Category Archives: Video Links

It's one of the funniest men who ever lived — Buster Keaton — in a commercial he did around 1964 for Ford vans…

This runs around ten minutes in two parts, and one should play after the other in the player I have expertly configured and embedded below for your dancing pleasure.

In 1995, Jerry Lewis stepped into the role of the Devil in a Broadway revival of Damn Yankees. My pal Paul Dini and I were there for his opening night and it was great fun. They warped the show a bit to let Jerry be Jerry, and ordinarily, we theater purists frown on such tampering. But in this one, it worked…or at least it did in the Marquis Theater in New York. Later, Jerry went on tour with it and from all reports, it began to seem less like the show that Adler and Ross wrote and more like one of Jer's earlier telethons. He broke character. He interpolated old bits from his night club act. He just carried on something awful…and most who went to see him loved it.

This clip is from the tour. It's the number, "Those Were the Good Old Days," which is his character's big solo in the second act. When Paul and I saw it, they'd added in the bit with the canes, which is a routine Jerry was doing on stages back in his Dino days, but he didn't stop and tell jokes and the whole thing was about half this length. The more he was in the show, the longer it got to the point where he dropped all pretense of playing Satan and just played Caesars Palace, if you know what I mean. Since I didn't see the show on tour, I have no idea if it threw things wildly out of balance or if audiences were able to leap out of the show, watch Jerry be Jerry for a while, then leap back into the show.

I know some people were outraged but in his defense, a few things should be said. One is that this was Damn Yankees, hardly the most sacred of texts. Secondly, the character of Applegate isn't in Damn Yankees all that much so if you put a legend in that part and you sell tickets on the strength of his stardom, some buyers of those tix are likely to feel cheated if he only does what's written. Thirdly, he's Jerry Lewis. Many of the ordinary rules do not apply.

Beyond that, you can judge for yourself. Personally, I think he overdoes it a little but if I'd gone to see this, I probably still would have had a great time. Then again, I'm not the author of Damn Yankees. If I were and I cared about more than the grosses, I might have gone after him and the director with a large pair of hedge trimmers.

When something's funny, it's even funny in Spanish…

From 1961 to 1964, there was a popular show on NBC called Sing Along With Mitch. Its host Mitch Miller had produced a vast number of hit records, many of which bore his name as the conductor of a male chorus. His TV program featured an hour each week of familiar tunes, and viewers were encouraged to sing along, aided by lyrics flashed on the screen. It was kind of like Karaoke except that no one but your family and neighbors had to listen to your rotten voice.

The show was produced in New York and Mr. Miller employed arrangers and performers he'd worked with there on his records. Nearly every "studio singer" ever heard on a Little Golden Record was involved but you never heard of most of his cast. The two exceptions were Leslie Uggams, who was a featured vocalist, and Bob McGrath. McGrath was just an occasionally-spotlighted member of the male chorus but he later gained great fame on Sesame Street.

The simplicity of Sing Along With Mitch appealed to America and it was a high-rated show for four years. Its ratings arguably justified a longer run but this was the period when networks began fretting about demographics — not how many viewers a show had but if they were within a certain young adult age bracket. The age of those singing along with Mitch was a bit too high for NBC and they got rid of the songfest when it was still winning its time slot. It was reported that Mr. Miller's reaction was not calm and that the show's fans were invited to Curse Along With Mitch.

Our clip below is the last ten minutes of an episode from '64. The show's finale usually consisted of the cast standing on stage, singing songs without the props, sets or costumes used in the rest of the program. They'd just stand there and sing…but to make things interesting, an unannounced celebrity would be slipped into the mix. As the camera panned the choir, viewers would watch and try to spot the familiar face. See if you can catch the surprise cameo guest in this one. And my thanks to Scott Edelman for telling me about this…

Air New Zealand has an ad campaign running — not in America, I guess — which features its employees clad only in body paint that simulates their working garb. It has something to do with having nothing to hide or not putting on frills or suggesting that you treat your flight attendants more as sex objects…or something. I won't pretend I understand it.

The motif has been carried over to the safety video they show you on some flights…thereby creating the only safety video that most passengers will ever actually watch. Whether they'll hear anything the people are saying is another question…

This clip's a little outta sync but it almost doesn't matter. It's George Carl on a vintage Johnny Carson Tonight Show, with Mr. Carl doing the act he did so well for around seventy years. I'm not sure if I've linked to a version of this before since Carl usually did pretty much the same portions of his longer act any time he got booked on television. He did at least two other appearances with Johnny and did the exact same bits…and Carson loved it every time.

