In the early days of TV, most major Hollywood studios saw it as “the enemy,” the force that was driving down attendance at movie theaters.

In those days, only Universal (which frankly could use the money), Walt Disney (who knew how to use TV to promote his movies and new theme park) and Warner Brothers really embraced the new medium.

Warner Brothers specialized in churning out 60-minure Westerns and private eye shows for ABC-TV. They began with the Western Cheyenne. When that clicked, others soon followed. One of the first was Sugarfoot, starring Will Hutchins.

While the show lasted 4 seasons, it didn’t run every week. Its first season (1957-58), it alternated with Cheyenne. The 2^nd season, Bronco was added to the rotation. It wasn’t until the 4^th season (1960-61) that Sugarfoot got a regular weekly airing.

The premise of the show involved Hutchins character, Tom Brewster, the proverbial tinhorn from the East – a guy so bad at being a cowboy the other ‘ombres nicknamed him “Sugarfoot” (apparently “Twinkletoes” was a little too over the line in the late 50’s).

Sugarfoot was ostensibly a lawyer, but he seemed to get involved in a fair amount of gunplay. He also seemed to roam far from the show’s Oklahoma setting (especially given how difficult long distance travel was back in the late 1800’s.

Like another W-B Western, Maverick, Sugarfoot was played very tongue-in-cheek. Jack Elam, veteran (or should that be “grizzled veteran”) of many Westerns was a frequent co-star as Hutchins’ sidekick Toothy Thompson.

As the vogue for all things Western began to fade as our attention would turn to doctors and spies, Sugarfoot rode off into that TVland sunset, occasionally returning in reruns.

The entire series is currently available on DVD.

1958: Following a series of arguments (over money, what else?), manager George Treadwell fires every member of the group, the Drifters. He replaces them with another group that had been calling themselves the Five Crowns.

This new set of Drifters quickly becomes the most successful line-up to perform under that name, scoring hits with “There Goes My Baby,” “This Magic Moment” and “Save the Last Dance for Me.”

1966: One of the great rock &roll mysteries: 22-year old Bobby Fuller, leader of the Bobby Fuller Four (“I Fought the Law”), is found dead inside his parked car outside his Hollywood apartment.

First ruled a suicide, many now suspect foul play as there was gasoline found in his lungs.

Is there a Baby Boomer male who didn’t have a crush on Hayley Mills back in the early 60’s?

If there was, he probably never saw her in her magnum opus, The Parent Trap.

The film trades on the extremely popular, but probably psychologically unhealthy fantasy of a lot of divorced kids that they can somehow get their parents back together again.

In this case, the too dumb for their own good ‘rents are played by Brian Keith (who owns every young girl’s fantasy of a California horse ranch) and Maureen O’Hara (who inhabits no one’s fantasy of a stuffy Boston home, relieved only by Charlie Ruggles as a grandfather with a permanent twinkle in his eye).

In The Parent Trap, their kids are both Hayley Mills (or Hayley and her body double, Susan Henning) as twins who were separated at birth by their idiot parents. 

Based on the German novel by Erich Kästner, Das Doppelte Lottchen (The Double Lottie), where the twins are named Lottie and Lisa. In the transfer to Hollywood, the girls are renamed Sharon and Susan. Somewhere along the way, they also picked up an inexplicable British accent. Very hard to understand as neither parent sounds remotely British.

Is anybody besides us bothered by one small fact? Despite the divorced parents seeming to be on pretty good terms (especially considering the relative rarity of divorce way back when), neither parent has told either of the girls that they have a sister - let alone an indentical twin? How screwed up is that?

Of course if they had been told, you’d never have a picture and we’d never have gotten see Hayley Mills get her underpants exposed to a bunch of boys! Yes, that scene was mighty racy for a Disney picture. Ms. Mills reports that she was so nervous about the scene where one twin cuts away the back of the other twin’s dress at a mixer with the boys’ camp that she actually wore multiple pairs of underwear during the filming of that scene!

Possible rock & roll history was made during the climactic scene involving the twins recreating their parents’ first date at an Italian restaurant in the outdoor courtyard of dad’s (Brian Keith) fantastic California ranch.

The duo serenades their folks with a very catchy little big beat number, “Let’s Get Together,” written by those Disney song-writing fools, Richard and Robert Sherman (later to hit the motherlode with the songs for Mary Poppins).

