This Week in Television History: July 2017 PART V

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.

August 2, 1924

John Carroll O'Connor was born. 

Actor, producer, and director whose television career spanned four decades. Known at first for playing the role of Major General Colt in the 1970 cult movie, Kelly's Heroes, he later found fame as the bigoted workingman Archie Bunker, the main character in the 1970s CBS television sitcoms All in the Family (1971 to 1979) and Archie Bunker's Place (1979 to 1983). O'Connor later starred in the 1980s NBC television crime drama In the Heat of the Night, where he played the role of Sheriff William (Bill) Gillespie. At the end of his career in the late 1990s, he played the father of Jamie Stemple Buchman (Helen Hunt) on Mad About You.

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

Stay Tuned

Tony Figueroa

Your Mental Sorbet: The TELL-TALE Zone #9 "The Crazy Doll"

This is a project Donna and I did in 2009

Here is another "Mental Sorbet" 

A little spark of madness

that we could use to momentarily forget about those

things that leave a bad taste in our mouths

The TELL-TALE Zone episode # 9 "The Crazy Doll" Written and directed by Marcellus Barron. 

Stay Tuned

Tony Figueroa

June Foray

I love the [Rocky and] Bullwinkle show because it’s so mordantly witty. … But I love everything I do with all of the parts that I do because there’s a little bit of me in all of them. We all have anger and jealousy and love and hope in our natures. We try to communicate that vocally with just sketches that you see on the screen and make it come alive and make it human.

-June Foray

June Foray
September 18, 1917 – July 26, 2017

June Foray was born as June Lucille Forer on September 18, 1917 in Springfield, Massachusetts.

After entering radio through the WBZA Players, Foray starred in her own radio series Lady Make Believe in the late 1930s. She soon became a popular voice actress, with regular appearances on coast-to-coast network shows including Lux Radio Theater and The Jimmy Durante Show.

In the 1940s, Foray also began film work, including a few roles in live action movies, but mostly doing voice overs for animated cartoons and radio programs and occasionally dubbing films and television. On radio, Foray did the voices of Midnight the Cat and Old Grandie the Piano on The Buster Brown Program, which starred Smilin' Ed McConnell, from 1944 to 1952. 

She later did voices on the Mutual Network program Smile Time for Steve Allen. Her work in radio ultimately led her to recording for a number of children's albums for Capitol Records.

For Walt Disney, Foray voiced Lucifer the Cat in the feature film Cinderella, Lambert's mother in Lambert the Sheepish Lion, a mermaid in Peter Pan and Witch Hazel in the Donald Duck short Trick or Treat; decades later, Foray would be the voice of Grandmother Fa in the 1998 animated Disney film Mulan. 

She also did a variety of voices in Walter Lantz's Woody Woodpecker cartoons, including Woody's nephew and niece, Knothead and Splinter. Impressed by her performance as Witch Hazel, in 1954 Chuck Jones invited her over to Warner Brothers Cartoons. 

For Warner Brothers, she was Granny (whom she has played on vinyl records starting in 1950, before officially voicing her in Red Riding Hoodwinked, released in 1955, taking over for Bea Benaderet), owner of Tweety and Sylvester, and a series of witches, including Looney Tunes' own Witch Hazel, with Jones as director. 

Like most of Warner Brothers' voice actors at the time (with the exception of Mel Blanc), Foray was not credited for her roles in these cartoons.

Chuck Jones is reported to have said, "June Foray is not the female Mel Blanc, Mel Blanc was the male June Foray."

She played Bubbles on The Super 6 and Cindy Lou Who, asking "Santa" why he's taking their tree, in How the Grinch Stole Christmas. 

In 1960, she provided the speech for Mattel's original "Chatty Cathy" doll; capitalizing on this, Foray also voiced the malevolent "Talky Tina" doll in the Twilight Zone episode "Living Doll", first aired on November 1, 1963.

She has done extensive voice acting for Stan Freberg's commercials, albums, and 1957 radio series, memorably as secretary to the werewolf advertising executive. 

