A lot of filmmakers complain that distribution is a mug's game; that the system is so controlled by a small group of corporations that independent efforts are at a disadvantage. That's true but as Bob Elisberg notes over on The Huffington Post, some producers — like producer-writer-director Brendan Foley — are finding new ways to get their wares to audiences. (In the interest of Full Disclosure, Bob notes that Brendan is a friend of his. So I guess I should note that Bob and Brendan are both friends of mine. You don't catch Robert Novak being this honest.)
One thing that may be educational about the Spector trial, or at least worthy of discussion is this: We who sometimes follow trials from afar via news coverage often see a very different trial than the jurors in the courtroom. Logically, we know this, of course. The jurors sit there every day for six or seven hours a day, sometimes for months. The collective time I spent following the Spector trial probably comes to less than two hours and a lot of that was reading reporters' descriptions of what was said, not seeing and hearing the actual witnesses.
Still, we like to think that's enough; that we can formulate an opinion that is almost as valid as the jurors'...and I'm not saying we can't. Juries can be wrong, which is why verdicts are sometimes overturned on appeal or proven erroneous by DNA testing. The two juries that sat in judgment of O.J. Simpson obviously saw very different trials with different witnesses, different rules of evidence, different lawyers arguing, differerent standards of proof, etc. On the larger issue of whether Simpson hacked two people to death, one jury got it as wrong as wrong can be.
The Spector jury's deadlocked 7-5. We don't know which way but even if it's seven for conviction, it's stunning that nearly half of the
jury thinks he didn't do it.
Or do they? Is it maybe that they think he did point the gun at her but that its discharge was enough of an accident that it doesn't rise to the level of second-degree murder? Perhaps they'd have voted to convict on a slightly-lesser charge...and perhaps, based on what the judge seemed to be saying a few minutes ago, they'll get that chance.
Or did at least five jurors buy into the idea, absurd as it may sound to us, that Lana Clarkson decided a visit to a stranger's home in the wee, small hours of the morn was a dandy opportunity for suicide? Seems absurd to me but so does a deadlocked jury in this case.
I'm not expecting anyone to answer any of this, and I supposed we'll know soon exactly what this deadlock is all about. Still, it and some other surprising verdicts we've seen, have to make you wonder. Maybe we don't know as much about these cases as we think we know. Or maybe it's the juries that don't know.
Message before last, I gave you an e-mail address for mail to Groo the Wanderer. For some reason, I'm having tech problems with this address so I just changed it to one that should work. If you sent me an e-mail in the last two hours or so, it probably bounced so please try again with the new address. Yeesh. I guess if everything worked properly, it wouldn't be Groo.
My longtime buddy Scott Shaw! has this wonderful slide show he does at comic conventions. It's called Oddball Comics and for it, Scott digs up comic books so weird that even I don't know about some of them. Each week on his website, he spotlights one of them and this week, he has up Kit Karter, a Dell book I'd neither seen nor heard of. It's a teen-type comic involving go-karts and it was written and drawn by Dave Berg, who did the "Lighter Side" feature for hundreds of years in MAD Magazine. (The caricature at above left is of Mr. Berg and it's by his fellow MAD artist, Don "hinged feet" Martin.) Go take a look-see. Great stuff.
As I've mentioned here more times than the news deserves, we just released the first issue of Groo the Wanderer in a long time and there's a mini-series coming shortly. The issue just released doesn't contain a letter column but the mini-series will. If you'd like to submit something and maybe get it printed in an upcoming issue, here's the address...
We will not be responsible for any damage done to your reputation by the world finding out that you read Groo.
P.S. The above e-mail address has been encoded by an encoder that encodes e-mail addresses. We do this so that little spiders that crawl the Internet, searching for e-mail addresses to which they can direct ads for penis enlarging pills, won't find our e-mail address. If your browser cannot read the encoded e-mail address and you want to write to it, do the following. Type "groo" and then type one of those little "at" signs you never used much before the Internet was invented. Then type the domain name, which is "povonline.com" and you have it. Easy!
In 1964, Hanna-Barbera produced two cartoon series for the Ideal Toy folks. One was The Magilla Gorilla Show and each half-hour featured a cartoon of Magilla, a cartoon of Ricochet Rabbit and a cartoon of Punkin Puss & Mushmouse. The other series was...well, there's some argument as to what it was called. I remember it always being called The Peter Potamus Show. My friend Earl Kress says it was originally titled Peter Potamus and his Magic Balloon and that it was later changed to The Peter Potamus Show. Whatever it was called, each 30-minute episode featured a cartoon of Peter Potamus, a cartoon of The Goofy Guards and a cartoon of Breezly & Sneezly, who were a polar bear and a seal.
Okay, you got all that? This is going to get complicated.
Ideal Toys was going to place the shows on various local stations around the country. Because different kinds of deals would be made here and there, Ideal asked H-B to format the shows with a minute that could be dropped out. In some cities, it might be necessary to offer the local station an extra minute of commercial time and Ideal wanted the shows constructed so that was easy to do. Hanna-Barbera was pleased to do this since it meant that one minute of animation in every episode would be a rerun every week. So they produced two little "curtain call" minutes, one for each series. In each, all the heroes in the show would come out and dance around and say goodbye...and this minute could run or not, depending on the needs of the local broadcaster. When Magilla Gorilla and Peter Potamus debuted in Los Angeles, the "curtain call" minute in each was aired each week and it was, in some ways, a highlight. Each featured a catchy little tune and better than your average H-B animation.
The shows ran in syndication until 1965 when the Ideal deal expired. Soon after, Hanna-Barbera sold the shows (all reruns) to ABC to run on Saturday morning. For reasons unknown though, they decided to switch two segments: Ricochet Rabbit would move from The Magilla Gorilla Show to what was now definitely called The Peter Potamus Show. The Breezly & Sneezly cartoons would move from Peter's show to Magilla's. This meant that some changes had to be made. The opening to The Magilla Gorilla Show had Ricochet and his sidekick Droopalong in it so it would have to be reanimated to replace them with Breezly and Sneezly. The opening to The Peter Potamus Show didn't have any other characters in it so it could remain unchanged.
Then the "curtain calls" in both shows had to be redone to change around the characters. The one on Magilla's show was just a matter of animation changes...but on the Potamus program, not only did the animation have to change but the song did, too.
As the Peter Potamus "curtain call" was originally animated, there was a point where Sneezly, being a seal, was balancing Peter on his nose. They took out Sneezly and had Ricochet Rabbit just balance Mr. Potamus on his head. In fact, everywhere Sneezly appeared, they redrew him into Ricochet, and wherever Breezly Bear appeared, they redrew him into Droopalong.
All well and good...but Breezly Bear had also been mentioned in the song and to save a few bucks, H-B decided not to bring in singers and redo the whole tune. So what they did instead was to dub in the voices of some men yelling "Ricochet." They couldn't say "Ricochet Rabbit" because it had to be the same number of syllables as "Breezly Bear."
Our clip today is the second version of the "curtain call" from the Peter Potamus Show. Breezly and Sneezly are out. Ricochet and Droopalong are in...and you'll hear the men yelling Ricochet's name to drown out "Breezly Bear." It's actually a nice little spot if you ignore the patch job on the audio track.
September 19, 2007
