Oscar Zamora!

And behold, a subset: Oscar Zamora! I wasn't expecting him to come up as I searched for Christian ventriloquist album covers. In fact, I had broadened my scope and left out the Christian part. But this evil-looking man with the handlebar moustache kept creeping in, perhaps the creepiest of them all. The album covers had a vague sense of sadism about them, and one wouldn't  play well at all today:

I'm assuming it's the puppet chasing the  woman in the hot pants. But I've never seen a ventriloquist's dummy get up and walk before, let alone run.

Real Twilight Zone stuff.

As with clowns, ventriloquists weren't even considered creepy back then. They weren't. I know that seems incredible now. Kids laughed, adults were delighted. Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy were a huge hit - ON THE RADIO, as if they could convey anything ventriloquistic with sound only. It was like doing audio card tricks. It just wouldn't play, but it did, wildly. Even in person, Edgar Bergen constantly moved his lips, and nobody cared.

This guy, though - I was unable to find out much about him, except that there are several Oscar Zamoras who aren't him. A ball player, an actor - not him. He had a shopping mall sort of career, and even ended up on TV in HOUSTON (presumably, the one in Texas) doing a sendup of his act on one of those desperate local furniture store ads. NO MONEY DOWN! NO INTEREST! Mattresses for less!

Chester: legend of the haunted automaton

Say hello to Chester.

Chester is a handmade antique automaton which some believe to be possessed by Satan. The automaton is known to be so damaged that it is practically in pieces, yet it has been secretly filmed by a hidden camera, standing, talking and brandishing a sword. 

Linguists have yet to decipher the unknown dialect he speaks. The fact that three murders have taken place in the house in which he is stored (in a trunk in the attic which is kept nailed shut) is purely coincidental.

Hitler's ventriloquist

The weird shit I find late at night! There seems to be no end to it. I'm now on a search for very early talkies, most of them made in 1929. That was the change-or-die year for most movie studios and their stars. Erich von Stroheim had a great villain's voice, heavily-accented, and would have come into his own and been a huge talkie star, except for the fact that he was (with the exception of Adolf Hitler) the nastiest man who ever lived. I think his personality was just too thuglike and violent to appeal to anyone. Even Peter Lorre wore eyeshadow, which seemed to soften him a bit.

I love the noisy soundtracks on these 1929ers, the thumps and thuds, the ringing sound (?) and whirring, no doubt the sound of the camera. To solve the problem, someone had the idea of enclosing the camera/man in a soundproof booth, with the result that he could only work for 10 minutes or so before falling into a gasping, sweating faint. When someone realized you only need to put the camera in the soundproof booth, it was a great day for technology.

I made a ton of gifs of this wonderfully awful thing because it was one of the first examples of that now-stock character, the devil-doll with a life of its own. This was imitated and/or elaborated-upon in various movies and Twilight Zone episodes. It has always puzzled me why a grown man wants to shove his hand up the back of an artificial boy and make his mouth move, but never mind. It is very late at night, so I should not get into how anatomically correct the dummy would have to be.

This ghastly phosphorescent image laid over an impenetrable hell-hole of black is like something out of your worst nightmare, the kind you can't wake up from. Then when you do wake up, something even worse happens, and you realize you haven't woke up yet. Then something even worse happens. . . 

And now it gets straaange. Here, the Little Wooden Boy discourses on something-or-other (who cares anyway? This would've been better as a silent), while at the other end of the table his master, looking like he's attending an SS banquet, calmly shoves food into his mouth. The marvel being that the little squicker can move his mouth and talk WITHOUT a hand shoved up his back. And can yatter on even though Stroheim is putting away the bratwurst like there's no tomorrow. So he can make his boy talk even with a sausage in his mouth. All done by mind control. They teach you this in Nazi training camp.

  

Yes. This guy makes Peter Lorre look like a pussycat. I can't think of anyone more evil in the movies. Not sure what happened to Stroheim - will have to look it up. He belonged to a certain time/sensibility, and reminds me of the German expressionists, Bertolt Brecht, and that infamous and oft-parodied painting, The Scream. Or maybe I just want to scream when I see him. I also think of Harvey Korman's dead-on impersonation of him in Carol Burnett's sendup of Sunset Boulevard (the last movie he appeared in, I think, in 1950). 

Ah, his love-hate relationship with his dummy, his Instrument, his thing. No doubt an extension of his poor nasty self. The dummy probably didn't feel very much, though he's the kind of conversationalist I'd like to sit across from at my next dinner party. Note that Stroheim's acting style is quite "silent film-ish", his punches very pulled. There is a slowness here too, with pauses that take forever. 

