- Wait, you have a TV? - No, I don't like to read the TV guide. Read the TV guide, you don't need a TV. ♪ Don't listen to me, don't listen to me ♪ ♪ Don't listen to me, don't listen to me ♪ ♪ Don't listen to me, don't listen to me ♪ - All right, it's Ken Reid, it's TV guides counselor. You know all the rest of the details. It's Wednesday, which means it's time for a brand new episode. My guess this week is Mr. Cliff Nesteroff. If you don't know him by name, you probably at very least know him by his work. He's an incredible writer about old showbiz and the sort of underbilly of showbiz and underbilly. That's not what I want meant to say. I meant to say underbelly of Hollywood and just a great, great writer and one of the huge influences for me in the last couple of years for sort of exploring these kinds of things. He wrote an excellent article in Joe E. Ross for WFMU that I would recommend if you're gonna just try to read one thing. But he's got a book coming out, which I'm very excited about. And Cliff picked first. This is an issue from 1963 that we go through. So that's pretty interesting. His knowledge is astounding. I felt completely inadequate based on what he knew. And we recorded this at Muso and Franks in Hollywood, which is very atmospheric, very fun. It was kind of perfect. I really enjoyed talking to Cliff and there's some really kind of fascinating academic and factual information in here that you will enjoy. So sit back, relax, listen, get a piece of prime rib. That's really with some horseradish. That would be ideal based on what I was eating while we were recording. And enjoy this week's episode of TV Guidance Counselor with my guest, Cliff Nestoroff. ♪ To the God like a season ♪ ♪ The videos can change ♪ ♪ I am a banana ♪ ♪ You're a banana ♪ ♪ I'm on the movies and I'm on ♪ Cliff Nestor, how are you, sir? - I'm very well. Thank you for having me on me. - You're welcome. - I'm meeting me here at the oldest restaurant in Hollywood, Muso and Frank. - We're at Muso and Frank, which is why you're hearing the sort of clanking and things. I'm eating an open-faced prime rib sandwich and cliff is eating the cream spinach. - I'm eating the cream spinach, which sounds disgusting, but here at Musos is truly one of the best things on the menu. - It's just spinach in like 18 sticks of butter. - It's a lot of butter. There's a lot of butter on this podcast right now. - Yes, there's actually physically butter on the recorder. We have a Domingo, the chef and a tall white hat in front of the grill in front of us. - This is a cliff comes here a lot. - This is a seminal link to Hollywood history. Greta Garbo or some wells. Everybody lays claim to Charlie Chaplin, of course, but this price actually can verify their claim to Charlie Chaplin with its own booth in the same room. - And this is one of the last places sort of in this area that directly connects to that here in Hollywood. - That's true. There's a lot of old buildings around here, but they're not used for their original purpose. - They're selling cell phones now. - Yeah, this is mostly a tourist district combined with sort of, there's a street two blocks away from here called Wilcox, which is sort of like the crack house, flop house road. And then all the cheap sort of ugly souvenir shops and on Fridays and Saturday nights, if you want to pick up a ho or a jock, I don't want to be sucked. It's the jock or a ho. This is the neighborhood to do so. Put on your best Ed Hardy shirt and do some bumping. - Yeah, just a little juicy shirt. So this replaced sort of the downtown flop house district, which is a part of Hollywood that fascinates me now before I get into the detail of that, like one of the reasons that I wanted to have you on is because you kind of put me to shame with your knowledge from like pre-1980. Like I'm 80 to like 2000, but pre-1980 - Right, I can't even hold a candle. And we're the same age. - So how did that era get in there? - I don't know. People do ask me that on a weekly outfit. - I am sure. - Why do you know about the 30s and the 40s and the 50s and 60s? People usually suggest their own answer. They say your parents must have been into it or your grandparents. And nothing could be further from the truth. They have no interest in movies or TV or music or the arts or culture or trash culture or any of it. My dad did use to sing me a lullaby when I was a baby that was a song from He-Ha. - Okay. - Got the theme song, but Archie Campbell, the hillbilly with the mustache did a song called You Were Gone. - And we're in Canada, which is? - This was in the mountainous woods. - This is pretty rural. - Of Canada. A rural route we were on and are our number one. - We're number one. - A rural route, number one. Site one, compartment 16 was the mailbox that we had to walk to to get our mail. - So I imagine that TV is how you sort of first sorrow this stuff? - Well, you know, since we grew up in Canada in the middle of nowhere, the only TV channels we got were CBC, which everybody gets in Canada. And then we would get CTV, the other Canadian network, if there was a storm, it came in for a little while. - And that's the one that was sort of parodied in video drive. - Was it? - Yeah, that's the sleazy sort of station that James Woods is supposed to work for. - Oh, really? - CTV television? - Oh, the city television was in Toronto. I don't know of CTV. - Oh, okay, it might be different? - Yeah, city television was, the guy who created the Canadian MTV, Moses Nimer, did much music, and he had this successful channel in Toronto called CTV, which still exists, but I was on the other side of Canada's. We never got CTV TV. CTV, there was only two Canadian networks. So here we had in America, there's ABC, CBS and NBC. And in Canada, you had two networks, CBC and CTV. CBC had always been around as a radio station from like the '30s. - Government owned back to the day's BBC. - Public broadcaster. And then CTV was the first private broadcaster, but it didn't come along to like 1965. - Right, right. - So we only had one channel in Canada for many decades. So everybody watched the same thing. So there's a lot of shared experiences and knowledge for people of a certain age, older than me. Mostly around hockey. - Right. - Hockey night in Canada. But anyway, so I didn't get to see anything actually on television as a child. Very little. We did get ABC, which had Saturday morning cartoons. - Right. - Spoken watching didn't have watched that. But in terms of like the famous shows that now I'm authority on like something from the '50s. Like what's my line or something from the '80s. Like late night with David Letterman. I never saw any of that. - Right. - But then when we got cable in 1992. - It's your 12. - I was 12. I think it just opened such a window of wonderment that I overcompensated and caught up by watching everything all the time from get smart reruns to rocking and bow ankle, to contemporary TV shows like the MTV Movie Awards, to the late night wars when Carson left. It was that summer we got cable. Carson left, replaced with Leno, Letterman. At that time, A&E was just rerunning old TV shows. - Oh yeah, they showed James at 15 a lot, which I used to watch all the time. 'Cause thus far what described is we're pretty much on the same exact path at this point. It's in '92 and A&E would show a lot of the short-lived TV shows too. Like "Police Squad" in these six-episode shows. - In the afternoon they had this block of like '70s and '80s detective shows like "Remington Steel" and "Quincey" yeah. And they would show two movies a day, usually. They'd show one in the evening and then maybe it was sometimes the same movie. They'd rerun it at midnight. And they also showed two episodes. For a little while, maybe just for a year or two, of late night with David Letterman from the early '80s would be one at 9.30 a.m. and one at 4.30 p.m. So I got to catch up and watch all of those and become a big fan. But I was over-compensating for everything I missed all these years that I'd heard about as I read "Mad Magazine" and "Love" but had no idea what they were actually satirizing until all these years later. - And like Looney Tunes and "Mad Magazine", people don't seem to understand how such great cultural artifacts of a very specific time and place that you're learning comedy from them but you're really learning an entertainment history. - Yeah, they're referencing Humphrey Bogart or Bob Hope's "Psychic" Jerry Kalana gets referenced all in Looney Tunes and these are obscure references or even a grown man in this day and age. It's interesting because you'll watch Looney Tunes as a child that you'll have no notion that these things are from the '30s or '40s. - Right, because it's a cartoon, it doesn't look dated. - Yeah, exactly. And then when I turned like 18, I moved to Toronto and I thought that everybody my age would be caught up to speed on show business and TV and movies. I found out suddenly I landed in the big city for the first time and I was some sort of like-- - Savant? - Yeah, I was an expert compared to people and much older than me but I just assumed everybody would now know what I know. - You were like, guys, didn't you do the pre-work? How are you enjoying things without having done this? - Yeah, I had no idea. I got an inkling in high school that I had a bit of a television pop culture obsession 'cause you drop a reference and nobody knows what you're talking to. Or somebody wants to do something after school and you can't because there's a re-run of dukes of hazard on you. - That's like, this is one they never show. - Yeah. - So, did you guys get TV got up in camera? - Yeah, TV Guide. We had locally originally one called Telescope which was on newsprint and it was kind of rectangular actually, it was taller and they sold it at Supermarket Checkouts. It wasn't TV Guide. TV Guide's brand was mostly in big cities. So if I were to have a modification to Vancouver you would see TV Guide with the famous red logo. But locally we had this one called Telescope and it listed all the TV shows on channels that we didn't get. - Just tantalizing, yeah. - Back in the days when TBS Superstation was something we had to pay extra for. Can you imagine an era where you had to truly pay extra for TBS? - And everything started on the five. - Yeah, 305, 235, 245. Late at night, Gomer Pile re-run some random three studious short, I love that. - So how did you use the telescope to know that stuff was coming on after school? - Well yeah, I really combed over the telescope every week with a highlighter. Although I mostly combed it for movies and they would have a little star rating, two stars, three stars, four stars. If it had a three star or up rating I highlighted it, taped it or watched it. And that gave me a big film education which I probably know more about film history than television, but that really served me well and it's funny now at my age I've run out of the famous movies to watch. Now I only have, you know, all I get to watch are like second string features from the 30s and 40s that nobody cares about. Even film historians don't care about it. - Right, right. - By the real poverty row houses. - Yeah, but when I go back and think about all the classics, like say The Thin Man or Bride of Frankenstein, all the major films throughout history, they all, I can trace back my first viewing to my parents' basement between the ages of 12 and 18. - Yup. - The telescope TV, CBC used to show a universal horror movie every night at midnight or a Paramount movie. And those film libraries today are very elusive 'cause they're not owned by turn-to-class movies. - Right, there's like 40 different companies that have a piece in these things. - Yeah, so I think you and I kind of were lucky to hit on the very last era where regional TV stations still existed. - Correct. - Weren't consolidated, media consolidation yet. And you could still see a random old movie at 2 p.m. because they had to fill time. - Exactly. - Or some old cartoons to kill some time. Now everything that's a rerun is Seinfeld or everybody loves Raymond. - Nothing's more than 10 or 15 years old. - Yeah, exactly. And there's nothing wrong with those shows but you do not just randomly see the monsters anymore unless it's on a specific cable channel that only shows the monsters. - You can't stumble upon stuff as easily as you could when you were kids. And this comes up all the time because you have access to everything you almost discover nothing. Because you only watch things you already know about. - Right, right, you have to specifically search for them. - And did you go to the library? I mean, I remember I used to go to the library a lot and there would be these sort of '70s books about horror movies, and I remember big horror originally. And there would be these kind of not that well researched but very, it would be, I guess it would be like looking at Wikipedia or IMTV now for people. Do you have to go to the library and get like several books and try to find sort of the truth in between the people? - Well, because of where we grew up, our libraries were not very good. But I do remember a lot of those film books from the '70s with the black and white photos immediately intrigued. What I actually had more of were like cracked magazines where they had super captions of like two guys like going through an Egyptian tomb and then they got some cheeky captioned like, where's the anchovies, you know? And you're like, this is horrible. But the photos-- - Famous monster stuff. - Yeah, but the photos were intriguing. And it's like, oh, I want to see that movie where there's a guy with a grease-pane mustache being chased by a monkey. - What is the context here? They would always, cracked was always showing pictures from, I walked with a zombie. - Right, I love that movie. - It was always, like every issue in that section of "Mantan" moment. - It's always on your hand. - And I walked with a computer. - So you're sort of educating yourself this way. - But I gotta say, that '70s era of film books, and nobody really talks about this. I don't think anybody's really put it forward as a thesis, but it's very important, I think, and very true in film history and television history. The '70s, the early '70s, all those film books came out then for a reason. It was the first generation of people graduating from college and university that had been raised on television. - Exactly, and they saw all these-- - So they became experts by watching "The Late Late Show" or "Chiller Theater" or "Creature Features" or "Million Dollar Movie," whatever it was called in there. - "Diling for Soles." - Yeah, yeah. And they became thumbnail experts. And they graduated from university college around '69, '70, and wrote the first wave of film books about Hollywood history and treating