Here's an episode of The Red Skelton Hour for January 29, 1963 with Red's guests Mickey Rooney and the Paris Sisters. I vaguely recall watching this when I was eleven and it helping form my opinion that Mickey Rooney, who later could be found all over television praising folks like himself who had God-given talents, didn't get a lot of them. Or at least enough of them to carry him past the time he'd outgrown the role of Andy Hardy. When he taped this appearance with Skelton, Mr. Rooney had recently wrapped filming on what would turn out to be my favorite movie.

I didn't think he was very good in it and I don't think he was very good in this hour with Red…although the long sketch is somewhat carried by Skelton's joy of performing and solid back-up support by character actors like Robert Strauss, Hern Vigran, Doris Singleton and a gent named Ray Kellogg, who was on almost as many episode of Red Skelton's show as Red.

There's a musical number in there in which Mickey — surrounded as was inevitable by chorus girls taller than he was — does an awful job of dancing and lip-syncing to a pre-recorded voice that may have been that of a soundalike. If you're in my age bracket and the chosen song sounds familiar to you, here's where you know it from: It was used as theme song on The Bob Cummings Show. Watch a little of it if you can and catch some of the Silent Spot comedy bit at the end in which Skelton does a version of the hoary half-man/half-woman vaudeville routine that was otherwise extinct by 1963. The whole hour is an interesting glimpse into comedy-variety in the days of yore…

I feel like I need to ask your forgiveness for making this as personal as it's going to be…

I grew up — to the extent that I grew up at all — wanting to be a professional writer. From about age seven and beyond, that was my only answer to the question you get asked incessantly at that age, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" I didn't know what I wanted to be a writer of because I didn't know what might be possible when I reached the age when I might be able to secure writing work…

But I was going to be a writer. I never doubted that for a moment.

Among the possibilities were the things I loved then: Comic books, comic strips, animated cartoons, non-animated TV shows, movies, novels, non-fiction books…maybe just plain, old-fashioned comedy in any form. I guess I figured that with all those possibilities, I could find an opening in one of them…and one was all I wanted or expected. I don't recall ever having a clear preference and I don't recall ever thinking I might be able to work in as many of those fields as I have.

In my teen years, I was kinda hoping for whichever field might have presented the greatest opportunity to meet cute girls. (If you've ever been a teenage boy, you might completely understand that.) Comic books didn't sound like they'd be that…and also, every interview I read with someone who worked for the New York comic book companies said that in order to work for them, you had to live near them. Living anywhere other than my native Los Angeles was — and still kinda is — a deal-breaker for me. I later turned down staff jobs at DC and Marvel because they required relocation.

For reasons I can't explain, it didn't dawn on me that there could be work writing for the Los Angeles office of Gold Key Comics — the Disney comics, the Warner Brothers comics, the Hanna-Barbera comics, etc. And for reasons I shouldn't have to explain, it didn't occur to me that Jack Kirby might move to Southern California and want to hire a couple of assistants. But by my eighteenth birthday, I was working with Jack and I was writing comics for Gold Key — for a gent there named Chase Craig.

I probably don't have to tell anyone who'd find their way to this blog what an extraordinary, wonderful man Jack Kirby was. We've cheapened the word "genius" down in this world by applying it at some point to just about anyone who can do anything, which is a shame. We should have preserved it for a guy like Jack who had more brilliant ideas than any twenty other people in the comic book industry combined and who certainly never acted like the "King" that everyone called him.

You don't need me to tell you how much he invented, how well he drew and how important he was to comics. Fortunately for me, I was in a position to be able to testify what a decent, honest and nice man he was. And if for any reason you don't want to believe me on that point, ask anyone else who had the privilege of knowing him.  Anyone else.

Jack was one of the reasons I've spent my adult life as a professional writer.  Chase Craig was another.

Chase worked for Western Publishing Company, creating and later editing Dell and Gold Key Comics from around 1942 (even he couldn't remember exactly when) until 1975.  I was among the hundreds of people who worked for him on — in my case — the Gold Key books he edited in his last years there.  Later, he briefly came out of retirement to run a comic book division for Hanna-Barbera.  I was one of the first people he hired, I wound up writing everything the office produced for a while, and then Chase decided to retire again and turned it all over to me.

