Classic TV Archives - Retro Reminiscing Video and Pictures

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?

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?

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 Monkees, Bugs Bunny and Kool-Aid

Talk about putting two things together that you wouldn’t expect — The Monkees and Bugs Bunny selling Kool-Aid!

But the first thing I noticed was that there are only three Monkees here. Peter Tork had already left the group in December 1968, leaving Micky Dolenz, Davy Jones and Michael Nesmith to carry on as a trio. By this point their NBC television series was over too, but that wasn’t the end of The Monkees on television.

In the fall of 1969, CBS brought the show back as Saturday morning reruns, and General Foods’ Kool-Aid was a sponsor. That explains a lot about why these commercials exist. The Monkees were suddenly being introduced to kids all over again, and Kool-Aid had three very recognizable spokesmen ready to go.

Bugs Bunny wasn’t new to Kool-Aid either. I found that the “Make Friends with Kool-Aid” campaign was already using Bugs several years earlier, so pairing him with The Monkees was really a combination of two existing advertising ideas.

There’s another interesting connection from this period. Their 1969 album The Monkees Present was also tied into a Kool-Aid promotion. The group was well past peak Monkeemania by then, Peter was gone and Michael Nesmith would soon leave too.

And for anyone wondering where the Kool-Aid Man is — he wasn’t the television star yet! That familiar walking pitcher didn’t make his big TV debut until 1975.

Looking back, this commercial is almost a snapshot of The Monkees right near the end of their original run.

Do you remember this commercial, or do you remember The Monkees more from their Saturday morning 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!

When Jonathan Winters Sold Us Hefty Trash Bags

Here’s one of those commercials where the product almost takes a back seat to the guy selling it. Jonathan Winters could turn something as ordinary as a trash bag into a comedy routine, and Hefty apparently knew exactly what it had.

I found Winters doing Hefty commercials as early as August 1970, and there are documented spots with him still representing the brand in November 1978. That’s a pretty long run for what could easily have been a one-shot celebrity endorsement.

What I didn’t realize was how much of Winters’ own comedy world crossed over into these commercials. His famous old-lady character Maude Frickert was partly inspired by an aunt who taught him poker when he was only nine. Then in 1972, Winters actually appeared on The New Scooby-Doo Movies, voicing both himself and Maude in The Frickert Fracas.

And there’s another connection most of us probably know without connecting the dots — Robin Williams considered Winters a huge influence. Years later they wound up working together on Mork & Mindy, with Winters playing Mork and Mindy’s very unusual son, Mearth.

So this is really a little piece of comedy history disguised as a garbage-bag commercial. Do you remember Jonathan Winters more from the Hefty commercials, Mork & Mindy, or somewhere else?

McHale’s Navy

The show aired from 1962 to 1966 and starred Ernest Borgnine as Lt. Commander Quinton McHale, the skipper of PT-73. McHale and his crew were stationed in the South Pacific, where they were supposed to be fighting the war, but most episodes were really about schemes, shortcuts, gambling, trading, and staying one step ahead of their commanding officer.

The breakout comedy came from Tim Conway as the nervous and clumsy Ensign Parker, and Joe Flynn as Captain Binghamton, who was always trying to catch McHale and his men breaking the rules. The crew also included familiar faces like Carl Ballantine, Bob Hastings, and for a time, Gavin MacLeod, years before The Mary Tyler Moore Show and The Love Boat.

What made McHale’s Navy work was that it had the setting of a war show, but the feel of a workplace comedy. McHale’s men were not polished heroes. They were lovable troublemakers who somehow got the job done when it mattered.

For a lot of viewers, it is remembered as one of those black-and-white sitcoms with fast jokes, big characters, and Tim Conway stealing scenes long before he became a legend on The Carol Burnett Show.

Tokin’ With Lawrence Welk

Only on The Lawrence Welk Show could “One Toke Over the Line” somehow become a “modern spiritual.”

In 1971, Gail Farrell and Dick Dale performed the Brewer & Shipley song on the show, giving it the clean-cut Welk treatment. The funny part came afterward, when Lawrence Welk referred to it as a modern spiritual, apparently not realizing the “toke” in the title was not exactly Sunday-morning church material.

It does not seem like someone deliberately pulled one over on Welk. It was probably more of a perfect generational misunderstanding: a hit song with the word “Jesus” in the chorus made it onto one of TV’s cleanest shows, and everyone smiled through it like it belonged there.

That is what makes the clip so unforgettable. It is a perfect little time capsule of early 1970s television, where a song with counterculture roots could be polished up, dressed up, and served with champagne bubbles.

Rocky and Bullwinkle

Rocky and Bullwinkle was one of those cartoons that worked on two levels. Kids saw a flying squirrel, a goofy moose, spies, fairy tales, and silly adventures. Adults heard the puns, political jokes, Cold War humor, and smart little digs that went right over a lot of kids’ heads.

The show began in 1959 as Rocky and His Friends on ABC, then moved to NBC in 1961 as The Bullwinkle Show. Rocky was Rocket J. Squirrel, the brave flying squirrel, and Bullwinkle J. Moose was his well-meaning but not always brilliant best friend from Frostbite Falls, Minnesota. The show originally ran until 1964, with reruns continuing for years, including ABC Sunday mornings into the early 1970s.

What made it different was the variety-show style. You did not just get Rocky and Bullwinkle fighting Boris Badenov and Natasha Fatale. You also got Fractured Fairy Tales, Peabody’s Improbable History with Mr. Peabody and Sherman, Aesop and Son, Dudley Do-Right, Bullwinkle’s Corner, and all those cliffhanger endings with ridiculous titles.

The animation was not fancy, even for its time, but the writing was the real star. Jay Ward and Bill Scott leaned into wordplay, satire, narrator jokes, and absurd situations. That is why Rocky and Bullwinkle still feels different from a lot of old cartoons. It was funny for kids, but it was also sneaky smart for the adults in the room. UCLA’s Hammer Museum called the series a “rare gem” and credited its wit to the Jay Ward team, including Bill Scott, June Foray, and the show’s writers and animators.