Thursday, October 2, 2008

One More...

Missed this but just caught it in a replay. Palin said...

I do respect your years in the Senate but I think the American people are craving something new and different.

...and so they'll vote for a guy who's older than you?

• Posted at 8:37 PM · LINK

Watching the Debate

I'm going to put any comments under this one item. So if you're checking in during the debate, keep refreshing for the latest...

6:05 — Well, they both dodged the first question. It was about the best and worst of Washington, not what your running mate has contributed.

6:10 — Sorry, Sarah. No one's going to buy that when McCain said "the fundamentals of our economy are strong," he meant, "U.S. workers are great!"

6:12 — If you were debating and I was your speechwriter, I could have anticipated these questions and written you an answer you could have memorized.

6:20 — Biden won the exchange about health plans...but Palin ain't doing badly. Gee, I wish they could each talk a little longer.

6:30 — Biden's repeating himself. Not a good tactic. He's also talking like John Moschitta, trying to get everything in. But Palin seems to think she can convince America that John McCain's the guy to regulate business. I can't imagine too many people buying that. And that line about not giving tax breaks to oil companies is going to be flagged in a lot of fact checks. They're proposing a tax break for all big companies, Exxon included.

6:35 — Half an hour in, I haven't heard anything that would sound silly coming out of the mouth of Tina Fey.

6:40 — I think Gwen Ifill's questions are predictable and dull. But no one can accuse her of favoring one candidate over the other.

6:45 — Biden could have done a much better job explaining how Obama didn't vote to not fund the troops.

6:47 — If you're playing a drinking game where you take a shot every time someone says the word "fundamental," you'll be dead by 7:10.

6:50 — Where was this Sarah Palin in the Katie Couric and Charlie Gibson interviews? I don't think she's doing Obama/Biden any damage but she's not giving the world a lot of cringe-worthy YouTube moments.

6:59 — Okay, Palin's little speech about how "change is coming" is the Palin that folks are laughing at. The reason her side is losing is because Obama is the change candidate. And no one believes we're not killing civilians in Iraq. She loses points for that one.

7:00 — Biden's too deep into some of the details...and he keeps saying, "I shouldn't say..." But really, it's impossible to discuss Pakistan and Afghanistan in 90-second chunks.

7:05 — Isn't the NATO commander named McKiernan? She keeps calling him McClellan.

7:08 — Palin's not going to convince America that John McCain has been consistent in his positions and Obama hasn't been. And what's this line I keep hearing about how McCain knows how to win wars? Which was the war that John McCain won?

7:10 — Biden's line about polling the folks at Home Depot about the economy was just as vapid as Palin's about asking people at a soccer game.

7:15 — I think Biden won the "what would you do as vice-president?" exchange handily. He'd actually participate and her answer was barely coherent.

7:21 — Is there a candidate in this election who hasn't made a speech that involved sitting around the kitchen table and discussing problems with your family?

7:28 — Palin's using a lot of the same lines of attack that have put her ticket into, at the moment, a losing position. That line about how she prefers to speak to the American people without the "filter" is silly, coming from someone who's been hiding out from the press. There are plenty of media venues that would gladly interview you on live TV, governor.

7:32 — Biden's closing statement wasn't bad. I get the feeling a lot of America is disappointed that no one's pants fell down. I'd rate it as close to a draw...but I thought that last time and Obama did about as well as anyone ever could. I don't think Palin's going to fare well in the fact checks but she might do well in polling, with viewers saying that she wasn't the bimbo they were expecting.

7:36 — Poor Gwen Ifill. Everyone's up on stage chatting and being friendly...and because of her broken ankle, she's still sitting down in the moderator chair, all alone. To the extent that her job was to knock these folks off their scripts and get them to say something new, I don't think Ifill did very well. But maybe she didn't think that was her job.

7:38 — Ah, someone noticed and now everyone's going down to say hello to Ifill. That's nice. I hope someone thanks her for the softballs.

7:44 — Palin did well...not as well as Pat Buchanan's now trying to convince people on MSNBC but she did a good job. The problem was that she was selling all the same talking points that America has already heard about McCain and which haven't sold very well to date. I don't think the voters who are leaning Obama are now going to go, "Oh, McCain is the candidate of change!" People who want the war to end are not going to decide McCain is the guy to make that happen. She said a few rambling, baffling things but overall, her problem is that people aren't buying what she's selling.

Then again, I called the last one wrong. So don't go by me.

