Category Archives: Video Links

From the late sixties: Yogi Bear and Boo Boo (with the voices of Daws Butler and Don Messick) lecture kids on the evils of smoking. This was to counter all those Winstons commercials that the Flintstones once did.

I've mentioned and quoted Mark Rylance's wonderful acceptance speech the other night at the Tony Awards. Now, you can see it…

In honor of Gary Owens appearing later today on Stu's Show (see here for details), here's two minutes of the man reminiscing about Laugh-In for a recent documentary.

You will notice that at one point, he holds up one of the original doors from the famed Laugh-In joke wall and says he got it when they were disassembling the set. He may have gotten others then but the one he's holding was salvaged by one of the show's writers, David Panich. (David was the guy who created and wrote The Farkle Family, along with many of the best routines on that show.) David later gave it to one of the show's other writers, Rowby Goren, and when Rowby was moving, he gave it to me.

I had it in the trunk of my car for months. One night, I was at a meeting of CAPS, the Comic Art Professional Society, and Gary was present…and I suddenly thought, "Hey, he oughta have that." So I went out, got it, took it in, handed it to him and told him he'd won the door prize.

I mention this because it's the only time I've ever known Gary to be wrong about anything. Make sure you catch him on Stu's Show…and believe every word he utters.

I liked most of the 1964 Hanna-Barbera feature, Hey There, It's Yogi Bear. What I didn't like from the moment I first saw it at the Picwood Theater in West L.A. were the musical numbers in which Yogi (Daws Butler) and Boo Boo (Don Messick) were dubbed with voices that were neither Daws nor Don. Even at age 12, I could tell the difference and I felt cheated.

The one musical number I really enjoyed therefore was this one which featured neither Yogi nor Boo Boo. It's the "St. Louie" number performed by a bunch of anonymous bears. The speaking voices you'll hear at the beginning are Mel Blanc and Don Messick but when the bears sing, that's a group of singers who called themselves Jonah and the Wailers. Who were they? Beats the heck outta me. There have apparently been a lot of groups over the years who've gone by that name but I know of no reference for whoever was going by that moniker in '64.

The great Warner Brothers director Friz Freleng worked without credit on the storyboard for Hey There, It's Yogi Bear and since he was known for doing jazzy dance numbers in his cartoons, some have assumed this scene is his handiwork. I have it on good authority that it was devised after Friz left the project and that it's mainly the work of Jerry Eisenberg and Willie Ito. It runs less than two minutes and it's very catchy…

What was this preoccupation some producers had with putting Charles Nelson Reilly in ghastly costumes? You all remember him as Hoodoo on Lidsville and as Uncle Croc on Uncle Croc's Block. Here he is selling Bic Banana pens. Let's all try and imagine the meeting in which one advertising guy said to another, "Hey, you know what would sell these crayon things? Charles Nelson Reilly in a banana suit!"

Then the other guy says, "Great! And let's write a song for him to sing and make sure we make the word 'gay' very prominent in it, even if it doesn't exactly rhyme!"

And then the first guy yells, "Brilliant," and they make this commercial…

Here's Lewis Black on an NPR show, getting a call from someone who doesn't like his work. The caller makes a number of mistakes, the most obvious being that if you want to criticize something in public, you need to be prepared to make your case with an example or two.
The caller believes that Black does some kind of damage by mocking religion, Judaism in particular. That alone makes you think the guy on the phone hasn't heard (or understood) much of what Mr. Black says. But even if he's right — even if Lewis Black is out there saying the worst kind of things about Judaism — they'd probably be less disrespectful of the religion than the suggestion that it's so frail it can be harmed by one guy yelling on a stage somewhere. It's like people who think America is so fragile, it could crumble if someone occasionally burns a flag.

Six minutes of Angela Lansbury in Gypsy. The picture ain't great and there's time code in the way…but come on. It's Angela Lansbury. Thanks to Shelly Goldstein for letting me know about this.

I don't link to a lot of clips of shows I worked on but for some reason, I've recently received a number of questions about The Secret World of Og, a three-part ABC Weekend Special that I wrote back in 1983 or thereabouts…so I'll write about it and let you see a couple minutes. The ABC Weekend Special was that network's capitulation to demands for something "educational" on the Saturday morning schedule. Later, CBS responded to similar demands with a series called CBS Storybreak and I did a mess of them, too, plus I wrote a lot of the host segments for both shows.

