1960s television Archives - Retro Reminiscing Video and Pictures

Gomer Pyle Sings — The Voice Nobody Expected

Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C. was mandatory viewing in our house. My dad was a Marine sergeant, so there was no missing it.

Like everyone else, I knew Gomer for the “Shazam!”, the “Goooolly!”, and the way he could drive Sergeant Carter absolutely crazy. That was the Gomer we expected every week.

What I didn’t expect was that voice.

The first time I remember hearing Jim Nabors really sing, everybody in our house stopped and paid attention. That huge baritone just didn’t seem possible coming from the same guy we knew as Gomer Pyle.

What I learned later is that television audiences had actually heard Nabors sing before Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C. even premiered. He showed off that voice on The Andy Griffith Show in 1964, and by 1965 Columbia Records had released his first album, Shazam!

By 1967, the show was fully embracing Jim Nabors the singer, including his powerful performance of “The Impossible Dream.”

That contrast is what made him so memorable to me. One minute he was making us laugh, and the next he could stop the room with that voice.

I still remember everyone in our house listening — including my Marine-sergeant dad.

Do you remember the first time you heard Gomer Pyle sing?

Saturday Morning Cartoons in 1965

It’s Saturday morning in 1965. You’ve got a bowl of your favorite cereal in front of you, the cartoons are on, and you have absolutely nowhere else you need to be.

So what are you watching?

The Beatles had become so huge that by 1965 they had their own Saturday morning cartoon. The funny part? John, Paul, George and Ringo didn’t provide their speaking voices — although when the music started, you heard the real Beatles recordings.

Then there was Atom Ant — “Up and at ’em, Atom Ant!” — a tiny Hanna-Barbera superhero with enough strength to take on just about anything.

Secret Squirrel gave us Agent 000, essentially a kid-friendly James Bond complete with trench coat, gadgets and Morocco Mole by his side.

And Milton the Monster may have had my favorite premise of the bunch. Professor Weirdo tried to create the perfect frightening monster, but accidentally added too much “tincture of tenderness.” The result was Milton — a monster who looked scary but was really a big softie.

Saturday mornings were different then. You watched what was on when it was on, and if you missed it, you waited until it came around again.

The Beatles, Atom Ant, Secret Squirrel or Milton the Monster — which one would you have been watching?

And what cereal was in your bowl?

“WHAT IS THIS, SOME SORT OF PEYTON PLACE?”

This was a little before my time, but I certainly remember my parents and other adults saying, “What is this, some sort of Peyton Place?”

For years I understood what they meant even if I didn’t really know why they were saying it.

Take a look at this 1964-65 opening to Peyton Place. A church steeple. Bells ringing. A peaceful little New England town. Then that wonderfully serious voice announces, “This is the continuing story of Peyton Place.”

Everything looks so respectable.

And that was the joke.

Behind those neat houses and small-town manners were affairs, family secrets, violence, alcoholism, mental breakdowns and murder. Peyton Place became so culturally famous that the name itself turned into shorthand for a seemingly respectable place where everybody had something going on behind closed doors. New Hampshire Magazine notes that “Peyton Place” had already become a synonym for scandal after Grace Metalious’ hugely successful 1956 novel.

The television version arrived on ABC on September 15, 1964, starring Dorothy Malone, Mia Farrow, Ryan O’Neal, Barbara Parkins and Ed Nelson. It was revolutionary television — a continuing prime-time story airing not once but twice each week. It became so popular that ABC eventually bumped it up to three nights a week.

And here’s something I never knew about this opening. The announcer is Dick Tufeld. One year later, television audiences would know that same voice as the Robot on Lost in Space — yes, the man behind “Danger, Will Robinson!”

Even the music has history. The theme was composed by Franz Waxman, who had also scored the 1957 Peyton Place movie.

The series lasted until June 2, 1969, producing an incredible 514 episodes.

But I think its greatest legacy may be that the show’s name escaped television entirely.

For a whole generation, you didn’t need to explain the gossip, secrets or drama.

You just called the place “Peyton Place.”

Do you remember your parents saying that — and did you know what they meant even if you’d never watched the show?

Branded

I remember Branded, but what sticks with me most isn’t the stories—it’s that theme song.

And I also remember that we had all kinds of our own reworded versions of it as kids. I can’t remember exactly what ours were anymore, but I know we weren’t singing the real words!

