im sure it was but maybe not…its just such a childhood show i threw it in…it was certainly bad enough to be canadian
I don’t know… We had this debate at work, and someone looked it up on the 'net. Originally there were lot’s of regional Romper Rooms. I don’t remember the gory details tho.
6was9–yeah I couldn’t believe it. They cut off Frank Sinatra in the middle of his goddamn speech and it really ticked everybody off. But Billy Joel got right and gave the man his props.
You don’t mess with someone from New Jersey by god.
I don’t know if anyone outside of the DFW metroplex has ever seen it, but Mr.Peppermint was an early Sat morning fixture and fave of mine for years and years. I cried when Mr. Peppermint died a few years ago. The world (or at least the big section that is DFW) lost a great entertainer.
IDBB
Since we’re on this odd tangent…anyone remember Capt. Chesapeake? 8 bells?
Costello knew his stuff. He was told to play one song, but he wanted to play another. The “correct” song was played during the dress rehearsal. The on-air switch was pure defiance.
I’m resurrecting this thread because it wouldn’t be complete without these two words:
1. Joe, and
2. Theisman
[shudder]
Nadia Comenici’s perfect tens…and Gilda Radner spoofing her.
After months of hype about how beautiful a skater NANCY was (I thought she sucked and there was nothing beautiful about her skating at ALL), watching that little girl from the Ukraine just kick the shit out of her. Technically imperfect, she did something I never saw anyone do before or since - added jumps to get the technical points she needed and beat Nancy by one tenth of a point. IMO there was no contest; you can’t compare Mozart to Neil Sedaka.
And Suriya Bonali - blew me AWAY. Again something I’d never seen done…she had made a couple mistakes and knew she had no shot; so you could see her mind CLICK into another gear and see the moment she decided “Screw the judges; I’m gonna play to the crowd.” And the crowd went nuts. She even did her backflip, which isn’t allowed in competition because she’s the only one who could do it lol.
The original space shuttle disaster…they showed it all day and all night on every channel and then never again for ten years. Reagan being shot. Ford being shot at. Carol Burnett tugging her ear and her final “I’m so glad we had this time…” I remember the moon landing but I was so little I don’t know if it was happening at that moment or maybe a year or two later I was seeing the footage.
NIXON RESIGNING; men crying always kills me. These have probably all been mentioned heh.
Once and only once did my name get mentioned at the end of the Romper Room when she spoke out some random names. I thought she was talking to me. Fun show heh.
I never got mentioned on Romper Room 
I’ll bypass those events of historical importance (Kennedy, the moon landing, Columbine, 9/11) and concentrate on the mundane (in no order of importance):
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The continuing episode of…
PEYTON PLACE ( I used to watch this with my mother)
----Hannah Cord (Ruth Warrick) tells her dead husband (whom we’ve never seen) in his coffin to “burn in hell.”
----Hannah Cord (again!) confesses on the witness stand that Steven Cord is not HER son, but the bastard offspring of the slutty daughter of her employer (old Martin Peyton).
—Stella Chernak (Lee Grant) tells her hospitalized father,
“Your liver looks like an old army boot.”
—Allison MacKenzie (Mia Farrow) leaves Peyton Place foreverONE LIFE TO LIVE
----A troubled nurse, Karen, secretly hoards countless pills because (we think) she is going to poison the good-hearted, simple and pure Melanie, her rival for the affections of Dr. Larry Wolek. However, at a lunch between the two women, Karen confesses to Melanie that she has ingested the pills and will die before her eyes, a suicide.DARK SHADOWS
----Barnabas plunges a stake through Angelique’s heartCHINA BEACH
----McMurphy (Dana Delaney) returns to the army base after her visit stateside
—K.C. (Marg Helgenberger), a pragmatic, self-concerned prostitute, boards the plane carrying the coffins of dead soldiers to the U.S. to offer solace to one of the decedent’s parents.
—K.C. , after receiving news of her father’s death, alienates herself from her lover, Boonie.JOSEPH CAMPBELL
—The Power of Myth/Transformations of Myth Through Time (The unbelievable erudition and scholarship of this brilliant mythologist is one of the seminal influences of my life).THE FIRST CHURCHILLS
—An early Masterpiece Theatre program, with brilliant performances by Margaret Tyzack and Susan Hampshire (Fleur, of The Forsythe Saga, which regrettably I have never seen)---Aretha Franklin singing United Together on SNL, circa 1982---her eye (and ear)-opening performance served as the inspiration for a gospel-inflected musical I subsequently wrote. ---THE ED SULLIVAN SHOW---Where else could you melt over Topo Gigio AND Paul ("sorry, girls--he's married") McCartney? I'll get back when I think of more.
