Creative artists tend to hit the interview circuit only when they have a project to promote. It can be a grind making the rounds and answering the same questions, but that’s show business. Comedian, writer, and actor Dana Gould, for example, might be asked about his latest comedy special (Perfectly Normal), or his passion project, the brilliant talk show parody Hanging with Dr. Z, in which he re-imagines Dr. Zaius from Planet of the Apes as a name-dropping old school talk show host, or his Emmy-winning work as a writer on The Simpsons. But no one ever asks him about the 1966 Adam West series Batman, just one of his myriad pop culture obsessions.
Until now.
Gould was recently a guest on a new podcast, Fun for All Ages! with Frank Santopadre, sharing stories of memorable collaborations with the late West and expounding on the series’ dastardly villains, from Frank Gorshin’s iconic Riddler to Ethel Merman’s best forgotten Lola Lasagne.
Fun for all Ages! marks Santopadre’s long-awaited return to the podcast-verse after nearly a decade of co-hosting and co-producing Gilbert Gottfried’s Amazing Colossal Podcast, an essential, more than 600-episode archive of freewheeling, deep-dive interviews that celebrate old Hollywood and vintage show business. The guest list skewed on the senior side, with character actors, (some that you recognize, some that you’ve hardly even heard of, as the Kinks sang),, former child stars, bona fide showbiz legends, and journeyman entertainers.
One episode in particular set the stage for Fun for All Ages!, Santopadre says in a phone interview. The guest was Kirk Hammett, Rock and Roll Hall of Famer and lead guitarist for Metallica. “We only brought up Metallica once during the entire interview, and that was just to please my sister-in-law’s boyfriend,” Santopadre says. “Kirk just wanted to talk about horror films produced by Universal in the 1930s and ’40s and his extensive collection of monster movie memorabilia.”
Santopadre, for whom the Amazing Colossal Podcast ended abruptly with Gottfried’s untimely passing in 2022, thought the Hammett episode – as well as an episode in which frequent guest Richard Kind gushed about his love of time travel movies – had the potential to create a different kind of interview show.
“I thought that I could invite creative people to talk about topics they’re interested in but rarely asked about, as we had done with those episodes,” he says. “Instead of career retrospectives, which I’d already done on the previous show, maybe my guests would be interested in building an episode around their memories of a cherished childhood toy, a favorite film director, or their classic comedy album collections.”
The force of the Amazing Colossal Podcast is strong in Fun for All Ages!. Both take inspiration from the deli scenes in Woody Allen’s Broadway Danny Rose in which veteran comedians sit around swapping show business stories. Santopadre and guests wax rhapsodic about movies, TV, music, Americana, and collectibles from the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s. Besides Batman, early episodes have delved into Mr. Ed (with comedy writer Robert Smigel, the man literally behind Triumph, the Insult Comic Dog), the late SCTV legend Joe Flaherty (with Joe’s brother, writer-director Paul Flaherty), and obscure TV game shows (with prolific producer Bob Boden).
There is no shortage of topics for show business savant Santopadre. “My wife handed me a legal pad and told me to compile a list,” he says. “I wrote down over a hundred ideas: long-gone amusement parks, the history of the Wham-O toy company, the Planet of the Apes franchise, bubblegum records of the 1960s, Irwin Allen-directed disaster movies, Night Gallery (Rod Serling’s follow-up to The Twilight Zone), and legendary movie producer William Castle (who sold his B-movies with spectacular gimmicks). The tricky part is mixing and matching which people want to talk about these particular subjects. For William Castle, I called Frank Conniff (of Mystery Science Theater 3000) and Svengoolie (nationally-syndicated horror movie host), and asked, ‘Do you guys want to do this?’ and I had a show.”
Santopadre’s return to podcasting is not without its challenges. While the Amazing Colossal Podcast community repeatedly asked him to keep the old show going, that idea was something of a non-starter for him. For one thing, there was the workload to consider. The Amazing Colossal Podcast had benefited from the social media skills of a small group of dedicated fans-turned-friends as well as the booking talents of Gino Salomone, entertainment reporter and Gottfried’s longtime friend. But putting together another weekly 90-minute episode while working at his full-time job as a writer on The View wouldn’t be easy to pull off.
And then there was the challenge of following what had come before.
“Gilbert was a force of nature,” Santopadre says. “He had a singular voice, a singular wit, and an encyclopedic knowledge of show business arcana” (Gilbert liked nothing more than to hear — and repeat — outré show business tales; a helicopter story involving comedy writer Pat McCormick looms large in the Amazing Colossal Podcast’s legend).
“People suggested I pick up right where we left off,” Santopadre says. “But Dara (Gottfried’s devoted wife and the Amazing Colossal Podcast’s co-producer) and I had managed to create something special. And there was no replacing the unpredictability or wonderful insanity that Gilbert provided or the chemistry the two of us had. Also, I needed time to recover from a seven-year journey and time to assess what we had done and what we had built.”
After three years, Santopadre is back and he’s happy to have the online community back in his life; a legion of kindred spirits who like nothing more than to geek out, laugh, or cry over the fun and crazy stuff they loved growing up. Santopadre references a joke by the comedian Andy Kindler: “My demographic is men in my age group who are me.”
In these, shall we say, fraught times, Fun for All Ages! is arguably the greatest escape among podcasts. “I found from the old show that nostalgia is a powerful drug,” he says. “Look at the success and popularity of autograph shows and Comic-Con. People want to swim around in the stuff from their childhood that made them happy. I’m in my early 60s and I’m still obsessing over breakfast cereals and the top 40 songs of 1975.”
But he hopes, as with the Amazing Colossal Podcast, new generations are introduced to these bygone treasures and keep their memory alive. “It was a point of pride that a 26-year-old would write to me after listening to the Amazing Colossal Podcast to say he didn’t know who Larry Storch was and now he was a fan of F-Troop. I hope it happens again.”
As for the future of Fun for All Ages!, Santopadre acknowledges that it’s an “unusual request” to ask a celebrity publicist if their client would like to spend an hour talking about their favorite Hanna-Barbera cartoon or Twin Peaks episode. But then, Santopadre says, he never expected the likes of Dick Van Dyke, Carl Reiner, Alan Arkin, and other icons to appear on the Amazing Colossal Podcast. So, who knows? Maybe Jerry Seinfeld might come on to talk about his love of Superman.
Until then, he says, he is going to keep trying new ideas and approaches. “I’m going to ask Rosanna Arquette and Griffin Dunne to talk about the 40th anniversary of After Hours, a movie that happens to be one of my obsessions,” he says. “Sometimes, the host gets to pick.”
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Comments
Thanks Don, for this feature. You had me sold into looking into it further within the first three paragraphs; particularly with the 1966-’68 ‘Batman’ TV series. No films since can hold a candle to it. Really perfect in every way, including only the cream of the crop stars that wanted to be on the show as one villain or another, never mind the ‘regulars’ like Julie Newmar Eartha Kitt, Cesar Romero. Frank Gorshin and Burgess Meredith.
That’s one of the (wonderful) problems with the ’60s: every decade since has lived in the long dark shadows it unknowingly creatively created at the time. The Jet-Age decade to the one now of a helicopter endlessly hovering around in a small circle over complete dearth to mine ANYTHING, but in reality sputtered out and crashed long ago into its own sad sea of oblivion.