This week in TV Guide: February 12, 1966

This week's Teletype brings us some news on upcoming projects hoping to make it to the fall schedule. As usual, these items are hit-and-miss, usually miss. For instance. James Farentino and Fabian are part of a proposed series called Sullivan's Place, "about three brothers who search for their missing father (Sullivan) and in the meantime run his trading post on the Amazon River." We're also told that ABC has a possible winner called Silver Springs, starring Kevin Brodie as a youngster who befriends a mermaid, played by Jeri-Lynne Fraser, and there's a pilot in the works for Li'l Abner, featuring Robert Reed as Henry Cabbage Cod. The show didn't make it, but Reed would be back two years later, in The Brady Bunch.*

*Reed was said to be the second choice for the show, after Gene Hackman turned it down. Imagine it for a moment: Mike Brady hunting down the French Connection. Kinda makes you pause, doesn't it?

On the other hand, ABC also has a pilot in the works for a series called The Time Tunnel, starring James Darren and Robert Colbert. That one absolutely did make it, along with its two stars. Also successful was Truman Capote's upcoming adaptation of his short story A Christmas Memory, which wins an Emmy.

Oh, one more thing. King Features Syndicate is hoping to convert the animated Mandrake the Magician into a live-action series made in England. It never came to pass, but in 1979 a made-for-TV version of Mandrake did appear on NBC. It didn't do very well; the critic for The New York Times said that "viewers can try a magic trick of their own. By turning the dial, they can make Mandrake disappear." The plot involves Mandrake coming to the aid of an amusement park owner being terrorized by a psychopath. The owner of the park? None other than Robert Reed.

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During the 60s, the Ed Sullivan Show and The Hollywood Palace were the premier variety shows on television. Whenever they appear in TV Guide together, we'll match them up and see who has the best lineup.

Sullivan: Scheduled guests: Ethel Merman, who sings selections from "Annie Get Your Gun"; the rockin' Rolling Stones; singer Wayne Newton; actor Hal Holbrook; José Colé, a balancer; comic Eddie Schaffer; and the Rumanian Folk Ballet. (According to the episode guide, comedian Sandy Baron was on in place of José Colé.)

Palace: Song-and-dance man Donald O'Connor introduces actor Edward G. Robinson, who reads an excerpt from Aaron Copland’s "A Lincoln Portrait"; pianist Roger Williams; singers Jane Morgan and Paul Anka; comedian Shecky Greene; and two acrobatic acts: the Three Bragazzis and the See Hee Troupe of Formosa. 

It's dueling tributes to Abraham Lincoln this week; while Eddie G recites "A Lincoln Portrait" on Palace, Sullivan has Hal Holbrook reading Lincoln's second Inaugural Address, the famous "With Malice Toward None" speech. (I wonder if youngsters today even know who Lincoln was?) And while Palace has a fine lineup overall, I'm afraid the Merm and the Stones make it very difficult to go any other way. This week, Sullivan is presidential in the win.

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From 1963 to 1976, TV Guide's weekly reviews were written by the witty and acerbic Cleveland Amory. Whenever they appear, we'll look at Cleve's latest take on the shows of the era.

Nowadays, Cleveland Amory says, "we not only have good guys and bad guys, we also have bat guys." And if that isn't a tip that this week's review is of ABC's new sensation, Batman, I don't know what else I can do. And Cleve seems not quite sure what to do about Batman, either. "It is, after all, trying to be all things to all men. Still, it is the season’s most talked about offering. Children, bless their evil little hearts, are apparently supposed to take it at face value, while us old folks are supposed to like it because it’s so far “out” it’s “in,” and also—sort of the way we go to bat for old movies—for its nostalgic value."

The show's strengths are obvious: it is, says Amory, "technically superior" to any of the Bond imitators currently on television: in color, pace, and direction. The technology is ingenious, "all the way from the batmobile to the batzooka and the batarang (boomerang, of course. Are you OK in the belfry?)." The writing is also superior, guaranteed to appeal to both young and old, and the off-screen announcer ("What foul trickery are the fiendish Riddler and his evil Molehill Mob up to now?" and "Oh, the irony of it! The horror!") adds to the fun.

You'll recall, however, that I mentioned Cleve didn't know quite what to make of it all, which suggests that, after all this praise, there has to be a downside. And that would be the acting. "Adam West may be excused by the fact that it isn’t easy to be convincing as millionaire Bruce Wayne and Batman—and at the same time convince half the viewers you’re for real and the other half you’re for fun." No such excuses exist for Burt Ward as the Boy Wonder, who has a far easier role and "is far less easy to excuse." Neil Hamilton, as Commissioner Gordon, and Madge Blake, as Aunt Harriet, are old pros who help bolster the show. And then there are the guest villains, "possibly the best thing about this show." Amory thinks that Frank Gorshin plays The Riddler "as if he had done one too many impersonations," but Burgess Meredith is "superb" as The Penguin, and the other various villains are in fine form. That leaves but one concern in Amory's eyes: TV executive Hubbell Robinson said that the history of television could be written as, "What's New, Copycat?" "If this is so, can’t you just see those "creators" at CBS and NBC now that the word has gone out? Not just copycat, of course—but copybat."

