Captain Fogg
In the early 1960's, Channel 11 officials asked Lary Lewman to come up
with another kid's show for the weekend.
"Things were going so good with 'Pete The Pirate' that they wanted to
do more Pete, and I was out of story ideas," he recalls. "So
they asked me to do a character associated with 'Pete The
Pirate.' I'd had a really successful role in college--the
first lead I played in college drama was in 'Thunder Rock' and I was a
lighthouse keeper. So I thought, well nobody's ever done a
kid's show as a lighthouse keeper. Now it turns out there's a
good reason for that, because nothing ever happens in a
lighthouse! I didn't figure that out until I got the show on
the air."
The show was "Captain Fogg" on Sunday mornings. Lary
continues, "I had a huge putty nose, and we're going in at the crack of
dawn on Sunday morning and glomming this putty on my nose, you know,
and geez, all this hair. Captain Fogg--had a British
accent. We did a lot of origami, mechanical magic, anything I
could think of. But the worst thing, there was a guy
downtown--his name I mercifully can't remember--who ran a costume
shop. I was renting a coat for Earl Reeves to appear as a
villian. And the guy said 'I wouldn't loan this to anyone who
wasn't a professional, and I wouldn't rent this out cause it's a really
valuable coat.'" Promising to take good care of the coat,
Lary dumped flour and water on the villian, which hardened to a
cement-like wheat paste on the precious coat. "I stayed up
all night, took nine hours with a paring knife and a pair of tweezers,
but there wasn't a trace of that stuff in the morning when I took it
back! As Bob Jones used to say, the golden age of television
wasn't so damned golden!" |
