Category Archives: TeeVee Moments

Elvis Scandalizes ‘Merka ► Another Magical Tee Vee Moment

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Dateline June 5, 1956 – Elvis Presley appeared on the Milton Berle Show. Coming during his first brush with national fame, his pelvic gyrations were so suggestive that it became a national scandal. No, really!

In March of ’56 Elvis had released his eponymous debut LP on RCA. The label bought out his contract from Sun Studios the previous year. This LP would go on to become the first #1 Rock and Roll album, topping the Billboard charts for 10 weeks. Some 50 years later it ranked #56 on Rolling Stone’s list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. However, Elvis was barely known at this point in his career. All that would change within the next six months.

Just a month after the LP’s release, Elvis appeared for the first time on the Milton Berle Show, singing an extremely hot version of Heartbreak Hotel from the deck of the USS Hancock. (Don’t ask.) When the performance finished, Elvis continued his tour. There was no public outcry. Watch:


To show how much Show Bidnezz has changed since then: Heartbreak Hotel wasn’t even on the LP Elvis had just released. He wasn’t promoting his new LP; Elvis was still promoting his January single, which had already topped the Billboard charts for 7 weeks. The music industry still thought of 45s as the money-makers, with LPs often an afterthought. Heartbreak Hotel would go on become the biggest selling single that year.

Elvis was just on the cusp of national and international fame. He had recently signed a 7-year Hollywood contract to star in movies and was still touring extensively. Milton Berle, who was trying to save his show from cancellation (unsuccessfully, as it turned out), booked Elvis for a return visit to his show in June, this time appearing at NBC’s studio in Hollywood. Before the show began Milton Berle, the show biz veteran of Vaudeville, radio, and tee vee, gave Elvis some advice; five words that changed history.

“Let ’em see you, son,” Milton Berle reportedly told Elvis, successfully convincing him to leave his guitar behind when he performed Hound Dog, a song he hadn’t even recorded yet. Without his guitar to hide behind, Elvis’ dancing was more exaggerated than his previous visit. While some girls screamed, much of the audience is confused, laughing and tittering. Clearly, they’ve never seen anything quite like this before:

‘Merka clutched its metaphorical pearls. According to the WikiWackyWoo:

Presley’s gyrations created a storm of controversy. Television critics were outraged: Jack Gould of The New York Times wrote, “Mr. Presley has no discernible singing ability. … His phrasing, if it can be called that, consists of the stereotyped variations that go with a beginner’s aria in a bathtub. … His one specialty is an accented movement of the body … primarily identified with the repertoire of the blond bombshells of the burlesque runway.” Ben Gross of the New York Daily News opined that popular music “has reached its lowest depths in the ‘grunt and groin’ antics of one Elvis Presley. … Elvis, who rotates his pelvis … gave an exhibition that was suggestive and vulgar, tinged with the kind of animalism that should be confined to dives and bordellos”. Ed Sullivan, whose own variety show was the nation’s most popular, declared him “unfit for family viewing”.

Ed Sullivan was brutal in his assessment of Elvis Presley:

Watching clips of the Allen and Berle shows with his producer, Sullivan had opined that Presley “got some kind of device hanging down below the crotch of his pants–so when he moves his legs back and forth you can see the outline of his cock. … I think it’s a Coke bottle. … We just can’t have this on a Sunday night. This is a family show!” Sullivan publicly told TV Guide, “As for his gyrations, the whole thing can be controlled with camera shots.”

Which is exactly what he did.

Sullivan was forced to book Elvis when Steve Allen’s show with Elvis singing Hound Dog to an actual hound dog, beat Sullivan’s show in the ratings. Elvis has called this the most ridiculous performance of his career:

Quickly reversing his principled stand to obtain boffo ratings, Sullivan offered Elvis the unheard of sum of $50,000 for three appearances. In case anything went terribly wrong on the first Sullivan performance, Ed Sullivan made sure that he could not be blamed. He had guest host Charles Laughton filling in while he recuperated from a car accident. Elvis performed Love Me Tender for the 60 million viewers who tuned in.

