Shhh! The Password Is...Password

When I was in grade school, we had no school cafeteria so options for lunch included eating uptown in a restaurant or running home, scarfing down food and running straight back to school. We had an hour. Most of the time, I'd hang out at the chili parlors a few blocks away feeding quarters to the jukebox for more Blood, Sweat and Tears. For a period around 1971, however, I'd rush home to watch PASSWORD.

PASSWORD was that rare animal--an intelligent game show. You could tell because host Allen Ludden had glasses. He had also been the host of a college game show before that and if you looked closer at his background, he was a Phi Beta Kappa with a Masters in English from the University of Texas. And a former school teacher himself!  

It was a simple premise. You had two teams, each with a celebrity teamed with a non-celebrity. One person on each team was shown a word and their goal was to get the other person to say that word by "passing" them another word. Example. If the word to guess was "insane," the word given might be "crazy." Or if the word was "lightning," one might say, "thunder."

Although not necessarily meant to be educational, PASSWORD was a great source of new vocabulary words for a sixth grader!

Beginning in the early sixties, PASSWORD ran through many incarnations up through host Ludden's death in the eighties and even then there were a few attempts to revive it on a grander scale with lots of bells and whistles.

But PASSWORD at its peak wasn't grand. It didn't need to be. There were no flashing lights or fancy music. Just smart TV and movie stars and lightning rounds. It was funny because of the silly guesses sometimes made. It was tense because you could see these people's minds working as they tried to piece together the word clues or worse, as they clearly failed to do so! It was simple and fun.

One of the biggest sources of fun on PASSWORD was Elizabeth Montgomery. To my mind, the BEWITCHED star, so pretty and funny, was also the single best game show contestant I ever saw and PASSWORD was her best showcase. She appeared often over the years and was always a treat. 

Originally aired from 1961-1967, if I saw any of those on first run, I don't recall. What I loved was the 1971-1975 revival, now considered all but lost. Produced by the Goodson-Todman team that also presented my mother's favorite classy panel shows including TO TELL THE TRUTH and WHAT'S MY LINE?, PASSWORD was apparently recorded over by episodes of FAMILY FEUD. Only a few episodes and clips are known to survive. 

A few years ago, a friend gave me as a birthday gift THE BEST OF PASSWORD, a 4 DVD set of episodes from the sixties nighttime and daytime runs. Great fun all around! Guests include Dick Van Dyke, Carol Burnett, Jack Benny, Peter Lawford, Robert Preston, Steve Allen, Lauren Bacall, Jimmy Stewart and Nancy Sinatra. And, of course, Elizabeth Montgomery! 

Probably Allen Ludden's favorite contestant was Betty White whom he met in summer stock not long after PASSWORD began. The two got married soon afterwards and became one of Hollywood's favorite couples for many years. Betty was legitimately one of the show's best contestants and so probably appeared more than anyone else over time. 

In 1981, Allen Ludden died and every other attempt at reviving PASSWORD has been lacking because of that. It's a good premise and it will probably be back again at some point but sometimes everything just falls into place and the magic just works. One can't create that on purpose. I can't imagine kids today running home for lunch to catch a game show. 

But me? I'm watching a PASSWORD episode right now with GILLIGAN'S ISLAND's Bob Denver and Carole Wells from PISTOLS 'N' PETTICOATS. And wishing Allen Ludden was still with us. Seemed like such a nice man. 

 

Come back and see us tomorrow. Until then, this is your host saying the password for today is PASSWORD!

 

Who Was That Masked Man?

It’s the Spring of 1975 and I’m 16 years old. All day long at school I’ve been excited because today’s 4 o’clock movie  is THE LONE RANGER AND THE LOST CITY OF GOLD, one of two feature-length movies shot during the run of the long-running TV version of THE LONE RANGER! Plenty of time. School gets out at 3:30 and I only live 10 minutes away. When I arrive, however, I realize that for one of the rare times in my life I had forgotten my housekey! And there was no one else due home until 5:30!! As minutes tick away toward the movie’s starting time, I sit on the porch trying to think of friends whose houses I could race to and take over their TV. No one close enough. Darn it! Why today of all days? This was important! After all, it wasn’t every day one got to watch The Lone Ranger and Tonto in the mid-seventies!

