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Bill "Wallace" Thompson passed away on Wednesday. When I was a kid growing up in Phoenix in the 60s and 70s, it was the burning ambition of everyone I knew to go on the Wallace & Ladmo Show and get a Ladmo bag. (Heck, I'm old enough to remember the Toy Cottage, which predated Ladmo Bags.) I never got to go on the show or even to any of their stage shows; Mom was strangely resistant to our pleading and never quite got that this was the MOST IMPORTANT THING IN THE UNIVERSE when you were eight and lived in Phoenix. But every morning and every afternoon, we were glued to the television. It wasn't your usual local kid's show. It was... well, it's become a cliche to call things like that subversive, but it was. Captain Kangaroo had guests like Mr. Greenjeans; Wallace and Ladmo had Alice Cooper. Ladmo (real name Ladimir Kwiatkowski) was the free spirit the kids all identified with, an eternal manchild long before Peewee Herman made it weird. Pat McMahon's stable of characters - bratty rich kid Gerald; the venal, cowardly Captain Super; the misanthropic Boffo the Clown; the perpetually down-on-his-luck cowboy Marshall Good (his horse? A bicycle); the licentious Aunt Maude and a host of others - kept the parents as well as the kids entertained. Wallace was the straight man who pulled it all together, as well as the writer and producer for much of the material.
The show was a mix of cartoons (old Warner Brothers and Hanna Barbera, not just the well-known ones, but weird stuff like Ruff and Reddy) vaudeville-style skits, recurring character bits, and the occasional week-long epic, such as the time Gerald's monster (Gerald had a monster, because when you're a bratty rich kid, you can buy monsters) captured Ladmo and trapped him in a closet. Sometimes the show got in trouble, in fact - I can remember one year they ran a promotional thing for Halloween for a local soda manufacturer, Orange Crush. Gerald's monster was going to be loose on Halloween, see, and the only thing which could protect you was wearing a pin you got from sending in Orange Crush bottle tops. Despite the fact that Gerald's monster was basically a stagehand with a furry bag over his head, we believed in its powers passionately, to the point that some kids got hysterical at the prospect of going out without the protective Orange Crush pin, and their parents complained, and there were some hasty retractions. Oh, and then there was the time that Gerald gave temper tantrum lessons...
One of the greatest things about Wallace and Ladmo was that both of them were genuinely nice guys and good friends in real life, and both of them loved kids and loved what they did. Which is a rare commodity among kids' show hosts, apparently. The show was a huge part of my childhood, and it's with regret that I note the passing of the driving force behind it. (Ladmo died in 1994; Pat McMahon's still with us.) For those of you who grew up with more conventional local kids' shows, well... thanks to the magic of Youtube, you can see what you're missing.
Rants Talk to me
The show was a mix of cartoons (old Warner Brothers and Hanna Barbera, not just the well-known ones, but weird stuff like Ruff and Reddy) vaudeville-style skits, recurring character bits, and the occasional week-long epic, such as the time Gerald's monster (Gerald had a monster, because when you're a bratty rich kid, you can buy monsters) captured Ladmo and trapped him in a closet. Sometimes the show got in trouble, in fact - I can remember one year they ran a promotional thing for Halloween for a local soda manufacturer, Orange Crush. Gerald's monster was going to be loose on Halloween, see, and the only thing which could protect you was wearing a pin you got from sending in Orange Crush bottle tops. Despite the fact that Gerald's monster was basically a stagehand with a furry bag over his head, we believed in its powers passionately, to the point that some kids got hysterical at the prospect of going out without the protective Orange Crush pin, and their parents complained, and there were some hasty retractions. Oh, and then there was the time that Gerald gave temper tantrum lessons...
One of the greatest things about Wallace and Ladmo was that both of them were genuinely nice guys and good friends in real life, and both of them loved kids and loved what they did. Which is a rare commodity among kids' show hosts, apparently. The show was a huge part of my childhood, and it's with regret that I note the passing of the driving force behind it. (Ladmo died in 1994; Pat McMahon's still with us.) For those of you who grew up with more conventional local kids' shows, well... thanks to the magic of Youtube, you can see what you're missing.
Click to viewRants Talk to me