Category Archives: Video Links

All right, I know what you want. You want to hear a good ukulele orchestra playing "The Theme from Shaft." Okay, okay. Just remember — I'm only doing this for you…

I've been looking for more footage of baby pandas for you and haven't been able to find any. Will you settle for a family of moose and a lawn sprinkler?

So they're taping a "Mama's Family" sketch on The Carol Burnett Show with Carol, Vicki Lawrence, Dick Van Dyke and Tim Conway…and Mr. Conway begins talking about elephants. Here's what happens…

I should have posted this a few days ago. The Los Angeles Fire Department (no kidding) produced posted this video on why you should never use one of those turkey deep-frying thingies. They may have overreached to make their case but it is true that those cookers have a pretty high accident ratio. [CORRECTION: The video was produced by the folks at Underwriters Laboratory. But the L.A.F.D. put it on their website and on YouTube.]

In honor of Thanksgiving, here's a complete episode of WKRP in Cincinnati. You can probably guess which episode…

Keith Olbermann's "Special Comments" boiled down to the basic ingredients…

Another animated commercial from the Jay Ward Studios! This one's for a cereal called King Vitaman that I believe was only marketed in portions of the country.

The voice of the King was done by Joe Flynn, who most of you will recall from the TV series, McHale's Navy. He's the guy in the above photo. During the sixties when that show was big, a number of cartoon studios tried casting Mr. Flynn to do voices…but he was one of those performers, it was felt, whose magic wasn't present when you didn't see him. They'd record him, listen to the track later and then hire someone else. Hanna-Barbera did a show called The Hair Bear Bunch in which they modeled one of the characters after Joe Flynn, recorded him for a few episodes…then decided that veteran cartoon actor John Stephenson doing a Joe Flynn impression sounded more like Joe Flynn than Joe Flynn.

The King Vitaman spots — there was a whole series of these — were one of the few times that Mr. Flynn's voice was heard in animation. The other two voices in this spot are Daws Butler (as the bad guy) and Bill Scott (as King Vitaman's aide)…

Here's a Howdy Doody P.S. This morn's video link brought an e-mail from celeb interviewer Barry Mitchell, who shares this brief outtake from a 1997 interview he did for ABC News with Buffalo Bob Smith. It captures a lot of Mr. Smith's charm and showmanship…

This is the opening of an episode of the Howdy Doody series with "Buffalo" Bob Smith doing his usual obvious job of supplying the voice of his puppet star, and the kids in the Peanut Gallery singing the show's theme song without knowing any of the words after the first line. Most of this clip is taken up by a commercial for Kellogg's Rice Krispies…and that's Thurl (Tony the Tiger) Ravenscroft you'll hear as the lead singer of the jingle.

The clip was posted to YouTube by the folks at Mill Creek Entertainment, a video company that's just brought out a 5-DVD set containing 22 hours (!) of Howdy Doody episodes and bonus features. You can order a copy from Amazon by clicking here. If that's too much for you — and by God, it oughta be — they have another set that's a little less than ten hours that sells for less than a third as much. You can order that one by clicking here — and no, I don't know if the episodes it contains are included in the larger set. Amazon doesn't seem to know, either…though they are selling the two sets in a package deal.

I was born a wee bit too late to count Howdy Doody as an obsession of my childhood. By the time I got to it, it seemed like a quaint relic of early television…and a show that catered to devout followers, not to new viewers. I never quite understood the characters or storylines or even if the premise was that the puppet characters lived in the same world as the human ones or were of the same species. But I liked moments in the show and I really liked Buffalo Bob, and friends who are a little older than me tell me I'd have been hooked if I'd started watching a few years earlier. I can see that. When I worked with Bob Keeshan, he told me that there seemed to be a clear dividing line among adults he met, depending on when they were born. Older than a certain age, they wanted to talk to him about his days on Howdy Doody playing Clarabelle the Clown. Younger than that age, they wanted to talk about his years playing Captain Kangaroo. There was, he said, very little overlap even though the shows co-existed for many years.

I was in the Kangaroo Krowd but I did ask him a lot about Howdy Doody, less as an avid viewer than as a student of TV history. Some of the episodes he did before his firing are on the 22 hour set and I may buy it just to see him in action. Anyway, here's a brief visit to Doodyville…

Here's a short interview from 1964 with Buster Keaton. In the first part, he talks about a movie he tried unsuccessfully to get made at MGM — an all-star parody of that studio's blockbuster, Grand Hotel. At the time he proposed it, Keaton was considered unreliable, unbankable and unable to refrain from alcohol…so for those reasons alone, the movie was never made. (In case anyone's puzzled about the reference to "Babe Hardy," that was Oliver Hardy's offscreen nickname.)

