Larry Mondello in Color

[jehobden]

I have been on a mailing list for old eps of The Shirley Temple Show through www.shirleytemple.com , and these eps were all originally on color videotape (now on DVD), having aired on NBC (which liked color shows to help sell RCA color tvs), so they look almost new. One of the eps is a version of the French children's book Madeline. In this dramatization, Madeline and a neighbor boy, Pepito, are searching for their lost dog, and they end up visiting a traveling circus. The boy running the merry-go-round is played by none other than Rusty Stevens, who appeared here about the time he appeared as Larry Mondello for the last time, since this broadcast originally appeared Oct. 16, 1960, and Larry appeared for the last time on LITB in the fall of 1960. His hair is obviously red when seen in color, though not as red as the uniform he wears. He's a bit whiny like Larry, and his gypsy mom slaps him and bawls him out for not taking out the trash earlier, so she reminded me a bit of Mrs. Mondello. :) His mom was played by Jane Rose, who played Phyllis Lindstrom's mother-in-law Audrey Dexter years later on the MTM spinoff Phyllis.

[tdr]

"Larry Mondello .... His hair is obviously red when seen in color."

I feel like that is vindication in a sense ;) , as I described Larry as having red hair in my fanfic of when he returns to Mayfield for his freshman year of high school, and a couple of posters said they "can't imagine" Larry with red hair.

[Tweety]

yeah, I remember when we were kids in the late 60s and we would watch LITB reruns...we noticed that Larry's real name was Rusty, and my brother figured that Rusty must have been his nickname because his hair was probably red... I think a lot of kids with red hair were nicknamed Rusty, at least in those days... we knew a couple of them ourselves...