The Bard Women-- Garbo
Recent Tuesday posts have been on the topic of books which became movies. Today, a book which became both movies and cartoons.
It was Betty MacDonald's sister Mary who dragged Betty into becoming the family's best-known writer. All the Bards were creative, intelligent, and active. A few had what Charlotte Bronte called "scribblemania." For example, Betty's mother, Sydney, a widow who needed money for her family, wrote scripts for radio soap operas during the Depression years. This was work Sydney got through connections Mary had through her own career in the production of radio commercials.
Mary herself wrote books about her life (as the wife of a doctor, for instance) as well as the "Best Friends" series of books for girls.
Betty was by far the most famous writer in the family. Mary had pushed Betty to write about her experiences with her first husband Robert and the egg farm they ran together. The memoir, The Egg and I, turned out to be a smash bestseller and the movie version, starring Claudette Colbert and Fred MacMurray, was also a huge hit.
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It was Betty MacDonald's sister Mary who dragged Betty into becoming the family's best-known writer. All the Bards were creative, intelligent, and active. A few had what Charlotte Bronte called "scribblemania." For example, Betty's mother, Sydney, a widow who needed money for her family, wrote scripts for radio soap operas during the Depression years. This was work Sydney got through connections Mary had through her own career in the production of radio commercials.
Mary herself wrote books about her life (as the wife of a doctor, for instance) as well as the "Best Friends" series of books for girls.
In Anybody Can Do Anything, Betty wrote about her mother typing soap opera scripts at the kitchen table and (lovingly) about how bossy Mary was about Betty writing books.
Betty was by far the most famous writer in the family. Mary had pushed Betty to write about her experiences with her first husband Robert and the egg farm they ran together. The memoir, The Egg and I, turned out to be a smash bestseller and the movie version, starring Claudette Colbert and Fred MacMurray, was also a huge hit.
In the same way the television show "Laverne & Shirley" spun off from "Happy Days," and became as bitg a hit as the original, the characters of Ma and Pa Kettle, Betty's neighbors, became (with their flock of children) the mainstays of a whole series of wildly popular movies.
The film versions weren't enough for viewers, who wanted more. They got it. Movie studios also made cartoons, and if there's anything Hollywood likes to make movies about, it's the movies. This goes for cartoons, too. And cartoons about movies and movie characters are a way of sneaking in publicity for a studio's films. You can think of a million examples of cartoon people and animals imitating Frank Sinatra, Bette Davis, Groucho Marx, Greta Garbo, and so on.
Universal put out a series of "Maw and Paw" cartoons, based on "The Egg and I." These were done by Walter Lantz, of "Woody Woodpecker" fame. The Maw character doesn't look much like Marjorie Main, but Paw definitely has Percy Kilbride's bowler. In this cartoon clip Maw, Paw, and the kiddies sing a birthday song to the family's pet pig. (It sounds like they are wishing "Wilbur" a Happy Birthday, but the pig's name is Milford, a joke because many of Ma and Pa Kettle's film children have refined and dignified British-sounding names.)
Here, in poor resolution, is the whole cartoon, which is called "The Pig That Stayed Home."
A few years after his Maw and Paw series, Walter Lantz did a different stand-alone cartoon with the title "The Ostrich Egg and I."
Here's another video version of it, with the limited dialogue in Spanish, and with better picture quality:
See you next week!
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| Garbo |
Entertaining and informative. I especially like the clips you embed in the text.
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