Category Archives: Video Links

In 1967, there was this weird, minimalist TV production of the musical, Damn Yankees. It had a cast of about eight people and almost no sets or dancing, and they interspersed little cartoon sequences and the whole thing looked like it cost about ninety bucks. The most interesting thing about it was that Mr. Applegate (i.e., The Devil) was played by Phil Silvers…but even he couldn't rise far above the overall cheapness of the proceedings.

Someone edited together eleven minutes of scenes, all of which feature Fran Allison in her role as Meg, the spouse who's "deserted" by her husband Joe when he goes off to become Baseball Superstar Joe Hardy. This is the same Fran who starred for years in the delightful puppet program, Kukla, Fran and Ollie. She does a nice job here. So did Lee Remick as Lola and Jerry Lanning as Joe Hardy, and you'll see them both in this video, too. Fans of The Dick Van Dyke Show may recall Lanning for the episode where he introduced the smash dance craze that swept the nation…the Twizzle! Here he is singing better songs…

How George met Gracie. Okay, it's not the real story but it's pure, vintage Burns…

Some time ago, I linked to a thirty-second version of this commercial I always liked. Here's the full one-minute version…

The animation on the first dozen-or-so Disney features is considered a high watermark in its category…its category, of course, being Disney-type animation. Many of the later features are quite splendid as well, but one of the ways they made the animation so good (and saved a few bucks) was to trace and reuse animation from earlier Disney masterpieces. Don't believe me? Here's a little montage. Thanks to Mickey Paraskevas, illustrator of The Green Monkeys, for pointing me towards this.

Keith Olbermann's mother passed away the other day. On tonight's Countdown, he did one of the loveliest tributes I've ever seen, avoiding all the clichés and mawkishness that you so often get with these things. I know there are some folks who read this site who hate Mr. Olbermann and there are times when I even think he goes too far in some area where I essentially agree with him. But I can't think of another broadcaster working today who could do something quite this classy…

I featured some Limeliters clips the last few days. Here's a classic from The Kingston Trio…

Yesterday, I linked up a number from a Limeliters concert in (I'm guessing) the late seventies. Here's the opening number from that performance. Up front are the original members of the group: Alex Hassilev, Lou Gottlieb and Glenn Yarbrough…

Way back in this post, I introduced some of you to the British team of singer-songwriters, Flanders and Swann. An awful lot of you already knew of them but you'd be surprised how many e-mails I received that said something to the effect of, "Where have these guys been all my life?" Even though I didn't provide a direct link to make it easy, about a dozen of you purchased Flanders and Swann CDs through the Amazon link on this page that gives me a tiny cut.

In that first posting, Mr. Flanders favored us with "Have Some Madeira, M'Dear," a song he and Mr. Swann authored and recorded. It's a great tune but I think I preferred the version recorded in 1960 by the folksinging group, The Limeliters. Which brings us to today's link. This is a later performance by The Limeliters…from the late seventies, I'd guess. It's the original Limeliters plus one or more later members of the troupe. The gent with the beard is Lou Gottlieb, who performed this tune on the '60 album. Take five minutes and watch what I think is a superb performance…

This is the kind of thing for which we love Stephen Colbert…

There's a wonderful exhibit of vintage comic book art and memorabilia up at the Skirball Cultural Center, here in Los Angeles. It's there through August 9 and if you're at all interested in the subject matter, you'll want to get up there at least once and immerse yourself in the material.

The exhibit was assembled by one of the folks whose artwork is nicely represented in it…Golden Age Legend Jerry Robinson. The video player below will show you a brief conversation with Jerry, though you may have to sit through a briefer commercial to see it…

As NBC ramps up to inaugurate Conan O'Brien as the new host of The Tonight Show, they've put together something on their website that may interest you. It's a Tonight Show retrospective complete with photos and video clips of all the past hosts. Naturally, the clips of Steve Allen and Jack Paar are the most interesting because they're the rarest. Most of those hosts' episodes no longer exist so any footage at all is something of a treat.

