25 years ago, Robin Williams was already a household name and television star, but at the time, while I was sitting in the theatre watching this box office hit unspool, I knew Williams had arrived as a full-blown movie star. 25 year later, watching the Blu-ray over the weekend, nothing has changed. The highly fictionalized story of story of Adrian Cronauer, an Air Force disc jockey in Vietnam between 1965-1966, is still just as entertaining, hilarious and clever.

Because director Barry Levinson handles the story’s political undertones with such a deft touch, none of the humor or plot points feel in any way heavy-handed or anti-military. In fact, like Robert Altman’s brilliant “M*A*S*H,” the war and the military feel more like devices used to explore a much larger and more universal theme about individuality and thumbing your nose at authority. And that, my friends, is good stuff.

“Good Morning, Vietnam” is also an opportunity to spend some time with two exceptional character actors no longer with us: Bruno Kirby and as  Cronauer’s primary foil, The Mighty J.T. Walsh. Williams deservedly earned an Oscar nomination for his work, and I think he’d be one of the first to admit that the greatness surrounding him helped to make him great.

This is still one of the best films Williams has ever done, and never let yourself or anyone forget that the real Cronauer is a lifelong Republican who openly supported George W. Bush in 2004.

Dead Poets Society (1989)

Everything about director Peter Weir’s handling of an Oscar-winning script written by Tom Schulman about his own personal experiences at a fancy preparatory school for boys is letter perfect. The production design feels like 1959, the young cast is believable in their roles as repressed, wealthy Caucasians who are really artists and poets looking for the opportunity to shine, and as the teacher who inspires them with poetry to “seize the day,” Robin Williams is all warmth and humor.

The plot is a simple one. John Keating (Williams) is the new English teacher at Welton Academy, a respected prep school steeped in oak-paneled tradition and determined to teach its young men “honor, discipline, and excellence.” Keating (a former student) will have none of it, though, and immediately abuses his position to teach his students to be reckless and, worst of all, insufferably self-indulgent.

As a response, the boys begin to break school rules, defy their parents, and devolve into pretentious, narcissistic bohemians who put a higher value on their own destructive self-actualization than anything else –  including their own futures. The young man most affected by all of this is Neil (Robert Sean Leonard), who comes from a loving home with a stern father, a self-made man who’s worked his butt off to give his son the opportunities he never had.

Thanks to Keating’s irresponsible nonsense, Neil lies to his father and accepts a part in a local community play. After he’s caught, Neil’s father decides to ship the defiant boy off to military school. With his head filled with Keating’s nonsense about “seizing the day” and how an unfulfilled life isn’t worth living, Neil blows his brains out in his father’s study.

In the end Keating gets fired, but the closing scene makes clear that the terrible influence this awful teacher had on his students is, tragically, a permanent one.

Obviously, the filmmakers and the film’s one-sided point of view don’t see these events in quite the same way I do. In fact, the story portrays Keating’s influence as a good thing, portrays narcissism as a virtue.

Which is why I hate “Dead Poets Society.”

Both Blu-rays are set for release Jan. 17, and are available for pre-order at Amazon here and here.

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“Two” welcomes Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, Pink, Hank Azaria and Sofia Vergara to the celebrated cast, while Elijah Wood and Robin Williams return (and Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman float on).

Tap-dancing penguin Mumble (Wood) is back and is now a group leader in his community. He is also a new father to cutie penguin Erik (Ava Acres), who is desperately trying to fit in by following his father’s footsteps but is stumbling along the way.

Once an outsider for his dancing, Mumble discovers quickly that coaching Erik to unleash his own talents isn’t easy, nor is being a parent a snap. Mumble’s mate Gloria (a singing showcase for Pink) encourages him to give their little guy some time before pressuring him to find himself.

After Mumble’s terrible pep talk, Erik decides that he’s miserable enough to run away from home with two of his buddies, which seems very rushed considering it’s still the beginning of the film. Also, Erik appears to be a young boy, not a teenager, so the fact that he ran away seems a bit unusual as well.

Erik and his friends run into Ramon (a scene-stealing Williams) who takes them to his community where they all meet the high and mighty Sven (Azaria), a Swedish puffin that’s disguised himself as a “flying penguin.” Erik begins to look up to Sven as a father figure, while Mumble burns with jealousy. Mumble upsets his son even more by telling him “he will never be able to fly.”

