Marshall Efron, Funny Cog in the PBS ‘Dream Machine,’
Dies at 81
In the 1970s he was part of a much-talked about
prime-time TV series as well as a somewhat subversive Sunday morning Bible show
for children.
The New York Times
By Neil Genzlinger
October 8, 2019
Marshall Efron, an actor and humorist who was a core
figure in two of the quirkiest television shows of the 1970s, “The Great
American Dream Machine” and the children’s program “Marshall Efron’s
Illustrated, Simplified and Painless Sunday School,” died on Sept. 30 at the
Lillian Booth Actors Home in Englewood, N.J. He was 81.
His longtime writing partner, Alfa-Betty Olsen, said the
cause was cardiac arrest.
At a time when “Gunsmoke,” “Bonanza” and “Marcus Welby,
M.D.” were among television’s top-rated shows, Mr. Efron made an idiosyncratic
entry into the viewing public’s consciousness as a parody of a consumer affairs
reporter on “The Great American Dream Machine,” a hodgepodge of a series that
premiered in January 1971 on PBS, then newly formed and still known as the
Public Broadcasting Service.
It was a freewheeling mix of short comic films, cartoons,
musical acts, humorous sketches, investigative journalism and opinion pieces,
and Mr. Efron, 5-foot-5 and weighing well north of 200 pounds, cut a
distinctive figure on it. The New York Times once called him “the big man
daintily wielding a satirical sledgehammer.” Another time, the newspaper
described him as “the plump elf with the crab grass mustache.”
In one bit, Mr. Efron riffed on the United States
Department of Agriculture’s grading of olives. “Which is the biggest — the
giant, the jumbo or the extra large?” he asked.
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In another, he parodied a cooking show by trying to
prepare a Morton’s frozen lemon cream pie using the arcane, somewhat
dubious-sounding ingredients listed on the box.
“Now we’re going to food starch modified,” he said midway
through, shaking a white powder into his bowl. “What are the modifications? No
one knows.” The bit ended with him holding up a Morton’s pie and saying, “No
lemons, no eggs, no cream, just pie.”
The show, produced by National Educational Television and
WNET in New York, lasted only two seasons. But it was much talked about in its
day, and the list of soon-to-be-famous faces who turned up on it includes Chevy
Chase, Henry Winkler, Albert Brooks and Penny Marshall.
Mr. Efron quickly returned to television in an altogether
different vein with the “Painless Sunday School” program, which turned up on
CBS’s Sunday morning lineup in late 1973. On that show, he single-handedly
enacted stories from the Bible. In one episode, he was both David and Goliath.
If the show was somewhat subversive for religious fare, it wasn’t
disrespectful.
“Everybody thinks we outraged the fundamentalists, but
it’s not true,” Ms. Olsen, who wrote the show with Mr. Efron, told The Boston
Globe in 1981. “We received awards from church groups, and letters saying
Sunday schools were using our show as part of their studies.”
Mr. Efron was born on Feb. 3, 1938, in Los Angeles. His
father, Jacob, was an accountant, and his mother, Ida (Plotkin) Efron, was a
homemaker. He grew up facing issues familiar to countless young people.
“School wasn’t much fun for me,” he told The Times in
1971. “I was short and fat, a lousy athlete, always the last to be picked for
teams. The better team would get me as a handicap.”
“I started being funny as a kid to avoid being pushed
around,” he added.
ImageOn the CBS show “Marshall Efron’s Illustrated,
Simplified and Painless Sunday School,” Mr. Efron single-handedly enacted
stories from the Bible. If the show was somewhat subversive, it wasn’t
disrespectful.
On the CBS show “Marshall Efron’s Illustrated, Simplified
and Painless Sunday School,” Mr. Efron single-handedly enacted stories from the
Bible. If the show was somewhat subversive, it wasn’t
disrespectful.CreditAssociated Press
He graduated from the University of California, Los
Angeles, in 1959, then earned a master’s degree in English at the University of
California, Berkeley, in 1964. After an aborted run at law school he tried
teaching, but he also began working with the International Theater Workshop in
Los Angeles. Soon he was acting there and in the Bay Area.
In 1967 he moved to New York, and the next year he was on
Broadway, playing several small roles in “The Great White Hope.” He also began
doing satirical radio spots for the listener-supported radio station WBAI.
During the 1968 student protests at Columbia University, he and his fellow
humorist Paul Krassner (who died in July) pretended to be students and said
they had taken over the station; some listeners who didn’t get the joke are
said to have called the police.
Mr. Efron eventually got his own weekly program on the
station, “A Satirical View,” and soon Al Perlmutter and Jack Willis, the
executive producers of “Dream Machine,” came calling. “Rowan and Martin’s
Laugh-In” and, in England, “Monty Python’s Flying Circus” had already
experimented with fast-moving, absurdist variations of the variety show format,
and “Dream Machine,” adding music and political content to the mix, was a
forerunner of “Saturday Night Live,” which made its debut in 1975.
By the time “Dream Machine” appeared, Mr. Efron had also
begun acting in movies, including the first feature by a young director named
George Lucas, the science fiction thriller “THX 1138” (1971). He would continue
to act and do voice work in films and television throughout his career. His
voice credits included the series “The Smurfs” and “The Biskitts” in the 1980s
and the animated films “Ice Age: The Meltdown” (2006) and “Horton Hears a Who!”
(2008).
He is survived by a sister, Mary Efron.
Mr. Efron was a car fanatic. In the early 1970s his
decorating scheme at his apartment on East 10th Street in Manhattan included
the grill from a 1937 Ford truck.
“My dream of success has always been to have a new
Cadillac on my own grease rack,” he told The Times in 1971.
In 1981 he reflected on his “Sunday School” series, which
ran from 1973 to 1977 and was rebroadcast into the 1980s.
“I don’t think we felt we were getting away with
anything,” he said. “If you look at the Bible as it’s written, there is wit, a
humor, a freshness, a liveliness to it. Those people who think it’s grim are
wrong.”
EFRON, Marshall
Born: 2/3/1938,
Los Angeles, California, U.S.A.
Died: 9/30/2019,
Englewood, New Jersey, U.S.A.
Marshall Efron’s
western – actor:
‘Doc’ – 1970 (Mexican bartender)
Home on the Range - 2004 [voice of Larry the Duck]
Home on the Range - 2004 [voice of Larry the Duck]
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