The Ernie Kovacs Collection

My review of the new DVD boxed set The Ernie Kovacs Collection for The Villager/ Downtown Express conglomeration of pennysavers is here. The collection is most exhaustive, but one wonderful artifact that wasn’t included in the collection deserved mention here. Shortly before he died in 1962, television’s most innovative comedian co-starred with the cinema’s most innovative comedian Buster Keaton in a pilot for a show called Medicine Man.  The show cast Ernie as a fast-talking, cigar smoking snake oil salesman, and Buster as his Indian companion. (Keaton had done the Indian before, in his short The Paleface as well as a movie version of Li’l Abner. He’d also gotten his start as a child in medicine shows). I’ve seen the pilot at the Paley Center. It is surpisingly lame given the talent involved, but then Kovacs and Keaton were just two hired guns on this thing, not the creators. As the collection’s curator Ben Model points out, the two geniuses would have inevitably worked out brilliant physical bits as the series went on if it had ever been picked up. Anyway, both the collection and Medicine Show are both worth watching if you’re as morbidly curious as I am. By the way, that’s not Buster Keaton in the picture above — it’s Kovacs’ beautiful wife and co-star Edie Adams.