Shark Bytes

Little Angela Cartwright was completely adorable. She was the main reason to watch this show. Danny Thomas was a great man, and his St. Jude's hospital in Memphis has saved thousands of lives.

I'll watch any old t.v. wherever I find it. All of them are better than any modern shows by greedy, no-talent unionized "writers". Danny Thomas' products are still classics!

Danny's two kids Terry +Rusty were redheads like their mom (and later their stepmom Kathy) while Kathy's daughter Linda was very much a brunette. Wouldn't Danny's Lebanese genes have overpowered his first wife's Celtic genes in the hair department?
Kathy had been a widowed nurse raising her young daughter Linda solo when Danny met her- yet showed not the slightest regret in dumping her vocation to become a full-time stay-at-home mom to his initially bratty offspring. And neither she nor Linda expressed any dismay at changing the child's surname to Williams from her late father's name. Ah, the times!
Both Rusty and Linda started out as cute kids but fate would give them different destinies Linda (Angela Cartwright) would develop into a rather fetching young lady who'd have a steady acting career well into her 40s. Unforunately Rusty had one of the most awkward puberties ever seen on TV (and it likely was a contributing factor to his lack of acting work after the show ended- as well as his mounting personal demons which would overwhelm him at the end of his life)

Penny Parker played the older daughter when she came home again. She was an adult, but Danny treated her as if she were still a child, so she acted like one to please her father.

What made Danny Thomas's character appealing was his feisty, "I'm the boss and don't you forget it or it's time for the belt" approach to playing a father.

It may not have been the romanticized approach to parenthood found in Leave It To Beaver or Father Knows Best, but it sure was believable!

I loved Danny Thomas' show back in the mid-60s.He did a good job as a nightclub performer balancing his family life with his career(and he even worked his family life into some of his monolouges).The change in wives was a change for the better-as Marjorie Lord was just as understanding a wife as Jean Hagen,and a little better looking.To an above poster-perhaps Angela Cartwright was a pioneer New Kid In Town(if not THE pioneer New Kid)-but she was a charming girl and very pretty.I felt she was a good little actress who had a long and well deserved career.You may not have liked her,but you shouldn't state opinions as though they were facts.I liked everyone in the Danny Thomas show.Even Uncle Tonoose was someone pleasntly annoying,if you know what I mean.I also remember the years when he tried reviving his show(with his oldest daughter's son...and it wasn't until I saw older reruns that I realized he had an oldest daughter)but after the failure of Make Roon For Granddaddy,he gave up,realizing sadly that the times for a wholsesome family show had passed.

It didn't jump the shark when Sherry Jackson left the show, but it was sad to see her go. She had been with the show from the beginning, and you had seen her grow up on camera. But a young Annette Funicello was awesome as her temporary replacement.

Just saw the episode that introduced Andy Grifith as Sheriff Andy Taylor, aired as part of TV Land's Moguls series. Danny Williams gets arrested for passing a traffic stop. He demands to talk to the judge and local newspaper editor of which Andy Taylor also work as! The best part was little Ronny Howard's first scene as Opie in which he talks about how his turtle died after accidentally being stepped on! Francis Bavier also appeared not as Aunt Bee (who hadn't arrived yet) but as a woman whose husband was buried in a rented suit that she still has to pay for after two years! Also, Frank Cady (later Sam Drucker of Petticoat Junction and Green Acres) appears as the town drunk (not Otis) who also happens to be Andy's deputy (not Barney Fife either!). The ends credits also mention Ronny Howard's father Rance, but having recognised Rance from many of his son's movies I couldn't place him in this episode. Did TV Land air an edited version that cut his scene?

It never jumped, but I had to comment on something spooky I noticed here. Someone above said that Danny Thomas played a character named Danny Williams. Also, this show ran for twelve years. On Hawaii Five-O, James McArthur played Danny "Dan-O" Williams. That show ran for........twelve years. Very strange, because how many shows actually last for twelve years, much less contain a character with the same name? I bet nobody has ever even thought of the Make Room For Daddy / Hawaii Five-O connection, except maybe Steve McGarrett, because he always thinks of everything.

