Let’s Get The Workweek Off To A Big Start
…with a big opening production number. But not just any opening number…an old-fashioned Broadway style opening number….except it was part of a TV show video taped in Miami Beach in 1966.
As someone who does and studies comedy, I’ve been collecting the DVDs of the 1960s Color Honeymooners where the great comedian Jackie Gleason turned his classic black and white 1950s 30-minute comedies into hour-long musicals complete with original lyrics and music. By the fall of 1966 all of the three major television networks were broadcasting in color — and shows made the most of it with outlandish wardrobes and backgrounds. Here’s the opening scene from a famous episode where The Honeymooners start a trip to Europe.
This also contains a bit of the opening show’s dialogue. Younger readers note: Gleason was the inspiration for Fred Flintstone (he looked into legal issues but got nowhere). The guy who comes out after in the yellow sports coat is Art Carney, whose Honeymooners character Ed Norton was the inspiration for the less-seen-today cartoon Yogi Bear.
So here’s a zippy opening number after a week of exhausting politics and political second-guessing:
And here’s a clip from when his 1960s hour-long show debuted four years earlier in black-and-white from New York City. This contains one of the famous kaleidoscopic overhead views of the dancing Emmy Award winning June Taylor Dancer’s dancers, a blaring orchestra and Gleason as himself as emcee using his famous catchphrases — and displaying all of his gifts of stage presence and showmanship:
One Response to “Let’s Get The Workweek Off To A Big Start”
A fantastic post! These videos are amazing . . . their product placements delivered by early 60s-styled beauties . . . great windows into the world of “Mad Men”.
(Perhaps it is just me, but the opening of the Miami Beach version of “The Jackie Gleason Show” is unnerving . . . the low flying camera and the ominous music reminiscent of “Jaws”. . .one would not be surprised if, instead of credits, the camera zoomed in on a floating body, or the hotels exploded in mushroom clouds)
I had only seen “The Honeymooners” in the Audrey Meadows B/W version.
Odd that this “Alice Kramden” is nothing on Meadows . . . she nervously takes Ralph's badgering, while the Meadows' version would have ripped a strip off him whenever he took that tone with her.
As Gleason would have approved/directed the writing for all “The Honeymooners,” this suggests he viewed the characters differently depending upon the actor playing the part. He probably regarded Meadows as a better foil.
The main thing I always liked about “The Honeymooners” was the class angle . . . it was a contrast to the suburban American ideal with kids and white picket fence.
Instead, it was gritty and urban . . . with a struggling bus driver and a sewer worker (I believe “Norton” worked in the city sewers, if memory serves). Continual tension between the husband and wife too . . . with Meadows a strong, assertive female character.
I had no idea a Miami musical version of the show even existed.
I suppose Gleason has a range of different objectives here.
It was sort of startling actually, in contrast to my memories of the early one. Dramaturgically speaking (shades of uni drama classes
Fascinating though.
A great post! Like windows on a different world, but not so very long ago.