How painful to see “Kukla, Fran and Ollie” consigned to somebody’s slapped-together Internet list of “Forgotten TV Shows.” Forgotten? Not by untold thousands for whom the adventures of Kukla, Fran and Ollie were once as integral to a day as eating breakfast, going to school or teasing your sister.
For some boomers, “K, F and O” may have been the first television show they ever really loved — not some prefabricated folly to be lumped in with “Holmes and Yo-Yo” or “Baggy Pants and the Nit-Wits” or others in the ranks of the forgotten.
To help keep it remembered, fans of the show and colleagues of its creator, the gifted Burr Tillstrom, have reissued five episodes from a latter-day revival and packaged them in a five-disc 60th anniversary commemorative-edition DVD set.
Faithfully enough, these episodes are in color, unlike most of the clips available on YouTube and other sites; the Kuklapolitans were on one of the first regularly scheduled color shows, mainly because they appeared on NBC, which was owned by RCA, which originally made all the color sets sold in this country.
Technically, “Kukla, Fran and Ollie” was a kids’ show, but adults watched almost religiously — and we’re talking adult adults, celebrated adults — including James Thurber, Orson Welles, John Steinbeck, Adlai Stevenson and lyricist Stephen Sondheim.
There don’t seem to be any old kinescopes or films or videotapes of that momentous oddity lying around, and in fact, not much of “Kukla, Fran and Ollie” still exists, considering it aired five days a week on NBC for the first 10 years of television, 1947-’57. You won’t find any surviving scripts, either, because there weren’t any in the first place. Tillstrom, who dreamed up the show and worked all the puppets, ad-libbed every performance.
Allison, a former schoolteacher who’d achieved some fame as a singer and as wacky Aunt Fanny on the “Don McNeill’s Breakfast Club” radio show, followed cues and suggestions she got from the puppets, only she never related to them as puppets. They were her friends, and ours — beamed through the air as visions of light, apparitions on the family’s 14- or 21-inch console TV set.
Kukla, the leader of the pack — his name taken from the Russian word for “doll” — was a cherubic but savvy chap with a down-to- earth outlook and a touch of sophisticated skepticism. Oliver J. Dragon was the naughty-boy rebel of the company, a one-toothed reptile with a leopard-skin body, for some reason, and a pair of soulful, doleful, heavily lashed eyes. There were other supporting players, too, chief among them Buelah Witch (named for one of the producers, Beulah Zachary), opera singer Madame Ophelia Oglepuss and Southern windbag Col. Crackey.
But once hooked, you were theirs for life. The accolades were extravagant, and remained so for years.
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