TV's Top 100 Episodes

Total Page:16

File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb

TV's Top 100 Episodes that takes corns off your feet.”) His long-suffering wife, Alice, tells him why it’s a terrible idea. His true-blue sidekick Ed Norton agrees to help June 15, 2009 him out and, inevitably, it all goes horribly, hilariously wrong. Ralph’s schemes always failed. The Honeymooners never did. TV’s Top 100 Ralph freezes on camera, unable to Episodes respond to Norton’s set-up question, “Tell me, oh Chef of the Future, can #7: The Honeymooners it core a apple.” The commercial ends with Ralph, humiliated, “Better Living Through TV” crashing through a backdrop and Norton left with nothing to say but, “And now back to Charlie Chan.” “The genius of Gleason’s Kramden,” says Till Death star Brad Garrett, who played Gleason in a 2002 CBS bio-pic, “was that his schemes and frustrations were always a byproduct of his desire to make a better life for him and Alice.” Original airdate: November 12, 1955 So she put up with his pipe dreams, not just the Handy Housewife Helper, but the no-cal pizza, the glow-in-the- If you want to understand the dark wallpaper, the uranium field in essence of The Honeymooners, and Asbury Park. She loved him in spite the generations of working-stiff of himself. “You can’t put your arms sitcoms it spawned – everything from around a memory,” Kramden says, The Flintstones to The King of threatening to walk out if Alice Queens and even Family Guy – this doesn’t go along with his latest bad is the episode where the magic idea. She just gives him that look ingredients are visible in their purest and says, “I can’t even put my arms form: Jackie Gleason’s blustery and around you.” self-deluding Ralph Kramden comes up with a sure-fire plan to make easy But she does. Every time. money, -- in this case the selling, via tv commercial, of a gadget called the Joe Rhodes is a Los Angeles-based Handy Housewife Helper. (“It cores freelance writer. ©2009 joebo apples, it scales fish, it sharpens productions. scissors and there’s a little thing here .
Recommended publications
  • Ll Be Your Huckleberry
    I’ll Be Your Huckleberry It is amazing what will spark a memory. I was transferring a client’s film today and the Christmas scene that appeared on the screen was of a young boy who had just received an inflatable punching bag in the image of Huckleberry Hound. I had one of those. And I certainly remember Hanna-Barbera’s Huckleberry Hound being a favorite cartoon when I was growing up. But my memory played a trick on me. I would have sworn that the Huckleberry Hound Show that I watched as a youngster consisted of three segments: Huckleberry himself; Yogi Bear and Boo-Boo (whose segment eventually became more popular than those of the titular star); and (I thought) Quick Draw McGraw with his sidekick “bing bing bing” Ricochet Rabbit. But I was wrong. Quick Draw had his own show. The third segment for Huck, as he is familiarly known to his young fans, involved a pair of mice, Pixie and Dixie, and the object of their abuse, the cat Mr. Jinx. Just goes to show how memories can tend to distort and blend together over time. A few trivia tidbits about this cartoon from my past: Huckleberry Hound debuted in 1958 and featured a slow moving, slow talking blue dog who held a multitude of jobs and always seemed to succeed due to either luck or an obstinate persistence. Huck was voiced by Daws Butler who also provided the voices for Wally Gator, Yogi Bear, Quick Draw McGraw, and Snagglepuss. Daws Butler fashioned the voice of Yogi Bear after Art Carney’s portrayal of Ed Norton in The Honeymooners.
    [Show full text]
  • Retrofuture Hauntings on the Jetsons
    City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works Publications and Research Queens College 2020 No Longer, Not Yet: Retrofuture Hauntings on The Jetsons Stefano Morello CUNY Graduate Center How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/qc_pubs/446 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] de genere Rivista di studi letterari, postcoloniali e di genere Journal of Literary, Postcolonial and Gender Studies http://www.degenere-journal.it/ @ Edizioni Labrys -- all rights reserved ISSN 2465-2415 No Longer, Not Yet: Retrofuture Hauntings on The Jetsons Stefano Morello The Graduate Center, City University of New York [email protected] From Back to the Future to The Wonder Years, from Peggy Sue Got Married to The Stray Cats’ records – 1980s youth culture abounds with what Michael D. Dwyer has called “pop nostalgia,” a set of critical affective responses to representations of previous eras used to remake the present or to imagine corrective alternatives to it. Longings for the Fifties, Dwyer observes, were especially key to America’s self-fashioning during the Reagan era (2015). Moving from these premises, I turn to anachronisms, aesthetic resonances, and intertextual references that point to, as Mark Fisher would have it, both a lost past and lost futures (Fisher 2014, 2-29) in the episodes of the Hanna-Barbera animated series The Jetsons produced for syndication between 1985 and 1987. A product of Cold War discourse and the early days of the Space Age, the series is characterized by a bidirectional rhetoric: if its setting emphasizes the empowering and alienating effects of technological advancement, its characters and its retrofuture aesthetics root the show in a recognizable and desirable all-American past.
