Category Archives: Video Links

One of my favorite Broadway-type performers, Brian Stokes Mitchell, performs at the memorial service for Ted Kennedy. At some point, this song became something of a joke among musical comedy folks — not that there was anything wrong with it but every male vocalist was singing it, especially on auditions. Performed in that context — in any context without the proper emotional setting — it seems pretentious and overly melodramatic…and a lot of folks who thought they had the chops for it clearly did not.

However, every so often, you get the perfect match of singer and context. Here is one such match…

From The Kraft Music Hall for January 14, 1959: Host Milton Berle does a musical number with Harpo Marx. It's a nice little spot that reminds me why I always loved Harpo and rarely found Uncle Miltie all that funny. It's that fierce insistence that every ounce of attention has to be on him, no matter who else is on the stage and what they're doing. But it's still worth seeing…

You probably won't want to watch all of this, either. It's almost an hour and back when we watched this in junior high school, it felt like it ran about eleven weeks.

This is Our Mr. Sun, a film made for the Bell Science Series in the fifties. Frank Capra directed and is credited as writer, though it's believed that others, including Willy Ley, did a lot of it. Bill Hertz directed the animated sequences, which were produced by the UPA Cartoon Studio. The live-action material features Dr. Frank C. Baxter and Eddie Albert, and the cartoon voices were done by Marvin Miller, Sterling Holloway and at least one other person…

Among folks who study voicework, there seems to be some argument as to whether the role of Father Time was actually performed, as credited, by Lionel Barrymore in his final acting gig. The skepticism probably flows from the fact that Mr. Barrymore passed away in November of 1954 and this film debuted on television in November of 1956. That seems like too much lead time for it to have been Barrymore…but research has determined that Capra finished the film in April of '54. So it could easily have been Lionel Barrymore and probably was.

Even though it preempted a pretty boring teacher back in junior high, I found the movie agonizing in its ability to cause my eyes to glaze over and my eyelids to plunge. It's a bit more interesting to me today, though only a bit. It now has the interesting aspect that you can score its predictions about energy usage and production as to their accuracy. Some hold up pretty well but there are a few wild pitches in there…

You probably won't make it through this one but here it is if you want to peek. This is Where There's Smokey, an unsold TV pilot produced by Desilu in 1959. It stars Soupy Sales as a bumbling fireman and Gale Gordon as his long-suffering chief, and I wonder if it was ever humanly possible to make something funny out of the premise of a bumbling fireman. Rod Amateau, who directed it and co-wrote, later did some pretty successful shows ranging from The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis all the way to The Dukes of Hazzard, but you can kinda see why this one didn't sell. It was a pretty complete flop in '59 and for a long time, they didn't even play it off on one of those "Vacation Playhouse" anthologies the networks used to run, airing unsold pilots in the summer.

Eventually, Soupy was popular enough from his other work that they aired it on one of them around 1966. As a loyal Soupy fan, I remember watching it and being pretty disappointed. I was also puzzled at first by the presence of Mr. Gordon, who was by then a fixture on The Lucy Show and in no need of another series. That was before I realized I was watching something that had been on the shelf for a long time.

You might want to watch a little. Jack Weston and Louise Glenn are in there, plus there's narration by Paul Frees. The player below should run the whole show in three parts…but I'll bet you don't watch all three. Thanks to some reader of this site named "OM" for letting me know about this one.

To the long list of things I never would have expected, add this: The musical version of The Producers is a big hit in Germany. I'm told it has a lot to do with a younger generation of German who has learned to move past the shame of the Hitler era and into actively mocking it. To the extent that's true, perhaps it's a good thing but I don't pretend to really understand it. Whatever the reason, they seem to love it. Here are some snippets from the production now playing in Berlin, as performed on a popular talk show…

And while we're at it, here's a commercial for that production…

The Barbershop Quartet chorus in yesterday's video link is called The Masters Ambassadors of Harmony. Here they are again, this time with the theme from "Man of La Mancha."