Well, whether I've linked to this before or not, here's one of the funniest human beings I've ever had the privilege to see…

You're not going to watch much, if any of this link. I'm only embedding it because, well, I can. And I thought you might like to hear the story that went with it.

In early 1976, I was teamed with a bright gent named Dennis Palumbo and together, we were one of a bazillion up-and-coming comedy-writing teams skulking about Hollywood, waiting for a break to find us. Nothing we'd written had made it to a TV screen yet but we were getting a rep and we'd gotten some good agents…and there were folks at studios and networks who looked favorably, they claimed, on our work. And I guess they did because we were being offered jobs.

Our representatives called and told us to report to a screening room at ABC to view a new, as-yet-unaired pilot. We so reported and were shown a two-hour TV-movie called The Love Boat — an anthology starring as the ship's crew, Dick Van Patten, Terri O'Mara and a whole bunch of other actors who would not be in the subsequent series. After the viewing, which was just for Dennis and me, we met Dawn Aldredge and Marion C. Freeman, who were the writing team that was developing the project. Here is what they told us…

ABC liked the pilot but had major problems with the cast and with the show's level of sophistication. The latter was all over the place, inconsistent from one segment to the next. What we'd just been shown might never air. A few months later, it did, though heavily re-edited to try and correct that inconsistency.

In the meantime, ABC had ordered another Love Boat pilot — another two-hour TV movie which, like the one we'd just seen, would interweave four separate stories. The ship's crew would be completely recast and they were about to sign Sandy Duncan to play the cruise director, who'd been tentatively named Sandy. (I have no idea what happened there.)

The plan at that moment was to make this a racy, adult series with way more sex than had ever been featured before on network TV. It would probably not become a weekly hour series but would more likely be a string of more two-hour movies. They'd run from time to time in some unspecified late night berth that didn't yet exist — maybe on Saturday nights from 10 PM 'til Midnight, changing forever the whole parameters of customary network time slots and on-screen sexuality. What's more, the material might be filmed and edited in two forms. The one that would air on ABC would feature adult themes and brief nudity. Another version, featuring more adult language and more nudity, would probably be released overseas, perhaps even as theatrical films.

Anyway, Dennis and I were hired at a nice fee to write one of the segments for the second Love Boat pilot, and we came up with a story about a bunch of frat boys who go for a cruise. One of them is a virgin…a condition which causes the lad to be much-mocked by his buddies to the point where the whole ship gets to talking about it. Before long, strangers are even giggling at him and wagering as to whether he'll become a Real Man by the time the ship makes port. All of this ratchets up the pressure on Danny (as we called him) to score and he tries like crazy, making an increasingly-grander fool of himself with the ladies upon whom he hits.

Finally, on the night before the ship docks, he gives up and it's only then, when he drops the Blitzkrieg approach, that he meets a woman who likes him without his tricks and "lines." They spend that last night together and it's so wonderful that when it comes time to disembark and his friends ridicule him for having spent a whole week on the guaranteed-to-get-you-laid Love Boat without being deflowered, he doesn't tell them otherwise. He and the lady go their separate ways with nice memories, uncheapened by him bragging to his pals.

We handed in our script and everyone said they liked it. One exec at ABC was so impressed that it helped us land our jobs as story editors on Welcome Back, Kotter, which in turn kept us from writing more for Love Boat. But our script was not filmed for the second two-hour Love Boat TV movie or even the third. We were told that the network was balking at making the franchise as "adult" as had been planned and that our script would be "ruined" if it had to be rewritten to the current-but-likely-to-loosen standards. It was being held, we were told, until the network would allow two people to have sex without them either being married or deciding to immediately get that way.

And indeed, that script was not ruined until Love Boat became a weekly one-hour series. It aired at 9 PM and all talk of making it close to R-rated subsided. Someone rewrote darn near every word of our effort to fit the much-less-naughtier motif. Robert Hegyes, with whom we worked on Kotter, was grossly miscast as the boy. We'd written the role for someone frail and innocent…no actor in mind but we were thinking, like, a younger Gene Wilder maybe?

