The Wombat File Is Yours to Keep

Let me help bring down the intelligence of the Friday quiz.

The rockingest band in history, KISS, had their TV debut on a Halloween special. Whose Halloween special was it?

Dick Clark?

Paul Lynde! And it was one of the most gloriously bad things ever to appear on network television! It has Margaret Hamilton and WitchyPoo and Tim Conway! So wonderful!

My pal Bunche, who gleefully showed Velma and me the Lynde Halloween special while we were innocent, trusting guests in his house, wrote an amusing piece on the special in his weblog a couple years ago, mostly just by straightforward description:

at this point, the show becomes truly impossible to turn away from since it is a cavalcade of bad TV-friendly discotheque antics such as Lynde spewing forth wretched one-liners (one of which involves bestiality between Tim Conway and an unwilling monkey), Florence Henderson performing a “disco” version of “That Old Black Magic,” and Peter Chris subjecting us to that wimpiest of Kiss tunes, “Beth” (in which the endless close-ups prove that Chris was bloated even then and that though his makeup is allegedly supposed to represent a cat, he looks like a “kitty”), as the band nods in approval as if to say “Yo, man. That shit is deep.” Then Lynde trades ultra-pitiful quips with Kiss until they take pity on the audience and lip synch “King of the Nighttime World.” Then, in a sequence that nearly caused me to have a seizure, Paul asks Roz Kelly to teach him some happenin’ disco moves and she launches into a version of “Disco lady” that somehow manages to be more noxious than the actual hit version. Then, incredibly, Lynde trumps that by singing the song himself; you have not lived until you witness all of the guest stars awkwardly shaking their groove thangs as the queerest man in the universe utters the lines “Move it in, move it out, move it in, and about, disco baby! I like that funky stuff!” Yes, you read that right.

(My memory of Kiss performing "Beth" on the show is the other three solemnly coming up behind Criss as the song ends, one of them putting a hand on his shoulder, the expressions on all of their made-up faces saying "We're there for you, buddy.")

So, yeah.

And that Halloween special is on youtube.

Paul Lynde knew where the band got their name and the idea to wear make up - they got in a fight and their mothers told them to kiss and make up!

(Gene Simmons: This isn't makeup.)

I love that.

It's actually been released on DVD.

This is surreal.