Maybe your chronology is off? That was several years before his stroke and just like a 10 second cameo where they just stood there. They even did some TV shows and a couple of movies after that.Originally Posted by Sturgeon's Lawyer
Maybe your chronology is off? That was several years before his stroke and just like a 10 second cameo where they just stood there. They even did some TV shows and a couple of movies after that.
Classic show for sure. And sad news from that cast today: Tom Lester, the gawky Mississippi native who starred as the friendly Hooterville farmhand Eb Dawson on the madcap CBS sitcom Green Acres, has died. He was 81.
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/ne...was-81-1290946
According to that article: "Lester showed up as Eb on Petticoat Junction and The Beverly Hillbillies as well. He is believed to be the last surviving castmember on Green Acres."
So I've gotten through the first four episodes of Sapphire & Steel so far. OK, so it's a bit slow moving, but I think it works well enough.
RIP.
I think Arnold Ziffel is still alive.
"The White Zone is for loading and unloading only. If you got to load or unload go to the White Zone!"
Bummer, he was great in that role.
You're right. The TV show where they introduced cartoons about themselves came after that. Fine hadn't had his stroke yet but he was in pretty pathetic shape, often muffing his lines and requiring retakes.
At least according to Wikipedia.
Cobra handling and cocaine use are a bad mix.
Here's a late period clip with Emil Sitka: https://youtu.be/rcMAW4rObF8?t=945
Those kid-oriented 60s appearances were definitely put together to appeal to kids.
Wiki says that DeRita initially fashioned his hair Shemp style for some live appearances before they decided to go with the Curly look.
A '70s Stooges led by Joe DeRita, with Mousie Garner and Frank Mitchell filling out the cast, when Moe and Larry were too frail to perform.
Well, I've add Roseanne to my regime of regular watching on Prime Video. I think soem of these episodes are edited differently than what's shown on TV, for sure the opening credits appear to be different, and I'm sure I'm seeing a few bits of dialog here and there that I wasn't seeing when I was watching it on CMT (yeah, I know, we talked about this, they cut bits out when they show reruns on TV so they can squeeze in my commercials, cause they're not making enough money as it is).
Anyway, I imagine most of you guys probably think Roseanne was a mediocre sitcom, starring a whack job of a crazy person, who managed to 86 her own comeback by sticking her foot in her own mouth.
All of that is true. But I thikn the original show actually pretty good, really funny, and at the time, it was really different. Every sitcom about family you ever saw, the house always looked perfect, the kids behaved perfectly etc. This was the first sitcom where the house was a mess, the kids talked back to the parents, and you had the adults dealing with things like losing their jobs, spousal abuse and things like that. In short, it as the first sitcom that really portrayed what family life was really like.
And there were certain classic moments on that show that I always loved, like when Muriel Hemingway gives Roseanne a kiss on the lips. Or the exchange between Roseanne and Darlene, after Rosey finds out Darlene spent the night in her bedroom with David:
Darlene: You think we'd have sex with you just 15 feet away?!
Roseanne: You could have done it quietly!
Darlene: Really?! You sure can't! (long pause as audience laughs hysterically)
Roseanne: You can hear us?
Darlene: Yes, I had to tell David you were moving furniture!
Then later in the episode, Dan gets upset about something else, I think because Becky was going on birth control or something and he hadn't been notified:
Dan: I want to know what's going on in my house!
Roseanne: Well, get ready for a shock: the kids can hear you having sex!!!!!
Another good one was when Roseanne and her sister take a woman's self defense class. When Dan insists that Rosey demonstrate what she learned in the class, Rosey walks up to Dan, who's like "Hit me with your best shot". Then they cut to black as Dan shrieks, "Oh, my eye, MY EYE!".
Another good one is when Dan tries to sneak out of the house, because he knows it's Rosey's "time of the month", which this month, just happened to coincide with his own birthday. So Roseanne's arranged a party, so the kids and Jackie have to talk him into staying home for that. There's a great bit where he's got to go back to the bedroom, and says to himself, "Take it easy, Dan Conner, somewhere in that bedroom is your real wife". Just then Rosey walks out, and starts acting sexy and says something like "Why don't you come over here and kiss me?!" and Dan says, "That's not her! But what the hell".