Ladies and gentlemen…I give you the 2009 International Barbershop Chorus Champions performing a rendition of "Seventy-Six Trombones" that I think would have made Meredith Willson very happy. Stick with it 'til the end for some fancy staging tricks…

Here, for no particular reason, is an old clip of Mort Sahl on some TV show in 1967. I think I hear Steve Allen laughing in the background so that may explain where the clip's from. This is a short version or excerpt from a much longer routine that Sahl was doing at the time…a pretty funny one, as I recall. One night he was on a local show in Los Angeles and they let him just go on and on with it, and it must have run a half-hour, uninterrupted by commercials. I remember it as being pretty darned brilliant.

Comic Pete Barbutti plays "Tenderly" on the broom.

Hey, I wanna make a suggestion to someone. There are eighty-seven thousand people running around these with high-def home video cameras and the desire to make some sort of documentary about something. I dunno what Pete's up to lately — haven't spoken to him in years — but someone oughta sit this guy down in front of a camera and capture some of his great anecdotes about working Vegas or working in clubs. Funniest storyteller I've ever met.

From 1969, we have a 26 minute film of historic note. It's the "pitch" that sold Sesame Street, explaining what it would be and why it was necessary. There's some nice Muppet stuff in there and some samples of early segments for what would become one of the most important TV shows ever done…

B.B. King visits Sesame Street and sings about his favorite letter…

How about a good Yiddish folk song as performed by two great song-and-dance men of the Yiddish Theater? Here are Mike Burstyn and the late Bruce Adler (Adler's the one on the left) with "Rumania, Rumania." Years ago in an aberration of my life known as Hebrew School, I actually knew most of what this song was about…

I have long told you here that nothing in the world is cuter than a baby panda. Well, I stand corrected. Even cuter is a baby panda being adopted by a mother cat…

This is the trailer for The Beatniks, a 1960 exploitation movie that was apparently filmed on a budget about equal to what I spent on Snickers bars that year. I never made it through the entire picture — if you want to try, it's available on DVD — but it has that campy, Jack Webb "the kids today are bums" message that I guess was commercial with some segment of the population back before "the kids today" were the primary audience.

You may notice that the voiceover on this trailer is by the legendary Paul Frees. Paul did some narration for schlocky projects but this may well be the schlockiest. How did they land him for the job? Well, it may have something to do with the fact that this movie was directed and co-written by Paul Frees…

Today's offering is an episode of Love on a Rooftop, a one-season sitcom on ABC that debuted in September of '66 and was gone by the following April. In 1971, when its star Peter Deuel was having something of a hit with a series called Alias Smith and Jones, someone at ABC had the bright idea of rerunning Love on a Rooftop for a while…and audiences didn't watch it then, either.

Deuel played an architect who was way too serious for his own good, and a pre-Laugh-In Judy Carne played his new wife, who was more passionate, and they lived in a cheap, tiny apartment. In many ways, it reminded one of the Neil Simon play, Barefoot in the Park, which was about a lawyer who was way too serious for his own good, and his new wife, who was more passionate…and they also lived in a cheap, tiny apartment.

Pete and Judy's characters had a lot of trouble with her parents, who for some reason didn't have British accents even though their daughter did. I guess there was some line in the first episode about how she'd picked one up when she went away to school in London but it sure didn't make them seem like much of a family. The newlyweds' best friends and neighbors were played by Rich Little and Barbara Bostock and I also never understood why anyone selected Rich Little for a role that didn't involve impressions. He threw one in once in a while but it was still kinda like…well, like hiring Rich Little for a role that didn't involve impressions.

I watched this show for a while because at that age, I had an enormous crush on Judy Carne. Eventually, even that wasn't enough to keep me tuning in. But it's interesting to watch it now because it really screams S*I*X*T*I*E*S in a big way. And this particular episode was wholly stolen by guest Dick Gautier, who was concurrently playing Hymie the Robot on Get Smart. It's a bit out of sync (with the voices and with the era) but you may find it of interest…