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marble falls

(56,359 posts)
Sat Mar 28, 2020, 04:28 PM Mar 2020

Soupy Sales and the naked lady

Soupy Sales Famous ‘Stripper Surprise’ Backstory
On June 28, 2012 - Broadcast History

https://eyesofageneration.com/soupy-sales-famous-stripper-surprise-backstorylet-me-let-you-in-on-a-little/

Soupy Sales Famous ‘Stripper Surprise’ Backstory

Let me let you in on a little secret. Lunch with Soupy Sales, Detroit’s most popular TV kid’s show, wasn’t really a kid’s show at all. Oh sure, Soupy always reminded the kiddies to take their vitaminnies and eat Silvercup Bread, “the best bread in Dee-troit,” but the show always relied on more adult oriented humor. In a 1958 Detroit Times article Sales even admitted, “There’s really no message to this show. It’s actually a kid’s show for adults.”

Soupy and his straight man, puppeteer Clyde Adler, were basically a modern day vaudeville team. The show never had a live studio audience, except for a very vocal stage crew. Soupy always tried to crack up the crew, and they were more than happy to reciprocate. For example, Soupy’s orange juice was on more than one occasion spiked with 100 proof vodka, courtesy of the stagehands. Another crew prank involved the placing of dirty notes between the buns of Soupy’s hamburger. When Soupy lifted the top of the bun to put ketchup on his burger he’d see the dirty note, which would invariably break him up.

<snip>

There never was a written script for the show; Soupy and Clyde would just work out what they were going to do, giving the director a bare-bones outline for camera angles and sound cues. The bit was for the audio man to play a recording of a woman screaming. Soupy would then run to the door, open it, and look down to see a pair of women’s shoes being pulled by fishing line, running from a pair of men’s shoes. Blackout, cut to commercial.

The studio that day was filled with curious onlookers who were in on the joke. Soupy knew that something was up, but he wasn’t quite sure what. The show started precisely at noon, and ran smoothly. At about 12:27 Soupy, as rehearsed, heard a woman’s scream. He ran to the door, opened it, and instead of a pair of women’s shoes saw a nude woman wearing nothing but a smile. Soupy stole a quick glance at the master monitor, hoping that the curvaceous cutie’s image wasn’t being broadcast live over the airwaves. Sure enough, to his horror the monitor showed exactly what Soupy had feared- a smiling nude woman. The engineers were clever enough to patch a different camera angle into the monitor, making Soupy think that thousands of Detroit kiddies were at home eating their lunches in front of the TV while getting a lesson in female anatomy. In reality, what the kids saw was a speechless Soupy standing next to an open door, nothing more. Soupy saw what he thought was his career passing before his eyes.

<snip>

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LakeArenal

(28,729 posts)
2. Unfortunately his prank of telling kids to steal money and send to him
Sat Mar 28, 2020, 04:36 PM
Mar 2020

Did his show in. But he was very adult in his humor.

Much like Simpsons is supposed to be a kids show too.

marble falls

(56,359 posts)
3. He never told them to steal money, he told them to get the green pieces of paper out their ...
Sat Mar 28, 2020, 04:45 PM
Mar 2020

parent's wallets and purses. I don't think he actually got more than a couple of bucks. But it did PO some folks.

LakeArenal

(28,729 posts)
5. It's stealing. Don't try to make it less.
Sat Mar 28, 2020, 04:55 PM
Mar 2020

Using minors who didn’t know better is still stealing.

Of course that wasn’t his intent but that is what happened. He never thought anyone would follow through on it.

But it ended the show.

marble falls

(56,359 posts)
6. Its a joke, don't try to make it revenue flow! From Snopes ...
Sat Mar 28, 2020, 04:58 PM
Mar 2020
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/greenmail/

Soupy Sales’ ‘Green Pieces of Paper’ Scandal
Scandal erupted when children's TV host Soupy Sales asked his young viewers to send him 'little green pieces of paper.'

David Mikkelson

Published 20 March 2001


Soupy Sales was once suspended for asking his young television viewers to send him "little green pieces of paper" taken from their parents' wallets.
Rating

True

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Origin

It may be hard to imagine for those who have grown up in the modern era of radio and television with its “shock jocks” and numerous programs involving hosts playing all sorts of bizarre (and sometimes outright cruel) pranks on unsuspecting participants, but back in 1965 an off-the-cuff joke by children’s television host Soupy Sales touched off a huge scandal over what would today seem like little more than a harmless prank:

Examples:

[Sivulka, 1998]

In January 1965 on his morning children’s show, the performer Soupy Sales suggested to his young viewers that they find the wallets of their sleeping fathers and take out “some of those funny green pieces of paper with all those nice pictures of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Alexander Hamilton, and send them along to your old pal, Soupy, care of WNEW, New York.”

