Category Archives: Video Links

The sequel you've been waiting for…

This is a one-reel comedy short made in 1929, which places it among the first talkies. Even more notable is that it represents the screen debut of the great Fred Allen, one of the wittiest men ever heard on radio. Allen was never quite as wonderful on film or TV as he was on radio but he was still always worth watching.

The Installment Collector was shot at the Kaufman-Astoria studios in New York. The man who plays the title role is reportedly actor-director Alonzo Price, who in January of that same year played a bill collector in the flop Broadway show, Polly, which starred Fred Allen. I don't know how that connects to this short but I guess there's some connection. The film was released in April of 1929. A month later was the premiere of The Cocoanuts, which was also shot at Kaufman-Astoria. So it's entirely possible that Mr. Allen visited the Marx Brothers on their stage…or maybe he even used theirs on one of their days off. All the studios were short on the new equipment during the early days of talking pictures and often had two movies going on the same stage, one shooting during the day and the other at night.

But that's enough speculation. Here's Fred Allen in his movie debut…

Les Bubb has been performing his unnatural act for quite a few years. He calls it mime and I guess it is…but I think it's something else altogether. See what you think…

When people write about visual humor on television, they often mention Ernie Kovacs, then leap to Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In, which is quite a leap. It bypasses a lot of other examples, one being Steve Allen. When I watched his old shows, I used to love a routine he did often called Crazy Shots. He did it often and frequently did it live, which must have required incredible planning and rehearsal. This is not the best example of the bit but it'll give you an idea how it went…

You know what I'd like to see? I'd like to see Stephen Sondheim's musical Into the Woods performed by seven-year-old children…

Buddy Hackett tells a joke about a duck. Watch how Johnny Carson, who knows exactly where the story is going, enjoys the performance. Thanks to Shelly Goldstein for the link.

One of the events I'm looking forward to at WonderCon this weekend is a panel I'll be moderating on the history of that fine convention. On Saturday at 11:30 in room 220/224, I'll be interviewing convention founders Joe Field, Mike Friedrich and Bryan Uhlenbrock along with David Glanzer, who's one of the main folks behind the Comic-Con International. Comic-Con acquired WonderCon in 2001 (I think it was) and now operates the annual event.

WonderCon started off in Oakland as a gathering called The Wonderful World of Comics. Prior to the 1989 show, a video was prepared…and that's Joe Field you'll see acting as host. It shows you a little about the earlier conventions and promotes the upcoming show, plus there are brief interviews of Stan Lee, Will Eisner and other early guests. Have a look…

Not long before he died, the actor Charles Nelson Reilly put his one-man autobiographical show on film. It is a wonderful, wonderful experience and the whole thing is up on YouTube in chapters, placed there I believe by its producers. They cut it into twenty-eight chapters and put it up there for all to see and enjoy.

In the player below, I've embedded two consecutive chapters about Mr. Reilly's experiences in an acting class. One should flow into the next. Unless coarse language horrifies you, you should love them and you may want to seek out the entire film and watch it, which you can do at this page. You can also order the DVD and get all this plus another hour or three of extra material, including an entire taping of another performance he gave of the show with some different material. If you think all he was was that sarcastic gay man on the game shows, you're in for quite a surprise…and treat.

Here's a goody for those of you interested in game shows — five minutes from The Money Maze, which ran on ABC from December 23, 1974 to June 27, 1975. It was hosted by Nick Clooney (father of George, brother of Rosemary) who at the time also had a somewhat successful local talk show in New York Cincinnati. The premise of Money Maze (sometimes spelled as one word, sometimes two) was pretty simple. Married couples would answer questions to see which couple would get to tackle the maze. There were "prize towers" in the maze. One member of the couple would watch from an outside vantage point and direct the other to run through the maze and get to a certain tower. If the runner navigated to the tower and hit a button within a certain amount of time (often as little as 15 seconds), they won the prize.

The show was produced for at least part of its run by a man who was later a good friend of mine, a splendid writer-producer-human named Don Segall. Don is no longer with us but he did a lot of odd TV shows and also a lot of odder comic books. Those of you familiar with Steve Ditko's character The Creeper may recognize Don as the fellow who provided the dialogue for the character's debut appearance, and Don also wrote a lot for Dell and Charlton, plus he did TV shows like Ball Four and The Four Seasons. He and Alan Alda were close friends and when Alda wrote and starred in the movie Sweet Liberty, he wrote a character into the film based on Don…and even let Don audition to play himself. Don — wouldn't you know it? — didn't get the part. Bob Hoskins did…and then Hoskins moved in with Don for a week or so to study him and get him "down."

Anyway, Don and I once discussed The Money Maze…which by the way was produced by Dick Cavett's production company. I assume that was because at some point when Cavett negotiated a contract with ABC, he demanded and got a side deal for his company to do something without him for another time slot.

Don claimed that The Money Maze got decent ratings…not blockbuster but good enough that it could have been renewed. What prevented that was that the set was so costly to maintain. They would tape five a day for several days in a row, then dismantle the whole thing so the studio could be used for other shows. Setting it back up for another series of tapings took several days…and the maze had to be constantly reconfigured with new paths after each taping which added to the expense. There were, Don said, only a few studios available in New York that were large enough to accommodate the set and they were always in demand by other projects willing to pay a lot more to be there.

