Monthly Archives: October 2009

Erik Tarloff remembers Soupy Sales. He gets White Fang and Black Tooth confused but otherwise, it's a perceptive piece. Thanks to Tom Pardue for the link.

Aaron R. Davis, a reader of this site, writes to tell me Cartoon Network stuck one of our new Garfield episodes into its schedule today between showings of R.L. Stine's The Haunting Hour and Mainframe Entertainment's Scary Godmother: The Revenge of Jimmy. So I guess they're airing our show. They're just not telling anyone.

I was just sitting here wondering if there was a video in this world of the Lennon Sisters dressed up as skeletons and singing "Dry Bones." And sure enough, I get an e-mail from Fred Rupnow telling me where to find one. What are the odds?

Just to remind you: I don't like Halloween and I really don't like candy corn.

Beginning in 1965 and continuing for two or three years (reports vary) there was a company called Hanna-Barbera Records. It released a flood of record albums based on Hanna-Barbera cartoon properties and also put out a great many records of unrelated music.

As a kid then, I was a big fan of the cartoon-based records, though I found some of them quite puzzling. For reasons I've never been able to determine (and perhaps never will), the "wrong" voice actors did a lot of the parts. For example, Daws Butler had always done the voice of Huckleberry Hound for the cartoons but the Huckleberry Hound record put out by H-B Records had Paul Frees playing the part. Daws had also originated the voice of Yogi Bear and done it for the cartoons…and he did it on some of the H-B Yogi records…but one features Allan Melvin performing the voice of the smarter-than-average bear with June Foray as Boo Boo! Daws (not Arnold Stang) did the voice of Top Cat on the Top Cat record. Don Messick (not George O'Hanlon) did the voice of George Jetson on a Jetsons record. The Augie Doggie record has Daws voicing Augie (as he did in the cartoons) and also Doggie Daddy (which he did not). And so on.

Despite the sometimes-odd casting and the generally-forgettable tunes, the records were often fun. I have them all, of course, but I've been hoping someone would reissue them on CD. It looks like that's beginning to happen.

A company called New Line Records is bringing out the first such re-release — an album of Christmas tunes ostensibly performed by Pebbles and Bamm Bamm. It's an odd choice since it really isn't a cartoon-connected album, as advertised, and that would seem to be the only appeal of such a product. It's just a bunch of anonymous singers singing holiday tunes with no connection to those characters or Bedrock or anything. (They even sing of the birth of Christ even though if we're faithful to continuity, Pebbles and Bamm Bamm were born before he was. That's kinda what "B.C." means, right?)

But if this release is the first of many, great. There are some real treasures in that library. You can sample Pebbles & Bamm-Bamm Singing Songs Of Christmas over on this website and if you want to order it from Amazon, come back and click here.

In May of 1968, MAD Magazine went to press with a political cover — a Norman Mingo painting featuring line art caricatures by Mort Drucker. Drucker drew the eight most prominent politicians in the country at that moment…basically the guys actively competing for the presidency plus President Lyndon Johnson. Johnson had announced he would not stand for re-election but a lot of folks thought he still planned to swoop down on the convention and somehow wrest a re-nomination.

The proofs of MAD #122 had just come off the presses on June 5 when Robert Kennedy was assassinated. The MAD guys decided it would be inappropriate to leave Bobby on their cover so they made a quick substitution, replacing him with a drawing of Alfred. Collector Steve Kuhn recently came across some copies of the "before" cover and he was nice enough to let me share one here. Just a little piece of history.

We all tend to be skeptical, I think, of "sizzling revelations" that come out years after the fact. I'm especially suspicious of ones that relate to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. So I'm not sure what to make of this new claim about the behavior of Surprise President Lyndon B. Johnson on that day. It sounds credible to me but we'll probably never know for sure…

Speaking of TiVos: If you have one and it breaks, this page may be of some value to you. There's this company called WeaKnees (I have no idea why) that does great work upgrading and repairing TiVos. They stuck a new hard disk in one of mine, boosting it up so it'll hold a couple hundred hours of Jay Leno Shows I haven't gotten around to watching, and it runs great. But even if you don't buy from them, their site is a tremendous online resource for TiVo users.

I'm still laboring under the impression that The Garfield Show debuts on Cartoon Network on Monday. It was supposed to debut there last Monday and it was on their website schedule and also on the schedule on my TiVo. Then it disappeared from the website schedule (though not from my TiVo listings) and, sure enough, it did not air, apparently because they decided to go with Halloween-themed programming instead.

It's now on the Cartoon Network website schedule for next week…though they list the contents of Shows #6-10, as if they ran the first five this week, which they didn't. It is not yet on my TiVo's schedule. And you now know as much about this as I do.

A number of blogs are quoting this but I can't resist. The Seattle Times did an article on the collapse of Washington Mutual and it includes the following…

"Someone in Florida had made a second-mortgage loan to O.J. Simpson, and I just about blew my top, because there was this huge judgment against him from his wife's parents," she recalled. Simpson had been acquitted of killing his wife Nicole and her friend but was later found liable for their deaths in a civil lawsuit; that judgment took precedence over other debts, such as if Simpson defaulted on his WaMu loan.

"When I asked how we could possibly foreclose on it, they said there was a letter in the file from O.J. Simpson saying "the judgment is no good, because I didn't do it.'"

Hey, it's not as if he'd lie about such a thing.

I kinda feel guilty covering this. Earlier this year, my friends Paul Dini, Misty Lee and I attended a live production of A Christmas Carol at the Kodak Theater in Hollywood. For those who enjoy theatrical disasters — and I don't — it was the Super Bowl times ten. Advertised stars did not appear and the ones who did didn't know their lines. The stage crew didn't know which order to bring the sets in. There was much laughter where there should not have been laughter. We ended up cheering the performers at the end of it for just getting to the end of it. Later, there were reports that the endeavor had lost tons of money and that folks who worked on it had yet to receive pay.

The same producer-director is now attempting to mount a new tour of the Dickens classic with a different set of stars, some of whom have already disappeared from the advertising. The show was to have opened in Philadelphia, then moved to Boston, Baltimore, Minneapolis and Chicago but it's being reported that no theater has yet been booked for the first two cities…and Minneapolis has now been cancelled. These are not good signs.

And another not-good sign: Reporters around the country are writing about the problems and digging up ominous things about the producer's past…including the fact that he apparently wrote the script for this version while serving time in prison. Here's a report in the Chicago Reader that even quotes this blog. Like I said, I feel a bit guilty to be following this. It's like watching a train wreck from afar…painful to experience but difficult to ignore.