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WS of Sit-coms - Consolation match: Seinfeld v Honeymooners

Seinfeld

11 votes

Honeymooners

16 votes

Frayed Knot Feb 16 2011 07:52 AM

Two of the great foursomes in TV history go head to head as the two semi-finals losers battle it out to determine 3rd & 4th place finishes overall. Jerry, George, Elaine and Kramer or Ralph, Ed, Alice & Trixie ?? You have until Friday to vote

Benjamin Grimm Feb 16 2011 08:05 AM Re: WS of Sit-coms - Consolation match: Seinfeld v Honeymooners

Honeymooners. Easily.

Willets Point Feb 16 2011 08:09 AM Re: WS of Sit-coms - Consolation match: Seinfeld v Honeymooners

Benjamin Grimm wrote: Honeymooners. Easily. Ditto.

LeiterWagnerFasterStrongr Feb 16 2011 09:55 AM Re: WS of Sit-coms - Consolation match: Seinfeld v Honeymooners

Someone-- batmags?-- proposed a top ten episodes faceoff as a countervailing argument to the Odd-Couple-stuck-around-longer argument. I'm not so sure that Seinfeld wouldn't take that matchup-- or at least get the push-- here.

HahnSolo Feb 16 2011 10:05 AM Re: WS of Sit-coms - Consolation match: Seinfeld v Honeymooners

A top ten battle would be interesting. The Honeymooners list would have to include that one where Ralph and Norton try to put one over on Trixie and Alice.

LeiterWagnerFasterStrongr Feb 16 2011 10:11 AM Re: WS of Sit-coms - Consolation match: Seinfeld v Honeymooners

They'd have a tough time topping that Seinfeld where Kramer comes up with a crazy moneymaking scheme while Elaine dates an outwardly-attractive guy hiding some quirk and a borderline-sociopathic lie gets George into hot water.

HahnSolo Feb 16 2011 10:16 AM Re: WS of Sit-coms - Consolation match: Seinfeld v Honeymooners

And don't forget Jerry's inability to commit to the latest impossibly-hot chick he's dating.

LeiterWagnerFasterStrongr Feb 16 2011 10:28 AM Re: WS of Sit-coms - Consolation match: Seinfeld v Honeymooners

To be fair, she did have a bothersome superficial characteristic that lent itself readily to a terse, catchy nickname. NTTAWWT

G-Fafif Feb 16 2011 11:35 AM Re: WS of Sit-coms - Consolation match: Seinfeld v Honeymooners

