Show us your pizza rolls

If Super Bowl commercials were a thing in 1968, this ad for Jeno’s pizza rolls would have had people talking Monday morning:

It was written and produced by Stan Freberg, whose list of accomplishments in television, radio and comedy recordings is long and remarkable, although he may be best remembered for his inspired advertising work with such clients as Contadina tomato paste (Who put eight great tomatoes in that little bitty can?), Chun King: (Nine out of ten doctors recommend Chun King Chow Mein) and Sunsweet prunes (Today, the pits; tomorrow, the wrinkles. Sunsweet marches on).

(The Chun King line of canned Chinese food and Jeno’s pizza rolls were both developed by the same guy, Jeno Paulucci).

The story goes that after one showing on The Tonight Show, Johnny Carson remarked that the Jeno's commercial was the first to receive spontaneous applause from the studio audience. 

The ad is funny, memorable and works off a shared experience, something much more easily achieved in 1968 than today when we all watched the same handful of television channels and didn’t – couldn’t – mute commercials.

First, the ad plays off this then-ubiquitous Lark cigarette commercial:

Secondly, it works off the shared knowledge that, going back to the 1930s, the William Tell Overture served as the theme music for the Lone Ranger radio and television programs. Not to mention that nearly everyone who ever had a music course in elementary school knew that piece of music.

In other words, everybody got the joke.

The guy playing the Lark lurker in the Jeno's commercial is Barney Phillips. With 188 acting credits listed on IMDB, he’s probably best known as the diner counterman with three eyes in a 1961 episode of The Twilight Zone.

Clayton Moore and Jay Silverheels reprise their roles as the Lone Ranger and Tonto, a full decade before Jack Wrather, who owned the Lone Ranger character, obtained a court order prohibiting Moore from making future appearances as The Lone Ranger. There was a countersuit from Moore before Wrather dropped the lawsuit in 1984.

C.C. & Company

The following is part of the So Bad It's Good blogathon hosted at 

Taking Up Room – Reviews. History. Life.

It’s never good when the best part of a movie is its first five minutes.

C.C. & Company (19700 starts with Joe Namath, as a member of an outlaw biker gang “The Heads,” pretending to grocery shop while actually making a sandwich for himself by taking food from the shelves (and resealing packages as he goes along – the golden age of product tampering), washing it down with a stolen pint of milk, then helping himself to a napkin and a package of Twinkies, begging the question, do biker gang members use napkins? Or eat Twinkies?

Never underestimate the importance of a nutritious lunch 

From that point forward, C.C. & Company unfolds like an R-rated Elvis movie, with Namath as the loner with a chip on his shoulder but a heart of gold. He even gets a cool Elvis character name, C.C. Ryder. And like many Elvis movies, C.C. & Company ends with a climactic alpha-male competition where the hero wipes the smirk from his rival.

(There’s no way Presley would have signed on for C.C. & Company. There’s beer guzzling, disrespect for authority, a biker chick skinny-dipping, a couple of blurred nude biker asses and Ann-Margret telling a biker to fuck off).

Namath, at the time one of the most recognizable people in America, got the call. When his New York Jets upset the heavily favored Baltimore Colts in the 1969 Super Bowl, he was everywhere. Books, magazine covers, a syndicated talk show, commercials. The path led, inevitably, to movies.

After their not-so-cute first meeting – C.C. steps in to stop two of his motorcycle buddies from raping Ann (Ann-Margret) when her limo breaks down in the desert – C.C. wins first prize in a motorcross event and leaves The Heads, pocketing the prize money instead of tossing it into the gang’s beer fund, angering head Head Moon, played by the always menacing and excellent William Smith. Other Heads include notables Sid Haig and Bruce Glover, all of whom, in the golden tradition of biker movies, generally behave like the apes in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

It also leads us to wonder how clean-cut C.C. ever got mixed up these guys. He doesn’t drink or smoke, and while the rest of the Heads are acting up, he works on his motorcycle. Marlon Brando = the Wild One, C.C. = the Mild One.

C.C. quits The Heads, trades in his motorcycle jacket for track suits and striped bellbottoms, and hooks up with Ann. They hit a club where, in an ultra-meta moment, the bizarrely coiffed Wayne Cochran and his band, the C.C. Riders sing the blues/rock standard See See Rider.

Wayne Cochran gets ultra-meta

That’s followed by a Hallmark moment “falling in love” montage, C.C. and Ann feeding ducks and riding a pedal boat as Today: The Love Theme from C.C. & Company sung by Miss Margret provides a suitable soundtrack.

But the Heads are still trying to reclaim the money C.C. took. They kidnap Ann from her huge glass-walled home – we’re not sure what she does for a living. At one point it’s said she owns a New York City “fashion house,” but she also seems to art direct photo shoots and write news releases.

All of it leads up to the big motorcycle race/duel to the death between C.C. and Moon seemingly lit with a flashlight.

Namath is personable, self-deprecating and laid-back. He isn’t given much in the way of dialogue (or at least many lines of dialogue strung together) so there’s no need for any emotional heavy lifting. Ann-Margret and William Smith handle that department.

As biker gang movies go, C.C. & Company is pretty tame. It’s worth checking out, but if you switch to something else after the sandwich scene, it’s understood.

The home of the brave

The textbook year for divisiveness in America that’s always cited is 1968: Vietnam, race riots, the murders of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, and on and on. Today, it’s only February yet 2026 is shaping up as possibly one of the most brutal and contentious years in U.S. history.

