A profile of "That Announcer Guy," Don La Fontaine. One thing these articles never mention is the amazing number of voiceover actors these days who have strived — some with considerable success — to develop a "Don La Fontaine read," meaning that they get hired by someone who wants something like Don La Fontaine but not Don La Fontaine. Sometimes but not always, there's work for these guys from ad agencies and producers who think that the real thing is too expensive. But often, it's a matter of just not wanting to hire Don because they think he's overexposed.
I don't know what to think of this scandal involving the firing of U.S. Attorneys. Well, I do know something: I know that all the principals are acting like mobsters who don't want to get caught giving their versions of what happened for fear that they'll get hung out to dry when others in the mob settle on their versions. There's either an old saying or there should be that mass lies only work when everyone gets together and lies in unison. That may even apply to situations where the lie isn't covering up a crime but is masking something that was technically legal but really, really slimy.
Wasn't it Michael Kinsley who once said that the real scandal of Washington was not what's illegal but what's legal? I sure get the feeling that each succeeding generation of elected officials in this country gets better and better at doing things that should be illegal but, thanks to loopholes and/or sleazy legislation, isn't.
I miss my dear friend, Howard Morris. You all know Howie was a great comedic performer, most famously when he worked with Sid Caesar on his TV shows or as Ernest T. Bass on The Andy Griffith Show. You may also know that he was a terrific cartoon voice actor and you may know that he directed TV shows and movies. You may not know (unless you read it on this site) that he directed an awful lot of the McDonald's commercials in the sixties and seventies, and he was also the voice of a couple of characters in McDonaldland.
Here we have a four minute mini-documentary on the making of one of those commercials. Much of it is an interview with Howie who looks a little uncomfortable and unhappy about it. He was usually a funny, natural presence in front of a camera or in my living room. Still, it's nice to see him again, even this way.
Well, last night, we took Mark Evanier's advise and went to Sweet Tomatoes — known on the West Coast as Souplantation — for their creamy tomato soup. Holy anna, it's fantastic! Honestly, the only soup I've had that's better is the gazpacho at Mean Bean. Unfortunately, this appears to be a periodic, rather than a regular fixture. So you have THREE DAYS to find a Sweet Tomatoes near you and get some of this yummy soup before it vanishes again.
Just to make sure you understand: The Creamy Tomato Soup at Souplantation (and Sweet Tomatoes) is a March special and March is darn near over. Based on my past experiences, I know they sometimes have a soup like this for a little past the end of the month. For instance, I'll bet some outlets have it on Sunday, which is April 1. April 2 is very unlikely since Monday is when these places get in a lot of their new supplies. But it's also entirely possible that tomorrow will be the last day in some places.
So give it a try and if you like it as much as I do, call them and tell them you'd like the Creamy Tomato Soup to be a permanent part of their repertoire. Here's a toll free number you can call and it's supposedly open 24 hours a day so you can call right this minute. Just tell the person that you love the Creamy Tomato Soup and that if they will only have it there all the time, they'll have you there all the time. The person in their Customer Service Department will ask you if you'd like to leave your name and address but that's not necessary. Just calling will do. It also wouldn't hurt to call or tell the manager of your local Souplantation or Sweet Tomatoes restaurant. Together, we can make it happen.
This will only be of interest to people who live in Los Angeles. Currently under consideration is the idea of turning Pico Boulevard and Olympic Boulevards into one-way streets. Olympic would be only westbound whereas Pico would be only eastbound. I drive a lot on both roads and oddly enough, I probably am more likely to be westbound on Olympic and eastbound on Pico...but I still think it's a sucky idea. It may not be quite as sucky as allowing those streets to get even more sucky at rush hour than they already are. That, however, does not make the idea unsucky.
What bothers me is that those streets are actually quite easy to drive on when it's not rush hour. Four or five hours per day, they're rough in some sections to the point where some of us have learned not to be on them then. So we're talking about making it less convenient the rest of the day for everyone in order to make it more convenient during the busiest hours for those who must drive then.
Another question that occurs to me is what kind of parking they're thinking of retaining on these streets. The above-linked article talks about moving some parking meters but perhaps eliminating some to allow for bus lanes going in both directions. There are some areas where eliminating a lot of street parking would cause major hardships. And if they're talking about leaving the street parking but switching directions...well, I'm guessing there are less than a hundred people in Southern California who know how to parallel park on the left hand side of the street. Don't believe me? Just go to Beverly Hills where there are a few such avenues and watch the attempts.
I think they're missing the obvious solution which is to make all the east-west streets westbound and leave them that way. Eventually, the traffic crisis will be Santa Monica's problem and we'll all know not to go to Santa Monica.
See? I have answers to problems. But somehow, they never call on me.
I wish whoever writes these songs for the JibJab guys owned a rhyming dictionary. "Ensued" doesn't rhyme with "boobs" and "news" doesn't rhyme with "food" and "map" doesn't rhyme with "puddy-tat" and you'd think that if they were going to spend the weeks and weeks it must take to animate one of these, they'd lavish the same care on the lyrics. Anywhere, here's their latest...
Several folks have written me to ask about a series over on the Comic Book Bin website in which Philip Schweier is serializing a history of DC Comics. Here's a link to Part One and you can find your way to subsequent parts through that...but I don't recommend you do that. The three parts posted so far have just too many inaccuracies and misleading statements. For example, in Part Three, Schweier writes...
In 1971, Carmine Infantino was named publisher, overseeing the entire line of comics, holding court in matters ranging from animated cartoons to toy production. Seeing a need for a more visual approach to creating comics he named a number of artists — Joe Kubert, Joe Orlando, and Dick Giordano, among others — to assume editorial positions with the company.
Infantino was named publisher in 1971 but that was just a change of title. He'd been overseeing the entire line of comics for several years by then. He named Joe Kubert an editor in 1967 and Joe Orlando in 1968. Dick Giordano began editing in 1969 and was ousted in 1971. Here's another paragraph...
Under Infantino’s leadership, new titles were introduced, such as Tarzan and The Shadow. However, whatever financial success they may have enjoyed was offset by licensing fees. Another financial leak came in the form of rising freelance fees. To reduce the impact, the company chose to send work to the Philipines to be drawn.
The financial problem with Tarzan and The Shadow was not licensing fees, which were rather modest, was that those books didn't sell very well. Neither did a lot of non-licensed books of the period which were also cancelled. With the licensed books, the problem was not that the company had to pay fees but that they didn't share in any licensing of those characters. It's not so bad to lose money publishing Wonder Woman when you're taking in money from Wonder Woman toys...but DC received no part of the merchandising cash from Tarzan. Also, the Filipino artists were cheaper but their employment had nothing to do with rising freelance fees since DC didn't raise those fees much, if at all, during this period. Matter of fact, this was a way of trying to cut them for everyone, using the Filipino contingent as a threat.
I haven't the time or inclination to go through the whole series but there's an awful lot that's like the above. Sorry to say.
Here we have an interview with Al Feldstein, the man behind E.C. Comics and Mad Magazine. As I usually say when I interview Al — which I seem to do at half the conventions I attend — if he'd just done Tales from the Crypt and Weird Science and quit there, we would still be hailing him as a legend of the comic book. That he also took over Mad and ramped it up into the best-selling humor magazine in the history of Mankind is kind of an added bonus.
You know those bills in Congress that link continued funding of the Iraq War to troop withdrawals? Well, if we believe Fred Kaplan, they wouldn't do exactly what most people think they would do.
Here's another old burlesque sketch as performed (and cleaned up a little) by Abbott and Costello. The guy in the straw hat is another old burlesque comic, Sid Fields, who appeared with them on their TV shows and sometimes in live appearances. In fact, this clip is from one of their TV shows.
We're busy tonight...too busy to answer the 7,732 e-mails I've received reminding me that contrary to the previous item I posted, April Fool's Day is Monday. I could say I posted that intentionally as a kind of early trick but you're all too smart to believe that.
I've received some interesting e-mails from folks reminiscing about playing Mystery Date, and also some discussing the reason why Milton Bradley didn't bother issuing a male version of the same game. I'll post some of these messages and my responses when I get a little more time.
A story before I go. You know how when you're in a market, there's often a shopping cart near the front full of all sorts of miscellaneous items? In some stores, they call it the Returns Cart. At the checkout counters, shoppers sometimes change their minds about some purchase and abandon the item before it's time to pay for their purchases. The employees toss all those into the Returns Cart and every so often, someone goes around and puts the items back in their proper places on the shelves.
So today I'm in a market and I want to buy some Wheat Thins. You all know Wheat Thins. Well, the shelf is bare...no Wheat Thins. I shrug, complete my other selections and head for the checker. On the way, I pass what is obviously a Returns Cart sitting unattended — a cart overflowing with miscellaneous items, among which are several boxes of Wheat Thins. I grab one, add it to my cart and go through the line.
I pay and the checker is bagging my purchases when I turn and notice a lady behind me in line, unloading the cart from which I got the Wheat Thins I just bought. It was not a Returns Cart. It was her cart...but if you'd seen the willy-nilly aggregation of items, you'd have understood why I made that mistake.
It's probably a good time to say nothing and leave but for some reason, I explain to her what happened. She says, accusingly, "You stole my Wheat Thins?" As she says this, she's unloading her cart onto the conveyor belt and I now see that her cart contains nine boxes of Wheat Thins. She wanted ten, I guess, which is why the shelf was bare.
I say, "Well, they really aren't yours until you pay for them. But I made a mistake so here, take them. On me." I try to hand her the box of misappropriated Wheat Thins.
She shoves them back at me like I've just offered her a dead pussycat. "I don't want your Wheat Thins," she says. "I want my Wheat Thins."
I put my Wheat Thins back in my cart and begin to push said cart out of the store. Behind me, I hear the lady telling people, "That man stole my Wheat Thins!"
And I hear the checker say, "If it had been me, I'd have taken your purse."
Didja hear me and my pal Earl today on Shokus Internet Radio? Never mind us. Did you hear Doug Young, our super-secret surprise guest? Doug was, of course, one of the mainstays of Hanna-Barbera cartoon voicing in the late fifties and early sixties, and his performance as Doggie Daddy, beloved pa of Augie Doggie, is still one of my all-time favorite bits of animation voice acting. He was doing a voice not unlike Jimmie Durante but, as my co-guest Earl Kress remarked today on the show, it was a Durante with great warmth and charm. Those H-B cartoons didn't have a lot going for them in the animation department so the joys, if any, had to come primarily from the scripts and voice work. The scripts were by the great Michael Maltese and with Daws Butler as Augie and Doug as Augie's Dear Old Dad, the material couldn't have been in better hands.
Doug did other voices for H-B, including that of Hokey Wolf's sidekick, Dingaling. We chatted with him around the top of the second hour of Stu's Show...and that show reruns once a day for the next week on Shokus Internet Radio. We also discussed why some shows are or are not available on DVD, working with Jay Ward, the history of Total Television and Filmation...and not that many other topics. The two hours raced by like Speedy Gonzales after a bad burrito.
Want to hear the replay? Go to the schedule here, adjust it to correspond to your time zone and then look for the episode of Stu's Show with us. Most of the next seven days, it repeats from 4 PM to 6 PM Pacific Time. I'm sorry there's no way to just go there and download it but that's not how Internet Radio works. To hear us, you have to log in to Shokus Internet Radio at the proper time, which you can do on this page.
We had a good time chatting with our host Stuart Shotak and with our phone-in surprise guest, Doug Young. It was also nice to hear from several of you who called in during the program. There's actually a lot of fun stuff on Shokus Internet Radio so you might want to give a listen even when I'm not on. Next week, for instance, Stu is welcoming game show host Jack Narz to the program. I'll be listening to that one.
This is your final notice. Evanier and Kress. Stu's Show. Shokus Internet Radio. Today from 4 PM to 6 PM West Coast Time. Answering questions. Taking your calls. Talking all about cartoons. With a special surprise guest from the world of cartoon voicing. Listen by going to this site and selecting the Internet browser of your choice.
Here's one of those commercials I saw so often as a kid that I could sing the tune in my sleep. It's for the Milton Bradley game, Mystery Date. I never played it — it was a "girl" game, obviously — but I gather it was some sort of card game where the young ladies would try to match up points and if you won, you "won" a theoretical blind date with a guy whose photo would then be revealed. He might be a dreamboat or he might be the slob and if you got a night on the town with the latter, the other players could then mock you and be glad it wasn't them. Someplace in there was a terrible, cautionary lesson for young women about something.
I think it's also amusing that the photo of the horrible date is not of a guy who's obese and wild-eyed and holding a live chicken. It's a picture of the same kind of handsome male model, only not dressed well. It's like in the romance comics where you had these stories of the two young ladies: One is viewed as gorgeous and the guys are mud-wrestling to see who'll get to ask her out. The other is so homely that she couldn't get a date if she owned the company that made ketchup. And the two women, of course, look pretty much the same except that the unattractive one is wearing glasses.
Apparently, whatever company now owns Milton Bradley (is it Hasbro?) has recently tried selling an updated version of this game that includes a toy cellphone with recorded calls from the Mystery Dates. I think it oughta come with a little cardboard Chris Hansen who surprises the Mystery Date on Dateline NBC and gets him arrested as a sexual predator.
This article asks the eternal question, "When will the Disney people agree to put Song of the South out on DVD?" What I keep hearing from within that curious organization is that everyone who has to agree has agreed that it will cause little or no problem to put out that fine film but that they keep kicking it down the road a little farther. It's one thing to decide to do something and another to actually commit to a date and do it.
One does get the feeling that the idea is to float a few pieces in the press like this one to gauge any possible negative reaction. In the past, I'm told, there really hasn't been any. It gets into the media that Disney may soon release Song of the South and no one complains or speaks of dressing up like Tar Babies and picketing The Magic Kingdom or anything. If there are none to this latest round of rumors, they'll probably start talking seriously about a release schedule. And once they have one, they'll start talking about actually following through on it. And once they decide to actually follow through on it, they'll schedule a whole bunch of meetings to decide what kind of special treatment will be necessary. And at some point — and maybe sooner than all this suggests — they'll actually do it...and no one will be upset except for someone, somewhere who'll see it as a good opportunity to get a lot of personal publicity.
Thanks to Ray Arthur for calling my attention to this news item, and to others for which I haven't thanked him.
I found this via the fine website of radio kingpin Paul Harris. It's a list someone compiled of performers who've been "banned" from appearing on Saturday Night Live ever again.
I put the word "banned" in quotes because I don't think that's the right word when what's really at work here is that Lorne Michaels says, "Let's not have that person on again." He probably says that — or would, if asked about certain folks — about a lot of performers because they didn't particularly impress him as outstanding or (more often) because their careers have simply cooled. Most guest hosts and musical guests don't do the show more than once. I mean, Louise Lasser is on the list because the episode she hosted was famously a disaster due to some personal problems she was having that week. But even if she'd been ultra-professional and the show had come out fine, she probably would never have been on the show again. For that matter, when was the last time you saw Louise Lasser on anything?
There have been plenty of performers who were great on SNL who stand as much chance of being on again as does Ms. Lasser. They aren't asking George Carlin, Robert Klein or Candace Bergen to host again, either...and won't unless those people suddenly become somewhat younger and the stars of a current hit movie.
More correctly, this is a list of known cases where there was some friction or perceived misbehavior that supersedes any assessment of the performer's future worth as a contributor to the entertainment content of the program. Also notable are the cases where a segment of a show is being withheld from reruns because of what someone did. It's an interesting list but it should be called something like "Performers Who Pissed Off Lorne Michaels."
I'm more than a wee bit interested in the soon-to-be-released Richard Gere movie, The Hoax, which is the story of Clifford Irving and his infamous bogus Howard Hughes autobiography. Just before he went to prison for the crime, Irving wrote a book which purported to be the true account of his crime. Since his crime was passing off a fake book as legit, a lot of people were skeptical that the "true account" was true. If you read it, it sure felt honest...self-serving in many ways perhaps, but honest. Other sources suggested Irving's confession wasn't much more accurate than his phony book. As an outside observer weighing it all, I tended to think Irving was probably closer to candid than his detractors wanted to admit...which isn't to say he didn't spin at every possible opportunity to minimize his less admirable actions.
I read almost everything I could find about Irving and Hughes, individually and collectively, and for a time tried to convince a couple of motion picture producers to option the Irving confession book and pay me to adapt it into a screenplay. Before the film Melvin and Howard came out, all I heard was "Hughes is dead...no one's interested in him." After that movie came out and did rather well, what I heard was, "Melvin and Howard exhausted the market for a film about Hughes." As we all know, once someone puts out a successful film, no one in Hollywood would ever think of making something in the same vein.
Advance reports on the Gere movie (like this one) make it sound like great liberties have been taken with the truth. If that's so, I'm curious as to why...because the true story — or at least the version Irving told in his tell-all — struck me as eminently filmable without embellishment or alteration. Just looking at the plot points that are beyond dispute, you have a pretty fascinating tale that's all the more compelling because you sit there realizing, "This actually happened! And this and this!" Over on Irving's website, he's posted this statement which basically says he hasn't seen the film but already doubts its accuracy. People may suspect this dispute is all a way to gin up interest in the film but I doubt it. For one thing, I think this is the kind of story that's only of interest if you believe it hasn't been exaggerated or faked in any way. It would be like knowing a TV magic show contained camera trickery.
This might be a good spot to stop and embed the trailer for the movie. It's three minutes...
You can find out a little more about it at the website for the film. Also, elsewhere on Clifford Irving's site, you can download and read for free, a few chapters from the bogus Autobiography of Howard Hughes. You can also download on the honor system (on your honor to send him money) a copy of the whole book.
Irving notes that the hardcover edition of The Autobiography of Howard Hughes, which came out in 1999, is now rare and sells through some dealers for $160. I bought it when it first came out for about a tenth of that and frankly didn't find it as interesting as his account of how he and co-conspirator Richard Suskind flim-flammed the publisher with it. I also found myself wondering how so many people had believed it was real...but then again, I knew it was a fraud before I read it. I'd like to think I wouldn't have been fooled but of course, that's easy to say.
The "confession" book was originally called What Really Happened and was later reissued (with a few deletions) as The Hoax. It's now out again in a new paperback edition with a photo cover of Richard Gere from the movie. You can order it from Amazon here. I don't guarantee its veracity but it's a pretty easy, engrossing read. I hope the movie's that enjoyable.
This is to remind you once more that tomorrow, my pal Earl Kress and I will be back on Stu's Show, the keystone program on Shokus Internet Radio, which is part of the vast Live365 network. We'll be blabbing about TV animation for two hours, beginning at 4 PM Pacific Time. The show is live and you can call in and ask questions or you can call in and answer host Stuart Shostak's trivia questions. Or you can just listen to us yak.
But now here's the big announcement! We'll have a special, surprise guest on the program. Who is it? Earl and I are keeping it a secret and not just from you. We haven't even told Stu yet who it is...and we won't until after we're on the air. He loves game shows. We're going to make him guess who it is.
Our surprise guest, who'll be joining us via phone for a little while, is a great cartoon voice performer. Way back in the late fifties and on into the early sixties, this person did voices on a number of classic cartoon shows that you've probably heard. In fact, one of my all-time favorite cartoon characters was voiced by this person. What's more, this is a voice performer who to my knowledge has never been interviewed about those days in any public forum, so this will be a "first."
You can listen to the show tomorrow afternoon by going to this website and selecting an audio browser. (Note: If you log in just before the show starts at 4PM Pacific, there's a slight chance that you'll get bumped off when the show starts. If that happens, just log right back in and it shouldn't happen again. There's some sort of glitch in the Live365 software that occasionally does that when a station switches from pre-recorded programming to live.)
Hope you'll tune in. If you love old TV cartoons, you'll very much enjoy "meeting" our surprise guest star.
This Thursday evening — and again, early next Monday morning — Turner Classic Movies is running They Shoot Horses, Don't They? This was the 1969 feature directed by Sydney Pollack and starring Jane Fonda, Michael Sarrazin and Gig Young in a downer tale about old time marathon dances. Depressing? No more than watching small, helpless animals die. But the film was oddly entertaining in its way.
I saw it twice when it first came out, both times at the Picwood Theater in West Los Angeles. The first viewing was with a bunch of guys I knew, one of whom I discovered that afternoon had a dread fear of the cinema device known as the Flash Forward. He believed that films should be structured in a linear, chronological manner with one event after another. He could occasionally tolerate a flashback because, after all, in real life we sometimes talk about things that occurred in the past. But we do not have a clear glimpse of the future and this fellow hated it when a movie did.
They Shoot Horses contains a couple of Flash Forwards. When the first one came on the screen, we all felt our friend freeze and shudder. Softly, we could all hear him mutter, "Oh, dear God...no. Not Flash Forwards!" The second time, he rocked in his seat as if slammed in the face and after that, he sat there whimpering until the next one. When the third Flash Forward occurred, that was all he could take. He jumped to his feet and screamed out, "No, no! Not Flash Forwards! NOT FLASH FORWARDS!!!" And he began squeezing past everyone's feet, trying to get to the aisle with the same urgency as if the theater was ablaze. Everyone told him to shut the hell up but there was no stopping the guy. In fact, he couldn't understand how the rest of us were sitting there so peacefully, pretending to be enjoying a movie that contained the unspeakable horror of Flash Forwards.
When he reached the aisle, he sprinted up and out of the theater. Being true friends, we decided to just forget about him and enjoy the film, which we did. After it was over, we found him sitting in the lobby with half a box of Milk Duds, still shivering and murmuring to himself, "Flash Forwards...brrr..."