While his first Sullivan appearance cemented Elvis Presley’s fame, it was his appearance on the Milton Berle Show that earned him the nickname of Elvis the Pelvis. He hated this phrase the rest of his life, calling it, “one of the most childish expressions I ever heard comin’ from an adult.”

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Johnny Carson’s Last Tee Vee Appearance ► Another Magical Tee Vee Moment

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Johnny Carson got his start in Show Biz as a magician

Dateline May 13, 1994 – Johnny Carson makes his last tee vee appearance ever, fittingly on David Letterman’s show.

Carson was a tee vee institution for over 30 years. While other people hosted the Tonight Show both before and after him, Carson will always be the gold standard against which all others are judged. Carson retired from his show on May 22, 1992.

Johnny Carson always felt that David Letterman was the natural heir to the Tonight Show seat and was sorely disappointed that the show was given to Jay Leno instead. “Some people say” that’s why Carson declined to appear in NBC’s 75th Anniversary Special. “Other people say” that Carson never forgave NBC for destroying all the early Tonight Shows to make shelf room for newer shows. It very well could have been both.

Either way, it’s so appropriate that Carson’s last appearance was on Letterman’s show, almost 2 years to years to the day after his retirement. Letterman sprung Carson’s appearance as a surprise and the audience gave him a sustained standing ovation. After waiting out the applause for a while, Carson left the stage without saying a word. It looked like he had some lines, which he decided not to deliver at the last minute because anything he said would be an anti-climax. Remember: Carson was the master of Show Biz Timing™. Later Carson said he pulled his Marcel Marceau act due to acute laryngitis. This clip makes it clear he was going to say something.

This was one of the rare post-retirement appearances Carson made on tee vee, and the very last. On January 23, 2005 Johnny Carson died of respiratory failure from emphysema at the age of 79. After his death David Letterman did a Johnny Carson tribute show, which included an entire monologue written by Carson. It turned out that Carson regularly faxed jokes to the Letterman show just for the thrill of having then delivered on air.

Johnny Carson was the Comedian’s Comedian to the very end.

Here’s David Letterman’s tribute show to Johnny Carson:

Further Reading at Not Now Silly

Last Tonight Show with Johnny Carson ► Day In History
I’ve Got A Secret ► Another Magical Tee Vee Moment
Andy Kaufman ► Another Magical Tee Vee Moment

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Bob Dylan Walks Out On Ed Sullivan

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Dateline May 12, 1963 – Back in the day you couldn’t really say you were in Show Biz unless you had appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show. As much as Bob Dylan was known as a Protest singer, he still craved Show Biz legitimacy. That’s why he allowed himself to be booked on the Sullivan Show on this day in 1963. However, always the contrarian, Dylan walked off the show before he was to appear.

Ed Sullivan was a Tee Vee institution. Beginning in 1948 as Toast of the Town, his show ran for 23 seasons — 22 of them in the same Sunday night time slot of 8PM. Entire families would gather around the only tee vee set in the house and watch one of the only 3 tee vee networks in existence. The Sullivan Show had something for everyone in the entire family. It was a variety show, in the Vaudevillian tradition; a solo singer might be followed by a ventriloquist, who was followed by a plate spinner, with a Big Band performance next, to be followed by a comedian, and then, maybe, wrapped up with a scene from a Broadway musical. In a classic example of Art imitating Life, this “Hymn for a Sunday Evening,” from “Bye Bye Birdie,” sums up the importance of an appearance on the Sullivan show.

In ’63 Dylan was just an up-and-coming singer/songwriter, barely known outside the small, cultish world of Folk enthusiasts. If people knew him at all it was from Peter, Paul and Mary’s cover version of Blowin’ in the Wind. His 2nd LP, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, with his own version of “Blowin’ In The Wind,” was just days away from being released. A Sullivan appearance would have been a huge boost to Dylan’s career and fame. However, according to the Official Ed Sullivan Show webeteria:

Bob Dylan was slated to make his first nationwide television appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show on May 12, 1963.  For the show, Dylan decided to perform “Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues”, a satirical blues number skewering the conservative John Birch Society and the red-hunting paranoia associated with it.  A few days earlier, Bob Dylan auditioned the song for Ed Sullivan who seemed to have no issue with it. However, on the day of the show during the dress rehearsal, an executive from the CBS Standards and Practices department decided Dylan could not perform the song due to its controversial nature.  When the show’s producer, Bob Precht, informed Dylan of the decision, Dylan responded saying, “No; this is what I want to do. If I can’t play my song, I’d rather not appear on the show.”  Rather than choose a new song to perform or change the lyrics (as the Rolling Stones and the Doors on Ed Sullivan would agree to do), a young Bob Dylan walked off the set of the country’s highest-rated variety show.

