Category Archives: Video Links

Debuting this week on most PBS channels — on Wednesday night in L.A. — which is described as "…a six-hour comedy epic showcasing the most hilarious men, women, and moments in American entertainment and why they made us laugh." It also says on the series website that it's "…hosted by America's favorite funnyman, Billy Crystal." I like Billy Crystal…but America's favorite funnyman? I don't think so. I don't even think Billy Crystal or his agent think so.

One thing that often bothers me about this kind of show is the lack of historical perspective and that today's top comedy stars are on the same plateau as Chaplin, Keaton, Laurel & Hardy, etc. They may be comparable in their respective categories but your basic old time comedy legend had a little different job description, a different set of challenges and, most significantly, produced work that has stood the test of time. The work of the current guys hasn't been subjected to that test yet and I have the feeling some of them aren't going to pass.

Still, I'll be watching. Here's a little reminder…

As a follow-up to yesterday's Video Link: On October 23, 1984, Paul McCartney appeared on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson again…and this time, Johnny Carson was actually there. Paul was out promoting his then-recent film, Give My Regards to Broad Street.

One of the first things you'll see Carson ask him is about a little mystery. The night the Beatles made their first, historic appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, Ed thanked a number of folks for making it possible, including Johnny Carson. Johnny never knew what that was all about and you'll see him ask Paul, who doesn't have a clue. I believe a prevailing theory among Beatles historians is that Mr. Sullivan was confused, as he tended to be; that he'd meant to thank Jack Paar and had mixed up the names of the previous host of The Tonight Show and the new one.

As for why Ed would have wanted to thank Jack Paar: Here's an excerpt from this article in which Mr. Paar talked about his days on television…

Mr. Paar reminded the audience that, legend to the contrary, it was he, not Ed Sullivan, who first showed the Beatles in action to an American television audience. In January 1964, five weeks before Mr. Sullivan introduced the Beatles live, viewers of the Jack Paar Show saw a film of the Beatles sending a teen-age English audience into shrieking, delirious orbit just by shaking their hair and chorusing "Yeah, yeah, yeah."

The segment was shown in full again last Thursday. "In my seven years on NBC, I never, ever had a rock 'n' roll act," Mr. Paar commented. "I was interested in the Beatles as a psychological and sociological phenomenon." He added that his was the only television show to which no one under 21 was admitted because "kids tend to take over the audience."

I offer that as a point of information not only as to why Ed might have thanked Paar, but also as to why Jack Paar didn't remain on TV after the mid-sixties. Around the same time he did that interview, I saw him give a little lecture and he was very charming and very witty but he also seemed shocked and angry that anything had changed in the world or show business since 1961.

So here's John and Paul. The audio isn't very good on this but you should be able to make everything out. If you don't want to sit through the whole thing, you still might be interested in the last few minutes when, after teasing the audience, Mr. McCartney finally takes up the guitar and sings a little. The video is in three parts and in the unlikely event that I've configured things properly, they should play one after the other in the browser below. Thanks again to Shelly Goldstein…

Talk about rare Tonight Show clips. Shelly Goldstein sent me this link to maybe the rarest one of all.

On May 14, 1968, Paul McCartney and John Lennon held a press conference in New York to announce the formation of their new company, Apple. Later that same day, they then did two TV interviews — one on a local educational program and the other on The Tonight Show. As (bad) luck would have it, it was on a night that Johnny Carson was off and his program was being hosted by Joe Garagiola. Mr. Garagiola was a good sportscaster and a fine game show personality but he proved that night to be woefully deficient in the art of interviewing Beatles. Among other problems, he seemed to think they were still the four mop-tops who'd made such a hit on The Ed Sullivan Show and was unaware they'd evolved and gone on to other, less flighty things.

Prior to their appearance, John and Paul did a brief pre-interview with Jim McCawley, who was then a Talent Coordinator for The Tonight Show. That interview, McCawley always told people, went quite well. In fact, it went too well. At the close of it, he was stunned when John and Paul said to him, "We want you to interview us on the show." McCawley had to convince them that this was not possible; that the Tonight Show didn't bring on staff members to displace the host, even a guest host.

On the air with the guest host, John and Paul both seemed a little high and their dislike for Garagiola became increasingly obvious. Another guest, Tallulah Bankhead, threw in a few questions and she wasn't much help. Here's a transcript of the entire conversation. During the commercial breaks, Garagiola was counselled to pay a little more attention to McCawley's notes from the pre-interview but he kept departing from them and it all made for an evening of great discomfort.

