In my recent conversation with the Flexitoon folks last week, Craig and Olga mentioned Foodini and Pinhead as being a major influence. I’d heard the reference at least once before; the show had also been an influence on Charles Ludlam of the Ridiculous Theatrical Company. Foodini was before my time, and hasn’t lingered in the popular memory in comparison with some contemporaries we’ll mention. So I of course looked into it right away and of course I was led down a rabbit hole — in more ways than one, led there by a pair of Jewish brothers from Chicago named Bunin.
Lou Benin (1904-1994) was a pretty left wing guy. According to his official website, when he was 22 years old he drove to Mexico to apprentice under Diego Rivera as a muralist. While there, he seems to have discovered his love for puppetry, and began presenting a series of marionette shows, many of them adaptations of straight plays, such as O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape. One of his assistants was the future Anne Morrow Lindbergh, the daughter of the Ambassador to Mexico. The Communist photographer Tina Mondotti took numerous shots of his puppet shows, the best known of which is called “Hands of the Puppeteer” (1929).
At some point after this, Bunin toured nationally with a marionette company with Meyer Levin, better known as a journalist and novelist, author of Compulsion. (Great article about him by my old friend Alisa Solomon in Performing Arts Journal here).
For a brief time, Lou and younger brother Morey Bunin (1910-1997) both worked with Tony Sarg and Bil Baird, creating floats and suchlike for the 1932 Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade and a marionette show for the holiday shop windows at Macy’s itself. In 1939 the brothers contributed to an astounding project for the 1939 New York’s World’s Fair. Called Pete Roleum and His Cousins (1939), it was a stop-motion animated film that was shown at the Standard Oil pavilion. Astoundingly, it was designed and created by no less than Charley Bowers, under the direction of Joseph Losey, with music by Hanns Eisler, conducted by Oscar Levant. The Bunins, along with future Tony winner Howard Bay did the sets and puppets. It’s completely charming, though to watch it nowadays requires catapulting yourself to a headspace where you don’t already know that reliance on fossil fuels will be the death of the planet.
In 1943, Lou created Bury the Axis, his own stop-motion short that poked fun of Hitler, Mussolini, and the Emperor of Japan. Two elements date it today: 1) it’s clearly pro-Soviet Union, and 2) it makes the then-common mistake of undermining and clouding his attack on Fascism with racist stereotypes. In its day it was effective, no doubt; today it works against the message of the film. As we’ll see, Morey was not above such stereotypes himself. It was the very staff of comedy back in the day.
In 1946, Lou created the color stop-motion animated prologue to the MGM movie The Ziegfeld Follies, which was later sometime cut from screenings. It’s incredible! Like Bury the Axis, it’s available to watch on Youtube.
In 1949 came what Bunin remains best known for today, his stop-motion adaptation of Alice in Wonderland. It was a French-British coproduction, with Bunin as producer, and the equally interesting Dallas Bower as director. Carol Marsh, later known for such roles as Fan in Scrooge (1951) and Lucy in Hammer’s Dracula (1958), played Alice. Peter Bull is one of the voice-over actors. The timing of the film was bad. Walt Disney’s Alice in Wonderland came out soon afterward, and the more powerful studio sued to thwart American screenings of the Bunin version. In the UK, it was similarly suppressed, as it was thought that the Red Queen bore an unfortunate resemblance to Queen Victoria. Neglected for decades, the only extant copies of the film degraded, although MOMA has created a restored version. A not very restored version lives on youtube. It’s a bit like watching The Seven Faces of Dr. Lao — vaguely unsettling. Though nothing could be as unsettling as Paramount’s 1933 Alice.
After this, Bunin was said to have been blacklisted because of his leftist associations, although he did do some educational films, industrials, and commercials, notably some ads with talking beer mugs for Utica Club Beer. Again the official Lou Bunin web page is here.
Oddly, that website makes no mention whatever of Morey Bunin, arguably the better known of the two. Morey’s partner (and later wife) at some point became Providence-born, Brown grad Hope Shippee (1908-1970). Morey and Hope specialized in hand puppets. They worked together as a team for the WPA Children’s Art Project and the U.S.O. They played what was left of American vaudeville and British music hall. They were part of Danny Kaye’s revues at the Palace Theatre, and also played Radio City Music Hall. But the medium where they really made their mark was television. As early as 1944 they were doing shows on Dumont’s local station WABD in New York.
Then, from 1948-51, the high water mark of their careers, a children’s show originally called The Adventures of Lucky Pup, and later The Great Foodini, after that character and his sidekick Pinhead, originally minor characters on the show became more popular. Foodini was of course a magician — not to be confused with this man. Visually he’s in the tradition of all the turbaned faux Eastern stage illusionists I wrote about here, although to me, he also seems to resemble Eddie Cantor, especially as seen in Ali Baba Goes to Town. Morey Bunin played Foodini. Hope Shippee Bunin played Pinhead, his hapless assistant. Their relationship was very much in the old school comedy team tradition, with Foodini as a schemer, and trickster, and Pinhead as the butt of his ill-tempered wrath. Clips of this show too are available on Youtube. Originally airing on CBS, the show later moved to ABC. It was so popular that many lines of merch were launched, including comic books, games, record albums, toys etc.
Why The Great Foodini didn’t survive in popular memory to the extent that Howdy Doody; Beany and Cecil; and Kukla, Fran and Ollie all did, is a question. Perhaps because it went off the air so early? At any rate, the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens has done their part to keep the Bunin Puppets’ memory alive; see their entertaining webpage here. There is also another good site devoted to them here.
Later Morey Bunin invented a unique technique that merged elements of animation and puppetry called Aniforms, perhaps best known from the “Fred” segments on Captain Kangaroo, voiced by Cosmo Allegretti. Apparently the technique used rods somehow to manipulate the video image of a character so that the puppeteer could improvise with it, and interact with live people in real time. There are some clips about it on Youtube, but no real good clips demonstrating the technique itself that I could find.
Anyway, thanks, Olga and Craig, for the intro! Now I too am a fan!
For more about vaudeville history consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, And please stay tuned for my upcoming Electric Vaudeville: A Century of Radio and TV Variety.