This is interesting. I thought the tune from the Ernie Kovacs clip this morning was "Rialto Ripples" by Gershwin and Donaldson. And if you clicked on the link I provided to an old piano roll copy of that tune, you can hear why I thought that. Like maybe because it's the same song.
But as Kovacs fans are now informing me, the piece ol' Ernie used was "Oriental Blues," aka "Ernie's Tune," written by Jack Newlon. This website which studies classic TV themes has the following posted…
…this piece is based upon "Rialto Ripples" cowritten by the teenage George Gershwin with Walter Donaldson. Comparison of the melodies verifies that the "A" themes of both pieces are nearly identical (only the bridge and overall tempo was changed to protect the guilty.) "Rialto Ripples" strolls along at a leisurely pace, but "Oriental Blues" is a more frantic piece often with added comedic sound effects during the bridge…
Given how litigious the Gershwin estate has always been — especially back when Ira was alive — it's amazing that a national TV show got away with featuring such a total rip-off. Then again, since "Rialto Ripples" was written so early in Gershwin's life — he was eighteen when it was copyrighted — and he only co-wrote it, perhaps his estate didn't control it in any way.
Thanks to all who wrote in, including Robert Poodiack, Mary Wallace, Dave Sikula and Eric Wilson. And isn't it interesting that Ernie Kovacs — a man from whom so many stole — would have had a "hot" theme song?
A few days ago in this item, I linked to a clip of Groucho Marx doing a surprise cameo on an episode of I Dream of Jeannie. A reader of this here site, Tom Atwill, wrote to ask, "How would something like that come to pass? Would they write it and then go to Groucho's agent and see if he'd do it?"
Probably it came about because Sidney Sheldon, the producer of I Dream of Jeannie, was an old friend of Groucho's. I have no first-hand knowledge on this one but I'll bet it was as simple as this: Sheldon was having dinner with Groucho one night and he said something like, "Hey, Grouch. How about dropping by the set some day and shooting a cameo appearance? We'll let you hug Barbara Eden. You can even see her navel." And Groucho said something like, "Okay…just let me get a real bad toupee to wear." Then Sheldon either wrote the scene or had his staff figure out some way to get Marx into the episode…and I'll bet it wasn't any more complicated than that. Just Groucho doing a favor for a friend.
This was only possible because back then, they used to actual do surprise cameos on TV shows. When was the last time you saw one that wasn't in the promos beforehand? One of the reasons I've soured on Deal or No Deal is that I feel like the promos and/or the opening tease usually give away the entire episode. They'll tease that the contestant must make a life-or-death choice when they're down to the last five cases…and that effectively tells you that not much is going to matter as they open the first twenty cases — i.e., the first half hour of the show. Or like on last night's show, they told you in the previews that Magic Johnson was going to make a surprise appearance. So all through the game, whenever Howie Mandel asked the contestant if they wanted to accept the latest bank offer, you could think to yourself, "She's not going to take it. We haven't seen Magic Johnson yet."
The first twenty case openings on that show never matter…and what's more, the producers know it. They have Magic Johnson backstage and they know they can wait 'til late in the game to send him out there. Because they know it's going to go that long; that no one's going to take the first bank offer or the second or the fourth. I think the earliest offer anyone's taken has been the fifth and the player has to really being doing poorly to quit then. Almost all the games go until at least the seventh offer…and the banker only makes a maximum of nine. So it gives the whole thing a very pre-arranged feel and I don't know why I'm still watching, even with a lot of fast-forwarding.
I love surprises on television. You'd think, in the era of Reality Programming, someone would try one every now and then.
The Producers has opened in Las Vegas. We've been wondering here for some time how they were going to cut an hour out of it and this article supplies some of the answer. The omitted musical numbers are…
Act One, Scene 4: "We Can Do It" Reprise (Max & Leo)
Act One, Scene 6: "Der Guten Tag Hop Clop" (Franz, Max, Leo)
Act One, Scene 9: Act One Finale (All)
Act Two, Scene 1: "That Face" (Leo, Ulla, Max)
Act Two, Scene 3: "You Never Say 'Good Luck' on Opening Night" (Roger, Max, Carmen, Leo, Franz)
Act Two, Scene 5: "Where Did We Go Right?" (Max, Leo)
Act Two, Scene 6: "Betrayed" (Max)
Act Two, Scene 7: Max's section of "'Til Him" (Max)
…plus there are also trims in the dialogue. I actually thought the show felt rushed in the full version so this one probably goes by in a wink. I'd love to see my pal Brad Oscar playing Max — when I saw The Producers in New York, it was when he was still playing Franz — but I have little desire to see the stripped-down version. Sounds to me like with those cuts, "Springtime for Hitler" practically becomes the finale.
