WATCHING EVERYTHING THERE EVER WAS

WATCHING EVERYTHING THERE EVER WAS

FEATURES

DREW WHEELER

Television taught me just about everything. If I wanted to be a bigot, I could pattern myself after Archie Bunker, if I wanted to be a consummate hipster, there was Maynard G. Krebs, or if I wanted to be a snivelling creep, there was Eddie Haskell. Aside from shaping my personality, television brought me the most powerful images of our time— events of such global significance as the war in Indochina, the first moonwalk and the Beverly Hillbillies going to England. Well, let’s just say that among our household's appliances, the TV set hoa ’em all beat by a mile.

I'd heard tell of the Museum of Broadcasting from time to time. I'd heard that it was really a library of TV, that they had an unlimited catalogue and— this one reaily got me— they left all the original commercials, in. I'd heard plenty about the Museum of Broadcasting, but like a prospector being told that the mother lode is just over the ridge, my enthusiasm was generally tempered with skepticism. "They leave the commercials in? What else is there, chocolate fondue? A private audience with Milton Berle?" Yet beneath the surface, and not very far at that , my imagination ran wild. I wanted to watch it oW. I wanted the episode of You Bet Your Life when one of Groucho's housewife-contestants was a pre-showbiz Phyllis Diller, I wanted Soupy Sales telling his pint-sized apostles to go into their parents' wallets and take out the pieces of paper with pictures of presidents on them and mail them to him, I wanted that "Watch Out For The Other Guy" traffic-safety spot where the unsafe driver virtually mows you down in yourown easy chair,..good God, I wanted to watch it all I wanted to see Lenny Bruce on the Tonight Show, when Steve Allen was the host. There was no end to the possibilities. The Museum in my head swelled to monstrous proportions: I wanted to see Fidel Castro's historic meeting with Ed Sullivan, I wanted to see Betty Furness host an atomic explosion, I wanted to see Billy Graham interviewed by Woody Allen...

There was no yellow-brick road leoding up to the Museum of Broadcasting, but I found it all the same, just off Fifth Avenue at 53rd Street, One of the pleasant ladies behind the front desk will charge you S3 if you don't have a membership, which costs $30 ($20 for students and seniors). A 63-seat auditorium, used for video exhibitions, takes up the rest of the ground floor. Upstairs there's a smaller screening room, which they refer to as a Videoteque, where other exhibitions take place. Farther upstairs is the card catalogue, which can summon up around 6,000 television shows and 10,000 radio shows that date back to 1920, Over 2,400 radio scripts are also on file there. To see (or hear) what you've chosen from the card file, there are two rooms of viewing consoles. And that's all there is to ihis tightly-run little archive.

The Museum of Broadcasting was founded in 1975 by William Paley, Chairman of the Board of CBS. This makes him Chairman of the Board of the Museum of Broadcasting as well, other members including NBC chief Grant Tinker and ABC biggie Frederick Pierce, Fritz Jacoby, head of public relations for the MB, told me that one-third of their money comes from Paley and the rest comes from the three networks and group stations. The Museum is □ nonprofit enterprise. Every year, each network offers around 300 hours of programming, from which the MB takes about half for its permonent collection. Fritz Jacoby says of the programs in the Museum: "It's not just the best or the most distinguished—it's a sampling." Since the MB is a place where you can watch the Kennedy-Ntxon debates one minute ond Charlie's Angels the next, that would seem to be the case. Still, criticisms have been made that the collection is quite CBS-heavy, given the founder's association with that network. An unscientific survey of my own seemed to bear this out, with NBC in second place, ABC in third, and fewer programs from PBS than any of the others. Of course the MB is only eight years old— better representation among the networks will have to come about over a period of years.

