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.
I suppose we'll see it said again in his obits even though his syndicate no longer seems to be making that claim. If you're interested in the math, they do say that B.C. is in "more than 1,300 newspapers." In the custom of the newspaper business, dailies and Sundays are counted as two separate papers...so if The Picayune Post-Dispatch runs the strip seven days a week, it's said to be in two newspapers. If that same paper also carries The Wizard of Id, that's two more papers — four total, though you and I would say Hart's work is only appearing in one newspaper. Furthermore, the entire circulation of that paper would be quadrupled and called Hart's readership. So if in this example, they sell 10,000 copies of The Picayune Post-Dispatch per day, it would be claimed that Johnny Hart had a readership of 40,000 people even though the paper was never in that many hands and many of the people who did read it never turned to the funnies page.
Creators Syndicate also says that The Wizard of Id is in "more than 1,000 papers." Many of those are the same papers that carry B.C. but even if we count them as separate, Mr. Hart's work does not appear in more newspapers than Garfield, Blondie or the Peanuts reprints, all of which are in more than 2,600 newspapers.
I very much admired Mr. Hart's cartooning and his sense of humor but I have to say that he continually disappointed me. Even with a crew of assistants, he often seemed to put minimal effort into B.C., reusing the same artwork over and over with new captions. I was baffled by that because in every interview for years, he went on and on about how many hours he put in and how it was always necessary for him to work weekends, and it looked like he was spending about four hours a week on average drawing. My one in-person encounter with the man, back in his drinking days, was extremely unpleasant but I think I liked him less when he became religious in a big way and began loading his strips down with that breed of intolerance. I have nothing against religion in comics but the intolerance part was sometimes hard to tolerate.
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 used to 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. I hope he's finding Heaven all that he ever wanted it to be...though I'll bet he's surprised that all sorts of people he said could never get in because they were of the wrong faith are waiting there to welcome him.
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...
April 9, 2007
