TFTP Variety: "Jack Benny's Bag" from NBC (Nov. 16, 1968)

Posted to YouTube by user 'balsamwoods'
Length - 1:01:39

Jack Benny's long-running weekly sitcom (a continuation of his long-running radio program) ended in 1965, and for the remainder of his career until his death in 1974 Benny did occasional TV specials. The above program is one of the early such specials, with a theme lampooning youth counterculture of the late-1960s, entitled "Jack Benny's Bag".

Like a lot of old-line comedians, Benny was pretty clueless when it came to the counterculture he was lampooning. In most cases of mainstream TV treatment of counterculture, including here, some garish colors, some psychedelic imagery, some youth-oriented clothing, and some tossed-off slang was thought to do the job.

In "Jack Benny's Bag", though, the counterculture elements are mainly window-dressing. Benny himself wears either a tuxedo or a regular suit throughout most of the special, and there is little of substance regarding the counterculture. (The one sketch that does treat it is a groan-worthy parody of the film "The Graduate" where Benny-as-Benjamin-Braddock enters through an arch that is a large mock-up of Mrs. Robinson's famous leg.) A pair of hippies appears near the beginning to collect payment for painting Benny's house (he assumed given their values that they'd do for free); Benny's Maxwell car, in which he makes his first appearance, has been painted in psychedelic designs, as has the stage backdrop; and that's about it.

Guests abound, including Dick Clark, Lou Rawls, Phyllis Diller (who portrays Mrs. Robinson in the "Graduate" sketch), Dan Rowan and Dick Martin, Eddie Fisher, and Benny's own former supporting player Eddie "Rochester" Anderson. (Rochester appears with Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon as their "Odd Couple" characters in the special's cold opening.) Sponsored by Texaco, the special includes a few filmed commercials for that product, and a group of young girls in Texaco "Fire Chief" costumes appear with Benny in a couple of segments.

TFTP Will Return After These Messages: Commercials for Kentucky Fried Chicken (1968/1971/1981)

Posted to YouTube by user 'chicagofilmarchives' (top), 'Bionic Disco' (middle), 'robatsea2009' (bottom)
Length - 1:06 (top), 1:04 (middle), 0:30 (bottom)

Every Wednesday, TFTP takes a break from regular programming to bring you a selection of classic commercials. We will return after these messages...

These three commercials from fast-food giant Kentucky Fried Chicken all feature the iconic red-and-white-striped KFC bucket. In the first commercial, from 1968 and the only of the three to also feature the actual Colonel Sanders, the Colonel puts wheels on the bucket to demonstrate its portability. (Was take-away food still that much of a novelty in the 1960s?) Commercial number two (from '71) uses the bucket as a punchline: a mother has served KFC chicken at dinner with her daughter's new boyfriend and passed it off as her own cooking, until little brother barges into the dining room wielding the bucket. Finally, the third commercial, from 1981, displays the bucket prominently upfront--a KFC employee fills and displays a bucket--before going on to show numerous groups of people eating fried chicken--out of KFC boxes.

TFTP Kids: "Bozo's Circus" from WGN/Chicago (1968)

Posted to YouTube by user 'Brian P. Collins'
Length - 56:10

Bozo the Clown is a legendary children's TV character that appeared in local kids' programs in various cities but nowhere as famously as in Chicago on WGN-TV. The Bozo character had been around since the late-1940s on children's record albums and by the late-'50s had begun to be franchised for television. WGN started to air "Bozo's Circus" in 1961 as a midday program aimed at kids who were home from school over the lunch hour.

The episode above is from 1968 and features Bozo (Bob Bell), Ringmaster Ned (Ned Clarke) who was the nominal host of the program, and Sandy the Clown (Don Sandburg). The cast engages in a number of shenanigans, including an attempt at plate-spinning by Bozo and a human-marionette act in which Bozo pulls the strings on Sandy. A Bozo cartoon is shown and two lucky kids (one boy and one girl) from the studio audience get to play the "Grand Prize Game".