Ramon continues his search for the perfect mate when love hits him in the face and he falls for the beautiful Carmen (Vergara). Of course Carmen resists Ramon at first and their back and forth relationship is a fun subplot in the film, one that I wanted to see more of.

As if the dispute between father and son isn’t enough, more tension erupts when climate change pushes a gigantic iceberg towards the neighborhood of penguins, trapping them in with some elephant seals and humans.

Will the Krill (Pitt) and Bill the Krill (Damon), a smart and thankful addition to the sequel, end up turning their subplot into a hilarious focal point of the film. The goofy duo embark on an idiotic adventure to prove that they are better than the rest of the bottom of the food chain and test what it’s like to be a predator. Sounds dumb, but it is downright genius and a save to the overall plot of the film.

Will and Bill the Krills stealing the show in ‘Happy Feet Two’

Pitt and Damon steal the show or at least seem to be having more fun than everyone else. Lucky for them, their storyline doesn’t lose steam like Mumble and Erik’s.

The original film doubles as a musical, as does “Two,” with an energetic performance of Queen and David Bowie’s “Under Pressure” featuring the entire cast of characters during the movie’s climax. For part “Two,” Pink sings the original song “Bridge of Light,” a tune which could garner a Best Song nomination come Oscar time.

Overall, “Happy Feet Two” is still an appropriate family friendly movie, but it lacks the energetic and charming storyline of the original.

In this episode, “NewsBusted” covers: President Obama, Government Bailouts, George W. Bush, Nancy Pelosi, Joseph Stalin, America’s Debt Ceiling, Robin Williams, Climategate, Porn Star Karaoke, Airlines, and the Super Bowl.

In the film, Robin Williams plays Dan, a divorced man who is great friends with his business partner Charlie, played by John Travolta. After Charlie takes Dan out for the aforementioned wild evening, that night becomes fodder for business clients during sales meetings. However, several years after the event takes place, Dan is told suddenly that he has two children that he has to take care of as their mother serves a couple of weeks of prison time for a minor offense. The premise of a father bonding after time apart is nothing new and unfortunately, the movie does not provide a lot of laughs from the idea.

Many of the jokes are crude and most of them fall flat. From the story of the wild night together to tasteless humor about an actual old dog, the comedic bits are tired and disappointing and they are often introduced through ridiculous plot twists. After the first part of the movie, though, there are a few comedic moments that made me and the audience I was watching with laugh out loud, including a funny bit about the comedic side effects of certain pills and penguin attacks from a zoo. However, those few laughs do not compensate for the rest of this film.

The movie, like many family-friendly films before, does feature some positive themes about fatherhood. Eventually, both Dan and Charlie discover the joys that come from having children. Both businessmen realize what the kids mean to them and both develop as characters because of that. The theme is a solid one but the movie wastes it with crude humor and not enough comedy.

“Old Dogs” comes with a solid class of actors including its two leads, Travolta and Williams. Kelly Preston, Rita Wilson and Seth Green also join the fun as supporting characters. These actors have all had solid roles before but they are wasted in this often unfunny picture.

Many families will likely go to see “Old Dogs” this weekend and some will likely enjoy some of the crude humor. However, there are smarter and funnier movies that could have been made with the same overall concept than this and those films would have succeeded far better than. Unfortunately, these “old dogs” have not yet learned any new tricks.

In “World’s Greatest Dad,” the recently-released, extremely dark and sometimes perverse new comedy from writer-director Bobcat Goldthwait (we know, we’re just as surprised as you), Clayton (Robin Williams) is the epitome of the put-upon, browbeaten modern middle-class American man. He’s a high-school poetry teacher with hardly any students, a girlfriend who’s afraid to be seen in public with him, and a son named Kyle (played with an amazing level of scorn by Daryl Sabara) who surely must rank as the foulest, most awful teenager in the history of movies. 

