The picks and pans of prime time for Wednesday, June 12th, 1991.
Hello again everybody, I'm Mary Hart.
And I'm John Tesch. And the official beginning of summer is still a week away, but fall already looms in the thoughts of network TV programming czars.
Will their prime time lineups hit or miss?
The three networks will introduce 24 new series this fall, and according to a media research group, there will be only one clear winner, and this is it.
My wife says when I put this bad boy on, I turn into a wild, hairy, disgusting, grunting ape.
Is that supposed to be me?
Home Improvement, scheduled for Tuesdays on ABC, stars comedian Tim Allen as the host of a local Mr. Fix-It show, whose home life is in disrepair.
The study was done by Bulls-Elle, Inc., and Steve Sternberg, manager of broadcast research, explains why the show is a hit.
Home Improvement is the type of show, the pilot was very funny, and it's the type of show that we think they can maintain the material from week to week, and it follows Full House, and it's right before Roseanne, so it's sandwiched in a good time period.
Other shows predicted to have a chance at success are ABC's Step by Step, starring Suzanne Summers and Patrick Duffy, which will be on ABC's Hot Friday schedule.
This is like a fairy tale.
A revamped Carol Burnett show on CBS has a chance due to a built-in audience and three new NBC shows, a drama I'll Fly Away with Sam Waterston, and two new Saturday night sitcoms, The Torklson's and Nurses.
Where do they get these nurses from? Where are the good ones?
The good smart ones like us?
Yeah.
They're too smart to be nurses.
According to the study, there will be plenty of failures, and a show called Teach on CBS may have a particular distinction.
Teach could be one of the first programs to be canceled, I think.
Also included in the study's failures are some stars and their new shows, James Garner's Man and the People, Marlee Matlin and Mark Harmon in Reasonable Doubts,
Marcia Mason in Grown Ups, and Terry Garr in Good and Evil. All these shows have been given little chance of survival.
NBC has won the network ratings race for the past six years, but the 1991 and 92 season could see a change, according to Sternberg.
The difference may have nothing to do with the new shows in the lineups.
Talking about a real winner is kind of like splitting hairs, but with CBS having the World Series, Super Bowl, and Winter Olympics,
they may have the edge for finishing the full season in first place.
The fall television season gets into full swing in September.
Actress Julia Duffy is changing shows and changing generations. It's goodbye to Baby Talk and hello to Designing Women.
What can I do? You can't stand in the way of genius.
Julia Duffy, the star of Baby Talk, is officially calling it quits, but she's already in final negotiations to play a new role on Designing Women.
With Delta Burke and Gene Smart apparently on the way out and Jan Hook's about to come on board along with Duffy now,
critics say the show is poised for a big season. That's the word from Ken Tucker of Entertainment Weekly.
I think long term it opens up lots of possibilities for lots of new storylines.
It just makes sense that even in the basic premise of the show that these are women running a business,
to have new employees, new partners in this business, it just adds a lot to the show.
As a wife and mom in real life, Julia reportedly was looking for a supporting role that would give her more free time,
but Tucker says it was a matter of Baby Talk holding her back creatively.
Whoa, party down.
I think Julia Duffy, who's been completely wasted on television on Baby Talk, finally graduates to Grown-Up Talk
and can do some of the good work that she used to do on New Heart.
Well, where's Julia?
And I think all these changes, you have the residual bonus of the public squabbling between Delta Burke and Linda Bloodworth-Thompson
going on all summer, which will be highly entertaining and can carry us through the summer until fall, new episodes of Designing Women.
Today's entertainment trade papers quote sources that say Julia Duffy would play the spoiled cousin of the Sugar Baker sisters on Designing Women.
On our Inside Story tomorrow, fashion.
Believe it or not, new trends for men in underwear.
At first I was kind of skeptical about it. I didn't really know how the fans were going to react, and I had to get my OK from my wife first.
You'll see it all here, the new look at Men's Unmentionables, our Inside Story tomorrow on Entertainment Tonight.
Coming up next, Danny DeVito reveals the secrets of dressing like a star right down to his skitties.
And later, Paul McCartney is full of surprises, and he may be heading to your town to spring one.
The two most important things in Danny DeVito's life are his work as an actor and his family life.
Now he gets to combine the best of both worlds, and he's doing it in his own backyard.
Lisa Gibbons went on location to bring a bit of Danny's world back to you.
And action!
