This Childhood Memory Brought to You by . . .
An Elegy to the Hosts of Children's TV
"Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.
— James Baldwin
Children's television has never concealed its true intents; a half-hour long
cartoon is as much an advertisement for a set of action figures as it is
entertainment. Like most of us who grew up on a heavy diet of children's
television, Tim Hollis can to this day remember the commercial jingles fed to
him by the local hosts of Birmingham, Alabama. He has even thoroughly
incorporated such hosts' incessant glee and affinity for terrible puns into
his writing style for Hi There, Boys and Girls: America's Local Children's
TV Programs, his half reference work, half elegy to America's local
children shows.
Children's shows have been in existence as long as television itself. Many
were simply old radio programs adapted to the new format. Often, they were run
by local stations at times the major networks did not offer any other
programming, consisting at first largely of B-Westerns and second rate
cartoons. Hosts might have been a news anchor roped into working Saturday
mornings, a radio personality trying desperately to survive in the new medium
or just someone who had worked in one of the station's administrative
departments. Given such names as Sergeant Jack and Skipper Frank, or even just
named after the station's call letters, these hosts sometimes did as little as
introduce each cartoon and tout the sponsoring products.
More than education or even entertainment, advertising was the primary
motivator in children's television. Such is the case with most of broadcast
television, but no type of programming could be so associated with its sponsor
as children's shows, which regularly went by such uncreative titles as
Birmingham's Tip Top Clubhouse, which was created for the purpose of
promoting Tip Top Bread. Because of the stations' small budgets, these shows
consisted of usually a single set and single host, and often disappeared after
their sponsor decided to spend its advertising dollars elsewhere. Other shows
were even less discreet, such as Junior Auction, which appeared in one
form or another across the country, auctioned off promoters' toys to the child
who could bid the highest number of empty potato chip packets — another
endorsed product.
Most shows eventually switched from Westerns and old film shorts to animation
produced specifically for the new market, cartoons such as Popeye,
Mr. Magoo, and the Hanna-Barbera and Warner Brothers arsenals. Other
cartoon offerings redefined low tech. The adventure cartoon Clutch
Cargo, for instance, featured patented "Synchro-Vox" system of inserting
live action footage of actor's lips rather than animating the lips, resulting
in show mostly consisting of still pictures in which pairs of disembodied lips
were the only things that moved.
During the 1950s, franchising of show formats began. Bozo the Clown and
Romper Room, two well-remembered, very different programs were actually
franchised out for years, with each region boasting its own Bozo and its own
Miss Sally to host. Local childrens' programming remained viable through the
1960s, but by the early seventies the genre was at its end, due to
better-budgeted, more constant, national network programming and also the
Action for Children's Television and the FCC's efforts to curtail advertising
within children's shows.
Hollis grew up during these twilight years, and worked for several years in
the late eighties in public access television, trying to recreate what he saw
as the lost art of children's shows, co-hosting a program with the very same
"Cousin Cliff" Holman he had watched as a child. Hi There, Boys and
Girls continues his attempt at enshrinement of children's television hosts
on a nationwide scale, as he compiles a history and summary of all local shows
and hosts categorized by state and town.
Hollis would have done fabulously as a host himself. He maintains an
unrelenting cheerfulness as he plows through a dull, dense amount of
information regarding shows often so short-lived or inconsequential that the
station employees who worked while they were produced sometimes cannot even
remember the host's real name.
After a brief, glib history of the programs in general, the book becomes
completely unreadable. It is primarily a sourcebook to be used by other
researchers not willing to travel to Lubbock, Texas themselves for more
information about the host of Sunshine Sally, or for sentimental adults
trying to remind themselves of what they were watching during their formative
years. But few people actually need any of this information; fewer still need
all of it. Hollis rarely offers up the interesting factoids — such as Earline
of Earline in Storyland, who not only dressed and acted as a little
girl on the set, but in real life as well — that make such comprehensive
reference works worth leafing through. He sticks to the basics: what station
the show was on, its sponsor, its host and what cartoons it showed. In cases
where there is actually some information worth knowing, he shys away from
telling it himself and instead refers those interested to a host or show's own
biography. At his most frustrating, he will allude to a seedier detail of a
host's history, or make oblique remarks regarding their dismissal from the
job, but he hardly reveals anything worth repeating.
More disappointing, though, is that Hollis makes no effort to put the
information he has gathered to any use. He offers no insight into what he
presents, and holds back judgment upon any show's relative quality. He has
accomplished something laudable, being the first to catalogue a lost era that
already has begun to slip away, forgotten. Hi There, Boys and Girls is
a labor of love, and Hollis admits that for those who cannot understand why he
would do such a voluminous amount of research in the first place, he has no
explanation because, in truth, he has not bothered trying to understand it
himself.
— 3 May 2002