Then Keaton talks about the decline of comedy films…and the reasons he gives are probably valid, though in his case, it probably also had a lot to do with drinking. Anyway, it's interesting to hear him talk about those days…

One of the big lies of the TV business is that "reality shows" are unscripted. Just about every such show has a couple of folks who oughta have the title of Writer but aren't called that because the producers don't want to work under the auspices of the Writers Guild of America, West. I'm not sure how much of this is because they want to pretend everything on the show is spontaneous and how much is because they just don't want to pay WGA rates and abide by the list of things that the WGA says you can't do to its members.

It doesn't have to be like this, of course. Some "reality shows" (I'm deliberately using the quotes) are WGA signatories and in the eighties, when the term was coined for a certain new kind of program, almost all were, including a show I worked on. We wrote narration. We wrote seeming ad-libs for the on-camera participants. We also helped work out scenarios for what would be filmed and helped structure the storylines created in the editing room.

It is not true that a "reality show" points its cameras at things that would have happened even if the video crew wasn't present. Someone arranges for the participants to be there, someone "casts" them, someone plots (in the same way a writer plots a screenplay) the challenges and problems they will confront. Writers may or may not write some of what the people say, and of course someone writes narration and introductions and voiceovers. In the editing process, the footage is structured to create a narrative and during that process, someone may be doing much the same kind of work that a Writer does when involved in the editing process on a fiction show.

The Writers Guild is attempting to bring down the lie that "reality shows" don't have Writers. One effort towards that end is this video, which explains how Writers participate in the creation of the WGA-signatory series, Intervention. Give it a look…

The Monty Python guys have started their own YouTube channel. Here's the official announcement…

Here's a little sampler of the revival of South Pacific, which I saw last Friday night in New York and wrote about here. This is from the Tony Awards, where it won the Best Revival trophy…

The brilliant comedian Jeff Altman has been a frequent guest with David Letterman as long as Dave's been on TV. They met at the Comedy Store in the mid-seventies and were regulars on a short-lived 1977 variety show featuring everyone's all-time favorite musical group, the Starland Vocal Band. I always loved seeing Jeff appear with Dave, not only because Jeff is so funny — if you ever get the chance to see him live, do not hesitate — but because Letterman always seems so danged happy to have him there. Dave rarely appears pleased to have anyone on but there's always a certain delight when he has Altman in the guest chair. I suspect it's an admiration because Jeff can do all the comedy things that Dave can't: Impressions, characters, physical comedy, etc.

Some time in the eighties, back when Dave was on NBC, his show gave Jeff some money to make some short videos that he could use in his appearances. Jeff decided to shoot some bits where he'd be a "test boy" at NASA, being subjected to various experiments, and he enlisted a couple of friends to help. I was one of those friends. The idea was that we'd tape about thirty ten-second gags and every time Jeff guested with Dave, he'd show three more. They were shot in one long afternoon in a video studio out in Woodland Hills.

Our clip today is a long segment that Jeff did with Letterman and near the end, he shows three of those short vignettes — the only ones that ever aired. Shortly after this, and before the time Jeff was next booked with Dave, there was a huge accident — the Challenger Space Shuttle disaster, I think it was — and someone decided it was not a good time to be making sport of folks who train for NASA missions.

The black guy in the first one is some acquaintance of Jeff's whose name I don't remember. I'm the guy holding Jeff's eyes open in the last one. But the more difficult role I played was holding the leash in the second one, keeping Jeff (a very strong person) away from a friend of mine I asked to come out and put on a bikini for a couple of bits. Her name was Angela Aames and she was a lovely, gifted actress who died unexpectedly one night at one of those ages where you're way too young to be dying unexpectedly. She still has fans and friends who remember her fondly and I'll bet few (if any) knew that that was her in that blackout. So I thought I'd mention it here so that those who Google her name, as so many do, will know.

Direct from the convention I attended over the weekend, here's historian (and writer and videographer) Mike Catron exploring the uncanny breach of comic books and politics with Marvel legends John Romita and Roy Thomas…