Yum, TV Dinner

When TV really took off in the fifties and sucked us in more and more each day, the kitchen began to lose out as the social center of the household. Of course, with all those additional hours spent in front of the tube, nutrition became an issue. Family not spending much time in the kitchen anymore? Move the kitchen to the TV room. The TV dinner was born. Rumored to be the brainchild of someone at the Swanson Company who had too much leftover Thanksgiving turkey to deal with, the TV dinner took off selling more than ten million dinners in the first year. Furniture manufacturers even started offering TV trays, sets of little fold-up tables that sat neatly in a folder that stood in a corner of the room.

To some naysayers, the birth of the TV dinner and the death of the family dinner hour marked a general decline in the familial social fabric and American values in general. I’m not so sure. Nothing sounds more American to me than gulping down a leathery salisbury steak bathed in gravy with my legs jammed under a wobbly fold-up table while I’m watching Bonanza.

What Happened to TV Slapstick?

What ever happened to good old physical comedy on TV? Oh sure, there are moments when someone may roll over the back of a couch, or crash into someone else coming through a swinging door. Pretty lame stuff. Anyone can take a pie in the face. Really good physical comedy requires an extremely rubbery face, a boneless body and a perfect sense of timing. Seinfeld’s Cosmo Kramer is the most recognizable recent example, but in the days of Classic TV, physical comedy ruled.

For some classic TV slapstick, check out Tim Conway’s bumbling Ensign Parker from McHale’s Navy or Don Knotts’ nerve-wracked Barney Fife from The Andy Griffith Show. Dig a little deeper and you’ll find that many of TV’s best physical actors started in vaudeville or theater where physical comedy had to be over the top to play to the back row. Great physical comedians like Lucille Ball, Jackie Gleasan, Sid Caeser, Milton Berle and Red Skelton all came from the stages of Vaudeville and the Borscht Belt theaters of the Catskills.

For The Dick Van Dyke Show, the pratfall opened the show. CBS producers wanting a strong hook came up with the idea of having Van Dyke, a very acrobatic comedian, walk through his front door and immediately summersault over an unseen ottoman in his way. They then shot variations with Van Dyke hopping gingerly around the stool. The opening became a draw in itself. What was Dick going to do this time?

Here’s to great reception
Jim

The Agony of Defeat

I remember watching Wide World of Sports on the weekends. While the other networks were focusing their lenses on mainstream sports like football, basketball, baseball and golf, Wide World of Sports and created Roone Arledge literally toted their cameras around the world giving American living rooms glimpses of exotic events from around the globe. Table tennis, lumberjack competitions, drag racing and cliff diving were just a few of the more colorful sports that added to the show’s constant variety and extreme approach to coverage. It was X games before there was such a thing.

The show’s most compelling moment came in the opening when ski jumper Vinko Bogataj plunged into television history by missing his takeoff and rolling like a rag doll off the end of the ramp and into the snow. Bogataj wasn’t injured badly, but that scene became synonymous with “the agony of defeat.” I haven’t seen it for years and I still remember it.

Here’s to great reception,
Jim

Laughter-Silvered Wings

Remember when stations used to sign off the air? It was usually after a late-night B movie, around one or two in the morning. The end of programming would  start with a still-shot of a sunset and a voice-over announcer reading station specs: wattage, reach, affiliation. Then came the National Anthem followed by an Indian Head test card and finally static and snow. But one of our local stations had a cool poem read over this amazing aerial footage of fighter planes flying through high altitude clouds. It was called High Flight and it was written by Royal Canadian Air Force pilot Gillespie Magee who died doing what he loved, flying. It was a nice little piece of inspiration before heading off to bed.

Here’s to great reception
Jim

A Toast To TV Drinking

In our ever more politically correct world, drinking on television has become a bit watered down. If someone is drinking on a show, it’s usually friends consoling each other at the corner bar, or a couple sitting across a table sipping wine over dinner, wondering how their lives became so pitiful and dull. No one’s ever drunk. Even Cheers, a show about a bar rarely showed the regulars out of control.

There was a time on TV when having a bit too much was not only prevalent; it played a comedic roll in some of TV’s most popular shows. Crazy Guggenheim’s tipsy “heya, Joe” was a staple of The Jackie Gleason Show. Foster Brookes built his entire comedic career on showing up drunk and stumbling through his routine. Otis Campbell, the town drunk from Mayberry R.F.D. actually locked himself in jail regularly to sleep it off.

Then there were the shows where showing up drunk wasn’t an act. Ed McMahon was regularly accused by Johnny Carson of having a little hooch in his mug on The Tonight Show. Rowan and Martin’s Laugh In had their Cocktail Hour, and The Match Game had an open bar backstage between tapings. Well, gotta go. It’s five o’clock somewhere.

Here’s to great reception
Jim

Don’t Mess With These Chicks

During the first twenty-or-so years of TV, women were more or less relegated to stereotyped roles, often submitting control to and rarely appearing smarter than their male counterparts. There were some exceptions. Audrey Meadows’ Alice Kramden calmly tolerated her husband Ralph, played by Jackie Gleason in The Honeymooners. Marlo Thomas’ character in That Girl, may have been TV’s first feminist, single and independent in the Big Apple, but she was still a girly girl. The sixties revolution spawned a wave of 70s TV shows featuring girls who could kick your butt and look great doing it. Angie Dickinson was street-wise cop, Pepper Anderson in Police Woman. Lindsey Wagner’s Jamie Sommers got retrofitted with some serious hardware and outran speeding cars as the Bionic Woman. Then came Charlie’s Angels, three delicious detectives who could just as easily flirt as fight and win either way.   My vote still goes to Diana Rigg, the smart, sexy Emma Peel from 60s spy show, The Avengers. No one else looked so good delivering a neck-breaking karate chop in a cat suit.   

Here's to good reception!
Jim

Live TV and the Kennedy Assassination

To this day, one of my most profound TV memories is the live coverage of the Kennedy Assassination. For four days in November 1963, I sat with my Mom in front of our TV, transfixed as history played out in an incredible array of live broadcasts that are still as vivid as they were then. Walter Cronkite glancing up at the clock on the wall as he announces the exact moment of death.  Jackie Kennedy escorting her husband’s body back to Washington D.C., still wearing her bloodstained dress. Lee Harvey Oswald getting shot right in front of the camera by Jack Ruby. Three-year-old John Jr. saluting his father’s flag-draped coffin. Neilsen estimated that more than 90% of America’s TVs had tuned in. At a time when TV was getting knocked by critics as a mind-numbing waste, it immediately and dramatically changed the way we interact with our world and look at ourselves. What’s your most memorable live TV moment?

Here’s to good reception!
Jim

Saturday Night Creative Feature

It was all about Saturday Night when I was a kid. Shake the Jiffy Pop over the stovetop, put the PJ’s on and get ready for our local creature feature, Sinister Cinema. Whatever happened to this Saturday night bastion of blood and gore when we could hardly wait to get scared out of our wits with the likes of Godzilla, Wolfman, Klaatu or Killer Tomatoes? Now, we just plug in the DVD whenever it’s convenient, but back then the Saturday night horror flick with the cheesy host in the ill-fitting vampire suit was the event of the week. It spawned sleepovers, ghost stories by flashlight, big pancake breakfasts the next morning and loads of great memories. What was your local horror movie called? How good or shall I say, how bad was the host?

Here's some links for your blast to the past:
http://www.subcin.com/wilkins.html
http://www.countgore.com/ 
http://creature.netwiz.net/menu.htm
http://www.creature-features.com/ 
http://store.sinistercinema.com/

Here's to good reception!
Jim