Revisiting the Wild Wild West: The Night of the Puppeteer

"The Night of the Puppeteer" 

Written by Henry Sharp
Directed by Irving Moore
Synopsis (from IMDB): The mad puppeteer Zachariah Skull re-creates a courtroom drama, using life-size puppets, to seek revenge on both Jim and the Supreme Court Justices who sentenced him to death.

Trey: This is one of my favorite first season episodes. It makes good use of the lack of color. The mostly dark setting and it's obvious staginess adds an air of the surreal. This was all the idea of the director, Moore, who had been told he had to bring the elaborate episode in under budget.  It reminds me of the sort of story that might have been on the British contemporaneous show, The Avengers.

Jim: It reminds me of some Twilight Zone episodes. I'm thinking of "Five Characters in Search of an Exit," particularly. There's definitely a creepiness factor, too. Normally my teenage daughter joins me as I rewatch the shows, but the first appearance of the puppets and she was out.

Trey: Those puppets were the work of Bob Baker, who worked the alien puppet in Close Encounters of the Third Kind and some monsters in other sci-fi films.

Jim: One of the things I’ve noticed watching the episodes again is how often the same sets were reused. In this case it’s the huge alcove with the marble staircase that was the stage for West’s big battle in "The Night of the Grand Emir." The show does a good job in redecorating the sets in each case.

Trey: That probably helped keep those costs down, too.

Jim: West seems atypically astute in this episode as he remarks on theme of deformity in the dolls, and he figures out the connect to Triton. I’m not suggesting that West is normally a dumb character, but here his powers of observation seem to have a temporary boost.

Trey: Maybe. We're rewatching less that half the episodes, so far, so we might not have the full extent of his capabilities. And he still gets in a lot of fights, including with a caveman puppet! It is interesting he easily makes the mythological connection and it takes Artemus (the smart one) a bit longer.

Jim: Muted shades of Holmes and Watson there.

Trey: Lloyd Bochner is great here as Skull with his urbane bearing, and the silky menace of his voice.

Jim: He really is. Bochner’s screen credits run long, as he was a staple of television during the 60’s through the 80’s. One of his most notable genre roles would be in the Twilight Zone episode, "To Serve Man" where he appeared with another WWW regular, Richard Kiel. 

I also like the reveal of the real Zechariah Skull (played by Bochner in makeup), like a big, black spider in a center of his web.

Trey: It works really well. I think the actors playing his puppets did a good job. Bochner plays a puppet, too. The bit where West grabs his invisible "strings" and Bochner sort of floats up then slouches down when released works surprisingly well.

Jim: A feel like there's an acting class exercise in that, but you're right: everyone gets an "A."

Trey: Skull would have been a great villain to make a return appearance. We don't even see the body, so it has the perfect setup for that.

(Top) 10 Things About David Letterman — Good Night, Everybody!

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Thanks for sticking with me through this day-long reflection on David Letterman's career.  Here's the whole list in one place for easy navigation:

• Our Top Ten List ...

1. Worldwide Pants
2. Everyone Is a Star
3. Freaks and Geeks
4. Impeccable Timing
5. The Anti-Show
6. Biting the Hand That Feeds Him
7. Top Ten Lists
8. Real Journalism
9. The DIY Ethos
10. When Things Got Real

Similar things were said about Johnny Carson when he retired, and I know detractors tire of hearing them, but:  It really is impossible to overestimate the influence and importance of David Letterman to television.  If nothing else, he's been on every weeknight for most Americans entire TV-watching lifetime.

Late Night was once the title of a single quirky program that aired after the The Tonight Show.  Now it's an entire genre that comprises Tonight itself and a host of competing programs.

Many of these shows rely on guest- and audience-participation games, something Letterman pioneered.  In 1993, NBC lawyers may have tried, with a straight face, to claim that talk-show games were their intellectual property.  If they tried that now, they'd be laughed out of the room with the same vigor Letterman's CBS audiences showed when Dave rolled his eyes as said the words intellectual property.

