This month we are taking a look at some classic sitcoms that many people don’t remember anymore.
Blondie is one of those shows. It was based on the Chic Young comic strip and debuted on NBC in 1957, lasting one year. The series was resurrected in 1968 and the reboot also lasted a season.
Blondie had become very popular with fans. Beginning in 1938, 28 movies were made starring Penny Singleton and Arthur Lake. Blondie also showed up on the radio from 1939 to 1950. Many products had been based on the characters including comic books, coloring books, lunch boxes, and board games.
The 1957 series starred half the movie duo. Lake took on his role of Dagwood Bumstead, but Pamela Britton was offered the role of Blondie Bumstead. Their kids, Cookie and Alexander, were played by Ann Barnes and Stuffy Singer. Florenz Ames was boss J.C. Dithers with Elvia Allmana as his wife Cora. Rounding out the cast was Harold Peary as neighbor Herb Woodley.
A decade later Will Hutchins and Patricia Harty play Dagwood and Blondie, Jim and Henny Backus play the Dithers, and Pamelyn Ferdin and Peter Robbins are their kids. The only advantage this series had over the original was color.
The comic strip, movies, radio show and both sitcoms all encompassed the familiar Bumstead elements: Dagwood being physically and socially awkward; their dog Daisy, and Dagwood’s love of napping and huge sandwiches.
The reboot was produced by Joe Connelly and Bob Mosher, the faces behind Leave It to Beaver and The Munsters. There was room in the schedule after the network cancelled He and She, a sitcom starring real life spouses Paula Prentiss and Richard Benjamin. The show is described on imdb.com as “Dick and Paula Hollister are a couple living in New York. Dick is a comic-book artist who has become famous for creating a superhero called Jetman, which has been turned into a TV show starring egocentric actor Oscar North.” During its one season of 26 episodes, the show received seven Emmy nominations, including a win for writing. It’s too bad that show was given the axe and Blondie moved in because the Prentiss-Benjamin show was much more creative and felt new, while Blondie felt extremely old.
No surprise, the ratings were not great. This is even worse when you see what the show was in competition with: The Ugliest Girl in Town, which would also be gone by 1969, and Daniel Boone. The one new 1968 show to return on CBS was Hawaii Five-0 which seems so much more sophisticated than Blondie; it’s hard to believe they both debuted the same year.
Perhaps the fans didn’t tune in because the critics panned the show before it aired. The Milwaukee Journal’s Wade Mosby said it was “a horrendously contrived piece of fluff that should have never been snatched from the comic pages.” Don Page of the Los Angeles Times called it “an unmitigated disaster,” and Cynthia Lowry of the Associated Press described it as “dismal.”
By November, rumors were that the show was already cancelled, and its last episode aired in January. The show probably relied too much on slapstick and unsophisticated humor; things that might have been fine in the 1930s but were passe by the 1960s. Sometimes a show is cancelled just because it’s a badly written and executed show. It seems Blondie fell into this category not once but twice.
Off the top of my head, I can only recall two comic strips becoming popular television shows: The Archies and The Addams Family. Because the Blondie characters were not very dimensional and got into the same situations over and over, they just never were able to translate into sustainable television characters. I think there’s a good reason that many people don’t remember this show and perhaps it’s better that way.
thewritelife61 