it as an art form. Yeah, exactly. So the '70s, because of that, you go to any library today, there were hundreds of movie books from the '70s. Some are good, some are bad. Some of them are mind-boggling 'cause you're like, the internet didn't exist. How did-- - How did you research this? - How did William Robert Parrish write an entire 800-page book about the RKO character actor inside of it? Wow, but-- - You talk to him or something, it's pretty remarkable. - Yeah, it's crazy. And that's when you started getting film clubs and midnight movies and all this stuff. - To make it like accessible to your listening audience, this is the school, the world that Leonard Malton came out of. - Yes. - It's the world that Robert Osborne came out of to a degree. So all the major film historians that came of age in the '80s and '90s started in that era. - Absolutely. - And it's an important thing. If TV had not been re-running old movies in the '50s and '60s, a lot of history would be non-existent. - Exactly, 'cause these kids aren't going, you know, some kids didn't go to the all day Saturday, Matt May's kind of thing, which was kind of drying up by the '70s. It was a very '60s, it was sort of the last-- - Well, on that period of that. - Free VHS era, and you can look at your TV guide and say, "Oh, they're showing that movie again, "this time I'm gonna pay attention." Yeah, exactly. - So you were very engaged and active. So we put, you grabbed an issue here from 1963, I think, November 2nd to the 8th, 1963? - Looks like it. - Yeah, and it's my favorite Martian on the cover. - My favorite Martian, Bill Bixby and Ray Wilson. Ray Wilson never came out of the closet, was married, but let's be honest, it doesn't matter, but Ray Wilson's pretty-- - Yeah, Mr. Hands-- - Clearly gay, right? - Also, he's one of those people that seems to have reached an age and then stopped aging. Like, 'cause he's my favorite Martian era, he's probably 35, looks 45, pretty much looks 40. - 45, forever, after. - You know, if they were doing whatever that celebrity boxing thing is now, you know where they get screech fighting Dustin Diamond fights against whoever it was, Paulie Shaw. - Hot bridges. - Yeah, if they had that in the '60s, I think it would be Ray Wilson versus Tony Randall. - Yes. - The pressy, gay, straight man. - Yes. - Sort of good at light comedy, but not really a funny guy. - Who would you, who do you think would win? - I think Tony Randall would win. - I'd get Randall. - It's probably fixed in advance through the agents, and I bet Tony Randall's agents were better, yeah. - Yeah, I would agree. - But they filmed the show right up the street from here on just off the Santa Monica Boulevard here in Hollywood at a place called Hollywood Center Studios. It was also called Hollywood Producers Studio, something like that. It was sitcom central. They made the monsters there, Adam's family, gets smart for a couple of seasons. My favorite Martian, The Burns and Allen Show. A lot of other TV shows too, like Lassie, Perry Mason. Just a ton of those film ways, presentations. We're done there. - Green Acres. - Green Acres, Beverly Hillbillies. What's the other one in that trifecta? - Howdy Coach Junction. - Howdy Coach Junction. - They made them all there. And actually, it's a cool lot, still functions today. And they do a nice job of honoring their history. There's a giant photo of Burns and Allen outside on one of the sanit stages that overlooks the whole soundstage. But they made my favorite Martian there. And you know, it's weird to think of TV sitcoms from 1963. Like who was the audience? 'Cause my favorite Martian is clearly a children's show. - It is, and I've talked about this a lot on the show. There's a parallel between it. My favorite Martian is a holdover from the '50s really. And I always say, the '50s didn't end until Kennedy got shot in the early '60s. But it's really from that era. But the '50s in the '80s, you had a parallel conceit of this, we have something magical in our house. We have to hide. - Right. - You had Bewidge, Dr. Majini, you know, my favorite Martian in the '80s. You had things like out of this world. Small wonder. - Small wonder, yeah. - Alf, the Harry and the Henderson show. And you know, I don't think they were, there was embedded context in them. But I think a lot of that was. I made this joke that if you took all those shows and replaced the magical character with a gay son, that's pretty much what the show is about for a lot of those things. - Right. - And so, you know, I don't know, they would try to make it as a kid's show. - And those shows seem to succeed in every generation. We seem to think that we're past that. Oh, we're sophisticated now. But all those shows, you just run it off in the '80s, 20 years after my super Martian. And today, you know, you got your, I made a crack on Twitter a couple of years ago where I dissed the guy who played Dennis on the head of the class. - Yes. - And I said, whatever happened to that guy. - He runs the movie. - And then, yeah. And then everybody tweeted me, "Oh, he's the most powerful man in Hollywood." - Yeah. - Retard. - Yeah. - And I went, "Oh, I didn't know." He produces all those terrible Nickelodeons that come with the world's worst laugh tracks. And they're extremely popular. - They are. - And so it's, again, it's like, we're not that sophisticated. For some reason, that kind of style of what you think might be juvenile, still manages to succeed a man. But it's almost more narrow-casted now because I think that, you know, families were probably watching my period marching together. Although, you know, there's the children's element, but it was certainly probably family viewing. I mean, I think that in the '90s, what happened was the three-camera format became less about families and more about workplace sitcoms or things like friends. And so, the more traditional sitcoms instantly started, narrow-casting to teenage girls, or tween, which weren't a thing. - Right, right. - So they got more and more baby-ish. And you actually saw that on a lot of shows, like, I always use pumpkin rooster as the example, because that show started as an issues show. It was a dark issues show. I mean, it's not NYPD Blue, but it was a family-dark issues show about, you know, child abuse, and they did some very heavy, special episodes. But then, when it got canceled on NBC and became a syndicated show, it's now a cartoon for babies, basically. And you can tell by the audience laugh track, because it's clearly an audience entirely of nine-year-olds. - Oh, they sound like kids. - They sound like kids. And the humor is very juvenile all the time now for kids. And there's a few shows, different strokes of the same thing. - Definitely. - When they came back, they become more and more childish as they go along, which is an odd thing. And now they just kind of fit away with the first four seasons. - You can't even never happen, yeah. - Right. - And now all the shows are that final season of those shows. - That's very interesting. - There was a punky rooster cartoon as well, right? - It's punky rooster. - I remember that, basically. - Very strange. - I always theorized that someone had pitched this show about a magical elf, and the network said no, and then the guy just pulled out of his ass like, "And the girl's punky rooster!" And they're like, "So, because there's nothing to do with punky rooster." - Well, there was a, my favorite Martian cartoon once. One ABC Saturday morning superstar special. Like a 90-minute animated, my favorite-- - Is it filmation? - It's filmation did a lot of the adaptions that lose some of the company. - Yeah, it may have been filmation or Hanna Barbera, but I'm not sure which. It may even have been Rankin Bass. All three companies animated for that ABC Superstar Saturday morning movie in the early '70s. They did one that was a bewitched one. They did one that was, is Tabitha the spinoff of the bewitched? - Yes, Tabitha. - So they did one called Tabitha and the Clown Family, which is sort of a ripoff of Josie and the Pussycats with a bubblegum band except the drummers and clown makeup and it's all rotus, and it's rotus scoped. It's terrifying. - Yeah. - It's terrifying. I think that one's Hanna Barbera, but that one's got all the songs and, oh, my lord. - There's a show from the '80s called Little Clowns of Happy Town, have you ever seen that? - No. - It was on ABC and it was produced by a producer who had cancer and was hanging out in the cancer wards. Like the children's wards and clowns come in and amuse the kids so the guy goes, you know, let's do a cartoon about clowns that kind of help kids die, basically. - My God. - But not that dark and it's really bizarre. - Really bizarre. - How long does that last? - Not even a season. - Wow. - It was gone by mid season. - Wow. - Really warm. - So people are watching this stuff. There's really only three networks. They might have the local channels and it's mostly family viewing, this issue from '63. Did you watch any stuff? Well, you didn't really get a lot of stuff, but did you watch things with your parents? - Not really, I mostly watched in my parents' basement to escape. My parents were viciously fighting most of the time. I'm trying to think, my dad mostly watched hockey. Hockey Night in Canada, nobody's written the proper book about it. I tried to before I left Canada to write the oral history of hockey night in Canada. I had a book deal with Penguin Books, fell through, Harper Collins picked up the ball, fell through again, mostly because of legal reasons. CBC did not want this sort of-- - The story again now. - Salacious tell all. I simply just ripped off Tom Shales's "Live From New York" and applied it to this show "Hockey Night in Canada." And it's hard to explain to an American audience how important "Hockey Night in Canada" was 'cause there's no correlation. Like I would say-- - It's not like Monday Night Football. - I would say Monday Night Football, but it's not literally everybody in Canada watched "Hockey Night in Canada" because everybody got the same channel, only got one channel, and it started on radio in the 30s, shipped it to TV in 1953, and remained on the air every Saturday during hockey season to this very day. So it's the longest running program in broadcast history, the second largest running TV show in TV history, after "Meet the Press" and started in '48, "Hockey Night in Canada" on TV in '53, but it started on radio in '31. - Right. - Still going. - Right. - And at all these seminal iconic things, the logo was iconic, the theme song was iconic, the uniforms that the broadcasters wore in the '60s, '70s, and '80s, and part of the '90s are iconic, and everybody in Canada knows that. So I watched that show with my father. - And if you want to commit a crime in Canada, do it during "Hockey Night in Canada," and no one would do it. - Right, right, right. - You could do it. You could just walk into the banks. - You could, you could. Spinner Spencer, who was a hockey player for the Toronto Maple Leafs, I think he did rob a bank at one point. - Nice, during a game, no one had it. - I wish. - He had a giant afro. The '70s are the best area if you want to watch hockey, or hockey night in Canada. - That's true of all sports, I think. - Well, in hockey, it was before the rules changed where you had to wear a helmet. So you could still have a giant afro and just be, have it flown in the wind as you skate down now. - Grow your round phone. - And Spinner Spencer had one of the best white sky afros. Well, I don't have to qualify that as hockey, but he had this great afro. His father-- - He'll take the singer from the MC5, this one. - Yes, definitely. This actually goes back to my concept of being isolated and watching TV. Spinner Spencer's father lived in, I think, Prince George, British Columbia, north in the Woodlands, where the Caribou Rome can. And it's very isolated up there, too. He wanted to watch his son's game, like his debut with the Toronto Maple Leafs, but they weren't showing that game that night on his channel, they were showing a different hockey game. So he went to the local TV station with a shotgun and demanded they switch the feed to the Toronto feed so he could watch his son, yeah. - And I feel like hockey's so revered that the station was fair enough. - They actually made a TV movie about Spinner Spencer and this is all dramatizing the movie. It was a made-for-TV movie on the CBC in Canada in the 90s. I remember watching it, it was great. It was the first movie directed by Adam Agoyan, who was now a well-known indie director who did Exotica and all kinds of stuff, you know. Contemporary of sorts of Cronenberg or that dish. - Right, right, right. - Anyways, I don't know. That's what I mostly watch with my father was hockey. - Right. So your parents are probably like, why are you into all this weird old stuff? - They never noticed that I was into any of that old stuff. - Are you on the show? - I know I had a brother, but my parents never noticed what I was into. My mom still doesn't know what I'm into. - Did you stay out of trouble? - Did I stay out of trouble? Trouble's a subjective term. - I mean, I was into all this stuff compared to my sister. I asked because my parents didn't care what I was doing 'cause they didn't have to be involved 'cause I wasn't in trouble, basically. - Oh, no, I mean, I sort of guess, compared to my brother, I was in trouble because he didn't do anything. He just stayed in his room for 20 years. And my mother dressed him until he was 30, I think so. - Excellent. - So the idea that I would dress myself at the age 19 made me quite a fad, yes. Exactly, I didn't get a high school diploma 'cause I was kicked out of high school in the 11th grade. So maybe there's an argument to be made that I wasn't a good child at it. - Did you watch Degrassi? - Everybody watched Degrassi, Canada. Again, it was a CBC show. - That's all you had. - I remember it from very early on. - Kids of Degrassi Street. - Yes, I remember Kids of Degrassi Street in 1984. And I remember it very well because it was filmed so oddly. It was always kind of soft-focused, waggy. And I had this weird kind of like gentle piano score underneath. That's what had this weird vibe. And I remember Joey Jeremiah, I'm afraid from the very beginning, 'cause he always wore a hat in the dust right in Kids of Degrassi Street. But I didn't grow up in Toronto where the thing took place. - Still seems exotic. - Yeah, well, it didn't seem exotic. I just couldn't relate. I was like, what the fuck is this? Like, why is it foggy? - Right. - Then I moved to Toronto. It wasn't foggy. - Did you watch Buckshot when you were a kid? Was that in your area? - Never, never, never. - Okay. - What's Buckshot? - Buckshot, I did an episode with Ophira Eisenberg