While we’re still… sorta, kinda… on the subjects of slasher movies and birthdays, to most of you Betsy Palmer is best known for being Jason’s mother in FRIDAY the 13th. She’s maybe the world’s most famous Hockey Mom.But to us baby boomers Ms. Palmer is forever etched in our minds as a celebrity panelist on the I’VE GOT A SECRET game show from the 50s and 60s. And she was also playing P
eter Pan in any dinner theater that could afford the flying apparatus. So how does this cheery, chirpy pixie with a trademark smile and sixty teeth go from live game shows to blood splatter fests?
She needed to buy a car.
"What a piece of junk!” she said of the movie (not the car) in an early interview. “Nobody is ever going to see this piece of crap."
Any teenager who ever pissed in his (or her) pants knows that’s not true.
Betsy eventually embraced the franchise. And why not? No one ever became a cult figure asking contestants if their secret had anything to do with trampolines?
Betsy just turned 82. Happy Birthday. Your son is carving you a gift even as we speak.
Yes yes. If you were the right age, seeing that 1960s version of a MILF revealed as the bad guy actually came as a shock. I wonder what John Charles Daly thought of it.
ReplyDeleteI worked with Betsy once on radio, back before she played Sarah Palin in that Friday the 13th movie, and she impressed me very much. Great, smart lady.
ReplyDeleteYou just never know what's going to hit. I was in episode 9 of THE MIGHTY MORPHIN POWER RANGERS ("I, Eyeguy") back in 1993, shot about 5 months before the show ever hit the air. Between what we were shooting, the quality of the script, and the Japanese footage and stills they showed us of what we were being sliced into, I safely thought "This will be on and off the air in a month and then forgotten forever."
When it became a giganzo monster hit, I was stunned, and for a year I was a celebrity to every 5 year old I knew.
Well that significantly reduces the Bacon Number of Jose Jimenez.
ReplyDeleteFunny - they just showed an old I've Got A Secret" Friday night where the main secret (featuring Martha Raye) was a joke on Betsy (they were all supposedly doing Halloween party games such as bobbing for apples, but Betsy was the only one blindfolded and the only one doing it), followed by the house band playing "Happy Birthday" for her...
ReplyDeleteThis is totally unexpected and totally sweet....from the Game Show Network I learned to appreciate the classic panel shows and the people who appeared on them.
ReplyDeleteHowever, the words "She needed to buy a car" saddens me a little--I guess her marriage to the obstetrician must have ended.
scared with the pic. haha
ReplyDeleteSince I'm a wuss and never saw any of the Jason movies, I only know Betsy from I've Got a Secret. Too bad they didn't incorporate her game show expertise into the movie scripts.
ReplyDeleteBetsy, on finding blood splatter on Jason's clothes: Son, does your secret have anything to do with evisceration?
Hey Ken. Great comments on the Repubelickers. I thought I would falloff the chair when McCain accused Acorn of threatening the very fabric of democracy. If I were Barack, I would have said.."oh like you guys did in 2000 when the election was decided 5 to 4?" Voter suppression, disenfranchisement, intimidation. Even that won't work this time.
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ReplyDeleteI used to watch I'VE GOT A SECRET on the Game Show Network, and I have to wonder: why didn't any of the show's other panelists ever appear in the FRIDAY THE 13 movies? Just think, Bill Cullen could have carved the price of a washing machine in some poor victim's head, while Henry Morgan stood by and drolly complained that blood had splattered on his bowtie. Bess Myerson, meanwhile, could win another beauty contest, this time as the SOLE SURVIVER.
ReplyDeleteThe cycle of JUST SHOOT ME repeats on TBS is back at the first season....and if the production schedule had been a little different, you could have directed Betsy in "The Walk" instead of Monkey Dan in "Sewer!"
ReplyDeleteBetsy Palmer was the one the writers liked to cast as the "daffy" one of the "IGAS" panel, in contrast to Bess Myerson's sweetness. Likewise, Henry Morgan was the crab, and Bill Cullen the Boy Scout. You couldn't have cast four more distinct personalities, and they stayed together as the IGAS panel for the entire final nine years of the show (1959-1972, with Palmer becoming the final regular, IIRC) with very little substitution required.
ReplyDeleteAfter a public appearance in which she told about accepting the FRIDAY THE 13TH role because she needed the money to buy a new car, I saw Betsy Palmer confronted by a young woman who told Betsy that she had seen FRIDAY THE 13TH, and as an actress herself, she would never lower herself to appear in films like that. Betsy asked her, "Really? You're an actress? What work have you done?"
ReplyDeleteThe young woman admitted that, so far, she had only appeared in high school and college productions, but she WAS going to be a professional actress, and when she became one, she would never be motivated to take an acting job just for the paycheck.
And Betsy flashed that smile of hers and replied, "Well, dear, look me up ten years after you start your professional acting career and we'll do a reality check over your resume."
Look, I don't particularly want to defend the Friday the 13th franchise, but Ms. Palmer appeared in the first, the best, and, relatively speaking, the smartest of the movies. Remember, it had a SURPRISE ending. You expect the killer to be Jason, the little boy who drowned 10 or so years earlier, but, lo and behold, it's Jason's mother, taking revenge on sexually active teenagers who just happen to show up at a camp long since closed. Remember, I said relatively smart. Now, I'd like to pitch an idea to Hollywood. All these teenagers killed in this series are, from Jason and Jason's mother perspective, symbolic stand-ins for the original group that let that kid take the deep dive in the first place. But, as far as I can tell, those sexually-active teens, the ones in that first movies flashback, got away scot-free. Aren't they long overdue for a bloodbath? Granted, by now they'd be sexually-active middle-agers. Maybe Jason could attack a suburban swing club.
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