Wednesday, February 16, 2005

Wabbit of Tomorrow

Animation webloggers are reacting with varying amounts of horror today over a press report that Warner Brothers Animation is prepping updated (like, into the future) versions of Bugs, Daffy and other classic characters. The goal here is a new franchise that takes the old, beloved players and styles them in some cutting-edge manner that will appeal to a new, younger audience. There will tentatively be a TV show called Loonatics, accompanied by a whole line of merchandising...and some folks are reacting as if it's all the greatest sin of blasphemy since someone first heckled the Holy Ghost.

I yield to no one in my reverence for the classic Looney Tunes cartoons and the men who made them, but it may be too early for talk of petitions, boycotts and nuking the Time-Warner building. First off, though some of the news reports are playing this as a "new displaces the old" move, that is clearly not the case. The original, true Bugs and Friends will be no less available than before, and I can't imagine the high-tech models usurping their place in history. The new cartoons would have to be pretty damn wonderful to make a dent in that.

This is just another repurposing from the marketing principles that brought you The Muppet Babies and Disney Babies and Yo, Yogi! and that show with a Batman in the future and, of course, Baby Looney Tunes, the new Duck Dodgers show and even Tiny Toon Adventures. When you have a successful property or group of properties and you've merchandised it to the max, the next step is to find a way to repackage it into something new — but not so new that it loses the heat of the established material. Some of those shows or campaigns were pretty good, some perhaps less than good...but in no way did they destroy or dislodge the underlying classics.

Secondly — and lastly, for now — I'm always uneasy when I see a new show or movie being condemned when it hasn't even been written yet. In articles like this one, we see that — and I quote: "Names for the new characters haven't been finalized, but they are likely to be derived from the originals: Buzz Bunny, for example." In other words, it's real early in the development process. Very little has been done and its unlikely than any of that is set in lucite. I can understand the temptation to leap to say something's a hopeless idea. I've done it myself at times, and it's not impossible that WB is announcing the project at such an early stage in order to gauge reaction. Still, there ought to be more than two daubs of green on the canvas before you say the painting stinks. If it eventually does, there will be plenty of time to say that later, after it actually exists.

I may have mentioned this before but many years ago, around the time I started edging into the TV business, I attended a lecture by a very accomplished, successful producer...a man with many prestigious credits. He told us that we had to recognize and avoid what he called "The Marley Ideas" — notions so dreadful that they were dead from the moment of conception. As an example, he told us that one TV network was then considering an idea so terrible, so guaranteed to fail, that everyone involved with it should be immediately fired for programming malpractice. And the way he described it, it sure sounded like you'd be an idiot to think that they could make a weekly series out of the movie, M*A*S*H.

• Posted at 5:04 PM · LINK

Recommended Reading

Here's a rather meaty live chat with the Baghdad bureau chief for Newsweek, Rod Norland. It's all about the elections in Iraq and despite the attempts of some questioners to lump Norland in with extremists on either side, it comes off as a good, common sense look at the situation over there and what it means.

• Posted at 11:22 AM · LINK

More on Amos and Andy

I may be guilty of some sloppy phrasing in the previous message so let me run through this again. And before I do: The photo above shows the voices of Amos and Andy. That's Charles Correll on the left of Fred Allen, and Freeman Gosden on the right.

Now, then: The Amos and Andy radio show actually overlapped the TV show. The Amos 'n' Andy Music Hall left the airwaves on November 25, 1960 (date courtesy of Anthony Tollin, who knows old radio better than anyone I know except Frank Buxton). The TV show was on from 1951-1953 in first-run. Reruns followed and they were very popular at first but ratings decreased and protests increased around the end of the fifties. CBS, which owned the program, formally withdrew it from syndication in 1966 but by that time, very few stations were airing it.

I have a story about this. Elsewhere on this site, there's a story about how I used to sneak in to watch Red Skelton rehearse his show over at Television City in Hollywood. This was made possible by a friend of mine named Mike who had a friend who worked there. One day, Mike's friend tipped him off to be at a certain trash dumpster outside at 3:00 in the afternoon and to bring a car. Neither Mike nor I drove so we got a friend who did and we went over there...and waited and waited. Sure enough, around 5:00, some people began dumping old 16mm prints of TV shows into that dumpster. They threw out maybe 500 cans of film and once they were gone, we began scooping them up and loading them in the car. I think we grabbed about a hundred before a security guard came by and chased us off.

Some of the films turned out to be unwatchable because the film had decayed or curdled, but most were perfect. There were about thirty episodes of Amos and Andy, a lot of G.E. Theaters hosted by Ronald Reagan, some kinescopes of soap operas and a couple of Groucho Marx treasures. In 1962, Groucho followed his long-running You Bet Your Life show for NBC with the similar-but-not-successful Tell it to Groucho for CBS. There were a number of those, plus a film — and we could never figure out why CBS had this — that had served as the pilot for the TV version of You Bet Your Life. It was a film of a recording session for the radio version intended, I guess, to see how the show looked so they could determine what they'd have to do to dress it up for television.

Mike and I showed some of these films at schools and a few public exhibitions, and then he got an offer and sold them all to some film dealer. The You Bet Your Life film has made the rounds of collectors and has been aired on the PBS series, I Remember Television. I suspect that all the copies of it that are around are copies, of varying generations, from that print we fished out of the trash. So, probably, are a lot of the Amos and Andy episodes that are now available on tape.

The TV show hadn't been withdrawn in '61 when Gosden and Correll went to work on Calvin and the Colonel, but the reruns were drawing protests by then, and everyone knew they had a problem. They also were out of work since, as noted above, the radio show had ended. Actually though — and I knew this but I wrote it wrong — they didn't create the show. It was created with them in mind by Bob Mosher and Joe Connelly, who had written the Amos and Andy TV show, and later went on to create Leave it to Beaver and The Munsters.

As some of you noted in e-mail to me, there were a couple of Amos and Andy cartoons done in the thirties. What none of you know is that there was talk of one in the eighties. Around '82, someone at CBS either discovered they had the rights to Amos and Andy, or thought they had the rights, and they pressured the Ruby-Spears animation studio to develop it as a possible Saturday morning series. Ruby-Spears, in turn, pressured me into writing the pilot...which I did, knowing full well the thing would never get on the air. As I recall, the day I handed in the script, the CBS exec called up and said, "We're not sure we have the rights...we have the lawyers working on it." And that was the last time the show was ever mentioned in my presence. I don't recall if it dawned on me at the time but what I wrote was basically an episode of Calvin and the Colonel, but with the characters turned back into human beings.

• Posted at 1:15 AM · LINK