Cooking Up Some "Hammes" With Miklos: Trivia!!

Good evening my fellow Kovacsians.

The Ernie Kovacs My Space Fan Page is up to 741 friends and as always we thank everyone who requested an add or accepted a request from us. I'd love it to hit 1,000 members by the end of the summer if possible; we're up 16 from our last post so we're on the way, albeit a small way.

Our fellow Kovacsian, friend and trivia buff, John Hammes of The UGA Science Library at The University Of Georgia, has sent us yet another fantastic trivia quiz. You may remember the last one which involved Ernie and Jack Benny; this promises to be even MORE difficult and of course I'm grateful to John as it means that I don't have to think of a new one myself! Thank you John!
This trivia involves that classic Kovacsian character, master Hungarian chef "Miklos Molnar" who, contrary to popular belief, did not always appear as a chef in Ernie's sketches. Here are John's questions:

1. Miklos Molnar was not restricted to a cooking show...name another genre "lucky" enough to claim him.

2. What then current show was Ernie lampooning?

3. Miklos kept a pair of shears handy; how did this help him interact with the show's co-star?

For Extra Credit: Give Miklos' version of this show's title and describe in what state Miklos interacted with members of the show's audience.

Here's a hint in case your having trouble; John saw this on the A&E Biography which was done on Ernie and broadcast almost exactly ten years ago; June 23, 1988 to be exact. The link will bring you to the one page I found where you can purchase the VHS which is Amazon; A&E's website was no help. Hopefully you have a copy.

You can submit answers to the questions in any one of the following ways:

1. Post your answers here in the comments section.
2. Send your answers to me through the Ernie Kovacs My Space Fan Page.
3. Email your answers to me by clicking HERE.

I'll announce the winner in a future post so get to it!

Before I leave you today I'd like to share a very interesting video clip I found of Ernie on a 1957 episode of the game show "What's My Line?"; Ernie was a frequent panelist and actually used to do his own spoof called "Where Do You Work-a John?" Unfortunately I've never seen that and I don't think anyone else in the present day has as its not on any video collections I've encountered.

Thanks once again for stopping by and until we meet again "Its Been Real!"

Ernie The Grizzled Old Miner

Good afternoon my fellow Kovacsians. I'll start off by saying that the Ernie Kovacs My Space Fan Page is up to 680 friends, an increase of 4 since our last post. As always we thank everyone who requested an add or accepted a request from us.

I also need to mention that no one, not even my best "Kovacsian Trivia Answer-ers," has been able to answer all the question from our last quiz. Its a tough one; even yours truly couldn't get it. Give it a shot if you're brave enough. I'm going to let a few more weeks go by before I post the answers to give some more folks a chance to answer.

In our last entry I had a link to a blog post about the old TV western Shotgun Slade which starred actor Scott Brady in the title role. I found this post interesting because:

1. I'm a big fan of old TV westerns and had never heard of this one.
2. Ernie is the guest star in the pilot episode.

The pilot episode of this show was called "The Salted Mine" and it actually aired on March 27, 1959, as part of the "Schlitz Playhouse Of Stars," an anthology series of that era. In it Ernie plays a grizzled old miner named "Hack" (he tells Shotgun "Hack Berry's the whole of it." At least that's what I think he says...) who owns the "Hack Mine," which is located "over the hill a piece."

I'm not going to go into a long winded description of the series or the episode. That's because you can click on the links above to learn more about the show and its lead actor. And you can watch the actual pilot episode with Ernie below:

Its important to realize that before becoming a radio and then TV personality Ernie had trained to be a stage actor. His mentor was his high school drama professor Harold Van Kirk and he also acted in summer stock and studied drama in New York City. He was quite the excellent character actor as you can see from watching this program. Comics like Ernie have the ability to really inhabit and make you believe the characters they play, whether comedic or dramatic.

I sincerely hope you enjoyed the episode and I apologize for the quality. My goal in all the Ernie pages I run is to expose you to things about his career that you may not have known about or seen and I hope this has fit the bill!

Thanks once again for stopping by and until we meet again "Its Been Real!"

Some Kovacsian Jack Benny Trivia

Good afternoon fellow Kovacsians. I receive many nice emails from folks who enjoy our various Kovacsian websites. Here's one I received today from John Hammes of The UGA Science Library at The University Of Georgia:

Thank you for all you are doing. A lot of people can now receive greetings from Ernie Kovacs "over your internet tube"! His work is so superior to today's programming, and a quick visit to "his" web pages makes a lousy day much better. Many, many thanks!

Well, John, thank you for visiting! Its my pleasure and I certainly echo your sentiments.

