Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

hyped garbage

Highly Overrated But Still Good

Great example of an old-fashioned, pure-at-heart escapist event movie that doesn't pretend to be anything that it's not and has boat loads of fun being its own ludicrous self.

Me,Bobby Dias AKA Kissing Bobby, had been appearing on the Tonight show and then The Jack Paar Show at the Burbank Studios. Jack had been thinking of traveling a lot and his office was full of travel brochures, mostly Africa and China. A few times Jack would just not feel like going on with the show so others would sub for him, including a few times myself. I was good enough, they thought, for them to offer me a contract to the host of what they would call "The Tonight Show"(in the contract offer. This was before Johnny Carson and others were offered the job. I declined the offer, saying that at 14 I did not want to stay in the so-called "grown-up" world of show business people and millionaires and billionaires and politicians and the like that I had been for the last 7 years. Whatever about that, Jack had stayed off and walked off a few times before- just his time to move on. The final walk-off was one of those times there was not me or anybody else there able and willing to jump in to keep the show going. Two days later he said to me that the censorship had nothing to do with him walking off the set or quitting the show and that he did not care if they sued him for every penny he had for breach of contract. Just his time for whatever else.

Jack Paar was just that - Par Excellence as a talk show host. I quit watching when Johnnie Carson took over. What made Paar fun was that he NEVER, ever shut anyone off. If Johnny Winters got wound up one night, Jack would egg him on for an hour and half if he could. Other scheduled guests could either wait or come on another night. And no one seemed to be offended by that. And he was a master at getting Winters or Jack E Leonard started. I remember one night Leonard was on and fumbled for a cigarette. Jack offered him a Winston - one of the loyal sponsors - no thanks, said Leonard and pulled out his pack of Kents. There was a few seconds of banter over the quality of the brands and finally Leonard snapped, Well, at least MINE doesn't look like it was DIPPED in something.....Alas, we are told that of all those hours and hours of fun, NBC claims not to have saved any of it. And so I guess we can only dream of having a 3 or 5 DVD set of highlights. His later programs, which are on one set at least, never measured up to the old Tonight Show.

Jack Paar became a big presence in all our lives when I entered high school and got to stay up an extra hour each night. We were living in the Midwest at the time, in the Central Time Zone, so we got the "Tonight Show" on our TV an hour earlier than the East Coast did. 10:30 instead of 11:30 PM. Nightly talk shows were 90 minutes long at the time. --It wasn't until many years later that Johnny Carson shortened it to one hour. We received only two TV channels then, and almost all of the shows on at night were weekly--once a week--and most of them were westerns or detective dramas. But here was a show--with a "cast" of real characters that came on every single night of the week. It was like we were looking into their lives (all of which seemed related to each others')--Hermione Gingold, Mrs. Miller, Charlie Weaver, Alexander King, Robert Merril. These people seemed to live in some universe where they all knew each other and had lives in common and they all talked with Jack on his show. (A 1950s TV show contemporary to Jack Paar's--"WHAT"S MY LINE"--had a similar cast of New York sophisticates who all seemed to hang out together--but it was much more boring--who the hell were Bennett Cerf and Dorothy Kilgallen and Fred Allen?--just talking faces in tuxedos or rather tatty-looking evening gowns.) Maybe none of the people on either of these shows had what producers today would call "TVQ"--personal charisma or appeal on a TV screen-- like the actors on say "Friends" or Dennis Franz on NYPD Blue do. But the people on the Jack Paar show had lives and personalities of sorts, and told lots of anecdotes about themselves. Some of them had written books, which you could go to the library and read--Alexander King "Mine Enemy Grows Older." And Jack's world war two buddy with the Japanese wife who wrote the surrealist humor collections: "My Brother was an Only Child" and "Never Trust a Naked Bus Driver"--kind of like Lenny Bruce colliding with Mad magazine. I think his name was Jack Douglas. In format the Jack Paar show wasn't really all that different from David Letterman today--interviews, skits, Ernie-Kovacs-inspired stunts. Since I grew up in a very conservative household and did not get to go through any kind of "teenage rebellion" I was at home watching Jack Paar each night while some of my more adventurous (or doomed)peers were driving rattle-trap cars around burger joints and trying to get girls' bras off. Maybe that's why my memories of this show are so imprinted in my memory. For decades I thought of Johnny Carson as the "new guy" because the Jack Paar show was such a formative presence in my teenage life. That's another thing that distinguished the Jack Parr show--emotional involvement. In TV/Marshal-McLuhan terms Jack Paar was "hot"--sincere, emotional. While Johnny Carson was "cool"--detached, ironic. Paar, along with other early TV personalities like Arthur Godfrey, had the ability to make you feel like he was talking to you personally through your TV set. This was a mixture of informality and sincerity. Arthur Godfrey for example was such a successful TV character--he had two or three different shows on TV at once sometime--because he spoke into the microphone like someone coming into your living room and visiting you. Not like someone on a stage doing "public speaking" to an "audience."

Today in late night Television we have so many choices. Its almost limitless when you consider digital cable and TIVO. A long long time ago when late night TV might have consisted of an ever glaring, Indian Head test pattern along with a One Kilohertz Tone, there was The Jack Paar Show. This show evolved from the Steve Allen " Tonight" show which had its source from the Colgate Comedy Show in the early fifties.Quite unlike any show now or then we have the eccentric character Mr Jack Paar himself. Mr Paar can be seen in a few films of the late forties and was really known for very little else. In 1957, however, Paar launched what was to become a staple of late night TV. He had a cast of regular characters along with some of the most brilliant and witty personalities of the 20th Century!From authors like Alexander King to the bizarre and brilliant Oscar Levant, all payed visits and just talked with Paar and friends. A Truly amazing show with a sincere following that did not let up till the last show in 1962. This DVD set show us how fascinating these times were and is a window in time for TV viewers to recall ( if they are old enough) how unique and entertaining one could be by being.....oneself.Evocative, Timeless and Claustrophobic and when was the last time those three words were used to describe anything on television.Charles Pope