From 1967 to 1969, Tom and Dick Smothers hosted The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, a politely edgy comedy show that tested the boundaries of mainstream television and the patience of CBS executives. Playing to a younger demographic, the show took positions against the Vietnam War and for the Civil Rights Movement, while featuring musical acts that challenged the norms of the era–everyone from Joan Baez and Pete Seeger, to the Doors and Jefferson Airplane, to Buffalo Springfield and Simon and Garfunkel.
Then came The Who in September 1967. Making its American network TV debut, the band picked up where they left off a few months ago at the Monterey Pop Festival. They performed “My Generation” and went into auto-destruction mode, smashing their guitars, toppling their drums, and creating general mayhem, before bringing the song to a close. But for The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, The Who added a special twist, packing Keith Moon’s drum kit with explosives, a few too many, it turns out.
Here’s how Allan Blye, a producer-writer for the show, remembers it:
The Who wanted to do a big explosion at the end of their performance. In dress rehearsal, it was a powder puff. So, I say to the special effects guy, “We have to make a bigger boom.” Unbeknownst to us, The Who had told their own guy the same thing. When the explosion went off, it affected Pete Townshend’s hearing permanently. Keith Moon got blown off his drumstand, but was too out of it to know.
Stunned yet poised, Tom Smothers walked onto the stage, only to find his acoustic guitar snatched from his hands and smashed to smithereens too. He later recalled: “Everyone was so shocked.” “When Townshend came over and grabbed my guitar, I was busy just seeing where the bodies were, seeing if anyone was injured. He picked the guitar up, and people kept saying, ‘Did he really ruin your guitar? It looked so real!’ And I’d say. ‘Well it was real! I was confused as hell!’ ”
The suits at CBS abruptly canceled The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour in 1969, leading the brothers to file a breach of contract lawsuit, which they eventually won. (They discuss the sting of that whole experience with David Letterman here.)
Tom Smothers died yesterday at age 86, “following a recent battle with cancer.” His brother Dick announced his passing, stating: “Tom was not only the loving older brother that everyone would want in their life, he was a one-of-a-kind creative partner. I am forever grateful to have spent a lifetime together with him, on and off stage, for over 60 years. Our relationship was like a good marriage – the longer we were together, the more we loved and respected one another. We were truly blessed.” And so were the rest of us.
For Pretty Much Pop’s annual holiday episode, your hosts Mark Linsenmayer, Lawrence Ware, Sarahlyn Bruck, and Al Baker talk all things Muppets, but in particular the 1992 film The Muppet Christmas Carol, wherein Michael Caine gives us just as strong and serious a Scrooge as you might find. What’s the appeal of this puppet act? Is the humor actually supposed to be good, or post-funny ironic? How do Muppets change the way we experience music?
Even though Jim Henson had died by the time of Christmas Carol, nearly all the rest of the creative team from The Muppet Movie (1979) was still in place, including scriptwriter Jerry Juhl and songwriter by Paul Williams. Should the property still exist now that a new generation has largely taken over, and can it ever recapture that old magic? We consider recent iterations including the current Muppet Mayhem, the classic movies and various revivals, past Christmas specials (John Denver!Emmet Otter!), pre-Muppet-Show iterations of Henson’s act, the Dark Crystal and Labyrinth films, the role of humans in Muppet media, the ideology of Dickens’ story, and much more. Which Muppet personality type are you?
You can hang onto the source of Rudolph’s shame and eventual triumph — the glowing red nose that got him bounced from his playmates’ reindeer games before saving Christmas.
Lose all those other now-iconic elements — the Island of Misfit Toys, long-lashed love interest Clarice, the Abominable Snow Monster of the North, Yukon Cornelius, Sam the Snowman, and Hermey the aspirant dentist elf.
As originally conceived, Rudolph (runner up names: Rollo, Rodney, Roland, Roderick and Reginald) wasn’t even a resident of the North Pole.
He lived with a bunch of other reindeer in an unremarkable house somewhere along Santa’s delivery route.
