Soupy Sales, Rod Serling: Prophets who raised a generation
Like many a prophet, just two Jewish kids gone astray. The signpost to the Twilight Zone? The stop for home.
By Bradley Burston Tags: Bradley Burston Israel newsClick here for more articles by Bradley Burston
A man named Milton Supman died last week. He died quietly, at 83. He'd grown up in the only Jewish family in a small North Carolina town, his father a dry goods merchant who had moved there from Hungary. His family gave him the handle which was to be the origin both of a stage name and of a peculiar, indescribably influential bond with millions of American children - Soupy.
When Soupy Sales died last week, a lifelong friend of mine posted video clips of his work on her Facebook page. Her daughter, herself an adult now, added this comment: "I completely understand your childhood now. Thanks."
She was joking, of course. But not completely. It's the nature of jokes, after all, to mask and condense insight in the slapstick shorthand of the one-liner. Just as it's the nature of children to know more about their parents than their parents do. In the blurry, black-and-white, lo-fi footage of a loopy childrens' TV show from long ago, my friend's daughter saw what we should have known all along: What Soupy Sales was trying to do, at root, was to explain our excruciating, bewildering childhoods to us, in real time.
This was an era when the original Mad Men ruled the collective unconscious, when a gleaming pastel future, and, by extension, a lavishly sterile present, were held up as ideals and goals. Children were the very hope of America, and were therefore routinely lied to. Television was sanitized for our protection. Networks could not bring themselves to show married men and women sleeping in the same bed. Minorities, their cultures, music, and disenfranchisement, were conspicuous by their absence, sidelined, stereotyped, silenced and in ways both sophisticated and brutal, shunned.
At the time, programs for children were unnervingly cheerful, unrelievedly sentimental, saccharine and coddling in tone and substance. They were the expression and the vehicle for the Disney-animated postwar America of the mind, in which wishful thinking, however understandably, came in large part to paper over and replace critical thinking.
On the surface, the Soupy Sales Show looked a great deal like other kids' programs. The host acted, talked, and dressed like a burlesque of an overgrown child. But Soupy, along with a crew of animal puppets whose thorny personalities were often much more human than the norm of human television acting at the time, was to have a diametrically different role. He was preparing an unknowing new generation for a radically broken future.
This was to be the legacy of the kids Soupy addressed: an unwinnable war which would betray the principles on which they had been raised, an explosive roar of music that sounded like nothing our parents had ever heard or would ever be able to stand, a pervasive distrust of authority and the language of blanket obedience. Soupy would prepare them for what was coming, and also for what would follow: a rust belt world.
Sandwiched between the silent movie-era gags and vaudeville vintage corn, the real humor, much of it unplanned, some of it unfit for television, was offhand, biting, irreverent, the best of it taking lethal jabs at the workings and deviance of television itself. And then there was the music. The son of a merchant who sold sheets to the Ku Klux Klan, Soupy Sales was an unapologetic champion of African-American music, and at a time when much of it was banned from the airwaves as dangerous and valueless "jungle" trash.
And now in this, the rust belt present, a second peculiar milestone came this month, the 50th anniversary of the debut of another television series which, as well as any other institution, explained late mid-century American children to themselves.
So compelling was the program's message, it gave rise to a religious tradition of sorts in our house. On Friday nights, when we returned from Sabbath evening services at the Temple, we'd turn on the television and listen to a man whom I came to see as a true spiritual leader, recite the following:
"You unlock this door with the key of imagination. Beyond it is another dimension: a dimension of sound, a dimension of sight, a dimension of mind. You're moving into a land of both shadow and substance, of things and ideas; you've just crossed over into the Twilight Zone."
This was where we lived. Minorities each had their special neighborhood in the Twilight Zone of white America. Many, if not most, still do. We knew very well where, as the series' business-suited, chain-smoking guru Rod Serling intoned each week, the signpost up ahead - the signpost to "our next stop," the Twilight Zone - led. It was the stop we took to go home.
