After my eyes stopped bleeding...
The Donny & Marie New Year's Eve Special 1976 was... better than the Johnny Cash Christmas Special. They opened with a duet of "Be My Baby" and there's a really odd... squick vibe.
It's not quite what I'd think of a sibling duet.
It's followed up with a dozen ice skaters in babydoll dresses and baby bonnets doing Busby Berkley on Ice with a kick line. The comic relief is provided by Rip Taylor, who I just don't get. You can tell he's just said something funny because he throws confetti at the punchline.
The real treat is Tina Turner. Not six months after Tina leaving Ike, she's on tv. Her first number isn't something I recognized, but her second piece was part of a medly... a musical number for each era of the century. Donny does Ragtime, Marie does the Charleston. When they hit the sixties, they let Tina take the stage, doing "Proud Mary" while dancing on a piano. This makes the whole hour worth while.
Card Sharks 12.31.79 wasn't a show I'd watched regularly, Perry wasn't familiar with it. Standard 70's game show, this episode was "special" as it was a New Year's Eve show... and the crazy contestant- a male stripper. (I watched another episode from November 22, 78 which made me wonder about their contestant screening. They seem to choose people who are right in the middle - between Jeopardy scholars and Let's Make Deal carnies.)
I finished the evening with Dogs 1976. Nature gone wild in a college town. Lots of talky academics, but it's got David McCallum playing a biology professor investigating animal deaths. It's pretty standard, but fun, as Nature Gone Wild movies usually are. Reminiscent of The Birds, they play the Hitchcock card and don't resolve the situation... and leave it open for a sequel. Time to fire up the ol' fan fiction imagination.
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