That's entertainment: Father Knows Best

Father Knows Best started on radio in 1949 and ran until 1954, at which time it moved to network television, where it aired from 1954 till 1960. The series is an icon of American pop culture. 

The series starred Robert Young as Jim Anderson, the patriarch of a stereotypical middle class family in the Midwest. His wife Margaret was played by Jane Wyatt. The teenage daughter Betty was played by Elinor Donahue, her younger brother Bud by Billy Gray and the little sister Kathy by Lauren Chapin.

Interestingly, the show was cancelled at the end of the first season, but NBC received so many letters demanding its return that the series was reinstated. The show revolved around the premise that no matter what dilemma the family faced or what opinion the common-sense mother had about a solution, father was always right...because he knew best. And by the end of each episode, life was once more idyllic as a result of father's wisdom.

In 1983 Billy Gray said in an interview, "I wish there was some way I could tell the kids not to believe it. The dialogue, the situations, the characters...they were all totally false. The show did everyone a disservice. The girls were always trained to use their feminine wiles, to pretend to be helpless to attract men. The show contributed to a lot of the problems between men and women that we see today...I think we were all well motivated, but what we did was run a hoax. Father Knows Best purported to be a reasonable facsimile of life. And the bad thing is, the model is so deceitful."

What do you think? Did this sort of entertainment provide positive role models, or did it depict life in such a way that it caused people to have unrealistic attitudes about their own interactions with others?

From fatherknowsbest.com, imdb.com, nndb.com and wikipedia.org

geardiary.com

timvp.com

fatherknowsbest.com

That's entertainment: Hey there! Hi there! Ho there!

You're as welcome as can be. M-I-C-K-E-Y  M-O-U-S-E.  So went The Mickey Mouse Club March on the day of the show's debut in October of 1955. For four seasons, kids sat mesmerized, often wearing Mickey Mouse ears (yes, even me), as a bunch of precocious kids sang and danced their way into American homes.

I recently came across a fairly detailed history of the television show, and not only did it bring back a flood of memories, it also provided me with some answers to "Whatever happened to...?"

Casting for the Mickey Mouse Club began in March of 1955, and by the time production had started in May, 28 kids had been hired. Walt Disney had insisted that the cast be "ordinary kids," not professionals, but that idea was quickly abandoned. By the end of the third season (the fourth season being re-runs), a total of 39 people had been Mouseketeers, but only nine of the original kids made the cut throughout the entire run of the show.

The nine were Sharon Baird, Bobby Burgess, Lonnie Burr, Tommy Cole, Annette Funicello, Darlene Gillespie, Cubby O'Brien, Karen Pendleton and Doreen Tracey. So what happened to these well-known Mouseketeers after the show ended?

wn.com

catsafterne.com

   Sharon Baird worked at Disneyland
   and toured with a few other
   Mouseketeers from time to time. She
   taught dance and worked on and off in
   the entertainment industry, although she
   went to college and majored in math and
   secretarial science, supporting herself for
   most of her adult life as a full-time
   secretary.

jenniferkarmstrong.com

mouseclubhouse.com

  Bobby Burgess became a regular dancer on
  the Lawrence Welk show and eventually
  married Kristie Ann Floren, daughter of
  accordionist Myron Floren, who was also on
  the Welk show. He remained a performer on
  that show until the 1980s, at which time he
  opened a cotillion studio in Long Beach,
  California. He and his wife have four grown
  daughters.

popcultureaddict.com

jenniferkarmstrong.com

Lonnie Burr graduated high school at age 14 and went on to get his master's degree in theater arts from UCLA. He has worked on stage, in television and in film, has written a book, several plays and poetry.

spokeo.com

gcsu.edu

Tommy Cole had some success as a teen singer, received a junior college degree and did a stint in the U. S. Air Force. He had done some work on Leave It to Beaver and My Three Sons and became fascinated with work behind the camera. He eventually became a successful make-up artist, winning one Emmy for his work and being nominated several more times. He and his wife Aileen, a former dancer, have two children.

