This Week in Television History: April 2022 PART IV

 

April 25, 1992

The final episode of Growing Pains aired on ABC. 

April 25, 1992

The final episode of Who's the Boss? aired on ABC. 

April 25, 1997

The Dukes of Hazzard television movie entitled "The Reunion" aired. 

April 28, 1957

Mike Wallace was seen on TV for the first time. He was the host of Mike Wallace Interviews. 

April 29, 1992

The Los Angeles Riots were sparked on when a jury acquitted four Los Angeles Police Department officers accused in the videotaped beating of African-American motorist Rodney

King following a high-speed pursuit. Thousands of people in the Los Angeles area rioted over the six days following the verdict. First day (Wednesday, April 29) The acquittals of the four accused Los Angeles Police Department officers came at 3:15 p.m. local time. By 3:45, a crowd of more than 300 people had appeared at the Los Angeles County Courthouse, most protesting the verdicts passed down a half an hour earlier and many miles away. Between 5 and 6 p.m., a group of two dozen officers, commanded by LAPD Lt. Michael Moulin, confronted a growing African-American crowd at the intersection of Florence and Normandie in South Central Los Angeles. Outnumbered, these officers retreated. A new group of protesters appeared at Parker Center, the LAPD's headquarters, by about 6:30 p.m., and 15 minutes later, the crowd at Florence and Normandie had started looting, attacking vehicles and people, mainly whites.

At approximately 6:45 p.m., Reginald Oliver Denny, a white truck driver who stopped at a traffic light at the intersection of Florence and South Normandie Avenues, was dragged from his vehicle and severely beaten by a mob of local black residents as news helicopters hovered above, recording every blow, including a concrete fragment connecting with Denny's temple and a cinder block thrown at his head as he lay unconscious in the street. The police never appeared, having been ordered to withdraw for their own safety, although several assailants (the so-called L.A. Four) were later arrested and one, Damian Williams, was sent to prison. Instead, Denny was rescued by an unarmed, African American civilian named Bobby Green Jr. who, seeing the assault live on television, rushed to the scene and drove Denny to the hospital using the victim's own truck, which carried twenty-seven tons of sand. Denny had to undergo years of rehabilitative therapy, and his speech and ability to walk were permanently damaged. Although several other motorists were brutally beaten by the same mob, Denny remains the best-known victim of the riots because of the live television coverage.

April 30, 1992

The final episode of the The Cosby Show aired. 

The sitcom debuted in 1984 at a time when the sitcom was declared to be dead. Comedian Bill Cosby starred in the nation's top-rated program for four of its eight years and always ranked in the top 20 shows.

The show focused on the Huxtable family, an upper-middle class African-American family living in a brownstone in Brooklyn Heights, New York. The patriarch was Heathcliff "Cliff" Huxtable, an obstetrician. The matriarch was attorney Clair Huxtable. Despite its comedic tone, the show sometimes involved serious subjects, such as son Theo's experiences dealing with dyslexia, inspired by Cosby's child Ennis, who was also dyslexic.

Although the cast and characters were predominantly African-American, the program was unusual in that issues of race were rarely mentioned when compared to other situation comedies of the time, such as The Jeffersons. However, The Cosby Show had African-American themes, such as civil rights marches, and it frequently promoted African-American and African culture represented by artists and musicians such as Jacob Lawrence, Miles Davis, James Brown, Stevie Wonder, Lena Horne, Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie and Miriam Makeba.

April 30th 1992

The second day of the Los Angeles Riots, KNBC (NBC's Los Angeles affiliate) was covering the historic event nonstop. 

But that evening the station decided to suspend it’s around the clock riot coverage to air the series finale of The Cosby Show giving viewers a brief Mental Sorbet. Following the broadcast Bill Cosby went on the air and asked Angelinos to pray for peace. 

April 30, 1997

In The Puppy Episode of the ABC sitcom Ellen, the character of Ellen Morgan (played by Ellen DeGeneres) announces that she is gay. 

