Category Archives: Entertainment

Boop!

Posted on by

Boop! = much fun. I know that because I remember enjoying myself during the new musical of that name, despite my uncomfortable seat there in the dress circle at the theater formerly known as the Sam Shubert, now named for a bank, in downtown Chicago. We popped in for the show on Friday evening.

Even now, only four days after the performance, whatever detail I took in about the jazzy score or entertaining lyrics or the vivacious dance moves or the intensely colorful costumes – which were sometimes monochromatic yet colorful somehow – or the peppy dialogue or the remarkable sets, is all a kinetic blur.

That’s the way it should be with a musical, I figure. A little razzle, a little dazzle, something to enjoy in the moment. Still, Boop! wasn’t just a musical, it was a staged musical cartoon with a star character nearly 100 years old, singing and dancing her way through an appropriately gossamer plot.

A young woman named Jasmine Amy Rogers brought Betty to life with astonishing vitality and, often enough, a hot red dress, once Betty leaves monochrome behind. The supporting cast, up to and including a marionette dog, likewise filled the stage with song, dance and antics. The cast was first rate in every way.

Pudgy, Betty’s dog, a more-or-less life-sized marionette, did some astonishing moves himself, as guided by Phillip Huber, who once upon a time did some puppet work in the extreme oddity that was Being John Malkovich.

I am, I confess, mostly indifferent about Betty Boop. Or was, until I married a fan. Capt. Gus on KENS-TV Channel 5 didn’t show her cartoons on weekday afternoons after school; his thing was Popeye, though maybe he screened the Betty Boop short in which Popeye made his cinematic debut. In those pre-Internet, pre-You Tube days, the cartoons simply weren’t available. Betty, for me, was stuck in the amber of the 1930s, and while pop culture of the time has considerable interest, somehow she didn’t resonate.

So I grew to adulthood without giving her much thought, though I did see her brief appearance in Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

“Work’s been kinda slow since cartoons went to color, but I’ve still got it, Eddie!”

– Betty Boop, voiced by Mae Questel (d. 1998), who managed to live long enough to do so.

In Boop!, a monochromic-ish Betty, tired of being a cartoon celebrity, manages to transport herself to the “real world” via a machine concocted by Grampy, the inventor character from the shorts who is explicitly her grandfather in this show. She figures no one will know her in the real world, but she lands at New York Comic-Con in our time, in living color, and of course everyone knows her, especially the spunky little sister of her soon-to-be love interest, a modern jazzman. He provided the story’s shout-out to Cab Calloway, and I was glad to hear it.

Luckily, the story didn’t make too much out of Betty being a fish out of water, though that provided a little amusement. To her eventual dismay, she realizes she’s famous here, too.

Grampy, realizing that Betty needs to return to the cartoon world, comes to the real world to look for her, but also manages to spend the night with a real-world woman he had a dalliance with decades earlier. (The Hays Code doesn’t apply to this show, though it’s mostly wholesome.) There’s also a sleazeball running for mayor of real-world New York and it is he, in the fullness of time, who chases Betty around a desk, only to get clocked by her with a blunt object.

The sprinkling of serious elements – most musicals have a few – mostly involve female empowerment, though there was a dig at modern-day plutocrats. Betty is known for resisting sexual harassment and, after returning to the cartoon world, tells her director that she won’t be chased around desks by lecherous men any more in her cartoons.

I believe we saw the only the fourth performance of Boop! Not the fourth of this particular run, but the fourth ever in the history of the theater. I don’t think I’ve ever seen any big production that soon after its premiere. It was a fluke of marketing, and my experience with the character, that made that happen: a few weeks ago, a theater ticket website that sends me email once a week suggested Boop! I figured Yuriko, who has a longstanding fondness for Betty, would like it, so I got some tickets for something to do on the day after Thanksgiving. She did like it. Ann did too. We all did. Boop! is a crowd pleaser, and we were happy to be in the crowd.

Apparently the show has been in the works a long time and eventually was brought to fruition by director and choreographer Jerry Mitchell, who is very much a known quantity in the American theater. Its run at the Shubert serves essentially the same shakedown-cruise function as pre-Broadway runs in New England towns used to do – may still do, for all I know, but I expect Chicago offers a much larger pool of potential theatergoers.

Eventually, probably soon, Boop! will be on Broadway. As a crowd pleaser, I’ll bet it will do well there.

