Vince Waldron (a fine author, whose website is a haven for us sitcom fanciers) writes in reference to our earlier item on the series, Hank…
Just saw the Hank piece question, on which I have no more to add. (I think that one may have been before my time.) However, I did have a "wait a minute!" moment when I saw the publicity graphic you included in your listing, which showed Hank pondering one of life's ponderables next to a statue of Rodin's Thinker. Surely I'm not the only fan of old tv who found the juxtaposition of Hank and thinker more than a tad reminiscent of a motif frequently employed in the opening bumper of another series that featured a campus cut-up named Dobie.
Yeah, that's interesting. I don't recall "The Thinker" ever being a part of the TV series. It may have turned up only in that one publicity photo, which Hank star Dick Kallman also used on the cover of a record album he had out at the time. Hard to believe though that no one involved with Hank realized they were replicating a key visual from The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, which had gone off the air not long before and was still quite visible in reruns.
…although I'll tell you an odd thing. One of the producers of Hank (and I think he directed some of them) was my old boss, Jimmie Komack. And in 1977, when CBS hired Komack to produce a revival of Dobie Gillis, Jimmie enraged Max Shulman, Dwayne Hickman and everyone else involved in the old show by bragging that he'd never seen the original series. Hickman, Bob Denver, Frank Faylen and Sheila James all signed on to the pilot/special because Max Shulman had co-written (with Eric Cohen) a very funny script that was true to the spirit of the original but, I thought, quite accessible to anyone who didn't know the old show. It also struck me as quite contemporary, but Komack decided that everyone involved was too fixated on replicating a series no one remembered and he was worried it wouldn't be modern…so he tossed the Shulman-Cohen script and had a new one written by two other writers who didn't particularly recall the old series.
The result was a deservedly-unsold pilot called, appropriately enough, Whatever Happened to Dobie Gillis? and if you ever run into Dwayne Hickman and want to see him turn a lovely shade of scarlet, ask him about it. (Actually, don't, 'cause he's a very nice guy. Here's a link to his website, by the way. His autobiography, which you can purchase there, is a pretty good book.)
I guess this really has nothing to do with the Hank photo but in the world of weblogging, if something pops into your head, you post it. By the way, the above story has one of those EC Comics endings. A few years later, when Jimmie might have been trying to sell a new sitcom to CBS, he had a teensy problem: The guy you pitched to then at CBS was Dwayne Hickman.
While I'm posting: Tom Wittick wrote to ask if I knew anything about Dick Kallman. Well, I know he was a musical performer before and after his time in Hollywood. He spent a lot of time after Hank playing the Robert Morse role in productions of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, then he replaced Tommy Steele in the lead of Half a Sixpence on Broadway, then took it on the road for a while. He worked a lot actually, bouncing around between movie and TV parts and stage, plus he also played Vegas a lot. Somewhere in the mid-seventies, performing dried up and he became a dealer in rare paintings and antiques until 1980 when he was killed in a robbery of some of his wares. Sad ending for a pretty talented guy.