Reconstructing the Carol Burnett Show, Part Twelve

As we end week 12 of lockdown and week one of protests and curfew, it's time for the Carol Burnett Show Reconstruction to continue. I was all excited because ShoutFactory! had announced they were going to make all 11 seasons of Carol's variety series available for streaming for the first time on June 1, preceded for a weekend-long marathon of episodes on May 30 and 31. The press release implied that we would be getting different, previously unseen material, stating Carol herself went over the masters of the original episodes with people from Shout Factory! I eagerly awaited the marathon and it turns out all segments they have are exactly the same as those 22-minute, hacked up ones already available on Amazon and MeTV. What a disappointment. Shout Factory! was not being completely truthful. Amazon did have the same episodes as Shout Factory!

This means I may never find every minute of every episode of all 11 years. Oh well. Returning to reviewing segments, the theme for this blog is movie satires. These segments include Carol's parodies of Mrs. Miniver, Love Story, The Seventh Veil, Waterloo Bridge, A Star Is Born, the Sherlock Holmes and Miss Marple series.

Season One
March 4, 1968: Imogene Coca, Mel Torme
(Best of DVD) Not one of the better early efforts of the series. Carol and Imogene indulge in cat-fight comedy as rival political wives. Harvey and Mel do movie monster schtick along with Carol and Pat Paulsen makes a cameo as the frightening couple's baby. Paulsen was one of the briefly famous

Carol and Imogene Coca as rival political wives

comics of the late 60s who disappeared after his 15 minutes were up, along with Tiny Tim (who had 30 minutes.) With a deadpan worthy of Buster Keaton, Paulsen ran a mock campaign for the 1968 Presidential election from the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, satirizing the corruption of politics. His gimmick was his lack of charisma, claiming he couldn't possibly do a worse job than those in power. He had a short-lived half-hour comedy show.

The extended finale revolves around the upcoming Olympics with the USA team (Mel, Carol, Lyle) battling it out against the Russians (Harvey, Imogene) with specialty numbers written exclusively for the show. We get to see Lyle in a skimpy track suit.


Season Two
Oct. 14, 1968: Bobbie Gentry, George Gobel
(Best of DVD) George Gobel was another comic of the show's time who eked out his remaining fame on the Hollywood Squares after the variety series format faded away. His folksy, gentle humor and

George Gobel and Carol
as the Duke and Duchess of Wormser

his image as a sad sack with a bossy wife named Alice did not fit in with the revolutionary times. During the VIP segment, Gobel and Carol play exiled royalty living like slobs in a parody of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. We only see country-western singer Bobbie Gentry in one production number with the dancers boogeying in a Louisiana swamp. There's a stab at relevance with Carol as a housewife chatting with her African-American neighbor (Vivian Bonnell, who shows up a few seasons later as a fortune teller on As the Stomach Turns). The best part of this hour is an extended sketch with Gobel and Carol as a Revolutionary War-era couple watching Ye Olde Tonight Show. After gags about Paul Revere and George Washington as if there were contemporary figures, the cameras cut away to a 18th century version of the Tonight Show was Harvey as a bewigged Johnny Carson stand-in, Lyle as his Ed McMahon, Carol as Zsa Zsa Armour (based on Zsa Zsa Gabor, a fixture on gabfests of the time), and Gobel as Ben Franklin constantly plugging his Poor Richard's Almanac.