So I did the only logical thing—I broke the back bedroom window and climbed in. Not the glass. The lock. I knew the mechanism on that particular window was old and barely attached anymore so I climbed up and just pushed and pulled relentlessly at the frame until the lock gave way. At that point I had less than five minutes to spare.

The movie wasn’t that good. It wasn’t even as good as the just plain old THE LONE RANGER that I had seen a few months earlier on the 4 o’clock movie. But that wasn’t important.  It was The Lone Ranger…and Tonto, too!

The premise behind The Lone Ranger was as simple as ABC…or in this case XYZ. That would be WXYZ in Detroit, the radio station owned by one George W. Trendle who, along with writer Fran Striker, conceived the cowboy hero who would become such an icon of American pop culture.

Originally a radio series starring, most famously, the wonderfully named Brace Beemer, our hero also appeared in early film serials as well as books, comics, pulps and, eventually, TV cartoons.

You had these Texas Rangers, see. And they were all killed…except one, making him the LONE Ranger. Get it? He was nursed back to health by an Indian—excuse me, a Native American—named Tonto. He put on a mask and swore to fight injustice. There were more details, naturally, but essentially that was it.

The details are found in the character’s famous Creed and Guidelines, as seen in various spots around the Internet. In fact, here they are again.  

The Creed  

"I believe...

That to have a friend, a man must be one.

That all men are created equal and that everyone has within himself the power to make this a better world.

That God put the firewood there but that every man must gather and light it himself.

In being prepared physically, mentally, and morally to fight when necessary for that which is right.

That a man should make the most of what equipment he has.

That 'This government, of the people, by the people and for the people' shall live always.

That men should live by the rule of what is best for the greatest number.

That sooner or later ... somewhere ... somehow ... we must settle with the world and make payment for what we have taken.

That all things change but truth, and that truth alone, lives on forever.

In my Creator, my country, my fellow man."

The Guidelines  

The Lone Ranger is never seen without his mask or a disguise.

With emphasis on logic, The Lone Ranger is never captured or held for any length of time by lawmen, avoiding his being unmasked.

At all times, The Lone Ranger uses perfect grammar and precise speech completely devoid of slang and colloquial phrases.

When he has to use guns, The Lone Ranger never shoots to kill, but rather only to disarm his opponent as painlessly as possible.

Logically, too, The Lone Ranger never wins against hopeless odds; i.e., he is never seen escaping from a barrage of bullets merely by riding into the horizon.

Even though The Lone Ranger offers his aid to individuals or small groups, the ultimate objective of his story is to imply that their benefit is only a by-product of a greater achievement -- the development of the West or our Country. His adversaries are usually groups whose power is such that large areas are at stake.

All adversaries are American to avoid criticism from minority groups.

Names of unsympathetic characters are carefully chosen, avoiding the use of two names as much as possible to avoid even further vicarious association. More often than not, a single nickname is selected.

The Lone Ranger does not drink or smoke, and saloon scenes are usually interpreted as cafes with waiters and food instead of bartenders and liquor.

On radio, Brace Beemer made a stalwart hero, aided by John Todd as Tonto and I later years Fred Foy as the announcer who intoned the famous opening (which had several variations), “A fiery horse with the speed of light, a cloud of dust and a hearty Hi-Yo Silver! The Lone Ranger! ... With his faithful Indian companion Tonto, the daring and resourceful masked rider of the plains led the fight for law and order in the early western United States! Nowhere in the pages of History can one find a greater champion of justice! Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear! From out of the past come the thundering hoof beats of the great horse Silver! The Lone Ranger rides again!” After this would come the stirring music of THE WILLIAM TELL OVERTURE, a classical piece now more associated with the masked man of the plains than with the Swiss bowman.

By the time television came along, though, the role went to Clayton Moore, a handsome actor with an amazing voice who was, ironically, best known for playing villains in Westerns and Gangster films and serials at the time. Beginning in 1949, Clayton Moore became The Lone Ranger. His impact was so big that he would remain The Lone Ranger for the rest of his life. In fact, the studio thought him easily replaceable when he asked for more money after the second season. After all, he was never seen without a mask anyway. They hired a bland actor named John hart to play the role for one season. Then they wisely gave Moore the raise he wanted to come back.

