Back in the 50s, the show Smilin' Ed and his Buster Brown Gang, renamed Andy's Gang after Ed passed away in 1954, featured a rubber dog toy/minor demon named
Froggy the Gremlin, unhallowed be his name, who would often puncture a talk given by some pompous lecturer or ethnic stereotype. Froggy could appear by "plucking his magic twanger," and disappear at will, but his chief power was his ability to make people do silly things by completing their sentences.
Here's 6½ minutes of Froggy's antics. (CW: 1950s attitudes, annoyed animals)
Buster Brown was a comic strip that ran from 1902 to, variously, 1911 or 1923. (It's complicated.) The Brown Shoe Company adopted foppish Buster and his bug-eyed dog Tige as mascots in 1904, and kept using them into the 90s. The company has dropped them now, and has since taken up the boring name Caleres. The comic strip had ended long before Smilin' Ed's Gang began on the radio. Buster Brown in the show's opening is played by Jerry Maren, one of the Lollipop Guild performers from The Wizard of Oz.
"Smilin'" Ed McConnell was a religious singer on the radio, but he became best known as the host of Smilin' Ed and his Buster Brown Gang, a footwear-hawking kids show where he told culturally-insensitive adventure tales out of a huge tome titled "Smilin' Ed's Stories." Every episode of Ed and Andy's shows ended with an exhortation, yes, to buy shoes, but also not to forget "church and Sunday School." Smilin' Ed passed away suddenly in 1954, to the inheritance of a replacement host, Western star Andy Devine, who kept much of the format. Both had a couple of extremely annoyed real animals, Midnight the Cat and Squeaky the Mouse, "play music" and "sing." After that, it was Froggy Time.
If this bizarre show interests you then you're a freak after my own heart. And if it doesn't that's okay, just know that, some day, everything you think is as natural as the air you breathe will seem similarly ridiculous and nonsensical.
It'll happen to YOU.
The two Gangs are still fondly remembered by those old enough to have grown up with them, and there are a number of surviving episodes scattered around Youtube. Try searching for "Smilin' Ed's Gang" or "Andy's Gang." For my part, I'm trying to preserve the legend of the infernal Froggy the Gremlin as best I can. TV today is full of buffoons to puncture; will we ever see Froggy's like again?
Some extra links:
A full episode when it was Smilin's Ed Gang (30m). The story involves Little Fox, the Sioux "Indian" boy with an unsettling inability to use contractions, together with a friend pursuing mostly separately-filmed footage of a puma (or "pewma"). Then Midnight the Cat plays the accordion very badly while Smilin' Ed expresses his unlikely approval. Along the way shoes are pitched repeatedly.
A surviving full episode of Andy's Gang (26m), with 'The Man-Eater of Jog, set in "India" and starring Gunga and Rama, Midnight and Squeaky performing Spanish music as badly as ever, and Froggy messing up Andy's card tricks. BTW: the audience with the kids are said to have been added in editing during Andy Devine's tenure, but the crowd's laughter in Ed's time also seems to be looped. The easily-flustered Mr. Gymnasium gamely tries to explain golf, but a rogue amphibian keeps sabotaging him.
Another episode of Andy's Gang (34m), with story "The Leopard Hills" set in pseudo-India, commercials that have nothing to do with shoes, but they do have to do with toy machine guns, puppets (possibly Muppets!) selling candy bars, Colorforms and the horrifying Penny the Poodle "by Marx!" Midnight and Squeaky play Oh
Beelzebub Suzanna. "Pasta Fazooli" tries to give a singing lesson, I don't know maybe he'll succeed this time but it seems doubtful.
More Andy's Gang (26m), there seems to be a conflict around this time whether it's "The Buster Brown Show" or "Andy's Gang." The song about
everybody's gotta have shoes has had its lyrics changed to
everybody's gotta have a gang. The story is The Monkey's Temple, again in India-ish. The opening clips seem reused here from a different episode. Midnight the Cat's in a sailor dress, but when she and Squeaky actually play it's even more fake than usual. Froggy's voice is different! We also get some Gremlin lore: Gremlins are all magic, and all look different, and Froggy has a cousin, Harry, who's an Orangutan, a real one (though they seem pretty chill), who appears by plucking his "Orangutwanger." It's a fun segment (thought not as fun as the looped crowd noises suggest), shame about Froggy's voice though.
Midnight and Squeaky play "Three Blind Mice" in 2½ minutes of the most excruciating television I have ever witnessed.
Midnight and Squeaky play "Jesus Loves Me," (2½m) which is the audio/visual equivalent of eating paint.
Another of Froggy's battles with Pasta Fazooli (4m) which has the hapless Italian stereotype desperately trying to explain tubas to the kids at home while derailed at every turn by a mischievous frog-god.
Here's some more random episodes from Youtube, they're all from 24-30 minutes long:
Tiger Shark,
Village of the Nets,
War Bonnet and
The Wild Ponies, There aren't many episodes of Smilin' Ed's TV show on Youtube, but here's some radio episodes:
one,
two,
three,
four,
five. There's more to find out there, but I think my patience with building links is just about gone. Yep, there it goes. Right out the window. See you!
