I'm not sure you can really 'get' Soupy Sales if you didn't grow up watching him, but I think you can certainly appreciate him. The very notion of a local kids' TV show host, let alone one who runs a ship as loose as this, seems outlandish in today's era of homogenized children's programming. Sure, there are children's cartoons that aim to appeal to grown-ups with a sly reference here and there, but as cheap-looking as modern animation can be, nothing outside of public access is as ramshackle as The Soupy Sales Show. You know what, though? To me, that crude 'What the hey?' kind of attitude is the whole charm of it. Not a lot of vintage Soupy Sales material is available today. You can find clips online, and RTV shows the late-Seventies revival, but original full-length episodes are not abundant. Therefore, Soupy Sales: In Living Black and White is a valuable sampler, delivering 5 episodes from the host's mid-1960s run on New York's WNEW (a portion of which was nationally syndicated), plus a smattering of material lumped together as the disc's bonus feature. Sales hosted several incarnations of his show, all with the same basic format: He talks to the camera for a half-hour or so while entertaining a parade of (mostly off-camera) visitors who knock on his door, most played in this New York version by puppeteer/performer Frank Nastasi. The most famous of these characters are giant dog White Fang and small puppet lion Pookie. There are sketches and musical interludes as well, but most of the show plays like a long running joke, with Soupy putting on the pretense of putting on a presentation for US while really, you can't help but feel, playing as much if not more for Nastasi and the crew. There are terrible puns, muttered asides, and what have to be inside jokes, all accompanied by constant laughter from the camera crew, stagehands, and whoever else was around, including Sales himself. Much of it looks improvised or at least barely rehearsed. Special guest Fess Parker appears with Sales and Fang in one segment, but on this disc there are few other people in sight except for when a piece of stock footage is used to suggest a crowd of people outside Sales' door. The focus on a select few helps keep the show cheap, for one thing, but it also creates an intimate feel. It's just you, Soupy, and the gang, all having a good time and laughing (or maybe groaning) at...whatever! I think many people today, if they recall anything at all about Sales, remember two things: pies in the face and the infamous moment when he opened his door and a topless woman stood off camera, placed there by the crew as a prank. The pies don't fly as often as you might expect on this DVD, and there is nothing as risque as that latter moment, but there are some off-kilter moments that suggest why adults might have enjoyed the show as much as their children. The collection's first episode offers an example of how subversive the material could be when it's suggested that Fang tears off someone's arm. In fact, we actually do see 'the arm.' In another episode, we see a static shot of a door--just the door--as Soupy goes off camera. The shot lasts maybe 10 seconds, and of course even a mere 10 seconds of nothing feels like an eternity compared to today's television. Even then it must have been a bit of a risk. Another highlight of the DVD is Sales performing The Mouse, a pop hit for him in 1964. Maybe this is 'just' a novelty record, but I'll be darned if 'Hey, do the Mouse, yeah,' didn't stick with me for about a week after I heard it. Another recurring Sales bit shows him turning on the radio to get the weather, a set-up that allowed for musical bits and quick verbal gags, and we see that here as well. One segment you won't see here, unfortunately, is the notorious New Year's Day incident in which Sales urged the kids watching to sneak into their folks' wallets and purses, take out the 'green pieces of paper' with all the pictures of Presidents, and send them to him at the station. That stunt got ol' Soup a brief suspension. However, there's no record of the live broadcast, so we don't have the video or even a confirmed account of exactly what he said, and it's not on the disc. What strikes me as a relative Sales newbie is how Soupy himself gets laughs with simple, earnest reactions. Sure, he makes his own comments and frequent asides and can score that way, but he also holds everything together with his expressive face and credible responses. Sometimes he acknowledges the throwaway nature of the material, and of course that in itself is often funnier than the material itself. Hey, if you don't believe me, just listen to the crew. They're always having a good time! The 5 'full-length' episodes contained here run in the neighborhood of 22-23 minutes each, which seems short, and there are some moments where it just feels like we're missing something. I don't know enough to guess what could be cut, but it seems like music rights aren't an issue on the disc. We see the same opening and closing sequences for each installment, and I suppose they may have used the same one for each episode on the DVD regardless of whether or not it actually aired that way. I just don't know much about the series, and unfortunately there are no extras that provide context. There is a Bonus Soupy option which provides a tantalizing glimpse of the former Milton Supman in a different setting. We see a brief segment from a TV pilot starring Sales and Donald O'Connor. The two do a musical action comedy number, and it's energetic and amusing enough to make you long for some kind of explanation of what the heck it is, let alone the rest of The Hoofer. I had to do a quick Internet search just to get the title. A few more scenes from The Soupy Sales Show abruptly follow. Overall, you get about 150 minutes of Soupy Sales: In Living Black and White, and I imagine it's enough to get a decent sense of what his show was like. It's certainly enough to make me wish there were more. I'm not sure the adult version of me could watch this sort of thing every weekday, but maybe a few times a week or in reasonable chunks when in the right mood. In 1965, I might have loved it no matter what my age. And it sure seems like I would have LOVED it were I working on the show in 1965. Rick Brooks is the proprietor of Cultureshark, a blog in which he uses an often irreverent approach to express his reverence for the classics and the un-classics.