 This is the SF Productions podcast network Before all the video was put directly into computer memory and the comnet, people used to tape shows. Let me see. It's a tape already in here. Let me hook this up here and let me see what we got. Back with us to the 60s and 70s, the dwelling place of the lost generation. An era whose heroes, role models, and very lives were molded and formed by weekly installments of favorite television programs. Welcome to the place your parents didn't understand. Welcome to the vast wasteland. Welcome home. I'm your host, Mark Spindbar, along with Wilbur Neal and Marty Wiley, and we're here to talk about 60s and 70s television. And before we get into the big extravaganza tonight, just want to tell you we're on Tuesdays at 6, Wednesdays at 10, and Thursdays at 3 p.m. here on ACTV. K-Book 21. Are they still using that? Probably. I hope not. The Caucasian singing the theme, yeah. And if you want to write to us and tell us stop singing, our address is vast wasteland. Vast wasteland. 15, 14, 11. 15, 14, 11. Columbus, Ohio, 432, 1-5. Columbus, Ohio, 432, 1-5. Yeah. So just right in, and since the old vast wasteland mailbag seems to be emptying out a little bit, we really need to see some people start to write in. That's true. I got a letter here. No, I didn't, because they didn't write. That's right. And also, this really won't affect you viewers at all because we're shooting this show a little bit ahead. What you're seeing tonight was taped on September 17th, and you're going to see it, oh, looks like mid-November. But ACTV is getting brand new equipment, so we're going to be off the air for a few weeks, but it won't affect you because we care about you as a viewer. So we've shot shows in advance, so you won't even see a difference, except you won't see the lousy Chiron titles again. Next time you see us, we'll all have gray hair or something. It'll be months ahead. So there you go. Anyways, on to the night show. Certainly one of the biggest things in television, especially early television, was the recreation of something that was already out there. Because it was cheap to do, and you really didn't have to pay writers to bring up original concepts. You just took something from another medium and went, oh, that works. Transplant the characters over here, you know, and you can screw around with it if you want or not. And it's a cheap show to do. Look, they don't do that now. Well, that's true Walt Disney. I don't think they ever had an original concept. They just take everything. What do you mean? They have excellent casting, like, you know, Mickey playing Bob Cratchit. What an actor they are. That's the idea that they never really... They always took something that existed and they just put it into their own animated form or whatever. Right. And that's what we're talking about tonight. We're talking about comic strip shows. Not comic strip shows. Woo hoo hoo. No, not comic stripping. Or not wacky stand-up comedy shows. Like you see dozens of those today. You get to the other side. No, we're talking about the stuff you see in the funny papers. The funny papers. I should probably deal with this. It's called funny... Funny paper shows. There'll be shows about funny... About papers that are funny. Woo hoo hoo. Woo hoo hoo. Funny paper. No, it's not that either. You guys are really grasping this time, aren't you? Yeah, we are. Look at the idea of comics. It's not only your superhero things, but the funny things, which is where people got the idea of funny books. Oh, I said to get after people heard. Saying the funny book thing. Comics are comics. It's not just funny things. There's some serious stuff. There's action things. There's all kinds of things. So it's comics. It's not funny books, but yet you'll still have your older people. I remember buying funny books. You're eating them funny books. I used to have funny books. Pay a nickel and go to the store. You could buy ten of them for a nickel. Funny books. No, they're comics. Okay, it's comics. For you collectors, it's comics. No, no. For you collectors, it's graphic novels. For you collectors, it's punches and bunches of money. That's what it is. It's punches and bunches of money. Money, money, money, money. And then some. So, let's just jump right in here. That's right. And the first one, alphabetically, because that's the way we're going to do it. What shows first? Well, actually, I could go with, even though we're going to do a show actually on this, I could mention it here because... Well, mention it. Go ahead. Okay, Chaz Adams worked for New Yorker Magazine and he came up with this concept of a family. It was called the Adams family. That's right. And he had just... They weren't necessarily a strip thing, but they were just