The Bob Hope Christmas Special (1968)

    Oh shit, we’re already onto the USO tours, I was hoping we weren’t there yet. Hokay.

Well they do warn you.

    Shot over the course of 1967 but aired on NBC on January 18^th, 1968, the only name I recognize off of the cast list is Raquel Welch. Barbara McNair was apparently a singer and actress who would go on to give several notable performances after 1967. Elaine Dunne did all of the usual tv variety shows during the 60’s as a singer and dancer but stopped appearing in 1968 for reasons I couldn’t easily find. Madeleine Hartog-Bel was Miss World in 1967. Finally, oddly enough, there’s Earl Wilson, a sometimes actor but better known as a prominent gossip columnist for the Broadway scene. Oh, and Bing’s kid Phillip Crosby.

    Fair warning, by the way, this special is an hour and a half long and features a lot of troop footage so we are going to just zoom through the content.

    It’s made very clear in the opening that this was filmed at many, many locations over the course of some time so I am fully expecting a stitched together mess. Also, audible sigh, this is humor for soldiers during a war in Asia in 1967, expect casual racism unless I specifically say it’s not present.

The golf club adds dignity.

    The first actual segment is Hope, golf club in hand, doing such clever bits as how funny they talk over there and boy aren’t these guys horny. I’m already expecting exactly zero mentions of Christmas during this Christmas special. They fly somewhere else and have Hartog-Bel strut around for the crowd. You can add casual sexism to the assumptions.

    As we traipse from location to location with Hope changing outfits but clearly not material I find myself with lots and lots I’m able to say but no desire to say it. This was a stupid war fought for stupid reasons by basically teenagers with very little access to world culture and an attitude towards women that was not improved by their complete lack of exposure to them and Hope is exactly in his element in playing to just the easiest crowds he could ever hope for. These men have next to no access to entertainment so of course they’re going to jam themselves around the stage to watch a famous guy tell jokes and parade around celebrities at them. The whole thing is such a miasma of despair I can either throw my hands up and just focus on the very specific parts I’m looking at this month or track down every scrap of the raw footage and start writing a dissertation.

She wore that outfit like thirty times.

    So the jokes continue, he makes fun of the protests back in the US, complains about prices in Thailand, brings on Raquel Welch to sing a number (y’know, that famous singer Raquel Welch), makes sure to tick some anti-Communist boxes, the troops eat it all up and ask for more. I’m sure at some level Hope really did support the USO out of some kind of patriotism or altruism or something but I’m starting to think he really did these for the access to such easy audiences.

    At a certain point the repetition become numbing. It’s standup, shots of troops, travel footage, and then repeat with the occasional interstitial material. I will say that even now there’s still something jarring about seeing footage of the celebrities touring bunkers near the front, Hope with golf club in hand. Maybe every third go round you get lucky and someone does a song or dance number. Apparently these are some of the most watched tv programs in history, I’m not seeing what 60 million people were getting out of this.

    Oh hey, 45 minutes in and a new face, Phillip Crosby. I will simply note that his highest professional accomplishment was being born to Bing Crosby and he was a vocal Goldwater supporter. His act is a shadow of a shadow of his father’s and that’s enough about him.

I do like the idea of the troops desperately missing Broadway gossip.

    Now it’s Earl Wilson and I’m back to paying attention because I really want to know the justification for his inclusion in this. He presents himself as a member of press out to get the true news about the war directly from the troops, which is a lazy way for Hope to come back onstage in character as the supposed oldest enlisted man. Earl is stiff and nervous and they’re both reading off cue cards and I figure this setup is enough to justify a Broadway gossip columnist being flown onto an aircraft carrier in the Pacific. And then he exits the stage and that’s it, that was Earl Wilson. Sure.

    I guess I can see the appeal for the US audiences, it’s an opportunity to see the troops having a good time and served as a contrast to the images they were seeing on the news. I mean, of course in the end this is all pro-war propaganda fully supported by the military so I guess the question as to its purpose answers itself, they used Hope as a vehicle to smuggle in the imagery they wanted the US populace to see. Did it have to be so all-encompassingly boring, though?

I dunno, girl power or something.

    Not gonna lie, the last half hour was watched with two half-opened eyes while I slouched ever deeper in my chair. It feels unkind to say but perhaps the caliber of entertainment hauled halfway across the world to plunk down before bored servicemen is not up to the usual televisual standards of the time. The acts are a bit shit, to clarify. The only thing keeping me awake is verifying that Raquel Welch really does wear the exact same outfit at all of her appearances. Hey, at least this thing doesn’t end with a Christmas medley.

    I’ve got another one of these from 1972 and five years is a long time so I think I’m going to save my overall thoughts until after that one. I will say I very much did not enjoy watching this for both the obvious and non-obvious reasons. The comedy was hacky, the jokes were all sorts of problematic, and I have no wish to see the Vietnam War filtered through this particular lens.

This man's name was Nguyễn Cao Kỳ, go ahead and look him up.