One of the most important shows in early television, it was NBC’s first public color broadcast and one of the first shows aired nationally. Its 4 million fans included John Steinbeck, Thornton Wilder, Orson Welles, and Adlai Stevenson. Edward Albee based the protagonist of The Sandbox on one of its characters. Tallulah Bankhead was such a fan that she asked friends to keep notes on the episodes she missed while she was traveling. “ ‘Addicts,’ ” wrote one journalist, “is not too strong a word to use in speaking of the devotion generated among the followers.”
And its stars were puppets. Kukla, Fran and Ollie was a live television show that aired from 1947–1957 on NBC and ABC. Today, it’s best remembered as a children’s show, but in its heyday it inspired astonishing ardor in adult viewers. Certainly, children’s shows have continued to appeal to adult audiences, who generally appreciate them for the kinds of qualities that Emily Nussbaum recently praised in a review of Adventure Time: They are “childlike, nonlinear, poetic, and just outside all the categories that the world considers serious.”
Kukla, Fran and Ollie shares those characteristics, but its history also complicates how we understand such attachments today. Perhaps mass media haven’t only been a mirror for what New York Times critic A.O. Scott recently described as the “slow unwinding” of a once-dominant patriarchal authority. It would be easy to suggest that Kukla, Fran and Ollie challenges Scott’s argument that this is a 21st-century phenomenon simply by extending it: Adulthood as we know it was as “conceptually untenable” in 1947 as it is in 2015.
The show’s conceit was simple: It revolved around the antics of the Kuklapolitan Players, a theater company made up of one human—radio actress and vocalist Fran Allison—and a dozen puppets, all of which were animated by the show’s creator, Burr Tillstrom. The puppets talked and danced and sang on a small stage while Allison stood in front of it and talked and danced and sang with them.
The plots usually involved planning for the company’s upcoming performances. They staged re-enactments of The Mikado and Shakespeare’s plays, historical pageants, and an original presentation of St. George and the Dragon, which they performed with Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops. (Ollie, a dragon puppet, had a starring role.) One of the show’s running gags was that Ollie was always quite eager to stage a puppet show—they themselves, of course, were not part of a puppet show—and occasionally convinced everyone to try using marionettes. It was quirky—mostly improvised, in fact—charming, and unlike most everything else on television, then and now. Even as other shows contributed to the creation of the formulas that still dominate the industry, Kukla, Fran and Ollie avoided them entirely.