Today's Video Link

At last, we have some semi-decent footage of The Banana Man. I covered his history here and here but basically, this was a great old vaudeville act started by a man named A. Robins. He originally billed himself as "The One Man Music Store" and his act consisted of coming out and taking all sorts of items — musical instruments, mostly — from his pockets. At some point, he became known more for pulling out bananas and the act became more commonly known as The Banana Man. And at some point, Mr. Robins retired and sold or otherwise passed the act on. A man named Sam Levine did it in the fifties and well into the sixties, appearing on almost every live kids' show, often multiple times. It is not known if anyone else did the act between Robins and Levine but the guy who I recall seeing on Captain Kangaroo, The Mickey Mouse Club, The Ed Sullivan Show and anything hosted by Paul Winchell was apparently Levine.

This video clip starts with some brief footage of what may or may not be Mr. Robins in the 1947 feature film, Mother Wore Tights. The folks who posted this say it's Robins and they may be right…but some sources say he gave up the act in the early forties.

Most of the clip is a late TV appearance by Levine, probably on the Captain Kangaroo program. It was never as wonderful an act when he did it without a live audience and he seems a little slower and less energetic than I remember him, probably a function of age. I think though you can tell that if it was done faster and in front of a bunch of kids, it would bring down the house. (At the end, he turns his trunk into a train and pushes it off stage. I remember him always riding the train off stage, probably pulled on a cable by the stage crew. I don't know why he didn't do that here.)

This could even have been his last performance. Legend has it that once Captain Kangaroo went to videotape in the mid-sixties, it was no longer necessary to bring The Banana Man in to do his act every few months. Since he always did the exact same things, they just reused the old tape and paid him. Then at some point, the Good Captain got a new set and they called up and asked Levine to come back in and do a new performance for them. He said he couldn't; that his props had gotten too old and fragile and that he hadn't the energy (or enough other jobs) to refurbish them. Another story is that the Captain Kangaroo people didn't want him back because the props and costumes could not be laundered and so they fouled the studio with their aroma. ("I've heard of acts that stink but…")

It still isn't the ideal clip but footage of The Banana Man is amazingly elusive, especially when you consider how often this guy was on TV. I'm glad we have this much. It runs close to eight and a half minutes.

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