Harlow Van Voorhees’ Episode Guide: The Apple Sisters #22
The following is a message from one of our special contributors. Enjoy!
Boo, everyone! It’s your old friend Harlow Van Voorhees with another installment of my Apple Sisters’ Episode Guide. Unfortunately I’m way behind on putting together my handmade caramel popcorn balls for the trick-or-treaters tonight and don’t have time to write a proper introduction to this excerpt. But I decided to take a cue from one of my other favorite sources of entertainment: The Family Circus.
If you like The Apple Sisters, do yourself a favor and hunt down some Family Circus books. It’s another example of good fun that’s suitable for the whole family. (With the exception of the cover to “I’m Wearin’ a Zucchini!” which I found needlessly tantalizing.) Humorist Bil Keane, who draws the The Family Circus, will often have his son Billy draw the comic when he just doesn’t have the time do it. These particular comics are delightful peeks inside the mind of a modern American youngster and as those of you who have read my Family Circus guide know, they tend to be favorites of mine. So, in that spirit, I have asked my grandson, Timmy, to write up some of his thoughts on this episode of The Apple Sisters. Take it away, Timmy!
jesus, grandpa! you know I don’t listen to ur stupid old radio shows. and it’s TIM. I’m 23 for christ’s sake. and no one eats ur dumb caramel popcorn balls. they taste like they have mayonnaise in them. and last year some kid found a thick yellow fingernail in one after it cut the roof of his mouth. i’m not going to listen to this gay old show. i don’t have room on my ipod for it anyway because mom got me the stupid 8 gig one like an idiot. plus I don’t put old shit on my ipod. the only old thing I have on my ipod is The Best of Alien Ant Farm, but that’s only cuz those guys were like OUR beatles. whatever. if anyone’s reading this you should listen to JokeLand, the jackie “the joke man” martling podcast because its funny as shit. so far there’s only one 43 second episode from August, 2005, but it’s so f’ing good. also me and kurt are working on an app that you can fart into and it tells you what you had for breakfast so look out for that. other than that, have fun listening to your old radio show old person.
The Apple Sisters Episode #22 – Original Airdate: 10/31/1943
Plot Summary: The girls decide to play tricks on their neighbors and end up running into J. Edgar Hoover. In the mailroom they find out what peoples’ favorite Halloween tricks are. A murderer shows up at the door. Mayhem ensues.
Notes: The Apple Sisters’ Halloween episodes were always some of the best in my opinion because they featured my favorite Apple Sister, Candy. You could say that Candy was my first crush as a boy, and I always imagined what our life would be like together. The one flaw I always saw with the Apple Sisters is that Candy didn’t have a very well defined character. Cora was the dumb and amorous one, Seedy was the religious one — but what was Candy’s defining characteristic? No one knows, of course. And that’s the problem. Oh sure, we did find out some small details about her interests — she liked enjoying a box lunch at the Y, for instance — but that hardly seems to be the type of trait you could build a character around. Yes, on many occasions, she would make it clear that she liked activities such as yodeling in the valley, talking to the canoe driver, bobbing for clams, sipping at the fuzzy cup, mumbling in the moss, telephoning the stomach, lip-syncing to the fish-fueled jukebox or guest lecturing at Beaver College. But these seem like such disparate interests, and I really think she would have benefited from having one defining facet of her personality. Oh, I guess this is just the perspective of an old-man wishing his first crush had a little something in common with him (like his love for soap-box derby cars or his pathological inability to discern euphemisms) so he would have had an excuse to write her something more than a piece of fawning fan mail.
According the American Costume Census, the top 5 Halloween costumes of 1943 were:
5. Sexy Hirohito
4. The Apple Sisters
3. Johnny Dawson: Space Traveler
2. Negro
1. A costume that came in a box simply labeled “Genuine Nightmare Material“
This episode — the final in The Apple Sisters’ “Boosical Spooktacular” — immediately preceded one of the most infamous and repulsive moments in radio broadcast history when a young Paul Harvey, drunk on Brandy Alexanders, launched into a 45 minute anti-Filipino screed. The incident (which would come to be known as the Booze-ical Gooktacular) was as shocking as it was uncalled for. Paul Harvey was shamed into exile for the next 30 years before re-emerging in the radio world as a folksy news-commentator. And now you know… the rest of the story.
Until next time…
HVV