I represent the first generation who, when we were born, the television was now a permanent fixture in our homes. When I was born people had breakfast with Barbara Walters, dinner with Walter Cronkite, and slept with Johnny Carson.
Read the full "Pre-ramble"
The TV show The
Jacksons began airing for four weeks on CBS.
The Jacksons was
a variety
show featuring the Jackson
siblings (except for Jermaine,
who was signed to Motown while the Jackson group was signed to the Epic/CBS
record label). It was the first variety show where the entire cast were
siblings. As with the Jackson 5 regular performances, Michael
Jackson was the lead performer in musical and dance performances.
The thirty-minute Wednesday evening show began airing
on CBS as a
summer 1976 show and it continued into the 1976–1977 season,
finishing on March 9, 1977 after running for 12 episodes.
In honor of O'Connor's career, TV Land moved
an entire weekend of programming to the next week and showed a continuous
marathon of All in the Family. During the commercial breaks TV Land
also showed interview footage of O'Connor and various All in the Family actors,
producers with whom he had worked, and other associates. O'Connor's best
friend Larry Hagman and his family were also there, alongside the
surviving cast of In
the Heat of the Night,
including Alan Autry and Denise Nicholas,
who also attended the memorial. Actor Martin Sheen,
then starring on The West Wing, delivered the eulogy. O'Connor is buried at Westwood
Village Memorial Park Cemetery with
his son Hugh's cenotaph placed on his grave stone.
Griffith was born in Mount Airy, North Carolina, the only child of Geneva (née Nunn) and Carl Lee Griffith. At a very young age,
Griffith had to live with relatives until his parents could afford to get a
home of their own. Without a crib or a bed, he slept in drawers for a few months. In
1929, when Griffith was three years old, his father took a job working as a carpenter and was finally able
to purchase a home in Mount Airy's "blue-collar" southside.
Like his mother, Griffith grew up listening to music.
His father instilled a sense of humor from old family stories. By the time he
entered school he was well aware that he was from what many considered the
"wrong side of the tracks". He was a shy student, but once he found a
way to make his peers laugh, he began to come out of his shell and come into
his own.
As a student at Mount Airy High School, Griffith
cultivated an interest in the arts, and he participated in the school's drama program. A growing love of music, particularly swing, would change his life.
Griffith was raised Baptist and
looked up to Ed Mickey, a minister at Grace Moravian Church, who led the brass band and taught him to
sing and play the trombone.
Mickey nurtured Griffith's talent throughout high school until graduation in
1944. Griffith was delighted when he was offered a role in The Lost Colony, a play still performed today on Roanoke Island. He performed as
a cast member of the play for several years, playing a variety of roles, until
he finally landed the role of Sir Walter Raleigh, the namesake of North Carolina's
capital.
After graduation, he taught English for a few years at
Goldsboro High School in Goldsboro, North Carolina, where he taught, among others, Carl Kasell. He also began to
write.
Griffith's early career was as a monologist, delivering long
stories such as What it Was, Was Football, which is told from the point of view of a rural backwoodsman trying to figure
out what was going on in a football game.[6] Released as a single
in 1953 on the Colonial label, the monologue was a hit for Griffith, reaching
number nine on the charts in 1954.
In 1957 Griffith made his film début, starring in the film A Face in the Crowd. Although he plays a "country boy", this
country boy is manipulative and power-hungry, a drifter who becomes a television host and uses his
show as a gateway to political power. Co-starring Patricia Neal, Walter Matthau, Tony Franciosa, and Lee Remick (in her film début
as well), this now-classic film, directed by Elia Kazan, showcases
Griffith's powerful talents. Written by Budd Schulberg, and partly
based on the on-stage phoniness of Arthur Godfrey, the film
demonstrated, quite early on, the power that television can have upon the
masses. This prescient film was seldom run on television until the 1990s.
A 2005 DVD reissue of A Face in the Crowd includes a
mini-documentary on the film, with comments from Schulberg and
surviving cast members Griffith, Franciosa, and Neal. In his interview,
Griffith, revered for his wholesome image for decades, reveals a more complex
side of himself. He recalls Kazan prepping him to shoot his first scene with
Remick's teenaged baton twirler, who captivates Griffith's character on a trip to Arkansas. Griffith also
expresses his belief that the film was far more popular and respected in more
recent decades than it was when originally released.
Griffith's first appearance on television had been in
1955 in the one-hour teleplay of No Time for Sergeants on The United
States Steel Hour. That was the first of two appearances on that series.
