Soupy Sales

Soupy Sales
Sales at the Big Apple Convention in NYC, June 8, 2008
Birth name	Milton Supman
Born	January 8, 1926(1926-01-08) Franklinton, North Carolina, United States
Died	October 22, 2009 (aged 83) The Bronx, New York, United States
Medium	Television, radio, film
Years active	1949–2009
Genres	Slapstick, word play, improvisation[1]
Influences	Marx Brothers[1] Harry Ritz[1]
Influenced	Saturday Night Live[2] Paul Reubens aka Pee-wee Herman[2] Andy Kaufman[3]
Spouse	Barbara Fox (m. 1950–1979) «start: (1950)–end+1: (1980)»"Marriage: Barbara Fox to Soupy Sales" Location: (linkback:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soupy_Sales) Trudy Carson (m. 1980–2009) «start: (1980)–end+1: (2010)»"Marriage: Trudy Carson to Soupy Sales" Location: (linkback:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soupy_Sales)
Notable works and roles	Lunch with Soupy Sales

Soupy Sales (January 8, 1926 – October 22, 2009)^[2] was an American comedian, actor, radio-TV personality and host, and jazz aficionado.^[4] He was best known for his local and network children's television show, Lunch with Soupy Sales; a series of comedy sketches frequently ending with Sales receiving a pie in the face, which became his trademark.

From 1968 to 1975, he was a regular panelist on the syndicated revival of What's My Line? and appeared on several other TV game shows. During the 1980s Sales hosted his own show on WNBC-AM in New York City.

Early life and career

Sales was born Milton Supman, in Franklinton in Franklin County, North Carolina to Irving and Sadie Supman.^[5] His father, a dry goods merchant, had emigrated to America from Hungary in 1894. Sales had two siblings, Leonard Supman (deceased) and Jack Supman (born 1921).^[6] His was the only Jewish family in the town; Sales joked the local Ku Klux Klan bought the sheets used for their costumes from his father.^[7]

Sales got his nickname from his family. His older brothers had been nicknamed "Hambone" and "Chicken Bone". Milton was dubbed "Soup Bone," which was later shortened to "Soupy". When he became a disc jockey, he began using the stage name Soupy Hines. After he became established, it was decided that "Hines" was too close to the Heinz soup company, so he chose the Sales, in part after comedian Chic Sale.^[1]

Sales graduated from Huntington High School in Huntington, West Virginia in 1944. He then enlisted in the United States Navy and served on the USS Randall (APA-224) in the South Pacific during the latter part of World War II. He sometimes entertained his shipmates by telling jokes and playing crazy characters over the ship's public address system. One of the characters he created was "White Fang," a large dog that played outrageous practical jokes on the seamen. The sounds for "White Fang" came from a recording of "The Hound of the Baskervilles". He took the record with him when he left the Navy.^{[citation needed]}

Sales enrolled in Marshall College, where he earned a Master's Degree in Journalism. While attending Marshall, he performed in nightclubs as a comedian, singer, and dancer. After graduating, he began working as a scriptwriter and disc jockey at radio station WHTN in Huntington. He moved to Cincinnati in 1949, where he worked as a morning radio DJ and performed in nightclubs. He began his television career on WKRC-TV with Soupy's Soda Shop, TV's first teen dance program, and Club Nothing!, a late-night comedy/variety program.^{[citation needed]}

When WKRC canceled his TV shows, Sales moved to Cleveland, Ohio, where he hosted another radio and TV series and continued his nightclub act. It was in a skit on his late night comedy/variety TV series Soupy's On! that he got his first pie in the face. Sales claimed he left the Cleveland station "for health reasons: they got sick of me."^{[citation needed]} He moved to Detroit in 1953 and worked for WXYZ-TV (Channel 7), ABC's O&O station.

