Ghost Town (1988)

 

Bing Crosby Live at the Hollywood Palace (1968)

    Airing on Saturday, December 21^st, 1968, this was the last of the Hollywood Palace Christmas episodes hosted by Bing Crosby as Perry Como would take over the next year’s. Once again we have Crosby acting as mostly as the center of the show and this time he’s brought along most of his family, albeit his second one. The guests for the evening are again a hodge-podge of people who happened to be available at the time. This is also the first episode I can recall where they clearly cut away to footage shot elsewhere at another time and for all I know another purpose. They could have just snipped it out of something else to fill time.

Why do these things keep opening with visions from Hell?

    One thing I never pay enough attention to are the writers for these shows because they always feel fairly invisible. There’s clearly scripted patter between the hosts and guests and an overall structure to the show but it never feels particularly substantial. No one is tuning in to watch Crosby and Glen Campbell trade witty bon mots. There are three for this episode and they were basically the show’s long-time staff writers who churned out scripts from week to week. They all did their time in the variety trenches and only one has a surprising twist to their career, George Arthur Bloom. He did several variety shows like this in the sixties and those celebrity roasts from the seventies before shifting to fully scripted tv shows, both dramatic and comedy, and then taking a hard turn into children’s shows in 1984. I will have you know he wrote the first chunk of episodes of the seminal ‘Transformers’ cartoon show as well as many episodes of ‘My Little Pony.’ He’s currently still working, so fair play to him.

    The show opens with a bunch of stock footage of gathering crowds from the outside of the theater before shifting inside to show more stock footage of crowded seats before the announcer tells us all about tonight’s sponsors and dumps us to commercial. We’re then treated to the sight of Crosby coming down some more stairs to some more dancers and launching into some kind of Christmas song about kids drinking milk and it being that time of the year. He starts working in introductions to the guests in the song, starting with Glen Campbell who basically prances onto stage.

Was this part of his audition reel for 'True Grit?'

    A few notes on Glen Campbell. In 1968 he was entering the peak of his entire career. He’d been toiling away as a fairly successful musician for years alternating between attempts at solo success and session work (he was a session musician on the ‘Pet Sounds’). In 1967 he started gaining popularity with ‘By the Time I Get to Phoenix,’ most famous from its interpretation by Public Enemy, and in 1968 he released arguably his best known song ‘Wichita Lineman.’ The next year he would co-star in ‘True Grit’ with John Wayne as La Boeuf and hit the top of the charts again with its titular song. He remained popular throughout the 70’s.

    Next up are The Lennon Sisters of Lawrence Welk fame. They were just starting out on their own in 1968. They do have lovely singing voices. Comedian John Byner comes out to take a bow, and of him more later. Then Crosby drags out his second family for antics. He and his family launch back into the milk/time song and then depart when it’s done.

    Crosby tells a series of what seem to be jokes but are really just the names of famous people he’s associated with and a couple of things they’re associated with, like Jack Benny being cheap, that sort of thing. His wife comes back for some banter, then John Byner comes on to do a funny voice that I’m sure is a reference to something but I can’t be bothered to do the research. Glen Campbell gives a gift, The Lennon Sisters give a gift and then sing about Santa and then ‘The Christmas Song’ (the one about chestnuts roasting, it has a name). It’s very Stepfordy.

 Bob Newhart had been hilarious for 18 years at this point, you have no excuse.

    More Crosby and one of his children and then John Byner is back to do a truly awful section of what I guess was stand-up comedy about strange types of half-time football shows. John Byner’s a strange one. He was a comedian, yes, but was primarily known as an impressionist, although based on his impressions in this episode he can do exactly one good one. It happens to be Bing Crosby but all of the other ones just sound like normal people doing bad impressions of John Wayne and Ed Sullivan and the like. It’s as not-special as it sounds.

    Commercials again, special shout out to Corn Huskers Lotion for a commercial that is deliberately strange enough to work even these days, and we’re back to Crosby and his wife discussing various vacations they can’t go on before singing a song of how they can’t wait for their kids (all in single digits at this point, mind you) to get married so they can go off and do the things they want to do. Crosby was 65 at this point so the song doesn’t make a lot of sense in a lot of ways.

Presumably the children were preventing them from doing this.

    John Byner comes out and inflicts his vague impressions on us before they throw to footage of Nicolai Olkovikov (I don’t know either) doing some impressive acrobatics on horseback, if that’s your idea of fun. They could not be more obviously filling time if they had a stopwatch on screen counting down the seconds.

    More Crosby family and I don’t care, Bing, then Glen Campbell comes out and does one song I’m unfamiliar with before, of course, ‘Wichita Lineman,’ which I have to admit is a very good song. Crosby comes out afterwards and they duet on something called ‘1432 Franklin Pike Circle Hero’ about a suburban dad. Sure.

I do get to stop singing this at some point, right?

    Second to last commercial break and Crosby headfakes us by singing some tuneless thing about winter in LA before giving into the inevitable and launching yet again into ‘White Christmas,’ clearly as sick of it as we are. He brings the family back to slog through yet another stupid, stupid traditional Christmas medley we’ve all heard before, Campbell and the Lennons and the Byner come out and join in and finally it’s over and Crosby gives a shout out to Bob Hope in Vietnam.

    Take my impressions of the 1965 episode and it’s that just a little older and a little more tired. I’m not going to say it’s less Christmassy but it’s certainly not any more. There’s such an air of “Again?” hanging over the whole thing I’m not in the least surprised that Como took it over the next year for its last Christmas special. I’ve seen Bing Crosby is some of his earlier movies and whatever I liked about him then is slowly starting to flake away. It is worth noting that Como was about this age during his 1978 special which is when I really started noticing everything slowing way down and everyone more and more going through the motions. This was possibly the first special where no one individual moment was worth the investment of time, not even a novelty dog act.

The guys are just happy it's over.