In his newest film, Jack the Bear, Danny DeVito plays a single father faced with raising two young sons alone following his wife's death.
The film's being shot in the hills above Hollywood, where the movie makers converted a soccer field from scratch into an entire neighborhood.
Well, Danny liked that concept, but he especially liked the fact that he and his family lived just around the corner.
I could walk to my house from here. Like in the mornings, if I'm not called right away in the morning,
I take the kids to school or hang out with Jake at home, and I'm usually home for dinner.
So you get some sense of a real life.
Oh, yeah.
Being a dad at home, then coming to the set and being a dad on camera.
It's so great. Yeah, it's really interesting.
As a matter of fact, we're going to do a Halloween scene, which is a wonderful scene in this beautiful neighborhood.
And we're going to have, my kids are going to come tomorrow night. We're going to shoot.
Oh, be trick-or-treaters?
Yeah, be trick-or-treaters on the block.
Oh, no!
In the movie, Danny is something of a hero to the neighborhood kids.
He hosts a late night horror movie show.
In the show, Danny actually plays two different guys, both complete wackos, and Danny's loving it.
I play Al Gorey, who's this guy. I got these teeth, and I talk like this here, you know, and I'm this guy with a hat.
And then there's Psycho Ward Cleaver, who's a guy who has, you know, he's an axe, he's a very neat kind of guy who's, you know,
Psycho Ward Cleaver.
walks around with a cleaver in his head.
You look so different from the last time when we talked to you.
I lost a few pounds.
You've got the stubble, and the clothes are not quite as nice.
Yeah, everything's different.
And you've got the hair thing going.
Yeah, a little bit of hair, yeah. You know, these are like period clothes and stuff. It's all out of my closet.
These pants, see? These shoes, they're all... I don't know where I got the socks, I don't remember, but the pants and the shirt.
And the underwear.
Okay, Danny, I'll just take your word for it. Liza Givens, Entertainment Tonight.
Thanks, Liza and Fanny.
DeVito will next star as the Penguin in the Batman 2 movie, which begins production in August.
He has another movie, Other People's Money, which comes out in October.
Plus, he'll star with Jack Nicholson in Hoffa, the film biography of the late Jimmy Hoffa, which will get underway early next year.
Anthony Quinn is also a very busy man in Hollywood these days.
Not many 76-year-old actors can make that claim.
After a career that dates back to 1936, Quinn has sunk his teeth into three full-bodied performances that are putting him back in the hot feature film spotlight.
Take a look.
In Jungle Fever, the story is set in Brooklyn and is one of interracial romance.
Playing the father of jilted John Turturro is robust Anthony Quinn.
You call that a woman? I was married to a real woman, Joe.
Last month, Quinn was in France at the Cannes Film Festival, joining the cast and director Spike Lee.
It turns out Lee is a big fan of the actor's famous 1954 Italian picture, La Strada, directed by Federico Fellini.
He felt like he'd known me for years. He has known me for years because he saw La Strada when he was a little boy.
He loved it. And he went after Fellini and got him to sign the billboard.
Got me to sign it, so that's one of his favorite showpieces in his house.
Quinn can also be seen in Only the Lonely as the lovesick next-door neighbor of widow Maureen O'Hara.
Feel that stomach. Hard. Like an 18-year-old. Come on, feel it.
I'm not feeling anything of yours.
This is the fifth film co-starring the two veterans.
I thought she was the most beautiful woman in the world. I still think she's one of the most beautiful women in the world.
And we're old friends. I've had a very lucky year.
While the lucky year is still not over, the upcoming gangster film Mobsters lies ahead,
and this two-time Oscar winner feels no need to worry about chasing down film roles.
Kids 20 years old, 25, it's ridiculous to compete. And I'm just delighted to be playing in the same field with them.
Jungle Fever and Only the Lonely are in theaters now. Mobsters will be coming out at the end of July.
You can call him King Koto. Actor Yaffit Koto claims in a soon-to-be-released autobiography called Royalty
that he has British royal blood coursing through his veins.
And those claims have the British blue blood's upper lips quivering.
As the co-star of films like Midnight Run and Alien, Yaffit Koto is used to action and adventure.
But the tale he tells in his upcoming autobiography sounds stranger than fiction.
Koto was born in Harlem but claims to be the great-great-grandson of England's Queen Victoria.
According to him, Victoria's son Edward visited the African nation of Cameroon in 1863 and seduced a Cameroon princess.
Her son was a whoremonger. He was out with every woman that he could possibly be with.