The story got widespread media attention in the days that followed helping to establish Dylan’s public reputation as an uncompromising artist. The publicity Bob Dylan received from this event probably did more for his career than the actual Ed Sullivan Show performance would have. Unfortunately, this leaves us with no performance footage of Bob Dylan on The Ed Sullivan Show.

Here’s a live version of “Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues,” which Dylan introduces by saying, “And, there ain’t nothing wrong with this song.”

No wonder they didn’t want the song performed on the show. In 1963 “Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues” would have still been politically explosive. However, Ed Sullivan was a known control freak, who had his fingers in every aspect of his show. It’s hard to believe he wasn’t part of this decision, if not the instigator. An alternative theory is that Sullivan found the song a bit too far for his family audience, but wanted to come off as Mr. Nice Guy, so he told Bob Precht to deliver the bad news to Dylan. Blaming the CBS Standards and Practices office was probably just Standard Operating Procedure at the time.

Regardless of who made the decision, it resulted in Dylan’s “boot heels to be wandering.”

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The Bible, Subliminal Satan, and Racism

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Left: Satan wearing his hoodie. Right: without hoodie.

I have been watching this miniseries . . . err . . . religiously. What can I say, I love Sand & Sandal epics, even if they are epic fails. This thing is horrible on a number of levels, but I’m not here to review the series.

While watching the most recent episode where the snake turns into Satan and Satan turns into President Obama, I was shocked! Most people have only seen the still, but I caught it as it was broadcast. However, it was a quick flash. It happened so quickly. You never got a really good look, because the
face was mostly shrouded in darkness except for that quick flash.

I suddenly blinked thinking, “Did I just see what I thought I saw? Nah! That would be too blatant.” In the end I decided I hadn’t seen what I thought I had seen.

Then . . .

The meme and controversy with the still [above] started immediately the next morning. That’s when I was convinced there was no fucking way this was accidental. When I was in my 20s “Subliminal Advertising” was the book to read and I’ve reread it several times since.

Then . . .

I’ve now seen the Christian Fundamentalist and the Reality Show Creator (both professions which are an evil abomination foisted upon our society) deny this was intentional several times. I still ain’t buying it. Controversy sells. They have a product to sell.

Note the resemblence Mohamen Mehdi Ouazanni
has with President Obama? Me neither!

Then . . .

I saw a publicity photo of Mohamen Mehdi Ouazanni, the actor who played Satan in The Bible. He looks nothing like President Obama. It would take a great make-up artist to make him look even remotely like President Obama.

Then . . .

Remember I said that I’ve been watching? I have noticed something subtle. Most of the leads in the miniseries are White or Mid-Eastern (which qualifies as White on every census here). However, there would have been too much backlash if the producers hadn’t included some Black folk, especially since there were loads of ’em back in biblical times.

However, the Black folk depicted tend to lean more towards either Satan, or Samson. Now this Samson is the darkest Black person in the entire miniseries so far. He’s as dark as a man can be without actually being a crow. And, he had long dreadlocks! YA, MON!!!

But . . . it’s the depiction of Satan that made me sit up and take notice. In the miniseries Sampson is usually behaving like a raging animal. Oh sure, he had his soft and tender side (and the Delilah depiction made for an interesting interracial relationship). And, credit where credit’s due, when he spoke he didn’t sound like a moron, but an intelligent and thoughtful man. However, most of the time Sampson was simply destroying shit. And, when he destroyed shit he grunted, and growled, and shouted long, unintelligible cries of hate and anguish.

Since this was one of the few leads who was Black, as opposed to a supporting character, I couldn’t help but think that this was also a conscious: Black Guy = Raging Madman, who has divine justification because . . .  because . . . because he’s on a mission from God.

