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?
March 13, 2007
