Kudos & Choler

Walt Disney, who made a mouse enter taining, last week made a mousetrap educational. To illustrate an atomic chain reaction for Our Friend the Atom on ABC's Disneyland, Disney moviemakers crowded 200 mousetraps together, each with a pair of pingpong balls poised on its taut spring. When Physicist Heinz Haber, the show's narrator, tossed a single pingpong ball into the arena of massed traps--so that each sprung trap would fire two balls to spring two more traps--the screen erupted into a chaos of snaps, pings and pongs. The mousetraps were the brightest touch in a lucid, hour-long primer, mostly in cartoons, tracing the story of atomic energy from Democritus to Rickover. The title ominously suggested that the show might smack more of Pluto than plutonium, but apart from small blemishes, e.g., giving a Russian accent to the villainous genie in the illustrative fable of the genie-in-the-vessel, the lesson was straightforward, cleverly taught and free of the cuteness with which some TV educators have patronized the mass audience.

Viewers can look forward to lots more of Disney: last week he signed a $9,000,000 contract to do three filmed series for ABC next season, including another round of Disneyland. For nine weeks millions of viewers suffered through their TV screens with young (30), curl-cropped Charles Lincoln Van Doren as he stood inside one of the soundproof pressure cookers of NBC's game of chance, Twenty-One, and answered a staggering variety of questions ranging from Lincoln to Latin America, from chemistry to comic strips. Last week

Cliff hanger Van Doren gave his fellow sufferers something special to cheer about --he broke TV's record ($100,000) for big giveaway bonanzas, built his winnings up to $104,500. As a result of it all, Bachelor Van Doren, son of Poet Mark Van Doren,* has become a sort of All-America Ph.D. When he enters his English classroom at Columbia University, his students rise to cheer him. He is being swamped with TV offers and marriage proposals. (A tax expert said he could save $16,000 by getting married this year, and a girl wrote: "I would like to meet you. I am 20, and my bust is 37.") Charlie Van Doren was painfully torn between going on again this week at the risk of losing some of his big stake to a new opponent, or getting out now that he has enough to finance a "snazzy sports car" and several free summers in which to finish a thesis on Poet William Cowper and write a novel. "Something about it gets you," he said.

Out of 60-odd cameras and a vast spider's web of cable, the three TV networks wove a panoramic view of Inauguration Day that lasted more than five unsponsored hours and cost $360,000 in canceled commercials alone. But the most memorable picture was the simplest: the un precedented, waiter's-eye view of the President of the U.S. munching his lunch with his wife and four friends, Vice President and Mrs. Nixon, Senator and Mrs. Styles Bridges. The President dug heartily into what NBC Commentator Richard Harkness described as a "trencherman's lunch," sipped ice water, chatted animatedly (but out of the viewer's earshot) during the bare half hour that the day's tight schedule allowed them at a buffet luncheon in the Capitol. At one point he reached for the salt, did a double take as another hand beat him to it from out of camera range; the hand hastily restored the salt to Ike's reach, and he got it on his second try, only to be reproached by Mamie for sprinkling too much on his roast beef. The three networks dawdled over the lunch scene like small boys glued to knotholes in the ballpark fence, finally drifted away one by one with a few evident--but wholly unnecessary--qualms over what, as ABC Commentator John" Daly put it, "is, after all, something of an intrusion."

In the eight years since CBS's Studio One first came to TV, it has accumulated more honors than any other dramatic show on the air. For a long time it was accepted as the yardstick of good TV drama. But in the past year, the big, full-hour productions have slipped in quality, also lost ground in the ratings to rival

Robert Montgomery Presents. Last week, armed with an old but unproduced Fred Coe favorite, The Five Dollar Bill, Studio One lived up to CBS's high promise of a "new look." Writer Tad Mosel deftly limned the character of a sensitive young boy (well played by 20-year-old Actor Burt Brinckerhoff) struggling for his identity against the fumbling demands of his father (Hume Cronyn) and the solicitous affection of his mother (Jessica Tandy).

*Who for "a lifetime devotion to letters . . . as poet, author and scholar" last week won a prize of $100 and a gold, muse-littered medal from the Poetry Society of America.

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