Tugboat Annie

1 9 5 6 (Canada/USA)
39 x 30 minute episodes

Salt spray, insults and action marked this expensively-produced comedy about rival tugboat captains in the Pacific Northwest of America.

Foghorn-voiced widow Annie Brennan (Minerva Urecal) skippered the Narcissus and Captain Horatio Bullwinkle (Walter Sande) skippered the Salamander.

The two of them were constantly trading jibes, stealing jobs from one another, and sharing adventures. Both were built like an Ox and down deep they really did like one another.

Pinto (Don Orlando) was the weakling cook on Annie’s tug and Eric Clavering played Shiftless. Her other crew member was Whitey (Don Baker). Bullwinkle’s helper was Jake, played by James Barron.

The character of Tugboat Annie had been created many years earlier by Norman Reilly Raine in a long series of stories for The Saturday Evening Post. These were made into a famous movie in 1933, in which Marie Dressler traded salty insults with a drunken Wallace Beery.

The Canadian production company Normandie obtained the television rights to the stories in 1954, but had great trouble in both casting the two leads and with the actual filming, on location in San Pedro Harbour and on the Pacific Ocean.

The pilot episode was said by Variety in 1956 to have been the most expensive ever made, costing upwards of $130,000.

It took two more years to get the series onto the air, and then it only lasted for 39 episodes.

Tugboat Annie (Brennan)
Minerva Urecal
Capt Horatio Bullwinkle
Walter Sande
Murdoch McArdle
Stan Francis
Whitey
Don Baker
Pinto
Don Orlando
Jake
James Barron
Shiftless
Eric Clavering