In 1963, Jay Ward's cartoon studio was riding high with The Bullwinkle Show and starting to break out into live-action productions. One was Fractured Flickers, hosted by Hans Conried, which offered up silent movie footage redubbed with hilarious dialogue. It was a modest success in syndication.
Less successful was an unsold pilot for a prime-time hour-long variety show on CBS. It was called The Nut House (sometimes spelled The Nut House!!) and it featured a troupe of young comic actors performing sketches of various lengths, interspersed with cartoon segments, with no sense of continuity. While it didn't become a series, practically everyone involved in it considered it a prototype for Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In, which was a huge hit four years later. Most of them, in fact, were not hesitant to call Laugh-In a rip-off of The Nut House.
Ward's show was supervised by Jay and by Bill Scott. The writing staff consisted of some of the guys who were writing Ward's cartoons at the time plus some outside guys experienced in writing comedy sketches for TV. It is said that most of the material written by the outside guys failed to make the final cut. The full writing staff, as credited at the end, was Bob Arbogast, George Atkins, Allan Burns, Jim Critchfield, Chris Hayward, Art Keane, Jack Margolis, Hal Parets and Lloyd Turner. Atkins, Burns, Critchfield, Hayward and Turner all wrote animation for Ward before and after.
The cast consisted of Ceil Cabot, Jack Sheldon, Len Maxwell, Fay DeWitt, Tony Holland, Jane Connell, Don Francks, Andy Duncan, Adam Keefe, Muriel Landers, Mara Lynn, Marilynn Lovell, Kathy Kersh and Alan Sues. Sues, of course, was later a cast member on Laugh-In.
Charles S. Dubin was the producer-director, Jerry Fielding did the music, Herb Ross (later an Oscar-nominated director) did the choreography and there was special musical material from Martin Charnin, Mary Rodgers and Jim Rusk. Charnin later wrote for Broadway shows like Annie and Two by Two. Mary Rodgers, whose name was misspelled in the credits, was the daughter of Richard Rodgers and a pretty successful composer in her own right.
CBS was not happy with what the Ward-Scott team turned in and much editing was done on it. They didn't like the absence of a real host, cringed at the general chaos and objected to some bits as being unfunny or in poor taste.
The pilot was handed over to the CBS testing people, who showed it to focus groups and reported on their reaction. It tested very poorly…probably about as bad as the pilot for The Mary Tyler Moore Show and we all know what a flop that was. Still, when the (by then) unsold pilot of The Nut House finally aired on CBS in September of '64, some reviews thought it was fresh and different. Alas, in network television, "fresh and different" are not always considered good things.
For years, bad video copies of that one episode circulated but a fairly decent one has recently surfaced and you can watch it below. The show as aired was an hour but this copy, which is minus commercials, runs 33 and a half minutes…so something is missing, I know not what…