Modern (Stone Age) Family

This, kids, is how cave people invented the prime time cartoon, and many of the tropes that go with it.



The Flintstones, "Flintstone Hillbillies"
OB:  January 16, 1964, 7:30 p.m. EST, ABC
I was two days old when this episode first aired.

The Flintstones was filmed in color beginning with the very first episode, and broadcast that way beginning in season three...because what better way to stick it to CBS than to say, "Shoot, we here at ABC have been broadcasting in color since the stone age, unlike certain other networks."





Fans of The Simpsons know it as the "couch gag." It's the moment in that show's opening when the entire family rushes into the house at once, presumably to take their places on the couch in front of the TV, but something always comes up before that last step.  And one week, the whole family stopped in their tracks to see Fred, Wilma and Pebbles Flintstone already sitting on their couch, watching their TV.  Fred just looks at Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa and Maggie, and shrugs.

That Simpsons couch gag is a nice tribute, because the Flintstones, and The Flintstones, really were there first.  The original Flintstones opening even had Fred rushing home from work, jumping into his easy chair and turning on his TV.  (That's probably where The Simpsons got the idea in the first place.) In so many ways, some intentional, some eerie, it appears the whole civilization of Springfield was built atop the ruins of the ancient civilization of Bedrock.  And that goes for Quahog, Stoolbend, South Park and any other modern day animated TV town you could mention.  (What can I say, Bedrock was huge...despite having a population of only 2,500 according to the first season opening credits.)



It all began during a period of transition, from "the Golden Age of Animation" to its so-called Dark Age. The (first) age of richly drawn work and Disney princesses was coming to an end; Bugs Bunny's legendary "What's Opera, Doc?" was a bug, not a feature, and Disney's "Sleeping Beauty" had actually bombed in theaters.  There were two things going on at once that changed the way cartoons were drawn and marketed: the Hollywood studio system was in its death throes (and with it, the animated short as a common sight in theaters and drive-ins), and television was showing itself to have an insatiable appetite for quickly drawn, rushed to the airwaves animation.  No longer did the norm involve taking two years for a Disney classic; you pretty much had to feed the beast and he was hungry, like, right now.


William Hanna and Joseph Barbera were queried by Screen Gems executives about a very simple idea: Hanna-Barbera had already produced syndicated cartoon series for television (The Ruff 'N' Reddy Show, Huckleberry Hound), but those were aimed at mostly children.  So why not an animated series mostly for adults...like they did in the movies?  Sure enough, anyone who's ever seen a Bugs Bunny cartoon knows clearly it had as much adult humor as could make it past the censors, as did the Tom and Jerry shorts Hanna-Barbera had done for MGM, since  the cartoon shorts often preceded both children's and adult movies alike.  (Plus they worked with Tex Avery, who seemed to enjoy screwing around with the censors as much as making cartoons of wolves with their eyeballs popping out.)

The conferences narrowed down what everyone wanted: a half hour sitcom, first of all, in prime time.  They tossed around a number of ideas: the characters might be in ancient Rome, for instance (an idea H-B would try in 1972 with The Roman Holidays), or they might've been hillbillies.  The "Eureka!" moment came when Hanna-Barbera storyboard editor Don Gordon suggested the characters all be cave people, and work with appliances, vehicles, etc. that were funny pre-historic versions of their modern-day counterparts. Gordon drew the first sketches, then they went to Ed Benedict, who had created a universe of cave people in the West for the 1955 Tex Avery MGM short, "The First Bad Man." Benedict drew on that inspiration as he developed who we would later know as Fred, Wilma, Barney and Betty.



Selling the idea wasn't easy.  Joseph Barbera remembers going to numerous ad agencies and companies.  He remembers the entire headquarters staff of Bristol Myers piling into a conference room to hear his 90 minute pitch (about Fred and Barney building a swimming pool), then later coming back for a command performance before the CEO.  "...There were two agencies there, and neither one was going to let the other one know they were enjoying it," Joseph Barbera later recalled.  "But I pitched it for eight straight weeks and nobody bought it." On what Barbera later claimed was going to be his last try before he'd decided to give up, he made that pitch to ABC...and they bought it in the room.  At the time, ABC was a third place network with series aimed at various parts of the young demographic (77 Sunset Strip, Leave It to Beaver), basically the Fox of their day.  And they were willing to take a chance on something that daring and new.

A brief pilot, "The Flagstones," was made for potential sponsors.  However, the similarity in name to the Flagston family featured in the newspaper comic strip "Hi and Lois," resulted in a change to The Flintstones.



At first glance, in those early days, the bombastic but loving husband Fred, the wisecracking, level headed Wilma, and their neighbors, Betty and Barney (plus Fred's and Barney's membership in a lodge), seemed to all bear more than a passing resemblance to another classic TV foursome...the cast of The Honeymooners. Hanna and Barbera were actually split over whether that show inspired the characters, but both acknowledged being big fans of it.  Jackie Gleason himself was said to have considered a lawsuit, and was even told by his lawyers it would be open and shut, but decided he didn't want the publicity of being known as "the man who killed Fred Flintstone."



Veteran character actor Alan Reed was cast as Fred Flintstone, and even looked a bit like him.  Reed had been in numerous films such as "The Postman Always Rings Twice" and "The Desperate Hours," radio programs like Duffy's Tavern and The Life of Riley, and TV shows like The Donna Reed Show.  When the script called for Fred to yell "Yahoo!" it was Reed who improvised the now-iconic "Yabba-Dabba-Doo!" in the audio booth.  It was based on the phrase "A little dab'll do ya!" that his mother said a lot; that was also a slogan and jingle for Brylcreem.  The greatest voice man of all time, Mel Blanc, added Barney Rubble to his thousand voices; Blanc was replaced briefly in 1961 as he recovered from a near-fatal car crash.  Rounding out the cast were character actress Jean Vanderpyl as Wilma and Bea Benederet (The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show, Petticoat Junction) as Betty, then for the last two seasons by Gerry Johnson.

Then Hanna-Barbera landed two sponsors, one of which was Miles Laboratories, makers of Alka-Seltzer and One-a-Day Vitamins.  And when I say this was an adult series, that means at least one adult sponsor...


...R.J. Reynolds, makers of Winston cigarettes.


To be fair, this was a controversial move at the time; we weren't that far gone in those days. Winston ultimately did drop their sponsorship in 1963, to be replaced by the more family-friendly Welch's jellies and juices and Skippy peanut butter.


The series premiered in September 1960 to big ratings, and a surprisingly bad, very rough review from Variety.  Their critic called it a "pen and ink disaster" and portrayed Fred as an unlikable bully.  It also wrongly predicted the show would be cancelled quickly and forgotten.

The show got decent, respectable ratings, finishing the 1960-61 season as the 18th most watched show on television.  But it also started a huge marketing empire: comic books, Golden Books story books, toys.  At one point Welch's jelly came in jars that could double as drinking glasses with character likenesses painted onto them, and a whole generation of us had Fred, Barney and the gang populating our kitchen cabinets.

The 1961-62 season premiere had Fred deciding he wanted to be a songwriter, and getting help from "Stoney Carmichael," actually voiced by none other than songwriting legend Hoagy Carmichael.  To be sure, it wasn't the first time a celebrity likeness appeared in a cartoon.  A 1920s "Felix the Cat" cartoon featured images of Charlie Chaplin and other stars of the day.  Frank Sinatra's and Bing Crosby's actual voices could be heard singing in some cartoon shorts, and the cast of The Jack Benny Program even "appeared" as mice once in a Warner Brothers short.



What this did do, however, was pioneer the idea of "guest voices," celebrities who would voice their animated selves alongside series regulars.  Sure enough, before the end of the series, we'd hear from "Stony Curtis,""Ann-Margrock,""Jimmy Darrock" and the "Beau Brummelstones," actually voiced by Tony Curtis, Ann-Margret, James Darren and the Beau Brummels.  In one episode, Elizabeth Montgomery and Dick York even voiced animated versions of their Bewitched characters, Samantha and Darren Stevens. (According to York, they each got a TV set in lieu of payment.)  This, of course, would pave the way for the incredibly stellar list of guest stars who later populated The Simpsons over the years.

There are plenty of other contemporary TV parodies as well, without the actual stars' voices.  There's a variety show called "The Hollyrock Palace" (based on ABC's real variety show, The Hollywood Palace),   and in a sendup of Bonanza, they meet the men of the Cartrock family.  The episode that introduced Bamm-Bamm included a Perry Mason spoof, with an attorney named Bronto Berger representing the Rubbles and facing down the formidable Perry Masonry (who always defeats Berger in court) in a custody hearing.


By the time I was born, the show had evolved somewhat.  In 1962 the show dropped its Simpsons-inspiring open and instrumental theme, with Fred rushing home to the TV, in favor of the more iconic trip to and from the drive-in, and added the now familiar "Meet the Flintstones" theme with full lyrics.  (That theme debuted on a record album in 1961, and originally even had extra lyrics mentioning Dino and the Rubbles.)



Fred and Wilma made TV history as being among the few TV couples to be seen in bed together, the very first in animated TV.  The previously childless Flintstones gave birth to Pebbles in February 1963; the following October, the Rubbles would adopt Bamm-Bamm.  (In a very touching scene, the Rubbles had also wished upon a star for a child because they couldn't have any of their own.  This made the show the first animated series to ever address infertility.)  And the TV season in which I was born, kicked off with that memorable season premiere featuring "Ann-Margrock."

The week I was born, we get a possible glimpse at what the show almost became: a show about hillbillies.



It starts with a cold open, showing the Flintstones on a car trip crossing over from Tennestone, the "Wet State," to Arkanstone, the "Dry State." (The cold opens were usually scenes that were part of the plot, but wouldn't be seen in the actual episode since...well, we just saw it.)



It begins, strikingly enough, with a funeral for Zeke Flintstone, who fell out of a tree to his death at the age of 102 and was believed to be the last of the Flintstones.  (You just don't see that many funerals in a medium whose characters are known to fall off cliffs and suffer a big bump on the head and a disgusted look...and sometimes, a brief accordion shape.)  That's very sad news for the Hatrocks, the other half of a 90 year old feud, now distraught because they no longer had anyone to shoot at.  They even suggested Zeke did it on purpose to deprive them of "the joy of shootin' at a Flintstone," and can't even take comfort in hunting wild animals because "Bears don't holler like a Flintstone when they're hit."

But they do take comfort in Granny's words, that the sheriff will find the rightful heirs of the Flintstone estate, San Cemente.  Sure enough we see the sheriff dictating a letter to his secretary, who promptly chisels it and sends it via airmail.



Of course, the airmail gag is just one of the "animal inventions" featured in this episode, with others including a monkey running a soft drink machine and two elephants functioning as gas pumps...one of whom is named "Ethel." (But no dinosaurs are present at the gas station, perhaps so people won't assume this is a product placement for Sinclair gasoline.)   These were a running feature on the show, the animals often complaining about their jobs as the airmail bird and soft drink machine monkey do.

Wilma calls Fred at work (prompting his dino-crane to complain about wives calling husbands at work, and telling the dino-crane next to him "I'm glad we work together!").  Fred decides to leave immediately with the family and the Rubbles, because "The sooner we leave, the sooner I get what's coming to me."

The Case of the Tried and True Formula

...or how you can set your watch by a formulaic plot that still manages to surprise you



Perry Mason, "The Case of the Capering Camera"
OB: January 16, 1964, 9:00 p.m. EST, CBS
I was two days old when this episode originally aired.

For years, as I covered criminal trials in Etowah County, Alabama, I was privileged to see a man named James Hedgspeth, the district attorney, deliver some very convincing, emotional opening statements and closing arguments.  And in many of them he told what I call the "Perry Mason story." He told the jury how he grew up watching Perry Mason, sometimes even mentioning its Saturday night time slot.  And he explained how it inspired a career in law, bringing him before them that day.  You couldn't help but be touched by that story.

It's a testimony to the power of fine television that a series about a defense lawyer; in which constantly-losing district attorney Hamilton Burger is a supporting character, could inspire a man to someday become a real-life D.A. (with a much, much better track record than Burger's).  And Mr. Hedgspeth wasn't the only one: during her Senate confirmation hearings, Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor mentioned that the show influenced her own decision to go into law.

But for decades, that was pretty much it for legal shows. They were almost always about defense attorneys. It seems the idea of a show centered around a prosecutor skipped several decades, between old time radio's Mr. District Attorney and TV's Law & Order and JAG. That allowed Perry, The Defenders, Arrest and Trial, Judd for the Defense and Owen Marshall, Counselor at Law to rule the courtrooms of the airwaves.  (Perry Mason creator Erle Stanley Gardner himself once tried unsuccessfully to sell a pilot in 1955, called The D.A.  It would've starred Wesley Hau, himself a future Mason regular.)

I have no idea why prosecutors got such short shrift on TV in the early going.  Maybe executives felt the audience would be quicker to root for an underdog.  Maybe no one had figured out how to make preparing a case for trial as fascinating as Jack Webb had done for standard police evidence-gathering on Dragnet. Maybe it was an outgrowth of the film noir era, which also gave us early TV shows like Mr. Lucky, Peter Gunn, and Darren McGavin's original version of Mike Hammer.  Or perhaps the public's original TV view of a would-be "prosecutor"--Senator Joseph McCarthy in his televised early 1950s hearings--just left a really bad taste in everyone's mouths.



Perry Mason and its title character were the brainchildren of writer Erle Stanley Gardner.  Gardner was kicked out of law school after one term when his penchant for boxing interfered with his studies.  So he taught himself and was admitted to the bar in 1911.  But he was bored with the day to day activities of his practice, only getting excited about trials and trial strategies, so he started writing stories for pulp magazines. His most famous character, Perry Mason, began appearing first in short stories, then in entire pulp novels.

Perry also found his way to the big screen in the 1930s; in the 1940s, then he became the title character in a daytime soap on radio.  CBS wanted that series to make the switch to television in the same five day a week format, but Gardner said no. He wanted the TV Mason to focus on prime time detective work and not soap plots.  So CBS changed all the names of the characters, and adapted the radio show into a daytime drama known on TV as The Edge of Night.



Gardner was never happy with the movies (especially; he considered them embarrassing) or the radio show, so he wanted, and got, creative control when CBS outbid NBC for the rights to show the highly successful defense attorney in prime time.  That meant he had to approve every script and approved casting for series regulars.



When the prime time Perry was being cast, it's said that Raymond Burr walked into the room, and Gardner declared, "That's him!  That's the guy!" That would've been quite a surprise to the veteran actor, who had actually shown up to audition for the part of forlorn D.A. Hamilton Burger.  Prior to his best known, Emmy-winning role, Burr had appeared frequently in radio, narrated and appeared in the first "Godzilla" movie, and played bad guys, most notably in Alfred Hitchcock's "Rear Window." Among the people he beat out: Fred MacMurray (talks apparently collapsed) and one of Perry Mason's other regulars, William Hopper.



The memorably melodramatic opening theme music starts off with a few notes that suggest distant sirens. Then, the full orchestra joins in for some heavier music that suggests the full weight of the justice system bearing down on a defendant and his attorney, Perry Mason.  The credits during the 1963-64 season actually rotate between three similar sets shot from different camera angles.

The TV Perry Mason locked quickly into a formula inspired by the novels: Perry would represent an almost hopeless-seeming, but innocent client in a murder trial, usually someone from the Mad Men upper or upper middle class.  (The episodes I saw often had Perry almost falling ass-backwards into these cases, usually because he handled a will for someone or something like that.)  The client is often a victim of circumstances, and sometimes a victim of their own embarrassing panic, bad behavior, bad decisions or abject stupidity. But the police are immovably convinced they have the right man/woman, and the "losingest" (yes, I know that's not a word) D.A. in the history of television or literature, acts really smug about how this case is going to turn out and poor ol' Perry can't do anything about it.


I've never seen such a supremely confident perennial loser in all of TV history.  Hamilton Burger's very name suggests Perry always "ground him up like..." that in the courtroom.  Burger is the Barney Fife of serious drama. In his novels, Gardner modeled him after a D.A. he really, really didn't like.  Having said all of that...it's obvious from their interactions the two really respect each other, and on some rare occasions, there's even admiration.  When Burger was once accused of murder himself...naturally, he called Mason.

There's a quick, head-spinning montage near the end in which Perry questions all of the other possible suspects in the case, following a twisted path along the way, sometimes with no clean hands, that lead to the person who did it.  This is key in how the same formula most weeks can still be fresh and still keep an audience from correctly guessing "whodunit." It also shows something of an influence from the film noir genre, which thrived on nothing appearing as it seemed and everyone having a secret.  And at some point, his private investigator, Paul Drake, will pop into the courtroom to share some game-changing information with Perry, usually just before the big courtroom reveal.



Ultimately, as much as the series prided itself on educating us in legal terms and giving us a guided tour of the pre-grand jury justice system, the formula relies on being resolved in a very unlikely way: Perry gets the true guilty party, who's always in the courtroom, to finally break down and sing, either on the stand or sometimes even yelling out from the gallery.  (Or he meets them at the crime scene for one of those classic "I gathered you here today..." scenes.)  Those witnesses very rarely invoke the Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination for some reason (and anyone who watched the McCarthy hearings knew about the Fifth Amendment), but even more bizarrely, why are they in the room in the first place?  I always believed they could be kept out while other witnesses were testifying, if one side invokes that rule.  And as much as it appears it would make life easier for them at times, Mason and Burger always act like it never occurred to them.



Also, these almost always happen in the evidence/preliminary hearings, and never in front of a jury.  That means many of these cases never make it as far as the grand jury.  It makes some of Perry's antics seem more reasonable, since a  lot more questions can be raised in earlier hearings than in front of a jury.  But it also makes Burger's constantly repeated line, "Your honor, I object!  Mr. Mason is clearly on a fishing expedition!" almost pointless since he's usually allowed to be on one in a preliminary hearing.  (Plus the main reason for all of this: CBS and Paisano Productions were able to save a little money by not hiring 12-14 or so extras, including alternate jurors.)

We don't really know much about Perry.  We often hear of him buying drinks for ladies but even that's to get information for a client.  It's implied his longtime secretary, Della Street, kind of has a thing for him and perhaps they have an affair between hearings and depositions.  Then again probably not, when would they have the time?  We do see them occasionally go dancing together, much like Ben Casey did with fellow doctor Maggie Graham.  (Erle Stanley Gardner actually married his own legal secretary who was the basis for the Della Street character.)  We know he loves a good steak. Otherwise, as far as we know, Perry's girlfriend is criminal law and his hobby is being always right about everything.  This may have been an outgrowth of what was happening off the screen: Burr and the rest of the cast put in long days and very few off-days, not giving Burr the time he desired for some of his real-life interests like philanthropy and growing flowers.



We actually get to know a lot more about Mason's preferred private investigator, Paul Drake, than we do about Perry; Paul loves food, loves the ladies, loves convertibles.  And he's not big on museums; when Della once asked him what he knew about art, he replied, "I don't even know what I like!" Paul Drake may very well have the most fun part of the entire show, definitely the most dangerous.  His posing as a naive "rock hound" looking for gold in one episode, just about cracked me up. William Hopper (son of famed Hollywood columnist Hedda Hopper) played Paul Drake.  I wished Hopper had lived long enough to be in a 1970s cop or private eye show, I could just see him chasing after someone in a '73 Mercury Marquis.  In addition to William Talman's portrayal of Burger, police Lt. Tragg was played by Ray Collins, who, like Burger, hated dealing with Mason and always seemed happier to beat Mason than to catch an actual, guilty suspect.

In addition to the most feared defense attorney and the most seemingly inept D. A. in television, we also got to meet every week, Mason's executive secretary, Della Street, played by the lovely Barbara Hale. She's the only other regular besides Burr to win an Emmy for the show.

The mostly reliable (at least by the writers) formula worked well for about five years; fans complained in season six that the scripts were starting to look tired, somewhat lame.  So in season seven (1963-64, the year I was born), something happened--maybe new writers, positive network interference, some type of consultation, I don't know what--that improved the quality of the writing and dared the show to take new risks.  The side effect was that the scripts began to get more complicated; Burr supposedly claimed he watched the final, edited prints of some episodes and still couldn't figure out the case or the motive.

The second episode of season seven, "The Case of the Deadly Verdict," actually shows Perry losing a case, one of only two instances involving a murder case (he also once lost a civil case).  In fact, the show opens that way, with a jury delivering its verdict (that's well known character actor Olan Soule as the jury foreman; most remember him as Mayberry's choir director who had to deal with Barney Fife's really bad singing voice), and recommending the gas chamber for Perry's client (who lied her butt off to police to keep quiet about an affair that never even happened).  Perry was able to sift through the million or so shattered pieces of his (really, really stupid) client's credibility to solve the case and get her off the hook, only after she refused to cooperate and the Supreme Court upheld the verdict.

The week I was born had Perry investigating "The Case of the Capering Camera," a surprising titillating episode about nude photographs, blackmail, and how they led to murder.  It's fairly daring stuff for 1960s TV, and they don't just mention the incriminating photos in question; they're the center of the whole episode. (No, of course we don't actually see them, not even artfully obscured.)  Jonathan Latimer wrote this episode and about 40 others, and also wrote the screenplay for one of my favorite film noirs, "The Big Clock."



The story opens with a "high fashion" model, Judith Blair, posing for a set of photos in the Karl Kadar studios in Los Angeles.  (High fashion models are probably what we would now call supermodels.)  The man taking the photos isn't Karl, but his accented, low-rent cousin, Jacob.  Right in the middle of the shoot, he'll find her suddenly pointing a gun at him--his own gun, in fact.  She demands the negatives and says she's already paid out $5,000 in blackmail money.  She claims he has them in a cabinet in the darkroom, but he swears he hasn't had them in months.  Then a shot rings out; we know it's not from her gun because we see no smoke or gunfire coming out of the barrel.  (If Burger or Mason could ever subpoena the audience, this would all be over within seconds.)  She sees a sliding door open and curtains blowing from the wind; this is apparently where those shots were fired.  She runs away and we have our first commercial break.


Judith (played by Margo Moore, herself a former fashion model)  tries to appear nonchalant as she leaves Karl Kadar's studio.  She walks past a woman who's walking her dog, and the Scottie barks at her.  As a man peeks from a nearby alley, Judith gets into her Corvette and drives away.  Against the unusual beat of jazz-like music that the show used on rare occasions, the man gets into a Dodge sedan and follows her through the streets of L.A.  She eventually loses him by turning into a driveway.



Being a film noir fan, I am loving this so far.  The scene in which Judith was followed, for instance, looks like it could've very well come from a noir if it weren't for the early 1960s cars.  The city of Los Angeles, a character in so many of those films, appears to be putting in an unbilled cameo.

Meanwhile, Karl arrives and meets Irene, the lady with the Scotty, the studio.  The two arrive, and find Jacob's lifeless body lying on the floor.  No gasps, screams, "Dear God!" or anything like that.  They just stare silently for a few seconds before Irene says, "Well Karl, I suppose this means you're in charge of the blackmail department now."



Judith arrives home where her sister's in-laws are entertaining Perry Mason.  It seems he's the family attorney, and the dad, Lewis (who's in line for an ambassadorship) had wanted him to take care of something...but whatever it was, he took care of it himself.  We get to meet the family:  Lewis, his wife Katherine, a retired model herself; and little sister Penny (Karyn Kupcinet) and her husband Norman.  We'll find out she's in the pictures Judith was demanding; we'll also see Judith get a call from an answering service saying someone wanted her to know everything's been handled and she doesn't have to tell anyone anything.

Judith finally goes to see Perry at his office and tells him the whole story.  She tells him she panicked; he asks if she fired it accidentally, she adamantly denies it.



When Perry and investigator Paul Drake return to the crime scene, they have a chance to question a few people themselves, including Karl Kadar, and agency owner Harper Green.   Perry and Paul are surprised to hear the police ruling so far: suicide.  Apparently there's residue and powder burns on the corpse to back it up.

Perry talks with Paul and with Della about his ethical dilemma: does he go to the police with what he knows (and implicate his client) or does he protect her confidence and the let the police think whatever?  Meanwhile, he asks Paul to find the negatives and to find out what's in the ballistics report.



As we see Lt. Arthur Tragg (Ray Collins) and Lt.Andy Anderson (Wesley Lau) discuss the case, Tragg makes the call and finds out the ballistics indicate the gun was, indeed, used in a suicide.   (The results come back in less than a day, one of those things that only happens on TV.)  Tragg then tells Anderson to do something that sounds unconstitutional-ish: "...make Perry Mason your chief suspect." They also find the negatives of Judith's fashion shoot, including the one in which she's holding the gun.



Sure enough, the police tail Mason to the point they find, and arrest, Judith Blair.



We will come to find out, the sleazy Jacob would find models who needed money, offer them money for "calendar girl" photo shoots, then when the ladies would make more money on future jobs and/or get married, would start blackmailing them.  We also get to the courtroom scenes: Mason gets the police to admit the time of death could've been any time between 7:10 and 7:50, and the photo of Judith holding the gun (taken by Jacob just before his death) doesn't prove it's the murder weapon.  Eventually he'll get the cops and the D.A. to admit they originally felt the evidence pointed to a suicide, and that the gun they found was not registered (raising the possibility it's not even the murder weapon).  Right about here is where Paul arrives to consult Mason with the new information, as he does in almost every show.



Paul makes an appeal to Penny for any information that will help save her sister; she produces one of the blackmail letters.  Paul also visits Irene, the lady with the Scottie, who turns out to be an actress, Irene Grey filming a movie in which she plays a nun.  It turns out she also had photos taken and was blackmailed and is concerned about getting mixed up in all of this, especially since it would lead to a scandal ending her career (and even her current movie) before it began.



Perry, having been given the key to the studio by Karl, goes back to look for a second pistol to corroborate a theory.  Sure enough he finds it and it belonged to Karl.  In the courtroom he gets Della and Paul to help him re-enact the gun switch.  "Get on with your little play, we're all on pins and needles," history's losingest D.A. snappily tells Mason in court.  Mason then grills several people in quick succession (a trademark of the show and a way to keep us guessing despite the formula).  This leads us through a litany of suspects, likely and unlikely, until the moment the killer breaks down and sings on the stand...and it's Harper Green, the head of the agency, a man the police appeared to dismiss as a suspect early on and the show played down after that.  It almost always happened that way, in fact.  Oh, and he has the negatives.



This show was a "last" for four of the actors involved.  Elaine Stewart, who played Irene Grey, never acted in a role again after this episode.  She was going through a divorce when it was filmed; on New Year's Eve 1964 she'd marry the love of her life, game show producer Merrill Heatter.  In the 1970s she'd come out of retirement to hold up cards or roll dice on two of Heatter's game shows, Gambit and High Rollers, apparently so the couple could spend time together at work.  Byron Palmer, a singer in the 1950s, also never acted again after this episode.



The most shocking end is that of Karyn Kupcinet, who played Penny, found murdered in her home on Thanksgiving Day 1963, just six days after the Kennedy assassination.  To this day, her murder remains unsolved.  Obviously she didn't even live to see this episode after she filmed it.



And this would be the last we'd see of Lt. Tragg.  Ray Collins was a veteran actor who had been part of Orson Welles' Mercury Players; in "Citizen Kane" he played the machine boss who ended Kane's first marriage and political career in one fell swoop.  Health issues forced Collins to switch from series regular to semi-regular after the 1959-60 season, with Wesley Hau's Lt. Anderson picking up the slack.  The two work together here for the last time.  Collins died in 1965.



That had to be a blow to a close-knit cast, who also went to bat (especially Burr, as well as creator Erle Stanley Gardner) for William Talman.  He had been fired from the show by CBS in 1960 following his arrest during a raid on a party where drugs were allegedly used.  CBS invoked a "morals" clause in the contract. After Talman was exonerated of all wrong doing, Burr campaigned to get him rehired on the show, even appealing to individual CBS affiliates.  It worked, and Burger was once again back on the show, objecting to fishing expeditions in December 1960.



The cast, who put in long hours together for this show, became very close and even had a special rack with their coffee mugs hanging from it.  When Talman was off the show, Burr refused to let the studio remove his belongings from the dressing room and to remove his mug from the rack.  Talman and Hopper shared a dressing room for years and were said to have never had an unkind word with each other that wasn't in the script.

Over the years the show was not without its critics.  The National Association of County and Prosecuting Attorneys complained that the show left real-life jurors with the impression that the D.A. was the villain, the defense attorney was the hero, and that they should expect last minute theatrics, tricks, stunts and tearful sudden confessions.  Then the cast themselves became critics of the scripts, with Burr calling the following season, 1964-65, a "bad year." Burr later reflected that the show and its long hours and theft of his personal life, left him with a lot of regrets that he didn't get married and settle down.

The 1963-64 season was the year the show dropped out of the Neilsen Top 25, losing its case for the viewers against Jimmy Dean's ABC variety show, and Dr. Kildare and Hazel on NBC. The final season, 1965-66, saw the show moved to Sunday nights opposite Bonanza, where it got clobbered.

The show experimented with a lot of ideas during that season; one of them, "The Case of the Twice-Told Twist," was a modern day take on the Oliver Twist story, this time involving a car theft ring.  (Ford Mustangs appeared to be the car of choice for this gang.)  The episode was the only one in the series filmed in color, apparently an experiment to persuade the network to pick up the series for a tenth season.  It also had a little more action and fast jazz-type music than normal for the series.  And it had a courtroom which, as always, was painted in black, while and shades of gray to accomodate black and white photography.  It can be a real headache to watch with all the flesh tones and red neckties, and was a visual trainwreck to actually try to watch without turning down the color on your TV set.

By then, CBS had already announced the ninth season would be its last.  The finale, "The Case of the Final Fadeout," included scenes in which the show's actual crew appeared on camera, Dick Clark as the man confessing to being the killer, and Erle Stanley Gardner himself as the judge.



The show would join Star Trek as one of the few hour-long shows to be a runaway hit in syndication,  and is still a favorite on cable TV even now.  Hopper and Talman would act rarely on camera again before their deaths; Burr sailed to Fiji, only to return in 1967 to a new show, Ironside, with a hectic schedule all its own.

But that doesn't mean this formula, that worked so well for the series, was done.  Burr and Hale came back in 1985 for "Perry Mason Returns," the first in what turned out to be a  highly successful series of TV movies for NBC.  This time, Perry is a judge who leaves the bench to defend Della Street on a murder charge. This one was so successful it was the highest rated show of the week, and the second highest rated of the 1985-86 TV season. The same old formula has one tweak to accommodate a two hour running time: we know whodunit when we see the murder.  But about halfway through the movie, we found out someone else put the person up to it.  There were 26 of these TV movies in all, then four more after Burr's 1993 death, all of which included the phrase "A Perry Mason Mystery" in the title, and Barbara Hale still in the cast.

During this same era, this same formula was also dusted off for another lawyer show:  Andy Griffith's Matlock, which included some of the same producers and writers.  Its tweak was something Perry Mason chose not to do: character development.  Southern-based attorney Ben Matlock was full of quirks and ticks, and we often saw him interact with the real world and had a decent idea what he did when he wasn't being an attorney.  Matlock was a deeper character.  Basically, unlike Perry Mason, Ben Matlock had a life.

And it still may not be over.  After 80 years, Perry's return to the big screen is being plotted as I write this, with Iron Man himself, Robert Downey Jr. ready to take over the title role.  It will be set in the 1930s, when the original movies and some of the original novels were set.  It remains to be seen whether they'll stick to the tried and true TV formula or reinvent one for today's audiences.



Still, the old black and white Perry Mason can look like something of a relic now, like old, dusty law books on a shelf, with all of the court rulings that have changed a lot of things since the show was on.  In fact, it left the air just as the Miranda ruling came down from the Supreme Court, a ruling that had a profound effect, for instance, on the newly revamped version of Dragnet that returned in 1967.  And it seemed quaint just two years later, amid assassinations, rioting, protests, and presidential candidate Richard Nixon's vows to fight for what he called "law and order," filled the airwaves.  But still, the story structure remained very compelling in the reruns and still reaches in and grabs fans of legal TV.

Just as the Perry Mason movies and Matlock were making a big splash on 1980s TV, a new, upstart show, L. A. Law, premiered.  It was prided itself on being everything Perry Mason was not: they told their stories in story arcs; murder wasn't the center of every episode; they had an ensemble cast, full of attorney characters who didn't always win cases; they clashed over the inner workings of the firm; the show followed them off the clock and to home; Susan Dey's character was even a prosecutor, and later a judge.  One of the show's creators said at the time, if a story idea looked too Perry Mason they'd throw it out, but then said, "...but that doesn't mean we don't respect the hell out of its storytelling." By the 1980s the stories had changed drastically and so, sometimes, are the way they're told.  But a compelling story is still a compelling story.  And it all still resonates: I still have yet to hear from an attorney or prosecutor who ever told me, "Judd for the Defense made me want to be an attorney."

Availability:  the entire series is available on DVD, and can be downloaded from Amazon.

Next time on this channel: Combat!

How We Fought World War II in the '60s

The Greatest Generation takes a trial run at telling us what they did in the war



Combat!, "The General and the Sergeant"
OB: January 14, 1964, 7:30 p.m. EST, ABC
I was born the day this episode was first broadcast.

When ABC announced its fall schedule for the 1962-63 season, there were two shows set against the backdrop of World War II: Combat! and The Gallant Men.  (Well, O.K., there were three if you count McHale's Navy.)  The first two shows were dramas, both involving soldiers on the front lines, both in the European Theater.  The men of Combat! were fighting their way out of France, while the infantrymen of The Gallant Men wound through Italy (and found lots of Italian girls along the way).  Both touted their gritty realism and deep characters.  But ultimately, it was Combat! that won the ratings war, and got to be renewed (along with Commander McHale and his own motley sitcom crew).




Combat! and the two decades of war movies that preceded it, may have been our first efforts as a society to come to grips with exactly what our fighting men (and women, who weren't in combat yet but served important roles and some even died at Pearl Harbor) were doing in Europe and the South Pacific.  We know, of course, what they did in the broadest sense: they stopped Hitler, Hirohito and Mussolini and freed Jews and others who were held in concentration camps.  But men like my grandfather, for instance, came back and many of them didn't want to talk about what happened over there.  Only in his later years did Grandaddy Hayes discuss, for instance, the time he made homemade ice cream for General MacArthur (Granddaddy was an Army cook) or the nightmarish images he couldn't forget when his platoon went into Hiroshima after the bomb.  Contrast this to my nephew, Josh Wetzel, who tells anyone who wants to hear it about the day a roadside bomb cost him his legs in Afghanistan, and you'll see it was a generational thing.  It could be the Greatest Generation, which came of age in the Depression, got used to adversity and misery and just not talking about things, and didn't know yet that talking those kinds of things out like my nephew did, is actually healthy for the soul (and might even be good for others to hear).  

But by the 1960s, much of the Greatest Generation had become much of the workforce, and were generally in charge of things.  They were CEOs, plant managers, office managers, network and advertising executives. A former, heroic PT boat captain from the South Pacific was in the White House, having taken over from the former Supreme Allied Commander of the European Theater.  So it seems natural, as soon as budgets and special effects caught up with the evolution of television, that we'd eventually see World War II re-created on the small screen.  



Since I started doing this blog, I've taken new looks at old favorites but also found myself introduced to shows I'd never watched in my life, at least not for an entire episode.  One of those was Combat!  I remember when Channel 17, WTCG in Atlanta, the first independent station I ever saw, reran a block of war dramas at night, including this one, Twelve O'Clock High and The Rat Patrol.  And I remember the clips that were all over the news when Vic Morrow was killed horribly on the set of "Twilight Zone: the Movie" in 1982, ironically filming a battle scene in a war setting.

So when I sat down to watch some episodes for the first time, I guess I was expecting some gung-ho patriotism and perhaps even jingoism, something along the lines of "America?  Hell yeah!  Now let's go kick some ass!"

Boy was I ever wrong.

Combat! prides itself on its grittiness, its realism, its muddy, harsh look.  It doesn't pretend to be, perhaps doesn't even want to be, a recruiting poster for your local Army recruiter.  The men on Combat! value warm, tasty meals, vehicular transportation and hot showers as luxuries, and I'm taken by how often they're interrupted during one or the other by live Nazis, live gunfire or air raid sirens.  We get to know these guys so intimately we can practically feel the fatigues and mud on ourselves, taste the godawful C-rations and smell the tobacco smoke.  Many episodes even appear to have an anti-war bent to them, but then again it did air as another war was making itself known on the evening news..


And they weren't gritting their teeth with impatience to run out and kill more Germans.  They appeared to be more concerned with making sure they didn't run into any, and knowing what to do if they did.  You could almost see the fear in their eyes every time they went out on a mission, like they always knew it wouldn't be a simple "go in, go out" proposition.  Guest stars could sometimes stick around for a number of episodes, to avoid anything like the "red shirt" syndrome on Star Trek and leave the audience guessing as to whether any of them would die in combat.  And I'd bet my next paycheck the line "America? Hell yeah!" never appeared anywhere in the show's 152 episodes, unless it was in a scene in which a soldier just got his orders to ship out and head for home.  (Plus they didn't say "hell" that much in prime time back then.)

I guess I was expecting Sergeant York, and instead I got something closer to Private Ryan.  And that's a good thing.


Rick Jason once recalled when his agent first brought the show to his attention.  At the time he'd just been forced (due to back problems) to stop work on a very short lived series in which he played a crime fighter trained in martial arts.  His agent told him ABC was casting a World War II drama they planned to produce themselves.  As Jason later recalled in his autobiography, '"You guys crazy?' I asked, 'Who’s going to stay home every week to watch a war movie?' (You can readily see how smart I really was.)"

ABC, however, also owned a chain of movie theaters they bought when Paramount, like other big studios, were forced to get out of the theater chain business by the Supreme Court.  And those theaters saw a heavy demand and profit from war movies.  And that's what these shows look like: hour long movies, with movie production values and artsy angles. It helps tremendously that ten of the show's first season episodes were directed by future film great Robert Altman, and set the tone and standards for the show.  One of those, "Cat and Mouse," memorably has Saunders paired with a sergeant whose personality clashes with his own, repeatedly.  That other sergeant ends up nose-to-nose with the Nazis, then dies heroically in battle (while protecting Saunders), all to get an important message to the field headquarters.  Only then it turns out the message was no longer needed, with one of the commanders even saying "it doesn't matter," despite Saunders' protests that a man gave up his life for it.


When the two leads were cast for the show, two men were chosen, who seemed born to play men perpetually fighting their way out of France.  (That's despite the fact the real King's Company, on which the show was based, never had to do that.)  You couldn't really picture Hanley or Saunders stateside, like you could the cast of M*A*S*H; then again, you knew they really didn't want to be on the battlefield, either. Ironically, both of those actors were cast somewhat against type: Rick Jason, as ranking Lieutenant Gil Hanley, had a real-life anti-authority streak about him, by his own admission.  And Vic Morrow, who played the war-weary, experienced Sgt. Chip Saunders, hated guns, I mean hated them.  Neither he nor Jason (who was more of a gun enthusiast and had a collection) wanted to carry the Thompson machine gun because it was so heavy. So Morrow carried a wooden replica of one.  (That's how they worked out a similar issue with Lloyd Bridges and his scuba tanks on Sea Hunt.)


Rounding out the cast were Pierre Jalbert as Caje, the Louisiana-born soldier who is fluent in French and serves as the unit's interpreter; Dick Peabody as Littlejohn; Jack Hogan as Kirby, the unit's official wiseass who seems to exist mainly to complain about everything.  In season one, Braddock, the unit's comedy relief, was played by standup comic Shecky Greene; he had to leave the show because its grueling shooting schedule interfered with his gigs and cost him money.  The medic, always only known as "Doc," was played by Steven Rogers in season one and Conlan Carter for the rest of the run.


Much of the action was shot either on the MGM lot (which explains why the squad members look to be searching and/or protecting the same French village over and over) or in the Franklin Canyon Reservoir. Franklin Canyon, a beautiful by-product of a complex designed to deliver water to thirsty Los Angeles residents, was once restricted from the general public (not anymore) and was otherwise a very frequent shooting location for movies and TV (and still is).  It's where Claudette Colbert went hitchhiking in "It Happened One Night," where Lassie constantly had to rescue people from wells and mineshafts, and where Opie Taylor memorably skipped a rock on a lake.  I suspect its prominence may have to do with relevance, and efforts by the directors to make the show's look and the fake European forestry, somewhat resemble the jungle warfare of Vietnam that was playing out on the nightly news.

The location shoots at Franklin Canyon were plentiful, and made extensive use of the concrete culverts built by the WPA in the 1930s.  (You can still see and visit those now, in fact.)  Director George Fenady recalled the way they blew up so many things in that area, but always left it the way they found it, right up to using bulldozers to fill foxholes and bomb craters.

The series theme song, like many military comedies and dramas, sounded like a military march.  The credits, however, featured a very modern set of graphics depicting abstract gunfire, and a lot of bayonets.  The bayonet is an interesting choice for a weapon to be the one most prominently featured, as it makes sure we know all of this was going to be intimate, person and perhaps rather ugly at times.


The first season of the show contained some tight scripts and action that would stand up even now.  The very first episode to air, "Forgotten Front," is about the capture of a German POW and the quandary of what to do with him as they are being approached by other Germans--all the while, debating whether to trust him. We hear a lot of the anti-German slur "kraut" in this episode and it's a word we'll hear a lot in later episodes. It just shows that in World War II, prejudice was sometimes marshaled as a motivational force, and in the early 1960s, actors, directors and writers were still surprisingly comfortable using it.  Even if they were taking historical accuracy into account, there wouldn't be that much comfort were those scenes filmed now.

"Rear Echelon Commandos" has Saunders taking on three unlikely squad members who were mistakenly sent to his unit despite a lack of skills.  They include cook, a male ballet dancer (at least he was in peacetime), and a radio announcer with an attitude.  Later in the episode, the men come under heavy fire, and Saunders is hit and actually thinks he's going to die.  The three replacements rise to the occasion, however, most notably the ballet dancer who uses his dance skills to mount a rooftop, in an effort to take out a Nazi machine gun nest.  "Any Second Now" has Hanley trapped under a beam in a cathedral, where an unexploded bomb is being diffused by a shaky bomb technician.


One especially memorable standout from season one, "A Day in June," is the series' actual pilot, and a flashback to D-Day.  We find out how Braddock won the D-Day pool, only to lose the winnings under fire. We see Hanley back when he was a sergeant, and we actually see him and Saunders fight over a girl--not once, but twice.  (The order-barking Hanley was actually a bit of a player.)  We see a rare shot of the unit in barracks (as opposed to being constantly on the march), having a good time and waiting for the orders to advance.  And we see a surprising amount of humor in this episode as well, with at least one very funny moment coming from each regular character.  It also reveals just about the entire five-year series takes place within the last year of the war.

The very night I was born, "The General and the Sergeant" aired on ABC.  It's one of the shows' rare forays into humor, and is considered by fans to be a "so-so" episode.  A Combat! fan website gives this episode "two bayonets" out of four.  Personally, I had gotten used to the tight drama of the previous episodes, and the humor mainly coming from the regular characters themselves, so I wasn't read to see a "goofy" character suddenly show up.


The squad walks into a small French village, being greeted as liberators despite the town appearing to be in something of a mess from artillery.  A note which a child hands to Saunders (and is interpreted by Caje), requests them to meet at once with the "commanding officer of the local forces." A general--General Brouchard, as we'll find out--walks toward them, wearing a World War I era uniform with full ribbons, with the townspeople cheering, laughing and following behind in a mock parade.  An attractive woman comes out and tells Saunders, "Please sergeant, please...be kind."

It becomes obvious he's more of a "local character" than an active member of the allied forces.  The general delivers a speech in French that sounds very serious, but the townspeople are clearing trying to stifle laughter. Caje interprets that they've just been drafted into the French Army.


The general is played by guest star John Dehner, a well known character actor.  Dehner had appeared in the main roles on the radio series Frontier Gentleman and Have Gun, Will Travel, and guest starred in numerous TV shows, mostly westerns like Maverick and The Virginian.  We'll find out that his attractive granddaughter Jacqueline is the one who pleaded for mercy from Saunders and his men.  She's played by Denise Alexander, best known for daytime soaps like Days of Our Lives. Another World, Sunset Beach, and especially her long running role on General Hospital as Dr. Leslie Webber.


After a commercial break, the meeting continues.  The general kisses Sgt. Saunders on both cheeks; Saunders' reaction is priceless.  He inspects the men, tells them he's not impressed with their appearance (they came straight from the battlefield apparently) and tells them to report to his office in three minutes.  The townspeople clap as if the "show" is over.


Jacqueline explains to Saunders that the man is her grandfather and only holds a figurehead position, but actually served in World War I and was a distinguished member of the generals' staff.  "They forget all he has done for France," she tells him. "They cannot understand an old man's pride.  He has a need to be wanted." It's unclear, probably on purpose, whether General Brouchard is a bit senile, just pushy and pesky with his ideas, or perhaps all of that.

Saunders tells his men they are to respect the general, despite Kirby calling him "The old coot." When Saunders arrives at the general's office, Jacqueline thanks him for being so kind to his grandfather, only to have the general chastise him for being "30 seconds late." He shows off his maps and shows off how he outwitted the Kaiser in 1911, and Saunders points out he was only three years old then.  Brouchard wants to go with the squad and share command, and wants Saunders to share their strategic plan.  Saunders says he doesn't know the plan and can't allow the general to assume command, with the general complaining about how he's thought to be "too old." Saunders does come up with a plan: the general's map shows an extra way out of town not list on his own maps and asks the general to be their guide.  They are searching for a site for an observation post.  The general says he would be proud.


Saunders tells his men "I don't want any wisecracks, any smiles, any smart stuff." As they leave town, the general leans over to Saunders and says, "A day to remember, sergeant.  Together we shall cross the Rhine!" Just before the commercial, we get a glimpse of the "What have I gotten myself into?" look on Saunders' face.


When they come to the signpost on the edge of town and Saunders thanks the general for his help, Brouchard apologizes for being "so selfish" and insists on going with them.  He says he was planning to go that way anyway to visit his wife in the cemetery.

As the general goes to the cemetery, Hanley arrives in a jeep and demands to know what's taking so long in finding the O.P.  Hanley says he met the woman in the village who told him all about the "noble, kind American sergeant" and the grandfather.  Just then, Brouchard returns from visiting his wife's grave, when Hanley orders him to return to his village.  As Hanley leaves (why didn't Hanley just take the general in his jeep?), the general declares he will not take orders from a lower officer in the field and vows to have Hanley court-martialed.


Littlejohn reports finding a large stone mansion, so the squad goes to check it out.  The general goes back to his wife's grave (her name was Elizabeth, she was English) and tells her, maybe they're right, maybe "I am too old."

As the men find the mansion, Brouchard, then the men find a German convoy coming by.  They actually drive up to the mansion as the men take cover and draw their weapons, clearly outnumbered.  As the Nazis get out of their vehicles and head up the stairs, they hear a man singing a French song.  Sure enough, General Brouchard has walked up.  (By now the soundtrack marks all of the general's appearances with a special, comical theme.)  They surround him and he says something to them in French.  He waves a white handkerchief and tries to surrender.  They all laugh, and one makes a "crazy" motion.  Then they throw change, cigarettes and other items into the general's hat and leave.  "You can come out now, my good companions," he tells the men.  "It is now safe."


He tells them of another mansion with a spectacular view, and assures them the countess told him that very morning it was unoccupied.  The men find out the hard way he was wrong: there's a machine gun nest on the second floor, and they open fire.  Saunders loses one of his men, and another appears to be critically wounded.  Doc says the wounded man needs to be moved immediately as he is losing blood.  The men are pinned down in what appears to be an old carriage house.

Just then the general, and his theme music on the soundtrack, arrive.  The general apologizes, then asks them why they didn't sneak around to the tunnel.  "Did I not tell you of the tunnel?" he asks.  No, Saunders says, he did not.  The general says there's supposed to be a tunnel that dates back to the French Revolution, allowing the aristocrats to escape.  Kirby dismisses it as a "fairy tale" but Saunders wants to check it out.  He heads up there to join the men who were cut off near the house by the gunfire; the general runs in that direction, dodging bullets himself.


After a commercial break, the men search under piles of debris, etc. for the tunnel, which the general insists is there.  He recognizes a tree and walks off the distance; roughly at that spot, the ground suddenly collapses under Littlejohn.  "I told you there was a tunnel!" the general reminds them.

Sure enough, they've found the tunnel.  They remove bars from a vent and head to the kitchen, telling the general to stay put since he's the only one without a gun.  The general tells them about a spiral staircase that they use to surprise the Germans, killing a couple and taking three prisoner as well as capturing the house. Sure enough, the general shows up one more time to say the surprised look on the Nazis' faces were identical to the ones he saw when he pulled the same maneuver in 1911.


The final shot of the episode shows the men marching through the village, and as they turn and pass the general in review, saluting him, under Hanley's orders.  His granddaughter is by his side, seeing the general feel needed and appreciated.

The show continued until the 1966-67 season, its final one and its only one in color.  Rick Jason recalled one episode featuring a number of unfamiliar faces that he suspected was a series pilot.  Sure enough, that episode, with Jason's scenes cut, aired the following year as a one-season wonder known as Garrison's Gorillas.

The show has continued, however, to hold onto its fans.  And they have conventions every year.  Rick Jason died the weekend after attending one, in fact.

But Combat! has a haunting quality about it, one that will challenge what you might think about military shows.  Its action was mixed in with a lot of humanity.  And even though we didn't always know the characters' full names, the series' writers seemed to be very conscious of that as the show evolved.

A case in point is the 1962 episode "Far From the Brave." The squad's BAR man (the man assigned the Browning Automatic Rifle) is killed heroically, so Saunders has to replace him.  This doesn't go well: Kirby, who expected to get that assignment, is woefully unhappy.  And it turns out the man who now has the gun is a former cook's helper with limited combat kills.  He, too, dies in action, with a heroism that surprises Saunders.


At the end of the episode, Hanley and Saunders are talking as Saunders checks the BAR man's body tag.

Saunders: William P. Delaney.  I didn't even know his first name.  Doesn't seem right to ask a man to die without even knowing his name. I was wrong, lieutenant.
Hanley: Wrong?
Saunders: I gave Delaney Grady's gun because I didn't want to lose another man the way I lost Grady.  I thought if it was someone I didn't know, it would be easier. It's not.

Later on, Braddock introduces a soldier as the newest replacement, as a slow version of the show's theme song plays gently underneath.

Saunders: You got a first name, Baker?"
Soldier: Yes, sir.
Saunders: What is it?
Soldier: Albert.  Albert Baker, sir.
Saunders: Glad to know you, Albert Baker.

Just that simple piece of dialogue packs a lot of power in that context.  It's all at once, minus all the gunfire and grenades, the heart and soul of Combat! and what makes it such a special show, even among shows set in wartime.  It reminds us those statistics we often hear about are all real people, and a good war series treats its characters the same way.


Availability: the entire series is available on DVD; however, the episodes appear to be time-compressed, which is very disappointing since there's no need for that on DVD.

Next time on this channel:  The Judy Garland Show.

Once More, Over the Rainbow

How CBS likely sabotaged Judy Garland's last truly great work, her variety show 



The Judy Garland Christmas Show, "With Lorna, Joe, Liza, Tracy, Jack Jones and Mel Torme"
OB:  December 22, 1963, 9:00 p.m. EST, CBS
I was born three weeks after this broadcast first aired.

The Judy Garland Show, "With Guests, Vic Damone, Chita Rivera and Louis Nye"
OB: January 19, 1964, 9:00 p.m. EST, CBS
I was five days old when this broadcast first aired.

"Somewhere over the rainbow, way up high,
There's a land that I've heard of, once in a lullaby..."

Lassie!  Quick, Get Help!  Timmy's Not in a Well!

She may have rescued people from wells, lakes and caves, but our favorite collie also had to navigate an audience through an emotional minefield




Lassie, "Lassie's Gift of Love"
OB: December 15 & 22, 1963, 7:00 p.m. EST, CBS
I was born the following month after this two-parter aired.

O.K. let's get something out of the way first: I don't care what Jay Leno or David Letterman or anyone else ever told you...Timmy absolutely did not fall into a well.  Never.  Ever.  Neither did Jeff.

It's an often told joke and Lassie the superhero wonderdog did perform some laughably ridiculous feats over the years...but Timmy never fell into a well.  A bad guy fell into one during the first season and Lassie had to get help for him...Timmy's father almost fell into a well...and Lassie herself fell into a well, during a 1970 two-part episode. And Timmy was goofy enough to get into all sorts of trouble--a snakebite, being threatened by animals ranging from other dogs to a bear to a lion, getting trapped in a cave and a drainpipe (maybe the drainpipe is what people are thinking about), and falling into a lake twice.  But Timmy never fell into a well.  That's actually why actor Jon Provost titled his autobiography "Timmy's in the Well," just to make that point.  The TV Tropes website went as far as to suggest, with all the over-the-top peril Timmy got into, maybe falling down a well was just too boring.

Actually, a quick browse through 19 years of the show's episode guides shows more common recurring themes, ranging from the cute animal of the week, to the show's pet cause, the environment (before that was even fashionable). Lassie during its early years was more often about moral values than it was a cute collie in search of an action movie.


That's not to say that kind of stuff never happened, or that it wasn't laughable when it did.  June Lockhart could give you an earful about the ridiculous things the script assigned to Lassie...like the time Ruth sent Lassie to get a C-clamp, and Lassie came back with a knife.  That wasn't enough to free Ruth from the trap in which she was caught, so she made a letter "C" with her hand...and Lassie brought back the right tool. Still, that wasn't the point of the show.  A more typical show would be about, say, a raccoon upsetting Jeff's and Porky's beehive, or the Martins nursing a bear cub back to health after it's been shot with a hunter's arrow.

The long-running series is actually broken up into multiple formats.  Based on a 1938 novel, Lassie was first the star of a series of MGM movies, always filmed in color.  The first co-starred Roddy McDowall; a sequel featured a young Elizabeth Taylor.  In 1951, when MGM was done with the series, they were trying to get out of its contract with trainer Rudd Weatherwax and didn't have the $40,000 to pay him.  Or maybe they had it and didn't want to part with it...I mean come on, this is a movie studio.  So they simply gave Weatherwax the rights to the name and the character, even the trademark to it.  That was the Hollywood equivalent of winning the lottery; all Weatherwax had wanted was his money and the right to call his collie "Lassie" when he took "her" (him) to make personal appearances.  What he got was a franchise.



That's actually how Lassie operated over the years, as several different mini-shows within one series that lasted 19 years.  That's because the show was aimed mostly at young people, and not only did the stars grow older and get replaced, there were complete turnovers in the audience as well.   And considering that even Lassie herself was played by multiple (male) collies (whose coats didn't shed as much), the show really had a complete turnover, like daytime soaps.  It may very well have paved the way for franchise television like, say, the various Star Trek series.

