TV Legends Revealed #25
This is the twenty-fifth in a series of examinations of legends about television and the people involved in TV and whether they are true or false. Click here to view an archive of the previous twenty-four.
Let’s begin!
TV LEGEND: Bill Cosby tried to purchase the rights to the Amos and Andy TV series to keep it off the air.
STATUS: False
A very popular urban legend is that entertainer Bill Cosby bought the rights to the Little Rascals so that they would no longer be aired, because Cosby found the show offensive due to its jokes involving the African-American character, Buckwheat.
That story is false (here’s Snopes on the subject).
However, a similar story has also popped up involving the TV series Amos and Andy (here’s someone asking about it on answers.com and here is an article from a few years back saying “A rumor, which might be nothing more than an Urban Legend, claims that it is entertainer Bill Cosby who bought the rights to the television sitcom and is responsible for keeping it off the air.”), and in this case, there actually is a little more to it than the Little Rascals story, which seems to have just been made up from whole cloth.
It is not true that Bill Cosby purchased the rights to the Amos and Andy television series (CBS currently owns the rights).
It is also not true that Cosby ever TRIED to purchase the rights to the program in the interest of keeping the program off of the air.
However, Cosby DID play a (slight) role in the series NOT being on the air.
The Amos and Andy television series spun out of the popular Amos and Andy radio show in 1951.
Unlike the radio show, the TV series actually (out of necessity) had African-American actors play the characters in the series.
The radio show had seen its share of protests, but nothing like the protests reserved for the television program, which was denounced right from the start for its portrayals of African-Americans.
Due to protests (and some boycotting), the main sponsor for the show, Bratz Beer, pulled out of sponsoring the show in 1953, and the show ended soon after.
However, it continued to be a popular show in syndication well after its cancellation.
It was here that people like Bill Cosby got involved. During the late 1960s, the NAACP began to put increasing pressure on CBS to pull the show from syndication, and the growing civil rights movement made it a much larger issue than it had been in the past.
By this point in time, Cosby (who was already a noted comedian) became famous as the co-lead on the hit series, I Spy…
A petition was sent out signed by a number of notable entertainers, all asking for the show to be removed from syndication. Cosby was a prominent supporter of the petition.
In 1969, Cosby was interviewed in Playboy magazine, and he made his thoughts on Amos and Andy quite clear…
PLAYBOY: To a very real extent, your role in I Spy helped open up the television industry to black performers. Do you think the representation of Negroes on TV has improved enough since you began the series in 1965?
COSBY: Well, we’ve certainly come a long way from black cats who were bug-eyed, afraid of ghosts and always saying things like “Feet, don’t leave me now.” Guys like Mantan Moreland, Stepin Fetchit and Willie Best never hit anybody, never fought back and were always scared white. And we don’t see the mass stupidity of Amos ‘n’ Andy anymore. That show still gets to me, man. Each time I name an Amos ‘n’ Andy character, try to imagine these guys as white, and you won’t be able to: You had Lightnin’, who was slow in every possible way; Calhoun, the lawyer who never got anybody out of trouble and never went into court prepared; Kingfish, the conniver, who was always saying, “Yeah, but brother Andy…”; and Andy himself, who wasn’t too bright, either. Like, nobody on that show was bright except Amos, the cab driver, who we hardly ever heard from. And then there was Kingfish’s wife, Sapphire; every time he came through that door, she’d be chewing him out for something. Now, audiences weren’t supposed to laugh with these people; they were supposed to laugh at them, because they were so dumb. And while that show was on, there was nothing else on the air to counterbalance these stereotypes. It was almost as if Poles were exclusively presented as characters in Polish jokes. Well, you’re just not going to believe that all Polish people are really dumb; but if that’s all you got to see about ‘em, you might start to believe it. And they’d understandably resent it. Or the same thing about Jewish people hoarding money. You have to show things besides stereotypes.
And by the end of the decade, CBS had officially pulled the show from syndication, and it has never returned, nor has CBS pursued an official DVD release. They seem content with letting the series fade into obscurity (while also defending their rights from those who try to sell bootleg copies of the series through mail order).
As an amusing aside, later in that interview, Cosby had this to say about depicting racial issues in television…
PLAYBOY: Do you think that a series with a nonstereotyped all-black cast could be successful on TV today?
