Saturday, July 5, 2003

More for San Diego

Just added the illustrious Joe Alaskey to the Cartoon Voice Panel, which is currently scheduled for 3:30 on Saturday afternoon. I say "currently" because we may wind up moving it a half hour later. Details here in a day or three.

Joe is currently the voice of Daffy Duck and many of the great Warner Brothers characters once voiced by the immortal Mel Blanc. I'm going to try to get him to do some of his non-Mel voices for us, as well. He's one of the best in the business and I'm thrilled he'll be joining our little vocal gangbang.

• Posted at 5:55 PM · LINK

Coming Soon...to San Diego

One of the panels I'm really looking forward to at the Comic-Con International in San Diego is the one we're doing at 10:30 on Saturday morning (July 19) in Room 8. It's on the history of Western Publishing Company, which produced the contents of Dell Comics (until around 1962) and Gold Key Comics (thereafter). If you're baffled — as so many seem to be — about the history of this unique company, this article that I wrote will explain a teensy bit of it to you and you can learn a little more at the panel. Actually, I'm hoping this will be the first of several annual panels on the topic, as there are a couple of folks I'd love to interview about Western but they're unable to make it this year. But we'll have plenty to discuss without them. We'll have Paul Norris and Mike Royer, both of whom did tons of comics for Western Publishing's West Coast office (as did I) and we'll have Len Wein and Frank Bolle, both of whom worked for the company's East Coast office. And we'll have collector/historian Maggie Thompson and I'm hoping for a few more last-minute additions.

If we all do our job, you'll get the beginnings of a portrait of an amazing company — one that often thought more like printers than publishers, and more like book publishers than comic book publishers. I am a big believer in the philosophy that the company does not create the comic; people do. In the field, we too often speak of "DC did this" or "Marvel did this," when it would be vastly more accurate to speak of specific human beings working for those companies doing such things...people who change from time to time. I recently read an as-yet-unpublished article by someone analyzing Marvel's business strategies over the last half-century as if that plan all came from one mind with one philosophy of publishing. (Marvel has rarely had one mindset at a given time, let alone over an extended period, and quite a few folks who've gotten into positions of power there have been of the mind that their predecessors were complete idiots who were mismanaging the firm into oblivion.)

All that said, there is a rough continuity of thought behind how Western operated — or at least, some prevailing views that ran very much counter to what the boys at DC, Marvel or other companies were then thinking. So we'll talk about that. And we'll talk about Carl Barks and Disney Comics in general. And Magnus, Robot Fighter. And Tarzan and Korak. And Star Trek. And Little Lulu and John Stanley and Oscar LeBeck and Chase Craig and Harvey Eisenberg and Dr. Solar and Walt Kelly and Roger Armstrong and Pete Alvarado and Hanna-Barbera comics and Dan Spiegle and Woody Woodpecker and Russ Manning and Paul S. Newman and Gaylord DuBois and Wally Green and all those movie and TV adaptations and...

Boy, this is sounding like it's going to have to be a couple of annual panels. Be there for the first of them.

• Posted at 1:06 PM · LINK

Mind the Music and the Step...

Watched Yankee Doodle Dandy last evening for maybe the eightieth time. I have it on Laserdisc so I could have watched it whenever I thought of it...but Turner Classic Movies was running it so I had TiVo grab a copy — and don't you sometimes feel dumb watching a free telecast of a movie for which you paid good money? Anyway, I did enjoy it. I think I had trouble appreciating this movie back in the seventies because I'd read a couple of biographies of George M. Cohan, and a series of letters that George S. Kaufman had written to a friend about his many troubles with Cohan. They all made Cohan sound like a pretty nasty man who waved the flag to mask selfish goals. That's a personal peeve of mine — shallow, self-interests disguised as patriotism — so I was disinclined to view Mr. Cohan in a favorable light.

I was also acutely aware of how little the movie resembled his actual life. One does not expect a Hollywood bio-film to reflect reality 100% or even 80% but this one was so far down the accuracy scale that it seemed like its makers had said, "Well, we can't tell the truth about this bastard so let's make up something." He wasn't even born on the Fourth of July, you know.

So why have I seen it so many times? I think it's because I like it a wee bit more with each viewing, which doesn't happen with many pictures. Jimmy Cagney is so darn good in it — acting, as well as singing and dancing — that he forces you to love the guy he's playing, and I care less and less each time that it isn't the real Cohan. Cagney just eclipses the real guy to the point where if you today mention George M. Cohan to people and they happen to recognize the name, they think of Cagney. In Funny Girl, Barbra Streisand may have supplanted the genuine Fannie Brice, but that would be the only other time I can think of that happening; of the real star being obliterated by the person playing them. Obviously, some of that has to do with the general unavailability of real Cohan or Brice performances but not completely. Those have been the only two times (unless you can think of another) where the person playing a supposedly-great star was a lot more talented — and a bigger star — than the person they were portraying.

Cohan himself did make a few movie appearances, by the way. Given his success on the stage, you have to figure that something just plain didn't translate. Either film didn't capture any trace of his talent or it had atrophied by the time he reached Hollywood. But like a few other (allegedly) great stage performers in early film, he sure doesn't come off as a star of any magical ability. If I were him, I'd much rather people think I was Jimmy Cagney.

• Posted at 11:47 AM · LINK

N!xau, R.I.P.

The best-known Bushman in the world — actually, the only known Bushman in the world — has died. N!xau was the star of a very wonderful movie called The Gods Must be Crazy. Here's a link to an obit.

• Posted at 11:09 AM · LINK

Film Restoration?

Are classic movies being altered (and even ruined) when transferred to digital format and "restored?" Some people in this article think so.

• Posted at 10:48 AM · LINK

July 6, 2003 • Current • July 4, 2003