Lance does have dreams of greatness, however. In fact, he’s in the middle of sending off his fifth novel for agent consideration, even though he’s never been published before. But ** SPOILER ALERT ** one night, after finding his son dead from a bout of autoerotic asphyxiation that occurred while watching porn on this computer, Lance suddenly feels a unique burst of inspiration: in order to cover up the shame of his son’s actual cause of death, he moves Kyle’s body, re-hangs him in his closet and writes the perfect suicide note so that the policeman who finds him will think that it was just another, normal teenage suicide. 

But when the note is leaked to his high school newspaper, Kyle is quickly embraced as a misunderstood saint rather than the most misanthropic monster in the building. And with a newfound discovery of his writing’s potential for power, Lance quickly builds lie upon lie, creating an entire book of Kyle’s faux “journals” and watching his words take flight among all of Kyle’s newfound “fans.” ** END SPOILER ** 

With “Dad,” which caused a sensation last January at the Sundance Film Festival, Goldthwait accomplishes several remarkable feats. He manages to take a detestable subject, death by auto-erotic asphyxiation, and still deal with it in a way that won’t drive people from the theater. 

He also pulls out a stunning performance from Williams that easily ranks among the Oscar-winner’s career best. Conveying everything from drudgery to wild-eyed glee with a dollop of perfectly placed tragedy in between, Williams shows that when he wants to apply himself, he’s still one of the most daring and unpredictable actors in the business. 

Goldthwait manages not only to completely reinvent his image from its prior heyday as a B-grade, one-note comedic weirdo with a screechy voice and claim a spot as an astute observer of modern American life whose best qualities easily fit in the canon of the character-based classic comedies of the late, great writer-director Hal Ashby. 

But most important of all, Goldthwait has created a film comedy that offers plenty of fodder for deeper consideration. For even as Lance Clayton manages to deify his son through the falsely glowing tribute of a suicide note, the movie quietly yet firmly points the finger at each and every audience member as well – asking them if they want to laugh or cry, believe or disbelieve in Kyle’s sudden appearance of saintliness. 

While “World’s Greatest Dad” was shot last year in Seattle and debuted in January, its amazingly prescient script addresses a question that all of America should be asking in a summer overshadowed by the deaths of two controversial American icons, Michael Jackson and Teddy Kennedy: Just because someone with a vile or highly questionable past dies, does that suddenly mean we have to make them a saint?

Like any great film, “World’s Greatest Dad” doesn’t have all the answers, but at least it’s asking the right questions.

Looking back at The Karate Kid (1984), which turned twenty-five years old this week, a thought keeps recurring.

Wow. . . Avildsen made it work twice.

John G. Avildsen is, in some ways, a director of little distinction when compared with well-known marquee names like Spielberg, Scorsese, Nolan, and Tarantino. The vast majority of his movies are utterly forgotten by the average filmgoer — indeed, he’s been nominated for Worst Director at The Razzies three times. And yet, like Victor Fleming decades earlier with his twin successes The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind (both 1939 — read a great recent article on Fleming here), Avildsen has twice punched way above his weight, netting himself an Oscar for Best Director and giving birth to some of the most memorable moments in motion picture history.

His first triumph, made on a shoestring budget and a scant few weeks of shooting time, was a little picture called Rocky (1976). He had no money, no stars, no amazing effects, and yet Avildsen used camera, music, and editing to craft scenes of immense power and impact. Has there ever been a film, before or since, that ends on a more rousing wave of uplift? That takes such pains to create identification and empathy with its wide array of characters? That more patiently or expertly builds up to its cataclysmic swell of emotion? That has the guts and sense of timing to fade to black at the exact peak, frustrating our desire to know what happens next even as it leaves us too blissful to care?

Rocky did all of that and much more, and despite its fight scenes now looking like slow-mo hokum compared to the MMA-style mayhem that now rules on TV, it remains the most memorable and effective boxing film ever made. That’s really saying something, given the immense amount of solid competition the genre boasts.

But as other directors began ineptly looting and mimicking Avildsen’s style and innovations, it looked as if everything that made Rocky great would quickly become so cliché as to make a repeat impossible. We all know that sinking feeling when we begin perceiving the clunky wheels of the typical “Hollywood sports plot” turning — that excruciatingly slow crawl towards the utterly predictable final showdown, where the very last seconds of a contest are shamelessly milked until the hero finally hits the last shot/punch/goal/basket. Even the Rocky sequels couldn’t escape these pitfalls, and it would be hard to blame an audience for glumly concluding that Avildsen’s 1976 artistic triumph had spoiled the sports movie for all time.

