'The Gong Show' recruits a Memphis man and his Japanese toy

This is a story about a man from Memphis who will appear Monday night on the new edition of “The Gong Show” playing a toy musical synthesizer from Japan called an Otamatone.

To write this story, I had to reckon with two pieces of information that were new to me:

There is a toy musical synthesizer from Japan called an Otamatone. There is a new edition of “The Gong Show.”

My ignorance of the first fact isn’t surprising. I know little about toy musical synthesizers from Japan, even ones as distinctive as the Otamatone, which resembles a smiley-faced tadpole or a cross between a musical note and a robot Muppet.

My ignorance of the second fact, however, took me somewhat aback, especially when I learned the new “Gong Show” is not a daytime or syndicated program but a prime-time ABC series with notable stars — Mike Myers, Elizabeth Banks, Anthony Anderson, Zach Galifianakis — as its host and guests.

Like most kids in the 1970s who wasted a lot of time in front of the television, I was a fan of the original version of “The Gong Show,” which ran from 1976 to 1978 on NBC daytime TV and until 1980 in syndication, with the show’s inventor, the inimitable Chuck Barris, creator of “The Dating Game” and “The Newlywed Game,” as its distracted and feverish ringmaster.

The game show equivalent of the Alex Chilton album “Like Flies on Sherbert,” “The Gong Show” was the envelope-pushing, bridge-burning and nose-thumbing gesture of a disillusioned art-maker bored with glossy entertainment and standard measures of success. Unlike “Sherbert” and other similar self-indulgences from restless creators, however, Barris’ “The Gong Show” was a hit. Audiences enjoyed this self-parody with its crummy prizes, its loose structure, its camp celebrity judge (Jaye P. Morgan, Jamie Farr, Rex Reed) and a supporting cast headed by “The Unknown Comic” (who told stale jokes with a paper bag over his head) and “Gene Gene the Dancing Machine” (an NBC stagehand whose slow-footed train shuffle and infectious smile were greeted with wild enthusiasm).

More to the point, audiences embraced the concept of “The Gong Show,” which each day hosted a series of bizarre contestants who offered highly original but often intentionally awful performances that frequently were ended in mid-note, mid-stride or mid-juggle when a judge chose to strike the large prop gong hanging on the set. This noisy act in itself was an inversion of a show-business tradition: The gong gimmick was borrowed from Britain’s J. Arthur Rank film company, which portentously opened each of its movies with footage of a gigantic gong being struck by a muscled myrmidon, to herald the presentation of such prestige productions as Laurence Olivier’s “Hamlet” and David Lean’s “Oliver Twist.”

Barris — whose distinctive career includes the songwriting credit for Freddy “Boom Boom” Cannon’s 1963 hit, “Palisades Park,” and an autobiography in which he claimed to have been a CIA assassin — died March 21 at 87. The revival of “The Gong Show” premiered almost exactly three months later, on June 22, and if it’s a bigger-budgeted project than its inspiration, its format remains unchanged and its weirdness remains consistent: The new host is “Austin Power” and “Wayne’s World” star Mike Myers, deep in character and unrecognizable in makeup, as one “Tommy Maitland,” a washed-up British comedian whose catch-phrase is “Who’s a cheeky monkey?” and who tells viewers at the start of each program to “Turn on you telly and turn off your brain — we’re just here for funsies.” (In fact, ABC refuses to confirm that Maitland is Myers.)

Needless to say, appearing on "The Gong Show" is not for those without a sense of humor. “It was really a surreal experience,” said Memphis-born 2000 White Station High School graduate Michael Thomas Connolly, whose Otamatone rendition of Schubert’s “Ave Maria” — which he describes as "a goof" — caught the attention of recruiters for “The Gong Show” after a YouTube video version of the performance attracted more than 699,000 views.

"It feels much lower-stakes than 'America's Got Talent' or 'The Voice,'" Connolly added. "If feels like an absurdist variety show." Low-stakes or not, Connolly's episode — which was shot in Los Angeles in May and airs at 9 p.m. Monday, Memphis time — features the show's most impressive lineup of celebrity judges to date: Will Arnett, Jennifer Aniston and Jack Black. (As for Myers, Connolly said the actor remained in character even during rehearsal, even when discussing the lights or some technical problem.)

A multi-instrumentalist who played clarinet in the Memphis Youth Symphony and studied music and computer programming at the University of Michigan, Connolly, 35, now lives in Seattle, where he owns and operates Empty Sea Studios. ("Empty Sea" is a phonetic play on his initials, M.T.C.)

Empty Sea specializes in acoustic recordings by folk, roots and Americana artists, so "a lot of the music I work on is painfully earnest," Connolly said. To help remedy that (and to help alleviate the stress caused by what he describes as "constantly gorging on political news"), Connolly purchased an Otamatone, an electronic synthesize developed by Japan's CUBE toy company and the Maywa Denki design firm.

A sort of hands-on theremin, the touch-sensitive Otamatone requires two hands to play: One for the "stem" or "tail" of the so-called tadpole, the other for its "head," which produces sound through its mouth. Manipulating the parts controls the pitch of the instrument, and can create various effects.

"The instrument sounds very human, you can make it sound like a voice," Connolly said. Because of this and its alien cuteness, Otamatone videos have become popular on YouTube. Playing around, Connolly in July of 2016 decided to post a video of himself performing the 1825 Schubert composition popularly known as "Ave Maria" on his Otamatone, with piano accompaniment. In the video, he is shrouded in black, so only the "face" of the instrument is visible, increasing the illusion that an anime-esque creature is producing this ethereal song.

The comments added by people who have watched the video testify to its uncanny impact. Wrote one viewer: "I was overwhelmed by a fit of joyous laughter that brought me to tears." Added another: "Finally, an instrument that looks like a Muppet, and has the emotional depth of a real human. I am in love."

For Connolly (brother of The Commercial Appeal reporter, Daniel Connolly), the success of the video is cause for mixed emotions.

As a member of the band Coyote Grace (in which he played fiddle, dobro, mandolin, accordion and upright bass), he opened for the Indigo Girls, and played "for many thousands of people." He has spent "hundreds of hours" producing "very serious singer-songwriter albums," and has hosted some 300 concerts in his studio.

Nevertheless, "Nothing has ever gotten the response of that YouTube video. It's been by far the most-praised thing I've ever done, which is kind of hilarious and a little tragic."

How did Jennifer Aniston and Jack Black and friends respond to Connolly and his Otamatone? That, for now, is privileged information: Connolly is sworn to secrecy until after the episode airs.