Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, May 26, 1994 TAG: 9405260065
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Tom Shales
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium
How can 30 terrific years be compressed into a mere three hours? Well, they can't. And yet the folks behind ``Johnny Carson: His Favorite Moments from The Tonight Show'' have made a good stab at it.
Three tapes full of ``Tonight Show'' highlights which take Johnny and the nation from the '60s to the '90s have just been released by Buena Vista Home Video. In addition, a fourth tape, Johnny's last show in its entirety, is available to those who plunk down $59.99 for the whole four-tape set. The first three tapes cost $14.99 each.
America seemed a happier place when Carson was tucking it in every night, or almost every night, and these tapes show why. We stayed up to see Johnny and his guests or Johnny and the animals or Johnny and his monologue - but always, first and utmost, Johnny, the star next door, a man who combined prodigious performing skills with immense personal charm.
Performing skills alone wouldn't have made Johnny the welcome guest and national icon he became. In the more than 100 clips collected on the highlight tapes, Carson is not just funny but also personable, neighborly, comfortable and comforting. Most of his guests were show-biz celebrities, but as the tapes remind us, Johnny was awfully good with ordinary people, too, and he was great with animals.
Birds talked, or failed to talk (Johnny made it funny either way), a leopard leaped at him, a Goliath beetle crawled up his arm, a snake slithered between his knees. Johnny feeds a banana to a kinkajou, lets a marmoset sit on his head, and substitutes for a fickle dog who won't eat the product during a live Alpo commercial. Cuddling a baby orangutan that looks at him worriedly, Johnny says politely, ``Excuse me. I didn't mean to laugh at your face.''
The tapes include many of the outrageous moments replayed by Carson during his annual anniversary shows: Ed Ames throwing a tomahawk at the outline of a man and becoming the Lorena Bobbitt of his day; Don Rickles interrupting Carson's geisha-girl massage (``Give me a break - I'm so lonely''); out-takes from a commercial spoof in which Johnny, as Karl Malden, is supposed to be hit in the face with a pie, except the pie thrower keeps missing.
Tiny Tim gets married, Jack Webb joins Carson for a memorable ``Dragnet'' spoof (``The Copper Clapper Caper''), Jimmy Stewart reads a poem he wrote about his dog, and Jane Fonda tells a lewd, apparently apocryphal, Zsa Zsa anecdote. ``Young'' comics like David Letterman, Jay Leno, Flip Wilson, Sam Kinison, Eddie Murphy and Roseanne Arnold make early appearances.
There's more - so much more it is almost pointless to try to list it all. But Carson's first decade as ``Tonight Show'' host is under-represented because many of the original tapes were erased long ago by network cost-cutters. Carson talked about this last November when I visited him at his home in Malibu.
``NBC in its infinite wisdom in those days just used the tape again,'' Carson said. ``Not just the original show but most of the first 10 years is gone - Barbra Streisand's first appearance, Boris Karloff, Peter Lorre, Jayne Mansfield, Ethel Merman, Tallulah Bankhead, Georgie Jessel sitting with Sophie Tucker one night. I mean, you talk about show business. It was magic.''
Many of these moments exist now only as still photos on the wall of Carson's tennis house.
Carson's longtime producer Jeff Sotzing, working with Carson, put the ``Favorite Moments'' tapes together. ``Jeff happens to be my nephew, but he's extremely bright,'' Carson told me. Wisely, Sotzing did the tapes without any intrusive narration, just captions to identify the dates and the guests.
Two years since he left ``The Tonight Show,'' Johnny Carson is still greatly missed. Ten, 20 or 30 years from now, the happy moments on these tapes are bound to provoke warming laughter. They leave you hungry for more - at least four more tapes or, better yet, 30 more years.
How can we ever thank him enough? Well, we can't.
Washington Post Writers Group
by CNB