The pivotal role of Tonto, The Lone Ranger’s “kemosabe,” went to Jay Silverheels, a Canadian actor and later an Indian activist. The pair of them visually struck one of the most perfect looks in all of TV history.

Rounding out the series was Silver, a magnificent white stallion who quickly took his place alongside the great cowboy hero horses in pop history. Silver even had his own comic book!

The actual TV adventures were simple and somewhat formulaic with Moore often being given a chance to have fun in a secondary role as a doddering old prospector character the Ranger regularly used as a disguise. These were the only times the actor was seen without a mask on the series.

More important than the writing here, though, were the characters themselves, the Masked man and his faithful Indian companion, painlessly teaching concepts of justice, friendship and right and wrong to kids everywhere.

At the height of the show’s popularity, they made the feature film. THE LONE RANGER AND THE LOST CITY OF GOLD, however, was a lower-budgeted follow-up after the series had gone off the air after its eight season run.

Moore continued to appear as the Ranger in a few guest roles, in commercials (including famously with Silverheels in Stan Freberg’s mid-sixties pizza rolls ad) and in personal appearances. Like William Boyd before him, the actor had so thoroughly embraced the ideals of the iconic role that he , for all intents and purposes, became The Lone Ranger, never appearing in any other acting role again.

There was a big to-do over all that in the early 1980’s when the feature film THE LEGEND OF THE LONE RANGER was coming out and Clayton Moore was hit by a cease and desist order from the trademark holders, saying he had to stop wearing the mask in public. Moore, for a time switching to mask-like Foster-Grant sunglasses, stood up to them and his by then grown Baby Boomer fans backed him up as he took it to court! There were even petitions passed around about refusing to see the new movie. I signed one and have not seen it to this very day.

In fact, if someone passes one around I may sign one saying I won’t see the seemingly misguided new Disney version in 2012—the one with Johnny Depp’s Tonto wearing a bird on his head for no apparent reason.

 

The best part of all of that publicity, though, was that the original TV series was revived on cable and I was finally able to see hundreds of episodes!

In the late 1990’s, I was privileged to meet Fred Foy, the announcer on both the later radio series as well as the now-classic television version. My wife and I had dinner with him one evening. Mainly, we discussed his time as announcer on THE DICK CAVETT SHOW in the sixties. The next day I got to appear on stage with him in a re-creation of a 1954 radio episode. The best part, though, was when I told him I loved the Lone Ranger so much at age 16, even though I'd never seen a lot of episodes, that I broke into my own house to watch it!

Danger Man/Secret Agent

  

It's 1968 and I'm 9 years old and one of my favorite shows is the enigmatic THE PRISONER starring Patrick McGoohan. On Saturday afternoons, though, there's another Patrick McGoohan. This one's a cerebral secret agent named John Drake. In fact, he's THE secret agent, as in the bouncy hit song by Johnny Rivers that served as the theme for SECRET AGENT. It would be many years before I had a clue that song was appended in the US to a show actually called DANGER MAN.

Patrick McGoohan was a very mannered actor, thoughtful and intelligent. He is perhaps unique in the annals of show business in that he famously refused to do any love scenes--ever--so there are no real Bond-style femmes fatale in SECRET AGENT.

Born in New York but raised in England, the earliest incarnation of DANGER MAN in the UK was a half hour show featuring John Drake as an American agent, complete with American accent. The show returned in a better-suited one hour format with Drake somehow now a British agent, accent and all.

Although there were some nods to 007-style gadgets, the spy stories in the series tended toward the more serious side with espionage games, counter-spies and questioned loyalties galore.

If you're a fan of British actors, ths series abounded with excellent performances from quite a few well-known names, often cast against type. Patrick Troughton, Bernard Bresslaw, Judy Geeson, Barbara Steele, Ferdy Mayne and Donald Pleasance all show up, just to name a few. Even James Bond's boss, Bernard Lee is in one. I didn't know any of these folks in 1968 but I most certainly do now.

