Monday, September 5, 2005

Freberg Overseas

Our friend and hero Stan Freberg will be making a couple of appearances in England later this month. On September 19, he'll be the subject of a show for BBC4 Radio which will emanate from The Comedy Store over there. Here's the info if you're there and want to attend. When I find out how to listen in on the Internet, I'll let you know.

• Posted at 9:47 PM · LINK

Highly Recommended Reading

The best bit of commentary I have seen so far on what's happened in and to the Gulf Coast comes from Keith Olbermann. Here's a link to a transcript of it and here, to whet your appetite, is the first part...

Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff said it all, starting his news briefing Saturday afternoon: "Louisiana is a city that is largely underwater..."

Well, there's your problem right there.

If ever a slip-of-the-tongue defined a government's response to a crisis, this was it.

The seeming definition of our time and our leaders had been their insistence on slashing federal budgets for projects that might've saved New Orleans. The seeming characterization of our government that it was on vacation when the city was lost, and could barely tear itself away from commemorating V.J. Day and watching Monty Python's Flying Circus, to at least pretend to get back to work. The seeming identification of these hapless bureaucrats: their pathetic use of the future tense in terms of relief they could've brought last Monday and Tuesday — like the President, whose statements have looked like they're being transmitted to us by some kind of four-day tape-delay.

But no. The incompetence and the ludicrous prioritization will forever be symbolized by one gaffe by the head of what is ironically called The Department of Homeland Security: Louisiana is a city...

Politician after politician — Republican and Democrat alike — has paraded before us, unwilling or unable to shut off the "I-Me" switch in their heads, condescendingly telling us about how moved they were or how devastated they were, congenitally incapable of telling the difference between the destruction of a city and the opening of a supermarket.

Go read the whole thing. As soon as I find a good video link to Mr. Olbermann's comments, I'll post it, too.

[UPDATE: Found one! Here's a video link.]

• Posted at 8:00 PM · LINK

Monday Afternoon

A correspondent wrote to me, apparently misunderstanding something I'd written here, that he too wanted to hear no more about Hurricane Katrina. What I meant was that those of us who've done all we can (donations, mostly) cannot continuously think about it and nothing else. We have to --- to use a phrase I've never liked — get on with our lives. But we also can't make like nothing happened down there. There's a lot to fix and in our own microscopic ways, we can and must apply some pressure to those who are in a position to fix it.

We had also better get used to hearing about the Gulf Coast devastation because there's a lot more bad news to come, starting with an ongoing body count that will probably be rising for many months. It wasn't long after the towers fell on 9/11 that the world had some sense that around 3,000 lives were lost. This tote's going to mount in continous and sickening increments for a long time as they find bodies in houses and drained communities, and as people who were ill or injured succumb. The Mayor of New Orleans is saying it may hit 10,000 and I'm not sure how he can possibly know that now...but no one's rising to claim he's way off.

And then we're going to have hearings about what went wrong. Actually, one assumes there will be hearings about what went wrong but we may first have to go through the hearings to determine whether we should have hearings about what went wrong. If we do, we're going to hear a lot of reports like this one, excerpted from an online account by NBC newsguy Brian Williams...

In a strange way, the most outrageous news pictures of this day may be those of progress: The palettes of food and water that have just been dropped at selected landing zones in the downtown area of New Orleans. It's an outrage because all of those elements existed before people died for lack of them: There was water, there was food, and there were choppers to drop both. Why no one was able to combine them in an air drop is a cruel and criminal mystery of this dark chapter in our recent history. The words "failure of imagination" come to mind. The concept of an air drop of supplies was one we apparently introduced to the director of FEMA during a live interview on Nightly News on Thursday evening. He responded by saying that he'd been unaware of the thousands gathered at the Convention Center. Later that evening an incredulous Ted Koppel on ABC was left with no choice but to ask if the FEMA director was watching the same television coverage as the rest of the nation.

In fact, read Williams's entire report. I'm sure there's a lot to disaster relief that the experts know and we don't. But even interrogating the so-called experts, Williams can't figure out why things weren't done that any of us could have thought of. (The "director of FEMA" he mentions is Michael Brown, the guy who was fired from running horse shows and then our government put him in charge of disaster preparations. I'm not sure if Mr. Brown is going to take all of the blame or none of it, but either option would be grossly unfair.)

The hearings may be more explosive than most because, I suspect, Americans are going to be madder at this than they have been about 9/11 or Iraq. The 9/11 deaths do not seem to have been preventable and there have been few assertions of human error or negligence by those "first-responders." Besides, many of the rescuers on 9/11 were victims themselves, and it all occurred before we realized we had to do more to prepare for such disasters. This hurricane is an indicator that a lot, maybe even most of that Homeland Security appropriation went for pork and the illusion of better preparation for disaster. You get the feeling we spent $30 billion just to have some rude people make us take our shoes off at the airport? Don't you wish we'd spent about 2% of that on the levees in Louisiana?

Meanwhile, the Iraq deaths are occurring out of sight, out of mind, and a lot of people think they're for a good cause. The hurricane deaths — which if that mayor's right, could top 9/11 and Iraq combined — were for no good purpose and it's going to be argued that a lot of them were preventable and due to negligence...and there are even a few class and race cards in that deck. Does anyone think they won't be played? What's more, it all happened right here in the U.S. of A., live on our TV screens, and was covered by reporters on the scene, many of whom were furious at what they witnessed. If someone tries to argue that everything that could have been done was done, it's going to be interesting to see how Brian Williams and Ted Koppel, to name but two, will report it.

• Posted at 1:50 PM · LINK

One More Blondie Link

Mentioned today in Pluggers. Thanks to Jim Davis — no, not that one, a different one — for calling it to my attention.