    [Show full text]
  • Read Book ~ the Honeymooners / N0RZTCG37RWN
    UVPQH2JPRGIG > PDF ~ The Honeymooners The Honeymooners Filesize: 7.6 MB Reviews Basically no phrases to describe. I was able to comprehended everything out of this published e ebook. You can expect to like the way the author compose this ebook. (Mrs. Novella Will) DISCLAIMER | DMCA 2VVAAEUPGVRZ > eBook // The Honeymooners THE HONEYMOONERS To download The Honeymooners PDF, please follow the button below and save the file or have accessibility to other information which might be relevant to THE HONEYMOONERS ebook. Wayne State University Press. Paperback. Book Condition: new. BRAND NEW, The Honeymooners, David Sterritt, This title examines the cultural, historical, and artistic significance of the Honeymooners in the context of postwar American values. "The Honeymooners" chronicles the lives of New York City bus driver Ralph Kramden and his wife, Alice, as they search for domestic happiness inside a confining Brooklyn apartment. As a stand- alone television program, it ran for just thirty-nine weeks from 1955 to 1956, but its characters appeared in long-running sketches on Calvalcade of Stars and The Jackie Gleason Show and the program has lived on for generations in reruns and home video releases. David Sterritt investigates "The Honeymooners" as an enduring and valuable index of societal norms and televisual tastes in the 1950s - a project made all the more intriguing by the diverse ways in which "The Honeymooners" both reairms and diverges from the typical broadcast idioms of its day. With chapter headings borrowed from Honeymooners episode titles, this volume considers the program's cultural, historical, and artistic dimensions in connection with the values of postwar America at large.
    [Show full text]
  • Richard Butsch a HALF CENTURY of CLASS and GENDER In
    Butsch, Richard. « A Half Century of Class and Gender in American TV Domestic Sitcoms », Cercles 8 (2003) : 16-34 <www.cercles.com>. ©Cercles 2003. Toute reproduction, même partielle, par quelque procédé que ce soit, est interdite sans autorisation préalable (loi du 11 mars 1957, al. 1 de l’art. 40). ISSN : 1292-8968. Richard Butsch Rider University, Lawrenceville A HALF CENTURY OF CLASS AND GENDER in American TV Domestic Sitcoms Over a half-century of television, domestic situation comedies have reinforced images of the middle class as better than the working class. Similar inequalities have been portrayed for men versus women, black versus white, old versus young, and for other status hierarchies. Already embedded in the larger culture, these stereotypes are used to signify character types that advance dramatic goals. Nevertheless, the pervasiveness of network tele- vision and the persistence over five decades have contributed immeasurably to reproducing these same stereotypes. Women, for example, have been cast as main characters only where the subjects of romance or family are salient; they have been absent from rational discussions in scripts [Gerbner, 1972]. Women’s presence thus signals certain themes. Similarly, traits culturally associated with a lower status, applied to a person of higher status devalues that person. Men are devalued by characte- rizing them as feminine. Such status inversion can then effectively confirm other lower statuses held by the person. Female, black and lower-class adults have been devalued by characterizing them as child-like. Child-like attribu- tions undercut their adult status, confirming their lower status as female, black or lower-class.
