Current mood:	nostalgic
Current music:	The Monkees

When the Bozos weren’t all on newscasts …
The news last week of the death at age 83 of Larry Harmon, the man who made Bozo the Clown a “local” television phenomenon across the country in the 1960s, got me to thinking how local children’s programming has all but disappeared. It seems only in the fictional Springfield, where animated Bart and Lisa Simpson are loyal followers of a brutal Bozo parody named Krusty the Klown, does television still target the younger set with such localized kiddie characters.

Back when I was a kid, not only did every TV market have such shows, but just about every station had its own kiddie host. Many featured their own Bozos since Harmon, who bought the character from its originator, syndicated the rights to TV stations around the country who then hired someone locally to put on the trademarked orange fringe of hair, bulbous red nose and red-white-and-blue clown suit. Some stations came up with their own Bozo knockoffs, and there were many other variations, including friendly policemen or firemen, cowboys, forest rangers, ship captains and so on.

I grew up in the greater Atlanta TV market, where kiddie TV was ruled by a jovial faux cop known as “Officer Don” (reportedly inspired by an “Officer Joe” in New York City), who at his peak filled 90 minutes every weekday afternoon on WSB/Channel 2, the most-watched station, with pie-in-the-face slapstick comedy, games and cartoons on the “Popeye Club.” Officer Don, a sort of wacky overgrown kid himself who in later years had a phenomenally popular wisecracking dragon puppet sidekick named Orville, was a booth announcer and news update reader named Don Kennedy who had been drafted unwillingly into the role but then proceeded to become the nation’s highest-rated local children’s host. Soon there was a long waiting list for tickets to be part of the in-studio “gang” that got to count down the cartoons (5,4,3,2 …) and play games like Ooey Gooey (a variation on Russian Roulette with the loser sticking his hand into a bag filled with raw eggs, chocolate syrup and the like).

For a brief b&w glimpse of Officer Don leading a cartoon countdown, go to:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77TYGwMVWEk

Kennedy started taking the format on the road on weekends, appearing before SRO crowds at movie theaters and shopping centers all over the northern half of the state (where Channel 2 could be seen). Sometimes he’d have to do two shows, and one time in my hometown even that wasn’t enough, with a couple of thousand kids showing up, some of whom didn’t get in. I’ll never forget one of the times Officer Don appeared at the Palace Theatre and I got picked by him to go up onstage and play musical chairs.

Kennedy ended up doing so well that he and a couple of partners bought a radio station on the side and eventually he launched a statewide radio news network and owned a UHF TV station. He’s still around as host of the nationally syndicated “Big Band Jump” radio program and has done voices and bit parts for Atlanta-based Cartoon Network’s “Space Ghost Coast to Coast” and “Aqua Teen Hunger Force.” Oh, and many years after the “Popeye Club,” Atlanta TV alums Terry and Bonnie Turner paid tribute to Kennedy by naming Wayne Knight’s character “Officer Don Orville” on their NBC sitcom “Third Rock From the Sun.”

Every other station in town in the 1950s and ’60s had its own kid show host, such as “Skipper Ray” (supposedly a yacht captain; he showed Three Stooges shorts), “Mr. Pix” (he wore a candy-cane jacket and drew funny pictures; years later when he was a newscaster for the local NBC affiliate and then Headline News, I still thought of him as “Mr. Pix”), “Tubby and Lester” (a blatant Laurel and Hardy ripoff) and Bestoink Dooley (mainly known as the ghoulish but erudite tramp host of late-night Friday horror movies — another local TV staple in those days — but briefly on in the afternoons as well). But none of them came close to Officer Don in popularity.

When the clouds were just right, we also could pick up stations out of South Carolina and North Carolina that had their own kiddie shows, including “Mr. Bill and Bozo” out of Asheville. And when we got community antenna TV (as cable was originally called) in the mid-’60s, my younger brothers could see those distant shows on a regular basis, along with Trooper Terry, a sort of redneck version of Officer Don, on an Augusta station.

Compared with the inspired silliness of Officer Don, however, they all came up lacking. Yes, even Bozo.

As an adult, I got to meet Kennedy quite a few times when I was doing stories for the paper or guesting on a music news show on his TV station. The first time I ever interviewed him, I told him I’d grown up watching him and he said he got that all the time. I asked him if he minded hearing that from grown-up fans. “Only when I’m in a bar trying to pick up some chick and a guy comes up and calls me ‘Officer Don’,” he cracked between puffs on a cigar.

By the mid-1970s, local kiddie hosts were pretty much out of fashion, with syndicated animated offerings increasingly taking their place. (Kennedy kept Officer Don going into the late ’70s on his UHF station, but it was no longer a big deal among Atlanta kids.) Of course, the fact that stations weren’t really bothering to do much local programming aside from news any more had something to do with it, too. No more “house party” midday shows or local talk shows, no more “Dialing for Dollars” movies, no more “Big Movie Shockers.”