This game was the centerpiece of the program into the 1980s, after WGN had begun to be carried on cable systems nationally and the program shifted to an early-morning timeslot (with a new name, "The Bozo Show"). In the "Grand Prize Game", kids attempted to toss ping-pong balls into a series of six buckets, with each successful toss resulting in a group of prizes, progressively more valuable as the game proceeded from bucket #1 to bucket #6. This 1968 episode (which includes original commercial breaks) ends with another signature segment of the Bozo show--the grand march that closes the program.

TFTP On This Day: "ABC Evening News" from ABC (Jan. 25, 1968)

Posted to YouTube by user 'efan2011'
Length - 18:08

It Was 50 Years Ago Today: This excerpt of "ABC Evening News", from fifty years ago today, January 25, 1968, focuses on reporting on the U.S.S. Pueblo incident in which North Korea captured the American ship the U.S.S. Pueblo. (The clip is from the mid-2000s ABC News program "Time Tunnel" that appeared on the ABC online service and digital subchannel called ABC News Now that existed from 2004 until 2009.)

Anchor Bob Young introduces the newscast by discussing President Lyndon Johnson's decision to call up military reservists in an attempt to counter North Korea's action. Correspondent Frank Reynolds (who would himself become the "ABC Evening News" anchor before the end of 1968) reports from the White House, followed by Jim Burns reporting on the reactions among reservists in Brooklyn and other reporters on reactions from other locations around the country.

The balance of the excerpt is filled out by Bill Downs discussing American military options in the event diplomacy failed in resolving the conflict; commentator Howard K. Smith on how average Americans were responding to the crisis; and anchor Young offering additional headlines (with graphics) related to the Vietnam War and other topics. Included also is a lengthy Purina Dog Chow commercial that features a tie-in with the contemporary movie "Dr. Doolittle".

Christmas at TFTP (On This Day Edition): "The Bob Hope Special" from NBC (Dec. 19, 1968)

Posted to YouTube by user '20th Century Vision'
Length - 1:01:08

It Was 49 Years Ago Today: Bob Hope did dozens of specials on NBC over the course of several decades between the 1950s and the 1980s. This is one that is not so much a Christmas special as one that happened to air during the Christmas season--forty-nine years ago today on December 19, 1968.

Unlike many of Hope's specials over the years, this special consists of one long sketch, a parody of the secret agent show "Mission: Impossible". The Hope version is called "Mission: Ridiculous", and he plays a secret agent fighting an outfit called "B.R.O.A.D.S." made up of all women. (The initials were a take-off of the tendency of these spy shows to fight an enemy with similar names.) The women (played by Janet Leigh, Carol Lawrence, and Nancy Ames) have kidnapped Santa Claus for offenses (not made entirely clear) against women. Hope goes through several vignettes--including visiting the North Pole where Leigh poses as Mrs. Claus, flying on a Cuban airline with a Fidel Castro lookalike, and appearing in a Hong Kong nightclub where all of the characters are horrible Asian stereotypes (and Hope's accent is completely offensive).

A couple of musical performances are worked into this hackneyed story: one number sung by Ames in character as a spy posing as a flight attendant on the Cuban airline, and another by Glen Campbell, who is Hope's cellmate in a Cuban jail. Jerry Colonna pops up as a judge in the Cuban jail scene, while Santa--imprisoned at B.R.O.A.D.S headquarters--turns out to be Wally Cox.

The topical jokes in Hope's opening monologue seem like they would have been groaners to contemporary audiences in 1968, and they are completely impenetrable and unfunny now. Bob Hope was never on the cutting edge of comedy, not even in his 1940s heyday as a movie star, and the shoddy quality of this program shows just how sloppy he was as a comedic craftsman despite the fact he was beloved by mainstream audiences. This special is a shining example of how NBC by this point would put on the air literally anything that Hope put together.