This may interest game show fans and it may interest animation fans. In 1969, there was a short-lived daytime game show on NBC called Lohman and Barkley's Namedroppers. It was hosted by Al Lohman and Roger Barkley, who were two very funny Los Angeles radio personalities back then. (This was when every city in America had at least one set of guys on the radio who were more or less imitating Bob and Ray. Lohman and Barkley were the best of many who did it in L.A.)
Namedroppers was kind of like To Tell the Truth, only backwards. There were three celebrity guests in each game and the hosts would bring out someone who had a relationship of some sort with one of the celebs. Each celeb would then tell a different story about how he or she knew that person, and then twenty contestants (who played for a week at a time) would vote on which story to believe and win cash and prizes if they were right. I recall it as a pleasant show that ran around six months without capturing the rapt loyalty of daytime viewers.
All of that is for the game show buffs. What will interest the animation folks is that in this clip, the "namedropper" is Ward Kimball. He was there plugging, "It's Tough to Be a Bird," which is a short he directed and co-wrote for Disney in '69. (It won the Academy Award that year for best animated short subject.) He's identified as a casting director but he was actually one of the all-time great animators. He's the guy who animated most of Jiminy Cricket in Pinocchio. He's the man who animated the crows in Dumbo. And he's the one who animated the wild musical sequence in The Three Caballeros, which a lot of cartoon scholars think is the funniest bit of animation ever done. He was also, as you'll see in the clip, a pretty good liar.