It took several years for Hollywood/actors to figure out how to DO sound films. Most pictures from 1929 were packed with high-kick, early-Busby-Berkeley-style production numbers, and this one is no exception. These have nothing to do with the main plot. Early talkies were very static in the dramatic scenes, the actors hunched around a stationary microphone hidden behind a potted palm. No one had yet figured out the concept of the sound boom. The dance numbers were no doubt added so the audience could see something MOVE once in a while.

The stars who burst to the forefront in this tenuous, genre-shifting era were people like Cagney and Garbo and Edward G. Robinson, with quirky voices that stuck in the head. Stroheim's voice was malignantly nasty, and creeped people out too much for them to pay to listen to him for two hours. He did however direct a monster of a film called Greed which, in its first cut, ran to 10 hours. I think Turner Classics is showing it next week in its entirety, with a 58-minute introduction by Robert Osborne.  (I plan to post my 90-second gif version in the very near future, or not, since I think my gif program just collapsed.) Having sat through 10 hours of Greed, one critic commented that Stroheim was "a genius. . . badly in need of a stopwatch." Or an on-off switch.

The dummymeister, predictably, goes nuts. My favorite part is all the chorus girls running away from him. The dummy swings from his hand like a useless appendage. In another scene he drags it around like Linus's blanket, the head bumping along behind him. This man is beyond unpleasant. He is EVIL, and though audiences seemed to dig it during the silent era, his talkies did not burn up the track. He went into a long and predictably bitter decline until Sunset Boulevard, which starred another great silent movie relic, Gloria Swanson, along with sad-faced Buster Keaton, who always seemed to be trying to make the best of a bad deal.

Zee end, meine liebchen.

POST-SCRIPT. And don't tell me he was Austrian. They ALL say that.

Christian ventriloquists: better than bad

Since those strange and tawdry days of Charlie McCarthy and (shudder) Jerry Mahoney, ventriloquism seems to have gone underground. It still shows up  on novelty shows like America's Got Talent (or Britain, or Ukraine, or Mongolia or wherever), an update of the old vaudeville show glorified in the '60s by Ed Sullivan.

Though the ultimate ventriloquist was Senor Wencez with his "hand puppet" (literally, a puppet made out of his hand, which is a device that still delights toddlers), I found a particularly juicy sub-genre of the art in Christian ventriloquism. Perhaps dogma sounds better coming out of the mechanical mouth of a wood-carven mutant.

Most of these poses are from record albums that enjoyed huge popularity (I nearly said "pup-ularity") in the 1950s and '60s. No doubt these were small labels, for how else would "Do You Know Jesus?" starring Uncle Les and Aunt Nancy Wheeler (Featuring Randy) find an audience?  Quite a few of these acts proclaim family relationships, mostly uncles and aunts who somehow produced a ball-jointed wooden robot with their contribution of DNA. And I have never been able to figure out how it is that a ventriloquist's dummy would work on a record album. It wouldn't matter if you moved your lips, for sure.

I can't help but notice that all these dummies look suspiciously alike. Creepy, I mean. That mausoleum look on the puppeteer's face is mighty strange, as if she's taking a day off from Madame Tussaud's. Both dummy and "manipulator" (the technically-correct term) seem to have the same hairdresser. (By the way, like harness-makers in the early 20th century, did the dummy-maker go into decline when audiences became more sophisticated? Or did they all flee to Bible camp?)

Then we have squicky little Marcy, who has so many albums that I had to pare it down to a couple. I can imagine she had a squeaky irritating voice as she prattled on about Jesus and salvation. The manipulator has perfect helmet-like Mary Tyler Moore hair, placing this somewhere in the early 1960s. I wonder if these records were discounted at Bible camp. I know they still show up in garage sales and thrift shops, eagerly snarfed up by collectors, else why would we be enjoying this display right now?

Marcy sings some more. Yikes. We see her standing up here, which is odd for a dummy, but I'm not sure the puppeteer has so much skill as to make her mouth move without any physical contact. That WOULD be squicky, if not downright supernatural.

Obviously a bargain basement record, with an incomprehensible cover. Why is it that all these things exude so much guilt? I guess because that's what religion is all about. There are many red arrows that say "AND" on them, and many grainy b + w photos of dummies, plus choirs. And, as it says in the upper left corner, it is all FUN.

Maybe the ick factor never even occurred to anyone back then, but the thought of Uncle "D" with a girl on one knee and a boy on the other, a huge Bible in front of them and stained glass in the background is alarming today. The "D" seems to indicate a suspicious anonymity, like something from an AA meeting where people are afraid to give their last name.

