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"
Williams met Penny Marshall, first on a double date, and later at Francis Ford Coppola’s Zoetrope company, both hired as comedy writers, because "they wanted two women", on a prospective TV spoof for the Bicentennial.While writing at Zoetrope, Penny Marshall's brother, Garry Marshall, called to ask if they would like to make an appearance on one episode of Happy Days, the television series he produced.
In 1975, Williams was cast as a fun-loving brewery bottle capper, Shirley Feeney, in an episode of Happy Days with Penny, who played her best friend and roommate Laverne De Fazio. The girls were cast as "sure-thing" dates of Richie and Fonzie (Henry Winkler). Their appearance proved so popular that Garry Marshall, producer of Happy Days, commissioned a spin-off series for the characters of Shirley and Laverne. Williams continued her role on the very successful Laverne & Shirley series from 1976 until 1982. At one point during its run, the series was the number one rated show on television. Williams was praised for her portrayal of Shirley Feeney. She left the show after the second episode of the show's eighth and what would become its final season, after she became pregnant with her first child. The show's various producers were not enthusiastic that Williams was pregnant, as her character Shirley was not pregnant. Williams and co-star Penny Marshall had also been feuding for quite some time on the set long before Williams became pregnant.They would reconcile many years later. The success of the TV series led to a short-lived Saturday morning animated series Laverne & Shirley in the Army (1981–82), created by Hanna-Barbera.
In 1990, Williams returned to series TV in the short-lived sitcom Normal Life and, a couple years later, reunited with former Laverne & Shirley producers Thomas L. Miller and Robert L. Boyett to star in their family sitcom Getting By (1993–94). She guest starred on several television shows, including two episodes of 8 Simple Rules.
Williams reunited with Penny Marshall on the TV series Sam & Cat in the episode "#SalmonCat" (2013).
In 2015, her memoir Shirley, I Jest! (co-written with Dave Smitherman) was published. In the same year, Williams engaged in celebrity branding for the senior citizen service Visiting Angels.
With the stirring notes of the William Tell Overture and a shout of "Hi-yo,
Silver! Away!"The Lone Ranger debuts on
Detroit's WXYZ radio station.
The creation of station-owner George
Trendle and writer Fran Striker, the "masked rider of the plains"
became one of the most popular and enduring western heroes of the 20th century.
Joined by his trusty steed, Silver, and loyal Indian scout, Tonto, the Lone
Ranger sallied forth to do battle with evil western outlaws and Indians,
generally arriving on the scene just in time to save an innocent golden-haired
child or sun-bonneted farm wife.
Neither Trendle nor Striker had any connections to or
experience with the cowboys, Indians, and pioneers
of the real West, but that mattered little to them. The men simply wanted to create
an American version of the masked swashbuckler made popular by the silent movie
actor Douglas Fairbanks in The Mark of Zorro,
arming their hero with a revolver rather than a sword. Historical authenticity
was far less important to the men than fidelity to the strict code of conduct
they established for their character. The Lone Ranger never smoked, swore, or
drank alcohol; he used grammatically correct speech free of slang; and, most
important, he never shot to kill. More offensive to modern historical and
ethnic sensibilities was the Indian scout Tonto, who spoke in a comical Indian
patois totally unrelated to any authentic Indian dialect, uttering ludicrous
phrases like "You betchum!"
Historical accuracy notwithstanding, the radio program
was an instant hit. Children liked the steady stream of action and parents
approved of the good moral example offered by the upstanding masked man. Soon
picked up for nationwide broadcast over the Mutual Radio Network, over 20
million Americans were tuning into The Lone Ranger three
times a week by 1939. In an early example of the power of marketing tie-ins,
the producers also licensed the manufacture of a vast array of related
products, including Lone Ranger guns, costumes, books, and a popular comic
strip.
The Lone Ranger made a seemingly effortless transition
from radio to motion pictures and television. The televised version of The Lone Ranger, staring Clayton Moore as the masked
man, became ABC's first big hit in the early 1950s. Remaining on the air until 1957, the program helped
define the golden age of the TV Western and inspired dozens of imitators
like The Range Rider, The Roy Rogers Show,
and The Adventures of Wild Bill Hickok. Although the Lone
Ranger disappeared from American television and movie screens by the 1960s, he lived on in a popular series of comic books well
into the1970s.
January 31, 1988
The first episode of The Wonder Years aired on ABC.
A coming-of-agecomedy-drama television
series created by Neal Marlens and Carol Black. It
ran on ABC from 1988 until 1993. The pilot aired on January
31, 1988, following ABC's coverage of Super Bowl XXII. It
stars Fred Savage as Kevin Arnold, a boy growing up in a middle
class family, and takes place from 1968–1973.