It was the third version (1964-70) that I and my siblings watched every Sunday night.  We had a Birmingham dual network affiliate (WAPI, Channel 13) that managed to get Lassie on CBS and The Wonderful World of  Color on NBC back to back in the same lineup.  No adult dared get in our way on that night.  That third version was the "Forest Ranger" version, where Lassie served with Corey Stuart (and later, two other rangers).  It was the first version to air in color (though isolated episodes were filmed in color earlier), and it's the first time in my life I ever saw forest rangers, or the green trucks they drove.  I remember one episode in which Corey was hanging over a cliff (I think he was trying to help an eaglet or something) by a rope tied to the front bumper of his Dodge pickup...which apparently slipped its parking brake and started rolling.  Lassie quickly grabbed a log and placed it in front of a tire, stopping the truck.

Version #4 was basically Lassie on her own, wandering the land, and consisted of the 1970-71 season. When an FCC ruling forced networks to give back some early evening access time to local affiliates, CBS suddenly had no decent place to put it on their fall schedule.  It was seen as too juvenile for prime time, yet too good for Saturday morning.  So they dropped the show and it continued for two more years in first run syndication, this time (version #5, 1971-73) set at the fictional Holden Ranch for troubled orphaned boys.  A pre-CHiPs Larry Wilcox can be seen in the cast, along with Pamela Ferdin (The Odd Couple, Lucy's voice in the early "Peanuts" specials) as a deaf girl.



The first version (1954-57), which most fans consider the show's best era, was known in syndication as Jeff's Collie. It starred Tommy Rettig at Jeff, with Jan Clayton as his mother Ellen and George Cleveland as Gramps.  Many fans believe the quality of the writing, and especially the acting, made this version stand out. Jeff, basically, came off as a typical kid, with a best friend Porky.  Jeff wasn't perfect and it wasn't out of the question for him to get into a fight every now and then.  He had pet lizards and pet frogs in addition to Lassie, just like the rest of us who didn't have Lassie did.



I was born halfway through what would be the final season of version #2, the 1958-64 "Timmy" version, known as Timmy and Lassie in its initial syndication run.  I never knew Lassie ever even had a "boy" until the 1970s, when I first saw Jeff's Collie and Timmy and Lassie in reruns.  Initially, Timmy's adoptive parents, Paul and Ruth Martin, were played by Jon Shepodd and Cloris Leachman...yes, the same Cloris who was Phyllis Lindstrom on The Mary Tyler Moore Show (and later Phyllis), Frau Blucher in "Young Frankenstein," and more recently, Maw-Maw on Raising Hope.  She only lasted the second half of a season before she left. One version has her and the producers parting ways mutually because she was unhappy and not a good fit for the role of a farmer's wife; another version had an interviewer asking her if she used the sponsor's product, Campbell's Soups, to which she supposedly replied, "Hell no, I make my own"...and so, Cloris got canned.  So the following season, the Martins were played by Paul Reilly and June Lockhart (Lost in Space). Timmy, as always, was Jon Provost.


While Jeff was basically your typical bruiser of a boy (even 20 years later in reruns, boys my age still felt like we knew real kids like Jeff), Timmy was more of your classic nice guy.  While he had friends of his own, like Boomer, he usually hung around adults and was basically an animal and nature lover who just wanted to do good.  You got the feeling Timmy grew up and became one of the first people to ever celebrate Earth Day. Unfortunately, that doesn't make for the most dramatic or engrossing television in the world, so that's where Timmy found himself getting into ridiculous amounts of trouble--everything from chickenpox to being threatened by escaped circus animals (more than once), and Lassie starting to emerge as an honorary member of the Justice League.

And it's "do-gooder Timmy" who's at the center of the two-part episode, that was the closest one I could find to my birth era.  "Lassie's Gift of Love" first aired a week apart in December 1963, one of the show's Christmas episodes.  They did a different one every year, very unusual for that time.



Part one opens with Timmy and Lassie traipsing along a road in what is unmistakably California's Franklin Canyon Reservoir, without managing to bump into Opie Taylor or the cast of Combat!  But it's supposed to be Calverton, state unknown.  And there's snow on the ground.  As Timmy puts Christmas decorations (some edible, as we'll find out) on a snow-covered fir tree, Lassie sees a deer come up and start eating out of the small picnic basket they brought.  The jingling of one of the ornaments apparently scares it off.



A bearded man names Mr, Nicholson comes up and introduces himself to Lassie and Timmy, shaking hands with both.  He notes what Timmy is doing: feeding wild animals, who can't find food because the snow has covered it all up or covered up the scents.  Mr. Nicholson's donkey Holly brings up Mr. Nicholson's carriage, and Timmy can see by the writing on it that Mr. Nicholson can mend toys.  That's good news since his mother Ruth happens to be involved with a toy drive for a children's hospital.  Mr, Nicholson says he'd love to help, but first he has to find a place to sleep for the night.  Timmy invites him over to the Martin farm.



Ruth and Paul are in the kitchen, talking about how Mr. Nicholson, his wagon and his donkey all seem like they're from another century.  Ruth is making dinner, and expresses concern that she only made three baked potatoes.  But when Paul checks the oven, he finds four.  This seems to shock Ruth a bit.


Mr. Nicholson joins them for dinner, where we see them bow their heads in grace (they actually do a lot of praying on this show by the way...religion was often overlooked on TV even then).  Mr. Nicholson tells about Christmas being celebrated in other parts of the world.  He mentions the countries in which Christmas is shared with animals, like Timmy and Lassie were doing, only with hay and feed being used instead of bread.



This prompts Timmy to suggest the idea to his dad, who agrees to kick off his animal relief effort with a bag of feed.  Mr. Nicholson then recites the Biblical passage from Matthew 25:40, "Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these...ye have done it unto me." The Martins invite him to stay.




An exterior of the Martin farmhouse shows it suddenly start to snow.  This is a little symbol reminding us that 1950s and 1960s television believed in God more often than not.  Whenever someone invokes God's name in a positive way in a Christmas show or movie, it suddenly snows.  That's supposed to mean God is listening.  Watch what happens when Jimmy Stewart finishes his "I want to live!" combination prayer/appeal to Clarence in "It's a Wonderful Life" and you'll see the same thing.




Two things are starting to become glaringly obvious at this point.  Obviously the first one is that Mr. Nicholson is Santa Claus, helping out Timmy and the Martins, and the animals in the forest.  Or perhaps he's an off-brand Santa.  Secondly, helping the animals when snow is interfering with their feeding grounds, is a metaphorical stand-in for welfare and helping the poor, the snow representing economic hardship.  



The next day, Mr. Nicholson uses his donkey-drawn wagon to set out with Lassie and Timmy to collect food for the animals Christmas relief project.  They get a sack of corn from Mr. Livermore, a bale of hay from another neighbor, and a hard time from the episode's official Scrooge, Mr. Krebs, who's perfectly content with letting "survival of the fittest" rule the day in the snow.  Timmy apologizes for wasting Mr. Nicholson's time with that man (a Lassie fan site says Timmy spends much of season 10 saying "I'm sorry"), but Mr. Nicholson suggests maybe they "planted a seed in that lonely old heart of his."



That night, Lassie, sleeping next to Timmy's bed, hears howling outside, and finds two wolves trying to get into the Martin barn.  Apparently believing there's no sense in disturbing Paul, his shotgun or his opposable thumbs this time of night, Lassie noses the window open and jumps into wonderdog mode, chasing the two wolves away.

The next day, we hear how helpful Mr. Nicholson has been in decorating the church.  Timmy, who has been rehearsing for a church solo and overhead the Women's Auxiliary, imitates the women complimenting him. 



That's when Mr. Livermore and Mr. Krebs (the latter apparently named by the writers because it sounds like "crabs") show up looking for Paul.  Krebs says wolves raided his farm, killing a bull calf and two laying hens, and apparently did some damage at Livermore's place, too.  Paul tells them about how Lassie chased apparently those same wolves away, and how odd it is since wolves haven't been around that area in years.  
Krebs blames Timmy (naturally, since Timmy is a trouble magnet and Krebs has all the social grace of one of his own cattle), saying the feeding grounds attracted the deer, which attracted the wolves.  While the deer were agile enough to escape, the wolves figured "as long as we're here anyway" and got to work on the farms.  Mr. Livermore acknowledges Timmy's idea was nice, but "just wasn't practical." Timmy's parents inform him all he can do is stop the project.  A dejected Timmy excuses himself to the barn.



Mr. Nicholson then invites Timmy into his wagon, showing off the toys from the toy drive that were turned from junk to condition: brand new.  Mr. Nicholson explains he's not Santa, just one of his helpers, but he's been at the toy repair trade for along time.  Mr. Nicholson also tries to comfort Timmy about his failed animal relief project.  "The wolves appear in one form or another in every man's life," the old man tells Timmy.  "But each time it happens, there's a reason." He explains God's way is very difficult to understand, implying Timmy (in addition to all of his other crises) may very well be having a crisis of faith.  End of Part 1, although the June Lockhart-narrated preview of Part 2 pretty much spoils everything.




Oh, and since the whole series is really about separation anxiety, Lassie eggs it on by waving goodbye to us under the closing credits, as always.




Part 2 opens with everyone loading the toys for the toy drive into the bed of Paul's '58 Dodge pickup.  Ruth wishes she could go with them to town but Timmy makes a big deal out of the fact that she can't, she just can't...because it'll make him nervous singing the solo.  (Really, it's so he can buy her Christmas gift.)  They arrive at the store where Timmy asks the shopkeeper for the pink silk umbrella, but the man says he sold the last one before Timmy could save up.  Mr. Nicholson insists he take one more look, and sure enough, that umbrella turns up in the stockroom after all.  (So if you're keeping a "magic" score, that's one potato and one umbrella.)  The shopkeeper throws in that Krebs shot and killed one of the wolves last night night and wounded the other one that got away.  




Sure enough, while Lassie and Ruth are in the kitchen, the remaining wolf shows up and Lassie chases it away. Mr. Krebs, waiting in the woods, shoots and kills the second wolf.  Lassie stops short when she sees it dead, but then hears whimpering nearby and goes to check it out.  She finds three wolf cubs in a den.




Krebs, dragging the wolf up the mountain, bumps a log that sets off a small avalanche, enough to cover the entrance to the den and trapping Lassie with the pups.  It's apparently too much for Lassie to dig through.  
Two hours later, Timmy, Paul and Mr. Nicholson return to the farm, but there's still no sign of Lassie.  So the three search the woods.  They come close to the den--Timmy even finds the wolf's blood, thinking it might be Lassie's.  But not only is there too much snow to dig through, there's apparently enough to block Lassie's barks.  For some reason she can hear them outside the small cave but they can't hear her.  (Consistency was never this show's strong point.)

With no Lassie in sight, Timmy prays silently next to the window, with Mr. Nicholson saying "Amen" along with him.  Cut to Lassie still trying to find a way out of the cave.


At the Christmas Eve church service, we see Timmy singing his solo, and everyone is touched, even that old coot Krebs.  As he finishes there's suddenly a brisk wind outside, enough to shake a small tree outside the church window and enough to blow away the snowdrift that Lassie couldn't dig through.    



Apparently, prayer is a large part of the Martins' life and Timmy says it a lot, mostly on behalf of Lassie and the family.  The show doesn't proselytize, but it doesn't shy away from religion in America life either.

As everyone departs the church, Mr. Nicholson points out the Christmas stars to Timmy.  Mr. Krebs compliments Timmy on his singing and expresses his empathy about Lassie being lost.  He tells Timmy he shot the wolf Lassie was chasing.  They both express a Merry Christmas to each other.



Lassie takes one of the cubs out to the roadway and gets Mr. Krebs' attention in his truck, leading him to the other two.  Back at the Martin farmhouse, there's a happy reunion, and a suddenly chipper Krebs explains about Lassie, the cubs and how he accidentally caused the small avalanche that trapped Lassie and the cubs in the cave.  One of the extras, a woman with light hair and glasses, suddenly shivers in empathy when she hears about Lassie and the cave.  It's a really nice touch.

Back in the Martin kitchen, Krebs admits he's wrong and asks Timmy if he can help restart the animal feeding project.  An excited Timmy runs out to find Mr. Nicholson, only he's gone, along with the wolf cubs and the wagon.  Timmy asks why Mr, Nicholson left, and Ruth suggests maybe he finished whatever it was he came to do.  Timmy notes Lassie sees something they don't, and it's even something we don't see.  The show ends with the credits rolling over the Martins' snow-covered farmhouse, with the guests' cars parked outside, as we hear Timmy sing "Silent Night" one more time.


For all the peril or adventures Timmy might encounter--and this is a kid who narrowly avoided being eaten by enough different animals to fill an encyclopedia--his worst, most dire fear was that he would somehow or another lose Lassie.  And that was a very real fear, for as much as Lassie rescued people from stuff, she couldn't do anything about their broken hearts...even if she was the one who broke them.

In late 1957, the show's producers were hit with a double whammy that complicated their storyline.  First, Tommy Rettig was getting a bit old to appeal to the children who were meant to draw in the family audience. The first answer to that was to go the Brady Bunch"Cousin Oliver" route (come to think of it, Lassie may have even invented that idea) by introducing Timmy, an orphan who had run away from his aunt and uncle. When he ended up on the Miller farm, it's somehow agreed he can stay there for the time being, and Jeff begins to treat Timmy like a younger brother.  In a true, torch-passing episode, Jeff and Porky try to make Timmy get lost so they can enjoy a fishing trip in peace; their bizarre scheme endangers Timmy.


Then the tragic second event that finally forced the producers' hand: actor George Cleveland, who played Gramps, died, and his character needed to be written out of the show.  (My dad remembered watching that when he was 12, and crying when he saw Lassie sadly walk across the farmyard with her head held down.) The writers felt there needed to be a male figure to run the farm (having Ellen become a pioneer woman overnight was seen as implausible, even in a show that seemed to live off implausibility at times) .  So the decision was made to write Jeff and Ellen out of the show.  It's explained Ellen decided to sell the farm and move to the city (something they tried in season one only to be miserable) and they wouldn't be able to take Lassie.  That had to be a lot to take for Jeff; it was a lot to take for any kid having to watch that.  (When Lassie is such a central part of a family, she can't just be passed off to another family without some trauma involved.  Jeff and Timmy just aren't going to "get tired" of a dog who probably saved their lives multiple times.)  So it works out to where Lassie, and Timmy, end up living with the Martins, who also bought the Miller farm.  (Cleveland's death is also why the switch happened in mid-season.)


The Timmy era is the best known era because it lasted the longest. And aside from Timmy's seemingly Dickensian life full of peril (Did I mention the runaway hot air balloon incident?  Or the one where Timmy and Lassie are exposed to radiation?  Or the minefield...yes, there was a minefield?!), we saw him get separated from Lassie on occasion, most notably the classic three part 1962 episode, "The Odyssey," in which Lassie accidentally gets locked inside a produce trailer and ends up a state or two away, trying to find her way home.  This is likely the greatest Lassie episode ever. Keep in mind, this epic saga actually began with Timmy and Lassie going to their favorite spot, and Timmy carving "Timmy and Lassie Martin" on a log, as if she were his sister. Timmy's reaction to the prospect of losing Lassie borders on clinical depression (remember, he already lost his birth parents, too).  It's at that spot where Lassie and Timmy are finally reunited.

So after all of that...the 1964-65 season premiere finds Paul getting some kind of job in Australia...only for everyone to find out Lassie can't come, because she'd have to be quarantined for six months in England and that would break her spirit.  (That was an actual law at the time, but it's been changed.)  By now Timmy has bonded with Lassie in a way that's more similar with how soldiers bond under fire than, say, the relationship I had with my own childhood dog Ginger. So his coming to terms with this pending loss is very, very difficult to watch; the last time we see him, he's in the farmyard one last time as Lassie walks up.  Instead of embracing her and saying goodbye, he runs away.  He's just in too much pain. A lot of people probably cried when they first saw that episode; I simply gasped, my mouth dropped open, when I first saw it decades later on Nick at Nite.  (And at the end of the three-parter, we see one last, mournful glimpse of the now-deserted Martin farmhouse with a "For Sale" sign in the yard.  If nothing else, the writers and directors of Lassie knew how to push its viewers' buttons with emotional imagery.)


Then it's Lassie's turn.  Five years later, Robert Bray, who played Ranger Corey, was let go from the show due to his alcoholism.  He was written out as having been critically burned in a forest fire.  Lassie walks all over the countryside, along an interstate and into the next major city to find Corey in the hospital and stay by his side. The fact that she ends up staying with two other rangers in later episodes, implies the news wasn't good for Corey.  All of these can be very disturbing to a young person watching it, especially if it's first run. And any adult who responded with "Get over it, kid, it's just a TV show," probably wasn't helping.

The current that runs through the great, big, rural, rugged 19-year world of Lassie...is trauma and heartbreak. Widows and orphans, be they Ellen, Timmy or the boys on the Holden Ranch, are a big part of the show. So is separation, for that is the true peril that feeds all the others.  The opening credits to every episode in the show's first ten years began with someone calling Lassie's name because they couldn't find her. All the times either Lassie, Jeff or Timmy are lost or trapped somewhere, were stand-ins for the horrible day in which each of them have to say goodbye forever to someone they love. This likely had the unintended effect of getting us all used to the idea of loss in the 1960s era of assassinations and war dead, then in time for us to grow up and eventually deal with other forms of loss in our adulthood.  And that could very well be Lassie's greatest rescue of all.

Availability: A smattering of episodes are available on DVD, including "Lassie's Gift of Love" and "The Odyssey." They may be out of print, but they turn up on eBay and Amazon.  There's also a 50th anniversary set that came out in 2004.  All or most of season five (1958-59, the first June Lockhart season) also appears to be on Hulu.  Dreamworks bought the full rights to the show not long ago, but so far we have no indication as to whether that means season-by-season DVD releases or remastered episodes streaming online.

Next time on this channel: The Danny Kaye Show, Christmas edition.

A Smiling Face from Christmas Past

Behind Danny Kaye's smile was a personal life as complicated as any of his trademark, comic tongue-twisters.




The Danny Kaye Show, "Christmas Show, with Mary Tyler Moore and Nat King Cole"
OB: December 25, 1963, 10:00 p.m. EST, CBS
I was born three weeks after this show was first broadcast.

Once upon a time, we used to have variety shows.  (Sigh.)

They were likely the earliest network shows in both radio (The Eveready Hour) and television (Hour Glass).   From The Texaco Star Theatre with Milton Berle to Barbara Mandrell and the Mandrell Sisters, a large variety of singers, dancers and comedians welcomed guests each week as we'd welcome them as guests in our homes.  Pat Boone, Dinah Shore, Andy Williams, Carol Burnett, Sonny & Cher--and the list goes on.

Sometimes we sang along; sometimes we just sat and listened; sometimes we just laughed.  Sometimes they'd bring us recurring characters, like Ralph Kramden, Clem Kadiddlehopper or Eunice, sometimes they'd appear as a character one time only, sometimes they'd spoof movies or TV shows. And often, they'd make just a little bit of sincere-sounding small talk with their guests.  Sometimes it was cheesy to the point of embarrassing; often it was grand entertainment.  There seemed to be a fine line sometimes between those last two.  But chances were, if you had an entertainer who was a gifted enough comedian or singer, they could get their own show and fall into it with ease.  Done well, viewers could always feel the warmth, even if it was sometimes fake warmth.


CBS already had a nice collection of variety shows going into the 1963-64 TV season, old pros like Jackie Gleason, Red Skelton and Garry Moore, not to mention Ed Sullivan.  That fall they would add four more stars.  They managed to get Edie Adams and Sid Caesar for alternating weekly half-hours.  But their two biggest gets who would be renting out space at CBS Television City, were still-young 1940s film stars Judy Garland and Danny Kaye.  It was Judy who got the nicest dressing room and most elaborate perks (like a rotating stage) but it was Danny who basically got his choice of time slots--Sunday nights opposite the ratings powerhouse Bonanza, or Wednesday nights.  He took Wednesday, and Judy got Sunday and was pretty much screwed.

There's a better-than-average chance if you know who Danny Kaye is, it has something to do with this phrase: "The pellet with the poison’s in the vessel with the pestle, the chalice from the palace has the brew that is true." That famous line is actually a whole routine from possibly Kaye's film masterwork, 1956's "The Court Jester" (and he would re-create it on his television show), in which Kaye's character is trying to keep from being poisoned..  There's also a flagon with a dragon involved.



You might also know Kaye from his other best remembered movie, the one that made him the most money but he least wanted to do: he appeared with Bing Crosby, Rosemary Clooney and Vera-Ellen, in 1954's "White Christmas." Or maybe you remember him from his guest appearances on The Muppet Show, The Cosby Show and the "Paladin of the Lost Hour" episode of the 1980s Twilight Zone remake.  But there's a lot more to his work, both in show business and the humanitarian world, that is in danger of being forgotten. Kaye's daughter Dena spent a good part of 2013, the 100th year of what Kaye celebrated as his birth year, keeping her father's tongue-twisting memory alive. (Turns out he was actually born in 1911. No one, including his own family, has any idea why he fudged a couple of years.)  She's been campaigning, for instance, to get more of his movies, like "Up in Arms," released on DVD; sure enough, that and three others did get released as a box set.

Born in Brooklyn, to a Russian immigrant in what we now know to be 1911, his birth name was David Daniel Kaminsky. He worked at a radio station before becoming a Borscht Belt comic in the Catskills.  He worked briefly with a dance team, then as a solo act, making his Broadway debut in 1939's "Straw Hat Revue." Along the way he met the woman who would write a good bit of his musical and comedy material and be his wife, Sylvia Fine. They grew up within blocks of each other in Brooklyn but never met until years later.


Kaye began working in movies, first in some shorts for Educational Films, then on to Technicolor success in movies like "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,""The Inspector General" and "Hans Christian Andersen" (the latter actually being re-released at some point in my childhood, which would be late 1960s/early 1970s).  He hosted his own variety show on CBS radio in the mid-1940s for Pabst Blue Ribbon Beer, replacing Groucho Marx.  On Kaye's very first show for Pabst, just a few minutes in, he does his famous routine in which he sings a 39 second song, naming 57 Russian composers.  That was Kaye's best comic gift, having a loose tongue and working around tongue twisters.  His "pellet with the poison’s in the vessel with the pestle" routine from "The Court Jester" is but one example.  He also did a large number of one man shows on stage, and by all accounts, those may have been his greatest work.  (Too bad a vast majority of us will probably never see any of them.)  His wife, Sylvia Fine, wrote so much of his material over the years, that when the Library of Congress set aside a special website describing the materials they hold from the two, they gave them equal billing, as if they were a team known by both names.

So if Kaye's gifts with really quick tongue twisters made him the Robin Williams of his era, something that began in the 1950s made him the Bono of those years as well.  He was selected as a United Nations "Goodwill Ambassador," and became the public celebrity face of the UNICEF children's fund.  He often toured the world on behalf of UNICEF, and in at least one tour flew the aircraft himself.   Kaye, quite a renaissance man, had all manner of pilots' licenses, and knew how to fly everything from the smallest single-engine planes to a Boeing 747. Kaye was also gifted with culinary skills, with the cooking abilities of a master chef, and even had a small gourmet stove installed on his patio. And he was part-owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers, often flying with the team to road games. He was said to have an encyclopedic knowledge of baseball in general, and once recorded a novelty tune for the Dodgers.

And he also stuck his neck out for freedom, when he joined other celebrities (Lucille Ball, Humphrey Bogart, Groucho Marx only being a few) in speaking out against the House Un-American Activities Committee and their bully tactics in 1947.

Kaye did a series of television specials in 1960, '61 and '62, the latter being a well-reviewed ratings triumph on NBC in which he co-starred with Lucille Ball.  While the two apparently did not get along well at all, they managed to do some fine work together in that special, most notably the Chinese restaurant scene.


While the comparison to Robin Williams, who played the first title character in Mork & Mindy, suddenly has me wondering what My Favorite Martian would've been like with Kaye in the lead role, the fact of the matter is the variety show format was really the best use of his talents.  He was comfortable jumping from character to character as much as he changed costumes for those characters, but could also deliver a decent monologue to the studio audience.  And during the first year of his variety series, the show appeared to be very well put together, to the point that it won four Emmys, including Best Variety Series, beating out The Judy Garland Show in the process.

One more thing: in the 1960s, networks still demanded first run material to run on holiday nights. Reruns over holidays, and pre-emptions by football games, weren't as commonplace in those days.  So the closest complete Danny Kaye Show I could immediately find for my blog, happened to be the one telecast on December 25, 1963....what better way to look at the television work of one-fourth of the starring cast of the holiday classic "White Christmas." (And I write this as one of 2013's Christmas film releases, Ben Stiller's remake of Kaye's "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty," hits theaters nationwide.)


Danny cold-opens his show against a black background, shushing us and telling us he has what he's been told is "a document of the utmost importance." It was entrusted to him by his choreographer, Tony Shumley, stressing that it would be "just terrible, if this were to fall into the hands of the wrong people." He assures us no one will get it away from him, just as a hand reaches from off screen and takes it away.


What follows next is an elaborate, multi-shot spy caper with the paper switching hands from one person to another.  (Remember, this was the year after "Dr. No" introduced James Bond to movie audiences.  And oh yes, it was also smack dab in the middle of the Cold War.)   I suspect this sequence made heavy use of videotape editing, which I'm sure wasn't easy in those quad reel days.  When Kaye finally gets the message back, it says "Merry Christmas."


Then we go to the show's open, and presumably a sponsor billboard, perhaps even a commercial. (Sometimes variety shows come with their original commercials intact on DVD, but not this time.  That's a pity, as some of Kaye's sponsors included Rambler automobiles, S & H Green Stamps and Armstrong flooring, and I'm sure some of those ads would've been a hoot to see.)


We catch Danny on the other side, on a stage decorated by a Christmas tree and what appears to be a large pile of torn wrapping paper that presumably came from gifts.  (The show's writers and director clearly knew its audience would have that same type of backdrop in their own homes, with Christmas being nearly over this time of day.)  Against this background, he breaks into a song called "Once in a Lifetime." He then tells us he has a present for us, and reaches into the wrapping paper to pull out...


...my favorite woman in all of television history, Mary Tyler Moore.

Kaye's original producer wanted Dick Van Dyke as one of his priority guests, "with or without Mary Tyler Moore." He got Mary first, and as it turns out, Mary was a smash, with a considerable amount of chemistry with Danny.  So she was invited back multiple times.  This was actually her second appearance.


Mary and Danny then appear in a brief sketch in which they play husband and wife.  At first it looks like a typical husband and wife sketch, with hubby trying to get the wife to tell him what she got him for Christmas.  "C'mon, you can tell me, I won't listen!" he begs.  He thinks he can get her to reveal it by facial expression so he starts rattling off guesses..."A pipe a pouch...ashoearingabat...aballagloveachair?  A desk a cane...a hat, asuitashirtacap?" very quickly in his usual tongue-twister fashion.  What's interesting is the sketch ends with Mary matching him by rattling off guesses the same way and not missing a beat.

After what I'm guessing was a commercial break, Mary (who was a dancer, and had the legs for it I might add) comes out to do a dance number set against the 1920s, with Mary dressed to look like a flapper.  This is one of those old-school Hollywood numbers that may have actually worked better on television than in the movies, as they fit in a lot better in a variety show than a movie with a plot.  It's another one of those things we just don't see any more because we're not the kind of people who appreciate that kind of thing anymore.


Kaye then appears again to introduce "no finer Christmas gift than the one we're about to open." He's talking about that week's musical guest, Nat King Cole, who first sings a swinging version of "Get Me to the Church on Time." Then something magical happens: the background changes to a cozy living room with a fire in the fireplace, and he sings his signature Christmas tune, "The Christmas Song." Here he is, standing on a stage at CBS Television City 50 years ago this very week, on an old, black and white piece of quad videotape, singing a song exactly the way we've heard it piped into department stores for even longer than 50 years, and he's making it new all over again.  It's a sight and sound to behold.

Danny joins him on stage and makes some small talk with him, recalling the last time he heard him sing "The Christmas Song" two years earlier in Japan.  They had apparently worked together and were backstage spending hours talking about baseball and the Dodgers.  They imitate how the Japanese pronounced the names Sandy Koufax and Leo Durocher.  Then they sing "Jingle Bells" in multiple languages and accents.

After a commercial break, Kaye comes back out, sits on a lone chair close to the studio audience, and begins his late-show monologue.  He recalls touring for the armed forces, when he was in the northernmost tip of Japan, in a very cold place, where he and his pianist were watching TV.  It turns out they were watching Gunsmoke, and he then launches into a funny imitation of how Matt Dillon and Chester appeared with Japanese actors dubbing over their lines.  I realize a lot of Kaye's humor is often the imitation of an accent and that may not come off as "politically correct" in this day and age, but I don't see it coming from a place of hate on his part.  He's mostly a man who can get laughs doing funny voices, is all.  It's not like he's J. Carroll Nash, the character actor who made almost an entire career out of broad stereotypes.

The singing Clinger Sisters are next, and Danny reads letters from admiring male fans, mostly for the older girls (which is good since the younger ones were a bit too young to be hit on by anonymous letter writers). Danny had apparently mentioned the two older girls possibly being "old maids," setting off the letters. Danny then joins them as they harmonize on "Baby, It's Cold Outside."

Then Kaye introduces an operetta by a "non-profit opera company," an elaborate musical sketch that finishes out the show.  Carol Burnett used to do musicals like these at the end of her own show, and they usually are the quickest to get cut from the syndicated Carol Burnett and Friends syndication package.  And that's a shame, as a lot of nice work went into those, as it did into this one.


It's set at a "biergarden" in what appears to be late 19th Century or so Germany.  We know we're in good hands because the first two character actors we see are series regular Harvey Korman (who would go straight from this show to Carol Burnett's show in 1967) and frequent bit player Jamie Farr.  They play young cadets in college, "singing, dancing, dueling, kissing and drinking!" as Korman's character puts it.  "Vat udder subjects are ve studying?" he then asks.

Mary Tyler Moore shows up, portraying a princess who wants to mingle to get a better idea of the common person, the "common poople" as she calls them.  She decides to get a job as a waitress at the beer garden.

Kaye arrives as "Vinnie Chucklemeister," the most honored man in all of Heiselberg.  After he's carried around by the other cadets on their shoulders (who bump his head on the hanging lamps), singing "In Vienna," they celebrate their day, which included throwing the headmaster into the danube, "and it's only eight o'clock in the morning!"


During one of the "In Vienna" reprises, the cords on the back of Farr's costume get caught on a chair.  This was obviously unscripted and Kaye ad-libs around it. ("His fiery steed is aloft!  Vere did you get a horse like this?")  This is part of the charm of seeing these variety shows: during the tapings, mistakes like these were sometimes left in, as it was easier to do it that way than to doing a second or third take on such an elaborate sketch.  The Dean Martin Show was especially notable for that.

While the other two cadets suggest Vinnie hang around and fall in love, Vinnie, the self-titled "kissing cadet," says his lips don't sit home at night.  The cadets assure him, one kiss from the right woman will make him fall in love.  So he kisses the princess/waitress, who suddenly stops still in wide-eyed wonder.   As for Vinnie, his buttons turn into flashing lights.  Sure enough, they fall in love on the spot and Kaye sings some more apparently original music, a song expressing his feelings of love but consisting of angry-sounding, clunky German words, and he pulls this off very well.  Mary does the same thing on the next verse, making a hilarious punchline out of the German language.


Vinnie declares he's a poor student and the only thing that could get in the way would be if she were a princess.  But then the consort comes back and tells the princess she's due at the palace, blowing her secret; apparently Vinnie thought her tiara was "high hair pins." It sends the heartbroken Vinnie and his fellow cadets into a comically ugly cry.  Then another consort tells Vinnie his own six years are up and he is due back at a palace.  Apparently Vinnie forgot he was a king.  "You don't read the paper von day and you forget everything that is going on!" So they're off to get married, being carried on everyone's shoulders.


The show ends with Danny, Nat and Mary, backed by a chorus, all singing "Let There Be Peace on Earth." Danny thanks his audience and wishes them a Merry Christmas, and the show ends, the closing theme, "Rendezvous In May," playing over the credits.

It's a warm, likable hour from a talented man who seems likable enough himself.  Offstage...it was more of a mixed bag.

Danny Kaye was married to the same woman from 1940 until his death in 1987, but not 100% happily it seems.  He left her for his radio co-star, Eve Arden, with whom he had a lengthy affair, but eventually came back and swore never to leave Sylvia again.  But by all accounts he still didn't remain faithful.

For all his apparently on-stage friendliness and sincerity, Kaye had a temper and was often cold and dismissive.  His supporters argue (and concede) he was a perfectionist who gave everything he did 100%, but had no patience for others who didn't.  Then again, there are stories about Kaye blowing up at people for the "crimes" of, say, telling him "I hope you feeling better soon." ("Why should you care?" he once reportedly bellowed back,while hobbling on a burned leg from a cooking accident.)  For all the interaction he did with children, through UNICEF and with performers like the Clinger Sisters and child actress Victoria Paige Meyerink, he didn't always get along especially well with children.  Meyerink even scaled back her appearances when she began to feel a bit hurt that Kaye was apparently "pushing her buttons," like for instance, having a set painted yellow after finding out it was her least favorite color.  (This, for a black and white show, meaning it couldn't have been necessary.)  Those claims of perfectionism fall apart when one hears some awful stories of his constantly acting up during his role in the Broadway musical "Two By Two." Perhaps it's a testament to his acting skills that he could "fake" sincerity so well, if indeed that was the case.


But still, think about this: Kaye had talent to do a lot of things.  He could've been a deadly serious actor, for instance, as he showed with his jaw-dropping performance as a Holocaust survivor fighting a neo-Nazi protest in the 1983 CBS TV-movie "Skokie." He could've just held an occasional fundraiser or handed an occasional big check to UNICEF or some other charity, but he flew around the world tirelessly for that fund, just as he did to entertain troops in war and peace alike.  And there are plenty of people who have very nice stories to tell of Kaye--for instance, the time he cooked a gourmet Asian meal for the workers installing a swimming pool in his backyard.  Even the guy who got his head bit off for daring to say "I hope you feel better soon," thinks highly of Kaye.  So does Victoria Paige Meyerink.

Then again, who are we to judge?   We're now so edgy and ironic as a pop culture, we can't enjoy a simple, old-school variety show anymore.  Saturday Night Live and The Daily Show With Jon Stewart have all ruined us forever on variety shows and the patter and music that would be involved.  The closest we have anymore are late night talk shows, award shows and every once in awhile, a special.  Perhaps all we really have the right to ask any performer is that he or she entertains us. Perhaps we should take some comfort in the fact that Danny Kaye was truly happy when he clocked in, just as he did on that Christmas Day in 1963 (or more specifically, weeks earlier when it was taped). Instead of pretending to invite us into his home for Christmas like Judy Garland did (in his case it might've looked like a cooking show...plus Kaye was Jewish and might not be celebrating anyway), he simply went to work like he always did at Television City, at least for four years. Maybe we should take comfort in the fact that he might've been a bit cold to the people who saw him offstage, because he was saving his best for the rest of us.

Availability: This is part of a Danny Kaye Christmas DVD that came out in the late fall of 2012 and can be easily found for a nice price.  Harder to find is a compilation DVD of the best sketches from his show, or other complete shows in general.

Next time on this channel: it's the busy holiday season, so...reruns.

"Nostalgia Ain't What It Used to Be"

Yogi Berra's famous words might not have drawn so much laughter if he'd been talking about reruns...then he would've been spot-on.



In 1937, a beautifully written and acted radio series for children, was syndicated to local stations in time for the Christmas holidays.  The Cinnamon Bear had a pair of children following a talking stuffed bear into a wonderland, looking for their stolen aluminum star that was supposed to go atop their Christmas tree, and finding a number of memorable characters in the process.  This audio "cartoon" aired 15 minutes each weekday evening and was usually sponsored by local department stores to advertise themselves as destinations for Christmas shoppers, and children who wanted to sit in Santa's lap.  The series was repeated by many radio stations every year, some as late as the early 1950s.

While long forgotten or completely unknown by most people (except old time radio fans who talk it up heavily every November and December), it nonetheless pioneered at least two things we take for granted in modern day television. One of them is the annual Christmas special for children "of all ages," like Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (which arrived just in time for Baby Dixon's first Christmas) and A Charlie Brown Christmas. The other thing it did was to revolutionize the fact that people would make appointment listening out of something they've heard before, perhaps even because they've heard it before.

For all intents and purposes, it looks like The Cinnamon Bear invented the syndicated rerun as a viable force in broadcasting.  It proved reruns were more than just schedule filler, they could be very real ratings grabbers, and could be programmed as such.


Groucho Marx once took credit, in a book he wrote, for joining producer John Guedel in inventing the network rerun--both types.  He recorded his radio comedy-quiz You Bet Your Life in advance instead of doing it live, recording lengthy interviews with contestants and only using his funniest jokes.  (That's exactly how Who's Line is It Anyway? was videotaped as late as the 1990s.)  And it was his recorded show that appeared to be the first to go into in-season reruns on radio, as opposed to taking the summer off in favor of another, short-lived show.  Then, in the late 1950s, when NBC radio was looking for filler material for its Monitor series, they dusted off old You Bet Your Life and People are Funny radio programs, both produced by Guedel, for that very purpose.  This, as the network did the same for the TV versions, making the two shows the first game shows to ever go into reruns.


This idea eventually caught on in television, surprisingly slowly (even I Love Lucy usually left the air for the summer instead of appearing in reruns).  A look through the January 1964 issues of TV Guide that I have show three types.  One, the in-season network rerun, was designated by (Rerun) in the listings; by the time I was poring through TV Guides in the 1970s it had been changed to (Repeat).  A few network shows were in reruns in late January (The Beverly Hillbillies being one), perhaps because their casts and crews took time off in December for the Christmas holidays.  I used (Rerun) as the title of this post but don't plan to go any further into that type.

There are two others: the now-gone (or now evolved?) daytime network rerun, and the syndicated rerun.

Syndicated Reruns

If it weren't for syndicated reruns, sold directly to local stations, I might've never been well acquainted with Lucy Ricardo, Ralph Kramden, Beaver Cleaver, or Jim Anderson's entire family.  I might've known Lassie only as the pretty collie who hung out with a forest ranger named Corey, with no clue she ever belonged to a little boy on a farm (actually, two consecutively).  And I might've never heard about that fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man, The Twilight Zone.  During the "baby boomer" years we got to know this phenomenon as "Rerun Heaven," the idea that once a network was finished with a good enough show, it could live "forever" in reruns.  In the logic of our perverse, couch potato universe, it was something of a badge of honor, to see the shows that looked so pristine coming down the network lines just a year earlier, now with occasional dust, film splices, vertical jumps from malfunctioning film chains, and top-corner "cigarette burns" to cue the commercial breaks.

A look through the Kentucky edition of TV Guide for the week of January 11-17, 1964, shows these shows in syndicated rotation: The Ann Southern Show, The Amos 'N' Andy Show, Our Miss Brooks, theatrical shorts featuring the Three Stooges, The Mickey Mouse Club, Science Fiction Theater, Highway Patrol,  Adventures of Superman, Thriller and Mr. Lucky.

A New York City edition from January 18-24 yields a bumper crop.  These are always very fascinating to see, as the stations include three independents who had to feed the beast with as many reruns as they could find.  This included prime time, where they competed with current day fare by using recent cast-offs, like Sugarfoot, Lawman, Hawaiian Eye, Checkmate and Boris Karloff's anthology series, Thriller.  A peek into the daytime shows The Phil Silvers Show and the forerunner to all of those fantasy shows of the 1960s, the 1950s ghost sitcom Topper.


A peek at a Pennsylvania edition from the last week of the month adds a raft of westerns, populating Rerun Heaven with the western craze of 1955-63:  The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp, Cheyenne, The Rifleman, Maverick, and even Jack Lord's short-lived, modern-day western, Stoney Burke. Add to that Sea Hunt, Leave It to Beaver, Adventures in Paradise, and Love That Bob! (the syndication re-title of The Bob Cummings Show).  There, also in the mix, is the man who claimed the dubious title of "inventor of the rerun," Groucho Marx, whose TV version of You Bet Your Life was running as The Best of Groucho. The Groucho films were heavily cropped, leaving the De Soto/Plymouth logos out of the frame, with a little graphics "cloud" covering up the NBC letters on Groucho's microphone.

In the Kentucky edition, I'm struck by two shows, competing against each other in early afternoon reruns, that had things in common and then, couldn't be more different from one another.  The Amos 'N Andy Show and Our Miss Brooks. both originally ran on CBS in the 1950s (even sharing one season together, 1952-53) and both began on radio.  (In fact, the network radio versions of both outlasted the TV versions, even continuing on radio afterwards.)  And you won't find either one in reruns anywhere anymore.  The similarities end there.


The Amos 'N Andy Show was removed from syndication in 1966 after years of controversy.  And it's easy to see why: the characters are racist stereotypes.  The two title characters are co-owners of a little-seen taxicab company.  Andy is slow-witted, and quick to be fooled by the always conniving con artist, George Stevens, the "Kingfish" of the Mystic Knights of the Sea Lodge.  Amos is the more intelligent member of the cast who narrates most episodes but is rarely seen.  And the dialect is cringeworthy to put it mildly: "I's a-going to de lodge" is an example, and "I's regusted wid de whole thing" is actually the closest thing the show had to a catchphrase.  The actors acted over the top with their characterizations, mainly because the show's white creators told them to do it that way. Worst of all, it was the only show on television at the time with an all black cast, the only show to portray any type of life in the black community.  And that's a shame: on the plus side, those creators, Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll (who actually voiced these characters on radio) clearly had a lot of affection for these characters (however misguided they may have shown it), and the actors, say what else you will about them, have pretty good comic timing.  The writers, Joe Connelly and Bob Mosher (who'd go on to create Leave It to Beaver and The Munsters) actually had a lot of very funny, non-racist lines buried in all of this.

Spencer Williams as Andy and Tim Moore as the Kingfish

But you have to get through a lot of offensive material to get to it--and really, no one should have to.  The characters may appear racially stereotypical in the worst possible ways, but they're also 1950s sitcom archetypes that also played out on mostly white shows. The Kingfish had a lot in common with Sgt. Ernie Bilko, for instance, and the Kingfish's wife, Sapphire, was a strong female character; she and Alice Kramden were clearly birds of a feather.  But there again, Sgt. Bilko and Ralph and Alice Kramden aren't hurtful to people.

Alvin Childress and Spencer Williams as Amos and Andy.

The show originally ran for two and a half seasons on CBS from 1951 to 1953, then was cancelled when its sponsor, Blatz Beer, pulled out after being the target of a boycott.  Perhaps it didn't exactly help that the show premiered during the annual NAACP convention.  Nonetheless, as late as January 1964, the show was still a hit in reruns, especially during the daytime hours and especially in the South.  This is especially eyebrow-raising, considering the evening news was full of protests, riots, a deadly 1963 Birmingham church bombing, a stand in a schoolhouse door, an attack on marchers at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama.  All of this was carried on stations that still showed The Amos 'N Andy Show in reruns--a leap forward, followed by a few steps back.  The show was finally withdrawn from syndication, and even though a small cable channel does rerun some of the public domain episodes even now, it's unlikely you'll ever see the show with digitally remastered episodes, with the TV Land or MeTV bug in the corner, with modern day commercials in the breaks, or on an official DVD with a specific logo at the end.

But I did find the show's best loved, and arguably least offensive, episode: its December 1952 Christmas show.  I suspect this was meant to be rerun every year in the holiday season, had the show not been cancelled in 1953.  It's a remake of the annual Christmas show from radio.  It opens with a flashback to nine years earlier, when Amos' daughter was born, and he and Andy are pacing in the waiting room, Andy, the godfather, expecting it to be a boy and acting even more nervously.  But Arbadella was, of course, a girl. Then, present day, Andy and Arbadella are looking in a store window at all the toys, in a very nostalgic set piece (just 12 years removed from the setting of the movie "A Christmas Story").  The dimwitted Andy pretends to know, for instance, that an artists' easel is a hat with a tassel that keeps their heads warm.  (His lack of education is one of the most offensive parts of the show.)  She then spots a talking doll that she'd love to have for Christmas, but her father already told her Santa couldn't afford to bring it this year.

(My friend Lee Withers points out that on radio, Arbadella was played by Barbara Jean Wong, who played Judy in the aforementioned Cinnamon Bear radio show.  On TV Arbadella was played by African-American child actress Patti Marie Ellis.)

Nick O'Demus (left) played Lightnin'.

Lightnin' (the show's most unfortunate Stepin Fetchit character) helps Andy with wrapping his presents, and runs across some handkerchiefs with the letter "C" on them.  Andy had bought them for a girl he dated the previous Christmas, Carmen, but they broke up before he could give them to her.  He's now dating another girl, and is calling her "Cookie" just to hedge his bets.  (Andy's awkward girl chasing is one of the funnier parts of the show.)   Then the Kingfish shows up, angling for a present, and talking about a conversation he had with his wife, about "that bathrobe in the corner window at the Westside Men's Shop." Andy isn't concerned about getting anything from the Kingfish, but he'd really like to get something nice for Arbadella.


Andy manages to get hired as Santa Claus--making one of television's earliest Santas, black.  He hears children ask for jet planes, tanks, machine guns, and a little girl asking for some masculine toys...for her younger brother, who's sick.  There's a running joke where Andy calls for a floorwalker everytime there's a problem--like not knowing where Santa gets the oranges and bananas that he puts in stockings, and not knowing the answer to a request for a baby sister.  It's actually a very well-written scene.

Andy finishes his assignment, and the manager gives him the doll Arbadella requested.  After Andy delivers it, comes the show's crowning touch.  Amos goes to visit his daughter in her bedroom on the night of Christmas Eve, and she can't sleep from the excitement.  So she requests the radio be turned on.  It's at that point, as a chorus sings the words, Amos explains the Lord's Prayer to his daughter. When he finishes, it suddenly starts snowing outside--as I explained in the post about Lassie, this is a metaphor that means God is listening and granting His blessings.  No matter what you think of the rest of the series--this is a very sweet, tender scene, and a television rarity now and even back then.  An atheist once told me this touched him more than anything else he ever saw on television.


From there, we got to a show that had zero controversy that I know of...it's simply not seen anymore because, presumably, its shelf life expired.


Our Miss Brooks starred the wisecracking Eve Arden as a single high school English teacher who constantly chases after her crush, Mr. Boynton, the science teacher.  She tries not to run afoul of her boss, principal Osgood Conklin, played by Gale Gordon.  She's a strong, sharp-tongued character that I would've thought would hold up well even now, and it's a shame she's not better remembered than she is.

Born as Eunice Quendens, Arden was getting by on bit parts in plays and movies when she reportedly saw two perfume bottles in a department store--Evening in Paris and Elizabeth Arden--and took the stage name Eve Arden.  Her breakout role was in a comedy sketch in the Ziegfeld Follies, which led to a major full screen role in 1937's "Stage Door," establishing her in that role for multiple movies.  One of the most notable found her opposite Joan Crawford in "Mildred Pierce." She also played the role of Danny Kaye's agent in his 1945-46 radio variety show (while she was having a real-life affair with him), and in 1948 began starring in her own radio show, Our Miss Brooks.  It made the jump to television in 1952, and lasted four years. The first three includes a lot of stellar dialogue that holds up surprisingly well even now, even if the situations seem rather ridiculous.

Robert Rockwell as Mr. Boynton and Eve Arden as the title character in Our Miss Brooks

One classic, well-remembered episode (that fits the "it could never happen now" category) had student Walter Denton (played by a squeaky-voiced Richard Crenna, who's obviously much older than a high school student) bringing a short-wave radio to school on a rainy, storm day.  It's the same day Mr. Conklin has to stay home so some expensive (and classically 1950s) bamboo furniture could be delivered.  So, he leaves Connie in charge of the school.  And she hears that same radio announce a pending hurricane warning for the area, so she immediately does what any principal would do in the face of dire weather: closes down the school and sends everyone home.  Only when she's out of the room do we hear the announcer give his location: Bombay, India.


She, Walter and Mr. Boynton head to Mr. Conklin's house with the radio to make sure he's okay, as they hilariously try to make sense out of the weather bulletins, calling for "lashing down of all ox carts" and "sending the natives to the hills." The announcer demands that windows be boarded up with...you guessed it...bamboo, with Mr. Conklin almost in tears as his new furniture gets destroyed.  Everyone finally starts to figure something is up with the warning to "tether your elephants."  "Tether your ELEPHANTS??!! Whooooo keeps elephants??" Conklin bellows.

Richard Crenna and Gale Gordon in Our Miss Brooks

It's among a few episodes that are on Youtube, including my personal favorite, "Marinated Hearing" from 1953.  It's a remake of a radio script from 1950.  It's "Board of Education" day At Madison High, and Walter gets the idea to set off the school's historic cannon, while Mr. Conklin is standing directly next to it. Denton, the editor of the school paper, had also written a scathing editorial blasting the school board that Connie looked over and took away temporarily so she could get Walter to water it down a bit.  Walter's friend Stretch, the really dumb football player, gets a laughably inept biology report mixed up with the editorial, which both get torn up and thrown into a garbage can.  A more board-friendly editorial (which Conklin now wants read out loud to the superintendent) also gets torn up and put in the same trash can.  And it's up to Stretch to piece together the "good" speech from those remnants.


So the cannon goes off, Conklin temporarily loses his hearing, and the pieced together speech is read to the superintendent by Connie while an unknowing Conklin nods his head in approval.  "This august body is composed of a group of able members, and these baboons grow to a height of four feet," goes one sample line, with Conklin adding "Believe me, every word comes right from my heart." "These members of the board of education make very good pets, as they don't hardly bother nobody as they're all the time busy making love," goes more of the speech that's being read with a straight face to the school superintendent.

Unfortunately, one development of syndicated reruns over the years, is sometimes entire scenes, perhaps even the funniest scenes, get chopped out to make room for more commercials, especially for mail order products like the Ronco Kitchen Magician and Mr. Microphone in the 1970s.  I suspect that's the source of this Youtube Our Miss Brooks episode as it's missing its howler of an epilogue.  Connie, thinking Mr. Conklin's hearing is still gone (it's not, he can hear again) smiles, appears friendly, even gives him a neck massage, all while going on and on about what she thinks of him...the term "overstuffed windbag" comes up, along with "cheapskate." Even though the mechanics of the script are strictly 1950s situational goofiness, that final scene is a great, lengthy experiment in cringe comedy that would've fit right in today and would've made masters of that type of humor, say Steve Carell and Ricky Gervais, proud.

Our Miss Brooks lasted four seasons, its final one being a "jump the shark" year in which the setting is changed to a private elementary school.  It ran in reruns as late as the 1970s (the one I just cited on Youtube ending with the Viacom "V of Doom" logo from the late 1970s) but has now, sadly, mostly disappeared.  It's definitely a candidate for preservation on DVD, along with The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show and the rest of The Phil Silvers Show...both of which, too, were in syndicated reruns in 1964.

Network Daytime Reruns


...So if you're asking, "Wait!  Where's Lucy in all of this?" there's a very good answer.  Lucy was a major player.  Her reruns were considered even more special than anything you'd see spooling through the film chain at a local station.  Seven years after the last first-run episode, and four years after Lucy and Desi got divorced, they were still ratings magic and still rained money for the network.  That's why CBS held onto them as tightly as they could.


CBS had always wanted to keep the show going, in fact.  That's why they talked the cast into continuing the storyline as monthly specials from 1957 to 1960, and why they tried to get William Frawley and Vivian Vance to star in their own spinoff in 1960.  Unfortunately the two hated each other in real life and were pretty much done with having to work together.  In-season reruns didn't actually begin until 1955, and even then, on a different night of the week, Sunday.  There were also other rerun series including 1960's Lucy in Connecticut (featuring the rural-themed episodes from the series' final season), and a 1962 summer rerun of the 1957-60 monthly specials, now dubbed The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour.  As late as 2013, two colorized 1956 episodes--the Christmas-themed clip show and "Lucy's Italian Movie"--were actually rerun as a prime time special.  (The once "lost" Christmas show never even got a second broadcast until 1989 and was never part of the rerun package.)

So important was the show for CBS' daytime lineup, that when NBC and ABC were showing hearings on the Vietnam War in 1966, CBS stuck with Lucy, and CBS News President Fred W. Friendly (who was once Edward R. Murrow's right hand man) quit in protest.  The episode in question was the one featuring Tennessee Ernie Ford as visiting "Cousin Ernie"; perhaps CBS wanted to keep this one since Ford was hosting a daytime variety show on ABC at the time.  (Ironically, Lucy left CBS for syndication the following year.)

The week I was born in January 1964, kicked off the 1956 storyline about the Ricardos heading to Europe. On Monday, Lucy got seasick aboard the Staten Island Ferry and found herself at the mercy of a fussy passport clerk; by Friday she was off on a fox hunt.  (The classic "grape stomping" episode, "Lucy's Italian Movie," would be rerun two weeks later.)  The day I was born was a rerun of the one where Lucy misses their cruise ship, the SS Constitution, when she runs back to the dock to kiss Little Ricky one more time. Unfortunately, her dress gets caught on a messenger's bicycle.  The episode is all about her many attempts to then catch the pilot boat, then a helicopter.  My favorite bit was when a dispatcher (Jack Albertson) tells her she's out of luck, since the last helicopter just left to pick up some crazy lady who missed the Constitution. ("I'm that crazy lady!  Bring it back!")  Desi Arnaz once said it was the show's most expensive episode to produce.

One of the Best Shows You've Never Heard Of

East Side/West Side was dark, harsh, often depressing and even hopeless.  It was great.



East Side/West Side, "One Drink at a Time"
OB: January 27, 1964, 10 p.m. EST, CBS
This episode aired when I was 13 days old.

"Now I want you to remember that no bastard ever won a war by dying for his country.  He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country."

And that's how most people picture General George S. Patton--that speech from the movie "Patton," delivered by George C. Scott in his role of a lifetime.  Most people who've never see actual footage or heard actual recordings of the real Patton, likely picture him, or hear him in their heads, looking/sounding like Scott. (Neither would've been true, of course.)  And most people see this motivational speech as the ultimate example of gung-ho, up-by-your-bootstraps, no-excuse, flag waving patriotism, the giant flag behind him dwarfing him but still making him appear bigger than life.  He was a tough guy and nothing and no one ever got in the way of what he wanted...not Rommel, no one, except maybe Patton's own bad behavior.

