Category Archives: Video Links

Another Broadway commercial! This is for Victor/Victoria, which came to New York in '95 and starred Julie Andrews, Michael Nouri and Tony Roberts. And doesn't that sound a little like Tony Roberts doing the voiceover? A rather nice vehicle for Ms. Andrews…and also for Rachel York, who stole the show in the role of the gangster's lady friend.

Today, we're embedding a video with two commercials for stage productions of Fiddler on the Roof — one with Zero Mostel, one with Topol. I think the Mostel one is from a revival production he did at the Shubert in Los Angeles in the early seventies. The Topol one, I'm guessing, is the New York revival he did around the end of 1990. L'chaim!

This is a short TV commercial for the 1994 Broadway revival/revisal of Damn Yankees, which I saw and liked a lot, and which I guess didn't do as much business as its backers had hoped, even after they brought in Jerry Lewis to play Applegate. (This commercial is from before then. That's Victor Garber you'll see playing that role in the ad.)

I saw the pre-Lewis version three times and then was there for Jerry's opening night…plus, I have since seen two non-Broadway productions that incorporated many of the changes made for the '94 mounting. Part of me wishes they'd leave old shows in their original state and part of me has to admit that, in this case and a few others, they probably improved things at least for a modern audience. I did not catch the recent L.A. version directed by Jason Alexander which took things further, using a mostly-black cast and turning the Washington Senators into the Los Angeles Dodgers.

Which reminds me. Not all that long ago, there was an announcement that a new filmed version of Damn Yankees was soon to go before the cameras with Billy Crystal portraying The Devil. You may recall me suggesting that Christopher Walken would have been a more interesting choice. Well, whatever happened to that? Anyone?

Here's someone named Todd Vegas covering the implosion of the Stardust Hotel in Las Vegas last March. I'm not sure why I find the demolition of these places so interesting. (As recounted here, I was present for the bringdown of the old Hacienda Hotel.) Some of it may be because of the curious mindset that insists on preceding these events with rather spectacular and expensive fireworks displays. It's a great show…but why? Who stands to profit from attracting a crowd at 2 AM to watch a building blow up?

I'm not asking this to be sarcastic. I'm genuinely curious. It was decided to drop the Stardust. Okay, no quarrel. It was a dump and a half. But why did someone spend many, many thousands of dollars on fireworks? How did the developers of what's going on that piece of land a few years from now benefit from that expenditure?

Not only that but let's say they had a great reason to get a huge crowd out there to witness the big kaboom and to get maximum attention. In which case, I'm still wondering: Why the fireworks? Did someone say to someone else, "You know, just blowing up a hotel isn't enough. It needs something else to make it special!"?

Just one more thing in this world I don't understand. Here's the clip…

From the 1992 Broadway revival of Guys and Dolls, here's Faith Prince as Miss Adelaide with the Hot Box Dancers. They're doing "A Bushel and a Peck," which was one of the best songs in the show and which was replaced with an inferior tune in the movie version.

This is a 10-and-a-half minute segment from the 60 Minutes show from September of '87…a piece on Mad Magazine. The main point of interest is the chance for those who never met him to get a look at William M. Gaines, the colorful publisher of that publication.

Gaines died in 1992 and this was one of the last interviews he did. The three men you'll see with him in his office are Nick Meglin and John Ficarra, who were then the magazine's editors (Ficarra still holds that job) and its editorial consultant, Dick DeBartolo. You also get to see a bit of the old Mad offices over at 485 MADison Avenue. There's no mention of the magazine's first editor and founder, Harvey Kurtzman, or of Al Feldstein who took over from Kurtzman and ran the mag for 29 years during which it became the best-selling humor publication in the history of mankind.

The piece dwells a lot on the fact that Mad did not merchandize much or sell advertising at all — two policies that have changed since Gaines passed away. In the interest of accuracy, it should be noted that while Bill's stated reasons for declining those dollars were true, there was also probably another, unstated reason. Gaines was a compulsive who had a dread fear of his magazine getting any larger. He liked keeping it small and simple so he could manage it by himself. He didn't like dealing with new people and ran in fear from any suggestion — and there were many — that might have meant increasing the size of the operation, its staff, its financial complexity, etc. When the subject of selling ads in Mad came up, Gaines had what you might call his "principled" reasons for refusing, and perhaps they were reason enough. But he also was horrified at the idea of just dealing with advertisers and of upgrading Mad's printing and adding more color, which is what those advertisers would have wanted.

