We interrupt Cookie Monster Week to bring you this…and you only need to watch the first one minute and forty seconds of it. It's the opening to Dean Martin's 1968 Christmas Show.
I was fascinated by The Dean Martin Show — the series that ran on NBC from 1965 to 1974. They had a lot of great performers on it (including its star) but the way it was put together was also interesting. Usually, if someone starred in a weekly hour-long network variety show, it would mean four or five long days per week of rehearsing and taping.
Dino did that for his show's first season and decided that if that's what it took to have a weekly series, he'd rather not have one. To keep him doing it, producer-director Greg Garrison invented a new way of doing a show. During the week, they'd tape all the segments Dean wasn't in and rehearse (without him) all the ones that required his presence. They eliminated the pre-recording of songs, kept Dean in a tux for almost everything and staged things so Dean could just stand in one place and read everything off cue cards on his one day a week in the studio.
If you watch those shows with that in mind, you can see all kinds of shortcuts and cutting tricks. Often when some bit went wrong, Garrison preferred to try and save it in the editing room rather than to take the three minutes on the stage to do a second take. Or if during a song, Dean was having trouble hearing the orchestra, they wouldn't stop, turn the volume up and start over. Instead, Dean would give a special hand gesture — you can spot it once in a while — to tell them to make the track louder as he kept on singing.
When I watched the opening to the show below in '68, I thought I noticed another trick but in those pre-VCR/TiVo days, I couldn't rewind the video and check. I just found this on YouTube and, sure enough, if you watch carefully, you can see how Dean managed to participate in a dance number that would have required some rehearsal. They could have made it impossible to notice if they'd done it in two pieces and edited it together but that might have taken an extra two minutes of taping…