I love looking at old Las Vegas. This video is black-and-white footage that has been restored and colorized…so the colors are just someone's recent guesses. But hey, wouldn't you have liked to go to the Sands to see a double bill of Alan King and Mel Tormé? And Louis Prima appears to have been performing elsewhere on the premises.
The video is labelled to say it's in the seventies but the marquee for the Stardust has "Lido '67" on it and the one for Caesars Palace offers the afternoon show, "Bottoms Up '67" produced by and starring Breck Wall. I wrote about Mr. Wall and my one encounter with him in this post.
At the Desert Inn, you could have seen a touring company of Hello, Dolly! with either Dorothy Lamour or Ginger Rogers. Their names are both on the marquee and they took turns. On eBay and elsewhere online, you can find all sorts of photos and souvenirs from that engagement — like the postcard above — and they all say it was 1967. As a point of interest, Hello, Dolly! didn't close on Broadway until December of 1970.
All of this leads me to the fearless conclusion that all or most of this footage was shot, not in the seventies, but in 1967. And hey, Don Rickles was playing at the Sahara. That might have been welcome news if you were in town then and eager to sit in the front row and be called a hockey puck…
