If you are a contemporary of mine, you will immediately recognize the fellow on the right in the photo above. That is Robot B-9, the automated companion of the Space Family Robinson from the classic 1960s television show “Lost In Space”. But you may not recognize the humanoid to his left. That is Dick Tufeld, longtime announcer and voice-over specialist, and the man who voiced the Robot and made immortal the line “Danger, Will Robinson!”.
Dick Tufeld passed away over the weekend at the age of 85. My two favorite showbiz bloggers, Mark Evanier and Ken Levine, each had somethingnice to say about him and his career.
(The fellow who actually performed INSIDE the robot suit, actor Bob May, passed away in 2009.)
Lapham’s Quarterly features this map which traces the paths taken by three now-ubiquitous, but once rare, foods as they were “discovered” and spread by European explorers in the 16th Century: tomatoes, coffee beans, and black pepper. Here’s the full-sized image, where you can actually read the blurbs. Actually, in the case of black pepper, traders have bought and sold it since Roman times, if not earlier, but it was a rare and expensive spice up until the modern era. There’s also some interesting factoids about ketchup; apparently it was invented by the Chinese, but did not include tomatoes until some colonial New Englanders devised their own recipe about 100 years later.
These next two links speak volumes: This Mother Jones article (via MetaFilter) details a years-long struggle between processed-meat manufacturer Hormel and workers in the factory in Iowa where the company makes Spam. The workers claim that unsafe production processes exposed them to aerosolized pig brains which caused their bodies to develop an autoimmune disease that has left many of them crippled for life. The vivid descriptions of the carcass-processing floor are as evocative and unpalatable as “The Jungle”.
Via the absolute master of cartoon knowledge, Mark Evanier, heres a link to a story in the Los Angeles Times about cartoonist Elzie Segar and how he came to create one of the best-loved cartoon characters, Popeye The Sailor. Segar was already a successful comic strip artist when he came up with Popeye, who appeared as a minor character in Segar’s established strip, “Thimble Theater”, in 1929. Popeye proved so popular that he quickly became the main character and several years later was launched into animated cartoons from the famed Max Fleischer studio. Segar died of liver failure at the young age of 44, but Popeye cartoons were produced for many years after his death.
If you were a small child in the Boston area in the 1960s, as I was, you knew that 4:30 every afternoon was time for Bozo. Many local television markets had their own versions of Bozo the Clown, the most famous probably being Chicago’s “Bozo’s Circus”, which ran on WGN for 40 years, but Boston’s Bozo, which starred local television legend Frank Avruch, was almost as popular and very widely distributed around the country. Recently, the always-wonderful showbiz industry blogger Mark Evanier dug up this excellent YouTube video with several minutes of high-quality film clips of Avruch and the show, including an appearance by a young Carroll Spinney, who went on to become the Muppeteer behind (well, inside, actually) Big Bird. In the Spinney segment, he does a thing where he writes a child’s name on a piece of paper and turns it into a drawing. I remember this part of the show vividly from my own daily viewing because I always wanted to have MY name turned into a picture, and they never seemed to have a kid named Brian show up on the set.
I really enjoyed watching this video, and I hope anyone else who remembers watching this as a little kid has a chance to enjoy it, too.
We’ve got Jack Benny on the brain, mostly thanks to Mark Evanier, who has had a spate of posts about the great comedian.
Evanier has had several posts lately about trying to discern whether or not Benny made a small cameo in the classic movie “Casablanca”. This latest one looks like he might have been successful. If you look at the large version of the image, which shows the full length of the man walking behind Sam the piano player, his gait is very much like Benny’s. So much so that Jack Benny’s daughter has said that she believes it is him.
