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Jonathan Storm: TV pioneer Ernie Kovacs a barrel of laughs

The wheel was already in place. Ernie Kovacs invented the engine and the transmission and the windshield wipers and that little Hawaiian hula dancer that sticks to the dashboard and jumps around whenever the car turns or hits a bump.

The wheel was already in place. Ernie Kovacs invented the engine and the transmission and the windshield wipers and that little Hawaiian hula dancer that sticks to the dashboard and jumps around whenever the car turns or hits a bump.

Commercial TV had been kicking around for about five years when Kovacs came along and laid the foundation for just about every comedy-show host and TV sketch style that would follow. Without Kovacs, it's difficult to imagine Monty Python or Saturday Night Live, Johnny Carson or David Letterman.

An important six-disc boxed set of his work hits the shelves Tuesday.

The title, The Ernie Kovacs Collection (Shout! Factory, $69.97), reflects the frequently matter-of-fact names Kovacs gave some of his characters, such as Uncle Gruesome, or the two Misters (Mister Science and Mister Question Man), rather than some of his more flamboyant creations: Percy Dovetonsils, J. Burlington Gearshift, or the decades-ahead-of-his-time TV newsman, Leroy L. Leroy-Leroy W. Bascomb McFinister.

Like so many early TV entertainers, Kovacs was a transfer from radio, Trenton's WTTM. He showed up at WPTZ (now CBS3) in 1950, auditioning at the Philadelphia station dressed in a barrel to host a fashion show. Unlike most of those radio transplants, Kovacs understood that TV was a visual medium. There were very few video tricks in those early days that he left untested.

Kovacs was basically incapable of playing it straight on TV. He turned another early cooking show on WPTZ into such a gabfest that the chef, Gulph Mills Country Club's Albert Mathis, would sometimes forget what he was cooking.

The son of Hungarian immigrants, Kovacs is credited with establishing television's first morning news and talk show, Three to Get Ready. It premiered on WPTZ at the end of 1950. There was real news and weather, but there was also Kovacs' lunacy. A recurring gag: If rain was in the forecast, Kovacs would climb up on a ladder behind the set and dump a bucket of water on the weatherman.

Before Three to Get Ready, WPTZ hadn't signed on until 10:45 a.m. Nobody thought people would watch TV in the morning. They learned differently fast. A little more than a year later, NBC premiered a morning show for the entire network and named it Today. Affiliate WPTZ stuck with Kovacs' show for a few months, but then went with the network offering, starring Dave Garroway. Kovacs left Philadelphia for New York.

No copies exist of Three to Get Ready, but the boxed set includes three installments of a show produced at the same time for the network. And then it's off to the races, with a total of more than 13 hours of material, all of it archived by his wife and partner in comedy, Edie Adams, who bought as many videotapes as she could after Kovacs died before the networks could record over them.

Never a popular success, always pushing limits and breaking rules, he appeared through the '50's in various productions, frequently as a summer fill-in, often late at night, on ABC, CBS, NBC, and the defunct DuMont network.

Kovacs died in 1962 at 42, when his Chevy Corvair (a brand later lambasted by Ralph Nader as "unsafe at any speed") hit a power pole after hydroplaning on a Beverly Hills street in a January rainstorm.

The boxed set chronicles Kovacs' originality - and his unwillingness to treat the new medium as much more than a silly toy and commercial engine. He insults the network president. He goofs on his sponsors.

Forty years before cable news started going down the drain, his pompous newscaster, Leroy-Leroy, ushered in by the 1812 Overture, uses every trick in the then-limited TV video book to make his bombastic recitation of "the news behind the news behind the news as it happens before it happens" seem important.

Mr. Science takes gas ("you burned me last week") from little Johnny from next door. Miklos Molnar the Melancholy Magyar, a clueless Hungarian who was a particular Kovacs favorite, tries to fill in for Howdy Doody's Buffalo Bob. The Nairobi Trio, three people in gorilla masks, bowler hats, and Edwardian overcoats, fail yet again to make it through Robert Maxwell's "Solfeggio" without a little mayhem.

Almost the entire David Letterman repertoire, from walking down the hall out of the studio to chatting with stagehands, is here, most of it thought up before Dave was out of elementary school.

There's a 1957 show, in color, featuring Kovacs' everyman character Eugene without a word of dialogue, so radical it earned him a cover slot on Life magazine.

Much like early automobiles, a lot of Kovacs' material will seem antiquated and balky. Computer-generated imagery was 40 years away. Kovacs used film clips and little models to put himself in impossible situations.

Many of the concepts will seem familiar. That's because subsequent performers have had nearly 60 years to perfect them.

Filled with material not seen in public for half a century, the six DVDs packaged in The Ernie Kovacs Collection provide a rare combination, showcasing creative genius and offering historical perspective at the same time.