Last week, we mourned the death of Soupy Sales, and I bet his passing strikes a nostalgic note for many fellow Baby Boomers.
Soupy hosted a kids’ TV show in the 50’s and 60’s that was far cooler than his contemporary Bozo the Clown, who, even to my unsophisticated tastes as a child, seemed to exude an off-key forced mirth, making me suspect that he really was a closet grouch. On Soupy’s show, it was never “a perfect day in the neighborhood”. Mayhem was a certainty.
Soupy was just plain zany. He used to crack me up with his White Fang/Black Tooth routine. You never saw White Fang or Black Tooth, just their outstretched paws, and Soupy used to translate their “Reh, reh, reh-oo-reh” off-camera jibberish. I used to regale my schoolmates with a pretty decent impression.
Of course we all did the Soupy Shuffle with Soupy on TV, and practiced at home and at school. And we did “The Mouse” (yeah!).
There was something subversive about Soupy. It was like he had some kind of private joke going on with us. He originated the pie-in-the-face routine; you got the feeling that the show was always almost ready for the wheels to come off; some of his routines were very edgy, especially for the time. It became the hip thing to guest on Soupy: Burt Lancaster and Frank Sinatra subjected themselves to pies-in-the-face. Later, rocker Alice Cooper dropped in on Soupy.
Maybe Soupy’s army of fans grew up to become the vanguard for the protest movement of the 60’s—we were well-schooled in irreverence by that time. The spirit of rebellion never left us, nurtured by Soupy’s pranks and pointed sarcasm. Was he subtly responsible for Woodstock, the campus eruptions of the 60’s, and the Sexual Revolution?
But all was forgiven when Soupy would “blow us a kiss.” The combination of impishness and sweetness is what made Soupy so beloved.
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