A few years earlier, CBS had a game show called Video Village that also had an elaborate set and therefore much the same problem. That show had decent enough ratings that when the cost of doing it in a New York studio became prohibitive, they moved it to Los Angeles. Money Maze wasn't quite popular enough for that…so off it went…or at least, that's what Don told me. Here's five minutes of what was either the pilot or among the first episodes…

From October of 1972, it's Johnny Carson's tenth anniversary special. I wonder, if you'd offered that evening to bet Johnny he would do the show until May 22 of 1992, what kind of odds he'd have given you.

The audio on this material is not good but the guest list is impossible to ignore. I remember that when it was originally advertised, the names of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis were casually mentioned in the lineup and some people got excited, thinking it was a reunion of Martin and Lewis. They must have been disappointed that Dean was only in a pre-taped introduction…which was the only way they could have the two of them both "on" the show. If they'd been together in the studio, the event would have been about them instead of being about Johnny.

I also remember hearing — and I can't remember where — that Johnny hated this format, which is why they never did it again. He didn't like not having his desk and he didn't like having the guests all out there at once, placed in locations where it felt unnatural for him to talk to them and them to talk to each other. It was a lovely set but it's obvious the NBC crew hadn't quite figured out how to shoot it. Note that when you first see the layout, there's an awkward shot of the boom mike and there's a stagehand running through the shot.

This runs about 50 minutes and gets a little tedious around the time Rowan and Martin come out, if not before. It's in five parts which should play one after another in the player I've embedded below…

I linked to a poor quality video of this a few years ago but someone has uploaded a much better copy to YouTube so I'm a'gonna link again. These are three commercials for Bosco Chocolate Syrup, a concoction that my friend Johanna, back when I was eight, used to drink right out of the jar without bothering to mix it into milk. Last I heard, Johanna was just coming down from the sugar rush.

The little rabbit in all three was voiced by a man I discuss here often, the late Daws Butler…and Daws may have had a hand in the writing of these, as well. I recall they were among his favorites of the nineteen million commercials he did during his wonderful career. As I mentioned the first time I featured these (and as the fellow who put the better copies on YouTube notes), the rabbit with the deep voice is not, as one might think upon first listen, Thurl Ravenscroft. Sounds a lot like him but isn't. I don't know who it is…most likely some studio singer whose name I never heard. The other rabbit's voice is, maddeningly, done by someone I probably do know but cannot place.

Daws liked these a lot. I like these a lot. I'll bet you like these a lot…

I don't know if you've seen this but it's a brief look at Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, including some footage I've never seen anywhere else…

(By the way: Another actor in the show has been injured. It doesn't seem to be widely reported, maybe because it's no longer news.)

Here's a rarity…a brief chunk of The Morning Show, which ran on CBS starting in 1954 as that network's unsuccessful attempt to compete with NBC's Today show. The Morning Show featured news, interviews, games, songs, cooking demonstrations, the Bil Baird marionettes and just about anything else they could think of to throw in there. It was done live from a studio in Grand Central Terminal in New York and was originally hosted by Walter Cronkite before Jack Paar, who you'll see in this clip, took it over.

Paar always loved to tell the story of how after he replaced Cronkite, the network kept a running tally of letters — how many wanted Cronkite back, how many preferred Paar. One day, one of the talliers came to Paar and said, "We don't know how to score this one. It says, 'I wish you hadn't gotten rid of Walter Cronkite.'" Paar said, "Well, that's easy. Put it in the pro-Cronkite pile." The staff member replied, "Okay, but it's from your mother."

We've been talking here about the problems of doing TV out of New York in those days. The Morning Show aired for two hours a day but it wasn't the same two hours in every time zone. Cronkite and then Paar actually did three hours every morning. The Eastern Time Zone got Hours 1 and 2. The Central Time Zone got Hours 2 and 3. I have no idea what they did out here on the West Coast. In the third hour, the host would repeat much of the material from Hour 1, including re-interviewing people he'd interviewed in the first hour. Paar used to say he got very confused at times when he'd refer to something that occurred earlier in the program…then realized the time zone he was currently addressing hadn't seen that segment yet and it was coming up later.

Paar did it for a while, then CBS moved him to an afternoon show and tried other hosts including John Henry Faulk and Dick Van Dyke. In October of '54, CBS cut the show to one hour and gave the other hour over to a new show for kids, Captain Kangaroo. The Good Captain had his own problems with the time zone thing. He would do his show live every morning for the East Coast and at the conclusion, they would have two minutes — the length of the station break — to reset everything so they could perform the entire show again for the Central Time Zone. They actually did it twice every day for several years before tape became feasible…and again, I have no idea what they did for other time zones.

