MeTV is now into Season Five of The Carol Burnett Show. That was the last season that contained previously unreleased material. Season Six marked the start of the episodes in the syndicated Carol Burnett and Friends which began airing when the series was still on CBS in its 11th and what would become its last season. So will MeTV continue with Season Six once they reach the end of the "Lost Episodes" or will they go back to the beginning of Season One? I hope they do the latter because I didn't start watching until just recently. They began the reruns in April when I was busy teaching high school. I'd hate to have to go through six more seasons before they went back to the start.
SEASON FOUR
Oct. 12, 1970: Nanette Fabray, Ken Berry
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| Carol and Lyle in Flight 13 to Nowhere |
The highlight, as per usual, is a movie spoof. These goofy send-ups of Hollywood classics were always my favorite part of the show. Flight 13 to Nowhere was derived mostly from The High and the Mighty, a 1954 John Wayne melodrama with an airplane full of stock characters facing engine trouble and disaster. Carol is the horny stewardess who is carrying on with the entire flight crew including Lyle as the captain. The passenger list includes Harvey as an alcoholic brain surgeon (based on the Thomas Mitchell character in Stagecoach), Nanette as a "painted lady" (Claire Trevor in the original High and Mighty and she also played a similar role in Stagecoach), Ken as a
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| Carol as Nora Desmond and Harvey as her butler Max in Disaster 75. |
March 29, 1971: Paul Lynde and Nanette Fabray
Cut up into two segments on MeTV. The final show of Season Four. In the Carol and Sis sketch, they finally get out of the house and into Roger (Harvey)'s office as Carol helps her hubby out by taking over for his ailing secretary. Of course, everything goes wrong. Commercials for everything from cameras to detergent to sandwich wraps are kidded in a series of vignettes with the cast committing bloopers and an off-camera director screaming "Cut!" These were pretty funny. As the Stomach Turns had Nanette as a friend of Marion (Carol), Paul Lynde as a heartless banker foreclosing on Marion's house, Harvey as a prissy summer-stock actor renting a room at Marion's and, as usual, Vicki as Marion's long-lost daughter showing up with a baby (this time, she's a Vegas showgirl.) The soap spoof got the biggest laughs and Paul Lynde played off his coded gay image. While threatening to take everything from Marion to pay the mortgage, he takes even her contact lenses and then asks her shoe size. "Nine," she answers. "Darn," he answers, "I take a seven. But I'll grab your wig" and rips it off Marion's head so he can wear it. The second segment ends with Carol as the Charwoman wandering through old sets from the previous season and flashing back to the scenes they contained. In a Carol and Sis excerpt, Lyle poses shirtless for amateur artist Carol, flexing his gorgeous muscles, much to the consternation of Harvey as Roger.
SEASON FIVE
Sept. 15, 1971: Jim Nabors
Seen on MeTV. Jim Nabors was always the guest on the first show of the season. Carol regarded him as her good luck charm. The MeTV edited version of this season five opener features only two sketches. In the first Carol is the game-show winner of a cruise with gorgeous Lyle and Jim is the obnoxious, child-like chaperone. This is based on a popular show of the time, The Dating Game. Carol schemes to get into bed with Lyle who only has eyes for himself while Jim keeps interrupting. We do get to see Lyle shirtless. (Ted Ziegler, later a regular on The Sonny and Cher Show, has a short bit as a steward.) The second sketch casts Harvey as an obese Henry VIII and Carol as a scheming Anne Boleyn, maybe because Anne of a Thousand Days had come out a few years earlier. Bob Mackie's costumes are period perfect and the humor mostly comes from fat jokes (Henry) and cracks about Anne losing her head. Lyle appears as a mincing nobleman, affording somewhat homophobic gay jokes. I wonder how the closeted Nabors and Paul Lynde felt about such gags?
