Tuesday, September 12, 2017

You Know The Voice: Bud Collyer on What's My Line? (1969)

For the 2nd straight day, we have a You Know The Voice entry taken from What's My Line?, but this time, we have a full episode from the Wally Bruner era. The significance of this one is that this was one of the last appearances of Clayton "Bud" Collyer before his passing later in 1969, and this was 2 years after he'd crossed over from To Tell The Truth, joining with Allen Ludden (Password), Gene Rayburn (Match Game) and Ed McMahon (Snap Judgment), to appear on Line with original moderator John Daly.

Arlene Francis was the only panelist to have appeared in each case. This time, she's joined by Ruta Lee, Soupy Sales, and a pre-M*A*S*H Alan Alda.



Well, that didn't take long. After Soupy brings up Bud's radio work as Superman, Bud puts in a plug for the Saturday series that was running at the time. Arlene can be heard mentioning she didn't know about the Superman radio show.

Some of you will recall that Soupy used to do a series of skits spoofing detectives, but it seems the work he put in as Philo Kvetch actually served him well as a panelist on Line.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Why it didn't take so long:

Gil Fates, who produced What's My Line? forever, wrote a book about his experiences on all versions of the show.

Fates had a major memory about Soupy Sales: he always had to be the one who solved the Mystery Guest.
Soupy was the best Mystery Guest Guesser, because he knew (and was liked) by just about everybody in show business.
You'll note that he guessed Bud Collyer almost without asking a question, just from his voice.
This show is from early in the syndie run; within a year, Gil Fates decreed that Soupy would always start the questioning, so he wouldn't cut the game short with a rapid wild guess before anybody else got to ask a question.
Later Fates rules required the host (first Wally Bruner, later Larry Blyden) to always ask that Sales explain how he got certain Mystery Guests after only one question, and that if any panelist made a wrong guess, he or she would be disqualified from the game; these were known as Fates's Laws.
Soupy Sales, for all his competitiveness, went along with these rules, and stayed the course for all of the syndie What's My Line? run.

hobbyfan said...

Hmm, that explains a lot, Mike. Thanks.