[Collected on the Internet, 1997]

“Hey kids, last night was New Year’s Eve, and your mother and dad were out having a great time. They are probably still sleeping and what I want you to do is tiptoe in their bedroom and go in your mom’s pocketbook and your dad’s pants, which are probably on the floor. You’ll see a lot of green pieces of paper with pictures of guys in beards. Put them in an envelope and send them to me at Soupy Sales, Channel 5, New York, New York. And you know what I’m going to send you? A post card from Puerto Rico!”

The controversy began on Friday, 1 January 1965, when Soupy Sales — who was somewhat miffed at having to work on New Year’s Day — had a few minutes to kill at the end of his program. Ad-libbing, Sales looked into the camera and delivered a request to his young viewers to sneak some “little green pieces of paper” (i.e., currency) out of their parents’ wallets and send them to him. (The show was aired live and no tape of it exists, so a verbatim transcription of what Sales actually said is not available.)

Complaints from outraged parents came fast and furious, and the television station that hosted Sales’ program, WNEW-TV in New York, had pulled him off the air by the following Monday. (Contrary to common belief, Sales wasn’t fired over the stunt, nor was his show canceled because of it: He resumed broadcasting two weeks later, and his program ran on WNEW for almost another two years.)

It’s easy for those who weren’t around back then to be puzzled by the frenzied response to what now seems like a tepid, impulsive gag at worst, but back in 1965 plenty of adults were livid at the thought of a TV personality’s crassly manipulating children for commercial gain. As many of Sales’ supporters maintained, though, Soupy hadn’t really done anything that radio and television pitchmen hadn’t already been doing for years: he had simply cut out the middleman by suggesting that children send him money directly rather than exhorting them to buy his sponsors’ products. Hadn’t his radio predecessors been just as commercially manipulative when they continually touted the charms of various mediocre products to children, who then pestered their mothers to buy those products solely because the purchases were necessary to obtain a Shake-Up Mug or Code-O-Graph or whatever geegaw was being plugged on popular kids’ shows like Little Orphan Annie and Captain Midnight?

If cooler heads had prevailed back in 1965, adults might have realized that the furor was much ado about nothing. The premise of Soupy’s stunt was largely untenable, because it required that children mostly too young to understand or appreciate the concept of “money” would nonetheless be able to recognize it, surreptitiously remove it from their parents’ wallets, put it in envelopes with the correct postage and address (even though Soupy hadn’t provided an address), and mail it to him, all without their parents’ knowledge or assistance. At that age I’d have been hard-pressed to successfully mail a postcard to myself without help, and no kid I knew who was mature to enough understand the value of money was about to part with any prized currency by sending it to a TV host who promised nothing in return, no matter how nicely he asked. Nonetheless, decades later sloppy historians were still reporting that “It worked. According to reports it was ‘the biggest heist since the Brink’s robbery.'”1

It didn’t work. Although various accounts credit Soupy with having received up to $80,000 through the mail, Sales himself has revealed on numerous occasions that he netted only a few real dollars, along with a lot of play money, green Monopoly money, and other forms of fake currency:

The most famous single gag comes on New Year’s Day 1965. Mr. Sales tells kids to go into their parents’ wallets and to send him “those little green pieces of paper.”It’s become a cult thing to say you sent $10, $20, he says, but if that had been true, he would have had enough money to buy the building. He received only a few dollars, and a week’s suspension.
2

Perhaps someone should have been more concerned with the gullibility of parents, not children.

LakeArenal

(28,729 posts)
7. Prank Joke whatever, it went assbackward and he lost his show.
Sat Mar 28, 2020, 05:20 PM
Mar 2020

I know it’s not his intent. And at the moment it was funny. But the fallout was his downfall.

My family were very sad about it. My parents had a great sense of humor.
But other parents not so much.

Zambero

(8,954 posts)
4. Whoa...I think I needed that!
Sat Mar 28, 2020, 04:52 PM
Mar 2020

Just grateful that it's afternoon, and the daily coffee sipping routine has come and gone.

mithnanthy

(1,725 posts)
9. I LOVED watching Soupy Sales
Sat Mar 28, 2020, 06:08 PM
Mar 2020

I was a young teenager and he cracked me up and I wouldn't miss a show. White Fang. Black Tooth...Pookie and Hippy. Every Saturday. FUNNY stuff.

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