Blondie, No. 10 - Blondie Goes to College (1942)

Well, this is it. Technically, I’m not even halfway through the series, but this is the last entry that’s actually available in a non-anachronistic media format. In a way, I’m sort of sad to be leaving this franchise prematurely, since at this stage it’s starting to evolve somewhat, reacting to the actors’ aging, the developing comic strip, and audience tastes. Oh well, if on the off chance further Blondie DVDs get released in the future, maybe someday I can revisit the series.
In Blondie Goes to College, Blondie goes to college. This movie makes the cleanest break from early series formula, suggesting later films might go even further. Not only is the paperboy gag MIA, but so is the stalwart pummeled mailman joke. Daisy herself only makes a token appearance. Hell, by now it’s clear that Baby Dumpling has doubled in age, from four to eight, and must serve different functions accordingly. For one, I’m astounded his parents still see fit to call this eight-year-old human being “Baby Dumpling,” which sounds more like a Chinese appetizer than a respectable nickname.

Blondie Goes to College opens at an intercollegiate football game, the Bumstead family watching from the stands. Despite the fact no one is this family has any college affiliation, they are rooting for local university Leighton. Dagwood even manages to catch the extra point football, something that sadly no longer happens. This is enough to get Dagwood to wax poetic about the college experience – he vows that he himself shall be educated, to get a college education. [Repressed snicker.] I find it hard to believe that Dagwood even made it through elementary school, let alone high school.

This out of the way, we can have our regular breakfast table scene. Dagwood and Blondie argue about the efficacy of college, Blondie revealing her own occasional idiocy by declaring “I already know more than I understand.” As a proud believer of certain Aristotelian notions, I firmly believe these people are not college material. Dagwood hollers loudly about that there book learnin’ like what them colleges got, then he storms off for work – surprisingly, this ample opportunity is where the mailman gag would happen, had it not been dropped.

So Blondie goes to Dithers’ office (Dagwood’s probably off fixing a vacuum cleaner or something) to discuss the college problem with him. However, knowing this movie’s title and justifiably wishing to get Dagwood out of his hair, Dithers recommends that both he and Blondie head off to college, to get the “bug” out of their systems. Eh, good enough, we gotta make the transition from suburban sitcom to collegiate comedy painlessly enough.

Naturally, Baby Dumpling cannot be around for this kind of plot, so his parents just go and dump him at the Calhoun Military Academy. We will occasionally cut back to Dumpling’s reduced screen time at Calhoun whenever the movie gets bored of its college setting. The joke here, apparently, is to see little kids acting like older soldiers. A priggish, stick-in-the-ass institution like the military, and that’s what they’ve come up with?! Kids? Comic strips are right, the mere presence of children must be inherently humorous to some people.

Driving to campus, Dagwood and Blondie actively plan out the artificial premise for their Leighton adventures. See, they miss their youths (but not their youth – good riddance to Dumpling). So in order to get “the real college experience,” they shall both pretend to be single, then arrange a “meet cute” in the quad. I can see where this is going! They’re both gonna get paired up with this entry’s guest stars, and their marriage will see predictable wear and tear.

To further arrange this unlikely and improbable scenario, Dagwood keeps good to his unerring incompetence at life, and somehow manages to get himself an apartment he neither needs, wants nor is looking for. He really is the world’s ideal consumer. And this is a male only apartment, lorded over by the most disgustingly paranoid, hateful old landlady I’ve ever seen in the media. Dagwood’s typical stammering prevents him from explaining matters, so he is physically separated from his darling wife. What an idiot.

That’s it for the set up. Now it’s off to college, which appears pretty similar to what was seen in Love Laughs at Andy Hardy. That is, college in the forties was full of males in gay sweaters and pinstriped caps, looking quite the fops. The female coeds, however, have the good sense to dress in schoolgirl outfits that are somehow simultaneously innocent and slutty – women, I salute you. Here we meet ace football champion Rusty Bryant (Larry Parks), commanding his collegiate minions like a proto Van Wilder. He quickly takes note of the attractive Blondie, and – Holy schnikeys!, is that Lloyd Bridges?! Indeed it is a cameo by Lloyd Bridges, prolific star of countless fifties B-movies and Airplane!, looking exactly the same as he did forty years later. And it so happens that Lloyd Bridges is Rusty’s romantic rival, two Hays-approved horndogs who discuss human sexuality entirely in football metaphors. In regards to Blondie, Rusty actually says something about tackling the tight end, and I honestly can’t believe that made it past the censors. Then Rusty approaches Blondie, employing the most brilliant pick up line I’ve ever heard: “Hello.”

