A simpler opening title sequence, without film clips or co-star credits, was also introduced. These stage portions were dropped in the second season, which followed a more traditional sitcom format. They would reappear halfway through the episode and discuss what had just occurred or hint at things to come. Each episode began with a framing sequence on a stage, where the pair would share gags with the audience and occasionally a fellow cast member, and often set up the episode's plot. Brooke, Kirk and Besser did not appear in the second season.įirst season shows opened with a title sequence over a montage of scenes from Abbott and Costello's early Universal films. Several episodes featured a pet chimp named "Bingo", who was dressed exactly the same as Costello she was later "fired" from the show after biting Costello. Bobby Barber and Joan Shawlee also appeared frequently in small roles. Joe Besser occasionally appeared as Stinky, a "little boy" dressed in a Little Lord Fauntleroy suit. Bacciagalupe, an Italian immigrant caricature who held a variety of jobs depending upon the requirements of the script. The supporting cast included Sidney Fields as Sidney Fields, their landlord Hillary Brooke as Hillary Brooke, their neighbor and sometime love interest for Costello Gordon Jones as Mike the Cop, a dimwitted foil for the boys and sometime rival for Hillary and Joe Kirk (Costello's brother-in-law) as Mr. As a result, the show became a valuable record of classic burlesque scenes performed by the duo.Ībbott and Costello portrayed unemployed actors sharing a small apartment in a rooming house in Los Angeles. Basically, if a situation or gag was funny, the team filmed it with little regard to plot, character or continuity. It was conceived as a vehicle to bring the duo's tried-and-true burlesque routines to television in a format that the team could control, without the musical interludes or love stories that marked most of their feature films, or the limitations and unpredictability of live television. The show was put into production in May 1951, soon after Abbott and Costello had joined the roster of rotating hosts of The Colgate Comedy Hour. Jerry Seinfeld has declared that The Abbott and Costello Show, with its overriding emphasis upon funny situations rather than life lessons, was the inspiration for his own long-running sitcom, Seinfeld. In 2007, Time magazine selected it for its "The 100 Best TV Shows of All-TIME". In 1998, Entertainment Weekly praised the series as one of the "100 Greatest TV Shows of All Time". The series is considered to be among the most influential comedy programs in history. The program premiered in syndication in the fall of 1952 and ran two seasons to the spring of 1954. In 1935 the discovery of a chest in a “pretty seaside town” was reported, a wooden chest inscribed “Capn Kidd his chest”, with a “false bottom” which contained “a treasure chart of an island in a certain remote Far Eastern Sea” (unnamed, like the “pretty seaside town”).The Abbott and Costello Show is an American television sitcom starring the comedy team of Bud Abbott and Lou Costello. In the public imagination pirates seem to have been busier burying their treasure on land than in obtaining it at sea. He survived in fiction, however, living on forever in legend as an immortal citizen of Grub Street and Hollywood, not to mention Fleet Street.īack at Saint Mary’s the hull of his sunken ship was reported at the bottom of the harbour in 1699 and has long since rotted away.īut in fiction, pirates always have treasure which survives them. Somewhat inebriated, at Execution Dock in Wapping, London, on May 23 1701, he was pushed off the scaffold, but the rope broke, not his neck, so he had to climb the ladder again for a second, successful hanging. Kidd denied this pact: “That is only what these witnesses say.” He was found guilty of piracy and condemned to death. Kidd “took a cup of Bomboe, and swore to be true to them”. Members of his crew testified (in return for their own freedom) that he had made a pact with the pirates at Saint Mary’s. After a while Kidd’s own leaking ship, the Adventure Galley, sank in the large harbour at Saint Mary’s and he sailed away in his captured prize, for the Caribbean and for capture and trial at the Old Bailey in London.
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