Oh, rapture! Grace and Wilbur Thrush have a whole family of gaudy dum-dums, not to mention furries such as you'd see in one of those bizarre conventions (and you can't tell ME that funny business doesn't go on in those). What's that on the left, a chess game? I'll have to blow this one up and try to get the details.

Woah.

This is a very odd kind of biker ventriloquist act, with Butch and Suzi (both girls, I assume) sitting on Maralee Dawn's lap. This is an obvious pseudonym to hide her Angel Mama past. They all sit precariously atop a cardboard-cutout Harley, with the caption Featuring The Country Ridin' Preacher, which I won't even try to explain.

It's Sunday School pageant time, with a man dressed in his wife's bathrobe and a kitchen towel. His little disciple is no doubt meant to represent a shepherd boy of some sort. The title is hard to read, but it goes (as they say) something like this: Dan Butler and Louie tell the Bible Classics, Volume III.

No shit, VOLUME III! Volumes I and II must've been hot sellers at Bible camp, or maybe they gave them away free. I must try to track some of these down on YouTube. I need some religion about now to salvage this bizarre day before it sinks in a quagmire of wretched depravity.

I've saved the best until last: the inimitable Erick on the Rainbow label, which (believe me) does not mean the same thing now as it did then. Or maybe it did, who knows. Erick's routine is called Pastor Pickin', which sounds so sinister I don't want to go into it. 

My personal favorite. The seeming eroticism of this, the way their foreheads touch, the way they lean into each other, suggests a love that dares not speak its name, because it's not just interspecies, it's - well, what DO you call having a thing for a ventriloquist's dummy? I'm not sure there is even a word for it. It took me quite a while to realize that Erick and his manipulator Beverly Massagee are PRAYING together, that's all. I mean it. And it's on the Rainbow Label, too.

Hurray, hurrah: welcome to hell!

It wasn't good, my childhood. Few and far between were the real joys, and this wasn't one of them. But we sort of watched the show anyway. I must have kept watching it right up until high school, because I distinctly remember my seatmate Patty sending up the "hurray, hurrah" theme song with "c'mon and take a hm-hm" (meaning, presumably, a dump).

This whole genre is creepy and sick, a big man controlling a little man of childlike proportions, making him say things, making him DO things he would not normally say or do because he is nothing but a chunk of molded particle-board adorned with bits of plastic.

I couldn't escape Edgar Bergen altogether (and for those who are too young to remember - in other words, everybody - he was Candice Bergen's Dad and an old vaudeville entertainer, a ventriloquist who performed on the Ed Sullivan Show in his dotage). He appeared mostly on the radio with his dummy Charlie McCarthy, a smart-ass hunk of particle board famous for parrying with W. C. Fields. But think of it: a ventriloquist on the radio? Isn't that sort of like tap-dancing on the radio, or doing card tricks? What the fuck was THAT all about?

When he showed up on Ed Sullivan, it was plain he wasn't even trying to avoid moving his lips. He didn't even talk out of the side of his mouth, and no one cared. None of this business of drinking a glass of water while Charlie sang Vesti la Guibba.

I might have posted some of these photos before, who knows. They are hideous. The things that children had to endure in the name of entertainment is awful to contemplate, but the thing is, this stuff used to be really popular! A form of it still exists in weirder circles, like on TLC's My Strange Obsession.

Such an extreme form of the black arts lends itself to movie treatments and episodes of the Twilight Zone. The dummy talks all by himself, blows up the theatre, etc. or cuts his master's throat. For some reason Gary Oldman did a whole buncha gifs pretending he was a ventriloquist's dummy, so I thought, why not, even if he doesn't really look like one.

 

Gahhhhh!

My question is: if Gary Oldman really is playing a ventriloquist's dummy here, where is the ventriloquist? Who has his hand shoved up his back, who is yanking his string? Who throws him into the trunk at the end of the day and locks it? Who takes home all the earnings, not even sparing his dummy a few crumbs of sawdust?

The dummy exceeds even the doll in spiritual significance/menace, because he says things (lots of things, not like Chatty Cathy), carries on conversations, and seems to have a will of his own. This must go back to something very ancient, like the Very Ancient Creepy Ventriloquist's Dummy Ritual That Scared Everybody Shitless. But people came anyway, and paid good money.

 

This is my personal favorite: the Dying Dummy, his nurse at the ready with a horse syringe. The grin on his face reveals his delirium, if not his masochism. How can a dummy die if he isn't even alive in the first place? Doesn't this smack of zombie ritual and voodoo? THIS is children's entertainment?

Hurray?. . . Hurrah? I think we're in hell.