She also appeared in several Rankin/Bass TV specials in the 1960s and 1970s, voicing the young Karen and the teacher in the TV special Frosty the Snowman (although only her Karen singing parts remained in later airings, after Rankin-Bass re-edited the special a few years after it debuted, with Foray's dialogue re-dubbed by an actress who was uncredited). She also voiced all the female roles in Rikki-Tikki-Tavi(1975), including the villainous cobra Nagaina. Foray worked for Hanna-Barbera, including on Tom and Jerry, Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!, The Jetsons, The Flintstones and many other shows. 

In 1959, she auditioned for the part of Betty Rubble on The Flintstones, but the part went to Bea Benaderet; Foray described herself as "terribly disappointed" at not getting to play Betty.

For Jay Ward: she played nearly every female on The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show, including Natasha Fatale and Nell Fenwick, as well as male lead character Rocket J. Squirrel (a.k.a. Rocky Squirrel); played Ursula on George of the Jungle; and also starred on Fractured Flickers.

In the mid-1960s, she became devoted to the preservation and promotion of animation and has since written numerous magazine articles about animation. She and a number of other animation artists had informal meetings around Hollywood in the 1960s, and later decided to formalize this as ASIFA-Hollywood, a chapter of the Association Internationale du Film d'Animation (the International Animated Film Association). She is created with coming up with the idea of the Annie Awards in 1972, awarded by ASIFA-Hollywood, having noted that there had been no awards to celebrate the field of animation. In 1988, she was awarded the Bob Clampett Humanitarian Award. In 1995, ASIFA-Hollywood established the June Foray Award, which is awarded to "individuals who have made a significant and benevolent or charitable impact on the art and industry of animation." Foray was the first recipient of the award. In 2007, Foray became a contributor to ASIFA-Hollywood's Animation Archive Project. She also had sat on the Governors' board for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences and lobbied for two decades for the Academy to establish an Academy Awardfor animation; the Academy created the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature in 2001 from her petitioning.

In 2007, Britt Irvin became the first person ever to voice a character in a cartoon remake that had been previously played by Foray in the original series when she voiced Ursula in the new George of the Jungle series on Cartoon Network. In 2011, Roz Ryan voiced Witch Lezah (Hazel spelled backwards) in The Looney Tunes Show, opposite June Foray as Granny.

Foray also voiced May Parker in Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends from 1981-1983, as well as Raggedy Ann on several TV movies, Grandma Howard on Teen Wolf, Jokey Smurf and Mother Nature on The Smurfs, and Magica De Spell and Ma Beagle in DuckTales. At the same time, she also had a leading role voicing Grammi Gummi on Disney's Adventures of the Gummi Bears, working with her Rocky and Bullwinkle co-star Bill Scott until his death in 1985.

Foray guest starred only once on The Simpsons, in the season one episode "Some Enchanted Evening", as the receptionist for the Rubber Baby Buggy Bumper Babysitting Service. This was a play on a Rocky & Bullwinkle gag years earlier in which none of the cartoon's characters, including narrator William Conrad, was able to pronounce "rubber baby buggy bumpers" unerringly. Foray was later homaged by The Simpsons, in the season eight episode "The Itchy & Scratchy & Poochie Show", in which the character June Bellamy is introduced as the voice behind both Itchy and Scratchy. 

Foray appeared on camera in a major role only once, in Sabaka, as the high priestess of a fire cult. She also appeared on camera in an episode of Green Acres as a Mexican telephone operator. In 1991, she provided her voice as the sock-puppet talk-show host Scary Mary on an episode of Married... with Children. She played cameos in both 1992's Boris & Natasha and 2000's The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle. 

The Duck Factory Ep3 The Annies by kocsi106

Another on-camera appearance was as herself on an episode of the 1984 TV sitcom The Duck Factory, which starred Jim Carrey and Don Messick.

She was often called for ADR voice work for television and feature films. This work included dubbing the voice of Mary Badham in The Twilight Zone episode "The Bewitchin' Pool" and the voices for Sean and Michael Brody in some scenes of the film Jaws. She dubbed several people in Bells Are Ringing, Diana Rigg in some scenes of The Hospital, Robert Blake in drag in an episode of Baretta and a little boy in The Comic.

