What is your Favorite Sitcom of All-Time?

[Mr. O'Brady]

Did you ever find a reference to "King Bushwick the Toidy-Toid?"

Can't say. My memory is almost non-existent these days, all I remember is the Ruby Yacht. Haven't seen an episode in at least thirty years.

I know from our old friend RockyRoad that Bushwick is in New York. Toidy-Toid is 33rd to non-Texans. Don't make me look it up!

[jdb1]

Did you ever find a reference to "King Bushwick the Toidy-Toid?"

Can't say. My memory is almost non-existent these days, all I remember is the Ruby Yacht. Haven't seen an episode in at least thirty years.

I know from our old friend RockyRoad that Bushwick is in New York. Toidy-Toid is 33rd to non-Texans. Don't make me look it up!

That King Bushwick thing always makes me laugh. You are right - Bushwick is one of Brooklyn's oldest neighborhoods, and has always had a reputation for toughness. It is now mostly Hispanic, and in the past it was predominantly Irish. Both Mae West and Jackie Gleason came from Bushwick.

Do you remember how Mae West talked? I mean her pronunciation -- pure Bushwick, like saying Toidy-Toid for "Thirty-Third." When you spoke about Bushwick in the past, you used to say "I'll meet you at Toidy-Toid and Toid," and people knew you meant you were going to Bushwick (those streets don't actually go through Bushwick, but we Brooklyn aristocrats liked to think that that's how they talked there).

Only in the recent past, like 20 years ago, I was picking up my daughter from her Brooklyn nursery school, and the teacher's assistant, and older woman named Marie, commented "Oh, I got to get at those terlets this afternoon." (She meant the toilets.) We were in Sheepshead Bay, but could guess that Marie came from some older neighborhood, like maybe Bushwick.

It seems that at least one of the writers for Rocky & Bullwinkle must have come from Brooklyn.

[Mr. O'Brady]

I'm glad you told me that, or I'd have dragged out a map of New York to see if 33rd did in fact go through Bushwick. Terlet, I remember, was the same pronunciation used by Archie and Edith Bunker, supposedly hailing from Queens.

[Hollis]

Hey Pat,

Quite by accident, while researching something else, I stumbled across this -

"A thunder of jets in an open sky, a streak of gray and a cheerful "Hi!"
A loop, a whirl and a vertical climb and you'll know it's time... for The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle (and friends.) Starring that supersonic speedster Rocket J Squirrel with his pal Bullwinkle the Moose and a host of others."

Remember "Fractured Fairy Tales?" "Peabody's Improbable History?" "Dudley Do-Right Of The Mounties?" and "Aesop and Son?" and the shorts "Bullwinkle's Corner," "Mr Know-It-All" and "The World of Commander McBragg?"

Check out the Wikipedia entry for "The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show" where it details all the minutiae of the show and the two different video packages that are available. I thought you might get a kick out of it.

As always,

Hollis

[Mr. O'Brady]

Nice avatar! I had already visited the Wiki page about the show to check the spelling of WABAC for my earlier post. I don't remember "Commander McBragg" at all for some reason, even after reading its Wiki page? Old age, I guess. Mr. Peabody was by far my favorite.

[traceyk]

Something that stands out to me is the different levels of humor in older sitcoms. When I was a kid, I remember watching and enjoying The Mary Tyler Moore show. Then years later, I caught an episode on Nick at Night and was shocked to discover that Mary Richards SLEPT WITH MEN!!! Totally missed that when I was 10...

[movieman1957]

Totally missed that when I was 10...

I should hope so

[jdb1]

Remember when Mary's parents came to visit? She and her father were standing together, and her mother walked by on the way to the door saying (addressing her husband) "Don't forget to take your pill," to which both Mary and her father answered "I won't." That got a very long laugh.

[traceyk]

jdb--
That's the episode I was talking about! You had to be an adult to get that line. So subtle. At 9 or 10 I could sit and watch these shows with my parents and it went right over my head. Not like modern sitcoms--we never watched prime time TV in our house until the kids were old enough to understand. I just felt like they didn't need to be exposed to that.

[melwalton]

Enjoyed reading about Bullwinkle. That was a really good one.

