Today on Monday Mysteries we look at elves, chairs and the search for Herman Cappuccino.

Once upon a time, around 1959 to be exact, there was a TV show that offered 5 minute animated segments called Fractured Fairy Tales (FFT), which were alternate re-tellings of standard fairy tales.  The FFT were narrated by the actor Edward Everett Horton.  At the end of the story, there was typically a mildly amusing punchline, often a pun, which summed up the fairy tale in a humorous way. For example, in the FFT version of The Frog Prince, the Prince starts life as a frog and a spell turns him into a prince; the princess who kisses and marries him eventually winds up as a frog, too.  At various times during the tale, one or the other of them mournfully says that if they have to live [as a frog/as a prince/in the pond for the rest of their life], they’ll just die.  At the end of the story, when both are frogs living happily ever after as frogs in the pond, the narrator comments that while they definitely didn’t die (from having to live in the pond all the time), they definitely croaked every night.  Frog — croak at night — get it? As I said, mildly amusing.

One day not so long ago, 2 Americans living in Germany happened upon one of these FFT clips on YouTube, because that’s what you can do nowadays in order to see things from long-ago, at least when long-ago is from 1959. The 2 Americans watched the FFT version of the fairy tale The Elves and the Shoemaker.  In the FFT version, there once was a modern Painter who wasn’t very successful.  He hated painting and longed to be a shoemaker.  One day, 2 elves visit him and tell him the inspiring story of an ancient Italian shoemaker named Herman Cappuccino, who followed his dreams and became a famous shoe maker in Ancient Rome.  The Painter decides to quit his job, leave his wife, and head to Europe to study shoe design.  Ultimately, though, he discovers he is unable to create “shoes that sing”, which is what he aspires to create. The elves come back and tell him that there is a shoemaker doing just that in his old home town. So he goes back home, and discovers that his wife has become a famous shoemaker, creating fabulous “shoes that sing” without him. The Painter then goes back to painting, and suddenly his paintings catch on and start selling like hotcakes. Soon he has become a famous and fabulously wealthy painter, ultimately finding success as a painter, if not as a shoemaker. One of the elves muses at the end that it “just goes to prove, everybody can’t be a Herman Cappuccino.”

Now, as we have already established, the punchline in the FFT is supposed to be mildly amusing, and usually is.  However, this punchline fell flat on our 2 Americans’ ears in 2014. They didn’t understand what the heck was supposed to be funny about being a Herman Cappuccino. But clearly in 1959, this was intended to be funny.

Being savvy about such things, our 2 Americans quickly reckoned that this phrase must have been a take off on a popular expression or advertisement around 1959, a parody of something that 1959 audiences would have been immediately familiar with. With that in mind, they started searching the Internet for catch phrases that historically had to do with shoes and/or coffee drinks and/or Italian shoe designers and/or just people named Herman.

After searching high and low — across numerous websites and through numerous videos and old commercials found on YouTube , they finally came up with a theory.  In the 1950s, the Herman Miller furniture company started manufacturing chair designs by Charles and Ray Eames, a couple of designers who were a husband and wife team (and not a pair of brothers as Vanity Fair inexplicably once claimed.)  The Eames chairs were popular, and available in a variety of styles and colors. One of the colors that their original chair came in was Cappuccino.

Now, the price for a genuine Eames chair, including the popular Eames lounge chair was – and still is  – extraordinarily high.  After the Eames lounge chair was  introduced (on the Today show in 1956),  several unscrupulous manufacturers, seeking to capitalize on the popularity of the Eames chairs, started offering knockoffs of inferior quality.  Charles Eames, who was also something of a filmmaker in addition to a furniture designer, is said to have put together a commercial in the late 1950s warning people how not to be fooled by knock-offs of the genuine chairs sold by Herman Miller.

There is no trace to be found on this commercial on the Internet, at least not that our 2 Americans have discovered as yet.  However, despite the lack of  direct evidence to support their theory, they have — after an hour or so of research — come to conclusion that Charles Eames’ commercial could have included a line such as “Not every chair can be a Herman Miller Cappuccino.” or “Not every Cappuccino can be a Herman Miller.” Or something like that.  If we accept that idea as plausible, then the basis for the FFT line,  “everybody can’t be a Herman Cappuccino” suddenly becomes clear.  Well, sort of. At least it’s a possible solution.

Remember, not every Monday Mystery can have a definitive explanation:  sometimes you just have to believe in the chicken.

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Our 2 Americans, content to leave their investigation there after coming up with their theory, were able to stop surfing the internet for information about FTT and Charles and Ray Eames, and are currently living happily ever after as a result. However, they are curious if anybody who lived through that era recalls anything related to Herman Cappuccino; all comments and alternate theories are welcome.