Neil Armstrong 1930-2012

Neil Armstrong was the centre of perhaps my happiest TV moment on that evening in July 1969, when he stepped off the ladder to the footpad of the LEM and then onto the Moon and said those famous if somewhat garbled words: “That’s one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind.” (Most of us never heard the word “a” in his statement.)

 

 

A few years before, in 1962, a couple from Ohio appeared on the panel show I’ve Got A Secret. Their secret? Their son had just been selected to be an astronaut that very day. Just watch the clip and listen for the question (at about 4:40) that Gary Moore asks Stephen and Viola Armstrong about their son Neil. Reportedly Neil Armstrong didn’t see this until nearly 40 years later.

 

James Arness - 1923-2011

He was a big man. He stood 6’7” tall…on his left leg. His right leg was 5/8ths of an inch shorter, a result of his military service in Italy a few days after the landings at Anzio. He wore a lift in his right shoe to balance him out. James Arness was a big man, and the role he played in the early days of television was fittingly a big part.

James Arness was born James Aurness in Minneapolis, Minnesota in 1923. Never a good student – he often skipped classes – he managed to graduate from high school in 1942. Rejected by the Army Air Force – he had wanted to be a fighter pilot but was five inches too tall – he worked at various menial jobs until being drafted in 1943 as an infantryman. Serving with the 3rd Infantry Division he was the first man off his landing craft during the Anzio landings because of his height; his commander thought that how high the water came on him would be a good gauge of the depth for the rest of the men – it came up to Arness’s waist. A few days later he was shot while serving as point man on a night patrol. He spent over a year in Army hospitals and was honorably discharged in January 1945. At the suggestion of his brother Peter (who would later act under the name Peter Graves) he enrolled in a radio announcing school and got a job as a disc jockey at a Minneapolis radio station. A few months later he quit that job and joined a friend on a trip to California.

In California, Arness made a variety of show business contacts and decided to use his GI Bill benefits to study acting at the Bliss-Hayden Theater’s little theater school. His first screen role was in the Lorretta Young film The Farmer’s Daughter as one of Young’s brothers. Other small film roles followed in such films as Battleground (directed by William Wellman and starring Van Johnson) and Wagon Master (directed by John Ford and starring Ward Bond, Harry Carey Jr. and Ben Johnson). He also appeared as the title character in The Thing From Another World, and as an FBI agent in Them. His big break came when he signed with John Wayne’s production company Batjac. They developed a close friendship and Arness co-starred with Wayne in four films – Big Jim McLain, Hondo, Island In The Sky, and The Sea Chase. And it was through John Wayne that Arness got the role that made him a legend – Matt Dillon.

While there is apparently no truth to the story that Wayne was approached to play the role of Marshal Matt Dillon on Gunsmoke, he was a vocal advocate for his protégé James Arness to get the part. Initially Arness was uncertain about taking the role. Like many actors of the time he worried that doing television would stall his film career. Nevertheless he took the part, and after getting an enthusiastic endorsement from Wayne, who filmed an introduction to the first episode of the show, he stayed with the show for twenty years, as well as five made for TV movies. Including the movies, he played the character of Matt Dillon in five decades; the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s for the series, and the 1980s and ‘90s for the movies. After Gunsmoke was cancelled in 1975 Arness appeared as Zeb Macahan on the ABC series How The West Was Won from 1976-78. His last series was McClain’s Law. The drama was something of a departure for Arness in that he was playing a modern role rather than appearing in a period piece. The series ran on NBC for sixteen episodes and was criticized for its violent content.

James Arness didn’t create the character of Matt Dillon. Beyond the shows creators, the elements of Mister Dillion’s character were really put into place by William Conrad who played the part on the radio show. Conrad had a tremendous voice that fit our collective image of the Western lawman. If you ever have the chance to hear Conrad playing Dillon on one of the radio episodes – and heaven knows there are a ton of podcasts that play episodes of the radio Gunsmoke on a regular or occasional basis – do it, setting aside what you know of how Conrad and Arness looked, and you’ll understand how perfect Conrad was for the part…on radio. The trouble is that Conrad, who had been a fighter pilot during World War II, was a big man who got bigger over the years. Although my good friend Ivan Shreve points out that Conrad looked a lot like real western lawmen of the period looked, his body type was not what we the audience expected out western heroes to look like. We wanted John Wayne in Stagecoach or Fort Apache rather than John Wayne as he would appear in True Grit. We wanted someone big and powerful who radiated power and masculinity. In other words we wanted James Arness. Arness created the visual image of Matt Dillon and in so doing created a visual template for the way that Western lawmen should appear, at least if they were the lead character in their shows.

And because Arness played the role of Matt Dillon for so long, he had the opportunity to get better with age in terms of fitting the role. It used to be a feminist talking point the while women got wrinkles, men got “character,” but in James Arness’s case it was true. As James Arness grew older he face grew craggier and became more interesting. He increasingly became the wind-blown and dried plainsman, tough as rawhide but with a kindly side that you saw in his eyes. I suppose that if anyone remembered the radio shows with Conrad’s voice they might say that as he aged, Arness looked more and more like Conrad sounded.

By most accounts Arness was a generous actor in terms of letting his co-stars carry episodes from time to time. While Gunsmoke had a very strong primary supporting cast for Arness – including Milburn Stone, Amanda Blake, Dennis Weaver, and Ken Curtis, as well as Burt Reynolds and Buck Taylor for shorter terms – the show could hardly be described as an ensemble show. Marshal Dillon was very much the most important character on the show, and there were indeed episodes where the supporting characters were seen only in cameo appearances. For Arness to allow himself to be put himself into that sort of situation, particularly early in the show’s existence, shows something about the man’s self-confidence and his willingness to let others have their time in the sun. Later these absences had a practical aspect to them. As he got older Arness’s war wounds were becoming increasingly stressed by the physical aspects of playing Marshal Dillon. By the end of the series Arness was having considerable difficulty mounting a horse, which is a definite liability when doing a Western series. Thus you had episodes that focused almost entirely on characters like Festus, Doc Adams, Miss Kitty or even Newly O’Brien (Buck Taylor), where Dillon would only appear sitting at table having a cup of coffee with other characters on the show.

In the wake of James Arness’s death there have been numerous comments in various blogs and in response to newspaper articles that spoke quite glowingly about him, and Gunsmoke, particularly the early seasons of the show which in the opinion of most commenters were the show’s best seasons. I won’t dispute that. I would however point out that Gunsmoke was a show that lasted twenty years on network television at a time when network TV was the only game in town and there were only three networks playing the game. It survived that long by adapting to the changing trends in the medium, and by responding to actions like the protests about violence in the media. The show evolved over time. But Matt Dillon didn’t evolve; he didn’t have to. The ideals that he stood for, upholding the law and making sure that the the weak were defended from the strong were valid throughout the show’s run. They may have been black & white concepts that wouldn’t necessarily be in keeping with the whole notion that things have to be looked at in a nearly infinite number of shades of grey, but for this show and this character they were the right ideals. In the end James Arness’s portrayal of Matt Dillon embodied these ideals.

In the end, James Arness and Matt Dillon were lucky to have found each other. It is impossible to imagine anyone else – including John Wayne – being able to fit into the role of Matt Dillon, and it is just as had to imagine Arness having the success that he did without being Matt Dillon. It was the perfect confluence of actor and part. James Arness was meant to be Matt Dillon and Matt Dillon wouldn’t have worked if he hadn’t been played by James Arness.

