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In 1957, Ed Sullivan's Sunday night show on CBS was one of the biggest hits on television…a fact which amazed many who felt that Mr. Sullivan was the least-talented man in show business. Someone at NBC had the idea they might be able to counter Sullivan with the most talented guy they had in their stable — Steve Allen. At the time, Allen was the host ofTonight, the late night series later known asThe Tonight Show.

Tonight was then an hour-and-forty-five minutes every night, five nights a week, so Mr. Allen was already working pretty hard. As of June 24, 1956, he was doing both shows — five late night shows each week and an hour variety program Sunday nights opposite Sullivan. Steve's Sunday show did pretty well but it failed in its primary assignment, which was to knock Ed off the air. Ed continued to get (usually) higher ratings.

Steve, working as hard as he did, was starting to get weary and someone decided that he needed to devote more time to the Sunday show. So as of October 1, Steve began doingTonight only three nights week. Ernie Kovacs began hosting it on Monday and Tuesday nights.

The change did not help boost the ratings of the Sunday night show so it was eventually decided that Steve would give up the late night show completely and focus wholly on Sunday nights. Kovacs was reportedly offered full-time hosting ofTonight but he declined it. So what were they going to put on there?  Well, someone at NBC had an idea for a new kind of show to go into that time slot so in late January of '57, Steve Allen and Ernie Kovacs did their last episodes ofTonight. On 1/28/57, a series calledTonight – America After Dark debuted.

Anchored at first by announcer/broadcaster Jack Lescoulie,Tonight – America After Dark was, it is said, a bit of a mess. It consisted a lot of short segments where different newspaper columnists or other personalities would interview different stars or newsmakers. Viewers tuned out quickly and local NBC affiliates stopped carrying it…and on July 29, it was replaced by Jack Paar hostingTonight in a format more like what Allen and Kovacs had done.

Steve Allen now was doing only the Sunday night show and it was a pretty good one. Still, it never quite sent Ed Sullivan off to the unemployment office.  Then in September of '57, ABC programmed a new western calledMaverick starring James Garner against Ed and Steve.  It began to sometimes win the time slot over both of them.

Maverick lasted five seasons. Steve Allen's show moved to Monday nights in 1959, conceding the time slot to Ed who lasted there — amazingly — until March of 1971.

Years later, Steve was asked what guests on his show had attracted the most viewers to switch over from watching Ed Sullivan. He mentioned Elvis Presley, Tony Bennett, Pearl Bailey and many other stars…and said that, curiously, they got enormous tune-in when he featured The Three Stooges. Here are three sketches that the Stooges did on Steve's show. They are gloriously, wonderfully stupid and despite what die-hard Stooge lovers may think, Joe DeRita is better in them than Moe or Larry…

John Oliver returns to the air tomorrow night. Given all that's gone down during his hiatus, he and his staff have probably had great trouble deciding what to talk about.

I love him on his show and I love when he makes the rounds of other shows to plug his return. Here from a week or two ago is a segment of him on with Stephen Colbert and you can't help but enjoy the affection and respect these two men have for each other. Pay careful attention to what they have to say about the difference between improv comedy and stand-up comedy. This is very true…

Of all the rotten, damaging things the Trump Administration has done, the most terrible may turn out to be the decision to dismantle the Environmental Protection Agency and to take the position that 97% of scientists are wrong and that we should be doing nothing about Climate Change. And it isn't even because of some possibly-credible counter-argument against it. It's because some people just don't want to believe it and Donald Trump — who won't be around if and when the impact of Global Warming gets really bad — thinks it'll help him keep more of a base that's slowly deserting him. Lovely.

That's my friend, the late Will Ryan. Will was an actor — on-camera and for cartoons — and a historian, a songwriter, a recording artist…even a singing cowboy. He loved comedy and laughing and funny cartoons and before he left us, he arranged for something called The Will Ryan Excellence In Humor Award. As is explained inthis article…

Funded by a $60,000 gift from Ryan's family, the grant reflects his long-stated desire to "pay it forward." According to the organization, applicants will be able to apply annually, with the program aimed at artists pursuing distinctive, laughter-driven projects.

And you can find out even more about the program and eventually apply over onthis site. But you'd better be funny.

I'm running way behind on things I need to get done today so I'm declaring this a Mushroom Soup Day. That probably doesn't mean anything to you but it makes me feel less guilty when I don't post much here on the blog for a while. I shall return when I get more things crossed-off on my "to do" list, not to be confused with any other important lists in the news these days.