Beginning in 1960, Griffith starred as Sheriff Andy Taylor in The Andy Griffith Show for the CBStelevision network. The show took place in the fictional town of Mayberry, North Carolina, where
Taylor, a widower, was the sheriff and town sage. The show was filmed at
Desilu Studios, with exteriors filmed at Forty Acres in Culver City, CA.
From 1960 to 1965, the show co-starred character actor and
comedian—and Griffith's longtime friend—Don Knotts in the role of DeputyBarney Fife, Taylor's best
friend and partner. He was also Taylor's cousin in the show. In the series
première episode, in a conversation between the two, Fife calls Taylor
"Cousin Andy", and Taylor calls Fife "Cousin Barney". The
show also starred child actorRon Howard (then known as Ronny
Howard), who played Taylor's only child, Opie Taylor.
It was an immediate hit. Although Griffith never
received a writing credit for the show, he worked on the development of every
script. While Knotts was frequently lauded and won multiple Emmy Awards for his comedic
performances (as did Frances Bavier in 1967), Griffith was never nominated for
an Emmy Award during the show's run.
In 1967, Griffith was under contract with CBS to do
one more season of the show. However, he decided to quit the show to pursue a
movie career and other projects. The series continued as Mayberry R.F.D., with Ken Berry starring as a widower
farmer and many of the regular
characters recurring, some regularly and some as guest appearances. Griffith
served as executive producer (according to Griffith, he came in once a week to
review the week's scripts and give input) and guest starred in five episodes
(the pilot episode involved his marriage to Helen Crump).[10] He made final
appearances as Taylor in the 1986 reunion television film, Return to Mayberry, and in two reunion specials in 1993 and 2003.
Matlock (1986–1995)
After leaving his still-popular show in 1968, and
starting his own production company (Andy Griffith Enterprises) in 1972,
Griffith starred in less-successful television series such as Headmaster (1970), The New Andy Griffith Show (1971), Adams of Eagle Lake (1975) Salvage 1 (1979), and The
Yeagers (1980).
After spending time in rehabilitation for leg paralysis from Guillain–Barré syndrome in 1986, Griffith returned to television as the title
character, Ben Matlock, in the legal drama Matlock (1986–1995) on NBC and ABC. Matlock was a country lawyer in Atlanta, Georgia, who was known for his Southern drawl and for always winning his cases. Matlock also
starred unfamiliar actors (both of whom were childhood fans of Andy Griffith) Nancy Stafford as Michelle
Thomas (1987–1992) and Clarence Gilyard Jr. as Conrad
McMasters (1989–1993). By the end of its first season it was a ratings
powerhouse on Tuesday nights. Although the show was nominated for four Emmy
Awards, Griffith once again was never nominated. He did, however, win a
People's Choice Award in 1987 for his work as Matlock.
During the series' sixth season, he served as
unofficial director, executive producer and writer of the show.
This show is mentioned on TV's longest animated show The Simpsons and is noted as Grandpa Simpson's favorite show as
well as Marge Simpson's mother Jacqueline Bouvier's as well.
Most of the TV movies Griffith starred in were also
attempts to launch a new series. 1974's Winter Kill launched the
short lived Adams of Eagle Lake which was canceled after only two episodes in 1975. A
year later, he starred as a New York City attorney for the DA's office in Street
Killing which also failed to launch a new series. Two television films for
NBC in 1977, The Girl in The Empty Grave
and Deadly Game, were attempts
for Griffith to launch a new series featuring him as Police Chief Abel Marsh, a
more hard-edged version of Andy Taylor; despite strong ratings for both films,
both were unsuccessful.
While appearing in television films and guest roles on
television series over the next 10 years, Griffith also appeared in two feature
films, both of which flopped at the box office. He co-starred with Jeff Bridges as a crusty old
1930s western actor in the comedy Hearts of the West (1975), and he appeared alongside Tom Berenger as a gay
villainous colonel and cattle baron in the
western comedy spoof Rustlers' Rhapsody (1985).
He also appeared as an attorney in the NBC mini-series
Fatal Vision in 1984, which
is considered a precursor to his role in Matlock.
Griffith stunned many unfamiliar with his A Face in
the Crowd work in the television film Crime of
Innocence (1985), where he
portrayed a callous judge who routinely sentenced juveniles to hard prison
time. He further stunned audiences with his role as a dangerous and mysterious
grandfather in 1995's Gramps,
co-starring the late John Ritter.