The Super Bowl should be apolitical, but it seldom is and this year’s halftime entertainment has right-wingers jumping down a Bunny-hole. Ironically, in 1968 another Puerto Rican-born singer pissed off a different generation of conservatives during a sporting event.

Born blind, Jose Feliciano was 20 years old when his jazz/folk take on the Doors' Light My Fire went to #3 nationally, winning him Grammies for Best Contemporary Pop Vocal and Best New Artist. Choosing Feliciano to sing the national anthem before the fifth game of the 1968 World Series between the Detroit Tigers and St. Louis Cardinals seemed like a safe bet.

Sitting on a stool in the infield with his guide dog lying next to him, Feliciano shed the bombast usually associated with the anthem, slowed it down and reshaped it much as he did with Light My Fire.

Conservatism in 1968 meant membership in the “silent majority,” a hawkish view of U.S. involvement in Vietnam and, according to public opinion polls “found the antiwar movement, particularly its radical and ‘hippie’ elements, more obnoxious than the war itself.” If you were male, you likely served in the military at some point. 

Short-sighted viewers were presented with a singer with longish hair, who doesn’t even have the decency to remove his sunglasses and with a foreign name yet, fooling around with the national anthem. People freaked out and provided feedback the old-fashioned, pre-social media way: angry calls to the NBC switchboard and letters to the editor for weeks afterwards. One example: “I have never heard anything so disgraceful or disrespectful.”

“When I did the anthem, I did it with the understanding in my heart and mind that I did it because I’m a patriot,” Feliciano said in 2018. “I was trying to be a grateful patriot. I was expressing my feelings for America when I did the anthem my way instead of just singing it with an orchestra.”

Earlier in the World Series, the anthem was sung, predictably and colorlessly, by 1950s pop singer Margaret Whiting and Marvin Gaye, whose version is straightforward (at a time when Berry Gordy was looking to move his Motown acts deeper into the world of white entertainment and before Marvin’s soul got psychedelicized). “I was very disappointed that Gaye didn’t do his own thing,” said Feliciano later. “Gaye chose to follow the old, safe path. He had a wonderful opportunity to say something for his people.”

Gaye made up for it before the 1983 NBA All-Star Game with a version that, just as Feliciano reshaped the anthem in the same manner that he reinterpreted Light My Fire, turned The Star-Spangled Banner into a coda for his 1983 hit Sexual Healing.

Released as a single, Feliciano’s version of the anthem went to #50. He's also performed it at naturalization ceremonies welcoming new immigrants to America.

Snap it, pal

Two disparate anniversaries that occurred in early January, unfortunately and unexpectedly, converged with Floyd Vivino’s death on January 22.

January 8 marked Soupy Sales’ 100^th birthday. His daily show on WNEW Channel 5 in New York City was a quirky inside joke of comedy bits that often ran way too long, double entendres that went over kids’ heads, puppets lip-synching novelty songs and cheap sets – a format that Vivino would evolve, build on and turn into The Uncle Floyd Show.

The ten-year anniversary of David Bowie’s death was January 10. While performing in The Elephant Man on Broadway in the early 1980s, he watched The Uncle Floyd Show while in make-up, something that another fan of show, John Lennon, turned him on to. In 2002, Bowie wrote Slip Away, a nostalgic, almost melancholy homage to the New York City of the early 1980s, with Floyd and his puppets Oogie and Bones Boy as avatars.

From 1974 to 1998, The Uncle Floyd Show could be found, if you knew where to look, on cable, UHF, regional syndication or New Jersey public TV. All told, something like 7,000 shows total and always with Floyd’s bomb squad supporting cast of aspiring comedians and knuckleheads.

The immortal Oogie and Uncle Floyd

Go snap!

And his puppets. Bratty yet endearing Oogie, whom Floyd always introduced as his partner, was an off-the-shelf factory model named “Walter” produced by a British puppeteer. Bones Boy was an irritable and ill-tempered skeleton in a suit that looked as if he’d been a prize in a claw machine on a boardwalk arcade. His trademark phrase, “Snap it, pal,” captured Jersey attitude (or at least how the rest of the country perceives it). If Bones Boy stopped for breakfast at a diner, he would order black coffee and a hard roll.

Floyd’s career seemed to always be on the verge of something bigger than New Jersey. An Uncle Floyd Show album on Mercury Records was left to die in cutout bins. He had small parts in Good Morning, Vietnam (1987) and Crazy People (1990), but a role in Paul Simon’s One Trick Pony (1980) was cut. When The Uncle Floyd Show went into syndication, it was shown in New York City on NBC, but at 1:30 a.m.

But he persevered and never became one of those stuffed monuments to lower tier show business that used to populate Joe Franklin’s couch. He made seemingly thousands of personal appearances around New Jersey, acting as MC, playing Tin Pan Alley piano in restaurants; he played piano at a record show I attended in the 1990s.

New Jersey lost Bruce Springsteen to international stardom, but Floyd stayed and represented the uniqueness that once flourished in this state, although it’s slowly being squeezed: wooded acres losing ground to yet another townhouse development, dead zone shopping malls that all offer the same stores, CVS pharmacies every hundred feet. The Star-Ledger, Bergen Record and Jersey Journal all gone. Boarded up storefronts along Broad Street, Newark.

Somewhere in the cosmos, Bones Boy is taking names. Snap it, pal.