Remembering Soupy Sales: Familiar face on 1960s TV
Photo credit: AP | In this Nov. 17, 1966, file photo, Soupy Sales rehearses for his Broadway debut in "Come Live With Me," in Manhattan. Soupy Sales, the rubber-faced comedian whose anything-for-a-chuckle career was built on 20,000 pies to the face and 5,000 live TV appearances across a half-century of laughs, died Oct. 22, 2009. He was 83.
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Soupy Sales' career in photos
Soupy Sales: Is there anyone out there - from Mineola to Ridge, from Eatons Neck to East Islip - who grew up in front of their TV set in the mid-'60s and doesn't have an absolutely vivid memory of that name, of that face?
Anyone?
Unlikely, because for a brief, shining and (yes) even slightly controversial period, Sales, who died Thursday at 83, was a kids' TV king, and the 75-mile radius beyond his midtown Channel 5 studio was his kingdom. He was one of the early - maybe the first - postmodern kids' TV hosts (before even anyone knew what "postmodern" meant) who could laugh at his straitlaced contemporaries and know that his audience would laugh along with him. He straddled audience divides, appealing to adults almost as much as to kids, with pure flights of lunacy.
Soupy Sales was the cool kids' host in a genre still dominated by squares. He played music (mostly jazz), told jokes, performed skits, threw (though mostly received) cream pies - famous victims included Soupy fans Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr. - and performed a famous and much copied novelty dance, the Mouse.
His most famous sidekick was a giant dog, White Fang, never seen except for a pair of giant, impossibly expressive paws. Fang grunted - Frank Nastasi was both voice and puppeteer - and Sales translated for his viewers. Some critics said the whole act subverted the good clean fun of kids' hosts like Bob Keeshan ("Captain Kangaroo").
They were right. The act did.
Born Milton Supman - "Soupy" was actually a derivation of a pet kids' name, "Soup Bone" - in Franklinton, N.C., on Jan. 8, 1926, he later joined the Navy, and after service in the Pacific kicked around local radio and TV as a comic and DJ. The big break was in Detroit, where "Lunch With Soupy Sales" became a huge hit, and he later shifted to Los Angeles where his show went directly to the ABC network. Relations with the network deteriorated - "interference" from the suits is how some explained the rupture - and he took the show to New York.
He was made for the city and the city apparently for him. "The Soupy Sales Show" was a giant hit for WNEW / 5, then an adventurous independent station with a huge appetite for original programs.
"There was a lot of innovative stuff [and] it was a very dynamic place," said Ted Kavanau, boss of the stations' programs at the time. "But [the hosts] were working with nothing. The budgets were tiny and they had to be creative in whatever way they could think of."
Chuck McCann - one of the kids' show triumvirate on Channel 5 that included Sandy Becker and Sales - said Friday that he first met his friend in Detroit. "He was silly and crazy and electric and alive - and he appealed to adults as much as kids, because the fathers were coming home from work and watching with the kids.
"We were basically comics and what we did was very visual, whereas Mr. Rogers or the Captain were always talking down to kids. It was always 'Well, let's go here and see what Mr. Rabbit is doing,' or 'Hey, kids, let's go and pull my sweater out of the drawer.' We did parodies on those guys."
The New York run didn't last long, even by TV standards. Sales ruled the New York air only for four or so years during the mid-1960s, ending after kids TV advocate groups pressured stations to drop host-driven shows, according to McCann. Sales went on to become a game show fixture, launched another version of the kids program in the late '70s, and had a radio gig at WNBC (now WFAN) in the 1980s. But he never recaptured the magic of the early years.
"He broke through the four walls," McCann said. "He looked into the lens and went into their living rooms and their hearts. . . . Nobody does that anymore. It's really a shame."
