Yet, I really can't place him.
Posted on 10/22/2006 4:26:57 PM PDT by lunarbicep
Jane Wyatt, the lovely, serene actress who for six years on "Father Knows Best" was one of TV's favorite moms, has died, said her publicist. She was 96.
Wyatt died Friday in her sleep of natural causes at her home in Bel-Air, according to publicist Meg McDonald. Her death also was confirmed by Bernard Johnson of the funeral home Gates, Kingsley & Gates Moeller Murphy Funeral Directors.
" Wow, Hawaiian Eye - hadn't thought of that one in many years. Troy Donahue and Connie Stevens, wasn't it? Her character had a funky little name like Gidget .... hmmm ... Cricket???"
I dig the early episodes which Troy Donahue wasn't in . I bought the first 52 episodes on DVD ( DVD-ed from TV ) from a guy in NH for $ 15 ! And yes , it was Cricket .
Early episodes starred Anthony Eisley ( whatever happened to him ? ) and Robert Conrad along with Connie Stevens and ...Poncie Ponce ! haha !
LOL, I have to disagree, most respectfully about the county nurse and especially about Charlene Darling. (She sure "set her cap" for Andy that time, didn't she?)
Even though Charlene eventually turned into something a little better than her raisin', she was really just too backwoods for Andy, I think. Then there was that high school sweetheart of his who was just too uppity when she came back for the reunion. *She* would've definitely been a thorn in his side like you think Helen is.
It just beats me why Andy, with all his other good common sense, is sooo anti-marriage. It's hard to fathom how in the world he ever courted and married Opie's mother the first time around.
LOL, I know it's just a show, but poor Opie absolutely never gets one moment of stories about his mom or how much his dad loved her - all that kind of stuff. I know, I know, it's just too hard for Andy to even think about.
I mean, even Howard Sprague courted that farm girl at the bakery and ran off to marry someone - that's more than Andy could bring himself to do!
A lot of people really liked Henry Morgan, but he was just one of those entertainers I just never could take a liking to, for some reason.
She should not have gone out partying with Paris Hilton...
Hmmm, I don't recall much of the show at all, really. It wasn't one I made a point of watching, but usually caught parts of it just because it was on.
My memories of it are getting mixed up with memories of scenes from Magnum PI, lol.
Thank you for the bio.
I always thought she was a true lady, an excellent role model, despite all the TV-family-bashing that came in later years. You could tell she came from a classy family; it was like a perfume coming from within her.
Yet, I really can't place him.
But his radio comedy was probably his best vehicle, in part because he was a deft ad libber in his own right and in part because he seemed most comfortable with (and satirising) that medium. I suspect his real flaw was the way radio historian Gerald S. Nachman described him: If Fred Allen loved to bite the hand that fed him, Henry Morgan wanted to bite off the whole arm. You can get away with that want for only so long before one of two things happens: a) the target begins to supercede the way you approach it, and b) you make yourself your own worst enemy.
Henry Morgan also had a big hand in making Spike Jones possible: on his original 15-minute shows of the early 1940s, Here's Morgan, Morgan slipped goofy little novelty songs in between his freewheeling comic monologues---many of which turned out to be Jones's early records, helping make Jones into a comic music star, enough that Jones began giving Morgan first crack at many of his pending releases.
And, anyway, how could I knock a comedian who'd a) created the absolute best soap opera, "Great Men of History," and BBC satires, b) anticipated the short-lived Life Saver holes (Morgan had lost Life Savers as a sponsor when he needled them for hiding the holes, offering to market the holes as Morgan's Mint Middles. Life Savers was not amused---but about fifty years later Life Savers actually tried packaging the "holes"), and c) launch his show---breaking into pause in "For He's A Jolly Good Fellow" (ho ho ho)---with "Good evening, anybody, here's Morgan" and signing off with "Morgan'll be here on the corner in front of the same cigar stand next week." (He explained many years later that he birthed the intro as a barb against Kate Smith's "Hello, everybody": he thought Smith's sign-on was dishonest in assuming everybody was listening when you really didn't know. "I, on the other hand, was glad if anybody was listening.")
