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It Takes A Tough Man To Make A Tender Chicken Dance.

6 Jun

June 6, 2011

GEORGE: Do chickens have individual personalities?
KRAMER: I don’t care.
GEORGE: If you had five chickens could you tell them apart by just the way they acted? Or would they all just be walking around? Cluck, cluck, cluck? Because if they have individual personalities I don’t think we should be eating them.
           –Seinfeld, The Dinner Party

Any of you guys coming to NYC? If you are coming to the City the best part of the City to visit is Chinatown, and the best time to visit Chinatown is the 1970′s. So hop in your hot tub time machines and travel back with me to the era of the ABA, roller-disco, and dancing chickens.

Yes, dancing chickens. And this time I mean it.

But you’ll have to wait a minute for it.

Remember the show That’s Incredible? It was on in the air in the early 80’s. It was sort of a modern take on Ripley’s Believe it or Not, and was hosted by the scary-talented Fran Tarkenton, whose impressive TV resume includes playing in some football games televised on Monday Night Football. With him were John Davidson, whose hair was tailor-made for television, and Cathy Lee Crosby, whom I am still not sure why she became well-known.

I think John is farting.

The show was a hit, and if you wonder what the ratings were, don’t bother. You know you are talking about a hit show when you can find this in its wikipedia entry:

The show has been cited as an influence on hip-hop culture in New Zealand, where much television programming in the 1980s was American. In 1983 the show featured several dancing crews, giving youth of Pacific Island and Maori heritage, many of whom were interested in hip-hop culture and dance, a sense of connectedness to global youth culture. The Floormasters hip hop dance crew appeared on the show in 1983.

But since I found this on wikipedia, which I stubbornly refuse to capitalize, that could simply be someone’s idea of a joke. I watched every episode of Flight of the Conchords and they never once talked about That’s Incredible.

I never really watched the show but I did have some of the books, at least the first three. Each volume had sections on some incredible people or things, like knife throwers or the world’s fattest midget.

It was in those pages that I read about the Dancing Chicken.

The Dancing Chicken lived in my neck of the woods, New York City. Specifically, it lived in Chinatown, and outside of Colonel Sanders’ backyard a more dangerous spot for a chicken to live you’d be hard-pressed to find. I already knew about the Dancing Chicken and his friend, a chicken of mystery whom I will reveal in due time. In fact, I had already seen them a few times.

Now, how you feel about the Dancing Chicken depends on how you feel about animal cruelty. On a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being a chicken left out in the rain, and 10 being a chicken getting sodomized by a wolf, this falls in at about a 2.5. If that offends you, and you are still reading after “a chicken getting sodomized by a wolf” you may want to skip ahead a few paragraphs to the mystery chicken.

The chickens lived at the sadly gone Chinatown Fair, an unofficial landmark and a great place to play video games and pinball, but an ever better place to get robbed and pick-pocketed so you had to watch out.

Hey, what word is missing below dancing? Hmm...

The Dancing Chicken was not far inside the front door. These chickens were major attractions. If I am not mistaken, they were both easily visible from the street.

Straight from YouTube, here is The Dancing Chicken of Chinatown


What made it dance? A mild electrical charge on the floor. Hey, it was the 70’s. New York was the Wild West and if some poor chicken got its feet tingled, then tough. If a respected military man like Col. Sanders, who  retired from a lifetime of campaigns and trench warfare, never said boo about chicken abuse, who was there to argue?

See what New York has come to? You can’t smoke outdoors, you can’t drive in Mid-Town, and you can’t electrocute a chicken. Thanks Mayor Bloomberg.

The Dancing Chicken’s mystery friend (so to speak- in reality they were fierce rivals) was the Tic-Tac-Toe Playing Chicken. You may have even seen one yourself. Although it was less cruel than the Dancing Chicken it was more fun. You got a chance to play a game against a chicken, and who hasn’t dreamed about that? You’d put in a quarter and the chicken would walk over to its “thinking booth,” a screen behind which he would make his move. The chicken always went first, and if you know tic-tac-toe you know that is a big advantage because the first to move usually wins. The chicken had one other advantage- he wasn’t really playing. A computer was making the moves.

What happened was that when you put in your money a piece of corn or barley or whatever chickens eat dropped into a slot behind the thinking booth. The chicken walked over and took the food and had to peck a certain button. It was always embarrassing to lose to the chicken and there was a ton of jeering. Every once in a while someone would overcome great odds and heroically win but those wins were few and far between.

These games still go on today.


That is a pretty lucky chicken. Most don’t get that level of respect.

“Is this chicken, what I have, or is this fish? I know it’s tuna, but it says ‘Chicken of the Sea.’” – Jessica Simpson.

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The Saturday Comics: The Shadow

4 Jun

June 4, 2011

Who Knows What Evil Lurks In the Hearts Of Men?