He also appeared as a comical villain in the spy movie spoof Spy Hard (1996) starring Leslie Nielsen. In the
television film A Holiday Romance (1999), Griffith played the role of "Jake
Peterson." In the film Daddy and Them (2001),
Griffith portrayed a patriarch of a dysfunctional southern family.
In the feature film Waitress (2007), Griffith played a crusty diner owner who takes a shine to Keri Russell's character. His
latest appearance was the leading role in the romantic comedy, independent filmPlay The Game (2009) as a lonely, widowed grandfather re-entering
the dating world after a 60-year hiatus. The cast of Play The Game also
included Rance Howard,
Ron Howard's real-life father, who made appearances in various supporting roles
on The Andy Griffith Show, and Clint Howard, Ron's younger
brother, who had the recurring role of Leon (the kid offering the ice
cream cone or peanut butter sandwich) on TAGS.
Singing
and recording career
Griffith sang as part of some of his acting roles,
most notably in A Face In The Crowd and in many episodes of both The
Andy Griffith Show and Matlock. In addition to his recordings of
comic monologues in the 1950s, he made an album of upbeat country and gospel
tunes during the run of The Andy Griffith Show, which included a version
of the show's theme sung by Griffith under the title "The Fishin'
Hole". In recent years, he has recorded successful albums of classic Christianhymns for Sparrow Records. His most
successful was the 1996 release I Love to Tell the Story: 25 Timeless Hymns, which was certified platinum by the RIAA.
By the end of 1955, Elvis
Presley had nearly 18 months of nonstop touring behind him and two dozen
singles already under his belt, though his only hits were on the Country and
Western charts. He was a hardworking and hard-to-categorize up-and-comer, but the
next six months would make him a superstar. It was his debut single on
RCA/Victor, his new label, which propelled Elvis to the top of the pop charts.
But if "Heartbreak Hotel" is what made him the king of the radio and
record stores during the spring of 1956, it was television that truly made him
the King of Rock and Roll. And if any one moment might be called his
coronation, it was his appearance on The Milton Berle Show on
this day in 1956, when he set his guitar aside and put every part of his being
into a blistering, scandalous performance of "Hound Dog."
This was not Presley's first
television appearance, nor even his first appearance onMilton Berle.
Between January and March 1956, Elvis made six appearances on Tommy and Jimmy
Dorsey's Stage Show, and on April 3, he appeared for the first time
with Uncle Miltie. But every one of those appearances featured Elvis either in
close-up singing a slow ballad, or full body but with his movements somewhat
restricted by the acoustic guitar he was playing. It was on his second Milton
Berle Show appearance that he put the guitar aside and America
witnessed, for the very first time, the 21-year-old Elvis Presley from head to
toe, gyrating his soon-to-be-famous (or infamous) pelvis.
Reaction to Elvis'
performance in the mainstream media was almost uniformly negative. "Mr.
Presley has no discernible singing ability....For the ear, he is an unutterable
bore," wrote critic Jack Gould in the next day's New York Times.
"His one specialty is an accented movement of the body that heretofore has
been primarily identified with the repertoire of the blonde bombshells of the
burlesque runway. The gyration never had anything to do with the world of
popular music and still doesn't." In the New York Daily News,
Ben Gross described Presley's performance as "tinged with the kind of
animalism that should be confined to dives and bordellos," while the New
York Journal-American's Jack O'Brien said that Elvis "makes up for
vocal shortcomings with the weirdest and plainly suggestive animation short of
an aborigine's mating dance." Meanwhile, the Catholic weekly America got
right to the point in its headline: "Beware of Elvis Presley."
June 6, 1971
The Ed Sullivan Show airs
for the very last time.
Sunday nights, 8:00 pm, CBS. Ask
almost any American born in the 1950s or earlier
what television program ran in that timeslot on that network, and they'll
probably know the answer: The Ed Sullivan Show. For more than two
decades, Sullivan's variety show was the premiere television showcase for
entertainers of all stripes, including borscht-belt comedians, plate-spinning
vaudeville throwbacks and, most significantly, some of the biggest and most
current names in rock and roll. Twenty-three years after its 1948 premiere, The
Ed Sullivan Show had its final broadcast on this day in 1971.
