TVSquad

Each year in our "Top TV Stories" posts we look back at the number of celebrities and behind the scenes people that have passed away during the year. This is always a hard list to put together, so if I've missed anyone, please let me know in the comments and I'll add them to the list.

This year we also lost someone very close to us.

Merv Griffin
Tom Snyder
Joel Siegel
Anna Nicole Smith
Robert Goulet
Joey Bishop

Like any normal person living in the 21st century, the first thing I did upon hearing about Tom Snyder's death was to try and find some of his old interviews on YouTube. I'm too young to have watched The Tomorrow Show, but I did watch Snyder on The Late Late Show during my college years.

As I assumed, my YouTube search resulted in a lot of great clips, but the most interesting, to me anyway, is the interview Snyder conducted with James Doohan, Deforest Kelley, Walter Koenig, Harlan Ellison and Al Shuster. The men are talking about the still-in-development Star Trek motion picture. I've placed the interview, in five parts, below.

A roundup of TV people from in front of the camera and behind the scenes who have passed away.

• Bill Flemming: He was a sportscaster for ABC who covered everything from the Olympics to golf to chess championships. He worked in broadcasting for 60 years (including a stint on NBC's Today) and was a fixture on Wide World of Sports for years. He died of cancer at age 80.

Wow. The people that permeated the TV landscape in the '70s and '80s are slowly starting to disappear, aren't they? That realization came to me when I went to the web site Romenesko and saw the news that talk-show host Tom Snyder died yesterday. The cause of death was listed as complications from leukemia. He was 71.

Most of us in the 35-and-up set will remember Snyder as host of the NBC talker The Tomorrow Show, which held the post-Tonight Show slot from 1973 to 1982. Much different than the show that preceeded it (and much different from what David Letterman would do in the timeslot), Tomorrow consisted of relaxed, long-form, smoky conversations with newsmakers and cultural icons like John Lennon, Charles Manson, and the Sex Pistols. It was also the show that provided "Weird Al" Yankovic with his first national TV exposure. Not sure why I remember that factoid.

And before all of you Craig Ferguson fans yell and scream and throw tomatoes at your computer screen, let me add, I really like Ferguson! His opening monologue is 10 of the best minutes on TV every night.

Having said that, I still miss former Late, Late Show host Craig Kilborn. You know why? I didn't really realize until he was gone that he was doing something truly different on late night television. Sure, he was the irreverent wiseass, but the show also had a clear old school, retro, Rat Pack-ish vibe too. You sensed that in the guests he had (Merv Griffin was a favorite and he even went to parties at his home), the suits he wore, some of the segue music they played, and the references that he made. Even the set was like something out of a 50s or 60s movie.

And his regular bits! The news segment he did at the start of the show was consistently funny (better than SNL's Weekend Update has been in 10 years), and I really, really miss "Five Questions." And I miss Family Guy writer Alec Sulkin's appearances as the chain-smoking guy who came on and said that everything "sucked." And I miss Craig's faux-newspaper interviews backstage, "A Moment For Us," and his Dance, Dance, Dance!

Tom Snyder Productions, the company best known for its use of the Squigglevision animation technique which resulted in such cult faves as Dr. Katz: Professional Therapist and Home Movies, also tried its hand at Saturday morning children's entertainment with Science Court, a show which dipped from the same well of humor as his other productions but with more of a kiddy slant. You know, dry and witty science humor for little kids.

Actually, it was probably the "dry and witty" part that pretty much guaranteed the show wouldn't last more than a year, since it was clearly aimed at little kids who weren't necessarily interested in the kind of cerebral humor the show would occasionally delve into. Those of us who knew Snyder's other productions, though, could at least enjoy hearing many of the same voice talents, including H. Jon Benjamin. Still, the show, which would pit lawyers against one another in a trial over scientific principles (thus, the "learning" part) managed to stick out from whatever else was on ABC Saturday morning in 1997. Unfortunately, it was one of many Saturday morning gems, like Freakazoid and The Completely Mental Misadventures of Ed Grimley, that never quite gained the audience it deserved.