Thank you for putting this video out there! I'm 67 and remember how much I loved the Jackie Gleason show as a little girl. It's great even just to hear the well-remembered incidental music again. Watching with older eyes, I more appreciate the talent and boisterous charm that Gleason had.
This is the first time seeing this from the American Scene Magazine days. Gleason did a magician bit in the 1950s on his variety show. Truly The Great One...
I am so pleased to introduce this to you. Yes, like so many television variety stars [like Johnny Carson, Milton Berle etc.] they held a love of magic first and then broadened into comedy and acting.
This is delightful. Thank you for posting it. Gleason's comic timing is superb. He sure gets a lot of laughs from a simple hat coil (2:15 - 3:43) ! Ian, do you think Gleason was familiar with Roy Benson's presentation of the long salt pour and was influenced by Benson? The blasé attitude of _"when will this nonsense be over?"_ , impatiently glancing at his watch ... all very similar to Benson's act.
I'd say yes. Gleason hung around with my comic friend Tommy Hanlon Jnr. a magician. They often got drunk together and once they went specially to a bar in Lexington Avenue and got tipsy watching Marilyn Monroe's dress blow up for the famous movie scene. Jackie knew the comics of importance around the traps and I am sure he knew Benson, though did Benson get some inspiration from Gleason who was established for many a day. The Long Pour Salt came out of Britain and was created in Ireland by Hugh Lambert the Leprechaun magician. It 'went straight into' Fred Kaps act and he won his first World Championship of Magic with it as part of his act. That competition became rebrand with the ugly acronym F.I.S.M [for god's sake]. The pouring of paper coils had been a specialised feature of Abbott's line since the 1930s. The bowls he used were Abbott's Spurting Bowls. He almost worked his way through the entire Abbott's catalogue. The waterfront, I believe I've covered it.
@@Bucklandian _"The Long Pour Salt came out of Britain and was created in Ireland by Hugh Lambert the Leprechaun magician"._ I would love to learn more about Hugh Lambert. This is the first I've heard of him (and in connection with the Long Salt Pour). I had read previously that Fred Kaps was influenced by Benson's presentation, but I have not heard of Hugh Lambert before now.
I checked my notes and it seems that Hubert Lambert was first to create a commercial version to be sold by Harry Stanley. Until then it was generally a trick for upper echelon pros. It looks to me that [gasp] Dai Vernon might have developed-up a pour in the 1930s. He used diamond dust and a dazzling light array. Even earlier, Louis Histed of Square Circle fame was in love with pouring sand from containers and ... he used " ... the sand is the usual table salt, col-oured with distemper to choice". Histed's Long Pour Sugar and Sand trick seems to have gone back further than Dai's diamond dust. Interestingly, without knowing any of this in the 1970s I used pouring glass glitter when I performed Histed's masterpiece on my spectacular TV series. It's a bit of a history this, and I am guessing Histed was keen, as we all are, on the never fail wonderment of pouring streamers from containers. I finally acquired the Hubert Lambert Long Pour of Harry Stanley's in the 1980s. I received a tin tray and a rubber syringe ball with a slot cut into it and and a glued-in nickelled thimble of the other side. I've never understood why the 'engineered' metal containers cost hundreds of dollars. @@david_t_nethery_animator
@@Bucklandian Watching this again almost a year later (I'm glad it's still up on YT!) I notice yet another example of Gleason's great showmanship at the 4:51 - 5:24 mark , seeing how much entertainment value Gleason gets from a "self-working" trick like "Botania" , which I've often seen done by magicians in the most perfunctory, boring way imaginable.
@@david_t_nethery_animator Oh yes David. We used to say that someone got a lot out of things. We often meant wonderful and adept trifles made simply great. I must say my wonderful performing life has been built that way. Gleason's tossing of the Abbott Super Botania dart is so confident and 'throw away' that it's clearly the mark of an ultimate professional. One of my favourites I've performed it thousands of times and the most beautifully designed Botanias of them all. Jackie even understood through which end to show the tube. I always shudder when I see 99% of magicians with everything around the wrong way. To think he'd only run through that apparatus and all the rest casually that afternoon. He knew how to hold things for clear and tumultuous effect. I've often been 'brought in' to show the great talk show hosts of history how to hold things in the most striking way without too much flourish and loss of visual. Most of them are fumble-fingered. And, with amateur magicians, 'handwashing' through their too decorative sleight of hand. More slight of hand.
