In which I love a man in a bear suit.
A short side trip from our main story ...
Growing up, fall was my favorite time of year. School was starting again, so there was all the pleasure and excitement of new clothes, new classes and new school supplies. My birthday’s in September, so there’s that, too. And it was the beginning of the new TV season.
Even as a child, I was a pop culture addict. I fell upon each year’s New Fall Shows issue of TV Guide the way most kids slavered over the Sears Christmas catalog. I eagerly read each show’s description and studied the color photos of the cast. I looked at the weekly schedule and circled the premiere episodes that I most wanted to watch, then negotiated with my mother over scheduling conflicts.
“Pleasepleaseplease let me watch The Partridge Family, please just the first show, pleeeease?”
“Well, nine o’clock is getting late and it’s on at the same time as Name of the Game...”
“But it’s FRIDAY and I don’t have SCHOOL the next day and everybody ELSE gets to stay up past nine ...”
And on and on, until it was hammered out. My mother suffered from the same fall television fever that I did, so we shared a rare bond over the predicament of which show to choose. Medical Center or The Johnny Cash Show? Flip Wilson or The Waltons? Saturday nights became a struggle when Alias Smith and Jones, which held beefcake appeal for both Mom and I - she liked Pete Duel, I had preadolescent lustings for Ben Murphy - was scheduled on Saturday nights at 8 p.m. opposite All in the Family, which my father loved ... and which my mother thought was possibly too “adult” for me to watch. That same year an ongoing rift between my parents arose over whether to watch Dad’s preferred The Men, ABC’s rotation of three different shows as an answer to NBC’s popular Sunday Mystery Movie, or Mom’s favorite show, Ironside. Thursday nights were a battle zone for months.
My freakish interest in writers, directors and character actors, the one that would someday serve me well as a film critic, blossomed during these halcyon days of my youth. Andy Williams’ variety show - the second, short-lived incarnation - was a must-see for me, partly because of the bizarre cavalcade of musical guests but mostly for the comedy. Williams, an extremely bland performer, surrounded himself with hilarious comics to fill out the meat of the show between songs - Charlie Callas, Irwin Corey, Jonathan Winters and Ray Stevens were all regulars at one point or another.
But the highlight for me, every week, was The Bear.
Each episode there would be a fairly pointless sketch in which a huge brown bear, walking upright -- and it really looked like an honest-to-God bear -- would knock on a door and Williams would answer. The bear would try to finagle some cookies. Williams would refuse to give him any cookies, finally erupting in anger that he would never, ever, ever give him any cookies, EVER! and slam the door.
I found this hilarious, every single time. Just fall off the couch, tears streaming down my cheeks hysterically funny. My best friend’s parents had a charming guest house out behind their home, and I would make her help me reenact these cookie sketches over and over again. I’d knock on the door and ask for cookies. She’d be Andy Williams, and tell me no. I would come up with ever more elaborate schemes to talk her out of the cookies and then she’d yell at me that she would NEVER give me any cookies EVER and slam the door, and I was deeply satisfied at my ability to recreate professional humor.
TV Guide did a profile on the show and I devoured every detail, obsessed with what I felt, at age 9, to be the pinnacle of comic genius. It was in that article that I learned the man in the bear suit was a Hungarian named Janos Prohaska, who worked as a stuntman but was also considered the go-to man when you needed a guy in an animal suit. He played the Horta on Star Trek, as well as an anthropoid ape thingie on that show’s episodes “The Menagerie” and ”The Cage.” He designed and wore his own bear and gorilla suits, which were considered the most realistic of their time, and he'd studied the movements of the animals to present them as accurately as possible. He also did Peter Falk’s stunts in It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.
Because of his thick Hungarian accent, the bear’s voice was done by one of the show’s writers, Ray Reese. This fascinated me - after reading that tidbit, I watched the Cookie Bear sketches even more closely, obsessed with the combination of stuntman pantomime and off-screen voice acting. When I read that he had taught his trade to his son, Robert, and the two of them worked together on stunts and in animal suits, I thought that had to be the most marvelous family ever - to have a father who owned his own bear suit! And who taught you to be a bear, too!
The Andy Williams Show aired for just two seasons by which point even I had to admit that bear was running out of steam as far as the cookie gag went. But I was still sad to see it go. Three years later, my mother showed me an item in the L.A. Times that Janos and Robert Prohaska had died together in a plane crash. I cried. I never even knew what the man looked like outside the bear suit, but I’d been a fan. I somehow knew that there would never be anyone who’d match him as an animal impersonator, and the loss to the world broke my heart.
