Happy’s era

Kid TV and Lexington’s wonderfully dirty years

By Bill Widener

By the time I settled in Lexington, Happy’s Hour, the subject of the documentary When Happy Met Froggie, had already been cancelled. But I still have warm memories of the once-ubiquitous kind of kids’ show memorialized by the film. My guy was named, aptly enough, Mr. Bill. He was the host of Mr. Bill’s Workshop, broadcast from 7:30-9:00 AM Monday through Saturday on WLOS-13 Asheville, NC–the only channel my family could pick up out on the southernmost fringe of Corbin. Weatherman Bill Norwood would put on a rangerish get-up and teach easy crafts, read happy birthdays and get-wells to lucky kiddies, and show the usual mix of old comedy shorts and cartoons, the latter a grab bag of Bugs, Casper and Deputy Dawg alongside oddities like Snowman in July.

Though he started off with a Bozo (fellow weatherman Bob Caldwell), by the time I was watching in the mid-Sixties, Mr. Bill was solo. He had no retinue of continuing characters, no live audience of eager children in their Sunday best. Even so, I was a fan, watching as much as I could before being forced out the door to catch the school bus. Saturday was a special treat: a whole Mr. Bill, three hours of cartoons like Super-President and Fantastic Four, then Shock Theater with Norwood tricked out in Dracula duds as the host. Cartoons, more cartoons, and monster movies – the only way my mom could get me away from the television was to bring out the vacuum cleaner.

This wearing of many hats was typical of kids’ show hosts. As revealed by When Happy Met Froggie, Tim Eppenstein already had a job at WTVQ (then Channel 62) when his boss asked him to host the new afternoon children’s show. So did all the other members of the cast and crew. Five days a week, after starting their day with Happy’s Hour, they would go run the station for the rest of the night. That’s a hardworking bunch of people. Maybe that’s why they were such a hard-playing bunch.

Lexington’s dirty decade

“It was the Seventies,” the interviewed would say by way of…explanation? apology? when speaking of the party-hearty fun behind the scenes of Happy’s Hour. Hey, it was the Seventies, that lost decade when the “new freedoms” of the Sixties penetrated the straight world from the mailroom to the boardroom.

Lexington, in particular, was a party town back then. A college burg still reeling from the impact of urban renewal, poised to embark on the great suburbanization that would devour the surrounding countryside, Lexington was a scroungy little place. For instance, the august institution which premiered When Happy Met Froggy on April 6, the Kentucky Theatre, made its rent with biker and Godzilla movies while its little sister theater, then called “the Cinema,” ran XXX films with the “good parts” cut out to keep the law happy.

Lexington was wilder then, dirtier, but in many ways kinder, a wide-open place where a shy boho wannabe could end up sharing a joint with a professor, a seven-foot-tall drag queen, and the zonked-out heiress of a horse fortune. So of course an afternoon kids’ show full of impudent humor and improvised hijinx would garner an unintended audience of potheads and saucehounds. Of course the people involved with the show would party just as hard as that audience. Pitchers of beer with lunch before the show, some maryjane to get those creative juices flowing, followed on the weekends by “non-stop” parties complete with wild wives dancing tits-out on the kitchen table…they don’t make television like that anymore.

Perhaps Happy’s Hour and others of its kind have such resonance because they were made on the cheap and on the fly by human beings with hearts and habits, not careerist droids gelded by corporate puritanism. While out on one of the many personal appearances Happy and Froggie made during the show’s run, Froggie #1, Mike Mellon, buzzed and wanting to impress a chick, gave her his Froggie puppet, the original, never seen again. Using their talent for improv, the boys just vamped for weeks until a new puppet was made. Nowadays, if he wasn’t canned on the spot, Mellon would be made to endure the unctuous grind of counseling. As the sun-glared sepia Seventies gave way to the rain-slick blue urbanity of the Eighties, the good times stopped rolling, brought to a halt by cocaine and Jesus. Everybody became a professional, even the heads and hounds, partying now a full-time gig, another kind of career.

Even if Happy and the gang had made it through the burn-out of making it up week after week, plus appearances, their days were numbered. As the Reaganites gutted the FCC rules regarding local and children’s programming, Happy’s Hour and other kids’ shows were supplanted by GI Joe, Transformers, and their ilk, glorified toy commercials doubling as agitprop for the bonehead manicheanism of the neo-cons.

Some kids’ show hosts tried to roll with the punches – there was a different Happy in another town who would do his thing between the Thundercats and She-Ra – but, for the most part, the kids’ show format that had existed from the beginning of televison was finished. The mess and muzz of mere humanity, whether scratchy old prints of the Little Rascals or some moonlighting meteorologist with a silly suit and sillier jokes, just wasn’t good enough anymore. Besides, can you imagine getting kids today to sit still for a black & white short? They’d just badmouth the special effects in that week’s chapter of Flash Gordon, pop another Ritalin, and go back to their video games.

When Happy Met Froggie is now available on dvd. To order, please visit www.whenhappymetfroggie.com. For more info about classic children’s programming, go to captainerniesshowboat.com which, unfortunately, doesn’t have “Happy’s Hour” listed in the “Kentucky” section.