Tuesday, December 12, 2006

Today's Bonus Video Link

And it's a special bonus because I didn't write any of it. It's another thirteen minutes of old cereal commercials for those of us who usually liked the commercials more than the cereal. (Warning: This package contains some repeats from others to which we've recently linked.) Among those in this collection, you'll find a couple of Alpha Bits spots with Jack E. Leonard voicing his mailman character, a Crispy Critters commercial with Sheldon Leonard as the voice of Linus the Lion-Hearted, Ex-pugilist Rocky Graziano as a sea captain selling Post Raisin Bran, a Sugar Bear ad with Gerry Matthews as the voice of the bear and Ruth Buzzi as Granny Goodwitch, Tony the Tiger as voiced by Thurl Ravenscroft, and a lot of commercials that suggest that if you eat Post Sugar Crisp, you can beat up anyone you want to beat up.

Somewhere in there, there's a spot with Euell Gibbons, a "naturalist" who was very famous for a brief time, mostly in jokes that appeared in Johnny Carson monologues. Mr. Gibbons used to advocate the eating of odd (to some) plants and berries that could be found in the wild and was known to take lunch by nibbling away in public parks. For some reason, some ad agency thought he'd be a dandy person to be the spokesperson for Post Grape Nuts...and he may have been, I don't know. All I know is that I thought it made the notion of eating that cereal sound like eating tree bark and I always wondered why they thought that was a good idea.

• Posted at 12:52 PM · LINK

Today's Political Thought

There are a lot of polls out about potential presidential nominees in 2008, telling you that Hillary Clinton has X% support while Barack Obama has Y% and John McCain and Rudy Giuliani are battling for Z%. I not only think these polls are meaningless this early, I think they're especially meaningless with candidates who haven't indicated they're likely to run. A lot of people don't want to fall in love with someone they can't have. I think if Al Gore came out and said, "I'm running for president and I'm going to do everything I can to take back the White House for the Democrats," his numbers among Democrats would go way up.

Polls say that Clinton and McCain are the front-runners for their respective parties' nominations. Okay, that makes sense. They're also the two people perceived as most likely to make the effort, and I don't think that's a coincidence. Maybe this is all stating the obvious on my part because I keep reading polls that say that, to cite one recent one, Hillary is favored by 28% of self-identified Democrats, whereas Gore is only favored by 13%. Uh, maybe that's because Gore keeps acting like he isn't running and Hillary keeps acting like she is. And maybe that's all it means.

• Posted at 12:39 PM · LINK

More Cat 2 Buy

The Fox Home Video people have already issued all 121 half-hours of Garfield and Friends in five volumes of DVDs. Now, they're going back and issuing single DVDs, each holding a batch of selected episodes. The first one is out now, I'm told. It's called Garfield and Friends: Behind the Scenes and it spotlights cartoons in which the lasagna-gorging cat explained to viewers how a cartoon show is assembled, or otherwise lectured on the vital issues of the day. There are fifteen of them included. These were among the episodes that the crew on the show liked the most and certain folks at CBS liked the least, so that says something for them.

You can order it two ways, assuming you want to order it at all. There's the plain, old fashioned DVD for thirteen bucks at Amazon, and they also have the deluxe model for eighteen bucks. The deluxe model is the same DVD but it includes a Garfield "mini beanie" plush toy that I just know you can't live without. A similar DVD package featuring Odie will follow shortly...and maybe someday, Mark will get his royalty payments, although I fear they're going to pay me off in those little dolls.

• Posted at 11:45 AM · LINK

Wonder Whatever Became of Me...

We're hearing that it's finally going to happen: A DVD release of WKRP in Cincinnati. But as we've warned here before, they will not be as the shows originally aired. The disc jockeys in the popular sitcom often played records and at the time the shows were produced, it didn't cost that much for the producers to use real records. So they did. Then later, when the shows got to the land of syndicated reruns, the rates had changed and it cost more to leave those real records in. So they didn't. Other, generic songs were substituted...and where there were lines of dialogue referencing the now-excised tunes, they either (a) left the lines in so they made no sense or (b) had someone try to imitate the actors and redub new dialogue. Neither worked all that well.

I'm told a first season DVD set will be out next Spring and that a number of songs will be changed. I'm not sure if that means these are the syndicated prints or if they're redoing the replacements. Either way, it's something of a shame...though I suppose an altered collection is better than no collection at all.

The last time we discussed this here, it sent another blogging friend into a tirade, the jist of which was, "How dare those greedy record owners try to hold up the DVD company for money, thereby making it impossible for the folks who made the WKRP shows to market them in their original form?" That may be the case or it may be that the company that now controls WKRP in Cincinnati (which is not the company that made them in the first place) is just being penurious. That has been known to happen, too. Unless you're privvy to the negotiations, you don't know.

• Posted at 9:29 AM · LINK

Hot Manatee Action

If you've been watching Late Night With Conan O'Brien, you're already familiar with their great new website. If you're not, here's the story of how it came to be...and a direct link to www.hornymanatee.com.

• Posted at 2:12 AM · LINK

Today's Video Link

This is another Garfield cartoon that I wrote and which shouldn't be up on YouTube. It's called Skyway Robbery and it features a recurring conman character named Mr. Swindler who was in four or five episodes.

Interesting story how we cast his voice. I decided to introduce a larcenous scam artist who'd pop up every few weeks to try and cheat Garfield's owner Jon out of his hard-earned mazuma. To play the role, I cast a wonderful character actor named Jesse White. Most people remember him as the Maytag Repairman in the commercials but most of the jobs Jesse got during his long, rich career had him playing agents and con-artists and crooked salesmen, and I thought he'd be perfect. And if we'd gotten him five years earlier, he probably would have been.

But Jesse was old and Jesse was ill, and it just broke your heart. He simply wasn't up to the job. The recording session took a long time and even then, what resulted was barely satisfactory. I decided then and there that that particular conman character wasn't coming back and that I'd create a new one and find a different actor to play him. About two minutes after Jesse White left, I was walking into the waiting room at the recording studio, wondering who I might get for the job when I noticed an actor sitting there. It was Carl Ballantine and he was waiting to do a radio commercial in one of the other studios.

You may know Carl Ballantine from his role on McHale's Navy. You may know him from one of his hundreds of other TV and motion picture appearances. You may even know him as The Amazing Ballantine, performer of the lamest, funniest magic act in the world. I know him from all those and from appearing in the 1971 stage revival of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum starring Phil Silvers. It was the most hysterical, magical thing I've ever seen in a theater and Ballantine was one of the reasons. (I wrote about this production here and here.)

So that day at Buzzy's Recording Studio, I saw Carl sitting there, said the word "perfect" aloud...and he soon became Mr. Swindler. I thought he was quite wonderful in the role and he was a joy to work with. One of the reasons I kept bringing Swindler back was so that I could keep bringing Ballantine back.

Our cartoon today was his second appearance. When I first put up a website, I had a number of requests to post one of my cartoon scripts so people could see what they look like. I picked Skyway Robbery and you can read it over here.

In addition to Carl, the voice cast consisted of Lorenzo Music as the cat, Thom Huge as Jon, and Gregg Berger as Odie and everyone else. You may click when ready. It runs about six and a half minutes.

• Posted at 2:09 AM · LINK

December 13, 2006 • Current • December 11, 2006