who grew up, I think, in Western Canada. - And she said she used to watch the show Buckshot in Canada. That was just some really bad cowboy puppet show in Canada that no one has ever heard of. - I was at Ophira Eisenberg's first stand-up taping. I knew her from Toronto's stand-up like in 1999. We were on a lot of the same shows before she moved to America. I had completely lost contact with her. But I remember her doing her stand-up special and that the guy who, they did three stand-up specials in a row, thank you. They did three stand-up taping in a row and the guy who was keeping the audience warmed up in between each taping was getting way bigger laughs than the three people taping in the shows. - Two people taping in specials? - Fear is one of the people taping in specials. But the guy who was warming up the audience between each act was Russell Peters. - Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. - But I never saw Buckshot. - Yeah. - Kids in Jurassic Street, sure. And then in Sex Education in junior high, they showed us episodes of "The Grass of Junior Hot." - Yes. - The AIDS one? - I don't know if they showed the AIDS one. They showed the one where the guy has to carry the egg around and not break it. - Yes, egg baby. - Egg baby, yeah. - And I think it's spike or someone gets up. - Definitely spike, definitely spike. - So that show was very exotic to me because we were getting all this Canadian stuff on PBS, which is what "The Grass of the Yard" on, and on Nickelodeon here, which was mostly Canadian content. - Did Nickelodeon also show you can't do that on television? - It did. - Which is very Canadian as well. - Very Canadian. And they picked it up after the first season, which was a very different season with Rusebuzzi. - Here's a piece of trivia, which nobody has ever told you and nobody ever will again. - Okay. - Less slide. - Yes. - The actor who played barf, barf, just, and most of the adult characters. - All of the adult male characters. - He got his start in a comedy team in Canada in 1963 with Rich Little. - Really? - Rich Little and Less Slide. - I didn't even know Rich Little was Canadian. - Yeah, of course, yeah. - They were a comedy team in Ottawa in the early '60s. - I would say Less Slide is the talented one in that parent. - Yeah, but if Less Slide had lived longer and done more, maybe you would disagree. - That's true. Rich Little is one of those guys that we just got inundated with down here. - Yes. - And every single one of his impressions was Richard Nixon. - Yeah. - He said it with someone else. - You know, I was watching a YouTube clip of an impressionist named Guy Marks. - Yes. - You know what that is? - Yes. - Seeing a bunch of sitcoms in the early '60s. The Joey Bishop sitcom. I think he's in a western called Rango with Tim Conway. He did a spot on a Pericomo show, I think. I watched it on YouTube. It's excellent, but he does all the hack impressions. He does Bogart, Kagnie, Boris Karloff. These were the hack Sullivan. - He didn't do Sullivan, but it was that kind of thing. And, you know, the equivalent of a Christopher Walken impression today, or Jack Nixon impression in the '80s. But he does them better than anybody I'd ever seen in my life. It was eerie how good they were. And I wondered if maybe he was the guy who invented them because they're so good. - Yeah, people are doing an impression of his impression. - Yes, and Rich Little kind of just did impressions of other people's impressions. - Yes, absolutely. - Adeptly, but they were all kind of ones that had already been done. - Yes. - And yet he continued to, do you remember the TV movie? Of course you do. - It was Christmas? - No, the Late Shift of Bill Carter's Late Shift. - Yes. - And they got Rich Little to do Carson. - Yes. - And he can do the voice, but they put him in a white wig. And it looks like Rich Little. It's got a big fat head. - It's like albino, Rich Little. - Oh my God, I mean, took takes you right out of the movie. - It absolutely does. Yeah, he hasn't, he's still alive. - Rich Little's still alive, he lives in Las Vegas. - You don't see him, okay. - His son or his daughter drowned, maybe five years ago. So he's laying low and his wife died around the same time. That was tragedy remarried. He is good friends with John Voight. - Yes. - He was at a screening of Midnight Cowboy here in town about five years ago. And it was gonna be introduced by John Voight. And John Voight starts talking about Obama complaining about whatever. And then he invites his very special friend up from the audience and it's Rich Little. - And they just go on a right, right? - Rich Little. And John Voight did 50 minutes of right-wing anti-Obama jokes before a screening of Midnight Cowboy. Failed to mention Midnight Cowboy. - Yeah, for some reason I'm Facebook friends with Arch Hall Jr. - Arch Hall Jr, of course. - And the choppers. - Exactly. - He got, he posts the craziest right-wing rass ever. It's fantastic. - Well, he doesn't seem like the kind of guy that would have been, was ever intelligent to begin with as much as we love him and love his filmography. - Wild Guitar. - Wild Guitar, which takes place right down the street here. - Absolutely. - Capital Records building, The Walk of Fame. First time ever came to Los Angeles, the theme music to Wild Guitar came on my iPod as I was walking down Vine Street past the Capital Records. - And you're like I'm staying. - Yeah, yeah, Wild Guitar. - So what brought you here for the first time? - As an adult, and I think it was the same year as that John Boyd screening. It was for the Turner Classic Movies Film Festival. I saw the ads in Canada and wanted to go, but it was very expensive. - Yeah. - And my girlfriend at the time suggested that I apply for a press pass to cover it for WFMU. So I did, very smart girl. - You were already writing these articles. - I was already, I'd already written a popular article about David Letterman and Woody Allen to W. - And the Joey Ross one, I think is the first thing I remember. - Sure, that was a very popular one. So I decided to cover that for the TCM Festival for them, came to Los Angeles and realized that everything is here. Everything I've ever enjoyed is from here. Music, movies, television, art. Anybody I've ever admired comes through here if they don't live here. I went for a little walk in between movies up Sunset Boulevard and paid homage to the Bullwinkle statue, which has been removed, but blew my mind that it was still there at all. Why would it still be there? - When the Myra Breckenridge spinning woman used to be across the street, but it was gone by the time I got here. - Right, right. And they used to paint over the Bullwinkle statue with a different, thank you. They used to paint over the Bullwinkle statue with a different fashion, like a different style sort of suit to correspond with the billboard that was across. - Well, they had a billboard for some swimsuit line across the street, and it would change the fashion on it every few months, so whenever they did that, they repaint the Bullwinkle statue in the new fashion. - I'd like to talk to the guy who did that job. - Yes, yeah. Jay Ward was very influential on my thinking. They used to show one of the great TV stations of my youth in Canada was called YTV Youth Television. It was like a Canadian Nickelodeon. - Yeah, they brought that up. - But they reran a lot of stuff late at night, and on weeknights, I'd watch it during the summer break when I was off from school. Two in the morning they'd show it, get smart, and at 2.30 they'd show Rocky and Bullwinkle. - Which is a great pairing. - Great pairing, and in fact, it's one of the things that got me interested in comedy writers, in the credits there was the same name in both shows, a guy named Chris Hayward, who was a show runner on Barney Miller and the monsters, and clearly must have been a very funny man if he's credited on both Rocky and Bullwinkle and Get Smart, which are two of the hippest shows, which is not saying much, but two of the hippest shows of the 1960s. - They managed to be reflective about culture, which was pretty new at the time, and actually, for someone who loves Cracked and Mad Magazine seems to fit, but without being snarky. - Yeah. - Pardon me, I'm having a big mistake. - You could enjoy it on multiple levels. You didn't have to be hipped to laugh at it, and you could be six years old and loved both, or you could be a grown man with a university education. - Like, I remember the fractured fairytales, for example. Those were sort of twisted takes on fairytales, but ended up reinforcing the point of the fairytale, better than sometimes the original take. - There was a moral, a not heavy-handed moral too. - Exactly, and so it was brilliant. - And great voice actors, you know, I remember one of the first comedy records I ever bought when I was a teenager was this record, Stan Freiberg with the original cast, and I listened to it, and I loved it, because I recognized all the voices, but I didn't know why I recognized the voices, and I realized that two of the voices were the voices of fractured fairytales, Dawes Butler and June Ferre, who were both on Rocky and Bowling Club, I think, uncredited, or at least Dawes Butler. - June Ferre was Rocky. - She was Rocky, the Flying Squirrel, and Natasha, and she was the voice of every woman on that series, so there was lots of, you know, princesses and fractions. - Did you see the Boris and Natasha movie with Dave Thomas? - I never saw it, but Brent Butch, who's the most successful Canadian stand-up comic, who has the only successful Canadian sitcom of all time, Corner Gas, is in that movie. - What about King of Kensington? - King of Kensington, well, comparatively speaking, I mean, yeah, it was the only successful Canadian sitcom for so long, but now, Corner Gas is so eclipsed. - Corner Gas is incredible. - And it's so a thousand times more successful that now King of Kensington seems unsuccessful. - Really, really. - Keep in mind that in the '70s, we had one channel. - Right. - You know, two. We had one channel that showed new episodes of King of Kensington and another channel that shows the reruns of King of Kensington, yes. - Oh, that was on for like 10 years or something, right? - I don't think it was on that one. I think it was on more like six or seven scenes. - I always think of it as... - But if you go to Kensington Market in Toronto, where that TV show took place hypothetically, there is a statue in the part of Alalaxman, the King of Kensington, and furthermore, if you go to ACTRA, which is the Canadian version of SAG, that head office has a giant oil painting of Alalaxman, like within a robe that overlooks the whole office. - People in the States would have no idea who that is. - He was the desk surgeon on Kegney and Lacey, that was the only claim to fame in America, and he was in the Louis Mal film Atlantic City. - It's like, I look at it as like... - Thank you very much. - Thank you very much. - It's like the British equivalent would be only fools and horses, is the way that people look at. - I'm not familiar. - It's the way the people Canadian sort of think of King of Kensington, I find that. - There's an episode though, I never forgot that Erve Velliches is in, and he jumps on the back in like a grocery store on Alalaxman, as I recall, big laughs from the studio audience on that one. - People love a little person. - And of course, Mike Myers, a child actor, Mike Myers, before he was Wayne Campbell on SNL, it's in I think two episodes of King of Kensington. - And I found out about King of Kensington from Twitch City. - Oh, sure. - Which was kind of mine. - They referenced it a lot. - He plays the King of Kensington in the first episode. - Oh, that's hilarious. - And it's murdered. - That's hilarious. - King of Kensington market. - I have to go back and watch Twitch City, yeah. It didn't last, it had a lot of push behind it because it featured, you know. - Don McKellar? - Don McKellar and Bruce McCullough. - Yes. - Who, the kids in the hall, when I was growing up, and still to this day, are one of the biggest things in Canada, and certainly one of, it's unfair for me to save the biggest, but I think I could make a reasoned argument that they were the biggest thing in the history of Canadian comedy. That's a bold statement for people who grew up on SCTV, and the second city, Saturday, and live connection. But for my generation, nobody was bigger than the kids in the hall. They only ever had a cult following really here, a big one, but in Canada, they were mainstream. That comedy was mainstream in Canada, in the late '80s and throughout the '90s, and the biggest thing. The next day in school, after a new episode of Kiss in the Hall, it's all anybody talked about. And to this day, all five of those guys have carte blanche to do whatever they want in Canada. - Absolutely, and I love SCTV. It's maybe my favorite sketch show of all time. I think it's infinitely better than "Saturday Night Live." But despite the Bob and Doug Mackenzie thing, was not no overtly Canadian show. It pretended to not be Canadian a lot. Some probably by design on the NBC seasons, but not so much earlier from what we got there here. But "Kids in the Hall" was unapologetically Canadian. You knew it was a Canadian show. - Right, well, I just knew it was a hilarious show, and up to that point, no Canadian comedy I'd ever been exposed to was hilarious. In fact, I don't know, it's all objective, but I don't know that I had seen a Canadian comedy that I had found funny at that point. I had certainly seen John Candy movies and thought they were hilarious, but I mean something that originated in Canada, we had a horrific show that I used to reference in my stand-up act just as an easy, referential laugh. - Right. - I was an amateur comic at the time, and it was an easy, referential laugh. Was this show called "Smith and Smith." And it was also known as the Smith and Smith comedy mill in a different season. - Variety show or a sketch show? - It was a sketch show that was not funny. It was very broad, and it was interspersed with gospel songs that were not jokes in the middle. - It's like Canadian he-haw. - I don't think that there's anything compared to, but the guy who created it and starred in it, Steve Smith, you would know being a TV junkie. - Yep. - He created a character on that sketch show, which 15 years later became the most successful, syndicated Canadian program of all time, despite not being good. - Red-green show. - Red-green show. - Yeah. - So, Red-green was invented for this show, Smith and Smith, and Red-green, Steve Smith, was Smith and Smith and Smith's comedy mill. So, that show started in the late '70s, and it aired all through the '80s. Nobody liked it, nobody ever liked it. - What was an