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Something you don't much see anymore is the telethon. While Jerry Lewis' Labor Day extravaganza was the best-known, there were others, both nationally and locally, throughout the first few decades of television, and we get an example of the latter on Saturday, with the start of the March of Dimes Telethon, live from the California State Fair Grounds in Sacramento (11:00 p.m., KCRA). The show, which runs until 4:00 p.m. Sunday, boasts quite the lineup, including James Drury (The Virginian); Michael Landon (Bonanza); Philip Carey, Peter Brown and William Smith (Laredo); Ed Ames and Patricia Blair (Daniel Boone); Bill Burrud (Traventure Theatre); and Jackie Coogan, state chairman, and Brenda Benet, teen-age chairman, March of Dimes Foundation.

I've never been ashamed of admitting that I enjoy Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, despite the show's descent (no pun intended) into fantasy and monster horror after a first season that was mostly dedicated to Cold War drama. Sunday presents a typical episode that's sure to give you that sinking feeling, as the crew of the Seaview go back in time and find themselves victims of a pirate curse, with Albert Salmi as the chief pirate. Aargh, me buccos (7:30 p.m., ABC). 

Monday gives us plenty of entertainment, beginning with The Andy Williams Show (9:00 p.m., NBC), and the guest lineup is a singular testament to how agents jockey to get billing for their clients. The show "stars" singer Nancy Wilson, with "special guests" Peter, Paul and Mary, and "added attraction" Bob Newhart. I'd like to think this is all tongue-in-cheek, but one can never know. That's followed by Gene Kelly's song-and-dance tribute to New York, New York (10:00 p.m., CBS). The city's legendary landmarks form the backdrop for performances by Woody Allen, Tommy Steele, singer Damita Jo, and dancer Gower Champion. (No word on whether they were all guest stars or if some were special featured added attractions.) Kelly himself is responsible for the choreography.

How times have changed: CBS Reports takes an in-depth look at "The Divorce Dilemma" (Tuesday, 10:00 p.m.), described as "one of the major social problems in the U.S., where one out of every four marriages will end in the courts." The current divorce rate is about 40 percent, which is actually down from the commonly-cited 50 percent rate in the 1980s. Part of the reason for that, of course, is that there are fewer marriages in the first place. The program, hosted by Walter Cronkite, also takes a look at the rising trend toward "no-fault" divorce in some states, as opposed to New York state, where adultery is the only ground. 

Bob Hope is back with one of his comedy specials on Wednesday, with an all-star lineup that includes Martha Raye, just back from entertaining the troops in her own tour of Vietnam; the Righteous Brothers, Jill St. John, and "special guest" Danny Thomas. (9:00 p.m., NBC) You can get a double-dose of the lovely Miss St. John, as she's also on The Big Valley (9:00 p.m., ABC), as "Barbary Red," a waterfront saloonkeeper who plays a role in Nick (Peter Breck) being drugged and kidnapped. George Kennedy and John Hoyt are part of the conspiracy.

A fascinating time-capsule episode of David Susskind's Open End (Thursday, 9:00 p.m., KVIE), where Gore Vidal and Washington columnist Max Freedman discuss "Is There a White House in Robert Kennedy's Future?" The speculation centers on the 1972 presidential election; in February of 1966, the assumption is, of course, that President Johnson will routinely be nominated for a second full term. And that's the power that history has to crush those who become caught it its trap; scarcely two years later, Johnson will have announced that he's not running for reelection, and Robert Kennedy will be dead.

One of the main reasons that Johnson and Kennedy find themselves caught in that trap can be seen on Friday, in an NBC special report on the Vietnam crisis (7:30 p.m.), with David Brinkley, Elie Abel, and Sander Vanocur reporting on the peace conference in Geneva, Switzerland. And on a lighter note, Carol Channing hosts her first television special, appropriately called, An Evening with Carol Channing (8:30 p.m., CBS), with George Burns and David McCallum guesting, and Carol performing songs from some of her Broadway hits, including "Hello, Dolly." 

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Care for a starlet? How about two? Neither are exactly unknown; each is a regular on a current show. First up is Debbie Watson, 16-years-old and the titular star of ABC's sitcom Tammy. It's a role that's been played on the big screen by Debbie Reynolds and Sandra Dee, but, says Jane Wilkie, Debbie Watson hasn't let it all go to her head. 