Most of tapes of The Tonight Show from that era were lost and the first ones to go were those with guest hosts. (The episodes with Johnny were kept around for a few years for possible rerunning before erasure.) As a result, there is no decent video of the Lennon-McCartney appearance. However, one ardent Beatles fan pointed a silent 8mm movie camera at the screen and got a Zapruder-like record of a few minutes of the event. Another recorded the audio on a reel-to-reel tape recorder…and the two sources have been married together to create the fuzzy, hard-to-see image that is linked below. It's less than two hundred seconds long and it's bad video but it's all we've got.

Tomorrow, I'll bring you a later appearance that Paul (alone) made on The Tonight Show, thankfully with Mr. Carson. In the meantime, here's John, Paul and Joe…

Here's a goodie…footage of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy you've never seen before. Okay, so it's just a few seconds but we'll take what we can get.

In the forties, Stan and Ollie occasionally went on tour, playing to packed audiences in theaters and arenas across the country and in England. Usually, they were part of a musical revue and would perform a few routines, especially one called "The Driver's License Sketch." In this short film, you see a few seconds of that. The gent who plays the person interviewing Laurel for his driver's license is James C. Morton, who was in a lot of Laurel and Hardy films, usually playing a policeman.

This was shot at the Riverside Theater in Milwaukee where they performed between October 11, 1940 and October 16. They did four shows a day and the theater management later announced that every seat was sold for every performance. Can't do much better than that.

The dance troupe you'll see was called The Danny Dare Girls. The show also included a classical dance team, the Fredricos, and the girl singer at the end is Maxine Conrad.

A gentleman named Robert Wilson, who lives in Milwaukee, has the film which was shot by his father. I think it's great that he shared it with the world. It runs less than two minutes but it's a treasure…

Today is the 83rd birthday of Soupy Sales. I wrote all sorts of gushy things about Soupy in this article (most of which he reprinted, with my permission, in his autobiography) so I needn't repeat them here. I'll just wish that his day — hell, the rest of his life — has the kind of happiness that he brought to so many of us with his TV appearances.

And I'll favor you with this video of Soupy at a comedy club appearance a few years back, telling the infamous story of how he was suspended from his New York show for telling kids to send in money…

I mentioned the other day here that Walt Disney never liked people to see him when he did the voice of Mickey Mouse. Here's what may be the only footage around of him performing as his most famous character…a bit of footage shot at a recording session.

The other actor in this clip is Billy Bletcher, who was heard constantly in cartoons and on radio shows for many years. He played an awful lot of villains in Disney cartoons including The Big Bad Wolf. He also did a lot of overdubbing of actors in movies, including a couple of Munchkin voices in The Wizard of Oz and…well, I could waste a lot of bandwidth listing places you heard Billy Bletcher's voice.

One place you never heard him was on a TV cartoon. He did a few TV commercials (voiceover and on camera) and a few acting jobs. (He played Pappy Yokum in one of the nine thousand unsold Li'l Abner TV pilots.) But for some reason, no one ever hired him for an animated project on television.

But I tried. One of the first cartoon shows I wrote was Plastic Man and for my first script, the producer allowed me to suggest an actor to play the villain…a living plant creature called The Weed. A week or so earlier, a friend of mine had done an interview with the then-long-retired Mr. Bletcher and told me that Billy still sounded like he'd always sounded…and that he had lamented how no one ever called him for cartoon work anymore.

You can almost guess where this one's going. I asked the producer to hire Billy Bletcher. He agreed. Billy was called and booked…and then he took ill and was unable to do the job. He passed away about a week later at the age of 85. I did get to speak with him once on the phone and, sure enough, he sounded exactly like he did in this clip with Mr. Disney…

Hey, it's two commercials for Stag Beer featuring Jim Backus as the visually-challenged Mr. Magoo. Backus does the voice of the boat captain in the first one, also.

It's 1972 and we're at the Academy Awards. Acad President Daniel Taradash does the historic introduction as Charlie Chaplin is welcomed back to Hollywood after a twenty year exile. Chaplin's politics had always been somewhat left-wing and a number of forces, including J. Edgar Hoover, decided he was dangerous or subversive or something of the sort. In '52 when Chaplin went to England for the premiere of his film Limelight, it was intended as a brief trip. But then Hoover and others moved to prevent his return, and Chaplin decided Switzerland might be a better place to live.

In '72 when he came back here to accept his second Honorary Oscar (his first was in 1929), he received what is said to be the longest standing ovation in the history of Academy Award ceremonies, clocked at a full five minutes. It has been edited down in this clip and a montage of Chaplin work has also been removed. As you watch it though, notice the quick shot of a grinning bald man in the audience. That's Jackie Coogan, who as a child actor appeared with Chaplin in The Kid. You'll also see Jack Lemmon come out on stage to hand Chaplin his famous prop cane and derby. It's not in this clip but then Lemmon then led the audience singing one of Chaplin's songs, "Smile." (Lemmon was one of four hosts that year. The others were Helen Hayes, Alan King and Sammy Davis Jr.)

