Home Cinema 54 years ago, 26 high school students wrote a classic Christmas episode

54 years ago, 26 high school students wrote a classic Christmas episode

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54 years ago, 26 high school students wrote a classic Christmas episode


TV CAPTION: A high school class wrote a Delighted storyline adapted into a classic Christmas episode of the famous television series.

As you might imagine, in the world of network television, when you have to come up with material for more than 20 episodes per season (and even more back when 30-episode seasons were commonplace). The Munsters only aired two seasons in the mid-1960s, but it still made 70 episodes in those two seasons!), there is a constant need for content. This is why there are so many famous clichés that appear in most famous sitcoms (I even do a TV Bingo piece where I try to see if I can fill a bingo card with classic sitcom clichés using various sitcoms, like, let’s say, The partridge familyand if I can, how many episodes does it take to make a “bingo”). Clichés happen because they pretty much WORK, so shows turn to them to fill out episode order.

However, sometimes there are much stranger origins for some notable TV show episodes, like “Sisters at Heart,” the beloved 1970 Christmas episode of Delighted.

Promotional art for Bewitched featuring Endora, Samantha Stephens and Darrin Stephens from left

Delightedof course, starred Elizabeth Montgomery as Samantha Stephens, a witch who married a mortal named Darrin Stephens (originally played by Dick York, but after an injury prevented him from continuing in the role , Dick Sargent last reprized the role three seasons out of the series’ eight seasons from 1964 to 1972). The series was about Samantha trying to hide her magical powers, while often USING those magical powers for misadventures without getting away from her husband, who didn’t like that his wife was a witch (the whole thing was a riff on the hit from 1958). movie, Bell, book and candlewith James Stewart and Kim Novak as a couple facing the same problems).

The series is also known for its iconic Hanna-Babera animated opening credits…

This opening became so famous that Filmation decided to try to adapt Delighted into a cartoon, and when that failed, he morphed into ANOTHER character that was ALSO based on Kim Novak’s witch in Bell, book and candleSabrina the Teenage Witch!

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What was the Bewitched Christmas episode, “Sisters at Heart” about?

Last year I did a countdown of my picks for the best Christmas episodes of the 1970s (not counting TV movies or Christmas specials), and I included “Sisters at Heart”, so I’m just going to repeat what I wrote about the episode rather than summarizing it again.

The seventh season episode (as was the case in the Dick Sargent years) had only one sponsor (Oscar Mayer), so the show’s producers (led by the show’s executive producer, William Asher, who was married to the series lead, Elizabeth Montgomery), only had to handle the then-controversial storyline through a single advertiser instead of multiple companies.

The show contained dueling storylines about racism. One of Darrin Stephens’ colleagues at his advertising company, a black man named Keith Wilson (Don Marshall), is scheduled to go on a business trip. His wife goes with him, so he leaves their daughter, Lisa (Venetta Rogers), with the Stephens family. Daughter Tabitha (Erin Murphy), a witch like her mother, Samantha (Montgomery), is delighted that Lisa is staying with them. They treat each other like real sisters during the trip, but when a little girl at the park tells them they CANNOT be sisters because of the color of their skin, Tabitha uses her powers to match their skin by adding white polka dots. on Lisa’s skin and black polka dots on hers. Samantha has to reverse the spell, but she has difficulty doing so, because Tabitha’s subconscious clearly WANTS them to be real sisters, so she feels she HAS to keep score. Samantha explains that the color of their skin has no impact on whether they are sisters, and the spell is reversed just in time for Lisa’s parents to stop by for the company Christmas party .

However, before that, a toy company owner, who represents a possible million dollar account for the advertising agency, stopped by the Stephens residence to investigate his possible representative, and when Lisa opens the door and says his father works for the company, and Tabitha says they are sisters, the owner of the racist toy assumes Darrin has a black daughter and is very upset. Later, at the company Christmas party, he sees Darrin talking to Keith’s wife Dorothy (Janee Michelle), and he assumes they are a couple and kicks Darrin off his account.

When he learns the truth, he tries to get Darrin back on the account, but Larry Tate (David White), the boss of the company, refuses to do business with a racist. Samantha then uses HER powers to make the racist owner of the toy company now consider EVERYONE to be dark-skinned, even himself! He comes to the Stephens’ house the next day, apologizing for his racism, and he brings an expensive turkey, and they invite him over for Christmas dinner. Silly? Sure, but it was also very sweet, and the episode won a special Governor’s Award Emmy at the 1971 Emmy Awards, because unfortunately there weren’t many sitcoms at the time that openly dealt with racism like this one (All in the Family would debut a month after “Sisters at Heart” aired, and obviously it changed the television landscape a lot).

