In the 1950s, American culture suddenly blew up. Cinemascope doubled the size of movie screens, televisions burst into living rooms everywhere, comic books were a four-colored geyser drowning the newsstand under hundreds of titles, rock ‘n’ roll came screaming out of nowhere to own the airwaves, and Hollywood went crazy for epics: Biblical epics, Western epics, musical epics. What motion pictures needed was a plus-sized director who could stand up to this mushroom cloud of pop culture; what they got was animator-turned-gagman Frank Tashlin.