Oct. 13, 1971: Ken Berry, Cass Elliott
MeTV divvied this one up into two segments, so they actually included some musical numbers including Ken in a jazzy, New Orleans-style dance bit and Cass Elliott beautifully warbling "There's a Lull in My Life" on a fire escape. Elliot rocketed to stardom as a member of the Mamas and the Papas, often just referred to as Mama Cass. (She is a character at the Playboy Mansion party in Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood, dancing with her bandmate Michelle Phillips.) The overweight Elliot is subjected to gags about her size in a series of commercial vignettes. Every year, they would present the Annual Carol Burnett Show Awards for the Most Memorable TV commercials. Cass gets crude laughs by playing a little girl with no cavities and a housewife posing as a cheerleader. The funniest bit was Carol flushing Harvey as the Tidy Bowl Man down the toilet. Another George-and-Zelda routine takes place in George's Wild West dreams (yawn). The high spot of the show is Love in an Avalanche, a parody of Sonja Henie movies. Carol is the skating champion, Ken Berry a Hollywood songwriter, Vicki the nasty star Tallullah Tantrum, and Harvey as Uncle Olaf, based on the character actor S.Z. Sakall. As reported in an earlier blog, when she was a little girl my mother and her brother got in trouble for sitting through a Sonja Henie movie twice and not going home in time for supper. Their mother had to go the movie theater and have them paged. This hilarious sequence pokes fun at the absurd conventions of 1940s movie musicals. Ice skater Sonja and leading man Johnny compose a hit song while snowbound in a Norwegian mountain cabin.
Oct. 20, 1971: Dom DeLuise, Peggy Lee
Only one segment on MeTV, so we miss a chance to hear the magnificent Peggy Lee in her prime. I saw her at Carnegie Hall on a double bill with Mel Torme not long before she died. So obese she had to be helped onstage, Lee still had her signature sultry style. The two sketches here are kind of hum-ho. Clumsy secretary Carol breaks all the expensive glass in antique dealer Dom's shop. Then Carol is pesky Girl Scout Alice Portnoy solving a murder for police inspector Harvey with Dom as a French chef suspect. (I vaguely remember watching the initial broadcast of this sketch.)
Oct. 27, 1971: Tim Conway, Diahann Carroll
Two episodes cut up on MeTV. I wondered who at MeTV did the editing and decided which shows should be seen in two segments and which get only one. Even with two half-hour slots, there still is material missing from some shows so MeTV can sell more geriatric products like MedAlert bracelets and insurance. Carroll, popular from her series Julia and her Tony-winning Broadway performance in No Strings, only appears in the finale with Carol, Harvey, Tim and the chorus in a specialty song called "Chutzpah," combining Jewish torah rhythms with Broadway uptune tropes. The premise is Carol and Diahann are single girls looking for action and Harvey and Tim are clumsy bachelors. Diahann encourages schlumpy, shy Carol with a rousing rendition of the song. Diahann presumably had a solo number and maybe a medley with Carol, but we never see it. We do see plenty of Tim including his legendary Old Man, this time as a elderly thief leading a gang of inept burglars and cracking up Harvey. Lyle is especially hot in a tight, black top exposing his bulging biceps. The other highlight of this episode is Arrivederci, Summertime, a send-up of the 1955 Katharine Hepburn romance with Carol as a lonely schoolteacher and Harvey as an impoverished Italian nobleman.
Feb. 23, 1972: Burt Reynolds and Nanette Fabray
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| Burt Reynolds on The Carol Burnett Show |
Available on Amazon. Burt Reynolds was the hottest sex symbol of the early 70s. Hairy as hell, he caused a sensation posing nude in Playgirl magazine. Lyle the super handsome and hunky announcer and regular cast member, also posed for the publication. After decades of women being treated as objects, turnabout was finally fair play and men were being treated as objects. Carol contributed to this trend by treating Lyle as the equivalent of Marilyn Monroe, something to be fawned over. In her book, In Such Good Company, Carol expresses regret over the "swooning-over-Lyle" schtick, but I think the routine was empowering, showing women could enjoy a good-looking man just as much as men could enjoy hot women. It was clear Reynolds enjoyed being enjoyed. What set him apart from other macho stars of his era was his sense of humor about himself. In this show, he spoofed his own image by falling and tripping all over the place while barely crooning "As Time Goes By" (predicting his abysmal musical performance in At Long Last Love a few years later) and camping it up as a swishy courtier in the move spoof The Lavender Pimpernel. This extended sketch featured the most blatantly gay humor I've yet seen on the series (even campier than Paul Lynde) and for 1972, it was pretty daring. Burt plays a super-foppish courtier who is in reality the swashbuckling pimpernel. I don't know if I find the jokes in 2019 offensive or just silly. I did have a problem with Carol's character, a damsel in distress, disdaining the queeny Burt as "less than a man." It would have been funnier and closer to reality if he became her gay BFF. In a strange solo number which jolted us back to the time of the segment, Carol plays a studious coed singing of her long-gone love, a draft dodger named Al who is now in Canada. Again, very daring.
March 29, 1972. Family show with Harvey, Vicki, Lyle and no guest stars.
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| The Doily Sisters with Harvey as Harry Handsome |
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