Barry Mitchell, who often turns up doing funny things on ABC news programs, sends the following comment on my treatise on pie-flinging…
We had Soupy on World News Now in August, 1998. The director would not let him throw a pie at me for fear it would mess up Peter Jennings' brand new anchor set.
So we compromised: Soupy just pushed it in my face. Not quite as funny, but before he left the studio, Soupy reminded me to be sure to add the gunshot sound effect. We did, and it made all the difference.
Well, there you are: Verification of what I say from The Master. Pushing it in the face is not as funny as throwing it…and you need the gunshot sound. And not just any gunshot. Soupy had the perfect one which was more of a ricochet.
I wrote about my own experiences with Soupy in this article. As I've mentioned here and many other places, I made an embarrassing error in this piece when it was first published: I knew that Soupy's director on his syndicated show in the seventies was Lou Tedesco but I somehow typed the name of Lou Horvitz. Years later when Soupy's autobiography was being written — heavily ghosted due to his medical problems — his collaborator asked permission to quote from it and I, of course, granted permission. Anything for Soupy. Well, much to my surprise, they reprinted the entire thing in Soupy's book…including my Tedesco/Horvitz mix-up. So it's wrong in Soupy's book, which is where you'd figure you could go for solid facts.