Almost no one would didn't already know better, would look at that and say, "Yes, definitely...I could see that actor as an inner-city social worker.  He'd be perfect." The ones who would, could laugh at that very thought, since the first man to ever actually think that...was George C. Scott himself.


The role was Neil Brock, and the show was one of television history's greatest "brilliant but cancelled" poster children, East Side/West Side.  During a television season which included President Lyndon Johnson declaring his "War on Poverty" in his annual State of the Union address, the man who would one day play Patton declared his own such war four months earlier.

The show appeared on CBS, in the fallout of FCC Chairman Newton Minnow's speech calling television a "vast wasteland" and challenging the networks to come up with better programming.  CBS had founder and board chairman William S. Paley, who always prided himself on taking this to heart with critical favorites like The Twilight Zone, and CBS President Jim Aubrey, who had a more cynical view of what the public liked and served up Mister Ed and Gilligan's Island.  So, from the outside, viewers saw a schizophrenic network.  Still, Aubrey would let the high-quality fare get by if it delivered the numbers.

It was actually Aubrey himself who greenlit East Side/West Side, but you could argue he was tricked or forced into it.


Scott, and the show, found each other.  In 1962 he and United Artists announced a deal with CBS for a new TV show.  But they didn't say what it was because, frankly, they didn't know.  Scott didn't see anything offered to him that he liked.  Scott, who channeled his own anger and depression into most of his roles, had a dead-end job at IBM and often got into bar fights before he got into acting.  Scott had made a splash on Broadway, first playing King Richard III, then getting Oscar nominated roles in the movies "Anatomy of a Murder" and "The Hustler." While he wasn't crazy about television, he had appeared on The DuPont Show of the Month, Kraft Theatre, Naked City, The Virginian and even got an Emmy nomination for an episode of Ben Casey.  Nonetheless, he agreed to star in a new series on CBS.  In exchange, he'd be committed to the show for three years (unless it was cancelled), get $10,000 an episode, and (apparently the deal sweetener) some $70,000 would go toward Scott's pet project, the Theatre of Michigan, headquartered in his hometown of Detroit.

Scott's relationship with CBS was rocky from the start.  He rejected the ideas they kept bringing him, including their preferred idea: an action series featuring Scott as a foreign correspondent.  (Scott really hated that one in particular.)  His rejection left the network, and Aubrey, semi-desperate, as it looked like Scott might violate his agreement.  That's when David Susskind showed up.

Susskind is mostly remembered as a talk show host, the host of the innovative Open End and the longer running show with his own name.  He also co-owned Talent Associates, Ltd., which had produced TV shows ranging wildly from the Wally Cox sitcom Mister Peepers to the anthology docudrama Armstrong Circle Theatre.  Susskind turned to Robert Alan Aurthur, a live TV playwright, who found an old script about three social workers, reworked into a starring vehicle for Scott.  Its title, East Side/West Side, referred to the two halves of upper Manhattan using Central Park as a boundary.


The pilot, "It's War, Man," actually aired later in the season, and while it was rather unlike the rest of the series, it did establish its premise.  Scott and two other workers, were employed at the Community Welfare Service of New York City, a fictional, private agency.  (Susskind chose to make the agency private for dramatic license, as a public agency would've been more limited.)


So, for the first time in history, a TV series documented life at a social agency, its main character a social worker.   Elizabeth Wilson played Frieda “Hecky” Hechlinger, Brock's boss who often deferred to his judgment on most matters.  The groundbreaking role of secretary (and occasionally, social worker) Jane Foster was played by Cecily Tyson, in a rare regular role for an African American actress at the time.

Stephen Bowie's writeup of the series appears to be the definitive reference dealing with the show, and most of the information here comes from his website.  It's a comprehensive history that describes the show's production in great detail, which turned out to be every bit as turbulent as the world it wanted to describe. The temperamental Scott often fought for more realism, but also found himself at odds with some of the greatest writers in the business.  Scott, and the show's producers, were always at odds with the network, considering the show's subject matter, its dark, gritty style of looking at it and the fact that Jim Aubrey was more of a Petticoat Junction fan.

The good news for the show was that it was placed on CBS' lineup with a beloved, highly rated show as its lead-in.  The bad news: the show was placed on Monday nights, the night most people start their work weeks and perhaps the least likely night of the week when an audience would want to view this kind of show.  And the lead-in in question: the show's polar opposite, The Andy Griffith Show, a comedy set in a small town where everyone wanted to look out for each other.  It wasn't exactly the kind of audience that would be in the mood to stick around for a weekly exercise in inner-city social Darwinism, not after spending a happy half-hour in Mayberry.

The show was meant to showcase the gritty streets of New York, the plight of the poor and struggling, people to whom $5 would be a fortune and any shack could be a palace as long as it didn't leak.  Not every ending was a happy ending, and most weren't..in fact, Neil Brock wasn't much of a hero, what he could do wasn't often enough to solve a social problem that ran much deeper than perhaps we first thought.  And that was the whole point of the series: one man couldn't solve these problems, society in general would have to step up.  The series' premiere, in fact, was about a prostitute who fought to keep her child when her in-laws sued for custody.  The ending was supposed to be a happy one, but was changed one day before shooting began (at the request of Scott and Susskind). Ultimately it ended with the woman losing custody and saying "I want my baby back!  I want my baby back!" on the steps of the courthouse in New York City.

We definitely weren't in Mayberry anymore.

Scott and a number of the writers, producers and directors, were perfectionists, so script revisions on the set would become a recurring theme on this show.  Director Ralph Senesky describes in his blog how he and the actors, including that week's guest star, Carroll O'Connor, did their own rewrites to make a couple of scenes work on the series' second episode, "Age of Consent." O'Connor played a cop who found out his 17 year old daughter was having sex with her 21 year old boyfriend, so he called the cops and filed charges for statutory rape.  It was daring for the time and eyebrow raising even now, and had a bittersweet ending. Senesky also says his one and only episode was otherwise drama-free, and came apparently before the turnover and upheaval that would mark the series' run.  At one point the story editor and many of the writers, were people who had been blacklisted during the McCarthy era.


The show prided itself on pushing envelopes and taking stands, with Scott and the staff vs. the network and sometimes vs. each other.  And the episodes tackled some tough issues for that time and a few even for now.  The episode "You Can't Beat the System" found Brock trying to help a Korean War veteran with post-traumatic stress syndrome.  "No Wings at All" was about a couple coping with a son who was mentally retarded (written by Allen Sloane, himself the father of an autistic child); "My Child on Monday Morning" directly addressed autism.

Perhaps the series' best and most highly acclaimed episode, "Who Do You Kill?" may have been its most controversial.  It attracted a lot of hate mail and angry phone calls, even threats.  A number of affiliates, including WAGA-TV, Channel 5 in Atlanta, refused to air it.  The episode featured a young James Earl Jones as Joe Goodwin and Diana Sands as his wife Ruth.  Don Goodwin tries to find a dignified job that isn't menial; Ruth helps out by waiting tables.  But they're basically trapped in their poverty by a system that tries harder to protect people already benefiting from it.  If that's not enough, in the show's most shocking twist, their baby is bitten by a rat in their tenement, and dies when Joe has trouble finding someone to help get him to a hospital.   Ruth suffers a breakdown and refuses to go to the funeral, while an angry Joe considers violence.  The script has not only sharp, political commentary but also delves into the characters of Joe and Diana showing them alone at home...a rarity in 1963.  The script won and Emmy and a Writer's Guild award.

"No Hiding Place" took on the practice of "blockbusting," as a wealthy liberal couple welcomes a black family to the neighborhood.  Unfortunately, shady realtors try to convince the other whites in the neighborhood to sell their homes due to declining property values...only to resell them to affluent blacks at much higher asking prices.  The show made news when a scene showing Scott dancing with guest star Ruby Dee was cut due to a fear of offending affiliates.  Scott gave interviews in which he blasted CBS and called them "cowards."


These controversial episodes did not make Jim Aubrey happy at all, especially considering that he wanted Cicely Tyson off the show.  Just her presence, apparently, was generating angry mail (that and the fact she was treated as an equal by the white characters).  George C. Scott had a different idea--he wanted his character to fall in love it Tyson's character and marry her, something that was unheard of in 1963 television (and in real life, even illegal in multiple states at the time).

Alas, these pieces of groundbreaking television are mostly unavailable.  The series has only been rerun once, on the Trio cable network in the early 2000s as part of their Brilliant But Cancelled series.  And only one episode is currently available (to me, anyway, since I can't get to a broadcasting museum anytime soon).  It's a fairly rough copy, apparently recorded on the longest speed from a DVD player, from the Brilliant But Cancelled series.  That means the video is fuzzy and Kenyon Hopkins' jazz score comes off very warbly. But it's all we have.


It's the series' 16th episode to air, "One Drink at a Time," originally airing at 10 p.m. on January 27, 1964, immediately after the episode of The Andy Griffith Show in which Barney buys a motorcycle.  In the opening moments of the show, we see a homeless woman loading pieces of cardboard into an old baby carriage.  She's Molly Cavanaugh and she's played by highly acclaimed actress Maureen Stapleton.  She walks into a bar where her friend Sam (J.D. Cannon) and his buddy Billy are being thrown out because they're out of money.  She says "Hiya, hubby!" He blows up and tells her to quit calling him that, he's not her "hubby." Out on the street, his friend Billy sees the carriage and says "Hey Sam!  Jug money!" They run off with Molly's cardboard as she haplessly takes off after them.  Barney, his motorcycle and Mayberry have all now clearly disappeared from our rearview mirrors at this point; we're now on the streets of New York watching an ugly display of social Darwinism along desperate people.


Cut to the show's open with Hopkins' jazz instrumental, mimicking the subway we see George C. Scott presumably riding home from work at the end of another day, darkly lit to fit the show's tone.


While I'm describing atmosphere, I should say a word about the noirish look at the streets of New York. Jack Priestley was hired as the show's director of photography, replicating the look that won him two Emmys on the just-canceled ABC series Naked City.  It's a look that serves its purpose, giving us such a sad world for these characters, almost as if it's a "thrift store" society cast aside by an earlier society, as if the Great Depression never ended.  It's a dark world even in the middle of the day.  I can't imagine what this show could've possibly looked like in color.  But the "look" was only one reason for the hire, according to Bowie's website.  Don Kranze, the executive production who hired Priestley,  later recalled, “I knew that Jack had shot in all kind of impossible situations in Naked City, all over the city, under any condition you wanted.  And he was a very calm type fellow.  And I knew that with Mister Vesuvius [Scott], you’d better have that type of fellow.  Cause things on a set get a little bit edgy after ten, eleven, twelve hours.”  The show so prided itself on realism that it often sought out some of the nastiest locations to spotlight.  A TV Guide article once quote Scott arriving at a truly awful-looking alley to shoot a fight scene, declaring, "Boy, this is terrible--it’s great!"

As the show resumes, the baby carriage full of cardboard flats gets wheeled into a recycling center, where the guys demand to know how much money they can get for them.  Molly, who's used to dealing with the guy and getting a little more money, is shut out of the conversation, as the manager hands them 40 cents, which the men keep for Molly's cardboard.  They're headed to get something to drink, and we can clearly see alcoholism is playing a very important role in this episode.  But this is not going to be a traditional episode about alcoholism...these characters, Sam in particular, are end stage alcoholics and they're going to buy paint thinner at a paint store.  Molly tries in vain to stop him, begging him to hold out for some wine.


It's a rather shocking thing to see, these two men passing around a can of paint thinner.  Yet, the idea of an alcoholic drinking dangerous chemicals was actually played for laughs a year earlier, on an episode of NBC's Car 54, Where are You? featuring guest star Larry Storch.  This time, however, it's portrayed in all of its truly ugly glory.  We're not meant to laugh, we're meant to gasp and cover our mouths.


Molly comes to the CWS office and speaks to Neil.  She explains her boyfriend's addiction to wood alcohol, how he started out "cutting" it with water but eventually started taking it straight.  "I just can't stand to see him fall face down in the street and have them tie that white tag around his wrist," she tells him.  When Neil explains the CWS isn't set up to cure substance abuse, Molly says, "I don't want to stop him from drinking, I want to stop him from dying." She simply wants to stabilize his life and get him a better grade of alcohol, like say, a cheap brand of wine.

Molly wants to get on welfare, but she can't be eligible unless she has a permanent address...and she can't keep a permanent address without the welfare money.  When she explains that she's found a place to live for $12 a week...then explains they'd each pay the $12...Neil suddenly acts very skeptical.  When she starts to leave, leaving it up to Neil to believe her or not, he tells her there's an "emergency fund" for shelters...and reaches into his pocket to hand her $23.  She says she can find the rest, and leaves to find Sam.


Sam and Billy are finishing off the rest of the wood alcohol along with a friend named Harry, who's wearing a coat and what appears to be a captain's hat.  We very quickly hear Harry's story...he was actually an attorney before alcohol destroyed him, and actually wanted to take a low-wage job picking potatoes in New Jersey but was too drunk to show up for work.  Harry is so drunk he can barely walk as the three run out of thinner.  Sam even checks out a can of shoe polish, which he finds empty, before the three hit up a pedestrian for more money.  As they pass around whatever they bought with the money, Harry collapses onto the ground, dead.  Sam notes, "Harry was really looking to get out of this town," as he and Billy take his hat and jacket.

A quick cutaway to the CWS office has Neil calling the hotel where Molly was supposed to check in, and finding out she never did.  He declares he's been taken.


When Molly tries to get Sam to come to the flophouse with her, we hear a lot of their back story.  It turns out the two have been together for years, all over the country; at one point they shared a room in Omaha, while he worked as a meat packer, and another time they had an apartment in El Paso overlooking the Rio Grande, where he proposed to her.  "You took off to get the license and I didn't see you for 19 days," she notes. She also gets upset when she realizes he has Harry's jacket and hat (she knew Harry), saying this is as low as Sam has ever sunk.  "You never took the clothes off a dead man before," she tells him.  Sam responds that Harry himself took the hat off another dead man.  Reluctantly, Sam agrees to go to the hotel and even swears off paint thinners, bay rum, hair tonic, antifreeze "or even canned heat." (Yes, this guy is pretty hardcore.)

When she catches Neil dozing in his office after hours, he gets up in her face and says he wishes he could shake that $23 back out of her.  He demands that she put whatever's left of that money on his desk.  She responds by throwing the hotel keys in front of him.  A surprised Neil promises to get her welfare application started, and she admits she's there for "another touch." So Neil hands her some grocery money.  Not only does she have a big heart, Molly's special talent appears to be street-honed negotiating skills.


We next see Sam and Molly...and Billy...in the hotel room.  She announces she has "breakfast" and he hurries into the room, only to be disappointed to find coffee.  Neil shows up at that point with a hot plate and some pots and pans.  He says welfare will only pay for lunch and dinner, so she can use what he brought her to make coffee in the mornings.  He also stresses to Sam, if the welfare agency finds out he took as much as a nickel from Molly for booze, they'll cut her off.

When he finds Billy in the next room, Neil starts looking around for anyone else "getting in on the cut." Sam is not happy.  "Sir, you've got an insulting way about you, you know that?...You think because you put Molly in the way of a few dollars you can come marching in her like you was a visiting minister?" Neil shoots back, "What would you like for me to do? Pat you on the back with a gentle hand of leniency, and tell you what a clever little man you are?" After Neil leaves, Sam and Molly eventually agree to throw Billy out, and Molly promises to get him "a jug."


The next morning at breakfast, Molly pours Sam some coffee and suggests they "make it real," actually get married.  She says the welfare people might give her more if she's married, and he can prove he's too disabled to work.  All Sam keeps asking for is "a jug," showing the big difference between the two.  Molly's vision of the future involves a fresh start in a new world; Sam's begins and ends with his next jug.


At a chance meeting in a bar, Billy finds an old friend, Teddy Larson, back from out of town and looking for a place to stay.  (Teddy is played by Richard Schaal, a character actor remembered for roles in The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Rhoda; this is his first TV appearance.)  Back in the apartment, Sam starts looking for something he can drink.  He starts to throw the hot plate in frustration, but then unplugs it and puts it in a bag, along with the pots and pans Neil brought in.  This is the point where Billy shows up with Teddy Larson, and talks Sam into renting him the room they are renting.  This is a devastating sequence that intercuts with Neil and Molly at a fruit market buying produce for the kitchen, Molly even fussing with the vendor over one of the apples.  As she's doing that, Billy even unscrews all of the light bulbs from a light fixture as the two leave the apartment cleaned out except for Teddy Larson.   We actually see them dash across the very street where Neil and Molly are buying fruits and vegetables.

Obviously, Molly is upset when she arrives, finds everything missing, and Teddy Larson holding up a receipt and trying to insist that's his apartment.  Molly swears Sam has made a dunce out of her for 20 years but no more, but changes her mind when she realizes he's with Billy and will therefore be on wood alcohol again in no time.  She and Neil start looking for him, even find the hotplate that's already been sold, and find Billy passed out in a bar.  She then finds Sam passed out in the grass behind the building, next to an old shack. She gets him to the shack and tells Neil it's all Billy's fault.  But that's not how Neil sees it.  He says it's all Sam, and Sam may very well have some kind of death wish.  "For 20 years you've been a mourner standing over that corpse," Neil says.  "This man senses life in you, Molly, he can't endure it."

This appears to end Neil's, and our, involvement in the story of Molly and Sam.  "I don't hold it against you, you're right to give up on us," Molly tells Neil.  Molly begs Sam to come back to the hotel, so he won't catch pneumonia.  She reminds him the room is still paid up until the end of the week and is heated.  Even though he's ruined her chances to get on welfare, she's still at his side.  "I hung onto you all these years, if this is all I can get, that's it," she says.  As they leave, Sam turns to Neil and says, "Hey Senator?  You ever have a woman talk to you that way?  Do that for you?" Neil watches as the two walk off into the streets of New York.  He, and the audience, know Sam will die soon and Molly, the eternal optimist, will likely lose her own will to live as a result.


This episode turns out to be not what I (or likely most other viewers) would expect.  There's clearly no happy ending, no moral about the misuse of alcohol.  In fact, the episode itself, in the end, wasn't even about alcoholism.  It wasn't Sam's story, it was Molly's, and about what happens at the very bottom of society, the social Darwinism that plays itself out between self-destructive people like Sam and caring, responsible people like Molly.  It explains why good people like Molly miss so many breaks, due to the tough characters they keep as company...and why they even keep them as company.

One final note about this episode: during the filming, the crew actually saw a man lying on the sidewalk. Don Kranze recalls what happened next: “Someone says, ‘Move him out of the shot.’  I said, ‘No, don’t move him out of the shot, he’s fine.  Leave him.  Why would you move him?  He’s there, it’s beautiful, that’s real.’  Now they go over to this guy.  He’s dead.  I was ashamed!  I’m saying, ‘Don’t move him,’ and actually the guy was dead.  Then someone comes to the set, and says, ‘John Kennedy has just been shot.’”  When Maureen Stapleton broke down in tears, the production shut down.


Hopefully, that wasn't this shot.

For all the good things about this episode--the writing, the heartbreak, the stellar acting by one of the great actresses, Maureen Stapleton--it's very dreary, and makes no pretense to be anything else.  That's what made it less than a favorite to CBS President Jim Aubrey.  In perhaps the most famous story about the show, even about George C. Scott himself, David Susskind's son Andrew tells what happened when his father and Scott when to hear an embarrassingly tone-deaf idea from Aubrey:

My father got a call from Jim Aubrey saying, ‘I want you and George C. Scott in my office now, right away.’  George had quit smoking at this time, which only made him more ornery than usual.  As an oral substitute, he had taken up peeling and eating apples.  And he had a fairly impressive knife that he used to carve an apple.  So my father and Scott showed up in Aubrey’s office, and Aubrey said, ‘You know, we get this research, and it’s too depressing.  I want these characters out of Harlem and I want them on Park Avenue.’

                    Now Scott said nothing.  What he did was, he sat there, and he was carving the apple,
                    and he would slice off a chunk of it and [yank it off the knife and shove it into his mouth].
                    My father said, ‘Jim.  They’re social workers.  There are no social workers on Park
                    Avenue.  Their problems are in Harlem, or in Bed-Stuy, or in the rough, tough parts of
                    the city.  That’s where the show is.’

Aubrey said, ‘I don’t give a shit.  Get them out of Harlem.  It’s depressing.  Nobody wants to see it.’ 

They went back and forth and [my father] said, ‘Jim, we can’t.  You know I promised George we would really do the series and be true to it.  It can’t be done.  We’ll be a laughing stock if we begin to do Park Avenue social worker stories.’ 

Back and forth and back and forth.  And finally Scott, who’s been carving the apple, takes the knife and jams it in Aubrey’s desk.  The knife is going, ‘Boioioioioinnnnnng,’ and he says, ‘The show stays where it is.  Let’s go, David.’  And he left with the knife vibrating in Aubrey’s desk.  That, I think, pretty much sums up the relationship of that show with that network.

But CBS had the last laugh.  The show's format did, indeed, change, and the show did get out of Harlem and Bed-Stuy.  A politician character, Congressman Charles Hanson, was introduced during the season, and in the episode "Take Sides With the Sun," Neil decides he can do more good for New York City's poor by going to work on the congressman's staff.  But the decision to cancel the show had already been made.  The finale, "Here Today," is an allegorical story about the show itself.  Neil tries to get some columns written by the congressman, published in a newspaper.  The more highly read newspapers won't touch it but a small independent is willing to do so.  Unfortunately, the columns alienate advertisers (the way the series' content caused problems with sponsors), and the editor pressures the congressman's staff for fewer editorials about rat-filled tenements.  Ultimately the newspaper folds, and Neil, seeing a stack of letters from supportive readers, issues a final lament more for the series' real-life fans:  "Don’t they count for anything?  Don’t they have any say at all?”

So, the Jim Aubreys of the world appeared to win another round, with the "No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public" bit.  East Side/West Side and another acclaimed one-season wonder, ABC's Breaking Point, were both on in the same time slot as NBC's Sing Along with Mitch...which itself got canceled that year.  Ultimately, there were actually no winners in that time slot.


East Side/West Side is still a milestone for television, paving the way for such later groundbreaking shows as All in the Family, Hill Street Blues and other shows that instead of distracting us with gimmicks or gadgets, challenged us to take a good, long, hard look at ourselves.  If the show were to be remade today, it would likely still end up not on broadcast TV, but more likely a cable channel with a history of taking chances, like HBO, Showtime or AMC.

Except for the episodes seen on Trio, we have yet to ever see this show again.  There's enough star power and reputation left to attract a DVD release I would think, but otherwise, this show's special place in history is that it took us closer to the poorest, most forgotten people in America, and perhaps flew too close to the sun in doing so.  The quality makes us marvel that this ahead-of-its-time show only lasted a season; the volatile story on Bowie's website makes us marvel the show got on the air at all.  Then again, crazier stories have come from behind the scenes of other forms of truly great art.

Availability:  Other than the episode described above...none.  MGM gained the rights to the show in the mid 2000s, but there's no word of any type of DVD release.

Next time on this channel: my second favorite show of all time.

Submitted for Your Approval

The dreams, nightmares and life experiences of Rod Serling become a haunting challenge to the way we think and watch TV.



Twilight Zone, "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet"
OB: October 11, 1963, 9:30 p.m EST,. CBS
I was born three months after this episode first aired.

Twilight Zone, "The Self-Improvement of Salvadore Ross"
OB: January 17, 1964, 9:30 p.m. EST, CBS
I was three days old when this episode first aired.

The first one I ever saw was "Kick the Can."

I must've been eight or so.  It was a slow Saturday afternoon, and I found it on a station in Huntsville, Alabama, in a syndicated rerun.  I saw the opening moments: an elderly man at a rest home, announces his son is here to take him home.  The scene intercuts his goodbyes to his fellow residents with scenes of children playing "kick the can." He gets in the car with his son, and the car only goes a short distance before it pulls over.  (Even at that age, I knew what that meant.)  The son can be heard saying he never promised to take him home, just that he'd come to talk about it.  The sad, broken man gets back out of the car, holding his suitcase, knowing he'll have the humiliation of going to back to his fellow residents and saying "Well, so much for that," but probably nothing that cheerful.  He picks up the kids' can and walks around with it.  The boy, about my age, says "Hey mister!  That's our can!  Hey mister!" But instead of yelling at the children and telling them to go home (as most old people in my real-life Alabama neighborhood tended to do) or just giving him back the can, he just stares at it, as he sits under a tree.  And I seemed to instinctively know what that meant, too.

Then I saw another man walk out from behind some bushes, talking directly to the camera...Rod Serling, the man I already knew from Night Gallery...and he sets the scene for us, making sure we know that children's game is definitely going to matter.  "It will shortly become a refuge for a man who knows he will die in this world, if he doesn't escape...into the Twilight Zone."

I was hooked.

The rest of the episode (the man thinks the can is the ticket to the fountain of youth...and he's right) was delightful...then, sad, even heartbreaking.  I am so happy this was my introduction to the fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man.  It truly spoke to me.  It never in my life dawned on me until that afternoon, that any senior citizen in the history of the world ever wanted to be a child again.  I think it even made me ask my grandparents about that idea.

As television came out of the 1950s and evolved from live dramas to film, The Twilight Zone forever raised the stakes on what we could do on TV.  Its unique formula was to tweak its world like someone twisting the contrast and brightness knobs on a period black and white TV set: one knob pushes the picture ever so slightly into the land of fantasy, the other makes the rest of the picture that much more realistic.  Creating the "unknown" wasn't even the most creative part; the all-too-human, all-too-real emotional reaction of the characters is where the show excelled.

It also combined the best parts of television past and future: combining the staging, blocking, camerawork, and often the writing quality, of live 1950s TV dramas like Studio One and Playhouse 90, with the special effects that would later populate The Outer Limits and Star Trek. And if The Outer Limits was meant to prey on our fears of the unknown and the march of science, The Twilight Zone was meant to warn us about those very fears.  It made us face our worst nightmares about nuclear anxiety and the Cold War, and what we might find as we got ready to catch up to the Russians in space.  It made us realize that our biggest concerns should be our reactions to all of that.  And it did it all within the vision of Rod Serling.


Born on Christmas Day 1924 in Syracuse, New York, Serling grew up nearby in Binghamton.  This is where he often acted out movies he saw, pulp novels he read, and even worked on a stage in his basement.  In high school he wrote editorials for the school paper and joined the debate team.  He put off college long enough to enlist in the Army, taking up boxing while stateside before being shipped out as a paratrooper to the Philippines.  Serling, wounded in action, saw death every day, including a freak accident in which a crate of food supplies fell on a fellow soldier who was entertaining the platoon with comedy.

When Serling returned home from the war, he used the G.I. Bill to attend Antioch College in Ohio.  He met, and married, his wife Carol during this time.  Serling worked at the campus radio station, acting and especially writing scripts.  He got his big break winning a contest to have a script produced for the network radio program Dr. Christian.  While waiting for that story to air, he sold another one to CBS'Grand Central Station.  When he submitted radio scripts that did not air, he began in 1950 to submit some to television as well.  When one was rejected, he submitted it to another show.  Serling had done 71 when one of them, "Patterns," a Mad Men-type drama set in an executive suite, was picked up by Kraft Television Theater.  It ended up being his most acclaimed work to date, bringing in glowing reviews, a special encore performance later that season (in those live days before reruns were invented), and ultimately being made into a movie.  More scripts followed, including another one, Playhouse 90's "Requiem for a Heavyweight," which drew even more acclaim and suddenly put him in heavy demand.

Serling's biggest problems, however, were sponsors and censors, many of which were sometimes interchangeable.  Some of the requests were just silly; the line "Got a match?" was stricken from "Requiem for a Heavyweight" in deference to Playhouse 90 co-sponsor Ronson Lighters, and all references to the Chrysler Building in New York were removed from a Ford Theater script, right down to the building being airbrushed out of a skyline picture, by request of the Ford Motor Company.  But other instances were more chilling.  When Serling wanted to write a play about the racially-motivated murder of Emmett Till in Mississippi, the script ended up being watered down to a more generic story about a foreigner in an unnamed small town.

Fed up with all of the censorship, Serling longed to write for his own show, answerable to his own vision and his own demands, and the sponsors could just take it or leave it.  He chose science fiction, as both sci-fi literature and movies were beginning to reflect adult themes in allegorical ways...for instance, the pods in "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" were a stand-in for McCarthyism and fear of expressing certain beliefs.  He wrote his first ever science fiction script, "The Time Element," about a man who keeps dreaming he's in Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and no one will listen to his warnings that the Japanese are coming. The script aired on Desilu Playhouse, and CBS was so impressed it sold as the pilot to what would become The Twilight Zone.

Serling's anthology series opened with the episode "Where is Everybody?" about a man who shows up in a town that's completely empty, even though cars are on the street, food is in restaurants and grocery stores and there's even a lit cigarette in an ashtray.  The series quickly received rave reviews and high ratings, and many of the series' most beloved episodes came from that first season.  One of them was one of Serling's personal favorites and one of the first I hear mentioned in conversations, "Time Enough at Last." That's the episode in which Burgess Meredith plays the bookworm who's harassed and bullied by his boss and his wife over his love to read.  Then when he's in the vault of the bank where he works, enjoying a lunch hour with a good book, a bomb wipes out the city.  The guy gets his bearings and figures out where to find the food and supplies, then realizes there's no more job or boss, no more nagging wife, he can now go to the library and read all he wants.  Just as he stacks up everything he wants to read, he bends over to get one more book...and his thick glasses fall off, hit the steps and shatter, leaving him permanently vision-impaired and crying, "It's not fair!  I had time!"

My favorite, "The Martians are Due on Maple Street," was another parable about the still fresh wounds of McCarthyism and how they got there, with neighbors on a pretty suburban street (the same one used 20 years earlier for Mickey Rooney's "Andy Hardy" movies) seeing a UFO, and accusing each other of being the invading aliens making the power go on and off.  The twist ending finds the real aliens manipulating the power from afar, for that very effect of turning the neighbors against each other.  "Walking Distance" is a bittersweet, nostalgic look back at Serling's own small town upbringing, and at what happens when a grown man finds himself back in the town of his youth, face to face with his childhood self.  The result was not what he expected and was actually a heartbreakingly harsh lesson on the need to protect memory from the jaded experience of time.  "A Stop at Willoughby" also revisits an old, turn of the century small town, this time about a commuter who constantly dreams of it as a train stop between his cruelly high-pressure job and an empty existence at home with a dissatisfied wife.  It has an even more downbeat ending, as we see the man finally get off the train and walk happily into the town.  Then, modern day, we see his body hauled off in a hearse belonging to a Willoughby Funeral Home; he had actually stepped off the moving train to his death.


All of those were written by Serling (with "Time Enough at Last" being an adaption of a short story by someone else), and like the rest of the series, were somehow or another inspired by Serling's life experiences.  The Twilight Zone, really, was just a route for Serling's life journey, as themes like war, racism, the right to free expression (and Serling's politically liberal views on those last three), childhood, small towns, big city pressures, censorship, sudden death, men who love to talk, aviation and space flight, even occasional ventures into old time radio and even one episode about TV production itself, all wove themselves through this tapestry. This being an anthology show, by nature, the results weren't always consistent, but when the show connected, it was art, and some of the best television of all time.  It's also my second favorite TV show.


And now, Serling had more artistic freedom, though he'd be reined in on other production matters.  He no longer found lines censored to appease nervous, controversy-shy network executives or control-happy sponsors.  If one advertiser wasn't happy, there were usually others, say, Pall Mall cigarettes or Prell Shampoo or Pepsi or Crest, to take their place.

Over the show's five year run, Serling wrote 92 of the show's 156 scripts, many from his own original ideas. This, however, put him back onto the treadmill he ran in the early to mid 1950s, where he constantly churned out scripts that began to become less consistent.  Then the show ran into problems with the network; CBS President Jim Aubrey complained about the show's episodes going over budget (due to special effects, set decoration, location shoots and makeup).  He ordered the second season to be a few episodes shorter, and some of the episodes to even be shot on videotape at CBS Television City as a money saving device.

The show was actually cancelled after season three; its replacement, an hour long sitcom called Fair Exchange, failed, so what was now called Twilight Zone was brought back as an hour long format to fill up the timeslot in the spring of 1963.  Serling, however, always preferred the half hour format; many of the hour long episodes are heavily padded with extra dialogue and even entire scenes repeating themselves at length. Its fifth and final season, the one in which I was born and that is the focus of this blog, the show went back to a half hour.  Despite the vision and heavy script output by the show's legendary executive producer, neither of the scripts I'm profiling were actually written by Serling.


By now the show had a new opening, the theme and narration best remembered by fans:  "You unlock this door with the key of imagination. Beyond it is another dimension: a dimension of sound, a dimension of sight, a dimension of mind. You're moving into a land of both shadow and substance, of things and ideas; you've just crossed over into the Twilight Zone."


The week I was born was a typical, not-special-but-workable, script called "The Self-Improvement of Salvadore Ross," adapted from a Henry Slesar short story by Don McNeely.  Don Gordon plays the jerk of a title character, Sal, who drives up in a Lincoln Continental...which we find out shortly is not his.  It belongs to someone who hired him to wash it, in fact.  He's trying to get Leah Maitland (Gail Kobe) to go out with him, but she's done with him.  He thinks it's because she's a social worker and he's one of her cases, "a crumb with dirt on my hands," who defends himself with an eye-rolling declaration, "I don't need books to show me which way is up.  "We're just two people who are never going to understand each other," Leah tries to explain.  Her father, very cool to Sal's overtures, shows up at the door and Leah goes in.  Sal punches the door and growls, "Why can't I want something in my life and get it?"


Serling, in his open,  describes Salvadore as "volatile mixture of fury and frustration" and tells us he's now hospital bound.  "Ambition: shows great determination toward self-improvement.  Estimate for potential success: a sure bet for listing in 'Who's Who' in the Twilight Zone.'"

For his broken hand, Sal gets to spend a night in the hospital, with an elderly bed mate (portrayed by veteran character actor J. Pat O'Malley).  The old man asks about Sal's broken hand, and discusses his chest congestion, which could turn into pneumonia, suggesting Sal's the lucky one.  "Young man, you could break both legs and an elbow, and you'd still be swimming inside of a month!" Sal then tells him "You take my busted hand, and I'll take your lousy cold!" and the old man says it's a deal.

Sure enough, Sal wakes up with a perfectly fine hand and a cough.  The old man begs for his cough back, concerned his hand will never heal at his age. Sal laughs and says "All deals are final!" as he gets his clothes out of the hospital room closet and leaves.

He then makes a deal with the Lincoln owner, Mr. Halpert, an older man who's rich and still likes to party.  Sal promises to sell him his years (26 of them apparently) for $1 million plus the apartment.  Mr. Halpert laughs him out of the place as he accepts the deal, but Sal promises he has a big surprise coming.


Sure enough, in the next scene. we see a much older Sal trying to lowball his years back from a younger doorman at what's now his apartment.   At first the young man is reluctant, saying "the days may be dull but I wouldn't swap my nights for all the crown jewels in a golden bucket," but then says O.K. as Sal writes out a $1,000 check for a year of the guy's life.  The fellow promises to tell his friends and perhaps sell a couple more years himself.

After a commercial break, the older Sal gets into an elevator with a new building worker, starts talking to him...and by the time they're on the ground floor, Sal is young again, while the elevator operator has suddenly aged decades in a matter of a few floors.  So, Sal is now youthful and rich...but we'll see he has yet to put a dent in that awful, awful personality of his.



He has a chat with Mr. Maitland, whose approval he wants to date his daughter (since Dad has apparently a lot of influence over his daughter).  Mr. Maitland still doesn't like Sal, even though he's happy to see him turn his life around.  Sal, flashing that personality of his (and proving Dad's point), then wants to know what makes him so "top shelf...teaching in that rattrap school all your life...no, not teaching, babysitting?!  And you come home from the war, and what do you bring?  A game leg, and a handful of crummy souvenirs!"

That last part has him gesturing to some guns and things on the apartment wall.  Dad asks if Sal could be a good husband and if he loves his daughter; Sal just says he wants her and can buy her anything she wants.

Leah comes home in the middle of this, and is impressed with how Sal looks and talks; Sal explains he paid a "friend from college" to coach him on his speaking skills.  Leah agrees to go out with him and makes out with him at his fancy apartment, but then tells him, being attracted to him was never the problem.  The needy jerk vows, "You tell me what kind of guy you want and I'll be that guy."

"It doesn't work that way," Leah says.

"Well, I've got a Christmas morning surprise for you, baby--it works that way with me!" he responds, vowing he can be anything he wants.  She explains the man she marries will have compassion like her father and he just doesn't.  Sure enough, what she expresses as a plea for humanity is interpreted by Sal as "I have daddy issues, so you'll have to push this button right over here."

Sal takes her home and talks to Mr. Maitland for a bit.  He offers the old man $100,000 and tersely tells him to "Let that sum stir around in your head for a minute."

Final scene, Sal drives up with Leah in what's now his Lincoln (a perfect symbol of material success), and actually says the words "I love you" to her (something he avoided all episode long),  She excuses herself to her room and Sal talks alone to her dad. He is contrite, explaining he wanted Leah originally because she was a prize,a symbol, but has now (just in the last day, apparently) gotten to know the true her.  He apologizes for all the grief and worry he caused Mr. Maitland, who repeats his vow that he won't marry Leah.

"I'm asking you for forgiveness, compassion?" Sal says.
"Compassion?  Don't you remember? I sold it to you yesterday." Mr. Maitland takes out a gun and shoots Sal dead.  Sal has learned his lesson the hard way: if your vision of improving yourself involves taking things or buying them like a commodity, you'll never live to see much of a life.

As Sal lies on the floor, we hear Serling's narration: "The Salvadore Ross Program for Self-Improvement. The all-in-one sure-fire success course that lets you lick the bully, learn the language, dance the tango, and anything else you were to do, or think you want to do.  Money-back guarantee, offer limited to, the Twilight Zone."

This is a so-so episode in a hit-or-miss season.  Serling didn't write this one, but he did write a very romantic one a week earlier, "The Long Morrow," about a man who's supposed to go into suspended animation for a lengthy space voyage, only to meet a woman the day before the mission and fall in love with her.  There are a lot of stories like these two this season, and I suspect it may have been intended to lure more female viewers, who weren't usually a big part of sci-fi audiences in those days like they are now.

Still, the season has a lot of all-time great episodes, great pieces of sci-fi/fantasy and television.  "In Praise of Pip" concerns Jack Klugman as a washed-up numbers runner who just found out his son was critically injured in Vietnam.  This Serling-penned early look at the conflict includes one of Klugman's all time greatest performances, as his son Pip suddenly returns to him--in his younger, childhood self, at a deserted amusement park, for one last ride on all the attractions.  "A Kind of Stopwatch" has an obnoxious, overly-talkative man (perhaps modeled after Serling's own younger self) who finds a stopwatch that makes time stand still.  Mickey Rooney puts on a bravura one-man show in the title role of "The Last Night of a Jockey," who swears one day he'll be "big" again.  (Wrong thing to say, Mickey.)

"You Drive" is a "reverse Christine"--a 1956 Ford Fairlane Club Sedan that comes to life, acting as the nagging conscience of  a hit and run driver.  "Living Doll," inspired by Mattel's "Chatty Cathy" doll, is about a toy who declares war on a cold, abusive stepfather (Telly Savalas), his attempts to rid the doll acting as a stand-in for his abusive tendencies toward wife and stepdaughter.  "I am the Night--Color Me Black" is one of Serling's all time most vehement, nakedly political scripts, about a town where a man is about to be executed, in which the sun suddenly won't come out and it remains dark.  To underscore the point of this early 1964 episode, a radio announcer mentions the names of other locations suffering the same problem: half the city of Berlin, the entire nation of Vietnam, a street in Dallas Texas, the entire city of Birmingham Alabama, and part of Chicago.  The darkness, clearly, is supposed to be hate, sadness and hopelessness.


And then there's the chilling, spellbinding piece of science fiction that could be one of the greatest TV episodes in the genre in all of history--not to mention William Shatner's greatest ever performance that doesn't involve him being Captain Kirk or attorney Denny Crane.  "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" was written by possibly the series' greatest non-Serling writer, science fiction great Richard Matheson ("I am Legend"), who we lost just last year; it's directed by Richard Donner, who later directed the "Lethal Weapon" movies and the first two Christopher Reeve "Superman" films.


Just three years before he'd be the captain of the Starship Enterprise, Shatner plays a man terrified of the plane trip he's about to take.  And it's for good reason: Robert Wilson, 37, husband, father, and salesman, had a nervous breakdown on his last flight that resulted in an emergency landing.  As we see him taking a seat next to his loving, comforting wife, he gets nervous as he eyes the handle to the emergency exit, which, as it turns out, is where he's sitting.  He also jumps when he hears the pilot secure the door, and questions whether he's fully cured. "It's all over now, Bob, and mama's taking you home," says his wife, Julia.


Switch to Serling explaining that Bob is on sick leave from his previous breakdown, and saying this time he'll go "all the way to his planned destination, which despite what Mr. Wilson thinks, is in the darkest region, of the Twilight Zone."


After the commercial, Wilson starts to settle down for his trip home.  The fact that it's raining and there's thunder and lightning isn't helping his nervousness much.  Then he sees it for the first time: that now iconic creature on the wing.  "There's a man out there!" he exclaims to the stewardess and his wife, but sure enough, when they all look, he's gone.   Wilson takes some kind of pain reliever, and then gently pulls the curtain back...

...to see the creature's face pressed against his window, in a shot that scares the hell out of me every time I see it.  And I saw it two more times just to write this.

Obviously there's another freakout, and he's gone...seconds later, Wilson sees the woolly-looking creature "land" on the wing again.  (The creature has no wings, he just glides in as if he's being held by an invisible parachute.)  Then just before the commercial break, Wilson's mouth drops open as we see the creature start to pull up a sheet of metal to tinker with the engine wiring.

This is all very effective.  Shatner's character knows he had a nervous breakdown earlier and knows what everyone's gone to think..."I know I had a mental breakdown. I know I had it in an airplane. I know it looks to you as if the same thing is happening again, but it isn't. I'm sure, it isn't," he tells his wife.  The look on her face shows she believes otherwise.  At the same time, Wilson is terrified that he's actually seeing something real, and that the plane could crash if he doesn't convince someone to keep an eye on the left engine.


Air travel has accelerated during this time, as the arrival of the jet age has now carried more people to and from their destinations by plane.  This, however, is a twin propeller plane, which harkens back to the World War II days when air corps pilots claimed to see "gremlins" on the wings of their aircraft...and sure enough, Wilson mentions that possibility to his wife.

The fact that the creature can just safely walk around and not lose his balance on a flying airplane also makes us wonder if the visions we're seeing along with him aren't some sort of hallucination.


Julia goes to get the pilot to take to Bob.  They discuss the creature, who the pilot claims to have seen.  He tells Bob they won't make a big deal out of it to alarm the other passengers but thanks him for telling him. Bob appears to resent the condescension.  The pilot tells the stewardess to give him "one of those pills" so he'll be "out for hours."

As Bob sends his wife off for water, he sneaks over to a highway patrolman who's on the same flight, to get his gun.  (We saw the trooper get on the flight at the beginning; as we saw in "The Self-Improvement of Salvadore Ross," Twilight Zone always adhered to the rule about Chekov's Gun.)  Bob takes the gun and heads back to his seat, with a haunting expression on his face knowing he's facing a terrible fear by embarking on a terrible, questionable, desperate act...then fastens his seatbelt and grabs the knob on the emergency exit.  (The show also believes in "Chekov's Emergency Exit Knob," apparently.)  The panel flies away, almost sucking Bob out of the plane, as he fires the gun at the creature and sees it clutch its chest and go down.

The final shot has Bob being taken out of the plane on a stretcher,in a straightjacket.  The trooper is shaking his head, Julia is vowing to see him soon, the pilot thinks he tried to commit suicide.  Bob leans up, saying--maybe to his wife, maybe to the pilot, maybe to himself or just to us--"I know, but I'm the only one who does know, right now." He's loaded into an ambulance.

Serling tells us, over a shot of the plane's wing, with a police car and the ambulance in the background, "The flight of Mr. Robert Wilson has ended now.  A flight not only from point A to point B, but also from fear of recurring mental breakdown." The camera pans slowly down to wing, to bent, pulled-up plate as Serling continues:  "Mr. Wilson has that fear no longer, though at the moment he is as he has said, alone in his assurance.  Happily, his conviction will not remain isolated too much longer, for happily, tangible manisfestation is very often left as evidence of trespass, even as so intangible a quarter, as the Twilight Zone."

It's a brilliant piece of science fiction, with that science including the study of psychology.  Shatner, who gets mocked a lot for his acting style, will not get that from me, not for this: his abject horror of seeing his life and that of everyone else on the plane threatened, while knowing no one will ever believe him through no honest fault of his own, is heartrending and convincing.  And it's a set piece: basically, this has four scenes to it, all either on the plane or directly next to it, yet the action makes the time fly by (no pun intended).  The least convincing part of the episode is the creature's appearance like it's wearing a large sweater; the remake in the 1983 "Twilight Zone: the Movie" (with John Lithgow in Shatner's role) improved upon it by making the creature part of the "Alien"/"Predator" tradition.
About the time "The Self-Improvement of Salvadore Ross" aired, CBS announced the series' third, and final, cancellation.  ABC was briefly in talks with Serling to pick up the show, provided it laser-focused away from sci-fi (they already had The Outer Limits) and toward gothic horror...Serling took a pass.  Ironically, that basic idea was the one that fueled Serling's later series, Night Gallery, on NBC.  The always-working, always-smoking Serling died in 1975 at the (I like to think) young age of 50, after a series of heart attacks and a failed heart surgery.  This left fans like to pick over all his previous work for infinity, and hope for more, even occasionally substandard, work to leak its way out in time, knowing he couldn't be around to comment on our later society.  But his vision was reborn: the show was brought back with new material in 1985 on CBS, then syndication, and again in 2002 on UPN, and apparently is being planned even now for yet another comeback on CBS.

Overall, The Twilight Zone is the vision of one righteous man with a lot of passion...perhaps it's Rod Serling's own "Willoughby," a dream, or series of dreams, on his life's journey, composed of fragments of his own experiences and the beliefs that tie them all together.  Yet, it's a universal series of dreams.  There's something that, while other black and white series from the 1950s and 1960s are long forgotten, keeps this show selling Blu-Rays and drawing viewers to Syfy every New Year's weekend.  And that's quite a feat: the show is known for its shocking twist endings,and they're often a leading part of an episode description.  ("Remember the time Roddy McDowall was the astronaut welcomed to Mars...then they put him in a Martian zoo?")   By nature, those endings should only work once...yet people like me keep coming back, over and over.

Availability: the entire series is on DVD, Blu-Ray and Hulu and is rerun on two different cable networks.

Next time on this channel: the gorilla born the same day as me.

Megillah for a Gorilla

What happens when a warm, fuzzy childhood memory turns out to be a piece of highly commercial "dark age" animation.

The Magilla Gorilla Show, "Big Game"
OB: week of January 14, 1964, times varied according to local markets
I was born the day this show premiered in first run syndication.

Today, January 14, 2014, it actually happens.  I turn 50.

Since my turning 50 is a big part of why I'm writing this blog, I wanted a show that marked the occasion especially well.  At first I took a long look at all the shows that aired that day in 1964.  I ordered a copy of that night's Garry Moore Show...that still hasn't darkened my mailbox (and I ordered it in early November). So much for that.  I already did Combat! and The Jack Benny Program.  I looked at McHale's Navy, The Fugitive, Petticoat Junction--even an ultra-rare Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson from that day. (In his monologue, Johnny actually mentions the winter storm that I was always told about from that day.) And all of those will get their columns.

But I also checked to see if any programming actually premiered that day or close to it.  There was The Hollywood Palace, and there is the sadly still unattainable That was the Week That Was.
But then, imagine my surprise when I saw one of my earliest childhood favorites, The Magilla Gorilla Show, was released into first run syndication that day.  Magilla was born the same day as me. So that was it...Magilla would be the official icon of the day I reach the half-century mark.  It may be the only thing in the world that the lovable ape and I have in common (aside from the fact that Magilla did love to watch TV).

Keep in mind, I harbor no illusions that Magilla Gorilla was a classic piece of animation.  I know it came from Hanna-Barbera, the favorite whipping goat of "dark era animation." And this is no different: lots (I mean lots) of "wraparound backgrounds," really corny and dry jokes, slow pacing to make sure everyone gets those jokes, and so forth.  Plus, Magilla will never be the icon that, say, Fred Flintstone or Tom & Jerry became.

But I still have those warm, fuzzy memories of Magilla back to back with his work buddy, Peter Potamus, on Saturday mornings on ABC.  That's where I got to know them.  But that was actually late in the game.
Our story actually starts much earlier, as I said in animation's "dark period," the period immediately after animation's "golden age" and perhaps its opposite.  Hanna-Barbera gets a lot of the heat from this era, being one of the first studios to adapt quickly to to the quick, sadistic, demanding schedules of TV that didn't allow time for a lot of detail. Yet H-B could still do a lot of pioneering work, revolutionizing the prime time cartoon with The Flintstones and The Jetsons. and turning out some surprisingly good animation in Jonny Quest. But H-B's constant rush to manufacture product prevented it from living up even to those standards on a regular basis. Its adult-friendly humor began to slip in 1963, and the studio began slipping into its comfort zone of more juvenile humor.

And Hanna-Barbera had, and has, its defenders, one of them none other than perhaps the greatest cartoon voice artist of all time, Mel Blanc.  While admitting "it would be dishonest of me to claim (the Hanna-Barbera cartoons) were on a par aesthetically with Warner Bros.'", he still said comparing the two were unfair.  In his autobiography, Blanc said "Not only were their budgets substantially smaller, production time was virtually cut in half."

But 1963 may not have been the best year for H-B, despite their high hopes to the contrary.  The Flintstones and the newly premiered The Jetsons were helping ABC usher in their earliest color programming.  (The Jetsons was actually ABC's first show to be seen in color, in fact.)  But things didn't work out well: despite three bona fide attempts at ratings events--the birth of Pebbles, the guest appearance of Ann-Margret and the adoption of Bamm-Bamm--The Flintstones was falling like a rock in the ratings, and The Jetsons was cancelled after just one season (though rerun by various networks into the 1980s on Saturday mornings).

So when Hanna-Barbera was ready to premiere its next show, it was in first run syndication, and it was that gorilla in the window.  Here's the color versions of the show's iconic open and closing themes, which sadly are missing from the series DVD for some reason.


A black and white documentary that was shown on local TV stations just before the show's premiere, shows William Hanna and Joseph Barbera talking to a group of the studio's creative people, acting out how they came up with the idea: they wanted a show about a gorilla, but not one set in a zoo where plots were going to be limited.  They considered a funny jungle, but ultimately decided to put him in a pet shop window. People would buy him every week, and ultimately bring him back for a refund, to the chagrin of Mr. Peebles the store owner.  What we didn't see was how in the world they came up with the name Magilla, which appears to be an aberration of "megillah," a Yiddish word that sometimes means long, drawn out, tediously detailed story.

Ideal Toys signed on as sponsor, and that relationship made the show affordable to local stations.  And so, on January 14, 1964 (the day I was born and a Tuesday), the show was released into syndication and premiered on a few stations.  That didn't mean everyone had to show it that night; some stations ran it other nights, usually in "prime access," just before prime time.  (That's when stations now often show Wheel of Fortune and Entertainment Tonight, for instance.)
And thus, the gorilla and I were born.

Each show had a cartoon featuring Magilla, a second featuring Ricochet Rabbit and Droop-a-Long, and a third with Punkin Puss and Mushmouse.

The week I was born, the premiere introduced us to Magilla just before we'd meet the weekly customer. Mr. Peebles (voiced by Howard Morris, cartoon voice man and character actor)  who flunks his zoology lesson by describing baby Magilla as a "chimpanzee." He tells us via backstory how the small Magilla first came to the shop, first started causing trouble, and eventually kept getting brought back over and over, was bananas, with Magilla telling him those will probably last about an hour.
That hungry voice is that of another character actor, Allan Melvin, who often specialized in tough guys or military men in comedy shows.  Perhaps you remember him from one of his on-camera roles: Corporal Henshaw on The Phil Silvers Show, Sergeant Hacker on Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C., Sam the butcher and Alice's boyfriend on The Brady Bunch, and Archie Bunker's co-worker and lodge brother, Barney Hefner, on All in the Family and Archie Bunker's Place.  Or you might even remember him for multilpe roles on The Andy Griffith Show and The Dick Van Dyke Show.

Enter J. Wimple Dymple and his butler/chauffeur, Faunteroy.   J. Wimple Dymple (always referred by his full name) seems to want Magilla really badly.  Mr. Peebles is so excited to get rid of his high-maintenance simian that he sells him for $5 (personally I would've bargained with the billionaire a bit, but that's just me).

Back at the Wimple Dymple manor, J. Wimple Dymple is making sure Magilla is feeling at home.  He shows him his game hunting trophies, a collection of frightened-looking animal heads mounted on his wall.  He then asks Magilla to stand atop a pedestal, giving our poor ape the idea he's about to pose for some snapshots. Then he notices J. Wimple Dymple has a "long lens atop your camera," which is actually his hunting rifle.

The blast of gunfire prompts Magilla's funny dry humored line, "That was a very suspicious move, sir!" "My collection lacks a gorilla, and you're it, Magilla!" J. Wimple Dymple responds.  Then there's a chase all over J. Wimple Dymple's backyard, because of course there's massive amounts of gunfire in a 1960s cartoon.

An attempt by Magilla to jump into a pool sends J. Wimple Dymple into a tree.  When Magilla disguises himself as a statue, it actually works until he's insulted ("What a homely looking statue!") and J. Wimple Dymple gets a pitcher full of water over his head.

J. Wimple Dymple then decides to get what turns out to be his very dumb but proper butler, Faunteroy, to put on a gorilla outfit and make what they think is a mating call ("Blook, blook, blook...and a blook") that will bring out Magilla.  Sure enough, Magilla catches up to his new buddy and gives him tips on how to imitate a gorilla: he hands Faunteroy his hat and bowtie.  Even if the humor of this cartoon is often groan-inducing, you have to appreciate the great cartoon logic here.  As Faunteroy leaves, we hear Magilla's now classic line: "Such a megillah over a gorilla!"

Sure enough, Magilla's advice works: Faunteroy finds himself being chased by J. Wimple Dymple and his bullets.  ("Help!  Help!  And an ouch!")  Magilla ends up on his own back in Mr. Peebles' shop window, and Faunteroy joins him, asking if he can stay until "the master" calms down.  The two then say "Blook, blook and a blook" to each other (remember, this is supposed to be a mating call) and that's where we last see them, homoerotically bonding in Mr. Peebles' window.

