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| The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson |
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|---|---|
| Format | Talk show Variety show |
| Created by | Sylvester L. Weaver Jr. |
| Starring | Johnny Carson ANNOUNCER: Ed McMahon BANDLEADER: Doc Severinsen (1967-1992) Tommy Newsom (Substitute) (1968-1992) Milton DeLugg (1966-1967) Skitch Henderson (1962-1966) |
| Country of origin | |
| No. of episodes | 4531 |
| Production | |
| Running time | 105 minutes (1962-1966) 90 minutes (1967-1980) 60 minutes (1980-1992) |
| Broadcast | |
| Original channel | NBC |
| Original run | October 1, 1962 – May 22, 1992 |
| Chronology | |
| Preceded by | Tonight Starring Jack Paar (1957–1962) |
| Followed by | The Tonight Show with Jay Leno (1992–present; scheduled to end 2009) |
| External links | |
| IMDb profile | |
| TV.com summary | |
The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson was a late-night talk show hosted by Johnny Carson under the Tonight Show franchise from 1962 to 1992.
For its first ten years, Carson's Tonight Show was based in New York City, with occasional trips to Burbank, California; in May 1972, the show moved permanently to Burbank. The Tonight Show has continued to this day under a largely identical structure with Jay Leno as host.
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The show's announcer and Carson's sidekick was Ed McMahon, who from the very first show would introduce Carson with a drawn-out "Heeeeeeeeere's Johnny!" (something McMahon was inspired to do by the over-emphasized way he had introduced reporter Robert Pierrepoint on the NBC Radio show Monitor). McMahon, who had served the same purpose for Carson's ABC game show Who Do You Trust? for five years previously, would remain standing to the side as Carson did his monologue, laughing (sometimes obsequiously) at his jokes, then join him at the guest chair when Carson moved to his desk. The two would usually interact in a comic spot for a short while before the first guest was introduced, sometimes just ribbing each other about Carson's alleged excessive vanity, or McMahon's alleged excessive drinking.
| “ | Unless it appeared as if I was doing it....If I was going to play second fiddle, I wanted to be the Heifetz of second fiddlers.
...The most difficult thing for me to learn how to do was just sit there with my mouth closed. Many nights I'd be listening to Johnny and in my mind I'd reach the same adlib just as he said it. I'd have to bite my tongue not to say it out loud. I had to make sure I wasn't too funny—although critics who saw some of my other performances will claim I needn't have worried. If I got too many laughs, I wasn't doing my job; my job was to be part of a team that generated the laughs. |
” |
The Tonight Show had a live band for nearly all of its existence. The NBC Orchestra during Carson's reign was led by Skitch Henderson, followed briefly by Milton DeLugg. Starting in 1967 and continuing until Jay Leno took over, the band was led by Doc Severinsen, with Tommy Newsom filling in for him when he was absent or filling in for McMahon as the announcer (which usually happened when a guest host substituted for Carson, which usually gave McMahon the night off as well).
Behind the scenes, Fred de Cordova joined The Tonight Show in 1970 as producer, graduating to executive producer in 1984.
The Carnac joke that garnered the biggest laugh, and Ed McMahon's personal favorite, as he discussed on several talk shows:
If the laughter fell short for a too-lame pun (as it often did), "Carnac" would face the audience with mock seriousness and bestow a comic curse: "May a diseased yak befriend your sister!" or "May a rabid holyman bless your nether regions with a power tool!"
When Carson took over from Jack Paar, he inherited a show that was 105 minutes long. The show was structured to have what appeared to be two openings, with one starting at 11:15 p.m. and including the monologue, and another which listed the guests and announced the host again, starting at 11:30. The two openings gave affiliates the option of having either a fifteen-minute or thirty-minute local news show preceding Carson. Since 1959, the show had been videotaped earlier the same broadcast day.
As more affiliates introduced thirty minutes of local news, Carson's monologue was being seen by fewer people. To rectify this situation, from February 1965 to December 1966, Ed McMahon and Skitch Henderson began to co-host the first fifteen minutes of the show without Carson, who then took over at 11:30.
