Word: shows
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Firsts & Fans. Though Lux Theater is careful not to offend, it has its moments of daring. Lux "broke ground in the radio field" by casting such opera stars as Lawrence Tibbett, Lily Pons and Helen Jepson in acting roles. The show boldly signed Radio Comics Jack Benny and Burns & Allen for "their first dramatic parts." And it induced Ronald Colman and Shirley Temple, "long holdouts from radio," to make their debuts...
...when the show's producer, Cecil B. DeMille, left radio because of a fight with the American Federation of Radio Artists over his refusal to pay a $1 union assessment for a political fund, Keighley got the job. A wartime Army Air Forces colonel in charge of the A.A.F. motion picture services and a Hollywood producer (The Man Who Came to Dinner, George Washington Slept Here), Keighley...
...desire to settle old scores gave a crusading fervor last week to the first Ed Wynn Show (Thurs. 9 p.m., CBS-TV). With blood in his eye, veteran Comic Wynn was out to challenge the TV popularity of brash Milton Berle. Wynn's feelings for Berle, whom he can scarcely bring himself to mention by name, range from lofty superiority ("I've yet to see something original from that man") to pitying scorn ("He'll be the D.W. Griffith of TV-nobody will give him a job in a couple of years...
Supremely confident ("I think I will bust TV wide open"), Wynn was onstage all but five minutes of the half-hour show, grimacing in a succession of funny hats, outlandish garments and size 13 shoes. The fluttery mannerisms, Rube Goldberg inventions and falsetto giggles were the Wynn trademarks made popular by a long succession of musical comedies (Ziegfeld Follies of 1914 and 1915, The Perfect Fool, Hooray for What...
Wynn talked his sponsor, Speidel Corp., into letting him make television recordings of his show on the West Coast two weeks before it was shown to the rest of the country. It seemed unlikely that Eastern critics would duplicate the West Coast raves ("The ultimate in TV comedy," cried the Los Angeles Mirror). Variety complained of Wynn's "vintage jokes and facial contortions," and commented acidly: "If he was trying to imitate Milton Berle he outdid him by staying in camera range longer...