My sixth-grade elementary school teacher was fond of returning from a diversion with the phrase, “Meanwhile, back at the farm…”. I’ve since noticed a lot of other people using the phrase, usually for the same purpose. Does it have a known origin?
I’ve always heard it as “meanwhile, back at the ranch” which I learned from Lemony Snicket but this thread suggests it may have come from silent movies or a Zane Grey novel.
Come to think of it, I’ve heard both variants. (And Google gives plenty of hits for both.) Thanks for the link to the earlier thread.
Old MacDonald
What, the children’s song? The version I learned doesn’t have this phrase.
When I was a kid in grade school in the 50s, there were a series of jokes (dirty by childhood standards of the day) that started, “Meanwhile back at the ranch, Tonto not realizing that the Lone Ranger was disguised as …”
I must have heard dozens of them, but the only one I can recall right now is
“… a pool table, racked his balls.”
They were all of about that level of humor. We of course thought they were terribly funny and naughty.
I strongly suspect that, back in the days of the William S. Hart silent western films, there was at least once a dialog panel between scenes that said “Meanwhile, back at the ranch . . .” in order to introduce a contemporaneous scene change. “Meanwhile” was a word that was repeated with enormous frequency in that medium, and in the corner of comic book panels to show that a newly revealed event was taking place at the same time as one just shown.
Intensified by the common feature of silent pictures, several members of the audience would read the dialog and scene-setting panels out loud, for the benefit of the large number of illiterate people in the audience. So when such a transition panel appeared on the screen, many audience members would shout out “Meanwhile, back at the ranch . . .”.
There’s also that common phrase from the old “Superfriends” cartoon “Meanwhile at the Hall of Justice” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1xtpsY0_LI
“Not knowing the Lone Ranger had disguised himself as a door, turned his knob.”
Meanwhile back at the ranch, tension mounts and rides away.
Meanwhile back at ranch, all the boys were jumping for Joy! And when Joy left the boys were sad.
Meanwhile, back at the outhouse, things were piling up. 
Meanwhile, back the oasis, where the Arabs were eating their dates…
Meanwhile back at the ranch, everyone was feeling a little gay. So he left.
There’s a novelty song from the 50s called Stranded In The Jungle that used a variation on the phrase.
I think it came from the plethora of cliché westerns and serials, where the “contemporaneous scene change” would show us what was happening back at… the ranch. To my mind, the “ranch” was already cliché from the 60’s (so from much earlier) while any variation of “meanwhile back at the…” was a take-off of the phrase from bad westerns.
I sort of imagine the phrase with the deadpan / mock serious announcer voice of the Rocky and Bullwinkle Show’s narrator.
nm
William Conrad, doing some of his best voice work.
A google ngram search shows that the phrase appears, extremely abruptly, in 1956.
Looking for the actual first usage is foiled by Google’s frustrating habit of dating magazines by the first issue in the volume that is being scanned, which may be years earlier than the issue with the actual hit.
However, the earliest date I can pin down is April 2, 1956 because of an ad in Life magazine. The ad is for GM’s OK used cars, so it undoubtedly was a national ad. It starts:
The usage skyrockets from there. Have to salute the ad agency for one of the great unsung advertising campaigns of all time. We may not be able to pin down the original usage but I don’t think there’s any question what put it into the common language.
Fascinating stuff, Exapno Mapcase! Thanks!