There are stars remembered for a particular movie or television series, others for a hit song and still others because they somehow came to embody a moment in American culture. Shelley Fabares, who died August 22 at the age of 82 following a brief illness, managed to do all three.

For one generation, she will forever be Mary Stone, the pretty and popular teenage daughter of Donna and Alex Stone on The Donna Reed Show. For another, she’s the young woman whose recording of “Johnny Angel” unexpectedly went all the way to No. 1. Movie fans remember her as Elvis Presley’s leading lady—not once, but three times—while viewers who came along decades later may know her best as Christine Armstrong, the smart, independent television anchor who fell in love with Craig T. Nelson’s Hayden Fox on Coach.

Yet pop culture historian Geoffrey Mark believes understanding Fabares’ appeal requires going back to the beginning and recognizing what she represented to the generation that grew up watching her. Mark met Fabares through his longtime friendship with her Donna Reed Show brother, Paul Petersen, and knew her aunt, actress and musical comedy legend Nanette Fabray, very well. More importantly for purposes of remembering Fabares today, he understood the place she occupied in the culture.

GEOFFREY MARK: “Shelley Fabares was to Baby Boomer TV what Ricky Nelson was to Baby Boomer TV. She was the female embodiment of what Hollywood was selling the suburban, pretty teenage girl should be, the same way they sold Ricky as the embodiment of all that was good about teenage boyhood and young manhood.”

Growing up in Hollywood

Born Michele Ann Marie Fabares on January 19, 1944, in Santa Monica, California, Shelley was hardly a newcomer when The Donna Reed Show turned her into one of America’s best-known teenagers. She had begun acting as a child, appearing on television and in films throughout the 1950s like The Bad Seed, Never Say Goodbye, Jeanne Eagels and Marjorie Morningstar, as well as a televised production of Our Town featuring Frank Sinatra, Paul Newman and Eva Marie Saint. There was also Disney’s Annette, which teamed her with another young performer destined to become an icon of teenage America, Annette Funicello. But it was The Donna Reed Show, which premiered in 1958, that changed everything.

At 14, Fabares became Mary Stone, older sister to Petersen’s Jeff and daughter of Reed’s Donna and Carl Betz’s Alex. If Donna represented the idealized television mother of the era, Mary quickly became something equally potent: an image of the ideal American teenage girl.

GEOFFREY MARK: “There had not been a strong teenage girl like her on television before. There were other teenage characters who were insecure and neurotic, but Mary was good in school, pretty, always popular, always being dated—10 feet wide and about a quarter-inch deep. The character was more concerned with how she was doing her hair or what she was wearing or her social life than really caring about what was going on around her. The character just floated in this teenage world of her own. Along the way she became the poster girl for that white, Protestant, upper-middle-class suburban teenage girl of America.”

And then something happened that nobody could have reasonably expected: Mary Stone started singing.

Enter ‘Johnny Angel’

In 1962, Fabares performed “Johnny Angel” on The Donna Reed Show. The song exploded, reaching No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 and turning an actress who never considered herself much of a singer into a genuine recording star. Mark remembers the irony of it all.

GEOFFREY MARK: “I don’t think I’m telling tales out of school that Shelley was no singer. They did God knows how many takes of the song and had to sew it together to make it work, but it worked and it became this huge hit. So Shelley is starring on a television show, has a hit song out and suddenly she’s moving into movies.”

Fabares would record additional material and release three albums, but nothing approached the phenomenon of “Johnny Angel.” The song’s success, Mark points out, also demonstrates just how powerful network television was at the time.

GEOFFREY MARK: “Having a song on a television show like that—today it sounds ridiculous, but back then a hit television show could have 40 million people watching every week. The wisdom of Ozzie Nelson was to make Ricky sing on the show. The hit music made young people watch the show, and the show made young people want to buy the hit music. The two fed each other. It did the same thing for Shelley.”

By the mid-1960s, Fabares was ready to leave Mary Stone behind.

Shelley Fabares meets Elvis Presley

Her transition to movies included Ride the Wild Surf with Fabian and Hold On! with Herman’s Hermits frontman Peter Noone, but the films that would permanently connect Fabares to another pop culture phenomenon paired her with Elvis Presley. She appeared opposite Presley in three movies: Girl Happy in 1965, Spinout in 1966 and Clambake in 1967, and it was quite a leap from the Stone family’s living room.

GEOFFREY MARK: “Shelley left at just the right time and blossomed into kind of a sex symbol of her time—not quite so white-bread pure. She was able to play more sophisticated characters. The teenage-girl model thing that I just spoke of kind of went away as she out-aged it very quickly. She couldn’t play, ‘Oh, she’s on the brink of womanhood.’ No. She was a woman.”

The hoped-for major movie career never quite materialized, despite working with one of the biggest stars in the world. Yet that may ultimately have worked in Fabares’ favor, because television gave her something more valuable than a short burst of movie stardom: an opportunity to reinvent herself.

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GEOFFREY MARK: “Her movie career did not go where they all had hoped it would go, even with starring in the films with Elvis. And Shelley returned to television playing witty, sophisticated, bitchy characters that were still beautiful, but funny and layered and a little more real.”

That description fits Francine Webster, Fabares’ recurring character on the original One Day at a Time, particularly well. Introduced as a friend and professional rival of Bonnie Franklin’s Ann Romano, Francine allowed audiences who had grown up with Mary Stone to see just how good a comic actress Fabares had become. Mary had been the teenager everyone was supposed to admire; Francine could be competitive, manipulative, funny and exasperating.

Fabares had spent the years between those two characters working steadily. Among her most memorable dramatic performances was the 1971 television movie Brian’s Song, in which she portrayed Joy Piccolo, wife of Chicago Bears running back Brian Piccolo, opposite James Caan and Billy Dee Williams. There were regular roles on The Brian Keith Show, The Practice and Forever Fernwood, along with seemingly endless television guest appearances.

GEOFFREY MARK: “She was one of those wonderful comedy sitcom actresses who just went from show to show to show working. Her star never faded.”

And then came Coach.

Finding Christine Armstrong

Premiering on ABC in 1989, Coach starred Craig T. Nelson as Minnesota State University football coach Hayden Fox, with Fabares as Christine Armstrong, the television news anchor who eventually became his wife. The role completed the journey that had begun with Mary Stone three decades earlier. Christine was attractive, certainly, but her beauty wasn’t the point. She was an accomplished adult woman with a demanding career, a strong personality and a relationship in which she was never simply an appendage to the male lead.

Fabares remained with Coach throughout its nine-season run, earning two Emmy nominations for her performance. The series introduced her to viewers who might never have seen The Donna Reed Show, heard “Johnny Angel” on the radio when it was new or bought a ticket to see her opposite Elvis. It also demonstrated something about her that her teenage stardom could easily obscure: Shelley Fabares was actually a very good actress.

Following her death, Nelson remembered his longtime co-star as an extraordinary woman and an important part of his life during their years together on the series.

A life beyond the screen

Offscreen, Fabares’ life had its own difficult chapters. Her first marriage, to record producer Lou Adler, ended in divorce. In 1984, she married M*A*S*H star Mike Farrell, beginning a marriage that would last more than four decades. She also became deeply involved in Alzheimer’s advocacy after watching her mother battle the disease.

Then came her own health crisis. In the late 1990s, Fabares developed severe liver problems caused by autoimmune hepatitis. Her condition deteriorated to the point that she required a transplant, which she received in 2000 after a lengthy wait. It’s that part of Fabares’ story that particularly impresses Mark.

GEOFFREY MARK: “She was given a death sentence a very long time ago. She outfoxed the whole medical community, living into her 80s when she was told she wouldn’t live past her early 60s. Tenacity, good doctors and luck.”

Her acting appearances became increasingly infrequent afterward. Among her later work was voicing Martha Kent in the DC animated universe, including Superman: The Animated Series, Justice League and, finally, Superman: Brainiac Attacks in 2006.

But by then Fabares had nothing left to prove. She had made the extraordinarily difficult transition from child performer to teenage star, from pop singer to movie leading lady, from former teen idol to character actress and, eventually, Emmy-nominated sitcom star. More than that, she had managed to grow older without spending her career trying to recreate Mary Stone.

Saying goodbye to Shelley Fabares

Which is probably why Shelley Fabares’ death feels like the loss of something more than another familiar television face.

There are performers whose characters become inseparable from the era in which they were created. For millions of Baby Boomers, Mary Stone was one of them, belonging to the same television landscape as Ricky Nelson, Annette Funicello and the other young stars who offered postwar America what was an idealized picture of what adolescence supposedly looked like. Fabares simply had the good fortune and talent to keep going after America stopped asking her to be that girl.

GEOFFREY MARK: “There were always these idols of youth and purity and energy, and Shelley fell into that. To Baby Boomers, she represented a type that the girls of America looked to. Everyone wanted to be just like Shelley Fabares in the same way every girl wanted to date Ricky Nelson and every boy wanted to be just like him. Baby Boomers are sad today because they’ve lost the icon of what the American teenage girl should be.”

Before Paul McGann became the Eighth Doctor in 1996’s Doctor Who television movie, another science-fiction legend nearly became part of the Time Lord’s universe: Star Trek icon Leonard Nimoy. And for the record, this was not simply just on somebody’s wish list.

Nimoy, who had successfully moved behind the camera as director of such films as Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home and Three Men and a Baby, was attached to direct an earlier proposed theatrical Doctor Who. Producer Philip Segal, who spent years attempting to bring Doctor Who back to television, actually found himself dealing directly with Nimoy.

PHILIP SEGAL (producer, Doctor Who: The Movie): “For the TV movie I was working on, there was one hurdle left. There was a movie that was supposed to be made, or was in pre-production. They had a deal to do a movie with Leonard Nimoy attached to direct it—and I think maybe even starring in it. I don’t know. I actually didn’t know about this until the lawyers got involved. In those days, it was very important when you were going to get rights to something, you needed to make sure you had all the rights, not just some of them. So it couldn’t be encumbered or clouded. You couldn’t have any loose strings. The idea that there was a movie deal floating around out there did not make the lawyers happy, and there was no way I was going to get this done if that didn’t go away.”

“They had to start pre-production by a certain date. Otherwise, those rights reverted back to the BBC and then I was fully clear. And they kept promising—this movie company kept promising—that they were scouting locations with Leonard and all this stuff. And I thought, ‘Okay, well, I’ll have a meeting with Leonard Nimoy and see exactly what’s going on.’ He came to Amblin, where I was working, and we had a meeting and we talked about it. And I found out from him that there wasn’t really pre-production going on. They were kind of bamboozling everybody, trying to figure out how to get enough money to even start.”

One point that Segal emphasizes is that Nimoy’s interest was absolutely genuine and not some passing fancy

PHILIP SEGAL: “Oh, it was very serious. I think in that moment in time, he was exploring wanting to be a director very seriously and they thought it was a great name at the time to attach. But as serious as he was, they just didn’t have the financing. On top of that, I knew just from reading that script and also from understanding who the players were, that they just couldn’t get it done. Remember, I worked for Amblin, so I had access to all kinds of intelligence—intelligence gathering from other studios, from agencies. There wasn’t any piece of information I didn’t know about a deal, and I knew that it was never going to get made. Not like that.”

“Eventually, the clock ran out and we were able to move forward. But as I said, there was a script for that version, which I read. And it was awful. It literally made those two Peter Cushing movies from the 1960s look like Raiders of the Lost Ark. Oh, it was bad.”

Leonard Nimoy quick facts

• Full name: Leonard Simon Nimoy
• Born: March 26, 1931, in Boston, Massachusetts
• Died: February 27, 2015, at age 83
• Best known for: Playing Spock in Star Trek, beginning with the original 1960s science fiction series
• First Star Trek movie: Reprised Spock in Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979)
• Famous sequel: Returned in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982), which featured Spock’s memorable sacrifice
• Behind the camera: Directed Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (1984) and Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986)
• Other Star Trek appearances: Nimoy played Spock in Star Trek V, Star Trek VI and later appeared in the J.J. Abrams-era films
• Beyond Star Trek: Had a major role on Mission: Impossible, playing Paris from 1969 to 1971
• Other directing work: Directed the hit 1987 comedy Three Men and a Baby
• Signature phrase: Spock’s Vulcan greeting, “Live long and prosper,” became inseparable from Nimoy and his legacy
• William Shatner connection: Nimoy and William Shatner became television icons as Spock and Captain Kirk, a partnership that continued through multiple Star Trek films

Nearly 15 years after Buck Rogers in the 25th Century ended its run, Erin Gray saw an opportunity she desperately wanted: the chance to command a starship. Having played Colonel Wilma Deering opposite Gil Gerard’s Buck Rogers from 1979 to 1981, she was among the actresses considered for Captain Kathryn Janeway on Star Trek: Voyager. The role would eventually go to Kate Mulgrew after original star Geneviève Bujold departed shortly after filming began, but Gray remembers fighting just for the opportunity to audition.

