Category Archives: Video Links

This runs three minutes. It's a Showcase Showdown segment on The Price is Right, way back in November of 1993. As I'm sure you know, the contestant who gets closest to one dollar in one spin or a combination of two spins gets into the showcase…and if their turn yields a total of $1.00, they get a thousand prize plus a bonus spin which could be worth up to $10,000.

In the segment embedded below, Bob Barker makes a huge mistake and no one in the studio spots it. You'll catch it but no one in the studio seems to…or if they did, they never spoke up about it. The person who posted this clip to YouTube claims that the producers of the show were unaware of it until years later when someone called it to their attention. Amazing.

The late night wars are about to flare up again. Jay Leno is nearing the end of his Tonight Show run and Conan is about to take over. David Letterman is nearing the end of his current contract and it's about time for CBS to either negotiate a new deal with him or begin looking for a replacement.

At the moment, Jimmy Fallon's in an odd position. His ratings are slipping…though they're still higher than his competition on CBS, Craig Ferguson. His ratings are also higher than Conan O'Brien's were in the same time slot at the same time last year but all of this may just be because tune-in of Leno is up. Presumably, Conan will have a splashy debut and then things will settle down…and NBC has to be worried that if O'Brien's long-term numbers don't match Leno's (the thinking is they won't) the network could be in trouble on two fronts. Then the anxiety will start all over again in fall when Jay starts his 10 PM show and we find out how, if at all, that will impact late night programming.

So what'll happen with Letterman? Rumor has it that he doesn't want a long contract; that he wants one of those deals like Johnny had his last decade or so, where each year he tells the network if he feels like doing another year. CBS may not be willing to give him that. It may be more like, "Hey, commit to staying through 2013 or let us start looking for the guy who will." At a time of belt-tightening, there may also be a problem with Dave's huge salary. He'll probably get what he wants but it may take a little jello-wrestling to get there.

Right now, all eyes are on Leno and what he's going to do at 10 PM five nights a week. NBC has assembled a little video which seems to have been mainly made to sell affiliates on the idea that the new show's a good idea and that someone there has some notion of what it's going to involve. Notice the assurance of a big comedy bit to close the program each night…a way of assuring local stations that their local news won't be following a song by some musical group no one's ever heard of. Notice also that apart from that and the announcement that Jay's going to have a new studio, there really isn't any news there…though it is good to hear that Jay will be bring his Jaywalking segments to prime time. You can never get enough of laughing at really, really stupid people.

Here's pop star Johnny Rivers singing a medley of his hit…

A group of popular (I guess) Japanese singing stars perform "I Could Have Danced All Night" from My Fair Lady. You get the idea no one told the men in this that they were singing lyrics written for a woman? Or that the camera would be on them for part of the instrumental section when they aren't doing anything?

Hans Klok bills himself as "The World's Fastest Magician" and no one who's seen him perform would waste a lot of time arguing that one. Nor will you if you watch this video of his recent Vegas engagement. I never got to see it live but a magician friend who did said it was like a "greatest hits" cavalcade, blasting through every state-of-the-art trick around, save for those clearly owned by others. My friend was stunned at the sheer budget, watching Klok roll out one expensive trick after another, allotting sixty seconds for a feat that another magician might have milked for ten minutes. (Klok is currently touring Europe. Assuming he's doing much the same show, his greatest feat is probably just getting all his props from town to town.)

I enjoyed yesterday's video link so much that we're doing it again…with Go-Bang. Thanks to Brian Liebowitz for telling me about this one.

You know what I feel like hearing? A bunch of popular Japanese singers performing the title song from the movie, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. That's what I'm in the mood for. If you're in a similar mood, click away…

Here's the end segment of The Hollywood Palace for March 7, 1964. Dean Martin was the host and usually, he'd do the promotion for the following episode with the show's Billboard Girl, Raquel Welch. Yes, that Raquel Welch. But this time, they trotted out the host for the following episode, Groucho Marx. It's fascinating to see two great pros out there without much of an idea of what they were doing…

It's been a while since we've linked to a video of William Shatner emoting his way through a song lyric. It's also been a while since we sent the bodies of Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe spinning in their respective graves. Here's a fine opportunity to accomplish both those feats with one little video embed.