Although the Museum of Broadcasting is more a library than an actual museum, it does have an ever-changing roster of exhibits like most museums. When I started coming to the MB, I was lucky enough to catch one of the progroms in their "Hanna-Barbara: 25 Years" series. The show was Wait Till Your Father Gets Home, probably the last prime-time cartoon, one that essentially brought the Flmtstones and the Jetsons into the present-day as a modern sitcom family. The Hanna-Barbora exhibition began with 1 heir earliest Tom and Jerry cartoons, Quick-Draw McGrow, Pixie and Dixie, Yogi Bear, Johnny Quest and Huckleberry Hound, which was the first TV-cartoon with no live-action host. The Fhnfstones, which ran from 1960 to 1966, is the most revered of all HannaBarbara shows, and is also remembered along with its spinoff, Pebbles and 8am8am, which featured Sally Struthers as the voice of Pebbles and Jay North as the voice of Bam-Bam, The exhibit covered such recent hits as Scooby-Doo and PacMan, which, along with the other cartoons shown, have entered the museum's permanent collection.

The one exhibit to which 1 dedicated the most time was "Sid CaesarMaster of Comedy." (There wosa Muppets exhibit on at the same time but I felt that in 1983 we’ve heard quite enough from the Muppets, while Sid Caesar is still a pretty rare item.) Over 30 years of Caesarana was there to see, including the classic "From Here to Obscurity" parody from Your Show Of Shows with Sid as a supersonic test pilot whose plane is so fast that he lands on hour and a half before he takes off. Caesar also had a prodigiously talented writing staff, including Mel Brooks, Woody Allen and Larry Gelbart, and equally adept co-stars Imogene Coca, Carl Reiner and Nanette Fabray.

One previous exhibition was an extensive Bob and Ray retrospective, which ran the gamut from their earliest radio braodcosts to television appearances storting in 1951 up to 1982, chronicling the lives of such memorable characters as Wally Ballou, Mary Backstage and Jack Headstrong, AllAmerican American. With B&R appearances on Ed 5u//ivan, Dick Cavett and the Tonight Show, the exhibition even featured their hysterical version of Rod Stewart's "Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?" from a 1979 Saturday Night Live. Shown throughout the series were Bob and Ray commercials, the very first "soft-sell" ads like Bert and Harry Riel that blazed the trail for humor in advertising.

"Disneyvision" was a month-long tribute to the Magic Kingdom on television, and while spotlighting some less-than-stimng Disney fare such as Flash, The Teenage Offer and Chico, The Mis understood Coyote, the series also touched on The Mickey Mouse C/ub and award-winmng cartoons like "Duck For Hire" and the wartime short, "Der Fuhrer’s Face." A 10-year retrospective on Home Box Office was shown a few months ago, including musical specials by Diana Ross, Elton John, Bette Midler and George Jones {with Elvis Costello among his guests). Comedians like Steve Martin, Lily Tomlin, Robert Klein, the Smothers Brothers and Robin Williams were also a part of the series, along with the "Thrilla in Manila" '75 Frazier-Ali bout. As is generally the case, exhibition material becomes port of the MB's catalogue.

But I wouldn't kid myself into thinking that the exhibits were what! came to the museum for. I wanted to watch it all, remember? All I had to do was let my fingers do the rifling through the MB card catalogue and come up with a living blast from the past. Just fill out a card, and leave it with one of the friendly and informative librarians. You'l be fold how long the wait is for a console. The heavier the video-traffic, the longer the wait—but the Videoteque downstairs is a room easily slipped in and out of, and nothing kills the time like o few episodes of Ruff and Reddy.

The video console rooms are extremely clean and well-designed. With headphones clamped over their heads, each viewer plugs into their own solidstate oracle. The MB staff insists on handling all the tapes themselves, so you can |ust sit back and en|oy.

My first choice was a dim memory, a weekly rock ’n' roll ritual known as Hullabaloo. The guest host of this 1966 broadcast was Barry McGuire, getting what mileage he could out of his recent hit, "Eve of Destruction." Brenda Lee and Barbara McNair were the obligatory "square" pop singers, whom I found myself ignoring in 1983 as I did back then. The "minor" act that day was the Kingsmen, who played a snippet of "Louie Louie" then "Money," surrojnded by caged go-go dancers. The "ma|or" act that day was a considerably younger Rolling Stones—featuring Brian Jones. But an even more telling harbinger of youth than the boyish Jogger immediately followed: it was an ad for the omnipresent Clearasil. {"Why are these Ohio teenagers hid/ng half their faces?") I had been reunited with a slice of my past hfe, and I remembered it just as it was. In the words of one Ohioan: "I couldn't wait to try Clearasil on the other half of my face!"

