Classic TV 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?

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?

CBS NFL Today 1977 — When Sunday Football Started With Brent, Phyllis and Irv

There are certain sounds that can immediately take you back, and this old CBS NFL opening from 1977 does it for me.

Before RedZone, fantasy-football apps and having practically every game available somewhere, Sunday afternoon football meant turning on one of the three networks. If you were watching the NFC, chances are you were watching CBS.

And The NFL Today had become part of the ritual.

There was Brent Musburger, Irv Cross and Phyllis George, with Jimmy “The Greek” Snyder contributing his predictions. What I never really appreciated at the time was how groundbreaking that desk was. Cross became the first Black man working full-time as a national television sports analyst, while George — the former Miss America — helped open a door for women in network sports broadcasting that had barely existed before.

And then there’s that music. The theme was called “Horizontal Hold,” written by Jan Stoeckart under the name Jack Trombey. Hear a few seconds of it and suddenly it feels like Sunday afternoon again.

The football itself was different too. 1977 was the last 14-game NFL season. The league had already voted that spring to expand to 16 games beginning in 1978, along with an expanded playoff format.

CBS had the NFC, NBC had the AFC, and ABC had Monday Night Football. Pat Summerall and Tom Brookshier were CBS’s top game announcers, and there were no streaming packages or instant access to every matchup.

The NFL Today became so successful that its studio format helped establish the blueprint for the pregame shows we still watch today. CBS eventually lost NFL football when Fox took the NFC package beginning in 1994, but The NFL Today returned in 1998 when CBS came back with the AFC.

Does hearing this opening bring back Sunday afternoons in your house — and who do you remember most: Brent, Phyllis, Irv or Jimmy the Greek?

Before Taxi, Judd Hirsch Was Selling Us Listerine

Take another look at the young radio DJ in this commercial. That’s Judd Hirsch, years before Taxi, Ordinary People and the long career we know him for today.

This spot appears to be from around 1970, when Hirsch was still trying to establish himself as an actor and doing commercials to make a living. What I didn’t know was that before acting, he had earned a degree in physics and actually worked as an engineer. A few years after this commercial, his career began taking off, and by 1978 he was Alex Rieger on Taxi, eventually winning two Emmys for the role.

But the other star here may really be Listerine’s advertising.

Most companies tried desperately to convince us their products tasted good. Listerine basically said the opposite. Its famous campaign was “The taste people hate twice a day.” In other words, yes, it tastes awful — but that must mean it works!

And boy did we believe that.

Listerine had actually been around since 1879, originally developed as an antiseptic rather than an everyday mouthwash. By the 1920s, advertising helped make the word “halitosis” part of the American vocabulary and convinced generations that bad breath could ruin everything from a date to a marriage.

Looking back, I think the burning sensation became part of Listerine’s identity. You swished it around, tried desperately to make it the full 30 seconds, and then came up gasping for air!

And sitting there in this old commercial is a young Judd Hirsch, probably with no idea that millions of us would someday know him as one of television’s most familiar faces.

Did you recognize Judd Hirsch right away — and be honest, how long could you actually keep old-fashioned Listerine in your mouth?

Room 222

Watching this old Room 222 preview made me wonder — was high school really like this in 1969, or was this Hollywood’s version of what they thought it should be?

The show premiered on ABC on September 17, 1969, and from what I found, the answer is a little of both.

The producers actually tried hard to make the school feel real. Writers were required to spend time in classrooms at Los Angeles High School and other area schools so they could pick up the clothing, slang, attitudes and atmosphere of a real big-city high school. Much of the series was filmed at Los Angeles High as well.

So the mini-skirts, Afros, racial mix, students questioning authority and discussions about Vietnam, race and changing social values weren’t simply dreamed up for television. Those things were happening.

But I also don’t think everybody watching at home saw their own high school reflected here. A suburban or small-town school could have looked very different, and Pete Dixon, played by Lloyd Haynes, was probably a little more patient and understanding than some of the teachers we remember!

The cast had some interesting backgrounds too. Denise Nicholas, who played Liz McIntyre, had actually worked in the Civil Rights Movement. Michael Constantine won an Emmy as Principal Kaufman and decades later became the father in My Big Fat Greek Wedding. Karen Valentine also won an Emmy for the first season.

And here’s one I had completely forgotten — that wonderfully laid-back theme was written by Jerry Goldsmith. He used an unusual seven-beat rhythm for it, years before scoring movies such as The Omen, Patton and Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

So maybe Room 222 wasn’t exactly everyone’s high-school experience, but it seems it was trying much harder to reflect real students and real issues than I ever realized.

For those of you who were actually in high school around 1969 — did your school look and feel anything like Room 222?

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?