It's the sitcom version of the Playoff Bowl! Little Consolation in Third-Place Game By RICHARD SANDOMIR It was an N.F.L. postseason game with several official and unofficial names and no meaning at all. The Playoff Bowl was one name. But you might have called it the Bert Bell Benefit Bowl (for a former commissioner), the Pro Playoff Classic or the Runner-Up Bowl. If you were paying any attention at all. By any name, Roger Brown, an All-Pro right tackle for the Detroit Lions and Los Angeles Rams, remembers that speck of an iota of a footnote in the history of the N.F.L.’s postseason. Brown was there with the Lions at the dawn of the Playoff Bowl when the second-place finishers in the league’s conferences played. He was present with the Rams when the format changed to match the losers in a new first round of the playoffs. “Why are you waking the dead?” Brown said, sounding less than jolly. “I was in five of them, and to have played in it five in the 10 years it was in existence is pitiful.” But listen to this: The Lions won the first three Playoff Bowls, a streak of success that must feel as distant as the Big Bang to Lions fans. Brown’s elation at winning three postseason games to start his career is not like, say, Joe Namath’s, in recalling winning Super Bowl III. Brown won two more bowls with the Rams, including a 31-0 stomping of the Dallas Cowboys in 1970, the finale for the game. Brown was happy to beat America’s Team. Who wasn’t? But playing in those meaningless games that were more like exhibitions, he said, was like having “the worst inferiority complex.” It is strange to contemplate that from 1961 to 1970, Commissioner Pete Rozelle’s rising pigskin-industrial complex celebrated something that screamed out, “We’re No. 3!” But it staged the consolation game every year at the Orange Bowl in Miami — all but one played after the N.F.L. championship game, the acme of achievement in the league until Super Bowl I in 1967. The runner-up games benefited the players’ pension fund, but they also got a few hundred to just over a thousand dollars for the junket to Florida. “We barely had enough for expenses,” said Rams quarterback Roman Gabriel, who won the 1968 and ’70 Playoff Bowls in routs. In the days before those games, he said, the disciplinarian Rams Coach George Allen “let us run wild in Miami, but we played loose and won.” This was the N.F.L. before it started the Super Bowl and initiated multiple rounds of playoffs. Wild cards were for poker, not the postseason. “It was sort of a fluff game,” said Frank Ryan, the Cleveland Browns quarterback who led his team to the 1964 N.F.L. championship but lost two Runner-Up Bowls. “That ridiculous game shows how ridiculous the league was in those days,” he said. At gatherings with teammates, do they reminisce about it? “It never comes up,” Ryan said. The Green Bay Packers sandwiched two Playoff Bowls between N.F.L. titles in 1961 and ’62 and three more championships from ’65 to ’67. Coach Vince Lombardi hated being crowned the league’s best loser when the Packers beat the Browns in 1964 and hated it even more when his boys lost to the St. Louis Cardinals the next year, 24-17. In “Lombardi,” the Broadway play, he called the game “the Toilet Bowl,” a cleaned-up version of what he really said. After losing to St. Louis, he raged about a “hinky-dink football game, held in a hinky-dink town, played by hinky-dink players.” He added, “That’s all second place is — hinky-dink.” Tom Matte, a Baltimore Colts halfback, said the 1966 game meant something. The Colts had lost the final game of the season in sudden death to Green Bay and a chance to play for the N.F.L. title. The Packers had tied that game in regulation on a disputed field goal. So the Colts felt the pressure to show that they deserved better — and had to play Matte at quarterback because of injuries to Johnny Unitas and Gary Cuozzo. “Shula said we’ll go down and have fun,” Matte said. “We had no curfew, we drank a lot of beer and Don Meredith shot his mouth off.” The Colts beat the Cowboys, 35-3, with Matte throwing two touchdown passes. And it was not all hinky-dink on the field, Matte said. “I’d done a bootleg,” he said, “and LeRoy Jordan came in late and really nailed me so I took a swing at him. I think I got a penalty and Tommy Bell walks me back to the huddle and said, ‘You’re the only quarterback they’ve got, and if you do that again, I’ll have to throw you out.’ ” Brown said an incident off the field before the 1961 game was more critical to him than anything that happened in his less-than-storied five victories. Several white players were upset that Brown and two other black players — Dick Lane, known as Night Train, and Danny Lewis — had to stay in a “dinky” hotel away from their teammates. “After practice one day, Gibbons, Pietrosante and Cassady talked to George Wilson,” Brown said, referring to Jim Gibbons, Nick Pietrosante and Howard Cassady. “They said, ‘We’re all going to go home because we came down here as a team, we’ll stay as a team and play as a team.’ ” Wilson, the coach, agreed and moved Brown, Lane and Lewis to the Ivanhoe Hotel on Miami Beach. “That meant something,” Brown said. Gabriel said that his two Playoff Bowl victories had some meaning — at least to Allen, who saw them as the first game of the next season. They were empty wins, but Gabriel said that they were more meaningful than a game that endures to this day. “After watching the Pro Bowl last week,” Gabriel said, “wouldn’t you have rather watched the Bears and Jets play?” Runner-Up Bowl, anyone? Might have been something Oscar Madison would have covered.