In October 2006, she portrayed Susan B. Anthony on three episodes of the podcast The Radio Adventures of Dr. Floyd. In November 2009, Foray appeared twice on The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack: in one episode as Ruth, a pie-maker trapped in Bubbie's stomach, and in another episode as Kelly, a young boy having a birthday party and as Kelly's Mom and Captain K'Nuckles' kindergarten teacher. In 1996 and 1997, Foray won the Annie Award for Outstanding Individual Achievement for Voice Acting by a Female Performer in an Animated Television Production for her work in Sylvester and Tweety Mysteries. In 2000, Foray returned to play Rocky the Flying Squirrel in Universal Pictures' live-action/CGI animated film The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle, co-starring and produced by Robert De Niro. On Season Three, Episode One ("The Thin White Line") of Family Guy, Foray again played Rocky in a visual gag with a single line ("And now, here's something we hope you'll really like!"). Foray voiced the wife of the man getting dunked ("Don't tell him, Carlos!") in Pirates of the Caribbean. In 2003, she guest starred as the villain Madame Argentina in The Powerpuff Girls episode, "I See a Funny Cartoon in Your Future". During this time, Foray also had a regular role, reprising Granny on Baby Looney Tunes and also Witch Hazel in an episode of another Warner Bros. Animation series Duck Dodgers.

In 2011, she voiced Granny in Cartoon Network's The Looney Tunes Show. That year, she received the Comic-Con Icon Award at the 2011 Scream Awards. She also appeared as Granny in the theatrically released Looney Tunes short, I Tawt I Taw a Puddy Tat, which was shortlisted for Academy Award consideration.

In 2012, Foray received her first Emmy nomination and won in the category of Outstanding Performer in an Animated Program for her role as Mrs. Cauldron on The Garfield Show. She thus became, at age 94, the oldest entertainer to be nominated for, and to win, an Emmy Award. Foray also reprised her role of Rocky the Flying Squirrel in a Rocky and Bullwinkle short film, which was released in 2014.

In September 2013, she was honored with the Governors Award at the 65th Primetime Creative Arts Emmy Awards. That same year, she reprised her role as Magica De Spell in the video game DuckTales: Remastered.

Good Night Ms. Foray

Stay Tuned


Tony Figueroa

This Week in Television History: July 2017 PART IV

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.

July 27, 1922

Norman Milton Lear is born. 

Writer and producer who produced such 1970s sitcoms as All in the Family, Sanford and Son, One Day at a Time, The Jeffersons, Good Times and Maude. As a political activist, he founded the civil liberties advocacy organization People For the American Way in 1981 and has supported First Amendment rights and liberal causes.

July 29, 1957

Jack Paar becomes host of The Tonight Show. 

NBC returned the program to a talk/variety show format once again, with Jack Paar becoming the new solo host of the show. Under Paar, most of the NBC affiliates which had dropped the show during the ill-fated run of America After Dark began airing the show once again. Paar's era began the practice of branding the series after the host, and as such the program, though officially still called The Tonight Show, was marketed as The Jack Paar Show. A combo band conducted by Paar's Army buddy pianist Jose Melis filled commercial breaks and backed musical entertainers. Paar also introduced the idea of having guest hosts; one of these early hosts was Johnny Carson. In the late 1950s, it was one of the first regularly scheduled shows to be videotaped in color.

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

Stay Tuned

Tony Figueroa

Your Mental Sorbet: Sean Spicer Press Conference (Melissa McCarthy) - SNL

Here is another "Mental Sorbet" 

A little spark of madness

that we could use to momentarily forget about those

things that leave a bad taste in our mouths

Published on Feb 5, 2017

White House press secretary Sean Spicer (Melissa McCarthy) and secretary of education nominee Betsy DeVos (Kate McKinnon) take questions from the press (Bobby Moynihan, Kristen Stewart, Cecily Strong, Vanessa Bayer, Alex Moffat, Mikey Day).

