A good taste tip from Mary Weiss

The holiday season is now upon us and Mary of the Shangri-Las reminds us of some of the dos and do-not-dos of gift receiving which are always in good taste no matter what season.
Click on the title for the link.

Is it bigger than a breadbox?

See Hollywood Wax Museum founder Spoony Singh, Kentuckian dynamite saleswoman Katherine W. Stone, mystery guest Joey Heatherton and sportswriter Elinor Kaine on Dorothy Kilgallen's final episode of What's My Line? (complete with commercials!).

The Osmonds 'Crazy Horses' 1972

L'anniversaire d'Astérix le Gaulois

French comics icon Asterix the Gaul turns 50 today.

"This success was not expected at all. Even in France the success was not expected. We were pleased to discover the international appeal, firstly in Germany, which compared with that in France," says Uderzo. "We were reassured because we had been told that Asterix in a way excused General de Gaulle and moreover that it only tickled the French, which was not what we wished. We were somewhat reassured when it became a success in other countries."

Around the same time I was introduced to Tintin in the pages of Children's Digest in the early-to-mid-1970s, I first read the adventures of the Roman-fighting, world-traveling Gauls Asterix and Obelix in Asterix and Cleopatra.

Flintstones stop motion

From Screen Novelties's "Flintstones: On the Rocks" for Cartoon Network.

Dress like Don Draper

Dress like Don Draper — or Dick Whitman — with the Brooks Brothers Mad Men Edition suit. With a $998 price tag — that's about $143 in 1963 dollars — I'll keep searching the thrift stores, eBay and Etsy.
My vintage 1960s Sansabelt suit (in like-new condition) came from the Salvation Army and was under $15.

Red Rose Tea

The Howling Man

Watch 5. The Twilight Zone - The Howling Man in Entertainment | View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

If you can find it, get a copy of the anthology of Charles Beaumont stories The Howling Man — if you don't happen to have a copy of the issue of Rogue Magazine it originally ran in — you can read the original story (and several other great ones).

Come in …

"A whole generation was cheated of radio drama. Only here in America did Madison Avenue say, 'This is it. Without a picture there ain't no story.' Nonsense! The finest stories are right in your head," Himan Brown told Time magazine in 1981.
One thousand-ninety-nine episodes of radio veteran — he produced shows like Inner Sanctum, The Thin Man, Bulldog Drummond, Dick Tracy and Nero Wolfe — Brown's CBS Radio Mystery Theater were broadcast from January 6, 1974 to December 31, 1982. The episodes aired daily till season seven, with five shows a week and by the early 1980s had 3.6 million dedicated listeners.

During the 1970s other attempts at reviving the radio drama included the Rod Serling-hosted The Zero Hour from 1973 to 1974 which had five-part, half-hour shows that aired Monday through Friday; the Sears Radio Theater in 1979 (the next year known as the Mutual Radio Theater) with different hosts and themes for each day's show — western, comedy, mystery, "love and hate," and adventure; NPR's Earplay; and the Himan Brown-produced youth-oriented General Mills Radio Adventure Theater in 1977 using many of the same writers and actors from Mystery Theater but it is the Mystery Theater that lasted longer and is best remembered.
I used to listen to the Mystery Theater on Tampa's WFLA-AM (I remember not wanting to miss the fifth and final episode of the of "Last Days of Pompei" and listening to it on the ride home home after watching the Tampa Rowdies play Nottingham Forrest in a nil-all draw) in the late '70s till the end of the show's run; another excellent show (and a story for another time) was the science fiction detective drama Dry Smoke and Whispers on community radio station WMNF and received praise from Harlan Ellison.

The announcer spoke: "The CBS Radio Mystery Theater presents," followed by eight seconds of the sound effect of a creaking door then the theme music (bonus fact: the theme was originally used in The Twilight Zone episode "Two" and can be heard at about the 4:35 mark) and "Come in … Welcome … I'm E.G. Marshall … ." Promising the "fear you can hear," Marshall acted as the listener's guide to the world of "terrifying imagination" on the other side of that creaking door except for the last season when Tammy Grimes became host.

The first episode "The Old Ones are Hard to Kill" starred Agnes Moorehead (Suspense "Sorry Wrong Number") and aired a few months before her death (she also appeared in the episode "Ring of Truth").
The copy of the episode I've linked to was from WDAF-AM in Kansas City and has the original ABC news, commercials and PSAs.
Mystery Theater is available from several OTR websites and podcasts online for listening or downloading. Himan Brown is still alive and is still the rightsholder of the series so if you find any collections of the show for sale it is without his approval.
The episodes vary in quality — some have the commercials, station IDs and news edited out and some are the versions that NPR aired in 1998 with Brown as announcer.