allposters.es

msn.com

Annette Funicello had a successful teen singing career, as well as making appearances in numerous television shows and films, most notably her beach party movies. She married in 1965 and left the entertainment business to raise a daughter and two sons. In the 1990s she revealed that she has multiple sclerosis, and she has retired from public life.

originalmmc.com

wikipedia.org

Darlene Gillespie was engaged in a long legal battle with Disney. She became a surgical nurse, but eventually she suffered a back injury which ended her medical career. In the early 1990s she became involved with a man with whom she committed a number of criminal acts.  They were charged with shoplifting in 1996, then a year later were indicted for a check-kiting scheme. Darlene was convicted in 1998, receiving a sentence of two years. In November 2005 they were indicted on federal fraud charges.   

columbian.com

wikipedia.org

  Cubby O'Brien went to the Lawrence Welk 
  show for two years after the show ended. 
  He then worked for several years with 
  bandleader Spike Jones and later with Ann-
  Margret, Jim Nabors and Carol Burnett. While 
  working for Burnett, he also worked for Richard 
  and Karen Carpenter. He still plays drums for 
  various Broadway shows.  

mouseinfo.com

     

catsafterme.com

Karen Pendleton dropped out of
college and became a sales clerk at a
department store. In 1970 she married
a lawyer and had a daughter but later
divorced. In 1983 she was in an
accident that left her paralyzed from the
waist down. She returned to college
and earned a master's degree in
psychology. She is now director of the
Center for Independent Living in her
city.

jenniferkarmstrong.com

fiftiesweb.com

   Doreen Tracey worked as a teen singer
   in the early 1960s and later toured with the
   USO throughout Europe and Asia in the
   mid-60s and entertained the troops in Viet
   Nam in the late 60s. She worked in the
   recording industry as a promotion director
   and scandalized the Disney organization by
   doing a couple of nude layouts for Gallery
   magazine.






From originalmmc.com

That's entertainment: Quiz show scandal

Despite the fact that the average viewer spends several hours a day staring at the TV screen, he knows reality shows aren't real and that a good deal of what he sees on the news is spun. For many people born in the latter part of the 20th century, it might be difficult to imagine a simpler time when television was still a new medium, when TV personalities had as much credibility as ministers and when the entire country was scandalized to find out it had been hoodwinked...but that was exactly what happened in the mid-1950s.

The scandal had its roots in a show called The $64,000 Question, which made its live television debut on June 7, 1955. Week after week, the viewing audience would sit glued to the set as the announcer said, "The $64,000 Question...And now, the star of our show, where knowledge is king and the reward king-size, Hal March!"

The program was sponsored by Revlon, and though Charles Revson denied any part in rigging the show's outcome, many show employees later testified that he pressured the producer to get rid of contestants he did not like. Thus, the coaching of participants began. According to a film entitled The Quiz Show Scandal, which aired on PBS:

All the big winners became instant celebrities and household names. For the first time, America's heroes were intellectuals or experts--jockey Billy Pearson on art, Marine Captain [Richard] McCutcheon on cooking--every subject from the Bible to baseball. Not only had the contestants become rich overnight, but they were also treated to a whirlwind of publicity tours, awards, endorsements and meetings with dignitaries.

Other game shows followed suit and had tremendous success, including Twenty-One, The $64,000 Challenge, Tic-Tac-Dough, The Big Surprise and Dotto. At one time, there were 22 game shows being aired across the country, but it was Twenty-One that would take the next giant step in quiz show rigging, casting the contestants like characters and making them complicit in the deception.

The scheme began to unravel when Twenty-One brought Herbert Stempel onto the show. Producers knew that the audience would react negatively to Stempel's personality. They counted on viewers to tune in every week, hoping his opponent would win. They instructed Stempel to get an unflattering haircut and wear an ill-fitting suit, making him an even less sympathetic character. After six weeks, Stempel had run his winnings up to $69,500. At that time, the producer called him in to tell him that he had to sign a paper agreeing to accept less money and denying receiving coaching if he wanted to stay on the show. He reluctantly signed and met his next opponent, Charles Van Doren.

