A friend runs a reporting service and each day (among other things) he sends out a writeup on something that happened on that particular date. October 31, 1912, was the birthday of Dale Evans, wife and costar of Roy Rogers, the Singing Cowboy, so yesterday he sent out a rather lengthy bio of her. Being a musician, I always read the ones about musicians. It talked about her early days on radio and the who's-who of stars she worked with. One of them was Edgar Bergen. How many of us are left who remember Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy? What shocked me today in 2006 was to realize that 55 years ago in 1951 I, and millions of other people, were entertained by a ventriloquist on the radio! Duh? When Bergen (father of Candice Bergen) made the transition to television, his dummy Charlie McCarthy never failed to make fun of him for the fact that, since he had practiced his art on the radio, he had never learned to speak without moving his lips! What a simple time that was. We could not see the actors or the scenery. We were enchanted by mystery shows full of thunderclaps and squeaking doors, western shows full of gunfire and stampedes, soap operas full of sighs and kisses, and most notoriously Amos 'n' Andy, a sitcom about black people played entirely by white actors. And... a ventriloquist. We could picture Edgar Bergen sitting there with his lips not moving while Charlie McCarthy seemed to be alive and talking. There were many other far more accomplished ventriloquists who put on amazing live performances in theaters and on TV. Some of them could throw their voices while drinking water. Some could make it seem that a person was talking in another part of the room. It was so magnificent. The dummies and other props were really talking. We believed it, at least for a while. That was the magic of entertainment. Edgar Bergen died several years ago and Charlie McCarthy is now on display in the Smithsonian's American History Museum. Last time I was there I observed a poignant conversation between a mother barely old enough to have seen Bergen's act and a little boy who wondered what was so special about a large wooden doll. She felt the way I do. I could see her rapt with the fond memories of those performances, as she enthusiastically explained to her son the special magic of making that large wooden doll appear to talk. The kid, of course, could not possibly understand this, in an age when geckos sell insurance, rabbits walk underwater playing bass drums and los perros quieren Taco Bell. He's seen The Matrix, Lord of the Rings and the Harry Potter series. He probably has videogames at home in which cars fly and people rise from the dead. "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Don't get me wrong, I love the technology. But ya know, sometimes I really miss the magic. I thought of this when I posted on the thread about animated TV shows. A good many of us think South Park is the best animated show ever, or at least one of the very best. South Park uses almost no technology worthy of the name. Only occasional CGI for special scenes, and no sequences of line drawings. It's basically all done with blocks of construction paper and looks like it was done by kids younger than the ones it portrays. It's so simply and quickly produced that Parker and Stone got an episode about the capture of Saddam Hussein on the air immediately after his actual capture. But it's wonderful. Yeah I know it's full of gross crap (often literally) and this member of the Howdy Doody generation occasionally has to turn it off, but still it's wonderful. It has magic instead of technology.
Actually, from what I heard from a guy at work, the creators of South Park only used construction paper in the first season. After the massive success of that season, they went out and bought a software suite for movie generation that, for their style, is actually grossely overkill, and they don't use all that it's capable of for the sake of retaining their style. But I know what you mean. If not for the irreverant humor, I loved Team America: World Police for it's ventriloquism and set design. I mean, making the entire movie with puppets and puppet sets was an insane idea that they pulled off very well with very good physical detail, while still keeping the style that made it integrally... well, fucking hilarious. Unfortunately, they've stated that they don't want to try to pull that off ever again because it was just a shitload of work.