The next segment stars a western hero: Ricochet Rabbit (voice of Hanna-Barbera veteran Don Messick, later the voice of Scooby-Doo and Papa Smurf), and his sidekick Droop-a-Long Coyote (the legendary Mel Blanc), in "Atcheson, Topeka and Sam Jose."

Ricochet's trademark was his speed, he was the fastest sheriff in the west.  He would always say "...or my name isn't bing-bing-BIIIINNNNNG!  Richochet Rabbit!" as he bounced off two walls and the ceiling on his way to take out his next bad guy.  (His debut was in a cartoon starring Hanna-Barbera's favorite turtle, Touche Turtle.)  Ricochet's painfully slow partner, Droop-a-Long, was always inept at that same move, usually crashing into a stove, a wall or a cactus. He also makes coffee so bad, he often has to chisel off a piece of it.

In this one, the two are after A. T. Sam Jose, the stereotypical Mexican bandit who is determined to rob a gold shipment aboard a train.  (This type of humor was already starting to become outdated at this time.)  Of course, there's a lot of gunfire yet again; Ricochet's bullets are trick bullets, which open up and, say, hit bad guys over the head with a mallet.  Nice little twist, there, just when you think you're going to see a piece of cartoon violence...you're surprised with a totally different piece of cartoon violence.

The next back segment cartoon introduces us to Punkin' Puss and Mushmouse, voiced once again by Melvin and Morris. (Morris actually uses his Ernest T. Bass voice from The Andy Griffith Show, in fact.)  It answers the question, "What can we do with cat and mouse characters to make them even more violent than Tom & Jerry or Herman & Catnip?" with "Give one of them a gun, of course." (My dear God at all the gunfire on this show.)   They were portrayed as feuding hillbillies.  The premiere week episode was "Callin' all Kin," in which Mushmouse calls all of his lookalike relatives to give Punkin' Puss a hard time.

The writing on this show was not very sharp, considering that Hanna-Barbera was known for being dialogue-driven over animation-driven cartoons.  The things that jumped out the most were, of course, the violence, and the derivative nature of the cartoons: Magilla Gorilla was modeled after Yogi Bear, with Mr. Peebles a variation of Ranger Smith.  Ricochet Rabbit is a variation of Speedy Gonzalez, and Droop-a-Long modeled somewhat after Hardy Har-Har, the whiny hyena who was Lippy the Lion's sidekick.  To me, Ricochet Rabbit was the most likable character of any of these, but wasn't given enough interesting things to do.

In time we'll get to meet Ogee, the little girl heard in the opening credits asking "How much is that gorilla in the window?" She's the surrogate for all the boys and girls in the audience who would love to have an unappreciated gorilla as a playmate.

While Hanna-Barbera is known for "borrowing" personalities of real-life celebrities for its characters (Tennessee Ernie Ford = Huckleberry Hound, Jimmy Durante = Doggie Daddy, etc.), there doesn't seem to be a real life counterpart to Magilla.  At least one argument has Magilla representing black people, and the show's universe mirroring a desire within white America to keep races segregated.  Personally I don't buy it, but it certainly would add a disturbing subtext to some of the episodes, like for instance the one in which Ogee brings Magilla home to her parents and they get upset and call the police.

Personally, I think the show's subtext is the more obvious one...I mean, heck, it's right there in the show's theme song.  "We've got Magilla Gorilla, Magilla Gorilla for sale...won't you,buy him, take him home and try him..."

Magilla's reason to exist...was to sell toys.  Ideal not only sponsored the show, and had Magilla pushing their product with all of his gorilla might, but they had an entire line of Magilla Gorilla dolls ready to go when the show premiered, tying in from the very first episode.  The whole idea of Magilla getting bought at Mr. Peebles' store every week was based on the idea that it would happen in real life, too, in toy stores across America.


So, I won't lie to you, that was a letdown.  I could accept that Magilla wasn't drawn with all the artistry in the world; I could accept the dialogue was sorely lacking, not adult friendly like Rocky and Bullwinkle; I could (or should) even accept all of the violence (probably why we never see this show very much any more).  But Magilla, a corporate shill?  A sellout from the getgo?  The "Gorilla for Sale" theme an actual commercial jingle, each episode an infomercial?  The founding lord of the empire that includes Thundercats, Transformers, and My Little Pony?  Say it ain't so, Magilla, say it ain't so!

Magilla ran for three seasons in first run syndication, to be joined in fall 1964 by his colleague Peter Potamus.  They were so successful they actually made the rare move of leaving syndication for a network: ABC picked up both series for Saturday mornings beginning on New Year's Day 1966, and extending until September 1967.  And it was during the ABC run that I first met those lovable louts, though until I watched this on DVD, I had no memories of either show except for the characters.  I couldn't have told you about a single episode.

But Magilla actually improved slightly in quality during the show's run.  And a song that appeared in one episode--remember when Saturday morning cartoons often had a song, like "Sugar, Sugar" on The Archies?--is my favorite I've ever heard on an animated TV show.  It's in the episode in which Magilla goes to the beach and ends up on a runaway surfboard, winning over all the teenagers as a surfer king.  Then we hear the legendary "Makin' with the Magilla" song, performed by Miss Loco-Motion herself, Little Eva.

After 1967, Magilla went into semi-obscurity, his co-stars--Mr. Peebles, Ricochet Rabbit, Punkin' Puss and Mushmouse--all completely forgotten.  I didn't see Magilla again until he powered Yogi's Ark in the 1970s, and he was also known to make guest appearances on the Cartoon Network and Boomerang.  If there were a cartoon equivalent of The Hollywood Squares, Magilla might have been a semi-regular.
I don't know it if was me, or him, or maybe the rest of us and the times (the move away from violent cartoons and racial stereotypes, maybe), but Magilla and I...well, we grew apart, we didn't stay in touch.  We moved on.  I had a couple of kids, and a career of my own in television, and he had his own work on the Ark, so we can assume Mr. Peebles either let Magilla go or finally sold him.

But, on this day when I turn 50 and think about everything in the world that involves, including my AARP card that's already been mailed to me, I guess the very least I can do for my old friend is give him a little shoutout here, a little remembrance of a childhood friend on his own 50th, since I might very well be the only one. I've often had a soft spot in my heart for the underappreciated, the forgotten, the constantly refunded.  Because I have to say, for a gorilla who so often got insulted about his looks on his own show ("I like the gorilla disguise, but next time try to get a better fit"), he still looks the same as he did 50 years ago...but I may have actually aged better.

Availability: the entire series is on DVD, minus the opening and closing (which are on Youtube).

Next time on this channel: The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson.

Heeeeeeeerrrrrrrreeee's You Know Who!

Johnny was always Johnny, but his Tonight Show evolved a lot in 30 years.

The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, "Guests: Hedda Hopper, Sam Levinson, Jack Douglas & his wife Reiko, Jonah Jones"
OB: January 14, 1964, 11:15 p.m. EST, NBC
This broadcast aired the day I was born.

When I was young and I first tried to stay up late, it wasn't for comic books under the covers or horror movies on TV.  It wasn't to read or to give any of my siblings any grief.  (There was plenty of time for that during the day.)  When I was as young as nine (don't ask why, at that age, I would be so  interested), I was staying up for one reason and one reason only: for Johnny.

I wanted to hear his monologues.  ("It was so hot...""How hot was it?" from the audience, then, "It was so hot, the Six Million Dollar Man got vaporlock in his shorts.")  I wanted to hear those bits he did with Ed after the first commercial.  I wanted to see if he was going to do his Carnac the Magnificent routine.  I was actually watching the night Carnac said "Sis-boom-bah" (a popular college football cheer), then opened the envelope and said "Describe the sound made when a sheep explodes." That line cracked up Johnny and Ed so much, it broke the show's previous record for its longest laugh.

Carson's other characters that I watched out for, included Aunt Blabby, or Floyd R. Turbo (a right-leaning Archie Bunker type, in the guise of delivering a TV editorial), or Art Fern the Tea Time Movie Host with that hot chick from Celebrity Sweepstakes, Carol Wayne. ("Look for the fork in the road!")  I wanted to see some of the people he interviewed, like Michael Landon, Jimmy Stewart (reciting hilarious poetry), Jack Benny or Burt Reynolds.  I wanted to see him flirt with Angie Dickinson and watch her flirt back.  There was something intriguing to a child about seeing grown-ups chat and sometimes let their guard down, whether just telling a story about something that happened to them in Hollywood or suddenly pulling a prank like Reynolds or Robert Blake.

I wanted to see the standup comedians who might come out, like David Steinberg or George Carlin.  (That's where I first heard George's "Differences Between Baseball and Football" bit.)  And I wanted to see if any of those new standups, making their first TV appearances, were going to be invited to sit next to Johnny, an official sign the comedian just made it.  (And I was watching the night Freddie Prinze made his debut, and sure enough, got waved over to the chair by Johnny.)  I watched Jay Leno and David Letterman just starting out in the 1970s, with the likes of Harry Anderson, Jerry Seinfeld, Drew Carey and Roseanne Barr coming along later.

Those biggest laughs were special moments for me, especially when I would see them again on the anniversary show and know I saw them when they first aired (like the time he was demonstrating new Christmas toys, and he used a small, working cannon to "execute" a toy basketball player that couldn't make a basket; also the classic night the marmoset peed on his head, during one of animal expert Joan Embry's visits).

At the age of nine, on Friday nights (or any night during school vacations), I was already getting to know Johnny Carson, and why so many people liked him as much as they did.  In doing so, I was already getting to know at that early date...what late night television would be like for the rest of time.

Born in Iowa in 1925, Carson's family moved to Nebraska when he was eight.  Four years later, Carson saw a book about magic at a friend's house, and was inspired to get a mail-order magic kit.  At the age of 14, he debuted as "The Great Carsoni," and started booking local events.  He took his abilities in magic with him into the Navy, where he narrowly avoided combat late in the war due to the atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Carson continued his magic in college, at the University of Nebraska, and got his first broadcasting job at WOW radio and TV in Omaha.  One of the highlights of his morning show on that station--Michael Landon mentioned it on The Tonight Show as late as 1979--was Carson pretending to interview pigeons atop the courthouse.  (Landon also recalled hearing about Carson asking his boss, on the air, if he wanted to see something funny...then holding up his paycheck.  This would not be the last time Johnny would publicly feud with an employer.)   Connections at the Omaha station helped Carson get hired at KNXT in Los Angeles, a CBS affiliate where Carson developed a cult comedy show, Carson's Cellar.  One of the show's fans was Red Skelton, who hired Carson as a writer; when Red actually knocked himself unconscious an hour before airtime one night in 1953, Carson stepped in to fill in for him.  And that led to Carson's network career.  He hosted the game show Earn Your Vacation, a short-lived variety show that was called The Johnny Carson Show, guested on Jack Benny's show, and then got the plum hosting job of the ABC daytime game show Who Do You Trust?

The show quickly brought in high ratings for the fledgling network, and made Johnny Carson a household name.  It was Trust that united Carson with his longtime announcer, Ed McMahon, and also the same show that spotlighted Carson's ad-libbing skills.  On one occasion a disastrous attempt to do a live Jell-O commercial--Carson was supposed to make a banana dish on the air, and put the ingredients together in the wrong order, thus ruining the "easy to make" dessert--brought the house down, and foreshadowed the hilarious audience response he'd get decades later when a monologue joke didn't go off so well.  ("Yes, because...you know...Minnesota has record low temperatures...wish I was there right now!")  Carson also appeared on the panel of all three of Goodson-Todman's nighttime panel games, I've Got a Secret, To Tell the Truth and What's My Line?

The Tonight Show itself premiered 60 years ago this year on NBC (after a run on local TV), as a late night collection of comedy hijinks and conversation hosted by Steve Allen.  (Its 1950 predecessor, Broadway Open House, was your basic variety show.) Then (after a brief 1957 attempt modeled after The Today Show) it became more of a talk show under Jack Paar, who used the time to himself to basically engage in free-association (and in all fairness, Paar was a great storyteller).  But it was Johnny (reportedly hired via Paar's recommendation after guest hosting in 1958) who smoothed the edges and made the show what it, and its competitors, would become: a monologue, followed by a comedy bit, then celebrity interviews with the occasional oddball guest like Criswell, the so-called mystic/psychic.

Next month we'll see another historic change: Jimmy Fallon will take over the hosting duties from Jay Leno, whose own long run (interrupted by Conan O'Brien's brief tenure) still sits in Johnny's shadow.  Fallon's own Late Night show, which he inherited from David Letterman and Conan, also followed that same Carson format (although there was often a comedy bit at the halfway mark).  If anyone ever shakes up the format and makes it unrecognizable, I doubt it'll be Fallon; he, like Leno, and Carson's choice to replace him, David Letterman, still has too much reverence for Carson's memory.  "In our heads, we've been doing the Tonight Show for five years. We're just on at a later hour," Fallon said in an L.A. Times interview.  
But there is one big change that is significant to this post: Fallon will be moving the show's permanent home back to New York, for the first time in 42 years.  That's where Allen and Parr always did the show, and where Carson did it from 1962 to 1972.  Occasionally Carson made road trips to the NBC  Burbank studios (more on those later), but the show was still a New York show and even incorporated the falling ball in Times Square every New Year's, among the few times the show went live.  

The Tonight Show was always in color under Carson's reign, a practice that started on the RCA-owned network under Paar.  Each night, at the beginning, it actually began at 11:15 EST because so many local newscasts only lasted 15 minutes back then.  Carson would come out, do the monologue, cut up with then-bandleader Skitch Henderson (another Paar holdover; Doc Severinsen and Tommy Newsome were in the band) as he did musical numbers, then the guests would start showing up around 11:30.  


The show would last until one p.m., an hour and 45 minutes altogether, sponsors lining up to advertise in 15 minute increments.  And in those days before the 1971 cigarette advertising ban took effect, many of them were tobacco companies.  Carson himself often puffed away on the set, an ashtray strategically placed on his desk for himself and his smoking guests.
Shows from this era are very rare, treasured jewels.  NBC wiped, reused or destroyed most of the tapes (the show was recorded "day of" for broadcast, a practice that actually began in the Jack Paar era), and there are conflicting accounts as to whether Carson encouraged it (saying it included a lot of substandard material) or was outraged when he found out (he also said we lost a lot of very funny material from Peter Lorre's appearances).  Even most of his 1962 premiere is gone; all we have are audio of Groucho Marx introducing Carson, and Carson's very first monologue ("I want my Nana!"), plus a few stills.  The few that do exist are either special occasions (New Year's, for instance, or when Tiny Tim married Miss Vicki on the show in 1969), shows that were recorded by guests and kept in their private archives (which is why some that do exist are on black and white kinescope...that was actually a cheaper process in those days), or shows that turned up in the archives of the Armed Forces Television Service, perhaps to be rerun more than once. This is the only reason we have that legendary 1969 show from Burbank, featuring Dean Martin, Bob Hope and George Gobel (and again, more on that later), and the only reason the classic TV gods smiled upon me by having the one from the exact day I was born, manage to still exist to this day.

My birth date show (January 14, 1964) is a New York show (and if I'm not mistaken it's the very studio where Jimmy Fallon has been doing Late Night for the last five years).  It's a black and white copy of a color broadcast; it has no commercials and Johnny's interviews often end abruptly, apparently where his sponsor pitches were edited out (except one).  This indicates the source for this show is Armed Forces Television.  This show is a lot different than what you will see today from Leno, Letterman, Jimmy Kimmel, etc. which shows how Johnny and company tweaked it over the years, but many of the basic elements are already there.

It opens with shots of Manhattan and Times Square.  "Johnny's Theme," performed by Skitch Henderson and the NBC Orchestra, is slightly slower-tempo than we remember from the show's later years.  Ed's "Here's Johnny!" isn't as exaggerated as the more iconic way he stretched the word "Here's" in later years. What is already there, is Johnny's entrance, bows, golf swing and all.

Remember, the open ran at 11:15 most nights, followed immediately by Carson's monologue.  Not all stations carried this part, some with 30 minute newscasts (or syndicated sitcom reruns) joining at 11:30, so much of America actually didn't see Johnny's monologue yet, even though he always delivered one.

On a personal note, Johnny's monologue opens with a remark that takes me back to the stories I've heard about the day I was born.  My mother apparently went into premature labor, because she helped my dad push a 1956 Ford through the snow in Talladega, Alabama.  As a result I was born a month or so premature.  Johnny's opening joke, "It's nice to be entertaining the troops in Thule, Greenland!" is a very reference to the nationwide winter storm (part of an abnormally nasty winter) that determined the day I was born.  Carson tells us the winter weather was a "madhouse," and a contrast to his own sunnier weekend.

"Over the weekend I was in the Virgin Islands, and if you think I'm going to make a joke about that, you're nuts!" (big laugh)  "You're all making up your own, aren't you?" This tells us a lot about censorship in those days as well as Johnny's skills in getting material past the censors...he pretty much did just make a joke about the Virgin Islands.  Johnny then jokes about New York Mayor Robert F. Wagner, Jr. and his snow removal efforts.  "He's right on top of things.  He came out with a brand new method of getting the snow out of the streets of New York.  You know what he did?  He challenged New Jersey to a snowball fight!" Then he discusses how the previous day's snow actually stranded commuters in Manhattan., and takes us back to the Mad Men era with this nugget: it was "like an office party with eight million people.  The weather bureau got a call from 3,000 husbands thanking them for the blizzard!"  

Apparently Ed McMahon and Skitch Henderson filled in for Johnny during the two days he was off,  and during the course of this show we'll actually hear a lot about that.  "Got a telegram saying, 'I want to thank you for letting Ed and Skitch fill in, because it did me a lot of good.' From Steve Allen!" (Johnny's syndicated competitor.)   Carson points out that Henderson almost didn't make the previous night's show due to the snow conditions (Henderson was in Vermont).  Tuesday was apparently much better for travel and Johnny reflects on the wild contrasts of his own day: "At seven o'clock this morning, I was skin diving."

After Johnny announces that night's guests followed by a commercial break, Johnny and Skitch start clowning around in the orchestra area.  They take turns throwing snow-like confetti at each other as the band plays "Take Good Care of Yourself," perhaps because the opening line is "Button up your overcoat..." At one point Skitch plays the piano in mittens, but he doesn't do it for long.

After the next commercial, Johnny is back at his desk next to Ed, using a whisk broom to brush off the white confetti and getting a big laugh by invoking a dandruff shampoo commercial.  "Doctor, I haven't been able to wear a black dress ever since I had this trouble!" Then he reads off a list of what he calls "What's Jokes," saying they were all the rage at the time (and I remember a few of these from my own childhood).

"What's purple and puts out forest fires?  Smokey the Grape."
"What's 50 feet long, is rubber and has a long tongue?  The Jolly Green Giant's sneaker."

"What's yellow and lies on its back?  A dead school bus."

After another commercial, we find Johnny in the audience as we hear the band finish up playing the theme song.  I'm thinking that may have been part of a second opening for stations joining in progress at 11:30. Johnny's getting ready to play "Stump the Band," a feature I remember well (and a holdover from Jack Paar).  It works the way I always saw it work: the band will attempt to play what they think is the suggested song (pretty much making one up on the spot), then the audience member will say "That's not it" and sing the actual song.  This crop includes "Did You Ever?", "Chicken Dinner,""Bring That Sinner Home" (an old hymn that I'm surprised the band didn't know..Johnny gets a lot of comic mileage out of that particular woman being a kindergarten teacher), and "Auntie Skinner's Chicken Dinner," which the audience member didn't seem to know herself and may have even made up on the spot.  The audience members are rewarded alternately with a copy of a Skitch Henderson record album, or two tickets to the Broadway revue imported from England, "Beyond the Fringe".

After the next commercial, Carson brings out his first guest, jazz trumpeter Jonah Jones, whose appearances on this show actually made me want to seek out more of his work.  In his first number he plays, and sings a little bit of, the Duke Ellington song "A Monday Date."

After another break, Johnny discusses his trip to St. Croix, in Grape Tree Bay ("There was one grape tree"). It didn't go as well as he expected: he got a piece of rust in his right eye, and after a doctor fixed him up, he spent Friday morning through Sunday afternoon blindfolded.  That means he only got to enjoy the sunshine vicariously, through his wife Joann.  "How's the weather honey?""Lovely." These funny backstage stories, which I remember on rare occasions when I watched the show, were another Jack Paar holdover, in fact Paar excelled at these.

After the next break, comedian and comedy writer Jack Douglas joins Johnny, at a second microphone on his desk.  This was a common sight on Jack Paar's show, and I'm surprised to see it here as Johnny never did this in the shows I saw from the early 1970s to the 1990s.  (There's a photo of Johnny interviewing Colonel Sanders this particular way that often pops up in KFC restaurants even now.)  Douglas is the only guest who will be interviewed this way on this particular evening.

Douglas tells a few rather politically incorrect jokes, including one about a trip to Puerto Rico as an "exchange welfare case." He also calls comedian and civil rights activist Dick Gregory "the only Negro in show business who is not Jewish...he's Italian." But he also gets a couple of laughs by describing the wife-swapping parties in Connecticut, saying "it's a little tough on some guys, they have to give Green Stamps."

Douglas was a comedy writer whose credits including The Colgate Comedy Hour, The Tonight Show in the Paar and Carson eras, Jack Paar's later shows, and Fernwood 2 Night.  He won an Emmy for his work on The George Gobel Show in the mid 1950s, and may be best remembered as one of the writers for Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In.  When he married his third wife, acrobat Reiko in 1960, they began making successful nightclub appearances together and became darlings on the talk show circuit.

Here, Reiko appears in Japanese dress and speaks in broken, but very understandable English.  She comes out after both of Douglas' solo segments, and describes how her husband acts on vacation.  Apparently Jack hated Honolulu, and she says "He's a nut!" That gets a big laugh, along with Johnny's comment about that being an "old Japanese expression." She goes on to say she'd trust him on a separate vacation if he went to Tahiti, where the women are smart and "can't be fooled." "I've never fooled a woman in my life," Jack replies, causing her to giggle.  She also discusses "plastic operations," either removing wrinkles from the 54-year-old Jack or adding some, and a gut, to her.

Johnny's next guest, Sam Levenson, is very similar to Jack Douglas: a writer and comedian who often appeared on talk shows, in his case mainly because he's such a great storyteller.  I read one of his books, "In One Era and Out the Other," years ago, and the Jean Shepherd-ish stories Levenson tells here are very similar to what's in the book.  Levenson hosted his own show on CBS in the early 1950s.  Classic game show fans might remember seeing him on the occasionally rerun extant episode of Two for the Money on GSN, when none other than Ed McMahon was his announcer.  He also appeared on Password and I've Got a Secret.  Levenson was very much a talk show favorite, appearing numerous times with Johnny, Paar, Merv Griffin, Dick Cavett and David Frost.

Levenson tells a couple of very funny and familiar stories from his childhood in New York, saying his family was poor but didn't always know they were poor.  He recounts when he and his older brother were given a nickel to get to and from home via streetcar, and no other money, to get to Coney Island.  While Sam\ held onto his nickel, his older brother was subjected to the fans from the frankfurter and custard stands that sent the delicious smells all over the boardwalk.  The brother finally breaks down and declares, "I don't care if I never get home!" as he buys a frankfurter.  So Sam becomes an accomplice by sneaking his brother onto the streetcar, as the conductor then counts nickels and counts heads.  "My brother just sat there, eating a frankfurter quietly, while they put a little old lady off the trolley," he concludes to great laughter.

Another story is about a highly questionable decision from his mother, about the time "Uncle Louie, Aunt Lena and the eight kids, happen to be coming in from Connecticut or something," out of the blue to the Levenson family which, themselves, had eight kids.  Mom called an emergency meeting in the dark bedroom ("the one with the window") to ask the kids to do her a favor and pretend they don't like the chicken legs she usually served them (and that they actually loved).   Levenson recalls spending the entire evening trying not to drool as he watched everyone else eat the chicken legs he pretended not to like, and spent the evening cooperating and being "a good kid." "When we got around to the dessert, Mom pulled a trick for which a psychiatrist would have her arrested today.  She gets up in cold blood and says, 'Now, all the kids who refused to eat chicken, don't get any dessert!'" Sam never said what happened after that--how everyone reacted, if there was a bloody revolt the next time Mom asked for a sacrifice for company, etc.

The Douglases, Levensons and the next guest--Hedda Hopper--are all classic examples of something that's a lost art now: the professional talk show guest.  Today's talk shows are full of people promoting their next project, standup comedians hoping for a break from the hosts who were all standup comedians themselves back in the day, etc.  But some people were character actors, socialites (Zsa Zsa Gabor comes to mind), etc. who seemed to appear on talk shows more often than movies.  In the case of these four, they were on because they could always be counted on to tell a good story, in Levenson's case multiple stories.  You don't see people like that much anymore, and while, arguably, the Zsa Zsas of the world didn't bring that much to the table, we clearly lost something when the Levensons, the Shepherds, etc. moved on or passed on.

Hedda Hopper, veteran Hollywood gossip columnist, is the last guest to be introduced.  The politically conservative Hopper mentions being nervous when she's about to appear on television.  "I always say a little prayer, and then I thought, gee whiz, I can't do that because that's a federal rap!" That gets a laugh and a smattering of applause as Carson speculates, "I don't know if that applies to television or not!" Hopper then tells Johnny "I know I can't say anything political on any of your shows" Johnny says "Why not?" but she doesn't answer him.  (It's probably because of Carson's own more liberal views and his desire not to express his political opinions on his show, and therefore not being thrilled at a right-leaning guest trying to bait him.) Instead, Hopper makes a rather odd remark about "what to do about Cuba":  "I think Joe Kennedy is so rich he can buy it, Jackie Gleason can sit on it and sink it, and Harry Truman can tell you what to do with it!"

Hopper then describes a Rolls Royce that was just given to her as a gift.  (I'm struck that everyone keeps talking about all of these luxuries, like island vacations and expensive cars, as if they think the average person can relate; maybe that's why Levenson's Depression-era stories stand out like they do for me.)   She invites Johnny to go for a ride in it when he does a week of shows in California in the near future; he says "Then we'll have to go to Muholland Drive and neck!" which gets quite a laugh.  She also tells a story about a conversation she had with arch-rival Louella Parsons, who morbidly had said she thought she would die soon and suggested, "Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could die together?" Hedda recalls telling her,  "You die on your time and I'll die on mine!" She also boasts about her son's work on Perry Mason, with Levenson chiming in about how William Hopper's character does all the dirty work while Perry gets all the credit.

We actually see Carson hold up a sponsor's product briefly; this scene was probably left in because a joke was involved.  Hopper points to the small, model Hotpoint kitchen Johnny is holding up and asks what it is, and Johnny jokes, "It's Mickey Rooney's kitchen!"

The great Jonah Jones comes back for one more number, this time a fully instrumental version of the 1937 Bunny Berigan tune, "I Can't Get Started." It's a beautifully haunting tune that evokes another era calling from far away, and ironically seems to fit the show in this 50 year later context.

The show ends like almost all talk shows did in those days (when the guests moved over and stayed on the couch, instead of all being "goodbye guests" and leaving right after their segments), with Carson re-iterating everyone's next appearances and the title of Hedda Hopper's book, then saying goodnight as the title appears on the screen.

Obviously the show would be tweaked heavily before the end of the decade.  Carson demanded his monologue be pushed to 11:30, as more local newscasts expanded to 30 minutes, leaving McMahon and Henderson to make up the difference in those first 15 "filler" minutes.  There's a very good example of one of these segments on Youtube as part of the 1965 New Year's Eve show, in which an impish Henderson keeps referring to Carson as "the prince" because it's not time for him to come out yet.  Eventually, Carson wasn't thrilled with the two having this segment to themselves and pushed for that segment to be eliminated, and the show to be a 90 minute show beginning at 11:30.  That's what happened in January 1967 and that's how I originally found it.

As it turns out, 1967 was a banner year for The Tonight Show: Carson walked off the show due to a dispute, was gone three weeks; the AFTRA strike affected the show, with Johnny accusing the network of violating is contract by rerunning older shows during the strike; and the show got a new, and its most famous, bandleader, Doc Severinsen, with Tommy Newsome as backup.

And there were other, more symbolic changes.  The censors' control over the show began to ease up, with the Ed Ames "Tomahawk Throwing Incident of 1965" being a watershed moment for the show.  (Ames, of NBC's Daniel Boone, was trying to help Johnny learn to throw a tomahawk; Johnny threw one and had it land between the legs of a human figure.  The audience roar, and Johnny's famous ad-lib--"Welcome to 'Frontier Rabbi'!"--set the laugh record broken by the 1979 "Sis-boom-bah" incident.)  Then, Johnny took more of his shows to Hollywood, bringing in a lot more celebrities like Lucille Ball, and fewer "talk show regulars" like the Douglases.  One memorable Burbank show from 1969 had Ozzie and Harriet, of all people, talking about the time Ozzie almost got caught with marijuana on a military base.  His excuse: he was holding it for someone.

Whenever the show was in Burbank, it was a different show.  It had a different atmosphere, a different personality.  Many nights it was "as spontaneous as a shuttle launch," as Time magazine once put it, but other nights it was freewheeling and unpredictable.  One such night was that legendary night in which a heavily inebriated Dean Martin whisked out one ad-lib after another, including a memorable rhyme from the era: "I love my wife, I could not ask for more, she's blind and mute and oversexed and owns a liquor store!" which brought down the house.  Then Bob Hope showed up (he had not been billed) and the three swapped ad-libs one after another.  George Gobel, drinking and watching in the green room and knowing he'd have to follow them all, came out still holding his drink (which Martin used for an ashtray in full view of the camera), and took stock of having to follow Hope, Martin and Carson on that night..and said the immortal line that is now in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations: "Have you ever felt like the world was a tuxedo and you were a pair of brown shoes?" That was the line of the night, sending Carson, Hope, Martin and the audience into hysterics.

I'm immovably convinced, that was the show, the very night, that sealed the deal for The Tonight Show to move to Hollywood.   Even though the move didn't happen until 1972, Carson had been pushing for it for years.  Before the Fallon era, the show never again returned to New York until Leno brought it back for a special week in the 1990s.

As any employee with a company over a period of time, Carson started racking up more vacation time, bringing in more guest hosts, and eventually stopped doing Mondays.  His last, big change to the show was when it was reduced to one hour per night beginning in 1980.  That was the last step and now the blueprint was done.  Carson had transformed what Paar gave him into what Leno, Kimmel, Craig Ferguson, etc. now do.  (Oh, and the record for the longest laugh would finally go to the great "Potato Chip Incident of 1987." Look it up, I can't possibly do it justice by trying to describe it.)

Carson's reign ended in 1992, with two shows that may very well be the best he ever did.  The next to last show featured Robin Williams at his funniest and Bette Midler at her best, singing "One More for My Baby" directly to a surprisingly tearful Johnny.  The following night, a clip show and a mini-documentary showing Johnny's typical day, led up to Johnny's final farewell, in front of the multi-colored curtains but this time (in perhaps one last nod to Jack Paar), uncharacteristically sitting on a stool.  "I am one of the lucky people in the world; I found something I always wanted to do and I have enjoyed every single minute of it," he told us that night.  "It has been an honor and a privilege to come into your homes all these years and entertain you. And I hope when I find something that I want to do and I think you would like and come back, that you'll be as gracious in inviting me into your home as you have been. I bid you a very heartfelt good night." As a VIP studio audience stood up and cheered, and those of us at home started missing him badly already, Carson choked up as he stood and waved goodbye.

Disappointingly, Johnny Carson never did find something that he wanted to do that he thought we would like; the last we saw of him were in a hilarious vocal appearance on The Simpsons and cameos on The Late Show with David Letterman.  He never appeared on The Tonight Show during the Leno years, except for the clips Leno showed when Carson died in 2005.  Unlike most performers, like Milton Berle or Jack Benny, Carson actually stopped working and enjoyed life, traveling and playing cards.  But Carson secretly kept sending jokes to David Letterman, apparently missing his nightly monologue more than anything.  Letterman delivered an entire monologue the next show he did after Carson's death, then informed his audience that all of those jokes had been sent to him by Carson.  It was the master's last monologue.

But Johnny, that late night king from my lost childhood, is surprisingly, not hard to find. His shows are becoming more available, on video and online, in clips and entire shows.  His ghost still haunts late night TV. Every time you see a talk show after 11:30 EST and every time you see a comedian come out to do a monologue, then take his seat behind a desk, know that Johnny Carson led them there, after finding his own way through three decades of the greatest talk in television history.

Availability: Johnny Carson Productions is making more and more of Carson's shows available online, hoping one day to allow people to search a database at johnnycarson.com for any of Carson's existing shows.   Some are already starting to become available even with their original commercials and NBC promos intact.

Next time on this channel: The Fugitive.

A Relentless Pursuit of an Innocent Man

The most genius idea ever for a TV show, and how it paved the way for modern cable drama

The Fugitive, "The Garden House"
OB: January 14, 1964, 10 p.m. EST, ABC
I was born the day this episode was originally broadcast.

"The name? Richard Kimble.  Occupation: doctor of medicine.  Destination: death row, state prison.  The irony?  Richard Kimble is innocent."

Every episode during season one of The Fugitive re-enacted the beginning of Richard Kimble's run from the wrongly applied law: the train wreck, which separates him from Lt. Gerard.

"Proved guilty, what Richard Kimble could not prove was that moments before discovering his murdered wife's body, he saw a one-armed man running from the vicinity of his home."

Why Gerard is escorting Kimble to state prison and not a uniformed state trooper or deputy is unclear (so is why they're not being transported on a more modern-looking train car), but it does put the antagonist in the opening, handcuffed to Kimble just as fate has done symbolically.

"Richard Kimble ponders his fate as he looks at the world for the last time, and sees only darkness.  But in that darkness, fate moves its huge hand."

...and then the trainwreck, followed by the splash in a nearby creek as newly-freed Kimble washes his face.

And so began Richard Kimble's (and David Janssen's) four year, legendary run from the law, from certain injustice and death, from the obsessed Lt. Philip Gerard (Barry Morse),  toward black hair dye and a new temporary identity and new life in every town big and small, and toward a scary, uncertain future and an odds-against search for the one-armed man.  That meant exactly one regular character, a couple of semi-regulars or two, settings that changed every episode, a shipload of guest stars, and one of the most liberated storylines in television history, rivaling the one from Route 66. Really, almost anything could happen--the show's entire genre could even change from one episode to the next, and it often did.  It's what makes The Fugitive to this day, one of the greatest hour long dramas of all time.

Kimble worked odd jobs, faced trouble makers from the very first episode (a jealous, woman-beating jerk played by Brian Keith), looked over his shoulder in every town.  He reacted with the rest of us, getting that sick, dreadful feeling in our stomachs every time he saw a uniformed officer or a police car.  (Newspaper photographers and radio microphones weren't the most welcome sights in the world, either.)  Kimble made friends tentatively and trusted surprisingly often, found himself uncomfortably close to murders and dead bodies a surprising amount of time, and often performed heroic efforts that attracted the attention of the media...and tips off Gerard to his whereabouts.  By the middle of the first season he'd already rescued a bunch of school children from a burning school bus, helped deliver a baby in the middle of a raging forest fire and rescued Gerard himself from drowning.

In true 1960s male fantasyland, Kimble became a jack of all trades who could do all manner of man's work. And there was almost always a woman.  Ladies were drawn to him like flies.  A troubled but innocent man was golden.  And the built-in premise allowed him to love 'em and leave 'em without any of the normal male guilt, because his very survival depended on her not seeing him again, and hers depended on not coming with him.  He spent the night with many of these women, and it was heavily implied he did more than crash on their couch, even in those pre-censorship times.  In one episode a single mom even seems to be figuring out what to do about her children so she can have a man over.  And those women were played by some beautiful 1960s era guest stars, like Susan Oliver, Suzanne Pleshette, Lois Nettleton and Angie Dickinson.

So how did his feelings for Helen Kimble figure into all of this?  Well, that's the rather dark elephant in the room.  We don't actually see Richard pine for her all that much, or stop to shed a tear or look at a picture of her in his billfold (yes, I know he had to travel light).  It turns out there's a reason for that.

When we finally meet Helen Kimble in flashbacks, we don't see a very pleasant side of her.  We first meet her in the hospital just minutes after the Kimbles' son dies in childbirth, and she's confronted with the wrenching news that she'll never have children.  Much later, she's grown bitter, hateful and alcoholic, and is swilling martinis left and right.  The night of her death, they're arguing about adoption, and when Richard takes a glass away from her and throws it into the floor, she simply stares at him and coldly says they still have more glasses.

Richard takes a drive in his Mercury to cool off, along the way seeing a boy in a rowboat (in Franklin Canyon Reservoir no less, I've written about that place already, a couple of times in fact).  It's a bittersweet moment as well as a key part of his later murder trial.

When he returns home, he has to slam on his brakes to keep his Mercury from running over a one-armed man, who stares at him for a moment with his mouth open.  Then arrives home and finds his wife, lying in the floor dead.

We've never heard much about whether Kimble had a chance to properly mourn Helen Kimble's death, or if he even did, considering the rocky state of their marriage.  And as I've seen it mentioned elsewhere, that wasn't his only rocky relationship; his hometown of Stafford, Indiana apparently didn't love him very much either.  After all, it was a jury of his Stafford peers who found him guilty (after a trial of questionable evidence),  and Lt. Gerard was considered a pillar of that community.  And when Kimble returns home briefly (in an episode the week before I was born, "Home is for the Hunted") we find his brother Ray not only has doubts about Richard's innocence, but despite those doubts, he's been treated badly by the community for being Richard's brother, complete with abuse and difficulty finding employment.  (To his credit, Ray still doesn't want Gerard to catch him and hides Richard from him.)

The show almost didn't get made due to its portrayal of law enforcement.  Sometimes, especially in episodes set in smaller towns, the police department or sheriff's office is portrayed as teeming with corruption or just plain laughably incompetent.  (In one episode we even see a deputy swilling moonshine while driving.)  In many other episodes they're seen as highly competent, and just as quick to get fed up with Gerard as everyone else.

In an early episode, Phillip Gerard has to break the news to his son that a planned fishing trip for the weekend may be cancelled due to another Kimble sighting in another part of the country.  A few episodes later in "Nightmare at North Oak" (the one in which Richard injures himself rescuing children from a burning bus, which Janssen actually injured himself filming that very scene), we see Kimble in a jail cell and a cocky Gerard talking mano a mano.  (Their local sheriff's office has taken an instant dislike to Lt. Gerard.) Gerard makes it clear, he thinks Kimble's time on the run has made his "fantasy" about being innocent more of a reality to Kimble. When Gerard appears defensive, having said he's done everything he could to find the one-armed man himself, Kimble says, "It's a curse, isn't it Gerard?  You know, I think you have nightmares too.  Your nightmare is, when I'm dead, you'll find him."

This is a tense, memorable scene that once and for all, makes it abundantly clear Gerard himself considers the "It's just my professional duty to carry out the law, that's all" line to be a huge, steaming crock.  Gerard is immovably convinced he's looking for a killer, and it's obsessive and personal.  And this episode's appearance after the one involving his son implies it grows even more personal over time.  And I honestly think Kimble's line about Gerard finding the one-armed man haunts Gerard.  Barry Morse always played Lt.Gerard of the Indiana State Police with exactly the right amount of cold, calculating obsessiveness, with a tiny amount of decency somewhere inside fighting to take control of him.  Making him a villain at this point in time was a daring choice.  Some fans felt he was downright scary, and one of those grew up to be horror writer Stephen King.

Put all of this together, along with Richard Kimble's odd jobs (he couldn't work for someone who demanded a social security number or too much more information) and how that often put him among some rough characters...and of course, the fact that the show's first three seasons were shot in black and white...and you basically have a recipe for film noir.  It's not that Kimble was an anti-hero, but during the later black and white episodes he comes off as especially desperate, willing to do almost anything to find that one-armed man; sometimes appearing less willing to clear himself under the eyes of the law than just make a point.  He even seems to get used to this lifestyle, having jettisoned a rather empty, unsatisfying life in higher middle classic suburbia, the very type described on Mad Men and in the works of John Cheever.

Put all of this together, and I could make the argument that the first three seasons of The Fugitive may very well be the last true, and truly great, film noir ever produced in this country.

Another thing to consider: the case against Richard Kimble.  Having covered numerous real-life capital murder trials over the years (in which the evidence was often more of a slam dunk since we now have DNA testing and the like; plus loose-lipped suspects who confess in front of surveillance cameras), I was very curious about whatever evidence in Kimble's murder trial made everyone, especially Gerard, so hand-on-stack-of-Bibles-swear-to-everloving-God certain and positive no one else in the universe could've possibly killed Helen Kimble.  We always heard the evidence was circumstantial; forensics science wasn't what it is now, and DNA testing was non-existent; the boy in the rowboat testified he never saw Kimble, but since Kimble saw him and placed him there, and the boy admitted being there, that should've solidified his alibi. It's later brought out that the defense never mentioned Helen Kimble's heavy drinking or how strong someone could be when they're missing one limb and have learned to compensate for it.

So, Dr. Richard Kimble basically had an inept attorney, and everyone's certitude about his guilt isn't based on a mountain of evidence and an arsenal of smoking guns as much as maniacally blind faith in a system that's clearly failed.  Perhaps that's a holdover from the smoking ruins of the McCarthy era and a foreshadowing of disillusion with "the system" that would come in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

The show's creator, Roy Huggins, always swore his one and only inspiration for this show was the western genre, basically the "loner" western character who often popped up so much.  (Sure enough, Brian Keith's pilot episode bad guy is wearing a cowboy hat.)  But there are glaringly obvious similarities to the real life murder case of Dr. Sam Shephard, and to the Victor Hugo classic novel "Les Miserables," in the latter case especially with Gerard's character patterned so closely after Javert.

Reinforcing the noirish style to the show was the work of the actor, not announcer, they choose for the show's narrator. William Conrad, radio's Matt Dillon, would actually have his own Quinn Martin-produced show ten years later (Cannon), but brought a surprising amount of depth to his role here as the sympathetic voice of doom.  He was clearly chosen for his acting skills, not just his deep voice.  (For an idea of Conrad's range as a gifted narrator, check out his other great TV narration work: The Bullwinkle Show.  Those two assignments overlapped for one season, 1963-64.)  During season one, Quinn Martin's usual announcer, Dick Wesson, read off the titles and guest cast.  (I didn't realize until I sat down to write this, that Wesson was also the announcer on The Wonderful World of Disney and many of the Disney movie trailers of the 1960s and 1970s.)  The opening is underlined by the Pete Rugulo theme song, the opening notes representing loneliness, the rest of the quick-tempo strings representing a man on the run.


This whole show may have very well failed had they picked the wrong actor...but fortunately they didn't. David Janssen takes on the role as if it were made just for him, with at least one fan saying he looked in the very first episode ("Fear in a Desert City") as if he'd already been doing the show for years.  I'm taken by how much acting Janssen did just with his eyes.  He may very well be one of the most underrated actors in television history, and it's a shame his health--smoking constantly on camera, drinking constantly off camera--cut short his life at age 48 and possibly interfered with his getting better roles in his lifetime.  It hurts that we didn't get to see more work from him, that a 60-something Janssen couldn't make a cameo in a Quentin Tarantino movie...and I know he would have, I just know it.  (Incidentally, the on-camera smoking may have been out of deference to one of the show's advertisers being a tobacco company.  There are even scenes where someone offers him a cigarette and he says no thanks, he has his own.)

Janssen always wanted a big break as a leading man in movies; the best he could get was four television series, two of which had him as private eyes.  His first, a 1950s TV version of radio's Richard Diamond, Private Detective, was a Peter Gunn-type TV noir that had him taking assignments from a woman whose sexy voice and sexy legs was all we ever heard/saw.  (The first woman in that role happened to be Mary Tyler Moore.)  On The Fugitive, his clean-cut persona, tobacco-stained voice, and the drinking that made him appear older than he was, all worked in his favor as he played a college man who stood out in the odd jobs he held, like truck driver and lifeguard.

The very day I was born, the show took a turn into Hitchcockian territory...maybe not Rear Window or Vertigo so much as Alfred Hitchcock Presents.  "The Garden House" was written by Sheldon Stark.  The woman who directed this episode--veteran Hollywood actress Ida Lupino--had also directed a couple of Hitchcock episodes.  At a time when it was exceedingly rare for a woman to sit in a director's chair, she directed episodes of Have Gun Will Travel, The Twilight Zone and The Virginian, and even sitcoms like The Donna Reed Show, Bewitched and Gilligan's Island.  She was known for her special ability to work with TV actors in particular and get them out of their weekly comfort zones.

The show opens with "Act I"--Quinn Martin's TV shows often put their titles after each commercial break with an "Act" number, very unusual then as well as now--as Ann Guthrie (played by Peggy McCay, better known for her long running role on Days of Our Lives) is struggling to stay on a horse.  Her husband Harland (Robert Webber) and sister, Carol Willard (Pippa Scott) are watching, as Carol takes pictures for a "Sunday spread." As Kimble, who goes by the name "Sanford" in this episode (he has a different alias in almost every episode) walks up with another horse, we hear the narrator set the scene: "Connecticut.  Green trees framing the homes of the wealthy and the near-wealthy.  Gracious living with roots deep in the past. And without roots, interstate fugitive Richard Kimble."
Carol snaps a quick picture of couple, horse and "Sanford," but Kimble quickly averts his head.  As Carol asks if he's camera shy, Kimble finds one of the girth buckles still undone, indicating a loose saddle and therefore, the problems with the horse.

As Harlan--editor of the Westborne Clarion--and Carol, a reporter and photographer for the paper, walk off to the side, we realize they mean to kill Ann.

"I really fumbled that one, didn't I?" Harlan asks.
"My love, with a capital F," Ann responds, speculating that latest attempt on her life could've resulted in nothing more than broken bones, "...or a wheelchair case.  How would you like that?  Pushing her around the rest of our lives in a wheelchair." The writers really want us to hate these two.  We come to realize Ann actually owns the house, estate, newspaper and has all the money, but Ann's husband really wants her sister Carol.  Carol, however, is expressing attraction toward Kimble.

A little later, an optimistic Ann has gotten back onto what turns out to be a runaway horse, and Kimble chases after her in a Jeep.  He finds the horse stopped on the trail and some blood on a nearby root, then he sees the title location, the estate's garden house.  He finds Ann inside, listening to a music box with a twirling ballerina and looking at some childhood artwork depicting her and Carol.  "Anytime I put my foot in it, I come here," she tells Kimble as he fixes a small cut on her arm.  She says "Sanford" reminds her of a doctor; Kimble says his ability is from earning an old Boy Scout merit badge.

Later, the two sisters chat at an art studio where Ann is painting; Carol, wearing a bathing suit, asks "Sanford" to adjust one of her straps, apparently both flirting and showing off to Ann her seeming freedom of a single life.  This is apparently where Carol hatches the idea of cooking up a phony affair between "Sanford" and Ann.

Back at the newspaper, we see her holding an old back issue about Kimble's escape from the train wreck, complete with photos.  She shows it to Harlan, who at first starts to call the police.  But she stops him, first pointing out that no one else knows yet so it's an "exclusive," then pointing out that he's now a convenient alibi for a murder, and they no longer need convoluted plans to make it look like an accident.  "He's killed one woman already," she points out.

Back at the house, we see Harlan pulling a gun out of a drawer.  (The graphics say we're in "Act II," in case you're keeping score for "Chekov's Gun" purposes.)   He asks Ann to touch it, so she won't be so afraid of it.  As Kimble walks in, Harlan asks "Sanford" to spend some time with Ann to show her firearms and horses.  This is especially low behavior...

...for when the two get into the car and Harlan lights up, they hatch their real plan.  It's to imply the two spent a lot of time together because they were having an affair, then got into a quarrel and Kimble, the lady-killer,strikes again.  "Make sure you don't miss, my love," Carol says.  "Don't worry about me, make sure you cry at the funeral!" Harlan shoots back.

Carol hides in the bushes and snaps away as Kimble takes Ann horseback riding.  When they get back to the house, Carol greets them and reminds Sanford Ann's a married woman, and that she, Carol, is single.  "Is there anything you can teach me?" Carol asks.  The conversation gives us some more background: apparently Ann inherited everything because she stayed home in Westborne while Carol traveled the country in search of herself.  Interesting enough, Ann's not that good on horses and with guns and Carol is, which is a family trait and perhaps another source of some of the resentment.  "Let that be a lesson to you, Sanford...a rolling stone gathers no loot!" Carol says to Kimble.

At a party at the estate that night, Ann is wearing Carol's dress, and Harlan goes off to dance with her for appearances' sake.  Carol reminds him he'll be dancing with her Dior dress.  "How many drinks have you had?" he asks the martini-swilling Carol.  "Not nearly enough!" she shoots back.

Carol finds Kimble alone in the stable, and starts peppering him with questions about his past, his work history, and his love life.  "I'm working on it, Miss Willard," Kimble says about his love life.  She tells "Sanford" that he's "much too formal" and promptly sticks her tongue down his throat.  He pushes her away and tells her they'll be asking questions if she's gone too long from the party.  (Interesting little argument there, implying Richard may very well be attracted to her himself.)  Harlan finds her in the stable and takes her back to the party.

As she leaves, Kimble finds a hotel key that's fallen out of her purse.  It mentions the name of a specific hotel and room number.  He keeps it.  As he walks out of the barn, he finds Harlan and Carol making out big time, and specifically overhears Harlan say,   "Until Ann is gone, we've got to be very careful, you know that!"

The next day, after unsuccessfully trying to teach Ann how to shoot skeet and after Carol showed off her own abilities ("When you aim at something, sweetie, you must want to try to kill it"), Kimble gets Ann alone and tells her about the affair and that, based on what he overheard, she may not be safe.  She gets upset and orders him gone, then tells Harlan what Kimble just said.  Kimble says he's sorry if he misunderstood what was going on and he'll be on the next bus out of town that night.  Harlan agrees to pay him before he leaves town.  Ann has gone back to her special place, the garden house, where she's listening to her music box and saying "Kimble's lying" over and over.

Back at the newspaper, Harlan tells Carol, "It'll have to be in the next couple of hours if we're going to blame him." Cut to commercial.

The Fugitive, "Act IV," has Kimble confronting Carol at the Clarion offices, with the motel key, and what he learned from the clerk.  He says the clerk provided a very convincing description of Harlan and Carol, and a handwriting expert can figure out the handwriting from the aliases on the register.  He mentions the idea of dropping it in a mailbox with a note to the D.A. and suggests Carol go back to traveling.

A panicked Carol calls Ann, but doesn't say anything and hangs up.  She hops into her Thunderbird and drives away.  Back at the house, Harlan and Ann have a very ugly confrontation in which he admits the affair and that he doesn't love her.  "You don't know, do you?  You really are stupid, aren't you?  It's Carol and I. You think I married you for love?" He says he only married her for the house, the newspaper and the money, and shows her the old newspaper with Kimble's picture.  He beats Ann over the head with the whole idea that she's alone and no one cares about her, obviously being an over-the-top anus to get her upset enough to head back to the garden house.

Kimble comes back, finds the newspaper lying in the floor and the open, empty drawer that once held the gun.  The maid tells him Mrs. Guthrie went back to the garden house, so he heads there.  Harlan arrives first, and loads his gun with bullets.  Then, while hiding, he sees two high-heeled feet come in the door.  Kimble, off in the distance, hears the gunshot and rushes to the garden house.  He finds Harlan inside, holding the gun and crouched over the body of a woman, and the two get into a fistfight.  (Quinn Martin's shows had a specific rhythm to them, calling for so much action per act and strategically placed action scenes like this one.)   With Harlan lying on the floor, Ann walks in, and finds Carol shot and wounded.  During her dying moments she still shows she can be mean, saying, "Harlan thought I was you.  That's a blow to my ego, mistaking me for you...Good little Annie, the good one, that's why you always had everything." But then she sees the childhood sisters picture on the wall, apparently noticing it for the first time, and strokes Ann on the cheek, saying "Annie, Annie," before she expires.

Harlan comes to and asks Ann to give him the gun, so they can blame it on Kimble ("He's a convicted murderer, what does it matter?"), but Ann--confident with the gun because Harlan already said he wanted her to be--holds it steady. Harlan tells her he was out of his head, and if he dies or goes away, she'll be alone.  Kimble tells her there are worse things than being along. When Harlan lunges for the gun, Kimble slugs him one last night, knocking him out cold "for awhile," as Dr. Kimble puts it.  He tells Ann to call the police.

The Fugitive, "Epilog," finds Kimble walking her back to the main house where the phone is located.  "I wish you could stay or that I could go," she assures Kimble, thus assuring him both main women in this episode were very much attracted to him.  She says she has no idea what she'll do next, and that she doesn't know how to run a newspaper, but Kimble assures her she'll be all right.
Every episode ends with a shot of Kimble returning to live on the run...either walking off into the distance, catching a bus, hitchhiking, what have you.  In this one, we see him walk, then break into a jog (remember, the police are coming) as William Conrad leaves us with an afterthought:  "Tomorrow the Westborne Clarion will have a new editor.  One of the paper's first editorials will be a plea for innocent men pursued by the furies, men such as Richard Kimble, the Fugitive."

There was never any sign of Gerard in this episode, just the opening scene re-enacting the train wreck; in fact, he only appears in some 35-40 episodes, 12 of them in season one alone.  But his presence is always felt and he's basically the reason Kimble is on the run.

In the show's final season, 1966-67, it suddenly wasn't the same show anymore.  Like the rest of ABC's prime time lineup, it was now in full color, robbing it of many of its noirish qualities, even though so many of the other noir tropes were still in place.  In part one of the series' two part finale there's even a scene in a bail bondsman's office with neon light streaming in through Venetian blinds.  One thing the new lighting and bright colors did do is make us subconsciously think for some reason, it might actually be easier now for Kimble to get caught.  It also paved the way for later, grittier color shows like Hill Street Blues.

By then, Janssen needed a break; he was showing up on time to put in long hours on the set, but then partied around the clock afterwards.  This took its toll on him, and made it harder to do the show, so he decided to bow out, despite an almost certain renewal.  Here's where the show came up with its best known innovation: the idea that it owed the fans some closure, a wrap-up.

