There are days when America feels like a nation in the grip of Civil War. There are days, months, even years when it feels like we can agree on nothing and that we, as a people, are incapable of viewing anything with a sense of unanimity and common ground. And then there are those rare moments when we feel as one...when everyone is on the same page and of the same mind, and truly there is widespread agreement on something.
I have just browsed political websites that run the gamut from Ultra-Liberal and Ultra-Conservative. And I am here to tell you that our great nation is united in its disgust of George Tenet.
I have a section on this website called Great Los Angeles Restaurants That Ain't There No More. An amazing number of folks have failed to grasp the concept that this is all about restaurants that I went to and about which I have fond or at least interesting memories. They write to me as if I have committed some grievous factual error by omitting some eatery that they went to in 1958 and which I never heard of. Wrong. The section is about places I've eaten. Me. Not you. Me. You want a page on the web about your favorite restaurants? Hey, no one's stopping you.
When I get the time, I will be adding to mine the somewhat-famous outlet of Trader Vic's in Beverly Hills, which closed forever either today or yesterday. It's part of the Beverly Hilton which is part of a big hotel/shopping center which is part of a forthcoming development of super-luxury condos. The Hilton's staying but undergoing massive renovations that involve the ousting of the notorious Polynesian bar-restaurant.
Trader Vic's was one of those establishments I really wanted to enjoy but rarely could. It felt like a great place to hang out, eat and/or drink something slightly exotic and take in an atmosphere of what we wish Hollywood nightlife was like but too often is not. But the times I wound up there — usually because someone I needed to eat with wanted to dine within — I found the service to be smothering and the food to be largely inedible and way overpriced. I've had expensive meals where I could understand the pricetag and others where I felt I'd just paid $24.95 for the exact same thing the Sizzler sells for eight bucks. Put enough Teriyaki Sauce on that Malibu Chicken, have it served by an overly obsequious waiter...and you have a Trader Vic's entree.
My last evening on the premises would have been in October of '05 when we had a bachelor party in one of the private rooms for my pal, Paul Dini. We had a great time in spite of the cuisine. We had exotic beverages. (I chug-a-lugged a 7-Up with a flowered swizzle stick in it.) We had festive decorations. We had several lovely young ladies who'd been hired to artfully disrobe to music. Mostly, we had friends around and you can enjoy being anywhere if you have that. I was wise enough to leave that as my final visit to Trader Vic's so I have fond memories of the place. I'm sure a lot of people do and are mourning its demise.
One hopes the obits for saxophonist Tommy Newsom, who died Saturday at the age of 78, will all remember what a fine musician he was and not just focus on his alleged boring personality. Newsom was a member of The Tonight Show Band beginning in 1962, even before Johnny Carson took over as host, and he stayed on 'til the night Johnny had departed. Not only was his playing valuable to that wonderful orchestra but his skill as an arranger was put to good use. Everyone else in the music business seemed to know this. Newsom was in constant demand for outside jazz gigs, both for his musicianship and for his charts.
The job of Musical Director on The Tonight Show went through a scuffling period before Doc Severinsen nailed it down on a permanent basis. Newsom became his second-in-command, stepping into the position when Doc was away. For a while, when Ed McMahon was off, they'd bring in an outside announcer to handle his job but in the early seventies, Carson decided he didn't want a "stranger" as his sidekick, even for an evening. So when Ed wasn't there, Doc would move over to function as announcer and that increased the number of nights when Tommy moved from playing his sax to leading the band. (There were even nights when Doc and Ed were both off. When that happened, Tommy would be the announcer and someone else from the orchestra — usually Shelley Cohen — would conduct.)
Johnny was already getting good monologue mileage off Severinsen's outrageous wardrobe. The writers went the other way with Tommy, penning jokes about how bland and unexciting he could be. Newsom was a brilliant musician but his awkwardness speaking on camera often yielded comedy gold. It certainly paved the way for David Letterman's practice of putting non-professionals on his show. A lot of the seemingly spontaneous banter between Johnny and Tommy was carefully scripted but there were nights when Newsom would come up with something so clumsy (or just odd) that it was hilarious.
At some point around the late eighties, Johnny more or less retired the "Tommy Newsom is so boring that..." franchise and only rarely went for such jokes. He also stopped using Tommy in sketches, as he'd occasionally done, and almost completely eliminated Newsom's role as Doc's replacement. The story is that Johnny decided he wanted Ed and Doc there any night he was hosting so the two men were asked/ordered to schedule their extracurricular projects for guest host nights so they'd be there for Johnny. And then on guest host nights when Ed was off, Doc would serve as both announcer and musical director...so Tommy rarely got to front the band. The official word around the Tonight Show set was that Johnny simply thought the lines about Newsom's lack of charisma had gone on too long, but many suspected a personal falling-out.
Whatever the cause, Newsom continued to contribute his playing and arrangement to what was truly an outstanding band. Whenever I was in the NBC studios and they were rehearsing, I'd race for Studio 1 just to listen. The sound was amazing and Tommy Newsom was a major reason.
Continuing with our festival of obscure Laurel and Hardy film clips: Our next installment is a little less than three minutes of a British Pathé newsreel from 1947. The first part is an interview with Barbara Stanwyck and Robert Taylor. Then comes a brief chat with Stan and Ollie, who were then about to begin touring the British Isles with what turned out to be a highly successful stage show.
You'll hear Hardy talk about an upcoming film version of Robin Hood that, alas, was never made. The storyline would have cast Oliver as Friar Hardy and Stan as Little John Laurel, the two main Merry Men of Robin Hood's band. It is unknown why the project never made it to the business side of a camera. Instead, they wound up making no movies for several years, which was our loss. Here's the newsreel...
I finally got around to watching the recent Bill Moyers special, Buying the War, which is about how the Iraq War was "sold" to the American people, how the press went along with it and how even a lot of prominent Democrats fell right in line with the narrative.
A lot of pro-Bush folks are quite upset at this show...and I suppose that if one is still clinging to the idea that our leaders did everything right, I understand that. I can also understand why newsfolks and pundits whose faulty predictions and disproven "facts" are reaired would be upset. (Nothing seems to upset Bill O'Reilly more than having someone haul out his old words.) I'm not sure though why anyone who can get past the "our team" mentality is bothered by anything other than the long, sad litany of how our leaders — Republican and Democrat, in the press and out — screwed up. Interestingly enough, a friend of mine who's still gung ho and supportive of the Iraq War urged me to watch Buying the War. He thinks the U.S. did the right thing to take out Hussein but is mad that it was justified with fibs and incompetent reporting.
You can decide for yourself since the whole thing can be watched online at this site. You can also watch Moyers' weekly show online on this page. He has a nice interview up with Jon Stewart, which includes the host of The Daily Show reflecting on his recent, contentious interview with John McCain. You might also enjoy Moyers' interview with Joshua Micah Marshall, the Master Blogger I quoted here the other day. I don't know how long these videos will be up but last night here, I told you about a program called Orbit Downloader which can be used to capture the video clip to your harddisk for later viewing.
Nothing above, by the way, should be taken to infer that I've changed my view that public money should not be used for television programming. I watch a lot of things on PBS but I still don't agree with the idea of government funding of the arts.
I don't think this link will work for very long but while it's operative, you might want to read the 2001 profile of late Jack Valenti that ran in The New Yorker. Mr. Valenti had an amazing life and during the decades that he worked for the Motion Picture Association of America, he served that organization well. This is not to say I liked all or even most of what he did, which included consolidating the majors in ways that would suppress the minors and step on unions. Before that, he served a flawed Chief Executive who did a lot of damage. Jack Valenti is the man who said in 1965, "I sleep each night a little better, a little more confidently because Lyndon Johnson is my President." A lot of us were glad someone did.
I'm sorry that I have no great Jack Valenti anecdotes to report here. I met him twice for a grand total of about three minutes and the only thing I recall is that I asked him which was tougher — working for the studio heads he then served or working for Lyndon Johnson. His precise response has long since escaped my memory but I recall noting it was a very measured, political answer. He was just talking to a jerky kid, not a reporter, but he still wanted to make sure he didn't say the wrong thing. I guess that's why he lasted as long as he did in both those jobs.
A childhood memory. During the early sixties, my family (Mother + Father + me) used to drive down to San Diego every summer to visit my Uncle Henry and Aunt Tillie, and to go to the zoo. Nowadays, I drive down to San Diego every summer to attend a big mother of a comic convention which is also kind of a zoo but that's another matter. Back then, we made those trips...and my Father drove at a leisurely pace, stopping off a half-dozen times along the way so it took all day. I was in the back seat with a pile of comic books I'd acquired but refrained from reading so I could enjoy them on the trip.
One year, we stopped off at a little lunch place in Long Beach and then went into a nearby drugstore to get a few items we needed. There, I saw a large, well-filled display of Comicpacs — a whole rack of plastic bags of DC Comics. In each, you got four comics which then sold individually for twelve cents each, and you got them for the amazing discounted price of forty-seven cents. Only it really wasn't a bargain because the store there charged sales tax, which they didn't do at newsstands where comics were sold without the plastic bags. There was also the obvious drawback that you could only see one of the four comics you were buying. What if the other three were books you didn't like? Or worse, books you already owned?
I had so many comics, the odds were I'd wind up with dupes but I still decided to gamble. I bought one package where the visible comic was one I didn't have — a recent issue of Superman I'd somehow missed. As luck would have it, two of the other three were comics I not only owned, they were in my pile to read on that trip.
That was why Comicpacs did not work for me. Insofar as I could tell, they didn't work for anyone. Several companies in the sixties tried selling comics in packs of three or four and every attempt was a failure.
I now understand why the companies tried it. Their regular comic offerings were on a returnable basis. Newsstands got them, in effect, on consignment. If they sold, the newsstand made a few pennies. If they didn't sell, the stand shipped them back and the publisher ate the cost of printing...but it was worse than that because if the comic got damaged or frayed on the rack, it could get shipped back and the publisher was out the cost of printing it. Or if the newsstand got cluttered and the dealers just decided to return books a few days after they went on sale — or not to even put them out at all — the publisher was out. At one point, DC considered an acceptable sale of a comic to be a 50% sale, meaning that they'd print 400,000 and sell 200,000. Not an efficient way to do business.
That whole system pretty much crashed and burned during the seventies. Some comics are still distributed that way but not many. Most go through an alternate system of non-returnable distribution that replaced it and saved the industry...but that came later. The bagged comics were the sixties' attempt to sell comics on a non-returnable basis. A store got a shipment and the bags stayed on the racks until they sold, whether it was one month or six or longer. Often it was longer.
It never worked for most publishers, though Western Publishing (aka Gold Key Comics) had better luck than most because Western was a giant in selling activity books, puzzle books, jigsaw puzzles and books for kids. That gave them momentum with many kinds of stores and national chains, and they were able to sell their bagged comics at the same time. The problem was, as I learned in the seventies when I worked for Western, that they were sometimes too successful selling the books...which meant that they were not successful enough. That sentence obviously needs a heap of explaining so let me try to do so by example...
You have a store and I'm a salesguy for Western Publishing. I do a great job of convincing you to buy bagged comics from me to sell in your shop. Let's say we consummate this deal in January. In March, we deliver to you a crate of 300 units, each unit being a plastic bag containing the March issues of Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig and Daffy Duck, with the Bugs Bunny in the front and therefore visible to consumers. I've made a tidy profit but I've also trapped myself out from selling you more. It may take you six months or a year to sell enough of those 300 bags so that you'll want to order additional bags containing other books. All that time, kids who might buy those other packs are looking at your display and saying, "Oh, I have that issue of Bugs Bunny." And they don't buy.
And if by some chance, I do get you to order more bagged comics before you're out of the previous shipment, we find that the two selections work against each other. You get in a crate of units that contain the July issues of Woody Woodpecker, Scooby Doo, Pink Panther and Yosemite Sam with the Yosemite Sam in the front and you put them on display alongside all the bags you still have from the earlier shipment. What we then find (what Western found) is that consumers would look at the two bags and worry that they contained the same comics in a different order. And when they thought that way, research found, they tended to view the whole product with suspicion and not buy anything.
In the seventies, Western's newsstand distribution was dying. They were selling so poorly in some states that they simply pulled their wares off the racks in those regions because they were getting so many returns. (So were DC and Marvel but unlike Western, DC and Marvel received revenues when their characters were merchandised. They owned Superman and Spider-Man, whereas Western did not own most of the characters in their comics. So there was no point in putting out books that were, in essence, loss leaders for licensing.) Western tried hard to make the plastic bags work. They built special displays and they tried putting stickers on the bags that told you what was inside. They even had their salespeople talk stores out of ordering too many of one bag and they experimented with limited returnability. Still, the distribution method never succeeded and when they finally gave up on it, they gave up publishing comic books at all.
I could have told them it wouldn't work. I could have told them that back when I was ten and going to San Diego with my parents. I didn't want to buy my comics in plastic bags and as it turned out, neither did almost anyone else. We want to buy our comics on an individual basis. And then we take them home and put them into plastic bags. That's how it's done.
This is silent home movie footage of Stan Laurel at his apartment in the Oceana Apartments out in Santa Monica. He spends most of it admiring the Academy Award he received in 1961 for — and I quote: "Creative Pioneering in the Field of Cinema Comedy." Laurel did not attend the ceremony due to poor health so Danny Kaye accepted for him. Stan was quite proud of the award — as you may be able to tell in this film — although he did nickname it "Mr. Clean."
In the years after Oliver Hardy died, Laurel made no public appearances despite many offers. He told visitors to his home that he was afraid audiences would be disappointed to see him as an old man. He doesn't look bad to me in this film. Matter of fact, he still looks like a very alive, able performer. See what you think.
When I see or hear something I like on the Internet, I like to save a copy to my harddisk. Streaming audio and video, after all, has the tendency to go away. So how do you do this? Here are some tips but they're only for PC users, I'm afraid.
I've tried a number of ways to save videos from sites like YouTube and Google Video. The best thing I've found — which is not to say it works everywhere — is Orbit Downloader. This is a free program that acts as an add-on to your browser. It works best when you're on the home site of a video clip and not on a web page that has it embedded. Let's say you see a YouTube video on my site and you'd like to capture a copy. Click on my embedded copy anywhere except where you click to start or stop the video. That should take you to the YouTube page where the clip originates. If you have Orbit installed and the clip is playing, hover your mouse over it and in a second or two, it'll give you a little window you can clip which will enable you to save the video as an FLV file.
You'll need an FLV player installed to run these clips later. The one I use is FLV Player and it's also free but you may have to root around on this page for a company called Applian Technologies to find it.
If you download FLV Player there, the installer may also ask you if you want to install a couple demos of Applian products. You may want to do this or you may not. Applian makes an array of programs that capture streaming audio and video from websites. They are not free and in some cases, they take a little effort to set up properly. Depending on how badly you want to capture the stuff that Orbit won't grab for you, the time and expense may be worth it. Many of their products like Replay A/V have a timer function and a tuner for Internet radio broadcasts so you can use them like a TiVo to record online programs. I've captured shows from BBC Radio and Internet radio stations (like Shokus Internet Radio) with Applian software.
I've been using their wares for some time and have generally been happy with them...but I'll caution you about one other thing. They seem to come out with a new product every month instead of upgrading the old ones. Many of their products provide overlapping functions and when a new one comes out, I'm never sure what it does that my old Applian products don't do. Make sure you experiment with a demo before you cough up any money. That's good advice, of course, for any software you purchase but it seems especially prudent in this case.
William F. Buckley Jr. writes the kind of column about Bush and the Iraq War which, had it been written by anyone else, would get denounced as the ravings of a leftie.
Mark is back from the L.A. Times Festival of Books up at U.C.L.A., an event that continues through the weekend with more booths of authors selling and signing their books and more panel discussions and lectures. The place was crowded, the sun was hot and people seemed to be having a very good time. If I didn't have to work on a book of my own, I might be going back tomorrow.
I attended one panel discussion today — "The Age of Spin: Controlling the Message" with Joe Conason, David Goodman, Michael Isikoff, Frank Luntz and the moderator, John Powers. The topic drifted a bit, thanks in part to a small but vocal group that was present to argue that the 9/11 attacks were a conspiracy that involved "controlled demolitions" and scheming that the press has refused to investigate. There were people outside the hall and inside with jars of 9/11 rubble that they held up to prove...uh, I'm not sure what. I'm also not sure what kind of scenario they imagine — who arranged these demolitions and why. The thesis seems to be that the lack of evidence is evidence that there's been a conspiracy to hide the evidence.
The rest of the panel was predictable and somewhat entertaining. You can probably catch it on C-Span some time in the coming week and if you do, you'll hear Frank Luntz being very amusing as he defended his own work as a Republican pollster and advisor and Michael Isikoff defending his position as a reporter who works for corporate overlords. David Goodman said that Hurricane Katrina was a turning point for the Bush administration in that they were unable to control the imagery of dead bodies in New Orleans the way they banned photos of the flag-draped coffins being shipped back from Iraq. And Joe Conason discussed the way "spin" was used to sell the Iraq War. For more information, catch it on C-Span whenever it runs. (Someone let me know if you see before I do when it's airing.)
Afterwards, I got to meet Conason and get a book signed, and I told him my theory that the entire Bush administration was a "controlled demolition." He laughed and added, "...of Democracy." I also got a book signed by Paul Conrad, the longtime editorial cartoonist for the L.A. Times.
There were other things of interest that I'll mention as I recall them. Right now, I'm going to thank my pal Gordon Kent for getting me a ticket to the panel and then I'm going to get back to work.
This is a Laurel and Hardy clip — not a particularly funny one but historic, nonetheless. It has usually been reported (by me, among others) that the only TV appearance Stan and Ollie ever made was on the Ralph Edwards program, This is Your Life. Insofar as American TV is concerned, that appears to be true. But in 1955, they did this brief bit on a British variety series called This is Music Hall, saluting some of their friends in that area of entertainment who were members of a club called the Water Rats. Stan was a lifelong lover of English music hall performers.
For the next few days in this space, I'm going to be spotlighting some obscure footage of my favorite performers. None of it will be particularly entertaining but it's always nice to see a little more of those two guys. Here you go...
Yes, I'm plugging another live show in Los Angeles. My friend Shelly Goldstein is a brilliant writer and singer who's been wowing them lately in the British clubs. On May 12, the day before Mother's Day, she will be doing a special mother-themed show she's calling "The Mother of All Cabaret" at The Gardenia, a small 'n' friendly supper club located near La Brea and Santa Monica Boulevard in Hollywood. I've seen Shelly there and she's very funny and she sings like a dream and what more do you need to know? Oh, right: When to go. The show starts at 9 PM but for the best seating and a darn good meal, go early and have dinner. And you'd probably like to have the number for reservations, which is (323) 467-7444. She has my highest recommendation.
Had a nice time today at the Hollywood Collectors Show out in Burbank. I spoke to many of the folks I mentioned would be there and encountered many other persons of interest in the aisles. Got Mickey Rooney to sign a copy of his autobiography (the first one — he's done two) and bought Bill Marx's new bio about his life as a musician and his father's as a comedy legend. It's called Son of Harpo Speaks.
Mr. Rooney seemed surprisingly healthy but a bit disoriented by the crowds. Hard to believe that at age 86 — he'll be 87 in September — the man has been in show business for more than 84 years. I heard someone today describe Sid Caesar as an "old-timer" and he is. But Mickey Rooney was a performer before Sid Caesar was born.
Oddly enough, Rooney wasn't the oldest actor in the room today, nor was he the shortest. Jerry Maren, who was born eight months before The Mighty Mick, was wandering around. Maren was in his late teens when he played a member of the Lollipop Guild in The Wizard of Oz, and you saw him in a video clip here the other day playing Buster Brown.
My friend Earl Kress and I had a nice chat with Mally Lewis, daughter of famed ventriloquist Shari Lewis. Mally has been carrying on the family tradition, performing (and doing a fine job) with Lamb Chop. Actually, the whole place was full of interesting folks...but not too full today. The longest lines seemed to be for Rooney, Henry Winkler, Erik Estrada, Joey Heatherton and Seka. Most but not all of those folks are scheduled to be there tomorrow.
Back here, we linked you to the website of a new company that takes people on short, expensive air flights in which they get to experience weightlessness and other variations in gravity. As you may have seen on the news, renowned Cosmologist Stephen Hawking recently took such a flight.
So did Teller of the team of Penn & Teller. Here's a short essay he wrote about his experiences.
...as Billy DeWolfe used to say. And on what other blog today are you likely to see a Billy DeWolfe reference?
Last night, I was out in the Valley for the first of what may be a regular — every other month or so — informal gathering of Animation Writers. My pal Steve Marmel threw it together. No speeches, no agenda. We just all go to a restaurant en masse for food and beverage. This one was at the Gordon Biersch Brewery in Burbank, which I guess is a nice place if you like the beers they make. I never touch the stuff and I almost couldn't handle the hamburger or the noise, either. Still, I had a good time mingling with around seventy of my colleagues and will go to more of these, if and when Steve arranges them.
Then today, it's back out to Burbank for the Hollywood Collectors Show, where the Great and the Near-Great sell autographed photos and other memorabilia. Among those scheduled to appear today and/or tomorrow are Henry Winkler, Mickey Rooney, Brinke Stevens, Gregg Berger, Kelli Maroney, Nastassja Kinski, Traci Lords, Erik Estrada, Tom Bosley, Alan Oppenheimer, Monique Parent, Henry Silva and Joey Heatherton. I always find the attendees at least as interesting as the featured guests so I expect to have a good time.
Tomorrow, I'm heading for the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books up at U.C.L.A. There, I will make my way to lecture halls I always tried to avoid when I was a student on said campus, and I will hear authors discuss their current books. One, I expect, will be Joe Conason, who's among my current favorite political reporters and commentators — a list that is hard to get on and harder still to stay on. Mr. Conason has a good article today over at Salon, all about Rudy Giuliani's silly "elect Democrats and die" remarks of the other day. I was already thoroughly disappointed by John McCain when he started renouncing past positions to try and get the support of the hard right-wing. It's sad to see Giuliani going the same route.
Sunday, I expect to spend writing and then Monday, it's back out to Burbank (again!) to do another one of those interviews for a special feature on an upcoming DVD. At this rate, I'm going to be on more DVDs than copy protection. I'll report on some or all of these events as they happen. And then I'll try not to go to Burbank again for the rest of '07.
On June 7, 2005, I posted the following item on this weblog...
George W. Bush's approval rating is now a full twenty points lower than Bill Clinton's was on the day he was impeached.
Quite a few people wrote me to express amazement at this. It was true, of course, but it was also amazing. I wonder what those people think now that Bush's approval rating is forty points lower than Bill Clinton's on the day he was impeached.
The Three Stooges — colorized within an inch of their lives — lead a classroom in "The Alphabet Song." I never quite understood the premise of the tune, either. But it is kinda catchy.
We're always on the lookout for articles that explain what the U.S. is trying to accomplish in Iraq and what it means to "win" or "lose." This one by blogger Joshua Micah Marshall strikes me as frighteningly on-target.
We spend way too much time on this webpage saying goodbye to great artists and writers of the early days of comics. So let's say Happy Birthday to two of 'em...
George Tuska is 91 years old today. George did his first known work in the comic form in 1939 as an assistant on the Scorchy Smith newspaper strip (which he later handled all by his lonesome) and for the Eisner-Iger shop. He's drawn thousands of comics in his day but is probably best remembered for his work on Lev Gleason's Crime Does Not Pay and for a long stint at Marvel drawing, among other comics, Iron Man. Stan Lee often referred to him as "Genial George Tuska" or "Gentleman George Tuska" and both those adjectives apply.
