Hi Bob!

Contrary to repeated barbs in the script, several of them self-referential, Mr. Carlin
did not wear a toupee. That was, in fact, Jack Riley's own head of hair.

Jack Riley, a gifted comedic talent best known for his scene-stealing appearances as the acerbic misanthrope, Elliott Carlin, on "The Bob Newhart Show" in the 1970s, and later as the voice of the absent-minded father, Stu Pickles, on the animated Nickelodeon series "Rugrats" and its spinoff, "All Grown Up," succumbed to pneumonia on August 19, 2016, at the age of 80.

After being drafted into the U.S. Army in 1958, Jack Riley toured military bases in comedy shows. He later became a popular radio personality in Cleveland, partnered with "straight man" Jeff Baxter.
The Baxter & Riley Show on WERE 1300 AM broadcast music and comedy sketches featuring an array of wack-a-doodle characters.

Jack Riley (right) and Jeff Baxter "on the set" of their radio show

Riley left his radio show in the mid-1960s and moved to Los Angeles, where his friend, fellow Cleveland native Tim Conway, helped him get work writing comedy sketches, which led to acting offers. He landed a recurring role on a 1966 sitcom titled "Occasional Wife," with Michael Callan ("Cat Ballou") and Stuart Margolin ("The Rockford Files"). Speaking of Tim Conway, from March 1980 to late summer 1981, Riley was a regular cast member on the sketch comedy series "The Tim Conway Show."

Jack Riley poses with cast members of "The Tim Conway Show,"
in the midst of more '80s hairstyles than you could wave a
Remington blow dryer at.

As a writer and performer on the first season of "Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In" in 1967, Riley met his future wife, Ginger Lawrence, then a producer's assistant. Beginning in the first season of "The Bob Newhart Show," Riley made almost 50 appearances as Elliott Carlin, the sardonic, chronically morose patient of Chicago psychologist Dr. Robert Hartley. Bob Newhart played the role as, more or less, a beleaguered straight man reacting deadpan to the absurd (often surreal) behavior of his clients, colleagues, neighbors, and wife Emily (Suzanne Pleshette).

"The Bob Newhart Show" was on the air for six seasons, from 1972 to 1978. These days, the top situation comedies include "The Big Bang Theory," "Girls," created by and starring Lena Dunham, "Brooklyn Nine-Nine," featuring Andy Samberg, "The Last Man on Earth," created by and starring Will Forte, and "Veep," with Julia Louis-Dreyfus. Back in its heyday, in the early 1970s, "The Bob Newhart Show" was a building block in a formidable wall of unequaled Saturday prime-time entertainment on the CBS network, starting with "All in the Family," followed by "M*A*S*H," "The Mary Tyler Moore Show," "The Bob Newhart Show," and "The Carol Burnett Show."

When Bob Newhart was initially presented with the premise for the series, he insisted on two revisions. He wanted his character's profession changed from psychiatrist to psychologist to avoid making fun of the mentally ill, and he didn't want to be saddled with TV kids and roped into the cliched role of a goofy father.

Marcia Wallace, Bob Newhart, Peter Bonerz, Suzanne Pleshette,
and Bill Daily pose on the set of "The Bob Newhart Show."

"Hi, Bob!" was a drinking game created and popularized by college students. Whenever a character in "The Bob Newhart Show" said, "Hi, Bob!" everyone watching would have to drink a shot. According to one source, "Hi, Bob!" was uttered 258 times. Bill Daily said it 118 times, Peter Bonerz 43, Marcia Wallace 36, Suzanne Pleshette 17. Minor characters said it 43 times. Newhart himself said it once. The game was spoofed by Chris Farley and Chris Elliott when Bob Newhart hosted a 1995 episode of "Saturday Night Live" (pictured below).

What we'd like to do in the Moviehouse this go-around is sift through various cast members from "The Bob Newhart Show" and point out at least one interesting thing they did - perhaps a role few were aware of but is worth rediscovering. Take Jack Riley, for instance.

In 1978, Riley was paid $1000 to play a small role in "Attack of the Killer Tomatoes," a low-budget parody of monster B-movies produced, directed, edited, scored, and co-written by John DeBello, who made the picture with a couple of friends in San Diego, all just out of college, when they decided to take a break from their fledgling business making sports documentaries and training films for high schools and universities. According to DeBello, "The idea was that 'killer tomatoes' was about the stupidest thing you could come up with. It's probably one of the few films that came into existence because of a title."