The widely publicized episode featured cameos by Oprah Winfrey, k.d. lang, Demi Moore, Billy Bob Thornton, and Dwight Yoakam. An estimated 42 million viewers watched the special hour-long program. Ellen DeGeneres herself had come out earlier that year on The Oprah Winfrey Show and in TIME. Ellen is often credited to be the first primetime sitcom to feature a gay leading character but there was a sitcom titled Love, Sidney (1981 until 1983) staring the late Tony Randall. The first openly gay regular character on a sitcom was Soap's (1977) Jodie Dallas, played by Billy Crystal.

In the spring of 1994, Ellen DeGeneres was cast in a series called These Friends of Mine, but in the fall of 1994, she took center stage and the program was retiled Ellen. The program finished in the top 20 shows for the 1994-1995 season.

The outing ignited a storm of controversy, prompting ABC to place a parental advisory at the beginning of each episode.

Despite her success, and the enormous audience drawn by the coming-out episode, ABC cancelled the series at the end of the 1998 season. Although the network pointed to dwindling ratings, Ellen DeGeneres contended that the network buckled under pressure from conservative groups and stopped promoting the show after the controversial episode. 

Stay Tuned

Tony Figueroa

This Week in Television History: April 2022 PART III

April 18, 2012

Dick Clark, host of "American Bandstand" and "New Year's Rockin' Eve," dies.

On this day in 2012, Dick Clark, the TV personality and producer best known for hosting "American Bandstand," an influential music-and-dance show that aired nationally from 1957 to 1989 and helped bring rock `n' roll into the mainstream in the late 1950s, dies of a heart attack at age 82 in Santa Monica, California. The clean-cut, youthful-looking Clark, dubbed "America’s Oldest Teenager," also was the longtime host of the annual telecast "New Year's Rockin' Eve" and headed an entertainment empire that developed game shows, awards shows, talk shows, made-for-TV movies and other programs.

Richard Wagstaff Clark was born on November 30, 1929, and raised in Mount Vernon, New York. His father was a salesman who later managed a radio station. Clark graduated from Syracuse University in 1951 and moved to Philadelphia the following year to work as a radio disc jockey.  In 1956, he became the host of a local, teen-oriented TV show called "Bandstand" (launched in 1952) after the original host was fired.

In 1957, "American Bandstand," as it was renamed, began airing nationwide. The program, which showcased ordinary teenagers dancing to records and musical acts introduced by Clark, quickly became a hit with millions of young viewers, who tuned in for the latest music, fashions and dance crazes. Clark helped end the then-standard practice of having white singers cover the songs of black artists on TV, and a number of African-American performers, including Chuck Berry and Chubby Checker, made their national TV debut on "American Bandstand."

In 1960, amidst the show's success, Clark was called to testify before a congressional subcommittee investigating the practice of payola, in which record companies bribed disc jockeys in order to get airplay for records. At the hearings, Clark testified to holding an ownership stake in more than 30 different record labels, distributors and manufacturers, and featuring the acts from those labels on "American Bandstand." He denied doing anything illegal and was never charged with a crime. However, prior to the hearings, ABC, which broadcast "American Bandstand," directed Clark to divest himself of all his music-related businesses, a move said to cost him millions of dollars.

"American Bandstand" originally aired every weekday afternoon before switching to a Saturdays-only schedule in late 1963. In 1964, the show relocated from Philadelphia to Los Angeles. In the ensuing years, as popular music styles changed, it continued to be a place for artists to launch or advance their careers. Among the multitudes of acts to appear on the program were the Beastie Boys, The Doors, Kiss, The Mamas & The Papas, Prince, Run-DMC, Michael Jackson and Madonna. Clark hosted "American Bandstand" until just months before it was cancelled in late 1989 (the show's final installments were hosted by David Hirsch).

The music impresario furthered his place in pop culture as the host and producer of "Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve," a TV special that debuted in 1974 and included musical performances and live coverage of the ball drop from New York City's Times Square. Clark helmed the telecast every year until December 31, 2004, having suffered a stroke earlier that month. Though the stroke left him speech-impaired, he returned to the countdown special the following year, with Ryan Seacrest as co-host, and continued to make annual appearances through 2011.