Okay, so we have a new TV show dealing with racism (and on CHRISTMAS, no less). It’s interesting, but how could it be even MORE interesting? What if it was written by a high school English class? Well, you wouldn’t know…

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How did a high school class end up writing an episode of Bewitched?

In a contemporary article on the subject in the Los Angeles Times, legendary LA Times television editor Aleene MacMinn told the story of Marcella Saunders, a 23-year-old teacher at an all-black high school, Thomas Jefferson High School, in Los Angeles, which had started there a year earlier (the early 1970s language is a little hard to read, as everyone, including Saunders, referred to the school as a “school of ghetto,” Saunders noting that SHE attended a ghetto school in Chicago (Saunders was white, which also adds a whole other layer to the whole thing, but for the sake of this article, let’s at least accept Saunders’ seriousness). Saunders began her studies at the school in 1969. She told MacMinn: “As far as my life goes, I feel I have a role to play in changing society. The best way to start is to teach young people to think creatively for themselves, to think independently and question the lives around them. The problem she had was that the students had difficulty reading. She noted, “In one class, only six out of 30 students were reading at high school level. The rest went down to the sixth grade level. And it was a good class. In another, the reading level was only third grade. »

The class was struggling with the textbooks and she pointed out, “I came in with my pearls of wisdom from college, but with the textbooks, which were too hard and irrelevant, they didn’t work. » So she decided to ask the students to choose a TV show that they all liked, and they would look at the stories from the TV episodes. The class chose Delighted to study. Saunders explained: “I had hoped they would choose Delightedbecause it is orally and visually oriented and often there is an underlying story, so I felt I could make my point better.

After the class began discussing the stories from the television series, Saunders felt they were starting to break through a bit and so she began writing for local television productions, such as Delighted, Room 222 (about a racially diverse high school in Los Angeles) and Julie (the vehicle starring Diahann Carroll which was one of the first examples of a sitcom starring a black actor). William Asher was intrigued and took the students on a tour of all the Delighted, and gave each student a copy of the script for that episode, then also gave the class 20 OTHER scripts to study when they returned to class.

Saunders was pleased with the results, noting, “All of a sudden, kids who never knew how to write before are writing three pages. The kids who couldn’t read were now dubbing their scripts and arguing over who Samantha and Darrin (the main characters) would be. ).” However, she also noted that the students were a little disappointed once the scheduled visit ended. They “described the warmth, the feeling of being in another ‘magical’ world. They said they didn’t felt no racism.” The students then had the idea of ​​writing. Delighted themselves. When Saunders asked them what they wanted to talk about, they told him: “We want to say that racism needs to be taught. That 4 or 5 year olds should not see color in racist terms. You have to teach a child how to be racist and hate. We would like to say that it is not what you look like but what you are that matters.

So they basically wrote the episode described above and sent it to William Asher as a Christmas present in 1969. He liked the episode and told the great Barbara Avedon (who would later create Cagney and Lacey) which later reminded the writer Herbie J. Pilato in an interview that she was really impressed by the script, that it was “as good as any she had seen from established writers.”

The episode was filmed in November 1970 and Asher brought the class to see it filmed. Asher noted, “They raised questions that upset me. This is just a small example of what can happen when you reach out and care.”

When the episode aired, all 26 students received “Story by” credit. The students were:

Annette Johnson

Waymon Jones

Orall Joseph Jr.

Stephen Kirk

Glenda Petty

Bob Randall

Gail Smith

Carmella Stuckey

Sweed asked.

Angela Thomas

Donnie Wallace

Ronnie Wallace

Glenn Williams

Joe Williams

Bruce Woods

Sandra Black

Eddie Brown

Cook teasing

Patricia Don

Larry Freeman

Bobbie Harris

Carliss Henderson

Harold Henri

James Higdon

Mittie Huddleston

Deborah Janisse

A number of students also spoke to MacMinn about what airing the episode meant to them. Here are three anonymous students:

“As students at Thomas Jefferson High, we are known for our overwhelming lack of learning…But Jefferson students have never had the chance to prove what we can do because some believe that We have gone too far to help them, but there are still people who will allow us to prove what we can do.

“Morale at Jefferson has been lowered by the constant talk of the mistakes Jefferson made, but never the right things. What we have done in the media will help ease the morale of our students.”

“Students in disadvantaged school areas can do just as great a job as any advantaged area if someone gives them the chance, and we have that now.”

Very cool stuff. The legend is…

STATUS: TRUE

Be sure to check my archives of TV Legends Revealed for more urban legends from the world of television. Click here specifically for legends about Christmas.

Please feel free (hell, I beg you!) to write to us with your suggestions for future installments! My email address is brian@poprefs.com

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