Episodes of the show are found easily enough online but the quality and content is highly erratic. The night before I received my copies of the first two seasons, I had a look at a random episode being offered on Amazon Prime, Season 1 Episode 3, "The Pills." Not only did the image quality look like curdled oatmeal, it was inexplicably stretched to 1.78:1. Watching the episode again last night was not only a revelation of pictorial detail, the official release included about three minutes of material cut from the Amazon Prime streaming master.
The show was one of the first to be photographed for TV in 35mm and the episodes have been digitally restored from the original 35mm masters. Time/Life previously issued a "Deluxe Edition" using this same official source, but their release cherry-picked only 100 of the full run of 435 episodes. As with that release, the MPI release is limited to DVD so the episodes may look a little soft to eyes raised on HD broadcasts, but to anyone acquainted with the options available before this (mostly video recordings of the 1985 Disney Channel broadcasts), these new releases are like seeing the episodes for the first time. As far as some material is concerned—like the hilarious lead-ins, in which the Nelsons wink at their sponsor of the week, like Hotpoint or Listerine—we literally are seeing it for the first time, as these precious bits are almost always trimmed from 16mm syndication prints and other PD sources. The first and third episodes, which I had revisited fairly recently, both included scenes I'd not seen elsewhere, usually somewhere near the middle of the episode, as well as opening and closing tags before the end credits. This is because the 16mm prints previously in circulation were syndication prints that lost footage as local stations accommodated more commercials into their half-hour slots.
Like any show, THE ADVENTURES OF OZZIE AND HARRIET gradually develops into its own ideal. While the first season is delightful in its own way, it's also still very much an outgrowth of the same-named radio show, which incredibly ran for 402 episodes (!) from 1944 to 1954, most of them with other child actors playing the Nelson boys until the real ones finally stepped up to bat. Remarkably, the radio version actually complemented the TV show for its first two years on the air. (What busy years those must have been!) Though Ricky was always clearly a nice kid, he was given a screen persona that in retrospect identifies him as American pop culture's earliest punk rocker—and a lively inspiration for Alvin of the Chipmunks. In contrast to the other Nelsons' kindly smiling faces during the first season introductions, Ricky sends out something very close to Johnny Rotten's infamous thousand-mile stare. The show's producers were quick to make the laugh track accompanying it a little louder but, after the first several episodes, they reconsidered and gave him a more amiable screen credit of his own.
Donna and I watched the first three episodes of Season 1 last night. We've seen most of the episodes several times, always with enjoyment, but MPI's new release embodies a significant new refreshment of the materials. The introductory pilot episode was particularly interesting because it sported a laugh track (as do the rest of the episodes); the last time I had seen it, the streaming copy was lacking the laugh track and it was far less effective. Best of all was the second episode, which Donna and I had no memory of ever seeing before; it seems to be missing from every collection of episodes I've ever bought. Soft as these new restorations may appear to eyes raised on HBO and Netflix, we noticed all kinds of minute detail we'd never caught before, like the inscriptions on the tiles framing the Nelson's living room fireplace, the stories in Ozzie's newspaper, and the soupiness of the Toll House cookie batter that Harriet was spooning onto a baking sheet. Essentially, we found the episodes to be completely reenergized and much like seeing them for the first time.
In the 1960s, when this series became the first to be renewed after a 10 year run, it acquired an unfair reputation from the counter-culture as a staid broadcasting tradition: a false, idealized depiction of American family life. Even a casual viewing of the show proves this to be untrue. The real abiding interest of THE ADVENTURES OF OZZIE AND HARRIET comes, first of all, from its ingenious idea of having a real American family portray themselves in stories often inspired by their own personal experience; the interest deepens into magic realism and even surrealism in the episodes that focus on Ozzie's intermittent obsessions, which encompass such whimsies as the desire to have a reading room (the family's wish to indulge him unleashes psychological worries that they are starting to exclude him and that he's aging before his time), or to see what it's like to spend an entire day in bed, or to taste some good ol' Tutti Frutti ice cream again. For me, these are the most fascinating and funny episodes of the series, and a good number of these episodes featured the writing input of future GREEN ACRES scribe Jay Sommers. In the mid-1950s, when Elvis happened, Ozzie had the ingenuity to turn his son Rick's interest in rockabilly music into a hook for younger viewers and, in the process, the show launched Ricky Nelson, a genuine first generation rock music artist and, with Ozzie's own montage of scenes from early Ricky episodes played over the new hit song "Travelin' Man," inadvertently invented the rock video. At some point, Ozzie had to relinquish his central role in the series to accommodate the greater audience interest in what his sons Dave and Rick were doing. By this point, Ozzie had played out most of his ideas and an embarrassing number of later episodes focus on middle-aged fantasies of making the wife jealous by doing something really stupid to prove that other women could still be attracted to him.
But 435 episodes of anything is a super-human feat, and this one Ozzie Nelson not only starred-in, but also co-wrote, directed and edited. make no mistake, the great bulk of this series is a treasure trove of fantasy in open conflict with reality, and I'm looking forward with great eagerness to enjoying the full run once again, this time in its newly ideal condition.
(c) 2022 by Tim Lucas. All rights reserved.
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