The show earned a spot in
the Nielsen Top 30 during its first four seasons. TV Guide named
it one of the 20 best shows of the 1980s. After six episodes, The
Wonder Years won a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Comedy Series in 1988. In addition, at age 13, Fred Savage became
the youngest actor ever nominated as Outstanding Lead Actor for a Comedy Series. The show was also awarded a Peabody
Award in 1989 for "pushing
the boundaries of the sitcom format and using new modes of
storytelling". In total, the series won 22 awards and was nominated
for 54 more. In 1997, "My Father's Office" was ranked #29
on TV Guide's 100 Greatest
Episodes of All Time, and in the 2009
revised list the pilot episode was ranked #43. In 2016, Rolling Stone ranked The Wonder Years #63 on its list of 100
Greatest TV Shows of All Time. In 2017, James Charisma of Paste ranked
the show's opening sequence #14 on a list of The 75 Best TV Title
Sequences of All Time. As of recent years many critics and fans
consider The Wonder Years to be a classic and that it has
had tremendous impact on the industry over the years and has inspired many
other shows and how they are structured.
February 1, 1953
CBS-TV debuted Private Secretary (also known as Susie)
A sitcom that aired from February 1, 1953, to September 10, 1957, on CBS, alternating with The Jack Benny Program on Sundays at 7:30pm EST. The series stars Ann Sothern as Susan Camille "Susie" MacNamara, devoted secretary to handsome talent agent Peter Sands, played by Don Porter.
February 1, 2003
The Space
shuttle Columbia breaks up while entering the atmosphere
over Texas,
killing all seven crew members on board.
The Columbia‘s
28th space mission, designated STS-107, was originally scheduled to launch on
January 11, 2001, but was delayed numerous times for a variety of reasons over
nearly two years. Columbia finally launched on January 16,
2003, with a crew of seven. Eighty seconds into the launch, a piece of foam
insulation broke off from the shuttle’s propellant tank and hit the edge of the
shuttle’s left wing.
Cameras focused on the launch
sequence revealed the foam collision but engineers could not pinpoint the
location and extent of the damage. Although similar incidents had occurred on
three prior shuttle launches without causing critical damage, some engineers at
the space agency believed that the damage to the wing could cause a
catastrophic failure. Their concerns were not addressed in the two weeks
that Columbia spent in orbit because NASA management believed
that even if major damage had been caused, there was little that could be done
to remedy the situation.
Columbia reentered the earth’s atmosphere on the morning
of February 1. It wasn’t until 10 minutes later, at 8:53 a.m.–as the shuttle
was 231,000 feet above the California coastline
traveling at 23 times the speed of sound–that the first indications of trouble
began. Because the heat-resistant tiles covering the left wing’s leading edge
had been damaged or were missing, wind and heat entered the wing and blew it
apart.
The first debris began
falling to the ground in west Texas near Lubbock at 8:58 a.m. One minute later,
the last communication from the crew was heard, and at 9 a.m. the shuttle
disintegrated over northeast Texas, near Dallas. Residents in the area heard a
loud boom and saw streaks of smoke in the sky. Debris and the remains of the
crew were found in more than 2,000 locations across East Texas, Arkansas and Louisiana. Making
the tragedy even worse, two pilots aboard a search helicopter were killed in a
crash while looking for debris. Strangely, worms that the crew had used in a
study that were stored in a canister aboard the Columbia did
survive.
In August 2003, an
investigation board issued a report that revealed that it in fact would have
been possible either for the Columbia crew to repair the
damage to the wing or for the crew to be rescued from the shuttle. The Columbia could
have stayed in orbit until February 15 and the already planned launch of the
shuttle Atlantis could have been moved up as early as February
10, leaving a short window for repairing the wing or getting the crew off of
the Columbia.
In the aftermath of the Columbia disaster,
the space shuttle program was grounded until July 16, 2005, when the space
shuttle Discovery was put into orbit.
February 2, 1973
NBC-TV debuted Midnight Special hosted by Helen Reddy.
The Midnight Special is an American
late-night musical variety series originally broadcast
on NBC during
the 1970s and early 1980s, created and produced by Burt
Sugarman. It premiered as a special on August 19, 1972, then began its
run as a regular series on February 2, 1973; its last episode was on May 1,
1981.[2]The
90-minute program followed the Friday night edition of The Tonight Show Starring
Johnny Carson.
Like its syndicated late-night cousin Don Kirshner's Rock Concert, the
show typically featured guest hosts, except for a period from July 1975 through
March 1976 when singer Helen Reddy served as the regular host. Wolfman
Jack served as the announcer and frequent guest host. The program's
theme song, a traditional folk song called "Midnight Special", was performed
by Johnny Rivers.
The Midnight Special was noted for featuring
musical acts performing live, which was unusual since most television
appearances during the era showed performers lip-synching to
prerecorded music. The series also occasionally aired vintage footage of older
acts, such as Bill Haley & His Comets. As the
program neared the end of its run in the early 1980s, it began to frequently
use lip-synched performances rather than live ones. The
program also featured occasional performances of comedians such as Richard
Pryor, Andy Kaufman, and George
Carlin.