Santa treated Rudolph’s household as if it were a human address, coming down the chimney with presents while the occupants were asleep in their beds.
To get to Rudolph’s origin story we must travel back in time to January 1939, when a Montgomery Ward department head was already looking for a nationwide holiday promotion to draw customers to its stores during the December holidays.
He settled on a book to be produced in house and given away free of charge to any child accompanying their parent to the store.
Copywriter Robert L. May was charged with coming up with a holiday narrative starring an animal similar to Ferdinand the Bull.
After giving the matter some thought, May tapped Denver Gillen, a pal in Montgomery Ward’s art department, to draw his underdog hero, an appealing-looking young deer with a red nose big enough to guide a sleigh through thick fog.
(That schnozz is not without controversy. Prior to Caitlin Flanagan’s 2020 essay in the Atlantic chafing at the television special’s explicitly cruel depictions of othering the oddball, Montgomery Ward fretted that customers would interpret a red nose as drunkenness. In May’s telling, Santa is so uncomfortable bringing up the true nature of the deer’s abnormality, he pretends that Rudolph’s “wonderful forehead” is the necessary headlamp for his sleigh…)
On the strength of Gillen’s sketches, May was given the go-ahead to write the text.
His rhyming couplets weren’t exactly the stuff of great children’s literature. A sampling:
Twas the day before Christmas, and all through the hills,
The reindeer were playing, enjoying the spills.
Of skating and coasting, and climbing the willows,
And hopscotch and leapfrog, protected by pillows.
___
And Santa was right (as he usually is)
The fog was as thick as a soda’s white fizz
—-
The room he came down in was blacker than ink
He went for a chair and then found it a sink!
No matter.
May’s employer wasn’t much concerned with the artfulness of the tale. It was far more interested in its potential as a marketing tool.
“We believe that an exclusive story like this aggressively advertised in our newspaper ads and circulars…can bring every store an incalculable amount of publicity, and, far more important, a tremendous amount of Christmas traffic,” read the announcement that the Retail Sales Department sent to all Montgomery Ward retail store managers on September 1, 1939.
Over 800 stores opted in, ordering 2,365,016 copies at 1½¢ per unit.
Promotional posters touted the 32-page freebie as “the rollickingest, rip-roaringest, riot-provokingest, Christmas give-away your town has ever seen!”
The advertising manager of Iowa’s Clinton Herald formally apologized for the paper’s failure to cover the Rudolph phenomenon — its local Montgomery Ward branch had opted out of the promotion and there was a sense that any story it ran might indeed create a riot on the sales floor.
His letter is just but one piece of Rudolph-related ephemera preserved in a 54-page scrapbook that is now part of the Robert Lewis May Collection at Dartmouth, May’s alma mater.
Another page boasts a letter from a boy named Robert Rosenbaum, who wrote to thank Montgomery Ward for his copy:
I enjoyed the book very much. My sister could not read it so I read it to her. The man that wrote it done better than I could in all my born days, and that’s nine years.
The magic ingredient that transformed a marketing scheme into an evergreen if not universally beloved Christmas tradition is a song …with an unexpected side order of corporate generosity.
May’s wife died of cancer when he was working on Rudolph, leaving him a single parent with a pile of medical bills. After Montgomery Ward repeated the Rudolph promotion in 1946, distributing an additional 3,600,000 copies, its Board of Directors voted to ease his burden by granting him the copyright to his creation.
Once he held the reins to the “most famous reindeer of all”, May enlisted his songwriter brother-in-law, Johnny Marks, to adapt Rudolph’s story.
The simple lyrics, made famous by singing cowboy Gene Autry’s 1949 hit recording, provided May with a revenue stream and Rankin/Bass with a skeletal outline for its 1964 stop-animation special.
On the evening of January 12, 1971, CBS viewers across the United States sat down to a brand new sitcom preceded by a highly unusual disclaimer. The program they were about to see, it declared, “seeks to throw a humorous spotlight on our frailties, prejudices, and concerns. By making them a source of laughter, we hope to show — in a mature fashion — just how absurd they are.” Thereafter commenced the very first episode of All in the Family, which would go on, over nine full seasons, to define American television in the nineteen-seventies. It did so not just by daring to find comedy in the issues of the day — the Vietnam War, the generation gap, women’s lib, race relations, homosexuality — but also by spawning a variety of other major sitcoms like Maude, The Jeffersons, and Good Times.