Paul Norris is 93 years old today. Paul started cartooning for the Dayton Daily News in 1937 and was drawing comic books by 1941. His most lasting contribution to the latter was as the co-creator of Aquaman. He later worked on a number of syndicated strips including Brick Bradford, which he wrote and drew from 1956 until it ended in 1987. I was delighted to write some of the comic books he also drew during that period (including Dynomutt) and to get to know this fine man.
George and Paul may not see this posting. I don't think either of them has Internet access and anyway, they'll probably be out partying 'til all hours. But I wanted to wish them well and to note how much entertainment they've provided over the years for so many.
In the past, I've linked you to clips of great kids' shows of the past that I liked. Here's eight minutes of Andy's Gang, a show I could never stand when I was a child.
Andy's Gang was a kind of successor-in-interest to an earlier radio and TV series called Smilin' Ed's Buster Brown Gang. It started on radio in 1944 with Smilin' Ed McConnell. The goal was to sell Buster Brown shoes, and I guess it did, even though its connection to the Buster character and his newspaper strip and even to his shoes was largely ceremonial. Buster appeared in commercials — in today's clip, he's played by former Munchkin Jerry Maren — but very little that was on the show came from the strip. McConnell and his crew came up with a colorful band of characters who peopled the show and for some reason, young listeners got hooked.
The radio show aired on Saturday mornings throughout the forties and a TV version began in 1950. The radio version ended in 1953 and Ed McConnell ended in 1954 when he stopped smiling and passed away, not necessarily in that order. The program was done on film so it kept rerunning for a while...but in '55, the same producers began offering instead, episodes of Andy's Gang with the same cast of puppet players and supporting characters, but with former western actor Andy Devine as the host.
Most histories say this show lasted until 1960 but I think that's misleading. My understanding is that the production company made a bunch of them and local stations just ran the same episodes over and over in unimportant time slots as long as someone was tuning in...which wasn't often after shows like Rocky and His Friends and Huckleberry Hound debuted. I recall one station in L.A. airing them at 5:30 AM for a while, and that was in the days before TiVo. You actually had to get up at that hour to watch it. I didn't...but every now and then, I'd be up with a stomach ache or something and I'd catch a little Andy's Gang. The show had a surreal atmosphere, like it was filmed on some other planet, and it seemed even odder that early in the morning.
Even though it was weird, I'm afraid I never warmed to the show. Every bit seemed to go on half past forever, and the kids in the audience laughed and screamed at everything, no matter what happened. It was the phoniest audience reaction in the world, especially since the on-stage action was obviously not filmed in front of them. I was able to figure that out at age six and I couldn't have been the only one. What I always suspected was that they had about two minutes of footage of those kids and just spliced it into each episode at random. The one thing that was occasionally amusing was when character actor Vito Scotti would duel with Froggy the Magic Gremlin, but it wasn't worth watching the show just for that. Not if anything else was on. At 5:30 AM, you could often catch a Farm Report and it was a lot funnier.
Please don't write and tell me it was your favorite show. Even if you could make me believe that, my reaction would be, "Good for you. I still couldn't watch it." The following link is offered for historical reasons, just in case anyone ever asks you where the phrase, "Plunk your magic twanger, Froggy" came from...
If you'd like to see an interview with Roger Ebert back in his healthier days — i.e., when he could talk — the Archive of American Television has posted its 90-minute one-on-one with him to Google Video. This link will tell you how to get to it.
As we surmised, the author of the letter in the previous item knew it was a joke. See here. I'm just wondering if the editor of the newspaper that published it did.
I'm trying to decide if this is a joke. I mean, this letter actually appeared in the Arkansas Democrat Gazette, which is a real newspaper. But I'm trying to decide if (a) the author was kidding and (b) if so, if the newspaper editor who selected it for publication realized that. I'm leaning towards (a) yes and (b) no. Here's the letter...
Daylight exacerbates warning
You may have noticed that March of this year was particularly hot. As a matter of fact, I understand that it was the hottest March since the beginning of the last century. All of the trees were fully leafed out and legions of bugs and snakes were crawling around during a time in Arkansas when, on a normal year, we might see a snowflake or two.
This should come as no surprise to any reasonable person. As you know, Daylight Saving Time started almost a month early this year. You would think that members of Congress would have considered the warming effect that an extra hour of daylight would have on our climate. Or did they?
Perhaps this is another plot by a liberal Congress to make us believe that global warming is a real threat. Perhaps next time there should be serious studies performed before Congress passes laws with such far-reaching effects.
CONNIE M. MESKIMEN
Hot Springs
One piece of additional information which may help you decide who's kidding who (or is it whom?): A quick search reveals that Connie M. Meskimen is a practicing bankruptcy attorney.
Remember: If you're interested in animation or animation history, you'll want to tune in Stu's Show today on Shokus Internet Radio when he hosts animation experts Jerry Beck and Keith Scott. 4 PM on the West Coast, 7 PM on the East Coast. Details are here.
I have a couple of boxes in the next room labelled "Mad imitations," meaning magazines that attempted to replicate the success of (and usually, most of the contents of) Mad Magazine. There have been an awful lot of them, most of which lasted three or less issues. I probably have at least a dozen that ran a grand total of one issue. Even back when Mad was up to a circulation over 2.6 million, the knock-offs couldn't muster enough sales to stick around for long.
Unless you count National Lampoon — and I sure wouldn't — only two managed to stick around for any length of time. Sick lasted for twenty years, though the last five or so were kind of rough...lots of reprints and then it was sold to Charlton, the rock bottom of the business, for its last hurrah. Cracked began in 1958 and published regularly until around 2000 when its issuance became erratic...then it stopped altogether. Soon, it was sold to new owners who revamped it, started publishing again — and quickly stopped. So the batting average for Mad simulations is pretty low. It's probably been just a few years shy of a half-century since anyone started one that ever showed a profit.
Which brings us to the latest in the long, grand tradition. The first issue of Gag! came out in 2004. Did you know about it? I didn't. Another first issue has just been issued but I don't think it's on conventional newsstands. It seems to be sold in comic shops and at the magazine's website. I haven't seen a copy yet so this is not a recommendation...but I'm somehow impressed with the sheer fact that anyone is trying it again. One of these days, it's going to work.
When rehearsals started for the original Broadway production of My Fair Lady, Julie Andrews was awful, at least in the portions where Liza was the unscrubbed flower girl. She was reportedly able to play the later scenes where Ms. Doolittle has become a refined lady of apparent breeding but she just couldn't master the character in the early scenes. It was so bad that her co-star, Rex Harrison, threatened to stop coming to rehearsal. He didn't see why he should waste his time rehearsing with an actress who obviously had to be fired and replaced.
In a "last chance" desperation move, director Moss Hart gave everyone but Julie a few days off from rehearsal and went into an intense, one-on-one tutoring session with her. It was brutal, it was exhausting...but it worked. Hart pasted the role on her, doing the opposite of what Henry Higgins did in the play — turning the gentlewoman into a street urchin. In some accounts, Hart's spouse, Kitty Carlisle, assisted in the marathon lessons that enabled her not only to play the part but to make it one of the stage's most memorable performances.
Here's concert footage of Julie Andrews performing a number of that show and telling a small, funnier version of that story. It runs five minutes.
This is funny. A few years ago, I purchased the book, Here's Morgan!, via Amazon. This is the autobiography of humorist Henry Morgan. Most of you know Morgan from his years as a panelist on the game show, I've Got a Secret. But he also did some very fine and clever programs on both radio and TV. Much of the humor in the early issues of Mad was inspired by Henry Morgan.
Anyway, I just received this e-mail from Amazon...
We've noticed that customers who have expressed interest in "Here's Morgan!" by Henry Morgan have also ordered "Empire of Blue Water: Captain Morgan's Great Pirate Army, the Epic Battle for the Americas, and the Catastrophe That Ended the Outlaws' Bloody Reign" by Stephan Talty. For this reason, you might like to know that Stephan Talty's "Empire of Blue Water: Captain Morgan's Great Pirate Army, the Epic Battle for the Americas, and the Catastrophe That Ended the Outlaws' Bloody Reign" is now available. You can order your copy for just $18.96 ($5.99 off the list price) by following the link below.
In other words: Since you were interested in Henry Morgan, the radio humorist, we assume you're interested in Sir Henry Morgan, the seventeenth century pirate. This is the same expert use of computers that causes our National Security people to arrest and torture the wrong person because they have the same name as the right person.
Vince Waldron suggested — and he's right — that this column by Rosa Brooks says all the salient things that the Christopher Hitchens column says about the Virginia Tech shooting, and says it with more understanding.
Congressman Dana Rohrabacher seems to have inherited Bob Dornan's old job of being the looniest guy in the House of Representatives. The other day, at a meeting of the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee, he was trotting out the old line about how anyone who disagrees with his positions must hate America. At one point when the audience moaned at one of the sillier things he said, he told them, "Well, I hope it's your families, I hope it's your families that suffer the consequences." At one point, he said the following...
...we are at war, and we've got to make sure that we do not let go fifty terrorists who will go out and plant a bomb in London and kill 20,000 people in order to protect that one person who we arrested accidentally because his name was the same.
I don't fully disagree with this position...but the problem is that we don't just arrest the wrong people. Sometimes, we arrest and torture the wrong people. I don't think we should be torturing anyone. I have yet to hear an argument that it accomplishes anything positive at all, let alone anything that justifies losing the moral high ground. But if there is a reason to torture, it probably won't apply to torturing the wrong person.
Should we tolerate torturing the wrong person just because they have the same name as the right person? I don't know...but I do know it's an easy position to take if your name is Dana Rohrabacher. Somehow, I don't think he'd feel quite the same way if his name was Bob Johnson or Joe Smith.
This is one you may not want to click on but you should be made aware it's there. Roger Ebert, out of the hospital and awaiting still more surgery, has written an article about why, though his illness has made him look quite bad, he is not going to hide out. The man is unable to speak and a section of his mandible has been removed...but he is still planning on attending his upcoming film festival. The piece is accompanied by photos of the guy that will break your heart even though he's happily giving the "thumbs up" sign, which I guess is now more of an affirmation of positive thinking than a movie review.
Okay, I've given you sufficient warning. If you still want to read the article, it's here.
Christopher Hitchens rarely makes me feel that he is writing out of conviction and not, say, to cultivate a certain Angry Gadfly reputation. Every so often though, his nasty screeds say something that I think ought to be said, if only so it can be considered. This essay, which is about the national mourning of the Virginia Tech massacre, is one such entry.
My friend/mentor/hero Jack Kirby was involved in a number of odd projects in his life, especially in the eighties when he was more or less out of conventional comic books. One was a motion picture proposal called The Lord of Light, based on Roger Zelazny's book of the same name. For it, he did a pile of concept sketches as well as some designs for a proposed theme park related to the proposed movie. Above is one drawing of what the theme park might have looked like. (The odd part is that as wild and untethered to reality as Jack's imagination was, it might have been fairly simple to build buildings that looked like his did. His world had balance and mass and structure.)
The film never got made but it was apparently helpful in the freeing of six Americans who were trapped in Iran. This article tells the whole bizarre story.
Ed McMahon, you may be interested to know, has been intermittently touring the U.S. with a one-man show called "Tonight Show Memories." Here, we have a link to a piece about him in Chicago with it, including a video interview. Thanks to Jeff Abraham for the tip.
Wanna hear a radio show discussing animation history? Better still, wanna hear one that doesn't feature me (although I may call in and be part of the discussion)? Well, two eminent cartoon scholars will be the guests this Wednesday on Stu's Show, which is heard only on Shokus Internet Radio. Each week, my pal Stu Shostak welcomes either someone prominent in entertainment history or me to his microphones and this Wednesday, he has two terrific guests.
One is Jerry Beck, who's one of the brewmasters of Cartoon Brew, maybe the best animation weblog on the 'net. Any time you see a great DVD collection of cartoons these days, the odds are good that it exists and is as good as it is because Jerry talked the appropriate folks into doing it and doing it right. He's too humble to say this so I will.
The other is Keith Scott, who's one of the top announcers and voiceover guys in Australia, along with being the world class expert on animation voice history and on the Jay Ward studio. Keith not only knows everything there is to know about Bullwinkle J. Moose, he is Bullwinkle J. Moose. After the passing of the character's original voice, Bill Scott, Keith (no relation) took over the role and now they fly him in from Down Under when they need the eminent moose to speak. It's an uncanny replica...as I'm sure you'll hear for yourself if you tune in Stu's Show.
I suggest you do this on Wednesday. An awful lot of folks who've listened to Stu on my recommendation have told me they really enjoyed it. The show airs on the Internet for two hours, beginning at 4 PM on the West Coast, which is 7 PM on the East Coast. To hear it, click over to Shokus Internet Radio, select an audio browser and then listen. The show repeats at that time for several days after but you'll enjoy it more if you listen live. Trust Mark on this.
Here's five minutes from a 1950 Burns & Allen TV show. It's a dance spot featuring George Burns, someone named Harrison Muller...and the legendary Bob Fosse. Mr. Muller was a Broadway dancer at the time and his son (of the same name) has achieved some success as a star in action movies. For some reason, I just like watching Fosse dance, even though this isn't Fosse-style dancing. George ain't so bad, either.
For reasons that escape me, I'm booked for a batch of comic-type conventions in the next few months...
June 2 and 3, I'll be at the Super-Con, which used to be in Oakland, California but is now in San Jose. They have a pretty good lineup of guests so we may have some interesting panels and program items. I'll tell you all about them when things get firmed up.
July 5 through 8, the lovely Carolyn Kelly and the lovely I (to say nothing of the lovely Rob Paulsen) will be Guests of Honor at Anthrocon, which is an annual convention in Pittsburgh to celebrate funny animals and the anthropomorphic arts. Again, there will be panels and talks. I'll talk about the silly cartoons I write. Carolyn will talk about the work of her father, Walt Kelly, on Pogo...which was only, like, the best newspaper strip ever. And I imagine Rob will talk about doing some of the best cartoon voice work done today.
And then of course, July 26-29, we and everyone who could get a hotel room will be at the Comic-Con International in San Diego. Usually, I go there and run twelve or thirteen panels. This year, they've made me a Guest of Honor so I guess I'm going to go there and run twelve or thirteen panels. It's way too early to say what they might be but they'd better be good. If they aren't, there's a good chance no one will show up for the convention.
If you can make it to any of these, please come by and say howdy. I get a lot of e-mail here but I somehow don't believe people are reading this website until they tell me in person.
Also, if you see me, look around. You may just spot John Lithgow lurking close by. (As a couple of you have written to me, it could be worse. I could be stalked by Robert Blake.)
One of my big peeves, apart from John Lithgow following me around, is that so many people who purport to care about comic book history don't seem to know how to spell the names of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, the creators of Superman. These are important men with not-difficult names but just take a moment and Google some aberrant spellings. You'll find countless hits for Siegal and Shuster, Seigel and Schuster, Seigle and Shusster, etc. Sometimes, they get one wrong, sometimes both. This probably bugs me more than it should.
Well, here's a bit of comic book history. Above left is an ad that appeared in New Comics #11, which came out in 1936 from the company we now know as DC Comics. It's a promo for a new book the company was then launching called Detective Comics. That's the cover of #1, which was drawn by Vince Sullivan, the book's associate editor. The ad touts the folks who created the interior of that historic publication — Tom Hickey, Sven Elven, Bill Patrick, Creig Flessel (who recently celebrated his 94th birthday), Seigel & Shuster [sic], Homer Fleming and Alger. Not listed is Fred Schwab, who also did a story in that first issue.
That's right. In what may be the first ad to ever mention Jerry and Joe, Jerry's name was misspelled. So maybe it's a time-honored tradition.
As some of you may recall, I've had some concern about the size of the crows in my neighborhood lately. They're now about the size of Lincoln Continentals.
But I have something new to worry about. I think I'm being stalked. What's more, I think I'm being stalked by John Lithgow.
Today, I went into a Bristol Farms market and as I was waiting to check out, I noticed that the man standing behind me in line was John Lithgow. This is the third time in thirty days I've encountered Mr. Lithgow. The first, which I didn't tell you about, was in a restaurant almost a month ago. He acted like he was there to eat with someone else but I wasn't fooled. He was there to keep an eye on me.
The second time was at the Billy Connelly performance mentioned here. Again, Lithgow feigned like he was there for some innocent reason like seeing the show...and he had me almost convinced. He's that good an actor. I was prepared to just consider the two run-ins a coincidence.
But today at Bristol Farms, I caught on. There he was with his little basket, pretending to be out grocery shopping, supposedly more interested in his purchases than he was in me. Nice try, Lithgow, but I'm on to you. I don't know what you're up to but it won't work.
Stay tuned to this weblog for more sightings of John Lithgow. And don't think there won't be plenty.
Ezra Klein debunks the myth that Americans have better health care than Canada, France, Great Britain and Germany. When people say otherwise, I'm never quite sure if it's just the old "we're the best at everything" reflex kicking in or if they actually believe this.
Earlier this morning, GSN ran two episodes of To Tell the Truth in tribute to its longtime panelist, Kitty Carlisle. One was an episode I described here...from memory since I don't think I've seen it since it first aired back in the seventies. Just for the record, I remembered what happened but I remembered them in reverse. The "reveal" of Ms. Carlisle's son preceded the unmasking of Joe Garagiola's son. Either way, it was still a funny segment.
Good night, Internet. I'll see you in the morning.
And after you bail on the Rich Little video, go watch something clever. This is a link to Robert Smigel's cartoon on last night's Saturday Night Live, "Torboto."
I've embedded too many videos today so I won't put this one up here. But here's a link to a YouTube video of Rich Little's appearance at the White House Correspondent's Dinner. It runs about twenty minutes.
Slightly off-topic: I noticed that one weblog (this one) that picked up a link from me on this described me as "a Leno apologist who obviously doesn't care for some aspects of Letterman's comedy." I think "apologist" is the wrong word there but just for the record, I like both Dave and Jay...though I watch them with generous fast-forwarding because I don't think either guy has been at his best for quite a while. And speaking of not being at your best for a long time, go watch Rich Little.
Speedy Gonzales, the fastest mouse in all of Mexico, is making a comeback. He's still an enormously popular character, especially considering that no one ever liked his cartoons. Thanks to Joel O'Brien for the tip.
I usually try to not put up more than two of these a day but this is the CNN interview from last week with Joe Simon. Joe is one of my favorite human beings and it's great to see him getting attention and still sharp and working at age 93. This only runs a minute and forty-five seconds but it'll give you a brief intro to one of the true living legends of comics...
I've written here in the past about Jim Thurman, especially about his partnership with a gent named Gene Moss. For several years in the sixties, they were top comedy writers in Hollywood and occasional performers. Most notably, they wrote and did voices for the popular cartoon series, Roger Ramjet, and starred in an extremely hip, adult kids' show called Shrimpenstein that ran on KHJ Channel 9 here in Los Angeles for too short a time. You can read more about them in this piece I posted when Mr. Moss passed away.
Alas, this is the piece about Jim Thurman dying. After he and Moss split up, he went on to become one of the main writers of Sesame Street, for which he won many an Emmy. He had a wonderful and wicked sense of humor and the few times we spoke on the phone, it was in full flower. Sorry to hear about his passing. Here are a few more details, courtesy of Variety.
If you have occasion to use public wi-fi connections, this article may be of interest to you. So may this article (and video) from the same source about what you can do to minimize problems like those described in the first article.
Okay, I've watched last night's White House Correspondents Dinner and am officially appalled. There's always something a bit "wrong" to me about reporters and the folks they cover intermingling this way; not that they shouldn't be civil to one another but the unbridled shmoozing makes you wonder about the sincerity of both sides.
Entertainer Rich Little had a rough time of it, especially since his "opening act" was George W. Bush announcing that in light of the tragedy at Virginia Tech, there would be no presidential attempts at humor that evening. I'm not sure I entirely follow the logic of that. Yes, it's awful and sad that 32 young people were killed and scores more were injured there. Would the president have gone out and yukked it up if that hadn't happened because, after all, the recent deaths of dozens of U.S. soldiers and hundreds of Iraqis shouldn't get in the way of a good monologue? Nevertheless, it got Little off to a bumpy start. (When Lewis Black did a similar dinner a few years ago, he had to follow Dick Cheney talking about the death of the Pope. Hey, there's a topic that will always get an audience in the mood to laugh.) It's also an awkward spot when you're brought in to perform with the clear expectation that you'll offend no one on the dais or in the front row.
Still, it could have gone a lot better. Once upon a time, Rich Little was an impressionist of uncanny talent. He did people that no one else had ever done before and when he did the ones everyone else did, he did them better than just about anyone. The impersonations though often carried rather weak or hoary material...and now the jokes are no better but the impressions aren't as impressive. The late Stanley Ralph Ross, who wrote for Little, used to tell people who said the replicas were uneven, "Rich is on target about 50% of the time but no one can tell him about the half that isn't." That was easy to believe last night...though I'm not sure Little wasn't "righter" for the event than some of those they've had in recent years. I have the feeling that after last night's dinner, the person in charge of booking the talent got a lot more compliments than the person who booked Stephen Colbert.
It was kind of an amazing performance. For his Johnny Carson bit, Little used a very old joke that you heard in high school or before. It was the one about the guy who takes an apparent drunk home — a drunk who can't even walk — and then the wife says, "Thanks for bringing him home but where's his wheelchair?" It's not a bad joke but of course, it has nothing to do with Johnny Carson and left me wondering why Rich Little, who's been replicating Carson for more than a quarter-century, doesn't have material tailored for that impression. Next week, he could do that joke for his George Burns impression or his Jack Benny.
Oh, well. I suspect Mr. Little — who no longer plays his home town of Vegas very often — has earned himself a year or two of bookings from Republican-leaning organizations and auditoriums in more Conservative communities. He'll do the same impressions and in between, he'll talk about the honor of performing for The President and crowds will love him for it. You or I may not have thought he was funny last night but it was probably a great career booster.
One final thing which I must admit baffled me was a video — and here, I'll embed it and you can see if it baffles you, too. It's a David Letterman Top Ten List introduced by, of all people, Presidential Press Secretary Tony Snow. If someone got up in a major public forum and said that Bush was a stumbling idiot who had convinced a large part of America that he didn't know what he was doing, it would be Mr. Snow's job, if not his duty as a supporter, to rebut and denounce that view of his boss. Yet here he is, presenting a video to that effect, endorsing the importance of Dave Letterman, a celebrity who makes it quite clear on a nightly basis that he thinks Bush is a dangerous boob. The video includes no disclaimer. Dave does not say, "It's all in fun" or even "In spite of his gaffes, he's still my president." There are no such niceties...and one even senses a certain air of contempt in the fact that Letterman says so little, as if the clips speak for themselves.
So, uh, why is Tony Snow affording so much dignity to this video? Shouldn't his official position be that Letterman is all wrong about George W. Bush?
Frank DeCaro discusses the TV series, Maude, which has just come out on DVD. I remember liking that series when it first aired and not being able to generate much interest or enthusiasm when it reran. It quickly became one of those "I admire the skill but I don't care about these people" shows. But it's been quite a few years since I've seen one so I oughta give it another chance. Here's an Amazon link to order the DVD if you'd like to. And while you're at it, you might want to order Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, which was the same way for me but from the start.
Clifford Irving discusses the accuracy, or lack thereof, in the new movie, The Hoax, which is all about his infamous Howard Hughes swindle. And by the way: "Sixth wife?"
As is way too usual around these parts, we must report the passing of another fine artist from what some call "The Golden Age of Comics." Artie Saaf died yesterday. The cause of death was complications from the Parkinson's Disease that had plagued him for many years.
