https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7fn7PKzf5tk Last week I posted various examples of TV episodic comedy show themes. I missed posting something Friday because…well, because I just missed posting something. Things happen, you know. So we’ll wrap up this theme song stuff with a little bit of ‘I Love Lucy’ history which you might or
The oddly beloved comedy series ‘Green Acres’, starring Eddie Albert and Eva Gabor, ran an impressive six seasons on CBS, from 1965-1971. There are many fans of the show who point to its occasional forays into surrealist humor as evidence that a deeper vein of television comedy was being explored
This week I’m posting theme songs from old shows that provided the backstory to the viewer. As I mentioned yesterday, simply putting up the well known ones would be far too simple. So I’m providing a glimpse of both the flop shows and the hits. Today’s flop is ‘Occassional Wife’,
Our mission this week is to explore the theme songs of old TV comedies which contained lyrics that set-up the backstory of the show. Yesterday we wallowed in ‘The Partridge Family’ theme and frankly I thought the rest of this week would be a breeze. You know, ‘Brady Bunch’, Gilligans
In the 60s through the mid-70s, TV theme songs we’re often used to provide a backstory to the show so new viewers could get a handle on what the circumstances surrounding the characters were that led them to wind up on–er–TV. Actually, these storyline themes also gave regular viewers a
Let us bid this world-wearying week farewell with a superb performance from the great Steven Wright on The Tonight Show in 1982. Thanks to Wright’s Wikipedia entry, I learned a new word–albeit one I’m still not sure how to pronounce or even to use properly in a sentence. According to
Here’s a marvelous compilation of behind-the-scenes miscellany and interviews about and with The Three Stooges, spanning the late 1920s well into the 1970s. We see home movies of them as young chaps goofing around in the water at Coney Island; an odd promotional reel for a home movie camera that
Continuing this weeks uncanny resemblance between Julius ‘Groucho’ Marx’s character Rufus T. Firefly in ‘Duck Soup’ and the current President of the United State, we come to the movie’s brilliant opening song in which Firefly lays out the rules of his administration. Given that our current Presidents early goals included
Continuing our comparison begun yesterday between the current Presidential Administration and Rufus T. Firefly’s rule of Freedonia in ‘Duck Soup’ (1933), here is a rather terrifying example of a ninety year old piece of comedic art predicting the future of American politics all too accurately. Among the many mad appointees
I try to keep this blog as apolitical as possible, steeped as I am in popular culture of another era–which may be seen by some as a method by which I avoid the present day. (By the way, if that’s what somebody thinks, they’re right). But the extraordinarily ugly events