Tuesday, May 30, 2006

Health-Type Report

Much of my e-mail is wishing me a speedy recovery and a number of people seem to think I'm still in the hospital. I appreciate the well wishes but I want to assure everyone that I consider myself (amazingly) largely recovered. I got out of the hospital on Sunday afternoon, almost exactly 48 hours after the surgery. I'm avoiding heavy lifting and overtaxing myself...but I always avoid stuff like that. Which is one of the reasons I needed the Gastric Bypass operation. Today, I was out of the house most of the day, pursuing a more-or-less normal routine, minus the eating part. Haven't had solid food since last Tuesday night — a two-day liquid diet is part of the pre-op routine — and haven't missed it. I'm dining on Canter's chicken broth and protein shakes...and probably not enough of either. But I feel fine.

No pain from the incisions. No pain at all, at least since early Saturday. One hundred hours after the surgery, I did not feel any different than I had before except perhaps a bit lighter. There could well be aches and nausea and complications ahead as my system adjusts further and as I eventually reintroduce it to solid foods...but right now, I'm jes' fine.

I'm trying not to "sell" this surgery to anyone because I'm sure others have a rougher time of it. In fact, I saw others at the hospital who did. I'm just telling my friends not to be concerned about me. In fact, I'd like to think that the time to be worried about my health has now been pre-empted for a couple of decades.

• Posted at 11:28 PM · LINK

License to Puzzle

As you've probably seen, cars that are driven in other countries sometimes sport little international license plates. On each, one, two or three letters denotes some code that indicates the country of origin for the vehicle. In the above three examples, "S" indicates a car from Sweden, "MC" indicates a car from Monaco and if you see "GBZ" on the back of an auto, you're following a car from Gibraltar. The codes are not always obvious, at least to those of us who speak English. For instance, "ROU" is Uruguay, "CH" is Switzerland and "CL" is Sri Lanka. I don't know those by heart. I got them off this list.

This afternoon, my friend Sergio and I were driving along and we were behind a car with one of those oval license plates on the rear. It said "DMB."

Now, Sergio has travelled the world over and speaks many languages including, on occasion, English. I have a pretty good memory. But try as we might, we couldn't figure out what country was denoted by "DMB." I kept thinking it was something like "Dominican of Milton Bradley" and that sure wasn't it. So finally, Sergio pulled up alongside the driver, rolled down the window and yelled to the guy to ask him...and the guy told us.

It stood for "Dave Matthews Band."

• Posted at 9:11 PM · LINK

Toth on Model

A number of fans of Alex Toth's comic book art seem to be a little puzzled about his vast body of work in the animation field. Most of it was done for Hanna-Barbera Studios, which was not far from his home and where his wife Guyla worked as a secretary to Joe Barbera. (And I hasten to add that that job description does not do her justice. She was a lovely and extraordinary woman who did a lot to keep that chaotic studio running.)

Alex had several functions for Hanna-Barbera. One was in the designing and selling of shows. H-B was basically in the business of getting networks to buy new programs and, once sold, the production of a given show was almost an afterthought. Alex was brought into meetings with writers and network execs where his skill for rapid drawing was given a workout. He'd sketch what they pitched and shape the melange of ideas into something visual, tossing in ideas of his own. Some people aren't sure if he created shows like Space Ghost, Herculoids, Mightor, Birdman, etc., and the answer is that he usually created the visuals and occasionally contributed ideas to the concepts. So I don't know that the word "created" really applies.

Then Alex would prepare large boards of color artwork — sometimes colored by him, often colored or otherwise embellished by others in the studio — that would be used as further selling tools in meetings. A cartoon show must often be pitched, re-pitched and re-re-pitched, meaning that Joe Barbera (or someone) would pitch it to network guys and then the network guys would pitch it to higher-ranked network guys and somewhere along the way, someone might have to re-re-pitch it to ad agencies. Having good art boards as visual aids can be an enormous aid for any pitcher, and Toth's were among the best.

After a show was sold and they began making episodes, Alex would usually do model sheets to design the characters — both the regulars and the "incidentals." Incidentals are new characters that appear in only one episode...and there would also be model sheets for vehicles, major props, key pieces of scenery, etc. He produced hundreds of these, perhaps thousands, and they are avidly collected by appreciators of fine comic-style illustration. They were a bit more controversial within the studio where some felt that Toth was the wrong guy to have setting the parameters of what everyone else would then have to draw. Everyone admired his drawing ability but there were those who argued that he was either too good or too special.

In most cases, the artists who would have to then draw the characters based on Alex's models had nowhere near his skills, or at least nowhere near the skills for that kind of illustration. H-B did adventure shows but they also continued to produce shows in what one might call the Yogi Bear style. Depending on what kinds of shows were sold each year and how many, it sometimes happened that a "Yogi Bear" artist would get assigned to an adventure show and many of these otherwise skilled artists struggled to replicate the kind of thing Toth was doing on the model sheets. Even a few artists who were solid in adventure-style art found his work too angular at times. Some Toth model sheets were worked over by others — traced and simplified (some would say, "watered-down") — before they went into production. But many artists were also stimulated by the challenge they presented and found that the designs were solid and, as is necessary with animation, designed with an absolute economy of line.

As I mentioned, animators still hoard and trade copies of them. It is not uncommon that an artist assigned to do up a model sheet of a policeman for some new show will haul out a Toth model sheet of a policeman and trace it, making just enough changes to pass it off as new...or not. I have seen Toth-designed characters appear without modification in shows he had nothing to do with, and I expect we always will. It's just part of the grand legacy that the man leaves us.

• Posted at 10:54 AM · LINK

Briefly Noted

Several folks inform me — as I guess I should have realized from the lettering style at the beginning — that the Tom Noddy clip is from The Tracey Ullman Show.

And it's now been 91 hours since they wheeled me into surgery and I'm doing fine.

• Posted at 8:29 AM · LINK

Today's Video Link

Here's a great act..."great," in part because he's the only guy who does it. His name is Tom Noddy and he invented what he calls Bubble Magic. He comes out and blows soap bubbles.

His first appearance on TV with his Bubble Magic may have been on a show I wrote in the early eighties. I recall that we had a lot of tech problems figuring out how to light him so that his handiwork was visible on camera...and it was also necessary to rearrange the studio air conditioning so that none of it blew onto the stage. The crew rigged little panels to funnel the air towards the studio audience and away from the performance area. Shortly after, The Tonight Show booked Tom — because they'd seen him on our show, I think — and their director called our director to find out how we'd handled it. This clip may be that Tonight Show appearance.

In any case, it's just a sampler of a much longer act that Tom still performs all around the world. I need to drop the guy a line and find out when he's blowing this way because I'd love to see it again and, of course, see how he's built on it in the last quarter-century. And now, we are proud to present a little more than two minutes of Tom Noddy and his Bubble Magic...

• Posted at 1:11 AM · LINK

May 31, 2006 • Current • May 29, 2006