This is the third of an as-yet-undetermined number of parts. I'm serializing the tale of how Scrappy Doo became a part of the Scooby Doo cartoon show and I'm owning up as to what I had to do with that. If you haven't read Part One or Part Two you might want to do so before venturing into what follows, which is our third chapter...
Everyone in sync? Good. So I'd just written the script which convinced ABC to pick Scooby Doo up for its ninety-eighth (or whatever number it was) season. I was asked to story-edit the show but I'd accepted a job to serve as head writer for a couple of variety specials for Sid and Marty Krofft and had to pass. I still, however, had to do another rewrite on my Scooby script to address a few comments that folks at Hanna-Barbera and ABC had before it could be produced...and you'd think that would be simple. I mean, they all loved the script and it had gotten the show renewed for another year. So how many problems could it have?
As it turned out, plenty. Ordinarily, when you wrote a script for H-B, you got "notes" from one person at the network and maybe (and maybe not) someone at Hanna-Barbera. But this was a pilot, even if they'd denied as much when negotiating my fee. A pilot pays more because more people have input and they're always more concerned about teensy details. So I got notes. Boy, did I get notes. Johannes Brahms once wrote a piece called Ein Deutsches Requiem that runs seventy minutes in performance. It had fewer notes than I got.
Joe Barbera read the script, told me it was wonderful but he gave me notes in such volume that I found myself wondering how many I'd get if he hadn't liked it. The person who ran the studio's day to day operations gave me a set of notes that topped Barbera's in breadth and volume. The head of the story department gave me a pile of comments...and then there was a set from the fellow who was line-producing the Scooby Doo show and yet another from the team of writers who'd signed on to story-edit the series after I passed. That's five sets of comments and we hadn't even gotten to the network where the real power was wielded.
I got three sets from ABC — from different programming execs there — and another from the Standards and Practices Lady. I ignored the S&P Lady because...well, I always ignored her notes. But even then, I had eight sets and they could not be humanly reconciled. One set said, "Let's lose the joke at the top of page 19." Another said, "Love the joke at the top of page 19." Yet another said, "Hey, could we make that joke on the top of page 19 a running gag and do it a few more times?" Being a mystery, the story involved three suspects and one set of notes suggested switching whodunnit from Suspect A to Suspect B, while another set of notes thought all clues pointed to C. It went that way all through all the notes. I suspected the eight of them had gotten together and divided up my script in a devious plot to drive me insane. ("Okay, you'll hate the scene in the cave and I'll love it and Joe will tell him to change it to a Chinese restaurant...")
For maybe a week, I struggled with rounding off this odd trapezium my script had become. Finally, I went to the person I just mentioned who ran operations, laid eight sets of notes on this person's desk and said, "Pick any two." I was immediately told, "Throw out everyone's comments except Mr. B's" — "B" for Barbera — "and Squire's." Squire Rushnell was the Vice-President of Children's Programming at ABC, the guy who everyone said loved it when the new characters were inspired by Warner Brothers cartoons and voiced by Mel Blanc.
I went home, did a rewrite to please Joe and Squire, and the next day the script was marked "final."
A week or so later, I was in the Hanna-Barbera Xerox Room and I happened to see my script being mass-copied for distribution. I peeked to see if any rewrites had been done since it had left me and there didn't seem to be any. In fact, the script hadn't even been retyped. They were copying the printout I'd handed in, the one from my word processor.
But someone had typed a new title page and instead of saying, "Written by Mark Evanier," it now had my name plus that of another writer in the studio. In fact, the other writer was the son of an executive at the Hanna-Barbera studio.
Three minutes later, title page in hand, I barged into the office of that executive and you can pretty much imagine what I said. He explained that his son had been among the many writers who'd worked on Scrappy Doo before I'd been hired. He felt his son deserved some credit for all the hours he'd put in on the project. I said, "He may have put in many hours but he didn't put them in on this script. I wrote this script and you put his name on my work." The exec apologized and ordered the title pages reprinted...and I had yet another example to cite of how writers get abused when they work on projects not covered by the Writers Guild of America. That kind of thing would never have happened on a WGA show...or if it had, the Guild would have handled it in a jif.
