Reconstructing the Carol Burnett Show: Part Eleven: Salute to Character Actors

More news on the Carol Burnett Show front as we enter week 8 of lockdown. For my birthday, my

husband Jerry got me the 50th Anniversary Best of DVD collection which includes several episodes not on the Lost Episodes collection he got me for Christmas. The 50th Anniversary set was released in 2017, a half-century after Carol's debut in 1967 and includes segments from the entire series. So there are several from seasons 6-11 which have been in syndication for years as well as earlier ones not seen in their entirety since the original broadcast. In addition, the Shout! Factory website has announced they will be making available the entire 11-year run, launching with a marathon run of episodes on May 30-31. The press release states several of the episodes have not been available for decades and that Carol went over all the masters of the shows with Shout! Factory which would indicate that they would be showing complete episodes, not the hacked-up, edited half-hours MeTV and Amazon had been offering. One of the major issues seems to be the copyrighted musical material and that it has always been too expensive to include all the musical numbers. (Even some of the segments in the DVD collections are not the whole shows because some musical stuff is missing.) We'll find out in June if it will be possible to FINALLY watch the entire, unedited series. Here is a rundown of segments offered on my newly-acquired DVD collection and those on Amazon and MeTV. This blog salutes various character actors and performers such as Pat Carroll, Jane Connell, Alice Ghostley, Ronnie Schell, and Rich Little who were staples of TV during the 60s, 70s and into the 80s and 90s.

Season Two
Sept. 23, 1968: Jim Nabors, Alice Ghostley
Jim Nabors returns for the first episode of the second season. In the butchered MeTV/Amazon

Alice Ghostley (r.) with Elizabeth Montgomery on Bewitched

version, Jim and Carol are near-sighted strangers who refuse to wear their glasses on an almost-literal blind date. Good physical comedy with the two crashing into walls and missing each other as they attempt to snuggle. Alice Ghostley who is best remembered as Esmeralda, the clumsy magical nursemaid on Bewitched and the senile Bernice on Designing Women, appears as Roger's disapproving sister Mimi in the Carol and Sis sketch. Mimi would later be played by Kay Medford and Pat Carroll in similar bits. Those are the only two sketches we see. Isabel Sanford shows up in a maid's uniform during the goodbyes.


Season Three
Dec. 8, 1969: Tim Conway, Martha Raye
(Nearly complete episode on the 50th anniversary DVD collection) Even on this DVD collection where you would think you could find all complete episodes, there are edited versions. In this segment, the musical finale is missing. Carol and Martha Raye are once again mismatched strangers meeting in a park. Tim Conway does physical schtick in a pit stop and as a wimpy virgin prince wooing narcoleptic princess Carol. A salute to 20th Century Fox involves short parodies of Dr. Doolittle, The Fly and Charlie Chan (offensive stereotypes of Asians with Tim as Charlie Chan and Harvey as his No. 1 son.) From the goodbyes, we know there was a big Shirley Temple musical finale with Carol, Martha and Tim in Shirley Temple outfits, but it's been cut from the DVD. Maybe because of copyright issues.

Feb. 23, 1970: Jack Jones, Pat Carroll
Pat Carroll was a frequent guest during this period. She and Carol are actresses trying out for a

Rodgers and Hammerstein's Cinderella with Barbara Ruick,
Lesley Anne Warren, Pat Carroll, and Jo Van Fleet

commercial and the punchline is casting director Harvey gives the job to his dim-witted, but busty secretary (Vicki). Then in As the Stomach Turns, Pat endures humiliation by donning a fat suit as Marion's overweight friend Renee. Pat is probably best remembered as one of the wicked step-sisters in the 1965 TV Cinderella by Rodgers and Hammerstein and as the voice of the evil Ursula in Disney's The Little Mermaid. I met her when I hosted a Drama Desk panel in 1998 when she was playing the chorus in Electra with Zoe Wanamaker. I introduced her as the only actress in the universe whose credits included playing Shakespeare's Falstaff and providing voice-overs for cartoons such as Pound Puppies and Galaxy High.

