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...
March 2, 2007