Both endeavors usually involved adapting kids' books for animation, the idea being to encourage reading. In some cases, if our adaptation prompted a child to run out and read the book in question, that child must have been somewhat baffled because a lot of those books were changed quite a bit for the screen. In one case, I was tossed (literally) a paperback and told, "Here…we bought the rights to this but just use the title and the character names and make up a new plot." Eventually, we even did one which was created as a TV special…then the studio arranged for a book to be published before the special aired, and we fibbed and claimed the show was adapted from the book, when in fact the opposite was true.

The Secret World of Og was a 1961 book by the prolific Canadian author and TV host, Pierre Berton. An ABC exec actually told me that he was excited by the acquisition because, after all, this was the man who wrote the book on which Planet of the Apes was based. When he told me this, I thought, "That doesn't sound right but I guess he knows." Of course, when I later checked, I discovered the ABC guy didn't know. The ape movie was adapted from a book by Pierre Boulle, not Pierre Berton, and even though I so informed everyone, at least one ABC press release continued that confusion.

Mr. Berton's book was a fantasy about four kids, named after and modelled on his own four children, who were apparently always losing things. In the story, they found a hidden world via a secret tunnel under their playhouse, and there they came across all the things they'd lost in the surface land. ABC paid a bit above their usually rock-bottom fees to acquire the animation rights to the book, so I was told they wanted to get three half-hour episodes out of it. This was good because if I'd had to cram it into one, it would have been corrupted beyond all dimension. Given thrice the space, I was able to do a pretty faithful presentation…one that prompted a lovely "thank you" letter from Mr. Berton. I wrote him back and told him, among other things, of the Planet of the Apes muddle and he replied that it wasn't the first time someone had made that mistake and thanks to ABC, it probably wouldn't be the last.

The one significant change I made from the book, apart from tossing out about half the incidents in it, was because the network folks wanted a clearer moral at the end. They didn't really care what it was, just so long as the kids learned something that was easily summarized. After reading and re-reading the book several times, I decided that only one moral that I could abide flowed logically from this story: Don't read books. Throughout, the kids had been conflating fantasy with reality, and spending too much time living in stories instead of the real world. So I went with that…and no one to this day has ever commented on the fact that though the ABC Weekend Special was intended to promote reading, I wrote one that told kids, "Hey! Stop reading and go outside!" I still think that's not a bad message.

The three parts aired about 8,000 times on ABC, then were edited together into a quasi-movie which has run often on cable and (I'm told) received limited theatrical release in some countries. It's available on this DVD which is currently out of stock on Amazon but they say if you order it, they'll get more. Very young audiences might enjoy it. I'm supposed to somehow get money from its ongoing exploitation but have yet to see a cent. I suppose some day when I'm in my eighties, I'll get one of those checks that's barely worth flipping over to endorse.

Here's the first two minutes of the thing. The animation was done by a company that was then functioning as Hanna-Barbera Australia and I thought they, especially producer-director Steve Lumley, did a very nice job. The mother's voice is Janet Waldo, better known to you all as Judy Jetson and Penelope Pitstop. The two little girls are Noelle North and Brittany Wilson, and the silly green man is the fine impressionist-singer, Fred Travalena. Also in the cast were Hamilton Camp, Peter Cullen, Julie McWhirter, Andre Stojka, Michael Rye, a buncha other folks and the legendary Dick Beals. Here it is…

Actor-writer Bill Dial died on June 2 from a heart attack. He was 66 and had most recently been working on 18 Wheels of Justice, a TV series on Spike. In earlier days, he wrote for (and occasionally acted on) Harper Valley P.T.A., Simon and Simon, Code Name: Foxfire, various permutations of Star Trek and many other shows. I never met Mr. Dial but I admired his work, especially on WKRP in Cincinnati, a wonderful and underrated series.

In fact, he wrote the best episode of WKRP — the famous Thanksgiving episode where Mr. Carlson had an odd promotional idea involving turkeys. Here, with limited commercial interruption, is the entirety of that episode…

This is from last night's Countdown with Keith Olbermann. It's a ten minute montage of moments from the primary campaign…a pretty nice overview which, by simply reporting what went on, doesn't make any of the candidates look particularly good.

Changed my mind. Someone just sent me this link and it's too good to not post right away.

It's the cast of the Broadway show Avenue Q joining forces with the cast of the recent revival of Fiddler on the Roof, doing a mash-up of the two shows. It took place at the annual Easter Bonnet Competition — a benefit for Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS — in 2004. The script (and more info on the event) can be found over on this page. Pretty funny stuff. Some of the language is not for the young or easily offended.

