The Soupy Sales Show
"Hey kids, get those little green pieces of paper with pictures of
George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Lincoln, and Jefferson on them,
send them to me, and I’ll send you a postcard from Puerto Rico.”
This memorable moment in the celebrated career of Soupy Sales
resulted in a one-week suspension from WNEW-TV. For seven days, the
country was without Sales' jokes, songs, silent films, puppets, and pie
throwing, the true Sales staple.
Although The Soupy Sales Show ran for only two years, from
1959-61, Sales had been performing his antics for nearly four years
prior to this national show on ABC. He had begun his career doing TV
shows for the children of Cleveland and Cincinnati in the early 1950's.
In 1955, the television station WXYZ of Detroit gave Sales a fifteen-minute show as a summertime replacement for Kukla, Fran and Ollie. Shortly afterwards, Sales appeared on another WXYZ show called Comics.
This daytime show brought in better ratings than many of the network
programs, attracting such celebrity guests as Ella Fitzgerald and Duke
Ellington.
While the daytime show was still running, Sales was producing a late night show called Soupy’s On. As a result of that show's success, ABC at last gave Sales his first network show, The Soupy Sales Show.
It was produced in Detroit and ran for eight weeks. Sales then moved to
Los Angeles, where he hosted a local show for a few more years.
The show featured Sales chatting with a menagerie of colorful
characters, including White Fang and Black Tooth, who, with the
exception of an arm, were off-camera creatures. Other characters
included Marilyn Mon Wolf, Herman the Flea, Pookie the Lion, Willie the
Worm and Hippie the Hippo.
But it was in New York in 1964 that Soupy achieved his greatest
success. The show had gone into national syndication, and it was during
this time that the “little green pieces of paper” incident occurred.
The publicity generated by the “joke” gave the show an edgy image, and
made it “cool” for kids to watch.
Leaving his show to make the movie Birds Do It, Sales found himself returning to TV as the host of the morning game show Junior Almost Anything Goes for a year.
In 1978, another Soupy Sales Show was created for
syndication. Despite an effort to recreate the look and feel of the
original show, this series only lasted for a year. Sales went on to
guest star on many game shows of the 70's and 80's, as well as on
several variety shows, including a regular stint on Sha Na Na in 1978.
Soupy also worked into the 80's, providing the voice of Donkey Kong on the animated series Saturday Supercade. Through the 90's, Sales continued to work in syndicated radio, extending a legendary career into its sixth decade.
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