The Travalanche Top 25

On the eve of putting Travalanche behind a canvas gateway like the peepshow that it is, we close out the year, as we usually do, with a little stock taking. Travalanche began in 2008 as an outlet for indie theatre news and reviews at a time when my usual print media outlets were drying up. A year later I began to add material related to my best known book No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, and because those vaudeville performers lives overlapped with so many other traditional show biz forms, we ended up writing pretty much everything related to old time entertainment. A few years later, my own nostalgia for the 1970s-90s began to play a role as well.

The 25 posts below are the ones that have attracted the most readers. Not coincidentally, they also make up what I call my “10,000 Club”, all of my posts which have attracted readership of five figures or more (in a few cases, quite a bit more). A few quick observations about what you, the readers, like to read: 3/5 of the posts have a true crime, tragedy or scandal angle; 6 concern slapstick comedy or comedians; 4 are about vaudevillians; 3 are about freaks; 3 are listicles; 2 are reviews. All are about show business. Only a couple are not related to movies or TV in some way.

1. Eko and Iko: The Men from Mars

2. The 22 Best Comic Drunks (and Drunk Comics) of All Time

3. Will Geer: Queer, Communist and American as Apple Pie

4. Respect for Jayne Mansfield

5. Tom Joad’s Speech

6. George Sanders: Committed Suicide Because He Was “Bored”

7. Eddie Foy and the 7 Little Foys

8. Jason Segel’s movie The Muppets

9. Terry-Thomas’s Tragic Final Days

10. 50 Funny Football Films

11. The Robert Blake Saga

12. The Death of Charlie Chaplin

13. The History of “Our Gang” a.k.a. “The Little Rascals”

14. The Volatile Life and Career of George C. Scott

15. Charlie Chaplin’s Early Years

16. The Sad Suicide of Stanley Adams

17. The Four Cohans

18. The Tragic Murder of Hee Haw‘s Stringbean Akeman

19. The Women of Vaudeville

20. The Horrific Fate of Yvette Vickers

21. Review of Bonfire of Destiny

22. Harold Lloyd’s Bomb Explosion

23. Jean-Jacques Liberra: The Double-Bodied Man

24. The Low-Down on Mason Reese

25. Dick Shawn: Literally Died On Stage

Just behind these, nipping at their heels, are posts on Joe Flynn, Frank Fay, Clara Blandick, and Ed Flanders (each of which have tragic angles of some kind), as well as ones on Stan Laurel, and my ranking of silent comedians. It will be interesting to see if there is a shift in emphasis once the readership gets more exclusive! Thanks, as always for reading, through good times and bad. I hope you will continue to do so!