"When Happy Met Froggie" on DVD!

One from the JSH News blog:


"Morris Book Shop at 408 Southland Drive now has a quantity of the brand new DVD release of When Happy Met Froggie available for sale!

The documentary, which recently had its world premiere in Lexington, includes footage from an interview with Jeffrey Scott Holland discussing his painting of the beloved clown-and-puppet pair whose children's show aired on local TV in the 1970s.

Support indie films and indie bookstores by trekking here to get your copy today!"

"When Happy Met Froggie" Film Premiere

Tonight's the night! Scott Hall and Michael Crisp's documentary When Happy Met Froggie makes its world premiere at the Kentucky Theatre in Lexington at 7:30pm.

It tells the true story that Lexingtonians have been longing to hear told - the power and the glory that was a locally-made low-budget TV kid's show called Happy's Hour. Happy's Hour starred Happy the Clown and his puppet sidekick Froggie, plus an obese doppelganger called "Happy II" in the later years. It ran on Lexington's WTVQ-62 (which later became 36) from 1976-1980.

Yours truly makes an appearance in the film, as the producers sent a film crew to my house when they found out I'd painted Happy and Froggie's portrait.

I'll be there on the red carpet tonight for the premiere, come join us! And then find me later, because I'll probably be at Blue Agave Cantina.

BBC Exec Based in Midway

There's been quite a flap going on in the British media about a migration that the BBC is undergoing - I haven't sorted out all the details, but the long and short of it is this: the BBC headquarters is being uprooted from its home in London to a place 200 miles away called Salford. The controversial project is going to cost a fortune, and many lifelong BBC employees are furious at being forced to move to another city.

The man in charge of this mass migration to Salford is Guy Bradshaw, whose consulting company Equals Consulting is behind the recommendation to move the BBC, as well as responsible for its implementation.

Now here's the interesting part: Mr. Bradshaw lives in Kentucky.

Historic old Midway, to be exact. According to an article in the Daily Mail, Guy and his wife (who is American) and daughter used to live in Kent before selling their house last year and moving to Kentucky.

For some reason, the British newspapers are up in arms at the revelation that Mr. Bradshaw's home so far away from London, and are trying to spin this into somehow rendering the entire move to Salford suspect. While the idea of packing up the BBC lock-stock-and-barrel and lugging it 200 miles away may indeed be a really stupid idea, I don't see the relevance of Mr. Bradshaw's living arrangements. If anything, his willingness to commute back and forth from Woodford County, Kentucky to Europe shows that he's not asking the BBC staffers to do something he isn't willing to do as well. They're complaining about being moved 200 miles from their families? Well, Bradshaw works 4000 miles from his!

I don't claim to have studied this matter in depth or to have but a smattering of the facts, but at a glance it seems to me that with looming budgetary disaster on the horizon for the BBC, something drastic has to be done. Is moving to Salford the answer? I don't know. But things are so bad that there's even rumblings of BBC3 and BBC4 being abolished, and in December BBC Chairman Sir Michael Lyons refused to deny those rumors. Now that's scary to me. If this man in Kentucky can promise that the move to Salford will keep 3 and 4 alive, I'm behind him six hundred percent.

(On the other hand, I hope Equals Consulting is better at real-world logistical planning than at internet self-promotion: their website is simply horrid, written in an inhumanly dense style that quite literally is nothing more than a mile-long string of random empty SEO keywords and phrases!)

Hell's Kitchen Comes to Kentucky

I forgot to blog about this, but a few weeks ago the producers of the FOX-TV reality cooking show Hell's Kitchen sent a casting crew to Louisville's Red Star Tavern to audition a long line of hopefuls. I didn't even know the casting call was going on - I just happened to be strolling out of the Hertz-Starks Building and wondered what all the crowd was lined up for.

The show stars the perenially controversial Gordon Ramsay, he of the alleged death curse. Although I have dabbled as a chef in my checkered past, I opted not to queue up for the chance to be on his show. I seriously doubt my idea of cuisine would mesh well with Ramsay's supersnob sensibilities.