A few days later, walking in Westwood, I ran into a young lady I'd known casually in high school and lusted after from afar. This was early 1970, as I recall...seven months or so after we'd both graduated and gone our separate ways. We got to talking and as I attempted to angle the conversation around to the topic of perhaps dating, she noticed a bus go by with an ad on it for They Shoot Horses, Don't They? Unknowingly making my job easy, she said, "You know, I really want to see that movie. Have you seen it?" I said no — not the biggest lie a male ever told a female, but a lie nonetheless. When I suggested we view it together the following Saturday evening, she agreed and even offered to drive since I didn't. (I started to ask her, "You aren't bothered by Flash Forwards, are you?" but didn't just in case she was and that would cause her to cancel.)
As dates went it was among the worst of my life, starting with the moment she picked me up and I asked her how she was feeling. She began a non-stop monologue about how she hated her mother, loathed her father, wanted to see her brothers and sisters all killed in a fiery car crash, thought her boss at work should be in prison, was deep in debt, hadn't slept in weeks, thought all men were evil and was experiencing menstrual problems that were agonizing to her and everyone around her. This went on all the way to dinner, throughout the meal and up until the moment the movie began. The graphic descriptions of her cramps and bleeding were expertly timed to coincide with the arrival of our entrees at the restaurant. I didn't eat a lot.
Finally, we made it to the Picwood and They Shoot Horses, Don't They? The people exiting from the previous showing looked depressed because, well, the film just had that effect on the normal person. Having listened to Sunshine Sally for the previous hour and a half, I was thoroughly dejected on the way in and I recall thinking, "Boy, I'm really going to be cheery by the time this is over." But an odd thing happened when the movie started. My lady friend loved it. The cynicism and pessimism didn't bother her one bit...and neither did the Flash Forwards. She just sat there, enjoying the hell out of the movie. The more miserable the people were on the screen, the more she liked it. In the first scene where one of the main characters dies (I won't tell you which one in case you haven't seen it), she had a big grin on her face and she emitted a small but audible cheer. The worse things got for the people on the screen, the more she liked it.
I was so amazed at my date's reaction that I hardly watched the film at all. At the end, she was happier than when she'd gone in and I had to ask her why. The answer was along the lines of, "It cheers me up to see people whose lives are so much worse off than mine." She told me that sometimes, she liked to page through the newspaper, savoring all the stories about people who'd died in horrible accidents. I guess I can understand that...but not really. This was not exactly schadenfreude. It was some sort of even more perverse enjoyment of the misery of others.
After that, she drove me home, parking a few doors away so, I guess, we could engage in a bit of physical contact without the chance that my parents would look out the window and see us. I think that's what she had in mind but for the only time in my adolescent life, I wasn't interested in any of that. I didn't know if she'd have a bad time if she liked it or a good time if she didn't. Matter of fact, I felt like I needed to end that date a.s.a.p. and did. There was no second date.
I haven't seen They Shoot Horses, Don't They? since then. I've set my TiVo and I'm going to watch it in the next week or so, but first I'm going to try to get myself in the same frame of mind as that lady. She obviously enjoyed it a lot more than I did. You will too if you watch it from her point of view. Especially if you don't mind Flash Forwards.
This is the finale from the revival of A Chorus Line currently playing on Broadway.
It seems like a pretty good performance of the number but I dunno...I'm planning my next New York trip at the moment and deciding what I want to see. Somehow, A Chorus Line ain't making my list. I liked the show the first time I saw it...and the second time and the third time. Around the fifth, it started to feel like a parody of itself...and of course, the movie version ruined it further. So I can't summon up the interest just now, though I will admit this is a pretty snazzy version of the closing song...
Various comic book news sites (Newsarama, for example) are reporting that artist Marshall Rogers has passed away — at the age of 57 from as-yet unknown causes. I have nothing to add to what is being posted elsewhere. Condolences to his friends and family.
I've been telling you people about the Monster Crows that I've been seeing in my area lately. Some of those birds must be three or four hundred pounds and every so often, I see them cracking open a Mazda the same way normal-sized birds break into peanuts. Here, thanks to my pal Dana Gabbard, is an article about the crows. It doesn't mention anything about how huge they're getting but I understand that's because no one wants to alarm the population.
The L.A. Times has a report on last Saturday's memorial service for Richard Jeni. I almost attended this but I'm on a deadline and had to choose between this one or the Sunday memorial for Ron Carey.
At the Carey memorial, a couple of folks were talking about the Jeni memorial, complaining that at least one speaker treated the event like an Open Mike audition of his stand-up act. That is (sadly) a not-uncommon occurrence at show biz memorial services. There always seems to be at least one person at the lectern who forgets about the deceased and talks at length about themselves. As you might expect, it's never the Biggies who do this. It's the folks for whom it's a rare treat to be in front of an audience...especially an audience that contains someone who might give them a big career break. You wish someone would tell them that no one has ever been "discovered" at a funeral.
Someone else was saying the true tragedy of Richard Jeni is that death-by-depression is always curable. I don't think that's so, even with properly administered medication. I'm thinking now of a couple of acquaintances who took their own lives...but those lives were in such disrepair that being depressed was perfectly understandable and maybe even not the least of their problems. The sad, stunning thing about Jeni is that apparently his life wasn't in bad shape. One reader of this site wrote me to suggest that Jeni had cause for gloom; that he wasn't as successful as a Leno or Letterman or Seinfeld and that most of his upcoming bookings were at grindhouse comedy clubs in hick towns. I don't think that's a true picture...and even it was, the man had still attained a stature that most comedians would envy. Based on the success of his recent cable specials, he certainly had offers and opportunities for even better things.
Still, you never know quite what others want out of their lives. I certainly know people who've set impossible goals for themselves, almost to the extent of ensuring their own inability to reach them. Was Jeni that kind of guy? I have no idea and the folks who knew him well don't seem to, either. I suspect that's why a lot of them went to that memorial service...to see if they could get a clue or two towards solving that riddle.
At the end of every episode of the old game show, What's My Line?, there was the famous Mystery Guest segment for which the panel would don blindfolds and attempt to guess the identity of some celebrity. Over the years, hundreds of stars from the world of show business and sports signed in, then attempted to disguise their famous voices while answering the panelists' questions.
The big achievement, of course, was that the show managed to get someone every week. It was done live for most of its existence so it was not possible to delay if someone didn't show or showed up late or even showed up drunk. The producers were quite prepared for this to happen and they had two emergency plans if they were suddenly caught without a Mystery Guest at the crucial moment. One was for the show's Executive Producers, Mark Goodson and Bill Todman, to go on as Mystery Guests. The other was for the show's host, John Daly, to pretend to be a Mystery Guest.
In the show's eighteen year history, they came close a number of times to using the first of these fallback plans. At least twice, Goodson and Todman were backstage, waiting to "enter and sign in, please" when the actual Mystery Guest made a last second appearance. (Goodson and Todman did go on as Mystery Guests a couple of times for anniversary episodes but these were planned, not because someone hadn't shown up.) The idea of Daly as Mystery Guest occurred to a lot of people over the years and it was constantly suggested to the program staff. They agreed it would be funny but wanted to save it for the night when it might be needed.
When it came time to select a Mystery Guest for the final broadcast on September 3, 1967, someone realized there was no point in saving the idea for the future. The show had no future. It was also, obviously, appropriate for the last show. So Daly pretended to be a Mystery Guest, attempting to stump a panel that consisted of Martin Gabel, Arlene Francis, Steve Allen and Bennett Cerf. Let's see how he did...
So about forty minutes ago, I'm in my friendly neighborhood CVS Pharmacy and a lady shopper comes up to me. She says her "favorite actor in the whole world" is over in the next aisle...and I guess she's so excited about it that she has to tell someone. So she tells me and naturally, I ask, "And who might that be?"
She says, "John Candy," and my immediate thought is just what yours would be in this situation: "I don't think so." As I'm thinking that, she's telling me how much she loved him in Planes, Trains and Automobiles.
Let's leave aside the question of how someone could be your "favorite actor in the whole world" and yet you're unaware they died thirteen years ago. Let's just focus on what I should do. Should I tell this young woman (she's about forty, I'd guess) that she didn't just spot John Candy in the Toothpaste Section, across from where they sell the Just For Men hair color? Or should I let her keep her little fantasy of having seen her fave in person? She'll probably find out one of these days...but is it my business to shatter her happiness?
Just then, she points to a gap in the aisles and says, "There he is," and I can see the person she thinks is John Candy. There, wearing a green t-shirt and shorts, is Andy Richter. "Do you think it would be okay if I went up to him and asked for an autograph?" she asks me.
I think to myself, "Hmm...I wonder if Andy Richter would enjoy being mistaken for John Candy. He might get a great anecdote out of it, one he could tell on his next talk show appearance. Or he might just feel insulted...I don't know." I decide to save the lady the embarrassment and I break it to her, as kindly as I can, that John Candy passed away some time ago.
She asks me, "Are you sure?"
I tell her I'm sure.
She turns and walks off, looking very sad indeed. I don't know if she's sad just because her "favorite actor in the whole world" is dead or if she's sad because she feels humiliated by her mistake. Either way, it sure doesn't feel like I've done this woman a favor. I should have let her go up and tell Andy Richter how good he was in Planes, Trains and Automobiles. If he was insulted, too bad. He could handle it.
Here we see the cast of a great TV show named Barney Miller. The short guy in the center is Ron Carey who, as noted here, passed away in mid-January.
This afternoon, a bunch of his friends — and he had many — gathered at the Improv in Hollywood for a lovely memorial service. Among those who spoke were the two men on either side of him in the photo, Max Gail and Steve Landesberg. We also heard from Mel Brooks and from the team of Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara, and others, plus there was a lovely tribute video edited by Chuck McCann.
(Forgive the abrupt change of topic but I seemed to have picked up Billy Connolly's disdain for sticking with a topic. People keep asking me about this. There are two Chuck McCanns in show business. There's the Chuck McCann who got famous hosting a kid's show in New York and who's now a busy character actor and cartoon voice actor and one of my best pals. There's also the Chuck McCann who's a film editor, whose credit you'll see on most of the Charlie Brown cartoons, among other places. Those are totally separate Chuck McCanns...but just to confuse you, the film I'm describing was edited by Chuck McCann the Actor. Back to Ron...)
The afternoon went long, as these things so often do. At the end of it, Anne Meara yelled out, "When we got here, I was still menstruating!" Everyone recalled Ron as a lovely, friendly guy who never missed a chance to help his friends and even some total strangers. Many recalled that before he was a successful character actor, Ron had quite a career as a stand-up comedian. Emcee Budd Friedman, who operates the Improv, remarked, "The thing about Ron — and I remember this with a lump in my throat — is that he was the first comedian I had to pay." That alone assures the guy his immortality.
We pause now for a commercial...two of them, in fact. Both are for Kellogg's Corn Flakes and feature Cornelius, the rooster who for many years has been intermittently seen on boxes of the cereal. Kellogg's tried a couple of times to use Corny as a commercial spokescritter but he never quite caught on as a real character. For this series of spots, his voice was done by the legendary western actor, Andy Devine. For a time before that, Mr. Devine was associated with Kellogg's Corn Pops, doing their commercials and appearing on the box.
I don't know who the little kid is in these commercials, though he looks a little like Brandon Cruz, who starred with Bill Bixby in the seventies sitcom, The Courtship of Eddie's Father. Whoever he is, his voice in these spots has been dubbed by Dick Beals, whom we mention often in this weblog as we speak of old commercials and cartoons. In the second of the two ads, we have Paul Frees voicing a supporting character. I think Hanna-Barbera did the animation in both. Here they are...
Yesterday, the House okayed a bill that would provide funds to continue the war in Iraq but with a mandatory timetable for withdrawal. I have no idea if that's a good idea or even if the representatives who voted for it all think it's a good idea. My omnipresent cynicism suspects the more immediate goal may be to force Bush to veto the bill, thereby taking even more responsibility for the war.
That was my suspicion when they passed it. I thought it was Political Theater, even though that precise term didn't pass through my noggin at the time they did it. I picked it up a little later when George W. Bush appeared in front of a microphone and accused the Democrats in Congress — though oddly not the three Republicans who voted for it and gave it a scintilla of non-partisan veneer — of "Political Theater."
And I thought, "Hey, he's right." If Bush knows about anything, it's Political Theater. In fact, he made this pronouncement from a lectern, flanked by members of the Armed Forces in uniform. Why were they there? They were props in a display of Political Theater staged to denounce someone else's Political Theater.
I think both sides are more interested in scoring points with voters than in doing what's right for our country and our soldiers. If the Democrats were primarily interested in doing the right thing, the bill wouldn't have been loaded down with irrelevant spending, thereby muddying its purpose and giving a few swing votes a chance to oppose it and claim they did so because of the pork. And if Bush were primarily interested in doing the right thing, he'd stop using our troops as window dressing and engage Congress on a bi-partisan basis...and I don't mean "bi-partisan" the way he always does, which is to demand they give in to him on everything.
The sense I get after following all the back-and-forth is that if we pull out of Iraq now or even soon, an awful lot of people are going to die...and if we stay there, an awful lot of people are going to die. And whichever way we go, we're going to have to listen to the side that didn't get their way blame all the deaths that occur on the side that did. So at the moment, it comes down to deciding which of two bad alternatives will do less damage and destruction. I'm not sure I trust either side to make that decision on the proper basis. Not as long as they're more interested in engaging in Political Theater.
Following a sumptious repast at the Souplantation, my friend Carolyn and I went to see one of the funniest men on this planet, Billy Connolly. It was his closing night of a brief stand at the Brentwood Theater in Westwood and the place was packed with celebrities. If Billy hadn't shown up for some reason, half the folks in the audience — which included John Lithgow, Eddie Izzard and Ricky Jay — were probably qualified to get up on stage and perform in his stead.
Fortunately, Mr. Connolly was there. He came out around 8:05 and talked until about 10:20, careening madly from topic to topic with A.D.D. delivery. He'd start Anecdote #1 and stop halfway through to discourse on the completely unrelated Topic A. This would remind him of Anecdote #2 which he'd start and get most of the way through before he was suddenly reminded of Anecdote #3, whereupon he'd stop #2 (which he never would finish) and tell #3, then rattle on for a while about Topic B, then go back and finish Anecdote #1, which would lead into Anecdote #4 and Topics C, D and E, interrupted by additional thoughts on A. By halfway through, people were not only howling at the anecdotes and topics, they were laughing at the sheer speed with which he jumped from one to another.
It's difficult to tell you what all he talked about. He discussed Los Angeles and weird people in his native Scotland. He told a story about a dwarf on a bus and another one about a dog howling on a movie set. He discussed drug use, his career as a musician, a couple of cars he used to own, religion, obnoxious people, women who vomited on him and a great many other issues of vital concern. What he talked about didn't matter a whole heap. It was just enormous fun being with him for that spell of time.
I don't know where he's appearing next but if it's anywhere near you, get a ticket. And if you can stop at the Souplantation on the way there and have the Creamy Tomato Soup, so much the better. A great evening.
Over on the BBC website, there's an article about Stan Lee that may set some sort of record for the most errors ever in an article about someone in the comic book industry. They don't even get his birth name right, which you can do with about ten seconds of Googling.
If you know about comic book history, take a look but treat it as one of those "How many mistakes can you find in this picture?" exercises. If you don't know about comic book history, don't click. No wonder the author didn't take a byline.
This coming Wednesday, I'll be back on Shokus Internet Radio along with my friend, Earl Kress, to discuss great cartoons of the past. We once again will be the live guests on Stu's Show, hosted by the vivacious Stuart Shostak. We'll be taking your calls, answering questions, talking animation...fun stuff like that. It all happens for two hours commencing at 4 PM Left Coast Time, and make a note because I'll only be reminding you thirty or forty times between now and then. You can listen up via this here website.
Hey, this might interest someone. If you have a Series 2 or 3 TiVo and it's hooked up to an Internet connection and you have a V.I.P. account with Live365 radio, you can listen to us (or anything on Shokus Internet Radio) through your TV. I've actually done this. The V.I.P. account costs six bucks a month and allows you to listen to hundreds of different stations with the best audio quality and without waiting. Once you have one, you need to add Shokus Internet Radio to your presets and then go to your TiVo's Live365 page (it's under "Music, Photos & More") and log in to your Live365 account there. Once you do, Stu's channel will come streaming through your TV speakers. Try it if you don't believe me. Only then will you learn the folly of not believing me.
An actress friend of mine once described to me a nightmare that sounded very much like what you'll see in this short (four minute) clip. It's from some TV show and there's a singer — I don't know her name — singing one of Stephen Sondheim's most famous songs...with Stephen Sondheim sitting there to critique and correct her. It's fascinating to hear his comments...which do not include the fact that this singer, though obviously quite talented, is way too young to be singing this particular tune at all.
Quite a few people sent me e-mails on the topic of why they don't like Google or why someone else might not like Google. This message from Nat Gertler covers most of the points made by others...
Google censors search results in China at the behest of their government.
Google infringes heavily on copyrights, in projects like their digitization of libraries and on their video sites (Google Video and now YouTube). They're facing lawsuits from publishers and film and TV companies over that.
Until a recently-announced policy change, they kept track of your searches and other actions forever, which is of great concern to privacy advocates. On the other end of things, they were reluctant to share information about searches with the government for the feds to build their case defending some Internet porn legislation (which recently got defeated in court.)
I imagine that someone who is actually anti-Google will have a longer list of concerns. I'm generally pro-Google, although I do think they are sadly cavalier with other people's copyrights.
No idea on Johnson & Johnson.
Okay, those are pretty good reasons. And a few other folks suggested bad experiences when the Google Toolbar or Desktop was installed on their computers by some piece of software and wasn't easy to remove. I guess that could all lead to 6% of the population having a negative view of Google.
In the case of Johnson & Johnson, no one had any suggestions but I thought of one. They're a drug company. I thought everyone thought of them as a company that made band-aids and baby shampoo but it's not unreasonable to think that some amount of people are aware that they make pharmaceuticals, including some pretty expensive ones.
My doctor had me on one of them last year for a few months. He gave me four weeks' worth in free samples and wrote me a prescription to get filled when the freebees ran out. When I took it in, I found out that it was not covered by my health insurance and that another month of it would have been $400. It was something like six and a half bucks a pill and I needed two a day. I told my pharmacist not to bother filling it, then I wrote an e-mail to my doctor and he said, "Come on by and I'll give you more samples." I hadn't recalled that the medicine was made by Johnson & Johnson but when I just now looked them up on the web and saw they made it, I could see why some people might have a negative view of the company. I know I think a little less of them now that I've made that connection.
Kevin Drum, who invented Friday Cat Blogging, isn't doing any today so I will. This is The Stranger Cat, who has been feeding at my back door for many months now. Actually, there are two Stranger Cats. There's the Stranger Cat you see above, who is not shy about sitting on the porch and howling 'til fed. Then there's the stranger Stranger Cat, who asks for nothing and rarely comes near a human. They're probably related but I wouldn't presume to guess how.
The Stranger Cat demands food, eats a little of whatever is put in the dish and then wanders off. During all this, the stranger Stranger Cat is either lurking in a far corner of the yard or peeking through a hole in the fence from the adjoining property. When the Stranger Cat finishes dining, the stranger Stranger Cat sneaks up and helps herself to whatever's left. Should anyone approach, the stranger Stranger Cat stops eating and sprints out of the yard...except that once, I was actually able to go out and pet both. I don't know what made that possible that one day. Anyway, they have a nice tag-team arrangement worked out there. Sometimes, I even see the Stranger Cat standing watch as the stranger Stranger Cat eats.
We also have a couple of Stranger Possums out there and the occasional Stranger Raccoon. There are also a lot of huge Stranger Crows in my yard lately. I still seem to be the only person worrying that the crows in this area are now the size of Toyotas. Someone needs to look into this.
Yesterday, we linked to a piece about Jack Hanrahan, an Emmy-winning comedy writer who's been living on the streets of Cleveland. Here's a link to an update which tells us that his plight has brought forth many offers of assistance. And I know some folks in Hollywood are doing much to help, as well.
We're always wary of polls here, especially when they seem to confirm that which we'd like to believe is so. This new one from the Pew Research Center — which I assume never took a survey to determine if that was a good name for a polling service — is therefore to be taken with great caution. Others can analyze its findings in a lot more depth but the bottom line is that the Bush/Cheney/Rove policies are driving voters away from the G.O.P. and also from traditional G.O.P. positions. This does not seem to be a case of Democrats doing anything right but of Republicans scaring people away.
One thing that caught my eye was this item...
The public expresses highly favorable views of many leading corporations. Johnson & Johnson and Google have the most positive images of 23 corporations tested. At the bottom of the list: Halliburton, which is viewed favorably by fewer than half of those familiar enough with the company to give it a rating.
How could anyone have a bad image of Johnson & Johnson or Google? I mean, let's leave aside someone who might have worked for one of those companies and been routinely flogged and caned while there. If you're part of the general public, what could possibly bother you about either firm? All you probably know about Johnson & Johnson is that they make band-aids and baby shampoo. Google is for most people, nothing more than a free search engine that gets you where you want to go on the Internet. Where are the negatives in any of that? How did those companies get even a 5-6% unfavorable rating, which is what the survey says?
I can understand people having problems with McDonald's or Coca-Cola, feeling that the companies are too pushy in selling unhealthy products. I can understand people having bad feelings about any of the airlines mentioned due to bad flights. I can see being down on Pfizer because it's a drug company and there have been some charges of it paying off government officials to keep drug prices high...and the low ratings for Exxon/Mobil or Halliburton are easy to fathom. A lot of people probably hate Starbucks just because they're so hard to avoid.