Lunch with Soupy Sales

Sales is best known for his daily children's television show, Lunch with Soupy Sales. The show was originally called 12 O'Clock Comics, and was later known as The Soupy Sales Show. Improvised and slapstick in nature, Lunch with Soupy Sales was a rapid-fire stream of comedy sketches, gags, and puns, almost all of which resulted in Sales receiving a pie in the face, which became his trademark. Sales developed pie-throwing into an art form: straight to the face, on top of the head, a pie to both ears from behind, moving into a stationary pie, and countless other variations. He claimed that he and his visitors had been hit by more than 20,000 pies during his career.^[1] He recounted a time when a young fan mistakenly threw a frozen pie at his neck and he "dropped like a pile of bricks."^[1]

History of the show

Detroit

A hand puppet featuring a likeness of Sales.

The show originated in 1953 from the studios of WXYZ-TV in Detroit. Beginning in October 1959, it was telecast nationally on the ABC television network.

During the time that Lunch with Soupy aired in Detroit, Sales hosted a nighttime show, Soupy's On, to compete with 11 O'Clock News programs.^[8] The guest star was always a musician, and frequently a jazz performer, at a time when jazz was popular in Detroit and the city was home to twenty-four jazz clubs.^[8] Sales believed that his show helped sustain jazz in Detroit, as artists would regularly sell out their nightclub shows after appearing on Soupy's On.^[8] Coleman Hawkins, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker, and Stan Getz were among the artists who appeared on the show; Miles Davis made six appearances.^[4][8] Clifford Brown's appearance on Soupy's On, according to Sales, may be the only extant footage of Brown, and has been included in Ken Burns' Jazz and an A&E Network biography about Sales.^[8]

Los Angeles

In 1960, Sales moved to the ABC-TV Studios in Los Angeles, California. ABC dropped the show from the network schedule in March 1961, but it continued as a local program until January 1962. The show briefly went back on the ABC network as a late night fill-in for the Steve Allen Show in 1962 but was canceled after three months. All of the puppets on the show during its Los Angeles run were also operated by Clyde Adler.^{[citation needed]}

New York

In 1964, Sales found a new weekday home at WNEW-TV in New York City. This version was seen locally until September 1966, and 260 episodes were syndicated by Screen Gems to local stations outside the New York market during the 1965–1966 season. This show marked the height of Sales' popularity. It featured guest appearances by stars such as Frank Sinatra, Tony Curtis, Jerry Lewis^[1], Judy Garland^[9] and Sammy Davis, Jr.^[10], as well as musical groups like the Shangri-Las and The Supremes.

As with his earlier shows, Sales performed musical numbers on the show and his extensive jazz record collection was used in his TV work. "Mumbles" by Oscar Peterson with Clark Terry was Pookie's theme. "Comin' Home Baby" by Herbie Mann was the theme for Sales' "Gunninger the Mentalist" character (a parody of Dunninger the Mentalist). This was also the period when Sales starred in the movie comedy Birds Do It. During the run of the New York show, actor Frank Nastasi played White Fang, Black Tooth, Pookie, and all the "guy at the door" characters.^{[citation needed]}

The New Soupy Sales Show: Los Angeles

The New Soupy Sales Show appeared in 1978 with the same format, and ran for one season. 65 episodes were briefly syndicated, through Air Time International, to local stations in early 1979. It was taped in Los Angeles at KTLA, with Clyde Adler returning to work as a puppeteer with Sales.^{[citation needed]}

Characters on the show

Clyde Adler, a film editor at Detroit's WXYZ-TV, performed in sketches and voiced and operated all puppets on Sales' show in Detroit in the 1950s and in Los Angeles from 1959 to 1962 and in 1978. Actor Frank Nastasi assumed the role of straight man and puppeteer when Sales took the show to New York from 1964 to 1966. Nastasi was originally from Detroit and had worked with Sales at WXYZ. Appearing on the show were both puppets and live performers.