This is great. Bill O'Reilly sometimes sends his producers out with camera crews to "ambush" folks who won't come on The O'Reilly Factor. At the National Conference for Media Reform 2008, one of his guys — a hapless fellow named Porter Barry — confronted PBS host Bill Moyers and…well, you'll want to watch this for yourself. Moyers handled the guy in a polite but firm manner and made the ambusher wish he'd never ambushed.

But that wasn't the end of it. After Moyers was done with Barry, other reporters began ambushing the ambusher, peppering him with questions in the same way he'd hectored Moyers. Always nice to see a troublemaker getting a dollop of his own medicine…

Many years ago, I dated a lady who had a videotape I desperately wanted to copy but never did. It was a tape of about thirty Albert Brooks appearances, all done back in the days when he used to show up on talk shows with routines. Sometimes, they took the form of stand-up. Sometimes, he was sitting down with the host. They were always fresh and outrageously funny…and he rarely repeated. He'd do a bit once, get huge laughs with it…then retire it forever.

I used to watch the tape at her place when I went over to pick her up and she wasn't ready to leave. When she emerged, ready to head out to dinner or a show or whatever, she'd say, "How do I look?" Usually, when your date asks you that, you say "Great," because…well, if she doesn't, going back and putting on a different top is not going to make a bit of difference. With this lady, I used to say, "Uh, I don't think that's a good color for you," because I wanted to see the rest of whatever Albert Brooks routine I was watching. When we finally broke up, I thought of calling and asking her if I could take the tape out for an evening.

Our clip today is from Mr. Carson's Tonight Show…and the best part of it is watching Johnny's delight. He obviously had not seen Albert's routine in advance…though in that skillful way that neither Leno nor Letterman are able to do, he helped Brooks set up the premise of the bit and clarified it slightly to make sure the audience understood it. Here's Albert Brooks demonstrating his new kit that allows you to do impressions at home…

From the era when cigarettes were advertised on television, we have this one minute spot for Chesterfields. Why am I showing you this? Because all the voices in it were done by the late, great Daws Butler…who, by the way, didn't smoke.

The person who posted this to YouTube claims that it's a reunion of Daws with his old partner, Stan Freberg. It is not. It's all Daws.

Okay, let's watch a commercial I saw incessantly when I was a kid — a spot for Andersen's Split Pea Soup. In fact, let's discuss pea soup in some depth.

I didn't know it when I was seeing this commercial every eight minutes on my TV but the voices were done by the great Bob and Ray. Bob Elliott had the lead role and then he and Ray Goulding played the chefs. The commercial was designed by Paul Kim, who was responsible for a lot of ads produced in New York in the fifties.

I used to love Andersen's Split Pea Soup…or at least the version served in their signature restaurant in the little town of Buellton, California. Buellton is (I just Mapquested it) 138 miles northwest of Los Angeles and is known for that restaurant and almost nothing else. The restaurant used to be alongside Highway 101 and there was a California tradition: When one was driving from L.A. to San Francisco or vice-versa, one would stop off in Buellton for a bowl of guess what at Pea Soup Andersen's. A lot of people would also spend a few hours in Solvang, a nearby city with a Danish motif and wonderful gift shops and bakeries.

Split Pea Andersen's is a bit farther off the 101 than it used to be but it hasn't moved. The 101 did. In the early sixties, the freeway was rerouted and the old 101 is now the main street of Buellton. Still, people hop off the 101 to eat pea soup. It's been years since I've been there but I'll bet people still do. I remember a couple of trips with my parents in the sixties where we wasted an hour of vacation time waiting for a table there. The menu was coffee shop standard and a common meal was to order a sandwich and "all you can eat" pea soup. Your waitress would roll a little soup cart to your table and fill or top off your bowl.

The pea soup was great and I assume it's still great. On the other hand, the canned version of it, which this commercial promotes, always disappointed me.

What I really liked was the version of it my mother made. Someone gave her what was alleged to be the Pea Soup Andersen recipe. I doubt it was that but it was pretty good…and quite labor-intensive so she didn't make it as often as I would have liked. These days, my favorite Split Pea Soup is served at Canter's Delicatessen on Fairfax in Los Angeles, but they only have it on Wednesdays.

Okay, that's a lot more about Split Pea Soup than you could possibly want to know. Here's the commercial that got me to thinking about it…