The apex of late-night games remains Letterman's "Is This Anything?" — an outgrowth of "Will It Float?" that consisted of an enormous curtain opening to great fanfare and Letterman and Shaffer passing judgment on whether the thing behind the curtain (animal, vegetable, mineral, or, most often, showbiz act) was something or nothing.

"Is This Anything?" was David Letterman's shtick in microcosm.  And, man, was it ever something.

— Scott

(Top) 10 Things About David Letterman — Number One: When Things Got Real!

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Photo by Susan Wood.  via

Letterman is never more memorable than when his show stops being a show (or even an anti-show) entirely.  In these moments, the veil drops, and audiences glimpse the David Letterman behind the ironic TV persona.  Sometimes slack-jawed, sometimes annoyed, sometimes unexpectedly sincere, this is the Letterman who breathes life into the TV host façade.

This is the Letterman Drew Barrymore flashed and Crispin Glover nearly kicked in the face.

More significantly, he's the one who brought Bill Hicks's mother onto the show in 2009 to apologize for cutting her son's appearance on the show back in 1993.  (The Late Show was new to both CBS and 11:30 at the time, and Letterman found Hicks's material, violent and rife with political incorrectness, problematic.  In 2009, he acknowledges that as a mistake brought on by his own insecurity.)

He's the one who devoted an episode to Warren Zevon following the musician's death.  (Zevon had been a regular guest on Late Night and had subbed in for Paul Shaffer.)

He later did the same to commemorate the passing of his comedic mentor Johnny Carson, the guests for that episode being Tonight Show alums Peter Lassally and Doc Severinsen.

Most humanly of all, this is the Letterman who admitted to having affairs with members of his own staff in order to cut short an extortion attempt.  The details were deliciously seedy, but Letterman managed to blend his on-air and off-air personas in a funny, defiant, and penitent on-air confession.

It was simultaneously his finest hour and his lowest ebb.  No matter what you thought of the man behind the curtain during that segment, you had to admit you were watching riveting television.  Which, when all is said and done, is what Letterman always delivered.

Thanks for indulging my Top Ten reflections on David Letterman.  Come back at the top of the hour for a few closing thoughts and a round-up of links to the individual posts.  (In case you've been playing along on social media, we'll make sure these links that actually work.)

— Scott

(Top) 10 Things About David Letterman — Number Two: The DIY Ethos!

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Giant doorknob aside, Letterman's no prop comic — but he knows how to get a laugh with whatever's handy.

The same way he roped staff and neighbors into bit parts on the show, he built legendary routines around items from the studio closet.

Chief among these were the wacky suits.  Letterman had more specialty outfits through the 1980s than Iron Man did in the '90s (and Iron Man had a toy line!).  I could embed suit videos all day, but instead I'll recommend you click here to visit the blog Rediscover the '80s, which has the most comprehensive collection of them I could find.

Dropping things off the roof.  Crushing things with a steamroller or an industrial hydraulic press.  (Breaking things, it turned out, was the perfect pastime for a show breaking the television format.)  Throwing pencils.  Actually taping the show at 4 o'clock in the morning.  Strapping cameras to himself, Paul, guests, audience members, Vegas showgirls, water hoses, and, yes, monkeys.

The camera was a favorite tool in Letterman's arsenal.  Rather than insisting on its invisibility, he brought the camera to the fore whenever possible, filling interstitials with roller coaster-style Thrill Cam rides and even doing an episode of Late Night where the camera rotated 360° over the course of the show (to many viewers' annoyance).

The one thing these high-concept shows had in common wasn't performance art but something much more low-brow.  These were things you might do if you had a television camera, an audience, and the social capital to ask someone to let you do them.  They were another way Letterman let the audience in on the joke, said joke usually being, "TV is dumb, but it's fun."

