When I was a kid in the 70s, Bob Hope was everywhere. Not as a comedian, not as a comedic actor, not as anything, actually. He was famous for a bunch of movies he made back in the Before Times, but those movies were never shown again. And he used to do USO shows for the troops in Vietnam, I guess. All we knew was that Bob Hope was this beloved figure, but we had no idea why. He’d show up on TV, or in movie cameos, and everyone would clap and cheer.
So he was famous to kids in the 70s, but we had absolutely no idea why or how, or why anyone would care about Bob Hope.
And so I got to thinking. Who’s the Bob Hope of 2016? What antiquated celebrities are trotted out nowadays to polite applause by the older crowd, and bored bafflement by the youngsters?
Maybe there are no such figures. Due to home video, movies made in the 80s are still watched by kids today. Bob Hope was also a figure of the Generation Gap. Famous to the WWII Generation, irrelevant and passe to the Baby Boomers, and mysteriously enigmatic to the young Gen Xers, like a lot of pop culture.
So the pop culture of the Baby Boomers still survives in 2016, in a way that the pop culture of the WWII Generation absolutely did not in the 70s and 80s.
So are there any Bob Hopes of today? Maybe somebody like Jim Carrey, who was a megastar in the 90s and then starred in a bunch of smaller and smaller movies and now seems to have disappeared entirely. Or do the kids of today watch the movies that made Jim Carrey famous, even though he’s not making any hits today?
Ryan Seacrest, maybe? I haven’t the faintest idea why he’s famous or why he’s on so many TV shows, but he seems to be some amalgam of Bob Hope and Dick Clark.
You left some things out. Bob Hope never worked blue. Bob Hop often took the safest comedy. I remember him “joking” about then President Reagan, that government austerity Regan had implemented left him meeting foreign dignitaries in jeans and a t-shirt, riding a skateboard. If you call that a joke. Yet, his specials were consistently funny. He attracted young talent, and they were glad to work with him.
Not working blue, but still consistently funny, but working with young stars and being respected by them? I can’t place a person like that, in my mind.
Except for as was mentioned Ryan Seacrest. But he’s not really gut busting funny.
I remember having to suffer through Bob Hope specials with my parents. Now that I think back on it, it’s only fair after all the awful shows they were forced to watch because of me. Buck Rogers? The A-Team? Yuck.
The annual trotting out of the All-American football team was a treat. :rolleyes: How many jokes can you make about how big a guy is?
No, the people who idolize Bill Murray have largely seen his films from the 1970s and 1980s especially. They know who he is and why he’s a star.
And that’s the thing: Back when Bob Hope was a big star in the 1970s, nobody could see his Road movies unless some UHF station did a late-night showing or an arthouse or second-run theater got a hold of some old prints and ran them as a matinee or something. Old culture was flat-out not accessible to the casual viewer back then, in a way that’s hard for people who came up in the VCR and especially Netflix eras to really grasp.
Back in the 1980s, everyone focused on cable TV and the hundred-channel wasteland it spawned as the horrible new threat to our culture, but the real harbinger of change was the video tape and the video rental store, which allowed average people to see old and obscure films on-demand, or as close to it as they’d ever come previously. The whole notion of “old” and “obscure” was redefined in the wake of that, and it continues to be redefined now that Netflix and YouTube are better video places than physical video stores ever were.
There is no “Bob Hope” the way the OP describes the concept because the media landscape has changed. Again. Similarly, media fragmentation with the decline of TV means there’s no “Johnny Carson” to be the person everyone watches at night.
Bob Hope, never blue. But Bob Hop was a favorite of the burlesque circuit, as blue as you could get in the days when blue was a lot paler than now. When preview was unknown, men were men, and sheep were nervous.
All very true but I do remember seeing his movies on weekends after cartoons. Living in an area that got all the New York stations meant I probably got a few more stations on the regular dial than many parts of the country.
Well, not Lewis Black…
[QUOTE=New York Times]
Astonished that his brand of profane humor has become mainstream comedy, Mr. Black, who has entertained troops on U.S.O. tours of Iraq and Afghanistan, declares, “I think it’s very odd that we went in my lifetime from Bob Hope to me.” Indeed it is.
[/QUOTE]
I remember when, in the 70s he was a pitchman for some oil company. He’d stand outside some refinery in a white hard hat and deliver the most humor free spiel possible. I always wondered why, with more money than God, he had to do that.
Texaco probably. He was a remnant of an earlier time. His specials were still sponsored by one company and I seem to remember Texaco doing that for a long time.
But it’s not just forgotten stars who used to be huge but kids today wouldn’t recognize. It has to be a guy who’s still a megacelebrity, but whose body of work is nearly entirely forgotten. That was the thing about Bob Hope. He was everywhere on TV, but nobody cared about his movies anymore, the body of work that made him famous. He was famous as being a former comedian, not as a comedian.
Bob Hope’s life and career spanned the entire twentieth century. He started in vaudeville, was a star on NBC radio when that medium was young, was a star on NBC television when it was young, did movies and live shows, including those for the USO.
I’m not sure who would be the present-day equivalent. Perhaps someone who was an early YouTube star?