Stay Tuned

Tony Figueroa

Dawn Wells and Jerry Beck: Next on TVC

Actress, author and producer Dawn Wells and animation guru Jerry Beck will join us this weekend on a brand new TV CONFIDENTIAL, airing July 21-24 at the following times and venues:

Share-a-Vision Radio
San Francisco Bay Area
Friday 7/21
7pm ET, 4pm PT
10pm ET, 7pm PT
Click on the Listen Live button at KSAV.org
Use the TuneIn app on your smartphone and type in KSAV
Hear us on the KSAV channel on CX Radio Brazil
Hear us on your cell phone or landline number by dialing 712-432-4235

Indiana Talks
Marion, IN
Saturday 7/22
8pm ET, 5pm PT
Sunday 7/23
10am ET, 7am PT
Click on the player at IndianaTalks.com
or use the TuneIn app on your smartphone and type in Indiana Talks

WON 920 The Apple
Brooklyn, NY
Saturday 7/22
10pm ET, 7pm PT
Streaming at www.920won.caster.fm

KSCO AM-1080 and FM-104.1
San Jose, Santa Cruz and Salinas, CA
KOMY AM-1340
La Selva Beach and Watsonville, CA
Sunday 7/23
9am ET, 6am PT
Also streaming at KSCO.com
or use the TuneIn app on your smartphone and type in KSCO

CROC Radio
Kimberley, British Columbia, Canada
Sunday 7/23
1pm ET, 10am PT
Streaming at CROCRadio.com
or use the TuneIn app on your smartphone and type in CROC

KHMB AM-1710
KHMV-LP 100.9 FM
Half Moon Bay, CA
Sunday 7/23
9pm PT
Monday 7/24
Midnight ET
Click on the Listen Live button at KHMBRadio.com

RadioSlot.com
San Francisco, CA
Monday 7/24
10pm ET, 7pm PT
with replays Tuesday thru Friday at 10pm ET, 7pm PT
Click on the Talk Slot button at RadioSlot.com

PWRNetwork
A member of the Truli Media Group
Ann Arbor, MI ~ Boston, MA ~ Chicago, IL ~ Melrose, FL ~ Los Angeles, CA
Various times throughout the week
on the Entertainment Channel on PWRNetwork.com
and the PWR channel on TuneIn

Known around the world as Mary Ann Summers on Gilligan’s Island, Dawn Wells is also a producer, author, spokesperson, journalist, motivational speaker, teacher, and chairwoman of the Terry Lee Wells Foundation, which focuses on women and children in Northern Nevada, plus she has starred in more than sixty stage productions on and off Broadway, including the national tours of Chapter Two and They’re Playing Our Song, and, most recently, a regional tour of Steel Magnolias. Her most recent book, What Would Mary Ann Do? A Guide to Life, shows readers how Mary Ann would respond to the various changes in culture that face women of all ages today.

Dawn Wells has two new web series out right now — one of which, She’s Still on That Freakin Island, asks the question “What would what happen if MaryAnn were still on Gilligan’s Island today?” while her other series, Life Interrupted, is an award-winning ensemble series in which she plays the wise cracking mother-in-law of Mason Reese. We’ll talk about this, and more, when Dawn Wells joins us in our second hour.

Dawn Wells will be appearing at the Mid-Atlantic Nostalgia Convention in Hunt Valley, MD on Sept. 15-17; The Com Erie Con in Erie, PA, on Sept. 22-24; and the Rainbows For Kids Charity Fundraiser in St. Louis, MO on Nov. 17, 2017. For more information on these and other events on Dawn’s calendar, go to DawnWells.com.

Our first hour will include a conversation with world renowned animation guru Jerry Beck, a man who has spent most of his career proving that adults can enjoy cartoons just as much as kids do. A former studio executive with Nickelodeon Movies and Disney, Jerry has written for The Hollywood Reporter, Variety and other trade publications, plus he is the author of more than fifteen books on animation history, including Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies, I Tawt I Taw a Putty Tat, The 50 Greatest Cartoons, Pink Panther: The Ultimate Visual Guide and The Art of Dreamworks’ Mr. Peabody and Sherman. He has curated cartoons for DVD and Blu-ray compilations and has lent his expertise to dozens of bonus documentaries and commentaries on such, including, most recently, an essay that he wrote for Shout Select’s Blu-ray release of the six Pink Panther movies starring Peter Sellers.

Jerry Beck also runs Cartoon Research, his personal website and blog devoted to animation history, past, present and future. We’ll talk about what first fueled Jerry’s interest in animation, how he essentially created his own genre, his upcoming appearance this weekend at Comic-Con 2017 in San Diego, whether some cartoons are more worthy of discussion than others, and a whole lot more.

