Category Archives: Video Links

A few minutes with Mr. S. Sondheim…

This is from an event staged in 2002 by what is now the Paley Center for Media. Several folks from The Daily Show — including Jon Stewart, Steve Carell and Stephen Colbert — are answering questions. Mr. Colbert tells a funny tale of a field piece he did one time for the program…

And, speaking of Jack Davis…

From last year's Chabad Telethon: Mike Burstyn, who keeps alive the tradition of the Yiddish Music Hall performer, favors us with "Hutzaza." You're not allowed to be a Yiddish Music Hall style performer unless you can sing this song — and you also have to be willing to be introduced by Larry King…

The other day, Bill O'Reilly slapped a Congressman around for saying that Fox News was spreading the lie that if you don't buy health insurance, you'll go to jail. Here's an excerpt from that discussion and it's followed by…well, you can guess what it's followed by…

It's been a while since I had one of these up here. It's a Kellogg's commercial featuring the vocal stylings of the great Daws Butler. Daws even gets a credit at the end, not because he deserved it (though of course, he did) but because Bert Lahr threatened to sue, charging that people would think he was the voice of Snagglepuss. As I told a class of aspiring cartoon voice actors recently, Daws was great at making boring copy sound interesting…

I linked to a poor copy of this long ago. Here's a much better look at an incredible dance number that was done on the 1985 special, Night of 100 Stars. It runs eight and a half minutes and is well worth watching from beginning to end. It features a few dozen of the best hoofers they could round up…and it's sad to think that today, if you could conscript everyone you wanted, you couldn't possibly put together such a collection of famous hoofers. (By the way: You'll see each star's name superimposed when he or she appears…all but Dick Van Dyke.That's because that was not his first appearance on the special. He was in an earlier section of it. And though the premise of the number is that red shoes are somehow magical and that all great dancers wear red shoes, I have no idea why Christopher Walken seems to be the only one not wearing red shoes.)

Voice actor Bob Bergen spotted this. It's a clip from the House of Mouse cartoon show that the Disney studio did from 2001 to 2003 — a cute little number but that's not why I'm linking it your way. It's because it features Jiminy Cricket as voiced by our pal, the late Eddie Carroll. I've written here a lot about Eddie's uncanny Jack Benny impersonation but he did a lot of other things and one was that in 1973, he took over the role of Jiminy following the death of its originator, Cliff "Ukulele Ike" Edwards. That made Eddie, at the time of his death, the longest-running voice of any Disney character, I believe.

It really is a great replica of a voice that can't have been easy to match because it was so natural. As you'll hear though, Eddie did a great job of it…

I don't know if you've been following the latest in a never-ending, never-addressed series of sex scandals involving Catholic priests and underage boys but it's pretty ugly, especially because the response from The Vatican seems to be along the lines of, "Keep moving…nothing to see here." Until the next one and the one after that and the one after that. Maureen Dowd and Andrew Sullivan (Catholics, both) have written pieces of eloquent outrage demanding action and decrying the Pope's apparent attitude, which is that the Church can handle this matter internally…and would probably handle it by doing not the right thing but the least embarrassing.

Not being of that faith, I won't pretend I fully understand its internal policies and if there's any remote justification for dealing with the crimes in this manner. But I sure can't imagine what they might be. Pope Benedict XVI may well have to resign over this…and if he doesn't, he's going to have to do something big to tell the world that the Church is changing; that it cares about its followers more than about its own officials. I don't have an idea what that might be — but Sarah Silverman does…

The witty Barry Mitchell chats, ever so briefly, with Meinhardt Raabe, the just-deceased Munchkin Coroner.The fellow doing the introducing is Jerry Maren, who was also in The Wizard of Oz and was also Little Oscar…

This runs close to an hour so you may not want to watch it…but if you do, here it is. It's an interview with the World's Foremost Authority, "Professor" Irwin Corey, on a cable access show.The interviewer is not likely to make Charlie Rose sweat the competition but Corey — at age 96 for cryin' out loud — is pretty sharp and pretty interesting. (And there's probably a freeze-frame below that reminds us of the first rule if you're going to do a TV interview show: Know enough about your guest to spell his name right.)

Here's yet another spiffy rendition of "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang" and it's accompanied by wonderful animation…

Jeff Hoover's the guy on WGN TV in Chicago who did that video that I still think is the funniest Jerry Lewis parody I've ever seen…with the possible exception of Jerry himself the last decade or so. Well, Mr. Hoover is back again to do it to Christopher Walken…

Here…take six minutes and "meet" my friend Eddie Carroll, who passed away this morning from a nasty brain tumor. As I mentioned, Eddie toured the nation in a one-man show where he portrayed Jack Benny — and while there don't seem to be any clips from that online, he tells a nice story about the man in this one. It was taped last year at a function of the Radio Enthusiasts of Puget Sound (REPS), which is a group that preserves and honors vintage radio programming. Eddie was a frequent guest and participant at such groups and also at Disney fan gatherings because of taking over the job of voicing Jiminy Cricket. So he's being mourned in both circles tonight…

Stubby Kaye, dressed for some reason as a cop, sings "Sit Down You're Rockin' the Boat" on a 1970 edition of The Rolf Harris Show. Mr. Harris is best known in this country, of course, for his hit record of "Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport" but he had a lot of popular shows on British television and I guess this clip is from one of them…