Carson influenced the scheduling of reruns in the mid-1970s and, later in 1980, the length of each evening's broadcast by threatening NBC with, in the first case, moving to another network, and in the latter, retiring altogether. In order to enable a shorter work week for himself, Carson began to petition network executives in 1974 that reruns on the weekends be discontinued, in favor of showing them on one or more nights during the week. In response to his demands, NBC began planning a new comedy/variety series to feed to affiliates on Saturday nights that debuted in October 1975 and is still airing as of 2008: Saturday Night Live. Five years later, Carson renewed his contract with a stipulation that the show lose its last half hour; Tom Snyder's Tomorrow expanded to 90 minutes in order to fill the resulting schedule gap. Despite the fact that a year and a half later, Tomorrow gave way to the hour-long Late Night with David Letterman (1982-1993; replaced by Late Night with Conan O'Brien, also an hour in length), an hour remains the length of Tonight to this day.
The show's start time was delayed by five minutes to allow NBC affiliates to include more commercials during their local newscasts.
In 1979, when Fred Silverman was the head of NBC, Carson took the network to court claiming that he had been a free-agent since April of that year because his most recent contract had been signed in 1972. Carson cited a California law barring certain contracts from lasting more than seven years. NBC claimed that they had signed three agreements since then, and Carson was therefore bound to the network until April 1981. [1] While the case was settled out of court,[2] the friction between Carson and the network remained. Eventually, Carson reached an agreement to appear four nights a week but cut the show from 90 to 60 minutes.[3] In September 1980, Carson's eponymous production company gained ownership of the show. [4] [5]
Virtually all of the pre-1970 shows, including Carson's debut as host, were lost to history when, following standard procedure at the time, the extremely expensive videotapes were reused. It was rumored that many other episodes were lost in a fire, but NBC has denied this. Other surviving material from the era has been found on kinescopes held in the archives of the Armed Forces Radio and Television Service, or in the personal collections of guests of the program, while a few moments such as Tiny Tim's wedding, were preserved. Longtime New York meteorologist Dr. Frank Field, an occasional guest during the years he was weather forecaster for WNBC, showed several clips of his appearances with Carson in a 2002 career retrospective on WWOR-TV; Field had maintained the clips in his own personal archives.
The program archive is virtually complete from 1973 to 1992.[6]
A large amount of material from Carson's first two decades of the Tonight Show (1962–1982), (many of it not seen since its original airings) appeared in a half hour "clip/compilation" syndicated program known as Carson's Comedy Classics which aired in 1983.
Although no footage is known to remain of Carson's first broadcast as host of The Tonight Show on 1 October 1962, photographs taken that night do survive, as does an audio recording of Carson's first monologue. One of his first jokes upon starting the show was to pretend to panic and say, "I want my Na-Na!" (This recording was played at the start of Carson's final broadcast.)
Thirty-minute audio recordings of many of these "missing" episodes are contained in the Library of Congress in the Armed Forces Radio collection. Many 1970s-era episodes have been licensed to distributors of the sort that advertise mail order offers on late-night TV. The later shows are stored in an underground film archive in Kansas.
The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson had guest hosts each Monday for most of the show's run and sometimes for entire weeks during Johnny's frequent vacations. Various people served as guest host, some over fifty times. This list is the most frequent guest hosts of the first 21 years of the show's run; however, a complete list would have Joan Rivers, Garry Shandling and Jay Leno well at the front, as they were the permanent guest hosts from 1983–1986, 1986–1987 and 1987–1992, respectively:
Carson himself had been an occasional guest host during the years when Jack Paar was the regular host, and Paar repeatedly claimed he had been the one to suggest to NBC that Carson replace him when he left the show in 1962.
