Saturday, August 9, 2003

Recommended Viewing

If I read the schedule correctly (never more than a 50% probability), the episodes of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart that run during the day on Monday are both last week's outing with guest Tracey Ullman. The Daily Show airs three times a day on Comedy Central. The last of these (at 7:30 or 10:30 PM depending on your time zone) is that day's new episode. The episodes that air earlier in the day are reruns, usually of the previous installment.

The reason I mention this is that I found Ms. Ullman to be fall-down funny in this appearance. Can't recall the last time I laughed so much at a "chat spot" on any talk show. You also get to see her underwear but even without that, it would be worth catching. If and when they put a clip up on the Comedy Central website, I'll post a link to it. In the meantime, if you watch, TiVo or tape either of the during-the-day broadcasts on Monday, you should get it.

• Posted at 3:21 PM · LINK

William Woolfolk (Again)

And here's a link to the obit for Bill Woolfolk that ran in the New York Times. Did I mention that Mr. Woolfolk struck me as a very nice, very dedicated man? At the Comic-Con in San Diego last year, he was very proud that people remembered and loved his work, and we had a wonderful conversation about The Defenders, the TV show he wrote in the sixties.

(One error in the obit: Sy Reit was the co-creator of Casper, not the creator. Joe Oriolo should also have been credited.)

• Posted at 3:05 PM · LINK

Old Business

As discussed here some time ago (and here and here and other places), there are plans afoot to tear down the old Hanna-Barbera building on Cahuenga Boulevard and replace it with one of those shopping malls that Southern California can't have enough of. Hey, yesterday I actually drove five blocks without passing a Victoria's Secret.

Over at Animation Blast, Amid Amidi expresses his ambivalence on whether the structure should be preserved for its historical and/or architectural value. As I mentioned, I feel much the same way. I worked in that building for years and I love the early H-B cartoons. But the early H-B cartoons weren't made in that building, and it seems to me that if it's worth preserving, it should have been worth not selling it to the current owners.

Nevertheless, I just added my signature to this online petition that urges the preservation of the place. (At the moment, my name is ten above that of "A. Sphincter Sayswhat.") I'm not sure I want to see public funds used for the purpose but the petition doesn't call for that. Perhaps if there's enough light on the matter, someone will come up with a creative way to preserve the birthplace of Jabberjaw.

Thanks to Bob Bergen — a nice Jewish boy who grew up to be Porky Pig — for e-mailing me the link. Here's a link to Bob's website. He's one of the best voice guys in the business and if you're interested in that field, the advice he has posted over there will be very valuable.

• Posted at 2:57 PM · LINK

A Question About Online Polls

You've all seen them: "Non-scientific" polls that ask you to vote if you love the president or hate his policies or want to see gay marriage in Iraq or some other hot-button issue. They're non-scientific because anyone can vote and if they take the time to figure out how to delete cookies and/or mask their IP addresses, they can vote hundreds of times, even thousands. I often log into activist political sites and see everyone being urged to go vote in one and sway the vote their way.

The sites that set up such polls love them. They know they're utterly meaningless but they bring a lot of people to the site, if only to vote a few dozen times. They brag to advertisers about how many "hits" their site receives. I suspect some sites set up a poll for something like, "Should people be put to death for eating cheese?" and then they have folks log into the Cheese Lovers' chat rooms and post messages urging everyone to run over there and vote.

In any case, no one thinks they reflect any real sense of the public. In fact, on a given day, the same question can be asked in a dozen different online polls and "yes" will win by 90% at one site while "no" wins by 90% at another. Everyone knows they're a massive fraud.

So why is it that when I log onto a site that has one, I can't resist voting in it? And I feel a little better if the results show that my view is leading?

• Posted at 1:35 PM · LINK

William Woolfolk

Another obit on comic book and TV writer William Woolfolk, who passed away last month.

• Posted at 11:41 AM · LINK

No More Losers

Here's yet another in the long list of things that bother me about the California recall...

An awful lot of our political discourse in this country is driven, I am convinced, by folks who fan flames for monetary gain. I don't think there's much chance of Hillary Clinton running for president in 2004 but a number of groups have found that spreading that notion as probable is a dandy way to shake donations loose. Or here's a better example: In my quest to read political views of all stripes, I wound up on some right-wing spam lists. During the latter months of Hillary's husband's presidency, I was bombarded with e-mail that claimed to have uncovered Bill's plan to cancel the 2000 elections, declare some sort of martial law in the country, and remain in the White House indefinitely. He was not only going to not leave, he was going to sit there and pass all sorts of ultra-liberal edicts, and we had to all donate money to this group to save the U.S. from him and all the rules he was going to put in place making abortion and homosexuality mandatory.

