Stephen Colbert's speech last night was at least as critical of the Washington press corps as it was of George W. Bush. Take this section...
But the rest of you, what are you thinking, reporting on NSA wiretapping or secret prisons in eastern Europe? Those things are secret for a very important reason: they're super depressing. And if that's your goal, well, misery accomplished. Over the last five years, you people were so good over tax cuts, WMD intelligence, the effect of global warming. We Americans didn't want to know, and you had the courtesy not to try to find out. Those were good times, as far as we knew. But, listen, let's review the rules. Here's how it works: the president makes decisions. He's the decider. The press secretary announces those decisions, and you people of the press type those decisions down. Make, announce, type. Put them through a spell check and go home. Get to know your family again. Make love to your wife. Write that novel you got kicking around in your head. You know, the one about the intrepid Washington reporter with the courage to stand up to the administration. You know...fiction.
This was a dinner for White House correspondents, let's remember. And if you were trying to tell them that you think they're a bunch of incompetents who have damaged the world by not doing their jobs, I'm not sure what you could have written that would convey that charge better than the above.
The more I think about it, the more I think Colbert made a conscious decision not to care if the audience laughed. I mean, if all you care about is making White House reporters guffaw, you do jokes about the cramped offices, the hate mail, the lack of respect they get from others, etc. Whatever you think of the guy, he didn't come out there and pander to the audience for laughs. He insulted the audience. Perhaps he totally misjudged the room but I think it's more likely he just plain said what he thought of them.
I've received about forty messages from readers of this site about how they felt, ranging the gamut from "he was hilarious" to "not one giggle." I think both extremes overstate and I'm inclined to agree with this e-mail that came from a Rob Rose...
I think my feelings can be summed up quickly:
1. He had some pretty brilliant lines — some of which were perhaps a bit too pointed for that room.
2. Probably not quite how I would have approached it myself — while I personally loathe the Bush administration, if I were working the stage while the President was sitting there, I would probably not want to kick him while he's down quite as much as Colbert did.
3. On the other hand, it was I think pretty true to Colbert's usual style — which means the blame really lies with whoever decided to hire him. They got what they ought to have expected, I think.
There are times when I see some politician I don't like getting slammed and I feel sorry for them. In spite of what anyone says, these are human beings and even the ones I think are destructive are in some warped way trying to make life better. But then I think about that destruction and about the fact that often, they don't seem to recognize it. I often recall a remark I heard on some political discussion show years ago about one elected official. Some reporter said, "He does not connect what he does with its impact on people's lives. If you tell him someone died because they couldn't afford medical care, he says 'That's terrible' and genuinely feels sorry for them...but refuses to accept that it might have something to do with that bill he signed that cost a million people their health insurance." Even the politicos I support at times do things that devastate lives and our sympathies ought to go to the folks who get killed in wars, lose their homes, etc., not to the ones who, even inadvertently or indirectly, caused or failed to stop that damage.
I also remember that most politicians seem to be fine with calling their opponents mentally ill or criminal or pathological liars, and that they voluntarily get into a line of work where others are going to do that to them. Nixon used to use the old ruse of saying, "What people say about me doesn't bother me but it upsets my family" — to which a reasonable reply was, "Well, maybe you should have thought of that before you decided to seek public office." It sort of comes with the job description.
The man who booked Colbert for the event — apparently the gent you see on the video introducing him — did what they always do: He went for the highest-profile topical comedian he could get. That was probably Stephen Colbert. I'm not sure why they even have a comedian at these things since the audience never seems all that interested in sitting there, listening to an outsider mock them and what they do. But you're right: They got what they should have expected. And everyone Colbert insulted, Bush especially, should have thick-enough skin to endure it.
In the previous message, I posted the following two links to the best copy of Stephen Colbert's routine I could find online. This upset a couple of readers of newsfromme because — as I hadn't noticed, sorry — the links are to a site that also hosts a fair amount of porn. At the moment, I can't find another complete link to a decent copy so for those of you who want to risk connecting with a site that also contains naked people, here they are: Part One and Part Two. If and when I find a "safer" link, I'll post it.
My e-mailbox is stuffed with messages from people telling me either that Colbert was inarguably hilarious or definitely unfunny. Most of these people seem to think he is always whichever way they found him to be at the Correspondents' Dinner.
I haven't quite decided yet what I think of Stephen Colbert's speech at the Correspondents' Dinner though I'm getting there. I will say that he showed great courage to do some of that material in front of that crowd. I'd be curious to hear reports from people who were actually in the room since the audience was not well-miked and I'm not sure why certain folks were selected for the audience reaction shots. One did get the idea that Mr. and Mrs. George W. Bush weren't delighted with the floor show...as is explained in what I suspect is the first of many articles about the performance.
I've never been to one of these press dinners but I'm guessing it's a very hard room for a comedian. The people aren't there to be entertained. They want to mingle and hobnob with the famous. They'll sit still for a speech by the president, whoever he is at the moment, because it's his presence that elevates the importance of the event they're proud to be attending. But apart from that, I'll bet most of the crowd is eager for it to be over with so they can go back to fraternizing. The gent who was hosting seemed to be having a fair amount of trouble getting the audience to pipe down and listen to the program.
I'd also be curious to know what Colbert's goal was...and it may not have just been to entertain the folks out front in the formal wear. If it was, he probably went about it the wrong way. When you hammer the president that much right in front of him, you make an awful lot of people uncomfy...and not just the ones who side with the guy. I thought some of Colbert's lines were brilliant but if I'd been in the room, I might have spent more time looking at the reactions of others (Bush, especially) to some of them than laughing. On the other hand, Colbert's main objective may have been to cultivate a certain image as a performer...or simply to express his views. He could well have succeeded in one or both of those.
I'm going to watch it again tomorrow and see how I feel about it then. It may be it's like one of those events where the boss is being ridiculed but everyone feels okay about laughing as soon as the boss starts laughing. Only in this case, the boss never started laughing.
Yesterday, I told you I liked Penn and Teller. Today, I tell you I like David Copperfield...at to some extent for the same reasons. Both acts took magic to new places. While I have a great respect for someone who can do the linking rings as well as Jonathan Pendragon or the cups-and-balls as well as Johnny "Ace" Palmer, I also like guys who come out on stage and do something you've never seen before. Or at least, it doesn't look like anything you've ever seen before. (A lot of good "new" magic is putting a new facade on an old structure.)
I know people mock Copperfield's poses and the way he portrays himself...and I find that kind of thing funny and/or creepy when it's done by lesser magicians who haven't his skill or crediblity. But there's also a "perfectionist" aspect to his work that I admire and a constant desire to do something different, something that the audience (the members of it not on his payroll) will long remember. Someone posted to Google Video a bit from one of his specials that I heard people discussing in the Ralph's Market, days after it first aired on CBS. It's another one of those tricks that you can figure out if you have the slightest common sense but he does it so well that it works anyway. Here it is...
If you just want to catch whatever Stephen Colbert does at the Correspondents' Dinner tonight, C-Span is currently saying that the post-meal program will commence around 9:30 PM (all times Eastern), George W. Bush will speak at 10:05 and the Prince of Truthiness will go on around 10:25. Right after the dinner is concluded, C-Span will re-air the entire thing and they're saying that will start "around Midnight," plus they'll run it all again on Sunday at 12:30, which I assume means 12:30 PM.
That's what they're currently saying on-air. The schedule on the CNN website says something else. This is not unusual for C-Span.
Also, I believe Mr. Colbert is the subject of a story tomorrow night on 60 Minutes.
Here's a birthday shout-out to Lennie Weinrib, one of my favorite friends and one of the most talented. I first worked with Lennie on a show for Sid and Marty Krofft for which he was re-creating the role of H.R. Pufnstuf. Lennie was not only the voice of Pufnstuf but wrote most of that character's first TV series. There was a time there when you couldn't turn on your TV or radio without hearing Lennie: He had hundreds of commercials running and he was on a dozen cartoon shows (including The Amazing Chan and the Chan Clan, written about here a few days ago).
This period followed the one where you couldn't turn on your TV without seeing Lennie doing a guest role on some TV series. One time a few years ago, I was flipping channels on my satellite dish and I caught him simultaneously on reruns of The Munsters and Emergency, plus some channel was running The Thrill of It All, a Doris Day movie in which he had a small role. The still above is from one of his several appearances on The Dick Van Dyke Show. And at some point in there, he also had a period as a film director. Anyone here ever see Beach Ball? Or Wild, Wild Winter?
He's pretty much retired now and living outside the U.S. but we still talk and e-mail, and in honor of his birthday, I'm actually packing up a box of stuff I've been promising to send him for several months now. In fact, I like him so much, I'm even going to go mail it.
Tonight, CNN is rerunning a Larry King Live from last Tuesday on which King interviewed Mark Felt, the gent who was recently revealed to have been Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein's infamous source, "Deep Throat." The interview was pre-taped (i.e., not aired live) at Felt's home and it comprised part of the show. The rest of the hour was a live panel discussion with Woodward, Bernstein, Ben Bradlee and members of Felt's family.
The panel discussion is of little interest due mainly to King's lazy interviewing style. At one point, he asked, referring to Felt, "What manner of man is this?" Which might have been an interesting question if he'd directed to Woodward, who had the friendship with Felt and who met him in that parking garage many times and who visited him recently. But King put it to Bernstein, who never met Felt and who speculates with as much authority as you or I might have had. Then King asked Ben Bradlee if he ever had any doubts about Felt's validity and he lets Bradlee get away with talking about how perfectly accurate Felt was as a source. The moment cried out for an interviewer who would cite some of the questionable "facts" Deep Throat is quoted as providing in All the President's Men...but King obviously didn't know about them.
By contrast, in the interview with Felt, King asked most of the right questions, perhaps because he was reading them (in some cases, as if he'd never seen them before) from notes prepared by someone else. The discussion, which looks like it was heavily edited, is actually a pretty decent chat with Felt, who's a lot more lucid than one might expect from some recent accounts. It also may be the only one we're ever going to get so if the story of Deep Throat and Watergate interests you, you might want to catch the replay tonight. Felt praises J. Edgar Hoover and even Richard Nixon...and while I got the feeling that some of his answers were learned for the interview (the whole show is about promoting a new book), what emerges is a somewhat different set of motives than we might have expected. Felt has bad words for no one, which you have to suspect was not his attitude back when he was helping Woodward. He seems to have had a powerful devotion to the law, which more than any goals involving politics or personal benefit may have been his dominant reason for doing what he did.
In the panel discussion, Carl Bernstein couldn't resist making a couple of comments about how he wished more public servants today were like Mark Felt, placing duty to the truth above duty to the boss. A lot of us feel that way.
I don't know quite why this struck me as funny but when I went to tell my TiVo to record the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner tonight, I laughed to see the listing: "President George W. Bush and Stephen Colbert speak." And I had a mental flash of Colbert looking at this and saying, "Hmm...have to do something about the billing order."
I'm a big fan of Penn and Teller...not of everything they do, of course. I think, for example, they're responsible for what I see as an unfortunate belief among some newer magicians. That's the notion that a trick is hip if you can only work some self-mutilation and stage blood into it. But that's okay. One of the things I like about them is that they try different things and aren't afraid to alienate one segment of the audience to entertain another.
For a time, they had a bad name among magicians for allegedly exposing tricks. I thought that was an unfair rap. The few tricks they did expose were the kind that anyone with an I.Q. higher than their shoe size could figure out in ten seconds. The one exposed in today's video link is just such a trick. I figured out how it was done when I was six. I mean, how else could you put a box containing a live human head on the floor unless the rest of the human was under the floor? There would be little entertainment value in doing the trick and pretending it was fooling anyone. There's plenty in doing it in a way that shows you how hard it is to do.
The clip is from a pretty good TV special they did in 1990 called Don't Try This At Home and it runs a little more than three minutes. So let's blast off...
Rush Limbaugh, as you've probably heard, has reached a pretty favorable plea bargain (his lawyer calls it an "agreement") regarding prescription abuses relating to his drug dependency. He is paying a $30,000 fine (his lawyer calls it a payment to defray the public cost of the investigation) which represents something like two hours' income for the radio host.
The initial news reports said "Rush Limbaugh arrested" and his supporters are scurrying to claim that since he turned himself in, the word "arrested" is inaccurate. Not only is it inaccurate, they say, but the use of it is an example of Liberal media bias.
I don't think I buy either spin. The word is probably technically correct. If there's a warrant out for you and you go in and you're booked and they take a mug shot photo of you, you've been arrested, albeit voluntarily. But the word is also misleading. The first thing people think of it you say someone's been arrested is that the cops came and put the cuffs on him, which is not what happened here.
It isn't bias. It's just the way reporters write stories. A few moments ago, I did a Google search on the words "surrendered to police" and one of the first things I found was this item about an NFL player who's out there setting a wonderful example for today's youth...
Green Bay Packers fullback Najeh Davenport was arrested Monday, accused of breaking into a university dormitory and defecating in a woman's closet. Davenport, 23, surrendered to police Monday and was charged with a second-degree felony count of burglary and a misdemeanor count of criminal mischief, said Richard Master, a Miami Shores police spokesman. The former University of Miami player was wanted on a warrant issued in April.
There was a warrant for the guy and he turned himself in...and they used the word "arrested." I think it's a bad choice of word but it's pretty standard for this kind of story. It wasn't used just to make Limbaugh look bad.
And what do you want to bet that if it had been a Democrat or Liberal in exactly the same situation, Rush would be out there proclaiming that a dangerous, immoral criminal had been arrested...and then a bleeding-heart, weak-kneed prosecutor had given him a slap on the wrist instead of throwing the slime in prison where he belongs? I'm not saying that would have been the proper punishment for Limbaugh. But you know that's what he would have said.
Veteran TV-movie writer Harvey Bullock died last Sunday at the age of 84. Bullock was an amazingly prolific author of scripts, usually in partnership with R.S. Allen, whom he met while writing a radio show starring Abe Burrows in 1949. The team of Allen and Bullock went on to become one of the top teams in television writing with credits on The Real McCoys, The Andy Griffith Show, I-Spy, The Dick Van Dyke Show, The Danny Thomas Show, The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, The Bill Dana Show, The Joey Bishop Show, Rango, Hogan's Heroes, Gomer Pyle, Mr. Terrific, My World and Welcome To It, Love American Style, The Doris Day Show, The Misadventures of Sheriff Lobo, Alice and dozens of others. They also wrote numerous scripts for animation including The Flintstones, Top Cat, The Jetsons and Wait 'til Your Father Gets Home. (Bullock and Allen created and produced the last of these.) This is a very partial list, and I should emphasize that Bullock and Allen wrote some of the most memorable episodes of the TV shows listed. For instance, they did 31 episodes of The Andy Griffith Show, including the one about the goat that ate dynamite, the one where Barney Fife had to track down a cow thief, and the one about Aunt Bea entering a pickle-making contest.
In the world of motion pictures, they wrote Honeymoon Hotel, Girl Happy (starring Elvis Presley), A Man Called Flintstone, With Six You Get Eggroll, Don't Drink the Water and one of my favorite unheralded comedies, Who's Minding the Mint?
Bullock's career slowed in 1981 when his partner Ray Allen passed away...though Harvey did team up in '86 with Everett Greenbaum (whose partner Jim Fritzell had died in '79) and together they wrote the highly-rated TV-Movie, Return to Mayberry, which reunited the characters from The Andy Griffith Show.
Harvey's work will live on and so will his name. In 1974, a police lieutenant character was added to the Batman comic books and he soon became a permanent part of that character's mythology. His name is Harvey Bullock and I don't know quite how it happened but he was apparently named after the writer. I'm told he felt honored.
The annual White House Correspondents Dinner is tomorrow night. I always find this interesting because of the tradition of bringing in some comedian — usually someone who does topical humor — to entertain, right in front of the current president and a goodly portion of the Washington establishment. Last year, they had Cedric the Entertainer but the highlight was a speech by Laura Bush. This year, Stephen Colbert will be toplining and I have a feeling he's going to be quite wonderful.
The event airs on C-Span, which will probably repeat it a couple of times over the weekend. You'll have to keep an eye on the ever-changing C-Span schedule to know when but at the moment, they're planning to run a 90 minute live preview at 8 PM Eastern time and the dinner itself at 9:30. Don't believe the part where they say it'll only run an hour.
Here are two articles about why the price of gas is so high, one by Charles Krauthammer and one by Michael Kinsley. Krauthammer says it's all a matter of supply and demand, completely overlooking the question of whether the oil companies are manipulating the supply, or taking advantage of shortages to crank prices up more than necessary. Kinsley says it's all because of the Iraq War and that we should tax windfall profits to help pay for that war. That makes more sense to me but it'll never happen. It won't even be seriously considered.
Tired of endlessly replaying William Shatner's stirring interpretation of Elton John's "Rocket Man?" Well, do I have a treat for you. Yes, it's William Shatner performing Harry Chapin's song, "Taxi" on an old episode of Dinah Shore's show. (If the ifilm link below doesn't play in your browser, go here.)
I've been a member of The Magic Castle for something like a quarter of a century...maybe longer. For the benefit of those of you who've never been there, it's a private club in Hollywood for magicians...or people who love magicians...or people who can cough up the initiation fee. You have dinner there — and the food, which once was pretty mediocre, is now pretty good. Then you can wander around and look at curios and wonderful decor and perhaps drop by one of several showrooms where magicians perform all evening. You can find out more about the place over at its website.
If you check out the "Now Appearing" page this week, you'll see that a performer named Jason Alexander is appearing in the Parlour of Prestidigitation. This is the mid-sized showroom there — it seats 68 people — and yes, this is "the" Jason Alexander, the guy from Seinfeld. We all know he can sing and dance and do comedy but it turns out, he also does magic. I don't know how good he is because everyone I know who's gone to see him has been unable to get in. Like I said, the room only seats 68.