Not that people haven't been waiting for it to happen. Debbie started out in the Long Beach Community Playhouse, appearing in Bye Bye Birdie and Brigadoon, and from there graduated to Karen, the only segment of NBC's ill-fated 90 Bristol Court to survive the entire season. There was no second season for Karen, but Debbie had another gig waiting for her. It's been bittersweet for her parents; while they're proud of her, mom Kittie has to accompany her on the one-hour drive to the studio (due to her age), where Debbie alternates between acting and attending school on the lot, while her mother literally has nothing to do. And after a long day, and a longer drive home, there's dad Eugene, home from work and waiting for his dinner, joined occasionally by Debbie's dates, "who are also waiting." 

It seems to work, and Debbie takes it all in stride, but, as Wilkie writes, "there has been a change, subtle and unsettling. It is not easy for a parent to tell any 16-year-old what to do; it is an age of emerging independence, and this is compounded when the daughter is working at a full-time job in a world completely alien to her parents and earning more each week than most adults do in a month." It's not easy, and Debbie herself knows what she's missing at Buena Park High School (she continues to hang out with her friends, who look to "mature" Debbie for advice). On the other hand, a couple of months ago she became engaged to 21-year-old Richard Orshoff, a student at USC.

What lies ahead for Debbie Watson? Wilkie cynically speculates on when Debbie eventually moves into her own apartment, closer to the studio, and "the cynics say the apartment will be in posh Bel-Air, that Debbie will soon drip with sables and eventually will even hire a press agent. And Kittie and Eugene Watson, although they will not admit it, must have some second thoughts." In fact, Tammy, like Karen, runs for only one season; Watson continues her acting career until 1971, including taking on the role of Marilyn Munster in the movie Munster, Go Home! in 1966. She married young Richard Orshoff later in 1966. She's still with us, at age 77; according to Wikipedia, so is Richard. And later this year, they will have been married for 60 years.

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I mentioned another starlet this week, and that's Nina Wayne, who can be seen in NBC's sitcom Camp Runamuck, and who is the younger sister of Carol Wayne, the Tea-Time Lady on the Art Fern skits that Johnny Carson does. The Wayne sisters began their career as figure skaters with the Ice Capades. It's interesting that when you watch the footage of Carol's first appearance on The Tonight Show, Johnny mentions that her sister has been on the show several times in the past, so at this point Nina is probably the better-known of the two.

And there's good reason for her to be known here, with this display of the latest in terrycloth fashions. It's a pleasant thought on these cold winter days.

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MST3K alert: The Leech Woman (1959) Bay Area TV Debut. A woman discovers that she is to be the guinea pig for her husband’s weird experiments. Coleen Gray, Grant Williams, Gloria Talbott, Philip Terry. (Wednesday, 5:00 p.m., KGO in San Francisco). As Crow has said many, many times, this really isn't a very good movie, although Grant Williams is fine. And this isn't the only time you'll see him this week; he's also in the much-better movie, The Incredible Shrinking Man, 90 minutes earlier, on KHSL. TV

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Around the dial

We lead off this week's edition at The Twilight Zone Vortex, where Brian discusses an excellent episode from the show's final season, "Night Call," written by the great Richard Matheson, and starring Gladys Cooper in an outstanding performance.

The "Tony Wright Season" continues at Cult TV Blog, with John looking at one of my favorite British imports, The Saint, and not one, not two, but three episodes in which Tony Wright appears: "The Arrow of God," "The Crooked Ring," and "Where The Money Is." Great stuff!

I don't know about you, but I was a big fan of Roller Derby when it was on local TV in the 1960s and 1970s, and that's my excuse to link to Classic Film & TV Cafe, where Rick's talking about Raquel Welch in Kansas City Bomber. I think that's good enough, don't you?

Along those same general lines, at Classic Film and TV Corner, Maddy reviews the 1956 movie Anastasia, which represented Ingrid Bergman's return to Hollywood (as well as an Academy Award), and look at that picture of her: there's a beauty there that is hard to top in today's movies.

Did you watch the Super Bowl on Sunday? We did not, for something like the twenty-fifth consecutive year, but Bob Sassone did, and he's got thoughts about some of the commercials, as well as some random observations that are, as always, well worth your time.

Terence has some fine content at A Shroud of Thoughts; not obituaries, but: a tribute to Leslie Nielsen on his 100th birthday; a look at Margaret Hamilton (the Wicked Witch in The Wizard of Oz) on Sesame Street; Get Christie Love!, and happy 95th birthday to Mamie Van Doren!

At Television's New Frontier: The 1960s, we're at the 1962 episodes of the perennial favorite, Ozzie and Harriet, and while the show may be running on fumes at this point, it's interesting to look at some of the best episodes, such as how aging parents deal with adult children who have their own lives. 

You may recall that last week at The View from the Junkyard, The A-Team was involved in drama involving firefighters. This week, in the episode "Timber," it's lumberjacks! With a little bit of Bigfoot thrown in, how can you possibly say no?

My latest appearance with Dan Schneider in our American television history series is a look at the decade of the 2000s, and while I don't find this a terribly compelling decade for TV, it does raise some interesting questions about trends, psychology, and all kinds of interesting things.