Thanks for posting this. Was there more of this show ? Somehow I remember reading that Milbourne Christopher also performed. Or was that another occasion ?
You are right, Milbourne Christopher put the magic together for this show. The Abbott Magic Company in Colon, Michigan never did have such a massive order. Multiples of their classic apparatus originals in some cases, plus big illusions. The plant was working hard. Milbourne put together a couple of segments for himself and they are elsewhere on TH-cam. The sequences in this video of mine are the lost Jackie Gleason masterpieces. I am grateful that someone put them together. Heaven knows why Milbourne's acts were separated from the Gleason performances? I might one day splice them all in the correct order. I have already made this video more watchable because it came to me unbelievably washed out. We are fortunate to have digital ways to lift and restore projects like these. I'd say my 'cleaning, darkening, and sharpening' is the best version the world has. I stretched the repairs as far as I could with it collapsing into garish nothingness. If ever there was a project held together with sticky tape, you see it here.
Where are all Gleason's Florida shows? Will they ever be released to the public? What about the American Scene Magazine show? Why is this video so blurry? Looks as bad as a kinescope in terms of picture quality. Did Gleason preserve all of his TV shows?
It's all that we have with the Kinescope era. Essentially a film camera was set up and rolled in front of a TV screen during the live broadcast. Thus it became what is technically 'second generation' where any quality goes down. Most black and white TV cathode ray tubes in sets were iffy at best ... even in TV studio control rooms. Shooting film of bad quality is even worse quality. I even 'repaired ' the definition of this one by 'chumping up the blacks' to make them darker. The original looked like it was shot in a snow storm. We just have to be glad to get what we have. And boy was I pleased to get this lost gem. There are some of Gleason's shows from the Florida times floating around the Web. History has never been foremost in the minds of the salesmen who run TV networks. They usually 'taped-over' shows to get more value our of the expensive tapes. When I left one network my wonderfully fascinating shows with all of the name music acts ... Elton and such was simply taped-over with football. The only surviving bit is a few minutes of the most extraordinary special I hosted about The Beatles. An enthusiast 'out there' managed to record it onto 2 inch computer tape on a mainframe. When Networks are doing a programme on history they have to find the last few minutes of tapes with sport on them. Luckily, whatever boring game finished early and left the dregs of the good and rare stuff on the end.
@@Bucklandian As you probably know video tape goes back as far as 1958 so they did not always need to do kinescopes for recording a TV show. I just wanted to know if Gleason preserved his shows. He had the lost episodes from the 1950's that he released in the mid-1980's so did he own the American Scene Magazine shows and the Jackie Gleason shows he did from Florida? What is the point of keeping shows in the vault instead of releasing them? It is great that Gleason had the intelligence to NOT film the classic 39 episodes on kinescope but he also did not film the show on cameras either like Lucy did with her show. He used a different system. Can you explain that system and why more TV networks did not do what Gleason did?
@@Bucklandian Some of these American Scene Magazine shows are in original videotape form. Many of them were cut down to a half-hour and syndicated in 1979, including one 22 minute episode posted here on You Tube from Season 1 ( 1962 to 1963 ) with semi-regular Alice Ghostly as Agnes in the "Agnes & Arthur" sketches. Also a 1965 episode posted in its hour-long B & W videotape entirety features Phyllis Diller, doing a 10 minute stand-up set.
@@executivedecision6141 Yes, the edited versions with iffy quality ran at odd hours here in Australia on the Nine Network. For a short time, Gleason had a panel of comedians sitting at a long table cracking gags at each other. There was one performer who beat all of them with the most wonderful charm and almost chillingly clear intelligence ... Jayne Mansfield. Not just a bombshell.
Thank you for putting this video out there! I'm 67 and remember how much I loved the Jackie Gleason show as a little girl. It's great even just to hear the well-remembered incidental music again. Watching with older eyes, I more appreciate the talent and boisterous charm that Gleason had.