For her, it wasn’t simply about joining Star Trek, a franchise she admits she was never that familiar with. Instead, it stemmed from the years of playing women who frequently existed in support of a male leading character—including Wilma, despite her military rank. In Janeway, Gray saw the kind of role actresses were rarely offered at the time: the person in charge and the character around whom the story revolved.

ERIN GRAY: “I knew it was an opportunity of a lifetime. I really wanted to be in charge. It just came at a time in my life where I went, ‘I want this.’ But I had a hard time getting in on the audition; they did not want to see me. I kept asking my agent to please try again. And finally they did. They let me in. I went into the audition really memorizing that monologue—and memorization is not easy for me. I get nervous and my mind blanks out or whatever, but I worked really hard on it. And I get in there and I’m about to say the opening line and I hear a voice off to my right saying, ‘So you don’t remember me, huh? We only spent three weeks together in Hawaii.’”

“I’m looking at the person and I don’t recognize him. I think, ‘Wow, I did three movies in Hawaii, and who is…?’ Talk about throwing me off my center. Well, that did it. I got through it, but not to that place as an actor where you know you nailed it. You feel good about it. You were flowing. This was not that. I did it, but it wasn’t the best.”

The man Gray couldn’t place turned out to be a director she’d previously worked with on an episode of Magnum, P.I. His presence rattled her for reasons that went back to that earlier experience, and the timing couldn’t have been worse. 

ERIN GRAY: “I knew that the role for Captain Janeway was important to the producers and the director because they wanted somebody who could do a lot of dialogue and memorize it and do it quickly. They’d had problems with another actress who hadn’t been able to do that and didn’t like working at the speed that television requires, so she left and they were looking for a replacement. So I knew how important that was going in, but I did not know that the same director who did Magnum, P.I. would be the same director of that episode. I was so humiliated. It was one of those moments. But it turned out to be for the best. My father did wisely say that all things conform to the right way, and he’s right.”

Why Janeway meant so much to Erin Gray

Gray’s desire to play Janeway becomes considerably more understandable when viewed against the career she’d already had. Wilma Deering may have been a colonel, but Buck Rogers in the 25th Century was still built around the title character. She had spent years encountering a familiar limitation for actresses: no matter how capable their characters were supposed to be, the men usually remained at the center. Janeway offered something different.

ERIN GRAY: “I think it’s more the fact that there were very few roles for women to star in, period. I was always the objectified, beautiful girl who adoringly looked up at her leading man and whatever, but to be the center and to carry the story was a rare occurrence.”

“The only time I did that was on ‘Vampire in Space,’ the one episode on Buck Rogers [where] the storyline went through my character. So to be in something where I could be pivotal to that storyline was very appealing to me as an actress. I did one movie called Born Beautiful that I was the lead in, and it was a great experience. I wanted to do that again. I didn’t want it to be all about being goo-goo eyes at the leading man kind of thing. I did a lot of that in the ’80s, which is fine. I mean, I love men, so I had no problem with that. But there’s something as an actor, as a talent, that you just want something you can sink your teeth into.”

That frustration actually makes Wilma Deering an interesting contradiction. Gray may not have felt she was being given the opportunities she wanted dramatically, yet Wilma was having a profound effect on many of the girls watching. That’s something Gray wouldn’t discover until years later.

ERIN GRAY: “I know that with Buck Rogers, my role had inspired a lot of women to join the military. I had a woman who was one of the highest-ranking women in the Marine Corps come up to my table and she was, like, ‘You’re the reason.’ I’m looking at this almost six-foot-tall woman going, ‘Really? I inspired you?’ ‘Absolutely.’ And she said, ‘Oh, I just got a call. I got to go. I got to go fly the president.’ ‘Yeah, yeah, go. Please.’ But to know that my role did that, I did not ever think when I got the job on Buck Rogers that that would have that kind of influence. It was just a job. It was just do the best you can kind of thing. To find out 10, 15 years later the impact, it was mind-boggling to me.”

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In that respect, Gray’s experience with Wilma belongs to a larger science-fiction tradition. Nichelle Nichols famously heard from women inspired by Uhura to pursue careers in science and the space program, while Mulgrew would discover that Captain Janeway had a similar influence on the generation that grew up watching Voyager. Gray never imagined Wilma Deering would be part of that lineage.

ERIN GRAY: “That’s a wonderful gift the universe gave us in a sense, because I didn’t set off to do that. I set off to get a job and survive. I came from a very poor upbringing and left home very early and it was up to me to pay the bills, find a job and discover myself and figure it all out. So thinking of a legacy was not in my upbringing.”

The changing face of Wilma Deering

Even Wilma’s status on Buck Rogers wasn’t necessarily secure. The series was dramatically revamped for its second season, with the characters leaving Earth aboard the space vessel Searcher. Gray remembers meeting incoming producer John Mantley and being greeted with a rather startling declaration.

ERIN GRAY: “When I met the new producer, I think we met him at a bar somewhere near Universal Studios or something, if my memory is correct. Anyway, he said, ‘You know, I’m going to fire you.’ I went, ‘What? Are you nuts?’ Because I knew the success of my spandex, that’s for sure. And I was, like, ‘Really? Okay. What can I tell you? I’m not going to fight for it, but if you think so.’ We continued to have a conversation and he shared his ideas with me. And of course he didn’t fire me.”

Gray remained with the show, although an attempt was made to change Wilma’s familiar look.

ERIN GRAY: “Unfortunately, I didn’t wear my spandex for a while, a couple of episodes. I was Dairy Queen in space instead, which didn’t last long because I said, ‘Give me back the spandex.’ The hat went first. And then the little skirt, whatever. I just needed the tray and the roller skates to complete the look.”

There’s an irony to all of this that Gray recognizes. Her appearance was undeniably part of the appeal of Buck Rogers, but she was an actress who wanted considerably more than just looking good beside the hero. Which is why, when she read the Voyager material years later, Janeway struck such a chord.

ERIN GRAY: “I did [get a sense of Janeway]. And I wanted to bring my take on it and bring myself into that role. And I felt I was very right for it, but it wasn’t meant to be.”

Gray may not have gotten her chance to join the official Star Trek universe, but years later she did get to put on a Starfleet uniform. She appeared as Commodore Laura Gray in the acclaimed fan-produced series Star Trek Continues, which was designed to recreate the look and feel of the original 1960s series, debuting with the 2014 episode “Lolani” and returning two years later for “Embracing the Winds.” In a coincidence that seems particularly appropriate given her feelings about Janeway, the latter dealt with Commander Diana Garrett (Clare Kramer) challenging Starfleet over the barriers preventing women from commanding Constitution-class starships. Gray’s Commodore was one of the officers presiding over the dispute.

The Captain’s chair that got away

Mulgrew ultimately got that opportunity and made Janeway one of Star Trek‘s defining characters, while Gray came to realize there was another side to the job she had wanted so badly.

She already knew something about the punishing schedule of a weekly science-fiction series from Buck Rogers. By the time Voyager came along, Gray was also a mother. Years later, she recognized her own experience in Mulgrew’s account of the price she paid while trying to balance motherhood with the demands of playing Janeway.

ERIN GRAY: “Looking back, strangely enough, I had said I would never want to work the hours that I worked on Buck Rogers and have a child at the same time. That’s just impossible for me as a mother, and combining the two roles is hard. Kate Mulgrew said in her memoirs, which I read, that she felt that it really damaged her relationship with her sons in that the hours were so long. She talks about sleeping on the set, which [was] similar to what I did on Buck Rogers, sleeping in my dressing room, not even bothering to go home because it was eight hours before we were back in action again.”

“So looking back at it, it was a good thing that I didn’t get the role, because I had another baby at that time, so it was really a blessing in disguise. But, damn, I wanted to be in charge.”

Before there was a ‘Battle’

According to Garnet, the roots of Battle of the Network Stars actually stretched back years before its 1976 debut.

BILL GARNET (producer, Battle of the Network Stars): “There was a gentleman by the name of Dick Button who won the gold medal in men’s figure skating twice in the Olympics. And when he won the second one, he was awarded something called the Hickok Belt, which at the time—it doesn’t exist anymore—represented who was considered to be the best amateur athlete in the United States.”

“And Dick commented that not only didn’t he think he was the best amateur athlete in the United States, he didn’t even think he was the best amateur athlete amongst figure skaters. So out of that, he grew this idea, which he finally nicknamed World’s Most Versatile Athlete. And his idea was to get a bunch of athletes together who were famous in their sport and have them compete in sports other than what they were famous for.”

Button took the idea to the three networks — ABC, NBC and CBS — and initially found no takers.

BILL GARNET: “The gentleman that he pitched it to at CBS was a guy named Barry Frank, who later became the executive vice president of the International Management Group. It had a division called Trans World International, which was the television production arm of it. Barry remembered World’s Most Versatile Athlete, changed it to The Superstars, went and pitched Roone Arledge at ABC, and Roone said, ‘Fine, you can get it on a Sunday afternoon if you can get it sponsored.’ Which Barry did. It did well. So the next year they did, I think, four of them. And the next year they did seven of them. And it continued to grow and spawned Women’s Superstars, World Superstars and then we did something called Celebrity Superstars, which had people like Oleg Cassini and Robert Duvall. And out of that grew the idea of doing Battle of the Network Stars.”

Getting ABC, CBS and NBC to play together

Bringing stars from the three competing networks together was something virtually unheard of at the time. “It wasn’t pretty unprecedented,” he clarifies, “it was unprecedented.”

Yet the networks quickly recognized that putting their stars on ABC could actually benefit them.

BILL GARNET: “The networks were looking at the show as great publicity for their shows, so they didn’t mind the exposure. Not sure you could get away with it these days, but those days, networks had no problem. And it was always on ABC, so ABC, of course, had no problem, but NBC and CBS were more than happy because they figured it was great exposure for their shows. And we always were the number one show, so whether you were on a CBS show or an NBC show, the exposure for your show was great.”

The first Battle included Ron Howard, Penny Marshall, Robert Conrad and Gabe Kaplan, among many others. But for Garnet, one incident in particular demonstrated why the show connected with viewers.

BILL GARNET: “The thing that I think made the show take off was the running relay in the first show. What happened was one of the NBC runners was judged as passing the baton outside the passing zone. NBC won the race, but it was decided that they had to be penalized because they passed it out of the zone. As a result, they were awarded a two-second penalty, which put them in second place and put ABC in first place.

“Bob Conrad was not happy about this. Bob was a very competitive guy, so he started going nuts and thought it was unfair and so on and so forth. And Telly Savalas got involved. But at the end of the day, Conrad said to Gabe Kaplan [Welcome Back Kotter], ‘Why don’t we have a runoff?’ And Gabe said, ‘Just you and me.’ What Gabe knew, which Bob didn’t, was Gabe ran track in high school, so it was Bob Conrad against Gabe Kaplan and Gabe Kaplan beat him. But I think that moment, that drama and that sort of realism made people say, ‘Oh, this is actually real. This isn’t just a bunch of actors making believe they’re doing stuff.’ They were really competitive.”

LOU FERRIGNO (actor, The Incredible Hulk): “I remember when I did Battle of the Network Stars, I had a chance to see all the other celebrities from the TV shows being themselves. Because when you’re filming a TV series or a film, you’re playing a character. It was just like a group of us all having fun, especially when it came to the competition. But when it came to the competition, they’d fire the gun and everyone changes. Everybody wants to win. Nobody wants to lose. I remember I had a great time on the show because you had the different networks—CBS, NBC, ABC. And I remember people like Robert Conrad, Erin Gray, these different people, being with them, seeing them. It was just so delicious.”

