Even in the 1960s, they were saying "vaudeville is dead." But it wasn't quite then. And it isn't quite now. Not with DVDs like this week's release of "The Jackie Gleason Show in Color" (list price $10, from Time Life) _ exemplifying that early 20th century assortment of entertainers telling jokes, playing music, singing songs.
The disc's four episodes originally aired 1968-1969, when Gleason was a dozen years past his classic season of "The Honeymooners" half-hours with Audrey Meadows, but still riding high with a Saturday night hour produced "in color" when that was a big deal. Gleason taped his show with name comics and pop stars before enthusiastic tourists at Florida's vast Miami Beach auditorium, having famously decamped from New York so he could play golf all year long.
Also re-energized by the move south was "The Honeymooners." After a long hiatus, Art Carney returned to play Ed Norton, with new "wives" in Sheila MacRae (Alice) and Jane Kean (Trixie). Gleason's Ralph Kramden escapades were now mixed in amid other comedy and music bits, as 20-minute sketches, or sometimes as the hourlong musicals released a decade back in "The Color Honeymooners" DVDs.
But this new disc's three "Honeymooners" sketches have been unseen since their original airings decades ago. That makes them sound like a revelation. So it's too bad these '60s bits feel much less sharp than the classic '50s episodes staged in more intimate Manhattan theaters.
More notable, then, are the guest gigs, which now seem a veritable bridge between entertainment of the Depression-era '30s and the psychedelic '70s. Stand-up legend George Carlin is on hand for an early routine, still clean-shaven, but clearly edging toward the counterculture wit that made his name. There's also Nipsey Russell, the rhyming comic then big on game shows, whose routine at the height of the civil rights movement is peppered with lighthearted racial jokes riffing off his blackness.
Meanwhile, Gleason (born 1916) and his contemporaries do the kind of vaudeville shtick represented by the host's arm-flapping dance moves and "And away we go!" catchphrase. "Human joke machine" Morey Amsterdam, from "The Dick Van Dyke Show," plays his cello and spits punchlines. Old-timers Milton Berle, Phil Silvers and Red Buttons bounce gags off host Gleason while he's smoking cigarettes, whose makers were then sponsoring much of prime time. (Their ads would be banned in 1971.)
This single-disc release is really just a teaser for what Time Life sells online _ a color-era box of 27 episodes on 10 DVDs ($100; this week's disc comes from that set), plus a Deluxe Edition ($200) adding 15 discs of live "Honeymooners" skits from Gleason's black-and-white '50s hour. Be warned: The '60s productions have been stripped of their famed kaleidoscopic choreography from the June Taylor Dancers, as well as some other segments using music.