Yes, this is an actual scene from "Attack of the Killer Tomatoes."

One scene deposited Riley in a helicopter, which promptly, and unscripted, crashed. The helicopter's tail rotor blades grazed the ground, sending the whirlybird into an uncontrollable spin. Debris from the main rotor blades narrowly missed the crew and actors portraying police. The accident was caught on camera, and DeBello panicked that he had just killed the guy from "The Bob Newhart Show." The pilot received minor injuries, while Riley and the other actor onboard emerged unscathed.

As the helicopter started to burn, DeBello thought, "I should ask them to go and crawl out to build a scene out of this." Just when he started thinking, "That's so wrong to ask," Jack Riley piped up, "Hey, why don't we crawl out of the wreckage and ad lib some dialogue?" DeBello said, "Hey, that's a great idea!" Riley later proudly played the clip of the accident on "The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson." The destruction of the $60,000 rented chopper used up more of the movie's $100,000 budget than all the other aspects of production.

The film's climax was shot at San Diego's Jack Murphy Stadium (now known as Qualcomm Stadium). Co-writer Costa Dillon recalled, "We rented the San Diego Stadium for the entire day for $200 and just spent the whole day smashing tomatoes...San Diego in 1977 was still not a very large city, and they were thrilled to have us filming, even though we were this tiny movie."

Hey, isn't that The KGB FM-Radio Chicken - later The San Diego Chicken -
later The Famous Chicken - later just The Chicken? I believe so!

One of the "heroes" in "Attack of the Killer Tomatoes" is Wilbur Fenletter, a none-too-bright paratrooper who hilariously drags his open chute behind him wherever he goes (pictured above, at San Diego Stadium). He was played by one of DeBello's college buddies who co-wrote the screenplay, Stephen Peace (billing himself as Rock Peace), who later served in the California State Assembly and the California State Senate.

John DeBello and his business partners-filmmaking cronies, Costa Dillon and Stephen Peace, cranked out three sequels - "Return of the Killer Tomatoes," "Killer Tomatoes Strike Back," and "Killer Tomatoes Eat France" - all starring John Astin as a mad scientist who transforms tomatoes into humanoid minions. "Return of the Killer Tomatoes" featured a 27-year-old George Clooney, in his second motion picture after making his big screen debut as a a doomed security guard in the 1987 slasher parody "Return to Horror High."

George Clooney is engulfed in product placement gags
in "Return of the Killer Tomatoes."

Jack Riley became a familiar face in some of Mel Brooks' later comedies, namely "Silent Movie," "High Anxiety," "History of the World Part I," and "Spaceballs."

Jack Riley has a cameo as a newscaster in Mel Brooks' "Spaceballs."

In 1970, Jack Riley had a supporting role in "Catch-22," an epic dark comedy about the absurdities of war based on Joseph Heller's novel, scripted by Buck Henry and directed by Mike Nichols. Coincidentally, the stellar cast of the sprawling satire included Riley's future "Bob Newhart Show" costars Peter Bonerz and Newhart himself (pictured below).

"From now on, I don't want anyone to come in and see me while I'm in my office..
Tell them I'm in and ask them to wait...Until I've left." Bob Newhart is a hare-
brained hoot as the compulsively elusive Maj. Major Major in "Catch-22."

Bob Newhart was drafted into the U.S. Army during the Korean War and served as a personnel manager until his discharge in 1954. He got a job as an accountant for a company that manufactured construction materials like drywall and joint compound. In 1958, Newhart became an advertising copywriter for an independent film and television producer in Chicago. There, he and a coworker would amuse themselves with mock telephone calls to faux customers, which they recorded and sent to radio stations as audition tapes.

Newhart honed the prank calls into shtick for himself, portraying one end of a phone conversation and veritably becoming the first solo straight man in standup comedy, despite petty accusations of plagiarism by comedic peer and contemporary grumpy old man, Shelley Berman (pictured below). "He wouldn't do it maliciously," Berman said over a plate of sour grapes in 2012, "but he did it to make a living. And he became a star. I thought it was a rotten thing to do."

