Sam Fox is George W. Bush's nominee to serve as the new ambassador to Belgium. Mr. Fox got this nomination the way a lot of people get such nominations. He was a big donor to the campaigns of the Republican party...and let's stipulate up top that Democrats do that kind of thing too, whenever they're in a position to reward those who give cash to their electioneering.
Yesterday in his confirmation hearing, Mr. Fox was grilled by Senator John Kerry about why he'd donated $50,000 to the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. The exchange was quite extraordinary for a couple of reasons, one being the pathetic quality of Fox's reponses. He went out of his way to praise Kerry as an honest veteran who'd earned his medals and shown great heroism...in other words, the exact opposite of what was claimed by those commercials he helped put on the air. Asked why he gave money to the cause, Mr. Fox mumbled something about how one side engages in dirty politics so the other side has to, and then claimed he gave to so many charitable causes that he really didn't know who'd asked him to donate in this instance.
It was a pretty pathetic defense. I'm not sure what the Ambassador to Belgium is called upon to do but I don't think Fox demonstrated he's up to the task. This site has a video clip of the exchange and it runs a little less than seventeen minutes.
A couple of other folks have blabbed this on websites so I might as well mention it...
The New York Comic Con last weekend seems to have been rough on veteran comic book creators. The great writer Arnold Drake appeared there, went home and was then hospitalized with pneumonia. The great artist Joe Sinnott appeared there, went home and was then hospitalized with a heart attack. Both, I hear, are on the mend and we expect full recoveries and quick returns to their respective homes. I'll let you know if I hear anything else and in the meantime, you might want to direct your good thoughts in their direction.
I liked this paragraph in a news story on the deliberations of the Scooter Libby jury. They sent a note to the judge and a reporter wrote...
The note may indicate that jurors have made it through two of the five charges and are debating the third — or at least were debating it Tuesday afternoon. But there's no guarantee that jurors are going in order and reading juries is an inexact science.
In other words, this might mean something unless it doesn't.
We're talking about Judy Jetson here lately so let's have a look at the lovely young lady when she's a bit older. As you may recall, after they did The Flintstones, Hanna-Barbera did a series in which the infants Pebbles and Bamm Bamm were advanced to teenage. Several times, they also tried to sell a series that would do likewise with the futuristic family, adding about ten years to Judy and her brother Elroy. This is one of about eighty thousand presentation drawings that were done over the years to try and make that show happen, most of them the handiwork of the late Iwao Takamoto.
At one point, I was asked to do some writing for it and it's kind of interesting why they picked me. Someone, probably Joe Barbera, decided that the key to the idea was to make them like Donny and Marie Osmond were on their hit variety series produced by Sid and Marty Krofft. I was working for H-B but I was also, at the same time, working for Sid and Marty Krofft. So it seemed logical to turn things over to me, even though I hadn't worked on the Donny and Marie show. I didn't understand that, either. In any case, I never did any development work on The Judy and Elroy Show (or whatever it might have been called) but I did have one short meeting with Mr. Barbera about it. I remember there was a drawing similar to this one and there was also a duplicate of it in which the boy had reddish hair. I asked why and Mr. B explained that they weren't certain if it should be a sister/brother show or, like Pebbles and Bamm Bamm, a girl friend/boy friend show. So they had some art in which the boy wasn't supposed to be an older Elroy. He was supposed to be a new character who was dating Judy. The Freudian possibilities were infinite.
There were also a couple versions of this show developed that revived the Jet Screamer character and had him dating Judy, or maybe one was about Judy chasing after him or something. All the permutations I saw also had Astro the Dog in them and some had the little character you see above who was Astro's nephew, I suppose. During the meeting to discuss my possible involvement, he didn't have a name yet. I suggested "Tralfaz" and Barbera looked at me oddly and asked, "Where have I heard that name before?" I explained to him that in one episode of The Jetsons, it was revealed that Astro's birth name was Tralfaz. J.B. laughed and said, "How come you know that kind of stuff and I don't?" There was also a version where Astro was somehow in charge of watching over a whole litter of little dogs like this one. Not long after that meeting, H-B did a cartoon no one remembers called Astro and the Space Mutts.
That's about all there is to this story. And don't worry, I haven't forgotten. Another chapter in the ongoing series of how Scrappy Doo was born will be along soon in this space.
Dahlia Lithwick discusses what a mess the whole Jose Padilla matter has become. Mr. Padilla, currently rotting in a cell somewhere, was once an example of how our brilliant anti-terrorist experts had caught a saboteur before he could set off a "dirty bomb." He has since become a sad test case for some viewpoint having to do with the effectiveness of presuming those who are arrested are undeniably guilty and should be treated like maggots.
I have no idea if Padilla is guilty or innocent. Perhaps he deserves that cell, though it might be nice if a fair trial said that before he spends so much time in it. I'm not even sure what the charges against him are, this week. (They seem to change every time there's a chance of him getting near a courtroom.) It does bother me that some people don't seem to care. They want to believe so badly that we've caught people like those who caused 9/11 that it makes them happy to presume he's one, and never mind the reality.
Foxy Fagan was a comic book published around 1947 by an obscure company called Dearfield Publishing. It never found an audience and ran only seven issues but it makes for quite an interesting bit of funnybook history. It was drawn by a gentleman named Harvey Eisenberg, who was one of the great draw-ers of silly creatures. He was the main artist for decades on the Tom & Jerry comic books, which were really good-looking comics. Eisenberg had a way of "posing" his characters that other cartoonists would avidly study. He gave them weight and personality and movement. He also did this with a lot of the comics based on the earlier Hanna-Barbera cartoon shows like The Flintstones and Huckleberry Hound.
Even more intriguing is who his partner was in the Foxy Fagan enterprise. It was Joe Barbera, moonlighting (without credit) from his day job, which then was co-directing (with Bill Hanna) the Tom & Jerry cartoons for MGM. Barbera apparently got it into his head that there was money in publishing comic books, which of course was not one of Joe's sounder financial decisions. He and Eisenberg created the comic, he wrote it, Eisenberg drew it, Joe assembled a group of backers and put in some bucks of his own...and they lost a lot of money. I wrote about the endeavor some time ago in this item and my pal Scott Shaw! wrote about it here and reproduced some samples of the Foxy Fagan comic.
I bring this up again because the ASIFA Hollywood Animation Archive has scanned and posted a whole story from Foxy Fagan #1 and you can see it here. Go have a look. It's good stuff.
We were just talking about The Jetsons so here's a one minute promo for the show, complete with narration by George O'Hanlon, who provided the voice of George.
Here's the kind of Hanna-Barbera trivia that I should know and apparently don't. In the commercial, reference is made to the series taking place in the 21st Century. Did they ever say that on the show? I have the idea that they deliberately kept it vague but maybe they said it somewhere, somehow. Earl? Scott? Anyone?
This is another post for folks who live in Los Angeles but it may apply elsewhere...
Have any of you folks taken the bus anywhere lately?
You remember the bus...that thing that took you to school before you had a car? The long vehicle you rode with other people on it? If you don't know what I'm talking about, rent the first Speed movie from Netflix. It's an extremely realistic depiction of how it is on an actual Los Angeles bus.
Seriously: Up until late last year and not counting free shuttles, I hadn't been on a bus for over thirty years. I didn't even know what it cost to ride a bus in this town (answer: $1.25) and if it had occurred to me to take one somewhere, I didn't know which bus to get on to go anywhere I might want to go.
But lately, I've bused it a few times, usually when I had to go somewhere where the parking was impossible. Also, I had a little minor surgery a few weeks ago...nothing critical, nothing important. But it was one of those procedures where they don't want you to drive home, which means I couldn't drive there. So I took a bus there and had someone pick me up afterward. The trip there was a lot easier than I would have imagined. (And the same bus goes past the place where I take my car for servicing. When I've had to leave it there, I've taken a cab home, then taken a cab back. The bus will be so much simpler, to say nothing of cheaper.)
Los Angeles also has these things called Dash buses, which cost 25 cents to ride. If I need to go over to Cedars-Sinai Hospital — and I occasionally do — I can walk one block from my home to where the Dash will pick me up and take me where I need to be in not much more time than it would take me to drive over and find a place to park. That's not even getting into what you spend to park at Cedars-Sinai if you drive there. It's about the same per-hour cost as being a patient at Cedars-Sinai but the amount isn't covered by Blue Cross.
What has made this revolutionary new mode of transportation possible for me is that I discovered the MTA website. I guess most transit systems across the country have something like this but I was unaware of them. They have a form where you enter the two locations between which you need to travel and their database tells you how to get from one place to another and on which bus(es). I entered a number of places where I sometimes go and realized that with some of them, a bus might be easier than taking my car, hassling with traffic, finding a parking place and paying for that parking. (It was twelve bucks the last time I parked in the medical building where my doctor is located. There's a bus that goes right there.) It's also environmentally better and while I'm not doing it for that reason, when I do take the bus I intend to say it's because of that.
If it's been a long time since you've taken a bus anywhere, you might want to take a look and see if it's easier than you think. It can also be fun. On the way in for that minor medical procedure, I got to talking with a lady who was wearing a jacket with the logo of the Rio Hotel in Vegas. She said she'd just gotten back from that town and I asked her how she did at the tables. She said, "Let me put it this way. Before the trip, I used to drive to work in a Mercury Marquis." I laughed all the way into surgery.
The lovely lady at left is Judy Jetson, daughter of George and Jane. We all love Judy Jetson. The lovely lady at right is Janet Waldo, voice of Judy Jetson. We all love Janet Waldo, too. For reasons that Ponce DeLeon could perhaps explain but I can't, Ms. Waldo has been performing in front of a microphone since the days of radio comedy programs and still manages to sound like a teen-age girl and look not that much older than one. The only way I've been able to fathom how this works involves cloning and robotics so I won't try.
Nonetheless, she's been doing voice work — for cartoons and elsewhere — for some time. In addition to playing Judy, she was also Penelope Pitstop, Granny Sweet, Alice in that Hanna-Barbera special I keep writing here about, and many others.
Janet won't remember this but she was a voice on one of the first cartoon specials I ever wrote. The show had a director who was not overwhelmed with either tact or skill, and the way the recording session went for a time was roughly as follows. Janet would read a line and it would be perfect. The director would tell her she was way off base and he would then read the line the way he thought it should be done, which was all wrong. Janet would then read the line again, trying to do it the director's way but still managing somehow to do it right. The director would then scold her and say rude things and try to get her to do it his way. Janet would then do the line properly and he would get even madder at her and more insulting.
This went on until one of the other actors in the show — a leprechaun named Howard Morris — left his microphone, walked into the booth and said something to the effect of, "That woman knows what she's doing and you don't and if you don't knock it off, I'm going to knock several of your teeth out." Then he returned to his mike and thereafter, the director was much nicer to Janet and she was allowed to do the lines the way she wanted, which was exactly the way I, as author, wanted them.
It was a nice moment. On The Jetsons, Howie performed the role of a character named Jet Screamer, with whom Judy Jetson was very much in love. I always liked to think of our little recording session drama as a case of Jet defending Judy's honor.
Janet is, as I say, wonderful...and you can hear what I'm sure will be a wonderful interview with her, tomorrow on Stu's Show, which is live on Shokus Internet Radio from 4 PM to 6 PM, West Coast Time, or 7 PM to 9 PM, East Coast Time. Go to the station's site, pick an audio browser and you're in! I'll be listening.
We have here another one of those "best" lists where one entity — in this case, one person, it would seem — lists the best ten best or the fifty best or the hundred best in some category. I think we always take these things too seriously if they don't correspond to our own tastes but they can be fun.
This list is for The 51 Best Magazines Of All Time, as selected by Graydon Carter, who has been the editor of Vanity Fair for 15 years and apparently only thinks his own publication should place at #31, which is interesting. He selects Esquire during the Harold Hayes years as #1, The New Yorker as #2 and Life as #3.
Those aren't bad picks, I suppose. I was surprised to see — which is not to say I'd argue — his placing of Mad Magazine at #6. And what really surprised me was that he restricts his choice to "Post comic book, before the death of founder William Gaines (1955–1992)" and writes...
Mad was the skeptical wise guy. Ever ready to pounce on the illogical, hypocritical, self-serious and ludicrous, it was also essentially celebratory: to accurately parody something, you ultimately have to love it. Mad transposed onto the printed page the anarchic humor of the Marx Brothers and Looney Tunes, parodying comics, radio serials, movies, advertising, and the entire range of American pop culture. Nowadays, it's part of the oxygen we breathe; and Mel Brooks, Saturday Night Live, and The Simpsons would be unthinkable without it.
I think I'd debate much of that, starting with the claim that you have to love something to parody it. Mad loved tobacco companies? Misleading advertising? Lying politicians? I think it's usually the opposite. To parody something successfully, you must have some grasp of what's really wrong with it and the yearning to expose that. You can love something and still do that but I've interviewed almost every major Mad contributor from the years Carter praises. I sure got the impression they were most successful when trampling something they felt deserved trampling.
I would also quarrel with his choice of years. I don't see what part of his explanation doesn't apply to the comic book issues but unlike a lot of folks, I'm a big fan of the issues after it moved out of the comic book format and for many years thereafter. I just don't think the passing of Gaines was the end of a particularly good period. Mad seemed to me (and to many of those who worked on it) to be in considerable decline in the years before Bill died. Nothing against the man himself, but he'd have been the first to admit he got too set in his ways, too proprietary about keeping the magazine the same month to month. Some felt his passing may even have given the editors an opportunity to shake things up and clear out deadwood. In any case, I think it's now better than it's been in years.
Of course, you could argue the whole premise of comparing Mad to Sports Illustrated and National Geographic at all, and suggest that Spy (which Carter co-founded) is a bit high in the rankings. But it ain't a bad list. Have a peek.
The first one's short so let's make today a double feature. Here's a mysterious sixteen seconds of antique film. It's silent color footage shot on the set of the Marx Brothers movie, Animal Crackers, which as we all know was made in glorious black-and-white. Groucho, Chico, Harpo and Margaret Dumont are in it. I don't see Zeppo but then who ever noticed Zeppo? Harpo for some reason is out of costume — in a robe and without his wig. I have no idea why this was shot. I'm guessing it's home movie footage from a rehearsal, which is why Harpo didn't care how he was dressed in it. In any case, I can't recall seeing any other color film of the Marxes...so have a look. And look fast because it's short.
Turning to more important matters, how about a piano-playing cat? Here's Nora the piano-playing cat. Okay, so she doesn't play as well as Van Cliburn or even Mark Russell. So what? It's a cat, for crying out loud. And anyway, I've heard and tipped lounge performers who were worse than this...
This is another one of those "If I Ran the Oscars" posts. I've already said I'd get rid of the backstage antics and the little trivia facts as the winners head for the stage. Another thing I'd do is get more movie stars there. There may be one or two exceptions to this but it seems to me that every celeb in the place last night was either a presenter or a nominee. In years past, if I remember my Oscars accurately, the audience shots showed a nice cross section of Hollywood, including many folks who were not there to get up on the stage at some point. They were there because it was the Academy Awards and that gave a certain importance to the proceedings.
I would also not announce all the presenters in advance and I'd try to get some big surprises in that area. It was nice that Jack Nicholson presented Best Picture with Diane Keaton but by that point, I think we'd seen Mr. Nicholson about eighty times during the broadcast. They kept cutting to him in the audience and people were chatting with him from the stage. I'd have kept him backstage until he made his entrance to present, the better to make that an arresting moment. I also would have tried to find at least one or two presenters who represented "Old Hollywood," whatever that is today. (I think it's the eighties but maybe we could go back a little farther than that.)
So now I have a challenge for the readers of this site: Let's say you're producing the Academy Awards. Let's say you have the power to phone anyone and invite them to come in and present an award. Who would you have asked? What surprise appearance would have been exciting? A few years ago, Woody Allen shocked everyone by showing up. Give me some other names that would have been a big deal last night.
You have to pick people who are alive and who actually might be able to show up. And let's consider them in two categories: New Hollywood and Old Hollywood. The latter would be folks who, though they might still be performing, would connect the ceremony with its heritage. In both cases, we want names of presenters who, when the host introduced them, the whole audience would make that wonderful sound of delighted surprise, clap their hands off and maybe even rise for a standing o.
I've just set up a special e-mail address so you can send me your answers. It's . I'll post the best answers here in a couple days.
Earlier, at the suggestion of my friend Buzz Dixon, I linked to an article by Joe Lieberman about how things ain't so hopeless in Iraq. Now, at the suggestion of my friend Gordon Kent, I link to an article by Glenn Greenwald about how things ain't so honest with Joe Lieberman. The latter is less about Iraq than it is about the ongoing disingenuousness of the Senator from Connecticut but it's not a bad rebuttal.
What I'd love to find, and I mean this, is a solid "how we'll win in Iraq" article by someone who hasn't changed their rationales more often than their boxer shorts or panty-liners. My problem with a lot of the pro-war advocates is that they keep futzing with the rules, moving the goalposts each time they fail to complete a pass. It's like when Cheney said that the British troop withdrawal was a marker of success. You know that if Great Britain had pledged not to withdraw those troops, he would have said that was a marker of success. No matter what happens, they say that it's what's supposed to happen. The claim is made that everyone needs to be quiet and not question the strategy for six months. And then when things are worse in six months, they'll be saying everyone needs to be quiet and not question the strategy for another six months, followed by another six months and then another and another.
If the advocates of the Bush plan want Americans to believe that success is attainable in Iraq and thereabouts, they need to offer a direct, example-filled definition of what will constitute success. But they don't seem to want to do that because that would create a firm definition of failure and they can't have that. It's too hard to wriggle out of those when they come to pass.
Seriously: If anyone can point me to an article that says that defines success in Iraq without saying something like, "Success is when we win and they lose," please do. What turned me against this war was that I've never understood what it was supposed to accomplish and that its advocates have been so deliberately vague about how we'd know when that was or wasn't happening.
Above, courtesy of our dear friends over at OldTVTickets.com, we have a ticket for a local, Los Angeles show called Bill Stulla's Parlor Party. The date on this ticket, as you can see, is September 9. I believe the year was 1952.
Bill Stulla was a fixture for years of L.A. broadcasting. His Parlor Party started life on radio and segued to TV...in what year, I do not know. The premise of the show was that it was an on-air birthday party. It was done live, of course, and each day they'd have on a batch of individuals who'd been born on that day. They'd entertain them and play games with them and interview them and serve cake and award prizes. I have a vague idea that at one point in the program's existence, the birthday celebrants covered a wide range of ages. But on the day I made my television debut on the program, the premise was that it was all kids, aged ten or younger. In my case, it was much younger.
I am describing to you one of my earliest memories. I remember being taken to the TV studio — I don't recall where but it was probably Sunset and Vine like the ticket says. KNBH was then the local NBC television affiliate. (In 1954, it became KRCA and in 1960, it was renamed KNBC.) I remember being dressed up, which I never liked. I remember being backstage and my mother furiously combing my hair (which I also never liked) and dealing with the fact that I didn't want to be there and do whatever I was supposed to do. I remember being told that my relatives and neighbors were all watching so I had to go through with it.
I had seen the show. Mr. Stulla, a genial man with glasses, welcomed his young guests as they came in through the door of a little storybook-type house on the stage. I remember being backstage without my mother, waiting on the other side of that door for someone to tell me to go through it and onto live television. Back there, it didn't look like a storybook house. It was all fake and that seemed odd and scary. Everything backstage was odd and scary.
Then someone shoved me out onto the stage. I remember blinding lights and Mr. Stulla sticking a microphone in my face and asking me my name. If he had waited for an answer, we'd still be there today.
I was absolutely terrified. I'm not sure of what but I was absolutely terrified. I mumbled something. I don't know what it was but it wasn't my name. Someone off-camera told it to him. Mr. Stulla, who'd done this before, attempted gamely to get me to speak up and answer his questions: How old was I? Did I have any brothers and sisters? Did I have any pets? (There's not a lot you can ask a kid that age.) But it didn't matter what he asked. I wasn't answering. In a very short span of time, he decided I was just one of those children who wasn't going to cooperate and he passed me over to the party area and brought the next toddler out through the phony door.
In the party area, I sat with complete strangers, awaiting cake that would celebrate our mutual birthday. I didn't see the point of that, either. There was a cake waiting for me at home. As I sat there, I went from really, really not wanting to be there to really, really, really not wanting to be there. Well before it was time to bring out the cake and have about a dozen of us make a group effort to blow out the candles, I wandered off the stage, found my parents in the audience and made them get me the hell out of there.
So what year was I on that show? That's what I'm trying to figure out. (In case it's not clear, the above ticket has nothing to do with my being on the program. It's just the only visual evidence I've ever come across that the series even existed.)
I was born in March of 1952. I once thought I was three or four when I made my inauspicious television debut. My mother doesn't remember but one time when I asked her about it, she did recall that my going on the show was at the urging of my Aunt Dot, who thought it would be the greatest thing in the world to see her adorable nephew on the television machine. Parents apparently wrote away in advance and if their kid was selected, they were told to bring him or her down to the studio on the day in question at such-and-such a time. They were also sent some number of tickets to dispense to friends and relatives to come down and watch the festivities.
Research suggests that Bill Stulla's Parlor Party was off the air before my third birthday. All the history I've seen says that in 1954, Mr. Stulla went to work on KHJ, Channel 9 here in Los Angeles, hosting what always seemed like the worst cartoons available. He was the guy who ran Colonel Bleep, for God's sake. He adopted a train motif for his show, called it Cartoon Express and became Engineer Bill. I'll bet a lot of people reading this who grew up in L.A. remember Engineer Bill. He did that series, Monday through Friday, until 1964.
If he stopped Parlor Partying on Channel 4 when he began Engineer Billing on Channel 9, that would mean I must have been two when I made my traumatic appearance. That seems too young to me. A few years ago when I met Mr. Stulla (he's still around, by the way), I asked him what year Bill Stulla's Parlor Party ended and if there was an overlap with his KHJ job. He told me it was probably '52. I told him it couldn't possibly have been '52 because I was on the show on my birthday and I was born in '52. He said in that case, he didn't remember the year but was sure it was "long" before he became Engineer Bill. It couldn't have been too long.
I'll be 55 years old this Friday. Up until I was around 40, I hated being in front of a TV camera. Twice in my earlier career, I was asked to play on-camera roles in shows I was writing. Once on Welcome Back, Kotter, they needed a tall guy to hover over Arnold Horshack and threaten to beat the crap out of him. I was asked to be that guy and I refused. I was willing to beat the crap out of Arnold Horshack but not to go on camera. Later on Pink Lady, they used the whole writing staff as extras (dancing, no less) in a sketch and I couldn't get out of that one. I did it but disliked every second of the experience. In fact, if my parents had been there, I think I would have walked off the stage, found them and forced them to take me home for cake.
I still don't love being on the business end of a lens but I can do it now without fleeing in terror. I do not think, by the way, that when I recoiled from it in my adult life, it was because it reminded me of my bad experience on Bill Stulla's Parlor Party. I think I was born hating to be on television and that like acne, my Snagglepuss t-shirt and thinking fart jokes were funny, I eventually outgrew it.
This has been the first in a series of my Horrible Childhood Memories. This will not be a long series because I had a great childhood and don't have many horrible memories. But one of these days, I'll post another one. (I still can't believe I was two when this one happened...)
My buddy Buzz Dixon suggests I link to this article by Joe Lieberman which puts forth the argument that things in Iraq aren't as hopeless as they might seem and that "success" (which I wish he and those campaigning for it would define clearer) is still attainable.
As you may recall, I wasn't a fan of Mr. Lieberman, even back when he was a Democrat. Lately, a lot of his public statements urging his colleagues to withhold criticisms of the war and "support the troops" sound to me like pleadings to stop reminding everyone how spectacularly wrong he and those on his side of this issue have repeatedly been. But hope springs eternal, I guess. I'd genuinely like to believe there is some light at the end of that tunnel and I sure would like to understand better why some people think that. If you do, give it a read.
I have no idea who made this short cartoon or who's singing or anything other than you'll be able to deduce on your own. I just know it will make my friend Paul Dini very happy. This one's for you, Paul...
In Las Vegas, the closing odds on last night's Academy Awards had Eddie Murphy favored to win Best Supporting Actor, Jennifer Hudson for Best Supporting Actress, Forest Whitaker for Best Actor, Helen Mirren for Best Actress and The Departed for Best Picture. So they got four out of five right. I'm not sure too many of the critics did that well.
Oops. Nat Gertler informs me that the actors who were played on with the theme from the old Spider-Man cartoon were Tobey Maguire and Kirsten Dunst. Shows you how much attention I was paying.
They played Queen Latifah and John Travolta on with a song from the forthcoming movie of the musical, Hairspray, which both are in. Shouldn't the Academy wait until the movie is out before it gets that kind of plug?