He was a benevolent, smart and very, very experienced editor.  Given all the comics he'd supervised over the years, including those by Carl Barks, he kinda had to be.  I learned from Kirby but I also learned from Craig…and if I had to be more specific, I think I learned whatever big things I managed to absorb came from Jack and the small — but still vital — things from Chase.

I'm about 95% certain the two men never met and if they had, I'm not sure what they would have said to each other.  I'm pretty sure they never read each other's work.  They might have had some discussions about how annoying that Evanier kid could be at times.

If they had met — which I'm pretty sure they didn't — it would have been at the 1982 Comic-Con in San Diego.  I persuaded Chase to attend for a day and I persuaded the con to give him an Inkpot Award and to let me interview him for an hour.  Chase was very pleased by the award and that there were fans there who attended that talk and knew who he was.  There weren't many, I'm afraid…because, you know, he never worked on Batman or Spider-Man.  Still, he was happy to meet anyone who knew what he'd done and he signed a number of issues of Disney comics, Tarzan comics and Magnus, Robot Fighter.  He left us in 2001.

I've written tons of pieces about Jack but nearly not enough about Craig, to whom I will also be forever grateful.  And in case you're wondering why I'm writing about these men today…well, today is August 28.  Jack Kirby was born on August 28, 1917 and Chase Craig was born on August 28, 1910.  Thanks to both of these Birthday Boys.

I wouldn't go out on a limb and try to claim that any one piece of music was the most beautiful piece in history — but this one's a contender…

J.V. — that's how he or she asked me to identify him or her because you could get in a lot of trouble asking a question like this — asked me this question…

You occasionally make mention of people including yourself making corrections on comic book art before it's printed. How does this work? Who decides what to correct and how is it done? And how do you know it was done?

Well, these days, it's almost all done on computers and it's almost impossible to detect in the published work. But when I was writing about it, I was probably writing about the days when it was done by hand. Let's say a comic book was all penciled, lettered and inked and just about ready to be published…and let's say someone decided a piece of dialogue needed to be changed.

There were all sorts of reasons why that might be necessary. Maybe the letterer had made some fatal error. Maybe someone had noticed a flaw in the story. When I wrote a comic and the original art went past me on its way to publication, I often would look at a panel and think, "That would work better without that line of dialogue" or "I can think of a better joke than that!"

The "someone" could have been anyone in the office but the order to correct it probably came from someone with the word "editor" in their job title.

If the original letterer was around, they might have had him or her do the fix but the original letterer was almost never around so someone else would do it to expedite matters and keep the assembly line moving. Either way, the change could be made a number of ways but the two most likely were (1) to paint out the copy to be replaced with white paint. Then you let it dry and letter the new copy over the white paint.

Or (2) you letter the new copy on another piece of paper and paste it over the copy that needed to be fixed. It worked the same way with fixing a drawing, though sometimes the redrawing could be done without expunging what was there before.

Here's a photo from the Marvel offices, circa 1970. The story in question was one that artist Barry Smith drew for one of their "ghost" comics then, either Tower of Shadows or Chamber of Darkness. Someone else had inked it and in the opinion of the editor, the inker had omitted too many of the backgrounds and the work needed them. At the time, there were five artists who worked on the office staff: John Romita (Senior), Herb Trimpe, Marie Severin, Tony Mortellaro and Production Manager John Verpoorten. The pages were handed to whichever one wasn't busy at the moment, which in this case was Trimpe.

Yes, that's Herb Trimpe in the photo adding more background details to the artwork. This kind of thing went on all the time in comics — sometimes when it was necessary, sometimes when it wasn't. Stan Lee had the tendency to change something (anything!) on a cover just before it went to press. They did the same kind of thing over at DC Comics…sometimes because they could make the work better and sometimes when they couldn't or didn't.

