Steve, Author at Retro Reminiscing Video and Pictures

Gumby!

I think Gumby is one of those characters where several different generations can honestly say, “I grew up watching him.”

He actually goes all the way back to 1955, first appearing on Howdy Doody before getting his own NBC show. But what surprised me was how many little pieces of Art Clokey’s own life ended up in that simple green character. Gumby’s head was patterned after his father’s hairstyle in an old photograph, his big feet helped keep him standing during stop-motion filming, and Clokey chose green partly because he saw it as a color that didn’t represent any particular race.

Even the name has a story. Clokey’s father used the word “gumbo” for the clay-filled mud around Michigan farms, which eventually led to Gumbo, Gumba and little Gumby.

And Gumby almost came about accidentally. Clokey had made an experimental clay film called Gumbasia in 1953 after first working with clay professionally on a Budweiser commercial where he animated bites disappearing from a Swiss cheese sandwich. A producer saw Gumbasia and encouraged him to make clay characters for children’s television.

Then came another generation. College kids rediscovered Gumby, and in the early ’80s Eddie Murphy turned him into one of his memorable Saturday Night Live characters. That parody actually helped put the real Gumby back into the public eye.

So depending on your age, you might remember Gumby from the ’50s, the ’60s, reruns in the ’70s or his big ’80s comeback.

What era of Gumby do you remember watching?

Remember Holmes & Yo-Yo? ABC’s Short-Lived Robot Cop Sitcom

Here’s one of those shows where you mention the title and somebody immediately says, “I remember that!” — even though Holmes & Yo-Yo barely lasted three months during its original run.

It premiered on ABC in September 1976, with Richard B. Shull playing accident-prone detective Alexander Holmes and John Schuck as his new partner, Gregory “Yo-Yo” Yoyonovich. The catch was that Yo-Yo wasn’t really a cop at all — he was an experimental android programmed for police work. ABC put it on Saturday nights at 8:00, opposite The Jeffersons and Emergency!, which certainly wasn’t an easy place for a new comedy to survive.

Only 11 episodes aired before ABC pulled it in December 1976. Two more were sitting on the shelf and finally turned up the following August, bringing the complete series to just 13 episodes.

There was actually a surprising amount of talent behind this little show. Executive producer Leonard Stern had worked on Get Smart and McMillan & Wife — and was also one of the guys who invented Mad Libs. The theme came from Dick Halligan of Blood, Sweat & Tears, John Astin directed two episodes, and a young John Landis even received a story credit before Animal House made him famous.

TV Guide later put Holmes & Yo-Yo at #33 on its list of the 50 worst television shows, but I’m not sure that tells the entire story. Half a century later, people are still asking, “Does anybody else remember that show with the robot cop?”

Do you remember actually watching Holmes & Yo-Yo, or is this one of those shows where you mainly remember the opening and the idea behind it?

Wally Gator: The Cartoon We May Not Have Watched the Same Way

I definitely remember Wally Gator, but here’s something I never really thought about — depending on where we grew up, we may not all have watched him the same way.

Wally debuted in 1962, but he wasn’t originally created as a regular network half-hour show. His cartoons were part of a syndicated package with Touché Turtle and Dum Dum and Lippy the Lion and Hardy Har Har. Local television stations could package those cartoons differently. Chicago’s WGN, for example, actually ran the half hour under the name Wally Gator, while New York’s WPIX used the cartoons in a locally hosted program called Cartoon Zoo.

That may explain why some of us remember Wally almost as his own show while others remember seeing him mixed in with other Hanna-Barbera cartoons.

And that voice wasn’t accidental either. Daws Butler based Wally’s voice on comedian Ed Wynn, who many of us would recognize as the Mad Hatter from Disney’s Alice in Wonderland. Mr. Twiddle was Don Messick, several years before he became the original voice of Scooby-Doo.

