Wednesday, January 7, 2009

Recommended Reading

Jeffrey Toobin writes a lot of interesting stuff about Barney Frank.

• Posted at 8:22 PM · LINK

Go Read It!

Here's the latest on the Al Franken-Norm Coleman game show in Minnesota.

• Posted at 6:50 PM · LINK

Today's Worst Pun

A new flavor of Ben & Jerry's ice cream: Yes Pecan.

• Posted at 5:08 PM · LINK

Today's Video Link

I mentioned the other day here that Walt Disney never liked people to see him when he did the voice of Mickey Mouse. Here's what may be the only footage around of him performing as his most famous character...a bit of footage shot at a recording session.

The other actor in this clip is Billy Bletcher, who was heard constantly in cartoons and on radio shows for many years. He played an awful lot of villains in Disney cartoons including The Big Bad Wolf. He also did a lot of overdubbing of actors in movies, including a couple of Munchkin voices in The Wizard of Oz and...well, I could waste a lot of bandwidth listing places you heard Billy Bletcher's voice.

One place you never heard him was on a TV cartoon. He did a few TV commercials (voiceover and on camera) and a few acting jobs. (He played Pappy Yokum in one of the nine thousand unsold Li'l Abner TV pilots.) But for some reason, no one ever hired him for an animated project on television.

But I tried. One of the first cartoon shows I wrote was Plastic Man and for my first script, the producer allowed me to suggest an actor to play the villain...a living plant creature called The Weed. A week or so earlier, a friend of mine had done an interview with the then-long-retired Mr. Bletcher and told me that Billy still sounded like he'd always sounded...and that he had lamented how no one ever called him for cartoon work anymore.

You can almost guess where this one's going. I asked the producer to hire Billy Bletcher. He agreed. Billy was called and booked...and then he took ill and was unable to do the job. He passed away about a week later at the age of 85. I did get to speak with him once on the phone and, sure enough, he sounded exactly like he did in this clip with Mr. Disney...

• Posted at 2:22 AM · LINK

At The Movies

Joe Biden apparently got turned away the other night from a sold-out theater where he and his spouse wanted to see The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. According to this account, he was told there were no seats so he left, and only the theater staff realized who it was. Other moviegoers either didn't recognize him or didn't care.

Now, there are a couple of ways to look at this. Back in the pre-Cheney days, there were a lot of jokes about how there was no one in Washington more ignored than the guy who was a heartbreak away from the Presidency. Walter Mondale used to joke about how utterly unnoticed he was in the role. So we may be back into that. You could interpret the incident as indicative of how people don't care about Biden...or like him enough to demand autographs. Or you could commend the guy for not making a fuss and reminding someone that he was that state's Senator and is about to become Veep so they'd damn well better find him a couple of seats. Do we think Dick Cheney would have left quietly?

It might mean all of this or none of this. It also might not have been Joe Biden. It would be comforting though for me to think we were heading back to the era of the Invisible Veep. I want a Vice-President who doesn't do anything, doesn't get noticed, isn't seen as a secret power broker, doesn't shoot anyone in the face and just sits around fulfilling his one true Constitutional duty: Waiting for a foreign leader to die.

• Posted at 2:04 AM · LINK