On a couple of occasions, he engineered shows where applause determined which gags and props got used. (Consider for a moment how much effort went into taping and having all the unused segments on hand.  These weren't cheap laughs, no matter how it appeared.)  Building the show out of whatever was on hand made having a late-night show feel like something you could (almost) do at home.

Perhaps the best-remembered of these breaking-the-format shows occurred during a 1985 New York City heatwave, when Late Night decided to forego a studio audience and shoot the show in their offices rather than on the set.  I doubt television can break the fourth wall more decisively than this episode, which opens with Letterman reading jokes from his monologue with show writers — to neither audience reaction nor musical cues.  (Paul Shaffer is standing in the hall before they realize he should be making some sort of sound to accompany the zingers.)

Brilliant as these innovations are, they're not why the episode is fondly remembered, largely by middle-aged men.  That honor belong to guest Teri Garr, a staple of Late Night who might be better described as part of the recurring cast than as a recurring guest.  Garr had proven game for many of Letterman's shenanigans, engaging in awkward flirtations that may have been put-ons or may not have.  Whatever lay behind the banter, Letterman bordered on the inappropriate with Garr, one time passing her a note during a taping that became a notorious cornerstone of armchair psychologists' analysis of him.

The creeper-sweet infatuation he cultivated was never funnier than during the heatwave show, when he attempted to convince Garr to take a shower on the program.  Uncomfortable, titillating, and hilarious in ways that build over the course of the hour, this is an episode that could only have existed at the forlorn end of the broadcast day.  In 2015, it retains a surreal quality that might make you think you'd imagined it if it couldn't be found on YouTube.

Coming up:  Number one on our homemade Top Ten list!

— Scott

(Top) 10 Things About David Letterman — Number Three: Real Journalism!

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David Letterman — a journalist?

Absolutely.  A nightly interview show will do that to you, whether anyone expects it or not.  By CBS's count, Letterman has interviewed 19,932 guests on The Late Show alone.  Consider he was on Late Night 11 years before that and The David Letterman Show six months before that, and you rack up a guesstimate of interviews in the tens of thousands.  Even if 95% were softball celebrity puff pieces, Letterman's still talked to somewhere in the neighborhood of 2,000 pundits, politicians, writers, and scientists.

And he hasn't rolled over and played dead for them.  Letterman's been as challenging and demanding with Presidents as with celebrities, and that's no mean feat.  Appearances by Fox News's Bill O'Reilly following the invasion of Iraq became instant highlights because of the two's combative chemistry — and because Letterman both asked and answered questions you didn't expect to see a host grappling with.

Letterman did more than answer questions from his talk-show chair.  One week after September 11, 2001, The Late Show set the tone for entertainment programming returning to normal.  New York City's ambassador to the rest of America for two decades, Letterman gave voice to the city's perseverance, gratitude, and overwhelming sense of loss.

Given the scuttlebutt CBS may want him to host high-profile interview specials, we may not have seen the last of Letterman the interviewer.

— Scott

(Top) 10 Things About David Letterman — Number Four: Top Ten Lists!

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Letterman's Top Ten lists were such a fixture of both late-night shows that almost no one remembers they were a late-comer.

Letterman read the first one on September 18, 1985.  To put that into context, imagine there's a classic bit of Jimmy Fallon Tonight Show shtick Fallon has yet to invent; on the Top Ten list timeline, that bit is still more than two years out.  There's no mention of the iconic Top Ten list in Avengers #239 because it didn't exist yet.

When Letterman left NBC after being passed up as a replacement for Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show in 1993, the network claimed most of the recurring routines on Late Night were the intellectual property of NBC — including the Top Ten list.

In the months between his last broadcast on NBC and the premiere of The Late Show on CBS, commentators were nervous what an 11:30 Letterman without Top Ten lists, special suits, a never-seen home office, Stupid Pet Tricks, and throwing things off the roof would look like.  More nervous than modern audiences are about an out-of-character Stephen Colbert.

