Category Archives: Video Links

James Randi, aka "The Amazing Randi," is an expert magician who now puts his skills towards "debunking" those who claim to have psychic or otherwise supernatural abilities. I am of the view that such folks are all — 100% of 'em — frauds. Some are perhaps harmless frauds but some clearly do great harm and that harm is not always limited to bilking their victims of vast sums of money. So I applaud what Randi does through the James Randi Educational Foundation.

Lately, he has been showing up for little chats at the Magic Castle. He sits down with Max Maven — who plays a psychic to entertain, not to defraud — and they discuss Randi's work as both a magician and a debunker.Their first chat was last September and I linked to it in this message.

I was in the audience for that one and I was there last month for the second conversation, which is embedded below.

At the end, there is a ceremony where they unveil something that is now hanging on a wall in the Magic Castle. It's a framed poster of Randi back in the days when he was exclusively a magician and escape artist. In the video, you'll note that Randi says it was drawn for him by a comic book artist whose name he has forgotten.The artist was Jay Disbrow, who worked for Fox Comics and other publishers starting in the late fifties.

This runs almost an hour and a half. If you didn't watch the first one, I suggest you go watch it first. If it's of interest to you, come back and watch this one…

Here's a moment from David Letterman's old NBC show that I always thought was funny…

I don't usually embed Daily Show videos here because the Comedy Central codes are kinda screwy but this one's too good. Jon Stewart is right. Most of this talk about religious persecution in America (the part that isn't just about scaring people into voting against Obama) is about religious folks who are upset that everything isn't done their way…

This may come in handy. And it also works with fat relatives…

Back in this item, we brought you an episode of Sam and Friends, the first TV show from Jim Henson and the Muppets, done on a local station in Washington, D.C. from 1955-1961. Here on another episode, Sam and his friends mime to yet another popular record by the wickedly witty Stan Freberg…

So…what do you wanna do today? How about if we go out to Coney Island?

As I said in a Tweet the other day, I saw none of the Super Bowl, thereby maintaining my lifetime cumulative record of watching football games which stands at about ten minutes. That's where it's been since 1971 and where it's likely to remain 'til I plotz. I say this without pride or shame or any criticism of those who love it. When I see how happy Super Bowl Sunday makes some people, I wish I could join in. But some people simply can't wrap their brain around Italian Renaissance Madrigals and I can't even feign caring about football. The extent of my interest in last Sunday's game was that my mother's caregiver has a son who plays defense on whatever team won. If I had any more interest than that, I'd click over to Google and find out the name of that team.

The only moment I saw was not of the game but of a commercial which I've embedded below. I was sitting in a restaurant in San Francisco. The pre-game show, which I gather lasts for forty days and forty nights, was on a big projection screen on one wall. I heard no audio over the noise of the diners but believe it or not, I guessed the song was probably "Brotherhood of Man" from How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. It just looked like that's what they were dancing to.

Years ago, I read an article that said that was the most-played, ASCAP-lucrative of all the tunes written by the great Frank Loesser. He wrote arguably better songs but "Brotherhood of Man" was used a lot in commercials, including a long run in ads for Hamm's Beer. Every time they sang "Brotherhood of Hamm's," a little cash register at the Loesser estate went ka-ching. It's like that with most composers. Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby wrote better, more loved songs than "Hooray for Captain Spaulding" but none that Groucho used every week on his game show…and almost everywhere else he went.

Anyway, when I got back I wanted to see the commercial with audio and here it is. There seem to be at least three different versions on the web and this is the longest I've found. If I were Jay Leno, I might look at how much money I've made for my network the last twenty years and wonder why they don't give me more attention…or in this case, camera time. Then again, Leno was in three separate Super Bowl commercials and will probably be working long after everyone else in this ad is sitting behind a table at an autograph show selling photos. Including Donald Trump…

And say, while we're on the topic: Here's one of those Hamm's Beer commercials that made the ka-ching sound at the Loesser house…

Richard Belzer interviews Gilbert Gottfried about what some would call bad taste in humor.This runs a hair over twenty minutes and I guess I need a parental-type warning here because they say a lot of naughty words that will singe your ears if you aren't used to them. I think Belzer overstates the significance of Gottfried's routine right after 9/11 but I otherwise agree with most of this…

This is an episode of the game show I've Got a Secret that aired the night of October 9, 1957. Why am I embedding this one? Because it was a disaster and that's always fun to watch from afar. The program was broadcast live so all of America got to see it like this.