In addition to being an on-air personality, Clark became a media titan with his eponymous production company, formed in 1957. The company's long list of credits range from "The $10,000 Pyramid" to "TV's Bloopers & Practical Jokes" to the American Music Awards and the Golden Globe Awards. Clark also remained involved in radio throughout his career, hosting several national shows and co-founding a radio network. 
After half a century in the entertainment business, the thrice-married Clark suffered a fatal heart attack on April 18, 2012, following a surgical procedure at St. John’s Health Center in Santa Monica.

April 24, 1962

First coast-to-coast satellite telecast. 

The first coast-to-coast telecast by satellite takes place on this day in 1962. Signals from California were bounced off the first experimental communications satellite, Echo I, and received in Massachusetts.

April 24, 1982

Jane Fonda’s first Workout video released. 

Hollywood royalty, fashion model, Oscar-winning actress, controversial anti-war activist. Jane Fonda fit all of these descriptions by the late 1970s and 1980s, when she emerged in her latest incarnation--exercise guru. On April 24, 1982, Fonda extended her reach into the home-video market with the release of Workout, the first of her many bestselling aerobics tapes.

Daughter of the celebrated actor Henry Fonda (star of 1940’s The Grapes of Wrath), Jane worked as a model before joining Lee Strasberg’s famed Actors Studio. She broke out in 1960 with a Tony-nominated performance in Broadway’s There Was a Little Girl and a starring role in the big-screen comedy Tall Story. She soon established a reputation as both sexpot (1968’s Barbarella) and serious actress, earning her first Oscar nomination for 1969’s They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? and taking home the Best Actress statuette two years later for Klute. As an outspoken member of the opposition to the U.S. war in Vietnam, Fonda was famously photographed behind enemy lines next to an anti-aircraft gun during a visit to North Vietnam in 1972. Dubbed “Hanoi Jane,” she earned the lasting scorn of many Vietnam veterans and has since expressed deep regret about posing for the photograph.

Fonda won her second Best Actress Oscar in 1979 for Coming Home. That same year, she opened her first workout studio, breaking into a gym industry previously dominated by male boxers and bodybuilders. A former ballet enthusiast, Fonda had begun practicing aerobics with her future business partner, Leni Cazden, to keep fit. In 1981, Fonda published Jane Fonda’s Workout Book, which remained at No. 1 on the nonfiction bestseller’s list for more than six months and in the top five for more than 16 months. The cover showed a grinning Fonda striking a pose in black tights and legwarmers.

With the phenomenal success of her exercise studios, books and videos, Fonda not only sparked the aerobics trend of the late 1970s and 1980s--she also popularized the concept of working out for women in general. Other instructors soon capitalized on the workout movement, including Richard Simmons and Judi Missett, creator of the aerobics spin-off known as Jazzercise. For the first time, millions of women (and a few men) were exercising together in groups, doing leg lifts, side bends and lifting dumbbells to the beat of peppy music. Aerobics also launched a fashion craze, with neon spandex, legwarmers and leotards becoming ubiquitous among health-conscious women. Fonda’s videos remained top sellers into the latter half of the 1980s, including Jane Fonda’s New Workout (1986) and Jane Fonda’s Low-Impact Aerobic Workout (1987).

The revenues from Fonda’s exercise empire financed the Campaign for Economic Democracy, a leftist political organization founded by her then-husband, the leading 1960s radical Tom Hayden. After divorcing Hayden in 1989, Fonda largely withdrew from the spotlight. She announced her retirement from acting in 1992, explaining her desire to spend more time with her third husband, the media mogul Ted Turner. The couple divorced in 2001. Fonda has recently returned to the big screen in several movies, including Monster-In-Law (2005) and Georgia Rule (2007).

Stay Tuned

Tony Figueroa

Gilbert Gottfried

I have always felt comedy and tragedy are roommates.