In its first eight years of existence, there was no
such thing as rock and roll to be featured on the program originally called Toast
of the Town, yet even its first broadcast made music history when Broadway
composers Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II gave the world its first
taste of the score from their upcoming musical, South Pacific. Over the
years, live performances of new and current Broadway shows were featured
regularly on Ed Sullivan, including Julie Andrews singing "Wouldn't
It Be Loverly?" from My Fair Lady and Richard Burton singing
"What Do The Simple Folk Do?" from Camelot. Classical and
opera performers also made frequent appearances, but of course The Ed
Sullivan Show is now remembered most for providing so many iconic moments
in the history of televised rock and roll.
Elvis Presley's first appearance on The Ed Sullivan
Show, in September 1956,was actually one of his most restrained and
least thrilling. It was notable, however, given Ed Sullivan's assertion earlier
that year that he'd never allow "The King" on his show. By the time
the Beatles rolled around, Sullivan was far more comfortable with the hysteria
young Elvis had caused. In fact, it was Ed Sullivan personally witnessing
Beatlemania up close at London's Heathrow airport in 1963 that led the Beatles
being booked for their historic February 1964 American television debut.
Through the rest of the 60s, The Ed Sullivan Show continued to host the
day's biggest rock acts: The Rolling Stones, The Supremes, The Doors, The Mamas
and the Papas, Janis Joplin and more.
Gladys Knight and the Pips were the musical guests on
the final episode of The Ed Sullivan Show, which was cancelled shortly
after its rerun broadcast on this day in 1971.
The
long-running musical-variety program The Lawrence Welk Show debuts on
ABC.
Welk, a bandleader from North
Dakota known for light dance music, had launched his own show in 1951 on KTLA in Los Angeles. The show
remained a network hit for some 16 years, then became a syndicated series. Welk
retired in 1982 and died in 1992.
July 3, 1950
TV game show Pantomime Quiz Show debuts as a
network series on CBS. The program, a
variation of charades, ran for 13 years, although it changed networks several
times.
The show began as a local program in Los Angeles in 1947. In 1949, the
show was one of TV's first programs to win an Emmy, first awarded by the
National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences that year.
July 5, 1970
PBS began airing
concerts by the Boston Pops Orchestra.
Most shows featured a guest star, usually a well known singer or musician,
most commonly within popular music or sometimes rock, folk, jazz or other
musical genres. After one or two opening numbers by the Pops, the guest would
be brought onstage. Usually the guest would sing several their own hits or
songs associated with them, with accompaniment by the Pops. After concluding
their set, the guest artist would leave the stage, and the Pops would play one
or two closing numbers. The three men who served as Boston Pops Conductor
during the show's run – Arthur
Fiedler (1970-79), John
Williams (1979-95) and Keith
Lockhart (1996-2005) – appeared. Gene
Galusha provided narration and announced most of the pieces played.
Evening at Symphony, a companion series produced by WGBH and
featuring performances of the Boston Symphony Orchestra conducted
by Seiji
Ozawa, aired on PBS from 1974 to 1979.
Bonanza is
cancelled after 14 seasons. The
episode The Hunter was written and directed
by Michael Landon.
The
show, which debuted in 1959, was the first western to be televised in color.
Throughout the 1960s, the show, which featured the adventures of the Cartwright
family on their ranch, the Ponderosa, was one of the most highly rated programs
on television. Its trademark theme song rose to No. 19 on Billboard's Top
Singles chart in 1961.
January 18, 1948
Original Amateur Hour debuts
One
of TV's first talent shows was a spin-off of a popular radio show, Major
Bowes' Amateur Hour, the program where Frank Sinatra was discovered in
1937. The show, which aired for 12 years, was one of the few programs to be
aired by all four early TV networks (ABC, CBS, NBC, and the ill-fated DuMont
network) at different times. Seven-year-old Gladys Knight and 18-year-old Pat
Boone were both grand prize winners on the show.
January 19, 1953
Lucy gives
birth to Little Ricky.
Episode #56,
“Lucy Goes to the Hospital,” of hit 1950s sitcom I Love Lucy airs for
the first time. The episode, in which Lucy Ricardo, played by Lucille Ball,
gives birth to a son, was one of the most popular in television history. The
ground-breaking episode was one of the first American television programs to deal
with the issue of pregnancy, a taboo subject in conservative 1950s America,
when even married couples were not shown on television sharing the same bed.
Forty-four million viewers, a full 72 percent of all U.S. homes with a
television, tuned in; only 29 million viewers had watched President Dwight D.