Okay, so Blondie has hooked up without consent (this school is so ridiculously skewed towards Rusty’s will that a girl literally cannot say “no” to him – in Animal House, Rusty would be depicted as a snobbish rapist). It’s time to get Dagwood paired off too. This happens while he’s driving to campus, when a beautiful coed simply leaps into his moving vehicle. Oh, why doesn’t the real world work like that? This is Laura Wadsworth (Janet Blair), employer of bizarre 1940s idioms such as “You ain’t humming, drizzlepuss.” What the?! Laura’s forceful attraction towards Dagwood is very confusing, but I already can’t figure out how Dagwood could snare the likes of Penny Singleton or Rita Hayworth. It’s also worth noting that actor Arthur Lake is 35 at this point (Penny Singleton a mere 33), yet somehow everyone on campus mistakes them for fresh-out-of-high-school. Actually, considering the ages of most actors who play teens and college students, this starts to make meta sense.

As in most college comedies, there is only a single scene in class, token lip service to the notion that higher learning involves learning. There joke here is even the same as in contemporary comedies: the professor’s dense, academic lectures are far too high-falutin’ for our noble hero to understand. Indeed, this archaic professor answers simple questions with lengthy screeds filled with digressions – it’s like he’s writing a blog! The sad thing is, I can actually understand what the man’s saying, surely a sign that I’m over-educated.

But getting back to the real purpose of the college experience: sordid sexual escapades. Dagwood and Blondie go on a double date with Laura and Rusty, respectively. Rusty offers to show Blondie “General Hood,” making me think he’s uncircumcised. But no, “General Hood” is actually an ancient tree, and Leighton’s prime “make out” (re: fornication) spot. That ain’t sap all on the ground! Laura, meanwhile, takes Dagwood to see “General Gibson,” another sex tree. Both Bumsteads wither at the idea of mutual infidelity, fleeing their would-be paramours.

Dagwood’s real reason for going to college, it turns out, isn’t the education (he is a functionally illiterate man-child, after all), but the sports. Dagwood goes out for every college sport they had the time to film, in a montage of comic ineptitude that is really the leftover scraps from similar comic routines in Harold Lloyd’s The Freshman and Buster Keaton’s College. It gets less funny with each retelling. Dagwood fails at every sport, with the jokes being, for instance, that when trying to play baseball, he cannot hit a baseball. Yeah, that’s pretty much someone who shouldn’t play that sport, but no, it’s not a joke, per se. I did laugh at one moment in this sports montage, though maybe I shouldn’t have. Did you know that mules were considered regular field equipment in 1940s era football? It’s so endearingly hayseed, because surely the entire U.S. was just a bunch of rubes back then.

There is a little more standard business involving the Bumsteads’ separate unwanted romances, as well as a visit to Dumpling at Calhoun. Then Blondie plans to do Dagwood a favor by convincing Rusty to drop off the crew team. This opens up a spot, which Dagwood learns about when Mr. Dithers of all people drops by to inform him of it. I don’t even know why he insists on inserting himself into this story. So whatever, Dagwood agrees to join the crew team, and Dithers then fires him. Again, I don’t even know why he does this, except it’s become such a kneejerk response for the man – it’s like a very specific form of Tourette’s. I’ve officially lost count of Dagwood’s firings – I think it’s around 5 or 6 now.

Apparently Dagwood is actually good at rowing, shown by a sports montage more at place in Rocky. This attracts the attention of Laura’s millionaire father, Mr. Wadsworth (Andrew Tombes), who welcomes Dagwood with open arms into his extravagant yacht-going lifestyle. Dagwood eats a large sandwich, so they’re perpetuating that gag. Both Laura and Blondie show up in really cute sailor uniforms – Dang it! I should’ve taken screen caps before I sent the DVD back!

All this sandwich-eating and sailor-suit-looking-at was in preparation for the big crew regatta against Atlantic. (This is entirely a collegiate experience that is lost on my sorry West Coast ass.) The race is off!, conveyed mostly through our set-bound actors cheering on a lengthy reel of stock footage. Leighton (the good guys) are about to win when Dagwood goes and does something predictably stupid. He pretty much just forgets how to row all of a sudden. Leighton loses. Again, a simple inability at sportsmanship is not enough to warrant a joke, unless you’re the sort of person who also points and laughs when an old lady falls down on the sidewalk.

Dithers of all people realizes this movie is pretty much just grinding its gears, and has to end somehow. He vows to convince both Dagwood and Blondie to leave college (the moral of the movie – neglect your education), though I question why he now cares, seeing as he’s already fired Dagwood…again. It seems Dithers’ grand plan involves springing Dumpling from Calhoun so he can convince his father to come home. The problem here is that Dumpling goes to see Dagwood in his gulag-like apartment, where babies (everyone still thinks this eight-year-old a baby) are strictly verboten. The disgusting landlady finds this “baby” in Dagwood’s unit (for shame!), and actually calls the cops on him. Pretty soon both Dagwood and Dithers have been taken in to the police station under suspicion of baby-napping. Yeah, brilliant plan, Dithers.