You'll want to go to the site itself and browse around but I'm going to embed two clips here. The first is of Steve Allen doing a bit he often did, reading aloud angry letters from The New York Daily News, giving them the outraged delivery that their authors intended. These were, apart from the gag name signatures, real letters. Here's that clip — and by the way, you may have to sit through a brief commercial for these…

The second clip is from the first Jack Paar Tonight, though it doesn't have Jack in it. It's the intro of Mr. Paar…and the man you'll see doing it is the bizarre character actor, Franklin Pangborn. Books will tell you that Hugh Downs was Paar's sidekick and that was true…eventually. When they started out, it was Pangborn.

Paar's show was thrown together in a hurry. Steve Allen had been replaced by a multi-host aberration called Tonight: America After Dark, a total and embarrassing flop. Paar was quickly hired and shoved out onto the air without a lot of lead time. Amazingly, they didn't even take an hour or two to meet the man they selected as his announcer-sidekick before hiring him. Someone got the idea that Mr. Pangborn would be the perfect choice. Pangborn was a very funny presence in a lot of movies, including (memorably) W.C. Fields' The Bank Dick, usually playing little effete, prissy men.

The actor was then living in Los Angeles and not working much. The producers contacted him and made an offer which Pangborn immediately accepted, even though it meant moving to New York. No one on the Paar show had met him in person. No one had screen-tested him to see how he'd come across on a (mostly) unscripted live TV show, playing opposite the new host. It turned out he was terrible. He couldn't ad-lib and without a script, he couldn't even replicate his old screen character. He also turned out to be, according to several accounts, very nervous and paranoid backstage, unsettling everyone with paranoid fantasies of unnamed people trying to kill him. They got rid of him in a hurry and eventually, Mr. Downs — who'd been hired just to be an announcer doing commercials — eased into the sidekick role.

This only runs a few seconds but I was amazed to find it on the site. So here's Franklin Pangborn introducing Jack Paar on his first Tonight, which was on July 29, 1957…

If you like this stuff, go over to the Tonight Show Experience to experience more of it. But don't believe everything you read. The "Timeline" feature there says that Downs introduced Paar on the first show, even though the site has this clip of someone else doing that. And then it says, of Paar's last show, that "various guest hosts try to fill his shoes as speculation over who will replace him continues." That's all wrong. Carson was signed before Paar left. But the site's full of enough fun stuff that it's worth a long visit.

Certain songs seem to rocket through the "cabaret" circuit. For a while there, every time I went to see a performer singing show tunes (or similar songs), I could bet and win serious money that the repertoire would include the number, "My Simple Christmas Wish." It was written by a clever tunesmith named David Friedman, though if you Google it, as I just did, you can find a lot of other folks getting the credit. But I'm pretty sure it was Friedman.

I've probably heard this song in a dozen club acts, maybe more, and it works best when it's sung by a young, up-and-coming performer. It takes on special meaning — which I'm not so sure I like — when offered by nine-year-old Lily Taylor. With some laundered lyrics, no less.

Peter Schiff is the head guy at Euro Pacific Capital Inc., a Connecticut-based brokerage firm. Throughout '07 and '08, he appeared on cable news shows, mainly on Fox, to air his dire views of the economy. He was a "token" bear amidst the bulls, usually being mocked or told he didn't know what he was talking about. Here's a little montage of him being essentially right when everyone else was essentially wrong…

The late Aaron Spelling had an awful lot of money and he built himself an awful lot of mansion…a 56,000-square foot home with 123 rooms, give or take a half-bath. His widow Candy has now put it on the market with an asking price of $150 million. (She's decided that in these tough times, it's wise to downsize one's lifestyle. So she's moving into a condominium for which she paid a measly $47 million.)

Here's a short tour of the place. You may need to watch a brief commercial before it starts…

Who's Erik Weiner? Why, he's an actor who had one line on The Sopranos. Here — let him tell you about it…