Any video archeologist will take joy in tracing the career of Ernie Kovacs, justifiably touted nowadays as the first "video artist." The high-flying Kovacs, who later died in a car crash, was probably TV's first diabolical genius. He employed every technical gimmick available at the time, such as dissolves splitscreen and superimposition— sometimes gratuitously, but generally to a powerful effect. One splitscreen encounter showed how simple yet successful Kovacs' sketchs were: one half of the screen is a shot of the studio audience, the other half is a shot of two goldfish bowls; Kovacs ond an unidentified actress do voice-overs as the fish m the bowl, ad-libbing caustically about the people they {and we) see i n the audience. Did they really try stuff like that way back in '56?

Another comic rarity that [ couldn't pass up was The Woody Alien Special which aired n September of '69, featuring Candice Bergen, the Fifth Dimension and — I kid you not—special guest star Billy Graham. It was a spectacle of democracy in action: confirmed agnostic Woody Allen asking the best-known evangelist in the world things like "What's your favorite commandment?" In a later sketch, Allen plays a sort of magic rabbi who converts a socially inept debutante (Bergen) into an intellectual by teaching her to soy things like "Ffvfro Madigan was a beautiful film to look at, but it was visua/Jy disoppomting."

Of couse, not everything is good for a laugh. The April 5, 1955 installment of The Morning Show on CBS featured an above-ground detonation of o 40-Kiloton atomic bomb hosted by, you guessed it, Betty Furness, the Queen of Television (as they then referred to her). Covered with all the gusto of an Olympic game, there were reporters in the trenches near the blast site, reporters commenting on what terrific breakfasts those Civil Defense guys can whip up, and reporters wondering about the future of "Survival Town," a community of 10 houses peopled by mannequins due for a rather hot time in just a few minutes. Army personnel stationed around the blast were ordered into the dust cloud to "check" the effects of such weapons under batllefield conditions—who would've thought some of these men would end up battling cancer and the Government as a long-term result of this test?

One of my last choices turned out to be one of the single most requested programs at the Museum of Broadcasting, but I'm not at oil ashamed of my lack of originality. The night was Sunday, February 9, 1964 and the Beatles were making their first U.S. appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show.

Certainly anyone alive then was watching it, as l was, and the impact of seeing the Fab Four live on TV crystalized the already-rampant Beatlemania in our suburban household. Yet in 1983 my goal was different. Of course, this was the Beatles' first hello to America, but who else was in that charmed lineup? Aside from a comedy magician and an acrobatic troupe whose names escape me, that show featured perhaps the worst impressionist of all time, whom Sullivan introduced as "The brilliant impressionist, Frank Gorshin." Far more palatable was actress Georgia Brown, appearing with the kids from Oliver!, a Broadway hit that year. But still my absolute favorite was Tessie O'Shea, a corpulent music-hall chanteuse in a lame gown, a sort of British Ethel Merman. Tessie O'Shea could've speorheaded the Beatles' invasion if only we'd let her, bellowing out "I've Got Rhythm," telling jokes with a vaudevillian's bouyoncy ond strumming a midget banjo to her signature theme, "Two-Ton Tessie." (A real star, but where is she now?) Well, the Beatles weren't afways teamed up with such talent—the second Beatles/ Sullivan telecast featured Allen ond Rossi, Mitzi Gaynor and Myron Cohen. (Ed actually spoke to Fidel Castro for the show a few weeks before, so Mitzi must've been a breeze.)

One learns, at the Musuem of Broodcosting, that in retrospect everything is much cheaper than you remember it to be. This marks the difference between the Museum of Broadcasting and the Museum in my Mmd. Ed Sullivan was preparing to introduce the Beatles for their lost two songs when he said, "But first, here are some interesting facts about Kent cigarettes..