This came out last December but I just now saw it. It's a short but pretty accurate profile of my occasional employer, Sid Krofft, and an announcement about his latest project. The quote from his brother Marty in the next to last paragraph is a great description of Sid.
This website has some pictures of the new venture before it opened. And this site has a report on opening night.
So I've been thinking of getting one of those cellular cards for your laptop that will allow you to access the Internet from everywhere, even when you're nowhere near a T-Mobile Hot Spot. I asked here about them.
I was still thinking about it when I came across an interesting news item. According to this piece in today's L.A. Times, "Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa today pledged to blanket all of Los Angeles with free or very cheap wireless Internet service by 2009." Hmm...maybe I oughta wait and...
Hold on! What am I thinking? What that means is we might (might!) have something that will sorta, kinda work but not well by 2113. Forget I said anything.
And this won't matter to most of you but could they have made a bigger mess of Santa Monica Boulevard between around Wilshire and the 405? I go there now and I feel like I'm driving through a friggin' M.C. Escher print with little roads off to the side that lead to larger but still little roads that you have to get onto and get off of to go anywhere there, except that getting off them means merging back into the big road at points where no one will ever let you in...
Hope they're not putting the guy who designed that in charge of the city-wide Wi-Fi Service. If you think getting on a wireless network is difficult, go down to Santa Monica Blvd. and Ensley and try to get to Johnnie's Pizzeria. That's difficult.
Fred Kaplan explains the agreement that the Bush administration just made with North Korea to roll back its nuclear capability. Rough summary: After years of decrying the pact that Bill Clinton and his representatives negotiated, the Bush folks finally went out and made the same deal.
Judging from that most accurate barometer of the American mood — my e-mail — I'm not the only fan of the obscure comedy team of Olsen and Johnson. Many of you are hankering for their movies to become more legally available on DVD in this country and many of you possess and enjoy bootlegs or imports. Some of you have region-free DVD players and so have ordered the new British release of Hellzapoppin', the cover of which is seen above left. A few of you even own the local, obscure VHS release depicted next to it.
As Joe Dante and others have reminded me, some of their films have more complicated legal situations than the norm because they were based, as least nominally, on their Broadway shows. Often, when studios acquired the underlying rights in the days before TV exhibition, the contracts were for limited periods that expired. That was the thing that kept the Marx Brothers movie, Animal Crackers, unavailable for years. It was based on a play and Paramount had only purchased the rights to the play — or maybe it was to the songs in the play — for a few decades, not in perpetuity. A whole new deal had to be worked out to liberate the film from the estates and the lawyers, which meant that someone had to think there was enough of a demand to make it worth the expense.
In the case of Hellzapoppin', there seems to have been an added complication because of the 1977 stage revival. The legendary producer Alexander Cohen thought Broadway would welcome a new version and purchased the rights to mount one, even though just about all he was purchasing was the title. He then signed the legendary Jerry Lewis to star in it and the result was one of the legendary troubled productions that toured but never made it to the Great White Way. (A "troubled production" is hard to define but when the producer and star are making daily death threats towards one another, you have one.) Anyway, the deal Cohen made apparently kept the film off American TV for some time.
But such details are renegotiated all the time, especially now when there's a buck to be made on home video. Someone's made a deal to put some of the Olsen-Johnson body o' work out in some forms and venues. They can and probably will make one to put out DVDs in the Land of the Free here. One of these days.
I'll link to anything with the great voice actor Daws Butler in it. He was such a wonderful performer and such a wonderful man. I used to have a little late night ritual for whenever I was sitting here at the computer, trying to break away from work and go beddy-bye. This was only for the nights when no lady would be joining me. I'd begin flipping around the TV dial and the rule was that I wouldn't turn in until I'd heard Daws.
I started doing it a few years after he passed away, which was in 1988. At one point, there were three channels that programmed old cartoons, mostly Hanna-Barbera, for much of the night so it rarely took long. I'd catch him playing Huckleberry Hound or Quick Draw McGraw or Elroy Jetson or Mr. Jinks...or sometimes, it would be a Jay Ward cartoon or even something older — from MGM or Warner Brothers. After I heard him for a minute or two, I'd say, "Good night, Daws" and turn off the TV and leave my office and go to sleep.
I couldn't do that when I had a date over. She'd think it was just too weird. I don't know why I'm telling you this. You probably think it's just too weird. But there was something so comforting about his sound. It always reminded me of a good time (when I was a kid watching cartoons and listening to the records he did with Stan Freberg) and a good friend (later, when I got to know him).
This is a commercial in which he plays Snagglepuss. The other voice in there is from his frequent co-star, June Foray, who reminds me of the same two things but is still happily with us.
Daws actually gets a screen credit at the end of these Cocoa Krispies ads...the result of a legal action that Bert Lahr took or perhaps just threatened. Snagglepuss didn't actually sound that much like Lahr. It was one of Daws's many "inspired" voices, meaning that the voice was inspired by a celeb but was not an actual impersonation. Hokey Wolf didn't sound like Phil Silvers. Hokey sounded like what people think Phil Silvers sounded like. Same with Yogi Bear and Art Carney or Peter Potamus and Joe E. Brown or many others. Anyway, some folks apparently thought it was Bert Lahr doing these commercials or Mr. Lahr was afraid they would, so he called a lawyer. I don't know if he got money but Daws got a credit. It was kind of a reverse disclaimer — a way of proclaiming, at least to those who could read fast, that it was not Bert Lahr.
I knew it was not Bert Lahr when I was ten but I guess they had to do that for the grown-ups who didn't know about important stuff...like who was the voice of Snagglepuss. Anyway, here's Snag selling the cereal that then had him on the box. And now that I've heard that voice, I can exit stage left and go to bed. Good night, Daws.
February 14, 2007