" Yet I can't place him " ...
I probably saw many of the TV shows he appeared in other than Hawaiian Eye , but like yourself , I can't place him . The only show I remember him in is Hawaiian Eye and that's only because a few years ago it was on TV here in Japan and I re-acquainted myself with the show . I always remembered Conrad , Stevens and Ponce ...but Eisley slipped into the void !
BTW , the guy on the far right in the pic you posted is Grant Williams . He was the star in movie The Incredible Shrinking Man - remember that flick ?
and don't forget Don Rickles
If you're talking about series radio or television you'd about have to forget Don Rickles. He may have been all over the place as a guest performer, but his only known starring vehicle in the pre-All in the Family years was the (very) short-lived Kibbee Hates Fitch, a 1965 sitcom in which he co-starred as one of two firefighters who marry sisters, share a duplex, and are at each other's throats almost immediately after moving in together. The show was a certifiable bomb and not even close to picking up the kind of following-in-the-breach (or return to popularity as the sketch-within-a-variety-format as which it was born) that The Honeymooners experienced.
Rickles got another crack at series television after All in the Family arrived: The Don Rickles Show (1972) (he played an advertising executive) and C.P.O. Sharkey (self-explanatory; 1976). The first show bombed; the second lasted two seasons. For all his ubiquitousness as a guest performer from 1955 forward, Rickles actually never turned up in the regular supporting cast of a series, and thus wouldn't have qualified in the context that I was discussing pre-All in the Family insult humour. (He was practically a regular---not to mention once the guest of dishonour himself---for Dean Martin's celebrity roasts, including serving as roastmaster when they decided to let Martin himself have it, but that isn't quite the same thing.) Which is just as well. Don Rickles was really at his best when he could ad-lib with his hecklers in a good live performance.
(Trivia: Kibbee Hates Fitch's head writer was Neil Simon. Don't laugh. Simon and his brother, Danny, began their careers as proteges of Goodman Ace; they were two of Ace's discoveries when Ace ran a kind of training school for comedy writers at CBS in the late 1940s, after Ace had decided to retire as a performer himself to concentrate strictly on writing. Simon went from Ace's "school" to become first a writer for Jackie Gleason's original Cavalcade of Stars variety show (on DuMont) and then one of the legendary writing team for Your Show of Shows. Another alumnus of Ace's "comedy school" was George Axelrod, who went on to write such films as The Seven-Year Itch, Breakfast at Tiffany's, and How to Murder Your Wife, not to mention The Manchurian Candidate.)
I didn't know that. He shouldn't have climbed into the ring with a super heavyweight.
My comment aboput Don Rickles was in reference to this post.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1724023/posts?page=113#113
"It wasn't until "All in the Family," that the insults became acceptable."
Not about who did and didn't have TV a show.
Reading before posting is our friend.
Not about who did and didn't have TV a show.
Reading before posting is our friend.
Indeed. Which is why you might have stopped to ponder, first, that the post prompting your first reference to Mr. Rickles addressed an earlier post that referenced series television directly. Since that was the context in which I thought we were trading, it wasn't irrelevant to note where Mr. Rickles doesn't exactly belong. In the context of insult humour in general, as opposed to broadcast specific, he certainly belongs in the conversation (even if he would be the first to admit that he modeled his comic persona to a good extent upon that of Joe E. Leonard)---though for my taste he'd be perched way up in the nosebleed seats. There have been better, funnier avatars of insult humour taken as a whole, though there aren't as many who are as adept at standing an audience heckle on its head as Mr. Rickles has been.
The High School babe -- Sharon Despane (how do I know that?) was an insufferable snob. I'm positive she's a lib! ;)
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