By the way: Call me dense but I just checked the Pluggers website and learned what that panel is all about. I never really pondered what a "plugger" was and if I had, I'd probably have assumed it was a guest on a talk show or someone with a lot of electrical equipment. Turns out, it's a person who plugs along, getting through life and not giving up. Not a bad thing to be in these times...or to keep in mind on Labor Day.

• Posted at 11:33 AM · LINK

More DVDs 2 Buy

Okay, I'm gonna plug some shows I worked on. The folks at Fox Home Video are in the home stretch of releasing all 121 half-hours of Garfield and Friends on DVD. Needless to say, you want to own all five volumes but just in case you're going to pick and choose, here are some of the highlights of each, plus Amazon links...

• Volume 1 features guest voice work by Larry Storch, Chuck McCann, Lennie Weinrib, Stan Freberg, Dick Beals, Pat Buttram, Robin Leach and some other fine people. (There's a story about the Robin Leach episode over here and I swear, it's true. I have witnesses.) My three favorite episodes on this set are "Garfield Goes Hawaiian," "The Lasagna Zone" and "Magic Mutt."
• Volume 2 includes voices by Chick Hearn, Frank Buxton, Jesse White, Shep Menkin, Carl Ballantine, Stan Freberg, Kenneth Mars and others. This set includes "Invasion of the Big Robots," which is the one where Garfield makes a wrong turn and finds himself in an episode of a show that looks a lot like The Transformers. We hired Transformers artists to do some of the graphics and Neil Ross, the voice of Slag and Springer from that show, to do the extra voices and the whole thing went waaaay over budget. Also on this set is "Video Airlines," which is one of the ones people keep asking me about. It's the one where Jon and Garfield go to see the movie, "Kung Fu Creatures on the Rampage II."
• Volume 3 contains episodes with guest voices by Jonathan Winters, Jack Riley, Marvin Kaplan, Paul Winchell, Rod Roddy, Pat Buttram and others I'm forgetting. The "budget buster" in this set was "Mistakes Will Happen," which was the episode where we tried to see how many errors we could make in one cartoon. We actually had to redo some scenes because the animators screwed up and did them right. Also on this set is a U.S. Acres cartoon called "Big Bad Buddy Bird," which is the one where I got the Standards and Practices department of another network (not CBS, which aired the series) mad at me because I criticized the silly "pro-social" values they had been forcing us to put into cartoons.
• Volume 4 includes guest voices by Victoria Jackson, Paul Winchell, John Moschitta, June Foray, Jewel Shepard, Bill Kirchenbauer, Don Knotts, Buddy Hackett, Carl Ballantine and others I'm leaving out. This is the volume that includes "Picnic Panic," which is the episode with the ant song that everyone asks me about. (I wrote the lyrics and Ed Bogas wrote the music and did the voices of the ants.) This set also includes "The Garfield Rap," the animation for which was so complicated that the guy in charge of budgets at the studio glared at me every time I went in for a month.
• Volume 5 is scheduled for release on December 6 but you can order now. When you get it, you'll find the rest of the episodes — and by the way, the ones on Volumes 4 and 5 and a few on Volume 3 have never been syndicated since their original network airings. This last volume includes guest performances by, among others, Shelley Berman, Brinke Stevens, Bill Saluga, Mark Hamill, Imogene Coca, Eddie "The Old Philosopher" Lawrence, Arnold Stang, George Foreman, Kevin Meaney, Tracy Scoggins, Rip Taylor, Harvey Korman and John Byner. There's a sequel to the "ant" episode and one where we parodied Barney the Dinosaur (voiced by Stan Freberg) and got an angry letter from that character's proprietors. It also has "The Man Who Hated Cats," which is my all-time favorite episode — a mini-musical with the great George Hearn in the title role.

In addition to the guest voices, all of the sets feature the superb vocal acting of the late, wonderful Lorenzo Music as the title cat, plus Thom Huge as Jon, Gregg Berger as Odie and hundreds of other people and animals, and the talents of Frank Welker, the also late and wonderful Howie Morris, Julie Payne, sometimes Gary Owens and Desiree Goyette, and other folks not mentioned here. There are no special features apart from some ads, including some for the live-action/CGI Garfield feature...and by the way, a sequel to that film is in the works and no, I'm not working on it.

I might also point out that Amazon has these tremendous package deals if you look around a bit. For instance, Volumes 1 and 2 bought separately cost $31.98 each. Purchased in a bundle, they go for $63.96, which saves you...well, let me call up the calculator since I've forgotten how to add and I'll do the math on that for you. Aha! I see that if you order both at once, you save...absolutely nothing. Well, I guess you have to click one less time so that's something. Anyway, if you order any, I hope you like 'em. This show was the most fun I've had in close to 30 years of writing animation.

• Posted at 12:56 AM · LINK

Monday with Blondie

Blondie mentions in B.C., Curtis and in Cathy.

I suspect that's about the end of the mentions in other strips. If so, it's a bit puzzling why some strips participated and so many — including ones depicted in Blondie — did not. There was one Blondie strip (this one) featuring Frank and Ernest but I didn't see any Blondie mention in that strip. Dilbert turned up in Blondie but not vice-versa. Some of the press reports said that Zippy the Pinhead would be there but they were apparently wrong. Even a lot of strips from the same syndicate, King Features, didn't opt in although a few more will appear in Blondie before the week is out. Given that Blondie is one of the most widely-circulated strips in the world, you'd think that a lot of cartoonists would see it as a great opportunity to get their characters seen on comic pages that don't normally include them.

• Posted at 12:56 AM · LINK