[78-L] Soupy Sales: One of jazz's best friends is gone

[Royal Pemberton]

The UK children's show TISWAS had lots of 'pies', done with shaving cream
and all....paper plates were standard.  More goop here:
http://www.tiswasonline.com/pies_gunge_water.php?section=pies

78 related, in a left-handed way:  The show's hosts had a single out around
1980 called the 'Bucket of water song' that used a melody from Gilbert and
Sullivan.

On Mon, Oct 26, 2009 at 8:33 PM, Michael Biel <mbiel at mbiel.com> wrote:

> Soupy died on the eve of the Friends of Old Time Radio convention, and I
> opened my broadcast of the event with Soupy's obit.  He had made 3 or 4
> appearances there in recent years, and was well remembered this weekend
> by some of his WNEW-TV co-conspirators such as Chuck McCann.  Sandy
> Becker's widow Cherie showed some X-rated outtakes of her hubby from
> that same station.  Soupy had been very ill in recent years and suffered
> from an illness which left his body in the way that he looked and
> sounded like he had suffered a serious stroke, but his mind was
> completely undamaged so it must have been frustrating to him.  But he
> loved being at FOTR and every once in a while was able to put in a
> zinger to top his old-time buddies.   The video they showed to end the
> tribute was not the usual -- we've seen all those before -- but rather
> his Ed Sullivan Show performance of "Do the Mouse" where he pranced
> around Ed's audience and coincidentally danced with and met for the
> first time his future wife, who remained devoted to him.  That simple
> video, no jokes and no pies, was strangely moving to me, and it took
> about 15 seconds before I was able to talk after it, and I don't think I
> was fully fluent till several minutes after.   There is a picture of a
> tribute that has been placed at Soupy's star: a pie.
> http://www.newsfromme.com/images11/soupystar.jpg   The pie appears to be
> in a tin, something that Soupy did not allow.  His colleagues told us
> that his theory was that the person's face must be immediately visible
> as the pie hits and falls away, something that a tin will inhibit.  So a
> pie throwing hint: filling and crust only.
>
>
> Mike Biel  mbiel at mbiel.com
>
>
> From: David Lennick <dlennick at sympatico.ca>
> > I knew he was a jazz fan the time he referred to a coat he'd bought in
> Chicago
> as an Illinois Jacket.
>
> Some fun stuff here:
>
> http://www.tvparty.com/soupy.html
>
> You can start sending those little green pieces of paper to me instead.
>
> dl
>
> Cary Ginell wrote:
> > Like every other kid of the '60s, I watched Soupy Sales every day but
> didn't realize how much he loved jazz until I started writing my book on
> Terry Gibbs. Soupy would invite famous jazz musicians to appear as literal
> "walk-ons" on his show. Soupy might be doing a skit, when, without warning,
> Thelonious Monk would just saunter across the stage in back of him, minding
> his own business. Five minutes later, he'd walk back across the other way.
> Click on the Youtube link at the bottom of the article for a rare TV
> appearance by Clifford Brown on the '50s version of his show.
> >
> >
> >
> > Cary Ginell
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > October 23, 2009
> >
> > Soupy Sales, Slapstick Comedian, Dies at 83
> >
> >
> >
> > By RICHARD GOLDSTEIN
> >
> > Soupy Sales, whose zany television routines turned the smashing of a pie
> to the face into a madcap art form, died Thursday night. He was 83.
> >
> > Mr. Sales’s former manager, Dave Usher, said the entertainer died in a
> hospice in New York City after suffering from multiple health problems.
> >
> > Cavorting with his puppet sidekicks White Fang, Black Tooth, Pookie the
> Lion and Hobart and Reba, the heads in the pot-bellied stove, transforming
> himself into the private detective Philo Kvetch, and playing host to the
> ever-present “nut at the door,” Soupy Sales became a television favorite of
> youngsters and an anarchic comedy hero for teenagers and college students.
> >
> > Clad in a top hat, sweater and bow tie, shuffling through his Mouse
> dance, he reached his slapstick heyday in the mid-1960s on “The Soupy Sales
