It's so weird. I watch clips of Carson all the time, some older than this (like 50 years old) and I feel right at home like not a year has passed. I feel like it would be "normal" to turn the TV on to Channel 4 at 11:30pm and see this. The kicker is that some cable stations
do show Carson re-runs.
I hardly ever watched late-night talk shows after Carson retired in 1992. I did like Letterman for awhile back when he was first on (and that was before Carson retired), but there was always something special about Carson and his guests. You really felt like you were seeing the best stars -- because you
were.
Unfortunately, Carson was supposedly an SOB in real-life. All this has come out due to the internet of course, and after Carson died -- so he cannot defend himself. Search youtube for Wayne Netwon's story about how he slapped Carson around, in Carson's office, since he had had enough of Carson's jokes about him.
You do have to take everything with a grain of salt, though. Take Frank Sinatra, for instance. So much bad stuff has been written about him -- that he was an SOB, among other things. But then you notice that his friends, the people who really knew him, say he was a sweetheart. So do you believe them or Kitty Kelly?
I enjoy Sinatra's music, and I actually have it all -- I'm not a half-Nelson guy who has a few "best of" CDs or LPs and then calls himself a big Sinatra fan. (I know tons of people like that -- though not always with Sinatra but with other recording artists. Awhile ago, perhaps a year or 2 after Sinatra died, my wife, her friend, and I were taking a long drive somewhere. They were playing nothing but Sinatra on this station that day. Then her stupid friend says,"How many songs did he record? I mean, they've been playing his songs for an hour already!" I thought to myself -- "What?
? You've got to be kidding me!" I mean -- Sinatra was "The Entertainer of the Century", and considered the greatest singer of his genre and generation, and you're surprised that there's as much as an hour of his music that was recorded?
This woman was the same age as me, and I know that she had heard Sinatra before -- of couse-- and liked his music.)
I decided a long time ago to enjoy entertainers like Carson and Sinatra for their entertainment, and not be concerned about what they were like in real-life. Plus -- they're long dead so I'll never meet them anyway.
