This Week in Television History: November 2018 PART II

The further we go back in Hollywood history,

the more that fact and legend become intertwined.

It's hard to say where the truth really lies.

Donna Allen-Figueroa

November 14, 1988

The first episode of Murphy Brown aired.

Murphy Brown aired on CBS from November 14, 1988, to May 18, 1998, for a total of 247 episodes. The program starred Candice Bergen as the eponymous Murphy Brown, a famous investigative journalist and news anchor for FYI, a fictional CBS television newsmagazine.

November 15, 1933

Jack Burns is born. 

Burns began his comedy career in 1959, when he partnered with George Carlin; both were working for radio station KXOL in Fort Worth, Texas.^[1] After successful performances at a Fort Worth beat coffeehouse, The Cellar, Burns and Carlin headed for California in February 1960 continued to worked together for two more years. An album containing some of their material was released in 1963, titled Burns and Carlin at the Playboy Club Tonight.

Longer lasting was a later teaming with Avery Schreiber, whom he met when they were both members of The Second City, a live comedy and improv troupe based in Chicago. Burns and Schreiber were best known for a series of routines in which Burns played a talkative taxicab passenger, with Schreiber as the driver.

During the first half of the 1965-1966 season of The Andy Griffith Show, in an attempt to replace the Don Knotts' Barney Fife character after Knotts left the show, Burns was cast as Warren Ferguson, a dedicated but inept deputy sheriff. His character was not popular, and was dropped after eleven appearances.

In 1967, he was cast as 'Candy Butcher' in The Night They Raided Minsky's, a movie about burlesque.

Burns voiced Harry Boyle's (Tom Bosley) neighbor Ralph Kane in the short-lived syndicated primetime cartoon Wait Till Your Father Gets Home. The series was a forerunner of adult animation comedies.

Burns was the head writer for the first season of Hee Haw and for that of The Muppet Show. Schreiber appeared on an episode with The Muppet Show during that first season. Burns also co-wrote The Muppet Movie (with Jerry Juhl, his successor as head writer of The Muppet Show.)

He hosted a 1977 episode of Saturday Night Live, the first to carry this title, after Saturday Night Live with Howard Cosell was canceled.

In the early 1980s, Burns became a writer, announcer and sometimes-performer on the ABC sketch comedy series Fridays. He and comedian Michael Richards were involved in a staged on-air fight with Andy Kaufman, later re-created in the Kaufman biopic Man on the Moon.

He teamed with Lorenzo Music to provide the voices for a pair of crash test dummies respectively named Vince and Larry in a series of United States Department of Transportation public service announcements that promoted the use of seat belts. Distributed by the Ad Council, the advertising campaign ran from 1985 to 1998. In 1993, Burns starred in the cartoon-series Animaniacs, as the voice of Sid the Squid, giving the character a raspy, Daffy Duck kind of voice. Schreiber also appeared on the show, as Beanie the Bison.

Burns was a guest voice in the a 1999 episode of The Simpsons, Beyond Blunderdome.

November 17, 1968

NBC-TV cut away from the final minutes of a New York Jets-Oakland Raiders game to begin a TV special, "Heidi," on schedule. 

The Raiders came from behind to beat the Jets 43-32.

November 17, 2003

“The Terminator” becomes “The Governator” of California. 

On this day in 2003, the actor and former bodybuilder Arnold Schwarzenegger is sworn in as the 38th governor of California at the State Capitol in Sacramento. Schwarzenegger, who became a major Hollywood star in the 1980s with such action movies as Conan the Barbarian and The Terminator, defeated Governor Gray Davis in a special recall election on October 7, 2003. Prior to Schwarzenegger, another famous actor, Ronald Reagan, served as the 33rd governor of California from 1967 to 1975 before going on to become the nation’s 40th president in 1980.

Schwarzenegger was born July 30, 1947, in Austria. He trained as a bodybuilder and at the age of 20 became the youngest person to win the Mr. Universe title. In 1968, Schwarzenegger, dubbed “The Austrian Oak,” came to the United States, speaking little English, and went on to win a dozen more world bodybuilding titles. In 1977, he gained notice when he was featured in the documentary Pumping Iron, about the Mr. Olympia competition. Schwarzenegger’s acting career took off with the 1982 blockbuster Conan the Barbarian, in which he played a sword-wielding hero avenging his parents’ deaths, and its 1984 sequel, Conan the Destroyer. He later became an international star with roles in a long list of action films including The Terminator (1984), in which he plays a cyborg assassin who utters the now-famous line “I’ll be back”; the Oscar-nominated sci-fi thriller Total Recall (1990), co-starring Sharon Stone; Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), which contains the memorable catchphrase “Hasta la vista, baby”; and True Lies (1994), co-starring Jamie Lee Curtis and directed by James Cameron, who also helmed the Terminator films.

In addition to action films, Schwarzenegger also had box-office success with comedies, including Twins (1988), co-starring the diminutive Danny DeVito, and Kindergarten Cop (1990), in which he played a detective who goes undercover as a kindergarten teacher in order to nab a drug dealer. While continuing to make movies into the 2000s--notably including Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003)-- Schwarzenegger also built a reputation as a savvy businessman and an advocate of physical fitness and after-school programs for children.

In 1986, Schwarzenegger, a committed Republican, married the broadcast journalist Maria Shriver, a niece of President John F. Kennedy and a member of one of America’s most famous Democratic families. In August 2003, Schwarzenegger, who became a U.S. citizen in 1983 and had never served in public office, announced on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno that he intended to seek the California governorship in the special recall election that year. After winning the election and serving out the remainder of former governor Gray Davis’s term, “The Governator,” as he was dubbed, was re-elected in November 2006 to serve a full term in office.

November 18, 1953

Kevin Nealon is born. 

Actor and comedian, best known as a cast member on Saturday Night Live from 1986 to 1995, acting in several of the Happy Madison films, for playing Doug Wilson on the Showtime series Weeds, and providing the voice of the title character, Glenn Martin, on Glenn Martin, DDS.

November 18, 1978 

Mass suicide at Jonestown

Peoples Temple founder Jim Jones leads hundreds of his followers in a mass murder-suicide at their agricultural commune in a remote part of the South American nation of Guyana. Many of Jones’ followers willingly ingested a poison-laced punch while others were forced to do so at gunpoint. The final death toll at Jonestown that day was 909; a third of those who perished were children.

November 18, 1998

The The Powerpuff Girls officially premiered on, lasting 6 seasons with 78 episodes total. 

The Powerpuff Girls is an animated television series created by Craig McCracken for Cartoon Network. The series began as a student film called Whoopass Stew, made by McCracken while he attended the California Institute of the Arts in 1992. Two additional shorts, "Meat Fuzzy Lumkins" and "Crime 101", later aired on Cartoon Network's World Premiere Toons. A Christmas special and a 10th anniversary special were also produced. Episodes of The Powerpuff Girls have seen numerous DVD and VHS releases as well. The show centers on Blossom, Bubbles, and Buttercup, three kindergarten-aged girls with superpowers, as well as their "father", the brainy scientist Professor Utonium, who all live in the fictional city of Townsville, USA. The girls are frequently called upon by the town's childlike and naive mayor to help fight nearby criminals using their powers. 

To quote the Bicentennial Minute, "And that's the way it was".

Stay Tuned

Tony Figueroa