The Toy Box

The Sharks give budding entrepreneurs the chance to secure business deals that could make them millionaires.

Forget about athletes, movie stars and politicians. Parents are the real heroes—but we think Frankie Heck, must be some kind of superhero. A loving wife and mother of three, she's middle class in the middle of the country and is rapidly approaching middle age.

Michelle is a Las Vegas showgirl who would like to return to her true love - dancing. After a tumultuous experience at an audition for the musical Chicago, Michelle accepts a marriage proposal from an admirer. On impulse Michelle and Hubble get married and she relocates to a small town where she learns she will be sharing a house with her mother-in-law Fanny. Little to Michelle's knowledge, Fanny owns a dance studio in the back of the property and Michelle sees all these young ballerinas striving to reach their dreams. After an unexpected tragedy, Michelle's entire world will change.

Renowned bandleader Lawrence Welk began his own variety series in 1955... and it has never stopped running. Each program was straightforward musical numbers from Welk's band (many of which had featured solos at one point or another), as well as vocal selections and dance numbers from the show's cast. Most of the introductions to the performances, read stiffy by Welk, were kept short. Many of the shows revolved around a certain theme (e.g., "The Music Man" or the Fourth of July), with appropriate songs and dance numbers. The most famous of the featured singers were the Lennon Sisters (Dianne, Janet, Kathy and Peggy), who were featured most every week for 13 years. At the end of each show, Welk would invite women from the audience on stage to dance with him as the theme, "Bubbles in the Wine" (and later, "Champagne Fanfare") played. The show enjoyed a 16-year network run on ABC, and later a successful 11-year syndicated run. Just months after the original series ended, older shows (from c. 1965-1982) were repackaged with new footage and entered a long run in both syndication and on PBS.

The trials and tribulations, joyous occasions and heartbreaking moments of the Lawrence family: lawyer father Doug, housewife Kate, married (and quickly divorced) daughter Nancy, teenage son Willie and just-hitting-puberty daughter Buddy. In this critically acclaimed series, we watched various Lawrences fight, fall in love, become ill, graduate school, begin new jobs and, most of all, love each other.

Wildfire is the story of what happens when Kris Furillo, willful daughter of a lousy mother, who took a bad start in life landing her in jail, gets parole because Pablo Betart, an excellent foreman who also had a juvenile record, gets her a job on the horse ranch of the Ritter family, where she proves her worth working with horses, especially Wildfire, but still wrestles with her past and upsets the social dynamics there, not in the least because of her appeal on the owners' teenage boys, Jean Ritter's son Matt and Ken Davis' son Kenny 'Junior' Davis.