Friday, March 4, 2005

Set the TiVo!

Late Saturday night (aka early Sunday morning), NBC is rerunning the full, 90-minute version of the third-ever episode of Saturday Night Live. Actually, as you'll note from the above ticket, it was still called NBC's Saturday Night at the time. I believe this was the last episode before they changed the name.

This is the one hosted by Rob Reiner who, it is said, freaked out after a disastrous dress rehearsal and almost walked off the show. It was good he didn't because the show miraculously came together for the live broadcast. It was not only a decent episode but it represented a giant step forward in the program finding its format and identity. The first week was a jumble of disparate segments with occasional appearances by host George Carlin. The second week, Paul Simon hosted and it turned into a long Paul Simon special, including a reunion concert with Art Garfunkel. The third week, with Reiner, it actually began to look like a sketch comedy show.

There are some nice moments in there. Andy Kaufman does his "Pop Goes the Weasel" routine. John Belushi does his Joe Cocker impression. Near the end, there's a brilliant film by Albert Brooks in which he attempts to perform open-heart surgery on someone.

The Brooks film was the subject of much upset. He was contracted to produce films of a certain length and that week, he handed in one that was more than double the agreed-upon running time. No one at SNL questioned its cleverness but already, they were beginning to sense that long film pieces did not work on a live show, and members of the cast and writing staff resented that Brooks was usurping so much of their screen time. There was a strong push to chop it down or even dump it but the host, Mr. Reiner, was one of Brooks's closest friends and he insisted it air without cuts...which it did. The whole matter pretty much soured the relationship between the show and Brooks, and one might note that after he delivered the remaining films on his contract, he disappeared from Saturday Night Live forever. He never appeared on it again, and has gone largely unmentioned in the various histories and retrospectives.

Anyway, you might want to catch the episode...or at least, Brooks trying to become a surgeon. It's buried at the end, right after a spot with the Muppets. Their "Land of Gorch" segments, though done live in the studio, were otherwise in the same category as the Brooks efforts — another good idea at the outset that didn't fit as the show found its form. As it did, everyone wanted to dump everything besides the host spots, the musical guests and the sketches. (John Belushi reportedly lobbied to dump the hosts and everything else that didn't feature John Belushi.) I always thought it was a shame Jim Henson didn't do more with Gorch. The bits didn't fit into SNL but the characters were funny and oddly appealing. I'm guessing there was some contractual problem where he had to share revenues with NBC and/or Lorne Michaels, so he opted to invest his time and energy in projects he could own outright.

• Posted at 9:45 PM · LINK

Super Men

One other thing I should have mentioned about Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. If you want to research them on the Internet, it may help to remember that though they were two of the most important creators in comic book history, an amazing number of comic book fans and scholars cannot spell their names. Sometimes, it's Siegal. Sometimes, it's Schuster. Often, it's Siegal and Schuster, and there have been other permutations. I have a magazine here somewhere that says that Superman was created by Simon and Schuster.

Think I'm exaggerating? Take a look at this Google search.

This probably shouldn't bother me as much as it does...but I lived through the period when DC Comics pretended Jerry and Joe had never existed...when they even published histories of the character without mentioning their names. I recall vividly sitting in the Writers Guild Theater for an early screening of the 1978 Superman movie, which gave them their first on-screen "Created by" credit after Time-Warner management came to its senses and gave them that, plus pensions. I didn't particularly like the film but that moment in the credits — when their names came up and a huge cheer erupted from the audience — was one of the most thrilling moments I can recall spending in a movie house. Considering what it took to get those names on their creation, it seems like we oughta make an effort to spell them correctly.

(The story of how Jerry and Joe waged that battle, and how master cartoonist Jerry Robinson acted as their representative, is told in the new book by Gerard Jones, Men of Tomorrow, which I reviewed/plugged here.)

• Posted at 9:04 PM · LINK

Today

Spent all afternoon at the dentist having old, cracking fillings drilled out and replaced with new ones. This is about as much fun as...well, as spending all afternoon at the dentist having old, cracking fillings drilled out and replaced with new ones.

