As part of my ClassicFlix duties, I whip up a few birthday shout-outs to celebrity notables of the past on both Facebook and Twitter—today, for instance, actress-singer Janis Paige turns ninety-one…and I wrote a mercilessly short bio, mentioning a few of the movies that were graced by her amazing presence.
Sometimes there are people that I’d like to single out for
mention but they get lost in the cracks—either because I’ve already got too
many birthdays or I can’t find a decent photo of them on the Internets or in my
collection. Case in point:
writer-producer Paul Henning was born on this date today in 1911. The name is no doubt familiar to TV fans,
since Henning was a major-type mogul in the world of television with series
like The
Dennis Day Show and The Bob Cummings Show (a.k.a. Love
That Bob) to his credit…and then in the 1960s, executive producing the
bucolic trilogy of The Beverly Hillbillies, Petticoat Junction and Green
Acres. Henning started out as a
radio scribe; he cut his teeth assisting Don Quinn on Fibber McGee & Molly and
then went to work for Joe E. Brown and Rudy Vallee before becoming Burns and
Allen’s head writer in the 1940s (he also penned many of their TV scripts).
I bring up Paul Henning (and not just to make a bad pun in
the title) because I got a pair of e-mails this weekend from TVShowsOnDVD.com announcing that the third season
of Petticoat
Junction and the fourth season of The Beverly Hillbillies are coming
to DVD the first of October…in what are being termed “Walmart exclusives.” Whether or not this means that the
brick-and-mortar behemoth will be the only ones selling these sets I do not
know; it may be one of those deals where the collections make their debut there
before being released in a more inclusive fashion. Still, I decided not to take a chance on this
and so I ordered both sets, even though I will probably burn in a fiery hell
for the rest of eternity shopping Walmart online.
Cultureshark
proprietor Rick Brooks mentioned to me via Facebook that TSOD’s decision to announce the Hillbillies and Junction
releases was influenced by a lively give-and-take at the Home
Theater Forum, in which the webmasters from TSOD attempted to explain their decision not to give people a
heads-up about the sets and were drowned out by loud cries of “Bullsh*t!” I wasn’t aware of the fracas (any bulletin
board that winds up driving Stephen
Bowie away is probably not one I want to frequent) so I won’t labor over
the details but I’m offering a doff of the TDOY
chapeau to Messrs. Lacey and Lambert (The Men from T.S.O.D.) or TV Guide or whomever for changing
their minds and letting folks know the news (again, I don’t frequent HTF as
much as I did in the past because the administrator has a particularly annoying
habit of curtailing people’s speech freedoms just when the conversation starts
to get interesting).
There was a discussion
on the HTF Beverly Hillbillies thread about the show itself and why it
seems to have done so poorly with regards to DVD sales…particularly since it
was the biggest thing to happen to CBS since they put I Love Lucy on the
air. There’s always been a stigma
attached to the program—one I’ve never completely comprehended because I don’t
think Hillbillies gets enough credit as being both a funny sitcom and
a nice little slice of social satire. My
take on it is that if you’re familiar with George and Gracie’s radio show, you’re
probably a fan of Beverly Hillbillies because the same “illogical logic”
permeates both programs; the Clampetts, being the “fish out of water,” often
take simple misunderstandings and make mountains out of them…and thereby
producing classic comedy. I think Green
Acres also takes a lot from Burns & Allen (even though
Henning was only the executive producer—Jay Sommers created it) as well—the character
of Oliver Wendell Douglas is essentially a man trapped in a town populated by Gracies.
The other birthday I didn’t get to single out today is that
of OTR actor Lawrence Dobkin, born on this date in 1918. With Larry, it’s never a question of what did he do on radio…it’s more like “what
didn’t he do.” He’s best known as one of
radio’s Ellery Queen’s—and for high-profile appearances on The Adventures of the Saint,
The
New Adventures of Nero Wolfe and Gunsmoke—but he also worked on such
series as The Adventures of Philip Marlowe, Broadway is My Beat, Escape,
Family
Theatre, Jeff Regan, Investigator, Let George Do It, The Lux
Radio Theatre, The Man Called X, Night
Beat, Richard Diamond, Private Detective, Suspense, The Whistler
and Yours
Truly, Johnny Dollar…and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
Dobkin would later work in movies (Sweet Smell of Success, North
by Northwest) and TV—he even became a noted small screen director with
episodes of The Rifleman, 77 Sunset Strip, The
Donna Reed Show and Star Trek to his credit (as well as
a couple of episodes of the show featured here on the blog, The
Doris Day Show). Every Sunday
night at 1am, I enjoy hearing Larry’s best-known TV gig on Me-TV—as narrator of
the hour-long Naked City. (“There are
eight million stories in the naked city…this has been one of them.”)
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