I remember Danny Kaye’s show, largely for the hilarious satire of Batman they did not long after that show debuted: Chickenman!
POLICE COMMISSIONER: We’ll call him on the Chicken Wire! (Pulls out a copy of the Batphone, with a cover made of chickenwire.)
Laughed my ass off on that one!
Star host, regular supporting cast, special guest stars, comedy sketches, song and dance numbers, studio orchestra (not band) and dance company. Those are the elements of what I’d call a classic TV variety show.
Maybe it could work, but not as a weekly show. And actually, I think it could be a good idea for Netflix. If they pumped out one or two variety shows per month, maybe a different host every time, they might be able to draw in new subscribers. I’m thinking folks who enjoy that kind of stuff but don’t love the original content already on Netflix. Could be Hulu or Amazon or whatever streaming service. But it might not be the worst idea ever.
As a weekly show on network TV, I think it’s a loser. As many have said, they’ve tried and they’ve not lasted.
Donny and Marie
Sonny and Cher
The Flip Wilson Show
The Julie Andrews Show
The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour
The Captain and Tennelle
The Hudson Brothers
The Jacksons
The Jim Nabors Hour
Tony Orlando and Dawn
I said *more *a thing of the 50s and '60s, not that they were exclusive to them.
Do you have the dates for these? I’m willing to bet the vast majority of them ran from the late '60s through to the early '70s (which was when I pretty much lost interest in variety shows).
I know Donny and Marie were on later, because they had C-3PO and R2-D2 as guest stars, but I never watched the show.
Donny and Marie: 1975-1979
Sonny and Cher: 1971-1974
Flip Wilson: 1970-1974
Julie Andrews Show: 1972-1973
Glen Campbell: 1969-1972
Captain and Tennille: 1976-1977
Hudson Brothers: 1974
Jim Nabors: 1968-1971
Tony Orlando and Dawn: 1974-1976
I can’t find evidence that the Jackson 5 ever had their own variety show. Anyway, other than Campbell and Nabors, the rest were purely 1970s shows, though most didn’t last past the middle of the decade.
Are you sure you aren’t confusing Kaye’s show with Dick Orkin’s radio show, Chickenman? (A Batman parody, AKA The White Winged Warrior.) This is more Kaye:
Only once, I think. Howard hosted a variety show, “Saturday Night Live with Howard Cosell” on ABC, which premiered a month before NBC’s “Saturday Night” did, in September 1975. The NBC show was named “Saturday Night,” rather than “Saturday Night Live,” at first, to avoid confusion with Cosell’s show. After the cancellation of Cosell’s show, “Saturday Night” eventually was renamed “Saturday Night Live.”
Cosell’s show ran in prime time, rather than late-night, and its development was, as far as I can tell, completely independent of SNL (and I don’t know of any evidence that it was created to somehow compete against SNL). I watched it once or twice, and remember it being pretty bad, even to my 10-year-old eyes. The show somehow made it through 18 episodes (probably because of Cosell’s and Roone Arledge’s power at ABC), and is generally considered to be one of the most pathetically bad shows in TV history, despite the fact that Cosell was able to draw a lot of big names to the show, and several future SNL stars (Bill Murray, Brian Doyle-Murray, and Christopher Guest) were all regulars on it.
Rhett and Link, apparently, want to turn Good Mythical Morning (a YouTube show) into a variety show, but their strategy for doing so didn’t work out. They were doing a 15m show with a single silly activity and they tried to set it up that they were doing three 7-10m activities in separate videos that were tightly linked together. But they didn’t do anything new, just copying all their old stuff and cutting it short, rather than introducing new stuff like guest performers or skits, so really all they accomplished was to churn through three seasons worth of material in one season, done less well. And the separate videos thing wasn’t super smooth.
I watched part of the first episode of this show and then switched it off permanently. The “Big Name Guest Stars” were the Bay City Rollers, a Scottish rock band that was being hailed in the US as “the New Beatles” and quickly vanished into oblivion.
SNL had been under development all that summer under the direction of Lorne Michaels (NBC executives had given him a blank check, and were surprised to see how the show turned out). The similarity between the names was pure coincidence, and the two shows were completely different. Cosell’s was never intended to be anything other than prime-time vanilla; SNL was biting from the start, and was always intended to take over the Saturday late-night slot (which at the time was showing Johnny Carson reruns, if your local affiliate carried them at all).
I remember watching SNL from the beginning and it was like nothing I had seen before. The highlight of the first? or second? show was Weekend Update showing a topless photo of Elizabeth Rey which Chevy Chase quickly (but not too quickly) covered up! :eek: Ahhh…my teenage hormones were revved up for every SNL episode after that!
Oh…and the week where Jane Curtain (with her chubby legs - Roseanne Roseannadana) ripped open her blouse and showed her bra! Yep, variety shows today could never top that!
The first episode of SNL started cold with immigrant John Belushi getting an English lesson from Michael O’Donoghue: “Repeat after me: I … would like … to cut off your fingertips … and feed them to the wolverines.”
The guest host was George Carlin: “How come all those dashboard Jesuses are facing inward, and not looking at the road? I guess it’s because Middle American hypocrites like to show off for Jesus.”
Musical Guests were Billy Preston (“Nothin’ from Nothin’ Leaves Nothin’”) and Janis Ian (“At 17”).
Garret Morris did “News for the Hearing Impaired” on Weekend Update: “OUR TOP STORY TONIGHT…”
The parody commercials included the correspondence-course School of Diplomacy: “The Chinese ambassador has just made a derogatory remark about the United States. Do you (a) shoot him and create an international incident, or (b) smile and ask him to pass the sweet and sour pork? You’d be surprised how many people choose (a)!”
Andy Kaufman lip-synched the Mighty Mouse theme.
And so on. I watched this episode with my brother, and we were laughing our asses off the whole time!
Reviving the old Muppet Show or the new one that got canned? I liked the new one (seriously, Pepe the Prawn is hilarious) but apparently no one else did.
In that case, since the Orkin radio series was nationally syndicated ca. 1966 too, I wonder who ripped off who. Or maybe great comic minds think alike; both were supposedly inspired by Batman.
