MILTON SUPMAN, 1926-2009…
October 26th, 2009When Soupy Sales died last week, a lifelong friend of mine posted video clips of his work on her Facebook page. Her daughter, herself an adult now, added this comment: “I completely understand your childhood now. Thanks.”
She was joking, of course. But not completely. It’s the nature of jokes, after all, to mask and condense insight in the slapstick shorthand of the one-liner. Just as it’s the nature of children to know more about their parents than their parents do. In the blurry, black-and-white, lo-fi footage of a loopy childrens’ TV show from long ago, my friend’s daughter saw what we should have known all along: What Soupy Sales was trying to do, at root, was to explain our excruciating, bewildering childhoods to us, in real time.
This was an era when the original Mad Men ruled the collective unconscious, when a gleaming pastel future, and, by extension, a lavishly sterile present, were held up as ideals and goals. Children were the very hope of America, and were therefore routinely lied to. Television was sanitized for our protection. Networks could not bring themselves to show married men and women sleeping in the same bed. Minorities, their cultures, music, and disenfranchisement, were conspicuous by their absence, sidelined, stereotyped, silenced and in ways both sophisticated and brutal, shunned.
At the time, programs for children were unnervingly cheerful, unrelievedly sentimental, saccharine and coddling in tone and substance. They were the expression and the vehicle for the Disney-animated postwar America of the mind, in which wishful thinking, however understandably, came in large part to paper over and replace critical thinking.
On the surface, the Soupy Sales Show looked a great deal like other kids’ programs. The host acted, talked, and dressed like a burlesque of an overgrown child. But Soupy, along with a crew of animal puppets whose thorny personalities were often much more human than the norm of human television acting at the time, was to have a diametrically different role. He was preparing an unknowing new generation for a radically broken future.
Not just deconstructed but iconoclastic. No wonder I loved him.
Thanks for the shout out.
Shalom Sherry,
One of the lessons I think we can learn from his life is that advanced technology can hamper creativity. Compared to what children’s programming has to work with in 2009, Soupy Sales was working with rocks and twigs. That made him work harder and think more creatively.
Did you ever see the stripper outtake? Sadly, I can’t find the video anywhere on the Internet.
B’shalom,
Jeff
I can’t form an opinion on what television is supposed to be in regards to reality.
most of the best cartoons were made as shorts for movie theatres. generally to have some entertainment value for viewers of all ages. Disney, Warner Brothers, Merry Melodies, Popeye. they were kind of gritty comedy like the Three Stooges, abbot and costello, the little tramp, Our Gang.
I get kind of perplexed watching Bonanza and Big Valley. the more guttural and lascivious attraction of the wild west are encoded and understated: the saloon girls, the card tables. The Fist Fights and gun battles are always presented with with some kind of buildup. when teh violence starts early, there is a lot of ethical deliberating among the characters. The Andy Griffith show was kind of the same. they explored ethical quandries. Even the Brady Bunch did as much sometimes.
in the early 90s Arnold Swartzeneggar was sometimes called this generations John Wayne. when i watch a john wayne movie there’s usually a lot more dialogue. not many explosions, cussing, gunplay, and titties though.
in the end, I think television isn’t supposed to be so omnipresent whether its fiction aspires to be real or not. lawrence welk and bob villa are reality television enough.
gritty realism or ultra-violence is best encountered in literature. reading without pictures at least requires some kind of cerebral consideration of the subject matter.
Shalom ATD,
First, thank you for stopping in, for reading and, most importantly, for taking the time to share your thoughts. It is with our conversations that we construct our communities.
On your point about John Wayne and Arnold Schwarzenegger, I think that technology has out run our ability to be creative. We’ve grown lazy because we use special effects to wow audiences in much the same way a floundering vaudeville performer would grab an American flag and run back and forth across the stage to get the crowd cheering.
B’shalom,
Jeff