Finally, it's never too early to start looking forward to my upcoming novel, The Book of Revelations. Want to know more about it? You can check out the teaser page here. TV

If you enjoy the content here and want to support my broader creative work, please consider making a donation at my Ko-fi page. Any amount you contribute helps me continue writing, researching, and sharing these articles and projects. Thank you!

The return of MST3K

A gentleman at one of the Mystery Science Theater 3000 message boards wrote to say that in the last couple of years, he'd lost his wife and had been diagnosed with incurable brain cancer. When he found out that new episodes of MST3K were on the way, he said, "if this isn’t a reason to fight to keep living, I don’t know what is."

That may be an extreme example, but it's clear that last week's news about Rifftrax preparing to make four new episodes of the series, featuring Mike Nelson, Kevin Murphy, Bill Corbett (the trio responsible for the last few seasons of the original series), along with Mary Jo Pehl (the evil Pearl Forrester) and many of the original crew, was met with virtually universal acclaim, and the only reason I add that qualifer is because I'm sure that someone somewhere must have had a discouraging word about it.

The news was completely unexpected, which made the surprise all the more welcome. The original series ran for ten seasons, and a few years ago, the program's creator, Joel Hodgson, raised enough money to fund three additional seasons. These new episodes included an all-new cast, however, given that so many of the original cast and crew were currently working with Rifftrax; and while I've no doubt that they tried their best, the new episodes were, in the opinion of many (including me), sadly lacking in what made the original MST3K so beloved. The sets were more elaborate, thus losing some of the charm of the "garage" feeling engendered by the original. The actors, both on camera and providing the voices, never quite seemed to fit the personalities of the robots; perhaps had there been all-new robots to go along with the all-new humans, it would have been different. There was something about the riffs that seemed off as well; some viewers said they felt there were too many of them, that they didn't seem to be generated spontaneously from the movie itself; others felt that the jokes weren't quite as pop culture savvy, which wouldn't be a surprise given that pop culture itself isn't as funny as it used to be.

Whatever the reason, the new episodes received less-than-unanimous praise, and a project to fund a fourth season fell short of its goal, due in part to complications resulting from the writers' strike. It seemed at that point that MST3K had finally come to an end. But when Hodgson sold out to the parent company of Shout! a couple of weeks ago, the company quickly contacted their collaborators at Rifftrax, and the shocking announcement soon followed, combined with a Kickstarter campaign with an announced goal of $20,000, which was passed in the first hour or so; the most recent figures show that it's raised nearly $1.8 million, 

Considering that I've got MST3K in my list of top-10 favorites, and I write about it frequently in my TV Guide pieces, it won't surprise you to see that I'm spending some time on it this week. During the last five months while I've been working on my new book, MST3K was an almost constant companion in the background; even when I wasn't really paying any attention to it, it was comforting to know that it was on, and I was always able to pause long enough to appreciate a good punchline (and there were many of those). For me, MST3K is the ultimate comfort (TV) food.

Of course, it doesn't pay to go overboard; after all, plenty of people were excited about the first revival as well. And just to be fair, many people like those new episodes; just because I'm not one of them doesn't mean that my opinion is any more important than theirs (except to me, of course). But look; Mike Nelson was the head writer for MST3K for virtually its entire run, as well as being on-camera for the last few years. Kevin Murphy played Tom Servo for every season but the first. Bill Corbett, the voice of Crow T. Robot for the last three seasons (as well as the albino alien Brain Guy) is a very funny guy. Mary Jo Pehl, as the evil Pearl Forrester, was one of the most inept villains anyone's ever seen. Not every episode of the original series was a gem; sometimes the movies were so bad that it was a real challenge finding anything funny or clever to say about them. Sometimes, the jokes misfired, or the skits just weren't that good. That was the exception more than the rule, though. 

If anyone is to be trusted with reviving the legacy of classic MST3K, it's this crew. They've been very successful for 20 years doing Rifftrax, but there's something about teaming their voices up with the characters that fans have known and loved for so many years that makes this singularly irresistible. (Not to mention the announcement of appearances by Trace Beaulieu and Frank Conniff in the final new episode of this series, the evil henchmen tormenting our heroes for most of the show's run.)

The reason this is notable, and why it's important to me, is that it marks a moment of genuine excitement about an upcoming project. Granted, MST3K will never have the ratings of the more prestigious series of the past (although it does have a Peabody Award), and I'm sure there are many more viewers for whatever shows happen to be the latest flavor of the month. But, in an era when it's hard to work up any real enthusiasm for what television has to offer, it's wonderful to see that something which brought so much happiness to people in the past still can create such joy among its fans today, especially when such a part of its appeal is grounded in throwing back to the show's simpler roots. No expensive gadgets, no super-spectacular CGI, just the kindsof things that were created in Joel Hodgson's garage many years ago. When we're constantly reminded of how much innocence we've lost in our modern world, we could do with a little bit of it today. TV

If you enjoy the content here and want to support my broader creative work, please consider making a donation at my Ko-fi page. Any amount you contribute helps me continue writing, researching, and sharing these articles and projects. Thank you!