Saaf was another of those guys who was in comics practically from the start. Born in Brooklyn on December 4, 1921, he was self-taught when he began drawing comics in 1938, though he later attended Pratt Institute, the School of Arts and Mechanics and the Art Students League. He worked for almost every company publishing out of New York at first but his steadiest account was Fiction House, where he became the main artist for a time on Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, an assignment which somewhat typed him as a specialist in drawing pretty ladies. Fiction House kept him pretty busy but he also ghosted the Hap Hopper newspaper strip for a time and often turned up in the pages of Thrilling Comics, Startling Comics and other books from Better Publishing.
Around 1954, he began working less in comics and more in advertising, particularly in the storyboarding of TV commercials. Most of his comic book work for the next decade and a half involved helping out other artists when he had time. Some of the romance comic art that is usually credited to Vince Colletta in the early sixties was actually pencilled by Saaf, for instance. He did occasional jobs on his own for Western Publishing and Dell but around 1967, he seems to have made a conscious decision to focus more on comics. A flurry of Saaf art began appearing in Western's Gold Key comics like Twilight Zone and Boris Karloff Tales of Mystery, and he began drawing for DC.
For DC, he drew (pencils and inks) the Hunter's Hellcats feature in Our Fighting Forces, but mostly pencilled, mainly on ghost comics (Ghosts, The Witching Hour, The Unexpected) and several that featured those pretty ladies. He did many romance stories inked by Vince Colletta and was the main artist on Supergirl with a few jobs on Lois Lane, Angel and the Ape and even Teen Titans. Illness and age brought a close to his comic book work around 1978...a great loss for us because his art was lively and always interesting. No one drew the female figure in action better than Artie Saaf.
More information on him — though sadly, not enough — is available over at www.artsaaf.com, a site set up by his son, Steve. I had the pleasure of meeting Steve at this year's Wondercon in San Francisco. In the later years of his life, Art was unable to recall many details of his long, impressive career and Steve's been on a mission to research it. At the convention, he had a long conversation with Nick Cardy, who worked for many of the same companies and even inked Art Saaf work on occasion. Nick helped fill in some of the gaps but there are many more and if you have any information, I'm sure Steve would welcome hearing from you. His father was a good and important contributor to the field and that should be properly documented.
A number of folks have sent me info and discussion of this matter of baseball announcers being on a short delay. For the best explanation, we turn to the wise and all-knowing Paul Harris, whose talk fest is heard Monday through Friday on KMOX radio in St. Louis.
The Life was an original Broadway musical that ran for a little over a year beginning in 1997. Reviews were mixed and when it closed, it disappeared. There have been very few productions of it since. I saw it in New York and liked parts of it but not the whole, which was all about pimps and prostitution and the rise of one lady in that very old profession to Hollywood stardom. It struck me as a show filled with people I didn't care about and one that took a phony, sanitized look at a tawdry world.
Still, some of the songs were quite good. Cy Coleman wrote the music and the lyrics were by Ira Gasman. Our clip today is a promotional video that was made of the show's hooker chorus singing "My Body," which was supposed to be some sort of whores' anthem. It's a perfectly fine theatre number but I think it also demonstrates what was wrong with the show.
You may remember that last year around this time, Stephen Colbert caused something of a ruckus with his performance at the White House Correspondents Dinner. I meant to alert you but forgot that this year's was this evening, with Rich Little performing what everyone expected (correctly, it would seem) would be less controversial material.
I haven't watched it yet. I have my TiVo set up to record a rebroadcast in a few hours on C-Span. You can find the schedule and the video can also be watched online at the C-Span website, which doesn't work for me insofar as video clips are concerned but may for you. I imagine the clip will show up on YouTube or Google Video in the next day or so. If this report is correct though, you may not want to take the time to watch. Bush, they say, made no attempt at humor, apparently out of respect for the Virginia Tech shootings. Rich Little, they say, didn't do so well. I'll let you know if I disagree.
I believe Hollywood is heading, much in the manner of a runaway train, towards a big, crippling strike over how residuals will be paid and revenue streams divided for the new marketplace of DVD, digital delivery, Internet podcasts, etc. There are many possible scenarios over when the strike could come...and even which labor organization(s) will lead the way, though the smart money is on the Writers Guild with the Screen Actors Guild tagging along if it can get its leadership squabbles in check. In any case, the issue is out there and it seems unlikely that it can be resolved by the producers being reasonable.
Strikes have not been settled or prevented through sheer reasonableness for a long time in this town. Some of the labor actions of the fifties and sixties were but that was before the main entertainment companies were international conglomerates. The legendary Lew Wasserman, the super-agent who used to run MCA and Universal, ended or headed off several strikes by getting on the phone to the heads of MGM, Disney, Warner Brothers, Paramount and others and working out a deal. But there is no more Lew Wasserman, nor do Time-Warner, Sony, the current Disney and the rest operate on that kind of personal level nowadays.
I hope I'm wrong but the only way I can imagine there not being a major conflagration is if the Writers Guild and S.A.G. both experience internal collapses and their memberships decide not to fight for a fair share in these new revenues. That doesn't seem likely. In fact, if it does happen, we will probably see all-out war, anyway. We'll just see the members of those unions firing at one another, rather than at Management.
The other day, a group of studio and network heads announced a proposal that their side and the unions jointly fund — and I quote — "a showbiz version of the report from the Iraq Study Group" to study and propose new formulas. I suspect this will be about as effective as the real report from the Iraq Study Group and I wonder why they would liken their idea to that. Here are some details on the proposed report.
Ordinarily, I'm wary of the "everything you know is wrong" article. Almost any time anything happens in our world and a conventional, obvious wisdom emerges, you're never more than two clicks away from an article on the Internet telling you why the opposite is true. If some candidate makes a horrific gaffe and plunges in the polls, someone will pen a piece that will explain that while this may look bad for that candidate, it is actually a bit of brilliant strategizing that has guaranteed his/her election in a landslide. I'm all for examining all possibilities but most of these articles seem forced and contrived and usually intended as attention-getting, separate-yourself-from-the-herd exercises.
That said, it is worth considering this article by Dahlia Lithwick, whose premise is that Alberto Gonzales did a great job with his testimony the other day.
Boy, you people are fast. I just posted the question in the previous item and here comes Dave Sikula with the answer, which we can all find in this article. Basically, it's that stations all over the country have put in delays on live broadcasts for fear of F.C.C. fines if a naughty word gets on the air. Seems silly to me. Vin Scully has been broadcasting Dodgers games since 1950. How many obscenities have snuck in during that time?
My impression is that when there is outrage over naughty words or content on TV or radio, it's either over prepared content or cases like the Janet Jackson breast incident where someone felt the broadcasters could and should have pre-screened what was going to happen. Almost every week it seems, some forbidden word slips onto a news program or other live show somewhere and if it's clearly an accident, even the people who go way out of their way to get outraged about obscenity on TV or radio don't get outraged. I'm more offended by the delay than I would be about anything it could prevent.
Speaking of "out of sync," I have a question which will probably have to be answered by a baseball fan in Los Angeles.
When I was a kid and occasionally following the L.A. Dodgers, one of the big appeals was Vin Scully, who called the play-by-play. He's still the most important person in the stadium whenever that team plays. My father, who followed baseball more than I did, wouldn't dream of watching a game without Scully in his ear. Whenever we went to a game, he took along a transistor radio so he could listen to Vinnie describe what we were seeing...and even if he hadn't brought the radio along, so many other Dodger fans did that you could often hear Scully throughout the bleachers.
Even watching the Dodgers on TV, he had to have Vin Scully. For a time, Scully's co-anchor was a guy named Jerry Doggett, who was probably a decent-enough sportscaster but he wasn't the Ol' Redhead. Scully and Doggett would switch off. One would call a few innings on the TV broadcast while the other did the radio narration, then they'd swap. Whenever Scully was on the radio, my father would mute the sound on the television and haul out his radio so he could hear Vin.
The other day, I was discussing this with a friend who, unlike me, follows the Dodgers these days. She said that you can't do this now. According to her, they have the radio transmission of Vin Scully on a five second delay. So if you listen to him, he's not describing what you're seeing live or on your TV screen. He's a few seconds behind and it doesn't work.
I guess this is a multi-part question, then. Is this true? And if so, is it being done intentionally to discourage people from listening to Vin Scully on the radio while they watch the game at the stadium or on TV? I can't imagine why Vin Scully would need to be broadcast on a delay, nor can I fathom why anyone would care if you listened to him this way. Can anyone clear this up for me?
Congressguy Barney Frank (D-Mass.) was the chief sponsor of the Executive Compensation Act, which passed in the House yesterday by a vote of 269 to 134. The bill gives shareholders of public companies the right to cast an advisory ballot on the compensation awarded to the company's executives. Here, in case you're interested, are the details.
Before it passed, there was a last minute attempt by some Republicans to insert a provision that Frank felt was ill-timed. Here we see him objecting to it. It's about four minutes, it's rather entertaining, and it's a bit out of sync. For some reason, most of the clips on YouTube of Barney Frank have him speaking out of sync. This is apparently a side effect of being gay.
Take the old Hanna-Barbera Super Friends cartoon show. Recast with Democrats as the super-heroes and Republicans as the super-villains and what do you have? You have The Challenge of the Super-Duper Friends.
Thanks for sharing the e-mail from Dick DeBartolo. It reminded me of the 60 Minutes feature on Mad that aired many years ago. At that time, the parent company that owned Mad (I forget who it was) had a policy that required all senior management to get an annual physical. Supposedly, Gaines hated going to the doctor, so he sent a much younger staffer as a body double. They also related the story of Gaines flying to some remote place (Guam, perhaps?) along with several senior staff members to personally entreat their one subscriber there to renew his subscription. I haven't picked up Mad in years, maybe I should, for old time's sake...
It wasn't Guam. It was Haiti. And Gaines didn't fly there to get the one subscriber to renew. He'd decided to take the entire staff on a vacation — it was the first of the legendary Mad trips — and out of curiosity, he had someone look and see if Mad had any subscribers there. When it turned out they had one and his subscription had just expired, Gaines decided to pay the guy a visit. He loaded his entourage in five jeeps, drove over to the address and presented the fellow with a renewal card.
The funniest part of the story is probably that in spite of that, the reader didn't want to renew. But he agreed to accept a free subscription.
Gaines was a colorful guy. I think though that Mad has actually survived the loss of him. In my opinion as a Mad completist, the magazine is now better than it's been in a long time. It's gone up and down over the years but I think it's clearly on an "up" and you oughta pick up a copy, not for old time's sake — you won't recognize a lot of the credits — but because it's a pretty funny publication.
The Silent Movie Theatre over on Fairfax was an important part of my childhood. As I explained here, I spent many a Friday evening in its hard seats watching Laurel and Hardy or Chaplin or Douglas Fairbanks or some other star of legendary status, and I developed a casual friendship with the man who ran the place.
Recently, I was interviewed for a forthcoming documentary on the Silent Movie Theatre. A gentleman named Iain Kennedy just sent me the following brief summary of his project...
The documentary will look at the history of the theater through the personal recollections of those people who have worked there or who went there as members of the audience. Particular focus will be given to the owners of theater who made it an L.A. landmark and kept silent films running for audiences to re-discover and enjoy. We're very interested in hearing from people who went to the theater during the John and Dorothy Hampton "era" (approximately 1942 to 1979) and Lawrence Austin's tenure (1991 to 1997), as well as more recent years (Charlie Lustman's revival of the theater, 1999-2006).
If you are such a person, drop me a note and I'll forward it to Iain.
Ah, what has Mark found for us this morning on YouTube? Mark has found the title number of one of his favorite musicals, On the Twentieth Century, a show which had book and lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green, and music by Cy Coleman. The show opened in early 1978 and the original cast was toplined by John Cullum, Madeline Kahn, Imogene Coca, and Kevin Kline. Ms. Kahn left after just a few months, allegedly due to illness and with lots of other reasons rumored. Many years later when I worked with Ms. Coca, I asked her about the reason for Kahn's sudden departure and she just shook her head and said, "Poor girl...so talented and so many problems." Make of that what you will.
This number is from that year's Tony Awards broadcast in May, by which time Madeline Kahn was long gone and Judy Kaye, who you'll see in the clip, was in her place and being hailed as a major find. The show — briefly — is about a train ride from Chicago to New York, during which many things happen but most of them center around the attempts of an unscrupulous producer (the part played by Cullum) to woo back his greatest discovery, Lily Garland, who has gone on to stardom since she left him. Lily Garland is the role originated by Ms. Kahn and handed off to Ms. Kaye. And of course, you'll see Coca and Kline in there, as well. Apparently, you weren't allowed to be in this show unless your last name started with a "K" sound.
Here's that number, which includes a lot of lyrics that somehow didn't make it onto the cast album...
Dahlia Lithwick on today's testimony by Alberto Gonzales. I think we're reaching the stage where the only thing keeping this guy in his job is his seeming ability to defy the law of inertia. It's like, "Yeah, he should quit. But he should have quit a month ago and he's still there. So maybe 'should quit' doesn't apply to him."
Dick DeBartolo, who's been writing funny stuff for Mad Magazine for centuries, worked for almost as long at the Goodson-Todman game show factory. He sends in the following...
I wrote The Match Game, but also worked on To Tell The Truth. One week, I got Gaines on as a central subject. (Gaines as in William M. Gaines, for those who might not know.) I'll never forget Bill's joy when it was Kitty Carlisle's turn to pick who she thought was the real publisher of Mad Magazine. She said it obviously wasn't #3 (Gaines.) When the host (can't remember if it was Garry or Joe G.) said "why not?" Kitty said: "Well, the publisher of Mad, a very successful magazine, must be an executive and...and...well, just look at #3. It can't be him!"
Gaines was thrilled not to look like an executive. God bless him. And Kitty, too. I hope they meet up there.
If they do, she'll probably think, "What would the guy who published Tales from the Crypt be doing up here?" But it's a nice thought.
newsfromme, your full service weblog, is about to do some of you a big favor. You may recall a recent post here where I discussed the new Hostess Cupcakes that come in 100 calorie packets. Lately, I've been trying almost every 100 calorie item I've spotted in my local markets. These come in handy for me. Since my Gastric Bypass Surgery, I don't have to worry much about my weight but I have to eat in certain rhythms. It usually comes down to two or three small meals a day and three or four smaller ones. The 100 calorie packets are usually perfect for the latter, not so much because of their calorie count but their size.
I've sampled the Chips Ahoy, Oreo, Lorna Doone, Planter's Peanut Cookies, Cheese Nips and Ritz Mix packets, all from Nabisco. The Ritz Mix, I found nearly inedible and since I bought a box of six packets, I forced the other five on company. The Oreos bothered me because they weren't Oreos. It was as if the Nabisco scientists said to the boss, "No way can we configure Oreos for 100 calorie packages," and the boss said, "I don't care...I want 100 calorie packets of something I can say are Oreos." So they came up with these air-filled chocolate wafers that they claim are Oreos but which have nothing to do with real Oreos. They're probably decent cookies but who can swallow a lie like that?
The other Nabisco products were okay. So were the 100 calorie packets of Cheetos that come from that company, and I've also tried 100 calorie Hershey dark chocolate bars, 100 calorie Thomas' English Muffins, 100 calorie Orville Redenbacher microwave popcorn and the aforementioned 100 calorie Hostess Cupcakes. They were all decent in that they were either tasty food or they reminded me of tasty food. But I'm here to tell you about my favorites, and some of you will thank me for this.
The Trader Joe's chain has gotten into the 100 calorie sweepstakes with several items, two of which I like a lot. One is their cheese crackers, which are shaped like little toucans. The other is their oatmeal chocolate chip cookies, which are shaped like oatmeal chocolate chip cookies. They taste pretty good, you get more product in each packet than you might expect, and the ingredients do not include too many unpronounceable chemical names.
Give 'em a try...and while you're there, you might want to sample some of Trader Joe's other 100 calorie products, just in case you like the cinnamon graham cracker toucans more than I did. They were all right but I liked the others better. The stores also have some multigrain cracker toucans that I didn't test. In my experience, Trader Joe's products are very hit and miss, and when I find a good one, I sometimes opt to not press my luck.
Craig Yoe has up some nice photos of Johnny Hart and Brant Parker, along with the first week of The Wizard of Id. Boy, that was a funny strip during its best years.
Another post about the new NBC series, Thank God You're Here. As I mentioned, last Saturday night I was with a group of people who excel at improv comedy and have studied it with the best teachers and co-improvisers in the world. There, the buzz on the new show was uniformly negative to the point of disgust. This article by Dan Kois sounds like a transcribed summary of those complaints.
I agree with everything in the article but I will add the following, not so much in defense of the show as explanation. Some of the press releases claim the show is "improv" but the producers themselves don't seem to be claiming that, and the folks using that term don't seem to mean "improv" in the classic tradition of Second City, Viola Spolin, The Groundlings, Del Close, Nichols and May, etc. In classic improv, the goal is to create a scene that is natural and organic and, if possible, funny. On Thank God, the goal seems to be to create an instant blooper reel where one player on stage (and only one) is in trouble and we can laugh at his predicament and perhaps applaud how he gets out of it.
There are some theater games in the classic tradition that revolve around one person not knowing who he is or what the scene is about...but even in those, as played at Second City, no one has any advance prep. So it's a challenge for the one naïve performer to guess what has been predetermined but it's also a challenge for the others in the scene to hint and convey that information for him. Everyone is improvising. The producers of Thank God seem to have decided that it's more fun to stack the deck against the one player. The improv vets who are criticizing the show know from past experience that the "real thing" would be more entertaining.
Jim Brochu is performing his one man show in Houston. This is the one I raved about here in which he channels/recreates Zero Mostel, right before your eyes. It's called Zero Hour and if you're anywhere near the Stages Repertory Theatre, get a ticket right away.
Bob Bergen is performing his one man show in Hollywood. This is the one I haven't seen yet but I know how good Bob is so I'm going to go and you should, too. It's called Not Just Another Pretty Voice and it's the story of — to use the oft-quoted line about Bob — a nice Jewish boy who grew up to be the voice of Porky Pig. It's at the Stella Adler Theatre every Wednesday through May beginning next Wednesday.
The Totally Looped show, which I've said good things about here in the past, is back in a new home...also in Hollywood. Beginning Saturday evening, April 28, they'll be appearing the last Saturday of every month at the iO West Comedy Theater, which is just a couple blocks from where Bergen's doing his show. They are great and well worth your attendance.
Finally: Recently here, I raved about the Spolin Players, a group that does genuine, 100% improv comedy in a classic tradition. Their next performance will be on Saturday, May 5 at the Westsideeclectic, which is situated on the 3rd Street Promenade in Santa Monica. I'm going to try to get to this one, too.
The musical Fiddler on the Roof opened on Broadway on September 22, 1964. Since then, that show and that Fiddler have never stopped playing. It is always being produced somewhere. There are actors who have literally made their livings for decades by going from one production of Fiddler to another, playing whichever role they were then the right age for.
The show was a hit all over the world and the following anecdote has appeared in almost every article ever written about its popularity. The anecdote tells of how the show opened in Japan, translated into the language there and featuring a local cast. It was a big hit and someone involved in that production went to the folks who'd originated the show and asked, "Was this really a hit in America?"
The American producers were puzzled. "Of course," they replied. "Why wouldn't it be?"
The Tokyo producer responded, "Well, it's so Japanese."
A Japanese Fiddler on the Roof? What could that have been like?
GSN will salute the life of Kitty Carlisle Hart with two reruns of To Tell the Truth that will air late Sunday night, April 22. More correctly, they're on Monday morning — at 3 AM and 3:30 AM East Coast time. I'll get them here on the West Coast at Midnight and 12:30 AM via my satellite dish.
The first is the episode from March 5, 1957 which featured her first appearance as a panelist on that show. One of the segments involved the panel guessing which of three men was the real Alan Freed. That's the disc jockey Alan Freed, who was famous for bringing rock 'n' roll to the masses, as immortalized in the movie, American Hot Wax.
The other episode they're going to air is the one I mentioned in the previous item and it's from 1973, with her son Christopher in disguise. I don't know if they got the idea from what I posted here — probably not — but either way, I'm glad they're running that one.
A classy lady, Kitty Carlisle Hart, is dead at the age of 96. She did a lot of fine movies but when you're in A Night at the Opera with the Marx Brothers (as she was), it's understandable that people forget all the others.
She was Kitty Carlisle then. She became Kitty Carlisle Hart when she married playwright-director Moss Hart and became his partner in every sense, even to the extent of aiding him when he directed shows like My Fair Lady. After his death, she became the guardian of his legacy, making sure that the plays and his autobiography, Act One, were kept available and treated with the proper respect.
Many people probably know her best from the game show, To Tell the Truth, where she was a longtime panelist. She had a refreshing honesty and seemed to really enjoy what she did. If anyone from GSN (aka The Game Show Network) is reading this and thinking of running some episodes as a tribute, there was one — it was on the daytime version during, I believe, the Garry Moore era — where the impostors were all under heavy make-up. When they unmasked at the end, the first one turned out to be the son of her fellow panelist, Joe Garagiola. Kitty chided him lovingly for not recognizing his own son. Then the next panelist turned out to be her son, Christopher, and she practically fell off her chair. If GSN can dig that one out of the vaults, I think people would love to see her wonderful reaction.
The last few years, despite being in her nineties, she performed occasionally in both New York and L.A. with a one-woman show where she sang songs and told anecdotes about her incredible life. Somehow, maddeningly, I never got the chance to see her, nor was I able to accept an invite to go have a meal with her in Manhattan. We did exchange notes once. She made a brief appearance in Woody Allen's Radio Days and I wrote her a note to let her know that at the Writers Guild screening, a roar of recognition and applause had greeted her appearance on the screen. She wrote back a cordial letter that said something like, "I would rather be applauded by a roomful of writers than all the other people on the planet." Indeed.
Here's a link to one of several obits on the 'net today.
Among the dozen-or-so political websites I hit every day are those in Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo empire. He has several and he's expanding not only in the number of sites but in what they do. Recently, he has begun producing little online webcast segments such as the one I thought you might like to watch.
It runs seven minutes and it's in two parts, both taped the other day when John Kerry went in to appear on The Colbert Report and Marshall and his cameraman got to ride along. The first part, recorded in the back of the limousine, is a fairly unremarkable interview with the senator about his new book on the environment. The most interesting thing about it is a "blogger" getting this kind of access to someone like Kerry. The interview is, of course, entirely benevolent...but I like the potential. Bloggers roaming about with video cameras and the ability to post their reports to the Internet could do a lot to make up for "real" journalists who don't ask hard questions.
The second part is backstage at The Colbert Report as Stephen C. greets Kerry and briefs him on how the interview will go. If you watch Mr. Colbert, you may be fascinated by what he tells his guest, which I'm guessing is pretty much what he tells all of them.
The New Yorker has posted online a number of articles that appeared in that publication and discussed the works of Kurt Vonnegut. Here's John Updike on Vonnegut, James Atlas on Vonnegut, and Susan Lardner on Vonnegut.
The Mann National Theater in Westwood Village is closing this week. It opened March 27, 1970 and one of the first movies it offered — and the first I saw there — was the Mike Nichols movie of Catch 22. A bunch of my friends went to a matinee and I would describe our reaction to the movie as mixed, leaning towards the negative. But there was one scene we liked a lot. It was the one early in the film with Paula Prentiss removing her clothing. We all agreed that was filmmaking at its finest, and that we had to stay for enough of the next showing to see it again.
