The backup feature on The Alvin Show featured "inventor" Clyde Crashcup (Shep Menken), who was a parody of Don Herbert's Mr. Wizard in that his "inventions" already existed.
When the series began a new cycle of episodes in the summer of 1962, mistakenly assumed to be a second season, Clyde was feted in a send-up of Ralph Edwards' This is Your Life.
Edit, 1/19/23: The video, long deleted, has been replaced by a screencap of the episode.
In a way, the spirit of Clyde would live on, thanks to the Muppets' Dr. Bunsen Honeydew, whose sketches on The Muppet Show were also Mr. Wizard parodies.
Clyde would return in a dream sequence in 1981's A Chipmunk Christmas, and his final appearance to date was in an episode of Chipmunks go to The Movies which sent up "Back to The Future".
Rating: B.
2 comments:
I actually saw "A Chipmunk Christmas" before I saw "The Alvin Show" (I didn't catch the latter until years later when we got cable in our apartment where I first saw the show in WGN in Chicago), so I didn't know that Clyde Crashcup was a recurring character on Alvin; when I first started watching "The Alvin Show" I saw a Clyde Crashcup short for the first time and I said "Hey, that's that weird guy who appeared in the Christmas special!" I stopped watching the Chipmunks' TV series by the time they got to "Chipmunks Go to the Movies" so I never knew he appeared in that era.
It was just a 1-shot, and he hasn't been heard from since.
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