Celebrities who wanted to be athletes

BILL GARNET: “What we found out over the course of time is that athletes wanted to be celebrities and celebrities wanted to be athletes, so this gave them their chance to. It was one weekend at Pepperdine, which is in Malibu and is beautiful. And we demoed everybody out. They, at the time, got paid rather well for it, but the bottom line was they had fun and we knew it was competitive, but it was outside of their acting. So they got to do something that was fun in sports and something that they could sort of sink their teeth into.”

In Robert Conrad’s case, his Battle persona even had an unexpected impact beyond the show.

BILL GARNET: “There was a time where, I don’t remember which one of the shows it was, but Bob Conrad was out of work. He had done The Wild Wild West and he had done Baa Baa Black Sheep and that got canceled and he had nothing lined up. We were sitting there in the bleachers talking and I said, ‘Why don’t you just be a hard-ass? Maybe something will come of it.’ What came out of that was his successful Eveready Battery commercials. That sort of grew out of this character that he played on Battle of the Network Stars.”

Few celebrities took the competition more seriously than Star Trek icon William Shatner.

BILL GARNET: “Well, he was very competitive. In fact, as I remember, when he was the captain of his team, I think it was two weeks, it might’ve even been three weeks before we were going to shoot the show. He would gather his team together and they would practice and they would determine who was going to be in the running, who was going to be in the swimming, who was going to be in the kayak. And he had it all down the morning they showed up. He knew who was going to be in every event and what heat they were going to be in or what leg. He was a captain of his team.”

“He was still in the era of taking himself seriously. Although I will say that backstage during Battle of the Network Stars, it wasn’t crazy serious. But once the cameras rolled, he was going to be the captain of his team and he was going to win come hell or high water. He wasn’t going to mess around. And so he was Captain Kirk of his team.”

Mark Harmon, Erin Gray and Tom Selleck

Some competitors arrived with considerably more athletic experience than viewers might have expected.

BILL GARNET: “I remember Mark Harmon, who was quarterback at UCLA and big-time quarterback, and one of the events was football. I remember him coming over and saying, ‘Wouldn’t be fair if I was quarterback,’ so he ended up being one of the receivers. Gabe Kaplan was very competitive. Conrad was very competitive. So were Erin Gray and Cathy Lee Crosby, who was a very good athlete.”

ERIN GRAY (actor, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century): “I actually learned just how competitive I am. I’m pretty fierce.” 

BILL GARNET: “They wanted Tom Selleck, who at the time was a big star doing Magnum, P.I. and the talent booker didn’t think he would do it. But a friend of mine was working on Magnum, P.I., so I figured I’d call him and see if he could put in a good word. I said to him, ‘I’m trying to reach Selleck to see if he’ll do Battle.’ And he said, ‘Hold on.’ Handed the phone to Tom Selleck. I said to him, ‘You don’t know me. I’m producing Battle of the Network Stars.’ ‘Oh my God, don’t you understand? I went to USC on a volleyball scholarship. I’d love to do that show.’ And he ended up doing it four times.”

Selleck’s first appearance also resulted in one of Garnet’s favorite memories.

BILL GARNET: “If you remember, they all were supplied with Speedos, rather skimpy bathing suits. About three weeks after the first time Selleck did it, he called me up in the office and he said, ‘I hope you’re making money on this.’ I said, ‘What are you talking about?’ He said, ‘You don’t know?’ I said, ‘Help me out here. I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ He said, ‘Get in your car and drive over to Westwood and go to this address.’ I drive over and there’s a poster shop. In the front window is a picture of Tom Selleck on the starting blocks of the swimming in his Speedo with me standing next to him. So I called him back and said, ‘No, I’m not making any money off it.'”

The women became a force

The series also reflected the attitudes toward women and sports in the late 1970s and early ’80s—and Garnet watched those attitudes begin to evolve.

BILL GARNET: “I think it was that time period really where when it came to sports, men tended to take command. And especially some of them— Robert Conrad, Telly Savalas, Gabe Kaplan, Shatner. At that time in the late ’70s, early ’80s, men looked at sports as a men’s thing. We looked at it as when we were booking it, you needed men and women. But the women tended to play second fiddle up until a certain point. And then when they started to realize that some of these women were incredibly good athletes. There were a number of the women who, when you put them side by side with the guys—I mean, the guys were probably a little bit older, not in as good a shape. And so little by little, it grew that the women actually played a more important role as time went on.”

ERIN GRAY: “I remember they wouldn’t let any of the women become captains, and I was really ticked. There was a gentleman who was the captain of one of the Battle of the Network Stars that I did, and he didn’t know the back end or the front end of a boat. I was, like, ‘We’re going to win. Okay?’ So I just took it upon myself to knock on everybody’s door. I said, ‘You lose points if you don’t know the rules. Let’s go over the rules right now.’ And I just took charge. Mama was going to win.”

BILL GARNET: “There was no rule about men and women on the teams. I mean, in terms of whether it be the swimming or the kayak or the running, it was the captains who decided who was going to go on what leg. And it could be men against women, women against women, men against men. It didn’t matter. That was up to the captains.”

ERIN GRAY: “I remember the first time we were doing flag football with Robert Conrad and I’m, like, ‘Ugh!’ And he’s laughing at me, but I didn’t care. What was I thinking? Robert Conrad’s going to knock me over with one bump. But we became good friends after that. I think he liked my spunk.”

Lynda Carter and the Standards and Practices Department

Having dozens of television stars running around in Speedos occasionally presented challenges that had nothing to do with athletics. Garnet remembers Lynda Carter preparing for the swimming competition when someone from ABC’s Standards and Practices department approached him.

BILL GARNET: “Lynda was at the pool getting ready for the swimming event. The Speedos were very tight and therefore very revealing, and the Standards and Practices person from ABC came over to me and said, ‘No.’ And handed me a roll of gaffer’s tape. I had to walk over to Lynda. She had been here before and went to her dressing room and gaffered up where she had to gaffer up.”

ERIN GRAY: “On Silver Spoons, I was constantly being told that my nipples were showing and that I should wear a bra. I hate wearing a bra, so I would just put an extra sweater on or whatever, but I was constantly getting these notes from the network. So what did they do on Battle of the Network Stars? They gave me a bathing suit that once it got wet was completely 100% see-through. It wasn’t just a little nipple peeking there. You could see it all. I’m, like, ‘Really, guys? Did anybody think about this?'”

It wasn’t the only Standards and Practices note Garnet remembers.

BILL GARNET: “There were notes about shots of nipples or wet asses, but my favorite one of all time was Arte Johnson was on the show. He was doing the dunk tank, got dunked and yelled, ‘Oh, sh**.’ So I got a note from the Standards and Practices person, ‘Please edit out the ‘Oh, sh**.’ Of course, I wrote back a note that said, ‘No sh**.'”

Robin Williams goes in his own direction

BILL GARNET: “Billy Crystal did it a number of times and actually co-hosted with Howard Cosell, which was great fun because Billy did an imitation of Howard. So it was Howard and Billy doing Howard. David Letterman did it once. Robin Williams did it once. The level of celebrities that did it when you look back was incredible.”

Williams particularly sticks in Garnet’s memory.

“Fortunately, I knew Robin from the days when he was at the Improv. And Robin, I mean, arguably is the most genius stand-up comedian of all time, at least in my mind.But when we were doing it, he was very good. He was very sort of quiet until we got to the final event, which was the tug-of-war. When we did the tug-of-war, we always got this big meat scale with the big round things and people would go and stand on it and then we’d video them getting their weight.

“Well, Robin got on it and just went into this place where he started talking to the scale as though it was his mother for five minutes, 10 minutes. And I’ve got other people in the production saying, ‘What should we do?’ I said, ‘Let him go. Robin will come back when he feels like coming back.’ And he snaps out of it and he was fine. That was Robin. He would just go to places nobody else went.”

Howard Cosell treated it like a real sport

Overseeing much of the madness was sportscaster Howard Cosell, whose presence helped give the competition an odd kind of legitimacy.

BILL GARNET: “Howard was brilliant. Howard could talk to you about anything and have an opinion about everything, but he loved what he did. He loved sports, he loved being around athletes, or in this case, performers. He could do play-by-play of anything at any given moment. I mean, he was just brilliant. Howard used to show up every Saturday and Sunday morning at 6:30. He wanted to be the first one there and watch everyone arrive.

“And he’d come to me, ‘Billy, I’m the biggest star out there. They all want to do this show because of me.’ For the most part, he was right. He was a huge star. I mean, there were a couple of years where he was voted the most loved and most hated sportscaster in the same year. But he was brilliant. Brilliant. Howard always looked at doing Battle of the Network Stars as, ‘This is true sport. They’re not doing it for the money. They’re doing it for the love of athletics.'”

Why it worked

Garnet believes one of the reasons Battle of the Network Stars would be difficult to recreate today is the fragmentation of television itself.

BILL GARNET: “There were three networks then, ABC, NBC, CBS. Now there’s broadcast, there’s cable, there’s pay-per-view, there’s streaming. It would be hard to break it down into three or four teams. Also back in the day, pretty much everybody knew everybody who was on a show on ABC, NBC, CBS. Now, I’m not even sure that other actors know everybody who’s on every show. There are a lot of big stars who are coming out of YouTube videos and TikTok and I couldn’t tell you 90% of them. So, you could probably do the show today, but the audience would be so disjointed because someone might know this person from TikTok, but wouldn’t know the person from broadcast television.”

Fifty years later, Garnet doesn’t pretend Battle of the Network Stars was intended to change television or the world. In fact, that was precisely the point.

BILL GARNET: “Battle of the Network Stars wasn’t just a sports show. It was celebrities and it was a fantasy. People would come up to me when they were doing the show and say, ‘How do you justify doing something so meaningless?’ And I would say to them, ‘Look, if I can provide mindless entertainment where people can sit in front of their television for two hours every six months and smile at their television, and five minutes after it’s over, they don’t even remember what they watched, that’s a vacation. That’s providing a great service.’ Why does everything have to be so damn serious?”

More than 35 years after Dallas ended its remarkable 13-season run and 48 years after it started, the saga of the Ewing family continues to attract devoted fans around the world. The proof of that lies in this Sunday’s episode of MeTV’s Collector’s Call, where host Lisa Whelchel visits Oklahoma superfan David Goodspeed’s extraordinary collection of Dallas memorabilia. Joined by Charlene Tilton, who played Lucy Ewing throughout much of the series, the episode revisits everything from screen-worn costumes and signed posters to cast transportation plaques and other rare pieces of television history.

For Tilton, however, the collection represents something even more meaningful, with every prop and costume serving as a reminder of a series that became a worldwide phenomenon—and one that continues to win over new generations of viewers.

CHARLENE TILTON: “While we were doing the show itself, we were just always so busy. There was always press and things, but I was young and I was just so busy that I didn’t really notice. But now that I’m older and Dallas is on Amazon, people are discovering it for the first time. I mean, people my age when I started the show come up to me and love it. And then there are people re-watching it for the 10th time. They love it.”

“I have to tell you—actually, I’ll show you. I had a fan make me this recently—it’s a Lucy Ewing Barbie doll, and then there’s a lunchbox featuring Lucy with her yellow sports car. I mean, people are so nice. I brought this for the episode, but Dolce & Gabbana made this shirt. It says, ‘Lucy Ewing, Bringing Sexy Back Since 1978.’ Dolce & Gabbana was selling this in their stores. It really is a phenomenon.”

Preparing for Southfork Experience: an official fan convention celebrating the legacy of ‘Dallas’

On top of everything else, Tilton is preparing for February’s Southfork Experience, where surviving cast members will once again reunite with thousands of fans from around the world in Texas. To get ready, she’s given herself a very specific assignment: watch every episode of Dallas from beginning to end. In doing so, she’s come away with an even greater appreciation for the work she and her castmates did all those years ago.

CHARLENE TILTON: “I’m starting to watch them, and the performances are literally some of the best acting I’ve ever seen. And I have to say, I was pleased with a lot of my performances because I didn’t know. But I’m older now and can take a step back from it. We were genuinely a close-knit group, a close-knit family, and that chemistry translated. There was no acting in that. It really was there; you can’t manufacture it.”

