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| 0111 : Jack LaLanne and personal approach were perfect fit for TV |
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LOS ANGELES - It is hard to believe that anyone as fit as Jack LaLanne could ever die, but pneumonia caught up with the master exerciser last week. He was only 96 years old when he passed on Jan. 23.
LaLanne had already been in the "physical culture" business for some 15 years when he went on television in 1951 with "The Jack LaLanne Show," beginning at ABC's San Francisco affiliate and later jumping to the network itself. Five-foot-six with dark curly hair, dressed in a jumpsuit zipped open halfway down his chest, with "Jack" stitched over his heart and strappy slippers on his feet, he was well-built without being muscle-bound, and manly with a soft edge.
As a star of weekday daytime television, his audience was primarily women. He called his fitness regimen "trimnastics," promising it would "firm up your bustline" and "trim down your waist." Overeating had not yet become the national pastime, but plenty of people wanted to look and feel better than they did; "slenderizing" was no less a concern then than it is now.
LaLanne certainly had things to sell - a Power Juicer is out there now somewhere, waiting for your call - but he was temperamentally an evangelist, a man with a message, a mission. "You can actually be reborn again," he told his viewers, whom he addressed as "students," "because I was reborn again."
He had been a troubled child, underweight and overaggressive, saved from a bad end, he believed, by healthful food and exercise. He wanted to pass that on, to change lives.
For the most part, his exercises required no equipment more complicated or costly than a chair. That was his main prop, and when not using it in some routine, he would straddle it backward and talk, as if off the top of his head - he knew his subject well enough, after all - with the directness of a "Romper Room" teacher calling out to Bobby and Suzy and Tommy and Jane. "We're going to work this thing out together," he would declare.
This conversational intimacy - he never hectored - was a convention of early TV, when the idea that the box brought the far world into your living room was still felt as something more than a metaphor. You not only watched Jack LaLanne; he watched you. "See what you're doing wrong," he'd say, breaking off halfway through an arm exercise. He acted as if there were no screen between him and his audience: As if to blur the space between those realities, his set was a living room, too.
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The Power Juicer
Was
Featured In
(click below to view) |
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Good Housekeeping
09.2009 |
Life & Style
07.2009 |
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Good Housekeeping
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Life & Style
09.2008 |
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US Weekly
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Star
08.2008 |
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In Touch
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OK! Weekly!
08.2008 |
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OK! Weekly!
07.2008 |
Shape
06.2008 |
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Health
04.2008 |
InStyle
12.2007 |
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InTouch
09.2007 |
Stuff
06.2007 |
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OK! Weekly!
05.2007 |
InStyle
12.2006 |
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OK! Weekly!
12.2005 |
Sport Illustrated
01.2004 |
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Business Week
05.2004 |
Cooking Light
09.2004 |
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