This Paramount musical short offers us Lawrence Welk, his orchestra and his singers in this fairly typical and unexceptional musical short, singing a variety of songs. They seem over-orchestrated and uniformly peppy, but the smiling face of Lawrence Welk as he enthusiastically plays his accordion helps round out each number.
The short is unexceptional, but it a particular way. It's exactly the same sort of music performed in exactly the same sort of way that Welk and his band performed it every week on television from the middle of the 1950s through the 1980s. The orchestrations are the same, if, perhaps, a bit more complicated: fixedly cheerful stuff in which everything was a mildly peppy polka. Even the singers are the same: young couples who sing in slightly nasal songs about the innocent activities of the 19th century.
There is only music, so we miss the occasional introductions and the inevitable "And a one, and a two" with which Welk began each song. That and a lack of Geritol commercials. Otherwise this is a clone of the show he would do for the next forty-three years. It bespeaks of a man who is fatuously pleased with himself, who spent half a century not learning a single thing.
The short is unexceptional, but it a particular way. It's exactly the same sort of music performed in exactly the same sort of way that Welk and his band performed it every week on television from the middle of the 1950s through the 1980s. The orchestrations are the same, if, perhaps, a bit more complicated: fixedly cheerful stuff in which everything was a mildly peppy polka. Even the singers are the same: young couples who sing in slightly nasal songs about the innocent activities of the 19th century.
There is only music, so we miss the occasional introductions and the inevitable "And a one, and a two" with which Welk began each song. That and a lack of Geritol commercials. Otherwise this is a clone of the show he would do for the next forty-three years. It bespeaks of a man who is fatuously pleased with himself, who spent half a century not learning a single thing.
