Jerry Lewis: 1926-2017

I grew up with Jerry Lewis.   Not only did I see many of his movies from the sixties in the neighborhood theaters, but if one was showing on TV we always watched.  We watched because Jerry Lewis was a funny guy, and his comedy was such that it could be appreciated by young kids such as myself, or adults.

There was also the many times he guest hosted The Tonight Show many times throughout the sixties and into the seventies.  He always seemed to be in your living room one way or another.  Whereas sometimes the more mature current event commentary of Johnny Carson would fly right over my head at the age of ten or so (or even younger), the spontaneous physical outrageous antics of Jerry would always leave us in stitches.  I wish there were some of those episodes still available.  But I imagine they are long gone, lost in the purge of saving money by reusing video tapes.

I did manage to snag a DVD release of The Jerry Lewis Show which ran from 1967 – 1969.  But it is incomplete with many musical numbers axed and some episodes missing.  That collection is only available from 3rd party sellers at an exorbitant price.  But there is a “Fan Favorites” DVD with even less content then the one I acquired some years ago.  But at $9.95, it’s cheap enough.

Lewis was loved in France but often derided by U.S. Critics.  And while even I’ll admit some of his late sixties early seventies stuff is tough to sit through, there’s no denying the man’s comedic genius.  My favorite Lewis films are some of the Martin/Lewis films like Living It Up, Artists and Models, and You’re Never too Young.

Of his solo films, I’d rank Rock-a-bye Baby, The Nutty Professor, Don’t Give Up the Ship, The Delicate Delinquent, Cinderfella, and Boeing, Boeing (despite it’s low regard for women) as my favorites.

Then there’s the Muscular Dystrophy Telethon held every Labor day that raised millions for the charity.  If you were lucky enough to view the show in it’s early years, before it went coast to coast, becoming (necessarily so) bigger but more bloated with corporate sponsors, you got 24 hours of Lewis being Lewis non stop where he would often go out and mingle with the audience, grabbing money, and just having fun.

I’m not going to get into why the MDA thought it necessary to do away with the yearly event.   But their unceremonious firing of Lewis who raised over 2 billion dollars was and remains a disgrace to this day.  There is a right way to do things, and a wrong way to do things.  After sixty-one years of hard work in which Lewis earned not one penny, instead of rewarding him they kicked him in the ass.  And I do know this: Since Lewis last hosted the telethon, Labor Day has never been the same.

Following is a selection of screenshots from my Jerry Lewis Library.  I don’t have every film, but what I do have is extensive.  Visit to a Small Planet is not here, but I’ll add it when the Blu-ray version arrives next week.  Eventually I hope to have them all although some, such as The Sad Sack, have never had a U.S. DVD release for whatever unknown reason.  I had a digital copy but it had a Spanish audio track.  I also have a copy of The Ladies Man around here somewhere, and will add that as well. 

But one thing is certain, Lewis, despite any faults he may have had, was a comedy giant who made the world a better place.  We will miss him.

And finally, no Jerry Lewis memorial would be complete without this signature song with which he signed off each and every telethon.

RIP Jay Thomas: 1948-2017

Jay Thomas has passed away at the age of 68.

The Hollywood Reporter:

Don Buchwald, his longtime agent and friend, reported his death, after a battle with cancer, to The New York Daily News. His publicist, Tom Estey, would not divulge when or where Thomas died when contacted by The Hollywood Reporter.

Thomas played the obnoxious TV talk-show host Jerry Gold (and Candice Bergen's on-again, off-again boyfriend) on CBS' Murphy Brown from 1989-98 — winning a pair of Emmys — after his stint as Rhea Perlman’s husband Eddie LeBec, a French-Canadian goalie with the Boston Bruins, on NBC's Cheers. On the latter, his character winds up appearing in an ice show and gets killed by a Zamboni.

Thomas also starred on his own sitcom, playing an egotistical sportswriter opposite Susan Dey and then Annie Potts on CBS' Love and War, a 1992-95 series created by Murphy Brown's Diane English.

A native of Kermit, Texas, who was raised in New Orleans, Thomas got his start in radio as a high school football announcer for the Rutherford High Rams in Panama City, Fla.

