BOOTLEG FILES 943: “Hot Dog” (1970-71 children’s series starring Woody Allen, Jonathan Winters, and Jo Anne Worley).
LAST SEEN: Bits and pieces are scattered on YouTube.
AMERICAN HOME VIDEO: None.
REASON FOR BOOTLEG STATUS: It is complicated
CHANCES OF SEEING A COMMERCIAL DVD RELEASE: None.
The other day, I was scrolling around social media and spotted a post that mentioned how Woody Allen starred in a kiddie television series in the early 1970s. And my reaction to that post was: Huh?
After all, I was a child in that decade and I fondly recall too much of the era’s wacky and wooly television programming. But I had no recollection of Woody Allen as part of the Saturday morning small-screen entertainment. So, I started to dig around and found a long-forgotten program called “Hot Dog.”
The show in question offered its juvenile viewers a mix of light educational content answering innocuous questions such as “How do they get toothpaste in the tube?”, “How are pennies made?” and “What makes popcorn pop?” And yes, there were two segments that circled back to the show’s title: “How do they make a hot dog roll?” and “Who invented the hot dog?”
Each segment ran a few minutes and offered a straightforward mini-documentary answering the raised question. There would also be a montage of kids giving their answers, which were mostly comically incorrect.
For some reason, it was decided to bring in a few funny adults to liven up the proceedings. The pilot episode included Woody Allen, Jo Anne Worley and Tom Smothers. When NBC picked up the series for broadcast, Smothers was replaced by Jonathan Winters. The three adult stars each had their own segments and never interacted.
To be honest, I have no idea how or why Allen got roped into “Hot Dog,” except that he possibly received excellent compensation for relatively little work. Indeed, Allen’s contributions to “Hot Dog” involved him sitting in a club chair and giving weird answers to questions posed by an off-camera producer. These exchanges lasted for a few seconds and are peppered throughout the episodes – it appears they were shot in a single day.
For example, when asked to name the people featured on American paper currency, Allen cited Art Linkletter, Barbra Streisand, and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. When asked how brooms are made, Allen claims with a straight face that animals give birth to brooms in the woods. When asked what baseball bats are made from, Allen says they are created from halva and can be eaten after the game.
A similar set-up involved Worley, whose segments appeared to have been filmed in someone’s backyard. Unlike Allen, Worley was not given the chance to be funny. Instead, she answered questions with either serious responses or polite confusion. It is bizarre that a zany comic actress like Worley was shoehorned into a non-comic setting that anyone could have easily filled.
Jonathan Winters was given the task of the comedy heavy lifting, which he performed in micro-skits via his collection of wonderfully silly characters including Maude Frickett. Unfortunately, most of Winters’ work was less than stellar and he didn’t seem very enthusiastic about his clowning.
Between a subpar Winters, a too-serious Worley, and a bizarre Allen, the kids who watched “Hot Dog” during the 1970-71 television series must have been utterly confused. The show ran at noon on Saturdays with minimal promotion and it was often pre-empted in favor of live sports broadcasts. After a single 13-episode season, NBC dropped it.
“Hot Dog” was created by actor/writer/director Frank Buxton, who co-produced the series with Lee Mendelson, who was best known as the producer of “A Charlie Brown Christmas.” The pair won a Peabody Award for their efforts. The rock band The Youngbloods created the light and bouncy music score that supported the segments.
During the 1970s, the individual segments of “Hot Dog” were marketed to the educational film sector for classroom screenings, and portions of the series were inserted into “That’s Cat,” a 1976 children’s program on KNBC in Los Angeles. The series was rebroadcast in syndication in 1977 after Allen’s success with “Annie Hall.”
Since then, however, the full “Hot Dog” series has been out of sight. Buxton pledged to produce a DVD featuring the entire series, but he died in 2018 without fulfilling his promise.
Today, bits and pieces of “Hot Dog” can be found in unauthorized uploads on YouTube. Even if the various performance rights were cleared and the surviving materials were digitally restored, the commercial prospects for this obscure production would be minimal.
But for the curious, here are a few excerpts that can give you an idea of what “Hot Dog” was all about:
IMPORTANT NOTICE: While this weekly column acknowledges the presence of rare film and television productions through the so-called collector-to-collector market, this should not be seen as encouraging or condoning the unauthorized duplication and distribution of copyright-protected material, either through DVDs or Blu-ray discs or through postings on Internet video sites.
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