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Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? Frank Tashlin and the Hard Sell
SteynonLine ^ | February 17, 2024 | Rick McGinnis

Posted on 02/17/2024 2:02:18 PM PST by Twotone

One aggravating peculiarity of baby boomers – one of many, to be sure – was to imagine their parents and every preceding generation afflicted with a lack of self-awareness. From farm hand to Harvard man, they were all benighted rubes, overwhelmed by the speed of change and in thrall to authority and received wisdom. Irony was born out of thin air, in the smoky funk of a dorm room when someone put on a Lenny Bruce record after Rubber Soul.

While it's far from the most egregious error their cohort ever forced upon the world (Earth Day and the music of Jefferson Airplane were far worse) it's among the flimsiest, blown to ash simply by mentioning MAD magazine, the Ernie Kovacs shows that ran on NBC and ABC from 1956 to 1962, nearly every Looney Tunes cartoon produced after 1937, and the uneven but fascinating films directed by Frank Tashlin.

Listing Tashlin is a bit of a cheat since he worked at Termite Terrace between 1936 and 1946, making classic Looney Tunes like The Woods are Full of Cuckoos (1937), Plane Daffy (1944) and A Tale of Two Mice (1945). Before Tashlin, the other only director who began his career in cartoons was Gregory La Cava (My Man Godfrey, Stage Door, Fifth Avenue Girl). It's a tiny, select group that includes Tim Burton and Brad Bird.

Tashlin drifted into a job at Looney Tunes after working at both Fleischer and Ub Iwerks and drifted from there to writing gags for comedians like the Marx Brothers and Lucile Ball, punching up scripts for movies like The Fuller Brush Man and The Paleface before being drafted to finish The Lemon Drop Kid (1951), with Bob Hope, after director Sidney Lanfield left the picture.

(Excerpt) Read more at steynonline.com ...


TOPICS: History; TV/Movies
KEYWORDS: franktashlin; movies; tonyrandall

1 posted on 02/17/2024 2:02:18 PM PST by Twotone
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To: Twotone

Reading that was 15 minutes of my life gone forever.


2 posted on 02/17/2024 2:13:05 PM PST by ChildOfThe60s ("If you can remember the 60s....you weren't really there")
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To: Twotone

The clue was he didn’t like the Jefferson Airplane.


3 posted on 02/17/2024 2:37:08 PM PST by PIF (They came for me and mine ... now its your turn)
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To: Twotone
One aggravating peculiarity of baby boomers – one of many, to be sure – was to imagine their parents and every preceding generation afflicted with a lack of self-awareness.

I am a baby boomer. I have no clue what he is talking about.

4 posted on 02/17/2024 3:40:10 PM PST by E. Pluribus Unum (The worst thing about censorship is █████ ██ ████ ████████ █ ███████ ████. FJB.)
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To: ChildOfThe60s

For me, this was unreadable and I don’t say that about too many postings.


5 posted on 02/17/2024 4:02:46 PM PST by WaldenPond (No Taxation Without Representation)
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To: E. Pluribus Unum

This boomer owns up to it for my cohort. We thought we were so smart and had all the answers.


6 posted on 02/17/2024 4:29:32 PM PST by Bigg Red (Trump will be sworn in under a shower of confetti made from the tattered remains of the Rat Party.)
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To: Bigg Red

So you speak for all baby boomers? You’re right. You are pretty arrogant.


7 posted on 02/17/2024 5:13:55 PM PST by E. Pluribus Unum (The worst thing about censorship is █████ ██ ████ ████████ █ ███████ ████. FJB.)
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