I Can’t Understand You!!!

While watching TV the past few days, I have to say that, once again, I was struck by the fact that some of the people who provide commercials to stations must really not be listening to their own spots- because there were lines in the commercials that I just didn’t catch the first couple times around. One instance was those goofy Smythe Brothers, doing yet another “aren’t we funny?” ad where they’re acting like high-pressure TV commercial pitchmen.(Do we really need the ending with them standing around laughing at themselves?) Anyway, there was one line near the end where I swear the brother mentioned bicycles until I heard it a couple more times… Then, there’s the doofus who’s taking someone on a comparative shopping trip to Wal-Mart to show how much can be saved by shopping there. He delivered one line in an odd, screeching voice that was totally a mystery. After repeated viewings, I finally understood that he was saying something in Italian, since whatever product he was saving the shopper money on was something used in Italian cooking. One more example is a local car dealer’s spot, where the female announcer is questioning another satisfied customer- but her first lines, delivered at breakneck speed, were hard to understand. Granted, it’s tough to get a lot of information into a brief thirty-second ad- boy, don’t I know it- but- if you have to cut the words down so it’ll be understood- please do it. I hopefully get enough entertainment out of the shows than to need to have the extra puzzle fun of trying to figure out what they’re saying in the ads. While watching a few moments of “The Munsters” (the old classic, not any sort of sneak peek at the upcoming reboot that so many of us have reservations about) I remembered that the show was actually produced by Bob Mosher and Joe Connelly. The two TV veterans had originally decided to do a TV show that came from a child’s point of view, instead of the parents, as most shows those days were, and came up with “Leave It to Beaver”. Since both men had families with lots of offspring, they could use some of their real-life stories as plots for shows. When the “Beaver” show had pretty much run its course, they got into the project that produced the Munster family- and actually adapted some Beaver scripts to fit the freaky funny family. (The Munster house actually showed up in a “Leave It to Beaver’ episode, as a house the neighborhood kids thought was haunted!) The pilot script for the show was originally called “Love Thy Monster”. We were wondering- if the Cleavers of “Leave It to Beaver” sort of morphed into “The Munsters” via use of their scripts- what other shows could have become monstrous? For example-what if “The Honeymooners” could become “The Fullmooners”- with Ralph as an over-weight werewolf? Alice could be a gypsy girl that Ralph married-possibly a niece of Maleva the gypsy woman of the Larry Talbot/Wolf Man flicks. Norton could be a zombie ( I know I’ve used the name”Dead Norton” in bits before…) and Trixie could be a witch who brought Norton back to “un-life” so she could have a husband who was totally under her control! Hmm…this might be fun to explore further in a future blog…

Quick trivia question you can pull on your friends- what do the shows “Leave It to Beaver”, “The Munsters”, and “Frasier” have in common? The answer: each has a character named Eddie!