one-shots of this weird family. Well, I think those count. And you saw more Uncle Fester in the comics than anybody else. It was just this weird bald guy looking over things with this maniacal look. He had this tall guy with the bags under his eyes. That's your lurch character. You're your... Just your go-betts character. We're going to talk more about Adams family and also the monsters on our next exciting episode of Ass Waste Land. This is true, so we can mention them. But we're not going to go much into it. Adams family don't think about it as being a... Right, but it is. Comic strip. Practically it is. That's right. It did come from a comic strip. It's true. Let's just move right along. Did they ever do a show with Rodney and Douglas? Oh, yes, they did. We're going to talk about them also. Let's go to that right now. Well, that's B. That's B. Okay. Adams. B. Blondie. Adams Blondie. Okay. Well, I mean, I know I saw the... I remember seeing the movie short thing. Well, actually those were done for television. Those were actually done for TV. Those were done for television. Okay. With Arthur Lake and Pamela Britton. Arthur Lake playing Blot. Playing Dagwit. I knew I was going to do that. No, no, no. I knew I was going to do that. I was thinking Penny Singleton. Penny Singleton. What's her name? We don't even have a Penny Singleton show. No, no, no. What's her name? She does James Voice, but she was also Blondie in some of the Blondie shows. Oh, I know who you mean. You know who I mean? Isn't it Singleton? Well, I think she did it on radio. Well, she's got some name. Well, she did it in the movies and she did James Voice on the Jetsons. Well, I know this stuff from something. For the TV show, well, for the first incarnation, there's a good word, incarnation of the TV show, which was actually done in the 50s, by the way. It was Pamela Britton that was Blondie. But anyway, it's your Blondie and Dagwit thing. Blondie was, what was she? She was like a housewife. Well, I mean, she had a, she was like a singer or something for a while there. And then she married Dagwit. And she was actually kind of like wealthy. And she married below her station when she married Dagwit Bumstead. Okay. Well, that's not the idea. Well, anyway, they were married and they had, um, Cookie and Howlick. Little kids and a little funny dog who amazingly looked exactly like them. Well, that's how it happens. You guys don't know this. You ain't got no kids. But it was such an incredible, not just an incredible resemblance. It was like a clone. It was like... What happened to the comics? Early cloning. Yeah. Mr. Dithers. Yeah. Always liked that name. Mr. Dithers. It was the boss. It was Dagwit's boss. And it was like, um, in the, in the older ones, I know Dagwit would always have these Vascos that would happen to him. Things he would, he would try to do something right. It would always go wrong, which, oh, I guess that happens in a lot of sitcoms now. It's just like possibly... I think that's like why they're called sitcoms, you know? The situation happens and it's comedic. Yeah. The whole thing's just funny. But, well, back then it was like Blondie would always figure out the way to make it, make it go right. Yeah. So that was... That's a lot like life, isn't it? The guys screw it up. Yeah. Yeah. There was also in the mid-seventies, and I don't, I don't think it's listed in there, was, I'm sure there was some sort of Dagwit animated series. There was. I remember, yeah. There was. Was that part of that funny paper show? That was a part of that, um, that Archie's Funny. Archie's, Archie's Sunday Funnies. Archie's Sunday Funnies. He was a part of that. And I, well, we'll talk about that a little later, too. That's right. Archie and Broomhilda. They were, they were just millions of things that were out there. It shows that I never even knew existed. Comics I never knew existed because, well, we just didn't get them here in Columbus. Oh. I think there were comics that had been in any papers for about 20 years. Over, over 20 years. Yeah. That's the problem. I don't know. I had, Broomhilda was in the paper where I lived. I think I was a dating paper. So I was like, real happy to see that on TV. Casting Jammer kids. Oh, yeah. I don't know if anybody has seen them since the 30s or 40s. Yeah. Yeah. The last appearance of the Casting Jammer kids. Somewhere in the 30s. Smokey Stover. I had never had him. No. That one was like. I had never, ever heard him. Way back in the old days. Well, there's, there's Blondie. And then, um, let's see. Most irritating, most irritating comic book or comic strip show. To this day, I know he's grown up, but I'd still like to kill the child. Dennis. Dennis. I have this vision. You know where he always goes, hello. This