Taking a page right out of Fox “News,” the station that perfected this tactic, I like how the producers of The Bible found a Black man to explain why Sampson is Righteous, with a capital R, even tho’ he’s a Scary Black Man™. Bonus points: He’s also named Sampson. Watch:

Yannow who else was on a mission from God? That’s right!

Andy’s Gang ► Another Magical Tee Vee Moment

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Dateline October 7, 1905 – Andrew Vabre “Andy” Devine is born in Flagstaff, Arizona. With his trademark raspy voice, Andy Devine went on to become one of the great character actors in Hollywood. He appeared in more than 400 hundred flicks, often playing the sidekick. He was Cookie alongside Roy Rogers and appeared in several John Wayne movies, including the original Stagecoach, Island in the Sky, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, where he played the cowardly marshal. Among his other movie credits are Romeo and Juliet, the original A Star Is Born, the original Geronimo, the Jack Benny comedy Buck Benny Rides Again, Pete Kelly’s Blues, and dozens of others.

However, there’s a whole generation of kids, who are now my age, that know him for the phrase “Plunk your magic twanger, Froggy” when, in mid career, he hosted the children’s show “Andy’s Gang.” Each show began with Andy leading the kids in a song that parents would go nuts if they heard it today:

♫ ♪ ♫
I got a gang,
You got a gang,
Everybody’s gotta have a gang,
But there’s only one real gang for me, 
Good ol’ Andy’s Gang.
♪ ♫ ♪

Here are some wonderful excerpts from Andy’s Gang, when children’s programming on tee vee was still in its infancy.



Jimmy Buffett name-checked Andy Devine in his song Pencil Thin Moustache, which is as good way as any to play out this blog post. Enjoy:

Another Magical Tee Vee Moment ► Richard Nixon’s Checkers Speech

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Jackie Gleason keeping Richard Nixon from falling in the
drink in Inverrary, Florida, a few miles from where I live.

Dateline September 23, 1952 – Under fire for taking money from his private backers to pay expenses, Richard Nixon went on national tee vee and delivered what has come to be known as The Checkers Speech.

At the time he was Senator Richard Nixon, having won over Helen Gahagan Douglas in 1950 after accusing her of being a Communist, who was “pink right down to her underpants.” Tapped to be General Dwight D. Eisenhower’s vice presidential running mate, Nixon ran into trouble two months later when the press learned of a fund that ‘topped off’ Nixon’s salary of $12,500 (which was about $150,000 in 2009 dollars, according to the WikiWackyWoo). As demands grew for Nixon to resign from the ticket and his senate seat, Eisenhower started to distance himself from the party’s GOP pick. To save his position on the GOP ticket, not to mention his seat in the Senate, Nixon convinced Ike to allow him to go on tee vee and make his case directly to the ‘Merkin people. However, Nixon wanted Eisenhower to make a decision on whether to keep him on the ticket immediately after the broadcast. Eisenhower wouldn’t agree to that, so Nixon famously said to the General who saved Europe for democracy, “[G]eneral, there comes a time in matters like this when you’ve either got to shit or get off the pot.” Even at that, Eisenhower said it would take a few days to determine which way the wind was blowing.

At 9:30 PM EST Nixon gave the following speech to all of ‘Merka:

The speech was both maudlin and heart-warming. It became known as The Checkers Speech, a term Nixon hated, for this passage:

One other thing I probably should tell you because if we don’t they’ll probably be saying this about me too, we did get something—a gift—after the election. A man down in Texas heard Pat on the radio mention the fact that our two youngsters would like to have a dog. And, believe it or not, the day before we left on this campaign trip we got a message from Union Station in Baltimore saying they had a package for us. We went down to get it. You know what it was?

It was a little cocker spaniel dog in a crate that he’d sent all the way from Texas. Black and white spotted. And our little girl—Tricia, the 6-year-old—named it Checkers. And you know, the kids, like all kids, love the dog and I just want to say this right now, that regardless of what they say about it, we’re gonna keep it.

