If you want a genuine taste of what Durante’s character “Brainy” the press agent was like, JUMBO was the first musical to have a concurrent radio show, with pretty much the same plot used each week, kind of paralleling the plot of the show. The offspring of two rival circuses are in love; her dad’s circus is in dire financial straits; Brainy, his press agent, tries schemes to help, but generally makes things worse.
But you do get a lot of the songs, and Durante doing Texaco commercials as Brainy.
The movie, made nearly thirty years later, had Durante (now playing the dad-circus owner), an elephant named Jumbo, and only two lines from the original script: “Where are you going with that elephant?” “What elephant?”
Laura in LA, who has listened to every single one of these episodes for her sins….twice |
