"That's Entertainment"

"That's Entertainment"
March 9, 1982
B

This episode is definitely less notable for the only L & S script by either Etan McElroy or Larry Strawther than for the musical performances and of course shipping fodder up the wazoo.

We start with the unusual spectacle of Carmine singing "It's Not Unusual," very Vegasly, as sort of an audition for Frank, in the girls' apartment, while they're working late.  This is odd because, one, Frank, looks visibly uncomfortable; two, they could've held the audition at Cowboy Bill's; three, the audition is for the "second anniversary" of Frank managing Cowboy Bill's, which muddies an already sticky tar-pit of a timeline; and four, Carmine has no reason to audition when he used to sing regularly at the Pizza Bowl. However, it does prepare us for more bizarre even by early '80s standards "entertainment" that is, in spite of itself, entertaining.  (OK, there is one genuinely marvelous scene, in or out of context, but I'll get to that.)

Frank and Carmine argue about new and old entertainment for most of the rest of the episode, a lame frame, but I'll take it in the absence of a Shotz Talent Show or any more plausible device.  It does bring up the question of whose fantasy sequences these are: Frank's? Carmine's? Both?  Neither?  In some cases we can guess, in some it doesn't matter, and in others, well, I'm going to go with the collective consciousness of the L & S fandom.

Season Seven has mostly been a blur in checking it against my memories of the time, but I do kinda sorta remember Rhonda's version(s) of "Blue Moon."*  Frank says "Something like," as the lead-in, but the "doot doot doo" version is presumably Carmine's part of the fantasy.

Frank is the one to rave over the Dr. Kronkite comedy routine, which is gender-flipped with Shirley as the leering doctor and Carmine as her sex-object nurse.  So Frank ships Shirmine, and in a somewhat smutty way?  Note that this is not played as sexual harassment, since when the doctor wants to take the patient's blood pressure, Carmine tells her to take anything she wants, and it's clear he's a willing participant throughout, even when she has him bend over, twice.

I suppose that I should mention that there's an impatient customer that Carmine has to wait on.  I'm not clear why he's working as a waiter, but like I said, the frame is weak.

The next sequence I guess belongs to Mr. DeFazio, too, since he raves about Eleanor Powell and then his daughter shows off her dancing skills with Carmine.  If dancing is symbolic of sex and/or love, then Mr. DeFazio does not ship Carverne.  Laverne and Carmine dance parallel more than together in the sense of touch-dancing, and there's a set of shots that, if I recall correctly, would pop up in the next year's opening credits, which at the time I called Laverne & Laverne (which we'll get to).  I'm not saying Marshall & Mekka have no chemistry together, but I mean it seems to be more about the joy of dancing with another highly skilled dancer than about flirting, especially after the doctor sketch.

The dance is the first sequence that really clicks and then it's followed by one of my favorite Lenny & Squiggy numbers, although an atypical one for them.  To begin with, "Call the Police" is a cover song, and they are not playing as Lenny & the Squigtones (if such a band still exists after the California move).  Not only that, but they are actually outshone by their (very early-1980s-looking) back-up band, especially on that exquisite opening, where the drums, sax, bass, and piano tease the listener, and the boys seem perfectly happy to be "taken home" and made to "feel good" by their band.  They get more and more into the song, going from professorial instruction** to sheer release, only to be arrested at the end, with Squiggy closing out with "Call the police?"

Pics are below, but this is still really easy to find on Youtube if you don't own the episode.  (I've had days where I just play it a half dozen times in a row.)

The last number is a six-and-a-half-minute opera, or I guess operetta.  By any objective standard, it's pretty bad, and even at fourteen I probably cringed.  But as a shipping smorgasbord, it's hard to beat.  The "plot," which I guess could be a collaboration of opera-hating Frank and opera-singing Carmine, is that sisters Mimi and Brunhilda will be evicted if they don't either come up with the rent or agree to marry their evil landlord, the Baron Squigliacci, and his not as evil assistant, Leonard Feather.  You know how the pairings go by now, and you probably know that Mimi (Shirley) believes, "We surely know that if we married you, the day would come when we would rue it."  This is similar to Laverne's dream in "2001: A Comedy Odyssey," but Laverne (at least in whoever's fantasy this is) has had enough of package deals.  A little wooing from Mr. Feather, and Brunhilda tells Mimi to sing for herself. 