Starting in September 1983, Joan Rivers was designated Carson's permanent guest host, a role she had been essentially filling for more than a year before then. In 1986, she abruptly left for her own show on the then new Fox Network. This move — and her failure to inform him personally — infuriated Carson so much that he banned Rivers from his show, canceling even the three weeks of guest hosting she was scheduled to do in the remainder of the 1985-86 television season. Unfortunately for Rivers, her new show flopped and was quickly canceled, and she never appeared on the show with Carson again. In a CNN interview after Carson's death, Rivers revealed that Carson never spoke to her again, even on the occasion when Rivers confronted him in a Los Angeles restaurant.
The program of July 26, 1984, with guest host Joan Rivers, was the first MTS stereo broadcast in U.S. television history;[7] however, only the New York City affiliate of NBC had stereo broadcast capability at that time.[8] NBC transmitted The Tonight Show in stereo sporadically through 1984, and on a regular basis beginning in 1985.
As his impending retirement approached, Carson tried to avoid too much sentimentality, but would periodically show clips of some of his favorite moments and revisit with some of his favorite guests.
But no one was quite prepared for Carson's next-to-last night, where he hosted his final guests, Robin Williams and Bette Midler. Williams was in top form with his manic energy and stream-of-consciousness lunacy. Midler, in contrast, found the emotional vein of the farewell. After the topic of their conversation turned to Johnny's favorite songs ("I'll Be Seeing You" and "Here's That Rainy Day"), Midler mentioned she knew a chorus of the latter. She began singing the song, and after the first line, Carson joined in and turned it into a touching impromptu duet. Midler finished her appearance when, from center stage, she slowly sang the pop standard "One for My Baby (and One More for the Road)." Carson became unexpectedly tearful, and a shot of the two of them was captured by a camera angle from across the set which had never been used before. This penultimate show was immediately recognized as a television classic, and Midler would win an Emmy Award for her role in it.
Carson did not have guests on his final episode of The Tonight Show. An estimated 50 million people watched this retrospective show, which ended with him sitting on a stool alone on the stage, curiously similar to Jack Paar's last show. He gave these final words of goodbye:
| “ | And so it has come to this: I, uh... am one of the lucky people in the world; I found something I always wanted to do, and I have enjoyed every single minute of it. I want to thank the gentlemen who've shared this stage with me for thirty years, Mr. Ed McMahon... Mr. Doc Severinsen... and... you people watching, I can only tell you that it has been an honor and a privilege to come into your homes all these years and entertain you—and I hope when I find something that I want to do, and I think you would like, and come back, that you'll be as gracious in inviting me into your home as you have been. I bid you a very heartfelt good night. | ” |
During his final speech, Carson told the audience that he hoped to return to television with another project and that hopefully "will meet with your approval", and a few weeks after the final show aired it was announced that NBC and Carson had struck a deal to develop a new series, but ultimately he chose never to return to television with another show of his own. He only gave two major interviews after retiring. One was in 1993, another in 2002. Carson hinted in the December 1993 interview which was with Tom Shales of the Washington Post that he did not think he could top what he had already accomplished.
Carson appeared briefly on Bob Hope's 90th birthday special on NBC and did a voiceover as himself on The Simpsons on Fox, both in May 1993. He spoke to David Letterman via telephone on Letterman's Late Show on CBS in November 1993. Carson followed that with an appearance on the Kennedy Center Honors on CBS in December 29, 1993 to receive a lifetime achievement award; He was the first person to receive the honor for working in the field of television. He never spoke and only sat in the balcony with President and Mrs. Clinton and the other honorees. During Letterman's week of shows in Los Angeles on CBS in May 1994, Carson passed by in a car during a skit early in the week and then walked onto the set on a later show to hand Dave the Top Ten list. He never spoke, citing laryngitis afterward, but received a long standing ovation from the live audience. It was Carson's last television appearance ever. A few months before Carson's death, Letterman announced that Carson had been sending jokes to the show in the last several years.
Johnny Carson died of complications from emphysema on January 23, 2005 at age 79.
| Lists of miscellaneous information should be avoided. Please relocate any relevant information into appropriate sections or articles. (September 2007) |
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