The Jackie Gleason Show

The Jackie Gleason Show was the name of a series of popular television shows that starred Jackie Gleason, which ran from 1952 to 1970.

Cavalcade of Stars

Gleason's first variety series was aired on the DuMont Network under the title Cavalcade of Stars. After previous host Jerry Lester quit the show in June 1950 (soon to become the star of NBC's first late-night series, Broadway Open House), Gleason — who had made his mark on the first television incarnation of The Life of Riley sitcom — stepped into Cavalcade on July 15, 1950, and became an immediate sensation. The show was broadcast live, in front of a theater audience, and offered the same kind of vaudevillian entertainment common to early-TV revues. Jackie's guests included New York-based performers of stage and screen, including Bert Wheeler, Smith and Dale, and Vivian Blaine. Production values were decent but not spectacular, owing to DuMont's humble facilities and a thrifty sponsor (Quality Drugs, representing most of the nation's neighborhood drug stores).

In 1952, CBS president William S. Paley offered Gleason a much higher salary, with which DuMont could not compete. The series was retitled The Jackie Gleason Show and premiered on CBS on September 20, 1952.^[1]

While much of DuMont's programming archive was later destroyed after they ceased broadcasting^[2], a surprising number of Cavalcade of Stars episodes survive, including several episodes at the UCLA Film and Television Archive, and at least 14 of the Jackie Gleason episodes survive at the Paley Center for Media, though the exact number of surviving episodes is unclear (see online catalog).

Format

The show typically opened with a monologue from Gleason, followed by sketch comedy involving Gleason and a number of regular performers (including Art Carney) and a musical interlude featuring the June Taylor Dancers. (Taylor was Gleason's sister-in-law; he married her sister Marilyn in 1975.)

Gleason portrayed a number of recurring characters, including supercilious, mustachioed "playboy" millionaire Reginald Van Gleason III; friendly Joe the Bartender; loudmouthed braggart Charlie Bratten; mild-mannered Fenwick Babbitt; bombastic Rudy the Repairman; and a put-upon character known only as the Poor Soul, whom Gleason always performed in pantomime.

Gleason also occasionally portrayed Stanley R. Sogg, a late-night movie pitchman for Mother Fletcher's products ("No-Cal Chicken Fat"), similar to the later Art Fern character played by Johnny Carson in his "Tea Time Movie" skits on The Tonight Show.

The Honeymooners

The Honeymooners
The Honeymooners Title Screen
Format	Sitcom
No. of episodes	39 (List of episodes)
Production
Location(s)	Adelphi Theater, Manhattan, New York
Camera setup	Three-camera Electronicam
Running time	30 minutes (including commercials)
Broadcast
Original run	October 1, 1955 – September 22, 1956

By far the most memorable and popular character, however, was blowhard Brooklyn bus driver Ralph Kramden, featured originally in a series of skits known as "The Honeymooners", with Pert Kelton and later Audrey Meadows as his wife Alice, and Art Carney as his upstairs neighbor. These were so popular that in 1955 Gleason suspended the variety format and filmed The Honeymooners as a regular half-hour sitcom, co-starring Carney, Meadows, and Joyce Randolph. Finishing 19th in the ratings, these 39 episodes were subsequently rerun constantly in syndication, often five nights a week, with the cycle repeating every two months for decades. They are probably the most familiar body of work from 1950s television with the possible exception of episodes from I Love Lucy, starring Lucille Ball.

The show's original variety format and title returned in September 1956 and continued until June 1957. Then, in October 1958, Gleason debuted a half-hour version of The Jackie Gleason Show, with Buddy Hackett as a sidekick, but it was short-lived, cancelled in January 1959.

The Jackie Gleason Show (1961 Revision)

The Jackie Gleason Show
Format	Talk show
Presented by	Jackie Gleason
Narrated by	Johnny Olson
Country of origin	United States
No. of episodes	8 (without the 2 "You're in the Picture" Episodes)
Production
Running time	30 minutes with commercials
Broadcast
Original channel	CBS
Original run	February 3, 1961 – March 24, 1961

In 1961, Gleason began an ill-fated stint as host of a game show called You're in the Picture. which lasted only one episode, and was so bad that it led to Gleason offering an on-air apology to his viewers the following week. Committed to filling a quota of episodes, Gleason renamed the series The Jackie Gleason Show and turned it into a short-lived talk show, featuring one-on-one informal interviews with Art Carney, Jayne Mansfield, Bobby Darin, and other friends and celebrities.

American Scene Magazine

In 1962, Gleason returned to the tried-and-true variety format with his American Scene Magazine. (The official title of the show was, again, The Jackie Gleason Show.) In its first year, Gleason's ratings killed the competition: a revived comedy-western-variety program, The Roy Rogers and Dale Evans Show, on ABC and the legal drama Sam Benedict with Edmond O'Brien on NBC.

American Scene was initially taped in New York City; after two seasons, production moved to Miami Beach (1964), on Jackie's insistence. (This caused some difficulties for Olson, who had several other announcing jobs, including The Match Game, in New York, and Olson commuted frequently back and forth from New York and Miami to do both jobs.) Each week, Gleason would begin his monologue and be surprised by the flamboyant jackets worn by bandleader Sammy Spear. (Beholding Spear's animal-print blazer, Gleason quipped, "I've heard of Tiger Rag, but this is ridiculous!") Reggie Van Gleason, the Poor Soul, and the rest of Gleason's comic characters were regular attractions. Frank Fontaine, as bug-eyed, grinning "Crazy" Guggenheim, starred in the Joe the Bartender skits, delighting fans with his nutty speaking voice and goofy laugh, and charmed by his surprisingly mellow singing voice. June Taylor's chorus girl routines revived for the TV generation the aerial pattern kaleidoscope formations made famous on film by Busby Berkeley.

In the fall of 1966, the title once again became simply The Jackie Gleason Show (dropping the American Scene format), and would remain so until its cancellation in 1970. By this point the episodes included well-known guest stars and skits. A component during this period was the musical Honeymooners episodes, which had first been tried on Gleason's variety show during the 1956-57 season. These were later collected as The Color Honeymooners, with Sheila MacRae and Jane Kean as Alice and Trixie. The regular cast included old sidekick Art Carney; Milton Berle was a frequent guest star. The show was taped at the Miami Beach Auditorium (now called the Jackie Gleason Theatre of the Performing Arts), and Gleason (along with the show's announcer, Johnny Olson) never tired of promoting the "sun and fun capital of the world" on camera. Hordes of vacationers took Gleason's advice, boosting Florida's economy. Later specials were taped at the Olympia Theatre's Gusman Center across Biscayne Bay, in downtown Miami).

References

This section needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (October 2007)