From WVLT-FM's "That's Entertainment" program, 9/4/08. Series creators Pab Sungenis and R.J. Garvey join writer/performers Kris Leeds and Bob Mercogliano for an interview about the creation of, and process behind "The Idiot Box." 18 minutes, MP3.
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While rehearsing the "phone call to Doctor Pauli" host segment, R.J. and Bob fool around with director Pab Sungenis.
Because Captain Video was done live from DuMont's New York station WABD, and usually without commercials, footage from movies laying around the control room at Channel 5 was usually worked into each episode, giving the cast and crew time to move sets around and get ready for new shots. These films were billed as being transmissions from Captain Video's secret agents throughout space and time. That's why the sudden transition when the "Remote Carrier Beam" kicks in twice during this episode.
The western cut into the middle of the episode is called Range Warfare, one of a series of westerns made in the 1930's by independent producer William Kent starring college football hero Reb Russell. Reb's horse Rebel usually received billing right underneath Reb in the movie credits. If you're particularly masochistic, you can buy "Range Warfare" from Amazon On Demand.
Captain Video was one of the top rated shows on the DuMont television network. In later years, the show would star Al Hodge (who became famous for playing The Green Hornet) as the Captain and Werner Klemperer (who would become famous as Col. Klink on Hogan's Heroes) as Doctor Pauli, and have among its stable of writers Arthur C. Clarke, who went on to write some strange novel about a mad computer, a monolith, and a space baby. You may have heard of it.
The full, un-riffed and un-edited, version of this episode of "Captain Video" is available at the Internet Archive.
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If you'd like to make some Turkish Taffy at home, this is as close to the original Bonomo recipe as you can get. Tootsie Roll still considers the actual recipe to be a trade secret, but this is close enough.
Ingredients:
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Combine sugar, Karo syrup, water, and margarine in a large pan. Bring to a boil over medium heat until the sugar dissolves, stirring constantly until the mixture reaches firm ball stage (270 degrees on a candy thermometer). Remove from heat, then stir in the flavoring.
Let the taffy stand until it's cool enough to handle, then pull it with greased hands until it is light and no longer shiny. Spread it out, and cut it into pieces. Allow it to completely cool, then store it in an airtight container in a cool place.
A popular way to eat the candy is to take a large piece and slam it against a table or counter (like Jack did) and break it into shards.
If properly prepared, this recipe should not taste just like ass.
If The Magic Clown reminds you of today's infomercials, it's no surprise. The show was literally created and produced by Tico Bonomo, the grandson of the founder of Bonomo's. He created and designed it solely for the purpose of selling taffy.
Four different men played the Magic Clown over the years. After Zovella and Richard DuBois (the two Magic Clowns features on our show), the role was played by comedian, mimic, cartoonist, and puppeteer Doug Anderson. The last man to play the Magic Clown was James Randi, much better known to modern audiences as "The Amazing Randi"
The show ran on NBC from 1949 to 1954, when it was cancelled. The show moved to Allen B. DuMont's WABD, Channel 5, in New York for another four years, then was retooled as Bonomo, The Magic Clown for a year on WNTA, Channel 13, in Newark, NJ for a short lived run. An attempt to revive the show for syndication was made for the 1970-71 television season, but did not last long.
Bonomo's was bought out in 1980 by Tootsie Roll. The taffy was discontinued in 1989, but other candy under the Bonomo name can still be found in select outlets, manufactured by Tootsie Roll.
The full, un-riffed and un-edited, versions of these episodes of "The Magic Clown" are available here and here at the Internet Archive.
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If you'd like to download the actual animation we used in this episode for the fake Chesterfield ad, click here. It's big.
Neither of the guest stars in this episode did only one appearance on Dragnet. Carolyn Jones appeared in four different episodes as four different characters. Marty Milner appeared in six different episodes before making his name in Jack Webb-produced Adam 12 years later.
The full, un-riffed and un-edited, version of this episode of "Dragnet" is available at the Internet Archive.
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Super Circus debuted as a local show on WENR-TV in 1948, and a year later went nationwide on ABC, broadcasting live from the Civic Theater in Chicago. Ringmaster Claude Kirchener was an actual circus ringmaster, who later turned to commercial production.
Mary Hartline had been a known personality, appearing on the ABC radio program Teen Town, but her appearances on Super Circus made her a star. During the show's run, her image was on tons of merchandise for the show, and she even had a line of dolls made to look like her. For a while, she even had her own show on WENR, a few episodes of which can be seen on Google Video. After Super Circus, Mary went over to WBKB-TV in Chicago as the star of Princess Mary's Magic Castle, which lasted a little over a year. She later went on to marry the heir to the Woolworth five-and-dime fortune.
In 1956, not long after this episode aired, Super Circus was revamped and moved to New York with an entirely new cast. Lacking the chemistry that Claude, Mary, and the three clowns had brought to the show from its beginning, it soon lost its sponsor and was unable to find another one. The tent was folded on the new show after less than a year.
For more information about the show, and Mary Hartline in particular, you might want to read TV Party's write-up, TV's First Sex Symbol.
The full, un-riffed and un-edited, version of this episode of "Super Circus" is available at the Internet Archive.
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The full, un-riffed and un-edited, version of this episode of "The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes" is available at the Internet Archive.
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We asked Kris and Bob to do a promo for the script promotion. They ad-libbed this ten minute monstrosity, which we barely managed to edit to the 30 seconds we asked for.
104 episodes of Diver Dan were filmed over a period of nine months, each ran about 6-7 minutes in length, and it was syndicated mainly to NBC affiliates. Some stations aired Diver Dan as part of a cartoon block (as in New York where WNBC ran it as part of The Felix and Diver Dan Show. Others would edit four individual episodes into a single half hour, as we have done here.
