Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In: Complete Series Boxset Due from Time Life in June 2017

for that ridiculous price it should be at least a Blu-ray set!

 

NTSC Videotape is stuck forever in 480 res. There is no information in the VT's that would benefit a Blu-ray release.

 

I remember watching it around that same time and thinking it was flat-out awful. But I was born in '73 so there's no nostalgia there at all.

 

I've tried watching it numerous times and I really desperately wanted to like it, but it just hasn't aged well.

 

I can tell you as a young mind who was already warped by Mad Magaazine by this time (and luckily so, because I grew up in Indiana - and not the 'cool' parts!), I saw them all as they originally aired...they absolutely "worked".

Funny thing was? So did Hee-Haw!

I remember enjoying - but NOT "nostalgically - when NBC dredged these up sometime in the '90s, before unleashing their fresh, def, totally-tubular update of the formula. And this did not work. The '90s audience couldn't relate to the trappings of the style. Nor could they look at the original and get it. Why? Well for one thing...they lived in a world that had already had Laugh-In, and had reacted, backlashed and rebounded to, generations previous ...which of course a young 1970s 'boomer" had not. That distinction alone was a huge flaw in their intent; heck, even commercials today benefit from the DNA of that sort of pacing in their presentation.

Remember, Laugh-In! itself had only one grooundbreaking contemporary at the time: Sesame Street, also fresh because of its' pixilated, rat-tat-tat pointalist style. So, you had one for kids, you had one for hip folks, and you had one for the rubes ("I'm Buck!" "I'm Roy!""Let's go..." "...and right now!"). There just wasn't any more room for any other variations on the theme in the zeitgeist. Although you could make a case for midnight movies such as The Groove Tube, or Mad Mike's Mondo Video, or Monty Python's Flying Circus (but, let's just call that "the zeitgeist next door"...).

I loved Laugh In. I ate it up. I lived through it.

And then I finished growing up.

 

Loved Laugh-In as a kid! Arte Johnson and Ruth Buzzi were hilarious to me back in grade school. The scenes where they are dressed like hipster club-goers telling little jokes to each other were my favorites. I noticed later that the Benny Hill Show had some skits almost exactly like that and I always wondered if they got that from Laugh-In or the other way around. The Decades channel shows this (some times in big blocks of 2-3 hours) frequently enough that I can watch it pretty regularly, but the boxed set is tempting. It would be nice to have the complete run uncensored, as some people online have said that some cast member's faces were blurred out for some reason and some skits were cut short (not sure if that's true or not but some people swear it is). Still a lot of money for a show that I'm not sure I would watch too often. A used box for $100 would be a great deal.

 

Like Mad magazine, Laugh In was a nondiscriminatory satirist. It made fun of the old guard and the young hippies equally. So much of that is now not only unfunny, it's considered quaint and antique.
Kovacs had been dead for awhile, and they adapted his style into something (in color) new and hip for the times. All the references to politicians and movements have either faded away completely from memory or become stale jibes at the dead.
Even the "wow" cameos of famous movie stars of the time are now meh.

At some level, George Carlin knew that topical comedy wasn't the way to go for lasting notoriety--keep it general, go after our basic tendencies and the enduring ways people screw each other (and themselves).

 

gotcha...

 

My review of Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In:The Complete Series box set is here:Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In: The Complete Series Box Set-DVD Review

The first season has some interesting music video appearances by Strawberry Alarm Clock, The First Edition (with Kenny Rogers), and The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band.

 

BTW,
Three Dog Night also perform during a fifth season Laugh-In show.

Marshall

 

Here we go! I'm shocked this is following so quickly. And it still has bonus features.

http://www.tvshowsondvd.com/news/Rowan-Martins-Laugh-In-Season-1-Press-Release/23526

 

'Laugh-In' at 50: How the Comedy Helped Elect Nixon and Set the Stage for 'SNL'

 

The series is currently streaming on Amazon prime.

Darryl

 

that was interesting ...

 

Just discovered this. Aaaaaand there goes my weekend.

 

Huh. I lived through Laugh In, enjoyed maybe 3 seasons and then moved on to other, edgier shows. It was made for those mad, mod times specific to that era. I bought the 1st season, watched maybe 2 shows and haven't gone back to it since. And that was months ago.

 

I've got an interesting question about the Complete Series DVDs:

Do the episodes have the film look, the same problem as the Decades versions that air airing currently, or do they look as videotape is supposed to look (smooth and fluid)?

 

Videotape. I have the first three seasons, bought individually, not the complete set, but I'm sure they are the same.

 

How Decades could it get wrong, but the DVDs got it right is a mystery to me.

 

Benny Hill could've taken cues from Laugh-In. I seem to recall that show aired for a time on the BBC, having skimmed old Radio Times listings. Certainly the acceleration of the pace of his show from the early to mid-'70's onwards seemed derived therefrom. (He may have also modeled his show format post-1964 after the second [1963-64] season of Jackie Gleason's American Scene Magazine, an episode of which was entered into the Montreux Festival in '64 and thus was aired over the BBC, for all I know; Gleason's second ASM season intermixed live studio segments with pre-recorded blackouts in a [for him] quick-cut format, which one of Gleason's biographers also claimed was a forerunner to Laugh-In.)

 

Ernie Kovacs was the master of the quick cut outs. I believe Rowan acknowledged their debt to him at some point.

 

Yeah, they talked about him during the first season.

 

The guy who told you videotape look doesn't know what he's talking about. They are improperly encoded and all have the dreaded fake film look rather than looking like beautiful color 2-inch tape.

 

George Schlatter was married to a former Kovacs supporting player from his 1961-62 ABC specials, Jolene Brand.