The Shadow Knows!

I refer, of course, to perhaps the most famous show OTR ever produced.

So who was The Shadow?

“Years ago in the Orient, The Shadow learned a strange and mysterious secret, the ability to cloud men’s minds so they cannot see him”

Or “using advanced techniques that may one day be available to law-enforcement, The Shadow fights crime as invisible as the wind, as inevitable as a guilty conscience.”

In his everyday identity, The Shadow is “Lamont Cranston, wealthy young man about town.”

Or an amateur criminologist. Or sometimes he was the best friend of the police commissioner.

Usually he was just some rich guy who stumbled into plot to rob a bank, or spent the night in a haunted mansion, or ran into his double, who just happened to be newly released from prison and planned to frame Cranston for war crimes or something. The show ran for almost three decades so the quality depends on when the episode was made. It could be a supernatural show with ghosts one season, a show where Cranston foils attempts at art forgery the next season.

But it doesn’t matter. An invisible man is the perfect character on radio- everyone is invisible. It’s radio, everyone is a disembodied voice. No special effects were needed. All they did was give his voice some echo and poof! He’s The Shadow.

BAD GUY 1: We got Cranston locked up in the vault. No one can get in or out, see?
BAD GUY 2: Hey! The vault is empty! What happened?
SHADOW: Ha ha ha, Cranston is gone, I am the Shadow!
BAD GUY 1: How did you get in? And what happened to Cranston? He was here just one second ago.
 SHADOW: Heh heh heh!

Once you suspend a ton of disbelief, this is a really good show. (Please discount the story where the guy thought he was a gorilla simply because he was hairy, thank you very much.)

On the radio, The Shadow was played by a whole lot of actors, but the first one was the best, Orson Welles. He only stayed for one season but his is the voice everyone remembers.

The Shadow was so popular they made a series of movies about the character. For some reason they never turned him invisible. He was just a silly looking guy in a hat that was too big for him and long black cape that he almost tripped over. Why he didn’t turn invisible is anybody’s guess. Roll film, stop film, actor walks off set, start film, hey! He turned invisible!

The Shadow on film was played, I swear I am not making this up, by a guy named Rod LaRoque. A better porn name is difficult to find. “Rod LaRock.” I suppose Long Cockman comes close. And while we are on the subject of dirty-sounding names, the radio Margot Lane, The Shadow’s assisstant, was first played by Agnes Moorehead.

The movie Shadow is a very different character than the radio Shadow, and for a good reason. Like the comic books and strips, the movie Shadow is based on the pulp fiction version of the character. While an invisible man is perfect for radio, it is kind of boring to watch. In print, The Shadow was a man in a dark cloak and hat. He carried a pair of guns and often used them. There was no invisibility for him, this Shadow had to rely on a perfect skill of disguise. And this Shadow wasn’t even Lamont Cranston, he just pretended to be. Confused?

There was a Lamont Cranston in the pulps and the Shadow did claim to be him but he wasn’t. It was a disguise. The real Cranston was a wealthy playboy. He was usually travelling around the world or away at some glamorous resort. His high-class connections were just what the shadow needed to open doors so while Cranston was away, The Shadow would assume his identity.

The real identity of the Shadow, and you didn’t hear it from me, was Kent Allard, a World War One Aviator.

In addition to the pulps there were many comic book versions of The Shadow, and one of the best was put out by DC in the 1970’s, written by the legendary Denny O’Neil and often illustrated by the equally legendary Michael William Kaluta. And since this was a DC comic, he even met Batman. In fact, Batman claimed it was The Shadow who influenced him to fight crime.

But this is a Saturday Comics installment so let’s tear ourselves away from the comics (which I have a complete set of, including those Batman issues) and look at the rarely seen newspaper strip.

These are pretty hard to find. The strip began in 1940 and ended just two years later when World War Two broke out and the strip’s creators were drafted. Examples are hard to find online but luckily I have my own collection.

Some years ago in the 80’s the strips were collected in comic book form. the paper they were printed on was cheap even by comic book standards and my issues are all very, very yellow, much worse than other comics from the same era. The pages were even printed crooked!

I can’t vouch that the strips are formatted the same way they were as originally printed. Compare the dimensions to the strip above and you’ll see why I have doubts. I am also afraid some panels, like the title panel in the strip above, have been removed totally. At any rate, the odds are you have not seen these strips so sit back and check out an OTR legend and comic strip rarity, The Shadow!

As a bonus, I’m including what may be the most famous single broadcast of OTR, the infamous War of the Worlds broadcast starring Orson Welles and The Mercury Theater.

Special and extreme thanks to Jim of Relic Radio for providing the War of the Worlds. Check out his site for tons of great- and free! radio shows.

More special and extreme thanks to Peter Church of the wonderful Radio’s Revenge podcast for finding the music that opened this page, The Shadow theme.

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