*** DVD CORNER ***

[skeith]

Anybody know if Peter O'Toole's THE RULING CLASS is out on DVD? Quite a film which I last saw when it came out, sometime in '72. I wouldn't mind re-visiting that one, hopefully with good special features.

It most certainly is and it is a Criterion release with tons of extras.

I love this film, but it is not for everyone.

[sal]

I have just got back from the local supermarket with some wine for my wife and I, and I have also picked up a copy of the film, for the kids to watch this evening.

Che.

Che, I recommend that you watch it with them. You might enjoy it even more than they will!

[Guest che]

I have just got back from the local supermarket with some wine for my wife and I, and I have also picked up a copy of the film, for the kids to watch this evening.

Che.

Che, I recommend that you watch it with them. You might enjoy it even more than they will!

Sal.

I did not see the origional film with them, as I was abroad teaching, and they are asking me to watch it with them so I think I will do that. Here in the UK the film was a great success, as it was in many other places and the DVD is selling very well.

Che.

[BERIGAN]

Some Hellishly cheap prices on Warner box sets at deepdiscountdvd.com right now!

http://www.deepdiscountdvd.com/studio.cfm?mainStudioid=4

[Guy Berger]

I have just got back from the local supermarket with some wine for my wife and I, and I have also picked up a copy of the film, for the kids to watch this evening.

Che.

Che, I recommend that you watch it with them. You might enjoy it even more than they will!

I really liked the Incredibles too. Pretty sophisticated for a kids' movie, or for that matter what passes for "grown-up" comedies. Though I guess there's a place for Harold and Kumar too.

Guy

[Jazzmoose]

Well, I finally watched a movie last night that I've been putting off watching for most of my life: Gone with the Wind. I've been putting it off because I knew the "historical interpretation" of the movie was guaranteed to send my blood pressure into the stratosphere, and wanted to do my best to see it as a "fantasy melodrama" rather than a pathetically twisted historical drama. With my brain fully tuned to this viewpoint, I watched the DVD and gave it my best shot. With that approach, I must admit the movie isn't bad. However, the ending is so clumsily handled that for the life of me I can't understand why it has the reputation it has. I mean they completely blew it! If they had ended it with Brett uttering his famous last words, then panning away from Scarlett as she collapsed internally, this would have been a great, satisfying movie. However, they had to add more afterwards that added absolutely zilch to the movie and ruined the great ending they had in their hands. Pathetic.

[Guest Chaney]

For fans of the Mary Tyler Moore Show, season two is up for pre-ordering at Deep Discount DVD for $21.96.

[Guest Chaney]

Everyone's favorie retailer, Walmart ( ), is having a sale on Twentieth Century Fox first season sets, at $14.44 each, for the following shows:

The Mary Tyler Moore Show

King of the Hill

Buffy, The Vampire Slayer

Futurama

Dark Angel

Harsh Realm

NYPD Blue

Cedric the Entertainer

The Bernie Mac Show

Picked up the MTM set.

First time I've been in a Walmart. OH THE HUMANITY!

[BERIGAN]

For fans of the Mary Tyler Moore Show, season two is up for pre-ordering at Deep Discount DVD for $21.96.

Great news!!!! Now, Amazon has to beat Deep's price, so it's only 20.99 (But you have to pay shipping if don't find a way to spend 4.01 more on something) Bob Newhart show out Tuesday!!!

[Guest Chaney]

Bob Newhart show out Tuesday!!!

YES!

For me, this is the most exciting DVD release ever. This is one of the few shows that I caught growing up and then didn't manage to then kill by watching it in syndication over and over again. (All In The Family comes to mind as one possibly killed. Although, it has been many years since I've seen an episode of that show. Hmmm...)

[Jazzmoose]

Allow me to ask the dumb question...which Bob Newhart show is it? If it's the one with Suzanne Pleshette...

[jazzbo]

I watched "Rush Hour 2" again (first time was in the theater) this weekend as part of my Ziyi Zhang kick!