But what's the complaint that 6% of respondents have about Google? What exactly has that company done to bother anyone?
Steve Winer, who among his other accomplishments used to write for David Letterman, shares with us the story of Calvert DeForest's unlikely leap to stardom...
As one of the two writers responsible for the film, King of the Z's, I thought you might like a little background on Calvert's rise to fame. All the obits that I've seen seem to suggest that David saw the film and then sent staffers out to find Calvert. Not quite. The film Karl Tiedemann and I made was a parody documentary about the world's cheapest movie studio of the 40's and 50's. We cast Calvert as one of the major players in the fake film clips from that studio. David and Merrill Markoe saw the film and became intersted in us as writers. During our interview with them, Merrill said "We're looking for someone like that little guy in your movie for our show," and I said, "You're not looking for someone like that guy. You're looking for that guy." We were ultimately hired for the show and brought him with us. (The Melman name was Merrill's, as was the Frankenstein bit that opened the first show).
Calvert was a very sweet man who always wanted to be a star and through this somewhat unusual crossing of personalities, became one. I have many great memories of Calvert and "Melman," but the one that comes to mind first is the night Bob Hope and Calvert were on the same show. Calvert was star struck and went up to Hope to compliment him. Hope, who had watched Calvert work from backstage, told Calvert that he thought he was very funny too. And as I watched Bob Hope compliment Calvert DeForest, I remember thinking: "Only in America!"
I'm going to miss him.
We already miss him. A lot of people have written to tell me of encounters with Calvert and how sweet he was to them. I only had two encounters with the guy, one a brief meeting up in Letterman's NBC offices. He was trying to make small talk with the office staff and I remember thinking, "My God...this man really can't ad-lib." Couldn't even say anything bright standing in the reception area. But that was okay because he had some sort of odd quality in front of the camera that made him fascinating to watch, even if he was just cluelessly reading cue cards.
I have to admit I've never been a big fan of humor (or attempts at humor) that come from putting the stagehands in sketches or counting on the utter lack of professionalism on the part of the deli owner around the corner. With occasional exceptions, I don't find these bits funny. I think they're often a substitute for actual writing...and maybe a way of protecting the host, preventing him from having to compete with someone who might upstage him a tiny bit. But Larry "Bud" Melman was a usual exception. He was genuinely funny and not just because he was awkward and inept. When they did bits like "Ask Mr. Melman," Dave's writers knew how to write for the guy and give him lines that worked when they were read right and worked even better when read wrong. The point of the bit wasn't just his clumsy delivery.
And hey, some people said that all Bob Hope did his last twenty years in show business was to read cue cards badly...
I think this is from Caesar's Hour, the series Sid Caesar starred in after Your Show of Shows. It's a pantomime sketch with Sid and Nanette Fabray miming "Argument to Beethoven's 5th." It runs about six minutes and it's a very nice piece of material.
The post office is joining forces with the Star Wars franchise. This will not change anything as far as I'm concerned because my mail is already delivered by a Wookie.
I can't recall the last time I watched it...but I'm still saddened by the decision of the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce to discontinue the annual Hollywood Christmas Parade, a holiday tradition since 1928. Generally referred to as "The Santa Claus Lane Parade," it caused no end of traffic nightmares as floats and stars (including some you actually had heard of) marched down Hollywood Boulevard and sometimes portions of Sunset on, usually, the day after Thanksgiving. Here's an article about the decision and there's also some video and a photo gallery.
As a kid, I used to watch it every year. A local TV host named Bill Welsh often covered it live, running out to every passing car that contained a celebrity for a quick chat. I remember one year when Walter Matthau was riding in the event to promote his then-current film, Cactus Flower. Matthau had a little blooming cactus plant as a prop and I think he'd decided to see if he could set some sort of world record for the longest, most shameless plug in television history. He made his driver stop in front of the TV cameras and Matthau began relentlessly selling the film into Welsh's microphone, talking about how funny it was and how great it was to work with Goldie Hawn and how everyone had to go see it. The whole parade just came to a total halt and Welsh stood there with nothing to report on...nothing he could do but let Matthau go on and on, which he did, until a sheriff on horseback came by and ordered the driver to move it. If he hadn't, Bill Welsh and Walter Matthau would have remained on that stretch of Hollywood Boulevard until long after Cactus Flower had come and gone.
Oh, well. At least now if I have to go anywhere near Hollywood on the day after Thanksgiving, I may be able to get there.
I'm of the opinion that when people talk about the great comic talents of the previous century, they don't make nearly enough mention of Marty Feldman. We swoon over the madness that was Monty Python but the Feldman shows I've seen — sadly, not all or even most — often seem as clever and funny as anything the Python boys did. Don't go by that disappointing Beau Geste parody movie he made. See if you can find some of his British shows...and if so, let me know so I can get copies.
For now, I'll call your attention to a half-hour radio documentary that aired this morning on the BBC and which can still be heard online. In it, Gene Wilder narrates and other friends and co-workers remember the man with the unusual eyes. Here's the link and I don't think it'll be active forever so don't delay.
Feldman was a wonderful talent and, going by the one time I met him, a very nice man. I still haven't quite forgiven Sergio Aragonés for killing him.
More Spike Jones. This is his version of Khachaturian's "Sabre Dance" and he does a xylophone solo in there — complete with more cowbell — that reminds you what a good musician he was. One of the reasons his strange kind of music worked so well was that the guy really knew what he was doing. Here we go...
Once upon a time — to coin a phrase — Jack Hanrahan was one half of the hottest comedy-writing team in Hollywood. I knew the names of Phil Hahn and Jack Hanrahan from Mad Magazine and I believe before that, they were among the top writers of humorous greeting cards for Hallmark. They went from Mad to very successful careers writing for TV shows including Get Smart, Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In, Sonny and Cher and many others. They also wrote a lot of animation, including the 1967 Fantastic Four cartoon show, Birdman, The Banana Splits and whatever else Hanna-Barbera was producing around then. On his own, after he and Phil went their separate ways, Jack later wrote Inspector Gadget, Heathcliff, Beverly Hills Teens and dozens of other shows.
I knew Jack casually in the eighties. He was a lovely, funny man who told great stories about show business. There are some comedy writers who are among the unfunniest human beings on the planet and others who are as entertaining and flamboyant as anyone who performs their material. Jack was solidly in the latter category...and he even did occasional acting roles. A friend of mine once produced a quickie VHS tape called Video Psychiatrist, which consisted of an hour of a well-dressed man in an office welcoming you and asking you to sit down and tell him your problems. That was how it opened but the bulk of the tape was him sitting there going, "Uh-huh...well, how do you feel about that?" Jack played the psychiatrist. He was also in a movie called Up Your Alley in which he played an eccentric homeless guy.
In a tragic case of life imitating art, Jack Hanrahan is now an eccentric homeless guy. Several of you, starting with Tony Isabella, sent me this link to an article in the Cleveland Plain Dealer. [Warning: The site may ask you for some harmless personal data.] [Second Warning: This article is very depressing.] Jack came from Cleveland and now he's returned there to live on its streets. He is sick. He is penniless. He is in a very bad way.
Among other things, the article notes that Jack's Emmy Award is in hock. Let me tell you how Jack got that Emmy. It was for the 1967-1968 season of Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In. The writing staff that year consisted of Chris Beard, Phil Hahn, Jack Hanrahan, Coslough Johnson, Paul Keyes, Marc London, Allan Manings, David Panich, Hugh Wedlock and Digby Wolfe. Back then on the Emmy Awards telecast, all the names of nominees had to be read aloud and there were several separate nominations for the Laugh-In staff, which was essentially competing with itself for the trophy. So some presenter had to read that list several times and they stuck Don Rickles with the job of presenting, figuring he'd get rightly pissed-off and therefore funny.
Rickles was all that and every time he came to Jack Hanrahan's name, he stumbled over it, pronouncing it something like, "Harrahannahan." When the writers won, it seemed like half the audience went up to accept. Jack walked directly to the microphone and he was the first of the winners to speak. He said, "The name's Hanrahan, dummy!"
He got one of the biggest laughs I've ever heard on an award show. How does a guy like that wind up homeless?
If you have one and if your cable company or satellite dish gets the Boomerang channel, you might want to grab a season pass for Late Night Black & White, which used to be a treasure of Cartoon Network. Now it's on Boomerang every Saturday and Sunday night at 11 PM on my set. I'm sure these are reruns of the same episodes but, hey...it's a rare chance to see vintage WB and MGM cartoons that probably won't be turning up on DVD soon.
This coming Saturday night, they're running three "Captain and the Kids" cartoons, including one directed by Bill Hanna, sans Barbera. On Sunday night, we get three great WB black-and-white classics including We're in the Money, built around the Harry Warren tune. This is followed by two Goopy Geer shorts. You don't see a lot of Goopy Geer on TV these days so you have to take him wherever you can get him. He was an early, unsuccessful attempt by the Harman-Ising company (they produced the early Warner Brothers cartoons) to create a big cartoon star to rival Mr. Disney's mouse.
Cameo appearances aside, Goopy only starred in three cartoons so here's your chance to see two-thirds of the canon. Perhaps you'll be able to figure out why he never caught on...apart from the obvious fact that his name was Goopy Geer. If your name was Goopy Geer, no one would have heard of you, either.
I'm just a guy sitting here at my computer, blogging now and then when I need a break from my paying work. The Associated Press is a huge organization with offices all around the world, reporters, stringers, fancy equipment, etc.
I posted about the passing of Calvert DeForest last night here, shortly after Midnight, Pacific Time. How come it took the A.P. sixteen hours to get this news on the web?
Let's hear another number from Spike Jones and the City Slickers. Here they are destroying "Yes Sir, That's My Baby" and even managing to get in a good, offensive Oriental stereotype at the same time. That's Freddie Morgan doing the solo and once again, Spike is wearing a suit that I wish I owned.
Ronald Brownstein writes about the relationship between George W. Bush and the Republican side of Congress. Quick summary: The latter didn't police the former so the former got away with all sorts of things it shouldn't have gotten away with. I think I agree and I think a rising number of Republicans agree.
The new A380 airbus landed in New York on Monday and received great attention. Peter Greenberg, who's the Travel Editor for The Today Show, was on that flight and he filed this video report which is posted over on the MSNBC website. One of the other travellers interviewed in his report is my longtime pal,
Joe Brancatelli, whose name comic fans may remember from fanzines of the seventies and a column he did for Warren magazines. I worked with Peter Greenberg years ago, too — on a TV pilot idea that no network had the guts/foolishness to pick up.
I mention this because I know an awful lot of people and I'm always amazed how they intersect. I'm always telling friends that eventually, everyone I've ever met will meet everyone else I've ever met. So it was not unusual but still odd to be watching Keith Olbermann last evening. Olbermann replayed Greenberg's report and there I saw someone I knew from one part of my life interviewing someone I knew from another part of my life. Joe and Peter are both in the business of travel reporting now but still...
Over in the David Letterman newsgroup, Letterman authority Don "Donz" Giller has reported the death of character actor Calvert DeForest, who was a fixture of Dave's TV shows, first as Larry "Bud" Melman on the NBC show and later under his own name on CBS. According to Giller's posting, DeForest died Monday night from a heart attack after contracting pneumonia.
DeForest was born in 1921 and did not intend to have a career in show business. His mother was an actress and discouraged it, but he told interviewers he needed no discouragement in that area. He did, however, appear in a student film that caught the attention of Mr. Letterman. To his surprise, DeForest (who was then working in a Social Services office) received an offer to be part of a sketch on Dave's show and that led to regular appearances as the character, Larry "Bud" Melman. Dave and the writers especially loved putting DeForest into sketches and situations where the hapless actor had no idea what he was doing. DeForest read everything off cue cards and could almost always be counted on to pause or stand in all the wrong places. Once after he showed a tiny bit of on-camera professionalism, Dave reportedly remarked, "If he ever gets good, he'll be of no use to us."
When Letterman moved to CBS in 1993, his production company lost the legal rights to the name of Larry "Bud" so DeForest began appearing under his own name...but not often. Advanced age and frequent illness kept him from being on the show as often as Letterman and the producers might have liked. According to Giller, DeForest's last appearance was on the April 30, 2003 show where he was introduced as Saddam Hussein.
A tribute to DeForest had been planned for last night's show but Dave took ill with a stomach flu and missed the broadcast, which was hosted instead by Adam Sandler. Tonight's episode was taped on Monday night and the Thursday and Friday shows are both scheduled reruns. So one presumes Dave will be back next Monday and will say something then.
Our video link today is a clip of Larry "Bud" Melman on an early (1983) episode of Late Night With David Letterman. They sent DeForest to the Port Authority Bus Depot in New York to welcome arriving passengers, armed with nothing more than a microphone (which he didn't know how to use) and a supply of hot towels. Here's what ensued...
In the last years of his life, Stan Laurel spent a lot of his time answering fan mail. This website is attempting to collect them all so that they can be shared with the world. Fascinating stuff.
Tom Spurgeon has a long, probably definitive obit up for Jay Kennedy, who died last Thursday on a vacation accident. Jay was a historian of underground comics and, more lucratively, an editor of newspaper comic strips for King Features Syndicate. I never met the man but he was well-respected by everyone who knew him and a lot of good people are still stunned at the loss.
Sit back, click and enjoy a great old vaudeville/burlesque sketch. Years ago, I met a professor-type who was trying to research the origin of this one. What he found was about nineteen different comedians had nineteen different stories about how they wrote it and how everyone stole it from them. At some point though, it became part of the more-or-less public domain repertoire that comedians working in revues then drew from. There were a lot of comics doing this material, often in their own, personalized versions — some of which they copyrighted — on stages the world over. Later on film and television, Abbott and Costello had their interpretation and the Three Stooges had theirs, and there were a couple of other folks who did it now and then, sometimes changing the "trigger word."
You'll understand what I mean when you see it...and you'll probably remember the bit. Here are the Stooges doing what they did best: Beating the crap out of one of their own...
This morning, Presidential Press Secretary Tony Snow was asked about Alberto Gonzales and he said, "We hope he stays." Since all these guys serve at (to use the cliché) "the pleasure of the president," doesn't it come down to he stays if Bush wants him and he goes if Bush doesn't? Rarely does a presidential appointee depart over the objections of the Chief Exec and every single story ever written about Gonzales, incuding those written by his supporters, has stressed his unwavering loyalty to George W. Bush. So what is this nonsense about "hoping" he stays?
The Disney DVD folks have issued a new, 2-disc version of Walt's animated Peter Pan. Here's an Amazon link to purchase it and here's why you might not want to. A number of animation websites (like this one) have erupted in discussion of the transfer which some say is not what it should be. I saw a bit of it in a store the other day and it looked wrong to me, but I (at first) figured the shop's TV was misadjusted or something. I mean, if ever there's a film restoration that you'd figure the issuers would get right, it's something like this, and it gets back to our oft-discussed topic. You know the one: How studios will put out a wonderful, complete, everything-a-collector-could-ask-for DVD of some movie...and then they convene a staff meeting to discuss how they can put out another version later on that the same people will feel they must also purchase.
One way, some have learned, is a better transfer. In fact, last time we discussed this, a friend in the business wrote to me and said the following about a movie (not Peter Pan) that his company was selling on DVD...
When we put [the movie] out, there was some talk of using the old transfer for the DVD. This was a transfer done some time ago, I think for when the film first came out on Beta. No, no, the boss said. We need a new, deluxe transfer. He was right. The studio spent a lot of money and had a beautiful transfer done. They restored many faded or damaged frames and it really looked superb. But when it came time to put the DVD out, they used the old transfer even thought the new one was all done and paid for. At first, I thought it was an incredible, horrible mistake. What lunkhead had used the wrong transfer? I found out later it was intentional. At the last minute, someone decided to save the good transfer for the next release in a few years. It was your old "let's make them buy it again" theory.
In other words, the image quality is supposed to get better and better from release to release, not the other way around. It's more than the right thing to do from the standpoint of honoring the work and respecting the consumer. It's just good marketing.
I'm not casting my lot completely with those who say the new version of Peter Pan is a bad transfer. Not yet, anyway. I've only seen about two minutes of it on someone else's set...but it was enough to send up a warning flag. The maddening part of this, of course, is that I'll probably buy the thing anyway, just for the special features. If the image quality is as bad as some say, I'll probably sit there watching the film, thinking to myself that in this version, the pirates win. I may lead an expedition to track down the guy who's responsible and make him admit he's a codfish.
Here's a great clip but it requires a little explanation. In the early days of talking pictures, the studios had a problem. It was pretty simple to sell silent films to foreign countries that didn't speak English. You just had to change the title cards. But when sound came in, the technology to dub movies into other languages was not there, and the producers didn't want to lose all that overseas revenue. The solution at some studios was, amazingly, to film some movies multiple times with multiple casts speaking multiple languages.
Our example today is of Laurel and Hardy, who did a number of these. They didn't do it with all their early talkies but they did it with some. They'd shoot the movie in English and then, using the same sets, they'd go back and do the film again in Spanish, German, Italian and/or French, depending on market conditions at the moment. A few of the same supporting actors could be used but for the most part, they'd bring in bilingual actors to take over the other roles. One interesting example is that Boris Karloff, who apparently spoke pretty decent French, was in the French version of their feature, Pardon Us. In it, he played a part that someone else played when the same film had been made in English.
Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy were monolingual so they had to fake it. Obviously, pantomime scenes were no problem and it was sometimes possible to use what they'd filmed for the earlier version in the foreign version. But when it came time for dialogue, their lines were written out phonetically on blackboards just off-camera and a coach taught them how to pronounce words and where to put a certain emphasis or gesture. I've heard mixed things from people who understand these other languages as to how well Stan and Ollie came across. They did this for a while...until dubbing became practical.
Foreign versions of their pictures are of special interest to us Laurel and Hardy buffs for obvious reasons but also because many contain material that was never in the English editions. Some films ran longer overseas and in several cases when The Boys were making shorts for the American market, they'd be making patchwork features for foreign countries — several U.S. shorts stitched together via the addition of new scenes to connect the storylines. Our clip is from the Spanish film, Los Calaveras, which combined two shorts — Laughing Gravy and Be Big — into a feature. (There was also a French version of the same thing called Les Carottiers.)
So here's five minutes of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy speaking Spanish. And remember: This is not them being dubbed. This is them reading Spanish dialogue off a chalkboard...
Years ago, my Aunt Dot used to say to me, "You have something in common with every person in the world. Before you criticize them, you should stop and figure out what it is you have in common with that person."
I've been very critical of Alberto Gonzales. In terms of upholding the Rule of Law, he has the most important job in our country and I've long felt that all he does is to warp it, trample it and misinterpret it to try and support the view that anything the current (and only the current) occupant of the Oval Office and his crew does is legal, constitutional and proper. George W. Bush could stick up a liquor store and Gonzales would argue it was within the president's power to do so.
But I tried to do what my Aunt suggested. I sat down and tried to figure out what I have in common with this man. I'll admit it took a while but I think I've got it. I think I know what I have in common with this man. Within two weeks, neither one of us will be the Attorney General of the United States.
The trial of Phil Spector starts tomorrow. He's accused of murdering a young actress named Lana Clarkson. I gather the case comes down to the fact that (a) Spector is a known looney and alcoholic who was drinking that night and has a history of irrational actions, some involving firearms and (b) there's testimony that at the murder scene, Spector said he'd shot her accidentally. Those are pretty damning facts. Against this, his attorneys intend to argue that Clarkson obviously committed suicide in the home of this rich guy she'd just met, and that the two men who say Spector said what he said cannot be believed because...well, uh, we all know that when someone dies at your home, the first police officer on the scene and your chauffeur always try to pin it on you.
Obviously, that's a pretty shaky defense but Spector has brought in a heavyweight legal team and there's a reason those guys get paid as much as they do. Also, O.J. Simpson and Robert Blake have done much to destroy the concept of the Open-and-Shut Case, especially against celebrities. True, they were able to argue that they weren't there when the murders were committed and Spector can't...but he has more money than either and that's gotta be worth something.
It all sounds like a courtroom drama I really, really don't want to follow. I met Lana Clarkson a few times when she was dating a friend of mine. She seemed very nice and very smart, and I'm positive I won't be watching when Spector's lawyers start killing her all over, trying to sell the idea that her career was in ruins and that she was suicidal. I didn't know her well enough to say with any authority that the latter wasn't the case but it sure doesn't jibe with the Lana I saw. What I am sure of is that almost everyone who acts for a living has those periods when the prospects of future work look as remote as hers might have at certain points...and that that's almost never a reason for picking up a gun and exiting stage left.
One of the fascinating (some might say "maddening") things about show business is that on Tuesday at 2:00, it can feel like no one will ever again let you within fifty yards of a camera or audience and that you stand a better chance of tap-dancing to Jupiter than of getting another acting gig. And then at 2:30, you get a call for an audition, they see you at 5:00 and Thursday morning, you're in make-up and a movie. That doesn't happen as often as you might like but it happens often enough that you have to go a long time — certainly longer than Lana had — before you believe it's all over. Lack of roles alone is rarely a motive for putting yourself in the Variety obituary column. In fact, it may be the opposite. You want to wait until that obit's going to be a little longer.
I think what I'm trying to say here is that while anyone could be irrational to the point of suicide, I'm suspicious of the simple explanation like, "She decided to kill herself because she hadn't had an acting job in a while." That always sounds to me like something a beginning screenwriter comes up with after they take one of those courses that teaches you to give every character a simple, one-line motivation for everything they do. In real life, it's never that uncomplicated. Richard Jeni had plenty of bookings lined up and offers.
