Category Archives: Video Links

Hey, it's been eleven days since we had a video clip here of someone singing the theme from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Time to rectify that glaring oversight…

Here's Stan Lee on a 1977 Canadian talk show talking about, among other things, how Spider-Man is like Woody Allen. I don't think any of the story points that Stan describes ever actually appeared in a Marvel Comic, at least when he was editor, but that's not the point. The point is that he's always been a good promoter for the industry and especially for his corner of it. A large chunk of Marvel's success was because of interviews like this one.

Here's a rerun…one of the first videos I embedded here and one of the hardest to get out of your brain after you hear it…

I really liked the parody that Neil Patrick Harris sung at the close of the Tony Awards last night so here it is for those who missed it. The lyrics were by Marc Shaiman and and Scott Wittman, and I'm wondering how many different versions they had ready. The winners in those categories weren't a huge surprise so I don't think they bothered writing lines for every possible outcome. But a couple of those awards could have gone to others so they had to be prepared.

Speaking of musical comedies! There's a new one based on the movie, Sister Act which starred Whoopi Goldberg. Ms. Goldberg is not in the new show but she's a producer of it, and it just opened in London to pretty decent reviews. Sister Act: The Musical has a score by Alan Menken and lyrics by Glenn Slater, with a book by my longtime friends, Bill and Cheri Steinkellner. Here's a website with more info and here's one of the numbers from the show, which I hope will come closer so I can see it…

If you're readying your TiVo for the Tony Awards tomorrow, you might also want to snag Mr. Prince, a documentary/interview about the great Broadway producer-director, Harold Prince. It debuts tonight on the Ovation network and reruns many a time over the coming weeks. I've haven't seen it but the man's career has been so interesting, it's hard to imagine this show won't be.

What's that you say? You don't get the Ovation network on your set? Well, you might want to check and make sure because I didn't think I did, either. Turns out I do. I just found out about it and gave its schedule a quick once-over. Looks like a good channel to have if you love infomercials and a minimal amount of actual programming.

Here, if I've embedded it properly, is a preview of Mr. Prince…

Australian Raymond Crowe bills himself as an "unusualist." Take a look at what he does…

This is kinda interesting, though you may not want to watch all of it. We're big fans here of the movie musical version of Li'l Abner. The movie was shot for the widescreen VistaVision process and its cinematographer framed its images accordingly. But when they run it these days on Turner Classic Movies, they use a print that has not been cropped for VistaVision format; that shows more of the top and bottom of each shot than was intended. As a result, you see a lot of boom mikes and lights and tops of backdrops and such. Someone has compiled about eight minutes of these cropping malfunctions…

Skip E. Lowe is a local star of cable and public access TV and local club revues. He's been doing celebrity interviews for something like 35 years and he's pretty good at it. Here's a chat with Arthur Marx, son of Groucho and a pretty successful comedy writer in his own right…

In the eighties, master ventriloquist Paul Winchell made some appearances where he "aged" his two main dummies, Jerry Mahoney and Knucklehead so he could do material about how they'd all gotten older. For reasons I'm not sure I can explain, the bit he often did with the older version of Knucklehead was all about "Knuck" coming out of not just the suitcase but the closet and admitting he was gay.

Here's a clip of part one of his routines with Jerry in which they lip-sync to a song Winch recorded many years earlier. There are a couple of interesting things about this, one being that Dr. Paul's voice had gotten lower so you can hear how he and Jerry both changed over the years.

Another interesting thing may not be visible to you on the small screen but I noticed it when I watched a good video of this performance on a large monitor. While miming to the record, Winchell was of course moving his mouth to match his old voice track…but at times, he was also — subconsciously, one assumes — doing Jerry's lines in order to keep time so you can occasionally catch his lips and Adam's Apple moving for Jerry's lyrics even though he wasn't singing them aloud. (I once asked Paul if when he did his act on radio or for records, he moved his lips when speaking for Jerry or Knucklehead. He said he usually would but sometimes, he'd forget.)

And thirdly, the performance is really convincing and the audience seems to have really loved it. At one point, Paul and Jerry are singing different lyrics against each other…obviously recorded in the studio in separate takes and then combined. But I thinks some folks watching this live momentarily forgot it was a prerecorded track and applauded Winchell's "incredible" feat. Whatever, it's great just to see a little more of Winch in action…

Tom Richmond is the star caricaturist among the "newer" artists of MAD Magazine…a venue where guys like Mort Drucker and Jack Davis set the bar pretty high. Here's an old video of Tom showing you how he works his magic…in this case to give Rodney Dangerfield a little respect…

Jacques Brel was a popular singer-songwriter of Belgian heritage. He wrote dozens of marvelous songs which have been recorded by others and also arranged into revues and stage productions. When it comes time to select a single Brel song to perform, the rule seems to be that you look them all over, consider each and every one…

…and then you sing "Madeleine." It ain't a bad song and it certainly isn't his worst…but it's the one everyone picks, especially for a group. Here's a rather typical arrangement of it as staged on the 1969 TV series, What's It All About, World? The singers are Eve Arden, Lorene Yarnell (of Shields & Yarnell) and Kathy Gale.