If you look up comedy and tragedy, you will find a very old picture of two masks. One mask is tragedy. It looks like it's crying. The other mask is comedy. It looks like it's laughing. Nowadays, we would say, 'How tasteless and insensitive. A comedy mask is laughing at a tragedy mask.'

-Gilbert Gottfried

Gilbert Jeremy Gottfried

February 28, 1955 – April 12, 2022

Gottfried was born in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Lillian (Zimmerman), a homemaker, and Max Gottfried, who ran a hardware store with his own father, above which the family lived. At age 15, Gottfried began doing amateur stand-up in New York City and, after a few years, became known around New York as "the comedian's comedian." In 1980, Saturday Night Live was being retooled with a new staff and new comedians; the producers noticed Gottfried and hired him as a cast member for season 6. Gottfried's persona in SNL sketches was very different from his later characterization: he rarely (if ever) spoke in his trademark screeching, obnoxious voice and never squinted. During his 12-episode stint, he was given very little airtime and seldom used in sketches. Gottfried recalled that a low point was having to play a corpse in a sketch about a sports organist hired to play inappropriate music at a funeral. Despite this, he had one recurring character (Leo Waxman, husband to Denny Dillon's Pinky Waxman on the recurring talk show sketch, "What's It All About?") and two celebrity impersonations: David A. Stockman and controversial film director Roman Polanski.

Gottfried also played accountant Sidney Bernstein in the 1987 film Beverly Hills Cop II which reunited him with friend and fellow SNL alumnus Eddie Murphy.

Beginning in the late 1980s, Gottfried was a favorite guest of Howard Stern's, often impersonating Andrew "Dice" Clay, Bela Lugosi as Dracula, and a senile Groucho Marx.

Although not a regular, he also appeared in The Amazing Live Sea Monkeys, as well as voicing the crazed dentist Dr. Bender and his son Wendell in The Fairly OddParents and the voice of Jerry the Belly Button Elf on Ren and Stimpy. Three of his most prominent roles came in 1990, 1991, and 1992, when he was cast as the adoption agent Igor Peabody in Problem Child and Problem Child 2 and the parrot Iago in Aladdin. When asked how he prepared for the role, Gottfried said, "I did the whole DeNiro thing. I moved to South America! I lived in the trees!" Gottfried reprised the role in Aladdin: The Return of Jafar, Aladdin and the King of Thieves, the television series and various related media, such as Kingdom Hearts and House of Mouse. However, the character was ultimately recast to Alan Tudyk for the 2019 remake. Gottfried also voiced Berkeley Beetle in 1994's Thumbelina.

Gottfried was the host of the Saturday edition of USA Up All Night for its entire run from 1989 to 1998.

Gottfried was a recurring guest star during the Tom Bergeron era of The Hollywood Squares and became the central figure in a bizarre episode that aired October 1, 1999. In this episode, the two contestants made nine consecutive incorrect guesses, six of which were to be game-deciding questions asked to Gottfried. Penn Jillette, who, with his partner Teller was a guest on the same episode, berated a contestant earlier for giving an incorrect guess by shouting "You fool!", which Gottfried himself then began to use, with most of the other stars including host Bergeron himself eventually joining in with every successive wrong guess, beginning with the second question he was asked. As a consequence, it took the entire half hour to play only one game. Appropriately, the episode became known as the "You Fool!" episode.

Gottfried provided the voice of the duck in the Aflac commercials and Digit in Cyberchase, as well as Mister Mxyzptlk (pronounced "Mitz-yez-pit-lik") in Superman: The Animated Series. He reprised his role as Mxyzptlk in Lego Batman 3: Beyond Gotham, Justice League Action, and Lego DC Super-Villains. He also voiced a nasty wisecracking criminal genius named Nick-Nack in two episodes of Superboy (he also co-wrote an issue of Superboy: The Comic Book, which featured Nick-Nack's origin). Gottfried made regular appearances on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.

