Dean Martin Celebrity Roasts Featuring Valerie Harper, Jack Klugman, Tony Randall, Michael Landon, Sid Caesar, Milton

That it plays.

My thoughts about this particular Dean Martin Celebrity Roasts DVD:The Valerie Harper roast features many cast members of both the MARY TYLER MOORE and RHODA shows. Longtime star of Bounty paper towel commercials NANCY WALKER (Rhoda's mother) is very much present, but her shtick has been wiped clean from the program. Dr. CHAD EVERETT inadvertently sets into motion a wild and wonderful complete-and-utter breakdown, for several minutes, of the entire proceedings! Dean makes a marvelous "What the hell is happening?" face!Beware: the "Odd Couple" roast has been severely edited down from an hour to a half hour! The segments which feature JACKIE VERNON (voice of Rankin-Bass' "Frosty the Snowman") and Cajun Louisiana singer-songwriter-fiddle player DOUG KERSHAW have been eliminated (although older-looking bespectacled Vernon is seen very briefly in a couple of long shots, and Kershaw is shown laughing a few times).Dean Martin's "Odd Uncle" LEONARD BARR (who's 70 years old here!) makes an appearance, but Barr doesn't do his famous super-weird "Eccentric Dancing". (Barr turns up on SEVERAL Dean Martin TV shows through the decades! Wonder why?) Famous horse jockey LAFFIT PINCAY JR. makes a few comments; he's kinda cute in his tight little 1973 racing silks! A rather random star appearing on the dais is... LORETTA LYNN??!! What is she doing there!? Maybe Doug Kershaw wasn't available..Also noteworthy are some surprises in the MICHAEL LANDON roast: VICTOR SEN YUNG, longtime actor who portrayed the Ponderosa's Asian cook, Hop Sing, shows up in his actual BONANZA costume; a possibly-very drunk DON RICKLES gets weirdly frisky (at least twice!) with Michael, in a bizarre ad-libbed sketch (which reminded me of the famous Rickles moment with JOHNNY CARSON and the Tonight Show jacuzzi!)."Pa" Cartwright, LORNE GREENE is here, but Pernell Roberts and Dan Blocker are not. Blocker had died exactly 3 years before this program was taped. There are several congratulatory mentions of Landon's "new" series, LITTLE HOUSE ON THE PRAIRIE.>>Interesting trivia: just three years before appearing on this roast (and less than 2 months after Blocker's death), Victor Sen Yung was shot and wounded in a passenger jet hijacking in San Francisco. He died in 1980 of poisoning from an accidental natural gas leak in his small Hollywood pottery studio.One of the most amazing bits on the entire disc, is the newly-taped Bonus Segment featuring impressionist RICH LITTLE, who tells a fantastic anecdote about Dean and the Michael Landon roast!!Thanks, Time-Life, for putting this out! There are enough entertaining moments to make it worth purchasing. Just wish you could stop with the major editing of many of the old TV shows you release on DVDs! (I realize it has to do with the dead stars' families, estates, attorneys, and years of legal red tape, but enough already! The people interesting in buying, owning and watching these programs ARE GETTING OLDER AND DYING OFF. Younger folks won't give a damn, THEN who will you sell this stuff to? "Time" is of the essence!)- WC in DSLA