Your Mental Sorbet: Remembering Gilda

I wanted to use this weeks "Mental Sorbet" (That we normally use to momentarily forget about those things that leave a bad taste in our mouths) to remind us who Gilda Radner was. If she was around before your time, please take some time to find out who she was. Gilda Radner - Biography

Comedian Gilda Radner died from ovarian cancer on May 20, 1989. By coincidence, the news of her death broke on early Saturday afternoon, while Steve Martin was rehearsing as the guest host for that night's season finale of Saturday Night Live. They scrapped Martin's planned opening monologue and instead, Martin, in tears, introduced this video clip of a 1978 sketch in which he and Radner parodied an old Hollywood romantic couple's dance.

 
Steve Martin Gilda Radner Tribute from buford on Vimeo.

In 1991, Gilda's Club, a network of affiliate clubhouses where people living with cancer, their friends and families, can meet to learn how to live with cancer, was founded. The center was named for a quip from Radner, who said, "Having cancer gave me membership in an elite club I'd rather not belong to." Many Gilda's Clubs have opened across the United States and in Canada.

A Madison-based cancer support group named after legendary Saturday Night Live player Gilda Radner has announced that it will be changing its name to accommodate younger patients unfamiliar with the iconic comic.

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Tony Figueroa

TV CONFIDENTIAL Archives: Nov. 21-27, 2012

Broadcast Dates

Guest and Topic

Show No. 162 Nov. 21-27, 2012

First hour: Ed welcomes author, playwright and director Anthony Wynn. Tony’s latest book, Conversations at Warp Speed, features interviews with many actors who appeared in the original Star Trek, including George Takei, James Doohan, Grace Lee Whitney and Paul Carr, plus two brief interviews with Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry. Also in this hour: an excerpt from our May 2007 interview with actor Barry Morse (The Fugitive, Space: 1999). Second hour: Actor Robert Colbert (The Time Tunnel, Maverick, The Young and the Restless) shares some memories with Ed about his 50-year career in film and television, a career that began with a dramatic recital of a poem that Bob wrote in 1956. Also in this hour: Greg Ehrbar with DVD recommendations.

This Week in Television History: November 2012 PART IV

Listen to me on TV CONFIDENTIAL:

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As always, 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.

November 26, 1922

Cartoonist Charles M. Schulz is born in St. Paul, Minnesota.

The son of a barber, Schulz showed an early interest in art and took a correspondence course in cartooning. After serving in the army in World War II, Schulz returned to St. Paul and took a job lettering comics for a small magazine. In 1947, Schulz began drawing a comic strip for the St. Paul Pioneer Press called "L'il Folks," featuring Charlie Brown and his gang of friends. In 1950, after several rejections, Schulz sold syndication rights to United Features, which renamed the strip "Peanuts." Schulz drew the comic himself, without assistants, until his retirement in 1999. Peanuts ran in some 2,600 papers, in 75 countries and 21 languages, earning Schulz some $30 million a year. Schulz died in 2000.

Nov 28, 1962

Jon Stewart born.

Stewart’s irreverent take on national and world events has been a huge hit with audiences and has even led some viewers to cite The Daily Show as their primary source of news.

Raised in Lawrenceville, New Jersey, Jonathan Stuart Leibowitz attended the College of William and Mary and after graduation began performing stand-up comedy at clubs in New York City. In 1991, he became host of Short Attention Span Theater on Comedy Central, which was followed in 1992 by You Wrote It, You Watch It on MTV. In 1993, he hosted a half-hour program, The Jon Stewart Show, also on MTV. A late-night, nationally syndicated version of the program launched the following year but was cancelled in 1995.

In January 1999, Stewart took over hosting duties of The Daily Show from Craig Kilborn, who had hosted the show since its 1996 debut on Comedy Central and left to replace Tom Snyder as host of The Late Late Show. With Stewart in the anchor seat, The Daily Show typically opens with a monologue about the day’s news stories, followed by a satirical report from one of the program’s “fake news” correspondents. (Previous correspondents have included Steve Carrell, who was a Daily Show regular from 1999 to 2004 and went on to star in such movies as The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Little Miss Sunshine and Get Smart and the NBC sitcom The Office. Another Daily Show correspondent, Stephen Colbert, left the program in 2005 to launch his own spin-off, The Colbert Report.) During the final segment of the half-hour Daily Show, Stewart conducts interviews with politicians, authors, Hollywood celebrities or other newsmakers. The Daily Show has won multiple Emmy Awards, and in 2004 Stewart and his writing staff released a best-selling mock-history textbook titled America (The Book): A Citizen’s Guide to Democracy Inaction.

In addition to hosting The Daily Show, Stewart served as master of ceremonies for Hollywood’s biggest annual event, the Academy Awards, in 2006 and 2008. His own movie career, which includes appearances in Playing by Heart (1998), The Faculty (1998) and Big Daddy (1999), has yet to win him any Oscars. On The Daily Show, Stewart has mocked his roles in such box-office bombs as 2001’s Death to Smoochy.

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

Stay Tuned

Tony Figueroa