Now, this morning, Cory Doctorow has a post at Boing Boing about how CBS is blocking the release of some long-lost episodes of the Jack Benny Show from the 1950s and early 1960s. The copyright has long expired on these episodes, so they actually belong to the public domain, but CBS doesn’t want the hassle and expense of releasing them, despite impassioned pleas from Benny fan groups and the official sanction of the Benny estate. Here’s a link to the source article for the Boing Boing story, which explains many of the details and the efforts to convince CBS to release the films. This being the 21st Century and all, you can rest assured that there is a Facebook group you can join to show your support.
Dick Cavett, who occasionally blogs in the New York Times, had a recent remembrance of Jack Benny, too. In typical Cavett fashion, the story is really about himself, but told in that charmingly droll and self-effacing way that Cavett has. He is mostly skewering Tiger Woods and remarking on the price of being a public figure, and Jack Benny appears at the end to set up a hilarious punch line. Anyone who has ever read much about Benny and knows about his real personality (as opposed to the elaborate stage persona of the cheap guy) will instantly recognize the absolute truth and genuine humor of the story.
And back again to a link from Mark Evanier: a YouTube clip of Jack Benny and Mel Blanc performing the famous and hilarious “Si, Sy, Sue” sketch on an episode of the TV series. Blanc played dozens of incidental characters on the radio version of the show, and despite being a bit more limited due to his recognizable physical appearance carried a number of them over to television. THIS, my friends, is COMEDY:
The game show scandals that rocked American television are about to hit the 50th anniversary milestone. In anticipation of that, Charles Van Doren has finally broken his half-century of silence about his side of the story with a feature piece in this week’s New Yorker. Van Doren is now 82 years old. He’s spent most of his life in a sort of half-light of obscurity — for many years he was the editor-in-chief of the Encyclopedia Brittanica, worked closely with the noted scholar Mortimer J. Adler, and published a steady stream of books about various intellectual topics, so he was never entirely out of the public eye but managed his career in a way that let him dipolmatically avoid any significant attention.
As he says in the article, he even declined to cooperate with a well-regarded documentary film made about the scandal which was made for PBS in the early 1990s, and flatly turned down almost as much money as he’d won on “Twenty-One” to be a “technical adviser” on Robert Redford’s Oscar-nominated film “Quiz Show”. I’m sure the combination of the upcoming 50th anniversary (which will invite new attention) plus his advanced age is the primary explanation for why he’s finally talking about it. He doesn’t let himself off the hook; he readily admits that he knew what he was getting into and went ahead despite voiced misgivings from his father and his fiancee. But he also doesn’t really have an answer as to why he went through with it except perhaps to hint that he may have had trepidations about following in his father’s and grandfather’s footsteps and that the fame television brought him was his escape path. Ultimately that path was cut off for him and he did indeed follow in his father’s footsteps, so perhaps he thinks that has been punishment enough for his misdeeds.
As coincidence would have it, not long ago Mark Evanier, the television writer, blogged about the practice of using what were called “gambits” on the game show “What’s My Line?”, which was a contemporary of “Twenty-One”. It seemed that the producers of the show, Mark Goodson and Bill Todman, felt that they could prime the pump, as it were, on the witty and delightful comments that their panel show was famous for, if they dropped a few hints to the panelists about what to say and how to correctly guess the contestant’s secret. It wasn’t blatant cheating in the way that Van Doren and others were given specific answers to specific questions, but Van Doren writes about how the producers of “Twenty-One” coached him and the others on their stage behavior, too. Here’s a YouTube clip, via Evanier, that shows panelist Bill Cullen trying to deliver some pre-suggested joke before “guessing” the right answer:
Goodson and Todman mostly ran a clean show, so they escaped relatively unscathed from the resulting prosecutions and hearings that came from the revelations about “Twenty-One” and “Dotto”, and through the 1960s they were the leading producer of game shows for the networks. Jack Barry and Dan Enright, on the other hand, were essentially blacklisted from television for almost 20 years. Van Doren’s most famous opponent, Herb Stempel, is still alive as well — he *did* take the offer (and the check) from Robert Redford to work on “Quiz Show”, and made the talk show rounds after the movie was a hit.
