Fractured Flickers


Fractured Flickers is a live-action syndicated half-hour comedy television program produced by Jay Ward, who is otherwise known for cartoons. The pilot film was produced in 1961, but the series was not completed until 1963. Twenty-six episodes were produced; they were syndicated by Desilu Productions and played for several years on local stations.

Content

Host Hans Conried introduced short "flickers" pieced together from silent film footage and from other older films, overdubbed with newly written comic dialogue, music, and sound effects. The voices for these were provided by fellow Ward mainstays Paul Frees, June Foray, and Bill Scott.
The earliest episodes have careful dubbing, with the actors and writers taking pains to synchronize the new dialogue with the actors' lip movements. Once the series had deadlines to face, however, the time-consuming dubbing was abandoned, and the later episodes do not bother with exact synchronization. The concept anticipated Woody Allen's comic overdubbed film debut a few years later.
True to the Jay Ward brand of humor, the dialogue was loaded with puns and one-line jokes. One silent vignette was retitled "The Barber of Stanwyck", utilizing scenes from Douglas Fairbanks' 1920 silent classic, The Mark of Zorro. The canine serial Rin Tin Tin was satirized as "Foam, king of the mad dogs." Films, television, advertising, and even the Fractured Flickers series itself and executive producer were fair game for merciless kidding. The show was at its funniest when desecrating early melodramas with "hip" reinterpretations, such as presenting Rudolph Valentino as an insurance salesman or Lon Chaney Sr.'s The Hunchback of Notre Dame as "Dinky Dunstan, Boy Cheerleader." Many segments were vicious satires of television commercials; a typical "word from our sponsor" would have the announcer extolling the virtues of the item being advertised, accompanied by darkly humorous clips. A fly-by-night real estate development, for example, was illustrated with clips of buildings being destroyed by a cyclone. And "This moment of softness has been brought to you by Bee. Bee, the only tissue woven in mid-air by bees!" Regular features were the "Minute Mysteries", featuring a credited Stan Laurel as master detective Sherman Oaks, and the weekly "tributes" to some American city.
Each episode also featured a celebrity guest whom Conried would interview. Most were popular TV or film personalities of the 1960s such as Fabian, Bob Denver, Deborah Walley, Rod Serling, and Rose Marie. Many of them caught the spirit of the show, and answered Conried's scripted questions with tongue in cheek.
Many prominent figures of the 1960s were lampooned, including TV icons such as "Uncle Walt" Disney. Bob Newhart's distinctive hesitant delivery was frequently mimicked for droll narration. A segment based on the Kennedy family was excised from all copies of the series when John F. Kennedy was assassinated so that it was never shown; although a throwaway line to another character named John Fitzgerald slipped through. This segment remains lost to this day.

Guest stars

The following were guest stars:
  1. Rose Marie 8-1-63
  2. Fabian 8-8-63
  3. Gypsy Rose Lee 8-15-63
  4. Allan Sherman 8-22-63
  5. Annette Funicello 8-29-63
  6. Edward Everett Horton9-5-63
  7. Paula Prentiss 9-12-63
  8. Sebastian Cabot 9-19-63
  9. Roddy McDowall 9-26-63
  10. Vivienne Della Chiesa 10-3-63
  11. Connie Stevens 10-10-63
  12. Rod Serling 10-17-63
  13. Connie Hines 10-24-63
  14. Cesar Romero 10-31-63
  15. Diana Dors 11-7-63
  16. Bullwinkle J. Moose 11-14-63
  17. Deborah Walley 11-21-63
  18. Paul Lynde 11-28-63
  19. Anna Maria Alberghetti12-5-63
  20. Ruta Lee 12-12-63
  21. Barbara Eden 12-19-63
  22. Bob Denver 12-26-63
  23. Pat Carroll 1-2-64
  24. Bob Newhart 1-9-64
  25. Ursula Andress 1-16-64
  26. Zsa Zsa Gabor 1-23-64
An interview with Johnny Weissmuller was filmed but not used; the interview with the Bullwinkle puppet may have been filmed as its replacement. Co-producer Bill Scott appears briefly in two episodes, one as a delivery man and the other a clumsy stuntman who falls flat on his face.

Home media

The complete series was released on DVD by VCI Entertainment in 2004.
As of 2022, reruns of the show aired on Movies! channel every Sunday morning.