Turn up the lights!
TIL, Carol Burnett did an episode of Scooby-Doo. One of the new generation ones.
"Scooby-Doo and Guess Who?: The Movieland Monsters"!
It's coming up this Wednesday, I'll have to catch it.
LWIL (last week, I learned) she's got a Sunday show where she re-watches an old movie she parodied on her show, and then they (her and the other host) watch the skit.
Funny, I had just been thinking, seeing all the old movies on TCM made it so I finally got all the old-Hollywood parody skits.
Likewise, in reverse, if you're a TCM geek, Carol is for you.
Well, now TCM has formalized the link.
Okay, so here's why her show has two titles.
The original show was just "The Carol Burnett Show".
When it went to syndication, they cut out the musical numbers, and only had the skits, and renamed it "Carol Burnett and Friends".
But CBAF starts when Tim Conway joins the cast, because Carol thinks that when the show really became itself.
So, those first few season were "missing".
Then, whatever legal hurdles were cleared, and the "lost episodes" were folded back in, and given the original name of "The Carol Burnett Show".
So, it's all the same show, but the name changes when you get up to Tim Conway.
Oh, and they mostly cut the musical numbers out of TCBS too, but some musical numbers squeak through anyway.
It can get a little confusing.
The eras basically break up into Lyle Waggoner vs Tim Conway.
Tim Conway guest starred a bunch of times before joining the permanent cast, so it's not a perfect cake slice, but close enough.
Waggoner left to be Steve Trevor on "Wonder Woman".
Anyway!
Her show had on everybody, so it's a good wellspring for "six degrees of...".
Alan Alda from MASH did a couple.
Then her and Alan did a movie together.
George Carlin did one (well, one that I've seen so far) and he did a skit of "what if the FBI most wanted list show were jazzed up like Johnny Carson?" and he did a fake ad branching off that boiling down to "forget big business crushing a small local place, or the mafia corrupting a politician, what you really need to worry about is commie pinkos corrupting your kids at school! Demand a nativity scene!".
Goddamn! The right-wing has never changed.
Same exact laundry list of paranoid authoritarian bullshit in the 60's as now.
George was really young. Had Beatles hair, and an ascot.
The episode dropped the exact date of William Cally's conviction.
The other half of the same episode, Carol and Lucille Ball were The Rock Sisters, a corny 1919 vaudeville act. They get fired. They don't work again for 50 years. They accidentally get hired in 1969 by Vicki Lawrence as Carlin's ditzy hippie secretary.
They play as old ladies at Carlin's rock festival.
Leonard Nimoy popped up on another episode in full Spock gear.
Lucy made Desilu, and Desilu produced Classic Trek.
So, no doubt, Lucy greased the wheels for that cameo.
Carlin and Carol both got the Mark Twain prize.
Carol got hers in 2013.
Carol said in her acceptance speech that as a girl, she'd make funny faces in the mirror, and her nanny would slap her hand, and say "Stop that! That's not going anywhere!".
We all have that (well meaning or not) dipshit.
You have to ignore the dipshit.
She'd no doubt say it in classier words than me.
Roddy McDowall (of "Fright Night" and the original Apes movies) did a few.
Vincent Price did a couple.
They were Halloween episodes, natch.
Speaking of horror!
They once did a Jekyll/Hyde parody where Harvey Korman is Jekyll, and it turns out to be a sex-change potion, and he turns into Carol.
Then, he/she finds out Lyle Waggoner co-invented the same potion at the same time, and now Lyle turns into Vicki Lawrence.
Harvey falls in love with Vicki, Lyle falls in love with Carol, so Carol and Lyle make another potion to split them into 4 people so they can all get married.
The split works, but the minds end up in the wrong bodies.
That's right; Carol Burnett beat Star trek to this level of gender-bending we'd later see in DS9 by decades.
(12/19/24: It played again tonight!! 😎👍)
They had a running soap parody called "As The Stomach Turns" and man, does it nail everything.
Right down to the bad continuity. Every skit-episode, Vicki Lawrence is her slutty daughter, and Carol's character never recognizes her, and she has a new backstory every time.
Hey, I know soaps; when I had days off from school as a kid, I watched my mother's soaps, and did MST3K in my head.
Turns out Carol beat me to all of it.
Including the title.
When I started cartooning, I fancied myself the next MAD Magazine writer, and I thought I came up with "As The Stomach Turns".
Nope, it was on Carol first. That title is just too obvious.
Thought I was brilliant, but everyone was laughing behind my back.
Rat bastids.
I'm sure I must have absorbed it subliminally.
Carol did a Barbie skit before anybody.
Carol was Barbie. Harvey was Ken. Lyle was GI Joe. Vicki was Betsy Wetsy.
I can't remember what the copyright-safe parody names were, but come on.
Carol was Olive Oyle before Shelley Duvall.
It was one of the musical numbers. Even though they were chopped off, you still see the cast in costume for the final credits scenes.
It was a salute to the funny-pages, cuz Harvey was Superman, Lyle was Shazam...and I couldn't tell who Vicki was. Blondie maybe? I dunno.