The puppets were:

• White Fang, "The Biggest and Meanest Dog in the USA," who appeared only as a giant white shaggy paw with black triangular felt "claws" jutting out from the corner of the screen. Fang spoke with unintelligible short grunts and growls, which Soupy repeated back in English, for comic effect. White Fang was often the pie thrower when Soupy's jokes bombed.
• Black Tooth, "The Biggest and Sweetest Dog in the USA", also seen only as a giant black paw with white triangular felt (just the opposite of White Fang), and with more feminine, but similarly unintelligible, dialogue. Black Tooth's trademark was pulling Soupy off-camera to give loud and noisy kisses.
• Pookie the Lion, a lion puppet appearing in a large window behind Soupy (1950s), was a hipster with a rapier wit. For example: Soupy: "Do you know why my life is so miserable?" Pookie: "You got me!" Soupy: "That's why!" One of Pookie's favorite lines when greeting Soupy was, "Hey bubby... want a kiss?". In the Detroit shows, Pookie never spoke but communicated in whistles. That puppet also was used to mouth the words while pantomiming novelty records on the show.
• Hippy the Hippo, a minor character who occasionally appeared with Pookie the Lion and never spoke. Frank Nastasi gave Hippy a voice for the New York shows.

Regular live characters included:

• Peaches, Soupy's girlfriend, visually played by footage of Sales in drag.
• Philo Kvetch, a private detective played by Sales in a long-running comedy skit during the show's New York run (a parody of early 20th century fictional detective Philo Vance).
• The Mask, evil nemesis of Philo Kvetch, revealed in the last episode to be Nikita Khrushchev, who had been deposed about a year earlier.
• "Onions" Oregano, henchman of The Mask, played by Frank Nastasi, who ate loads of onions. Every time Oregano would breathe in Philo's direction, Philo would make all sorts of comic choking faces, pull out a can of air freshener, and say "Get those onions out of here!"
• Hobart and Reba, a husband and wife who lived in the potbelly stove on the New York set.
• Willie the Worm was a 35-cent toy Sales got from Woolworth's, according to WXYZ art director Jack Flechsig. With animated squeezings of his rubber air bulb, the latex accordion worm flexed in and out of a little apple. Willy was "The Sickest Worm in all of Dee-troit" and suffered from a perennial cold and comically-explosive sneeze. He helped read birthday greetings to Detroit-area kids while the show was on WXYZ. Willie didn't survive the show's move to the Big Apple.

New Year's Day incident

On January 1, 1965, miffed at having to work on the holiday, Sales ended his live broadcast by encouraging his young viewers to tiptoe into their still-sleeping parents' bedrooms and remove those "funny green pieces of paper with pictures of U.S. Presidents" from their pants and pocketbooks. "Put them in an envelope and mail them to me", Soupy instructed the children. "And I'll send you a postcard from Puerto Rico!" He was then hit with a pie.^[11] Several days later, a chagrined Soupy announced that money (mostly Monopoly money^[12]) was unexpectedly being received in the mail. He explained that he had been joking and announced that the contributions would be donated to charity. As parents' complaints increased, WNEW's management felt compelled to suspend Sales for two weeks. Young viewers picketed Channel 5. The uproar surrounding Sales' suspension increased his popularity. Sales described the incident in his 2001 autobiography Soupy Sez! My Life and Zany Times.^[13]

Claims that Sales told dirty jokes on the air

An urban legend claimed Sales sneaked off-color humor onto his show for the amusement of his huge adult audience. This has been disproven repeatedly, including by Snopes.com. For many years, Sales had a standing offer of $10,000 to anyone who could prove he worked "blue" on his kids' shows. Nobody ever took the offer, although the rumor persisted. Sales states in his autobiography:

After many years, I think I finally figured out how these ridiculous stories got started. Kids would come home and they'd tell a dirty joke, you know, grade school humor, and the parents would say, "Where'd you hear that?" And they'd say "The Soupy Sales Show", because I happened to have the biggest show in town. And they'd call another person and say, "Gladys, did you hear the joke that Soupy Sales was telling on his show?" and the word of mouth goes on and on, until people start to believe you actually said things like that.^[13]

Topless dancer pranks

The show's set included a door in the background. During the show, Sales would answer a knock at the door and interact with an actor seen only as an arm. Occasionally, the person at the door was a celebrity, such as Burt Lancaster, Fess Parker or Alice Cooper. Once, while the show was being broadcast live from Detroit, Sales' studio crew pulled a prank on him: when he opened the door, he saw a topless dancer partially covered with a balloon. Some reports say the gag was furthered by the crew switching the studio monitors so that Sales would think the stripper image was going out over the air.