Rod Serling, genius misfit, poet of estrangement, was lord mayor and master architect of the Twilight Zone, which, while written for adults, spoke perhaps most clearly to kids.
Soupy Sales and Rod Serling, like many a prophet, just two Jewish kids gone astray. Two fiercely on the margins, who brought children front and center.
I feel for the kids of this bend of the future. At least when we were small and left to our own devices, we had Soupy and Rod to raise us. To show us the value of an expertly targeted pie. And to make sure we didn't miss the signpost up ahead - and our next stop.
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"A Special Place in Hell" - seems like a sentiment Yaakov Teitel would express. It may be the only time I've witnessed an exception to your otherwise laudably moderate tone but your abhorrence for Messianic Jews is not a healthy thing.
I remember being home alone when TV was new in the USA. I turned the TV set after watching Soupy Sales for 10 minutes & being bored by his corny routines. Soupy Sales & Buffalo Bob Smith of Howdy Doody were the epitome of boring. Soupy & Bob killed my interest in TV. I picke up on classical music & reading for entertainment. Since the www came along-I rarely watch TV. Thanks, Soupy for driving me from using TV. It led me to being an ersatz hippie, culture vulture, lounge lizzard. That is a life. TV is for vouyers & isn't like life.
"The wisdom of the prudent is to understand HIS way, but the folly of fools is deceit. Fools mock at sin, but among the upright there is good will."
"There is a WAY(what's that signpost ahead)which seems right to a man, but its END is the wayof death."
Raised in Detroit, on Soupy Sales. Talk about sentimentalism! Soupy would laugh at this aggrandizement of his work. He was an extension of all the great Jewish physical comics -- if you look at the Marx Bros. you'll certainly see his irony, his wry put-ons, his imaginative puns and his imaginary friends(toi-ta-toi-toi, as White Fang would have said it!). He was also, like his precursors, bawdy, and the stories of backstage antics at his 'children's' show are legion. He was NOT a pre- or post-minimalist image for the apocalyptic age! He was just great in what he did...so please, let's miss him, but let's be real about it, too...one of his sons quoted him at the memorial:'Be true to your teeth and they'll be true to you.' Be real about who and what he was--anything else would make him false, and he certainly wasn't!
I used to watch "Lunch with Soupy Sales" every Saturday as a kid...with his 2 'dog' sidekicks White Fang and Black Tooth...sponsored by Jello and laughing at the old silent movies he would show and listening to his own ad lib comments as dialogue for them....and sniggering at the slightly naughty jokes he would tell like "My girlfriend may not know how to bake a pie,but she sure can make my banana cream."....gonna miss that loveable mouse.
Excellent job making the connection between the two. And not only were Soupy and Rod outsiders as Jews, they weren't NYC Jews, who are really insiders in the self-created Jewish World Capital. Their childhoods as outsiders left them able to see the hypocrisy and absurdity of conformist culture. May their memories be for a blessing.
I watched Soupy Sales as a kid in Detroit and loved him, but...he did not originate pie throwing. Nor was he the foremost exponent of this lost art form. Moe, Larry, and Curly--the 3 greatest Jewish comedians of all time and don't give me any garbage about the Marx Bros--perfected pie throwing. They combined it with biting social commentary to raise it to an art form. Soupy Sales, PBUH.
There aren't many of us Detroit boys left, guys who grew up when that city was on a roll. It wasn't NYC, or Chicago, but it was a decent place to live. Soupy cut threw all the population then, as racially divided as it was then, something like North-South Tel Aviv, but far more complicated. It was a real loss when he left town for the West Coast, but it was predictable. For us kids growing up in "the city", as it was, it was part of our coming of age.
place, there is no censorship to filter any spoken word, so it cannot be heard, and there is no action that cannot be seen somewhere, somehow, and lastly there is no deed and lies that can hide anywhere and everywhere.
Sales was a subversive with a grin, and often a pie in his face. Serling was a deeper and far more powerful man. He had a way of holding a mirror to a compulsively conformist and anxious age.