Looking back, she’s struck by how willing the series’ writers were to tackle issues that television rarely addressed at the time.

CHARLENE TILTON: “One of my favorite storylines for Lucy was when she was engaged to get married to Kit Mainwaring, who was the son of the Mainwaring family, another very wealthy oil family. J.R. thought this would be great to have Lucy marry him and join the two oil family fortunes. Well, Kit decided to be true to himself and said, ‘Lucy, I have to tell you this because I love you. I can’t marry you. I’m going to confess it to you: I’m a homosexual.’ At that time, they couldn’t even use the word ‘gay,’ and the writers handled it so beautifully. Kit said, ‘Lucy, J.R. knows, and he’s going to cause a scandal. Basically, J.R.’s going to out me.’ And I said, ‘No, I’ll handle J.R.’ Lucy handled J.R. and protected Kit Mainwaring.”

“Well, it’s all so relevant now. Sue Ellen’s alcoholism, where Lucy was addicted to pills and my character got pregnant and had an abortion—we’re still talking about these issues, but they were handled back then on Dallas.”

Looking back, Tilton laughs when she’s asked whether she and the rest of the cast realized they were making television history. The answer is, of course, that no one could have at the time.

CHARLENE TILTON: “We couldn’t go anywhere at that time because of the paparazzi. I think now people control their own social media; they put everything out that they want out there themselves, which is kind of a nice thing in a way that they can control the narrative of their own lives and career, but back then you couldn’t. So we were just being chased and traveling all over. And, of course, everyone wanted to know…”

The unstated question of exactly what they wanted to know was in reference to television’s most famous cliffhanger: who shot J.R.?

CHARLENE TILTON: “I genuinely did not know. Larry Hagman was very smart; he rode that wave to negotiate himself a wonderful contract and good for him. And the frenzy wasn’t limited to the United States. There’s news footage from back then of their bringing film rolls to the UK on private planes. It was crazy.”

Patrick Duffy, who played Bobby Ewing, recently reminded her of something she’d never really considered during the show’s original run:

CHARLENE TILTON: “When Dallas went worldwide, it went into about 186 countries simultaneously. So it didn’t just trickle out, it went out all at once and became a global phenomenon.” 

One that is still growing, which is one of the reasons that stepping into David Goodspeed’s remarkable Dallas collection for Collector’s Call proved to be such an unexpectedly moving experience.

Entertainment

Barbara Bel Geddes Went From ‘Vertigo’ to ‘Dallas’— Her Amazing Story

In the decades after Hollywood’s Golden Age ended, many movie stars of the era found a surprising second act in TV, from Citizen Kane’s Agnes Moorehead in Bewitched to Double Indemnity’s Barbara Stanwyck in The Big Valley. One of the most fascinating tales of this kind of actress reinvention came from Barbara Bel Geddes, who […]

CHARLENE TILTON: “I was, first of all, in awe of what David and Jen Goodspeed had put together and that they took the time to do it. They curated it in such a beautiful manner, and they’re preserving it and they get so much joy out of it. Now being on Collector’s Call, we get to share that with the world, which, I have to tell you, was amazing for me to see. So I know other people watching the show are going to be astounded because there were things that I didn’t even know existed.”

Those discoveries are another reminder that while Dallas may have ended its network run in 1991, its story is still being written through the fans who continue to celebrate it. Years ago, Larry Hagman quietly predicted exactly what would happen.

CHARLENE TILTON: “He described it as excellent writing and good solid acting. He said, ‘It’ll stand the test of time,’ and he was right.”

Collector’s Call airs on Sunday, August 2, 2026, at 6:30 PM Eastern/5:30 PM Central on most MeTV stations.

In the 1960s, television and movies were still viewed as two very different worlds. TV actors rarely managed to make the leap to becoming movie stars, while established film actors generally looked down on the small screen. Don Knotts was one of the few performers who successfully crossed that divide. Despite becoming one of television’s most beloved comedians as Deputy Barney Fife on The Andy Griffith Show, he never lost sight of his ambition to headline feature films.

That opportunity came sooner than expected. Knotts had joined The Andy Griffith Show believing that he and Andy Griffith would leave after five seasons. While Griffith ultimately chose to remain when the network made it financially worthwhile, Knotts stuck with the original plan after Universal offered him a five-picture contract. Although he continued to return as Barney for several guest appearances during the series’ final years and once on Mayberry R.F.D., his focus had shifted to building a movie career—a gamble that ultimately paid off.

Knotts wasn’t starting from scratch when he signed with Universal. He had already appeared alongside Andy Griffith in the 1958 film adaptation of No Time for Sergeants, the Broadway hit that first brought the two comedians together and sparked a lifelong friendship. Supporting roles followed in Wake Me When It’s Over (1960) and The Last Time I Saw Archie (1961), before he joined the all-star ensemble of It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World in 1963 as the appropriately named “Nervous Driver.” That same year, he appeared opposite Doris Day and James Garner in Move Over, Darling, paving the way for his first true starring vehicle, 1964’s The Incredible Mr. Limpet.

Entertainment

Karen Knotts Reflects on Her Father, Don Knotts’ ‘Andy Griffith’ Legacy

One generation of television watchers knows him as Deputy Sheriff Barney Fife on The Andy Griffith Show. Another recognizes him as landlord Ralph Furley on Three’s Company, with additional viewers meeting him for the first time in the recurring role of Les “Ace” Calhoun, the nosy neighbor of Andy Griffith’s Ben Matlock, on Matlock. But […]

As part of our ongoing effort to preserve classic television history, we sat down with Don’s daughter, Karen Knotts, to look back not only at her father’s remarkable career, but also at the stories behind many of his best-known performances. A comedian herself, Karen tours with her acclaimed one-woman show, Tied Up in Knotts, an affectionate and deeply personal portrait of growing up with one of America’s most beloved comic actors. Here, she shares her memories of the roles that defined Don Knotts’ extraordinary career.

‘The Andy Griffith Show’ (1960–68)

Don achieved his greatest fame as Deputy Barney Fife, forever earning a place in television history alongside Andy Griffith’s Sheriff Andy Taylor in the fictional town of Mayberry.

KAREN KNOTTS: “We didn’t see him a lot, because he worked 10, 12 hours a day. And when he was home, he was always holed up in his room working on his lines and stuff like that.”

From the outset, Don and Andy Griffith had agreed they would spend five seasons on The Andy Griffith Show before moving on to other opportunities. When that fifth season arrived, however, their paths diverged. Andy accepted an offer to remain with the series, while Don honored the original plan after Universal came calling with a five-picture contract.

KAREN KNOTTS: “Put yourself in his place. That show was hard, hard work. Then think of the character, and also the energy that it took to play him. Imagine the intensity, plus the level of perfection that was being strived for. Then, all of a sudden, you get offered a five-picture deal to be a star in your own right and make all the decisions.”

Although he left as a regular cast member, Don would return for five guest appearances during the show’s remaining seasons.

‘The Incredible Mr. Limpet’ (1964)

Blending live action with animation years before it became commonplace, The Incredible Mr. Limpet casts Don as Henry Limpet, a mild-mannered civilian who, during World War II, is transformed into a fish while retaining his human mind. After adapting to his remarkable new life, he becomes an unlikely ally of the U.S. Navy, helping track down and destroy Nazi submarines.

KAREN KNOTTS: “If not the first, it was certainly one of the first films to combine live action with animation. Maybe Disney did one before, but this was very early on. In those days, films always debuted in New York, and it got a terrible, crushing review there that it never recovered from. That review destroyed the movie and it got no box office after that. The man who produced it, John C. Rose, went to Mexico after that, retired and never made another movie again. Dad wasn’t frustrated about the movie, because it was still a great piece of work. I don’t think he was expecting anything major out of it.”

Karen fondly remembers visiting the set of The Incredible Mr. Limpet, where the magic of moviemaking first inspired her to pursue acting herself.

KAREN KNOTTS: “I remember seeing Carole Cook putting the glasses on the face of the imaginary fish. Actually what they had in front of her was just a box full of junk that was raised up on a crane so that it would be at the proper eye level for her. Then she could lean forward and put the glasses on him. In the end, it was a very touching scene; she was such a very good actress. So she leaned forward and put the glasses on the fish, and the way she did that made me realize that I wanted to be an actress because I saw the power of that moment, how she made it real while just talking to a box of stuff.

“The funny thing is that we had a 16-millimeter projector in our house. Every time my brother would thread the movie and we’d watch it, when it came to that part where my dad turned into a fish, I would start to cry. I don’t know why. My dad was obviously still alive—he was actually in the same room with me—and he wasn’t a fish, but it just made me sad.”

‘The Ghost and Mr. Chicken’ (1966)

The first release under Don’s five-picture Universal contract gave him his first opportunity to carry a major studio comedy. He stars as Luther Heggs, a timid typesetter and aspiring newspaper reporter who volunteers to spend the night in a supposedly haunted mansion, hoping the assignment will earn him both a byline and the attention of Alma Parker (Joan Staley).

KAREN KNOTTS: “He was absolutely terrified, excited, overwhelmed—everything about this movie because it was the one he left The Andy Griffith Show to do. I mean, he left for the five-picture deal, but on this one I just remember him being extremely nervous, pacing around the house, and just completely consumed with it. He had his own little bungalow at Universal Studios with an office and a secretary. He would go down there to work with the writers. He actually hired Jim Fritzell and Everett Greenbaum, who were two of the top writers on The Andy Griffith Show. Part of his nervousness is that he didn’t have the safety net of The Andy Griffith Show. There, the producers were running the show and Andy was kind of like the kindly headmaster, but none of that was there now. It was him.”

What surprised Karen most was how quickly The Ghost and Mr. Chicken was made. Shot in just 17 days on a modest budget, the film nevertheless became one of Don Knotts’ signature comedies.

KAREN KNOTTS: “It was so unbelievable and now it’s a classic film. And it was exciting for him, because he was stepping out and being his own boss now, and that was scary, but the film’s success was a huge deal. What’s interesting is that the first draft of the script wasn’t working very well, so Dad called Andy Griffith in to be a story consultant. That’s a little-known fact, that Andy Griffith was one of the best story consultants in the business. He had a mind for stories that was absolutely unbelievable, and that’s probably one of the reasons why those stories on The Andy Griffith Show were so tight. Every story had a beginning, middle and end, and an arc, and surprises. I think a lot of that was Andy’s doing.”

‘The Reluctant Astronaut’ (1967)

For his next starring role, Don left haunted houses behind for the Space Race. In The Reluctant Astronaut, he plays Roy Fleming, a carnival ride operator who lands a janitor’s job at NASA’s Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston before a series of comic mishaps unexpectedly launches him into orbit. Once again, the screenplay came from former The Andy Griffith Show writers Jim Fritzell and Everett Greenbaum. With The Ghost and Mr. Chicken proving to be a hit, Don entered production with considerably more confidence than he had on his first Universal film.

KAREN KNOTTS: “He kind of knew the ropes now. One interesting thing about The Reluctant Astronaut is that he actually went to NASA to poke around the rockets there. There’s a picture of him somewhere up there in the rocket, looking around. It’s possible it wasn’t research and that he was invited there.”

One of Karen’s favorite memories from the production involved the old-school movie magic used long before CGI became commonplace.

KAREN KNOTTS: “In those days when you had to have things lift off the ground in a rocket, like a peanut butter tube or something, it would float because of strings that were attached to it and lifted it up. Nowadays, with CGI, they don’t need to do it that way anymore. But when I was a kid, I loved the fact that you could see the strings on set, but they were gone when the movie came out.”

‘The Shakiest Gun in the West’ (1968)

For his third Universal comedy, Don headed to the Old West in The Shakiest Gun in the West. He stars as Jesse W. Haywood, a newly minted dentist whose arrival on the frontier quickly lands him in the middle of a dangerous gun-smuggling scheme alongside a mysterious woman played by Barbara Rhoades.

KAREN KNOTTS: “Those films really did cover a lot of ground dealing with a lot of different themes and topics, so you never got bored. I mean, his performance in The Shakiest Gun in the West was hysterical. They came up with some great gags. This was a remake of a Bob Hope film called The Paleface. Barbara Rhoades was a contract player at Universal, and she didn’t have a very good acting background. My father said she wasn’t really ‘cutting the mustard’ in that role, so he worked with her a lot. He taught her how to act, basically, and in the end she did a fine job. But she didn’t have enough training at the time, and she was beautiful and was cast. Dad didn’t have any choice in who was cast in the role.”