Carol's Olive had the cartoon accurate long nose.
Night before that, she was Minnie, and Harvey was Mickey, and Carol sang the song in a dead-perfect Minnie voice.
They later abandoned the cast bow out for the Charwoman cartoon version of the credits.
That's the version I remember from when I was a kid.
The sketches are a blur, but I remember that.
Okay, quickie side trip to set this up.
There used to be collector's cards called Wacky Packages that were parody versions of products.
They ran off-and-on from the 70's to the 90's.
In '85 they were stickers, and there was a sticker album to put them in that was the insane world the Wacky Packs lived in.
Carol Burnett's commercial parody skits were like that.
Carol would be a housewife besieged by the mascots and spokesmen from commercials, and what that world would actually look like.
I love the shit out of those ones. I think those are my favorites.
Advertising is still as dumb, so even though you may not recognize 60's-70's products, the tropes are all there.
They did a Maude parody skit.
Now, as a kid, I was already getting Weezy on Jeffersons, and Florida on Good Times mixed up.
Well, Florida started out on Maude, and parody-Maude had Isabel Sanford (Weezy) as parody-Florida, thus messing with my head even more.
I've re-seen the skit, and it's great, and I half wonder if the Weezy/Florida confusion was a regular thing, and Carol was fucking with people.
Y'know, like how all the Marvel/DC Chris-es get all mixed up, and SNL played around with that.
Anyway!
Isabel Sanford and Sally Struthers were the only Archie-verse crossovers.
Sally didn't do an Archie skit. The clean comedy shows never went near Archie with a 10 foot pole.
I get it, TV was different. The changes were coming, but TV fought back.
Hell, Lucy did a clip show special of "Three's Company" and praised the show because "it's not trying to change the world".
Well...come on, that's an obvious slam on Norman Lear shows.
Et tu, Lucy? Et tu?
Y'know, watching the show, and I think I'm second time through the cycle now, Harvey Korman is really underappreciated!
He really could do it all.
Carol called him her favorite comedian in an audience Q&A.
There was an awesome skit that really resonated for me of Harvey as a writer typing at his typewriter, and Carol and Carl Reiner (Rob's dad! Okay, three Archie-verse connections!) acted out Harvey's writing as he kept fucking things up.
Harvey finally gets fed up, and hates everything he wrote, and crumbles everything up.
This makes Carol and Carl crumple up, then when Harvey's gone, they reach out and hold hands.
Excellent summation of what it's like to be a writer.
Heh, up to struggling with writing this very entry! 😓🤣
They did a sequel where at the end, Harvey pops an Aspirin, and the characters get crushed by a giant Aspirin.
Somehow, that made it through the fog of childhood memory.
I can totally see that Asprin on our old CRT TV in the old trailer I grew up in.
They could have done continuation of that one forever, but they only did the two (that I know of).
Yeah, these and the commercial parodies are tied for my favorites of all time.
And of course, Harvey was in "The Star Wars Holiday Special" and "Blazing Saddles".
The Holiday Special also having Bea Arthur, the real "Maude" and thus looping back to Archie-verse.
I knew there was a link from parody-Maude to real-Maude in there somewhere.
Tim Conway always knew how to make Harvey crack up, and break character.
RIP to both Harvey Korman, and Tim Conway.
Shit, and Lyle Waggoner.
Carol and Vicki are still ticking, but the boys are all gone. 😢
After TCBS, Carol was Miss Hannigan in "Annie".
Before TCBS, she was in a Twilight Zone.
Which two-degrees her away from Richard Matheson.
Course, her episode was written by Rod Serling himself.
There's an ad on MeTV of her 90-something self talking to her 20-something TZ self.
Well, dammit, I want that whole Twilight Zone episode now.
Who has TZ now? Jordan Peele? Get on it, Jordan. Make that happen.
She's one of the few celebs to successfully sue The National Enquirer, and drink their milkshake.
I always knew they were a shit-sheet; I didn't know how in-the-tank Republican they were until it came out how hard they crowbarred reality to bury the Stormy Daniels story.
Yeah, fuck them.
I hope Carol made them have to put an icepack on their bloody nose.
After TCBS, and Annie, Carol's ex-husband produced "Mama's Family" with Vicki Lawrence and Harvey Korman hopping on over.
It caused a friend-divorce that lasted the run of the show, but they patched things up for the TCBS anniversary reunion specials.
Her and Vicki are still close.
Reading about that cheered me up about the whole TERF saga with my ex-Facebook-friends.
If this goddamned drama can happen to Carol Burnett, it happens to all of us.
And who knows? Maybe we'll re-unite someday like Carol, Harvey, and Tim.
Maybe.
Carol was on Stephen Colbert, and he got her to reveal her favorite movie is "The Shawshank Redemption".
So that's Stephen King in the mix.
I really have to get around to owning Shawshank and Green Mile.
And....that's all the things I think.
Yup!
2 comments:
Carol was in the final season of Better Call Saul!!!!!!!
That's what I get for not watching Saul.
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