institution? - It wasn't even an institution. It was just like, ah, what the fuck? Why is this on again, you know? And some people remember it, and some don't. If most Canadians, if they saw a clip of it, would remember, but it was so bad that very few people retained the name of it, even. - They glocked it out. - I used to do this joke on stage. I'd say I used to write for the Smith and Smith comedy mill, and maybe a third of the audience would laugh, but that third would laugh really hard, and the other two-thirds would sound. - I also remember Pizzar at that time. - Pizzar was a co-production candidate in America, air on Showtime, and they showed topless nudity on Showtime version. In Canada, there was no topless nudity. - They'd reshoot the same sketch with toplessness. - Right. - It was so bizarre. - Right, John Viner was American, Bob Einstein was American, but there was a tax break incentive. The '70s, Canada tax shelter incentive, they came up to Toronto to shoot it, and that's where Super Dave Osborne was invented, was for that show. And YTV, when I was saying they used to rerun Rocky and Bullwinkle, and get smart, they also reran Bizzar at midnight on Fridays in the '90s. - The Continental version, or the Canadian version? - The Canadian version. It was a children's channel, YTV. So it was, you know, they're late nights. - 'Cause it was almost-- - But they also showed the young ones, the British show. - You got that in MTV here. - Yeah, yes, Prime Minister. This was a children's channel. They're showing this stuff. - That's a pretty good education. - They would show great movies on Sundays. I remember seeing Lord Love A Duck starring Roddy McDowell. - That's in a Tuesday Weld. - Yeah, Tuesday Weld with that Pervy, seeing him in the Mink clothing store. - What a weird movie that is. - Yeah, it's a fun movie, a great Neil Hefty soundtrack. Well, it's written by George Axelrod, the great George Axelrod who wrote Seven Year Itch, and a little success, 'Spoil Rock'. Actually, a lot of great plays, maybe. Anyways, YTV was incredible in terms of their programming. It was pretty mishmash, but they showed Bizar reruns. - Bizar was like-- - Literally, not, well, both Bizar reruns and reruns of Bizar, yeah. - Bizar reminded me it was almost like a Canadian Benny Hill. - Was sort of like that. I never found Bizar funny. I loved the theme song. Super Dave Osborn also was a co-Canadian American production in reran, Odd Nausea. Probably still does rerun ad nauseam in Canada today as a Canadian content thing. I never enjoyed it. I never liked the laugh track. I always liked Bob Einstein, but I never liked the Super Dave show. - There was another Canadian producer from the '80s that I used to watch a lot. Speaking of Get Smart, which is a show called Check It Out. - Of course, yeah. - And that aired on USA Network here, but was very Canadian. - Yeah, well, it was created for CTV in Canada. Again, that's secondary network that I'm talking about. Check It Out was one of many attempts to recreate the success of King of Kensington. All through the '80s and '90s, there were Canadian sitcoms, but none lasted more than a season. Check It Out ran for three seasons. It started on Adams, Get Smart with a mustache. - That's the manager of a supermarket. - As a manager of a supermarket in Calgary, not even Toronto in Western Canada, all just terribly contrived. It looked like it was shot on videotape. - It was, yeah. - With like a show. - Yeah, and the interesting thing about it, the reason Don Adams is in it, you know, this sort of star, at least people still remember him from Get Smart. - From Tennessee, Tuxedo. - And Tennessee, Tuxedo. There was nobody else in the film or in the TV show that was of note or famous, but the reason Don Adams accepted this gig to star in a terrible Canadian sitcom was because he was a terrible gambling addict, and so he took that gig in Canada strictly to pay down his debts. - Still silver, still silver style. - Yeah, exactly, exactly. Every single, that's the reason that show apparently went to third season, 'cause Don Adams had not paid off his gambling-- - See, that's ponies. - The debts he owed were to the mafia, so it was quite imperative that he pay off these debts. - Would you say the worst thing the mafia ever did was give us a third season of Check It Out? - Check it out, yeah. It's right up there. It's right up there. But I watched it, I watched every week on CTV, at my grandma's house. That was, again, that dark, pre-cable era in my life where I just watched whatever it was on. - As it was on. - Yeah, bizarre, check it out. Trying to think of Smith and Smith Comedy Mill. I don't know if it's on YouTube, but it's truly terrible, but it had gospel songs that weren't comedy in between the sketches, and I once asked Steve Smith, Red Green, when I met him. I said, you know, Smith and Smith Comedy Mill, you guys sung on it, why? - Yeah. - He didn't have a funny answer, but he did talk in his voice and he said, well, at that time, the Canadian television awards, they didn't have a comedy category, just a variety, and so in order to have variety, we had to have a musical component. - But that guy's the wealthiest man in the history of the Canadian television. Lives in Hamilton in some-- - Man's gigantic guy. - He owns Hamilton. - Well, it's like the young one's story where the reason they had musical guest songs, I'm sure you've heard, is that they got a bigger budget as a musical variety show. - Right, right. - So, it was a sitcom that just-- - Madness, yeah, madness was on the damned. Every episode they'd have a musical act completely with no context whatsoever in this sitcom, 'cause they got extra money. - Well, that's cool, but if they could also get away with it because anything could be out of context in the young one. - The original context. - An Alexi sale monologue, the subliminal flickers, you know. - That show changed my life. - I loved young, the young ones, and when I used to have hair, I used to grow my red hair up to kind of mimic Vivian. - Vivian? - Yeah, eight Edmondson. - We always spent that time in jail for abusing people violently. - Did he really? Did he really legit? - No, but it's such a violent character. - Yeah. - Just we just got hit by. - Yeah. - Kicking the hallway in. - You know, all those British comics from that era ended up writing novels. I remember reading Hugh Laurie's novel before he was known in America. PBS from Spokane, when we got cable, they were showing a bit of Brian Laurie in 1992. I became addicted to it. I became the biggest Steven Fry fan in the world. I bought a copy of The Hippopotamus. - Yep. - I bought a copy of The Liar. And then I guess Hugh Laurie tried to follow in his footsteps and he wrote one novel. Steven Fry wrote many novels and his first one is probably his best, The Liar. But Hugh Laurie wrote a book called The Gun Cellar and it's got the best opening three paragraphs of any novel I've ever read of that era and then the rest of the book shit, yeah. - I was really in a red dwarf at that time. - Right. - From New Hampshire PBS. - Right. - We would get that. We would air in a block with red green and red dwarf. Which I think someone at that PBS station didn't wash the shows but was like red and red perfect. - Right, right. - Makes perfect sense. - Right, right. - Very, very weird. - That's very funny. - So we didn't get too much into this issue here but how did you start to- - We gotta get into this issue. - Into the issue. How did you start to hunt down some of these shows? Because in a, I mean movies, yes, we have video stores. We can find movies. It was a little harder when we were teenagers. I remember taking two buses in a train to get a copy of a racer head. - Right. - But TV shows, if they weren't hearing, you could read about them. But there was really, absolutely no way to get them. - I am a real fraud. I'm a YouTube baby. I really am. As soon as YouTube came out, don't even know the year. But I was one of the first people to like discover YouTube I think. I would send the link. I was like, have you looked at this website and watched every Ernie and Bird Sesame Street sketch from the '70s on YouTube is the first thing I ever watched. And just hunted everything down and still do over the course of the past few years. And people think I'm much older than I am when I meet me because I know about Gary Moore. I've seen every episode of I've got a secret and watched my line. But it's strictly because of YouTube. I didn't catch any of this. - Do you use the most modern technology to seem really old? - Yeah, isn't that interesting? And I'd, same with research too. Like, I mean, how did anybody research history without the internet? I don't know. I would never have been able to be one of those guys in the '70s goes to the stacks or the microfiche and research things. I don't have the disposition for that. I like just doing it in my underwear at home between porn sites. It's so much easier to-- - You can do it at the library too. It's just a different issue. - Not in the '70s. - Right, but I was going to the microfiche and I would get the old grindhouse movie listings. I'd have to pay to get a print out and all that stuff. It's ridiculous. - I always had a general knowledge for some reason that these things existed. Like, it kind of always had an understanding of who Steve Allen was, who Jack Parr was, even though I had not seen them. I don't know where that came from. I picked it up, I guess, from Mad Magazine spoofs and things like that. I had a good tactile mind for absorbing that information. But it was really the internet that accelerated everything for me as like an eventual expert. - When did you start interviewing these people? - I started interviewing old comedians. I did a zine when I was still doing stand-up. In 2003, I briefly did a photocopied zine. The zine boom is already over, but I decided to do it and defy the internet. And I was collecting records. All through my teenage years, I was collecting LPs and I would collect comedy records. And every thrift store in America and Canada has records by three comedians that nobody is familiar with. Woody Woodbury, Rusty Warren, and Von Meter. These three are in every thrift store, every junk store, every garage shop, but are not household names. How could they not be household names if they're in every store, the most common records. And I was like, well, who are they? Why are they? So I managed to track down Woody Woodbury somehow. - With the internet? - With the internet. And interviewed him about his career. And it was very good. And people said, oh, you should do more of that. And I never did. - Right. - And then three years later, I was writing for WFMU online and I wrote this piece or started to about this guy named Murray Roman, very obscure comedian who was kind of like a poor man's Lenny Bruce. - Right. - As Fred Willard would maybe describe it this past weekend, it would be Lenny Bruce after taxes. Murray Roman was just the poor man's Lenny Bruce, but he put out this bizarre comedy record. I was so fascinated by it. It was like psychedelic, it had a kaleidoscopic cover. - Right. - And he would deliver his punchlines and it would echo with reverb, like psychedelic reverb at the end of the jokes. This is so weird. Tommy Smothers from The Smothers Brothers wrote the liner notes. - Right. - So I asked him, who is this guy Murray Roman? And he started telling me the whole story. This was at a show. So a few months later, I followed up and contacted Tommy Smothers. I said, I want to write a piece about this guy Murray Roman. Can I interview you? We spoke, but at the end of the phone conversation, he said, you know who would know more about this than me is Steve? Have you talked to Steve yet? And I go, Steve? He goes, Steve Martin. - Yeah. - And he used to write for The Smothers Brothers and so did Murray Roman. Two hours later, my phone rings in Vancouver, my shitty apartment, and Steve Martin on the line. So that was the start of interviewing these guys. The first guy was Woody Woodbury. Several years later, the second guy was Tommy Smothers, a couple hours later. - Steve Martin. - With Steve Martin. So I kept that because original research is better than relying on pre-existing research. - Absolutely. - You get the new stories out of people. So I started that around 2006 and only really picked up my pace with it around 2009, 2010, and discovered that there's this whole circuit of comedy in the '40s and '50s that is undocumented. There are lots of books about vaudeville. There are books about the comedy club age. There's no books about comedy, specifically in the '40s and '50s when the mafia controlled nightclubs. And I thought that was really intriguing. And so that's kind of what I've been studying. - A lot of those mafia comics showed up on television. - Sure. - They were the character actors. That was almost the feeder into that world for a lot of things. - Definitely, definitely. Well, there was also a genre that is long lost, but in the late '40s, throughout the 1940s, if you were a sketch comedian, it wasn't on radio and it wasn't in vaudeville and it wasn't in nightclubs, it was on Broadway. And it was what they called the review, spelled specifically R-E-V-U-E. So if you ever see review R-E-V-U-E, it's often misspelled. - Right. - That specifically referred to sketch comedy. - Which would have been like "Hell's of Poppins," probably famous. - Yes, exactly on Broadway. And all the actors that did that, they were not necessarily nightclub comedians, somewhere and somewhere. But they were everybody that populated the shows like "The Honeymooners" and "Milton Burles" variety shows. And then all the sitcoms in the '50s and '60s, nine out of 10 of those guys were guys that worked in these sketch comedy reviews in the '40s. Anyways, this was an entire undocumented era as far as I could tell, at least not properly done. So I decided to zero in on that. It's always good to find a niche that other people aren't always also doing. - Right, absolutely. So the interesting thing to me about, you know, you obviously have some cachet now in that world and you have access to things that you would never had access to in "Can and I" and even with YouTube. - Yes, yes. - So there are probably shows like in this TV guide that you could get a hold of or that you know people who can get you archives. - Right, right. - Do you take advantage of that? - I really don't, you know. UCLA has a great film and television archive but you have to set up appointments. Often you have to prove why you're doing it, like that you have credentials. There's of course the Paley Center Television Academy, which I had a membership to and I went once and it cost me a couple hundred dollars and expired by the end of the year. But I have