And there was another thing: Mad had been pretty successful in the late sixties and early seventies. He'd gotten very wealthy off a magazine without ads so he didn't want to tamper with the package. By '87, sales were in serious decline but it was still profitable enough, and Mad remained a sacred untouchable within the Time-Warner company that owned it. Sales were nosediving at the time of his death and that trend continued. Some members of the Mad crew believe that if Bill had lived, he would have gone to the better-printed format — including paid ads — that is the current Mad package. (I'm of two minds on this. I sure wish Mad had had that kind of printing in the days when Wally Wood and Jack Davis were drawing for them and Mort Drucker was in every issue instead of every fourth or fifth issue. If it had meant paging through some ads to get to that, I'm not sure I wouldn't have made the trade-off.)

Gaines was an interesting man. He ran Mad in a way that was consistent with his personal quirks even when it cost him a lot of money. It was a generally-benevolent dictatorship and some of his people tolerated certain business practices that they would not have accepted elsewhere…because they loved Bill. Here are a few minutes with the man and his magazine…

As a few of you know and even fewer of you care, I wrote the Garfield and Friends cartoon show for something like eight years. I forget exactly how long. Anyway, it was a lot of lasagna jokes.

During the show's life on CBS, it had three different openings and three theme songs. I cannot explain the third one, which was an odd rap thing that no one associated with the show liked and which didn't last long. The first one though went like this…

That animation was done, by the way, by a gifted artist named Kevin Petrilak. The song was written by Desiree Goyette, who was also the voice of Nermal on the show, and that's mostly Desiree's fine singing voice you're hearing. I came up with the idea of having Garfield say a different line at the end of the main title each week, which was easy to do since his mouth didn't move. I wrote dozens and dozens of those, a couple of which got us into trouble. One week, I had him say, "And a special hello to all you wonderful Nielsen families out there." Apparently, you're not supposed to do that. NBC accused us of trying to rig the ratings (I am not making this up) and there was actually an article in The New York Times about how the Nielsen company had decided to void the Saturday morning ratings for the week because of it. (I can't find my copy, either on paper or in the online N.Y. Times archives. If someone here has Nexis/Lexis or some other service that can track it down, I'd love to get the text of that article.)

A year or so later, NBC got out of the business of programming animation on Saturday morning. The first AM this was effective, the end line to our opening was Garfield saying, "Don't bother watching NBC, kids! There are no cartoons there!" There were more complaints from the Peacock Network but nothing they could do to us. Besides, it was true.

Anyway, that was our first opening and I liked it. I've decided, however, that I like it even better in Spanish…

In honor of January Uno, we have a three-for-one special for you. From The Today Show of last October 31, here's much of the cast of Young Frankenstein performing three numbers from the show out of context on a makeshift stage in the middle of the street, dancing and moving their mouths to a pre-recorded track. They did the same performance at the Macy's Parade (though with worse lip-sync) and as I mentioned, there will be a number on Mr. Letterman's show on Thursday evening.

I'm curious as to why they've been doing all this so early in the life of what everyone assumed would be a long, long-running show. Broadway shows often arrange appearances like this when they're not selling tickets at a brisk clip…but this show opened with tremendous fanfare and promotion on November 8…and there they were, more than a week before that, getting everyone up and into costume very early in the morning. This was before any reviews, remember. Usually, you don't start showing the world your best numbers until after you've opened…and then, only when you need to drive people to the box office because the reviews and word-of-mouth aren't doing that.

Could this show not be performing up to expectations? Even before it opened, could its producers have been looking at a disappointing advance sale and figuring they had to do something? In light of the mixed (in some cases, negative) notices, could Young Frankenstein not be doing so well? I went to look up the grosses to see how ticket sales have been and — well, here's a surprise — Young Frankenstein is the only show on Broadway that is not reporting its grosses to the press. This is very rare.

Before we leap to any conclusions: According to this article, it's a decision that was made some time before the show opened. So maybe they had a principled reason for doing it…or maybe they took a look at those advance sales, got worried and decided to keep mum about how they were doing. Or maybe they decided to keep mum unless sales were outstanding. Or…

Well, it's all just speculation. It could also be doing fine. A check of the TKTS website shows that it was one of the few shows that didn't have half-price tickets available there last week. Les Miserables and Cyrano DeBergerac, which each reported selling 95% of their seats that week were on the TKTS board but Young Frankenstein wasn't. (A theory I like is that maybe they're hiding the grosses because they financed the whole thing by selling 12,000% of the show to little old ladies.)