It turns out that John is quite the Jack Benny fan and he had an idea for a trivia quiz related to Ernie's January 25th, 1959 appearance on CBS TV's Jack Benny Program:

1. During Jack's opening monologue, what prized possession does Ernie share with him?

2. What do Jack and Ernie present for the main sketch?

3. Ernie gives a very dramatic performance at sketch's end. Why?

4. There are two things about this broadcast that are the first and only time something happened to Ernie during his career. What are they?

I must admit that I did not know the answers to these questions and I don't think you'll find them in books so it will take a real Jack Benny fan to answer them. I may have seen the episode once at the Museum of TV and Radio (then known as the Museum of Broadcasting and now known as The Paley Center For Media) but that was quite some time ago. I did find out, however, that you can see the episode by ordering The Best Of Jack Benny, a 4 DVD set where it is found on Disc Two.

Thanks to John Hammes for a great quiz! He's reached Kovacsian blog immortality and you can too by submitting answers to the questions in any one of the following ways:

1. Post your answers here in the comments section.
2. Send your answers to me through the Ernie Kovacs My Space Fan Page.
3. Email your answers to me by clicking HERE.

I'll announce the winner in a future post so get to it!

The Ernie Kovacs My Space Fan Page is up to 676 friends this week, an increase of 15 since our last post. As always we thank everyone who requested an add or accepted a request from us.

And now some fun Ernie related posts from the Blogosphere:

Robert McHenry is Mad about Mad Magazine!

Portzebie talks about the history of Mad's Alfred E. Neuman

A great post about the early days of video which talks about Ernie

Ernie in the old TV series Shotgun Slade? I guess so, pardner!

Pop Art Diva talks about the Tonight Show Hosts and mentions our fellow Kovacs...

Thanks once again for stopping by and until we meet again "Its Been Real!"

Ernie Kovacs Cameraman Bob Kemp

Hello fellow Kovacsians.

The Ernie Kovacs My Space Fan Page is still at 495 friends this week; while we actually did add some new friends some others deleted their profiles so it all evened out. We also had to delete a couple of spam type requests. When friend requests are sent to us they are all checked to make sure that they are not porn or spam sites. If you send us a private profile we will add you but we immediately check it once we do to make sure it does not fit into either of those two categories. All that type of stuff is deleted and reported to MySpace.

For this week's post I'd like to direct you to an interview I did several years ago on my main website, http://www.erniekovacs.net/. It was with one of Ernie's most respected cameramen and friends, Bob Kemp. Bob not only served as a cameraman but also as sort of an unofficial photographer on the set. Ernie encouraged this and purchased many of Bob's photos. When you read what Bob has to say you get great insight into what it was like to work for television's original genius.

I'm still hoping to get some trivia questions from fans so that I can put up a user generated trivia quiz. Check out last week's post to find out how to submit your questions.

I didn't find any new blog posts or news about Ernie this week so until we meet again, "Its Been Real!"

Miklos Molnar The Soccer Playing Danish-Hungarian Chef

Hello my fellow Kovacsians. I'm putting up the weekly post on Monday instead of the usual Wednesday because I have to go out of town.

Last week's trivia question was once again successfully answered by Ernie Kovacs My Space Fan Page friend and Kovacs trivia queen Barbara. We're not sure what's happened to trivia "King Brian" as we haven't heard from him in while.

I put a link to a Wikipedia entry for a European sports star and asked the following question:

In what way does this former Danish soccer player relate to Ernie Kovacs?

Here's the answer in pictorial form:
As usual, nice going Barbara! Go figure that a famous soccer star would be given the same name as a beloved sketch comedy chef. Perhaps his parents were Ernie fans, although the Wiki article doesn't mention this.

I'm hoping to have some new trivia in the next post, some of which may even be contributed by fans as I'm receiving a lot of messages from people saying they'd like to come up with questions. So we shall see! Can you stump the mighty Kovacs Trivia Queen Barbara or that potentate of Kovacs Trivia, King Brian? Actually Queen Barbara wants to contribute some questions. Who shall she stump? I'm sure those questions will be really tough! I'll probably have to come up with new titles for people, but what's higher than King and Queen? Why do you people have to make my life so difficult?!

But I digress. If you'd like to submit some trivia questions for a future quiz you can do it in the the following way:

1. Post them here in the comments section.
2. Send them to me through the Ernie Kovacs My Space Fan Page
3. Email them to me by clicking HERE.

Be sure to let me know who you are. Credit will be given next to each question whereby you will achieve immortal blog fame. Management (namely me) reserves the right to delete any question that management has already asked. And we've asked a lot of them so think hard! Remember Kovacsians, to make Ernie proud!

The Ernie Kovacs My Space Fan Page is up to 495 friends this week, an increase of 4 from since last Wednesday's post. As always we thank everyone who requested an add or accepted a request from us.

