Shark Bytes

I just read in a book on oldtime radio that Hildegarde originated the phrase "A little traveling music, please" when she finished her banter and wanted to get to her songs. And all this time I thought Jackie had originated it. Maybe he stole it, with fiond memories of ehr old show. Jackie seemed fond of the old days, referencing band leaders and singers from the good ol' days in a couple of episodes of the 39 episodes of "The Honeymooners"

In "better living through tv" episode, what cheese did Gleason offer to viewers who ordered his kitchen gadget?

El Saludo cordiar exelente las comedia de Jackie Gleason es mi favorito en comedia y peliculas espero tener toda la coleccion de mi mejor compañero y Amigo Jackie que descanse en paz mi mejor actor que dios lo vendiga por siempre

Anyone know where i can find the Jackie Gleason show showing some of the Bartender scenes?

I feel the show jts when it started the musical Honeymooners in color. Especially hiring Sheila MacRae, a very good singer and musical comedy actress, but a shadow of Meadows' Alice, was really a tremendous mistake. Gleason and Carney, both comedy geniuses, were not singers, and could not carry that end of the show. As hokey and corny as the American Scene Magazine was, there was something endearing in all the characters, like Joe the Bartender, Crazy Guggenheim, Reggie and the Poor Soul. And I loved the June Taylor dancers. Gleason was the last of the great showmen on TV. After him, the deluge!!!!!!

Being in my 50's, I grew up watching Gleason in the movies and on TV. He was a great talent and knew how to entertain, to be sure. Those 39 episodes of THE HONEYMOONERS are great and his variety show was good until the last 2 or 3 seasons as it went stale like the end of the Dean Martin Show.

The Miami Beach move, pure and simple. Gleason represented old showbiz New York, right down to his accent, reference points (pretty nightclub-esque dancing girls, booze, cigarettes, booze, Toots Shoor's, booze, dapper suits with vests, booze, etc). When he moved to Miami, his act (already hopelessly dated by the mid-60s) became somehow less genuine when produced in relatively sedate and sunny Miami instead of gritty New York City. The musical-comedy style Honeymooners segments were awful, and color (I really don't know why) just made everything look even less authentic. Plus, Gleason was obviously getting lazier (if that's even possible!) and seemed to be on cruise control the last two or three years ('67-'70). No doubt, Gleason was brilliant...a real American original. But, all things come to an end, and it is better to end a series before it starts running out of gas, rather than--in Gleason's case--in 1970 when the tank was long empty.

I suspect that viewer reactions to this show are a function of age. I'm in my 40's, grew up with the color Miami Beach shows, and didn't come to appreciate the old black-and-white Honeymooners until much later. While the color shows aren't as classic as the "Classic 39," Gleason is still a comedic force to be reckoned with (albeit a bit sadder but wiser) and Art Carney is ageless and timeless - and hilarious. Putting aside Sheila MacRae, who inevitably suffers in comparison to Audrey Meadows, Jane Kean does a fine job as Trixie. The musical numbers are catchy and memorable, if a little stagy (just like the Broadway show tunes of that period), the recent introduction of full network color is put to excellent use (get a load of Gleason's garish attire), and the characters still hold plenty of punch (the Poor Soul Christmas Special is a bona fide TV classic that should be seen every year, but unfortunately is languishing in someone's vaults). Yes, a few of those plots do look awfully familiar, but this is still TV "variety" entertainment of the highest order, and in its day it was unsurpassed. No shark bites here, not even a nibble. A little traveling music, Sam!

This show Jumped a couple of decades after it went off the air and it dawned on someone that alcoholism (Crazy Googenheim and Reginald van Gleason) and spousal abuse ("one of these days, Alice, POW! right in the kisser) weren't very funny. I'm more conservative than G. Gordon Liddy but this makes me uncomfortable now when I see the reruns. I remember being a little kid and drawing pictures of trucks and airplanes carrying cases of XXX Booze to Reginald.

The first year Gleason went to Miami Beach was the beginning of the end for his show.The whole group was still there,but the skits-as I now realize-were largely rehashes of many of the older skits from his 50s variety show-the many skits with the Poor Soul or Reggie or even RumDum.In the Joe the Bartender skits,Crazy Gugenhiem told a lot of the same jokes that Joe had once told in the 50s-when Joe the Bartender was an occasional skit with only Joe talking to Mr.Denehy.Then after two years in black & white in Miami Beach(they'd been in New York the first two years)Gleason went to color and tried to resurrect The Honeymooners...using skits from the 50s variety show which weren't included in the Classic 39 Honeymooners shows.Shelia MacRae was no Audrey Meadows.('Nuff said!)There would only be occasional appearances by other Gleason characters like Reggie(in a show where he fought the Red Baron),Joe the Bartender (when in 1967 Frank Fontanie made one final guest appearance) or the Poor Soul(in the annual rebroadcast Christmas show).

Okay, I'm not a sophisticated critic of the show like so many of you other posters obviously are. When I started watching Jackie Gleason's variety show in 1962 I was all of seven years old. But I ALWAYS watched the show to catch the last fifteen minutes, with Jackie and his "Joe the Bartender" sketch. And if he said the blessed words, it made my weekend. The words of course were, "Yeah, he's in the back, ya wanna see him? HEY, CRAZE!!!" And the audience would break into wild applause when Crazy Guggenheim strolled in. I was not the only kid in America who loved ol' Crazy Guggenheim, not by a long shot. The actor who played him, Frank Fontaine, even made the cover of the kids' magazine "Children's Playmate". But it seemed to me that in a future season - maybe even the very next one - the Joe the Bartender sketches were dropped and poor Craze was no more. (In my adult years I heard a rumor that Gleason was jealous of the fact that Guggenheim was essential the star of those sketches and decided to fire Fontaine.) When Crazy Guggenheim left the show, IMHO, that was when it jumped the shark.

I agree that it jumped the shark when they went to Miami Beach. I was just a kid then but I remember watching the years of the American Scene Magazine, with the sketches. I always enjoyed the Poor Soul, Reggie Van Gleason et al., and of course Joe the Bartender. It was a show of its time and had a New York/East Coast edge to it. Miami Beach made everything too easy, everyone too comfortable, hence the reach back for the Honeymooners and the insertion of musical numbers. Ralph and Alice, Norton and Trixie were not meant to break out in song and dance. The Ralph of the great 39 episodes was so lovable and special because he was everyman who couldn't help but dream of a better, bigger life, but who could never help but fail. He never resorted to singing, he had to brive a dus, or dus a brive, hummna, hummna, hummna. Hello ball...

The guy with the 1st and 3rd posts, you're an idiot and know nothing about classic comedy. The Jackie Gleason show was classic. The characters developed on it were very funny. True, when it moved to Miami, it wasn't as funny but it still had the Great One.

The show jumped on its move to Miami from New York. It had been a great show for years in its many incarnations (including the American Scene Magazine, Gleason somehow managed even to salvage "You're in the Picture" as well) but the move to Florida just seemed to put a damper on the show. It suddenly became an hour long musical version of The Honeymooners, which looked decidedly weak next to the brilliant black and white original. Oh well, at least Carney was still around to make it bearable. BTW, I LOVED Frank Fontaine's Crazy Guggenheim character!

The Jackie Gleason Show was loved by everybody that I knew. We were kids then, and we used to mimic Crazy Guggenheim in the school yard. Jackie was exciting, his show was daring, a last vestige to vaudeville (that and the Ed Sullivan Show), shot live, on stage, where anything could happen and often times did. Our family never missed this show on Saturday nights!