It's "Ben" Real: The Ernie Kovacs Collection

Just about everyone loves, tenders respect to, and over-collects, the Beatles. I love them. I always claimed to enjoy Beatles music, but I never truly appreciated them until I heard The White Album... and compared it to all other music that was current when The White Album came along.

Some good stuff filtered over the airwaves in 1968, to be sure – a few select songs may still symbolize that era, of the Vietnam War and 1960s unrest, in the minds of those who lived it. But nothing else was quite like the empty-covered enigma that the Beatles gifted to the world, that year, which was also one of the most tumultuous of the group's career. It was there Rock evolved out of bobbie socks and biker jackets, and became something that art pundits and music journalists would debate over, for ever after.

This year, 2011, film historian and curator Ben Model, and Shout! Factory, have bestowed upon lovers of comedy an almost equal gift: The Ernie Kovacs Collection.

Being a longtime Ernie-phile myself, I can hardly describe even my punchy frustration at attempting to concisely review this 6-disc box-set, much less my temptation to sit down and watch it again, rather than write. So many other – better – writers across the country have already chimed in with giddy approval about this release. Another gushing, stellar "thumbs-up" would only appear redundant and predictable. Instead, I'd like to sum up something comparatively novel; a history of THE LACK of any comprehensive retrospect of Kovacs's work, over the past 20-or-so years.

Take a look at that photo up there... take a good look. Until The Ernie Kovacs Collection, there wasn't much. Most contemporary Kovacs fans were first turned on to Ernie by a 6-part PBS series in the summer of 1977 – the same month that the original Star Wars movie opened, if that adds any chronological context. The show was essentially just a batch of re-edits of his 1960s ABC network specials, mixed with a sprinkle of his "clue" sketches from the gameshow Take A Good Look.

In hindsight, those specials were a grand enough place to start – as modern an intro to Ernie as was available to a newbie audience. White Star Video* packaged those shows into a VHS tape set, called The Best of Ernie Kovacs.

Today, complete sets are a somewhat rare find – one occasionally still encounters random cassettes sold separately, but most savvy Kovacoisseurs have long ago traded in that shelf-hogging assortment for its lean, digital reincarnation, released in 2000. It's the center box shown above.

Soon enough, it too became a scarce item – available mainly just in eclectic media outlets, and via mail-order, if in stock. I purchased my copy at a Santa Cruz comicbook retailer's, who had just one left. I snagged it within seconds of spying it inside, from out on the sidewalk. I and the shop's owner (a fellow Kovacs fan with his own copy at home) bored his young, punk-emo counter girl to runny purple and green mascara tears, with 20 solid minutes of post-sale Ernie talk.

There were other incidental video offerings, like John Barbour's 1982 Showtime network documentary, Ernie Kovacs: Television's Original Genius. Barbour is the TV critic responsible for nicknaming Ernie the "Charlie Chaplin of Television" – a descriptive as powerful as it is concise. It was a nice, well constructed missive on Ernie, containing the remarks of other comedians who'd grown up with Kovacs's influence, like Chevy Chase.

I remember renting it, forcing my girlfriend through the torture of my relentless, geeked-out, babbling side commentary.

But before even the long-ago PBS series, all that anyone had, who'd never known Ernie Kovacs on TV during his life, was B. Ziggy Stone's 1971 80-minute opus, Viva Kovacs! It played the college circuit, and consisted of a limited sampling of Kovacs video transferred onto filmstock – which gave it the ambiance of a 1930s B-movie on the late late show.

Burbank Video, in 1992, released the film – by then a public domain oddity – on VHS cassette, renaming it simply Ernie Kovacs. That's my copy up there, on the left.

And that was it. IT!!

The only reasonably available reading material on Kovacs was David Walley's fascinating but over-prosey Nothing In Moderation, renamed The Ernie Kovacs Phile (Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1984) and later, Diana Rico's masterfully thorough Kovacsland (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1990).

Describing Kovacs to a neophyte was a soul-crushing exercise in futility. Dropping his name with a young comedy fan raised on Saturday Night Live, Steve Martin and John Belushi was the same as trying to have a serious dialogue with a philosophy major about Bigfoot. The comparison is valid – I've tried both.

The missionaries who first showed a Bible to cannibals... I had a feeling they pee-pee danced through a conniption similar to mine.

Kids in the mid-1980s just couldn't believe that the conceits of their hip, cutting-edge comedians were fodder to one particular guy on TV of 30 years – now about 50 years – prior.

That not only had he done it already, but that the first generation of copy-cats had come and gone.

Of course, once Ernie's work began to re-circulate, literally "in ernest" again, thanks to the PBS series, and word of mouth – helped handsomely by the emerging digital age – his overdue come-uppance started to take shape. But it wasn't without the hard work, and luck, of many diligent people over the decades who knew Kovacs and made preserving his legacy a part of their very life's devotion.

