On Stage
SHIPLEY, JOSEPH T.
On STAGE The Comic Strips Invade Broadway By Joseph T Shipley Li'l Abner. From the comics of Al Capp. By Norman Panama and Melvin Frank. Lyrics by Johnny Mercer. Music by Gene de Paul. Dancing...
...Such is the humor of Li'l Abner...
...In politics, he has fashioned the hydrogen bomb, the cold war, and segregation...
...With Li'l Abner, the comics capture the theater undisguised...
...Their hold became so strong, as they reached from children to immature adults, that advertising, then other fields, adapted or adopted their technique...
...The other aspect of change, subtler but perhaps more significant, is the enforcement of literacy upon individuals neither emotionally nor intellectually capable of coping with its demands...
...In the arts and sciences, he has created psychoanalysis, abstract painting, and the comic strip...
...but when the women are running to catch a mate on Sadie Hawkins Day, a device is brought in guaranteed to stop any man in his tracks: a woman wearing even less...
...perhaps in the next five, or fifty, he will move equally far in his control of the world within...
...Its popularity is a gauge of the spread of the comic-strip mind...
...Li'l Abner is banal, vulgar, leering...
...They appeal to the adult with the mind and taste of a preadolescent, the emotional impulses of a goat...
...The girl chosen as Daisy Mae is the ideal comic-strip heroine—with long flowing blonde hair, long fluid limbs, and the proper places so rounded, who cares if her voice is flat...
...In the past five, or fifty, thousand years of his development, man has moved far in his control of the world about him...
...get near a skunk and you know what happens...
...Excess is success...
...James Theater...
...Frank and Kidd...
...Daisy Mae and the other maidens of Dog-patch wear as little as they can, which is, of course, in the tradition of musical comedy...
...At the St...
...The world which the children of I today see around them differs from the world of 1900 more than 1900 differed from 1492...
...Now they have come full-bodied into the theater...
...As the evening's basic story, we are told that the overdrift of atomic explosions is too close to Las Vegas, which must be preserved as the entertainment center of the country...
...Presented by Messrs...
...There are, as I see it, two main aspects to this revolutionary change...
...The moral and emotional level is that of the comics, but the form is routine farce...
...A polecat is a skunk...
...Their first entrance was insidious, rather of emotion than of form...
...Meanwhile, man must find a way of living with himself...
...Some political satire is attempted as the antics go on...
...In rapid succession, the telephone, the automobile, the airplane, the cinema, the radio and television have become commonplaces, part of the child's normal environment...
...this makes him a hero, and the captain who wants to keep him must therefore be a martinet, an ambitious fool, and a proper butt for everyone's practical jokes...
...He wants to get into front-line "action...
...To bring the comic strip further into the field, "Evil-Eye Fleagle" is summoned, to put a spell of eerie green on Abner and make him select the wrong woman, so that he can be murdered, so that the miraculous juice from the tree that grows on his plot alone can bring profits to the millionaire General Bullmoose...
...They reduce reading to its lowest rank...
...How its citizens cheer to learn they are the most—it doesn't matter what...
...The most obvious is that of technology...
...Beginning as a strip across a newspaper page, the comics grew into entire books...
...Roberts, just revived at the City Center...
...And the Government is destroying Dogpatch to save Las Vegas...
...The "comics"—it is hardly necessary to point out that the word no longer has any connection with humor—are perhaps the most pervasive attempt to entertain the immature who have learned to read and write...
...Roberts is doing an excellent job in the war, keeping up his men's morale in the dreary task of maintaining supplies...
...The actor chosen to represent Li'l Abner is a facsimile of the comics hero...
...Outer space and supersonic travel are routine subjects...
...Not even The Arabian Nights employs such childish asininities...
...Dancing and direction by Michael Kidd...
...Dog-patch has been chosen as the most unnecessary town in the U.S.A...
...Early in the century, musicals that appealed to young and old—Babes in Toy-land, The Wizard of Oz, Top o' the World—were imaginative, tasteful, smiling in their treatment of sex...
...A flagrant vehicle was Mr...
...Attached to other figures we find such names as Moonbeam McSwine and Lonesome Polecat...
...Li'l Abner's mother, 'way down south in Dogpatch, gets her telepathy working on Bullmoose at the nation's capital to reveal his murderous plot...
...The names reveal its quality: Mayor Dawgmeat, Senator Jack S. Phogbound?There's no jackass like our jackass...
...I will not stoop to reveal what device is used to save Dogpatch...
Vol. 39 • November 1956 • No. 51