Growing up, fall was my favorite time of year. School was starting again, so there was all the pleasure and excitement of new clothes, new classes and new school supplies. My birthday’s in September, so there’s that, too. And it was the beginning of the new TV season.
Even as a child, I was a pop culture addict. I fell upon each year’s New Fall Shows issue of TV Guide the way most kids slavered over the Sears Christmas catalog. I eagerly read each show’s description and studied the color photos of the cast. I looked at the weekly schedule and circled the premiere episodes that I most wanted to watch, then negotiated with my mother over scheduling conflicts.
“Pleasepleaseplease let me watch The Partridge Family, please just the first show, pleeeease?”
“Well, nine o’clock is getting late and it’s on at the same time as Name of the Game...”
“But it’s FRIDAY and I don’t have SCHOOL the next day and everybody ELSE gets to stay up past nine ...”
And on and on, until it was hammered out. My mother suffered from the same fall television fever that I did, so we shared a rare bond over the predicament of which show to choose. Medical Center or The Johnny Cash Show? Flip Wilson or The Waltons? Saturday nights became a struggle when Alias Smith and Jones, which held beefcake appeal for both Mom and I - she liked Pete Duel, I had preadolescent lustings for Ben Murphy - was scheduled on Saturday nights at 8 p.m. opposite All in the Family, which my father loved ... and which my mother thought was possibly too “adult” for me to watch. That same year an ongoing rift between my parents arose over whether to watch Dad’s preferred The Men, ABC’s rotation of three different shows as an answer to NBC’s popular Sunday Mystery Movie, or Mom’s favorite show, Ironside. Thursday nights were a battle zone for months.
My freakish interest in writers, directors and character actors, the one that would someday serve me well as a film critic, blossomed during these halcyon days of my youth. Andy Williams’ variety show - the second, short-lived incarnation - was a must-see for me, partly because of the bizarre cavalcade of musical guests but mostly for the comedy. Williams, an extremely bland performer, surrounded himself with hilarious comics to fill out the meat of the show between songs - Charlie Callas, Irwin Corey, Jonathan Winters and Ray Stevens were all regulars at one point or another.
But the highlight for me, every week, was The Bear.
Each episode there would be a fairly pointless sketch in which a huge brown bear, walking upright -- and it really looked like an honest-to-God bear -- would knock on a door and Williams would answer. The bear would try to finagle some cookies. Williams would refuse to give him any cookies, finally erupting in anger that he would never, ever, ever give him any cookies, EVER! and slam the door.
I found this hilarious, every single time. Just fall off the couch, tears streaming down my cheeks hysterically funny. My best friend’s parents had a charming guest house out behind their home, and I would make her help me reenact these cookie sketches over and over again. I’d knock on the door and ask for cookies. She’d be Andy Williams, and tell me no. I would come up with ever more elaborate schemes to talk her out of the cookies and then she’d yell at me that she would NEVER give me any cookies EVER and slam the door, and I was deeply satisfied at my ability to recreate professional humor.
TV Guide did a profile on the show and I devoured every detail, obsessed with what I felt, at age 9, to be the pinnacle of comic genius. It was in that article that I learned the man in the bear suit was a Hungarian named Janos Prohaska, who worked as a stuntman but was also considered the go-to man when you needed a guy in an animal suit. He played the Horta on Star Trek, as well as an anthropoid ape thingie on that show’s episodes “The Menagerie” and ”The Cage.” He designed and wore his own bear and gorilla suits, which were considered the most realistic of their time, and he'd studied the movements of the animals to present them as accurately as possible. He also did Peter Falk’s stunts in It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.
Because of his thick Hungarian accent, the bear’s voice was done by one of the show’s writers, Ray Reese. This fascinated me - after reading that tidbit, I watched the Cookie Bear sketches even more closely, obsessed with the combination of stuntman pantomime and off-screen voice acting. When I read that he had taught his trade to his son, Robert, and the two of them worked together on stunts and in animal suits, I thought that had to be the most marvelous family ever - to have a father who owned his own bear suit! And who taught you to be a bear, too!
The Andy Williams Show aired for just two seasons by which point even I had to admit that bear was running out of steam as far as the cookie gag went. But I was still sad to see it go. Three years later, my mother showed me an item in the L.A. Times that Janos and Robert Prohaska had died together in a plane crash. I cried. I never even knew what the man looked like outside the bear suit, but I’d been a fan. I somehow knew that there would never be anyone who’d match him as an animal impersonator, and the loss to the world broke my heart.