What odd “behind the scenes” stories have you heard about television shows?
I’ll start you out with one:
When Happy Days first aired, ABC refused to let Henry Winkler wear a leather jacket, saying that it made him look like a hoodlum. Garry Marshall talked them into letting him wear it when he was on his motorcycle, saying that it was safety equipment. Then Winkler was on his motorcycle in as many scenes as possible, even riding it into Arnold’s Diner.
sounds like that show might have been bordering on sharky from early on.
I trump your elementary triv and call upon brother Chuck.
Well, these are some fairly well known “obscure” facts, but oh well…
“the Flintstones” are based off of “the Honeymooners.” (Fred + Wilma = the Kramdens, Barney + Betty = the Nortons)
“the Jetsons” are based off of “Blondie” (George = Dagwood, Jane = Blondie, Mr. Spacely = Mr. Dithers, etc.)
“Scooby Doo” - the four kids are based on characters from “the Many Loves of Dobie Gillis” (Fred = Dobie, Velma = Zelda, Daphne = Thalia, Shaggy = Maynard.)
On Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (why yes, i do i own the entire series on dvd :D), my favorite science fiction series from the 1960s, the Seaview would always have to suffer through the explosion of the week, which would rock the submarine from side to side. You could practically set your watch by it.
To accomplish this, either the director, or creator Irwin Allen, would bang on a bucket timed to the tilt of the camera to simulate the roll of the sub which would cue the actors to throw themselves around the set.
These I did not know. Thanks!
And Scooby Doo’s name came from Frank Sinatra’s Strangers in the Night.
Apparently the short skirts and mini-dresses common in Star Trek the Original Series were the idea of the actress who played Janis Rand. They didn’t appear in the original pilot, which was before she was recruited.
But Sally Kellerman reportedly did not wear undies, that’s gotta count for something.
Just to be in on thread, I’ll reveal that this week’s Jeopardy! disclosed that the set used for the original Hawaii 5-0 was reused for Magnum PI which caused me to choke on my salad, and utter, “What hath God wrought!”
Twelve kids were cast for The Brady Bunch, six blond and six brunet. They wanted the kids’ hair color to match their birth parents’. Reed and Henderson had not yet been cast.
Every Trekkie knows this one (tho it may be apocryphal, I dunno): In production of the original pilot, The Menagerie/The Cage, the green-skinned dancing girl kept showing up pink in the prints for some reason and Roddenberry kept saying “Paint her greener!” until she was dark as an eggplant. Turned out somebody in the film-editing stage of the process didn’t know she was supposed to be green and kept correcting her tint.
I thought eggplants were purple, though.
Someone gave me a book, Forbidden Channels by Penny Stallings that is chock full of stuff like this. One snippet about I Love Lucy:
“Bill Frawley often growled at his boss Desi Arnez, ‘Where did you dig up that bitch?’ when referring to his TV wife, Vivian Vance. Frawley’s other pet name for Vance was ‘Old Fat Ass’.
It wasn’t just that Vance got on Frawley’s nerves, he had despised the woman from the first moment he set eyes on her. And with some reason: out of her frumpy Ethel Mertz character, Vance was very much the grande dame. She’d come to TV from the Theatah, don’t you know, and tended to think of herself as an artiste. But you’d be a little sensitive to if, like Vance, you suddenly found yourself catapulted into national prominence as the frumpy fictional wife of a humorless old poop. At 64, Frawley was 25 years Vance’s senior. ‘He should be playing my father,’ she often complained. Vance also deeply resented a clause in her contract that allowed her character to be written out of the show if anything happened to Frawley.”
Some other TV show casting tidbits from the book - Gene Rodenberry wanted Martin Landau to play the part of Spock, Mickey Rooney nixed the part of Archie Bunker and Penny Marshall came thisclose to being cast as Gloria, Bing Crosby turned down the role of Columbo because he didn’t need the money and would interfer with his passion - golf.
One of my favorite stories, which I’ll probably mangle, is about Star Wars. Kind of.
Star Wars was huge at the time, so Garry Marshall’s 5-year-old son begged him to do a Happy Days episode featuring a space alien. Having long since jumped the shark, Marshall agreed.
The cast hated the script. The actor playing the alien was so disgusted with it that he quit less than two days before taping. Marshall’s assistant suggested a replacement actor, some guy she’d seen at a comedy club the night before.
The replacement actor was horrible. He wouldn’t follow the script, and ad libbed his way through the entire thing.
The next morning, everyone in the world was talking about Robin Williams.
I can trump this. Jane Jetson was voiced by Penny Singleton, who actually played Blondie on the radio from 1939-1950. and in a series of movies from 1938-1950.
That is very interesting. At the time, Marshall was married to Rob Reiner, who played Gloria’s husband, Mike.
Nit-pick: Somebody at the film processing stage…
During the filming of the Jeremy Brett version of Sherlock Holmes, Brett carried around a big tome of the complete stories and novels by Doyle. He marked with flags all of the places which mentioned how Holmes looked, spoke, dressed, acted or reacted, and he referred to it all the time when he was deciding how his character would look and sound in each scene.
I thought of this once when I read a passage in one of the stories describing Holmes’s voice as having a “high, strident tone”. I heard Brett speak naturally in some old tapes of talk show appearances, and his own voice was deepish and soft. When he acted as Holmes, though, he’d take it up an octave or so, and make it quite piercing, and, well, strident.
That’s really interesting. Brett defined Sherlock to me. Quite a stretch from My Fair Lady (1964) 
Fred MacMurray only agreed to do My Three Sons if he could shoot all of his scenes for a season in 2 months of the year, leaving him the rest of his time for golf and his investments (he was one of the most successful businessmen of any actors and died one of the richest men in Hollywood). This proved very hectic for the other actors and the writers and is why many of the scenes in the show are of MacMurray alone. The other actors dialogue would be filmed sometimes months later and spliced in.
A sort of shocking one about Car 54 Where Are You?: Joe E. Ross, who played Gunther Toody, was pretty much universally hated by his co-stars and everybody else associated with the show. He had a horrible temper, was frequently drunk, brought prostitutes to the set, and exposed himself to Charlotte Rae (later famous as Mrs. Garrett) who in the commentary on the DVDs (as one of the few surviving cast members) didn’t even pretend to like him. (All of them liked Fred Gwynne, though they said he was very private so they didn’t know him well.)
Ross was written out after the first season but basically begged and pleaded and promised to reform and the show’s producers wrote him back in. When he was just as bad (off camera) on the second season they wrote him out for good in the third, but the show was- to their surprise- cancelled before a third season went into production.
Ross may have been one of the inspirations for Andy Kaufman’s character Tony Clifton. While there’s no evidence they knew each other, some of Clifton’s antics were identical to Ross’s TV show and nightclub stunts.
That really surprises me about Francis Bavier. I guess the woman could act!