Anyway, here are the three numbers. Both feature Roger Bart as Dr. Frankenstein, Sutton Foster in the Teri Garr role and Christopher Fitzgerald following in the footsteps of Marty Feldman. (They were all quite good when I saw the show, especially Fitzgerald. I hope my partner Sergio doesn't kill him.) This first scene is a slightly-abbreviated version of the Act One closer. Doc Frankenstein has created another of those monsters that his family likes to create and the angry villagers are swarming the castle, wondering it it's so. Igor (pronounced "Eye-gore") tries to start a dance craze to divert their attention…

And then here's "Roll in the Hay" from earlier in Act One, which introduces the Inga character. On stage, there were some visual effects that made this a much more effective number but you may enjoy it in this form…

Lastly, here comes "Together Again for the First Time," which is the number Dr. Frankenstein and Igor/Eyegore perform when first they meet. I liked this song a lot. In fact, despite the disappointing moment here and there, I liked the entire show a lot. I still recommend it, by the way, no matter how it looks when performed outdoors in Rockefeller Center early in the morning with traffic going by in the background as sleepy actors try to lip-sync and the director and cameraguys struggle to cover a production number that they obviously didn't see much of in advance…

Here's one that'll waste a nice chunk of whatever's left of your weekend. It's sixteen (!) minutes of old cereal commercials. The first one or two are from a show called Super Circus. There's a King Vitaman spot in there with the voice of Joe Flynn (from McHale's Navy) as the character from that cereal's box. There's Clayton "Lone Ranger" Moore selling Cheerios. There's an old Trix Rabbit spot and a couple of great old Cocoa Puffs ads from the days before they had the cuckoo as their mascot. You'll see future game show host Jack Narz as a spaceman selling Rice Chex and Wheat Chex. There's Andy Devine hawking Kellogg's Sugar Corn Pops, followed by a spot with his cartoon replacement, Sugar Pops Pete, who was voiced by Daws Butler. You'll meet Buffalo Bee, who used to sell Wheat Honeys, and whose voice (I think) was by Mae Questel…and there are other treasures in this package, as well. Happy viewing!

Hey, whadda ya say we watch a cartoon? The Private Snafu shorts were made between 1943 and 1945, mainly to be shown to our fighting men overseas. Some were a bit educational and some were intended to drill some message into the soldiers' heads…but all were intended to be primarily entertaining. To that end, the War Department allowed the filmmakers to be a little more adult in their humor. Bob Clampett, one of the directors who worked on them, said that they became a repository for many of the jokes they dared not put into the cartoons they were making to be shown in American movie theaters.

Frank Capra had the original idea for the series and Theodor "Dr. Seuss" Geisel was their main writer. There is some dispute as to how much of Geisel's work made it to the screen and how much was supplemented by gag writers at the Leon Schlesinger cartoon studio, aka Warner Brothers. Schlesinger got the contract — which was originally expected to go to Disney — by underbidding Walt, then he turned the project over to his staff of directors: Clampett, Chuck Jones, Friz Freleng and Frank Tashlin. Mel Blanc supplied the voice of the hapless Private Snafu, who sounded very much like Bugs Bunny.

This one is entitled Booby Traps and it was directed by Clampett and released in January of 1944. The narrator you'll hear is a man named Robert C. Bruce, who usually narrated travelogues for a living, and who was used by the Schlesinger/WB studio whenever they did a travelogue parody, which was often for a while there. The cartoon will teach you a lesson that we all learned well from later Warner Brothers cartoons; that you should never, ever play "Those Endearing Young Charms" because the last note of the first line is always hooked up to explosives. That joke certainly did not come from Dr. Seuss.

Today, we have three Captain Crunch commercials, one of which you saw here the other day. All feature the voice work of Daws Butler, June Foray and Bill Scott, and the first one has Shepard Menken doing the voice of Robinson Crusoe. If he sounds familiar to you, it may be because he used essentially the same voice (a near-impression of actor Richard "Edwin Carp" Haydn) for the character of Clyde Crashcup, the genius inventor on The Alvin Show.

Shep was one of those prolific on-camera actors who pretty much gave it up when he began making a fortune in voiceover. He had done movies and TV shows, including several appearances on I Love Lucy, but he began to devote himself to announcing and animation. At one point, he had dozens of national commercials running, including most of the Jack-in-the-Box spots, but was best known for a long series of ads that ran only on this coast. They were for Western Airlines and in them, a rich bird was seated on the tail of a plane where he was served caviar and champagne. To close each spot, he would intone — in the dulcet tones of Shep Menken — "Western Airlines…the oooonly way to fly!" Shep was also in the cast of the historic comedy album, Stan Freberg Presents the United States of America, Part One, which he called, "the high point of my career." That's an actual quote, uttered to me when I hired him to do a Crashcup-style voice on a show in 1989.

