Lyle Talbot played a "mature" Chick in the Columbia Pictures serial.

Have you ever been watching your favorite sitcom/drama and a baby's introduced in one of the later season finales (Hello, Family Ties, Growing Pains and Cosby Show.)? Then, in the next season's premiere the just-born infant is suddenly five years old and talking?

It's not a new concept folks. And Chick Carter, Boy Detective is just another glaring example.

Though not a gurgling infant when he was introduced and given his own Mutual radio show in 1943, Chick Carter was written as the precocious son of Nick Carter, a popular '30s pulp magazine sleuth. No one's quite sure why Nick wasn't the one being adapted from print to radio (especially since Chick was rarely mentioned in the pulps), but all the same, Chick's radio series charted his adventures as a pre-teen sleuth who learned everything he knew from his dad.

That worked great. In fact, there was even a popular Chick Carter Club (aka Chick Carter Inner Circle), which produced a club kit with a promo insert of The Shadow, a promo booklet, a club folder and kit card, and a set of 24 Inner Circle stickers before the show was canceled in 1945.

But wouldn't you know it... just like the strange and unexplained TV phenomenon of demanding audience to suspend their disbelief and accept that the baby the series star delivered with comic hijinks in the finale is now the cutely quipping moppet in the new year... Columbia Pictures produced a 15-chapter serial just one year after the radio show's cancellation, featuring a fully grown Chick played by 40-something veteran actor Lyle Talbot!

We ask you: when has this ever been a good idea? And why not keep Nick Carter if the Chick Carter of silver screen fame would be middle-aged anyway? Can you think of other instances in which rapid age progression of characters either enhanced or destroyed your favorite comic, cartoon or pop culture premise? You decide.