Karen also appeared on the set of The Shakiest Gun in the West, and one memory still makes her laugh.

KAREN KNOTTS: “I think I actually put my hand down on the bar and kind of wrecked the shot. Also my brother and I were extras in that moment; we were extras in a lot of them. I was so excited to be on the set for this one that I couldn’t stop smiling. I was just happy and kept smiling. So I’m standing there in the background during this shootout Dad has with the gunslinger, and I’m smiling. The crowd is supposed to be terrified. I think I was 11 or 12. So in between takes, the costume lady comes over to me and wanted to change my outfit a little bit. So they gave me this Western hat. It was big and flat with a wide brim, and the hat covered my face. It put my face in shadow, so you couldn’t see me smiling. Oops. My brother and I were hamming it up like crazy on the set of that movie. We were all over the place, running around, playing around on the sets like we were cowboys and Indians, and it was beautiful.”

‘The Love God?’ (1969)

By the fourth film in his Universal contract, the studio was eager to move Don beyond the wholesome image audiences had come to expect. The Love God? cast him as Abner Peacock IV, the mild-mannered publisher of a struggling birdwatching magazine who is unwittingly transformed into the figurehead of a risqué publishing empire—a role that effectively turned him into an unlikely Hugh Hefner-style celebrity.

KAREN KNOTTS: “This was his fourth picture in the deal, so by this point, they had three in the can and they were all successes, generating a nice bit of profit there. Because of that, the studio wasn’t paying too much attention anymore to the scripts and that sort of thing. So this script, written by Nat Hiken, comes in and in it Dad plays this guy, Abner Peacock IV, who has a bird magazine that’s failing, and he can’t get enough funding for it. These gangsters, who run a porno ring with a dirty magazine, decide to buy out his magazine so they can put their own content in it. And they convince him to become the symbol of the magazine, and they basically turn him into Hugh Hefner.”

“With all due respect, it is difficult to imagine Don in the role of a Hugh Hefner type. And that was the problem. Everybody thought of him as a squeaky-clean guy, which he had always been. I mean, this was all comical and a satire, of course, but all of a sudden the studio didn’t know where the audience was going to be. They had him in these outrageous costumes—like the ultimate 1960s outrageous Nehru jackets and hats… I can’t even describe these outfits that they had him in. Plus they had a bevy of women following him around from city to city, while he’s totally naive about what’s going on. Plus, Anne Francis plays a woman trying to facilitate all this, who tries to seduce Abner. At the same time, he’s got a girl at home.”

Entertainment

Don Knotts & ‘Andy Griffith’—His Biographer Shares the Untold Stories

When you watch reruns of The Andy Griffith Show—most notably its first five seasons—you can’t help but get taken in by the easy-going chemistry between Griffith’s role as Mayberry’s Sheriff Andy Taylor and Don Knotts as Deputy Sheriff Barney Fife. At the same time, bring up the subject of the show to people, more often than […]

Karen enjoyed visiting the set and seeing the lavish lifestyle being created for Abner Peacock, but she also believes the film faced an uphill battle almost from the beginning.

KAREN KNOTTS: “Instead of letting Dad look over the different drafts of the script, Nat kept saying, ‘No, no, you can’t look at this until it’s finished.’ So that drove my dad crazy, because he was one of those nervous people who would say, ‘I want to know what I’m getting myself into!’ It took Nat forever to write it, and when it was finally finished, they shot it. Afterwards the studio finally realized what the movie was about and they were stunned. They didn’t really want to promote it, so they didn’t. It got very little publicity and came and went as a result, with very few people even knowing it existed. I honestly don’t know how Dad felt about it, but he was always kind of frustrated with his squeaky-clean image. He loved being Barney Fife and all that, but then, as we got into the late ’60s, everything had this sexual innuendo to it. It was the days of free love and all this stuff, so he was hindered by that because of his image. Many of the sketches they wrote for him on variety shows had to be toned down, because they didn’t want to offend his public, which he thought was a little bit unnecessary.”

‘How to Frame a Figg’ (1971)

Following the more adult-themed The Love God?, Don returned to the kind of family comedy that had made him a favorite with audiences. In How to Frame a Figg, he stars as Hollis Figg, a well-meaning but bumbling municipal bookkeeper whose unexpected promotion threatens to unravel a corruption scheme engineered by his own superiors. While Karen admits she doesn’t remember much about the production itself, she does recall her father reflecting on what the film ultimately represented in his career.

KAREN KNOTTS: “I don’t remember very much about this one, but I remember Dad saying that that was the end of his film career such as it was, because the family picture era had ended at that point. The variety shows were coming to an end, too. Hippies were prominent and it changed the whole texture of the way they were marketing things. So that was kind of the end of an era for him. But he did the five pictures, they were successful and he was very happy, because it established him as a movie star and somebody who could carry a movie.”

Teaming up with Tim Conway

After a few quieter years in film, Don found a perfect comic partner in Tim Conway. Disney teamed the two together for the 1975 hit The Apple Dumpling Gang, and audiences responded so enthusiastically that they reunited for Gus (1976), The Apple Dumpling Gang Rides Again (1979), The Prize Fighter (1979) and The Private Eyes (1980). Looking back, Karen believes the pairing was nothing short of inspired.

KAREN KNOTTS: “Disney put Dad and Tim together, and whoever came up with that combination was brilliant. He was ecstatic making those films, especially the Apple Dumpling films. He absolutely adored Tim Conway, and they were great friends. Tim did ad-lib a lot and he wrote a lot, too, so my dad had to kind of learn to adapt to Tim and learn to improvise a bit. He was comfortable doing it as long as he was with Tim.”

‘Three’s Company’ (1979–84)

While Don continued appearing in feature films, it was television that would once again redefine his career. Joining ABC’s hit sitcom Three’s Company as the eccentric landlord Ralph Furley, he introduced himself to a new generation of viewers. Sharing the screen with John Ritter, Joyce DeWitt and Suzanne Somers, Don once again proved why he was one of television’s most gifted comic performers.

KAREN KNOTTS: “What was wonderful about the show is that it introduced him to a whole new generation who was discovering him. That was such a wonderful thing because he just kept coming back. It’s like The Andy Griffith Show touched one generation, The Apple Dumpling Gang touched another and Three’s Company reached a whole different audience. So in every phase of his career, he became known to a new age group of people. It was fantastic.”

A Career That Never Stood Still

Whether he was making television history as Barney Fife, headlining Universal comedies, teaming with Tim Conway or delighting audiences as Ralph Furley, Don Knotts rarely looked back on past successes. Instead, he threw himself completely into whatever project came next.

KAREN KNOTTS: “He just looked at things as one project or another. He never was one to go back and look at stuff from the past. In fact, I don’t remember ever seeing him watch The Andy Griffith Show. He loved the show, but he would just look at each new project for what it was and take it for what it was. And dive into that particular project. That’s just how he functioned.”

Today, it’s pretty much expected that late-night hosts like Jimmy Kimmel, the “late” Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Fallon—or the cast of Saturday Night Live—will take aim at the President of the United States, Congress, government policy and just about anything else making headlines. Political satire has become so commonplace that it’s no longer viewed as particularly daring; it’s simply part of television’s comedic landscape. But that certainly wasn’t the case in the late 1960s.

At a time when the nation’s television networks generally avoided controversy, especially during prime time, one series was willing to challenge the status quo week after week. The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, hosted by brothers Dick and Tom Smothers, blended music, sketch comedy and increasingly pointed social and political commentary in ways network television had rarely attempted before. In the process, it not only changed the boundaries of what television comedy could say, but also ignited a battle with CBS that ultimately brought the series to an early end.

DAVID BIANCULLI (author, Dangerously Funny: The Uncensored Story of The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour): “You think about all these people and their political humor, and they’re either on cable or late night. What makes it so amazing to me was that the Smothers Brothers were doing it in the middle of prime time on Sunday nights, then television’s biggest viewing night of the week. And for a while they were among the most popular shows on all of television. I mean, nobody’s really replicated that in terms of satirical political comedy in more than 50 years. So the number of people who are watching Jimmy Kimmel is maybe a couple of million, and then it spreads as far as it does through social media, YouTube and various clips. But for The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, everyone was tuning in at one time. Many millions of people.”

Born in 1937 and 1939, respectively, Tom and Dick Smothers grew up in the shadow of tragedy. Their father, Thomas B. Smothers Jr., a West Point graduate and U.S. Army officer stationed on Governors Island in New York Harbor when the boys were born, died during World War II while being transported from a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp in Fukuoka to another camp in Mukden, Manchukuo.

As young adults, the brothers combined their love of folk music with an offbeat style of comedy, building an act that revolved around sibling rivalry and Tom’s unforgettable refrain to Dick: “Mom always liked you best!”

‘The Smothers Brothers Show’

Their breakthrough came in 1959 with a successful engagement at San Francisco’s famed Purple Onion nightclub, which led to a string of popular comedy albums. National television exposure followed with an appearance on The Jack Paar Show in 1961, and four years later CBS cast them in their first starring vehicle, the sitcom The Smothers Brothers Show. The series featured Dick as a carefree bachelor and Tom as an angel sent to Earth to help guide his brother toward a more responsible life.

Although the sitcom lasted just one season—largely because it failed to capitalize on the brothers’ winning blend of music and comedy—CBS executives remained convinced they had star potential. Rather than cutting ties, the network offered them a one-hour variety series. When The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour debuted as a midseason replacement in January 1967, there was little indication that it would soon become one of the most influential—and controversial—programs in television history.

GEOFFREY MARK (pop culture historian): “They’d failed in a sitcom for CBS, but they still had a contract. CBS looked at them as a pair of funny folk singers and gave them a variety show. Nobody expected it to become what it became.” 

‘The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour’ arrives

DAVID BIANCULLI: “It was a mid-season replacement series thrown on by CBS simply because one of the most popular variety shows of a few years before, The Gary Moore Show—which is where Carol Burnett came from—had stopped production a couple of times because Gary needed a rest, but then came back in 1966 on CBS and got killed in the ratings by Bonanza. The Gary Moore Show had been a hit when it premiered in 1959 on NBC, and anything CBS put against Bonanza didn’t work. So when Gary Moore really tanked, they needed a fast replacement. They didn’t have a drama series sitting on the shelf ready to go, so they turned to the Smothers Brothers. The head of programming at the time, Mike Dann, rightly looked at them as what they were: just a couple of young goofball kids making fun of folk music.”

Unlike today, when overnight ratings provide almost immediate feedback, television executives in the 1960s often waited as long as two weeks before learning whether a new series had found an audience. By the time the first ratings arrived for The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, which premiered in January 1967, the cast and crew were already taping the third episode.

DAVID BIANCULLI: “That’s when they found out, ‘Oh, people are watching. Then a couple more ratings books came in and they found themselves to be a Top 10 program. Bonanza was also a Top 10 program, but sometimes The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour actually got higher ratings. They couldn’t dethrone Bonanza, but they brought in a whole new audience of young people. After about three ratings books, they began to realize, ‘Hey, we’ve got some clout here. Let’s do more of what we want.’ And that’s exactly what they did.”

GEOFFREY MARK: “The ratings were phenomenal. They insisted, ‘This is what we do, and this is why we’re delivering you great ratings. Get your hands off the show.’”

DAVID BIANCULLI: “They had designed the initial shows simply to appeal to as many people as possible. That’s why you had Simon & Garfunkel on the same show as Kate Smith. Somebody from old show business and somebody from the new generation, and they didn’t just appear in separate segments like on The Ed Sullivan Show. They put them together in sketches and really capitalized on the contrast. One show had Mickey Rooney and Bette Davis. There was a real diversity in the guests every week.”

“I think it was the 10th show of the first season where they did a long sketch called ‘Billy the Kid’s Birthday. Tom played Billy the Kid and everybody else were the outlaws. Janet Leigh guest-starred as Belle Starr, while Simon & Garfunkel played troubadours who sang about the outlaws. It started like a traditional shoot-’em-up Western where they give Billy a birthday cake, but then they get into a fight and decide they’re going to kill him. Dick Smothers says, ‘Wait a minute! Maybe fighting’s not the answer. Maybe love is the answer.’ Tom decides he wants to ride off with Janet Leigh. Well, you can’t do that on television. You can kill on TV, but you can’t make love on TV. So one of the CBS outlaws says that doesn’t seem right… and kills him. Then it goes back to the troubadours, who sing, ‘Sometimes you want to say something when people don’t expect you to say something.'”

