The gloriously bogus rock group Spinal Tap will reunite for a performance at Wembley Stadium in London. It's all part of the Live Earth concerts scheduled worldwide for July 7 to increase awareness of Global Warming or Global Climate Change or whatever we're now calling the fact that our weather seems to be harming us. To promote this, Tap and its documentarian have prepared a 15 minute video that you can watch online. Well, maybe you can. Since it's on an MSN site, I suspect some Mac users will have trouble watching it but they, like us, can go to this page and try.
For a month or three now, Dick Cavett has been writing an enjoyable column for The New York Times which I'm not linking to because you have to be a Times Select subscriber to read it. Either that or have a friend who is and sends it to you on occasion. I'm in the latter category.
The other day, Cavett wrote about an incident that occurred at a taping of his ABC show in 1971. A guest actually passed away in front of the cameras. Here's an excerpt from that column...
When I'm doing an appearance somewhere and taking questions from the audience, I can always count on: "Tell about the guy who died on your show!" I generally say, "I will, and I promise you that in a few moments you will be laughing." (That gets a laugh.) I go on: "First, who would be the logical person to drop dead on a television show? A health expert." (Laugh.) I go on to explain that he was Jerome I. Rodale, the publisher of (among other things) Today's Health Magazine. (Laugh.) The irony gets thicker.
He'd been on the cover of The New York Times Magazine that Sunday, and we needed one more guest. He was a slight man, and looked like Leon Trotsky with the little goatee.
He was extremely funny for half an hour, talking about health foods, and as a friendly gesture he offered me some of his special asparagus, boiled in urine. I think I said, "Anybody's we know?" while making a mental note to have him back.
I brought out the next guest, Pete Hamill, whose column ran in The New York Post. Rodale moved "down one" to the couch. As Pete and I began to chat, Mr. Rodale suddenly made a snoring sound, which got a laugh.
Comics would sometimes do that for a laugh while another comic was talking, pretending boredom. His head tilted to the side as Pete, in
close-up as it happened, whispered audibly, "This looks bad."
The audience laughed at that. I didn't, because I knew Rodale was dead.
I've never met Dick Cavett but if I did, I'd lay the following addendum on him because he might find it amusing. On the chance that he may Google himself some day and come to this site, here it is...
That episode, for obvious reasons, never aired. A rerun was hastily selected and it happened to be a rerun where the featured guest was Jack Benny, who was then still very much among the living.
So that day in '71, I'm watching the afternoon movie on Channel 7, the ABC outlet in Los Angeles. One of those little teasers comes up during a commercial break and a local newsguy comes on and says, "Famous guest dies during taping of Dick Cavett Show. Details on the news at five."
Don't you just love when they do things like that? Give you a little bit of important information but not enough to let you know what's really going on? Anyway, this is followed by another commercial for something, and then there's an ABC network promo. You see a slide with a logo for The Dick Cavett Show as an announcer says, "Join Dick Cavett and his special guest Jack Benny, tonight."
Immediate assumption: Jack Benny is the famous guest who died during the taping of the show.
It takes me a few seconds to realize it probably isn't so. If it had been Jack Benny, that would have been the headline; that Jack Benny was dead, not that some unidentified guest died while chatting with Mr. Cavett. But it takes a moment before that occurs to me and of course, I have to wonder if others are leaping to the same immediate and erroneous deduction.
Sure enough, a minute later, the local newsman is back on ABC, interrupting the movie to say, "Uh, just to clarify...the guest who died at the Dick Cavett Show taping today was not Jack Benny. So you can stop calling the station..."
Speaking of Hanna-Barbera shows: A lot of you have seen this but I'll bet some of you haven't. It's the opening to Ruff & Reddy, the first cartoon show produced by that studio. It ran on NBC on Saturday mornings beginning in December of 1957, a few months before I turned six. Still, I remember getting up to watch it every week.
The show had a host named Jimmy Blaine who'd run a couple of episodes of Ruff & Reddy and then, in between them, he'd offer up an old Columbia theatrical cartoon, often one featuring The Fox and the Crow. Between the animated features, Mr. Blaine interacted with a couple of bird puppets — Rhubarb the Parrot and Jose the Toucan. They were operated by puppeteer Rufus Rose, who was the main puppeter on Howdy Doody, which was also a part of NBC's programming for kids. After a few years, the show with Mr. Blaine went off but Ruff & Reddy came back later in another series, this time hosted by Captain Bob Cottle.
I never cared much for either Blaine or Cap'n Bob but I liked Ruff & Reddy...though I liked Hanna-Barbera's next few shows a lot more. It's a shame we aren't likely to see their first series out on DVD for a long time. There were 156 of the four minute Ruff & Reddy cartoons and they'd fit nicely on two DVD sets. In fact, they'd probably fare better there than they have anywhere else.
These were serialized stories and those don't work so well on a cable channel like Boomerang or Cartoon Network, especially the way those channels have usually run them on the rare occasions when they've run them. They were used as fillers. I don't think kids today ("those kids today") will really spark to the notion of following a serialized storyline. That's why no one makes serialized cartoons and why the Rocky & Bullwinkle cartoons, as wonderful as we all know them to be, don't do well on TV. But you really can't build an audience for a serialized cartoon show that doesn't air in a regularly scheduled timeslot. A serial might, however, work just fine on a DVD. It's a pity that Warner Home Video will probably have to be right down to the bottom of its barrel before we get The Complete Ruff & Reddy. So for now, just enjoy the opening titles...
May 6, 2007
