Monday, March 13, 2006

Peter Tomarken Meets Sylvester

Here's a fuzzy video clip of Peter Tomarken from Press Your Luck. What happened on this episode was that a wrong answer was given to a question about Warner Brothers cartoon characters. The producers realized the mistake during the taping and since the game had run short and they had time to fill, they arranged for a phone call from Mel Blanc to correct the record. Let's go to the videotape...

• Posted at 8:38 PM · LINK

Update

More details are emerging about the plane crash this morning that claimed the lives of Press Your Luck host Peter Tomarken and his wife. The plane was on a mission for Angel Flight West, a non-profit organization which provides free air transportation for people with medical needs. The Tomarkens were on their way to San Diego to pick up a man who needed to get to UCLA Medical Center.

This article in USA Today says that Tomarken was piloting the plane. Some of the other news stories (like this one) have muddy language that suggests that a third person, whose body has not yet been found, was the pilot. In any case, the plane was registered to Tomarken and he and his wife were on board.

So not only did the Tomarkens die, they appear to have died while performing a volunteer act of charity. Which of course just makes a sad event even sadder.

• Posted at 8:30 PM · LINK

Recommended Reading

Helen Thomas says that the press has been way too timid in dealing with the Bush administration. She's right.

• Posted at 7:23 PM · LINK

Peter Tomarken, R.I.P.

Game show host Peter Tomarken and his wife Kathleen were killed this morning when a small airplane crashed just off the Pacific Coast, apparently due to engine trouble. Here's an article with the few other details that are currently available. Mr. Tomarken was 63 years old.

He had a background in magazines (he was an editor at Women's Wear Daily and Business Week, among others) which led him into advertising. Soon, he went from producing commercials to appearing in them and that led him into the world of game show hosting. He was best known from Press Your Luck, a popular CBS game show from 1983 to 1986 which still reruns on GSN. He also presided over Hit Man, Bargain Hunters, Wipeout and several other quiz programs, and did occasional acting jobs, usually as a TV news reporter. For a time, he was the host of a show on The Playboy Channel and a frequent emcee of infomercials. I thought he was always a classy and clever presence on my television, and the one time we met made me believe he was that way in real life, as well. He had a wicked sense of humor and would probably appreciate all remarks about him hitting the Ultimate Whammy today.

• Posted at 4:37 PM · LINK

Not-Wonderful Woman

Today's video link is to a demo film, a little under five minutes in length, that was made in 1967 to try and sell a Wonder Woman TV show to ABC. Its producer, William Dozier, already had a hit on that network with the Adam West Batman series and he locked up a number of other comic book (or comic book-ish) properties to see if he could make lightning strike again. He couldn't. Not with this effort, not with a half-hour Dick Tracy pilot he produced, not with several others that never got anywhere near a camera lens. The only other show he was able to sell was The Green Hornet and it didn't last long.

The short Wonder Woman demo was written by Stanley Ralph Ross and the team of Larry Siegel and Stan Hart. That's right: It took three men to write this.

Stanley was concurrently writing many episodes of Batman. He later claimed — and I'm not sure I believe him — that he hated the idea that Dozier had of making Wonder Woman into a broad sitcom about a drab lady who imagines herself as the more beautiful, exciting Wonder Woman. On the other hand, eight years later, after ABC had commissioned and passed on another Wonder Woman pilot (the one starring Cathy Lee Crosby), they bought a very faithful adaptation of the comic book, the pilot of which was written by...Stanley Ralph Ross. Stanley developed the Lynda Carter version and claimed it was the way he'd wanted to handle the property all along. So maybe he did.

Stan Hart and Larry Siegel were a fairly new comedy writing team at the time. Shortly after this project, they were hired for The Carol Burnett Show, where they worked for many years and won many awards. They also wrote a lot for (and may still occasionally appear in) Mad Magazine.

In what you'll see if you're brave enough to click on the link below, Diana Prince is played by a woman named Ellie Wood Walker, who had few credits and who, I guess, was television's idea of an unattractive woman. On TV, it's okay for a lady to play someone who can't get a man as long as she's pretty enough. Portraying her alter-ego — the beautiful version of W.W. — was Linda Harrison, who was then the actress cast in every role at Twentieth-Century Fox that called for someone stunning but didn't have much dialogue. The same year, she played "Miss Stardust" in A Guide for the Married Man. The year after, she was Nova in Planet of the Apes. And the year after that, they stuck her in my favorite trashy TV melodrama of the sixties, Bracken's World where, amazingly, she was allowed to talk. She did fine.

Her nagging mother was Maudie Prickett, who managed to turn up at one time or another in just about every sitcom in the sixties. Narration was supplied by William Dozier himself, filling the same job he'd hired himself for on the Batman show.

Why didn't his version of Wonder Woman sell? Well, watch it and see. What's usually the case when a network commissions a brief demo film instead of a full pilot is either (a) they have so much faith in the premise and creative team that they don't feel the need to waste the time or money...or (b) they have so little faith in the project that, though they've been pressured into giving it a try before the cameras, they don't want to waste the time or money. Guess which was the case this time.

• Posted at 12:58 AM · LINK

More Kosmic Kirby

In July of '76, the satellite Viking Orbiter 1 sent back photos from the surface of the planet Mars, one of which seemed to suggest a face. This article by Richard C. Hoagland notes that in 1958, in a comic book called Race for the Moon, Jack Kirby drew a story called "The Face on Mars" that bears more than a slight similarity to what the satellite photographed eighteen years later. This is not the first time this kind of thing has been noticed in Jack's work and they're probably all coincidences...but they sure remind me of the many times Jack was unquestionably ahead of his time.

• Posted at 12:58 AM · LINK