Early reviews were not so kind. From the New York Times: "Mention radio drama to those who reached adolescence before the early fifties and they are likely to go limp and soggy with nostalgia. Listen to the new "CBS Radio Mystery Theater" series, and the nostalgia itself goes limp and soggy."and Chicago Tribune: "If CBS Radio Mystery Theater doesn't get better in a big hurry, radio drama will be buried in a grave from which resurrection may be forever impossible." Early into the second season (that year the show received a Peabody Award) James Brown of the Los Angeles Times noted that "The second year of CBS Radio Mystery Theater began last Monday on KNX, and those prophets of doom of last year, convinced that Himan Brown's nightly broadcasts of original radio drama were a foregone flop, have now retreated quietly."

Mad Monster Party?

Betty Boop's Hallowe'en Party

Soupy Sales: 1926-2009

Goodbye Mr. Supman.

Vic Mizzy 1916-2009

Vic Mizzy, best known for memorable '60s television themes and scores — The Addams Family, Green Acres, The Ghost and Mr. Chicken — has died; he was 93.


"I sat down; I went 'buh-buh-buh-bump [snap-snap], buh-buh-buh-bump. That's why I'm living in Bel-Air: Two finger snaps and you live in Bel-Air."

The Tell-tale Heart

Rooty Toot Toot

Creating the look of Mad Men

The Collectors Weekly talks to Mad Men props master Scott Buckwald.

I think that the promotion of the show has really highlighted its historical accuracy. Mad Men exists in a world that people still remember. You’ll have people who were working in 1960 going, “Oh, my God. I remember that item.”

Most people are not historians. Most people are not totally geeked out about any one time in history, so they really don’t know. If you do a Revolutionary War movie and you put in a weapon that didn’t come about until the War of 1812, the majority of people aren’t going to know. But part of the charm of a show like Mad Men is that it’s about our life. I wasn’t alive in 1960, but I was born in 1963, so I remember a lot of that stuff from when I was a little boy in ’68 and ’69. History doesn’t just change on a dime. Things that existed in 1960 also existed in 1970, and are still easily accessible thanks to photos. It’s still within our grasp.

You Are My Sunshine

performing on the television program, Rainbow Quest.

Blazing The Trails: King Records

image courtesy of: Cinncinati Public Library

More of the spoken word history of King Records heard here and here.

1950s Tri-Color/Tri-Level End Table

ATHENS, GEORGIA: TRI-COLOR/LEVEL END TABLE {1950s}, originally uploaded by HoldThatTiger.

We got word from a fellow Flickr contact that these end tables were once manufactured in Germany. I snapped this photograph in the store I spotted it in. As of this writing, it sits comfortably in our living quarters, ready to display a planter or a decorative bowl or both!

p.s. - I (Dusty) am currently rearranging my Flickr photographs. Any photos posted on this blog - Bob & Dusty's Whirl-A-Go-Go - from my Flickr account will be absent for a short time. They be back soon. Don't you worry, folks!

The fire preventin' bear

Way Out Junk has my favorite chilhood record (the above photo is of my brother's well-played copy) — Smokey Bear With Ranger Hal, featuring the original voice of Smokey Jackson Weaver and kiddie TV host Ranger Hal Hal Shaw
via PCL LinkDump




Here's Eddy Arnold singing "Smokey the Bear" — the song that gave the iconic 65-year-old ursine fire warden his unoficial middle name "The."

Pee-Wee Herman: He'll come into your town and help you party down

Pee-Wee Herman {Paul Rubens}

Paul Reubens is resurrecting his late 1970s/early 1980s live stage show. From what little I know, he will only be playing select dates in Los Angeles next month (November). For more information, check this out…right here!

Update: The Los Angeles Times posted this information early this morning (about his comeback show). Most important information. Read it here!

Fifty years in the dimension of imagination … we call the Twilight Zone

Rod Serling on The Mike Wallace Interview


Rod Serling on Fractured Flickers


A rare Rod Serling blooper.

Not much to say about The Twilight Zone. It's one of my favorite television shows and today is the 50th anniversary of the series' debut of the episode "Where is Everybody?"(CBS has this and other episodes available for online viewing.)
Feel free to share your favorites episodes or even the ones you don't like — because there were a few stinkers — in the comments.

Some of my favorites: "Walking Distance," "The Hitch-hiker," "Time Enough at Last," "Third From the Sun," "The Purple Testament," "The Big Tall Wish," "A Stop at Willoughby," "A Passage for Trumpet," "The After Hours," "The Eye of the Beholder," "Nick of Time," "The Howling Man," "The Invaders," "The Odyssey of Flight 33," "Static," "Night of the Meek," "Long Distance Call," "A Hundred Yards Over the Rim," "Shadow Play," "It's a Good Life," "To Serve Man," "The Last Rites of Jeff Myrtlebank," "Little Girl Lost," "The Dummy," "The Incredible World of Horace Ford," "In Praise of Pip," "The Masks," "Night Call," "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet," "The Last Night of a Jockey," "Living Doll," "You Drive," "Caesar and Me," "An Occurence at Owl Creek Bridge," and "The Bewitchin' Pool."

The Silhouettes

Bing Bong {Ember Records/ 1958}

The Silhouettes

Sha Na Na perform The Silhouettes' biggest hit, Get A Job, on Music Laden {1973}