I am not the worst dancer in the world but I'm probably in the bottom two. I mean, I'm really terrible. When I broke my ankle last year, the surgeon who fixed it said "In no time at all, you'll be up and dancing." I offered to bet him everything I owned that that would not happen.

Years ago, a lady I was dating who understood my total lack of dancing ability asked me, "If you could dance like anyone you've ever seen, who would you pick?" Many names occurred to me — and of course, anyone more agile than Swamp Thing would have been an improvement. But the name that came out of my mouth was Ray Bolger. She said, "You want to dance like the scarecrow inThe Wizard of Oz?" I said no, I wish I could dance like he did in the movie,April in Paris.

She wasn't familiar with the film. In case you aren't, here's Ray Bolger dancing — alone and with a couple of past presidents — inApril in Paris.  It's not a great movie and Bolger was miscast as Doris Day's love interest but boy, could that hoofer hoof…

I haven't seen the playYou're a Good Man, Charlie Brown since November of 1969 when I took a girl I knew to see it on a date. I remember enjoying the show tremendously and being the fan ofPeanuts that I am, I can't imagine not loving any production of it that wasn't at least semi-professional.

Here fromThe Ed Sullivan Show for November 17, 1968 is the cast from the then-current off-Broadway production for a six-minute excerpt. That's Bob Lydiard as Charlie Brown, Boni Enten as Lucy, Gene Kidwell as Linus, Jimmy Dodge as Schroeder, Karen Johnson as Patty and Don Potter as Snoopy…

The photo above is of a building that was enormously important to my life for several years…but I haven't set foot inside it in for over a half a century. Come to think of it, I'm just assuming it's still there. I haven't even driven past it in a couple of decades. There could well be a Whataburger at that address by now for all I know.

The address is 11360 Santa Monica Boulevard in West Los Angeles and having just done an online search, I see they have a website and an active Facebook account so I'll assume it's still up and running…or up and loaning, whatever the correct term is. That was our public library when my age was a single digit. My mother, father and I went there a lot because my parents loved books and it rubbed off on me. We were there a lot, returning what we'd checked out and checking out some more.

When you walked in the front door, there was a chiildrens section to the left and the non-childrens section was to the right. At a pretty early age, I was issued a card to check out books from the left section and I did…lots of them. From the moment I started Kindergarten and on through elementary school, I was constantly being tested because my reading and writing skills were markedly above those of other kids my age. When I was six, they said I was reading and writing at the level of a ten-year-old…and let's just skip the part where the smartasses out there e-mail me to say, "I've read your blog and you still do, Evanier!"

The Powers That Were in the L.A. School System started skipping me in grades because of my reading 'n' writing, which was not wholly a good thing. It meant, for instance, that I was usually the youngest, least-physically-developed kid in my class. I had trouble making friends. I had trouble because I'd missed certain grades where you learned certain things — like how to play certain games we played on the playground during recess. But I think I've written about this before here…and about the problems I had because I wasn't equally advanced in math or history or other subjects.

This is the first of a couple of articles about that library and how important it was to my life. We were there a lot and I managed to exhaust the selections in the childrens department. There came a day when I'd read every book there I wanted to read. That was not that hard to do because an awful lot of them were targeted at kids well below the age level at which I was reading. I began going over to the "adult" section, finding books I wanted to read and having my parents check them out for me on their cards.

The restriction didn't make a lot of sense to me. There was nothing stopping me from taking a book off the shelf in that section, sitting down at one of the tables in the reading area and reading it. But I couldn't check it out on my card and take it home and read it there. I know because I tried it once and the librarian who did the checking-out that day reacted in shock and upset. For a moment there, I felt like she was going to call the police station — it was about a block away — and have me thrown in a cell along with other hardened criminals.

My parents decided they had to do something. I'll tell you what they did in the next part of this series.

A couple of what were then "oldies" snuck into the mixtape I made in 1972. Remember, the tape was made by taping KHJ Radio and then splicing and clipping to save the songs I liked onto one reel and KHJ sometimes played older hits. This one is "The Night Has a Thousand Eyes" recorded by Bobby Vee in 1962. Bobby Vee had an awful lot of hits but I don't remember him being on TV as much as a lot of performers who had but one or two.

The rise of The Beatles explains a little of why a guy like Bobby Vee suddenly wasn't as "hot" an act as he might have been in the sixties. Then again, there were plenty of his kind of singer who were more visible. Anyway, even though it was a bit of an anachronism, I liked this song so I put it on my tape.

