Category Archives: Video Links

Hard to believe it's time for this again. But Christmas comes with certain rituals and around these parts, it includes posting certain videos…

The first series Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera produced for television was Ruff & Reddy, which went on in 1957. Matter of fact, it debuted on December 14, 1957 — 54 years ago today, forever changing the world of animation. Some would say "…and not for the better" and we could spend hours debating that. Matter of fact, I could spend hours debating it with myself. I'd have to factor in my personal fondness for Bill and Joe, along with my awareness of them as genuine Job Creators who kept animators working at a time when many thought that art 'n' craft would soon employ no more people than Mr. Disney could accommodate. I guess the main talking point would be my love of the early H-B cartoons, starting with the debut of Ruff & Reddy.

I was five at the time and I'm pretty sure I saw it the first morning it was on. It was new animation but not all new and not all animation. A fellow named Jimmy Blaine hosted the show, which was on NBC Saturday morning. He had two talking puppet birds with him. Each episode contained a few minutes of him talking with the birds, a couple of Ruff & Reddy episodes and one old cartoon (often Fox & Crow) from the rarely-opened Columbia/Screen Gems vault. Having already memorized all the old theatrical cartoons that were shown on TV, this was a refreshing new trove to enjoy.

Our video today is a series of Post cereal commercials that I guess aired on the Ruff & Reddy program, though I don't recall them at all. They have somewhat better animation than the episodes of that series. Don Messick did the voice of Ruff and he's also the spaceman in the first commercial. The announcer on it is Dick Tufeld. Daws Butler played Reddy with a voice not too different from the one he'd do the following season for Hanna-Barbera on their first all-animated series, Huckleberry Hound. Daws also supplied the crocodile with a voice similar to the one he'd do for H-B in '58 as Quick Draw McGraw. I liked the shows starring both of those characters more than I liked Ruff & Reddy but at the time, I liked Ruff & Reddy a lot. And I still do, especially when they're not selling cereal…

Believe it or not, I still have more videos to link to featuring "The Lambeth Walk."To make it easy on those of you who ran screaming into the streets when I gave you a steady diet and still hear it in your sleep — though no one said you had to watch what I embedded — I'm going to ration them to one a week or so. Here it is on a player piano…

The person who posted this clip to YouTube said it was Spike Jones with Mickey Katz. I don't see Mr. Katz in it. I think the poster thought Billy DeWolfe — who is in it — was Mickey Katz. But he got Spike Jones right. It's Spike's contribution to Variety Girl, a 1947 movie into which Paramount Pictures stuck every actor they had under contract…or who wandered anywhere near the lot while they were shooting. The male lead here is DeForest Kelley who, many years later, would play the doctor on some science-fiction TV show produced by Paramount…

You know what this weblog has needed for a long time? A video of a porcupine eating a pumpkin, that's what.Thanks to a tip-off from Darcie Cebula, I can finally rectify that…

On his second album, Allan Sherman had a number called "No One's Perfect" performed by an elegant choir of voices. Here's a recent rendition of the piece as presented by the Combined Choirs of Albright College in Reading, Pennsylvania…

I dunno if Hans Klok is the best magician in the world but he's sure the fastest. Back in this post, I showed you a half-hour version of his Vegas show in which he did a stunning number of feats. Recently, a Dutch TV show challenged him to see how many tricks he could perform in five minutes. A couple of these are the same trick with different window dressing but why quibble?Take a look, prepare to be dazzled…and notice that he and "The Divas of Magic" finished with time to spare.Thanks to Marc Wielage for calling this to my attention…

The only late night show I watch in full these days is Craig Ferguson's. I TiVo his and Leno's every night, and Letterman's when there's a guest of special interest. Jay and Dave, I speed through with adept fast-forwarding and complete avoidance of some segments…but Craig, I usually watch start to finish. He's the only one with the capacity to surprise me and the only one who doesn't seem to be on auto-pilot.

For some reason, I really enjoy the silly appearances on the show of two guys in a horse suit as Secretariat. Ferguson doesn't do the bit every night — he seems to know how quickly it would wear out if he did — so it's still a treat, albeit a quick one.

Below is a video that runs almost 24 minutes. It's a compilation of Secretariat appearances assembled by one of the two audience members who were involved in the last segment. You might not want to watch the whole thing…but then again, you might…

Our pal, the indecently-talented Jason Graae, finally finds a musical worthy of him. It happens in the latest installment of Bruce Kimmel's Outside the Box web series…

My pal of 40+ years Bruce Simon linked to this on Facebook and I had to share it with you here. It features longtime Los Angeles TV personality Ralph Story as he recalls several other longtime Los Angeles TV personalities like Spade Cooley and Clete Roberts. Some of you may remember Clete Roberts as the interviewer in three famous episodes of the M*A*S*H TV series in which he played a newsman interviewing members of the M*A*S*H unit.