The Best Acting Oscars this year went to people playing Idi Amin and Queen Elizabeth II. If you were an actor trying to decide what kind of role was most likely to get you an Academy Award, what would you deduce from this trend?
Okay, Scorcese finally won. At any given time, there's always that one glaring omission...that one person who you can't believe never won an Oscar. Who is it now?
It's over...well, except for nineteen minutes of end credits. What's the official running time? Three hours and forty-nine minutes? Something like that. Lord, how people are going to curse about that.
They're playing the song, "Hooray for Hollywood." Amazing. I haven't been so shocked since I went into an Italian restaurant and I heard a Sinatra record.
Like I said, I think Ellen did an okay job. I doubt they'll ask her back but then again, I didn't think they'd ask her in the first place. It's a shame there doesn't seem to be anyone like Hope or Carson who can lend an air of importance to the proceedings by their very presence. With most hosts these days, the show makes them important. It used to be the other way around.
That's it from Tinsel Town. I'm going back to a script that's due tomorrow.
Ellen DeGeneres is doing a decent enough job as host. To some extent, she's making the same mistake Letterman made when he hosted, which was to think this was an episode of his regular talk show but with some award presentations inserted. But Ellen is so self-effacing and pleasant that it doesn't get in the way of the proceedings. I suspect the telecast will be faulted for its sheer length...but it always is.
I was surprised her monologue wasn't sharper. It seemed to get things off to a sluggish start. So did the overlong montage of nominees making cute remarks.
Another slow starter was the lack of what they call "major awards" during the first hour or so. Usually, they give out one of the Best Supporting trophies right off the top in order to ramp up the energy. Bet they go back to that next year.
What I'd do: If I were in charge of the broadcast, I'd dump all the backstage antics, all the stuff in the wings. Who cares? Hyping what's coming up next is another way of saying, "Hey, we know it's dull but if you'll stick around, it may get exciting." I'd also drop the little trivia facts as the winners walk to the stage. It's not that long a period to expect people to pay attention.
Is it a requirement that when you win an Oscar, you have to either hold the statuette up like a Price is Right model or raise it over your head like it's a "power to the people" salute?
When someone wrote the theme song for the 1967 Spider-Man cartoon series for Saturday morning, do you think that person or persons ever dreamed it would someday be used to play on a presenter — in this case, Leonardo DiCaprio — at the Academy Awards?
I've been fast-forwarding so I may have missed one but I don't think we've had a joke about Britney Spears or Anna Nicole or the Lady Astronaut in Diapers or even a line about Joan Rivers out on the red carpet. If so, good for Ellen, good for the writers.
Wouldn't Steve Carrell be a good Oscar host?
The silhouette dancers are interesting but when the show feels long — and this one sure does — audiences get very unappreciative of "extras" like that.
Lastly for now: If anyone voted for An Inconvenient Truth because (as per the Evanier Theory), they thought Al Gore would give an acceptance speech of historic proportions, I think they got shortchanged. It was pleasant enough. People who already didn't like Gore are probably already bitching about it on some message board but they'd complain about anything he said. I like him and I'm complaining because he could have looked the world in the eye and said something they'd all be talking about the next day. And that's why he made the movie: So people would talk about Global Warming. It wasn't a bad moment but it was an easily-forgotten one. By the time we get to Best Director, no one on the planet will even remember what Gore said.
I'm catching a little of the Academy Awards Red Carpet arrivals on KABC Channel 7 at the moment. I sometimes feel sorry for everyone who has to make small talk in these situations. The interviewers have to gush over the interviewees and the interviewees have to gush over everyone and everything. So far, the only thing I've heard that departs from that script is Steve Carrell saying it was an ordeal to spend time in a trailer with Greg Kinnear because of Kinnear's bad personal hygeine.
But I think I can see why a lot of folks across America think that people in Hollywood are different. Maybe it's just the DirecTV satellite feed but it looks like everyone in the movie business tonight is just a little bit out of sync. Out in the heartland when people talk, their lips match up with their voices.
Well, it worked out pretty much as we expected. Some of us thought Boomerang was going to run the 1966 Hanna-Barbera version of Alice in Wonderland this afternoon commencing at 1:45 PM. Here — here's what the online TV Guide listing still says...
Alice in Wonderland
1:45pm BOOM ch:297 60min
Animation and music are combined in this spoof of Lewis Carroll's classic tale. The story opens as Alice tumbles through the TV set---and into Wonderland. Voices...Alice: Janet Waldo. Cheshire Cat: Sammy Davis Jr. White Rabbit: Howard Morris. Hedda Hatter: Hedda Hopper. Queen of Hearts: Zsa Zsa Gabor. Mad Hatter: Harvey Korman.
That's the description of the '66 H-B version but what they ran instead was a 1995 animated version of Alice in Wonderland produced by Goodtimes Entertainment, primarily for the home video market.
I don't know that this is Boomerang's fault. I never saw them explicitly advertise the '66 H-B Alice. Perhaps the confusion was elsewhere.
On the other hand, the Boomerang folks are to blame for the fact that they advertised the show as starting at 1:45 and it actually began at 1:50. That means that if you were TiVoing the program before it, which was the 1974 Hanna-Barbera animated version of Cyrano (with José Ferrer voicing the title role), your recording would have clipped off the last minute or two. I don't know why they do this. I can't imagine any possible upside for the network to not give out accurate start/end times. And it's not like these are live shows and no one knows how long they'll run.
This coming Friday, the annual WonderCon convenes at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. The WonderCon is similar to the annual Comic-Con International in San Diego — it's even run by the same people — but it's smaller and doesn't make you feel like a gnat the moment you walk into the hall. Which is not to say there isn't plenty to do, plenty to see, plenty to buy. Think of it as Comic-Con International on a more human, rational level. It has many of the same attributes of its larger relative...including panels hosted by me.
Clicking on the above box will take you to a page that lists these panels. Or you can click here. Doesn't make any difference to me. Either click will get you to a list of events you won't want to miss at a convention you won't want to miss. As you can see, I actually have some hours when I'm not hosting a panel and interviewing some important person in comic book history. If you encounter me during one of those hours, please say hello. Because otherwise, I won't know what to do with that time.
The other night on The Late Late Show, your host Craig Ferguson did one of his more interesting monologues. It was about why he'd decided not to pile on the jokes with regard to the Britney Spears spectacle. His reasons had to do with his own alcohol problems of the past, which he discussed with a candor one does not often get from a late night host.
This link should let you watch the whole monologue, which runs a little over twelve minutes. It reminds me that I need to set the TiVo more often to catch at least Ferguson's opening remarks.
Seymour Hersh writes about how The War on Terrorism is going. His conclusion is that this country is doing much that is making the situation worse, including ramping up for attacks on Iran. Scary stuff.
Say, how about if we watch a Daffy Duck cartoon? You could always do with a Daffy Duck cartoon. This is Daffy Duck and the Dinosaur, which was released April 22, 1939. It was directed by Chuck Jones — one of his earlier efforts and the first time he ever got his hands on that crazy water fowl.
Mel Blanc, of course, supplies the voice of Daffy. His adversary, Casper Caveman, is a caricature in voice (and to some extent, manner and appearance) of Mr. Blanc's frequent employer, Jack Benny. The impression was done by an actor/announcer named Jack Lescoulie who was then on a Los Angeles-based radio series called The Grouch Club, produced by the great Nat Hiken. Lescoulie later relocated to New York where he a prominent announcer/host on NBC shows for many years. He was a regular on The Today Show from 1952 to 1967 and was a host of Tonight: America After Dark, the short-lived series that NBC attempted to launch in the 11:30 PM Monday-Friday slot in 1957 after Steve Allen left The Tonight Show. It flopped big and the network hurriedly brought back The Tonight Show and got Jack Paar to host it. Lescoulie later filled in occasionally as announcer/sidekick on The Tonight Show during both the Paar and Johnny Carson years.
Anyway, that's him doing Jack Benny. Here comes the cartoon...
Several folks have written to inform me, like I got it wrong, that if An Inconvenient Truth wins for Best Documentary, Al Gore does not receive the Oscar. It goes to the film's director, Davis Guggenheim. One could also go to one of its three producers, none of whom is Gore.
I didn't say Gore would get the statuette. The rule is that two people get to go up on stage and "win." I put that in quotes because, of course, if the film wins, all the producers win in a very real sense. But only one would get to go up and get a statuette at the ceremony and if Gore's appearance weren't an issue — say, if he'd decided not to attend — then they would have designated one of the three producers for the other slot. But they haven't. They've left it open, which is their way of making Gore eligible to go up on stage. Since he's in town and attending the festivities, everyone assumes he'll go up there. That's assuming the film wins. As I understand the rules, they have a certain number of seconds to speak (45, I think) and can apportion it however they like.
But I also didn't say that Gore would make a speech. He could just stand there looking respectful and saying nothing, or just saying, "Thank you." Some might think that was very classy of him. My point was that I suspect there were some votes for the film because people thought it would lead to Al Gore making a memorable speech. He could well disappoint them. Goodness knows, it's not like he never disappointed anyone who cast a vote for him.
And no, I don't think he will take the opportunity to announce he's running for President. First off, he may never announce that. Secondly, if he is thinking of getting in, he could easily pick a time 'n' place where he wouldn't launch his candidacy by being accused of exploiting the Oscars (and the campaign against Global Warming) for personal reasons.
My guess as to what's on Gore's mind with regard to '08 is no better than anyone else's, maybe a bit worse. But if he is open to the idea of running, he may be figuring to wait a while. Let the other contenders duke it out. Let it become clearer what the key issues will be in that election. If and when he does get in, we're going to hear very little from the Press Corps about his positions and policies. It's all going to be about how he doesn't know who he is and what his wardrobe selections tell us about the man...and by the way, he needs to lose twenty pounds. Something about Al Gore always seems to turn the reporters who cover him into Joan Rivers. If he waits eight more months to enter the race, that's eight months of that crap we don't have to endure.
In fact, as long as he doesn't announce for President, people might actually listen to what he has to say. True, they'd only be listening because they want to hear if he's going to run or not. But at least they'd be listening.
Also: A couple of folks have written to ask who I think will be honored in the "In Memoriam" montage. This weblog has had too much about death on it lately so I don't think I want to ponder that one for long. But we'll certainly see Glenn Ford, Maureen Stapleton, Don Knotts, Robert Altman, Peter Boyle, Jack Warden, Red Buttons, Joe Barbera, Carlo Ponti, Jane Wyatt, June Allyson, Betty Comden, Yvonne DeCarlo, Gordon Parks and Vincent Sherman, plus others. And I'll predict they'll either open or close with Jack Palance doing one-armed push-ups.
It's official. The Broadway run of The Producers will close on April 22 after a run of 33 previews and 2,502 regular performances. That's a lot, of course...more than South Pacific, Oklahoma!, Man of La Mancha or Annie. Still, I think a lot of people in the theatrical community are surprised it wasn't more.
The original Hello, Dolly! ran a little longer — 2,844 performances — by continually bringing in new stars. After Carol Channing left, producer David Merrick hired some pretty big names to fill the role of Dolly Levi: Ginger Rogers, Martha Raye, Betty Grable, Dorothy Lamour, Ethel Merman, etc. Ethel Merman was a huge star then, at least on Broadway. At one point, he had the whole thing restaged with a black cast toplined by Pearl Bailey and that added another year or two to its New York run.
By contrast, after Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick left The Producers, the only big names brought in to replace them were...Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick. They came back for a reported $100,000 each per week for a return engagement. You'd think that if it was cost-efficient to pay them that, the show could have afforded some other huge stars...but that never happened. There were rumors of John Goodman and others being wooed. Jason Alexander and Martin Short starred in a West Coast production and everyone assumed one or both would go to New York. Never happened. Tony Danza is currently in the version at the St. James Theater in Manhattan and he's as close to a "big name" as was ever engaged.
I guess I'm curious why more wasn't done to sell tickets and keep the show running. Was it just that there weren't any stars available they thought would make a difference? Did they think the show was destined to run out at a certain point regardless of who was on the stage? Or are they just so in need of an empty theater — in which to open the forthcoming Young Frankenstein musical — that they decided to let The Producers expire prematurely? Just wondering.
And wouldn't it be neat if without advance fanfare, just to surprise and delight those who buy tix to the last performance, Nathan and Matthew suddenly reappeared in the roles? It won't happen but wouldn't that be neat?
I seem to have just gotten a new, unexpected channel on my DirecTV satellite dish. In fact, it's so new, it doesn't even have any shows on it yet.
Something called "Chiller" is now on channel 257. Looking ahead, I see it starts early Thursday morning with episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, followed by Night Gallery, then the Friday the 13th TV show, then more Alfred Hitchcock Presents, then Tales from the Crypt, then more Hitchcock, then more Tales from the Crypt. Then at some point Thursday, they run the movie, The Shining, followed by more Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Further down the line, I see episodes of Twin Peaks, plus they're running other scary movies including all the ones in which Abbott and Costello met monsters.
Sounds like Universal to me. I think I'll do a Google search and see if I can find out more about this channel. Here — you watch this video clip of one of my favorite moments from David Letterman's old NBC show. While you do, I'll have me a look around and then I'll report back.
Okay, I'm back. I found the Chiller TV website but there's nothing much on it yet except to say the new channel launches on March 1 and they dare us to watch. Also found this article from last month telling about the new channel and, yes, it's from Universal. Interesting to know. I may even TiVo a few of those Alfred Hitchcock shows.
All right...so we have Sleuth rerunning old detective shows and Chiller rerunning old spooky shows. Don't we need a couple more old sitcom channels? No one's rerunning Bilko or Car 54 or McHale's Navy or Dobie Gillis. Wouldn't it be great to have a network that ran those and even lesser-known shows like He and She or The Good Guys or Good Morning, World or The Bill Dana Show or I'm Dickens, He's Fenster or The Danny Thomas Show or Hennessey or —
Well, you get the idea. You could probably add to that list, too. I don't think anyone's planning such a channel...but then, I didn't know about Chiller until about twenty minutes ago. Maybe one of these days...
B. Baker corrects me. Tales of Manhattan wasn't the final screen appearance of W.C. Fields. He had cameos as himself in Follow the Boys, Song of the Open Road and Sensations of 1945, all of which came out in 1944. I knew that but made the mistake of cross-checking my memory with his listing at The Internet Movie Database, saw they had Tales of Manhattan listed as his final film, and assumed I was confused.
I should have known better. The I.M.D.B. has recently been reformatted and now they credit someone's appearances as an actor (where they played characters) separately from appearances where they played themselves. Fields played himself in the last three films.
I don't know why they're making this distinction and certainly many of these assignments are arguable. Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy were apparently actors in their films even though they played Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy. Jerry Lewis is listed as an actor in Mr. Saturday Night even though he played the great screen comedian, Jerry Lewis. But in Defending Your Life, Shirley MacLaine played herself.
Anyway, B. Baker also disagrees with me that the Fields chapter in Tales of Manhattan is the best one in the film and favors the Edward G. Robinson vignette. I don't think so but I wouldn't argue the point. It's a pretty good piece of film.
The folks who bring you The Price is Right are still looking for someone to take over when Bob Barker retires in June. We told you here that they were doing a non-broadcast taping to try out three potential replacements — Doug Davidson, Todd Newton and John O'Hurley.
Apparently, none of those three nailed the job. On March 12, they're doing another non-broadcast taping to try three hosts. One is Mario Lopez from Dancing with the Stars. One is Mike Richards, former host of the reality show, Beauty and the Geek. And one is George Hamilton. That's right. George Hamilton. The guy with the tan.
Hamilton is a surprising choice even for an audition. He's 68 years old and you'd think CBS would want someone much younger for two reasons. One is so there's a chance that the new host might do the show for a long time. The other is that advertisers — even daytime advertisers — are supposed to yearn for younger viewers, the kind who might be attracted by a younger host. (Bob Barker was 49 when he took over The Price is Right, and the trend for younger demographics has only gotten worse since 1972.)
But good for him, good for them. I still think The Price is Right in its present form won't survive the loss of Barker but it's nice to see they're at least considering someone older than the show.
In 1942, Twentieth-Century Fox released an anthology film called Tales of Manhattan featuring four or five stories, all about the same black tuxedo as it passes through different lives.
The discrepancy between four and five is because five vignettes were filmed but one was trimmed from most prints for reasons of time. Oddly, the sometimes-missing one was easily the best and it starred W.C. Fields in his final screen appearance. [Correction.] It was absent when the film was released in America but turns up on most home video versions. Our clip today is a little less than three minutes from it.
It's not particularly funny but it's worth seeing just to witness the on-screen meeting of two of the all-time great comic actors of film. Cast as the clothing salesman who sells Fields a coat was a then-new comedian named Phil Silvers. That's him with the bad wig on.
Phil Silvers and W.C. Fields in the same scene. How great is that?
When I interviewed Silvers, he told me a story about working with Fields. Though he was quite ill at the time, Fields kept drinking. The film's producers pleaded with him not to and offered to take him on the drunk of his life after shooting was completed. Fields swore he wasn't drinking but they caught him taking nips from a thermos bottle he'd brought to the set. "We thought you said you weren't drinking," they scolded him.
Fields pointed to the thermos and said it didn't contain booze. "It's just a little lemonade to soothe a stomach condition that's been ailing me." Then he turned to Silvers, handed him the thermos and said, "Sir, if you please. Take a sip of this and tell these gentlemen what it is."
Silvers took a sip and tasted straight gin. "It's lemonade," he told the producers. "I'm as surprised as you are but it's lemonade." The producers shrugged and walked off.
According to Silvers, he and Fields were the best of friends after that. Here they are in the scene. Forgive the foreign subtitles.
Who's going to win what on Oscar night? No one knows. But I do know that there's never one reason for any award. After Joe Shlabotnik wins as Best Supporting Actor, pundits say things like, "They gave it to him because they felt he got robbed two years ago when he was beaten by a guy in a pigeon costume." Or "they gave it to him to show their support for the fine charity work he's doing, trying to equip the world's kangaroos with pocket protectors."
But "they" are a disparate bunch of strangers about whose past motives, nothing is really known. There's no exit polling, there are no "why did you vote that way?" questionnaires...there is no meaningful data for analysis. After a political election, we can say with some level of certainty that Candidate X captured 71.3% of the vote from Caucasians under the age of 65 who rank Social Security as their most important concern. But about any given vote at the Oscars, we know zip. We don't even know if someone won unanimously or it was close to a five-way tie. You could say, "They all voted for Clint Eastwood because they loved the appearance he once made on Mr. Ed," and nothing could ever prove you wrong.
So my point is that there isn't one reason...and even if there were, we'd have no way of knowing it.
That said, I'm going to go against my own, absolutely valid point and suggest a couple of simple reasons, not because I think they're right but because no one can prove me wrong. If you insist on viewing the voting mass as a homogenous body acting of one mind, here's what may be on that mind...
One thing is that sometimes, it seems like some voters want to reward someone for a little career gamble, taking on a project that looked like anything but a guaranteed money maker...something that might actually damage a career if it didn't turn out well. If you made a zany sex comedy or a big, special effects action thriller, you might entertain the masses but you wouldn't have really risked a whole lot. A small, sensitive film that tackles a controversial subject and/or pays scale is deemed more deserving of an award. When it works, at least.
And in some categories, I think people vote a certain way because they think it will result in a great acceptance speech. This brings us to the question of who'll win on Sunday night. I didn't see the film Peter O'Toole is up for and I have no idea if his performance deserves the Oscar or not. But I think I'd like to hear that speech. Of the five nominees, I think he'd give us the most interesting turn at the podium. He'd act a little drunk, whether he was or not. He'd be overcome with emotion because he's made so many movies without this kind of recognition and this could be his last shot at one of these. He'd say something wickedly charming and the audience would just love him. And I'll bet the broadcast's director would let him ramble on for some extra time before cuing the orchestra to begin playing the "hurry up and get off" music.
So I'll say a lot of people voted for him because they want to hear that speech.
Of those up for Best Supporting Actor, I think Eddie Murphy would give us the most captivating Oscar moment...and also, some people might think he took a bit of a career gamble to do a supporting role like that. You and I know it wasn't risking anything but I suspect some voters will think it was. I'll also predict that if he loses, pundits will say he soured Academy members on him with that Norbit movie he has out now. That's a good, succinct reason that no one can disprove.
I don't know about Best Actress. Everyone seems to think Helen Mirren so I'll guess Helen Mirren. I don't see any clear winner in that category if one applies the "who'll give the most interesting speech?" standard. They might just have to give it to whoever gave the best performance and people are saying it's her.
Best Supporting Actress might be Jennifer Hudson for Dreamgirls or Abigail Breslin for Little Miss Sunshine. Either one is the kind of Cinderella story that makes for a great acceptance speech moment.
And of course, it's about time — it's long past time — for Martin Scorcese to win for Best Director. Some years, that would work against him. Some years, it feels like the voters are saying, "Everyone thinks we have to give it to Scorcese. Well, we'll show them! We'll give it to Kevin Costner or Clint Eastwood instead!" This time, I think they'll decide they've proven their independence on Scorcese and he'd give the most interesting speech — kind of a Susan Lucci experience — so there's no reason not to give it to him.
Best Picture, I have no idea about. I don't think the "most interesting acceptance speech" rule applies to this one, at least not this year. Which of the five made the most money?
And Best Documentary? For reasons I should explain here some day, I don't think Hollywood is as overwhelmingly Liberal as many people think. I think there are a lot more local denizens in the Bruce Willis/Charlton Heston/James Woods political wing than it seems. Still, I don't think politics is what will cause the Academy to give the award to An Inconvenient Truth. I think there will be three dynamics in play. One is that everyone who cares what wins for Best Documentary likes the idea of one of those films making some actual money. That's a dream that every documentary filmmaker, regardless of his or her politics, has so they'll reward a film that accomplishes that. A documentary that makes serious cash empowers everyone out there who has a non-fiction film in need of financing.
Secondly, everyone who cares about documentaries likes the idea that a movie can have some impact and actually change the world. That's another dream they all have. We don't know what members of the Academy think about a whole raft of issues (including Global Warming) but I think it's safe to say that they believe in The Power of Film. In fact, five bucks says that phrase is used by either a presenter or winner in this category Sunday night. An Inconvenient Truth is making a difference, reinforcing the notion that the world's problems can be changed by someone making a movie. Even some people who would argue the message of Al Gore's film like that idea.
And lastly, we return to our thesis: They want to hear the acceptance speech. They want to hear Gore get up there and make a quick self-deprecating remark about how great it was that this vote wasn't counted in Florida or however he'll put it, then segue into a fast pitch to save the planet. I haven't seen any of the other nominees — I haven't even seen Gore's film — but I don't think anyone expects an important, headline-making event at the podium if one of the others wins. Just thinking like the producer of the Oscar telecast, it'll make for a better show if An Inconvenient Truth wins. Which is why it probably will.
If the voters apply my "who'll give the best speech?" theory, we could be in for quite a show. On the other hand, rumor has it that Ellen DeGeneres will kick things off by dancing with a line of CGI animated penguins and that there are other "musical surprises" planned. Better pad that TiVo recording by another hour. It could be an interesting evening but it could also be a very long night.
Christopher Cook just sent me an e-mail pointing out who did the voiceover for the Matty's Funday Funnies clips I just posted. It's Johnny Olson, who was most famous for shouting "Come on down!" on The Price is Right. Just thought someone would like to know that.
In 1959, the Mattel toy folks put a show on ABC called Matty's Funday Funnies — a half hour of old Paramount cartoons and new commercials for Mattel toys. The name came from the fact that the show was supposed to run on Sunday afternoons but they didn't change it when ABC decided to move it to Friday nights and then Saturdays.
In 1962, they dumped the Paramount cartoons and replaced them with newly-animated exploits of Bob Clampett's Beany and Cecil.
Our clip today is actually four clips from the Paramount period — two promos for the show, two vintage Mattel ads. You will enjoy them all but you'll especially enjoy the toy spots. And you'll wish you still owned your old Popeye ukulele.
Would you like to buy Ed McMahon's house? They're only asking $6,750,000 for it, which means they'll take — what? Six twenty-five? It has six bedrooms and five bathrooms and it's 7,013 square feet.
Maybe you'd just like to take a look at the place. You can take a virtual tour over at this site. See how many images you can spot of Johnny and Frank. I think I saw three Carsons and one Sinatra.
If the realtor had any sense of humor, he'd have decorated the place with thousands of empty Budweiser bottles before he took the pictures.
This is a tough one for me. Walker Edmiston, a wonderful actor, cartoon voice, puppeteer and kids' show host, died on February 15. I just found out this afternoon.
If you look back, you'll see me talking about him in this post of the day before. At the time I wrote it, I didn't know he was hospitalized and not expected to survive for long.