I’m including two clips of opening sequences from Gunsmoke here. The first is from 1964 (based on the clip for the next episode), and the second is from the period after the show was cancelled in 1967. The first title sequence is the classic “the bad guy shot first but Matt shot best” opening, while the second version is the only one that I could find of the “Matt racing his horse across the prairie” opening that turns into the insets of the actors along the Main Street of Dodge City. The riding sequence was reportedly shot on the day that the cast found out that the show had been cancelled. Reportedly they were shooting a scene where Matt was riding across the prairie and he just let go in and rode his horse hard as a sort of catharsis and the director decided to keep the cameras rolling.

Weekend Videos–Nicholas Courtney and Doctor Who

Nicholas Courtney passed away on February 22at the age of 81, following a long illness, reported by his former Doctor Who cast mate Tom Baker to have been cancer. Courtney was a well-regarded character actor who worked extensively in the theatre and on television. He was a regular on the comedy French Fields and appeared opposite Frankie Howerd on Then Churchill Said To Me, a series that was made in 1982 but was shelved because of the Falklands War. However it is for Doctor Who, and in particular the character of The Brigadier – Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart – that he is best known. Courtney appeared with every actor to play The Doctor in the first incarnation of the show except one – Colin Baker – and that includes Richard Hurndall who played the First Doctor in The Five Doctors. In addition he appeared in Doctor Who audio plays produced by Big Finish Productions with Colin Baker, and Paul McGann playing their respective versions of The Doctor, and with David Tennant, who played a character named Colonel Ross Brimmicombe-Wood.

Courtney’s first appearance on Doctor Who was not as the iconic character of Lethbridge-Stewart but rather as Space Security Agent Brett Vyon in the third season serial The Dalek Masterplan. Among other people to appear in this series was Jean Marsh, who had previously appeared in the The Crusades arc of Doctor Who (she kills Vyon who, as it turns out, was her brother). Most of The Dalek Master Plan is lost. However among the episodes to survive is the one in which Nicholas Courtney first appears.

Courtney’s next appearance in the series was as Lethbridge-Stewart, but not quite the Lethbridge-Stewart we know. In Web of Fear Lethbridge-Stewart was a Colonel, and UNIT had yet to be formed. Based on his hat he was in a Scottish regiment, which fits with what we later discover about Lethbridge-Stewart. He appears opposite Patrick Toughton as The Doctor, Fraiser Hines as Jamie and Deborah Watling as Victoria. Courtney was originally cast as Captain Knight while David Langton (who later played Richard Bellamy on Upstair Downstairs) was to play Lethbridge-Stewart. Fortunately – given what happens to Knight – Langton was took another job and Courtney was recast as Lethbridge-Stewart. Unfortunately most of Web Of Fear after the first episode is lost and we have to depend on is fan recreations using photos taken while the show was being made, and Courtney doesn’t make his first appearance until the second or third episode. What I have is the last part of the last episode of one of these recreations.

Significantly more exists of Lethbridge-Stewart’s next appearance (although not enough to air as a “complete” episode) and in it the major aspects of his participation in Doctor Who were set. In Invasion we learn that four years have passed since the Yeti incident (for everyone except the occupants of the TARDIS) and Lethbridge-Stewart has been promoted to the rank of Brigadier. He now commanding an element of a new United Nations organization known as UNIT. Also introduced is the ever faithful Benton (John Levene) who at this point was still a corporal. This particular pair of clips are a bit of a mixed bag. It begins with an animated recreation of the end of the missing first episode and at about the 3:50 mark transitions into the complete second episode, which features Benton and two other soldier in mufti grabbing the Doctor and Jamie and taking them to their leader whose headquarters are aboard an RAF Hercules transport. The leader is of course Lethbridge-Stewart.

It is the Third Doctor, played by Jon Pertwee, that Lethbridge-Stewart is most closely associated with. In this clip, the Brigadier and UNIT’s new Science Advisor, Liz Shaw, encounter a problem that people who met previous versions of The Doctor should comment on more regularly, namely that he doesn’t look the same as he did when he knew them. In this case the change from Patrick Troughton to Jon Pertwee is just a little more than the Brigadier can absorb at the moment, though the man who (to Lethbridge-Stewart’s mind at least) is pretending to be The Doctor does seem well informed.

Perhaps the Brigadier’s most famous line in the series was from the last episode of The Daemons. “Chap with the wings. Five rounds rapid.” In fact Courtney used the line as the title for his 1999 autobiography Five Rounds Rapid (he wrote a second autobiography in 2005 called Still Getting Away With It)

The Brigadier and UNIT were pretty much fixtures of Doctor Who for the first two seasons of Pertwee’s run on the series. They became less so during the last two seasons, after The Doctor was freed from his exile on Earth by the Time Lords. About half of the serials after that featured UNIT. The final Pertwee episode had a relatively minor involvement of UNIT, with The Doctor returning to UNIT to regenerate. In this set of clips the Brigadier,and Sarah Jane witness the Doctor regenerating. This time around The Brigadier takes the whole thing entirely in stride, mentioning the first time that it happened. Of course Tom Baker’s Doctor could be a bit eccentric at the best of times, but newly regenerated he was more than a handful (as you might be able to tell I preferred Pertwee’s Doctor).

Robot, the first Tom Baker episode was the penultimate appearance of Nicholas Courtney in the Tom Baker series of Doctor Who. He’d appear one more time in Terror of the Zygons in the show’s thirteenth season, while UNIT itself would disappear a couple of serials later in the serial The Android Invasion. In that episode The Doctor goes to an office with Lethbridge-Stewart’s name on it but he’s absent. Still, you can’t keep a good character down and the Brigadier kept popping up from time to time. In Mawdryn Undead we get two versions of the Brigadier – now retired and working as a maths teacher in a British Public (which means Private) school – separated in time. One has a definite memory problem. Unfortunately, while this serial very much exists, the BBC seems to have cracked down on people posting full episodes. What we have in this clip is Peter Davison’s Doctor reviving the memory of the older, moustache-less, version of the Brigadier in a sequence which includes brief excerpts from various episodes in which the Brigadier featured. Interestingly the episode wasn’t meant to feature The Brigadier at all. It was written for William Russell, who played Ian Chesterton in the very first Doctor Who episodes. However, the actor (whose real name is Russell William Enoch) was unavailable to appear on the show and after some consideration was given to using Ian Marter and his character Harry Sullivan, Courtney was picked for the role.

Later the same year, Lethbridge-Stewart appeared in The Five Doctors special, commemorating the series’ twentieth anniversary. In this clip the Second Doctor (Patrick Troughton) drops in on The Brigadier at a UNIT reunion where he meets Colonel Crichton, Lethbridge-Stewart’s replacement, who doesn’t really impress the Doctor. Continuity obsessed fans were able to determine that this episode took place after Mawdryn Undead because The Brigadier recognises Tegan and the Fifth Doctor.

The Brigadier’s final appearance in Doctor Who proper was in the twenty-sixth and final season of the show’s original run. The episode was very much an old home week for Courtney as it featured Jean March as Morgaine. Marsh had appeared in the very Doctor Who story that Courtney did, The Dalek Master Plan. In that episode Marsh’s character, Sara Kingdom, kills Courtney’s Brett Vyon. In Battlefield she tries to kill him, but fortunately doesn’t succeed. In these two sequences we find The Brigadier, recalled to duty with the return of The Doctor, encountering Morgaine, and then in the second clip reuniting with The Doctor – who else could it be indeed.