Joe Pyne is in there. Pyne was more or less the father of rude Conservative talk show hosts on radio and TV, and people tuned him in more to watch the insults than the political discussions. The latter never got very deep or anywhere near the facts. Pyne was actually a hard guy to pin down in terms of political labels. Folks called him a right-winger and on many issues, he was. But he was also fiercely pro-union. His overriding view was to side with The Working Man. He hated hippies, bums and unemployed students but he also had no love for rich folks who hadn't, in his view, "earned" their wealth. For many years, the man who cut my hair also cut Pyne's and he said Pyne was a nasty man who yelled about practically everything but that his on-air rants were mostly calculated for their entertainment value. Some of us didn't find him all that entertaining.

The piece closes with Engineer Bill Stulla, who was on KHJ Channel 9 for years showing many of the cartoons that my pal Jerry Beck now includes in his "Worst Cartoons Ever" presentations. Over on Channel 5, Skipper Frank had Bugs Bunny cartoons and Tom Hatten had Popeye. Engineer Bill was stuck with Colonel Bleep and Spunky & Tadpole. But Mr. Stulla was a good broadcaster and managed to triumph over the cartoons he was forced to show…and for a while, he did have the Fleischer Superman cartoons and a few other goodies. I made my TV debut (and darn near my farewell) on the show he did before he was Engineer Bill. I wrote about that experience here and here. If you go now and read the first part of that remembrance, make sure you read the second.

So now here's Ralph Story, who (alas) is no longer with us. He was a pretty important person on L.A. TV himself…

I first discovered the work of my hero Stan Freberg on the Soupy Sales TV show that was broadcast in Los Angeles from 1960-1962 (my age: 8-10). Soupy had a lot of time to fill and couldn't spend it all getting hit with shaving cream pies so he'd often have puppets mime to old records. Many were Freberg's and that's how I found my way to the comedy records section of a shop in West L.A. and bought my first Freberg album.

Soupy used other records. I also discovered Eddie "The Old Philosopher" Lawrence there as well as Spike Jones and every once in a while, Mickey Katz. And quite often, Soupy would have Pookie the Lion lip-sync to Johnny Standley's 1953 novelty record, "It's in the Book."This was, amazingly, a smash hit…and really Mr. Standley's only biggie, though he made other records. He spent most of his career as a vocalist/comic with the Horace Heidt Orchestra and when that ended, he played local clubs in California and state fairs around the country. He died in 1992.

I have no idea what show or film this is from but it's Johnny Standley performing an abbreviated version of the number. I believe the man introducing him is his longtime employer, Horace Heidt and that Mr. Heidt is exaggerating the number of copies that were sold of this record. My understanding is it sold one million, not two million — but hey, one million is pretty darned good…

As we've noted here before, there seems to be a thriving industry in the world and especially in the U.K. impersonating John Cleese. Here's one such gent in action…

But most often, they're found in the role of Basil Fawlty. There are literally more professional impersonators of Basil Fawlty around than there were episodes of Fawlty Towers. Here's the next logical step…

Ah…another video of the great (and alas, deceased) clown/mime George Carl. You may remember a lot of this from previous clips on this blog. When you saw him live, Mr. Carl did about 20-30 minutes of solid comedy, all paced with about this laughs-per-second pace. When he was on TV, he always did — probably at the insistence of those who'd booked him — this six minute hunk. No matter. I could watch it again and again…sheer poetry.This is from The Tonight Show in May of '86…

Get ready to spend some time watching videos. In 1962, Norman Jewison produced and directed a wonderful one-hour TV special about the work of Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe. It was hosted by Maurice Chevalier and featured Julie Andrews, Richard Burton, Robert Goulet and Stanley Holloway. This aired on 2/11/62 when Lerner and Loewe were represented on Broadway by My Fair Lady — it closed in September of that year — and Camelot, which ran until the following January. I believe Burton had just departed the cast of Camelot when this special aired while Andrews and Goulet followed soon after.

I mention this because I believe that the musical numbers in this show were authentic re-creations of what was on the stage with those two shows using the same sets, costumes and staging…and probably the singers and dancers who were then in those productions. In this clip, you'll see Mr. Holloway perform "Get Me to the Church On Time" the same way (I bet) he did in on stage a few years earlier in New York.

You'll also see a sketch which was obviously written by Lerner, who famously complained about the kind of theatrical rabble depicted. The lady in the sketch is Frances Sternhagen and you'll also recognize a very young Charles Nelson Reilly who at the time was featured on Broadway in the original production of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. Oh — and the first voice you hear will be that of Paul Frees. Frees was based in L.A. at the time and I have no idea why he did the announce for a show produced in New York. Perhaps Jewison brought it back out here to edit…

Now here with slightly worse video is the musical number that the sketch leads into. The person who posted this on YouTube said it was from The Ed Sullivan Show but they're wrong. It's from that special…

And while we're at it, here's another seven and a half minutes from the same special. In this, you get to see Richard Burton perform the closing of Act One of Camelot with what I assume are the costumes, sets and supporting players then doing it on Broadway. An amazing bit of theatrical history…

Another number from the late, great Allan Sherman…