Never mind the fact that the '60s comedy team of Mike Nichols and Elaine May performed their own version of telephone monologues, as did '50s comedienne Betty Walker, '40s comic Arlene "Chatterbox" Harris, and '20s vaudevillian George Jessel.

Newhart's 1960's comedy album "The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart"was the first comedy album to make #1 on the Billboard chart. Bob himself reaped three Grammy Awards, for Best Album of the Year, Best Comedy Performance, and Best New Artist.

Paramount Pictures cashed in on Bob Newhart's popularity by casting him in his first screen role in "Hell Is for Heroes" as a fresh-faced Army clerk typist inadvertently recruited to aid a luckless "lost battalion" of U.S. G.I.s in a suicide defense against a German company on the Siegfried Wall in northern France during World War II. The low-budget anti-war drama, filmed in typical no-nonsense terseness by director Don Siegel ("Dirty Harry," "Charley Varrick," "The Shootist") in stark, sun-baked Shasta County locations of northern California, boasted a testosterone-fueled troop including Steve McQueen, Fess Parker, Bobby Darin, Harry Guardino, James Coburn, Nick Adams, Mike Keller, and L.Q. Jones.

After being startled by "friendly fire" from fledgling infantryman Bob Newhart,
steely-eyed Steve McQueen rests his grease gun in the direction of Bob's foxhole.

The American squad immediately puts the company clerk's jeep to use by rigging it to backfire and sound like a tank, while the fresh-faced frontline combatant conducts phony, one-ended radio communications with "headquarters" to convince eavesdropping Germans that a much larger Allied force is actually present and reinforcements are on the way. Inspired by Obviously by his comedy monologues, Newhart radios a commander, "Don't send them up here. Sir, I have five men in each foxhole now. I don't have room for any more, sir. Well, sir, there's still a war going on in Japan, you know, sir, you might send them over there."

Director Don Siegel was reluctant to include Newhart's fake radio conversations, believing they had no place in the story, but he was overruled by the studio, which insisted the scenes be shot to capitalize on Newhart's rising acclaim as a standup comic. Newhart wrote his own lines for the bits, which included, "One problem, sir, the vichyssoise tastes a little too much like potato soup...Oh, it's supposed to taste like potato soup?"

Bob Newhart and Bobby Darin clown around on-location for "Hell Is for Heroes."

Because of the success of his album "The Button-Down Mind," Bob Newhart was being offered increasingly larger paychecks for nightclub appearances during the shooting of "Hell Is for Heroes," considerably higher than his salary for the film. With a genuine desire to get back on the road as soon as possible, he repeatedly asked Don Siegel how his character could be killed off. Siegel would reply, "You're in it to the end, soldier."

Sultry Suzanne Pleshette, possessor of one of the sexiest contralto voices in Hollywood, began her career as a stage actress, making her Broadway debut in the 1957 play "Compulsion," based on Meyer Levin's novel about the Leopold-Loeb thrill-murder case of the 1920s. She made her feature film debut in the 1958 Jerry Lewis comedy "The Geisha Boy" (pictured below), directed by former Warner Bros. animator Frank Tashlin.

In 1962, she costarred with future husband Troy Donahue in "Rome Adventure." They were paired again in the western "A Distant Trumpet" in 1964 (pictured below), the same year they were wed. The marriage ended bitterly after a mere eight months.

Other films role for Pleshette came in "The Birds" (1963) and "Fate Is the Hunter" (1964), both with Rod Taylor, "Nevada Smith" (1966), starring Steve McQueen," and "Mister Buddwing" (1966) and "Support Your Local Gunfighter" (1971), both with James Garner. She starred in a number of Disney features, including "The Ugly Dachshund," "The Adventures of Bullwhip Griffin," "Blackbeard's Ghost," and "The Shaggy D.A."

Suzanne Pleshette and Tippi Hedren enjoy a fleeting respite from the avian
assaults in Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds." When it comes to survival odds
between the brunette and the blonde, your best bet is on the Hitchcock Blonde.

In 1971, producers saw her on  "The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson" and couldn't help but notice a chemistry between her and another guest on the dais, Bob Newhart. She was soon cast as his wife, Emily Hartley, on "The Bob Newhart Show" and appeared on the series for all six seasons. She reprised her role in the memorable finale of the later series "Newhart," when it was revealed that the entire series had been Bob Hartley's dream (pictured below).