    [Show full text]
  • The Audiences and Fan Memories of I Love Lucy, the Dick Van Dyke Show, and All in the Family
    Viewers Like You: The Audiences and Fan Memories of I Love Lucy, The Dick Van Dyke Show, and All in the Family Mollie Galchus Department of History, Barnard College April 22, 2015 Professor Thai Jones Senior Thesis Seminar 1 Table of Contents Acknowledgements..........................................................................................................................3 Introduction......................................................................................................................................4 Chapter 1: I Love Lucy: Widespread Hysteria and the Uniform Audience...................................20 Chapter 2: The Dick Van Dyke Show: Intelligent Comedy for the Sophisticated Audience.........45 Chapter 3: All in the Family: The Season of Relevance and Targeted Audiences........................68 Conclusion: Fan Memories of the Sitcoms Since Their Original Runs.........................................85 Bibliography................................................................................................................................109 2 Acknowledgments First, I’d like to thank my thesis advisor, Thai Jones, for guiding me through the process of writing this thesis, starting with his list of suggestions, back in September, of the first few secondary sources I ended up reading for this project, and for suggesting the angle of the relationship between the audience and the sitcoms. I’d also like to thank my fellow classmates in the senior thesis seminar for their input throughout the year. Thanks also
    [Show full text]
  • Blaxploitation and Its Contexts
    AMERICAN TELEVISION and CULTURE FILM 2153A Western University Department of Film Studies (2015) Screenings: Tuesdays 12:30-3:30pm (AHB-3B04) Lecture/Discussion: Thursdays 11:30-1:30pm (AHB-3B04) Dr. Joseph Wlodarz Email: [email protected] Office: AHB-ON60 Phone: 661-2111 x86164 Office Hours: Tuesdays 3-4 pm; Thursdays 1:30-2:30pm and by appt. COURSE DESCRIPTION Despite its pivotal role in postwar America, television has rarely been viewed as a medium worthy of serious critical attention. Long tainted by its commercial ties and mass audience, television has only recently acquired a degree of cultural esteem through its widely acclaimed cable programming (The Sopranos; Mad Men). This course will provide an introduction to the historical development, forms, and reception of television in the U.S., paying particular attention to the social element of the medium. We will thus explore television’s diverse audiences and analyze the various ways in which American culture has both shaped and been shaped by TV. In addition to a focus on key moments in the medium’s history, we will examine the distinctive elements of the televisual form (flow, liveness, seriality, advertising), TV’s key genres (soap, sitcom, drama, news, reality), modes of reception (fandom, distraction, time-shifting), and television’s construction and conception of social difference in America (representation and narrowcasting strategies). Key topics of discussion will include: quality television and cultural hierarchies, HBO and the cable/satellite shift, teen TV, children’s TV, representing “reality,” the gendering of television, televisual immediacy, and the flexibility of “television” in the digital era.
    [Show full text]
  • Rank Series T Title N Network Wr Riter(S)*
    Rank Series Title Network Writer(s)* 1 The Sopranos HBO Created by David Chase 2 Seinfeld NBC Created by Larry David & Jerry Seinfeld The Twilighht Zone Season One writers: Charles Beaumont, Richard 3 CBS (1959)9 Matheson, Robert Presnell, Jr., Rod Serling Developed for Television by Norman Lear, Based on Till 4 All in the Family CBS Death Do Us Part, Created by Johnny Speight 5 M*A*S*H CBS Developed for Television by Larry Gelbart The Mary Tyler 6 CBS Created by James L. Brooks and Allan Burns Moore Show 7 Mad Men AMC Created by Matthew Weiner Created by Glen Charles & Les Charles and James 8 Cheers NBC Burrows 9 The Wire HBO Created by David Simon 10 The West Wing NBC Created by Aaron Sorkin Created by Matt Groening, Developed by James L. 11 The Simpsons FOX Brooks and Matt Groening and Sam Simon “Pilot,” Written by Jess Oppenheimer & Madelyn Pugh & 12 I Love Lucy CBS Bob Carroll, Jrr. 13 Breaking Bad AMC Created by Vinnce Gilligan The Dick Van Dyke 14 CBS Created by Carl Reiner Show 15 Hill Street Blues NBC Created by Miichael Kozoll and Steven Bochco Arrested 16 FOX Created by Miitchell Hurwitz Development Created by Madeleine Smithberg, Lizz Winstead; Season One – Head Writer: Chris Kreski; Writers: Jim Earl, Daniel The Daily Show with COMEDY 17 J. Goor, Charlles Grandy, J.R. Havlan, Tom Johnson, Jon Stewart CENTRAL Kent Jones, Paul Mercurio, Guy Nicolucci, Steve Rosenfield, Jon Stewart 18 Six Feet Under HBO Created by Alan Ball Created by James L. Brooks and Stan Daniels and David 19 Taxi ABC Davis and Ed Weinberger The Larry Sanders 20 HBO Created by Garry Shandling & Dennis Klein Show 21 30 Rock NBC Created by Tina Fey Developed for Television by Peter Berg, Inspired by the 22 Friday Night Lights NBC Book by H.G.