gone there from time to time. Right now in this TV guide we're looking at this great ad for Steve Allen, 11, 15 p.m. weeknight. - Zing. - Zing, exclamation point. - He's on the phone. - K-D-K-A, TV2. This is the syndicated Westinghouse Steve Allen show. There were so many different versions of the Steve Allen show, all cold, the Steve Allen show. But this '60s one, I guess he had two syndicated ones, first half of the '60s and the last half of the '60s. Oh, maybe three actually, but I don't think of it. The late '60s one features the TV debuts, plural of Albert Brooks, and you can watch some of those at the TV Academy. I did go and watch some of that. - It's very weird too that because television was disposable, especially at that time, you would get the history of like '50s to even '70s shows for these people that were around all the time. It's a little bit difficult to parse out because you get the Steve Allen show, the new Steve Allen show, the Steve Allen show. - Well, the thing is, if you were to look at this, TV Guide right now at 12 o'clock, the listing says Johnny Carson, which was never the name of the show. - That's not the Tonight Show. - It is the Tonight Show. - Is it the Tonight Show? - That is the Tonight Show. - '63 he was doing the Tonight Show? - Yes, that's the first you've been doing it for a year. - So it's the 4th, November 4th, 1963. And you're pointing out that they're calling it Carson, they're not calling it the Tonight Show. - Yeah, in TV Guide, it's listed as Johnny Carson. And then there's also things that just say Steve Allen, but that was not actually the name of the show. Same thing in these early, in the '50s and '60s, there's listings in TV Guide that just says cartoons. - Right. - Children, who knows what it was. Heckling, Jekyll, Bugs Bunny, who knows? - 'Cause these were made locally, and you know, there wasn't necessarily the sort of corporate branding where they would say, if you list this show, you have to call it the Tonight Show. It was kinda like whatever the guy in the local office called the show. - It's difficult for historians, especially if they're not doing their work. When it comes to Steve Allen, Jack Parr and Johnny Carson, the first three hosts of the Tonight Show, the show had shifted names. So originally, before the Tonight Show went national in 1954, I think. It was just regional in New York, and it was hosted by Steve Allen on WNBT, which became WNBC. It was called "The Steve Allen Show" regionally, and then it was called "The Knickerbocker Beer Show," 'cause it was sponsored by Knickerbocker Beer. - I would hope that's why it was called. - Yes, and then when it went coast to coast, it became tonight with an exclamation point. It wasn't the Tonight Show. Then it eventually became the Tonight Show, the Tonight Show with Steve Allen, but then in the TV Guide, it would still say things like Steve Allen. - Right. - Or it would say the Steve Allen Show, when it wasn't called that. - It wasn't even called that. In 1956, when Steve Allen went to Sunday nights, he was still hosting the Tonight Show part time, his new show was called "The Steve Allen Show." - Right, right. - So it becomes very confusing. Then Jack Parr takes over, and it's called "The Tonight Show, The Tonight Show, Jack Parr." Again, the TV Guide listing just as Jack Parr. - 'Cause people didn't need to fact Jack. I mean, they weren't making TV Guide specifically as a historical record. - And then sometimes it would say Jack Parr Show, which was the name of a show Jack Parr had before he had the Tonight Show called "The Jack Parr Show." And then Steve Allen had a syndicated show in the early '60s that was called "The Steve Allen Show." Then he had another syndicated show called "The Steve Allen Show." - Well, it's like, you know, Phil Silvers is one of my all-time favorites, and Sergeant Bilco is called "The Phil Silvers Show." - Right. - It's not Sergeant Bilco. It's the Phil Silvers Show, but sometimes it would be listed in the TV Guide as Sergeant Bilco. - Right, and it was renamed "The Phil Silvers Show" for syndication, when it originally aired was called-- - You'll never get rich. - And we'll never get rich. - Right, and then there was the new Phil Silvers Show. - But you're right, we're looking at a listing right now in TV Guide that says Bilco, capital letters. - Not even Sergeant Bilco. - Yeah, just Bilco. - Just Bilco. - Hyphenated Phil Silvers. - Which is one of my all-time favorite shows. - Sure, of course. - This particular issue, I've noticed, the original owner has made some notes in the margins about what they would watch. - He didn't want to watch Bilco, but at the same time, he did want to watch "Sea Hunt." - Yes, and to tell the tree. - So all at the same time on 7 p.m. on November 4th, '63. - It's a Saturday evening. - Which is, is that shortly before or a year after the president was assassinated? - August 6th, 1962, was Maryland, so November, yeah, year after. - So at the same time, 7 p.m. a year after the president was killed, he could watch a show called "Hollywood and the Stars" about Al Jolson. That sounds good. - Right, and focus on behavior. - Focus on behavior, oh my god. - Channel 13. - No two alike, Lloyd Humphreys, University of Illinois, and James Gallagher Institute for Research on Exceptional Children show how they are developing new methods of measuring human capabilities. John G. Darley is host. Well, it's no coincidence that the original owner has not marked that down as something. - No, I does not want to watch that. - There's an episode of the Thin Man TV series. There's an episode of Mr. Ed, "Huckleberry Hound," which I would probably watch. - What's your stance on Mr. Ed? Again, one of those magical things you have to keep a secret show. - I never liked Mr. Ed. - I don't either. - You know, I've watched the weird ones, like the Maywest episode, and the episode where Mr. Ed becomes a beatnik, but it actually has the exact same laugh track as my favorite Martian, literally. You can recognize there's, she's called the, uh oh woman. Do you know about that? - Yes. - Where she shows up in all these sitcoms, it's the most distinctive mark on the laugh track. That's how you know they're using the same laugh track, because right as the laughter tapers out, you hear this woman go, "Oh, yeah." And it's in Mr. Ed, it's in my favorite Martian. I never really liked Mr. Ed, but the guy who starred as Wilbur, Alan Young, has a deep history that nobody knows about. - Right. - Unfortunately, there's things that, you know, will end up on our tombstones. Bobcat Goldpuede talks about, doesn't matter how many great indie movies he makes. - Hot to try. - It's gonna, he's gonna have the police academy burden on him for the rest of his life. - Three weeks of work when he was 22. - So Alan Young, the same thing with Mr. Ed. Before he did Mr. Ed, he had this entire career almost 20 years, maybe 15. He started in Canada on CBC Radio. He was Canada's first star comedian. Nobody knows this. - I didn't even know he's Canadian. - He's Canadian. He started in Vancouver. Toronto courted him. He had his own show called The Alan Young Show. It was a comedy show. Before Wayne and Schuster existed on CBC Radio. Eddie Cantor's manager picked up the CBC from New York one night and heard the show, thought it was funny, hired him as the summer replacement for the Eddie Cantor Radio Show on NBC in 1939. In fact, Alan Young, Wilbur is still alive. He lives up on the hill. - He's really, he's having his 90s, right? - He's 95, yeah, he lives in the motion picture home. But, so we did this radio show on NBC, a summer replacement. You'll really find this interesting actually. Throughout the 1940s, Cantor's summer replacement. He'd never been to New York before. He gets all these New York Jewish comedy writers assigned to him doing jokes about bagel and locks. He's just some Canadian guy. - Scottish boyum from Vancouver. - Yeah, he looks a bit like Edward. - But one of the first writers on that show was Sherwood Schwartz in one of his first gigs, the creator of Brady Bunch in Gilligan's Island. The guy who wrote the theme song and was the band leader on The Alan Young Radio Show. Well, Sherwood Schwartz was the writer. Was a guy named George Weil, W-Y-L-E. He wrote the theme song to Gilligan's Island. - Yes. - So Sherwood Schwartz was on that show working. George Weil who wrote the Gilligan's Island theme song was the band leader. One of the character actors on The Alan Young Radio Show. Doing a character named Rup, I can't remember the full name. I think it's Rupert. Rupert up-diked the third or wealthy rich snob. - I guess I wondered what that back is. - Back is, yeah. - Doing Thurston Hal the third, 20 years earlier on The Alan Young Radio. - Interesting, interesting. - So anyways, that was Alan Young's career before he was on Mr. Ed. This radio show was critically acclaimed. It was pretty funny. It had a lot of great character actors. Hans Conrad is in it. Arnold Stang is in it. And it lasted for several years. Then when TV came in in the late '40s, one of the very first comedy shows done from the West Coast was The Alan Young Show. It was the first comedy show to win an Emmy. Nobody remembers this. And in fact, they also won a Peabody Award as like a intelligent comedy. - It's really quality. - Yeah. - And then it's Mr. Ed. - But he's only known as Wilbur from Mr. Ed. - I always wonder how much of television history, sort of free 1980, was dictated by a chance. What I mean to say is that not all shows were kinescoped. Not all shows were saved just somewhere. And the ones that were weren't necessarily the best shows. They just happened to get saved or survived for whatever reason. And so those are the people that go, "Oh, classic shows like Mr. Ed." And so there's probably five other better shows that you never see. - Right, right. - That's really that. The internet has proved who was a liar who wrote books in the '70s. There's the guy who produced What's My Line for Goodson Toddman, not Goodson or Toddman, but this other guy. He wrote a book about the show in the '70s where he says, "This happened and that happened." And this person stumbled over the lines. This person fell down. - No, no, no, yeah. - Yeah, and now Game Show Network has rerun them and they're all on YouTube, you watch it. And they completely contradict this guy's stories. - Unlike in the butt from the newlywed game, which is an actual clip? - Right, right, right, right. I love Game Show depravity. - Yes. - There's actually a nice little clip reel somebody put together on YouTube of some of the weird moments from What's My Line. And I don't know if you've ever watched What's My Line, but I love the chemistry of the panel. Henry Morgan is one of my favorite comedians for '40s and '50s. He's a sardonic, witty, sarcastic, not to be confused with Harry Morgan. - Not Harry Morgan of "Black's Magic." - Yeah, but Henry Morgan, the funny satirist, had a very sardonic wit and Bennett Surf, who was another panelist on What's My Line. He was a publisher at Random House, fancied himself a comedian, but he wasn't funny. - No. - He wasn't funny. He was corny. He was like somebody's uncle during dad jokes. So on this one episode of What's My Line, it's his turn, he has to introduce the host. And he's doing it in this long, loquacious manner. He goes, "Our moderator, John Charles Daly, "was recently up in the polka nuts. "And when the bottle came in, "Henry Morgan cuts him off and goes, "How long is this story gonna go on?" And Bennett Surf gets all flossed. He goes, "Ah, Henry, may I finish?" And Henry Morgan goes, "I wish you would. "Is this great moment of live television?" People didn't treat themselves that way. - No, no, no, no. - If he's TV, it was very polite. - Yeah, it's very polite and congenial and they were, it was like, you dress up, should be, you know, it was like, we go on an airplane, we dress up. - There wasn't a lot of arguments. - There's another clip on that same clip reel of What's My Line, kind of weird moments, where a guy charges the stage. And what's my line, if your listeners remember, there was a mystery guest segment where they put on blindfolds? - Yes. - There's this one segment where everyone puts on their blindfolds and while they're blindfolded, a man from the audience charges the stage and tries to take over the show. They drop off the sound, 'cause it was live TV, so people couldn't hear what he was saying. He was like yelling something at the camera and you see these like security guards come on stage and lead him off. And everybody's blindfolded and confused about what's going on. It's another weird moment, yeah. I don't know, outtakes are fascinating to me. - Especially at that time, too, because it was, you know, people didn't, hadn't learned how television worked on either side of the camera, really, that person. - Right, right, right. - People weren't as hip about show business. - Right, absolutely. So when you would get like a loony showing up on the show, they kind of went above and beyond to know how to do that. - Well, looking at this TV guide, again, still at seven o'clock, I'm coming up on 7.30, one of the things that this TV guide owner has decided to watch is to tell the truth, which, look at this, it's on channel two, nine, 10, 12, 27, and 56 simultaneously. - Yeah, so it was regional, the TV guides would often be in a larger region than the networks were. So you would have, so you would have like nine ABC affiliates all under the same TV guide in a certain region before they got really different, you know, different. - And early in those days, there were also independent TV stations that were corresponding affiliates from more than one network, where they'd show half CBS shows and half NBC shows. - Which people could not believe today. - Yeah, it's not bizarre, like I didn't even know that until fairly recently. - You're almost like insurance brokers. - Yeah. - And I can get you this company or this company. - Right. - Wherever you like. - So they're showing to tell the truth, which is produced by the same people who produced what's my line. - Similar show. - And I've got a secret. Four people on the panel, they're supposed to have a good chemistry to tell the truth. It was a very famous parodied up the wazoo in Mad Magazine and things like that. Will the real so-and-so please stand up? - Yes, yes. - Hosted by this guy, Bud Collier, who was a born-again Christian. He was the voice of Superman on radio in the '40s. - Which introduced Kryptonite and Jimmy Olsen, I think, on the radio show, yeah. - Kryptonite's not from the comic. - He's not from the comic. - I did not know that. - And I believe that the flying was from the TV series and not from the comic as well. He was just able to leap very high. - Oh, really? As I recall, the