Nicholas Courtney’s final appearance in the Doctor Who universe was in the spin-off series The Sarah Jane Adventures episode Enemy Of The Bane from the sho’s second season. The episode aired almost exactly twenty-five years after the last time Elizabeth Sladen and Nicholas Courtney had appeared together, in The Five Doctors. In the episode Sarah Jane needs access to some material that only Sir Alistair, now a special envoy for UNIT, is able to provide her with. Amazingly the entire episode has been posted on YouTube (though for how long I don’t know).

That was Nicholas Courtney’s last episode as Lethbridge-Stewart. Reportedly Courtney was supposed to appear again in The Sarah Jane Adventures episode The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith but had suffered a stroke and was unable to appear. It is also said that Courtney wanted to make one final appearance on Doctor Who in an episode that would kill the character off. Unfortunately this wasn’t to be.

Nicholas Courtney was an integral part of the original Doctor Who series, a first rate actor who took what could have been a throwaway role and became an iconic figure to the point where the word Brigadier has become a “TV Trope” (a convention or device found within creative works) for “any senior military person in a sci-fi drama who is a good guy.” And it seems to me that both Brigadier Sir Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart and Nicholas Courtney were pretty good guys. 

On The Tenth Day Of Christmas

On the tenth day of Christmas, my true love (Television) gave to me...ten dead people.

Yeah, it's that time in the awards show....sorry....the list of lists that my 12 Days Of Christmas posts really are, to do the obituary montage. Now obviously there were a lot more than ten prominent TV people who left us in calendar 2007, and if you want a far more complete list that I am going to provide, check out TV Squad and my good friend "Tele-Toby's" great blog Inner Toob.

So what am I doing with this list? Basically I have picked out ten people who, for one reason or another, have either had great significance for me in my life as a TV viewer or for one reason or another were (in my oh so humble opinion) towering figures in the history of the medium. I'll try to give some explanation but I will tell you right now, inclusion on this list is extremely arbitrary and is in no particular order.

Charles Lane (January 26, 1905-July 9, 2007): One of the great grouchy old men, whether it was in Frank Capra's movies, working with his good friend Lucille Ball on a number of her films and TV shows, or as the prototypical flint-hearted businessman, Homer Bedloe on the TV series Petticoat Junction, Charles Lane was one of the great character actors. Primarily known on TV for his comedy work he was equally comfortable in dramatic parts, particularly later in life. He was a founding member of both the Screen Actors Guild and the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. Honoured at the TVLand Awards on his 100^th birthday, he stated "In case anyone's interested, I'm still available!" Apparently someone called because his last IMDB credit is as the narrator in a 2006 animated short, The Night Before Christmas.

Tom Snyder (May 12, 1936-July 29, 2007): One of my favourite talk show hosts, in part because he was an involving (and involved) conversationalist. You usually got the sense that he was at least interested in his guest and unlike Larry King (who Snyder apparently had some animosity towards) you knew that Tom actually read the books. He could bear right in on a guest when necessary or at other times just let them talk. You could tell when Tom really liked a guest. One of the best things that David Letterman did when he came to CBS from NBC was to put Snyder (who had been replaced by Dave at NBC in 1981) on after him. It was joy to just listen to him talk to people but in the opinion of CBS at least the time for his type of talk show had passed and I at least think that television is the worse for it.

Verity Lambert (November 27, 1935-November 22, 2007): The first woman to become a producer at the BBC, and later headed her own production company, Cinema Verity, she will forever be linked with the first series that she ever produced at the BBC – Doctor Who. In fact she passed away one day before the forty-fourth anniversary of the debut of the series.

Merv Griffin (July 6, 1925-August 12, 2007): Merv Griffin was one of the titanic figures of the Television industry. The former big band singer would have been numbered among the most memorable figures in the history of the medium just for his landmark talk show, which ran mostly in the afternoons, except for an unhappy three year period when his show ran on CBS in the late night time slot opposite Johnny Carson. It was after the CBS debacle that he took his show to syndication with Metromedia where it ran until 1984. For most of this time Merv's own production company was creating game shows, of which the two most famous are Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune. Griffin sold his production company to Columbia Pictures Television in 1984 for $250 million, although he continued to dabble in Television, most recently creating the syndicated game show Merv Griffin's Crosswords, which debuted after his death.

William Hutt (May 2, 1920-June 27, 2007): Though probably best (or only) known to American readers for his performance as Charles Kingman in the third season of the series Slings And Arrows, a generation of Canadians were riveted by his performance as Canada's first Prime Minister, Sir John A. Macdonald, in the 1974 adaptation of Pierre Berton's National Dream. He actually did relatively little film or TV work, but was a fixture at Ontario's Stratford Shakespeare Festival from its beginning in 1953 until 2005. He was recognised as one of Canada's greatest actors of the last half of the 20^th Century.

Charles Nelson Reilly (January 13, 1931-May 27, 2007): Best known on television as one of the regular panellists on Match Game where he regularly crossed wits with Brett Somers (who also passed away in 2007), he was in fact a talented actor, stage director and raconteur. The first time I remember seeing Charles Nelson Reilly on TV was in the TV version of The Ghost And Mrs. Muir as Claymore Gregg, one of three roles for which he was nominated for an Emmy, which preceded his time on Match Game. He developed a close friendship with Burt Reynolds and was a frequent guest director at the actor's dinner theatre in Jupiter, Florida. Reilly showed his dramatic abilities playing Jose Chung in an episode of the X-Files and on its sister show Millenium. Although he was long a gay icon on TV he didn't actually reveal his sexual orientation until his one man stage show Save It for the Stage: The Life of Reilly in the 1990s.

Tom Poston (October 17, 1921-April 30, 2007): A fixture, along with Louis Nye and Don Knotts on the old Steve Allen Show Tom Poston was a serious dramatic actor (he played opposite Jose Ferrer in Cyrano de Bergerac he would come into his own as a comedic actor on television and the movies. He was a regular on a number of game shows of the 1960s including What's My Line. In 1975 he appeared on his friend Bob Newhart's series The Bob Newhart Show along with Suzanne Pleshette, who he would eventually marry in 2001. Later he would be a regular on Newhart as the easily befuddled George Utley. He was in high demand as a supporting actor in both comedic and dramatic roles until shortly before his death.

Bob Carroll Jr. (August 12, 1918-January 27, 2007): Writer and sometimes producer, he forged a professional relationship with Madelyn Pugh that lasted for 50 years. The pair's relationship with Lucille Ball was shorter lived only because Lucy died on them. Along with Jess Oppenheimer they created Ball's 1948 radio series My Favourite Husband, and followed her to TV to write most of the episodes of I Love Lucy. Later they would write for The Desi-Lucy Comedy Hour, The Lucy Show, Here's Lucy and Ball's last series Life With Lucy (an unfortunate project for all involved). They also wrote the story for the Lucille Ball-Henry Fonda movie Yours, Mine and Ours, which was remade in 2006.

Yvonne DeCarlo
(September 1, 1922-January 8, 2007): Although she is best known today for playing Lilly Munster on The Munsters, the actual amount of television work that she did was quite limited. She had been very popular in films playing sexy exotic roles in 'B' movies (like Princess Scheherezade in The Desert Hawk) under contract at Universal. The Munsters was her only series though she did a number of guest appearances including the first episode of Bonanza. She took the role of Lilly Munster to pay the medical expenses of her then husband, Bob Morgan, a stuntman who had been severely injured during the making of the movie How The West Was Won (that was also the reason why John Wayne hired her for another of her better known roles these days, Mrs. Warren in the comedy western McLintock. Not bad for a little girl from Vancover B.C.