“It was just the weirdest bit of television I think I’d ever seen up to that point. I was 15 or 16 years old, and it was television talking about itself and making you question what was acceptable on TV and what wasn’t. From that show on, they just started doing more and more. They were making fun of the president, they were making fun of the Vietnam War, they were bringing on all these new rock acts and doing blackout sketches about racism. Then one of their supporting players, Pat Paulsen, ran for president. Just brilliant.”

If “Billy the Kid’s Birthday” demonstrated that The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour was willing to push television’s boundaries, the obvious question became: Where would the brothers go from there? The answer arrived in the form of writer and performer Elaine May, who joined Tommy Smothers in a sketch playing a pair of television censors screening a movie. The audience never saw what was unfolding on the screen before them—only the censors’ increasingly uncomfortable reactions. That alone was enough to alarm CBS, which refused to allow the sketch to air.

Behind the scenes, the battle was becoming about far more than a single sketch. As the Smothers Brothers became increasingly willing to tackle politics, the Vietnam War and the cultural upheaval of the late 1960s. CBS executives found themselves caught between one of television’s biggest hits and mounting pressure from both sponsors and Washington.

GEOFFREY MARK: “It became a push-me, pull-you tug of war between people trying to make the Nixon administration happy and wanting the huge ratings the Smothers Brothers were delivering.”

DAVID BIANCULLI: “In response, Tommy flew to New York, and this was the first time an entertainer went to a serious newspaper to complain about censorship in terms of content. The press loved it and ran with it. So automatically it became ‘CBS vs. The Smothers Brothers,’ and it just got worse and worse, because the network didn’t want viewers to know there were censors—much less that CBS employed them. But every time Tom felt he’d been wronged, he went to the newspapers. This was the height of the ’60s. CBS became the very stern parents and Tom and Dick were the rebellious teenagers. It was just a lot of butting heads.”

“Tom really was young enough to think, ‘I’m right, and I’ll win this.’ That didn’t quite happen. Over the course of those three seasons, you can watch the brothers mature as performers and as people. By the start of the third season, they were actually singing about being censored. They brought on Pete Seeger, but CBS censored the song he wanted to perform. So they went back to the press, and within that same season they were able to bring him back and air the song. They won some fights, but lost others.”

GEOFFREY MARK: “The more Tom and Dick got leaned on, the more they held onto the idea that they had to become even more radical.” 

By the third season, The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour was no longer the Top 10 sensation it had once been. Yet despite the ongoing battles over content, CBS continued renewing the series and, for a time, tolerated the brothers’ increasingly confrontational relationship with the network.

DAVID BIANCULLI: “The more political they became, the more they alienated some of the older audience. By the third season, they weren’t a Top 10 show anymore. They were more like a Top 25 show. But they were still a very popular program and, under almost any other circumstances, they would have stayed on the air. As a matter of fact, they’d already been renewed for a fourth season before CBS fired them. One of the things that happened was David Steinberg came on the show and did a sketch in which he played a minister delivering a sermon. It generated more negative mail than anything else in the history of television up to that point.”

“CBS told the Smothers Brothers they couldn’t bring him back and, if they did, absolutely no more sermons. The short version is that they invited him back very quickly. They did the run-through with the censors there, and there wasn’t a sermon in it—they were just running the show. After the rehearsal, David Steinberg said to Tommy, ‘You know, I sort of expected another sermon.’ Tommy asked, ‘Would you like to do one?’ David was an improv comic, so he said, ‘Okay.’ When they taped the show the next day, they included it—but it never aired. The entire episode never aired, and that was basically it. It was like breaking curfew for the last time. CBS decided it simply wasn’t worth the hassle anymore.”

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“On top of that, the CBS executives, advertising executives and programming executives would go to their country clubs in upstate New York, and all their wealthy, conservative Republican friends would ask, ‘Why are you letting those boys do that?’ It became a real issue, and that was the end of The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour.”

Although The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour ended its run in 1969, David believes its influence lived on through Saturday Night Live, which premiered on NBC six years later.

DAVID BIANCULLI: “And Lorne Michaels is still there as a very strong arbiter of public tastes. He chooses the guest hosts, the musical guests and all the people who’ve come through Saturday Night Live over the decades. If the Smothers Brothers hadn’t been fired by CBS, in just a few more years their show could have become just as powerful. Even in those three seasons, they were already creating stars. And when people watch the episodes, they’re going to see just how many musical superstars appeared on that show. The Doors were there doing things they never did anywhere else. Jefferson Airplane created the first psychedelic television background with colored oils being dropped behind them while they performed.”

“If they hadn’t been canceled, the show would have gone on to deal with Woodstock and Watergate, and they would have featured artists like James Taylor and Elton John. George Harrison even appeared unannounced simply to support what the Smothers Brothers were doing. And when The Beatles stopped touring and released promotional films for ‘Hey Jude’ and ‘Revolution,’ they only allowed them to be shown on David Frost’s program in the U.K. and The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour in the United States.”

Looking back more than half a century later, David has little doubt about the show’s place in television history.

DAVID BIANCULLI: “Without them, you don’t have Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In, which followed about six months later and eventually eclipsed them in popularity. You don’t have Saturday Night Live or the kind of humor it embraced. There are straight lines from the Smothers Brothers to Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert and Bill Maher. You might not have any of those in quite the same way. If you watch the programs today, most of what they did after more than 50 years will seem pretty tame. But at the time, nobody discussed politics on a comedy show. Certainly nobody spoke out against the Vietnam War or made jokes about drugs in a comedy series before they did. They got there first.”

William Frawley never forgot a grudge. By the time he was starring as Bub O’Casey on My Three Sons in 1960, it had been three years since I Love Lucy ended its run and the same year that the final of 13 episodes of The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour had aired. Yet his long-running feud with former television wife Vivian Vance was far from over. As fate would have it, Frawley soon found two enthusiastic accomplices in young My Three Sons co-stars Stanley and Barry Livingston, whom he enlisted in a series of practical jokes aimed at his former TV wife.

To understand why Frawley was still orchestrating practical jokes years after I Love Lucy ended, you have to go back to the very beginning of the classic sitcom. According to entertainment historian Geoffrey Mark, author of The Lucy Book: A Complete Guide to Her Five Decades on Television, the bad blood started before the cameras ever rolled.

GEOFFREY MARK: “Day one of I Love Lucy, the first read-through, Bill is there early to prove he’s reliable. Vivian shows up and innocently greets Desi Arnaz. She didn’t recognize Bill Frawley because Vivian wasn’t really a film person; she was a Broadway and nightclub performer. She said to Desi, ‘Who’s the old coot?’ Desi said, ‘That’s the guy who’s going to play your husband.’ ‘Husband?! He could play my grandfather!’ Bill heard this, instantly hated her and never forgave her. But the hostility became so obvious that the writers began writing the animosity into the scripts. It gave them a reason not to be huggy-kissy and lovey-dovey.”

Ironically, Frawley’s departure from Desilu is what made his later “venom campaign” possible. 

GEOFFREY MARK: “Bill had a contract with Desilu, which he completely ignored and went right into My Three Sons. Desi forgave him because of what he felt Bill had brought to the success of I Love Lucy. My Three Sons, its first five seasons, was shot at Desilu. Two seasons into that run, Lucille Ball and Vivian Vance came back for The Lucy Show.”

Hollywood pranksters

BARRY LIVINGSTON (actor, “Ernie Douglas,” My Three Sons): “We shot on sound stages that were literally right next to each other.” 

STANLEY LIVINGSTON (actor, “Chip Douglas,” My Three Sons): “He got me involved in pulling a prank on her a couple of times. I didn’t know what he was up to, but one time he said, ‘You know what I want you to do? I want you to go in there and get about 10 or 20 of those film containers.’ Those containers were aluminum and made to hold reels of film. I was more than happy to get them. Then we found a box and put them in there, but still didn’t know what Bill was up to.”

BARRY LIVINGSTON: “Bill would hold open the door to The Lucy Show stage and, anytime he’d hear Vivian’s voice, he’d signal us, ‘Okay, throw them!’ 

STANLEY LIVINGSTON: “Then we threw this box up there, and all these film tins came crashing down. Some of them took off rolling and spinning and running into each other. It really made a commotion.” 

BARRY LIVINGSTON: “When they’d hit something, there’d be this explosive metallic bang-bang-bang. Then he’d say, ‘Come on, let’s get the hell out of here,’ and we’d run back to our soundstage.”

STANLEY LIVINGSTON: “I think Vivian must have known it was Bill, because we heard this voice scream, ‘Bill!’ He yelled some expletive back at her and we ran for it. The crew was laughing; they may have known it was coming for all I know. It was just kind of fun to participate in Bill’s hijinks.” 

BARRY LIVINGSTON: “It was under the cover of this little intrigue, like we were on a mission. We were Bill’s little toadies in his little army—we would do his bidding to wreak havoc on Vivian whenever he felt like it.”

As outrageous as the prank sounds today, Geoffrey insists it wasn’t an isolated incident.

GEOFFREY MARK: “It wasn’t just the film cans. Bill also went in there and made other noises, loudly saying nasty things about her if she was within earshot—not to her face, but about her. It was just little things; Bill just hung onto this feeling about her. The kids went along with him because they loved Bill. They didn’t have a grandfather, and Stanley especially felt that Bill was a grandfather to them.”

That affection explains why the Livingston brothers remember the incidents with laughter rather than any lingering sense of guilt. To them, they weren’t taking part in some bitter Hollywood vendetta, but instead helping their favorite older co-star play another practical joke. Yet Barry is quick to point out that the mischievous side of William Frawley was only part of the man they knew.

BARRY LIVINGSTON: “He was a wonderful, gentle, funny guy. It was all steeped in a lot of Cutty Sark. He was just a guy straight out of the Depression—a hard nut who didn’t take any guff from anybody. He was also a big prankster.”

STANLEY LIVINGSTON: “It was just kind of fun to participate in Bill’s hijinks.”

For Geoffrey, though, the story is also a reminder that the famous Frawley-Vance feud wasn’t simply a publicity myth.

GEOFFREY MARK: “Vivian resented Bill’s treatment of her. I think if Bill had behaved better, she probably would have let it go, but he never really did.”

Even so, decades later, it’s hard not to smile at the image of one of television’s most beloved curmudgeons recruiting two young co-stars into what Barry Livingston laughingly describes as his “little army”—all in service of keeping one of Hollywood’s longest-running grudges alive, one crashing film can at a time.

Television reboots have become commonplace over the past decade. Some continue the stories of familiar characters, as Will & Grace and Roseanne/The Conners did, while others start over from scratch with entirely new casts, including Hawaii Five-0, MacGyver, Charmed and Magnum P.I.

When Warner Bros. decided to revisit The Banana Splits, however, the studio took a far less conventional route. Rather than reviving the beloved Saturday morning series for a new generation of children, it transformed the property into a horror film. The Banana Splits Movie debuted digitally in August 2019 before making its television premiere on Syfy two months later.

That twist was especially surprising given the pedigree of the original series. Created by animation legends William Hanna and Joseph Barbera, whose credits include The Flintstones, The Jetsons and countless other classics, The Banana Splits stood apart from the duo’s animated hits by combining live-action comedy, music and cartoons. The show’s stars—Fleegle the beagle (voiced by Paul Winchell), Bingo the ape (Daws Butler), Drooper the lion (Allan Melvin) and Snorky the mute elephant—performed as a bubblegum rock band while stumbling through comic adventures in the amusement park they called home before introducing the cartoons that rounded out each episode.

Although Hanna-Barbera had mastered the world of animation, live-action television was another matter. To help realize the concept, the studio enlisted Sid and Marty Krofft, who were just beginning the careers that would eventually produce such memorable series as H.R. Pufnstuf, Land of the Lost, Donny & Marie and The Brady Bunch Variety Hour.