It was a lot of fun.

[jazzbo]

Maigret eh? I can't imagine watching a British version of Maigret, but the Simenon novels are wonderful (actually, ALL Simenon is worth reading in my opinion, or rather all that I've read, I'm trying to read it all!)

[brownie]

Maigret eh? I can't imagine watching a British version of Maigret, but the Simenon novels are wonderful (actually, ALL Simenon is worth reading in my opinion, or rather all that I've read, I'm trying to read it all!)

Read ALL Simenon?

The man wrote 400 books. He was a great prolific writer!

He also was insatiable! (he had sex with 10,000 women according to various accounts!)!

[Guest Chaney]

Allow me to ask the dumb question...which Bob Newhart show is it?  If it's the one with Suzanne Pleshette...

Yepper!

Edited April 11, 2005 by Chaney

[BERIGAN]

Allow me to ask the dumb question...which Bob Newhart show is it? If it's the one with Suzanne Pleshette...

well, she was on 2 of his shows!

[BERIGAN]

Speaking of Bob, did anyone see him on Desparate Housewives last night??? He was on for about 2-3 minutes(He is the Boyfriend of Leslie Ann Warren, Terri Hatcher's mother) and he's still got it!

[Guest Chaney]

Speaking of Bob, did anyone see him on Desparate Housewives last night??? He was on for about 2-3 minutes(He is the Boyfriend of Leslie Ann Warren, Terri Hatcher's mother) and he's still got it!

I saw around 8 seconds of the show and it was a Newhart scene. He was stammering in a very natural way. B-)

[Jazzmoose]

Hey, just give me Bob Newhart and a telephone, and I'm halfway to cracking up before he even starts...

[Guest Chaney]

Hey, just give me Bob Newhart and a telephone, and I'm halfway to cracking up before he even starts...

Funny then but some of those bits haven't aged very well.

[ghost of miles]

Hey, just give me Bob Newhart and a telephone, and I'm halfway to cracking up before he even starts...

Interesting jazz-trivia note: the Newhart telephone gag dates back at least to Wonderful Smith's chat-with-FDR bit in Ellington's 1941 musical Jump for Joy. Not sure that that's where Newhart got it from (probably not) or if Smith was the first to do it... it's pretty funny (the full version is on the oop Smithsonian 1988 JUMP FOR JOY LP). You can hear about a minute of it in the special I did on JUMP FOR JOY, about 28 minutes in:

Jump for Joy

[Guest Chaney]

Just put up on the NY Times site:

April 12, 2005

For Bob Newhart, Dean of Deadpan, the Laughs Go On

By NED MARTEL

SANTA MONICA, Calif. - Ever the gentleman, a tuxedoed Bob Newhart went one by one to each reporter's station along the red carpet of last month's TV Land awards. Each year, the nostalgic cable channel salutes, with a curator's dedication, the legends of television, and the first of Mr. Newhart's two self-titled sitcoms was soon to receive an Icon Award.

Carol Burnett cackled alongside him and a regal Joan Collins was only a few steps behind. Mr. Newhart straightened his houndstooth pocket square before stepping toward the microphone of Terri Seymour, a reporter for "Extra" and girlfriend of the "American Idol" magistrate Simon Cowell. Crinkly around the eyes already, Mr. Newhart winced in an effort to hear his interviewer's questions over the squeals that greeted Jon Peter Lewis, a rejected "Idol" contestant from last year.

As Mr. Newhart made his way down the rope line, Ms. Seymour turned to her producer and asked, "Now what show was Bob Newhart on?"

Despite the din of reality television, applause is mounting for nobler scripted shows like Mr. Newhart's, which fans have discovered in syndication and on DVD. His success in reruns has led to today's DVD release of the first season of "The Bob Newhart Show," which made its debut in 1972 and might today be a model for the flagging sitcom genre.

