# Tippy-Top — General Electric Theater

Tippy-Top originally aired December 17, 1961 (Season 10, Episode 13) on the General Electric Theater anthology TV series which ran from 1953 to 1962. Starring Red Buttons as the imaginary friend of Ron Howard, it made for an unusual and entertaining episode. Both the story and the songs were written by Sidney Michaels and Mark Sandrich Jr, who would later team up for the Broadway musical Ben Franklin in Paris . Tippy-Top also utilized the talents of well-known musical arranger Conrad Salinger and choreographer Miriam Nelson. Sherman Marks directed. At the time this was made there was a consensus among many mental health experts that children with imaginary friends were lacking something in their lives which created the need to create such friends. Psychological counseling was a common recommendation for the condition. This would be in line with the attitude displayed by the character Bob in the episode, played by Frank Aletter. These days the view of kids with pretend friends has shifted more in the direction of the character Meryle, played by Joan O'Brien. For the current thinking on the topic, see the following two links: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/growing-friendships/201301/imaginary-friends http://www.aboutourkids.org/articles/when_your_child039s_new_friend_imaginary The unusual Tippy-Top episode received an even more unusual resurrection in 1995 when the HBO series Dream On included clips from it as part of their Try Not to Remember episode (Season 6, Episode…

- Kind: TV
- Year: 1961
- By: General Electric Theater
- Archive: [Internet Archive](https://archive.org/details/TippyTop_201501)
- Licence or status: [Public Domain Mark 1.0](http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/) (as the archive states it)
- Who can watch: Teens profiles and older (the archive gives no rating; placed by Invisible Network from its collection and subjects)

Not offered: its uploader marks it public domain, and the US Copyright Office's records do not settle that it is (a record that may be another film's, a film first published abroad, a year when renewal was automatic, or a country they do not name). Unclear is not offered.