He worked at stations in Panama City; Pensacola, Fla.; Knoxville, Tenn.; Nashville; Jacksonville, Fla.; and Charlotte, N.C., where he earned nicknames like "The Mouth of the South," "The Scorpion" and "The Prince of Darkness."

Thomas moved to New York for a job at the FM station 99X and then did stand-up comedy at the Improv and acted in off-Broadway plays. He got his start on television in 1979 as Remo DaVinci, the co-owner of a New York deli, on ABC's Mork & Mindy. He also hosted a radio show in Los Angeles and, most recently, had a daily gig with SiriusXM.

Appearing as an annual Christmas guest alongside Letterman "has been fun," he said in 2014. "I've always wanted to be one of those guys on late-night talk shows who everybody wants to see. Like on Carson, when [Don] Rickles would come out. I became that guy. And I love football, so my two big dreams were totally realized."

I’m a big classic TV buff, and especially love collecting Christmas episodes of as many TV series as possible.

I have a lot of Jay’s work in my Library including his work on Cheers and Murphy Brown.  But I choose to highlight his particular episode to honor Jay.

I originally recorded this episode, A Christmas Kvell, when it first aired in 1992.  It was always a favorite of mine, but eventually the old VHS tape had worn out and I was sure that was that.  But as it turned out, you could purchase it from Amazon digitally, so I was glad to have it back in my collection. 

I think just from this small clip you can  grasp why this is one of the better stories about Hanukkah and Christmas, and while Dey’s comedic timing leaves a bit to be desired (she would be replaced by Annie Potts in Season Two), the episode does highlight Jay’s comedy genius.  In case you’ve forgotten, Dey’s character Wally is Catholic and Thomas’s character Jack is Jewish.  They’re struggling to celebrate their first Christmas/Hanukkah together.  In this clip, Thomas tries to explain the significance of the Jewish holiday.

Movie Junk 101.1–Some Thoughts on Oliver

In some quarters, for whatever reason, Director Carol Reed’s Oliver! has taken some heat.

There are those who claim that Oliver! was not a worthy choice for the Best Picture Oscar back in 1969.

It seems these detractors continue to be butthurt after over forty years because 2001: A Space Odyssey wasn’t even nominated for the award, although the director, Stanly Kubrick was nominated for best director, an award which went to Reed. I think most of the complaints come from Geeky Internet Fanboys who view 2001 as a Masterpiece. As for myself, I find it quite flawed for several reasons as I mentioned when I rated the movie a week or so ago.



You want to talk robbery? That would be Cliff Robertson’s overrated turn as Charly in the movie of the same name over Ron Moody who played Fagin. That’s robbery.


I have many musicals that I love and will watch from time to time. Oliver is one of them. Having finally acquired the limited edition blu-ray from Twilight Time is icing on the cake. The picture quality of Oliver is terrific, although I felt that the sound mix left something to be desired and could use a little more oomph. But I’ll take this any day of the week when you consider how many times I passed on the DVD hoping for something better. This is a lot better.


Oliver! is a musical which is based on Charles Dicken’s Oliver Twist. It had a lengthy run as a Tony Award winning stage play by composer Lionel Bart before making it to the big screen and the transition couldn’t have been in better hands.



The casting is perfect. I already mentioned Moody, but Oliver Reed is as dour and menacing a Bill Sykes as there ever was. Jack Wild nearly steals the show as The Artful Dodger, and Mark Lester brings just the right wide eyed naïve innocence as Oliver even if his singing voice had to be dubbed.
Often forgotten and hardly mentioned is Shani Wallis who plays Nancy. I don’t know why. As the good hearted prostitute who tries to protect Oliver while not trying to piss off her boyfriend Sykes, she won me over. And her big musical numbers are outstanding.


In fact, all of the musical numbers that made the transition from the play are. I thought Onna White’s choreography was sometimes a bit overproduced and a bit crowded, but I still enjoyed every second of it.

How does Oliver compare with greats like West Side Story, The Sound of Music, Singing in the Rain, and Mary Poppins? It’s right up there with that bunch as far as I’m concerned and if you get a chance to see it, you won’t be sorry. Five Stars from me.



