Exactly how did this piece of crap last nine seasons? I suppose the time slot was a big asset, but it's not like the quality of the show ever improved much beyond unwatchable.
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The Mystery of "Alice"
- Thread starter BD Sullivan
- Start date
I never watched it but I have noticed something about Classic TV shows in general.....they don't generally air well decades beyond their initial airing. Lots of reasons why but I think most of the criticism is because each show has to be compared to its own time. Just like it would be unfair to judge our distant ancestors by today's standards, the culture surrounding those old TV shows has changed so much a lot of it isn't relevant or understandable or humorous today. I'm 74 and have lived through the Golden Age of Television yet it is very difficult for me to watch some of my old favorites today. Someone younger might miss the program intent altogether.
Parenthetically, just yesterday I asked my 31 year old daughter who Mick Jaggar was. She had no idea.
Several days ago I tried watching a Laurel & Hardy movie. They are among my most treasured memories from my youth. But this movie was so slow and predictable I actually went to sleep watching. In the old days I would have been laughing so hard I would have risked losing my lunch.
We live in a very different world today. Those old shows belong to another era.
Most shows from the past don't stand the test of time. Many are entertaining, to be sure, but only a few classics truly endure. That's why I Love Lucy, The Honeymooners, The Andy Griffith Show, and a few others are still aired on broadcast TV: Those shows are timeless.
But Antenna TV, et al, air too many shows from the Good Old Days that are either anachronisms like Father Knows Best (which was hokey even in its day), so topical that they make little sense today, such as Johnny Carson reruns (Why do we need to hear Nixon, Ford, and Reagan jokes in 2019?), All In The Family, The Jeffersons, Maude, and Murphy Brown, or are as just plain bad today as they were when they first aired, like The Joey Bishop Show. At least they don't air My Mother The Car, Mister Terrific, and It's About Time.
And as far as L&H go, I think they're still funny, but by the mid 1930s, they were aging to the point where it affected their comedy. The same was true, to a lesser extent, of the Marx Brothers post-1940. The only comedy act that remained funny as they got older was the Three Stooges, and even they had their limit (and the limit's name was Joe Besser).
Stick with cartoons. Other than the WW2-era releases, they still hold up. Even the 1930s B&W stuff like Betty Boop and early Popeye that haven't aired on TV since the mid 1960s.
At least they don't air My Mother The Car, Mister Terrific, and It's About Time.
Anymore.
BTW: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0LOWVFptf5Y
Joe DeRita wasn't much better, but at least he didn't object to getting smacked around--like Besser did.
Neither DeRita nor Besser was a good fit for The Stooges. So much of their comedy came because the Howard's (Shemp, Curly and Moe) were brothers. It didn't work when the third Stooge wasn't part of their family. Since Moe did virtually all of the management of The Stooges I would have loved to know what his thinking was replacing Shemp with DeRita and Besser. Perhaps he had been hit in the head too much by that time.
Never liked or understood Betty Boop but the last time I was in the UK Popeye cartoons were still being shown. I have never understood how a country of people who have the BBC could like Popeye.
The WB cartoons (and others made by Disney etc.) circa WWII are likely never to be released again due to politics/PC considerations. I'm glad I have my collection from many years ago. A lot of it was propaganda and some of it was very good.
I don't entirely agree. I'm not trying to imply that I'm a cultured person of great taste, or anything - but I thought Alice was crap at the time. It didn't help that it was created from an excellent theatrical film - Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore with Ellen Burstyn and Harvey Keitel. The only thing the two had in common was the diner and the "Mel" character, played by the same actor, who only had a few lines in the film.
There is another thread here about The Golden Girls, and how well it has aged. Somebody replying compared it to All in the Family which seems dated today because it was topical, and those topics are about 1970's politics. But AITF was an excellent show in its time - Alice was always crap.
I've seen Linda Lavin in other vehicles since then - usually in character parts, and she is quite good, so it wasn't her that was the problem...though in my opinion, she could not sing.
The main problem is that they simply went to the well again and again and again. Just have Flo says "Kiss my grits," Vera act like an airhead and rag on Mel about his lousy food and how cheap he was. Rinse, repeat.
Sometimes one can make a decades-long career by "going to the well" week after week. Jack Benny (he's cheap, he's 39, etc.), Burns and Allen (Gracie's an airhead, George is the straight man), Jackie Gleason (Yer goin' to the moon, Alice!) and countless others have done it, going back to the earliest days of movies, let alone radio and TV. It's the supporting cast and the writers that make it work, as well as the star(s). Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.
In the case of Alice, if Linda Lavin didn't have those fine comic actors supporting her, she would have been back on Barney Miller after one season. She was no different on her show than George Burns and Jerry Seinfeld were on theirs -- the straight man... er, woman in her case.
Betty Boop and the other early Fleischer sound cartoons introduced America to a lot of jazz musicians that they otherwise would never have been exposed to. Given that so many were African-American, I doubt that they ran much in the South.
As far as Popeye's popularity in the UK goes, I have no idea. Maybe spinach is a British delicacy.