"You should really wear more sweaters."

In 1979, Suzanne Pleshette portrayed one of a foursome of frustrated Miami police detectives - alongside Dom DeLuise, Jerry Reed (the raucous country singer best known as "Snowman" in the "Smokey and the Bandit" films), and "The Electric Company's" Luis Avalos - who decide to set up a phony pawn shop of their own as a sting operation to trap criminals fencing stolen goods in "Hot Stuff," a caper comedy featuring a screenplay co-written by best-selling crime novelist Donald E. Westlake.

Allegedly based on a real-life sting operation, "Hot Stuff" stars
Jerry Reed, Dom DeLuise, Suzanne Pleshette, and Luis Avalos.

This was the only movie directed by Dom DeLuise, who was the third Mel Brooks alumnus to direct a film, following Gene Wilder's "The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes' Smarter Brother" (1975) and Marty Feldman's "The Last Remake of Beau Geste" (1977). (And then there was Brooks' wife, Anne Bancroft, who directed her sole feature motion picture, "Fatso," in 1980, featuring Dom DeLuise and frequent Brooks supporting player Ron Carey as brothers.)

DeLuise, who was also a familiar presence in a number of Burt Reynolds pictures, surrounded himself with several of Burt's other pals in "Hot Stuff," including, besides Jerry Reed, Ossie Davis, Pat McCormick, and Alfie Wise. What DeLuise ended up with was an infectiously likable comedy, free of malice and sour humor. Roger Ebert noted, "This movie is so affectionately wacky we can forgive it for falling short of greatness."

Suzanne Pleshette, Jerry Reed, and Luis Avalos get the drop on a trigger-happy
gangster played by Richard Davalos, who made his screen debut as Aron Trask,
the unstable brother of James Dean's Cal Trask, in 1955's "East of Eden."

"There's a rare sense of comic skills here, well used," Ebert commented. "I don't mean 'Hot Stuff' contains brilliant new comic visions; strictly speaking, it doesn't contain a single original frame. What I mean is that the movie knows the craft of comedy, slapstick, doubletakes, funny lines, eccentric characters. That's a craft that was mastered in the '30s and '40s...Even in the Bowery Boys comedies, which were competently made in their own dumb way. But it's been lost in recent years...'Hot Stuff' doesn't miss on many of its bets."

According to Ebert, "The characters are so well-drawn...that we get to like them. DeLuise, directing himself, doesn't indulge himself, and gives a lot of the best lines to his three costars." Dom also cast his real-life wife, Carol Arthur (memorable as the loudmouthed Harriet Johnson in "Blazing Saddles"), as his onscreen spouse, while their sons, actors Peter, David, and Michael have roles as well. The then mayors of Miami and Miami Beach portrayed Mafia enforcers.

In 2001, Suzanne Pleshette married Tom Poston, who had been a recurring guest star on "The Bob Newhart Show" and a costar on "Newhart." Long before they worked together on TV, Pleshette and Poston were involved romantically, as early as 1959, when they performed together in the Broadway farce "The Golden Fleecing."

Over the next four decades, they married others but remained friends. The deaths of their spouses (his in 1998, hers in 2000) brought them together again.

They were married up to Poston's death from respiratory failure on April 30, 2007, age 85. Pleshette, 70, died less that a year later, January 19, 2008, of respiratory failure as well. They rest in peace together in Culver City California.

Tom Poston enjoyed a longstanding relationship with Bob Newhart. On "The Bob Newhart Show," Poston appeared periodically as Cliff "The Peeper" Murdock, Bob Hartley's practical joking pal from their college days. On "Newhart," Poston portrayed George Utley, the incompetent handyman of the fictional Stratford Inn in rural Vermont. He also had a role in Newhart's short-lived 1992-1993 sitcom "Bob."

Tom Poston served as a pilot in Europe during World War II, dropping paratroopers for the Normandy Invasion. In the 1950s, he gained recognition, along with fellow comedians Louis Nye and Don Knotts, in the "Man on the Street" interviews on "The Steve Allen Show." In 1959, Poston won the Emmy Award for Best Supporting Actor (Continuing Character) in a Comedy Series."

Louis Nye, Don Knotts, Tom Poston, and Steve Allen go over a script
that will doubtlessly be ignored in favor of ad-libbing.