DANGER MAN had a brief run in the beginning of the sixties, its classic, black and white run into the middle sixties and then a couple of bigger budget, full color John Drake TV movies. After that--in spite of McGoohan's insistence to the contrary, I believe Drake resigned from Her Majesty's Secret Service...and became THE PRISONER.

Yes, Drake was the Prisoner. It's not just the surface details (including actors who appeared on both series) but the way McGoohan plays the role. He walks like Drake, talks like Drake and maintains the ethics and individual qualities he had previously instilled in Drake. According to some reports, his denial was simply because the two series were made by different companies and he was afraid that the DANGER MAN folks might surface trying to get a piece of THE PRISONER.

As an actor, Patrick McGoohan radiated a charismatic intensity unlike any other actor. He was at his best in  dark, brooding roles, be they hero or villain. He acted with aplomb in everything from spaghetti westerns to multiple COLUMBO episodes and his unjustly forgotten TV series, RAFFERTY, often considered a blueprint for HOUSE by those of us who know it. One of my favorite appearances of his was in SILVER STREAK as an extremely ruthless villain out to kill Gene Wilder and Jill Clayburgh on a train.

In America, DANGER MAN was that rare British series to cross the pond in the sixties and it was imported mainly to cash in on the Bond craze. I don't know whose idea it was to hook it up with the new theme song but it definitely made it memorable. The show reran for years in US syndication, long after most black and white series were laid to rest.

I had never seen a Bond film in '68, despite there being five of them out already. In fact, I doubt I had seen any spy films at all. But we played secret agents all the time. To me, secret agents wore trenchcoats and disguises and used cameras more than guns. To me, a real world secret agent wasn't at all like James Bond...but he was very much like John Drake. In 2010, for my birthday, I received the box set of all the DANGER MAN/SECRET AGENT episodes and sudddenly it was like 1968 all over again.

Gilligan's Island and Me

It was 1965. I was 6 years old and we were living in a third floor apartment on the opposite side of the block from a Depression-era Post Office facility. The Post Office had a huge parking lot and right square in the middle of it was a little "island" with grass, a big, decorative rock and a street lamp. All of us kids in the neighborhood called it Gilligan's Island.

We'd run around the lot playing (much to the annoyance of truck drivers) until all hours--there was a light, remember? I was sometimes Gilligan, sometimes the Professor. There was Jeff and Greg and Kenny and Nita and Phyllis and her brother (whose name I forget) and they were all the other castaways. Who was who varied. Sometimes we had more kids so we pretended that a second boat had also gotten shipwrecked on the island!

GILLIGAN'S ISLAND had premiered on CBS in the Fall of 1964, which, to us kids, meant that it had been on forever. That first season was in black and white but the second and third were shot and aired in color. Created by Sherwood Schwartz, the premise was ideal for farce, setting up, as it did, a microcosm of society by isolating archetypes in a unique situation.

But enough over-analyzing. GILLIGAN'S ISLAND was hilarious! Silly...stupid even, but not the least bit controversial. It was kid-friendly sitcom at its finest, with a cast of mostly season performers who meshed amazingly well.

Bob Denver had literally joined the cast as the hapless first mate, Gilligan, fresh off his long run on THE MANY LOVES OF DOBIE GILLIS where his "Maynard G. Krebs" had become a major TV character as the small set's resident beatnik. Affable Alan Hale, Jr, a dead ringer for his father, a frequent Errol Flynn sidekick, fit easily into his Skipper role, similar in a way to his train engineer role on CASEY JONES a few years earlier. Russell Johnson was one of those character actors from the late fifties who often played authority figures so his deadpan performance worked on several levels. Tina Louise, already a minor sex symbol for several years, was reportedly asked to play a a combination of Marilyn Monroe and Lucille Ball and she did both. I had never seen the real Marilyn in anything but by the time I did, she reminded me of Ginger. Ginger was very pretty. I loved Ginger. BUT, like most Americans, I REALLY loved Mary Ann, played by relative newcomer Dawn Wells. Finally, there were the Howells, played by the voice of Mister Magoo, Jim Backus, and the delightful stage and film actress Natalie Schafer (once the mistress of George S. Kaufman!)

