VOTW: Woody Allen’s First TV Series – Hot Dog 1970

Woody Allen has been working on a 2016 Amazon series, with many outlets calling it his first work for television (kinda television?). That is mostly true, but Woody Allen did star in a TV series 45 years earlier in 1970. Our videos of the week are all the clips we can find of that show, a children’s documentary series called ‘Hot Dog’.

Here are the opening and closing segments

And some clips of the kind of doc work, all featuring Allen.

The footage is all pretty shaky – we’re not sure any good transfers exist, and the show has not been cleaned up for the home market. Allen was a contributor, and in the pilot was Tom Smothers of the Smothers brothers. Amazingly, Smothers and Allen reunited earlier this year at one of Allen’s jazz shows.

13 episodes were made and the series was off air by 1971. Allen had already made Take the Money And Run at this point and was likely working on Bananas at the same time.

That’s it for our extremely irregular video of the week series. Let’s hope Allen can top this with his Amazon series!

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