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two of the question is…’ You could never get it right.”
“The first question I can remember,” Milt adds, “was: ‘How do you get
the horse out of the bathtub?’ After a minute, Beulah the Buzzer would go
‘aaack, aaack,’ and Bob would give the answer: ‘You pull the plug out.’
“Now, that joke is sooo old; people don’t even call horses plugs anymore.
But that was the form. You could not win no matter what you would do. ”
“What people may not remember about the show was that it was very,
very, costume heavy and sketch heavy and music heavy,” Arlene says.
“We built sets,” adds Milt.
Back to the show
“Usually what would happen,” Milt relates, “is maybe we’d select someone
from the audience and put him in a back room and have him change clothes.
Let’s say they put him in a Tarzan costume. [His wife is kept in a sort of
soundproof room]. Then Bob would say, ‘And, what she doesn’t know is that
her husband will be in back of her swinging on a vine dressed as Tarzan as we
ask her a series of simple questions.’ Then, another person who’d been asked
beforehand to do so, would give the Tarzan yell from out of the audience. The
wife is trying to figure out why they’re laughing, thinking they are laughing
because the man was giving a Tarzan yell.”
Surprise televised reunions were big then too, as it wasn’t too long after
the Korean War and even World War II.
The Southern Belle Run
“The Southern Belle Run,” Arlene explains, “is where a bunch of men
would be dressed in hoop skirts, big hats, petticoats, and high heels and race,
while their wives (and the audience) bet on who would win.
“But, there’d always be a twist.
“In this case, one of the guys dressed as a Southern Belle was a guy who’d
just got home from the military and hadn’t seen his wife yet. When Bob
would say, ‘Well, I guess we have a winner,’ and get close to the ‘belle,’ one of
the women would shriek as she had no idea her husband had returned.”
Live Practical Jokes
The practical jokes
Truth or Consequences
did are very different from what
is done today. “You have to remember,” Milt notes, “in the earlier days on NBC
(the first nine years of the show), it was totally live. Everything happened in real
time. We were
live
. When the big hand hit the hour, we were on. And, we only
had one commercial in the beginning of the show and another one at the end.”
Milt’s favorite live practical joke for
Truth Or Consequences
went something
like this:
First, Bob Barker would do the setup: He’d look at the camera and say,
“Here’s what’s going to happen…”
Conversations
Milt and Arlene premiered their latest collaboration with Richard Sherman,
“Pazzazz! The Musical” – a fond look back at the lives of vaudeville kings Weber
& Fields – at the Granada Theatre in Santa Barbara, starring stage veterans Joey
D’Auria as Lew Weber and Dale Kristien as Lillian Russell