Another Trip to Kovacsland

Last year when the good people at Shout! Factory released “The Ernie Kovacs Collection”, a six disc collection of the work of genius and TV pioneer Ernie Kovacs, I sang its praises. Ernie Kovacs is one of my heroes. From 1951, till his tragic death in 1962, Kovacs had a number of shows on the air. Each one stamped with his unique brand of humor, far more interested in what was happening on the screen, than what the audience in the studio thought. Kovacs realized that television was a visual medium, and did things with early TV equipment that no one else dared to do. 

So here I am once again to sing the praises of Shout! Factory's release of “The Ernie Kovacs Collection: Volume Two.” I sing it's praises for a number of reasons. For one, it shows that the first collection was successful enough to warrant more, that gives me hope. Secondly, it helps to spread, and preserve TV's past. Something that doesn't get celebrated as much as film's past. There's one person to thank for this material being around for us to see, that's Kovacs wife, the late Edie Adams. 

You see kiddies, until the mid 1970s, most of television was considering ephemeral. It airs once, and that's it. So why keep it? Pre-video tape, shows were preserved on film using the kineoscope method. Literally filming a TV screen with a 16mm camera. With video tape, tapes would be erased and re-used. Case in point? The first ten years of Johnny Carson's Tonight Show do not exist. Bits and pieces do, but those masters were erased by NBC. But Edie Adams, when she got word of the puring of Kovacs work, went around tracking down master tapes, kineoscopes, whatever she could, and bought them back from the networks. Doing it long before anyone knew there would be this thing called home video. 

So what is it that made Ernie Kovacs so special? For one thing, the man was ahead of his time. His shows are wildly creative, and you can see the earliest stems of what would come in David Letterman, SCTV, Saturday Night Live, Pee-Wee's Playhouse, and even a little Monty Python. It could also be argued that the first music videos are Kovacs' work. A kitchen dancing in time to tunes by Esquivel, or an office with the furniture all reacting in time. There in the middle of this beautiful circus, was Kovacs, with his ever present mustache and cigar. Looking something a mix of Groucho Marx and Gomez Addams. 

This new three disc collection pulls largely from the most existent of Kovacs work, his NBC morning show, and his ABC nighttime pseudo game show Take a Good Look. I am endlessly fascinated by his morning show, which aired at 10:30 AM. You turn on NBC now and you get to see Kathy Lee and Hoda half in the bag, but from 1955 to 1956, there was Ernie, having fun and giving the world a sorta wild variety show. Playing around with the conventions, walking off the set—which was a dungeon—and up into the audience. Doing a take off of kiddie puppet shows called “The Kapusta Kid in Outer Space.” 

Kovacs worked in what Laugh In producer George Schlatter called “dangerous television.” Not “dangerous” in sense of a threat, the idea of the F bomb being dropped. But “dangerous” in the sense of you never know what's going to happen next. One episode of the morning show ends with Ernie deciding he wants to see the show from the view of the audience. So he marches the ENTIRE audience on stage, sits up in their seats, and looks them asking “Now what song are you all going to sing?” 

The freewheeling nature of Kovacs' morning show, shares a spirit with what Craig Ferguson does with his The Late Late Show. Ferguson often taking the show in random directions, such as a few weeks ago, when he abruptly stopped the monologue and went over to his desk as it wasn't going well. We're so used to seeing TV so tightly structured, so tightly worked over to appeal to largest demographic possible. That watching someone who is genuinely having fun with a TV series, is greatly appealing. 

That fun comes over too in Take a Good Look. On the surface, it's one of the many popular panel shows from the period (What's My Line, I've Got a Secret), but below that, it's more of a parody of them. A panel of people have to guess what a person of note has done, using clues that Kovacs shot ahead of time. Clues that are short sketches, with barely discernible information hidden in them. It's a real pleasure to watch Take a Good Look, as it's just a lovely half hour of fun. You don't see that anymore on network TV, not even sure if you do on cable. 

Watching Ernie Kovacs' work both thrills and inspires me. It's wonderfully entertaining, creative, unique, funny, and mind boggling that there was a time this was on network television. “The Ernie Kovacs Collection: Volume Two” is very much worth you time. I hope you'll seek it out and give it look soon.