Good point. So much the easier for someone to do the research, then!
Why else do you think they were so anxious for shore leave?
Pity he never had a chance to play the role of the politician he was born to portray:
http://www.diegovelazquez.org/Portrait-of-Philip-IV-1652-53-large.html
More Sanford & Son trivia: Demond Wilson starred in a couple of more sitcoms: (Baby I’m Back (forgettable but not terrible sitcom about a man trying to win back his ex-wife) and an Odd Couple remake with a mostly black cast (he was Oscar and Ron Glass from Barney Miller & Firefly played Felix) that even used some of the same episodes if not the same scripts as the original, and he did some guest shots, but then he basically left the business. He was offered the role of Lamont in a reprise of Sanford & Son for, at least in his telling, big money (and even small money for TV is big money for most fields) but declined. Instead he became a minister.
Larry King said Demond Wilson was the worst guest he ever had on his radio show. Demond Wilson would probably agree; he admits he was not a happy person during that era.
Unfortunately he’s one of the holier-than-thou shouting-is-believing variety of ministers. He’s very anti-gay and fundamentalist- always a shame when that happens. He has built from his own money halfway homes for ex-cons, so at least he does good deeds. He returned to sitcoms in a recurring role on Girlfriends as the biological father of one of the characters whose birth mother was played by Ellen Geer, most famous for playing Sunshine Dore in Harold & Maude and daughter of Waltons star Will “Grandpa” Geer.
Redd Foxx, famous for his money problems (not the least of them caused by signing away his residuals for S&S to his wife in a divorce settlement) did reprise the role of Fred of course in Sanford, a P.S. series to S&S that actually had a couple of good moments but was nothing at all like the original. The show overwrote Sanford Arms, a four episode spin off of Sanford & Son whose main character was Phil Wheeler, had bought the Sanford “empire” and made it into what we’d today call a B&B. Some of the supporting characters from Sanford & Son appeared (Aunt Esther, Bubba, Grady and his wife Dolly [played by Norma Miller who appeared on a hysterical episode of S&S as the same character and a couple of others as different characters) appeared but Fred and Lamont were said to be in Arizona. Opening credits.
Phil was played by Theodore/Teddy Wilson. , a character actor who was kept busy in the 1970s. His most famous character was probably Sweet Daddy Williams, a flashy criminal who appeared in several episodes of Good Times, but he also appeared on many other shows (and in fact appeared on episodes of GT when he wasn’t Sweet Daddy). Sadly, he died of AIDS received from a drug transfusion.
Grady was also a S&S spinoff for a few episodes. The pilot was incorporated into Sanford and Son (the episode where he buys the awful nude painting for his suburban daughter and her husband). Grady’s grandson was played by Heywood Nelson who later played Dwayne on What’s Happening?. Mayo’s real life son is a legislator in Atlanta.
Holy Smokes, Batman, that guy looks and sounds exactly like Adam West (at least in that clip).
But the Monkees are just “Beatles” types, especially Davy Jones, the short one that Roddenberry mentions. I mean, he’s the British one.
Just learned a new one today:
Chuck Jones acknowledged that he got the idea for Wyle E. Coyote from reading the description of a coyote by Mark Twain:
Mark Twain In His Own Words, special edition magazine from American History Magazine, citing Roughing It, 1872.
They couldn’t find Craig’s Batgirl costume - they had one that was worn out, because Craig wore it out doing her stunts, and one that was unfinished, but they couldn’t find the usable one they had had.
Eventually, Burt Ward said he had a friend who may have one - and sure enough, soon he brought in the actual costume she’d worn.
Craig is convinced to this day that Ward’s friend is fictional, and that he had the costume himself.
Which reminds me: Mel Blanc, voice of Bugs Bunny and many, many other toons, was allergic to carrots*.
*At least, according to urban legend. His autobiography makes no such claim, and in a Straight Dope column, a Blanc confidante confirmed that Blanc only spit out the carrots because of time constraints, and not because of allergies or general dislike.
I don’t think I’d bother keeping the costume without having Yvonne Craig in the costume.
All in the Family, while not a spin-off, was a re-make of a British show Till Death Do Us Part. Good Times may yet count…
Bear in mind I was a wee bit younger then, if I saw the same actress playing a lady named “Florida” I probubly assumed it was a spin-off.
Dyn-o-mite!
Hey, as long as you can find a girl willing to wear the costume…
Assuming Ward wasn’t wearing it himself!:eek:
The soap opera “Edge of Night” was originally conceived as a daytime version of the Perry Mason" character that was popular in books, radio and a couple of movies. But author Earle Stanley Gardner didn’t like what was planned and wouldn’t cooperate.
