I’m writing a project on history, so I just thought I’d share some videos I found with you.
What do all three of these people have in common? Well, all of them are big American television hosts: Fred Rogers, Johnny Carson, and Oprah Winfrey. And I’m currently researching them.
They may not give us insight on how to run entertainment in the present. But they give us insight into how the world functioned in the past. And they can teach us something about power.
I know you may not want to read this post. After all, these are very mainstream people, it may seem boring. But I’ll let you know that this post is not boring. Because these people are interesting. And they lived in interesting times.
Let’s start with Oprah Winfrey: because she was the first person I researched.
1. Oprah’s Interview with Michael Jackson
(video is 3:25 in length)
The year is 1993. Oprah has just been hosting The Oprah Winfrey Show for seven years now. And in a rare prime-time event, she interviews Michael Jackson on her show for Americans all across the nation to see.
The interview itself is interesting. Michael Jackson confesses that he dislikes the idea of being portrayed of as a white person, when he believes he’s “a black American”. He says the color of his skin started to change “sometime after Thriller”.
He claims that what he’s been doing that’s resulted in the drastic change in his skin tone is that he was using makeup to even it out, and denies “taking anything” to change the color of his skin.
This interview is the most watched interview ever, with an audience of 36.5 million people that watched it from home. It really shows the popularity of Michael Jackson—and the power of Oprah Winfrey.
You see, you may not have heard about Oprah Winfrey much anymore, but she was once the most powerful woman in the world. During its 1991-1992 season, The Oprah Winfrey Show had 13.1 million daily U.S. viewers.
A survey back in 2003 estimated that 73% of American adults “had a favorable view of Winfrey”. Her outreach was so wide that every time she showed a new book on her segment, Oprah’s Book Club, it would instantly become a bestseller.
Forbes named her the “world’s most powerful celebrity” in 2005, 2007, 2008, 2010, and 2013. She became the world’s first black billionaire in 2004, and remained the only one until 2007.
Michael Jackson died in 2009. If he was still alive today, he’d be 62. But Oprah Winfrey is still alive. She’s worth $2.5 billion, the richest self-made woman in the world.
2) Johnny Carson Invites Frank Sinatra
(video is 4:52 in length)
The year is 1976. Johnny Carson is in the height of his career, who’s soared to become an American icon in the 1970s. And here he brings Frank Sinatra, the famous singer, onto his talk show The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson.
Johnny Carson begins with a funny yet intriguing question to Frank Sinatra: “when you’re in a romantic mood, and you’re trying to make out, whose records do you put on?” The audience laughs.
Then Don Rickles walks on stage. Don Rickles is a famous comedian that’s a comedic favorite in the eyes of Johnny Carson and a long-time friend to Frank Sinatra. (Don Rickles is also the voice of Mr. Potato Head in the Toy Story movies.)
Don Rickles is happy to see Frank Sinatra because “I’ve never met him before”. Then Rickles jokes with Sinatra about the Mafia, since Frank Sinatra is Italian. (Remember, this is the 70’s, the Mafia was still big around this time.) Then Don Rickles kisses Frank Sinatra. Twice.
This clip is not very important. I mean sure, there’s Frank Sinatra, and the clip is very funny, but it has no historical significance nor modern effect. It is, however, a breath of fresh air, for people in the present to look at humor in the past. There’s something about this that just doesn’t exist anymore.
A quick Google search of “most influential television hosts” yields Johnny Carson at the top of the list. Yet you’ve probably never heard of him. Why? Because the audience he catered to is all grown up now.
You see, late-night talk shows like The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson lend themselves to a uniquely adult audience. Let’s say a person watched this episode on television when it first aired, which is not unlikely. Suppose they were 26 years old then. Now, they’d be 70.
As a result, you may not know just how much of an effect Johnny Carson had American comedy culture.
Some comedians kickstarted their careers by appearing on Johnny Carson’s show and getting Carson to laugh at their jokes. Examples of comedians that did this include Robin Williams, Jerry Seinfeld, and Ellen DeGeneres.