One wonders what's on Mr. Shatner's mind (apart from artificial hair) when he does these. Does he realize that he's going beyond self-parody and is actually engaged in self-parody of his own self-parody? And yet, the guy's had an incredible career. Go figure.

The other day, we had the sad news here of the passing of veteran comic artist Ric Estrada. Now, you get to see a snippet of me interviewing Ric on the Golden Age Panel at the 2001 Comic-Con International in San Diego. (The other panelists — you get fleeting glimpses of some of them — included Ramona Fradon, Irwin Donenfeld, Chuck Cuidera, Mart Nodell, Alvin Schwartz and Julius Schwartz.) This video was shot by the loyal, devoted videographer, Mike Catron. Thank you, Mike…for this and for preserving so much history and so many of our friends.

The anonymous artist Ric is talking about at the beginning was Dan Barry. I don't think there's any reason not to mention that, given how it's common knowledge Ric later ghosted the Flash Gordon newspaper strip for Mr. Barry. And as much as I loved Ric, I'm not going to embed this without telling you all that in the shot of me at the end, I weigh 100 pounds more than I do today. At least.

But forget about me. This is intended to give you a wee taste of what a charming, self-effacing man Ric Estrada was. This is only two and a half minutes but I think you'll understand…

One of the show-stopping numbers in the Broadway musical, Promises, Promises, was "Turkey Lurkey Time," a largely off-story song 'n' dance performed by three secretaries at an office Christmas party. Once upon a time, it was an odd convention of musical comedies that if possible, you had to have one big dance number that was supposed to take place at some sort of amateur show and it seemed to be required that it never have anything whatsoever to do with the plot. Other examples of this would be the "Steam Heat" number in The Pajama Game and "Who's Got the Pain?" in Damn Yankees.

Anyway, not long ago there was a Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS benefit in L.A. that saluted the work of Burt Bacharach. For the Act One closer, director Bruce Kimmel and choreographer Adam Cates decided to present the original "Turkey Lurkey Time" number, and they even re-created the original choreography by Michael Bennett. Here's that performance…

From 1961: A brief clip from a Canadian TV show in which Joe Barbera and Bill Hanna explain how animation is done in their Hollywood studio. Barbera's the one explaining the first part; Hanna takes over when they get down to the editing process. The man you see doing storyboard work near the top (not layout as Barbera's v.o. suggests) is Alex Lovy, who directed for Walter Lantz and was a key player on the H-B team.

A couple of folks viewing this have complained about the "sexism" when Mr. B. refers to "girls" doing the inking. All I can say to that is that that's the way everyone in the industry talked back then, and I doubt any females took umbrage. Truth to tell, in all my years around H-B, I never saw a woman who met Joe Barbera and didn't think he was an utterly charming gentleman. This included the week he and I (and a few other folks, all male) spent auditioning actresses in string bikinis for a sitcom pilot I wrote for the studio. If you have a dram of sexism in you, that's the situation where it's going to come out…and Mr. Barbera did our gender proud.

You ever see The Big Snit? You should. It's a 10-minute animated short produced by the National Film Board of Canada and written/directed/etc. by Richard Condie. He made it in '85, got nominated for an Academy Award the following year as well as many other major awards, some of which he won. Very funny, weird stuff.

Hey, what's up with Adam West?

Here's another promo for the show I've been working on for the last year or so. It's The Garfield Show, an all-new series, which is airing in some countries (like France) and soon to air in others. This is a commercial for its debut on Boomerang UK, which happens May 5. Last I heard, they had all the big territories sold except for North America and Japan, but they will come.