One of the first times (if not THE first time) she calls Alan "Zippy" she refers to "Zippy the Chimp". "Zippy" was a chimpanzee television/shorts character from the late 50s and early 60s. He was featured as a sort of "near human" character, rather than as an animal, in a series of shorts used as fillers on television and at movie theaters. He was treated as an equal by his child co-actors. he sort of filled the role of the main character in the shorts (ala "Spanky" in "Our Gang") but typically closed out the feature by doing something extraordinarily foolish - thus proving himself to be only a monkey (ala Alan Harper).
Chat with our AI personalities
Bertha calls Alan zippy after 'zippy the chimp'. Zippy was some major star back in 1950. Anyway, she calls him (alan) that coz he looks a bit like zippy.
U can see this in episode 14 in season 4 (at round 6 mins 24 secs into the show i think)
Berta Richey's birth name is Roberta Louise Richey.
His real first name is Zippy but he goes my "ZP" still being pronounced as Zippy
It was for V8. My grandfather thought he was hilarious, so he would like to mimic the old man sometimes when he was talking about something interesting... "It's a zippy kind of thing... a zippy thing." Since he has passed away, I've been looking high and low for this ad, and I finally found it in a YouTube video. Here is the link. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1csxWVQUpQs
Her name is Sylwia something. I forgother last name let me look it up.
Alan Balsam's birth name is Alan Howard Balsam.