So the cast and crew shot a two-part episode, "The Judgment," that was held back until the end of summer reruns, airing August 22 and 29, 1967.  It's a convoluted plot that's actually not a fan favorite, as it also manages to pay tribute to the series' long run while managing to shred the canon at the same time.  (For one thing the writers actually managed to change Helen Kimble's cause of death from strangulation to blunt force trauma;  they also pulled an eyewitness out of their butts, a coward who watched Helen Kimble get murdered and could've intervened but didn't, then was too cowardly to come forward.)  Gerard finally got his man, allowing Kimble to spend a last weekend with his family (an unusual twice likely borrowed from "Les Miserables") and one last effort to find the one-armed man.  Sure enough, Kimble and the man, Fred Johnson, end up atop an amusement park tower that was part of a water-based ride of some sort, and Johnson confesses to everything.  The two fight, Johnson ends up pointing a gun at Kimble...and Gerard spectacularly saves his life, shooting the one armed man who then falls off the tower.  By then Gerard has made an eleventh hour conversion, finally convinced of Kimble's innocence, and gets coward guy to finally tell everything in court.  It robbed fans who wanted Gerard to get his comeuppance, or at least walk away looking deflated.

If the finale failed in story construction, it succeeded wildly in emotional drama, especially the pitch-perfect epilog.  We see Kimble (arm in arm with one final woman, the one he was able to stay with this time) leaving the courthouse a free man talking very confidently to a gaggle of reporters he once would've feared with good reason, then sees Gerard, who shakes his hand and watches Kimble go his separate way.  The real kicker is when we see that once-feared police car drive up, and two officers matter-of-factly get out and walk off.  Kimble suddenly realizes the sight of the police no longer means what it did for four years and will never again mean what it did when Helen Kimble was alive.  "Tuesday, August Fifth...the day the running stopped," is what the narrator leaves us with.  It was the highest rated TV broadcast in history, a record that is now held by the February 1983 M*A*S*H episode that saw the Korean War end.  Today we now expect series TV to wrap up with finales, giving us closure with the characters, all because The Fugitive forever convinced network executives that we will always consider that a big deal.

The show's "wrong is right" mentality can best be summed up in a season one episode, "Smoke Screen," in which a group of migrant workers take an instant dislike to Kimble when he goes to work with them.  We later find out it's because, again, of his college-educated demeanor, making him stand out and making them fear he's working undercover for customs and immigration.  When Kimble tells one of them he's actually on the run from the law, they reward him with fierce loyalty.  And that, I believe, was the day the inverted logic of heroes was born.

The Fugitive obviously inspired a lot of shows in its format, shows that couldn't be less like one another--The Incredible Hulk, Touched By an Angel, The X-Files, Mad Men, all owe a lot to The Fugitive. But so does The Shield, The Wire, The Sopranos, Breaking Bad and a number of other shows, where we see what happens when flawed people are left in charge of a system, or a main character is liberated from having to be a "good guy" necessarily.

The Fugitive was remade as another series on CBS in 2000 (for just one season), with Tim Daly channeling Janssen.  I didn't watch so I don't know much about this one, and how Kimble stayed on the run in the era of the internet (I know they dealt with that), DNA, fingerprint databases and the earliest cell phones with cameras, but I do know he did think of his late wife a lot and apparently missed her.  Before that, there was a highly acclaimed 1993 movie version, in which Harrison Ford once again faithfully re-created Janssen's persona.  But Tommy Lee Jones won an Oscar for re-inventing Gerard (now a U.S. Marshal) as a more professional lawman who isn't quite as cold, and went from not caring whether Kimble was innocent to figuring out on his own that he was--and did so a lot quicker than the TV Gerard.

When Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert reviewed that movie on their TV show (they loved it), Siskel spoke about how faithful it was to the TV show, and made a remark that could very well be a pop culture seismic shift: he pointed out that, just like the TV show (and others from the 1960s), the action swells up to a climax in 15 minute increments, like a TV show leaving us hanging through a commercial break.  That's one of the earliest recognitions I've ever heard that what was once a TV director's nightmare, working around commercial breaks, might actually result in an art form by itself.  Quinn Martin pioneered that idea, and The Fugitive ran with it.  You can still follow those steps even now on any hour long TV drama that has any amount of suspense.

Availability: the entire series is on DVD and many episodes are on Youtube.

Next time on this channel: The Ed Sullivan Show.

Yeah, Yeah, Yeah...

It was really just like any other Ed Sullivan show...except for those two segments that, you know, changed pop culture forever



The Ed Sullivan Show, "The Beatles' First Appearance"
OB: February 9, 1964, 8 p.m. EST, CBS
I was three weeks old when this broadcast first aired.

I don't remember it but I remember being told.  It's a lovely memory, one that people constantly try to take away from me.  I can see why they do that, but they won't.

The memory is this: my still-young mother, young enough to dearly love rock music, holding me (a three week old infant) in her lap, while she watched the Beatles make their debut on The Ed Sullivan Show. That simple act (my mom keeping me with her on the couch, perhaps so she wouldn't have to worry about running to the next room because Baby Dixon was wailing for a bottle in the middle of "All My Loving") put me face to face with one of the major pop culture moments of the 20th Century.  It's the first documented TV show to be playing when I was ever in front of a TV set, not to mention my first documented exposure to rock music and the Beatles, and the first nationwide, communal event in which I would take part (the next one would be the first moon landing).

Here's why people always try to take that away from me: at the time, my family was living in central Alabama (specifically a small apartment in Gadsden's Walnut Park neighborhood), and the main station that would've served as a CBS affiliate in central Alabama, WAPI, Channel 13 in Birmingham...didn't carry The Ed Sullivan Show that night.  WAPI was actually a combination CBS/NBC affiliate in those days, and with the apparent exception of CBS' Lassie, chose to run NBC's Sunday night lineup that night instead. Truthfully, it was (usually) the higher rated lineup, and included Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color and the unstoppable Bonanza. At the time of that night's Ed Sullivan Show, Channel 13 was showing the second half of Disney, followed by Imogene Coca's sitcom Grindl, which turned out to be one of that season's critical and ratings disasters.

But here's the thing: remember, we didn't live in Birmingham, we lived in Etowah County, about an hour northeast on the (then still unfinished) interstate. We lived in an area surrounded by mountains on almost all sides, so we weren't going to see much television without some help. So, the Etowah County/Gadsden area was one of the first communities to benefit from cable TV, which in those days was meant to import distant signals for clarity.  Sure enough, the Gadsden Times TV listings of that era tell which stations appear on "Cablevision." (I remember our having Cablevision; channel 8 was the one with all the clocks and barometers, and the sound of a local FM radio station.) And one of those stations just happened to be the Atlanta CBS affiliate, WAGA, Channel 5, which certainly did show Ed, John, Paul, George, Ringo and the other guests that night.  That's probably where my mother and I saw it.  And those who didn't have cable, could apparently still turn their antennas toward Chattanooga and pick up WDEF, Channel 12.

I should probably clear up some semantics and confusion first: the February 9, 1964 broadcast of The Ed Sullivan Show was not the first time the Fab Four's faces ever popped up on an American TV screen.  This show's distinction is a bit different from that.  They first appeared on the news, actually--first on NBC's Huntley/Brinkley Report then on The CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite, both in 1963.  On NBC, Edwin Newman narrated video of the Beatles, while on CBS, their London correspondent Alexander Kendrick profiled them, showing them singing "She Loves You" and bags of mail coming into their fan club. Later, Jack Paar showed footage of the group, and the crowds reacting to them, in early January 1964. What Paar and the others weren't able to do was to get the Beatles live in their own network studios. That was what Sullivan did that was so momentous, actually got the Beatles live in the U.S., on an actual CBS soundstage in the Ed Sullivan Theater, without question. That's why his often-repeated phrase, "right here on this stage," was actually such a big deal whenever he introduced anyone.

That still wasn't what made the night special.  What made it special was that it was the very first time the Beatles ever performed on American soil, in the land that gave them all of their musical inspiration.

Ed Sullivan will always be remembered as a TV host, but he was a newspaper entertainment columnist first. In fact, that's how he became famous enough to host his own variety show, writing the "Little Old New York" column for the New York Daily News, and in the process, starting a rivalry with Walter Winchell. Both men had similar columns and similar politics.

In 1948, in the infancy of post-war television, Sullivan was tapped to host a show on CBS called Toast of the Town.  Variety shows themselves were in their infancy; the first, Hour Glass, premiered on NBC in 1946, and Milton Berle's Texaco Star Theater would come along two years later, same time as Sullivan, and just after Arthur Godfrey.  The even older medium of vaudeville influenced nearly all of these shows (except Godfrey's, the first to have the sensibility of a broadcaster).  Sullivan's first show featured the television debut of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, and also featured singer Monica Lewis, as well as Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein previewing the score to their upcoming musical "South Pacific." The show eventually moved to CBS Studio 50, which would later be renamed the Ed Sullivan Theater.  The series, sponsored by Lincoln-Mercury Dealers for its first 14 years, would be officially renamed The Ed Sullivan Show in the fall of 1955.

Sullivan was a study in contrasts.  He was sensitive to disputes to the point that some people may not be invited to his show; yet his lack of personality and talent, and his ability to get tongue-tied, trip on microphone cords and forgot names of even iconic musical groups made him comedian fodder--and he loved it when comedians made fun of him, he loved the attention.  His right-wing sensibilities kept people off the show who were suspected of being "Communist sympathizers," yet he also positioned himself as one of the first major network stars to promote rock and roll music; his 1955 guests Bill Haley and the Comets, singing "Rock Around the Clock," is believed to be the first time a rock song was performed on U.S. network television.  Some were not without controversy; disputes with Bo Diddley, Buddy Holly and the Crickets and Bob Dylan were well known stories (and Dylan walked off without appearing).  But Sullivan made a name for himself by spotlighting the rising young singer, Elvis Presley, despite the fact that Sullivan got him only after he appeared with the Dorsey Brothers (on Stage Show, his TV debut), Milton Berle and Steve Allen.  Legend has it a lengthy layover at London's Heathrow first brought him into the path of the Beatles in 1963; he saw the crowds of girls who had lined up to see them fly in and realized he had another potential act that could deliver Elvis-type numbers.

The Beatles, who had been performing together since 1960, were starting to catch on in 1963.  Sullivan's talent coordinator had actually caught one of their concerts that summer, before Sullivan crossed paths with their fans at Heathrow.  The Fab Four had a couple of number one hits and a best selling album by the time they made their October 1963 television debut on Val Parnell's Sunday Night at the London Palladium, arguably the U.K. equivalent of Sullivan's American show.  The pandemonium related to that TV appearance on the BBC elevated the Beatles from just another pop group to a phenomenon in the British media, which in turn brought them to the attention of the London news bureaus of NBC and CBS and their appearances on both networks' nightly news.  Then the Beatles made their famous Royal Command performance at the London Palladium, the one where John Lennon famously asked everyone in the "cheap seats" to clap their hands during "Twist & Shout," and said "The rest of you can just rattle your jewelry." While some thought that might have been disrespectful toward the royal family, the audience, including the royals themselves, ate it up.

By the time Sullivan saw the CBS Evening News appearance (it had appeared on the CBS Morning News the morning of November 22; the Kennedy assassination later that day kept it off the Evening News until December 10), he'd already booked the Beatles for three appearances on his show in February. He and Brian Epstein had worked out the details personally and sealed it with a handshake, giving the four a total of $10,000 for their two live and one taped appearances. Then Sullivan saw the CBS News story and called Cronkite personally to ask all about it; that was when he knew a major storm was coming.  That's when CBS started promoting the Beatles' upcoming appearance on the Sullivan show.

In January 1964 Jack Paar showed the Fab Four on his NBC show, in some footage he'd licensed from the BBC.  They were heard singing "She Loves You" just as they were on the CBS Evening News. The behind the scenes politics involving this is fascinating: Epstein went through the roof when he saw this, feeling it had violated the exclusivity deal worked out with Sullivan and threatened a boycott of the BBC Radio and TV (the Beatles had their own popular radio show on the BBC at the time).  But it was a different matter to Sullivan--he and Paar had been feuding over booking guests (or dumping guests who appeared on the others' programs), when Paar presented the Beatles footage, then used it to plug their upcoming appearance
on Sullivan's show.  This, to Sullivan, appeared to be an olive branch from Paar (which it was, actually) and he responded by inviting Paar's daughter Randy to the Beatles' show, and letting her bring guests.  She brought Richard Nixon's daughters, Julie and Tricia.

By that time, radio DJs in Washington, Chicago and St. Louis had jumped the gun by playing "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" a month ahead of its scheduled release in January.  Capitol Records at first tried to get its attorneys to stop the radio stations, but by then popular demand had placed it in heavy rotation.  So Capitol moved up the release to December 26, 1963, and the record became a runaway hit, so much so that Capitol couldn't press enough singles to meet the initial demand.  Thus, Beatlemania had become pandemic.

Keep in mind, this was not an otherwise pleasant time in America.  We were still mourning the assassination of a young president, his official mourning period ending the day I was born, January 14, 1964, in the midst of a brutal winter that kept most of America indoors.  But something about those young, pleasant voices from far away, overseas, singing music that was influenced by America itself.  As they evolved from John Lennon's and Paul McCartney's Quarrymen garage band into what we would know as the Beatles, they listened to and paid tribute, to such U.S. performers as Carl Perkins, Buck Owens and Buddy Holly.  (They recorded an especially angelic version of Holly's "Words of Love" at one point.)  It lead to the Merseybeat/Liverpool sound, which the boys themselves didn't think was all that special.  ""It was a bit more like the original rock and roll than the stuff they've had over the last few months" was how George Harrison put it to CBS News.  "Just a way of classifying it, I don't think the music's very different," added Paul McCartney.  When asked whether they'd be just another flash in the pan and be forgotten in six months (a favorite topic of the media at the time), John Lennon candidly shot back, "It probably will, but it depends on how it takes for them to get tired, don't it?"

On February 7, 1964, the Beatles touched down at JFK International Airport in New York.  They arrived to about four thousand screaming teenagers who were encouraged by New York area radio DJs to turn out...on a school day.  They held a messy, chaotic news conference that actually began with a bald man shouting for everyone to "Shut up!" or there won't be a news conference.  The Fab Four show off a lot of their quick wit; when asked how they found America so far, Ringo Starr quipped, "Turn left at Greenland." Asked about criticism that they were four Elvis wannabes, they denied it as John and Ringo started gyrating like Elvis.

February 9th, show day, was a very extensively busy day in CBS Studio 50 on Broadway (known beginning in 1968 as the Ed Sullivan Theater).  There were dress rehearsals for Beatles and non-Beatles alike.  Their road manager, Neil Aspinal, filled in for George Harrison holding a guitar, while Harrison stayed at the hotel to recover from strep throat.  He had to leave to tend to a number of crises from the hotel itself: the Beatles were being threatened with eviction over all the screaming girls, many of whom were claiming to be a sister of a Beatle.  (This was especially bad news for the real sister of George Harrison, Louise, who had been turned away when she arrived to help take care of her brother's strep throat.)  So Aspinal left and one of the show's staff members go to briefly "jam" with the other three Beatles, even though the instruments weren't working. The comedy team of Charlie Brill and Mitzi McCall, making their television debut that evening, thought all the crowds were for impressionist Frank Gorshin, and wouldn't know a Beatle if one knocked on their dressing room door asking for a Coke...which one did (John Lennon).  TV Guide even warned in advance that "30 policemen will be on hand in case a 'Beatle-Mania' reaches the riot pitch."

For the record, the first set the Beatles would ever play before a live audience in America, was a pre-taped appearance for the February 23rd show.  Sullivan opens that set by already expressing regret that this would be the boys' last of three appearances.  Then the Fab Four break into the Lennon-led "Twist and Shout," followed by a rousing "Please Please Me." They then taped their closing number for the February 23rd show, their number 1 hit "I Want to Hold Your Hand." Man, they're really good in this particular set.  Their backdrop would be different than the one seen that night, live, and so would the audience.

The February 9th show would be mostly live, and would kick off promptly at 8 Eastern with the show's surprisingly spartan open...the announcer saying "Good evening ladies and gentlemen, tonight, live from New York...The Ed Sullivan Show!" (I would've added "From CBS Studio 50 on Broadway, it's the biggest show in New York..." but that's just me.)  The announcer then delivers the sponsor I.D. for the first half of the show, then introduces Ed.  We see our host take the stage and say, "You know, something very nice just happened and the Beatles got a kick out of it.  They just received a wire from Elvis Presley and Colonel Tom Parker wishing them a lot of success in our country, and I think that was very, very nice." (The telegram actually came a half hour before the show, prompting Harrison to say "Elvis who?")

One thing that's missing from this open: any sentence that sounds like "Tonight, right here on this show, the Beatles will be making their debut American performance!" They apparently respect the audience's intelligence by not starting with a "Captain Obvious" moment like that one, as well as making it clear...the number of people watching that night very likely included precious few who just "channel surfed" onto the show during the second half of Disney.

Sullivan ran down some of the guests from the last few weeks...from the Singing Nun to Milton Berle to puppet semi-regular Topo Gigio, then last week's show in which Sammy Davis Jr. and Ella Fitzgerald performed together.  (That must've been something to see.)  He then mentions the Beatles as "tremendous ambassadors of goodwill," before pitching to a commercial for Aero Shave.

After the break, Ed's most famous introduction of his entire 23 year series: "Now yesterday and today our theater's been jammed with newspapermen and hundreds of photographers from all over the nation, and these veterans agreed with me that the city never has the excitement stirred by these youngsters from Liverpool, who call themselves The Beatles. Now tonight, you're gonna twice be entertained by them. Right now, and again in the second half of our show. Ladies and gentlemen, The Beatles. Let's bring them on."
And so, on that now-iconic set with all the arrows pointing to the group (a visual embodiment, perhaps, of Sullivan's "right here on this very stage" line that he used so much) , Paul, Ringo, George and John break into "All My Loving," with Paul on lead vocal.  We can hear it just find all these years later on the videotape that's been remastered for DVD; but supposedly with the screaming girls in the audience--an audience of some 723 out of 50,000 actual ticket requests--they couldn't be heard that well in the studio.  But the Fab Four perform beautifully and energetically for that audience, with only George ever glancing into the camera. (George does surprisingly well in this show despite having strep throat.)

The next song has a much different tempo: it's a ballad, and a very nice choice.  Even though this was certainly a song already in their repertoire, they chose "Til There was You," a show tune from Meredith Willson's "The Music Man." Shirley Jones sang it in the movie version.  This pays tribute to the Broadway influence over The Ed Sullivan Show; Studio 50 was right there on Broadway, and Broadway tunes were a common factor in the show. Sullivan even featured original casts in current shows (and one of those would be featured in this very broadcast). I don't know if it was the Beatles' or the show producers' idea to include this number, which Paul sings rather angelically, but it's a nice way for the Beatles to fit into the actual show instead of treating it as one more of countless venues they'll play in their career.
And it's during this number when we see some of the most significant supers to ever come out of a character generator in television history: the first names of each individual Beatle on the screen, which is how most of America of a certain age will forever be able to place a Beatle's name with a face, as we were basically being formally introduced to the Fab Four.  It's during this segment that we see the now-famous super of Lennon, with the caveat, "Sorry Girls He's Married."

Right after this number, they almost immediately break into a rousing rendition of "She Loves You," which was climbing the charts at the time, and the main single they were promoting at the time.  One very significant choice made by the show's production staff that night: for the first time ever, they intercut the performance video with shots of the audience, screaming at specific times--when the band goes into a chorus, for instance. (O.K, I guess they could hear the music.)

There's even a camera shot from high in the audience, showing the Beatles distantly on stage amid screaming teenage girls and studio lights. It's a great effect that cements this show in our consciousness, and it may have very well been the birth of the modern concert film.  Too bad we didn't get any shots of them from backstage hitting their marks before the curtain went up.

After "She Loves You," Sullivan tries to quiet the audience long enough to remind them there are other acts coming up, right after this word from Anacin.  And sure enough, except for two more Beatles songs near the end of the show, this is mostly like any other Sullivan show.  People who often write about this particular broadcast often implore us to feel sorry for the other acts that night, but I submit...maybe not.  It was a once in a lifetime experience for everyone involved, and all but one of the acts were show biz veterans who were performing just another gig.  We'll get to the one exception in a little bit.

Next up: a French-accented magician named Fred Kaps, whose act is based on the idea that he's an inept magician but still possesses the full power of magic.  First he keeps trying to do a card trick where he's supposed to make two's and three's of hearts and diamonds disappear...but every time he tries to get rid of a card, it turns back into a black royalty card (what appears to be the queen of clubs).  Then he does a trick with salt and can't get the salt to stop flowing.  Ed, oddly enough, gives away all the jokes as he introduces him.  The good thing for Kaps is that this bit was taped in advance, perhaps earlier that evening, which is good since the subtlety of  what he's doing surely would've been lost immediately after the Beatles.  He seems to get a good reaction from the audience.

Immediately after the Kaps bit, Sullivan features the cast of Broadway's "Oliver!" at a time when the play was on Broadway. (Many Broadway theaters closed on Sunday nights in those days, freeing up the casts for an appearance on the Sullivan show.)  This was a tradition that also provides us with a very rare video record of these original casts performing in costume. In this case, Sullivan only mentions Georgia Brown, the British actress who appears as Nancy.  But we also see Bruce Prochnik as Oliver Twist, Clive Revill as Fagin, Alice Playten as Bet, and in the most significant pop culture moment of the night, we hear a brief solo from the actor who plays the Artful Dodger.

He's none other than Davy Jones...yes, that Davy Jones, the same one who would be one-fourth of the Beatles sitcom knockoff, The Monkees, just two and a half years later. He starts off the number "I'd Do Anything for You," followed by Brown's solo, "As Long as He Needs Me," which is met with nice applause and a "come over" from Ed.

After a commercial break, Ed introduces impressionist Frank Gorshin from Hollywood.  He's probably the biggest non-Beatle hit of the night.  His routine is based on Hollywood stars taking over the country's government, with Broderick Crawford as Vice-President, Senator Dean Martin (especially funny, saying things like "I'd like to thank all the liquor dealers all over the world, for helping me get as high as I am today!"), Senator Anthony Quinn, Senator Marlon Brando, Secretary of State Burt Lancaster and others.

Gorshin's act is unique in that he puts his whole body into every impression he does.  He gets a lot of laughter, laughter that sounds very young and very female, which means he clearly reached the young girls in the studio audience. Gorshin clearly left the stage that night a big hit. The year he died, I'm pretty sure this is the clip the Emmy Awards used in their "In Memoriam" montage.

Once per show, Ed usually introduced at least one distinguished person in the audience and asked them to stand up and take a bow.  This particular night, it's winter Olympics Gold-Medal-winning speed skater, Terry McDermott.  If you ever see any backstage photos of the Beatles, with Paul pretending to wince as someone acts like they're cutting his hair, it's McDermott.  He happened to be a barber in the real world.

And now a word from Pillsbury...and about the commercials seen in this show.  By the 1961-62 season, the show had become too expensive for one sponsor, so that was the year Lincoln-Mercury pulled out of the show.  They were replaced by a multitude of advertisers, showing the big changes in the television business as the idea of buying ad time replaced buying entire shows.  During this show, viewers saw a smattering of ads from Griffin Shoe Wax, Coldwater All liquid detergent and a bunch of commercials for Pillsbury.  The way the advertising was sold may have been new, but the ads themselves were way retro.  A commercial for Pillsbury's canned biscuits and rolls, which was a new innovation at the time, shows a wife dutifully making them as part of a family dinner in which hubby is still wearing his coat and tie from work.  The jingle: "Nothing says lovin' like something from the oven, and Pillsbury says it best." Then-unknown actor Paul Dooley also popped up in a commercial that night for Kent cigarettes, with the "Micronite" filter ("Micronite" = asbestos).

Tessie O'Shea, who Sullivan introduces as being from England and from the Broadway show "The Girl Who Came to Supper," comes out and sings a medley of old show tunes.  She, too, seems to do fine by the audience, getting a nice laugh when she says "Oh this will be sexy!" and some good applause from a mostly young audience.  She picks up a banjo for her signature song, "Two-Ton Tessie (from Tennessee)," so if you've never heard of it, this is a perfect idea of her act.

This particular audience wasn't an easy one to entertain this particular night.  It was largely teenaged and female and by all accounts, even within the show (as Ed tried to talk several times, for instance), we get the idea they were easily distracted and spoke amongst themselves quite often. There's a very real chance many of them weren't even born yet when the show premiered in 1948. But the show biz veterans who came on after the Beatles appeared, from what I can see, appear to have (mostly) held their own. No, there's no reason to feel sorry for Tessie or any of the other non-Beatle acts who appeared before her.

Which brings us to the next act...that one is a different story. Performers often bomb, and sometimes they bomb in a way that's the stuff of legend.

Just putting it out there up front, Mitzi McCall and Charlie Brill, in their television debut, pretty much laid an egg. I really wanted to like this part: I knew them from their 1970s appearances on game shows like Match Game '73 and Tattletales, and I could tell from the tone of their sketch, they're more used to intellectual humor than perhaps what they delivered here.  But during dress rehearsal, Sullivan (who usually wasn't there, but again this wasn't just any week) asked them to change their act.  He felt it was too "cerebral" for his family-oriented show, and worked with them as they pieced together another routine on the spot.

What they delivered was a piece about a producer auditioning actresses, with Brill as the producer and McCall as a ditzy secretary, two actresses (one of them a beauty pageant winner, one a method actress) and an overbearing stage mother.  Years later, the then-newlywed couple in their early 20s (which made them roughly the same age as the Beatles) recalled they couldn't hear each other over the crowd; on the DVD we can clearly hear them but we also hear the dull roar of a rude audience in the background, a sound not present during Gorshin's or O'Shea's acts.  The whole sketch suffers from poor timing (in more ways than one), a couple of misfired punch lines and a rotten final line that sounds so cruel 50 years later (the producer suddenly notices his secretary is just want she's looking for, but calls her "ugly" when she takes off her glasses).  At the end of the laughless act, the two, looking stunned, take a quick bow and leave, very noticeably not going over to shake hands with Ed.

Three things could've avoided this: a toned down final line; Ed mentioning them earlier (just before the last commercial he implied Tessie O'Shea was the only act left standing between the Beatles and their fans), and taping the segment in advance.  They were pretty much set up to fail.  The fact that McCall played four different characters may have been lost on an audience that was barely paying attention and couldn't hear the dialogue.

After a Pillsbury Cake Mix commercial, Ed reminds everyone the Beatles will also appear during the next two weeks of shows, then says simply "Once again...!" as he points to where the Beatles launch into "I Saw Her Standing There." Then there's an especially big scream as they play the opening notes to "I Want to Hold Your Hand."

There's even a crane shot that zips over Paul, George and John straight to Ringo, a bit of camerawork that was rare in those days but taken for granted now.
The Fab Four finish their final number, leave their instruments on the stage, and shake hands with Ed.  After they leave the stage, Sullivan gives special thanks to the NYPD for their handling of thousands of teenagers clogging up Broadway, and the media who were on site covering the Beatles appearance.  Then he pitches to one final act: the "most likely to get booted for time reasons" Wells and the Four Fays acrobatic act.  But they do appear briefly.

And that's the show. That's the show that an estimated 73 million people watched that night, making it the highest rated show of all time up to that point, breaking a record set weeks earlier by a bunch of hillbillies and a giant jackrabbit. And it's an audience that included, for instance, a young mother and her infant son in Gadsden, Alabama. Mom never mentions what Dad was doing that night; I'm guessing he was reading a book or something. Dad was always more of a Frankie Valli fan.

The following week would find the show, and the Beatles, on the road in Miami for their second appearance. Sullivan actually pushes Mitzi Gaynor as the headliner, and suggests in his introduction that his staff had to work longer and harder to get her on the show than they did the Beatles. Then the week of February 23rd, America finally gets to see the Beatles' first performance ever on American soil: their pre-taped appearance before the February 9th show. No screaming, distracted audience to interfere with that night's other acts, including Gordon and Sheila MacRae, Cab Calloway and the British comedy team of Morecambe & Wise (who most certainly did not bomb, as they could hear themselves).  This particular broadcast was almost as highly rated as the Beatles' first appearance.

The Beatles would appear on Ed's stage one last time, in the 1965-66 season premiere (and what would turn out to be the show's very last black and white broadcast), promoting songs from both the movie and album "Help!" After that they'd only appear in occasional "performance clips" (read: music videos) that were filmed or taped in advance, by the Beatles themselves.

Sullivan's show outlasted the Beatles as an act, by one year.  I often bemoan the lack of variety shows in today's television, as well as how we've changed that makes variety shows no longer marketable.  But the Sullivan shows in which the Beatles appear, lay bare the main reason we don't have them anymore: so many of the acts are laughably outdated. In fact, critics often argued they were outdated even then. Sullivan's show didn't have a host who sang or was known for acting in sketches (though he did do that last one), but it did have a man who scouted talent and specifically programmed for every member of the family, from the youngest children to grandma and grandpa. That's why the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Supremes and so many other rock and soul acts were so prominent on his show during the last decade of its existence.

But still, all of the acts--the Beatles, Frank Gorshin, Tessie O'Shea, all of them--all bring their best and all bring their charm, in a way we don't see anymore.  Even Mitzi McCall and Charlie Brill clearly show us they're capable of better material than what we're seeing unfold.  We don't see any of that charm on modern day TV and certainly not cable, and will likely never see it first run ever again.

But the 1960s was the era in which networks discovered younger demographics being the most profitable, and started just going after them.  That made Ed's overall audience look so old, and prompted CBS to cancel the show in 1971, after 23 years.  Sullivan was so upset, he refused to do a finale, and the last few broadcasts were reruns. Sullivan still did specials for the network until his death in 1974.

Ironically, the hippest variety shows of the 1970s and '80s were rock and roll shows, ones that used so much of the talent Sullivan used on his own show.  American Bandstand, The Midnight Special and the still-going Soul Train far outlasted Sullivan--but truthfully, owe a lot to him as well.

As for the Beatles, I can't put into mere words, the impact they had on the world of music and pop culture, and on me. I remember nothing of that actual evening in February 1964, but somehow I grew up to be a Beatles fan. I was just short of my 17th birthday in December 1980, when my friend Marcus called me just before school to tell me John Lennon had been shot to death by a deranged stalker, the night before. I remember being upset about that for days. I remember being annoyed that there weren't any candlelight vigils for me to attend where I lived in Alabama. I never did find a vigil, so I held my own in my bedroom, in the dark but no candles, listening to "Strawberry Fields Forever" on my cassette player. I guess this was the first time in my life someone famous left me with a need to grieve.

Availability:  All four Ed Sullivan Show broadcasts featuring the Beatles on stage, are on DVD; they're complete with most of the original commercials, except for the ones that advertised cigarettes.  Sofa Entertainment has put out similar sets of complete shows featuring Elvis Presley and the Rolling Stones, and a number of releases featuring clips of rock and soul acts.

Next time on this channel: Bonanza.

Don't Fall in Love with a Cartwright

Apparently the Ponderosa was one of the biggest fictional ranches in Nevada, yet there was still no room for women




Bonanza, "My Son, My Son"
OB: January 19, 1964, 9 p.m. EST, NBC
I was five days old when this episode was first broadcast.

Throughout the half-century of my personal life, my love life--well, let's just say it, it hasn't often been perfect. Sure, I'm in a good relationship now, but the road to that relationship was a long, bumpy one, most especially in the last 10-12 years or so before it.

But if I could take comfort in anything, it's that I wasn't a Cartwright.

My relationships didn't have the typically, truly ugly end of a Cartwright's.  I suppose if I ever hung out with Ben, Hoss, Adam and Little Joe in a bar and we swapped stories, their end of the conversation would be like, "What, another one dumped you for an ex? Wah, wah, wah.  When one of your girlfriends gets an arrow in the back or smallpox, we'll talk."

Don't get me wrong, Bonanza was a lavish, well-written series, one that practically reinvented the western. But when the writers feel a need to keep its male leads single forever, and that show goes on for more than a decade, sooner or later a trope like this one will jump right out at a person. But perhaps it looks so obvious because Bonanza wasn't just any western. It was that rarest of genres, the personal western.  On Gunsmoke we didn't spend a lot of time thinking about Matt Dillon's personal life because he was such a loner; Major Adams of Wagon Train was a workaholic whose personal life would've gotten in the way of his wagon train (to the extent you could have one if you're always leading wagon trains from St. Joseph on west).  Bonanza was every bit about the Cartwrights' personal foibles and heartaches as much as it was about the latest wannabe alpha male who wanted to kick a Cartwright's ass just to show everyone who was in Virginia City that day.

What's interesting is, I was never big on westerns when I was growing up, but I always did watch Bonanza. Maybe it was because the Hayes family TV set stayed on NBC after Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color every Sunday night.  Maybe it was because it was in color, a new thing for television, and westerns, at that point.  Maybe it was because I loved cars so much even at that young age and the show was sponsored by Chevrolet, with the cast even appearing in costume to sell a Chevelle or two at the end of every show. Maybe that was my personal unspoken contract with the Cartwrights: Dixon, we know you're not big on westerns, but hang out with us for an hour and we'll at least show you a car.

But maybe it wasn't even a car. Maybe it was just Ben Cartwright breaking the fourth wall and talking to me. Maybe it was just the fact that the Cartwright boys were so accessible, that Hoss might actually be my friend in the real world. Most western TV heroes were often considerably grumpy at best.  Married men need not apply, and with the rare exceptions like this one (and say, The Rifleman), "family" wasn't a word associated with western shows and characters.

Bonanza arrived in the midst of a big boom in westerns on TV, a tried and true genre that raked in large amounts of money for movie theaters, and was posed to rake in ad money on television once production budgets caught up with television's growth.  It was also a common way to deal in subtext with current day social issues, which Bonanza would do most especially.  What made it different was its choice of writers, men like Anthony Lawrence who admitted up front they weren't comfortable or experienced writing westerns, but were well at home writing about characters and relationships.

The show's premise was also very unusual: Ben Cartwright, a one-time sailor and three-time widower who apparently moved to Virginia City, Nevada early on and built a great deal of wealth for his three sons, each by different wives.  That meant his three sons--the educated and slightly arrogant oldest, Adam; the big, burly but sweet teddy bear, Eric "Hoss"; and the somewhat temperamental Joseph "Little Joe"--could be way different from one another and still show a brotherly bond. We meet them as adults in 1860s Nevada. In the earliest years we often saw them brawling with each other, physically and verbally.  With a father's military background and three grown sons who still lived at home, the Cartwrights would be relatable to the postwar baby-boomer audience who were more used to seeing families on sitcoms and daytime soaps than westerns. And the Cartwrights' wealth fit right in with the prosperous middle class of the 1950s and 1960s that were tuning in.

The show also ushered in something that would be quickly picked up by other westerns, especially the ones on NBC: color.  When Bonanza premiered on NBC in 1959, it was sponsored by the network's parent company, RCA, which used the hour to play up its still-new, still-postwar-status-affirming color TVs.  And as ratings and script quality were shaky during the first season, RCA still had a lavishly produced series on which to show off their product (and show off through their product), so that's how it managed to stay on the air for a second season.  That's when ratings started to rise with the show finishing at #17 for the year.

But the third season changed all of that.  The show got a new time slot--Sundays at 9 Eastern, replacing The Dinah Shore Chevy Show and immediately beginning to pummel its competitors. It also got a new sponsor. As RCA left to co-sponsor Disney, the show inherited Dinah Shore's sponsor, Chevrolet.  Apparently the General Motors carmaker was the go-to blue chip sponsor for lavish budgets whenever needed, like the cross-country location shooting of Route 66 and the special effects of Bewitched.  On Bonanza they helped underwrite the much-needed location and color photography and period sets, props and costumes.

On screen, the biggest changes were with the characters.  At first they seemed to live fiercely by the motto "Shut up and get off our property!" making them knee-jerkedly hostile to outsiders. It was the actor playing the show's patriarch, Lorne Greene, who told the producers that "Get off my property!" wasn't a business plan that made sense, and as wealthy people heavily involved in their community (as they should be), they would quite often welcome guests to the Ponderosa Ranch.  The producers agreed and toned down that vibe.  They also tinkered with the relationship between the three Cartwright brothers, who stopped throwing each other all over the house so much and became more affectionate and protective toward each other.

And ultimately, all of that made the show one of the great runaway hits of the 1960s, crushing competitors like Perry Mason (which once beat the show in another time slot), Judy Garland and Garry Moore. It also made iconic stars out of its four male leads, Lorne Greene (as Ben Cartwright), Pernell Roberts (as Adam), Dan Blocker (as Hoss) and Michael Landon (Little Joe).  Previously the only one who had even the tiniest modicum of being on pop culture radar was Landon. He was the title character in the low-budget "I was a Teenage Werewolf," a movie that became a cult favorite at drive-ins. But once the show took off, the four were in a position to negotiate salaries of the then-unheard-of $10,000 an episode.  Considering the show cranked out more than 30 episodes per season, they were all on track to become millionaires.

Bonanza was very socially conscious.  Despite the show's central family coming from wealth, and bad guys constantly making an issue of it (and even good guys sometimes resenting it), the show actually had a more progressive agenda.  Tolerance of different people was a common theme, for instance, as different episodes throughout the years examined bigotry toward Native-Americans, Asians, Jews, African-Americans and even little people. The TV season in which I was born, season five, actually had an example of both of the last two. It also has episodes dealing with health care for the poor and fundamentalist opposition to it ("Rain from Heaven"), how bureaucracy adversely affects poor Native Americans ("The Toy Soldier"), euthanasia ("The Quality of Mercy") and the pitfalls of military justice and blind authority ("Alias Joe Cartwright"). The rights of the accused, to a fair trial, is an issue that comes up more than once. Other episodes throughout the years would deal with domestic violence, substance abuse, and during the Vietnam era, anti-war themes and the right to protest.

The well-remembered, legendarily-goofy episode, "Hoss and the Leprechauns," is a classic from that season that made me laugh out loud several times. Hoss sees what appears to be a leprechaun, complete with green costume, get chased up a tree by a bear; when Hoss saves him from the bear he runs away, leaving Hoss to find his bag of gold. Hoss is concerned (rightfully) his family and the townspeople will think he's off his nut when he tries to explain that. The "leprechaun" has a similar moment when he tries to tell his fellow "leprechauns" that a "giant" just rescued him from a bear.  This episode actually has a surprisingly sweet, poignant plot twist, in which the "leprechauns" turn out to be vaudeville performers whose leprechaun act is the only profitable work the "little people" can get in the old West. It ends as Hoss gives a touching speech to his fellow Virginia City residents about co-existing with people different from them who want them same things out of their community that they do.

But the theme of "Hoss and the Leprechauns" wasn't necessarily a civil rights stand-in; no, that would come in a more obvious way later in the season with the episode "Enter Thomas Bowers." It was originally broadcast in April 1964, just months before Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and more months before Martin Luther King was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace. William Marshall played Thomas Bowers, a well known singer of Italian opera who gets a chilly reception after being invited to Virginia City to perform. He turns out to be black, and so he's refused service at the cafe and refused a hotel room, then a group of vigilantes start hunting him after word gets out he could be a runaway slave. It's a tough, hard-hitting, uncompromising episode that made General Motors and a couple of NBC affiliates nervous, but it makes its point. It brings up memories of when actresses Hattie McDaniel and Butterfly McQueen were treated so badly by Atlanta's hospitality industry when they came to town for the premiere of "Gone With the Wind." We even hear a lengthy explanation of the Dred Scott decision, presented here as a passing indictment of the legal system that worked against black people for such a long time.

But most of the season was on the show's familiar, personal territory, including the Cartwrights' very unfortunate luck with women. The season premiere has Hoss falling head over heels, and getting engaged, to a woman who is apparently (as much as 1963 era television writing can tell us) a sex addict, hoping to "save" her. Over the course of the season, Little Joe will lose Calamity Jane to Doc Holladay (historical figures often popped up on Bonanza, including Jonathan Harris as Charles Dickens), and we'll see the flashback involving Hoss' birth and the death of his mother, Inga. Spoiler alert: she's the one who gets the arrow. Hey, don't get upset with me, NBC actually spoiled it in their original 1963 press release. (Writer Anthony Lawrence would write similar flashbacks for Adam's and Little Joe's mothers, and their own untimely demise.)
It was during this season the show came as close as it ever did to having a regular female love interest. Adam actually had a four-episode romance with a female ranch owner and single mom played by Kathie Browne. A TV Guide article from the last week of January 1964 revealed the producers came up with the idea as an effort to keep an unhappy Pernell Roberts on the show, and if it didn't work, provide a way to write him out, by having him marry her character and move away. Roberts' own idea, in that 1964 world of television: Adam marries a Native American woman who would be portrayed by an African-American actress. NBC politely said no. Browne's character ultimately left the show arm-in-arm with the Cartwrights' cousin Will.

And the episode the week I was born, "My Son, My Son," is about yet another doomed Cartwright romance. This time, it's about a problem son that may or may not be a killer.

As we begin the episode, Ben and his new love, Katherine Saunders (played by Oscar winner Teresa Wright) are very happily riding along the countryside. Ben invites her over for dinner, and as they ride away, Little Joe tells Hoss he might have to get out his blue suit. "Who died?...I only wear it to funerals, and weddings," Hoss replies. (I love the way those two are conflated, like they're letting us know up front not to get too attached to Ben's new girl.)

As Ben and Katherine take in a view of Lake Tahoe from their carriage (Lake Tahoe bordered a large chunk of the Ponderosa, according to the map that catches fire in the opening credits), they give us a quick verbal tour of Katherine's baggage.  She's a widow, and her son went on trial for murder (he claimed self defense) and was acquitted, but left town because he felt no one believed him.  She kept her ranch open in case he ever returned and still loved him. "Is that so wrong?" she asks Ben. "I think it's kind of hard to judge the right from wrong, of love," Ben replies. (I don't think any western character on TV ever discussed the ins and outs of love so much as Ben Cartwright. He's surprisingly sensitive.)

Katherine and Ben arrive at the Ponderosa, where they're met with the show's most cringe-worthy attack on political correctness, Hop Sing the cook. Played broadly by Victor Sen Young, his broken English is clearly meant to be "cute," and unfortunately distracts from the show's otherwise good record on celebrating diversity. Hop Sing only appeared on the show eight or nine times a year; Ray Teal as Sheriff Roy Coffee appeared far more often most years. Hop Sing's presence also underlines another running joke among Bonanza fans: the Ponderosa, a livestock and timber supplier, supposedly has hundreds of workers--even its own army, according to the show's pilot episode--but we never see any of them.

As Ben gets a fire going on the fireplace, the two discuss their relationship and their future, amid the romantic sounds of David Rose's score. Rose proves himself to be very versatile, supplying music ranging from slapstick comical to dramatic action, and here, romance.

"This house just needs a woman's touch," Ben tells Katherine. "Oh, Ben, this is probably the best run household in Nevada! You don't need a woman to help you," she replies on behalf of the writers and showrunner David Dortort. When they ask each other why they never remarried, Ben just says he never met anyone else he wanted to ask, while Katherine mentions her whole world revolving around her desire to be reunited with her son. Ben tells her she shouldn't build her whole existence around that, and she tells Ben she doesn't want to be alone.

Right when she gets that out of her mouth, we meet her son, Eden (Dee Pollock), wading and swimming through a creek to lose the trail of a posse that's hunting him.
At dinner, Ben tells everyone  that he has a big announcement, but before he can get it out of his mouth, Little Joe and Hoss correctly guess it and began celebrating their father's engagement. Adam, who has just returned from town, takes Ben aside and tells him about Eden and the posse; apparently Eden was upset over his former love Linda marrying Frank Miller, and was heard in a bar repeatedly vowing to kill Frank Miller. Later, Frank's brother Carl saw Eden running away from Frank's house, then found Linda shot to death. "He's got the whole town riled up, and they're out looking for blood," Adam tells Ben, then suggests they join the posse so they can get to Eden before a bloodthirsty vigilante like Carl Miller does.

As the Cartwright sons get horses ready to join a posse, Katherine tells Ben she just knows Eden didn't kill Linda.  Ben explains to her about the posse, and about some men who are "pretty riled up" over the whole case, and is noticeably non-committal about Eden's guilt or innocence. When Katherine asks if Ben is going to let Eden be arrested, he pointedly says, "I'll see to it that no harm comes to him. I can't promise any more."

After a commercial break, we see Eden hiding in a creek as a posse goes by. He notices his gun missing from its holster and hides in the lake. Right about that time, one of the searchers finds it and hands it to a delighted Carl Miller. As the Cartwrights arrive, the man who's presumably searching for the killer of his brother's life is expressing snark a whole lot more than grief or anger, referring to Eden as a "wolf cub" and making snide remarks about Ben "holding the widow's hand." "He'll face a jury, not a lynch mob," Ben tells him. "Well, I guess that's according to who finds him first," the apparently sociopathic Miller shoots back.

Miller then tells Ben, he knew Eden better than anyone and treated him like his own son, so, holding up a makeshift noose, asks, "Is this about the right neck size?" Ben's response to that is a quick ass whooping. There's usually one of these per episode. Adam grins from ear to ear. Ben then tells his sons to keep a close eye on Miller, then Ben rides away.

Katherine goes out to the barn, where Eden surprises her. She embraces him and says, "My son, my son!" She tries to assure him he's safe now and Ben will help him, but Eden remains skeptical. Then Ben walks up, gun drawn, and asks Katherine if she's O.K. She says yes, she's happy Eden is back. Eden extends his hand to Ben, who doesn't return the gesture. He tells the two to get back to the house.

As Eden drinks coffee at the Cartwright dining room table, he describes life on a large Texas ranch, then gives his side of the "Linda" story. He says he went over to the house to tell Linda what he thought of her, but she was already dead. And he said he ran because he knew everyone was going to blame him anyway, since the previous trial.

At this point, Hop Sing announces he hears "many, many horses." Ben improvises a quick escape plan: he'll take Eden up near the lake, by foot, and Katherine will bring food and horses later.

Meanwhile, the Cartwrights and the other searchers arrive at the Ponderosa, and Little Joe offers fresh horses. Miller starts demanding to know Ben's whereabouts and starts suggesting he's covering Eden's tracks and hiding him. Adam suggests Miller look for himself but Miller just wants to mouth off. At one point Miller and Adam also get into another fight (which Miller's already had his ass handed to him once that day by the oldest, slowest Cartwright so he must be some kind of masochist), but Hoss stops them.  Adam goes into the house, where he finds Eden's empty gun belt lying on the floor. That's when Katherine admits Ben is taking Eden near the lake. She implores Adam to delay the posse, so he goes outside to push the idea of searching by the river, not by the lake, since Eden couldn't have gotten very far. Miller then starts demanding they search by the lake. But this is where Sheriff Roy Coffee rides up, and reminds Miller and everyone else this will be handled his way and legally. So, they'll be searching near the river.

Near the lake, Eden panics at the idea his mother won't make it with the horses. He and Ben have a long talk about the hunting trips they used to take with Eden's father, who Eden thinks couldn't be satisfied with anything he did, and insists his mother was the only one who cared. Ben says Eden's father just didn't understand him, and "He gave you every chance, until your credit ran out." Eden pleads self-defense in the earlier killing.

Then they hear horses; Katherine brought them, and the food. Eden then asks to go along and starts throwing a fit to get a gun, but Ben wants to take him to a military stockade in Port Churchill, where a mob won't be able to break into the jail and lynch him.

Miller and his man, who've broken off from the posse, see the three ride by, so Miller fires a shot at them. He orders them off the horses, and orders Ben to drop his gun. After sending his man back to get the rest of the posse, he keeps trying to order Eden to step away from his mother. Eden then shouts "You did it, didn't you?  You loved your brother's wife!" As Miller steps closer, Ben jumps him and takes his gun away. Eden then shoots Miller. As Ben gets up, he shoots Ben, too, in the episode's shocking plot twist.

Katherine then points Ben's gun at Eden and tells him to put his own gun down. Eden accuses Ben of "double-crossing us" and asks for a gun. "When I have a gun, people sit up and take notice...they all give me a chance, because they're scared.  Now c'mon, hun, give it here, you don't look right with that thing in your hands." He suggests her coming with him, that they won't shoot if she's there. It makes her ask if that's all anyone means to him, someone to use. He eventually snatches the gun away and she vows he'll have to use it on her. "You think I won't?" he shoots back. She asks, "You did kill her, didn't you?" and he answers by slapping her to the ground. Ben, now with Miller's gun, rises up and calls out to Eden. He fires at Ben, who shoots Eden off his horse. Katherine then screams and cries, throwing herself on Eden's now lifeless body as she weeps.

The final scene finds Katherine, wearing black for mourning, leaving the Ponderosa, with Ben wearing his left arm in a sling. "I understand. Just couldn't work out for us now," Ben tells her, with the implicit understanding that killing your girlfriend's murderous son is a bit of a dealbreaker. Katherine says she'll always love her son, no matter what. She tells Ben she's sorry and goodbye, as she rides away, still alive, but leaving another Cartwright relationship in ruins shrouded by death.

It's a well done, well acted episode, one that many of the show's fans rightfully consider an all-time favorite. But it's also one that still sticks to the old "something bad will happen to a Cartwright woman" trope. Creator and showrunner David Dortort once said in an interview that Ben Cartwright won't be "led around by the nose by anybody," and that his show rejects maternal instincts. But I have to wonder if they really needed to reject them so brutally?

Bonanza finished the 1963-64 season as the 9th most watched show in television, killing The Judy Garland Show on CBS and Arrest and Trial, ABC's Law & Order ancestor, in the process. The following three seasons it was the number one show on television and its competitors were mud--until The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour on CBS and its youthful, equally progressive audience, finally put a dent in its ratings.

Despite Lorne Greene's appeals to his financial sense, Pernell Roberts left the show after the 1964-65 season, its first at #1. He cited becoming tired of the role, and the fact Adam and the other sons had to ask "permission" of Ben to do things.

Those ratings would slip by the turn of the decade, until Dan Blocker's sudden death in 1972 coincided with the show's plummet out of the top 30, and its midseason cancellation by NBC in January 1973. Lorne Greene would go on to a few short-lived series, most notably the original Battlestar Galactica; Pernell Roberts had Trapper John, M.D.; but none of them had the post-Bonanza bonanza of Michael Landon (Little House on the Prairie, Highway to Heaven) before his untimely death. It was Landon who once joked that Bonanza had to be canceled because "they ran out of room to bury the women." And on Little House, Landon's character, Charles Ingalls, stayed married for the duration of the series, and both of his daughters, Mary and Laura, were married during its course. It was a reverse Bonanza.

But many feel the real reason Bonanza may have been canceled was because time finally ran out for its very boys' club mentality. The 1972 season premiere, "Forever," actually found Little Joe getting married, finally...only for the bride to end up murdered by a bad guy. I've heard anecdotes of people who swore off the show forever after seeing that one, letting a Cartwright get married, only to take the bride back away. It may have very well lost its female audience forever that night. It may have been the last straw, as times changed for women in the early 1970s. In fact they changed as far back as 1965, when ABC premiered The Big Valley, a show very obviously modeled after--and one-upping, perhaps--Bonanza. This time the head of the family, Lorne Greene's counterpart, is a woman, Victoria Barkley (screen legend Barbara Stanwyck), and one of the adult, stay-at-home siblings is the beautiful but tough Audra (Linda Evans). As soon as America met the Barkleys, the whole idea that women in the mix would kill a family-oriented western, was laid bare as a lie forever.

Bonanza's lack of permanent women, you could argue, reflected like in the 1860s as much as the 1960s, when women were rarely in positions of power and their aspirations were often based on who they could marry. But the show clearly played on how the male writers perceived the modern day sensibilities of their audience. The idea of selecting a mate based on love may even be newer than we're led to believe on Bonanza, for instance. It was likely believed the women in the audience would rather see the Cartwright boys single, but still wanted to see them have something resembling a love life.  But they didn't want to alienate people who might be put off by four men loving them and leaving them.

What really killed all of those women weren't arrows, bullets, now-cured diseases or medieval childbirth, and what really chased off the others wasn't guilt, foiled schemes or revelations of sordid pasts.  No, the true culprit was a common cause in the 1960s that originated in the writers' room: an overdose of testosterone and an allergy to estrogen.

No wonder Chevrolet wanted to sell their trucks on the show so much.

Availability: the show's first six seasons are available on DVD, and select episodes can be streamed in some places. To this day, the show is also a staple in cable reruns.

Next time on this channel: The Dick Van Dyke Show.

Oh, Roooobbbbbbb...

How my favorite TV couple were so different from the ones who came before them

The Dick Van Dyke Show, "All About Eavesdropping"
OB: October 23, 1963, 9:30 p.m., CBS
I was born three months after this episode first aired.

The Dick Van Dyke Show, "The Lady and the Tiger and the Lawyer"
OB: January 15, 1964, 9:30 p.m., CBS
This episode first aired when I was one day old.

There are quite a few stories that get told, about how The Dick Van Dyke Show fell into place.  We always hear, for instance, that it was almost Johnny Carson stepping into the role of Rob Petrie, which would've changed pop culture in unfathomable ways (assuming that oft-told legend is true). We hear about the risk Dick Van Dyke took walking off Broadway's hottest musical, "Bye Bye Birdie," to go to work on the show. We hear about how Mary Tyler Moore almost didn't go to the audition and how Van Dyke was convinced she was all wrong for the part...until they actually started working together and had incredible chemistry. Van Dyke even had a crush on her (and she later had one on him).

What never gets told, however, was whether their visual similarities to another family we suddenly got to know that same year, 1961, was coincidental or on purpose. We never hear whether a CBS executive, for instance, wanted the Petries to look like the Kennedys, or whether Carl Reiner saw Van Dyke and Moore together and said "Wait! Wait! I see it now! John and Jackie, only funnier!" The comparisons are always there and are obvious: Van Dyke looked a little bit like JFK, Moore looked a lot like Jackie, they both had a little boy, the men of their respective houses served in the military and had glamorous jobs (president, and head writer of The Alan Brady Show), they both had to diplomatically deal with temperamental blowhards (Nikita Kruschev, Alan Brady), both families were all known for their charm and their youth. The very first episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show, in fact, was filmed on January 20, 1961, the very day John F. Kennedy was sworn in as our 35th U.S. President.

But the bulk of this post is going to be about what makes the two couples so different from one another. And it's really a thousand little, sweet, funny, charming things that make Rob and Laura Petrie my favorite TV couple of all time.

John Kennedy's influence reached far and wide. Almost every TV show I've written about for this blog, has his shadow, or the shadow of his death, looming over it in some form or fashion. But Kennedy was also a member of the "greatest generation," the generation who had begun running things at that point in time. What's interesting is, Rob Petrie was clearly younger than that, too young to serve in World War II. In fact I don't think Rob actually saw combat duty, although his time would've been close to that of the Korean War. And Mary Tyler Moore was playing a woman quite possibly about ten years older than she actually was at the time--21, when the show premiered. All this to say, John and Jacqueline Kennedy epitomized youth and vitality...but the Petries were even younger, both on the show and in real life, and perhaps more relatable to suburban America. And this is very significant in television history.

