Monday, March 19, 2018

'Mooners Monday: On Stage

"On Stage," which premiered April 28, 1956 on CBS, gets better each time I see it. There isn't a lot of hilarious moments compared to some of the other Classic 39 episodes, and really there are only two things that stand out to me. Yet it's a solid episode with a warm (if hokey) ending as Alice once again throws away a chance at improving her life in favor of staying trapped in that dinky Chauncey Street apartment all day.

Well, that's a harsh way of putting it. Maybe Alice really doesn't think she can be an actress and maybe, more importantly, she doesn't want to be. Either way her and Ralph have a nice moment at the end of the story.

What stands out in "On Stage" is the hilarious way Ed pronounces "polo ponies" as one word when he is reading lines for Master Thespian Ralph before the latter stars in the fundraiser the Raccoons are staging. It gets into Ralph's head, of course, and he can't say the word any other way, and I bet you can't, either, after seeing this.

An interesting note is that according to The Official Honeymooners Treasury, writers Leonard Stern and Sydney Zelinka built the entire teleplay around that word. Stern tells the authors:

That one word came first, and we built a whole sketch around it. When the word 'poloponies' came up,  we started to devise a character who would be rich enough to have polo ponies. Then we came up with the play, and who he would rehearse with. The whole thing was worked backwards, just to  justify having 'poloponies' in a speech.


A string of poloponies?

 


That's a string of POLO PONIES!

How can Ralph go on with such a rank amateur? 
Ralph says it himself.

Now he's got ME doing it!


Ralph's face when he has to tell famed producer Herbert Whiteside, "I made a little mistake. It should have been polo ponies."

2 comments:

top_cat_james said...

There was a second season episode of The Flintstones, "Flintstone of Prinstone", where the "polopony" gag was rehashed by Kramden's animated counterpart.

Rick Brooks said...

Ooh, nice call! I remembered that episode--Fred goes to college and Slate gets him to join the football team--but never would have remembered they used the gag in that one. I watched it last night. Kind of a shame they didn't milk it like The Honeymooners did!