Superman radio starts off with the sound of wind as if he's flying, but Bud Collier, Hosted to tell the truth, other claim to fame, voice of Superman. - Right. - And he used to end every episode with God bless. - Interesting. - Yeah. - That was his "Have your pet spay or neuter?" - Yeah, and it wasn't controversial. The cast in this episode, actor playwright Aussie Davis. Look at that. - A lot. - Being defined as a playwright, Aussie Davis, the great actor. - Who you've all know from Bubba Hotep as JFK. - Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Joins panelist Peggy Cass, Tom Poston, and Kitty Carlisle. - Tom, very early Tom Poston, too. - Well, Tom Poston. - Until the New York stuff. - That's right. Yeah, as the hilarious dopey custodian on Newhart. But Tom Poston, his claim to fame, was the Steve Allen show. - Okay. - Oddly enough. Steve Allen got his Sunday night show, which was actually called the Steve Allen show for real. In 1956, Steve Allen, it was a scripted program, which is what differentiated from the tonight show I was doing. It was put on the air by NBC to compete against Ed Sullivan. - Okay. - Who dominated Sunday nights on CBS. So they created this show, the Steve Allen show. And 'cause it was scripted, they hired a cast of comic actors. - Right. - And among those comic actors, and their kind of like first big break was Tom Poston. - Okay. - Louis Nye, a guy named Gabe Dell, who'd been a Bowery boy, and Don Knotts. - Right. - Don Knotts and Tom Poston got their big break at the same time. - From Steve Allen. - From Steve Allen. And then Tom Poston went on to do a few movies, and was a regular to tell the truth. - Yes. Interesting. - Kitty Carlisle was the wife of Moss Hart, the famous playwright, and collaborator of Georgia S. Kaufman. - And Andrew Martin used to play her on S.C.T.B. - S.C.T.B. - S.C.T.B. - Right, right, right, right. - She had a very distinctive laugh. - Right, and they parodied her on the Simpsons as well. - Yes, yes. - Come on, everybody, let's play the game. - Yes. - Yeah, a very broad way, socialite, kind of just bubbly, lots of pearls around her. - Right, right. - Peggy Cass was like very brassy. She was sort of like a perennial game show panelist. - Yeah. - She's in every game show panel. I don't. - But what she was famous outside of that. - Yeah, I don't have any other credits for her other than that. - That's what people are watching on a Saturday night. And what about on the fifth, or anything that struck you the next day? - Let's see. The fifth. - Oh, it's a Tuesday. - It's Tuesday. - That's a Monday night. - Okay, so this we're in the morning, so I see that Davian Goliath aired that morning. I would definitely watch that. - Yes, our cookie is a fascinating man to make. - Did you watch that documentary? - I haven't seen it yet. - I've only seen the trailer. - I've read some pieces about him, and he's very cagey about Davian Goliath. And I remember hearing, I, at one point, wanted to write a book on him in the late '90s, and it was very difficult to get any information. And he apparently kind of stopped, my understanding was, he kind of stopped doing interviews in the '70s when sort of the college underground comics drug scene started kind of really enjoying Gumbi. And he would get these people that would come up and be like, "Yeah, man, you know, the cookie." And he was like a very straight lace guy. - Oh, I heard the total opposite, 'cause there's this documentary called "Gumbi Dharma," all about how he left his family in the late '60s to go to Haed Ashbury and do LSD. - So maybe that's why you wouldn't talk about it in the '90s. - Yeah, and the YouTube trailer that's out there is all our cloaking talking about his LSD trips and how important they were to it. - Interesting, okay, so no wonder, maybe I was, there was a gatekeeper who was capping that story out. - Yeah, maybe, maybe, there was a PR person in play who can't let him know that the Gumbi creator-- - Was drop an asset. - Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. There's a photo of him, Frank Zappa didn't do drugs, but there's a photo of him with Frank Zappa in San Francisco. - It's hanging out? - Yeah, just hanging out. - Makes a lot of sense. - Yeah, Gumbi was a seminal. There was a Christian cartoon that aired on TV in these syndicated independent TV stations called Jot. J-O-T, have you ever heard of that? - I've heard the name, but I don't know the show. - My God, Jot is amazing. It's, each short is about five minutes, so I'm not sure if they use them as filler or if they actually short a half hour of them. - Right, they might've been a rapper on "Gumbi." But it is the most artsy, experimental looking animation, very late '50s, early '60s, and it's Christian, each one tells a Bible tale, but the art is mind-boggling. The aesthetics are incredibly, exactly. The cartoon modern style. Okay, Tuesday night, November 5th, 1963, well, new sports weather. There is a show on channel 13 called Talk About Typing. - Yes, which is probably fascinating. - We'll actually see typing, we'll just talk about it. - Yeah, today's topic is envelope typing, and look who hosts it. - Carl. - Carl, no last name. - Carl, the Talk About Typing guy. Can you, that sounds like an adult swim show now. If you had a guy named Carl talking about envelope typing for 10 minutes, they would be like, "This is genius." - There is a carpentry show I found on YouTube from the '50s. I posted it on double the FME a few years ago, 'cause it's so entertaining. I forget what it's called, but it's like a Mr. Fix-It-Chop show. And he teaches you how to build a saw horse, and it takes 18 minutes, and it's just him sawing and nailing. Like, he doesn't even talk while he does it. - 'Cause again, they're sort of inventing the genre at this time. The editing, why would you do that? - It is just this blissful experiment in the mundane. It's quite incredible. - And at seven, this person's watching my three sons, which does not surprise me, but the show that intrigues me, which we get no explanation of, is camera goes to college on channel five. It's seven o'clock on the Tuesday. - Yeah, there's no write-up on what that is, because I guess everybody knew-- - Everyone would know. This camera goes to college. - Camera goes to college. Yeah, I have nothing to add to that. - Lost to the sands of time. - My three sons, my friend Ernie is the name of the episode, chipping his new psychic Ernie. Oh, they're jumping the shark here. Ernie, chipping his new psychic Ernie are lost in the woods in this episode. Stanley Livingston's brother Barry becomes a regular as Ernie Thompson. - Yeah, and that show was on for like 12, see, look at how, that's not show went well into the shaggy hair, bell bobs, and it was very, very jarring when you would see those back-to-back, like a '50s, my three sons in that. Like a psychedelic, same with dragnet. When you'd see those weird '60s ones, that kind of never really late '60s ones. - My favorite ones, yeah. - They very rarely would show those, and they're not the dragnet people remember. - Right, well, it's the dragnet I remember, 'cause Harry Morgan is the psychic and that not to be confused with Henry Morgan, Harry Morgan. But yeah, my three sons and Beverly Hillbillies and a few other sitcoms of that era, when they entered that hippie era, and then they started introducing hippie characters, they're like, there's protests in the background, it's just so weird, no. - Very, very strange. - There's always a joke in there, are you a boy, or are you a girl? - Yes, yes. - Laugh, track laughs, and then the a-ho woman comes in and goes, a-ho. - And hey, man. - Yeah. Of course, I'm sure you must've talked on your podcast before about the "Gomer Pile" episode in which Rob Reiner is a hippie, who sings "Blowing in the Wind" with "Gomer." - Yes, and I also love the "Car 54" or "RU Show," where this is more of a beat-neck thing, but it's very hippie, where Joe E. Ross goes undercover in a bank as a hippie. - Wow. - Yeah. - There is a beat-neck episode of "My Three Sons," but the writers of "My Three Sons" were so square that the beat-neck episode is like from 1965. - Right, right. - Well passed, we beat generation. - The way "Dobe Gillis" was well treaded at that point. - Yes, yes. Let's see, what else? "Rude 66" is on. - Great show. - With a special guest, our J. Carol Nash, one of the most prolific character actors of all time. - One of my favorite episodes of that show is "What's in the Lon Chaney Jr." - It's the famous one, Peter Lori Lon Chaney and Boris Carla, right? - Yes. - Yeah, great one to watch on Halloween. There's an ad on the same page for "Rude 66" that is drawn by Al Hirschfeld, the famous Broadway-curricaturist. Martin Miller, the co-star of "Rude 66" became the co-star of "The Dragnet Spinoff" Adam 12 in later years. - Adam, Adam 12. - One Adam 12, one Adam 12. I love Adam, "Living in Los Angeles" gives you a whole new appreciation for Adam 12. All the most of that is shot in the valley. - And most of the dragnet is shot in Los Angeles. - Someone told me I looked like him one time. Was it Ken McCord? - Ken McCord, yeah, your haircut looks a little bit like Ken McCord. - Yeah, people would also say, you'll like Mad Men because of your haircut. - And did you? - No. - Oh, okay. - I don't see what the correlation with you. - I don't either, I don't either, it seems very weird. - Uh, you know, I don't necessarily prefer bald actors, but Larry David does love "Sergeant Bill Cope" because it stars a ball-manning glasses. - Yes. - The Red Skeleton Show is on at eight o'clock on November 5th, 1963. I never liked Red Skeleton, I never found him funny. Another person who was on TV forever. 20 years, 20 consecutive years. Sometimes at the top of the ratings, sometimes at the bottom, but always on the air. Again, most of it filmed not far from here. CBS Television City, where they get the prices right today in Bill Maher. - It's on a Melrose or something? - Beverly and Fairfax. - Yes. - And it was the state of the yard, where television concurs when it was opened in 1953. In fact, it was a great CBS special based on the launch of that facility with all the stars, and they show you all the behind-the-scenes cameras and the curtains that have CBS logos on them. - Because until the early '50s, most television was produced in New York, and the movies were produced in Los Angeles. And it was, was CBS the first one that moved their production out? - Yes, it was the first one to have a specific facility devoted to it. So there had been other TV shows done here, but they were done from theaters that were meant for live shows. - It was like a special event, when they do like Los Angeles Week or something. - Well, Alan Young did his show here. Ed Wind did his show on Vine Street, 1735 Vine Street, theater's still there. It's the same theater they did, the Jerry Lewis talk show in in 1963 that renamed it the Jerry Lewis Theater, but it got canceled after nine episodes so they had to rename the theater something else. - We renamed it. - Became the Hollywood Palace, which is a great variety show that was sort of like a competitor to Ed Sullivan between '65 and '70s. - It was a great episode of that, hosted by Frankie and Annette from 1968. - Oh wow, oh wow, that sounds fantastic. - It's very gummy, kick-out. - Yeah, all of those Hollywood palaces are great. That show came to TV in a pinch because Jerry Lewis got canceled so quickly and so suddenly and unexpectedly, and it was such an expensive show, they lost so much money on. They suddenly had, they needed to do something super cheap, super fast, for prime time Saturday night at 9am. So they just did the Hollywood Palace, which was we'll just hire a celebrity to read off cue cards and introduce a band that already has a song and a comedian that already has a five-minute set. - Which is what television's become now? - Yeah, yeah, yeah. But that theater's still there, 1735 Vine Street, and they did some early TV shows there in the late '40s in Los Angeles. But yes, you're right, most of TV was in New York in the 1950s and slowly moved it way out here. Red Skelton had his show at CBS Television City. - Red Skelton always struck me as sort of a terrifying bruiser. I don't think he had a reputation, but as a kid when I would see him on TV, he looked like an old man that would punch you. - Yeah. - I don't know what it was. - Yeah, I think that's true in real life too. He was an alcoholic of star resorts. Also, just like Bud Collier ended every episode of his TV show saying God bless, was considered a Christian family man. The tabloids had to always had a scandal ready to go and somebody had hush money to pay them off. - Right, right, right. - Red Skelton was famous in movies with MGM in the '40s. He was the height of mediocrity in comedy, the biggest stars are always average. They're not the funniest, they're not the worst. - They're always the average. - Milton Burl, but even today, like Dink, Cook, or Kevin Hart, or Russell Peters, and that's not to slam any of them. - But that's how you appeal to a wife, right? - That's exactly right. So that's why Red Skelton was on the year for 20 years, 'cause he wasn't that great. It was good enough, yeah. - The less specific you are, the more people you'll appeal to. - Red Skelton did his show for two years up the street where the Chaplain Studio is now at La Brea and Sunset. It's where the Chaplain Studio always was. But Red Skelton owned that concourse, I think from '60 to '62, removed his operations over there. It was Red Skelton Studios. But yeah, I never, ever liked him. And then in the mid '60s, they tried to hippify the Red Skelton Show. They made a deal with Brian Epstein, the guy who had been major in pressario for the British Invasion, and they did an exclusivity deal with the Red Skelton Show that he would introduce a new British Invasion band every week, like these animals, the Dave Clark Five. - Which was clearly in the wake of the Beatles at Sullivan. - Exactly, exactly. But they had some like grungy ones on there too, like the Yardbirds, and it's Red Skelton saying, please, please welcome these darling guys from England, the Yardbirds. - It's the Troggs. - Yeah, exactly, exactly. So there's that weird thing, but I never liked this guy. - It's a bizarre culture clash where, you know, we didn't really get teenagers to the '50s. They kind of didn't exist, you were a child and then you were an adult. And television took a little bit of time to catch up to that. And the guys who were used to appealing to what would have been teenagers before they kind of had a name in the '40s who were really young adults, 18, 19-year-olds, now don't know what these things are. It was really people downplay that sort of generation gap, but it wasn't just that there was