MARTY KROFFT (executive producer): “Joseph Barbera came to see me, because he didn’t know how to do this idea yet. This was live-action and he’d only done animation. Oddly enough, this was our dress rehearsal for Pufnstuf, which we had introduced at the 1968 World’s Fair. But with The Banana Splits, it started with us creating and building the characters, refining them and making them all workable. Joe would come to our studio probably every week and he’d run everything by me.”

GEOFFREY MARK (pop culture historian): “Sid and Marty Krofft were incredible trailblazers for children’s television, taking what had already come before and then twisting it, adding the live element so it wasn’t just cartoony things, but actual people in wild costumes playing wild characters. While other things they produced were for Saturday morning television, The Banana Splits was, in many cities, shown in the afternoon.”

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MARTY KROFFT: “Of course, everything has some relationship to something else. I think it’s totally original now, but at the time I’m sure we said, ‘Let’s turn this into The Monkees.’ That was a hard thing to do with these four goofy characters, but they’ve lived on. I liked the name The Banana Splits, and I thought the characters, if we built them right, could be real interesting as a band and the truth is, they’ve stayed alive.”

GEOFFREY MARK: “That theme song! You went to school and everyone was walking around humming the ‘Tra La La’ song. The music stuck with people and brought you into that world. There was something so charming and yet so corny about the show that, whether you liked it or didn’t like it, you couldn’t look away.”

MARTY KROFFT: “You know, we probably have 40 million dedicated fans today from when they were kids who are interested in this new version. And I think it’s great what they’re doing. I think it took guts to do something like this. And look at all the interest… hey, I’m talking to you because of what they did.”

SARA CANNING (actor, “Rebecca”): “I never watched the original series growing up, because I was raised in a small place with two channels. But after I got cast, I watched the opening credits and was, like, ‘Wow, this is an acid trip.’ This new version is meant to be a straight horror film, but there are elements of camp that arise just because it’s a bunch of furry things running around and, you know, massacring people.”

Giving the ‘Splits’ a ‘Banana’ twist

When Warner Bros.’ Blue Ribbon Content teamed with Warner Bros. Home Entertainment and Syfy to develop a horror-themed take on The Banana Splits, the project found its writers in Jed Elinoff and Scott Thomas. With years of experience creating children’s television, the pair immediately saw the potential in turning the beloved Saturday morning series on its head.

SCOTT THOMAS (writer): “Today there’s this sort of hunger to find stuff that was meaningful or that people used to love, and for us to find an interesting way to do something new with it as opposed to just rebooting it was really exciting. To be honest, growing up, the Sid and Marty Krofft show that we knew and loved was probably Land of the Lost. That was kind of our touchstone. We obviously knew about The Banana Splits and had seen it, but we didn’t grow up watching it. There was some time looking back on YouTube and finding clips and sort of diving into that world.”

“The funny thing is, when you think of a show like The Banana Splits or Barney or Yo Gabba Gabba, it’s a really fine line. If you were to take a scary horror movie score and just put it over them, it’s not a giant leap—most of your work is already done for you. There are kind of freaky costumes. In the context of the original show, they’re fun and light and they’re for kids and they’re funny, but it’s not a big stretch to see how you can twist this and make it kind of demented.”

JED ELINOFF (writer): “In this movie, The Banana Splits sort of serve as a catalyst for the main character, Beth, to take agency over her own life. Following a traumatic experience from her past, she’s married the wrong guy and, in an attempt to find safety, The Banana Splits really serve as the catalyst for her to seize power in her life and move on. That’s what the movie’s really about. They’re just these great agents of chaos, which is a lot of what they always were. When you watch the old show, there’s this goofy, chaotic quartet that always makes something funny and kind of crazy happen when they get involved. So in a way, it’s a little bit of harkening back to the show, while the horror part was the fun reason for us to dive into it.”

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“We set it in a world where The Banana Splits show is still on. We made it into a live show that is performed in front of an audience, so when the movie starts you get a taste of the old show with the fun, goofy Banana Splits. But there is a moment that triggers things and gives them a reason to turn bad. What we’ve done is turn them into robots, and their whole reason for being is to put on this show. When they find out that their show is going to be canceled… well, they have to keep putting on the show. Which is everyone in entertainment, right? They’ve got to keep making the show and don’t want it to end. If we were being super-duper heady and not quite honest about it, you could say it represents the culture we live in right now where the show has got to go on no matter what the show is.”

SCOTT THOMAS: “We’ve created and run shows for the Disney Channel and Netflix, and you definitely see both sides of it. There’s the really fun side and, at the end of the day, it’s a business. I think we really looked forward to lampooning that a little bit and diving into what can sometimes be the cutthroat business of children’s TV. And we’ve had shows canceled, so we know that feeling, too.”

JED ELINOFF: “The Banana Splits was originally done in the same vein as The Monkees, which was kind of a commentary on Beatlemania. Being able to use that same property and make a commentary on the state of children’s television as a packaged product is amazing. There’s something really interesting in the fact that so many years ago it was commenting on pre-packaged entertainment that’s served up to kids, so in a way its legacy remains true.”

The ‘Westworld’ Connection

Although the filmmakers could have simply depicted people in costumes who suddenly went on murderous rampages, the writers instead looked to the 1973 film Westworld, at one point turned into an HBO series—for inspiration.

SCOTT THOMAS: “We just thought of all those great moments of Yul Brynner as the Gunslinger walking through those hallways and, at the end of the movie, being this robot that was created for fun and enjoyment that becomes homicidal. So our thought was, ‘What if this movie is Westworld meets Yo Gabba Gabba! or Barney? What if Barney was a robot and started pursuing everyone through the hallways of these sound stages?’ That was really what we were drawing from.”

With the screenplay taking shape, the filmmakers next turned their attention to finding a director. They found one in Danishka Esterhazy.

DANISKA ESTERHAZY (director): “I had recently finished a dystopian thriller called Level 16. The film was a hit in the horror community and played at many genre film festivals. Level 16 brought me to the attention of Warner Bros.’ Blue Ribbon Content and Syfy. They had a project in development with a strong female lead: The Banana Splits Movie. I’m known for creating elevated genre with strong female leads, and so it seemed like a good fit. They sent me the outline for the script and I loved it. The story was dark and scary and funny with great characters. I also loved the themes of self-discovery and acceptance. The writers are really great, so I very much wanted to make this film. On top of that, I love horror movies, so I’m always interested in a great scary film. On top of that, I think that a lot of children’s television is unintentionally creepy. There is something about the design of The Banana Splits characters that is unsettling, so it did not seem like a stretch to take those characters and create a horror story world. There is also something deliciously subversive about turning a children’s show into a horror movie,” she continues. “One of the things that I love about horror fans is their willingness—their delight—in exploring the darker side of everyday life. The way a horror story can look at family, suburbia or children’s television and shine a light on the fears and insecurities that lurk beneath the surface makes for very intriguing storytelling.”

Judging solely from its marketing, it would have been easy to assume The Banana Splits Movie was little more than a traditional slasher featuring murderous versions of the beloved children’s characters. Scott says that couldn’t have been further from the filmmakers’ intentions.

SCOTT THOMAS: “I grew up watching horror movies in the ’80s and loved every sub-genre of horror, especially those over-the-top gory slasher movies. It definitely has a feel like that, but with everything we do, we really try to create a story we care about. That seems really silly to say, but we didn’t write it first and foremost as a slasher movie. It’s somewhere between slasher horror and survival horror, but at the heart of it, we made it about this broken family and this woman from a terrible past who is trying to keep the world safe for her kids. She brings them to The Banana Splits because she thinks that’s going to be safe.”

JED ELINOFF: “What she thinks is going to be safe and enjoyable turns out to be incredibly dangerous. It reminds her that you never know when something bad is going to happen or who is going to do something terrible. She really stands up and takes control again, and in that way, ‘Mama Bear’ sort of comes out. It really became about this woman who is kind of depressed and has to seize her power from within.”

DANISHKA ESTERHAZY: “I wouldn’t want to make a film that is simply a slasher film,” she says. “I love genre films that are thrilling and entertaining, but that also have a deeper layer of storytelling—a layer that explores the human condition. In The Banana Splits Movie, there is definitely blood and gore, but there is also the story of Beth and Harley, a mother and son who go through a harrowing adventure and emerge stronger. It is also a story about self-acceptance and non-conformity. A story that explores the theme of ‘to thine own self be true.'”

Thomas and Elinoff recognized there was an inherent campiness to the idea of The Banana Splits becoming homicidal killers. Rather than embrace it, however, they made a conscious decision to treat the material as seriously as possible.

SCOTT THOMAS: “We tried to write it straight. We really tried to write it as a traumatic horror movie without winking at the camera. And Danishka did the same thing. She really approached it drawing inspiration from Kubrick’s The Shining and things like that, because we knew at the end of the day that it was going to be silly.”

DANISHKA ESTERHAZY: “Horror movies are changing. Perhaps because the film industry itself is changing. Women directors are finally getting the chance to make bigger movies, and we bring a different sensibility. I don’t want to portray women as victims, fantasies or cardboard characters. I want to make stories about women who show the full range of human complexity. The Banana Splits Movie has a great protagonist in Beth. She is a fascinating woman who goes on a terrifying journey to protect her family and discovers her inner strength in the process. I was also very happy with our lead, Dani Kind, who can be vulnerable and misguided, but also very kick-ass.”

The Final elements

Of course, the concept would only work if audiences believed the Banana Splits themselves. That required recreating not only the characters’ physical performances, but their familiar voices as well—a task that fell to veteran voice actor Eric Bauza, whose animation career has included voicing many of the Looney Tunes characters.

ERIC BAUZA (voice actor): “The Banana Splits, like most everything that I watched as a child, I caught in reruns. I love The Splits, Sigmund and the Sea Monsters, H.R. Pufnstuf—anything that starred costumed characters. Paul Winchell, Daws Butler—who seems to live in my vocal cords—and the rest of the voice actors were very inspirational to me, and it was a thrill to bring them back in this way.”

DANISHKA ESTERHAZY: “When I think about the most challenging part of this film, I have to mention that the Splits costumes were very heavy, very hot and very itchy. I hired dancers to play the parts of Fleegle, Bingo, Drooper and Snorky because I knew they would be able to embody both the comic movements and the animatronic movements of their characters. Those dancers endured long hours on the set, but they never lost their enthusiasm or their commitment. So I applaud Terry Sauls, Brandon Vraagom, Kori Clarke and Bunto Plam for all their hard work.”

GEOFFREY MARK: “You know, the genius of being able to turn The Banana Splits into a horror movie—reinventing their own characters—shows you the agile creative minds of Sid and Marty Krofft.”

The Banana Splits Movie is available for rental or purchase at Amazon Prime.

When people remember Jack Benny today, they usually think of the comic persona that made him one of the biggest stars of American entertainment: the eternally 39-year-old skinflint whose violin playing, slow burns and perfectly timed pauses generated laughs from listeners and viewers for decades on radio and television. At the height of his popularity, he successfully made the leap from vaudeville to radio, movies and television at a time when many of his contemporaries struggled to survive the transition to those media. Yet Benny’s greatest contribution may have had less to do with the character he played than with the way he and his writers quietly reshaped comedy itself. To understand how he pulled off this quiet revolution, here is the story of how Jack Benny changed entertainment forever—told in the words of his daughter and the historians who knew his legacy best.

GEOFFREY MARK (pop culture historian): “It is true to say that Jack Benny helped invent the sitcom, but it took a long time. Originally, there were no sitcoms on radio. There were mostly comedy variety shows and music variety shows, meaning the emphasis was on one or the other, but they all had elements of both in them.”

What followed wasn’t the invention of the sitcom so much as the gradual creation of its building blocks. Long before television audiences embraced ensemble casts, recurring character relationships and stories driven by personality rather than punchlines, The Jack Benny Program was experimenting with those very ideas.

As author Kathy Fuller-Seely notes in her book Jack Benny and the Golden Age of American Radio Comedy, “Benny and [head writer] Harry Conn experimented week after week, gradually expanding the narrative world of the show, creating continuing characters and moving away from monologues toward comic situations built around relationships. The result was a forerunner of the situation comedy.”

JOAN BENNY (daughter): “When I think about him, I think about radio. I love the radio show and I actually liked it better than the television show. The radio show was so funny—I listened to it not long ago when I was asked to do an interview about him. I hadn’t heard them since I was a child, and I was laughing my head off.” 

