Monthly Archives: March 2007

A profile of "That Announcer Guy," Don La Fontaine. One thing these articles never mention is the amazing number of voiceover actors these days who have strived — some with considerable success — to develop a "Don La Fontaine read," meaning that they get hired by someone who wants something like Don La Fontaine but not Don La Fontaine. Sometimes but not always, there's work for these guys from ad agencies and producers who think that the real thing is too expensive. But often, it's a matter of just not wanting to hire Don because they think he's overexposed.

I don't know what to think of this scandal involving the firing of U.S. Attorneys. Well, I do know something: I know that all the principals are acting like mobsters who don't want to get caught giving their versions of what happened for fear that they'll get hung out to dry when others in the mob settle on their versions. There's either an old saying or there should be that mass lies only work when everyone gets together and lies in unison. That may even apply to situations where the lie isn't covering up a crime but is masking something that was technically legal but really, really slimy.

Wasn't it Michael Kinsley who once said that the real scandal of Washington was not what's illegal but what's legal? I sure get the feeling that each succeeding generation of elected officials in this country gets better and better at doing things that should be illegal but, thanks to loopholes and/or sleazy legislation, isn't.

I miss my dear friend, Howard Morris. You all know Howie was a great comedic performer, most famously when he worked with Sid Caesar on his TV shows or as Ernest T. Bass on The Andy Griffith Show. You may also know that he was a terrific cartoon voice actor and you may know that he directed TV shows and movies. You may not know (unless you read it on this site) that he directed an awful lot of the McDonald's commercials in the sixties and seventies, and he was also the voice of a couple of characters in McDonaldland.

Here we have a four minute mini-documentary on the making of one of those commercials. Much of it is an interview with Howie who looks a little uncomfortable and unhappy about it. He was usually a funny, natural presence in front of a camera or in my living room. Still, it's nice to see him again, even this way.

This is from a blog called The Hipster Dad…

Well, last night, we took Mark Evanier's advise and went to Sweet Tomatoes — known on the West Coast as Souplantation — for their creamy tomato soup. Holy anna, it's fantastic! Honestly, the only soup I've had that's better is the gazpacho at Mean Bean. Unfortunately, this appears to be a periodic, rather than a regular fixture. So you have THREE DAYS to find a Sweet Tomatoes near you and get some of this yummy soup before it vanishes again.

Just to make sure you understand: The Creamy Tomato Soup at Souplantation (and Sweet Tomatoes) is a March special and March is darn near over. Based on my past experiences, I know they sometimes have a soup like this for a little past the end of the month. For instance, I'll bet some outlets have it on Sunday, which is April 1. April 2 is very unlikely since Monday is when these places get in a lot of their new supplies. But it's also entirely possible that tomorrow will be the last day in some places.

So give it a try and if you like it as much as I do, call them and tell them you'd like the Creamy Tomato Soup to be a permanent part of their repertoire. Here's a toll free number you can call and it's supposedly open 24 hours a day so you can call right this minute. Just tell the person that you love the Creamy Tomato Soup and that if they will only have it there all the time, they'll have you there all the time. The person in their Customer Service Department will ask you if you'd like to leave your name and address but that's not necessary. Just calling will do. It also wouldn't hurt to call or tell the manager of your local Souplantation or Sweet Tomatoes restaurant. Together, we can make it happen.

This will only be of interest to people who live in Los Angeles. Currently under consideration is the idea of turning Pico Boulevard and Olympic Boulevards into one-way streets. Olympic would be only westbound whereas Pico would be only eastbound. I drive a lot on both roads and oddly enough, I probably am more likely to be westbound on Olympic and eastbound on Pico…but I still think it's a sucky idea. It may not be quite as sucky as allowing those streets to get even more sucky at rush hour than they already are. That, however, does not make the idea unsucky.

What bothers me is that those streets are actually quite easy to drive on when it's not rush hour. Four or five hours per day, they're rough in some sections to the point where some of us have learned not to be on them then. So we're talking about making it less convenient the rest of the day for everyone in order to make it more convenient during the busiest hours for those who must drive then.

Another question that occurs to me is what kind of parking they're thinking of retaining on these streets. The above-linked article talks about moving some parking meters but perhaps eliminating some to allow for bus lanes going in both directions. There are some areas where eliminating a lot of street parking would cause major hardships. And if they're talking about leaving the street parking but switching directions…well, I'm guessing there are less than a hundred people in Southern California who know how to parallel park on the left hand side of the street. Don't believe me? Just go to Beverly Hills where there are a few such avenues and watch the attempts.