Even if you didn’t live through the seventies, you’ve probably heard of these shows. Now you can watch full episodes on the official Youtube channel of Norman Lear, the television writer and producer involved in the creation of all of them and many others besides.
If you’ve ever seen Sanford and Son, Fernwood 2 Night, Diff’rent Strokes, or One Day at a Time (or if you happened to catch such short-lived obscurities as Hanging In, a.k.a. Pablo, and Sunday Dinner), you’ve seen one of his productions. His death this week at the age of 101 has provided the occasion to acquaint or reacquaint ourselves with Archie and Edith Bunker, George and Louise Jefferson, Florida and James Evans, and all the other characters from what we might now call the “Norman Lear multiverse.”
The best place to start is with the premiere of All in the Family, which introduces the Bunker clan and the central conflict of their household: that between boisterously prejudiced working-class patriarch Archie Bunker and his bleeding-heart baby-boomer son-in-law Michael “Meathead” Stivic. Later episodes introduce such secondary characters as Edith Bunker’s strong-willed cousin Maude Findlay, who went on to star in her own eponymous series the following year, and the Bunkers’ enterprising black next-door neighbors the Jeffersons, who themselves “moved on up” in 1975. (So far did the televisual Learverse eventually expand that Good Times and Checking In were built around the characters of Maude and the Jeffersons’ maids.)
An outspoken proponent of liberal causes, Lear probably wouldn’t have denied using his television work to influence public opinion on the issues that concerned him. Yet at their best, his shows didn’t reduce themselves to political morality plays, showing an awareness that the Archie Bunkers of the world weren’t always in the wrong and the Meatheads weren’t always in the right. By twenty-first-century standards, the jokes volleyed back and forth in All in the Family or The Jeffersons may seem blunt, not least when they employ terms now regarded as unspeakable on mainstream television. But they also have the forthrightness to go wherever the humor of the situation — that is to say, the truth of the situation — dictates, an uncommon quality among even the most acclaimed comedies this half-century later. Watch complete episodes of Norman Lear shows here.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
The Beatles were made for black-and-white television, as evidenced by the immediacy with which their 1964 performance on The Ed Sullivan Show launched them into permanent international superstardom. Though only a few years younger than the Fab Four, their countryman David Bowie arose in a different era: that of color television, with its vastly expanded aesthetic range. Bowie is known to have carried himself as if his own international superstardom was guaranteed, even during his early years of struggle. But it was only when he took full, lurid advantage of the technologically-expanded sonic and visual palettes available to him that he truly became an icon.
“It’s deceptively easy to forget that in the summer of 1972 David Bowie was still yesterday’s news to the average Top of the Pops viewer, a one-hit wonder who’d had a novelty single about an astronaut at the end of the previous decade,” writes Nicholas Pegg in The Complete David Bowie. But his taking the stage of that BBC pop-musical institution “in a rainbow jumpsuit and shocking red hair put paid to that forever. Having made no commercial impact in the two months since its release, ‘Starman’ stormed up the chart.” As with “Space Oddity,” “the subtext is all: this is less a science-fiction story than a self-aggrandizing announcement that there’s a new star in town.”