Branded premiered on NBC on January 24, 1965, starring Chuck Connors as former U.S. Army Captain Jason McCord. The entire premise was explained before the episode even started:

McCord was the only survivor of the Battle of Bitter Creek. Because everyone else had died, the Army concluded that he had abandoned his men and fled. He was court-martialed, stripped of his rank and publicly drummed out of the cavalry as a coward.

But McCord wasn’t a coward.

The tragedy had actually resulted from decisions made by his commanding officer, and McCord refused to disgrace the dead by publicly revealing everything he knew. So wherever he went, people knew him as the man who supposedly ran away, and each episode gave him another chance to prove what kind of man he really was.

And that opening was hard to forget — his insignia ripped off, his buttons removed, his sword broken in half and the fort gates slammed behind him.

The theme was written by composer Dominic Frontiere with lyrics by Alan Alch. Frontiere also supplied music for the series. The song was unusual because instead of simply introducing the show, it told you the whole setup in less than a minute.

Branded lasted only two seasons and 48 episodes, ending April 24, 1966. And here’s something I never realized: the television series never gave Jason McCord the big final exoneration the whole story seemed to be building toward. The show simply ended.

Interestingly, a feature-film reworking of the three-part episode The Mission, released as Broken Sabre, reportedly gave McCord a happier resolution in that version — but viewers of the weekly television series never got that ending.

For me, though, it still comes back to that song.

I know we weren’t the only kids who changed the words to the Branded theme. What version do YOU remember singing?

MIGHTY MOUSE & ZESTABS — WHEN CARTOON HEROES SOLD VITAMINS

Seeing Mighty Mouse selling vitamins takes me right back to an era when our Saturday-morning cartoon heroes seemed capable of selling just about anything. In this commercial, Mighty Mouse gets clobbered by a cat, takes a Zestabs chewable vitamin and suddenly turns the tables — not exactly subtle advertising, but certainly memorable!

There’s actually much more history behind this little commercial than I expected. Zestabs came from Sauter Laboratories, a division of pharmaceutical giant Hoffmann-La Roche. That strange “Mighty Mouse — Nutley, New Jersey” slate at the end makes sense once you learn that Roche’s longtime American headquarters and research complex was in Nutley.

The campaign also arrived just as people were beginning to question how products were marketed to children. Zestabs came in fruit flavors and later chocolate, and groups such as Action for Children’s Television objected to advertisements that made vitamin pills look and taste too much like candy. By 1972, Hoffmann-La Roche said it had stopped placing its vitamin commercials inside children’s programs, although Zestabs advertising continued elsewhere on television.

And here’s one connection I never expected: years before Pretty in Pink or Two and a Half Men, Jon Cryer says his first paying acting job at age four was a Zestabs commercial.

ABC “Meet Us in September” — 1969

I remember this song like it was yesterday, played dozens of times a day on ABC to promote the new season. I was hoping to find the writer or performer of the song, but no luck this time.

“Meet Us in September” was ABC’s big promotional campaign for the fall of 1969, and looking back at what ABC was introducing that season, they had plenty to promote. The Brady Bunch, Marcus Welby, M.D., Room 222, The Courtship of Eddie’s Father, Love, American Style and ABC’s Movie of the Week were all part of that new season.

The graphics in this clip were created by Harry Marks, one of the pioneers of television motion graphics. That same year Marks worked with Douglas Trumbull, who had done groundbreaking visual-effects work on 2001: A Space Odyssey, to create the memorable opening for ABC’s Movie of the Week.

I really thought finding out who wrote and sang the catchy “Meet Us in September” jingle would be the easy part. Surprisingly, the surviving archival material credits Marks for the visuals but doesn’t identify a songwriter or the studio singers. Rather than guess and attach somebody’s name to it, we’ll have to leave that one a mystery for now.

ABC was still battling CBS and NBC for viewers, but this season brought some major successes. Marcus Welby finished #8 during its first season and, the following year, became the first ABC series ever to finish #1 in the ratings.

It’s funny how a little network promo like this can stick in your head for more than half a century. Does anyone else remember ABC playing “Meet Us in September” over and over as the new fall season approached?

Did You Walk A Mile For A Camel?

If you grew up watching television in the 1950s or ’60s, cigarette commercials weren’t unusual or something that jumped out at you — everybody saw them. Camel, Winston, Marlboro, Salem and the rest were mixed right in with the cereal, cars and laundry detergent.

