A Day On The Tube: 35 Clown-Hating, Sponsor-Trashing, Kid-Riot Years With Wallace And Ladmo

From left to right:
Liberace with Ladmo, Aunt Maud, and Wallace

As the years passed, Thompson, McMahon, and Kwiatkowski continued pushing the boundaries of comedy, relentlessly slamming the hackneyed and hated staples of TV kids’ shows (clowns, magicians, public service messages, and especially puppets). Local prudes doubtless had fits over the slow-burn no-rules violence of Ladmo’s frequent altercations with park-bench weirdo Mr. Grudgmeyer. A cavalcade of iconic stars did cameos, like Muhammad Ali, Jack Benny, Steve Allen, Waylon Jennings, Joe Louis, and any other random celebrity that happened to be passing through town.

Meanwhile, Condello embraced the psychedelic era with a vengeance. His canny Beatles spoofs—starting with 1964’s Fab Four-style “Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer” and continuing with the Blubber Soul EP—reached their zenith with “Commodore Condello’s Salt River Navy Band,” in which Condello created a credible duplication of the Beatles’ multimillion-dollar Pepper-era sound in a few hours using minimal equipment and no budget whatsoever. A typical example: “With A Little Help From My Friends” became the Marshall Good-themed “With A Little Help From His Horse” (the only thing he loves is his horse. . . you understand it’s platonic, of course). Perhaps his most recognizable original song from the era is “Soggy Cereal,” which became a staple of Dr. Demento’s show for years.

Besides his psych spoofs for (and with) Wallace and company, in 1968 Condello cut a psych-pop album (Condello—Phase 1) that’s highly prized among collectors of the genre. He also produced Warren S. Richardson’s self-titled LP (actually a pseudonym for the Tubes’ Bill Spooner). Around the same time, Condello also recorded what might be his finest work, an unreleased concept/comedy album combining his love of Wallace and Ladmo-style satire with his exotic musical explorations. The LP features songs like “A Pimple Is A Sometime Thing,” “Public School Lunch,” and “Sock It Near Me,” and one can only hope it will see the light of day. Condello did session work for Lee Hazlewood, and was also part of Hazlewood’s group Last Friday’s Fire, the proto-indie name an oblique reference to the Apollo 1 launchpad disaster (Hazlewood’s choice, over Condello’s objections). He left the show in the early 1970s to try his luck in Los Angeles, and did session work for artists from Jackson Browne to the Tubes.

Photo © WallaceWatchers.com

Well into the 1980s, the show remained vital, adding new characters (notably adding the entire cast of the very funny and decidedly grown-up sketch comedy troupe the Ajo Repertory Company, including Ben Tyler and Cathy Dresbach), and while it may have lost a step or two from its swinging-sixties heyday, Wallace and Ladmo kept its edge and its audience until the decade came to a close. In 1989, Thompson decided to end the show, to Ladmo’s sorrow. Five years later, Ladmo passed away from cancer.

After leaving the show, Condello recorded another unreleased classic, in a band called Elton Duck which featured Michael Steele (later of the Bangs/Bangles) on bass. Arista Records President Clive Davis was so impressed that he personally signed the band, but the resulting LP never saw release and still languishes in some dusty label vault. Condello helped produce two vital records at the intersection of punk and new wave, X and Y by Billy Clone and the Same (1980) and the self-titled debut of the Clones’ successors, the Jetzons (1982). He also released a solo album, No Bathing In Pond, on the Takoma label in 1984. But Condello never found the success as an adult that he’d known as a teen prodigy, and overcome by depression, he committed suicide in 1995, on the eve of a huge rebirth of interest in his work.

Thompson, now 80, and McMahon, whose exact age has been a state secret since approximately 1961, still carry on the show’s legacy. Thompson is retired but continues to make public appearances; McMahon is a television host and media personality who shows no sign of regret at the fickle Hollywood opportunities he left behind. Meanwhile, the show endures. “Best Of” episodes periodically air on local television, and this year’s PBS Pioneers of Television special earned the show many new fans. And while DVDs and YouTube clips are available, a disastrously short-sighted penny-pinching management decision means the bulk of the show is lost forever. The vast majority of Wallace and Ladmo episodes prior to the 1980s were erased, every single day, so the tape could be used to record the following day’s show. A handful of kinescopes and video clips of the era’s special moments exist—and thankfully the last few years of episodes were preserved—but the 1960s-era show is all but lost. The show’s sets, costumes, props, and scripts are preserved by the Arizona Historical Society, which hosts a popular permanent exhibit on the show.

An audience at Wallace and Ladmo live

Off the air now for nearly 22 years, the subversive Wallace and Ladmo influenced generations of fans, including Phoenix residents Alice Cooper and Steven Spielberg, who continue to praise the show decades after it ended. “I lived in Phoenix, Arizona for over a decade, and I watched them every day, and even when I grew up and was supposed to be too old to watch them I still watched them, because they were very hip,” Spielberg told KPHO in 1989. “They kept abreast of the times and they were very hip. They were the Saturday Night Live before Saturday Night Live.” Cooper, the former Vince Furnier, who made his television debut on the show with his band The Spiders, took particular inspiration from the overwhelming crowd response to Gerald, the show’s villain—and created a gleefully villainous persona of his own.

The era of the locally produced kids’ show—indeed, locally produced programming of any kind—is sadly mostly over, but Wallace and Ladmo set a standard for freewheeling multimedia creativity, sneakily anti-authority comedy, and hardscrabble endurance that will be hard for anyone to match.

For an exhaustive history on Wallace & Ladmo, including photos and video clips, please visit WallaceWatchers.com.

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