TV's Grooviest Variety Shows (of the '60s and '70s)' is an irresistible page-turning account of TV's greatest and goofiest variety shows of the psychedelic 1960s and '70s. Designed to be browser-friendly, the book covers the main shows of the era?Ed Sullivan, Lawrence Welk, Dean Martin, the Smothers Brothers, 'Laugh-In, ' Flip Wilson, 'Sonny and Cher, ' 'Midnight Special, ' classic 'Saturday Night Live' (1975-80), 'SCTV, ' and 'The Muppets.' Each of these key chapters is fast-moving and fun, with quick, easy-to-skim sidebars like Memorable Moments,"" ""Quotable Quotes,"" and ""Bloopers & Breakups,"" plus a brisk narrative of the show's behind-the-scenes dramas, cast, and history.""

For the few hundred television viewers in 1946, a special treat on the broadcast schedule was the variety show called Hour Glass. It was the first TV program to go beyond talking heads, cooking demonstrations, and sporting events, featuring instead dancers, comics, singers, and long commercials for its sponsor, Chase and Sanborn coffee. Within two years, another variety show, Texaco Star Theatre, became the first true television hit and would be credited with the sales of thousands of television sets. The variety show formula was a staple of television in its first 30 years, in part because it lent itself to a medium where everything had to be live and preferably inside a studio. Most of the early television stars--including Jackie Gleason, Milton Berle, Sid Caesar, Ed Sullivan, Red Skelton, Dinah Shore, and Arthur Godfrey--rose to prominence through weekly variety shows. In the 1960s, major stars such as Jerry Lewis, Dean Martin, Judy Garland and Danny Kaye were hosting variety shows. By the 1970s, the format was giving way to sitcoms and dramas, but pop music stars Sonny and Cher, Tony Orlando and Dawn, and Donny and Marie Osmond hosted some of the last of the species. This book details 57 variety shows from the 1940s through the 1990s. A history of each show is first provided, followed by a brief look at each episode. Air date, guest stars, sketches performed, and a listing of songs featured are included.

The Encyclopedia of Sixties Cool profiles over 250 of the most intriguing personalities of the 1960s. The men and women covered in the book include a wide range of celebrities—from well-known superstars (the Beatles, Dustin Hoffman, Muhammad Ali) to lesser-known icons (Nico, Terry Southern, Bo Belinsky)—who had a significant impact on popular culture. The figures include musicians, actors, directors, artists, athletes, politicians, writers, astronauts . . . anyone and everyone who made the sixties the most influential decade of the twentieth century! Over 200 vintage photographs and more than fifty sidebars are featured throughout the text. The sidebars include lists of Best Picture winners, great quarterbacks, Playmates of the Year, memorable TV theme songs, favorite toys, Disneyland rides, Wimbledon champions, groovy screen cars, surf stars, Indy 500 winners, cool cartoons, sci-fi classics, Bond girls, “bubblegum” hits, beach-movie cameos, and legendary concerts. A “what happened on this day” calendar highlighting landmark events in the lives of those profiled appears on every page. Entertaining and enlightening, The Encyclopedia of Sixties Cool is truly a celebration of the grooviest people, events, and artifacts of the 1960s!

From the most popular routines and the most ingenious physical shtick to the snappiest wisecracks and the most biting satire of the last century, Make 'Em Laugh illuminates who we are as a nation by exploring what makes us laugh, and why. Authors Laurence Maslon and Michael Kantor draw on countless sources to chronicle the past century of American comedy and the geniuses who created and performed it-melding biography, American history, and a lotta laughs into an exuberant, important book. Each of the six chapters focuses a different style or archetype of comedy, from the slapstick pratfalls of Buster Keaton and Lucille Ball through the wiseguy put-downs of Groucho Marx and Larry David, to the incendiary bombshells of Mae West and Richard Pryor . And at every turn the significance of these comedians-smashing social boundaries, challenging the definition of good taste, speaking the truth to the powerful-is vividly tangible. Make 'Em Laugh is more than a compendium of American comic genius; it is a window onto the way comedy both reflects the world and changes it-one laugh at a time. Starting from the groundbreaking PBS series, the authors have gone deeper into the works and lives of America's great comic artists, with biographical portraits, archival materials, cultural overviews, and rare photos. Brilliantly illustrated, with insights (and jokes) from comedians, writers and producers, along with film, radio, television, and theater historians, Make 'Em Laugh is an indispensible, definitive book about comedy in America.