In 2004, Comedy Central featured Gottfried's stand-up material for Shorties Watchin' Shorties. Gottfried was part of an online advertising campaign for Microsoft's Office XP software, showing, in a series of Flash-animated cartoons, that the Clippy office assistant would be removed. In 2006, Gottfried topped the Boston Phoenix's tongue-in-cheek list of the world's 100 Unsexiest Men. In April 2006, Gottfried performed with the University of Pennsylvania's Mask and Wig Club in their annual Intercollegiate Comedy Festival. Also in 2006, he made an appearance on the Let's Make a Deal portion of Gameshow Marathon (as a baby in a large high chair, he says "Hey Ricki, I think I need my diaper changed!"), and in the Dodge Viper in the big deal (where he tells the contestants "What were you thinking?!" because neither one picked it). He also guest-starred in The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy as Santa Claus in the one-hour Christmas Special. He voiced Rick Platypus in an episode of My Gym Partner's a Monkey entitled "That Darn Platypus".

He appeared as Peter's horse in an episode of Family Guy entitled "Boys Do Cry" (in which Peter Griffin is enthused to learn that Gottfried is providing the horse's voice). He also guest-starred in Hannah Montana as Barny Bittmen. In January 2009, Gottfried worked again with David Faustino for an episode of Faustino's show Star-ving. In 2011, Gottfried appeared in the episode "Lost Traveler" on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit as Leo Gerber, a sarcastic computer professional working for the NYPD's Technical Assistance Response Unit, which producer Warren Leight said could become a recurring character. Gottfried read a section from the hit book Fifty Shades of Grey in a June 2012 YouTube video, which was created with the aim of using Gottfried's trademark voice to make fun of the book's graphic sexual content.

In 2013, Gottfried became a member of "Team Rachael" on the second season of Food Network's Rachael vs. Guy: Celebrity Cook-Off. In March that year he appeared on ABC's Celebrity Wife Swap. He swapped wives with Alan Thicke. He was also a commentator on truTV Presents: World's Dumbest....

On May 28, 2014, Sideshow Network premiered Gilbert Gottfried's Amazing Colossal Podcast, an interview series where Gottfried and his co-host Frank Santopadre discussed classic movies and talk to "Hollywood legends and behind-the-scenes talents" who shaped Gottfried's childhood and influenced his comedy. His first guest was Dick Cavett.

Gottfried was the third contestant fired during the fourteenth season of the NBC reality show The Celebrity Apprentice. In 2016 he played the 'Pig Man' in a comedy/fantasy film Abnormal Attraction.

In 2017 he appeared as himself in Episodes, where a contestant on a fictional TV endurance game show is penalized with "48 hours of Gilbert Gottfried".

On June 10, 2018, he appeared in a special segment of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver where, for UK viewers only, a segment about the UK's law restricting broadcast of debates from the Houses of Parliament was replaced by five minutes of him reading "3 star Yelp reviews", along with host John Oliver telling the audience "you brought this on yourself because of your stupid law". He returned on November 18, 2018, in the show's last episode of the year to read out extracts from the Brexit agreement, again for UK viewers only. He had previously performed as "the real voice of Jared Kushner" in dubbed film clips on the show.

On July 31, 2019, he appeared as a guest in episode 170 of the Angry Video Game Nerd. On January 10, 2022, he guest-starred as God on the season finale of Smiling Friends.

Good Night Mr. Gottfried

Stay Tuned 

Tony Figueroa

This Week in Television History: April 2022 PART II

 

April 12, 1987

21 Jump Street first airs on the Fox Network. The series focused on a squad of youthful-looking undercover police officers investigating crimes in high schools, colleges, and other teenage venues.

Created by Patrick Hasburgh and Stephen J. Cannell, the series was produced by Stephen J. Cannell Productions in association with 20th Century Fox Television. The show was an early hit for the fledgling Fox Network, and was created to attract a younger audience. The final season aired in first-run syndication mainly on local Fox affiliates. It was later rerun on the FX cable network from 1996 to 1998.

The series provided a spark to Johnny Depp's nascent acting career, garnering him national recognition as a teen idol. Depp found this status irritating, but he continued on the series under his contract and was paid $45,000 per episode. Eventually he was released from his contract after the fourth season. A spin-off series, Booker, was produced for the character of Dennis Booker (Richard Grieco); it ran one season, from September 1989 to June 1990.

