Funny, but MTM didn't make much of an impression on me.
Laura Petrie? Sure.
Mary Richards? meh
I remember when Jay Leno first took over The Tonight Show, Mary Tyler Moore was of his first guests. And as I recall, she tripped on the riser as she made her way to Jay's desk. Then, like a night or two later, some comedian, uh...who was the really neurotic guy was popular in the late 80's and early 90's? Can't think of his name now, anyway, he was on a couple nights later, and he deliberately "tripped and fell" in the same spot, then explained after he sat down that he had a huge crush on MTM back when he was a teenager, and he felt like that was the closest he was ever gonna get to...ya know.
Not to change the subject, but also speaking of DVD...
Anybody remember Van Dyke's other TV shows in the 70s? One was with Hope Lang (no, I didn't remember her name) in the early '70s and towards the end of the decade was a short-lived variety show that sort of poked fun at the format. My best memory of that show was that they held a (fictional) Fonzie look-alike contest: the finalists were an African American and relatively unknown comedian Andy Kaufman. I remember the first time I saw Kaufman perform his impersonation of 'the Elvis Presley' was on this show. He also had a recurring skit about a family of dolts called "The Brights".
I vaguely remember that late 70's variety show, but not too well. I wonder if that wasn't the show that I first saw Kaufman on as well, though. I do remember seeing him on one show or another back then, where he does like 5 or 6 minutes of his usual bullshit, then he turns his back to the audience, as the Also Sprach Zarathustra fanfare plays, and he puts on the jacket, slicks his hair back, etc all of this inside of 90 seconds or whatever it is it takes for the fanfare to play out, and then when he turns around, he does this perfect Elvis routine. I don't remember if he actually sang or anything, but he had the facial expressions and "moves" down pat. It might have been like Tommy Smothers' Johnny Carson impression (which involved him simply aping Johnny's mannerisms, without actually saying a single word). Just about the only thing that Kaufman did that was actually "good" in the conventional sense.
Kaufman had some pretty funny audience participation bits but after he started doing Taxi he seemed to become very bitter, doing bits that really became self-indulgent and insular and at times downright mean spirited, which actually lent itself to his heel turn in professional wrestling down in Memphis (growing up in W. TN gave me a 'ringside' seat). The Man On The Moon bio-pic touched upon that but his involvement with wrestling and his kayfabe fued with Jerry Lawler lasted for 3 or 4 years.
Yeah, I remember the gag on Letterman where he got into a shouting match with Lawler. It ends with Andy throwing a glass of water at Lawler and running off, and Dave says "Well, I think some of those words you can say on TV, but throwing water at people, that's where we draw the line!". Whenever it was brought up in interviews, Letterman always disavowed any and all knowledge of the con, as it were.
I saw a bit of The Man In The Moon on TV sometime back, I don't know if this really happened, or if it was one of those things that invariably get thrown in bio-pic films, but there's a bit where he's performing a concert, and he pulls out this book, and starts reading, and people are yelling at him to do Latka or to sing along with a record or whatever (ya know, the Mighty Mouse routine). Anyway, he says "Oh, you want to hear a record? OK" and puts on a record of him reading the same book that he just been reading live.
I dunno, I sort of get the performance art aspect of his whole trip, but at times it just got stupid. The whole business of getting himself thrown off the Paramount lot, dressed as Tony CLifton being a prime example. Of course, we'll probably never know who was "in" on that, and whether that itself was a great big con (i.e. the producer apparently knew Andy and "Tony" were one and the same, so maybe he didn't "really" have him thrown off the set, it was just done to please Andy or whatever).
I mean, the guy had some legit talent, being able to go in and out of some of those characters. And the clip I saw of him staying in character as Latka (except I don't think that was the character's name yet) as Johnny Carson interviewed him was pretty funny. But some of it just struck me as a guy deliberately being bad, like he was saying "Let's see how far I can go before they give me the hook". And people just ate it up. (shrug)
To me there's a difference between getting an audience to "laugh at you" and "laugh with you", and I think he tended to go for the former, which has since become commonplace in comedy now. (shrug)
What is Walter Brennan doing introducing the ABC Fall shows in the Petries' house? The DVD show was on CBS.
Luanne was a bit too flakey for me. Donna Douglas was smoking! She was in at least one Twilight Zone. That was the one where she had facial surgery and was masked through most of it only to reveal that the surgery didn't work and she was still hideously ugly.
Twilight Zone had some gorgeous women actors.
"The White Zone is for loading and unloading only. If you got to load or unload go to the White Zone!"
Watched the first episode of a late 50's/early 60's show called One Step Beyond. This show actually predated The Twilight Zone, but it had a similar vibe, in that it was an anthology show focused on the paranormal. The episode I watched last night had a woman becomes possessed by the spirit of a murdered woman who is trying to convince the authorities her death wasn't a suicide. The opening refers to the show's content as being based on "public record", but according to Wikipedia, it was mostly just urban legend type stuff. The cast of this episode included Skip Homeier, who did a lot of episodic TV guest work, including episodes of The Addams Family, Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea and Star Trek (he was the leader of the space hippies).
I don't know who the space hippies were. I must be Herbert.
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