Four years after Dire Straits released "Money For Nothing" as the 1st single off their CD, "Brothers in Arms", "Weird" Al Yankovic mashed "Money" together with the theme from The Beverly Hillbillies for the soundtrack to his film debut, "UHF".
Straits lead singer-guitarist Mark Knopfler sits in on guitar, a condition agreed to that allowed Yankovic to send up the classic rock track.
After the animated Pac-Man had ended its run after 2 seasons, Hanna-Barbera called some of the cast back for a commercial to promote---wait for it----Pac-Man canned pasta from Chef Boy-Ar-Dee (now part of ConAgra Foods).
Marty Ingels (ex-Motormouse & Autocat), Barbara Minkus (ex-Curiosity Shop, Love American Style), and Russi Taylor voice the Pac-family.
In 2006, Sesame Workshop & Sony Wonder put together a DVD that mixed new material with clips from past Sesame Street holiday entries, some of which have been showcased here before.
A Sesame Street Christmas Carol, narrated by Tim Curry (ex-The Wild Thornberrys), focuses on the Street's resident miser, Oscar (Carroll Spinney). Kristen Chenoweth guest stars.
An assignment issued down the chain of command from the Pentagon all the way to dimwitted Private Zero (Allan Melvin) leads to chaos when Zero mistakenly uses some top-secret invisible paint to make Camp Swampy disappear.
Here's "Camp Invisible":
Talk about your emotional gut punches.
Singer Bob McGrath was one of the original human cast members of Sesame Street, and continued with the series for nearly 50 years, retiring in 2017 after a 48 year run. Bob returned to television with Sesame Street after a run on Sing Along With Mitch a few years earlier, and the earliest Street albums were released on Columbia, where McGrath had recorded with Mitch Miller until Miller left the label in 1965.
We're sad to report that McGrath has passed away at the age of 90.
What we're not sure of, of course is whether or not PBS or HBO will pay tribute to McGrath's contributions to Sesame Street, including the "People in Your Neighborhood":
You know the characters, from Yogi Bear to Cap'n Crunch. In 1987, PBS devoted an hour during a national pledge drive to the early career of the incomparable Daws Butler.
Butler started as a vaudeville impressionist, and parlayed that into a lucrative career in radio and animation. In the course of the hour, narrated by William Conrad (ex-Rocky & His Friends, The Fugitive, Cannon, et al), we see and hear from Butler, along with a fair number of his contemporaries, specifically Stan Freberg, Don Messick and June Foray, and producers Walter Lantz, William Hanna, & Joseph Barbera.
On with the show!
ABC Family (now Freeform) sold a half hour's worth of airtime to Ocean Spray, which, in turn, allowed a flash animated adaptation of the book, A Cranberry Christmas, to air commercial free in 2008.
Co-produced by Film Roman, Cranberry is built around a dispute over a piece of property between two men (Jeff Bennett & Rob Paulsen). Narration & music by Barry Manilow.