Maybe that's why shows in the 60's and 70's kept inviting him on--he'd paid his dues in the 50's. Israel is the Twilight Zone, a fiction that, like "Star Trek", zealous fans can't accept is a fiction, something that could never be. "Literature is a lie that tells the truth," but I'm confident IB Singer would not suggest you sell your house and move into one of his books.
Excellent reply to the passing of Soupy Sales and the cultural significance of their work. Wish our new generation had the same!
I dont know about you, but I loved Soupy, and I enjoy the Twilight Zone. And those days were much better for them. Now our children, and Grandchildren are exposed to every kind of trash emaginable.
Apparently, Serling's Judaism was left in the Twilight Zone. He ended up attending a Unitarian Church.
Hey, I loved Soupy. To my mind he was the funniest guy on television, in many venues, for many years. But let's cut the "harbinger" stuff. He was a wonderfully subversive comedian but he wasn't some transformative being. Soupy would crack up himself if he read this column. He was a hoot, not a prophet. You dishonor his spinning tie by writing this. Burston gets a pie in the face for this column.
Touché. I wanted to write something about the ending of an era. I noticed that, perhaps appropriately, I also finished my last, final jar of that American hot drink called Postum.. It was a remarkably healthy powder for a drink that few knew about, and even less enjoyed by the masses. Bran, wheat, & molasses ? that was it. The jar and the smell of the instant coffee-like powder always threw me back to the ?good ole? days? of getting up to watch launches to the moon at 3am with my dad & other memorable moments. They stopped making Postum. ?A blah o?blah!? as Black Tooth might have commented.
The Twillight Zone aired prime time just a few years from 1959 to 1964. It ran up against "One Step beyond" (1956-'61): "What you are about to see is a matter of human record. Explain it: we cannot. Disprove it: we cannot. We simply invite you to explore with us the amazing world of the Unknown ... to take that One Step ... Beyond." and towards the end against "Outer Limits" (63 to '65): "There is nothing wrong with your television set. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling transmission. If we wish to make it louder, we will bring up the volume. If we wish to make it softer, we will tune it to a whisper. We will control the horizontal. We will control the vertical. We can roll the image, make it flutter. We can change the focus to a soft blur or sharpen it to crystal clarity. For the next hour, sit quietly and we will control all that you see and hear. We repeat: there is nothing wrong with your television set. You are about to participate in in a great adventure. You are about to experience the awe and mystery which reaches from the inner mind to... The Outer Limits.
Dark Shadows, Sheriff John, Leave It To Beaver, Dennis The Menace, Ozzie and Harriet; all in Black and White. Imagination before the days of the microchip and the cellphone. I can still remember witnessing Sputnik flying overhead while sitting out in my backyard. You remember the good old-fashioned barbecues Bradley and the Tiki-Torches at night? Remember when a first class fill-up at a gas station meant they would wash your windows and check your oil? Nothing like the good old days! Eh Bradley? Now we have to do it ourselves. Make our own movies and write our own jokes. The term is Indie, I believe.
Boy! did you open up old memories. I recall Soupy Sales very well. Also, there was Captain Kangaroo, Choo Choo Charlie, and others. Soupy also got into trouble for asked his viewers (children) to send him a picture of Abraham Lincoln that could be found in Mom's purse. I would WALK home for lunch every day and watch Soupy Sales on the Black and White TV, while drinking chocolate milk and finishing off a Ring Ding cake that my mom would cut into neat bitesize portions. I am sorry that he died, although, honestly, I didn't know he was still alive.
Though I missed Soupy, I remember the marvelous shock The Twilight Zone provided once a week; now days it's called thinking out of the box. For middle class kids the same frisson was also embedded in listening to Pete Seeger or reading "Pogo". For those who were fortunate enough to see it, the final blow to McCarthy era, was delivered by Edward R. Murrow on "See It Now". That's when I knew that I was a liberal.