Good Morning World

The veteran producers of Dick Van Dyke had a hand in doing this show. They did a great job. The entire cast of the show was really solid. If you want a prime example of how hot Goldie Hawn was as a young woman, this series really shows her off. This was before Laugh-In.

Billy De Wolf was an excellent Station Manager for this show. His mannerisms on this show were borrowed by Pat Paulsen when he was doing sketches on the Smothers Brothers Comedy hour. De Wolfs character is a classic.

Jodie Baker & Ronnie Schell really complemented each other well on the show as the morning DJ's who were always getting into trouble. I wish the ratings had kept this show on longer. It was the best sitcom on CBS during its short run.

CBS remembered it well as they took the format for this series, tweaked it, & brought it back as WKRP In Cincinnati. When you watch this, it is very obvious where the latter show had its roots. WKRP was a great show in its own right, & lasted longer, but without this show, there would have been no WKRP.

If you see this show anyplace, pick it up. Good Morning World is a 1960's classic. The introduction of each episode has a 1960's flair with the fast shower, shave, & freeway trip to work.

GOOD MORNING, WORLD was an amusing bit of fluff with Joby Baker and Ronny Schell that was set on a radio show that was produced by Billy DeWolfe. Baker and Schell played Lewis and Clarke, the D.J.s on the show, who found their attempts to enliven their show curtailed by DeWolfe (whose name was Roland Hutton). Baker was married to Linda Lewis, and Schell dating Golde Hawn. DeWolfe was married, but you never saw his wife. The show was on Tuesday nights from 9:30 to 10:00 P.M.

I don't recall all the episodes (it ran for only one year). There were two that I recall, one involving DeWolfe's background and the other dealing with Baker and Schell's fondness for Laurel and Hardy. In the latter, they both see (in a novelty antique store) a salt and pepper set that are in the shape of Stan and Ollie, and both want it. The perfect solution doesn't occur to them (keep the set at the radio studio boys) because each feels he is the world's biggest fan of the team. So, at one point, they try to best each other in a rapid fire trivia contest on the films of Laurel and Hardy. I remember one of the questions dealt with the first short they starred in together ("Putting Pants on Philip").

The one with DeWolfe's past is interesting because it enables us to see him from his nightclub/vaudeville days. Billy DeWolfe is remembered for his snide, fussbudgets. He is like a younger brother of Clifton Webb (it would have been amusing if they had been together in a film as brothers). But his best known characterization before he hit the movies was "Mrs. Murgatroyd", a tight-ass-ed lady who reveals her pent-up feelings when she gets drunk with a friend at a local bar. This actually was shown in one of DeWolfe's early films, and is quite a funny piece of business. But we rarely saw much more of his early acts. In the episode on GOOD MORNING, WORLD, DeWolfe and the show are running a charity program - they get phoned in requests that the D.J.'s will do for money for a charity. One of the requests that is phoned in requests that the show put on some unknown man. It turns out it is DeWolfe. His wife has called in because she wants him to do the routines that he played when he was courting her (the name is his long forgotten stage name). And DeWolfe, for the last five minutes cuts up in very unusual comic bits that one normally never thought of him doing. It was a very unusual episode actually, and quite rewarding.

It never picked up the audience it deserved. Too bad, for it was above average as far as a sit-com of that period.

For anyone wondering what The Dick Van Dyke Show would have been like in color, here you go. Another reviewer said it was similar to Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm, and that's a good analogy. The biggest difference is Seinfeld was tailored for network broadcast, while CYE found its niche on cable. Unfortunately for Good Morning World, there was no cable in 1968. Coupled with a second-tier group of actors and that TDVDS had expended the audience for the show's premise, Good Morning World was destined to fail.

Honestly, what's really surprising (and actually rather laudable) was how the writers for GMW managed to come up with new ideas for scripts (lame as they might have been) rather than taking the easy way out and just recycling old TDVDS ideas.

But, really, when watching GMW, you have to imagine the DVDS actors, plus the sets being in B&W, and you quickly realize that there's not a lot of difference between the two. The sad fact was that TDVDS' time had simply passed and no one was interested in a color version with different actors.

The 26 half-hour episodes of the situation comedy "Good Morning World" were originally broadcast by CBS during its 1967-68 season. Many of those who tuned in to see the premiere of "Laugh-In" in the fall of 1968 did so to see Goldie Hawn who had already developed a cult following from playing the Lewis' ditzy neighbor Sandy Kramer on "Good Morning World".

Dave and Linda Lewis were a married couple played by Joby Baker and Julie Parrish much in the vein of the Petrie's from "The Dick Van Dyke Show". Not a big surprise as both shows were produced and developed by Carl Reiner and Sheldon Leonard. Dave was also coupled with bachelor Larry Clarke (Ronnie Schell who viewers already knew as Gomer Pyle's friend Duke Slater) as an early-morning drive time Los Angeles radio DJ team known as (big surprise) "Lewis and Clarke". Think 1960's "WKRP" with funny voices, silly chatter, and general on-air antics between songs and commercials.

The show followed the home and office lives of this "sort of" wacky pair; mixing elements of their personal lives in with bits involving their overbearing boss, station manager Roland B. Hutton (Billy DeWolfe).

The series was a few years ahead of its time and the basic formula would be more successful a few years later as "The Mary Tyler Moore Show". MTM's famous "Teddy Awards" was a tribute to "Golden Mikey Awards" featured on "Good Morning World".

Good writing and excellent performances make it well worth watching.

Then again, what do I know? I'm only a child.

OK, the producers of this show wrote the Dick Van Dyke Show. Problem is they produced this show and didn't write for it. It's not funny. The characters are one dimensional. Carl Reiner wrote about the writing staff of a prime time comedy-variety show because that's what he knew. Apparently, nobody connected with this show had any experience working in radio (unlike WKRP, even though that experience was about 20 years out of date). The situations are dull and not believable. Amazon Prime is showing it now so we can all see how bad it was.