But I think it's neat that he's doing it. The Castle is notoriously conservative in how much it pays its performers (some would say "stingy") and I would guess it's the worst money he's worked for in a long time. Of course, it's not like he needs it.
I've just read about a dozen reviews of United 93, the new movie about the fourth plane that was hijacked on 9/11. I will save you the trouble of reading any of them. They all say...
This film was made with great respect and integrity and skill and boy, do I wish I hadn't had to go see it.
It'll be interesting to see what the box office is like this weekend. There may be some kind of "thrill-seeking" audience, like the folks who rushed to see The Exorcist after they heard it caused audience members to faint. But I have the feeling that a lot of people will feel the way I did: Wait and see it at home, if at all. This was an option that wasn't available to those who saw The Exorcist when it came out.
I love acts that represent years of hard work and ingenuity — jugglers, magicians, etc. Today, we spotlight a great act...David and Dania, who tour the world doing a stunning "quick change" routine, often at halftime at sporting events. You can see many videos of them at work over on their website but if you click below, you'll see a minute and twenty seconds of what they do...
I get a lot of e-mail from folks who want to get into doing voices for cartoons. I'm always a little baffled by these inquiries. Somehow, the person found my website but though they claim to be passionate about breaking into the business and doing whatever it takes to make that happen, they never seem to have bothered to read the material I put up about how to do this. They just hit the e-mail link and write to ask me to tell them how to make their dreams come true. I usually direct them to this page which they could probably have found in ten seconds by going to Google and searching for almost any phrase similar to "break into cartoon voice work."
It's frustrating because some of the messages are so eager and sincere, and I wish I could give these folks a firmer route into a highly competitive profession. Fortunately, I can now offer a real good piece of advice...easily the best I could give to anyone who's interested in working in voiceover.
On May 9 at the Learning Annex in Los Angeles, my buddy Paul Doherty is conducting a class in how to break into the business. Paul is the head of the Los Angeles Division of Cunningham, Escott, Slevin & Doherty, which is one of the top agencies for folks who announce, narrate and act with their voices. I can't think of anyone who knows more about the field. If I was anywhere near Southern California and trying to launch a career in that area, I'd go to Paul's class and do absolutely everything he said. I'm serious about this.
George Tuska, who's been drawing comic books almost as long as there have been comic books, was born 90 years ago today in Hartford, Connecticut. His first comic art job was in 1939 assisting on the Scorchy Smith newspaper strip and soon after, he went to work for the Eisner-Iger Shop (that's Will Eisner) where he worked alongside artists like Lou Fine, Bob Powell and Nick Cardy, and soon proved himself as bold and skilled as anyone in the field. He drew super-heroes (including Captain Marvel) before going off to fight World War II...and it was upon his return that he really began to shine. Before long, one of the top-selling comics in the country was Crime Does Not Pay, and Tuska was the book's "star" artist — the one others tried to imitate.
He later returned to the Scorchy Smith newspaper feature, this time as lead artist, and drew the Buck Rogers strip for a time. In the sixties, he was a mainstay of the Marvel line, especially on Iron Man, X-Men and Luke Cage, Hero for Hire. For DC, he drew Challengers of the Unknown, Teen Titans and many other comics and he was among the illustrators on T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents for Tower. Lately, in semi-retirement, he's been doing commissions which show he's still got it.
Stan Lee dubbed him "Gorgeous George" Tuska for good reason. He could have also called him "Gentleman George" and "Gallant George," for he is a charming, delightful man. I don't think you're on the Internet, George...but please, someone tell him that a lot of us here on the World Wide Web are delighted to wish him a happy ninetieth.
A cartoonist friend of mine is writing an article about his experiences back in the sixties trying to sell gag cartoons to some of the crummier men's magazines of the day. He would like to know the name of the publishing house responsible for Dude, Escapade, Gent, Caper, something called Gags and Dolls, and a magazine called either Army Laughs or Army Laffs. Can anyone drop me a line and help this person?
I don't think I'm going out this weekend to catch United 93, the new film dramatization of the events that occurred on 9/11 aboard United Flight 93. This is despite the fact that I keep hearing that the movie is expertly made and done with total respect and as much taste as anyone could bring to an account of such a horrible event.
When it was first announced, it sounded like something I'd want to see, that perhaps I should see. I've certainly read enough about the events of that day and seen at least a half-dozen documentaries with actual footage. But now that it's about to open at a theater near me, I think I'll wait for either the DVD or a showing on HBO. That's if I even watch it at all.
It figures to be an emotional experience. In this world, you can't always control when you have your emotional experiences but to the extent you can, I think you should. If I watch United 93 at home via DVD or TiVo, I can start it when I want, stop it when I want, pause it when I want. If I go to a theater, all of that will be out of my control. It's bad enough that it will be out of my power to change what happens on screen. Flight 93 will crash and kill everyone aboard whether I remain in my seat to see it or not...and I guess that's what I'm afraid of: That feeling of powerlessness. At home with remote close at hand, I'll feel a tiny bit in command, maybe not of the fate of that plane and the people aboard but certainly of myself.
You may call it cowardice. I call it not subjecting myself needlessly to things that may be unpleasant. It's the same reason I don't go on roller coasters or hang-glide or listen to The Howard Stern Show any more.
Some movies, of course, you want to watch on a big screen and/or with an audience. This one, I'm thinking I'd rather watch without anyone else around, or at least only with people I feel close to. That's if I watch it at all...and I'm thinking I might. Still, the problem with seeing it in a public place is that it's a public place. I don't want to deal with the grief of the lady sitting in front of me, the kids sitting behind me, the people on either side. I want to be able to cry or to get angry...and I may even feel like yelling at the screen. A good comedy should be shared with others and their laughter can make it a more enjoyable occurrence. But some tragedies — especially the kind you can't do a damn thing about — are best experienced alone.
Our friends at TiVo are quietly rolling out a new model — the Series 2 TiVo DT. This is not the new, improved Series 3 model that's been announced for later this year and which will shock everyone if we actually see it before New Year's Eve. The Series 3 will handle HD-TV. The big difference in the new Series 2 model is that "DT" stands for dual tuner. That means you can theoretically record two shows at once.
Here's why that may not be as wonderful as it sounds. To record two shows, you need two video sources and with this machine, neither one can be a plain, old-fashioned roof antenna and one must be analog cable without a cable box or descrambler. You could have a satellite feed or a digital (or analog) cable signal with premium channels for one...but the other would have to be basic analog cable, meaning you can't record HBO and Cinemax at the same time.
The new model comes initially in an 80-hour configuration with a 180-hour version to follow at some unspecified time. The first ones are supposed to be available already over at the TiVo website but I sure couldn't find them there. If you can't either, they're supposed to be at your local retailers on May 1. List price is $249 but there seem to be some $150 rebate deals available. Alas, that's not the main expenditure. Since lifetime service is no longer available for standalone TiVos, you'll have to pay as you go, which is $12.95 a month if you own one TiVo and an additional $6.95 per month for every other one you own. In addition, most people will probably have to shell out extra to their local cable company to get an analog cable signal as their second input and that will run them at least another ten bucks a month.
None of this sounds all that useful to me, though I suppose it will brighten the television experience for some folks. Overall, it's a disappointment. Most of the time, TiVo is wonderful but it does tend to let us down once in a while.
And here we have the Evian commercial with the naked babies doing water ballet to the song "Bye Bye Baby" from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Notice if you will that every single one of these kids displays more talent than Henny Youngman did in yesterday's video link.
Several folks have reminded me that Howard Hughes is said to have granted permission for the filming of Diamonds Are Forever on property he owned in exchange for, among other considerations, either a 16mm print of the finished movie or (accounts vary) 16mm prints of all the James Bond movies. So he presumably saw Diamonds. We just don't know what he thought of the way the character based on him was portrayed.
Y'know, I find it amazing that the filmmakers got permission. They had to submit the proposal to Hughes' underlings, all of whom were notorious for being terrified of what "the old man" would think about something. Hughes was already somewhat irrational by that time, especially about his privacy and image. This was the period where Hughes would hear that some journalist was readying a book or article about him and he'd call one of his lawyers and say, in effect, "Stop publication or you're fired." If I'd been a Hughes aide at the time, I'd have looked at the script, saw that it included a Hughes-like figure and thought, "Even if the boss okays this, he might hate the finished film and sack everyone who didn't stop it. There's nothing in it for him (or me) so I'd better stop it." But somehow, that isn't what happened.
The arrangement presumably was to allow some filming at the Landmark Hotel. As far as I know, the hotels where the movie was shot were Circus Circus, the Riviera, the International and the Landmark. Of these, the only one Hughes ever owned was the Landmark. (He also at times owned the Desert Inn, the Sands, Castaways, the Frontier and the Silver Slipper. The only one still standing is the Frontier and no one's betting on it being around for long.) The "Whyte House" — the hotel in the film owned by the Hughes doppelgänger, Willard Whyte — was played by the International, which Hughes never owned and which is now called the Las Vegas Hilton.
Scott Blacksher writes with regard to that story I related of Hughes buying TV station KLAS and phoning in to tell them what late movies he wanted to watch each night...
I've spoken to a couple of life-long residents of Las Vegas about things they remember. The funniest story was about how Howard Hughes kept falling asleep while the TV station ran Ice Station Zebra. Whenever Hughes dozed off and reawoke he'd have his people call KLAS-8 to put the movie on the last scene he remembered watching. It wasn't unusual for Vegas to watch the same segment of a movie more than once.
Talk about Video on Demand. I recall talking to one Vegas resident who recalled those days as rather exciting. Every night, he'd turn on KLAS and find some great, surprise movie run uncut and without commercial interruption. This was before home video or HBO so unexpurgated movies on your TV was a big deal. (I remember when we first got cable TV at our house — the legendary Theta Cable with its "Z Channel" — we'd watch anything. It must have been like the early days of talking pictures.)
A website called popcereal likes to scan old Gold Key comics and offer them for your downloading pleasure. They're currently featuring The Amazing Chan and the Chan Clan #1 from 1972 and I'm going to suggest two reasons why you should not download it. One is that the way they have it set up, it'll take you an awfully long time. Secondly, it's not a very good comic...and I oughta know. I wrote it.
It was, in fact, the first comic book script of mine to see print in this country. Previously, I'd written lots of comics published overseas and about a dozen scripts for Gold Key. As you may know, comics are not always published in the order they're written and if you're working on a book that's in no danger of cancellation, it's not uncommon to try and get way ahead. The first things I did for Gold Key were Disney comics that didn't come out until more than a year after I wrote them.
The Amazing Chan and the Chan Clan was a TV show that Hanna-Barbera produced for the CBS Saturday morning season that commenced in September of '72. As I later learned when I worked for H-B, there was always at least one "trouble" show that Joe Barbera would sell to one of the networks and then no one, including Joe, could figure out what to do with. Some years, they had way more than one. Chan Clan was about Charlie Chan and his ten (ten!) children solving mysteries that usually involved figuring out how some "impossible" crime had been committed — a kind of plot that was concurrently being featured on the prime-time show Banacek starring George Peppard. Banacek as a series debuted the same week that the Chan Clan debuted but the TV-Movie pilot for Banacek had aired the previous March when H-B was developing Chan Clan, and that's where someone got the idea.
I didn't work on the H-B TV show but heard about it from some who did. Between juggling all those regular characters and making that kind of gimmicky mystery work each week, the writers had a terrible time. One of them was an actor-writer named Jamie Farr who was struggling with a script when he got the call to run over to the Twentieth-Century Fox studio, put on a dress and make what was intended as a one-time appearance on a new show called M*A*S*H. I always figured that he was glad to do that because it meant he didn't have to write The Amazing Chan and the Chan Clan.
Another problem the show had was with the voice cast. The wonderful actor Keye Luke was signed to play Charlie Chan and then the original idea was to cast all Chinese (or at least, Asian) actors in the other roles. This gave Bill Hanna a fit because it meant hiring performers who were not experienced in voice acting, which usually means long and expensive recording sessions and employing folks who can't "double" (i.e., do multiple roles). With Keye Luke, ten kids and someone to bark for the Chans' dog, that meant twelve regular actors each episode plus two or three more to play the villains, witnesses and other roles in each episode. That's two or three times as many bodies to pay as your average H-B show...and it was actually worse than that. There may well have been good young voice actors around of Asian extraction but the H-B casting people didn't find many. Several members of the cast had to be replaced...in some cases, quietly by Caucasian actors. Among the latter was a then-unknown child actress named Jodie Foster.
So the show was in trouble before it even debuted. Gold Key was then doing the comics based on H-B properties and had first refusal on the new ones. When they were offered The Chan Clan, they refused. The editor there, Chase Craig, was in close touch with writers and artists who worked at H-B and he'd heard about the problems the show was having and how those working on it didn't have much hope for its success. But the studio put some kind of pressure on Gold Key and one day, Chase was ordered to hurriedly get a first issue written and drawn. I got the assignment because I was, he felt, his fastest writer...and I also happened to walk into the office that day.
The show was still a few months from debuting on TV. Chase handed me a pile of storyboards and told me to read them all to get a feel for the property but to write an adaptation of one in particular. I don't think this was an episode by Jamie Farr and his then-partner, Eddie Carroll. My recollection, which may be faulty, is that Norman Maurer wrote it. Anyway, I was assigned to adapt it and later on if the comic continued, there would be original stories conceived fresh for the comics. As Chase explained to me, he preferred to launch a new H-B book in this manner. The studio had approval rights and the people there could get pointlessly picky about the material...but they rarely bothered looking at any issue after the first few. Therefore, it simplified the procedure to do the first issue as an adaptation and maybe the second. They couldn't very well complain that a plot taken from the show was inappropriate.
I wrote the script in one day, as I recall. It was drawn by a wonderful artist named Warren Tufts who is probably best known for his long-ago newspaper strip, Casey Ruggles. Tufts was much admired as an adventure artist but he was a slow, meticulous worker who never felt that the financial rewards matched the hours he put into his art. In the late sixties, he began telling everyone that his goal was to "become Ernie Bushmiller," Bushmiller being the guy who drew Nancy. This was a little like Sir Laurence Olivier announcing that since there was no money in doing Ibsen, he wanted to join the Three Stooges. Warren more or less made good on his goal. He later drew the Pink Panther comic books for several years with a Bushmiller simplicity. Chan Clan represented a transitional period between his adventure work and his more cartoony endeavors. He also dabbled in acting, filmmaking and even the building of airplanes. A few years later, he was killed while test-flying a plane that he built in his garage.
Tufts accepted the assignment without seeing the property because he figured it would go fast. When you drew a Hanna-Barbera comic book, you got a packet of model sheets with key poses of the characters and you could usually trace a lot of drawings right off the model sheets. Wherever possible in Chan Clan, Warren did that. I picked a panel at random to post above next to the cover image, then realized they both have the same pose of the honorable Mr. Chan, certainly copied right off the models. But the comic had so many characters in it and they had to be in so many poses that weren't in the model packet that Warren hated the job...though he did stick with it for all four issues of the comic book. I was luckier: I only did the first issue before Chase decided my services were needed more on Bugs Bunny.
The first time I met Tufts was up in the Gold Key offices, not long after he'd drawn this story. He was just leaving as I arrived and someone introduced us. I told him how much I loved his drawing...and Warren made a curt remark about how he'd hated drawing my script. I said something like, "Gee, I'm sorry you felt that way" and then he left and I went in for my meeting. A half-hour later as I was leaving, Warren was waiting for me in the foyer. He'd gotten to his car, realized I'd probably taken his remarks the wrong way and returned to apologize and clarify. What he'd hated, he explained, was the Amazing Chan Clan and all the characters he'd had to draw for — he felt — insufficient pay. My script was fine, he said...and we wound up going downstairs to the Hamburger Hamlet for a long, late lunch. He was a fascinating man, very passionate about his work, and I guess I'm now happy we had that little misunderstanding because it led to my one chance to spend any amount of time with him. Thereafter when I encountered him, our conversations were brief. He always had to get home and put in more hours on a plane he was building.
Like I said, don't bother downloading the comic. It'll take you forever and you won't see either Tufts or me at our best. But having it online got me to thinking about what went into it. And I also recall the day when I was up in the office and someone handed me a printed copy — the first comic book script of mine to make it to print in English. You never forget your first time...even if it's The Amazing Chan and the Chan Clan.
The late Henny Youngman (who I wrote about here) was a funny guy. I tell you he was a funny guy because you'll have no way of knowing this from today's video link. This is a soundie that Youngman made in 1943. Soundies, in case you don't already know, were kind of the music videos of their day. They were short films that were exhibited mainly in little juke box devices that were marketed in candy stores, bars, restaurants and other such establishments.
Youngman became something of a success on Kate Smith's radio show in the late thirties but he had his heart set on movie stardom. As the story is told, when he got an offer to go to Hollywood and make some films, he wanted to grab it but his contract on The Kate Smith Show prevented it. He begged...and the producers said they'd release him only if he helped them find a suitable replacement. He looked around and recommended an act that was then trying to work its way out of burlesque — two comics named Bud Abbott and Lou Costello. Kate Smith's producers were skeptical but Youngman convinced them Abbott and Costello could work clean and work on radio...and Henny won his freedom. Of course, it didn't work out the way he'd planned. Just a few years later, Abbott and Costello were the hottest comedians in the movie business and Henny's film career never went anywhere. Today's clip pretty much explains why.
As mentioned here before, a bill looming before Congress would give communications companies like AT&T and Verizon an increased role in the control of the Internet. Earlier today, I spent some time trying to decipher just what this means. It sure feels like a dangerous change but a lot of folks opposing it are unable to explain just why it will be bad.
Which doesn't mean they're wrong. These days, it is not uncommon for lawmakers and elected officials to cobble up proposals that sound harmless or even beneficial...and they are until you get down to the particulars. George W. Bush has frequently attempted to drum up support for a plan like the privatizing of Social Security while remaining deliberately vague on the specifics. Lack of details is a perfectly valid reason to oppose a proposal...and of course, a seemingly-innocent change can be Step One in a scheme where we'll absolutely hate Steps Two through Ten and wish we hadn't accepted the first phase.
