Florida's Film, Television and the Arts Magazine
THE PENSACOLA CONNECTION December, 2025
This month: A new family entertainment center will open soon, plus Christmas flicks with Pensacola connections, and I go in search of an old friend for the holidays…
FIRST: A new Launch Entertainment Family Fun Center location is coming to Pensacola next spring. It is expected to take the place of the old Dirt Cheap Discount Retail store in Ferry Pass Plaza, located on North Davis Highway and East Olive Road. Launch will offer 31,000 square feet of video game arcades, trampolines, a bowling alley, dodgeball, laser tag, stunt jumps, a gladiator pit, obstacle courses, multiple party rooms, a soft play area and more, with a Krave Restaurant & Bar for food & drink service. Local owners John & Jeremy Reams are the father/son duo who signed a franchise contract with Launch as early as 2023, with location scouting in Escambia & Santa Rosa Counties, before finally settling on Ferry Pass Plaza. Launch has opened up to 30 locations across 15 US states, including Georgia, Arizona, Texas and Tennessee, with 3 already open in Central and South Florida. Opening for the Pensacola location is expected around mid-to-late spring of 2026, and could well bring some serious competition for the Sky Zone Indoor Trampoline Park near Davis & Brent, which has been operating in Pensacola since July of 2016. For more information, visit: https://launchfamilyentertainment.com/pensacola/home/, and: https://www.skyzone.com/pensacola.
NEXT: Believe it or not, there ARE some classic Christmas films with Pensacola connections. One example is: “Laurel & Hardy’s March of the Wooden Soldiers,” the 1934 Hal Roach Studios take on Victor Herbert’s “Babes in Toyland.” It stars Felix Knight, who was born in Macon, Georgia in 1908, moved with this cotton farming family to Pensacola in his youth, learned to sing as an opera tenor and play guitar by his teens, and performed at several local venues by 1925. It was at a show he did at the Pensacola Yacht Club in 1929, that he was discovered by a Hollywood film company manager, in town for a silent military feature film shoot at the Naval Air Station (possibly “The Flying Fleet” for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.) By the early 1930’s when sound and ‘talkies’ took over, Knight was doing Verdi’s “La Traviata” at the Hollywood Bowl, Berlioz’s “Faust” in San Francisco, and soon landed the role of Tom-Tom the Piper’s Son for this picture. Amazing what paths to fame stars can take.
Fast-forward to about 69 years later, and here’s another example: “Elf,” the 2003 Will Ferrell yuletide comedy from New Line Cinema, about an orphaned man named Buddy who is raised by Santa’s Elves, and goes to New York to reconnect with his long lost father. But would you believe: it features a local face in the cast? Claire Lautier, daughter of the famous Dr. Yves Lautier of Pensacola’s Baptist Hospital, and a graduate of Gulf Breeze High School with high marks in drama, plays NY1 TV news reporter Charlotte Dennon, who provides on-the-spot coverage as she interviews eyewitnesses of a crash in Central Park. And oddly enough, the North Pole elf Ming-Ming is played by Peter Billingsley, best known as Messy Marvin for Hershey’s Chocolate Syrup commercials, and as little Ralphie Parker in “A Christmas Story” by MGM in 1983. AND by curious coincidence, Billingsley just happens to be in town on the Gulf Coast this year: hosting a live screening and Q&A session for “A Christmas Story” on December 10th at the Mobile Saenger Theater. (The Pensacola Saenger is having “A Christmas Story: the Musical” on December 2nd & 3rd the week before, but without Mr. Billingsley. Oh, well, Italian leg lamps and Red Rider BB guns at the ready, anyway!) For more about these films and their people with Pensacola connections, check their Wikipedia pages at: www.wikipedia.com.
AND FINALLY: Now that it IS the Christmas holiday season at last, what’s say we look up an old friend, shall we? Whatever happened to Pensacola’s Barbara Walters of the Boondocks: Channel 3 News and News Journal entertainment news reporter and celebrity interviewer Taris Savell? Born in Selma, Alabama (early to mid-20th Century or so; she’s never actually given out her official age) her family moved to Pensacola when she was only 6. A later graduate of Pensacola High School, and soon college graduate of Louisiana State University (LSU) by the 1950’s, Taris’s first media job was in writing commercials for Pensacola news talk radio station 1450-AM WBSR. And being a pro-women’s rights activist, though not a follower of the “women’s liberation” movement, she also hosted a radio program discussing public issues for women. She later moved to 1350-AM WCOA and worked as an on-air DJ. But her biggest calling was: “interviewing the stars,” meaning bigtime showbiz celebrities whenever they came to town. Her earliest interviews were with Arthur Godfrey, Edgar Bergen, Doris Day, Bette Davis, Harper Lee, Jayne Mansfield, and even a young Elvis Presley when he sang at the South Palafox Pier Bayfront Municipal Auditorium in 1956. Other stars included Bob Hope, Ed Sullivan, Eva Gabor (“Green Acres”) Ernest Borgnine (“McHale’s Navy; Airwolf”) as well as US Presidents Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, and Ronald Reagan. When St. Anne’s Catholic Church of Bellview began their annual ‘Wild Western Round-Up’ Fall Festival in 1964, guest stars became an annual tradition, and Taris was often on hand to interview them, including Angie Dickenson (“Police Woman”) and Tony Danza (“Taxi; Who’s the Boss?”) all the way up to Charlton Heston (The Ten Commandments, Ben Hur, Planet of the Apes, Midway," etc.) By this time, Taris was writing for the Pensacola News Journal, and doing on-camera interviews for ABC affiliate WEAR TV-3, throughout the 1960’s, 70’s, 80’s and 90’s. But by the early 2000’s, hurricanes destroyed the St. Anne’s backyard property, and the Round-Up rode off into the sunset. Taris went back to reporting entertainment news on radio: this time for a weekly show on 790-AM WPNN. Soon times got tough, and Taris had to sell off much of her star memorabilia collection in a 2001 estate sale. After suffering a debilitating fall in August 2015, breaking a femur in her left leg, she moved into the Life Care Center Nursing Home on East Olive Road uptown, and later left Pensacola to move back to her college alma mater state of Louisiana, to live near family cousins. Today, Taris Savell resides in, and is actively serving on several senior committees at, St. James Place Retirement Community in Baton Rouge. For news links, including a 2015 dedication write-up by her fellow PNJ reporter Troy Moon, plus an inquiry from the Library of Congress interested in her story and interviews, see: https://www.facebook.com/search/top/?q=Taris%20Savell.
Okay, that’s all for December, and for the year 2025.
MERRY CHRISTMAS and a HAPPY NEW YEAR!
Until January, later, gators!
_______________________________
Sincerely yours, KENNETH L. MANNING
Your Pensacola Connection
49 Murphy Lane, Pensacola, FL 32505
Phone: 1-850-287-2581
