Category Archives: Video Links

This is pretty much what life is all about. Or should be…

This runs about two minutes and you can ignore the first half, which is an overlong title sequence someone made. The second half is a minute from On the Wrong Trek, a 1936 comedy starring the wonderful, underrated comic, Charley Chase. Mr. Chase was working on the Hal Roach lot at the same time as Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy with overlapping crews and much interchange, and many of his films are as wonderful in their own way as theirs were. In this film, Stan and Ollie made a brief silent cameo and here it is in full…

This video was made because the Tom Tom company, manufacturers of Global Positioning Systems for cars, is releasing a series of GPS packages with famous voices.There's one coming with Warner Brothers characters and I recently listened in a bit as the Emmy-winning Joe Alaskey recorded some of the voice tracks for that offering. (There's a certain irony to that since Joe does not drive.) Also one in the works is one with a famous lasagna-eating cat and there are others. And the current promotion is for your opportunity to be guided to your destination by characters from Star Wars. Here's a little of what they allegedly went through recording Darth Vader…

We mentioned this here a day or so ago. Here's news coverage of Jim Henson's early Muppets being donated to the Smithsonian…

More info will be here soon (maybe a couple of weeks) on the various/sundry running times of one of our fave films, It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. One of the things you may learn from that info is that there's not nearly as much "lost footage" as some folks think. It's true that the movie was trimmed after its initial release. It's not true that there are hours and hours of what Mad (the magazine) used to call "Scenes We'd Like to See."

Another fine historian of the movie is my pal Paul Scrabo. Now, let's see if I can type the following with a straight face. He (ahem) recently found an important "lost" sequence — the (cough) legendary fantasy scenes with Mickey Rooney and Buddy Hackett…

From a 1976 episode of The Muppet Show, Dr. Teeth (Jim Henson) sings a song co-written by Stan Freberg…

This is a "pitch" video from back when Jim Henson and George Schlatter were trying to sell The Muppet Show to CBS. It stars a character named Leo (voiced by Henson) who'd previously appeared in projects Henson's company did like sales training films, and though it's very funny, it did not result in CBS buying the program. Neither did any other network and later, sans Schlatter, it wound up in syndication where it was a tremendous success.

Granted, this is hindsight but I don't think it's surprising that this reel failed to sell the product. The network execs to whom it was addressed already knew the credits of Mssrs. Henson and Schlatter and didn't doubt that those two, individually or collectively, could produce three minutes of funny stuff. What the suits probably wanted to know was what The Muppet Show would be: What's the format? Who'll be on it? What would a typical episode be like? This pitch told them none of that. Presumably, Henson and Schlatter submitted other material, verbal and written, that would convey all that…but this pitch just sounds like empty hype for an undefined product.

Years ago, I worked with a gentleman named Kim LeMasters who had been for a few years, the guy at CBS you pitched your show to if you wanted to sell a prime-time show to that network. He was out of that job by the time I worked with him but willing to discuss it. I asked him how often someone had walked in, pitched him something and he knew on the spot he wanted to buy it. He said it had happened twice. He'd purchased many shows but only two had been first-round knockouts.

One was when Barry Kemp walked in with Newhart — the series set at the inn in Vermont. Kim said, appoximately, "He had Bob Newhart and he had the perfect format with everything all worked-out." The other show was Magnum, P.I. and I'm not sure if Tom Selleck was attached at that point but Kim said the pitch was very complete with all the regular characters clearly defined and a good handle on the kind of stories that would be done. Obviously, there was also a lot of confidence in those who'd be producing and writing…but one of the things that had impressed Kim was a lack of hard sell. The pitchers had not come in and said, "This is going to be a huge hit." Almost everyone says that and if you hear pitches all day, as network execs do, you tend to get sick of that and to just tune it out.

I suspect Henson and Schlatter intended the following as a parody of the kind of thing they knew their target audience (i.e., the CBS brass) heard ad nauseam. But maybe it didn't come off that way. Fortunately, the idea refused to die, moving way past material like this…

William F. Buckley hosted the TV interview show Firing Line for 33 years of often-pretentious speech and pontification. He sounded eloquent, at least to those easily impressed by excessive syllables, but if you listened hard enough and could figure out what he was saying, it always struck me as shallow and selfish.There was this odd subtext that the world should be run by smart (by his measure) and wealthy people and that the poor and stupid should just do everyone a favor and comply or, better still, disappear.That's an exaggeration on my part but, at times, not a huge one. He was also darn good at over-intellectualizing topics to the point of missing the entire point.The first few minutes of a 1967 interview with Groucho Marx, which is our video embed below, demonstrates this.

I remember one time on his show Buckley really lost whatever remaining respect I had for him. It was a discussion about capital punishment…and I must admit I've never fully understood the Conservative point-of-view on the topic. It seems to be that though the government is always inept and that it should have as little control of our lives as possible…we can trust and even encourage it to execute people.That is, as long as it executes the people "we" (i.e., the upper class) know should be executed. In one discussion that amazed me, Buckley said he wasn't concerned about innocent people being put to death. We just needed to make sure we had smart jurors because, after all, any intelligent person could hear a case — or even just read the newspaper accounts of a trial — and know for certain who was guilty.