an age difference. This was a whole group of people that kind of didn't exist. - Well, there's certain film studios, as I mentioned, Frankie and Annette, AIP, the studio that made those beach party movies and coincidentally also had their base of operations where Red Skelton would have his base of operations in the Chaplain studio. They were there from '58 to '60 and then Red Skelton was there from '60 to '62. AIP had this mandate that they would only make movies that would appeal to teenagers because the film studios never made any movies. - And that's how they made a ridiculous model. - The zillions of dollars, yeah. The teenagers would go to the drive-in to see people that were their same age. - They were the ones with time and money. - Yeah, and he would use the word teenage in the title. I was a teenage Frankenstein and I was a teenage werewolf for good reason, it was all marketing, but they were very deft, very smart. - And those AIP movies we got inundated with and we had this on television. - Sure, yeah. - Those were the packages, like the theater packages. - Yeah, when I got cable in the '90s, there was a channel called the Speed Channel. It was all about fixing cars and stuff like that, but every Saturday they showed a movie. - Last drive-in? - Yes. - Bruce Dern would host it. - Bruce Dern, the lost drive-in. - The lost drive-in, that's right. - And that's actually, I'm so young, that was my introduction to Bruce Dern. Was that show, he was hosting it. - Mine was the burbs. - Oh yeah, maybe I'd seen the burbs, maybe I'd seen the burbs. But you know, Bruce Dern would do this like hamlet soliloquy in a empty abandoned drive-in and hold like an old speaker like it was a Yorick and say the lost drive-in. - Yeah. - Nobody comes here anymore. Used to hear all the crows, now there's just nothing. - I have a few episodes of that as well. - Yeah, and then he would introduce a great AIP, drive-in movie about cars or teenagers and I fell in love with all the AIP stuff, and still to this day I love. - Most people now would probably see them, or the genre on like MST3K. - Yeah. - Probably the most people. - And then later AIP did all the black exploitation movies in the '70s. - Then came out of AIP before he founded New Concord. - Right, Roger Corman, a lot of people did stuff for AIP, and all the beach party movies too. - Yeah, absolutely. - McHale's Navy is also on in this TV guide shortly after Red Skilton. - Did not like. - Had a lot of good actors in it. Joe Flynn, who played the authority figure, the guy with the hornroom glasses, great character actor appeared in a lot of those bad, but charming Disney movies in the late '60s, early '70s that the young-- - Candle shoe, Jody Foster, was it any of them? - Yes, yes, yes. - The cat from outer space. - Whose name am I trying to remember? Goldian's husband. - Oh, yeah, the computer were tennis shoes. It's Kurt Russell. - Kurt Russell. Joe Flynn is in a lot of those Kurt Russell Disney movies. Ernest Borgnine said that he only accepted the role in McHale's Navy for one reason. He'd gone to somebody's door for some reason, like a neighbor and a child answered the door and said, "I recognize you, I recognize you, are you from?" And Ernest Borgnine started rattling off his credits. I did the movie "Martage." No, that's not it. - Kid would know that. - Dude, I did the movie "The Wild" and I said, "No, no, the kid said I know who you are." And he identified him as like some TV star who wasn't Ernest Borgnine, somebody else. - I should do TV. - Yeah, Ernest Borgnine decided he should do TV because nobody recognized him from, they recognized him but didn't know his name from movies. - We overheard the Kurt Russell Disney story, the famous story about, so when they found, Walt Disney dead, it was clutching a piece of paper where he had written Kurt Russell on it. - Oh, no way. - No one knows what for. - Wow. - Imagine he was saying we're gonna do another movie and get a Kurt Russell, but he was like 13 years old and they were like, you know, when we found him dead, he just had a piece of paper with your name on it. - That's incredible. - That would freak me out. - I did not know that, had Kurt Russell already done child acting? - He had, yes, he had done several Disney movies. - Oh. - And then Elvis movies as well. - Right, that's fantastic. I did not know that. - And then he was a professional, he got signed as a professional baseball player and had given up acting, got an injury and then went back and back. - I like all of those live action Disney movies that are like pre-74. - Right, Pete's Dragon. - Before Tim Conway fucked it up. - The no-mobile, before the Apple dumping main. - Yeah, before that. And I like all the ones with Kurt Russell because I don't know who the person was in charge of the casting department, but they cast nothing but brilliant character actors. All those movies are full of recognizable faces and they're all solid. Whether it's Kathleen Freeman or William Shallard or Joey Ross, they all appear in these things. - They're almost like store brand, mad, mad, mad world. - Right. - But just on that respect, yeah. - Right, right, right. Michael's Navy, this episode also, of course, has Tim Conway and has Carl Ballantine. You know anything about Carl Ballantine? - The name's familiar. - He did a presentation house act in the late '40s, long before Albert Brooks or Steve Martin ever did the same thing. Carl Ballantine did the bad news magician act. - Yes, okay. - Yes. - And that was his claim to fame. - He was on car 54, are you? - Yes, Craig. - He was also on night court, one of his last rules, where he played sort of a TV magician from the '50s. - Oh, I do not know. - Who Harry had as an inspiration to getting into magic, but who was actually just now an old con man. - What has happened to Harry Anderson? - Harry Anderson owns a comedy in Magic Club and he's moved back to New Orleans and where he grew up. And he owns just some like magic shops and stuff like that. - He liked the Ray Combs of New Orleans. - Exactly, exactly, but I don't-- - Still alive, yes. But that episode specifically was very interesting because he was basically playing sort of a Creskin type character or like a Harry Blackstone. - Creskin, another Canadian American co-production in the '70s. Creskin was all over Canadian TV. - Yes. - And so was ravine the impossibilist, who was a hypnotist, who never had a career here, who was from Australia. His entire life, he just toured back and forth. - From Australia and Canada? - No, just across Canada, playing recreation halls, you know, and people always love a hypnotist, audience, disability. - Absolutely, sure. - But I think he briefly had a TV show. His records are very common in thrift stores. - Hypnotist records? - Yes, quit smoking, put it on as you go to sleep. - Oh, actually self-hypnosis types. - Yeah, yeah, a lot of those. But he had the classic look of the hypnotist with the goatee that comes to a point. - I think he meant to see the classic look of an evil hypnotist. - Yes, yes, yes. But he didn't build himself as a hypnotist. He built himself as a impossibilist. - Okay, not a mesmerist. - Ravine the impossibilist, but he and Creskin were very popular, for some reason, in Canada in the '70s and '80s. - Canada loves magic. - I don't know. - Isn't Tom? - I don't know what they love. - Isn't Tom, oh, the '70s magician. - Thank you, thank you. The rainbows and mustache. Oh my god, it was so '70s. He's a '70s magician at several variety shows. Doug Henning, Doug Henning's Canadian. - Well, I don't remember getting Doug Henning as a child where I grew up, but-- - I believe he was Canadian, I may be wrong. - Sounds like a Canadian name. - Yes. - All right, well, we should wind up here, but let's see, before we go, what else I can discover in this team. - Let's top it out at you here. - Well, you know, I'm really amazed by the level of simulcasting going on, like multiple channels with the same things. You don't say, which is an interesting game show that had a lot of celebrities on it. Hosted by a guy named Tom Kennedy, who was a great game show host who eventually took over Password Plus from Alan Ludden. His brother is also a game show host named Jack Nars. - Okay. - And A-R-Z, and he hosted a show called Now You See It, Now You Don't, and was the announcer on one of the Steve Allen shows. - I'm intrigued by this Ed McMahon show because Ed McMahon fascinates me as a human being. - Missing links. - This is missing links, and Tom Posten, again, I assume this is a panel game show. - Missing links, he was a game show of some kind, and look at this, seven keys, hyphen Nars. - Yes. - N-A-R-Z, that's the brother of Tom Kennedy, yeah. - I wonder if their parents were proud or felt like they could get something wrong. - And then, and then Pete and Gladys, starring Harry Morgan. Everybody we've mentioned is coming together here. - They're all coming together. - Missing links, Ed McMahon, that may have been, I could be wrong, but that could have been his game show, which actually originated from Philadelphia, where he got his start in Philadelphia. I don't know what region this TV guy's from. - I don't know either, I'm not sure. Usually says in the top masthead. - Philadelphia, so that's the regional show. - So this is before Ed McMahon, I guess, joined Johnny in the tonight show, or maybe simultaneously, these might be a reruns. - He was from Lowell, Massachusetts. - Ed? - Ed McMahon originally, yeah. - I know he got his start at Philly TV. - I often say this, but there's several, he's from not far from where I live. And there's several like very 1960s donut shops still there. - Oh yeah. - When you walk in, it's just tables full of Ed McMahon. It's like 40 guys that look like Ed McMahon in there. It's great. - Other headshots, autographed in the wall of Ed McMahon. - No, no, we have Killer Kowalski headshots. - Oh, that's nice, I like that. I do love '50s and '60s wrestling footage. It was all over TV. - Yes. - Again, cheap, simple, easy. - But it would be like, we're like midget wrestling, and it would be much more gimmicky. - Midget wrestling was invented in Canada by a hustler in Montreal. I forget his name. - Of course. - But there was this in Presario wrestling. A lot of the big wrestlers through history have come from Canada. - Rowdy Rowdy Piper. - Rowdy Rowdy Piper. Brett Michaels is more recent in his family, and they had a famous thing in Calgary called the dungeon where their abusive father raised all these famous wrestlers by beating the shit out of them in the dungeon. - You know, you got a super hero origin stories have to happen somewhere. - Andre the Giant came from France, from Europe, through Canada, wrestling Canada first, before he became a star in America. - He's maybe apocryphal, but I think he's from the same village in France as Herve Valishes. I've heard that somewhere. - Wow. Wow. - Which would be like, what's going on there? - That's interesting, I have to search that up. - Yeah. Midget wrestling was invented in Montreal, and Andre the Giant used to wrestle midgets frequently. I do want to mention maybe my favorite thing in this entire TV guide is a special, a documentary on Wednesday night, November 6, 1963, called World Girls. And it says, "The mysterious creature called woman "is given more than just the eye "in this worldwide exploration of her charms, "aspirations, and dilemmas." - You could never say that to him. - No. - Hey, baby, I'd like to give you more than just the eye. - More than just the eye. - Yeah, that is-- - That sounds pretty fascinating. - A lot of these news documentaries are completely lost to time, you know. - Yeah, no one kept those. None of these were from prosperity. - Oh, my favorite writer is also on an episode of David Susskin's Open End, who was a public television talk show, which was tried to be more erudite. David Susskin was a Broadway producer who fancied himself a talk show host. He was not a good talk show. But he had a lot of great guests. This episode has Norman Mailer, Nelson Alagrin, William Goyan, James T. Ferrell. But Nelson Alagrin is my favorite writer, and if I rip off anybody, it may be Nelson Alagrin. He wrote two famous books that probably most people haven't read, but they would know the names. The first is called The Man with the Golden Arm, it became a famous movie, starring Frank Sinatra and Arnold Stang with a great great soundtrack by Elmer Bernstein, which is a book about heroin addicts in Chicago in the late '40s and very bleak and very good. His other book is where this famous phrase came from. His other book is about Chicago street walkers, prostitutes in the late '50s, and the name of that book is Walk on the Wild Side. - Right, right, right. - And that's where that phrase comes from. - Right. - So Nelson Alagrin wrote these two books. He hated the movie Man with the Golden Arm. He didn't get along with auto-premager. He thought he was sanitizing his book. - Yeah. - And surely he was. Frank Sinatra playing a heroin addict. - Yeah, I'm not buying it. - Arnold Stang, Milton Burles Sidekick, who's hilarious, playing a junkie addict. - Yeah, it's not the same. It's certainly not the same. - Great soundtrack. - Could you ever read a heroin Ellison's Glass Teeth books? - Yes, I love them both. That's, back to what we were kind of talking about beginning before we finally wrap up, is that those sort of came out of that '70s television film Historian era. - Sure. - But those were so ahead of their time in that they weren't historical records. They were taking the next step of, I mean, those books seemed so what we would see in the '90s. - They're historical record now by accident. Because they're compendiums of his weekly column. So it was about what was coming up on TV next week, what he had seen on TV last year. - It's like Harlan Ellison's TV Guide. - But he's got, you know, Harlan has one of the all-time great attitudes, and it always comes across from his writing. For years, when people wrote about TV, it often didn't have much of a bite to it. - Right. - Although surprisingly, these old TV guides are often very caustic. - They're very editorial. I think it's totally anonymous. - Yeah, you think it's gonna be puffery promoting things. But they are tearing, you know, you'll read TV guides from '65 and the fall preview will say, "Will this finally be the year "where they finally make television for adults to watch?" - Right, right. - No, it isn't. You know, and they'll go off tearing it apart. - Yeah, the anonymity of TV Guide really makes some true stark in these old-- - Of course, Cleveland Armory is the famous writer from TV Guide who got his byline in here. There was another guy named Richard Gaiman, G-E-H-M-A-N. He was known as the King of the Freelancers. - Right. - Because between 