I first knew of Walker as a kids' show host here in Los Angeles. He'd been a performer on the original Time for Beany puppet show. In fact, for a while after Daws Butler left, he was Beany. He'd done other puppet shows as well, including The Walker Edmiston Show, which he hosted on KTLA here in town. The still below is of him on that program, posing with his main puppets. Left to right, they were R. Crag Ravenswood, Calley the Cat, Barky the Dog and Kingsley the Lion. The show, which he ad-libbed every day, was as hip and funny as anything ever done for children or even most adults. You'll have to take my word for that because few episodes (if any) survive...but I would stack it up against the best of Soupy Sales and Chuck McCann. It was that good.
It was also a small part of Walker's career. He did hundreds of movies, hundreds of cartoons, hundreds of on-camera appearances, thousands of commercials. He was part of Red Skelton's stock company on his TV show. He was a recurring character (an expert in replicating voices) on Mission: Impossible. He did the voices of many creatures and aliens on the original Star Trek.
I first worked with Walker on shows for Sid and Marty Krofft. He was one of their main voice people. On H.R. Pufnstuf, he did the voices of all the male characters who weren't done by Lennie Weinrib. On Sigmund and the Sea Monsters, he was Sigmund and many of the other creatures. On The Land of the Lost, he was Enik the Sleestak and dozens of others.
You heard him constantly without knowing it was him. He did dozens and dozens of movies where they brought him in to imitate and redub another actor. For example, he looped Orson Welles in Start the Revolution Without Me. Once, when one of Mel Brooks's movies was being released, the studio wanted Mel to do the radio commercials but Mel was out of town so Walker went in and did an imitation, and everyone thought it was Mel Brooks. He was the announcer for years for the Stater Brothers market chain in Southern California. He was several of the Keebler Elves.
He did cartoons — Top Cat, Spider-Man, Plastic Man, The Flintstones, The Transformers and many more. Walker took over the role of Ludwig Von Drake after Paul Frees retired from it...and being an ethical person, he only agreed to take it on after talking to Paul and getting his blessing.
He was also — and I don't want this to get lost among a list of credits — a very dear, lovely man.
This is not a formal obit. I'm helping the L.A. Times assemble one and I'll link to it when it's up, probably next week. This is also certainly not an overview of his entire career because I wouldn't know where to start. These are just some quick thoughts about a fine actor and fine gentleman...and someone I already miss. I'll post more details of his extraordinary life here shortly.
Here's a tip for folks who are thinking of purchasing animation cels...
Every so often, you see some dealer selling "color model sheet" cels from old Hanna-Barbera cartoons. Sometimes, they claim these were used in the production process. Sometimes, this is implied. Sometimes, it's even true.
But about 95% of the time when you see a hand-painted, full-color model sheet cel, what it means is this: Some person who may never have worked for Hanna-Barbera or even in the industry got hold of a Xerox copy of a black-and-white model sheet. Then they had this line art Xeroxed or otherwise copied onto a cel. Then they painted it themselves. Usually, this was all done a decade or two after the cartoon show in question ceased production.
The dealer now selling this cel may not have done this. He may have acquired the piece from someone who recently manufactured it...or from someone who acquired it from someone who recently manufactured it. But the point is that most of these pieces were not produced in or for the H-B studio. If I had a set of the right cel paints here, I could whip up one that was just as "authentic."
There's a lot of fake cartoon and comic art out there. eBay always seems to have at least one "original Charles Schulz drawing" up for bids that the Six Blind Men of Hindustan could spot as bogus. Common sense should tell you which ones would be the easiest to fake and among the easiest would be shaky sketches of Snoopy done in Flair pen, and alleged cels that anyone could have painted. They're not all fake but a lot of them are. Be wary.
Yesterday, we had a Mighty Mouse commercial. Here's a Mighty Mouse cartoon. Yeah, I know. I stopped liking Mighty Mouse cartoons when I was around seven, too. But there's some funny animation in here of goofy wolves...and it's the early, skinnier Mighty Mouse instead of the later, pumped-up one who always looked like he was getting steroids in his Velveeta. It's worth six minutes and eleven seconds of your time and besides, it's free.
Mighty Mouse, in case you didn't know, was called Supermouse in his first seven cartoons. The name was changed not because of litigation from the Superman people — although that might have come, eventually — but because there was another Supermouse in existence in a comic book. When those first cartoons were rereleased later, the name was overdubbed and otherwise changed. As a kid watching them on TV in the fifties, I used to always wonder why the sound was so weird on some of them. That's why.
This was the twelfth in the series. It was released 6/22/44, it's called "Wolf! Wolf!" and what more can I tell you? Oh, yeah. The announcer is Tom Morrison, who was the big house voice and also a storyman at the Terrytoons Studio, from whence this came. He often did the voice of Mighty when Mighty had a voice but sometimes it was a guy named Roy Halee. Also, you should know that the opening titles you'll see were put on when the cartoon played on TV. The original cartoon opened with much classier title cards which probably got this one off to a better start when it played in theaters.
Another post for folks who live in Southern California...
If you're venturing anywhere near Hollywood and Highland in the next few days, be aware that streets are already closed because of the Academy Awards. This webpage tells you where and when.
Also: The Reprise! folks, who stage those wonderful musicals up at U.C.L.A., will present a one-night-only staged reading of It's a Bird, It's a Plane, It's Superman! on Monday, May 17. Tickets are now on sale and can be ordered through Ticketmaster.
One other thought about how the silliness of the poll cited in the previous message. People are asked if they'd vote for a person who'd been married three times. I guess this is to suggest that if you've been married three times, it must say something about your personality or your ability to deal with others or your devotion to your religion or something. But I know a guy who's been married three times because his first two wives died — one killed in a car crash two years after they were married; the second, taken by cancer after thirty-some-odd years of a wonderful, happy second marriage. Does getting married a third time reflect poorly in any way on this man?
Half the political blogs I'm reading this morning are linking to or reposting the above poll and noting how many people say they would not vote for an Atheist. That may be so but it may also be because the question is so overwhemingly hypothetical. The American people have never been confronted with an Atheist who seems otherwise qualified for the office. On the question of whether they'd vote for a woman, they can think about Hillary or Elizabeth Dole or Condoleeza Rice or any of several ladies who've become mayors or governors or representatives, and say, "Hmm...some of those, I could vote for." Someone might not be inclined to vote for any specific woman but it usually isn't the gender that's the reason. I don't think anyone will not vote for Hillary Clinton just because she's a she. Even if that bothers them, they'll find another justification.
I also think there's something silly about polls that ask you to decide your vote in a vacuum. We can all imagine an alternative so loathesome that people who say they wouldn't vote for a Jewish or gay or Black or whatever candidate would hold their noses and vote for the Jew, the gay, the Black, the whatever. In this country, we rarely vote for someone. We vote against someone or we vote for the least objectionable of two alternatives. In the Bush-Kerry election, I'd bet at least 70% of all the voters on both sides wished they'd had someone better to vote for than the guy they had to select.
But none of this is why I posted the above. What caught my interest is that everyone is discussing how voters feel about blacks or gays or Athiests or women...but no one is noticing that question in there about being 72 years old. If we believe this poll, 42% of the country wouldn't vote for someone who's 72 years old...and I'm assuming that means older candidates would do even less well.
Well, John McCain is 71 years old. In the next presidential election, he'll be 72.
I don't think 42% of this country would decline to vote for John McCain because of his age. They might refuse to vote for him because of his position on the Iraq War or his embrace of the Religious Right or his stance on abortion or any number of other reasons. But his age? I don't believe for a minute that would matter to anyone unless, maybe, they otherwise had a microscopic preference for him over his opponent. That never happens in this country.
For the record, Ronald Reagan was 69 when he ran for president in 1980. He was 73 when he won a second term. Bob Dole was 73 when he ran in 1996 but that's not the reason he lost.
Hey, lemme suggest something you should listen today if you're anywhere near your computer and Internet Access. My pal Stuart Shostak is interviewing Dwayne Hickman on Stu's Show, a two-hour program heard on Shokus Internet Radio. You probably know Dwayne best as the star of The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, which was just about the smartest, cleverest classic sitcom that isn't yet out on DVD. It and Car 54, Where Are You?
Dwayne is a very nice guy and one of the smartest people I've ever chatted with about the TV business. Actually, I knew him for a time when he was a programming executive over at CBS and it was always fascinating to hear him talk about television because he knew it from all angles: In front of the camera, behind the camera and way behind the camera, over at the network. He'd been a child star and worked with all the biggies.
So let's see: He's an actor and a writer and a production exec...oh, and did I mention he's an artist? In addition to everything else, he's a pretty good painter. There was a period of his life — I don't know if Stu will get to cover it with him — when he worked in Las Vegas for Howard Hughes. If he doesn't, I may call in and ask Dwayne to talk about that. Or if I want to get him mad, I may ask him about a dreadful Dobie Gillis revival special that was done by a company I was working for at the time. (I am a witness. The stories Dwayne tells about how a wonderful script was destroyed by the show's producer are all absolutely true.)
Do yourself a favor and tune in. It starts at 4PM Pacific time, which would be 7PM back East. Go to the website for Shokus Internet Radio and select an audio browser. That's all there is to it. (Note, by the way, that if you're tuned in when the show begins, you might get booted off and have log in again. That's a technical glitch that sometimes happens, but only at the start of some programs.)
If you've never tried listening to Internet Radio, you're in for a treat because there's some wonderful programming available for free and with great sound quality if you have any sort of decent web connection. Do what I do: Connect to the station of your choice, then minimize that window and go on with answering e-mail or writing something or playing Minesweeper while you listen. It's one more thing your computer can do for you.
Three mice — who seem to have about one tooth among them — sell Colgate Toothpaste with the help of a Mighty one. And remember, kids: You don't actually brush your own teeth with the stuff. You use it to polish the giant tooth nearby with a happy face on it. Who wrote these things?
Several bloggers writing about George W. Bush's Iraq policy have referenced something they call "The Green Lantern Theory of Geopolitics." This has something to do with the idea that if we fail, it can only be because we didn't have the will. Over here on this page, blogger Matthew Yglesias explains the way others present this argument. It flows from the fact that Green Lantern's power ring is a function of his will and resolve, and that if he doesn't falter in those areas, he will supposedly triumph in any battle.
And over here on this page, my friend Denny O'Neil assesses this theory from the Green Lantern point-of-view. Denny knows a little something about Green Lantern, having written some of the most acclaimed issues of that hero's comic book.
For those of you who live in Southern California...
Lewis Black is doing a performance on Thursday evening, August 16, at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown Los Angeles. One suspects he will have something to say about the mere fact that he's performing in a building named for Mr. Disney.
As with most Lewis Black concert appearances, the scalping mechanism has already swooped in and gobbled up all the great seats and they're asking five and six times the face value. Recent experience suggests that'll seem like a bargain compared to what those tickets will cost in July.
I believe they went on sale last Sunday but the show hasn't been publicized much yet and there still seem to be some decent seats left at Ticketmaster. If you want to see him, you might want to click right on over. Compared to this, getting a hotel room for the Comic-Con in San Diego is like getting Viagra ads in your e-mail.
I just set my TiVo for the Academy Awards this Sunday. TiVo is the only way to go with the Oscars. Record the thing and while it's on, go out to dinner at that restaurant that's always too crowded on a weekend night. Unless it's a Wolfgang Puck eatery, you'll have the place to yourself. Then come back either when the show is over or in its closing hour and start watching from the top, fast-forwarding when it gets boring. I've been known to do a three-hour Oscarcast in an hour and fifteen minutes that way and not miss anything of even minor importance. If you only skip over commercials for new credit cards and cellular service, you can save a least an hour of your life.
But you have to remember this: Pad your recording. They say three hours but it could be 3:10 or 3:20 and I think there was once a ceremony that went more than an hour over the announced time. That was back when they used to just lie and tell you the show would be two and a half hours long, knowing full well it would be at least three. They'd pre-sold ample commercials for that length. Now, they say three and try for three but it could be longer. You don't want your TiVo to stop recording just when something interesting's about to happen.
So I've padded my recording by an hour. Just in case. Wouldn't want to miss a single joke about the fatherhood of Anna Nicole's kid or Britney Spears shaving her head, or whatever really offensive thing Borat is going to do.
Also, I've set my TiVo to record Alice in Wonderland on Boomerang on Sunday but I'm not optimistic. That is, I'm not optimistic it's the show some of us want to record.
I've probably waaaay oversold this but back in '66, Hanna-Barbera produced what I remember as a pretty good prime-time animated special called Alice in Wonderland or What's a Nice Kid Like You Doing in a Place Like This? It was written by Bill Dana, who also appeared as the voice of Jose Jiminez, who appeared as the White Knight. Janet Waldo provided the speaking voice of Alice. (As H-B so often did, someone else sang for the star character.) Sammy Davis Jr. played the Cheshire Cat and the regular H-B voice cast did most of the other roles. The songs were supplied by Lee Adams and Charles Strouse, who otherwise wrote some pretty good Broadway scores and movie songs.
It's never been out on home video but we've heard that Boomerang is running it at 4:45 Eastern (1:45 Pacific) on Sunday afternoon, though it's possible we've been misinformed. There are about eight thousand animated interpretations of Alice in Wonderland and apparently Boomerang has at least half of them in its library. Some version will be running on Sunday but don't be shocked if it isn't the Bill Dana rendition. They've advertised it before and shown another. Also, don't be shocked if it is and you watch and it isn't as fabulous as I remember. There's lots of stuff I liked in '66 that I can't stand now. When was the last time you tried to watch an episode of The Man From U.N.C.L.E.?
While I'm at it, I should mention that Boomerang's start and end times rarely coincide with any clock you might have in your home. I think the whole network is on Southwestern Bolivian Moonlight Savings Time or something.
What you won't see in this show, assuming you see it at all, are the original animated commercials for its sponsor, the Rexall company. In the sixties, they always ran a big, annual "one cent sale" — it's when my family would stock up on aspirin, Maalox and floss for another year — and it was always kicked off with some big Rexall-sponsored TV special. Ron Kurer, who runs the fine animation site Toon Tracker, has posted two of these commercials on YouTube. They're interesting because it's always been very rare for a company to spend money on animated commercials — even commercials animated on a Hanna-Barbera budget — that only ran a few times. These only ran a few times so they're quite rare.
As I mentioned, Janet Waldo did the voice of Alice. You probably know her better as the voice of Judy Jetson, or maybe Penelope Pitstop. Janet has been performing before microphones since the days of radio drama and is still at it, still sounding like a teenager. A charming lady, indeed. Howard Morris did the voice of the White Rabbit in both of these commercials and in the second, you'll hear Daws Butler as the King and as the March Hare, and that's Harvey Korman as the Mad Hatter.
The Scooter Libby perjury trial is about to go to the jury so there could be a verdict shortly. I have no idea what it might be. Sometimes, you can formulate a hunch based on the press coverage...but this time, the mainstream media has reported very little that would suggest how it's going or how it might go.
The exhaustive, in-depth coverage has mostly been from bloggers and/or via news sources that few would argue are not highly partisan. I've read some of the reporting from both sides and I don't think these people are all covering the same trial. I know these sites skew the news, possibly as a conscious, deliberate policy. As we keep saying here, there's money to be made telling some people what they want to hear, whether it's true or not.
But I can't recall the last instance of reporting that was this Rashomon. The sites that could be said to be Liberal are saying that an airtight case has been made for Libby's guilt. He'll be convicted of something and it may lead to Cheney. The more Conservative coverage says there's no "there" there; that the case is close to non-existent and should never have been brought.
Someone's going to be spectacularly wrong, at least about how the jury will decide. (This should not be confused with how the jury should decide. Remember the first O.J. case.) I'm just amazed that I can't find any reporting that delves deep into the case and finds both strengths and weaknesses in the assertions of both sides. And I'm wondering if that's because the case really is that lopsided in one direction...or if it's because reporters just don't do Fair and Balanced anymore.
We all love Wile E. Coyote, the long-suffering Road Runner chaser. But, uh, what does the "E" stand for?
I guess I don't know. I mean, none of the cartoons directed by Charles "Chuck" Jones and written by Michael Maltese ever said. Only a couple of them ever even said his name was Wile E. Coyote.
But it has just (this morning) been brought to my attention — thank you, Devlin Thompson — that more than a thousand websites say the Coyote's middle name is Ethelbert. The source for this is a 1973 story that appeared in the comic book, Beep Beep the Road Runner, published by Western Publishing Company under its Gold Key imprint. This is noted by Jon Cooke over on this page and as he also reveals, it was the question/answer to the Final Jeopardy question on the 1/18/07 episode of the game show, Jeopardy!
In the story, which was called "The Greatest of E's," Wile E. Coyote realizes he doesn't know and gathers together some of his relatives to answer the question. One is an uncle named Kraft E. Coyote who informs him and the world that the "E" stands for Ethelbert. That is, as far as I know, the only piece of fiction licensed or otherwise blessed by the Warner Brothers company that ever said such a thing.
This raises one of those moral issues that has no firm answer. What makes something like this an "official" fact in the world of animated cartoons? I mean, we know Bugs Bunny is named Bugs Bunny because...well, we just know. But what is the name of the frog that sings and dances in the Jones-Maltese masterpiece, One Froggy Evening? It's Michigan J. Frog, right? Apparently...but that name appears nowhere in the cartoon. As I understand it, the moniker was coined years later when there was some merchandising interest in the character...or maybe when W.B. decided to try and generate some merchandising interest. Chuck or Mike may have come up with it then or someone at WB may have and then Chuck and Mike endorsed and used it...but anyway, that's the frog's name. I suppose. I mean, if the guys who made One Froggy Evening didn't argue the point, who are we to say it isn't?
For that matter, even if some "fact" appears in a cartoon that doesn't make it inviolable. There were WB cartoons where Sylvester the Cat could talk and was owned by Granny. There were others where he couldn't talk and was Porky Pig's cat. Quick: If I asked you, "Who owns Sylvester?," you'd probably forget about all cartoons to the contrary and say it was Granny, who also owned Tweety. There were Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck cartoons where for no apparent reason, those characters lived in other eras. Elmer Fudd had a couple of different middle initials in different shorts and characters' appearances were often changing and we could list hundreds of other inconsistencies. The films weren't intended to have an airtight continuity from one to another. Some "facts" were meant to be forgotten.
It was the same with the comic books. Western Publishing licensed the right to do comics of those characters for around thirty years, and the editors at Western thought of the comics as separate entities from the cartoons. The Donald Duck that Carl Barks and others wrote and drew for Western's Disney comics was not exactly the same Donald Duck that appeared in the Disney cartoons. They adapted the character, rethinking and redesigning him for a different medium. (It's a funny thing: When I was a kid and read Bugs Bunny comic books, I always "heard" the wabbit's dialogue in Mel Blanc's voice from the shorts. But when I read a Donald Duck comic book, I never thought that duck spoke with the voice Clarence Nash supplied for Donald in his cartoon appearances...maybe because I understood so little of what the animated duck said and I could read every syllable of the comic book Donald's word balloons.) In some ways, the Donald of the comics was the same character but in others, he was a different but similar creature. And I never quite related the Mickey Mouse of the comic books or strips to any of his animated appearances.
While Western was doing the Warner Brothers-based comics, they changed a lot of the characters to make them — they thought — more workable for print media. They didn't think matching the cartoons closely mattered because, for one thing, those films weren't on TV every week then. During the forties and early fifties, they weren't on TV at all. Many of the kids who bought the comics rarely, if ever, saw the animated shorts and certainly didn't see them over and over and over, like they would in later years. So it didn't matter a whole heap if the comics matched the cartoons; only that they worked as comic book reading experiences. Back then in the Bugs Bunny newspaper strip, which was read by millions, Elmer Fudd rarely appeared and I don't think Yosemite Sam ever did...but Sylvester was a regular. He was a hobo who wasn't owned by Granny, didn't chase Tweety Birds and who had a British accent. Someone thought it made for a better strip that way.
This is why, for instance, the Road Runner in comic books differed so much from the Road Runner in cartoons. When I was a kid enjoying both, I was puzzled. I'd seen Road Runner cartoons. They were tough to come by then but I'd caught one or two and in them, there was one Road Runner and one Coyote and neither spoke. In the comics, the Road Runner not only spoke, he spoke in rhyme. He had a name — Beep Beep — and in some stories, he had a wife and a family of either three or four youthful road-running kids. The Coyote spoke too, though not in rhyme, though that didn't bother me as much. The Coyote had spoken in a couple of non-Road Runner cartoons.
I wondered aloud back then if the folks who made the comic books had ever viewed one of those hard-to-see cartoons — but of course, they had. As I learned much later, Michael Maltese wrote many of those comics and the early ones were drawn by Pete Alvarado. Pete handpainted all the backgrounds for the first Road Runner cartoon, Fast and Furry-ous. Almost all the other writers and artists who did the comics (Phil DeLara, Don R. Christensen, Warren Foster, et al) had worked for the Warner Brothers cartoon studio, if not in Jones's unit then right down the hall. They knew that in the cartoons, the Road Runner didn't talk — in rhyme or at all and it had been a conscious decision to change it for the comics. The editors and creators had also decided to not worry about consistency from comic book to comic book. In some, there was a Mrs. Road Runner and four kids. But there were several years there where the wife and one of the kids disappeared...except that every now and then, they'd inexplicably turn up for a story or two or in a reprint sandwiched in among new adventures.
So as far as I'm concerned, it's no more a "fact" that the Coyote's middle name is Ethelbert than it is that the Road Runner is named Beep Beep, has a wife and kids and speaks in doggerel. It said the "E" stood for Ethelbert in one comic book story but that's just one obscure comic book story...and even the guy who wrote it didn't intend it as anything more than one joke on one page of one story in one issue.
How do I know this? Because, as some of you may have guessed by now, I was that guy. I wrote that story. I think I was around twenty years old at the time. I'm pretty sure, by the way, that that one was conceived in a lecture hall at U.C.L.A. while I was simultaneously jotting down script ideas and feigning attention to what a tedious Anthropology professor was teaching. Mike Maltese had been occasionally writing the comics in semi-retirement before me...but when he dropped the "semi" part, I got the job and that was one of the plots I came up with. For the record, the story was drawn by a terrific artist named Jack Manning, and Mr. Maltese complimented me on it.
Still, I wouldn't take that as any official endorsement of the Coyote's middle name. If you want to say the Coyote's middle name is Ethelbert, fine. I mean, it's not like someone's going to suddenly whip out Wile E.'s actual birth certificate and yell, "Aha! Here's incontrovertible proof!" But like I said, I never imagined anyone would take it as part of the official "canon" of the character. If I had, I'd have said the "E" stood for Evanier.
This is sad but it's something you oughta see. It's a short bit of home movie footage shot on 11/22/63 in Dallas — John F. Kennedy and the First Lady in the motorcade, only a minute or two before shots rang out. I don't think there's anything in here that gives us any additional clues as to whodunnit but it's a piece of history.
For the record, I'm a recovered conspiracy nut. Back in the seventies, I thought the answer to "Who Shot J.F.K.?" was anyone or anything other than a lone assassin named Lee Harvey Oswald acting alone. Snipers on the grassy knoll, Secret Service men programmed a la The Manchurian Candidate, the three hoboes, chickenmen from Saturn...all more likely than one loner with a Mannlicher-Carcano, thought I. But the more I read, the less I could defend any of those theories and I came around to the belief that not only did Oswald act alone but that not a one of the arguments against that scenario was valid. I further came to the view that it was pointless to discuss this with anyone so I don't. I also will not discuss the validity of any religion, where to get the best pizza, Fred Astaire vs. Gene Kelly, what's sexy, or any other topic about which no human being has ever changed another's mind.
Here's a few seconds from Dallas. If you're over fifty, you know exactly where you were when this film was shot.
The new "Conservative version of The Daily Show," The Half-Hour News Hour, debuted last night on Fox News to killer reviews and not just from Liberals, either. There are enough articles online telling you how lousy it was so I thought I'd focus on (a) why it was destined to stink, at least at first, and (b) why it might still be a big hit for Fox.
Why it was destined to stink: Well, for one thing, when someone else has an acclaimed hit and you come along and say, "We're going to do our version of that," you're setting yourself up for failure. People are not going to just expect a good show from you. They're going to, not unreasonably, expect something as wonderful as the hit upon which you're basing and selling yourself. It's like being Frank Sinatra, Jr. No matter how good he is on stage — and actually, he's pretty good — all audiences seem to do is mutter, "Not as wonderful as his father." An impossible standard.
You're also starting from scratch but likening yourself to something that's long since gotten its act together. The Daily Show wasn't all that terrific when it started, either. But The Half-Hour News Hour isn't being compared to Jon Stewart's first weeks or even to Craig Kilborne's break-in period.
