When CBS failed to stop ABC from broadcasting a new reality series “The Glass House,” which it called a rip-off of its own “Big Brother,” the network retaliated with a satirical announcement of its plans to develop an imitation of a well-known ABC series to be called “Dancing on the Stars.”
The Washington Post reports:
“Dancing on the Stars” will be broadcast from the celebrity-strewn Hollywood Forever Cemetery, CBS claimed. It will feature “moderately famous and sort of well-known people you almost recognize competing for big prizes by dancing on the graves of some of Hollywood’s most iconic and well-beloved stars of stage and screen.”
The cemetery houses the remains of such Hollywood luminaries as Rudolph Valentino, Cecil B. DeMille, Douglas Fairbanks Sr. and Jr., Tyrone Power and Terry, the dog that played Toto in “The Wizard of Oz.”
If denied its first choice, CBS says “approaches will be made to Westwood Village Memorial Park, where equally scintillating luminaries are interred.”
Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery is where Ray Bradbury was laid to rest earlier this month, joining others with strong ties to the sf/fantasy field, Richard Basehart, Robert Bloch, Alexander Courage (composer of the Star Trek theme), and Ray Walston.
The Hollywood Forever Cemetery, in addition to the dog from The Wizard of Oz, is the last resting place of tangential sf/fantasy figures Mel Blanc, Elmo Lincoln (Tarzan in silent movies), Peter Lorre, Darren McGavin, and Fay Wray.
- The Ackerplaque
Forrest J Ackerman, who once speculated about being buried at the Hollywood cemetery with an interactive audio-video plaque, was ultimately interred at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale with a standard memorial plaque which reads, “Sci-Fi Was My High.” Other notables at Forest Lawn, Glendale with connections to sf/fantasy are James Arness, Joe Barbera (of Hanna-Barbera), L. Frank Baum, Lon Chaney Sr., Walt Disney, Errol Flynn, Fritz Leiber Sr. (the writer’s father), and Jay Ward.
And that’s only scratching the surface…
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I wonder if 4E left internment space available for a certain raconteur who would offer us the following comeback:
“The sound of crickets….”
Dancing on the Graves of Stars. A gimmick, but would it work? I think the old saying “I will live long enough to dance on your grave,” was uttered many times to scandalise the ill mannered. The whole idea is good enough for a joke, but no more.
The sound of crickets, indeed.
There was an early SNL film vignette in which an elderly John Belushi, the only one still alive of the original Not Ready For Prime Time Players, danced on the graves of his compatriots as dancing kept him alive.
In reality, of course, he was the first to die.