The Great Foodini Show on CBS-TV and ABC-TV grew out of
the Lucky Pup show. The popularity of Foodini, his foils
Pinhead, Jolo, and Phineas Pitch were so compelling that
Foodini got his own show. The combination of Lucky Pup and
Foodini ran from 1948 - 1951. The voices were Hope Bunin,
Morey Bunin, Doris Brown and George Fryne. The shows were televised directly by cable from New York
City to Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston and Washington, DC. A
Kinescope recording was shown five days a week in Cleveland,
Toledo, Detroit, Syracuse and Seattle. Hope and Morey Bunin were the creators and operators of
the puppets for The Lucky Pup Show and The Great Foodini
show. For years they played theatres and night clubs with
their troups of puppets. When the shows came to television,
they became better known to more people from the four months
on CBS than in their 20 years of trouping.The series
competed favorably against "The Howdy Doody Show", "Kukla,
Fran And Ollie" and "Captain Video" for three years, until
it moved to ABC as "Foodini the Great" in 1951. The shift to
the earlier time slot, compounded by a change to
pre-recorded production, caused it to lose audiences. The
final new episode was broadcast on December 29, 1951, it
remained in syndication until 1954. Morey Bunin was born in Chicago in 1910. Morey and his
brother Lou worked for famous puppeteer Bil Baird in 1932
where they performed stringed marionettes in windows of
Macy's department store. The brothers began to produce shows
using string, rod, hand, shadow and animated puppets. He
started working for the New York State Welfare Department in
Syracuse and worked in various venues for the WPA. Morey and Hope (Shippee) built puppets and performed free
shows in schools and parks in the new York area as a part of
the WPA Children's Project in the 1930's. During the Second
World War, they joined the Army USO and spent a year
entertaining troops in New Guinea, islands in the Pacific
and the Philippines. After the war, they performed on vaudeville circuits in
England and the mid-western states of the United States.
They worked at Radio City Music Hall and were contracted in
1948 by CBS to do a children's show. "The Adventures of
Lucky Pup" would run live for three years at 6:30 pm Monday
- Friday and as a kinescope rebroadcast on Saturdays. Lucky
Pup was seen in the 1951 Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade. Morey Bunin collaborated with David Seville to produce
the puppets of Alvin and the Chipmunks. Morey had made a
large puppet of a duck with articulated head and mouth to
sit on the head of singer David Seville when he appeared in
1958 on Dick Clark's American bandstand show singing "The
Bird Sitting on My Head." He also made a witch doctor puppet
to accompany the singing of that bigger Seville hit. The
Bunins also made puppets who appear on the opening credits
of the Ziegfeld Follies (MGM 1946) Bunin did many characters
for early television commercials such as "Bucky Beaver" for
Ipana toothpaste. In 1963, along with cartoonist, puppeteer and radio/TV
broadcaster Hank Stohl, Morey and his second wife Charlotte
developed an innovative form of video animation which
employed some puppetry techniques which was patented as
"Aniforms." Aniforms was a characterized as a process of
live animation, as opposed to video animation. It was used
to a great degree at trade shows, where a hidden operator
manipulated the character with rods (similar to a rod
puppet, but operated with the puppet lying on a table, as
opposed to standing behind a screen or stage), and could the
have live interaction with a person. So, for example, if you
were passing by, the Bullwinkle character could say, "Hey,
Prof. Bryson...nice tie you're wearing today." Video was the
mechanism through which it was used on TV, but it was as a
"live" cartoon that it was most effective. When someone
commented on the Aniform that it was the most important
development in animation since Disney, Morey's response was
"not really, but it was the most important advancement in
puppetry in 300 years." Aniforms first appearance was on Captain Kangaroo where a
character named Fred was manipulated.Fred's voice was Cosmo
Alligretti. Aniforms were featured on The Gary Moore Show,
What's My Line, The Dick Cavett Show, To Tell The Truth and
The Surprise Show. Morey was a "Silver Circle Awards Inductee" into the New
York Emmy organization in 1995. Morey Bunin died on February 26, 1997 at 86. Upon his
death, his family donated all of the puppets, old reels of
film, fan letters and other memorabilia to the Museum of of
the Moving Image, in Long Island City, NY.
If you have ANY Foodini history,
stories, pictures, material or information to add to this
chronicle,
Please eMail Rhett
Bryson
(rhett.bryson@furman.edu)
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©2004 Rhett Bryson
If you have ANY Foodini stories, pictures, material or
information,
Please eMail Rhett
Bryson (rhett.bryson@furman.edu)
Last Updated 03/18/2004