Pre-Thanksgiving Assortment

Posted on by

Regards for Thanksgiving, back to posting November 27 or so. In the meantime, eat, drink and be indolent.

I woke up this morning from some sort of dream, trying to remember these three kinds of to-dos: shindigs, hullabaloos and hootenannies. I’m pretty sure I could call Full Moon Bluegrass a hootenanny. Otherwise, my experience with them is thin. Also, I forgot about hoedowns. The unconscious is a funny place.

Gentle rain last night, and all through the early morning. I cracked the window very slightly to listen as I drifted off. Still raining when I went to the bathroom not long before dawn. Maybe that put me to mind of folk music parties.

A couple of recent flags, including one that I saw in full flutter after I entered Tennessee just north of Nashville.

A distinctive design. The three stars represent, of course, the Grand Divisions of Tennessee, a thing unique to the state. Distinct legal entities, but also acknowledging historical and cultural distinctions.

I remember when Tennessee Gov. Lamar Alexander joined Garrison Keillor on stage during the pre-broadcast warmup for A Prairie Home Companion when the show came to Nashville in 1985. The governor played a little on the piano – he was really good, as I recall – and bantered with Keillor.

When it came up that Alexander had grown up in East Tennessee, Keillor said, “You guys were on our side during the war, weren’t you?”

In Texas, I saw a Space Force flag on a pole. First time ever.

That arrowhead design looks suspiciously familiar. Can’t quite put my finger on it.

Heard some blatherskite on the radio recently about planning one’s “celebration of life.” There’s that absurd euphemism again, standing in for funeral. Apparently it’s caught on. I suspect that undertakers and their marketing people are behind this.

I insist that my survivors, if they want to have some kind of formal event to mark my shuffling off this mortal coil, call it a funeral. It doesn’t need to have any of the trappings of a conventional funeral here in North America, just the term.

That got me to thinking, “mortal coil”? Sure, it’s Shakespeare, Hamlet in particular, but why coil? First place to look: my copy of Onions, which I haven’t opened in entirely too long. That is, a volume called A Shakespeare Glossary by C.T. Onions. I have a revised edition published in 1986.

Coil, n.

1. Noisy disturbance, tumult. Comedy of Errors: What a coil is there, Dromio?

2. Fuss, ado. Much Ado About Nothing: yonder’s old coil at home. Hamlet: When we have shuffled off this mortal coil.

So a coil’s a noisy bit of business. An Elizabethan meaning worth bringing back, but I doubt that’s going to happen. Thus your mortal coil would be the fuss of being alive, of which there’s a fair amount, including sound and fury and signifying… a different play, one that I won’t name.

Not Yet, I Haven’t

Posted on by

Not long ago I came across the blog of a fellow – Everywhereman.me — who aspired to visit everywhere mentioned in the U.S. version of the song “I’ve Been Everywhere.” He then did just that, mostly by motorcycle. I don’t think I’ll do that exactly, but that’s the kind of meshuga I like, since I’m a bit touched myself.

Though others have recorded it, including Johnny Cash no less, I associate the U.S. version with Hank Snow. As well I should.

The original version was Australian, written by Geoff Mack and a hit for Lucky Starr. I have to give it its due. Australia is full of lots of weird and gorgeous place names, after all.

You need a written list to keep up with Lucky, as posted in Wiki. Or a very detailed knowledge of Australia.

Other versions for other places exist. None other than Stompin’ Tom Connors starts off in the United States, but naturally gravitates to Canada, with an entire verse about the Maritimes.

Canada’s fine, but Texas place names are just as good.

By one Brian Burns, who managed to work in some of my favorites, ever since my days of poring over Texas road maps: Pflugerville, Dime Box, and Cut and Shoot.

I Don’t Need No Talking Pictures

Posted on by

From the Department of Not My Beat, excerpts from a PR pitch that arrived in my inbox recently:

While the Covid-19 pandemic has officially ended, the male loneliness epidemic in the U.S. persists… AB, Founder and Executive Coach of CD, knows this struggle all too well. He was the “Mayor of the Friend Zone”… Over the span of a decade, he immersed himself in the art and psychology of male-female connection, meeting countless women all over the world while training with the most elite dating and attraction coaches…

AB is available to speak on the male loneliness epidemic, how to find success on dating online and IRL, trending news stories, and the following topics:

Logic is the Death of Romance: Many of CD’s clients come from analytical fields (doctors, engineers, software developers). CD helps them get in touch with their inner emotions that attract women — more Captain Kirk than Mr. Spock…

My eyes are a little sore, having rolled them so much reading that pitch. Or maybe that’s just a lack of empathy on my part.