I'm thinking I need to do something to affect the outcome of this trial and I don't mean what happens in the courtroom. I can't do anything about that. But I can do something to limit the damage that this trial does to me. I can not follow it. This may be rough — as you can see from a few posts back here, I still have a Pavlovian interest in the O.J. case — but I'm going to do my best. If this isn't the last mention of Phil Spector on this site until the verdict is read, we'll all know I've failed.
I can't link you to Frank Rich's weekend column in The New York Times but I can quote the first paragraph...
Tomorrow night is the fourth anniversary of President Bush's prime-time address declaring the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom. In the broad sweep of history, four years is a nanosecond, but in America, where memories are congenitally short, it's an eternity. That's why a revisionist history of the White House's rush to war, much of it written by its initial cheerleaders, has already taken hold. In this exonerating fictionalization of the story, nearly every politician and pundit in Washington was duped by the same "bad intelligence" before the war, and few imagined that the administration would so botch the invasion's aftermath or that the occupation would go on so long. "If only I had known then what I know now ..." has been the persistent refrain of the war supporters who subsequently disowned the fiasco. But the embarrassing reality is that much of the damning truth about the administration's case for war and its hubristic expectations for a cakewalk were publicly available before the war, hiding in plain sight, to be seen by anyone who wanted to look.
The rest of the piece is a list of things prominent people have said about the war that now seem to be foolish, disingenuous, unrealistic or just plain lies. They're all the kinds of statements that no one can now argue were wise or valid, so they have to defend them as good faith judgments by people who through no fault of their own were misled or misinformed, and of course you can't fault someone for believing faulty information and acting on it. Even if the person is Dick Cheney and acting on that faulty info has tripled the value of Halliburton stock.
Lately, it seems to be all the rage to ask politicians if they think homosexuality is immoral. I'd like to see them all asked how they feel about people getting wealthy from a war that's killing people left and right, and driving the U.S. into a financial Grand Canyon. Anything about that make you at all uncomfortable?
The wise and sage Earl Kress announces, surely to the disappointment of many, that The Banana Splits Adventure Hour is off the list of old Hanna-Barbera shows that will be coming out on DVD in the near future. The source material, sez Earl, is simply in too bad a shape for a good DVD to be produced without a lot of time and moola. Better they yank it from the release schedule than put out an inferior product.
I was never a huge fan of that show. Liked the theme song, liked some of the blackouts, liked hearing Daws Butler and Paul Winchell and Allan Melvin doing voices. Never quite sparked to the individual features in the show, nor did I understand the mix of comedy and adventure. But some folks loved it and I think anything that some folks loved ought to be available on DVD...though they should wait 'til they can do it right.
Here's another Garfield cartoon I wrote. I called it, for reasons that will become obvious if you watch, "The Creature That Lived in the Refrigerator Behind the Mayonnaise, Next to the Ketchup and To The Left of the Cole Slaw."
As always in these, Lorenzo Music was the voice of Garfield, Thom Huge was the voice of Jon and Gregg Berger — whom you saw recently in a video clip here — was the voice of Odie. The Police Sergeant was also voiced by Gregg and there's an odd thing there. In the Ink and Paint Department at the studio, there was a lady who took it upon herself to make sure that we didn't have a show where a disproportionate percentage of the human beings were Caucasian. That was a commendable goal but she was kind of arbitrary about who she decided should get minority status. Every so often, she'd just decide to make some supporting character black even though the artist who designed that character hadn't had that in mind and the voice track had already been recorded with, say, an Irish accent...or at least a voice which certainly didn't suggest a non-white race. Sometimes, the producer or I caught it. Sometimes, we didn't. The Police Sergeant in this cartoon is an example of a "didn't." (She also sometimes missed noticing the other way and a character we intended as black came out about as Afro-American as Audrey Hepburn.)
The voice of the Police Sergeant's assistant Jones was done by Jim Davis, creator of Garfield. The voice of Shmidlap was done by Thom Huge, and the little girl's scream at the end was done by my friend, B-Movie Babe Jewel Shepard, who was helping me out in the studio that day. Jewel has screamed in a lot of movies, so I decided to have her scream in one of my cartoons. Here's that cartoon...
Are you following the latest twist in the O.J. Simpson book deal? It's kind of odd. A court has ruled that Simpson's rights in that If I Did It book must be auctioned off with the proceeds going to help pay down the $33.5 million judgment that the families of Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown won against him. He's paid almost nothing on the amount which, with interest, is now more like $38 mill. The Goldman family, which adamantly opposed publication of the book when it was first announced, has now done a one-eighty and they want the book published.
I'm sure there are those who think the difference now is one of sheer greed, and I think that's unfair. Even if money is the primary reason for the change, the families are entitled to some compensation for all they've been through, and some bucks on a judgment that they won. But there's a big question here that's going unasked and unanswered. The other night on Larry King Live, Fred Goldman was asked what's changed and he answered as follows...
Well, I think what changed is very simply the fact that we know more about it now than we did then and we believe that there's perhaps good reason to see it back out in print. Everybody that's read it, my attorneys specifically, believe that it's tantamount to a confession.
And then King said that Judith Regan, who was involved in packaging the book, told him she believes it's the total truth. He then asked Goldman, "How do you react to that?" and Goldman replied...
Well, frankly, from the bits and pieces that I've heard about it, I would tend to agree. He never contradicted the timeline or any of the evidence in the criminal trial. If nothing else, he almost validated it all.
This was one of those moments that reminded me why I've pretty much given up watching Larry King. They happen often on that show. A guest says something that cries out for a follow-up query and King, because he does no research (not only does none but practically brags about it) doesn't ask the obvious question. In this case, it would have been something like...
Fred, all the reports from people who've read Simpson's account of the murders in his book say the same thing. They say the text talks of an accomplice named Charlie who was present when the killings were committed, who urged Simpson to stop and who may have disposed of the murder weapon and other evidence. Do you think there really was a Charlie? And if not, why do you agree that the book is the total truth and why would you then want it published?
...or words to that effect. I suspect Goldman would have said no, that's the one part he doesn't believe but he thinks the rest is a confession and that there's a value to having that portion in print. But it would have been nice if there'd been a real interviewer there to pose that question.
The current issue of Mad, the one just coming out, is #476. The first Mad work by Sergio Aragonés appeared in #76, which was the January, 1963 issue. He missed one issue so this new one represents the 400th time his artistry has appeared in America's most popular humor magazine.
This is not the record. Mike Slaubaugh maintains lists of these things and if we consult the relevant tote board for this category, we see that Al Jaffee has had work in 427 issues. Tied for third are Dick DeBartolo and Mort Drucker, each of whom has been in 391 issues. Since Drucker is not in every issue lately and DeBartolo is, Dick will probably have third place to himself as of next month. (In fifth place, we see Dave Berg with 386 appearances but he's not likely to challenge anyone, having died in 2002.)
In the meantime, I am locked in about a ninety-way tie for 237th place, having contributed two pieces to the magazine. This is so much more impressive than that guy on Jeopardy! yesterday. He only managed to create a three-way tie.
On another list of his, Mike notes that DeBartolo holds the record for the most consecutive issues of Mad with 374, followed by Sergio with 365. Sergio had no work in Mad #111 because...well, his recollection is that the post office lost what he mailed in for that issue. Personally, I'd like to believe it was something more embarrassing so when people ask me, I always make up something that involves a morals charge, a stay in prison and maybe a couple of farm animals.
You may also be interested in this list of Mike's that charts circulation figures over the years. This looks pretty dreadful for Mad but there aren't a lot of other magazines where the list wouldn't tell a similar story.
Getting back to Sergio for a moment. His first appearance in Mad was with a batch of astronaut cartoons but he instantly became known for the tiny cartoons in the margins of the pages — the ones that look like this...
Before he came along, Mad had text gags in those spaces. They called the feature "Marginal Thinking" and the jokes sometimes took the form of a little lecture by a character named Marginal Marvin. The lines were written by the editorial staff and it was quite a drain on their time and creativity.
Sergio is, as we all know, an extremely fast cartoonist. He wanted to sell a lot of work to Mad but there was a limit as to how much they could buy from him without firing all their other artists. Since his English then was severely limited, he didn't get the text gags in the margins and thought that maybe he could replace them with his drawings, thereby creating more space for his work in the magazine. The editors liked the suggestion since it got them out of filling those spaces themselves, but they thought of it as a brief respite. Surely, they believed, the new kid from Mexico wouldn't be able to come up with gags like that for every issue and they'd have to go back to the text gags. Four hundred issues later, he's still filling those spots and Marginal Marvin still can't catch a break.
Even I'm tired of my posts on this topic. However, I felt I should link to a Live Journal posting by Scott Weiss, the gentleman whose wager on yesterday's Jeopardy! created its unprecedented three-way tie. Here's the whole post and here's the most relevant paragraph...
Oh, you want to know about the Final Jeopardy! wager? It was an intentional bet. I counted on Anders and Jamey betting rationally and wagering everything. I thought it would be really cool to be a part of Jeopardy history. I knew that meant I'd be playing seasoned opponents, but it didn't matter to me. I had already won a couple of games myself, and I thought it would be neat to share the money. (See my post about Jennifer from a couple of days; that's what the literary people call foreshadowing. :-)). Now there'll be a notation next to one of my games in the J! Archive. How cool is that?
Several folks who wrote me assumed that Weiss was trying to bring back two opponents he knew he could beat. Here, he suggests the opposite. In any case, congrats to him for doing what he intended to do...and no, it isn't all that logical, which may be why the Game Theory expert suggested it wouldn't happen again. And you know what else isn't going to happen again? Me posting about this episode. You're welcome.
I only have one tonight. A couple of folks have written to me to say that Scott, the contestant on Jeopardy! who caused the three-way tie, did so deliberately to make a little history and also, perhaps, because he figured he'd do better to bring back two contestants he figured he could beat, rather than face two unknown quantities the next time. Okay, fine. My point was that he wasn't playing to win.
Here's an appearance by the comedian, philosopher and juggler A. Whitney Brown on The Tonight Show around 1988. There are a couple of odd bleeps in there but it's a good spot, especially as an example of political humor of the time. Back when Brown did commentaries on Saturday Night Live, I thought he was one of the sharpest people on television and I'm sorry he doesn't seem to be performing much these days.
I think this makes 8,366 of them. My partner Sergio Aragonés was among those honored recently in the Comicdom 2000 Awards presented at the Comicdom Con in Athens, Greece. He won as Best Writer/Artist in the field of humor for Solo #11 and also for Best Short Story, "I Killed Marty Feldman" in that same issue. To celebrate, I bought him lunch today and even allowed him to Super-Size his fries.
Here's an example of why a lot of us lost the positive feelings we once had about John McCain. An interviewer asks him if it's true that the use of contraceptives helps stop the spread of HIV. There are twelve year olds in this country who could have told you they do. I would even have respected an answer that admitted it's so but wondered if the availability of condoms made people more likely to engage in sexual relations. I think that's nonsense but it's an aspect of the matter that's worth considering.
I know we've been paying too much attention to this one Jeopardy! episode but I wanted to write one more post about how it's unlikely to happen again. The three-way tie was an anomaly in large part because one player didn't play the game to win. Going into Final Jeopardy!, here's how the totals stood...
Scott: $13,400
James: $8,000
Anders: $8,000
So how much do you wager if you're one of those contestants? If you're James or Anders, you'd presume the following: That you can't win unless you're right and Scott is wrong. In theory, you could win the game with the wrong answer if Scott was also wrong and he wagered so much that his total dropped to below where you wound up, but you have to operate from the assumption that he's not dumb enough to do that.
James and Anders made the right wagers. Neither one could afford the risk that the other would bet more than he did. You'd also assume that the odds are that it's unlikely you will get the answer right and the other two will both get it wrong. That's possible but it's much more likely that it either stumps everyone or no one. So you'd wager as each of them did: The full eight thousand.
Now, let's say you're Scott. You'd assume from the above that at least one of the other two players — and probably both — is wagering $8,000. A person who does that will beat you unless you're also right and you wind up ahead of them. Therefore, the correct bet for you is at least $2,601. That way, one or both of them could wind up with $16,000 and you'd have $16,001. You'd also win if all three of you were wrong. The only way you could lose is if you're wrong and one or both of the others is right...but that's going to be true no matter what you bet. So at least $2,601 is the proper bet here. The trouble is that Scott didn't bet that way. I'm assuming the Game Theory expert opined that this wouldn't happen again because future players will recognize that Scott blew his chance to win and they won't make that mistake.
But is it really much of a mistake? If Scott had bet $2,601, he'd take home $16,001 and come back on Monday to play against two new opponents. Since he bet $2,600, he takes home $16,000 and comes back on Monday to play against the same two opponents again. Not much difference from his standpoint. Scott didn't really lose anything except being able to say he won.
A three-way tie. Each player wound up with $16,000 so they all come back on Monday.
As noted, there was a three-way tie before but it was a matter of everyone wiping out. This is, I guess, the first three-way tie where everyone won money. That's what all the fuss was about. And I guess the Game Theory person suggested that it would never happen again because now that the possibility of a three-way tie has entered into the way Jeopardy! contestants figure when they wager, they'll henceforth bet to make that less likely. Or something of the sort.
Oops. I did the math wrong — always a possibility when you let me fiddle with numbers. September 11, 1984 was 22 years, 6 months and 5 days ago. So the 9/11/84 Jeopardy! when they had a three-way zero tie was within the last twenty-three years. If that's what happened today on the show (and I'm now inclined to think it isn't) then they're fibbing to say it's never happened before in the last twenty-three years.
We'll see what it is in just a little while. I can catch the East Coast telecast on my satellite dish at 4:00 Pacific Time. Maybe it'll turn out that Alex Trebek admits that he plotted 9/11, fathered Anna Nicole's kid, fired all the U.S. attorneys, blew Valerie Plame's covert status and put the bomp in the bomp-she-bomp. Or has that happened before, too?
WARNING: Whenever I find out what it is, I'm going to post it here. So if you don't want to know until you see the broadcast, don't check back here 'til then.
For some reason, I haven't been watching Sit Down Comedy With David Steinberg, a little talk show on TV Land that is nothing more than Mr. Steinberg chatting with some prominent comedian. At the suggestion of Shelly Goldstein, I caught the one currently running, which is a back and forth with Jon Stewart. Very good. It's real conversation, as opposed to that time-limited, pre-planned stuff that Leno, Letterman, O'Brien and the others do. Steinberg and Stewart seem to really like each other, which is something you almost never get on the aforementioned hosts' programs these days.
The episode with Stewart runs four more times, the next being very early tomorrow morning. Next Wednesday evening, they debut an episode with Garry Shandling. I've set the TiVo for that, too.
Still speculating over what the big secret is about tonight's episode of Jeopardy!
Richard Leung points out to me that a three-way tie with all the players at zero has happened before. As noted at this site, it occurred on the show that aired on September 11, 1984. That was the second show of the Alex Trebek era.
But consider this. In that promo to which I linked (this one), they say, "In 23 years, it's never happened." That would seem to indicate that it never happened on the show...but a fast calculation shows that September 11, 1984 was 23 years, 1 month and 5 days ago. [Correction: No, it wasn't.] So the first time there was a three-way tie with zero scores was more than 23 years ago. It could still be that. And maybe it's significant that they said "In 23 years, it's never happened" instead of, "In the history of Jeopardy!, it's never happened." I think there were several ties, zero and otherwise, in the earlier version of the show hosted by Art Fleming.
Meanwhile, as has been noted on several message boards this morning, there's an interesting clue which may give it away or it may be something that a smart guy did to trick us. The address of that page with the promo announcement ends with "20070314_3wt.php." Note the "3wt" in there. One would assume it stands for "three way tie." That would seem to tip the surprise but, as Maxwell Smart would say, maybe that's what they want us to think.
It's been a while since we've heard the chilling phrase, "Stan Lee Media." That was a dot-com company that was briefly a shining star of the Internet. It was said to be worth zillions even though during the brief time that I was a vice-president of the firm, no one there could explain to me just what it did that made money. Not long after I departed — no connection implied — the whole thing crashed and burned and people were convicted of various crimes that fell under the general category of Stock Fraud.
Well, Stan Lee Media is back in the news, at least for a day. It's been announced that the current owners are suing Marvel Entertainment for five billion smackers. Here's a story with more of the details. Basically, they're saying that Stan Lee assigned certain proprietary rights to Stan Lee Media and that despite the company's bankruptcy, it still exists and still owns those rights and that the stockholders are entitled to profit from them. They're further asserting that it all amounts to half-ownership of Spider-Man, The X-Men, Hulk and such.
I have no more information on this apart from what's on the Internet this morning and I ain't a lawyer. Those caveats noted, this sounds to me like a lawsuit of the kind that gets filed to try and panic someone into a quick settlement. There are legal actions of the sort that work because the company being sued is afraid that the lawsuit will interfere with their commerce and it's easier to pay off than to allow that to happen. I doubt that will be the case here but that's a view from afar since I haven't read the contracts.
Still, it sounds like a tough case to win. Stan Lee says he never had half-ownership of those characters. Stan Lee Media is saying he assigned half-ownership of those characters to Stan Lee Media. That's quite a speed bump. Moreover, though the current owners of Stan Lee Media are apparently all honest souls, they're trying to enforce a contract negotiated by a regime that has copped to various frauds and misrepresentations. It might be a little dicey to argue that it was all done in good faith and that it means what all those folks who went to prison might say it means. Are they going to be called in to testify on the intention of that deal and if so, who's going to believe them?
But hey, weird things sometimes happen in courtrooms. I can't recall the last time I heard someone say that the law always comes to the logical conclusion. It may have been O.J. Simpson after his first murder trial. If the Stan Lee Media people can get that jury, they might have a shot.
So I was lying awake in bed and my mind kept drifting back to wondering what the big deal is on tonight's Jeopardy! Shows you how great my fantasy life is, eh? Anyway, it dawned on me — and yes, I know I'm probably overthinking this — that the tip-off is that the press release said they'd consulted an expert in Game Theory. It did not say that they'd consulted a statistician or other expert in the science of chance and numbers. Game Theory experts deal in how people strategize; how they try to exploit their opportunities for maximum advantage.
So what is it in Jeopardy! that involves strategizing? Answer: How much you wager in Final Jeopardy! Everything else in the game is a function of (a) whether you know a given fact and (b) whether you get the button pushed at the proper moment. A Game Theory expert would have nothing to say about either of these matters. What he would be able to discuss is how the contestants wager. This suggests to me that they wagered in some manner as to yield an interesting finish...and it had to be a finish that was not desirable. (If it was a desirable outcome, then you wouldn't have the Game Theory expert saying it might never happen again.)
Anyway, what this all lead me to, lying in that dark room, was the deduction that they wound up with a three-way tie, probably with everyone having zero dollars because all each player bet his or her entire wad. And the Game Theory guru then said, "This will probably never happen again because after this, players will always make sure they don't bet everything and at least hold back a few bucks."
I got up to post this, checked e-mail and discovered that several of you guessed a three-way tie and one even guessed the zero part. We'll see if we're right.
One other thing: There are promos up (see one here) for this already saying that something amazing happens on the show. If the amazing thing was a new one-day total, the promos would suggest something about big money because they could do that without saying who won and therefore giving away the ending. But there's no way to hint at a three-way tie and not blow what happens. So it's gotta be something like that.
This is the second part of I-don't-know-how-many detailing the creation of the cartoon character, Scrappy Doo. If you haven't read the first part, you might want to study it before proceeding with this one. Which you can do over on this page.
Now then. When we last left me, I was lunching with Joe Barbera at the Villa Capri restaurant in Hollywood, being charged with my mission: To write a Scooby Doo script that would introduce the character of Scrappy Doo. I had to make Scrappy "work," at least on paper, so the good folks at ABC would invest in another season of the series. Mr. B. had sketches of Scrappy — mostly by Iwao Takamoto, I believe — and a rough idea of who the character was. As he told me what he had in mind, it sounded to me like he was trying to avoid saying two words. The two words were "Henery Hawk."
It is not uncommon for a new creation to start with what some might call a reference point or some element of inspiration. We all know about The Honeymooners turning into The Flintstones or Sgt. Bilko being a jumping-off point for Top Cat. Some are less obvious and there are also times in the development process when you start with one idea and by the time it reaches the air, it bears so little resemblance to that idea that it really qualifies as a new creation. The Scooby Doo show itself started out with the template of the old Dobie Gillis show and morphed into something altogether different.
There was at the time at ABC, a senior exec who (it was said) could best be sold a new series if he perceived some lineage to the classic Warner Brothers cartoons. Years later, I discussed this with the exec and became convinced his passion in this area was greatly exaggerated. But at the time, many of the folks whose livelihoods involved selling shows to him believed it, and so would laden their pitches with WB references — "This character is like Daffy Duck crossed with Wile E. Coyote" or somesuch gobbledygook. There was also a special sales magic to obtaining the services of Mel Blanc to voice a new character.
Not long before, H-B had tried to sell a series to ABC featuring a hero whose body was mostly mustache, a la Yosemite Sam. The network was only semi-interested so more sketches were done and the concept was changed a bit...and the character got hairier and hairier. At some point, he was so hirsute that they decided to make him into a caveman and that's when ABC bought the show. Soon after, he made his debut: Captain Caveman...with a voice provided by Mel Blanc.