Then Carmine shows up as a clown, Mimi's "beloved Carmine," and the fencing champion of France.  He fights and kills Squigliacci, and Leonard says, "I never cared much for him anyway." The surviving six pair off-- including Frank & Rhonda!-- and they go into the finale.  One censor-bait line, when they sing of having to go, is "We have to pull out, quit, retire, withdraw."  (Opera interruptus?)  And Squigliacci comes back from the dead.

Now, as much as I can remember after almost 38 years, I think I knew that there was this weird opera in the episode, but I couldn't catch the lines at the time (unfortunately lip-synched by the cast, although they do their own dialogue, including Laverne's not-even-trying-not-to-sound-Brooklyn "Squigliacci's dead").  Even today I had to turn on the subtitles to get them.  But this is an opera to watch more than to listen to, so here you go, Pic Spam City!

Taking the ships in reverse order of interest:

• Um, Fronda?  Not gonna happen, even after Edna officially leaves him.  Besides the age difference (and Frank is a very old 56), they have nothing in common and normally hardly interact.  If this is Frank's fantasy, then he wants to cheat on Edna, and if it's Carmine's fantasy, I don't know where he's going with this.
• Squiggy appears to be the last Squigley shipper standing, with Lenny here almost as eager as Laverne to break out of the package deal.
• If this is Carmine's fantasy, then of course the forces of good and Shirmine must defeat the wicked Squigliacci, even if the "dead man" manages to hold hands with the prospective bride.  Carmine and Shirley smooch, but they got more action (and more focus) in the doctor sketch.
• It is not just shipper's bias that makes Lavenny reign supreme, in a season with sadly too many episodes that can't even put Lenny and Laverne in the same room.  Only McKean and Marshall could wear ridiculous costumes and somehow come across as not only "adorable and sweet," but, well, pretty sexy, like they can't wait to take advantage of each other.  (Note that in the opening, Brunhilda comes home from a date where her boyfriend "sat on her horn," more of that reverse Freudianism that we get sometimes with Laverne.)  Leonard seems to blow in her ear, and soon they progress to nose-rubs.  Then his boss dies and, instead of mourning, he caresses her face, a little like on "I Do, I Do."  They embrace and kiss for at least twenty seconds, and unlike the Mimi/Carmine (Carmimi ship?) kiss over the "corpse," we can see their faces and his hands.  They are also more scantily clad than anyone else onstage, which includes Rhonda for a change.  After their kiss, with her trying to spit out one of his feathers, they sing of their future.

BRUNHILDA: I know that we will have a happy life.
LEONARD: You'll make a very fine and feathered wife.
BOTH: We'll have a child or two or three or four.  And when we've had our fourth, we'll try for more.

Sounds like she's going to be covered with a lot of feathers.

And the episode ends with Frank declaring that "old food" is better than new, because this is Season Seven and the normal rules don't apply.


*I just checked, and the Three's Company episode that night, "Critic's Choice," is hardly one of my favorites, even for that season, while I seem to have blessedly blocked out most of the ninth season of Happy Days, to the point that an episode from two weeks earlier, "Hello, Flip," in which "Roger's irresponsible, younger brother comes to town to straighten out his life," is a complete blank to me.  (I can tell you that Roger was played by Ted "You know your show is on its last legs when you hire this guy" McGinley, so if they were already throwing in his brother, Season Nine must've been truly pathetic.)  I digress, but so does this episode.

**We're informed that Nat King Cole released the song in October of 1941, when "little Chuck Berry" was only 10 years old, and thirteen years before the invention of rock & roll.  Well, an online discography has the song on a December 1940 NKC album, although I guess it could've been a single the next year.  Oh, and Chuck Berry was a not so little 15 in 1941.  As for the invention of rock & roll, yeah, I guess if you want to say "Sh Boom" or whatever kicked things off, but isn't '55 or even '56 the more standard launch into the mainstream?  Is this Carmine's error or Lenny & Squiggy's?  And, OK, these are hardly the biggest timeline mistakes in this series.  Perhaps I shouldn't care about "such distinguishments."