Nah. Still, anyone can call him- or herself a “dating coach.” I don’t think there’s a specific NAICS code for that. (I had to check: probably 812990, “all other personal services.”) Moreover, how does one get to be an elite dating coach? Is there a series of tests, like for actuaries? Doubt it. Do dating coaches have trouble keeping a straight face when they meet each other? Could be.

Interesting to note: the Kirk-Spock yin-yang is so completely woven into the culture that no elaboration is required. But I will say that Spock got lucky a few times, too. I seem to remember a dalliance with a high-placed Romulan, though it was a ruse, and a hot woman in a cold cave. Also, as evidenced in “Elaan of Troyius,” an episode that Ann and I watched just last weekend, not even an alien space babe with love potion tears could pry Jim Kirk away from his one true love, the Enterprise.

The sorry state of romance, if that’s really the case, reminds me of an entertaining video I happened across earlier this year, one made for the song “Silent Movie” by Little Violet, using artfully edited clips from the movie The Artist (2011).

After seeing the video a few times, I was inspired to finally get around to watching the movie on DVD, which I enjoyed a lot. The leads, especially French actor Jean Dujardin, nailed it, as was widely acknowledged. Take him back in time 100 years and he could have been a silent movie idol.

As for the video, it manages to loosely tell a rather different story than the movie did, and listening to the song without the video isn’t as good an experience. The British label Freshly Squeezed calls Little Violet a “retro pop piano-playing chanteuse and band.”

The Little Violet lead singer is one Cherie Gears, which AMV Music – a music booking agency based in Newcastle, England – describes as a “Yorkshire Wedding Singer Pianist.” Quite the voice.

The Lesson: Go Look at the Elephant Yourself

Posted on by

“Shop epic deals influencers love,” says an ad I saw today, one associated with an online retail behemoth oddly named for a major tropical river. Instantly I found a use for that Reagan-era phrase: just say no.

Influencers would be about as useful for finding worthwhile goods as the blind men in describing the elephant.

I didn’t know until today that the inestimable Natalie Merchant set the poem “The Blind Men and the Elephant” to music. That comes of rummaging around the Internet about blind men and elephants. She might have sung it at Ravinia in 2012, since the recording would have been fairly new then, but I don’t remember.

The poem by John Godfrey Saxe is much older, of Victorian vintage. I didn’t know much about the poet, so I looked into some of his other work. His rhymes tend not to be dense with complex images, as far as I can tell. One begins:

Come, listen all unto my song;
It is no silly fable;
‘Tis all about the mighty cord
They call the Atlantic Cable.

That’s from “How Cyrus Laid the Cable.” I have to like a poem about early communications infrastructure, though I don’t think Natalie has set it to music.

The parable of the blind men and the elephant is much older than the 19th century, of course, a dash of ancient wisdom from the Subcontinent. I might have first heard about it in one of my Eastern religion classes. Or perhaps when I bought the record Waist Deep in the Big Muddy and Other Love Songs in the mid-80s, the disk that kicked my admiration for Pete Seeger into high gear. On that record, he performs a comic spoken version of the parable — the second spoken interlude during a song called “Seek and You Shall Find.”

I like all of the stories. Especially the first one, which is about boiling all the world’s wisdom down into one book, then one sentence, then one word. A re-telling for our time wouldn’t involve a king and wise men, but perhaps a tech mogul and his AI specialists. Eventually, sophisticated AI boils all the world’s wisdom down into a single word, and the result is the same. Maybe.

A Ship of Fools Sailing On

Posted on by

The first chill of fall is on. Not freezing, not even in the wee hours, so mild in the grand scheme of the year. A warm day in December, brought forward.

More than a tinge of yellow and brown in the trees, but green is still dominant. For maybe a week. Bright colored leaves will soon detach themselves and find their way to the ground, where they will be pushed around and crackling underfoot: a sound of the season universally experienced but less often mentioned. (But not never.)

Not long ago, I watched the video of “Everybody Have Fun Tonight,” which dates from 1986, a vaguely remembered curiosity. I remember the song being OK, even fun – it’s in the title – but not liking the video, which jump cuts like there’s no tomorrow.

