Search Results

Punk’s musical style can be considered as beginning with the transformations to blues resources explored mostly by white baby boomers invested in the sixties counterculture, especially in the northern Midwest, such as the Stooges and the MC5. Their approaches to the blues were a response to the changing stakes of musical expressions of whiteness and Blackness during the 1960s, connected to the social upheaval surrounding so-called white flight to the suburbs and the Second Great Migration of African Americans from the South. Some similar approaches to the blues were also cultivated in New York among musicians such as the Velvet Underground. Their music emphasized riffs, limited harmonic movement, and other features which are described in this chapter as the “Raw Power” approach to punk. But despite punk’s deep musical roots in the blues, the discourse around punk served to obscure these connections.

Jack Benny drew from a successful vaudeville career to adapt his humor to radio form in 1932. Realizing the pressures of creating new program material on a weekly basis, he hires Harry Conn. Benny and Conn develop continuing, quirky characters and “comedy situations” in imaginative spaces away from the microphone, that create a new kind of American humor. Sponsored first by Canada Dry Ginger Ale, Benny and Conn develop their program through experimentation, addition of new character Mary, and turn Jack into the “Fall Guy” who was butt of his cast members’ jokes. Friction with Harry Conn nearly derails the program, but Benny finds new writers and the program hits top radio popularity ratings by mid-decade.

Reluctant, young Sadye Marks becomes drawn into vaudeville and radio performance through marriage to Jack Benny. The character created for her by Harry Conn, Mary Livingstone, becomes a popular and unique character in American entertainment. As Jack’s sometimes-secretary and chief heckler, Mary criticizes men with remarkable freedom, yet also retains her independence and attractiveness, much like Hollywood heroines of the 1930s, and yet Mary never has to get married in the final reel. Mary Livingstone had great cultural impact, and star status, in the 1930s as a comic “Unruly Woman.” After World War II, however, Mary’s inhibitions drew her away from the microphone, and her delightfully tart tongue was heard less frequently. With a fascinating affinity for a feminist viewpoint, female characters in the Benny show narrative universe were tough and usually prevailed over the men.

Rather than being aimed at family filmgoers generally, Hollywood Verne adaptations began to polarize around either adults or preteens in the later 1960s. A bifurcation emerged as Verne became a name attracting not only children but also mature filmgoers as he emerged as an author for adult consideration. The Verne cycle evolved in approach and function, embracing the ethos of an age of social and generational transformation. A certain exhaustion of the existing trend became evident as filmmakers, in the search for fresh perspectives, turned away from adaptations toward pastiche and satire of the author’s stories, using characters, icons, and vehicles in narratives and contexts outside of those the author created. New variations on his ideas or futuristic elements beyond Verne’s vision or intent developed, while still retaining canonical elements, plot structures, and thematic motifs. This was also the rationale allowing for a series format in several Vernian animated television presentations, and the first Verne television series would demonstrate this form as a viable style for bringing Verne to the screen.