Thursday, May 17, 2007

Lubed Again!

KNBC Channel 4 here in Los Angeles has a reporter named Joel Grover who does something I like. Every so often, they send him out with hidden cameras to take a car to various mechanics and document the rip-offs. In his latest expedition, he went to ten outlets of the EZ Lube chain and six of them prescribed unnecessary repairs and/or charged him for repairs they didn't perform. What's interesting about this is that is the second time Glover has had this experience at EZ Lube outlets. In fact, at one, he encountered a manager who was one of the guys who swindled him the last time he did this kind of survey. Here's a link to a video report.

• Posted at 4:35 PM · LINK

Pseudo Sergio - Part 2

Again, let us review: Several of you alerted me to a drawing currently being sold on eBay and represented by its seller as an original sketch by Sergio Aragonés. It is not. It's a forgery and a pretty bad one. As explained here, I wrote to the seller and told him as much.

Now, here's the update. He wrote back to me and said...

You are entitled to your opinion. I stand behind each and every autograph and drawing from my collection. I acquired this and various other Mad drawings years ago while into my Mad phase. I have no doubt about the authenticity of this item or anything else I sell. I stand behind it with a 100% moneyback guarantee! I am not here to make enemies with you or anyone else but I am not going to pull any of my items because someone doesn't like them.

So now I've just sent the following to him...

It's me again, Mark Evanier, partner of Sergio Aragonés. Sergio says the drawing you're selling as one of his is a fake and I think he's going to notify eBay of this. He's also had me put up an announcement on his website at www.sergioaragones.com to beware of fake sketches on eBay. Do you still have no doubt about the authenticity of this item or anything else you sell?

I'll let you know what the guy says...but I suspect the auction will disappear and if I get a response at all, it'll be along the lines of, "My Goodness! For the first time in my many years as an autograph dealer, I've been hoodwinked by a fake!" This has been the result in the past when I've called sellers on forgeries...which I only do about half a percent of the time I see them.

This morning, the weblog for The Comics Journal took brief note of my little crusade here. I'd like to suggest that it would be a valuable service — for them or any news outlet that covers the comic and cartoon market — to at least follow up on this, if not to start some sort of Consumer Watchdog column or something. I'll gladly furnish any reporter with the contact info for the eBay vendor in this case. He's a major seller with a whole website of other allegedly authentic sketches and autographs. He claims in his e-mail to me to have "the world's largest autograph, cartoonist and fine art drawing collection in the world." (It must be big. It has a world on either end.)

But the point is that this is not a unique situation. This kind of thing goes on a lot with comic art and especially with animation cels. eBay polices their auctions to a limited extent but if someone offers a bogus "Charles Schulz" sketch — as happens quite often there — eBay doesn't notice that and couldn't verify it if they did. Generally, the worst that happens to the seller is that he cancels one auction. I don't think it would hurt for there to be a little more publicity and attention paid to this chicanery. Folks need to be reminded that the verified, authenticated Walt Disney sketch that comes with a money back guarantee from a reputable seller may have been drawn in the last few months.

• Posted at 10:35 AM · LINK

Odd Thoughts

Lots of e-mail this morning on the opening I linked to from The Odd Couple. Quite a few reminded me that when The Mary Tyler Moore Show was being first assembled, there was the worry at CBS not just that people would think Mary was a bad person for having been divorced but that they'd think she'd divorced Dick Van Dyke! Guess that's why a few years earlier, when Lucille Ball came back to CBS in her first sitcom since I Love Lucy, she played a widow. They didn't want people to think Lucy had divorced Desi Arnaz...which, of course, she had.

I don't think anyone has mentioned this in e-mail yet but someone will. It dawned on me that the reason they put that line in the Odd Couple intro about Felix wanting to return to his wife was that they were concerned America would think that Felix really, really liked the idea of living with another man. I seem to remember an article around the time that claimed that ABC was worried that viewers would think Oscar and Felix were light, as they say, in the loafers and that they were keeping an eye on scripts to make sure everyone knew that the roommates liked the ladies.

Also: Apparently, there were more episodes than I recalled in which Tony Randall expressed a yearning to return to his wife and in the last episode of the series, he did. That feels a bit contrived to me and I'll bet if they were doing that show today — and sooner or later, Paramount is bound to bring us The New, New Odd Couple — it would just be about two guys who were irrevocably divorced.

• Posted at 10:02 AM · LINK

Today's Video Link

Off and on here, I'm going to link to videos of openings I liked for TV shows. In some cases, I didn't like the show but I liked the opening.

This is the original opening for The Odd Couple with Jack Klugman and Tony Randall. The voiceover is done by Bill Woodson, a charming and witty man who has been doing commercials and announcing for decades. I always thought it was odd that the text makes a point of saying that though Felix's wife had thrown him out, he knew in his heart that one day he would return to her. Why did they say that?

First of all, is it even true? I don't recall any such sentiment on the part of Felix in the Neil Simon play, the movie based on it or the series. In the play and movie, the idea was that Felix had to accept the notion that his marriage was over and that he had to begin building a new life for himself. In the series, it seemed like the roommate situation was a permanent condition except for one episode here and there. So I'm wondering why they felt they had to say he'd return to the woman who'd thrown him out.

The same season that The Odd Couple debuted, The Mary Tyler Moore Show premiered on another network. As has been oft-reported, its writers originally intended that Mary be starting a new life following a divorce. The CBS folks objected, saying that America wouldn't like her; that despite the high separation rate in America, the nation still preferred to think of marriage as the natural state of all decent people. So Mary Richards became a woman who'd never married. Was the same concern at work over on ABC with The Odd Couple? Obviously, given the source material and premise, they couldn't say that Oscar and Felix hadn't been divorced. But it's easy to imagine a meeting in which concern is voiced in this direction and someone says as a compromise/concession, "Don't worry...we'll put something in the opening titles that says that even though Felix left his wife, they'll eventually get back together."

Garry Marshall, who was one of the producers, often tells the story of when they filmed this opening and other exterior shots around New York. They had a limousine to transport Klugman and Randall around and for them to wait in while shots were set up. Unfortunately, they only had the one limo and Klugman — as yet unaware of what it would do to his voice — was smoking constantly. Randall was a militant non-smoker and kept complaining that Klugman was rendering the interior of the car uninhabitable. This was early in the association and so Jack and Tony got their new partnership off to a fitting start by arguing incessantly. It was a good training ground for the series which opened like this...

• Posted at 2:41 AM · LINK