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You can now purchase Eric Idle's concert based on The Life of BrianNot the Messiah — in many forms. Here's a link to order the DVD. Here's a link to order the Blu-ray. Here's a link to order the CD. Soon, I will probably be offering a link that will arrange for Eric to come to your home and sing this little number in your patio.

The CD, by the way, is actually a CD-R, meaning that when you order a copy, they make one up special. There is apparently no mass-distribution CD release so you probably won't find it in your local CD store. That is, assuming you even have a local CD store.

Here's Eric leading us in song. Five more repackagings of this and I'm going to start to feel about Monty Python the same way I'm starting to feel about Cirque du Soleil.

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This one's a bit of a mystery. It's a Castle Film, meaning a commercial home movie release. It's a vast amount of musicians marching around and playing "76 Trombones" from Music Man, and at the end of the number, the gentleman you see conducting it all is Meredith Willson, who wrote that fine show. But what was this done for? The building they're marching around is CBS Television City at the corner of Fairfax and Beverly so I'm guessing it was done for some TV special in the early sixties…and that's all I know about it. Anyone else got any ideas?

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About every six months, I run into TV producer Leonard Stern at some event and I ask him what's up with the planned DVD release of I'm Dickens, He's Fenster. That was the one season (1962-1963) situation comedy starring John Astin and Marty Ingels as not-the-most-ept carpenters in the world.

A lot of shows I recall enjoying as a kid don't hold up very well years later. (Somewhere here, I must have mentioned my theory that all the old episodes of The Man From U.N.C.L.E. have been secretly refilmed to make them look cheap and clumsy.) But I'm Dickens, He's Fenster endures nicely, at least for me…a bit slapsticky but it's a good slapstick. Actor-bandleader Frank DeVol was especially funny in it.

Leonard Stern created the show and though it was but one of many credits, and he did others far more successful, I gather he still has a warm feeling for it. At least, he seems pleased when I ask about it and he always says, "Soon, we're close to a deal." I suspect that's wishful thinking but sometimes wishful thinking comes true.

Here's the pilot which sold the show…a somewhat typical episode, though it doesn't have nearly enough of Frank DeVol. No episode did. This one is somewhat redeemed with a nice, pre-Batgirl appearance by Yvonne Craig.

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Today's Video Link

More baby panda footage. This is exactly the way it went the first time my pediatrician gave me a physical…except, of course, that I was more adorable…

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This morn, I'm embedding five minutes out of the middle of the 1958 not-very-good science-fiction movie, Spacemaster X7. Why am I doing such a thing? Well, the whole thing's up on YouTube in pieces but you have much better things to do than watch it. Still, I thought you'd enjoy to see the great voice actor Paul Frees in one of his rare on-camera roles. Paul did thousands of movies, commercials and cartoon shows, the latter category including darn near everything Jay Ward ever did. He was Boris Badenov. He was Ludwig Von Drake. He was the Pillsbury Doughboy. He was the voice of the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland. He was everybody.

And here he is in this movie playing a scientist opposite actress Lyn Thomas. If I'd been the director of this film, I would have had someone else come in and redub Paul's entire part. Just to show him what it felt like.

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I thought I knew all or most of the Kellogg's cereal mascots but I didn't recall Tusk, an elephant who once shilled for Cocoa Krispies. Here's what must have been one of the few commercials to feature the character, whose voice was done by the greatest of all ventriloquists, Dr. Paul Winchell. The spot is a little bit out of sync but so was Paul.

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Hey, it's been a while since we had a video here of a baby panda. This is a red baby panda but the principle is the same: No matter how cute you are, a baby panda is cuter.

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From The Dick Cavett Show for June 13, 1969, Julius "Groucho" Marx favors us with a musical tribute to this day of days…

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This is an excerpt from Teaserama, a 1955 movie that filmed some then-current burlesque acts. Since you're not the least bit interested in the scenes of beautiful women taking off their clothes, we'll confine ourselves to these vignettes with two comics of the day, Dave Starr and Joe E. Ross. I don't know much about Mr. Starr but soon after this film was made, Mr. Ross was "discovered" by producer Nat Hiken and cast in the recurring role of Mess Sgt. Rupert Ritzik on You'll Never Get Rich (aka The Phil Silvers Show aka Sgt. Bilko). Hiken must have liked the guy because later when he produced Car 54, Where Are You?, he cast Ross as one of the two leads.

Ross was kind of a fascinating performer. He never quite forgot his roots in burlesque and in night clubs where he did a particularly filthy (for its time) act. For a time, he was the house comic at Billy Gray's Bandbox, a famous (then) nightclub on Fairfax Avenue here in Los Angeles, not far from where Canter's Delicatessen is now located. When he hit the big time, he'd get booked for live appearances where Middle American audiences would show up, expecting to see Gunther Toody from the TV show. Instead, they'd get Ross doing his old dirty act from the Bandbox and they'd all walk out in shock. He became impossible to work with — showing up late and never learning his lines — and Hiken fired him at least once from Car 54. The show only lasted two seasons but Hiken told associates that had there been a third, it would have been sans Joe E. Ross.