is Mr. Wilson getting out a shotgun and just blowing Dennis back across the fence. Goodbye, Dennis. He was just an irritating child. I mean. And yet, and yet that was yet another show that did the idea of, oh, well, an actor dies. We'll just drop somebody else in. And of course they did actually explain it was his brother. Yeah. The other Mr. Wilson. We have the, the original. Who is the original Mr. Wilson? Joseph Kearns. Joseph Kearns. And then the second Mr. Wilson. Gail Gordon. Gail Gordon, yeah. Gail Gordon. Later to become Mr. Mooney. Well, the guy that played, um, Dennis's father, he shows up on a lot of stuff. Uh, Dobie Gillis, a lot of stuff. Uh-huh. Herbert Anderson. Yeah. Well, they did a lot of that back then. That crossover thing. Right. Because if you were kind of in the background in the show, you were not making that much money. So, so it was like, well, I'll do a dozen shows and I'll just be in the background of several neighborhoods. And this actually, they, and this is really an early example of this is a crossover show because we found out that Dennis the Menace and Donna Reed live in the same neighborhood because there was an episode where Dennis drops by and Donna, Donna is like, what is she doing? She's, she's, uh, doing the house over. She's painting. And Dennis, and of course this is just like formula for disaster for Dennis. She's always going wrong. So Donna calls up Mr. Wilson and gets Mr. Wilson to call him over to help him. So the show leave, they'll leave the house. I think Dennis's parents were like, test people for Valium because I'm going to beat the hell out of that child. His mother's never, her hair was never messed up or closed. So I'll be like, Dennis, come here, we're going to talk. You watch the show and it's quite obvious that at least in the episodes that I've seen, is that Dennis is not this innocent little boy who doesn't know what he's doing. He knows exactly what he's doing. He's this evil little child who just wants to make everyone else's life a living hell, especially Mr. Wilson. No, Mr. Wilson's his best friend. Yeah, right. Yeah, right. At first Mr. Wilson just used to crack me up because he just always looked off. Oh, good gravy. I love that. Go good gravy, Dennis. What did you do? They did have a strange kind of little relationship, friendship kind of thing. You ever notice that? Well, I did. Actually, especially the first Mr. Wilson was a little bit effeminate. I thought. Oh, I didn't say that. I didn't say that. I was just a little bit, not a lot, not a lot, but just a little bit. Not me. And letters. Well, darn it, now we'll get letters. That little mailbag. But he's dead now. But he's dead. And he actually died on the show, which is an interesting concept, which is why they probably film things ahead now. All of a sudden, oh, he moved away, but his brother. Brought the house. Brought the house. Wow. And his brother, the writer, brought the house. Hey, it's just another Mr. Wilson, the bug. That's right. His brother brought the house, but he brought the far. Yeah. And you, what kind of relationship do these brothers have? This one goes to hell with this little boy. And what do you do? You just sell the house to his brother. I guess he didn't really like you. Mom must have always liked him. That's right. That's right. And let me just say before we move on here that Blondie, the first incarnation was in 57 basically. And then they had another incarnation of it in 69. Well, in 68, it lasted from 68 to 69 with whole new people. When was it on in 69? I'm just curious. At what time? Well, at 68 to 69, it was on CBS on Thursday from 7.30 to 8 o'clock. I was curious if they tried to do it really mod, because that's, right, you know. That is just about in the modern era. The kids are like wearing bell bottoms. Doing the whole mod thing. Jim Bacchus was Mr. Dithers in the news episode. Wow. And who hears that? Here's a Hennie Bacchus. Oh my goodness. They must be related. That was Cora Dithers. Yeah, Cora, Mrs. Dithers. Well, maybe, are they? Probably. I don't know if he's dead now. Isn't that a strange thing that happens to these people in these shows? They just, they just die. Like flies. Well, there's another show that I didn't realize was a comic. Oh, wait a minute. Wait a minute. What? Something else here in this thing. Cookie in the 68, 69 version of Blondie. It was that darn Pamela Ferdinand. Oh, no. Well, I guess we could talk about that later. No, I'm a fan of that darn Pamela Ferdinand. Talk about a child that weasels her way into every show that was ever created. You know, if they would have had a way to have a... Hey! She was Lucy's voice on the animated peanut. Yes, she was for quite a while there. It was that darn Pamela Ferdinand. Oh my goodness. Let's talk about peanuts as we mentioned. Okay, why don't we? What was the first one? The Christmas one? Oh, yeah. The Christmas one was actually the first one? Yeah, the first one. The Charlie Brown Christmas, I know for a fact, was the first one. Well then, it's the great pumpkin Charlie Brown had to follow that close on its heels like the next year. Yeah, they put that together right after they saw it was a big hit, but that... Which I think is the better one. The first time that hit was probably... 