Monday, July 30, 2007
I'll have a colortini, please.
Tom Snyder is dead.
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7 comments:
Now there's a man I would stay up late every night to watch. Network TV is far less a thing for having put him to pasture.
He was a great interviewer, and I can't place the exact moment I lost track of him. It wasn't one of those, oh god they canceled his show moments...
He just sort of faded away for me.
Jeez -- Tom Snyder, Ingmar Bergman and Bill Walsh, all on the same day. Now I really feel like I've lived too long.
I remember that interview with Manson, in the summer of 1981. I was living with my parents that summer, about to transfer to a downstate school. My folks were out of town on vacation, so my brothers and I invited a bunch of friends over to watch the interview (and drink beer). The interview totally deflated Manson as a menace-- he came across as a dim-witted piece of white trash. I wondered how pathetic his followers must have been to find him charasmatic.
I saw Dan Ackroyd's spoof of Snyder before I ever actually ever saw Snyder on television. The first time I did see him, I roared with laughter-- Ackroyd's impression of him was spot on.
Snyder could be quite the idiot. About 5 or 6 years ago, I saw him interviewing the author Isabel Allende. Tom prefaced a question with something about Allende's "father, the murderous Chilean dictator, Salvador Allende..." Ms. Allende tersely responded that no, the "murderous Chilean dictator Augosto Pinochet" had actually killed her uncle, the democratically-elected President of Chile, Dr. Salvador Allende.
There's a dvd of some of Snyder's mmoments, including his uproarious interview with the Sex Pistols.
Great tribute to Mr. Snyder.
I remember living in my first apartment, in 1980/81, and watching Tom Snyder almost every night. Your comment about the pliers and the busted knob on the b&w TV were dead on.
I'm not being fippant or anything, but those few seconds of Manson in the clip, his tone, his mannerisms, his belligerence, reminded me of nobody so much as George W. Bush.
Snyder was indeed full of himself! I remember that right about the time that I watched his show regularly Carson was also going through an arrogant phase. My mom and I would laugh after the news and say we were going to watch a few hours of blow-hard TV!
Loved the line about the pliers on the TV knob. Remember having to stand there and try to move the knob about a milimeter so that the picture would clear up? How about the first remote from Zenith (we didn't have one, but I babysat where they did) It had little tuning fork things inside that mechanical buttons moved... wierd.
Thanks for the memories - that was fun!
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