Nixon ended the speech with direct appeal to the ‘Merkin people to let their views be known:

I am submitting to the Republican National Committee tonight through
this television broadcast the decision which it is theirs to make. Let
them decide whether my position on the ticket will help or hurt. And I
am going to ask you to help them decide. Wire and write the Republican
National Committee whether you think I should stay on or whether I
should get off. And whatever their decision is, I will abide by it.

But just let me say this last word. Regardless of what happens I’m
going to continue this fight. I’m going to campaign up and down America
until we drive the crooks and the Communists and those that defend them
out of Washington.

The ‘Merkin people did as Nixon had asked. They inundated the GOP with letters and telegrams, Eisenhower decided to keep him on the ticket, and Senator Richard Nixon lived to fight another day, going on to become Vice President of the United States for the next 8 years.

Another Magical Tee Vee Moment ► Chuck Jones

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Dateline September 21, 1912 – Cartoonist extraordinaire Chuck Jones is born in Spokane, Washington. According to Jones, he credits his father, a failed businessman, with his love of drawing. Says the WikiWackiWoo:

His father, Jones recounts, would start every new business venture by purchasing new stationery and new pencils with the company name on them. When the business failed, his father would quietly turn the huge stacks of useless stationery and pencils over to his children, requiring them to use up all the material as fast as possible. Armed with an endless supply of high-quality paper and pencils, the children drew constantly. Later, in one art school class, the professor gravely informed the students that they each had 100,000 bad drawings in them that they must first get past before they could possibly draw anything worthwhile. Jones recounted years later that this pronouncement came as a great relief to him, as he was well past the 200,000 mark, having used up all that stationery.

Like so many children of my generation, Chuck Jones entertained me endlessly. While his cartoons were made for movie theaters, they were all over the tee vee dial when I was growing up and the cartoons are all that matter. Here are just a few:

“Great Performances,” on PBS, profiled Chuck Jones in one of its previous seasons. The program included some terrific behind-the-scenes descriptions of how cartoons are created and clips of some of the great cartoons. [Unfortunately PBS has removed this from its web site. I searched hard to find one with the proper aspect ratio, but could only find bits and pieces and not the entire documentary. Here is the full documentary with the aspect ratio skewed.]

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Another Magical Tee Vee Moment ► Philo T. Farnsworth

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Dateline September 7, 1927 – On this day Philo Taylor Farnsworth demonstrated his radical new invention: electronic television. Prior to this all televisions (which were still in the experimental stage) used a clunky mechanical system with a rotating disk. Farnsworth’s radical design used image dissection, an electronic scanning of a series of lines. He was only twenty-one.

More amazingly, he came up with the idea when he was just a 14-year old farm boy. The brainstorm came to him while plowing a field; the plow moves across a field, then back the other way for the next row. He drew his idea on a chalkboard for his science teacher John Tolman, who was so impressed with it that he made a contemporaneous sketch of it. This proved fortuitous years later when he was sued by RCA over patent infringment. The teacher’s sketch made in 1922 won the case for Farnsworth.

Indeed it was Another Magical Tee Vee Moment. Here’s just one more:

Electronic television is no longer with us, having gone the way of the horse and buggy. A whole generation has now grown up viewing tee vee on a cathode ray tube that necessarily made the living room tee vee deep in dimension. Now tee vees can be hung on a wall like a painting.

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Another Magical Tee Vee Moment ► President Clinton Addresses the DNC

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Last night William Jefferson Clinton, the 42nd President of the United States, officially nominated President Barack Obama for reelection at the Democratic National Convention. It was a barn-burner of a speech, which listed all the reasons why President Obama should get a second term and what separates the Democratic Party from the Republican Party in 2012. The crowd loved it because it was quintessential Clinton and, of course, they are all Democrats.

If you haven’t seen it yet, you really should.

The election is in exactly 2 months from today. Make sure you get out and vote.

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I’ll Take Game Shows Hosts For 200

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Who began his career on a televised sock hop in Canada in 1963?

Need another clue?

It was called Music Hop.

Another clue? Are you brain dead? Okay. he hosted the following exciting CBC competition show:

What about if we give him a mustache?

Happy 72nd Birthday, Alex Trebek. You’re a Canadian institution, on tee vee since 1963, longer than most.



And, a prank played on Alex Trebek: