Thursday, February 22, 2007

Attention, TiVo Users!

New, lower TiVo service rates. For those of you who didn't have the wisdom to order Lifetime Service back when they used to offer it.

• Posted at 9:18 PM · LINK

Hiyo!

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.

• Posted at 8:22 PM · LINK

Walker Edmiston, R.I.P.

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.

• Posted at 3:46 PM · LINK

Model Criminals

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.

• Posted at 1:38 AM · LINK

Today's Video Link

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.

Stand back. Here it comes...

• Posted at 12:05 AM · LINK