Interesting sidenote: While there have been many gay male jokes in the series, this episode includes the only reference to lesbianism so far encountered. At the end of As the Stomach Turns, Lyle's voice-over asks "Will Marion ever find romance? And who is the tall, muscular stranger entering her life?" A tall chorus girl in a black-leather motorcycle outfit enters. Marion looks frightened and takes a step away from her. "For the answer to these and other questions rated X, tune in tomorrow As the Stomach Turns."

March 2, 1970: Tim Conway, Jane Connell

Jane Connell in the film version of Mame

I remember Jane Connell best from her appearances on Captain Kangaroo when I was a kid. Like Alice Ghostley, she had a recurring role on Bewitched. First she was Queen Victoria, conjured up by Aunt Clara and then Hepzibah, Queen of the Witches. She was a familiar character actress on Broadway, playing Agnes Gooch in the original cast of Mame and in the execrable Lucille Ball movie when Madeline Kahn dropped out. I saw Connell on Broadway many times including Lend Me a Tenor, Crazy for You, Moon Over Buffalo, and a short-lived musical based on The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, as well as Off-Broadway in a one-woman show on Dorothy Parker. She also replaced Carol in Once Upon a Mattress. Here she is largely wasted as Carol's handmaiden in an Arabian Knights fantasy. Lyle introduces the segment as a tribute to Maria Montez costume spectaculars (he explains this genre was known as Maria Montez movies even if she wasn't in them.) The spoof is an elaborately costumed camp extravaganza worthy of Charles Ludlum or Charles Busch. Carol is the enslaved spitfire princess, Harvey is the lecherous emir, Tim Conway an elderly genie who transforms into hunky Lyle, and Jane who gets laughs for ululating mock Arabic sounds as the handmaiden. Tim does a sketch as a drunken husband trying not to awaken his sleeping wife. That's all we get in the edited Amazon/MeTV version. Who knows what Jane Connell had to do in the rest of the show.

March 16, 1970: Ronnie Schell, Nancy Wilson
Very unsatisfying segment on Amazon/MeTV. Ronnie Schell, who was at the time a co-star on Gomer Pyle and a recurring character as Ann Marie's agent on That Girl, is introduced during the Q&A. Then he appears briefly as a funny drunk during an Alice Portnoy sketch, replaying the familiar trope of the annoying Girl Scout bothering a hung-over Harvey. The second sketch is a forced Carol and Sis bit. Carol has locked herself to a ball and chain and makes the locksmith pretend to be a hairdresser (queer-bashing stereotype opportunity) in order to deceive Roger. I saw Schell many years later in an Off-Off-Broadway revue in a Jewish temple, co-starring other older actors from the same era including Marcia Rodd, Barbara Shimkus, and Steve Rossi (the straight man in the Martin and Rossi duo). Shimkus immortalized the song "It takes a whole roll of paper towels/To do the work of one Handi-Wipe" in the Handi-Wipe commercial.

Season Four
Oct. 19, 1970: Lucille Ball, Mel Torme
(Complete episode on 50th Anniversary Collection) There's a rare opening production number with

Carol and Lucy in Some Like It Hotsy Totsy

the entire cast and guest stars crooning "Blue Skies" and "Put on a Happy Face" while hacking their lungs out because of Los Angeles' famous smog. This segues into the Q&A section. Carol and Mel sing a medley from Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers movies. Lucy and Carol are rival stage mothers and casting director Harvey winds up giving the part to the child of a busty mother (Where have we heard that one before?) The showpiece is an extended parody of Some Like It Hot with the genders reversed. In Some Like It Hotsy Totsy, Carol and Lucy are showgirls who witness a gangland slaying and disguise themselves as a male singing act to escape mobster father, son and grandfather Mel, Lyle, and Harvey. The famous railroad berth scene with Jack Lemmon and Marilyn Monroe becomes a innuendo-laden encounter between Lucy and Lyle as he takes off his shirt to reveal a muscular, hairy chest. "Aren't you going to be hot in all those clothes," he asks Lucy in male drag. "Probably," she replies. The whole thing culminates in an elaborate Miss Underworld pageant with Vicki got up as a giant slot machine.