So here's a little sampler of The Morning Show from back when Jack Paar hosted it. I don't know how typical this is but it does look like they were trying to beat Today at its own game…and Today already had its act together and a tremendous head start…

The UCLA Film and Television Archive does vast amounts of good work preserving and restoring old movies and TV shows that would, were it not for their efforts, probably cease to exist. I'm delighted to learn that one of the treasures they've been saving is The Shari Lewis Show which replaced Howdy Doody on NBC on Saturday mornings when I was a lad — from 1960 'til 1963. I generally preferred watching cartoons to watching real people at the time but I made an exception if the people did magic or were Shari Lewis or Paul Winchell. Shari and Paul did their own kind of magic.

I've not seen a Shari Lewis Show since they aired on Saturday morns but I remember it fondly. It was kind of a weekly half-hour musical comedy…and they did it in New York, tapping into the talent pool of folks then working in and around Broadway. The first time I saw Jerry Orbach in a show (the original 42nd Street), I wondered, "Where have I seen that man before?" Took a while but I figured out he was that guy who, a decade or two earlier, had appeared often on The Shari Lewis Show.

The series was, of course, all about Ms. Lewis and her fabric friends, Lamb Chop, Charlie Horse and Hush Puppy…and I remember having two distinct reactions to her. I was kind of an amateur ventriloquist then — not that I ever thought of pursuing that as a career — and at age nine, I resented that a "girl" (say that with a note of disdain as a nine-year-old boy would) could do it so well. On the other hand, she was awfully, awfully cute.

It wasn't until I was in my mid-thirties that I got to meet and work with Shari. CBS hired me to write and develop an idea she had for a Saturday morning series. It took place in a classroom and the idea was that she would play a strict, rather humorless teacher…and all the kids in the class would be puppets. We met a few times on the project and talked less about it than about her career.

Among the things I remember is that in her home in Beverly Hills, the front hall was pretty much filled by a huge, stuffed Lamb Chop doll. It was about six feet tall and when she stood next to it, it looked even bigger because she was a pretty tiny lady. I had this mental image of a burglar breaking into the house in the middle of the night, worrying that there might be a dog…and being scared off by a seven-foot Lamb Chop. I also remember her being quite smart and enthusiastic about the project…and disappointed when the network decided they could only have one live-action show on Saturday morning and it would be Pee-wee's Playhouse.

I was disappointed, too. I was hoping we could recapture or maybe reinvent a little of the magic of The Shari Lewis Show. Here are two brief clips. The first of these is the opening of one episode. I am a little puzzled by the line in the lyrics about how you should throw your willie way over your thistle. Sounds to me like a good way to get a warning about going blind…

And here are two minutes from that episode which aired April 8, 1961. I wonder if what we got out here was a taped replay (in which case, why was NBC making kinescopes, which is what UCLA is restoring?) or if we got the kinescope a week later after it had been developed. Could they have been doing the show twice for broadcast? Anyone know?

Here's a real treasure. One of the greatest people I ever had the honor of knowing was a man named Daws Butler. I grew up on his voice, which was heard in most of the good cartoons produced for television in the fifties and early sixties. He spoke for many characters including Huckleberry Hound, Yogi Bear, Quick Draw McGraw, Snooper and Blabber, Hokey Wolf, Snagglepuss, Mr. Jinks, Wally Gator, Augie Doggie, Elroy Jetson…and the list goes on and on. He was a wonderful actor and a wonderful man.

He was also a wonderful teacher. He turned a guest house behind his Beverly Hills home into a workshop and a studio…and there he would teach aspiring voice actors. It was a building that overflowed with enthusiasm and talent, for Daws wouldn't take just anyone on as a student. You had to audition and he had to think you had promise. If you passed, the lessons were not expensive but they were priceless.

Daws did not teach, as some teachers do, by regurgitating what others had taught them or what they'd read in books. He taught that which he had learned throughout decades of work and he taught in his own terms with his own theories and his own vocabulary and his own standards. There are some great actors who do not quite understand what it is they do or how they do it. Daws knew exactly what he did: Why he took this pause, why he accented that syllable, etc., and he could explain it in a useful way.

He was largely above ego. He knew he was among the best at what he did but he knew it in a kindly, non-arrogant way. He loved watching talent emerge and he talked to you like you were an equal, even though you both knew you weren't and you knew you probably would never be.

Having zero flair for acting, I did not study with him but fortunately, he also loved writers and would have me over to just sit and talk about writing and creativity and anything that popped into anyone's mind. I was occasionally intimidated and once in a while, I'd just get lost in the realization that that voice — the one I knew so well from all my favorite TV shows as a kid — was coming out of the little man sitting eighteen inches from me. And it was telling me how much he hated Richard Nixon.

This video was shot by Bill Simpson on April 3, 1986, a little more than two years before we lost Daws. It's a brief tour of his workshop…and perhaps out of humility, he doesn't dwell on how many younger actors had their lives forever changed for the better in that building. Trust me. There were a lot of them, including many who are among the top voice actors of today. (The pride he had in his students does show through, though. He had their photos all over the place. I see my pal Earl Kress's eight-by-ten is next to the coffee urn.) Thanks to another of his students, Joe Bevilacqua, for posting this so I can share 14 minutes of Daws Butler with you. It's not nearly enough. Fourteen years wouldn't be, either…