Tammy Faye Messner (March 7, 1942-July 20, 2007): No one personified the excesses of the Evangelical Christian movement of the 1980s more than Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, and in the case of Tammy Faye there was never anyone involved in that situation who was more of an innocent victim. Unlike her husband Jim Bakker she was never tried or even charged of involvement in the financial improprieties that brought down the PTL Club, the organization that they headed. She had always had a far more tolerant attitude towards homosexuals than most evangelical religious figures, and she revealed a sense of humour over her own excesses – mainly makeup and her propensity to weep at the least excuse. She appeared on Larry King Live a number of times during her final illness, the last time the day before she died.

Merv Griffin – 1925-2007

Merv Griffin was a giant of the Television industry. The former big band singer parlayed his talent and entrepreneurial skills into a multi-million dollar empire, and he seemed to have fun doing it.

Born Mervyn Edward Griffin in San Mateo California he first came to public attention as a 19-year old singer on KFRC radio in San Francisco. This in turn led to a job touring with Freddy Martin's big band. Following his time with Martin he started a successful solo career in night clubs which allowed him to start an independent record label, Panda Records. His album "Songs by Merv Griffin" was the first to be recorded on magnetic tape and his recording of "I've Got a Lovely Bunch of Coconuts" sold over 3 million copies and was number one on the hit parade. Doris Day "discovered" him during one of his nightclub appearances and arranged a screen test for him at Warner Brothers. He appeared in a number of relatively minor roles in films in the early to mid-1950s the most famous of which was So This Is Love in which he and Kathryn Grayson (in her first film role) shared the first "open mouth kiss" in American movies.

During the '50s he was also a popular guest on various TV shows as a singer. In 1958 he was selected by Mark Goodson and Bill Toddman to host their game show Play Your Hunch, which he did for four years (1958-1962). During a live broadcast of Play Your Hunch, Griffin was able to manage an impromptu interview with Tonight Show host Jack Paar after Paar wandered onto the set of the show (Paar was superstitious and was trying to avoid the elevators at Rockefeller Center for some reason). This led to him guest hosting the Tonight Show, which in turn led to NBC offering him an afternoon talk show in 1962. The NBC version of The Merv Griffin Show failed but NBC gave him the opportunity to host and produce a new game show called Word For Word. This too lasted a single season. Griffin then revived the afternoon Merv Griffin Show this time as a syndicates show produced by Griffin and distributed by Group W (Westinghouse broadcasting which also distributed the Mike Douglas Show. Griffin's affiliation with Group W ended in 1969 when he made an ill-advised move to CBS to challenge Johnny Carson in late night (interestingly, one of Griffin's directors – the only one credited by IMDB - was Dick Carson, Johnny's brother). Network interference led to numerous conflicts even as the show wallowed in the ratings – sometimes even losing out to Dick Cavett on ABC. Eventually CBS cut Griffin loose but realizing the end was near at CBS he had already set up a distribution deal with Metromedia for a renewed version of the daytime Merv Griffin Show which ran from 1972 to 1986.

During this time Griffin was also busy as a game show producer. In 1964 he created Jeopardy for NBC, based on an idea that his then wife Julann who had the idea of turning the old quiz show staple of asking questions and giving answers on its head by giving the players answers and having them formulate questions. In addition to producing the show Griffin also wrote the music including the "Final Jeopardy" theme. This first version of Jeopardy hosted by Art Fleming ran until 1975. NBC allowed Griffin the opportunity to create the replacement for Jeopardy and came up with a word puzzle based on "Hangman" called Wheel Of Fortune hosted by Chuck Woolery (later replaced by Pat Sajak) and Susan Stafford (replaced by Vanna White) as hostess and "letter turner." The show was a modest success for NBC – it featured a shopping round after each game finished where players had to spend their winnings, frequently on some of the most tasteless kitsch you've ever seen (lots of brass) – but really took off in 1983 when Griffin syndicated the series. Jeopardy was also revived in 1984 with Alex Trebek replacing Fleming (who had hosted a short-lived revival of the show on NBC in 1978-79).

In 1986 Griffin ended his syndicated talk show – he decided that it was the right time based on changes in the marketplace – and sold his production company (and Jeopardy and Wheel Of Fortune) to Columbia Pictures Television – then owned by Coca-Cola – for $250 million. He soon became involved in real estate development. One of his first purchases was the Beverly Hilton Hotel which he bought for $100 million and spent $25 million refurbishing. He also became involved in a feud with Donald Trump over control of Resorts International, which ended with Trump gaining control of the Taj Mahal Casino project – then under construction – and Griffin wining the Resorts Atlantic City (the former Chalfonte-Haddon Hall Hotel) and the Paradise Island resort. Griffin was also involved in residential real estate and horse racing. Most recently he returned to his roots as a TV producer producing the psychic readings show Lisa Williams: Life Among the Dead for the Lifetime Network, and a new syndicated game show called Merv Griffin's Crosswords which will debut in September. In 2001 he also returned to the recording studio with the album It's Like a Dream

Griffin's last TV appearance (not counting an appearance on Entertainment Tonight) was as a guest on The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson in November 2006. Griffin had been diagnosed with prostate cancer in 1996 but had apparently successfully beaten the disease. He was admitted to Cedars-Sinai Hospital last month with a recurrence of the disease. According to doctors at the hospital the cancer had spread to other organs in an "unexpected and immediate'' manner.

As a game show producer Merv Griffin had a genius for taking a simple idea – a trivia quiz where the contestant gives the question instead of the answer; the kids' game "Hangman" – and make it a challenging and, more importantly, entertaining concept. It is as a talk show host that he truly shone, at least for me. While NBC cancelled the original version of the Merv Griffin Show as "being 'too sophisticated' for the housewife audience," he seemed to know that he had the right formula. While never as intellectual as Dick Cavett's various shows, Griffin didn't avoid intellectually challenging guests. Amongst his guests were Bertrand Russel, Pablo Cassals and Will & Ariel Durant. Other guests included at least four US Presidents, Robert Kennedy, John Lennon (when he was still with The Beatles) and Martin Luther King. His shows encouraged new talent including Jerry Seinfeld and Richard Pryor. The DVD set The Merv Griffin Show: 40 of the Most Interesting People of Our Time includes such guests as Richard Nixon, Ingrid Bergman, David Niven, Roger Vadim and then wife Jane Fonda, Grace Kelly, Laurence Olivier, John Wayne and Jack Benny. Orson Welles was a frequent guest – usually doing a magic trick during his each of his fifty or so appearances. In fact the DVD set includes Welles's last appearance with Griffin, recorded just hours before Welles died. And virtually all of this was done for an audience of "housewives" who according to NBC were too unsophisticated or this sort of material. Merv Griffin understood his audience better than the network weasels and built an empire out of it. If for nothing else he should be remembered for that.

Following is an excerpt from an episode of the Merv Griffin Show featuring a song by Howard Keel (before Dallas) followed by an interview.

Tom Snyder – 1936-2007

I wanted to write this and get it posted sooner, but I've been having difficulty connecting to the Web courtesy of my McAfee Security Center. For reasons known only to it, it suddenly wouldn't let me connect with the Web: email? – fine, newsgroups? – great, online poker? – perfect, World Wide Web – verboten, ils ne pass pas, no frakkin' way.

