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 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.
March 1, 2007
