Sunday, February 12, 2012

The Honeymooners

Jackie Gleason's Honeymooners sketch on his early fifties variety series led to a regular sitcom that rightly became a classic. In the early sixties, Gleason revived his variety series and here, as evidenced by this 1966 LOOK cover, he revived The Honeymooners. This time every week featured a new roughly hour-long musical version done in color live on stage in Miami Beach Florida! Sheila Macrae replaced Audrey Meadows as Alice but Art Carney and Jackie reteamed as one of the all-time great comedy teams. As you might expect, the strain of writing and producing a mini-stage musical each week showed pretty quickly but seeing the combination of Gleason and Carney together again was much fun. This was one of my dad's favorite shows in '66! By the seventies, both men had made a successful leap to the big screen with Carney winning an Oscar for HARRY & TONTO.

1 comment:

  1. It wasn't every week....but the reason Gleason ended his show in 1970 is that CBS wanted him to do just that, and he didn't.

    Paul

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