"Intellectual property" became a buzzword in an America where the combination of those two words was still inherently funny.  That's almost impossible to imagine now.

Fans needn't have worried.  Letterman replied to NBC's claim on the Top Ten by saying it couldn't belong to NBC since he had plagiarized it from somewhere else.  He threw watermelons off the roof of the Ed Sullivan Theater, joking that if NBC came after him, maybe they would also go after teenagers on overpasses.  When his mother appeared on the show, he even quipped that he might have to call her "Dorothy" since "Dave's mom" was the intellectual property of NBC.

And maybe it's just me — I've never heard anyone else say this — but isn't #4 (sometimes #3) on the Top Ten list always the funniest, usually the punchline to the whole Top Ten bit, with #s 2 and 1 serving as comedic dénouement?

— Scott

(Top) 10 Things About David Letterman — Number Five: Biting the Hand That Feeds Him!

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If you wanted contempt, Late Night had plenty of that on offer, too.

You got hints of it in Letterman's public feuds with Bryant Gumbel and Jay Leno and sometimes in his prickly, combative dealings with guests like Cher or Oprah Winfrey   It was usually for a laugh — at least on Letterman's part.  (He is a comedian, after all, with the driving comedic instinct to get a laugh whenever possible.)

Most often, though, you got it in the most unexpected, uncomfortable, and yet natural place in the world, someplace we can all relate to: Letterman's relationship with his bosses.

Though he had dust-ups with CBS over the years, Letterman was largely valued at that network and treated with some dignity.  (Except in Sioux City, Iowa, where the local affiliate refused to carry The Late Show back in 1993.)  At NBC, however, he'd started as a disposable cog in the network machinery.  Over time, his influence with viewers and sponsors grew to the point where he became more important to the network than any of his bosses — or even their bosses, as proved the case when General Electric bought NBC and became the target of Letterman's mockery.

Working for GE inspired some of Kurt Vonnegut's best work, and it did the same for David Letterman.

Nor were advertisers safe from Letterman's sharp sense of humor.  He rarely went after them directly, both versions of the show routinely featured jokes about the need to sell advertising and spoof products deflating the snake-oil hucksterism of TV commercials in general.

Letterman closed "Will It Float?" bits with a pitch for the home game.  He awarded studio audience participants with boxes of Explod-O-Pop microwave popcorn, a gag rooted in people's distrust of the microwave.  (It was always described with toxic adjectives. e.g. "contaminated with flavor!")  When CBS lightened up on the use of the word ass, he introduced Big Ass Ham, roping good-natured celebrities will to play on their — ah, let's say "abrasive" — reputations into recording spoof commercials for the brand.

— Scott

(Top) 10 Things About David Letterman — Number Six: The Anti-Show!

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Letting everyone in on the joke, from the office staff to the home viewer, was the just the beginning of Letterman's shtick.  Late Night was thoroughly anti-establishment and deeply ironic.  It never missed an opportunity to lampoon the superficial spectacle of television itself.

One time, that involved retooling the show for people who taped it and watched in the morning.  Another time, it involved an empty studio as Letterman waited at home for the cable TV installer.

Late Night never forgot its place in the television continuum.  On the rare occasions he resorted to them, Letterman took otherwise straightforward spoofs and turned them into meditations on the form.

Consider this After-School Special parody I'd never seen before.  (Shout-out to Stephen Robinson for sharing.)  Lesser shows would have settled for poking fun at the earnestness of real After-School Specials, but Letterman and his writers manage to equate cancellation with death — and NBC's 1983 fall season with the cycle of life.  Whereas a real After-School Special teaches children important coping skills for life, the Late Night version teaches audiences coping skills for watching television.  It's as profoundly irrelevant as the shows that inspired it sought to be relevant.

