Animation Cel-ebration
January 17, 2025 posted by Michael Lyons

The History of the World: A Look Back at the Special, “The 2000-Year-Old Man”

“Who was the person who discovered the female?” the interviewer asks pointedly. “Bernie,” answers the 2000-Year-Old Man.

Just one example of the brilliant humor found in Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks’ legendary act, “The 2000-Year-Old Man,” in which Brooks plays the title character, who provides hysterical spins on history while being interviewed by Reiner.

The two close friends came up with the idea while working on the classic 1950s TV series Your Show of Shows. They then performed the sketch on other shows, such as Ed Sullivan, and eventually released some wildly popular comedy albums, the first of which debuted in 1960.

Fifty years ago this month, The 2000-Year-Old Man got animated when it was translated into a prime-time special for CBS, directed by Leo Salkin.

As the special opens, we see a crowd waiting for a plane to land, and we hear from a reporter (Reiner’s voice) that the 2,000-year-old Man (Brooks) is on the plane. The interviewer is waiting to ask questions of the Man who has witnessed so much of history.

What follows in the 2000-Year-Old Man special isn’t a clear-cut plot but more of a back-and-forth, impromptu interview. This makes sense as the dialogue for the special was taken from Reiner and Brooks’ many live performances of the act.

It’s no surprise that the results are hysterical, thanks to the two comedians’ creativity and improvisation. The interviewer asks, “There were no buses in your time. What was the means of transportation then?” “Mostly fear,” answers the 2000-Year-Old Man. “Fear transported you?” the interviewer follows up. “You would see an animal growl,” responds the 2000-Year-Old Man,” “And you would go two miles a minute.”

The title character also reveals the truth about some famous historical figures he has known, letting us know that Robin Hood didn’t steal from the rich and give it to the poor, he stole it all and kept everything. “He had a fella, Marty. Marty, the press agent,” notes the 2000-Year-Old Man, discussing how Robin Hood gained his reputation as a good guy.

Director Salkin and his animators use the medium perfectly in scenes such as this, opening up the stand-up act and comedy in the special, not only presenting Robin Hood riding through a castle and keeping everything but also showing Marty writing his press release and posting them on scrolls throughout Sherwood Forrest.

Animation is also used cleverly, such as when the Man talks about how singing came about when people shouted while being attacked by an animal. We get a “flashback” of the 2000-year-old Man trying to escape from a lion and singing, “A lion is eating my foot off! Somebody call a cop!”

The two main characters in the special are also well designed. The interviewer is essentially a caricature of Reiner, but the 2000-Year-Old Man looks nothing like Brooks, and instead is short, with an overgrown beard, and a large nose, atop which glasses sit, while he wears a saggy robe and sandals with socks. This and the stylistically designed background characters add a nice cartoony touch to the proceedings.

When The 2000-Year-Old Man aired, Director Leo Salkin had already had an extensive career in animation that began after he graduated high school in 1932, with his first job as a cel washer with Walter Lantz. He would also work at Columbia Screen Gems and the Disney Studio through the years. Read more about Salkin’s career in this 2016 Cartoon Research article by Harvey Deneroff.

Originally airing on January 11, 1975, The 2000 Year-Old-Man is a nice remembrance of the era of animated specials and how effective animation can be when aimed at a different audience.

It also provides us with funny yet wise-in-its-way philosophy. An example is when The 2000-Year-Old Man notes, “Keep a smile on your face and stay out of a Ferrari, or any small, Italian car!”

10 Comments

  • I remember watching this special fifty years ago, and I don’t think I ever saw it again until today. I already knew Carl Reiner from the Dick Van Dyke Show, but I believe this was my introduction to the comedy of Mel Brooks, with which I was to become much better acquainted in the coming years. Brooks, of course, has written many comic songs for his films, and like his fellow comedians Peter Sellers, Charlie Callas and Jerry Lewis, he has played the drums at a professional level. It seems to me that his keen musical aptitude must be connected with his superb sense of comic timing, as evidenced in the “2000 Year Old Man” routine.

    The music to the special is credited to one Mort Garson; however, what we hear over the credits is the Sinfonia to the Cantata No. 29 by Johann Sebastian Bach, segueing into Bach’s chorale “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring”, as realised on a Moog synthesizer. It so happens that both of those pieces were also tracks on “Switched-On Bach”, a 1968 album of Bach’s music played on the Moog synthesizer by Wendy Carlos (then still going by her birth name of Walter). “Switched-On Bach” was one of the first record albums I ever bought, and I remember being delighted to hear excerpts from it at the beginning of this special. Listening to it again now, I can’t help but feel that it’s a bit of a cheat. Of course, Bach’s music is in the public domain, and if Garson wanted to record those two pieces on the Moog there’d be nothing Carlos could do to stop him. But he might have chosen something a little more appropriate to the tone and subject matter of the special than a couple of excerpts of Baroque sacred music from a best-selling album that was still being stocked in record stores in 1975.

