Posted on 07/05/2019 3:23:51 PM PDT by OttawaFreeper
Comedian and actor Arte Johnson, Emmy-winning star of 1960s and 70s comedy sketch show Laugh-In, died July 3 in Los Angeles of heart failure. He was 90 and had been battling bladder and prostate cancer.
On Laugh-In, he was most familiar as Wolfgang, the heavily accented German soldier who thought World War II was still going on. His catchphrase Very interesting
was one of many that caught on from the hit show. Johnson won one Emmy for the show and was nominated two more times.
(Excerpt) Read more at variety.com ...
Thought he died a hundred years ago...
Belly interesting.
RIP, Funny guy!
Ah. So THAT's what did it!
(Don't google me...)
I wonder who is still around from that show? I can guess Lily Tomlin and Goldie Hawn and Ruth Buzzi off the top of my head, but there must be a few others. I know that Dan Rowan and Dick Martin and Gary Owen and Richard Dawson and a few others have gone to the great NBC studio up in the sky along with Arte.
Circa 1968 I and my girlfriend (I was 19 years old then) would watch Laugh In at her parents house. We would then go out for a drink or two and then my apartment. I loved Saturdays.
Did your girlfriend’s parents have a color TV as a bonus (as I know that show was made in color)? I remember being told color sets were for fairly wealthy people until about the mid 1970s?
Wow. Your girlfriend had some pretty lenient parents for those days. I'm assuming she was younger than you, 17 or 18 perhaps?
Color Televisions were damn expensive, and most programming didn’t broadcast color until 1966 or 1967 or thereabouts. Bonanza was one of them, and to show it off they always had lots of color on the set, purple shirts, yellow dresses, green pants etc. I would say a Color TV was definitely a middle class thing until the early 1970s, yes.
I had an Aunt, a lefty college professor type, who hated Television. This was old school liberal, not to be confused with modern nutbars, although she was pretty bad. She had a fairly expensive 1960s B/W television, but it was on a cart, and not the centerpiece of her home. She’d wheel it out if there was something visitors wanted to watch, that was well into the 1980s until she died, mostly to watch Football games. I’ve since emulated her strangely enough.
You are right about most TV being black and white until about 1966. The Dinah Shore Chevy Show was (along with Bonanza) among the first in colour, and even in colour videotape circa 1959-1960. When I first saw footage of those shows, I was blown out of my seat practically, seeing people and other things from that time in that manner when I would have thought it was all black and white back then. And she had personally saved the tapes all of those years too.
There are other productions from that time done in early colour film or videotape that still survive, but what got chucked (to save space or that the networks did not learn about the value of preservation at that time) or taped over (to reuse the videotapes) just breaks your heart when you read about it.
That was actually one of their odder early episodes. The haunted car made its owner tell the truth. And eventually it was sold to Nikita Khrushchev.
Early black and white, with camera flares aplenty.
Already posted, happened a few days ago. I laughed when I was 12 ... he was a star, who cares. Find something else to worship besides Hollyweird, a half-million have died since his passing.
Yes. Television shows from that era (1961-1962) have a distinctive look to them.
My father in law was about as big a cheapskate as ever walked. Got his first car when he was 51. Although he enjoyed TV, he was damned if he was going to pay money for one. Finally garbage picked a black and white chassis that he got to working. Put it in his dank moldy basement. Years later I bought him a color set for his den and he lived happily ever after until age 92.
That makes me think of the “The Thirty-Fathom Grave” episode which I watched not long ago and found it to be that bit spooky (it featured Simon Oakland and Mike Kellin and it was about Kellin being the survivor of a submarine that was wrecked in World War II and he ends up being on a Navy ship that years after the war goes to the location where the submarine sank during the war).
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