So who would have guessed that, eight years later, Avildsen would essentially pull off the same trick again? How on earth did he once again make a Rocky-style plot arc work, without the end result becoming a pale pastiche?

He achieved this feat in large part by turning everything we remember from Rocky on its head. Ralph Macchio’s Daniel Larusso is played not as a thickheaded lummox, but as a fast-thinking, bone-skinny teen whose nasal Jersey whine sounds more like Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer than Sylvester Stallone. He’s neither a down-and-out fighter with his best years behind him, nor is he looking to “go the limit” to prove something profound to himself. He’s just a kid at the very beginning of his adult life, who for most of the film limits his ambition to simply not getting beat up. Similarly, Elizabeth Shue’s Ali Mills is light years away from Talia Shire’s Adrian Pennino: rich instead of poor, charming rather than an ugly duckling, sociable not shy. And Pat Morita’s unforgettable Mr. Miyagi isn’t washed up or pathetically ambitious like Burgess Meredith’s Mickey Goldmill — he’s the very epitome of contentment and balance and wisdom.

Rocky achieved its verisimilitude with generous dollops of grime, rust, blood and profanity, whereas The Karate Kid is notable for its relative wholesomeness (note how Elizabeth Shue even wears a one-piece swimsuit to the beach instead of the obligatory teen-movie bikini). The music marks yet another telling departure. Rocky’s iconic score, by Bill Conti, was a mix of 1970s funk, heroic brass, and a choir acting as a Greek chorus, all combined into a sonic brew that still ranks as one of the most recognizable and rousing in film history. For The Karate Kid, Conti was once again brought in as the composer. But this time, in between pop songs like Bananarama’s “Cruel Summer,” he chose a light mix of delicate strings, only occasionally allowing them to burst forth into full orchestral splendor. For the training montage, Conti completely eschews Rocky’s reliance on trumpeting brass and instead opts for the lonely skirling of Gheorghe Zamfir’s pan flute, creating a more spiritual and intimate vibe.

Avildsen’s camera, for its part, is probing and observant, often making excellent use of telephoto lenses to highlight what would otherwise be a missed reaction or expression. He achieves true poetry in the training scenes: on the beach among the circling cranes, on the lake amidst glittering golden waters, and even in the fights and strategies that pulse through the climactic tournament. He also warred with the studio when necessary to protect certain crucial scenes, such as the one where a drunken Miyagi reveals his service in WWII to Daniel. That one adds a whole new layer of depth to what was already a touching and authentic relationship, and yet the studio wanted it cut, deeming it superfluous.

On top of all that, the excellent screenplay by Robert Mark Kamen (who distinguished himself more recently by penning the immensely satisfying kidnap flick Taken) consistently leads Avildsen down novel paths. The teen villains of the story (portrayed by, among others, Steve McQueen’s son Chad and Elizabeth Shue’s brother Andrew) are refreshingly human, at times even gaining our sympathy. Unlike the usual faceless, gormless teens in Hollywood fare, this group is delineated exceedingly well, and remain recognizable as individuals even when hiding behind Ray Harryhausen-esque skeleton makeup in a genuinely chilling night scene. Kamen fleshed out his bad guys so well that the Cobra Kais, led outside the dojo by actor William Zabka’s smirking blond-haired bad boy Johnny Lawrence, now have a sizable fan following among Karate Kid aficionados. One admirer even made a clever YouTube re-edit of the final fight so that Johnny wins:

Meanwhile, a band called No More Kings has made a song about the redemption of Johnny called “Sweep the Leg,” with a fun “Karate Kid continuation” music video written and directed by Zabka himself:

In interviews, Zabka has expressed pleasant surprise that The Karate Kid remains so alive in the popular culture, calling it a “sacred film” and noting that there are even Cobra Kai bowling teams out there. It’s enough to convince me that The Karate Kid II should have been all about Miyagi reforming the Cobra Kais, slowly rehabilitating them into good guys.