What's on TV? Tuesday, February 11, 1969

This afternoon's main event is the Pillsbury Bake-Off from Atlanta (why it wasn't in Minneapolis, the company's home city, is a mystery to me), hosted by Art Linkletter. The Bake-Off used to be a big deal- I can remember watching it when I was younger. I don't even know if they have the Bake-Off anymore, and if they do, whether or not it's on television (Pillsbury itself is only a brand name, the company having been absorbed years ago by General Mills), and perhaps I'm the only one around who doens't know the answer; maybe all of you know the answer and think I'm hopelessly out of touch, which would be right, but such is the state of television today that something even the casual viewer would have been aware of back then is a mystery today. It's hardly anything new, I know, but it seems as if we're always being reminded of it. This week's listings are, obviously, from the Northern California edition.

This week in TV Guide: February 8, 1969

For media analysts, the 1968 Democratic Convention is the gift that keeps on giving. I know a lot of you are probably tired of me writing about it as often as I do, but I don't generally go looking for it; it comes to me. And TV Guide has written about it at least as often as everyone else. It is, in fact, a seminal event when it comes to looking at how the news media presented events, how it became a participant in those events, and the public's perception of those events.

In this first of a four-part series, Neil Hickey looks at the decisive questions raised by last year's convention: "How well did the networks discharge their responsibilities? Was coverage slanted? Were viewers fully and fairly informed? Did many of them deliberately refuse to believe their eyes?" The issue, Hickey says, "appears destined neither to die nor fade away, but to linger in some morose corner of the public mind for generations to come."  The answer will influence the future course of television news coverage."  

What is truly remarkable about this preamble to the series is how these questions about the media are not only still being asked today but also appear to arise with greater frequency, greater intensity, and greater scope. If news coverage of the convention raised eyebrows back then—if viewers truly were shocked by what had hitherto been, in Hickey's words, a "20-year romance which television has enjoyed with American families" that had achieved iconic status with the coverage of President Kennedy's assassination—then today, many of these accusations are simply assumed as a given by most viewers, who would claim that the media doesn't even make a token effort to hide their bias. 

Coverage of the convention—it's estimated that almost 90 percent of American households were tuned in to the events, and 92 percent of all television homes in the free world—makes this kind of discussion inevitable, one supposes. In an era when you still had to make an effort to write a letter—unlike today's social media instant-reaction environment—the three networks and the Federal Communications Commission were flooded with "tens of thousands of letters" complaining about the media's coverage. Among those complaints were that coverage was biased against President Johnson and Vice President Humphrey; that news footage focused on violent acts by the police against the protestorss "but never the provocation which led up to it"; that reports and anchors "engaged in too much editorializing (at the expense of straight news) without labeling it as such"; and that newsmen "were too generous and affectionate in their coverage of the hippies, Yippies and radical leftists who had come to Chicago with the announced purpose of disrupting the convention and creating havoc in the streets." One of the specific allegations was that the media inflated the number of protestors; in the weeks leading up to the convention, the news floated estimates of between 100,000 and one million, but "the best estimates now indicate that the demonstrators’ recruitment was an almost total flop, and that no more than 5000 of them came to the city from points outside Illinois."

And look at some of these comments: Columnist Jenkin Lloyd Jones wrote: "It should now be obvious that television, as it is now used, is the enemy, not the servant, of the political convention. It has become so, not out of malice, but because TV is a medium that prefers drama to uplift, and where both are present it will go for drama every time." Sen. Everett Dirksen (R-lll.), called it "an outrage against the democratic process" and "a clear and outrageous attempt at editorializing and bias." You can read variations of this quote pretty much any time you want today. 

In an extraordinary series of reports by Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson, the columnists claimed that a House Commerce Committe study confirmed that "some of the networks deliberately went out to slant the news; that TV directors purposefully photographed Vice President Humphrey and Mayor Daley in unflattering poses, even resorting to distorting the TV color; that speeches favorable to the Johnson regime were forsaken repeatedly by the cameras to focus on some dissident eager for publicity," and that the networks, "perhaps in their eagerness to generate high ratings for TV sponsors, encouraged dissidents to make inflammatory statements and helped to stir up controversies." This was far from a universal opinion, mind you; even some of the papers that ran the columns by Pearson and Anderson felt compelled to offer disclaimers about the content; the New York Post wrote that "The notion that the labors of conscientious TV men under fire were exploited in a network plot to discredit the Democrats is absurd." 

Since there are three other installments in the series, I haven't done an in-depth presentation of everything involved in Hickey's investigation; instead, I've pulled some quotes that point to the disturbing similarities between the era I'm writing about and that in which we live today. Perhaps someday I'll write about the entire series. But for now, I just want to look at this as, if you will, one of those "canary in the coal mine" moments, that also proves how the more things change, the more they stay the same. With only a little tweaking, most of what we see here could have been written today.