In the early 1960s, showman producer-director William Castle ("House on Haunted Hill," "The Tingler," "13 Ghosts") attempted to turn Tom Poston into a movie star of sorts in a pair of fantasy-horror comedy outings, "Zotz!" and "The Old Dark House."

"The Old Dark House," ostensibly a remake of the same-titled chestnut from 1932, starring Boris Karloff and directed by James Whale ("Frankentein"), gave the moth-eaten tale of an eccentric family doing away with one another in a cobwebbed mansion on an English moor a satirical '60s sensibility by tossing in Tom Poston as a fish-out-of-water American car salesman.

The enthusiastically game British cast for the surrealistic shenanigans in "The Old Dark House" featured Janette Scott, Mervyn Johns, Robert Morley, Joyce Grenfell, Fenella Fielding, Peter Bull (as Tweedle Dee-Tweedle Dum twins), and Danny Green.

As mentioned earlier, Peter Bonerz had a pre-"Bob Newhart Show" role alongside Bob and Jack Riley in 1970's "Catch-22" (pictured above, as the ill-fated Captain McWatt), before establishing his television persona as Dr. Jerry Robinson, the incorrigibly arrogant yet woefully insecure dentist on "The Bob Newhart Show."

After compulsory military service as a draftee in the U.S. Army, Peter Bonerz joined the improvisational comedy troupe The Committee in San Francisco. His first acting assignment came in a 1965 role on TV's "The Addams Family." Bonerz' experiences with The Committee led to his starring role in an experimental, nonlinear look at a comedian's search for romantic and creative meaning in his life titled "Funnyman" (1967), which he also co-wrote.

Bonerz' breakthrough screen role was as a leery TV news sound man caught up in the turmoil in Chicago preceding the tumultuous 1968 National Democratic Convention in "Medium Cool" (1969), seminal '60s cinema featuring Robert Forster as a vain news cameraman who undergoes a crisis of conscience.

Peter Bonerz, Peter Boyle, and Robert Forster share a scene in "Medium Cool."

But Peter Bonerz' most intriguing motion picture appearance was as a member of a gang of homeland terrorist bombers led by a mastermind known as the Deaf Man (Yul Brynner), intent on blowing up local politicians in a city extortion plot in the 1972 action comedy "Fuzz."  Based on the "87th Precinct" novel Let's Hear It for the Deaf Man by Ed McBain (the pen name for author Evan Hunter, who wrote the screenplay), the picture was retitled in an attempt to cash in on the four-letter popularity of "MASH," as the filmmakers hoped "Fuzz" would do for cop movies what "MASH" did for war pictures. Both movies did feature a laid-back performance by Tom Skerritt, who played the redneck Captain Duke Forrest in the former, and cool-headed Detective Bert Kling in the latter.

Stemming from derogatory wisecracks Burt Reynolds allegedly made about Raquel
Welch when they costarred in the 1969 western "100 Rifles," she insisted that she
not share any one-on-one scenes with the actor in "Fuzz." Even in scenes when
 they were in the same room together, they had no direct eye contact.

Roger Ebert called "Fuzz" "one of the nicest cops 'n' crooks movies in a long time." Put off by the movie's cartoonish, sexist newspaper ad, the critic admitted, "I went expecting the worst, and in under 15 minutes I found myself won over by 'Fuzz.' It's an offbeat, funny, quietly cheerful movie in which Ed McBain's 87th Precinct is finally brought to life. Several movies have been based on McBain's 87th Precinct novels, but never one in which the squad room was explored so lovingly by the camera, and the detectives were made so human."

In "Fuzz," Dan Frazer (far left), portrays precinct honcho Lt. Brynes, a set-upon
character not far removed from his role as the beleaguered Capt. McNeil on "Kojak."

"The maelstrom is presided over by three detectives who are laconic, eager, and slightly incompetent," Ebert remarked. "They're played by Burt Reynolds, Jack Weston and Tom Skerritt (pictured above), in a sustained piece of ensemble acting that is really fine. Everybody steps on everybody else's lines all the time, and director Richard A. Colla creates a nice sense of everything happening at once, something like Robert Altman did in 'MASH.'"

