Tony Dow Stars in the Teen Soap "Never Too Young"

Never Too Young (1965-1966) is famous as the first teenage soap opera, an attempt to draw the Beatles crowd into daytime tv.

It was set in Malibu, where Alfy (David Watson) ran the High Dive, the local teen hangout, and negotiated the angst-ridden lives of three high school girls, Joy, Rhoda, and Susan, and their boys:

Dack Rambo, who would go on to star in All My Children and Dallas, played all-around good guy Tim (shown here with his twin brother Dirk Rambo).  Both were bisexual in real life.

John Lupton (shown here with Michael Ansara and, apparently, their child) played rich kid Frank.

Tony Dow of Leave It to Beaver appeared in 10 episodes as brooding, always shirtless race car driver Chet.  Then he joined the California National Guard and temporarily retired from acting.

Tommy Rettig of Lassie played his boyfriend Jojo.











Michael Blodgett, a beefcake star of the 1960s, played injured football star Tad.

Never Too Young ran daily at 3:00 in the afternoon from September 27, 1965 through June 24, 1966.

That's a pitiable short life span for a soap; apparently teenagers were staying away in droves.  But not to worry, they grooved on the vampires and werewolves of its replacement, Dark Shadows

Only five episodes have survived  You can sometimes find them on Ebay.  But be warned, the reproduction is not very good.  Check out John Lupton's bulge, if you can.

Boris Vallejo: Bodybuilder turned Fantasy Artist

During the 1970s, the covers of your Conan, Tarzan, John Carter, Doc Savage, and miscellaneous barbarian hero books were likely to feature a heavily-muscled, naked or nearly-naked muscle-god fighting off monsters, giant snakes, or weird gods, usually with a naked steatopygous lady clinging to his feet (it's really hard to fight that way, but it keyed into the heterosexual fanboy's fantasy of conquest).

If they were comic books, the illustrator was Frank Frazetta.

If they were print novels, the illustrator was Boris Vallejo.



Both started out as bodybuilders, both began their careers in 1954, and moved into the field of fantasy illustration in the 1960s. They are neighbors, in Scranton and Allentown, Pennsylvania.

But the Peruvian-born Vallejo was more naturalistic in his drawings, he used a brighter color palette, lots of gold skies and gleaming muscles, and his work was more erotic -- these barbarian heroes had obvious bulges. .

He drew covers for many paperbacks, as well as posters for such films as Barbarella (1968) and National Lampoon's Vacation (1983).

Also oil paintings, like this glowing Icarus.

A friend of the gay community, Vallejo drew this poster in 1979 to commemorate the renovation of the famous St. Mark Baths in New York.

His wife, Julie Bell, is also a former bodybuilder and illustrator, who has a similar style, except her women aren't clinging to the legs of muscle gods: they're female bodybuilders and barbarian heroes in their own right. She has illustrated over 100 covers for science fiction novels since the 1990s.

My Mother the Car: "The idiots in Middle America will watch anything, so how about a sitcom with..."

I don't know why people think of Jerry Van Dyke as a failure.  Sure, he never reached the Emmy-winning tv-classic status of his older brother Dick, but he's had a 50 year-long career, starting with beach movies in the 1960s (Palm Springs Weekend) and going on to starring roles in at least a dozen tv series, including eight years on Coach (1989-1997) and five years on The Middle (2010-2015).













Besides, he was considerably more attractive than his gawky older brother.

Plus, in spite of his two long-term marriages to women, there's a.bigger gay subtext in his work than you can find in Dick's, such as a starring role on The Judy Garland Show, and the big brother-little brother acts

Maybe because of a few poor decisions, like rejecting the roles of Gilligan on Gilligan's Island and Barney Fife on the Andy Griffith Show.

The program he chose instead, My Mother the Car, is universally lambasted as ridiculous, although really, was the premise any more far out than Bewitched, I Dream of Jeannie, Mr. Ed, or for that matter, Gilligan's Island.

A man discovers that a car is a reincarnation of his mother (or maybe her ghost is trapped in the car -- it's really not explained in any detail).

Men obsessed with their mothers: 1960s code for gay.

Watching it today, it doesn't seem particularly terrible, for a 1960s sitcom.  The mother thing is kind of creepy, but the main problem is, it's just dull.  Mom doesn't provide the comedic foil that Mr. Ed did, and the main antagonist, an obsessed car collector, isn't chummy enough to provide a gay subtext or evil enough to provide any conflict.

South Pacific: A High School Music

I don't care much for musicals, but I've had a soft spot for South Pacific (1949), the Rogers and Hammerstein musical adaption of James A. Michener's Tales of the South Pacific (1948), ever since I saw it performed live 8 times in high school.

I was in the orchestra pit, so I had no choice.  But anything that required my male classmates to parade around with their shirts off was fine with me, even if they were singing the heterosexist "There's Nothing like a Dame."










Over the years I've seen four more live versions, at my nephew's high school, Augustana College, a community theater in Ohio, and a gay synagogue in West Hollywood.  But until recently, I never saw the 1958 movie with Ray Walston (later on My Favorite Martian), Jack Mullaney (later on It's About Time), and Ken Clark (the bodybuilder with something extra). (Gay icon Robert Goulet starred in the original.)

Most musical comedies have two hetero-romantic plots, one romantic and the other humorous.  In South Pacific, the romantic plot is handled by Lt. Joe Cable (in this case, Anderson Davis in a 2008 Baltimore production).  A soldier stationed on a small island in the Pacific during World War II, he falls in love with the native girl Liat, but his family's prejudices keep them from marrying.  Then he dies on a secret mission.

Here's another Jim (Matthew Morrison, who plays Will Schuester on Glee) from the 2008 Broadway revival.

The humorous plot is handled by Nellie Forbush, one of musical theater's big-voiced, gutsy broads, who falls in love with Emile, a fey, sophisticated, gay-coded plantation owner -- they perform a gender-bending number in drag -- but rejects him because he has mixed-race children.  He goes on the secret mission, too, but returns alive just in time for Nellie to overcome her prejudice and marry him.

The prejudice theme, plus the gender-bending romance between the gay-coded guy and girl, provides adequate gay symbolism.  But you hardly need any, with all the muscles to look at.