Eventually, with various cable channels splintering the kid audience and more syndicated talk shows available for local stations desiring to build the adult audience for their early evening newscasts, afternoon became too valuable for local stations to devote it to children’s programming. So even the syndicated Disney Afternoon and Fox Kids lineups that my son grew up with went away, and children’s programming left the local airwaves.

The profits may be bigger nowadays without the likes of Officer Don and Bozo, but local television definitely is the poorer for the passing of that era.

And here’s one more example of how much things have changed. My daughter, spotting a newspaper photo of Bozo last week, shuddered a bit and said, “Clowns creep me out.” Turns out the the girls had been sharing evil clown tales during ghost-story time at summer camp. Thanks a lot, Stephen King!

AT THE MOVIES: I managed to see two new films over the holiday weekend. First, Leslie and I caught “Wanted,” the action flick about a secret cult of assassins starring James McAvoy, Angelina Jolie and Morgan Freeman. The film’s comic book origins are betrayed by its hyper-reality, with laws of physics defied by more than just marksmen able to bend bullets around obstacles to hit their targets. And all those slo-mo shots used by Russian director Timbor Bekmambetov owe a large debt to “The Matrix.” But it’s fast, furious fun that only occasionally gets too ridiculous (the “loom of fate” weaving out the assassin’s next target). McAvoy, who I’d previously seen in more sensitive roles in the first “Narnia” film, “Atonement” and “The Last King of Scotland,” makes a surprisingly credible action hero. And Jolie is ultra cool and, of course, looks terrific. It’s mindless mayhem with a body count too large to keep track of, but we enjoyed it. Also enjoyable, in a much different way, was “Kit Kittredge: An American Girl,” the film based on the series of historical dolls, which I saw with my daughter, whose first American Girl doll was the Kit character. Thanks to a top-notch cast that includes Oscar-nominee Abigail Breslin in the title role and the likes of Julia Ormond, Jane Krakowski, Stanley Tucci and Wallace Shawn in supporting roles, plus a healthy injection of Great Depression economic suffering, it was a cut above your usual G-rated children’s film. The only false notes: the folks in the Hobo Jungle looked a bit too clean, and Joan Cusack’s wacky mobile librarian was little over the top. Still, if you have an American Girl fan in your family wanting to see this film, you don’t need to dread taking her.

QUICKIES: Cable’s USA channel has been running an amusing promo for the new season of its “Psych” series featuring a takeoff on the Paul McCartney-Stevie Wonder “Ebony and Ivory” video that shows a lot of attention to detail. You can see it here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZvM3RHLyzOo

I don’t know why the great “Lou Grant” series still hasn’t shown up on DVD, but you can now watch some first-season episodes of the Ed Asner newspaper drama here:

http://www.fancast.com/tv/Lou-Grant/90535/watch-it/on-fancast

Out this week are a couple of 30th anniversary editions of Billy Joel’s “The Stranger” album. The limited-edition deluxe set includes the original album remastered by producer Phil Ramone; a CD of a previously unreleased concert, “Live at Carnegie Hall 1977”; a DVD that features a couple of live promotional videos plus Joel’s 60-minute 1978 performance on the BBC’s “Old Grey Whistle Test”; and a 48-page booklet. The cheaper Legacy Edition has the remastered album, the Carnegie Hall disc and a 24-page booklet. It’s a classic album well deserving of such treatment. … Andy Griffith, whose wonderful supporting turn in “Waitress” is currently on the cable/satellite movie channels, appears in the new music video for country star Brad Paisley’s “Waitin’ on a Woman.” Said Paisley of Griffith: “He has influenced my life more than most people that I grew up with. … I wrote Andy a letter telling him what he has meant to me over the years and asked him to be in the video.” The 82-year-old Griffith agreed and “really adopted the music video as if it was his own.” You can watch it here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvKgnkIN8C8

This could be hiliarious or painful: Sacha Baron Cohen of “Borat” fame and Will Ferrell will play Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson in a film being co-produced by Judd Apatow (“Knocked Up”). … Here’s a new wrinkle on battling concert ticket scalping. A friend of my son attended a Tom Waits show at Atlanta’s Fox Theatre this weekend for which ticket buyers were not offered the chance to print their own or have tickets mailed to them. Instead, you had to show up with your credit card at the theater, where they processed the charge and then admitted you straight to the theater with no chance to peddle the tickets elsewhere. Of course, such an arrangement could only work at smaller shows like that. Can you imagine how many hours it would take to process charges for an arena-size crowd?

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