That’s an inventive band name, Wang Chung, who hailed from London, and were not the least bit Chinese. “Yellow Bell” in Chinese, Wiki tells me. A foundational term in Chinese music, Music Educators Journal tells me, but my grasp of music theory – Western, much less Chinese – is a flimsy thing, so I can’t pretend to understand it.

After I watched the video once, I watched it again. And a few more times over the course of a week.

The jumpy visual structure bothered me less and less. I was even a touch mesmerized. Soon I began to appreciate the method to its particular madness. It emphasizes the musicians as their parts begin and end against a spare background, especially the two lead members of the band, whose images are sometimes effectively fused as they sing together. But the supporting musicians get their due. It’s really quite remarkable, this video.

I also paid attention to the lyrics. I’m sure I never did, even when the song was on the radio; that was a time of my declining interest in the radio, for one thing. It’s easy enough not to pay attention, which means you hear the refrain, which is smooth as cold beer and seemingly meaningless. Silly, too. Self-referential. Everybody have fun tonight! Everybody Wang Chung tonight!

Though a line or two of lyric hint at seriousness early in the song, if you’re paying attention that is, the lead singer, one Jack Hues, belts out four serious lines at about 2:30, or half way through, that seem to drop from out of nowhere. (Jack Hues is a stage name for Jeremy Ryder, supposedly picked since it sounds like j’accuse. This just keeps getting better.) Hues sings:

On the edge of oblivion
All the world is Babylon
And all the love and everyone
A ship of fools sailing on

We all feel that way sometimes, don’t we? No? Anyway, that’s peppy pessimism.

Doors Open Milwaukee 2023: A Nondescript Warehouse, Home to an Enormous Theater Organ

Posted on by

A summerish weekend as the fall equinox came and went. That made Saturday a good day for Doors Open Milwaukee.Doors Open Milwaukee

The main event on Sunday was planting the enormous number of tulip bulbs that Yuriko acquired at a yard sale recently for a small price. If half or a quarter or even a tenth produce blooms next spring, there will be a nice display.

How would one start, and profit from, a virtual tulip bubble? Just wondering. Sillier things have happened in our time.

This was the sixth Doors Open for me. Yuriko didn’t feel like it this year, so it was a solo shot up to Milwaukee and back for me. When I was reading about possible sights at Historic Milwaukee’s web site, I came across one for Carma Laboratories, maker of lip balm Carmex.

“The 40,000 square foot building was built by Carma Laboratories approximately thirteen years ago specifically to function as a warehouse and distribution center,” Historic Milwaukee said. “The style of the building is a generic contemporary warehouse made of concrete.”

Well, fine. Why should I go there? Next paragraph:

“Carma Laboratories, the manufacturer of Carmex Lip Balm, is home to the world’s largest theater pipe organ, [which is] housed in its distribution center. The organ contains 6,000 pipes, a concert grand Steinway Piano, numerous percussion instruments and a set of handbells all playable from the organ console.”

Really? Rarely has such a bland opening paragraph been followed by such a wowzer. I knew I had to see that. It was my first stop Saturday morning.

Ordinary exterior indeed.Carma Laboratories

It’s one building in a district of suburban offices and distribution centers in Franklin, Wisconsin, which is south of Milwaukee proper.

Inside.Carma Laboratories organ Carma Laboratories organ

The organ is the vast enthusiasm – hobby is hardly the word – of the president of the company, Paul Woelbing, who was on hand to tell visitors about the organ, which has been under construction by the Century Organ Co. for years and isn’t quite finished even now. But enough to belt out a rousing version of the main theme from Star Wars (1977), which was playing when I walked in the door.

“When Woelbing and his late father, Donald, were inspecting a vacant warehouse for the expansion of Carma Labs, the acoustics of the cavernous building gave him some inspiration,” says the American Theatre Organ Society. “Woebling, a collector of paintings, old Harleys, and self-playing musical instruments, naturally thought of a pipe organ for the space.”Carma Laboratories organ Carma Laboratories organ

Woelbing at the console, programing the instrument ready for another piece, but I forget what. Carma Laboratories organ Carma Laboratories organ

Not Toccata and Fugue in D minor, though I’m sure that played at some point during the day. Still, the piece that did play was equally rousing, seeming to fill the space from top to bottom. Theater organs aren’t an enthusiasm of mine particularly, but I know a powerful instrument when I hear one.