In the 1999 biopic of edgy comedian Andy Kaufman, "Man on the Moon," Peter Bonerz portrayed TV producer Ed. Weinberger, one of the core members of Mary Tyler Moore's MTM Enterprises, the production company behind "The Mary Tyler Moore Show," "Rhoda," and, among so many others, "The Bob Newhart Show" and "Newhart."

Bonerz eventually drifted from acting into directing. He directed 29 episodes of "The Bob Newhart Show," not to mention 93 episodes of "Murphy Brown," which included a 1993 Emmy Award nomination. He also taught multi-camera production at USC School of Cinematic Arts.

Throughout his tenure as the neurotic orthodontist on "The Bob Newhart Show," Peter Bonerz' comic foil of choice was Carol Kester, the sharp-tongued medical floor receptionist portrayed by Marcia Wallace. After college, the Creston, Iowa-born native moved to New York with less than $150 in her pocket. She typed scripts, acted in summer theater stock, appeared in TV commercials, and filled in as a substitute English teacher. In a Greenwich Village nightclub, she performed with an improv troupe called The Fourth Wall.

Her first role on television was in a 1971 episode of "Bewitched," with "the other Darrin," Dick Sargent (pictured below).

Wallace appeared over 75 times as a semi-regular on "The Merv Griffin Show." It was a March 1972 appearance that prompted a phonecall from TV producer and Mary Tyler Moore's then-husband, Grant Tinker, who offered her a role on "The Bob Newhart Show," which was written specifically for her.

On one of the last episodes of the MTM series "Taxi," Marcia Wallace played herself, chosen as the ideal (if not uncomfortable) blind date for Christopher Lloyd's Reverend Jim Ignatowski (pictured below), a shameless fan of the Newhart series.

Marcia Wallace joined the cast of "The Simpsons" in 1989 as the voice of Bart's teacher, Edna Krabappel, a role she kept until her death in October of 2013. In 1992, she won a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Voice-Over Performance.

The name Krabappel was inspired by Miss Crabtree, the teacher in Hal Roach's
"Our Gang" comedies of the early 1930s.

On a 1994 episode of the Candice Bergen sitcom "Murphy Brown," Wallace reprised her role as Carol in her portrayal of Secretary #66. As Dr. Hartley, Bob Newhart appears on the show to beg her to come back with him to her job in Chicago.

What we appreciated about Marcia Wallace in the Moviehouse was her performance as the sarcastic, know-it-all White House maid Maggie Hawley in the all-too-brief Comedy Central series "That's My Bush!" created in 2001 by "South Park" architects Trey Parker and Matt Stone, who regarded the show more as a parody of '70s and '80s sitcoms than a political satire.

The cast of "That's My Bush!" includes Kristen Miller as the president's secretary,
Princess Stevenson (a character created by Parker and Stone after Comedy Central
forbade them to include the Bush twins), Kurt Fuller as Karl Rove, John D-Aquino as
the "wacky neighbor," Carrie Quinn Dolin as First Lady Laura Bush, Marcia Wallace
as Maggie, and Timothy Bottoms as President George W. Bush. (In 2003, Bottoms gave
a dramatic performance as Bush in the Showtime movie "DC 9/11: Time of Crisis.")

Before the outcome of the 2000 presidential election was known, the show was titled "Family First." Parker and Stone had to wait three months to see if their show would be "Everybody Loves Al!" At the time, "That's My Bush!" was Comedy Central's most expensive show to produce, costing $700,000 per episode. The show, which premiered five months before the 9/11 attacks, was canceled after only eight episodes, because, although it was critically praised, the costs were just too high.

Marcia Wallace died from pneumonia and sepsis, with breast cancer also listed as a contributing factor, on October 25, 2013, at the age of 70.

In one of our favorite episodes of "The Bob Newhart Show," titled "Bob and Emily and Howard and Carol and Jerry," Marcia Wallace's Carol was swept off her feet by Bill Daily's Howard, unaware that his sudden charm and wit were the aftereffects of sodium pentothal from a dental appointment. The smitten receptionist was left heartbroken when she dated the real, post-anesthetic, boring Howard.

The Des Moines-born Daily played stand-up bass in numerous clubs across the Midwest before being drafted into the U.S. Army and serving in the Korean War with an artillery unit. He was later transferred to an entertainment unit.

