Welcome to Fine Tuning with Drew Taylor, your one-stop shop what it comes to animation news and commentary.

I'm Drew's co-host, entertainment writer Jim Hill, and he and I recording this show on Friday, December 31st, 2021, New Year's Eve.

I don't know what this says about us, Jim.

We are parts of couples who have just gotten to this side of the holiday and the fact that we are home and both exhausted and beaten down and are staying in.

And again, this is a pandemic, we're being responsible, okay?

It's true, it's true.

But anyway, I guess we have to acknowledge the really big news tonight, of course, is the passing of Betty White, who would have been 100 in less than two weeks on January 17th,

2022. Do you want to talk about the drive you and Katie took yesterday? I'm just fascinated at the timing of this.

Yeah, I mean, we've been watching Golden Girls every night before we've gone to bed for, I don't know, the past few months.

And also looking up episodes of Empty Nest, which of course was part of the Golden Girls Extended Universe.

But we were really, you know, stir crazy yesterday. We said, let's go on a drive and we went and found the original Golden Girls House, which of course fans of this show will know was used for seasons one through three and then from four to seven.

They used the house on the Disney MGM back lot, which, you know, we all rolled by, but yeah, it was just very weird coincidence that that we did that.

And then today, she is gone, which is just such a bummer.

It is, it is. And I picked up recently, there's a wonderful new book, Inside Comedy, The Soul Whit and Bite of Comedy and Comedians of the last five decades,

which by the way, is written by David Steinberg, who was no slouch himself when it came to stand up, but he had a fascinating second career as a director of sitcoms.

And among the sitcoms he directed quite often was the Golden Girls. And T talked about, I talked in the book.

The first Golden Girl I met on my first day on the set was Betty White. She was the epitome of genuine and genuinely funny.

She was America's longest working actress comedian. She won five Emmys, three American comedy awards, three screen actor guild awards and a Grammy.

You pointed out today, you tweeted out the link to the Golden Girls actually went to Walt Disney World, or was that part of a special?

Yeah, it was part of a special. It was the 1986, I want to say, 15th anniversary Walt Disney World Special hosted by Michael Eisner.

I mean, it's got the two guys from Air Supply giving women roses as they're sitting around Main Street, a number of very energetic Ray Charles performances.

And unlike the the specials of today, which are all either in front of the castle or in front of a small world at Disneyland, this they have they are performing all over the park.

...