Foremost among them was his widow, actress/singer Edie Adams. Ernie had lived the antithesis of a frugal life, and left behind a financial maelstrom. Edie refused charity from friends and show business colleagues. She took every job she could get her hands on, and slowly paid off all of Ernie's mountainous post-mortem debts. Along the way she used what money was left over to buy back all of his work from the networks. Some of them were actually recording over his tapes... or dumping old footage into the Hudson River to free up space in the archives.

Fellow TV comic-icon Chuck McCann put Edie wise to that little secret, and she immediately dawned her Superwoman cape.

More and more of Ernie's treasured surviving moments began springing up on YouTube, and other video-content websites, and the realization formed that an entire "Erniverse" of yet unseen material was out there somewhere. Kovacs, supposedly a rare comic commodity, had been anything but rare in his day. He'd had shows on nearly every network – had spent entire workdays on-camera – damn, he'd been downright ubiquitous! Where was it all??

It was safe, just unavailable to the casual video consumer, until now. The Ernie Kovacs Collection is a quantum leap ahead of what even proud owners of The Best of... thought they possessed. It is, within reason, everything Ernie that's copiable onto a DVD. It's difficult to imagine what could possibly be left for Volume 2, if that's ever produced.

A comprehensive tribute, it includes much of his early TV work – a mere six or seven combined hours-worth, out of possibly hundreds that were broadcast, now lost for good. The balance of the total 13-hour running time consists of Model's exhaustive – and personally rewarding – research and reconstruction: Home movies, trailers, odds-n-ends, and some of the ABC specials, overlapping somewhat with the White Star Video content.

Ernie's final show which was broadcast posthumously, here contains the original prologue and epilogue eulogies, missing from the White Star release.

The crown jewel of The Ernie Kovacs Collection is the first-ever retail issue of his NBC Color Carnival broadcast, in which he upstaged the ballyhooed Jerry Lewis Special (the first after the break-up with Dean Martin) that preceded on that night's schedule. It was an entire show without dialogue, with the now legendary 'Eugene' segment featuring the 18-degree tilted dining room. This early color version has rarely been seen since its 1957 air date.

Until now it was only viewable by visiting UCLA's television archives. Ernie recreated it, in broader detail, for one of his ABC – black & white – specials in 1961, known as The Silent Show. That is the version with which most Kovacs fans are familiar.

Color, and the lack thereof, brings us back around to my White Album reference.

Like my then-sudden Beatles quickening, this new box-set might just turn a corner for those who previously thought they knew everything to ponder about Ernie Kovacs.

Some who see him today, shrug a "so what" at his lampoons and spoofs of television's formulaic conventions and contrivances – because all comedians do them now. Steve Allen's old newscast skits have evolved beyond Saturday Night Live's Weekend Update, into Jon Stewart's Daily Show. Gameshows have transcended mere bantery quizzing, into the neo-Orwellian vid-verité of Survivor and its ilk.

Like the Beatles, you don't really fully appreciate Uncle Ern until you consider what was on every other channel in his era... That he was the ONLY comedian already parodying what everyone else was supposedly "pioneering"... That he was the comic embodiment of Marshall McLuhan's etherial proclamation "the media IS the message" when the media was newly born...

Milton Berle and Bob Hope were still recycling Vaudeville.

You don't really get the references to Ernie's predating Laugh-In, Monty Python, et al., until you see him do something Laugh-Inian or Pythonesque, and realize that those entities wouldn't come along for another decade.

You don't see the reality of his informing David Letterman, until you witness Ernie deliver a monologue or an interview in that compellingly casual, intentionally distracted style that would cement Letterman's fame... 30 years later.

Catch Ernie's off-every-wall gameshow sketch Whip The Wristwatch and you'll glimpse the embryo that gestated, indirectly, into The Firesign Theatre's Beat The Reaper.

Ernie and Edie spent so much airtime conceiving the muse of Saturday Night Live, the video footage almost ranks as comedic porn.

The Ernie Kovacs Collection is such an unmitigated treasure, so long overdue, and so utterly welcome, that to assign it some trite, pat-hand descriptive, like say, "a love letter to Kovacs fans everywhere" is... well... about as much an anti-prize as a railroad car of mercurochrome.

The most amazing aspect of Kovacs? He didn't know he was defining a future generation of media, he was just being himself, at a time when the medium was still experimental enough to accommodate his maniacal exploration. His life's time was brief, but his destiny's timing was exquisite.

If you already know Ernie, this DVD set is a must-own. It simply beats everything else available to bruised whelps. If you are just getting into him, checking out a few YouTube clips and intrigued, this box will be like your own private Disneyland... make that Kovacsland... when you decide you want something tangible of Ernie for your home DVD collection. And you will.

As you can see, I got mine. Bravo, Mr. Model!

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*White Star Video is now known as Kultur Films.