Eisenhower’s televised inauguration the previous night.
January 19, 1993
Fleetwood Mac reunite to play
"Don't Stop" at Bill Clinton's first Inaugural gala. On this day
in 1993, the band Fleetwood Mac reunites to perform at the recently elected
U.S. President Bill Clinton's first
inaugural gala.
Fleetwood Mac had faced much intra-band squabbling
since their 1970s
heyday, why they released one of the biggest albums of all time—Rumours—and
a string of decade-defining hits like "Landslide,"
"Rhiannon," "Say You Love Me" and "Go Your Own
Way." And then, of course, there was "Don't Stop" (as in
"thinking about tomorrow"), which was candidate Bill Clinton's
unofficial theme song during the 1992 presidential campaign.
Along with Truman's "I'm Just Wild About
Harry," Eisenhower's "I Like Ike" and Ross Perot's
"Crazy," Clinton's "Don't Stop" can certainly be placed
within the catchy-and-memorable subset of Presidential campaign songs—in
contrast to, say, "Buckle Down with Nixon," "Get on a Raft
with Taft" and "Huzzah for Madison." Clinton's theme song may
have lacked specificity regarding his political agenda, but it had a good beat,
a warm vibe and a chorus that audiences could sing along to. Fleetwood Mac's
1977 recording of "Don't Stop" played in a seemingly endless loop
from the night of Clinton's nomination at the 1992 Democratic National
Convention that previous summer through to election night in November, so that
by the time January rolled around, the mere playing of the record would have seemed
a disappointing way to end the evening of the Inaugural gala.
And so the Clinton transition team sprang into action
and accomplished a political feat that certainly seemed to bode well for the
new president's ambitious plans to bring peace and stability to Haiti and
overhaul the nation's health-care system. It had been more than five years
since Lindsay Buckingham, Mick Fleetwood, Christine McVie and Stevie Nicks had
shared a stage, but in a true coup of diplomacy, the Clinton team convinced the
entire Rumours-era lineup of Fleetwood Mac to reunite for a truly
historic live performance of "Don't Stop" on this day in 1993.
January 20, 1998
The
first episode of Dawson's Creek aired
on the WB network.
Part
of a new craze for teen-themed movies and television shows in America in the late
1990s, it catapulted its leads to stardom and became a defining show for The
WB. The show placed at No. 90 on Entertainment
Weekly's "New
TV Classics" list in 2007. The series ended on May 14, 2003. During
the course of the series, 128 episodes of Dawson's Creek aired over
six seasons.
January 20, 2008
The pilot episode of Breaking Bad aired.
Breaking
Bad is
an American neo-westerncrime
drama television
series created and produced by Vince Gilligan. The show originally aired
on the AMC network
for five seasons, from January 20, 2008 to September 29, 2013. It tells the
story of Walter White (Bryan
Cranston),
a struggling high school chemistry teacher diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer. Together with his former
student Jesse
Pinkman (Aaron Paul), White turns to a life of
crime by producing and selling crystallized methamphetamine to secure his family's
financial future before he dies, while navigating the dangers of the criminal
world. The title comes from the Southern colloquialism "breaking bad", meaning to "raise hell" or turn toward crime.[5]Breaking Bad is
set and was filmed in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Laugh-In originally aired as a
one-time special on September 9, 1967 and was such a success that it was
brought back as a series, replacing The Man from U.N.C.L.E. on Mondays at 8 pm
(EST). The title of the show was a play on the "love-ins" or
"be-ins" of the 1960s hippie culture, terms that
were, in turn, derived from "sit-ins", common in
protests associated with civil rights and anti-war demonstrations of the time.
Laugh-In had its roots in the
humor of vaudeville and burlesque, but its most direct influences were from the comedy of Olsen and
Johnson
(specifically, their free-form BroadwayrevueHellzapoppin'), the innovative television
works of Ernie Kovacs, and the topical satire of That Was The Week That Was. The show was
characterized by a rapid-fire series of gags and sketches, many of which
conveyed sexualinnuendo or were politically charged. The co-hosts continued the exasperated straight man (Rowan) and
"dumb" guy (Martin) act which they had established as nightclub
comics. This was a continuation of cartoonistChic Young's "Dumb Dora",
and acts from vaudeville, best popularized by Burns and
Allen.