Here in 1961, a full two years before the Beatles recorded “She Loves You,” you can hear the lad’s trademark pop hook “Yeah, yeah, yeah” being crooned by two other lovable British mop-tops, Hayley Mills and Hayley Mills. Mills rode that song all the way to #8 on the Billboard Hot 100 in September of that year.

For whatever reason, the film’s title tune (also written by the Sherman brothers) is not sung by Hayley, but by Disney contract players Annette Funicello and Tommy Sands, who were busy at the studio filming Babes in Toyland at the same time.

The film was put together by the very capable David Swift. Swift had a long Hollywood career, working as animator for Disney and then as both a writer and director with a credit list that includes Pollyanna, Good Neighbor Sam, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, and a variety of TV shows from Alfred Hitchcock Presents through The Love Boat. Appropriately, his final project was serving as screenwriter for the 1998 remake of The Parent Trap starring Lindsay Lohan.

For whatever reason, the original version of The Parent Trap went on to become one of Disney’s best-loved and most-remembered live action films. It wound up the 6^th highest grossing film of the year, coming in just behind West Side Story, The Guns of Navarone, El Cid, and two other Disney films – 101 Dalmatians and The Absent-Minded Professor. The film was also nominated for two Oscars in technical categories (Sound and Film Editing).

BTW - Here's a photo of Hayley with her body double, Susan Henning. The two have remained in touch through all the intervening years.

Before the ’98 reboot, it spawned no less than three made-for-TV sequels all with Hayley Mills returning as the now grown up Sharon and Susan.

The Parent Trap and The Parent Trap II are available on DVD.

1973: John Lennon has his application for U.S. citizenship turned down. Instead, the State Department gives him 60 days to leave the country.

1972: At the Amphitheater in Washington, D.C., Smokey Robinson performs his final concert with the Miracles. At the end of the show, he introduces his replacement, Billy Griffen.

A Hidden Treasure From Rock & Soul’s Golden Era

A series of posts about albums you may have missed back in the day when so much good music was coming out on nearly a daily basis. But now that the real “good stuff” is few and far between, you might want to backtrack and add these gems to your music collection.

The Move was the right band in the right place at the wrong time. Successful from the start in their native England, they released a string of songs that went Top 10 in the UK, but went nowhere in the U.S. Their first, self-titled album wasn’t even released in the States. It was their second album, “Shazam,” released in February of 1970 that introduced the group to American audiences.

It remains one of rock’s great underappreciated masterpieces – a tremendous example of the kind of power pop the Beatles pioneered and later championed by bands like Cheap Trick.

Perhaps it was the crudely drawn cover that kept the album from getting much attention at the time. Maybe it was their American label’s (A&M) lack of promotional push. Whatever the reason, the album never made the charts and was known only to a small cult of rock afficianados.

The Move had already gone through a number of personnel shifts. Original members Roy Wood (guitar/vocals), Carl Wayne (guitar/vocals) and Bev Bevan (drums) formed the band’s nucleus. Wayne preferred a lighter pop sound perfectly suited to playing cabaret-style venues while Wood and Bevan kept pushing for songs that were more adventurous, with a harder edge. As Wood was the only real songwriter in the group, his preferences would come to dominate.

“Shazam” represented a compromise. Side one features 3 Roy Wood compositions while side two contains the kind of cover songs Wayne preferred.

SIDE ONE

1. “Hello Suzie”
2. “Beautiful Daughter”
3. “Cherry Blossom Clinic Revisited”

SIDE TWO

4. “Fields of People”
5. “Don’t Make My Baby Blue”
6. “The Last Thing on My Mind”

Tracks 1 and 3 rock pretty hard while “Beautiful Daughter” is a ballad that showcases Wayne’s vocals. “Cherry Blossom Clinic Revisited” is actually a re-working of a song from the band’s debut album, made longer and loonier with several extended snatches of famous classical tunes like “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” and “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” interwoven into the song (a precursor to the band’s ultimate direction, as you will see).

Track 4 is a polished piece of psychedelic rock (remember that?) complete with sitar and flower power lyrics. “Don’t Make My Baby Blue” is a Barry Mann-Cynthia Weil pop song from the Brill Building era of the early 60’s. “The Last Thing on My Mind” is actually a Tom Paxton folk song given the “heavy” treatment.

After “Shazam” was in the can, but before it was released, Wayne took off. Wood invited another prominent member of the Birmingham music scene, who also was songwriter, to replace him. Jeff Lynne came on board. The band released two more albums (“Looking On” and “Message from the Country”) as well as a brilliant double sided single “Do Ya”/“California Man.”

