Those of you who (like me) have cancelled your season pass for Late Night with Jimmy Fallon might want to record Wednesday night. Jimmy's guests will include, it says, "Monty Python."
And Thursday morning, the guest list on Live with Regis and Kelly includes John Cleese, Eric Idle and Michael Palin. There's also something about them on the Today show on NBC but I don't know if it's an appearance or just a news item or what. (Odd that they're not turning up on Letterman. Or maybe they are with a surprise Top Ten list or something…)
All of this is a prelude to the Python Reunion in New York on Thursday night and the debut of the six-hour documentary, Monty Python: Almost the Truth (The Lawyer's Cut), which debuts on IFC on Sunday night. In fact, IFC is running a mess of Python films over the next week or so: Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Monty Python's Life of Brian and Monty Python Live at the Hollywood Bowl. If you look really, really fast at Monty Python: Live at the Hollywood Bowl and use a microscope on a huge Plasma screen, you can see me in the audience. I'm the one not dressed as Mr. Gumby.
How can you resist a movie called Sex Kittens Go To College? It was a terrible movie. Every movie ever produced by Albert Zugsmith was a terrible movie. (He was also a terrible lawyer. He was the guy who represented Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster in the forties when they sued DC Comics over Superman.) But this film had Mamie Van Doren, who in her prime was only the sexiest movie star of her day, and there was a scenery-devouring performance by Louis Nye that every actor should study to see what it's possible to do with dreadful material. At least, take a look at the trailer and note that the opening voiceover, which I guess is supposed to be the chimp talking, is by Mel Blanc. (There are three other announcers in there and I think the male voice after Mel's is William Woodson.)
I don't know how many of you are familiar with a very silly man named Dayton Allen. Dayton was a member of Steve Allen's little stock company of funny people and he was one of the main performers (voicing puppets and playing characters) on Howdy Doody. He also did a lot of cartoon voice work including all or almost all of the voices on Deputy Dawg and was heard in a lot of commercials.
Around 1960, he did a whole series of little 5-minute TV shows that looked like they were shot for about a dollar each. The more elaborate ones may have cost two dollars. They also sold for very little money and a lot of TV stations around the country bought them, figuring it would be handy to have that kind of "filler" material around. If a movie ran 75 minutes, you could drop in a couple of Dayton Allen shows to pad out the time and start the next show on the half-hour. They were easy to watch and the canned laughter sure enjoyed them a lot. Needless to say, we have an example of one here…
Last week, Turner Classic Movies ran (and I TiVoed) There's a Girl in My Soup, a 1970 movie starring Peter Sellers and Goldie Hawn. It was one of those "romantic comedies" where two people who seem like they don't belong together meet and eventually fall in love, then fight, then fall in love some more, etc. The only unique thing about this one was that…
…they don't wind up together at the end. I saw it when it first came out and all I could remember was that Peter Sellers played an arrogant putz, that Goldie Hawn walked around naked for about four seconds, and that the opening titles were kinda bouncy and cute. I couldn't even remember if, apart from the four seconds and the titles, I even liked it.
So I watched it again last night. I liked the four seconds, the titles and not much else. Here's everything I liked except for the four seconds…
Several people have written to ask me what I know about this. Answer: Very little. In 1967, the Hanna-Barbera studio produced an unsold (and apparently, unaired) pilot called The World — Color It Happy. It was to be a kind of anthology show mixing live-action and animation segments…and they brought in some formidable talent, starting with Hal David and Burt Bacharach to write the theme song, and Jack Jones to sing it.
Woody Allen was also involved, contributing a spy spoof. In this video clip, which just shows the opening and end credits, you'll see him listed, plus he also gets a writer credit along with veteran animation writers Michael Maltese and Charlie Shows. Makes me wonder if this is the source of an urban legend I used to hear around the halls of Hanna-Barbera when I worked there years later. The story was that Woody Allen had been hired to write an episode of The Flintstones and had handed in an unusable script that was essentially a Honeymooners episode set in the stone age. Among the things wrong with it was that it presumed the limited-animation Barney Rubble was capable of an extended pantomime scene a la Art Carney, and that it was all set in one room for the entire half hour. This never happened and Joe Barbera even told me it had never happened…but a lot of people believed it.
Hanna and Barbera themselves were to be the hosts in animated form. They were caricatured in a Jetsons-like opening (I think those are Iwao Takamoto designs) but they didn't do their own voices. Hanna's is done by Bill Idelson, who was famous for playing in the Vic and Sade radio show, and later in the role of Herman on TV for The Dick Van Dyke Show. Barbera's is done by veteran announcer Art Gilmore, who also did the rest of the voiceover on this opening. Also in the cast was actress Laraine Day, who just happened to be married to the show's producer, Michael Grilikhes. You can read the rest of the credits for yourselves.
The show did not sell, for which I heard (second-hand, so take this for what it's worth) that Barbera blamed "too many chefs," both in his studio and at the network. That was the reason Joe gave for most projects that failed, which doesn't mean it wasn't applicable. The whole thing was instigated by execs at Taft Broadcasting, which was the conglomerate that bought the Hanna-Barbera studio in '67. They reportedly were eager to turn their new purchase into the Disney studio and decided to start by imitating Disney's popular Sunday night show on NBC, which at the time was named Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color. Not only did the H-B version have a name that sounded similar but it also employed Paul Frees as a voice guy. Frees was heard often on the Disney series in many roles, including its occasional host, Ludwig Von Drake.