I thought I'd linked to this long ago but apparently I didn't. It's a blooper reel from The Dick Van Dyke Show. And I think that's all you need to know…

Tonight Show clips from the sixties are very rare. As you may know, most of the tapes were erased…an act about which Mr. J. Carson was known to curse and moan. I once heard an NBC exec complain about Johnny's complaining, saying (in effect) that for a very modest amount of cash — or even for nothing if he'd demanded it of the network — Johnny could have had those shows preserved. But he knew they were being dumped and said nothing about it for more than ten years…whereupon NBC suddenly became the villains who'd destroyed his heritage.

I wouldn't take sides in that debate, and there may be more to it than the above. All I know is it's nice when a new clip surfaces…like these from the Tonight Show for New Year's Eve, 1965/1966. This was back when the show was based in New York and the bandleader (who you'll see briefly in the second clip) was Skitch Henderson.

The first of these two clips features Criswell, who I wrote about back here. Criswell, with his pompous manner and daffy forecasts, appeared at least annually with Mr. Carson for about a decade, usually around the first of the year. You'll notice he's reading awkwardly from cards. This was probably to make sure he did all the lines in the right order. Johnny, obviously, was sitting there with a page of pre-written "ad-libs" to inject after each Criswell Prediction if and when it suited him. (Carson knew enough to only glance down at them when Criswell was speaking, so the attention and camera were elsewhere but you can catch Johnny peeking once or twice.)

As the years went along, Carson took to mocking Criswell more and more with each appearance. The last few times, it got pretty insulting. Don Rickles was also a guest on what I think was Criswell's last time on the show, and he and Johnny just howled at the silly predictions and at the style with which they were delivered. I remember some TV critic of the day writing that Carson and Rickles had gone too far with embarrassing a guest…but I doubt Criswell minded. You could tell that he didn't even believe his own act…and besides, it was still the best show biz exposure he ever had. Pretty much anything is better than his previous claim to fame, which was starring in movies directed by Ed Wood, including Plan 9 From Outer Space.

Okay, here's Criswell. Stick around after because we also have a vintage Muppets appearance…

Fine. Now, here from the same Tonight Show, is that vintage Muppets appearance I promised you. This is from back before Sesame Street when Kermit the Frog was still eating worms that turned out to be…well, you'll see what they turned out to be. Also note the other guest Johnny had sitting next to him as he does the intro…

Let's kick off '09 with one of our favorite musical acts…The Manhattan Transfer. This is from a concert in Japan in 1986…

This is a little long — eleven minutes — but some of you may enjoy it.

One of my favorite entertainers, a gentleman named Bruce Adler, passed away earlier this year. Mr. Adler was a star of musical theater but when he wasn't doing that, he kept the Catskills tradition alive. He toured, mainly around New York and Florida, playing to predominantly Jewish audiences with an act that was one part Grossinger's and two parts Yiddish Music Hall. He sang, danced and told Jew jokes and, yeah, it was mostly ancient material but boy, did he know how to work an audience.

When he died, I regretted that I didn't have a video link I could provide to show him in that part of his career. Well, now I do. Here's Bruce Adler doing the kind of act you would have seen if you'd gone to one of those famous resort hotels that formed part of the Borscht Belt…

To ward off another hundred people sending me this link, I'm embedding the "star-studded" gay rights musical that features John C. Reilly, Jack Black, Margaret Cho, Andy Richter and so many more. But I'm also embedding it because I think it's absolutely on-target…

Here, for your dining and dancing pleasure, is another cartoon I wrote for the Garfield and Friends series. This is "Truckin' Odie" from season four. Lorenzo Music provides the voice of Garfield…and as I recall, I handed Lorenzo the script, he gave it a quick read…and then proceeded to record the entire song to our satisfaction in about fifteen minutes. He may have talked slow but he was fast. Gregg Berger barks for Odie, I did the lyrics, Ed Bogas did the music and the female singing voices you'll hear on the track are all Désirée Goyette, multi-tracked to sound like more people. (In quite a different vein: If you're looking for beautiful, inspirational music, check out some of the CDs Désirée markets through her own company.) I believe this episode was storyboarded and designed by Bob Nesler, who was one of the show's producers.

Actually, I do have some baby panda footage for you. PBS is now airing (check your local listings now) Panda Tales, an hour-long special on Zhen-Zhen of the San Diego Zoo. Here's a three-minute preview…