The Return of Happy and Froggie

A crew from Remix Films were just here at Chez JSH, interviewing me for their documentary film When Happy Met Froggie. The movie's all about the great lost Lexington 1970s children's show Happy's Hour, starring Happy the Clown and his puppet friend Froggie. And of course, my painting of them makes a prominent appearance. (Guess what, sniffers, the price just went up!)

Do you have any memorabilia pertaining to Happy's Hour, or any special memories or experience with the show, that may be of use for the documentary? It may not be too late - contact the producers and let them know!

The Windy Wonderful Show

From 1959 to 1965, a kid's program called The Windy Wonderful Show aired on Lexington's WKYT, Channel 27.

Like Happy's Hour, it was primarily intended as a vehicle to host cheap programming like Popeye, Mr.Magoo and The Three Stooges but soon the popularity of the host puppet became the real attraction. Here, that puppet was Windy the Horse, accompanied by his young female friend Mary Ann. Later characters included Windy's French cousin Maurice and a ventriloquist dummy named Harold Zink.

According to sixtiestv.com:

Everything was done live, without scripts and there were more than a few rough spots. Like the time a small monkey was brought on the show. "That monkey took one look at Windy and leaped, screaming up into the over head studio lighting equipment," Faulconer recalled. "After the 11 '0 clock news went off that night they were still trying to coax it down."

Even after Windy the Horse was put in mothballs, Mary Ann continued on several years longer with a spin-off show call Mary Antics, and then was seen on Channel 27's Christmas programs well into the 1970s.

Happy's Hour

In a day and age where even obscure Lexington TV shows like Monsterpiece Theatre are on youtube and well documented online, you'd think there would be something about WTVQ's Happy's Hour on the web. But surprisingly, there doesn't seem to be.

In the late 1970s and early 80s, Happy's Hour was an extremely popular afternoon children's show that acted as a showcase for old Three Stooges and Flash Gordon episodes. Airing on Channel 62 (later 36) at 3:15 weekdays, it quickly became a hit with kids, not for the old black and white films but for the show's hosts: a hobo-clown named Happy and his frog puppet sidekick, Froggie, who would pop out of a window on the wall and say insulting things.

The show began to jump the shark when Happy and Froggie became the mascots for "Picture Pages", a local weekly newsprint giveaway full of "educational fun for kids", and then when an obese slovenly clown called "Happy #2" started to host the show more and more.

Somewhere I have a 45 RPM record of the Happy's Hour theme, and when I do find it, I will digitize it. Meanwhile, all I have handy is this photo of a painting of Happy and Froggie that appeared in my Desperate Telegrams one-man exhibition at Gallerie Soleil in the summer of 2003.

Monsterpiece Theatre

From 1985 to 1986, Lexington's WLEX-TV ran a late-night horror host show called "Monsterpiece Theater", starring a rather cheesy lady in a frightwig calling herself Millicent B. Ghastly. YouTube archivist Nolegsblueguy has many episodes online.

The show's brief tenure may be chiefly because of the un-horrific nature of Millicent, who looked more like an L.A. bag lady than a horror host, in spandex outfits and new-wave sunglasses. Then again, it could also be because they were using a toy-store-bought Cookie Monster puppet as Millicent's sidekick. Furthermore, the name "Monsterpiece Theatre" was already in use as a very popular Cookie Monster routine on Sesame Street. Someone's attorney probably called someone's attorney.

According to this site, the actress playing Millicent was Barbara Ends, who did it pro bono just for giggles, and left the show only because she and her husband relocated to the east coast.

Sammy Terry

Though he was based out of Indiana, Bob Carter made hundreds of thousands of fans over the Kentucky border as late-night TV horror host "Sammy Terry" beginning in 1962, and then throughout the 60s, 70s and 80s.

Wikipedia says:

The format of Carter's Nightmare Theater usually involved the showing of two films. During the commercial breaks, Carter, as "Sammy Terry," would engage in camp banter with the audience and his floating rubber spider, "George." This banter often included some commentary on the films being shown, which included classic films as well as many less-than-stellar productions common to the horror film era of the 1930s through the early 1960s.

Sammy's makeup has drifted over the years, sometimes being more clownlike than skull-like. He can still occasionally be seen out there making personal appearances, often for charity.