Invisible, Nonexistant Characters

[FredLeonard]

Speaking of Archie Bunker, we never got to see the Rev Fletcher .... whoops, I mean Feltcher (whatever!).

Going back to old time radio, Fibber McGee and Molly had several often mentioned but never appeared characters. Wallace Wimple ("Wimp") had his "big old wife, Sweetie Face," who abused him often and who sounds like a direct predecessor of Howard's mother on Big Bang Theory. There was also the telephone operator, Myrt, and had a lot in common with Sarah, the Mayberry operator. Throckmorton Gildersleeve had a wife who was mentioned but never heard, until he was spun-off into his own show and she was not mentioned at all (Gildersleeve became either a bachelor or widower, they were a little vague on which).

 

[JeffM]

Well, I hate to state the obvious, but EVERY character on radio was invisible...

Of course, the star comedians of radio often had parallel movie careers. Jack Benny, Bob Hope, Red Skelton, Edgar Bergen, Burns and Allen, etc. So the public indeed knew what they looked like. And Fibber McGee and Molly (Marian and Jim Jordan) and Gildersleeve (Harold Peary) starred in movies as "themselves"...oddly enough for RKO "Radio" Pictures! (Apropos of nothing, Marian and Jim's nephew Rik Jordan was for at least 20 years the "morning man" at KDAL-AM in Duluth, MN; and a fine sportscaster too...)

Movies sometimes spoofed the heard-but-not-seen nature of radio; listeners hearing a passionate romantic scene, then cut to the studio to see it performed by two spectacularly unattractive actors, perhaps with their backs to each other. Or revealing the towering he-man hero of an adventure show or Western to be a "shrimp." Billy Bletcher, a diminutive actor with a booming voice, actually fit this comic stereotype; he was Disney's "Big Bad Wolf" and dubbed the Lone Ranger's voice in the Republic Pictures cliffhanger.