More importantly, comedy does not arise from nowhere. You can't just go from zero to sixty. If someone came to me waving large sums of cash and said, "Put together a Conservative comedy show for us," my first action would be to scour the country for existing troupes and comedians...people who've been doing it for a while and who've refined their acts in smaller venues. When Lorne Michaels started Saturday Night Live, he signed performers like Dan Aykroyd and Gilda Radner and Chevy Chase and John Belushi who'd already been working together at Second City or in the National Lampoon shows...and a lot of what they did on SNL the first year was material (or variations on material) they'd perfected in stage appearances.
I don't know where they got the folks who write and appear on The Half-Hour News Hour. They may all be very talented on an individual basis. But as we've learned from a lot of failed SNL imitations and even from a lot of SNL seasons when new cast members from different walks were thrown together without breaking in as "featured players," it's hard to just all start all being hilarious together. You can't even find a tone or an attitude that way. The only SNL imitation that had any real critical or ratings success was SCTV, which starred a long-established troupe that had been working together for years and already had polished routines and characters.
So I'd look for, say, a comedy troupe out there already doing Right-Wing Comedy. I'd hire them and use them as the core of my new show.
And if I couldn't find such a troupe already in existence...well, that would tell me something.
All of this is above and beyond the fact that Conservative comedy is, almost by definition, difficult. It's like (I've said this before) making a Marx Brothers movie and trying to make Margaret Dumont the funny one. There's plenty of phoniness and arrogance to puncture on the Left but it's tough to structure a joke which is the rich making fun of the poor, or those in power picking on those who aren't. It's not impossible but it's tough, just as it's tough to fill even a half-hour of political humor if you restrict yourself to one side of the aisle. The Executive Producer of The Half-Hour News Hour has been quoted as saying he looked around and didn't see anyone making fun of Hillary or John Kerry. Which only tells us he's never seen Jon Stewart's show, the program he's supposedly replicating.
Nor has he apparently seen Leno or Letterman or Conan or SNL or any of those shows. They all routinely rip into Liberals and Democrats and, yes, they do more about George W. Bush but that's not bias. That's because he's in power and giving them so much to work with. When it was Bill Clinton in power and Monica came to light, the jokes flowed freely in that direction.
So why do I think The Half-Hour News Hour might still be a hit? That is, assuming Fox doesn't yank it off, ratings be hanged, out of sheer embarrassment? Because it doesn't have to be funny. It only has to be mean.
There's a market out there for mean. There are people out there who'll pay good money to hear someone say Hillary Clinton is an ugly cow or Ted Kennedy is a pathetic drunk. No joke necessary. If you don't believe that, listen to some Talk Radio shows or, better still, check out what Dennis Miller now does on stage. Someone sent me a bootleg MP3 of a recent Miller live performance and I was so disappointed. The man was once so witty, not necessarily about politics. But at some point — I forget which of the many Dennis Miller Shows was on the air at the time — he adopted a kind of "I'm too hip to be entertaining you people" attitude. He goes out and just says Hillary's evil, Bill's a horny bastard, Al Gore is a fat liar, et cetera. And oh, yeah. Bush is a real man and why don't all these midgets get off his back? Some people love it.
I suspect Miller had a rocky period there before audiences knew what to expect when they paid to see the new him. But around the time he became the first professional topical comedian in history to announce he would not do jokes about the President of the United States, he found his audience...or rather, they found him. Those people may find The Half-Hour News Hour. They aren't the majority in America. They're a shrinking minority, which seems to be making them madder and madder and more likely to turn to whoever tells them what they want to hear. But there are enough of them to sell out all the Dennis Miller concerts and there may be enough of them to keep The Half-Hour News Hour afloat until its makers figure out what the show is.
This is a rerun. I linked to this commercial some time ago but the video was deleted from the website that hosted it. Here it is on another one. Nothing says "sixties" like this kind of ad.
It's one of my favorite commercials for one of my favorite products of the period — Adams Sour Gums. I was never much for chewing gum but I liked their Sour Orange and occasionally their Sour Lemon, and would pick up a pack now and then until they stopped making all four flavors. Recently, the company that now owns Adams brought back the two flavors I never liked — Sour Apple and Sour Cherry — in a limited release. Naturally, this prompted me to call up and demand they reissue the Sour Orange or at least the Sour Lemon. A nice lady on the phone said they'd look into it. That was a year ago and I'm still waiting, Nice Lady on the Phone.
Here's the commercial. That seems to be actor Barry Newman, who later starred in a fine lawyer series called Petrocelli, doing one of those jobs that actors do before they get a series.
There's a lot of talk out there about "supporting our troops," much of it from people who've confused that with supporting George W. Bush. In some cases, I think they're deliberately confusing the two.
Thinking Bush has sent them on the wrong mission — or even on the right mission but managed it poorly — is not a lack of support for our soldiers. The kind of thing described in this article is, almost by definition, a lack of support for our soldiers. And Bush loyalists ought to be furious about it even if it might reflect poorly on their side.
A few weeks ago, I bought one of these. It's the Cruzer Crossfire, made by SanDisk...a little USB connecting flash drive that with the cap on is a bit smaller than the standard-size Pez refill pack. It holds 4.0 GB of whatever you want to put on it. Cute, huh? Well, it would be if it worked.
It did for a time. I copied all my vital files onto it and used it to update them between my three computers. Then a few days ago, the thing stopped working. I plug it into a USB port and nothing happens. I've tried it on eight USB ports on three computers and none of them recognize its existence.
So I called SanDisk...and I'll say this for them. They have people on duty at Tech Support even on Sunday and I wasn't even on "hold" for very long. But really, all the guy there could tell me was that once in while, there's a defective one and they'll replace it if I send it back, or I can do what may be faster, which is to take it back to the place of purchase.
Which brings me to my problem. I put all my vital files on it — credit card data, bank accounts, passwords, pictures of various comic book industry figures naked...do I really want to send this to a total stranger at some distant company? I mean, they say they'll just destroy it and ship me another but do I want to trust this? Maybe it will work on some computer. Maybe it'll work on the computer of that kid at the Returns Desk at Costco.
The Extinct Attractions Club is a group that is interested (maybe "obsessed" would be a better word) with documenting the history of theme park attractions, especially at Disneyland. They have a whole line of DVDs they've produced with rare footage of the Magic Kingdom and interviews with the folks who built or otherwise contributed to the things you could once do for a "E" ticket.
Here's a little preview of their overview of the Haunted Mansion. In it, you'll get to see some footage of the late Thurl Ravenscroft, the man with the greatest singing voice that ever existed on the planet. You know him best as Tony the Tiger but he can be heard all over Disneyland, and we're glad the Extinct Attractions folks interviewed him so extensively.
This is just to remind you all that tomorrow (Tuesday) is National Pancake Day. If you go to an IHOP (those places we used to call The International House of Pancakes) between 7 AM and 10 PM, they'll give you a free short stack of buttermilk pancakes. All the details are over on this page but really, that's all you need to know. Go to one. Ask for free pancakes. Eat free pancakes. Go home. Simple as that.
Another pioneer of the earliest days of comics has died. It's legendary artist Bob Oksner and the cause of death, earlier this evening, was pneumonia. Born October 14, 1916 in Paterson, New Jersey, he originally embarked on a legal career at New York University. It was while he was editing the campus humor magazine that he met many cartoonists and began flexing his muscles in that area. Before long, he'd changed majors and enrolled also at the Art Students League. He received an M.A. at Columbia University, then taught art and history in high school until he broke into comics. His earliest work was in either 1939 or 1940 for Funnies, Inc., which was an art service that supplied comic book material to a number of publishers, including Timely (now Marvel) Comics. Timely liked to hire artists away from Funnies, Inc. and by '42, Oksner was working directly for the publisher on strips including The Destroyer and Marvel Boy, while also occasionally drawing for other houses. In 1945, he began drawing a syndicated newspaper strip, Miss Cairo Jones, that lasted until 1947.
Sheldon Mayer, an editor at DC, had been a fan of Miss Cairo Jones and he invited Oksner to work for DC...an association that kept Bob occupied for the rest of his career. He started on The Black Canary and other strips featuring pretty ladies and soon segued to humor features, especially ones based on licensed properties. Oksner drew The Adventures of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis until that team split up, whereupon his assignment became The Adventures of Jerry Lewis. He also drew Sgt. Bilko, Doberman, The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, Pat Boone, The Adventures of Bob Hope and non-licensed humor titles like Leave it to Binky, Miss Beverly Hills, A Date With Judy and Stanley and His Monster. One of his more memorable stints was as artist/co-creator of the short-lived The Angel and the Ape in the late sixties. He received the National Cartoonists Society Award in its Comic Book Division for 1960 and 1961 won the Shazam Award in 1970 for Best Pencil Artist (Humor Division).
When DC didn't have humor work for him, he did romance tales for Girl's Love Stories and other such comics. Later, when they weren't publishing either, Oksner worked on Wonder Woman, Supergirl, Lois Lane and other adventure-type strips, especially those featuring heroines. He did a long tour of duty as Curt Swan's inker on Superman and drew a number of Superman stories on his own and illustrated many classic covers.
Over the years, Oksner occasionally returned to syndicated comic strips. From 1952 to 1955, he drew a strip based on the I Love Lucy TV show and from 1967 to '68, there was Soozie, a very well-drawn strip about a very well-built young lady. His longest run in syndication began in '69 when he began collaborating with his long-time friend, Irwin Hasen, on the scripts for Hasen's strip, Dondi. Oksner did the plots and Hasen wrote the dialogue. This lasted until 1986 when the strip ended.
That was a year or two after Oksner had retired completely from drawing...and I don't mean just from drawing for DC. He gave away his drawing table and art supplies, and when fans contacted him to inquire about commissions, his reply was, "Sorry...I don't have anything to draw on." A few years later, he weakened enough to do a few sketches but when I interviewed him at the 2002 Comic-Con International, he said he was quite content to have put drawing behind him. (The above photo of him was taken at that convention. Thanks to Jackie Estrada for supplying it.)
That convention was the only opportunity I ever had to meet Mr. Oksner and spend time with him, even though we'd both worked briefly on a mid-seventies comic book adapation of the TV show, Welcome Back, Kotter. He was a charming gentleman who was amazed and delighted to discover he had so many fans. It seemed like every thirty seconds for all four days, someone was coming up to him to say how much they'd always admired his art. Especially the way he drew the ladies.
An issue of Alter Ego devoted to Oksner's work is just about to go to press.
Let's catch up with what folks are writing to me. This one's from Starmaxx and it's in response to that post I put up about replacing human cashiers at parking lots with machines...
I can tell you that these machines came into vogue at the parking lots that service the Washington, D.C. metro-rail (similar to the subway) in the last few years after management found out that the "manned" parking lot attendants were stealing lots of money. Apparently, it went into the millions and had gone on for years. Why an audit never caught this still remains a mystery, but that just goes to show you how the D.C. local government is run!
I had a horrible experience when I attended the 2006 baseball opening day for the Washington Nationals and decided to take mass transit. Went into the metro parking lot, but could not find any parking spaces after looking for 30 minutes. Tried to get out, but you needed the "fare card" to use in the automated machine — but you could only buy the card inside the Metro complex (which meant you had to find a parking space and take a 5 minute walk). What a quandary. Finally, a friendly attendent showed me an empty space. What lunacy — but I now always have a spare card in my glove compartment.
I can understand wanting to eliminate theft but it seems to me it would be quite easy and cheap to have a TV camera monitoring the exit cashiers and counting how many people exited and paid. I don't understand how it's cost efficient to have machines collecting parking fees, especially when you need to have human beings around to jump in when the machines fail or when "the system" doesn't work for some customer. My old pal Pat O'Neill, who does not live in Southern California, writes...
Wait a minute here — you have to pay to park at a shopping mall in Los Angeles? The fact that you're spending money in the stores isn't sufficient revenue? Do any of the stores offer to validate?
If I drove to a mall and found out they wanted me to pay for the "privilege" of leaving my car in the lot while I went in and spent money, I'd quickly find some other place to spend my money!
Don't think that hasn't occurred to some of us. But yes, there are malls out here that don't validate...where you can go in and spend thousands of dollars but you still have to come up with a buck to get out. The Beverly Center and the Beverly Connection, which are across the street from one another, both do that...and I'm guessing they haven't suffered a noticeable loss of consumers or they wouldn't do that.
Both once had free parking if you were there two hours or less. The Beverly Center started charging a buck minimum a few years ago and now the Beverly Connection, which is just reopening after a major renovation, is going that way. It'll be interesting to see if they stick with it. The revamped mall is not yet fully open — some stores aren't finished — so they aren't expecting a lot of business yet. Once they get to the point where they do, they may find that parking fee keeping people away.
Also, the other day, I posted a link to a video and wondered if that was Glenn Yarbrough of the Limeliters singing. I got some interesting responses, like this one from Fred G. Vigeant...
Most definitely Glenn on the Raid commercial. While the song was made popular by the Kingston Trio as the "M.T.A.", the tune is from a song known as "The Wreck of the Old '97," which every folk group, including the Weavers and Leadbelly sang. It may be interesting to you as well, that the Limeliters were formed as a "song try out group" for the Kingston Trio. Lou Gottlieb, who was singing with the Gateway Singers at the time, wrote a couple of songs that were part of the K.T. repertoire. Somebody (it may have been Lou or possible Frank Werber, the Kingston's manager) got the idea that another group could be formed that could "try out" new songs in front of an audience to see they would work. Thus, the Limeliters were formed (named after the club in Aspen, I believe, where they started out) and soon had their own following and recording contract.
A couple of folks thought it wasn't Yarbrough but they were just guessing. Here's another expert opinion from Michael J. Hayde...
First of all, that's definitely Glenn Yarbrough. Nobody could duplicate that voice. Second, I suspect the banjo player is fellow Limeliter Alex Hassilev.
As to why Yarbrough (and possibly Hassilev) did the commercial probably has a lot to do with timing. The Kingston Trio's "M.T.A." was released in the spring of 1959, and peaked on the charts around July. Coincidentally, that's the month the Limeliters were formed. Yarbrough and Hassilev had been working as singles and occasionally as a duo at a club in Aspen called the Limelite. They were joined by Lou Gottlieb, who'd been working as an arranger for...The Kingston Trio. Originally, Gottlieb thought the three of them could record demos for the K.T., but it was clear that the potential for something greater was present.
In any event, that Raid commercial probably was one of many projects the group members took on before, during or after their first (not-so-successful) album on the Elektra label came out in 1960, but prior to their signing to RCA Victor, which put them into the big time. I should add that no folk group did more TV commercials than the Limeliters; it was they who introduced the "Things go better with Coke" jingle, and how I'd love to see that turn up on your website someday.
We aim to please. Here are the Limeliters — who I always liked a lot better than the Kingston Trio, by the way — performing that lovely jingle with Mr. Yarbrough in fine voice as the lead singer. And because no detail's too trivial for me to not point it out, I think the short delivery guy in this commercial is the fine character actor, Bill McCutcheon. Thanks to everyone for all the mail.
A man named Douglas Feith seems to have been designated as Official Scapegoat for all the bad intelligence work that got us into the war in Iraq over, at best, erroneous assumptions.
I do not mean to suggest Mr. Feith is blameless. Indeed, the fact that he's now making the rounds, denying he ever said all the things he said does not speak well for his integrity. But he may be drawing a disproportionate share of criticism that should rightly be dispersed over a wider pantheon of folks who screwed up royally.
In any case, he has achieved something amazing. How badly does a Bush administration official have to dissemble before Fox News calls him a liar?
Step right up. I have your Sunday Video Link right here, friends. It's another clip from The Dinah Shore Chevy Show, in this case from October 4, 1959. Dinah and Groucho Marx perform "Peasie Weasie," which was one of those weird old songs that only Groucho seemed to ever sing.
It dates back to a touring vaudeville act that he and his brothers began doing around 1910. They actually had two acts then. One was called "Fun in Hi Skule" and the other was "Mr. Green's Reception." As I understand it, they did "Fun in Hi Skule" for a while and then developed the second act, which was kind of a sequel with the same silly characters. In some theaters, they did one of the two acts and in some, they did both and "Peasie Weasie" was usually the finale in one act or both. Here's two minutes of Groucho and Dinah taking a crack at it. (Just ignore the video weirdness at the beginning. It's the clip, not your monitor.)
I keep alluding here to the upcoming labor nastiness in Hollywood which may include either a monumental strike by the Writers Guild and/or the Screen Actors guild, or one or both of those unions getting its teeth kicked in, or both. There are some other possibilities but I'm not expecting any that involve everyone linking arms, singing happy songs around the campfire and life as we know it continuing unchanged.
This website has a very simple explanation of how the process works, at least from the WGA perspective. I disagree with the suggestion that my Guild "lost" the 1988 strike. In fact, I think one of the problems we've gotten into is this tendency to view a labor negotiation like a Jai Alai game where one side must emerge as undisputed winner and the other as loser. If you can get away from that mindset — and sadly, some folks like the bloodshed and don't want to — it's possible to arrive at a deal that works for both. It's also possible to wind up "winning" a strike the way some wars are "won" — i.e., fewer of your people got killed. So you still lose when you win. I believe the future of labor negotations, at least in Hollywood, involves moving away from the win/lose attitude and getting to the "works for both sides" mentality. I'm not sure though that the folks with whom we bargain are there yet.
Anyway, like I said, I don't think we lost the '88 strike. I don't think we won, either. I think we were forced into a situation where being on strike for five months was the less damaging of two bad options...and there were only two. When we get closer to when the '07 strike might commence, I'll try to write more about what I think happened in '88. But in the meantime, read that piece to which I'm linking. It's a good primer on the situation.
The late composer Meredith Willson wrote "It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas" and all the songs in The Music Man and The Unsinkable Molly Brown — tunes like "76 Trombones" and "Til There Was You" and "I Ain't Down Yet." But for some, his most memorable tune was one that was drilled into them in their school gym classes in the early sixties.
In 1961, President John F. Kennedy launched something called The President's Council on Physical Fitness and asked Willson to compose an exercise-oriented theme song. Willson responded with "Chicken Fat," a record sung by Robert Preston and distributed by the zillions to physical education classes across the country. In some schools, it was played every day and when students from that era hear it, they reflexively drop and begin cranking out push-ups.
Our link today is to a clip of the song as performed on The Dinah Shore Show on October 6, 1961. Dinah and Nanette Fabray give it their all, along with Dinah's dancers and brief appearance by Al Hirt and George Montgomery. It's an odd presentation of an odd song, and for the full effect, you might want to do a couple of sit-ups as you watch. Thanks to Shelly Goldstein for recommending this one.
So exactly what was so wrong with having cashiers at the exits in parking lots? It's getting so every mall I go to these days has a little recording on the way in that tells you that there are no cashiers at the exits and that if you have to pay, you have to pay at some machine before you return to your car. This is annoying enough in lots where you don't always have to pay — say, at the Westfield in Century City where the first two hours are free. But yesterday, I was at the new Beverly Connection on La Cienega and it's at least a dollar to get out, no matter what you bought or how short a time you stayed there. So if I go there, I have to deal with their silly vending-type devices.
I don't get how this can save them a lot of money. It's not like those people in the booths were drawing down CEO salaries, after all. By eliminating those employees, the lot incurs the cost of the equipment and the ongoing upkeep on it all. And in every lot I've visited that has gone to this system, there seem to be dozens of employees hovering around, making sure the machines work and teaching people how to use them and dealing with the inevitable confusions and system failures. Wouldn't it be easier/cheaper to put back the booths and stick those people in them?
At the Beverly Connection, before you return to your auto, you stop off at a kiosk and put in a dollar to get your exit ticket validated. A little voice informs you that you have twenty minutes to use the exit ticket.
Question: What happens if on my way to my car, I suddenly think of something else I'd like to go buy? Or what happens if I run into a friend and we get to talking or if I can't find my vehicle and it's twenty-one minutes before I get to the exit? Or if I lose my ticket? Or if, as happened to me twice in parking lots before Christmas, I drive around the lot for ten minutes, fail to find an empty space and decide to leave? I can think of a dozen other problematic scenarios, none of which occur if there's a human being I can talk to and pay on the way out.
Yesterday also, I was in a manned parking lot where the first hour was free. I was driving for the exit at 58 minutes after my entry time...but there was a traffic jam at the gate and I had to sit there for four or five minutes while the lady in the booth argued with some driver. When I finally got up to her, it was more than an hour after I'd entered but she waved me on through because she knew it wasn't my fault. A machine can't do that.
Like I said, I don't get how this can result in huge savings. I can see how it generates ill will and maybe a desire to not visit that parking lot if you can help it. But can this really be worth the potential ill will involved?
Dropped by the Hollywood Collectors Show this afternoon out in Burbank at what was once a Hilton and is now a Marriott. That's how it is sometimes in life. One day you're a Hilton and the next day, you're a Marriott. The next time I go there, I fully expect it to be the world's largest Motel Six.
Those of you who know about these events can skip this paragraph. Four or so times a year, a gent named Ray Courts stages these events, usually in Burbank but occasionally in other climates. There are dealers selling photos and movie posters and other show biz memorabilia but the big attraction is this: The room is full of stars of all kinds — TV stars, movie stars, silent screen stars, child stars, music stars...even some current working stars. They're all available to sell you an autographed photo or book and most are willing to just talk, especially after you've purchased an autographed photo or book. The purchase is not, with most, mandatory. I actually didn't spend a cent out there but had some nice conversations, regardless.
Two of them were with folks who've recently been featured in video links on this site — Bill "Jose Jiminez" Dana and William Schallert. Nothing all that interesting to report on either front, though I must say that Mr. Schallert seemed amazed at how many people were stopping by his table to buy a photo and tell him how much they've always liked seeing him on TV. It's also funny that back in the sixties, he played Admiral Hargrade, the ancient C.O.N.T.R.O.L. agent on Get Smart under heavy make-up...and now, forty-some-odd years later, he still looks younger than he did then. He was selling a still from that show and everyone was remarking about this.
Among the other celebs there, some of whom I had the chance to talk with, were Edie Adams, Gogi Grant, Adam West, Burt Ward, Julie Newmar, Paul "Pee Wee Herman" Reubens, Kristy McNichol, David L. Lander, Katey Sagal, David Faustino, Mariette Hartley and many others. And while they weren't guests, my pal Earl Kress (who went with me) and I enjoyed running into Chuck McCann, Wally Wingert and Gary Owens, and lunching with the latter. (By the way: Earl, over on his website, has a good post up about that Bill Dana/Hanna-Barbera cartoon I keep babbling about here.)
The Hollywood Collectors Show concludes tomorrow (Saturday) and most of the same guests will be there. It's $15 to get in and they nick you another seven for parking. That is, if you can find a space. You might have to wait around until the whole complex turns into a Holiday Inn Express or something.
Here's another Raid commercial. I don't think Tex Avery directed this one. I'm including it mostly because the parody of the song, "M.T.A.", is so bizarre.
I think the one word the mouse yells — "Raid!" — is Mel Blanc — probably lifted from the track for another Raid commercial — but you can't always be certain with one word. I'm more intrigued by who the singer is. Is that Glenn Yarbrough of the Limeliters? Or is it someone doing a great Glenn Yarbrough impression? And "M.T.A." was a hit for the Kingston Trio. I think the Limeliters performed it occasionally and may even have recorded it...but why have Yarbrough (or someone imitating him) perform a commercial parodying a rival group's hit?
I don't expect answers to any of this. I just think it's strange...or at least, strange enough to be Today's Video Link. You might as well click. It's only forty seconds.
The best source of information on Vegas — and one of the few that isn't under the thumb of advertising from the businesses they're ostensibly reviewing — is Anthony Curtis's Las Vegas Advisor. Formerly only a monthly paper newsletter, it's now also an Internet site where some features are available only by subscription but others are open to all.
One free feature is the daily Question of the Day, where Curtis and his staff answer some query about Vegas. Ordinarily, each question can only be read for free until displaced by the next day's question...but for the next few days, the Las Vegas Advisor Q.O.T.D. Archives are open to all. If you're interested in the city and how it works, hurry over there and read up. No one knows more about that place. Also, here's a link to today's question.
I've been swamped the last few days with calls and projects and more calls and deadlines and work on the Kirby book. I know there have been a lot of postings here but I'll give away a trade secret here and admit that many of them were pre-written and tossed up here to relieve the guilt I feel when I log in and see I haven't updated lately. But a couple of posts were fresh, and there should have been one more about the late Peter Ellenshaw, who passed away on Tuesday. A few years ago, I attended a great evening at the Academy where Mr. Ellenshaw discussed his work and clips were shown. It was stunning. I don't think I'd even begun to appreciate his artistry before that because I hadn't realized the extent of what he did.
Mr. Ellenshaw specialized in matte paintings...paintings that are incorporated into the visuals of a movie, adding details that do not exist in real life. He did it so well that often, you weren't aware that the beautiful image on your screen was primarily an Ellenshaw matte painting. Truly amazing.
So I should have written something earlier. But I couldn't have written anything better than this post, which appeared over at Jim Hill Media.
If in a room of comic strip historians, you proclaimed that Walt Kelly's Pogo was the best newspaper comic of all time, no one would call the sanitarium to come cart you away. Not everyone would agree, of course. Some would argue that Pogo was the second best or the third...but few would place it outside the Top Ten and no one would think you'd lost your taste or marbles. Mr. Kelly was a genius not only at drawing wonderful, mesmerizing critters but at putting them in fascinating situations and filling their word balloons with plain, old-fashioned brilliance. The "We have met the enemy..." line is his most quoted but he was that good, that sharp almost every week...for around 9,687 strips, daily and Sunday.
(Don't take those numbers as exact. For one thing, I did the math and mine is always a bit questionable. For another, I used the dates that the original Pogo strip ran and Kelly didn't do the last few years, owing to his having passed away.)
If you want a precise count, here's what you'll have to do. Fantagraphics Books, the folks who bring you those superb Peanuts reprints, are soon to bring you Pogo with the same loving care and format. Buy the books — there'll be twelve (or so) volumes in hardcover in the coming years — and when they get to the end, count up the strips. It'll be somewhere over 9,000 and they'll all be jes' wonderful with the presentation they deserve. Walt's daughter Carolyn is keeping an eye on everything and protecting the family jewels.
Here's the official announcement. Above is the not-final cover for the first one, expertly art-directed by Jeff "Bone" Smith. We are all quite happy about this.
It's a little more than two weeks until WonderCon convenes in San Francisco. Wondercon is run by the same folks who run the mammoth Comic-Con International in San Diego but WonderCon is a normal-sized convention. Which is not to say it won't seem crowded, especially on Saturday. But there's plenty to do, plenty to see, plenty to buy, etc., in an environment that won't overwhelm you the way San Diego does. I've been to a lot of these and always had a good time.
I'm a Special Guest Person (or whatever they call us) and unlike last year, when I found myself unexpectedly in a hospital bed when I should have been at Wondercon, I plan to actually be there. I'll be doing what I tend to do at these things...moderating panels. You can come and hear me interview great comic book artists like Nick Cardy and Gene Colan. You can come hear me chatting with Al Feldstein, the man who gave us Tales from the Crypt and other EC Comics, plus he was the editor of Mad Magazine for a few centuries. I'll be doing a panel with Sergio Aragonés, and then we have a panel with Sergio and Al discussing their days together at Mad. I'll also be...well, here. Let me just link you to my schedule. This page tells you about the events I'll be hosting.
And if for some inexplicable reason, you might be inclined to go to some of the programming I'm not hosting, this page lists the whole schedule. (Okay, I'll grudgingly admit: There are a few events on there not involving me that do look rather enjoyable.)
After he stopped making wonderful theatrical cartoons, director Tex Avery made funny animated commercials for a while. This is one of a long series he did for Raid, house and garden bug killer. Raid hunts bugs down like radar and kills them dead. And what's more, Raid won't oil-stain draperies or furniture. Not only that but outdoors, Raid won't harm plants. Isn't it wonderful?
The voice of the smaller bug is Mel Blanc, the voice of the larger bug is Paul Frees, and I'm guessing it took them a long time to record this spot. Maybe three minutes. I believe the announcer is William Schallert, who somehow managed to be on every TV show made in the sixties at one time or another. I don't know why they didn't just have Paul or Mel do all three parts but I guess they had a little cash to throw around on these. When I worked with Tex years later, he told me he made three times as much money doing a 30 second spot like this as he had for directing all seven minutes of Little Rural Riding Hood or Bad Luck Blackie or any of those great cartoons.
One of the more interesting gambles when you go to Las Vegas occurs not in the casino but at the hotel check-in desk. Not everyone knows about this and not everyone tries it but those who try it think it's a better wager than doubling-down on 11 when the dealer's showing a six.
When checking in, you have a twenty dollar bill at the ready. You let the desk clerk see it and you say, with a casual manner and an air of nonchalance, "Uh, any complimentary upgrades available?" Translation: "If I give you this twenty, will you give me a better room for the same price?"
There are, of course, variations. Some flash more than twenty. Some try to get by with less. Many think the way it works — or works best — is to fork over the gratuity and then ask. If you do this and the answer is "no," the clerk may or may not feel it's sporting to return the cash, which is where the real gamble occurs. If you don't fork it over regardless, then the gamble is that you'll be embarrassed and perhaps feel like a hick tourist with no juice. In Vegas, it's okay to lose your money but you don't want to lose the illusion that you're important.
Does it get results? Sometimes. Conventional wisdom is that it's more likely to work with male clerks than female — I have no idea why — and that your best chance is when you check in late in the day because that's when they have a good idea as to how many rooms may go vacant that night and what class of rooms. Also, of course, if you're there on a crowded weekend or during a big convention, you may feel privileged just to get the room you booked, never mind any improvement.
My own experiences suggest that it will often yield better accommodations if (a) the town is not jammed and (b) the clerk seems friendly and in a chatty mood. It also helps to bring it up before he goes through the whole procedure of assigning you that crummy room next to the glopeta-glopeta ice machine that you'd rather not have if you can help it. And it doesn't hurt to act like you're used to getting upgrades this way and that you're kind of a regular visitor to the hotel...you know, the kind of guy who might be about to go drop a couple thou at a craps table.
If you want to know more about this form of institutionalized bribery, there's a website that's wholly devoted to how and where it's succeeded and how often. I don't know how much stock to put in the reports there but I know that like everything else in that town, the $20 Bill Trick pays off...sometimes. What I've never been able to find out — and now that I'm admitting it here, I'm sure someone will write and tell me — is how the hotels feel about it and if the employee keeps all or part of the money. Management knows this goes on and I can't imagine why they'd let the guy behind the front desk make all that extra cash.
Among the perks of having a weblog is that if people keep asking you the same question over and over, you can answer it on your weblog and thereafter tell them, "Oh, I addressed that matter on my blog. Just go do a search for it." This is why over the next week or three or nine, I will be serializing the story of how the cartoon character of Scrappy Doo came to be, and what all I had to do with the birthing process.
People ask me if I knew at the time I was contributing to the creation of a such a hated thing as Scrappy Doo. No, I didn't and no, I still don't. I am aware that there are some folks out there who, given the choice of seeing the execution of Osama bin Laden or Scrappy Doo, would opt for Scrappy and wonder why you even had to ask. Such people are, I believe, a fairly recent faction, and I don't think they're as widespread as their noise level would indicate. I recall Scrappy being wildly popular the first few years he was on the scene. He certainly bolstered Scooby's ratings and kept the series on a good 2-3 years longer than it would have lasted without him.
Scrappy debuted on the Scooby Doo program in 1979 as a "new element." Scooby had been on the air for some time by then and the narrow formula of the series had become repetitive to the point where ABC was considering cancellation. One of the very real concerns was whether the writers could come up with the thirteen requisite ghost premises to do another thirteen episodes. Let me tell you how you sold a script to the Scooby Doo series in those days.
You'd go to the producer or the story editor and say something like, "How about a ghost who's an aardvark and he's been haunting ant farms?"
The producer or story editor would consult a list of all the episodes produced to date, and there was about a 95% chance he'd look up from it and say, "Did it in Season Four" or whatever season it had been in. Sometimes, they'd say, "Did it in Seasons Two, Four, Five and I have one in the works right now, same idea." But if you lucked into something in the 5% category, you had an assignment...even if you didn't have a clue who the aardvark would be when he took off his mask or why he was haunting ant farms. Didn't matter. You or someone else could figure that stuff out later. You'd done the hard part.
In setting the schedule for that year, it had come down to a decision between renewing Scooby or picking up a new series — the pilot script for which I'd written — from another studio. Joe Barbera called me in and said, approximately, "If this doesn't work, Scooby's dead. We have this new character that I came up with..." And he showed me sketches of Scrappy Doo, explaining that this was Scooby's nephew. We would add him to the show and this would make things just "fresh" enough, while still keeping the winning Scooby formula intact, that ABC would order thirteen more episodes. And thirteen more for the season after that, and then there would be the season after that...
I was not then on staff at Hanna-Barbera. Quite a few writers were and most of them had taken a shot in the previous months at writing scenes or an entire episode to establish Scrappy. The folks at network liked very little of what they'd done and were not about to green-light Scooby for another year; not without a finished teleplay that would show how Scrappy functioned, how he talked, where the comedy in the show would be with him around, etc. J.B. wanted me to write that episode. Even though it was competing with that other pilot I'd written, I said I'd do it. It was always very difficult to say no to Mr. Barbera.
The next thing that occurred was an unusually ugly negotiation between my agent and the gent in charge of Business Affairs for Hanna-Barbera. The latter took the position that this was not a pilot; that it was just another episode of Scooby Doo, so it should pay the same mediocre fee as all other episodes. My agent took the position that this was a pilot because (a) it was introducing a new character and something of a new format and (b) the network would or would not order episodes based on my script. I would also be going through several weeks of network meetings and extra rewrites, something that did not usually transpire on your average episode. Therefore, he concluded, it was a pilot and better pay was appropriate. The Biz Guy said no. My agent said, "In that case, Mark isn't doing it."
The Biz Guy said fine, Mark isn't doing it...or anything else for the studio, ever again. This was followed by the sound effect of the phone being slammed down. Then the Business Affairs guy called me at home and informed me that my days of writing for Hanna-Barbera were over. In fact, I should not bother trying to set foot in the studio again as I would be turned away. I pointed out to him that Scooby or no Scooby, I was still the editor of their comic book division. He said, "We'll see about that" and hung up.
Sure enough, I was banned from the studio for a good eighteen minutes, which is how long it was before Mr. Barbera phoned. He instructed me to — and I will clean up his language here a tad — "pay no attention to that damn idiot in Business Affairs." Before the sun set that evening, I had a deal to write the script that would introduce Scrappy Doo. The pay was sufficient (barely, of course) and there would be a small bonus if the show was picked up. The next day, I was to meet Mr. B. at the Villa Capri restaurant in Hollywood so we could brainstorm ideas over lunch.
This concludes Part One of The Birth of Scrappy Doo. Stay tuned to this weblog for the next exciting chapter, one of these days. Whenever I get around to it. Maybe in the next week or so.
Eric Boehlert on the non-scandal, based on nothing, where Republicans stopped talking about the War in Iraq and Global Warming and Terrorism and instead decided the big issue was Nancy Pelosi requesting luxury air travel, which she did not do. One fears that as long as Democrats have any power at all, even as little as they now possess, we're going to be in for stuff like this.
We have here the trailer for The Beach Girls and the Monster, a 1965 movie that was shot in about six days for less than what some producers now spend for six minutes of filming. It was originally released as Monster From The Surf but I guess that title didn't make it clear that there were girls in bikinis in it. Since that was about the only thing the film had to offer, it's probably wise that they renamed it.
The trailer is entertaining enough just from the sheer campiness but there are a number of things about this film that will interest the kind of person who visits this site. One is the narration, which was done by Art Gilmore, who did voiceovers for something like two-thirds of all the movie trailers made in Hollywood in the sixties. Doesn't he sound way too enthusiastic to be selling us what is probably the worst movie he ever had to sell us? Moviegoers of that era learned, or should have learned, that the more excited Art Gilmore was, the likelier the film was to suck Raisinets. He's almost giddy about this one.
Secondly: You see those two cops on the beach? Well, I think the one on the left is Clyde Adler, who was the foil for Soupy Sales then and the voice of White Fang and Black Tooth and Pookie and all those guys at the door. He doesn't cream anyone with a pie but I think that's Clyde.
Thirdly: Another great local kids show host of the sixties and a fine actor and cartoon voice person is Walker Edmiston. Walker is one of those guys who was on every damn TV show of the fifties, sixties and seventies at one time or another, and when he wasn't on screen, he was often dubbing the voices of actors who were. I worked with him on some of the Sid and Marty Krofft shows and he's a wonderful, wonderful man. In the fifties and sixties, he hosted brilliant shows in Los Angeles with his puppets, one of which was Kingsley the Lion. You don't really see Walker in the trailer but he had a large, particularly embarrassing role in the movie and even wrote its title song from when it was called Monster in the Surf. You do see a few moments of Kingsley singing that tune...to the lion's eternal shame.
And lastly, I have a story about this picture...not a happy one, I'm afraid. It was directed by a man named Jon Hall, who also starred in it. Mr. Hall was once a film star of some magnitude but by the time he made this, he was really touching bottom. In fact, I think it was the last thing he did. (He took his own life in 1979.)
Around 1971, Hall was broke and owed Uncle Sam a lot more money in back taxes than he would ever be able to pay. It became the sad duty of one Internal Revenue Agent to try and work out some sort of settlement deal. The agent kept negotiating payment plans that would let Hall off the hook for much of the debt but the way the I.R.S. worked (and probably still does), the agent then had to get his superiors to bless any settlement...and in this case, they wouldn't. They kept sending the agent back to demand more payment from Hall and it eventually came down to a complete seizure of Mr. Hall's assets, including the negative and all his rights to The Beach Girls and the Monster.
How do I know this? Because the I.R.S. agent was a man named Bernard Evanier. My father.
As I've explained elsewhere, my father hated his job and one of the reasons he hated it was cases like this one. He'd work out a payment plan to let Hall off by paying ten cents on the dollar over an extended period, which seemed reasonable given the man's financial condition. Then he'd go to his bosses for their approval and they'd say, "No, get more out of him and get it now." These were the same bosses who were then completely tearing up the tax bills of very wealthy, solvent men who were friends of President Richard M. Nixon.
It was a great deal for those friends. If you'd given $50,000 to Nixon's re-election campaign, you could get out of two million dollars or more of delinquent taxes. A few months ago when I met John W. Dean, I thanked him for his role in exposing these shenanigans. My father, by the way, did not even like the whole idea of taxes but he felt that if we had to have them, a guy making $20 million a year should at least pay as much as a divorced mother with a large family to feed.
I'm a little fuzzy on how the Jon Hall case was finally resolved but I know that Mr. Hall finally got off the hook with the Revenuers. He even called my father — who was retired by then — and thanked him for being compassionate and understanding about it, which would not surprise anyone who knew my father. I'm pretty sure the I.R.S. auctioned off the rights Hall had in The Beach Girls and the Monster but I don't know what they got for them. If it was more than twenty bucks, someone overpaid. Watch the trailer and you'll see why.
This came out last December but I just now saw it. It's a short but pretty accurate profile of my occasional employer, Sid Krofft, and an announcement about his latest project. The quote from his brother Marty in the next to last paragraph is a great description of Sid.
This website has some pictures of the new venture before it opened. And this site has a report on opening night.
So I've been thinking of getting one of those cellular cards for your laptop that will allow you to access the Internet from everywhere, even when you're nowhere near a T-Mobile Hot Spot. I asked here about them.
I was still thinking about it when I came across an interesting news item. According to this piece in today's L.A. Times, "Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa today pledged to blanket all of Los Angeles with free or very cheap wireless Internet service by 2009." Hmm...maybe I oughta wait and...
Hold on! What am I thinking? What that means is we might (might!) have something that will sorta, kinda work but not well by 2113. Forget I said anything.
And this won't matter to most of you but could they have made a bigger mess of Santa Monica Boulevard between around Wilshire and the 405? I go there now and I feel like I'm driving through a friggin' M.C. Escher print with little roads off to the side that lead to larger but still little roads that you have to get onto and get off of to go anywhere there, except that getting off them means merging back into the big road at points where no one will ever let you in...
Hope they're not putting the guy who designed that in charge of the city-wide Wi-Fi Service. If you think getting on a wireless network is difficult, go down to Santa Monica Blvd. and Ensley and try to get to Johnnie's Pizzeria. That's difficult.
Fred Kaplan explains the agreement that the Bush administration just made with North Korea to roll back its nuclear capability. Rough summary: After years of decrying the pact that Bill Clinton and his representatives negotiated, the Bush folks finally went out and made the same deal.
Judging from that most accurate barometer of the American mood — my e-mail — I'm not the only fan of the obscure comedy team of Olsen and Johnson. Many of you are hankering for their movies to become more legally available on DVD in this country and many of you possess and enjoy bootlegs or imports. Some of you have region-free DVD players and so have ordered the new British release of Hellzapoppin', the cover of which is seen above left. A few of you even own the local, obscure VHS release depicted next to it.
As Joe Dante and others have reminded me, some of their films have more complicated legal situations than the norm because they were based, as least nominally, on their Broadway shows. Often, when studios acquired the underlying rights in the days before TV exhibition, the contracts were for limited periods that expired. That was the thing that kept the Marx Brothers movie, Animal Crackers, unavailable for years. It was based on a play and Paramount had only purchased the rights to the play — or maybe it was to the songs in the play — for a few decades, not in perpetuity. A whole new deal had to be worked out to liberate the film from the estates and the lawyers, which meant that someone had to think there was enough of a demand to make it worth the expense.
In the case of Hellzapoppin', there seems to have been an added complication because of the 1977 stage revival. The legendary producer Alexander Cohen thought Broadway would welcome a new version and purchased the rights to mount one, even though just about all he was purchasing was the title. He then signed the legendary Jerry Lewis to star in it and the result was one of the legendary troubled productions that toured but never made it to the Great White Way. (A "troubled production" is hard to define but when the producer and star are making daily death threats towards one another, you have one.) Anyway, the deal Cohen made apparently kept the film off American TV for some time.
But such details are renegotiated all the time, especially now when there's a buck to be made on home video. Someone's made a deal to put some of the Olsen-Johnson body o' work out in some forms and venues. They can and probably will make one to put out DVDs in the Land of the Free here. One of these days.
I'll link to anything with the great voice actor Daws Butler in it. He was such a wonderful performer and such a wonderful man. I used to have a little late night ritual for whenever I was sitting here at the computer, trying to break away from work and go beddy-bye. This was only for the nights when no lady would be joining me. I'd begin flipping around the TV dial and the rule was that I wouldn't turn in until I'd heard Daws.
I started doing it a few years after he passed away, which was in 1988. At one point, there were three channels that programmed old cartoons, mostly Hanna-Barbera, for much of the night so it rarely took long. I'd catch him playing Huckleberry Hound or Quick Draw McGraw or Elroy Jetson or Mr. Jinks...or sometimes, it would be a Jay Ward cartoon or even something older — from MGM or Warner Brothers. After I heard him for a minute or two, I'd say, "Good night, Daws" and turn off the TV and leave my office and go to sleep.
I couldn't do that when I had a date over. She'd think it was just too weird. I don't know why I'm telling you this. You probably think it's just too weird. But there was something so comforting about his sound. It always reminded me of a good time (when I was a kid watching cartoons and listening to the records he did with Stan Freberg) and a good friend (later, when I got to know him).
This is a commercial in which he plays Snagglepuss. The other voice in there is from his frequent co-star, June Foray, who reminds me of the same two things but is still happily with us.
Daws actually gets a screen credit at the end of these Cocoa Krispies ads...the result of a legal action that Bert Lahr took or perhaps just threatened. Snagglepuss didn't actually sound that much like Lahr. It was one of Daws's many "inspired" voices, meaning that the voice was inspired by a celeb but was not an actual impersonation. Hokey Wolf didn't sound like Phil Silvers. Hokey sounded like what people think Phil Silvers sounded like. Same with Yogi Bear and Art Carney or Peter Potamus and Joe E. Brown or many others. Anyway, some folks apparently thought it was Bert Lahr doing these commercials or Mr. Lahr was afraid they would, so he called a lawyer. I don't know if he got money but Daws got a credit. It was kind of a reverse disclaimer — a way of proclaiming, at least to those who could read fast, that it was not Bert Lahr.
I knew it was not Bert Lahr when I was ten but I guess they had to do that for the grown-ups who didn't know about important stuff...like who was the voice of Snagglepuss. Anyway, here's Snag selling the cereal that then had him on the box. And now that I've heard that voice, I can exit stage left and go to bed. Good night, Daws.
I'm getting e-mails from bird lovers and experts responding to my message of earlier this morning about how the crows in my neighborhood are getting frighteningly large. Several folks want to know if maybe these are ravens, instead.
No, they are crows. Huge crows. Crows of awesome, worrisome height and girth. Crows that if they get much larger will be able to grab up a full-sized man in their beaks and snap him in two like a Rold-Gold pretzel stick. Crows that could crush the roof of your car if they were to merely alight on it. I don't even want to think about what might happen if you parked under a crow that big. One good dump and they'd have to send in St. Bernards to find you.
And every time I see the crows, they're bigger than they were the last time I saw them. Soon, they will be the size of Graf Zeppelins and then, by God, maybe you people will listen to me.
I am not a paranoid person. I don't spend much time worrying about natural disasters or the economy or terrorism or even the adminstration of George W. Bush, who's making all those things worse by the moment. I rarely imagine doom lies ahead. Just look at some of the jobs I've taken voluntarily when a more apprehensive man might have imagined what could happen.
But I tell you: I'm deeply, deeply worried about the crows. And also by the fact that people love Dancing With the Stars. Somehow, that threatens our well-being, too.
This will probably be all over the Internet by morning but here's where you can see it at the moment. Last December in a sky-diving session over New Zealand, 24-year-old Michael Holmes plunged two miles when his chute failed...but landed in a blueberry patch with only an injured ankle. There are two videos of this incredible occurrence — one shot from Holmes's helmet camera and one from the helmet cam of another diver who was jumping with Holmes and who wound up finding him on the ground.
Here's the link to see the two videos, one after the other. You may have to click the little button to turn the audio on. The videos are scary, they're amazing and — maybe this is an awful thing to say — my first reaction, until I realized how many news organizations have vetted the story — was to suspect fakery. Let's say I'm assuming it's all true but would not be shocked to find out otherwise.
Great minds think alike and so do Jerry Beck's and mine. Last Saturday, I wrote this item recalling a great cartoon special that Bill "Jose Jiminez" Dana wrote and appeared in. Right after I'd posted it but before he'd seen it, Jerry phoned to get some info for a posting he was readying for his fine blog, Cartoon Brew, about another Jose Jiminez cartoon. An odd synchronicity.
Jerry's post is now up on his blog (which has a spiffy new design, by the way) and it includes a link to a video of a 1966 Jose cartoon made but barely released by the Paramount cartoon studio in its dying throes. As I've mentioned in the past here several times, I'm a big fan of Mr. Dana's but it's easy to see why this short didn't prompt a demand for more.
Still, you might wind it worth a peek...and as I mentioned, Dana's big collaboration with Hanna-Barbera — Alice in Wonderland or What's a Nice Kid Like You Doing in a Place Like This? — runs on Boomerang later this month. So I think Jerry's right to hail Jose Jiminez as a Forgotten Cartoon Legend. He's also a Forgotten Legend of the Space Program. You almost never hear him mentioned when they talk about the great astronauts.
I'm up at an ungodly hour, concluding a lonnnnng day of working on the Jack Kirby book I announced back here. Before I hit the linens, I wanted to put out a public appeal. We're looking for interesting and special Kirby art to include in the book. This may be the nicest reproduction of Jack's work we'll ever see and I'd like to feature some pieces that especially deserve that treatment. Several collectors are loaning me originals — and even unframing framed pieces so they can be scanned at a high resolution.
I'm most interested in pieces that are either historic or early. I have access to hundreds of...well, I wouldn't say "common" since nothing Jack drew was "common." But pages that were common for Jack from the mid-sixties onward. But I'd like to locate the original art to some early pieces and especially to things that weren't done for Marvel, or were done for DC in the forties or fifties. I'm also trying to find intricate pencil pieces and one or two really spectacular pages from the Fourth World material. Art does not have to leave your hands if you can get it to a place that does high-rez scans, and we'll pay for expenses incurred and give proper thanks and such.
Please drop me a line if you have something you think oughta be in this book and you're willing to share it with the Kirby fans of the world. (If this explanation seems a little vague, it's probably because I am at the moment. Good time to go to bed. Good night.)
A lady named Alicia wrote to ask if I still have little furry creatures coming to my back door in search of a meal. Yes, I do. In fact, about two hours ago, the above fella (gal?) came around to nibble on the Friskies buffet. I put a dish or two out every evening. When they're empty before dawn, it usually means at least one and maybe several raccoons have wandered by. You can also tell that there have been raccoons because they not only clean the plate, they fling it around the yard, overturn the water dish and leave wet raccoon prints behind. The cat and possums, on the other hand, just eat a few mouthfuls and leave.
I also throw peanuts out every morning for the squirrels and bluebirds. You can see a few they didn't claim in the above photo, also. I suspect the reason the peanuts don't get eaten is that some mornings, my back yard is patrolled by crows the size of SUVs and while they peck at everything on the ground, they don't seem to like peanuts. In fact, the way they avoid them, you'd think they're afraid of anaphylactic shock or something.
