Wednesday, December 20, 2006

Off the Air

You missed it! But don't worry...Stu's Show, featuring Stu Shostak and Yours Truly discussing Hanna-Barbera and the late Joe Barbera, reruns throughout the next week. Consult this schedule to get the time in your zone when you can listen in.

• Posted at 6:04 PM · LINK

Live Radio Blogging

At this very moment, I'm on Shokus Internet Radio discussing Joe Barbera with my pal, Stu Shostak. If you read this in the next hour, click here to come over and listen in on our conversation.

• Posted at 4:57 PM · LINK

Today's (Risky) Bonus Video Link

I'm going to take my life into my hands now and attempt to embed a video from last night's Daily Show With Jon Stewart. This is dangerous because the Comedy Central website was designed by someone who apparently thought it would be hilarious to configure the most confusingly-designed website on the 'net and to include all sorts of complex animations and scripts to muck up our browsers. I always have the feeling when I'm there that I could click on the wrong thing and take the entire network completely off the air.

But it's worth the gamble to make sure you've seen Jon Stewart's interview with William Kristol, perhaps the punditry's leading advocate of the following Foreign Policy: Whenever something's wrong somewhere in the world, we should go in, show everyone that we possess awesome power, reduce them to subservience, make them have free elections ("free" in the sense that they have to elect only the leaders we want them to elect) and then allow American business to go in and exploit the situation. This actually may not be a bad strategy for some nations but Kristol and his crew seem to think it's a universal solution for everything and everywhere...and the fact that it keeps failing and creating more problems for us is a minor quibble.

Somehow, he reminds me of a guy I encountered years ago who thought he was a doctor (the A.M.A. did not) and that there was no ailment in the world that couldn't be cured by eating fish. Some who heeded his advice got better but most got worse and some died. And of course, if they got worse or died, the explanation always was that they simply hadn't eaten enough fish.

You almost have to admire Bill Kristol. If I'd been as utterly wrong as he's been — if I had people on my own side saying we'd screwed up big time — I don't think I'd be rushing onto every TV show that would have me to try and shore up my position. I certainly wouldn't go on with Jon Stewart, in front of his studio audience. I mean, even if there is a defense possible of the Bush plan, that's not the place to make your argument. Still, Kristol shows up on programs like this, smiling the same frozen smile, no matter how he gets slapped around. As you'll see, Stewart slaps him pretty hard. Or at least, you'll see it if the video link works...

• Posted at 2:12 PM · LINK

Jim and Steve Do the Big Apple

My friends Jim Brochu and Steve Schalchlin are currently in New York, appearing in their musical play, The Big Voice: God or Merman? It's at the Actors' Temple Theatre and it's probably quite wonderful. I haven't seen it but it's won a lot of awards and Jim and Steve are brilliant and I even got an e-mail from a reader of this weblog who went to see it strictly because he recognized Jim's name from previous mentions on this weblog. This reader is a self-admitted homophobe and didn't realize until he got there that the play was about two gay men who sing a lot about their relationship. But he stayed for it and enjoyed it, and that's probably the best review Jim and Steve will ever get.

While in Manhattan, they're keeping a running video diary, excerpts of which are posted on Steve's weblog. They're all interesting and worth your attention but I'll direct you especially to this installment, which finds them taking a tour of Al Hirschfeld's studio. Jim gets overcome by emotion, which is not all that unusual. I mean, Jim cries if you tell him the swallows will be a little late getting back to Capistrano. But it's all quite honest and fascinating and I kinda know how he feels. I had the honor of sitting for a caricature by Mr. Hirschfeld back in 1992 and spent a thrilling afternoon with him in that studio. There's something invigorating about just being in a room where so much great creativity has taken place. You also leave with little NINAs all over your clothes and in your hair.

• Posted at 11:33 AM · LINK

The Internet Trembles

Len Wein is blogging.

• Posted at 10:38 AM · LINK

Betty's Still Cuter

Nate Stewart is the latest of about ten people who've written, asking me to comment on a new "experiment" in the Archie Comics line...drawing the adventures of Betty and Veronica in a slightly more realistic style. Nate's message says, "Maybe you mentioned this already (if so, please point me toward the correct entry on your blog), but I am curious as to your thoughts on the change. I find it strangely unsettling."