So we stayed...and after our favorite scene was over, we all got up to leave. So did about eighty other males in the theater, all of whom had remained in their seats after the previous showing for the same reason. If Mike Nichols had had the presence of mind to make that scene last ninety minutes, I think we'd all still be there.
I feel a certain sense of personal loss hearing that the National is closing. I spent a lot of my life back then in Westwood Village and watched them build the place. Westwood was a great "date" community back then with plenty of restaurants, movie theaters and stores to browse. Often, we'd dine at the Hamburger Hamlet and then walk over to the National. After the movie, it was one block to Wil Wright's Ice Cream Parlor or two to a shop called Golden Star that served great made-on-the-premises sorbets and ices. Those were, as we nostalgists call them, the days.
It's probably not surprising though that the National's closing. At 1,100 seats, it was just too big and probably too unprofitable to occupy so large a plot of prime, expensive real estate. The last time I was in it was for the world premiere of Sin City two years ago. It didn't dawn on me then that its management was considering closing the theater but now that it's been announced, I'm thinking, "Oh, yeah...it did seem a bit shabby." It was probably a matter of either shutting down or spending a few million to refurbish and maybe carve the National into a bunch of smaller theaters.
It's not old enough to mourn as one of those great old movie palaces that are works of art, themselves. Truth to tell, the National always struck me as an ugly, uncomfortable house in which to see a movie. But I did have many a great evening that included a visit there...and I'm sorry to see a reminder of those evenings going away.
Since the lawyers have been slow at getting the Garfield cartoons removed from YouTube, I can link to another one I wrote. This is called "Mistakes Will Happen" and if you're ever writing a cartoon show and you want to get the animators pissed at you, just decide it would be fun to do a cartoon that's intentionally full of errors.
Actually, I just made a mistake in the previous sentence. I don't know how the animators felt about this one since they were in Taiwan. But the people at the American studio who had to concern themselves with budgetary matters had a lot of problems, and I believe the line producer had to keep going back and having the animation crew insert mistakes they'd accidentally left out. People got very confused over which mistakes were mistakes and which mistakes were supposed to be there and when he said, "This is wrong," it sometimes meant "this is right," which of course meant it was wrong but not in the way it was supposed to be wrong. I kinda like it when the production process gets to be as silly as the cartoons.
In addition to the usual voice people (Lorenzo Music, Gregg Berger and Thom Huge), this one features a line by Garfield's creator, Jim Davis. He does the voice on the police radio. I also have a line. That's me saying, "Garfield cartoon, take two." Hope you enjoy what you're about to see as soon as you click. If not, it was a mistake to post this.
Someone who signs himself "JonesR" writes to ask...
Do you know any history of the collaboration of Parker and Hart (I'm checking the obit as I write this). Because I was always curious as to, well, at least, who wrote and who drew, and if they may have both at times done either.
I figured that Hart did the character designs, then pretty much let Parker run with it. Parker may have had a history of providing gags to B.C. Or Hart may have given gags to Wizard of Id in the same sense that the Mort Walker crew might work out the gags on three different strips running, or the way some of the Simon/Kirby work seemed to leave the casual reader with a sense of not really being quite sure who may have been doing what.
My understanding is that Parker did no writing. Hart had a team of helpers — friends, assistants, gag writers, whatever you want to call them. Hart acted as Head Writer for a squadron that wrote both strips. The gags for Wizard of Id were sent to Parker and it was his job to get them drawn, which he did with increasing help over the years. The gags for B.C. were drawn by Hart with a little assistance.
Initially, the characters for Wizard were designed by Hart, Parker and a few others all sitting around a hotel room with ample drawing paper and liquor. Thereafter, sketches were exchanged by mail, fax or occasionally in person.
As anyone who's worked in a collaborative situation will tell you, there are times when contributions blur and even the guys who did the work aren't sure who contributed what. In gag-writing, it's not at all uncommon for Mutt to come up with a joke and Jeff to rephrase it and both guys to think they wrote it. I'll bet a lot of the jokes in both strips fall into that category.
The Hogan's Alley site has up a good interview with Hart in which he talks about his work, including much about the team that aided him with the writing. This chat is about thirteen years old and my understanding is that some of the aides changed in that time, plus Parker handed off more and more of the drawing duties on The Wizard of Id to others. But the modus operandi remained pretty much the same.
You might want to take a look at this extensive Washington Postpoll about what the people of this nation (or at least the ones polled) think about Bush and Congress and the war and all the major issues that concern most people and don't involve American Idol. The numbers aren't so good for Bush or Congress, but it's the Congressional numbers that have me a bit puzzled. I think there's a key question that isn't being asked here.
If someone says that they disapprove of the way Democrats in Congress are doing their job with regard to Iraq, what does that mean? Does it mean they think the Democrats have been too aggressive in stopping the war or not aggressive enough? That's a big difference and it's the most important issue facing Congress (and maybe the country) today. But for some reason, those who feel the Democrats in Congress should do more in this regard are being lumped in with those who feel they should do less. I'm guessing, based on the other answers, that most of the disapproval is because they aren't doing more...but that's just a guess. It would be nice if the pollsters broke it down for us.
Last Friday, I was a guest on the Time Travel radio show. Today, you can download an MP3 file of it (it's inside a ZIP file for some reason) from this page. Beware if you go there to get it. The site plays creepy music.
This runs two and a half minutes and may be of interest only to folks who live in or around Los Angeles.
One of the last surviving "chains" of the old style coffee shop is Du-Par's. There are three of them left, down from a one-time peak of, I believe, eight or so around the Southland. The original one was in the famed Farmers Market at Third and Fairfax in L.A., and that one's still there, having recently reopened after a two year closure for remodelling. From the outside, it doesn't look all that different. (An observation: You can sometimes spot a long time Angeleno when they refer to the place as "Du-Par's Farmhouse." But it hasn't had that name since the early sixties.)
We used to say that at a Du-Par's, you could get excellent breakfasts, okay lunches, pretty awful dinners and, for dessert, some of the best pies in town. The pies were — and I guess still are — baked right on the premises. I have to guess here because even though I live within walking distance of one, I haven't been to a Du-Par's in years; not since the chain was taken over by new owners. Interestingly, the new proprietors are of the family that used to operate two other great L.A. coffee shop chains — Tiny Naylor's and Biff's. I'll have to get to a Du-Par's soon and report back on if the breakfasts are still great and the dinners are still poor.
Someone — I have no idea who — put together this little montage of stills from Du-Par's history. I believe most of the images are from the Farmers Market location. It's our thing for you to click on for today.
We said back here that the Critierion company would soon be announcing a DVD release of the Billy Wilder film, Ace in the Hole (aka The Big Carnival). Well, it's been announced. No release date yet but we're hearing June or July.
A week after the death of Johnny Hart — who wrote and drew B.C. and wrote The Wizard of Id — we have word of the death of Brant Parker, who drew the latter. Parker was 86 and had been ailing for several years. He stopped drawing The Wizard of Id completely in 1997 but the strip had featured much work by assistants — mainly his son Jeff — for years before that. Jeff is expected to carry it on. Brant was also involved for a time with the newspaper strips, Crock, Goosemeyer and Out of Bounds.
I'm afraid I know very little about Mr. Parker beyond what you can get from obits like this one. But everything I said about Johnny Hart being funny applied to The Wizard of Id, a strip that was very popular in this country and wildly so in Australia. I used to have a friend down there who'd send me the reprint books that they put out in that country — huge, wonderful volumes that caused you to laugh out loud every page or two. I wish we had collections like that of the strip here.
On your 2:21 pm posting: you're painting with a terribly broad brush, and it follows jarringly on the heels of the Colbert posting, in particular this of Colbert's: "Cynicism masquerades as wisdom, but it is the farthest thing from it. Because cynics don't learn anything. Because cynicism is a self-imposed blindness, a rejection of the world because we are afraid it will hurt us or disappoint us."
I think you're expressing a cynicism (that isn't typical of you, from what else I've read) that all political debate is just opportunism, and that it
is inappropriate to take the bloodiest school shooting in history and use it to talk about those elements of gun policy that someone sincerely believes contributed to it. I disagree, presuming that we're talking about people arguing in good faith. I can certainly understand you not wanting to invite a swarm of gun control emails, and perhaps your sarcastic both-sides-be-damned approach seemed like a way of avoiding that.
Nevertheless, "referring" to both sides at once, by abstracting away any actual position and turning to phrases like "whatever you believe," comes across as spitting on the concept of having a position, or believing that it matters. You also seem to show contempt for the idea that one side might actually be right, even though both sides continue to behave in the "same" manner by persisting in arguing for their side.
The point of the discussion that I'm sure is playing out on blogs and on TV is not to "honor the memory" of those who died. Their survivors will not be spending the next several days hitting refresh on their RSS readers to follow the discussion, or watching cable news. If I strongly believe that implementing my position would save 32 more lives in another event, the time to argue for it is now, not later, and I think that can be done without disrespecting the dead.
Finally, that bit about "you may even be glad all those people were shot": that's another thing that's worse, not better, from naming no names, or sides of the issue. Maybe you've been watching cable news all day, and someone you've seen deserves it, but from out here, it's just a terrible accusation looking for a target.
I think you're reading a lot into my remarks that I didn't say and don't believe, starting with any criticism of having a position or believing that it matters. Obviously, the deadliest shooting spree in our nation's history matters. How could anyone think it didn't matter? Having a position therefore matters.
You disagree with me "presuming that we're talking about people arguing in good faith." There's the problem right there. The kind of thing I was talking about — pouncing on the issue to further one's view of gun control, particularly under the guise of honoring the dead — does not strike me as arguing in good faith. It strikes me as opportunism...exploiting the tragedy while it's hot, while people can still be manipulated by their emotions. If there is a reasoned argument to be made here, it will be valid when there aren't fresh bodies to use as selling points. And the time to make it is all the time...because this problem will always be with us until we do something about it. Which is not going to happen.
I wasn't really saying anything beyond that but since you've got me going here, I will: I don't think the solution is anywhere in all the Internet postings I read this afternoon in the immediate aftermath of the shootings. They all fell into the predictable, extreme positions of "we need less guns" versus "we need more guns." As long as the debate ping-pongs between those positions and those people control the issue, nothing will change.
I don't believe that in every issue, both sides are always wrong. Often, one side is right. In the quite-serious matter of the Iraq War, one side sure seems to me to be right and getting righter. But in this particular matter — the ongoing, constant issue of guns in America — I think neither side is right; not in the sense of doing anything to lessen the chance of more incidents like today's. They've effectively paralyzed this issue to the point where each new bloody massacre is an occasion for a lot of yelling and posturing and donation-collecting, much of it justified in the memory of the victims...but no meaningful changes.
Those would have to come from the middle...but the middle doesn't have a voice in this discussion. It never has, and as each mass murder further empowers the extremes, the chance of that voice ever being heard goes increasingly from slim towards none. Whenever the next "deadliest shooting spree in our nation's history" occurs, it will occur under the exact same set of gun laws we have today.
I know that sounds like cynicism. If you'd like to convince me it's not realistic, then tell me what changed after the last "deadliest shooting spree in our nation's history." Or the one before.
This runs a little under three minutes and it asks the musical question, "How many times can a politician avoid answering the same question?"
The politician is Michael Howard, who at the time of this interrogation was the Home Secretary in Great Britain. There was a controversy in 1997 when a report was about to come out about prison conditions and in particular, a series of escapes. Derek Lewis, who was in charge of the prison system, said that Howard had threatened to overrule him on a controversial decision. This would have been quite improper.
In the following clip, newsman Jeremy Paxman keeps repeating a question that Howard pretends to answer and doesn't. I wish more American journalists would do this but I'm afraid that if they did, no one who needs to be interviewed would ever consent to it. Paxman doesn't get an answer but apparently the interview so embarrassed Howard and created pressure on him that a few days later, he issued a statement denying that he'd issued the threat. He claimed he hadn't answered it on Paxman's show because he didn't recall and needed to check his records.
In any case, you probably won't care about the issue at hand but you might recognize the techniques of Answer Avoidance...
Fred Kaplan explains John McCain's stance on the Iraq War. It pretty much comes down to backing the George W. Bush plan in order to get the Republican nomination and then — in the unlikely event that he does — retreating from that position so that he has a shot at winning the election. I can't think of any politician who's ever disappointed me more.
At least 31 people are dead and many more have been wounded on a Virginia college campus when a guy with a gun went on a shooting spree.
I think we can best honor the memory of the victims by using the tragedy to lobby hard for our particular views on Gun Control. Whatever you believe, just insist that this proves you're right. Hey, if you can use it to swing a little public sentiment in your direction, you may even be glad all those people were shot.
I mentioned recently here that my one-time love of Woody Woodpecker cartoons flowed from the drawing lessons that the character's "boss," Walter Lantz, used to give on his cartoon show. Let me expand on that and mention a book that I suspect figured big into the lives of many folks my age who got into animation or drawing. Around 1958 (though possibly before), the Whitman Publishing Company brought out Walter Lantz Easy Way to Draw, a "how to" cartooning book written clearly and properly for a young audience.
I doubt Mr. Lantz (seen above in the photo at right) had much to do with its contents. The book is credited to Frank McSavage and Norm McGary, two artists who worked a lot for Western Printing and Lithography, publishers of Whitman books and tons of coloring books, games and puzzle books featuring Woody and the rest of the Lantz menagerie. Western also created and printed the Lantz-licensed comic books published at the time by Dell...and this was such a lucrative relationship for Lantz that he seems to have surrendered a lot of control of his properties to Western. The designs of his characters were constantly changing on screen and when Western standardized them for their books and magazines, Lantz recognized that those artists (McSavage, especially) knew what they were doing and adjusted his films and the other merchandise to match. He also employed McSavage and McGary directly from time to time.
Easy Way to Draw is a great book and my copy, which I must have gotten soon after it came out, moved me to sit for hours and attempt to replicate the drawings it featured. There was a concise, understandable explanation of the principles of animation along with step-by-step diagrams on how to draw Woody and his pals. Lantz had all these characters like Homer Pigeon that I didn't really know that well...and as an avid reader of Walter Lantz comic books and watcher of Walter Lantz TV shows, if I didn't know them, no one did. But I learned to draw them about as well as a kid my age could have learned to draw them and I'm sure it made me like them more. One day in school — I don't remember exactly why — I did a big drawing of Homer Pigeon on the blackboard. All of the kids in class were impressed, even though none of them knew who it was, either. Alas, these skills had limited value. When I got a little older, I learned you couldn't attract girls by showing them how you could draw Wally Walrus.
I'd wager big that I'm not the only person in my age bracket who was encouraged in a career towards drawing and/or animation by this book. It appears to have been kept in print for some time even if that meant dropping chapters and slapping a more "modern" cover on it, which they did. Still, you don't see a lot of copies around because it encouraged its owners to draw right in the book or cut out certain pages. So either you loved the book enough to despoil your copy or you loved it enough to keep it in pristine condition and never want to part with it. I'm in the latter category. I wonder if anyone's done a "how to draw cartoons" DVD or computer program that is now having the same impact on the nine-year-old Future Cartoonists of America.
Over on Salon — where you may have to watch a brief ad to get in — Glenn Greenwald has a weblog post that I suspect rolls out a new set of "talking points" against the Iraq War. It's that the war is becoming overwhelmingly unpopular among Americans (that part's true) and that the folks lobbying for The Surge and "staying the course" are really only interested in keeping it going over there so they don't have to admit how much of a disaster their plan has been. I think Greenwald's focusing too much on the pundits supporting the war and not enough on the guy in the Oval Office who actually keeps us there (i.e., The Decider). But I think there's something to the view that it's more about not being wrong than it's ever been about being right.
Retired General John J. Sheehan explains why he joined the long list of military men who've declined the post of serving as Bush's War Czar. It is perhaps worth keeping in mind that this is not someone who can be dismissed as a know-nothing, washed-up, left-wing looney. This is a guy that the White House thought knew enough about the military to be in charge of overseeing it near the highest levels. And he thinks the Bush administration is going about things all wrong.
And obviously, one of the guys who went to University High School in the seventies who could have starred in Dumb and Dumber was me. In the previous posting, I confused Jeff Daniels (who was in that movie) with Jeff Bridges (who wasn't).
Thanks to all of you who wrote in to point out my error. All nine thousand of you.
Actually, these are eBay auctions that have already closed but I didn't bid and you wouldn't have, either. Someone was selling yearbooks from my era at Emerson Junior High School and University High here in Los Angeles. Here's part of the listing for the 1964 Emerson yearbook...
I am selling a 1964 Emerson Junior High of Los Angeles, California Yearbook featuring singer Bonnie Raitt, Singer and actor David Cassidy, Director and writer, John Landis, Jayne-Marie Mansfield, daughter of Jayne Mansfield and Mark Evanier, tv writer. See them when they were in Junior High School!
You learn the darnedest things on eBay. I never knew I went to junior high school with Jayne Mansfield's daughter. (I did know about the others. Bonnie Raitt once expressed amazement that I knew who her father was. By the way, the first time I read the above, I thought it was saying that I was the father of Jayne Mansfield's kid.) Here's part of the listing for the 1967 Uni Hi yearbook...
I am selling a 1967 University High School Yearbook from Los Angeles, California. It features the cool actor Jeff Bridges on three pages (two pictoral and one printed name) as shown on the photograph of the index page. He is in two pictures from the high school play, Romanoff and Juliet, he has one school portrait photo and there is a mention of his name on the student council page.
And I never knew Jeff Bridges went to my high school. What's more, I recall seeing that play and also a few unpleasant arguments in the student council meetings. I don't remember Bridges specifically but I knew a lot of guys at Uni who could have starred in Dumb and Dumber. As well as a few teachers.
This is a P.S. to my earlier post about The Spolin Players and about the "Yes, and..." rule of improv. Anna Mathias, who was one of the performers who was so brilliant not just in the show last evening but in everything she's done, wrote to remind me that Stephen Colbert discussed the rule in a commencement address he gave last year. Here's a link to the entire speech but here are the relevant sections...
But you seem nice enough, so I'll try to give you some advice. First of all, when you go to apply for your first job, don't wear these robes. Medieval garb does not instill confidence in future employers — unless you're applying to be a scrivener. And if someone does offer you a job, say yes. You can always quit later. Then at least you'll be one of the unemployed as opposed to one of the never-employed. Nothing looks worse on a résumé than nothing.
So, say "yes." In fact, say "yes" as often as you can. When I was starting out in Chicago, doing improvisational theatre with Second City and other places, there was really only one rule I was taught about improv. That was, "yes-and." In this case, "yes-and" is a verb. To "yes-and." I yes-and, you yes-and, he, she or it yes-ands. And yes-anding means that when you go onstage to improvise a scene with no script, you have no idea what's going to happen, maybe with someone you've never met before. To build a scene, you have to accept. To build anything onstage, you have to accept what the other improviser initiates on stage.
They say you're doctors — you're doctors. And then, you add to that: We're doctors and we're trapped in an ice cave. That's the "-and." And then hopefully they "yes-and" you back. You have to keep your eyes open when you do this. You have to be aware of what the other performer is offering you, so that you can agree and add to it. And through these agreements, you can improvise a scene or a one-act play. And because, by following each other's lead, neither of you are really in control. It's more of a mutual discovery than a solo adventure. What happens in a scene is often as much a surprise to you as it is to the audience.
Well, you are about to start the greatest improvisation of all. With no script. No idea what's going to happen, often with people and places you have never seen before. And you are not in control. So say "yes." And if you're lucky, you'll find people who will say "yes" back.
Now, will saying "yes" get you in trouble at times? Will saying "yes" lead you to doing some foolish things? Yes it will. But don't be afraid to be a fool. Remember, you cannot be both young and wise. Young people who pretend to be wise to the ways of the world are mostly just cynics. Cynicism masquerades as wisdom, but it is the farthest thing from it. Because cynics don't learn anything. Because cynicism is a self-imposed blindness, a rejection of the world because we are afraid it will hurt us or disappoint us. Cynics always say no. But saying "yes" begins things. Saying "yes" is how things grow. Saying "yes" leads to knowledge. "Yes" is for young people. So for as long as you have the strength to, say "yes."
And that's The Word.
I think this is great advice for the stage and almost great advice for life. On a stage, especially in an improv show, the worst thing that can happen is that you ruin a scene and move on to the next one. In real life, the worst thing that can happen is that you ruin a life and — depending on your religion — may or may not move on to another. So maybe a little bit of reticence to say "yes" is a good thing...but certainly not to the point of closing off opportunities, as too many people do. Given the choice of yes and no, I'd err on the side of yes. It gets you places including, alas, places you may not wish to go. But that still can be preferable to not going anywhere.
On one of our cartoon voice panels last year at San Diego, voicing superstar Maurice LaMarche spoke of how he'd looped the part of Orson Welles in the Tim Burton movie, Ed Wood. Vincent D'Onofrio played Welles and as you'll see, he really looked the part. But as Maurice ("Moe" to his friends) told the story, D'Onofrio used a somewhat high-pitched, effete voice for Welles and when Burton got into the editing room, it became obvious it wouldn't do.
Burton was a fan of the cartoon show, Pinky and the Brain, on which Moe played the latter role with a dead-on Orson Welles imitation. "Get the the guy who plays The Brain," Burton said...and indeed, they did. Moe went in and for a nice piece o' change I'm sure, redubbed the part. Here's that scene...shot, I believe, in the Musso & Frank Grill on Hollywood Boulevard — one of my favorite places to eat and, I would hope, yours. If you're familiar with the LaMarche simulation of Welles, you'll note how cleverly and appropriately, Moe "dialed down" the impression from the on-camera (or on-mike) Orson to something that matched the character's mood in the scene.
By the way: One of my favorite "star-spotting" memories occurred not far from the Musso & Frank Grill. Across the street and down a bit is the Hollywood Magic Shop, which like most magic shops caters to a lot of amateurs and beginners. But it also serves many celebs and seasoned professionals, and one day in the seventies when I was walking by, I spotted two men standing out front — Orson Welles and Carl "The Amazing" Ballantine. Carl was heckling tourists who walked by and Orson was roaring with laughter at everything Carl said, which is still not an uncommon response around Ballantine. I stood there for maybe three minutes, taking in the show until a huge convertible pulled up at the curb and Welles, with great effort, went over and got in. Years later, when I became friends with Carl, I reminded him of that day and thanked him for that moment. It was one of the rare times Hollywood Boulevard was ever as colorful as we all wish Hollywood Boulevard was.
Reader Marc Horowitz wrote to ask me, "I am curious do you think the words that got Imus fired are racist or just a bad joke if
a bad joke what kind of apology is necessary? Do we go to rehab for saying something stupid?"
Well, I think going to "rehab" has become kind of a stunt and a way of escaping personal responsibility...which is not to say some of the folks who do it aren't in need of medical-type attention. I just wonder how many who do it are serious about dealing with the problem in other than a public relations sense. So kudos to Imus for not going that route.
Beyond that, I'm quite conflicted about the whole matter. I never thought the guy was that entertaining and felt he'd lucked into a non-vicious circle of success. Because of his huge listening audience, he got a steady stream of important guests who'd never have come near the same program if it was on a tiny FM station...and the steady stream of important guests got him that huge listening audience. Every time I heard him or watched him on the MSNBC simulcast in the wee small hours, he struck me as a monotonous presence who felt his duty was to say something nasty and condescending about every person, place or thing that crossed his gaze.
Were his remarks racist? I dunno. There's a fine line between racist and stupid, and what he said could go either way. As utterances of Imus, they were typical and thoughtless. I guess my reaction, as Free Speech Junkie, is that it's just another one of those things that we have to defend even though we don't like the speech or the speaker. To believe in the First Amendment, you have to do a certain amount of that.