• Posted at 6:07 PM · LINK

Video Me

As I mentioned, last Sunday I was at the West Hollywood Book Fair. There, the Internet talk show, Comics on Comics, recorded an episode/podcast with a panel of fun folks, one of them me, talking about comics. It runs about 43 minutes and you can watch it at this website. I talk about Jack Kirby for a while and about some of the more obscure crannies of my career.

• Posted at 4:35 PM · LINK

Thursday Afternoon

As we watch the debates tonight, it might be handy to remember that in the last one, almost all the instant analysis on TV said that it was either a draw or one guy had won by a teensy margin. Even I thought that. But the polls all showed a pretty decisive margin for Obama and his numbers have increased markedly since then. So don't go by the on-air commentators and don't listen to me.

• Posted at 1:57 PM · LINK

Answering Machine Messages of the Stars

Today is not only Huckleberry Hound's birthday, it's also 50 years since Yogi Bear first appeared on TV sets. This morning, we have the announcement that a (mostly) live-action Yogi Bear movie is in the works with Yogi and Boo Boo in CGI. Today's press release notes that Yogi first appeared in '58 but doesn't note the significance of this particular date. I have no idea what it'll be like but I hope they find a voice actor who can approximate the delivery and timing of Yogi's original voice, Daws Butler.

Here's Daws performing as Yogi in perhaps his greatest performance...an appearance on my old answering machine. If you missed the earlier ones in this series, I've posted Huck Hound (Daws), Garfield (Lorenzo Music) and Rocky the Flying Squirrel (June Foray).

• Posted at 11:55 AM · LINK

Raising McCain

And of course, John McCain is disappointing me by now suggesting that all is not copacetic with having Gwen Ifill as moderator of tonight's debate because she is the author of a "pro-Obama" book. No one apparently has seen this book and it's not officially about Obama. But it's about the role of race in politics and it comes out around Inauguration Day next year so I guess that's enough. I don't see any reason to think Ifill will favor one side...and if she did, it would probably be Palin to prove impartiality. Still, I kinda wish Ifill would withdraw so the post-debate discussions will be about what the candidates said, rather than what the moderator asked.

I think I linked to this once before but I first became a fan of John McCain's back in '96 when I read this article about McCain's friendship with peace activist David Ifshin. It's one of the most complimentary things I've ever read about a politician...although my Ultra-Ultra-Conservative friend Roger felt just the opposite. Re-reading it now, I honestly wonder if that was the same John McCain. Maybe I was just more gullible back then. It's sure starting to feel that way.

• Posted at 10:32 AM · LINK

Hollywood Labor News

In the last month or so, Show Business seemed to have forgotten that the Screen Actors Guild is still working without a contract. Just to refresh our memory: The customary joint negotiations of SAG and AFTRA splintered this year and each went it alone. This is like if you and I had a tradition of doing well as partners in a three-legged race and we suddenly decided to split up and each run on a leg-and-a-half.

AFTRA made a tepid deal. The studios have taken the position that SAG can have essentially the same terms or they can rot but that there will be no further negotiations. And that's how it's been for months...up until the other day when the SAG Negotiating Committee decided it wants a strike authorization vote. Sadly, it sounds to me like they're doing this because they simply don't know what else to do. In a way, they're passing the buck to the union's national Board of Directors which now must decide if it will authorize such a vote.

Obviously, it's a bad time to ask the membership to threaten a walkout. I've seen no enthusiasm for it...and there wasn't even any before we started waking up to Today's Bank Failure on our homepages. A strike vote might pass but it would be like 55% or 60% so what's the point? A general rule o' thumb is that you need 80%+ to have an effective strike. If SAG voted 60% to go out, the AMPTP could just announce, "Okay, if you vote to accept our last offer, we'll throw in a free t-shirt...but this deal is only good for 48 hours." If they said that, the vote would swing the other way in a jif. Or they could just "wait out" the strike and it would collapse in two or three weeks. That would cost the studios some money — certainly more than giving away t-shirts — but they might swallow that loss in order to really humiliate a labor organization and scare others.

I feel terrible about this because I'm a big supporter of the local labor guilds and unions, and I think what SAG has been asking for is more than reasonable. But it's one of those situations where anything less than total pessimism strikes me as unwarranted optimism.