COSBY: Probably not. The kind of show you mean would have to be about the life of a black family, with all its struggles. But if you’re really going to do a series about a black family, you’re going to have to bring out the heavy; and who is the heavy but the white bigot? This would be very painful for most whites to see, a show that talks about the white man and puts him down. It would strike indifferent whites as dangerous; it would be called controversial and they probably wouldn’t want to tune in. But when there’s a right and a wrong, where’s the controversy? The white bigot is wrong. The indifferent person sitting on the fence is wrong. Instead of having occasional shows that present the black viewpoint on educational channels, the networks should be in there pitching now.
I just found that so fascinating, as Cosby is BASICALLY describing All in the Family in a way, isn’t he?
I can only imagine how surprised he was to see just two short years later a white bigot appear on TV and shown to be just as ridiculous as Cosby felt such a character should be treated!
Anyhow, thanks to Bill Cosby and Playboy magazine for the neat quotes!
TV LEGEND: Penelope Pitstop had a vibrator among the various gadgets in her Compact Pussycat
STATUS: True
Reader Kerry wrote in to ask:
Remember Penelope Pitstop from Wacky Races? A friend of mine says that in one of the episodes, Penelope uses a device called a vibrator! That can’t really be true, can it?
To quickly answer your questions, Kerry - yes and yes!
But let’s give some more detail…
Penelope Pitstop was one of the many stars of Hanna-Barbera’s short-lived animated series, Wacky Races.
Wacky Races came out in 1968, and was most likely based on the 1965 film, The Great Race…
The show had a very large cast of colorful characters, who would, well, race.
Each individual/group would have his/her/their own unique vehicle.
Penelope Pitstop was one of the most popular characters on the show.
Her vehicle was the Compact Pussycat, which was basically a beauty shop on wheels.
She would have various little devices in her car that would help her, like she could click on “blow dry” and a giant blow dryer would come out and stop a bad guy from trying to mess with her car. Stuff like that.
So the $64,000 question - was one of those devices a vibrator?
Yes, one of them was a vibrator!
Here is a picture of the dashboard (courtesy of Alana-isms) featuring the vibrator!
What it did was that when activated an extra seat-belt strap would come out around Penelope to keep her secure, and then the car would, well, vibrate.
Presumably this kept the other cars from getting close to her while she drove?
Now the question we leave to YOU folks is, do you think it was an intentional joke or not?
Penelope was popular enough that after Wacky Races ended, she received her own short-lived spin-off series, The Perils of Penelope Pitstop!
Thanks to Kerry for the question and thanks to Alana for the photographic evidence!
TV LEGEND: Masi Oka appeared on the cover of Time Magazine as a kid!
STATUS: True
Heroes is a television series about a group of superpowered people and seeing what they all do with their powers (become heroes, villains, etc.).
Actor Masi Oka plays Hiro Nakamura, an idealistic Japanese office worker who discovers he has superpowers. As the series has gone on, Hiro has grown as a person and as a hero.
Oka has been appearing in various TV series for years before getting his big break on Heroes (he also worked in the digital effects field up to AND including his tenure on Heroes).
But amusingly enough, Oka had an earlier brush with fame when he was 12 years old.
Oka appeared on the cover of Time Magazine for August 1987, for a feature on “Asian-American Whiz Kids”…
Oka is the boy on the far left with the blue shirt and the knapsack.
He was not actually one of the children featured in the article (which was about the academic prowess and drive for academic success among Asian-American children in the United States), but the photographer was a friend of his family, so he knew they were looking for Asian-American children for the cover shoot.
I wonder if George Takei has ever been on the cover of Time magazine?
Could Oka be the only Heroes actor to ever appear on the cover of Time?
Neat feat, if true!
It’s a neat story either way, though.
Okay, that’s it for this week!
Feel free (heck, I implore you!) to write in with your suggestions for future installments! My e-mail address is bcronin@legendsrevealed.com
“Now the question we leave to YOU folks is, do you think it was an intentional joke or not?”
My leaning is towards unintentional in most matters like these but it’s really hard to say. How can you tell when a word or term came into popular usage? And you could also say that the show probably had mostly men in charge and they might have been being derogatory towards women/girls when women had even less of a voice in American society.
But it’s just very weird to think that all the people who worked on the show were chuckling under their breath and getting another joke past the censors. It sure wouldn’t fly today, though. And I wouldn’t be surprised if the cartoon were edited for any modern televised broadcasts.
That was a nice selection of different, interesting legends, Brian.
I watch Boomerang a lot and have Wacky Races quite often on in the background as I work on the computer. I never noticed that before!!! I’ve always known that it was based on The Great Race though, well at least in my adult years.
