Word: hobo
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Chaplin once explained that he created the character in 1915, after an accidental meeting with a hobo in San Francisco. The Tramp's resurrection was only slightly less serendipitous. IBM's advertising agency, the Madison Avenue firm Lord, Geller, Federico, Einstein, was looking for someone, or something, that would attack the problem of computer fright head on. The agency was talking about using the Muppets or Marcel Marceau, the mime, when, according to Creative Director Thomas Mabley, the idea for the Tramp "sort of walked in and sat down...
...wrote Buckley, was a "hectic idealism." He dressed in windbreakers and slept in his clothes, "always on the go, a kind of hobo of lost causes." With his boundless energy, said Kennedy in 1980, and "his papers, his clothes, and seemingly his whole life jammed into briefcases, envelopes, and satchels--all of it carried with him everywhere--he was a portable and powerful lobby...
...asking for her father's blessing. The passions are sudden and spontaneous and violent. Yet they do not seem phony or contrived. For all these homeless unhappy characters, the prospect of being loved stirs and then awakens their passions. In "The Girl in the Storm," for example, a railroad hobo finds himself trapped inside an old store during a flood with a young girl. After protecting her from the water and keeping her warm, he for the first time feels as though he has something to live...
...Sellon's delivery of the songs bear ugly shades of Caesar's Palace. The writers reach the lowest depths of their lyrical abyss with "Feelin' Good," a number that sounds like it was lifted from some bastardized Porgy and Bess. In a semicomatose performance, Adam Finkel as The Hobo sings "Dragonfly out in the sun/You know what I mean/Butterflies havin' fun/You know what I mean...It's a new dawn, it's a new day, it's a new life...
...Hobo makes Cocky realize that he's missing out on life's beauty and that to win freedom he must beat Sir at his own game. Suddenly, he becomes as fierce and determined as Sir and, once he wins over his master's protege (Alison Carey in a wonderfully impish performance) and proclaims his independence, Sir is left flab-bergasted with nothing but his empty rhetoric on manners and tradition. Though proud, the revitalized Cocky is not heartless. He dreams of "a new beginning, a new game of new hope, fellowship and understanding." O, Noble Proletariat...