This recorded concert from this summer gives some idea of its power and range, but not quite like being there.

The sound is one thing, but I’d say the icing on the cake is the location. We’ve all heard organs of various sorts in various places — including a few theaters — but in an obscure warehouse in an obscure corner of the Midwest? Sweet icing indeed.

The organ’s many parts occupy only part of the warehouse. The rest is exactly that – warehouse space, which was roped off to us casual visitors on Saturday.Carma Laboratories organ

“The nucleus of the instrument is the 3/15 Wurlitzer organ that was originally installed in Chicago’s Nortown Theatre,” says ATOS. “Denver organ enthusiast Dr. Bruce Belshaw purchased the organ in the 1950s and installed it in his home, before it made the current move to the Franklin, Wisconsin warehouse.

“With many additions, the now 90-rank instrument has extensive tonal colors. The organ has been used for annual company holiday parties, and Woebling’s desire is to share the instrument and music with the community.”

A $100,000 Space Suit, Almost

Posted on by

International Talk Like A Pirate Day has rolled around again. Where does the time go? Soon enough, it will be Millard Fillmore’s birthday and then National Gorilla Suit Day.

The art of the headline isn’t one of my strengths, but I understand the tendency to fudge just a bit for the sake of grabbing those eyeballs. Take the “$100,000 space suit.” That’s what the reader will see, the thinking goes, relegating “almost” to a second-place consideration, if that. The text will clarify.

Unless it doesn’t. I don’t know whether formal studies of the matter have been done, but they don’t need to be. It’s clear that the exaggeration is more easily retained by human memory than the small-print facts of the matter. You could argue an evolutionary advantage in that kind of big-picture perception for savanna dwellers of yore, but I’m not smart enough to know whether that’s the case.

Here’s the fine print: the item I’m talking about isn’t, in fact, a real space suit, and probably not selling for $100,000. The other day I saw a snippet about an auction to be held next month by Heritage Auctions, “The World’s Largest Collectibles Auctioneer.” The item for sale: Astronaut Space Suit (6) Piece Ensemble from 2001: A Space Odyssey (MGM, 1968).

At a starting bid of $80,000, the item might indeed sell for $100,000 or more, so my headline isn’t completely off base.

More detail, according to Heritage: “Vintage original (6) piece astronaut space suit ensemble including…  helmet, metal neck ring, tubing and applied ‘United States Aeronautics Agency – Clavius Base’ decal, leather lined interior retaining a label handwritten ‘Sean Sullivan’… These space suits can be seen prominently during the Moon crater and Moon Bus shuttle scenes… This epic piece of film history exhibits age, paint cracking to the entirety of the coveralls and gloves, crazing to the left side of the helmet visor, paint chipping to the backpack, and heavy production use.”

Cool. I hope the likes of the Seattle museum formerly called EMP acquires it for display; that would be a good outcome for the auction. I am, of course, a longstanding fan of that movie. I will not, however, ever find myself the proud owner of a faux space suit associated with it.

September 13, 1975

Posted on by

A curiosity in my personal chronology: I remember what I was doing from 10 pm to 11 pm Central on Saturday, September 13, 1975. I was 14 and the start of high school was just a few weeks behind me, but that wasn’t so important that evening. During that hour, I was parked in front of our living room television, a black-and-white set because my mother didn’t convert to color until it was impossible to buy black-and-white. That didn’t bother me a bit.

Because the Internet never ceases to amaze, it took me only a few seconds to find the local TV schedule for San Antonio that day, to confirm what I already knew: the 10 pm slot on Channel 12, which was the ABC affiliate, was given over the Space: 1999. Not just any episode of that show – sold to U.S. markets in syndication, so not in prime time – but the first episode, “Breakaway.”

As the most expensive British television program up until that time, the show got quite a buildup, so it was no accident I tuned in. Martin Landau and Barbara Bain, as I recall, had plugged it on The Tonight Show not long before. (That too is online, at least as difficult-to-hear audio.)

So I watched that evening, and every week for a short time afterward. The physics of the premise — the Moon blown out of orbit and traveling the stars — was like something out of the Irwin Allen playbook, but even so the show started with some promise. As time passed, however, its essential dopiness became all too clear.