April 15, 1987

Magnum P.I. Episode – Limbo

"Limbo" was originally intended to be the series finale (with Magnum seemingly walking off to heaven). When they filmed this episode everyone on the crew thought it was the last one, including Tom Selleck. Not long before the air date in April of 1987, Tom agreed to do one final (short) season (Season Eight). After Season Eight was greenlighted, "Limbo" underwent some minor edits to reenforce the idea that Magnum is not really dead (Michelle's visit to the hospital). Still, some scenes couldn't be re-done or re-edited, namely the scene were everybody is at Robin's Nest dressed in black, and talking about Magnum in the past tense.

April 17, 1937

Daffy Duck debuts. 

Daffy Duck makes his debut in the Warner Bros. short Porky's Duck Hunt. In the 1920s, movie houses had started showing a short cartoon before feature presentations, but the form became more innovative and popular after sound was introduced in 1928.

April 17, 2002

General Hospital airs 10,000th episode. 

ABC airs the 10,000th episode of the daytime drama General Hospital, the network’s longest-running soap opera and the longest-running program ever produced in Hollywood.

Created by Frank and Doris Hursley, General Hospital premiered on April 1, 1963. It was set in the fictional town of Port Charles in upstate New York, and focused on the lives and loves of the staff working in the town’s General Hospital. Prominent characters in the show’s early days included Dr. Steve Hardy (John Beradino) and Nurse Audrey March (Rachel Ames). On the same day General Hospital debuted, ABC’s rival network, NBC, launched its own medical soap opera, The Doctors. Both networks were attempting to capitalize on the success of prime time-medical dramas such as Dr. Kildare and Ben Casey.

General Hospital set a new standard for daytime soap operas by introducing dramatic action-adventure plotlines into the complicated mix of family and romantic issues that was the usual bread and butter of soaps at the time. Still, by the late 1970s, the show’s ratings had dropped to the point where it seemed on the brink of cancellation. In general, ratings for daytime soap operas were declining, a development some attributed to the fact that growing numbers of women--the target audience for the genre since the first of its kind, CBS’s Guiding Light, debuted in 1952--were entering the work force and weren’t home during the day. In 1978, Gloria Monty took the reins as executive producer of General Hospital; in a few short years, the show had become the No. 1 daytime drama, largely by captivating growing numbers of teenage audiences.

One of the big secrets to the show’s new success was viewers’ fascination with the romance of the “super couple” Luke Spencer and Laura Webber (known to millions of fans simply as “Luke and Laura”), played by Anthony Geary and Genie Francis. After bad-boy Luke stole Laura from her lawyer husband, Scotty Baldwin (Kin Shriner), their 1981 wedding became the most-watched event in soap-opera history. Luke and Laura divorced on the show in 2001 after 20 years of marriage; with great fanfare, they remarried in the fall of 2006.

In the 10,000th episode of General Hospital, Nurse Audrey receives a medal commemorating her 10,000 days of service. Rachel Ames departed the show in 2007, and the longest-running character on General Hospital (as of its 46th season in 2008) is Shriner’s Scotty Baldwin, who was introduced in 1965. Among the more famous performers to appear on General Hospital over the years are Demi Moore, who got her start on the show, and Rick Springfield, who became a pop star due to his soap-opera fame. Other General Hospital veterans include John Stamos, Jack Wagner and Ricky Martin. Elizabeth Taylor, a longtime fan of the show, made a cameo appearance in 1981.

One General Hospital spinoff, Port Charles, ran from 1997 to 2003; another, General Hospital: Night Shift, premiered in 2007. In recent years, General Hospital has been praised for its treatment of such sensitive issues as HIV/AIDS and sexual abuse of children. Chosen by TV Guide as the All-Time Best Daytime Soap, the show won a record-breaking 10th Emmy Award for Best Daytime Drama in June 2008.

Stay Tuned

Tony Figueroa