Nine minutes of The World's Foremost Authority, Professor Irwin Corey. This is from a 1981 special saluting the nightclub, the hungry i, and its owner, Enrico Banducci. If you watch carefully, you may spot a couple of moments in this where Professor Corey appears to actually know what he's saying.
I haven't seen a campaign commercial in this election that I've liked. Even ones saying things I liked I didn't like because they seemed so condescending and built on the premise that voters are morons who can't grasp anything more than short bursts of emotional appeal. You cannot possibly explain why one candidate is better than another in a twenty second bite, which is about all you have in a 30 second spot.
Here's a one minute ad from 1960 for John F. Kennedy which is probably condescending in a different way, selling the candidate like a new soft drink. I'm not suggesting we need this kind of commercial today…and Kennedy certainly didn't rely on ones like this. But at least it has kind of a catchy jingle. Don't blink or you'll miss the slightest reference to Lyndon Johnson.
Shrimpenstein was a very hip and funny kids' show that ran in Los Angeles back in the sixties. I've written about it before on this blog, most notably in this post which also included a video embed of almost seven minutes from an episode. You might want to go watch it before you click on today's link…because today's link is the next nine and half minutes from that episode.
That's Gene Moss as Dr. Von Shtick and his partner Jim Thurman supplying the voices of Shrimpy and Klaus. This excerpt also includes a number by The Tijuana Bats, who were two puppets worked by Thurman who mimed to sped-up records. (The speaking voices of the bats leading into the song were pre-taped so Moss could play one of them.) This hunk should give you some idea why my friends and I all found this show very hard to resist and were saddened when it was cancelled.
This is a thirteen minute segment from yesterday's episode of Hardball with Chris Matthews. If you're waiting for members of the press to "grow a pair," you might enjoy seeing one of those all-too-rare occasions when Matthews acts like a newsman. It usually only happens when an interviewee uses a historical reference without knowing what it means and/or evades the question of whether he stands by what he's said or done. The tap dancer in this case is Rep. Eric Cantor, a Republican from Virginia who commits the latter sin. He doesn't want to respond as to whether or not he still supports a man named George W. Bush.
A general rule of thumb in politics: When someone says, "This is no time for finger-pointing," it's because they know and don't like where that finger will point.
A lot of folks loved the "surprise" ending to the last installment of Newhart, the sitcom Bob Newhart did after he did The Bob Newhart Show. Here's the last nine minutes of that historic episode of Newhart. Unfortunately, this clip does not end, as the original telecast of it did, with the theme music from The Bob Newhart Show.
And here's a brief interview with Bob explaining how they kept it a secret. There are those who dispute that the idea originated with Newhart's wife but I don't want to get into that.
This is something I've been looking for for some time: A late performance by The Banana Man, an eccentric performer who turned up on every national kid's show when I was a kid. If you're anywhere near my age (physically 56, emotionally 9), you'll remember this guy and his odd act, which never varied much except for time constraints.
There were actually a couple of Banana Men. The act was originated by a man named A. Robins but at some point, it passed on to a gent named Sam Levine, and this must be Levine doing it on the Captain Kangaroo show in the late sixties. I wrote about the act and linked to a clip of Robins in this post. There may even have been a third Banana Man between Robins and Levine…but they all seem to have used the same props.
Here's an anecdote about this performance which may or may not be true. The Banana Man was seen many times on the Good Captain's program. This was not a simple thing because for a long time, Captain Kangaroo was done live, twice in a row. Because of different time zones, Bob Keeshan would do the show for one time zone every morning and then, after saying their goodbyes and rolling credits, they'd have about sixty seconds to reset everything and do the entire show again for another time zone.
This was a special problem for The Banana Man because it took him a long time to prep all his tricks and load his pockets. So he'd finish one performance and then have to race like the dickens to get ready to do it again in one hour. Somehow, he always managed. After a while, the Cap'n went to tape and it got a lot easier for everyone but especially The Banana Man. They stopped having him come in at all. When they wanted him on the show, which was every few months, they'd just reuse the old tape and pay him again. After all, it wasn't like he was going to do anything different if he came in and took the same bananas out of the same pockets and made all the same silly noises.
This was black-and-white footage and when the show went to color, they needed to have him come back and perform it again for color cameras. By this point, Levine was pretty much retired but he hauled the props out, did a little refurbishment on the shabbier ones and trucked them into the studio. The problem was — and this is the part that may be legend, not reality — that all the props and costume pieces were old and moldy by then and Levine was afraid that if he tried cleaning them, they'd fall apart. So the act was taped with the crew literally sickened by the stench…and after he left, they had to spray the studio down.
I don't know if I believe that or not but it's a funny story. Talk about an act stinking up the joint. If it is true, this may be tape of it being true.
Thanks to Earl Kress for telling me about this. And now, I give you in one of his rare color appearances — The Banana Man…
Guess what I found! Nine minutes of Eubie Blake (then, age 93) performing and talking on The Merv Griffin Show. They don't make 'em like that anymore. No, they sure don't…
Here's a number from a 1982 TV special in which the then-current cast of A Chorus Line performed "What I Did For Love," followed by a bit of "One."
Neil Simon's play The Sunshine Boys was about two old vaudevillians — a team that had split up and was reuniting for a TV performance. It was based very loosely on the old comedy duo of Smith and Dale.
Joe Smith and Charlie Dale teamed up in 1898 and performed as partners until 1971 when Mr. Dale passed away. They never split up like the characters Simon wrote. (That aspect of The Sunshine Boys parallels the true story of a couple of other comedy teams, most notably Weber and Fields.)
For the play, Simon wrote a sketch which his characters performed — a routine clearly inspired by the classic Smith and Dale sketch, "Doctor Kronkheit and His Only Living Patient." This clip, introduced by Jackie Gleason, is an abbreviated version of the Smith and Dale routine…and in case you're wondering, Smith is the patient and Dale is the doctor. It's from November of 1962…a CBS series called Jackie Gleason and His American Scene Magazine. Thanks to Jim Engel for telling me about this one.
Here's another clip from that 1972 episode of The David Frost Show saluting the original production of the Broadway musical, Follies. This is Yvonne DeCarlo singing "I'm Still Here" and remembering most but not all of the lyrics.
This one's only thirty seconds. It's one of those commercials I must have seen a thousand times back when I was a wee lad watching cartoon shows — an ad for a Remco game named Fascination. The catchy tune (a parody of "Alouette") resonated in my brain until half past high school. Which means it lasted a lot longer than the toy or, for that matter, the Remco company.
I don't know anything about this commercial but I thought it was kinda nice…
In 1987, John Cleese did a TV special in Great Britain to promote a political movement with which he was then involved. There's a ten minute excerpt from that special here but I'm just going to embed this shorter clip from it that runs a little over two minutes. It's about extremism and while a few of the details are different with political fringes in this country, the essential principle is just as valid. Sorry about the dark video.
In case you were wise enough to not watch the political conventions, here they are in the Cliff Notes versions…and these pretty much will tell you all you need to know. First, we have the Democratic Convention in a minute and thirty-seven seconds…
And now, here's the Republican Convention in a minute and thirty-eight seconds. The extra second is yet another example of how the media gives extra attention to the G.O.P.
I've found my candidate for the highest office in our land…