On the other hand, no one has a Constitutional Right to have a radio show...and advertisers certainly have every right to distance themselves from something they find offensive or even bad for business. I think they're usually way too cowardly in this regard, reacting to two or three threats of protest and boycott as if they represented the entire buying public. But they have the right to be craven and they certainly have the right to not sponsor a radio personality they find tacky. If I had a company that bought time on shows like that one, I hope I would have long since turned to my advertising department and said, "Let's see if we can find other programs that give us the same bang for our dollar."
I mention the advertisers because obviously, that's what this is all about. The huge salary Imus drew was because advertisers flocked to him. When they start running the other way, it's not unreasonable for his employers to think they're better off without him. I guess this is kind of how the system is supposed to work: You lose your sponsors, you lose your show. And it doesn't matter if they're bailing because they don't want to be associated with you or because they just don't think your program's worth what they're paying. The only real mystery to me here is why, of all the stupid and possibly racist things Imus and other radio personalities say these days, this one comment did a guy in.
For an interesting (if also conflicted) view of all this from a frequent Imus guest, check out Frank Rich's column in today's New York Times. I won't link to it since it's behind a "pay" firewall. But if you do a bit of Googling or a search at Technorati, it ain't hard to come by.
We were talking here the other day about the new NBC show, Thank God You're Here, and how it isn't real improv comedy. Last evening, I went to see real improv comedy...a performance by The Spolin Players.
The "Spolin" refers to the late Viola Spolin, hailed by many as "The Grandmother of Improv Comedy." She was, among other things, a teacher and an awful lot of fine actors either studied with her or studied with someone who was offering a second-hand version of her curriculum. She more or less invented the idea of Theater Games, a set of little exercises that hone the skills of an improvisational actor. A lot of what they do on Whose Line Is It Anyway? is the kind of thing — often, the same games — that Ms. Spolin invented. There are presently two troupes — one in Seattle, one here in Los Angeles — that carry on her work and do occasional shows.
The troupe at tonight's L.A. show consisted of David McCharen, John Mariano, Anna Mathias, Danny Mann, Harry Murphy, Donna DuBain, Edie McClurg, Gail Matthius and I know I'm leaving someone out. Forgive me, whoever I left out. Everyone was very good in ways that will not mean anything if I start quoting lines and snippets here. The great thing about true improv is that it's in the moment. There's a loose structure for a game and then the audience throws out some specifics: Who are the people on stage? Where are they? What is their relationship? And so on. Then you see the scene created before your eyes.
There are certain regulations, one of the most important being the "Yes, and..." rule. In improv, you must not deny anything that is said. If you enter the scene and someone says, "Ah, you're back with the pizza," then you're back with the pizza and that's part of the scenario. You don't say, "I wasn't going out for pizza." If you're going to take things in another direction, you have to say something like, "Yes, and..." and then append your new information to what's already been established. Once or twice last night when someone violated this rule, you could hear moans from the audience.
That was because the audience was full of actors, most of whom had extensive backgrounds in improv. In fact, I think I knew about half the audience, which included Ann Ryerson, Shelley Long, Dani and Jim Staahl, my pal Teresa Ganzel, cartoon voice director Ginny McSwain and cartoon voice actor Michael Bell. (Michael's the guy we had on the voice panel at San Diego who told the great anecdote about working with Mel Blanc.) I may have been the only one in the place without a S.A.G. card and it was fun watching one group of fine actors be appreciated by another.
Amidst the intermission and post-show chatter, I heard a lot of talk about Thank God You're Here, all of it quite negative...although when I spoke with Edie McClurg, who was on the show (and very good on it), the subject didn't come up. Everyone else though was negative about the series for being edited, for having all but the main actor so well scripted and for violating principles like the "Yes, and..." rule. There seemed to be a general horror that the tradition of improv games had been corrupted so for television, particularly when the real thing would have been far more entertainining...and honest. In fairness to the TV show, it never claimed to be classic improv — though I agree that the kind of thing Viola Spolin taught her students would have made for a much better program.
This troupe of the Spolin Players currently has no future performances scheduled but they'll be back soon. When they are, I'll let you know here in case you watch Thank God You're Here and would like to see what real improv looks like.
It is now possible to pre-order my forthcoming book on Jack Kirby (one of two, with the second still a few years off) at Amazon. That's right. We have an ISBN and everything!
Kirby: King of Comics will retail for forty smackers but you can order it now at Amazon for $26.40 and lock in that price for yourself. There may also, I'm told, be at least one "fancier" edition from a book club but if there is, or if there's a significantly cheaper place to order it, I'll announce it here in plenty of time for you to cancel your Amazon order and get it elsewhere. The thing won't be out until October.
With the help of Jack's daughter Lisa and other folks close to him, I'm finding some amazing treasures to include, including a lot of drawings he did in his teen year, signed with his birth surname of Kurtzberg. There's a self portrait he did of himself during his World War II days that's probably worth $26.40 all by itself. Plus, of course, there'll be lots and lots of Kirby art, some of which you've seen before, some of which you haven't.
The photo above probably won't be in the book. That's Jack at an art exhibition with Frank Frazetta on the left of him and Frank Kelly Freas on his right. Think of it as a picture of three guys who gave the world some of its greatest fantasy imagery.
I'll be telling you more about the book here out of enthusiasm, not as a sales pitch. I figure if you're familiar with Jack's work, you'll purchase this book and if you're not, you won't. If you're unsure where you stand, I leave you with Jack's advice from the cover of one of his books...
Reader Peter Avellino informs me that the name of the new game show pilot hosted by Tucker Carlson is actually Do You Trust Me?, not Who Do You Trust? The online article to which I linked had it wrong, which means the show has no connection to Johnny Carson's old program.
'Tis an awesome responsibility having a weblog like this. A reader named Marc just tipped me off that a site I linked to a few months ago has apparently been hacked. When I linked you to it, it had beautiful imagery of Earth's scenery on it. Now, it holds some pretty awful porn...the kind that no one could find erotic, only disgusting.
I've deleted the whole item but I just wanted to remind you, my fellow surfers of the Internet: It's a jungle out there. Old links often don't work at all...and when they do, they occasionally don't go where they used to. If you see any such thing on my site, please let me know. But don't be surprised.
Conservative pundit Tucker Carlson, who seems to go from one failed enterprise to another, is hosting a game show pilot for CBS called Who Do You Trust?This article tells about the show but doesn't mention if it's a revival of the show by the same name once hosted by Johnny Carson. From the description, I'm guessing someone acquired whatever rights there are to the earlier program but is changing it so much that a comparison seems inappropriate.
I'm a little surprised that they picked Carlson. I (sorta) understand his value to a station like CNN or MSNBC of even PBS. He has solid Conservative credentials so that group can't wail and scream "Liberal media." But he's also good-natured and rarely shrill with his viewpoints so Liberals don't mind him as much as they mind, say, a Glenn Beck or Michael Savage. He's kind of the right-wing version of Alan Colmes, tolerated and perhaps even welcomed by the opposition because he's never going to win an argument.
So programmers overlook his unbroken string of flop shows and they also overlook his wretched track record at predictions. (You know, Hillary Clinton's never going to come close to winning that New York Senate seat she's talking about.) He's especially useful if you're dumb enough to think you can program in a way to attract both rabid Liberals and strident Conservatives to your news channel, which is why MSNBC's ratings for everything but Olbermann are where they are. And besides, in the media today, we never hold always being wrong against a guy who's supposed to tell us what's going to happen.
But...game show host? Well, maybe. He can't predict and he can't dance. Maybe he can do that.
As you all know, David Hasselhoff has been appearing in the streamlined Las Vegas production of The Producers. Though he plays Roger Elizabeth DeBris, the cross-dressing director, Hasselhoff is being billed as the star and his is the only name or image on most of the billboards. To the surprise of many, he's leaving the play in early May, earlier than expected, because of the demands of his "day job," the America's Got Talent TV show. He'll be replaced on May 7 by Lee Roy Reams, who's been playing the role in the Broadway production, which conveniently closes on April 22.
This bit about America's Got Talent probably sounds a little suspicious to some. I mean, Hasselhoff signed for the The Producers knowing full well that his series would need him around this time. How did that schedule not get properly coordinated? I have no inside info here but the obvious (perhaps erroneous) assumption is that it's a cover story to get him out of the show because...well, maybe its producers no longer want him because they don't think its grosses justify his superstar salary. Or maybe he's not happy in the job for some reason.
Or maybe the schedules just weren't as easy to juggle as someone once thought. You never know. Sometimes, someone in show business actually quits a great job "to spend more time with the family" because they want to spend more time with the family.
Right now, the question is what this will mean for The Producers. I have no idea how good Mr. Hasselhoff is in the part but I doubt those who buy tickets will have any less of a time. Reams is a wonderful performer. He was in the first Broadway show I ever saw on Broadway and I saw him do The Producers with Jason Alexander and Martin Short, and he was splendid in both.
The question is how many people are buying tickets. Unlike shows in New York where the grosses are a matter of public record, no one on the outside seems too sure how The Producers is faring at the Paris hotel in Vegas. Anecdotal evidence does not suggest a huge hit but in Vegas, with all the comps and discounts and freebees, it's sometimes hard to tell. Certainly though, the substitution won't help ticket sales. Reams is a great performer but he's not a "name" the way Hasselhoff is a "name." The producers of The Producers obviously thought they needed a star in the show in order to sell tickets and now they ain't got one.
(Or have they? Tony Danza, who recently played Max Bialystock in New York for a while, recently visited the Vegas production. That certainly fuels the rumor mill. Danza is a "name" and while he apparently didn't boost sales in Manhattan, the folks behind The Producers might figure he would in Vegas. And he might be a lot cheaper than David Hasselhoff.)
Why all this matters is that a few years ago, there was a very real belief out there that Las Vegas would become a serious venue for theater, possibly even to the point of challenging Broadway for that honor. Given the finances and facilities of the town, it seemed plausible if — and it's a Big If — Vegas audiences were interested in seeing book musicals there. Then a couple of shows flopped — most notably, Avenue Q, which should never have been booked there in the first place — and lately, theater in that town is kind of on probation. It's too early to tell if the current productions of The Producers, Phantom and Spamalot will prove that musicals can make a go of it amidst the casinos...but a failure by any of the three would not bode well for the future. In fact, if all three fail, it'll probably be a long time before Vegas sees another musical. I mean, if those shows can't attract an audience, what could?
On Monday, there will be a segment on CNN spotlighting Joe Simon, co-creator of Captain America and a true legend of the comic book industry. I'm told it airs in the news blocks at 10 AM and 2 PM but I have no idea what that means in terms of time zones. I'm just going to set my TiVo to record a lot of the daytime programming and hope to snag it. It'll probably get bumped by Breaking News about who fathered Anna Nicole Smith's cat's last litter.
The above is currently the headline story on the website of the Las Vegas Review-Journal. I read it and my first reaction was that the paper has an odd definition of "breaking news." With all the disasters and scandals and life-threatening things happening in the world today, the fact that Tony Bennett has the flu and can't do two shows at the Las Vegas Hilton hardly qualifies as important.
But then I thought: If I had tickets to that, it would matter to me...not as much as some other things but I'd still appreciate knowing about it, a.s.a.p. so I could rearrange my life and not waste time going to the hotel. Wouldn't it be nice if every event you might attend had a website that you could trust to be updated with last minute info or a confirmation that everything will happen according to schedule? I wonder why the Ticketmaster people haven't set up something like that. I'm sure there are logistic problems with getting the various theaters and concert halls to keep it updated but there are also logistic problems if something's cancelled and hundreds of people show up for it. Just a thought.
If you care about the Don Imus matter — and I could sure understand if you didn't — this article by Joe Conason makes some pretty good points about it. It's a Salon link and if you're not a subscriber, I believe you need to view a short ad before they'll let you see the article. But I'm told the ads are shorter now than they used to be.
Incidentally: When is Al Sharpton up for re-election? I often find the Reverend Al remarkably entertaining and there are times on talk shows and in debates when he speaks with an honesty that folks who might ever hope to get elected to some position never seem to muster. Still, I've never understood his role in all these controversies upon which he seems to pounce. If I were a black guy, I think I'd wonder who appointed him and Jesse Jackson to speak on my behalf and to decide whether those who sin against my race were worthy of forgiveness. As Conason notes in his piece, it's not like Sharpton's hands are completely clean when it comes to accusations. Even leaving that aside, whenever there's an issue that touches upon race, the Reverend Al has a way of turning up and suddenly making it all be about the Reverend Al. That doesn't help.
Also, for a prescient view of the Imus situation from a few years back, read this.
Every time I post about the radio show I'm doing this afternoon, I get the time wrong and have to come back here and correct it. The episode of Time Travel with me as the guest is today at 4 PM East Coast time, which is 1 PM West Coast time. If you see me telling you anything different, don't believe me. It's 4 PM East Coast time, 1 PM West Coast time. Duh.
And this probably won't be the last message on the topic, either.
It's interesting that there is this recurring discussion about whether comic strips should end when their creators die...or even when they've been around for a certain, undetemined amount of time. I can't think of another art form where this kind of thing is even considered. No one is suggesting that now that Vonnegut's dead, we get all those copies of Slaughterhouse-Five off the bookstore shelves to make more display room for new authors. Or — and this may be a better analogy — that today's musical performers should not record old songs, thereby creating more opportunity for new songwriters. Should great movies not be remade so as to make it easier for today's screenwriters?
I guess there are a few people out there who have those sentiments but I think it's awfully unrealistic to think the system will ever work that way. You and I can sit here and decide that James Bond should have been laid to rest when Ian Fleming died and/or Sean Connery turned in his License to Kill. But I'd hope we wouldn't waste a lot of time thinking that anything will kill off 007 except a lack of interest in his adventures on the part of the paying public. Rarely does anything creative go away unless there's no market for it. Why should any other consideration be controlling in comic strips?
A lot of wanna-be strip cartoonists seem upset that reprints of Peanuts are still in newspapers — something like 2,400 of them, last I heard, making it one of the three most successful "current" strips. Why didn't it go away when Mr. Schulz died? Because readers still wanted to see those characters in their newspapers and the folks who make money off the property still wanted to make that money. Here's an excerpt from a message I received from Roy Wallters...
I understand where you're coming from on this but what if someone came up with the next Calvin & Hobbes and there was no room for it on the comics page because of reprint strips like Peanuts and Popeye and old strips being continued?
Yeah, but there was room for Calvin & Hobbes. Old strips being continued didn't stop it from attaining a truly impressive client list of papers in record time. If and when another strip that good comes along, the folks who edit the newspaper comics pages will find a place for it. If it means dropping another strip, fine. They'll drop whatever strip they perceive as their least popular...which will probably not be reprints of Charlie Brown and Snoopy.
Mr. Wallters also asked, "What if the people who will be continuing B.C. can't handle it and it becomes much less funny than it's ever been?" Well then, the same thing happens that would happen if Johnny Hart were still at his drawing board and the strip became much less funny than it had ever been. It might even lose enough audience to not be worth its makers' time to make or its syndicate's to syndicate. A bad strip is a bad strip whether it's done by the guy who created it or by his grandmother. Al Capp showed us what that was like, the last few years he and his crew did Li'l Abner. And when papers started dropping it left and right, he packed it in.
Granted, it's a slow process and if you believe some newspapers are way too reticent to chuck an established strip that's way past its prime, I wouldn't argue the point. I'm arguing that they shouldn't drop it just because one person died, especially if that person has arranged for assistants and collaborators to carry it on.
Let me give one more example here and I'll pick an oldie so I don't insult anyone currently trying to make a living. Bud Fisher created the comic strip Mutt & Jeff in 1907 and before long was making some serious money off it and employing many assistants. Around the late twenties or early thirties, Fisher decided he didn't even want to spend as little time as he was spending on it. His then-current assistant, a gentleman named Al Smith, began doing more and more of it and by 1932, Fisher wasn't even touching his strip. From all reports, he did nothing on it for the rest of his life except to give interviews in which he lamented the long hours he put in at the drawing table, and to pay Smith to ghost the strip and sign "Bud Fisher" on it. Fisher died in 1954, at which point Smith was allowed to sign it...and he kept on doing it for a couple more decades, during which it was one of the most popular, beloved entries on the funny pages. (Interesting aside: DC Comics published the Mutt & Jeff comic book from 1939 through 1958 and for many of those years, it outsold Superman.)
During the sixties, it was still a pretty good feature — Smith won the National Cartoonist Society award for the best humor strip in '68 — but in the seventies, its quality declined and a lot of new and better strips were coming along. Mutt & Jeff lost papers and therefore, income. Smith gave it up in 1980 and amazingly — at age 78 (!) — created a new strip and tried to make a go of it. It didn't succeed and meanwhile, others took over Mutt & Jeff and couldn't reverse its decline. It ended in 1982.
Now, if you believe that strips should end when their creator dies, tell me when Mutt & Jeff should have ended.
Lastly for now, here's a message from Russell Myers, who writes and draws one of my favorite newspaper strips, Broom Hilda — which was one of those great new strips that came along in the seventies and shoved Mutt & Jeff to one side. Russell, by the way, does his strip without a whole support team and still puts in a helluva lot of love and caring. He wrote me with the following to post here...
Over the years I've heard comments about how cartoonists doing older strips should step aside and make room for the new wave. Of course it was the new wave saying that. There has been plenty of commentary about comic strips as art. What I don't remember ever seeing is an in-depth explanation that producing a comic strip is a business. Woody Allen once said that if show business wasn't a business it would be called show show. The same applies to a comic strip.
Yes, as a kid I loved the comics and always wanted to do one. Then I grew up, more or less. I got me a wife and I got me some kids. Doing a comic strip was the only skill I had and it became vital to our welfare. What's more, it was a job that had no pension plan or benefits. Having had a school teacher for a father meant I sure as heck wasn't going to inherit much, so I had to plan ahead in case I outlasted my job by a decade or three. There are a few blessed comic strip creators who make it into the rarified realm of Big Money. Most of the rest of us make a living. Some make a very good living, some barely get by. From what I understand there are several people that make a living from B.C. and The Wizard of Id. More power to them. They should do everything in their power to hang onto what they have. In case the self-proclaimed purists haven't noticed, the Money Truck doesn't come down the street every day passing out free samples.
So to those who suggest that B.C. should be folded because Johnny is no longer at the helm, I say, most respectfully, kiss my inkwell.
I concur with the above except that the Money Truck does come down my street, not every day but Monday through Friday, passing out free samples. It's one of the perks you get from living in Los Angeles. Well, that and the new Third-Pound Angus Burger at McDonald's.
I'll have more on this topic later or, more likely, tomorrow.
This is a Budweiser commercial that I believe was produced for this year's Super Bowl. For some reason, I'm a big fan of Budweiser commercials, which is not to say they've ever caused me to consider buying their product. I'm also fascinated by how, beginning only a few years ago, Dean Martin's 1960 recording of "Ain't That a Kick in the Head?" had turned up in movies and TV shows and commercials, over and over and over. I don't recall hearing it anywhere before about 1993. I don't even recall Dino ever singing that song on The Dean Martin Show, which was on for nine years. But somehow, in a kind of delayed reaction, the record caught on big, at least among those who make movies and commercials. And as you'll hear, it pops up in this ad...
Here's a stunning reversal: Tomorrow, Don Imus will not be on the radio but I will. I'm the guest on the Friday the 13th edition of Time Travel, which is heard on station WRNJ and on the station's website. The show starts at 4 PM East Coast Time and its hosts, Dan Hollis and Jeff O'Boyle, will begin ruthlessly interrogating me about...well, I'm not sure what we're going to discuss but since I'm involved, you can bet it'll be trivial. Find out more about their show and listen to some past episodes at the Time Travel website. And tune in tomorrow to hear me say something even stupider than what Imus said. I'm good at it.
Fred Kaplan on why Bush is looking for and cannot find a "War Czar" to...well, part of the problem seems to be that no one is quite sure what this guy would do besides take some of the blame for things not going well in Iraq.
I'm going to write a little more on this topic of continuing newspaper comic strips after their originator quits or dies, and this probably won't be the last post about it. An e-mail this morn from my buddy Jim Korkis made me realize I may be guilty of oversimplifying this discussion to a useless degree. First off, here's Jim's message...
Aren't there some comic strips that actually were more popular or better received after the original creator passed away? While I know that comic strip historians love Frank King's version of Gasoline Alley, I much preferred Dick Moore's version. Many prefer Burne Hogarth's Tarzan to Hal Foster's. Some don't survive as well. I preferred Stan Lynde's original Rick O'Shay to the team that took over when he left the strip.
First off, I think we ought to differentiate something. There are comic strips that are essentially team efforts, if not when they start or achieve fame, then certainly by the time their creator exits. Often, three or four people are responsible in a serious creative capacity for a strip and when the creator dies, those collaborators are probably perfectly capable of carrying on the strip as essentially the same work. The worth of the material may be high or low but it isn't plunging because one guy died so that should not be the determining factor in its continuation. There are also cases where a whole new writer-artist — or writer(s) and artist(s) — come in and the strip is carried on by a stranger or strangers. I think those are two separate situations.
Yes, I think there are strips that were better received when in the hands of someone other than the creator. Sometimes, that's a matter of the new guy morphing the strip into his own. Fred Lasswell was picked by Billy DeBeck to assist on Barney Google and inherited it after DeBeck died...and eventually Fred turned it into the highly-successful Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, with the focus wholly on the latter. Ernie Bushmiller took over the Fritzi Ritz strip and it evolved into Nancy, which many hail as a classic of the funny pages. I don't believe Bushmiller was selected or trained by the originator of Fritzi Ritz, Larry Whittington. I think he was just a guy the syndicate hired to continue a strip they wanted to keep going.
But to me, the question of whether a strip is better or worse under new hands is a false question. The question to me is whether the new version is any good...or as good as the alternative. I never thought Hogarth's Tarzan was as wonderful as Foster's but I see no reason to expect that if they'd cancelled the Tarzan strip instead of giving it to Burne, what would have been in that space instead would have been better than Hogarth's Tarzan. (That's kind of a convoluted sentence but it's as clear as I can make it this morning.) And some of the other versions — Russ Manning's, especially — struck me as very good strips. An editor of a comic page has to pick from the best of what's available and if I'd been in such a position at the time, I'd sure have wanted Manning's Tarzan on my page. It was easily the best adventure strip of its period.
For the record: I thought Dick Moore's Gasoline Alley was one of the all-time great newspaper strips even if he didn't create it. I thought Secret Agent X-9 by Archie Goodwin and Al Williamson was as good as any previous incarnation of that strip, maybe better. Floyd Gottfredson did not start the Mickey Mouse strip but for at least a decade or two, it was one of the best things in the newspaper. I'll probably think of more examples before I'm sick of this topic.
I agree with you about Rick O'Shay, which is one of those cases where a strip was handed to strangers. My inclination, and I haven't done the math on this, is to say the following: In instances where a strip is essentially a team effort — where the creator has reached the stage of working with or delegating to other writers and artists — the strip can usually be carried on without much (if any) loss of quality. In instances where it's turned over to folks who weren't already involved in its creation, it's very much a hit-or-miss decision. Then again, from the standpoint of the syndicates and newspaper editors, so is replacing that strip with a wholly new creation.
I think there are also strips that are such personal creations that it's hard to conceive of them controlled by others. I can't imagine Doonesbury without Garry Trudeau, who has done it since the start, aided only by a guy who inks and letters. I can imagine B.C. as done by the other guys who've written hundreds of gags for it and done a lot of the drawing.