Judith
The accent topic is always interesting. I still recognize a NY accent. and what was called a 'Brooklyn accent' ( really 'Joisey) but I could never distinguish between the neighborhoods.
You mentioned Mae West. I saw a couple of her films but back then, I thought everyone talked like that. Yeah, I was young.
I do recall Alfred Emanual Smith, the Tammany politician and his thick Jersey accent. He spoke on radio while running for president. Smith was born in NYC but I don't know whereabouts, Probably Manhattan. ,... mel

[jdb1]

I've heard recordings of those radio broadcasts that Al Smith did when he was running for President. Yipes, that was really a Class-A New Yawk accent, wasn't it? I think he grew up in the Five Points District of Lower Manhattan (like in Gangs of New York). That area is now part of our ever-growing Chinatown. There is a plaque somewhere on the old St. Patrick's church in downtown Manhattan that says that Smith was a member of the congregation. I've always thought that Rosie O'Donnell speaks a modified, better educated version of the Old New York Irish, in both accent and cadence. (She grew up on Long Island, didn't she? Same thing.)

I'm glad you mentioned that the accent can be heard as well in New Jersey. You can indeed still hear it from the old folks in towns along the Hudson River, across from New York.

Have you ever heard the routine that George Carlin did where he demonstrated New York Irish, Italian and Jewish speech by slipping in and out of them in the same sentence? Uncanny.

[srowley75]

Why would <b>The Beverly Hillbillies</b> be a "guilty pleasure"? It is an excellently written show, with a cast that delivers fully realized characters. One of the best television series, ever.

I characterize it as a guilty pleasure because unless you're a dedicated, hardcore fan, the one-note characters easily become annoying after a while (especially Granny and Jethro) and the situations grow tiresome (the jist is always the same).

But even though TV critics characteristically pan the show, I could easily see why the postmodern literati of today would develop a fascination with it - not to mention its mirror twin, Green Acres. You've got these characters who inject themselves into unfamiliar territory, trying vainly to assiimilate yet always being thwarted because of an inability to communicate with those around them or to decode the messages they receive from others (miscommunication is a MAJOR theme in those Paul Henning sitcoms).

-Stephen

[melwalton]

Judith
Not familiar with Carlin or that other but do recall Minerva Pious from fred Allen's gang. She was a wonder. I liked Mel Blanc and Molly Picon and there was Gertrude Berg ( not sure was that an actress or a character). I heard, somewhere, in the early days almost everyone could mimic, as well as juggle that's how they got in show business,.... mel

[jdb1]

Yes, Gertrude Berg was the woman -- her character was Molly Goldberg.

I suppose that in radio days it was easy to pick up and mimic dialects (what we now more accurately refer to as accents) because they were all around you. Sid Caesar said in his memoirs that he learned all the dialects he so famously recreated from listening to customers at his parents' store (a candy store or something?) in Yonkers, NY, where virtually everyone came from somewhere else.

I was thinking about this just the other day: my father was born in Poland, and spent a part of his young manhood living in Paris, speaking French. One day one of my classmates told me that my father spoke with an accent, and I got all huffy - "Uh-uh! He does not!" Of course he did, but I simply never heard it, because I was so used to it. To my ear he had no accent. Now, Ricky Ricardo - that was an accent!

[srowley75]

Amazon.com and Deep Discount have both been having several sales lately, with some great can't-miss prices on sitcoms (my favorite type of program), so I finally broke down and - somewhat against my better judgment - bought the first seven seasons of Roseanne.

During its broadcast run, I almost never missed Roseanne, though I admittedly tired of certain aspects of the show as the years went on (e.g., Becky's rebellious stage and her relationship with Mark, the awkward and virtually exploitative way that gays were portrayed, anything involving Tom Arnold's character). Having viewed several seasons over the past few weeks, however, the show seemed better than I remembered, and I developed a deeper appreciation for what it accomplished in light of the fact that it was so startling different from anything else on TV, and yet much more realistic than any other "family" sitcom. The writing is sharp and the acting- especially by John Goodman and Laurie Metcalf - is terrific, though I honestly felt that Sara Gilbert wasn't as good as I remembered (Lecy Goransen is better, on average).

Overall, I think it's reentered my "top ten" favorites. Added to everything else, I've had a real rough time lately and I've needed some attitude to get me through the week. And Roseanne has enough to spare.

-Stephen