On Monday I posted a lovely song-and-dance number featuring William Frawley before he was Fred Mertz. Today we see an example of what used to happen when you became a big TV name; you got to make a record. Yes, William Frawley made an LP for Decca in 1957 called
In ‘I Love Lucy’ Fred Mertz–played by the inimitable William Frawley–protrayed an ex-vaudevillian turned East Side landlord. The backstory was that he and his wife Ethel (Vivian Vance) were once a husband/wife act who wised-up when vaudeville died in the mid-thirties and invested their hard-earned savings in a brownstone that
If you’ve never seen the duo dance act of The Nicholas Brothers, you’re in for an astonishing surprise. And if you have seen them, you’re once again in for an astonishing surprise. Nothing about their style of dancing had ever been seen before or has since been replicated. The brothers–Fayard
Did you know Raymond Chandler has a cameo of sorts in ‘Double Indemnity’? Well, he does and the above clip proves it. Much has been made over the years of Chandler and co-writer/director Billy Wilder’s antipathy toward each other, but I wonder. If they were as uncomfortable with each other
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-negj5-410https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nnOtXHWPqI I don’t usually post on the weekends but this is no ordinary weekend. It’s Labor Day weekend. And that means it was once the weekend of the MDA Telethon hosted by Jerry Lewis, which began Sunday early evening and continued through Monday afternoon. I never missed a telethon from
Let’s wrap up this increasingly tiresome week of 1970s commercial jingles with a body-oriented two-fer. Above I’ve posted a musical ad for Nivia skin cream. This ad will count as our Friday dance video–I’ve determined that the best way to wash away the weeks miserable news is with a dance
Continuing our week-long survey of 1970s commercial jingles, we find ourselves confronted with one of my least favorite examples of the genre–the ‘I am stuck on Band-Aids (Cause Band-aids stuck on me’) ad. I wouldn’t even dignify this low-grade (but apparently successful) little ditty except for the fact that the
Next on our list (or YouTube’s list really) of catchy, never-to-be-forgotten-if-you-watched-a-lot-of-TV-in-the-70s jingles is the classic ‘Be A Pepper, Drink Dr,. Pepper’ production number. The lead in this niftily staged ad is David Naughton, later to star in ‘An American Werewolf In London’ and a slew of TV shows many of
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fAqa1ACGdA Yesterday I posted the much-beloved ‘Haw Haw’ song used in a Levi Jeans commercial from the mid-1970s. Naturally this provoked YouTube to drop a dumpster full of 70s TV commercials into my queue. I’m glad they did. First up was the above classic which I couldn’t wait to share
Why did I wake up this morning with the song from the Levi Jeans commercial (circa mid 1970s) playing in my head? And why did I find I could remember every word of the lyric? And why am I not surprised to see in the comments section that those who