I have to run out to a meeting so I'll post this and continue this discussion when I get back...or maybe tomorrow. I don't know. This may take a while. I probably need to discuss what I see as some of the intrinsic realities of the marketplace here and how it's pointless to discuss what "should" happen from a fan's point of view. See you later.
A number of websites are now offering the opinion, sometimes in the form of outright pleas, that B.C. not be continued since Johnny Hart has passed away. Here's one such plea and here's another.
I largely disagree with this wish. If I were the person making the decision, I'd ask two questions, the first being what the creator wanted. This is never a mystery. Johnny Hart owned B.C. and could very easily have left instructions that it not be continued or, like Charles Schulz did with Peanuts, that it only be continued via reprints. Hart did not. Most cartoonists do not wish that. Imagine if your father had opened a successful restaurant. Would he want closed down when he died? I don't think it's ignoble, when you create something that's very lucrative, to want it to continue making money for your family and associates. You may also just like the idea of your creation living on and remaining current.
Which brings us to the second question: Can a strip still be produced that will have a value to readers? This is really the only other consideration that ought to matter — the quality of the finished product. If you scan message boards about comic strips, you'll see occasional messages from folks arguing that comic strip creators should never have assistants; that they should do it all by themselves or not do it at all. I have a certain self-interest here since I've ghost-written a couple of syndicated strips...but even before those jobs, I thought it was a phony argument. Most of the great newspaper strips have been to some extent the work of assistants or ghosts, including a few that claimed otherwise. So what? If the strip's good, it's good. If it's not, the fact that it was done by one person doesn't make it any better.
Nor does the fact that a strip is still done by its creator. I admire the fact that Mr. Schulz did it all by his lonesome for half a century but if at some point he'd decided he needed help, I wouldn't have thought less of him. Not as long as I still liked what he and that aide produced.
Johnny Hart's two strips have long featured the participation of other writers and other artists. If those folks can keep producing a strip of the same quality, I see no reason why it shouldn't get the same reception. Let the Free Market operate. I think Blondie, to name one, maintained the exact same level of quality after Chic Young passed away...and why not? Long before he died, he had a good crew — trained by him — writing and drawing it. After he left us, the strip was being produced by almost the same creative force as before. If it was unworthy of publication after its creator died, it was probably unworthy for ten or twenty years before.
It continued on, before and after Young's passing, because people liked it and editors perceived that people liked it. I don't see that his death affected that equation...or how Hart's will necessarily make people not want to read B.C. They might if it becomes less entertaining — but that would be true if Hart was still alive and his skills were declining. And in fact, that did happen a little while he was still at it. A number of key papers decided he'd lost his funny and dropped the feature.
That's how it works with strips and how it oughta work. I don't want newspapers or the Creators Syndicate to drop the new B.C. just because it will be done without Hart's participation. I just want the people doing the strip to make it as good as it ever was...and it's the readers who can and will decide if they've succeeded.
Here we have a commercial for Soaky toys...and what's interesting about it is that it has a Walt Disney character (Donald Duck) and a Warner Brothers character (Porky Pig) in the same ad. They don't meet and I'd be fascinated to know if that was a condition of the deal...if Disney said they wouldn't allow Donald to appear in the same scene with a non-Disney character or what. It also looks to me like the two halves of the commercial have different animators and could possibly even be the work of separate studios.
In any case, here are the voice credits: Donald Duck is voiced by Clarence Nash. Porky Pig is voiced by Mel Blanc. And the Soaky Kid is voiced by Dick Beals...and by God, I think it's been a whole eighteen days since I last linked to a commercial with Dick Beals in it. I'll try not to make it so long until the next one.
One of my frequent correspondents here is a gentleman named James H. Burns. He just sent me this and I thought it belonged here...
I'm pretty sure we had been in a few of the same places, over the years. But the only time we met, was almost exactly two years ago, over at Manhattan's York Theatre, for their concert presentation of his God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater.
At intermission, I made my normal bee-line for the exits, looking to catch my smoke. The elevator was completely down, which didn't particularly affect me, as I'll normally do that Bataan death march of stairs, a few flights up, through the veins of the church. But I was more than surprised to find the eighty-something Vonnegut already on the stairs, ahead of me. (I couldn't help but reflect on the theatres' inherent cruelty to our seniors.)
But those of us who are addicted to tobacco will not only walk a mile but do it uphill, and I think Vonnegut and I both found it odd to be
outside St. Peter's, two guys so seperated by decades, smoking the same filter-less brand. We chatted on the sources of addiction, and how it might well be tobacco, in tandem with other chemicals, that affect some folks, and not others...and how so much of everything, might just be based on genetics. He also told me something I had forgotten, how during World War II, a soldier's mess kit, his K-rations, rather, also included some smokes. We also chatted a bit, I think, on how some people have taken their stance against smoking as a license to rudeness...
But the overwhelming effect, the presence of the man, was one of gentleness. As we spoke of other things, within the strange camaraderie of those whose addiction has driven them to the streets, I knew that he was also delighted that at that very special night in the theatre, he was able to share it with his daughter.
If the aliens ever do land, or some future sociologist — terrestrial or otherwise — tries to make sense of what was once the twentieth century, he'll find Vonnegut a particularly humanistic purveyor of the future, and worlds that a sidewise slip in time might still find a-borning.
I've quoted this before but someone once asked Kurt Vonnegut to explain the meaning of life. He said...
Well, I have a son who writes very well. He just wrote one book; it's called The Eden Express. It's my son Mark, who is a pediatrician and who went crazy and recovered to graduate from Harvard Medical School. But anyway, he says, and I've quoted him in a couple of my books, "We're here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is."
Mr. Vonnegut's writing helped a lot of people to get through this thing, whatever it is. It's a shame to lose him but at least we, and succeeding generations, still have the books.
Jerry Beck has the happy announcement not only that a DVD of Walter Lantz Woody Woodpecker cartoons is on its way but that it will be done right — with well-chosen cartoons properly restored. (Well, almost right: I can't help but look at the cover art and note that when I did the Woody Woodpecker comic book, a drawing like that would have prompted a polite but serious phone call from Mr. Lantz himself, admonishing the editors that Woody's eyes do not cut into his beak.)
My pal Jerry is too modest to tell you about all the lobbying and consulting and suggesting he did to make this happen. So I will.
I'm happy this stuff's coming out even though I'm not the biggest fan of Woody Woodpecker. I once was. As a kid, I loved his TV show but I think what I loved most about it was that Lantz did these little "how to draw cartoons" segments. As I grew older, I'd occasionally catch a Woody cartoon and wonder what it was I ever liked about most of them. I have a VHS tape I picked up once in K-Mart for four bucks that Universal put out many moons ago. It contains all the cartoons Tex Avery directed for the Lantz studio plus five or six good Woody Woodpecker cartoons. I used to tell friends it had every good Walter Lantz cartoon on it.
"Pish and tosh," they'd tell me. Well, not really. I don't know anyone who says "Pish and tosh." But that was the kind of disagreement I heard from animation buffs. There were many wonders from that studio, they'd insist...not just the few on my tape. Well, I'm eager and quite willing to be convinced.
What has Mark found this time? Hmm...how about a Post Alpha-Bits commercial with Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd? This one was done for inclusion in the prime-time series, The Bugs Bunny Show, which ran on ABC from 1960 to 1962 before being relocated to Saturday morn. I think Friz Freleng directed this ad or at least supervised its direction. Mel Blanc, of course, is voicing Bugs Bunny. The Fudd voice is by Hal Smith, who most people will remember best as Otis the Town Drunk on The Andy Griffith Show. Hal did an amazing amount of animation voicing in his long career without ever becoming associated with a famous character.
This commercial does not make me want to buy Post Alpha-Bits. In fact, it suggests that if you do, you're likely to drive off a cliff. But it's interesting that in it, they're touting a new formula for the product. For fifty-some-odd years now, whenever I've seen a commercial for Alpha-Bits, it always seems to be announcing a new formula. This may be the only cereal to change the outside of the box less often than they change what's inside it.
This is an outsider's perception but it's always seemed to me that Post lucked into a great name for a cereal and a great gimmick — the letter shapes — but they've never found an actual cereal that can be sold in those shapes and under that name that people like. I remember trying it a couple of times when I was a kid, usually when a little box of it came in one of those "Post Ten Trays" with individual servings. It tasted a lot like eating plain table sugar. Even when I was ten, it was too sweet for me. For a time there, it was even called Frosted Alpha-Bits.
About two years ago, the Post people reconfigured its recipe for the umpteenth time, removing all the sugar and adding in whole-grain oat bran. It's now supposedly just like Cheerios except that you get the 25 other letters in the box, as well and the ads now tout its fiber content...an amazing transformation.
Jackie Estrada, who's one of the folks who brings us the Comic-Con International each year, says it's definitely Russ Manning in that photo. How does she know? Well, she took the photo. That's a pretty good reason to listen to her.
Two different folks who attended tapings of Thank God You're Here confirmed my suspicion that the spontaneous sketches were somewhat edited for broadcast. The scenes felt edited so even if they weren't, that's not a good thing. The ratings were not wonderful for a heavily-promoted debut so the question now is whether NBC will try to fix it or bail. If they try to fix it, I'd suggest three words — do it live — but they'll never do it. One of the things that I think will eventually doom most reality shows is how little "reality" is in them. At least, I haven't seen a moment yet which the producers couldn't have anticipated, prepared for or even configured.
I haven't written anything about Don Imus because...well, I don't watch Don Imus. The few times I've caught a few minutes of his show, he seemed like a guy who didn't like anything: Didn't like his guests, didn't like the topics, didn't like his employers. I remember the guy when he was starting out and he was occasionally funny and insightful back then. At some point though, the sour curmudgeon act seems to have consumed him and now he just sits there and says nasty things about everyone and everything. The only surprising thing about his recent racist/sexist remarks is that he got called on them. Instead of suspending him for two weeks, they oughta punish the guy by forcing him to say only positive things for two weeks. His face would probably shatter.
I erred. I said the other day that my appearance on the Time Travel radio show this Friday would be at 4 PM West Coast Time. It's actually 4 PM East Coast Time so you can figure out when it happens where you are. Sorry. I've corrected the earlier posting.
Lastly, one of the things you learn from having a weblog is that some people don't know how to read and some have no sense of humor. Every time I post anything even vaguely political, I get some insightful, reasoned rebuttals but I also get at least one message from someone debating a position I neither wrote nor hold. I also get an amazing number of e-mails from people who seem to be taking jokes seriously. So just to make sure everyone understands: I did not take my mother to McDonald's for her 85th birthday. My mother is a wonderful lady and she deserves the best. I took her to an Arby's.
Yesterday in this post, I gave you a photo taken at the Inkpot Awards Ceremony at the 1975 San Diego Comic-Con. Back then, the awards ceremony consisted only of the Inkpot Awards, which were bestowed by the convention committee. Later on, they added in the Eisner Awards and eventually, the Eisners squeezed the Inkpots out of their own ceremony. The Inkpots are now presented at daytime panels and other events. Also, in case anyone's puzzled about this: The Comic-Con International used to be called the San Diego Comic-Con, among other names.
Yesterday's photo was interesting because one rarely sees so many important, creative people in one snapshot and I was able to identify all but two of them. One, we've subsequently fingered as Jim Starlin...but there's another person in the photo whose face is blocked from the photographer's angle by Richard Butner, the convention chairperson. That's Richard you see with the beard in the above detail from the photo. A lot of my correspondents are now trying to guess who that person is behind Richard.
Many of them tried to guess by looking at the list of that year's Inkpot recipients. That year, the convention presented them to a couple of the convention committee members...but I can recognize all those people and I'm pretty sure it's not them. There were also Inkpots presented posthumously...to Vaughn Bode, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Rod Serling and Larry "Seymour" Vincent. It's none of them, obviously. (Larry Vincent was a great horror movie host, by the way. Here's an article I wrote about him.)
The professional recipients in '75 were Brad Anderson, Robert Bloch, Daws Butler, Will Eisner, me, Gil Kane, Dick Moores, George Pal, Joe Shuster, Jerry Siegel, Barry Windsor-Smith, Jim Starlin, Jim Steranko and Theodore Sturgeon...and no, I don't know what I was doing in a list like that, either. I think someone had been watching them play "One of these things is not like the others" on Sesame Street. We've already identified Anderson, Butler, Eisner, Kane, Moores, Siegel, Starlin and Steranko in the photo so it's none of them. I don't think George Pal or Barry Windsor-Smith were at the convention. Windsor-Smith might have been but anyway, it doesn't look like him. It also doesn't look like Shuster or Sturgeon.
It's not me. I'm taller than that and never had hair or a jacket like that and anyway, I didn't go to the award ceremony that year because I found out in advance that I was getting one. (They were badly-kept secrets back then. I think Alberto Gonzales's staff was in charge of security.) Anyway, I'll tell you some time why I didn't attend but for now, you just need to know it isn't me.
I thought it could be Robert Bloch, the author of Psycho, among other works...and I'm not 100% certain it isn't. But then Bob Foster sent me an e-mail and he's sure it's Russ Manning. I'm not positive but that's a much better guess. True, Manning didn't win an Inkpot that year but then neither did Jack Kirby, Stan Lee, Bob Clampett and June Foray, all of whom are in the photo. All of them, like Russ, received Inkpots in 1974, which was the first year of those awards. I think in '75, the convention got all the past winners who were present up there to pose with the new recipients and I'm pretty sure Russ was present. In fact, I believe he accepted the Inkpot for Edgar Rice Burroughs. Russ was then drawing the Tarzan newspaper strip.
So in the absence of more or better evidence, I'll say it's Russ Manning. Anyone got a better deduction? If it's Russ and if you could see that, it would make the photo even more impressive.
I remember one of the many times I attended the taping of what turned out to be an unsold pilot. The Big Network Guys sat through the whole thing and then (I heard later) went to the producer and said, "There's a good show here but you haven't found it yet."
I felt that way about the first two episodes of Thank God You're Here, which aired last night on NBC. If you didn't see it, here's the premise: An actor is dressed in a costume and then shoved into a sketch with no preparation. It's not exactly improv because the other actors in the scene have rehearsed and been provided with what I assume is a loose script, configured to force the unprepped actor to furiously ad-lib. Dave Foley, formerly of Kids in the Hall, sits as a kind of judge and at the end, he awards a trophy to whichever of the four actors in that hour has done the best job of making up his or her part on the spot. David Alan Grier is the host.
The "game" here is not new. It's played often in improv classes, though usually the scene isn't as structured and no one (not just one actor) has had any rehearsal or prep. I also, oddly enough, recall this was a recurring feature on the 1963 Jerry Lewis talk show where Jerry showed uncommon courage in being the unprepared actor in a weekly sketch that was broadcast live. The sketches on Thank God You're Here are not live, of course, and I had the sense that they were taped long and edited. I hope I'm wrong.
So how'd I like the show? I liked some of each episode. I thought Edie McClurg and Wayne Knight were the best improvisers in the two hours though neither got the trophy from Dave Foley. (I'm not sure what qualifies Foley to judge. Then again, what qualifies Simon Cowell?) But my main problem was that the games were overexplained and overhyped and then underperformed. Most of the scenes just didn't live up to the created expectation. To tell the truth, I was most impressed with the skills of the "ensemble cast" — the other actors in the scenes: Nyima Funk, Maribeth Monroe, Brian Palermo and Chris Tallman.
I have the TiVo set and I'll watch, at least for a while because I love good improv and this has the potential to turn into it. But it's going to have to be more than just a show about clueless actors struggling to get to the end of a sketch. We've had enough of that on Saturday Night Live.
By the way: The show makes a big deal about the fact that there's no script...and indeed, no writers are credited, nor did I see any job descriptions there like "program consultants" or "creative consultants" that are traditionally used to disguise a writing staff. But the end credits did list a Script Supervisor, two Script Coordinators and two Script Assistants. So, uh, why do you need those five people if there's no script?
We have here a terrific concert performance of "A Little Priest," the Act One closer of the musical, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. I guess most of you know that this is the play with a book by Hugh Wheeler and songs by Stephen Sondheim. The next paragraph is just for those of you unfamiliar with the plot...
Sweeney Todd is a man who has returned to his home town after fifteen years in a penal colony on bogus charges. Having lost everything, he now lives only for revenge on humanity in general and more specifically on those he blames for his ordeal. In this scene, he's making a pact with a lady named Mrs. Lovett who operates a store that bakes and sells meat pies. Their partnership will be based on him killing people and her using their remains to make pies. A lovely arrangement.
Mrs. Lovett is played here by Patti LuPone, one of the great stars of the musical stage. Mr. Todd is played by George Hearn, one of my favorite musical performers. I had the pleasure of working with Mr. Hearn years ago and told that story here. This clip may give you a little idea of why I was so enthused about writing something that he'd be performing...
My friend Marv Wolfman has been watching his TiVo. What's so remarkable about that?, you may wonder. Well, the TiVo is in Marv's home in Southern California and Marv is in Australia. That's kind of remarkable. If you don't know about the Slingbox — the only piece of video, audio or computer equipment on this planet that I do not own yet — read this weblog posting to find out how it works for Marv.
Here's another chance to hear Yours Truly talk about Yours Truly. I'll be the guest this coming Friday on Time Travel, a fine radio program hosted by Dan Hollis and Jeff O'Boyle, and heard on WRNJ, which is an oldies station. The program airs at 4 PM East Coast Time and you can find out more about it over on this website. [Warning: Music that plays automatically.]
Listen online at the WRNJ site or you can wait until they archive the show and make it available for downloading on their Archive Page [Same Warning!]. While you're waiting for it to show up there, you might like to enjoy some of the past programs, which have included interviews with Lee Mendelson, Marty Krofft and other people who've been foolish enough to hire me.
A lot of people on the web today are posting their favorite B.C. and Wizard of Id gags in honor of Johnny Hart. Here's mine and it wasn't in a strip. It was the ever-changing title of one of his many paperback collections. In 1975, Fawcett Books brought out Life is a Seventy-Five Cent Paperback.
A few years later when it was reprinted, the series had gone up to 95 cents per book so they changed the title to Life is a Ninety-Five Cent Paperback and in tiny text at the bottom of the cover, it said "Formerly titled Life is a Seventy-Five Cent Paperback."
A year or three after that, the books were up to a buck and a quarter each so when they reissued this same volume, it was Life is a Dollar Twenty-Five Cent Paperback and the text at the bottom said, "Formerly titled Life is a Seventy-Five Cent Paperback and Life is a Ninety-Five Cent Paperback."
That was the last one but you just know that if the paperbacks had kept going, we'd eventually have seen Life is a Nine Dollar Paperback and at the bottom, it would have said, "Formerly titled Life is a Seventy-Five Cent Paperback and Life is a Ninety-Five Cent Paperback and Life is a Dollar Twenty-Five Cent Paperback and Life is a Two Dollar Paperback and Life is a Two and a Half Dollar Paperback and Life is a Two Dollar and Seventy-Five Cent Paperback and Life is a Three Dollar and a Twenty Cent Paperback and Life is a Four Dollar Paperback and Life is a Four Dollar and Thirty-Five Cent Paperback and Life is a Five Dollar and Fifty Cent Paperback and Life is a Six Dollar Paperback and Life is a Seven Dollar Paperback and Life is an Eight Dollar and No Cent Paperback and Life is an Eight Dollar and Sixty Cent Paperback."
You also know that he planned it that way. Notice how he left plenty of space in that word balloon.
He also did this with the British edition. Somewhere here, I have a copy of Life is a Fifty Pence Paperback. Funny man, that Johnny Hart...especially when he wasn't telling my people that we'd burn in Hell for all eternity. Although come to think of it, that's not a bad gag, either.
Johnny Achiziger and Alan Kupperberg both say that the unidentified person in the photo I just posted is comic book writer-artist Jim Starlin. They must know.
As most of you know, I'm currently assembling a big art book and bio of Jack Kirby which will be out later this year from the Harry N. Abrams Company. (If you don't know about it, here are some details.) I'm spending today going over a file of hundreds of photographs from Jack's personal files and collection, selecting some to be included in the book.
I came across the above pic and decided to share it with you all here. It's from the 1975 San Diego Comic-Con's award ceremony and if the above version of it is too small for you, you can see or download a much, much larger version of it here. Let me see if I can identify all the talented folks in this photograph for you because you may never see an assemblage like this anywhere else. I'm going to go right to left...
At far right, partially cut off, is Russell Myers, creator of the wonderful comic strip, Broom Hilda. To the left of Russell is Dick Moores, famed Disney artist who took over the Gasoline Alley newspaper strip. To the left of Dick is Bob Clampett, the great director of Warner Brothers cartoons and the man behind Beany and Cecil.
The man holding an award to the left of Bob is Jerry Siegel, co-creator of Superman. To the left of Jerry is Will Eisner, creator of The Spirit. The gentleman in the flowery shirt to the left of Jerry is the popular comic innovator, Jim Steranko. Right behind Steranko is the guru of Marvel Comics, Stan Lee. Immediately to the left of Steranko is Jack Kirby and right behind Jack, towering over him in fact, is comic artist Gil Kane.
Helluva photo, right? Wait. We're not through yet...
To the left of Jack is the brilliant cartoon voice actor, Daws Butler. To the right of Daws is the brilliant cartoon voice actress, June Foray. I thought I'd taken the only photo ever with Daws and Bob Clampett in it after their 1954 "parting of the ways" but here's another one, even if they aren't together in it.
Standing right behind June is...uh, I don't know. Anyone have any idea who that is?
To the left of June and holding an award is Richard Butner, who was one of the main operators of the convention in its first decade or so of existence. I can't see who's standing behind Richard but I think the gentleman to the left of him is Brad Anderson, who did the comic strip, Marmaduke.
Nothing much to add to this. The photo kinda speaks for itself and when it does, it says something about how you rarely see so many talented human beings on one stage.
Why is the use of cell phones banned on airplanes while in flight? If this article is correct — and I'd be interested in hearing if it isn't — it's not for the reasons you might think.
Here's a nice obit in The Los Angeles Times on Mr. Hart. It quotes him as saying, "The end of the world is approaching, maybe by the year 2010." If he's right, then he's only missing out on about three years.
And here's the Associated Press obituary, which says that both his strips will continue. According to the article, "Family members have been helping produce the strips for years, and they have an extensive computer archive of Hart's drawings to work with." If they said that about some strips, I'd be skeptical. But Hart often reused old drawings and just altered the lettering on them. So B.C. may not change much without him.
Lastly, this obit from the Gannett Service is the longest I've seen and it covers many of Hart's more admirable, unheralded deeds. If you only read one of the three, read this one.
You've occasionally seen me mention the name of Dave Mackey, who among his many skills is an authority on some animation studios of the past. He also, for some reason, knows facts that are not about old cartoons and recently proved it by being a contestant on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire. When you do the show, you're sworn to secrecy about how you fared and even about how other games you witnessed at the taping came out. But Dave's episode ran last week so he is now free to discuss the experience. Here's Part One of his story and here's Part Two.
This is Part Two of our two-part series on the startling displacement of Little Lulu with Little Audrey. In Part One (which you can read here), we learned that Famous Studios was making very popular cartoons featuring Little Lulu, a character created by cartoonist Marjorie Henderson Buell. Lulu went from appearing weekly in The Saturday Evening Post to appearing in ads for Pepsi-Cola and Kleenex, as well as these animated cartoons that ran from 1943 to 1948.
Famous Studios watched Lulu become a very profitable and merchandised property during that period and decided that the character's popularity flowed from their animated cartoons, not the magazine cartoons. When their license to make the films neared its expiration date, Paramount approached Buell about a renewal...but instead of offering more money or even the same amount, they said in effect, "Give us part ownership of the character or we won't make the cartoons any longer." Buell refused and Paramount went about creating their own mischievious little girl character...and that was Little Audrey.