The ethnic aspect was central to this show and possibly unique for the era--including the dilemma of a Lebanese/American wedding for his daughter. This was no ordinary sitcom father. We even saw how insecure he felt about dropping out of high school, not through a lecture to his kids but through a nightmare before a reunion, because he felt he was "just a saloon singer". I wonder if that's what Danny Thomas really thought about his career, that it wasn't as significant as saving lives--which is why he did so much charity work for St. Jude's Children's Research Hospital. (We later saw the internal life of another sitcom father, Rob Petrie, in a Danny Thomas production.)

Angela Cartwright. From the first time I saw her in the series and she mugged and smirked her way through scene after scene. Previous postings mention how adorable she was and cute! She has always been totally annoying. "Lost In Space" was horrible mainly because of her terrible acting and even past puberty she was doing the same in "The Sound of Music!" Nearly ruined the film for me. Thankfully, her puss isn't visible on the screen any longer. One of the all time worst child actors in history.

Danny Thomas was a wretched ham of an actor, someone who believed himself far funnier than anyone else was ever likely to find him. He also wanted to play Vito Corleone. Wouldn't that have been grand.

Never jumped..I watched the Show (Marjorie Lord episodes) in afternoon syndication in the 70's. I thought the theme was great and the actors, guest stars and stories were mostly top-notch. You can currently catch the Jean Hagen episodes on some smaller less known cable networks..(America One, Faith TV) I recently watched one episode where they left a "see you next week" tag mentioning the 1954 Dodge cars (that week's sponsor) and reminding that the next week's sponsor would be Lucky Strike Cigaretts. I enjoy that sort of thing..gives one a feel of the era these shows were made..Overall, one of the more underrated sitcoms of TV History.

After discovering her on a trip to Venice, Italy, Danny Thomas, early in 1964, brought over Piccola Pupa, a teenaged girl with beautiful long dark tresses and a big singing voice, to California to appear on his show, and to launch a career for her in America. She appeared in three successive episodes of his show, the most memorable being where Rusty, trying to speak Italian to her, mistakenly proposes to Pupa, which she gladly accepts. Yet, despite a deal with Warner Brothers Records, guest appearances on A-list TV shows such as Ed Sullivan's and the "Hollywood Palace", and write-ups in magazines such as "16", she failed to catch on in America. By 1966, she was relegated to a guest appearance in the shlock cult classic "The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini".

I don't remember this show's demise well enough to say if it jumped. But I'm amazed that there are few posters for this so far. I mean, who knew this show ran 12 years!!?? That's amazing. The fact is, it was a VERY good TV show. Danny Thomas was Danny Williams, a New York nightclub singer. (He would bristle if you said he worked in a "saloon.") He had a lovely family who were not so "show-biz" that they couldn't have normal feelings and experiences. The family issues were engagingly played, and the show was extremely well written. Danny's coterie of agents and whatnot were funny without being over the top. Thomas himself was a wonderful presence. The introduction of Hans Conreid as Uncle Tonoose seemed like the kind of thing that might make a show JTS--but it didn't! More amazing is that the show didn't JTS when Marjorie Lord replaced Jean Hagen, or that other girl (name??) replaced Sherry Jackson, who was a very fine presence and also a fox. Rusty Hamer was basically obnoxious, setting the precedent for the introduction of Larry Mathews as Richie on the Van Dyke show. (Both shows were produced by Sheldon Leonard.) But unlike Mathews--who was simply godawful--Hamer did get off some zingers that were legitimately funny, often hysterical. And yes, Angela Cartwright was adorable. The fact is that this show was a groundbreaker, but it gets overshadowed historically by "I Love Lucy" and the Van Dyke show, which in fact it pre-dated by years. The more I think about this show, the more I miss it. It had style and was written with care and, most of all, was very funny in a clean way.