The Newhart revival also includes guest-star appearances on "Desperate Housewives," which began this past Sunday. In recent years he has signed on for roles on NBC's "E.R." and "Committed" as well as the movie "Elf." The job offers have hardly caught the 75-year-old Mr. Newhart napping. He still makes 30 stand-up appearances a year, reprising the dry, stammering shtick that got him discovered in the first place.

The encomiums will keep coming, as PBS readies an "American Masters" documentary on Mr. Newhart for July. He also won praise for comporting himself with a humble dignity when honoring his friend Johnny Carson in a special "Tonight" show tribute after the former host's death last January. Onetime neighbors in Malibu, the two comics both mastered a button-down sophistication without betraying their Plains-state roots. (Mr. Newhart is a native of Oak Park, Ill., and Carson grew up in Nebraska.)

His comedy career took off in 1960 with "The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart," the Grammy winner for album of the year. Mr. Newhart's modest persona, sharp wit and deadpan delivery were often expressed in a one-sided telephone conversation, with the audience imagining what was being said on the other end.

"I get a lot of credit for it, but I really wasn't the innovator of the telephone," he said, by phone, a few weeks after the awards show. Lily Tomlin, he noted, mastered a similar routine, as did Shelley Berman, Mike Nichols and Elaine May. "George Jessel had a radio show," Mr. Newhart recalled. "At the end, he would call up his mother and tell her how the show had gone. As a kid growing up, I remember listening to him and he would call his mother up and say, 'Mama, this is Georgie' " - he paused, skillfully - " 'from the money.' "

When "The Bob Newhart Show" was first batted around as a concept, psychoanalysis was a sophisticated novelty, and Dr. Bob Hartley made his debut as a healer of mild mental afflictions. He conducted group sessions about the fear of flying, the one phobia for which Mr. Newhart himself went into therapy. In one telephone consultation, he lavishly praised a client for making progress with her eating compulsion, paused, then politely, haltingly told her, "I can't understand you when your mouth is full."

Mr. Newhart and others from the show recalled that there was initial trepidation about making jokes about mental disorders. "In the pilot, we were both psychiatrists," said Peter Bonerz, Mr. Newhart's cast mate. "He was the Freudian and I was the New Age behaviorist." The test audiences flunked it, so Dr. Hartley became a psychologist, and Mr. Bonerz's character was changed to a dentist, a swinging bachelor with a penchant for sharing confidences.

Another reflection of the wordly, adult perspective of the show was a stipulation Mr. Newhart made from the outset: Bob and Emily Hartley, sophisticated Chicago high-rise dwellers, would remain childless. "In a way, they were a little ahead of the times," he said. "She wasn't this subservient, 'whatever you say, darling, you've been such a wonderful provider.' I was very tired of that kind of show where the kids are precocious and saying words that 7-year-olds don't know, and Daddy's kind of a lummox but lovable."

Instead the couple had suggestive conversations between their satin sheets and hashed out marital problems with a 70's-era openness and honesty. A jazzy, poetic musical theme set a sweet, even sad tone, in keeping with the format of "The Mary Tyler Moore Show," another adult-oriented, chatty sitcom. Ms. Moore's boutique studio produced both shows and, Mr. Newhart attested, shielded him from network intrusions.

On the red carpet, Mr. Newhart and his on-screen wife, Suzanne Pleshette, exhibited their usual chemistry. As Mr. Newhart talked with "Extra," Ms. Pleshette, once a glossy brunette and now a platinum blonde who is married to Tom Poston, Mr. Newhart's co-star on the 1982 sitcom "Newhart," grabbed Mr. Newhart's buttocks and yelled: "Still married? Oh, yeah, the redhead!" As she shrugged off feigned disappointment, she greeted Ginny, Mr. Newhart's off-screen spouse of 42 years, and three of their four grown children.