Nov. 9, 1970: Juliet Prowse
One of only two episodes shot outside the US, the segment was filmed in London. (The other was taped in Sydney, Australia a few seasons later.) The only element worth remembering is a filmed introduction with Carol, Vicki, Harvey and Lyle touring the British capitol. The ladies are dressed in 1970s high-fashion maxi coats. The quartet is seen at London Bridge, Trafalgar Square, and Buckingham Palace before arriving via bus at a British TV studio. The show itself is nothing a pair of old, recycled sketches. In the Carol and Sis scene, Carol is dead tired from jet lag just as the head of the girls' school Chris wants to attend arrives for an interview. This is the third time I've seen this same idea (before Carol was either drunk or had just taken a sleeping pill) It's basically an excuse for Burnett to indulge in some physical comedy as Harvey manipulates her comatose body into a semblance of consciousness. The second sketch is a direct repeat of a stage-melodrama-gone-wrong trope. Stage star Carol must go on opposite hammy Harvey even though she has the flu. Sneezing, wheezing and coughing ensue. We don't see dancing star Juliet Prowse at all until the finale though we hear Lyle announce that "Dancing in the Dark" and "Romeo and Juliet," presumably Prowse's two numbers, were previously recorded. There is a snippet of Carol as the charwoman performing "Maybe It's Because I'm a Londoner" with the chorus.

Dec. 28, 1970: Pat Carroll, Robert Goulet, Rich Little
As the Stomach Turns offers some genuine laughs with Goulet as a kissing bandit, Pat Carroll as a Salvation Army lass with a huge drum and Harvey as an undercover cop in drag. The gag is perpetually horny Marion (Carol) is desperate to get Robert to kiss her, but keeps getting thwarted. Robert winds up kissing everybody but Marion, and almost smooches Harvey.

Rich Little with Johnny Carson

Rich Little displays his uncanny impressions of stars such as Kirk Douglas, Tiny Tim, John Wayne, and Vice President Spiro Agnew and Richard Nixon doing commercials. Little was a brilliant mimic, but his material wasn't that funny. From the late 60s throughout the 70s, he was on TV constantly, and even had his own short-lived variety series, as well as appearing with other impressionists like Frank Gorshin, George Kirby, and Marilyn Michaels on The Kopykats. In the following decades, the Tonight Show stopped booking him and variety series like Carol's vanished.

Jan. 4, 1971: Art Carney, Pat Carroll
Pat Carroll is back, once again being humiliated by having to put on a fat suit as Renee, Marion's zoftig friend on As the Stomach Turns. Women's liberation is mocked as Renee is recruited by football scout Art Carney. Homophobia is tossed in when Harvey flounces in as Gaylord Futterman, Canoga Falls' theater director and "leading sissy." There is a slight variation in the routine with Vicki showing up as Marion's daughter bearing an illegitimate baby. This time when Marion answers the door, instead of dumping the infant in an umbrella stand as usual, she stuffs it in a drawer and closes it. Then she pauses, goes back and opens the drawer for air.

Jan. 18, 1971: Michele Lee, Mel Torme
I managed to catch the first half of this episode a few months ago while visiting my parents. This is one of the few episodes that MeTV divided in two, so we can piece most of it together. (The first part features a musical number with Michele Lee and a Tenth Avenue Family sketch and is reviewed in Part One of the Reconstructing the Carol Burnett Show blogs in this series.) Part Two is a riotous extended Hollywood movie satire with Carol as talent-free screen goddess Vanessa Vanilla and Mel as her agent, Irving Percentage. The goofy names of the characters are the best part of the piece. Harvey is studio boss Louis B. DeCecilGold and Lyle appears as all three of Vanessa's leading men and, an instance later, husbands--Ricardo Mandelbaum, Sex Weissenheimer (one of the many times Lyle appears as Tarzan, bare-chested in a loin cloth, yummy), and Cluck Garbo (in cowboy chaps).

Carol as Vanessa Vanilla and
Mel Torme as Irving Percentage

The titles of Vanessa's films are just as clever--Three Yanks and a Wac Down Argentine Way with Alexander's Ragtime Meets the Follies of 1943 (Vanessa's first hit musical); The Postman Always Sings Lousy; A Gob, a Girl and Her Galoshes. Plus there are three original songs, one with a big production number.

Even with the two parts of this episode, there are still pieces missing such as Mel's solo numbers.