He got other work…like on the TV series, It's About Time. His catch-phrase ("Ooh! Ooh!") is still used by folks who've forgotten that it once belonged to him. He did voices for Hanna-Barbera cartoons and appeared in small roles in smaller movies. He died in 1982.

Sad/funny story about his death: He was hired for $100 to do a show in the recreation room of an apartment complex in Van Nuys where he was living. In the middle of his act, he was struck with a heart attack and died. After the funeral, comic legend Chuck McCann was asked by Ross's widow to go pick up the $100 for Joe E.'s final performance. McCann went and got the check but it was only for $50. "I thought it was supposed to be a hundred," Chuck told the guy who'd hired Ross. The employer said, "It was but he only finished half the show."

Here's the kind of stuff Joe E. Ross was doing before he became a big star…

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I assume most of you watch The Daily Show with Jon Stewart so I don't bother linking to every great bit they produce. Every so often though, there's one so pointed that it deserves extra attention. If you know someone who doesn't watch the show, make sure they see this one. It's all about the U.S. getting off foreign oil and becoming energy-independent…

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Sixteen years ago today, there was something on the news about O.J. Simpson…something about his wife and another person being murdered over in Brentwood and they said Simpson was a suspect. I was busy that day getting an assignment done and getting ready for a big dinner that evening to honor June Foray so I didn't pay much attention to stuff like this. (You may have to watch a brief commercial before you get to the stuff to which I didn't pay much attention…)

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That evening, a bunch of us were at this dinner…and I remember that though it wasn't strictly formal, I wore my tuxedo because I thought it would amuse June and also I'd forgotten to send my suit coats out to be dry-cleaned. We were milling during the pre-supper cocktail hour when someone came in and said, "O.J. Simpson's on TV! He's in a car and the police are chasing him and he's threatening to blow his brains out!" Well, there's a distraction. Everyone drifted (some scurried) out of that ballroom and over to an adjoining room where a TV was on. There, we saw news coverage like this. (You may have to watch a brief commercial before you get to the news coverage to which we did pay much attention…)

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Eventually, most drifted back to the reason we'd gone to that hotel that night, though many ducked in and out to watch, and we got periodic updates from the next room. I remember feeling sorry for June that her big evening was marred by this distraction…though if it bothered her, she sure didn't show it. I also remember thinking how what was on TV was surreal but it was even more surreal for me because I was wearing a tuxedo. I'm not sure I can explain why that is.

No one, I'm sure, realized we were witnessing Chapter One or Two (depending on how you count) of a spectacle that would consume our nation, change so many lives and call our entire system of justice into so much question. Amazingly, the "slow-speed chase" and Simpson's quasi-suicide note were barely mentioned in the subsequent criminal trial. The defense didn't want to mention them because they seemed to denote guilt. The prosecution didn't want to mention them because they feared they'd evoke sympathy. It was that kind of trial.

June had a very nice evening in spite of it.

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Stan Lee was on with Craig Ferguson last night and I thought the segment was terrific…

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What happens when a turtle somehow winds up on his back and can't get up? Well, if he's a lucky turtle, a friend will come by and help him…

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In December of 1964, Jim Henson and his crew of Muppeteers got an important booking on The Jack Paar Show, which was a weekly prime-time series Mr. Paar did after stepping down from The Tonight Show. After dress rehearsal, the puppet squad had plenty of time to kill so they decided to create a little something. In this clip from Dave Letterman's old NBC show, Paar tells the story and takes Dave to see what the Muppets left him…

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Actually, Paar was wrong. The creation hadn't been hidden quite that long. Many folks at NBC knew about it and it had actually been shown on TV before…but it's still quite a wonderful thing. More recently, it was decided that it should be shared with the world — or at least the part of the world that takes the NBC Tour. Here's a segment from The Today Show for last Tuesday…

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Today's Video Link

This is video of an astounding segment from one of those "World's Wildest Police Video Car Chase" thingies…or at least, I think it's astounding. It might just be astounding editing.

I briefly (very briefly) got hooked on TiVoing and watching these shows a few years ago until it hit me how utterly phony they were with their editing and especially their audio. This is supposed to be a "reality" show but I wonder how many viewers understood that every bit of the audio — narration, sirens, crashes, squealing tires, gunshots, etc. — was created in a studio somewhere long after the event. Even the words of the on-the-scene helicopter reporter were written and recorded later. (On the series this clip was taken from, they'd show a car chase in Miami and follow it with a car chase in Portland…and it would be the same reporter's voice. Betcha some folks never noticed.)

Once you're conscious of how the audio is unreal, it gets you naturally to wondering about the video. How honestly did they chop a much longer chase down to four minutes?

I'm not sure why anyone (myself included) watched this show. There's something compelling about following a live car chase on live TV. No one, but no one knows what's going to happen and no one's manipulating what you're seeing and you're as much a participant as anyone watching. But I think one of the reasons that certain kinds of "reality" shows like the one that aired this clip have died out is that viewers finally began to feel like they weren't getting reality. Does this clip show us something that really occurred? Probably to some extent but between the editing and the bogus audio, it might as well be fiction. And as fiction, it's too impersonal to be interesting…

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