And Camel was certainly no little brand. It was introduced by R.J. Reynolds in 1913, became the company’s first nationally marketed cigarette and within four years was America’s number-one seller.

The commercial I’m showing comes from Camel’s revival of one of advertising’s most famous lines: “I’d Walk a Mile for a Camel.” What surprised me is how old that slogan actually was. Smithsonian records show it appearing in Camel advertising back in the 1920s, and Reynolds brought the idea back again near the end of the 1960s.

There’s also a future TV connection. Geoffrey Scott, who later played Mark Jennings on Dynasty, became one of the faces of the “Walk a Mile” Camel campaign. Scott made nearly 100 commercials during his career and also wound up doing ads for Old Spice and even portraying a Marlboro Man.

Then everything changed. Federal law ended cigarette advertising on American radio and television after January 1, 1971.

Do you remember the Camel commercials themselves, or mostly just the line “I’d Walk a Mile for a Camel”?

My Favorite Martian

When I think of My Favorite Martian, I really don’t remember watching it as a first-run show — I remember the repeats. After looking into it, I have a feeling I’m far from alone.

The show originally aired Sunday nights at 7:30 on CBS from 1963 through 1966, right after Lassie and immediately before The Ed Sullivan Show. And here’s something I never really thought about: at the same time over on NBC, it was going head-to-head with Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color. That’s quite a Sunday night television lineup!

The opening I’m showing here is from 1965, when My Favorite Martian finally made the jump to color for its third and final season. The first 75 episodes were black-and-white, while only the last 32 were produced in color. Production also moved from Desilu to MGM that final year.

But here’s why so many of us may remember the show from later. Almost immediately after the CBS run ended, My Favorite Martian went into syndication. I found a 1967 television-industry advertisement promoting all 107 episodes to stations as “The Martian Strip,” with the show already running or being sold in major markets around the country.

So while Uncle Martin originally belonged to Sunday nights, reruns probably created a whole second generation of viewers who never really thought about when the show originally aired. I think I’m one of them.

And once that George Greeley theme starts, I’m right back there again!

Do you remember watching My Favorite Martian on Sunday nights, or like me, do you mostly remember it from the reruns?

The Bullwinkle Show

I think one of the reasons Rocky and Bullwinkle still holds up is that when we watched it as kids, we probably weren’t getting half the jokes! The kids got a flying squirrel, a goofy moose and Boris and Natasha constantly trying to cause trouble, while the adults were getting political satire, pop-culture references and some pretty clever wordplay.

The show actually started in 1959 as Rocky and His Friends before moving to NBC in 1961 and becoming The Bullwinkle Show. What surprised me was how much talent was packed into those voices. Bill Scott, who played Bullwinkle, was also the show’s head writer and co-producer. June Foray voiced both Rocky and Natasha, Paul Frees played Boris, and that great narrator’s voice belonged to William Conrad, who many of us later knew as Cannon.

Here’s another one I didn’t know: Bullwinkle’s name reportedly came from a real person, Clarence Bullwinkel, who owned a car dealership near Berkeley and was known by creator Alex Anderson.

And despite how simple the animation sometimes looked, that almost became part of the charm. A lot of the animation work was done in Mexico to keep production costs down, while the writing remained incredibly sharp.

I went back to these cartoons expecting pure childhood nostalgia, but they’re actually funnier when you’re old enough to understand what the writers were sneaking past us!

Liberace Feelin’ Groovy

This may be one of the strangest—and most wonderfully 1968—things I’ve come across in a while. That’s Liberace getting “groovy” with The Youngfolk on The Red Skelton Hour on March 5, 1968.

And The Youngfolk weren’t just a bunch of dancers thrown together for the show. They were an actual seven-member Los Angeles folk group who recorded for United Artists and had already made several appearances with Red Skelton.

The song, of course, was Paul Simon’s “The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin’ Groovy).” Simon & Garfunkel recorded it on August 16, 1966—which, amazingly, was 60 years ago this week. Their version wasn’t originally the big single, though. Harpers Bizarre turned it into a #13 hit in 1967 with an arrangement by Leon Russell.

What I love about this clip is watching television try to interpret the whole flower-power generation for a mainstream audience. Giant flowers, bright colors, “groovy” slang—and right in the middle of it all is Liberace, completely committing to the bit.

Even better, Paul Simon eventually admitted he really didn’t care for this song and once jokingly used it as his own punishment after making a mistake onstage!

Do you remember seeing variety shows trying to get “hip” like this back in the late ’60s?