65? Maybe even earlier. Well, it could have been much earlier than that. Well... It was like 65 or 66. Peanuts have been around since the early 50s. I think peanuts had been around for quite some time. But I think that being on TV is what made that strip take off. Right. Because, I mean, you know, it's a pretty simple little strip. But then when it appealed, you know, TV-wise, it appealed to everybody. I think being on TV is what made that strip popular. Right. But of all the specials, there's no question that Charlie Brown Christmas has the coolest music. That's true. Not cool music, but I think the great pumpkin has a much better story. Oh, I don't know. Yeah. And I always... I could never understand why this great pumpkin thing didn't take off. It did for a little while. Not truly. I mean, you know, as an actual thing, it didn't, but... No. I mean, why has this... I know it's going to have a million years from now, somebody's going to dig that up, look at it and say, oh, wow, they had this wonderful old tradition of great pumpkining. Let's do it. Yeah. That's right. Future civilization. There are any pumpkins left by that time. All there will be. What's a pumpkin? Great big. People will live in them. Well, that'd be great pumpkins, so they won't have to pretend. That's right. So it'll be even that more special. This is mind-expanding, boys and girls. We're thinking about the future, which may never really happen. But in your peanuts thing, you've got, well, you've got Charlie Brown. Good grief. Nothing ever goes right for Charlie Brown. That's right. He's just a little round-headed kid with a crinkly mouth and a little piece of hair here and a piece in the back. And a shirt that looks like his mouth does, which they are selling, by the way. I saw one in a video one time, and I saw somebody run up the street earlier today. Well, you want to look like Charlie Brown. Wouldn't it be scary if Phil Collins put one on? Yeah. Wow. If Collins looks like Charlie Brown. Charlie Brown grown up. Just as much hair, too. Not even grown up either. That round-headed thing just don't seem to go right. You've got a round-headed child getting all these shirts for him. And his sister, his little sister, this little sister, Sally, who was, I don't know. Like, Sally's just learning quite a bit, but she seemed to know more than Charlie Brown. Yet, she couldn't really put it into action. I think she wasn't as naive as Charlie Brown. Right. She was basically too busy having to crush on Linus. Linus, who was too darn busy with that. The philosopher of the group. The philosopher who carried his security blanket with him. He just seemed to know everything. The wise one, yes. And his sister, his sister Lucy, was the crabby one. The crabby one. She just always wanted to butt into everything. Well, look at the baseball games. Obviously, Lucy is the world's worst baseball player because she just doesn't care at all, but she wanted to be involved. And Charlie Brown is too darn wimpy to say, you don't know how to play baseball. And yet. Not that he's an expert, but he wants to be. She's got him on the football. She's got him on football. Every time. Every darn time. He's just never learned yet. She's always, no, if I try to kick the football, you'll move it away. And I'll fall down and I'll break my head open or whatever it is. No, Charlie Brown, not this time. This time I'll see it there and hold it. You'll see. You'll see. Okay. Maybe she will. Miss Charlie Brown. Mr. Hope Springs eternal. So he goes running back. He takes over. She's losing the ball. And it's just, he gets that little funny mouth like a shirt. It's an easy line for Charles Schultz to draw there. And then they had a little brother rerun. I don't think he's ever really appeared in the. I think he's been on some of the newer ones. He was, I think he was one of the, in one of the movies. All they, all they did basically was show him on the back of his, of their mom's bike. And he's attached to this. It's kind of going like this. When they did it Saturday morning. Yeah. Okay. He is one of the newer characters. And he's just like a smaller version of Linus. Right. Like, oh, let's think of that one real hard. Yeah. The bigger head. Yep. But there was a