Imagine Mrs. G a television performer who was ... genuinely funny. Glad you enjoyed it, as I do.
This is the first time seeing this from the American Scene Magazine days. Gleason did a magician bit in the 1950s on his variety show. Truly The Great One...
I am so pleased to introduce this to you. Yes, like so many television variety stars [like Johnny Carson, Milton Berle etc.] they held a love of magic first and then broadened into comedy and acting.
I heard him tell that one of his characters
most likely himself was the one that wore
the Top hat. Did he say "Lonely Fool"?
Wonderful! Thank you!
It really does show how good things were in show business during those years. Enjoyment, you know.
This is delightful. Thank you for posting it. Gleason's comic timing is superb. He sure gets a lot of laughs from a simple hat coil (2:15 - 3:43) ! Ian, do you think Gleason was familiar with Roy Benson's presentation of the long salt pour and was influenced by Benson? The blasé attitude of _"when will this nonsense be over?"_ , impatiently glancing at his watch ... all very similar to Benson's act.
I'd say yes. Gleason hung around with my comic friend Tommy Hanlon Jnr. a magician. They often got drunk together and once they went specially to a bar in Lexington Avenue and got tipsy watching Marilyn Monroe's dress blow up for the famous movie scene. Jackie knew the comics of importance around the traps and I am sure he knew Benson, though did Benson get some inspiration from Gleason who was established for many a day. The Long Pour Salt came out of Britain and was created in Ireland by Hugh Lambert the Leprechaun magician. It 'went straight into' Fred Kaps act and he won his first World Championship of Magic with it as part of his act. That competition became rebrand with the ugly acronym F.I.S.M [for god's sake]. The pouring of paper coils had been a specialised feature of Abbott's line since the 1930s. The bowls he used were Abbott's Spurting Bowls. He almost worked his way through the entire Abbott's catalogue. The waterfront, I believe I've covered it.
@@Bucklandian _"The Long Pour Salt came out of Britain and was created in Ireland by Hugh Lambert the Leprechaun magician"._
I would love to learn more about Hugh Lambert. This is the first I've heard of him (and in connection with the Long Salt Pour). I had read previously that Fred Kaps was influenced by Benson's presentation, but I have not heard of Hugh Lambert before now.
I checked my notes and it seems that Hubert Lambert was first to create a commercial version to be sold by Harry Stanley. Until then it was generally a trick for upper echelon pros. It looks to me that [gasp] Dai Vernon might have developed-up a pour in the 1930s. He used diamond dust and a dazzling light array. Even earlier, Louis Histed of Square Circle fame was in love with pouring sand from containers and ... he used " ... the sand is the usual table salt, col-oured with distemper to choice". Histed's Long Pour Sugar and Sand trick seems to have gone back further than Dai's diamond dust. Interestingly, without knowing any of this in the 1970s I used pouring glass glitter when I performed Histed's masterpiece on my spectacular TV series. It's a bit of a history this, and I am guessing Histed was keen, as we all are, on the never fail wonderment of pouring streamers from containers. I finally acquired the Hubert Lambert Long Pour of Harry Stanley's in the 1980s. I received a tin tray and a rubber syringe ball with a slot cut into it and and a glued-in nickelled thimble of the other side. I've never understood why the 'engineered' metal containers cost hundreds of dollars.
@@david_t_nethery_animator
@@Bucklandian Watching this again almost a year later (I'm glad it's still up on YT!) I notice yet another example of Gleason's great showmanship at the 4:51 - 5:24 mark , seeing how much entertainment value Gleason gets from a "self-working" trick like "Botania" , which I've often seen done by magicians in the most perfunctory, boring way imaginable.
@@david_t_nethery_animator Oh yes David. We used to say that someone got a lot out of things. We often meant wonderful and adept trifles made simply great. I must say my wonderful performing life has been built that way. Gleason's tossing of the Abbott Super Botania dart is so confident and 'throw away' that it's clearly the mark of an ultimate professional. One of my favourites I've performed it thousands of times and the most beautifully designed Botanias of them all. Jackie even understood through which end to show the tube. I always shudder when I see 99% of magicians with everything around the wrong way. To think he'd only run through that apparatus and all the rest casually that afternoon. He knew how to hold things for clear and tumultuous effect. I've often been 'brought in' to show the great talk show hosts of history how to hold things in the most striking way without too much flourish and loss of visual. Most of them are fumble-fingered. And, with amateur magicians, 'handwashing' through their too decorative sleight of hand. More slight of hand.
