My mother saw a lot of great shows on Broadway I wish I'd seen, including the original Oklahoma! and South Pacific. She lived in Hartford but every few months, she and a friend would take the train into Manhattan and see a show or two.
I once asked her what was the single most memorable moment of any show she saw on Broadway and she said, sans hesitation, "Stubby Kaye singing 'Sit Down, You're Rockin' the Boat' in Guys and Dolls. She also said it was the best show she ever saw there and the last. Less than a month later, she moved to Los Angeles and married Bernie Evanier and, a year later, they had me. But never mind that. The point is that she always remembered the Stubby One stopping the show with that number.
And she said, "It wasn't the same in the movie." Probably very little was. But what she said made me very much aware of Mr. Kaye and I watched for him in everything he did, including a few movies I did like — Li'l Abner, Cat Ballou, Sweet Charity and a couple others.
I could have liked him in the film version of The Music Man. That's who the folks who made that movie wanted for the role of Marcellus Washburn. But that was before the agent who represented Buddy Hackett leveraged him into the role by threatening to withhold some other client they wanted for some other film unless Hackett got the part. Wouldn't you rather have had Stubby Kaye there singing "Shipoopi?"
Stubby Kaye was born Bernard Solomon Kotzin — a name he managed to keep mostly-secret from everyone until after his death in 1997. He had a great career performing in vaudeville where he was often billed as an "Extra Padded Attraction." He worked on Broadway a lot. He did quite a few movies. And he appeared on a lot of TV shows including Shenanigans, which is the subject of this video link. Shenanigans was a Saturday morning kid show on ABC.
It was sponsored, as they reminded you every two minutes, by the Milton Bradley company, maker of fine games. It was produced by Merrill Heater and Bob Quigley, whose production company later had a mega-hit with Hollywood Squares. At the time, their biggest success was a game show called Video Village, which ran on CBS from 1960 to 1962 in a daytime version, a short-lived nighttime version and a Saturday morn version for children called either Video Village Jr. or Kideo Village at different times.
In 1964, they worked a deal with Milton Bradley to revamp the kids' version into Shenanigans with Stubby as its host and Ken Williams as his announcer-sidekick. Kenny Williams was the announcer on darn near every game show the Heatter-Quigley company produced. Wikipedia informs me that Shenanigans aired on ABC Saturday mornings from September 26, 1964 to March 20, 1965, and again from September 25 to December 18, 1965.
They made 39 episodes but as far as I know, only two have survived, making the rounds of the collectors' market in very bad, grainy prints. Long ago on this blog, I linked to some fuzzy excerpts but now we have a complete show here in watchable shape, not that I expect most of you to make it through the whole thing. But the opening with Stubby singing the theme song is kinda fun. Watch at least that much of it…