Friday, August 13, 2004

Game Show Stuff

It's been a long time since I mentioned Game Show Network's Black-and-White Overnight bloc. That's because it hasn't been all that interesting. On weeknights, they've been running old episodes of Password (which I find generally boring) and old episodes of What's My Line? (which they've run many times before). On weekends, it's Beat the Clock (which I find unwatchable) and more What's My Line? But things will soon be changing.

The week of September 20, Password gets bumped for a week of Winner Take All, a long-forgotten show which is most notable for the fact that it was the first TV game show hosted by Bill Cullen. (They're running two episodes hosted by New York radio personality Barry Gray, then three with Cullen.) At the end of that week, September 24, they'll be up to the last network episode of What's My Line? This was one where host John Daly signed in as the Mystery Guest.

September 25, the weekend What's My Line? reruns will be replaced by Play Your Hunch, a long-running show which was hosted for most of its run by Merv Griffin. Based on what I remember of it as a child and the few I've seen since, this was a pretty good show.

On September 27, Game Show Network will begin offering cable companies a West Coast satellite transmission of its programming. At the moment, it looks like this will not be available on Dish or DirecTV. Also on that date, the Black-and-White Overnight time will shift to an hour earlier. This will screw up those of us on this side of the country who TiVo Letterman from 11:35 to 12:37.

So what's going to replace What's My Line? on weeknights as of September 27? I don't know yet. Rumor has it we may get another run of I've Got a Secret or To Tell the Truth, both of which have aired before on GSN.

But enjoy the current What's My Line? reruns while you can. The one that's on tomorrow morning should be the 9/4/66 episode with Buddy Hackett on the panel and Joey Bishop as the Mystery Guest. Sunday morning's is from the following week with Warren Beatty as Mystery Guest. This was the first episode of the show broadcast in color but apparently only black-and-white kinescopes of the prime-time What's My Line? survive. In a week or two, I'll give you a Head's Up when they rerun the one with Judy Garland as Mystery Guest, which has a lot of history in it.

• Posted at 10:40 PM · LINK

Garfield Question

Here's a question that a number of folks have sent me...

We've been enjoying our new Garfield and Friends DVDs. However, one thing baffles us. U.S. Acres seems to have turned into Orson's Farm. Do you know how or why this happened?

Yes. When Jim Davis did the U.S. Acres newspaper strip (on which the cartoons were based), the strip was distributed in certain other nations as Orson's Farm. The "U.S.A." pun didn't translate and even in some English-speaking countries, they wanted to change it to not remind readers that it was a foreign feature. When we did the cartoons, each title card was filmed twice, once with each name, so that when the shows were distributed overseas, they could air with the same name the strip had in each country. The DVD set was made off a set of negatives that had Orson's Farm title cards.

And to answer another oft-asked question: The second set of Garfield and Friends DVD is scheduled for December and the third for May of 2005. The second will not have any special features and I don't yet know about the ones to follow.

• Posted at 8:03 PM · LINK

Badtime Charley

I'm watching CNN coverage of Hurricane Charley as it slams into the much-maligned state of Florida. I worry for my friends down there and I feel sorry for everyone in the path of this monster. I wish we spent less time in this country sniping at one another and fighting, and more time working together to minimize the destruction from this kind of disaster.

And not that it's in the same category but I wish TV news would get over the notion that you have to send reporters to stand out in the wind and rain to report that it's windy and raining. It's not "on the scene" news coverage. It's cheap theatrics.

• Posted at 5:11 PM · LINK

Set the TiVo

Debuting this Sunday on the Travel Channel: The Marvel Super Heroes' Guide to New York City. Stan Lee, Roy Thomas, Joe Simon, John Romita and other great creators of Marvel Comics participate in a tour of Manhattan. The emphasis, as I understand it, is on locations where great scenes from comic book stories were set. It airs at 8:00 PM and again at 11:00 PM on my satellite dish. Check your local listings.

• Posted at 4:56 PM · LINK

Recommended Reading

Fred Kaplan discusses the mess we're in in Iraq and how there may be no solution. I would like to believe he's wrong but suspect he is not. Please, someone...point me to an article that is more than Bush-Cheney puffery and offers a more optimistic appraisal.