Ticket prices, you will note, range from $75.50 to $143.50. In New York, tickets for the full version run from $31.25 to $111.25 and are frequently available for half-price at the TKTS booth. Then again, the New York version does have Tony Danza playing Max.
These are the end credits to one of the many TV programs of Ernie Kovacs. Only Ernie Kovacs could have end credits that ran three and a half minutes and were more entertaining than most shows.
When I was a kid, I loved that tune that Mr. Kovacs often used on his programs and wondered who wrote it and what it was called. Turns out it's "Rialto Ripples" by George Gershwin and Will Donaldson. If you'd like to hear it as it sounded in a player piano in 1916, allegedly played by Mr. Gershwin himself, you can do so over on this page. [WARNING: At least on my computer, the tune starts immediately upon connection.]
…or at least your phone-dialing finger. Tomorrow morning at 9 AM Pacific Time, the hotel reservation line opens for this year's Comic-Con International in San Diego. You can also reserve online. All the info will be on the convention website.
So how long do we think it'll be before they're officially sold out? 9:15? 9:20? If you don't get in, don't despair. More rooms will become available later. Some of them will be for the 2008 con but there will be more rooms.
Back in 1967, there was a TV show on CBS called Coronet Blue. It starred Frank Converse as a man named Michael Alden. And who was Michael Alden? Well, Michael Alden was…uh…
Well, nobody knew. Not even Michael Alden knew.
Michael Alden was a man with amnesia. One day, he climbed out of the ocean, having either fallen off a pier or a boat, with no memory of who he was or where he was going or anything except for two words that kept coursing through his brain: Coronet Blue. Oh — and he also had some people searching for him, trying to kill him. From that moment forward, he was constantly on the move from episode to episode, trying to avoid his pursuers and simultaneously figure out who he was and what those words meant. This was when The Fugitive was a hit over at ABC and Coronet Blue seemed like a show popped from the same mold. The difference was that on The Fugitive, Richard Kimble was trying to find a one-armed man before someone caught him, whereas Michael Alden was trying to find himself before someone killed him.
Here's the first few minutes of one episode of Coronet Blue. This should give you a pretty good idea of what the show was like…
Not too exciting, was it? Maybe that's why the series was cancelled after half a season with the mystery still unresolved. Since no one was really watching, there wasn't a lot of public outcry. (I think TV Guide quizzed a few members of the creative staff and came to the conclusion that hadn't decided yet on who he was or what the mysterious words meant.) My friends discussed it though and I came up with a great theory that Alden must have been a defecting Soviet agent, that "Coronet Blue" was a codename and that the mysterious men tracking him were Russians trying to eliminate a defector. Like all great theories, its greatness was in the fact that nothing would probably ever emerge to prove me wrong.
But as it turns out, I wasn't wrong; not about who he was, at least. Forty years later — which is to say, just the other day — I'm reading the fine blog, TV Squad, and I come upon the following: "In a bio of the show's creator Larry Cohen, Cohen revealed what the words meant and who Michael Alden was." And then they quote him thusly…
When the Brodkin Organization took over the series, they wanted to turn it into an anthology so they played down the amnesia aspect until there was nothing about it at all in the show. It was just Frank Converse wandering from one story to the next with no connective format at all. Anyway, the show ended after seventeen weeks and nobody found out what 'coronet blue' meant. The actual secret is that Converse was not really an American at all. He was a Russian who had been trained to appear like an American and was sent to the U.S. as a spy. He belonged to a spy unit called Coronet Blue. He decided to defect, so the Russians tried to kill him before he can give away the identities of the other Soviet agents. And nobody can really identify him because he doesn't exist as an American. Coronet Blue was actually an outgrowth of "The Traitor" episode of The Defenders.
Just as I thought. I'm so proud of me.
And I guess that's the end of it. I doubt we'll see Coronet Blue on DVD since it would be like publishing the first half of an unfinished mystery novel. It wasn't that wonderful a show, anyway. I think the only reason I watched it was because I was intrigued with the mystery of the premise…which meant that I came to be annoyed that the show didn't seem to be giving up any clues. It's annoying that it took this long for me to get an answer but at least I got one and it feels good to be right about something. I occasionally am, even if it takes forty years for it to happen.
What, if anything, did O.J. Simpson confess to in those never-aired TV interviews to promote that book that wasn't released? This article explains that he didn't confess to anything but in a way he did…
I heard from a couple of folks who recalled chug-a-lugging Funny Face drinks when they were young. I meant to ask them if they had any teeth left.