In the pilot episode of the NBC television series The
A-Team, which airs on this day in 1983, the go-getting newspaper reporter
Amy Allen (Melinda Culea) seeks the help of a mysterious group of
Vietnam-veterans-turned-soldiers-for-hire to find her missing colleague in
Mexico. An elite commando unit in Vietnam, the so-called A-Team was wrongly
imprisoned by the Army. They escaped and began working as mercenaries, doing
whatever needed to be done for their various clients while consistently eluding
the fanatic Army officers sent to catch them. TheA-Team went on
to become a huge hit and make a star of the-then little known actor Mr. T.
Produced by Stephen Cannell and first envisioned by Brandon Tartikoff, NBC’s
president, as a volatile combination between films such as The Dirty Dozen,
The Magnificent Seven and The Road Warrior and TV programs such as Hill
Street Blues, The A-Team became a bona fide phenomenon during its
five-year run. Despite its late entry to the 1982-83 ratings season, The
A-Team was on its way to a No. 1 ranking by season’s end. It also topped a
list of the most violent shows on TV, compiled that year by the National Coalition
on Television Violence.
George Peppard, who memorably starred opposite Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast
at Tiffany’s (1961), played the A-Team’s leader, John “Hannibal” Smith; he
called his A-Team role “probably the best part I’ve had in my career.” The
show also featured Dirk Benedict as Templeton “Faceman” Peck and Dwight Schultz
as H.M. (Howling Mad) Murdock, but its breakout star was the mohawked,
gold-bedecked Mr. T. Born Laurence Tureaud in a tough Chicago neighborhood, Mr.
T got into show business after winning a contest as the “World’s Toughest
Bouncer.” He was spotted by Sylvester Stallone, who cast him as a boxer in Rocky
III (1982). As the surly A-Team mechanic B.A. (Bad Attitude) Baracus, Mr. T
uttered some of the show’s most memorable catchphrases, including “You better
watch out, sucker” and “Pity the fool.”
Campy and outrageously violent, The A-Team was particularly popular
among children and teenagers, and with male audiences. Over the years, the
show’s producers experimented with adding a woman to the mix--including Culea’s
Amy Allen, Marla Heasley as Tawnia Baker and Tia Carrere (who later starred in Wayne’s
World) as a Vietnam war orphan meant to provide a link to the soldiers’
past--but these stints were relatively short-lived, and the team’s
testosterone-heavy vibe remained intact. By its fourth season, the show’s
popularity was waning, due partially to its formulaic nature and partially to
the growing trend towards family-friendly comedy that was being driven by the
success of The Cosby Show. In the spring of 1986, Cosby-inspired
shows such as Who’s the Boss? and Growing Pains on ABC were
beating The A-Team handily in the ratings each week.
A-Team producers tried different tricks to win audiences over,
including one episode centered on the popular game show Wheel of Fortune and
various guest appearances by such prominent personalities as the pop star Boy
George, the professional wrestler Hulk Hogan and the Chicago Bears defensive
lineman William “Refrigerator” Perry. The show hung on into a fifth season, but
aired only 13 episodes, ending unceremoniously in March 1987.
January 28, 1973
CBS-TV debuted Barnaby
Jones.
Barnaby Jones was an American detective television series
starring Buddy Ebsen as
a formerly retired investigator and Lee Meriwether as his widowed
daughter-in-law, who run a private detective firm in Los Angeles, California. The show was originally introduced
as a midseason replacement on
the CBS network and ran from 1973 to 1980.
Halfway through the series' run, Mark Shera was added to the cast as a
much younger cousin of Ebsen's character, who eventually joined the firm.
Barnaby
Jones was produced
by QM Productions (with Woodruff Productions in the final two
seasons). It had the second-longest QM series run (seven and a half seasons), following
the nine years of The FBI.
The series followed the characteristic Quinn Martin episode format with
commercial breaks dividing each episode into four "acts," concluding
with an epilogue. The opening credits were narrated by Hank Simms.
The
first episode of the show, "Requiem for a Son", featured a crossover
with another QM program, Cannon,
with William Conrad guest-starring
as detective Frank Cannon. There was another crossover between the two programs
in the 1975 two-part episode "The Deadly Conspiracy".
January 28, 1978
Fantasy Island premieres. Fantasy
Island is created in early 1978 as a follow-up to ABC's surprise hit The
Love Boat.
Screen actor Ricardo
Montalban played the mysterious Mr. Roarke, and his diminutive sidekick,
Tattoo, was played by Herve Villechaize. Before it became a television series, Fantasy Island was introduced to viewers in 1977 and 1978 through two made-for-television films. Airing from 1978 to 1984, the original series starred Ricardo Montalbán as Mr. Roarke, the enigmatic overseer of a mysterious island somewhere near Devil's Island, French Guiana in the Atlantic Ocean, where people from all walks of life could come and live out their fantasies, albeit for a price.
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.
