Sunday, April 3, 2005

Felix the Auto Dealer

Another chapter in the saga of a great cartoon character. [Los Angeles Times, registration may be required]

• Posted at 11:29 AM · LINK

Game Show Heaven

Those of you watching GSN's reruns of The Name's the Same have probably noticed that they went through their entire supply of episodes hosted by Bob & Ray and are now into ones hosted by Clifton Fadiman. Mr. Fadiman was a scholarly game show host, more suited to his previous stint on Information Please and somewhat out of place on this one. The most interesting thing about the episode they ran the other night was that one of the panelists was the great playwright, Marc Connelly. I always admired his work, especially his collaborations with George S. Kaufman, but I don't believe I'd ever seen him on camera before. That's one of the joys of these hoary game show reruns — the history you get to see.

GSN has about two weeks of The Name's the Same hosted by Fadiman, and then that brings us to the end of that series. They'll replace it beginning April 18 with a string of old, short-term game shows. One is What's Going On?, which was on briefly in 1954. This was kind of a cute idea. There were six celebrity panelists each week. Three were in the studio and three were in various remote locations, doing something like ice skating or flicking a chicken or whatever. The three in the studio had to guess where each of the other panelists was and what that panelist was doing. A gent named Lee Bowman was the host.

Another is Choose Up Sides, which was an awful program on which Gene Rayburn presided over competing teams of kids doing the kind of silly stunts by which adults were humiliating themselves on Beat the Clock. Fortunately, the show only lasted a little less than three months in 1956 so GSN can't have that many episodes, and something else will soon follow...maybe Two for the Money, which was hosted by Herb Shriner.

In the meantime, they're currently airing episodes of What's My Line? from late 1955 with Fred Allen on the panel. We have less than three weeks before we hit the 3/11/56 show, which was his last. Either tonight or tomorrow night, they should run the one from 11/20/55, on which one of the contestants was George Petty, the famed illustrator of beautiful women. Like I said, there's history there.

• Posted at 10:49 AM · LINK

Early in the A.M.

I was going to post another story here about Greg Garrison tonight but my lovely friend Carolyn is here, and she's more important than updating my weblog. That's a high compliment since updating one's weblog is pretty darn important. Anyway, I'm going to be busy tomorrow so I may not get to the Garrison tales then, and I have jury duty this coming week. But I will get around to them. Promise.

(Hey, I wonder if the willingness of professionals to serve on juries would improve if they equipped those waiting rooms with wi-if access...)

• Posted at 1:10 AM · LINK

Moose Mall

As my comrade Jerry Beck notes, the Dudley Do-Right Emporium (seen above in a photo by Ken Plume) is going away. It closed some time last year or maybe the year before, and will soon be razed...though parts of it may be preserved for historical purposes. Jay Ward built the place in '71, around the time his last real series, George of the Jungle, ended production. Jay had an oddly-shaped parcel of land up on Sunset Boulevard and part of it was occupied by his studio. He put the gift shop up on a corner of it and stocked the place with Rocky and Bullwinkle merchandise, some of it made especially for the store.

It was always fun to drop into the Emporium. For one thing, you might be waited on by some employee of Jay's studio, some member of his family...or even Jay, himself. A lot of tourists bought Bullwinkle cels and Rocky dolls there, unaware the guy with the handlebar mustache who was taking their money was Jay Ward. Depending on his mood, he might or might not tell them. Once, the story goes, someone asked him if it would be possible to get Mr. Ward's autograph in their book. Jay said, "Well, I'll check but he's usually passed out drunk by this time in the afternoon." Jay took the autograph book into the studio building on the other side, signed the page...then took it back to its owner, explaining, "You're lucky. I caught him before he got to the heavy stuff." On request, he might also procure the signature of his shows' mythical executive producer, Ponsonby Britt.

Most of the time when I went up there, the person behind the counter was Jay's wife, Ramona. Well, actually, most of the time there was no one there and the place was closed. I forget what they claimed their hours were but the truth was that it was open whenever someone there felt like opening it. For the last decade or so of his life, Jay pretty much ran the animation part of his business with the same "if I feel like it" attitude. I worked with him on an unrealized project that, had it gone forward, would have been one of the biggest, most lucrative things to happen to him in years. His partner, Bill Scott, was excited about it. Jay's attitude was kind of like, "Well, if you want to...okay..."

Actually, I'm surprised the Emporium stayed around as long as it did. When it opened, there was a lot of tourist foot traffic in the area, owing to a bank across the street that was always staging events and exhibits. (Does anyone here remember the Guggenhead Travelling Exhibition of Awfully Modern Art? It was a touring show of art parodies and it was at that bank, whatever it was called then, for months at a time. People used to visit it and then hike over to the Dudley Do-Right shoppe to buy Boris Badenov t-shirts.) Nowadays though, no one walks on that part of Sunset, it's darn near impossible to park, and that piece of land has to be worth a fort-yoon. Or at least, it's worth too much to hold a store that's almost never open and which probably didn't make much money when it was. I think Jay did it the same way he did his cartoons: As much for fun as for the income. Sorry that Jay, his store and that attitude are no longer with us.

• Posted at 1:01 AM · LINK

April 2, 2005 • Current • April 4, 2005