Wally only produced 52 original shorts, but like so many Hanna-Barbera characters, the reruns gave him a much longer life than that original 1962–63 production run. He even came back with Yogi and the gang in the 1970s and returned again decades later in Jellystone!

For a cartoon that originally lasted only about a year, Wally Gator sure seemed to be on television forever!

Do you remember Wally as his own show, or do you remember him mixed in with Touché Turtle and Lippy the Lion?

Jiffy Pop — Was It More Fun to Make Than Eat?

It’s Friday night, and this one brings back that whole feeling of the weekend finally being here. Maybe there was a movie coming on TV, maybe we were allowed to stay up a little later, and somehow popcorn just seemed to belong with Friday night. And if somebody pulled out a Jiffy Pop, making the popcorn became part of the entertainment. Standing at the stove, shaking that pan back and forth and watching the foil slowly puff up was almost as much fun as eating what was inside.

There was popcorn, and then there was Jiffy Pop, where half the entertainment was watching that aluminum foil grow into a giant silver ball.

Looking this one up, I found that Jiffy Pop goes all the way back to 1959, but it wasn’t actually the first popcorn sold this way. A product called E-Z Pop had been around since 1954, and its manufacturer eventually sued Jiffy Pop’s makers for patent infringement. The case went all the way to a federal appeals court, where Jiffy Pop won in 1963 partly because its foil expanded differently.

The magician connection in these 1970s commercials wasn’t just advertising make-believe either. Harry Blackstone Jr. was a genuine professional magician, and in 1976 Jiffy Pop was promoting the product as “the magic treat.” Blackstone came from quite a magic family — his father was The Great Blackstone, one of America’s best-known illusionists and a contemporary of Harry Houdini.

Harry Jr. went on to become a major star himself. He was twice named Magician of the Year by the Magic Castle, took his show to Broadway in 1980 and later donated his family’s famous floating-light-bulb illusion to the Smithsonian.

And Jiffy Pop certainly outlasted these commercials. It even had a memorable role in the opening of Scream in 1996.

Best of all, Jiffy Pop is still being made today. Some products really don’t need much improving — watching that foil balloon get bigger was the whole experience!

Since it’s Friday night, this seems like the perfect one to ask:

What memories does Jiffy Pop bring back for you — family movie nights, staying up late watching TV, or trying not to burn the bottom?

Muriel Cigars — Edie Adams Made “Hey Big Spender” Her Own

Here’s one where the commercial spokeswoman may have become better remembered than the product.

Edie Adams spent an incredible 19 years selling Muriel cigars on television, and the Television Academy says Muriel’s sales increased more than tenfold during the years her commercials ran.

This spot uses “Hey, Big Spender” from the Broadway musical Sweet Charity, but with one perfect advertising change: instead of “spend a little time with me,” Edie sings “spend a little dime with me” because a Muriel Corona cost ten cents.

And apparently that little change caused quite a stir. I found that Universal filed suit in 1968 trying to stop the cigar company from using the Big Spender parody in its advertising.

Edie herself had quite a résumé. She was Juilliard-trained, won a Tony Award for Li’l Abner, appeared in movies including The Apartment and It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, and was married to television comedy pioneer Ernie Kovacs.

Here’s the part I really didn’t know: she never smoked. Adams later said the Muriel cigars never even touched her lips, and she devised a special ring to hold one convincingly for the commercials.

She also did something television historians owe her a lot for. After Kovacs died, Edie fought to locate and preserve his old programs at a time when networks were routinely erasing or throwing television recordings away. More than 1,200 items from the Kovacs-Adams collection eventually went to the Library of Congress.

Not bad for someone many people simply remember as “the Muriel cigar lady.”

Do you remember Edie Adams herself, or is it “Hey, Big Spender” that immediately brings these commercials back?