Stuff like that. And yes, some on the left do similar things though they've never had boogeymen quite as potent for this purpose as the Clintons. I also get spam urging me to fork over bucks for groups that promise they will sue to reverse evil legislation. I suspect many of these appeals are employing the Springtime for Hitler business model: They find a hot-button issue that will generate donations, collect a few million in the cause of righting that wrong, spend a small amount to lose the case, then keep the rest.

Anyway, I smell a new opportunity here if the recall succeeds. People get very emotional when they lose elections. They're mad, they're frustrated, and they're always vowing "this isn't over" and "we'll be back." I love it when propositions lose 80% to 20% and the TV cameras go to the "victory party" of the 20% side. You see otherwise intelligent individuals treating it as a minor setback and swearing to start gathering signatures the very next day. It's always an amazing view of the human capacity for outright denial of reality.

And with the concept of recalling someone like Gray Davis comes an even greater means of denying it's over when it's over. Losers are emotionally vulnerable and there will be those who will seek to exploit that vulnerability. Every time someone loses an election, we'll see some opportunistic cash-raiser declaring that the so-called winner is, at best, only momentarily legitimate. They'll say this as they pass the hat to fund the recall. It could become very lucrative to treat duly-elected officials as temps.

We're already partway to this mindset. About twenty seconds after Bill Clinton first won the presidency, some of his detractors were talking of impeachment. This was long before Ms. Lewinsky assumed a kneeling position. They just assumed that if they kept at it long enough, they'd find some means of aborting a Clinton presidency. A pretty large percentage of Bush opponents still say he didn't win the election, and some of them are bandying about the "i" word.

That's the new trend in politics: You never really lose an election. You always have some group claiming the voting machines were rigged. Now, you'll have others taking blood oaths to oust the alleged winner before he takes the oath of office. No more will you hear, "Well, I didn't support him but now that he's going to be our senator [or governor or mayor or president or whatever], let's all rally behind him and support him and hope he succeeds because if he does, we all win."

No more of that. Now it'll be, "I didn't support him and I don't recognize his right to govern. The recall drive has already started."

Don't believe me? Wait 'til the evening of October 7. I don't know if Davis will retain his office or if not, who will take over, but I'll bet you there will be those who will be denying it's over...especially if we wind up with a winner who gets 40% or less, which seems likely. Before that vote is even certified, people will be gathering signatures and soliciting donations for a sequel which may or may not happen. And denying that whoever is governor is legitimate. Yeah, that'll help straighten things out in Sacramento.

• Posted at 11:24 AM · LINK

A Confession

A few weeks ago on this site, I posted three covers from comic books based on TV shows produced by the Danny Thomas-Sheldon Leonard company. Since then, a number of folks have written to me to ask questions about those comics, including wondering who drew them. Well, the comic based on The Danny Thomas Show was drawn by Alex Toth. The comic based on Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C. had a first issue drawn by Warren Tufts (who was best known for Casey Ruggles, one of the greatest adventure newspaper strips) and then it was subsequently drawn by some artist whose identity is unknown, but all he did was swipe/trace poses from Tufts' issue. And the comic book based on The Dick Van Dyke Show wasn't drawn by anyone since it didn't exist.

Yeah, I'm sorry: It's a phony that I cobbled up using an old still and pieces from other Gold Key covers. I wish they had done such a comic and if they had, it would probably have been drawn by Dan Spiegle. But they never did so I whipped up the cover to one to see if anyone would notice. A few folks (like Scott Shaw!) did. A much larger number of correspondents wrote to say they remembered owning the Dick Van Dyke Show comic long ago and most asked who did it and where they might find a copy. To save these folks from prowling eBay for all eternity, I hereby confess to the hoax, beg your forgiveness and ask the logical question: They did The Danny Thomas Show and Gomer Pyle. They also did, from the same TV production company, The Andy Griffith Show in comic book form. Why didn't they do The Dick Van Dyke Show?

• Posted at 4:04 AM · LINK

August 10, 2003 • Current • August 8, 2003