Open And Shut Case
At the AV Club they have a list of "27 opening-credits sequences that evolved with their series." When I saw this I figured they had to have The Mary Tyler Moore Show or the whole list is a sham. And sure enough, there it is at #11:
When Mary Tyler Moore’s classic sitcom debuted in 1970, the show’s intro depicted a young, mini-skirted, beret-wearing Mary Richards walking around downtown Minneapolis, enamored by the fact that she’s landed in the big city, at a job producing the news at a big-time TV station. She’s looking in windows, and generally exploring her new surroundings. Her exuberance culminates in her tossing her beret in the air. While the beret-toss remained in subsequent years, the intro morphed into scenes of Mary at ease in the big city, looking more sophisticated while doing things like shopping for meat at the supermarket and interacting with Lou, Murray, Ted, and the rest of the folks in her second home, the newsroom of WJM.
Wrong, wrong, wrong. This misses the huge change. In the first season, the show felt it necessary to introduce its concept, so the words to the famous theme song were about whether our Mary could make it on her own, and there were shots of a going-away party and her driving to her new home. In later seasons, once everyone knew she was going to make it after all, the lyric was changed to the famous "Who can turn the world on with her smile?"
Here's the first season song, though I can't find the visuals:
These aren't the correct visuals either, but once again, the words are there:
posted by LAGuy @ 12:15 AM
11 Comments:
Its more a comment on changing styles and the advent of color TV, but did you ever notice looked younger and prettier as Mary Richards than she did years earlier as Laura Petry. As a youth although I regularly watched MTM and the original Dick Van Dyke pretty often in reruns, I didn'r realize for a while that they were the same actress. (Of course this gets back to what sequence you see shows in affects your appreciation and perception- I still think of Mrs. Dick Van Dyke as Hope Lange).
NEG
She looked younger as Mary Richards in the early years of the MTM show (which started four years after the Dick Van Dyke show ended). In later episodes, she starts to show her age. Part of the age thing is also that on the Dick Van Dyke show she plays a mother who's married to a man close to 40.
As far as prettier, I've gone back and forth. Just a few weeks ago a friend told me his theory that based on the archetypal roles Moore played, Laura Petrie was far sexier than Mary Richards. That may sound like a strange thing to discuss, but you have to understand a whole generation of comedy writers were inspired by Rob Petrie's life...and wife.
You must be the only person who thinks of Hope Lange that way. (To me, she'll always be the latter half of The Ghost & Mrs. Muir, the role for which she won two Emmys.) Certainly everyone still thought of Moore as Dick Van Dyke's wife when she started her show. In fact, originally they wanted Mary Richards to be divorced, but the network complained everyone would think she left Rob Petrie.
Now that's interesting. A divorced Mary seems like a different story altogether. It would have fit her physically (the old hag), but it would have played a different angle in the age of liberation.
And then it deserves special mention for spinoff that continued the theme and had the main character unsuccessfully tosses her hat in the intersection. Rhoda? Phyllis? I can't find it.
The Mary Tyler Moore Show's creators James L. Brooks and Allan Burns wanted to show relationships in a modern way that had rarely been attempted on TV. For instance, they had Mary on the pill. And eventually they worked divorce into the show, when Lou Grant and his wife Edie split up.
Phyllis was married to Lars, a character we never saw. In the fourth season, the Betty White character, Sue Ann Nivens, has an affair with Lars--something else you rarely saw in those days. When Cloris Leachman got her own show, Lars died and her character Phyllis moved to San Francisco.
When Valerie Harper's Rhoda got her own show, she moved to New York and they decided to turn the loser into a winner, so she had a successful romance with Joe. They got married, the show got boring, and so eventually they separated and divorced.
To answer the actual point you brought up, Rhoda is the one who tosses her hat unsuccessfuly. That'll teach her not to wear a scarf.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=De3nipPcAvY
Mary dumps her boyfriend (a doctor) in the pilot, so that was as close as they were allowed to get.
Exercising the trivia memory muscle- MTM theoretically spawned 3 new shows (though Lou Grant was not very much like Lou Grant). I feel Rhoda spawned MArge Simpson, Lorenzo Music's drunk voice act and the paper towel commercials (or did they come first?), I think there was a Latina character on Phyllis who was maybe going to be popular but the actress was murdered in real life (am I remembering that correctly) and that Lou Grant spawned a whole bunch of career supporting actors (though didn't Rossi (Robt Walden?) do a series later?)
I remember an episode where Mary didn't come home after a date. Her parents were in town and either staying at her place or stpped by early and she wasn't there (can't remember exactly). Pretty shocking for the era, a somewhat sexualized Mary Richards.
But come to think of it, the Dick Van Dyke Show episode with the flashback about their honeymoon (Rob dresses as a woman to get off base so he can meet with her in a bed and breakfast - with focus on the bed) seems sort of risque for an even earlier time.
The Mary Tyler Moore show had a bunch of spinoffs, but I think its influence in sticom style (and writers) was more important, leading to shows like Taxi, Cheers and The Simpsons. Speaking of spinoffs, All In The Family and Happy Days had more.
Barbara Colby, who did great supporting work on MTM and elsewhere, was a regular on Phyllis before she was murdered. She was not a Latina, though Liz Torres, who replaced her, was.
On the other hand, I've never heard of Giovanna Plowman.
You made me google her- ick- thanks
Post a Comment
<< Home