    Mel Brooks has another connection to animation: he once played himself in an episode of The Simpsons. Homer, working as a limo driver, is chauffeuring the comedian and wants to do the “2000 Year Old Man” routine with him — a request that Brooks has probably gotten many times in real life. Of course, Homer gets it all wrong, calling it the “2000 Pound Man” and the “2000 Dollar Man”. I understand that Brooks is a fan of the show and was a good sport about it.

    Carl Reiner passed away several years ago at the age of 98. Mel Brooks, at 98, is still with us. There’s an old Yiddish expression, “You should live to be a hundred and twenty.” But you, Mr. Brooks, should live to be a 2000 year old man!

  • Yet another cartoon featuring Mel Brooks is “The Critic,” (1963). As an abstract cartoon plays on the screen, we hear Mel, as an old man in the audience, loudly complaining about the nonsense. “What is this junk? I paid $2.00 for this?” The film won the Oscar for Best Animated Short in 1964.

    • I used to manage an “art Cinema,” and there was always someone in the audience who felt the need to provide a running commentary on the films. I always wanted to program “The Critic” before one of our movies to see if anyone would take the hint, but I could never talk the owner into it.

  • As a kid I loved watching the hilarious weekly live-TV New York-based “Your Show of Shows” that starred Sid Caesar which regularly featured a routine that had Carl Reiner as a reporter interviewing Caesar as a wacky “foremost authority” Viennese professor, basically the same concept as the 2000-year-old man. Here’s an example. https://youtu.be/yXd8E_tNSjw?si=fUZHTWtAohaEmut2

  • The animation reminds me of “Schoolhouse Rock” at times, but I can’t find any connection between the two.

    • I was thinking the same thing! The art styles look so much alike.

  • I always felt like the 2000 Year Old Man worked best as an album, not a cartoon. As with old time radio, it was more fun to imagine what the characters looked like than to actually see them.

  • Bill Littlejohn did most of the good talking scenes with the 2000 year old man character. Bill’s gestures are unmistakable, really livening up the show. His scenes are mostly towards the end of the show.

  • I saw this when it aired. I was a huge fan of the album, and I thought the animation was perfectly executed making one of the funniest comic bits of all time even funnier!

  • Brooks and Reiner both continued to dip a toe into the cartoon inkwell on occasion into the 2000s, and among the dippiest I would place Brooks’ “Spaceballs: the Animated Series” (2008-2009). Just as the feature film version limped in pathetically late for the Star Wars parody party, the cartoon show was even more desperate to find still-fresh material to mock, as episode titles like “Hairy Putter and the Gopher of Fire”, “Lord of the Onion Rings”, “Watch Your Assic Park” and “Spider-Mawg” make all too clear.

    Reiner’s even odder “Alan Brady Show 50th Anniversary” from 2003 is as hard to find now as it was to watch then. I’ll let the show’s original press release speak for it:

    CARL REINER REPRISES CLASSIC TV ROLE IN TV LAND’S FIRST ORIGINAL ANIMATED SPECIAL THE ALAN BRADY SHOW

    Hollywood, CA, July 8, 2003 – One of classic television’s most caustic TV hosts, Alan Brady, returns for the first ever animated original special for TV Land entitled The Alan Brady Show. 12-time Emmy-Award winner Carl Reiner reprises his character – in voice-over — from The Dick Van Dyke Show in the half-hour comedy special which will telecast on Sunday, Aug. 17 (10-10:30 PM, ET/PT) and will be featured in a prime time line-up that kicks off with two back-to-back episodes of The Dick Van Dyke Show (9-10:00 PM, ET/PT) and also features an encore presentation of TV Land’s original documentary Inside TV Land: The Dick Van Dyke Show (10:30-12 AM, ET/PT

    The contemporary setting of The Alan Brady Show is forty years after its debut and it’s clear that time has failed to mellow Brady, who remains as caustic and brash as ever. The show’s staff is deep in the throws of developing Brady’s Golden 50th Anniversary special. When the staff pitches a classic, in depth retrospective, Brady counters with “Who Wants to Marry Alan Brady?” This marks the first time a fictional character has embraced reality television’s programming rage.

    Gary Owens and comedienne Carol Leifer are among the guest-star voices featured in the special and Dick Van Dyke and Rose Marie make special cameo appearances. Reiner, who wrote the special, also serves as executive producer along with George Shapiro and Howard West, of Shapiro/West Productions. The Alan Brady Show is TV Land’s first original animated special in the network’s seven-year history. The special was developed internally for TV Land by Sal Maniaci, Vice President of Development and Production for TV Land and Nick at Nite. Animation for the half-hour special was produced by NICK Digital Studios in New York.

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