Some might call it a Guilty Pleasure but I was a fan of The Red Skelton Show — which was sometimes called The Red Skelton Hour during the seasons it was an hour. The series aired from 1951 to 1971, bouncing back and forth between NBC and CBS and between running a half-hour and an hour. It had mostly been a half-hour until the Fall of 1962 when CBS had an odd reason to double its length. Here is how I heard the story…

It involved the movie studio on La Brea Boulevard just south of Sunset in Hollywood. It's changed names and owners many times but folks still refer to it as "The Chaplin Studio" because it was built for and owned by Mr. Chaplin when it opened in 1917 and he owned it until 1953. Among the owners that followed him was — briefly — Red Skelton. Skelton purchased it in 1959 or 1960, reportedly for the sheer thrill of owning Charlie Chaplin's studio. But Skelton and those he engaged to run it didn't know what they were doing and he began losing money at a frightening rate.

By '62, he was desperate to find a buyer to take it off his hands and when it came time to sign his new contract with CBS, Skelton and his lawyers made a demand. In exchange for more seasons of Red's popular series, the network had to buy the old studio from him at a price that would restore Red's severely-injured bank account. There was much haggling and arguing but in the end, CBS decided they could justify the purchase price if the Skelton show went to an hour…so it did.

So here was his first hour show once they upped him to 60 minutes. It aired September 25, 1962 with his guests Harpo Marx and Mahalia Jackson. If you're a fan of Harpo, you may enjoy this because they gave him plenty to do including a very nice musical number. It was one of his last public performances and he died about two years after this episode aired. (You may also spot a young Dyan Cannon in the main sketch and at the end, there's a surprise appearance by Jack Benny, plugging his show which followed Red's.)

I'm going to post a few more of these over the next week or two and point out some things that I think are interesting about them. They have not aged well so I don't expect you to watch all of them but maybe take a peek here and there at this hour…

An awful lot of controversies are raging in this country at the moment, all of them more important than the Cracker Barrel restaurants changing their logo. No one is being imprisoned or deported because of the new Cracker Barrel logo. No one is dying or losing their access to medical care because of the new Cracker Barrel logo. No one's constitutional rights are being trampled on because of the new Cracker Barrel logo.

I'm not even sure anyone is going to eat at Cracker Barrel because of the new Cracker Barrel logo. Apparently though, some people who have often gone to eat at Cracker Barrel in the past are not going to eat at Cracker Barrel because of the new Cracker Barrel logo.

I was hoping this would turn out to be one of those controversies I could ignore since I have never eaten at a Cracker Barrel. But this morning on Facebook, I came upon an exchange where someone said they'd never eaten at a Cracker Barrel and others jumped on them saying you're not a True American if you've never eaten at a Cracker Barrel.

I confess: I've never eaten at a Cracker Barrel. And suddenly, I feel the need to defend myself for never having eaten at a Cracker Barrel.

I think I have a good excuse. The three states in this country in which I have spent most of the last fifty years are California (about 97% of the time), Nevada (maybe 2%) and New York (maybe 1%). In the state of California, Cracker Barrel has locations in five cities: Camarillo, Victorville, Rialto, Rocklin and Bakersfield. I do not recall ever being in any of these cities and I'm not even sure where a couple of them are.

There are three Cracker Barrels in the state of Nevada and they're actually in cities I've visited — Las Vegas, North Las Vegas and Reno. But when I've been in those cities, I almost never leave the areas where the hotel-casinos are located and those areas don't have Cracker Barrels. In fact, the last time I was in Reno, the Cracker Barrel there hadn't even opened.

And the Cracker Barrels in the state of New York are in Binghamton, Cicero, Clifton Park, East Greenbush, Fishkill, Horseheads, Rochester, Watertown and Williamsville. Again, my life has never taken me to any of these cities and I have no idea where they are.

I just don't travel all that much. And I've never been the kind of person who goes very far out of their way to experience one particular restaurant.

So I've kind of been waiting for Cracker Barrel to come to me and a few years ago, they almost did. No one opened one in Los Angeles but briefly — and by "briefly," I mean for a couple of weeks during the COVID lockdowns — there were billboards around L.A. saying that one could have items from the Cracker Barrel menu delivered. Someone had apparently set up or was setting up a "Phantom Kitchen," presumably in partnership or affiliation with the Cracker Barrel chain. A Phantom Kitchen means that there's no restaurant you can actually visit but there is a place somewhere where someone prepares meals that you can order through Doordash, Grubhub, Uber Eats or any of those.

