Jim Manago
The Vanished World of Robert Youngson examines the life of the forgotten producer and writer who got his start making short subject films. His later features revived audience and critical interest in the 1920s silent film comedians, particularly Laurel and Hardy. These compilations celebrate the world he knew as a child with a nostalgic yearning for a bygone era. Nonetheless, there is an inescapable sadness, particularly at the close of each film, as his narrator expresses how “the laugh makers and thrill makers… have vanished, leaving behind no successors but only moving shadows.” Besides candid memories from his wife Jeanne, this study incorporates the only known print interview that Bob gave with a young Leonard Maltin just three years before his death in 1974 at the age of 56. Film historian Jim Manago has authored biographies of Shirley Booth, Kay Aldridge, Gale Gordon, Huntz Hall and Leo Gorcey. He hopes to bring to readers the first biography of Jonathan Harris, best known as Dr. Smith on Lost in Space.