Okay, so we had a script. Now, Scrappy needed a voice. In our next installment, whenever it appears, I'll tell you about the actor they selected as being the perfect voice of Scrappy Doo. And then I'll tell you about the actor they replaced him with. And the actor they replaced the second guy with. And the one who replaced the third guy. And the fourth guy and the fifth guy and so on. Scrappy's still quite some distance from being born.
If anyone ever asks you to explain what "timing" means in comedy, don't waste your time with words. Just show them this clip of Jack Benny and Mel Blanc. The other day, I sat for a video interview that will appear on the fifth DVD volume of The Golden Age of Looney Tunes and I made the point that Mel wasn't just a guy with a lot of voices. He was a very gifted, skilled comic actor. You had to be to play opposite Benny, Abbott and Costello, Bob Hope and all the other people he worked with on radio.
Even the bit in which he played the little Mexican guy opposite Benny, of which this is an abridged version, demonstrates superior acting. He doesn't have a wide variety of dialogue but what makes the bit work is not just Benny's expressions but Blanc's lack of any. He is perfectly deadpan throughout, making his character (the pun is unavoidable) an absolute blank and directing all attention to Mr. Benny. The routine wouldn't have been funny if you saw the slightest smirk or sign of life on Mel's part. As you'll see, Blanc knew how to do that. He didn't know how to play the bass but he knew how to get a laugh...
Here's an odd one. This article in Newsday about newspaper strips is apparently a current article. It makes reference to The Phantom being drawn by Paul Ryan, Graham Nolan and Tony DePaul. That's almost the current crew. Nolan only left it a few months ago, leaving it to Ryan and DePaul. But elsewhere in the same article, we learn...
When [Chic] Young died in 1973, one of his assistants, Alex Raymond, took over the strip. The current artist, Stan Drake, hasn't messed with the success that has given Blondie one of the largest circulations in comic land.
Alex Raymond, of course, never drew Blondie. His brother Jim ghosted it for a decade or two before Young passed away and the name of Jim Raymond began appearing on it. Jim Raymond died in 1981. Stan Drake, who began drawing the strip a few years before that, died in 1997 and was succeeded on Blondie by Mike Gersher, Dennis LeBrun and the current artist, John Marshall. And through most of this, Chic Young's son Dean has been credited as its writer. So the article's wrong about Blondie. Let's see what it has to say about the Archie newspaper strip...
Montana died in 1975, and the Riverdale High gang is kept alive today by chief illustrator Dan DeCarlo.
Not only is Dan DeCarlo not keeping it alive today but sadly, no one's keeping Dan DeCarlo alive today. He stopped drawing that strip in the early nineties and died in 2001. These days, the strip is done by (and clearly signed by) Craig Boldman and Henry Scarpelli. Meanwhile, the article tells us this about the Dick Tracy strip...
Chester Gould retired in 1977, and the strip passed on to Dick Locher, who has kept it going in successful syndication.
That's not exactly wrong except insofar as it implies that Locher followed Gould on the strip. Actually, writer Max Collins and Gould assistant Rick Fletcher took it over for quite some time. The same kind of omission is present in what the article has to say about the Brenda Starr strip...
[Dale] Messick retired and was succeeded by artist Ramona Fradon and writer Mary Schmick.
True...but Ramona stopped drawing it in 1995 and June Brigman is the current artist, working with Mary Schmich, who spells her name that way. Which brings us to what the article has to say about Mary Worth...
Mary continues to dispense advice under the auspices of writer John Saunders and artist Bill Ziegler.
John Saunders died in 2004. Bill Zeigler (that's how he spelled it) died in 1990. Karen Moy has been writing it since Saunders died and Joe Giella has been drawing it since the guy who did it briefly after Zeigler left.
So, uh, what happened with this article? This is all very easy information to obtain. Just Googling the name of any of those strips will tell you in three seconds who's currently doing them. So my first assumption was that someone had taken an old article and passed it off as current. But the Phantom information is almost current. Why would someone update that and not update the rest of it?
Anyway, I just phoned Newsday and got hold of Bill McTernan, the author of the piece. He apparently wrote it recently and was unaware there was anything wrong with it. He said he'd gotten the information out of a "three volume comic encyclopedia" in the Newsday library. I told him some of the errors and said, "Well, I think you've got a big correction to write" and said I'd e-mail him a link to the item I was posting. Let's see what happens.
May 5, 2007