Nov. 18, 1968: Sid Caesar, Ella Fitzgerald
(Best of DVD) Because of a musician's strike, there was no live orchestra accompanying this show. Carol vocalizes the theme song and Lyle does the same with the intro music to one of the sketches. This is terrible because Ella Fitzgerald, the greatest singer of the century, had to lipsynch to her recordings of "Day In, Day Out" and "Skylark." Harvey also lip synches in a Carol and Sis sketch but with different results. The premise involves Harvey as Roger in drag along with Carol and Chris preparing to perform in a PTA show as a pseudo-Andrew Sisters trio. Harvey has to work late in his

Sister Act: Vicki, Harvey and Carol lip synching

costume and must deal with the shocked, but surprisingly enlightened reactions of the cleaning lady (Isabel Sanford, again pressed into domestic service) and his co-worker (Dick Patterson) and boss (Henry Hunter). It turns out Carol and Chris tipped them off and it was all a joke on Roger. Cross-dressing comes in for a few laughs, but not especially offensive ones. Then the "girls" do their act--with "Bei Mir Bistu Shein." In keeping with the theme of no musicians, the comic highlight of the whole show is Carol lip synching to her own record of "The Trolley Song" played at different speeds.

Sid Caesar makes an appearance during the opening Q&A and co-stars with Carol in Mrs.

Sid Caesar and Carol in Mrs. Magnificent

Magnificent, a parody of Mrs. Miniver relying on sight gags with huge bombs falling everywhere, recreating the Battle of Britain depicted in the Oscar-winning film. This was a brief riff on a classic film and not as well-written or directed as later, longer spoofs which followed the original plots more closely. There seems to be missing material because Sid refers to a Japanese sketch in the opening and we never see it. Perhaps it was cut from the DVD due to offensive Asian stereotyping.

Season Three
Sept. 29, 1969: Nancy Wilson, Bernadette Peters, The Burgundy Street Singers
(Best of DVD) Who the hell are the Burgundy Street Singers you ask? There were a white-bread singing group featured on Carol's summer replacement series, The Jimmie Rodgers Show. Who the hell is Jimmy Rogers, you ask? Apparently he was a pop singer. The Burgundy St. Group warbled on Carol's show this one time (weirdly singing Marrakesh Express) and they were on the Red Skelton Show a couple of time. It's bizarre to see this bunch of well-scrubbed suburban kids singing about traveling to the mecca of hippiedom and drugs. Aside from a spoof of Richard Nixon's family (following up from an earlier one just after Tricky Dick was inaugurated), the best part of the show is a medley featuring Carol, Nancy Wilson and Bernadette Peters saluting old movies called They Don't Make 'Em Like That Anymore. Nancy recreated exotic thriller. Carol does Carmen Miranda. But Bernadette has the big finale and steals the show with a mini-take-off on 42nd Street wherein the unknown goes on for the star and becomes a hit. The number is Wall Street from Dames at Sea in which Bernadette played Off-Broadway and ironically and became a star. However, she did not sing this show in the show, it was for the character Mona Kent, originally played Tamara Long.

Season Four
Feb. 1, 1971: Jim Bailey, Rita Hayworth, Glen Campbell (cameo)
(Best of DVD)
One of the better episodes on the Best of the Carol Burnett Show DVD collection, this one is oozing with camp. Not only do we have a screen goddess from Hollywood's Golden Age in Rita Hayworth,

Rita Hayworth and Carol

but also female impersonator Jim Bailey in drag as Barbra Streisand. Hayworth had seen and loved Carol's take-off on Gilda (Golda) and wanted to be on the show. She danced well in a charwoman duet with Carol and is a good sport in a Brown Derby sketch with Harvey as her agent and Carol and Vicki as obnoxious fans (Bing Crosby did a similar routine with Carol as an annoying waitress and Harvey again as the agent.) The biggest laugh comes when Carol turns from adoring fan to tyrannical director while staging a photo with Rita. ("Let's get it right so we can all get out of here," she bellows at the flummoxed star.) Then Glen Campbell, who must have been shooting his CBS variety series down the hall, pops in for a cameo. Hayworth also appeared on Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In the same year.