From what I can gather, the most immediate danger is that there will be nothing stopping the big Internet service providers from deciding to manipulate access for their subscribers...for instance, a company like Verizon might decide to block certain websites that espoused views they didn't want people reading. Or down the line, they could start blocking ads for their competition.
Will these and other abuses occur? I dunno. But it seems to me that there is a value to establishing loud and clear that when we go on the Internet, we expect equal access to all sites. Our supplier should just connect us and get out of the way.
I don't particularly believe in online petitions but there's one at Save the Internet, along with more details and facts. Yesterday afternoon, I phoned the office of my Congressguy, Henry Waxman, and told whoever answered the phone that I hoped my representative would represent my feelings on this matter. Whether or not the pending legislation would damage the World Wide Web may be arguable but this much is not: We now have total freedom. Any changes that matter can only result in less.
As I've mentioned before on this site (here and here and here) a group called the Musical Theatre Guild does staged readings of great old musicals several times a year and does a very fine job with them. These are not easy to do. There are no sets, a bit of basic costuming and very little time for rehearsals...all to present a show that was designed to be presented with vastly more budget and prep time. That they can do it at all is impressive...and sometimes, the results are just as entertaining as a more elaborate, polished version would have been.
Last night, MTG presented one of my favorite shows, Li'l Abner. The Alex Theater was packed with my friends and we all seemed to enjoy the show tremendously. They did it without sets (not even a statue of Jubilation T. Cornpone) and a cast of 21, which is about twelve actors shy of the Broadway configuration. Still, it worked just fine. Damon Kirsche was great in the title role, Melissa Fahn was an adorable Daisy Mae, Joe Hart stopped the show as Marryin' Sam and then Michael Kostroff stopped it again as General Bullmoose. Eydie Alyson was a terrific Mammy Yokum and...well, take it from me: Everyone was good. It's really a funny show and the cast got darn near every laugh in the script by Norman Panama and Melvin Frank. (If you'd like to read up on the history of the show, I wrote about it here and about the movie version here.)
This is a show that needs to be revived for Broadway. A few years ago, I was talking about this with Elliott Caplin, who was Al Capp's brother and the manager of his estate. There was a deal looming to bring the show back — it's never had a real revival — and I was going to be involved in revamping the material. Elliott warned me that the deal might fall through and he knew this because it was about the eleventh deal in twenty years to revive the show and they'd all fallen through. I don't recall if this one fell apart before or after Elliott died but it definitely fell apart. Some day though, someone will do it and I sure hope they do it right. They could have learned a lot about how to do that by seeing what the Musical Theater Guild did last night.
There are two more performances, by the way. One is April 30 at the Scherr Forum in Thousand Oaks. The other is May 8 at the Carpenter Center in Long Beach. I'm almost tempted to go again.
About eleven seconds after I posted the previous item, Del Williams wrote...
What was the name of the movie Howard Hughes liked to watch over and over when he was living in Vegas? I remember there was one that was his favorite but I can't for the life of me recall what it was.
It was Ice Station Zebra, the 1968 movie that starred Rock Hudson, Ernest Borgnine and Patrick McGoohan. According to one report, Hughes would run it at least three times a week and would occasionally get on a kick of watching his 16mm print over and over, back to back, several times a day. He had a Graflex projector with an add-on sound system that allowed him to crank the volume up to almost deafening levels because of his poor hearing. He had a whole library of films that he ran over and over including The Sting and the James Bond films that starred Sean Connery. It is not known if he had any particular reaction to Diamonds Are Forever, which was set in Vegas and featured Jimmy Dean as a Hughes-like billionaire.
The story I love about Hughes' movie watching is that he got hooked on the late night movies being run on KLAS, which was the local CBS affiliate. Just as he'd ordered his staff to have Swanson change the contents of their TV dinners, he sometimes told them to call the station and have them run a particular movie he wanted to see. To make it easier for this to happen, he soon bought the station...and thereafter, he didn't need the 16mm projector much. He'd have his crew phone the station and tell them what movie Mr. Hughes wanted to see next...and that's what would be broadcast to all of Vegas without advance announcement or commercial interruption. Once in a while, he got bored with a movie and he'd have them stop a film in the middle and start a different one. This is very similar to what NBC recently did with Celebrity Cooking Showdown.
One of the technicians who worked at the station later told the story of getting a call late one night informing him that Mr. Hughes wanted to see an episode of Sugarfoot, the old western series starring Will Hutchins. The technician replied that he'd be glad to thread one up but the station didn't have any reels of Sugarfoot in its library. The voice on the other end of the line said, "We'll get you one." A few hours later, a print of Sugarfoot arrived. It had been flown in from Los Angeles by one of the airlines that Hughes owned, probably on an otherwise-empty plane since there were then no scheduled LAX-LAS flights after Midnight. Back before the VCR was popular, home video could be kind of expensive.
From someone named Jason comes this message that I had to share with you all...
As an ex-employee of Ben and Jerry's (I was a former tour guide at the original factory in Waterbury), I can tell you why Vermonty Python is only available in pints: variety. In order to have the most flavors available at a given time, Ben and Jerry's makes some flavors pint exclusives, like Karamel Sutra and Vermonty Python, and some flavors scoop shop exclusives, like Bananas on the Rum. This way, they can keep making some of the less popular flavors that are on the cusp of going to the Flavor Graveyard™. Another reason is convenience. Vanilla Caramel Fudge is only available in pints because it was such a mess in the scoop shops (yes I also worked in a scoop shop, I was almost a lifer) due to the fact that the fudge and caramel pooled to the bottom of the 2.5 gallon tub, leaving a tasty, goopy soup. Hope that sheds some light on the subject.
It does...and it reminds me that I've never told my favorite Howard Hughes story here. It goes back to the period when Hughes was living on the top floor of the Desert Inn in Vegas. That's the hotel that tried to evict him so he bought the place.
Hughes was living in a darkened bedroom with coverings over all the windows. He would spend all day either fiddling with paperwork that never meant anything or watching television. A small, well-paid staff would wait on him, which usually amounted to bringing him fast food or TV dinners. Hughes would see a commercial for Arby's roast beef sandwiches and he'd say, "I want to eat that," so his handlers would fetch him Arby's for all his meals for a week or two. Then he'd see an ad for Swanson's TV dinners and he'd say, "Get me that," and that would be his meal of choice for a few weeks...and so on.
There was a brief crisis when Hughes tried the Swanson's entrees. He preferred the turkey over the chicken, but the turkey came with peach cobbler, which Hughes didn't like. He liked the apple cobbler included in the chicken dinners...so he ordered his staff to call Swanson's and tell them to switch the cobblers. The "Mormon Mafia" (as his employees were called) pretended to do this but what they'd really do is buy one of each dinner and swap the dessert when they served Mr. Hughes his Swanson's turkey dinner.
That's how one of the world's richest men dined for years — Arby's, KFC, Bird's Eye, etc. In the meantime, all the folks who waited on him were feasting at the most expensive Vegas restaurants...on expense accounts.
But that's not the story I wanted to tell. The one I want to tell — and as far as I know, it's true — began one day when Hughes saw a commercial for Baskin-Robbins and decided to try some ice cream. An employee was dispatched to the local 31 Flavors to bring back 31 scoops — one of each current variety. Hughes sampled them all and chose Banana Nut as his favorite. Thereafter, no matter what he had as a meal, he'd be served a scoop of Banana Nut for dessert.
This went on until one day when a staffer noticed their supply was running low. A runner was sent to buy more but he reported back that Baskin-Robbins had rotated the flavor off its current list. Someone called the ice cream manufacturer and asked when it would be back. The answer was, "Some time next year." None of Hughes' employees wanted to go in and tell the old man that they couldn't bring him the Banana Nut ice cream he loved...so they asked the company if they could make up a special batch for Mr. Hughes. The Baskin-Robbins people said they'd be glad to, but the minimum order was a thousand gallons.
Again, no one wanted to bring bad news to the billionaire...so they ordered the thousand gallons. They also rented refrigerated trucks to transport the order from the Baskin-Robbins plant in Southern California to Vegas, and ordered the kitchen manager at the Desert Inn to find space in their refrigerators for a thousand gallons of ice cream. This required several days of work and the purchase and installation of several new freezers.
The caravan of trucks arrived just in time. The day it all got there was the day they served Mr. Hughes the last remaining scoop of Banana Nut ice cream from the old supply. He finished it off and announced, "That was great but it's time for a change. From now on, I want French Vanilla."
What we have here is a clip from The Tonight Show for January 23, 1974. Johnny Carson's guests that night included Jack Benny, Mel Blanc, Maria Muldaur, Dr. Irwin Maxwell Stillman and Jim Henson...and this is Henson's spot with Kermit the Frog. You can see a bit of Benny at the end.
It's really world-class puppeteering. Henson was not a ventriloquist but he manipulated Kermit so well and gave him so much personality that you never really notice that Jim's lips are moving. (Although I always suspected that he grew the beard and mustache, which he did not have when he first began appearing on television, because they helped hide his mouth.) It's also quite charming that Kermit forgets the lyrics to his signature song...
A week or two ago in a monologue, Jay Leno mentioned some new bit of bad news for the White House and he said, "My God, that's the worst thing that's happened to the Bush administration all day."
That's kind of how it's been going lately: Every day or so, there's a new poll or a new revelation or a new document or a new general or former supporter calling for big changes. I'm starting to feel sorry, not so much for Bush and his crew, but for all the people who supported them in good faith. I've backed politicians who turned out to not be as competent or honest as I once thought. It's not a pleasant realization.
The latest blow is tonight's 60 Minutes interview with Tyler Drumheller, who was once the highest-ranking CIA officer in Europe. He says there was plenty of accurate intelligence on Iraq and its alleged weapons and its supposed attempts to acquire yellowcake uranium. The White House, he claims, simply ignored the good intelligence because the flawed reports fit their agenda. This will not come as a surprise to anyone but it adds to the pile-on.
I don't drink beer or have much to do with horses. Still, for some reason, I'm a sucker for the Budweiser Clydesdales and the commercials they appear in. Don't ask why. I don't know.
Here's kind of a nice one. (This is an ifilm embed and they don't seem to work with as many browsers as the others. So if it doesn't play for you, go to this page. You may have to sit through a commercial to see a commercial, though.)
As you may recall, NBC abruptly pulled the final two episodes of Celebrity Cooking Showdown from their Thursday night and Friday night schedules, substituting reruns of other shows.
Looking at it just in terms of immediate ratings, that may or may not have been a good idea. The Deal or No Deal rerun that ran Friday in place of the last episode of the cooking series won its time slot by a hair. Its first half hour got a 5.0 and the second got a 5.9. Would Celebrity Cooking Showdown have done better there? We'll never know but it doesn't seem likely. Clearly, not much of America got hooked on the bake-off to the point of following it every night. Then again, the finale of a reality show usually does better than an average episode, and the competition on other networks that night wasn't strong.
Saturday night, NBC had a stealth airing of the last two installments of Celebrity Cooking Showdown. Nobody knew they were on and each hour got around a 1.8 rating, which is about as poorly as one can do on a major network. In the TV departments of all the Wal-Marts across the country, there are usually enough sets tuned to NBC to get a 1.8. Had they aired the shows on Thursday and Friday, they might not have done as well as the reruns put in their place but they'd sure have done better than a 1.8. I'm curious if the folks at NBC think it was a good trade-off.
Congress is about to vote to give several top communications companies, including Time-Warner, Verizon and Comcast, a certain amount of control of the Internet. I dunno how this will work but I'll bet we won't like it.
There's nothing I like better than a good Laurel and Hardy film, and our link today is to three glorious minutes from one of their best. I'm sorry it's colorized but it's not offensively so...
Comic book/strip artist Richard Waring Rockwell passed away last Tuesday at the age of 85. Dick was a charming gentleman who lived too much of his life in the shadows of others. His name was rarely mentioned without noting that he was (a) the nephew of the great illustrator, Norman Rockwell, and (b) Milton Caniff's uncredited ghost artist on the Steve Canyon newspaper strip for some 35 years.
Dick began his comic book career in 1948 working for Stan Lee at what was then called Timely Comics. He also worked for Lev Gleason, Dell and several other publishers before (and occasionally, after) connecting in 1952 with Caniff. The way the story is told, Rockwell applied for membership in the National Cartoonists Society, which involved submitting a sample of his work. Caniff, who was then in charge of looking over applications, saw Rockwell's and immediately called him to say he qualified for membership and to ask if he was available for work. Rockwell was...and he was soon drawing a lot more of Caniff's strip than Caniff was. For much of the next 3.5 decades, Milton would write the strip, Rockwell would pencil it and ink in everything but the main characters, and then the art would go to Caniff who would finish things off and retouch wherever he deemed necessary.
After Caniff passed away in 1988, Rockwell brought the strip to a proper close and then turned his attention to his other projects. All the time he'd been working on Steve Canyon, he'd also been drawing editorial cartoons, illustrating books and working intermittently as a courtroom sketch artist. This article from 2003 discusses his work in this field. Dick also taught art for over thirty years at New York University and the Parsons School of Design, and had recently been teaching at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City.
I was privileged to work with Dick on a few projects, including a Blackhawk story of mine that he illustrated. He was a dedicated professional who deserved more time in the spotlight than he received.
Some of you may be wondering about Pearls Before Swine and Get Fuzzy. These are two newspaper strips which may or may not be in your local newspaper, both from the same syndicate. Monday's Get Fuzzy (which you can see here) featured a phone conversation. Someone named Alex called a gent who I guess is supposed to be Darby Conley, who draws Get Fuzzy. And I guess Alex is supposed to be someone who works at the syndicate. Alex tells Darby, "I think the FedEx you got last week accidentally had some unpublished Pearls Before Swine in it. Go ahead and destroy those." Darby, who's been busy playing a videogame, is late with his strips for the week...so he gets a fiendish idea.
The rest of this week, every Get Fuzzy strip has been the same day's Pearls Before Swine strip but with the Get Fuzzy characters badly pasted-in over the Pearls Before Swine characters. As an example, here's Tuesday's Pearls Before Swine and here's Tuesday's Get Fuzzy. Furthermore, in Wednesday's Get Fuzzy, we have Stephen Pastis, who draws Pearls Before Swine, making a guest appearance to call Conley and inquire about the duplications.
This is a very funny idea, especially with the bad, obvious pasteovers. Or at least, it's funny if you're reading a newspaper that carries both strips. As Len Wein and I were just discussing on the phone, if your local paper carries only Get Fuzzy — and there are at least a couple that do — you've got to be going, "Whaaa--?" I think I admire the guts that Conley is exhibiting not only to risk alienating a chunk of his readership for the sake of a good joke, but the courage to keep it going all week. Wonder if there's a further pay-off ahead.
You're bored...you're frustrated...your approval rating is down to 33% even in the Fox poll...what do you do? Why not bomb Iran? Here's a video about it. (If you can't understand all the lyrics, they're posted here.)
NBC has abruptly terminated its (supposed-to-be) week-long event, Celebrity Cooking Showdown. A press release says that the episodes scheduled for last night and tonight can be viewed at nbc.com. Here's a link in case you want to do this.
Jeez. I've done shows that were did poorly in the ratings...shows that were cancelled...but I never did anything they felt they had to yank off the schedule with less than 24 hours notice. And certainly nothing that ever got relocated from a major network to a website. (They couldn't even move it to MSNBC or CNBC?)
In case you're interested, the first night got a 5.7 rating. That's poor but it looks worse when you realize that the show before (Deal or No Deal) got a 9.2 and the show after (The Medium) got a 6.9. Tuesday night, Celebrity Cooking Showdown dropped to a 2.4...so more than half the people who watched the first night didn't bother with the second. Wednesday night, the show got a 3.5. Those are pretty bad numbers.
I didn't see Celebrity Cooking Showdown but I have the feeling someone made a mistake in dropping it this way. Okay, so the ratings may have been dreadful...but it was promised, it oughta be delivered. Not that long ago, NBC did the same thing with the third competition of Last Comic Standing, suddenly deciding to not run the final episode. That caused some ill feelings and this new termination will, as well. Somewhere, there are going to be viewers who will not bother with the next NBC special event series because it's frustrating to get wrapped up in a game and not get to see the ending. It's like reading a mystery novel and as you near the final pages, someone grabs them out of your hand, sets them on fire and just tells you whodunnit. Very unsatisfying.
There have been a couple of times in the comic book industry where I believe publishers have alienated their readerships with hasty cancellations. Something wasn't selling, the publisher panicked and no thought was given to what a fast termination would do to the folks who were buying the product. I can think of at least two distinct periods in the history of DC Comics where, I believe, consumers didn't want to try the new books because new books seemed to get axed so rapidly. It was like, "Why bother?" NBC could easily find themselves with the same problem...especially when they launch their upcoming, fourth edition of Last Comic Standing. And no, I can't explain why they're doing another one when the last round did so poorly they didn't broadcast the final part.
Tonight at 8 PM, where they would have been airing the grand finale of Celebrity Cooking Showdown, NBC will air an episode of Deal or No Deal. According to another press release, it's a rerun of the one from April 12 with the black guy who works as a professional clown. If you've never seen Deal or No Deal and have been thinking of giving it a try, this wouldn't be a bad choice...although they didn't have the usual 26 lovely models opening the briefcases. They had 26 Miss U.S.A. contestants doing the honors. You have to wonder though how much better it could possibly do than the grand finale of Celebrity Cooking Showdown that has been advertised. Not only will Deal or No Deal be a recent rerun but most potential viewers won't even know it's on.
And today's video link is also a plug for something that may interest those of you in the Los Angeles area. We love good magic and in a few weeks, you'll have the chance to see some of the best magic around...and for a good cause.
On May 26, 27 and 28 at the Colony Theater in Burbank you can see the lovely Misty Lee and the outrageous Sylvester the Jester perform miracles before your very eyes. Sylvester bills himself as "The Human Cartoon" and with good reason: He creates on-stage what Tex Avery created with a pencil and a pile of animation paper. Misty presents mind-boggling illusions that combine classic tradition with modern, audience-grabbing innovation. She's stunning and what she does is stunning...so this is quite a parlay. If I were you, I'd click here and get tickets now...because they're only doing the three performances.
And if that's not enough to sell you, here's a little less than five minutes of Sylvester jesting...
We're hearing better news about the health of master comic book and animation artist Alex Toth, who's been hospitalized for many weeks. Alex is easily one of the most respected artists in his fields...a man who's been remarkably influential on several generations of other artists. Word spread recently that he was not long for the world and I'm happy to report that this does not seem to have been the case. He is soon to leave the hospital, much to the relief of fans and friends.
Many of those folks have deluged him with letters and cards wishing him well, and these seem to have helped considerably. If you'd like to add to the pile — keeping in mind you won't be receiving a reply — the address has been posted on a few websites like this one. Alex has written hundreds of encouraging postcards and notes to others over the years, mostly inspiring others with their creative work. It's nice to think about the positive energy working in the other direction.
I just read a number of interesting discussions by mostly-Liberal pundits as to just how Liberal of Conservative John McCain actually is. I didn't come to any conclusion but if you want to read the same articles, read this one and this one and this one and this one and this one and this one.
I think it's way too soon to declare George W. Bush "The Worst President in History." But this cover story in Rolling Stone is getting a good jump on it.
That's not Groucho and that's not Ed Sullivan. Those are both photos of Will Jordan, maybe the best impressionist who ever impressioned. Among other comedians it is widely acknowledged that Jordan invented The Ed Sullivan Impression. It's the most-imitated imitation of all time, simulated by amateurs and stolen outright by professionals. Just about everyone who ever "did" Ed, apart from John Byner, was actually doing Will Jordan: The mannerisms, the facial contortions, the movements...even the phrases. People think of Ed as always saying, "We've got a really big shoe for you tonight." Well, Ed didn't say that. Will Jordan said that. (If Ed ever said it, it was because he was imitating Jordan imitating him. One of the amazing things that can happen with a great impression is that the real person starts to sound like the mimic. Happens all the time, just as every year our presidents are in office, they look a little more like the political cartoons.) Here's a video link to about half a minute of Will Jordan in Sullivan mode.
Another top impressionist told me that what he did involved a set of two or three skills. You needed to have the vocal and physical dexterity...that's all one skill. Another is that you need to have the "ear" to listen to the real person, pick out the extremes and know what to emphasize. It's a lot easier to "do" someone else if you hear a good impressionist "do" them...and it works the same way with cartoonists. A professional caricature artist once told me that the first time he had to draw Richard Nixon, it was more useful for him to look at a Mort Drucker drawing of Nixon, as opposed to a photo of the actual person.
The third skill — and this one is helpful but not mandatory — is the ability to do the impression and be funny. I see a lot of impressionists around who can sound like the guy and maybe look like the guy...but that's about it. Absent sharp material, all it is is a stunt. I always found Will Jordan very funny.
I'm really in awe of great impressionists. I have trouble sounding like me, let alone someone else. Recently, I heard from someone who'd read where I mentioned Will Jordan elsewhere on this site and thought I'd slighted the guy. I don't think I did. I think the fellow who wrote misread me. But just in case anyone else does, let me set the record straight. I am in awe of Will Jordan and wish we saw more of him.
Here's a little more than four minutes from the memorial service for Graham Chapman. This was apparently excerpted from a full-length TV special that I've never seen (anyone have a copy?) and I should caution at least one reader of this site that the clip contains a few naughty words. You get the feeling Graham would have wanted it that way.
Carl Bernstein says that the Bush administration needs to be investigated for possible impeachment proceedings. I don't think there's a chance of this happening, and Bernstein drags in a lot of stuff that doesn't necessarily relate to allegations of "high crimes and misdemeanors." Still, there's going to be an impeachment dialogue in this country, if only because it puts Republicans in an awkward position. We might as well get used to it.
Fred Kaplan on negotiating with Iran. One of the reasons I keep linking to Fred Kaplan articles is that I never see anyone rebut them or say he doesn't know what he's talking about...and I cruise some pretty extreme websites on all sides. I visit sites where they twist themselves and common logic into balloon animals, trying to deny every scrap of news that is bad for their team...but I never see anyone say Kaplan doesn't know what he's talking about.
Running out to a meeting so here's another number from Monty Python's Spamalot. This is "Find Your Grail," as performed on the 2005 Tony Awards telecast, with Sara Ramirez and Tim Curry and other people who are no longer in the show...
Last year at this time, sources within the vast Disney organization were saying that a DVD release of Song of the South was imminent. Fears of bad reaction to the film's racial depictions were being put aside. They figured that if they wrapped its presentation in endorsements and intros from prominent black personalities, the corporation could market the movie without creating a lot of upset. It looked like a definite "go" for this year, which is the 60th anniversary of the feature.
This has changed. Last month at the annual shareholders' meeting in Anaheim, Disney CEO Robert Iger was asked about it. He said he'd recently screened the movie for the first time in decades and that...
Owing to the sensitivity that exists in our culture, balancing it with the desire to maybe increase our earnings a bit but never putting that in front of what we thought were our ethics and our integrity, we've made the decision not to re-release it. [This is] not a decision that is made forever. I imagine this is going to continue to come up but for now, we simply don't have plans to bring it back because of the sensitivities that I mentioned.
(The entire audio of that shareholders meeting can be heard online on this webpage. You might find a lot of it interesting but if you just want to hear the Song of the South exchange, zip ahead to 1:42:40. By the way — here's a full disclosure — I am a Disney stockholder. I own two shares.)
What it all translates to, of course, is: "I'm still afraid of protests so I'm putting it off." I would imagine that there's also the feeling — and this part, I suspect they're right about — that releasing the film today wouldn't be all that lucrative. I think it's a great movie and it should be available but would it have a major impact on Disney earnings? Doubtful. It wouldn't surprise me if a marketing survey of some sort was done to determine that. And since they're not likely to try and build on the property — no Song of the South II sequel, no new major merchandising of Brer Rabbit, et al, the monetary upside looks not to be worth the possible hassle. They also may simply be waiting to see the response to Universal's new animated DVD feature, The Adventures of Brer Rabbit.
I dunno if I'd call it cowardice or caution. There might even be a small nugget of "let's do the socially responsible thing even if it does cost us money" in there. Whatever it is, I think they're erring on the side of too much of it. If they put the thing out, a few folks would seize on the opportunity to get on Entertainment Tonight and Fox News by expressing outrage, a few pickets would spend a few days outside theme parks...and then the whole matter would die down forever. If it were up to me, I'd go ahead and get it over with, and not worry about it harming The Walt Disney Company in any way. Then again, I only own the two shares.
Glenn Greenwald writes about something that has long bugged me, which is the debate trick of likening every potential enemy to Hitler and to argue that to not attack him now is to make some wimpish Neville Chamberlain mistake. It not only bothers me in regard to things like the Iraq War, it bothers me in less crucial, day-to-day battles. Back when I was active in the Writers Guild, every committee I was on seemed to have a couple of members who were rabid to go to war against some enemy — calling a strike, filing a lawsuit, etc. — and it had to be done right away to prove our manhood and stop this particular Hitler before he invaded Poland. Should you dare to suggest that the problem could be settled in a manner other than all-out combat — or even (shudder) that it didn't have to be fought at all — someone would haul out ol' Neville Chamberlain and use him as an insult.
Long before it became a cliché to do so, I used to argue on computer bulletin boards that it was unfair to compare anyone to Hitler unless the person was arranging for mass genocide. If they were actually killing Jews, okay, you could call them Nazis. You couldn't invoke the analogy if, for example, they wouldn't let you smoke in restaurants or park in a loading zone. By the same standard, not every time someone is hesitant to resort to fisticuffs does not make them Chamberlain-style appeasers. You have to pick your battles in this world. If you try to fight every one, you won't win any. If someone wants to make the case for war against Iran, they'd better be able to make it without that little trick.
The head of Exxon testified last year that gas prices were high because of global supply and demand. It's just been revealed that this gent is receiving a $400 million retirement package, this after years of multi-million dollar paychecks ($51 million in 2005 alone). This is in keeping with the fact that last year, Exxon made $36 billion, which is more profit than any company has ever made anywhere in the known universe.
In this news report, a lady at the Institute for Policy Studies says, "I think it will spark a lot of outrage." I don't think so. I think it will spark a few snarky comments here and there but most of America will never hear about it and 98% of those who do will shrug and go right on paying inflated prices. And tomorrow, if all the oil companies get together and raise prices by another buck a gallon, a few of us will grumble and then we'll go in and fill our tanks at the new prices.
Back in the late seventies, when gas inched up towards a buck a gallon, there was outrage in this country. People organized boycotts or demanded that their elected officials do something. Even advocates of free-market capitalistism toyed with the notion of capping gas prices or at least limiting CEO compensation. But we've given up on that. Now, we just bend over, grab our ankles and shout, "Thank you, sir. May I have another?"
MGM Home Video is about to release a deluxe, widescreen DVD of the 1955 movie of Guys and Dolls, which starred Frank Sinatra in the role of Nathan Detroit, and Marlon Brando in the role that Sinatra should have played.
Hollywood, of course, has a long history of taking hit Broadway shows, bypassing the stars that made them hits on Broadway, and miscasting them. The other day, I caught a few minutes of the 1969 film of Hello Dolly! and it dawned on me that Barbra Streisand is just now hitting the right age to play the role she played then. It's amazing that often when they did cast the right person, it was only after the filmmakers had tried and failed to get someone else. When they made My Fair Lady, Rex Harrison was the third or fourth choice to play the role made famous on Broadway by...Rex Harrison.
Sam Goldwyn obtained the film rights to Guys and Dolls. When it was suggested to him that he get Sam Levene, who'd created the role of Nathan Detroit on Broadway, Goldwyn reportedly said, "No, I don't want someone Jewish." That was not anti-Semitism. It was his way of saying he wanted a movie star in the role. That's not an unreasonable position but owing to Mr. Levene's inability to sing, Nathan Detroit was a largely non-singing part. So who'd they cast in that non-singing part? Only the top male vocalist of the day, Francis Albert Sinatra. And because they had Sinatra, they suddenly had to find reasons to have Nathan sing...so Frank Loesser wrote this dreadful, unnecessary song for him called "Adelaide." In fact, it's worse than unnecessary. It's against character. Nathan Detroit, until near the end of the story, is trying to avoid marrying Miss Adelaide and here, because they told Loesser to write a love song, Nathan's singing about how wonderful it would be to marry this lady. They also stuck Frank in the "Guys and Dolls" number, which is about how men always fall for the right lady. Nathan shouldn't have been singing about that, either.
So that pretty much destroyed Nathan Detroit's character arc. In the meantime, they put Marlon Brando, who didn't sing, in the role crafted for a strong singer. Brando is so charming and charismatic in the speaking scenes that he almost pulls it off...but I still think Frank would have been better.
You know who they should have gotten for Nathan Detroit? Think about it: A weasely gambler who tries to fast talk his way out of jams, matrimony included. There was a perfect actor available but unfortunately, Phil Silvers was busy making a new TV series in which he played an Army Sergeant. And of course, they also could have hired Sam Levene.
There are a couple of other odd choices in the film. One of the best songs, "A Bushel and a Peck" was replaced with a not-great tune called "Pet Me, Poppa." I don't know why unless Frank Loesser was eager to write something that might qualify for an Oscar. I also don't understand why, after spending so much money to acquire the rights and hire that cast and build those incredible sets, the producers didn't spring for a few bucks to get more extras to people the streets of New York. On stage, you can replicate Manhattan with a handful of people but on screen, it looks barren and uninhabited.
Anyway, it's still a fun movie in many ways. If you want to pre-order the new DVD, here's a link. And let's see if anyone in the supplemental material points out the appearance of a young Jerry Orbach in the chorus of the "Oldest Established" number. A decade or two later, he'd be more qualified to play either male lead than Frank or Marlon.
And now for something completely the same. Here it is: The original "Four Yorkshiremen" sketch as performed on At Last, the 1948 Show by John Cleese, Graham Chapman, Tim Brooke-Taylor and Marty Feldman.
A couple of folks have written to ask about this morning's B.C. strip with one character turning into another for no visible reason. (I may not recall the players' names accurately but I think that's Peter in the role of I.R.S. agent...and then the other guy is B.C. in the first panel and Clumsy Carp in the second.)
No, I don't get the switcheroo, either. It looks to me like a mistake...or maybe Johnny Hart did it deliberately to see if anyone would notice. At least three people who read my site did.
Just curious to know if people in Las Vegas, going to these truncated, "road show" versions of Broadway shows, are being charged the same $90 to $120 that they do on Broadway? If so I would say that's a pretty big rip-off.
Well, sort of. As I've noted here before, the price of a show in Vegas has gone up a lot. A few years ago, a number of them decided to try inching prices up and see what impact it had on their sales. A friend there told me, "Some of them were genuinely stunned at how much more they could tack on to the price of a ticket without it affecting the demand." So the going policy now seems to be to price tickets high and then if they start finding themselves with empty seats, they spread around discount coupons and offers, rather than to lower the base price of a ticket. This can make it a bit confusing to figure out how much it will cost to see some of these shows.
Tickets for the 90 minute version of Hairspray start at $71.50 and go up to $110 on the Luxor website. Over at Goldstar Events, which is the only online discount service, they have them for certain performances at $56.10 to $66.00. Tickets may also be available at up to 50% off at the discount booths in Vegas but you won't know unless you're in Vegas and you go to one of these places on the afternoon that you wish to attend the show.
Seats for Mamma Mia — which is performed in full, including an intermission — range from $45 to $100 on the Mandalay Bay website. The Goldstar Events site says that tickets normally go for $82.50 to $110 and they have some for $49.50 to $66. And again, this one is sometimes available at the half-price booths.
You can order tickets for the upcoming 95 minute version of Phantom of the Opera at the Venetian website for a low of $75.64 and a high of $150.64. They probably won't have discounts available for the first few months. No word yet on what The Producers will cost but I'll bet you it'll be the highest priced ticket until Spamalot shows up and tops it.
So I guess the answer is that they're charging Broadway prices or more...but as on Broadway, where you can go to the TKTS booth and maybe get a half-price ticket for that night, you can often score seats for 50% off. If you'd like a guide to show prices in Vegas, including an overview of discounts, The Las Vegas Advisor has a survey up on this page.
We told you back there about the planned demolition of the Hotel San Diego, scene of many a great convention party. Well, this morning they blowed that place up pretty good. This page has the details and an online video. Thank you again, Jackie Estrada.
A motion picture has been announced that will bring the original Captain Marvel (aka Shazam!) to the screen.
I find that I have very little interest in most of these comic book movies. I may have loved the comic books of the characters involved but that love doesn't necessarily transfer to some other interpretation. I mean, I cared about Spider-Man by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko. I cared about Spider-Man by Stan Lee and John Romita. I've enjoyed some other comic book versions of Spider-Man — though by no means, the majority. I have not been able to generate the interest to see either of the Spider-Man movies. In much the same way, I liked James Bond as written by Ian Fleming in the novels, I enjoyed the films when Sean Connery played him...and my interest in other Bonds, either in print or on film, is highly variable.
That said, when I heard about the possible/probable Shazam! movie, I thought of one thing that might pique my interest to see it. They probably won't hire him but how about Wallace Shawn as Dr. Sivana? Would that be perfect?
It may not work for everyone's browser but if you have Windows Media Player installed, this link oughta bring you a little more than a minute of Monty Python's Spamalot, as seen on Broadway.
In the early seventies, the folks behind Monty Python's Flying Circus did some odd things for money. They hadn't made all that much off the TV show so they grabbed some offers to do industrial-type films. This one is for Harmony Hairspray, it runs seven minutes and I should warn you that the video image is not the best and that much of it is out of sync. I don't create these clips. I just link to them.
Python authority Kim "Howard" Johnson points out to me in an e-mail that these films represent the directorial debut of Terry Jones. The Python TV shows had been directed by John Howard Davies (the first four) and Ian MacNaughton (the rest) and making commercials gave Python the opportunity to bring the director's job into the group and to give Jones some experience. He and Terry Gilliam would soon go on to direct Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
I think that's everything I know about this film...and yes, I know it's for hairspray. But how often do you get to see Python work from this era that you haven't seen before? Heck, I'll settle for just about anything I don't know by heart.
No, not the last day to mail your income taxes...you can do that on Monday. But today is the last day to order lifetime service for a TiVo. The $299 price, which covers the life of one machine, goes away after 7PM Pacific time tonight. Let's see how long it is before TiVo announces a price hike for month-to-month service.
I agree with this blog post by Glenn Greenwald. I don't know if all these retired generals criticizing the war effort are right or wrong, but I think their views need to be heard and considered. The Bush administration has scared a lot of Americans — and cost themselves a good deal of support — with the concept that they have a plan and they're going to follow it, no matter what evidence might emerge that it ain't working. I think there'd be a lot more confidence in Bush if he seemed to have the capacity to admit mistakes and move to correct them. And his supporters aren't helping him when they rush to attack the sanity, integrity and motives of anyone who criticizes his policies.
Several folks have written to say that the sketch that was this morning's video link — The Four Yorkshiremen — appeared on At Last, the 1948 Show. In fact, it apparently appears on this DVD which I have here but haven't watched yet.
If that's its point of origin, that helps narrow down the question of its authorship. The writing credits for that program were for its stars: Marty Feldman, John Cleese, Graham Chapman and Tim Brooke-Taylor. Tom Wolper sent an e-mail saying that Eric Idle performed the sketch on his recent Greedy Bastard Tour and identified it as one written by Feldman for At Last, the 1948 Show. Good to know.