What I find interesting is that you'll often read comments, mostly by people lamenting the state of today's news coverage, pointing to the "classic" era of television news, the days of Cronkite, Huntley and Brinkley, and others, when the news was "fair and objective," as opposed to today's slanted opinions and outright bias. In fact, the argument we're having today is nothing new. It may have intensified, it may be more available to more people, making them more aware of the controversy. But to suggest that everything was fine and dandy back in "the good old days" is simply not true, and the borderline-obsessive coverage of Chicago proves that.

This all happened nearly sixty years ago; most Americans of today weren't born then, and many of those who were alive don't have a clear memory of it anymore. I do remember it well; I remember what a terrible time it was for everyone. If we look back on these as the "good old days," how much worse does that mean things are in our modern age? One of the most disturbing quotes I found in this article comes from columnist Max Lerner, who talked of "a kind of 'social dynamite' in the spreading suspicion among both liberals and conservatives that the wells of communication in the U.S. are poisoned." Can there be any better description of the state of America today? 

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During the 60s, the Ed Sullivan Show and The Hollywood Palace were the premier variety shows on television. Whenever they appear in TV Guide together, we'll match them up and see who has the best lineup.

Sullivan: Tentatively scheduled guests: Leslie Uggams; comic Bill Dana; singer Roslyn Kind, Barbra Streisand’s half-sister; Joan Rivers; Barbara Eden of I Dream of Jeannie; Peter Gennaro; and the acrobatic Schaller Brothers. (If there were any changes, they're not reflected in the episode guide.)

Palace: Robert Goulet’s guests: the Mills Brothers; Kay Thompson; singer Dusty Springfield; comics Hendra and Ullett, and Jack Wakefield; and Nina Logatsheva, low-wire ballerina from the Moscow State Circus.

You want singers? Sullivan has Leslie Uggams and Roslyn Kind; the Palace is hosted by a singer, Robert Goulet, and has the Mills Brothers, Kay Thompson, and Dusty Springfield. You want comics? Sullivan has Bill Dana and Joan Rivers, the Palace has Hendra and Ullet and Jack Wakefield. Sullivan has acrobats, the Palace has a low-wire ballerina. So what does all this prove? Well, the Mills Brothers are unbeatable, Dusty Springfield (singing "Son of a Preacher Man") is undeniable, and Mr. G himself is as smooth as they come. This week, Palace wins with a song in its heart.

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From 1963 to 1976, TV Guide's weekly reviews were written by the witty and acerbic Cleveland Amory. Whenever they appear, we'll look at Cleve's latest take on the shows of the era.

Back in the day, you often heard it said that "there outta be a law." And Cleveland Amory has an idea for a perfect law: television should be prohibited from "laying its blood-stained hands on the classics—particularly on children’s classics." That includes NBC's new series, The New Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. "And make no mistake —which you already have if you've sat through an episode—this particular series is not content to murder just one classic." 

I think it's pretty clear where we're going from here, but it's our good fortune that our Cleve is leading the way, for the more he piles it on, the more entertaining he gets. Borrowing from Johnny Mercer's lyrics to Moon River, "Your Huckleberry friend who is waiting round the bend is only the take-off point here. Each program moves on from there to fire at will on "Don Quixote," "The Arabian Nights," "Gulliver's Travels," etc., etc.—until you end with a full-scale massacre. Watch it and we guarantee that your Huckleberry friend won’t have to wait at all. You too will be around the bend." (I don't normally quote at such length, but, unlike the series itself, this was simply too good to pass up.) You see, one of the conceits of this series is that episodes often involve Mark Twain's favorite characters in fanciful adventures that take place between the covers of other classics: "Huck of La Mancha," for example, in which Huck, Tom, and Becky find themselves rescuing Don Quixote and Sancho from Don Jose D'Indio, who is none other than—of course—Injun Joe. You might think that, well, at least this episode has good source material to work with; however, "it was really shocking to find that there was, in the concept and rendition of the character of Don Quixote, not one single whit of pathos, understanding or even point." Another episode takes our trio to the stories of the Arabian Knights: Ali Baba, Scheherazade, Sinbad. It takes them, and does nothing to them. In other words, the show is so much a product of today's values—"the self-centered, self-serving world the modern child today faces"—that it makes no attempt to present the values and morals that were integral parts of the original stories.

If you've never seen the show before (consider yourself fortunate), it blends live action and animation, not unlike Song of the South, although to much worse effect. In fact, Amory says, the animated characters are generally better actors. Of them, the best is Ted Cassidy, who voices Injun Joe. He appears in the prologue as a live character, then morphs into the animated villain of the story. Smart thinking, Lurch. Amory concludes at the beginning, with a look at that prologue. Speaking of Injun Joe, Huck says, "I had a funny feeling that we'd see him again." Says Cleve, "We had a feeling too—but it wasn’t funny."

