A. Robins from SEEING RED (1939)

I can't take credit for presenting this one, although I wish that I could. I've got two copies of this scene from the 1939 film SEEING RED, each with a flaw. I was hunting down a new copy when I saw that someone had beaten me to the punch and posted it to YouTube the other day.

Ladies and Gentlemen, in one of only two known film appearances, it gives me great pleasure to introduce the extremely inventive Mr. A. Robins, originally known as the "One Man Music Shop" or "The Walking Music Shop" and later simply as "The Banana Man".

This is not Sam Levine, the man who later presented the same act (with the same props) on television from the 40s through the 70s, this is the original Banana Man himself.

Mr. Robins was the featured clown on Ringling's 1943 Madison Square Garden spectacular entitled Spangles.


For more on A. Robins, Sam Levine and the Banana Man act please click the title of this post.



From Mark Evanier's blog NEWS FROM ME...

A man named A. Robins started doing his odd act in the days of vaudeville, occasionally venturing into circuses. It was an act that basically consisted of him taking things out of his pockets and using his voice, sometimes with the aid of a kazoo-like device, to provide the sounds of musical props. In most appearances, he'd drop the items he produced into a large chest which would eventually turn into a train — sometimes with many cars — and he'd ride it off stage at the end.

Originally, the act was called "The Walking Music Shop" but he spent so much of his on-stage time finding stalks of bananas in his pockets that he came to be known as "The Banana Man."

Mr. Robins, who was also a toy and propmaker, performed his unnatural act until around the end of World War II. In the fifties, The Banana Man was a frequent guest on all the live kids' shows of that era (Howdy Doody, Mickey Mouse Club, Captain Kangaroo, etc.) and even on variety shows for adults, including Ed Sullivan's. By this time, the act and its unique props were in the hands of a man named Sam Levine, though he was never billed as anything but The Banana Man. Once in a while, he was even billed as "A. Robins, The Banana Man," even though the first A. Robins — whose real name was Adolph Proper — passed away around 1950.

Among folks who study such matters, there is some argument as to whether someone else (or maybe even several someone elses) performed as The Banana Man after the act's originator sold it off and before Levine assumed the role. In any case, Levine was the guy I saw on all those shows and he was mesmerizing. I couldn't take my eyes off this odd man when he was on TV. Neither could most of my friends, and we all tried to mimic his bizarre, high-pitched humming, sometimes merging it with impressions of Curly Howard. He seems to have retired in the mid-sixties but his haunting song lingers on.

The following clip is introduced by a youthful Red Skelton. It's from a 1939 short film called Seeing Red, and it's one of the few times Robins performed on film...and as I said, it's a very short version of what he did on stage. In fact, he doesn't even get around to producing any bananas. Oddly enough, although Sam Levine did the act on hundreds of TV shows, clips of him are equally hard to come by.