This is the opening of an episode of the Howdy Doody series with "Buffalo" Bob Smith doing his usual obvious job of supplying the voice of his puppet star, and the kids in the Peanut Gallery singing the show's theme song without knowing any of the words after the first line. Most of this clip is taken up by a commercial for Kellogg's Rice Krispies…and that's Thurl (Tony the Tiger) Ravenscroft you'll hear as the lead singer of the jingle.
The clip was posted to YouTube by the folks at Mill Creek Entertainment, a video company that's just brought out a 5-DVD set containing 22 hours (!) of Howdy Doody episodes and bonus features. You can order a copy from Amazon by clicking here. If that's too much for you — and by God, it oughta be — they have another set that's a little less than ten hours that sells for less than a third as much. You can order that one by clicking here — and no, I don't know if the episodes it contains are included in the larger set. Amazon doesn't seem to know, either…though they are selling the two sets in a package deal.
I was born a wee bit too late to count Howdy Doody as an obsession of my childhood. By the time I got to it, it seemed like a quaint relic of early television…and a show that catered to devout followers, not to new viewers. I never quite understood the characters or storylines or even if the premise was that the puppet characters lived in the same world as the human ones or were of the same species. But I liked moments in the show and I really liked Buffalo Bob, and friends who are a little older than me tell me I'd have been hooked if I'd started watching a few years earlier. I can see that. When I worked with Bob Keeshan, he told me that there seemed to be a clear dividing line among adults he met, depending on when they were born. Older than a certain age, they wanted to talk to him about his days on Howdy Doody playing Clarabelle the Clown. Younger than that age, they wanted to talk about his years playing Captain Kangaroo. There was, he said, very little overlap even though the shows co-existed for many years.
I was in the Kangaroo Krowd but I did ask him a lot about Howdy Doody, less as an avid viewer than as a student of TV history. Some of the episodes he did before his firing are on the 22 hour set and I may buy it just to see him in action. Anyway, here's a brief visit to Doodyville…