In fact, the Befin-Ghadi, the living librarians of African history, cite the fact that he was there
and he went back to Egypt and then he took his ships and went down to the southern coast into Cameroon.
Their illegitimate son, Koto's great-grandfather, became king of the Cameroons.
Koto began researching his roots while filming Live and Let Die in 1973.
But historians like Theo Aaronson claim his facts are faulty.
I don't think it's true at all. No, it's absolutely impossible. It certainly couldn't be true.
For one thing, the Prince of Wales, I must say, was quite capable of doing this because he was a great friend for the ladies.
But he never ever went to the Cameroons.
Koto didn't plan to create a controversy with his book.
He wrote it out of a feeling of pride in his African heritage and has no expectations of a family reunion at Buckingham Palace.
I'm not trying to be accepted by them. I'm very happy to be accepted by my new-found royal families in the Cameroon.
That's what this book is about.
Koto says he was inspired by Alex Haley's search for his past in roots and has found the same difficulty in substantiating his own claims.
He's planning a trip to the Cameroons to learn more about his background soon.
Everybody loves a parade, including some imposters who horned in on a tribute to the troops during Monday's Big Event in New York City.
Monday's Welcome Home Parade not only featured stars of the battlefield and the stars of Hollywood,
but look-alikes danced in the streets as well, including Schwarzkopf's popular look-alike, Willard Scott.
On to bag dance, straight on through. We'll get him.
In Washington, Jason Hervey of the Wonder Years and Rain Prior of Head of the Class helped out with the first National Children with HIV AIDS Awareness Day.
Hervey says education will help beat this disease.
I don't like it when people start speaking and they don't know what they're talking about. And I think people should just learn more about it.
In Los Angeles, Jessica Tandy, Penny Marshall, Ruby Dee, Lee Vuhlman, Billy Crystal and Whoopi Goldberg were presented with Crystal Awards by the group Women in Film
for their efforts in improving the depiction of women in film and television.
The time has come to really see that women can be something else than a love object for a man.
Also in Los Angeles, MacGyver star Richard Dean Anderson visited the Challenger's Boys and Girls Club.
The organization provides a safe haven for inner-city kids and has been featured in several MacGyver episodes.
It's a group Anderson wholeheartedly supports.
It kind of speaks for itself. It's educational and kids are safe here.
Coming up next, tune up with Paul McCartney for a blitz of surprise concerts.
It all began for Paul McCartney 30 years ago in a dank underground liver puddley and bar called the Cavern Club where he and the Beatles would pack the place night after night.
The accommodations were less than first class but the music and atmosphere more than made up for it.
Now Paul McCartney wants to try and recapture that feeling of spontaneity of the early days with a special series of surprise concerts.
Paul McCartney's arrival in the sleepy English city of Cornwall marks the latest in a series of unannounced shows the superstar has been playing throughout Europe.
For McCartney, this impromptu tour of small nightclubs is a return to his roots.
These are the size of things that we would have played in the real early days of Wings or in fact early days of the Beatles.
Much of the show features McCartney and his band playing acoustically with only a microphone and an amplifier without any additional electronics involved.
We can work it out, we can work it out
It is how we first played you know I wrote most of my songs on acoustic guitar and so I like playing acoustic guitar it kind of just feels a bit more like a folk club.
Life is very short and there's no time
These informal club dates are announced just days in advance. A ploy Paul hopes will give fans the upper hand over scalpers.
This was announced on the local TV and then people they were told where they could buy them so it's whoever ran the fastest which is better you know it's not just the richest people who get them it's more like our audience.
McCartney says he loves the reaction to his music and has so far sprung concerts in London, Naples, Italy and Barcelona, Spain.
So far he hasn't divulged any plans to do a similar tour in the US but if he told us then it wouldn't be a secret.
Well it is no secret that Leonard Malton has a knack for finding movies to compliment new releases on home video and this week Leonard has come up with a pack of them that answer the call of the wild Leonard.
Well Mary earlier this year the Walt Disney Company brought Jack London's classic story White Fang to the screen and now that version is out on video.
The real star of the film is a wolf dog and I'm taking that as my cue to recommend some other wolfish movies you can find on video.
Each one has something special to offer.
What's his name? Latham. What does that mean? White Fang.
Thus young Ethan Hawke makes friends with the wolf dog known as White Fang.
They embark on an Alaskan Odyssey together with crusty trapper Klaus Maria Brandauer in which all three are called upon to test their mettle.
