Uncle John’s Giant 10th Anniversary Bathroom Reader (28 page)

          
Unfortunately, not only did Fox not want me to work for any other studio, but they refused to let me star in Larry’s film. I was told that “Batman” was such an important series to Fox that they didn’t want any dilution of Robin’s character by having the same actor portray a movie role whose character wasn’t the Boy Wonder.

          
At the time, I was sad and disappointed. When the movie was released and made a superstar out of the actor who replaced me—[Dustin Hoffman]—I wanted to jump off a building without my Batrope.

“Batman” went off the air about a year after
The Graduate
was filmed. Dustin Hoffman became one of America’s best-known actors; Ward quickly faded from sight. “Over the course of the last 20 years,” he writes, “I have run into Larry three times. Each time he said the same thing: ‘Burt, I wanted you for that role.’ I WANTED THAT ROLE! Pardon me while I scream.”

TOM SELLECK

Could Have Starred In:
Raiders of the Lost Ark
(1981)

Background:
After years of bouncing around Hollywood, Selleck got his break as a guest on “The Rockford Files” in the 1979-80 TV season. He was brought back for several episodes “by popular demand.” But as the season ended, “Rockford” star James Garner quit. That left CBS with a hole in its schedule where a successful detective program had been…and a distaste for unmanageable “big stars.” The network also had an empty studio in Hawaii, since the long-running “Hawaii Five-O” had just ended. CBS’s solution was “Magnum, P.I.”—a detective show based in Hawaii, starring new-comer Tom Selleck. It was scheduled for the 1980-81 season.

Story:
As Cheryl Moch and Vincent Virga describe it in their book
Deals:

      
Then the actor’s dream became the actor’s nightmare. [He was offered] two sensational jobs at once. Steven Spielberg and George Lucas cast him [as Indiana Jones] in
Raiders of the Lost Ark
. They wanted a new face. They asked CBS to postpone “Magnum”…
Ark
would most likely make Selleck a superstar, a big plus for any aspiring TV series. Selleck held his breath when he wasn’t praying.

          
CBS refused, fearful of losing the already announced “Magnum” idea to a competitor and worried about the demands superstars make. The two jobs conflicted and Selleck belonged to CBS. He packed for Hawaii. As it happened, an actor’s strike delayed [the ‘Magnum’] production for three months.
Raiders
, shooting abroad, was exempt. “I could have gone to Europe and Africa,” Selleck said with a sigh, “done
Raiders,
then come back to Hawaii to do ‘Magnum.’

“Magnum” ran for eight years and made Selleck famous, but he never really made it as a movie star.
Raiders of the Lost Ark
, starring Harrison Ford, became one of the top-grossing films of all time and helped establish Ford as the biggest box-office attraction in history.

* * *

RANDOM INFO: FIVE FOOD FLOPS

1. Cold Snap.
An imitation ice cream mix introduced by Proctor & Gamble in the 1960s. “It had the taste of cold Criso, took hours to prepare, and had directions similar to a model airplane.”

2. Prest-O-Wine.
Like alcoholic Kool-Aid. Just add sugar and water to a purple powder (secret ingredient: yeast), and wait a month.

3. Square Eggs.
Introduced in 1989, a French company called Ov’Action, Inc. “Fully cooked, reconstituted egg cubes,” 2/3” square. Had a 21-day shelf life and could be microwaved.

4. Spudka.
A vodka-like beverage from Idaho potato-growers.

5. Whisp Spray Vermouth.
“Good news for martini-drinkers”—vermouth in an aerosol spray container. Also recommended as a seasoning “for fresh fruit, meat, and seafood!”

More of the annual Top 10 TV shows of the past 50 years.

1961-1962

(1) Wagon Train

(2) Bonanza

(3) Gunsmoke

(4) Hazel

(5) Perry Mason

(6) The Red Skelton Show

(7) The Andy Griffith Show

(8) The Danny Thomas Show

(9) Dr. Kildare

(10) Candid Camera

1962-1963

(1) The Beverly Hillbillies

(2) Candid Camera

(3) The Red Skelton Show

(4) Bonanza

(5) The Lucy Show

(6) The Andy Griffith Show

(7) Ben Casey

(8) The Danny Thomas Show

(9) The Dick Van Dyke Show

(10) Gunsmoke

1963-1964

(1) The Beverly Hillbillies

(2) Bonanza

(3) The Dick Van Dyke Show

(4) Petticoat Junction

(5) The Andy Griffith Show

(6) The Lucy Show

(7) Candid Camera

(8) The Ed Sullivan Show

(9) The Danny Thomas Show

(10) My Favorite Martian

1964-1965

(1) Bonanza

(2) Bewitched

(3) Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C.

(4) The Andy Griffith Show

(5) The Fugitive

(6) The Red Skelton Hour

(7) The Dick Van Dyke Show

(8) The Lucy Show

(9) Peyton Place (II)

(10) Combat

1965-1966

(1) Bonanza

(2) Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C.

(3) The Lucy Show

(4) The Red Skelton Hour

(5) Batman (II)

(6) The Andy Griffith Show

(7) Bewitched

(8) The Beverly Hillbillies

(9) Hogan’s Heroes

(10) Batman (I)

1966-1967

(1) Bonanza

(2) The Red Skelton Hour

(3) The Andy Griffith Show

(4) The Lucy Show

(5) The Jackie Gleason Show

(6) Green Acres

(7) Daktari

(8) Bewitched

(9) The Beverly Hillbillies

(10) Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C.