And hey, what is it with these huge crows, people? Is this a symptom of Global Warming that Al Gore didn't warn us about? I don't recall the crows of my childhood being this large. Two more years of growth and they'll be carrying off dogs and small children. I'll try to get some photos of them one of these days but take my word for it. These are big damn crows. Since I got skinnier, I'm starting to get worried. The birds in your yard should not weigh more than you do.
Not long ago — in this item — we linked to the opening minutes of the Olsen and Johnson comedy, Hellzapoppin', which is not widely available in the U.S. these days. Today, we have three or so minutes from another film they made, Crazy House, which is an even weirder movie. I don't know why someone hasn't released these in this country on DVD since, with a little drumbeat, they'd probably do quite well. Hellzapoppin' is out on DVD in other nations, including what I hear is a lovely new edition in England. So what's the deal? Is our money not good? Are they all pissed at us over Gitmo?
Crazy House actually came out in America on VHS some years ago...but even though I would have snatched it up if I'd known about it, I didn't. Never saw an ad, never saw it in stores, nothing. General rule of thumb: If there's a weird comedy movie out on home video and I don't know about it, the releasing company has done their best to keep it a secret. I'd hate to think someone is looking at the sales of that, ignoring the non-existent promotional campaign and saying, "Guess there's no interest in Olsen and Johnson movies in America." Of course there isn't...just as there'd be no interest in Three Stooges films if they'd been kept that well-hidden. (Wait'll you see the Stooges DVD sets that are in the works. The complete works of Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein will never get such loving treatment. Of course, he wasn't as funny as Curly.)
Matter of fact, one of the ways the big studios could make better use of the Internet and services like YouTube is to circulate teaser clips like the one we're offering you today. I bet that if there was a link at the end of this where you could click and order the whole DVD from Amazon for a reasonable price, a lot of you would click. The film only gets sillier after this excerpt.
So here it is...and yes, speaking of the Stooges, that is indeed Shemp Howard trying to sell Olsen and Johnson everything that isn't nailed down and being persistent about it. The folks at Universal's home video company could learn a thing from that man.
Retired General William E. Odom offers about as pessimistic an assessment of the Iraq situation as you're going to find. Pay special attention to this paragraph in which he addresses the argument, "We must continue the war to prevent the terrible aftermath that will occur if our forces are withdrawn soon."
Reflect on the double-think of this formulation. We are now fighting to prevent what our invasion made inevitable! Undoubtedly we will leave a mess — the mess we created, which has become worse each year we have remained. Lawmakers gravely proclaim their opposition to the war, but in the next breath express fear that quitting it will leave a blood bath, a civil war, a terrorist haven, a "failed state," or some other horror. But this "aftermath" is already upon us; a prolonged U.S. occupation cannot prevent what already exists.
This is the Bush administration. They create a situation where no course of action will make things better, then lambaste their opponents for not putting forth a plan that will solve matters. Odom's piece, by the way, is entitled "Victory Is Not an Option."
Regarding the Chaz Chase short that was this morning's video link: Jerry Beck confirms my hunch that the musical track on it is not an original from 1928. For one thing, "Merrily We Roll Along" wasn't written until 1934 or thereabouts, and "The Merry-Go-Round Broke Down" wasn't written until 1937. Jerry sez the track on the Chase short we watched was lifted from a 1946 short, and he knows this stuff.
But that was basically Chaz Chase's act: He came out and ate things, including his own clothes. In his full act as I remember seeing it, he ate a whole pack of lit cigarettes and matches, then belched smoke for about five minutes. I have no idea how he did this.
I remember that Johnny Carson had him on at least once and a quick search of the incomplete database of Carson guests shows that Chaz Chase was on The Tonight Show on May 17, 1974. The other guests that night were Vincent Price, Bert Convy and Joan Rivers. I recall Mr. Carson being quite thrilled to have him on and making some remarks about how even Chaz wouldn't eat at the NBC Commissary.
Christopher Cook informs me that the show I asked about — Hanna-Barbera's Alice In Wonderland (or What's A Nice Kid Like You Doing In A Place Like This?) — will be on Boomerang on Sunday afternoon, February 25. I'll try and remind you when we get closer to the date in case you want to watch it, too. I haven't seen it since it first aired in 1966 but I remember thinking it was pretty good. It'll be interesting to see if I still think that because I don't with everything I liked back then.
Time for another unusual vaudeville act. This is Chaz Chase in a film from 1928 with what may be the original soundtrack. It sounds too clean to be the original but this was an early "talkie" and its soundtrack was recently restored. If it's the real thing, it's especially intresting because both songs that were later used as the themes for Warner Brothers cartoons — "The Merry-Go-Round Broke Down" and "Merrily We Roll Along" — turn up in it, one right after the other.
Mr. Chase did this act his entire life, right up until he died in 1983. A year before, he had been performing it on Broadway in the musical revue, Sugar Babies. He first did it on Broadway in The Ziegfeld Follies of 1925. The act did not change much over the years.
So what's unusual about Chaz Chase's act? You'll see. This runs four minutes.
This message will probably only be of interest to you if your cable company or satellite dish brings you Boomerang, which is the channel on which the Cartoon Network people stick anything that's more than about five years old. The schedule includes lots of vintage Warner Brothers cartoons and early Hanna-Barbera shows...or as they call them on Amazon, "Joseph Barbera Masterpieces." There are also occasionally shows that you wouldn't expect to see turn up there, like they're currently running episodes of Batfink. I'll bet a lot of people who read this site — one of whom was the voice of Batfink — would like to see more Batfink episodes.
Lately, Boomerang has been running one of the "lost treasures" of early Hanna-Barbera...Loopy De Loop cartoons. I put "lost treasures" in quotes for two reasons. One was that they were never really lost. They were just never easy to see in the first place. They were cartoons that the studio made wholly for theatrical exhibition...with the same artists and writers and voice folks (Daws Butler was Loopy) and on production budgets that may have been a dollar or two higher than an equivalent TV cartoon. But they were shown in movie houses so I've rarely seen them. I didn't even see them when I was a kid and avidly devouring everything Hanna-Barbera put out. There were 47 or 49 Loopy De Loop cartoons, depending on which source one believes, and they were produced between 1959 and 1965. I've caught maybe a dozen of them, if that many.
And the other reason I put "lost treasures" in quotes is for the "treasures" part. They aren't wonderful cartoons. I don't even think they're up to the standards of the concurrent H-B shows like Quick Draw McGraw or Yogi Bear. Loopy is just not an interesting or funny character.
Still, it's fun to see something from that period you haven't seen before...and you can now see them occasionally on Boomerang, which may be the only place you'll see them for quite some time. Warner Home Video is still balking at putting out the second DVD volume of Huckleberry Hound and they're dragging their feet (or hooves, I guess) on Quick Draw McGraw. There probably isn't a lot of enthusiasm in the place for The Complete Loopy De Loop. So if you care about such things, catch them on Boomerang while you can. They pop up in shows that consist of early H-B shorts, especially Huckleberry Hound. (One is scheduled for tomorrow's episode of Huckleberry Hound.)
Also, I'm on the lookout for maybe the only other early Hanna-Barbera goodie I'd like to see again and have on a DVD. It's the 1966 prime-time special, Alice in Wonderland (or What's A Nice Kid Like You Doing In A Place Like This?) It was written by Bill Dana (who also appears as Jose Jiminez) and has music by Lee Adams and Charles Strouse, who wrote some pretty good scores for musicals like Bye Bye Birdie. The voice cast includes Janet Waldo as Alice, most of the other H-B regulars (Daws, Don, Mel, Alan Reed, Howie Morris, etc.) with Sammy Davis Jr. as the Cheshire Cat and Zsa Zsa Gabor as the Queen of Hearts. This was before Zsa Zsa's husband got Anna Nicole Smith pregnant.
I'm told Boomerang runs it every so often but if so, I've managed to miss it. If anyone hears it's going to be on, let me know so I can let everyone else know. Thanks.
Barack Obama announced today he will seek the Democratic nomination for the presidency. Which group do you think now has the larger number? People running for the 2008 presidency or people claiming to have fathered Anna Nicole Smith's child?
I have no idea if Barack Obama would be my top choice for the office...and you know what? I don't have to decide that now. No one does. The primaries are a long way off and the world will change in many ways between now and then. The issues that concern us most will be different. More candidates will enter the race. Some who are in will embarrass themselves in different ways and get out. We can just about count on at least one sizzling revelation that will totally change everyone's view of a candidate.
To give you an idea of how things can and will change just in regard to the Democratic nomination, consider this. Today is 563 days until the nominee of that party will be voted upon at a convention in Denver.
Now, go read this old post that I had up here, only 232 days before the 2004 candidate was formally selected. And I was only repeating what all the polls and pundits were saying then.
High among the portions of this website that have received the most hits and "thank you" messages are my articles on what I call Unfinanced Entrepreneurs. Put simply, these are people who try to hire writers and artists to work, not for money, but for vague and shifting promises of money somewhere down the line if and when the project is successful. It has been my observation (and, sadly, experience) that few of those projects are ever successful and that even when they are, the promises are rarely honored.
There is no creative person alive who can't tell you a dozen stories of how they got screwed over by accepting such propositions. Still, most of us fall for them now and then, and of course it's the newest people who fall the hardest. Last month, I was contacted by a friend whose son is an aspiring comic book artist. The son is so eager/desperate (pick one) to get into comics that when an established writer of some success offered him the chance to illustrate a 64-page graphic novel "on spec," the son leaped at the opportunity and quit his real job, which paid him actual money. From there on, it's a long, ugly story so I'll cut to where it stands now: The kid spent six months drawing the graphic novel. The writer has the pages, will probably never do anything with them and will not return phone calls or e-mails. Except maybe as a practice exercise, the experience could not have been more of a waste for the young artist. His work will not be published. There will be no payment. He doesn't even have the original artwork to sell or show around as a sample.
This kind of thing happens way too often so we have to keep reminding each other. To that end, one group is doing something about it and about one party in particular.
Gail Simone, a fine writer who believes she was victimized by this party, is one of the key organizers. Also involved are Scott Shaw! and Sarah Beach and several others. They have a website with the glorious, apt name of Unscrewed. It's apt because they're out to turn their negative experiences into positive ones, not only righting some of the wrongs of their shafting but creating a bit of empowerment for creative folks who encounter swindlers. There's a forum over there and details on an anthology they're assembling to raise funds and I'm all for it. We'll never stop this kind of abuse but we can sure make creators less likely to fall for the malarkey.
Amazon-dot-com and the TiVo people have teamed up for a new joint venture. Basically, the way it'll work is that you'll be able to go to Amazon and pick out a movie or a recently-aired TV show, pay a fee and have it delivered via the Internet to your TiVo. This all assumes you own a TiVo (series 2 or 3) and have it hooked up to the Internet, of course. This page over at the TiVo site will tell you more about how it'll work. And this page over on Amazon will show you some offerings you'll be able to download and what they'll cost you.
What do we think of this? We think it's interesting and inevitable. We also think it's going to be the subject of at least one of the nastiest labor negotiations — and probably, strikes — that Hollywood has ever seen. The Writers Guild wants a piece of digital delivery. The Screen Actors Guild wants a piece. And even the Directors Guild — that wouldn't strike if the studios made directors all wear frog costumes and hop around the set — is talking labor stoppage. (If the DGA stays true to history, they won't strike. What they'll do is make some sort of deal which, by its very construction, creates a payment system that works for directors but doesn't work for writers or actors. The studios will agree to it and then try to force it on the other two unions as a precedent.)
On a more trivial level, we're probably bothered more than we should be by them ballyhooing that you can "Download a Joseph Barbera masterpiece." Here's the sales copy that's presently on the page...
Pioneer animator Joseph Barbera of Hanna-Barbera Productions has died at 95, but his Oscar and Emmy-winning toons are immortal. His partner Bill Hanna had a director's eye, but Barbera was the superior artist and gag man. Unbox presents the world download premiere of the Hanna-Barbera classics The Yogi Bear Show, Huckleberry Hound, Jonny Quest, and The Perils of Penelope Pitstop. And making their Unbox debut: The Flintstones, The Jetsons, and Scooby-Doo.
What's wrong with this? Well, for one thing, there's a certain cash-in-on-the-dead sleaziness, plus the questionable premise that Barbera was a better artist than Hanna. One of the reasons their partnership lasted so long is that they never tolerated that kind of talk. They did sometimes act like the two of them made all those cartoons with minimal assists from others, and you'd think we'd be past that by now. I mean, Joe B. never wrote or drew some of those shows. He was the producer and so, fully his equal, was Hanna. How'd those shows get to be "Joseph Barbera masterpieces?" (I've got ten bucks that says Joe never even saw some episodes of Scooby-Doo or Penelope Pitstop...)
There's also an ad that pops up on the page from time to time that says you can "Download an Iwao Takamoto Masterpiece." Iwao died recently, too.
Another great act of the past! It's Johnny Puleo and the Harmonica Rascals. I used to see these guys on all the variety shows of the fifties and I never quite understood what they were doing...but the music was pleasant enough and the act was silly, so that was reason enough to watch.
The history, as I understand it, is that there was an act called Borrah Minevitch and His Harmonica Rascals, and that Puleo was one of the many musicians auditioned and hired over the years by Mr. Minevitch. In the late forties when Minevitch retired, he handed the act over to the diminutive Puleo. At some point, there was a trademark dispute over the name and the group became The Harmonica Gang. Ed Sullivan especially liked them and was known to call them in at the last moment if he thought the show that week needed their kind of energy.
Puleo retired in the late sixties and the group disbanded. He made a brief cameo appearance in an episode of SCTV in 1982, a year before he passed away. Here he is with his troupe on a Milton Berle telecast of the early fifties...
You may recall that we groused about how, after releasing all the seasons of M*A*S*H as individual DVD sets, the folks at Fox Home Video were creating a maddening situation for devout fans of that series. Concurrent with the last release, they also issued the Martinis and Medicine Collection, which included all eleven seasons plus three discs worth of bonus material. So if you'd already shelled out serious cash for the first ten seasons — and if as a die-hard lover of M*A*S*H, you wanted everything — you had to buy a set that mostly included copies of shows you'd already purchased...and at a higher per-disc price. This is all part of the "Make You Buy It Twice" mindset that pervades too much marketing of DVDs these days...and also comic books, non-comic books and other types of entertainment that have loyal followings.
We were ticked off about that. Now we see that Fox is putting out the bonus materials as a standalone set so you can get it without buying the whole $150+ complete set.
So, do we think this is a step in the right direction? Well, it would be if they'd announced it before some people shelled out money for the fancy set. Somewhere out there, there are M*A*S*H fans who purchased seasons 1-10 at the individual price and then, to get the extra stuff, bought the Martinis and Medicine set...and now they're finding out they didn't have to buy the first ten seasons a second time to get the bonus material. I didn't do that but if I had, I'd be pretty angry about it.
As a longtime reader of your work, I demand...demand, I say...that you amend the last sentence of your 8:32 PM blog posting to include the words: "a Gabor sister." The entire piece is meaningless without them.
Okay, you've intimidated me sufficiently. I'll change it.
Have you watched the cable/tabloid news shows in the last day or so? They're all covering the Anna Nicole Smith story but, more than ever before with an Enquirer-type event of this sort, they all look real embarrassed about it. Larry King last night acted like he was doing a show about it at gunpoint. You can always tell when King is really disinterested in a guest or subject because most of what he asks will end with, "What do you make of this?" That's another way of saying, "I don't care enough about this to formulate an actual question so you figure out what to say about it."
Adding to the problem, of course, is that everything we know about Anna Nicole Smith and her untimely demise could be effectively summarized in about six minutes, and there don't seem to be a lot of available guests who knew her well. With all those hours to fill, this one's really running on fumes.
My friend Earl Kress just made a good point in a phone conversation. People are likening Anna Nicole to other celebs who died too young — Elvis, James Dean, Marilyn (of course), and a few others. But all those people did things that people liked. Marilyn was in some good movies. Anna Nicole Smith was most famous for marrying a rich old guy and for turning up at public events, drunk or otherwise incoherent.
Still to come: The "Anna Nicole was murdered" scenarios, followed by attempts to link this story up with other tabloid faves. You just know that right now, they're working late in the offices of Star trying to figure out how they can get Anna Nicole and O.J. into the same headline. Or maybe Anna Nicole and Jon Benet or Monica Lewinsky. We're going to be hearing about this until...well, until an even juicier story comes along. This one has a lot of the right elements — money, sex, huge breasts, mysterious parentage, court battles, public drunkeness, a maybe-orphan, a Gabor sister, etc. — so the next one's going to have to be even tawdrier. It's hard to imagine how but I know they won't disappoint us.
Another of the great artists of Archie Comics, Joe Edwards, has left us. Details are a bit sketchy but Mr. Edwards had been in poor health for some time. He died this morning at the age of 85.
Edwards was an amazingly prolific artist. After education at Rome Academy and something called the Hastings Animation School, he began drawing comic books in the late thirties, about the time the medium was first established. He worked at first for the Demby Studios shop, then did funny animals for Dell and Timely. He began working for MLJ (which was later known as Archie Comics) in 1942, initially doing several funny animal strips, including Squoimy the Woim, Cubby the Bear and Bumbie the Bee-tective. All three of these appeared as short features in the first issue of Archie Comics.
He continued to do funny animals for a time for Archie but as more and more of their line became the teen comics, his work gravitated in that direction. In 1947, he created a feature about a precocious youngster named Li'l Jinx who appeared in the company's books, primarily as a back-up feature but occasionally in her own title, well into the seventies. He reportedly drew on his own experiences as a parent when he wrote Li'l Jinx. (Jinx, like Edwards' own son, was born on Halloween.)
Li'l Jinx has sometimes been dismissed as a female rip-off of Hank Ketcham's Dennis the Menace by folks who are unaware that Edwards' strip predated Ketcham's by four years. On the other hand, Edwards also did another kid strip for Archie called Shrimpy that sure looks like he was instructed to ape Charles Schulz's Peanuts.
Edwards produced thousands of pages for Archie featuring the whole gang — Archie, Betty, Veronica, Jughead, etc. — through at least 1987, usually writing, pencilling and inking the work all by himself. Most were filler gag pages because the editors there had learned that they could always count on Joe to give them something funny in a short format. His work appeared often in Archie's Joke Book, Archie's Madhouse and in pin-up gags sprinkled throughout all the company's titles.
I never met Mr. Edwards but I always enjoyed his work, especially on Li'l Jinx. If anyone reading this has any more information on the man, please let me know so I can direct people towards it.
Clive James writes an appreciation of one of my favorite TV performers, Dick Cavett. It's a shame that it's been so long since television has found a place for Cavett. When you see some of the graceless, cloying hosts on cable these days, you wonder if it's his choice or everyone else's that there's no current Dick Cavett Show.
Mr. Cavett, by the way, is however now writing some sort of blog or column about the language of politics (or maybe it's the politics of language) for The New York Times. But it's in their online "pay" section, to which I no longer subscribe so I haven't seen it yet. Someone let me know if it's any good, which it probably is.
Joe Conason details one of the Bush administration moves that would have Republicans drawing up impeachment resolutions if a Democrat tried it. In fact, even some Republicans aren't going along with this one. It's a new policy, slipped into the renewal of the Patriot Act, that allows the White House to fire any career prosecutor who's investigating, say, a Bush ally and replace him with a political stooge.
Senator Arlen Specter is apparently the guy who slipped it into the bill, and his excuse is that one of his staffers did it without his knowledge. Isn't this just about the lamest thing a representative could say? "I didn't know what was in the legislation I sponsored." If your career gets to the point where you have to hide behind alibis like that, shouldn't you do the honorable thing and leave Congress for a job at a carnival, letting people throw balls at you in a Dunk-the-Ex-Senator tank?
The Conason article in on Salon, which will probably make you watch a commercial if you're not a subscriber. But if you feel like getting angry about the way your government's run today, it's worth it.
Back when Joe Barbera passed away, I posted the following anecdote about him...
One day, Barbera was in a network meeting proposing idea after idea for specials, tossing out jokes and concepts and ideas with machine-gun precision. Finally, as the hour grew late, the network guy said, "Okay, we'll buy two hours," and Barbera quickly left. That's how you sell. When they say yes, you get the hell out before they have time to think it over and take it back. So J.B. got the hell out and an hour or two later, the guys from the network called over to H-B and said, "Uh, this is embarrassing and we are going to honor the commitment — but there were so many ideas flying around that room. Just what was it we agreed to buy?" And of course, the punch line was that Barbera wasn't sure, either.
A reader of this site named Joe Wilson, who I assume is not the one wed to Valerie Plame, wrote to ask if I knew what the two shows were that resulted from that pitch session. I do. They were two live-action super-hero comedy specials that ran on NBC in 1979. They were done while I was working for the studio but I had nothing to do with them except that Mr. B., aware that I knew a little about the comics, occasionally stopped me in the hall to say, "Wait'll you see the costumes." I did glimpse the gent in the Hawkman suit one day as he posed for photos in the parking lot and it was pretty darn impressive, at least in person.
Actually, some of the casting was rather amusing. Howie Morris (under tons of make-up) was an inspired choice to play Dr. Sivana, the arch-nemesis of Captain Marvel...and I thought it was funny that Charlie Callas so closely resembled the Green Lantern villain, Sinestro, but without any make-up. The performance of Frank Gorshin, re-creating his role as The Riddler, affords a very nice example of what actors sometimes call "subtext." In this case, the subtext of what Gorshin did would be something like, "Just give me my check and get me out of this mess." And that's my friend Jeff Altman playing The Weather Wizard and Gary Owens doing the narration.
The first of the two specials had the super-villains running around, trying to kill the super-heroes, and it first aired on January 18. 1979. Here we have ten minutes from that special, which is probably all you need to see...
The second special, which was shot at the same time as the first, aired a week later...on January 25, 1979. It was hosted by Ed McMahon in a "roast" format, not unlike what Dean Martin was then doing. It's at least weirder than the previous entry so that may make it more enjoyable to some, I don't know. This excerpt gives you a little more than seven minutes from that show, but the first two minutes are substantially the same as the above clip...
These shows make the rounds in bootleg videos but pristine file copies probably still exist somewhere in the Time-Warner vaults. If you ever hear that they're putting them out on DVD, you'll know that absolutely everything else in the Time-Warner vaults that could possibly be released on home video is already out and they got desperate for New Product.
I pay most of my bills online and I pay some of my mother's, as well, charging them to her credit card. I always pay them in full and many weeks ago, I paid what was then her most recent phone bill.
Turns out, the phone company computers made a mistake. The bill was for $57.31 but when I logged into her account (which I set up) on their website and clicked "pay in full," it charged $57.23 to her card.
Other bills were subsequently paid at the correct amount but for some reason, they did not reflect the eight cent discrepancy. Then the other day, my mother got one of those lovely paper statements that told her she was horribly delinquent with her phone bill, and if the unpaid balance was not paid in full immediately, someone was going to come to her home in the middle of the night and rip out her phone and she'd never get another one as long as she lived. Or threats to that effect.
This is over eight cents.
Now, I don't believe they'd actually shut down her phone over that. Not over eight cents. Not with a customer who's in her eighties and has paid her phone bill promptly at that address for around half a century. Not when it was their mistake. I clicked "pay in full" and it's not my fault it wasn't the right amount.
But you never know with a phone company. And when she has medical problems, as she sometimes does, not having a working phone can be life-threatening. (I also got her one of those "I've fallen and I can't get up" buttons. It wasn't the brand that advertised with that slogan — I found them to be hideously overpriced compared to their competitors — but it works the same way and it depends on a working telephone connection.) Plus, just getting that notice upset her. So I promptly logged into the website to pay the eight cents.
Problem: The website won't accept a payment for less than a dollar.
Solution: I charged a dollar to her Visa card...and now, instead of her owing them eight cents, they owe her ninety-two. I figured we could even it all out on the next bill.
Immediate Effect: Her e-mailbox (which goes to me) is suddenly full of offers for "pre-approved" credit cards, many of them linked to her phone company. She never got them before but apparently, the fact that she overpaid her phone bill, even by under a buck, has made a big impression on her credit rating or the desirability of having her as a customer or something like that.
Not a big deal. I can add those messages to my Spam filter and never have to deal with them...but I wanted to share this discovery with you. Someone reading this weblog is probably having trouble qualifying for a credit card. If it's you, it's probably because you insist on paying your phone company only what you owe them. Send them ninety-two cents extra and see if they don't love you then. If you give 'em a couple of bucks, they'll probably offer you free cable.
Some people in this world are famous. Some people are famous for being famous. And Anna Nicole Smith was one of those who are famous for being famous for being famous.