This was unfortunate as I wanted to pay tribute to one of my favourite talk show hosts, Tom Snyder, who passed away of Leukemia. Others, notably Mark Evanier have mentioned Tom Snyder's facility as a TV News anchor, one of the last great "single" anchors in the business. Not living in Los Angeles, where Snyder did a lot of his local anchor work, I never saw that side of him. My blogging buddy Sam Johnson does mention him as an anchor in Savannah, although these seem to be second hand. I did hear stories about his adventures in local news after his Tomorrow show was cancelled by NBC, and one gets the impression that he didn't adjust well to working as part of an "anchor team." Or maybe it was just the jealousy of others that had them saying less than complimentary things about his abilities as a newscaster.

Snyder the newscaster wasn't my Tom Snyder. My Tom Snyder was the guy who hosted Tomorrow between 1973 and 1982, the guy who was given the timeslot after Letterman (by Letterman, who had a great appreciation for him) from 1995 to 1999. And my Tom Snyder was the guy who had a pioneering blog called Colortini.com (now long gone). My earliest Blogroll included a link to the site and it was there that we learned of the chronic lymphocytic leukemia that eventually took his life. This Snyder was a smart and savvy interviewer with a booming laugh and a willingness to talk to just about anyone.

Snyder was perfect for a University student working late into the night, which was how I first encountered him. This was late in the era of the original Tomorrow show when it was usually Tom and one or two guests – and of course Tom's then nearly ubiquitous cigarette – sitting opposite each other and talking. Snyder wasn't afraid to ask the hard hitting questions when they were called for, but most of the time Snyder maintained a conversational style without things degenerating into "puff-piece" questions. Probably his most famous interview was a prison interview with Charles Manson after which Snyder said that Manson was playing mind-games in prison, and knew exactly what he had done to be there. Tom didn't have a co-host, although author Nancy Friday was a frequent guest and at one point was a semi-regular contributor. He rarely had a studio audience during the original version of Tomorrow. It was intimate, and even when he had a comedian on it was seriously good TV.

The beginning of the end for Tomorrow came when Johnny Carson's show dropped from 90 minutes to an hour, at Carson's demand. For some reason NBC decided to expand Tomorrow to 90 minutes, add a studio audience as well as a co-host – gossip columnist Rona Barrett, who had been lured over to NBC with the promise of a big contract – whom he detested and engaged in a legendary feud with. The new show was dubbed Tomorrow Coast To Coast, and died a merciful death after just under two years. Watching the clip of Tom with Howard Cosell – with Frank Gifford trying very to stay out of the way – it's not hard to see why. He doesn't seem comfortable in the format.

I didn't see Tom's CNBC show or listen to his ABC Radio show that he did with Elliott Forrest but I was a total devotee of The Late Late Show which he did on CBS. It was different from the Tomorrow Show; more in the style of what Larry King (with whom Snyder had a celebrated feud, although the reasons were never totally clear) used to do. There were callers, although they weren't the dominant part of the format. What dominated was what David Letterman called in the clip that follows "the simple art of reasonable conversation." I loved The Late Late Show and watched virtually every episode. Tom was my first exposure to Molly Ivins and the first time I heard anyone call George W. Bush "Shrub" – as Ivins put it "because he's a little Bush." Harlan Ellison was another frequent guest. It was my first exposure to Jon Stewart as a "talking head" – I'd previously seen him as an actor/comedian but he was also an occasional guest and frequent replacement for Tom when he was ill or on vacation, as was Bonnie Hunt. Annual features included a display of Lionel Trains on set at Christmas (Tom was a collector and once had Neil Young on to talk about Young's ownership of the company) and a live broadcast after the Oscars that usually featured Gene Siskel & Roger Ebert, and Bonnie Hunt. In the last year or two of the show that was

A frequent guest was Robert Blake. Tom would bring Blake on and frequently he'd do the entire hour, talking about whatever he felt like. One night Blake spent the entire hour begging a woman with whom he had been in a relationship to come back to him – she didn't. Watching Blake on The Late Late Show, sitting on the edge of his chair waving a (usually) unlit cigarette was often a study in bipolar behaviour played out on our TV screen. Years later, after Blake had been accused and found not guilty of killing his wife Bonnie Lee Bakley (who Blake met after Tom stopped doing The Late Late Show) Snyder wrote in his blog that having known and experienced Robert Blake, he believed that Blake was a killer.

I think I speak for a lot of Tom's fans when I say that I was sad to see Tom Snyder leave The Late Late Show and even sadder to see him replaced, not with Bonnie Hunt or Jon Stewart in a continuation of what Tom had done, but by Craig Kilborn doing a pale imitation of Letterman and Leno, which – with due respect – is really an imitation of Johnny Carson (and in Leno's case in particular, a pretty poor one). When Tom Snyder left the air for good, an era epitomized by Jack Paar, Dick Cavett, and Tom Snyder on major network TV came to a close.

Following are a couple of YouTube videos. First is a tribute that Conan O'Brien did, featuring clips from some of Tom's most famous interviews from the Tomorrow Show, including Manson, Elton John, Johnny Rotten, Bono (and The Edge though he doesn't say a word), Muhamed Ali, and finally Howard Cosell. The second clip is the final portion of an interview that Tom did with his replacement at NBC and his boss at CBS, David Letterman. So as Tom would say, "Fire up the colortinis and watch the pictures as they fly through the air." And when you do, spare a few moments to remember our friend who we never met, Tom Snyder.

Charles Lane 1905-2007

I knew this day was coming but hoped it wouldn't be quite this soon. Sadly we have learned of the passing of fabled character actor Charles Lane on Monday at the age of 102 years and six months. According to his son Tom, "He was lying in bed with his eyes real wide open. Then he closed his eyes and stopped breathing.''

Born Charles Levison in San Francisco on January 26, 1905 he was one of the last survivors of the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. He was working as an insurance salesman and doing some amateur theatre when a friend (reportedly actor and director Irving Pitchel) suggested that turn entirely to acting. He trained at the famed Pasadena Playhouse before making his movie debut in an uncredited role as a hotel clerk in the 1931 James Cagney-Edward G. Robinson movie Smart Money. It was the first of over 250 movies. In 1932, he married Ruth Covell, a marriage which lasted 70 years until her death in 2002. In addition to his son Tom they had a daughter, Alice Deane.

In the 1930s he began what turned into a long collaboration with director Frank Capra. He appeared in eight Capra films including Mr. Deeds Goes To Town, Mr. Smith Goes To Washington, and It's A Wonderful Life. One of Lane's proudest possessions was a letter from Capra that said "I am sure that everyone has someone that he can lean on and use as a crutch whenever stories and scenes threaten to fall apart. Well, Charlie, you've been my No. 1 crutch." It was also in the 1930s that he developed a friendship with a young chorus girl at RKO. Her name: Lucille Ball. Lane did a number of episodes of I Love Lucy and the follow-up Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour, and played the banker, Mr. Barnstahl, in the first season of The Lucy Show. Accounts vary as to why he left the series. Author of The Lucy Book, Geoffrey Fidelman claims that Lane was let go because he trouble reciting his lines (difficult to believe). He told an interviewer that the main reason he had been let go was because Lucy wanted her longtime friend Gale Gordon in the role instead (Gordon had also been the first choice to play Fred Mertz. Gordon would co-star with Ball in all three of her post-I Love Lucy series). According to Lane, "Lucille was an extraordinary talent and I was madly in love with her. She had me doing this very big character part on a regular basis—and then Gale Gordon was again available, and she wanted him in the role. I was terribly disappointed, but I could understand perfectly." (Of course the same interviewer has Lane smoking a cigarette three years after the actor is supposed to have quit smoking.)

