Monday, August 28, 2006

Set the TiVo!

Well, you might want to...if you have The Sleuth Channel, which you probably don't. But if you do, you might be interested in this. Tomorrow night at 11:30 PM (my time), they're running an episode of the 60's Dragnet show that features the late Henry Corden in a showy part. Henry was a great cartoon voice actor, most notably as the second and longest voice of Fred Flintstone. But he also had a very nice on-camera career and some of his friends and co-stars in the voice biz have asked me to let them know when they could see him in one of these roles. Tomorrow night's the answer...if you have The Sleuth Channel which, like I said, you probably don't. Henry plays a furrier who has been robbed and then, thanks to the type of ace detective work that too often typified Dragnet, someone phones Joe Friday and tells him who the crooks are so Henry gets his furs back and why am I telling you all this? You probably don't have The Sleuth Channel. Forget I even posted this.

• Posted at 7:11 PM · LINK

Recommended Reading

Steven Greenhouse and David Leonhardt discuss the state of the American economy. Bottom line: Almost all the good news is for the folks who were already among the wealthiest. Those who work for a living are working harder and earning less.

• Posted at 4:56 PM · LINK

This Is Another Test

At this very moment, I am sitting in my car, which is parked in front of my mother's house in West L.A. I decided to see if I could post to my weblog from my handheld H-P iPAQ Pocket PC, which has connected to an open Wi-Fi connection. If you can read this, I was able to do this.

• Posted at 2:19 PM · LINK

I See Dead People

All last week in the Broom-Hilda comic strip, the witch and her vulture pal were discussing what to do with a dead cartoonist. A couple of folks wrote to me to ask if Russell Myers — who's been drawing that strip since Rembrandt worked in Crayola™ — was okay. Among his peers, Russell is famously far-ahead. Others spend their lives burning the Midnight Light Bulb to get this week's strips off to the engraver. Myers has around a year's worth of his fine feature Broom-Hilda, all drawn and ready-to-go.

So it's entirely possible that when he passes, which I hope won't be in the next few decades, his strip will continue to appear for some time. That's what happened when the late/great Virgil Partch was killed in a car accident in 1984. Ordinarily, when a cartoonist kicks the ink bottle, the syndicate has to decide A.S.A.P. whether or not the strip will continue and if so, who will do it. With Partch's strip, Big George, he was so far ahead that when people inquired about its fate, they were told, "We'll decide next year...or maybe the year after." The folks in charge finally chose to drop the feature when the Partch backlog was exhausted.

I decided to use the recent continuity in Broom-Hilda as an excuse to phone up Russell, who I've known for years, and make sure he was hale and healthy. He sure seems to be. Matter of fact, the joke here is that he's probably the syndicated cartoonist least likely to be found face-down-dead at his drawing board from "the ceaseless pressure of unrelenting deadlines." When he goes, it'll probably be from the strain of carrying around all those yet-to-be-published strips.

Here's a link to last week's Broom-Hilda storyline, which starts with the two panels above. Click the appropriate arrows to advance from day to day.

• Posted at 11:45 AM · LINK

Repair Work

Saturday evening, a local TV station (KTLA) telecast an edited version of the Local Emmy Awards ceremony we wrote about here. The ceremony was chopped — ruthlessly but probably unavoidably — down to an hour. And I wanted to note that the two complaints I voiced about the treatment of honoree Stan Freberg were both fixed. (I am not suggesting it was because of this site.) The spelling of his name was corrected and a new song was dubbed in to play him on and off the stage. To whoever did that: Thank you.

• Posted at 10:21 AM · LINK

Recommended Reading

Frank Rich on the Bush administration's handling of the Hurricane Katrina aftermath.

• Posted at 9:10 AM · LINK

Happy Jack Kirby Day!

Had he lived, he would have been 89 years old today...and still brilliant. Oh, his amazing creative powers might have dimmed with time and health. The last few years he drew, failing motor skills caused him to not draw anywhere up to his old standards. But that was okay because nobody else was drawing up to his old standards, either.

We're talking Kirby here...Jack Kirby, owner of (arguably) the most fertile imagination ever seen in adventure and fantasy comic books. People referred to him as a great artist, and he was...but I always thought that compliment kind of missed the point. It wasn't just that he drew so well but that he thought of wonderful things to draw that no one else would ever have imagined. Another pretty good artist, Al Williamson, once said, "If you told me or most of my buddies to draw fifty spaceships, they'd all look like they were built in the same plant. If Jack drew fifty spaceships, they'd look like they were built by fifty different alien races."

I miss Jack. I miss the guy the same way you miss that favorite uncle you always enjoyed being around. But I also miss just having a Jack Kirby in our midst...a man who just radiated creative energy and who made everyone he met feel a little more like a writer or artist. That was because he lived and breathed new ideas, new visions, new vistas. Young, wanna-be artists and writers went to him with their work seeking...well, some were seeking career help and others were seeking tips, but I think a lot of them just wanted semi-parental approval and the reassurance that they were breathing the same air as an idol. He encouraged everyone and they all went away with more confidence...because the King of the Comics stood on no ceremony. He treated everyone as an equal, even though no one really was.

I probably write too much about Jack but you have to understand. I don't do it for you. I'm not even sure I do it for him. I do it for myself because since he died, it's really the only way I have of spending any more time with him.

Happy birthday, Kirby. Make a wish and blow out the galaxy.

• Posted at 2:20 AM · LINK

Recommended Reading

If you want to read the smartest commentaries on the Katrina reconstruction debacle, as written by someone who really knows the area, go read Harry Shearer. Start with the most recent column and just read back 'til you can't take any more.

• Posted at 1:16 AM · LINK

Follow-Up Report

I am told by several correspondents that Orange Life Savers have made a reappearance in the basic Life Savers assortment roll...or so they think. A number of people wrote to say they'd heard that the Life Savers people had bowed to popular demand and reinstated our beloved orange...but not one of these people had actually seen one.

So in the next day or so, if I'm anywhere that sells them, I'm actually going to purchase a roll of Life Savers and report. Check back here for this hard-hitting investigative report.

Hey, don't laugh. It's more legwork than Bob Woodward has done in twenty years.

• Posted at 12:44 AM · LINK

Today's Video Link

Another clip from the 1985 TV special, Night of 100 Stars. This one spotlights "vaudeville," though I don't guarantee the definition of what they think falls under that heading. At least though, the featured stars in this one do a little more than just walk out on stage to applause. Among those who actually perform, you'll see Roby Gasser and His Sea Lions, an act from Switzerland that used to be featured in Splash!, the big show at the Riviera in Las Vegas. The way Mr. Gasser and his marine mammal leave the stage, which is the way they exit in this clip, always got one of the biggest ovations I ever heard in Vegas.

Another Vegas crowd pleaser is my pal Ronn Lucas, who you'll see in there with his pal, Buffalo Billy.. And I'll let the other ones surprise you. This runs a little under six and a half minutes and I guarantee you William Shatner is nowhere to be seen.

• Posted at 12:23 AM · LINK