• Posted at 12:55 PM · LINK

Recommended Reading

Gail Sheehy discusses what Donald Rumsfeld did the morning of 9/11. Between now and Election Day, I think we're going to hear a lot more about this, and about what Bush did (or didn't do) that morn.

• Posted at 9:33 AM · LINK

Recommended Reading

Here's a New York Times double feature: This article reports the shocking news that one-third of Bush's tax cuts in the last three years have gone to people with the top 1% of income. Could have knocked me over with a feather.

Then, keeping that in mind, you might want to read Paul Krugman as he claims that Bush is trying to shift the tax burden from those who make money through investments to those who make money by working. Someday in this country, someone will come along who will believe in tax cuts across the board that do not slash the burden of one group at the expense of another.

• Posted at 12:59 AM · LINK

Making It Up As You Go Along

Had a nice evening at Vince Waldron's monthly "Totally Looped" show up in Hollywood. Here's how this works: Vince, who is an award-winning writer-director-producer, assembles a troupe of talented actors skilled in improvisational comedy. Then he shows film clips that these folks have not seen. Then they have to do live dubbing, ad-libbing dialogue for the clips to make them address a topic that the live audience has suggested. The troupe last night consisted of (I hope I don't leave anyone out) Dan Castellaneta, Rick Kuhlman, Deb Lacusta, Rick Overton, Angela V. Shelton, Danny Mann and Edie McClurg.

If I may digress slightly — and since it's my weblog, no power on Earth can stop me — the Art of Improv Comedy has sustained some body blows in the last few decades. About the time performers started going from Saturday Night Live to huge movie careers, a lot of actors who didn't really have the chops for improv, or even a lot of interest in it, decided that was the new route to film stardom. Suddenly, improv classes were flooded with applicants...and that wasn't, in and of itself, a bad thing. Improv training is a good thing for actors even if they intend to spend the rest of their careers working off scripts. It trains them to hold onto the character they're playing and how to react to others in a scene and, most of all, how to listen. If you're doing an improvised scene, you'd better listen.

Not every actor can improvise. Some of the most honored actors of all time, starting with Sir Laurence Olivier and working down from there, could not. Others should simply not try. In the late eighties, I went to a number of alleged improv shows which were not really improv and/or not really good. The former were playing the old Morey Amsterdam game. If someone challenged Morey to tell a joke about a kangaroo, he often came back with this one...

So one day at the zoo, the kangaroo goes crazy. He screams and then he leaps out of his cage and runs off. The zoo keeper runs up to a lady standing by the cage and asks, "What happened?" The lady says, "I don't know. I just tickled him with my umbrella and he jumped up and ran off, that's all." So the zoo keeper says, "Well, you'd better tickle me 'cause I'm the one who's got to go catch him."

That's not a great joke but it was great for Morey's purpose because you could plug in any animal. If they wanted an ocelot joke, the lady tickled an ocelot with her umbrella. If someone asked for a platypus joke, the lady tickled a platypus. A lot of what gets passed off as improv comedy these days is like that: Fill in the blanks. So it's nice to see the crew Mr. Waldron has assembled. They're genuine improv performers, operating sans template. I especially love the little rambling introductions that Dan Castelleneta stammers out for the clips. Not only do we not know where he's going with them, it's obvious that Dan doesn't really know, either. That's the beauty of improv and the fact that he's very funny is an added bonus.

I would single out the other performers individually but I have a problem. As they dub the clips, they're sitting there in the dark doing rapid voice changes so it's not always easy to tell who's talking. Afterwards when we were mingling, I wanted to compliment whoever came up with a couple of specific lines but I wasn't sure which one to praise. My sense was that these people are all really good. There were some tech problems with the projector during the show, with some clips ending in premature blackouts. Being good improv performers, the players just worked it into the scenes and kept on going. The s.r.o. audience was delighted.

The next "Totally Looped" show is September 9 and details are at this website. I'll remind you when we get closer to that date but if you're near Hollywood (they're in the theater right next to the Improv on Melrose) you might want to jot it down now. They don't do these shows often enough.

P.S. At the end of the show, Edie McClurg announced that Dan C. just won his third Emmy for his voiceover performances on The Simpsons. Good pick.

• Posted at 12:55 AM · LINK