Legendary “Laugh-In” creator George Schlatter, plus Doug and Emmy Jo (creators and stars of “The New Zoo Revue”), joined host Kenneth Womack for a special “Super '70s” bonus episode of “Everything Fab Four,” a podcast co-produced by me and Womack (a music scholar who also writes about pop music for Salon) and distributed by Salon.
Doug Momary and Emily Peden, better known as Doug and Emmy Jo, met while in summer stock theater and got married just prior to filming the pilot episode of their classic children’s TV show “The New Zoo Revue” (1972-'77). Still together today, the couple was surprised to learn that the show was the reason our host, now a world-renowned Beatles author and historian, discovered the band all those years ago. Doug was honored. “The Beatles were a big influence on me,” he explained to Womack. “When I composed songs for the show, I didn't want to compose down to the kids. I wanted to lift them up. The compositions were really quite complicated. We experimented. All the stuff the Beatles were doing, I tried to do . . . Every song and album was different, and that's exactly what I wanted.”