“Ten seconds to go, nine, eight, seven…Do you believe in miracles?!----two, one!”
And then the sight of people jumping onto the ice, the flags waving…My family listened to that game on the radio before it was broadcast on TV later that night, and I remember thinking, Oh, please don’t let them lose, please don’t let them lose as only a little kid could. That was a great moment.
Carmela Soprano’s (Edie Falco) meltdown last season on The Sopranos, one of the most terrifying, powerful and TRUE performances I’ve seen on television
FAMILY---wonderful writing and terrific acting by a top-flight cast, particularly the warm and classy Sada Thompson, are hallmarks of this underrated show
THE GREAT AMERICAN DREAM MACHINE---A great PBS show from the days before they sold out to the Andrew Lloyd Webber-Sarah Brightman-Andrea Bocelli brain-dead crowd.
Some favorite made-for-TV movies; Playing for Time (Vanessa Redgrave, Jane Alexander), Escape from Sobibor ( Alan Arkin), The Missiles of October ( William Devane, Howard Da Silva)A few MASH ones that haven’t been mentioned yet.
Winchester’d operated on a patient who lost the use of his right arm. Normally this would be cause enough for consternation, but the look in the man’s eyes … “I’m a concert pianist.” And then the one-handed sheetmusic and Winchester missing the MASH barbecue … “each of us must answer to his own tune.”
One of very few episodes in which Winchester and Pierce were being civil to each other. The show ends with them in Rosie’s Bar drinking:
Pierce toasts: “To our fathers.”
Winchester respond: “And to their sons.”
The aforementioned “Colonel Henry Blake’s plane was shot down over the South China Sea [I think]. :: pause :: There were no survivors.” episode. That hit hard.
The entirety of the episodes where there’s a clock in the lower right corner of the television screen and Pierce et al. are trying to save this man’s life and vainly hoping they can keep him from being paralyzed … and the one that ends with the orphan child of the Korean woman and the American GI being placed in a sort of child basket of a nearby church.
The end of the episode where Pierce et al. shoot a video for a visiting person looking to do some “This is what MASH units face…” thing. The video is mostly slapstick comedy but the beginning and end … chilling.
Nine words: “He died with dignity, with honor and with pride.”
1995 World Series, Game Six.
Patrick Ewing’s number retired (of course, given my state of emotions then, I remember it as a very blurry scene).
On Homicide:Life on the Street, during Crosetti’s funeral procession when Pemberton shows up in full dress uniform on the steps on the police station.
Olympic Moments:
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the girl who won the gold in women’s singles of ice skating in the last olympics. Who would’ve thought ice skating could actually be exciting?
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Franz Klammer’s downhill in 1976. Just seeing a tape doesn’t do it justice. You’d have to see the whole event.
Another interesting thread would be “What was the first thing you saw on TV that scared you so bad that you were never really scared again?” For me, that would be the 2nd (I think) episode of Twilight Zone. The one where the guy who’s exiled to an asteroid gets a robot woman, who is destroyed in the final scene. The picture of all those twinkling electronics where her face was…I couldn’t sleep for a week.
What an amazing thread. I usually don’t read 4 page threads all the way through, but I did. Not a bad way to spend a Sunday morning.
For me…
September 11. I actually started recording the footage, never realizing how truly horrific things were going to get, thinking I’d share it with my class for a journal topic/discussion piece. But when the second plane hit, and then when the tower collapsed…I knew it wouldn’t be. My husband and I had interesting opposing reactions–I started crying, and he started storming off through the house spewing obscenities about how “that’s just what they [the terrorists] wanted!” So oddly, now, I have about 15 minutes of news footage from that morning on videotape.
Documentary on Sept. 11 It was…unbelieveable. No commercials, and so effin’ REAL. It was a documentary originally designed to be about a rookie firefighter; we see them out in the field inspecting a gas leak, then looking up and seeing the first plane hit. We see the firefighters all going in, all getting sick, all washing out their eyes, all returning back to the station exhausted, empty, drained; we see them rejoice as each member of their group returns safely. We see the rookie firefighter about to go nuts waiting at the station, holding down camp, restricted from “going in.” We see the Command Central at 2 WTC populated with firemen and chiefs–and a chaplain–that would not make it through the day. We hear the soul-shuddering sound of the bodies of jumpers crashing…oof, I have to stop.
