ajm-8

This much-hyped Saturday show (airing usually around the noon hour) was created by Bruce and Carole Hart who helped assemble Sesame Street, and was intended as a kind of SNL+American Bandstand+Phil Donahue for the 10-to-13-year-old set. If good intentions were the only important criteria, Hot Hero Sandwich would have been the greatest children's show ever.

But the show never really clicked (a TV Guide post-mortem was headlined, HOT HERO SANDWICH: THE AUDIENCE DIDN'T BITE). Simply put, the show's producers fatally underestimated the savviness of its audience. With Sesame Street, a three-year-old might easily confuse an alphabet cartoon for a TV commercial or pop song. A 12-year-old Hot Hero viewer, on the other hand, had no difficulty watching an SNL-like skit about playing hooky and IMMEDIATELY recognizing its self-congratulatory stay-in-school message. 6th and 7th graders have finely-honed BS detectors. They know when they're being talked down to.

That being said, the series had its pluses: excellent production values, a slew of top guest stars/music performers, and a decent regular ensemble (Denny Dillon, in fact, graduated to SNL in the fall of 1980, and has had a solid career as a comedic character actress). And when the show wasn't full of its pro-social pretensions, quite a few of the sketches were genuinely funny (writer Andy Breckman went on to SNL, the early years of Late Night with David Letterman and Monk). Hot Hero Sandwich was very much a series of its time, when networks were scrambling to provide "pro-social entertainment" for kids. If they'd only focused on the "entertainment" portion of the equation, the series might well have lasted.

A misguided film adaptation of the 1973 Broadway smash, and indirectly a remake of Ingmar Bergman's Smiles of a Summer Night. What should have been a small, character-driven musical gets swallowed up in elaborate sets and costumes, and sadly much of Stephen Sondheim's score was cut. The stage play and Bergman film were set in Sweden; for tax purposes the movie was filmed in Vienna, thus losing Sweden's "perpetual sunset" which served as the story's sexual metaphor. Harold Prince expertly directed the stage version, but he's simply all wrong here; Stanley Donen or Herbert Ross would have been better behind the camera.

In 1990 PBS telecast the New York City Opera's production of Night Music (starring Sally Ann Howes and George Lee Andrews) as part of its "Live from Lincoln Center" series. That production captured this musical's wit, sensuality and lyricism. A pity it's not available on DVD.

In the intended generation gap comedy, Bob Hope and Jackie Gleason play bickering not-quite-in-laws. I say "not-quite" because Gleason's son and Hope's daughter are cohabiting without benefit of matrimony.

Living in sin.

Shacking up, don't you know.

The kids have a baby out of wedlock and put it up for adoption so they can concentrate on performing in their Top Ten psychedelic rock group, The Comfortable Chair (Cue Cardinal Fang: "The COMFY CHAIR!?!") Hope and estranged wife Jane Wyman (whose real-life ex-husband was governor of California when this film was made) adopt the tot using fake identities and, after a round of 3 a.m. feedings, grudgingly reconcile.

Jackie discovers that Hope & Wyman have the grandchild, revealing the info during a golf match between Hope and a chimp. (You're ahead of me. Bob loses.) But Ol' Ski Nose solves everything by impersonating the youngsters' guru, a Maharishi-like religious leader, at a huge concert. In disguise, Bob tells the kids to forget nirvana and perfect happiness and get married instead. By the time everyone figures out who's who, the rock stars have their baby AND wedding rings, Bob and Jane are back together and the new house Bob just sold Jackie gets destroyed in a mudslide.

Even for a wacky 1960s comedy, the events in this movie defy logic: What adoption agency would instantly hand over a newborn to a decidedly over-the-hill couple? Wouldn't Hope and Wyman face prison sentences for using phony names to get the baby? And how could Jackie Gleason attract Tina "I Trained at the Actors Studio, But They're Going to Put 'She was Ginger on Gilligan's Island' On My Tombstone" Louise?

Hope's probably the LAST guy in Hollywood to have been defending monogamy, given his notorious unfaithfulness to wife Dolores over a seven-decade marriage, and it's doubly offensive that he spoofed an Eastern religious figure to do so. Imagine the justifiable outcry had he impersonated a priest or a rabbi.

Gleason's in decent form but is given little to do. HOW TO COMMIT MARRIAGE isn't as utterly bizarre as another Gleason '60s vehicle, SKIDOO (1968), but simply one of Hope's worst starring films -- a pity, because for around 25 years Hope WAS a legitimately great movie comedian. At least it's interesting to see Leslie Nielsen play the straight man in this film, and the young lovers are JoAnna Cameron (who set the hearts of seven-year-old boys aflutter as ISIS in the 1970s) and Tim Matheson (who, FIFTEEN years after this movie, would still be playing a collegian in UP THE CREEK).