Lost and Incontinent

In the movies of the 1940s and 1950s, every third movie produced in Hollywood was required by an obscure clause in the Hays Code to have a character from Brooklyn in the cast for comic relief. In many of those films, that relief was provided by Sid Melton, who has died of pneumonia at the age of 94. Among those films were Lost Continent, where he played a mechanic on an expedition to a land mass unabashedly reminiscent of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World who has erotic dreams about planes, and Radar Secret Service, one of the finest 59-minute movies about atomic theft this nation has ever produced. Both found second life on MST3K, where Joel and the ‘Bots dubbed Melton 'Monkey Boy.' Melton turned up like a bad penny on 3 different Danny Thomas series, inexplicably took his Brooklyn accent to Hooterville on Green Acres and played Sophia’s late husband in flashbacks on The Golden Girls.