Where Are They Now: Shirley Jones

Here at Harvest Gold Memories, I've featured a recurring series I call "Pop Culture Reunions" where I share various video clips from different cast reunions of TV shows, movies or even musicians and bands that were popular back in the 1970s and 1980s. In June 2012, I featured one for "The Partridge Family" or http://goo.gl/yuqQN which ran on NBC's Today Show on March 1-2, 2010. Almost the entire cast was featured ... EXCEPT for Partridge Family mama Shirley Jones, and Susan Dey who played sister Laurie Partridge.

Shirley Jones' real-life stepson David Cassidy (who happened to play Keith Partridge on the show) said she couldn't make the cast reunion because she was out touring at the time.

That was kind of a bummer.

However, I guess that's a testament to the fact that academy award winner Shirley Jones remains extremely active and keeps herself busy even at age 75 (her age at the time of the reunion on the Today Show). Shirley Jones looks largely unchanged over the last 30 years. Today, her platinum blonde hair has turned completely white, which I think helps her to keep a youthful appearance. But aside from not having gained a pound since her first movie premiers, she looks pretty much the same as she did when she played Shirley Partridge.

Regular readers here may recall that I've also started to feature a segment from Australia's 7 television network called "Where Are They Now?" when I introduced everyone to a clip on "The Six Million Dollar Man" (or visit http://goo.gl/QkLm9). Apparently, that particular program ran only for about a year or two in Australia, but nevertheless featured one of the missing parties from "The Partridge Family", notably actress and singer Shirley Jones.

I should note that the segment I'm featuring today actually pre-dates the cast reunion for "The Partridge Family" by several years since it ran in 2007 whereas the reunion took place in 2010. However, I think this fills in a missing piece of info from the original posting on "The Partridge Family", and the discussion with Shirley Jones remains as relevant today as it was in 2007. She talks about how she got involved in television to do "The Partridge Family" at a time when everyone told her it would be career suicide (it wasn't), how she wanted to do the show so she could remain home with her sons, how she still stays in touch with many of her former castmembers from the show, and more.

Without further delay, catch that clip below, or by visiting http://youtu.be/rXfsDvdLeUI:



Let me just close by including some additional info on Shirley Jones that is not necessarily included in the preceding video.

For one thing, Shirley Jones has been happily married to a man by the name of Marty Ingels for the past 35 years! Talk about an enduring relationship, especially in Hollywood where marriages are sometimes considered disposable commodities. Although her marriage to Jack Cassidy ended in divorce in 1976, her marriage to Marty Ingels seems to have endured the test of time.

While they might appear to be an unlikely couple, as the book "Shirley & Marty: An Unlikely Love Story" (see http://amzn.to/WplTIK to buy the book) written by Shirley Jones, her husband Marty Ingels, and Mickey Herskowitz writes in a very entertaining way happens to note, he's a New York transplant who's also a comic, and they really seem to compliment one another very well. Shirley who is the quintessential American (I believe she's originally from Pittsburgh), while her husband Marty is a gruff, Jewish guy from Brooklyn, New York and his accent shows that you can take the man out of Brooklyn, but you can't take the Brooklyn out of the man!

However, both of them discussed on a very entertaining podcast of Stu's Show (hosted by Stu Showstak, see http://www.stusshow.com/) recorded on September 15, 2010, where Shirley commented that one of the reasons their marriage has endured for so long (certainly by Hollywood standards), in her own words, was "Because I'M the crazy one!". That podcast is available for $0.99, just visit http://www.stusshow.com/ and search in the archives for "Shirley Jones". I would have to say that podcast was a pretty entertaining look at Shirley Jones in a way that I would say is probably seldom seen by outsiders.

Shirley Jones also has her own website at http://www.shirleyjones.net/ which is also worth a visit if you're so inclined. She's got all kinds of stuff from her long and successful career in the entertainment business. Let me just remind everyone that although "The Partridge Family" was certainly not all she was known for, certainly anyone who remembers that show (either from original broadcasts, or broadcasts in syndication) might also like to visit an awesome fan-made website about "The Partridge Family" at http://cmongethappy.com/. There, you can find out virtually everything about the show, and it even has the font for the show you can download for your computer ... all free.

