Mention the name of Jimmy Dean to folks today and if they recognize it at all, they probably know him from his success in the sausage business. But there was a time when Mr. Dean was a top recording artist and a pretty big TV star. At one point in the late sixties when Johnny Carson was battling with NBC over a new contract, the network signed Jimmy Dean to guest host The Tonight Show in Carson’s absence and to become its permanent host if they never managed to make a deal with Johnny. Which, of course, they finally did.
Our video today is a truncated video of the first episode of The Jimmy Dean Show, a series he did on ABC from 1963 until 1966. It’s an interesting show because one of his guests is Fred Flintstone in (fittingly) a primitive attempt to combine live-action TV with animation. I remember seeing this when it first aired and there was a really nice musical number with Fred and Jimmy which has, alas, been edited from this video. The sequence with Fred starts around 12:19. A spot with Dick Shawn early in the show was also apparently cut but he reappears later with an unusual dance spot.
There’s also a bit where our old friend Chuck McCann does the Little Orphan Annie characterization that made him very popular…and there’s other stuff. Other episodes of this program also featured the dog Rowlf, the first major network exposure of The Muppets. It was a nice little series while it lasted.
0 Comments