The one where they find out Jackie's boyfriend has been hitting her was also good. Dan says "I'm going out for a bit", and when he comes back, he says he went to see the boyfriend to get his side of the story. Roseanne says "What did he say?". Dan says, "Mostly, 'Ow! Ow! My head! Ow!". I thought that was good. And earlier in the episode Dan had to go to school because one of the kids was in trouble, and when the principal realizes who he is, he says "I'm sorry, we assumed you were dead" (because Rosey always dealt with this stuff). Then at the end of the episode, after Jackie's boyfriend calls the cops to arrest Dan for assault, they show him in the back of the police car, and they stop a traffic light. Next to the principal's car.
OK, enough of that.
Never knew about that, for some reason.
A '70s Stooges led by Joe DeRita, with Mousie Garner and Frank Mitchell filling out the cast, when Moe and Larry were too frail to perform.
I would not be happy to go see the Three Stooges and the only one I was familiar with was the Joe DeRita. I would feel like a stooge.
"The White Zone is for loading and unloading only. If you got to load or unload go to the White Zone!"
Speaking of Green Acres......RIP Tom Lester: https://variety.com/2020/tv/news/tom...eb-1234585075/
The first four or five seasons of Roseanne were great, ground breaking TV. But they certainly did overstay their welcome, like every sitcom does. The season where they win the lottery was truly shark jumpingly bad.
Yeah, I agree. I don't think I ever actually saw that last season. I think the last episode I saw was the finale of the previous season, where Dan has a heart attack or something. I remember there was talking that John Goodman wanted off the show, and I remember thinking "OK, this is how they're going to write him out". But then he came from the next season, which I basicaly didn't see for whatever reason (maybe because of work, I was working nights by then). I do remember reading the description of the last episode in TV Guide, where it was Jeered because it played like Roseanne was trying to retcon the last season, though I forget the details now (I guess I'll find out when I get to it).
Agree, it really went off the rails there at the end. These days I am not a Roseanne fan at all, but in many ways her show was groundbreaking at the time.
Yup. Up to that point it's a classic, still enjoy it. The Halloween episodes were always looked forward to. But Dan cheating, little Jerry Garcia and the lottery BS were just death to that show.
Funny how they just ignored Jerry's existence with the reboot.
Like I said, she effectively retconned the entire last season of the original series with the last episode. As I recall, there was something about had Dan hadn't survived his heart attack at the end of the previous season, and the entire last season was one big "what if" scenario that Roseanne Conner drempt up. Or something like that.
Another brilliant move was casting Shelly Winters as Roseanne and Jackie's grandmother. There's one where she comes to Thanksgiving dinner, and is feigning dementia, for what reason, I forget. Then at the end of the episode, she's continuing a story that was telling earlier and I think it's Dan who says, "Uh, that was two Thanksgiving ago that we were talking about that", like he's decided he's gonna mess with her, since she's already messing with everyone else's heads.
When Rosanne turned bad was when she married Tom Arnold, and conspicuously changed her name to "Rosanne Arnold." That's when her personal life took a bizarre turn, so her show was bound to follow.
Last edited by progmatist; 04-22-2020 at 03:52 PM.
"Well my son, life is like a beanstalk, isn't it?"--Dalai Lama
I remember when the LA riots happened, after the Rodney King verdict, she was apparently interviewed, for who knows what reason, by some news crew for the local ABC affiliate in LA. Anyway, apparently the local news called her "Roseanne Barr" and the national news called her "Roseanne Barr-Arnold", and she threw a fit. I recall the quote in TV Guide was something like, "ABC needs to learn to name of the woman who saved their network!" or something like that.
Tom was actually on the show for awhile, playing the goofy husband or boyfriend or whatever to Sandra Bernhard. Then there's a point where he ended up leaving the show, and they wrote his character out by having him literally abducted by aliens. His last scene is on the space ship, and he's pestering the aliens to let him drive the ship, and one of the aliens says to the other, "Does he know he's going to be a pet for your son?", and the other alien says "Yeha, he's ok with it".