I was startled when an H-B exec told me this. The two characters have zero in common apart from hair and Mel. It's one of those cases where Yosemite Sam was a jumping-off point but he jumped so far that he became a wholly new entity. Still, the WB connection (and Mel) were of some import in the sales of the series.
As Mr. Barbera told me how he saw Scrappy Doo, I kept thinking of Henery Hawk. Barbera never said that name and may not have even realized he was describing the pint-sized chicken hawk from several WB epics. But that's what it sounded like they wanted. So I went home and wrote a short scene, imagining Scrappy to have Henery Hawk's voice and swagger, and when Mr. B. read it, he called and said, "You've nailed it. That's exactly what I had in mind."
So that was Hurdle #1. The next hurdle was to come up with a ghost and mystery for the script. For this, I decided to steal from myself. I looked back over the issues of the Scooby Doo comic book I'd written a few years earlier, selected a couple of my favorite ideas and typed up short summaries. Someone at ABC picked the one they liked best and I went ahead and wrote the script in about a week. The hardest part of it was that every day, some Hanna-Barbera exec or agent (though never Joe) would call me and try to convince me how vital it was that the script be strong enough to convince ABC that Scrappy was viable. They all had a way of saying it as if they expected me to go, "What? You want it to be good? Well then, maybe I'd better take out all the recipes I'm putting in and insert some jokes instead!"
I handed the script in on a Friday and it was simultaneously distributed to all the important folks at H-B and sent to the folks over at the network. Over the weekend, Barbera called to say he was very happy with it. He had a few notes but not many and he thought we were in very good shape. Monday morning, I got a call from a rival producer, the one for whom I'd done another pilot that ABC was considering for that season. He "jokingly" told me that I did too good a job for Hanna-Barbera. He'd just heard that the show I'd developed for him wasn't going to make it because ABC liked my Scrappy script. (I put "jokingly" in quotes because the truth is that the guy was pissed.) Later that day, someone called from Hanna-Barbera to say that I was a hero and that Scooby Doo was being picked up for another season.
I was happy, of course. Little did I know my troubles were only starting.
Tune in one of these days — I'm not sure when but soon — for more of the story of how Scrappy Doo came to be.
Here's a great clip...Spike Jones and his City Slickers playing "Yankee Doodle Dandy," complete with a Jimmy Cagney impersonation by Billy Barty. The visual gag of Spike sitting on the piano with his feet playing the keys was devised for him by the great animation director, Tex Avery. Matter of fact, I have Tex's original sketches for this gag here someplace and if I can find them, I'll post 'em one of these days. In the meantime, here's my favorite bandleader and my old pal Billy making George M. Cohan spin in his crypt...
The publicist for the TV game show Jeopardy! has sent out a press release to TV writers telling them to alert their readers that something special happens on the show tomorrow night...
This Friday, March 16th, 2007...and for the first time in 23 years, "Jeopardy!" history will be made. It was such a remarkable event we consulted a Game Theory expert and he said it may never happen again! I wish I could give you more information about this special show, unfortunately, I can only encourage you and your valuable readers to watch Friday's program. Alex Trebek and our producers remain mum and I, myself, have been sworn to secrecy.
Your guess is as good as mine. Maybe someone got every single question and set some new one day record.
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. When even Republican Senators are calling for your resignation, that's a good sign that the Bush administration is going to cut you loose.
Rahm Emanuel is the Democratic caucus chair. He has a couple of nuggets of advice to new Congresspeople in his party but here's the main one: Avoid Stephen Colbert.
The lovely Diana Schutz sent me this lovely photo she took of the lovely Arnold Drake and it made me want to write a little more about my friend who passed away Monday morning, just eleven days after his 82nd birthday. I've been fortunate to meet most of the major figures who created comic books I loved as a kid and who were still alive when I got into the business. As I must have written somewhere else on this website at least once, only a very few of them turned out not to be great people to be around. Some, of course, were special joys.
Arnold was one of my favorite comic book writers before I knew who he was...even before I knew that the guy who wrote those Tommy Tomorrow stories I thought were so great was the same guy who'd written all those Challengers of the Unknown comics I liked so much. There were no credits then and when I later did learn who'd written what, I could see the connection. Arnold's writing was a little wittier, a little sharper than most of the others then scripting books by the tonweight for DC. He seemed to presuppose a little more intelligence on the part of the readers. He didn't explain everything four times the way some of the other writers did. He expected us to "get it."
I corresponded with Arnold in the seventies and met him in person in the early eighties. This is kind of a cliché but that doesn't mean it isn't accurate. He was a writer who made you feel like a writer. He was very serious about his work and always discussed it with people as if their opinions and respect mattered to him. He was full of wonderful anecdotes about the business and unlike some others I've interviewed, I found that Arnold's accounts usually checked out. I especially loved the story he often told about Bob Kane and the clown paintings. Do you know that story? Here — here's Arnold telling it on a panel a few years ago...
Bob had gotten to the point where he never drew anything. Never drew anything on the Batman comics, anyway. [Sheldon] Moldoff was ghosting them all and when he didn't, someone else did. The only thing I think Bob ever drew was when we'd be out somewhere, in a restaurant or someplace, and a pretty girl would come over to him and say, "Are you really the man who draws Batman?" Then he could whip out a little sketch for her, a big sketch if she was wearing something low-cut and would bend over to watch him draw.
One day I'm over at his house to discuss this newspaper strip idea we had and he's talking about who we might get to draw it. I was going to write it and we were going to get someone else to draw it. I'm not sure what he was going to do on it except sign his name. I said to him, "Bob, isn't it disappointing to you that you don't draw any more? You were once such a great artist." He wasn't but you had to talk to Bob that way.
He said, "Oh, no. Let me show you something." He took me into a little room in his house. It was his studio. I didn't even know he still had a studio. It was all set up with easels and things and there were paintings, paintings of clowns. You know the kind. Like the ones Red Skelton used to do. Just these insipid portraits of clowns, all signed very large, "Bob Kane." He was so proud of them. He said, "These are the paintings that are going to make me in the world of art. Batman was a big deal in one world and these paintings will soon be in every gallery in the world." He thought the Louvre was going to take down the Mona Lisa to put up his clown paintings. I didn't have the heart to tell him.
So a few months later, I'm up at DC and I ran into Eddie Herron. Eddie was another writer up there and we got to talking and Bob's name came up. Eddie said, "Did you hear? Bob's getting sued by one of his ghost artists."
I said, "How is that possible? Shelly Moldoff's suing Bob? But they had a clear deal. Shelly knew he wasn't going to get credit or anything..."
Eddie said, "No, not Shelly." Bob was being sued by the person who'd painted the clowns for him...
Love that story. But then I just loved Arnold. I loved the guy's feisty, honest manner. He was very proud of his work but also very critical. We once talked for a half hour on the phone about the work he did for Marvel after he got booted out of DC for having the nerve to demand health insurance. Arnold was not happy with the writing he'd done during that period and very disappointed with himself for booting that opportunity. He said that after he was ousted at DC, he was so angry that he lost his bearings as a writer and forgot certain basics. He was not writing to do good Marvel stories, he said. He was writing to show DC they couldn't destroy his career, which was the wrong attitude. The difference can be quite significant as it relates to what gets on the page. While it's sometimes easy to see when others have their priorities askew, it's difficult to perceive when you do. I was impressed that Arnold had that ability.
One of my last memories of Arnold is of a moment two years ago when we were all in San Francisco for the Wondercon. For some reason, a batch of us decided to go to Chinatown on Saturday night. That would ordinarily be a fun thing but this evening was one of intermittent downpours and parades. It was around the Chinese New Year and traffic was being diverted via odd routes. You literally could not get a cab at our hotel or anywhere near it. We had to walk about four blocks to find one and we only got the one we got because I spotted it discharging a passenger and I sprinted over and practically vaulted onto the hood.
We went to Chinatown. We ate a lovely meal. When it came time to leave, it was raining as hard as I've ever seen in my life and there wasn't a cab anywhere. It was like they'd all disappeared from the surface of the planet. My friend Carolyn walked one way to look for one and my friend Sergio went the other. I stood there on the sidewalk, trying to hold an umbrella over Arnold for what seemed like the longest time. Eventually, Carolyn flagged down a limo driver and made a deal with him to take us back to the Argent Hotel. But before that, there was a moment when the situation seemed hopeless.
I was standing there in the driving rain. I don't like rain anyway and I really didn't like the idea that poor Arnold Drake was in the midst of it with only my flimsy umbrella keeping some (not all) of the rain off him. We were stranded and it didn't look like we'd ever get a cab and even though none of this was my fault, I felt like it was; like I should have planned things better so an eighty year old man wasn't standing there in the cold and wet with no way to get home. A sudden wave of sadness came over me...
...and Arnold — brilliant, perceptive judge of character that he was — sensed it. I don't think I said anything to give away how I felt but still, he turned to me and said, "Don't get upset, Mark. I live in New York. I worked for DC Comics. This is nothing." And I realized that he wasn't the slightest bit upset or worried or even troubled by our predicament. He knew we'd get back to the hotel eventually and a minute or so later, Carolyn showed up with the limo and that began to look remotely possible. (Finding Sergio was now the big problem...)
Everything worked out fine, of course. But when I think of Arnold in the future, I think I'm going to remember him on that corner. He was, of course, not happy to be there but he acted truly unbothered by it all. Didn't complain, didn't express any fear. He knew, as I didn't at that particular moment, that there was no point to any of that. It was just something we had to get through and he didn't make it any worse by dwelling on the negative or whining or being weak. In fact, he made things better by setting a good example for me.
He always did, at least in my encounters with the man. We didn't get to speak during his final hospitalization because he was asleep for most of it. But many months earlier when he was in for something else that could have been fatal, we talked almost every day and he was the same way — positive without being delusional, realistic without being glum. It struck me as the perfect mindset for dealing with any problem.
Anyone who read Arnold's comics could tell you that he was a superb role model as a writer. I just wanted to add that he was an even better one as a human being. Those two things don't always go together so it's important to notice when they do. They did with Arnold Drake.
Let's go back to the one of Cartoon Voice panels I hosted at last year's Comic-Con International in San Diego. Last week, we linked to a video of the fine actor Gregg Berger telling a story about working with Mel Blanc in a Jetsons session. Shortly before he told that tale, another fine actor, Michael Bell, told about working with Mel in a recording session for Speed Buggy. Here's what Michael had to say...
And now, in case you didn't click on it the other day, here's Gregg Berger with the follow-up anecdote.
The CompUSA chain is closing down an awful lot of its stores. Here's a list of the ones that are shutting down, and it isn't even complete. The one on La Cienega at the Beverly Connection closed about a year ago and I noticed yesterday that the one at Pico and Westwood in West L.A. is already vacant. Neither is on this list, which I guess is of imminent closures. I used to shop at all three. As one who has purchased an awful lot of software and hardware from them, I'd like to suggest the reason those stores failed.
It's not because there's no demand for their product, that's for sure. Computers...cell phones...PDAs...plasma-screen televisions...My God, if there was ever stuff that people are buying left and right, it's new, high-tech stuff these days. Even people who own those things are in a constant state of upgrading to the next model. You'd think this would be the time that many chains of that sort would be blossoming like Starbucks on every corner.
But there was a problem with CompUSA: Finding anyone worked in one who knew anything about the equipment they were selling. I think you could have walked into the one in Culver City and yelled, "What's a spreadsheet?" and not gotten an answer. It seemed to me like in every store, they had one or two people who knew everything and those people were always too busy to wait on anyone, leaving customers at the mercy of the Amish.
You ever try asking a question in one of these places? Anything more technical than "Where's the men's room?" and you'd get back these blank Orphan Annie eyeballs. Inevitably, they'd start looking around for the one person in the building who might know...and that guy was always occupied and unavailable. I have been in CompUSAs where I wound up taking pity on bewildered customers and helping them with questions. I was also once in one where I had to explain the difference between DVD-R and DVD+R to a salesperson.
There's a place for a chain of computer stores where the people know their merchandise and know their technology. A lot of people would be willing to pay a little more for their technology bling to shop at that store...but it wasn't CompUSA. If I want to buy where they don't know anything about computers, I can go to Wal-Mart or Costco or Best Buy...or better still, order over the Internet. It's cheaper and you get the same amount of personal attention: None.
In the meantime though, the buzz is that the CompUSA stores that are closing are offering substantial discounts. So if the one near you is on the list, you might want to check and see if it's still there and if so, drop by. Just don't try asking anyone anything. If one assumes the smarter employees are already gone to get other employment, you may not even be able to find out where the men's room is.
Senator Alan Simpson once supported "Don't ask, don't tell" in the military. He has come around to the viewpoint that gays should be allowed to serve openly in the military. His two main arguments seem to be that (a) we need everyone competent we can get and (b) it doesn't bother some people as much as it once did. These are good reasons...and I suspect they were good reasons back when Simpson was on the other side of this issue. But back then, he was running for office now and then so he had a good reason not to come to this point of view.
This article in The Washington Post is about how game shows are getting dumber; how shows like Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader? come from the viewpoint that the viewers are low in I.Q. points and therefore enjoy watching idiot contestants. Here's one section of the piece...
Some of the program's questions are difficult, but it's unusual to get more than two real tough ones in a row. Among the questions in the debut episode: Name the ship the Pilgrims sailed on from Plymouth, England, to the Plymouth colony in America in 1620. Name the closest star to the Earth. What country has the longest shared border with the United States? What is the suffix in the word "undoubtedly"? TV executives call those kinds of questions "relate-able," by which they mean "unlikely to challenge viewers too much and thus make them feel bad about themselves."
More than a few viewers apparently appreciate the approach. Are You Smarter's elevation of familiar, simple facts to brain-twisting stumpers has proved to be monstrously popular, attracting a larger audience than any new show in the Fox network's history, some 26.5 million (although it admittedly was helped by following the even more popular American Idol). The quiz show's second episode drew 23.4 million.
My view? I think the whole premise of the article is wrong on two fronts. First off, there have always been game shows that required no intelligence or knowledge to get to the big prizes. Anyone ever see Beat the Clock, which was one of the most successful of the genre? How about Let's Make a Deal? To win on Newlywed Game, you only had to be on roughly the same mental wavelength as your spouse. To win on Match Game, you only had to fill in the blank with a word like "boobs" or "buns." Those were all pretty popular shows and on most, you could have the brains of a refrigerator and still win a refrigerator.
So this is not a new trend at all. Secondly, the point of Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader? seems to have eluded the author of the article so I'll explain it: The point of the show is to laugh at the stupid people. It comes from the same place as those jerk-on-the-street interviews that Jay Leno does where we're supposed to howl with laughter that some people think Ben Franklin was our first president. With some of the other shows, it's just mindless or near-mindless fun, which is not always a bad thing.
I'm surprised the reporter came to his conclusions. He interviewed two of the most knowledgeable people I know on the subject of game shows, Fred Wostbrock and Steve Beverly. On the other hand, I've seen very few articles lately in The Washington Post that I thought knew what they were talking about. What has happened to that paper? I think they're the ones trying to cater to stupid people.
Speaking of blowing up hotels in Las Vegas: Here's the last six minutes of the Hacienda Hotel, which was imploded on New Year's Eve ten years ago. As I wrote about here, I was present for this event. If you look hard, you may be able to see me in the crowd. I'm the one standing next to the really drunk guy.
Just to remind you all: Turner Classic Movies is running the oft-discussed (on this website) and ultra-cynical Billy Wilder movie, Ace in the Hole this Saturday. I think it's on at Noon on the West Coast but you'd better look it up to make certain. It may be listed by its other name, The Big Carnival.
As you may recall, we made a fuss over this film in part because it's never had a real home video release in the United States. Several folks have now informed me though that a DVD is coming this summer from the folks at Criterion. So if you don't remember to set your TiVo, it may not matter.
Rolling Stone convenes a panel of Iraq War pessimists to discuss how bad things are there and how much worse they can get. I almost didn't link to this because it seemed too negative and gloomy...but I do think even the optimists need to brace themselves for the possibility of some "worst case" scenarios. This piece will give you several.
The last big building that comprised the Stardust Hotel in Las Vegas was imploded very early this morning and I thought you might enjoy seeing that. Originally, the company behind it all told reporters that they weren't going to make a fuss; that they even preferred for safety reasons to not draw a huge audience for the event. Obviously, they changed their mind because they put on a huge fireworks show before making the shell of the hotel go bye-bye. It doesn't look like their fireworks display was as spectacular as the one I saw when the Hacienda Hotel was blown up but it looks pretty good.
It's charming in a way that they added the fireworks. I mean, why? It's not like you need that to attract interest when you're blowing up a building. And for what purpose? They don't have to drum up business for the Stardust, after all, and I fail to see how this will translate into any value to the new mega-resort they'll be opening on that parcel of land in a few years. They just did it to show off, which I think is great. It's Vegas, baby.
We have team coverage for you of the demolition. First, here's footage from a British newscast...
Then since that clip ends a little abruptly, here's the CBS News footage of the implosion...
I'm not going to miss the Stardust for reasons I explained here. Or at least, I thought I wasn't going to miss it. I kinda wish I'd gotten there one last time before they made it go away, not because it was a great hotel. It hadn't been that for decades. But it was fun to look at the coffee shop and imagine Frank and Dean and Peter Lawford sitting there, talking about stuff.
This post is mainly for folks who live in Los Angeles but the rest of you can listen in.
One of the things I've learned to never discuss with friends is pizza. I have friends who wouldn't react if you told them their mother was a crack whore but if you disparaged their favorite pizza, it would be pistols at twenty paces. Actually, the possessive quality of one's pizza fave often goes in two stages, the first being the locale of the best pizza. Some stand ready to fight to the death should anyone suggest that the best pizza outside of New York is not inferior to the worst pizza in New York. I have learned not to tell these people about some of the real lousy slices I've had in Manhattan.
Others are the same way about Chicago, Boston or certain parts of New Jersey, and I even have a friend who stands ready to argue that there's no better pizza than one can find in Reno, Nevada.
Anyway, once you decide what city defines your ultimate pizza, you can get down to the second stage of the argument, which is where — outside of that town — someone makes a reasonable facsimile of it. In Los Angeles, I have heard people swear that the closest thing to "New York Pizza" is to be found at Mulberry Street Pizza (in Beverly Hills and Encino), at Frankie & Johnnie's (in Beverly Hills, Brentwood and Hollywood), at Damiano's (on Fairfax, across from Canter's), at Rocco's (in the Miracle Mile and on Vermont, across from L.A. City College) and at Johnnie's (many locations). I like all of these places and wouldn't argue for or against any of them.
Two or three years ago, there seemed to be a consensus winner among my acquaintances. That was Vito's Pizza, over on Vermont in the building that is now a Rocco's. I know people who'd drive clear across town, passing all those other places, to get pizza from Vito's...and I admit, it was pretty good. Many went into mourning when Vito and his brother closed down, reportedly moving back home to Chicago.
Well, they're back. I haven't been there yet but I received an ecstatic e-mail from one buddy that Vito has reopened on La Cienega Boulevard. He's in a strip mall somewhere between Melrose and Santa Monica Boulevard...and it's all so new that Directory Assistance doesn't even have a listing for them yet. This is exciting news, especially if it turns out that I'm in their delivery area, as I may well be. I'll give them a try just as soon as Creamy Tomato Soup Month is over at the Souplantation. That's all I'm eating until April 1. If anyone gets there before me, let me know if the new Vito's is as fine as the old Vito's.
Ever since Deal or No Deal debuted, I've been TiVoing the show and watching it with increasing speed. Thanks to my remote control, I now make it through an hour episode in about seven minutes. When I pause, I can see that the program has gotten a bit more condescending and a lot more repetitive. There have been many games that were simply not interesting because the contestant knocked out the big amounts near the beginning so the whole hour was to see if they'd go home with $10,000 or $20,000.
Last night, they had on a two-hour episode and I guess I should insert the SPOILER ALERT right about here in case you recorded it and haven't watched yet.
Still with me? Fine. Last night, they had the second half on a game from the previous episode plus two complete games. No one won huge amounts. All three players went home with amounts under $100,000 — but what was interesting was that two of them picked the case with the million dollars in it. One sold it for $99,000 and the other — who obviously got out way before the producers and audience were expecting him to — took $81,000.
Now, neither one of those folks were likely to take home the million. They play out the game after the deal is accepted and the last guy, the one who settled for $81 grand, would have reached the point where he had either $75,000 or the million and he had a bank offer of, I believe, $561,000. If someone got that far, they almost certainly would have grabbed the dough. I doubt anyone would go down to the last case unless their last two choices were both six figure amounts.
Still, it's fascinating that the million was picked in two of three consecutive games. I guess that's why I still TiVo the thing...to see those odd moments. This one was pretty odd.
You may not want to sit through this entire clip but it's kinda interesting in a way. In 1972, the Goodson-Todman game show company revived their old game show, The Price is Right, in a new, more energetic format. In addition to the daytime version hosted by Bob Barker, there was a syndicated nighttime version hosted by Dennis James, and this is a sales film for the syndicated version. It was sent to stations to try and get them to buy the show...which, at this point, apparently had not taped any episodes. One presumes that if they had done some, they would have included scenes. Instead, Mark Goodson and Dennis James have to sell the show by explaining what it is, how it works, etc. There is a clip but it's of James filling in for Monty Hall as the host of Let's Make a Deal.
This runs close to fifteen minutes and it's amazing that the show sold. It sounds complex and boring, whereas the TV show they were hawking was pretty simple and fast-paced. You have to wonder what they thought the station managers would think they were buying — the idea of pricing games? The charisma of Dennis James? It may have just been the past track record of Goodson-Todman but for some reason, Goodson doesn't itemize their many past hits. If I were running a TV station and they sent this to me, I think I'd have wondered why they were so sure they had a great show when they obviously hadn't done one episode yet. But it worked.