When the 1950s version of “Perry Mason” was cast, Raymond Burr went to audition for the perpetually losing District Attorney Hamilton Burger (as a former lawyer, Gardner didn’t like DA’s and deliberately chose an insulting name for his). Mason had played a heavy in a number of films like Hitchcock’s “Rear Window” and Errol Flynn’s"Adventures of Don Juan". But Gardner saw mason and said “That’s Perry Mason!”. To make sure he didn’t lose the role, the always overweight Burr had himself locked in a hotel room for three days for a crash diet.
Only one “Perry Mason” episode was shot in color.Ironically anothef famous fat actor was the bad guy - Victor Buono.
Paul Drake was played by William Hopper, son of notorious gossip columnist Hedda Hopper. William had stayed away from acting for a decade and didn’t want to make it because of his mother. Hopper’s father DeWolf was a vaudeville actor who recited the baseball poem “Casey at the Bat” some 10,000 times in an overwrought manner. When the series was resurrected in a bunch of TV movies in the 1980s, Barbara Hale’s son William Katt played Paul Drake Jr since Hopper was dead.
William Talman, who played DA Hamilton Burger. Gardner was especially taken with his performance, saying he conveyed that Burger always looked like he was going to win a case but never did. Actually there are some exceptions: he once had Mason defend a friend and remarked at the dinner afterwards that he won and he got a conviction of a Mason client, but it was someone else using the clients name. Talman was arrested on a morals charge and CBS wanted to get rid of him. But Burr liked Talman and insisted he be kept. He was, but didn’t appear on as many episodes
[nitpick]Cambridge[/nitpick]
Wait, I see. You meant he attended school at Cambridge. However, I meant his birthplace was Oxford. So it looks like we’re both right.
Cite? I’d always heard he was auditioning for the Paul Drake part.
Once again, jumping in with a quote from Forbidden Channels:
“Fred MacMurray, the first choice for the lead in Perry Mason, turned down the role because he didn’t want the work load of an hour-long weekly dramatic show. The part went instead to Raymond Burr, who had originally read for the supporting role of prosecuting D.A. Hamilton Burger. In landing the lead, Burr delivered himself from B heavies and Godzilla flicks, not to mention creating an indelible alter-ego that would dominate his entire career.”
Fair enough. Still, a quick google got me this:
Two reviews of “Perry Mason 50th Anniversary Edition” DVD set:[ul]
[li]dvdtalk.com section Extra Features[/li][li]dvdverdict.com section The Evidence[/li][/ul]Per the two links:
and
So, per the above links: At least Burr tested for Burger, and Burr and Hopper tested for Mason.
Funny side note: according to Brandon Tartikoff’s autobio, William Devane, for reasons known only to him, decided to audition for the role of Sam barefoot. Everything was going fine until he knocked one of the glasses off the bar and it shattered on the floor. The casting people would have let the audition stop while the broken glass was cleaned up, but Devane apparently didn’t want to “break his rhythm” so he continued, gingerly stepping around broken glass on the floor, trying to do the scene. Needless to say, he didn’t get the part.
Hee Haw was conceived by Bernie Brillstein, who in later years would become the manager of such luminaries as John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, Gilda Radner, Lorne Michaels, Dabney Coleman and others too numerous to mention. HH was shot in blocks: all the music segments, then all the sketches, then all the blackouts in the cornfield. They could shoot an entire year’s worth of shows in three months.
Actually, it was a conglomerate called Gulf & Western that bought both Paramount and Desilu. It was run by an Austrian mogul named Charles Bluhdorn. I think he saw the two small studios together and decided to combine them, making Desilu the television division.
Nitpicking: it was actually a clothing salesman. Boy, I’d have loved to been a fly on the wall that day. Cassidy, in the Ruk makeup, is playing the part to the hilt, waving a cigar around and talking on the phone (“Listen, babe, I need another three grand in the effects budget or the Enterprise ain’t gonna fly, capisce?”) and glaring down at the salesman from the rafters (“Young man, I’ll take care of you in just a minute!”). The salesman did recover pretty fast and started showing swatches of material “imported from Japan.” Cassidy made a show of being interested (“You have anything in fuscia?”) before Gene and his cronies, watching from the doorway and just dying, finally explain the gag. They just wanted to make sure the Ruk makeup was startling, but not frightening.
For a tag, Gene ordered two pairs of pants. When he got them, they didn’t fit.