Even latecomers learned the plot from the introductory theme song that reminded us week after week about the portentous three hour tour and how, "If not for the courage of the fearless crew, the Minnow would be lost." Bottom line--the important thing was that these characters were trapped on an island and couldn't get off. It didn't really matter how they had gotten there. Like many great comedies, if you look at it in a realistic light, it falls apart. But what the hell would you want to do that for anyway? This was clearly farce. It isn't realistic. Of course the Professor couldn't fix the hole in the boat even though he could make a miniature cold fusion reactor out of coconuts and palm leaves. It wasn't his area of expertise, okay?

And there was all that talk of sex over the years. It wasn't THAT kind of farce, people. Get a life. The Professor wasn't screwing Mary Ann any more than Gilligan was getting it on with the Skipper. Even Mr. and Mrs. Howell weren't having sex. For purposes of each week's 30 minute episode, sex didn't exist.

It was a simple premise. There was this island and they were trapped there. A nebbish, an authority figure, a gorgeous movie star, a farm girl, a rich couple and a smart guy. Granted, a surprising number of other silly people came and went seemingly at will--lost pilots, forgotten soldiers, jungle boys--but basically, there were our heroes, the Castaways.

After three seasons, GILLIGAN'S ISLAND went away, returning soon thereafter in afternoon reruns that famously netted the cast little to no residuals. What the reruns did, though, was to turn them all into TV icons and the show itself into a classic of its kind. People began wondering if they had missed a final episode in which they were finally all rescued. But there had been no such episode. Then, in 1978, eleven years after the series ended, most of the cast reunited to give the fans what they wanted in the TV movie, RESCUE FROM GILLIGAN'S ISLAND.

Finally, those poor castaways had closure...or did they? It seems that the rescue movie was SO popular that a second one was prepared to serve as a pilot for a new series, this one, THE CASTAWAYS ON GILLIGAN'S ISLAND, had our old friends setting up a resort on the very island where they had been trapped so long.

A third movie, THE HARLEM GLOBETROTTERS ON GILLIGAN'S ISLAND aired in 1981. I saw it from my hospital bed where I was being kept overnight for kidney stones. They had me on Percodan. For years, I hoped that I had just imagined this third--and thankfully--final Gilligan TV movie under the influence of narcotics. Sadly, that was not the case.

After that, various combinations of the cast reunited on various sitcoms and talk shows with all of them, even the often-absent Tina Louise, only appearing together one final time, on Ross Shafer's THE LATE SHOW. That entire episode is on YouTube. Then Jim Backus, whose role in the last film had been truncated due to illness, passed away. One by one, he was joined by Natalie, Alan and, surprisingly, Bob Denver himself.

Jim Backus had had no problem working as a character actor after leaving the island back in '67, but everyone else did. Bob Denver's next series, THE GOOD GUYS, was good but unmemorable. His final series, DUSTY'S TRAIL, was syndicated and pretty bad. The others were rarely seen in anything major again without a Gilligan connection.
 

But at the end of the day, these actors had created characters we all remember in the way we remember our best old friends. Maybe that hasn't helped them personally and I'm sorry for that but it means something. It means something to us all who loved GILLIGAN'S ISLAND that we all share those memories. It means something to those little kids frozen in time back in 1965 playing at getting along in spite of their differences. GILLIGAN'S ISLAND is a simple farce. That's all that creator Sherwood Schwartz put into it and that's all that these wonderful actors brought to the table. But that's certainly not all that we fans have gotten out of it over the years.

Oh, and by the way, in case I didn't make it clear...Mary Ann.

Please Stand By

Television and I go way back. I was born during the last years of the Eisenhower Administration, a late Baby Boomer. According to my mother—and why would she lie? —my first words (presumably after “mama”) were “Kennedy,” “Nixon” and “Playtex.” As you can tell, the TV was always on at our house.

The earliest show I actually remember watching is YOU BET YOUR LIFE, the sort of quiz show with Groucho Marx holding court, George Fenneman announcing and an ugly stuffed duck that would come down from the rafters bearing money whenever a contestant accidentally said the day’s “secret word.”

We had a small table top black and white TV with a separate, attached rabbit ears antenna that just fascinated baby me. In fact, when they upgraded to new rabbit ears, my parents gave me the old ones to play with! They stayed in my toy box for years.