Many feared the "underground" or "countercultural" tone would evaporate when Letterman left 12:30 for 11:30 to compete with the mainstream powerhouse The Tonight Show, but it didn't:  It just became a little slyer.

Letterman's first episode on CBS featured staid, mainstream Paul Newman standing up and walking out because the show didn't feature "singing cats" (a nod to "Stupid Pet Tricks," a bit NBC wouldn't let him Letterman take to CBS) — and irreverent youth-culture icon Bill Murray defacing Letterman's new desk.  If that didn't put you on notice the show would continue to be subversive, even in the hallowed halls of 11:30, well, maybe you were aging into that "mainstream" part of the demographic that doesn't appreciate irony and subtext.



Like most revisionists, Letterman's desire to tear apart and rebuild television was born not of contempt but of reverence.  That reverence was on full display when he collaborated with Tonight Show host Johnny Carson, spoofing programming trends of the day with a manufactured feud whose solution was pure television.

Letterman loved TV.  If you doubt me, just look at the way he relentlessly needles it.  Letterman mocks the medium as only a friend can — with intimate understanding of it and ultimate forgiveness for its flaws.

— Scott

(Top) 10 Things About David Letterman — Number Seven: Impeccable Timing!

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Letterman is a comedian's comedian.  His timing, with guests and with a punchline, is as flawless as it is unique.  He pauses for laughs at odd moments, slides in punchlines when you're not expecting them, and knows when to let a bit linger long past the expiration date in the script.  He and Saturday Night Live perfected this style in the '80s, crafting gags that overstayed their welcome so long they became funny again.

The same instincts that let him milk a bit always told him when it was time to let go — which is why there are so many classic Letterman routines you've surely forgotten a few of them.  Some bits, like "Beat the Clock" and "Is This Anything?," lay dormant for months or years before making a comeback when the time was right.

That giant doorknob from the Avengers issue?  That was a funny bit about prop comedy mostly lost to the ages.  (There are no clips to be found on YouTube.)

"Will It Float?" started simply enough (as the name of the game implies), but it escalated quickly, reinvigorated by the addition of embarrassingly naked showmanship whenever its popularity began to flag.  A giant curtain restored the mystery in its early days before scantily clad hula-hoop and grinder girls upped the ante on spectacle.

Not that Letterman's gags needed spectacle.  More often, they were defined by the lack of pomp and overproduction, as when he showed the audience his record collection or sent his mom abroad to award canned hams to Olympians.

He knew exactly how long to hold a joke, and he knew it long before the audience did.  This allowed him to run ahead of his own gags and lay the groundwork for laughter when audiences would grow tired of a bit or think they'd exhausted its comic potential.  Bit that seemed painfully ill-conceived played out over entire episodes, revealing themselves as hilarious slow burns given time and space to come into their own.

My personal favorite, nowhere to be found on YouTube, were the high-definition television special guests.  When HDTVs were becoming commonplace and cable and satellite providers offering content in the new format, Letterman had walk-on cameos from celebrities who stood off to the side of the picture — guests who would only be seen on HD's 16:9 ratio but remained tantalizingly off-screen for viewers watching the 4:3 standard-definition broadcast.  Harvey Pekar might have seen this as contempt for the working class who couldn't afford to buy new TVs just to keep up with the Joneses — but we all laughed.  It was a bit that could have worked only at that time, and Letterman kept it around just long enough to do its job.

It's fitting, then, that Letterman announced his retirement with a prolonged, rambly shaggy-dog story that turned out to be concise and relevant, though the audience never realized it until he hit the punchline.

That's Letterman:  Perfect timing and thinking faster than his audience all the the way up to the finish line.

— Scott

(Top) 10 Things About David Letterman — Number Eight: Freaks and Geeks!

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Talk-show hosts (even late-night talk-show hosts) used to interview celebrities.  Letterman, already blurring the line between cast and staff on Late Night, decided he might as well interview interesting people who weren't celebrities.

