Biography
Comedian Soupy Sales emerged as the most daring and inventive children’s television personality of the baby-boom years while also landing multiple novelty hits such as “The Mouse” and “Spy with a Pie.” Born Milton Supman in Franklinton, NC, on January 8, 1926, he spent his formative years in Huntington, WV, before earning a journalism degree from Marshall University. While employed as a scriptwriter at Huntington’s WHTN radio, he began performing standup on the side and eventually secured a regular on-air slot. Retaining the boyhood nickname “Soupy” for the microphone, he first tried the surname “Hines” for its broadcast appeal, only to drop it upon noticing its resemblance to the Heinz food company; he then adopted “Sales” in honor of a fellow comedian he both admired and competed against. This choice helped him become the top-rated local DJ, prompting a 1950 move to Cincinnati for television opportunities.
His earliest program, Soupy’s Soda Shop, is widely regarded as the first teenage dance show on the new medium, reaching viewers nearly two years before Dick Clark’s American Bandstand. Poor ratings led to his next assignment hosting the variety hour Club Nothing. By 1953 he had shifted to Detroit’s WXYZ, the local ABC station, where he began Lunch with Soupy Sales, a daily midday children’s program. Fast-paced sketches, short films, and physical comedy made him the city’s dominant television figure for the rest of the decade.
Puppet characters voiced by his collaborator Clyde Adler—White Fang, Hippie the Hippo, and Pookie the Lion—became staples, yet the show’s signature routine remained the recurring pie-throwing gag, with one tally estimating nearly 20,000 cream pies thrown at or by Sales. A 15-minute national edition aired daily on ABC during the summer of 1955 as a temporary substitute for Kukla, Fran and Ollie; although the network declined to keep it on the fall schedule, Sales continued to dominate Detroit television with the concurrent late-night talk show Soupy’s On. ABC finally placed Lunch with Soupy Sales on its Saturday-morning lineup in 1959, where immediate success prompted a production relocation to Los Angeles the next year.
After signing with Reprise Records, Sales released his first album, The Soupy Sales Show, in 1961. By the arrival of the follow-up, Up in the Air, in summer 1962, falling viewership had ended the original series, yet ABC quickly introduced a new Friday prime-time edition of The Soupy Sales Show that drew both adult and child audiences and featured guest spots from Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Burt Lancaster. Network meddling halted that version after three months, sending Sales to New York City for a nationally syndicated revival of The Soupy Sales Show that premiered in September 1964.
His most notorious on-air moment came just months later. On New Year’s Day 1965, annoyed that executives had scheduled a live broadcast on the holiday, he told viewers to take “the little green pieces of paper with pictures of George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Lincoln, and Jefferson on them” from their fathers’ wallets, mail them to him, and receive a postcard from Puerto Rico. Parental complaints prompted a two-week suspension, but the resulting publicity lifted ratings and drove sales of the 1965 dance single “The Mouse,” which in turn yielded the ABC-Paramount album Sez ‘Do the Mouse’ and Other Teen Hits. At the height of his fame he also inspired an Archie Comics title and starred in the film Birds Do It. The syndicated series concluded in fall 1966, after which Sales largely accepted supporting parts and guest spots, among them an extended run as a panelist on What’s My Line? A new syndicated effort, The New Soupy Sales Show, launched in February 1979 but folded after one month following production setbacks that included Clyde Adler’s heart attack. Sales issued the album Still Soupy After All These Years in 1981, returned to radio with a WNBC series in New York, and published the autobiography Soupy Sez: My Zany Life and Times in 2003.
His earliest program, Soupy’s Soda Shop, is widely regarded as the first teenage dance show on the new medium, reaching viewers nearly two years before Dick Clark’s American Bandstand. Poor ratings led to his next assignment hosting the variety hour Club Nothing. By 1953 he had shifted to Detroit’s WXYZ, the local ABC station, where he began Lunch with Soupy Sales, a daily midday children’s program. Fast-paced sketches, short films, and physical comedy made him the city’s dominant television figure for the rest of the decade.
Puppet characters voiced by his collaborator Clyde Adler—White Fang, Hippie the Hippo, and Pookie the Lion—became staples, yet the show’s signature routine remained the recurring pie-throwing gag, with one tally estimating nearly 20,000 cream pies thrown at or by Sales. A 15-minute national edition aired daily on ABC during the summer of 1955 as a temporary substitute for Kukla, Fran and Ollie; although the network declined to keep it on the fall schedule, Sales continued to dominate Detroit television with the concurrent late-night talk show Soupy’s On. ABC finally placed Lunch with Soupy Sales on its Saturday-morning lineup in 1959, where immediate success prompted a production relocation to Los Angeles the next year.
After signing with Reprise Records, Sales released his first album, The Soupy Sales Show, in 1961. By the arrival of the follow-up, Up in the Air, in summer 1962, falling viewership had ended the original series, yet ABC quickly introduced a new Friday prime-time edition of The Soupy Sales Show that drew both adult and child audiences and featured guest spots from Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Burt Lancaster. Network meddling halted that version after three months, sending Sales to New York City for a nationally syndicated revival of The Soupy Sales Show that premiered in September 1964.
His most notorious on-air moment came just months later. On New Year’s Day 1965, annoyed that executives had scheduled a live broadcast on the holiday, he told viewers to take “the little green pieces of paper with pictures of George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Lincoln, and Jefferson on them” from their fathers’ wallets, mail them to him, and receive a postcard from Puerto Rico. Parental complaints prompted a two-week suspension, but the resulting publicity lifted ratings and drove sales of the 1965 dance single “The Mouse,” which in turn yielded the ABC-Paramount album Sez ‘Do the Mouse’ and Other Teen Hits. At the height of his fame he also inspired an Archie Comics title and starred in the film Birds Do It. The syndicated series concluded in fall 1966, after which Sales largely accepted supporting parts and guest spots, among them an extended run as a panelist on What’s My Line? A new syndicated effort, The New Soupy Sales Show, launched in February 1979 but folded after one month following production setbacks that included Clyde Adler’s heart attack. Sales issued the album Still Soupy After All These Years in 1981, returned to radio with a WNBC series in New York, and published the autobiography Soupy Sez: My Zany Life and Times in 2003.
Albums
Singles