In so many ways, Avildsen’s 1984 film is courageous in the way it deviates from the instantly recognizable Rocky formula. How strong must the pressure have been on Avildsen to make the easy, safe choices, mimicking his earlier masterpiece in every detail? His resistance to those impulses does him credit, and hence to dismiss The Karate Kid as a mere Rocky clone is to do it an injustice.

But if there is one overriding secret to the success of The Karate Kid, it is the transcendent performance of Pat Morita as Mr. Miyagi. In 1984, most Americans still conceived of the East, at least in cinematic terms, as a mystical wonderland of Kung-Fu magic and swordplay. Hong Kong directors like Jackie Chan, Sammo Hung, John Woo, Tsui Hark, and Ringo Lam were only beginning to create the explosion of masterful, modernized pictures that would eventually change the entire way the world looked at Asians on film. It’s hard to remember how utterly fresh a character like Mr. Miyagi was to 1984 audiences, completely unexposed as they were to the renaissance happening in Hong Kong. Fully fleshed out, with a compelling backstory and potent motivations, he was written as charmingly colloquial and disheveled, a character who could consistently shatter the stereotype of the “magic Asian” to raucously humorous effect.

Almost always in American cinema — to this day — Asian protagonists are depicted as cardboard caricatures at best and laughingstocks at worst. Avildsen rejected the initial front-runner for the part of Miyagi — the great Japanese actor Toshirô Mifune — and instead bet his entire film on the talents of a thoroughly Americanized stand-up comedian, one who in his salad days used to bill himself in comedy clubs as “the Hip Nip.” Comedians have a strangely robust record of shining in good dramatic roles — think Robin Williams, Bill Murray, Jim Carrey, Tom Hanks, Billy Crystal, Steve Martin, et al. — and they often manage to strike a solid balance between laughs and drama. Morita did exactly that in The Karate Kid: affecting just the right Japanese accent, leavening his character’s power and seriousness with just enough comedy, and always figuring out ways to make you laugh with Miyagi instead of at him.

If you haven’t seen The Karate Kid in awhile, you’re in for a treat — Mr. Miyagi was no fluke, he remains one of the most winning characters in the history of cinema. It was the role of a lifetime for Morita, who garnered a well-deserved Oscar nomination (as it happened, he lost that year to Haing S. Ngor in The Killing Fields, who himself became the first Asian to win an acting Oscar). Any number of others would have played Miyagi as either an embarrassing joke or an irremediably grim Samurai grandmaster. But in his every glare, mannerism, and pose, Morita elevates the character into a veritable Gandalf. Look closely at the scene when he bows gravely to a shocked Daniel (who has just discovered that his hated chores were actually important lessons), or when towards the end he smacks his hands together with such orchestra-enhanced thunder that the audience jumps. In those moments The Karate Kid — so often seen as an also-ran and afterthought to Rocky — breaks away from that film’s orbit and soars free all on its own.

So Avildsen pulled it off not once, but twice — I still can’t believe it. And if he never makes another great movie, he can still sit back and rest easy, secure in the knowledge that two of the very best fight pictures ever made have his name on them. That he did both of them on such low budgets should give hope to conservative filmmakers who assume liberal Hollywood will never give them a chance. There is nothing in The Karate Kid that couldn’t be accomplished on a micro-budget — all you would need is the gumption to dream up the script.

But will anyone take on the challenge, as Avildsen did those many years ago? Only time will tell. Until then: wax on, wax off. . . wax on, wax off. . . .

In a November 2007 radio interview I did on The Andrea Shea King Show with McMahon to talk about his then newly published book “When Television Was Young, Live, Spontaneous and in Living Black and White,” we talked about his life, and what it was like to share the NBC “Tonight Show” set with The King of Late Night.

McMahon was dealing with a bout of layrngitis, but it didn’t stop him from opening the interview with the famous words that announced to American viewers it was time for their eagerly anticipated nightly entertainment — “Heeere’s Johnny!”

Their Friendship

McMahon told of how he and Carson met.

“The first day I ever worked, I did a show with him called “Who Do You Trust” on ABC.  It was a quiz show, a game show in the afternoon, it was live, and he hosted it. He had another announcer, a fellow named Bill Nimmo who got his own show and he had to leave.   I came up and auditioned for the show and I got the job. Which was a wonderful, lucky happenstance for me.

