The Great Gildersleeve
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The Great Gildersleeve (1941 through 1957) was the arguable founding father of the spin-off program, as well as one of the first true situation comedies (as opposed to sketch programs) in broadcast history. Hooked around a character who had been a staple on the classic radio hit Fibber McGee and Molly, The Great Gildersleeve enjoyed its greatest period in the 1940s, when Harold Peary graduated the character from the earlier show into the sitcom and in a quartet of likeable feature films at the height of the show's popularity.
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From Wistful Vista to Summerfield
On Fibber McGee and Molly, Peary's Gildersleeve was a pompous windbag who became a consistent McGee nemesis ("You're a haa-aa-aa-aard man, McGee!" became a Gildersleeve catch phrase). But he also became a popular enough windbag that Kraft Foods---looking primarily to promote its Parkay margarine spread---sponsored a new series with Peary's Throckmorton P. Gildersleeve (the character assumed several first names on Fibber McGee and Molly) as the central, slightly softened, and slightly befuddled focus of a lively new family.
Premiering on NBC in 1941, The Great Gildersleeve moved the title character from the McGees' Wistful Vista to Summerfield, where Gildersleeve now oversaw his late brother's estate and took on the rearing of his orphaned niece and nephew, Marjorie (Lurene Tuttle) and Leroy (Walter Tetley; Gildersleeve's famous catch phrase was now altered to, "You're a brii-ii-iight boy, Leroy!"). In a striking forerunner to such later television hits as Bachelor Father and Family Affair, both of which are centered on well-to-do uncles taking in their deceased siblings' children, Gildersleeve was a bachelor raising two children while administering a girdle manufacturing company ("If you want a better corset, of course it's a Gildersleeve") and serving as Summerfield's water commissioner, between time with the ladies and nights with the boys.
Gildy's Family
Aiding and abetting the periodically frantic life in the Gildersleeve home was family cook and housekeeper Birdy Lee Coggins (Lillian Randolph), cantankerous estate executor Judge Horace Hooker (Earle Ross), and just a few of the ladies in and out of Gildy's life, including and especially Southern widow Lelia Ransom (Shirley Mitchell) and school principal Eve Goodwin (Bea Benaderet). Indeed, The Great Gildersleve may have been the first broadcast show to be centered on a single parent balancing between child-rearing, work, and social life, done with taste and genuine wit, often at the expense of Gildersleeve's now slightly understated pomposity.
The key was Peary, one of the most gifted voice actors of his generation (and several others), whose booming voice and facility with moans, groans, laughs, shudders, and inflection was as close to body language and facial suggestion as a voice got. Peary was so effective, and Gildersleeve became so familiar a character, that he was referenced and satirised periodically in other comedies and in a few cartoons. (No small irony there: Peary in later life included cartoon voicings in his work after his radio stardom.)
In one hilarious episode, Fibber McGee and Molly (Jim and Marian Jordan) themselves paid Gildy a visit in his new Summerfield digs, the laughs hooking around McGee and Gildersleeve's usual mock-insult banter and McGee's inadvertent discovery, while slipping down to the corner drugstore for a toothbrush, of Gildy's engagement to Lelia Ransom, an engagement Gildy was going to great enough pains to keep quiet until he was ready to announce it in his own good time.
Decline and Fall
Then, in 1950, the show's momentum changed, and the legendary CBS talent raids of the time factored. Though the highlight of the raids was Jack Benny jumping from NBC (and taking Burns and Allen with him, prodding NBC to offer big new deals to Fred Allen and Phil Harris & Alice Faye), Harold Peary was convinced to move The Great Gildersleeve to CBS. The problem was that Kraft, the sponsor, refused to sanction the move. Peary's CBS contract of course prevented him from appearing on NBC as a star performer, prompting Willard Waterman's hiring to succeed Peary as Gildy.
Waterman and Peary were longtime friends from Chicago radio; Waterman had replaced Peary as the Sheriff in Tom Mix, Ralston Sharpshooter in the 1930s. His voice was a near-perfect match for Peary's, though he refused to use Peary's signature laugh. Peary reportedly sued unsuccessfully to retain the right to both the Gildersleeve character and vocalisms, but Waterman agreed with Peary that only one man held the patent on the Gildersleeve laugh.
The Great Gildersleeve continued into the 1950s but lost momentum as classic radio comedy declined in general. A television version of the show, also starring Waterman, premiered in 1955 but lived for only 39 episodes. The TV version is considered now to be somewhat of an insult to the Great Gildersleeve legacy. Gildersleeve himself was sketched as less loveable, more pompous, and a more overt womanizer, an insult amplified when Waterman himself said the key to the television version's failure was its director not having known a thing about the radio classic.
By the time radio the show entered its final season, The Great Gildersleeve's remaining audience heard recordings of previous episodes.
Gildy Goes to the Movies
The Great Gildersleeve was not the only radio classic to be sent to the movies, but it may have been one of the better executed of the breed. The first film, The Great Gildersleeve in 1942, carried Peary and Randolph from the radio cast to the screen, with Nancy Gates as Marjorie and Freddie Mercer as Leroy. Walter Tetley, who played Leroy on radio, couldn't be seen on screen as Leroy because he was actually a child impersonator; the screen role was assumed by Freddie Mercer.
Gildersleeve on Broadway followed, in 1943; the story is centered on Leroy as the odd boy out as everyone around him is falling in love. Gildersleeve's Bad Day (1943) followed the mishaps around Gildy's call to jury duty; and, Gildersleeve's Ghost (1944) brings Gildy's relatives Randolph and Johnson up from the dead to help his campaign for police commissioner.
Peary went on to continue his career (often billing himself as Hal Peary) in films and television well into the 1970s. He died of a heart attack in 1985.
Trivia
Many of original episodes were co-written by John Whedon, the father of Tom Whedon (who wrote The Golden Girls), and grandfather of Joss Whedon (creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer).
Throckmorton P. Gildersleeve's middle name was "Philharmonic." Gildy admits as much at the end of "Gildersleeve's Diary" on the Fibber McGee and Molly series (10/22/40).
In full Gildersleeve character, at the height of the show's popularity, Harold Peary recorded three albums reading popular children's stories for Capitol Records, in heavy-bookleted four-disc 78 rpm record albums (the way albums were configured before the invention of the long-playing record). Stories for Children, Told in His Own Way by the Great Gildersleeve, was released in 1945 and was Capitol's first-ever such release for children. With orchestral accompaniment, it featured "Puss in Boots," "Rumpelstiltskin," and "Jack and the Beanstalk." The second album, Children's Stories as Told by the Great Gildersleeve, in 1946, featured "Hansel and Gretel" and "The Brave Little Tailor," again with orchestral accompaniment. The third and final album in the series, reverting to the title of the first and released in 1947, included "Snow White and Rose Red" and "Cinderella," once more with full orchestral accompaniment. The music was done by Robert Emmett Dolan. And to make sure stories would be unmistakably Gildersleevian without compromising their core integrity, Capitol brought in The Great Gildersleeve's chief writers, Sam Moore and John Whedon, to adapt them to Gildy's unmistakable bearing.
The Gildersleeve character was parodied in a Bugs Bunny cartoon called "Hare Conditioned", in which the rabbit distracts a menacing taxidermist by telling him that he sounds "just like that guy on the radio, the Great Gildersneeze!" The taxidermist responds with "Really?!" followed by Harold Peary's famous chuckle.