<p>How do you put Ernie Kovacs into context?</p> <p>Dead nearly 50 years after a 1962 car accident cut his life short just shy of his 43rd birthday, Kovacs is all but forgotten today. Yet he was, in David Letterman’s words, one of TV’s great innovators, a man who “knew exactly what to do with television before television knew what to do with itself. It’s 60 years later, and we still haven’t caught up.”</p> <p>A handsome new box set, “The Ernie Kovacs Collection” (Shout! Factory), finally gives modern audiences access to Kovacs’ eye-opening antics.</p> <p>The 13 hours, carefully spread over six DVDs, contains programming Kovacs created during various stints at four different networks – ABC, CBS, NBC and long-defunct Dumont.</p> <p>The episodes showcase Kovacs’ unique genius, but also shed light on why he was never quite able to enjoy breakthrough success. TV in the early ’50s was dominated by stars from radio, burlesque and film such as Jack Benny, George Burns, Red Skelton, Milton Berle, Groucho Marx, even Abbott & Costello. Some, like Berle, Lucille Ball and Jackie Gleason, were bigger hits on television than ever before. Kovacs, was different: playfully nonchalant, casual, all ad-lib and experimental, he was too at home to be a TV star. He was, as Letterman asserts, ahead of his time.</p> <p>Audiences that had embraced primitive fare like Berle’s “Texaco Star Theater” or the gentle puppet parables of “Kukla, Fran and Ollie” had to be baffled at this man with a moustache and a constantly lit cigar deconstructing what had just been constructed. Kovacs was out of the box right after the box had been opened.</p> <p>His 1950, Philadelphia-based morning show, “Three to Get Ready,” was the first big market morning TV show. Nobody thought audiences would watch TV that early in the day. NBC followed Kovacs’ example and launched “The Today Show,” effectively putting him out of work.</p> <p>He never stopped working, however, doing comedy specials, guesting on quiz shows like “What’s My Line?,” even working a Monday/Tuesday stint as the forgotten “Tonight Show” host between Steve Allen and Jack Paar.</p> <p>Kovacs had a causal, unrehearsed on-air presence. He’d often take viewers behind the cameras, up into the bleachers, even cutting into the opening or closing credits.</p> <p>Not a word was spoken on a rare 1957 colour NBC broadcast included in the boxed set. The 30 minutes are filled with video tricks, some shot live. Kovacs was in many ways the Buster Keaton of his day, testing the boundaries of television the way Keaton turned his movie camera inside out.</p> <p>Kovacs, who wrote many of his sketches, had several regular characters, including Percy Dovetonsils, a lisping poet. He would take viewer mail as “Mr. Question Man,” where it was declared, “all of your questions are carefully tabulated. Some of them are read.” You can see Mr. Question Man today in Craig Ferguson’s snide approach to emails and tweets. The Scottish-born comedian acknowledges Kovacs as an influence, as does Letterman and Chevy Chase.</p> <p>Kovacs’ most bizarre creation might have been “The Nairobi Trio,” three individuals dressed in grotesque gorilla masks wearing bowler hats and lodge member suits. They played instruments or often just smashed stuff over their heads while a jolly theme played. “If there is such a thing as dangerous laughter,” Mel Brooks says in a quote from the box set’s accompanying 44-page book, “it happened to me every time I saw the Nairobi Trio.”</p> <p>Besides this glimpse into Kovacs’ delightfully twisted mind, the other remarkable thing about “The Ernie Kovacs Collection” is that it was collected at all. Kovacs was a man who liked to gamble and lived large. On his tombstone is written: Nothing in moderation.”</p> <p>Unfortunately, nothing is what the tax man got, leaving Kovacs a half million in debt to the IRS at his death – a fortune in 1962. That burden fell to his widow, Edie Adams, a singer and key member of his TV troupe. As we learn in the opening essay in the booklet, “Saving Ernie Kovacs” – written by her son, Joshua Mills – Adams took it upon herself to not only pay off Kovacs debts but to track down and buy back much of his legacy.</p> <p>This wasn’t easy. A lot of early television was live and just vanished into the ether. What was captured on tape was often erased and taped over, a fate that befell much of the “Tonight Show” including the first 10 years of Johnny Carson. Entire runs of shows are lost on both sides of the border, including Canadian Boomer favourites such as “Tiny Talent Time” or “Party Game.”</p> <p>Kovacs died before home video or PVRs existed. There were no DVDs or BlueRays and little incentive to save or preserve footage. (One can only imagine the fun Kovacs would have today on YouTube).</p> <p>”When word came to my mom from the guys at the NBC television library that the network brass were using tapes from Ernie’s old programs to dub game shows, she immediately stepped in,” writes Mills. Over the next few decades, Adams bought 150 hours of Kovacs legacy back and paid to store it in a temperature-controlled vault. The result is a window on genius and a tribute to the woman who saved him from obscurity.</p> <p>___</p> <p>Bill Brioux is a freelance TV columnist based in Brampton, Ont.</p>
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