Lane's experience as a character actor in the 1930s led to him becoming one of the first members of the Screen Actors Guild. In 1933 alone he made 23 movies and as a contract player was being paid $35 a day. He said of the founding of the Guild "They'd work you until midnight and get you back at seven in the morning. The actors were taking a terrible licking physically. Generally, as the case with any union, you form it because people are abused." By 1947, thanks in part to the Guild, Lane was making $750 a week. Lane worked in so many movies over the years that he occasionally went to the theatre only to find that he was in the movie he had paid to see. The only real interruption to his busy schedule was during World War II when he served in the US Coast Guard aboard an attack transport. Between the end of 1942 and the beginning of 1946 he made only two movies – Mission To Moscow and Arsenic And Old Lace.

One of his earliest TV roles was an episode of the series Topper in 1954. TV soon became a regular venue for him, usually in a guest appearance as in his several appearances on I Love Lucy, or single episodes of other shows, but sometimes in recurring roles as in Dennis The Menace where he played Mr. Finch the storekeeper. He was a founding member of the Television Academy. His versatility – or the typecasting he was forced to endure – was such that he was equally at home in dramas and in comedies.

Still he may be best known to TV audiences for the role of Homer Bedloe in Petticoat Junction. Bedloe, vice-president of the C&FW Railroad was a grouchy curmudgeon with the heart of an adding machine who lived to see the Hooterville Cannonball on the scrap heap and Shady Rest Hotel boarded up. In a way, Bedloe may be comparable to Ahab in Moby Dick, or (to make things lighter) the Coyote in the Roadrunner cartoons. The Cannonball is his white whale or his Roadrunner, a foe that he becomes obsessed with vanquishing to the exclusion of all sense of proportion. Bedloe is a perfect villain for the show and is used perfectly. He isn't a permanent presence seen every episode but he is a permanent threat because there is always the uncertainty of when he will show up with another scheme that Kate Bradley will have to thwart.

By the time he did Petticoat Junction Charles Lane was largely typecast as a grouchy curmudgeonly type. As his New York Times obituary puts it, "His bony physique, craggy face and the authoritarian or supercilious way he would peer through his spectacles at his fellow actors eventually led to his being typecast and locked into playing a succession of lawyers, judges, assorted lawmen and other abrasive roles." Like most actors who are typecast he resented it; he called it "... a pain in the ass. You did something that was pretty good, and the picture was pretty good. But that pedigreed you into that type of part, which I thought was stupid and unfair, too. It didn't give me a chance, but it made the casting easier for the studio."

As Charles Lane grew older he became a much beloved figure as well as the oldest living American actor. In 2005 on the occasion of his 100^th birthday, SAG declared January 30 as "Charles Lane Day" and he was also honoured by the Television Academy at the 2005 Emmy Awards. The 2005 TVLand Awards honoured him as well. At the end of that tribute he announced "If you're interested, I'm still available!" Someone took him up on it – in 2006 he was the narrator for a short called The Night Before Christmas (interestingly this was filmed at the Henning Estate and the credits at the end not only thank Charles Lane but also his Petticoat Junction co-star – and Paul Henning's daughter, Linda Henning). Charles Lane was also interviewed for the soon to be released documentary You Know The Face, produced by Garret Boyajian, who also produced The Night Before Christmas.

Let's finish up with the tribute from the 2005 TVLand Awards, which interestingly enough doesn't include any scenes from Petticoat Junction, and only a fraction of the other TV shows he appeared on.

Tony Winner and Emmy Nominee Charles Nelson Reilly – 1931-2007

Charles Nelson Reilly used to say that "When I die, it's going to read, 'Game Show Fixture Passes Away'. Nothing about the theater, or Tony Awards, or Emmys. But it doesn't bother me." Well he's not getting that from me. Charles Nelson Reilly was nominated for three Emmy Awards: for Outstanding Actor in a Supporting Role as Claymore Gregg in The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1970); for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Drama Series as Jose Chung in the episode "Jose Chung's Doomsday Defense" from Millenium, and Outstanding Guest Actor in a Comedy Series as Mister Hathaway in the "Drugco" episode of The Drew Carey Show. He won a Tony Award for Best Featured Performer in a Musical for How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying for the role of Bud Frump (1962), and was nominated for Best Featured Performer in a Musical in 1964 for Hello Dolly as Cornelius Hackl, and as Best Director of a Play for the 1997 revival of The Gin Game. He was also nominated for a Drama Desk Award for his autobiographical one man show Save It For The Stage: The Life of Reilly (2002). He appeared in six Broadway shows and directed or staged five others. And yeah, he was also a fixture on the game show Match Game, which was hosted by his long time friend Gene Rayburn who Reilly had been an understudy for in the original Broadway production of Bye Bye Birdie, and was a frequent guest on Hollywood Squares.

Charles Nelson Reilly was born on January 13, 1931 in The Bronx, New York, but grew up in New Haven Connecticut. In 1944 he survived the Ringling Brothers Circus Tent fire which killed 168 people. Reportedly Reilly would never sit in the audience of any performance after that. Reilly's first television appearances were in two episodes of Car 54 Where Are You?, a series which shot in New York. He did a number of guest appearances in TV shows after that before landing the role of Claymore Gregg in the TV version of The Ghost and Mrs. Muir. That was the role that I first saw him in, playing the great nephew of the Captain Daniel Gregg (Edward Mulhare). Claymore – an eternal disappointment to his ancestor – is the scheming, but terrified of his ghostly uncle, owner of Gull Cottage. He was a delight to watch in the show's too short two season run.

After The Ghost and Mrs. Muir Reilly stayed in California and was a frequent guest star on network series as well as appearing frequently on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson on which he made 95 appearances on the show. He played the evil magician Horatio J. Hoodoo on the short lived Sid and Marty Krofft series Lidville (another Krofft series that was never seen in my part of Canada). It was also during this period that he reunited with his friend Gene Rayburn to do the revival of Match Game where he frequently feuded with another series regular, Brett Somers. Also during this time Reilly developed a longstanding friendship with Burt Reynolds. Reilly frequently served an instructor and director at the dinner theatre that Reynolds owned in his hometown of Jupiter Florida. Reilly made a number of appearances with Reynolds in movies and TV shows and directed several episodes of Reynolds's series Evening Shade.

Reilly had some regrets about his work in game shows telling The Advocate in 2001 "You can't do anything else once you do game shows. You have no career." This was probably true; certainly most of his work on Broadway after Match Game was as a director. Still, one of his most memorable TV roles came long after his main period of fame on Match Game. He played writer Jose Chung twice – once in the X-Files episode "Jose Chung's From Outer Space," and again in the Millenium episode "Jose Chung's Doomsday Defense" a not so subtle tweaking of Scientology. Watching Reilly playing Jose Chung made me re-evaluate him as an actor. In both appearances Chung was significantly less flamboyant than his persona on Match Game or even as Claymore Gregg on The Ghost and Mrs. Muir.

