Monthly Archives: January 2007

Timothy Noah tells you something you might be glad to know.

Fred Kaplan on Bush's plans for Iraq. Nothing you don't already know but Kaplan has a pretty solid overview of the problem.

Today's link takes you an excerpt from what was probably the funniest bit aired during the rarely-seen Season 10 of Saturday Night Live. That was the year when the cast consisted of Jim Belushi, Billy Crystal, Mary Gross, Christopher Guest, Rich Hall, Gary Kroeger, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Martin Short, Pamela Stephenson and about half a season of Harry Shearer. During the half of the season he was around, Mssrs. Shearer and Short teamed to demonstrate a unique, male approach to synchronized swimming. Here's two minutes of it…

Jacob Weisberg on what went wrong in Iraq. In the meantime, I'm waiting for a good article on what hasn't gone wrong in Iraq. There must be a few things.

I keep plugging Shokus Internet Radio here and for good reason. Stu Shostak runs a nice little station full of TV themes, old time radio shows, swing music and, on occasion, me. This week, he's rerunning the two-hour interview I did with him last December 7. Consult this schedule to see when it airs for sure but basically, it repeats each night this week through Sunday from 9 PM to 11 PM on the West Coast, Midnight to 2 AM on the East Coast. You can access Shokus Internet Radio by going to this page and selecting an audio browser. Ignore the parts where Stu tells you to call in since this is a rerun. (I just listened to a little of it and I almost forgot and called up to ask me a question.)

Today's video link will take you to an almost-15 minute TV show starring Pinky Lee. Mr. Lee was an odd celebrity. He was a one-time burlesque comedian — apparently, a pretty good one — who somehow became a kids' show host in early television. Someone at the company that made Tootsie Rolls seems to have adored him because he was usually sponsored by that product. Maybe it was because with his lisp, he always sounded like he was eating a Tootsie Roll and therefore had his back teeth cemented together.

He had an array of different shows on different channels over the years. Often during the periods when he didn't have a TV show, he could be found in Las Vegas, appearing in one of the many revues there that purported to replicate Minsky's-style burlesque. There was apparently some minor controversy over whether it was right and proper for a man who entertained children to also be consorting with strippers and gambling, but I don't know that it was what finally ended his TV career. I think evolving tastes took care of that. His "last hurrah" was around 1964 on local TV in Los Angeles where he tried to do exactly the same show he'd done ten years earlier. No one, not even Sid Caesar or Jackie Gleason, could do that in '64 and succeed.

There are many stories about Pinky Lee and things going wrong on live TV…words that shouldn't have been said, body parts that shouldn't have been exposed. The most famous though is probably the tale of him collapsing on camera in 1955, right in the middle of a broadcast. It was reported as a heart attack but when he returned to work weeks later, he insisted it was asthma…and it may well have been. Later, when his career wasn't going so well, he blamed the heart attack story for scaring off employers.

I had one encounter with Pinky Lee, back when I worked for Sid and Marty Krofft. He knew the Kroffts and had talked to them about hosting some show or being involved with something they did. He was interested in working with them but the feeling was not particularly mutual, and they had no idea what to do with him, anyway. Still, every month or three, he'd be on the phone or at the door with "the" project that would get him back on TV, where he knew he belonged and where he had not appeared for some time. This was around 1980 or so.

When the infamous Pink Lady TV show was announced, Lee was convinced that was it. Pink Lady…Pinky Lee…how was that not a combo of divine (pink) inspiration? He began calling the office every hour on the hour, asking when to report to work on the series. One day, I was sitting at my desk — I was the Head Writer — and suddenly, Pinky Lee danced in…and I mean, danced. He was in his seventies but he did a little time-step into my room. I was on the phone at the time and I remember saying to someone, "I'll have to call you back. I seem to have Pinky Lee performing in my office."

And perform, he did — telling me how wonderful he would be on our show. Yeah, like we really needed another star who no one had heard of and who didn't talk very well. I remember him just exuding energy and spittle, telling me how popular he still was; how everywhere he went, hordes stopped him to ask why he wasn't on the air these days.

At the time, "Buffalo" Bob Smith of Howdy Doody fame was big again, touring on college campuses to sold-out audiences. Pinky explained to me that those kids really wanted to see him instead and had contacted NBC trying to book him. NBC, he said, was mad at him over an old score and the network still owned a piece of Howdy Doody, so they'd steered all those inquiries to Bob Smith, instead. It was kind of sad, and yet you had to admire the guy's spirit and persistence in a way. He was actually pretty funny, at least in my office. I told him I'd discuss with the Kroffts if we could find a place for him on the show, knowing full well we wouldn't. In hindsight, maybe we should have. I mean, it's not like anything else we did would have hurt that series.