Bob Elliott (of Bob and Ray fame) is pretty much retired these days but he recently gave a good interview to my pal Steve Darnall for Nostalgia Digest magazine. If you have some Adobe product installed on your computer, you can read a PDF version of the interview by clicking here.
Or you can do yourself a favor and subscribe to Nostalgia Digest, which routinely features articles this interesting. And while you're at it, loads of great Bob and Ray stuff can be purchased from The Official Bob and Ray Website and it almost doesn't matter which CD you order. I have listened to hundreds and hours of Bob and Ray radio material over the years and have yet to find the weak material. I'm beginning to suspect there isn't any.
Starting today and continuing for I-don't-know-how-long, we'll be linking to Monty Python rarities. Today, we focus on a sketch the Python guys did in a number of different places, though not on their TV show, perhaps because it really isn't a Python sketch. The first place I saw it was on the program I mentioned here, Marty Feldman's Comedy Machine. I don't recall who, apart from Feldman, appeared in it and I suspect it did not originate there. Perhaps it's something done earlier for some other series like At Last, the 1948 Show with John Cleese and Graham Chapman...though when I asked someone to ask Mr. Cleese about it, he had no memory of where it had first appeared. In any case, various British comedians have performed it in a number of settings, especially for charity performances, and I'm curious as to whether Feldman wrote it, or if one or more of the Pythons did or just what the story is. It's awfully funny and back when we first saw it on Mr. Feldman's Comedy Machine, several of my friends and I added lines from it to our repertoire of catch-phrases.
A version of the sketch that runs a little over three minutes appeared in the Python Hollywood Bowl concert. Here's a link to it and as you'll see, it features Michael Palin, Eric Idle, Graham Chapman and Terry Jones. A slightly better, longer version of it appears below. It runs four minutes and features Palin, Jones, John Cleese and non-Python Rowan Atkinson. Ignore the foreign subtitles.
Michael Kinsley asks where we're going to meddle next. Good question. Of greater interest is the capsule history he provides of our shifting relationships with Iran and Iraq.
Around or about "late summer of 2006," a production of The Producers (the Broadway show) will open at the Paris hotel in Las Vegas. No word yet on who will star or if Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick will play the first few weeks, then hand off to others.
They might not want to because if early announcements are true, this Producers will run 90 minutes with no intermission. The version in New York clocks in at 2 hours and 40 minutes, fifteen of which is the intermission. So the Vegas Producers will need to lose close to an hour...and I have no idea how they'll do that without ruining the show. The recent motion picture version cut two numbers and it still runs 134 minutes.
Not all that long ago, some (including the guy who runs this weblog) were predicting that the new Vegas trend would be to import Broadway shows and perform them in full, instead of the cut-down "tab" versions that had been the norm for such transplants. A lot of Broadway shows have made it to Vegas but only a few haven't lost their intermissions and a few numbers. Then in 1999, an uncut production of Chicago did good business at the Mandalay Bay, followed in 2003 by Mamma Mia, also performed in full, which is still running and still successful.
Then last September, the Broadway smash Avenue Q opened a production at the new Wynn Hotel in Vegas. Although on a ten-a-week schedule, they performed the entire show as it runs in New York — about two hours plus a fifteen minute intermission. Ticket sales were disappointing and in an attempt to boost business, they lost the intermission and cut about a half-hour from the show. The cuts didn't help sales (the production closes in May, well ahead of when anyone hoped) but they seem to have marked the end of the full-length Broadway show in Vegas, at least for now.
One suspects the running time was not the problem. Avenue Q is an adult puppet show and a satire of Sesame Street that at any length seems out of tune with Vegas audiences. It has also been suggested that the producers simply had unrealistic expectations, opening what is basically a "small" musical in a 1,200 seat theater. With a ten show schedule, that means there are 12,000 tickets available each week so a lot of empty seats were inevitable. In New York, Avenue Q plays at the John Golden, which seats 804. With eight performances a week, that's about half as many seats to fill...and folks who've seen Avenue Q in both venues say it simply plays much better in the more intimate theater.
Still, those who are bringing Broadway shows to Nevada are looking at its failure and ordering trims. Hairspray — which opened two months ago at the Luxor in Vegas — was cut down from 2 hours and 40 minutes to 90. And a condensed version of The Phantom of the Opera is soon to be mounted at the Venetian in Las Vegas. Unlike the others, this one is not being marketed as a replica of what's playing in New York. It will be called Phantom: The Las Vegas Spectacular and will run 95 minutes with all-new staging by Hal Prince, who directed the original. (The New York Phantom runs around two hours and fifteen minutes. The Vegas incarnation is being advertised as having "all the songs" of the original, though no one is suggesting they'll be performed in full.) There will be ten performances a week so the primary roles are being double-cast. Two different actors will take turns playing The Phantom, two actresses will rotate as Christine, etc.
That may be the new trend: Less show, more performances. Once Avenue Q vacates its space at the Wynn Las Vegas, the showroom will be remodelled and renamed The Grail Theater and in 2007, it will be home to a production of Monty Python's Spamalot. The New York production runs two hours and twenty minutes, fifteen of which is intermission. The Vegas version will reportedly run ninety with all roles double-cast to allow for an unprecedented twelve performances a week. I don't think any show that ever originated on Broadway has gone on to do twelve performances a week in any theater anywhere...and that's not the end of it. There will also be something called (tentatively) "The Spamalot Experience," which will cost $70 million to build. One presumes it will be not unlike "The Star Trek Experience" at the Vegas Hilton, which is like a mini-theme park allowing tourists to become a part of the show.
Personally, I don't want to become a part of the show. I just want to see the whole thing, especially since they're going to be charging New York prices...or more. The problem with Avenue Q isn't that it was too long. It was just the wrong show in the wrong town in the wrong showroom. My suspicion is that Vegas entrepreneurs are seizing on its failure as an excuse to not do shows in their entirety. They like the idea of 10-12 performances a week, and of 90 minute shows that get the tourists back out into the casino in a hurry so they can resume gambling. I'll bet The Producers, performed in full, would sell just as many tickets per performance, if not more. It's just that if they do the whole show, they can't do it twice a night.
I was trying to think what I could put up here to note the first night of Passover...
And then I thought, "Maybe, somewhere on the World Wide Web, I could find some footage of a puppet doing an investigative report on how matzah is made." Yes, I know the odds of such a thing seem slim but sometimes in this world, you get lucky.
I've mentioned Paul Harris before here. Paul hosts a very fine radio interview show every weekday afternoon on KMOX in St. Louis and he has an amazing knack for, first of all, getting very interesting people to talk with him. He's also darned good at extracting interesting and informative answers from those interesting people.
This afternoon, he had on former U.N. weapons inspector Scott Ritter. Of all the "talking heads" who've been out there telling us what's happening (and what will happen) in Iran and Iraq, Ritter may well have the best track record for getting it right. His chat with Paul ran a little less than a half hour but if you want to know more about weapons — and hear why the Iran situation may not be as ominous as it sounds from some reports — that could be time well spent. Here's the link.
Here's an important (I think) article by Glenn Greenwald and I'll try to summarize its thesis. It's that for years after 9/11, Bush's defenders met almost every criticism of the administration by charging that the critic hated America, was pro-terrorist, was giving aid and comfort to the enemy, etc. But now, a lot of those Bush defenders are looking to distance themselves from him and his actions and are engaging in the same kinds of comments they previously found so treasonous.
JEFF GRUBB: I think the characters come from the old Saturday Evening Post. They had a humor/cartoon page in the back, with these little guys in the title bar.
LES DANIELS: I can offer a tentative tip on that cartoon. When I was a kid in the 1950s, my parents had a sub to the Saturday Evening Post, which interested me mostly for the cartoons they ran. I recognize the style of "You want it when?" from the Post of a half a century ago or more. I'm sure this artist was a regular there, but I can't remember his name. I realize this is a pretty slim lead...
BEN HERNDON: Double check me, but I always had the impression these laughing characters were drawn/created by Stan and Jan Berenstain (of "Berenstain Bears" fame...)
RUSS MAHERAS: I'm almost positive that cartoon illustration was drawn by Orlando Busino, and I'm also pretty sure it originally appeared on the cartoon page of the Saturday Evening Post.
MIKE LYNCH: The "You want It When" guys are a question I've had too. I'm a magazine cartoonist, as well as an NCS member. I've always been interested in the magazine cartoonists. I've talked about that iconic image to a lot of the pros. The consensus is that it was drawn by Henry Syverson. There are some images here.
GALEN FOTT: Looking on Usenet, someone wondered this back in 1993, and they were referred to some books by Alan Dundes, titled with variations on Urban Folklore from the Paperwork Empire. So maybe you could find the answer there.
NATE BUTLER: I think it's from the Saturday Evening Post...from the top of that page (toward the back, as I dimly recall) that had all the jokes or gag panels or whatever. I think the "You Want It When?" wording got added later maybe. I don't remember the name of that cartoonist who always did those little big-nose characters on the top of that page of the Post, but I'm pretty sure this is where the mystery art came from originally.
BRAD CASLOR: I'm not sure if this was the first use, but weren't the laughing cartoon guys the recurring mascot on the "Post Script" humour page of the Saturday Evening Post in the 1950s, possibly drawn by one of the regular Post cartoonists like John Gallagher?
TIM (no last name): I absolutely don't know who drew it but the guys in the drawing are dead ringers for cartoon characters that were in the Saturday Evening Post when I was a kid (60s). In fact, I believe they were at the top of the page but I can't find an example anywhere yet (if I do I will send it). I think what you're talking about was created by ripping off these guys from the page and adding "you want it when" but that's just a theory.
JOHNNY LEE ACHZIGER: This won't help much, but I remember back in the early 1960's (when Xerox machines still required a couple trays of wet chemicals to make copies) watching my Dad make copies of the same sort of cartoons like this at his office. There were a bunch of different ones, but they were in the same style. So even way back when, they were around.
SCOTT SHAW!: That cartoon — or at least, the original version from which it was traced (over and over and over, etc.) — was drawn by magazine gag cartoonist Henry Syverson, who regularly did such silly drawings for Saturday Evening Post's page of cartoons. I think that the "You Want It When?" was added by someone else.
I think Scott and the others who've fingered Henry Syverson are right. The samples Mike Lynch pointed us to seem to confirm it. So for now, I'm willing to go with Syverson and what I'm wondering is if he or the Post ever marketed a poster or sign of the drawing or if its life in Xerox just began with someone blowing it up. For now, thanks to all who've sent in their thoughts.
For more than 35 years, I've seen this thing posted in offices, stores...pretty much any kind of establishment where someone has to produce something on some sort of schedule. I know it's been at least 35 years because that's how long ago it was that my mother brought a 99th generation Xerox of it home from a store where she was working and asked me to please trace a new, clean copy for her boss. Even by then, I'd seen it taped up on the walls of places of business, and what I saw was always a Xerox of a Xerox of a Xerox of a tracing of a Xerox of a Xerox of a Xerox of a tracing of a Xerox of a Xerox of a Xerox of a Xerox of a...well, you get the idea. This thing has been passed around more than the hooker at the 99-Cent Only store.
I remember once hearing a cartooning authority (there are such people) claim that the R. Crumb "Keep on Truckin'" poster and its various bootlegs was the most widely-distributed cartoon image of its day. When he said that, I thought, "Not even close." The "You Want It When?" cartoon has to have it and all others beaten. And I think it's kind of interesting that in all the times I've seen it, I've never seen any other caption put on it. You could apply all sorts of sayings to it but it's always "You Want It When?"
So where did it start? All those Xeroxes of tracings of Xeroxes had to begin with some artist sitting down and drawing the first one for some purpose. Was it a greeting card of some kind? A poster? A graphic in a magazine article? Maybe someone did draw it just to put up in one office and a co-worker who liked it made a copy and sent it to someone else. And then that person copied it and sent it to someone else who copied it...
I'll be surprised if anyone has an answer but I have to ask, just in case. Who drew it in the first place? And for what purpose?
Why is it that we never get upset at our presidents for not knowing things? "My staff got overzealous and did it without telling me" seems to always be a perfectly acceptable excuse. Or just "No one told me" or "I was given faulty intelligence." Shouldn't the first responsibility of any president of the U.S. be to know what's going on in his administration? And to fire those who supply him with faulty intelligence?
So now we have yet another case where something in a George W. Bush speech was not merely untrue but there was solid evidence at the time he said it that it was not true. On May 29, 2003, Bush announced that two trailers seized by U.S. and Kurdish troops were mobile biological laboratories. "We have found the weapons of mass destruction," he declared. Now it turns out that in a report filed two days earlier, the crew of the Pentagon-sponsored research mission had unanimously concluded the trailers had nothing to do with biological weapons.
Bush's foes will charge that it's Bush caught in a lie. Bush's defenders will say "It's not a lie. He didn't know." I'm inclined to side with the latter but to suggest that this is nowhere near an acceptable excuse. It bothers me that a man who at any moment may make a decision that will get people killed is not operating with — and apparently not even insisting on — the latest, most accurate information available. That should bother the people who think Bush is a brilliant leader. Even a brilliant leader can make the wrong call based on bad data.
Hey, guess what TV show is making a comeback for one night. Okay, you saw the picture above, you know: On April 18 in Hollywood, a new episode of The Dick Cavett Show is being taped for Turner Classic Movies in what I'm told is an updated version of Mr. Cavett's old set. In September, TCM is going to begin airing a package of eight of Cavett's old shows spotlighting great stars of the silver screen, and added to the mix will be the new episode they're taping with Mel Brooks as the guest. This is because apparently TCM plans to blanket its schedule with Mel Brooks movies that month. Boy, would I like to see this lead to a steadier diet of Dick Cavett programs, both old and new. People forget what a really good interviewer he was.
Cavett and Brooks actually have a prior relationship. Many years ago, Mel did a series of radio commercials as The Two Thousand Year Old Man and because Carl Reiner was unavailable or uninterested (or both, I suppose), Dick Cavett was the interrogator. As I recall, he did quite well in a demanding job.
In other Brooksian news, we are hearing again that a musical version of Young Frankenstein will be making its way to Broadway before long. A lot of people I know have said they think this is bad idea but most of them felt a stage version of The Producers was a bad idea, so let's wait and see.
Also, a boxed set of Brooks movies has just come out and some people I know are more than a little pissed. It includes Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, Silent Movie, Robin Hood: Men in Tights, To Be or Not to Be, History of the World, Part 1, The Twelve Chairs and High Anxiety, all for (at Amazon) a little under seventy bucks. That doesn't sound bad if you love them all and haven't already bought some...but how many people are in that situation? I mean, it seems to me that if you had the slightest interest in a couple of those films you'd have purchased them by now.
Of these, High Anxiety, To Be Or Not To Be, Silent Movie and Robin Hood: Men In Tights have not previously been released on DVD. So should you be a Mel Brooks completist, you have to either buy a boxed set and pay for movies you've already bought...or wait until Fox Home Video gets around to issuing those four titles in individual releases. So what we have is another attempt to get us to buy movies we've already purchased, which seems to be the ongoing goal of the home video business.
And don't you just know that a couple years from now, they'll bring out The Complete (No Kiddin') Mel Brooks DVD Collection containing the remaining movies (Life Stinks, Spaceballs, etc.) and they'll put in bonus features and commentary tracks and newly-found outtakes to render the current set obsolete? Plus, of course, that'll be Blu-Ray or high-def DVD, which are both plots to get us to buy everything another time. It's enough to make you re-enact the campfire scene from Blazing Saddles, all by yourself.
I haven't linked yet to an unabashed music video so here's "Weapons of Choice" by Fatboy Slim. The neat thing about this is seeing Christopher Walken (and his stunt double) dancing around the lobby of the Marriott in downtown Los Angeles. Walken was a dancer earlier in his career, long before he took over Bruce Dern's old job of playing half the psychos on the silver screen. The video was directed by Spike Jonze, it took two days to shoot and there's an awful lot of well-done, not-too-obvious CGI in the last part. Mostly, I just like watching Walken move, which is almost as much fun as hearing him talk like someone doing an impression of Christopher Walken. I still think that if the long-rumored remake of the musical Damn Yankees ever comes to pass, he'd make the perfect Applegate.
I think I post too often on this site. People get used to it and then when I go eighteen hours without putting something up, I get all these e-mails asking if I'm all right, if there's been some disaster, etc. Either that or it's something really bad...like my Internet connection is out.
The connection is fine and I'm all right...but the last four or five days, I've been battling a bad cold that decided that since I was sick, I might as well have one of the worst cases of conjunctivitis my doctor has seen in years. That's not as awful as it sounds because this afternoon, he prescribed what can only be called a "wonder drug"...and five hours after taking it, my eyes are halfway back to normal. He said they'd be 95% healed by tomorrow evening and I think I'm going to beat that timeline. Moral of the story: I should have gone to see him on Friday instead of thinking I could conquer it with over-the-counter drops and eye wash.
Jack Kirby created a comic book character named Darkseid whose eyes emit a kind of red radiation of death. That's how I've felt the last few days...but now it seems to be over.
I'm behind on a script and way behind on e-mail — what are the odds? — so bear with me. And thanks for the messages of concern, partly for my health but mostly for that of my Internet connection. We may soon reach the stage in this world where you can be declared legally dead if you aren't seen in public for seven years or if you go 36 hours without checking your e-mail.
Here's another one of those commercials where you can barely believe someone went to the time and expense...but they did. The product is for the Sony Bravia line and I would love to have been in the meeting where someone said, "Hey, I know how to sell our new television sets. Let's go to San Francisco and dump a quarter of a million Super Balls down a hill!" I'm not saying this was a bad idea. I'm just fascinated as to how you get to it. And I suppose I'm wondering how many times someone watches this spot on TV and says to his wife, "Hey, Marion...they dumped 250,000 Super Balls down a street in Frisco. I think I'll buy a Sony Bravia!"
(I've always loved those commercials where they show you vivid colors and beautiful pictures like you'll get if you buy one of their sets. They assume you'll forget that you're seeing those vivid colors and beautiful pictures on the set they want you to replace.)
There are a couple of different versions of this Bravia spot around. This one is two and a half minutes. If you'd like to view it larger on your monitor and with better resolution, go to this page. And if you're interested in what's involved in sending that many bouncey-balls down the boulevard, there's also a "Making of..." documentary that runs a little under seven minutes. At no point in it do they tell you how (or even if) they cleaned them all up.
One other thing before you watch it: It's a marvelous piece of filmmaking but does it really look to you like 250,000 balls? Doesn't look like anywhere near that number to me. They had to have had nets to catch the balls, right? I mean, you don't just leave rubber balls all over the city or let them bounce down into the business district...and there's a limit to how many the crew and the spectators could have carted off. If you catch them, you can use them over and over again, right? I don't see any shot that looks like it had more than a few thousand in it. Why would they have needed a quarter of a million of them? And what did they do with them afterward?
I spend way too much of my life thinking about things like this. Let's go to commercial...
This morning, the Washington Post editorial writers (presumably a gent named Fred Hiatt) authored an opinion piece that defends George W. Bush for his leaking of what had been classified data, and attacks Joe Wilson for his statements against Bush. Here is a link to the editorial in question.
Now, what's interesting about this is that the "facts" presented in support of the editorial's position are not only at variance with what has been reported elsewhere...they're even at variance with what's been reported in the Washington Post. Matter of fact, the editorial contradicts some facts presented in the very same issue of the Post. This article that was in the paper this morning is headlined, "A 'Concerted Effort' to Discredit Bush Critic" and they're referring to Wilson. But the editorial in the same issue is written as if it's an established truth that there was no such effort. (For more on the contradictions, read this.)
So here's my question: Is the Post editorial a case of its author saying, "I don't believe the other article?" Or is it, "I didn't read the other article?" There's a big difference there.
This is not unprecedented. A few years ago, The Wall Street Journal went through a period where the editorial page seemed to be written and assembled by folks who were unpersuaded by facts that appeared in The Wall Street Journal. In that case, it seemed clear that they thought the rest of the paper was getting things wrong. I'd like to know if that's what's occurring now with the Washington Post.
For a paper that still gets dismissed by some as a left-wing rag, the Post has been pretty supportive of George W. Bush. In fact, the American people have been a lot less supportive of Bush than the Post has been. At times, it's seemed like the paper has been consciously trying to side with him in order to shake the "Liberal" label and garner some respect (and subscriptions) from Conservatives. If that's their goal, it won't work. They could write 98 editorials praising the brilliance of Bush and two criticizing his policies, and the two would still be dismissed as Bush-hating, left-wing bias. For a lot of right-wingers, hurling that charge has becoming a way of sticking their fingers in their ears and going "la la la" so they don't have to hear, and therefore deal with facts that aren't going their way.
Big Laurel and Hardy fest tomorrow evening on Turner Classic Movies. At 8:00 (all times Eastern), they run Bonnie Scotland, followed by The Devil's Brother at 9:30. Bonnie Scotland is okay and The Devil's Brother is probably the best of the "period" pieces they did. At 11:15, we get Nothing But Trouble, which is one of their later, less-than-wonderful features so skip that one unless you're a completist.
At 2 AM, TCM is running three shorts in a row: The Music Box, Them Thar Hills and Tit for Tat. Of these, The Music Box is the gem. Them Thar Hills is a short that I always thought was among the weaker efforts of Stan and Ollie but it was apparently quite popular with audiences of the time. So they made Tit for Tat as something of a sequel, and it's also not among my favorites. But what comes next is.
At 3:30 AM — and remember, these are all Eastern times I'm giving you — TCM gives us Sons of the Desert, followed at 4:45 AM by Way Out West. These were probably the two best features Laurel and Hardy ever made
That's all from Turner Classic Movies (although they are running Room Service on Wednesday if you like medium-grade Marx Brothers films). However, Tuesday morning the Fox Movie Channel is airing The Big Noise, which is another of those later films when The Boys were showing their ages and when they missed the freedom and support of the Hal Roach Studios. It does have some wonderful moments, though. Nothing Laurel and Hardy ever did was without wonderful moments.
The polling conducted by Fox News currently has George W. Bush at 36% approval and 53% disapproval, while they have the Vice-President at 35% approval, 53% disapproval. Dick Cheney is now demanding that when he checks into a hotel room, all the television sets be tuned to The Cartoon Network.
Of all the animated clips I've seen posted to the 'net, this one's my favorite. Even better is that I agree with its message and that it was commissioned by and distributed by the folks at Consumer's Union, the people who bring you Consumer's Reports magazine.
A couple of folks have written in to ask me if one of the two ladies in this morn's video clip — the one on the left — is Noel Neill, who played Lois Lane on the Superman TV series. I don't know. It looks a little like her but I'm not sure and I don't see any mention of it in her authorized biography, the pages of which I just flipped through. So decide for yourself...or someone ask her. (One bit of possible evidence: Ms. Neill says she made her movie debut after she signed her first studio contract in 1943 with Paramount. William Frawley wasn't working for Paramount at the time so the film probably was not made there. But it also could have been made before '43 — say, at Universal or Republic or Columbia — studios for which Frawley was freelancing — and Noel just didn't recall being hired for what must have been only a few hours or work. Or maybe it isn't her.)
Hmm...you know what would make a good video link for this morning? Three minutes of World War II musical propaganda telling Americans how we're going to kick Hitler's ass. And what would make it even better is if it was performed by the guy who later played Fred Mertz on I Love Lucy.
For some time now, the Writers Guild of America has made slow but undeniable progress in its attempt to represent those who write animation. Through a fluke of history, if you write a script for a live-action Disney film, you're covered by the WGA and if you write a script for an animated film for Disney, you're covered by the Animation Guild, Local 839. Having been a member of both and written both kinds of scripts for Disney and other studios, I can tell you there's no contest as to which labor organization does a better job for us. The WGA is equipped to handle the needs of writers, and not just in terms of getting them more money than 839 ever does. The WGA knows about things like creative rights and screen credits and multiple drafts and such. 839 primarily represents animators and background painters and other kinds of artists. They may well do a fine job on behalf of such folks but the writers seem to not get much attention and too many of their needs go unaddressed.
839 has jurisdiction at some but not all of the companies that produce animation. The WGA — reportedly with the Animation Guild's blessing — has managed to sign up to represent writers at many of the studios not covered by an 839 contract. The writers on The Simpsons, for instance, work under a WGA contract. The two labor groups have co-existed with only occasional rancor (and even moments of cooperation) for some time...but now it's starting to get ugly.
Obviously, I am with the WGA on this. During the years that I was directly involved in these battles, I couldn't see that the Screen Cartoonists Guild (as 839 was then called) wanted us for any reasons other than we paid the most dues and that when you threaten a strike, having the writers walk out is the first step in halting production. Though the leadership of 839 has improved considerably since then, those are still probably the only reasons they want us and they aren't good enough. If and when they realize that and stop keeping us in the wrong union, both organizations will be a lot better off.
Were it not for the fact that I can't record it on my TiVo, The Cheap Show would be my current favorite TV program. The Cheap Show is only seen on PlumTV, a cable system that exists in several faraway cities...and, oh yeah, you can see it on the Internet. I don't know why they call it The Cheap Show since every three minute episode obviously costs many hundreds of thousands of dollars to produce. For the latest one, they took the entire crew — socks and all — to the show business capital of the world, Las Vegas. And just to dare me to plug it here, they dedicated it to me...which is, sad to say, the greatest honor I've received since the time Don Rickles called me a hockey puck. (I still don't know what he meant by that but I just know it was some kind of honor.)
You can see The Cheap Show, coming to you live from Vegas, over on this page. Look for the episode dedicated to me or pick out one of the others. And keep your eye on the actress known as Baby. I hear she's in the running to replace Meredith Vieira on The View.
Okay, I think I've figured out the strategy of the Bush administration. They formulated a policy that they won't comment on any matter that is currently under investigation. Then either Bush turned to Cheney or Cheney turned to Bush and said, "Okay now, we have to make sure we get everything we do under investigation." So far, it seems to be working.
Before there was Monty Python's Flying Circus, John Cleese and Graham Chapman were part of another, not-dissimilar program in which they starred with Marty Feldman and Tim Brooke-Taylor. It was called At Last, the 1948 Show and of course, with those four gents involved, it was quite wonderful. A number of the sketches from that series later turned up in other venues, and you may have seen a version of the one from today's video link in one of the tapes of charity performances in which some of those men were involved.
Where I first saw it performed was on Dean Martin Presents the Golddiggers in London, which was the series that replaced The Dean Martin Show on NBC for the summer of 1970. It starred — in addition to the comely song and dance troupe known as The Golddiggers — Charles Nelson Reilly, Tommy Tune and Marty Feldman. It was the first time America laid eyes, as it were, on Mr. Feldman. As I recall (and I haven't seen a trace of this show since it first aired), he stole the proceedings, largely by bringing along material that I later realized was from his earlier appearances on British TV.
On the strength of Feldman's showing, Greg Garrison — who produced Dean Martin's program and its summer replacements — sold a series to ABC called Marty Feldman's Comedy Machine, which came and went with barely a notice in '71. It was produced in London by Larry Gelbart and featured a number of top comedy writers from the U.S. including Rudy DeLuca, who owes me a lunch. It also had animations by Terry Gilliam. I would love to see someone dig those shows out and issue them on DVD. The one time I met Marty Feldman, he was both extremely proud of what he'd done on that project and extremely bitter about how the material had been chopped-up for U.S. television, with sketches truncated and edited and some of the silent ones even sped-up. He was also upset about what he called "mysteriously-appearing guest stars." Apparently, someone felt the show needed more faces familiar to the American viewer, so Garrison brought in some stand-up comedians, taped them in L.A. doing bits and cut them into the shows without Feldman's participation. Marty said, "I keep running into people I never heard of before who tell me, 'It was great to be a guest star on your program.'"
Even with all that, those shows are probably well worth putting out. Given that they looked an awful lot like Monty Python, what with Gilliam's cartoons and all, I think they'd would sell very decently now. I'd also like to see The Golddiggers in London turn up again somewhere, especially for its more elaborate version of the sketch you'll be watching when you click the link below. Feldman played the same part and Charles Nelson Reilly played the other man...and I remember laughing so hard that I missed a lot of it. Really, someone should dig up everything Marty Feldman did for television because he really was an enormously funny, clever man...and so, come to think of it, is Charles Nelson Reilly.
Here comes the sketch as performed on At Last, the 1948 Show. This is Tim Brooke-Taylor with Marty Feldman, and the cop who comes in at the end is Graham Chapman...
Harry Shearer has put up a video clip of Chris Matthews (of MSNBC) chatting with Tom DeLay chatting during a commercial break, unaware they could be seen or heard. It's fascinating how Matthews has managed to become simultaneously disliked by Conservatives because he keeps talking about how bad things are for Bush, and disliked by Liberals because he keeps claiming that America really likes Bush. In the clip Shearer snagged — I'm guessing off a satellite feed of raw MSNBC cameras — Matthews is too, too grateful to DeLay for letting him break the story about the Hammer's abdication.
I stayed at the Hotel San Diego once or twice. The cockroaches were legendary. I do know that after the hotel was closed they filmed a few scenes of the film Traffic there. In it, the character played by Miguel Ferrer orders room service food and upon eating it, promptly dies. He should have known better.
Betcha Miguel never stayed there when he went to the con.
Another old San Diego hotel — the U.S. Grant — is undergoing a $52 million renovation and is scheduled to re-open for business in Fall of this year, too late for the Comic-Con. And probably too expensive for most attendees. I never stayed in the old U.S. Grant but it was the scene of the first San Diego Con, which I attended way back in 1970, back when we thought it was mobbed to have 500 comic fans in the same place at the same time. The hotel was undergoing a massive renovation then as well, but was merely upgrading from Extremely Shabby to merely Somewhat Shabby.
The place I still miss is the El Cortez Hotel, where the con was held for several years in the seventies. I'd say the place was a dump but that would be demeaning to dumps. Still, it was a fun dump, run by a management that didn't seem to care all that much what we did to it. Some people will be stunned to know that not only is the El Cortez still standing but it's been completely renovated — in some areas, restored to what it was in its glory days — and converted to condos. That's right: That crappy room that you stayed in for $20 a night in 1977...you can now live there. Or if you just have a yearning to visit, you can do so at the El Cortez website.
My buddy Earl Kress, whose new blog is simply bloggerific, suggested I link to this. It's a collage of George W. Bush speeches from the last three years that aired on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart. And it looks like it took three years to edit.
A couple more items about the Superboy custody battle. There's a pretty good article over at E!Online that traces the history and even quotes me. Two quibbles: I do not think that Superman was ever ruled a "work for hire." Also, in the mid-seventies campaign to win a pension and credit for Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, the name of Jerry Robinson should be prominently mentioned. Jerry, an award-winning cartoonist (and one-time assistant to Bob Kane on Batman) was as important as anyone in that battle.
That skirmish kicked off when Siegel authored an inflammatory press release putting a "curse" on the Superman feature that Warner Brothers was about to begin filming. My pal, comics historian Mike Catron, has made the text of that press release available and provided some historical context, all in a PDF file, meaning you need some Adobe product to read it. You can download Mike's presentation of this historic document here.
Those of you who've attended the Comic-Con International in San Diego for a good many years have probably at some point set foot in the Hotel San Diego, located in the heart of downtown. The venerable landmark was built in 1914 by the Spreckels Brothers, owners of the Spreckels Sugar Company. They were responsible for a lot of the development of San Diego and they gave the city what was for decades, one of its finest hotels.
In the seventies, when we all started going to San Diego Comic Book Conventions, back when they called them that, it was a frequent venue for con events. Some years, before it outgrew any available hotel ballroom, the Inkpot Awards presentation was held there. There were many memorable parties and gatherings, such as in 1982 when a group of Jack Kirby's friends staged a memorable surprise birthday party for him in one of its halls. Perhaps some year, you were either so hard up for money or so desperate for an available room (or both) that you even booked into its sadly-deteriorating accomodations. It was one of the cheaper places to sleep and con-goers took advantage of that up until June of 2001 when the building was declared structurally unsafe and was closed down.
On Saturday, April 15 at 8 AM, the Hotel San Diego will be imploded to make way for a new federal courthouse building. Which is silly. Anyone who's tried to find somewhere to stay for this year's Comic-Con International can tell you the city doesn't need a new federal courthouse one tenth as much as it needs more hotels.
Thanks to Jackie Estrada for letting me know about this. I have only fond memories of the place. Then again, I never stayed there.
I need to correct a couple of things in the piece I posted yesterday about the Superboy situation. This is what happens when you're so excited about a hunk of news that you write 'n' post in a hurry.
In the 1947 court decision, the judge ruled that Jerry Siegel (not Siegel and Shuster, as I misstated) owned Superboy. That was because Jerry developed the idea, Jerry submitted it, Jerry had it rejected and then done without him, etc. That's why Shuster's heirs are not involved in the matter. The judge in '47 ruled that Superboy had been wrongfully purloined from Jerry.
I mentioned that a lot of observers thought it was an odd decision — Superman to DC, Superboy to Siegel — that was done with the expectation that ongoing appeals would allow higher courts to sift through the matter. That has sometimes been the conventional wisdom in comic book history...but as I've pointed out regarding other situations, the conventional wisdom ain't always right, or may not be right. A little while ago, I spoke to a learned legal analyst who took a good look at the '47 decision and concluded it was wise and cogent and intended to settle matters. So I apologize for being too quick to parrot the accepted history and I've removed those lines from the earlier posting.
There's an awful lot of misinformation out there. I just took a tour of comic book message boards and in addition to the usual references to "Siegal" and "Schuster" — those names aren't that hard to spell, people — there are a lot of fans who seem to have gotten their facts out of The Phantom Zone. Do not believe everything you read on the Internet. Even on this site.
The simple fact here is that in 1947, Jerome Siegel was awarded full ownership of Superboy. He sold the copyright to DC Comics and they, by purchasing it, acknowledged that he was the owner and also that Superboy was a separate copyright from Superman. Under the laws of the day, that copyright would have expired by now and DC would have long since received the number of years of it they expected to receive for their purchase. But Congress has voted repeatedly to extend copyrights and since they have, they decided it would be unfair to folks who sold them under the old terms to give all the additional years automatically to the buyers. So they set up a procedure by which creators or their heirs can reclaim the copyrights. That is what the Siegels have done, and I think it's terrific. The only way it could be better is if Jerry was still around to enjoy it.
Still to come is the legal question of whether the Smallville TV show infringes on the Siegels' property...but the judge in the current matter refused Time-Warner's motion that he rule that it did not. So make of that what you will.
This morning's feature presentation is a short clip of what Fred Astaire once called the best tap dance routine ever put on film. How's that for an endorsement?
A few months ago here, we lamented the passing of Fayard Nicholas, who was one half of the Nicholas Brothers. That's Fayard and his brother Harold you'll see dancing in the excerpt, which is from the 1943 movie called Stormy Weather. In the number, the great Cab Calloway sings and then the Nicholas Brothers hoof it up. Whoever edited this piece for the Internet cut off Mr. Calloway's part of it...but that's almost okay because this clip over on Google Video has Calloway singing and then it cuts off in the middle of the dance routine.
Actually, if you like either half, you oughta just spend the fourteen bucks and buy the DVD of the whole movie. There are a lot of great musical numbers in it.
Here then are the Nicholas Brothers doing what they did better than anybody else...