Charles Nelson Reilly didn't officially reveal his homosexuality until his one man show Save It For The Stage although it was hardly a secret. He told Entertainment Tonight in 2002 that "he felt no need to come out of the closet and that he never purposefully hid his homosexuality from anyone." Certainly his comedic persona in Match Game and probably as far back as Claymore Gregg in The Ghost and Mrs Muir was that of a rather flamboyant or even camp gay man, and his sexuality may have hurt his TV career as much as his game show appearances during the 1970s. According to Reilly a network executive once told him "they don't let queers on television."

In recent years Charles Nelson Reilly had focussed on his one man show. According to his partner Patrick Hughes (who he met while appearing on the game show Battlestars in the early 1980s Reilly had been ill for more than a year before succumbing to pneumonia on May 25^th. And yeah, he was right – virtually every newspaper obituary referred to him as "game show fixture Charles Nelson Reilly."

Here is the trailer for the film version of Reilly's one man show which is called The Life of Reilly and was released onto the festival circuit in 2006.

Joe Barbera - 1911-2006

Here’s another one of those obituaries that I hate doing, but if you are going to do an obit for Aaron Spelling as one of the great figures in television history – which I did – then you’ve got to do one for Joe Barbera who died Monday at age 95. Barbera was one of the great figures of television and one of the great figures of animation. And if his name is regarded with scorn by some fans of animation, it probably should be remembered that it Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera who most successfully made the transition from creating short subjects for movies to creating animated series for television. In a very real way they were the godfathers of The Simpsons in that they were among the creators of the prime time animated series with The Flintsones, The Jetsons and Top Cat.

Joe Barbera started in animation at the old Van Beuren Studio in New York. When Van Beuren’s studio closed in 1936 he briefly went to Paul Terry’s Terrytoon studio before eventually being lured to California to work at MGM for substantially more money that Terry was willing to pay anyone except himself. It was at MGM that he met a writer named Bill Hanna beginning a partnership that would last until Hanna’s death in 2001. Their first cartoon as a team featured a cat named Jasper and an unnamed mouse. The film was called “Puss Gets The Boot” and earned them an Oscar nomination. The cat was renamed Tom, the mouse became Jerry and the team of Hanna & Barbera was launched. They would continue to create the adventures of the house cat and his nemesis, the plucky little mouse for 17 years, until MGM shut down their animation studio in 1957. In the process they won the studio seven Oscars for animated short subject.

With the major studios all closing down their animation shops, Hanna & Barbera launched themselves into a new area – television. There had been cartoons created for TV before – Crusader Rabbit comes to mind – but product from the studios dominated. Television was a good secondary market for them and in the days of Black & White TV they could show all of their shorts. The first show they did for TV, Ruff & Reddy, featured a dog and a cat and ran from 1957 to 1960. This was followed by a veritable host of shows in the 1950s: Huckleberry Hound, Yogi Bear, and Quick Draw McGraw. These three shows adapted the format of the old theatrical shorts. The cartoons ran about six minutes and there were usually three cartoons in a show with two of the cartoons featuring supporting characters.

Then came The Flintstones. The show was sold to ABC (which at the time was quite desperate for content) as a cartoon for adult audiences to run in prime time (the adult nature of the show would have been clear to contemporary viewers – the main sponsor was Winston Cigarettes). In form the series was variation on Jackie Gleason’s classic Honeymooners shows, half hour shows that were essentially sitcoms done in animation rather than shorts for TV. Fred and Barney were always trying to sneak away from their wives to go to lodge meetings or poker games, or becoming involved in “get rich quick schemes” which inevitably backfired on them. The series lasted from 1960 to 1966 in prime time and encouraged ABC to try several more prime time cartoons: Top Cat, The Jetsons, and Johnny Quest. None of these lasted more than a single season but all four shows were constantly repeated.

Hanna-Barbera dominated Saturday morning animation in the 1960s and ‘70s with shows that included Josie & The Pussycats, Wacky Racers, SuperFriends, and of course Scooby Doo. Production quality wasn’t always that great. The only way the Hanna-Barbera studio could churn out the massive amount of material they did was by cutting corners. They would animate fewer frames than a theatrical short would have – sixteen frames and sometimes less. They would repeat walks and actions. They would rely on talking heads, and stage events off screen with the sound track carrying the action rather than the visuals. As a result a half-hour episode of something like Josie & The Pussycats cost the same amount – $48,000 – as an eight minute Tom & Jerry theatrical cartoon from the 1940s. Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera were actually rather pleased with this. When they explained to their former bosses at MGM how they were able to produce this much product for such an affordable price, the executives asked why they hadn’t proposed doing that when they were at the studio. It turns out that they had, but the plan had been rejected in favour of closing the studio.

Over the years the quality of the material that the Hanna-Barbera studio was producing declined. The company was no longer independent, having been sold to Taft Broadcasting in 1967 but the parent company had considerable financial difficulty. Quality of the material produced decline markedly. They would churn out licensed material like cartoons based on The Dukes of Hazard or Laverne & Shirley, or rehashing older material like Scooby Doo. Moreover according to Mark Evanier, who worked at the Hanna-Barbera Studio during this period, Barbera was well aware of the decline in what they were doing, and not particularly happy about it although he was also constantly hopeful that the next show would be the one to turn things around. I come at the work of Joe Barbera and his partner as a fan.

One of the first shows that I have any memory of was Ruff & Reddy, and my old high chair had decals of Augie Doggie and Doggie Daddy and Huckleberry Hound on it. Those old shows were the ones I remember most and with the greatest fondness. And of course there was The Flintstones possibly the best thing that the Hanna-Barbera Studio ever did. I know them all and for a very good reason. One of the stations here in Saskatoon ran The Flintstones every weekday at Noon (except for most summer) for over 25 years – requests from adults that the station get a different series were greeted with the explanation that there were always kids who hadn’t seen the shows before.

Mark Evanier’s blog has an extensive appreciation of Joe Barbera from the point of view of someone who knew him very well. It is a heart-felt appreciation of someone Mark clearly admired. Amid Amidi on the Cartoon Brew blog has some other remembrances of Joe Barbera from people who knew him.

Peter Boyle - 1935(?)-2006

I’ve tried to get away from writing obituaries for TV performers, but sometimes you just can’t avoid it. This is one of those times.

Peter Boyle died today at New York’s Presbyterian Hospital. Until fairly recently Boyle was probably best known for his screen roles – notably the campaign manager Lucas in The Candidate and the Monster in Young Frankenstein - he also did considerable television work before Everybody Loves Raymond. One of his first acting parts was in the 1970 CBS summer series Comedy Tonight. He played Senator Joseph McCarthy in the TV movie Tailgunner Joe, and the title character in a short-lived show (six episodes) called Joe Bash about a lonely cop. This show is so obscure that only the barest of episode descriptions can be found. In 1994 he played “Stanilslas Kelly” in an ABC pilot Philly Heat, the cast of which included Ving Rhames and Tate Donovan. Most of his other pre-Raymond TV work was as a guest star. In Midnight Caller he played the Gary Cole character’s father J.J. Killian in two episodes. He played Dan Breen, Andy Sipowicz’s AA sponsor who is eventually killed by his abusive, mentally disturbed son. Perhaps most famously he played Clyde Bruckman in one of the most famous episodes of The X-Files “Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose”, the role for which he won his only Emmy Award.