Frayed Knot Feb 16 2011 12:57 PM Re: WS of Sit-coms - Consolation match: Seinfeld v Honeymooners

I was thinking as I was putting up this poll that hardly any sport (in this country anyway) does consolation games anymore. NCAA hoops used to I believe. The Olympics still does in team sports (have to determine the bronze medal). Does World Cup soccer? - I forget.

TheOldMole Feb 17 2011 07:26 AM Re: WS of Sit-coms - Consolation match: Seinfeld v Honeymooners

To be fair, she did have a bothersome superficial characteristic that lent itself readily to a terse, catchy nickname. Mulva?

Willets Point Feb 17 2011 07:28 AM Re: WS of Sit-coms - Consolation match: Seinfeld v Honeymooners

Frayed Knot wrote: Does World Cup soccer? - I forget. The World Cup has a third place game. The Boston Beanpot tournament has a consolation game. That's all I can think of.

Ashie62 Feb 17 2011 07:30 AM Re: WS of Sit-coms - Consolation match: Seinfeld v Honeymooners

HahnSolo wrote: A top ten battle would be interesting. The Honeymooners list would have to include that one where Ralph and Norton try to put one over on Trixie and Alice. Wouldn't that be almost every show they did?

Ashie62 Feb 17 2011 07:33 AM Re: WS of Sit-coms - Consolation match: Seinfeld v Honeymooners

Frayed Knot wrote: I was thinking as I was putting up this poll that hardly any sport (in this country anyway) does consolation games anymore. NCAA hoops used to I believe. The Olympics still does in team sports (have to determine the bronze medal). Does World Cup soccer? - I forget. NIT National Invitation Tournament NCAA Hoops plays a third place game.

Edgy DC Feb 17 2011 07:34 AM Re: WS of Sit-coms - Consolation match: Seinfeld v Honeymooners

I switched my vote to the Honeymooners. Milk of human kindness.

HahnSolo Feb 17 2011 07:56 AM Re: WS of Sit-coms - Consolation match: Seinfeld v Honeymooners

Ashie62 wrote: HahnSolo wrote: A top ten battle would be interesting. The Honeymooners list would have to include that one where Ralph and Norton try to put one over on Trixie and Alice. Wouldn't that be almost every show they did? Yup.

Edgy DC Feb 17 2011 08:03 AM Re: WS of Sit-coms - Consolation match: Seinfeld v Honeymooners

I disagree. There were gross misunderstanding plots. There were Ralph gets too full of himself plots. There were Ralph tries to improve himself plots. There were moneymaking schemes, helping Norton out of a jam, flareups in the cold war with the mother-in-law, and bitings off of more than Ralph and/or Ed could chew. Plenty of stuff. All funny.

Benjamin Grimm Feb 17 2011 08:04 AM Re: WS of Sit-coms - Consolation match: Seinfeld v Honeymooners

What Edgy said.

Valadius Feb 17 2011 08:58 AM Re: WS of Sit-coms - Consolation match: Seinfeld v Honeymooners

39 episodes vs. the recently departed Uncle Leo. Seinfeld.

Kong76 Feb 17 2011 09:17 PM Re: WS of Sit-coms - Consolation match: Seinfeld v Honeymooners

Took The Honeymooners, despite Trixie being the terribly obvious weak link in the four on four character run-off.

Edgy DC Feb 17 2011 09:24 PM Re: WS of Sit-coms - Consolation match: Seinfeld v Honeymooners

Trixie represented the team at Honeymooners Night at Shea. Extra points there.

Kong76 Feb 17 2011 10:48 PM Re: WS of Sit-coms - Consolation match: Seinfeld v Honeymooners

She was bad, embarrassingly so at times.

Fman99 Feb 18 2011 04:24 AM Re: WS of Sit-coms - Consolation match: Seinfeld v Honeymooners

Kong76 wrote: She was bad, embarrassingly so at times. I agree, she couldn't carry Fred Mertz' jock.