Jim Bailey was a rising young talent, delivering amazingly accurate impressions in drag of female stars such as Barbra Streisand, Judy Garland, and Phyllis Diller. He comes out in a tuxedo and chats with Carol, then appears as Barbra to sing "Don't Rain on My Parade." According to imdb and Wikipedia, Carol and Jim then sang a duet of "Happy Days Are Here Again" but it was cut out of this DVD version (maybe they couldn't get the music rights.) Bailey later appeared on Here's Lucy as Diller and then as his "real" self singing "Fever" to show that though he wears dresses, he's a "real man" and smokes cigars. I believe he was dating Lucie Arnaz at the time while her brother Desi, Jr. was dating Liza Minnelli while Bailey was impersonating Liza's mother Judy, so it makes a nice little circle, see? Many years later I saw Bailey perform as Judy in Provincetown. He died in 2015 at age 77.

As if that weren't enough, there's a delightful movie spoof called Lovely Story, mercilessly skewering Love Story's sappy sentimentality. Harvey as Ryan O'Neal is told by Lyle as the doctor that Carol as Ali McGraw has only five minutes to live. "What can I get for you, darling," Harvey bravely asks. "I'd love a four-minute egg," Carol responds.

(According to imdb, Vicki also had a number with the dancers to "Good Friends" from Applause, but it was cut from this DVD version. Here's where it gets weird. On Amazon, this segment is billed as a family show with no guests. All we get are Vicki's production number, featuring led male dancer Don Creighton and the Lovely Story sketch. So neither the Amazon nor the DVD version is complete. The Good Friends number is truly bizarre with Vicki and Don dressed in purple playsuits and the chorus decked out with weird plastic wigs and singing like munchkins or chipmunks.)

Season Five
Jan. 5, 1972: Peggy Lee, Paul Lynde, Harvey Lembeck's Improv Class incl. William Christopher
(MeTV/Amazon/ShoutFactory!) Harvey Lembeck's comedy improvisation class had appeared on the show the previous November, but they did not make the cut in the MeTV/Amazon version. They come back for a second visit here. Carol hands them a premise and they make up a sorta funny sketch about a honeymooning couple interrupted by a TV commercial coffee saleswoman (but not Mrs. Olsen of Folger's fame). The only reason this bit may have survived the cutting floor is the appearance of William Christopher, later to gain fame as Father Mulcahy on MASH. Christopher also appears briefly (as a priest) in another episode in the bookstore sketch with Carol and Cass Elliot.

We then cut to the Million Buck Movie (which only shows films that have lost a million bucks at the box office, according to announcer Lyle). The feature is The Seventh Wail, a take-off on The Seventh Veil which I just watched on my DVR from TCM. In the original Ann Todd (Carol) is a neurotic, suicidal concert pianist, dominated by her sadistic, manipulative cousin James Mason (Harvey). He pushes her like a slave driver and frightens away potential beaus (Paul Lynde as a jazz musician). The funniest part is when all three crack up and struggle to continue with the scene.

Season Six
Nov. 29, 1972: Carl Reiner, Melba Moore
(Best of DVD) I made a mistake and mislabelled this episode in Part 5 of this series of blogs. I had assumed it was an episode from Season Eight with Carl Reiner and Ken Berry, maybe because it was all cut up when I saw it on MeTV and confused it with a different episode with Reiner. Only Reiner appeared in the hacked-up version and Tony winner Melba Moore is nowhere to be seen. Moore was

Melba Moore and Carol as jellybean thieves

even cut out of the comedy sketch Terminal Hospital so MeTv could sell more life insurance policies and Med-Alert bracelets. Moore had won a Tony in 1970 for Purlie in which she stopped the show with an electric rendition of "I've Got Love" and appeared in a short-lived variety with her then-husband Clifton Davis. In the full edition of this episode we see her singing Carole King's "You've Got a Friend," pairing with Carol for "Have a Little Talk with Myself," wearing a bizarre feathered get-up, and as a nurse in the hilarious Terminal Hospital. There is a potentially offensive bit where Carol slaps Melba who imitates Butterfly McQueen from Gone with the Wind and she screams about not knowin' nothin' about birthin' no babies. The finale features Carol and Melba as little girls stealing a jellybean from candy-store owner Carl and then fantasizing a nightmarish trial for their heinous crime. Bob Mackie's costumes are delightfully exaggerated. I distinctly remembering watching this cute musical number when it initially aired, but nothing else about the episode.