Each episode followed a
somewhat similar format, often including recurring sketches. The show would
start with a short dialogue between Rowan and Martin. Shortly afterward, Rowan
would intone: "C'mon Dick, let's go to the party". This live-to-tape segment comprised all
cast members and occasional surprise celebrities dancing before a 1960s "Mod" party backdrop, delivering one- and two-line jokes
interspersed with a few bars of dance music (later adopted on The Muppet
Show, which had a recurring segment that is similar to "The Cocktail
Party" with absurd moments from characters). The show would then proceed
through rapid-fire comedy bits, pre-taped segments, and recurring sketches.
At the end of every show,
Dan Rowan turned to his co-host
and said, "Say good night, Dick", to which Martin replied, "Good
night, Dick!" (varying a bit from the Burns and
Allenold-time radio show). The show then
featured cast members opening panels in a psychedelically-painted "joke
wall" and telling jokes. As the show drew to a close and the applause
died, executive producer George Schlatter's solitary clapping continued even as
the screen turned blank and the production logo, network chimes, and NBC logo
appeared.
Although most episodes
included most of the above segments, the arrangement of the segments would
often be changed, so that the audience couldn't predict what was next.
The show often featured
guest stars. Sometimes the guest had a prominent spot in the program, other
times the guest would pop up in short "quickies" (one- or two-liner
jokes) interspersed throughout the show. While the guest was available, other
bits were recorded, and would be added to other episodes of the series.
The second season saw a
handful of new people, including Alan Sues, Dave Madden, and Chelsea Brown. All of the new cast
members from the second season left at the end of that season, except Alan Sues
who stayed on until 1972.
At the end of the
1968–1969 season, Judy Carne chose not to renew her contract, though she did
make appearances during 1969–1970; producer George Schlatter blamed her for
breaking up the "family." The show also survived the departures of
Goldie Hawn and Jo Anne Worley to remain a top-20 show in 1970–1971. Schlatter
tried to replace Hawn with other wide-eyed starlets acting dumb: first Pamela
Rodgers, then Sarah Kennedy, and finally Donna Jean Young, but Hawn's ditzy
characterization proved inimitable.
The third season saw
several new people who only stayed on for that season, Teresa Graves, Jeremy Lloyd, Pamela Rodgers, and Stu
Gilliam. Lily Tomlin joined in the middle of the season. Jo Anne
Worley, Goldie Hawn, and Judy Carne left after the season.
New faces in the
1970–1971 season included tall, sad-eyed Dennis Allen, who alternately played
quietly zany characters and straight man for anybody's jokes; comic actress Ann Elder, who also contributed to
scripts, tap dancer Barbara Sharma, who would later appear on Rhoda, and beefy Johnny Brown, who played the
superintendent Nathan "Buffalo Butt" Bookman on Good Times.
Arte Johnson, who created
many characters, insisted on star billing, apart from the rest of the cast. The
producer mollified him, but had announcer Gary Owens read Johnson's credit as a
separate sentence: "Starring Dan Rowan and Dick Martin! And Arte Johnson!
With Ruth Buzzi ..." This maneuver gave Johnson star billing, but
made it sound like he was still part of the ensemble cast. Johnson left the
show after the 1970–1971 season. NBC aired the pilot for his situation comedy Call
Holme, but it never became a series.
Henry Gibson also
departed after the 1970–1971 season. He and Johnson were replaced by Richard Dawson and Larry Hovis, both of whom had
appeared occasionally in the first season. Both of them were on Hogan's Heroes. However, the loss of
Johnson's many characters caused ratings to drop farther. The show celebrated
its 100th episode during the 1971–1972 season, with Carne, Worley, Johnson,
Gibson, Graves, and Tiny Tim all returning for the festivities. John Wayne was also on hand for his
first cameo appearance since 1968.
For the show's final
season (1972–1973), Rowan and Martin assumed the executive producer roles from
George Schlatter (known on-air as "CFG", which stood for "Crazy
Fucking George") and Ed Friendly. Except for holdovers
Dawson, Owens, Buzzi, and only occasional appearances from Tomlin, a new cast
was brought in. This final season featured future Match Game panelist Patti Deutsch, folksy singer-comedian Jud Strunk, and ventriloquist act Willie Tyler and Lester. Deutsch,
Strunk, and Tyler caught on to the spirit of the show and made valuable
contributions (Deutsch did celebrity impressions — in the presence of the
celebrity — and took over Worley's role in "The Farkel Family").
The shows were still amusing, but without the usual gang, viewers didn't
respond as they once had.
