Oh Carol!

Guess what I found!

Carol Burnett on youtube. And not just clips here and there, but entire Carol Burnett shows.

I'm a TV kid. I was part of the first generation of TV kids. My parents didn't have a tv growing up, but it was part of my childhood.

It started with Captain Kangaroo, Mr. Dressup, Mr. Rogers and the Friendly Giant. Then it moved on to Bewitched, I Dream of Jeanie and the Brady Bunch.

One of my favorites was the Carol Burnett show. I wanted to be Carol Burnett only prettier. I thought she was hilarious. Even funnier than Lucy. In fact I've seen some Carol on the Lucy Show and she steals it from Lucy.

My mother liked Carol too but she didn't like the Family skits. I loved them.

I wanted to be on her show and do skits with her. I wanted her to be on my show - because I was going to have a variety show too.

Variety shows have since died, which is sad. They were huge from the 50's to the end of the 70's and then they just disappeared. Barbara Mandrell and the Mandrell sisters were about the last. There is Saturday Night Live, but frankly other than a few brilliant moments every now and then, I never found it compared. Now instead we have people looking for love by sleeping with a half dozen prospective hoping they'll be picked.

At one point a few years after Carol called it quits on her show (she was never cancelled) they put together half hour shows called Carol and friends that took skits from her shows. It was chopped up and didn't have the continuity that a full show has.

It's hard to get variety shows on DVD because of the complexity of getting permission to showcase music. Everybody asks for outrageous prices. I would think they would just be happy to get noticed again.

I just watched Tim Conway torture Lyle Wagner with a Hitler puppet.

It doesn't get much better than that.