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."
March 29, 2007
