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"
U.S. President Harry S. Truman made his first
live television appearance.
Harry S. Truman made his first
"live" television appearance at a Navy Day speech in New York's
Central Park on October 27, 1945.
October 28, 1950
Popular radio personality Jack Benny moves to
television with The Jack Benny Program.
The TV version of the show ran for the next 15 years.
Jack Benny was born
Benjamin Kubelsky in 1894. His father, a Lithuanian immigrant, ran a saloon in
Waukegan, Illinois, near Chicago. Benny began playing violin at age six and
continued through high school. He began touring on the vaudeville circuit in
1917. In 1918, he joined the navy and was assigned to entertain the troops with
his music but soon discovered a flair for comedy as well. After World War I,
Benny returned to vaudeville as a comedian and became a top act in the 1920s.
In 1927, he married an actress named Sadye Marks; the couple stayed together
until Benny's death in 1974.
Benny's success in
vaudeville soon won him attention from Hollywood, where he made his film debut
in Hollywood Revue of 1929. Over the years, he won larger roles, notably
in Charley's Aunt (1941) and To Be or Not to Be (1942). Movies
were only a sideline for Benny, though, who found his natural medium in radio
in 1932.
In March 1932,
then-newspaper columnist Ed Sullivan, dabbling in radio, asked Benny to do an
on-air interview. Benny reluctantly agreed. His comedy, though, was so
successful that Benny was offered his own show almost immediately, which
debuted just a few months later. At first a mostly musical show with a few
minutes of Benny's comedy during interludes, the show evolved to become mostly
comedy, incorporating well-developed skits and regular characters. In many of
these skits, Benny portrayed himself as a vain egomaniac and notorious
pinchpenny who refused to replace his (very noisy) antique car and who kept his
money in a closely guarded vault. His regulars included his wife, whose
character, Mary Livingstone, deflated Benny's ego at every opportunity; Mel
Blanc, who used his famous voice to play Benny's noisy car, his exasperated
French violin teacher, and other characters; and Eddie Andersen, one of radio's
first African American stars, who played Benny's long-suffering valet,
Rochester Van Jones. The program ran until 1955.
In
the 1950s, Benny began experimenting with television, making specials in 1950,
1951, and 1952. Starting in 1952, The Jack Benny Show aired regularly,
at first once every four weeks, then every other week, then finally every week
from 1960 to 1965. Benny was as big a hit on TV as on the radio. Despite the
stingy skinflint image he cultivated on the air, Benny was known for his
generosity and modesty in real life. He died of cancer in Beverly Hills in
1974.
Winkler is best known for his role as Fonzie on the 1970s American sitcomHappy Days.
"The Fonz", a leather-clad greaser
and auto mechanic, started out as a minor character
at the show's beginning, but had achieved top billing by the time the show
ended. Winkler started acting by appearing in a number of television
commercials. In October 1973, he was cast for the role of Arthur Herbert
Fonzarelli, nicknamed The Fonz or Fonzie, in the TV show Happy Days. The show was first aired in
January 1974. During his decade on Happy Days, Winkler also starred in a
number of movies, including The Lords of
Flatbush (1974), playing a troubled Vietnam veteran
in Heroes (1977), The One and Only (1978), and a morgue
attendant in Night Shift
(1982), which was directed by Happy Days co-star Ron
Howard.
After Happy Days, Winkler put his acting career on the back burner,
as he began concentrating on producing and directing. He quickly worked on
developing his own production company and, within months, he had opened Winkler-Rich
Productions.
As the 1990s continued, Winkler began a return to acting. In 1994 he
returned to TV with the short-lived right-wing comedy Monty on Fox
which sank in mere weeks. Also in 1994, he co-starred with Katharine Hepburn in
the holiday TV movie "One Christmas", her last film. In 1998, Adam Sandler asked Winkler to play a
college football coach, a supporting role in The Waterboy (1998). He would later
appear in three other Sandler films, Little Nicky
(2000) where he plays himself and is covered in bees, Click (2006, as the main character's
father), and You
Don't Mess with the Zohan (2008). He has also played small roles
in movies such as Down to You
(2000), Holes (2003), and I Could
Never Be Your Woman (2007).