The Courtship of Eddie’s Father — “People Let Me Tell You ’Bout My Best Friend”

I think all you have to say is The Courtship of Eddie’s Father and a lot of us immediately hear Harry Nilsson singing “People let me tell you ’bout my best friend.” It may be one of those cases where the theme song has lasted just as long in our memories as the show itself.

The series premiered in 1969 and ran for three seasons on ABC, always on Wednesday nights, although ABC moved the time around. Bill Bixby played widowed father Tom Corbett and six-year-old Brandon Cruz was Eddie, the little matchmaker who figured Dad needed some help finding a new wife.

Something I didn’t know was that the story had already been a 1963 movie with Glenn Ford and Ron Howard, which itself came from a 1961 novel.

The relationship between Bixby and Cruz apparently wasn’t just television magic either. Cruz has said they spent weekends and vacations together away from the set, going to places like Palm Springs, Big Bear and the beach. He remembered Bixby bringing stability to his life and said Bixby deliberately didn’t want him learning how to “act” too much because he wanted Eddie’s reactions to stay natural.

Then there’s Mrs. Livingston, played by Miyoshi Umeki. I never realized as a kid that I was watching an Oscar winner. Umeki had made history with Sayonara as the first Asian performer to win an acting Academy Award, and Eddie’s Father ended up being her final regular acting job.

And whatever happened to little Eddie? Here’s one I certainly wouldn’t have predicted — Brandon Cruz became a punk rocker, singing with Dr. Know and later performing as lead singer for the Dead Kennedys. From “Best Friend” to punk rock is quite a trip!

The show only gave us 73 episodes, but between Bixby, Eddie, Mrs. Livingston and that wonderful Nilsson theme, it left a pretty big memory behind.

Do you remember watching it Wednesday nights, or did you discover Eddie and his father later in reruns?

Who Ya Gunna Call? Dustbuster!

I think the Dustbuster was one of those products that seemed to suddenly appear and then before long everybody knew exactly what it was. No dragging out the big vacuum, no cord and no bag — just grab it off the wall, suck up the crumbs and put it back.

This commercial is from 1980, right near the beginning of the Dustbuster craze, but I never realized how interesting the story behind it was.

Black & Decker introduced the Dustbuster in 1979, and there really is a NASA connection — just not quite the story that “NASA invented the Dustbuster.” Black & Decker was already making cordless tools before Apollo, but its work developing a battery-powered drill for NASA helped the company improve motor efficiency and cordless technology. That lunar drill was actually used on the Moon beginning with Apollo 15 in 1971.

The Dustbuster itself almost came from a failure. Black & Decker had sold a cordless multi-tool system that included a little vacuum attachment called the Spot Vac. The overall product didn’t do particularly well, but the vacuum gave the company another idea.

Designer Carroll Gantz completely rethought it. He gave the Dustbuster that distinctive shape based partly on a dustpan, changed Black & Decker’s familiar tool colors to an almond beige that wouldn’t look out of place in the kitchen, and created the wall-mounted charger — the “home base” featured in this commercial.

Black & Decker originally projected sales in the tens of thousands. Instead, more than a million were sold, and by 1985 about 10 million Dustbusters had been sold. Competitors rushed out their own versions and Black & Decker wound up fighting patent battles over the design.

And maybe the biggest sign of its success is that “Dustbuster” became the word many of us used for almost any little handheld vacuum, whether Black & Decker made it or not.

All that history just to clean up a few crumbs!

Did your family have an original Dustbuster hanging on the wall?

Remember Junior Jumble?

Remember Junior Jumble? This was one of those little newspaper features that could keep you busy almost as long as the comics!

Jumble itself dates all the way back to 1954, when the word game originally appeared as Scramble. Henri Arnold and Bob Lee later took over, and a kid-friendly Junior Jumble followed. The idea was simple: unscramble the words, take the letters from the circled boxes, then use the cartoon clue to figure out the final joke.

This particular one is especially neat because it’s from July 4, 1976 — the Bicentennial. Naturally, George Washington was the subject, with the final answer playing off the old legend that Washington could never tell a lie.

