Word: kazoos
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Archie is a lean, mischievous, battered six-footer named Ed Gardner, who declares : "Your true New York mug doesn't say toity-toid or erl. He's about halfway between oyster and erster." Gardner's in dignities are delivered with a kazoo-voiced good nature which keeps everybody happy, including his victims. Three writers turn out the original script, but the final version is practically all Gardner ("The boys do a rough draft and I tear it down"). The result is grade-A American foolery...
Durable Spencer Tracy (Father Flanagan) splashes through this pail of tears with an undampened performance. Kazoo-voiced Mickey Rooney (the mayor) very nearly drowns. The paying customers, unfortunately, are not provided with rain checks...
...broadcast from North Carolina's brown, brick Central State Prison just a few blocks from the business centre of Raleigh. Started eight months ago by six-foot, 240-pound Ren Hoek as part of the recreational activities of which he was director, the show began with a kazoo player, a piano pounder, a drummer. Inmates took part on the program only as a reward for good behavior the preceding week, soon made it the "shortest half hour of the week" for their 900 fellow prisoners...
Hollywood's No. 1 box office bait in 1939 was not Clark Gable, Errol Flynn or Tyrone Power, but a rope-haired, kazoo-voiced kid with a comic-strip face, who until this week had never appeared in a picture without mugging or overacting it. His name (assumed) was Mickey Rooney, and to a large part of the more articulate U. S. cinemaudience, his name was becoming a frequently used synonym for brat...