TV CONFIDENTIAL: A radio talk show about television
Fri 7pm ET and PT on Share-a-Vision Radio, KSAV.org and CX Radio Brazil
Sat 8pm ET, 5pm PT and Sun 6pm ET, 3pm PT on Indiana Talks (Marion, IN)
Sat 10pm ET, 7pm PT on WON 920 The Apple (Brooklyn, NY)
Sun 9am ET, 6am PT KSCO-AM 1080 (San Jose, Santa Cruz and Salinas, CA)
Sun 9am ET, 6am PT KOMY-AM 1340 (La Selva Beach and Watsonville, CA)
Sun 1pm ET, 10am PT CROC Radio (British Columbia, Canada)
Sun 9pm PT, Mon Mid ET on KHMB-AM and FM (Half Moon Bay, CA)
Mon 10pm ET, 7pm PT on The Radio Slot Network (San Francisco, CA)
Replays various times throughout the week on the Entertainment Channel at PWRNetwork
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If you listen to TV CONFIDENTIAL, and like what you’ve heard, please consider supporting our efforts by becoming a patron of our show through Patreon. It’s easy to do, it does not cost much, plus you can receive some cool rewards (such as coupons that will allow you to download up to six free programs every month from the TV CONFIDENTIAL Archives store). For more information, please visit www.Patreon.com/tvconfidential... and thanks!

This Week in Television History: July 2017 PART III

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.

July 22, 1922

Daniel “Dan” Hale Rowan is born. 

He was featured in the television show Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In, where he played straight man to Dick Martin. Born on a carnival train near the small town of Beggs, Oklahoma, under the name of “Daniel Hale David”, Rowan toured with his parents, Oscar and Nellie David, who performed a singing and dancing act with the carnival. He was orphaned at age 11, spent four traumatic years at the McClelland Home in Pueblo, Colorado, then was taken in by a foster family at age 16 and enrolled in Central High School (Pueblo, Colorado). 

After graduating from high school, he hitchhiked to Los Angeles, California, in 1940 and found a job in the mailroom at Paramount Pictures; quickly ingratiating himself with studio head Buddy DeSylva, a year later he became Paramount's youngest staff writer.

July 22, 1947

Albert Brooks is born Albert Lawrence Einstein. 

Actor, writer, director son of Thelma Leeds (née Goodman), a singer and actress, and Harry Parke (né Einstein), a radio comedian who performed on Eddie Cantor's radio program and was known as Parkyarkarkus. His brothers are comedic actor Bob Einstein, better known by his stage name "Super Dave Osborne" and Cliff Einstein, a partner and longtime chief creative officer at the Los Angeles ad agency Dailey & Associates and his half-brother was Charles Einstein (1926-2007), a writer who wrote for such shows as Playhouse 90 and Lou Grant. Brooks started his own career in comedy by landing regular roles on variety shows in the late 1960s and gaining popularity on Saturday Night Live in the 1970s. Brooks' first film appearance was Taxi Driver (1976). He began screenwriting and directing in the 1980s, with films including Lost in America (1985), Defending Your Life (1991), The Muse (1999) and Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World (2005). 

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

Stay Tuned

Tony Figueroa

Martin Landau

You can have immediate regrets, but if you look at stuff and say, 

'Things happen for a reason', there's a fatalistic thing about it. 

Something will happen that will justify it in some way. 

-Martin Landau

Martin LandauJune 20, 1928 – July 15, 2017

His career started in the 1950s, with early film appearances including a supporting role in Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest (1959). He played regular roles in the television series Mission: Impossible (for which he received several Emmy Award nominations and a Golden Globe Award) and Space: 1999.

Landau received the Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actor – Motion Picture, as well as his first nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, for his role in Tucker: The Man and His Dream (1988); he received his second Oscar nomination for his appearance in Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989). His performance in the supporting role of Bela Lugosi in Ed Wood (1994) earned him an Academy Award, a Screen Actors Guild Award and a Golden Globe Award. He continued to perform in film and TV, and headed the Hollywood branch of the Actors Studio until his death in 2017.

Good Night Mr. Landau

Stay Tuned


Tony Figueroa