Ever feel as though Life has you stuck “behind the eight ball”? Well, 1940s moviegoers saw that happen on an amazingly frequent basis to a put-upon everyman named Joe McDoakes. Released by Warner Bros./Vitaphone from 1942-56, the genuinely amusing Joe McDoakes series–also known as “Behind the Eight Ball” or “So You Want To”–followed Joe (character actor George O’Hanlon) as he muddled his way through various job-related and domestic crises…usually of his own making.
The series of 63 one-reel comedies actually began life as a college class project. In 1942 USC instructor Richard L. Bare produced a short entitled So You Want to Give Up Smoking, giving his students a step-by-step look at the moviemaking process. Playing Joe as he tries to kick the nicotine habit was O’Hanlon, whose 10-year Hollywood career to that point consisted mostly of uncredited bit parts. Bare sold the finished product to Warners for a princely $2,500 ($1,000 of which went back to the university). After the film proved to be popular with theatrical audiences, the studio signed Bare to a contract. Only one more short, So You Need to Wear Glasses, was produced in 1942 before things were put on hold due to World War II.
In the summer of 1945 the series resumed with So You Think You’re Allergic. These first three films were made sans dialogue, with an off-screen narrator describing the goings-on. Starting with 1946’s So You Want to Play the Horses and for the rest of the way the actors began speaking, adding to what modern viewers would call a sitcom feel. Each installment opened with a title sequence where O’Hanlon emerges from behind a giant eight ball (get it?). As Joe he would quickly find himself embroiled in one problematic situation after another. Over the years Joe would be a nervous expectant parent (So You’re Going to Be a Father); try to build his physique (So You Want to Be a Muscle Man); jump headlong into a new hobby (So You Want a Model Railroad); consider joining the force (So You Want to Be a Policeman); and so forth. One of the best entries, 1948’s So You Want to Be a Detective, spoofed the MGM whodunit Lady in the Lake and its first-person camerawork, with Joe imagining himself as private eye “Philip Snarlowe.”
The shorts’ 10-minute running time allowed for a quick set-up and an escalating strings of calamities, sometimes due to other folks but typically brought on by Joe’s own ineptitude. In many of the films the victim of Joe’s overenthusiastic nature was his long-suffering wife, Alice. Jane Harker, Jane Frazee, and future TV Lois Lane Phyllis Coates (who was briefly married to Bare) were among the actresses who played Mrs. McDoakes (Oddly, in several shorts Joe was a bachelor). Other notable actors who turned up in the series included Elmer Fudd voice actor Arthur Q. Bryan, Jack Benny Show foil Frank Nelson, and Three Stooges antagonist Philip Van Zandt. Even the Gipper himself, Ronald Reagan, made a cameo appearance in 1947’s So You Want to Be in Pictures. That film was the first of three McDoakes comedies to earn consecutive Academy Award nominations for Best Short Subject–One-Reel, followed by So You Want to Be on the Radio in 1948 and So You Think You’re Not Guilty the following year.
By the mid-’50s most studios were phasing out their shorts departments, and Joe was “Behind the Eight Ball” for the last time in 1956’s So Your Wife Wants to Work. Creator Richard Bare would go on to direct various TV shows (including such Twilight Zone faves as “Nick of Time” and “To Serve Man,” plus many episodes of Green Acres) as well as the classic 1968 film I Sailed to Tahiti with an All-Girl Crew before dying in 2015 at 101. As for Joe himself, George O’Hanlon found steady work in movies and television as well. He’s best known to generations of cartoon fans as the voice of George Jetson in Hanna-Barbera’s 1962-63 prime time series The Jetsons. O’Hanlon would also play the futuristic family guy (whose problems sometimes echoed Joe McDoakes’) in the 1980s revival series and for the last time in 1990’s Jetsons: The Movie. It was in February of 1989, after his final recording session for the film, that George passed away at a Los Angeles hospital at 76 due to complications from a stroke.