Thanks for posting this. Was there more of this show ? Somehow I remember reading that Milbourne Christopher also performed. Or was that another occasion ?
You are right, Milbourne Christopher put the magic together for this show. The Abbott Magic Company in Colon, Michigan never did have such a massive order. Multiples of their classic apparatus originals in some cases, plus big illusions. The plant was working hard. Milbourne put together a couple of segments for himself and they are elsewhere on TH-cam. The sequences in this video of mine are the lost Jackie Gleason masterpieces. I am grateful that someone put them together. Heaven knows why Milbourne's acts were separated from the Gleason performances? I might one day splice them all in the correct order. I have already made this video more watchable because it came to me unbelievably washed out. We are fortunate to have digital ways to lift and restore projects like these. I'd say my 'cleaning, darkening, and sharpening' is the best version the world has. I stretched the repairs as far as I could with it collapsing into garish nothingness. If ever there was a project held together with sticky tape, you see it here.
Where are all Gleason's Florida shows?
Will they ever be released to the public?
What about the American Scene Magazine show?
Why is this video so blurry? Looks as bad as a kinescope in terms of picture quality.
Did Gleason preserve all of his TV shows?
It's all that we have with the Kinescope era. Essentially a film camera was set up and rolled in front of a TV screen during the live broadcast. Thus it became what is technically 'second generation' where any quality goes down. Most black and white TV cathode ray tubes in sets were iffy at best ... even in TV studio control rooms. Shooting film of bad quality is even worse quality. I even 'repaired ' the definition of this one by 'chumping up the blacks' to make them darker. The original looked like it was shot in a snow storm. We just have to be glad to get what we have. And boy was I pleased to get this lost gem. There are some of Gleason's shows from the Florida times floating around the Web. History has never been foremost in the minds of the salesmen who run TV networks. They usually 'taped-over' shows to get more value our of the expensive tapes. When I left one network my wonderfully fascinating shows with all of the name music acts ... Elton and such was simply taped-over with football. The only surviving bit is a few minutes of the most extraordinary special I hosted about The Beatles. An enthusiast 'out there' managed to record it onto 2 inch computer tape on a mainframe. When Networks are doing a programme on history they have to find the last few minutes of tapes with sport on them. Luckily, whatever boring game finished early and left the dregs of the good and rare stuff on the end.
@@Bucklandian
As you probably know video tape goes back as far as 1958 so they did not always need to do kinescopes for recording a TV show. I just wanted to know if Gleason preserved his shows. He had the lost episodes from the 1950's that he released in the mid-1980's so did he own the American Scene Magazine shows and the Jackie Gleason shows he did from Florida? What is the point of keeping shows in the vault instead of releasing them?
It is great that Gleason had the intelligence to NOT film the classic 39 episodes on kinescope but he also did not film the show on cameras either like Lucy did with her show. He used a different system. Can you explain that system and why more TV networks did not do what Gleason did?
@@Bucklandian Some of these American Scene Magazine shows are in original videotape form. Many of them were cut down to a half-hour and syndicated in 1979, including one 22 minute episode posted here on You Tube from Season 1 ( 1962 to 1963 ) with semi-regular Alice Ghostly as Agnes in the "Agnes & Arthur" sketches.
Also a 1965 episode posted in its hour-long B & W videotape entirety features Phyllis Diller, doing a 10 minute stand-up set.
@@executivedecision6141 Yes, the edited versions with iffy quality ran at odd hours here in Australia on the Nine Network. For a short time, Gleason had a panel of comedians sitting at a long table cracking gags at each other. There was one performer who beat all of them with the most wonderful charm and almost chillingly clear intelligence ... Jayne Mansfield. Not just a bombshell.
@@Bucklandian I vaugely remember the episode with Jayne Mansfield. It was a game-show sketch Jackie did.