These last shows never
aired in the edited half-hour rerun syndicated (through Lorimar Productions) to local stations in 1983 and
later aired on Nick at Nite. The cable network Trio started airing the show in its original one-hour form in
the early 2000s, but only the pilot and the first 69 episodes (extending to the
fourth episode of the 1970–1971 season) were included in Trio's package. Two
"Best-of" DVD packages are also available; they only contain six
episodes each.
Of over three dozen
entertainers to grace the cast, only Rowan, Martin, Owens and Buzzi were there
from beginning to end. However, Owens was not in the 1967 pilot and Buzzi
missed two first-season episodes.
Lily Tomlin and Goldie Hawn later became noted film
stars (Hawn won an Academy Award while still a member of the cast; Tomlin was
later nominated for a Best Supporting
Actress Oscar in 1975 for Nashville). Henry Gibson later co-starred in the Robert Altman film Nashville and was nominated for a Golden Globe. Ruth Buzzi became a regular on the Sesame Street children's television
series. Dave Madden, whose trademark was to throw confetti
(representing an unspoken impure thought) while keeping a dour expression at
the punchline of a joke, played Reuben Kincaid on the television sitcom The Partridge Family. Richard Dawson, who previously had a
regular supporting role on the sitcom Hogan's Heroes, went on to success on
the game shows Match Game and Family Feud. Larry Hovis, also a regular on Hogan's
Heroes, appeared on Laugh-In during the first and the fifth seasons.
Teresa Graves parlayed her season on the show into the title
role of the police drama Get Christie Love!Flip Wilson took Geraldine and his
other characters to his own variety show from 1970 through 1974.
The Musical Director for Laugh-In
was Ian Bernard. Ian Bernard wrote the opening theme
music, plus the infamous "What's the news across the nation" number. Ian Bernard also wrote all the cute
musical "play-ons" that introduced comedy sketches like Lilly Tomlin's little girl character
who sat in a giant rocking chair, and Arte Johnson's old man who always got
hit with a purse. Ian Bernard also appeared in many of the cocktail scenes
where he directed the band as they stopped and started between jokes.
Composer-lyricist Billy Barnes, who wrote all of the original
musical production numbers in the show. Barnes is the creator of the famous
Billy Barnes Revues of the 1950s and 1960s, and composed such popular hits as
"(Have I Stayed) Too Long at the Fair" recorded by Barbra
Streisand and the jazz standard "Something Cool" recorded by June Christy.
The show was recorded at NBC's Burbank facility using two-inch quadruplex videotape. Since computer-controlled online editing had not been invented at
the time, post-productionvideo editing of the montage was achieved by the error-prone method of visualizing
the recorded track with ferrofluid and cutting it with a razor blade or guillotine cutter and splicing with video tape, in a manner similar to film editing. This had the incidental
benefit of ensuring that the master tape would be preserved, since a spliced
tape could not be recycled for further use. Laugh-In Editor Arthur
Schneider won an Emmy Award in 1968 for his pioneering use of the "jump cut" – the unique
editing style in which a sudden cut from one shot to another was made without a
fade-out.
During the September 16,
1968 episode, Richard Nixon, running for president, appeared for a few
seconds with a disbelieving vocal inflection, asking "Sock it to me?"
Nixon was not doused or assaulted. An invitation was extended to Nixon's opponent,
Vice-President Hubert Humphrey, but he declined. According to George
Schlatter, the show's creator, "Humphrey later said that not doing it may have cost him the election", and "[Nixon]
said the rest of his life that appearing on Laugh-In is what got him
elected. And I believe that. And I've had to live with that."
In 1977, Schlatter and NBC briefly revived the property as a
series of specials – entitled simply Laugh-In – with a new cast,
including former child evangelistMarjoe Gortner. The standout was a then-unknown Robin Williams, whose starring role on
ABC's Mork & Mindy one year later prompted NBC to
rerun the specials as a summer series in 1979. Rowan and Martin, who owned part of the Laugh-In
franchise, were not involved in this project. They sued Schlatter for using the
format without their permission, and won a judgment of $4.6 million in 1980.
The Jacksons was
a variety
show featuring the Jackson
siblings (except for Jermaine,
who was signed to Motown while the Jackson group was signed to the Epic/CBS
record label). It was the first variety show where the entire cast were
siblings. As with the Jackson 5 regular performances, Michael
Jackson was the lead performer in musical and dance performances.