And if you want the Blu-ray, better get to it. Remember that Twilight only puts out 3000 copies. When they are gone, they are gone except for extravagant sums from 3rd Party Sellers. Check it out here.

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Commentarily: It's What I Do

I like doing what I do.  I like posting things people might like to read.  I enjoy making comments about various subject matters that might interest me.   And most of all I enjoy writing about many different subject matters whether it's movies, entertainment, or poltics.  

I'm opinionated. I seldom hold back in that opinion.  And I never will.  It's just not in me.  And many hate that about me and will continue to do so.  I don't care.  At my age, I've earned that right.

I enjoy writing on my blog when I'm physically up to it and have the time. Lately I've had neither.  For those who do like what I write and post on my blog and other facebook pages, or even just read them with no comment, I'm forever grateful. 

Most of them are complete strangers who I will never meet or know anything about.  But that doesn't matter.
As I said yesterday, just posting a picture of Carrie Underwood and Grumpy Cat on Facebook was viewed by over 1000 people in a very short time.  Most reasonable people saw the humor in it.

I posted what I considered some of the best remarks from Twitter regarding NBC's Sound of Music on my blog, and it has shot up to number three on the popularity list.  The total time it took me to make that posting:  roughly twenty minutes.  Twenty minutes doing something that I like.  I guess for some people, that's twenty minutes of too much time on my hands.

Some people frown on what I do. Sadly, the great majority of them are people I know.  They look down on it.  They roll their eyes.

"Oh, you like to write?  You like to keep up with politics and want to know what's going on in the world?  You took all that time to post that on your blog?  You must have too much time on your hands" 

Oh my, I have a real opinion about real current events about things that matter in this world and okay, maybe some that don't.  So sue me and go bake a cookie since you have so much time on your hands to criticize what I do.  Bake a dozen. 

This reminds me of the people on a Facebook post that was put up by one of the local TV news networks here in Kern County.  The subject matter was Fast Food workers and whether they should have a minimum wage increase.  It wasn't just the fact that some of these people didn't think that they should that was disgusting, it was that in expressing their opinion they also showed that they view these people as the lowest of the low in our society, not hardly worth bothering with because to them, anyone who works in Fast Food or other minimum wage jobs are not real workers.  It doesn't matter to them how hard these people work because if they weren't such ignorant heathens, unlike themselves, they would have a better job.  So tuff shit.

Do you see the point I'm making here. 

There's always somebody out there willing to piss on what somebody else does, be it cooking up your crummy Big Mac while you raise your nose and sneer at them, or whether it's someone who dares to waste their time writing shit, 99 99/100 percent of which you've never even bothered to read which makes it that much easier for you to take a crap on.
But that is something I wouldn't normally do.  Not to someone I knew or cared about and most certainly not in public. 
I don't publicly criticize what brings enjoyment to someone I know no matter how I feel. 

What makes it worse is that when it's the people you know who are supposed to be supportive that put the knife in your back, it hurts that much more.  But that's okay.  I've had more than one dagger I've dug out of there over the years, and I imagine there will be dozens more.

Believe me, if I had more time on my hands to do the things I would like to do, I would do more of it.  Mostly writing on what you undoubtedly view as my piece of crap blog which you've never bothered with.

Here's my point.  You can consider the things I enjoy doing as being a waste of time and having too much time on my hands.  Maybe, I think what others do and the things they do as being a waste of time.  But I would never ever be so bold as to tell someone that what they enjoy doing is a pointless exercise in futility, or a crappy way to spend their time and money even if I thought so in the remotest parts of my mind. 

But it's understandable that this remark came from someone who has read very little if any of my writings, postings, or anything else I've done to be so judgmental about my life and stick your nose up in the air.  Hell, I’ve had my other Facebook page associated with my blog and you can’t even bring yourself to click the like button on it. 

If the shoe were on the other foot, I wouldn’t have hesitated visiting your page where ever or whatever it was and regardless of the subject matter.  It’s called being supportive. 

What you did is something I would never do to someone I cared about, least of all in a public place where people you know will see it.  Worse, it is the first time you have ever commented on my blog although it’s been in existence for at least 8 years or more.  So thanks again for the lack of support.