Came home to find the entire neighborhood was without electricity. I called up the Department of Water and Power to inquire if anyone had reported it (someone had) and to inquire as to when it might be restored. The lady on the phone gave me an answer that roughly translated to "Sometime between now and the next time the Red Sox are in the World Series." Her tone of voice seemed to favor the latter so I spent the next few hours trying to find a flashlight without dead batteries and wagering whether the power would be on before the Novocain wore off. The Novocain beat the electricity by about an hour. I'm going to hurriedly post a few things before it goes off again...

• Posted at 8:46 PM · LINK

Super Story

As a few of you may know, the families of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster have taken legal action to reclaim the copyright to Superman and certain allied characters. I think this is the most important news story to hit the comic book industry in decades but most of the sites that report on the business take the Jeff Gannon approach to news and just print press releases, so they're a lot more interested in who's signed a long-term contract to ink Iron Man. In fairness, some fans are more interested in that, too...but I think it's Big News. The business was largely founded on the success of Superman, and many companies thrived on the concept that you could lock up the rights to someone's idea, boot them out and then make all the money there was to be made off it. Because some decent folks at Time-Warner and DC Comics came to power, Siegel and Shuster did not live out their declining years in poverty and humiliation.

The two men received a respectable pension, and Jerry was at great peace the last time I saw him, which was only a few weeks before he passed away in 1996. Nevertheless, if he can see what's going on, I'm sure he's cheering on his widow and children as they pursue legal avenues that were not open to him for most of his lifetime.

As I said, a lot of the comic book community has not heard about this legal action, and some of what has circulated is in the Erroneous Rumor category. Some more of it has taken the form of panicked fans, worrying that Superman will be plucked out of the DC Universe, rupturing the precious continuity of the Legion of Super-Heroes or otherwise disrupting their collections. (It is highly unlikely that Superman will ever not be a Time-Warner property. The squabble is pretty much about how the super-millions of bucks the character grosses will be rewarded, and whether the saga of Siegel and Shuster will have a happier, albeit posthumous, ending.)

One of the few places where you can get solid info is the news site, Newsarama, where Matt Brady has been going beyond cut-and-pasting press handouts and filing stories like this one. Some of it's a bit complicated but Matt's presentation seems to be both fair and accurate, and I wanted to call your attention to it. Keep your eye on his site for further developments.

• Posted at 10:40 AM · LINK

TeeVee 4 Me

Starting March 18, TV Land will be airing two hours of SCTV every Friday night. A year or so ago, this would have come as glorious news...and it's still not bad news, I suppose. But now that many of those shows are readily available on DVD, it's like, "Oh, that's nice."

If it is bad news, it's only because some of us would like to see the many TV channels we receive resurrect some old shows that are not otherwise available. I remember that when I got my DirecTV satellite dish, I thought I was in for more of a feast than I got. I figured that with all the channels I could now receive, surely one of them would be running old Sgt. Bilko episodes...or Car 54, Where Are You? It turned out they were all running The Andy Griffith Show and M*A*S*H, sometimes many times a day, instead of more obscure shows that I think I'd like to see again.

You never know. Sometimes, you see something again after many years...and the main fascination is to wonder what you ever saw in the program and if maybe they've refilmed them since then. So while I think I'd like to see certain old favorite shows again, maybe not. I recently watched some old episodes of Hennessy, The Good Guys, Calvin and the Colonel, and a few others I'd once enjoyed. In each case, there was a small "nostalgia rush" and the fun of seeing how well my memory stacked up against what it was remembering. Beyond that though, there has usually been a slight letdown. I felt more like a distant spectator of those shows than I did, back when I used to look forward to them.

But then, maybe that's me and not the shows. As I get older, I find that TV is more and more something I watch while I do something else. I'm running last night's What's My Line? rerun right now as I write this, and I'm watching with about 20% of my concentration. That's just enough to scan for things that are worthy of my full attention and if one of those pops up on the screen, I'll stop writing this and watch for real. This is one of the luxuries of the TiVo. I can easily record things to watch when I feel like it, and I can watch them with this kind of divided attentiveness because I can always rewind if need be.

I wish we had available to us, a wider array of old TV shows — and old movies, for that matter. But I'm not sure I'd watch most of them with more than about a fifth of my attention.

• Posted at 9:19 AM · LINK