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It is hard to imagine that there was a time, as late as 1969, when people had not heard of Stella Stevens. I say this not just as a normal, red-blooded American male with an appreciation for such things, but as a student of pop culture. She appeared with Elvis in Girls, Girls, Girls. She appeared with Jerry Lewis in The Nutty Professor. She appeared with Dean Martin in The Silencers. She appeared with Rosalind Russell in Where Angels Go, Trouble Follows. She appeared with a smile and nothing else as the January 1960 centerfold in Playboy. I rest my case.

And yet, as Joe McGinniss* writes this week, that's exactly where we are. "Stella Stevens has not really failed. It’s just that she has not succeeded," McGinniss writes. "She has worked hard at her career since moving West from Memphis in 1958. She has made lots and lots of movies. She has done some very good television work. Yet nobody knows who she is." You'll forgive me if I have trouble believing this, and yet, there it is. She is, by all accounts, "warm and sincere," besides which, as we've mentioned, she's a knockout. But she's "too versatile," the knock is, moving from comedy to drama, from the big screen to television, never quite landing the part that would make her a star. 

*The same Joe McGinniss who would later write non-fiction books such as The Selling of the President and Fatal Vision. 

She's overcome a lot to make it this far, including a marriage at age 15, a son (Andrew Stevens, who would go on to become an actor in his own right) at 16, a divorce at 17. And her career is far from being what one would consider a failure. She has, McGinniss says, "adjusted to worse things. She will be able to proceed quite nicely through her 30's without being on the covers of magazines." And she believes the best is still to come. "I feel like my career is just beginning,” she says. "I've put in my apprenticeship. Now people are finally beginning to realize that I’m serious and I'm good." A lot of people say that she's very good, "a genuine comedienne who can handle straight roles, too." 

You can only remember so many names, though, and there are a lot of them out there. They're getting younger all the time, too (Stella is all of 29, virtually over the hill), and her chances of hitting the jackpot diminish. And yet, all these years later, the name "Stella Stevens" has yet to be forgotten. She appeared on television almost constantly, appeared as a regular in Flamingo Road and Santa Barbara, and remained active up to 2010. As a 2012 article noted, she was, in the 1960s, "one of the most photographed women in the world." Apparently, some people had heard of her. Of her layouts in Playboy (three in all), she said, "If you've got ten million people seeing you in a layout like that ... and half of them remember the name 'Stella Stevens', they'll buy tickets for your movies."

Joe McGinniss was a very good writer, but maybe he didn't know everything. Otherwise, all I can say is that it's a sad commentary on American manhood.

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Here's a movie that definitely should have made it to Mystery Science Theater 3000: Billy the Kid vs. Dracula (Saturday, 9:00 a.m. PT, KTVU). I suppose it had something to do with rights, but listen to the description: "Billy discovers that his fiancee's uncle is a vampire." And it features John Carradine! What more can anyone ask for?

Sunday's highlight is the special Man and His Universe (7:00 p.m., ABC), a look at space exploration, specifically last December's flight of Apollo 8. "As earth's unrolled stunning blue-and-white carpet is_ across the screen, viewers hear from Apollo 8 heroes Frank Borman and James A. Lovell Jr.; Col. Edwin Aldrin Jr., named to this summer’s scheduled Apollo 11 moon-landing team; and Dr. Harrison H. (Jack) Schmitt, who plans to make geological studies on the moon." George C. Scott narrates the hour, which I really would like to have seen. I think the Paley Center has a copy of it; it might as well be on the moon. That's one of three specials that make Sunday night special, including a presentation of A Midsummer Night's Dream (9:00 p.m., CBS) by the Royal Shakespeare Company, with a cast including David Warner, Diana Rigg, Helen Mirren, Judi Dench, Ian Holm, and Ian Richardson. And NBC presents a rerun of last year's Fred Astaire special (10:00 p.m.), with Barrie Chase, Simon and Garfunkel, Sergio Mendes and Brasil '66, the Young-Holt Trio, Neal Hefti's orchestra and the Gordian Knot.

Twenty-four years before Schindler's List, Monday's installment of the ABC Evening News with Frank Reynolds (5:30 or 6:00 p.m. depending on the market) features a special report on Oskar Schindler: "Although he was a Nazi, Schindler saved 1300 Jews by having them transferred from death camps to his factory, and later gave them weapons so they could overcome Gestapo guards and escape to freedom." You don't often see a special report on the evening news that's featured in TV Guide, but as I recall, this is something that ABC did from time to time to try and boost their news by giving it a different feel. In primetime, Ella Fitzgerald is joined by Duke Ellington for an hour of music (7:30 p.m., KOVR), Davy Jones guests on a Valentine's celebration on Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In (8:00 p.m., NBC), and Carol Burnett is joined by a stellar lineup including Lucille Ball, Eddie Albert, and Nancy Wilson (10:00 p.m., CBS)

Speaking of guest stars, Jimmy Stewart makes a cameo appearance on Julia (Tuesday, 8:30 p.m., NBC), while James Earl Jones (currently starring in the Broadway production of "The Great White Hope") stars on N.Y.P.D. (9:30 p.m., ABC), a really fine half-hour police drama. And on The Tonight Show (11:30 p.m., NBC), Johnny's scheduled guests are Jack Benny, choreographer George Ballanchine (perhaps the premier classical choreographer of the time), ballet dancers Suzanne Farrell and Arthur Mitchell, and author and Discovery host Frank Buxton.