GEOFFREY MARK: “What Jack and his writers did was give each of his regulars, using their own names for the most part, fictional backstories from which they could mine comedy gold. None of the characters—Rochester, Mary Livingstone, Phil Harris—were really playing themselves. The jokes about Phil Harris and the band being drunk and irresponsible had some truth to them, but they were greatly exaggerated. Eddie Anderson wasn’t a butler in real life—he had his own mansion with his own butler. Jack paid him very, very well. Eddie Anderson became wealthy from being with Jack Benny. Dennis Day wasn’t the innocent boy he played on the show, either. Verna Felton wasn’t really his mother. What Jack and his writers created was a hybrid of a variety show and a sitcom. They did it that way so audiences never knew which version of the show they were going to get. Some weeks it was an out-and-out variety show with character comedy. Other weeks it was a pure sitcom with a plot.”

That evolution is precisely what fascinates Kathy Fuller-Seeley. Rather than simply standing before a microphone delivering one joke after another, she believes Benny slowly transformed his radio program into something audiences had rarely experienced before.

KATHY FULLER-SEELEY: “It depends on whether you take a strict constructionist approach to what a sitcom is. If you think it has to be the same group of characters in the same place every week, then Jack’s show was more like a workplace sitcom. But what he did in 1932—and this is what wins it for me—was that instead of just telling a series of jokes the way one might in a vaudeville performance, he quickly turned the show into a workplace setting. He was in conversation with his bandleader, his singer and his announcer. He used them as continuing characters to build conversations, so he wasn’t just standing there telling joke after joke after joke. The humor was coming out of their relationships.”

Jack Benny himself admitted that doing a radio show was an eye-opener for someone who had come into it from the world of vaudeville. As he noted on the first radio broadcast:

JACK BENNY: “Ladies and gentlemen, this is Jack benny talking and making my first appearance on the air professionally. By that I mean, I am finally getting paid, which will be a great relief to my creditors. I really don’t know why I am here. I’m supposed to be a sort of master of ceremonies and tell you all about the things that will happen, which would happen anyway… So ladies and gentlemen, a master of ceremonies is really a fellow who is unemployed and gets paid for it.”

There was also a recognition on his part that things would definitely need to change and quickly if The Jack Benny Program was going to survive and indeed thrive.

JACK BENNY: “In vaudeville you had one show and that was it. You changed it whenever you felt like it. And in this, when you realized that every week you needed a new show, this got a little bit frightening. I didn’t have any idea how important it was to have good material and how hard it was to get. The first show was a cinch—I used about half of all the gags I knew. The second show consumed all the rest, and I faced the third absolutely dry.”

The solution gradually became apparent.

Making Jack the punchline

The transformation of The Jack Benny Program didn’t happen simply because Benny surrounded himself with talented performers, but really because he and his writers gradually turned those performers into fully realized comic characters—and then gave them permission to make fun of the star. Rather than positioning himself as the clever comedian who always got the last laugh, he became the target. His vanity, stinginess, vanity about his age, questionable violin playing and endless insecurities became recurring themes, while the others were encouraged to puncture his ego at every opportunity.

KATHY FULLER-SEELEY: “What happens over the first three or four years is fascinating. He starts out kind of like a talk-show host, a mild, slightly snarky New York guy—they called him a Broadway Romeo. Over the coming years he discovered that it worked better when everyone else made jokes about him. His faults and foibles became the comedy. He went from being a fairly normal character to an increasingly comic character with everybody else punching up at him because he was their boss. That was really different, because comedians like Eddie Cantor and Bob Hope generally punched down at their supporting players. On The Jack Benny Program, everybody got to make fun of everybody else.”

JOAN BENNY: “He said in an interview that he had all the foibles and so many things that normal people have, and they identified with him. The on-screen persona of the miser, the somewhat pompous, somewhat put-upon person—all the things that he was on that show—he said was a reflection of the population in general. People identified with that and they also knew, in spite of his radio and TV character, that he was a nice man. He came across as a really nice person.”

GEOFFREY MARK: “Jack also believed nobody could carry a radio show by themselves for 39 weeks a year. His feeling was, ‘Let’s surround me with wonderful actors doing great character comedy because if the audience loves their work, it’s still The Jack Benny Program. I’ll get the credit for it.’ That’s what Jack invented. Jack invented the idea of doing an entire episode around Rochester or making an entire episode out of changing the bandleader. Instead of simply announcing a new character, he built a story around it. Some weeks the entire half hour revolved around the people who lived in Jack Benny’s world, and other weeks it was a straight variety show. Other weeks it was a variety show with a 15-minute sitcom inside it.”

Those ideas may seem commonplace today, but in the 1930s they represented a dramatic shift. Rather than existing solely to support the star, Benny’s cast became indispensable to the show itself, with each performer bringing a distinct comic identity that audiences came to know almost as well as Jack’s.”

They were more than supporting players

If The Jack Benny Program had simply assembled a colorful supporting cast, it might still have been remembered as an entertaining variety show. What made the series different was that Benny and his writers continually expanded those characters beyond their original comic functions with distinct personalities.

Perhaps no character better illustrates that evolution than Rochester, Benny’s valet, played by Eddie “Rochester” Anderson. Although the role emerged during an era when racial stereotypes remained commonplace in American entertainment, Benny’s writers gradually gave Rochester something unusual for the time: intelligence, confidence and the ability to challenge his employer.

KATHY FULLER-SEELEY: “Rochester is truly amazing because almost no other Black characters on radio—or even in films—were given that kind of humane treatment. The writers allowed him to become a fully rounded character. Yes, in the late 1930s there were still regrettable stereotypes, but Rochester could be intimate with Jack; he could tell him the truth and talk truth to power all the time. The writers made him that way from the very beginning, and then Eddie Anderson’s performance—his wonderful laugh, his ‘Come now’ and ‘Oh, boss’—lifted Rochester far above stereotype.”

JOAN BENNY: “If you remember, my dad’s relationship with Rochester was one where Rochester always got the best of him. That dynamic was fine.”

GEOFFREY MARK: “People think radio blossomed fully formed into what they remember, or that it was just television without pictures. It wasn’t. Radio was full of music, news and sports. Comedy took a long time to figure out. There were people who believed you shouldn’t even have an audience for radio because listeners at home would become confused. Jack Benny and Burns and Allen said, ‘Don’t be ridiculous. It’s just like vaudeville or Broadway. People are used to hearing audiences laugh.’ Jack was an early proponent of having a live audience.”

That collaborative spirit paid dividends beyond Benny’s own program. As the supporting players became stars in their own right, audiences embraced them as individuals rather than simply members of Jack’s cast.

KATHY FULLER-SEELEY: “The incredible popularity of The Jack Benny Program made the supporting players extremely attractive to other sponsors. That’s how Dennis Day got his own show, and Phil Harris and Alice Faye got theirs. They even tried to develop a series for Eddie Anderson, but unfortunately the industry wasn’t ready to embrace an African American performer as the lead of his own comedy series.”

One of the most unusual aspects of The Jack Benny Program was that its performers weren’t playing entirely fictional characters. Their personalities drew inspiration from their real lives, but, as noted above, were exaggerated and reshaped for comic effect.

KATHY FULLER-SEELEY: “It was different then, and it remained different throughout the show’s run. It wasn’t a made-up family. The performers were using their own names, even if some of them were stage names, and blending real life with fiction. I really love the way the show mixed the real and the fantastical. Their adventures drew so much from their real lives.”

The line separating Jack Benny the performer from Jack Benny the character became increasingly blurred. Listeners heard references to Benny’s films, his sponsor, his radio network and even his public reputation, all woven seamlessly into fictional stories. The result was a comic universe that felt grounded in reality even as it became increasingly absurd. That approach extended beyond radio itself.

KATHY FULLER-SEELEY: “When Jack was making movies in Hollywood, he gave those films more free publicity than any other radio comedian. George Gallup actually came to Hollywood and told the studios they should have more stars like Jack Benny, because he was constantly making jokes about being on the Paramount lot and making his latest picture. Gallup said it amounted to millions of dollars in free publicity. Man About Town was the first film in which Jack played a character named Jack Benny, and it even brought Phil Harris and Rochester into the movie. For years Paramount had struggled to translate Jack’s radio success to the screen, but this film finally captured the spirit of the radio show. It sounded like the radio show, and audiences responded. It ended up becoming one of the top 20 box-office hits of 1939.”

Creating the sitcom playbook

Trying to identify the “first” sitcom can become a surprisingly complicated exercise. Depending on how the term is defined, historians can point to a number of early radio programs that incorporated elements audiences would later associate with situation comedy. Geoffrey Mark doesn’t dismiss those shows, believing the more important question isn’t who arrived first, but who assembled the pieces that eventually became the sitcom.

GEOFFREY MARK: “There were other shows people think of as sitcoms, like The Goldbergs, but The Goldbergs started as a soap opera. Amos ‘n’ Andy really began as a sketch that eventually grew into a sitcom. George Burns said it really well: ‘We were all in the Top 10. It was easy. There were only 11 shows.'”

What set Benny apart, Mark argues, wasn’t simply that he experimented with new ideas, but that he never stopped experimenting. The program continually shifted between formats, allowing its writers to discover what worked while giving audiences something they couldn’t find anywhere else on radio.

GEOFFREY MARK: “His television show worked the same way. Sometimes it came from Television City. Sometimes it was filmed. Sometimes it was performed before a live audience. You never knew what you were going to get from week to week because Jack never wanted his audience to get bored. He felt that as long as he kept juggling the balls and giving viewers something different every week, they’d keep coming back—and they did. He lasted on radio and television from 1932 to 1964, then continued with specials after that. That’s an awfully long time.”

“If you watch reruns of The Jack Benny Program, you’ll see pure sitcom one week, variety another week and sometimes a combination of both. The chutzpah of doing an entire episode built around a Beverly Hills tour bus passing the homes of all the members of Jack Benny’s radio family, with everyone talking about Jack—and then, at the very end, the bus reaches Jack’s house and all Jack says is, ‘This is where I get off.’ That’s all he says in the entire half hour. But the whole show is about him. That is genius sitcom work. And the writers stayed with Jack for years. They weren’t born knowing exactly what the show would become. They experimented until they found the formula that worked. That’s why The Jack Benny Program wasn’t fully formed from the beginning the way later sitcoms were.”

KATHY FULLER-SEELEY: “Jack and his writers were always experimenting. They’d do movie parodies, fantasy stories, musical showcases or bring on major guest stars. On television he could get Humphrey Bogart or Marilyn Monroe because people knew Jack would make them look good instead of making them the butt of the joke. It’s delightful to watch because Jack and his writers constantly borrowed ideas from the radio show and figured out how to make them visual for television. They’d also take things they’d experimented with on live television in the 1950s and rework them once the show moved to film. They kept recycling good ideas while still finding new ways to surprise the audience.”

JOAN BENNY: “He was very lucky because that character that he created made the transition very easily from radio to television, unlike other radio shows that couldn’t.”

KATHY FULLER SEELY: “The show became the most sitcom-like during its final two seasons because CBS pressured Jack into producing 35 episodes a year. Throughout most of the 1950s he’d only made a dozen or so shows each season, which gave him time to keep them fresh. Once he had to produce almost three times as many episodes every year, the series naturally became more domestic and more traditional in its storytelling.”

Legacy of ‘The Jack Benny Program’

It’s impossible to credit any one performer or program with inventing the sitcom. Comedy evolved gradually, shaped by dozens of writers, actors and producers working in radio before making the transition to television. 

GEOFFREY MARK: “It isn’t that Jack Benny created the first sitcom. He created the elements that make sitcoms work. His show wasn’t purely a sitcom, but he developed the individual pieces that eventually became the blueprint for successful situation comedy. He once said the reason people tune into sitcoms is because they get to know the characters and each character has shtick attached. You don’t use all of the shtick every week. You decide which character to spotlight and which aspect of that character you’re going to use. That’s why people tune in.”

JOAN BENNY: “As far as I know, he stayed with it for so many years between radio and television because that’s what he had a need to do. A lot of people get burned out doing something for so many years, but it seems like he was very happy to do it. And do it well.”