Category: Television & Radio

My hero

Hoppy and Topper

William Boyd, better known as Hopalong Cassidy, was born on this date in 1895. After success as a leading man in silent film, Boyd’s career was going nowhere in 1935 when he was cast to play the cowboy, Hopalong Cassidy. He made 54 films in the role for producer Harry Sherman, then 12 more on his own. In 1948, in one of the great prescient moves ever made in Hollywood, Boyd bought the rights to all the films, selling his ranch to raise the money. Television needed Saturday morning fare and Boyd had it.

One medium fed on the other, and by 1950 [William] Boyd was at the center of a national phenomenon. For two years he was as big a media hero as the nation had seen. In personal appearances he was mobbed: 85,000 people came through a Brooklyn department store during his appearance there. His endorsement for any product meant instant sales in the millions. It meant overnight shortages, frantic shopping sprees, and millions of dollars for Boyd. There were Hopalong Cassidy bicycles, rollerskates (complete with spurs), Hoppy pajamas, Hopalong beds. The demand for Hoppy shirts and pants was so great that a shortage of black dye resulted. His investment in Hopalong Cassidy paid off to an estimated $70 million.

Why a man of 52 years appealed to so many children remains a mystery. Possibly some of it had to do with the novelty of television: just as Amos ‘n’ Andy had capitalized on the newness of radio a generation earlier, a TV sensation was bound to occur. And the hero had a no-nonsense demeanor: he was steely-eyed and quick on the draw, and he meted out justice without the endless warbling and sugar-coated romance that came with the others. As for Boyd, he became Cassidy in a real sense. His personal habits changed; he gave up drinking and carousing and lived with his fifth wife until his death in 1972.

John Dunning, On the Air

Hopalong Cassidy was NewMexiKen’s first hero. None has been as good since.

And the hits just keep on coming

The radio business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There’s also a negative side. — Hunter S. Thompson

The above is from Marc Fisher’s Something in the Air: Radio, Rock, and the Revolution That Shaped a Generation.

Fisher, a Washington Post columnist, has written a book any fan of radio will enjoy, an anecdotal analysis of how Top 40 evolved, then FM and talk radio and finally the bland, every station sounds alike — because they’re all owned by about three companies — niche radio of today. We learn about Jean Shepherd, Cousin Brucie, Wolfman and Imus, Bob Gass, Big Daddy Tom Donahue, Rush Limbaugh and others. We find that Dick Clark got away with Payola and Alan Freed didn’t. (And how the payola scandal was mostly a political backlash against “race music” being played for white kids.) We read who came up with NPR, and we read about the consultant who has, to many people’s ears, just about ruined it.

If at times just a little too drawn out with the analysis, when another story would be more welcome, it’s still a very interesting sociological-economic study, with enough pop culture thrown in to make it a good read. (Especially, I suppose, if you’re old enough to have lived through the whole thing.)

The smartest show on televison

“Then I had this crazy dream that my family were all just cartoon characters and that our success led to some crazy propaganda network called Fox News.” –Bart Simpson
. . .

Terribly animated (at least by Pixar or Dreamworks standards), unabashedly crude and, at times, prone to deus ex machina endings (including one featuring a robed, sandaled and bearded God who actually booms, “Deus ex machina!” as he sets things right), The Simpsons will present its 400th episode on Fox on May 20. It’s important to note the “on Fox” part, as there would be no Fox, let alone a Fox News, without The Simpsons.

There’s more at The Simpsons Hit 400.

Best summing up of the day, so far

These young women were much, much smarter and much more decent than most of the adult commentary which has swirled around them this week. We thought their coach was outstanding too. Ditto for that superb Rutgers president, who told these young women that he and their school “have their back.”

Daily Howler

Jesus’ General deserves your click on this topic, too.

And, via Crooks and Liars, The Daily Show on Imusgate.

Packer happily set in his ways

“He’s not prepping to cover his 33rd consecutive NCAA men’s basketball Final Four by watching the teams’ games — ‘I don’t have a tape machine’ — or by going online, because he doesn’t have a computer.”

Michael Hiestand, USA Today, who says Packer provides “anecdotal evidence that NCAA [TV] ratings must be too low because people in airports always talk to him about the tournament.”

Apple TV

This silvery little $299 gadget is designed to play and display on a widescreen family-room TV set all the music, video and photos stored on up to six computers around the house — even if they are far from the TV, and even if they are all Windows PCs rather than Apple’s own Macintosh models. It can also pull a very limited amount of music and video directly off the Internet onto the TV.
. . .

Yet, in our tests, it worked great, and we can easily recommend it for people who are yearning for a simple way to show on their big TVs all that stuff trapped on their computers. We tried it with various combinations of Windows and Mac computers, with movies, photos, TV shows, video clips and music. And we didn’t even use the fastest wireless network it can handle. It performed flawlessly.
. . .