I was never a fan of Kool-Aid or Funny Face or even of the drink mix that most of the local kid show hosts used to push, a noxious liquid called Sonny Boy. I could tolerate the occasional Flav-R Straw (I wrote about those here) and I actually enjoyed my Fizz-Nik (which I wrote about here). But I didn't like things like Fizzies tablets (written about here) that turned perfectly good water into sweet, artificially-flavored and sweetened nectars.
Oddly enough, as an alleged adult, I've come around to a drink mix, though it's not one with artificial sweeteners in it. Ever since my surgery last May, I've had to find something I could drink besides water. Fruit juices contain more sugar than my body can now tolerate and I won't drink anything with Splenda, Nutrasweet or any of those. (I suspect they're bad for you but that's not even my main reason. My main reason is that I can't stand the taste of any of them.) My body doesn't like milk and the rest of me doesn't like tea, and I'm not supposed to have anything carbonated. So that leaves…
Well, not much. I drink a lot of tomato juice and I've also developed a watery orange drink and a watery lemonade. The watery orange drink is made by diluting down a Knudsen product called Orange Recharge that I buy at the Whole Foods Market. It's one of these sports drinks but it's lower in sugar than most, and I water it down by at least a third. Not a bad little beverage.
For the lemonade, I tried a few and settled on Country Time Lemonade drink mix. You know, the stuff isn't bad, even when I make it my way. I use half of what the directions tell me to use and then I add in a couple of big squirts of Real Lemon lemon juice. The result is a low-in-sugar lemonade that contains some artificial flavoring but no artificial sweetening.
I think someone's missing a bet by not developing a line of low-sugar soft drinks for kids. There seems to be the assumption out there that if you don't like a lot of sugar in your diet, you want zero so you'll go for something with Nutrasweet or Splenda. And if you don't like those, then you want as much sugar as you can get. I think there'd be a market for a middle ground product…and if I owned the old Funny Face trademarks, I'd bring them back with that as the premise. But maybe that's not feasible…and maybe no one owns those characters today. Maybe the whole franchise went bankrupt. I keep thinking that after they kicked Injun Orange off the package, he got his revenge by opening a casino and taking Jolly Olly Orange to the cleaners.
As a sequel to yesterday's video link, we have a clip of Sam Levine performing as The Banana Man. The video isn't very good and again, it's only a small piece of a much longer act…in this case, about five minutes. This is from a live broadcast of Babes in Toyland that NBC did in 1954. Somehow, they worked him into a plot that had nothing to do with a guy coming out and pulling bananas from his pants.
The main thing to notice here is the odd sound of The Banana Man as Levine successfully imitates the lilting voice of A. Robins before him. Several of you have written since yesterday's clip to ask if it could be true that Curly Howard of the Three Stooges got his not-dissimilar stage voice by imitating A. Robins. Beats me. But it's highly probable that when the Stooges worked in vaudeville with Ted Healy, they shared a bill with A. Robins at some point…so make of that what you will.
One of these days, someone's going to turn up a good, clear video of The Banana Man doing his entire act. For now, we have to settle for blurry, abbreviated footage like this…
I'm recommending a good one, this time. Early Tuesday morning, Turner Classic Movies is running A Thousand Clowns, starring Jason Robards and Barbara Harris in the film version of Herb Gardner's play of the same name.
The movie, about an out o' work comedy writer trying to pull his life together, is pretty faithful to the play. It was directed by Fred Coe and according to legend, the producers and Mr. Gardner were not all that thrilled with what Coe considered a finished product. They turned the whole magilla over to Gardner and film editor Ralph Rosenblum, who proceeded to recut the entire thing and even shoot some additional scenes. It took several long months but they managed to improve the movie so much that United Artists, which was distributing the film, began to sense a hit. U.A. agreed to kick in the extra bucks for a more ambitious score and the complete replacement of one actor.
The key role of Chuckles the Chipmunk, a rather disturbing clown, had been originated and performed on Broadway by Gene Saks. Everyone wanted him for the film but at the time it was to begin shooting, Saks was unavailable so another actor played the part. Gardner felt the movie needed the original and by the time he and Rosenblum had completed most of their transformation, Saks was available. He was hired, the Chuckles scenes were reshot with him, and the performance of the other actor was consigned to the scrap bin.
What they wound up with as a film is irresistible and it was even nominated for the Oscar for Best Picture that year. (It lost to The Sound of Music. If it hadn't, it would have lost to Dr. Zhivago, which also came out that year.) Perhaps more important is that in the pantheon of motion picture versions of plays, it's a stellar example of one that totally reflects the vision and sensibilities of the playwright and not the director. Its message about being a non-conformist and maintaining your individuality is pretty obvious — at least half the movies made in 1965 were about being a non-conformist and maintaining your individuality — but it holds up better than most. Give it a peek. It's better than a lot of stuff I've coerced you into watching.