• Posted at 9:48 AM · LINK

Thursday Morning

Like I said, I don't think Sarah Palin will fare as poorly in tonight's debate as some are wagering. For one thing, she's apparently had a lot of cramming. For another, the agreed-upon format limits the candidates to 90-second responses. Her side demanded this because they know that a lot of depth is not expected in a 90-second answer. Confronted with a stumper, any of us could probably run out that clock with pleasantries and generalities, leaving us — oh, sorry — no time to get down to hard specifics. It's Joe Biden who's at a disadvantage when it comes to giving short answers. Then again, I bet he knows that and has been practicing with that in mind.

A mini-fuss is being made by some over the fact that moderator Gwen Ifill has a book coming out that sounds rather pro-Obama. As Keith Olbermann noted on last night's show, this was not a secret and anyone could have found this out two months ago by Googling Ms. Ifill's name. Still, there's this sudden demand by some that she recuse herself, which apparently is not going to happen. I suspect Ifill will ask perfectly fine, fair questions and that Palin's supporters will never give up the spin that the Governor was sabotaged by a biased moderator. To his credit, John McCain was quoted yesterday as saying, "Gwen Ifill is a professional, and I think she will do a totally objective job."

I still think the host should open with the question I suggested earlier: "Are you wearing any sort of device that might enable someone to prompt you with answers or notes?" And then, since they're probably both expecting the first question will be about the bailout, I'd throw 'em off their game by saving that for later and asking them to each tell us their favorite knock-knock joke. I ain't voting for anyone who doesn't have a favorite knock-knock joke. Also, either of them could lock up my ballot by mentioning that today is the 50th birthday of Huckleberry Hound.

• Posted at 9:18 AM · LINK

Oh, My Darling...

Last year was the 50th anniversary of the founding of Hanna-Barbera Studios — a fact which insofar as I can tell went absolutely unnoticed. I mentioned it on a panel at the Comic-Con International last July and a lot of people looked amazed that there had been no articles, no specials, no commemoration of the birth of a company that employed so many people, produced so many shows, meant so much to so many childhoods. This may be the first time it has been noted on the Internet...and even I'm a year late.

But I'm not too late to mention this: Today is the 50th anniversary of the debut of The Huckleberry Hound Show, the second H-B series. (The first was, of course, Ruff 'n' Reddy.) At least, the official date was October 2, 1958, which was a Thursday. The show was syndicated and aired on different days in some cities...but 10/2 was apparently the first day it was broadcast anywhere. It was the day the world "met" Huckleberry Hound, Yogi Bear and Boo Boo, Mr. Jinks, Pixie and Dixie.

The Huckleberry Hound Show was the first animated series to win an Emmy Award. Of greater significance is that it was what put Hanna-Barbera on the map and established the beachhead for animation on television. Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera are often credited with inventing the whole notion of TV cartoons, thereby saving the animation business when the theatrical market fell apart. A more accurate assessment might be that they showed everyone how it could be done, both in terms of production technique and marketing. The endeavor that really demonstrated this was Huckleberry Hound.

And of course, the most important aspect of it all is that this was my favorite show when I was six, which I was in 1958. The local kids' shows in L.A. ran hoary theatrical cartoons, most of which were fine and most of which I had memorized by age five, World War II references and all. Huckleberry Hound was all new and all modern and even though the animation itself wasn't as wonderful as it was in the Bugs Bunny cartoons, that failing didn't matter to a six-year-old kid watching on a black-and-white Zenith with a small screen and fuzzy reception. In many regards, the simpler H-B graphics "read" better on the small screen.

They got away with the spartan animation because the stories were clever and also because Bill and Joe had an awesome secret weapon: The voice talents of a genius named Daws Butler. Daws was Huck, Yogi, Mr. Jinks, Dixie and many of the supporting players. Add in the considerable skills of co-vocalist Don Messick and you had more personality and humor than could be found in a lot of fully-animated productions. Later H-B shows would point up the shortcomings of their limited approach, and of course a lot of later H-B shows were simply not done very well. But I don't think it's just nostalgia for a childhood fave that causes me to still enjoy those cartoons. They really were pretty funny.

A couple of generations grew up on Hanna-Barbera shows, loving whatever was current when they were six the way I loved Huckleberry Hound. I know a lot of people care passionately about this work. What I can't understand is why the big five-oh was a stealth anniversary, unmentioned by darn near anyone.

Here's the opening of the first Huckleberry Hound show, pretty much as it looked on my little TV fifty years ago today. In fact, the screen is just about the same size...

• Posted at 12:29 AM · LINK