We’ve been testing Apple TV for the past 10 days or so, and our verdict is that it’s a beautifully designed, easy-to-use product that should be very attractive to people with widescreen TV sets and lots of music, videos, and photos stored on computers. It has some notable limitations, but we really liked it. It is classic Apple: simple and elegant.

The Mossberg Solution

In looks, it sits at the top of the heap. Apple TV is a gorgeous, one-inch-tall, round-cornered square slab, 7.7 inches on a side. It slips silently and almost invisibly into your entertainment setup. (You can’t say that for, say, the Xbox, which, in comparison, is huge and too noisy for a bedroom.)

The heart-breaker for millions, however, is that Apple TV requires a wide-screen TV — preferably an HDTV. It doesn’t work with the squarish, traditional TVs that many people still have.

Apple defends its audience-limiting decision by saying that the future is HDTV; Apple is just “skating to where the puck is going to be,” as a product manager put it.

David Pogue

Simple-minded morans

From Moraes on TV, the idiocy of television’s decency police in light of FCC restrictions since Janet Jackson:

“Desperate Housewives'” Marc Cherry said his strangest D[ecency] P[olice] note came during production of the pilot, in which Eva Longoria’s character has sex with her 17-year-old gardener. Looking at the post-sex scene, the DP said “does she have to smoke?”

“And I went, ‘So, you’re good with the statutory rape thing?'”

Jenny Bicks, from “Men in Trees” recalled one recent script in which “I had two ‘ass’s’ and one ‘crap’.”

“I was… told that I could trade an ‘ass’ for a ‘crap’ but I couldn’t have two ‘ass’s’ and the ‘crap’.”

Mary Tyler Moore

… was born in Brooklyn on this date in 1936 (some sources say 1937).

From The Museum of Broadcast Communications, The Encyclopedia of Television:

On The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Moore played Mary Richards, a 30-something single woman “making it on her own” in 1970s Minneapolis. MTM first pitched her character to CBS as a young divorcee, but CBS executives believed her role as Laura Petrie was so firmly etched in the public mind that viewers would think she had divorced Dick Van Dyke (and that the American public would not find a divorced woman likable), so Richards was rewritten as a woman who had moved to the big city after ending a long affair. Richards landed a job working in the news department of fictional WJM-TV, where Moore’s all-American spunk played off against the gruff boss Lou Grant (Ed Asner), world-weary writer Murray Slaughter (Gavin MacLeod) and pompous anchorman Ted Baxter (Ted Knight). In early seasons, her all-male work environment was counterbalanced by a primarily female home life, where again her character contrasted with her ditzy landlady Phyllis Lindstrom (Cloris Leachman) and her New York-born neighbor and best friend, Rhoda Morgenstern (Valerie Harper). Both the show and Moore were lauded for their realistic portrayal of “new” women in the 1970s whose lives centered on work rather than family, and for whom men were colleagues rather than just potential mates. While Moore’s Mary Richards’ apologetic manner may have undermined some of the messages of the women’s movement, she also put a friendly face on the potentially threatening tenets of feminism, naturalizing some of the decade’s changes in the way women were perceived both at home and at work.

Best anti-Comcast line of the day, so far

“The answer is that, at least in my recent experience with the nation’s biggest cable company, Comcast, the high-definition DVR it supplies is just awful.”

Walt Mossberg in a discussion of TiVo and DVRs. And Walt doesn’t even live in Albuquerque where, I assure you, Comcast does even less for its customers than seems to be the case in, say, the San Francisco or Washington, D.C. areas.

Top Ten Things: Dancing with the Stars

Top Ten Things I Have Learned From “Dancing With The Stars” presented by Jerry Springer

10. Sometimes your best choreographer is Johnny Walker

9. There are no disputes that can’t be settled by dancing — think about it North Korea

8. The fitness training will come in handy on my show when breaking up fights between hookers

7. I’m allergic to sequins

6. You do much better if you take the vitamins supplied by Barry Bonds’ trainer

5. The definition of “star” has really loosened up

4. This might be why the terrorists hate us

3. I have a whole new respect for the exotic dancers on my show

2. If there’s one thing more exciting than being on “Dancing With The Stars,” it’s no longer being on “Dancing With The Stars”

1. I need a new agent

CBS | Late Show with David Letterman : Top Ten

The Trouble with Magazines

Is that they can really pile up on you in a hurry.

Anyway, a couple of quick items from Rolling Stone Issue 1015 (the one with Snoop in the Santa hat).

Suze Rotolo, Bob Dylan’s first New York girlfriend (the woman with him on the cover of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan) is selling some of her memorabilia. Included is a valentine card (1963): “Love, Love, Money, Booze, I’d swap ‘m all to be with youse, love love me Bob.” It’s a good thing he didn’t choose to write romantic ballads.

Oh, and there’s a good best line of the day in RS, too. “[T]hey’re pretty people who wear white coats so they can drip tears on them, and carry stethoscopes only so they can listen to their own heartbeats in sad, private moments.”

The reference is, of course, to “Grey’s Anatomy.”