It's a lot different time. "Cool it with the boom-booms!"
Posted on 10/23/2009 9:57:22 AM PDT by nickcarraway
Soupy Sales died at age 83 yesterday. He hosted an afternoon kiddie show that reached its height of popularity in the mid-1960s. He was totally unlike other kids-show hosts of that, or any other, era. He wasn’t soft-spoken, like Mr. Rogers; he wasn’t grandfatherly, like Captain Kangaroo; he didn’t want to teach you anything, like Mr. Wizard.
What Soupy was was a unique combination of silly and hip. He mixed slapstick with self-conscious irony. He was forever getting a pie thrown in his face. He talked to puppets, especially two — White Fang and Black Tooth — that were really little more than offstage voices, with arms that entered the camera frame. He played jazz on his show and snapped his fingers like a nightclub performer. Cool cats and kitties of the era, like Frank Sinatra and Shirley MacLaine, dropped by to visit and take a pie in the face, because Soupy was, for a little while, himself very cool.
He had a Top 10 hit at the height of Beatlemania with “Do The Mouse.” His musical sons, Hunt and Tony, played with David Bowie in the band Tin Machine, and backed Iggy Pop on Lust For Life, among much other excellent L.A. session-work.
The Soupy Sales Show’s set decor said “clubhouse,” but the off-camera guffaws — when Soupy made the crew laugh with constant his ad libs — introduced a generation to the idea that there were real people behind the TV cameras, that this was a show, not a fantasy-world. Well before The Larry Sanders Show, Soupy was busy breaking the fourth-wall surrounding the creation of TV.
To his eternal and ambivalent fame, he was once suspended from the show for a New Year’s Day 1965 joke: he asked kids to go into their parents’ bedrooms and take the “little green pieces of paper” they found — i.e., money — and send them in to him.
I interviewed him for EW years ago, by phone. As the conversation began to fade, Sales thanked me for not asking him about the “little green pieces of paper” controversy. “Everybody thinks they have to bring that up — why?” he asked me, irritation in his voice.
“Because their editors tell them to, thinking they’ll get a bit more controversy out of it,” I suggested.
“Yeah,” he said, sighing. “Maybe. Or maybe some people just like to make happy people unhappy.”
I hope Soupy Sales has found some happiness now.
Soupy Sales came across the black and white screen as such a lovely, gentle man. It made it all the more sweet that "The Soupy Sales Show" really annoyed my mother.
Good for you......LOL!
He didn’t know about it at first. And then he opened the prop door and got an eyeful. And then he went back!
It's a lot different time. "Cool it with the boom-booms!"
Without Steve Allen and Soupy Sales, David Letterman would be just another washed up 1970s weatherman.
Did she elaborate, right when it was getting interesting?
He’s too cute.I saw him in a parade a few years ago.
:)Hehehehe
I loved Soupy.
One time he got hung up with pie on his face and he let White Fang take the commercial. I’m pretty sure I did permanent damage laughing at this alleged dog arm gesturing at a box of cereal and uttering gibberish.
And he would often give the footnote to a joke, as in,
“Bud Abbot, 1952.”
Genius.
Miss Brocaw came to realize that her dreamboat had wooed and wed her because she was in the employ of the American Embassy. When he found out that she was merely a file clerk he left her. She always ended her story with a flip of her hand and the words, “C’est la vie - end of story.”
Let's not hold that against them.
Like with the 3 Stooges I think most women didn’t find that humor funny. My dad used to watch Soupy with me and my brother and laugh his ass off with us. We didn’t know he was laughing on a whole other level of the show. Mom used to just shake her head at the 3 of us.
Soupy was the best , hip , funny and talented.
There was a show out of Detroit called “The Ghoul”. This guy would come into the studio on one of those bouncing rubber balls, blow things up and had a weird thing for Cheez Wiz. His program would feature bad monster movies and he always closed the program saying: “Turn blue, scratch glass, stay sick, climb walls but don’t get caught!”
Same guy?
The Ghoul is still around.
And yeah, he blew stuff up too.
Thats the guy! Great fun for a bunch of barely controllable teenaged kids.
He offers several DVDs of hours of old clips from his programs. It’s been decades since there was such a thing as local television and yet everyone seems to bemoan the “end” of local radio.
I had some VHS tapes from some years back but I don’t see one of them here, it was a staged Christmas performance somewhere.
You can probably find bits on Youtube as you can with Ghoulardi and other hosts. But at a point it’s more fun to sit back on the couch and watch something on tv. And unlike bootleg compilations, the money would appear to be going to the creator.
Another tv host (non-horror) who may have been Soupy inspired was/is Uncle Floyd. I’m not familiar with his show but I’ve heard about it because of different seventies rockers who appeared as guests on it.
again there is a website and at least one legit DVD release
http://www.unclefloyd.com/
http://www.netflix.com/Movie/Best_of_the_Uncle_Floyd_Show/60037483
Best of the Uncle Floyd Show
(1974) NR
In the mid-1970s, Uncle Floyd Vivino livened up children’s television with his bizarrely hilarious version of 1950s variety shows. His series caught on, and soon, viewers realized there was genius behind this surreal entertainment melding theatre with camp, improv with situation comedy, music with wacky choreography. It also boasted memorable characters such as Eddie Slobbo and Don Goomba, caught here in some of the best episodes from the show.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pae99gvWR8Y
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNv3rVV1mfs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_OioLUqcFo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=As7MaQSc7qc
There’s loads more at YouTube.
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