The show's usual host Garry Moore was out sick so Henry Morgan, who was usually a panelist, filled in for him and Carl Reiner took Henry's place on the panel. At the beginning, they tried to phone Garry at home but it was apparently a last minute idea and the technical aspects of the call had not been tested. That got things off to a bad start but it was at the end when the proceedings got really awkward.

Thanks to good guessing by Jayne Meadows, all three rounds were concluded in record time. This left Morgan with every emcee's worst nightmare. He had no more games to play…and seven minutes of network airtime to fill.

The producer of the show that night was Allan Sherman, several years before he recorded an album of song parodies and became the hottest comedian in the business. You can hear him shouting frantic suggestions from off-camera to Henry Morgan on what to do. In his later autobiography, Sherman wrote of this episode…

Henry Morgan had replaced Garry Moore, who was off on his sailboat for a week (and therefore unreachable by telephone or letter). It was a terrible show. Awful. We ran out of program with seven minutes left. Seven minutes of empty airtime is seven lifetimes of catastrophe, and Henry chose this night to forget that he is one of the best ad-libbers in the world, and instead devoted the seven minutes to hollering at me in public on the air for leaving him with seven minutes.

As you'll see if you watch this, Sherman misremembered. Garry Moore was not on his boat. He was home sick. And Morgan did not spend the seven minutes hollering at Sherman. The hollering probably occurred after they off the air. In any case, the next day, Allan Sherman was fired as the producer of I've Got a Secret. This was not the first episode where things went wrong. Fortunately, he went on to bigger and better things. He may even have been grateful that the show was a disaster that night, thereby getting him out of that job and on to other activities.

The show should be viewable in the embed below. It's in three parts which should play one after the other. If you just want to see when the real vamping and filling occurs, start a couple of minutes into Part Two…

For close to half my life, I've had this friend named Jewel Shepard. Some of you may know her for her many appearances in B-Movies. She has always been quite lovely and she's still managing to be that way while managing some pretty ghastly cancer treatments.

You can see just how lovely she is and even get a signed photo this coming weekend at the Hollywood Show out in Burbank. She'll be there Saturday and Sunday (2/11-2/12) autographing pics along with celebs the likes of Martin Landau, Paul Michael Glaser and David Soul, Davy Jones, Lainie Kazan, Valerie Harper and many more.

At one point, all of Jewel's lovely hair fell out but it's now growing back. In fact, it now just looks like she deliberately cut it a bit too short. But a few months ago when it was absent, she bravely shot a commercial for the Hallmark Cards people. You'll be able to figure out which one she is in this…

In the late sixties and early seventies, comic actor Don Adams often went on talk shows with outtakes (or fluffs or bloopers or whatever you want to call them) from his show Get Smart — especially scenes from episodes that guest-starred Don Rickles.They were a sensation and Adams got the idea of doing a TV series that would just present that kind of footage from other programs.

When he explored the idea, he discovered it wasn't feasible.The costs of licensing the clips were high…but the real problem would be getting permissions from the actors who appeared in the clips.The Screen Actors Guild has since changed some of its rules and now it's a bit easier but back then, it would mean negotiating with each actor…and obviously some of them would demand huge sums while others would veto the airing of the most embarrassing (and therefore, funniest) material.

So Mr. Adams abandoned that idea but put his mind to this question: How can I create outtakes that I could afford to show?The solution was Don Adams Screen Test, a 1975 series that looked like a talent competition — and was, in a way. But it was mainly an excuse to make and show bloopers.

Thousands vied for the prizes which were small roles in a TV show or movie. Each week, the contestants who were selected to compete would do scenes with real Hollywood-type stars, re-creating moments from classic motion pictures.The finished "screen tests" would be aired and a panel of judges from the industry would pick the winner…but before that, Adams would show the outtakes from the shooting of the screen tests.