“What happened was, on the very first show here I am a little nervous, you can imagine.  I’m doing the first show, and I’m replacing somebody.  I want to do a good job, and I’ve got a script in front of me and on this script it’s got these six responses of the day: “Swansdown Cake Mixes, the cake mixes you can trust.”  I have to read this.  Now, the audience at home doesn’t see me of course, but the audience in the theater does.  Johnny Carson comes over and sets fire to my script.  That’s the very first day I ever worked with him!

“Talk about buddies!  That kind of sealed us forever.  For at least thirty-seven years anyway.  And forty-seven years of friendship. But that sealed it. When he set fire to my script, I knew we were off and running, this is gonna be different than any other show I was on.  And then of course, when he got the Tonight Show he took me with him, which was another happenstance for me.  And we had thirty years of wonderful times on the Tonight Show.”

There never was a disagreement between them.  “We’d have dinner once a week or a couple of times a week.  We just became buddies.  We were like two kids kicking a can down the street, we just enjoyed each other, we liked to be with each other.”

The Funniest Bit

McMahon recalled the funniest moment on the show, the one that to this day holds the record for the longest sustained audience applause.

“Ed Ames had been a singer with his brothers, the Ames Brothers, then he went out on his own.  And then he went into acting. He got a job on a frontier show as an Indian.  And he was trying to show Johnny how you threw a tomahawk.  He was gonna throw a tomahawk at a cut-out we had.  We’d taken a piece of plywood and we’d drawn a cowboy outline on there in black chalk, full size.  You know, with the guns and the holsters and the vest and the badge, the ten-gallon hat and the boots.  Ed Ames was supposed to throw this hatchet, or tomahawk, at the target.  Now, he threw it and it struck the cowboy where no cowboy should be struck.  Especially if he plans on having a family.

“Johnny had three of the greatest lines ever — ad libs.  And to give you an idea of how sharp he was, Ed Ames of course is embarrassed and wants to go and retrieve the tomahawk.  There it is with the handle sticking out.  You can imagine what that looked like.  Anyway, Johnny grabbed him.  He knew that he had gold.  And when the laughter subsided a little bit, he said, ‘I didn’t even know you were Jewish’.

“More laughter.  And then when that subsided, he said, ‘Welcome to the Frontier Bris’.

“And it’s not over yet. Wait a minute. Because Ed Ames was so nervous he said, ‘Do you want to try it Johnny?’  Johnny looked at Ed Ames, he looked at the poor cowboy with the hatchet sticking out and he said, ‘Well, I couldn’t hurt him anymore than you did.’

“That was like in the third year, so that kind of gave us a definition of where we were headed on the “Tonight Show.” I think that exemplified to the audience what was going to happen for the future, so twenty-seven years later, they didn’t want him to say goodbye.  They didn’t want us to leave.  They wanted us to stay right there.”

May 22, 1992 – The Goodbye

“There were really two closing nights.  The next to the last show was really the last show.  That was where Bette Midler sang to him and Robin Williams was his crazy, wonderful self.  But that last show was like a compilation of all of the bits that had happened over the years, and we saw some of the people on the screen that had left us, who are no longer around.  And we saw a lot of the good stuff that had happened, and it was just like a big basketful of goodies.

“But the night before is the one people think as the last show, and that’s where Bette Midler sang that wonderful song — a parody of  ‘One for my Baby, one more for the Road.’   And at one point she said — and I think this exemplifies the thirty years of the Tonight Show — she said, ‘And all the class that you showed.’  And boy, did he have class when he did that show!

“They called him the King of Late Night, and as far as I’m concerned, he’s still the King of Late Night.

Carson’s Foil

“I loved being the second banana.  You know, it’s quite a challenging role.  The whole idea is that you have to be in when you’re needed, and out of the way when you’re not needed.  And that’s kind of like a tightrope walker, that’s a balancing act to try to do it right.  And hopefully I did it right all those years because he didn’t say, ‘Let’s get another guy.’   He kept me.