The titles of the other three episodes in this omnibus edition are Goldie The Goldfish, Talking Fish, and Skipper's Gold.
The voices of all the fish were provided by Allen Swift. You'd probably know him better as the voice of just about everybody on Underdog, King Leonardo, a bunch of Rankin-Bass stuff, and a lot more. Go look up his resume at The Internet Movie Database. It's incomplete, by the way. Compared to him, Mel Blanc was a piker.
The full, un-riffed and un-edited, versions of the four "Diver Dan" episodes are available at the Internet Archive.
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It's not a coincidence that the "Tom and Jerry" in this episode share their names with the duo everyone knows. Years after the Van Beuren shop folded, one of their animators was working for MGM when he dreamed up a cat and mouse team. Since RKO/Van Beuren's T&J were long gone by this point, he appropriated the name. When the original T&J cartoons were eventually repackaged for sale to television by the company that inherited the rights, they were re-labelled as "Dick and Larry" or just put out with no names for the characters at all.
The title card for the Tom and Jerry cartoon in this episode is a recreation by our editor; the version available to us was one of the "Dick and Larry" era nameless releases. We took the title frame from another Tom and Jerry cartoon from the same year, blacked out the original title, and keyed in "Redskin Blues" in as close a font as we had to the one used originally.
An excellent writeup about the Van Beuren "Tom and Jerry" can be found at Cartoon Research. Their references proved invaluable to us in the creation of this episode.
One more thing. If you're curious why there's so little lip synching in the Fleischer Popeye cartoons like the one in this episode, it's because about 95% of the dialogue was ad-libbed by the voice actors after the cartoons had already been animated.
The full, un-riffed and un-edited, versions of the four cartoons can be found at the Internet Archive: Popeye, Tom and Jerry, Mighty Mouse, and Felix The Cat.
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As part of the writing process, we usually gather all of the writers on a particular episode together to watch the show we will be making fun of and just free-form mock. We call it "gang writing." For some of us, it could be the fifth or sixth time we've seen the show. For others, it's the first. We record those sessions, and often the transcripts of these recordings form the basis of the final script.
The gang-write for Ding Dong School is an excellent example of our technique at work. Pab had seen the show three times by that point, R.J. and Bryan had seen it once, and Kris and Bob all went into it sight unseen. The riffs flowed freely, and eventually turned very, very naughty, yet extremely funny. So funny that we saved the recording and are putting it up here now.
This recording makes the phrase "Not Safe For Work" look like the understatement of the year. Do not listen to it in front of people you might have to explain it to, or if you are squeamish about the existence of sex and four letter words. You have been warned.
Ding Dong School gang-writing session (12.33 Mb MP3)
Reinald Werrenrath, Jr., and Judith Waller created Ding Dong School in 1952. At that time, Waller was the director of Public Affairs programming for the NBC Central Division. As host, they tapped Dr. Frances Horwich, who quickly became known as "Miss Frances," the head of the Education department at Roosevelt College in Chicago.
In 1954, Horwich (and the show) relocated to New York, where she became the head of children's programming for the entire NBC network. She left that job in 1956 when the network decided to cancel the show and replace it with a short-lived phenomenon called The Price Is Right. The rights to the show reverted to Horwich at that time, and she self-syndicated reruns of the program until 1965.
"Miss Frances" Horwich died in July, 2001, at the age of 94.
The full, un-riffed and un-edited, version of this episode of Ding Dong School can be found at the Internet Archive.
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Coming soon.
An interesting bit of synchronicity from the gang-writing session of Rocky King.
Rocky King gang-writing session excerpt (376.79 Kb MP3)
Unlike most of DuMont's shows, "Rocky King" had sets that looked very realistic. This was because the show, for the most part, had no sets. Most scenes were in offices or hallways because the crew used the actual halls and offices of DuMont executives during the show, to save on building sets. Others (like Rocky's kitchen and the bar seen in this one) were borrowed from other DuMont productions. This economy allowed Rocky King to become the network's longest-lived drama.
Mabel was never seen for a simple reason: she was a last second addition to the show. When the script was running short in the first episode, Karns threw together a scene with Rocky speaking with his wife: Mabel. There was no time to cast another woman (since the show would be going live in a few minutes), so the actress Grace Carney, who was playing a secretary elsewhere in the show, was thrown in head first, off camera with a script. Karns taped a copy of his lines as Rocky into a newspaper he could hold up and pretend to read while talking with Mabel, and history was made. The audience loved the interplay between the two, and it became a staple. Mabel's invisibility spawned a trend in sitcoms over the years of never-seen spouses like Cheers' Vera, Mary Tyler Moore's Lars Lingstrom, and The Dick Van Dyke Show's Pickles (who eventually graduated to on camera duties, unlike Mabel.) Karns wrote all of the scenes between himself and Mabel for the five years ths show ran, earning an "Additional Dialogue By Roscoe Karns" credit for the honor. (Although, arguably, Karns forgot his actual lines and had to ad-lib so much that those additions might have qualified him for the credit even without Mabel.)
The show's original title was Inside Detective. As Karns' portrayal gained popularity, it was renamed Rocky King: Inside Detective and eventually just Rocky King: Detective.
The part of Segeant Hart was played by Todd Karns, Roscoe's son, who also played Harry Land in the Andy Hardy movies opposite Mickey Rooney, and Harry Bailey in the Frank Capra film It's A Wonderful Life.
More episodes of "Rocky King" survive than almost any other DuMont live broadcast. Kinescopes of 37 of them are currently held by the UCLA Film and Television Archive, and four (including this one) are currently in wide circulation among collectors.
The full, un-riffed and un-edited, version of this episode of Rocky King: Detective can be found at the Internet Archive.
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