Fractured Flickers

Fractured Flickers
Genre	Comedy
Created by	Chris Hayward
Written by	Allan Burns Chris Hayward George Atkins Bill Scott
Presented by	Hans Conried
Voices of	Paul Frees June Foray Bill Scott
Country of origin	USA
Original language(s)	English
No. of seasons	1
No. of episodes	26
Production
Executive producer(s)	Ponsonby Britt, O.B.E.
Producer(s)	Jay Ward Bill Scott
Editor(s)	Skip Craig Roger Donley
Running time	30 minutes
Production company(s)	Jay Ward Productions
Distributor	Desilu Sales, Inc.
Release
Original release	1 January 1963 – 1 January 1964

Fractured Flickers is a live-action syndicated half-hour television comedy show that was produced by Jay Ward, who is otherwise known for animated cartoons. The pilot film was produced in 1961 (hence the 1961 copyright notice on the animated main title), but the series wasn't completed until 1963. Twenty-six episodes were produced; they were syndicated by Desilu Productions and played for several years on local stations.

Host Hans Conried introduced short "flickers" pieced together from silent film footage and from other older movies, overdubbed with newly written comic dialogue, music, and sound effects. The voices for these were provided by fellow Ward mainstays Paul Frees, June Foray, and Bill Scott. The earliest episodes have careful dubbing, with the actors and writers taking pains to synchronize the new dialogue with the actors' lip movements. Once the series had deadlines to face, however, the time-consuming dubbing was abandoned, and the later episodes don't bother with exact synchronization.

True to the Jay Ward brand of humor, the dialogue was loaded with puns and one-line jokes. (One silent vignette was retitled "The Barber of Stanwyck", utilizing scenes from Douglas Fairbanks' 1920 silent classic, The Mark of Zorro.) Movies, television, advertising, and even the Fractured Flickers series itself were fair game for merciless kidding. (Conried quipped, "This is what we'll be doing for the next several weeks--or until someone finds out!") The show was at its funniest when desecrating early melodramas with "hip" reinterpretations, such as presenting Rudolph Valentino as an insurance salesman or Lon Chaney, Sr.'s The Hunchback of Notre Dame as "Dinky Dunstan, Boy Cheerleader." (Lon Chaney, Jr. was not amused by the latter and attempted unsuccessfully to sue Jay Ward over it.) Many segments were vicious satires of television commercials; a typical "word from our sponsor" would have the announcer extolling the virtues of the item being advertised, accompanied by darkly humorous clips. A fly-by-night real estate development, for example, was illustrated with clips of buildings being destroyed by a cyclone (from Steamboat Bill, Jr. with Buster Keaton). And "This moment of softness (explosions, wild parties, etc.) has been brought to you by Bee. Bee, the only tissue woven in mid-air by bees!" Regular features were the "Minute Mysteries", featuring Stan Laurel as master detective Sherman Oaks (his scenes "fractured" from his 1925 short comedy, Dr. Pyckle and Mr. Pryde), and the weekly "tributes" to some American city.

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