A second, nonbroadcasting, camera captured the uncensored version, while a stagehand moved a balloon back and forth in the doorway, giving at least some indication to the home viewers what was supposed to be behind the door. Sales was forced to try to keep the show going without revealing the risque scene backstage. The prank was recreated when the show originated in Los Angeles. The Los Angeles prank footage survives.^[14]

Records

Reprise album The Soupy Sales Show (1961).

One of the fans of the Soupy Sales show was Frank Sinatra. When Sinatra started his own record label, Reprise Records, he signed Sales to a recording contract. Two albums were produced with Reprise, "The Soupy Sales Show" in 1961 and "Up In The Air" in 1962.^[15]

Sales' novelty dance record, The Mouse, dates from the mid-1960s period of his career, when his show was based in New York. Sales performed The Mouse on the Ed Sullivan Show in September 1965. He appeared on the Sullivan show several times, once with The Beatles. Sales signed with Motown Records in the late 1960s, releasing a single, "Muck-Arty Park" (a play on the 1968 hit "MacArthur Park"), as well as the album "A Bag of Soup".

Game shows

From 1968 to 1975, Sales was a regular panelist on the syndicated revival of What's My Line? He usually was the first panelist introduced and occupied the chair on the far left side (facing the camera), opposite Arlene Francis. In 2001, indie duo They Might Be Giants marveled to one interviewer that "Soupy Sales always knew all the jazz guys, and they all knew him. That was impressive." In 1976, Sales was the host of Junior Almost Anything Goes, ABC's Saturday morning version of their team-based physical stunt program. Sales was also a panelist on the 1980 revival of To Tell the Truth; he had appeared as a guest on the show during the mid- to late 1970s. Other game show appearances included over a dozen episodes of the original Match Game from 1966 to 1969, a week of shows on the 1970s edition of Match Game, a few guest spots on Hollywood Squares (December 12, 1977 & April 4, 1978) as well as a few appearances on the combined version on (The Match Game-Hollywood Squares Hour) in 1983–84 and a recurring role in all versions of Pyramid from 1973 to 1988 and 1991. In one episode, he repeatedly uttered the word "bacon" in an attempt to get a befuddled contestant to say "greasy things." He also made an appearance on Pictionary in 1997.^{[citation needed]}

Radio show

Sales hosted a midday radio show on WNBC in New York from March 1985 to March 1987. His program was between the drive time shifts of Don Imus (morning) and Howard Stern (afternoon),^[16] with whom Sales had an acrimonious relationship. An example of this was an incident involving Stern telling listeners that he was cutting the strings in Sales' in-studio piano at 4:05 p.m. on May 1, 1985. On December 21, 2007, Stern revealed this was a stunt staged for "theater of the mind" and to torture Sales; in truth, the piano was never harmed.^[17]

Sales was taken off the air in the middle of his show. He had begun to complain to the audience that his contract had not been renewed and that his sidekick Ray D'Ariano had been given the time slot, so he urged listeners to complain to the station. When the show went to commercial, Sales was replaced by the station's program director, who played music for the rest of the allotted time.^{[citation needed]}

Film

He had a sporadic film career that spanned over 40 years, including:

• 1961 - The Two Little Bears
• 1963 - Critic's Choice
• 1966 - Birds do It (a starring role)
• 1977 - Don't Push, I'll Charge When I'm Ready
• 1993 - And God Spoke: The Making of... His memorable appearance as himself, hired by two incompetant filmmakers to portray Moses because Charlton Heston wasn't available.
• 1999 - Palmer's Pick Up
• 2000 - A Little Bit of Lipstick
• 2000 - Behind the Seams
• 2001 - This Train
• 2005 - The Innocent and the Damned
• 2005 - Angels with Angles ^[18]

Animation

In 1983, Sales did voice work for Ruby-Spears, voicing Donkey Kong in the animated show Saturday Supercade.

