Good Look Taken

As you probably know, we have an affinity for two things over at Tedium: Old stuff that’s fallen through the cracks and people that, like me, are named Ernie, which is an excellent name.

Which is why I’m happy to tell you about something that hits both of those niches pretty effectively: A long-unseen episode of an Ernie Kovacs show is about to hit the internet for the first time.

A thought-to-be-lost episode of the Kovacs game show Take a Good Look, dating to 1961, recently resurfaced, and will make its world premiere next week on YouTube.

Kovacs, for folks who aren’t aware, is believed to be one of the first auteurs of the television medium, often using his comedic skills in highly inventive, visual ways that proved inspiring to later generations of comedians. He also represents a cautionary tale of what can happen when the entertainment industry fails to protect its classic material. Kovacs died in 1962, at the relatively young age of 42, and the companies that aired his material would tape over it, or worse, ditch it entirely. (One oft-repeated tale has Kovacs’ old Dumont Network recordings getting dumped in the Hudson River.)

Kovacs’ widow, Edie Adams, did her best to protect her husband’s legacy and what was left of his work, given these challenging circumstances. Adams, a regular Take a Good Look panelist and frequent collaborator with her husband, had saved most of the episodes of that show, though some had slipped through the cracks. While maintaining an entertainment career of her own, Adams gained a reputation as an innovator in the archival of entertainment content—which paid off decades later thanks to the rise of the VHS and DVD.

Adams’ son, Josh Mills, carried the archival torch through the modern day after his mother’s 2008 passing, maintaining the estates of Kovacs, his mother, and his father Martin Mills.

“She was doing this before anyone, so I feel like it’s sort of a duty, because my mom paid bills, literal storage bills, for 45 years for all of this material,” Mills said of his mother. “So not only did she put her money where her mouth was—she talked about it—but she paid it.”

Just a few years back, working from that archive and others, he gathered together all known episodes of Take a Good Look. They found more than they were expecting. But there was still a gap.

“We were missing the final episode, which is this one episode,” Mills said. “So we put out a box set of everything that was available, not even knowing this one existed.”

Eventually, word got to Mills that this episode had surfaced in the hands of a company called Retro Video—which showed a lot of respect for the work of Edie Adams in their dealings with Mills.

“I went over there, I saw the facility, and they were like, ‘Basically, your mom saved all this stuff, this is yours, take it,’” Mills recalled. “So they gave it to us, which was really nice, because a lot of people wouldn’t be that nice at all.”

That gave Mills a chance to resurface some of Kovacs’ vintage works (more is coming this year, starting with Mayhem in the A.M., a collection of Kovacs’ vintage audio recordings for radio which hits January 24). But a lot has changed even in the eight or so years since that box set came out—which means that 65-year-old episode, which features comedian George Jessel, is appearing on YouTube as a part of the Clown Jewels channel, which you might remember resurfaced the first episode of Turn-On a couple of years ago. (Mills, along with archivist Ben Model, will take part in a live chat during the premiere.)

One of the vintage episodes of Take a Good Luck, recently published to YouTube—but also included on a 2017 DVD box set. If you want to get on a Kovacs kick, there’s more here).

Why YouTube? Simply put, the streaming era has unfortunately buried shows and films past a certain age. Recently, it came out that 1973’s The Sting was the oldest film on Netflix, something that leaves a lot of classic film and television fans in a real lurch.

“Honestly, it’s kind of the only game in town,” Mills says of YouTube. “If you’re able to do a series of things, there are some physical media places like Shout Factory, with whom we had a deal for many years. We’ll still release stuff, but we’re entering a post-physical media world at this point.”

But for those willing to make their way over to YouTube, they’re in for a treat. (This playlist is a great place to start.) Mills describes the show, while organized as a game show in which people guess who a person is based on a series of short visual clues, as really an excuse for Kovacs to show off his visual trickery.

“They were so obscure and so weird and so off the wall that the point was almost to not guess it—because Ernie wanted you to see all the videos that he made,” Mills says.

Combined with Kovacs’ very relaxed conversational manner, it feels less like a game show and more of a showcase.

Part of the reason this kind of thing doesn’t appear on the Peacocks or Hulus of the world has much to do with their tonal differences from what we expect today. (Along with the lack of color, alas.) And because Edie Adams took ownership of this work way back when, Mills’ Ediad Productions effectively owns the copyright to the work, rather than a major studio. (The Library of Congress maintains the physical copies of the work, while Mills’ companies handle the digital rights.)

“I think that’s the hard part is trying to maintain people’s attention span and awareness that there is this stuff out there that maybe doesn’t have the same beats and doesn’t have the same tone as a lot of the stuff that you may be watching,” Mills says.

But for someone who is actually looking for a different lane, Kovacs’ work has much to offer.

“If you’re a little bit outside the margins and outside the mainstream, you’re going to find something in here that resonates with you.”

Keep an eye on the Clown Jewels YouTube channel to catch a glimpse of it January 23 at 7pm ET.