That Cosby quote about a show with an African-American family was pretty ironic. Y’know, all things considered.
Sadly, I’ve never seen an episode of “Wacky Races” or “Penelope Pitstop”. (I remember Dick Dastardly and Muttley from “Laff-a-Lympics”, though, so I probably would’ve loved it as a kid.) And it wouldn’t surprise me one bit if that vibrator bit was an animator sneaking something past the sensors. He probably expected someone down the line to get a cheap laugh out of it, and then cut it. From what I hear, animators do that sort of thing all the time.
I actually already knew about the Masi Oka story, though I thought he was actually included in the article. Guess I was wrong. (I kinda have to call you to task for saying that “Hiro has grown as a person and as a hero”, though. Four season’s in, and he’s pretty much the same “lovable” nerd he was in the pilot. Which is really a shame, ’cause the version of him from “five years later” that showed up in the first season was a total badass, and we really haven’t seen much progression towards that. But hey, that’s a debate for another forum….)
One thing that, as an adult, gets me about the “Wacky Races” is one of the characters’ name is “PETER Perfect”. The toon had Penelope Pitstop driving around in a car that has a vibrator while she was somewhat in love with Peter Perfect. All the while avoiding DICK Dastardly. I swear, the folks at Hanna-Barbera got by with something on that show.
Not to mention Penelope drove in the Compact PUSSYcat.
I think the characters’ names have more to do with how genital-based uses for words have grown in the last 40 years. Even if “Vibrator” was intentional, those probably wouldn’t have been.
[...] in Wacky Races (she even recently did the voice for the video game based on the show - by the by, in this installment of TV Legends Revealed, you can read all about Penelope Pitstop’s [...]
Ironically, Dick Dastardly and Muttley WEREN’T IN The Laff-a-Lympics. For reasons I’ve never completely understood, those characters were called The Dread Baron and Mumbly.
There may be some irony in Cosby describing how television might need a character like Archie Bunker. I’ve read, on two different occasions but I can’t remember the sources, that when All In The Family began that Cosby wrote letters to CBS and stated in interviews that the show would promote bigotry and should be taken off the air. I don’t know if this is true or not.
On an episode of his later CBS show Cosby, somebody– I think it might’ve been his character’s brother– was explaining some hairbrained scheme to make money, and Cosby starts talking about how it sounds like and Amos and Andy plotline. I only saw it once, but I remember he had at least a few lines about Amos And Andy, but he didn’t sound too critical about it.
Ha, Crazed Spruce, I was going to make the same crack about the lack of Hiro’s development in four seasons of the show, but you beat me to it!
Great legends all around.
“The Great Race” was loosely based on an actual historical event, the “Greatest Auto Race” of 1908, in which teams of drivers attempted to drive from New York to Paris via Russia (using boats when necessary, of course).
http://www.greatrace.com/newsite/index.php/the-great-race/greatestrace/
There was also a 1969 movie called “Those Daring Young Men in Their Jaunty Jalopies” that followed much the same formula.
This story kind of explains the shape of Peter Perfect’s car, doesn’t it?
“I just found that so fascinating, as Cosby is BASICALLY describing All in the Family in a way, isn’t he?”
What I find more interesting is that Cosby seems to be saying that you couldn’t do a show about a black family without having a white bigot to play off of, yet when he eventually did The Cosby Show, the family stood on its own merits without having to contrast them against intolerance. So in a way, he contradicted himself through his own work!
Granted, that was nearly 15 years later, and the cultural environment had absolutely changed, but I suspect it was also at least partially due to Cosby himself maturing as he grew older.
“How can you tell when a word or term came into popular usage?”
A number of dictionaries actually include information on when a given word first came into usage in English, along with a bit of cultural background as to the original usage and meaning, if it’s changed over the years.
According to Dictionary.com, the word originated somewhere between 1860-1865, its use applied to vibrating electrical appliances occurs as early as 1888, and the specific sense of “small electrical device for sexual stimulation” was in use around 1953.
So if Wacky Races first came on in 1968, that meaning would have ABSOLUTELY have been in common use. Which means it seems like another example of putting jokes for adults into kids cartoons, which seemed popular back then (Looney Tunes shorts are FULL of them).
Personally, I find the obsessive belief that anything even remotely salacious will taint children’s minds these days to be far more offensive than any “adult” joke slipped into kid’s cartoons in the past.
