TELEVISION : This Show Was a Hound Dog--Strictly in the Best Sense

Are your sinuses cleared?

It was the promised show in the promised land. It was exquisitely tacky and pretentious. It was rich in raunch and gaudy and corny.

It was also the perfect ending to Liberty Weekend’s lost weekend. It made you want to go out and buy a pair of Statue of Liberty Jockey shorts.

Produced and directed by Don Mischer, Sunday night’s three-hour closing rites on ABC completed the nation’s official celebration of the restored Statue of Liberty’s 100th birthday. (There couldn’t be more coming, could there?)

The show had marching bands, lasers, square dancers and an enormous red, white and blue horseshoe lit by flashlights. There was gospel music and music-music. You were Patti La Belled, Liza Minnellied and Pointered.

There was a tribute to Hollywood that included scores of yellow-slickered Debbie Reynolds clones singing in the rain around a real-life Gene Kelly, followed by oodles of tap dancers who would have made Busby Berkeley beam.

Best of all, though, was a salute to rock ‘n’ roll highlighted by the Temptations, the Four Tops, Frankie Avalon, Fabian, Bobby Rydell and 200--count ‘em--Elvis clones singing “Hound Dog,” while hordes of jazzercise ladies danced around them.

In the very best sense, this whole show was a hound dog.

Not everything worked. The Manhattan Transfer was one group that seemed too small for this panoramic stage, and the marching bands often seemed as removed as a football half-time show.

It was one of those nights, though, when energy counted more than execution.

“I’ve had a helluva good time,” David L. Wolper, chairman and executive producer of the Liberty Weekend events, told the throng in Giants Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J. “How about you?” If they weren’t, they were doing a good job of faking it.

This entire boisterous exercise in self-affection was another Wolper whopper.

Wolper has been accused of helping franchise the Statue of Liberty’s 100th birthday bash like fast-food burgers and turning Liberty Weekend into the Las Vegas strip. He was urged to go red, white and blah.

Yet this four-day event topped by Sunday night’s splash may be the creative high in Wolper’s long, commercially triumphant producing career.

His “Roots” and “The Thorn Birds” miniseries drew epic ratings on ABC, but the former seldom reached beyond middle-brow and the latter was still less distinguished. And although his miniseries versions of John Jakes’ “North and South” were rare ratings plums in ABC’s past season, they were also comic trivializations of history that failed even as camp trash.

Wolper got rave reviews for producing the opening and closing ceremonies at the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles. Yet both shows were far more dazzling in person than on TV.

Liberty Weekend, though, has been his most consummate performance as a ringmaster. Whether the ideas were his or borrowed, he was the man in charge. He has been at once true to the TV viewer and to his subject, creating a spectacle as colorful as he is colorless in person.

Wolper orchestrated a show that captured the liberty statue in its regal and vulgar extremes. He’s shown class and been crass. And how appropriate, for this is no devine, untouchable icon but a statue that means many things--some of them highly commercial--to many people.

Earlier in the week, Wolper agreed on TV that Sunday night would feature glitter and glitz. “But good glitter and glitz,” he added.

In capturing the spirit of the statue, Wolper also caught the spirit of the nation. Remove the overblown advance coverage and it’s all been grand and eclectic, from Thursday’s torch relighting to Friday’s American music celebration to Saturday’s classical music salute to Sunday’s rip-roaring finale.

In short, Liberty Weekend has been a true slice of America, red, white and bluster.