And that's about all I know about it. Take a look at this brief excerpt. It seems so lacking in focus that it doesn't surprise me it didn't sell…
And here's a video that someone showed us while we were at the Garfield offices. It started off to be a pitch to adopt this cat named Pinky and it turned into a fight for survival…
Eric Idle discusses (i.e., promotes) a recent show…the latest in the endless stream of ways they've found to repackage the joys of Monty Python for our purchasing opportunities.
Among some fans of the Three Stooges, it is almost blasphemy to say you liked Shemp…and if you dare utter a loving word about Joe Besser, someone will want to poke you in the eyes and run a saw across your scalp. To these folks, Curly was the only Third Stooge and his replacements were forever guilty of the unpardonable sin of not being Curly. But I really liked Shemp and I think one of the reasons most of the films featuring Shemp weren't as wonderful was because of their budgets and scripts…not because of which guy was appearing alongside Larry and Moe. Across the long history of the Stooges' Columbia shorts, the budgets just got leaner and leaner, and there was less spent on location shoots and stunts and a greater reliance on one-set quickies with stock footage. The whole market for short comedies was in steady decline and their films would probably have gotten worse and worse even if Curly had been in them.
I'll even risk bodily harm by saying that Joe Besser was just about the best thing that could have happened to the act. By the time he replaced Shemp, the films had very little to offer in terms of production values and new ideas, and Moe and Larry were getting kinda tired. Besser, with his infectious energy, was a nice shot of adrenalin for a dying franchise. He pretty much carried every film he was in — and given how cheap and repetitive they were, that amounted to a lot of heavy lifting. He was a very funny man, as he proved both with the Stooges and in his many appearances apart from them.
Here's an old clip of my buddy Ronn Lucas on one of the many Smothers Brothers shows. One night in a restaurant in Laughlin, Nevada, he and I were sitting and talking about his various routines and he started doing this thing he does (you'll see it in the video) where he essentially talks out of sync with himself. It's quite eerie in person and when a busboy came by to refill my water glass and heard it, he missed the glass and poured the water into my lap. I tipped him extra for it.
Folks keep telling me that Glee is a great TV show…and it may well be. But so far, the entire run of episodes is sitting unwatched on my TiVo, pending sufficient time to start viewing them. Here's a little segment on an appearance by Kristin Chenoweth. The blond and bearded gent playing the piano for her is Brad Ellis, who works on the show both behind the scenes and on-camera. About half the time when I write song lyrics for cartoons or club acts, Brad's the guy who writes the music. If he ever hits a period in his life when everyone in the world isn't hiring him to arrange or play music, Brad and I are going to write that musical we keep talking about. In the meantime, you may be amused to hear Ms. Chenoweth be compared to Jesus Christ. I think Jesus was a little taller and not quite as adept at show tunes.
Here ya go: Another hit from Big Daddy, the musical group that used to take contemporary hits and render them in some style from the fifties. Here's what they did to "Hotel California"…
It's really annoying at a play when some audience member's cell phone goes off. Here, we see how Hugh Jackman and Daniel Craig deal with that happening not once but twice in a recent performance of A Steady Rain on Broadway.
I must shamefully admit that I once had my phone go off during a show — a performance of the Follies revival a few years ago, also on Broadway. I had turned the thing off but it was in my shirt pocket and I guess when I folded my arms, I bumped it back on. Fortunately, our seats were far enough from the stage that the actors didn't hear it and get thrown. But I was so mortified that I didn't just quickly turn it off. I pulled the back of the phone off and yanked out the battery.
That was my old cell phone and for the rest of the time I had it, when I was somewhere one should not ring, I pulled out the battery. When I upgraded, I made sure to get one that was less likely to power up by accident…and when I go to a show now, I put it on "silent" and then turn it off. Just in case.
Here's what happened with Mr. Jackman and Mr. Craig. And by the way: The person whose phone went off was not the most flagrant disruptor of the rules that day. The person taking this video was.
This is a fan video that someone made regarding Jack Lord and the TV series, Hawaii Five-O. The visuals are of no consequence but the audio's worth a listen. It's a recording of the theme with lyrics, performed on a old record by Sammy Davis Jr. It's an example of the kind of work he did that led to a famous roast line — I forget who uttered it but it was so spot-on that it was hilarious — "You know, Sammy…you're allowed to turn things down."
I don't know the entire history of this song. A gentleman named Morton Stevens, who did music for the show, composed it, including the words I believe. I'm not sure if he wrote it for the series or if it was something he already had around and used for that purpose. But there were a number of recordings of it, including this one by Sammy and another one with the lyrics as performed by Don Ho. It sure was a great TV theme…as an instrumental. Most TV show themes have lyrics even if they were never used on the air.
The Mission: Impossible lyrics are pretty awful, though not as bad as the Odd Couple lyrics. At one time or another, Sammy Davis probably performed them all. Somewhere here, I have a recording of him doing the theme from My Mother, the Car, including the second stanza, which was never heard on the show. (It begins, "Well, everything my daddy never was / That's what she wants me to be / She's taken her place / As the fifth member of my small family.")
Every so often, I catch an old Hawaii Five-O in rerun. Some of them are quite good in spite of their repetitive nature. Years ago, I wrote this article about that. Here's Sammy…
In 1964, Jim Henson wrote and produced and starred in and directed and probably took the film to his nearby Fotomat to get it developed…all for a short he called Time Piece. It made the rounds of colleges and art houses and got nominated for an Academy Award it didn't win the following year. It runs a bit under nine minutes and it's a good indicator of the sheer creativity of the guy. See if you don't agree…
