Thursday, October 25, 2007

Daffy Duck Soup

A lot of questions this morning about the Marx Brothers Cartoon Show I mentioned in an earlier post. Obviously, no such show was ever produced...but you might be amazed at the number of times it's been proposed and planned and led to pilot scripts and presentation art. I was once in a group of four other animation writers and the subject came up. All five of us, we discovered, had been approached at various times or even worked on various proposed projects featuring animated versions of the Brothers Marx. It's one of those ideas that always seem to be "in development" somewhere. In the eighties, that list also included shows about Michael Jackson, Elvira and — of all things — Wolfman Jack. I think one of the four thousand Wolfman Jack proposals actually got on the air briefly.

The last time I was approached about writing a Marx Brothers cartoon show, it was by a studio that had or thought they were about to get the rights to Harpo and Chico. A deal to include Groucho, whose likeness was controlled by a different wing of the family, had eluded these producers, though they thought it still might be obtainable. They wanted to know if I thought I could write a Marx Brothers show without him. The answer was no. Then they wanted to know: If you could write a Marx Brothers show without Groucho, would it be possible to write the pilot script so that we can show it to the Groucho People and they'll think it's wonderful and they'll want to give us the rights to him for a reasonable fee and then you can add him into that script?

Again, I told them no. But I added that I thought The Groucho People was a great idea for a show. Wouldn't you want to watch a cartoon show called The Groucho People? Better than that, wouldn't you want to be one of The Groucho People?

The first time I was approached about a Marx Brothers cartoon show, the producers had — or more likely, thought they could get — the rights to Groucho, Harpo and Chico. They asked me who they should get to supply the voice of Groucho. I told them there was only one choice: Dayton Allen. This was back in the early eighties when Mr. Allen was still alive. Dayton was, for those of you who don't know, a great comedian — a part of the old Steve Allen stock company — and he did a fair amount of cartoon voicing. He also did an uncanny Groucho. One time on the old I've Got A Secret game show, Groucho was the guest star. The panel was blindfolded and they had to guess what Groucho was doing as he answered their questions. What he was doing was sitting there, smoking a cigar while Dayton Allen answered the questions in his voice.

I told them that story and the producers said, "Great! We'll get Dayton Allen! Now, what about Chico?" I told them that the great cartoon voice actor, Paul Frees, did a killer Chico impression. The Vincent Price movie, The Abominable Dr. Phibes, had just come out and there was a place in it where Mr. Frees had dubbed in his wonderful Chico imitation. If they wanted to hear it, it was on the movie's soundtrack album.

"Terrific," they said. Whereupon one of them actually asked me, "Who could do Harpo?"

I thought the guy was kidding so I answered, "Marcel Marceau." When he wrote it down, I realized he wasn't kidding and that these people would never do a Marx Brothers show. Nor should they.

• Posted at 12:33 PM · LINK

Today's Political Thought

Testifying before Congress, Paul Wolfowitz famously said that the Iraq War would pay for itself. People have since mocked him for this but, come on. He was only off by 2.4 trillion dollars.

To grasp the magnitude of this bad bit of estimation, consider this. You or I could have gone before Congress in his stead. And when they asked us how much the War in Iraq was going to cost, we could have picked any number between one and about 4.7 trillion at random...and we would have been closer than Paul Wolfowitz. They later made this man president of the World Bank.

2.4 trillion is a lot but don't sweat it. It's not like we have anything better to do with the money.

• Posted at 2:37 AM · LINK

Because It's Never Too Soon To Begin Plugging A True Work Of Art

Feel free to copy this banner and to post it all over the web for the next two months. If it's too large for your weblog, don't worry. I will have others available here soon.

• Posted at 2:31 AM · LINK

Today's Video Link

Guess I should have expected it. I wrote about the Abbott & Costello cartoon show produced by Hanna and Barbera, and I got a lot of e-mails that said, more or less, "So what was the deal with those Laurel and Hardy cartoons they did?" The deal, as I understand it, was something that Larry Harmon — best known as the proprietor of Bozo the Clown — put together. He knew Stan Laurel and around 1961, made an arrangement with him for a cartoon based on these caricatures. News articles dated October of that year said that it would be a prime-time series on NBC and that Mr. Laurel would consult and contribute to storylines. (It is worth noting that this was one month after the first cartoon series produced for television, The Flintstones, debuted on ABC. At about the same time, Screen Gems — then the parent company of Hanna-Barbera — announced that a Marx Brothers cartoon show was in the works.)

There was a flurry of merchandising in anticipation of the Laurel & Hardy show...but no show. Apparently, NBC was not as committed to the project as the articles had suggested, and then there were some complications over the rights. The complications got worse when Laurel died in 1965 and there was some sort of claim on the rights by producer David Wolper. A partnership or compromise was brokered and in '66, the deal was set, not for network prime-time but for the syndicated children's market. There was only one crucial element missing: No animation studio. Harmon's, which had produced the Bozo the Clown cartoons, was no longer operative. So an arrangement was made with Hanna-Barbera to do the series.

Harmon himself supplied the voice of Stanley. Jim MacGeorge, who often impersonated Laurel in front of the camera, was engaged to voice Ollie. (Any time you see Chuck McCann playing Hardy in a sketch or commercial, it's usually Jim playing Laurel.) The usual Hanna-Barbera storymen and artists and supporting voice players were in place, and the cartoons varied wildly as to their quality and appropriateness for Laurel and Hardy. Four years earlier, H-B had produced a series of cartoons featuring two characters named Lippy the Lion and Hardy Har Har. It has been rumored that many of the scripts for the Laurel and Hardy films were either leftover Lippy & Hardy scripts or close remakes. There were also scripts in which Laurel and Hardy became super-heroes and some of these, it is said, were rewrites of scripts that had been written for an unproduced series about two clumsy crimefighters. Quality-wise, the Laurel & Hardy cartoons weren't much different from Lippy & Hardy, which of course is what was wrong with them.

Amazingly, that wasn't the last time Laurel and Hardy were animated by H-B. In 1972, the studio had this odd incarnation of the Scooby Doo franchise called The New Scooby Doo Movies. In this case, a "movie" was an hour long episode with an odd guest star or two. Among those who "met" Scooby, Shaggy and the gang were Don Knotts, The Three Stooges, Jonathan Winters, The Harlem Globetrotters, Sandy Duncan, Sonny and Cher, some other even odder selections...and Laurel and Hardy. The characters were redesigned a bit to fit in better with the Scooby style and again, Harmon and MacGeorge provided the voices. It was not Stan and Ollie's finest hour.

Here's the opening of a 1966 Laurel and Hardy cartoon...

More recently, Larry Harmon's company has repackaged the cartoons. Here's the opening they produced which combines clips from the old cartoons with a new theme song...

And while we're at it, here's three minutes of Laurel and Hardy guesting on The New Scooby Doo Movies. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

• Posted at 12:06 AM · LINK