When you're filming or taping a scene, hilarious errors occur…but not always. (It helps if one of the actors in the scene is Don Rickles.)To yield the desired number of outtakes, the performers on Don Adams Screen Test were obviously told to screw around and to do each line wrong ten times before they tried to do it right. Props were sabotaged.Tricks were played. It all wound up being very forced and phony…and therefore not that funny.

And there was another problem.To the extent this was a talent competition, you want to root for the contestants to do well. But this focused on everything they did wrong…so that kinda killed the "stars of tomorrow" aspect of it all.The whole series had a forced, overly-edited quality to it and no one looked good.

Here's twelve minutes from the first episode from the one season of Don Adams Screen Test, complete with the longest, most tedious opening in the history of television…

Here's a half-hour of excerpts from The Tonight Show for New Year's Eve 1965, ringing in '66. Johnny Carson was (of course) the host of the show but you won't see a lot of Johnny in this. You'll see Ben Grauer reporting as he did in those pre-Dick Clark days, from Times Square. You'll see commercials. But most interestingly, you'll see the legendary First Fifteen.

During the Steve Allen and Jack Paar years, the program was an hour and 45 minutes, though not everywhere. Some local stations had a half-hour of news at 11 PM and some had 15 minutes.To fit in with both, Tonight worked like this: The show would start at 11:15.Then it would start over with a new opening billboard at 11:30. Stations that ran 30 minutes of late night news could join it at the 11:30 mark.

Over the years, more and more NBC affiliates went to a half-hour of late news. By the time Mr. Carson became the host, he was doing the first 15 minutes of the show (including his monologue) for less than half the country and that half didn't include New York or most other major markets. Eventually, as more and more stations stopped carrying what he considered the best part of the show, he decided things had to change. He told NBC to get their stations all lined-up to start at the same time. NBC said they couldn't arrange that. Johnny said in effect, "In that case, I may have a 15 minute flu every night."

Which is what he did at first. He'd announce he was ill and that he wasn't going on at 11:15 but hoped to be well enough to appear at 11:30. Announcer Ed McMahon and bandleader Skitch Henderson had to host the first fifteen minutes. Eventually, that became the format and Johnny dropped all pretense of sickness. His part of the show would just start at 11:30.

Apparently, this arrangement prompted more and more local stations to program a half-hour of news at 11:00 so before long, it wasn't necessary to do the First Fifteen for anyone.This made everyone happy except Ed and Skitch, who'd rather enjoyed having their own little network show every night. In this video, you'll get to see how that little show went and you'll see why it was no great loss…

Ah, we have here a complete episode of The Steve Allen Show from June 29, 1958. When I see shows like this, I'm struck by how much TV has changed in the following way. Today, if you went to any network and suggested a prime-time series that would open with the host and guest stars just standing around and largely ad-libbing for ten minutes, you'd find yourself out in the parking lot within moments. Actually, proposing a variety show at all might do the trick…but to suggest putting something this casual on the air would certainly end the meeting. Even The Jay Leno Show, which was about as close as they've come to that in the evening, opened with carefully prepared material.

This episode is most notable for the guesting by Don Adams, Tony Bennett and Oscar Levant. Mr. Levant was a delightful snide presence on a lot of TV shows of the fifties and early sixties. Professionally, he was a pianist but he wasn't always asked to play the piano as he was on this program. People just liked hearing him talk and complain about his health and make scathing sarcastic remarks about famous people. His sit-down chat with Steverino about halfway-through was staged to seem ad-libbed but obviously scripted as you can tell by the way Levant rarely takes his eyes off his cue cards. Still, I believe a lot of the lines on those cards are things he said on other shows in more spontaneous appearances.

That aside, there's really only one fully-written and staged comedy piece in this hour — a sketch that doesn't commence until almost 43 minutes into the hour. There's also an interesting musical number with Tony Bennett at the end that spills out into the streets of New York. Take a peek…

From a 1966 episode of Hollywood Palace: Carl Reiner interviews the Two-Thousand (plus) Year Old Man, Mel Brooks. I keep hearing rumors that they're about to record a new album (or CD or whatever you call 'em these days) of this character…

This is in German but you can still follow it if you don't speak that language. It's the magic of the iPad…