Where Are They Now? 6MDM

Until now, most of the cast reunions I've shared on "Harvest Gold Memories" have come from U.S. television networks, notably NBC and ABC (for some reason, CBS has not done many that I'm aware of). But let's face it, the world is a big place that has really been shrinking since the advent of the internet, global media conglomerates, etc. That's why some of today's post comes from Australia's Seven Network (which appears on Channel 7). Evidently, for a while, a morning show there (much like NBC's Today Show or ABC's Good Morning America here in the U.S.) had a feature they called "Where Are They Now" which ran in 2007.

For a period in the mid-to-late 1970s, ABC television scored a major ratings winner with a television show that began as a Movie of the Week based on a science fiction novel called "Cyborg" by Martin Caidin. The novel itself wasn't quite a bestseller until television came knocking, at which point, the book flew off the shelves. However, the movie and TV show were based loosely on the book, so the similarities are fairly limited.

6MDM: The Six Million Dollar Man

People cover 7/4/1977

I certainly didn't think of it back in 1977, but some American television shows were exported to Canada, Australia and elsewhere and became as popular there as they were here. One of those was the sci-fi show "The Six Million Dollar Man" which was a ratings winner for the ABC network here in the U.S. The lead actor who played Col. Steve Austin, was Lee Majors, someone best known for his prior work on the Western TV show "Gunsmoke".  Lee Majors was seen by kids of that era as THE coolest man on earth not only because he starred in this show, but also because in real-life, he was married to the hottest woman at that time, none other than Farrah Fawcett (whose bathing suit poster lined countless boys' rooms back in the day). Alas, their marriage didn't last, and neither did the ratings of "The Six Million Dollar Man". But Lee Majors' went on to star on another hit show known as "The Fall Guy" a few years later.

The 6MDM (Six Million Dollar Man) also spawned it's own spinoff, "The Bionic Woman" which was almost as popular, in part, because Gen Xer girls, like their mothers who were asserting their newfound independence with divorce in mass numbers (only to discover that being single-parent households was much tougher than they'd anticipated) liked that show.

The most popular school lunchbox in 1977

While "The Six Million Dollar Man" lacks a fansite as extensive as "The Bionic Woman" does (be sure to check out The Bionic Woman Files (www.bionicwomanfiles.com/) to see what an awesome job someone did for that show), and the most poplular school lunchbox among boys in 1977 is now a collectors item, all is not relegated to vague memories.

After spending a decade near the top of TVShowsonDVD.com's "Most Wanted" Unreleased DVD list, in late 2010, after years of bickering between the shows' producers and Universal Studios over content rights, both bionic shows were finally digitized and are now available on DVD. "The Six Million Dollar Man" had more seasons on the air, so it's release was much a bigger deal, and the entire series was released last year with some fanfare, while the 3 seasons for "The Bionic Woman" were released very quickly to retail stores with considerably less fanfare. However, after the initial full-season release, each season of "The Six Million Dollar Man" will eventually come to your local Best Buy, Target, or to Amazon.com.  Season 1 of 6MDM is already out, and Season 2 is due out in time for the 2012 holidays on November 6, 2012.

Check out the promotional video for the DVD release below, or by visiting http://youtu.be/t7fvVyYtajw:



Needless to say, this show was a big hit, especially among grade school kids. Sure, the show was campy with sound effects that one could hear kids trying to imitate all over school playgrounds, and equally campy slo-mo special effects, but that didn't stop kids from tuning in week after week. Anyway, I can't really call this post a "cast reunion" since it consists mainly of one man.

Still, as I noted at the beginning of this post, we can thank Australian TV for this "Where Are They Now?" video, which can be seen below, or at http://youtu.be/yxh5HEPbenQ:




Now that your memory has been refreshed, check out my very first posting on this blog, and be sure to view the commercial for the Mazda CX-5 there.  I'll just close with some of the awesomely cheesy sound-effects used in 6MDM.  Check them out!

Bionic Sounds:
Check out the "Bionic Sound" effect and other sound effects from 6MDM online at: http://www.soundboard.com/sb/Bionic_Man_Sounds.

6MDM Toys/Action Figures:
The Six Million Dollar Man Action Figure is among those listed at this site: http://www.toysyouhad.com/Bionicman.htm