the feature Naughty
Baby, and in 1929 he moved to Hollywood, though he still performed in New
York, serving as M.C. at The Palace and performing in a duo with Jack Haley. In
1932 he was afflicted with appendicitis and had to skip a performance with
Haley at the last minute. A young comic named Milton Berle was nabbed to fill
his place, and the rest is history. From 1928-32 he appeared in dozens of
shorts and features but reportedly missed the chance for a lucrative contract
with Fox when he refused to get a nose job. By 1938 with the Nazis rising in
Europe he was pressured to abandon his Jewish stereotype routine, but he
continued to find work playing ethnic characters on film, though over the years
his parts declined to playing unnamed cab drivers, waiters, and the like.
His
first television appearance came in 1949 on the Oboler Comedy Theatre but his best-remembered role was as an
annoyed help-desk employee on The Jack Benny Program whose catch-phrase was "I dunno!" He was also a
regular comic foil on The Red Skelton
Hour and had bit parts in dozens of TV comedies from The Bob Cummings Show to The
Joey Bishop Show to I Dream of
Jeannie. Likewise he showed up in several silly feature films such as The Patsy, The Disorderly Orderly, The
Ghost in the Invisible Bikini, and How
to Frame a Figg. On The Dick Tracy
Show he provided voices for Joe Jitsu, Pruneface, and Sketch Paree. His
last feature film was the 1979 sex comedy A
Pleasure Doing Business which also included comedians such as John Byner,
Tommy Smothers, and Phyllis Diller. He died of a heart attack on July 15, 1986
at the age of 87.
Jerry Hausner
Hausner provided the voice for Hemlock Holmes and for villains
Stooge Viller, Itchy, The Mole, and The Brow. See the biography section of the
1960 post for The Mr. Magoo Show.
Mel Blanc
Blanc provided the voice for villains Flat Top and B.B. Eyes.
See the biography section of the 1960 post for The Flintstones.
Paul Frees
Frees provided the voice for Heap O'Calorie and Go Go Gomez.
See the biography section of the 1960 post for Rocky and His Friends.
