Saturday, June 2, 2007

Sunday Funny

Salon is now running Berkeley Breathed's Opus comic strip as a weekly (Sunday) feature. Here we have the first installment. And here we have an interview with Mr. Breathed.

• Posted at 11:06 PM · LINK

Saturday Con Blogging

Hello from Super-Con in San Jose, where I spent the day Super-Conning, which mostly meant sitting next to Mark Waid in the exhibit hall and signing whatever comics he didn't write. There were one or two of them. Mark and I did a panel together and I also moderated a panel of Playboy cartoonists that consisted of Ray Lago, Russ Heath, Doug Sneyd and Dean Yeagle.

Nice to be at a comic book convention that's almost wholly devoted to comic books. There's nothing wrong with all the multimedia content that one now generally finds at something that is ostensibly a "comic book convention" but I'm happy the old-fashioned kind still exists.

This is my first time ever in San Jose and as with too many cities where I've attended conventions, I will go home having seen almost none of the town. When people ask me if I've ever been to, say, Houston, I'm not sure what to say. I was physically in Houston once for a convention...but all I saw of the place was the airport, a Marriott, a few restaurants near the Marriott and the freeways between the airport and the Marriott. Is that being in Houston? I guess so but if I say that, the next question is always either, "How'd you like it?" or they tick off a list of great places to visit that I didn't visit and ask me which ones I went to. (Answer: None.) This is true of perhaps a dozen other locales. I should try to stay an extra day or three in these cities and at least walk around but it never quite works with my schedule.

Years ago, there was some convention that kept inviting me and the dates never worked out. But once when I was considering making them work, I told the con organizer that I might want to stay an extra day or two and see some of the area. He said, "We were hoping you would. The day after the con, we're taking all our guests white-water rafting." If anyone ever asks you what activity you're least likely to catch Evanier doing, white-water rafting would be right up there between hang-gliding off Kilimanjaro and modern interpretative dance. I didn't even want to explain to the others why I wouldn't be joining them for the white-water rafting so I passed on that convention.

Some time later, one of the fellows who worked on that con was telling me it was great, that everyone had a good time, etc., and that I should have come and gone white-water rafting with them after the event. I said, "I notice you didn't take your guests white-water rafting before the convention," and he said, "Of course not. After the con, it's not as big a deal if someone gets hurt."

• Posted at 7:27 PM · LINK

From the E-Mailbag...

Dave Mackey, who probably qualifies as the world's ranking expert on Hal Seeger cartoons, if only by default, writes...

If you think the merchandising for The Milton The Monster Show was paltry, consider this: only one licensed item ever appeared for Batfink during his heyday — a Halloween costume.

I guess Seeger was too busy making cartoons to care about the licensing and such items that appeared for Milton were at the behest of ABC, who wanted to make their toy-maker sponsors happy with tie-in products.

Batfink was always a syndicated property. It was initially distributed by Screen Gems, though no "S-from-hell" (as the logo fanboys call it) ever appeared on the film prints.

I never met Hal Seeger, nor do I know a lot about him and his operation. However, I suspect he desperately wanted to generate merchandising of his characters and couldn't. You don't spend the bucks to make walk-around costumes of your characters unless you're trying hard to tell the toy industry, "Hey, how about us?" Matter of fact, at the Licensing Show in New York each year, it's almost a joke how these companies with properties that no one's ever heard of will parade around people dressed as their characters to try and drum up some interest.

Will Harris has a more important point to make about Milton the Monster...

All this talk of Milton the Monster and no Amazon link to the Shout! Factory set of the show that was released earlier this year.? Surely the massaging of people's memories would result in a few sales.and, therefore, a few cents here and there for newsfromme!

Gasp! What a horrible omission! Here's just such a link...and while you're at it, you can also pre-order the forthcoming Batfink DVD via this link. Thanks, Will. Can't imagine how I made such a foolish error.

• Posted at 9:27 AM · LINK

Today's Video Link

This week when Earl Kress and I were on Stu's Show (as discussed here), one of the many animation-related subjects that was touched upon was Hal Seeger. Mr. Seeger was a producer of TV cartoons from the late sixties through the early seventies, though he didn't produce a lot. On Stu's Show, we said that one of Seeger's shows, Batfink, was on NBC. This was probably wrong. It may have aired on some NBC stations but it was actually a syndicated show.

Hal Seeger Productions had but one network series. It was called Milton the Monster and it debuted on ABC in October of 1965. At the time, The Addams Family and The Munsters were hot shows in prime time and so was Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C. So someone, perhaps Mr. Seeger himself, got the idea to do a show about a big, lovable Frankenstein-type monster who talked a lot like Gomer. Bob McFadden supplied the voice and the cast also included Dayton Allen and Larry Best. It was a fairly clever show, with scripts by Jack Mercer, Kin Platt and Woody Kling.

Each half hour of Milton the Monster featured adventures of Milton and his monstrous supporting players, plus various other series that appeared in rotation. The two main ones were Fearless Fly, an insect super-hero, and a character named Stuffy Derma, who was a hobo who'd inherited millions of dollars. As a kid, I could never quite make much sense of Stuffy Derma, starting with his name. (A Stuffed Derma is a rare delicatessen specialty — roasted chicken intestines stuffed with matzo meal and something like chicken fat. But I didn't know that then and I'd be surprised if most of you ever knew that. Or would ever eat one.)

We have two clips here. One is the opening of The Milton the Monster Show. Watch it and then I'll meet you on the other side to introduce the second clip...

Hello on the other side. This next clip is apparently a home movie from Hal Seeger's collection. This is Hal (I think that's him) taking two people to the New York Toy Fair...two people dressed in walkaround costumes as Milton the Monster and Fearless Fly. This was presumably something he invested in to try and drum up some licensing interest in his characters; to perhaps get toy manufacturers to buy the rights to put out Milton the Monster dolls and Fearless Fly action figures...or something. I don't know of enough Milton merchandise to think that this campaign was too successful. There was a Milton board game from (appropriately) Milton-Bradley, a plastic frame-tray puzzle, one issue of a Gold Key comic book...and not a whole lot more.

The title card on this clip, which runs two and a half minutes, says it's from 1968 but I doubt that. Milton the Monster was out of production and off ABC by then, and pretty much dead as a viable property. All the merchandise I mentioned above came out in 1966 and this footage is probably from early that year. Here it is...

• Posted at 12:45 AM · LINK

Kirby Talk

Over on his weblog, Alex Ness asks a bunch of people (I'm one of them) about the legacy of Jack Kirby.

• Posted at 12:38 AM · LINK

June 3, 2007 • Current • June 1, 2007