John Holmes Motherfucker - 2019-10-15
The Great American Dream Machine was an amazing, seminal program. The closest thing today that remotely compares to it is the Radio Show "This American Life", but weirder and funnier. It was documentary/comedy. It ran from 1971 to 1972, and was hugely influential. Ken Shapiro, Chevy Chase, Andy Rooney, and Albert Brooks appeared, and it featured original songs from Martin Mull, before any of these guys were famous. Segments from GADM later made their way into SNL (Albert Brooks Comedy School) and The Groove Tube (Crampp's TV Kitchen).
Recently, episodes from GADM were streaming on Hulu. They were in really bad shape in terms of quality, and they've already been taken down, before I cfould watch more than a couple hours. It wasn't quite as good as I remembered it, but so much of the satire of the last 45 years was shaped by it, and so naturally it seems less revolutionary now, and kind of dated, because it was about its time, and its time was the seventies.
Marshall Efron's consumer reports were a staple. My Dad and I definitely looked forward to them.
I don't know what he's been doing all this time. He had a small role in an early Robert DeNiro movie (before Godfather II) and a line or two in a TV adaptation of Joseph Papp's stage production of Much Ado About Nothing. I never forgot him. A few years ago, I hunted down a clip on YouTube and submitted it. I don't remember if it got out of the hopper.
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