> Show,” a widely syndicated program based at WNEW-TV in New York.
> >
> > Some 20,000 pies were hurled at Soupy Sales or at visitors to his TV
> shows in the 1950s and ’60s, by his own count. The victims included Frank
> Sinatra, Tony Curtis and Jerry Lewis, all of whom turned up just for the
> honor of being creamed.
> >
> > His memoir “Soupy Sez!” (M. Evans, 2001), written with Charles Salzberg,
> supplied the precise ingredients for successful pie-throwing: “You can use
> whipped cream, egg whites or shaving cream, but shaving cream is much better
> because it doesn’t spoil. And no tin plates. The secret is you just can’t
> push it and shove it in somebody’s face. It has to be done with a pie that
> has a lot of crust so that it breaks up into a thousand pieces when it hits
> you.”
> >
> > But the key to his comedy went beyond the smashing of a pie.
> >
> > “Our shows were not actually written, but they were precisely thought
> out,” he explained in his memoir. “But the greatest thing about the show,
> and I think the reason for its success, was that it seemed undisciplined.
> The more you can make a performance seem spontaneous, the better an
> entertainer you are.”
> >
> > For all the staged mayhem, the truly unpredictable did occur. “I remember
> one time we were working with Pookie at the window,” Mr. Sales recalled. “He
> was doing a bit where he was breaking eggs and one of the eggs turned out to
> be rotten. My God, the smell was terrible! And I’m sure, watching us at
> home, everyone knew there was something wrong from the look on our faces.”
> >
> > Soupy Sales was born Milton Supman in Franklinton, N.C., where his
> parents, Irving and Sadie Supman, owned a dry goods store. His last name was
> pronounced “Soupman” by neighbors, so he called himself Soupy as a
> youngster.
> >
> > Drawing on the physical comedy of the Marx Brothers and Harry Ritz, he
> entered show business after graduating from Marshall College in Huntington,
> W.Va. Working as a teenage dance-show host and D. J. on television and
> radio, he appeared on stations in Cincinnati and Cleveland, then began
> “Lunch With Soupy” in 1953 on WXYZ-TV in Detroit. He took the name Soupy
> Sales in part from the old-time comic actor Chic Sale. After appearing on
> local TV in Los Angeles and on the ABC-TV network, he made his debut on WNEW
> in the fall of 1964.
> >
> > Then came an infamous moment. On New Year’s Day 1965, Soupy Sales asked
> youngsters to go through their parents’ clothing and send him little green
> pieces of paper with pictures of men with beards. He later reported
> receiving only a few dollar bills and said he donated them to charity, but
> Metromedia, the station’s owner, suspended him briefly after a viewer
> complained to the Federal Communications Commission that he was encouraging
> children to steal.
> >
> > That stunt only heightened Mr. Sales’s appeal to young people as a
> tweaker of authority, and when he headlined a rock ’n’ roll show at the New
> York Paramount the following Easter, perhaps 3,000 teenagers were snaking
> through Times Square hoping for seats at the morning performance. “He’s
> great, he’s a nut like us,” a 13-year-old boy told The New York Times.
> >
> > Mr. Sales was later a longtime panelist on TV’s “What’s My Line” and he
> was host for a variety talk show on WNBC Radio in the 1980s.
> >
> > Mr. Sales is survived by his wife, Trudy, and his two sons, Tony and
> Hunt.
> >
> > For all the shenanigans, one episode remained etched in the Soupy Sales
> pie-throwing hall of fame. “One of my younger fans made the mistake of
> heaving a frozen pie at me before it defrosted,” he once wrote in The New
> York Journal-American. “It caught me in the neck and I dropped like a pile
> of bricks.”
> >
> > Soupy was a big Jazz fan too:
> >
> > Clifford Brown On The Soupy Sales Show
> >
> http://video.google.com/videosearch?client=safari&rls=en&q=Clifford+Brown+%2B+Soupy+Sales&oe=UTF-8&um=1&ie=UTF-8&ei=-L3hSoTNLIigsgOdmrm5Aw&sa=X&oi=video_result_group&ct=title&resnum=1&ved=0CBUQqwQwAA#
> >
> >
> >
>
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