Still, American audiences were indifferent. So the three remaining members decided to go in a completely different direction. They renamed themselves Electric Light Orchestra. By the third album, Wood departed leaving the band under Lynne’s direction. And that’s when success in the States finally arrived! In fact, ELO’s version of “Do Ya” is the one that most people know today (although it is virtually identical to the earlier Move version).

Roy Wood went on to a reasonably successful solo career in England. Lynne joined the Traveling Wilburys and has now resurrected the ELO name as "Jeff Lynne's ELO," while Bevan tours with “The Move featuring Bev Bevan and Trevor Burton.”

So you’ve finally decided you want to get in shape. Your plan is to join a gym and reclaim that hard body you had at 25. Good for you! But here’s a tip.

Gym owners tell us that a large percentage of new gym members only last about a month before their visits start to trail off and then stop all together.

Before you make a long term financial commitment, test your resolve. Find a gym that will either charge you per visit or allow you to go month to month with no long term contract. If you’re still going strong after a few weeks, then you might want to consider signing up for the long haul.

While often lumped together with “The Twilight Zone” and “Boris Karloff’s Thriller,” “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” is the true original, debuting 4 years before TZ and 5 before “Thriller.”

Alfred Hitchcock’s show was also different than the other two in that it didn’t deal in either supernatural or science-fiction. The situations may have been odd, but were always rooted in reality. Cold, brutal or gruesome reality, but reality nonetheless.

The show debuted in the fall of 1955 featuring a pair of now-classic episodes directed by the master himself. The first, “Revenge” about a husband looking for the man who assaulted his wife when she was alone in their mobile home and “Breakdown” featuring Joseph Cotton as a man paralyzed in a car crash, unable to tell the workers carting him off to the morgue that he’s not dead!

Hitch would go on to direct 15 more half-hours during the show’s 8 season run. But even when he wasn’t directing, the show always highlighted his style of crime thrillers. And of course, each episode featured the master himself introducing and closing each program with a generous helping of his macabre sense of humor and disdain for the sponsor. 

You might not realize it, but Hitchcock used many an episode’s closing to skirt the censorship issues of the day. TV standards demanded that the guilty always be punished for their misdeeds. Hitchcock didn’t care about that. He wanted a story with a good punch at the end. As such, quite a few episodes of “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” end with crime paying – and paying very handsomely. But to please the censors, Hitch would show up on camera to assure the censors that the guilty were eventually punished.

The original half-hour produced 268 episodes. For the ninth season, it was expanded to 60 minutes and the show’s title was changed to “The Alfred Hitchcock Hour.” That version ran for another 3 season and produced an additional 93 episodes.

Among the current or future stars who appeared during the shows run: Clint Eastwood, Robert Redford, Steve McQueen, Walter Matthau, Claude Rains, Dick Van Dyke, Peter Lorre, Leslie Nielsen, Angie Dickinson, Burt Reynolds, Christopher Lee, William Shatner, Peter Falk, Bette Davis, Telly Savalas Olivia de Havilland, Martin Balsam, Elsa Lanchester, Bruce Dern, Richard Basehart, Francis Bavier, Charles Bronson, James Caan, John Carradine, Art Carney, Tony Randall, Robert Duvall, Peter Fonda, Martin Landau, Jayne Mansfield, Roddy McDowell, Bob Newhart and Vincent Price.

We all have our favorite episodes, but here are a few of the most famous:

- Barbara Bel Geddes kills her husband by beating him with a frozen lamb chop (Hitchcock’s personal favorite)

- Billy Mumy as a 10-yerar old wandering around with a real loaded gun that he thinks is only a toy

- Claude Rains as a ventriloquist who seems to have a very strange relationship with his female dummy

The series proved so popular in syndication that a revival was attempted in 1985. It lasted one season on NBC and three more on USA Network. In a ghoulish touch Hitchcock himself might appreciate, the new series featured colorized footage of the late director from the original series at the beginning of each episode.

By the way, that famous theme song is actually a piece of classical music, appropriately titled “Funeral March of the Marionettes.” And that line drawing caricature that opened the show was drawn by Hitchcock himself.

The first 6 seasons are available on DVD in the USA. The 7^th season as well as the complete “Alfred Hitchcock Hour” series is available in Australia.