They have historical value, but won't ever run on TV again. The generations that fought the war and watched the cartoons in theaters are almost gone. Plus, many of them are blatantly racist, especially toward the Japanese (German caricatures were usually limited to Hitler, Goering, and a few other well-known Nazis). It's completely understandable that we no longer see cartoons like Famous Studios' You're a Sap, Mister Jap! (Popeye) and others of its ilk.
Larry Fine wasn't related to the Howards. In fact, he had replaced Shemp in 1928, as part of Ted Healy's (who had grown up with the Horwitz/Howard brothers) stage act. Healy employed over 20 stooges, in groups of between 2 and 4, between 1922 and his death in 1937. Moe wasn't even with the act at the time Larry was hired (He'd left in 1925 to get married, and returned later in 1928 or early '29. I'm not sure which actor he replaced).
He wasn't given a choice. The Stooges' contract with Columbia Pictures mandated three stooges, not just Moe and Larry. In fact, after Shemp died in 1955, they hired actor Joe Palma to dress up as Shemp while they remade four earlier comedies with some new footage. That was where the term "Fake Shemp" came from.
Joe Besser was already under contract to Columbia. Joe DeRita (Moe's choice to replace Shemp) was not at the time.
Correction: Paul "Mousie" Garner, who had been a Healy stooge later in the 1930s, was Moe's first choice to replace Shemp. Unfortunately for Moe, Garner was working for Spike Jones at the time, and Jones wouldn't let him out of his contract. And since DeRita was working for the Minsky's burlesque circuit at the time, they had to hire Besser.
Speaking of Jones, one of his top comics, Peter James, had also been a Healy stooge in the late 1920s, using the stage name Bobby Pinkus. In fact, he was with Healy and Shemp when they discovered Larry Fine in 1928. Moe took credit for this in his autobiography (and said it was in 1925), but further research has proven this to be false.
I just KNEW someone would raise that!
In fact, if you look at the history of the Stooges (Moe, Curly and Larry) Larry was most often the odd man out. It didn't have to be that way though as he was a talented violin player and dancer (and amateur boxer) and almost none of that talent showed up in the Stooges slapstick. He did have an opportunity to display those talents when the Stooges went on stage at the various colleges.Thanks for more info on one of my favorite groups.
Did you also know that the Stooges (after Healy) never had a signed contract? It was all done by handshake for the rest of their careers. That takes an enormous amount of chuzpah in that industry! Probably never happen again.
I've heard that. I've also read that they worked on one-year written contracts, never getting a raise in their 23 years there. Given that Columbia Pictures was run by the Mobbed-up Harry Cohn, I'm sure the Stooges were in no position to argue, whichever it was. They made most of their money with their stage act, anyway.
I just KNEW someone would raise that!
Larry was the straight man for both the comedic bully (Moe) and the comedic fool (Curly, Shemp, Joe). He played his role to perfection, never stealing a scene, occasionally getting in a good line -- with Moe always getting the painful last word. There was one scene in which Curly has his head caught in a vise. Larry laughs and observes to Moe: "Looks like a V8." To which Moe responds, "Did you ever hear of a V5?" Larry: "What's that? A new car?" Moe: "No, it's an old sock!" Upon which Moe slaps Larry. That scene absolutely needed Larry to be memorable. There was no reason for him to be playing the violin or dancing in most of those shorts -- with the exception, of course, of "Punch Drunks," in which Curly as Kid Stradivarius needs to hear a fiddle tune to become an unbeatable boxer.
Kind of reminds me of the old Jerry Seinfeld line about the referee in pro wrestling being like Larry in The Three Stooges..."You don't really need him, but it's just not the same without him." (BTW, the fact that about 3/4 of the posts on this thread are about the Stooges indicates there's not really a lot to talk about regarding the original topic.)
OK, back to the original topic. Alice was a sitcom where three women and one man were the stars, unusual for its day. It was also about a woman who got divorced and had to start over, raising a kid on a waitress's wages.
The aftermath of divorce was a timely topic, since divorce went from being rare to commonplace in a short time. One Day at A Time, about a divorced woman, her two daughters and a male superintendent, ran from 1975 to 1984, while Alice ran from 1976 to 1986. I'd imagine more women than men were the fans of these shows.
And after all, this is a sitcom. Once you got the premise, you're not going to do much to shake it up. People are going to watch characters and situations they know and like.
The aftermath of divorce was a timely topic, since divorce went from being rare to commonplace in a short time. One Day at A Time, about a divorced woman, her two daughters and a male superintendent, ran from 1975 to 1984, while Alice ran from 1976 to 1986. I'd imagine more women than men were the fans of these shows.
And after all, this is a sitcom. Once you got the premise, you're not going to do much to shake it up. People are going to watch characters and situations they know and like.
Actually, the character (both in the movie and tv show) was a widow whose husband had been killed in a trucking accident
I seem to recall that in the film, it is established that Alice's husband (played by Harvey Keitel) is emotionally and physically abusive prior to his death.
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