Wednesday, July 19, 2023

 

Toppers: Holly of Hollywood

 

Keeping Up With The Joneses was already quite a venerable daily strip when it added a Sunday page on January 3 1932. The daily began in 1913, almost two full decades earlier. Associated Newspapers, the distributor, was primarily a syndicator of dailies, so it is perhaps not surprising that it took one of their better-known strips that long to take the plunge into colour. Or maybe the wait was for creator Pop Momand to find enough able assistance to take on the extra work. Who knows...

Whichever it was, the Sunday Keeping Up WIth The Joneses was not exactly a gangbusters success, but it did get enough clients to be kept running until both the Sunday and daily were cancelled in April 1938. In this seven-plus year run the strip had one and only one topper that ran with it every single week for the entire span, titled Holly of Hollywood

In the earliest few strips, the svelte tall beauty Holly was an aspiring Hollywood actress, but after just a few months she set her sights considerably lower and became a waitress in a greasy spoon. Holly might have been attractive, but her personality left something to be desired -- she was vain, self-absorbed, and lazy. From this Momand eked out the gags of this one-tier usually three panel strip. Typical situations involved her smarting off to the restaurant customers, sassing the other help, or going out on first dates (one can imagine second dates were pretty rare). 

Holly of Hollywood ran from January 3 1932* to April 10 1938**, the same running dates as the main Sunday page. For some reason for most of those years the name Holly in the title panel was lettered within double-quotes -- I have no idea why.


* Source: Brooklyn Times, via Jeffrey Lindenblatt.

** Source: Brooklyn Eagle


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Comments:
Are there any surviving recordings of "the funnies read over the radio"? It seems to miss the point.
 
I remember hearing one of LaGuardia's readings on those old time radio on cassette tape things that were so popular for awhile. (Yeah, that was a few years back). The reading was trying to be dramatic and entertaining, he described what was going on in the panels.

The concept mainly came about because of newspaper strikes. If your paper was on strike, the radio station would get the proof sheets and keep you up to date on what was happening in the story strips. I think the other shows that read the funnies were more a way to cheaply fill air time. Why the papers would advertise them is a bit of a mystery to me. Maybe they thought the kids would get hooked and make papa switch papers to get the funnies they'd heard on the radio?

--Allan
 
No real mystery to this. It used to be a very common tradition for parents to read the comics to their children (with appropriate voices, of course) and radio stations often stepped in with a canned equivalent as a promotional tie-in with a local newspaper. King Features had a syndicated radio show, The Comic Weekly Man, which dramatized comics from the Puck Sunday section until as late as 1953.
 
You can hear a long version of Fiorello reading the comics here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_G-IC7MaTPw
 
There were many comic section readers avilable for radio listeners in the 1920s-50s. Usually this would be on stations that were owned by a specific newspaper, who would, natch, only do that paper's weekly offering.
The term "canned", in radio jargon, was applied to ready-made, syndicated stuff, like "The Comic Weekly Man", who was reading it for the whole chain. Hearst had many "canned" programmes from the 1930's to 50s. I myself own one such disque, an episode of "Jungle Jim" on one side, and something from "The American Weekly" on the other. It's 16" wide. Basicly, a "canned" comic reader could only happen with Hearst's "Puck" section, because pretty much all other papers were unique, and would have to have a production tailored for them.
 
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