Van Doren's father was a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, his mother was a celebrated novelist, his uncle a respected American historian. He was handsome, likeable and had a good sense of humor...everything Herb Stempel was not. Week after week, Van Doren's popularity increased, and so did Stempel's resentment. When Stempel was eventually told to take a dive, he asked that he be allowed to continue the contest fairly, but the producer insisted that it was time for him to leave the show.

After intentionally missing a question he could easily answer, he was leaving the stage and overheard one technician tell another, "At least, we finally have a clean-cut intellectual on this program, not a freak with a sponge memory." The remark was so hurtful to Stempel, and he was so summarily dismissed when he asked for a job he had been led to expect, that he eventually made a decision to contact journalist Jack O'Brian and expose the producers of Twenty-One. A grand jury was convened. According to the PBS film:

Not only did some of the producers lie to the grand jury, but they also had urged contestants to perjure themselves. In lower Manhattan, the grand jury was convened for nine months and heard over 150 witnesses. A majority of them, about 100 contestants, lied under oath. As a lone voice Herb Stempel continued telling the truth to anyone who would listen, but it was Stempel's word against everyone else. There was still no corroborating evidence.

Game shows went back to their old practices and made more money than ever, until a standby contestant on Dotto uncovered hard evidence that a returning champion had been given answers, and again the press was notified. Congress called for an investigation and the truth came out, according to The Quiz Show Scandal:

Eventually, an anguished Charles Van Doren, one producer and 17 other contestants were formally charged, arrested and convicted of lying under oath to the New York grand jury. All pleaded guilty. All received suspended sentences. None served time in jail. The District Attorney estimated that at least 100 others who testified with Van Doren--two-thirds of all those who faced the grand jury--had perjured themselves.

The television quiz show scandal had wide-ranging consequences. Quiz producers were unofficially blacklisted for years and forced out of television. Many contestants, in disgrace, hid from their past. Networks took control of programs away from the sponsors and federal regulations were enacted against broadcast fraud. The scandal left us feeling betrayed. Television had entered tens of millions of homes and lives in an era filled with trust, and the violation of that trust changed our view of a new medium in an age we still like to think of as innocent.

The scandal was the subject of the 1994 film entitled Quiz Show, directed by Robert Redford and starring John Turturro as Herb Stemple and Ralph Fiennes as Charles Van Doren.

From pbs.org and newyorker.com

Hal March on The $64,000 Question
timstvshowcase.com

Van Doren faces Stempel on Twenty-One
newyorker.com

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Charles Van Doven on the cover of Time magazine
ebay.com - sparkyncody

That's entertainment: Strike It Rich

Strike It Rich was a game show on American radio and television from 1947 to 1958 on CBS and NBC. The program premiered on national television on May 7, 1951 and ran daily until January 3, 1958. It became so popular that CBS aired a prime time version from July 4, 1951, to January 12, 1955.

Known as "the quiz show with a heart," it featured people in need of money who would appear, tell their tale of woe and try to win cash by answering relatively easy questions. If they failed to win, the emcee opened the "Heart Line," which allowed viewers to donate to the contestant.

The show was controversial throughout the 11 years it was on the air. Some claimed that the show really did help less fortunate families and encouraged charity and goodwill among viewers through the Heart Line. Others said the show exploited the needy.

The show received between 3,000 and 5,000 letters each week from people who wanted to be on the show. People hoping to be selected would spend the last of their money traveling to New York, only to be rejected and having to rely on charities such as the Salvation Army and Travelers Aid to help them.

The networks were unconcerned over the controversy and went on record as saying, "We don't want to do anything that would antagonize the sponsor." This attitude allowed companies to control every aspect of the shows they sponsored, resulting in the quiz show scandals of the 1950s, which will be the topic of the next post in this series.

Strike It Rich ended before the scandal came to light, so it never fell under public scrutiny.

From kfcplainfield.com and wikipedia.org

Host Warren Hull
kfcplainfield.com

Strike It Rich contestants
wikimedia.org

Vel...a consolation prize?
kfcplainfield.com

Posing with the emcee and announcer
robert-temple.com

Jane Wilson steps in for a contestant in the Heart Line
wikipedia.org