The Star Wagon

I saw this on public television when I was 15 and alone at home one night when my parents went out for the evening. I was too young to appreciate the actor behind a character, or what it took to make a character compelling. All I knew was that watching Hanus (Dustin Hoffman) was somehow hypnotic and I wanted to watch it again. Which I did, several times. It was only years later that I put two and two together and realized who it was!

I saw this in the late 60s and have never forgotten it. I didn't even remember the title, but decided to search for it under Orson Bean.

What a gem! I saw it along with The Miracle Worker and was blown away by both of them. My kids are the age I was when I saw this, and I definitely want them to see it.

Thank you for this site.

This TV movie made a lasting impression on me. It opens with Dustin Hoffman being an old man. I thought he was an old man and couldn't figure out how I had never heard or seen him before. Later in the story he plays a young man and I realize that the actor is really just a young man, an unknown actor who is destined to make it big. Shortly afterwards, The Graduate opened and the rest is history.

I also remember Orson Bean who got top billing. He was adequate. In the 1960's he was mostly on talk shows playing at being a charming imp.

Maybe because Hoffman made such an impression on me, the story is less memorable. The story was good but not great.

That six people before me voted high-ratings for this long-unseen PBS broadcast from the '60s indicates that a few other people enjoyed it as I did. Anderson's play, from the '30s, featured Burgess Meridith and Lillian Gish in its original staging-- the story involves a disappointed inventor whose time-machine gives him a chance to revamp his life. Appealingly, the "early days" he and his buddy return to is a turn-of-century idyll (much of the broadcast was videotaped outside, near a lake). Orson Bean cuts a surprisingly romantic figure, and he has a lovely tenor solo of the traditional hymn "Jerusalem". But his stooge, a gnomish misfit with a compulsive belch, gets all the attention-- a very young Dustin Hoffman muttering and engagingly skulking in the shadows. Before THE GRADUATE appeared, this film anticipated the career to come. The film is once again available on videotape (priced expensively, for institutional use), and it will appear fitfully in retrospectives.

I remember watching this in 1966, when it was on TV.

I finally got a DVD copy of it in 2022, so watched it again.....66 years later.

It was worth the wait. Sweet, moving, and profound. Dustin Hoffman got 3rd to 4th billing, which was correct for this, but he and Orson Bean really made the film.

This is the way TV used to be. We miss it.