Season: 1 (The Sonny & Cher Show)
Episode: 4
Guest(s): Jim Nabors
CBS Air Date: February 22, 1976
Also aired: Never re-aired
Thanks to Jay for the run-down on this lost episode.
Opening Song: “Gotta Get You Into My Life” (Audio Only)
Cover of the Beatles (1966)
Sonny is wearing a black suit with a red shirt. Cher is wearing a patterned brown, white and red floor-length dress. Sonny does his hand on hip thing a lot. Sonny says “Hit it mama!” before her part, Cher does this new thing on this show where she leans forward and brings her hands together while singing an emphatic part. They look like they’re having fun with this. Cher kicks her legs a few times and Sonny fixes her hair on her face. Cher starts them on what turns out to be a very big finish.
Sonny & Cher covered this song a lot, on episodes #6, #17 and #40 of The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour. Cher also covered the song on #3 of her solo show. They also recorded the song on their first Live album in 1971.
Opening Banter: Sonny tells Cher how pretty she looks tonight and that she sometimes inspires him. Cher is suspicious. “What happens to you when you get inspired? Will we notice any physical differences?” Sonny does another Fair Cher poem similar to the ones he did on The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour.
Fair Cher
Fair Cher with the raven hair
Looks that cook beyond compare.
(Cher: Are you going to say anything about my chest?
Sonny: Wait a minute. Can I finish?)
Looks that cook beyond compare.
You still can sing and you still can stare.
But not anymore with your belly button bare.
(This is in reference to the stricter censorship in the late 1970s.)
Cher seems tentative about the poem per usual. She scratches her wrist during the whole preamble. Sonny says he needed the poem applause because the audience is like fuel to him. The audience is the gas station and he’s like a car. “You’re a car, huh?” Cher asks. “Do you have to park it on my stage?” Sonny explains a metaphor about show business being the car of life and accuses Cher of not listening. Cher says she stopped listening when he said “the audience gives you gas.”
gives him “the gas” he needs to perform. Cher then makes a joke that Sonny gives the audience gas back, “tit for tat.” Sonny says he’s trying to paint a poetic word picture. Sonny says he would describe Cher as a “supersonic moon rocket” because of her “sleek lines and enormous engine” and because of her “enormous nose cone.” Cher slaps him on the shoulder.
Sonny keeps insisting he’s a car that needs gas from an audience so at the end Cher quips that she’s standing next to the Edsel of Show Business. Then she says next time he’s at a gas station, he should get them to put a little air in his shoes.
The end the song with another big finish. Sonny grabs Cher’s hand from his shoulder and they hold hands.
Vamp: This time the piano is white and the set is very bright. Cher’s dress is more pink with more sequins.
+ Jim Nabors and Sonny are U.S. Soldiers in World War II at a French cafe with a secret message to pass on but German spies are listening all around them. Cher comes on as Mata Har in a red trench coati, the Dutch exotic dancer and spy, and tries to intercept the secret papers. When Sonny claims he will eat them before giving them up, Cher sends them back to the kitchen to be cooked up for him. Then Sonny and Nabors banter about who has the real papers.
+ Cher is a Minnie-Mouse-like character called Milly Mouse who is seeking a star to be in her movie. She says Cary Grant has a funny voice and Clark Gable is too big. The Moutx Brothers (a spoof of The Marx Brothers) arrive (Sonny looking like Mikey Mouse, Jim Nabors looking like Goofy and Billy Van looking and sounding like Donald Duck). Sonny holds a cigar and raises big eyebrows like Groucho Marx. They do Marx brothers-like jokes. Milly wants only Sonny but he won’t split up the team. Then the conoodle Minnie and Mikey style and Sonny changes his mind. Cher then tries to lure him into her dressing room with some vintage Velveeta cheese.
+ Sadie Thompson is back! Drunks in the bar are crying to Sonny, the preacher, because Sadie has been gone for two years (actually since the demise of The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour). Billy Van cries that her bosom was two things he missed about her. The third thing was the way she walked and he tries to imitate her coming in the bar. Then Ted Zeigler tries it. Then Gailard Sartain tries. They each try to bump Sonny off his chair the way Sadie used to do it. They lament over her big feathered hat.
Cher comes in dressed in a white robe. She is the reformed Sadie. She has been gone on a meditation retreat. Nabors arrives as a rich playboy looking for a girlfriend. Sadie rips off the robe to reveal her former red dress. Sonny tells Cher he thought she had found herself while doing meditation for two years with the Maharishi and E.S.T. and Esalen and the swimming pool at the Y. The drunks are very upset. Nabors arrives as a “terribly wealthy playboy looking for a girl to help squander my fortune.” Cher tells the sailor he came come to her place and she’ll teach him how to tie some new knots.