Mr. Buckley lived well into the time when efforts like the Innocence Project were using DNA to free (to date) 258 people from prison, many from convictions for First Degree Murder.To my knowledge, he never commented on this.

The Groucho excerpt — which I'll warn you ends abruptly — is from a new series of manufactured-on-demand DVDs that have been issued of Firing Line episodes. It's one per DVD for ten bucks and you can order the one with Groucho or ones with Ronald Reagan or Norman Mailer or Muhammad Ali or Hugh Hefner or dozens of others. I may get around to ordering the one with David Merrick. Here's a few minutes with Dr. Hackenbush looking like he's not entirely sure why he agreed to appear…

Speaking, as I was a post or two ago here about being late: Some time ago here, I announced I'd soon be posting some new facts about the much-argued running times of the various cuts of It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. That piece is still coming…when, I dunno. In the meantime, my pal Paul Scrabo has dug this up. It's a 1988 interview with the film's director, Stanley Kramer, discussing the 25th anniversary of the Cinerama Dome on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. Mad World was the first movie to play that theater and the place was in some ways built for it. Here's more about its history…

I don't believe all of these are real — especially the last one — but it's a nice little package of clips set to the right tune…

Here's 30 seconds of silent footage of three Los Angeles area kids' show hosts from the late fifties and early sixties, all from KTLA. KTLA had a pretty powerful late afternoon lineup of such hosts, starting with Skipper Frank, who's the third gent you see in this clip. Let me take them in order…

First up in the footage is our local Bozo the Clown, Vance Colvig. Vance was the son of the actor who first played Bozo, Pinto Colvig. In fact, just to keep this accurate, Pinto's full name was Vance DeBar Colvig and his son, who followed in his size 23 shoes, was Vance Colvig Junior. Junior did a lot of acting work out of the clown makeup and performed a novelty act where he played tunes on various parts of his anatomy. He was also the voice of Chopper the Bulldog on the Yakky Doodle cartoons.

Next up is a fast shot of Tom Hatten, who put on a sailor costume and hosted Popeye cartoons on KTLA, and in between them, he'd give little cartooning lessons. He's the only one of these guys who's still around, doing stage acting and working as an entertainment reporter for a local radio station.

And then last, we have Skipper Frank Herman. Skipper Frank did magic and ventriloquism and showed the same Bugs Bunny cartoons over and over and over. He had the most interesting show in the KTLA lineup because he would sometimes just talk to kids about how to get along in school or how to treat your parents right…and it was pretty sound, honest advice delivered without a hint of condescension. On the other hand, when he did a live commercial for some product, he was such a good communicator with young people that he practically hypnotized us into demanding our parents buy us whatever he was selling. That skill could have been dangerous in the wrong hands.

The brief footage you'll see is him making a personal appearance somewhere with one of his ventriloquist dummies. He had two, one of which replaced the other. There was a local mini-scandal in L.A. one day when Skipper Frank appeared at a supermarket opening or some such event and someone stole his dummy out of his car. There were public appeals for its return and they employed the same rhetoric one might use addressing kidnappers who held a child. It was very traumatic for the Skipper's audience. Newspapers reported that parents called the station complaining that it was making their kids hysterical with worry…and that was literally the last I heard of it. Apparently, they just decided to drop the matter and a week or so later, Skipper Frank introduced his new friend — a different wooden guy who had the same voice as the one who'd been abducted. (One of them — I forget which — was named Ziggy.)

Anyway, I've written an awful lot here to introduce 30 seconds of silent footage but as you can tell, I have fond memories and affection for these guys. This is also pretty rare film. The shows were done live and only a few hours were ever preserved in any way…and most of those were lost. Each of them did about nine years of programs, five days a week…and in total, less than an hour of any of it still exists. So here's a real quick peek at three guys who made a large chunk of my childhood fun. Or at least, less painful than it had to be…

Okay, here's the premise: Take "In Buddy's Eyes," which that Sondheim fella wrote for the musical Follies and rewrite the lyrics as if it were performed by and about Betty White. You got that? Fred Landau did the new words. I assume that's the same Fred Landau who wrote the book for the musical version of The Last Starfighter. And Broadway actress Mary Jay is the singer who does a great Betty White impression and that's all I know and all you need to know…

Here's a few minutes of Chipper Lowell, a comedy-magician I've seen a few times up at the Magic Castle in Hollywood. He does a fast-paced act (this is the slowest part of it) that always keeps the audience laughing from start to finish. Here, in a bit that other magicians seem to love, we see him mocking Criss Angel…

Don't you wish you could play a guitar like this?

When you have a spare seventeen minutes, watch this. It's author Malcolm Gladwell discussing the marketing genius of a fellow named Howard Moskowitz who among his other successes, made Ragú Spaghetti Sauce into a grand success. It's an abbreviated version of what Gladwell wrote about in this article. Anyone who's into marketing anything ought to hear this story and then read the article to find out more about it, including the exception to the premise of the tale as told in the video.