Furthermore, his style of humor was so contagious that many comedians today credit Johnny Carson as an influence. Examples of these comedians include David Letterman, Jay Leno, Conan O’Brien, and Jimmy Fallon.
Johnny Carson and his show had a massive influence on the modern comedy world. In total, at least thirteen comedians started their careers through him, and at least twenty-three comedians credit Johnny Carson as an influence.
Today, everyone in this clip is now dead. Johnny Carson died in 2005. Frank Sinatra died in 1998. And Don Rickles died in 2017. (That’s why movie producers were panicking over Toy Story 4 in 2019.) But Johnny Carson’s influence lives on.
3) Mr. Rogers Wades with Officer Clemmons
(video is 3:03 in length)
The year is 1969. Fred Rogers is filming the fifteenth episode in color on his children’s show, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. And he and Officer François Clemmons are about to break one of the times’ color barriers.
In this scene, Officer Clemmons has had a hard long day of being a police officer, and it’s a hot summer morning. So Mr. Rogers invites him to put his feet in the water with him and relax for a moment.
Officer Clemmons cools his feet down in the wading pool with Mr. Rogers. However, just a moment later, Officer Clemmons cuts his time short with Mr. Rogers so that Clemmons may return to his job.
Mr. Rogers is very understanding of this. He says that “sometimes just a minute like this will really make a difference.” Officer Clemmons dries his feet, they sing a song, and they part ways.
Fred Rogers played a very large role in the production of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. He was the creator, showrunner, and host. He wrote all the episodes and created all the characters. He wrote and sang in most of the songs, and played most of the puppets.
And this scene was intentional. Mr. Rogers didn’t “accidentally” stumble into integration or topics about racism. As François Clemmons said in an interview in 2016, “thaaat’s not Mr. Rogers! It was well planned and well thought out.”
Mr. Rogers had an idea of what he wanted to teach to his prekindergarten television audience. He wanted to embed in his TV show, ideas that came from the complicated real world outside his show.
While children were learning in his show about how to control their anger and how to be kind to others, adults were hearing on the news about black people being driven out of integrated pools by white people, pouring cleaning chemicals into the water.
Policemen were white, and they were arresting black people in mass numbers for civilly disobeying. This is the 1960s, remember, and it was a very hostile world for black people in America.
Fred Rogers heard about all this, and that’s the reason why he made François Clemmons a policeman on their show. That’s why they did this scene together.
At its peak, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood was broadcast to 1.8 million homes across America. All these families heard the various different themes that Mr. Rogers put in his show.
Fred Rogers died in 2003, two years after the last episode of his show. François Clemmons is still alive, at the age of 75. A documentary and a drama film have since been made about Fred Rogers’ Mr. Rogers Neighborhood.
Besides, Fred Rogers is just a genuinely good guy. He became a part of so many children’s lives across America, teaching them many life lessons. And isn’t that enough?
Well, that’s the end of this post.
Why did I show you this? After all, I really never needed to. I could have just as easily kept it to myself for the history project. Well, it’s because I was interested in this.
I watched these clips and realized I had no idea what the world was like back then. And you hadn’t watched these clips yet, so you probably have even less of an idea. So I wanted to show them to you.
You can see how different a world the people before us grew up in. The people who saw this were Baby Boomers and Generation X, they were your parents or grandparents. And this could have been the source of entertainment they saw when they were growing up.
And you can see how powerful these people are. Let’s be honest, no one here on Tumblr has power. No one around here has a lot of money. We fund Kickstarters to fundraise people’s surgeries. We donate to charities to help people elsewhere around the world.
These are people who influenced the livelihoods of millions of people across a third of a continent. Oprah Winfrey is worth billions of dollars. Johnny Carson influenced an entire generation of comedians. And Mr. Rogers made an entire generation’s childhoods.
These are the people who are actually called “powerful”.
And finally, one last note. I’m not a historian. I’m a storyteller. It’s why I’m not concerned with citing my sources. (That doesn’t make what I said here any less true, though, know that everything I said here is factual. You can look it up and see for yourself.)
I wanted to share stories with my friends and with the world. So that’s why I made this post. So they can see it now. And you can see it too.