Mr. Newhart soon invited his cast to join him onstage to receive the Icon Award, and they meandered en masse for backstage interviews, group photos and gags. Asked if there was bad blood worth airing, Bill Daily, who played the Hartleys' childish airline-pilot neighbor, Howard, issued a fake tirade expressing his supposed true and profane feelings for his colleagues. The signature laugh of Marcia Wallace, the flame-haired receptionist, was audible above all others as the flash bulbs popped.

Jack Riley, who played Dr. Hartley's neurotic patient Elliot Carlin, admitted he once thought about going into group therapy himself. "But people would look around and think it was a joke, like they were being 'Punk'd,' " he said, referring to Ashton Kutcher's MTV pranking series.

Even veterans have become versed in reality television, and Mr. Newhart admitted he grudgingly watches a few such shows to find fodder for his stand-up act. But the genre has put many writers out of work, he said, and the loss of air time for new scripted shows will lead to a loss of old shows to rerun (and venerate), a phenomenon he called "television eating its young."

With television favoring louder voices, the kind of calm exhibited by comedians like Mr. Newhart and Johnny Carson might now be seem a quality worth emulating. Mr. Newhart had some advice for newcomers. "If they can," he said, "they should go back and get born in the Midwest, I guess."

[Randy Twizzle]

One of the first hit comedy records was Joe Hayman's "Cohen on the Telephone" from 1913:

"Hello? Hello? Are you dere? Hello? Vat number do I vant? Vell, vot numbers have you got? Oh, excuse me. My mistook. I vant Central 248 please. Yes, dat's right, 248. I say, Miss, am I supposed to keep on saying hello and are you dere until you come back again? Vell don't be long! Hello? Are you dere...I vant to see de manager, please. Vot do you say? This is not a telescope, it is a telephone? Say, you tink you're very clever, ain't it? Vell, do me a favor. Just hang a small piece of crepe on your nose. Your brains are dead! And if I have any more of your impertenence, I'll speak to the manager about you. I said I'll...oh...oh, YOU'RE de manager. Oh, I beg your pardink. Much obliged..."

I guess you had to be there...

http://www.comedystars.com/Bios/hayman_joe.shtml

[Guest Chaney]

Bob Newhart: Season 1

Fox // Unrated // $29.98 // April 12, 2005

Review by John Sinnott | posted April 5, 2005

The Show:

Bob Newhart was working as bookkeeper for a Chicago advertising company and living in his parent’s basement when he started writing stand-up comedy routines. He recorded some of these at home, and lent the tapes to a friend. Eventually a talent scout heard these tapes and based on their strength, signed Newhart to a recording contract. His first album, The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart, was a phenomenal success. It was the first comedy album to ever reach #1 on the Billboard charts. His follow-up recording, The Button-Down Mind Strikes Back, also did extremely well, with those two albums holding the first and second slots in the charts for an amazing eight months.

After an aborted attempt at a TV show in 1961, Bob Newhart had little interest in staring in another show. When David Davis and Lorenzo Music, writers for the Mary Tyler Moore Show, presented him with a script about a mild mannered psychologist and his trials and tribulations, he agreed to star in the show, and The Bob Newhart Show was born.

In case you have managed to miss seeing this funny and intelligent comedy during its oridinal run or any of the frequent re-runs, Bob Newhart stars as Bob Hartley, a psychologist who lives with his wife Emily (Suzanne Pleshette) in Chicago. His life is filled with treating his neurotic patients, and dealing with his equally necrotic co-workers and neighbors.

This comedy was different from others that were on the air. Bob wasn’t the goofy father, who had to be extricated from some mess every week. Newhart refused to let Bob and Emily have children for just that reason. (In the sixth season of the show, the writers came up with a plot in which Emily gets pregnant. When asked what he thought of the script, Newhart replied “It’s very funny. Who are you going to get to play Bob?”) It is a more intelligent type of comedy, with humor arising out of plausible situations, rather than the usual contrived plots that sitcoms usually generate. One of my favorite shows in this first season has Emily trying to get people to visit the elementary school class that she teaches for ‘career day.’ Bob is insulted that she doesn’t ask him, but she explains that what a psychologist does would be too hard for eight year olds to grasp. When someone cancels at the last minute, Bob steps in and has a horrible time in class. Not because the children were smart-alecs throwing out witty lines of banter, but because it is hard to describe what a psychologist is in second grade terms. “How many of you know yourselves? I mean, really know yourselves?”