This informative two-volume set provides readers with an understanding of the fads and crazes that have taken America by storm from colonial times to the present. Entries cover a range of topics, including food, entertainment, fashion, music, and language. Why could hula hoops and TV westerns only have been found in every household in the 1950s? What murdered Russian princess can be seen in one of the first documented selfies, taken in 1914? This book answers those questions and more in its documentation of all of the most captivating trends that have defined American popular culture since before the country began. Entries are well-researched and alphabetized by decade. At the start of every section is an insightful historical overview of the decade, and the set uniquely illustrates what today's readers have in common with the past. It also contains a Glossary of Slang for each decade as well as a bibliography, plus suggestions for further reading for each entry. Students and readers interested in history will enjoy discovering trends through the years in such areas as fashion, movies, music, and sports.

*Includes pictures *Includes the stars' quotes about their lives and careers *Includes a bibliography for further reading “I wanted to be Stan Laurel, then I wanted to be Fred Astaire and then Captain Kangaroo. I actually started out as a radio announcer when I was 17 and never left the business, so that's literally 70 years.” – Dick Van Dyke “I'm Mary Tyler Moore and I am…an actress, an animal lover, the chairman of the Juvenile diabetes Research Foundation, the wife of Dr. Robert Levine…Suffice it to say there are a lot of ways to end that sentence, and I don't think I've come close to living through all the possibilities, thank heavens. But what I do know is that in every role I am a devotee of laughter and tears, committed to expressing the nuances of each.” – Mary Tyler Moore If television was still coming into its own during the 1950s, it truly became a national phenomenon across America in the 1960s, and in an era where most Americans finally owned a television, one of the most popular shows on the air was The Dick Van Dyke Show. The show starred Van Dyke as a middle class writer who worked on a television show, and it also helped catapult Mary Tyler Moore (who played his wife) to superstardom and her own hit show, The Mary Tyler Moore Show. To this day, it is widely considered one of the greatest television shows in history, and Dick Van Dyke remains best known for it, but the show was merely the peak of a career that had already proven quite versatile. Van Dyke had long aspired to be in show business and even a television show host long before television was popular, and he got his start as a radio DJ when he was still in his early 20s. Always a fan of comedy, Van Dyke parlayed that into a comedy gig, and he then rode the success of his comedic performances to starring roles on Broadway. Van Dyke's skills and versatility ultimately helped make him a good choice to star in a television show in 1961, thus spawning the show that took his name. If anything, Mary Tyler Moore is now better known than Van Dyke, in part because her show was one of the most popular and influential shows of the '70s. Moore's show was the first mainstream television program to portray a single woman more focused on her job than her domestic life. Geoff Hammill wrote of the show, “As Mary Richards, a single woman in her thirties, Moore presented a character different from other single TV women of the time. She was not widowed or divorced or seeking a man to support her." Moore's show was so critically acclaimed that it won dozens of Emmy awards, holding a record for the most Emmy awards for nearly 25 years, and it was recently ranked one of the best shows of all time by the Writers Guild of America. The shows made Moore a superstar, and it's no surprise that she never had another show nearly as praised as the ones that brought her fame, but she had a long and storied career across TV, film, and Broadway. She has also participated in numerous charity endeavors and remains an activist well into her 70s.

Before establishing himself as the "master of disaster" with the 1970s films The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno, Irwin Allen created four of television's most exciting and enduring science-fiction series: Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Lost in Space, The Time Tunnel and Land of the Giants. These 1960s series were full of Allen's favorite tricks, techniques and characteristic touches, and influenced other productions from the original Star Trek forward. Every science-fiction show owes something to Allen, yet none has equaled his series' pace, excitement, or originality. This detailed examination and documentation of the premise and origin of the four shows offers an objective evaluation of every episode--and demonstrates that when Irwin Allen's television episodes were good, they were great, and when they were bad, they were still terrific fun.