One of our new friends is Jeff of the "Vegas Film Critic" MySpace Page. You may recall that back in June I wrote a post with a trivia question about an episode of the "Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour" called "Lucy Meets The Moustache" in which both Ernie and Edie guest starred. In that post I mentioned the episode is hard to find and that supposedly a new DVD with all 13 episodes (the Ernie episode is # 13) would be coming out. Jeff let me know that it is out. Here's a link to it on Amazon. Its referred to as "I Love Lucy - The Complete Seasons 7-9" which is the reason I think I had trouble finding it for you in the past. Thank you Jeff and to you we say "Welcome fellow Kovacsian!"

That's it for this week folks. I didn't find any new Ernie news items or great blog posts so that feature will have to wait until next time.

We shall return on Wednesday, August 29 2007. Until then, "Its Been Real!!"

Ernie Wants A Danish!

Good afternoon my fellow Kovacsians.

Some quick trivia. And this one, Kovacsians, is quite abstract. Click this link, study the page, and then answer the following:

In what way does this former Danish soccer player relate to Ernie Kovacs?

The Ernie Kovacs My Space Fan Page is up to 491 friends this week, an increase of 11 from last week. As always we thank everyone who requested an add or accepted a request from us. I'm hoping we'll hit 500 by next week!

I found no particularly interesting Ernie posts on the web or in the blogosphere this week.

Until next week, "Its Been Real!!"

Bill Wendell

Good day, fellow Kovacsians. Last week I asked a trivia question based on a photo in a previous trivia question. I asked the following questions which were answered by Ernie Kovacs My Space Fan Page friend and Kovacs trivia queen Barbara:

1. Who is the gentleman seated next to Ernie?
Answer: Bill Wendell

2. What functions did he perform on the shows where Ernie used him? Answer: Announcer and sketch man (assisted in a lot of sketches)

3. What other famous performer did this man spend years performing these services for? Answer: David Letterman

Good job Barbara! The late Bill Wendell was an NBC Television staff announcer for almost his entire career. He would play straight man to Ernie in certain sketches like "Mr. Question Man" and also act as announcer on Ernie's shows. Barbara, who once worked as an intern in TV news, had an opportunity to interview Bill. Here's her reminiscence of that experience:

To tell you the truth, when I was 20 I was all hellfire to write a book about him, but didn't have a clue how to do it. Still don't, actually!

I worked in TV news as an intern and I wrote him a letter to ask if he would talk to me. I was sitting at home one day and he called from the control room at the Letterman show! I wish to hell I'd have recorded it. I was too young to know better.

He told me a story about a skit they did where they used gallons and gallons of water and everyone was sliding all over the place while having a food fight. He said Ernie had hands "the size of canned hams" and that he could hold and throw three times what everyone else could. He said that as talented as Letterman is, no one will ever touch Ernie, and that he missed him every day.

Anyway, I was still toying with the idea when Rico came out with her book, and well, she did a fine job. Somewhere, I still have all the library research I did (now you can buy all those magazines on eBay)...copies of microfiche, etc. But Bill was the only person I talked to, and he was a really nice man, who really loved Ernie a lot

Thanks again, Barbara.

The Ernie Kovacs My Space Fan Page is up to 480 friends this week, an increase of 17 from last week. As always we thank everyone who requested an add or accepted a request from us. I'm hoping we'll hit 500 by next week!

One of our new fan page friends, "Paulie," asked me if I knew where to find the Percy Dovetonsils poem "Ode To Stanley's Pussycat." This can be found on page 135 of "The Ernie Kovacs Phile" by the late David G. Walley. This is a must have book for any true Kovacsian so pick up a copy if you don't already have one.

And now, some interesting Kovacsian articles from the news and posts from the blogosphere:

PBS is planning a special slated for 2009 about the history of television. Ernie and Edie are prominently mentioned in the article.

Filmmaking 101 compares some of the video techniques used in the HBO
series "Flight Of The Conchords" as being similar to those pioneered by Ernie.

Laura's Miscellaneous Musings talks about the 1959 movie
"It Happened To Jane" which had Ernie as one of its stars.

Here's a very creative and interesting take on the tilted room bit that Ernie used in "The Silent Show" ("Eugene"). Apparently its by an Australian comic named Shaun Micallef.

Until next week, "Its Been Real!!"

A Short Ernie Kovacs Post

Good afternoon fellow Kovacsians. I'm calling this "A Short Ernie Kovacs Post" for two reasons:

1. Its exactly that.

2. When someone searches for Kovacs posts by title it will come up and we can draw some more attention to the blog.

So here are the questions. Take a look at the picture in this post and then answer the questions below:

1. Who is the gentleman seated next to Ernie?
2. What functions did he perform on the shows where Ernie used him?
3. What other famous performer did this man spend years performing these services for?