Stateside, he started performing standup comedy. He worked for an NBC affiliate in Chicago as a floor manager and announcer, eventually becoming a staff director. As he was preparing for a local Chicago TV Emmy broadcast, he asked comedian Bob Newhart for help in writing a bit about press agents, which resulted in the routine "Abe Lincoln vs. Madison Avenue."

Coincidentally, like Marcia Wallace, Bill Daily made his television debut on an episode of "Bewitched," in 1964 (pictured above). Of course, he subsequently enjoyed early sitcom success as Larry Hagman's sidekick, astronaut Major Roger Healy, in the '60s sitcom "I Dream of Jeannie."

In the Moviehouse, our favorite Bill Daily performance came when he was cast against type as a corrupt mayor in 1991's "Alligator II: The Mutation," a direct-to-video hybrid of a sequel to the 1980 cult film (with Robert Forster and Henry Silva) and a rip-off of "Jaws." A sewer-flushed gator hatchling feeds on toxic industrial growth hormones and terrorizes an amusement park run by a soulless greed-hound who, predictably in pictures like this, ignores the danger of a freakishly oversized gator making meals out of the local tourists.

Almost unrecognizable as the ill-fated, duplicitous city leader in "Alligator II,"
Bill Daily (right) shares a deadly ferris wheel ride with carny capo Steve Railsback
(a Moviehouse favorite for his roles as psychotic cult leader Charles Manson in
the 1976 miniseries "Helter Skelter" and as the rocket-fueled trucker, Cowboy, in
the 1986 John Candy-Eugene Levy comedy "Armed and Dangerous").

In lieu of the original movie's cynical detective played by Robert Forster, the sequel proffered a sardonic leading man in the presence of Brooklynite Joseph Bologna as a droll cop, while macho croc hunter Henry Silva was replaced by Cajun gator-slaying siblings Richard Lynch and Kane Hodder (a hulking stuntman best known for portraying Jason Voorhees in four "Friday the 13th" outings). The supporting cast featured Dee Wallace ("The Hills Have Eyes," "The Howling," "Cujo," "E.T.") and Brock Peters (best known for his portrayal of Tom Robinson in 1962's "To Kill a Mockingbird").

Now that we're familiar with the cast of irregular regulars, here are glimpses at a few of the more interesting patients who paraded their neuroses through Dr. Hartley's group therapy sessions...

Besides the caustic Elliott Carlin, Dr. Hartley's patients on "The Bob Newhart Show" included the forlornly insecure Ed Herd, played by character actor Oliver Clark (pictured above, with Jack Riley). A decade after "The Bob Newhart Show," Clark appeared on a number of episodes of "St. Elsehwere" as "John Doe #6," an amnesiac patient who could very be Mr. Herd. As a matter of fact, John Doe finds himself committed to the same mental ward as none other than Jack Riley's Elliott Carlin, who treats the anonymous patient with the same verbal abuse he directed at Herd on "The Bob Newhart Show," while blaming his own mental instability on an unnamed "quack in Chicago."

Years before portraying milquetoast former Marine Emil Peterson on "The Bob Newhart Show," John Fiedler made his screen debut as meek Juror #2 in director Sidney Lumet's first motion picture, "12 Angry Men" (1957). Unil his death, Fiedler provided the inimitable powdery voice of Piglet in Disney's animated Winnie-the-Pooh films. He succumbed to cancer at the age of 80 on June 25, 2005, one day after the death of ventriloquist-comedian Paul Winchell, the longtime voice of Tigger in the Pooh cartoons.

Never too far from her knitting needles, elderly grocery store clerk Mrs. Bakerman was portrayed by Florida Friebus, already a familiar face on TV for her role as Winnie Gillis, the mother of Dwayne Hickman's character on "The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis" from 1959 to 1963.

Frank Faylen (recognizable as Ernie, the friendly cabbie in "It's a Wonderful
Life") played grocer Herbert T. Gillis opposite Florida Friebus' Winifred Gillis.

Perennially luckless with men, Michelle Nardo was played by Renee Lippin (pictured below, with Jack Riley), who had roles in the Woody Allen films "Startdust Memories," "Radio Days," and "Celebrity" before retiring to marry a doctor and raise a family.

