I once heard Foghorn Leghorn (ala Bugs Bunny) was modeled after someone named Gen. Klaghorn, IIRC? Apparently, this man spoke like that…or his character did. What is the name of this person, and who is he? Could he have been a radio personality, perhaps? - Jinx
On Fred Allen’s old radio show, he had a character named Senator Claghorne, who was the quintessential folksy, good ol’ boy politician.
Many of the cartoon chicken’s speech patterns and mannerisms were based on Fred Allen’s character.
Thank you, uh, thanks son, that is! 
You know, Jinx, you ask a lot of questions that you could easily answer with Google or (more specifically) with Wikipedia with only a few seconds work, less time than it takes you to ask the question on the SDMB. When I Google on “Wikipedia” and “Foghorn Leghorn”, the first item that comes up answers this question. Wouldn’t it be better to answer the question that way rather than slowing down the SDMB?
He shared an interesting question with us. One that I wouldn’t have thought to ask, but one whose answer I found interesting. Thanks for posting it here Jinx.
No… if he didn’t ask the question I would never known about the origin of the character. If this board was limited to things we couldn’t Google or Wiki it would be faster, but much less interesting.
I liked the question, enjoyed the answer. If we all, say, read general questions and immediately went to Winkopedia, where’s the fun? Facts are facts, but reading the SDMB’s answers shine a new light on the subject. Any subject. A lot of light.
I too liked the question and the subject matter.
I now know something that I didn’t before - even better that it’s about one of my favorite cartoon characters. Had Jinx not asked, I still would not have known and most likely would never had thought to research it on my own.
Thank you, Jinx.
From a post by TubaDiva in January:
> The resources available to this board are finite. It does seem sometimes
> (especially at peak times, when everybody and his brother are calling for
> pages), it seems those resources are stretched beyond limits. This means that
> at peak times the board reacts to overdemand by thrashing around and
> resetting. The outcome from this is that some requests for pages go through
> lickety-split (on the good side of the reset, when there’s a lot of bandwidth
> available), some go through very slowly (at various points in the process,
> usually getting slower as the demand builds), and some don’t go through at all
> (got dropped by the server while it was resetting).
The SDMB doesn’t have an infinite amount of bandwidth. Indeed, at times it is very slow. When a resource is scarce, what one has to do is conserve it. One way to conserve bandwidth is to not ask questions that one can easily be answered with just a few seconds of Googling. Jinx is not a newbie. He’s been on the SDMB for six and a half years and has over four and a half thousand posts. This is enough time to learn how to use Google. I am requesting the decision of the moderators on this.
According to Mel Blanc’s autobiography That’s not All Folks! both characters developed independently. According to Mel the character of Senator Claghorn was based on a Texas rancher that gave Kenny Delmar a lift while he was hitch-hiking. Foghorn Leghorn was based on a character that Mel Blanc saw on a Vaudeville show at San Francisco’s Pantages Theater in 1928. While Senator Claghorn was broadcast first, Mel suggested that due to the lead-time in animation (and the fact that voices are recorded first with the drawing coming later) both characters were born at roughly the same time.
[Hijack of a Hijack]
How much bandwidth is consumed by people complaining about limited bandwidth, and the resulting messages from people that say “it was a good question”? At least 75% of the stuff in GQ can be easily handled with Google. Most of the stuff in CS could be discussed on IMDB, or Television without Pity, or various food related message boards. The Pit is OK, but I’ve seen better flaming elsewhere; maybe most of the Pit should be moved off-board. Pretty soon, half of the message board is gone. Then we can ignore the other half.[/Hijack of a Hijack]
“I-I-I know what you’re gonna say son. When two halves is gone there’s nuthin’ left - and you’re right. It’s a little ol’ worm who wasn’t there. Two nuthins is nuthin’. That’s mathematics son. You can argue with me but you can’t argue with figures. Two half nuthins is a whole nuthin’.”
I call BS. If you read the original WB scripts, they are so similar to General Claghorne that no coincidence can even be considered,
Amen
Moderator intervenes:
Let’s get this focused solely on Foghorn Leghorn, Senator Claghorn, and/or Steve Allen.
The issue of whether it’s OK to ask questions that are “easily answered” by a quick look-up is broader, and belongs in the About This Message Board forum. Moderators from GQ forum, for instance, would be interested as well. I will take it up for Moderator discussion, but if someone wants to open a thread in ATMB, that would be fine.
that’s Senator, ah say that’s Senator son. Boy’s about sharp as a bowling ball.
Not everything we do is always pure information; sometimes there’s some fun mixed in.
As in this case.
This is not a bad thing.
I hope we will always have an interesting mixture of threads in all our forum areas. You never know what enlightens someone else, what makes someone else smile, what they may bring to a discussion. Again, none of this is a bad thing.
Your consideration of the hamsters is duly noted, Wendell. (We are still discussing the situation.)