Along with Groucho, other early TV favorites included Charlie Chaplin, Fatty Arbuckle, The Three Stooges, local Cincinnati area TV kids show hosts including Uncle Al and Skipper Ryle, and, of course, cartoons, particularly Hanna-Barbera’s Huckleberry Hound and Yogi Bear! Rocky and Bullwinkle were also in that mix as was Mister Magoo.

The Flintstones became a special favorite as I also had the Little Golden Book version of it that featured Fred, Jr!

More mainstream shows I vaguely recall from this period, often watched through the bars of my crib, include LASSIE, THE ADVENTURES OF SUPERMAN, ZORRO, WALT DISNEY PRESENTS, SUGARFOOT, LEAVE IT TO BEAVER, THE REAL McCOYS, CANDID CAMERA, RED SKELTON, TO TELL THE TRUTH, JACK BENNY, THE REBEL and DENNIS THE MENACE. Keep in mind, I was pretty much tied to what my parents wanted to watch because I could barely speak, if at all, during my first year and a half or so.  Also, it was rare that I was up after 9 PM (although I recall trying regularly to stay awake for CANDID CAMERA at 10!).

My Dad loved westerns so we always watched BONANZA, RAWHIDE, MAVERICK, HAVE GUN WILL TRAVEL, GUNSMOKE, LARAMIE, THE RIFLEMAN and WAGON TRAIN. Not my thing at the time, though. By this point, the heyday of the TV kids western had passed. These were the so-called “adult” westerns that took over in the late fifties.  Soon enough though, I found one of my own, reruns of THE ROY ROGERS SHOW on Saturday mornings! By age 2, I had multiple cowboy hats and cap pistols.

Needless to say, I was inundated by commercials—not just Playtex but Doan’s Pills, Geritol, Chef Boyardee, Campbell’s Soups, Raid, Pepsodent and Gleem, dozens of brands of cigarettes and beers and a hundred sugar-laden cereals! My favorite was Sugar Frosted Flakes. They were Grrrrr-eat!

The first prime-time series that I considered to be my favorite show began when I was not quite three years old—THE DICK VAN DYKE SHOW. Sure, it’s a classic among classics now but at the time it almost didn’t survive its first season. My Mother liked it from the beginning, though, and I would lie on the floor and laugh uproariously at the fast-talking people telling jokes I wouldn’t even “get” until the sixth rerun. I also decided that I was going to be a writer when I grew up because Rob Petrie was a writer and I really, really liked Rob Petrie with his pretty wife and his silly friends. Apparently my ever-supportive parents believed me because, just before I turned four, they bought me a typewriter. I had learned the alphabet from Uncle Al (stunning my Mother the first time I sang her “The Alphabet Song”) but I still couldn’t read or write so, sadly, that particular typewriter sat idle. It served its purpose, though.  After that, I knew they would support me in anything I wanted to do!

There were only three channels in those days—ABC, NBC and CBS. Locally we had an NET channel, Channel 48, the very first licensed public TV station to go on the air. It didn’t matter to those of us who only had VHF TV’s, however. I wouldn’t discover “educational” TV until we got one with a UHF tuner, also…and that wouldn’t be until 1968.

Oh, by the way, in spite of occasional onscreen announcements to the contrary, as far as I knew, television shows only came in black and white! We never even knew anyone who had a color set! I never had any trouble telling reality from what I saw on TV because, of course, reality was always in color. TV was always in black and white. And had a lot more horses.

Anyway, THE BOOKSTEVE CHANNEL is a personal reminiscence of shows I’ve watched, specials I’ve seen and actors I’ve enjoyed. It’s not meant to be a TV reference site. There are several good ones of those out there, already. There will be some info, some trivia, some pics, some clips. But you’ll never see anything here about FRIENDS or THE SOPRANOS or LITTLE HOUSE ON THE PRAIRIE. Why? Because I’ve never seen a single episode of any of them. I’m sure they’re fine series but they weren’t my type. Thousands of other shows were, though…and you’ll find them here daily on THE BOOKSTEVE CHANNEL! Thanks for tuning in. Tune in again tomorrow for more great memories!