Meanwhile back at the college, the loser students of Leighton are handling their crew loss in a really weird way – they’re actually singing a song in honor of rival Atlantic, applauding in genuine joy. I mean, most student bodies would be drunk or rioting now, not willingly brown-nosing the enemy! Blondie is there. Then the cops show up with Dagwood, Dumpling and Dithers (three characters starting with a “D” – somebody screwed up). The cops query Blondie, and the recent baby-napping plotline is resolved just like that without any further comic shenanigans, thankfully. This does force Blondie to reveal her marital deception to the student body. They are surprisingly receptive to the string of lies and athletic failure that the Bumstead family has brought to their institution – they applaud this all wildly. They’re happy about everything; these students are even more spineless than Dagwood. Then Dithers goes and rehires Dagwood back on, with as little justification as the firing. I think Dithers has become genre savvy, and is just playing along.

The reunited Bumstead family walks for the horizon as the student body sings them the Leighton song. Blondie reveals a final surprise to Dagwood, something that would surely influence the rest of the series to come – she’s pregnant with a second child.

The coming of this second child coincides with a similar event in the concurrent “Blondie” comic strip. The movie series was actually making a good faith effort to follow their source material to the letter. If Chic Young tossed a gigantic, Manhattan-destroying space squid into his comic, you’d be damn well guaranteed the Blondie series would actually show it too. By the way, the introduction of young Cookie Bumstead means that, in both the films and strip, Baby Dumpling would get his long-overdue promotion to “Alexander” Bumstead. I mean, the kid’s only eight, you might as well call him by his name!

A full eighteen more films would follow Blondie Goes to College, so I leave this series when it isn’t even half over. It would remain in the family sitcom mold, child characters aging at the same pace as their cartoon counterparts, up to 1950. To reiterate a portion of an old list, these are the films yet to come:

Blondie's Blessed Event (1942)
Blondie for Victory (1942)
It's a Great Life (1943)
Footlight Glamour (1943)
Leave It to Blondie (1945)
Life with Blondie (1945)
Blondie's Lucky Day (1946)
Blondie Knows Best (1946)
Blondie's Big Moment (1947)
Blondie's Holiday (1947)
Blondie in the Dough (1947)
Blondie's Anniversary (1947)
Blondie's Reward (1948)
Blondie's Secret (1948)
Blondie's Big Deal (1949)
Blondie Hits the Jackpot (1949)
Blondie's Hero (1950)
Beware of Blondie (1950)

I cannot say precisely why the Blondie series ended in 1950, whether it was due to fading popularity or aging actors. I’d suspect the latter, as surely Lake and Singleton were getting a bit long in years to keep up with a hectic B-movie shooting schedule. It was around this time that Chic Young froze time in his comic strip, the Bumstead’s two children to remain teenagers for the duration of the format. Thus it makes sense to leave the film series as it stood.

No matter, Columbia was intent upon continuing their Blondie success with a new project. The original intent was to adapt the “Gasoline Alley” comic strip into a similar series of films, which would make enough sense if film serials remained a viable format into the fifties. But this new series never materialized, and instead Columbia devised a lazier solution. They simply reissued the old Blondie movies again, since if you can make the same kind of money on a pre-existing product, might as well.

Of course the fifties were really when television came into its own as a medium, allowing for the proliferation of family sitcoms. Had the Blondie film series continued on, it would have had to contend with this new competition. Instead, as an odd postscript to the films, the “Blondie” strip would twice become short-lived television sitcoms, once in 1958 on NBC, and again in 1968 with CBS. Neither was terribly successful, despite how clearly the Blondie formula could apply to television. Perhaps it’s simply a sign of evolving tastes, as Blondie would seem square even in 1958, paling against edgy fare such as “My Three Sons” and “Leave it to Beaver.” But the Blondie legacy still continues in its original form, since the “Blondie” comic strip retains that format’s astounding immortality against all common sense, continuing to delight elderly readers who died twenty years ago with its increasingly anachronistic humor down through the ages. And again, “Blondie” remains one of the better strips out there, despite its modern shortcomings. “Marmaduke” has always been awful…


Related posts:
• No. 1 Blondie (1938)
• No. 2 Blondie Meets the Boss (1939)
• No. 3 Blondie Takes a Vacation (1939)
• No. 4 Blondie Brings Up Baby (1939)
• No. 5 Blondie on a Budget (1940)
• No. 6 Blondie Has Servant Trouble (1940)
• No. 7 Blondie Plays Cupid (1940)
• No. 8 Blondie Goes Latin (1941)
• No. 9 Blondie in Society (1941)