Wednesday is Lincoln's Birthday, which used to be a fairly big deal, at least back when I was in school, and Aaron Copland conducts the National Symphony in a Lincoln Day concert (8:30 p.m., NET), including one of Copland's most famous works, "Lincoln Portrait," narrated by Coretta Scott King, MLK's widow. Meantime, NBC repeats last year's highly acclaimed special with Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass (9:00 p.m.). The most interesting item on Tuesday, though, is what we didn't see: the never-aired second episode of ABC's infamous disaster Turn-On (scheduled for 8:30 p.m.), which would have featured as hosts Robert Culp and his wife, France Nuyen. 

As a sign of the times, I'm intrigued by this episode of I Dream of Jeannie (Thursday, 7:00 p.m., KHSL), in which Jeannie, in an attempt to free Tony from house fix-up projects, redoes the house into a mansion sold for $60,000 to a NASA VIP. Now, the idea of a $60,000 "mansion" intrigued me; I'm not sure you can buy a mobile home for $60,000 anymore, so I decided to see what that $60,000 house would be worth today. The answer? Approximately $558,831.03, an increase of 831.39 percent. Does that qualify as a mansion under today's home prices? Given that the median U.S. home price hovers around $400,000–$450,000, and that "luxury" homes start at about $1.3 million, Zillow estimates that a mansion would run around $1.4 million; in Miami, the price would be closer to $2 million. For $560,000, you would get a home classified as "nice" or upper-middle-class in many places; to call it a "mansion" would probably be treated with skepticism. (In case you're wondering, in 1969 a mansion would have run over $100,000.) Thus endeth our economics lesson for today.

Davy Jones, who was on Laugh-In on Monday night, is one of the guest stars on This is Tom Jones (Friday, 7:30 p.m., ABC), along with Nancy Wilson, who was on The Carol Burnett Show on Monday night, Rich Litte, Mireille Mathieu, and Herman's Hermits, who weren't on anything else this week. On The Name of the Game (8:30 p.m., NBC), Robert Goulet and his then-wife Carol Lawrence star as Tony Franciosa's investigative reporter looks into the case of a famous doctor (Goulet) who's "an absolute whiz at hospital fund-raising—but totally incompetent as a surgeon." In the late-night movie slot, check out The Outrage (11:30 p.m., KOVR), an Old West version of Rashomon starring Paul Newman as a bandit executed for murder, even though nobody knows for certain what the facts were. Claire Bloom, Laurence Harvey, Edward G. Robinson, and Howard Da Silva fill out a tremendous supporting cast, as well as William Shatner as a preacher—made to order for the Shat's overacting. 

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Finally, as a dedicated MST3K fan, I can't ignore Robert de Roos's feature story on Peter Graves, who appeared on Beginning of the End, It Conquered the World, and Parts: The Clonus Horror, as well as the Rifftrax feature Killers from Space. Graves is now starring in Mission: Impossible, but according to de Roos, he still can't escape the shadow of big brother James Arness. 

"I don’t know why Peter wants to be a star so badly," says George Santoro, a producer at Universal. "He's already recognized by more people than most stars."  Graves insists that this doesn't bother him, although he does admit that he wishes he came across as a star whose fans hold him in awe, rather than those who come up to him and treat him like a long-lost friend. Some think it has to do with the squeaky wheel getting the attention; producer Norman Macdonnell says, "You never hear much about Pete." Others, including Graves, say that his television work has effectively kept him from making the movies that could elevate his profile. 

This could be changing, though. CBS vice president Perry Lafferty says of Graves that "The quiet strength of this man has contributed to the smash hit of Mission: Impossible." It could have been awkward stepping into the lead that had originally been held by Steven Hill, but "there was never a hint

of trouble. I can think of a half dozen other leading men who would have been bitterly resented by the cast. I just wish I had 15 more like him." (This jibes with other descriptions from costars and crew who speak highly of Graves' professionalism and quiet sense of humor.) Graves himself says, "Some bloom early, and some take a little longer. I have a deep sense that I am ready for the big push." Indeed, Peter Graves becomes the face of M:I, notwithstanding the show's gradual decline in the years after Barbara Bain and Martin Landau left the show. Perhaps his greatest hit comes in his deadpan role as Captain Oveur in Airplane. Like Stella Stevens, maybe it just took a little patience. TV

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