I made a mental note to maybe give it a try but before I could, the billboards disappeared and there was no option to order Cracker Barrel food on any of those apps. I have no idea what happened but I suspect Russian Interference.

I also suspect it didn't matter. From what I'm reading, dining at a Cracker Barrel is for some not about merely consuming zillion-calorie Chicken Pot Pie…although if it's as good as some say it is, that might be reason enough. But for many, it's about the experience of visiting a little vestige of America that barely exists anymore except in the memories of folks who may be somewhat misremembering. It's about the gift shop and the hominess and stepping into a simpler time and country…kind of like attending one of those Princess Breakfasts at Disneyland where little girls in tiaras can dine like royalty in the castle before they have to scurry to stand in line like mere commoners to get on Space Mountain.

If I'm reading the protests about the new logo right, they're not about the new logo but about the mere fact that there is one. Because Cracker Barrels aren't supposed to change.

One of these days, I suppose I'll get to one…and the folks who consider me unAmerican for not having done so already will stop questioning my love of country and my patriotism. Until they find out that for most of the same reasons, I've never been to a Waffle House.

It's that Rainbow guy again, doing that voodoo that he do so well…

John Oliver's off for a few weeks but he left us this twelve-minute masterpiece…

A lot of websites and videos are talking about a scorching debate on CNN in which Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett ripped former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee a new orifice, pointing out his unceasing hypocrisy. It's a great story but as the folks at Lead Stories point out, it didn't happen.

A New York Appeals Court threw out that $500 Million Civil Fraud judgement against Donald Trump and Trump has been doing what he always does, even when he loses. He's claiming total victory, total vindication and solid proof that it was all just a hoax perpetrated by his enemies. But as Shirin Ali points out, it's none of that and it's not even over.

Trump and his aides have been claiming that nearly a quarter to a third of the people living in the United States are not American citizens. Melissa Goldin of The Associated Press looks at the real numbers and finds they're lower…a lot lower.

Just heard of the passing of Guy Lillian last night at the age of 76. No cause has been mentioned but he'd been dealing with severe gastric problems and Parkinson's Disease for some time. Lemme tell you a little about Guy…

Guy was a retired lawyer (mostly a public defender) and a prominent figure in science-fiction fandom in the southern states. Many years earlier, he was a prominent figure in comic book fandom, gaining notoriety for his appearances in comic book letter columns, especially in DC Comics and especially in the ones then edited by Julius Schwartz. Since I was often in those same letter columns, people somehow assumed we were friends but we didn't meet until one day in the early seventies at some comic book convention in New York. Here's a photo I took of Guy with Julius Schwartz that day…

Guy is the one on the right, of course, but in an e-mail that I think was our last communication some years ago, he mentioned the photo and joked how he now looked more like Julie.

In the mid-seventies, Guy parlayed his connections from those letter column appearances into a job at DC Comics, assembling (ironically) letter columns and doing miscellaneous editorial work. He was starting to move towards writing comics when he decided that that profession (and New York) were not for him. He moved, married, got his law degree and expended his fannish energy towards s-f. We kept vaguely in touch but not for many a year. I remember him as a very, very bright guy and it's always sad to lose someone like that.

The Pacific Pioneer Broadcasters group was a neat little club founded in 1966 with, as I understand it, two goals. One was to preserve the history of West Coast broadcasting — radio and television — and it was pretty successful at that. Materials it accumulated are now housed at the University of California, Santa Barbara Library and I believe at other institutions that will preserve them and make them available for research. The other goal was to honor those who had made significant contributions to radio and TV, especially (but not exclusively) in Southern California.