I also love the way they hid the answer at the bottom. Instead of simply turning the newspaper upside down, you had to hold it up to a mirror to read it. I have to admit, looking up those answers so many times as a kid is probably how I taught myself to read backwards!

And Jumble didn’t disappear with the newspapers of our childhood. It’s still being published today, with the children’s version now known as Jumble for Kids.

How many of you used to grab a pencil and try to solve Junior Jumble before looking at the answer?

Handi-Wrap Won Me Over One School Sandwich at a Time

I remember this Handi-Wrap commercial, but what it really brings back is a debate we used to have in our house — Handi-Wrap or wax paper for my school sandwiches?

At my young age, I already had a pretty strong opinion! Wax paper never seemed to really seal the sandwich. By lunchtime the edges of the bread would already be starting to harden, and that was all the proof I needed that we should be using Handi-Wrap.

Apparently I had fallen right into Dow’s marketing plan.

When Handi-Wrap arrived around 1960, Dow went straight after wax paper. I found an original ad in the Science History Institute collection promising that a 100-foot roll would wrap 100 sandwiches while selling at wax-paper prices. The advertising specifically pushed Handi-Wrap for lunchboxes and claimed sandwiches could stay fresh even when made the night before.

A few years later Dow even created a “Lunch Box Go-Together” store promotion built around Handi-Wrap, so getting Mom to switch the kids’ sandwiches from wax paper to plastic was clearly a big part of the strategy.

And there actually was something behind what I was noticing. Wax paper provides a moisture barrier, but folding can crack or interrupt that barrier, while plastic film can surround the sandwich much more completely.

So I’d like to think I helped convince Mom that Handi-Wrap was the better choice.

Of course, there was one thing stronger than my argument in our house: if the wax paper was on sale, I probably wasn’t winning that week!

Funny how something as ordinary as what Mom wrapped your school sandwich in can become a memory more than 50 years later.

Which did your house use for school lunches — Handi-Wrap, wax paper, aluminum foil, or eventually those wonderful little sandwich bags?

Cathy Rigby Built Quite a Career After the Olympics

This old Cathy Rigby Stayfree commercial brings back a completely different Cathy Rigby memory for me.

Back in the 1990s, I worked as a Communications Specialist at Caldor’s corporate headquarters in Norwalk. We were opening a new store in Pennsylvania and Cathy Rigby was there to meet customers and sign autographs. What I remember most about her personally was how soft-spoken and very polite she was. Nothing flashy at all, and that stuck with me.

Most of us remember Cathy first as the young American gymnast who became one of the faces of the sport. She competed in the 1968 and 1972 Olympics, but something I had forgotten is that her most historic medal didn’t come at the Olympics. In 1970, she won silver on the balance beam at the World Championships, becoming the first American gymnast ever to win a World Championships medal.

After retiring from competition, she did something a lot of famous athletes struggle to do — she kept finding ways to turn that recognition into a long career.

There were the Stayfree commercials, which became one of her best-known endorsement campaigns. She also spent 18 years covering gymnastics for ABC Sports, did other television and fitness work, and then built a whole second career on stage.

And that second career became huge. Rigby began playing Peter Pan in the 1970s and returned to the role for decades, eventually earning a Tony nomination in 1991. She and her husband also moved into producing through McCoy Rigby Entertainment.

Then there’s Caldor itself, another memory for a lot of us. The chain was founded in 1951 by Carl and Dorothy Bennett, and even the name came from them — CAL from Carl and DOR from Dorothy. By the time I worked there, it had grown into one of the Northeast’s best-known discount chains.

So for me, this commercial connects three different things: a familiar face from television, a remarkable post-Olympic career, and my own memory of meeting Cathy Rigby years later through Caldor.

Do you remember her most from gymnastics, the Stayfree commercials, Peter Pan, or somewhere else?