Sonny likes to fake- play that piano backwards.
Skit: The Bicentennial Minute. This was a spoof on shorts about the Bicentennial the networks did in 1976. The Carol Burnett Show also did these spoofs.
The announcer invokes the Fairness Doctrine of equal time. Which is why King George III is giving his rebuttal to the American Revolution. Cher plays his wife, Queen Charlotte who spends the rebuttal filing her nails. King George III says he’s willing to take America back except for New York City and Howard Cosell. He complains about the American press including all the famous American columnists through history, including Patrick Henry, Benjamin Franklin, Art Buchwald, Jack Anderson and Walter Cronkite. He then goes into a tirade that makes Cher laugh.
Concert: “Baby Don’t Get Hooked On Me” (Audio Only)
Cover of Mac Davis (1972)
I love this song. Cher is wearing a green gown and Sonny is wearing a green suit with a lime green shirt that matches Cher’s Grecian dress (and she has a Grecian curly wig). Cher also wears big gold swinging earrings. Sonny makes this kinda creepy though. The version Cher did with Mac Davis was better.
The French Foreign Legion: Glad these guys are back. They’re in the Moroccan Dessert in 1922 and they want to abandon their fort because they’re taking on losses. Billy Van is the commander and he tries to give the legion hope and encouragement but he doesn’t succeed. There’s a harp gag. They’ve lost all the silent slapstick humor of their previous incarnation. Nabor does his Gomer Pyle bit. Gaylard Sartain tries on a bad Oliver Hardy. Before the end, we get a Sonny Stare. The whole thing is trying too hard.
Cher Solo: “Bang, Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)” (Audio Only)
Cher’s own song (1966)
Cher wears a blue gown with a bow and a sheer flowered wrap, set against a purple background of moving objects. Her hair is up in a kind of vaguely ethnic kind of homeland hairdo They are re-asserting their more ethnic version here. Nice to hear Cher’s 1970s version as we already have a 1960s and 1980s version, but only Sonny gave us a previous ,over-the-top, “Italian boogie-woogie” version in 1973 (with its male-stripper suggestive interlude) from their second Live album. (I do like the crazy horns on this production though). And when Sonny says “it gets big,” rumor has it…)
I would say this is my favorite Cher version of the song, the 60s version being a bit dry and the 80s version being too bombastic.
The Operetta: Cast members sing about the virtues of the network’s family hour. They do a spoof of The Waltons called The Walnuts. Billy Van play Pa Walnut and takes us through the characters. Everyone’s name has “boy” at the end, including Grandma-boy. Cher plays Ma Walnut and serves one hot dog for Thanksgiving dinner. The E-I-E-I-O song spoof is pretty funny. Cher sings an original song, “There aint nothin leaner than a Thanksgiving wiener.”
Nabors plays Jim Boy, He sings a spoof of John Denver’s “Thank God I’m a Country Boy” (1974).
News Boy arrive predicting the arrival of Sonny who plays killer Pretty Boy Bono Bob, who tries to use their house as a hideout. They keep spoofing the word wiener. Sonny does an original song about being a pretty boy.
There’s a Duesenberg car joke. Grandpa tries to milk everything like Sonny’s getaway car. It explodes when he leaves to start it up. This happens off-stage and Bono Bob returns in tatters. The sheriff arrives to arrest Bono Bob and he gives the Walnuts a reward of eye glasses. Gaylard Sartain plays the sheriff who sings a spoof of Melanie’s “Brand New Key” (1971). Nabors can now see and he decides his family is very ugly. He now plans to write a pilot TV show about “a bunch of homespun folks milkin and plowin together.” When asked what the show will be called he says The Tony Orlando & Dawn Show. The cast then all sings a spoof of Tony Orlando’s “Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Old Oak Tree” (1973). Partial Sonny shirtless alert.
IGUB: Sonny thanks their guest Jim Nabors and Sonny tells Cher Nabors should have his own variety show every week and Cher agrees and says she tried to get Nabors a variety show but Jim didn’t want to take Sonny’s job away from him. The sing IGUB and Sonny quips they’re not so young anymore. Cher says “some of us!”
Highlights: Cher’s 1970s version of “Bang Bang” and the Walton’s spoof.
