STEVE CARLIN writer, producer and creator of Rootie Kazootie, Happy The Humbug & The 64 Thousand Dollar Question
When Steve Carlin was out-of-work and needed a place to get away from it all, he would go to Yankee Stadium and watch a ball game, look at people, and think. One time in 1950, he was picking up on all the rooting going on in the stadium by the fans, and started playing on the word Rooting, Rootin, Tootin, and eventually ROOTIE TOOTIE, the first name the character would be called.
These odd thoughts came from the strange imagination of this talented 35-year-old, who turned out scripts in the mid-forties for Kate Smith, Famous Jury Trials, Counterspy, Gang Busters and Exploring the Unknown, among other radio shows. At the age of 24 Steve attended the College of the City of New York were he got his B.S., and earned an M.S. in education at Columbia University. He’d started out to be a teacher. Having freelanced at WNEW radio during his college days and with work scarce in the teaching profession, he started free-lancing in radio. By 1940, WMCA had hired him as a script manager, and in 1942 NBC brought him on to their production staff. HAPPY THE HUMBUG
At the same time, writing under another name, Steve Roy, he’d finished a children’s book he was working on called, Happy The Humbug, but he didn’t have a publisher yet. As luck had it in 1944, while in a meeting with NBC programmers looking for a pre-Christmas program for kids on the radio, Steve submitted his children’s book as an idea, without telling them he was the author. When they loved the story and wanted they know if Steve could make a deal with the author, the rest was Christmas entertainment history, as the first character he’d created made its debut on radio.
It’s when the radio sponsors wanted a color brochure to plug the show, that Carlin met Myron Waldman, one time animator for Max Fleischer (Betty Boop, Popeye, and others). Now an ex-serviceman, Waldman was the chief animator at the Paramount New York Studios in Astoria Queens. Carlin convinced him to do some newspaper sequences of Happy Humbug, as a test, which resulted in a partnership that lasted five years. By 1945 Newsweek had featured a story on the two men and their successful comic strip, which was a hit among the weekend kids and even the adults reading the New York Post, and earning the authors about a $100 dollars a week. It’s also at this time that Carlin started mastering the art of merchandising, when he was able to sign up licenses for Happy the Humbug and sell promotional pins, sweaters and kids records. This is also a time when parents, teachers, psychologists, and politicians were attacking comic books for their content, but nobody was bothering Carlin & Waldman’s strip--rather, they were admiring it. The dictionary defines the Humbug as among other definitions, a hoax, and Carlin’s way of playing on words, situations and spoofing other talent was gaining in popularity, as a fun hoax on life in Carlin’s jungle world. The characters even spoof Lewis Carroll--Happy looks like a giraffe with a turtle’s back and a monkey’s tail.
He pals around with Hunky the Monkey who, of course, has a Monkey’s Uncle; the Dumb Bunny, The Cock and Bull, who tell cock-and-bull stories; and Hickory, Dickory, and Dock, the three mice who keep the clocks in the forest running. Happy’s godfather is a lovable Pink Elephant, who cries strawberry tears and has such a crammed memory that he has to have an assistant to remember things. As script head of the NBC Radio Recording division, Steve had to have all of the shows finished ahead of time, so they could be sold ahead of time.
Newsweek wrote in 1945 that the Radio-Recording section was a little publicized department of NBC that sells product by the same rule of thumb as a newspaper syndicate. A permanent staff of six writers and five directors, with actors drawn from the best in the Radio Registry, produced complete sets of recorded shows, ranging from soap operas like Betty and Bob, and musical shows like Slim Bryant and his Wildcats, to half hour dramatizations like Playhouse of Favorites.
Any individual station, including those affiliated with rival networks, could subscribe to NBC’s radio recordings. Happy the Humbug was written as 54 separate 15-minute shows, with time out for the insertions of local commercials. That year, they carried Easter week, broadcasting three times a week from at least 23 stations in the United States and Canada. The New York World Telegram wrote in 1945, after the first radiocast, that “Steve Carlin wrote the story, and it deserves to become more than a short transcribed series for the holidays.” It has a delicious wit, a sharp satire, and a wonderful gentleness. The writer of the piece, Harriet Van Horne went on to write that, “ Myself, I’m in love with Happy The Humbug.” In Variety, they wrote that the Humbug format “isn’t the usual fairy clad one, thanks to the clever scripting of Steve Carlin. It has its fairy tales, but each has a note of satire for the more observant youngsters, or for the parents sharing it with the more or less hep kids.” The cast of radio voices included Budd Hulick, Gilbert Mack, Jackson Beck, Winfield Hoeney, Joe Rogers, Joe Boland, Jan McAlisterm, Abbey Lewis, Bob Sloane, Phil Kramer, Mae Questel, Frank Milano, Bob Sherry, Amy Seidel, Roc Rogers, Junius Mathews, Brad Barcker, Humphrey Davis, Donald Bain, George Mathews and Timmie Hyler as the narrator. The writer was Steve Carlin and the producer and director was Bert Wood.
|