    [Show full text]
  • Animated Television: the Narrative Cartoon” Was Originally Published in the Third Edition of Jeremy G
    “Animated Television: The Narrative Cartoon” was originally published in the third edition of Jeremy G. Butler, Television: Critical Methods and Applications (Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2007), 325-361. It was not included in subsequent editions of Television and consequently it was placed online, although not in the public domain. All © copyrights are still reserved. If citing this chapter, please use the original publication information (above). Questions? Contact Jeremy Butler at [email protected] or via TVCrit.com. ch11_8050_Butler_LEA 8/11/06 8:46 PM Page 325 CHAPTER 11 Animated Television: The Narrative Cartoon Beginnings The Aesthetics of the 1930s Sound Cartoon: Disney’s Domination UPA Abstraction: The Challenge to Disney Naturalism Television’s Arrival: Economic Realignment TV Cartooning Since the 1980s Summary edition FurtherTELEVISION Readings 3rd nimation has had a rather erratic presence on television. A A mainstay of Saturday morning children’s programming, small snippets of it appear regularly in commercials,TVCrit.com credit sequences, music videos, news and sports, but there have been long stretches when there were no prime-time cartoon shows. After The Flintstones ended its original run in 1966 there wasn’t another successful prime-time show until 23 years later, when The Simpsons debuted. Since 1989 there has been something of a Renaissance in television animation. Numerous prime-time cartoon pro- grams have appeared and at least three cable channels have arisen that fea- ture cartoons—the Cartoon Network, Nickleodeon, and Toon Disney. And, of course, cartoons continue to dominate the TV ghettos of Saturday morn- ing and weekday afternoons. Although numerous new animated programs are now being created, many of the cartoons regularly telecast today were produced fifty, sixty, or even seventy years ago.
    [Show full text]
  • SOCIAL RESEARCH SOCIAL JUSTICE CONFERENCE & “CITIES of PEACE” EXHIBIT and GUIDED TOUR “Art As an Instrument of Social
    The 8TH ANNUAL SOCIAL RESEARCH SOCIAL JUSTICE CONFERENCE & “CITIES OF PEACE” EXHIBIT AND GUIDED TOUR April 7-8, 2011 MUHLENBERG COLLEGE Moyer Hall and Baker Center for the Arts Thursday, April 7, 2011: PLENARY EVENT AND DESSERT RECEPTION “Art as an Instrument of Social Justice” with ELLEN FRANK Artistic Director and Founder of the Illumination Arts Foundation Recital Hall Baker Center for the Arts 7:00 p.m. Friday, April 8, 2011: RESEARCH SESSIONS AND ART EXHIBIT GUIDED TOUR 8:30 – 9:00 a.m. Continental Breakfast Galleria, Baker Center for the Arts 9:00 – 10:00 a.m. Guided Tour with Artist Ellen Frank Martin Art Gallery Cities of Peace is a series of nine 6 x 8 foot gold-illuminated works on canvas consisting of a visual tribute to the people and locations around the world where violence and tragedy through war or conflict and ideological extremism in modern times have left horrific reminders of man’s destructive power. The Cites of Peace project and exhibition was started as an ambitious idea to unite people and the visual arts through dialogue about issues of peace. 10:15 – 11:00 a.m. RESEARCH SESSION I PANEL ONE: Engaging Afghanistan Moyer 214 Darius Callier, Connor Skutches, Courtney Weintraub, Nowell Kahle, & Meagan McDonald, Lehigh University, “Engaging Afghanistan Documentary and Panel Discussion.” Moderators: Nandini Deo and Julia Maserjian, Lehigh University PANEL TWO: Propaganda and the United States Moyer 302 Kristin Lapos, Muhlenberg College, “The Long War: Taliban Propaganda and U.S. Foreign Policy.” Judson Battaglia, Muhlenberg College, “McCarthyism: The Red-Baiting Campaign of the 1950s.” Moderator: Sue Curry Jansen, Muhlenberg College PANEL THREE: Quantifying Democracy Moyer 209 Benjamin Rosen & Alexandra Chili, Muhlenberg College, “Voting Behavior of College Students: Lacking Social Responsibility at Muhlenberg College.” Alyssa Smith, Lafayette College, “Quantitative Reasoning for True Democracy.” Joseph Leeson & Michael Lindenfelser, DeSales University, “Income Inequality in the United States vs.