1950 and '70, he wrote something ridiculous, like 10,000 freelance articles in "Cosmopolitan," "Red Book TV Guide." He goes through a Jerry Lewis, well, he didn't go straight. He shadowed Jerry Lewis for this biography called "The Kid" in 1964. And the last chapter is all about being backstage at that. Jerry Lewis talk showed about-- - Right, that was getting canceled. - Mm-hmm, it's well worth reading, Richard Gaiman. And Jerry Lewis called him "The Beards." That was his nickname. - Excellent. - 'Cause he looked kind of like ravine the impossible, Richard Gaiman. - And he has cameos in a few of the '60s Jerry Lewis movies. - "Cinderfiller." - Yeah, you might even be in "Cinderfiller," "The Beards." And then I guess one of my favorite things is I'm looking at this TV Guide as the morning schedule or the afternoon schedule. I miss regional TV when the weatherman had to dress up as a sea captain and introduced pop-eye cartoons. So in this child's slot, November 8th, 1963, there's Captain Jim's Popeye Club. - Yes, which we know exactly what that is. - Yeah, a bunch of kids on a bleachers, probably getting some canning prizes. Are you ready for another cartoon? - Here's another pop-eye. - And then Channel 12, I don't know if you've talked about this on your podcast before. - Uncle Pete. - Uncle Pete. Do you know all about it, right? - Uncle Pete has come up, yes. Uncle Pete has come up several times. - Again, 'cause this is a Philadelphia TV Guide. Uncle Pete is Peter Boyle's father. - Yes, and he was blind. - Was he? - I believe so. I may be remembering this wrong. If people email me if I'm wrong, but in the episode with Amy Sedaris. And her family went on the Uncle Pete show. And he was a legally blind host. - Right, right, right. - Or television show. And I think he called David a little girl or something like that. - Yeah, that's fantastic. - Uncle Pete, father of the great actor, Peter Boyle from Young Frankenstein and Joe and so many other things. And it was a huge star in Philadelphia. Everybody knew Uncle Pete. But most of us, in other parts of the country, no idea. - Well, Philadelphia was sort of like, before television really moved to LA, it was like TV, it was like TV's LA for New York. Because you also had to Clark getting his star out of there with American Bandstand. - Sure, sure. - Which was a Philadelphia show. And Philadelphia kind of was the second city. - Mike Douglas. - Mike Douglas. - And then just kind of fell off the map for TV. - Right, right, right. It's very interesting what was considered a media hub then. But they, I mean, industrial America in the Midwest, these used to be booming towns. Detroit was big for TV and radio. Same with Philly, yeah, any industry area where there was a big population it had that then. And Pittsburgh had the very first radio station in the history of America. Detroit is interesting because across the river in Windsor, Canada, regulations were different. This is a little bit off topic, but there was a radio station in Windsor called CKLW, also had a TV station. And everybody in Michigan received it. There was some kind of regulation where you could not have a certain amount of wattage in a certain area under FCC rule, but the same rule didn't apply across the river. So CKLW had the most powerful wattage of any radio station in the northeast. - And you can't make it directional, so it's gonna go over the border. - So it went all over America, but because of that, it was the most influential musical tastemaker in America all through the 1960s, Motown, the sound of Motown, literally Motown Records, spread to Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, New York, all that region and became popular because of CKLW. - Interesting, it's almost like the radio, the pirate radio stations in the UK on the boats. - Right, right. CKLW had a great sound, it had great DJs, you can find air checks, but I don't think I ever really got as due as how influential it was. - It's very rarely named checked when people were talking about the classic-- - Yeah, CKLW, and they also had a TV station that was a small time 'cause it didn't have that reach called CKLW channel nine. Now, Captain Jim's Popeye Club is competing with Uncle Pete at the same time they're showing a movie made by AIP that appealed to teenage drive-ins called Attack of the Puppet People, starring John Agar who was in so many of those movies. - And this is a classic case of what AIP was known for, which was selling a poster, then making the movie. - Right, right, right. - The Puppet People is one of the classic, classic examples of that. - And it's about a group of people that shrink. The guy who directed it, his name is Bert I Gordon. - Yes. - And this was a big change-- - It's big. - There's a big change of pace for him this movie because usually he made movies about things that grew really large. - Bazing colossal man. - Bazing colossal man, war of the colossal beast, village of the giants, empire of the ants about giant ants, food of the gods, which is about giant farm animals. - Food of the gods too, which had a lot of nudity. - Did he direct that though? - Didn't direct it now. - The village of the giants is about giant teenagers. - Which has one of the-- Oh, the brothers, Bo Bridges is in it. - Bo Bridges is in it and oddly enough-- - Rod Howard. - Oddly enough, the Bo Brummels do the opening song. Bo Brummels, Bo Bridges, Ronnie Howard, Tony Basil, hey Mickey, you're so fine, you're so fine, you blow my mind, who looks great, by the way, as I recently. - Yes, yes. - Bert I Gordon also made the beginning of the end, which is about a giant cricket. He made a movie called Earth versus the Spider, which is about a giant spider, but this movie, attacking the puppet people, is about tiny people. - Small things. - Because the incredible shrinking man had been a hit. - That's right, yeah, it was the year before. - It's an emphasis. - And Jack Arnold directed that. Jack Arnold also directed Tarantula, he also directed Monster on the campus, and he directed many episodes of Gilligan's Island, Love American style, that kind of stuff. - Which makes sense, I mean, a lot of those people went from low-budget movies into the episodic television because it was pretty much the same kind of schedule. - Exactly, they can shoot fast. William One Shot Bodine became a big TV director because he had been making B Westerns in three days. - Right, absolutely. - That you're absolutely right, that is the reason. And then Friday, November 8th, 1963 at 11.30, it's Johnny Carson, that is The Tonight Show. - Yes. - But it's also listed at 11.20, Steve Allen's at 11.15. It's interesting, when Conan O'Brien was explaining on TV why he said no to NBC's suggestion that he started The Tonight Show at midnight, and Jay Leno was an 11.30 lead-in. Conan, who usually knows his history, said The Tonight Show has always been at 11.30, and to me, The Tonight Show means 11.30. But it wasn't true, The Tonight Show has not always been necessarily at 11.30, and it has not necessarily always been an hour. In many regions, it started at 11.15. - Right, they would pop in, some people would miss the first 15 minutes. - That's right. - 'Cause radio would do that often. And it was a holdover from radio. - Right, right. And one of the other reasons, and also, for a long time The Tonight Show was 90 minutes, not an hour, it's more a recent phenomenon that it became 60. One of the reasons was they could sell that last half hour to regional commercial affiliates, or to have regional commercials on each affiliate. And so those affiliates would make more money. - Absolutely. - It was strictly a cash grab for the affiliate, not for the network. - And that's why SNL is a 90 minute format, still to this day. - That's the reason? - Right, because it was in that slot in the mid 70s, they were airing reruns of The Tonight Show. - Right. - And they said, why don't we put something new here instead? - Right, right. - So it had to be a 90 minute format, because it's a holdover from that era, but it's unusual to have a TV show in a 90 minute format now, and in fact, SNL seems to be the only one that still is. - This is sort of interesting, and then we'll wrap up, and we'll keep saying that, that November 8th, 1963, Friday night, there are three people listed on this page, three different shows. The names are Jack Parr, Steve Allen, and Johnny Carson. - All three hosts in the next show. - It's the first Tonight Show host, the second Tonight Show host, and the third Tonight Show host. The third Tonight Show host, Johnny Carson, is the one who's actually hosting the Tonight Show on this page. They don't list his guests, unfortunately, but the Jack Parr program that's listed here, just says Jack Parr, but the name of this show was the Jack Parr program. It was his prime time show that he took over after walking off of the Tonight Show on the air, quitting on the air, Johnny Carson was his replacement. He went back to TV on Friday nights only. I had heard that it was at 8 p.m., but here it says it's listed at 10 p.m. Jack Parr welcomes Jonathan Winters, Phil Harris, who was a band leader, and Jack Many Psychic, and Alice Faye, who I think was Phil Harris' wife, and Jose Melez, who was Jack Parr's orchestral leader on the Tonight Show, came over with him. But Jack Parr is really responsible for Jonathan Winters' fame. He pushed him hard on his programs, both the Tonight Show and the Jack Parr program, and allowed him freedom to just improvise. - To do what people think of Jonathan Winters. - No stand up routines, no pre-screened interviews, just improvise, and really, that's what made Jonathan Winters famous, and it was when he was at his best. - Right, absolute without a net. So Steve Allen is on the same Friday night at 11.15, Channel 2 and 33, 1963. This must be a Westinghouse syndicated version of Steve Allen. - Right, and only one name I recognize in the line up there. - Who do you recognize? - Mel Tormey. - Mel Tormey. Songstress Janice Baker never heard of her, just a girl singer. Louis Nye was a character actor and comedian who was in that co-tree of People I mentioned in 1956. The host in Don Nye. - Right, Louis Nye. He had a hang-dog face, great looking face, beggar's eyes. - Sure, I've read some problems. - He often did a gay character that always got big laughs. Steve Allen would do like a fake man in the street and say, "Hello there, sir, may we speak to you?" And he'd go, "Oh, you ought to talk to me. "I lie on TV right now, hi-ho." You know, he would do this fake character. But it's interesting to see that Friday, 1963, Jack Parr, Steve Allen, Johnny Carson, all doing different shows. - All different shows. Neither Steve Allen nor Jack Parr would ever be as successful again as they had been as the hosts of The Tonight Show. - Right. - And likewise, Johnny Carson was just about to become the most successful he would ever be as the host of The Tonight Show. It was really a potent program in those days. - And I do want to point out, too, that finally here, before I go, because I brought this up frequently, also competing with those shows, is bowling and it's live at 10.45 p.m. - Oh my God. - Make that spare. And it's Harry Smith's challenges, Johnny Johnston reporting. - Wow. - And that was 10.45 live bowling. It was the most watched sporting event on American TV at that time. - Right. - 'Cause it's the easiest to broadcast. - It's only 15 minutes long. - Yeah. - 'Cause it's one more cuts to the news at 11. - It's like one match. - And then the same night, the movies that they're showing, the High of the Mighty, one of the rare non-Westerns for John Wayne that he produced in that era is playing. Also competing with a movie called Bell Booking Candle that Ernie Kovacs is in, one of his few fine film roles and Jack Lemons in it as well. - Two stewards in it, too, isn't he? - He is, and 11.20, it's The Gay Divorcey, one of the great Fred Astaire Ginger Rogers musicals filmed, again, not far from where we're sitting right now, up at Melrose and Gower is where that movie was made. A western called Jubal with Glenn Ford and Ernest Borgnine, again, the name we already mentioned. Boomtown is a fun, late, late show movie. Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy and Hedy Lamarr. There's a great episode to tell the truth with Hedy Lamarr on it when she's older and she looks gorgeous. - Right. - That aired maybe like two or three weeks before she was arrested for shoplifting. - Excellent. - Yeah. - She was the one known writer of her day. - And then the last late, late show movie of this night, November 8th, 1963, is called Hitler's Mad Man. - Not too far after actual Hitler was around. - Yeah, apparently a movie about Hitler wasn't enough. - Yeah. - To make one about his side cake. Hitler's Mad Man. - Hitler's Mad Man. - Featuring, of course, John Carradine, who's in so many of those movies, but reading the description. When his native village in Bohemia is subjugated by the Nazis, a young check and the royal armed forces returns to lead his people in freeing themselves from the Nazi yoke. - Yes. - Why okay? - It's very similar to the Frozen Dead, one of the fine Nazi zombie movies genre that exists without this zombies. - And probably better than they saved Hitler's brain. - Yes, yes. - Which is not that great. - No, it really isn't. - As a concept and as a movie. Well, Cliff, thank you so much for doing this and for flipping through the TV God. I really enjoyed learning. I, not that my guests aren't smart, but I rarely learn facts. - Well, I'm sorry if I talk too much. - No, no, not at all. - But this is fun. I love going through these TV guides. You've got a great concept for a podcast. - Oh, thank you. - And it's been a delight. (upbeat music) - There you go. A wealth of information. A genius, Cliff Nestoroff. Can, can it his own Cliff Nestoroff? You can find him at our old TV show, but just Google his name, it's written and spelled in the title of the show so you can find it there. And pre-order his book. It is gonna be great. You will really enjoy it. If you like this show, you will love anything you read by him. And as always, you can email me, Canadaicandread.com or TVguidenscounselor@gmail.com. We also have Twitter. I'm at Kenneth W. Read or the show is at @TVguidens. Here's a secret. They're both me. I know. And I love hearing from you guys. So let me know anything that you think questions or any feedback you have on the show. It's great to hear from you. And we'll see you again next week for a brand new episode of TVguidenscounselor. (upbeat music) - You were gone. - Where's the end trophy? - I am a real fraud. I like just doing it in my underwear at home, but talking porn sites. The biggest stars are always average. Hey, baby, I'd like to give you more than just the app.