Most of the other TV families we'd seen up to that time--the Nelsons, the Stones, the Cleavers--were clearly of the "greatest generation," and the actors played all of those parents with the world-weary experience, both of raising children and of the rest of the world to share with those children. They wore the experience of navigating the postwar suburban American lifestyle like a nice, comfortable sweater.

What makes Rob and Laura so different is that they didn't have any of that. They appear to be still young enough to suddenly experience new things and small, surprising crises, and huddle together to figure out what to do next. So what do you do when (as was the case in the very first episode) you call a sitter for your sick son so you can go to a party? Or come to the realization your overly competitive husband loves to grab the check at restaurants? There wasn't an Ozzie and Harriet next door to give sage advice--no, their next door neighbors, Jerry and Millie Helper, were just as young as they were. So they worked it out among themselves, with Laura's part-worried, part-adoring "Oh, Roooobbbbbb!" becoming the show's catch phrase. This lower confidence level is clearly something the Petries do not have in common with the Kennedys.

One example: in the episode "How to Spank a Star," as soon as Rob comes home from a rough day at the office (Alan's guest star that week was a temperamental diva)  and his son Ritchie immediately starts pestering Rob to put a wheel back on a toy race car. When Rob protests he just got home from a rough day, Ritchie doubles down on his begging and whining, even ignoring Rob's threat of a spanking. When Laura walks by and tells him to leave his father alone and go to his room, Ritchie stops abruptly and says "O.K." and leaves. Why? Because Rob doesn't back up his threats...and Laura does. Obviously, we're not dealing with Ward Cleaver here.

We actually had an idea about how young Rob and Laura (and Jerry and Millie) were, because we saw a surprising amount of their back story in flashback episodes. We find out, for instance, how Rob met Laura (while he was a soldier and she was a USO dancer), the night he proposed and their wedding day (a classic), their honeymoon, the birth of Ritchie (another classic), how Ritchie even got his name, and (I'll get to this in a minute) Rob's belief they had just brought the wrong baby home from the hospital. We even found out how they got around to buying their home at 148 Bonnie Meadow Road in New Rochelle, New York, and how Rob got hired as the head writer of the fictional show-within-a-show, The Alan Brady Show. All of that combined wouldn't make a bad romantic comedy, actually. And when you watch the show episode by episode like I did, you can make it all the way through season two before feeling like you've known them longer than you actually have.

Carl Reiner would eventually play Brady once they actually showed him on screen, and in fact, it was all supposed to be Reiner's show. The original pilot was called "Head of the Family," and starred Reiner. CBS loved the show but wanted someone other than the New York, Jewish Reiner. They wanted someone "middle American." (In fact the pilot's entire cast was replaced, and the show switched from single-camera to live audience.)

Enter Dick Van Dyke, a man whose broadcasting career began when he married his first wife on the 1940s radio reality show, Bride and Groom.  He worked in local television in New Orleans (where he actually did weather) and his "Merry Mutes" pantomime trio had their own show in Atlanta. He even hosted a CBS morning show on which Walter Cronkite did the news. There were also a couple of memorable guest appearances on The Phil Silvers Show. But it was the 1960 Broadway musical "Bye Bye Birdie" that made his name familiar enough to be inserted into the title of a network sitcom. His TV wife would be Mary Tyler Moore, whose previous TV experience included playing "Happy Hotpoint," the elf who did the appliance commercials on The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet, and as the leggy but otherwise unseen voice who appeared in Richard Diamond, Private Detective. Her previously unused talents as a comedienne shocked and surprised even the very people who hired her, to the point that the ninth episode shot, "My Blonde Haired Brunette," was moved up to the second episode shown, to show her off.

Yet, the show's lackluster ratings during its first season almost got it canceled, possibly dooming it to a "brilliant but canceled" place in TV history. CBS was ready to drop the ax, and one of its co-sponsors, General Foods, actually pulled their support. A whole series of lucky breaks saved the show. First, the other sponsor, Procter and Gamble (which advertised Cheer and Crest on the show), stood firm, even reminding CBS of how much of their daytime advertising came from that one company. Then, CBS relented a little, offering to renew the show for a second season if they could find one more sponsor. So the show's producers, including Sheldon Leonard, Carl Reiner and even Van Dyke himself, actually held presentations at the headquarters of several companies like Lorillard Tobacco. When they were in the middle of a presentation to the makers of Albert VO5, they got a call from Lorillard saying it was a deal. So, for the rest of the series, the show was co-sponsored by the makers of Kent and Newport filter cigarettes.

A few more breaks--the show's ratings suddenly picking up during summer reruns, an Emmy for its writing and a time slot right after what turned out to be a runaway hit, The Beverly Hillbillies--helped set the show's course toward its rightful place in television history. Some even argue it helped that the show changed its opening from a forgettable still montage with a weird conga beat, to the iconic rotating openings that show him either tripping over the living room ottoman, avoiding it gracefully or avoiding it but then stumbling shortly thereafter. The famous Earle Hagen theme song even sounded like it tripped and fell along with him.
Rob, the college-educated, refined comedy writer, has a beautiful wife with her own knack for wisecracks, making their occasional fights true sights to behold. Their son Ritchie, is kind of "just there," playing roughly only a slightly bigger role than all three children from the Van Dyke-inspired Everybody Loves Raymond. But unlike most of the other family shows of the era, the show follows Rob to work.  And while, say, Ward Cleaver's accounting job or Jim Anderson's insurance job likely wouldn't be very entertaining to watch (though we did follow Dr. Carl Stone to his pediatrician practice), we intimately get to know the far more entertaining writers' room of The Alan Brady Show.

Modeled after the one from the 1950s TV series of Sid Caesar (whose death, sadly, I learned about while writing this piece), it includes veteran comedian Morey Amsterdam as a trunkful-of-gags writer modeled after Mel Brooks, and one-time child star Rose Marie as the man-chasing Sally Rogers, another writer modeled after Selma Diamond. Their producer, the bossy and much-insulted Mel Cooley, is played by Richard Deacon, after Carl Reiner cracked up seeing him as Lumpy's father on Leave It to Beaver. Alan Brady himself (modeled after the supposedly tyrannical Milton Berle and Jackie Gleason) was an unseen presence, with his back to the camera (or painted as a clown, or dressed as Santa Claus), until season four's "Three Letters from One Wife," when Reiner himself appeared on camera as Brady.

When people reflect fondly on the era of shows that were "wholesome fun for the whole family," and perhaps mention this one, what they're really saying is "I wish the censors played by the rules from the old days." Season one's all time classic, "Where Did I Come From?" (a flashback episode about Ritchie being born) had a script in which Rob originally answered Ritchie's titular question with "Why, Ritchie, you came from Mommy's belly," only for the CBS censors to snip that line because they felt it was in poor taste. In fact, for all the things about the show that still make it seem so fresh today, there are still matters like this one that make it a product of its time--Rob and Laura slept in twin beds, for instance, and the show's unfortunate but evolving take on 1960s gender roles (more on that later). On the other hand, the show made it as abundantly clear as 1960s television could possibly make it, Rob and Laura very much have a sex life. This ranges from the obvious sexual tension in the flashback scene in which Rob proposes, to the legendary 1965 episode "Never Bathe on a Saturday" which reveals they're into role-playing.

And the show appearing in black and white doesn't help either; years later it came out the show could've been filmed in color as early as the season profiled in this piece, season three, but Carl Reiner and Sheldon Leonard vetoed it for budgetary reasons. And so, The Dick Van Dyke Show has the distinction of being the last prime time network series to close out its first run in black and white, as the rest of prime time was switching to color in 1966.

The episode that first aired the day after I was born, "The Lady and the Tiger and the Lawyer," is a typically, very funny show that shows everything that makes Rob and Laura such a great couple. However, it also has a rather shocking plot twist (shocking now, at least) that clearly shows the series being occasionally, a product (or victim) of its time.

As the show opens, Rob finds Laura talking to a lawyer in the kitchen ("Just because I was late for dinner?" Rob asks out loud), where she's teaching him how to work the dials on the appliances. It turns out Arthur Stanwyck, new to the neighborhood, is a highly eligible bachelor, to the point that he's taking his brother to a bar association ball soon so he can dance with his sister-in-law. After he leaves, Laura asks about the possibility of matchmaking.

"What if I say no?" Rob asks. "Then I'll probably do it behind your back," Laura says matter-of-factly. Then they start disputing (or perhaps, competing) over who the woman will be: Laura's klutzy cousin Donna, or Rob's co-worker, the man-chasing Sally. Laura decides to have them over on successive nights, with Arthur present both nights and Donna coming first. Rob asks "Why should Donna have a head start?" So they flip a coin to see who gets to have dinner first.

"Heads, I win!"
"You didn't even call it!"
"Rob, you know heads is mine, ever since we've been married heads is mine!"
"Are you sure you never took tails?"
"I hate tails!"
By the time I was born (season three, 1963-64), The Dick Van Dyke Show was already on its way to becoming a critics' and Emmy darling. It had presented such legendary classic episodes as "The Curious Thing About Women" (the one about one of Laura's bad habits being written into a TV sketch...also known as the one with the inflatable life raft), the sci-fi fantasy "It May Look Like a Walnut," and "The Two Faces of Rob" (again, the role-playing). The 1963 season premiere broke new ground with the legendary "That's My Boy?", the one in which it's recalled in flashback how Rob thought they took the wrong baby home from the hospital. Among other things, Rob bases it on the fact the baby doesn't look like either parent, the presence of another couple with a similar last name, Peters, and constant mixups involving misdelivered flowers and gifts. When the Peters are coming over to the Petries', Laura vows no one will take her baby, setting up possibly a very, very ugly showdown. But it's resolved when the Peters family walks in the front door...and they're black. The audience laughter starts off rather nervous, then cathartically long and loud before evolving into applause.

Another classic from that season, "All About Eavesdropping" (actually filmed at the end of season two but not broadcast until season three) is Rob and Laura at their best, teamed up against a perceived affront and navigating a difficult, bumpy road of ethics, friendship and passive-aggression.

The episode opens (aside from Rob avoiding the ottoman but stumbling anyway) with the Petries getting ready for a party next door at the Helpers'. Laura is running late. "Just a minute, darling" is her answer to everything Rob says. "I hope they never send a woman into space, 'Five, four, three--''Just a minute, darling!'" Rob mocks her. He asks for his handkerchief and she says "We're only going next door!" to which Rob says "I guess I can run back here to blow my nose."

Rob then trips on one of Ritchie's toys--"At least it's an ambulance" he says, picking up the toy ambulance--and takes stock of all the ridiculously violent cold-war era toys Ritchie owns, including a toy water-based atom bomb launcher and a toy moon base. There's also a toy "space communicator" that's also an intercom, and it's hooked up apparently so Ritchie can communicate with the Helpers' son.

As Laura comes out, they happen to notice it's on and they can hear Jerry and Millie.  (Jerry is played by Paris, back in front of the camera, and Millie is played by Ann Morgan Guilbert, who later played Nana on The Nanny). Millie is asking Jerry to try her peanut butter and avocado dip, a recipe she got from Laura. "You want to know the truth? It tastes a little drab," he says.

"A little drab? That's my own recipe!" Laura shoots back, deciding she wants to listen further. She and Rob are shocked to hear the two speculate that she deliberately left something out of the recipe, "so she can say she makes the best peanut butter and avocado dip in Westchester County, maybe she left it out on purpose!"

"What nerve to accuse me of such a catty trick?" Laura says, incredulous. At first they seem to hear Jerry agree. "Laura wouldn't do a thing like that, Rob would," Jerry says. "Remember that dress pattern she gave me? She left out a sleeve," Millie adds. They speculate it's about a compulsive, competitive drive to be the best at anything. "I didn't think Laura could be so insincere," says Millie. "Let's face it, honey, Rob is no Albert Schweitzer either!" adds Jerry, invoking the name of the famed humanitarian and medical missionary.

"I'm no Albert Schweitzer? He's no Eleanor Roosevelt!" an incredulous Rob shoots back. The two are so upset they consider not showing up for the dinner party. Then Rob reminds Laura that it's only a six person party, and the other two are Buddy and Sally, who are his friends and co-workers, not the Helpers'. So they decide they can't skip.

After a commercial, we see that Buddy and Sally have already arrived and everyone's asking about the Petries. Buddy wonders if they had a fight, but Jerry says he and Millie have "five or six big fights to their little ones." Back at the Petries, Rob accuses them of "malicious accusery," and asks Laura, "You'd never leave someout out of a recipe would you?...You did, didn't you?" She says she may have left out the mustard because she was experimenting. When Jerry calls and threatens to come over and drag them over, Rob says, "Let's go visit the nice people next door, Dr Jeckyll and Mrs. Hyde!"

When they arrive, the frowning, quiet Petries come inside reluctantly. "I wasn't sure we were welcome," says Rob. When Millie asks for Laura's wrap, she chooses to keep it, saying "It's always a little cold in here." They claim they were late because of a headache. When the tense room becomes quiet, Sally makes a hail Mary at conversation by saying "Boy this is a beautiful ashtray!""We gave them that ashtray, we also gave
them that lamp," Laura replies. "No reason, just friendship," Rob adds.

When Jerry suggests they play a game, Rob says "It's your house." "You didn't give them the house?" Buddy asks. At first Jerry repeatedly suggests "Who Am I?" for a game, but Rob just says "Not Eleanor Roosevelt, that's for sure." Then, in a fateful suggestion that sets up one of the greatest scenes (and my all time favorite) from the series, Millie suggests charades, and divides up teams. What plays out next is a ballet of passive-aggressiveness that's the stuff of television legend.

Laura stands up and motions that she's going to do the first word of a song title. She pounds her fist against her hand, as Rob calls out "Crush! Destroy!" He guesses "Small! Petty! Hypocritical! Two-faced!" for the next word, leading Jerry to ask when "two-faced" was ever part of a song title.

As Laura goes through motions which include claws, a stabbing motion, and the act of pointing at Millie and Jerry repeatedly, Rob keeps guessing things like "Treachery!""Malicious accusery!""Pearl Harbor!" then jumps to his feet and says "Wait, I got it! 'On the Street Where You Live!'" Laura says he's right, and a stunned Jerry reads the piece of paper that confirms the title.

That pretty much ends the game of charades and as the conversation once again reaches a standstill, Buddy decides he'll try the dip. "Real good, but why did you leave out the mustard?" Buddy innocently asks, laying bare what apparently started this in the first place. As he takes another bite of the chip, he says "Hey, Millie does make it better!"

As Millie calls everyone into the dining room for dinner, Rob and Laura stay back for a few seconds, long enough for Laura to say "Don't eat anything.""I'm sincere, I'll nibble," Rob shoots back. A crossfade and one scene later, Rob and Laura leave, and everyone else speculates what they could've done to offend them, noting they arrived angry. Buddy's best guess: "I know the problem...They need on the spot relief for acid indigestion!"

We next see Rob and Laura at their dining room table, eating breakfast cereal and celebrating how "We got 'em!" They lose a fight with temptation and turn the intercom back on to hear what they're saying now. Jerry, clearly upset, says he'll never forgive them for their behavior. But Millie wonders what they did to upset them. Jerry suggests it was a dental bill he sent Rob; he usually works on Rob's teeth for free but still charges him for lab work, but the lab costs had gone up and he forgot to tell them. They discuss Rob and Laura being "loyal people" and wish out loud they knew what they did to upset them so much.

"I did leave the mustard out of the dip, you know," Laura says. "And I know I'm no Albert Schweitzer," Rob adds. They pick up the bottle of wine they had angrily not chosen to take to the party earlier, and decide to take the "neighborly" back way to their house.

They arrive at Jerry's and Millie's and admit what all they heard on the intercom, about insincerity, Albert Schweitzer, etc. They apologize for eavesdropping and acting out. "If you can't say nasty things about your best friends at home where can you say them?" Millie then asks, "Did you hear about the dip?...Oh, I'm so embarrassed!" The episode ends with the four reconciling, and Rob sitting down on the piano, playing some Bach and saying, "I'm no Albert Schweitzer, eh?" a reference to the famed humanitarian's abilities to perform that composer's work.


The show gets a lot of criticism for its portrayal of women...but to be sure, it was an ever-evolving portrayal. Laura is a former professional dancer who gave up her career to be a stay-at-home mother and wife; Sally is the single career girl. The show often catches flak for presenting these two lifestyles as mutually exclusive, but that may not be entirely fair. Just in season three, we do see Laura come to work in Rob's writer's room as a secretary, and it's made clear she can successfully take care of the house and work during the day (though it's not easy and the episode's resolution looks groan-worthy in 21st Century America). And we also see Sally appear on a late night talk show making jokes about her single life, making it clear she wants a husband but also intends to keep her career. It's even implied in that episode (and in "The Lady and the Tiger and the Lawyer") that she's willing to happily bring home the bacon to her husband.

But Laura was a modern housewife for that era--as women like June Cleaver and Margaret Anderson were often seen doing housework in dresses, Laura made censors nervous and laid down a pop culture marker by wearing capri pants, just as Mary Tyler Moore did at home. (It's her later series from the 1970s that would be cited as a feminist milestone in pop culture history.) But most importantly, as both of the episodes I profiled here make clear, Rob and Laura are a team of equals. Laura is clearly not "second-in-command" of the household, she's co-manager. Even with his sometimes antiquated ideas about a "woman's role," Rob still respects her as an equal; when they have a disagreement, either they work it out or Rob tries to "lay down the law" and makes an ass of himself. Their equality is most especially obvious in the famous charades scene, in which Rob manages to guess "On the Street Where You Live" despite Laura's claws and pointing, etc., even though it's clear Jerry wrote the answer down before they even arrived. Their ability to communicate is seen as almost telepathic, like a Fonzie-type superpower.

And it moves the whole notion of the TV couple miles ahead in progression. For this reason, although the show is often seen as a piece of comedy evolution, it can also be seen as a step in how women are portrayed--bridging the 1950s gap between the married life of I Love Lucy and single life of Our Miss Brooks, to the single life of, say, The Mary Tyler Moore Show and the modern, mutual respect of couples like Max & 99, Bob & Emily, Tim & Jill, Paul & Jamie, Ray & Debra, Jim & Pam, Mike & Molly and Phil & Claire (and perhaps even Mitch & Cam). Even in real life, today, you're more likely to meet a Rob & Laura than you are an Ozzie & Harriet. And you'd probably want to be their friends and neighbors. Just be sure there's not an intercom involved.

Availability: the entire series is available on DVD & Blu-Ray, Netflix and Amazon, and (mostly) on Hulu.  Except for DVD & Blu-Ray, it usually appears in production order so some of the episodes may be in odd places, like "All About Eavesdropping" popping up in season two instead of the following season when it first aired.

Next time on this channel: Wagon Train.

The Way West: Right to Left

Wagon Train's most tumultuous trek was perhaps its next to last season, the only one in color.

Wagon Train, "The Geneva Balfour Story"
OB: January 20, 1964, 8:30 p.m. EST, ABC
I was six days old when this episode was first broadcast.

Radio and recording comedian turned TV advertising genius Stan Freberg once told a hilarious story about the TV commercial that may have been his masterwork. Singer and dancer Ann Miller would headline a team of chorus girls in a 1930s-type number for Heinz Great American Soups, and it would be directed like a Busby Berkley-type revue from that era...by the then-retired Busby Berkley himself. The commercial was expensive enough--it had a kitchen that broke away to reveal a large stage, and a giant can of soup that came out of the floor while Miller danced on top of it--but still, they could only afford 20 dancers. And Berkley was used to directing huge revues, with as many as 100 and counting. So when he arrived for work, Freberg and his people broke it to him that he wouldn't quite have a hundred dancers. The great showman responded, "Eh, don't worry, I can even make 50 girls look like a hundred!"

Wagon Train basically worked on a very similar production method: each week they made 10 wagons--10 small wagons, in fact--look like an old west wagon train of 100 or so. The wagons were fairly small; if we ever saw any of the larger Conestogas (built especially for wagon train travel, to hold items and keep them from sliding around or tipping over on rocky overland trips), it was in the often-used stock footage. The effect of using smaller wagons was on the one hand, laughable. The sets made them clearly appear to be more roomy on the inside than the outside...inside they appeared to be the size of my bedroom. But also, it had a bittersweet effect. In real life, most covered wagons were simply farm wagons covered with canvas, indicating most of the travelers were rural, middle and working class citizens. It was perhaps meant to appeal to audiences who had moved to new territories and frontiers themselves (i.e., suburbs) in the recent past, the pioneers' search for a new life suggesting the promotion of upward mobility in the 1950s. The linear, forward right-to-left movement of the California-bound train, in the most vehicular western in TV history, also suggested another modern marvel to the viewers: the real-world interstate highway system that was only then, in the 1950s, starting to be built and put in use.

And yet, despite the aforementioned limitations, the show still had a big budget. It was big enough, for instance, to afford the wagons themselves, plus accommodate (occasional) location filming, presumably a California desert like the one used in M*A*S*H, and attract a galaxy of guest stars. And they were able to pull it off for eight seasons, including one as the number one show on television.
When it began, the show's star was clearly grizzled western veteran Ward Bond. I was most familiar with him from a non-western role, interestingly enough: Bert the cop in "It's a Wonderful Life." (He did often play cops, too.) Bond's western-heavy movie resume dated all the way back to a spiritual grandparent of the show, a 1930 movie called "The Big Trail" about another wagon train. His character, civil war veteran Major Seth Adams, was more than just the wagonmaster and leader; he was clearly its moral compass. Despite his toughness and world-weariness, he never forgot he was in charge of a lot of everyday men, women and children, and their dreams. And when someone was accused of something awful and "put on trial" (the wagon train had its own justice system in the old west) it was Adams who made sure it was a fair trial.

Joining Bond for season one were Robert Horton as trail scout Flint McCullough, a much younger man. Rounding out the cast were Terry Williams as Bill Hawks and Frank McGrath as Charlie Wooster, the train cook and comic relief character. (And like comic relief characters on other "adult" westerns, Wooster was pretty much a hidden badass. In one flashback episode, Wooster, a Union army solider in the Civil War, had to be physically restrained by Adams from running into the line of fire, Rambo-style, to rescue another soldier.) Williams and McGrath would be the only two regulars who would stay throughout the series' entire eight season run.

Frank McGrath as Charlie Wooster

Realistically, many real-life wagon trains were believed to be easier to manage in groups of 20 or 40 wagons, which at first glance would seem to better suit a series like this one. But the writers clearly wanted us to believe the wagon train on Wagon Train was usually a 100 wagon affair (with as many as 300 people by season 7), and apparently the reason for that was because the show was built around its guest stars. It would make more sense for faces to rotate in and out of a larger wagon train. Those stars often brought their individual stories into, out of and sometimes close to, the wagon train on Wagon Train. (I'm loathe to use the term "character anthology" anymore as I'm starting to hear from classic TV fans who misunderstand it.)

Among the guest stars over the years: the very first one, Ernest Borgnine, as a drunken, washed-up boxer in the show's pilot. The very next episode featured Ricardo Montalban as a Frenchman with a gambling problem, who kills someone in self-defense in one of those towns that has a "town boss" who seems to own everything and everyone. Others throughout the years included Bette Davis, Linda Darnell, Leonard Nimoy, Frances Bavier, Lee Marvin, Mike Connors, James Whitmore, Cesar Romero and Barbara Stanwyck. Future Bewitched co-stars Elizabeth Montgomery, Dick York, Agnes Moorehead, Sandra Gould and even "second Darren" Dick Sargent, appeared in separate episodes. Past western stars like Guy Madison and Andy Devine (both of Wild Bill Hickok), and future western stars like Lorne Green and Dan Blocker (Bonanza), Jack Kelly (Maverick), James Drury (The Virginian), Leif Erickson and Linda Cristal (both of The High Chaparral), Linda Evans and Peter Breck (who would later join Barbara Stanwyck on The Big Valley), and Chuck Connors and Johnny Crawford, who would play father and son on The Rifleman. Comedians like Ed Wynn, George Gobel and Lou Costello made rare dramatic appearances on the show, Costello's performance being especially heartwarming as a drunken bum traveling with an orphan. (In fact, alcoholism, and how it often threatened the progress of the wagon train, was a recurring theme.)

The show's regular cast, however, had quite a turnover. The first, and saddest, one happened midway through season four when Ward Bond died unexpectedly of a heart attack while the show was on hiatus. His final episode, "The Beth Pearson Story," was about Adams falling madly in love with a woman who bore an uncanny resemblance to the late love of his own life. Even though it didn't write Adams out of the show, it was a near-perfect finale for him, as it touched on themes such as loss, love, retirement and legacy.

John McIntire as Christopher Hale, wagonmaster

The episode that introduced his replacement, Christopher Hale (John McIntire), showed everyone awaiting a new wagonmaster with nothing but our imaginations to go on as to whatever happened to Seth Adams. The wagonmaster in that episode ("The Chris Hale Story"), Jud Benedict (played by Lee Marvin) evolves in the episode from a cold, no-nonsense manager to a sadistic, near-psychopathic tyrant. The differences between Benedict and Hale are almost cartoonish: Benedict and his men arrest Hawks and Wooster ("giving too much lip" appears to be the crime), beat up old men and threatens them even when they're wearing a cast, while Hale, a wagon passenger and retired wagonmaster himself, repairs a child's doll. If I'm reading things right, the apparent subtext is a critique of McCarthy-era politics, and of corporate greed in particular. (The company that hired Benedict apparently liked the way he moved wagon trains so quickly despite the fact that he did it so dangerously, often killing passengers in the process.)

We eventually hear Hale's hellish, emotionally scarring backstory as to why he's so reluctant to get back in the saddle again: he was about to retire and settle down when Apache Indians burned down his house and killed his wife and children...something that wouldn't have happened if he'd been there. The episode ("The Chris Hale Story") ends with the ferociously mean (but hyper-sensitive to criticism) Benedict going mano-a-mano with Hale and getting his ass royally handed to him. When the beaten, losing Benedict goes for a gun, he gets shot, and the wounded Benedict and his bully co-horts leave the wagon train with their tails between their legs. Chris Hale is now their new reluctant leader, having firmly won the trust of the party that Benedict, with all his power and terror, could never get.

Robert Fuller as Cooper "Coop" Smith

Robert Horton made it to the end of the next season before he left the show in 1962. Hale handled everything himself, with the existing regulars, until former Laramie co-star Robert Fuller (himself a one-time Wagon Train guest star) joined the cast for the 1963-64 season. I mainly remember Robert Fuller as Dr.Kelly Brackett from Emergency!, and from his appearances on The Hollywood Squares in which his ability to give a false, "bluff" answer with a completely straight face tripped up many a contestant.

Michael Burns as Barnaby "Barney" West

Two other regulars joined and stayed for the remainder of the series: Michael Burns as Barnaby West (the youngest member of the train) in 1960, and Denny Scott Miller (a former movie Tarzan who I remember from two appearances on Gilligan's Island) as Duke Shannon.

Denny Scott Miller as Duke Shannon

The show's own journey can be reflected in its choice of theme songs, a tune changed three times during the show's run. During the first season it was a generic, western-sounding theme; in season two it was a much faster-tempo song (with lyrics under the closing credits), an odd choice given that wagon trains are known to move slowly. In season three the show adopted its best known theme, the Jerome Moross work the show would keep until the end of the series, which suggests a large, slow-moving wagon train through a large valley under a wide open sky.

In the meantime, the show had made it all the way to the top of the ratings, being number one for the 1961-62 season. After that season, ABC, having never had a top five hit at that point, spent a (still unknown to this day) pile of money to steal it away from NBC. It wouldn't work; the show's ratings plummeted and never recovered.

Season seven, 1963-64, was the year the show switched to full color and expanded each episode from an hour to 90 minutes, apparently inspired by the success of NBC's The Virginian. The new format meant each episode usually had more guest stars and an "A-story" and "B-story." Although the show was quite a sight to behold in color, it still had its limitations: many ABC affiliates still weren't broadcasting in color yet, plus the built sets looked little more fake (although the location footage was often beautifully shot; still,even scenes that are supposed to be set in the desert are often shot in interior studios at Universal) and the editors were more limited in their use of stock footage. For instance, I'm pretty sure I saw the same wagon turn over in three different episodes if not more. And of course its biggest limitation of all: being scheduled against a powerhouse CBS Monday night lineup that included The Lucy Show and The Andy Griffith Show.

During the show's first two seasons, it had the unique format of making the specific trip a season-long story arc, with the first episode or being all about the departure, and the season finale being about the arrival in California. There were even episodes about the crew's trips by boat or stagecoach back across the country to lead another train (as there were next to now wagon trains heading west to east). Eventually the show moved away from this format and the series was about a perpetually moving train. And the large number of riders made the wagon train a virtual moving community, complete with its own rules, its own justice system and even votes on how to proceed in certain situations, with the wagonmaster explaining all the options and risks. The justice system was especially noteworthy, as  the show often had the travel-weary wagon train passengers so quick to turn into a mob, almost gritting their teeth with impatience for one good chance to use their rope for a lynching party.

And that last point suggests a lot of real-world politics playing out underneath the surface of the series. The constant attempts by Adams and Hale to forgo lynching parties, for instance, was perhaps subtext for the then-in-progress civil rights movement. Corporate business policies and cold-war politics often seem to play out as well, as does concerns about such modern problems as health care, as well as issues over whether a popular vote is the best way to decide whether certain people do and don't have rights. For instance, the wagon train is sometimes vulnerable to Indian attacks, but usually it's made clear the Indians won't attack because Adams or Hale made treaties with them long ago, perhaps a hidden reference to the then-young United Nations.

A bit of Cold War and domestic politics play out in the episode from the week after I was born, "The Geneva Balfour Story," which is all about the whole concept of lying to avoid a panic...and the consequences that go with such an action.

The show opens with the train moving into a town, followed by Hale paying for more than $200 (in 1860s money) for a large amount of groceries--flour, bacon, etc. Judge Arthur Forbes (played by Robert Lansing, who just a year later would be an air corps commander in Twelve O'Clock High) and two other men discuss using the judge's influence to get a military escort. It seems the wagon train route is closed down by the U.S. government due to an Indian war ahead. Instead, Chris Hale announces the first of two decisions that will set up the events of this episode: taking a cutoff through the desert, what Cooper Smith calls "the most miserable 200 miles in the world." Coop tells Hale there could be trouble from the passengers, so Hale says "We'll wave the flag a bit."

So, with the supply wagon decorated up in patriotic colors, Hale delivers a fiery speech that's made to sound like a military commander speaking to his troops, telling them the enemy is the land. "We can retreat or we can attack," he tells them, saying he has tankers of water from the government and an extra wagon full of supplies for the trip. He at once appeals to their patriotism, their courage and their pride. "You can expect every hardship that the land will dish out. You'll curse every day that will fry your brains, nights that will freeze the marrow in your bone. Worst of all you'll curse me for driving you on...have you the courage to tackle it?"

Judge Forbes tells the cowboy who's riding with him, Ishmael, "Has it ever occurred to you that so much truth can sound like a lie?"

Guest stars Archie Moore and Robert Lansing

Just a quick word about this minor character, Ishmael. It's a guest shot by boxer Archie Moore. This is interesting in that there were a lot of black cowboys in the old west, but you'd never know it from old western movies or TV shows, including this show. So seeing him here is significant.

Guest stars Peter Brown and Sherry Jackson

We then see a crossfaded montage, of Chris Hale over images of the wagon train, rain, lightning, the sun, a wagon turning over, and a grave, among other things. It's immediately after this part we meet Aaron and Geneva Balfour. Aaron is played by Peter Brown. Geneva is Sherry Jackson, a former child actress who played Danny Thomas' daughter on Make Room for Daddy for five years, then because a B-movie sexpot who often played the edgy biker chick (when she wasn't guest-starring on shows like Star Trek). Geneva, who's carrying the couple's child, complains, complains, complains about the conditions. "How many more Aaron dear, how many more before the graves are ours?" She says she'd rather not have their child at all than have it in the desert on a wagon train.

That night, another woman is trying to give birth; we hear it mentioned she's been in labor for 12 hours. Geneva holds her own baby bump as she hears the other woman moan and scream. But sadly, that's followed by the weeping of the father and husband: mother and child died in labor, in those high infant mortality days. Or as the midwife announces, "She belongs to the angels now."

Hale announces there will be a funeral just before they pull out at daybreak, and assigns people to burial detail. One man begs out of it, saying he had it last time. This prompts Geneva to get in Hale's face. "Is that all death means to you? A mess to clean up?"

The next day, Forbes is present as Hale and Coop look ahead to Castle Rock Butte. Coop says there was a fort there when he visited three years ago, but doesn't know if it's still there. Hale says he's sent Duke Shannon ahead to see if it's still there. When Forbes, who's been speaking to Chris Hale on behalf of the passengers, questions the idea of betting everything on the fort being there, Hale (and not for the only time this episode) tells him to leave the wagonmaster's job to him.

Aaron finds Geneva watching the burial crew digging the grave. He asks what she's doing and she says, "Waiting my turn." She then begs him to take her home. "Just once believe in me, just once believe in me?" he begs in return. She says that's what she did when he talked her into leaving "safe" Boston. Aaron explains her father and his money had way too much influence on their marriage. "You weren't my wife, you were his daughter," he says, to which she responds, "Put that on my tombstone." Clearly the writers don't want us to feel too sorry for Geneva, with all her histrionics. But it's about to get worse.

Duke Shannon returns and tells Chris Hale the bad news: the fort is abandoned. But he does have one silver lining as he hands Hale a can of sardines. Shannon says he got that can from a prospector who says there's a mining camp west of the fort, and if he can find him, he can find that camp. Hale responds the way emergency and political leadership often did in those days: with what we would, in a few short years, call a "cover-up.""I don't want these people stirred up more than they already are," Hale says, as he tells Shannon to keep quiet to everyone, even Coop.

The funeral takes place. A large number of pallbearers carry the coffin that contains the unnamed mother and child to their final resting place. (It wasn't unusual for there to be funerals and burials along the route.) Geneva watches the procession go by, then heads the other way to get to work making everyone, including the audience, hate her. She grabs a couple of cans of kerosene and douses it onto the red, white and blue supply wagon. Aaron is looking for her, and walks up just in time to see her set it on fire.

"Let it burn! It's the only way we can go home!" she screams as Aaron tries frantically to put it out. We immediately cut from that to Hale finishing up a prayer that ends the funeral, and as everyone puts their hats back on, one of the women yells "Fire!" Everyone runs back to camp to see Aaron trying to put out the fire.

Guest star Kathleen Freeman

Naturally, the passengers, being in a constant near-mob state, see Aaron next to the fire, and the fact that he was trying to put it out is lost on them. "He did it! He was the only one around!" shouts one especially mean, angry woman who will emerge as the leader of angry Greek chorus women during this episode. (She's played by character actress Kathleen Freeman, who's better known for her comedy roles. Just a few weeks after this show, for instance, she'll have a hilarious role as a hotel owner on The Dick Van Dyke Show.)

A mob actually starts to descend on Aaron before Hale fires a shot in the area and has his men put Aaron in the jail wagon. Hale then tries to address the crowd, with Freeman's character, who I'll call "the lead harpy," shouts "...because of him we're all going to starve!" Hale then goes from cover-up to flat out lie as he says there's an active army base at Castle Rock that's chock brimming full of food and supplies. "We can turn around and die, we can stay here and die, or we can move on ahead," is how Hale puts it to the passengers. Forbes, his role suddenly more important, tells everyone, "I saw we head to Castle Rock!" and the crowd calms down.

Left: Terry Wilson as Bill Hawks

As the crowd breaks up, Geneva, trying to make sense out of why her plan isn't working like she thought, asks Bill Hawks if they're going back. "No way we can turn back without that extra food," he tells her, giving her a geography lesson that she had failed to take into account (i.e., they were already more than halfway through the desert).

So if you're keeping score, after all of her melodramatics, Geneva Balfour has now, during a funeral, set fire to a supply wagon full of food in the middle of a desert...then let her husband take the fall. She now seems like an easy win for "Worst Person in the Entire Episode" (with Freeman's "lead harpy" character being a dark horse candidate to move ahead). But then again, this is a complicated story in which almost everyone who appears on the screen will become their own worst enemy.

Geneva then stands next to the command wagon where Hale and Shannon--speaking freely inside a wagon covered with non-soundproof canvas--discuss the lie and how Hale acknowledges no one will believe him now. "It's my lie and I want it to be kept my way," Hale tells Shannon, along with his plan to "Delay and pray," until Shannon hopefully returns with the prospector who will be the train's true savior.

Coop and Aaron reach an isolated place ahead of the wagon train, so the mob wouldn't get to Aaron. In fact he rode up front of the jail wagon, not inside it. When they stop, Coop puts axle grease on Aaron's burns, the only thing he has in 1860s wagon train America that strikes him as close to a salve. Coop levels with Aaron: he thinks Geneva set the fire and Aaron is covering for her, which he admits. Aaron says he's concerned about "all of those harpy women" and that the woman carrying his child is mentally "hanging on by a thread.""People already think I'm guilty, we've got to leave it that way," he says to Coop, swearing him to secrecy. Coop, reluctantly, goes along with yet another cover-up. But just then, as Coop puts Aaron back into the jail wagon, Hale and Forbes ride up and Hale declares the wagon train will make its noon stop earlier than usual, and in 30 minutes Aaron Balfour will go on trial with Forbes acting as prosecutor. When Coop protests--both because of the fair trial thing and the need to get to Castle Rock as soon as possible--Hale indignantly points to the jail wagon and says "anyone who doesn't like it can get in there with Balfour."

Geneva Balfour gives the lead harpy some peaches, but the lead harpy calls her out on the bribe and tells her it won't do her any good. Then the women show how viciously bloodthirsty they are by pushing, shoving and attacking the pregnant woman, leaving it to Coop to rescue her from the all-female mob. One woman yells, "who's going to midwife you in the desert, a buzzard?"

Just a quick word here: no, women don't fare well at all in this episode. There's not a single reasonable woman to be found (no female counterpart to Coop or Forbes, for instance) and the ones who don't come off as crazy come off as either coldly indifferent (Geneva) or viciously bloodthirsty (the harpies). But it did strike me that the reason there's an all female mob was because writer Ken Trivey and director Sutton Rolley realized a mob full of men screaming for Geneva's head would've been even worse, very obviously misogynistic even for 1964. There are other Wagon Train episodes with a strong woman here and there, but not many, and this is clearly not one of those episodes.

Coop then confronts Geneva. He says he thinks she did it, and when Aaron takes the fall for her, the trial will find him guilty and he'll be "banished," or abandoned in the desert. He says if she confesses, they won't bring themselves to do that to a woman, especially not a pregnant woman. "That fool's ready to lay his life on the line for you," he tells her. "You better face yourself Geneva, or are you rotten all the way through?"

Geneva, however, goes straight to Chris Hale and tells him she knows everything. She tells him all about the empty post at Fort MacLaren and even repeats his "delay and pray" phrase back to him. Hale tells a skeptical Geneva that if Aaron goes with them to Castle Rock in the prison wagon, the crowd will tear him apart, while he has more of a chance in the desert. He tells her Coop will bring him food and a horse later. Hale calls the hot, tired, angry train a "powder keg" and says her husband lit the fuse. That's when she tells him she did it..and to her surprise, instead of demanding she spill the beans like Coop told her to do, he tells her the opposite. "The lives of 300 people depend on your silence," he says.

The trial, an obvious farce from the getgo, begins with prosecutor Forbes trying unsuccessfully for a continuance since they're in a hurry to get to Castle Rock and he doesn't think Aaron will get a fair trial. Chris Hale is the judge, and it doesn't go unremarked that he's also the one who paid out of his own pocket for all the food destroyed when the supply wagon was set afire. Aaron Balfour then pleads guilty, and as members of the crowd start calling for his head, Coop runs forward and spills all the beans: Aaron didn't do it, he was covering for his wife Geneva, and that Aaron swore him to secrecy. As the crowd starts raising hell, Geneva collapses, and Forbes remarks on how close they came to a miscarriage of justice. The now easily threatened Hale reminds everyone he's the wagonmaster and is ready to prosecute any challengers for "mutiny."

It leads to Forbes sardonically quipping "wagonmaster right or wrong" (a play on the "My Country Right or Wrong" bumper stickers that were all over cars in that real-world era) with one of the other passengers remarking that whenever Chris Hale is wrong, Forbes is right. It's interesting to see the 1960s era politics play out under the surface; in just another year or two as the Vietnam era progresses, the term for everyone seeing something different than those in authority are telling them, and those in authority even giving them differing stories, would be "credibility gap," and it's all being demonstrated here. This whole episode could be a brilliant textbook example of "how to make a political statement in an unlikely work," much like the 1956 movie "Invasion of the Body Snatchers."

"Did you feel like you had to serve him up like a roast pig to satisfy that mob?" Cooper Smith asks Hale when the two are alone. "Go ahead, say it," Hale says back, "I'm ruthless, dictatorial, unjust.""You're none of those things," says Coop, asking what's gotten into Hale. Hale says it's the heat. Coop warns him the wagon train members are looking for a new wagonmaster and seem to like Judge Forbes: "Maybe he doesn't know a cactus from a cauliflower but he's fair and they respect him."

Hale then goes to Forbes and tells him there's a big difference between the courtroom and its laws, and the wagon train. "The only procedure out here is west and the only rule is, get there," says Hale. Forbes tells Hale the people might respect his orders more if he explained them instead of obstinately demanding blind trust.


The color, 90 minute season of Wagon Train would end up as a money-loser for ABC and Universal Studios; the following season, its last, the show would revert to hour-long, black and white episodes. In syndication cycles through the years, local stations would often skip season seven (since the odd running time would disrupt their daily lineups) and even now, those episodes are often rerun separately, perhaps on weekends by the cable networks who rerun the hour-long shows during the week. But they often aroused a lot of curiosity among western fans, enough to where season seven, "The Color Season," was actually the first to be released on DVD in 2008, a full year before the first actual black and white season.

Looking back now, Wagon Train had a unique place among the many westerns in network television. It wasn't the plot or format, which found everyone constantly on the move (Maverick and Have Gun, Will Travel also had main characters all over the place). Yes, it probably glossed over real history at times, like how the white man pushed Native Americans off their land. The characters were similar to other shows; while they did get their individual moments to shine (and even emotional romances and detailed backstories, which are some of the best episodes), in most episodes they were there to guide the often misbegotten passengers, looking for some semblance of a new life, a new chapter. That's what made the show special: a reminder that the pioneers who populated our country in its early years weren't always gunslingers or ruthless railroad or timber barons, just every day people like those watching at home. Every one of them had a dream, whether or not they had any clue on how to get there. That's why almost every episode of Wagon Train is named after a character ("The ----- ------ Story"), one more chapter in the wagon train's logbook. Even in the last episode, the train didn't stop...it simply moved on at the end, like most other episodes, presumably looking for a new life in reruns and DVD sales.

Availability: the entire series is available on DVD.

Next time on this channel: The Price is Right.

Come on Down...a Different Way

The earliest version of U.S. television's longest running game show, gives us a nice museum tour of 1960s consumerism


The Price is Right, "Guest Star: Pat Carroll"
OB: October 16, 1963, 8:30 p.m. EST, ABC
I was born three months after this show first aired.

In 1972, CBS was finally ready to get back into the game show market. Since the cancellation of To Tell the Truth in 1968, they'd left their daytime lineup almost completely to daytime soaps like Love is a Many Splendored Thing and reruns of, say, The Lucy Show and Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C. So for the game shows they wanted, they turned to three different game show production houses...and ultimately got three recycled ideas in return, all of them successful to some degree, but wildly disproportionately so with one another.

Heatter-Quigley, the people who at that point provided daytime's hottest game show, The Hollywood Squares, got the first, and most original, idea on the air: The Amateur's Guide to Love. The combination panel and Candid Camera-type show lasted every bit of two months; it bombed and was replaced by reruns of Family Affair. Then H-Q came up with Gambit, a show based on the card game blackjack and hosted by Wink Martindale, which was more successful. Meanwhile, Jack Barry, looking for a comeback after his involvement in the 1950s game show scandals, hosted and (with his old partner Dan Enright) co-produced The Joker's Wild, which was based on the idea of a slot machine. Both of those premiered the same day--September 4, 1972--as one other idea from game show powerhouse Goodson-Todman: a retooled revival of one of their own old favorites, now called The New Price is Right.

The results: they all got very good ratings, Gambit and Joker lasting until the mid-1970's, Jack Barry's image being rehabilitated, and both shows being revived at different times with differing levels of success. But the new version of The Price is Right was on its way to becoming a television legend. Using the original format as the front game, the show took bits and pieces of inspiration from other shows--Video Village, Seven Keys, the original versions of Let's Make a Deal and Sale of the Century--to make a weekday powerhouse. Bob Barker, who hosted Truth or Consequences for years, was tapped as host. He'd actually been more interested in The Joker's Wild but was told he had too much talent for that show. The result, Barker and Price, was one of those classic, made-for-each-other pairings, with Barker lasting 35 years and the show lasting right up to this very day (now with Drew Carey as host). So I guess the lesson is...original ideas fail, recycled ideas are golden. That's kind of a downbeat lesson to take away from game shows where so many people seem to be so happy. Then again, originality is probably the last thing on anyone's mind when they've won a car or a vacation.

In 1975, the show expanded to a full hour--unheard of in network daytime TV (but done as far back as old time radio), and stayed that way to this day, with a spinning money wheel (much like one in another network at the time) which determined who got into the "Showcase Showdown."

And so, for what, two, three, four generations now?, many of us have either spent our sick days home from school (or work) or gotten a late start on our school vacation days, watching the pricing games, the contestants jumping up and down, Bob Barker's exciting voice raising and dropping as he offers words of encouragement, and all the pricing games, like the Pricing Game, Plinko, the Clock Game, and the one with the mountain climber and the yodeling soundtrack. And suddenly we're conscious of how much everything costs, from a jar of Jolly Time Popcorn to a brand new Vega or Chevette (or Suburu Brat, or Chevy Cruze, or whatever car they gave away in whatever era).

When I was home one day recently, on a sick day, I watched one of the modern shows (custom made t-shirts and all) and was struck by how much the prizes tell us so much about this particular time: a flat-screen TV, a laptop, a home gym, a karaoke machine; an iPad and iPhone; two vacations (as part of one showcase) and a 2014 Kia Forte. I also couldn't help but notice how drastically the set and especially its colors have changed in 42 years, and how small and few the changes have been in all the theme and prize music. In fact, the prizes given away at any given time tell a lot about who we were in those days. The very first item up for bids in September 1972 was a fur coat. Host Bob Barker would later become an animal rights activist, successfully pushing to have furs banned as prizes on the show years later. His contract even forbade any previous shows, with furs given away, to be rerun.

Although there are a few leftover elements from the older Price is Right, the version that's on now is a different animal. The newer version has a long list of things that didn't exist on the old one: the iconic sound of the late announcers Johnny Olsen, then Rod Roddy (and today, George Gray), saying "Come on down!": the pricing games, like "Plinko"; the exciting music, and of course those "loser horns," those few notes of the theme song played on tuba. And the old version didn't have Bob Barker, since he was busy hosting Truth or Consequences in those days. On the other hand, it always had "the next item up for bids"--in fact, that's almost all there was to the show--and it had one of the other greatest game show hosts of all time: Bill Cullen. No one in television history hosted more game shows than Cullen...and this one was his longest-running gig.


A native of Pennsylvania, Cullen helped call local coverage of Pittsburgh Steelers games and worked in radio before moving to New York. He broke into network radio by writing for the comedy show Easy Aces and eventually began hosting game shows. His subdued, sedate, button-down style, which would become so en vogue in the late 1950s and early 1960s, is quite a contrast to the hyper-excited, melodramatic style of, say, Bert Parks. Listen to recordings of both of them taking turns hosting the radio game show Stop the Music! and it's almost as if you're listening to two different shows. If Cullen were a comedian, he'd have been someone like Stan Freberg or Bob Newhart; had Parks been one, it's likely seltzer water would've been involved.

Cullen began hosting games on TV when Goodson-Todman hired him to host Winner Take All; the earliest existing footage we've ever seen in modern day television of Cullen hosting a show is of him hosting this one, and the two or three existing broadcasts have even been rerun on GSN. From there, the buzzcut, spectacled Cullen would be seen as a panelist on I've Got a Secret for 15 years, and hosting shows like Bank on the Stars, Place the Face and Eye Guess. Cullen had a long life of health problems, including a sharp, pronounced limp from a childhood bout with polio and a 1937 car accident. In 1969, just after Eye Guess ended, Cullen suffered a severe bout of pancreatitis that required surgery. This is where he lost the buzzcut and grew his hair out. Cullen recovered, beginning a stint as a panelist on a syndicated revival of To Tell the Truth and an Emmy-winning job hosting NBC's Three on a Match. He went on to host The $25,000 Pyramid, Password Plus, the original version of the twice-remade Chain Reaction, The Joker's Wild, Blockbusters (heavily rerun for years on GSN, largely on the strength of Cullen's abilities as host), Hot Potato and Bumper Stumpers.

Cullen was so highly thought of, and so in demand, that he was the first choice to host Who Wants to Be a Millionaire when the British game show came to America. The reason he couldn't: Cullen had died nine years earlier, in 1990, as age 70. It was lung cancer that finally did in the man who managed to stand up to so many other health problems; it should be noted that many of the shows he hosted or on which he joined the panel, like I've Got a Secret, were sponsored by tobacco companies like Winston. The Price is Right counted Newport and Lark among its main advertisers.

It was likely those health problems, and his hard time walking around with the limp, that kept Cullen from accepting the job of hosting The New Price is Right in 1972. Most of the other shows shot around Cullen's difficulty in walking, to the point that even his fellow game show hosts were surprised when they met him in person. Bob Barker, who had hosted Truth or Consequences for years and did a lot of walking around on that show, got the physically demanding job hosting the daytime Price instead, with Dennis James the first host of the syndicated nighttime version. Cullen did appear on the show in 1982 to promote another CBS daytime show he hosted, Child''s Play, but neither he nor Barker mentioned his earlier job hosting The Price is Right. Barker has mentioned Cullen a few times, and Drew Carey (whose glasses and haircut seen to resemble the early Cullen) has mentioned him more often. For his part, Cullen actually mentioned future host Barker on the old Price is Right by name; during the NBC daytime version he told viewers they could catch Barker next on Truth or Consequences. Having said that...Cullen can occasionally be seen taking a few steps around the set of the old Price is Right, and his limp is only occasionally noticeable.

If you want to read up more on the fascinating career, life and world of Bill Cullen, a friend of mine, Matt Ottinger, has a definitive website devoted to the master gamesman.

Before I contrast the colorful post 1972 Price is Right to the black-and-white kinescopes of the Cullen era, it should be noted that NBC aired most of the show (if not all of it) in "living color," peacock and all, through its September 1963 departure from the network. Unfortunately, as was the practice in those days, the few existing shows (out of the hundreds that aired in prime time and thousands from the daytime run) were preserved in black-and-white kinescope format, a much cheaper method in those days. However, I could've sworn I saw a colorful few seconds of a Cullen Price is Right that flew by as part of the game show montage, featured on the special NBC: the First 50 Years in 1976, so perhaps one color show existed as late as then.

Beginning in 1956, the show aired five times a week in daytime and once a week in network prime time, as a surprising number of game shows did as late as the early 1970s. In the show's days on NBC, Don Pardo (the man who had done old time radio big band remotes, we'd later hear on the original Jeopardy! and heard him just a few days ago introducing guest host Jim Parsons on Saturday Night Live) did the honors of announcing the show. "Tonight these four people meet to compete for the prizes of a lifetime on...the Price is Right!" is how Pardo opened each show, before introducing Bill Cullen and/or maybe reading a sponsor billboard for, say, Speidel, Lux dishwashing liquid, Imperial Margarine or Newport Cigarettes. (Another version of the opening had Pardo referring to the contestants as "bargain hunters.")

What you would never hear Pardo say, since the players were already seated, was the still not yet coined phrase, "Come on down!" (But how cool would that have been? Hearing that from Pardo?)  Pardo's detailed prize descriptions, sponsor I.D.'s and instructions on mailing sweepstakes postcards to NBC, probably made his role the largest role he's ever had on a TV show, rivaled only by Saturday Night Live in its earliest years. And Pardo is the first man in television history to utter the words, "...and it can be yours if the Price is Right!" at least in this context.

There were no pricing games, no 1950s equivalent to Plinko, for instance. Basically they bid on four-five prizes per show, and every item was the next item up for bids (a phrase that was heard on this version, spoken by Cullen). Everyone had to bid without going over the actual retail price, but there were two or three pricing rounds for most items; there were specific increments of $100 the contestants were required to bid (so you couldn't bid, say, $201 if the guy next to you just bid $200) and you couldn't underbid the highest existing bid; your only other option was to "freeze." (The audience shouting "Higher! Lower! Freeze!" is another feature that made the jump from the Cullen to the Barker years.) They may have used only one part of the 1972 version, but they certainly knew how to complicate it and also mine it for drama. During a 1958 show, for instance, one man talks about how he's always fantasized about owning a boat much like the one up for bids...then wins it and invites the other three contestants for a ride on it.

Other items up for bids during the NBC years include furs; an entertainment center that includes a radio, a televsion and a "hi-fi"; a luxurious dress and a trip to Paris; a serving bar that comes with a bonus prize of 120 bottles of champagne--given away on Christmas Day 1961, presumably for a New Year's party. And of course there were cars. An Alabama native going to school in Boston won a 1959 Ford Country Squire station wagon; others included a 1959 Rambler Cross-Country station wagon, a Chevrolet Corvair and a 1962 Mercury Meteor sedan.

The Wikipedia article on this version of the show lists some highly exotic prizes, like a 1926 Rolls Royce with chauffeur; a ferris wheel; an island on the St. Lawrence Seaway; a live steer to go with a barbecue pit; a live peacock to go with a color TV (a play on the NBC icon); an airplane, a submarine, and walk-on parts on TV shows and movies, including a trip to Israel to work as an extra in the move "Exodus." Contestants could trade the prizes for cash or a more practical prize (example: the antique Rolls could've been traded for a more modern car). Once the show gave away a live elephant, and the contestant refused the alternate prizes and insisted on the elephant...so, he got it. It always wasn't unusual, in those post=war, suburb-growing days, for new homes in newly built subdivisions to be given away as prizes, giving viewers a rare chase to see the fifth digit light up on all of the scoring boards.

The show was created and produced by Bob Stewart, who said he got the idea by watching an auction take place outside his office window. It premiered just as the quiz show scandals were breaking. The show, investigated and found to be clear, continued as other tainted shows like Twenty-One, The $64,000 Question and Dotto, fell by the wayside. So with less competition and as one of the few shows still giving out luxurious (but still less costly) prizes, The Price is Right became America's top rated game show for two years.

