Jay North, aka Dennis the Menace, the quintessential rascal next door, gets his chance to cut a record.   Hey it worked for Ricky Nelson.   This is not music from the series, in fact I don’t know any of these songs (e.g., When I become a man, What good is a girl).

The liner notes say: “This album is for you…if you are a child…if you have a child…if you know a child…or if you ever were a child.”   It still didn’t sell.

This is the 1959 CBS live-action situation comedy based on the comic strip by Hank Ketcham. Dennis is portrayed as the helpful menace that always seemed to cause chaos. Dennis Mitchell lived at 627 Elm Street with his parents, Henry and Alice. Next door was his best friend, Mr. Wilson (though the feeling was, certainly, not mutual). Dennis always was around to help Mr. Wilson whether he wanted the help or not. The allure of the series was to see how Dennis would unintentionally mess things up for Mr. Wilson.

The series lasted four seasons, but, perhaps, could have lasted longer. Joseph Kearns, the actor who portrayed Mr. George Wilson, died during the show’s third season. This left a huge void that even veteran actor Gale Gordon (Mr. John Wilson) couldn’t fill. He was introduced toward the end of the third season, and the series was cancelled the following year.

Theme Song “Dennis the Menace” by Irving Friedman

First Telecast : October 4, 1959
Last Telecast : July 7, 1963
Episodes : 146 black-and-white episodes
CBS Sundays —- 7:30 – 8:00 P.M.

Courtesy of TV.com

(15 votes, average: 2.67 out of 5)

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7″ from a flea market in Cannes.

(10 votes, average: 4.40 out of 5)

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Here’s a vintage 45 on the French Fontana label.   Soundtrack music to the French comedy classic Mon Oncle.   I saw this movie with my friend Tony Jacobs in Jr. High School.   Maybe at Case Western Reserve (where they had a good film series and we saw a lot of foreign films) or at the Cedar Lee theater where they still show the best foreign and independent films.   I don’t remember much about the movie, but that Jacques Tati was like the French Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton.   Tony turned me out to lots of great movies and music in those formative years.   Here’s a bit from Wikepedia about Jacques Tati:

Jacques Tati (October 8, 1909 ““ November 5, 1982) was a noted French filmmaker   Originally a mime, Tati’s films have little audible dialogue, but instead are built around elaborate, tightly-choreographed visual gags and carefully integrated sound effects. In all but his very last film, Tati plays the lead character, who – with the exception of his first and last films – is the gauche and socially inept Monsieur Hulot. With his trademark raincoat, umbrella and pipe, Hulot is among the most memorable comic characters in cinema. There exist several recurrent themes in Tati’s comedic work, most notably in Mon Oncle, Playtime and Trafic . These include Western society’s obsession with material goods, particularly American-style consumerism, the pressure cooker environment of modern society, the superficiality of relationships among France’s various social classes, and the cold and often impractical nature of space-age technology and design.

Mon Oncle (My Uncle), was his first film to be released in color and perhaps his best-known work. The plot centers on M. Hulot’s comedic, quixotic and childlike struggle with postwar France’s mindless obsession with modernity and American-style consumerism. Mon Oncle quickly became an international success, and won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1958.

(14 votes, average: 4.14 out of 5)

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This is from a series of eight records on Decca called “Mood jazz in Hi Fi”, each with a different animal on the cover.   This one features “Toots” Thielemans, certainly the best, (if not the only), jazz harmonica player.

(13 votes, average: 3.69 out of 5)

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This is a rare record because it has two “front” covers. Two very different approaches to “classical music for people who don’t know anything about classical music.”

(11 votes, average: 4.55 out of 5)

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Sometimes covers in distant parts of the world seem to just match up too well. Or is this the same model and photo shoot. Martin Denny’s Primativa (1958) on Liberty is a staple of any exotica/bachelor pad/lounge collection. But this Arturo Romero record on Orfeon from Mexico may even pre-date it.

(36 votes, average: 4.58 out of 5)

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