George Burns: Encyclopedia II - George Burns - Inside and Outside the Box

George Burns - Inside and Outside the Box

On television, The George Burns & Gracie Allen Show merely put faces to the radio characters audiences had come to love. Burns made three significant changes (four, if you counted first Fred Clark and then Larry Keating replacing March as Harry Morton): a) He "stepped out of" the show more often than not and chatted with the home audience, telling understated jokes and commenting wryly about what show characters were doing or undoing. b) When Bill Goodwin left after the earliest episodes, Burns hired veteran radio announcer Harry Von Zell to succeed him. Von Zell was cast as the good-natured, easily confused (by Gracie and just about anyone else) Burns and Allen announcer and buddy, and he also became one of the show's running gags, when his involvement in yet another one of Gracie's harebrained ideas would get him fired at least once a week by George. c) Midway through the show's run, the Burns's two adopted children, Sandra and Ronald, began to feature on the show, Sandy as an occasional drama school classmate of Ronnie, and Ronnie himself as George and Gracie's son who held his parents' comedy style in befuddled contempt and as something the "serious" drama student just didn't aspire to be.

Burns and Allen also took a cue from Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz's Desilu Productions and formed a company of their own, McCadden Corporation, headquartered on the General Service Studio lot in the heart of Hollywood and set up to film television shows and commercials. Besides their own hit show, the couple's company produced such television series as The Bob Cummings Show (a.k.a. Love That Bob); The People's Choice, starring Jackie Cooper; Mona McClusky, starring Juliet Prowse; and Mister Ed, starring Alan Young and a talented "talking" horse.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Inside and Outside the Box", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki