So You Want to Be on the Radio is a 1948 short comedy film (10 minutes) directed by Richard L. Bare. It is another installment of Warner Bros.' long-running (1942–56) So You Want... series starring bumbling goofball Joe McDoakes.
So You Want to Be on a Game Show might have been a better title, because the plot is all about game shows. In this one Joe (George O'Hanlon, who later voiced George Jetson on The Jetsons) and his wife Alice (Phyllis Coates) get tickets to a radio game show called "Aren't People Ridiculous?". Alice botches the questions, which causes Joe to take some unpleasant physical punishments, but they get a bunch of prizes anyway.
One of the prizes is tickets to another quiz show called "Double Down or Drop Dead". Joe is basically dumber than a fencepost, so he can't answer any of the questions, but the host gives him super-easy softballs after Joe says he was a veteran—until Joe admits he was only an air raid warden. Finally, after Joe and Alice are back at home, they are called by still a third game show, "The Sneezing Man", in which contestants have to guess the identity of the person sneezing on the radio.
Tropes:
- Consolation Prize: After blowing the last question in "Double Down or Drop Dead", Joe gets soap flakes instead of $1600.
- The Ditz: Joe is really dumb. The host of "Double Down or Drop Dead" is trying to feed Joe softballs. The question is "John says to Mary, 'I love you.' Mary says, 'I love you, __.'" When the host holds up two fingers to help Joe figure out the answer is "too", Joe says "I love your fingers?" Then at the end, Joe can't answer the question "Who wrote The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper?"
- Fanservice Extra: The last of the prizes filling up Joe and Alice's house is a hot lady in a bikini, standing behind the fridge.Alice: I'm sorry Joe, that thing will have to go back.
- Game Show Appearance: Joe gets tickets to a game show, where he wins tickets to a second game show. Then he's selected by call-in to play in still a third game show. Overall, it doesn't go very well. (The first two are parodies of Real Life quiz shows People Are Funny and Truth or Consequences.)
- Game Show Host: They're your typical smarmy pricks. The host of "Double Down or Drop Dead?" stops helping Joe and gives him a hard question after Joe admits that he wasn't really in the army, he was an air raid warden. (Afterwards a bemused Alice asks why Joe didn't tell the host that he was in the Navy.)
- The Joy of X: This series probably originated the "So You Want..." standard title.
- Mathematician's Answer:Host: If half of the married people who get divorced are men, the other half are?"
Joe: Single. - Phone-in Game Shows: The last game show is "The Sneezing Man" in which listeners have to guess who is sneezing. The show calls Joe's house at the exact moment that Alice is on the phone with her mother. Fortunately for Joe the game show studio is right down the street so he's able to dash over there himself and answer the question in person.
- Pie in the Face: Joe has to suffer this on a game show when Alice gets a question wrong.
- Sadistic Game Show: On "Aren't People Ridiculous?", Joe has to stick his head through a hole in a wall, and suffer some sort of punishment if Alice gets a question wrong. She gets them all wrong, so he gets punched in the face, hit with a pie, and dunked with a tub of water.
- Speaking Simlish: When Alice's mother calls on the phone, the mother's half of the conversation is high-pitched gibberish.
- Studio Audience: They roar with laughter when Joe gets punched in the face or hit with a pie for a game show. (Oddly, the host is not Narrating the Obvious for his radio listeners.)
- Twisted Echo Cut: The opening sequence has Joe punching buttons on a radio, with each station transitioning to the next in comical cuts. The first cut goes like this: a radio commercial says "Suffering from liver bile? Do you realize that you have two pints of digestive juices running through your"—cut—"living room, dining room, and bedroom suite."
- Undesirable Prize: Among the prizes Joe almost wins on "The Sneezing Man" are "an over-aged destroyer", a steam locomotive, Schenectady New York, ten thousand gallons of swimming-pool water, and a gold-plated elevator shaft.