Jack Valenti — or as Robin Williams used to call him on the Oscars, Jack "Boom-Boom" Valenti — offers an interesting viewpoint on politics, one that I think is not without merit.
There are many sad things about the death today of Anna Nicole Smith. One of them is that we're now in for a bunch of really crappy movies about the life and death of Anna Nicole Smith.
It's been a while since I linked to one of these Fleischer Superman cartoons. We had the first one in the series back here and the second back here. This was the third entry and it was entitled "Billion Dollar Limited." It was released to theaters on January 9, 1942 and seems to have the voices of Bud Collyer as Superman and Joan Alexander as Lois Lane. Here you go...
In the credits, you'll notice the name of Myron Waldman. Mr. Waldman, who passed away at the age of 97, spent his life working in animation, bringing us some of the most memorable characters ever drawn on film. Last Saturday, I was among the speakers at an event called The Afternoon of Remembrance, which is an annual salute to folks in the animation community who've passed away in the previous year. Mr. Waldman was touchingly remembered by his sons, Robert and Steven Waldman. All the speeches that day were brief but theirs was probably the most memorable and there's a video of it, with not the best sound quality alas, over on this page of the ASIFA blog.
Folks are writing to remind me of a couple of other animation voices that Jim Backus performed in his career. He was in a Disney short called Plutopia that was made in 1951 and while doing the Magoo cartoons for U.P.A., he also appeared in a couple of that studio's non-Magoo cartoons. I still find his employment record in the field rather unusual. From the forties through the sixties, the "talent pool" for cartoon voicing in Hollywood was pretty small and anyone who was good enough to get repeat work from one studio was routinely working for many studios. Paul Frees reportedly once remarked that Mel Blanc's exclusive contract with Warner Brothers was a good thing for other voice actors...because if Mel hadn't had that deal, he would have had all the jobs in town.
They don't seem to be anywhere on the Internet but there are some hysterical audio recordings floating about of Mr. Backus doing his Mr. Magoo recordings. Reportedly, his deal called for pretty low money but Jerry Hausner, who directed the sessions, had it in his budget to take Backus out before and fill him with liquor. If you factored that in, Backus was apparently pretty expensive talent. Sometimes, Hausner overfilled and his star would require dozens of takes, venturing deep into filthy terrain. The joke around U.P.A. was that if business ever got bad, they could stop making cartoons and just release the voice session tapes as "party records." They'd have made a fortune.
For a while, the official Jim Backus filling station seems to have been a restaurant called The Smoke House that's still in business over in Burbank, right across from Warner Brothers. Someone should write an article about the role this place has played in the history of comic books and animation. U.P.A. was right next door and many other animation studios were close enough that it became a major lunch spot and watering hole for cartoonists. In fact, the editors from Western Publishing (Dell Comics, Gold Key) would frequently lunch there because some of the artists drawing their comics were working days at the studios and editorial business could be transacted there — scripts or checks handed out, artwork turned in, etc. — over a meal. Also of course, everyone liked the food there...especially the garlic bread, which is still quite wonderful.
Hanna-Barbera was not far away and when I was working there, I'd lunch at least once a week at the Smoke House. I always ran into other folks in the cartoon business there — often, Bill Hanna or Walter Lantz — and sometimes saw Jim Backus. He wasn't doing Magoos at the time but he'd be at the bar, tossing back a cocktail and joking with everyone. You'd hear the distinctive laugh of the Nearsighted One cackling throughout the restaurant and I always meant to go over, buy him a beverage and just thank him for being Jim Backus. Somehow, I never felt it was the right moment. Years later, when we started Garfield and Friends, I tried to hire him for a voice job but his agent said the man's health was just not up to it. Another one of the many "waited too long" experiences that we all have and regret so.
Stan Sakai has done one hundred issues of Usagi Yojimbo...and that's just for Dark Horse, its current publisher. There were other issues and other publishers before that. In an era where a year or two is considered a long run on a comic, Stan has almost single-handedly written, drawn and lettered all those tales of his long-eared warrior, roaming about the world of 17th century Japan, and this is cause for celebration.
A hundred issues would be an impressive achievement even if the comic sucked. That it's one of the best books of its day is a happy bonus. When people ask me what comic book these days I'd recommend, the first one I always recommend is Usagi Yojimbo.
To celebrate the milestone, Stan got a major assist for #100. A bunch of his friends pitched in to create a "roast" of Stan and his bunny. The dais includes Frank Miller, Jeff Smith, Sergio Aragonés, Guy Davis, Jamie S. Rich, Andi Watson, Rick Geary, Scott Shaw!, Yours Truly and Dark Horse publisher Mike Richardson, as well as Stan himself. It's on sale now and while I haven't seen a copy yet, I have seen most of the contributions. It's fun, it's silly and it's almost as entertaining as an issue created wholly by Stan without us clowns displacing him in his own book.
David Cook read the previous item about the Aladdin-type movie with Phil Silvers in it and writes to ask...
There's a Fifties Bugs Bunny cartoon with a genie who is more like Phil Silvers than anyone else. Did that tie into this movie?
I don't see any particular connection. Phil Silvers doesn't play the genie in A Thousand and One Nights and I don't recall any plot similarities, although the time frame isn't far off. A Thousand and One Nights came out in 1945 and the Bugs Bunny cartoon you're recalling — A Lad in His Lamp — came out in October of 1948. A very rough rule of thumb on Warner Brothers cartoons of this period is a year lead time from when the gag men were writing the film to when it reached theaters. But I still don't think one had anything to do with the other.
The most interesting thing about A Lad in His Lamp — and here I go veering off on trivial tangents again — is that the voice of the genie was done by Jim Backus. He's not credited, of course, but it's definitely him and it may have been his screen debut. He was a radio actor before then and this was a full year before the first Mr. Magoo cartoon appeared.
What's odd is that Mr. Backus gave this wonderful performance as the genie in that cartoon, and then became a cartoon voice superstar as Magoo...but never really did anything else in cartoons; not until 1974 when Filmation turned Gilligan's Island into the first of two animated series. Backus was constantly doing animation voicing during the interim but only as Magoo. Maybe it was because he was so prolific as a film and television actor...but you'd think Warners would have used him again or Disney would have had him play a role in some movie or something of the sort.
Nope. In a 41-year career doing cartoon voices, Jim Backus seems to have played only four roles: The genie in that Bugs Bunny cartoon, Quincy Magoo in hundreds of cartoons, Thurston Howell III in The New Adventures of Gilligan (1974) and Gilligan's Planet (1982) and Gamun the Rat in a 1984 feature, Enchanted Journey. Backus was the only other actor besides Mel Blanc to regularly receive credit on animated theatrical shorts...but in four decades, he voiced fewer characters than Mel usually did in one cartoon.
Here's a Head's Up for Phil Silvers fans. On Saturday, as John Hall has reminded me, Turner Classic Movies is running A Thousand and One Nights, a 1945 movie that Mr. Silvers manages to elevate from boring fodder to a special treat. The film stars Evelyn Keyes and Cornel Wilde, but it's Phil you want to see. He just makes every scene he's in soar.
This was one of several pictures he made for Columbia in the forties, which meant he crossed paths with the studio's gruff, unpredictable head, Harry Cohn. In fact, this was apparently the film where the following famous anecdote (not involving Silvers) occurred. Cohn summoned to his office, several writers who'd worked on the screenplay. They were all college-educated men and therefore a special thorn in the paw of Cohn, who'd never finished high school and resented folks with degrees. He asked them accusingly when the film, the script of which was before him, took place. They said it was in some year or other, B.C.
Triumphant that he had caught the college boys in a boneheaded error, Cohn demanded to know why everyone was walking around, talking contemporary slang. He said, "I didn't have the kind of education like you jerks but I know that people didn't walk around in those days saying, 'Yessiree,' all the time! All through this script, you've got people saying, 'Yessiree!'"
The writers all exchanged nervous glances. No one wanted to tell Mr. Cohn that the line in question was, "Yes, sire."
Silvers claimed that he devised the end gag of the film...and I'm going to go ahead and tip it so I can tell this anecdote. Am I forgiven if I put a big SPOILER ALERT up here? Fine.
In the end gag as written, the Phil Silvers character gets a wish and winds up fabulously wealthy and surrounded by comely babes. The script called for him to look into camera and exclaim, "I must have had a heart attack!"
Silvers went to Cohn and explained that there was no joke there; that it was actually less than "no joke," because there's nothing really funny about a heart attack. Instead, Phil proposed the following, which they used. In his ending, his wish transforms him into a soundalike of Frank Sinatra, who was then at the peak of his popularity with swooning females. To really make the joke work, Silvers persuaded Sinatra, who was a friend, to come in and spend an afternoon recording a voice track that he [Silvers] could lip-sync to.
After the film came out and did well, Silvers suggested to Cohn that a bonus was in order for saving the picture. Cohn, to the comedian's amazement, told him in rather earthy terms to drop dead, get out, etc. Silvers was stunned...until a few days later when his brother got a big, unearned check from Columbia. That was just Cohn being clever. Silvers was doing the film on a loan-out from MGM and technically, any bonus he received would have to be reported to that studio, which would probably demand it go to them. Because the money was paid to his brother, Silvers didn't have to tell MGM about it.
When he went by to thank Cohn, Silvers reminded him that Sinatra hadn't been paid a cent and suggested that a piano would be a nice thank-you present, as Frank was in need of a new one. The mercurial Cohn blew up at this, threw Silvers out of his office and never sent Sinatra so much as a harmonica. That was Harry Cohn.
Anyway, it's kind of a fun movie if you don't expect a lot. Look closely and you may notice that one of the extras in the harem scenes is Shelley Winters. That is, if you can tear your eyes off Phil Silvers for two seconds. Boy, he was good.
If you grew up in Southern California and you're anywhere near my age (54), you remember watching Tom Hatten, who hosted Popeye cartoons for years on KTLA, Channel 5. He wore a sailor outfit and gave drawing lessons and was a generally genial presence on Los Angeles TV. After that job ended, he hosted movies on Channel 5 for quite some time and can now be heard on KNX radio as an entertainment reporter. All of this is in addition to a nice, ongoing acting career. (For a long time, any time a TV show needed someone to play a cartoonist, they called on Tom. There was a Hawaii Five-O about a demented comic fan who was murdering people because he'd confused the storyline in a newspaper comic strip with reality. Tom Hatten played the guy who drew the newspaper strip.)
What we have here is a recent (2004) interview with Tom. It was done for a show called Marty's Corner that is or was done in La Puente, which is about thirty miles southeast of Los Angeles. The show is telecast live on KCAT, the last three letters standing for Community Access Television. I've never seen it except in YouTube clips but Marty's apparently had his corner going out there for thirteen years, which is impressive. Even more impressive is that he somehow gets guests to drive out to La Puente. Anyway, the interview with Tom Hatten is in two parts. Here's Part One...
And now, if you want to watch Part Two, click here.
I'm sorry you had so much trouble this morning attempting to secure a hotel reservation for this year's Comic-Con International. I'm sure you're telling the truth when you say that you logged on and/or dialed in at the appropriate hour. I can't explain why the rooms were all booked, seemingly within minutes, while you were on hold or waiting for some webpage to load or getting dumped off the line or whatever the hell happened.
I'm also sorry that there's nothing I can do to help you except to suggest that more rooms should become available at some point, both through the convention's booking agency and directly through the various hotels. The hotels, for their own purposes, hold onto some rooms until closer to the con dates. I know that doesn't make sense from your standpoint since you're ready to plunk down cash right now for one...but they're not worried about not selling those rooms. They are worried about not having rooms for important guests and others who do a lot of ongoing business with the hotel. There are also comic-congoers who make multiple reservations, or book more rooms than they'll need, and some of those may become available in the coming months.
Keep looking. You may not be able to stay within walking distance of the convention but you should be able to find a room somewhere if you remain ever-vigilant. It's maddening, I know, but look at it this way: It'll be a great convention and once you get this messy lodging problem settled, you'll forget what a hassle it was and you'll enjoy the heck out of the con. I know I always do.
Your pal,
P.S. I expect to be moderating my usual roster of a dozen or more panels at the con. If you can't find a place to sleep in San Diego, come to my panels and sleep there.
Continuing with our theme today, which seems to be brilliant men who smoked cigars...
My friend and one-time employer Jack Kirby died thirteen years ago this morning. It's a cliché — but perfectly true — that not a day goes by that I don't find myself thinking about him and, usually, talking about him with someone. I always knew I was privileged to have been around him as much as I was but I'm still coming to realize just how privileged. A lot more than I imagined at the time, probably even more than I can now begin to grasp.
This seems like the right day to make the following announcement...
As many of you know, I've been working on a biography of Jack that might be described as "authorized" and/or "official." I don't think of it either way. I'm thinking of it as Mark setting down every possible thing I've learned from or about Jack. Anyway, this book in its present state is huge. It makes the Encyclopedia Americana look like one of those take-out menus they hang on your doorknob...and it's still growing. I recently came across a trove of info about employees in the Simon and Kirby studio and I haven't even been able to begin sorting through that material and incorporating it into the book.
I finally decided that the endeavor was getting too large and taking too long...so I'm turning it into two books. Jack is just too big a topic for one book.
The first will be a very nicely printed art book with a simpler but quite complete version of the Kirby biography. The volume will also be loaded with rare Kirby art, all of it in reproduced in full color, much of it shot from the original artwork. That needs a bit of explanation. Many of the pieces will consist of black-and-white artwork in pencil or ink but we'll be printing them in color so that you can see all the pencil marks, corrections, smudges and in some cases, notes in the margins. There will also be plenty of pages that print Jack's art in pencil form and, of course, color pieces and some things you've seen before but not in the way we're going to present them.
This book will be called Kirby: King of Comics and it will be released in October of this year by Harry N. Abrams, Inc., which is one of the world's most prestigious publishers of high quality art and illustrated books. It'll be a hardcover volume, 9" by 12-1/2", all in color and with a gatefold and all sorts of nifty features that we hope will make it worthy of its subject.
Later on — and don't ask me when but it'll be another year or two at least — I'll publish the gargantuan, Galactus-sized bio for the hardcore Kirby fan...the kind of person who wants to read every little detail of the man's extraordinary life. As soon as fresh data stops coming my way, I'll wrap that one up but in the meantime, you'll have the first book before this Christmas. I'll tell you more about it over the next few weeks.
This is interesting. I thought the tune from the Ernie Kovacs clip this morning was "Rialto Ripples" by Gershwin and Donaldson. And if you clicked on the link I provided to an old piano roll copy of that tune, you can hear why I thought that. Like maybe because it's the same song.
But as Kovacs fans are now informing me, the piece ol' Ernie used was "Oriental Blues," aka "Ernie's Tune," written by Jack Newlon. This website which studies classic TV themes has the following posted...
...this piece is based upon "Rialto Ripples" cowritten by the teenage George Gershwin with Walter Donaldson. Comparison of the melodies verifies that the "A" themes of both pieces are nearly identical (only the bridge and overall tempo was changed to protect the guilty.) "Rialto Ripples" strolls along at a leisurely pace, but "Oriental Blues" is a more frantic piece often with added comedic sound effects during the bridge...
Given how litigious the Gershwin estate has always been — especially back when Ira was alive — it's amazing that a national TV show got away with featuring such a total rip-off. Then again, since "Rialto Ripples" was written so early in Gershwin's life — he was eighteen when it was copyrighted — and he only co-wrote it, perhaps his estate didn't control it in any way.
Thanks to all who wrote in, including Robert Poodiack, Mary Wallace, Dave Sikula and Eric Wilson. And isn't it interesting that Ernie Kovacs — a man from whom so many stole — would have had a "hot" theme song?
A few days ago in this item, I linked to a clip of Groucho Marx doing a surprise cameo on an episode of I Dream of Jeannie. A reader of this here site, Tom Atwill, wrote to ask, "How would something like that come to pass? Would they write it and then go to Groucho's agent and see if he'd do it?"
Probably it came about because Sidney Sheldon, the producer of I Dream of Jeannie, was an old friend of Groucho's. I have no first-hand knowledge on this one but I'll bet it was as simple as this: Sheldon was having dinner with Groucho one night and he said something like, "Hey, Grouch. How about dropping by the set some day and shooting a cameo appearance? We'll let you hug Barbara Eden. You can even see her navel." And Groucho said something like, "Okay...just let me get a real bad toupee to wear." Then Sheldon either wrote the scene or had his staff figure out some way to get Marx into the episode...and I'll bet it wasn't any more complicated than that. Just Groucho doing a favor for a friend.
This was only possible because back then, they used to actual do surprise cameos on TV shows. When was the last time you saw one that wasn't in the promos beforehand? One of the reasons I've soured on Deal or No Deal is that I feel like the promos and/or the opening tease usually give away the entire episode. They'll tease that the contestant must make a life-or-death choice when they're down to the last five cases...and that effectively tells you that not much is going to matter as they open the first twenty cases — i.e., the first half hour of the show. Or like on last night's show, they told you in the previews that Magic Johnson was going to make a surprise appearance. So all through the game, whenever Howie Mandel asked the contestant if they wanted to accept the latest bank offer, you could think to yourself, "She's not going to take it. We haven't seen Magic Johnson yet."
The first twenty case openings on that show never matter...and what's more, the producers know it. They have Magic Johnson backstage and they know they can wait 'til late in the game to send him out there. Because they know it's going to go that long; that no one's going to take the first bank offer or the second or the fourth. I think the earliest offer anyone's taken has been the fifth and the player has to really being doing poorly to quit then. Almost all the games go until at least the seventh offer...and the banker only makes a maximum of nine. So it gives the whole thing a very pre-arranged feel and I don't know why I'm still watching, even with a lot of fast-forwarding.
I love surprises on television. You'd think, in the era of Reality Programming, someone would try one every now and then.
The Producers has opened in Las Vegas. We've been wondering here for some time how they were going to cut an hour out of it and this article supplies some of the answer. The omitted musical numbers are...
Act One, Scene 4: "We Can Do It" Reprise (Max & Leo)
Act One, Scene 6: "Der Guten Tag Hop Clop" (Franz, Max, Leo)
Act One, Scene 9: Act One Finale (All)
Act Two, Scene 1: "That Face" (Leo, Ulla, Max)
Act Two, Scene 3: "You Never Say 'Good Luck' on Opening Night" (Roger, Max, Carmen, Leo, Franz)
Act Two, Scene 5: "Where Did We Go Right?" (Max, Leo)
Act Two, Scene 6: "Betrayed" (Max)
Act Two, Scene 7: Max's section of "'Til Him" (Max)
...plus there are also trims in the dialogue. I actually thought the show felt rushed in the full version so this one probably goes by in a wink. I'd love to see my pal Brad Oscar playing Max — when I saw The Producers in New York, it was when he was still playing Franz — but I have little desire to see the stripped-down version. Sounds to me like with those cuts, "Springtime for Hitler" practically becomes the finale.
Ticket prices, you will note, range from $75.50 to $143.50. In New York, tickets for the full version run from $31.25 to $111.25 and are frequently available for half-price at the TKTS booth. Then again, the New York version does have Tony Danza playing Max.
These are the end credits to one of the many TV programs of Ernie Kovacs. Only Ernie Kovacs could have end credits that ran three and a half minutes and were more entertaining than most shows.
When I was a kid, I loved that tune that Mr. Kovacs often used on his programs and wondered who wrote it and what it was called. Turns out it's "Rialto Ripples" by George Gershwin and Will Donaldson. If you'd like to hear it as it sounded in a player piano in 1916, allegedly played by Mr. Gershwin himself, you can do so over on this page. [WARNING: At least on my computer, the tune starts immediately upon connection.]
...or at least your phone-dialing finger. Tomorrow morning at 9 AM Pacific Time, the hotel reservation line opens for this year's Comic-Con International in San Diego. You can also reserve online. All the info will be on the convention website.
So how long do we think it'll be before they're officially sold out? 9:15? 9:20? If you don't get in, don't despair. More rooms will become available later. Some of them will be for the 2008 con but there will be more rooms.
Back in 1967, there was a TV show on CBS called Coronet Blue. It starred Frank Converse as a man named Michael Alden. And who was Michael Alden? Well, Michael Alden was...uh...
Well, nobody knew. Not even Michael Alden knew.
Michael Alden was a man with amnesia. One day, he climbed out of the ocean, having either fallen off a pier or a boat, with no memory of who he was or where he was going or anything except for two words that kept coursing through his brain: Coronet Blue. Oh — and he also had some people searching for him, trying to kill him. From that moment forward, he was constantly on the move from episode to episode, trying to avoid his pursuers and simultaneously figure out who he was and what those words meant. This was when The Fugitive was a hit over at ABC and Coronet Blue seemed like a show popped from the same mold. The difference was that on The Fugitive, Richard Kimble was trying to find a one-armed man before someone caught him, whereas Michael Alden was trying to find himself before someone killed him.
Here are the opening titles and the first three or so minutes of one episode of Coronet Blue. This should give you a pretty good idea of what the show was like...
Not too exciting, was it? Maybe that's why the series was cancelled after half a season with the mystery still unresolved. Since no one was really watching, there wasn't a lot of public outcry. (I think TV Guide quizzed a few members of the creative staff and came to the conclusion that hadn't decided yet on who he was or what the mysterious words meant.) My friends discussed it though and I came up with a great theory that Alden must have been a defecting Soviet agent, that "Coronet Blue" was a codename and that the mysterious men tracking him were Russians trying to eliminate a defector. Like all great theories, its greatness was in the fact that nothing would probably ever emerge to prove me wrong.
But as it turns out, I wasn't wrong; not about who he was, at least. Forty years later — which is to say, just the other day — I'm reading the fine blog, TV Squad, and I come upon the following: "In a bio of the show's creator Larry Cohen, Cohen revealed what the words meant and who Michael Alden was." And then they quote him thusly...
When the Brodkin Organization took over the series, they wanted to turn it into an anthology so they played down the amnesia aspect until there was nothing about it at all in the show. It was just Frank Converse wandering from one story to the next with no connective format at all. Anyway, the show ended after seventeen weeks and nobody found out what 'coronet blue' meant. The actual secret is that Converse was not really an American at all. He was a Russian who had been trained to appear like an American and was sent to the U.S. as a spy. He belonged to a spy unit called Coronet Blue. He decided to defect, so the Russians tried to kill him before he can give away the identities of the other Soviet agents. And nobody can really identify him because he doesn't exist as an American. Coronet Blue was actually an outgrowth of "The Traitor" episode of The Defenders.
Just as I thought. I'm so proud of me.
And I guess that's the end of it. I doubt we'll see Coronet Blue on DVD since it would be like publishing the first half of an unfinished mystery novel. It wasn't that wonderful a show, anyway. I think the only reason I watched it was because I was intrigued with the mystery of the premise...which meant that I came to be annoyed that the show didn't seem to be giving up any clues. It's annoying that it took this long for me to get an answer but at least I got one and it feels good to be right about something. I occasionally am, even if it takes forty years for it to happen.
What, if anything, did O.J. Simpson confess to in those never-aired TV interviews to promote that book that wasn't released? This article explains that he didn't confess to anything but in a way he did...
I heard from a couple of folks who recalled chug-a-lugging Funny Face drinks when they were young. I meant to ask them if they had any teeth left.
I was never a fan of Kool-Aid or Funny Face or even of the drink mix that most of the local kid show hosts used to push, a noxious liquid called Sonny Boy. I could tolerate the occasional Flav-R Straw (I wrote about those here) and I actually enjoyed my Fizz-Nik (which I wrote about here). But I didn't like things like Fizzies tablets (written about here) that turned perfectly good water into sweet, artificially-flavored and sweetened nectars.
Oddly enough, as an alleged adult, I've come around to a drink mix, though it's not one with artificial sweeteners in it. Ever since my surgery last May, I've had to find something I could drink besides water. Fruit juices contain more sugar than my body can now tolerate and I won't drink anything with Splenda, Nutrasweet or any of those. (I suspect they're bad for you but that's not even my main reason. My main reason is that I can't stand the taste of any of them.) My body doesn't like milk and the rest of me doesn't like tea, and I'm not supposed to have anything carbonated. So that leaves...
Well, not much. I drink a lot of tomato juice and I've also developed a watery orange drink and a watery lemonade. The watery orange drink is made by diluting down a Knudsen product called Orange Recharge that I buy at the Whole Foods Market. It's one of these sports drinks but it's lower in sugar than most, and I water it down by at least a third. Not a bad little beverage.
For the lemonade, I tried a few and settled on Country Time Lemonade drink mix. You know, the stuff isn't bad, even when I make it my way. I use half of what the directions tell me to use and then I add in a couple of big squirts of Real Lemon lemon juice. The result is a low-in-sugar lemonade that contains some artificial flavoring but no artificial sweetening.
