Arthur Godfrey
I recently read somewhere that this movie is at least somewhat based on Arthur Godfrey...as was The Great Man. Anyone else know more about this?
shareWell, I’ve heard that, but I’ve also heard that Rhodes is a composite character based on at least 3 different folks active in television from ca 1948-1956. Arthur Godfrey is one, Ed Sullivan another.
The thing though with Arthur Godfrey, it concerned his dismissal of singer Julius LaRosa on the air in October, 1953 without prior notice to LaRosa. If you’ll have a look at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6s75wpdiri8 the incident is explained pretty well.
Both Arthur Godfrey & Julius LaRosa survived the flap, but Godfrey took one square in the chops, as this little ditty suggests, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVgtOHxufts
The other two were likely Will Rogers (namechecked two or three times as a common-man character with power) and Elvis Presley, who was the female sensation at the time and, like Lonesome Rhodes, a successful guitar-lugging recording artist from the Mid-South.
Uncle Don was a children's show host on radio who supposedly was destroyed in a fashion similar to Rhodes, saying something he shouldn't have when he thought he was off the air. That, however, has been just about proved to be a false urban legend. Still, he gets name-checked in a newspaper headline we see after Lonesome's last show.
I've heard the incident you are talking about in a bloopers collection. It is NOT a myth. He said something like "Are we off? GOOD! That oughta hold the little bastards!"
If you were observing this nutty planet, would YOU want to make contact?
No, it's a myth. The recording you heard was from Kermit Schaefer's Bloopers LP, which used recreations of supposed incidents. No "real" recording of the supposed episode, or contemporaneous news accounts, have ever turned up. Here's the link to snopes.com, which includes the recording you heard, and is clearly fake: http://www.snopes.com/radiotv/radio/uncledon.asp
shareAh, good ol' Snopes - the fact-checker's friend...
(BTW, here's a clickable link to the above-mentioned story: http://www.snopes.com/radiotv/radio/uncledon.asp )
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"Leave the gun. Take the cannoli."
Uncle Don was immortalized in this film by something he never said and is most famous for something that never happened to him, or probably anybody. "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."
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