In 1978, I signed on to be Head Writer on a special/pilot for Sid and Marty Krofft that was to be called[Someone's] Rock 'n' Rollers. The premise was to do a variety show that would try to capture some of the energy and heat of the movie,Grease and the "Rock 'n' Rollers" part was decided before we knew who the Someone would be. CBS wanted a star who'd had a fair amount of hit records in or around the era thatGrease celebrated. For a brief time, we thought it might beFrankie Avalon's Rock 'n' Rollers and for a time, it looked like it might beBobby Rydell's Rock 'n' Rollers. At some point, I suggested we look into Bobby Vee and his name went on a list of singers to be discussed.

I also suggestedAlvin and the Chipmunks' Rock 'n' Rollers but no one took the suggestion seriously. I still think that would have been a good idea.

I was not involved with the final decision which was made when some of the Krofft execs met with The Network and it wound up beingBobby Vinton's Rock 'n' Rollers. Here's a promo for the finished show which did remarkably well in the ratings and which almost became a weekly series. The announcer, who was also the announcer on our show, was the great Dick Tufeld. His voice was all over TV for many years, including coming out of the robot onLost in Space.

It was some time after the show aired that I found out that Bobby Vee hadn't even been considered. This was apparently because when I suggested him, the person at the Krofft office making up the list wrote down "Bobby V." and later when Bobby Vinton's name went on the list, someone thought "Bobby V." was a duplication and crossed him off. So he was never discussed.

I don't know if it would have been a better show with Mr. Vee but I thought that was a funny reason for him not being considered. I'll bet that wasn't the only time someone got them confused.

Anyway, I went looking on YouTube for a video of Bobby Vee singing "The Night Has a Thousand Eyes" to post here and I found this. I'm not sure what it was made for…some TV show or something. They didn't make music videos as we know them back then. Nothing about the song suggests good-looking young people on a beach in swimwear but I guess that didn't bother whoever decided to have them in this…

I mentioned here the other day Donald Trump's policy of never admitting when he's wrong…and he's wrong a lot. A slight variation on that is his constant denials of losing when he loses.Jeffrey Sonnenfeld and Steven Tian list just a few examples of that.

The latest Randy Rainbow video…sponsored by Ground News, to which I have subscribed and which I like. In these times of video Deep Fakes and leaders who've decided they can outright lie and get away with it, we all need a couple of cautiously-trusted sources of news. Ground News is one of mine and no, I'm not monetizing my site to tell you that…

Two of the funniest men who ever lived…

Sorry I've been too busy today to post more but I'll make it up to you. Here's Jon…

Years ago, the great voice actor Frank Welker gave me a video of him doing celebrity impressions for celebrities — imitating William F. Buckley in front of William F. Buckley, imitating Mort Sahl in front of Mort Sahl, imitating George Burns for George Burns, etc. To do this, you have to be real good and real gutsy.

Here's voice actor Brian Hull wandering around Disneyland doing Disney voices for the characters he'd imitating. This is a bit different and I suspect the folks in the costumes didn't know what to make of him. It's too bad we couldn't see their faces…

By the way: Brian will be one of the panelists on the Cartoon Voices panel I'm doing atWonderCon Anaheim on Saturday, the second day of the con. As you can see, he's really an amazing talent.

Folks are still rankled about Donald Trump posting a video that depicts the Obamas as monkeys. Actually, I'm not sure if the current story is that someone else (unidentified, of course) posted it on his account without his knowledge or if he posted it deliberately and knew he was doing so and will not apologize for it because he was right to do so.

I'm also not sure which of these two stories is the worst. There's probably a movie in the premise that some underling had the power to post messages to the web in the President's name and accidentally posted one that triggered World War III.

I'm inclined to think Trump did it and that he admitted it because someone realized that no one was buying the other story. And one of the many unappealing things about this man is his policy of never apologizing for anything and never admitting mistakes. If Trump accidentally said 2+2 equals 11, he'd defend it to the death and call the reporters who challenged him on it fat and ugly losers.

So here's what I'm wondering about…

When someone posts or says a racist remark and there's the expected blowback, there's another aspect to it besides the racism. There's the question of stupidity. Did this person not know what the reaction would be? Or did they know and think it was a good idea? Was Donald Trump dumb enough to not know it might cost him support at a time when he's bleeding it from multiple lacerations? Or did he think this would bolster his support among racists by reminding them that he's one of them?

As with the above question, I'm not sure which one is worse.