Bob Clampett,
Boy Wonder Of Stage C
(continued from page 1)
The opening theme fades out,
and what follows, sprinkled with cleverly integrated commercials
of course, is a few minutes of adventure, chases, comedy, explosions,
fights, shipwrecks, funny dialogue and turmoil, visually expressed
by the Clampett hand-puppet characters, among whom is everyone's
favorite, the marvelous and goofy personage of Beany's sidekick,
Cecil the Seasick Sea Serpent, pronounced in all narratives as "sur-pent,"
with pent emphasized. Beany was created for kids, but Cecil was
created for everyone! Beany and Cecil and their adventures captured
an enormous children's audience and, unexpectedly, an adult audience
as well. In fact, even Albert Einstein called Beany his favorite
TV show!
In an early kinescope, first broadcast in December, 1952 from Paramount,
Los Angeles' Channel 5, the Time for Beany story-line concerns
Cecil's confrontation with a menacing robot-Cecil who has appeared
in previous Beany episodes as an evil threat to the boys
on the Leakin' Lena and their friends, the natives of nearby islands.
Except for its "metal" skin and the deliberately visible
nuts and bolts that hold him together, the robot-Cecil character
is a dead-ringer for the "real" Cecil. During one confrontation,
robot-Cecil lands one tremendous haymaker on Cecil's noggin, who
spins backwards, landing on the "set" on his back, mouth
open, unconscious. Fade to commercial...
When we come back to the story, robot-Cecil has disappeared, and
Cecil awakens, saying: "Like the lollipop said to the lollipop
sticker: `I'm not licked yet!'" In the meantime, robot-Cecil
is chasing Beany who calls for help. Cecil hears Beany and zips
out of the frame: "I'm comin' Beany. I'm comin'...."
As today's story evolves, robot-Cecil, although presumed evil ("ee-vee-il,"
as the word "evil" is invariably pronounced during the
Beany opening narratives), is in reality good natured and
not one whit brighter than the Cecil "in the flesh." It
can be surmised that following Beany, Cecil and robot-Cecil's predictable
reconciliation, the show, as many segments of Beany do, concludes
with a Ragg Mopp duet:
"Rag Mopp Doodly-dah-de-do-dah... Rag Mopp Doodly-dah-de-do-dah...
Rag Mopp Ragg Mopp R-a-g-g M-o-p-p (spelled out) Ragg Mop! Ragg
Mop!"
...and so on. The song, Rag Mopp, represented the good natured
Cecil's joie de vivre and piece of mind following another
hair-raising adventure. After its fleeting but spectacular moment
of public recognition in the `50s, Ragg Mopp became on some
level unquestionably the on-air property of Cecil the Seasick Sea
Ser-pent; Cecil "owned it," as they say.
Time For Beany audiences were both loyal and colossal. In
its heyday, TV rating bureaus estimated that during the Time
for Beany broadcast time-period, of the total number of sets
turned on to watch anything on TV, 60% were tuned into Beany,
an enormous audience for a children's show. Additionally, Time
for Beany was syndicated into roughly 60 television broadcasting
markets, nationwide.
It is also something to note that Bob Clampett had two other shows
in production at the same time, Thunderbolt the Wondercolt and
Buffalo Billy. Plus, a half-hour weekly show The Willy
the Wolf Show and another Time for Beany half-hour to
do on Saturdays. Bob and his entire staff was spread between these
shows.
Bob Clampett Productions
Bob Clampett is a stickler for security, and the doors leading from
Sunset Boulevard into the Clampett production offices complex adjoining
Stage C are loaded with locks, buzzers and alarm devices to keep
employees in and the unwashed out. Behind the doors, gates and locks
are conference rooms for meetings, offices for storyboard and script
pick-and-shovel work, workrooms for puppet manufacturing and Bob's
office which houses a quagmire of models and drawings on bulletin
boards, artwork, scripts, books and puppets. In addition, other
areas of the Clampett complex are jammed with wardrobe, props and
sets, while elsewhere on the lot sit thousands of pounds of equipment
-- owned by the broadcasting station -- necessary to transmit Beany
over the airwaves. While Beany is being broadcast live from
Hollywood to Southern California audiences, downstairs it is "Kinescoped,"
a system whereby the broadcast TV picture is sent on wires to the
Kinescope or Kine (pronounced "kinnie") department --
a dimly lit, refrigerated series of rooms called Master Control
wherein the massive kinescoping equipment sat. The rooms house the
big, black, humming machines with buttons, dials and switches and
one very bright televised picture the size of a 35mm movie frame,
originating on Stage C and projected into yet another 35mm frame-size
aperture where it is exposed onto black and white motion picture
film. This is the videotape equivalent of its time. Years later,
when I am working on the animated Beany and Cecil cartoon
series, in the bowels of Clampett's Snowball Productions on Seward
Street in Hollywood, I come upon reel after reel of 16mm Beany
kinnies carelessly stashed among other production paraphernalia
including one Cecil hand-puppet, looking sorrowfully up at me, displaced
by animation.