What's It All About, World? was an odd program. At the time, Laugh-In and The Smothers Brothers were two big hits. Today, the politics of those shows seem about as radical as a "Make Love, Not War" bumper sticker on a Prius, and large chunks of what they aired seem like clown acts. But in '69, with the Vietnam War raging and everything else that was going on in this country, there were those who denounced the knock-knock jokes on those shows as Communist, Marxist, Stalinist and inarguably destructive to the American way of life. I'm sure glad no one hurls those labels at their political foes these days.

Among those who felt that way were a couple of men who owned ABC-affiliated stations. They practically demanded that the network give them a variety show that would celebrate their idea of American Values. The network responded with What's It All About, World? and there's a reason most of you don't remember it. It was because of this show that I formulated my occasionally-quoted axiom that trying to do comedy from a Conservative point-of-view is like trying to write a Marx Brothers movie and make Margaret Dumont the funny one. It ain't impossible but it sure doesn't come naturally.

This number isn't political or anything. It's just odd…and indicative of the legacy of Jacques Brel. That legacy, as I said, is that people neglect his vast repertoire of work and only sing "Madeleine." Here are three ladies only singing "Madeleine"…

Yesterday up at the Magic Castle, I saw Richard Sherman, a man who goes through life with people behind him whispering, "Do you know what he wrote?" I've gotten to know him a little and he's a wonderful source of anecdotes and stories about Working With Walt and discussions of Mary Poppins and Disneyland and all the places one can hear timeless tunes that he and his brother Robert composed. So I'm eager to see a new documentary that's out now about the two of them. It's called The Boys and I hear nothing but raves about it. (Well, actually, I hear people lament that it's not in very many theaters…)

The Sherman Brothers, of course, wrote the tunes for Chitty Chitty Bang Bang…and the title song is one of our faves here in the old Today's Video Link spot. Not long ago, Richard played a little concert for children out in Thousand Oaks and I'm a sucker for composers performing their own compositions. So here he is…

This is kinda neat. It's a cut-down version (opening, commercials, credits) of The Bob Newhart Show…but not the Bob Newhart Show that you probably remember. This was before that one. It was a half-hour variety show he did on NBC from 1961 to 1962 that received great critical acclaim and many awards. It was somewhat noteworthy for having received an Emmy after it was cancelled, a circumstance that provoked a very funny acceptance speech from Mr. Newhart on the Emmy telecast. After that speech, a lot of folks probably wished they'd watched the thing.

It led to Bob's second series, which was also not the sitcom about the psychologist. Two years later, he surfaced as one of the rotating stars of a CBS variety hour called The Entertainers. You can read about this one over on this page of the Old TV Tickets website. And by the way, we wish the clowns who run that site would do us the courtesy of updating it once in a while.

One of the interesting things I noticed about the clip below is the name of the announcer at the end. It's Dan Sorkin. Mr. Sorkin was the Chicago disc jockey who "discovered" Newhart and who said to Warner Brothers Records something like, "Hey, I know this guy who's really funny and ought to be a comedian." The rest became history so it's nice to see that Bob decided to reward his benefactor by bringing him along.

Here's six and a half minutes of the forgotten Bob Newhart Show…

Leo Dorfman was a prolific writer of comic books…and I'm afraid I don't know as much about him as I'd like. He began working for DC around 1950. One of his early credits was the Robin strip in Star Spangled Comics. He wrote war stories and romance stories and such throughout the fifties, and around '61 he became one of Mort Weisinger's main writers for the Superman titles and may well have been the most prolific scripter of the Man of Steel during that decade. (One story of his that many will remember was "Superman-Red and Superman-Blue.") During that period, he was also working a lot for Dell and Gold Key Comics. He passed away in 1974.

Some time between 1952 and 1956, he appeared as a contestant on the game show, Two for the Money, which was hosted by comedian Herb Shriner. Kevin Greenlee just wrote me that he discovered this appearance on an old videotape and he's been nice enough to transfer the segment so we can all see it. Not much is said about the specifics of Mr. Dorfman's career — they don't even mention a comic he writes or a publisher — but it's interesting to see how the host talked about comic books in those days when they were under attack by parents' groups and other moralizers…