I think someone's missing a bet by not developing a line of low-sugar soft drinks for kids. There seems to be the assumption out there that if you don't like a lot of sugar in your diet, you want zero so you'll go for something with Nutrasweet or Splenda. And if you don't like those, then you want as much sugar as you can get. I think there'd be a market for a middle ground product...and if I owned the old Funny Face trademarks, I'd bring them back with that as the premise. But maybe that's not feasible...and maybe no one owns those characters today. Maybe the whole franchise went bankrupt. I keep thinking that after they kicked Injun Orange off the package, he got his revenge by opening a casino and taking Jolly Olly Orange to the cleaners.
As a sequel to yesterday's video link, we have a clip of Sam Levine performing as The Banana Man. The video isn't very good and again, it's only a small piece of a much longer act...in this case, about five minutes. This is from a live broadcast of Babes in Toyland that NBC did in 1954. Somehow, they worked him into a plot that had nothing to do with a guy coming out and pulling bananas from his pants.
The main thing to notice here is the odd sound of The Banana Man as Levine successfully imitates the lilting voice of A. Robins before him. Several of you have written since yesterday's clip to ask if it could be true that Curly Howard of the Three Stooges got his not-dissimilar stage voice by imitating A. Robins. Beats me. But it's highly probable that when the Stooges worked in vaudeville with Ted Healy, they shared a bill with A. Robins at some point...so make of that what you will.
One of these days, someone's going to turn up a good, clear video of The Banana Man doing his entire act. For now, we have to settle for blurry, abbreviated footage like this...
I'm recommending a good one, this time. Early Tuesday morning, Turner Classic Movies is running A Thousand Clowns, starring Jason Robards and Barbara Harris in the film version of Herb Gardner's play of the same name.
The movie, about an out o' work comedy writer trying to pull his life together, is pretty faithful to the play. It was directed by Fred Coe and according to legend, the producers and Mr. Gardner were not all that thrilled with what Coe considered a finished product. They turned the whole magilla over to Gardner and film editor Ralph Rosenblum, who proceeded to recut the entire thing and even shoot some additional scenes. It took several long months but they managed to improve the movie so much that United Artists, which was distributing the film, began to sense a hit. U.A. agreed to kick in the extra bucks for a more ambitious score and the complete replacement of one actor.
The key role of Chuckles the Chipmunk, a rather disturbing clown, had been originated and performed on Broadway by Gene Saks. Everyone wanted him for the film but at the time it was to begin shooting, Saks was unavailable so another actor played the part. Gardner felt the movie needed the original and by the time he and Rosenblum had completed most of their transformation, Saks was available. He was hired, the Chuckles scenes were reshot with him, and the performance of the other actor was consigned to the scrap bin.
What they wound up with as a film is irresistible and it was even nominated for the Oscar for Best Picture that year. (It lost to The Sound of Music. If it hadn't, it would have lost to Dr. Zhivago, which also came out that year.) Perhaps more important is that in the pantheon of motion picture versions of plays, it's a stellar example of one that totally reflects the vision and sensibilities of the playwright and not the director. Its message about being a non-conformist and maintaining your individuality is pretty obvious — at least half the movies made in 1965 were about being a non-conformist and maintaining your individuality — but it holds up better than most. Give it a peek. It's better than a lot of stuff I've coerced you into watching.
In the latest CNN poll, an amazing 68% of the American people say they oppose the idea of the U.S. taking military action in Iran. That's stunning for two reasons.
One is that in the past, we as a people were usually supportive of any war and of the need to fight it. We usually had to get into a war and have it devolve into an unwinnable quagmire before the opposition reached anywhere near 68%.
But the second is that I don't think anyone has made much of a case for that war yet, not even those who are gung ho for us to start shelling over there. People know very little about why Iran is a problem and what a U.S. military action against the country might seek to accomplish. At this point, the poll ought to have an overwhelming "Don't Know" response, rather than the 6% it does. I'd love to see that 68% group broken down into its reasons. How many are just so sick of Iraq that they don't want another war anywhere for a while? How many simply don't trust the Bush administration to lead us into any war?
In the last CNN poll on the matter, which was a few weeks ago, Bush's disapproval rating was 63% Maybe the 68% is just the 63% plus a few more people who soured on the guy after the State of the Union address.
Just to remind you: It's not all that long until the 2007 Wondercon in San Francisco, traditionally one of the best comic and media conventions in the country. I'm a guest again and I'll be moderating a whole batch of panels with people like Gene Colan, Nick Cardy, Al Feldstein and Sergio Aragonés. That is, unless I wind up in the hospital again like I did during last year's Wondercon...but that won't happen. I'll be there and we'll have a great time. Click here or on the banner above for more details, and watch for the programming schedule which will be available soon.
Got another goodie for you today. A man named A. Robins started doing his odd act in the days of vaudeville, occasionally venturing into circuses. It was an act that basically consisted of him taking things out of his pockets and using his voice, sometimes with the aid of a kazoo-like device, to provide the sounds of musical props. In most appearances, he'd drop the items he produced into a large chest which would eventually turn into a train — sometimes with many cars — and he'd ride it off stage at the end.
Originally, the act was called "The Walking Music Shop" but he spent so much of his on-stage time finding stalks of bananas in his pockets that he came to be known as "The Banana Man."
Mr. Robins, who was also a toy and propmaker, performed his unnatural act until around the end of World War II. In the fifties, The Banana Man was a frequent guest on all the live kids' shows of that era (Howdy Doody, Mickey Mouse Club, Captain Kangaroo, etc.) and even on variety shows for adults, including Ed Sullivan's. By this time, the act and its unique props were in the hands of a man named Sam Levine, though he was never billed as anything but The Banana Man. Once in a while, he was even billed as "A. Robins, The Banana Man," even though the first A. Robins — whose real name was Adolph Proper — passed away around 1950.
Among folks who study such matters, there is some argument as to whether someone else (or maybe even several someone elses) performed as The Banana Man after the act's originator sold it off and before Levine assumed the role. In any case, Levine was the guy I saw on all those shows and he was mesmerizing. I couldn't take my eyes off this odd man when he was on TV. Neither could most of my friends, and we all tried to mimic his bizarre, high-pitched humming, sometimes merging it with impressions of Curly Howard. He seems to have retired in the mid-sixties but his haunting song lingers on.
The following clip is introduced by a youthful Red Skelton. It's from a 1939 short film called Seeing Red, and it's one of the few times Robins performed on film...and as I said, it's a very short version of what he did on stage. In fact, he doesn't even get around to producing any bananas. Oddly enough, although Sam Levine did the act on hundreds of TV shows, clips of him are equally hard to come by. I'll link to one tomorrow but for now, here's A. Robins...
I guess I post too often on this site. Lately, whenever there's an eight hour gap between items that is not explainable by the occasional need to sleep, I get e-mails asking if I'm all right and if my mother is all right. We're both fine, thank you. I took her out this morning to do marketing, in fact. Then I went up to speak at The Afternoon of Remembrance, which is an annual event sponsored jointly by The Animation Guild and A.S.I.F.A., honoring everyone in the animation community who's passed away in the previous year. Then I came home and plunged back into a manuscript that needed (and still needs) a lot of my time.
Sporadic postings may be the norm for a while. I appreciate your concern, my friends, but please don't assume anything from a lack of material up here. It could mean I'm in a crisis situation but it more likely means I'm just plain busy, possibly even with something I like doing. That has been known to happen.
Yes, there is video of Julie Andrews making an appearance the other night in the Broadway show, The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. Go here to view it.
The Netflix site has quietly added a new option..."Watch Now." For certain movies, none of which appear to be recent releases, you can click on a button that will stream the film to you over the Internet. You need Windows XP or above (nope, no Mac service at this time) and you need to download their special viewer. You also, of course, need a speedy Internet connection, and the Netflix site will test yours and tell you how it qualifies. The quality of what you receive is way better than YouTube but a bit below watching a real DVD on your computer.
I'm not sure if this is available yet for all subscribers. If it's available to you, you need to go to the "Your Account" page and enable the feature. Right now, this is done by clicking a link that asks, "How can I watch movies instantly on my PC?" From there on, it's pretty simple, though it may upgrade your Windows Media Player in the process and also acquire a new digital license or two. A "watch now" option will then be added to the listings for movies that can be streamed this way, or you can browse the listings of just those films.
When you select a movie for viewing, the Netflix site begins sending it and in most cases, there will be a delay to give the stream a little "head start." I just tried having them send me The Bank Dick with W.C. Fields and as I'm typing this, the viewer is telling me the feature will start in seven minutes. I have a pretty fast Internet connection so you may experience an even greater delay. You can pause the playback but I don't believe you can just shut down, go back later and start where you left off. History suggests it won't be long before someone will be selling a piece of software that will enable you to capture the stream to your harddisk and keep the movie but right now, you can't do that.
The future of home video involves services like this, though it may be a while before a lot of people begin using them. Internet connections will need to be faster and the available films will have to be newer. Both these things will happen, plus it may soon be possible to have the film sent not to your computer but to your TiVo or other comparable device and with DVD quality. (Many cable companies are already offering something comparable.) Right now, the appeal seems as limited as the selections. I suppose if you were in a hotel room with a good Internet connection and you couldn't find anything you wanted to watch on TV, it would be ideal. Certainly, if no X-rated film company has started such a service for porn, there'll be one up and running within the hour.
If you're a Netflix subscriber, you might want to watch at least one movie this way now. You may not enjoy the film but you'll be able to experience the method of delivery that will probably soon lead to the worst strike in the history of the motion picture industry.
The video on this one is a little washed-out but it's watchable. This is a commercial for Funny Face instant drink mixes, which were introduced into the market in 1964, knocking Kool-Aid out of first place in the category of Unhealthy Things A Busy Mom Could Give Her Kids To Drink. I remember swigging the stuff down occasionally at friends' homes but not caring too much for it. Seemed like an awful thing to do to perfectly good water. I also remember one friend practically living off the stuff and being put into utter despair in '69 when the F.D.A. banned cyclamates (a form of artificial sweetener) and therefore, the Funny Face drinks made with it. Funny Face returned to shelves soon after with a different formula but it was never, my friend said, quite the same. Still, somehow, the product lived on into the early eighties.
I don't know when this commercial was done but it was after 1965. The first two years that Funny Face was out, the orange flavor was called Injun Orange and the cherry was Chinese Cherry, both depicted with racially insensitive caricatures. In '66, the orange became Jolly Olly Orange and the cherry became Choo Choo Cherry, and racial harmony was achieved, at least in the fruit community.
At least half of the voices of the characters in this commercial were done by Paul Frees. I think the grocer you see at the end is played by Grady Sutton, a doughfaced character actor who appeared in so many movies of the thirties, forties and fifties. Matter of fact, he was in The Bank Dick with W.C. Fields, which I'm going to mention in the next posting. Here he is in this spot, probably ignoring advice he received from Mr. Fields about never working with children...
Congrats to R.C. Harvey who has posted the 200th edition of "Rants & Raves," a website feature that covers comic books, comic strips, editorial cartoons and other venues where grown men and women draw silly pictures. I've been a subscriber for some time and have always enjoyed his views and reporting. There's some free stuff to be read over at his website but you really oughta subscribe.
About once a month, I check my Spam filter to see if it's caught anything that shouldn't be in there.
I didn't count but it actually looks like I've received more messages in the last few weeks trying to sell me Windows Vista than I have from folks who want me to buy Viagra from them.
When you think about it, they're kind of the same thing.
Showtime is running How To Murder Your Wife, a 1965 movie that Jack Lemmon, it is rumored, very much regretted making. It's kind of an interesting film because it has a good, fun feeling and a lot of great performances. Terry-Thomas is quite splendid as Lemmon's "Man" (i.e., butler-valet) and Eddie Mayehoff, a very underappreciated comic actor, walks off with every scene he's in. Lemmon twinkles, Virna Lisi is stunning, the music is great...and somehow, the whole thing falls apart from a stupid story with a stupider resolution.
Lemmon plays a comic strip artist who's a confirmed bachelor. His art imitates his life and vice-versa so when he accidentally gets married to Lisi, his comic strip character (Bash Brannigan) gets married in the strip. Both creator and creation undergo changes, not necessarily for the better, and the cartoonist finally decides to murder the wife in the comic strip...only this gets confused with murdering his real wife. When the real wife runs away, Lemmon is charged with her murder...and in order to make that part of the story happen, screenwriter George Axelrod and director Richard Quine have to just ignore how the actual judicial system works. For example, it is somehow decided that Lemmon can be charged with First Degree Murder even though there is no physical proof that anyone has been killed, thereby suspending habeas corpus years before anyone had ever heard of Alberto Gonzales.
Lemmon goes to trial — and I'm going to go ahead and blow the ending in the next paragraph because it's so lame, so consider this your SPOILER ALERT...
Lemmon goes to trial and decides that his only chance of not being sent to the electric chair is to (a) confess to a murder that never happened and (b) convince a conveniently all-male jury, in a five minute speech, that murdering your wife is a good thing. I was thirteen years old when I saw this movie and even I was sitting there going, "Come...on!" Easily one of the silliest scenes ever to appear on the screen, and I don't mean that in a good way. The whole film, if you think about it with the slightest bit of logic, is quite ridiculous and it's a testimony to Mr. Lemmon's charm (and Mayehoff and Thomas) that it's still almost worth watching...once.
Cartoonists love it, not for the plot but for the absurd life style of one of their own, and the occasional shots of comic strips and of "Lemmon's" hand drawing them. Obviously, a real artist had to be engaged to do this and when Mr. Lemmon was signed, he told the producers that as a kid, his favorite comic book was a strip called The Sub-Mariner and he wondered if they could get that feature's artist. They tracked down Bill Everett but he was then coping with too many alcohol-related health problems and he reluctantly declined the job.
Instead, they hired the great Alex Toth and his first assignment, which he did, was to whip up several newspaper-style strips that ran in the Hollywood trade papers to announce various signings and the upcoming commencement of filming. Toth was also supposed to "stunt double" Lemmon's drawing hand for some shots in the film until someone noticed a teensy problem: Lemmon was right-handed and Toth was a lefty. Alex also began arguing with the producers over something-or-other (Alex was always arguing over something-or-other) and he walked off the project. His replacement was Mel Keefer, who did all the artwork in the film and played Jack Lemmon's drawing hand.
At least, this is the way Alex told me the story. Mel Keefer told me a slightly different version years ago and we'll be discussing both accounts, along with his extraordinary career as a cartoonist in strips and comic books, when I interview Mel at this year's Comic-Con International in San Diego. He's a Guest of Honor and it's about time.
In the meantime, you might want to watch How to Murder Your Wife on Showtime, February 5, 9, 13 and 16. Each airing is in the middle of the night so the scheduling folks obviously know this is not a cinema classic. They're right.
There's a Broadway show currently playing called The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. As part of each performance, at least one person is summoned out of the audience to become a participant in the on-stage spelling competition and whenever possible, it's a celebrity.
At the January 30 performance, one of the audience members who was dragged up on stage was Julie Andrews, and they gave her a word that she had to spell. The word was "supercalifragilisticexpialidocious." To her eternal shame, she got it wrong.
Wanna get real depressed today? Read the summary of the National Intelligence Estimate, which is titled, "Prospects for Iraq's Stability: A Challenging Road Ahead." Then, if you have a gram of optimism left in your soul, get rid of it by reading the new U.N. Report on Global Warming issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Two more foreboding, troubling documents have never co-existed.
Here's a quick summary of The N.I.E. Report: Things over there are a mess. The Sunnis and the Shiites are killing each other (and our guys) in record numbers. There's no solution, there's no flicker of light at the end of any tunnel...and — oh, by the way — that "surge" thing isn't going to work.
Here's a quick summary of the U.N. Report: Things everywhere are a mess. We must act now but even if we do, glaciers will continue to melt, oceans will continue to rise and there will be disastrous effects everywhere and for everyone.
You can read the N.I.E. paper in PDF form at this link. You can read a summary of the U.N. report, also in PDF form, at this link. And then you can go hide under your bed for the next month or three, hoping they're both wrong. Or at least, that they're making two bad situations sound worse than they are.
A lot of Republicans and Democrats have announced they're running for president, even including some people you've heard of. How many of these people actually think they have even a 1% chance of getting elected? I mean, come on. Mike Huckabee will get as many electoral votes in 2008 as I will.
I'm not even talking about people like Mike Gravel who seem to be running only for Harold Stassen's old position as perennial laughingtock candidate. I mean folks who are actually in or around government like Dennis Kucinich or Tom Vilsack or — over across the aisle — Tom Tancredo or Tommy Thompson. How many of these folks really think they have a shot at going the distance and how many are merely candidates the way Pat Buchanan sometimes is, the way Al Sharpton always is, the way Ralph Nader persists in being?
There's obviously a value to running. Mr. Buchanan, to pick one of them as an example, enhanced his fame and raised public awareness of his causes by running for an office he could never come close to winning. He may even have forced some electable Republicans to pay more attention to his issues or lean a bit in their direction. People who believed in his message donated millions of dollars to Buchanan's candidacy and there were reports that via legal means, he found ways to direct much of the cash into his personal accounts. Even if he didn't, I'll bet running for president raised his fees as a speaker, commentator, author, etc. In short, it was a good career move and I don't believe he ever thought he'd win a single elector, let alone 270. Sharpton obviously doesn't but he runs.
The distinction matters, I think. One of the many moments when Ross Perot seemed to take a solid running start and leap the shark was when, in 1992, he seemed to believe he was not only going to win but that he was going to carry every single state. Near as I can tell, all Perot got out of that run for the White House was a brief moment in the spotlight. He didn't enhance a political career, advance a political cause or increase his income. Many of those who won't win in '08 will achieve one, two or all three to some extent.
We all know they aren't going to win. What I wanna know is how many of them know it?
See those covers above? The issue of Adventure Comics came out in 1939 and the Detective Comics was two years before that. Both covers were drawn by Creig Flessel, a fine gentlemen who is 95 years old today. Congrats and good thoughts to Mr. Flessel.
Here's one more George Carl clip. This one's from The Hollywood Palace and it's his dance routine, which he sometimes did when he wasn't getting himself tangled up in microphone cords. This is from an episode hosted, as you'll see, by Jimmy Durante. It aired on December 10, 1966 and you can view a ticket for its taping over on this page at our sister site, Old TV Tickets.
I stole this one from the weblog of Earl Kress. It's a link to an eBay auction where someone is selling 15,000 toys. You might want to bid. At the very least, you'll enjoy looking at the photos and going, "I used to own one of those...I used to own one of those..."
Fred Kaplan on where we are now with regard to Iraq and Iran. Mr. Kaplan seems to be one of the few people writing about these topics who understands the difference between a Shiite and a Sunni.
Also over on Slate: Jack Shafer claims that despite legend, there were no documented cases of returning Vietnam veterans being spat upon by anti-war protesters. For what it's worth, I was swept up for a time in those protests — working both sides of the street in a way as my viewpoint morphed from supporting to opposing the war. I met people who were passionate, emotional, sometimes even hysterical. I saw folks who would not have hesitated to expectorate on (or do worse to) Nixon, L.B.J., Kissinger and others who directed that war. But I never encountered anyone who had the slightest anger or resentment of the soldiers for serving in it...just as I've yet to see anyone who has anything but compassion and gratitude for those who are now serving in Iraq.
People sometimes ask what I'm working on. Okay, so most of them are people to whom I owe money. The point is that they ask. In a week or so here, I'll announce another project that I have in the works...something involving a comic book artist with the initials "J.K." In the meantime, the folks at Paws, Inc., makers of all things Garfield, today put out the following press-type release...
Paws, Inc. is thrilled to announce that they have entered into an agreement for Dargaud Marina S.A. (Paris, France) to produce and distribute a new fully animated half-hour television series beginning with 26 episodes for the first season.
The series will be produced in the English and French languages, and animated in CGI with 3D tools. The television programming is intended for worldwide distribution.
Mark Evanier will write the series in collaboration with French nationalist writers. Evanier wrote the highly successful Garfield and Friends series. Garfield and Friends started its first season on CBS-TV in 1988. The half-hour program was so popular, it was expanded to one hour for the second season. Garfield and Friends stayed at the top of the ratings chart for Saturday morning shows for 7 years. In fact, the show was the most popular children's program on television in 1993, with an audience that was 40% adult.
The new series will be animated and produced by Ellipsanime, under the direction of Robert Réa, Director General, and Philippe Vidal, creative director.
Paws has worked with Dargaud Editeur S.A., managed by Claude de Saint Vincent, on Garfield books, albums, journals, calendars, etc., for over 24 years.
Before anyone asks: I have no idea where or when you'll be able to see these cartoons. I haven't even written the first one yet. I will be voice directing, as well. Yes, the new voice of Garfield has been selected. No, it is not Bill Murray and no, Garfield will not look look like he does in those movies. He'll look more like he did in his other cartoon appearances. Also, no, I'm not listening to voice demos for non-recurring parts at this time. And you now know almost as much about this show as I do. I'll post more details here if and when there are any.
My activities were interrupted twice yesterday for radio-type interviews on (mostly) other topics. If for any reason you have the burning desire to listen to me babble, here are two places on the 'net where you can do this.
Aaron Barnhart is the TV critic for The Kansas City Star and a special authority on late night talk shows, Mr. Letterman's in particular. He is also the proprietor of TV Barn, a fine site where he offers news and links to TV-related articles, plus he posts podcast interviews and chats that he does with people, most of whom are more impressive guests than me. The latest podcast, which you can listen to or download in MP3 format by clicking here, is 24 minutes of the two of us discussing the significance of David Letterman having achieved 25 years of late night TV programming.
Then later in the day, my friend Earl Kress and I were guests for two hours of Stu's Show, which is heard on this Shokus Internet Radio I keep telling you people about. We spoke of Earl's career, animation history and obscure TV cartoons. This is not a podcast that you can download any time you like. This is a radio-type broadcast where you have to tune in at a specified hour and listen then. That episode reruns every day for the next week: From 4 PM and 6 PM on the West Coast or 7 PM and 9 PM on the East Coast...except on Sunday when the rerun starts at 10 AM out here and Noon back east.
If you live somewhere else, you can probably figure out the local time from this schedule. And you can tune in to Shokus Internet Radio by going to their page and selecting an audio browser. There's plenty of good stuff to listen to over there 24/7.
The other day, I linked to a clip of the master mime/comic George Carl on The Tonight Show. Here in two parts is George Carl on one the Jerry Lewis telethons.
You know, it dawns on me: I think I saw George perform twice, not once like I said, both times at the Stardust. They're tearing the place down in March but even in its mid-to-latter glory days, that was a great place to see him. Why? Because the Stardust was then the last of the major showrooms with a production show and live musicians. They had an actual orchestra — maybe the last of its kind in that town for a show that featured dancers and variety acts. That was important for Carl's act because...well, listen to the drummer here and on the Carson clip from the other day. You couldn't do that with a pre-taped track and the routine would be so much less without that kind of punctuation and accompaniment.
Further thinking back, I seem to recall that Carl was briefly the headliner in a small revue at (I think) the Riviera around or about 1988. It was him and a line of almost-naked dancing ladies and when I saw it advertised, I thought, "Next time I get to Vegas, I have to go see that." But the next time I got to Vegas, I couldn't see it. It had closed, apparently without much notice. I was disappointed at the time but now that I mull it over, maybe it was for the better. Because he was in a tiny showroom and almost certainly working without a live band so it wouldn't have been the same.
Anyway, here's Part One of George Carl, extracting all the poetry there is to be found within total clumsiness...
That's the first part. Here's the second part. And by the way, what the hell am I doing up at this hour? I had a very busy day. I should be in bed.
I wanted to note the passing of three important writers — columnist Molly Ivins, novelist and screenwriter Sidney Sheldon, and TV writer-producer Bob Carroll. All left us in the last few days and I'm sure you can learn all about any or all three with a minmum of Googling.
Of the three, the only one I ever met was Bob. He was a man who wrote many things during his long career, most of which don't get mentioned a lot because we're all too impressed with the fact that he was one of the main writers of I Love Lucy. A credit that impressive tends to suck up all the oxygen in the room, and I think Bob liked the fact that I talked to him about his other projects like The Mothers-In-Law, a sitcom in that "oughta be on DVD" category. It's probably the obvious cliché to say that his work will be rerun and loved forever but it's also probably true.
As for Sidney Sheldon and Molly Ivins: I never made it very far into any of Mr. Sheldon's novels, not even the one with the thinly-disguised portrait of Groucho. But I sure liked The Patty Duke Show and I Dream of Jeannie. And I sure liked Molly Ivins's writing, especially when she was in high outrage about something Texas-related. I have the feeling we'll really miss her, especially throughout the rest of the Bush administration.
March 1, 2007
