Thursday, December 21, 2006

Set the TiVo!

This weekend on C-Span 2: Art Buchwald, Too Soon to Say Goodbye. As we all know, the great columnist checked into a hospice in Washington last year with the expectation that he had 2-3 weeks to live. He's still alive and still writing, and this is a little 25 minute show about him. It airs Sunday at 11 AM and 5:30 PM, and on Monday at 6:30 PM and 9 PM, all times Eastern. My thanks to Gordon Kent for alerting me to this and I hereby forgive him for the lousy creamed corn I ate last night.

Meanwhile, here's a Head's Up! On Wednesday, January 10, there's something on Basic Cable that you're going to want to record, at least if you're a fan of great comic actors in very bad movies. I'll write about it here next week but trust Mark on this one. It's a classic and not in the good sense...and no, it's not Skidoo. It's not that awful...but it's close. Check this space in a few days for all the details.

• Posted at 4:22 PM · LINK

Today's Video Link

You've all seen this a thousand times but I don't care. I feel like putting up the opening from The Jetsons because I feel like writing about the first time I saw that show.

It was the first night that show was on: Sunday evening, September 23, 1962...which I means I would have been ten years of age. A great age to watch the first episode of The Jetsons.

I wonder if kids today get as excited about a new cartoon show as my friends and I did back then. We all loved what had emerged so far from the Hanna-Barbera studio and this was their new series. What's more, it was announced as the first series to be broadcast in color on ABC. My family and I did not then own a color set but Mrs. Hollingsworth down the street did. She was an elderly widow who was cranky about everything except me because I was so adorable. And if you think I'm adorable now, you should have seen me when I was ten. She invited me to come down and watch the new cartoon show on her set.

(Trivial Aside, of the kind that appears often on this website: We all agree, I'm sure, that H-B TV cartoons never had the visual richness and depth of Disney animation or any good Warner Brothers cartoon...or even the theatrical animation that Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera had produced for MGM. But something to consider is that they may have worked better on television then. The simple graphics, thick outlines and bold colors came across well on the primitive TV screens of the day. We didn't have 50" High Def Plasmas then, remember. My middle-class family watched its shows on a black-and-white 17" Zenith with reception via a cheap roof antenna. Even when new and tuned properly, it wasn't all that clear. Huckleberry Hound looked pretty good on that set, probably better than Fantasia would have fared.)

The Jetsons went on at 7:00 that first, fateful evening. I was at Mrs. Hollingsworth's, parked in front of the set in her den, by 6:30. Didn't want to miss a second. My mother had cooked a pot roast for our dinner and as she sometimes did, she served up a plate of it — with potatoes and carrots and the works — and had me take it down to Mrs. Hollingsworth. We did that for her on holidays and special occasions, and this seemed like a special occasion. Mrs. Hollingsworth left me with the TV while she went into her dining room to dine.

She was back in time to watch the show with me, and I'm not sure she enjoyed it but she sure enjoyed how much I enjoyed it. I took an instant liking to The Jetsons. I even liked it more than The Flintstones and I liked The Flintstones a lot. The futuristic show seemed to me to have even more likeable characters doing even neater things. I also liked that I recognized the voice of Daws Butler as "his boy, Elroy." It wasn't a Hanna-Barbera cartoon without Daws.

When the story was over, Mrs. Hollingsworth made a move to turn off the TV before the end credits. I probably said something rude when I stopped her. The credits were almost the best part...in two ways. Something funny always happened under them...and I also wanted to read the names to see how many I recognized from other H-B shows I followed. Dutifully, not wanting to be hurt, Mrs. Hollingsworth waited for the show to be utterly and totally over before she snapped off her RCA. I ran back to my home, half a block away, and asked my father why we didn't have a color TV. I think within two or three years, we did.

By that time, of course, The Jetsons was gone from the ABC prime-time lineup, consigned for all eternity to daytime and syndicated reruns. It only lasted one season because, I suspect, the time slot was too competitive and much of America was set in its Sunday night viewing habits. When I first met Mr. Barbera, one of the things we talked about was how that show (and Top Cat) should have lasted a lot longer than they did. He agreed. Those were two of his favorite shows and he said that in both cases, there were offers to continue production immediately for syndication but they were deficit offers, meaning the studio would have had to go way in the hole to produce them and hope they could recoup and turn a profit by the shows rerunning for a long time. They had not been in a position to take that gamble at the time, he said, but in hindsight, he wished they had. Years later, his studio produced another batch of Jetsons episodes for syndication with the original voice cast but (largely) a new creative team. It wasn't the same, of course. The momentum was gone, the spirit was gone...and even Mrs. Hollingsworth wasn't around anymore.

Here's the opening, just as you remember it...

• Posted at 3:47 PM · LINK

Recommended Reading

Two articles in Slate you might want to give a look-see...

John Dickerson assesses how George W. Bush answers the repeated question about what he's learned. When we get around to tallying lists of why the country turned against the Iraq War, a biggie will have to be the truly awful job Bush has done of instilling confidence in people...and I don't even mean in Democrats and others predisposed to oppose him. I mean people who voted for him and believed in him and his word.

And Fred Kaplan explains in pretty good detail why the latest "surge" proposal is doomed to failure. The whole thing looks like an attempt to postpone the losing until it can occur on the next president's watch.

• Posted at 9:24 AM · LINK

Correction

Jack Burnley spent his last years in Charlottesville, Virginia...not in Charlottesville, North Carolina as I said. We regret the error. We regret all errors. We especially regret ordering the creamed corn last night at dinner.

• Posted at 9:09 AM · LINK

Jack Burnley, R.I.P.

It is the sad but frequent duty of this weblog to report the passing of another veteran comic book creator. Jack Burnley died Tuesday at the age of 95. He was only active in comics from 1940 until 1947 but during that time, he drew some of the most memorable covers and co-created the popular super-hero, Starman. His renditions of Superman and Batman were among the first, if not the first, to be done outside the control of those characters' creators and his slick, professional approach did much to shape the image of those classic heroes.

Hardin "Jack" Burnley was born in 1911 and unlike many of the early illustrators of comic books, came to the field as an established professional. During the thirties, he worked as a sports cartoonist and illustrator in newspapers, and in the area of advertising specialties. In 1940, he was hired to do material for the World's Fair comic book that DC Comics was producing that year. The cover he drew (seen above) was the first time Superman and Batman ever appeared together in print. He soon began drawing covers for all the DC books, as well as frequent Superman stories to supplement the material being prepared by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. For a time, he pencilled both the Batman and Superman syndicated newspaper strips, and he and writer Gardner Fox also launched their own feature, Starman, who appeared in Adventure Comics.

In 1947, Burnley decided a better living could be made back in newspapers and he returned to that field, working for The Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph and subsequently for The San Francisco News. He retired from that job in 1976 and moved with his wife Dolores, a former dancer, to Charlottesville, North Carolina Virginia [Correction] in 1981. Jack and Dolores were said to be inseparable in life and their passings showed a similar sense of togetherness. Dolores died in 2003 from complications relating to a broken hip and Jack just died in the same retirement home from the same thing.

I'm afraid I have no personal anecdotes or insights into Mr. Burnley as I never met the man. Always admired his work, though. The guy could really draw and it's a shame that comics lost his talents when they did.

• Posted at 12:04 AM · LINK