“We knew each other, we saw each other, we had fun together, and it translated itself onto the screen.  I think people knew that.  In fact, on that next to the last show, he commented about that.  He said, ‘You know, a lot of couplings on television aren’t really good friends.’  You know what happened with Martin and Lewis.  I’m told that the Marx Brothers didn’t hang out together.  Abbott and Costello apparently were not good friends.  I don’t know.  But he said, ‘We are good friends.  We go out to dinner, we have fun together, we enjoy each other.’  And it’s true.  We just had a good time together.”

The Brigadier General

Not many people know that McMahon flew 85 combat missions in two wars.

“Well, the very first show I was on was a play I was in.  I was going to Catholic University in Washington right after World War II.  I was a Marine fighter pilot in World War Two and a test pilot.  I taught carrier landings and so forth.  But anyway, the war was over, and I wanted to continue my education.  I had been in Boston College for a year and a half and I got an OK to go to Catholic University and I studied drama and speech.  I was in a play that was broadcast from Washington, through Philadelphia to New York, in 1947.  That’s how far back I go. And it was the first use of the coaxial cable which took programming through a city, which never happened before.

“Then in 1949, Sept. 12th, a Monday, I started in Philadelphia on a show called “Take Ten”, that was the call letters, you know, the number of the station — WCAU in Philly — and there I was, host of a three-hour daily live variety show… I was the producer, I was the make-up man, I swept up the studio, whatever you had to do.  I was on the air from 12 to 3, and I was the happiest man in North America.

“I had thirteen different shows — on the air thirteen different shows a week.  Unbelievable!

“I was called back for the Korean war and off I went for a year and a half, but when I got back I went right into the same station.

“The California Air National Guard named me a Bigadier General, an honorary position, but in the Marine Corps, I got to be a full bird, what they call a full bird, a colonel.  And I’m very proud of that, and I’m very proud of my career in the Marines.  I had six years, two wars, 85 combat missions, so I’m very proud of that.”

Hollywood Then

“It’s not the same, no it’s not.  It’s unfortunate.You know, in World War Two, even in Korea, everyone was kind of involved.  They called Korea the ‘forgotten war’ but still, everybody had someone, a cousin or somebody that was in the war, and in World War Two, everybody was in the war — the Gold Star mothers, you know, everybody was involved.  We had certain restrictions and rules we had to abide by and it was a different situation.

“Unfortunately now, it’s tumbled into a thing almost like Vietnam again where these boys coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan — they should be honored as well and it disappoints me that they’re not.”

Fade to black

We went on to talk briefly about his book and with that, his faltering voice faded and he said goodnight.

McMahon was gold, and to Carson’s credit, he recognized it and kept him close by.  Sadly, we’ll never see the likes of the late night duo again.  Ed’s passing marks the end of a sparkling era in late night TV.

Goodnight, Ed McMahon.  Thank you for everything.

Two weeks ago, I did a story about how the Broadway show “Avenue Q” held a contest to find a lyric as funny as “George Bush is only for now.” Calls to the theater assured me that keeping the lyric Presidential wasn’t even an option. Your Mother in Law, This Show, Prop. 8 and Recession were the lines the producers were hoping to pay off.

My friend Jane Shaffmaster, who alerted me to the contest, sent this link today. The contest is now officially over. According to the article, the show’s producers “have dismissed the contest’s winning lyrics except for Prop 8 [is only for now]—which will still be used during the tour’s California dates.”

Well that makes sense. Outside of California and the gay community, most of America has no clue what Prop 8 is. The theatrical community is far more familiar with the proposition than the rest of America, and was likely surprised when the lyric didn’t get the response they sought. I’m sure the show was disrupted more than once when Lorraine from Kansas (who just dumped a hundred bucks to see a puppet show) leaned over to a friend and whispered, “What’s a ‘prop-eight?’”

So what did they decide to use? The winning lyric is: ”George Bush WAS only for now.”

Brilliant. I guess like “South Pacific” and “Bye-Bye Birdie,” some vintage musical theater is better when presented in the time frame that it was originally written. “Avenue Q” will now be forever remembered as a Bush-era production, although the impact has noticeably waned. ”We now know that although George Bush’s presidency was only for now,” show creator, Robert Lopez noted, ”the comic potential of ‘George Bush’ seems like it may last forever.”

And for some of us, it seems like it already has. 

For more information on Tim Slagle check out TimSlagle.com