They made her look quite different but otherwise followed the same template, including a not-dissimilar theme song and pretty much the same kind of stories. In fact, the first few Little Audrey cartoons, it is said, were originally written for Little Lulu and switched. The last Little Lulu cartoon, The Dog Show-Off, was released January 30, 1948. Little Audrey appeared briefly in a 1947 Christmas cartoon for Paramount (Santa's Surprise) and then they put her in a Popeye cartoon, Olive Oyl for President, which came out the same day as that last Little Lulu short. The first official Little Audrey cartoon, Butterscotch and Soda, was released in June of 1948.
The one that's our video link today is called Tarts and Flowers and it came out May 26, 1950. The voices are by Mae Questel and Jackson Beck, who seem to have been in well over half of all the cartoon shorts made in New York. What you'll see when you click in a TV print released by a company called U.M. & M., which was a partnership of three companies — United Film Service, MTA TV of New Orleans, and Minot T.V. The combine was formed in the fifties to buy up the rights to old movies (cheaply, they hoped) and to syndicate them to the then-new television stations that were popping up around the country.
In the mid-fifties, someone at Paramount decided to unload much of their library to television in a sale they later regretted. Various films were purchased by different companies but U.M. & M. got a lot of it, including many of the studio's live-action shorts and most of the cartoons released before June 30, 1950 with the exception of the Popeye and Superman films. A condition of the sale was that all references to Paramount had to be removed from the films so the titles were replaced with the bland, generic ones you see here.
Audrey was fairly popular. Paramount made cartoons of her until 1959 and she also starred in a couple of comic books published by the Harvey company. In 1961 when Paramount's cartoon studio fell on hard times, they reached back to their past and made another deal with Marge to do Little Lulu cartoons again. One came out that year and one the following year but no one cared by that time.
Here's Little Audrey in one of her better starring performances...
I said in this message that the movie Going My Way was released for Christmas, 1944. B. Baker informs me that it came out in May of '44. A small point but it's worth getting right.
This kind of thing mystifies me. This is Michael Isikoff writing about Attorney General Alberto Gonzales prepping to appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee...
...even his own closest advisers are nervous about whether he is up to the task. At a recent "prep" for a prospective Sunday talk-show interview, Gonzales's performance was so poor that top aides scrapped any live appearances. During the March 23 session in the A.G.'s conference room, Gonzales was grilled by a team of top aides and advisers — including former Republican National Committee chair Ed Gillespie and former White House lawyer Tim Flanigan — about what he knew about the plan to fire seven U.S. attorneys last fall. But Gonzales kept contradicting himself and "getting his timeline confused," said one participant who asked not to be identified talking about a private meeting. His advisers finally got "exasperated" with him, the source added. "He's not ready," Tasia Scolinos, Gonzales's public-affairs chief, told the A.G.'s top aides after the session was over, said the source. Asked for comment, Scolinos told NEWSWEEK: "This was the first session of this kind that we'd done."
What mystifies me is not how could Gonzales be so bad. What mystifies me is how does he bring in people to prep him who then turn around and tell Newsweek how bad he was? Shouldn't the Attorney General of the United States of America be able to surround himself with aides who can keep a secret and won't go off and make him look bad in the press for no obvious reason? I suppose it's possible Isikoff made it up but I doubt that since Gonzales's public-affairs chief seems to have been asked to comment and didn't deny anything. I suppose it's also possible that Gonzales did great in the sessions and this is a lie to try and lower expectations for his appearance...but then why isn't he making any live appearances before that?
Seriously. Can't the Attorney General of the U.S. control leaks from his own private rehearsals?
Johnny Hart, who created the comic strips B.C. and The Wizard of Id, and who drew the former has died at the age of 76. This press obit does not cite a cause, nor does it tell much about his two highly successful newspaper strips.
For the record, B.C. started on February 17, 1958 and was a slow but steady success. Later, he launched The Wizard of Id, which was drawn by Brant Parker. That strip started on November 9, 1964. They were both very clever strips that attained high circulation figures...though I always took issue with some of Hart's loftier claims in that regard. He and his syndicate took to claiming at one point that the two strips' combined circulations made him the most widely-read author on the planet. That's a ridiculous claim, though he got some reporters to believe it...and then later cited them as authorities who confirmed it to be so.
Having said all that, I must say that I have a shelf full of B.C. and Wizard of Id paperback collections and they're strips that often made me laugh out loud. I also have two originals of the latter on my wall, not so much for the drawing but because there was something enormously fun about the feature and the characters in it. When he was funny, which was often, he was funnier than just about anyone.
Some women don't want anyone to know their age. Not my mother. For months now, she's practically been stopping strangers on the street to tell them she's going to be 85 years old on April 8. And if they try to correct her to "85 years young," as many of them do, she corrects them right back and tells them 85 is old. Since no one who tries to convince her otherwise is that age, she speaks with authority on the subject.
This evening, the celebration will include taking her to dinner at the restaurant of her choice. I won't attempt to influence her decision except maybe to note that that new Angus Burger at McDonald's sure looks tempting. In honor of the day, I may even let her Super-Size her fries.
Happy 85, Mrs. Evanier. I hope when I'm that age, I'm as happy about it.
Next time you're in McCarran Airport in Las Vegas and you decide to rent a car, you're in for a surprise. All the rental counters at the airport are gone. All that action has been moved to a new building about three miles away. Now, those seeking to rent cars will instead pile on one of the constantly-running shuttle buses that take them to the McCarran Rent-A-Car Center. There, eleven auto rental agencies are up and operating in a 1.7 million-square-foot structure that includes parking for 6,000 vehicles. That's about the same amount of enclosed space as the Empire State Building. The facility also boasts one of the world's largest gas stations with no less than 125 pumps.
The eleven car rental companies there are Advantage/US, Alamo, Avis, Budget, Dollar, Enterprise, Hertz, National, Payless, Savmor and Thrifty.
When you return your rental car, of course, it works in reverse. You go to the Rent-A-Car Center, turn it in and ride one of the forty shuttle buses back to the air terminal. You can also check your baggage at the Rent-A-Car Center for some airlines.
Sounds like a nice idea...and I'm betting that if they don't have slot machines in the place now, they will soon. And someplace to eat. And then maybe they can get some Elvis impersonators and showgirls and pretty soon, you won't have to rent the car. You can just stay there for your entire vacation.
Today and tomorrow, we feature a two-part video link that will detail the amazing displacement of Little Lulu with Little Audrey. I know most of you have been wondering about this since you were small toddlers and we're delighted to give you the answer. In Part One, we feature a Little Lulu cartoon entitled Bout With a Trout, which I only saw on TV about eight thousand times when my age was in the single digits. This cartoon came out on October 10, 1947 and the main non-singing voice work was reportedly done by Cecil Roy, about whom I know nothing.
Little Lulu was created by cartoonist Marjorie Henderson Buell, aka "Marge," and first appeared in a single panel cartoon in The Saturday Evening Post on February 23, 1935. A series of cartoons followed and Lulu also began appearing in advertising cartoons for Pepsi-Cola and Kleenex paper products. For a long time, she was in all the ads for Q-Tips and numerous promotional items that you could get by mail if you sent in the coupons from a couple of boxes of those cotton swabs. In 1943, looking to replicate the success of its Popeye cartoon series, Paramount Pictures obtained the rights and had its cartoon division, Famous Studios, produce a string of Little Lulu shorts like the one we feature today.
The cartoon features the song, "Swinging on a Star," which was written by Johnny Burke and Jimmy Van Heusen for the 1944 Paramount movie, Going My Way, where it was sung by Bing Crosby. As was not uncommon back then, the song came out as a record well before the film...in this case, in February of 1944. By the time the movie was released, which was in December [Correction: May], Crosby's recording was a big, familiar hit. The tune later won the Academy Award for Best Song of its year. Paramount kept flogging it in other films and on the radio shows it controlled and in '47, they had it used in this Little Lulu cartoon. You may note that one of the singers is trying to sound a little like Mr. Crosby.
This was one of the last Little Lulu cartoons made by Famous Studios. The films were successful but when the contract expired, Paramount decided not to offer Marge more money to continue them. I'll tell you all about that tomorrow, plus I'll explain why the title cards on this print are so bland and don't mention Paramount Pictures. For now, here's the Little Lulu cartoon, starting with her theme song, which I always liked...
As we all know, there's nothing on this planet cuter than a baby panda. Here's an entire website full of photos and links to videos of pandas, many of them babies. Thanks to Gordon Kent, who's pretty cute but not as cute as a baby panda.
Several people have written me about this so I guess there's sufficient interest to warrant this posting. A large hunk of land in Hollywood is for sale and it's the parcel that includes the Magic Castle as well as a famous Japanese restaurant called Yamashiro. The ten acres of choice ground have been owned forever by a family called the Glovers. There's also a motel there as well as a lot of undeveloped land which someone may be able to put to profitable use. All eyes though are focused on an old mansion, the former Rollin B. Lane estate, which was built in 1908 and which was later, with many add-ons and modifications, turned into the Magic Castle. I'm a longtime member of the Castle and no, if I don't know you, don't bother writing me and asking if I'll give you a guest pass because I won't.
The Magic Castle, in case you live in a hole, is a private club for magicians or anyone who wants to pay the membership fee. It's an old house full of exhibits and wonderful furnishings and architecture, and there are showrooms in which some very talented people perform the Linking Rings and occasionally other tricks. There's also a restaurant which used to be kinda so-so and mediocre but which has been upgraded to the point where some folks think it's pretty good. You get dressed up (jackets and ties for men at night) and go up there and see great magic and eat and wander around and look at things and no, like I said, I won't give you a guest pass if I don't know you. It's enormous fun.
The articles about the possible sale (like this one) are a little vague on the relationship but here's all you need to know: The Castle is operated by a group called The Academy of Magical Arts and for years, it has leased the structure from the Glovers. Not long ago, there was a crisis period during which it looked like the future of the Castle, at least in that precious building, was threatened. That all got settled and a lot of members rejoiced in the news that the continued presence of the Magic Castle seemed assured. I would imagine they're not happy to have this new uncertainty arise, especially so soon after.
As far as I can tell, no one knows if there'll be a buyer and if so, what that party might want to do about the Magic Castle. The buyer(s) may even be the Magic Castle folks, themselves. This is all a little new and fuzzy.
If you want to make an offer — no price has yet been mentioned — here's a link to the realtor's listing, which includes lots of photos and history. If the photos of the Castle make you yearn to visit, just remember what I said about guest passes.
I haven't put one of these up in a while. It's another one of the Superman cartoons produced by the Max Fleischer cartoon studio. This is The Bulleteers, which was released on March 27, 1942.
I don't have much to say about this one except that back when I was a kid, there was an extended period when you couldn't turn on Engineer Bill's Cartoon Express on Channel 9 without seeing The Bulleteers. It got so he'd introduce it by saying, "And now, it's time for another Superman cartoon, which means we're probably showing The Bulleteers again." I'm not even sure Channel 9 had any other cartoons.
Also, you may note the name of Orestes Calpini in the credits. Mr. Calpini was one of the better animators at the Fleischer Studio, responsible for some of the most memorable scenes of Popeye. He also had a nice career drawing comic books, particularly the Punch & Judy comic published by Hillman.
And now here, as Engineer Bill would say, is The Bulleteers...
Here's a nice article about some of the new features that us TiVo people have or will soon have to enrich our TiVoing experiences. I had one of the first TiVos sold in this country and I'll have one of the last.
I dunno how it is where you shop but in the market where I go, all the food seems to be migrating into 100 calorie packs. I fully expect to go in there next time and see a box containing 100 calorie packets of Peanut M&M's. Each packet would contain about half a Peanut M.
This afternoon, I spotted 100 calories packs of Hostess Cupcakes. Hostess Cupcakes! I thought it was a joke but there they were in a big display at the end of an aisle, available in three varieties — chocolate cake, golden cake and carrot cake. They look like traditional Hostess Cupcakes but they're smaller and the company, obviously trying to keep the calories down, omits the famous squiggle. I always knew that the squiggle was where all the calories were.
Yes, of course, I bought a box...of the chocolate kind. Each box contains six packets and each packet contains three small cakes that collectively will put a mere hundred calories into your system. How were they? They were Hostess Cupcakes. How good or bad is that? The bakers (I'm using that noun loosely) apparently reconfigured the recipe a bit to lessen the unhealthy content — and of course, they got rid of the fattening squiggle. And then they made the cupcakes smaller. Each is about two bites. I think the question becomes whether the six bites you get in one of these packages would satisfy your craving for something sugary or if it would just make you hornier for a real Hostess Cupcake...or something better.
I'm in the former camp. Since my Gastric Bypass Surgery, I have much less of a sweet tooth. My sugar consumption is way, way down. In fact, I'll tell you a story about that, about how my intake of sugar actually plunged well before the surgery. I used to be one of those people who downed 3-6 cans of non-diet carbonated something per day — usually Pepsi during daylight hours and something non-caffeinated, like 7-Up or Canada Dry Ginger Ale, after dark.
February of 2006, as you may recall, I was briefly hospitalized. This had nothing to do with the Gastric Bypass I would have a few months later but at the time, I was on the waitlist and studying up on my impending stomach surgery...and one thing I'd learned was that after the procedure, I would need to eliminate all carbonated beverages and to lower my sugar intake. A nutritionist I'd met with emphasized that to me and said, "Do you think you can give up sodas?" And I replied, at least half-seriously, "If I could give up sodas, I wouldn't need the Gastric Bypass."
It turned out I could give them up. While I was in Cedars-Sinai for those four days, I had no Pepsi or anything of the sort, nor did I miss it. I'm not sure if it was because I was just lying there the whole time, not exerting myself and therefore not needing any energy boost. Or it may have been because nurses kept taking my blood sugar and bringing me either snacks or insulin depending on whether it was too low or too high. In any case, I had no soft drinks and when I got out, I decided to see how long I could refrain. It turned out that breaking that addiction was much easier than I'd imagined. CO2 bubbles have not crossed my lips since, nor have I missed them. It also turned out that I still needed the Gastric Bypass, which I had three months later. Lowering my sugar intake (or at least, the levels of High Fructose Corn Syrup) caused me to lose some weight but not enough.
I can still eat sugar but I consume and want a lot less of it. Cakes and candy just don't taste as wonderful as they once did and that's not a bad thing. In a way, the joy of them now is that the taste reminds me of earlier, better experiences. So the six bites of Hostess 100 Calorie Cupcakes are just fine, insofar as I'm concerned. They may work the same way for you.
Bruce Bartlett, who was one of the architects of "supply-side economics," says that the theory is being cited — wrongly — to justify a lot of tax cuts that aren't good for the economy.
I've linked before to clips of the late and lovely George Carl. Here's another. Mr. Carl spent around 65 years doing his act all around this and a few other continents. He could do it anywhere since it was all in mime and there was no human alive who couldn't laugh at it. This is Carl from one of his appearances on The Tonight Show and as you'll see at the end, Mr. Johnny Carson was a huge fan of his.
Here's a list of names. Guess what these people have in common. No, on second thought. Don't bother. You won't be able to guess. I'll tell you what they have in common after you scan the list.
Johnny Carson
Bob Hope
Frank Sinatra
Dean Martin
Mel Blanc
Jim Backus
Stan Laurel
Bud Abbott
Buster Keaton
Oliver Hardy
Lou Costello
Buddy Hackett
Okay, yes, they're all dead but that's not the answer I'm looking for. Here's the answer: They all apparently have money being held for them by the Screen Actors Guild department that collects residuals. Their names all turn up on this database on the S.A.G. website. The union collects this money and is supposed to forward it to the performer or if said performer is deceased, to the appropriate heirs. But sometimes they don't have an address and that's where the database comes in. If you're a member of S.A.G. or you know a member of S.A.G. or you know someone who's a relative of a deceased member of S.A.G., go to the database, enter their name and if it's in there, let someone know.
This does not just apply to biggies like Carson and Sinatra. My friend Earl Kress and I just entered the names of every cartoon voice actor we could think of. In addition to Mel Blanc and Jim Backus, the database says they're holding cash for Daws Butler, Don Messick, Alan Reed, Paul Winchell, Bill Scott, Jackson Beck, Jack Mercer, Mae Questel, Syd Raymond, Jean Vander Pyl, Vance Colvig, Thurl Ravenscroft, Paul Frees, Lennie Weinrib, Walker Edmiston, Howard Morris and Sterling Holloway. Earl and I are going to alert the heirs of some of those folks but if you're in contact with any of them, by all means, be our guest.
You might caution them, by the way: It could be a lot of money or it could be almost nothing. Some people are going to go to the trouble of calling S.A.G. and/or downloading and filling out forms in order to receive a check for three dollars or thereabouts. But I'll bet some of them have tidy sums waiting.
The problem may puzzle some of you. Why can't S.A.G. find Bob Hope's family? The Hopes operate a website. There's still a Bob Hope estate that produces projects and controls the rights to what he owned. Okay, so the current address they have for Frank Sinatra is no good. Don't they have one for Frank Jr. or Nancy? And the answer is that it's probably a drawback to the age of computers. Back when human beings handled all this stuff, someone could figure that out. S.A.G. needs to do what some other unions, including the Writers Guild, have sometimes done, which is to hire a few people to just work the phones and play Detective. It's probably a pretty formidable task however, given the size of the S.A.G. membership, past and present.
It may also puzzle some of you that so many addresses would be no good. The widow of Daws Butler still lives in the same home where she and Daws lived since the sixties. Why doesn't S.A.G. have that address? I'm just speculating here but I'd guess that near the end of his life, Daws had his agent's or business manager's address listed with the union. That address is now invalid — Daws's last agent died years ago — and no one at S.A.G. has done any legwork to find the Butler home address, which they could get from any number of sources. That is, if they had anyone or even enough people assigned to do that.
And let me emphasize that though I'm talking here so far about deceased actors, the database is full of people who are alive. I'm going to call some of the ones I know over the next few days but, to quote Regis Philbin (who does not seem to have any money due him), I'm only one man. In particular, we oughta try to notify the performers who could really use it.
I'm thinking of one particular veteran character actor who I believe is now homeless and on the streets. Or at least he was a few years ago when I used to occasionally see him in my neighborhood. I tried once to slip him some cash but he refused it because I made the mistake of greeting him by name before offering. At least, I think that was his reason. I sure got the feeling that if he hadn't known I knew who he was, he would have grabbed the loot. Anyway, I haven't seem him in some time but his name is in the database. I'm not sure what can be done to get him whatever money they have for him — that is, assuming he's still around. But if he is, I'll bet he could sure use it.
Thanks to James H. Burns who wrote to remind me about this database. I'd been meaning to link to it and also to the much smaller Writers Guild Undeliverable Funds database to see if we could help get some of these bucks to the right people. If you're in or around what they call "The Industry," take a look and see if you can help a friend.
George W. Bush keeps saying that the Democratic Congress must send him a funding bill without "artificial" timetables for withdrawing troops from Iraq. I don't understand the repeated use of the word, "artificial." What would a real timetable be and does he have any of those? How might a real (as opposed to "artificial") timetable emerge? The only thing I can think of is that at some point, our military could be so exhausted and in disrepair that it will create a timetable out of a sheer manpower shortage — i.e., we withdraw on a certain timetable decreed by a lack of troops.
Maybe I'm overthinking this but it seems like the word he really means there is "arbitrary" or maybe he just means "Congressionally-dictated." I'm assuming that if at any point, he and the military leaders decided some sort of withdrawal schedule becomes prudent, that one would not be artificial in his view. Perhaps a real timetable would be one we arrive at because of a heightened ability of the Iraqi governing forces to, as they say, "stand up as we stand down." In that case, the adjective Bush should probably be using is "imposed." He doesn't want an imposed timetable.
But really, isn't a timetable imposed by the Democrats in Congress the least of Bush's worries? Seems to me that if he wants to stick to his plan — and he always seems to want to stick to his plan for anything, no matter how poorly it seems to be working — he should be more concerned about a timetable forced on him by Republicans. Because Republicans are the ones worried about having a timetable forced on them by voters who are sick of this war. And that one won't be artificial.
In 1982, there was a short-lived sitcom on NBC called One of the Boys. Mickey Rooney was the star but if the show is mentioned at all today, it's probably because the then-unknown co-stars included Nathan Lane, Dana Carvey and Meg Ryan. It advanced none of their careers. About all any of them got out of it was that Carvey developed a great Mickey Rooney impression.
Here's a one minute promo for the show with a voiceover by Casey Kasem. For some reason, it's called The Mickey Rooney Show on this clip but as far as I know, it was never called that on the air or anywhere else that mattered. This was probably done well before the show debuted using scenes from the pilot, and they decided to change the name before its debut. Here it comes...
Sad to hear that director-writer Bob Clark and his son were killed in a car crash this morning. Actually, it's sad when anyone's killed in a car crash but it's especially wrenching when (a) it's a guy who directed a couple of your favorite movies and (b) it was because of a drunk driver. As you may recall from past postings here, I think people who drink 'n' drive should be spanked hard. It's truly a reprehensible thing to do, getting behind the wheel when you're tipsy. I don't believe it should be easily forgiven, even when the culprit doesn't kill anyone.
Clark directed and co-wrote A Christmas Story, of course, and I don't have to tell anyone who's seen it what a treasure of a film it is. But he also directed two other movies I like a lot...the 1980 Tribute, starring Jack Lemmon and based on Bernard Slade's play. It came and went with little notice but I thought it was a fine film.
And I'm sorry...I like Porky's. I laughed a lot at it, especially the scene in the principal's office. If you don't think it was a well-made movie, just watch any of the 7,000 imitations that were made in its wake. You can even watch the two excrutiating sequels, only one of which Clark worked on. If you do, you'll see that the original Porky's hit a note that all the others missed. It's the only one of those pictures about horny high school memories and fantasies that seems to depict someone's actual horny high school memories and fantasies.
I never met Bob Clark but I liked his work. So it feels like I've lost yet another friend to drunk driving.
I've been writing a lot lately about one of my favorite topics, Jack Kirby. In the last month, four separate pieces about the man some call the greatest comic book creator of all time have made their way through my copy of Microsoft Word...and for four separate publishers. Here's a rundown of them in no particular order...
DC Comics is bringing out a complete, hardcover, fancy, lovely (I expect) series of four volumes that will reprint all of Jack's "Fourth World" material in a format that would have made him very happy, indeed. When Jack launched The Forever People, The New Gods and Mister Miracle, it was on the premise that someday, the series would be collected in real — as opposed to comic — books. This was then a radical, almost inconceivable idea. Of course, he imagined a much longer storyline with a more developed ending but he'd still be delighted. I know I am. Anyway, I'm consulting on these and writing Afterwords, which means that I turn up in the rear of each volume to tell you what you just read. This fine article by Ian Brill in Publishers Weekly will tell you more. It comes out early next month and if you can't wait, you can order a copy of Volume 1 by clicking here. You can also pre-order Volume 2 while you're at it. Amazon is offering another one of their exciting package deals where you can purchase two books at once for exactly the same price you'd pay to order them separately, thereby saving yourself one mouse click.
Neil Gaiman — despite the fact that I took him to a mediocre Chinese restaurant a few years ago or perhaps because of it — asked that I pen the foreword to Marvel's forthcoming collection of his (and John Romita's) take on Mr. Kirby's 70's series, The Eternals. I was delighted to do so because Jack's brainstorm was in fine hands and I got to write a little about him and the history of that comic along with blessing the Gaiman/Romita extension. This book comes out the same time as the one above and you can snag your copy by clicking here.
