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Wonderama
American television series
American television series
| Field | Value | |
|---|---|---|
| genre | Variety show | |
| presenter | various (see below) | |
| opentheme | "I Ain't Down Yet" | |
| endtheme | "Kids Are People Too" (1967–1977) | |
| runtime | {{Plainlist | |
| country | United States | |
| location | New York City | |
| first_aired | ||
| last_aired | ||
| first_aired2 | ||
| last_aired2 | ||
| first_aired3 | ||
| last_aired3 | present | |
| num_seasons | 26 |
- 1955–1977: Sunday version: 3 hours
- ?–1970: weekday version: 1 hour
- 1977: 2 hours
- 1980–1987; 2017–present: 1 hour
Wonderama is a children's television program that originally aired on the Metromedia-owned stations from 1955 to 1977. The show was revived from 1980 to 1987, and again in 2016.
Hosts
- Al Hodge (as Captain Video 1955–1956)
- Jon Gnagy (mid–late 1950s)
- Sandy Becker (1955–56)
- Chuck McCann (1955–56)
- Pat Meikle (co-hosting 1955–1956)
- Herb Sheldon (1956–1958)
- Bill Britten (co-host in 1958; later known as New York's Bozo the Clown)
- Doris Faye (co-host in 1958)
- Sonny Fox (1959–1967)
- Bob McAllister (1967–1977)
- various teenagers (1980–1987)
- David Osmond (2017–present)
Original series
Wonderama aired on its originating station, WNEW-TV in New York City, as well as in five other markets in which Metromedia owned television stations: WTTG in Washington D.C., KMBC-TV in Kansas City, KTTV in Los Angeles, WXIX-TV in Cincinnati, and WTCN-TV in Minneapolis – Saint Paul. The show was three hours long for most of its run on Sunday mornings. The show was created as well as originally hosted by actor-comedian Sandy Becker, who became a New York children's program star in his own right.
In the 1960s, Wonderama aired in a one-hour weekday version in addition to the three-hour Sunday show. The one-hour program lasted until 1970.
The show scaled back to two hours in September 1977 before WNEW canceled it in November of that year. The last produced show was taped on December 15, before airing on December 25. In an interview on WNEW's local talk show Midday with Bill Boggs on the day of Wonderama cancellation, host Bob McAllister claimed to have no idea why the show ended. However, in a 1993 interview with the Pennsylvania newspaper The Morning Call, McAllister stated that an advertisement that he bought in The New York Times telling viewers to stop watching Wonderama might have led to the program's cancellation. McAllister bought the Times ad after he became upset when an ad for the 1972 Charles Bronson movie The Mechanic aired during the show. "When I was doing Wonderama," McAllister said, "I always made sure that there was never any violence within the framework of the show. They claimed that the ads were computer programmed, but I didn't buy it. I took out a full-page $10,000 ad in The New York Times warning parents not to let their children watch the show. Unfortunately, I bummed myself out of broadcasting permanently with that little faux pas, but I still stand by it."
After its cancellation, Wonderama continued in two-hour Sunday morning reruns from January 1978 to June 1980. McAllister reportedly was unhappy with edits to the reruns, which usually eliminated celebrity performances in order to avoid having to pay royalties.
The Sonny Fox years
Independent television network Metromedia (born from the former DuMont Network) hired Fox to host Wonderama on its New York flagship station, WABD (soon to become WNEW-TV), succeeding the team of Bill Britten and Doris Faye. Hiring Fox ended what some called the "musical-hosts syndrome" that Wonderama had for its first few years. Fox became ''Wonderama'''s sole host for eight years, until August 1967.
During this time, Fox made countless personal appearances throughout the New York metropolitan area. The Wonderama show was featured at the Hollywood Arena at the Freedomland U.S.A. theme park in The Bronx. Several shows at Freedomland were filmed and broadcast on the following Sunday mornings.
The Bob McAllister years
Following the frequent turnover of hosts throughout the 1950s, Wonderama experienced its greatest viewership by way of one-time Baltimore kids' show host Bob McAllister, who replaced Sonny Fox as host in 1967 and remained in that role until 1977. Each show's taping included features like education, music, audience participation, games, interviews, and cartoon shorts.
The program aired for three hours, including several breaks to allow for cartoon insertions. On most of Metromedia's stations, these would be Warner Bros. cartoons from the 1940s and 1950s. On KMBC in Kansas City, an ABC affiliate, the show only ran two hours without the cartoon inserts since this station did not own broadcast rights to cartoon shorts.
The program's closing theme song, sung by McAllister, was called "Kids Are People Too", which was later adapted as the show's title when ABC picked it up as a Sunday morning kids show. The song was also featured on an album of music from Wonderama by McAllister called Oh, Gee, it's Great to be a Kid.
Features
Popular features of Wonderama during the McAllister years included the following:
- "Snake Cans": the classic game in which Bob would pick kids from the audience one by one to open one of ten cans, nine of which were filled with spring-loaded "snakes". The tenth one contained an artificial flower bouquet, which earned the holder the grand prize (usually a Ross Apollo bicycle), along with other prizes for answering trivia questions.
- "Wonderama A Go-Go" (later called "Disco City", and currently known as "Dance Emergency"): a dance contest similar in style to American Bandstand, in which the best dancer won a prize. After it was renamed "Disco City", each contestant did his or her own dance to the same record; the record was introduced at the beginning of the segment by The Disco Kid, a boy dressed in a costume reminiscent of The Lone Ranger. Originally, The Disco Kid's theme was a loop of the chorus from The Raspberries' "Overnight Sensation", but this was later replaced with the song "Ride On, Disco Kid".
- "Does Anybody Here Have an Aardvark?": a song which Bob sang before a segment asking members of the audience to produce unusual objects for prizes. This usually occurred at the beginning of the show.
- "Exercise, Exercise!": this most often included jumping jacks and three-way burpees, involving all the kids in the audience. The segment had its own theme song:
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