Of course it was for the role of Frank Barone that most TV viewers know him today. Amazingly he was the only member of the adult cast of that show not to win an Emmy award, despite having been nominated seven of the nine years the show was on the air. Boyle was perfectly cast as the sarcastic, angry, Frank, and you could always see a sort of twinkle in his eye when his character put one over on his wife Marie, played by Doris Roberts. Reportedly, when he auditioned for the part of Frank, producer Phil Rosenthal kept him waiting, which made the actor increasingly angry so that when he finally came in to read, “He came in all hot and angry, and I hired him because I was afraid of him.” Because of efforts to cross several of CBS’s Monday night sitcoms over, Boyle appeared in an episode of Bill Cosby’s last series Cosby. That show co-starred Madeline Kahn, who had appeared with Boyle in Young Frankenstein and before that in Comedy Tonight.

Peter Boyle met his wife Loraine Alterman on the set of Young Frankenstein - she was a reporter for Rolling Stone. Through her close friendship with Yoko Ono, Boyle developed a friendship with John Lennon, who served as Best Man at the couple’s 1977 wedding. They had two daughters. In recent photos he appeared increasingly gaunt and ill, possibly as a result of the multiple myeloma (a form of plasma cell cancer) and heart disease that he suffered. Peter Boyle was either 71 (according to most sources including IMDB) or 73 (according to Wikipedia).

Jack Warden - 1920-2006

I started working on this earlier today but I was basically forced to abandon it by other things I had to do. It gave me a little time to think about Jack Warden and his life and times. Another blogger with considerably better credentials than I described Jack Warden as a great character actor. I disagree with about two thirds of that statement - he wasn't a character actor so much as he was a supporting actor, of the sort who never stood out as the star but used to be nominated in the Best Supporting Actor category at the Oscars before it became populated with "second" stars in a movie or other stars doing a quick cameo, and was really about the guys who put together strong performances in secondary roles in movies, that was Jack Warden. Think about the movies he did: Shampoo (for which he won an Oscar nomination), Heaven Can Wait (another nomination), All The President's Men, Death On The Nile, And Justice For All, The Verdict and so on. Sure he did crap - more than his share in fact - but he was from a generation that came of age in the Depression and took roles because, well it was work.

Jack Warden had an interesting life before he got into acting. Born John H. Lebzelter in Newark New Jersey he was raised in Louisville Kentucky. Expelled from high school, either for fighting or as he sometimes said for being a professional boxer, he once fought on a card at Madison Square Garden along with an equally young Charles Durning. Boxing wasn't particularly lucrative so he joined the Navy in 1938, serving mostly with the Yangtse River Patrol in China. Leaving the Navy in 1941 he entered the Merchant Marine but after a particularly harrowing period at sea he requested service on deck rather than in the engine room of ships. When that request was denied he walked across the street and enlisted in the US Army. Assigned to the 101st Airborne he was injured in a training jump before the invasion of Normandy. So badly injured that he was shipped back to the United States he developed an interest in acting during his recuperation when someone gave him a play to read. He returned to active service in time to fight at Bastogne. After leaving the army as a Sergeant he did a series of odd jobs including bouncer and semi-pro football player while learning his craft.

Of course this blog being what it is, I'm a bit more focused on Jack Warden's television career. He did a lot of memorable roles but looking at his filmography in the IMDB it seems that virtually all of the series he was in never lasted more than a couple of years. People of a certain age (mine) were really introduced to Jack Warden in Wackiest Ship In The Army a sort of World War II comedy with adventure overtones based on the 1960 film of the same name and a real incident during the war. The show only lasted a year but those of us who saw it remember it - and are amazed that it only lasted a year. The truth is though that Jack Warden's TV career began well before that. His first continuing role was as the coach in the 1952 Wally Cox series Mr. Peepers and throughout the 1950s he was a regular presence in the live TV anthology series that were a mainstay of that era. He appeared in Kraft Television Theater, Studio One, The Alcoa Hour, The US Steel Hour and Playhouse 90 among many others. Moving to California as film work increased he was a frequent guest star in series as diverse as The Twilight Zone, The Untouchables, The Naked City and even Bewitched before getting the lead role in Wackiest Ship In The Army. That was followed in 1967 by N.Y.P.D. which lasted two years. That series was followed by a long period of film work which also included his only Emmy win as George Halas in Brian's Song. In 1976 he starred as the title character in Jigsaw John which lasted 15 episodes, and in 1979 he starred in an ill-advised attempt to bring The Bad News Bears to television (26 episodes). Perhaps his best series role was as aging private detective Harry Fox in the 1984 series Crazy Like A Fox opposite John Rubinstein as his very straight laced son. The series only lasted two years but it earned Warden two Emmy nominations for Outstanding Actor In A Comedy - he lost to Robert Guillaume in Benson in 1985, and Michael J. Fox in Family Ties in 1986. His last attempt at a series was 1989's Knight and Daye with Mason Adams. It lasted three episodes. Jack Warden's last television role was in an episode of 1999's The Norm Show with Norman MacDonald. His last film role was in 2000's The Replacements with Keanu Reeves and Gene Hackman.

Jack Warden died in New York on Wednesday. According to his business manager Sydney Pazoff "Everything gave out. Old age. He really had turned downhill in the past month; heart and then kidney and then all kinds of stuff."

Aaron Spelling - 1923-2006

What can you say about Aaron Spelling, who passed away on Friday at the age of 83 following a stroke. Although he had a number of credits as an actor - mostly bit parts but he did do six episodes of Dragnet in the 1950s - and as a writer, it is as a producer and executive producer that he's probably best known. While he's probably best remembered for shows like Dynasty, Beverly Hills 90210 (which starred his daughter Tori Spelling - but we won't hold that against him) and Charlie's Angels, the fact is that an examination of his credits as a producer stretch back all the way into the 1950s and include just about every kind of show that you can imagine. He did anthologies, westerns, detective shows, cop shows, and night time soaps, as well as some shows that simply defy description. He first worked for actor Dick Powell's company Four Star Productions then became a partner with actor-singer Danny Thomas in Thomas-Spelling Productions before creating his own company Aaron Spelling Productions (later Aaron Spelling Entertainment) in 1972. He produced Lucille Ball's unfortunate last series Life With Lucy which is ironic in a way because back in the 1950s one of Spelling's bit parts was as a gas station attendant in Tennesee on an episode of I Love Lucy. He made movies, mainly for TV but he was also the executive producer on a couple of pretty good theatrical film called California Split (directed by Robert Altman) and Mr. Mom. Not everything he did was a hit - far from it - but his batting average was pretty good and when he had a hit it was big. Among the series he provided for The WB (just as an example) were Savannah (an early hit for the network although it didn't last long) Charmed, and 7th Heaven, a series which Spelling described as his personal favourite of all the series he worked on.

I debated whether or not to list all of the TV series that Spelling was credited as Producer or Executive Producer on. I couldn't included everything he produced since he's credited with over 200 separate productions - the most prolific TV producer ever. Instead I decided to only include highlights. It's still a long list.

• Zane Grey Theater,


• Burke's Law


• Honey West


• Daniel Boone


• The Guns of Will Sonnett


• The Mod Squad


• The Rookies


• Starsky and Hutch


• S.W.A.T.


• Vega$


• Fantasy Island


• The Love Boat


• Charlie'sAngels


• Family


• Hart to Hart


• Dynasty


• Hotel


• Melrose Place


• Beverly Hills90210


• 7th Heaven


• Kindred: The Embraced


• Savannah


• Buddy Faro


• Charmed


• Clubhouse

In an industry where the phrase "industry giant" is used as commonly as balloons at political conventions, Aaron Spelling truly deserved that description.