Okay, needing to get away from that…other impacting moments were Challenger disaster. I was in 8th grade, dismissed to go to lunch from my history teacher when he said, “Did you hear the space shuttle blew up?” We all looked at him funny and thought it was an odd joke. When we got back from lunch and TVs were everywhere, we were disturbed to find he was right.
Fiction-wise…The ER episode, “Love’s Labor Lost.” Kept me up late at night thinking about it.
The episode of Buffy where her mother dies. I don’t know much about the show and stumbled across that one. Totally glued me to the set.
Sports…it’s not much of a mystery that horse racing is my game. Greatest racing moment I’ve ever seen on TV was the 1988 Breeder’s Cup Distaff. Personal Ensign was vying to become the first horse to retire (sound, not due to injury) undefeated from major competition in over 70 years. She was facing only the third filly in history–and currently the last–to have won the Kentucky Derby, Winning Colors. The track was muddy, “like rolled peanut butter,” and the big-striding mare stuggled with her footing the moment they broke from the gate. Winning Colors was happily cantering away on the lead, and the gritty Kentucky Oaks winner Goodbye Halo wasn’t far behind. Personal Ensign, meanwhile, was scrambling in the back of the pack. Everyone thought the race was over when they turned for home and Winning Colors had an 8-length advantage over the undefeated mare. But somehow, that tough little thing put in a final surge and nailed the Derby winner right on the wire. Gives me chills even now thinking about it! BTW, Personal Ensign has become a Broodmare of the Year. She is the mother of another Breeder’s Cup winner, My Flag, who became the mother of last year’s Breeder’s Cup Juvenile Fillies winner, Storm Flag Flying. It’s a helluva female line!
On the other end of the racing emotional spectrum was the 1990 Breeder’s Cup Distaff, where Go For Wand gruesomely broke down not a hundred yards from the wire. It was like a match race as the champion 3-year-old duked it out neck-and-neck with the champion older mare, Bayakoa down the homestretch. The crowd was cheering frantically…then GFW’s foreleg snapped and she did a front flip. The crowd audibly gasped, then fell silent as Bayakoa completed the trip to the wire alone. Even more potent…Go For Wand struggled to get back on her 3 good legs, and hobbled her way down the stretch to the wire.
I’m too young to have seen my screennamesake’s similar demise.
Oof! I need to come back with happy TV memories.
Another MAS*H bit that hasn’t been mentioned: The episode where no one was getting any sleep, and the few moments they could catch a few Zs had horrific nightmares. The scene where Margaret’s wedding dress was stained with blood really got to me.
Same idea, just later in the games. During the exhibition skate Scott What’shisface was explaining that the backflip was illegal because the skater must land on one foot for it to …and then she did just that.
Obviously, Septermer 11, 2001.
This is the most touching bit of TV I’ve ever seen:
On the show SportsNight (fictional show about a SportsCenter-type show), the anchors and crew have been trapped in the building all day because of a blizzard and they can’t get any food, so they are “starving”. While this is happening, the show is covering the ascent of Mt. Everest by a team of climbers. One of the anchors, Dan Rydell, steps away from the camera because he remembers he has a half of a turkey sandwich in his office. When he gets to the office, there is a homeless man there who has found his way in off the street. Dan shares the sandwich with the man as they watch the team reach the summit. Dan says to the man, “Isn’t it amazing what we can do?”
Me, too, because the first thing I thought of was remembering his inaguration. For some reason, the principal of our grade school decided this was an Historic Moment worthy of our attention, and had a large (for the day) console television brought in and set up on the stage at one end of the gymnasium. The entire school (perhaps 125 kids) sat in folding chairs on the gym floor, watching the black and white image raptly. Robert Frost read a poem for the occasion; there was some consternation as a small fire broke out at the podium and was quickly put out. And our new president looked so young next to Eisenhower, the only other one any of us could remember. A potent moment, underlined by the school’s conviction we would learn more from that than from being in class.
AND a similar startling change of events when my parents announced one evening at supper that my brother and I would be allowed to stay up late ON A SCHOOL NIGHT and watch a movie that was a special favorite of our parents. We were perhaps 11 and 9 at the time and due to the completely out-of-routine event, paid particular attention to the movie, which turned out to be the incredible Beau Geste," the 1939 Gary Cooper-Ray Milland-Robert Preston version. Heady stuff, that Viking funeral “with a dog at his feet”