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Anyone Else Confused About Babe Ruth and the Kid?

posted 9 years ago by cmashieldscapting
1 reply | jump to latest

In the episode telling the story of Babe Ruth and the Kid on the radio, Felix makes up a fake ending that the kid was dying when penicillin was discovered and saved him. Numerous listeners called in to say he got the story wrong, but the episode never told the actual story (unless it was cut from the version I saw). Presumably they either figured it was so famous everyone knew it, or it didn't matter. I asked my mom, but not being a sports fan she didn't know the details.

For decades I assumed the kid was deathly ill and actually passed away despite the Babe's promise to knock a homer for him if he got well. Felix just wanted to tack an upbeat ending on the sorry story so moved the invention of penicillin to a bit earlier in history. This shows exactly the morbid turn of my childhood imagination (which incidentally has changed relatively little).

Thank God for the internet!

Here is the original thread which answered years of wondering: http://www.sitcomsonline.com/boards/showthread.php?t=239133

Here is just one source on the real story! http://www.nytimes.com/1990/01/11/obituaries/johnny-sylvester-the-inspiration-for-babe-ruth-heroics-is-dead.html

When I learned the details, lo, many years later, I had to wonder, if the kid didn't die, why did Felix invent a fake ending? I must conclude that he believed kids should have faith in science rather than rely on hero worship of celebrities. What do others think?

[–] tmaj48 9 years ago

Felix, fussy and full of himself, always has to make his own "improvements" to well-known works,
whether it's his hammy performance as Scrooge in the A Christmas Carol auditions;
his thoughts on his lines of dialogue in a re-creation of Abbott and Costello's
famous "Who's on First" routine (he argued that it would be more grammatically
correct to throw the ball to "whom"); or in this case, the hokey and inaccurate,
but well-loved legend of Babe Ruth and the kid. Of course, he just couldn't
resist changing the ending because 1. He would be the first one to point out, churlishly, that hitting a homer couldn't save a kid's life, even in a sentimentalized story. He'd have to make it more logical, and 2. He wrote the script for the play; he wasn't going to let Oscar (as the Babe) get away with
being the hero. Naturally, he would get to be the hero of the story as the doctor,
along with penicillin ("The Big P!")

Another version of this legend appears in an early Saturday Night Live episode:
John Belushi plays the Babe, and Garrett Morris is the kid. Babe, drunken and hungover, fails to come through on the home run promise, which nearly finishes off
the poor kid, but he manages to recover anyway, and vows revenge on Ruth for
disappointing him. The little boy grows up to be Hank Aaron, who would later break Ruth's home run record.

I'm not crying, you fool, I'm laughing!

Hewwo.