Young fogey
One of the Regulars
- Messages
- 276
- Location
- Eastern US
Me about Welk
LW is hit-or-miss with me. Seems like a very nice man: old-school, hard-working, taskmaster German Catholic. (Frugal pay and if you were late for a gig you were fired.) I'm not quite a fan but love the period and its music of course and agree with the poster on the wholesomely lovely girls. The early shows seem better. But I'm with the detractors on the cloying aspect (before I read this thread I didn't know why he was typecast that way; thanks) and the worst shows in my opinion were at the end in the '70s: garish and misguided half-hearted attempts to look hip (fashion, hairstyles such as helmet hair on the men, etc.), a mistake if you're intentionally doing a cornball nostalgia show! (He should have paid attention to his own advice: ever see the episode or clips from it where they pretended to turn hippie for a while?) So I can only watch the show in limited doses, unlike listening to great big-band music. He had that famous interesting accent too: from a German-speaking town in the Dakotas where the teachers who taught him English spoke that way. Not like a German in a war movie but gentler; a lot of people think he was Swedish. Yes, a deranged fan who wanted to marry one of the Lennon Sisters (they went to the same LA Catholic high school as Welk's son) shot their father to death.
I thought the same on spooning (cute) and we may never know the story behind 'One Toke Over the Line' getting on the show. (Did Cash write and record that song? I remember it was a hit for someone else.)
Interesting how the network cancelled him. I think it was ABC in 1971. That year CBS did the same sort of thing for the same reason. It wasn't because of ratings but because the networks decided they didn't want old people watching any more. Lots of people still watched Welk and CBS's cornball '60s comedies like 'The Beverly Hillbillies'. But the networks wanted to be hip so they took off shows people still watched and put on things like Norman Lear's sitcoms (which in their own way could be very good – Archie Bunker was more than a buffoon), telling people what they thought they should watch. Anyway, Welk moved to PBS for a decade until, realizing he was starting to turn senile, he retired. RIP.
[video=youtube;oFmSv2WFDrs]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFmSv2WFDrs[/video]
LW is hit-or-miss with me. Seems like a very nice man: old-school, hard-working, taskmaster German Catholic. (Frugal pay and if you were late for a gig you were fired.) I'm not quite a fan but love the period and its music of course and agree with the poster on the wholesomely lovely girls. The early shows seem better. But I'm with the detractors on the cloying aspect (before I read this thread I didn't know why he was typecast that way; thanks) and the worst shows in my opinion were at the end in the '70s: garish and misguided half-hearted attempts to look hip (fashion, hairstyles such as helmet hair on the men, etc.), a mistake if you're intentionally doing a cornball nostalgia show! (He should have paid attention to his own advice: ever see the episode or clips from it where they pretended to turn hippie for a while?) So I can only watch the show in limited doses, unlike listening to great big-band music. He had that famous interesting accent too: from a German-speaking town in the Dakotas where the teachers who taught him English spoke that way. Not like a German in a war movie but gentler; a lot of people think he was Swedish. Yes, a deranged fan who wanted to marry one of the Lennon Sisters (they went to the same LA Catholic high school as Welk's son) shot their father to death.
I thought the same on spooning (cute) and we may never know the story behind 'One Toke Over the Line' getting on the show. (Did Cash write and record that song? I remember it was a hit for someone else.)
Interesting how the network cancelled him. I think it was ABC in 1971. That year CBS did the same sort of thing for the same reason. It wasn't because of ratings but because the networks decided they didn't want old people watching any more. Lots of people still watched Welk and CBS's cornball '60s comedies like 'The Beverly Hillbillies'. But the networks wanted to be hip so they took off shows people still watched and put on things like Norman Lear's sitcoms (which in their own way could be very good – Archie Bunker was more than a buffoon), telling people what they thought they should watch. Anyway, Welk moved to PBS for a decade until, realizing he was starting to turn senile, he retired. RIP.
[video=youtube;oFmSv2WFDrs]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFmSv2WFDrs[/video]
It's good, clean fun and we always get a kick out of it.