    [Show full text]
  • 2018-The-Honeymooner
    PRODUCTION HISTORY The Honeymooners was a television sitcom in the mid-1950s that to this day is one of the most memorable half hour situation comedies of all time. It started out as a six-minute sketch on comedian Jackie Gleason’s 1951 variety show Cavalcade of Stars. He continued performing these skits when the Cavalcade was renamed as The Jackie Gleason Show in 1952. At the time, he got tired of creating an hour-long variety show and he went on to create two 30-minute shows simultaneously: The Honeymooners and Stage Show, a variety show dedicated to music. The show followed an everyman bus driver named Ralph Kramden and his sarcastic wife Alice (Audrey Meadows) who often comes to his rescue. Ralph also has his best friend Ed Norton, portrayed by Art Carney and his wife Trixie, played by Joyce Randolph. It was one of the first comedies on television to portray a normal married couple that is struggling to get by. Most of the action takes place in the kitchen of their Brooklyn apartment. There are many elements that made The Honeymooners unique in its time and remembered for over sixty years following its conclusion. One was that the show was filmed live in front of a 1,000-member audience at the former Adelphi Theatre in New York City and broadcast at a later date. Gleason hated to rehearse so for many episodes they would only run through a script one time before performing it in front of the live audience. The other cast members would rehearse diligently without him, as they were not comfortable with this arrangement.
    [Show full text]
  • The Thesis Committee for Steven Vern Reddicliffe
    The Thesis committee for Steven Vern Reddicliffe Certifies that this is the approved version of the following thesis Voices of Comedy: Conversations With Writers of Television’s Most Enduring Shows APPROVED BY SUPERVISING COMMITTEE: Supervisor: ________________________________________ Janet Staiger __________________________________________ Michael Kackman Voices of Comedy: Conversations With Writers of Television’s Most Enduring Shows by Steven Vern Reddicliffe, B.S.J. Thesis Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts The University of Texas at Austin August 2010 Voices of Comedy: Conversations With Writers of Television’s Most Enduring Shows by Steven Vern Reddicliffe, MA The University of Texas at Austin, 2010 SUPERVISOR: Janet Staiger An oral history of television comedy from the early 1950s through the mid 1970s as told by the writers Sydney Zelinka, Larry Rhine, Milt Josefsberg, and the team of Seaman Jacobs and Fred S. Fox. The shows they wrote for included “The Honeymooners,” ‘The Phil Silvers Show,” “The Red Skelton Hour,” Bob Hope specials, “Here’s Lucy,” “All in the Family,” and “Maude.” These five writers were working in the earliest days of the medium and spent years writing for the personalities—from performers to producers—who pioneered and defined it. Most of them also wrote scripts during one of broadcast television’s greatest periods of transformation, when comedy took a decidedly topical turn that continued to have a significant impact on television comedy in the decades that followed. iii Table of Contents Introduction ……………………………..….……………….……..……1 Chapter One: Sydney Zelinka ……………………………....…..….…..15 Chapter Two: Larry Rhine ……………………………………......……32 Chapter Three: Milt Josefsberg ……………………...…….…...…....…58 Chapter Four: Seaman Jacobs and Fred S.
    [Show full text]
  • The Flintstones Chris Pisar
    Etched in Stone Journalistic Portrayals and the Prevalence of Media in a Town Called Bedrock Chris W. Pisar Etched in Stone: Journalistic Portrayals and the Prevalence of Media in a Town Called Bedrock Pisar 2 Abstract This article examines the animated, primetime comedy The Flintstones and how its portrayal of the news media affects the way people, especially children, view journalists. The research will focus on the portrayals of journalists throughout the show’s run. This article also will look at the prevalence of the media, such as newspapers, radio, and television, in the series and how this affects how people think the media function in the real world. With television consumption at an all-time high (the average American watches four hours of television a day)1, the residual effects of the way the media and journalists are portrayed on television, including cartoons, becomes increasingly important. By understanding the way journalists are portrayed in cartoons, we can better understand the longtime impact on children, the primary target audience of The Flintstones. I hypothesize that the way the news media are portrayed and the prevalence of the media in the series affect the way audiences view the media and journalists in reality. Introduction Television was introduced in the United States back in the 1930s, but it wasn’t until 1948-49 that “the explosion of sets into the American marketplace” took place.2 The typical household had one set and used television as a family activity.3 Now, two-thirds of the nation’s population has three or more TV sets in their home.4 This has caused watching television to become an isolated activity rather than a family activity like it had been in the past.
    [Show full text]