I had a temp job for a few days and I had to enter data so they let me listen to my CD. I was playing was called “When Dinah Shore Ruled The Earth.”
Of course I don’t expect anyone there with me to know who Dinah Shore is, (she’s a singer most famous in the 40s and early 50s. She later hosted a talk show and was noted for dating Burt Reynolds).
Anyway I had about four people look at the CD, while they liked her singing, they didn’t understand the title of the CD.
“When Dinah Shore Ruled The Earth”
It’s obviously a play on the phrase
“When dinosaurs ruled the Earth?”
My question is do YOU get this right off the bat? Or are both Dinah Shore and the phrase too old to have meaning.
All these people who didn’t get it were young probably under 25
I didn’t get it right off the bat. I know who Dinah Shore is (although I’m sure most people my age wouldn’t), but I would have just taken the title to mean that the songs were from the time when Dinah Shore was popular.
If I’d heard it out loud I might have been more likely to get it, but reading the title I don’t think I would have. I would expect that most young people have heard the phrase “When dinosaurs ruled the earth”, though.
The OP is laboring under a common misconception. The title is not so much a play on “dinosaur” as the other way around: Dinah Shore actually predates the dinosaurs–the word “dinosaur” is itself a corruption of the name “Dinah Shore.” Ms. Shore is thought the be the earliest known ancestor of all vertebrate life on the planet, and is believed by some to be the actual first organism to crawl out on land from the originating seas. (NB: this is also where we get the word “shore.”)
I didn’t get the pun. I suspect not being familiar with Dinah Shore would have helped, because all I thought of was Dinah Shore.
Some of what I know about Dinah Shore:
She was a lot cooler than her folksy demeanor might have suggested. She had Iggy Pop and David Bowie on her daytime talk show in the 70s and talked to them like they were real people instead of freaks. (Of course they were freaks, but it’s just weird seeing her talking to the godfather of punk and the thin white duke as if it was the most normal thing in the world.) She developed a reputation as a gay-friendly entertainer, and the golf tournament named for her still has a large lesbian following. (Yeah, I know, lesbians and golf, but this one in particular.) Andy Kaufman once dumped eggs on her head, which is yet another reason not to like Andy Kaufman.
She made a pretty funny cameo in Oh God. John Denver plays a grocery store manager to whom God appears, in the produce section, as George Burns. He ends up going on her show, and she interviewed in a very straightforward manner; her deadpan non-jokey delivery made it much funnier than it might have been. I thought it was cool that by sacrificing her opportunity to be the funny at the center of attention, she succeeded in making the overall situation much, much funnier.
Gosh, I knew I wasn’t one of the cool kids. I’m 52 and was raised on Dinah Shore…have tons of her sheet music…and I didn’t get the pun…never heard her called a dinosaur before. Oh, well. And I watched a lot of Beanie and Cecil
She actually had about 5 or 6 successful TV variety shows and talk shows. She had about 8o singles hit the charts. She was very big. I am 66 so I watched her shows.
But I got the pun immediately.
I’m 55 and got it straight away. I fondly remember her TV show(s) from the 60s. Now that I think back it seems that every second woman in Hollywood had her own show:
Ann Sothern
Dinah Shore
Donna Reed
Lucille Ball
Jane Wyman
Loretta Young
Patti Page
Rosemary Clooney
Shirley Temple
and Gracie Allen with some guy.
Well for the first half of the century, from 1900 -1950, Dinah Shore ran a close second behind Jo Stafford as the female singer with the most hits. (Stafford, just slightly came out ahead)
Shore’s version of “Tess’s Torch Song,” is a classic of the (IMHO) world’s best song.
As she got older Shore was known for her talk show (it was like a Merv Griffin type show) but she was also known as she dated Burt Reynolds and he was much younger than her.