Having troubles with your computer? A lot of people recommend Iolo's System Mechanic to fix them.
Having no troubles with your computer? I recommend Iolo's System Mechanic to create some.
Seriously, I had one or two things wrong on each of my two main computers. I installed System Mechanic and suddenly had ten or fifteen things not functioning properly. I uninstalled it and now I'm back down to the one or two things wrong on each.
Moral of the story: Well, you can figure out what the moral of the story is — something about not believing that every piece of software out there will do what it's supposed to do on your computer...or even what it does on other folks' computers.
Over at the Sequential Tart website, Katherine Keller makes her case that the annual Comic-Con International in San Diego should become the annual Comic-Con International in Las Vegas. I don't think this is very likely. For thirty-some-odd years, there's been talk of the convention moving to another city but it's never really come from anyone who would actually be involved in making that happen.
In any case, Katherine concludes her essay by saying, "Based on these facts, name me one reason it should not be Las Vegas." Since I know Vegas pretty well, I'd like to give her a few, starting with the weather. The average July temperature in San Diego is 84 degrees and it's usually 5-10 degrees less around the ocean where the convention center is located. The average July temperature in Las Vegas is 106. How's that for one reason?
I would also question a lot of those facts or at least their relevance. Yes, McCarran Airport in Vegas can handle a lot more traffic than San Diego. It has to handle a lot more and it isn't doing that good a job of it. They've been adding new terminals and gates at a feverish rate and so far, they haven't been able to gain on the steadily-increasing visitor traffic. Deutsch Bank recently released a projection of tourist volume that does not seem to be available online except behind one subscription firewall...but trust me. They calculated the number of planned hotel rooms in Vegas (42,000 more in the next five years) and said that McCarran will fall even farther behind. In fact, the hotels have been counting on some (not all) of those problems being alleviated by a new $4 billion airport planned for Ivanpah Valley, which is thirty miles outside Las Vegas. But the most optimistic date for its completion is 2017.
If we're going to compare the two destinations in terms of how easy they are to get to, I think San Diego wins. Most San Diego attendees are coming from portions of California to the north. Many go by train and they can't get to Vegas that way since there's no train service to Las Vegas. There's also very little bus service. Most drive...and the drive to Vegas, at least from Southern California, is a mess these days with I-15 being intermittently closed or limited for construction. One of the appeals of Comic-Con is how many attendees come from Hollywood...and it takes twice as long to drive to Vegas from Los Angeles as it does to drive to San Diego from Los Angeles.
Ms. Keller touts the wonders of the Vegas monorail system as being able to deliver people easily to the convention center. Well, it is if you're near one of the seven places it stops. It's useless for most hotels in Vegas and it's even useless for the seven locations it serves when it's out of commission, which is a large percentage of the time. It may become totally useless if it closes, which it may do because it's losing a fortune.
Yes, Vegas has more convention center space. It's also vast, cold and impersonal. People complain about having to walk too much in San Diego. These are all people who've never attended the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. More space is not a good thing if it fragments the event to the point you never get from one area to another.
The C.E.S. is worth mentioning because it's the biggest convention in that city and at 150,000 attendees, it's as big as the Comic-Con will be in a few years if Comic-Con doesn't do something silly like move to Vegas. It's no easier or cheaper to get a hotel room in Vegas during C.E.S. than it is to get one in San Diego during Comic-Con. Just to give you an example, I went online and checked out the Riviera Hotel in Vegas, which is one of the crummier places one might stay there. During normal, non-convention times, a room at the Riv is $69 a night. For the dates of next January's C.E.S., which is not even on a weekend, they're already asking $269 a night. The Bellagio, which is a very nice hotel, is asking $499 a night and the cheapest room at the Venetian is $549. If it were a weekend, those rates would certainly be doubled. These prices should tell you something about demand and availability. During C.E.S., all the hotels either sell out months in advance or charge like that...or both.
And let's also note that the C.E.S. is in January. They're smart enough not to try to get people to go to Las Vegas in the Summer. When they used to have two Consumer Electronics Shows per year, they had the Winter one in Vegas and the Summer one in Chicago.
Lastly: The convention, when it's in San Diego, is almost the only game in town. Comic-Con would not be that big a deal in Las Vegas. No one convention is and the hotels in Vegas were not built to serve the convention center, whereas the main ones we stay at in San Diego were. The Comic-Con actually changed the face of convention-going in San Diego and is deemed important by the locals there. Vegas wouldn't care. We'd just be one of many conventions that week or that month, and the esteem in which we were held, and the "clout" of the convention organizers would have everything to do with how much money we spent while we were there. Somehow, I don't think comic book people would spend anywhere near as much as the people who attend the C.E.S. in Vegas, most of whom seem to be Sony and Panasonic execs on unlimited expense accounts. I also don't know what exhibitor space at a Vegas convention would cost but I'll bet it would be a lot more expensive than what Sergio Aragonés and Stan Sakai pay for their tables in San Diego.
So there's a whole bunch of reasons and I'll bet if I spent another twenty minutes on it, I'd come up with twenty more...and I say this as someone who likes Las Vegas, who goes there often. But I go there for totally different reasons than I go to the Comic-Con in San Diego. Vegas is designed to lure you to the showrooms and Blackjack tables when you're not at your convention. At Comic-Con, I don't want or need all that enticement. When we go to Comic-Con in San Diego, we're the show and we bring our own entertainment. Oh, and I just remembered a biggie: At Comic-Con, they don't expect you to go pay good money to see Wayne Newton or Carrot Top. There's two more reasons.
Still no sign of Disney releasing Song of the South on DVD. But over at the Disney Family Museum website, this page has a nice article about the film and some online video clips shot on the set. So if and when they do put the film out on DVD, there could be some great extras included.
Arnold Drake, one of comics' most acclaimed writers, died this morning. We all knew he was sick. He collapsed a few days after attending the New York Comic Book Convention (Feb. 23-25) with, they said at the time, "a touch of pneumonia." Other complications were found and he never left the hospital.
During his career, he wrote all the major characters for DC Comics but distinguished himself especially with his co-creations, Deadman, The Doom Patrol and Stanley and His Monster. He was also known for long stints writing the comic book adventures of Bob Hope and Jerry Lewis, most of which were drawn by the also-recently-deceased Bob Oksner.
Drake was born on March 1, 1924. At age 12, a bout with scarlet fever kept him confined to his bed for a year. He spent much of the time drawing his own comics and, though he later did do some cartooning work, he found that his primary interest was not in drawing characters but in deciding what they'd say and do. That sent him off on a writing career and he studied Journalism at the University of Missouri and later at New York University.
Then he met Bob Kane, the official creator of Batman, who happened to be a neighbor of Arnold's brother. He worked with Kane on a few projects and the artist introduced him to the editors at DC. Before long, Drake was writing for DC books including House of Mystery, My Greatest Adventure, Mark Merlin, Space Ranger, Batman and Tommy Tomorrow. Most of his new creations in the sixties came about because an editor said to him, "This comic is in sales trouble and needs a new feature." My Greatest Adventure was down in sales so Drake, working with artist Bruno Premiani and fellow writer Bob Haney, invented The Doom Patrol, a band of misfit heroes very similar to Marvel's X-Men, which went on sale at almost the exact same time. Strange Adventures was in sales trouble so Drake, working with artist Carmine Infantino, came up with the acclaimed Deadman character. The Fox and the Crow was down in sales so Drake, teamed with Bob Oksner, fashioned Stanley and His Monster — a highly-imaginative kids' comic that preceded (but contained many of the elements of) the newspaper strip, Calvin and Hobbes.
But Drake was a feisty guy who had trouble getting along with editors. In the late sixties, he fought with the management at DC, partly over what he considered inept editorial direction and partly over business matters. He was a loud voice in a writers' revolt during which several of the firm's longtime freelancers were demanding health insurance, reprint fees and better pay. Many of them were ousted, including Arnold, and he then worked for a time for Marvel before settling down at Gold Key Comics for many years. For them, he wrote many comics including The Twilight Zone, Star Trek and a particularly long and delightful stint on Little Lulu.
Arnold wrote other things including plays, movies (Who Killed Teddy Bear? and The Flesh Eaters, among others) and novels. In the fifties, he authored a long comic book in book form called It Rhymes With Lust for a small publisher and later touted it, with some justification, as the first graphic novel. (Dark Horse will soon reissue it.) He also worked extensively with a group called the Veterans Bedside Network, writing materials to aid in the rehabilitation and nursing of men and women who'd served in the armed forces.
Very active on the convention circuit in recent years, Arnold at one point began crusading for the industry to establish something he wanted to call The Bill Finger Award. Finger, hailed by Drake and others as the unbilled co-creator of Batman, died in poverty and Arnold felt that there should be an award to shame people and companies that mistreated talent. In 2005, quite independently, a Bill Finger Award was created, this one to honor veteran writers who had not received proper recognition for their work. The first recipient of it was Arnold Drake.
Arnold was one of my favorite comic book writers of all time. Much of his early work was uncredited and I was delighted, as I learned more about who'd written what, to find him as the common thread among some of the best comics DC produced in the sixties. (The Showcase issues of Tommy Tomorrow are especially brilliant, and they were written by Arnold.) I was privileged to get to know Arnold and to spend many a convention panel and telephone conversation, hearing him discourse on his favorite subject in the world, which was creativity. At the time of his death, he had several projects in the work and the urge to write something wonderful was undiminished. We are all a little worse off that Arnold isn't writing and I can't begin to measure what those of us who considered him a good friend have lost.
In the seventies, after The Mary Tyler Moore Show, M*A*S*H and All in the Family redefined what a sitcom could be, there were probably thousands of attempts to reinvent the variety show. Most never got farther than pitches to networks but every year, there were at least a dozen such pilots, some disguised as one-shot specials, and a few became series. The consensus seemed to be that the day was past when you could just take someone like a Danny Kaye or a Carol Burnett and build a show around them and their versatility. That kind of multi-faceted entertainer was becoming extinct. The new ideas were mostly matters of concept — some format that allowed for songs and sketches, often incorporating elements of a sitcom and/or Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In. One that tried to the latter combo was the short-lived 1971 series, The Funny Side.
It was produced by Bill Persky and Sam Denoff, and I'm not sure who else worked behind the cameras. In front of them, they had a stock company of ten regulars, five men and five women representing five different kinds of couples. The pairs were Warren Berlinger and Pat Finley as the "blue collar" couple, Dick Clair and Jenna McMahon as a more or less "wealthy" couple, John Amos and Teresa Graves as a "minority" couple, Michael Lembeck and Cindy Williams as a "young" couple and Burt Mustin and Queenie Smith as an "old" couple. The host of it all was Gene Kelly and I thought it was a pretty clever show that deserved to run longer than the three months it lasted. It would have if the show had been as funny and charming as Mr. Mustin was, off-camera.
I have a personal story here. In '71, I was nineteen years old and writing all sorts of things — mostly comic books published in languages other than English — for the Walt Disney Company. Often when I wasn't attending my classes at U.C.L.A., and sometimes when I should have been, I'd take a bus out to Burbank and spend the morning on the Disney lot, which was a much more magical place then than it is today. Back then, everyone who worked there felt like they were a part of Walt's heritage and that they had a job for life...maybe not a great-paying one but there was a sense that being part of D*I*S*N*E*Y (and having all that job security) made up for low wages. These days, it seems like everyone who works there thinks of themselves as an extended Temp toiling for whoever runs the company this week, watching their paychecks get slashed to compensate for CEO bonuses.
In 1971, I worked mainly for a fellow in his late thirties named George Sherman, who was involved in all sorts of publishing projects. We got along great and he was always recommending me for other jobs on the lot and to outside companies doing Disney projects, especially anything involving Goofy. I was his big Goofy writer. I owe a lot of my comic book writing career to that man.
George was out sick for weeks at a time (he died not long after) but when he was there, I'd sometimes spend mornings in his office, go to lunch with him and then in the afternoon, I'd walk the two blocks to NBC Studios and sneak or talk my way in to watch the taping of a Bob Hope special or Laugh-In. Some days, I could see The Dean Martin Show rehearse without Dean Martin or even watch the legendary Mr. Carson do what he did so well.
One day, George and I were lunching in the Disney commissary when a man came by and said hello. It was Gene Kelly. I have no idea how George knew him but he knew him. The great star of so many movie musicals was on the lot to talk to someone at Disney about some project. He sat and talked for a bit and told us about a new TV show he was taping over at NBC, one that wasn't yet on the air. It was The Funny Side. George told him that I was known to prowl the NBC corridors and Mr. Kelly invited me to visit the set whenever I wanted...say, later that day. I accepted and that afternoon, I didn't have to talk my way past the security guards. I was, ahem, the personal guest of Mr. Gene Kelly. Matter of fact, for the next few weeks when I went there, the guards just waved me through because they figured I was associated with him.
I'm not sure if The Funny Side ever taped with a live audience but they didn't have one that day. For most of the afternoon, I was the live audience. They spent about an hour with Kelly, who was dressed in a tux and looking just like you'd want Gene Kelly to look, doing a very simple dance routine on a conference table with the cast seated all around it. It should have taken ten minutes but there were technical snafus and delays, and you could see Kelly was getting annoyed but he kept his temper in check.
When he was done, he wasn't needed for a while so he came out to the bleachers and sat with me and we talked for...well, it must have been an hour. It was another of the many "I'd give anything for a tape recorder" moments of my life. We talked mostly about current Hollywood and how Gene (he insisted I call him that) didn't like the way it was going. He was more interested in discussing his recent work as a director — on Hello, Dolly and A Guide for the Married Man — than in talking about the MGM days, but he did tell me a long, X-rated anecdote, the point of which was that Louis B. Mayer preached core American morality to all whenever he wasn't making starlets earn their contract renewals on or under his desk. Of the film of Hello, Dolly, Gene said his great directoral achievement was to make it appear that Barbra Streisand and Walter Matthau did not want to strangle each other.
Later, wearing the same tux, Gene went down the hall and taped some spots for The Dean Martin Show, some of them even with Dean. I was invited to tag along and there Kelly introduced me to Lou Jacobi, Kay Medford, Nipsey Russell and to Harry Crane, who was the head writer and as famous in the business for creating great jokes as Gene was for dancing in inclement weather. It was quite a magical day, though Gene showed no interest in continuing our casual friendship and I never spoke to him again after that. I was impressed with how much energy he had (he was 59 then) and how he truly worked hard at everything he did. I guess that was one of the reasons he was such a great performer. I felt bad for him when I heard The Funny Side was cancelled because he seemed to think it was his last chance to prove he had a place in the current entertainment industry, as opposed to the "old-timer" circuit.
Here's a little less than five minutes of The Funny Side, and it should give you a pretty good idea of what the show was like. My thanks to someone named "Wookie" who wrote to say he put this clip up on YouTube, just because I once mentioned the program here. So does anyone have any clips of Stubby Kaye hosting Shenanigans? How about Our Place starring Burns and Schreiber? Or that season of Dean Martin Presents the Golddiggers that was taped in London with Marty Feldman?
Apparently, theories are already starting to pop up on Ye Olde Internet that Richard Jeni didn't commit suicide and was the victim of, as they say, foul play. "Foul play" is one of my favorite euphemisms for murder. It makes it sound like someone violated the Infield Fly Rule.
Two different e-mailers wanted to know if I was suggesting that when I said there was no sign that the guy might kill himself. No, I was not. I don't know anything more about it than was in the Associated Press report to which I linked. As near as I can tell, none of the speculators have any reason at all to speculate, either...which doesn't mean this might not blossom into a great tabloid news story. I mean, Anna Nicole is kind of winding down and Britney Spears has run her course. Nancy Grace and others on cable would probably love to find even the remotest justification to introduce the "m" word into this matter. Remember: You don't need to believe there's anything to a scandal in order to cover it in the news these days. You just need to be able to say "someone" thinks something might have happened.
As a quick change of partial subject, I wanted to repeat one of the funniest things I ever heard Richard Jeni say. I mentioned it back here but to save you clicking, I'll just reprint it...
A few years ago, I was in Las Vegas and I happened to catch him doing an interview on a local show there. He was talking about his appearance in the then-upcoming motion picture, Burn, Hollywood, Burn, and he said approximately the following...
Did you ever see the movie, The Player? This is the exact same movie but without the quality. This is for the discriminating filmgoer who's been wondering, "What if The Player hadn't been a very good movie?"
I thought it was the funniest, most honest thing I'd ever heard anyone say in "plugging" an upcoming film.
Boy, I don't get this one at all. They're saying stand-up comic Richard Jeni committed suicide yesterday morning. There was no apparent reason, no apparent warning sign...nothing.
He was a very funny boy. Back here, I highly recommended his latest (and I guess now, last) HBO Special. I'd still recommend just about anything he did, though it may be a little harder to laugh at it after this. He was a very simple, straightforward comedian whose act seemed derivative of no one else. It came from nothing but his own sense of humor. On stage, he projected the image of a guy who really had a sane, common sense attitude towards the world. Which I guess is one of the things that makes it hard to accept that he did what they say he did.
Last week was the 25th anniversary of the death of John Belushi, who committed his own kind of suicide with drugs and the way he lived. I thought about posting something here but didn't get around to it. If I had, it would have been about how (to me) the most tragic part of Belushi's passing was that everyone knew in advance how it would end. In fact, it wasn't necessary to even announce the cause. When it first hit the news wires, they just said that John Belushi had been found dead and everyone just kind of shrugged and assumed, "Drug overdose." Some people thought they heard the TV and radio news reports give the cause of death hours before they actually did. It was that expected.
People talking about Jeni's death are probably going to mention Belushi and also Freddie Prinze. I knew Freddie a little bit, though not well. At the time he shot himself, I was working for the outfit that produced his show, Chico and the Man, and while I don't think anyone there expected the guy to take his own life, no one seemed all that stunned that something dark and tragic occurred. The warning signs were there.
And then you have something like this. I never met Richard Jeni. I'm not sure I ever even saw him perform live, though I know that recently, when I saw he was playing the Improv in Hollywood or the Comedy and Magic Club in Hermosa Beach, I thought, "Hey, maybe I'll get a group together and we'll go see him." (Let that be a lesson to me about putting things off 'til the next time.) Maybe there was a dark side that never showed itself on stage. Maybe those who knew him well aren't stunned at the news, I dunno. It's just a kick in the gut for some of us.
In case you didn't hear, Premiere magazine is shutting down. And so, after only three issues, is the new Cracked.
George S. Kaufman reportedly once said that if you wanted to get even with someone who did you wrong, you should convince them to invest heavily in new productions of Ibsen plays. I think I'll tell everyone I don't like that it's a dandy time to start a new magazine.
Robert Kagan writes that the "surge" in Iraq has been a great success, while Glenn Greenwald reminds us how Robert Kagan has been wrong about Iraq, every step of the way.
Here's another one of those cartoons I wrote that shouldn't be on YouTube but the lawyers haven't gotten around to ordering its removal. This is "Picnic Panic," which was a fifth season episode and one of the occasional all-music cartoons we did. Lorenzo Music performed the voice of Garfield and Thom Huge did the voice of Garfield's long-suffering owner, Jon. Thom also did the picnicker at the end. I wrote the lyrics and a very gifted musician named Ed Bogas wrote the tune, did the musical score (that's mostly him you hear playing) and sang for the ants. This cartoon is full of singing ants...
My buddy Jerry Beck got together a bunch of vintage Cocoa Puffs commercials that feature the voice of the great Chuck McCann. He does both Gramps and the Cocoa Puffs bird in these spots you can view over at Cartoon Brew.
Lately, there seem to be a lot of what one might call "Something to outrage everyone" news stories — cases where we could disagree on what's happening but either interpretation is cause for anger. The case of Jose Padilla, the alleged terrorist, is one of those.
Either this guy's innocent or guilty. If he's innocent, then your government has held an innocent man prisoner for three and a half years, doing everything possible to not let him have his day in court or proper legal counsel. They've also either tortured him intentionally or just by keeping him confined the way they have, done severe damage to his physical and mental health.
Or maybe he's guilty. If that's so, then the outrage is that your government has botched his prosecution beyond belief. Many of the charges against him have been dropped or dismissed. The rest may get tossed because of his condition or because the prosecutors keep amending their account of the facts of the case or, most recently, because they seem to have "lost" the videotape of his last interrogation.
I don't know which it is. But something really stinks about this whole affair.
As we mentioned back here, this weblog has only three missions in life. They're not about stopping Global Warming or the War in Iraq or any of those unimportant, easy crusades. Anyone can do stuff like that. No, we tackle the vital issues of the day which are, of course...
Get the Souplantation to add their Creamy Tomato Soup to their regular line-up.
Get the Cadbury Adams Gum Company to bring back Adams Sour Orange Gum.
Get Skidoo released on DVD.
So far, we've had limited success with #1. The Creamy Tomato Soup is back at Souplantation but only for the month of March. (We trust you're websurfing via wireless connection from some Souplantation while eating this scrumptious Creamy Tomato Soup. That's where I'm posting from until April Fool's Day. I'm at one right this minute, happily regaining much of the weight I've lost in the last nine months.)
There's been no movement on #2 so we've decided to focus our energies on #3: A legal, Kosher release of easily the oddest motion picture ever to be directed by an Oscar-nominated (though not for this) director and released by a major motion picture studio. You want to know how strange this movie is? The three minute chunk you'll see in today's video link, which is from the opening of the film, is the most coherent part.