I remember a few years after that, after she and Tom had broken up, he had gotten his own sitcom, where he played a sitcom star who gets a chance for a comeback after he comes out of rehab or whatever. And I remember David Letterman had him on, and Dave says something like "That's kind of your life story, isn't it?" and Tom was like, "Yeah, it's like 'What if I could do it all over again, but without Roseanne'".
I fine Rosanne as funny as a car wreck.
For me it depends on how many clowns were in the car wreck.
Tom's character on the show was "Arnie." What a stretch. I also remember Tom and Rosanne making a cameo appearance on the Cosby produced show A Different World. The first episode after one summer break put the cast in the middle of the LA riots.
BTW: After Dan Quayle made the snide remarks about Murphy Brown, the show had to wait until after the summer break to respond. Comedy is about timing, often killed by summer breaks.
"Well my son, life is like a beanstalk, isn't it?"--Dalai Lama
Murphy Brown is mostly unwatchable now. In its quest to be uber topical, most the jokes fall flat unless you are old enough to recognize names like Quayle or Sununuh and remember how they're relevant to the joke.
I never liked when sitcoms stretched out into topical events because they were usually rather clumsy about it. Even one of my old faves, WKRP in Cincinnati, fumbled about when trying to address current events like John Lennon's assassination or The Who concert were attendees were trampled and killed.
As deft as Roseanne's writers were, they were often too heavy handed at times. It is interesting to see some of those old topical episodes in contrast to her current political views.
Well, you're talking about some of the side stuff that was largely incidental to most of the main plotlines. Things like Miles kidnapping Murphy's Meaty Boy statue, all the stuff with Eldon, or Murphy's quest to get readmitted to the White House press room I think still make sense to anyone who doesn't remember (or can't be bothered to Google) the topical material.
But that reminds me of something funny that I noticed a few years ago when one of the cable channels was rerunning Night Court: in an early episode (so we're talking 84 or 85, I think), Dan Fielding mentions Donald Rumsfeld. That kinda blew my mind, because I only remember Rumsfeld via his affiliation with Bush II's White House. I had to look up to see what notoriety Rumsfeld had in the mid 1980's that he got mentioned in a throwaway line on a sitcom. Surely, Reinhold Weege and his writers couldn't have known that 15 years later, Rumsfeld would still be a recognizable name (or 30 years later, considering when I actually saw the rerun in question).
Well, given the setting of WKRP, you kinda couldn't let those things go by and not have a comment within the show. If they had been doing the show in the mid 90's, there'd have been episodes about the deaths of Kurt Cobain and Jerry Garcia, also.I never liked when sitcoms stretched out into topical events because they were usually rather clumsy about it. Even one of my old faves, WKRP in Cincinnati, fumbled about when trying to address current events like John Lennon's assassination or The Who concert were attendees were trampled and killed.
I don't remember Roseanne being that political, unless you count the gay side characters or the episode where Jackie was abused by her boyfriend and she still hesitated about leaving him.As deft as Roseanne's writers were, they were often too heavy handed at times. It is interesting to see some of those old topical episodes in contrast to her current political views
The stuff I thought was heavy handed was things like the Different Strokes episode where Arnold's step brother gets abducted (or maybe he just ran away from home, I can't remember which), or the one where Arnold's friend gets molested by the bike store owner. THey did that every once in awhile in the 80's, you had the "very special episode". There'd be something to do with drugs, or drunk driving, or teen pregnancy or whatever. And don't even get me started on Degrassi Junior High.
One show that I actually really like, but I can see how some people might feel it was too heavy handed was Designing Women. Like every other episode, Dixie Carter would have to launch into some tirade about politicians, or the IRS or girly magazines, or whatever. The really funny thing is, I read Dixie Carter chaffed at doing that stuff because she was actually a conservative, but I guess the show's creators (who are actually friends of Bill and Hilary Clinton) envisioned Julia Sugarbaker as being an outspoken advocate for liberal causes or whatever. According to Wikipedia, they made a deal whereby for every one of those tirades she had to perform on camera, they had to let her sing one song on the show (which she was also quite excellent at too).
^^ Rumsfeld was Nixon's Defense Secretary. That's enough to mock.
Roseanne became political in the last few years, exposing her deep racism and ignorance.
"The White Zone is for loading and unloading only. If you got to load or unload go to the White Zone!"
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