Winkler recently had a recurring role as incompetent lawyer Barry Zuckerkorn in the Fox Television comedy Arrested
Development. In one episode, his character hopped over a dead
shark lying on a pier, a reference to his role in the origin of the phrase
"jumping the shark".
After that episode, Winkler in interviews stated that he was the only person to
have "jumped the shark" twice.
When Winkler moved to CBS for one season to star in 2005–06's Out of Practice, his role as the Bluth
family lawyer on Arrested Development was taken over by Happy Days
co-star Scott Baio in the fall of 2005, shortly
before the acclaimed but Nielsen-challenged show ceased production.
The rally was a combination of what initially were
announced as separate events: Stewart's "Rally to Restore Sanity" and
Colbert's counterpart, the "March to Keep Fear Alive." Its stated
purpose was to provide a venue for attendees to be heard above what Stewart
described as the more vocal and extreme 15–20% of Americans who "control
the conversation" of American
politics, the argument being that these
extremes demonize each other and engage in counterproductive actions, with a
return to sanity intended to promote reasoned discussion. Despite Stewart's
insistence to the contrary, news reports cast the rally as a spoof of Glenn Beck's
Restoring Honor
rally and Al Sharpton's
Reclaim
the Dream rally.
Barbara
Eden reprises
her world-famous role as the magical Jeannie; also reprising their roles from
the original series were Bill Daily as Tony's fellow
astronaut and best friend Roger Healy, and Hayden Rorke (in his final film
role) as NASA psychiatrist Dr. Alfred Bellows. The role of Tony Nelson was
played by Wayne
Rogers,
best known for his role as Trapper John McIntyre on the 1970s series M*A*S*H. Larry
Hagman was
unavailable to reprise his role as Tony Nelson reportedly because he was too
busy filming his CBS series Dallas at the time.
The
film was directed by William Asher (who was also director
of the 1960s show Bewitched) and the teleplay was
written by Irma Kalish.
October 23, 1925
Talk show host Johnny Carson is born in Corning, Iowa. After studying journalism in college, Carson began
working in radio and television. He began writing for TV shows in the 1950s and
hosted his own show, Carson's Cellar, in 1951. He began occasionally
guest hosting for Jack Paar on The Tonight Show and became the show's
permanent host in 1962. He retired in 1992 and died in Los Angeles on January
23, 2005.
The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show, aka The Burns and Allen Show, began on CBS Television.
The show was originally staged live before a studio audience
(during its first three months, it originated from the Mansfield Theatre in New York, then
relocated to CBS' Columbia Square facilities in Los Angeles). Ever
the businessman, Burns realized it would be more efficient to do the series on
film (beginning in the fall of 1952); the half-hour episodes could then be
syndicated. From that point on, the show was shot without a live audience
present, however, each installment would be screened before an audience to
provide live responses prior to the episodes being broadcast. With 291
episodes, the show had a long network run through 1958 and continued in
syndicated reruns for years.
Cameron is also an active Christianevangelist, currently partnering with Ray Comfort in the evangelical ministry The Way of the
Master, and has co-founded The Firefly Foundation with his
wife, actress Chelsea Noble.
He stated that his main priorities in life are: "God, family,
career — in that order," and he says that this decision has had
negative consequences on his career.
that we could use to momentarily forget about those
things that leave a bad taste in our mouths
The Hilarious House of Frightenstein is a Canadian children's television series, which was produced by Hamilton, Ontario's independent station CHCH-TV in 1971. It was syndicated both in Canada and internationally, and occasionally still appears in some television markets. In Canada, the series has not aired on broadcast TV for several years, but is available on streaming service Crave.
A quirky sketch comedy series that included some educational content amid its zany humor, the show's cast included Billy Van, Fishka Rais, Guy Big, Mitch Markowitz, Vincent Price, and Julius Sumner Miller. Van played most of the characters on the show.
