…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:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qm3s-22lcPY&feature=related
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:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEQg-L-Rbp0&eurl=http://themoderatevoice.com/entertainment/comedy-humor/great-comedians/24232/lets-get-the-workweek-off-to-a-big-start/
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.