Talking animals feature in the Aesopica (or Aesop's Fables) from as far back as the seventh/sixth century BC of ancient Greece, and indeed there are animal fables that originate from a much more distant time.
In more recent times, animals that talk have been a popular source of film and television entertainment and one of my own childhood favourites, the US TV sitcom Mister Ed, had its last original episode broadcast on CBS 50 years ago on February 6th.
The social-consumer web platform ranker.com has ranked the greatest talking animals in TV history (the rankers were television critics, historians and fans) and, of the top 50, all were cartoon characters (Donald Duck, Tom and Jerry, etc) except for Mister Ed.
The character Mister Ed appeared in a series of short stories in 1937 by the American children’s book writer Walter R Brooks, who is probably better known for his Freddy the Pig series of novels.
In the 1950s, film director Arthur Lubin made a series of popular Universal-International film comedies under the title Freddie the Talking Mule, in which the eponymous equine character spoke only to one human, thus creating opportunities for misunderstanding and fun.
Lubin wished to make a television series involving Francis but was not able to secure the rights.
His secretary told him about Brooks’s Mister Ed stories and he decided to try to turn these into a TV series.
He had to sell the show into syndication first and after the initial 26 episodes were well enough received, the TV network CBS picked it up from October 1st, 1961, and broadcast it for five years.
A palomino gelding called Bamboo Harvester played Mister Ed (Allan Lane, a former actor in Westerns did the voice) and the horse’s owner, Wilbur, a kind but accident-prone architect, was played by Alan Young.
Arthur Lubin said that he chose Young for the lead role because he “just seemed like the sort of guy a horse would talk to”. Connie Hines played Wilbur’s long-suffering wife, Carol.
Mister Ed’s ability to talk was simply never an issue. When Wilbur tried to understand it in the first episode, Ed’s reply was the only comment on the subject: “Don’t try. It’s bigger than both of us.”
The horse’s trainer was Les Hilton. In Alan Young’s words, “Ed actually learned to move his lips on cue when the trainer touched his hoof. In fact, he soon learned to do it when I stopped talking during a scene. Ed was very smart.”
Much of the comedy arose from the fact that Ed tended to talk only to Wilbur and from situations where other characters heard Wilbur talking to his horse and asked him who he was talking to.
Adding to the humour was Ed’s cleverness, fondness for pranks, inventiveness and penchant for witty one-liners. Two sets of neighbours, the Addisons and the Kirkwoods, were often bemused by Wilbur’s doings, mainly because Ed did his best to make him appear as eccentric as possible to them.
Romance featured in a number of episodes, such as one where Ed went on a diet to impress a filly, or another where he fell madly in love with a French horse but his ardour cooled when he discovered she was taller than he was.
In another episode, he begged Wilbur to find him a justice of the peace so he could marry his favourite filly.
Ed often displayed jealousy, of babies or puppies or cats, because he felt they were taking away attention from himself. More often he showed himself a principled character, such as when he discovered he was part Cherokee and refused to associate with a parrot descended from Gen Custer’s parrot.
A number of celebrity guest stars appeared as themselves in the series and gave Ed ample opportunity for his famous one-liners.
Mae West hired Wilbur to redesign her stables and, after Ed took a telephone call from her, he said: “Mae West! Maybe she can come up and shoe me some time.”
When Wilbur told him that Clint Eastwood had moved into the neighbourhood, Ed remarked to him that Eastwood rode bareback. On Wilbur's denying this, Ed asked: "Then why do they call his show Rawhide?"
A number of DVD editions of the series have appeared in the last 15 years but a planned remake for the Fox network in 2004 did not happen.
We still await the fulfilment of the Waterman Entertainment announcement in 2012 that they were developing a new feature film based on Mister Ed.