I'm not sure what basis I should use for this judgment. Is it sacrilegious? No...this is Archie Comics, not The Bible. The characters have been changed a hundred different ways over the years to make them more merchandisable. They've long since passed out of the realm of creations with any sort of unified vision or concept.

Is it a good idea from the standpoint of moving product? Probably. The line of comics has gotten so generic and easy to overlook that almost anything that generates some interest is likely not a bad idea. Moreover, the revamp — and I'm going just off the one cover drawing above right that's been released so far — may partially correct a certain problem that the comics have long have, which is that they've become unstuck in time. They're not set in today, as the wardrobe and haircuts of certain characters establish, as well as the fifties approach to dating and male-female relationships. But to try and make the stories relevant to a current audience, the writers keep dropping in references to current celebrities and trends...which means the stories don't take place in the fifties, either. At least with this "new look," we have an Archie-line comic that looks like it was drawn in the year 2006. Perhaps some day, they'll let one good writer take the scripts into into this century, too.

• Posted at 10:06 AM · LINK

Today's Video Link

It's the opening of one of my favorite Hanna-Barbera shows, Top Cat. I'll point out two things for those of you who love to fixate on minute, trivial details. In the beginning, when the limousine turns around, you can briefly see that the insignia on the front is "HB." Then near the end, the folks in the camera department got the cel levels screwed up. The fancy-dressed waiter manages to walk between the lunch box and the table on which it has been placed. This mistake not only got on the air but no one ever fixed it.

Still, I thought this was a great series. Obviously, it drew inspiration from the Phil Silvers Bilko show. Some of us have a theory that the original notion was to build the show around Daws Butler's conman voice, which had otherwise found its way into the mouth of Hokey Wolf. It wasn't exactly an impression of Mr. Silvers but it did bring him to mind. And the way the theory goes, at some point in the development process, they chickened out, just as they had with The Flintstones. Daws did the voices of both Fred and Barney in the original presentation that led to that series...and what he did, at the request of Mssrs. Hanna and Barbera, was essentially the same dead-on Gleason/Carney impressions that he'd done for the Warner Brothers "Honeymousers" cartoons.

In the case of the Modern Stone Age Family, the lawyers seem to have gotten too worried about a lawsuit from Gleason and/or the producers of The Honeymooners. Daws's impressions were good enough to sell the series but when it came time to go on the air with it, they replaced his voices with ones that sounded a bit less like Gleason and Carney. The same thing may have happened with Top Cat. They feared litigation so they dumped the Daws impression and brought in someone who didn't sound quite as close to the original.

They did retain Maurice Gosfield, who'd played Doberman on the Bilko show, to play Top Cat's not-dissimilar cohort, Benny the Ball, but no one else from the Phil Silvers program was in evidence. Not long after, Allan Melvin — who'd played Bilko's sidekick, Henshaw — became a mainstay of the H-B voice pool...and Harvey Lembeck, who played Bilko's other sidekick, was heard in a couple of uncredited roles in other Hanna-Barbera cartoons soon after that. Makes you wonder if they first came to the studio's attention because someone was thinking of casting more voices from the Bilko series.

Meanwhile, I should mention one other possible source of inspiration for Top Cat: Joe Barbera, himself. There was a fair amount of Joe in Top Cat, always charming the ladies and buttering people up when he wanted something out of them. Both did it with such style and grace that it usually succeeded. After I started working with Mr. B. and seeing him in action, I decided that at least some of the writers of Top Cat must have had him in mind as a model, at least as much as they thought of Bilko. And it was only after I formulated this observation that I learned that in the original presentation, the name of the series was Top Cats (plural, referring to the whole gang) and their leader was named "J.B." A surviving storyboard for the pilot episode clearly has the name "J.B." written in throughout and replaced with "T.C."

Make of that what you will. And now it's time to click and watch the clip...

• Posted at 12:23 AM · LINK