Fireball Fun-for-All (episode 13, aired October 24, 1949)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Charles came home from work early last night, and he caught at least half of Fatal Fiancé, leaving us time for another movie. He suggested we pick up where we left off on Amazon’s series The Man in the High Castle (based on Philip K. Dick’s 1962 novel about an alternate future in which Germany and Japan won World War II) and I briefly thought of starting my run-through of James Whale’s films with his 1930 anti-war drama Journey’s End, but I decided that I really wanted something funny and found it in Ole Olsen’s and Chic Johnson’s Fireball Fun-for-All. This was a short-lived TV series (only one year, 1949 – not 1951, as Leonard Maltin had it in the chapter on Olsen and Johnson in his 1970 book Movie Comedy Teams) of which only this one episode, a Hallowe’en-themed one originally aired on October 27, 1949. It featured a relentless assault of various gags, including one that opened the show in which two burglars blow open a safe. One of the burglars asks the other if he isn’t worried that the sound of the safe exploding will draw the police, and his partner reassures him that it won’t because for the next hour the cops will be too busy watching Fireball Fun-for-All.

The show was sponsored by Buick – though we were watching it on an Alpha Video release that edited out the Buick commercials and the only trace of their sponsorship was the Buick logo embroidered on the stage curtains – and it was basically a vaudeville show in miniature for a 45-minute TV time slot. Fireball Fun-for-All was a mixed bag, with skits featuring Olsen and Johnson as private detectives (in an office set so flimsy you could see the cloth it was made of vibrate whenever anyone entered or exited) with lines and gags of various degrees of humor (my favorite was when someone walks in the office trailed by his own shadow and he announces he’s The Whistler – a popular radio show of the period in which the Whistler represented the conscience of a criminal – and then an old woman walks on, also trailing a cardboard “shadow,” and when Olsen and Johnson ask who she is, she says, “I’m Whistler’s mother!”). The show also featured a musical number called “Manhattan Symphony,” seemingly a parody of Elmer Rice’s play Street Scene as well as the “Tenement Symphony” number Tony Martin had done in the Marx Brothers’ film The Big Store (and which was there presented absolutely seriously even though we would have wanted to see the Marxes disrupt and make fun of it), which managed to be moving and funny at the same time and which I thought was the high point of the show; as well as a finale in which private detectives Olsen and Johnson repair to the house at 13 Bleak Street where the burglars from the opening are hiding the jewels they stole and, of course, Olsen and Johnson repeatedly just miss recovering them.

Fireball Fun-for-All is a mixed bag, with some genuinely hilarious moments as well as some jokes that Charles described as “groan-inducing even then.” I remember reading about Olsen and Johnson in Maltin’s book well before I ever had a chance to see them in action – over the years I’ve managed to catch seven of their nine feature films but the only one I’m really familiar with is their 1943 Universal production Crazy House, which I taped onto Beta back in the 1980’s (and I liked it not only for the comedy but because the principal musical guest was Count Basie) — but after watching Fireball Fun-for-All I’m not so sure Maltin was right to lament the musical acts and other performers that were incorporated into their feature films. Without them the Olsen and Johnson humor can get a little overbearing. Also they were not character comedians, nor did they pretend to be – though before they hit their stride on Broadway in the madcap musical revue Hellzapoppin’ in 1938 (and filmed it at Universal in 1941 in a marvelous mixture of conventional movie and crazy comedy; the film simultaneously tries to shoehorn Olsen’s and Johnson’s revue into movie conventions and makes fun of itself for doing that) they made films for Warner Bros. and Republic that attempted to fit their humor into coherent plots. Their third Warner Bros. film, Gold Dust Gertie, cast them as executives who’d both previously been married (to the same woman, at different times, played by the marvelously raucous comedienne Winnie Lightner) and who had to conceal that fact from their boss because he’d fire them if he knew they’d ever been divorced – and through much of that film I was thinking, “This would be so much funnier with Laurel and Hardy in the leads.” Olsen and Johnson never became movie stars – though Hellzapoppin’ inspired the 1960’s TV show Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In (Dan Rowan admitted as much in an interview; he said he’d seen Hellzapoppin’ on stage as a boy and never forgot it) and apparently the film version has become something of a cult item since. Still, it’s nice to see Fireball Fun-for-All end with the surprisingly moving salutation which also ended their stage shows, and which Maltin quoted in his book; one of them says, “May you live as long as you want to,” and the other says, “And may you laugh as long as you live.”