I do recall recently a TV segment about Bill Cosby and there was a clip of a talk show from the 80s (I think it was Donahue) where he commented how he did not like Archie Bunker. While someone may argue it was good to mock a bigot and show him to be an idiot, Cosby didn’t like how the bigot was (or became) a funny character who wasn’t taken seriously, while that kind of prejudice was no joke.
I guess I can see where he’s coming from, as he’s a person who no doubt saw the kind of racism that couldn’t be laughed at. Even so, I think the main point of that show was to show people how idiotic such ideas were and that bigoted people were just ignorant people.
I’m almost certain that the whole vibrator thing was an in-joke on the H/B animators’ part. Chuck Jones and the Termite Terrace gang would come up with all sorts of shenanigans while working on their cartoons. There’s a story about Chuck and his “privates” that I’ve read about from time to time which is quite ribald.
Speaking of which, that “I, Spy” pic also seems to be hinting at something there. I’m sorry, but I just couldn’t help but smile a bit. I’ve always loved that show.
Regarding Cosby, I think Norman Lear did a nice job with Archie Bunker, even though Carroll O’Connor had a lot to do with the character’s success. “Softening up” Archie helped lose a lot of the tension found in the earlier seasons and made the character mature along with the audience. Cosby’s 80’s series might not proved as popular if TV mores hadn’t changed as a result of Lear and O’Connor’s own breakthroughs.
Finally, that bit about Masi Oka is pretty cool. I had no idea that he was on the cover of TIME. It all seems very Karmic right now.
One more argument for (or possibly against) “vibrator” being an in-joke is that it appears all her special devices were based upon actual things a woman might use - Hairspray, Hair Dryer, Makeup. Unless, vibrator was a beauty salon term of which I am unaware, I would say that’s a string argument for in-joke.
Looking back on All in the Family, I think part of what made it work was that when bigots showed up on TV they were seriously evil (neo-Nazis plotting to blow things up or the like); having a working joe who loved his wife and daughter (no matter how much he yelled at them) and was generally average and was still a flaming bigot (as they said in one episode, he wouldn’t burn a cross on someone’s lawn, but if he found it burning, he might toast a marshmallow on it) was a lot closer to real life and a lot more unsettling.
what gets forgotten is that Amos and Andy was actually funny - both radio and TV. If you read Cosby’s argument, his problem was that the comedic shuffling stereotype was the ONLY portrayal and thus the dominant portrayal. However, the negative charge stuck and now you can’t go back and see the originals anymore. The Amos and Andy show employed a LOT of black actors - and when it went off the air, they simply had no more jobs, not jobs with better portrayals. it was 10 years before Cosby and then Diahann Carroll in Julia played a black main character who was “normal.” That’s a long time of little to no work for black actors.
and their sponsor was BLATZ beer, not Bratz beer. it was a major beer brand up through the end of the 1950’s, when a series of purchases and mergers led to it being lost.
The Vibrator button on Penelope Pitstop’s console refers a vibrating belt machine found at the time in salons and gymnasiums, and believed to promote a slimmer, trimmer figure. If Penelope’s Compact Pussycat was, as described, a traveling beauty salon, it would logically come equipped with one of these commonplace devices. The action described in the above article about a belt emerging about her waist when the button is pressed confirms it.
Here’s a link to a website describing such a machine:
http://fitho.in/tag/vibrating-belt-machine/
So, sorry, folks. No one snuck one by the ol’ unwary, unhip blue-nose censor this time. There was no under-the-table under-the-covers bit of the ol’ nudge-nudge-wink-wink taking place here…
Hey, here’s an idea. Why don’t we post that cover from the old Rifleman comic with the log and all share a laff about how they really got one over on the censors with that gag, huh?? Yeesh…
[...] of fun and engaging articles on Movies, TV, Popular Music, and other forms of entertainment. Did Bill Cosby try to censor Amos & Andy? Was the Little Mermaid modeled on Alyssa Milano? Was the song Breakfast at Tiffany’s [...]
There’s been enough sexual refeences in other cartoons (one episode of Super Friends had Batman & Robin use the Bat-Lube; one episode of He-Man had He-Man and other character constrantly arguing over the quality of their swords; Men in Black’s cartoon mentioned the cat scan) that I tend to make “intentional” my default assumption.
[...] which you can check out here, at legendsrevealed.com. I’d especially recommend you check out this installment of TV Legends Revealed to find out what involvement Bill Cosby had with the Amos and Andy TV series coming off the [...]