Here's Pinky Lee in all his glory. Like I said, this clip runs close to fifteen minutes. I'll be surprised if most of you make it past five but you might enjoy seeing a little of a pretty good TV host of that era strutting his stuff…

I'm not a big fan of the pontifications of Christopher Hitchens. I think they're often contrarian for the sake of snobbishness and attention-getting. But unlike so many people penning essays on the situation in Iraq, the man at least mingles with the people he writes about and is willing (too eager, perhaps) to voice an unpopular viewpoint. So I think his view of the Saddam Hussein execution is worth a read. And not that the two deaths were even remotely in the same category but his writing about the death of Gerald Ford said some things that are worth consideration, as well.

You have a wonderful resource available to you on Google Video. The Archive of American Television is uploading oral history interviews with dozens of important people in the history of broadcasting. You could waste spend hundreds of hours watching these and I'll suggest a good use of two. They've just put up an interview with everyone's favorite actor, Jack Lemmon. It's almost two hours in four parts and this link will take you a page where you can access each part. Excellent material, well worth your attention. And after you get done with that, check out some of the others they have up there. A number of people have asked me to write more about what Joe Barbera was like. There's three and a half hours over there of Joe Barbera discussing his career and it'll tell you so much more tha I ever could. Here's the link to that.

I should also mention that full episodes of The Charlie Rose Show are now available for free viewing on Google Video. They used to cost five bucks each to watch and now they're free. Here's a link that will search the library and show you what they have. It seems to take a few weeks to get shows up there. They don't have Rose's recent (and quite excellent) chat with Stephen Colbert, for instance. But you should find plenty there to watch.

The prolific writer Robert Schaefer died December 14 at the age of 80 in his home in Laguna Woods, California. The cause of death is being reported as emphysema.

Schaefer was born in Salt Lake City, Utah but his family soon migrated to Hollywood, which is where he grew up. Initially, he wanted to be an engineer but a friendly English teacher encouraged him to pursue writing and, when he got out of the Navy, he did. He enrolled in a school for would-be professional writers and that's where he met Freiwald. Both men had uncles in the movie business. Scheafer's was producing TV shows and movies for Gene Autry while Freiwald's was directing for 20th Century Fox. Soon, via those connections, they began selling scripts and gaining a reputation for swift delivery of good, filmable material.

Their first sale was a teleplay for The Gene Autry Show and they soon followed it up with sales to The Adventures of Kit Carson, Tales of the Texas Rangers, Maverick, Whirlybirds, Texas John Slaughter, Zorro, 77 Sunset Strip, The Adventures of Wild Bill Hickok, Buffalo Bill Jr and many more. It was through their Gene Autry connection that Schaefer and Freiwald hooked up with Western Publishing Company and began writing at first the Gene Autry comic books, then comics of all kinds, including the Dell Comics versions of most of the TV shows on which they were concurrently working.

Between 1957 and 1965, they wrote approximately a comic book per week for Western, including many issues of Rawhide, Gunsmoke, Maverick, Zorro, Laramie, Lassie, The Real McCoys, The Restless Gun, Roy Rogers, Sea Hunt, Sugarfoot, Spin and Marty, Wagon Train, Ricky Nelson, Rin Tin Tin, Wyatt Earp and many more. They authored many of the comic book adaptations of Disney movies (The Parent Trap, The Shaggy Dog, The Absent-Minded Professor, etc.) and even dabbled occasionally in scripts for Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. Several of the early issues of the classic Magnus, Robot Fighter comic book were authored by Schaefer and Freiwald.

Obviously, they were particular favorites of the editors at Western Publishing. The senior editor there, Chase Craig, told me they were his most valuable writers, able to instantly grasp the essence of a new TV show that had to be turned into a comic book. In a 1979 interview, Craig said, "It was always difficult to get the people who produced a TV show to approve our scripts because, you know, we were outsiders and they couldn't believe we could write their characters. But they always loved what those guys did because, well, for one thing, Schaefer and Freiwald were probably writing the TV show, as well. And if they weren't already, the producers would read the comic book scripts and hire them to write the TV show."

Around 1964, Schaefer and Freiwald got too busy with the Lassie program to write many more scripts for Western. (They wrote 188 episodes of Lassie and Schaefer even had one of Lassie's pups as a housepet.) Schaefer retired from professional writing in 1984 after he and Freiwald completed a script for the Michael Landon show, Highway to Heaven. Freiwald continues to write for television, currently for the daytime drama, The Young and the Restless.

As I wrote in this article, one of my heroes was the great ventriloquist, Paul Winchell. I watched every show he was on and I never saw him not be entertaining. When people write of the pioneers of television, they always mention Berle and Caesar and Steve Allen and forget about Winch, who was just as important as any of them.

Our link today is a whole half hour of The Paul Winchell-Jerry Mahoney Variety Show. I must admit I'm not sure which of his many shows this was. He had quite a few in the fifties and they were always changing names and switching back and forth between daytime and evening hours. I'm not even sure what year this is but I'll take a stab at late 1955 or early 1956.

I don't remember watching this particular episode when I was three or four…but I bet I did.