Overview
Ole Olsen and Chic Johnson began as musical entertainers: Olsen played the violin and Johnson played ragtime piano. They met in 1914, when Olsen hired Johnson to replace the pianist in his College Four quartet. Ole and Chic hit it off immediately and joined forces for a vaudeville act. No joke was too old, no song too corny for Ole and Chic, and the two engaging comics became a minor sensation in the Midwest. Radio enlarged their audience and led to appearances in early talkie movies for Warner Bros. and two more minor features for Republic Pictures. The movies of the 1930s were much too confining for Olsen and Johnson's special brand of nut humor. Ole and Chic recited their lines and played off each other well, but their scripts were too formal, leaving the team little room for their nonsensical comedy. During the Summer of 1932, they were featured each week on NBC's Red Networks' Fleischmann's Yeast Hour. Based on surviving samples, Rudy (Vallee) did not interact with them on-air. The intense and fast paced segments were titled "The Padded Cell of the Air". It was a Presidential Election year: in one, they nominate Mickey Mouse for President. The "Padded Cell..." segments are clearly a predecessor of Hellzapoppin'.
Comedy teams traditionally had a straight man and a stooge. However, Olsen and Johnson both took on the comic role, goodnaturedly chuckling their way through the steady barrage of gunshots, explosions, props plummeting to earth, intrusions from other performers and input from the audience.
In 1938, they mounted their revue, Hellzapoppin'. Sophisticated Broadway audiences were unprepared for such chaos: stray props came out of nowhere; comic characters were planted in the audience and disrupted the action; Olsen and Johnson dashed on and off the stage in crazy costumes and indulged in cheerfully earthy humor; chorus girls lost their skirts, and vaudeville acts did their trick specialties. The show never played the same way twice. On some nights, songs would be pre-empted by jokes, and on others, songs would interrupt the jokes.
In 1941, Universal Pictures decided to commit Hellzapoppin' to film, with plenty of crazy and sometimes innovative gags. A cab driver literally goes to hell, with Olsen and Johnson as his reluctant passengers. A serious song by Robert Paige and Jane Frazee is interrupted when a title card crashes on the screen, advising one Stinky Miller to go home. Man-chasing Martha Raye pursues Mischa Auer, who finds himself suddenly stripped down to his underwear and running a mock track meet. The film goes out of frame, and Olsen and Johnson try to correct the problem themselves. Despite Universal's insistence on a then-customary romance and a 'serious plot', somewhat diluting the Olsen and Johnson onslaught, Hellzapoppin' is still fresh and funny. Copyright issues involving the original stage production have forced the film version out of general circulation in the United States, although a European DVD has entered circulation.
Universal made three more comedies with the team. Crazy House (1943) had Olsen and Johnson running amok through the Universal studio and evacuating the staff, including Universal regulars Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce, Johnny Mack Brown, and Andy Devine. In Ghost Catchers (1944), Ole and Chic help singer Gloria Jean make her Carnegie Hall debut, despite strange happenings in a spooky old house. See My Lawyer (1945) was a patchwork of vaudeville acts, with Olsen and Johnson noticeably absent from most of the proceedings. After completing this last film, Olsen and Johnson resumed their stage career, mounting variations of Hellzapoppin'.
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