Charles Martin Smith puts himself to the test in the fascinating story Never Cry Wolf as a man who ventures to the Arctic by himself to study wolf behavior.
There's a young brown wolf who seems to be a particular favorite of the Cubs. I've named him Uncle Albert.
To survive at one point he's forced to eat mice which is not something you'd expect to find in a film made by the Disney studio, Home of Mickey.
Then there's the original 1941 horror classic The Wolf Man with Lon Chaney Jr. as the doomed Larry Talbot who learns of his curse from a fortune telling gypsy.
He will spell pentagram wolf pain. I'm sick of the whole thing. I'm gonna get out of here.
Whoever is beaten by a werewolf and lives becomes a werewolf himself.
It's all true as he turns wolf man and goes crazy in the process.
A top flight cast and pretty advanced special effects keep this film fresh and watchable today.
Finally there's a different kind of wolf, the 1940s kind who goes wild at the sight of red hot riding hood and the sexually supercharged cartoon of the same name.
But he's not just a sex crazed maniac, he can be suave too.
I will give you diamonds, bears, eminence. I will even give you a new scent of white sidewalk tires.
What's your answer to that, babe?
Well, my answer is...
No!
That cartoon caused such a sensation in the 40s that it led to a string of sequels and you can find them on a bunch of cassettes called Tex Avery's Screwball Classics.
Avery's the man who made those very funny cartoons.
Thanks, Leonard.
America's love affair with animals will be the theme for a one hour salute to America's pets on ABC. Celebrities and their canines, felines and fine feathered friends are featured in a show that gets down to basic animal instincts.
It's only fitting that pets are the guests of honor in this audience. The show is called A Salute to America's Pets.
It takes a look at our animal friends of all kinds, cats and dogs of course, and pigs, ponies, birds and whatever.
Marla Gibbs is one of the co-hosts.
They're not just pets, how they are actually in the working force. You know, how they help the handicapped, of course we know that.
Some of them do tricks, how they are actors who are working when I'm not.
One of those actors, Morris the Cat, makes an appearance and co-host Mary Fran is joined by her dog, Pinachi.
I'm his makeup artist. Do you think I do a good job? And his hairdresser.
His personal servant and slave. That is our relationship.
Other stars joining in with their furry friends are Angie Dickinson, Dick Clark, Lily Tomlin and a rather musical Bob Hope.
And they are beautiful dogs, I tell you that. Hey, aren't you pretty? Why don't you get a little sing for them?
Ow, ow!
Showbiz.
I'll say. The special will be broadcast on ABC tomorrow night and is part of a month-long effort to draw attention to the plight of the millions of abandoned pets in the United States.
As book lovers may already know, The Commanders is the top-selling book on the latest New York Times non-fiction list.
The ET Insider is here to tell you what's hot on the most stolen book charts.
According to Spin Magazine, bookstores tell them art books are in third place on the Thieves' favorite list because they have high resale value.
In runner-up position, any book by Jack Kerouac, the late dean of the B generation, and tops on the book swiping charts.
Any works by contemporary philosophers that Spin calls the three Bs, Paul Bowles, Charles Bukowski and William Burroughs, all favorites of Book Thieves.
Other entries in the Steelers' top ten, the I Ching, the Bible, the Prophet, and books recorded on cassette tapes, apparently taken by those too cheap to pay and too lazy to read.
One final book note, Spin reprints an old Newsweek quote from Vanilla Ice, the rapper slash writer.
Quotes, my rap music tells a story. You can write a book on each of my thoughts. End quote.
To which cool Moe Insider, who is living large lately, would like to add, it's nice that Ice is such a deaf rapper jammer.
Perhaps he lifted his stuff from the hammer. Whatever the case, the Insider being real, Vanilla Ice's thoughts are not worth a steal.
Air travel furnished and a promotional fee paid by Delta Airlines.
Fly to your favorite sunspot on Delta, Florida, the Bahamas, California, Mexico or Hawaii. At Delta, we love to fly and it shows.
Celebrating a birthday today after Timothy Busfield turns 34-something.
Singer Jim Neighbors is 59. Singer Vic DeMone, 63 today.
President George Bush turns 67 and actress Uta Hagen is 72.
And that's it for us for today. Skivvies tomorrow.
We're going to close with more from the Paul McCartney surprise tour. Here's We Can Work It Out. Enjoy it. See ya.
We can work it out