Professor Popinjay's Compendium of Perspicacity

Unless you’re about 80 years old you’ve probably never heard of  these guys but back in the 50’s Ma and Pa Kettle saved Universal from bankruptcy. It’s no big surprise either because these films are pretty enjoyable. Actress Marjorie Main as Ma Kettle was the driving force behind the duo with her big personality but she’d demand we give equal credit to Percy Kilbride who played the rather quiet and subdued Pa Kettle. He was the yin to her yang and the father of their nine children so you know he got some charisma hidden somewhere!

That was the gag most of the time. They have a lot of children. But running gags done right can be hilarious and these guys knew how to keep the laughs coming.

These characters started with Betty MacDonald’s book “The Egg and I” which was adapted for film in 1947, staring Claudette Colbert and Fred MacMurray. It was a charming enough film about a visionary husband who gives up city life to start a farm much to his wife’s chagrin. Their neighbors happen to be the Kettles who provide an ample amount of hilarious situations for them. I find it fascinating that Marjorie Main would play a very similar character with a multitude of children in the very excellent Abbott and Costello film The Wistful Widow of Wagon Gap which released just one month prior to The Egg and I. She seemed to have found her niche.

Such a hit were the Kettles, they would spawn a spin-off film simply titled “The Further Adventures of Ma and Pa Kettle”. From there the cash cow was born and Universal, who was cutting it close financially at the time, bet the farm on these two. Eight more Kettle films would be produced between then and 1957. I list them all here:

The Egg and I

Ma and Pa Kettle (The Further Adventures of)

Ma and Pa Kettle Go to Town

Ma and Pa Kettle Back on the Farm

Ma and Pa Kettle at the Fair

Ma and Pa Kettle on Vacation

Ma and Pa Kettle at Home

Ma and Pa Kettle at Waikiki

The Kettles in the Ozarks

The Kettles on Old MacDonald’s Farm

You may scoff at a cinematic universe centered around non-super-powered hillbillies but you’d have to admit, this franchise was certainly more successful than Universal’s Dark Universe when you account for inflation.

You’ll notice the last two films are titled differently. That’s because Percy Kilbride eventually retired due to health problems and boredom. Not the best endorsement for the latter films which continued to get made without him. Arthur Hunnicutt would take on the role of Sedgwick Kettle, Pa’s brother. The last two films did take on a bit of a different dynamic without Pa as a sounding board for Ma. Maybe they should have given him more to do than just get harangued by Ma all the time.

The public’s craving for rustic comedies with fish-out-of-water hillbilly characters would not be quenched however. A mere five years after the last Kettles movie, The Beverly Hillbillies series and Petticoat Junction would premiere on syndicated television and three years after that we’d get a Petticoat spinoff with Green Acres, a show with a very similar plot to The Egg and I. These shows would all be connected by a variety of locales and crossover characters. So there you have it. Ma and Pa Kettle are the originators of everything we know and love today. Go watch something in black-and-white.