A few pearls of wisdom from
599 Things You Should Never Do,
edited by Ed Morrow.

“Never argue with an idiot—folks might not be able to tell the difference.”

—Anonymous

“Never believe anything until it’s been officially denied.”

—Antony Jay

“Never sell the sheep’s hide when you can sell the wool.”

—German adage

“Never say ‘that was before your time,’ because the last full moon was before their time.”

—Bill Cosby

(on talking to children)

“Never cut what you can untie.”

—Joseph Joubert

“Never slap a man who chews tobacco.”

—Willard Scott

“Never be flippantly rude to elderly strangers in foreign hotels. They always turn out to be the King of Sweden.”

—Hector Hugh Munro

“Never whisper to the deaf or wink at the blind.”

—Slovenian adage

“Never test the depth of a river with both feet.”

—African adage

“Never fight an inanimate object.”

—P. J.
O’Rourke

“ Never think you’ve seen the last of anything.”

—Eudora Welty

“Never eat anything whose listed ingredients cover more than a third of the package.”

—Joseph Leonard

“Never play leapfrog with a unicorn.”

—American adage

“Never try to outsmart a woman, unless you are another woman.”

—William Lyon Phelps

“Never judge a book by its movie.”

—J. W. Eagan

There are bad movies…and then there are BAD movies. Years ago the Medved brothers reintroduced stinkers like
Plan 9 From Outer Space
to the public in their groundbreaking books,
The 50 Worst Films of All Time
and
The Golden Turkey Awards.
Then “Mystery Science Theater 3000” gave us a chance to watch the best of the worst on
TV.
Today there are millions of bad movie buffs…and Uncle John is one of them. Here’s one of his favorite stinkers.

T
HE GIANT CLAW
(1957)

Director:
Fred F. Sears

Starring:
Jeff Morrow, Mara Corday, Morris Ankrum, Robert Shayne, Louis Merrill, Edgar Barrier, Clark Howat, Ruell Shayne

The Plot:
Mitch (Jeff Morrow), an electrical engineer, is testing aircraft for the military (huh?) when he spots a UFO that doesn’t seem to show up on radar. Then, coincidentally, he and his girlfriend Sally are in a plane that’s captured by the same UFO—which turns out to be a giant puppet…er, bird. The plane crash-lands, but Mitch and Sally are saved by a French-Canadian named Pierre—coincidentally, the guy on whose land the giant bird is nesting. See, that’s the secret—the giant puppet…er, bird, protected by an anti-matter shield, has flown all the way from another galaxy to lay an egg on Earth. Luckily, Mitch and Sally figure it out in time, find the nest, and come up with the only weapon that can defeat the Giant Puppet…er, Claw—a “mu-meson” projector. As Air Force General Buzzkirk looks on, they blow up the bird and save the Earth.

Commentary:

•
From
Badmovies.org
:
“One of the great B-movies of all time I must say, this film made quite an impression. Any movie bold enough to feature a GIGANTIC ANTIMATTER SPACE BUZZARD (Hehehehehe!) is awesome!…To top it all off the winged terror is really absurd looking. Forget the premise, forget the execution—who the heck came up with that puppet? A terrific B-movie, it makes me giggle constantly.”

•
From
Creature Features:
“Inane, incredulous, incompetent—one of the truly laughable sci-fi turkeys of the ’50s and a classic low-water mark for schlockmeister producer Sam Katzman…the titular talon is attached to a giant bird from space, which resembles a stuffed Thanksgiving turkey and is obviously pulled by wires…The asinine avian avenger, with long neck, bulging eyeballs and a plucked look, will have you rolling in the aisles.”

•
From
And You Call Yourself a Scientist!:
“For the most part,
The Giant Claw
is a run-of-the-mill little film, indistinguishable from most of its low-budget contemporaries. It has all the usual features: the Earth threatened with destruction, an initially antagonistic couple who fall in love, a fair mix of scientists and the military, pages of pseudo-scientific gobbledygook posing as dialogue, stock footage and stock music….For the first twenty-five minutes, a casual viewer might [suspect] that [it’s] is nothing more than a time-waster…. But then we hit the twenty-sixth minute, and…we realize
The Giant Claw
has something that lifts it…into the rarefied atmosphere of the truly, unforgettably awful: its monster, without exception the silliest monster in all fifties science-fiction, and a sure finalist in any all-time-silliest list.”

•
From
Jabootu’s Bad Movie Dimension
(Ken Begg)
: “The
Giant Claw
has the distinction of featuring perhaps the silliest looking monster of any 1950s Sci-Fi flick. Genre vets Jeff Morrow and Mara Corday had no idea what they were in for when they signed on for this cheapie.” That’s literally true. Years later, Morrow confessed to a critic:

      
We poor, benighted actors had our own idea of what the giant bird would look like—our concept was that this was something that resembled a streamlined hawk, possibly half a mile long, flying at such speeds that we could barely see it. That was the way we envisioned it. Well, the producer, Sam Katzman, decided for economic reasons not to spend the $10-$ 15,000 it would take to make a really good bird—he had it made in Mexico, probably for $19.98! [My family and I] went to a sneak preview in Westwood Village, and when the monster appeared on the screen it was like a huge plucked turkey, flying with these incredible squawks! And the audience went into hysterics.