And so the world met Harvey Pekar, an autobiographical cartoonist from Cleveland (by night; Harvey was a file clerk at the Veterans Affairs Administration by day).  Pekar and Letterman clashed several times over the years.  Just as Letterman jabbed at television convention with his brash, irreverent show, Pekar jabbed at Late Night.  Theirs was a thorny relationship, with Harvey Pekar more real than the realest guy on television.  Letterman eventually stopped inviting Pekar to the show, but not before he had him on the more staid, mainstream Late Show once, in 1994.  Once was all it took for Pekar to address the in-studio audience, telling them, "Letterman has more contempt for you than I do.  Don't kid yourself."

Oh, and Letterman teamed up with the Avengers during Assistant Editors Month.

Sure, Obama has met Spider-Man, but that's in an age when the Avengers themselves are blockbuster movie stars.  In 1983, when Letterman's 12:30 show had barely been on a year, comics were anything but hip and Letterman was all but unknown.  But he was popular among New Yorkers and college students, which meant there was counterculture synergy to be had in blending Late Night with Marvel characters.  (Then-)assistant editor Mike Carlin recognized the value in a crossover and contacted NBC to "book" the Avengers for an appearance in their own title.  The issue was equal parts super-hero throwdown and sketch-comedy romp, writer Roger Stern scripting such convincing versions of David Letterman and Paul Shaffer I sometimes attribute one-liners from this issue to the actual show.

The Avengers weren't even the show's oddest guests.  Late Night also had Andy Kaufman on at his strangest and most controversial, during his infamous feud with professional wrestler Jerry "The King" Lawler.  Feuds being a standard trope of both pro wrestling and celebrity, Kaufman staged a perfect one — sometimes a delightful circus, sometimes erupting unexpectedly into (seemingly) real violence and confusion.  Audiences of the day struggled to tell how much was performance.  When Kaufman frothed over in a tirade of obscenities on Late Night, no one thought it could have been a bit.  Letterman seemed visibly upset.  Lawler seemed furious.  Kaufman seemed unsympathetic and perhaps unhinged.  If the whole thing were staged, no one would have let it go that far off the rails — would they?

Jim offered up a fun analogy when were talking about Kaufman and Letterman's rising stars in the early 1980s.  They both worked in absurdity and surrealism, tearing down institutional comedy from within like true subversives.  In this, they're much like the Fawcett Comics characters.  Letterman, in retaining his Midwestern naïveté and acting as the protagonist, is Captain Marvel.  Kaufman, with his put-on sniveling and sincere cynicism, plays the role of Black Adam.  Two opposing forces wielding the powers of celebrity and intelligence.

Patton Oswalt summed it up well when he called Letterman's world a "twilight circus of irony, sweetness, freaks and geniuses" on Facebook and explained Letterman himself as a freak who could pass among straights on Conan just before the Late Show finale.

— Scott

(Top) 10 Things About David Letterman — Number Nine: Everyone Is a Star!

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Everyone.

To be in David Letterman's orbit is to be a prop for his talk show, whether you're on the staff (like long-time producer Biff Henderson, seen here in a clip from 1986) or just work nearby (like Hello Deli owner Rupert Jee or Pocket Books rep Meg Parsont).  As Jee explained to Rolling Stone, "People tell me that when they're out of ideas, they call me."  Incidentally, that's the same reason Letterman called the Simon & Schuster building facing his NBC offices and met "Meg from Across the Street."

And, of course, Letterman pioneered forays into the audience.

Involving staff, bystanders, and audience members brought the home audience into the show as well, giving them "characters" who existed as real people they could drop in on during their tourist trips to New York and reinforcing Letterman's standing as an everyman.


Turning the irony dial up to 11, the "real" bits of both shows were more real than audiences gave them credit for.

Tony Mendez, the angry cue-card guy, got fired from the show last year for being too angry over the cue cards.