Johnny Gilbert, the show's announcer on ABC

But ratings began to slip and NBC cancelled the show in 1963; Goodson-Todman quickly found a new home for it on ABC. The switch meant no Don Pardo, as he was under contact to NBC. Ironically, the man who would succeed him as announcer on the Alex Trebek version of Jeopardy!, Johnny Gilbert, also did the same on The Price is Right. (Like Pardo, Gilbert was even called upon to guest host on occasion.) This glorious celebration of consumerism also reflected a shift in emphasis from the contestants to the prizes themselves, right down to Gilbert's standard opening: "Backstage are some of the most exciting prizes on television...Stand by for...The Price is Right!"

That's how the prime time show of October 16, 1963 opens, complete with a sponsor I.D. for Imperial Margarine. It also has a theme song, "Window Shopping," that seems to revel in how old-fashioned it sounds. It makes me think of what I might've heard as a child, standing in line for the antique car ride at Six Flags. It's a sharp contrast to the 1972 theme, which is so crisp and exciting that it's still used even to this day.

Then Bill Cullen comes out and puts on his lavalier microphone while we all watch, and he opens the show. Pat Carroll is the celebrity panelist, a noticeable change from the NBC version; the celebrities played each of the four rounds for a different member of the studio audience. Sometimes Cullen would tell the winning audience member to come down onto the stage; this is probably what evolved into "Come on down!" in the 1970s.

Cullen introduces the panelists: Marian Dillon of Illinois, a returning champ who previously won $8500 on the show; William Smith of Massachusetts, an older man who won a choice between an oil well and $25,000 and chose the money, saying "I ain't got time to wait for the oil well" (he must've been a home sweepstakes winner); Bill Roberts, the one apparent newcomer, from New Jersey; and Carroll, who plugs her appearance in the musical "The Unsinkable Molly Brown" off-Broadway. "You run from the minute the curtain goes up, not too good for an old lady like me!" she tells Cullen. "Now you know why I turned it down when they offered it to me!" he shoots back.

Pat then chooses four cards from a fishbowl; all of the cards in the bowl have names of studio audience members. She lays each one face down, and will play for each one each round. The first name she calls out is James Snead.

Cullen then calls on Johnny Gilbert to tell us the first item up for bids: it's a travel trailer. The entire panel, including Pat Carroll, even gets to walk through the trailer, as Gilbert describes its many features: gas-powered stove, refrigerator and water heater, sink, shower, storage space and a double bed.

Cullen asks the panel for a bid no lower than $1,000. Marian Dillon bids $1200; William Smith bids $1350 (the minimum raise is $100 and you can't go lower than the lowest bid); Bill Roberts bids $1700 and Caroll, on behalf of Mr. Snead, bids $1800. Then he asks Dillon which way she wants to go, and she bids $1900; Smith bids $2000, Roberts $2300, Carroll $2500. Then a buzzer goes off which means each contestant only gets one more bid.

So the first thing we see is a half-scale replica of a 1910 Ford Model T with a fiberglass body, made by McDonough, a company based in Georgia. (Well, there you go with the whole Six Flags thing...) Cullen says if the Model T won't pull the trailer...

...then perhaps the next part of the bonus will. It's a 1964 Mercury Comet Caliente sedan with a V8 engine. Roberts, who hadn't cracked much of a smile before winning the trailer, is now a very, very happy man.

Pat then turns over her next card, and reads off the name Ruth Billick. Then comes the next item up for bids: a 12 place, 162 piece bone China service, from Royal Worchester.


Cullen announces this is a one-bid item. When Smith bids $100, Cullen reminds him of the one-bid status (apparently a hint that Smith is way off). Roberts then bids $400; Pat, $450; Dillon, $475. The actual retail price turns out to be $1004.50, so Dillon is the big winner.
Cullen then announces a new home viewer sweepstakes; these encourage viewers to send in bids by postcard, and one lucky bidder will not only win the prizes but also get a spot on the show. This is occasionally called a "showcase," the earliest use of the word in Price is Right lore. This particular one is called the "auto sweepstakes," because the main prize is a luxurious 1964 Lincoln Continental. The sweepstakes also includes a Tyco train set and a stereo system.
If the Continental itself wasn't enough to make you think of Mad Men, the next item up for bids will surely do it: a true relic of the "Martini Generation." It's what Johnny Gilbert calls "a unique bar!" Not only does it serve alcohol, but it has a built-in black and white television set and a stereo system.
Roberts starts the bidding with $1500. Cullen then tells Smith he's allowed to underbid but will have to freeze, an apparent hint that Roberts just overbid. After all the bidding, the actual retail price is $1490. Smith gets it with his frozen bid of $1250.
The last item up for bids is a five carat diamond ring from Johnston Jewelers LTD. This time Pat Carroll gets the lowest and highest bid, starting off with $2750, and after three rounds of rather dramatic bidding, comes out with the high bid of $6250. The actual retail price turns out to be $8675 so Pat wins it for her chosen audience member, Carrie Winfield. Carrie, as it turns out, is black, making her a rarity on the shows I've seen on Youtube.
As Cullen tallies up the totals, Pat is the big winner because of her bid on the diamond ring. But the returning contestant is chosen from the other three, and it's the one newcomer, Bill Roberts who won $5833 in prizes. (The total you see below for Marian Dillon is her two-show total.)
The prime time version of The Price is Right would leave the air after the 1963-64 season; Pat Carroll would return for the September finale, in which the last-ever prime time prize turned out to be a newly-built house in Florida. The winner was invited to return the following Monday on the still-running daytime version. The show finally left ABC Daytime in 1965.

Bob Stewart would leave Goodson-Todman to start his own production company; he and Cullen would team up again in 1966 for Eye Guess, and in the 1970s for The $25,000 Pyramid. Stewart would also create other shows like Jackpot! hosted by Geoff Edwards, whose death, sadly, I learned about while writing this post. As for Don Pardo and Johnny Gilbert, they're still working to this day--the 96 year old Pardo still records intros for Saturday Night Live and Gilbert can still be heard dramatically saying "This...is...Jeopardy!"

Looking at this show and all the others, two things come to mind, and one is something I've already mentioned: how much the prizes tell us about the times. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, we see a lot of politically incorrect prizes like furs and the occasional live animal; obsolete prizes, like stereos with turntables and the Chevy Corvair that was "unsafe at any speed"; and some even a combination of both (the bar that's also a combination entertainment center). But some things never go out of style, like new cars in general or vacations, or contestants getting excited about winning them.

But in true late 1950s/early 1960s ideal life, a lot of these prizes seemed to be aimed at upper-middle-class suburban America. They tended to be family-type cars or things that would be a center of attention in a split-level suburban home. I can't imagine the bar that's also an entertainment center going into a small apartment, or for that matter, a farmhouse.

But what's interesting is, the contestants tend to be rather far apart on bidding on these items. They often tend to be as far off as $1-2,000 and in one case, everyone overbid. These are clearly not people who go shopping every day for bone China and large boats. It lays bare the disparity between those who accumulate all of these possessions (and perhaps the debt that goes with them) and those who aspire to them. And the few we met on the old Price is Right were among the lucky ones who had a shot at getting some of these and only having to worry about paying, say, the tax man.

Availability: a number of the Cullen Price is Right shows are on Youtube, including some 37 added by a man I previously idenfitied as a JFK news coverage guru, David Von Pein. A DVD released in 2008 by current rightsholder Freemantle, features four of the Cullen shows (including the September 1964 ABC prime time finale), and 22 other shows from the Barker era (including a few from 1972's CBS premiere week and Barker's final week in 2007).

Next time on this channel: my favorite show of all time.

Utopia, North Carolina

Mayberry embodied most of the idealism, and none of the ugliness, of the 1960s.

The Andy Griffith Show, "Opie the Birdman"
OB:  September 30, 1963, 9:30 p.m. EST, CBS
I was born three months after this episode aired.

The Andy Griffith Show, "Aunt Bee the Crusader"
OB: January 20, 1964, 9:30 p.m. EST, CBS
I was six days old when this episode first aired.

"You know what I think I'll do?...I think I'll go down to the fillin' station, get me a bottle of pop, go home and take a nap, go over to Thelma Lou's and watch a little TV...That's what I'm going to do, down to the fillin' station, get a bottle of pop, home, take a nap, then go over to Thelma Lou's and watch a little TV. You sure you don' t feel like a bottle of pop, Ange?"
"No."
"Well, I do. That's what I'm going to do. Go down to the fillin' station to get me a bottle of pop, home, nap, down to Thelma Lou's..."
"Watch a little TV?"
"Yeah."

I put off writing this one as long as I could. This isn't just any TV show, not even just any classic TV show. I wanted this to be just right. I wanted to take my time, and I wanted it to be written carefully. Maybe I got there, maybe I didn't.

And there's a reason for that. The Andy Griffith Show happens to be my favorite TV show of all time.

It was important to me to give the two inner selves of mine who are helping me write this blog--the critic and the fanboy--a chance to duke it out amongst themselves before they settled down and agreed to work together. It was important to me to make sure everyone knew I approached every show with an open mind, and didn't want anyone to think any show I described in the posts after this one, to be afterthoughts.

And you should know one more thing: my list of my favorite, say, 20 TV shows of all time cuts across all eras and decades and genres, and range from I Love Lucy to Breaking Bad. I love and admire them all very much.

But they all take a back seat in the '63 Ford Galaxie squad car to that warm, comforting, idealistic, character-driven, beautifully acted, lovingly crafted eight-year love song to America's small towns.

Opie: Johnny Paul says, if you put a horsehair in stagnation water, it'll turn into a snake.

I can't remember the first time I ever saw The Andy Griffith Show, but I do remember the show was still on CBS at the time.  I remember it being in daytime as well as nighttime, and I seem to remember it being in color--that's right, in a perverse fluke of timing, I got to know Howard Sprague before I ever met Barney Fife. I remember the first time I ever heard the name "General Foods," it was because the company sponsored this show, and I still think of this show whenever I see the Post cereals logo. And I heard the name "Mayberry" before I even fully understood the name of the real life small town where I grew up (Glencoe, Alabama). So all of this to say, the citizens of Mayberry go back as far with me as my own family and only a handful of my closest friends.

Gomer: Goober says hey.
Andy: Hey to Goober.

Like I said, I grew up in a small town myself...but it surely wasn't a Mayberry. Granted, Glencoe was and is, full of wonderful people who'd do anything in the world for you, but it also had a four-lane federal highway running right through the middle of it (and another one slicing through a far corner) and it's attached to a larger city, Gadsden, our much closer version of Mount Pilot. So it doesn't have the isolation or the quietness, or the town square for that matter, of a Mayberry. In fact, I always suspected Mayberry was meant to reflect small towns that were bypassed by the new, and still under construction, interstate highway system of the 1960s. And that would've suited the citizens of Mayberry just fine.

In fact, the town of Mayberry seemed like a character unto itself; it, and the overall series, each had their own personalities. The personality of Mayberry never changed; the personality of the show changed constantly. Although it was supposedly founded in the 1860s, Mayberry was created for our purposes at a time when Southern small towns could've used all the public relations they could get: they started to get a reputation as either a place where civil rights workers mysteriously disappeared, or more commonly, a place where you'd be more likely than not to get pulled over. (The latter is actually how we meet Sheriff Andy Taylor for the first time, in fact.) The show was very likely modeled after Andy Griffith's real life hometown of Mount Airy, North Carolina; although he denied that fact for years, later in life he started hinting maybe there was considerable truth to it after all. "Boy, it sure seems that way, doesn't it?" Griffith once said, winking, as the Andy Griffith Playhouse in that city was being dedicated. Griffith may have also modeled it after a few other towns in that area as well, including one that often shows up on maps as "Mulberry."

Those memories, obviously, are honed by nostalgia and idealism, Griffith's version of a perfect small town, mostly free of the political division that gripped so much of America in the 1960s. The result was very, very little sign of the outside world of that era. One of the most obvious exceptions was the squad car in which Andy and Barney patrolled the streets.  It was always a brand new Ford, and ironically a reminder in itself as to why it was necessary, since so many of the crooks they arrested (who weren't moonshiners) were people just passing through from that very outside world.

Barney Fife: If only there was a crime, just one crime! If only someone would just kill somebody...
Andy Taylor: Barney!!
Barney Fife: Well, it wouldn't have to be anyone we know... If two strangers was to come to town, and if one of them was gonna kill the other one anyway, they might as well do it here...

Born June 1, 1926--the same day, interestingly enough, as Marilyn Monroe--Andy Griffith grew up in Mount Airy's blue collar section. In high school he studied drama and music, taking up the trombone (which he played in at least two classic episodes). He also landed parts in the annual play "The Lost Colony," eventually working his way up to the plum role of Sir Walter Raleigh. At the University of North Carolina he changed his major to music (he was actually going to be a preacher) and taught music and drama at a high school in Goldsboro. Griffith became a standup comedian, with one of his routines, "What it Was, Was Football," actually becoming popular on the radio and in record stores. The routine is based on a premise that would seem to be unheard of in the BCS era: a Southern hick who has never heard of football, wandering into a well-attended college game where they're "fighting over a funny looking pumpkin." Five years later, it was part of a comedy album that paved the way for those of Bob Newhart, Bill Cosby and others, that redefined the genre.

Griffith made his TV debut on The Toast of the Town (as The Ed Sullivan Show was still known in those days) in January 1954, and just a few months later appeared on The Colgate Comedy Hour, in a show in which Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis were the headliners. In 1955 he appeared in a play that made its world premiere on The U.S. Steel Hour, "No Time for Sergeants." He played country bumpkin Will Stockdale, who's drafted into the Air Force and makes fools out of the veteran military men around him. It's a role he'd repeat on Broadway and memorably, on film--but first, his 1957 movie debut in Elia Kazan's "A Face in the Crowd." Although it was financially unsuccessful at the time of its release, Griffith's role as Lonesome Rhodes, a guitar-playing drifter who becomes an Arthur Godfrey-style TV superstar with heavy political influence, is prescient and almost scary to watch now: Griffith, trying method acting for apparently the only time in his life, embraces his dark side. It's quite possibly his all time greatest acting performance, one that some felt should've gotten an Oscar, but Griffith hated what method acting did to him (he often remained in his dark character even during breaks in filming). And so, an alternate pop culture history in which we might've thought of Andy Griffith the same way we think of, say, Marlon Brando and James Dean, simply never happened.

His next film was more typical, an adaptation of "No Time for Sergeants." It was a smash hit, and had the distinction of uniting Griffith with Don Knotts. In a single scene, Knotts plays an Air Force psychologist who tries to get Will Stockdale to take a mind game-type test (he has to link two big metal rings), which Will does before the psychologist even finishes explaining it. It freaks out Knotts' character, and thus one of the greatest comedy teams in history was born.

By the time 1960 rolled around, Griffith had now established himself in yet another Broadway production--"Destry Rides Again"--and was a hot property, so CBS and Danny Thomas gave him a plum shot: a "backdoor pilot" on the February 15, 1960 episode of The Danny Thomas Show. It almost didn't happen: when Griffith saw Danny Thomas screaming at his writers, he suddenly got cold feet and told producer Sheldon Leonard he didn't know if he could do it. Leonard (who played Nick the bartender in the movie "It's a Wonderful Life," one of several connections Mayberry would have to Bedford Falls) simply put his hands on Griffith's shoulders and said, "Andy. It's Danny's show and Danny just likes to scream. Everyone here knows it. This will be your show. If you don't want anyone to scream, no one's going to scream."

The Arthur Standler-penned episode takes a direct shot right off the bat at the Southern stereotype of the ticket trap: Danny Williams (Thomas' regular character) and his family get pulled over in their Ford Thunderbird convertible, for running a stop sign that was simply set on a roadside with no intersection in sight. Sheriff Taylor, in his world premiere as a TV character, explains the county could only afford the sign and was still saving up to build the road. When Danny demands to speak to the justice of the peace...that also turns out to be Andy Taylor, leading Danny to question whether he can get a fair trial. "Wow, that's quite a roll you've got there," Andy smiles and says as Williams pulls out a large amount of cash to pay his fine. Sure enough, the fines mount and Danny ends up behind bars.

During the half hour we only see two Mayberry characters played by the same actors, the other one being rising young child star Ronny Howard as Sheriff Taylor's son Opie. (Their scene together comes right out and says what's only implied in the series: that Opie's mom died before he was old enough to remember her.) Frances Bavier appears, only this time not as Aunt Bee. Will Wright plays the shady owner of a suit store (and would play the crabby department store owner, Ben Weaver, on the series), while the town drunk is a different character played by Frank Cady (Green Acres). Most importantly, it's a glimpse at an alternate Mayberry, one in which Griffith plays a hickish but ultimately country-wise sheriff. And this is likely what the show would've looked like, almost a one-joke show, really...had it not been for a phone call the next day.

Don Knotts called to congratulate Andy on the show, apparently it already being obvious that CBS would pick it up for a series. But the call was about two fortunes possibly headed in opposite directions: Knotts was suddenly unemployed. For years, he had been a regular on The Steve Allen Show (on which Griffith himself appeared very frequently), and NBC had just announced it would pull the plug on the Allen show at the end of the season. So Knotts swallowed his pride and asked, "You wouldn't need a deputy, would you?" It was a simple question that would change television history; Griffith, having already been told he would have enough influence not to allow screaming on his show, saw to it Don Knotts had a job as a deputy in the Mayberry courthouse.

Born and raised in West Virginia, Knotts started off in show business as a ventriloquist. He gave up the idea while touring as part of a Special Forces team in the Army in World War II; years later one friend recalled Knotts just threw the dummy off of a troop ship into the ocean, and even mimicked its fading cries for help. After the war, Knotts finished his college studies at West Virginia University before moving to New York and getting jobs in radio, including Windy Wails, the comic-relief character on the kids' western, Bobby Benson and the B-Bar-B Riders. On television his first role, improbably enough, was a surprisingly serious one: he played a hysterical mute who would only talk to his sister, on the daytime soap Search for Tomorrow. Knotts eventually made a name for himself as one of Steve Allen's "man on the street" regulars (along with Tom Poston and Louis Nye), usually playing a trembling, nervous character.

Knotts taking on on the role of Deputy Barney Fife--it was written just for him, no one else was ever considered--changed the show completely. By the second episode, "The Manhunt" (in which a hickish Andy was still playing with a state police commander's chart magnets), it became obvious Knotts was going to be even funnier than Griffith, so Griffith should function as more of a straight man. And so, Barney Fife became an icon of over-confident, code-quoting, small-town cops who thought they were saving the world, one jaywalking ticket at a time.

If no cop in America wanted to be called "Barney Fife," the opposite is true of his supervisor: I've known a surprising number of real-life Alabama sheriffs who've embraced Sheriff Andy Taylor as a role model. Where Barney Fife always wanted to find trouble, Andy wanted to avoid it and make it go away. He felt he was there for the townspeople, not for the crooks. Andy prided himself, for instance, on rarely carrying a gun, once saying, "When a man carries a gun all the time, the respect he thinks he's getting might really be fear. So I don't carry a gun because I don't want the people of Mayberry to fear a gun. I'd rather they respect me." (The real reason: Griffith just didn't like how it felt on his hip. Somehow, that explanation just fits perfectly.)

The show evolved as a stew of various pieces of inspiration: Griffith's own upbringing, and his own beliefs in religion and human nature; inspiration from small-town-skewing old radio shows--the dialogue inspired by Vic 'n' Sade, and a similar setting to The Great Gildersleeve (whose characters even included a barber named Floyd); and even TV westerns. Andy's and Barney's relationship may have been modeled after Matt Dillon and Chester Goode on Gunsmoke; Andy's single-father relationship with Opie, possibly molded after the one Lucas had with his son Mark on The Rifleman. (Single parents were just then beginning to make inroads into television at that point; that same year, 1960, Fred MacMurray would also start playing one on My Three Sons.)

The show, and  Mayberry, tried to appeal to as many of our senses as possible. It visually looked like a comforting city where almost anyone would feel welcome and where everything you needed was almost always within walking distance. The sound was laced with a lot of music--Andy was often seen strumming his guitar on the porch at the end of the day, and there were guest appearances by the much-sought-after bluegrass band, the Dillards, who appeared as the Darling Boys. (There was a folk music revival going on in the country at the time, so that's probably why all the guitars. Sure enough, they often sang folk songs, like Pete Seeger's "Tom Dooley.") Even our sense of taste wasn't ignored, as food was also a big part of the show, whether it was fried chicken prepared by Aunt Bee or meatloaf served at the diner, or perhaps even the cashew fudge snacked on by Barney and Thelma Lou while they were watching that doctor show on TV. Food was so important, in fact, that years later a best-selling cookbook was made out of many of the dishes mentioned on the show.

Each little change in the show affected its, and Andy Taylor's, personality. Barney Fife being a breakout character helped push Andy away from his hickish character to a wiser, mature lawman, as did his season-long relationship with the very liberated lady pharmacist, Ellie Walker (Elinor Donahue). As she left and we got to know a lot of other characters (and Andy would date a few more women before finding permanent girlfriend Helen Crump, a school teacher--again, just like The Rifleman), the show arguably became the first sitcom to evolve into an ensemble piece. Its sharp writing emphasized character; Griffith, who was involved in every script and was even known to improvise entire scenes with Knotts (the famous bit about Barney buying a septic tank for his parents' anniversary was actually one of those, as was the above running joke about getting a bottle of pop), had a rule that "If it sounds like a joke, throw it out!" An alternate to that was, "If it sounds like a joke, at least have the characters treat it as one.""He should go sit in the market, so everyone will know he's the big cheese!" Barney once said of an especially arrogant character. Andy laughed and told him that was "a good one, big cheese," making Barney appear very proud of himself.

In fact, side by side with The Dick Van Dyke Show which shared producers, The Andy Griffith Show helped revolutionize character humor, doing it for single-camera shows the way Van Dyke did it for those shot in front of a studio audience. Maybe you came because the small town atmosphere made you comfortable; the high quality of the acting and writing would definitely make you stay.

Barney (to two cells full of prisoners): Now here at the Rock we have two basic rules. Memorize them until you can say them in your sleep. The first rule is, obey all rules. The second rule is, no writing on the walls, as it is very difficult for us to get back there and remove writing from walls.

And the quality was married to an unforgettable atmosphere, the sum of its unique characters--a town barber who was a big fan of Calvin Coolidge, a town drunk who arrested himself so he could sleep one off in the town jail; a mortician who also repaired televisions and used a hearse as his repair vehicle; a friend of Aunt Bee's who prided herself on her award-winning pickles...and a whole town full of people who looked out for one another no matter what, even if it meant conspiring to save someone's feelings. "Keeping the peace" in Mayberry meant two old men getting into their weekly argument after a checkers game going bad, Aunt Bee casually cooking an excellent meal with tons of leftovers for whoever wanted them (and that included prisoners); Barney locking himself in a jail cell again, far away from the keys; or Gomer giving an entire speech about how water and air are free but Wally's Service would go broke if the same were true about gasoline. And it always meant church and prayer, clearly written from personal experience with details right down to Andy filling out an offering envelope.

A pair of season two episodes epitomize this wonderfully unique idea of looking out for one another: in one of them, they're trying to keep Aunt Bee from finding out her canned pickles suck, even though she plans to enter them in the county fair; in another, it's to keep Barney from finding out the same about his singing voice, even though he just landed a solo in the choir. In yet another, when an overzealous Barney is left in charge and arrests a large percentage of the town for minor infractions--that includes Aunt Bee, Opie, the mayor, the president of the bank, etc.--and becomes a laughing stock, Andy lets it slip Barney will have to be fired for losing respect of the town. As a result, everyone locks themselves up again.

Although the series' 1960 debut episode, "The New Housekeeper," introduced Aunt Bee to the Taylor household, a better introduction to the series might well be the season three episode, "Man in a Hurry," about a businessman whose Lincoln Continental breaks down en route to an important business trip. But he finds himself stranded in a small town with no way to get his car fixed quickly and enslaved to the town's slow, leisurely pace, and its Sunday afternoon tradition of letting two elderly sisters use the party telephone line for a few hours, even if all they have to talk about is their feet falling asleep.

Mr. Tucker: You people are living in another world! This is the 20th Century, don't you realize that? The whole world is living in a desperate space age!  Men are orbiting the earth! International television has been developed! And here--a whoooole town is standing still because two old women's feet fall asleep!
Barney: I wonder what causes that?

The show's ensemble cast, like the townspeople, all worked together for the common good, and you rarely heard behind-the-scenes incidents involving people who didn't get along with each other. Of course, I didn't say "never," I said "rarely"...because there was at least one exception.
If you ever hear any behind-the-scenes "dirt" about the show, there's a better than even chance Frances Bavier, who played the otherwise beloved Aunt Bee, was in the middle of it. It's often mentioned that she considered a small-town sitcom to be "beneath" the classically-trained Broadway actress. "There's just something about me that woman just never liked," Griffith himself once said. She once, famously, blew up at Howard Morris while he was directing a scene (Morris played Ernest T. Bass on the show but also directed a few episodes). A TV Guide article from the week of January 11-17, 1964, explores her loneliness, suggesting the studio set of the Taylor home may have been more of a "home" for her at that point than the actual Hollywood home where she went every night. It also quotes her as saying "I've had to take a backseat and watch others get the laughs, and it hasn't been easy," on being upstaged by Don Knotts and then-child-actor Ronny Howard. The article says because of that relegated role, she was "in analysis" (this was a time when stars were only beginning to admit they saw counselors) and it made her philosophical. Eventually her retirement from acting would be even lonelier and more bizarre.

It's often stated she resented the role of Aunt Bee, but it was actually one of the more fascinating on the show. I suspect she eventually came to peace with it; she supposedly apologized to Griffith while on her deathbed in 1989, and her tombstone actually mentions the name "Aunt Bee" and includes the inscription "To live in the hearts of those left behind...is not to die." Over the course of the series, we actually see her evolve and become more liberated. In the premiere episode she's left thinking she can't do anything right after she and Opie get off on the wrong foot. Eventually we see her win prizes on a national TV game show; buy a car and learn to drive; run unsuccessfully for city council; travel to Mexico; put on a blonde wig and experiment with reinventing herself; co-own a Chinese restaurant; date a congressman, and even take flying lessons and go on a solo airplane flight. Some of that helped Bavier win an Emmy in season seven.

If you want to see Aunt Bee as a protest march organizer (and an angry-sounding Bavier the way most of the cast probably knew her), look no further than the first episode of my lifetime, "Aunt Bee the Crusader." It was directed by Coby Ruskin and written by John Whedon...who has family you may've heard of.

The guest star in this episode is one of those people we've seen in everything from I Love Lucy to L.A. Law, Charles Lane. He also appeared in the movies of Frank Capra, including as the rent collector in "It's a Wonderful Life." He often played villains and snippy bureaucrats; while interviewing him once, David Letterman once described his stock characters as "look who's coming, guess we're going to lose the farm now." Only in this episode, Lane plays Mr. Frisby, the egg farmer (we used to have someone like him deliver eggs to our house too, back in the 1960s), and it's his turn to lose the farm.

He chooses to break this to Opie and Aunt Bee by bearing gifts: Opie gets Mr. Frisby's prize rooster, Beau, and he gives Aunt Bee a moustache cup. Then he uses this occasion to break the news: he has to get out of the butter-and-egg business because "They're running me off my property." He says he's being evicted from "the land I was born on, and my father before me," to extend the highway.  "Sheriff's got his orders, nothing he can do about it, got a job to do." Aunt Bee decides to see about that.

Back at the courthouse, Andy and Barney go through their ritual of letting sober-again Otis (Hal Smith--character actor, cartoon voice man, Los Angeles kids' show host and real-life teetotaler) out of his cell. Barney takes his usual failed crack at trying to get Otis to reveal where he's getting his illegal liquor. Mayberry was a dry county so Otis likely got it from moonshiners. (Obviously the show's attitude toward substance abuse is a tiny bit outdated; a surprising number of 1960s sitcoms had "drunk characters." On Bewitched it was the guy played by Dick Wilson; on Car 54, Where are You? the guy was played by Larry Storch.) Barney tries giving Otis the "third degree," once again using "sophisticated crime-stopping methods" he most likely got off the late, late movie. The first attempt ends with Otis breathing his morning alcohol breath in Barney's face; the second ends when Barney tries to shine the office desk lamp in his face, only to break the neck and having the lamp keep dropping over.

"Otis, you didn't let it happen again, did you?" Aunt Bee asks as she comes into the courthouse. "Oh no ma'am, at least I tried not to...I seen temptation coming and it seen me coming too." Aunt Bee tells Otis she prayed for him and suggests he talk to Reverent Tucker. "Poor Otis, and he tries so hard," she says just after Otis leaves, to which Andy responds, "I wouldn't say he strains himself."

Aunt Bee then jumps Andy's case for not working harder to go after the moonshiners selling Otis the alcohol, and picking on "decent folks" like "that darling Mr. Frisby."

Barney: That's the county for you, extend a highway that already goes no place!
Andy: They ran out of money!
Barney: They ran out of brains!
Andy: They've got the money now, and the reason they want to extend it--
Barney: If you ask me, they ought to fire the whole lot of them, a bunch of dead heads and goldbrickers, the whole lot of 'em!
Andy: Barney, did it ever occur to you that we're county employees?

No, of course it didn't.
As Aunt Bee and Andy debate what's going on, Barney takes the side of whoever spoke last, repeating "They need that highway!" and "Why don't they put it someplace else?" until Aunt Bee snaps, "Oh Barney, will you stay out of it?" (I have to wonder how much of Aunt Bee's dialogue was inspired by what Bavier may have said on the set.) When Andy tries to explain that Frisby will be well paid for his land and can move wherever else he wants, Bee says some things might be more imporant than money, "...things like home, and people's feelings, and where they grew up, and things like, do unto others!" When Andy says there's nothing he can do, Aunt Bee suggests he not hang out at jails so much and go to church more often, then storms out the door. I love how the nastiest, most hurtful thing you can do to someone in Mayberry when you're mad at them...is to judge them, being judgmental being akin to anger and meanness.

Barney: Wouldn't hurt Ange, maybe if you went to church more often--
Andy: Will you shut up?

Andy's not through with this yet, unfortunately. He comes home and finds Opie building a coop for his rooster, and Opie then tells him about the moustache cup; "I guess it's to keep mustaches in." Andy confronts Aunt Bee on the porch, telling her Frisby is just playing on hers and Opie's sympathies. Aunt Bee says it's something Andy is "doing to him,:" but Andy says everything's done by due process of the law. "Due process my foot! It's one poor old man against the county, what can he do? And you stand there talking about the law, no justice, no feelings, just do what the law says! Whatever side your bread's buttered on!" Fans of the show believe each episode has a "life lesson"; this is actually a study in political philosophy, in which Andy and Aunt Bee come right out and admit they're debating the old question, "Are we a nation of laws or a nation of men? Can the good of the one outweigh the good of the many?" Andy represents the law and tries to insist everything is done fairly; Aunt Bee takes everything personally and lashes out on behalf of one man who has her sympathies.

"Are you telling me how to do the job of sheriff?" Andy asks. "Well, somebody should!" Aunt Bee shouts as she storms through a screen door, her second such dramatic flourish in a second consecutive scene. For the next few minutes the two talk to each other through Opie--supper's on the table, she'll have hers in the kitchen, Andy's not hungry, suit himself, ending with Andy saying "I don't care what you tell her!" and Opie shouting through the screen door, "He doesn't care what I tell you!" This one makes me laugh out loud and recalls the older Ron Howard I would see on Happy Days.

The next day Barney chats with Andy about this at his breakfast table, where Andy mentions the gifts and the argument.

Barney: We could get him on a 204...bribery, collusion, tampering with and/or intimidation of material witnesses.
Andy: That's a 204?
Barney: Kind of a catchall.

They drive up to the courthouse and find a good ol' 1960s protest with signs and everything. Andy goes into the courthouse and still tries to argue with the protesters--he never gives up trying to persuade, never gives up trying to explain himself to everyone, never says "Because I said so and that's all you need to know." No wonder real Southern sheriffs still like him so much. As he goes in, Barney tries to get the protesters to disband.

"You all heard the sheriff. Now you all put on a real nice demonstration here, and I think you should all go home now and lay down and rest." This gets a reaction from the crowd, so Barney reminds them they're "congregating unlawfully," a favorite phrase he likes to throw around, but they say they have their rights too.

"You heard what the sheriff said, now we can't have some minority here--"
"Minority?" Aunt Bee and the crowd screech almost in unison as they descend on a horrifically terrified Barney, who never takes his eyes off of them as he gets into the courthouse.

Barney tells Andy this is a "real situation" they have on their hands, but Andy says he's not worried. "Men you can slap in jail, but women, what can you do with women?" Barney asks.  Barney says Andy should've seen how they were coming after him, holding up his claws and going, "Nyeah! Nyeah!"
"How did they come at you?"
"Nyeah! Nyeah!" Barney repeats, holding up "claws" again, in a scene that never fails to crack me up.

Andy: I ain't worried about it, I think you can take Aunt Bee!
Barney: Huh?
Andy: She's got a mean left jab and some fancy footwork but I still think you can beat her!
Barney: You're funny, you are as funny as a crutch!

After getting the call that the bulldozers are ready at Frisby's property, Andy and Barney show up in the squad car to find Aunt Bee and the rest of the protesters, joining Mr. Frisby in front of his farmhouse, singing "We Shall Not Be Moved." Opie meets his pa at the squad car. Turns out Aunt Bee can throw a surprisingly spirited protest rally.

Andy yells for the crowd to calm down; they do just in time to hear Barney yell his trademark "Nip it! Nip it!" Andy tells Mr. Frisby it's now time for him to move on, but the crowd starts chanting "Stand your ground! Stand your ground!" and "Move us too! Move us too!" Andy quietens the crowd again and jumps Barney for chanting along with them. "Barney will you stop hollering with those women?"(Barney isn't used to having to choose sides in Mayberry.) The crowd boos as Andy orders Barney to clear out the livestock and tells Opie to help him. When the two get to the chicken coop, Opie starts saying "Here chickie chickie chickie!" to coax them out. "To heck with that!" Barney shouts, as he storms in and tries to order and boss around the chickens, only to run back out when they start attacking him.

As the furniture is being moved out, Opie runs up to his father with Beau, the rooster Opie had earlier been ordered to give back to Mr. Frisby. He's concerned that Beau is sick and even dying, he stumbles around a lot in a way suggesting a real-life animal wrangler was using fishing line. (I hope he was being treated humanely.)  Andy, noting the chicken has a case of the "blind staggers," asks Opie where he got him, and Opie surprises him with the news there's a cellar with a trap door under the henhouse. Andy asks Barney to do anything to stall the women while he checks out the henhouse. Barney tells them "how much we appreciate this fine turnout," then pathetically (and hilariously) tries to lead them unsuccessfully in "Row Row Row Your Boat," suggesting they sing in sections. They respond by chanting "We will not sing, we will not sing!" and Barney starts "conducting" them.

Then Andy shows up with a still, saying "Ladies, what am I bid for this fine old antique? I'd like to tell you it's one of a kind, but there's five more down there just like it." Andy explains they were with the incubators, and with the egg business being down, Mr. Frisby apparently needed a sideline and "You women were about to help him keep one going." So naturally, Aunt Bee and the rest of the crowd abruptly turn on the farmer, prompting Andy, being an obligated lawman, to say "Well, I reckon we need to go save Mr. Frisby."

So the episode answers its question with, "We are a nation of laws," and in the epilogue, Aunt Bee has to eat some crow and apologize to Andy. This episode may have taken that side, but the series itself could change its mind. In another episode, when Andy is up on charges over ineptly running his sheriff's office, it's Barney who saves the day, in one of Don Knotts' rare and finest dramatic moments, telling a hearing, "Sometimes you don't go by the book, as much as by the heart."

As a big fan of the show, I find something to love about every single episode, even the much criticized ones from the color years. (I mean come on...episodes directed by James L. Brooks? Guest appearances by Jack Nicholson, with Aunt Bee calling him "such a sweet man"? What's not to love?) Even some of my least favorite, and some of the series' most disliked episodes (like the one in which Barney returns to town and finds out his girlfriend, Thelma Lou, married someone else), have at least something that's redeemable. But most fans believe the show's black and white era--the first five seasons, when Don Knotts was a regular--are the show's creative height. Even then, it can even be winnowed further to seasons two through four, and I was born halfway through season four.

And a number of those season four episodes are beloved classics: "The Haunted House," as explored by Andy, Barney and Gomer; "The Sermon for Today" is about how a church sermon inspires an ill-fated attempt to spontaneously plan an evening band concert; "A Black Day for Mayberry" is the one about the gold truck (if you've ever wanted to see the Mayberry squad car get into a dramatic high speed chase, this is the one you're looking for); "Citizen's Arrest" is about Gomer doing just that to Barney, who made a U-turn in the squad car;  "A Date for Gomer," which turns out to be Thelma Lou's cousin Mary Grace; "Barney's Sidecar," arguably the show's funniest episode as Barney becomes a motorcycle cop and unites the entire town against him; "My Fair Ernest T. Bass," about the disastrous attempt to introduce the titular hillbilly to high society; "The Fun Girls" which not only bring back fun-loving Daphne and Skippy but also introduces us to Goober; and the season finale, the backdoor spinoff pilot for Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C.


Barney:You know something I found out? If you ride into the wind with your mouth open, and you put your tongue up on the roof of your mouth, it's impossible to pronounce a word that starts with the letter S.
Andy: You didn't let anybody see you riding around on that thing with your mouth open?

And there's one more that often gets ranked on Top 100 Episode of All Time lists, both Andy Griffith's and Ron Howard's personal favorite and one that often rivals "Man in a Hurry" as the episode most loved by fans: "Opie the Birdman." Like all of the series' season premiere episodes, it was centered around Opie; in fact the whole episode only has four human characters.

Before he was a teenager on another show that would reach #1, Happy Days, and before becoming a wealthy, Oscar-winning movie mogul, Ron Howard was Ronny, one of the best, most soulful and most well-adjusted child actors working in television and movies. He was part of an acting family--father Rance was a character actor, brother Clint landed his fair share of roles, including a regular spot on Gentle Ben and even the non-speaking Leon on this show. "Opie the Birdman" could very well be one of his finest performances ever.

The episode begins like all the others: with one of the great openings in history, a whistled theme song (by its composer, Earle Hagen) that calls Andy and Opie to the fishing hole where they're headed, and the rest of us to join them for another time and place (or really, state of mind). It's the very definition of escape and it sets the mood, making us feel wistful and safe. Most TV themes announce; this one invites.

The episode itself opens with Opie and Barney in the Mayberry Courthouse; Opie has a new slingshot, and Barney, being the weapons expert, tells Opie all about David from the Bible and his own slingshot. ("Where did David get the innertube?""Well he just cut up an old ti--") Barney teaches Opie a few tricks like "over the mountain,""behind the barn,""under the bridge" and the mirror shot.

And it's during the mirror bit--aiming for a wastebasket, Andy telling him to take it outside, Barney insisting he knows what he's doing--that Barney breaks the glass on the bookcase. Andy tells Opie all about David's actual slingshot--leather, and he turned himself around to fling it--before Opie goes on his way. Barney argues vehemently that they did too have vulcanized rubber in biblical times. "Leather straps was it?...Andy, if you don't know something, you should just say so, it's better than filling the boy's head up with a lot of nonsense," to which Andy responds, "Where did David get the innertube?" Barney still can't answer that one.

Opie walks happily down the street, pretending to hit fake targets as he shouts "Pow!" He then starts shooting actual trees...and suddenly, a bird falls out of one of them. "I didn't know you were a bird, honest...""It's probably just a scratch, it'll be okay." Then, in a heartbreaking scene that shows just how good an actor Ron Howard was, Opie picks up the lifeless bird and tearfully says, "Fly away! Please fly away!" He runs into the house, upset and crying.

That night at supper, Aunt Bee explains she couldn't make the green beans Chinese style she'd planned to try; the newspaper recipe was continued on page seven and she used that one to line the garbage pail. Opie is obviously not hungry. Andy mentions Mrs. Snyder's cat is running loose and apparently killed one of their songbirds, but Aunt Bee points out Mrs. Snyder went out of town and took her cat with her. This is more than Opie can bear and he runs up to his room.

Andy confronts him in his room, and  says, "Hand it over." Opie gives him the slingshot and that's the last we see of it in this episode. "You going to give me a whipping?" asks Opie, in a time when belt whippings were often considered the answer to everything. Andy was known to do that to Opie, too, but fortunately we never had to see it happen. "No, I'm not going to give you a whipping," Andy says, walking over to open the window, revealing the singing birds. "Can you hear that? That's those young birds chirping for their mama that's never coming back. Now you just listen to that for awhile." Obviously, to a boy who's grown up without a mother of his own, that's harsh. But it's effective.

After a commercial break (wow, try selling some Sanka after that scene), we find Opie sitting on the porch, making a "breakfast" of bugs and worms. "Sounds like another recipe out of the newspaper," Andy quips. Opie then explains, "I got to thinking last night. Since their ma ain't coming back, and since it's my fault, and since just being sorry won't help, I'm going to take over and feed 'em." He introduces Andy to Winken, Blinken and Nod, and as Andy explains to Aunt Bee, "Fact is, Opie's just become a mama." And the episode has become an allegory, a beautifully written symbolic tale mirroring Opie's own upbringing by a young single father, written  (by Harvey Bullock, directed by Richard Crenna) when writers could still be influenced by literature and not just other TV shows.

We see Opie on a ladder, feeding the birds, as Barney gives him a pair of tweezers to help him out. Barney, wanting to feel important even here, relays that urban legend about how "All wild creatures shy away from anything with man's scent," and says even on African safaris, "the main rule is never to touch the food with your hands." Andy, apparently believing it as much as I do, says "That's good to know, next time I go tiger hunting I'm going to take my tweezers!" Barney shoots him that "funny as a crutch" look.

At breakfast, just as Barney joins the Taylors, they hear the sound of Mrs. Snyder's cat, apparently having returned with her own from a trip. "A cat?" Opie shouts frantically, followed by Andy, Barney and Aunt Bee completing the freakout as the first three run out of the house. The next scene finds the three birds in a cage, and Opie asking if he can bring them into the house. Barney tells them they're wild and they like the fresh air, then murmurs to Andy, "Besides, a bird in the house means there's going to be a death in the family."

As they go inside, Opie worries about the birds, and relays a belief from his friend Johnny Paul Jason that "If you touch a bird, he'll die." Barney assures him by saying birds communicate through chirping, then simulates chirps that supposedly mean "Gee, I'm feeling good,""Gee I'm feeling bad""Here comes a cat" and "Let's fly away.""The ways of the creatures of the wild are many and wonderful," Barney concludes, with no self-awareness whatsoever. When Opie asks Andy how he'll know if he's treating the birds okay, Andy says, "Well, Winken will tell Blinken, Blinken will tell Nod, Nod will tell Barney and Barney will tell you!"

Barney responds with that look he gets whenever anyone gets his goat. He has that look a lot.

As the final scene comes up, Andy tells him it's time for the birds to fly away, and that he'd explained that time would come one day. What's especially touching about this scene, is that most of Opie's misgivings about releasing the birds have nothing to do with his missing them; he's worried he didn't prepare them enough to survive on their own. We can feel our hearts be gently grabbed when Opie opens the cage door and says, "I hope I did all the right things," then once again, "Fly away, please fly away." I can never watch this scene without getting a little misty, not even now.
Opie releases the birds one at a time, their smiles and the music showing us the success of Winken's, Blinken's and Nod's new life. Then Opie comments on how empty the cage looks now. "Yes son, it sure does," says Andy, then in a multi-level metaphor, wistfully looks up and says "But don't the trees seem nice and full?" He and his son walk back into the house to start another day of their own lives.

Mayberry, clearly, was a perfect world...or almost perfect. Even a classic has its issues. The writers, first of all, perhaps could've used a better fundamental knowledge of civics and Southern local politics; we see a lot of the town council but almost nothing of "the county" (presumably the county commission) where Andy and Barney draw their paychecks. We're led to believe in a couple of episodes, for instance, that the sheriff has voting powers on the town council, and at least once it's implied the mayor could just flat-out fire the elected sheriff.

The show had an obviously outdated view of women, though to be fair (as far back as season one, when Ellie Walker broke Mayberry's glass ceiling and ran for town council), the show also seemed to occasionally acknowledge this, asking us to perhaps accept that the men of Mayberry weren't the most progressive in the world toward women without necessarily endorsing that attitude.

Still, the show clearly had obvious diversity issues, for a series about a town where everyone looks out for one another. Black people were mostly relegated to extras in crowd scenes, like for instance, the crowd that cheered Barney after he tackled a fleeing litterbug who turned out to be a wanted bank robber. I don't blame Griffith and the producers for this so much: sure, Andy could've fought for a more diverse cast and the show could've been cancelled and forgotten as a result. Instead, the show was on CBS, the same network that offered to renew East Side, West Side if Cicely Tyson was replaced by a white actress. So I blame CBS partly, and partly the viewing public. It says a lot about the times we lived in, that the idea of black people and white people living together happily and peacefully in a small Southern town was still fiercely controversial. I have to believe Mayberry otherwise would've welcomed people of all races...and did, in the show's later years, when Opie's African-American football coach saved the day in one episode. (Mayberry also had a full-blooded Native American, and we met him in the episode "The Battle of Mayberry.")

The show lasted eight years altogether, always in the top ten and seven of those years in the top five. And despite some changes many fans believe hurt the quality of the show--the departures of Jim Nabors, Don Knotts (especially) and later, Howard McNear (Floyd the barber) changed the acting chemistry, as did the expansion of Goober's role and the arrivals of other characters like Howard Sprague and Emmett the fix-it man. The departure of several writers and producers for Gomer Pyle changed the show's tone to a much dryer form of humor. Without Barney to play off and no one to really tease, Andy Taylor seemed to become more temperamental, while Andy Griffith simply became burned out. He left in 1968, and would try to find another hit series for years. He wound through a string of flops before striking gold again in Matlock, a legal drama featuring him as a crusty Southern attorney. He actually played Ben Matlock longer than he played Andy Taylor.

The rest of Mayberry simply kept going, since The Andy Griffith Show achieved the rare feat of being the number one show on television for its entire final season, 1967-68, a feat matched only by I Love Lucy and Seinfeld. On the retitled Mayberry R.F.D., Ken Berry, as farmer Sam Jones, was now the alpha male of Mayberry, with Andy only making a few guest appearances including the series premiere (in which he marries Helen Crump).  In 1986 much of the surviving cast (minus Frances Bavier, who was ill and refused to record an audio track after quibbling over a line) got together for the TV movie "Return to Mayberry," which turned out to be the highest-rated made-for-TV movie of the entire 1985-86 season. It actually corrected some of the series' most egregious wrongs, by showing us a completely sober Otis, getting Gomer and Goober together (the two Pyle cousins only appeared together in one episode) and reuniting Barney with Thelma Lou, and letting us see their wedding. Since the original set had been bulldozed in the late 1970s (that whole lot had fallen into disrepair because the owners shortsightedly never saw the potential in tours, like the ones at Universal), a makeshift Mayberry had to be built in a California town, including a replica of the courthouse.

People who are looking for Mayberry can still find at least one part of it: Andy's and Opie's fishing trip in the opening credits was filmed in Franklin Canyon Park in California, and that spot still exists (in fact it's marked by a bench now). People also like to flock to what's believed to be the real-life Mayberry, Mount Airy, North Carolina, where I'll be headed next week in fact for my first time ever.

But no one's ever going to find a geographic Mayberry, because it's not an actual town. It's an ideal, an aspiration, a place where anyone can feel accepted and loved and not judged. The irony is, fans like myself often read our own selfish projections into it, because it's human nature to take something special and hog it for ourselves. People on all sides of the political spectrum, for instance, often assume the show is speaking just to them to the exclusion of non-like-minded people. People make a lot of the fact that Don Knotts once said he left the show by "accident," assuming it was going to leave the air after the fifth season, and signing a movie contract with Universal before hearing the show had been renewed. But what we seem to forget was that Knotts' theatrical films of the time ("The Ghost and Mr. Chicken,""The Reluctant Astronaut") were major box-office draws and likely the financial height of his career. It was probably a good move for him, if not for us.

Perhaps those of us who are fans should make that point more often--that Mayberry was clearly made to appeal to everyone who wanted in, not just a select group of people. It wasn't an exclusive club by any means, in fact there were episodes about "exclusive clubs," and the real-life Andy Griffith Show Rerun Watchers Club is just about the least exclusive club in the world. That's the whole point of Utopia: when you live in a perfect world there's enough of that perfect world to go around. (The town church was even called the "All Souls Church," making it clear Mayberry didn't favor religions or denominations.) Perhaps the show's writers and producers kept the ugliness of the 1960s--the riots, the divisiveness, racism and the violent death throes of Jim Crow laws, Vietnam, the Cold War and the nuclear arms race--swept off the streets of Mayberry, but the other part of the 1960s, the perfect-world, Kennedy-era idealism, pretty much had free reign over the place. If Mayberry was anti-anything, it was anti-tribalism. In the very end, the show fiercely believed the good of the many outweighed the good of the few, and "many" can even be defined as a small town's population.

Perhaps I should make that point more often. Then I'll go down to the filling station, get bottle of pop, then take a nap, maybe head over to Melanie's to watch a little TV. Yes, that's what I'll do...utopian idealism, get a bottle of pop, nap, maybe over to Melanie's for a little TV. Yes, sir.

Availability: the entire series is on DVD and Amazon, and Season 1 will soon be released on Blu-Ray. Netflix also has the first three seasons, and a few episodes from the rest of the series' run, available for streaming. Mayberry R.F.D. will also make its DVD debut when Season 1 is released in April.

Next time on this channel: Bob Hope Presents the Chrysler Theatre.

Hello, I Might Not Be Going...

Groucho's play may be trying to tell us something about the last stage of his own life

Bob Hope Presents the Chrysler Theatre, "Time for Elizabeth"
OB: April 24, 1964, 8:30 p.m. EST, NBC
I was three months old when this show was first broadcast.

This is part of the Big Stars on the Small Screen Blogathon, hosted by Aurora at the How Sweet It Was blog.

Groucho Marx was always one of my favorite comedians, perhaps bordering on being a hero. So much so, and for so long, I once wrote a theme paper about him in high school and my English teacher Mrs. Handy gave me an A. I actually called it "Hooray for Captain Spaulding." Just after his death, a TV station in Huntsville, Alabama began rerunning You Bet Your Life late at night. I stayed up to watch it, much to the chagrin of my brother who just wanted to go to sleep and not be disturbed by some old comedian from 20 years ago. When Groucho died I was actually sadder about his passing than I was that we lost Elvis a few days earlier (and I still consider myself an Elvis fan), even though we clearly lost Elvis before his time and Groucho was nearly 87, feeble and perhaps no longer of sound mind.

The comedic persona Groucho chose for himself spoke to me: a smartass, whose job it was to protect the world from pretension. His movies put him in the middle of highbrow settings--a cruise ship, a university, a society party thrown for a famous explorer, the world of opera--and let him and his brothers, Harpo and Chico, completely wreck the place. What's really a sight to behold is when a bunch of pretentious people are bowing to his characters' wrongfully earned authority--the high society bigwigs saluting Captain Spaulding in "Animal Crackers," the university faculty bowing to President Wagstaff in "Horse Feathers," everyone when Groucho owns a failing luxury hotel in "The Cocoanuts"--and even as he insults them and sometimes even physically embarrasses them (ripping off toupees, etc.), they still kiss his ass. It made the musical numbers that much more potent, the abused ass-kissers singing backup and swaying in rhythm as Professor Wagstaff table dances and gives them all a 1930s era, code-friendly lapdance in "Horse Feathers." The "Hooray for Captain Spaulding/Hello I Must Be Going" sequence from "Animal Crackers" is an especially good and hilarious example of this, with Mrs. Rittenhouse (Margaret Dumont, one of the brothers' favorite straight women) being the recipient of so many of his machine-gunned insults. ("This insurance policy will take care of you in your old age, which should be along in a couple of weeks...")

Groucho and his brothers--piano-playing Chico, harpist and vocally silent slapstick artist Harpo and until 1933, "the normal one," Zeppo, often even the male romantic lead--must've been a sight to behold on the big screen in the Great Depression, when the upper crust made popular villains or butts of jokes. The brothers still made me smile and laugh even in the recession-wracked 1970s, when I discovered many of their movies on WTCG, Channel 17 in Atlanta.

To listen to Groucho throw out those great lines--most scripted, and some not--is to go on a nice, long, road trip of the English language, each of his scenes or speeches being one more ride in perhaps an entire theme park of wordplay. "Remember, gentlemen, we have to protect this woman's honor...which is probably more than she's ever done," he memorably said in my favorite of his movies, "Duck Soup" (again, to Margaret Dumont).

...and from "Animal Crackers":
"Let's get married...all of us."
"All of us?..Why, that's bigamy!"
"Yeah, and it's big of me, too!"

From the same movie, to a rich man who's financing he's seeking believe it or not: "What do you think of the traffic problem? What do you think of the marriage problem? What do you think of when you go home at night, you beast?"
(Outraged) "Well, I tell you, my--"
"I'd rather not discuss it further" (pointing at camera, and by extension, theater audience) "there are children present!"

By the late 1940s, the Marx Brothers movies were becoming less frequent, less successful and less funny. Groucho (and at one point, he and Chico) had made several attempts at radio. His most recent, Pabst Blue Ribbon Town, supposedly (according to Groucho) ended when the brewery held a party to celebrate a major anniversary and he got "Old Man Pabst" drunk...on Miller High Life. Groucho's radio career up to that point had been mostly been guest appearances on the shows of Rudy Vallee, Dinah Shore and Bing Crosby. Legend has it an ad-libbed appearance with Bob Hope inspired the idea that Groucho using a script was like "using a Cadillac to haul coal." That idea turned into his game show You Bet Your Life, first on radio, then on NBC television. The show was one of the first radio programs to be recorded in advance, so the conversations with contestants, who lined up for the honor to be Mrs. Ritttenhouse and get teased by Groucho (really, the whole point of the show, the quiz portion being a tacked-on afterthought) could be mined for their funniest--and cleanest, according to the censors--moments. It was also the first TV game show to be recorded (filmed, in those days) in advance, which is why they nearly all still exist. And it was the first game show to be syndicated in reruns, with the references to sponsor De Soto-Plymouth carefully edited and cropped out.

When the show ended in 1961, Groucho never wanted to leave the public light, and with that, came wildly varying degrees of success. Another You Bet Your Life-type show, Tell It to Groucho, lasted a single season; an attempt at a sitcom pilot starring Groucho, Harpo and Chico--Deputy Seraph, in which they would've portrayed angels visiting Earth, portending the fantasy sitcoms of the 1960s--fell apart due to Chico's health problems, discovered during the filming of the pilot. (Chico would die shortly thereafter, in 1961.) Harpo retired in 1963--reportedly, for the first time in show biz history, actually speaking out loud to thank his audience at his final nightclub performance--and died the following year.