April, you may be fascinated to learn, is National Grilled Cheese Sandwich Month. Now, this raises all sorts of questions, not the least of which is who the heck designated it National Grilled Cheese Sandwich Month? Who has that authority? And what is it about April that makes it more conducive to a grilled cheese sandwich than, say, March or May? I'm guessing there's some sort of National Cheesemakers Council that looked at their month to month sales and noticed that people weren't making a lot of grilled cheese sandwiches in April. So someone there said to someone else there, "What can we do to promote the making of grilled cheese sandwiches in April?" And then the other person said, "Well, how about if we designate April as National Grilled Cheese Sandwich month?"
But never mind that. What bothers me is that in the interest of celebrating National Grilled Cheese Sandwich Month, some people are polluting the whole concept of the grilled cheese sandwich. As part of a promotion on this site, the DuPont Corporation has gathered close to 6,000 different recipes for grilled cheese sandwiches and they've posted a sampling of them.
This is very wrong. There aren't 6,000 recipes for a grilled cheese sandwich. There is one. You take two slices of bread, put a couple of slices of cheese between them and grill the thing. That's a grilled cheese sandwich. Even I can make them.
Flipping through the recipes there, I see concoctions involving all kinds of bread (including baguettes, bagels and crullers) and all kinds of cheese (including cream cheese and Brie) and all sorts of additives like walnuts and apples and sauerkraut and peppers and cinammon and molasses and pumpkin and pretty much the entire contents of a Whole Foods Market. On that site, they're all cooked in pans coated with Teflon® because DuPont makes Teflon®...and they may be great sandwiches but they're not grilled cheese sandwiches. A grilled cheese sandwich is two slices of bread and a couple of slices of cheese. And always will be.
According to this site, Americans make 2.2 billion grilled cheese sandwiches at home every year and the average American eats 8.4 grilled cheese sandwiches a year. If they're counting these creations that include sausage and maple syrup and peach chutney on a muffin, they're cheating. A grilled cheese sandwich is two slices of bread and a couple of slices of cheese. If these people had any brains, they'd know that.
[UPDATE, April 6: I have made a few corrections in the following item since it was first posted to the Internet. See this later post for a fuller explanation.]
Joanne Siegel and her daughter Laura — widow and child of the late Jerry Siegel, co-creator of Superman — have won another round in their battle against Time-Warner, specifically the skirmish over ownership of Superboy. On March 23, Judge Ronald Lew ruled for the Siegels in summary judgment, tossing out a number of Time-Warner arguments. The biggie, if I understand this correctly, is the judge saying that Time-Warner has no grounds on which to assert, as they have attempted to do, that Superboy was a "work-for-hire" creation.
As you may know, Siegel and his partner Joe Shuster, sued DC Comics in 1946 over the rights to Superman. Part of that suit also involved the assertion, with which that judge agreed, that Siegel had created and submitted a separate idea for Superboy to DC, and that DC rejected Jerry's idea and later did it without his consent. The judge in that case issued a ruling that, legal scholars seem to agree, was not meant to settle the matter once and for all. [And some don't. See the update.] He ruled that DC Comics owned Superman and that Siegel owned Superboy.
Soon after, in a move I believe he regretted, Siegel sold the Superboy copyright to DC. In purchasing Superboy from Jerry, DC acknowledged that he was the rightful owner. Judge Lew is now saying, in effect, "That matter was settled long ago." Time-Warner, as DC's current owner, cannot now go in and argue that Siegel never owned the copyright.
This is a major win for the Siegels. To read more about it, peek in on this story over at Newsarama, which is one of the few comic book news sites that has ever followed this story. Most of 'em are too busy breaking scoops over who's inking the next Wolverine crossover to care about what I think is the biggest newsbreak in comics this century.
Treasure Chest carried the Comics Code for a number of years, which raises an interesting question. As we all know, the Comics Code was formed in 1954 because their comic books were under attack from various groups that wanted to ban them or institute government-controlled censorship or something of the sort. So DC and Marvel and Archie and most of the other major publishers and their printers and distributors got together and formed this self-censorship board and henceforth, all their comics displayed the Comics Code symbol. It was there to assure parents and watchdog groups that the comic had been properly scrutinized and laundered. The smaller publishers had to go along with it or no one would carry their product.
There were two exceptions. Dell Comics, which published in partnership with Western Publishing, refused to have any part of it. They had their own distribution and, more important perhaps, they had Mickey Mouse in their line. They felt the crusaders wouldn't come after them and that their spotless reputation shoudn't be used to repair the blemished name of the folks who'd published horror and crime comics. Later on, when Dell and Western split off (as explained here), Western also refused to have anything to do with the Comics Magazine Association of America and their Code. An editor at Western once told me that in some magazine somewhere, a representative of the C.M.A.A. was asked why Western hadn't joined and was quoted as saying something like, "Well, they have their reasons but believe me, they got copies of our guidelines and they told me they apply its principles to their books." According to this editor — it was Chase Craig, by the way — Western's lawyers immediately dispatched a letter that said, in effect, "That's a lie. We've never looked at your stupid Code and we'll sue you if you ever say that again."
The other company that didn't subscribe to the Code was Gilberton, the people who put out Classics Illustrated. Presumably, they felt that the reputation of the works they were adapting — books that were in most school libraries — made it unnecessary to join the Code. Besides, they had only limited distribution via conventional channels. They sold most of their product through educational outlets.
Okay, so why did Treasure Chest join the Code, which it seems to have done almost from the start? If the folks publishing Walt Disney's Comics and Stories didn't think they had anything to fear, why did the people putting out adaptations of The Holy Bible think they did? I mean, Treasure Chest was the comic that nuns encouraged kids to buy...and even if the occasional Biblical scene could get a little bloody, was anyone going to object to the content? So why did George A. Pflaum, the publisher of Treasure Chest, join up, which not only meant submitting his books to the Code's censor board but also financially supporting the organization? I'd think he'd have been happy to see the mainstream publishers sink. Why did he lend his squeaky-clean image to an organization designed to rehabilitate the reps of the people who brought you Chamber of Chills?
I don't know a lot about Mr. Pflaum other than that in addition to Treasure Chest, he published non-comic religious publications like Young Catholic Messenger, Junior Catholic Messenger and Our Little Messenger. That doesn't sound to me like someone who would have cared a lot if Atlas Comics, publishers of Adventures Into Terror, couldn't get their product on newsstands.
My first thought is that perhaps Pflaum's printer wouldn't print his comics if he didn't have the Code symbol on them. Some printers, like World Color Press, were motivators of the Code and might have insisted on it for all their clients. But there were certainly printers who would have welcomed that business. There were distributors who wouldn't carry books that did not bear the Code seal but Treasure Chest didn't go through newsstand distributors.
Or did it? It's possible that Pflaum thought he was just supporting a cause that would improve comics for all children and that this was of primary importance to him. It's also possible — and this is just me speculating aloud — that Treasure Chest did have some newsstand distribution in some areas. And since he wasn't going to set up his own distributor for that purpose, he had to go through the existing ones, some of whom might have insisted on Code approval.
I don't know if anyone can answer this or even if anyone cares. But one of the accusations against the Comics Code was that it was an alliance of publishers and distributors making a move that stank of anti-trust, telling all their competitors, "You join our group, pay in money and make your product conform or we'll see that you never get on a newsstand." Wouldn't it be interesting if even a guy printing Bible stories felt he had no choice but to go along with this?
Several folks have written to ask me about the Honda commercial I linked to this morn, specifically about the part where the tires roll uphill. Back when this spot first materialized, I read a number of articles about it, few of which seem to still be online. My recollection is that while there was no camera trickery involved and while all the action actually occurred in the studio, there were gimmicks used within a few pieces. For example, the tires had weights embedded in them that caused them to roll the way they did. Hold on. Let me see if I can find anything online about this...
Yeah, here over at the Snopes site is this page which says, among other things, "The sequence where the tyres roll up a slope looks particularly impressive but is very simple. Steiner says that there is a weight [in each] tyre and when the tyre is knocked, the weight is displaced and in an attempt to rebalance itself, the tyre rolls up the slope." Sounds possible to me. That page may answer other questions you have about the spot.
On the redesigned New York Times website that debuted this week, there's a little section called Most Popular Movies. Maybe it was there on the old site but if it was, I never noticed it. But I noticed it just now and it says...
Most Popular Movies, also known as TimesPulse, calculates the most popular movies among NYTimes.com readers, based on the cumulative number of reviews read, movie details pages viewed and trailers accessed.
Know what the top movie is at this moment? The one that is reported as the most popular among the readers of that website? United 93.
Know what's odd about that? It isn't out yet. It doesn't come out until April 28.
But it's already the most popular movie among NYTimes.com readers.
Apparently, this is a measure of how many people access the trailer, which is online for viewing over there, or search for info on the film. This is not the same thing as being popular. It's called being curious, especially after reports that when the Coming Attractions are shown in some theaters, audience members get unsettled and emotional. United 93 is being written about elsewhere in the Times so that's generating inquiries, too.
A couple of the other movies on the "most popular" list aren't out yet. One that is — it came out in 1968 — is the Lucille Ball-Henry Fonda movie, Yours, Mine and Ours. It's currently #22 with NYTimes.com readers...though I'm guessing that just means that a couple of people were looking for info on the recent remake with Dennis Quaid and Rene Russo. That, however, is not what it says in The New York Times. They list the '68 version directed by Melville Shavelson.
Beware of online surveys. They know not what they do.
I had a link to this on my site a few years ago but that was back in the Paleolithic Era, long before the days of video clip embedding. In any case, if you've seen it, you won't mind seeing it again. And again and again. What we have for you today is only, I think, the most amazing commercial ever done. It's entitled "Cog," it's for the Honda Accord, it runs two minutes and what follows are the other bullet points you need to know about it...
It is real. That is, what you're about to see was actually created in a studio and not in a CGI program. They actually set this up and did it without special effects.
Reported total cost: Six million dollars. The spot ran mostly on British television, which is why it was able to be two minutes long. They have those there.
It took 3-6 months to set up (accounts vary) and it was shot over a round-the-clock four-day shooting schedule in a Paris studio. The initial press releases said it required 606 takes but that number has been disputed.
Because the studio in Paris was not large enough to house the whole thing, the commercial was shot in two parts. The edit point, which is just about impossible to spot, comes around the one minute mark. So it's two continuous takes butted together, which only detracts a wee bit from the achievement.
Two new Hondas were disassembled to get the parts. At the time they made this, the model they were promoting had yet to hit the assembly lines so the ones they cannibalized were new, made-by-hand prototypes.
And lastly, that's the voice of Garrison Keillor at the end, I'm told. Doesn't sound like him to me but that's who they say it is.
So now you can go ahead and watch it. Somewhere, the ghost of Rube Goldberg is either smiling or demanding royalties.
My friends pick up their bad habits from me. Earl Kress, a fellow writer who has been mentioned in this site many a time, has followed my horrid example and started blogging. He's just getting started but if you like this site, you'll like Earl's. In fact, if you hate this site, you'll still like Earl's. Go take a look.
I want to add a couple of thoughts to the discussion about the Gordon Lee case. There are a number of hypocritical things about the way some prosecutors handle cases relating to pornography or adult entertainment. One is that they usually go after the folks who can least afford to fight them. It is possible now to view hardcore porn on satellite or in most major hotels...but you don't see them going after Rupert Murdoch, who owns DirecTV, nor do they try to close down the local Marriott and throw its operators behind bars. They don't even go after Hugh Hefner or Larry Flynt any longer. Those guys have too much money. The reason to go after a Gordon Lee is because he does not have friends in high places, does not have deep pockets, does not have the ability to hire Floyd Abrams or some other top First Amendment lawyer. The hope here is that the little guy will just plea-bargain, admit guilt and give them a "win" that will intimidate others.
Which brings me to another area of hypocrisy in these cases: The efforts made by the prosecution not to give the accused his day in court. Many juries simply will not vote to convict and judges often decide the charges are excessive. The Gordon Lee affair started with him being indicted on two felony charges and five misdemeanors. The felony charges were tossed out and the misdemeanors tossed out or condensed down to two...and then on Monday, the prosecutors dropped those and announced they'd find others. It's like they played by the rules, decided they couldn't win by the rules and now they're changing the rules. And what's really galling about that is that these are their rules.
A lot of prosecutions in this category fall under the general heading of Prosecutorial Tyranny. They don't want to try the case because they know they'll lose...but they also know that they can waste the accused's time and money, keep his life off-balance for years and scare the bejeezus out of him. The idea is to make it less painful to plead guilty to some lesser charge than to incur the cost and uncertainty involved in proving one's innocence. I know why our system of justice works like that but I don't have to like it.
Forgot to mention (sorry) that early this morning, GSN started rerunning old I've Got A Secret episodes again. Last time GSN ran this show, they started with episodes from 1952 but this time around, they're skipping all the ones with cigarette sponsorship...so the one that aired this A.M. was from September of 1959. So we're missing a lot of good episodes there and it may be impossible to predict what will air when.
In the meantime, the What's My Line? reruns are up to December of 1962. The one that airs tomorrow morn should be one with Vaughn Meader as the Mystery Guest. Mr. Meader then had the hottest record in the business with The First Family and one of the other contestants is football great Ray Nitschke. Thursday morn, the Mystery Guest should be Bert Lahr.
Okay, it's the 1999 Tony Awards ceremony and a star is born. The revival of You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown is up for Best Revival of a Musical and business ain't so hot. This means they want to win the Tony and also present on the telecast a musical number so fine that it will cause people to storm the box office. Of the two, the latter is more important.
They don't win for Best Revival (Annie, Get Your Gun with Bernadette Peters does) but two of the Charlie Brown cast members — Kristin Chenoweth and Roger Bart — take home Tonys as featured performers. People seem to love the number that is performed, mostly by Ms. Chenoweth, but it does not motivate a stampede of ticket purchasers. The show winds up posting a closing notice a few weeks later.
Our video link is to that performance from that evening. The sound is a hair out of sync but it's still quite watchable. The clip also includes Kristin Chenoweth winning her Tony immediately following the song, making what may well be the fastest change of clothes ever accomplished by a woman. I just ran a stopwatch on it and from the moment we last see her in one outfit to the moment we first see her in the other is 43 seconds, which means she probably had 5-10 seconds less than that. I used to date ladies who couldn't change direction in that amount of time.
Right after this aired, every producer in several media wanted to hire Kristin Chenoweth. I'm not sure how many of them loved how she sang and danced, and how many were just thinking, "Boy, an actress who can change that quickly...think how much money that will save."
You may recall that when "Grandpa" Al Lewis passed away in February, there was a mini-controversy over his age. He'd been telling people he was 95. Other sources suggested he was 83...which, if true, would mean that a lot of those stories he'd told about what he did in the twenties — like involvement in the defense of Sacco and Vanzetti in 1927 — were fibs.
Well, the Social Security Death Index — which one can access online — now has his listing up. They say he was born April 30, 1923 and they oughta know. That means that when he died on February 3 of this year, he was 82 years, 9 months and 4 days old. Or if you like: 82 years, 9 months and 4 days young.
I'm so glad that's settled. You have no idea how many nights of sleep I've lost over this.
In Georgia, a comic book retailer named Gordon Lee was indicted more than a year ago for allegedly selling an adult comic book to a minor. The case went to trial today and something utterly unexpected occurred. The prosecution dismissed all charges and then re-filed to charge Lee under a similar charge covered by different statutes. They are, in effect, trying to start all over under slightly different rules.
The legal bills for Lee's defense, which look like they'll easily hit the $50,000 mark, have been handled by the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, a most worthy organization. Their website has a full report on today's developments here.
At the risk of making a Bill Frist-style diagnosis from afar, it sounds to me like the prosecutors are trying the old Bleed 'em Dry strategy. They're afraid they can't win on the merits of the case so they'll drag it out and make it expensive...and hope that the accused will agree to a fast plea bargain just to get the thing over with. This works more often in our nation than it should. I hope it doesn't here.
The L.A. Times is running a series of profiles on wounded and limbless soldiers returning from Iraq. Forgive me for going to a Vietnam memory on this but one of the things that turned me around on that war — I went from protesting the protesters to being one of them — was what I saw as a lack of compassion for the troops on the part of those who wanted the war to continue or even escalate. Put simply, I found myself marching among people who simultaneously screamed "Support our soldiers" while not seeming to place a very high value on the lives of those soldiers. When the parents and widows of fallen servicemen spoke out against the war or when the amputees made themselves conspicuous, there was an anger towards them for reminding us that, in a time of war, this happens.
I am not suggesting that the fact that there are body counts and soldiers crippled for life is, in and of itself, reason for stopping a war. Some wars are necessary. But if they're going to go and get blown up in our service, I think the least we can do is look at it.
The first part of the Times series is here, and you should be able to find your way to the others from there. It's very sad reading with occasional glimmers of inspiration, but it will help us to remember that the human cost of a war is not just in the number of fatalities.
You can get a closer look at each of these wonderful items by clicking on it. You'll need a closer look because I'm showing you three examples of the weirdest toy I ever came across — the Lovable Smoking Traveler's Pet. I'm not sure what's so lovable about smoking or just who's doing any travelling here...but that's only the beginning of my bewilderment. When Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble were selling Winstons, they weren't the only Hanna-Barbera characters who had the habit.
I had a couple of these back around '63 or thereabouts. The premise was that you'd take the little plastic figure of Yogi Bear or whoever and wedge one of the little "cigarettes" into the hole in its mouth and light it. It was supposed to blow smoke rings...but when my friend Randy and I tried it with ours, I think we just got a few wisps of smoke in no particular form and then as the fake cigarette burned down, it started to melt the doll. In fact, I think the only part of it Randy liked was seeing Huckleberry Hound with his face melted. We let it go and the doll got shorter and lost its color and looked a lot like Droopy.
We found these in a crummy toy store on Westwood Boulevard. They were a dime or so apiece and there were many to choose from, including Popeye and (I think) Mighty Mouse. I remember thinking that the Popeye one should come with a pipe instead of the tiny cigarettes. There was no evidence on the packaging that the companies that owned the characters had sanctioned or even heard of these bizarre playthings that were made in Hong Kong.