There are three ways to send me the answers:

1. Post them here in the comments section
2. Send them to me through the Ernie Kovacs My Space Fan Page
3. Email them to me by clicking HERE.

The Ernie Kovacs My Space Fan Page is up to 463 friends this week, an increase of 9 from last week. As always we thank everyone who requested an add or accepted a request from us.

I was unable to locate any interesting Kovacsian news stories or blog pieces this week so as I always I shall close by saying that until next week, "Its Been Real!!"

Trivia Winners And Choco Spinners

Good day my fellow Kovacsians. Remember our trivia quiz from last week? And remember how I told you that "the folks who answer the trivia questions I post here are really hard to stump?" And I was so proud of myself because I thought I had designed a quiz that would be really hard? Well, it was hard. But my two top trivia "answer-ers" were not only the first to respond but they did a bang-up job answering the questions. I've included a photo of them along with the requisite crowns and approval from Percy Dovetonsils. Barbara is in color and resembles Edie a bit. Brian is in black and white. I think Ernie would have approved of both!

Barbara was the winner; she got all 20 questions right and is awarded the honorary title of "A genius or someone with way too much time on their hands." Brian got 18 right and gets the title of "An Honorary Kovacsian Scholar." The two Brian missed, by the way, were the hardest on the quiz. Congrats to both. They always respond to our trivia questions and they both really know their Kovacsian Lore!

I'm not going to tell you the answers because I want others to be able to enjoy the quiz if they haven't had a chance yet. You can get the QUIZ by left clicking the link (it will then open in a separate browser window) or by right clicking the link and choosing "Save Target As," at which point you can save it to your hard drive and open it that way. You have my promise that more quizzes will be introduced in the future.

The Ernie Kovacs My Space Fan Page is up to 454 friends this week, an increase of 9 from last week. As always we thank everyone who requested an add or accepted a request from us. We're averaging about 10 adds a week and are really happy about it!

And now, some interesting Kovacsian articles from the news and posts from the blogosphere:

Artist Rob Smith Jr. was happy that we liked his drawing and reciprocated with a very nice post about the blog and website.

WFMU's blog has a great piece on the radio great Henry Morgan. Ernie's mentioned briefly. I'm putting a link here because Henry Morgan was also a genius and if you don't know about him, you ought to.

Until next week, "Its Been Real!!"

Mr. Question Man & Dr. Stroehmann

Good day my fellow Kovacsians. I have a very special assignment for your this week.

The folks who answer the trivia questions I post here are really hard to stump. I mean REALLY hard to stump. And I've also found that the posts featuring trivia are the most popular ones on this blog.

So for this week, I've created a 20 question multiple choice quiz about Ernie Kovacs and some of the folks close to him. Its in PDF format which requires the Adobe Acrobat Reader. Almost every computer in the world has this but if you don't, you can get it for free by clicking the link above.

You can get the QUIZ by left clicking the link (it will then open in a separate browser window) or by right clicking the link and choosing "Save Target As," at which point you can save it to your hard drive and open it that way. My suggestion is that you then print it out to work on the questions; its a doozy and I don't want you to go blind staring at your screen!

There are three ways to send me the answers:

1. Post them here in the comments section
2. Send them to me through the Ernie Kovacs My Space Fan Page
3. Email them to me by clicking HERE.

Please put the question number with the letter answer next to it. In the next couple of weeks I will announce the answers and present the following awards of dubious distinction:

All 20 Correct: A genius or someone with way too much time on their hands.

17-19 Correct: An Honorary Kovacsian Scholar

13-16 Correct: A Senior Professor Of Kovacsian History

9-12 Correct: A Junior Observer Of Kovacsian Lore

5-8 Correct: Lay off the Harry Potter films and crack out those Kovacs books, tapes and DVDs!

1-4 Correct: Matzoh Hepplewhite gets to saw you in half as part of his next "trick."

Get to it folks!!

The Ernie Kovacs My Space Fan Page is up to 445 friends this week, an increase of 8 from last week. As always we thank everyone who requested an add or accepted a request from us.

Our My Space friend Rob sent me a note about his Granddad, who had a recurring part on Ernie's first morning show "3 To Get Ready:"

He was the actual Stroehmann's Bread delivery guy for the show. Ernie liked him and always invited him to watch the show. During one show he was live on camera and invited him onto camera and he addressed him as 'Dr Stroehmann'. Apparently his mother was watching the show and told Ernie that 'she liked that young man' and it became a recurring bit.

And now, some interesting Kovacsian articles from the news and posts from the blogosphere:

Artist Rob Smith Jr. has a great drawing of Ernie

"Smoldering Embers In A Mohawk Campfire" talks about Edie Adams for Muriel Cigars

An article on performance artist Dan Carbone who's work is influenced by Ernie

Until next week, "Its Been Real!!"