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…