I think of this when I recall that I saw the first episode of Saturday Night Live on October 11, 1975. Or rather, the last two-thirds of it, switching channels after Space: 1999 was over at 11 Central. My reaction was, What is this? Then I think I remembered that a live comedy show had been slotted for that time, as it had been promoted as well. Within a few weeks, I didn’t bother with Space: 1999 any more, and took up SNL, as many of my peers did.

Despite its failure as science fiction, Space: 1999 did have one thing going for it, something I occasionally still enjoy. Namely, the kick-ass introduction.

Visually, it teases with quick-cuts of the episode ahead, as well as reminders of how the hapless residents of Moonbase Alpha got into their situation, and a sequence that fixed the fictional events of September 13, 1999 in one’s mind (and, lots of crashing space ships!). Aurally, there’s a rousing blend of orchestral passages, jazz and a funky electric guitar by British composer Barry Gray (d. 1984) that had early ’70s all over it.

The Demise of Cousin Oscar

Posted on by

Unlike Wednesday morning’s thunder but no rain, Thursday morning provided rain but no thunder. At least, none that I was awake for. Not a lot of rain, but enough to kick off a cool cloudy day.

Not long ago I watched an episode of All in the Family on a whim, as the series is available on one of the streaming services I pay for. I was curious to take a look at the program, so famed in its time, with my older eyes – older now than any of the characters.

I didn’t watch it every week back in its heyday, except maybe during the fall of ’73, when CBS had its remarkable Saturday line up: All in the Family, MASH, Mary Tyler Moore, Bob Newhart and Carol Burnett.

As I was 12 that year, Saturdays weren’t yet for social occasions; that would come later, sometimes causing me to forego television I would have enjoyed, such as a number of episodes of the original-cast SNL. It was years before I saw the Killer Christmas Tree sketch, for instance.

The All in the Family episode I watched recently, “The Saga of Cousin Oscar,” originally aired on September 18, 1971, as the first episode of the second season. Even though the show had found its footing by then – All in the Family became No. 1 that season, probably as a result of word-of-mouth that summer — I’m fairly certain I’d never seen “Cousin Oscar” before. As a 10-year-old, I wasn’t paying attention to that kind of word-of-mouth.

As a start for a season, the episode was a good one. It was actually funny at times. The main reason, I believe, is that there was very little in the way of discussions, or arguments, about the issues of the day, except maybe a comment by Mike complaining about the funeral industry. That’s often the case with comedy, and especially this show: the lower the level of tendentiousness, the funnier it is.

The titular character Oscar, a ne’er-do-well cousin of Archie’s, was described in the first act, but not seen, as he was reportedly sleeping late upstairs. Why he had no other place to go at that moment wasn’t entirely clear, but it was clear that Archie considered him a moocher and planned to kick him out. Commercial break.

I was entirely sure I knew what would happen next. I’ve seen enough sitcoms in my life.

Sure enough, like the luckless guest in “The Kipper and the Corpse,” Oscar checked out sometime that morning. Now the Bunkers had to deal with that, including a series of long-distance calls to other relatives, trying the raise money for Oscar’s funeral, which Archie doesn’t want to pay for. I’m not giving much away when I note that in the end, he’s stuck with the bill, though it’s played as him reluctantly doing the right thing.

A lot of sitcoms could have done that story. I could imagine a cousin of Fred Sanford’s doing the same. Plautus could have done the story too. Maybe he did, and the scroll waiting to be discovered at some buried site in the Near East.

Some observations.

Archie was incredibly bossy, which I suppose fits, but more remarkably everyone else goes along with it, including Mike.

One forgets what an involved process long-distance calls used to be.

Edith, of course, had more sense than Archie, and more empathy too, a pattern that persisted throughout the series. Plautus could have done that as well.

No one even mentioned the possibility of cremating Oscar, a cheaper option. I know it wasn’t as common then, but it did happen. Or, for that matter, having Oscar buried in a potter’s field at county expense (Mike’s suggestion) and then holding an inexpensive memorial service. It was either all or nothing when it came to a funeral.

This was before residential sets were often depicted as more expensive than the characters could afford (viz., Friends). I marveled that there was supposed to be enough room upstairs for Oscar to have his own bed to die in.

In terms of sets, the show had a remarkable economy: the living room and the kitchen. I can only remember a handful of times the upstairs was seen, including one memorable moment when Archie got on Mike’s case – nonpolitically, mostly demented – about the right way to put on socks and shoes.

The show could have used more material like that.