Tuesday, December 23, 2003

The Menace That Was Dennis

I was never much of a fan of the Dennis the Menace newspaper strip by Hank Ketcham. It was nicely drawn but there was something about its attitude towards children that struck me as needlessly condescending. At times, it was almost like Dennis was not a kid but a pet in need of better housebreaking. This attitude extended to the TV show with Jay North but only occasionally to the comic books, which are among the most overlooked of great comics. Ketcham didn't write or draw the comics (nor his strip's Sunday pages) and they were generally the work of writer Fred Toole and artist Al Wiseman. (That's Fred above with the mustache; Al's the guy in the photo at right.) The stories were very clever and some were long enough that you could make a case for them as among the first graphic novels. In an article on his weblog, Fred Hembeck explains what he loved about them. I'm not sure he's right in identifying Owen Fitzgerald as the Dennis artist whose work he once didn't like, but otherwise he pretty well summarizes my thoughts. (Hembeck is a darn good cartoonist, himself. Browse around his site and see for yourself.)

• Posted at 3:16 PM · LINK

The Fifty Best (Well, Not Really...)

Starting in a week or so, Comedy Central loses their package of Saturday Night Live reruns to the E! network. As a last hurrah, the former is airing what they're billing as "The 50 Greatest SNL Episodes" in five 10-hour blocks, one block per day starting tomorrow. It probably won't be the fifty best since E! already has custody of the first five seasons, and Comedy Central doesn't have the last few years, either. So I guess it's actually the fifty best of the years 1980-2001, as ostensibly determined by this online ballot at the Comedy Central website. (The voting seems to be closed now, judging by the fact that the voting function on that site is no longer operative.)

So what will Comedy Central be running? So far, they seem to be keeping it a secret but I wouldn't mind seeing some of the episodes they haven't rerun in a long time. The shows done during the absence of Lorne Michaels have rarely been seen the last few years. For some reason, both Comedy Central and the NBC All Night rerun (early on Sunday A.M.) have occasionally announced an episode from those seasons and instead aired one from the Michaels years. It was like they tried to sneak one in and got caught before they could broadcast it. They've also given the shortest of shrift to shows from 1986-1993, airing only a couple of selected ones over and over.

No word yet on which ones E! is going to run, but the channel seems so fixated on who's hot this week, you suspect they'll concentrate on the ones spotlighting current stars. I hope not because there was some really good work on episodes featuring people who don't have a big, heavily-promoted movie or CD coming out next week.

• Posted at 2:02 PM · LINK

Going Up

The eBay auction of my pilot script and bible for Dungeons and Dragons is rolling along. Up over a hundred bucks now with several days yet to run. Let's see how high this thing will go...

• Posted at 11:59 AM · LINK

Source Materials

Here's Robert Scheer with one side of an issue that has me genuinely on the fence. Increasingly, government officials are leaking stories to reporters that turn out to be either not quite true or not at all true. The leak is calculated to advance the official's agenda and may even be a crime...but the ethics of journalism are supposed to protect the leaker: The reporter is honor-bound not to reveal who told him or her what they printed, in effect covering for someone who may have broken the law. There seems to me little doubt that someone in the government, figuring they could hide behind that shield, planted phony stories about Wen Ho Lee, the scientist who was locked away in solitary confinement for nine months and hit with all sorts of espionage charges that later evaporated. The stories were obviously intended to scare the accused into some sort of plea bargain and confession to a crime for which there was otherwise insufficient evidence. Should the reporters who printed those stories be compelled to reveal their source? One doesn't want to see that kind of sleazy trial-by-phony-leak tactic go unpunished but one also doesn't want to see the mechanism put in place to uncover legit news sources. So I dunno...

Same thing with the Valerie Plame leak. Someone may have broken the law by "outing" a C.I.A. operative but if so, that someone can never be caught as long as the reporter who received and published the leak can claim First Amendment protection. I see both sides of the argument in this one. Anonymous leakers and sources have helped the press uncover enormous amounts of wrongdoing and scandal...but they have also created a lot of it, as well.

There has always been a certain conflict between the two positions. Back during the Impeachment Festivities, it seemed pretty evident that Ken Starr's office was leaking anti-Clinton info to reporters in probable violation of the law. Reporters who were printing those stories were also reporting that others were charging Starr with such leaks, and then they were publishing Starr's denials. This made for an odd situation. If Starr was not leaking, then reporters who knew the charges to be false were publishing them without comment. If he was leaking, then reporters were publishing his denials, knowing full well they were lies. Either way, someone was wrong and the reporters knew who it was and weren't telling.

Going back a few more scandals: During Watergate (and before that, the Pentagon Papers), we heard a lot about the right of reporters to protect their sources but also more discussion of the need to weigh that right against possible abuse. The Wen Ho Lee case sure feels to me like a definite abuse. Before it, I felt that nothing should ever force a member of the working press to divulge a source. Now, I'm not so sure.

• Posted at 11:46 AM · LINK

Les Tremayne

Another great voice has been silenced. Les Tremayne starred in many memorable radio programs, including The Falcon and The Thin Man before becoming one of those "works all the time" character actors in motion pictures and television. His listing in the Internet Movie Database is woefully incomplete but even it will give you some idea of how many times you saw and heard this man. Comic fans will probably best identify him for his role as Mentor on the 1974-75 Saturday morning series, Shazam! and he also was heard on many cartoon shows. He was the Voice of Christmas Present in Mr. Magoo's Christmas Carol, the voice of Churchy LaFemme and other characters on The Pogo Birthday Special, and the villain in dozens of Hanna-Barbera shows. Here's a link to an obit and I thank Tommy Raiko for calling it to my attention.

• Posted at 11:10 AM · LINK

Changing Trains

Justin Foster (a reader of this site) informs me that Thurl Ravenscroft's narration on the Disneyland Railroad has been replaced by another voice. I will never ride it again.

• Posted at 2:33 AM · LINK

Idle Chatter

Eric Idle has finished his "Greedy Bastard Tour" which means (sadly) that he's finished his online tour diary. I dunno how long they'll leave it up over on this web page but I suggest you go enjoy it now, while you still can. A wonderful read it is...and certain installments, especially the last few, will give you a good idea of why it's unlikely we will ever again see the surviving Monty Python guys reunite for much of anything.

By the way: Carol Cleveland, who played women for Python whenever they needed a real one, now has her own website.

• Posted at 12:23 AM · LINK