April Fools Day with Kukla, Fran & Ollie
- Mar 31, 2023
- 2 min read
This is a great treat, most especially if you're lovers of Kukla, Fran & Ollie. But not limited to that. It’s their April Fools' Day program from 1950, over 73 years ago. (I say “over,” because oddly the date of the broadcast is not April 1, but March 31. I have to assume that April Fools' Day that year fell on a weekend, and so they were weren’t on the air that day.
This is a particular treat for me because it not only features my favorite Kuklapolitan who is rarely on the show, Cecil Bill, but it’s one of the longest appearances I’ve ever seen for him. He comes on about the 11:00 mark, in costume for April Fools Day. And he even gets to sing a song! Now, that might not sound like much, but you have to realize that Cecil Bill only speaks with the words “Toi-te-toi-toi…” And that holds for the lyrics of a song he sings.
Cecil Bill is quite nuts. And when I visited the 50th anniversary tribute to Kukla, Fran & Ollie about 20 years ago at the Chicago Historical Museum, I discovered something that Burr Tillstrom did to reinforce that, which was quite clever – something I never noticed before, but finally saw close up. That’s because they had all the Kuklapolitan puppets on display. And looking at Cecil Bill (which was a joy for me…), I noticed that Tillstrom hadn’t painted his mouth on where a person’s mouth would normally be. Instead, he made it a crescent that was angled a bit and ever-so-slightly off to the side, askew, not centered directly under his nose. So, without exactly knowing why, unless you paid close attention, Cecil Bill would seem somehow…off. And if you look closely in the video, you’ll see what I mean. He jumps around a lot in his song, and is covered with a big coat, so you can’t always see his mouth clearly, but you’ll notice what I’m talking about.
Or you can just check out the good fellow here below, second from the left in the striped shirt --
Fun, too, in this episode is Fran gets a chance to impersonate Ollie in a song, and clearly is enjoying herself with it.
But then, the whole show is fun.
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