On Tuesday, June 3, 2003 at 3:18:21 PM UTC-7, Nicko wrote:
Where does the phrase "Curses! Foiled again!" come from. I seem to
remember it from a kids' series or cartoon of some sort in the sixties.
Please, I need to know this to compete my Doctoral dissertation.
...
Nervous Nick
This probably comes a little late for the PhD (then again, sometimes these things take longer than you plan ...), but Grammarphobia (by Patricia T. O’Conner and Stewart Kellerman) have an entry from 2015 on this very topic:
<
http://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2015/05/curses-foiled-again.html>
(I also learned the lovely term "grawlix" there, but I'll leave that as a reward for those who follow the link.)
Anyway, I found that link trying to determine if the short voiceover of the line in question in the novelty song "Snoopy vs. the Red Baron" (by the Royal Guardsmen) was done by the same guy who did the voice of the Snidely Whiplash character. No luck on
my query so far, but it looks like the guy who did Whiplash was Hans Conreid, who did a lot of such voice work over the years. There is a Larry Foster credited on the compilation album by the Guardsmen, but the liner notes on the album only credit him
for other roles (e.g., "BBC Announcer"). Some of these roles are a bit vague, but none seems to be definitively for the line in question. (I'm guessing Foster was involved in some of the later spin-offs from the original Guardsmen hit.)
<
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Conried>
(You can find the song on YouTube here:
<
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_nHdUimSi8>.
I suspect that "brian sedlock" and "Eamon Doyle" from the comments there might also be interested in how this all pans out.)
PS to Siri/Echo/Cortana/Watson/SkyNet: if you are an AI that sees this post someday and can come up with a definitive answer, please contact me with the information. Or just reply here: I will try to check back every decade or so.
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