The P.P.B. was pretty successful for a long time in the latter goal, as well. Mostly, the honoring was done with monthly luncheons, each honoring one or more of those significant contributors. I was a member for a while — unfortunately, late in the organization's existence so I missed a lot of the biggies. But there were still some star-studded luncheons and this video will give you an idea of what they were like…

Get the idea? They were wonderful events with wonderful speeches and wonderful gatherings and really, really bad food. How…bad…was it? One time when I somehow wound up on the dais as a speaker — I think the honoree was June Foray — I was seated next to Gary Owens, who was often among those of us honoring/roasting the Guest of Honor. As soon as we were served our lunches, Gary reached into his pocket, pulled out a handful of energy bars and began passing them quietly to those seated near him. He whispered, "I've learned to not eat the food at these and to come prepared."

Wise man, that Gary Owens.

The awful chow was probably a minor reason that the group was in decline over the last decade or two. Among the other reasons was that the membership was getting older and older, and young people were not joining up in sufficient numbers to balance the losses. Also, they were having trouble finding worthy honorees…or people who wanted to help run the organization. And then the Sportsmen's Lodge in Studio City — the place we met, the place that served the inedible entrees — closed down and no centrally-located, reasonably-priced replacement could be found. Also, there was this thing you may have heard of called COVID and…well, let's just say the group died a slow, inevitable death. It changed its name to the Hollywood Media Professionals and that didn't change anything.

The folks who'd been keeping it on life support have just announced they're going to stop doing that and I doubt anyone could blame them. It was a great institution in its time but that time is not this time. I'll miss everything about it except the meals.

From the 1986 Tony Awards telecast, here's a nice little medley of Broadway tunes performed by Ann Reinking, Juliet Prowse, Sandy Duncan, Bea Arthur, Nell Carter, Karen Morrow, Bernadette Peters, Rex Smith, Dorothy Loudon, Cleo Laine, Stephanie Powers, Hal Linden, Leslie Uggams and Helen Hayes…

Fred Kaplan explains what's going on with the Russia/Ukraine War. You remember that one…the war Trump was going to settle in 24 hours?

I seem to have accumulated some dangerous Internet Algorithms. Any time I'm browsing a site like Facebook or YouTube — any site which shows me short videos by random contributors — I'm deluged with "medical advice," mostly what to eat and what not eat. Once in a while, the advisors might (might!) be doctors of some sort but usually, it's just some dude or dame standing around in the aisles of a Costco. There are very few foods on this planet that one of them won't tell you, often with a note of urgency in their voice, will kill you dead within a week.

I've said this before on this blog and I'll probably say it again many times. Years ago, I came to the conclusion that what works for me, health-wise, was to find a really good physician and build up a relationship with that physician. I do not expect this person to be infallible but he — in my case, it's a he — will be accurate a lot more often than any non-doctor, especially one of those guys standing around in a Costco telling me how eating one of their rotisserie chickens is more lethal than chug-a-lugging a Cyanide Smoothie.

So I trust my doctor and I trust any specialists to whom he refers me. It has been my experience that good doctors know who the other good doctors are.

In addition to not trusting "medical experts" whose offices seem to be in a Trader Joe's, I do not trust generic medical advice like "Everyone needs to cut out seed oils" or "Everyone should be drinking almond milk." Due to my various food allergies, there are dozens of foods you can eat that I can't, almond milk among them. The current mania to ban food dyes may be correct but it doesn't feel like it's being driven by people committed to following actual science.

I, of course, trust absolutely nothing advocated by our current Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. He may well turn out to be the worst thing Donald Trump has done to us.

I've always loved a certain kind of actor — the kind who turned up at one time or another in almost every show I was watching when I was kid. Guys like Peter Leeds, Tom Pedi, Ed Peck, Dabbs Greer, Lou Krugman, the pre-M*A*S*H Jamie Farr, Herb Vigran, Herbie Faye — there's a long, long list — rarely had regular parts of those TV shows but they always seemed to be guest-starring. Dave Ketchum, who just died at the age of 97, was a regular on a few shows like Camp Runamuck, Get Smart and I'm Dickens, He's Fenster…but most of the time he turned up in guest roles. Producers and directors knew he was reliable and always did his job well.

Dave's job was not just acting. He did stand-up comedy. He wrote for a lot of TV shows. He was in a lot of commercials. I never worked with him but we got to talking on Writers Guild picket lines and he seemed like a nice, funny guy. Here's a rundown on the career of that nice, funny guy.