I enjoyed this show when it was first on the air, though I haven’t seen an episode in years. I was very pleased to discover that this is one of the few sitcoms to really stand the test of time. Though the hair styles, fashions, and furnishings are a little dated, the show is still as funny as it was when it was first broadcast. I laughed several times in every show, something that doesn’t happen with most sitcoms.

The program is very low keyed, yet it had a healthy mix of satire and humor with a little sarcasm thrown in. Bob was an everyman type of character, someone the audience could relate to. A lot of his problems weren’t all his doing, but you could see how he contributed to the messes he found himself in.

Like silent comedian great Buster Keaton, Newhart met most problems and difficulties with a dead-pan reaction. These were more effective at showing his thoughts (not to mention more humorous) than if he ran around the room waving his arms in the air. Newhart often has long pauses in his delivery when someone asks him a difficult or embarrassing question. This almost forces the viewer to imagine what they would say in that situation, and Bob’s reply is always more bizarre and off the wall than anything I’d come up with. Odd, but realistic and believable.

This show really had an ensemble cast, with all of the supporting characters doing an outstanding job. Suzanne Pleshette played Bob’s wife wonderfully, making her his equal. She wasn’t a dingbat air-head, nor was she the one always solving his problems. She was his partner, and though they occasionally fought (like in the hilarious episode Don’t Go to Bed Mad) one never dominated the other.

Other cast members include Bill Daily, well known for his role as Major Roger Healy in I Dream of Jeanie, who plays Bob’s always hungry neighbor Howard, Marcia Wallace as the receptionist Carol and Peter Bonerz (sound like the name of a porno star doesn’t it?) who plays the orthodontist with an office next to Bob’s Jerry Robinson. My favorite supporting member though is one of Bob’s patients, Eliot Carlin magnificently played by Jack Riley. This morose, terminally depressed man had a quick tongue capable of flinging out the most hilarious insults, backhanded compliments, and bizarre observations. The fact that he always talked in a monotone just added to the characters appeal. You’d never think that something funny would come out of the mouth of such a loser. Riley managed to steal just about every scene he was in, and was a regular character for the full run of the show.

The DVD:

This set contains all 24 episodes from the first season on three double sided discs.

Audio:

The show is presented with English and Spanish audio tracks, both in two channel mono. Originally airing on TV in the 70's, the soundtrack isn’t dynamic or exciting, but it gets the job done. The dialog is clear, and the show sounds very good for a show this old.

Video:

The full frame video is also looks very good for a show over 30 years old. There is a small amount of grain to the picture, and the occasional piece of dirt, but overall the image is clear and clean. They did a good job encoding the shows too. With only four episodes on most sides, there is plenty of room on the disc and digital defects are rarely seen.

Extras:

Unfortunately, there are no extras on this set. Bob Newhart has said that he’d love to contribute commentaries and interviews, and I presume that Fox is testing the waters with this first season. Hopefully if this set sells well future seasons will include more bonus features.

Final Thoughts:

Ironically, The Bob Newhart Show gained critical acclaim throughout its entire run, but never won an Emmy award. Now the show is often eclipsed by some of the other great 70's sitcoms like All in the Family, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and MASH, but The Bob Newhart Show is just as funny and intelligent as its more famous contemporaries. The show has aged very well, and each episodes contains a lot of laughter. No collection of quality TV shows would be complete without this gem of a show. Highly Recommended.

[rostasi]

Already have the Criterion Cocteau Orphic Trilogy

and am really looking forward to this release.

Should be out on the 26th.

Anyone else?