I just wrote yet another installment of my ongoing column on J.K. for The Jack Kirby Collector. I don't have to tout this publication to anyone with the slightest interest in Kirby so I'll just mention that you can order the latest issue here. My piece in this one is about Jack's speed in producing comics and about his relationship with a young artist named Joe Maneely who was killed in a tragic train accident in 1958.
Lastly, but hopefully not leastly, I'm putting the finishing touches on Kirby: King of Comics, a very fancy book by Yours Truly which comes out before the end of the year from Harry N. Abrams, Inc. Here's a page on that company's website with not much more information than I've given you here. And here's some exciting news: There's a place there you can pre-order at the full price if you have a yearning to pre-order and can't wait until you can pre-order from Amazon for less. I'm very pleased with how this book is coming out and I won't say any more now because I expect to become a bore and a nag (both at the same time) about this project.
So there you have them: Four times lately when I've written about Kirby...five, if you count this item. And now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go finish my income taxes. Maybe I can sneak a mention of Jack in there, too.
April 04,2007 | LONDON — Keith Richards was joking when he claimed to have snorted his father's ashes along with cocaine, a spokesman said Wednesday. "It was an off-the-cuff remark, a joke, and it is not true. File under April Fool's joke," said Bernard Doherty of LD Communications, which represents the Rolling Stones. Doherty declined to say any more about why Richards made the statement in an interview with NME, a pop music magazine.
"The strangest thing I've tried to snort? My father. I snorted my father," the 63-year-old guitarist was quoted as saying. "He was cremated and I couldn't resist grinding him up with a little bit of blow. My dad wouldn't have cared. It went down pretty well, and I'm still alive."
Richards' father, Bert, died in 2002, at 84.
Uh, why was the earlier report a news item? Didn't reporters and editors understand it was a joke? You did, right?
Since we've been talking Popeye here lately, let's make today's feature a Popeye cartoon. This is Little Swee'pea, which was released to theaters on September 25, 1936. Jack Mercer and Mae Questel provide the voices and that's all you need to know...
Oh, yeah. I should mention that this print starts with the A.A.P. logo. Associated Artists Productions was a company that acquired theatrical material and distributed it to television. They got a mess of Popeye material in 1956 and slapped their own title cards on the front of the cartoons to replace the Paramount logo. I'm not sure what they did but you'll notice that these Max Fleischer Popeye cartoons (most of 'em) start with the ship's doors opening and closing...and somehow, when the A.A.P. logo went on a lot of them, the music was adjusted so the sound of the doors closing was out of sync. On this print, it's okay but on a lot, it ain't.
Anyway, after you get past the A.A.P. title card, it's all original equipment. Here we go...
As this article explains, Garry Trudeau is now doing a Doonesbury sequence about the many and varied positions of Republican presidential wanna-be Mitt Romney. The storyline points out that Romney has reversed a lot of his past opinions about things like gay rights and stem cell research. He has now moved to positions more in keeping with the hardcore Republican base for, I suspect, the same reason John McCain now shamelessly panders to that group. You may not be able to win the presidency with those positions but you sure can't win the Republican nomination without them.
I haven't paid enough attention to Romney to have an opinion as to whether he's sincere in his "evolved thinking" or not. I'm just wondering aloud if "flip-flopping on the issues" is going to be a serious charge against anyone in the next election. After eight years of George "Stay the Course" Bush, even the staunchest Republicans may be a little leery of a guy who brags about never changing his mind.
When I was eight or so, my favorite non-cartoon TV program was a game show on CBS called Video Village, hosted (at first) by a man named Jack Narz. Later, he was the host of — this is by no means a complete list — Seven Keys, Beat the Clock, Concentration and Now You See It. And before he hosted Video Village, he was the emcee of Dotto, which was one of the first game shows to be axed in The Great Quiz Show Scandals of the fifties. Mr. Narz was in no way responsible for the fact that certain outcomes on that show were occasionally manipulated.
I could never stand Beat the Clock...not with him hosting it, not with anyone hosting it. But the other Narz shows were all pretty good and he was a key reason. Unlike a lot of hosts, he hit that perfect note of respect for the game and its contestants, never taking things too seriously but never acting as if his own show was beneath him. He also seemed like a witty, nice man and the few times I've encountered him here and there would seem to bear out that evaluation.
I'll be tuning it tomorrow when he's a live guest on Stu's Show, which is heard from 4 PM to 6 PM Pacific Time on Shokus Internet Radio. Another fine host, Stuart Shostak, will be quizzing the quizmaster about his career — which, by the way, included a brief stint as an announcer on the George Reeves Superman show. Tune in and listen by clicking on this link and selecting an audio browser. You may even hear me calling in to ask a question or three.
Several years before they began producing the Popeye cartoons we're talking about here lately, the Max Fleischer studio made this little educational film that explained to movie audiences how the "talking" part of talking pictures was accomplished. I'm not sure audiences of the day understood it but they probably enjoyed the odd characters and odder animation of them. This runs a little less than eleven minutes...
Mort Sahl turns eighty next month. A number of celebrations and tributes are planned, and I'm going to try to mention them here...but if you just want to see Mort in more-or-less his natural habitat, he'll be doing a stand-up performance next week. It's the evening of April 12 at the Comedy and Magic Club in Hermosa Beach. If you live in Los Angeles, you might want to head on down there. It's not as far from L.A. as it sounds.
The Comedy and Magic Club is a pretty nice room and a great place to take friends, especially friends from outta town. Most Sunday evenings, you can see Jay Leno there doing essentially the same act he does for $90.00 a head in Las Vegas. I'm not sure what tickets cost in Hermosa Beach but they're a lot cheaper, plus he has Jimmy Brogan opening for him. Jimmy is a very funny man.
Fred Kaplan on the game of "Chicken" that Bush is playing with Congress over the Iraq War funding. I don't think Bush can win this one with the majority of the American people but he may be able to "win it" in the sense that his ever-dwindling base will become even more convinced that everything that hasn't worked or won't work can be blamed on Bush's enemies.
That's the cover at left of the forthcoming Popeye DVD release that excites us so. It also, judging from my e-mail, upsets a few folks on account of its announced price tag of $64.92. Even though the set includes sixty great cartoons, lovingly restored and joined by commentary tracks and documentaries and other extras, that sounds steep to some people. One person wrote me, "You don't care about what it costs since you're on the DVD and you're getting paid, plus you'll get a case of them free."
This person is wrong about the last part. There's a little coterie of animation and TV buffs, of which I am a part, who get called upon to help out with these things and who do so out of fannish devotion to the material. I probably have about three dozen friends who have assisted DVD companies in finding footage, researching history, locating interviewees and doing commentary tracks and interviews. Sometimes, one of us is paid for our services. I've never been but sometimes, people are paid...a little. We always get promised free DVDs — one or two, never a case — and I'd say that promise gets honored about half the time. By that time, they don't need us.
This is kind of a sore spot with some of us — make that, "with all of us." You feel stupid buying a DVD you're on, especially because if you do, the free one will arrive the next day. On the other hand, if you don't buy it, the free copy never arrives. I don't know why it works like this but it does.
Back to Popeye. Yeah, $64.92 is kinda steep but keep in mind that's the official price, the one nobody pays. It'll probably be $55 or so when it first comes out, then drop down to around fifty bucks. Secondly, there's a ton of material on this and it all went through a painstaking (I'm sure) restoration process. By comparison, some of the Looney Tunes Golden Collection sets list for the same price and contain 320 minutes of material as opposed to the 550 minutes of content you'll get with the spinach-eater's collection.
While you're at it, save some cash for three more releases which have just been announced in the Walt Disney Treasures series. When I think about how difficult it was to see — forget about "to own copies of" — just to see this stuff years ago, I have to conclude it's the best time ever for animation buffs. The collecting can get expensive...but hey, the work is available and it's not only being restored for us but for all posterity. Very happy news.
Back in this message, I mentioned that friends of mine in Los Angeles were happy to hear that Vito's Pizza, which was once down on Vermont across from L.A. City College, has reopened on La Cienega in West Hollywood. I also said I was going to try it after April 1 and the disappearance of Creamy Tomato Soup at the Souplantation.
Well, yesterday I took Carolyn by for a couple of slices...my second visit, to be honest with you. I went once in March. The verdict? As good as ever. Vito has a little hole in the wall restaurant with fast food ambience...but he also has the best pizza in town. The pasta bologonese is pretty darn good, too. If you're looking for "New York style," here it is...Vito's Pizza.
Note: Vito makes great Italian food but he's not all that great on websites. His may not open in some browsers. If it doesn't open in yours, know that the address is 846 N. La Cienega Boulevard, situated between Melrose and Santa Monica Boulevard. It's in a little strip mall and it doesn't look like much. Here's a PDF file of his menu. By the way, if you do get the website to open, that's a picture of Vito himself in the apron.
I'm going to bed. Good night, Internet. I'll see you in the morning.
And another pal, Jerry Beck, has posted the info that Warner Home Video is bringing out a DVD set of the first sixty Popeye cartoons produced by the Max Fleischer Studio. They have been, we hear, lovingly restored so this is going to be quite a treasure. The DVD will also include commentary tracks and interviews with knowledgeable animation experts...or at least, that's what I'm telling people since I'm one of them. The whole thing comes out on July 31 and you'll want it, you'll want it. I'll post an Amazon link as soon as that's doable, since this is wonderful material. Congrats and thanks to Jerry and all those who made this possible.
Rick Rogers referred me to this video of the smartest dog in the world. I know people who graduated college who couldn't have figured out how to do what this pooch does...
The original, Jay Ward-produced George of the Jungle cartoons on DVD? My pal Earl Kress has the scoop.
And I'll quickly add this: There were 17 half-hours produced of the show in 1967, each featuring one cartoon of George, one of Super Chicken and one of Tom Slick. This new DVD release is purportedly coming from Classic Media, which not long ago put out a complete DVD set of The Mr. Magoo Show containing 26 half hours. So I'd guess they're thinking of just putting the 17 half-hours of G.O.T.J. out as one complete set. That's what I'd guess.
It's been over a year since we played this game so some of you may be new to it while others may have forgotten how it works. How it works is that I describe six websites and post links to them. Five of them are real websites. One, I made up. Your mission — should you decide to accept it, Mr. Phelps — is to figure out which website is the phony one. When you click on its link, you'll be taken not to the described site but to a page that will tell you you're right, the one you picked is bogus.
Pretty simple concept? Yep. Just keep in mind that when I've done this in the past, all the sites seem to get a ton of extra hits and one or two have been known to crash so you can't get to them. A non-connect doesn't mean it's the phony website. If you click on the phony website, you'll know for sure. Got it? Here we go...
The Burger Museum - What can you do with a McDonald's hamburger if you don't want to eat it? Well, you can just put it on display for many years. Apparently, they don't change that much.
My Cat Hates You - A collection of photos of pussycats who don't seem to like you (or anyone) very much.
Jell-o Star Shots - Hey, doesn't that dish of America's favorite gelatin dessert look a lot like Tony Soprano? Or is that Tom Arnold?
Gum Wrapper - Gary Duschl has created the world's longest gum wrapper chain, currently at 50,905 feet...and still growing!
Rate My Cow - So, uh, what do you think of this one? Surely you have an opinion of this fine cow, don't you?
If you come across a website on the Internet that is real but sounds like I made it up, drop me a note with the link. If enough of you do, maybe we'll play this game more often than annually.
I mentioned the prices of Vegas shows a minute ago here. I think it's interesting to see what they're charging these days to go see various headliners. Generally speaking, shows in Las Vegas are priced intelligently from the hotel's viewpoint. They get as much money as they can but that's the secondary consideration. The main one is to get bodies into the seats so they'll gamble on the way out. Ergo, none of these shows are probably overpriced to the extent that they can't sell all or most tickets for each performance.
These are headliners who are currently scheduled to perform in that town some time during the remainder of this year. Some are there more or less full time...like Louie Anderson is a near-permanent fixture at the Excalibur. Some are there for a few nights here and there. Of these performers, Mr. Seinfeld is the only one I'd guess whose ticket prices have something to do with how often he performs. He's only doing two nights. The rest of these folks are there often enough that it's not that special to be able to go see them. There are probably people scheduling Vegas trips just to see Seinfeld.
I've divided the list into two categories. Although a few of the ones in the first category may sing and even have a small band there, these acts are basically one person standing on a stage with a microphone and talking...
Jerry Seinfeld
$75.00 - $150.00
George Lopez
$45.00 - $125.00
Jay Leno
All seats $90.00
Ray Romano
All seats $90.00
Wayne Brady
$69.00 - $89.00
Rita Rudner
$49.00 - $85.00
Bill Maher
$42.50 - $72.50
David Spade
All seats $70.00
Howie Mandel
All seats $65.00
Jon Lovitz
$39.95 - $59.95
Don Rickles
All seats $55.00
George Wallace
$45.00 - $55.00
Paul Rodriguez
$29.95 - $54.95
Craig Ferguson
$29.95 - $54.95
Carrot Top
All seats $52.50
Roseanne Barr
All seats $49.95
Louie Anderson
All seats $45.00
Steven Wright
$24.95 - $44.95
Dennis Miller
All seats $39.95
The one pricing anomaly that leaps out at me is this: When I saw Dennis Miller there about ten years ago, I think tickets were more than they are now...and back then, he had Rita Rudner opening for him. Now she gets more than he does.
This other category is musical acts. These are a little harder to compare to each other because some of them are one singer with a small band and some of them are production shows which have huge orchestras and also involve dancers and special effects. Still, it might be of interest...
Elton John
$100.00 - $250.00
Barry Manilow
$95.00 - $225.00
Celine Dion
$87.50 - $225.00
Toni Braxton
$65.00 - $100.00
Paul Anka
$71.01 - $98.51
Liza Minnelli
$50.00 - $95.00
Tony Bennett
$70.00 - $90.00
LeAnn Rimes
$59.00 - $88.00
Johnny Mathis
$60.00 - $75.00
Tom Jones
All seats $75.00
Tony Orlando
$22.00 - $44.00
In fairness, I should add that some of the pricing variations may have something to do with where the performers are working. Elton John is at Caesars Palace, whereas Tony Orlando is at the Suncoast, which is a beautiful hotel but it's way off the Strip. On the other hand, if Tony could sell $250 tickets, he'd still be at Caesars.
What was Walt Disney's secret? Why was Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs such a wonderful movie? Well, the secret would seem to be divulged in this eight-and-a-half minute infomercial for the film. It's that he hired pretty girls to paint the cels.
The Las Vegas production of Monty Python's Spamalot opened this evening at the Wynn Hotel. Here's the first review I've seen, which is of a preview performance. According to this piece, only one song — "All for One" — is cut in its entirety. They must have hacked large chunks out of other songs and lost a lot of dialogue to bring the show down to ninety minutes. The version on Broadway runs two hours and 20 minutes, including one fifteen-minute intermission.
Perhaps of interest is that tickets to the New York version run $36.25 to $111.25, whereas tickets to the shortened Vegas version are from $49.00 to $99.00. This is a bit different from The Producers. The full New York version of that show, which closes April 22, charges $31.25 to $111.25, whereas the Vegas incarnation, which was also sliced down to 90 minutes, asks $75.50 for the cheapest seats, going up to a top price of $143.50.
A friend of mine who saw the Vegas Spamalot in previews raved about it and particularly about John O'Herlihy in the role of Arthur. Unfortunately, my friend wasn't there one night when there was a technical snafu. Reportedly, there was a mechanical problem with one of the sets and it was necessary to stop the show for about twenty minutes to fix it. Eric Idle was there and he grabbed a guitar and went out to entertain the audience while repairs were done. I'll bet those playgoers had a good time that evening.
John McCain says that the press is not giving us an accurate picture of conditions in Iraq. He says that "there are neighborhoods in Baghdad where you and I could walk through those neighborhoods, today."
To prove this, he spent a little time today strolling through an open-air market in Baghdad. And apparently, he's right. It is a safe place to walk, just as long as you're accompanied by a hundred armed soldiers, you have three Blackhawk helicopters and two Apache gunships nearby, and you're wearing a bulletproof vest.
Do we think this proves anything? About Iraq, I mean. I know it proves something about John McCain. I guess what it proves about Iraq is that we need to commit to staying there forever and sending enough troops and equipment so that anyone who needs to go buy a basket of strawberries is escorted by a hundred armed soldiers, three Blackhawk helicopters and two Apache gunships. Oh — and they'll need that bulletproof vest, too.
I seem to recall that back in the sixties when John Lindsay was Mayor of New York, he decided to try and dispel the "myth" that a person couldn't walk through Central Park at night without getting mugged. So he took a well-publicized stroll through that piece of real estate one evening, accompanied by about half the city's police force and a hundred reporters and camera crews. Amazingly, no one mugged him.
Less clearly, I remember that reports of crime elsewhere in town took a noticeable upswing that evening...which makes sense since all the cops were in the park, making sure no one tried to grab His Honor's billfold. It was also pointed out that the Honorable Mayor Lindsay was something like 6'4" tall and in great physical shape. Even had he been alone, he was not exactly most criminals' first choice when it comes to picking victims.
This was not the main reason that Lindsay's popularity in New York fell to what we now and forever will think of as George W. Bush levels, but it was a factor. Bet John McCain's little charade lowers his esteem a tad...though maybe not with the crowd he now seems to be trying desperately to win over.
Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are both off this week, which is a shame. What either of them could do with that news footage.
It's been a while since we mentioned the DVD release of WKRP in Cincinnati. As you may recall, there was a problem because the original show contained many "needle drops," that being a cute Show Biz term meaning that they played a record. Jaime J. Weinman has been studying this problem and has a report on what has actually been changed for the DVD. The answer is, sadly: "A lot."
Let me toss one caveat in here, which I think I mentioned before: It's very easy to presume that the villainy in this all is that the folks who own the music want "too much" for its inclusion. That may indeed be the case. It may also be the case that the releasing company thinks almost anything over fifty cents is "too much." From the outside, you just don't know. In fact, people who worked on the DVD and are familiar with its finances may even be arguing the point. I've been involved, usually as an interviewee or commentary track person, with more than a dozen DVD releases of old TV shows. In almost every case, I see the people assembling the DVD arguing — sometimes on a friendly basis, sometimes not — over whether they can afford to include certain extras or if the budget can be raised to cover them. Usually, it can't.
This is product and the way you make a profit in this business is to maximize sales and minimize costs. On a lot of these DVD sets, someone is hired to put the thing together — often, happily, someone who cares passionately about the material and about producing a DVD release that has everything included, fully restored and perfect, enhanced with every possible special feature. And then someone else has to make certain they don't spend so much that the project cannot possibly recoup and show a decent return. I don't know anyone who's produced a DVD release of old TV shows who won't, off the record or sometimes on, tell you how frustrating it was that they couldn't afford to do this or that.
Even more frustrating — for them and for us — is that at some levels in some companies, there seems to be a mindset that it's almost preferable to not make the DVD release as fine and complete as possible. By not doing so, you make it more feasible to put out another version of the same material a few years down the road, thereby tempting those who love the material to purchase it again. As I've said here many times, I think the whole premise of Home Video is a sick conspiracy to see how many times they can get me to buy Goldfinger. I'm so looking forward to the Blu-Ray release, which I think will make about fifteen, starting with the first Betamax version. That was the first of several that were literally flawed and incomplete from the first second. They cut off the opening note of The James Bond Theme and it wasn't, I think, until the second Laserdisc that it was fixed.
This practice of planning to put out a better version later is annoying above and beyond the monetary penalty that some of us will pay for being devoted fans of something. Not long ago, a home video company issuing cartoon shows on DVD asked for my aid in deciding what to include, how to locate certain missing materials and how to contact certain folks who worked on the shows and should be included in commentary tracks and interviews. I helped with all of this but they later decided not to produce any commentary tracks or interviews. "One of these days," I was told, "we'll do a 'platinum edition' and put in all that stuff." (Beware the term, "platinum edition." It probably denotes a higher-priced release of material you've already purchased...but one that includes something extra that compels you to buy it again. There will also probably not be any platinum in it.)
I pointed out to the folks who'd made this decision that they might consider that several people they might want to interview for the DVD were over eighty years of age. These people might not be available (or as lucid) if interviews are to be conducted a few years down the pike. But we're not going to interview them for the current release because someone thinks the DVD can sell enough without it and wants to save something for another release several years from now. And we're not going to interview them now and bank the material because the cost of that can't be charged to some current budget. So it isn't done...and four years from now, someone at the same home video company is going to call me and ask me a question that starts with the phrase, "Do you know anywhere we can find footage of...?"
I keep mentioning my pal Howie Morris on this site. Howie directed a couple of movies, one of which is out on DVD. There's no commentary track because no one ever had him record one. His other films will be out someday and they won't have director commentaries, either. Nor will many movies and shows he was in, including at least two dozen cartoon series I could name. In the years before we lost him, he was available to do this. If they'd been willing to pay him, as they sometimes are, great. Having been through many a divorce, he could have used the money. But he'd have done it for free, just to do it, just to share the history and anecdotes he knew.
True, "making of" documentaries and commentary tracks may only appeal to a limited section of the audience...but they seem to be cost-effective. In the case of collections of popular TV shows, the extras give fans of the show an extra reason to buy the collections instead of just watching or recording the show off Nick at Nite or purchasing bootlegs. Other alternatives will become more viable in the future so a company seeking to exploit a library in the home video marketplace will have an even greater reason to do special features such as commentary tracks.
Let me put this in simpler terms. I keep getting calls to appear on DVDs and do commentary tracks for releases of shows that I never worked on. I'm asked because I was a big fan of the material and am viewed by some as an expert. That's fine...but the main reason they're asking people like me is because they can't get enough (often, any) interviewees who actually worked on the shows in question and no one thought to record that material when those people were still alive and available. I'd much rather buy a DVD with them on it than one with someone like me. Who wouldn't?
You've probably heard about the tainted pet food that is now making many cats and dogs sick and even killing a tragic number of them. I hope you've been hearing about it because it hasn't gotten as much attention as it might have. One of the many downsides of focusing on tabloid-style stories like the autopsy on Anna Nicole Smith is that it gives shorter shrift to news stories that might actually save lives and prevent disasters and misery. Here's a link to one of many stories you might have missed because the headlines were the latest on Sanjaya Malakar.
Friday afternoon, a friend called in absolute hysterics, thinking she'd killed her beloved dogs by feeding them the unsafe food. At last report, the dogs were still alive but very sick, and the friend had emptied her bank account to pay vet bills. I directed her to this website where the company responsible seems to be willing to reimburse people for such expenses...but even if she does get compensated for that, how can you compensate her for the emotional assault? Very sad.
Then this morning, I awoke to a flurry of voice mail messages from my friend Carolyn. At 3 AM, she'd heard on the radio or read on the Internet — I forget which — that the Purina company has joined the recall ranks. As you may remember, I feed two or more stray cats, a couple of possums and God knows how many raccoons in My Backyard and I feed them two different varieties of dry Purina chow. Carolyn hopped on the Internet to determine if Purina has recalled either of those two products. If they had, she was prepared to hop on a bus at that hour and come over here to empty the overnight dish.
It turned out not to be necessary. All Purina has recalled is Alpo® Prime Cuts in Gravy, which is a wet dog food and not something I offer the nightly menagerie. Still, it's a scary thought. Glad we have the Internet to make instant checks on such matters. It conveys a lot of lies and trivia but boy, it sure comes in handy for the facts.
Here's a better video clip with Howard Morris...or at least, it's more like the Howie I knew because he's funny in it. Sid Caesar and Carl Reiner are funny in it, too. This runs a little more than eight minutes but I'll bet it makes you laugh...
May 1, 2007
