BYE BYE BIRDIE
TCM, 8:00 p.m. ET
Jesse Pearson, who plays the Elvis-like rock star in this 1963 movie musical, didn’t get much traction out of this film, but others did. Dick Van Dyke and Janet Leigh already were stars, thanks to TV’s The Dick Van Dyke Show and the movie Psycho respectively, and Ed Sullivan, playing himself, had been a TV mainstay since 1948. But Ann-Margret, who played a Birdie-brained teen and danced with wild enthusiasm in the opening credits, stole the movie before it even got started. Bye Bye Birdie, in one memorable song, explains why Ed Sullivan was such a central cultural touchstone – and Sullivan himself, who had introduced the real Elvis Presley to middle America on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1956, reinforced his own impact in 1964, a year after Bye Bye Birdie was released, by introducing another musical act on his live TV show. What was the name of that quartet again? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah – The Beatles.