I think they're missing the obvious solution which is to make all the east-west streets westbound and leave them that way. Eventually, the traffic crisis will be Santa Monica's problem and we'll all know not to go to Santa Monica.

See? I have answers to problems. But somehow, they never call on me.

I wish whoever writes these songs for the JibJab guys owned a rhyming dictionary. "Ensued" doesn't rhyme with "boobs" and "news" doesn't rhyme with "food" and "map" doesn't rhyme with "puddy-tat" and you'd think that if they were going to spend the weeks and weeks it must take to animate one of these, they'd lavish the same care on the lyrics. Anywhere, here's their latest…

Several folks have written me to ask about a series over on the Comic Book Bin website in which Philip Schweier is serializing a history of DC Comics. Here's a link to Part One and you can find your way to subsequent parts through that…but I don't recommend you do that. The three parts posted so far have just too many inaccuracies and misleading statements. For example, in Part Three, Schweier writes…

In 1971, Carmine Infantino was named publisher, overseeing the entire line of comics, holding court in matters ranging from animated cartoons to toy production. Seeing a need for a more visual approach to creating comics he named a number of artists — Joe Kubert, Joe Orlando, and Dick Giordano, among others — to assume editorial positions with the company.

Infantino was named publisher in 1971 but that was just a change of title. He'd been overseeing the entire line of comics for several years by then. He named Joe Kubert an editor in 1967 and Joe Orlando in 1968. Dick Giordano began editing in 1969 and was ousted in 1971. Here's another paragraph…

Under Infantino's leadership, new titles were introduced, such as Tarzan and The Shadow. However, whatever financial success they may have enjoyed was offset by licensing fees. Another financial leak came in the form of rising freelance fees. To reduce the impact, the company chose to send work to the Philipines to be drawn.

The financial problem with Tarzan and The Shadow was not licensing fees, which were rather modest, was that those books didn't sell very well. Neither did a lot of non-licensed books of the period which were also cancelled. With the licensed books, the problem was not that the company had to pay fees but that they didn't share in any licensing of those characters. It's not so bad to lose money publishing Wonder Woman when you're taking in money from Wonder Woman toys…but DC received no part of the merchandising cash from Tarzan. Also, the Filipino artists were cheaper but their employment had nothing to do with rising freelance fees since DC didn't raise those fees much, if at all, during this period. Matter of fact, this was a way of trying to cut them for everyone, using the Filipino contingent as a threat.

I haven't the time or inclination to go through the whole series but there's an awful lot that's like the above. Sorry to say.

Here we have an interview with Al Feldstein, the man behind E.C. Comics and MAD Magazine. As I usually say when I interview Al — which I seem to do at half the conventions I attend — if he'd just done Tales from the Crypt and Weird Science and quit there, we would still be hailing him as a legend of the comic book. That he also took over MAD and ramped it up into the best-selling humor magazine in the history of Mankind is kind of an added bonus.

You know those bills in Congress that link continued funding of the Iraq War to troop withdrawals? Well, if we believe Fred Kaplan, they wouldn't do exactly what most people think they would do.

Here's another old burlesque sketch as performed (and cleaned up a little) by Abbott and Costello. The guy in the straw hat is another old burlesque comic, Sid Fields, who appeared with them on their TV shows and sometimes in live appearances. In fact, this clip is from one of their TV shows.

We're busy tonight…too busy to answer the 7,732 e-mails I've received reminding me that contrary to the previous item I posted, April Fool's Day is Monday. I could say I posted that intentionally as a kind of early trick but you're all too smart to believe that.

I've received some interesting e-mails from folks reminiscing about playing Mystery Date, and also some discussing the reason why Milton Bradley didn't bother issuing a male version of the same game. I'll post some of these messages and my responses when I get a little more time.

A story before I go. You know how when you're in a market, there's often a shopping cart near the front full of all sorts of miscellaneous items? In some stores, they call it the Returns Cart. At the checkout counters, shoppers sometimes change their minds about some purchase and abandon the item before it's time to pay for their purchases. The employees toss all those into the Returns Cart and every so often, someone goes around and puts the items back in their proper places on the shelves.

So today I'm in a market and I want to buy some Wheat Thins. You all know Wheat Thins. Well, the shelf is bare…no Wheat Thins. I shrug, complete my other selections and head for the checker. On the way, I pass what is obviously a Returns Cart sitting unattended — a cart overflowing with miscellaneous items, among which are several boxes of Wheat Thins. I grab one, add it to my cart and go through the line.

