The other day here, I told about two guys who I spotted in a local supermarket, denuding the shelves of every kind of solid chocolate they could find. I had no idea why they were doing such a thing and neither did the employees of the market. I appealed to you here for theories and you folks supplied many...
Nick Varga wrote, "My thought on the chocolate puzzle is the it might be something like Dinner: Impossible from the Food Network. D.I. is a show where the chef needs to put together a unique gourmet menu with limited time and resources. But they would've had cameras around filming them, or at least to catch them coming out of the store with all that high-carb stuff.
Dave Lowe says, "My gut feeling is they might be some P.A.s or prop people buying chocolate for some gag or set decor. I know in my work, I've had to do similar and felt the odd stares from fellow shoppers. Case in point, years ago I worked on a Nickelodeon game show and would have to clean grocery stores out of whipped cream for pie fights or apple sauce and green food coloring for "slime" making.
Bryan, who asks that his last name not be used, suggests, "The only thing I can think of that would have those guys buying up chocolate is that I've heard that (some of) the candy industry is wanting to change the formulation of the stuff. If that were about to happen, maybe these guys are planning to hoard the old stuff and eBay it.
Jim Guida just asks, "Why wouldn't someone buy that much chocolate?" Good point, Jim.
Patrick Shaughnessy thinks, "They were stoned." And Alex Ness had much the same idea: "They were hippies who were planning to smoke much dope and needed to acquire predope munchie material."
Nat Gertler points out, "When this has happened in the past, this has ended up with (a) the purchaser being investigated for terrorism or (b) the purchaser getting a golden ticket, but still being beaten out by Charlie and his Grandpa for the real prize, inheriting the factory, oompa-loompas and all."
Edward Douglas also went the Wonka way with it: "I thought it would be pretty obvious that those guys were planning a trip down to Loompaland where they'll be living like kings for the rest of their natural lives."
Joe Frank's thought is that, and I quote: "Maybe they're trying to get into the Guinness Book of World Records under the Biggest Zit category."
Someone named Frank theorizes, "My guess it's for a college/frat/charity Halloween party for kids." And Buzz Dixon offers, "My guess would be a college fraternity initiation prank" while Michael Schlesinger has two guesses — "College initiation ritual or really deranged scavenger hunt."
Well, your guesses are as good as mine...better, actually, since I don't really have one. But there were no cameras in evidence and the guys didn't look like dopers. Then again, neither have most of the dopers I've known. I will add one more piece to the puzzle, though: Until one e-mailer mentioned it, I forgot that we're approaching Halloween...and one of the reasons I didn't figure that into the possibilities is that when I saw the guys' carts, I didn't see any Halloween bags of candy. Maybe I missed them but I'm thinking they hadn't grabbed up the big bags of miniature Hershey bars that were for sale there in Halloween packaging. Maybe, as Ellery Queen would say, that's a clue.
Here's an article about Milton Caniff's work and an upcoming exhibit thereof. The piece seems to suggest that the Steve Canyon strip lost popularity near the end because it was a military strip and the nation was turning against the Vietnam War. I don't think I'd draw that connection so directly or fervently. All adventure strips, including those that in no way reflected the war, were losing popularity then at about the same rate. In addition, Steve Canyon was in an awful lot of newspapers that, through no fault of Caniff's, went out of business.
And there was a third reason that I suspect mattered more than Caniff's politics. It's that his strip, the last decade or so, wasn't all that wonderful. Al Capp had the same problem with Li'l Abner. It wasn't a very good strip near the end and while Capp, perhaps understandably, preferred to blame other factors...well, just read those last few years some time and see if he wasn't coasting on his rep. (The shrinking size of all strips was yet another problem.)
Caniff had simply burned out on his own strip by his last decade. Dick Rockwell was doing most of the art and he was getting old and not doing great work, either. Milton didn't seem to know what to do with Steve Canyon, as witness the many silly "Steve is dreaming" storylines that imagined the character in other time periods. To the extent Vietnam damaged the strip, it was because Caniff didn't know what to do about that war in his continuity and couldn't come up with an interesting alternative. He was a brilliant man and a brilliant artist, and when he was at his best, he was better than just about anybody. But his best wasn't those last ten years. It was all of Terry and the Pirates and then about the first two decades of Steve Canyon.
Yesterday, we favored you with the opening to the Beetle Bailey cartoons that were produced for TV in the early sixties. Here's the opening of the Snuffy Smith cartoons that were produced by the same company at the same time. That's Paul Frees you'll hear providing the voice of the bodacious Mr. Smith...and if you look fast, you'll notice the name of the late Dennis Marks listed as writer.
Dave Mackey informs me that some of the Beetle Bailey cartoons weren't done by the Paramount Studio but by Gerry Ray's crew in the United Kingdom — the same outfit that did the Beatles cartoons and also worked on the Yellow Submarine feature. He adds...
I wouldn't call it "the remnants" of Paramount, though, because there was still a theatrical release schedule to fill in addition to these TV cartoons (starting with the new Popeye series in 1960), and everyone was working harder than normal to get all these cartoons out. IMHO, this grueling schedule may have contributed to Seymour Kneitel's weakening heart condition and subsequent death in 1964.
For some reason, all these cartoons — including the Krazy Kats (mostly Gene Deitch, with some Jack Kinney episodes and two made at Paramount) and the Snuffy Smiths (all Paramount) made concurrently, were recorded in Hollywood (which explains Morris, Melvin, Frees, etc.), and more of an effort was made to have more traditional sitcom-type writers on staff rather than just relying on the Paramount storymen (by that time, pretty much Burton Goodman, Jack Mercer and Howard Post). Many of the Krazys had been written by Eli Bauer, who worked quite often with Gene Deitch and his alternate director, Al Kouzel. There were even a few Beetle Baileys written by Morris and Melvin! Was Al Brodax supervising the stories from Hollywood? Who was running the recording sessions? I'd be interested in knowing how that worked.
Unfortunately, when I asked Howie Morris some of these questions, he had no memory of the show other than that he recalled getting hired for Beetle Bailey and recommending Allan Melvin. (Howie was teamed with Allan on Magilla Gorilla, Atom Ant and a few other Hanna-Barbera projects and they were good friends.) The writers seem to have come from both coasts but primarily from the East, and I have no idea why they did that or why the voices were done out here. Brodax was based in New York as far as I know.
Here's the opening to Snuffy Smith. And I'll just add that if I'd been casting these shows, Howie would have played Snuffy, probably sounding a lot like Ernest T. Bass.
October 9, 2007