“No matter how weird and alien you felt, you couldn’t have been as weird and alien as David Bowie and his bandmates looked,” writes the Guardian’s Alexis Petridis. The occasion is that paper’s new list of the 100 greatest BBC music performances, whose range includes Bob Dylan, Prince, the Pixies, Talking Heads, Patti Smith, and Dizzy Gillespie. But the top spot goes to Bowie’s 1972 Top of the Pops gig, due not least to the fact that “umpteen viewers have testified to the life-changing, he’s‑talking-to-me effect of the moment when Bowie points down the camera as he sings the line ‘I had to phone someone so I picked on you.’ ” CNN’s Todd Leopold likens the Beatles to “aliens dropped into the United States of 1964,” but as Bowie would vividly demonstrate eight years later, the real invasion from outer space was yet to come.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
In 1939, Margaret Hamilton made cinema history as the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz. In 1976, she made television history by reprising the role on a Sesame Street episode that was pulled from the show’s rotation immediately after it aired. It seems to have drawn Sesame Workshop, then known as the Children’s Television Workshop, a fair few complaints from the parents of disturbed children. As a result, writes Mental Floss’ Michele Debczak, “the episode was banned for being ‘too scary’ for kids, and for decades it was difficult to find,” seen only on low-quality video tapes and in the troubled minds of certain Generation Xers.
Now Hamilton’s Sesame Street appearance has become available on Youtube, ready for you to watch with the braver children in your life this Halloween. But then, it’s hard to imagine any twenty-first-century viewer being truly frightened by it, no matter how young. (This in contrast to the Wicked Witch’s army of flying monkeys in the original film, which continues to give kids the creeps generation after generation.)
Some may even be delighted by the evident relish with which Hamilton plays her part, even 37 years after the first time; as William Hughes writes at The AV Club, she “was always game to reprise the role of the Witch on behalf of educational programming; she also appeared, around that same period, on several episodes of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood.”
In Big Bird’s neighborhood, the Wicked Witch accidentally loses her broom to David, whom readers of a certain age may remember as the spirited law student who once dated the iconic Maria Rodriguez. Only when the Witch shows him some respect, David insists, will he return that precious possession. Thus begins the Witch’s campaign of terror and trickery on Sesame Street, which continues until David finds a way to outsmart her into a wholly uncharacteristic show of courtesy. This story within the episode deals with the timeless theme of overcoming fears; and as the long unavailability of the episode itself shows us, giving in to fears — especially those of public backlash — can have real consequences.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Behold a crowdsourced, collaborative art project where more than 130 animators and filmmakers from 11 different countries joined together and remade a full episode of Frasier. (It’s the finale of Season 1, “My Coffee with Niles.”) The project’s mastermind, Jacob Reed, asked individual artists to animate different scenes, each with a different style, and then he stitched them all together. Above, you can see how everything hangs together.
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In the fall of 1969, there were still a great many people who’d never heard a synthesizer. And even among those who had, few would have known how its unfamiliar sounds were actually made. Hence the importance of the segment from the BBC program Tomorrow’s World above, which introduced the Moog synthesizer (originally created by Robert Moog) to viewers across Britain. Having come on the market four years earlier, it would go on to change the sound of music — a project, in fact, on which it had already made serious inroads, with such Moog showcases as the Doors’ “Strange Days” and Wendy Carlos’ Switched-on Bachhaving already become cultural phenomena unto themselves.
Manfred Mann would also do his part to make an impact with the Moog. Calling him “the Moog pioneer of rock music,” Fidelity magazine’s Hans-Jürgen Schaal writes that “Mann lent his instrument out to be used to produce the first Moog solo on a record by Emerson Lake & Palmer. He even did the keyboard work himself on the first Moog solo by Uriah Heep.”
It is Michael Vickers, a multi-instrumentalist veteran of Mann’s eponymous band, who demonstrates the Moog for Tomorrow’s World by playing a variety of melodies through it on a keyboard — though not before plugging in a series of patch cords to create just the right electronic sound.
Whether or not the BBC viewers of 1969 had ever heard anything like the Moog before, they almost certainly hadn’t seen anything like it before. Despite looking less like a musical instrument than like a piece of military hardware, it actually represented, like most technological advancements, a step forward in ease of use. As presenter Derek Cooper puts it, the Moog “produces sounds in a matter of minutes which would normally take radiophonic experts with their complicated equipment,” like the BBC’s own Daphne Oram or Delia Derbyshire, “days of work and multiple re-recordings to achieve.” Not that the average hobbyist could afford the Moog seen in this broadcast back then — nor, for that matter, can the average hobbyist afford the $35,000 a faithful re-creation of it costs now.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
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