Saturday, July 2, 2005

Saturday Night Not Live

My cable modem has picked a splendid time — the July Fourth weekend — to malfunction so I'm in on a dial-up connection. This will limit posting here a bit until Tuesday afternoon when a technician is supposed to come make it well again...although the last few times the cable went out, I made an appointment for a service call and then, six hours later, I was able to cancel it because the thing began to miraculously work again. Each time, of course, was after they'd assured me that they'd done all they could from their end and that the problem had to be on mine. They're saying that this time, too, so maybe it'll right itself before then.

If not, not only will posting be so lethargic but I'll be even farther behind on e-mail than I am now. Forgive me if yours is languishing in my "to be answered" folder. It's in good company in there.

Several folks have written to ask about the photo of George Reeves I posted earlier...why Superman is gold, did I change it, did some stupid person color it, what? I was going to color-correct his uniform to blue but then decided to leave it the way I'd found it. It's a cropped pic from the lobby card from Superman in Scotland Yard, and I did a little Photoshop Magic where something covered part of his arm. I copied a hunk of the other arm, flopped it and pasted it over to complete the Man of Steel's manly elbow. But I didn't change the coloring.

In the black-and-white episodes — one of which that was — Reeves wore a costume that wasn't colored properly but it "read" on film as the right shades. Sources conflict as to what the hues of that actual uniform were, and how many times they changed but I don't think they were ever quite these colors. I think the person who assembled the lobby card took a photo of Reeves in the not-blue suit and enhanced its colors but, deliberately or not, didn't change the main color to Superman's traditional blue. So they took the wrong colors and made them more wrong. If anyone has more info on this, let me know...but don't expect a reply until after Tuesday.

• Posted at 9:25 PM · LINK

Super DVD News

You can't get it until the middle of October but Warner Home Video will soon be bringing out the first season of The Adventures of Superman on DVD — 26 episodes plus special features. There were 104 in all, so assuming this one sells, we'll probably see three more volumes spaced out over the next few years.

If you have to buy one set though, this is the one. Over the five years the series was in production, it got increasingly sappier and chintzier, becoming more of a kids' (only) show, filmed increasingly indoors and relying on stock "flying" footage to supply all the action. They got away with it because the title character was so appealing and because George Reeves was so perfect in the role. So were Phyllis Coates and Noel Neill as Lois Lane and Jack Larson as Jimmy Olsen. (Noel replaced Phyllis after the first season, but I somehow saw all the Noel Neill episodes around eleven times before my local TV station ever reran the Coates shows...so Ms. Neill will forever be my Lois Lane.)

So the first 26 were generally the best. Partly because of the mood and partly because they were in black-and-white — but mostly because of the background of the folks who worked on them — these episodes have that old "movie serial" feel. Later, when the producers seemed to want to see how many of the scenes could be set in the Daily Planet offices, it felt more like a cheap, studio-bound TV show. It's interesting that while they were saving every possible dime on the last 52 shows, they did spring for the extra money to shoot those episodes in color. This showed amazing foresight since at the time, there was no market for the show in color. The negatives were just locked away and those episodes were syndicated in black-and-white until such time as it became economically feasible to go back into the vault and strike off color prints.

As soon as they're offered, I intend to order the first DVD release. And, to be perfectly honest with you, I'll probably order however many sets they bring out, even the last seasons. But I'll betcha I play Volume One more often than all the others combined.

• Posted at 1:18 PM · LINK

Winch Remembered

Here's an article about Paul Winchell's life. And here's another and here's another and here's another. And while we're at it, here's one more.

• Posted at 11:34 AM · LINK

Sneaking Up On Us...

We are edging towards the day when many of us will be wishing aloud that the Comic-Con International in San Diego could be postponed a week or two. But it's coming, it's coming. The Thursday Programming Schedule is now posted but you don't need to read it since you'll only be going to my panels.

In a few days, I'll post a list here of tips to help you enjoy/survive the convention but in the meantime, you can start by reviewing this.

In the meantime, the AccuWeather people are forecasting partly sunny conditions with a high of 72 degrees and a low of 64 for the convention weekend. Sounds like a pretty typical San Diego climate.

• Posted at 10:27 AM · LINK

A Checkered Experience

They had a problem at DC Comics in the mid-sixties: Sales on everything except the Batman books were inching downwards...and Batman was only doing well because of the TV show. At the same time, sales on the new Marvel line were going up. In fact, the Marvel books were gaining at almost the exact same rate the DC books were losing. DC's head honchos began to study the Marvel books, trying to figure out the reason for this aberration of the marketplace.

In later years, some of them would deny it but others say it was true; that the DC execs thought the Marvel books were horrible — bad art, bad stories, bad characters, bad everything. DC artist Mike Sekowsky used to do an impression of the company's publisher throwing down a Marvel book and gasping, "This is garbage! The readers have no taste!" At some point, an explanation began to emerge for the ghastly sales trends. Obviously, it went, readers were getting confused and were buying non-DC books thinking they were DCs. It was decided that something had to be done to make their covers more distinctive and identifiable. Editorial Director Irwin Donenfeld would later receive the credit/blame (pick one) for adorning DC's covers with a hideous checkerboard pattern across the top. They called them, I'm afraid, "go-go checks" and it was the ugliest thing anyone had done to comics since Dr. Wertham called them "blueprints for delinquency."

No, they didn't help sales. Matter of fact, DC's slide hastened...and while there were certainly other reasons for that, it was suggested that the go-go checks had made things worse. "Readers could now spot the DC books much quicker, making it easier to avoid purchasing them," was how Sekowsky put it. After eighteen months, they got rid of the checks and not long after, they got rid of Irwin Donenfeld, which was quite a firing since his father had founded the company. So I guess you could say that "go-go checks" across the top of a cover was a pretty awful idea...

...which is why I was amazed to see TV Guide try it recently. One wonders if someone there did it as a kind of inside joke for those who remember the DC experiment. Yeah, maybe the Nascar theme suggested a checkered flag motif but the reference there to "Dynamic Duos" also invokes the 1966-1968 Batman comics. Either way, they're lucky that they only did it for one week. If they'd put go-go checks on their covers regularly, they'd be out of business in a year.

• Posted at 1:06 AM · LINK

July 3, 2005 • Current • July 1, 2005