The lady with whom he finally canoodles was to be played by someone who was not a star. That was because she was supposed to more or less come out of nowhere and apart from a parting exchange of smiles on the dock, she would disappear after. At least, that's what everyone understood when we wrote it. But ABC now wanted billable names in their show so they got Maureen McCormack of The Brady Bunch and then they had to give her scenes earlier in the story to establish her presence and make sure Maureen got enough to do.

The biggest change, of course, was that the one-night stand could not be a one-night stand because, though that's apparently what the real Love Boats were mainly about, there were none then on network television. The boy and girl had to have a real relationship that was likely to culminate in wedlock. So the rewriters rewrote such that Danny and the lady turned out to be friends from school (it had briefly slipped his mind) and they were going to continue dating after the cruise and probably get married. Not at all what our story was about.

By the time it aired, Dennis and I felt pretty distanced from it all. It was a nice credit since the weekly Love Boat series was a pretty big hit but there were only two lasting remnants for me from the experience. One was that after Dennis and I decided to go our separate ways, I teamed up for a time with Marion Freeman and worked on a couple of shows, and she's still a good friend. And every so often, I get a Love Boat residual check for about a buck-eighty.

Embedded below is the entire hour episode. Our heavily-rewritten script is entwined with two other scenarios…and I'm really not suggesting you view it. I didn't, except the first minute or so, just to see if the type font of the writer credits was actually as hard to read as I recalled. It was, which coupled with how briefly our names were on the screen, may have been a blessing. I believe all the credited folks complained and Love Boat later changed fonts and increased screen time of their credits. In any case, the link below may require you to sit through an ad before it plays…in which case, I would really recommend you not watch it. But I put it there because I could and because I thought you'd enjoy the story that leads up to it. You've read it so now you can find something better on the Internet to watch…like this, for instance.

In the U.K., one must pay one's Road Tax, which is a tax for driving one's car. This has been suggested for California but I suspect we'll see a tax on breathing in this state before we see one on driving.

Anyway, across the pond they not only collect this tax, they do clever commercials to encourage folks to come across with their fees. Here's one that uses a tune that regular readers of this blog are probably sick of by now. Thanks to Tony Redman for the tip.

There's a crime wave in progress. Be on the lookout…

It's going to be a Beaker kind of week…

It seems like months since Ed McMahon died but it was actually only two celebrity deaths ago…three, if you count the lead singer of The Seeds. Here's a tribute that ran on Conan O'Brien's version of The Tonight Show. I think you'll have to watch a brief commercial before it plays but that's only fitting. Ed did a lot of commercials…

Speaking of creepy things…we have here a nice three-and-a-half minute montage of horror movie hosts from around the country, more or less in the late-seventies or early-eighties, I believe. There are some nice bits in there with Elvira and Zacherle, two of the best, and some stuff from folks I'd never heard of.

Before you go looking for it: There's nothing in there of Larry "Seymour" Vincent, who had that job description in Los Angeles from 1969 to 1974 on KHJ and then KTLA. He was enormously funny and clever…and though he was on TV an awful lot, there doesn't seem to be any tape anywhere of the guy in action. Because of this article I wrote about him, I get an inquiry or two a month, sometimes from fans who are dying to see him again, sometimes from folks doing documentaries or retrospectives. I always tell them, "I don't know of any. If you come across footage of Seymour, please let me know." I've been saying that for eight years here and apparently no footage has ever turned up. Or at least, no one's let me know.

There aren't even many photos of him. The above pic is one I took on his set around 1971. What a shame such a fine body of work has been lost. Here are some of his fellow horror hosts in action…

Vince Waldron told me about this and it should be fascinating…but so far, neither he nor I have had the attention span to make it all the way through.

It's a never-broadcast promotional film for Desilu Studios, from back in the days when Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball owned half the television industry. Westinghouse was one of their biggest sponsors so Desi and Lucy starred in this tour of their operation that was designed to show appliance dealers how Westinghouse was going to be selling washing machines like crazy. I think this was done in early 1958 and it runs a little less than half an hour. It's been posted to YouTube in three parts and they should play, one after the other, in the window I've embedded below. Thanks, Vince.

We need something up here that has nothing to do with anybody dying today. So here's one of the funniest guys I know, Pete Barbutti, from an old Tonight Show appearance…

Here's an oddly-stylized Donald Duck selling the 1955 Hudson automobile. Since they stopped making Hudsons two years later, maybe Donald wasn't such a great idea as a spokesduck…