I am told that Paramount Home Video, which I once urged here to show some moxie and put this thing out on DVD, is powerless to act; that the estate of director Otto Preminger controls the 1968 film and won't let it out. I think they're making a big mistake. If you try and suppress Skidoo, three things will happen. One is that it'll still be around but the bootleggers will make the money instead of the estate. Secondly, the movie will be seen only via crummy prints that will harm its reputation. And lastly and most significantly, people will think of this movie as something that Otto must have been ashamed of and will therefore view it the wrong frame of mind.
It only works if you presume that Mr. Preminger — a skilled filmmaker, as he proved so many times in his career — knew exactly what he was doing and made exactly the film he intended to make, and that his intention all along was to create something no sentient human being could ever understand. The very same year, Stanley Kubrick tried to achieve the same goal in 2001, but he failed by not casting Groucho Marx as God or Jackie Gleason as a mobster who trips out on LSD.
Here's three minutes of Skidoo with Gleason, Carol Channing and Arnold Stang. While you watch it, I'm going back to get more of the Creamy Tomato Soup and maybe another slice of the Garlic Asiago Focaccia. Come to think of it, I believe there's an actress in this movie named Garlic Asiago Focaccia...
Jonathan Chait on two sad things. One is that John McCain seems willing to sell out an awful lot of his principles to try and get the Republican nomination for '08. The other sad thing is that he's doing it even though it doesn't seem to be working.
This year's Academy Awards, like most recent ceremonies, struck me as conspicuously devoid of star power, above and beyond the folks who were there because they might be receiving an Oscar. And the ones who were there for other reasons were seen over and over and over. It might have been a small but thrilling moment to have Jack Nicholson come out to present Best Picture but by that point in the telecast, we'd seen Nicholson eighty times in audience cutaway shots and Ellen DeGeneres had acknowledged him from the stage once or twice. So it was like, "Nicholson? Big deal."
I asked here who there is around who might have been a big deal as an Oscar presenter and I asked it in two categories. Who would have been exciting to see who represented "Old Hollywood?" And who of our current pantheon of stars would have given you a tingle if they'd suddenly been announced? Here are some of the names I received in the first category...
Jean-Paul Belmondo
Sidney Poitier
Brigitte Bardot
Karl Malden
Shirley Temple
Ricardo Montalban
Tony Martin
Sophia Loren
Olivia DeHavilland
Cyd Charisse
Elizabeth Taylor
Jane Russell
Celeste Holm
Kirk Douglas
Joan Fontaine
Deborah Kerr
Richard Widmark
Paul Scofield
Kathryn Grayson
Jerry Lewis
Betty Hutton
Lena Horne
Deanna Durbin
Van Johnson
The two most often-mentioned names were Doris Day and Mickey Rooney. Based on my admittedly-limited encounters with both, I would guess the following: That if you went to Doris Day and said, "Either you appear in front of a live audience or every man, woman and child in the state of Ohio will die," she would shrug and say, "Goodbye, Columbus." And if you put Mickey Rooney up there, he'd still be talking about the days when he was the biggest box office star in the world and you could go into the MGM Commissary and see the lovely Miss Judy Garland order a chicken salad sandwich.
A number of you also mentioned Charles Lane. I think it would be better if we waited until he got a little older.
Many of the suggestions were for interesting teams...like Sean Connery, Roger Moore, George Lazenby, Timothy Dalton, Pierce Brosnan and Daniel Craig all presenting an award together. Of course, that would mean taking Lazenby away from his job as a seat filler.
Other teams put forth: Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr. Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke. Joanne Woodward and Paul Newman. Robert Redford and Paul Newman. Almost anyone and Paul Newman. Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks. Jonathan Winters and Robin Williams.
In the category of Newer Hollywood, I got very few reponses, mostly duos from hit movies — Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, Mike Myers and Dana Carvey, Mark Hamill and Harrison Ford, Ben Affleck and Matt Damon, the cast of Ocean's 13, etc. I suspect the Oscars may already be doing as well as they can in this area.
A couple of people asked what I thought would happen if the surprise presenter in the Best Director category was Roman Polanski. I think it would depend on whether he was brought on in handcuffs...but the response would have been interesting. Would people hesitate to applaud a man convicted of statutory rape? Or would they have figured that if it's okay for him to win that Oscar, it's okay for him to present it? I dunno. What I think would have upset many is if he'd "appeared" via satellite link the way he testified in that libel suit he brought against the magazine, Vanity Fair.
Thanks to all of you who sent in suggestions, even the joke ones like Tony Clifton, Ron Jeremy and me. My favorite suggestion, by the way, was from the person who wanted to see Shirley Jones and Marty Ingels present an Oscar. I think that would have been wonderful. Imagine that moment when they announce Marty Ingels and every single person in the Kodak Theater gets up and walks out.
Let's take a minute and watch Bucky Beaver sell Ipana toothpaste. Most of these ads were produced by a special division that Mr. Disney had in his studio during the fifties. It produced commercials, many of them with animation and graphics that did not fit the established Disney look or quality of movement. A gentleman named Charles A. Nichols — everyone called him "Nick" — was the main director there, having earlier distinguished himself as the director of some of the better Pluto cartoons. Like many animation folks of his generation, Nick closed out his career working on Saturday morning cartoons for Hanna-Barbera. (He also directed for Ruby-Spears. Remember that story I told here recently about one of the first cartoons I wrote and how its voice director was rude to actress Janet Waldo? Well, Nick was the animation director of that particular cartoon. Had he also directed the voices, he would have been much nicer to Janet.)
Another animation vet who worked for a time for H-B was Tex Avery. In fact, Tex and I briefly shared an office at the studio. Once, I eavesdropped as he and Nick got into a friendly argument about Disney's commercial division. I wish I could recall it in better detail but basically, Tex was needling Nick, telling him that that was where Walt stuck artists because they weren't good enough to work on Sleeping Beauty or because they were in need of a good spanking...or both. Nick knew Tex was ribbing him but he still repeated, over and over, that the commercial crew was full of talented people and that it was encouraged to be more experimental. With television becoming an increasingly important marketplace, Walt wanted to see if his people could do limited, lower budget work that would be acceptable as Disney animation. (The premise, I guess, was that the commercials didn't count as Disney animation since they were commercials and since most people didn't know what studio had done them.)
Tex had nothing against doing commercials. He'd done an awful lot of them, himself, including the Raid spots like the one I posted here not long ago. He was just having fun kidding Nick and imitating an imaginary Walt Disney bellowing, "We can't put Nichols on the important stuff. Put him in the garage where we make commercials for bran flakes!" Later, when Tex wasn't around, Nick admitted to me that there was a little truth to the joke; that Walt did stick some people in that department to keep them away from the work he cared about. I'm pretty confident Nick was not one of them.
Anyway, that's what came to mind when I came across this clip you're about to watch. The announcer you'll hear at the beginning is Jimmy Dodd, who was the adult host of The Mickey Mouse Club. And the voice of Bucky Beaver is Jimmy Dodd sped up a little. Here's Bucky trying to get us to brusha brusha brusha with the new Ipana...
The last few years, I've seen a lot of things that have lowered my opinion of reporters in this country. Obviously, I don't mean every reporter but taking them as a homogenous group, it's amazing how they will try to gin up a "hot story" out of darn near nothing...and get the basic facts wrong, to boot.
And I can't think of anything that proves this better than the fact that so many papers, magazines and websites think it fits any known definition of "news" that Captain America has been killed in his comic's current storyline.
The best argument against moving up the start of Daylight Savings Time, as Congress did, is that it's confusing our TiVos. Here's a page that explains this in a way that will probably confuse you. Bottom line: You don't have to do anything. Here and there, the time displayed on your screen may be wrong but you won't miss American Idol.
A writer friend of mine, Marc Scott Zicree, takes us on a tour of three of his favorite places to eat in Los Angeles. But that's not why I'm linking to this video, no sir. I'm linking to it because they happen to be three of my favorite places to eat in Los Angeles...
This afternoon, I had to drive something to the post office. Which would have been no big deal except that when I went out to my garage, I found that the battery in my car was dead. Some idiot (i.e., me) hadn't fully closed the right rear door on the passenger's side when he (i.e., me) last drove the car, which was Tuesday afternoon. The dome light had been on for over 48 hours and that had run down the battery.
Actually, it still wasn't a big deal. I called Triple-A and a man was there in fifteen minutes to give me a jump and send me on my way, just in time to not get to the post office before it closed. But I got to thinking...
Obviously, I need to be more careful about this in the future, especially since this is probably the third or fourth time I've done this in my life. (In my defense: Once, it wasn't me, it was my assistant when she took the car to be washed. And once, it was because I closed the car door on a seat belt that was hanging out.) But I'm curious why this is even a problem at all with cars...or is it just with some cars?
Almost everything I own that "charges" has some sort of battery meter, often with a little warning buzzer if it gets too low. Why doesn't my car have a little meter that stops the battery from being drained if it's about to get too low to start the car? Do some cars have that? It would seem like a feature that could be installed for around five bucks, which means they could make it a $300 option and we'd all pay.
Here's an idea that I thought of once while waiting for the Auto Club in this situation. A car should have two batteries. One, which we'll call Battery A, works just like your standard car battery: As you drive, it charges and it's what starts the engine in the morning. But you'd also have Battery B, which is a smaller battery, just big enough to start the car twice. It gets charged the same way but it doesn't power anything on its own. It just holds a charge, waiting until it's needed.
When the moment comes that Battery A is dead — say, because you stupidly didn't close the right rear door on the passenger's side two days earlier — you flip a switch. Or maybe there could be an automatic connection...but either way, Battery B goes online in the car and it starts the engine. Then once Battery A is charging again, Battery B goes offline or you take it offline...and later, it recharges so it's ready the next time you need it.
Why don't they have this? Or do they have it? What am I missing here? (Even though I used to sometimes fix my old '57 T-Bird myself, I'm not too savvy about cars. When I had to look at the engine, I used to try peeking through the ignition keyhole.)
Yes, I know there are little packs of drycell batteries one can buy that will jumpstart your car. There are cables that will connect you to an AC outlet via your cigarette lighter. I even have a little portable powerpack that I could have used to jump the battery if I'd remembered to recharge it in the last year or two. I'm wondering why no one just builds something like that into vehicles. They're putting DVD players into back seats now. Couldn't there be an extra battery in the trunk somewhere? Or at least a little gauge that stops the main one from draining to the point where it's useless?
Three weeks ago here, I linked to a Washington Post report on the dreadful conditions at the Walter Reed Medical Facility. That referral brought a few e-mails from folks who wrote, in essence, that it couldn't be true; that this was just another Washington Post lie to try and embarrass the Bush administration. In short order though, the entire story seems to have been validated, heads are rolling and everyone is scurrying to fix the problem.
Today on one of the cable news networks, I saw a number of sound bites from various folks in the chain of command over all this, all hiding behind the "I didn't know about it" excuse. I don't understand why they think that gets them off the hook. If you're in charge of making sure that our soldiers have decent medical care, aren't you admitting you've failed at your job to say you didn't know that they weren't getting it?
At last, we have some semi-decent footage of The Banana Man. I covered his history here and here but basically, this was a great old vaudeville act started by a man named A. Robins. He originally billed himself as "The One Man Music Store" and his act consisted of coming out and taking all sorts of items — musical instruments, mostly — from his pockets. At some point, he became known more for pulling out bananas and the act became more commonly known as The Banana Man. And at some point, Mr. Robins retired and sold or otherwise passed the act on. A man named Sam Levine did it in the fifties and well into the sixties, appearing on almost every live kids' show, often multiple times. It is not known if anyone else did the act between Robins and Levine but the guy who I recall seeing on Captain Kangaroo, The Mickey Mouse Club, The Ed Sullivan Show and anything hosted by Paul Winchell was apparently Levine.
This video clip starts with some brief footage of what may or may not be Mr. Robins in the 1947 feature film, Mother Wore Tights. The folks who posted this say it's Robins and they may be right...but some sources say he gave up the act in the early forties.
Most of the clip is a late TV appearance by Levine, probably on the Captain Kangaroo program. It was never as wonderful an act when he did it without a live audience and he seems a little slower and less energetic than I remember him, probably a function of age. I think though you can tell that if it was done faster and in front of a bunch of kids, it would bring down the house. (At the end, he turns his trunk into a train and pushes it off stage. I remember him always riding the train off stage, probably pulled on a cable by the stage crew. I don't know why he didn't do that here.)
This could even have been his last performance. Legend has it that once Captain Kangaroo went to videotape in the mid-sixties, it was no longer necessary to bring The Banana Man in to do his act every few months. Since he always did the exact same things, they just reused the old tape and paid him. Then at some point, the Good Captain got a new set and they called up and asked Levine to come back in and do a new performance for them. He said he couldn't; that his props had gotten too old and fragile and that he hadn't the energy (or enough other jobs) to refurbish them. Another story is that the Captain Kangaroo people didn't want him back because the props and costumes could not be laundered and so they fouled the studio with their aroma. ("I've heard of acts that stink but...")
It still isn't the ideal clip but footage of The Banana Man is amazingly elusive, especially when you consider how often this guy was on TV. I'm glad we have this much. It runs close to eight and a half minutes.
Fred Kaplan (him again) on how the Bush administration hasn't been doing right by our returning veterans. Does anyone besides me suspect that if a Democratic administration was doing this it would be cited as proof that their party hates the military?
Unless there's Breaking News, like they dig up Anna Nicole or something, Larry King Live will devote its Friday night show to memories of Johnny Carson.
This Sunday, early in the A.M., Fox Movie Channel is running three of Laurel and Hardy's lesser efforts back to back: The Dancing Masters, The Big Noise and The Bullfighters. As we often say here, even Laurel and Hardy at their worst is still better than most comedians at their best.
Not long ago, we made a big fuss here because Turner Classic Movies was about to show (for the first time in a long while anywhere) the Billy Wilder movie, The Big Carnival, aka Ace in the Hole. A lot of you wrote to thank me for letting you know about it. Others wrote to curse the fact that they'd missed it. The cursers have another shot at it when TCM runs it again on Saturday, March 17. We'll try to remember to give you another reminder before then but may forget.
This coming Sunday evening, TCM is running The Benny Goodman Story starring Steve Allen. It isn't much of a movie but I'm fascinated by the fact that Steverino filmed it during the day while he was still doing an hour and forty-five minutes of Tonight live every night. This is not humanly possible.
Lastly for now: If your cable company or satellite dish gets The ReelzChannel, tune in my buddy Leonard Maltin's series, Secret's Out. It's a great show about movies for people who care about movies, as opposed to current movie stars. Each episode runs about nine thousand times a week so you have no excuse for missing it. That is, unless you can't get that channel on your TV. Then we forgive you.
Dave Foley, formerly of NewsRadio and Kids in the Hall, is hosting a new 15-minute variety show on the Internet. It's called Can't Sleep With Dave Foley and he hosts it in the middle of his night in his bathrobe. There are guests, there's music and some of the episodes have what you might call "adult content." Ben Varkentine told me about it and I'm linking to the first episode which guests Lewis Black and musicial group Rilo Kiley...
If you like that, you can watch Episode 2 or Episode 3. That third one's recommended for Mature Audiences...as if there's anyone mature surfing the Internet.
Jacob Weisberg itemizes what he calls "The Four Unspeakable Truths" about the Iraq War. I think there's an important dialogue here that this country isn't having because of these taboos.
One of my best Conservative friends often rails at what he sees as a pernicious "political correctness" on the part of the Left that prevents, for example, a lot of valid points from being made about minorities because the observations are mislabelled as racism. I agree with a lot of his examples. Where we part company is that I see as much of that on the right. One cannot say or even suggest, for instance, that the death of any U.S. soldier was unnecessary or due to leadership incompetence or that it's anything but the noblest of sacrifices. I think everyone is now of the mind that something has been seriously wrong with the whole invasion of Iraq, or at least the aftermath of that invasion. It might be nice if we could discuss what exactly it was.
Let's talk about Mel Blanc. Better still, let's let the fine voice actor Gregg Berger talk about Mel Blanc. This is a clip someone shot from the audience of one of the Cartoon Voice Panels I hosted at last year's Comic-Con International in San Diego. The camerawork and the ethics of taping and posting this stuff are all a little shaky but it's a good story.
I'm the big guy at the podium. Another great voice actor on the panel, Michael Bell, had just told a story about working with Mel on a Hanna-Barbera show — Speed Buggy, I think. Michael enjoyed the experience except for the fact that Mel, who was playing a talking car in that series, tended to spray large quantities of saliva in the air when he simulated the engine sounds of the character he voiced. Bell explained how he went home drenched in Blanc spit and then Berger told the following anecdote...
Now, here's something weirder. This is a video about which I know nothing other than that it purports to be footage of Mel Blanc's vocal cords as he demonstrates some of his character voices. I don't know how or where this was made or even why. I don't even guarantee it's legit. But Bob Bergen, who's the current voice of Porky Pig, sent me this link and it's too bizarre not to share it with you all...
I'm not sure how the conviction of Lewis Libby will affect the world, other than that Jay Leno will have a joke tonight about how some convicts will have a nice, spanking new Scooter to ride around the yard. Of course, we doubt that Mr. Libby will spend one night behind bars. His lawyers can easily run out the clock on appeals until George W. Bush is a lame-enough duck to issue a pardon. I wonder if the conviction means anything beyond being another in a long list of slaps to the Bush/Cheney mob.
The saddest thing to me about all this is how cynical we've all gotten with regard to the judicial system in this country. Those who'd like to see Bush 'n' Cheney brought down were so sure that Libby was, as they say in Doonesbury, "Guilty, guilty, guilty!" Those who've cast their political/emotional lot with the G.O.P. are so sure there was no harm, no foul, no case. We have this unfortunate tendency to believe that the correct verdict in any case is the one that serves our political wish list. Obviously, someone is not innocent just because they're more or less on my side, just as they aren't guilty just because they're on the other team. But it sure doesn't play out that way in Internet debates, does it?
Let's take a look at the CBS Saturday morning lineup for 1965. What strikes me about it is how unbelievably cheap the whole thing must have been for the network. CBS had purchased the Terrytoons library years earlier so they owned Heckle & Jeckle and Mighty Mouse and weren't paying anything for those two shows. Tom & Jerry and Quick Draw McGraw were old cartoons which probably didn't cost much. Tennessee Tuxedo was produced for CBS but it went on the air in '63 and I think by 1965 was all reruns.
The only show of the six that I think even produced new animation for 1965 — and they probably didn't do much — was Linus the Lionhearted. That was a fairly expensive program but Post cereals ate most of that expense. The series was done as a kind of loss leader to promote the characters who were associated with Post cereals and appeared on their packaging. I don't know how much CBS kicked in but I'll bet it wasn't much. This promo also probably didn't cost the network more than — what? — maybe fifty bucks for editing old footage and putting in a bad announcer track.
Anyway, here it is: A whole Saturday morning schedule that probably cost less for the season than one episode of any current series...
Want to fly like Superman? Want it badly enough to spend $3500 to do it? A company called Zero Gravity Corporation will take you up in a plane that goes through parabolic flight maneuvers. And when a plane does that, you can drift around its cabin for thirty seconds or so like the astronauts do when they're not driving to Florida with diapers on.
The company website will tell you all about it, including how it works and how you can sign up. I've never had the particular dream of flying but if you have...well, you probably still don't want to spend that kind of money to do it. But you might enjoy a little window shopping.
Last year, we made a fuss over the Creamy Tomato Soup that was part of the rotating selection at the Souplantation chain. (In some states, Souplantation is known as Sweet Tomatoes. By any name, it's a place where you go, pay a flat fee and tank up on salad, soup and baked goods.) I suggested you all try it and if you liked it, call the company's Customer Service line and tell 'em so. I phoned up a couple of times and a lady there told me they'd gotten "a lot" of calls but she knew of no plans to add my favorite soup to their permanent lineup.
About two weeks ago, I happened upon those old posts and on a whim, I called up and asked it they had any plans to ever bring the Creamy Tomato Soup back again. The person who answered the phone there said it didn't look good.
Well, guess what. Creamy Tomato Soup is on the Souplantation/Sweet Tomatoes lineup for the month of March.
I suppose the person on the Customer Service Line just didn't know, because these things are scheduled some time in advance. But never mind that. The soup's back and I have to get over there and have a few bowls of it and see if I still like it. The last time I tasted it was before my Gastric Bypass Surgery and there are a number of things I enjoyed then that don't taste as wonderful now. Most of those are foods with high sugar content so there's a good chance the Creamy Tomato Soup will still be wonderful. That is, unless they've done something treacherous and changed the recipe. If they have, I'm blaming Cheney. It would be just like him.
This page will show you if there's a Souplantation or Sweet Tomatoes near you. I do not own stock in this company but if they make the Creamy Tomato Soup permanent, I may buy some.
Back when Mike Douglas was doing his talk show out of Philadelphia, the producers occasionally brought in famed Stooge Moe Howard to guest. Invariably, pies were thrown, which was half the point of bringing Moe in at all. Someone has posted a whole mess of these segments to YouTube and I'm only going to link to this one. You can find the rest on your own if you like.
In this one, Moe, Mike and guest star Soupy Sales do a version of the Stooges' old "Maharjah" sketch that runs a little less than ten minutes and feels like thirty. It's slow going but it's worth it just to see Moe and Soupy. The older woman at the end who gets a pie in the face is Moe's wife, Helen.
