Peanut Gallery
A distinctive feature was the Peanut Gallery, on-stage bleachers seating about 40 kids. Each show began with Buffalo Bob asking, "Say kids, what time is it?" and the kids yelling in unison, "Howdy Doody Time!" Then the kids all sang the show's theme song (set to the tune of "Ta-ra-ra Boom-de-ay"). It was thus one of the first television shows with audience participation as a major component.
In many of the 1949–54 episodes released on DVD by Mill Creek Entertainment in 2008, the children can even be heard singing jingles for commercial breaks, with Buffalo Bob or Howdy leading them and the lyrics appearing on screen. Colgate toothpaste, Halo Shampoo, 3 Musketeers candy bars and Poll Parrot Shoes are among the products advertised this way.
Read more about this topic: Howdy Doody
Famous quotes containing the words peanut and/or gallery:
“It has been an unchallengeable American doctrine that cranberry sauce, a pink goo with overtones of sugared tomatoes, is a delectable necessity of the Thanksgiving board and that turkey is uneatable without it.... There are some things in every country that you must be born to endure; and another hundred years of general satisfaction with Americans and America could not reconcile this expatriate to cranberry sauce, peanut butter, and drum majorettes.”
—Alistair Cooke (b. 1908)
“I should like to have seen a gallery of coronation beauties, at Westminster Abbey, confronted for a moment by this band of Island girls; their stiffness, formality, and affectation contrasted with the artless vivacity and unconcealed natural graces of these savage maidens. It would be the Venus de’ Medici placed beside a milliner’s doll.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)