Before spinning discs as Dr. Johnny Fever on "WKRP in Cincinnati" and teaching gifted cutups in "Head of the Class," Howard Hesseman, a founding member of the previously mentioned San Francisco-based comedy troupe The Committee, appeared on "The Bob Newhart Show" as Mr. Plager (pictured below), a tireless game show idea pitchman and aspiring playwright who stirred up prejudices amidst the group when he came out as gay.

And, of course, the actor who played Miles Lascoe, a convicted thief treated by an apprehensive Dr. Hartley, went on to peddle reverse mortgages on TV ads. Oh, yeah, Henry Winkler also portrayed TV icon Fonzie on 11 seasons of "Happy Days."

The Hartleys would be periodically visited by their respective parents, who predictably exhibited behavior as erratic as Bob's clientele, providing Newhart with even more ample opportunities to hone his skills at deadpan reactions to a Wonderland of nonsensical eccentrics.

Dr. Hartley's mother, Martha, was played by Martha Scott, who did double duty in Biblical epics of the 1950s starring Charlton Heston, first as Yoshebel, Moses' birth mother, in Cecil B. DeMille's "The Ten Commandments" (1956), and as Miriam (pictured below), the title character's mother in "Ben-Hur" (1959).

Cathy O'Donnell, Haya Harareet, Martha Scott, Sam Jaffe,
 and Charlton Heston enjoy a round of Seder wine in "Ben-Hur."

Born Bernard Hughes, veteran character actor Barnard Hughes changed the "e" in his first name to an "a" on the advice of a numerologist who thought it would benefit his career. He appeared as Bob Hartley's father, Herb (pictured below, on the far left, with Martha Scott, Pat Finley, Bob Newhart, Suzanne Pleshette, Ann Rutherford, and John Randolph).

Like Barnard Hughes, John Randolph, who portrayed Suzanne Pleshette's outdoorsy pop, Cornelius "Junior" Harrison, was a longtime character actor, enduring a blacklist during the McCarthy era witch hunt for Communists in Hollywood in the 1950s to re-emerge in the 1960s as an anchoring rock of support in such roles as Al Pacino's guardian angel, Chief Sidney Green, in 1973's "Serpico" and as Chevy Chase's pop in "Christmas Vacation" (pictured below).

John Randolph (far left) plays Clark Griswold Sr. in "Christmas Vacation," with
Doris Roberts as Ellen Griswold's mother, E.G. Marshall as Ellen's father,
and Diane Ladd as Clark Griswold's mother.

Emily Hartley's mother, Aggie Harrison, was played by Ann Rutherford, a true survivor of Hollywood's Golden Age, who portrayed one of Scarlett O'Hara's sisters in 1939's "Gone with the Wind" (pictured below).

Ann Rutherford portrays Carreen O'Hara, Vivien Leigh is Scarlett O'Hara,
and Evelyn Keyes plays Suelellen O'Hara in "Gone with the Wind."

Postscript

As previously mentioned, Jack Riley reprised his role of Elliott Carlin on a 1985 episode of "St. Elsewhere." In a 1987 episode of the science fiction-based sitcom "ALF," Willie (Max Wright) visits a psychologist, played by Bill Daily. Jack Riley appears in the waiting room, presumably as Mr. Carlin. (In the same episode, the extraterrestrial fur ball mentions that he learned about psychology by watching episodes of "The Bob Newhart Show.")

On Bob's later series, "Newhart," Riley had a cameo as an unnamed character who, behaving very much like Carlin. is being treated by the same therapist Dick Loudon (Newhart) is seeing for marriage counseling. When Newhart says he recognizes Riley but can't come up with a name, the latter predictably replies with an insult ("I'd love to stay around and listen to you stutter all night, but I've got a life to live...psycho!"). The therapist apologizes for the patient,  explaining that it has taken years "to undo the damage caused by some quack in Chicago."

Elliott Carlin and Dr. Hartley reverse roles on "The Bob Newhart Show."

In a statement released after Jack Riley's passing, Bob Newhart, who called him a "dear friend," said Riley created one of television's "most endearing situation comedy characters with his Carlin portrayal."

In 2005, the cast of "The Bob Newhart Show" was honored with the Icon Award
at the TV Land Awards: (left to right) Bill Daily, Jack Riley, Marcia Wallace,
Suzanne Pleshette, Bob Newhart, Peter Bonerz, Tom Poston.