But you have to admire the total lack of logic. First, there's the assumption that children are eager to see their favorite characters smoke...although, come to think of it, Randy and I did buy them. On top of that, they promote two things we really want to see kids do: Smoke and play with matches...although, again come to think of it, I've never smoked. Not once in my entire life, not even one puff. I always thought it was because I find the odor so repulsive but maybe, deep down, I just have a fear that my face will melt until I look like Droopy Dog. Perhaps these toys weren't such a bad idea after all.
If I'd put this up on April Fool's Day, none of you would have bothered clicking on the link...but it's legit. Here's what The New York Times has to say about it...
For the last few months, youtube.com has had available for streaming an advertisement for Rice Krispies, recorded by the Rolling Stones in early 1964. It's completely smoking. You don't see the band; you just see a parody of the British television show "Jukebox Jury," with screaming girls, disapproving grown-ups and exploding cereal boxes. "Pour on the milk-a-licious to the crackle of that rice," Mick Jagger sings. This is when the Stones had only begun to compose; they had just graduated from clubs to theaters, and were still known as a nasty rhythm-and-blues cover band. The question is, how can a Rice Krispies jingle be so hot?
That's as much as I know about it but it's our video link for this morning. If you can eat breakfast while watching it, so much the better...
While we're in a Krispie mood, here's a non-embedded link to another Rice Krispies commercial. This one features the great comic actor Lou Jacobi and the voice work of Frank Welker and Don Messick. I don't know about Frank but to do these, Don (who lived in Santa Barbara) used to get up very early in the A.M., drive down to LAX, catch a plane to Chicago and he'd actually record a couple of Kellogg's spots there the same day, then be driven to O'Hare to catch a plane home. This was before they had ISDN lines that made it possible for someone to record from anywhere in the world but it was possible then to do a phone-patch.
(Quick explanation of phone-patches: The actor is, for example, in a recording studio in L.A. but there's a telephone connection to the studio in Chicago so he can hear the other actors and the director and can take direction from that director. The L.A. actor is recorded in the L.A. facility and then that tape is FedExed or otherwise sent to Chicago to be edited into the mix. Nowadays, an ISDN set-up enables people in different corners of the world to be linked via digital connections and they can all be recorded at once. Or one guy can be in Rangoon and you can hear him and record him just fine in a studio in Tampa.)
Apparently, the folks making the Rice Krispies commercials didn't want to put Messick on a phone-patch. Since Don made an awful lot of money remaining here in Southern California, I can only imagine how much they had to pay him to go through that ordeal. But he'd fly there and fly back and then the next day, he and Frank would go into the Hanna-Barbera studios in Hollywood and record an episode of Scooby Doo.
YouTube also has two versions of my favorite musical Rice Krispies commercial online but on this one, the sound is way outta sync and on this one, the sound is a little out of sync and the picture is worse. I downloaded 'em figuring that when I get the time (HA!), I'd try to slip-and-slide and create one in-sync good copy but it may be a while. If someone else wants to tackle this, be my guest.
Not that long ago, John "Straight Talk" McCain referred to the Reverend Jerry Falwell as "an agent of intolerance." But now the Senator from Arizona is facing his last shot at the presidency. If he were to win, he'd be three years older than Ronald Reagan and a lot of people thought Reagan was too old. McCain seems to feel he needs to court the far right-wing of the Republican party so suddenly, though I sure haven't seen any change of personality or rhetoric out of Falwell, they're buddies. Over at Crooks and Liars, they have a video clip of McCain trying to explain this on today's Meet the Press.
While you're over there: As I've mentioned, I haven't been too taken this season by Real Time With Bill Maher. But the episode that debuted last Friday evening and which is repeating throughout the week was pretty good. At one point, Maher made a very solid case for the ineptness of George W. Bush on the morning of 9/11. Bush's defender on the show was Congressman Dana Rohrabacher who had such a feeble response that I doubt he even believed what he was saying. If you can, catch the whole program this week but in the meantime, Crooks and Liars has about 50 seconds that will give you the idea.
My longtime chum Scott Shaw! has moved his wonderful Oddball Comics site from Comic Book Resources over to its own domain. Things aren't completely set up over there yet but he already has a fun message board and the first Oddball Comic review in his new digs. Henceforth, when you want to see a comic book that'll make you go, "What the hell were they thinking?", click your way on over to www.oddballcomics.com. That's where you'll find 'em.
I went over to the Souplantation near me this afternoon for one last bowl of their Classic Creamy Tomato Soup. That's it in the photo above. The particular soup was only supposed to be in the pots for the month of March but I knew from past experience that the weekend is a transitional time. A lady who works there told me it was the last day but they'd had so many requests to bring it back that she assumes they will.
I was not the only person there for it. Someone else was using the ladle to fill their bowl as I approached. Thinking I was reaching for the soup next to it (Texas Red Chili), he said, "Hey, try this. It's great and this is the last day." He was very happy when I said, "That's what I'm here for." Two strangers bonding over a good bowl of soup...there's a commercial there.
This month, your local Souplantation or Sweet Tomatoes outlet is on a Hawaiian kick, meaning that the employees are all wearing Hawaiian shirts and leis and that most of the non-permanent items have pineapple in them. There's no Pineapple Soup but they have a Curried Pineapple and Ginger Pasta that looked like something you'd buy at a live bait shop, Carrot Pineapple Muffins (with Oat Bran) and Wowie Maui Pineapple Focaccia (with ham). This was in addition to the much-promoted Pineapple Coconut Slaw. I used to think just plain cole slaw was the most disgusting thing on the planet that anyone ever voluntarily puts into their mouth. But there were people eating this stuff so I stand corrected.
About eight of you all wrote me at once to point out, as I should have realized, that the time stamp of 01:02:03 04/05/06 will come again...in a hundred years. And then again, a hundred years after that and a hundred years after that and a hundred years after that. Of course, by the time next time around, the only one of us who'll be around to see it will probably be Charles Lane. So enjoy it while you can.
(Nat Gertler notes that it will happen twice in one day for those folks who aren't on military time.)
One fact in your write-up on Treasure Chest is incorrect. I never had a subscription — that seemed to be limited to students who attended Catholic school, and I was only a Friday afternoon visitor for my weekly Catechism class — though Jerry Sinkovec did, and had actually "bound" (he punched holes in them and put them together with o-rings by year) his issues together so as to easily keep track of them, and re-read the serials. Since I'd see them in the classrooms on Friday afternoons, I presume the subscription copies were delivered and distributed like the Weekly Reader was in public schools, and that kids didn't get them through the mail (though that was probably an available option).
Anyway, my cousins (who also attended Catholic school) also had a subscription, and somehow I got an issue from them circa '60 or so, which had a Joe Sinnott story about Pope John XXIII, which held my interest in finding out more about them eventually. This is why I was fully aware of the subject matter when Treasure Chest showed up on newsstands about...well, obviously by '71 to '72, the last volume and the first one that was issued monthly. I'm wasn't certain when this was, exactly, but my memory of it — and I'm rather sorry that I ignored it at the time, because then I could determine exactly when it was — was also that it was 35-cent giant, which I see is the actual cover-price on those last eight issues. They are also the only volume to display the Comics Code Authority stamp — ironic, since the subject matter could hardly have ever been in danger of triggering anything by them. I treated them then like I treated Classics Illustrated (and all humor comics): I rarely gave them more than a passing glimpse. Had they continued, by the mid-'70s I probably would've started collecting them, like I eventually did everything else...except Classics Illustrated.
Now, I'd like to see Boys' Life put their comics online...
Now that you mention it, I do seem to recall seeing Treasure Chest on a newsstand or two, late in its existence. I'm guessing that circulation via the old method had declined a lot and someone decided to see if it could hold its own against Spider-Man and Batman on the racks. I'm also guessing it didn't. But I think you're wrong about the Comics Code stamp. Scanning that website I linked to, I see a lot of Code symbols on books from earlier years.
The in-class distribution I recall from elementary school in Los Angeles was of Scholastic Books, sometimes known as Tab Books. Once or twice a semester, they'd pass out these little catalogues to us and we were encouraged to order very cheap paperbacks from it. You'd pay your money in and the teacher (or some designated pupil) would compile a bulk order for the class and send it off. Then a few weeks later, a big crate would arrive and we'd all get our books.
A couple times, I was the pupil in charge of the order and I recall taking the job very seriously, keeping careful records of who'd ordered what and collecting all the money. I had to count it over and over to make sure I had the right amount and then take it all down to the principal's office where they'd write one big check for all the orders that were going in from the school. Then every single day, my classmates would ask me — like I had any more information than they did — when their orders would be arriving. When they did, all learning stopped for about an hour while I opened the crate and passed out the books. There were always a few missing but there were also always extras included. I could usually use the extras to appease the kids who hadn't received what they'd paid for. Also, there were other snags in the system...like what to do with the books ordered by a kid who'd been expelled the previous week. I think in that case, I just took his books home and kept them for myself. Which is what you'd have done. Admit it.
I still have a number of these paperbacks on my shelf. I believe some of them — like a nifty collection of the newspaper strip, Miss Peach — were only available through this program.
Getting back to Treasure Chest: I know there have been other comics distributed by this method. Were the EC Picture Stories from the Bible and their other educational items sold this way, either exclusively or in addition to some other means? Does anyone know? And a big Thank You to Mike for the additional info.
This may be my favorite Monty Python sketch. Yeah, I know: It doesn't really have an ending. Most of their sketches don't have endings. But this one makes me laugh a lot every time I see it. It's from their live show at the Hollywood Bowl in 1982. In fact, if you listen hard, you can probably hear me laughing in the fourth row. This particular story never appeared in an issue of the Treasure Chest comic book.
Voice wizard Gregg Berger sent this to me. I assume it's ricocheting all around the Internet and we'll all have it in our e-mailboxes the next few days...
On Wednesday of this week, at two minutes and three seconds after 1:00 in the morning, the time and date will be 01:02:03 04/05/06. This won't ever happen again.
I'd better make a note to stay up late that night. Wouldn't want to sleep through that. [Correction: It will happen again. See here.]
Every so often, George Will writes a column that makes you wonder if wearing bow ties causes the brain to shrink to the size of a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup. Then you watch Tucker Carlson and you become think, "Hmm...maybe an Altoid."
Today, Will ponders the notion that maybe Global Warming isn't such a bad thing. Hey, maybe it'll even be good for us. Yeah...and maybe a nuclear bomb going off in one of our cities will do wonders for urban redevelopment.
The way I think the argument should be made is something like this: Yes, we know there are some scientists who don't think Global Warming exists...and it may turn out to be a false alarm. We hope it'll turn out to be a false alarm. But this is way too serious to not start acting upon now. If a couple of visitors in your home smell smoke, you go investigate. You don't wait until you actually notice a wall erupt in flames to take some action.
At a party last year, I got into a debate with a pro-Bush guy who felt that even though it turned out Hussein didn't have the weapons we thought he might have, we couldn't take that chance. But then later, when the topic of Global Warming came up, the same guy seemed to think we can take that chance; that we don't need to act until it's a proven fact and it won't be a proven fact until the consensus among scientists is unanimous. Never mind that the consensus among scientists isn't even unanimous about whether Listerine kills germs.
The fellow was going on and on about how he hated environmentalists (he called them "eco-terrorists") who are always telling us that we need to save the rainforests and the endangered species and how that's all bunk because the ecology is exactly what it was thousands of years ago and it never changes. And all the time he was saying this, he was drinking bottled water.
One of the most widely-circulated comic books in history is one that, I must admit, I know very little about. The Treasure Chest of Fun and Fact was a comic published by George A. Pflaum of Dayton, Ohio (and later by T.S. Dennison) especially for Catholic schools. It ran from 1946 to 1972 with contents that were educational and enlightening and not always preachy. The concept — at least, I'm extrapolating this from the handful of issues I've read — was to reach young minds in a familiar format but to provide them with not only Biblical lessons but also non-violent stories with an emphasis on what we now call "human values." There were some nice tales of racial and religious understanding but there were also a few issues that Joe McCarthy might have used to read his grandkids to sleep, harping on the Soviet menace, particularly in an ongoing series of stories called "Godless Communism." (In some of those tales, which I talked about earlier in this item, things could get a little gorey and — dare I say it? — comic bookish.)
Treasure Chest was not sold on newsstands. You had to subscribe and most kids subscribed via forms distributed in their classrooms, which probably meant that their parents gave them the money. As each bi-weekly issue came off the press, the publisher would ship crates to parochial schools around the country and the comics would be passed out to the subscribers, with plenty of extra copies sent along for the school library. The comic usually suspended publication during the summer months when school was not in session but would publish the occasional special. I have heard a wide range of estimates as to how many copies were sold, including one artist's belief that it sold enough to be a "gold mine" for its stingy publisher. Since the book lasted something like 500 issues, I think it's safe to say it was at least profitable. (Near the end of the run, it it probably wasn't. They cut its frequency to monthly and cheapened the package considerably.)
Among the talents who contributed to the title and whose names would be known to readers of mainstream comics are Joe Sinnott, Bob Powell, Fran Matera, Reed Crandall, Dick Giordano, Joe Orlando, Murphy Anderson, Jim Mooney and even "Ghastly" Graham Ingels, drawing material that was a far cry from Tales From the Crypt. Although neither Pflaum nor Dennison paid very well, most of the artists enjoyed the creative challenges, if not the subject matter. A lot of their pages show vast amounts of research and care, and most of them liked how steady the work was, especially during periods when the newsstand comic book market was pretty shaky.
The American Catholic History Research Center came upon a collection of Treasure Chest and they've decided to scan the pages and put them online for all to see. They don't have all the issues there but they have more than you'll probably read. Pick one at random and you may be impressed with some very nice storytelling and some very fine illustration. Here's the link and now I think it's time to pass the collection plate...
I'm always fascinated by a kind of event that turns up on C-Span two or three times a year. It's these dinners where much of Washington will gather to dine and hear speeches, and they bring in some comedian to entertain. They usually pick someone who does political material, which gives the comic quite a challenge. I mean, it's one thing to do jokes about the president and quite another to do them in front of the president and a ballroom full of people who work with or around the president. For the most part, the comics wind up tempering their acts and/or throwing in a lot of "I'm just kidding" disclaimers, and things often do not go well. Last year, for instance, Lewis Black spoke at the annual Radio and Television Correspondents Dinner and while he certainly didn't bomb, he also didn't get the kind of response he usually gets from an audience.
The tape of this year's Radio and Television Correspondents Dinner was on C-Span a little while ago. It airs again in an hour and will probably be rerun later in the week and posted to their website. The entertainer this year was impressionist Frank Caliendo, best known for his work on Mad TV. Caliendo's a good mimic and a funny guy, and his versions of John Madden and George W. Bush are especially good. Bush wasn't present for the event but Dick Cheney was about eighteen inches away from the rostrum as Caliendo went through his routine, peppering it with more assurances than were probably necessary that he liked Bush and had voted for him. The audience, including Cheney, seemed to have no problem laughing at a good George W. Bush impression...and even at one joke about Cheney and his rifle. (Cheney got a lot of laughs during his part of the program, especially with a slide show that poked fun at himself.)
Coming up later this month, I believe, is the White House Correspondents Dinner for which the president is usually in attendance. Entertainment will be provided by Stephen Colbert.
In the meantime, I'll post a link to the video of the Radio and Television Correspondents Dinner whenever it's up on the C-Span site. And here's a link to three minutes of Frank Caliendo doing his George W. Bush and Bill Clinton material on Late Show With David Letterman...
It may be the most famous movie no one's ever seen. In 1972, Jerry Lewis wrote, directed and starred in The Day the Clown Cried, a film about a clown named Helmut Doork who was employed during World War II in a most unclownlike task: Entertaining little Jewish kids in a concentration camp until it was time to put them to death, lest they grow up to be Adult Jews. The film was based on a work by Joan O'Brien and it said that Ms. O'Brien hated what was done to her story and would not allow the movie to be released.
Ordinarily, this would not matter in a movie deal. Writers almost always waive all control once they accept the check. But in this case, the producers of the film got into trouble while it was being made and just plain ran out of money. This caused two things to happen. One was that production was shut down with many scenes yet to be filmed. Jerry, who believed passionately in the movie he was making, actually financed the last week or so of filming out of his own pocket. But he stopped with many scenes left unshot when he and his lawyers realized the other thing that had happened, which was that the ownership of the movie was thrown into question. Jerry was paying to make a movie he might not be able to own...that perhaps no one would ever be able to own.
So he stopped shooting and began assembling a rough cut of the film without the missing scenes. The idea at that point was that the lawyers would straighten things out and once ownership and more financing were secured, Jerry would go back and film whatever he needed to complete the picture. Didn't work out that way. It took a long time to even begin to iron out the contractual mess and it was impossible to do it without the cooperation of Joan O'Brien, who refused to cooperate. At some point, Jerry reluctantly realized that too much time had passed; that he had aged too much to play Helmut in further scenes, plus the sets and costumes were destroyed, other actors were unavailable, etc. On top of all that, several articles about the debacle had destroyed the film's reputation without it even reaching completion. Reportedly, he continued to edit and re-edit the footage, just to see if he could make something of it...but he has declared it will never be shown, not even in its unfinished state. Unavailability has given the project a legendary status.
In 1997, Life is Beautiful — a film with a not-dissimilar premise — won acclaim and an Academy Award for its star, Roberto Benigni. It was a partial vindication for Lewis in that it disproved the claim of some that he had tackled an impossible storyline. Still, one cannot go and rent The Day the Clown Cried from Netflix. It's an unfinished film forever and as I said, Lewis will not allow anyone to see it. But videos have a way of making the rounds and about twenty minutes (some of it in work print form, with crayon markings and bad splices) recently turned up on the bootleg circuit. You can decide for yourself but personally, I found the scene with the fat kid rather funny and the one where Helmut puts on a puppet show for the children without having any puppets, rather touching. See if you don't agree...
May 1, 2006
