Friday, August 18, 2006

Disneyland 2006

Here we are out in Anaheim, CA visiting Disneyland! Just landed yesterday afternoon, got to the Hotel, got something to eat, hit the local Target for some necessities, and got down to the park at around 7pm to at least get some Disney fun going on our first day.


We decided to hit California Adventure since we only had about 2 hours before that park closed, and we figured that was about all we would need.




More to come later...

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Monday, August 14, 2006

The Uncle Floyd Show

My lovely Wife, Liz, surprised me to no end on my recent birthday not only with a "Fudgie The Whale" Ice Cream Cake from the Carvel Ice Cream store, but with an awesome gift. A DVD of "The Best of the Uncle Floyd Show". Uncle Floyd was a big part of my teenage years in New Jersey. The show typically started out with Floyd and his puppet pal, Oogie, doing an opening monologue. Check out Oogie in action below:

Castmember Mugsy recollects: "For twenty-five years the Uncle Floyd Show has been entertaining the masses and eradicating the blues, if only for a half hour a day, five days a week, 52 weeks a year. In a place in people's hearts not unlike Johnny Carson, Floyd was welcomed into millions of homes each night. Leading a weird bunch of misfits and even stranger puppet pals, the Floyd program was definitely an exception. It was a show that brought people together when everything else in the world was driving them apart. It was a show that parents could watch with children, husbands with wives. Teenagers would watch in one house and senior citizens in another. A show you might talk about the next day in school or work. Where the signs of status and success meant getting a picture on the wall or even Viewer of The Week!"

Mugsy sadly passed away after battling lung cancer in October 2005.

Floyd is a phenomenal piano player. He would play old-time Dixieland and Vaudeville favorites, songs that you typically had never heard before, but you loved all the same. In 1999, Floyd set the Guinness World Record for Continuous Piano Playing where under the watchful eyes of the Guinness judges, he played he piano for 24 hours and 15 minutes!

I might add that Hugo was a staple on the Floyd Show long before Pee-Wee Herman added "Hugo" to his act. In fact, watching Pee-Wee's original HBO special will remind you quite a bit of the Uncle Floyd Show for some strange reason.

Another of Mugsy's hilarious puppet creations is "Cuppy", a headless baby doll with a paper coffee cup for a head. Click on the clip below to see "Cuppy" in action:

Go find out for yourselves how ingenious and hilarious this local, no-budget television show was.

Thanks, Liz, for bringing Uncle Floyd back to me!

Read More... After the Jump!