I'm back, I'm back. Before I get out of Bitching and Moaning mode, what is it with all these caste systems about who boards the plane in what order? I understand letting on the elderly, infirm or even families with small children before anyone else. I even understand letting on the First Class people, though I always thought that since they sit in the front, it would be more comfy for them to get on last. But last night at Alaska Airlines, it was like, "We now invite all passengers with elite gold level in our Mileage Plan to board," followed by "We now invite all silver card holders in our mileage partners plan to board" and then "We now invite all Alaska Air Super Saver Partnership cardholders with platinum star points to board" and so on. I don't remember the specific tiers but it seemed like those of us who'd just bought tickets (i.e., 98% of us) were in the nineteenth group allowed to go down the jetway. The whole idea seemed to be to get me on last. I kept waiting for them to say, "We now invite everyone who's never written Groo the Wanderer to get on the plane."
And here's something that's long puzzled me. Why is it that at some airports, when I pick up my suitcase at the Baggage Claim, someone examines my little claim check stub to make sure I'm taking only my own luggage out of there...but in some, nobody checks? If that's a good idea sometimes, why isn't it a good idea always? Are there times when suitcase theft is more likely to occur? Or is the checking, when they do it, in the same category in which I place most of the screening they do when you board the plane and they make you throw away lighters and take off your shoes? (That category is "Useless inconveniences they put you through to make you think they're protecting you when they really aren't.")
Okay, change of mode. Let me underscore the very good time I had at the Wondercon, doing my panels and seeing friends and just talking with people. If I'd been in more of a shopping frame of mind, I could have had a very good time purchasing goodies. The place was loaded with treasures. I've been to good conventions and bad. Wondercon is one of the best.
For those of you who are interested in such silliness, here's a report on a panel I did with Sergio on Friday.
I have a ton of work to do, as well as an awful lot of unread e-mail. So posting on this site may not be up to speed for a day or three. Or four or ten.
Welcome to the weblog that is unafraid to tackle tough questions. Today's tough question is: "Why do airlines keep telling me to be 90 minutes early for flights that take off two hours late?"
Tonight, we're coming to you from San Francisco International Airport where I arrived at 7:15 for an 8:50 flight which they're now saying may (a note of hopeful expectation in that "may" take off at 10:15. Fortunately, I found a nice eatery here in the airport called Max's Deli that has a pretty good matzo ball soup and — of greater importance — tables on which one can dine and set up one's laptop. Let's see if my patience or my Lithium Ion battery runs out first.
Today's session of the Wondercon didn't seem as crowded as yesterday's. Then again, there were scenes in Ben-Hur that didn't seem as crowded as yesterday's Wondercon. The joys were many, the complaints were the usual for most cons...rotten, overcrowded food stands and long lines and nearby hotels and eateries that charge on the presumption that everyone's on an expense account and is charging it all to the home office. I think I may stop bitching about these things and just learn to accept them as a part of most convention-going. Wherever you go, no matter what the con, the food at the convention center is going to be awful and way overpriced, and there's nothing the operators of any one convention can do about it.
I did a nice panel today called "The Art of the Cover" with Al Feldstein, Nick Cardy, Gene Colan, Phil Jimenez, Tony Harris and Michael Turner. I showed random covers these gentlemen had drawn for comics and they discussed how and why they'd done what they'd done. Not only did the audience seem to find it interesting but the artists were intrigued by the "shop talk" aspect of it all. Gene was supposed to leave early for another engagement but he elected to stay because he found the discussion so enlightening. (Gene's been drawing comics since Johannes Gutenberg used to print them between running off Bibles. And I suspect that one of the reasons Gene is still doing stellar work, eclipsing his previous personal bests, is that he doesn't regard himself as too experienced to learn something from someone else.)
Not much more to report other than to say it was a great con, as always. Oh, yeah — and there's this: Late in the day, Russ Heath (who's been doing comics about as long as Gene Colan) packed up his table and left, and he gave me permission to set up my laptop there and get a little work done, which I did. So I'm sitting there typing on this here machine and a young man comes up with a pile of DC war comics. Seeing the sign on the table which still says "Russ Heath," he informs me that he always loved the way I drew Sgt. Rock and asked if I'd mind signing a batch. I know Russ doesn't look his age but still...
I can't post this from the airport without paying T-Mobile a serious chunk of change for wireless access so I'll put it up on the site when I get home. If you're reading this, I did. I hope the time stamp below isn't too late.
Whadda ya say we all watch an interview with Charles Schulz? Here's a nice little ten minute chat with the creator of Charlie Brown, Snoopy and the rest of the gang. He makes a good point in this, which is that people often said that Peanuts was about children talking like adults...but their dialogue was only slightly like adults, not a lot like the way adults talk. There were occasional exceptions in the strip but only occasional ones.
Second day of the con: Same as the first, only a lot more people there. Around 2:00 in the afternoon, you could have lifted your feet off the floor and just let the crush of humanity carry you down the center aisle. But off to most sides, it was a bit less cramped and most people didn't seem to mind a lot.
I did three panels, starting with a nice chat with Nick Cardy, one of the great comic book artists. Here's a link to Nick's website and if you browse about, you'll agree with the way I introduced him: No one ever drew handsomer men or sexier ladies. We discussed his work for DC, particularly on Bat Lash, and Nick narrated a slide show of his paintings and advertising work. He did some real nice movie posters but the paintings he did for his own edification were even better.
Then came a Mad panel with Sergio Aragonés and Al Feldstein. Al was Editor-in-Chief of the rag for more than a quarter of a century, back when it was selling more than 2.5 million copies per issue. (Current sales are a lot less...like 2.4 million less.) Al was fascinating and some publisher is missing a bet by not making a grab for his autobiography, which he's still trying to find a home for. It's the story of how he went from writing and editing horror comics that almost killed the industry to helming the best-selling humor magazine of all time. He took over Mad after its original editor, Harvey Kurtzman, departed with most of the staff. In an amazingly short span of time, Al stepped in, restaffed and reinvented the magazine and it became a success in so many ways, including its influence on a generation or two. Somebody, please. Publish this man's book so his story can be properly documented and shared with the world.
Lastly for today, I did an interview with Gene Colan. Here's a link to his website — and come to think of it, here's a link to Al Feldstein's website.
Everyone who ever read Marvel Comics knows what a class act Gene has always been. He drew most of the major Marvel titles at one time or another but particularly distinguished himself on Iron Man, Daredevil, Tomb of Dracula and Dr. Strange. We discussed all that and how movies had played such a vital role in his work. People write a lot about the intersection of those two media, film and comics, but it was never more visible than in Gene's work, especially in how he "lit" his world and positioned light and shadow. If you were there and had as much fun listening to Gene as I did interviewing him, you had a great time.
I roamed the hall after that and enjoyed talking to an awful lot of people whose names I won't itemize. If you were among them, it was a pleasure to chat with you. Maybe I'll see the rest of you there tomorrow.
Our cartoon today, kids, is called Betty Boop and Grampy. It was released August 16, 1935 during a time when the Max Fleischer Studio was loading Ms. Boop's cartoons with new and/or guest star characters who might warrant being spun-off on their own. There were a couple of other films with Grampy but he didn't catch on.
The most interesting thing about this cartoon is probably its use of the table top background camera in which a small, three-dimensional model took the place of the usual painted background in some scenes. It was one of Max Fleischer's many inventions and some have suggested, based wholly on speculation, that Grampy's own inventiveness was inspired by Max's tendency to cobble together new devices. Maybe so.
Mae Questel did Betty's voice while Grampy's voice was supplied by someone named Everett Clark, about whom I know absolutely nothing. Jack Mercer — who was best known for playing Popeye — can also be heard in there somewhere. The animation is credited to Dave Tendlar and Charles Hastings but a number of other fine artists worked on it.
The other night, sitting around with some other animation folks, we got to recalling Dave, who passed away in 1993. He was a colorful, affable gent who finished out a long career in cartoons the way a lot of cartoon creators of his era did...working at Hanna-Barbera. He'd been one of the main animators on the classic Popeye shorts and in 1978, when H-B got the rights to produce a TV series of the squint-eyed salt, Dave was excited at the prospect of getting back into the Popeye business. He started warming up and lobbying the art directors to let him design the whole show...and was then crushed when the decision was made to ship the production off to a studio H-B had in Australia. One time after that, I went up to visit another artist whose table was right across from Dave's and I heard him sitting there and sketching, muttering under his breath just like the early Popeye did. Dave had been assigned to a show called Casper and the Space Angels. It starred what was ostensibly the same Casper the Friendly Ghost that Dave had once animated for Famous Studios but he was still moaning, "Why am I drawing this when I should be drawing Popeye?"
He was right. He should have been drawing Popeye. But as you'll see, he did a good job drawing Betty Boop and her eccentric grandfather, too. Have a look...
Several of you have written to tell me that the Federal Anti-Nepotism Act of 1967 would prohibit President Hillary Clinton from choosing her husband as Secretary of State. The law, which I must admit I'd never heard of, is summarized as follows...
A public official is prohibited from employing, appointing, promoting, advancing or advocating for appointment, employment promotion or advancement any relative for a civilian position in the agency in which the public official is serving.
So if I understand this correctly: If Bill Clinton had a different state as his place of legal residence, Hillary could pick him as her running mate and he could become Vice-President...but could not serve in her cabinet. Or the Clintons could get a divorce (thereby making hundreds of past tabloid headlines retroactively accurate) and then he could be Secretary of State. Seems kind of odd to me but I guess someone was worried that Robert Kennedy would become President and put Teddy in the cabinet the same way J.F.K. made Robert his Attorney General.
Anyway, I stand corrected on the technicalities of the matter and I still would be happier with William Jefferson Clinton running our foreign policy than anyone we have now. Maybe President Barack Obama could make him Secretary of State.
Let's see if I can crop and post a photo from my laptop. This was taken today at the WonderCon: Me surrounded by two of my favorite comic book artists. On the left is Nick Cardy, best known for his fine work on Aquaman, Bat Lash and Teen Titans. On the right is Gene Colan, best known for his fine work on Iron Man, Tomb of Dracula and Daredevil. I could list another two dozen credits for each of them but you get the idea. We took this photo during a rare moment today when they weren't besieged by fans wanting autographs, sketches or just to say, "I've always loved your stuff." I've never understood how "stuff" became a term of endearment for work that you love and respect, but that's how people talk to artists...and even how most artists talk to each other. Well, I like the "stuff" these men have produced for comics for many years and as usual, it's always nice to discover that your favorite artists are such nice people, as well. It almost always works out that way but it's still something to be happy about.
First day of the con. Some members of the staff seemed a bit surprised by how many people were in attendance today at what was supposed to be the "non-busy" day. Does this bode ill for tomorrow, which is supposed to be the "busy" day? We shall see, we shall see.
I attempted — foolishly, I might add — to live-blog from the convention floor earlier but a wireless Internet connection I tapped into kept cutting out on me and I lost the post I'd composed. It was a list of folks I'd spent time talking to and it included Russ Heath, Gene Colan, Nick Cardy, Al Feldstein, Al Gordon, Trina Robbins, Steve Leialoha, Tom Yeates, Ernie Chan, Tony DeZuniga, Mike Royer, Paul Power and an awful lot of others whose names were in that list the first time I typed it.
I hosted three panels today and was pleasantly surprised at the turnout for all three. That goes double for the first one, which the con billed as "When Historians Clash," a discussion of comic book history between myself and Gerard Jones, author of this fine volume. We discussed a number of things but kept drifting back to a little-known facet of funnybook heritage which Gerry delved into when he wrote his book. It's how many of the early comic book publishers had previous (and sometimes, concurrent but concealed) careers publishing what then passed for pornography. That was part of, or in addition to, what enabled some of them to get their wares distributed...connections with what some might term "organized crime." Once upon a time, magazine distribution was a pretty dirty business and so, by extension, was comic book publishing.
Later, I did a panel with Sergio Aragonés about our work together and then a panel with Al Feldstein about his work on the classic EC comics like The Vault of Horror and Weird Fantasy. Tomorrow, I interview Nick Cardy on one panel, Gene Colan on another and we have a Mad panel with Al and Sergio. If you can make it for any of these, you'll probably enjoy yourself a lot.
No real news on the convention floor...or at least, none that reached my ears. Nice to meet so many of you who read this silly stop on the World Wide Web, and I hope to see more of you tomorrow.
Another Fred Kaplan article...and this one's in the "must-read" category. It's about how the Bush administration has botched (and probably lied a lot about) relationships with another arm of the infamous "Axis of Evil." In this case, it's North Korea that's now more of a threat to us than before George W. and his mob began handling things.
I'm not enthusiastic about Hillary Clinton for President, either as someone who can win or should win. But I'm beginning to think she could get a lot of support, including mine, if she ran on a simple platform: "I'll appoint Bill as my Secretary of State and let him try to put all our foreign relations back the way they were when he was in office." With North Korea, it looks like the Bush team is now trying to close a weapons control deal very much like the one Bill C. put in place. That's the deal they and all their supporters denounced as "too weak" but the current version is weaker, and they're making it after North Korea built its nuclear arsenal, rather than before, like Bill did. Way to go, guys!
Time for another one of the great Superman cartoons produced by the Max Fleischer Studios. We're serving The Arctic Giant, which was the fourth one in the series. It was released February 27, 1942.
One of the credits you'll see on this cartoon is for animator Reuben Grossman. Mr. Grossman later went to work for DC Comics drawing, among other strips, Peter Porkchops and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.
You'll also notice a writing credit there for Ted Pierce. Mr. Pierce was, before and after his stint at Fleischer's, a gagman and occasional voice for Warner Brothers cartoons. For example, he did the Bud Abbott imitation in the cartoon, A Tale of Two Kitties. Lured away to the opposite coast for a few years, he worked on the Fleischer Brothers' Gullivers Travels and a few other films. (He is sometimes given the credit/blame for Popeye getting those four nephews in his cartoons.) He also did voice work there. He's in this cartoon in a couple of roles, including (I think) Perry White. Superman and Lois are Bud Collyer and Joan Alexander.
Almost forgot. While at LAX, I got a call from Jim Amash saying that Joe Sinnott is doing much better and earlier in the day, I got an e-mail from Ken Gale saying that Arnold Drake's condition is much improved. Happy news.
Okay, now I'll post a video link and go to bed. I think it'll be one of those Fleischer Superman cartoons.
So the first thing that happens is that at LAX, the lady who checks your I.D. against your ticket doesn't believe I'm me. She looks at my driver's license, then at my face, then at my license again, then at me, back and forth for quite a while before declaring, "This isn't you."
I said, "It's me. I've lost a hundred pounds since that photo was taken. Probably more than a hundred pounds."
She stares at me and tries to imagine what I'd look like with extra weight. I said, "Here, let me help you." And I puffed up my cheeks and scrunched my jaw downward to try and create some double chins for her. She laughed and said, "I'm sorry...I don't think this is you" and she called another lady over to give a second opinion. The other lady didn't think I was me, either. In fact, she seemed so sure that it raised grave doubts in my mind.
Then the first lady noticed that the date of birthday on the license was 03-02-52. I'm typing this on March 2 but it happened last night. That's when she said, "Oh, it's your birthday tomorrow. In that case, you can go on through."
A tip to any terrorists who read this site: If you want to get past security with a fake I.D., forget about the photo. Just fly the day before the date of birth on the fake I.D.
Then the flight was running late because it was coming in from Chicago, and the weather there is apparently like the inside of a snow globe. A woman ahead of me at the gate podium was asking why they let a storm in Chicago impact a flight between Los Angeles and San Francisco. This was not a stupid woman. She was trying to ask the gate attendant why the airlines do that...why they don't just have planes that go back and forth within the state so that a LAX/SFO flight is not at the mercy of lake effect snow in Illinois. The gentleman there didn't understand and kept explaining to her how the route is for the plane to come in from Chicago, stop in L.A. and then go on to San Francisco. I could have intervened and cleared up the confusion but I figured we had more than three hours to kill before our fight was taking off. Might as well let them duke it out.
The flight finally did take off. On the plane, I checked out the roster of America's Top Steak Houses in the in-flight magazine, which is really the only reason to ever get on an airplane. They had someplace called III Forks in Texas listed in the top slot, while Peter Luger's in Brooklyn was nowhere on the list. That makes me think the whole thing is as bogus as the 2000 presidential vote totals in Florida and that it was probably another one of those Scalia deals. By the way, I get that the alleged winner is actually named "Three Forks" but they type it in Roman numerals and I can't help thinking that it looks like the place is named "ILL FORKS." Would you eat at a restaurant named that? Of course not, and that's more proof that this list is a fraud. If they keep this up, people will suspect it's all just a group advertising deal and that these places pay to get their names on it.
The flight finally landed and here I am, ready to report on the Wondercon, which opens in about eleven hours. Maybe I'd better post a video link and turn in. Good night.
As you may know, I sometimes direct voices for cartoon shows. Whenever feasible, I try to heed a piece of wisdom that was imparted to me by one Mr. Joseph Barbera. He said, "It's important to audition everyone you can before you hire Frank Welker." Frank is the "workingest" voice actor in the history of mankind. I don't mean he's worked more than Mel Blanc, Daws Butler or Paul Frees. I mean he's worked more than all three of them put together.
Frank does cartoon voices. He does commercials. You've heard him in dozens of movies, including many of the top box office grossers of all time, making creature sounds and barking for dogs and often replacing the vocal tracks of the on-screen actors. Sometimes when you think you're hearing Jack Nicholson or someone like that in one of their movies, you're hearing a line redubbed by Frank. He can sound like anyone or anything.
This is a very tiny taste of what he does. This is two and a half minutes of him making monkey sounds for a Curious George videogame. The weird and amazing thing about him is that he could go seamlessly from doing this to making terrifying dragon shrieks or sounding just like Bill Cosby or Gregory Peck. Once for a show, I asked him to create the sound of living oatmeal that was bubbling in the pot and getting angry at the person cooking it. Without pause to ponder, Frank went immediately to the microphone and made the sound of living oatmeal that was bubbling in the pot and getting angry at the person cooking it. Honest. If I played you the tape with no explanation, you'd hear it and say, "Hey, that sounds like living oatmeal bubbling in the pot and getting angry at the person cooking it." He's that good.
Thanks go out to Augie De Blieck Jr. for telling me about this. Here's Frank getting paid, probably very well, for making monkey sounds. This man, by the way, went to college.
Jacob Weisberg on a new proposal for Universal Health Care in this country. I think its time is coming. It's just a matter of how they'll corrupt and cripple whatever gets enacted.
The Wondercon starts tomorrow in San Francisco, a city that's easy to get to if you don't make the mistake of booking on United Airlines. I've been to quite a few of these and always had a good time. I have no reason to expect this time will be any different. Be there. See my panels. Say hello.
Here's my new theory. My new theory is that in 1924 when George Gershwin composed "Rhapsody in Blue," his friends all told him how wonderful it was and how it would be played forever in concert halls around the world. And George said, "Never mind that. What I want is for people who are stuck on hold for long periods of time on the United Airlines reservations line to have to listen to a real cheesy recording of the same 32 bars of it, over and over and over..."
Which bring us to today's topic: Let's say you have a $108 non-refundable ticket on this airline. Let's say you need to move it to another time because you have sudden meetings and must fly later in the day. Why is it that when you call up and attempt to do this, you have only the following two options?
Cancel the $108 ticket and use it instead on a later date for some other United Airlines flight, providing you do so within one year and pay the $100 change fee. This means that if by some chance you want to go somewhere during the next year and a flight on United represents your best ticket option, you can use that ticket and apply what's left, which would be eight dollars. But actually, it's worse than that because you can't really do that kind of rebooking through their website. You have to call up and book through a human being and when you do that now, they charge you an extra $15 service fee. So to use a ticket you paid for in the past costs seven dollars more than to throw it away and start from scratch.
You can have the lady on the phone find you a later flight...but the cheapest flight she has available for the same date is $709. Of course, she can apply the $108 you've already paid to that but she also has to charge you the $100 change fee and the $15 service fee.
Two pretty crummy options, wouldn't you say? That's why instead you should opt for...
Just throw those tickets away. They said "non-refundable" and they're just that. The money's gone and all this talk about fees for changing and rebooking is gobbledygook designed to fool people into thinking they're getting some of their cash back in some way. Wrong. Instead, you should jump on the Internet and hit the travel sites where you'll find plenty of new reservations available on almost any airline (including United, should you have some reason to still consider flying them) for — in this case — $258. Which is not as good as $108 but a whole lot better than $709 plus additional fees.
Guess what I've been dealing with for the last hour. I may not be able to stomach Gershwin for years to come.
This is a Wheaties commercial that dates from 1954 or thereabouts. It features a gentleman named Bil Baird who may have been the most famous puppeteer in America before Jim Henson usurped the title. The Bil Baird Marionettes turned up in a wide array of TV shows, movies, Broadway shows and commercials. In the late fifties, he did a couple of TV specials with Art Carney that I remember as being quite entertaining.
His star puppet, seen in this spot, was a lion who is here referred to as Champy but I think he had other names at other times. I don't know who did the character's voice but he does sound a lot like Tony the Tiger, doesn't he? This is about the same time Thurl Ravenscroft began doing Tony's voice and that character clicked into place, selling tons of Sugar Frosted Flakes for Kellogg's. One wonders if Tony came first and the Wheaties people thought the big cat was working and that they should bring in Baird and his character for its similarity...or was it the other way around? It could also be a coincidence, I suppose, but it wouldn't surprise me if one inspired the other.
Here's the commercial. It starts a bit slow but stick with it, at least until you hear the rabbit chorus and the recipe for serving Wheaties with ice cream...
April 1, 2007