Personal life

Sales was married twice: first to Barbara Fox (from 1950 until their divorce in 1979). They had two sons, both of whom are rock musicians: bassist Tony Sales and drummer Hunt Sales. Along with David Bowie and Reeves Gabrels, the Sales brothers comprised the art rock band Tin Machine and worked with Iggy Pop on Lust For Life. In 1980, Sales married dancer Trudy Carson, who survives him.

Death

Sales died on October 22, 2009, at Calvary Hospice in the Bronx, New York, aged 83, from cancer.^[19]

According to writer/columnist Mark Evanier, comedian Tim Powers reported that a fan left a cream pie on Sales' Hollywood Walk of Fame star.^[20] The pie was left by Matt Beckoff, Larry Storch's manager and friend to Soupy Sales.

Legacy

• ABC replaced The Soupy Sales Show in 1961 with Cynthia Pepper's short-lived sitcom, Margie. Sales and Pepper later became good friends.
• In the episode "TV Or Not TV" of the 1960s cartoon series The Jetsons, a segment was shown with a character named "Soapy Sam" who hit George Jetson in the face with a pie.^{[episode needed]}
• In the episode "The One with the Lesbian Wedding" of the TV series Friends, Phoebe mentions Soupy Sales while supposedly being inhabited by the spirit of her dead massage client.
• Sales is referenced in the Bloodhound Gang's song "Pretty (When I'm Drunk)".
• Soupy Sales is referenced by name in the song, "6ix" on the 1996 The Lemonheads album, Car Button Cloth. His on-air request that children send money to him is also referenced in that song with the line, "Come on kids, grab your parents' wallet". While those are the lyrics performed in the recording, they are not the printed lyrics included in the album packaging.
• In the 2007 film Juno, Sales is referred to during the scene in which Juno confronts Bleeker about taking another girl to the prom. Juno had earlier suggested he go out with her, but he said he didn't like her because she smelled like soup. Later, when Juno realizes she loves him, she calls his date Soupy Sales.
• Howard Stern named Sales as one of his childhood heroes, and in an interview on the 2007 Sirius Satellite Radio program "The History of Howard Stern," he expressed regret over his harsh words and actions towards Sales.^[17]
• There is a brief track called "Soupy Sales" on the album "Coroner's Office" by the death metal band Post Mortem.
• Rock biographer Jeffrey Morgan uses the expression "Soupy Sez" in his authorized biography of The Stooges which was published in 2009 by Abrams.
• The New Year's Day Incident served as the inspiration for the "Neighbor Hood" episode of The Powerpuff Girls, where children's show host Whimsical Willy asks his viewers to send him money.

Further reading

• Kiska, Tim. From Soupy to Nuts!: A History of Detroit Television (Momentum Books, 2005) ISBN 1-879094-70-3; ISBN 978-1-879094-70-3

References

This article includes a list of references, related reading or external links, but its sources remain unclear because it lacks inline citations. Please improve this article by introducing more precise citations where appropriate. (October 2009)

External links

• The Soupy Sales Show Original NYC on-set Photos and sound file of radio interview
• Soupy Sales at the Internet Movie Database
• Soupy Sales at the Internet Broadway Database
• The Soupy Sales Show at the Internet Movie Database
• "Soupy Weighs In", On the Media, 2006-02-04 (accessed 2004-04-04)
• "Coins & Currency", TVAcres.com (accessed 2004-04-04)
• The Soupy Shuffle (.ram file)
• Soupy Sales on YouTube
• "No More Pies in the Face for Soupy Sales", Christian Science Monitor, 1996-05-23