Jan. 6, 1973: Tim Conway, Jack Cassidy
(Amazon/The Best of the Carol Burnett Show) A series of complete episodes from Seasons 6 to 11 are available on Amazon for $2 per episode. I bought this one because I vaguely remember seeing

Carol and Jack Cassidy in the Broadway show Fade Out--Fade In
Don Creighton (background, right) would later be hired by
Carol as the lead dancer on her variety show.

Cassidy performing a number from Kismet but nothing else about it. The entire second half of the show is devoted to the movie spoof, The Story of a Star, a satire of the twice-filmed A Star Is Born (which would be filmed two more times after this.) Cassidy and Burnett worked together in a Broadway musical called Fade Out--Fade In, playing a narcissistic leading man and an unknown who is catapulted to stardom. They recreate those roles here. This multi-scene extravaganza features several original musical numbers written by Ken and Mitzi Welch, Tim Conway's little old man as a lecherous studio head, and physical comedy from Carol as she accepts an Oscar after breaking every bone in her body in an accident on the set. Cassidy often played an ultravain blowhard to perfection as he does here and on the short-lived but Emmy-winning sitcom He and She. Two years later he died in a fire, apparently caused by his dropping a lit cigarette.

Feb. 3, 1973: Family Show, no guests
(Best of DVD) Vicki sings (or maybe lip-synchs, I can't tell) her gold-record hit "The Night the

Lights Went Out in Georgia" which was on the radio all the time when I was in high school. The highlight of this all-regulars show is Waterloo Bilge, satirizing Waterloo Bridge (originally 1930, then remade in 1940). In the movie, a young woman (Carol as Vivien Leigh) turns to prostitution when the dashing Army captain (Harvey as Robert Taylor) she loves is killed in World War I. Then he shows up alive and she has to hide her scandalous past. Most of the humor comes from the absurd lengths the characters go to in order to avoid saying the word "prostitute" or "hooker." Instead the orchestra plays dramatic music every time the vile profession might be uttered. Vicki is particularly versatile here as both Carol's streetwalking roommate who introduces her to a life of sin and as Harvey's patrician mother. Lyle gets a rare opportunity to play something other than a hunky dreamboat when he essays an elderly friend of Harvey's aristocratic family.

Season Seven
Dec. 22, 1973: Anthony Newley, Dick Martin
(MeTV/Amazon/ShoutFactory) After a ho-hum sketch with Carol and Vicki as girlfriends at a singles bar, this edited version includes a three-part salute to detective movies. Anthony Newley and Harvey make a brilliant Sherlock Holmes and Watson in an all-too-brief scene. Newley is delightfully on-target as Holmes ("The maple syrup clue told me Prof. Moriarty was cleverly disguised as a blueberry pancake"), but Harvey excels as Nigel Bruce's

Anthony Newley and Carol in
Miss Marble Screams Bloody Murder

Watson, perfectly capturing the character actor's fumbling persona. Then Dick Martin spoofs Humphrey Bogart's Sam Spade by drowning Carol as Mary Astor in saliva. The best part is an extended sketch called Miss Marble Screams Bloody Murder with Carol impersonating Margaret Rutherford's elderly amateur sleuth. Vicki and Anthony are the main suspects, Dick is the dim-bulb butler and Harvey the inefficient police detective. The stage is littered with corpses by the finish of the sketch. When only Anthony and Carol are left, she reads the will and finds out Anthony does not get a penny. "As for my only son Reginald, tough rock-os," she reads. Reginald (Anthony) then reveals himself to be the killer. This package is part of the Carol Burnett and Friends syndicated series and we don't even get to the see the good-nights which would have given us an idea of what the finale would have been. There's just the animated Carol charwoman mopping up a spotlight a la Emmet Kelly as the credits roll.