show that I never realized with a comic show. Wait, wait, wait. Now we're not finished with the comic. We're not. No, I mean. No, Snoopy. We haven't mentioned Snoopy at all. Who was. A dog. The, the dog that just had everything. Yeah. Even he had. The dog house. The dog house. It's like parallel to Oscar's trash can. Yeah. They, they showed the inside of his house one time. And it's the dog house. And it's just modular furniture. And all this modern stuff. A great big stereo. He come back outside. It's just a dog house. You look back inside. It's like the, the, the TARDIS and Dr. Who is just more space. That's what it is. It's another TARDIS. Exactly. And he used to fly around in it too. So maybe so. He's like a world, world flying ace. And then back in the space program, there was one. I don't remember which mission it was, but there was actually one mission where they, they named the things after Snoopy and Snoopy Landry. I remember because they had a time magazine cover, which had them in spacesuits. Yeah. It was just a whole big thing there back in the late 60s, early 70s. Which, hey buddy golly, that just fits our type frame. That's right. And then there's Woodstock, the little bird, you know. There's Franklin, Peppermint Patty and Patty and... Schroeder. Schroeder. Yeah. Schroeder on the piano. Who provided all that cool music. Yeah. With just a small piano with no more than five or six keys on it. But yet he could pull all kinds of music out of that thing. It was incredible. I think really Schroeder should really get some sort of like MIDI keyboard or something. And just admit it, you know. I think he already had it. Yeah. And then early... Schroeder. That's right. Out of that little key, out of that little piano it is. You never see him in like modern keyboardist magazine or something, you know. That's right. Schroeder. Schroeder. Schroeder. And Lucy was just in love with him. That's right. And he tried to stand her. Yeah. Because he knew she was the crabby one. No, he wasn't crabby, she was a fuss budget. And he was more interested in his music than in her. So she would yank that piano away from him. Just like she would yank that football away from Charlie Brown. Because nobody liked her. Nobody liked her. It was a fuss budget. That was the proper, that was the term. That was her term, but she was just a crabby one. She was pretty crabby. So, okay, your show that you didn't realize was a comic show. The show that I never really realized was a comic show until later was Hazel. Because the characters seemed so different. The character in the comic didn't seem to have as much personality as Shirley Booth. Well, that's not possible. I mean, in a comic you've just got your two-dimensional character. But you have more dimensionality than the comic strip character. No, they just seemed so different. What a huge compliment. They seemed so different where the kid, Jay North, playing Dennis, seemed just like the kid in the strip. Right. Well, they patterned their master. I mean, down to their hair coming out in the big... I wonder if it here still does that. The big... Not the big butt. The big fling shot that he created. It here still does that. It might. It could be scary. The off-offer thing. Of course, I didn't have the comic Hazel either until a lot later. Well, that's one that they just never had here either. Well, maybe they did, but... But you couldn't read it. I didn't read it. Yeah. Well, it's not that I couldn't. It's that I didn't. Yeah, that's it. The mystery kid has saved you, but it came along too late. Yeah, it was too late. I was reading. So, well, there we are. I had to do it all by myself. Well, I liked Hazel because it was another situation where she was in everybody's business. But she was just such a nice person. Wasn't Hazel the prototype for Rosie? Yeah. Yeah, really. Rosie of the Jetsons. Hello, Mr. J. And one comic strip that did do a TV special, which I've only seen maybe once, and I think there's even somewhere out there, a record album that went with it, was Doonesbury. Yes. That's right. Which I really like Doonesbury. Doonesbury did do a special. There was a Broadway show that closed almost as quickly as it opened. It was in and out. Boom. Well, that's because it was very satirical. And, well, if we're going to mention Broadway shows, there was also Your Good Man Charlie Brown. That's right. That traveled all over. I saw it here at Ohio State, in fact. And there was definitely an album that went with that, too. It was interesting. Well, speaking of fascinating, next time on the fascinating program, Fast Wasteland, we're going to talk about the Munsters and the Atoms, this Munsters versus the Atoms. Another one of our exciting versus shows. So you want to tune in for that.