I pay and the checker is bagging my purchases when I turn and notice a lady behind me in line, unloading the cart from which I got the Wheat Thins I just bought. It was not a Returns Cart. It was her cart…but if you'd seen the willy-nilly aggregation of items, you'd have understood why I made that mistake.

It's probably a good time to say nothing and leave but for some reason, I explain to her what happened. She says, accusingly, "You stole my Wheat Thins?" As she says this, she's unloading her cart onto the conveyor belt and I now see that her cart contains nine boxes of Wheat Thins. She wanted ten, I guess, which is why the shelf was bare.

I say, "Well, they really aren't yours until you pay for them. But I made a mistake so here, take them. On me." I try to hand her the box of misappropriated Wheat Thins.

She shoves them back at me like I've just offered her a dead pussycat. "I don't want your Wheat Thins," she says. "I want my Wheat Thins."

I put my Wheat Thins back in my cart and begin to push said cart out of the store. Behind me, I hear the lady telling people, "That man stole my Wheat Thins!"

And I hear the checker say, "If it had been me, I'd have taken your purse."

The Top 100 April Fool's Day Hoaxes Of All Time.

Didja hear me and my pal Earl today on Shokus Internet Radio? Never mind us. Did you hear Doug Young, our super-secret surprise guest? Doug was, of course, one of the mainstays of Hanna-Barbera cartoon voicing in the late fifties and early sixties, and his performance as Doggie Daddy, beloved pa of Augie Doggie, is still one of my all-time favorite bits of animation voice acting. He was doing a voice not unlike Jimmie Durante but, as my co-guest Earl Kress remarked today on the show, it was a Durante with great warmth and charm. Those H-B cartoons didn't have a lot going for them in the animation department so the joys, if any, had to come primarily from the scripts and voice work. The scripts were by the great Michael Maltese and with Daws Butler as Augie and Doug as Augie's Dear Old Dad, the material couldn't have been in better hands.

Doug did other voices for H-B, including that of Hokey Wolf's sidekick, Dingaling. We chatted with him around the top of the second hour of Stu's Show…and that show reruns once a day for the next week on Shokus Internet Radio. We also discussed why some shows are or are not available on DVD, working with Jay Ward, the history of Total Television and Filmation…and not that many other topics. The two hours raced by like Speedy Gonzales after a bad burrito.

Want to hear the replay? Go to the schedule here, adjust it to correspond to your time zone and then look for the episode of Stu's Show with us. Most of the next seven days, it repeats from 4 PM to 6 PM Pacific Time. I'm sorry there's no way to just go there and download it but that's not how Internet Radio works. To hear us, you have to log in to Shokus Internet Radio at the proper time, which you can do on this page.

We had a good time chatting with our host Stuart Shotak and with our phone-in surprise guest, Doug Young. It was also nice to hear from several of you who called in during the program. There's actually a lot of fun stuff on Shokus Internet Radio so you might want to give a listen even when I'm not on. Next week, for instance, Stu is welcoming game show host Jack Narz to the program. I'll be listening to that one.

This is your final notice. Evanier and Kress. Stu's Show. Shokus Internet Radio. Today from 4 PM to 6 PM West Coast Time. Answering questions. Taking your calls. Talking all about cartoons. With a special surprise guest from the world of cartoon voicing. Listen by going to this site and selecting the Internet browser of your choice.

I'm not telling you people again.

Here's one of those commercials I saw so often as a kid that I could sing the tune in my sleep. It's for the Milton Bradley game, Mystery Date. I never played it — it was a "girl" game, obviously — but I gather it was some sort of card game where the young ladies would try to match up points and if you won, you "won" a theoretical blind date with a guy whose photo would then be revealed. He might be a dreamboat or he might be the slob and if you got a night on the town with the latter, the other players could then mock you and be glad it wasn't them. Someplace in there was a terrible, cautionary lesson for young women about something.

I think it's also amusing that the photo of the horrible date is not of a guy who's obese and wild-eyed and holding a live chicken. It's a picture of the same kind of handsome male model, only not dressed well. It's like in the romance comics where you had these stories of the two young ladies: One is viewed as gorgeous and the guys are mud-wrestling to see who'll get to ask her out. The other is so homely that she couldn't get a date if she owned the company that made ketchup. And the two women, of course, look pretty much the same except that the unattractive one is wearing glasses.

Apparently, whatever company now owns Milton Bradley (is it Hasbro?) has recently tried selling an updated version of this game that includes a toy cellphone with recorded calls from the Mystery Dates. I think it oughta come with a little cardboard Chris Hansen who surprises the Mystery Date on Dateline NBC and gets him arrested as a sexual predator.

Here's that commercial…