Frankie Avalon at a mere 19 years of age, Milton Berle and Ed Wynn, long since passed...and we still have a copy, almost like viewing thru a time machine
Two pioneers of Television. Milton Berle and Ed Wynn. It's interesting to see them together. Milton of course was the first major television star and Ed hosted one of the first comedy-variety television shows
I was sad to know that Ed Wynn died on the day I was born (June 19, 1966). Milton and Ed were hilarious and goofy. They were both great. Frankie is a music legend. Awesome show.
Wow from "Eisenhower" to the growing population in the Los Angeles, it's so awesome to sway to the Frankie Avalon for longer than "40 minutes". Stay safe everyone!
Thanks for posting this it looks really great on my vintage color sets, that leaves me wanting so much more, do you by chance have any full-length programs?
Interesting to see how a younger Frankie Avalon appeared and sounded several years before those infamous "Beach Party" and "Beach Party"-derivative films. And as with Elvis Presley, the calculated film career of Avalon also served to water down even his music, but not that much. As with Paul Anka, Bobby Darin, Fabian Forte, Bobby Rydell, and others of their male crooner ilk of the late 1950s, the emphasis was more on being a junior league successor to Frank Sinatra than a real rock and roll singer. In the case of Pat Boone, perhaps the emphasis was on being a junior Perry Como or Bing Crosby. In any case, lightweight when compared with Presley and Ricky Nelson, who were also teen idols but the real rock & roll deals. I'll concede Darin's "Splish Splash" was somewhat more rock than pop. Also, nothing wrong with being a competently swinging pop singer of its own accord. But there certainly was a pretense, enabled by such promoters as Dick Clark, these teen idols (many of them, like Sinatra, of Italian-American ethnicity) such as Avalon were also rock & roll, which they really were not. By the way, I assume your RU-vid handle is a deliberate misspelling of the name of the Russian engineer Vladimir Zworykin, who is sometimes misattributed with the invention of television over the actual inventor, the American Philo T. Farnsworth. Zworykin was an employee of Radio Corporation of America (RCA) and its longtime president, David Sarnoff, who hired Zworykin to be in charge of TV development. It was Sarnoff's intent from the get-go to use NBC to sell RCA-manufactured TV sets, just as he had NBC Radio to sell RCA-made radios. Nothing wrong with that wonderful market venture plan, but also disingenuous to make his boy (Zworykin) out to be the Tom Edison of TV (which Sarnoff did, self-servingly) when he was not. I guess also those Eastern European emigres stuck together.