Word: hellzapoppin
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...notices. "A gargantuan honky-tonk," sniffed the Time's Brooks Atkinson. "Olsen & Johnson would be practically scriptless if the Chinese hadn't invented gunpowder," grumped the Herald Tribune. "A cheerful nightmare," said the World-Telegram. Actually, Olsen and Johnson seem to be criticproof. Funzapoppin's predecessor, Hellzapoppin, was disdained by almost every critic, yet it ran for more than three years on Broadway...
Into the Parlor. Last year Olsen & Johnson invaded Europe to satisfy a lifetime ambition to play in Scandinavia (Olsen is of Norwegian descent; Johnson, Swedish). They were so successful in London that the show never got to the Continent. One Hellzapoppin road company is still in England; another is touring New Zealand. Both men have invested their huge earnings (they grossed $227,000 in 16 nights in Chicago; $387,000 in 14 days in Toronto) in real estate and in such enterprises as a string of frozen-custard stands on Long Island and an ice-skating rink in California...
...night, without notifying his bosses, Hawthorne suddenly turned his show into a carefree, wit-loose "Hellzapoppin on the air." Next day, before the station had time to fire him, the place was snowed under with fan mail. By last week, the scattyboo platter session was being broadcast over five Southern California stations ("the net-to-net coastwork of the Oh-So-Peachy-Keen Broadcasting Company"). Both ABC and Mutual were dickering for national network rights. Hawthorne's salary is now $450 a week...
...week.* Though the authors may not have intended them to be, their accounts are a revealing documentation of the harum-scarum behavior of the press under stress. "The whole thing," wrote Cornelius Ryan (then of the London Telegraph, now of TIME), "was a cross between a Marx Brothers movie, Hellzapoppin and an Irish wake...
Last week Mme. Sun Yatsen, elder sister of Madame Chiang, broke a long silence on politics with a public statement that advanced the possibility of hellzapoppin China. Said she: "In recent years . . . I have avoided political controversy . . . [but] today we are threatened by a civil war into which the reactionaries hope to draw America, thus involving the whole world. . . . I feel it is necessary to speak. . . . The present crisis is not a question of who wins-the Kuomintang or the Communists. It is a question of the Chinese people. . . . The time of the Kuomintang tutelage is over. . . . A coalition government...