Via Mark Evanier’s blog: on January 7th, Soupy Sales was formally awarded his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
I was right in the middle of the generation that grew up with the great kids’ TV that appeared on WNEW in New York during the late 50’s and early-to-mid 60’s. (“Wonderama”, anybody? I would have been in the Sonny Fox and Sandy Becker generation.) Soupy’s slightly weird brand of humor sank deeply into my brain: I can still hear the affable ravings of the only-partially-visible White Fang and Black Tooth, not to mention Pookie the Lion and the rest of that deranged crew.
Soupy’s comic timing was faultless. No one knew how to pie somebody like Soupy. And Noel Godin, aka “M. le Tarteur” — the guy who hit Bill Gates with one, and installed the verb entarter, “to be hit in the face with a pie,” in modern French usage — may possibly owe Soupy a very sideways debt. For the Great Art might have fallen wholly into decline after the death of vaudeville had not its faint spark been kept alive by a slightly crazed guy from North Carolina. Anybody who had the staying power to either hit over 19,000 people with pies during his career, or to be hit by them (in a rather Zen way, the stats are confused as to the direction in which the pies were traveling) deserves a star for that alone…but there was so much more.
Congrats, Soupy!
