...or at least your phone-dialing finger. Tomorrow morning at 9 AM Pacific Time, the hotel reservation line opens for this year's Comic-Con International in San Diego. You can also reserve online. All the info will be on the convention website.
So how long do we think it'll be before they're officially sold out? 9:15? 9:20? If you don't get in, don't despair. More rooms will become available later. Some of them will be for the 2008 con but there will be more rooms.
Back in 1967, there was a TV show on CBS called Coronet Blue. It starred Frank Converse as a man named Michael Alden. And who was Michael Alden? Well, Michael Alden was...uh...
Well, nobody knew. Not even Michael Alden knew.
Michael Alden was a man with amnesia. One day, he climbed out of the ocean, having either fallen off a pier or a boat, with no memory of who he was or where he was going or anything except for two words that kept coursing through his brain: Coronet Blue. Oh — and he also had some people searching for him, trying to kill him. From that moment forward, he was constantly on the move from episode to episode, trying to avoid his pursuers and simultaneously figure out who he was and what those words meant. This was when The Fugitive was a hit over at ABC and Coronet Blue seemed like a show popped from the same mold. The difference was that on The Fugitive, Richard Kimble was trying to find a one-armed man before someone caught him, whereas Michael Alden was trying to find himself before someone killed him.
Here are the opening titles and the first three or so minutes of one episode of Coronet Blue. This should give you a pretty good idea of what the show was like...
Not too exciting, was it? Maybe that's why the series was cancelled after half a season with the mystery still unresolved. Since no one was really watching, there wasn't a lot of public outcry. (I think TV Guide quizzed a few members of the creative staff and came to the conclusion that hadn't decided yet on who he was or what the mysterious words meant.) My friends discussed it though and I came up with a great theory that Alden must have been a defecting Soviet agent, that "Coronet Blue" was a codename and that the mysterious men tracking him were Russians trying to eliminate a defector. Like all great theories, its greatness was in the fact that nothing would probably ever emerge to prove me wrong.
But as it turns out, I wasn't wrong; not about who he was, at least. Forty years later — which is to say, just the other day — I'm reading the fine blog, TV Squad, and I come upon the following: "In a bio of the show's creator Larry Cohen, Cohen revealed what the words meant and who Michael Alden was." And then they quote him thusly...
When the Brodkin Organization took over the series, they wanted to turn it into an anthology so they played down the amnesia aspect until there was nothing about it at all in the show. It was just Frank Converse wandering from one story to the next with no connective format at all. Anyway, the show ended after seventeen weeks and nobody found out what 'coronet blue' meant. The actual secret is that Converse was not really an American at all. He was a Russian who had been trained to appear like an American and was sent to the U.S. as a spy. He belonged to a spy unit called Coronet Blue. He decided to defect, so the Russians tried to kill him before he can give away the identities of the other Soviet agents. And nobody can really identify him because he doesn't exist as an American. Coronet Blue was actually an outgrowth of "The Traitor" episode of The Defenders.
Just as I thought. I'm so proud of me.
And I guess that's the end of it. I doubt we'll see Coronet Blue on DVD since it would be like publishing the first half of an unfinished mystery novel. It wasn't that wonderful a show, anyway. I think the only reason I watched it was because I was intrigued with the mystery of the premise...which meant that I came to be annoyed that the show didn't seem to be giving up any clues. It's annoying that it took this long for me to get an answer but at least I got one and it feels good to be right about something. I occasionally am, even if it takes forty years for it to happen.
What, if anything, did O.J. Simpson confess to in those never-aired TV interviews to promote that book that wasn't released? This article explains that he didn't confess to anything but in a way he did...
I heard from a couple of folks who recalled chug-a-lugging Funny Face drinks when they were young. I meant to ask them if they had any teeth left.
I was never a fan of Kool-Aid or Funny Face or even of the drink mix that most of the local kid show hosts used to push, a noxious liquid called Sonny Boy. I could tolerate the occasional Flav-R Straw (I wrote about those here) and I actually enjoyed my Fizz-Nik (which I wrote about here). But I didn't like things like Fizzies tablets (written about here) that turned perfectly good water into sweet, artificially-flavored and sweetened nectars.
Oddly enough, as an alleged adult, I've come around to a drink mix, though it's not one with artificial sweeteners in it. Ever since my surgery last May, I've had to find something I could drink besides water. Fruit juices contain more sugar than my body can now tolerate and I won't drink anything with Splenda, Nutrasweet or any of those. (I suspect they're bad for you but that's not even my main reason. My main reason is that I can't stand the taste of any of them.) My body doesn't like milk and the rest of me doesn't like tea, and I'm not supposed to have anything carbonated. So that leaves...
Well, not much. I drink a lot of tomato juice and I've also developed a watery orange drink and a watery lemonade. The watery orange drink is made by diluting down a Knudsen product called Orange Recharge that I buy at the Whole Foods Market. It's one of these sports drinks but it's lower in sugar than most, and I water it down by at least a third. Not a bad little beverage.
For the lemonade, I tried a few and settled on Country Time Lemonade drink mix. You know, the stuff isn't bad, even when I make it my way. I use half of what the directions tell me to use and then I add in a couple of big squirts of Real Lemon lemon juice. The result is a low-in-sugar lemonade that contains some artificial flavoring but no artificial sweetening.
I think someone's missing a bet by not developing a line of low-sugar soft drinks for kids. There seems to be the assumption out there that if you don't like a lot of sugar in your diet, you want zero so you'll go for something with Nutrasweet or Splenda. And if you don't like those, then you want as much sugar as you can get. I think there'd be a market for a middle ground product...and if I owned the old Funny Face trademarks, I'd bring them back with that as the premise. But maybe that's not feasible...and maybe no one owns those characters today. Maybe the whole franchise went bankrupt. I keep thinking that after they kicked Injun Orange off the package, he got his revenge by opening a casino and taking Jolly Olly Orange to the cleaners.
As a sequel to yesterday's video link, we have a clip of Sam Levine performing as The Banana Man. The video isn't very good and again, it's only a small piece of a much longer act...in this case, about five minutes. This is from a live broadcast of Babes in Toyland that NBC did in 1954. Somehow, they worked him into a plot that had nothing to do with a guy coming out and pulling bananas from his pants.
The main thing to notice here is the odd sound of The Banana Man as Levine successfully imitates the lilting voice of A. Robins before him. Several of you have written since yesterday's clip to ask if it could be true that Curly Howard of the Three Stooges got his not-dissimilar stage voice by imitating A. Robins. Beats me. But it's highly probable that when the Stooges worked in vaudeville with Ted Healy, they shared a bill with A. Robins at some point...so make of that what you will.
One of these days, someone's going to turn up a good, clear video of The Banana Man doing his entire act. For now, we have to settle for blurry, abbreviated footage like this...
February 6, 2007