So that left Groucho to guest appearances--often pleasant, as he demonstrated his walk to Dick Cavett and The Today Show's Hugh Downs, or that walk-on cameo he did on I Dream of Jeannie, and occasionally even triumphant, as he re-created some of his old movie routines with former co-star Margaret Dumont on ABC's The Hollywood Palace. And then there were the bad ones; where the running off at the mouth and getting his butt kissed served him so well in his 1930s movies and on You Bet Your Life, it made him come off as more of a "crazy old uncle" on shows like The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, where he might overtalk some of the guests who came on after him. He just about ruined a week of The Hollywood Squares with his sudden inability to shut the hell up. In his book "Backstage with the Original Hollywood Square," host Peter Marshall theorized Marx just didn't get how to play the game and thought he needed to save the show from dead air. After taping the final of that week's shows, he shook hands with Marshall and said, "Son, the only time I'd like to see you again is socially."

So, it's in the mist of Groucho's "second guest star era" where we get a glimpse of a rather obscure play he co-wrote with Norman Krasna, "Time for Elizabeth." Although he didn't do it much, Groucho wasn't against the idea of taking chances with roles; once on General Electric Theater he even made a dramatic appearance, in a show called "The Holdout" that co-starred a young Dennis Hopper.

This particular appearance would be part of the 1963-67 anthology series, Bob Hope Presents the Chrysler Theatre. Hope would host the series, usually pre-empted a few times a season by his own variety special, but in only rare occasions would he act on-screen. It was part of Hope's unusual, wide-ranging agreement he usually made with his TV sponsor; in this era, it was the Chrysler Corporation. It would even go as far as to allow product placement in Hope's theatrical films of the era, like "Boy Did I Get a Wrong Number!" so all of the characters would be driving Chrysler products. (He earlier had a similar agreement with General Motors, which is why he, Lucille Ball and everyone else can be seen driving Buicks in 1960's "The Facts of Life.")

Bob Hope Presents the Chrysler Theatre came along at an interesting time for anthology shows: they were basically on the way out, despite being even better-produced than they were in the 1950s. Many of the 1950s shows were done live with smaller budgets, not shot on location like this one and Kraft Suspense Theater. But it's an important link in how anthology drama evolved from, say, Studio One in the 1950s to The ABC Movie of the Week in the 1970s.

Chrysler Theatre had a variety of shows of different genres, that NBC would even use years later to plug holes in its summer schedule--the comedy shows would have one title, the dramatic shows another, and Hope's wraparound segments would be long gone by then. Unfortunately, I couldn't find any of those segments for this show myself, so here's a shot of him as a gangster, in an October 1963 sketch from one of his variety specials.

"Time for Elizabeth," the play by Marx and Krasna reportedly took years to write, with the two working on it bits and pieces at a time. (Accounts vary on exactly how long, but the shortest amount of time I saw described was seven years.) It premiered on Broadway in 1948 with Otto Krueger in the lead role; Groucho was tied up at the time with You Bet Your Life on the radio and filming the final Marx Brothers' film as a team, "Love Happy." The show bombed, closing after just eight performances. However, the pair did get a half million dollars for the screen rights, even though it was never filmed. Only in the late 1950s, when Groucho dusted it off to use as summer stock material and tweaked it here and there, did it ever reach any kind of success; many felt his ad-libs, and a long curtain call speech at the end of every show, were usually the highlights.
The play was adapted to television by Alex Gottlieb, known for "Hellzapoppin'" and working with Abbott and Costello. It was directed by Ezra Stone, radio's Henry Aldrich, who by the 1960s had made a name for himself as a director of shows like The Munsters. And sure enough, this show has a laughtrack. Of all the questions the hour long show (minus car commercials and Bob Hope's wraparounds) seems to want to answer, one of them appears to be, "What if Groucho Marx starred in a sitcom?" I don't know the differences between this version and the stage version--other than the stage version being a three-act play and considerably longer than the TV version, meaning a lot of material was cut out. But there are some things I can guess about.

Within just seconds of the opening, we get to meet perhaps the most un-Groucho like character Groucho has ever played: not a memorable name like Wagstaff or Hackenbush, but a plain name, Ed Davis, "General manager in charge of getting blamed for everything" (according to Marx' narration) at the Snowdrift Washing Machine company. While his usual movie characters found him in some high, unworthy position that he obviously BSed his way into, this one finds him, sadly, downtrodden, and unappreciated, but it's made clear, highly competent. We immediately hear him tell his tyrant of a boss, Mr. Schaeffer, that the person who screwed up his latest order is once again, "Your brother-in-law, Herman. Shall I fire him?"

We get a quick glimpse of Davis' wife, Kay (Kathryn Eames), which by the way, was the first name of Groucho's wife in the 1940s, when he co-wrote this play. You'll come to appreciate the irony of that shortly. The one-note boss (who exists mainly to get us to hate him and wish Davis out of that job) shows up long enough to bum a tranquilizer off Ed (who keeps a drawerful of them) and make Ed cancel his bridge game tomorrow night to have dinner with him and his wife. "That's the way I like to run things, like one big relaxed family," he says. Davis gets to present a gold watch to a man named McPherson (Cyril Delevanti, who often played roles like this one). After Walter calls McPherson "McFadden," then says "What's the difference?" we hear McPherson discuss what's next after 25 years in engineering. He and his wife had discussed retirement for years, and their plan to retire to Elizabeth, New Jersey, and finally decided it was "time for Elizabeth." He leaves Davis with a though from "The Rubyiat of Omar Khayyam": What does a wine-getter get, that's as good as the wine he has to sell?

Ed and Kay get to the restaurant for the news that their daughter's boyfriend is engaged. But the in-law-to-be, Richard, doesn't get to say much before Kay figures it out and congratulates Anne. "You're accepted, we don't take any chances," says Ed, surprising Anne who thought her parents would try to talk her out of marrying Richard. They only have a minute or so to celebrate before Walter Schaeffer calls at the restaurant and bawls Ed out for leaving work "in the middle of that afternoon." When Ed says he left at seven, Walter says "Your watch was wrong!" Back in Ed's office, Walter's upset a half-page newspaper ad for Snowdrift is just one page away from a full page ad for their fiercest competitor. Ed tells him Walter's brother-in-law Herman was responsible since Walter put him in charge of advertising a week earlier. Schaeffer denies writing the memo and says "I'm not in the habit of being called a liar!"

Ed's wife is in the office with him and gets to watch all the bawling out. After Walter storms out, Ed shows her the retirement ad he kept in his drawer, inviting retirees to Florida for the swordfishing. "Where did those last 30 years go? I never got a good look at them," he says, pointing to the model washing machine agitator in the corner of his office. The buzzer starts going off and Walter is now bawling out Ed for ordering 38 drinking fountains, demanding he get out of it and even tell a lie if he has to. "For thirty years I've dreamed for a moment like this one," Davis says, before he mockingly gets back onto the intercom and says "I don't want to tell them a lie, I signed for them and you're stuck for them!" Walter then storms back in and fires him.

"My pens, if you don't mind," Davis says, as he gathers his photos and personal effects. "...my wife and kids, if you don't mind...my liquor, which you probably do mind...""You're fired!" Walter bellows a third time, his voice getting higher each time. "And you're monotonous!"retorts Ed. "Fired, after 28 years...hey, I have a gold watch coming!" Ed takes one, dropping it in model washing machine on the way out. Ed and Kay leave arm in arm, while Walter shakes his finger and says nothing, as if he's frustrated he can't fire him even more.

We're used to Groucho machine-gunning disrespectful one-liners at people in authority left and right (or being in authority and then doing it), so it doesn't feel right seeing him bullied with such weak comebacks. No references to Walter's lack of a personality or of a life, and you'd think he'd had a gold mine of insults based on the incompetence of Walter's brother-in-law Herman, who we never get to meet. We're even happier to be rid of Walter at this point than Ed himself.

On the plane trip to Florida, Ed explains to Kay that the whole point of his job was to keep up appearances and a lifestyle. As he's being taken to his new home in Miami by realtor Horace Jasper, he's asked how close it is to the beach. "One short mile as the crow flies," he says. "When does the next crow leave?" Ed asks. The old Groucho isn't all over the place like in his movies; he just seems to peek out here and there. As they walk into the home, Horace tells Ed he's been nominated into the "Forevermore Association," which is another way of saying he wants to sell them cemetery plots. (I suspect this character, selling both retirement homes and burial plots, often to the same people, signifies the underlying theme of this episode: Groucho's real-life fear that retirement=death.) "We just moved in and he wants to bury us already...I'll let you know when we feel ourselves slipping," Ed says. He then throws a disc trying to help his wife across the threshold.

We then see a montage showing us where all of this is going: first, a swordfish dancefully jumping in and out of the ocean; with poor Ed bent over the side of the boat heaving his guts out; then making an attempt at gardening; then on a golf course, stuck in a sand trap, and after finally deciding to forget it and just take a stroke, having to dodge balls from other golfers playing through; then back to his garden, and a sign in the middle of it that says "grow." After all of that, we see him walk down the street, past a Snowdrift Washing Machine showroom.

We then see him having dinner with Kay and complaining about how sick he's become of carrots. Kay tells him carrots are good for him and helps him see in the dark. "If I want to see in the dark, I'll eat what a cat eats: mice," he says.

Ed: What did you do this morning?
Kay: I went down to the beach and watched the waves come in.
Ed: Were there many of them? What did you do then?
Kay: Watched them go back out again.
Ed: Well, you came out even on the day.

Another place where a good forensics investigator would've found Groucho's fingerprints on the script.

Groucho then goes to the post office to mail another letter to his daughter and son-in-law, and we see him bump into an attractive brunette, setting up a small plot diversion that could've been written out of the script and not missed. But it's not just any woman or any plot diversion: the actress seen here is none other than Groucho's real-life current wife, Eden Hartford Marx. She was obviously a lot younger than Groucho, a "trophy" wife, and she turns Ed's head in this scene. A minor plot point, but it was heavily promoted in NBC's publicity materials for this show, that the two would be working together and Eden would even be using her married name in the credits for the first time ever.

During this scene, Ed makes a phone call to his daughter and son-in-law, who is unemployed and still looking for a job. Ed suggests Richard join him in taking over the local Snowdrift franchise, since the owner is himself, moving to Montana.
The two make plans to move to Florida in two weeks and not tell their mother, since it's supposed to be a "surprise." Oddly, Anne says "I won't even tell her I'm going to have a baby!"

This next scene is my favorite, the bridge scene. It's the closest we see to the old Groucho, clearly annoyed with the people around him. This would've been a much better play had he been this way the whole time. Kay announces three guests are arriving to play bridge. Ed, a big bridge player back home, is excited to hear this. But the three players show up--Horace, and a couple of friends of his--and they, oddly enough, ask for weird juices, like papaya juice, sauerkraut juice and prune juice. "Wouldn't anybody be interested in a little scotch?" Ed asks. "Scotch what?" replies Amy, the one female guest. "Scotch juice!" says Ed. (That's Madge Blake as Amy, perhaps you remember her from Batman, Leave It to Beaver or The Real McCoys.) When everyone gets ready to sit down, one man says, "I don't play cards, only horseshoes.""We don't have any horses," Ed shoots back, recalling a pale echo of a line from "Horse Feathers." Ed says he doesn't like to talk when he plays cards, so naturally, the non-playing man chats him up about Fargo, North Dakota.

Kay opens the bidding with a one spade...then silence. It turns out none of these people have the first clues to their souls about how to play bridge and assumed Ed and Kay would teach them. Kay, gamely, just tries to go with it. "The first thing you'll notice is, we've dealt the cards," she says. "Well, we're off to a flying start!" Ed grouses. Then Kay explains, "Each player has 13 cards," and that doesn't go over well at all with the guests. "Thirteen? Why that's unlucky!""Couldn't we make it 12?" She tries to explain about bidding and about the suits, so Horace says "I'll keep the ball rolling and say one spade.""But you can't say one spade, you have to have one spade!" Kay says back. "But I do have one spade!" says Horace, showing her all of his cards. Ed says, "I once had a dog one spayed...never ran away again!"

The attempt to explain signals is completely pointless, especially since the guests have clue about even the basic concept of subtlety. Ed has a few signals of his own: he goes to the door and motions for Kay to throw them out, gesturing wildly.  Then he decides he needs a good Scotch. "Mr. Davis, must you drink?...Have you ever seen the inside of a drunkard?" Amy asks. "No, let's have a look at it," he shoots back. Ed finally announces he just remembered he promised to visit a dying man. "I'm sorry your friend is dying," Amy says. "He's lucky!" Ed snaps. Horace, never missing a chance for a sale, reminds him of the specials they have, but Ed says his wife already plans to cremate him. "She's going to do it herself!"

Then we see the reappearance of the woman we now know as Vivian, or as Mrs. Real-Life Groucho. It turns out she knows Kay and has come to visit her, not knowing she's married to the nice man she bumped into at the post office and spilled ink on him. Vivian is fairly crass about her "business," which is apparently to collect rich old husbands and inherit their fortunes. "I landed three of my four husbands right off the pier here. The hotel lobbies are full of the old goats. All retired, all with money, all in the frame of mind that life owes them someone like me." This is especially awkward and uncomfortable to hear since Eden Hartford Marx likely married Groucho for that exact reason, but she says it here like she means it. She asks to borrow a handbag from Kay so she can coordinate what she's going to wear when she "bumps into him" again tomorrow. Do you need any other equipment?" Kay asks. "Oh, I have all the other equipment I need." Vivian says. Right then, Ed walks in holding his pants, asking Kay if she get the spots out--then runs behind a nearby curtain. "That's the lady from the post office!" he says. Vivian leaves without the no-longer-needed handbag. "What a magnificent creature, why don't we see more of that kind?" Ed asks, and Kay rewards him with a night on the couch.

After a commercial break, we see Ed now running the Snowdrift showroom, and trying to explain to Horace why there's yet another delay on some washing machines he ordered. He and Richard then get a telegram saying the machines will be delayed four more weeks, prompting the two to discuss the idea that Walter Schaeffer found out Ed was Richard's "silent partner" and started messing around with his orders. "Are you going to take this lying down?" Richard asks Ed. "That's a good idea, my back has been giving me trouble lately." The very next scene finds Ed sitting alone in the now-empty showroom as Richard comes to join him. Ed explains he borrowed up to his neck for the venture, and lost the other half of his savings on an orange grove that got infested by a navel insect. He comes home and talks to himself in the mirror about how much, or how little, he'll have after liquidation. "Well Davis, there's one thing they can't take away from you: you finally licked the income tax!"

Ed goes to see Mr. Gilbraltar about a job at a shoe store, since an opening just came up. He goes home to wait for the store owner's call. As he tells Kay and Anne about selling the store, the phone rings, and Kay answers. She tells Mr. Gilbraltar off about firing the clerk she liked so much and says, "I'll never step foot in your store again and neither will Mr. Davis," Ed says "You can say that again!"

Ann invites Ed and Kay to move to New York and live with her and Richard. She asks, "Dad, you're having money problems, aren't you?""Well, I wouldn't say that, we're flat broke is all," he says back. Ed decides to swallow his pride and ask Walter Schaeffer, who is in town with his yacht, about getting his old job back. Kay begs him not to humiliate himself, but before Ed can even clear the door, Richard walks in and announces he's just punched Schaeffer in the nose, for holding up the machine to ruin their business. Thus, another of Ed's dreams evaporates. "I had my Elizabeth and didn't realize it," laments Ed of his now-gone Mad Men lifestyle. "..general manager of a big corporation. Dollar cigars, country clubs, and all in New York, what a city!"

Then Schaeffer suddenly shows up (along with his wife Lil, played by Eleanor Audley), and thanks Richard for punching him in the nose, which apparently gave him some sort of personality transplant. He finally breaks down and admits his brother-in-law Herman is ruining the business. "What you and I built over 28 years, he's ruining overnight!" he tells Ed. "I didn't think it would take him that long!" Ed says back. Schaeffer says he never held up the machines; it turns out no one ever got any, since due to Herman's mismanagement, they never left the factory. Schaeffer says he's ready to plead on his knees if necessary for Ed to come back and this time, be treated well; Ed gets a 15 year contract out of the deal, and presumably another chance at the Snowdrift Washing Machine company to make him miserable.

So, that's how it works out, Schaeffer buys the Davis' Florida home, and sells them the yacht so they can take it back to New York. Then Schaeffer tries to take his wife, Lil, across the threshhold, with the same bad luck Ed had. Ed hands Walter his doctor's business card and says he's a very good man.
Then  Groucho puts on his skipper's cap, stops at the door and says, "Tell him Groucho sent you!" Then the laughtrack plays applause as Ed Davis walks away from his Florida home for the last time.

"Tell him Groucho sent you!" was how he ended You Bet Your Life for years, and became his TV catch phrase. "Friends, be sure to visit your De Soto-Plymouth Dealer tomorrow, and tell him Groucho sent you!" This is a nice treat for Groucho fans. It could be a reference to the fact De Soto-Plymouth were both divisions of Chrysler, which is sponsoring this broadcast as well (De Soto having folded back in 1961). Or it could just be that Groucho was so ready for this show and this role to be over, he couldn't wait for the script to end, or to even get out of the room, before he dropped the Ed Davis character like a bad habit.

Surely, no one could go into this show seriously expecting to see Groucho singing and dancing and jumping all over the place, 1930s style, or machine-gunning insults left and right. Just being a curmudgeon would've helped. In fact, one of the problems was that Groucho was too nice. Another was that his cutting wit was kind of dull by now. We were used to razors; we were now getting what you use to spread butter. "I'm not much of a joiner" is a lame line anyway; it's cringeworthy coming from the man who once said "I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member." We didn't expect those lines every time Groucho orders a beer in a restaurant but we did expect better.

Groucho was 73 when he filmed this show. He went on Social Security just two years earlier; when he was 65 he was still hosting You Bet Your Life. He often told the story of his brother, Harpo, applying for Social Security. The clerk, with no clue to her soul that she was hearing the voice of a man who left millions literally wondering what he sounded like, asked him his name, and he just gave his real name, Arthur Marx. She asked him how many days he worked the previous year, and he said one day. Then she asked how much money he made, and he said "Five thousand dollars." He had filmed a milk commercial. Those were the kinds of things that were going through Groucho's head as he continued to pick up an occasional gig here and there.

Groucho would try as much as he could to stay in the public eye in the last 13 years of his life after this show. Sadly, those weren't always good years. Sure, he had his triumphs, like his "Night with Groucho" at Carnegie Hall, but also had his misery. His old, emaciated self appearing on the network and local news, amid allegations he was being mistreated and physically abused by his companion, Erin Fleming, following his divorce from Eden--was likely not what he had in mind when he chose not to retire.

In some sort of way, Groucho appears to be telling us something: he would be miserable if he ever stopped working, and he would be miserable if he were "fired" and cast aside in retirement. Only it wouldn't be Schaeffer firing him over some order fouled up by his brother-in-law, it would be the public. Perhaps that's why he kept talking so much on The Tonight Show or The Hollywood Squares: he was afraid each appearance might be his last, and wanted to hold the floor as long as he could. He'd stay a week or two, he'd stay a summer through, and he was telling you...he won't be going.

Availability: this and two other episodes of Bob Hope Presents the Chrysler Theatre are on Youtube, and I'm not getting my hopes up to ever see this series on DVD. However, a number of other Marx Brothers rarites can also be found on Youtube: "The Holdout,""Silent Panic" (Harpo's one serious role) and "The Great Jewel Heist" (a slapstick comedy starring the three brothers the last time they'd work on camera together), all episodes of General Electric Theater.

Next time on this channel: The Bullwinkle Show.

The Moose Who Came in From the Cold

Now it can be told: the true story, of the conspiracy to kill moose and squirrel. 

The Bullwinkle Show, "Moosylvania Parts 3 & 4"
OB: January 18, 1964, 12:30 p.m. EST, NBC
I was four days old when this episode first aired.

When I was sitting in my local multiplex, the Premiere 16 in Gadsden, Alabama, waiting for "Mr. Peabody and Sherman" to start, I watched a number of previews to upcoming movies (all computer animated just like this one). Aside from the fact that they were nearly all either sequels or (again, just like this one) a remake of an earlier idea, one other thing jumped right out at me: why can only celebrities supply animated voices anymore? "Mr. Peabody and Sherman" included voices like Ty Burrell and Stephen Colbert--don't get me wrong, men whose live-action work I enjoy a lot. But do they all have to be, say, Tom Hanks and Tim Allen? What about the Paul Frees', the Daws Butlers and the Don Messicks?  The June Forays and the Bea Benederets? the Mel Blancs? What about the character actors like the Hans Conreids, the Alan Reeds or the Allan Melvins and Howard Morrises? Are John Ratzenberger and the cast of The Simpsons as close as we'll ever get anymore?

I always brace myself whenever a beloved childhood favorite of mine is remade for the big screen. I know they can't all be as good as "The Fugitive," and on the other hand, surely won't be the name-only ripoff that the "Mission: Impossible" movies turned out to be. But I must say, for a modern-era movie, I liked what they did with "Mr. Peabody and Sherman." They expounded on their backstories, and instead of their relationship from a dog and his pet boy, they emphasized their original relationship of dog and adopted human son, for emotional resonance. Also, there's a lot of poop and butt-sniffing jokes that you know Jay Ward would've used had it not been for the censors.

Sherman's character was fleshed out surprisingly well (and he gets a romantic interest!) and the genius dog Mr. Peabody stayed faithfully in character from his 55 year ago TV days, really bad puns and all. They kept in everything, from their penthouse home to the little cleaning man at the end. Of course, I always knew the animation couldn't possibly be worse than the original (and it's in 3D!), and of course, I knew I'd never be able to experience Jay Ward's subversive, near-anarchic satire...but then again, will we ever again? (Mr. Peabody actually bites someone at one point...but it's the movie itself that doesn't have the overall bite of the original show.)

The last few times Hollywood took a crack at Jay Ward Studios, the results were mixed--1991's "Boris and Natasha," 1999's "Dudley Do-Right" and 2000's "The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle" were big-budgeted disasters (even with Robert De Niro giving a committed performance as "Fearless Leader" in R&B), while "George of the Jungle" did surprisingly well. So it was nice to see "Mr. Peabody and Sherman" atop the box office.

That makes it even more successful than the characters' original 1960s parent show.

Rocky: Bullwinkle, do you know what an A-Bomb is?
Bullwinkle: Sure, a bomb is what some people call our show.
Rocky: I don't think that's very funny.
Bullwinkle: Neither do they, apparently.

...But that doesn't mean it wasn't loved or didn't have a following. In fact, the whole genius of Rocky and His Friends (as it was known on ABC) and The Bullwinkle Show (its NBC title) was that the most subversive characters weren't necessary Pottsylvania's Slavic-accented Boris and Natasha...the biggest subversives were the writers, producers and creators, the ones who brought our cold-war hero moose and squirrel to life. Their satire didn't use needles, they used spiked clubs, on subjects ranging from advertising to Disney princesses to classic literature to U.S./Soviet tensions. And they did it with the worst puns imaginable. All of that added to the show's charm.

Bullwinkle (to the head of a shipping line): For someone who's supposed to be a really big magnate, you sure don't pick up things very fast!

The writers made it clear: they were very well-read on the classics of world literature...but that was simply more stuff to tear apart with goofy cartoons and silly voices. That's how a Peabody & Sherman adventure about Sir Francis Bacon's allegations that he was getting ripped off by William Shakespeare, for instance, would include the line "Bacon, you'll fry for this!" It's also how the show's fifth and final season, the one in which I was born, came to include a plot about Bullwinkle's discovery of a much-sought-after toy boat encrusted with jewels, known as...wait for it..."The Ruby Yacht of Omar Khayyam." (That could be both the worst, and greatest, pun in television history.)

When I was watching the show as a child, it was in full reruns. Its first run ended in 1964, at which point ABC picked up the reruns for Sunday mornings, where it stayed until 1973 and syndication. During that time, I heard works of classic poets for the first time, usually read in Bullwinkle's goofy voice and illustrated with sight gags. I saw the same fairy tales retold to me time and again by parents, grandparents, and teachers, retold in a perverse and hilarious way (via "Fractured Fairy Tales" and "Aesop and Son") that I knew even then, were just wrong. (Obviously I couldn't get enough of them.) And to add to the wrongness of it all...I didn't always get to see the show because of church. So if I was watching it at all, I had some nagging guilt I might go to hell for missing God's Word to hear Mr. Know-It-All lecture us on "How to get into the movies, without worrying about being caught by an usher."

With animation that was just barely of enough quality to be watchable and hold children's attention, and humor that went right over their heads and landed bullseye on their parents, our fearless heroes revolutionized and pioneered the sophisticated satire that wouldn't become commonplace on TV until the debut of The Simpsons (whose creator, Matt Groening, was inspired to get into animation by Rocky and Bullwinkle themselves and often pays tribute to them on his own show). It's likely more than one baby boomer thought, "It was the first time that I can recall my parents watching a cartoon show over my shoulder and laughing in places I couldn't comprehend." But the person who actually said that was none other than movie mogul Steven Spielberg.

The creators of Rocky, Bullwinkle and their post-McCarthy, cold-war influenced universe, were simply looking for a road less traveled in television animation. They didn't want adventure or a sitcom; they didn't want necessarily the cuteness of Disney or the brashness of Warner Brothers (though both are in the mix, make no mistake about that), and certainly not the by-the-numbers assembly line of Hanna-Barbera. They followed the leads of era comedians like Stan Freberg and Bob Newhart (most of the voice people worked extensively with Freberg, in fact), and went with droll satire.

And they went with dialogue unique to that one and only series...because no other series in history could possibly get away with this dialogue, again from the show's 1963-64 season, in which they find Natasha, dressed as a school cheerleader, weeping on the campus of ...wait for it...Wossamotta U:

Rocky: Hold it, Bullwinkle! That sounds like a lady in distress!
Bullwinkle: So?
Rocky: Gee, didn't you ever read the Hero's Handbook?
Bullwinkle: I can never get past the picture of General MacArthur on the cover.
Rocky: Well, chapter two says we should always help ladies in distress.
Bullwinkle: Hi, there, lady! Are you in distress?
Natasha: This dress, that dress, who cares? I'm distraught!
Bullwinkle: Do we help ladies in distraught?

That dialogue comes from the show's last legendary storyline, 1964's plot about Rocky and Bullwinkle playing football at Wossamotta U. Written for Jay Ward's love of college football, the story assails the whole institution--Wossamotta U continues to fall apart with outdated books and equipment even as its football team becomes a well-financed powerhouse. And a jingoist Southern colonel shows up out of nowhere to object to the term "civil war" being used, followed by any use of the word "civil"...perhaps a shot at NBC's rocky relationship with some of its southern affiliates.

If the writers and producers read up on classics of literature for much of the show's inspiration, they also read Time and Newsweek. Boris and Natasha, and their boss, Fearless Leader, hail from the mythical eastern European (I guess) country of Pottsylvania, suggesting they're stand-ins for the Soviet-bloc leaders of the Cold War. Rocky and Bullwinkle stood for the good guys--Rocky, perhaps, even for our military--but the whole attitude behind the stories, and the fact that things worked out due to a really dumb idea from Bullwinkle ("And once again, Bullwinkle's stupidity has saved the day, for at that moment..." is a line that came from the narrator more than once)--suggests jingoism wasn't a destination for the writers, but perhaps a target, or even something to run over on the way where they were going. It's telling (aside from their friendship being described in such sweet, poignant terms) that it's always Rocky who kicks butt and protects Bullwinkle from everything...but considers Bullwinkle his hero. Whenever Bullwinkle says something dim-witted that inspires Rocky to day-saving action ("Bullwinkle, that's it! Bubblegum is the answer!"), Rocky does his deed and gives Bullwinkle all the credit.

Bullwinkle: Humble, that's me... Mr. Modesty. When it comes to humility, I'm the greatest!

Although the show appeared in different formats over the years--there's even a syndicated version that only runs 15 minutes per show, from the series' ABC years--each show typically begins and ends with the latest chapters in a Rocky and Bullwinkle storyline. Showing a clear influence from movie serials and old time radio, they're done in chapters with cliffhanger endings. Borrowing an idea from radio's Adventures of Sam Spade, the announcer usually gives "our next exciting episode" a double title, only this time in really bad pun form: "A Stitch in Time, or Suture Self" for example. (Other examples: "The Vanishing American or No Moose Is Good Moose,""Under Bullwinkle’s Bowler or The Wide, Open Spaces," and "Too Much Too Moon or What Makes Lunatick?")

In between those chapters are self-contained segments: Rocky and Bullwinkle in "Poetry Corner" or "Mr. Know-It-All," the latter with our great, dumb moose trying to give us a disastrous lecture about how to do or not to do something; "Peabody's Improbable History," or our favorite doofus Canadian Mountie, "Dudley Do-Right of the Mounties," co-starring Dudley's horse, the inspector, Snidely Whiplash, and love interest Nell); and either "Fractured Fairy Tales" or "Aesop and Son," which re-tell beloved tales of our childhood in perverse, wonderfully cynical ways.

Little Jack Horner (sticking in his thumb and pulling out a plum): What foods these morsels be!

The roots of all of this subversity come from three men, and their contributions have often been debated. But make no mistake, Jay Ward (the driving visionary behind this enterprise), Alex Anderson (the man who created so many of these characters, including our favorite moose and squirrel) and Bill Scott (the man who gave a moose a voice, and something to say with it) are the three fathers of these children who kept so many of us glued to their sets with such limited animation. Keith Scott (no apparent relation to Bill, though Keith did supply Bullwinkle's voice in the 2000 movie) did a yeoman's job unearthing the show's behind-the-scenes history with his book, "The Moose That Roared: The Story of Jay Ward, Bill Scott, a Flying Squirrel and a Talking Moose," and that book is the lead reference source for this post.

J. Troplong Ward originally intended to go into his father's real estate business, and was actually standing in the front doorway of that Berkeley, California office when he was the victim of a freak accident: a truck crashed into that very office, pinning him against a far wall. While he was recuperating he heard from his old friend, Alex Anderson, who wanted his help with a novel idea: cartoons especially for television. This was the 1947, and that hadn't been done yet. Anderson got his start working for his uncle--who just happened to be Paul Terry of Terrytoons studios, the firm that gave the world Mighty Mouse and Heckle and Jeckle. So, the two got together--Anderson creating the characters--and came up with the first-ever TV cartoon, the "limited animation" classic Crusader Rabbit.

Those cartoons can be jarring to watch now, with animation so limited that often the scenes have characters that don't move, just basically one long shot of a stationary cartoon. But, as would be the case with so many Jay Ward productions, the stories more than made up for it: the rabbit, and his friendly sidekick Rags the Tiger, went far and wide to bring justice and right wrongs. If you came for movement, you'd be disappointed, but otherwise, the cartoons are still somewhat engaging to watch. Crusader was one of three characters featured in a "comic strips for TV format," with the other two being rejected. And one of those other two just happened to be the earliest incarnation of none other than Dudley Do-Right.

Crusader Rabbit premiered in first run syndication in 1950, under the sponsorship of Carnation milk and pet food. After two seasons, however, and some production problems, the show wasn't renewed. In fact, Ward and Anderson would eventually lose control not only of the films, but the characters themselves. They did get paid off, however, and did get to keep all undeveloped properties from their former production company. One of those unsold projects, created in 1950 as a possible follow-up for Cruasder Rabbit, was "The Frostbite Falls Revue." All of the characters were animals--including a fox and a bear--and there were a moose and a squirrel in the mix. Bullwinkle and Rocky were the ones in this mix, and except for Rocky's mission to save the day, they were a little different than they would be when we'd first meet them on the air.

Bullwinkle was named for Clarence Bullwinkel, a Ford dealer whose car lot was just down the street from Ward's studios. Anderson came up with the character after a bizarre dream about a talking moose who did card tricks and came with him to a party. During the long hiatus after Rabbit--and the sight of a new production company producing new, now color Rabbit cartoons, without them--Ward and Anderson began developing the format of what would become Rocky and His Friends. And that's what brought Bill Scott under the Frostbite Falls umbrella.

A jack of all cartoon trades who bounced from studio to studio, Scott was a native of New Jersey and Pennsylvania. But a bout with TB brought him to Colorado as a teenager. In World War II, the cinema-minded Scott was drafted into the army and found himself reporting to none other than Ronald Reagan, before being assigned to a film crew. That was enough to get him hired at Warner Brothers' animation unit, where he worked for a year and even worked on Daffy Duck, before he wasn't renewed. A stint at Paramount ended with his being fired, which simply freed him up to work for UPA, a burgeoning, creative studio that gave him the opportunity to work with Mr. Magoo, even writing stories for the shorts. But that only lasted a short time before Scott began a financially rewarding--but soul-crushing--stint making educational, corporate training and propaganda films. His disillusion after being exposed to the ugliness--and as he put it, the flat-out dishonesty--of executive America led him to walk away from a profitable enterprise. And that attitude flavored much of his later work.

Scott worked at the short-lived Gerald McBoing-Boing Show, again for UPA, before his brief time at the animation studios of the (reportedly rather difficult) Shamus Culhane united him with Jay Ward for the first time. After they left, Ward lured him over to work on his new ideas in 1957, the idea of reviving two characters from "The Frostbite Falls Review," Rocky and Bullwinkle, in their own show. During a rather harrowing whirlwind of production activity, Ward set up studios in Mexico, purportedly to save money but ironically, it turned out to be costly and messy. (The behind-the-scenes, rather shady story of how it all worked with the sponsor's approval, would have been a worthy Mad Men episode, in fact.) The premiere of what would be Rocky and His Friends was actually delayed twice due to massive production problems, but the show's network, ABC, and its primary sponsor, General Mills, stuck by the show. Ultimately it became a big daytime hit for ABC, appearing one afternoon a week after American Bandstand and even became the number one daytime show.

Bill Scott, who spent more time writing than voicing, was a superb voice artist. He voiced Bullwinkle and would go on to voice Mr. Peabody (modeled after Clifton Webb's "Mr. Belvedere" character from the movies) and Dudley Do-Right. June Foray, quite possibly the greatest female voice artist of all time, is our pal Rocky, as well as Dudley's love Nell Fenwick, and so many of the great fussy old broads, laughing witches and Bronx princesses that made up the "Fractured Fairy Tales." Paul Frees added his talents, as did an uncredited Daws Butler, who was still working for Hanna-Barbera at the time. Character actor Hans Conreid was Snidely Whiplash and a few other characters, which character actors Edward Everett Horton narrated the "Fractured Fairy Tales" and Charles Ruggles played the first title role in "Aesop & Son."

The production problems worked themselves out over the course of the season, with many of the "Fractured Fairy Tale" segments being produced in Hollywood by Ward himself. The show's first adventure did something no other cartoon did at the time: mirrored America's collective anxiety over the "space race" with the Soviet Union. Bullwinkle's family recipe for mooseberry pie causes an explosion that puts his and Rocky's stove on the moon, and they have to build a rocket ship to get it. Of course, the recipe itself actually makes an advanced rocket fuel formula, which brings out the evil Boris and Natasha, clearly on the "wrong side" of the Cold War.

During the first two seasons, we saw our heroes weather the trials and tribulations of the counterfeit boxtop caper (and the censorship-minded attitudes of General Mills and its ad agency--it wasn't really the box tops that bothered them as much as a gag about a "goof" from the "Great Spirit" that sends Rocky, Bullwinkle, Boris and Natasha falling off a mountain). And we saw them deal with the season one "moon men" again as Bullwinkle inherits a mine full of the anti-gravity material "Upsidasium." At one point the moon men start damaging TV antennas, leaving Americans cluelessly staring at nothing, and one man even watching the window of a front-loading washing machine ("Love these sea stories!"). Leave it to Ward and company to make sure they made fun of everyone, even their own viewers.

That "make fun of anyone" approach was the source of much of the censorship friction; Ward and company were often called on the carpet for over-the-top foreign accents, for example. Patriotic General Mills executives also objected to Peabody and Sherman segments that ridiculed our founding fathers; they managed to get in digs at Ben Franklin (and his kite experiment), Paul Revere and the Battle of Bunker Hill (where the "Don't fire until you see the whites of their eyes!" order is confounded when the Tories show up all wearing sunglasses). But then, the Big G finally pulled the plug on one script in which Mr. Peabody helps Francis Scott Key write the "Star Spangled Banner" during the Battle of Fort McHenry. (I know that one had to be hilarious, and I probably seem like a "bad American" for saying that.)

Had Rocky and Bullwinkle been living beings instead of brush-and-ink creations, they likely would've endured a lot of friction that could've split them up like Abbott & Costello or Martin & Lewis. But the duo managed to remain caring friends, not only through all the nightmarish production difficulties of season one, but the super-heavy workload of season two. And then there's a tiny matter of billing: Bullwinkle became the breakout star, and the new episodes introduced on a new network in season three would find a tiny little change in billing: now it was the sweet but daffy moose who would be center stage--literally, in a new set of opening credits that show him dancing in a spotlight and tipping a hat.

The show was in prime time on NBC beginning in 1961; perhaps that new opening (which I remember so much from my childhood) was meant to evoke the many variety shows on network TV at the time. It could even be a gentle knock at the "Overture! Dim the lights!" opening to The Bugs Bunny Show, itself premiering in prime time a season earlier. There was also a Bullwinkle puppet, filmed live-action, who hosted each show. If the cartoon Bullwinkle was a sweet simpleton, the puppet Bullwinkle was a smartass, taking digs at the network and even the show that came on right afterwards. Once he declared it was time to go because "Mr. Disney has just arrived in the studio, and he's holding a baseball bat." Another time he pretended to be unfamiliar with Walt Disney's name, declaring "He'll never get anywhere with a handle like that one!" In one of the earliest shows, he told children in the audience to remove the channel knobs from their TV sets, so they can "be with us again next week, and the next week, and the next week..." Irate mail that flooded NBC resulted in Bullwinkle coming back the following week, telling everyone to glue the knobs back on.

The NBC prime time incarnation opened to rave reviews and disappointing ratings; our beloved moose and squirrel had to compete with a beloved collie, Lassie on CBS (which in turn, had another beloved animal as a lead-in, Mister Ed the talking horse). Another difference: "Aesop and Son" replacing "Fractured Fairy Tales," and the premiere of Alex Anderson's one other great creation, Dudley Do-Right. (Anderson worked as a consultant as the show was being developed in the late 1950s, but wasn't further involved in the show. It was after Ward's death, and his not being mentioned in an entire documentary, that Anderson went to court to finally get his rightful credit as the creator of Rocky, Bullwinkle and Dudley.)

Plus, we found out, as sweet and cheerful as they appeared, Bullwinkle and Rocky (and even Dudley Do-Right) made lots of trouble. First, there were lawyer's letters swapped over the caper about the "Kirwood Derby," the hat that made dumb people suddenly very smart when they wore it. It was a play on the name of announcer Durward Kirby, who, despite being the sidekick of comedian Garry Moore and co-host of Candid Camera, didn't find much humor in the joke. (Or did he? I suspect Kirby had the letters sent just to get in on the joke, but that's just my humble opinion. In any event, the threat of a lawsuit didn't get anywhere; Ward even begged Kirby's attorneys for one, for publicity's sake.)

NBC objected to a show that depicted Rocky and Bullwinkle being possible victims of cannibals, despite the fact that eating a moose and squirrel is, by definition, not cannibalism. And when  Dudley Do-Right short featured a bear named Stokey who "went bad" and set forest fires instead of preventing them, the U.S Forest Service was so hot they actually threatened criminal action, saying Smokey was "protected by Congress.""Stokey's" adventure, consequently, was buried for years. But now, you can see it again without any irate forest rangers trying to put you in jail for it.

While the shows often barely made their deadlines during the earliest years, in later years they were produced well ahead of schedule. So much so, in fact, that the soundtracks to the 1963-64 season were already recorded at the end of 1962, with the animation taking up 1963.

When Bullwinkle returned for the 1962-63 season, it was out of prime time again, now on late Sunday afternoons. The following season it would be moved to Saturday mornings. That season, with quality a bit more inconsistent than earlier seasons, still yielded some classic adventures: "The Bumbling Brothers Circus," for instance, as well as the aforementioned "Ruby Yacht" and "Wossamatta U" stories. There was also an epic sci-fi tale, "The Pottsylvania Creeper," modeled after the movie "The Blob" and Roger Corman's cult favorite, "Little Shop of Horrors." And then, there was one whose roots go back to one of the scariest moments of American history...and how Jay Ward and company forever became wrapped up in it.

Ward, always coming up with wacky promotional ideas (like the Hollywood Boulevard street dance to celebrate the unveiling of the Rocky and Bullwinkle statue...for that matter, the statue itself), decided he wanted to buy an island and name it Moosylvania. So he found one in north Minnesota, not far from the Canadian border, and leased it, then decided to petition for statehood for it. So the otherwise shy Ward put on an funny hat and Napoleon outfit, with his publicist, Howard Brandy, dressed in a Dudley Do-Right Mountie outfit, and NBC publicist Pat Humphrey (daughter in law of Senator Hubert Humphrey, himself from Minnesota), and they took off for a 22 city tour. They traveled in a tricked-up Ford Econoline van that played calliope music over a loudspeaker, as the trio went town to town, appearing in parades and news conferences. Ward often spoke of Moosylvania being our 52nd state, since he heard "Mississippi will be our 51st any day now." Then they made one last, eventful stop: the White House.

I'm not sure what they thought would happen when they went to the gate and demanded to see President Kennedy so they could hand over a 30,000 signature petition for Moosylvanian statehood, or when they insisted after a Secret Service agent demanded they leave (Secret Service agents notoriously don't have a sense of humor on the job...I found that out years ago), or when they simply took their colorful Econoline to another gate...but they probably weren't ready for an agent to unsnap the holster holding the gun. So they left the White House, taking the photos they'd just taken to the local AP office...where they were told, a situation we now know historically as the Cuban Missile Crisis was just unfolding, and President Kennedy was getting ready to make a speech.

So, a year and three months later, in January 1964, we finally got to see the movement for Moosylvanian statehood play out on our televisions, at least the ones whose antennas hadn't been eaten by the metal-munching moon mice. On January 11, parts one and two of the "Moosylvania" storyline had a bored Boris impressing Natasha with a sudden jolt of brilliance: a essay contest called "I like being evil in 25 words or less..." It becomes a national mania: two orbiting astronauts conspire to keep it a secret that the world is really flat, and a gun-wielding robber tells a jeweler it's nothing personal, he just wants to win the contest. The jeweler is understanding, since he's been selling fake jewelry all week with the "real stuff" at home with his wife. But his wife is writing him a letter, saying by the time he reads it, "I will be gone with the swag and maybe first prize in the contest."

But Bullwinkle is the winner: he wrongly thinks he's writing about weevils and says he has the exclusive rights to them in Moosylvania. Boris conspires to get those "exclusive evil distribution rights" as we hear about Moosylvania: no population or industry; Bullwinkle is governor, superintendent, owner and janitor of the island, which has been in his family for generations. And it got rooked out of being a state as far back as the American Revolution, when it almost became the 14th state (until Betsy Ross threatened to charge George Washington extra for adding a star to the flag). We're then told to tune in to our next episode, "Resign Your Fate to a 52nd State, or Moosylvania Mania!"

So, on January 18, 1964, as that next episode begins, Rocky and Bullwinkle are on a train to Washington to petition for statehood. "That way it can set an example for Texas!" says Governor Bullwinkle, but the unlikely tones of narrator Bill Conrad (who sounds nothing like radio's Matt Dillon or television's Cannon or the Fat Man here) tell us they're actually headed to Butte, Montana. It's been disguised as Washington, complete with thin, phony facades, by Boris and Natasha. Of course, since Boris and Natasha are evil, naturally Frankenstein's statue is atop what's supposed to be the capital dome. The denizens of what's presented to us as the "small town" of Butte, Montana, have been asked to play along. "Someone asked me to wear this Supreme Court robe," says a man at the feed store, getting the reply, "I know, Selwyn...I used to want to hit you in the mouth, now I just want to impeach you!" Another old man is upset because his TV antenna is now bent to where Channel 4 gets nothing but presidential press conferences. B&N apparently told a farmer's wife she's now the new curator of the Smithsonian.

Rocky: Doesn't it kind of give you a special feeling?
Bullwinkle: Yes it does, Rock, almost like the time I first saw Butte, Montana.

They pull into the train station, whose sign up top reads "Washington, Dee See." Boris, posing as a cabbie, offers our heroes a ride, leading to this all-time classic exchange of dialogue:

Rocky: That voice, where have I heard that voice before?
Bullwinkle: In about 320 other episodes. I don't know who it is, either!

The "cabbie" drops off our heroes at a building, where he proclaims, in sing-song fashion, "Thees is where all mooses and squirrels file for statehood!" But "little do our heroes know" that "at that very moment," Natasha is swinging an ax to cut a rope that causes the capitol facade to start to fall on our heroes. Rocky yells at Bullwinkle to run for it. "Rocky, you mean our nation's capitol isn't really made of one quarter inch beaver wood with plastic clips?" Bullwinkle asks.

Rocky: Run, Bullwinkle!
Bullwinkle: I thought you only ran in Washington every fourth year!

...and this is where the segment ends, as  the narrator tells us to tune in for the next episode, "Bad Day at Flat Rocky, or a Record in Bullwinkle's Blot."

One thing about the show and its segments: they've been spliced apart and reassembled numerous times for Saturday and Sunday morning reruns and for syndication, almost like someone shuffled two or three decks of cards together then lost a few. So Keith Scott, and the DVD company that remastered the show, again did an excellent job of TV archaeology in reassembling most of them, even the "Hey Rocky! Watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat!" segments. That being said, even though the Rocky and Bullwinkle adventure is new for this date, as is the Mr. Know-It-All segment, the "Fractured Fairy Tales" and "Peabody's Improbable Adventure" segments are actually rerun from previous years.

This "Fractured Fairy Tale" has Edward Everett Horton retelling "Beauty and the Beast." In this version (which the network very much didn't like), the Beast can't get a pretty girl to kiss him and make him a prince again. "I'm really a prince, but I'm all fudged up like this because of witchcraft," he reminds us. We see him get doors slammed on his nose and foot, having a kissing booth close in his face, gets a wedding cake thrown at him when he waits in line to kiss the bride at a wedding. "I'm just a no-good beastnik," the seemingly hopeless beast declares, before a woman comes by who warms up to him, and kisses him. "Better try again, baby, that one didn't take," says the unchanged beast, so she kisses him again; nothing. "Well the script says you turn back into a prince. You really are a prince, aren't you?" inquires our narrator, Horton. "Listen bud, you get kissed your way, I'll get kissed my way!" he shouts back. So the woman clubs him. End of story, for our ugly, serial sexual harrasser.

"Fractured Fairy Tales" was one of my favorite parts of the show. In his book, Keith Scott quoted people who went as far as to suggest many of them were high-quality enough to have been released as theatrical shorts...and I agree. One legendary fracture from season one retold a perverse "Sleeping Beauty"--in this one, Prince Charming, who bears an uncanny resemblance to Walt Disney, decides that awake, she's just another princess, but asleep, she's a gold mine. So he lets her sleep and charges admission to "Sleeping Beautyland." In a retelling of "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs," it's all about a wicked witch with dire self esteem issues, and a group of dwarfs who keep exploiting that fact to sell her stuff. Bill Scott's bad experiences in big business and advertising likely added to the tone of some of these tales.


The "Mr. Know-It-All" segment, as I said earlier, is original to this episode, and is a random, Monty Python story from out of nowhere...and perhaps not my favorite. While I do love the title ("How to Remove a Mustache Without Getting Any Lip"), it's as if the writers came up with that and didn't know what to do next. First, Bullwinkle has to buy a mustache since he doesn't have one. "Which would you like," asks the clerk at the mustache store, "the thousand dollar type" (genuine mink) "or the 999 dollar type (wash 'n' wear Dacron)?" "I'd like something in the middle, say a buck and a half?" our hero says back. They only sell expensive mustaches, so Bullwinkle goes to Bank of Podunk and uses a frowning Rocky as collateral for a $1000 loan. But he spills ink all over robber, and then, well-meaning, says "Here, let me hold your gun." Then the cops show up. "But your highness, this is all a mistake!" he implores the judge as he gets 99 years. Back on stage, Rocky suddenly notice Bullwinkle has a mustache, so Bullwinkle snatches a can of "mustache remover" and pours it on himself. But Rocky says "that's vanishing cream!""Now, he tells me," Bullwinkle's floating mustache seems to say.

Then Bullwinkle says "Hey Rocky, watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat!" and proceeds to pull out a growling bear. These segments, believe it or not, were actually meant as timefillers during the first season on ABC, when the network began demanding more content as the lab was too slow in getting completed product back from Mexico.

"Peabody's Improbable History" is a rerun from the first season...and the animation looks shockingly cheap, as if the whole thing was drawn with sidewalk chalk. (Again, this is during the problem, shakedown period with Gamma Productions in Mexico.) It's a jaw-dropping sight to behold considering the modern day Sherman and Peabody we just saw computer animated on modern movie screens, in some cases even in 3D.

"This is the WABAC machine, and this is my boy, Sherman. Speak, Sherman."
"Hello."
"Good boy."

That's Bill Scott we hear as Peabody (and we'd hear as many of Ward's other starring characters, like Dudley, George of the Jungle, etc.), and Walter Tetley as Peabody. He made a career, well into adulthood, out of sounding like a little boy, and did so all throughout the golden days of radio. He was Junior, Gildy's nephew, for years on The Great Gildersleeve.

The WABAC takes us to 1810 Paris, back to Napoleon, who's in a crisis: "The imperial braces" are gone, namely his suspenders. Why are they important? Because they hold his pants up. "I cannot order the troops forward, I cannot even salute! As for making a speech, impossible!" the French leader laments.

It turns out they were swiped by Pierre La Como (a play on fellow NBC personality, singer and variety show host Perry Como), his personal assistant, who ran off to a pirate ship with the royal braces in hand.

Peabody throws a rope to the ship so he and Sherman can climb aboard (similar to a stunt in the 2014 movie, in fact...which actually has a segment set in the French Revolution). They see Pierre and his conspirators discussing how the lack of suspenders make Napoleon helpless; "France will fall...like Napoleon's pants!" they laugh. Sherman and Peabody grab the suspenders and run, fighting off pirates in the process. Sherman's even in a swordfight at one point.

When the two return with the suspenders, they get a parade...but not the admiration of the French people, who beg him not to return the suspenders. "Today has been the first day in 33 years there has been peace and quiet in France,""This is the first day the cannons have been silenced in years, no boom boom boom!" they tell him. A little girl says it's the first time in 33 years she's seen her daddy...who is Napoleon.

"There didn't seem to be any reason to return the suspenders to Napoleon...so we didn't. There they are," Peabody says as he points to the framed royal braces. It seems all the times we see Napoleon with his hand in his coat, he's really holding up his imperial pants. This is one of the few Peabody adventures that doesn't end with a terrible pun, but there's another one just a few episodes away that has two.

Bill Conrad then sets the scene for the final Rocky and Bullwinkle installment of "Moosylvania." (His voice evolved over the years and got progressively higher and goofier. Conrad was quite a skilled voice man; this same season, a different sounding Conrad can be heard dramatically narrating the first season of The Fugitive.)

"In our last spleen-shaking episode..." Conrad begins as he wraps up the previous installment, explaining why a facade that looks like the U.S. Capitol building is about to fall on Rocky and Bullwinkle. But fortunately, they make it past the falling facade. This leaves Boris and Natasha, simply devastated.

Natasha: Where did we fail?
Boris: And I always try so hard to do the wrong thing.

Rocky laments that that they can't apply for statehood in Butte, Montana anyway, "or was it?" as the narrator inquires. That's because the Butte, Montana lumber company facade that was behind the capitol facade, falls too, revealing it was a facade.

Rocky: What do you say to that, Bullwinkle?
Bullwinkle: What else? Timber!

Turns out Washington DC had been disguised as Butte, Montana by a lobby for the Montana Mushmelon Trust. "We made Washingon D.C. look like Montana and you're still voting against the mushmelon bill?" asks the lobbyist. The politician responds, "Son, I even voted against Medicare, and they wrapped 54 million Band-Aids on the Washington Monument!" (Medicare wouldn't be passed until 1965, but the word was already common as Ronald Reagan and others spoke out against the idea.)

So, we found out there were subversives in the capitol, or at least there were this time, for Boris is pretending to be a clerk, in a special window devoted to Moosylvania. He says they better hurry as they're about to close in honor of Aaron Burr. "Hey, isn't he the one who shot Alexander Hamilton?" he's asked. "That's why the window is closing, I've got to warn him to get out of town!" Boris then assures Natasha he's pulling it off just fine.

Rocky tells Bullwinkle to give him the petition, so Bullwinkle tells Rocky to "hold this first" and hands Boris the paper; Boris says "Now Moosylvania will never have statehood!""Bullwinkle, we gave them our petition and they were fake!" Bullwinkle says don't worry, they still have that "gift" from the New Mexico Dynamite and TNT Trust. It turns out Bullwinkle handed over the wrong paper, "Once again, Bullwinkle's incredible stupidity had saved the day, for at that very moment, a blinding flash covered the metropolitan Washington, D.C. area and parts of Alcove, Nevada as well," sending Boris and Natasha orbiting the earth every seven minutes, because it was an explosive issue.

As they drop off the petition at the real statehood petition filing place, Bullwinkle wonders if they have a chance. As he looks hopefully at the audience, Rocky says, "That all depends on whether good Americans get behind it, Bullwinkle!" And so, they've done it, not an irate Secret Service agent in sight. Or have they?
"But will Rocky and Bullwinkle be joined in support by people everywhere? Or will the same sinister forces that defeated the Snooky Lanson presidential boom be at work again? Perhaps we'll find out more in further adventures of Rocky Squirrel and Bullwinkle J. Moose!" And so it ends, with a random name-dropping of a regular singer from Your Hit Parade.

Just a few weeks later, NBC would air its last ever first run Bullwinkle Show. In that last adventure, once again set in Moosylvania, Rocky and Bullwinkle find themselves on the island spending their vacation, when it begins to sink under the weight of emergency supplies sent because word got out Rocky and Bullwinkle were stuck there. The show ends with the narrator saying, "It is, the end! But watch for another episode soon, of Rocky and Bullwinkle!"
Bullwinkle: It may be a little hard to find, but don't give up.
Rocky: We're not!


Availability: the entire series is on DVD and Hulu, minus Fred Steiner's 1961-era theme song and Bullwinkle's dancing open.

Next time on this channel: The Garry Moore Show.