Anyway, he's in the first commercial, no one special is in the second…and I linked to the third one the other day but it's good so you might want to sit through it again. Here's the Captain…

I mentioned Dragnet the other day and someone wrote in to ask, "What was the deal with Jack Webb?" Near as I can tell, the deals with Jack Webb were all pretty much financial. He was a shrewd producer who wanted to make a lot of money in radio and television…and succeeded.

Webb was an actor in film and radio who was often cast as a police detective. He was offered a number of different shows in which to star but preferred to create something himself so he could own it. Pretty smart move, there. He had a certain narrative and dialogue style in mind, much of it suggested by a 1948 cop film in which he'd appeared, He Walked By Night. The show he came up with, Dragnet debuted on radio in 1949 and segued to television in 1951, running until 1959. It wasn't all Webb did during that time. He also had a short-lived radio show which later became a movie, Pete Kelly's Blues and he did a film about a drill instructor called The D.I. that probably inspired the creation of the comic book character, Sgt. Rock. Later, about the time Dragnet was cancelled, Webb did a really good film about the newspaper business entitled 30.

In the sixties, Dragnet made a comeback. The way the story was told to me by someone who worked on the show — and I think the "official" accounts differ from this a little — several networks wanted to revive the property but without Webb. They all thought he was too old and stodgy to connect with viewers of the day, either as producer or performer. Webb took the position that it wasn't Dragnet without its distinctive style and only he could replicate that…so he had to be in charge of the proceedings. He also said that he would relinquish the on-camera job only if they paid him as much as Executive Producer as they'd have to pay him as Executive Producer and Star. Eventually, NBC gave in to the extent of commissioning a TV Movie/pilot on his terms. The result was encouraging enough to yield a series, which was on for four years. Each time it was renewed, Webb's production company landed a few more commitments for other pilots and these turned into Adam 12, Emergency and several other weekly shows.

The most interesting thing about the sixties Dragnet show was, to me, the day players. Webb had a little stock company of actors, many of them good friends, who appeared over and over as crime victims and witnesses. They included Virginia Gregg, Julie Bennett, Herb Vigran, Doodles Weaver, Jack Sheldon, Olan Soulé, Bobby Troup, Leonard Stone, Buddy Lester, Vic Perrin and Amzie Strickland. Often, when the studio or casting director tried to freshen things up with new faces, Webb would say, "No, get me Vic Perrin again."

If he cast you in an episode, the big no-no was knowing your lines. Actors did not get scripts in advance and were encouraged not to memorize. The dialogue was all on TelePrompter and Webb, when he directed, would tell the performers just to read what was on the prompter. After each take, he'd have the TelePrompter operator increase the speed a hair. The idea was to get the actors reading as rapidly as possible without sounding like they were auctioning tobacco. Henry Corden, who was on many an episode, told me, "Jack always used the next-to-last take you did. The last take was when it got to be too fast so he'd use the one just before it." If anyone questioned Webb's methods, there was a fast response: It works. He made a ton of cash off Dragnet, especially in the last season when they set many episodes in one or two rooms and were able to film them in one or two days with one or two guest actors.

Webb died in 1982. I met him briefly — for maybe four minutes — the year before that. I was going in to pitch something at CBS and he was coming out from showing a demo tape to the same exec, and someone introduced us. The two main things I remember are being somehow surprised that he sounded so much like Jack Webb…and that, off-camera, he laughed like a human being. He actually had a good sense of humor that wasn't in evidence when he played Joe Friday. But he loved parodies like Stan Freberg's Dragnet spoofs and he even participated in the best one, which was the case of Johnny Carson and the Clean Copper Clappers Kept in the Closet. Here it is…

As I explained here, the only chewing gum I ever liked was Adams Sour Orange Gum. A few months ago, the company that acquired the company that acquired the company that used to make it put out what they called a "limited availability" of Adams Sour Cherry Gum and Adams Sour Apple Gum — two of the other flavors that were part of the same line. We've been hoping they'll get around to whipping up some of the orange kind too, and we will not abandon that hope. Until, of course, it looks pretty certain they're not going to do it.

Yesterday afternoon, I called the Cadbury Adams company and asked a nice lady in the Consumer Relations Office if they had any plans to bring it back. She said, "We never know until the folks upstairs announce those things. I haven't heard anything but I'll be glad to submit your request." I asked her if while she was at it, she could do something to get Souplantation to keep the Creamy Tomato Soup around and also get someone to release Skidoo on DVD. I figured it couldn't hurt.

I'm not sure if I want to chew Adams Sour Orange Gum again or if I just like the idea of some lost relic of my childhood making a comeback. What I think I'd really like is for them to start airing this commercial again…