Stephanie Birkitt, the droll intern who grudgingly tolerated Letterman's flirting and acted as a reluctant correspondent (occasionally snapping back as part of the joke), turned out to be his mistress.  (If you click only one link in this section, click this one to read Amy Argetsinger's smart reflection on the role Birkitt played on The Late Show.)

What Andy Warhol's Factory stars were to the art world, Dave's extended cast were to America at large.  Hats off to all of 'em.

— Scott

(Top) 10 Things About David Letterman — Number Ten: Worldwide Pants!

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According to TV legend, Letterman formed his own production company as a means of protecting the material he created for The Late Show on CBS from being owned by the network.  Unfortunately, that's a bit of an exaggeration.  Pants had been around and co-producing Late Night with NBC before all the bad blood.  (It shared a 1991 Peabody Award with the network.)

Once known as "Space Age Meats," the administrative branch of Letterman's media presence took its more famous name from a Late Night bit NBC comically censored: "Guess What's in This Guy's *****."  To the Late Night staff's surprise, NBC censors bleeped the word pants, leading Letterman to work it into all manner of odd phrasings until the joke finally died of old age.  It enjoyed a long second life in the form of the odd phrases Late Show announcer Alan Kalter boomed over the production company logo at the end of Late Show episodes through the '90s and '00s.

Worldwide Pants became Letterman's incubator for talent.  Its alumni include innovative, one-season, comedian-driven sitcoms like The Building, Ed, and Welcome to New York and one show that managed to land at just the right time to become a long-running hit, Everybody Loves Raymond.

Letterman also used Pants to create a later-night offering for CBS to pit against NBC's retooled, Lettermanless Late Night with Conan O'Brien.  The Late Late Show started out with more serious late-night talk hosted by Letterman's NBC predecessor, Tom Snyder.  Over the years, it took many forms, eventually culminating in a decade-long run under Scottish comedian Craig Ferguson, who subverted and defied late-night expectations in much the same way Letterman had done 20 years earlier at NBC.

David Letterman was an one-man incubator for new talent above and beyond Worldwide Pants.

Late Night  introduced the world to Chris Elliott, a second-generation comedian who sharpened his ability to walk the line between endearing and menacing on Late Night.  Afterward, he turned his unique shtick into one of the fledgling Fox network's first original shows, Get a Life.  The whole early Fox line-up looked like it could have come from the Late Night writers' room, filled with smart, deconstructionist "sitcoms" (or were they spoofs of sitcoms?) like Get a Life, It's Garry Shandling's Show, and Married ... with Children.  You can see that throughline today in The Simpsons — and you can see Elliott in Eugene Levy's Schitt's Creek.

— Scott

(Top) 10 Things About David Letterman — A Little Counting Music, Please ...

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David Letterman by Al

Milgrom and Joe Sinnott,

from Avengers #239

(January 1984).

A couple of weeks ago, David Letterman said goodbye to late night.  Wanting to address his 33 years in television here on the Flashback blog, I dug into the research — which is to say, I wasted hours watching Letterman clips on YouTube.

That means I have a bevy of videos, tidbits, and thoughts to share with you.  Unfortunately, you're going to have to sit through yet another "tribute" Top Ten List to get them.  Before you roll your eyes and start pelting me with rocks and garbage, remember we already do a feature called 10 Things About ... here at Flashback, so it's only natural we're making our "10 Things About David Letterman" into the "Top Ten Things About David Letterman."

Plus, I'm not alone in stealing this bit.  Everyone from Jimmy Fallon to James Corden has done a wannabe Top Ten to commemorate the Indiana weatherman's retirement.

To put a little fun into this one (and give you time to watch all the video clips), I'm going to trickle the Top Ten out throughout the day.  We'll publish a new item at the bottom of every hour until we get through all of them.  Think of it as a bloggy version of "Beat the Clock" with me as the Guy Under the Internets.

All you need to play along at home are a keyboard and your own band.

— Scott