The Orange County Register is conducting an online poll to determine the best "make-out" ride at Disneyland. Make up your own joke about "It's a Small World." At the moment, it's a landslide for "The Haunted Mansion" and I can certainly understand that. Something about the voice of Paul Frees always got me in the mood for hanky-panky.
In a similar vein, Disneyland is denying rumors that they've dismissed actors playing the Jack Sparrow character because women kept flashing them. Yo ho.
Yes, that's Carl Barks, the delightful cartoonist who wrote and drew Donald Duck comic books for years and created much of Donald's supporting cast, including The Beagle Boys, Gyro Gearloose and Uncle Scrooge. This is a photo I took in 1973 on a visit to the home he and his wife Garé then had in Goleta, California. His main preoccupation at the time was doing oil paintings of Donald, Scrooge and the gang...lovely paintings which then sold in the astronomical price range of $500-$1000. He would live to see some of them going for close to six figures. Anyway, he was working on this one at the time. He didn't work on it while we were there but he was nice enough to pretend to be adding brush strokes to it while I snapped some pictures.
Shortly after this visit, I was in the company of two comic collectors I knew. Both were around 30 years of age. Hearing that I'd been visiting Carl, one of them said, "Hey, we have to go up there and meet Barks before he dies." I winced and said I thought that was a crass way of putting it. The other fan replied, "Come on...the guy's old...he's not going to be around for much longer."
This was in 1973. Mr. Barks was 72 years old. As it turned out, he was around much longer. He died in 2000 at the age of 99, thereby outliving both those guys.
Our friend Paul Harris had a great guest on his radio show the other day...Tom Davis, formerly of the comedy team of Franken and Davis. In the early days of Saturday Night Live, no one contributed more than Franken and Davis. Franken's been busy trying to get seated as the junior senator of the great state of Minnesota. Davis has been writing a new book which I've yet to read. Come to think of it, I'm going to post an Amazon link to it and then use it myself to order a copy of 39 Years of Short Term Memory Loss: The Early Days of SNL from Someone Who Was There. And in the meantime, we can all hear Paul interview Tom Davis — it runs about fifteen minutes — over on the Harris Online website.
We all have favorite Monty Python lines. My single favorite, I think, is in this scene from The Life of Brian...and oddly enough, it's one of the few memorable Python lines not uttered by John Cleese, Terry Jones, Eric Idle, Michael Palin, Graham Chapman or even Terry Gilliam, for God's sake. It's spoken by an actor named Terence Baylor, who played multiple supporting roles in the film.
What's more, the line wasn't even written by Cleese, Jones, Idle, Palin, Chapman or Gilliam. It was the inspired idea of Mr. Baylor, himself. My pal Kim "Howard" Johnson is the world's foremost authority on All Things Python and he was there when it was filmed. I asked him in an e-mail last night if I had the story straight and he sent this...
As I remember, everyone was in place and we'd started rehearsing the scene, Terry J coaching the crowd to speak in unison. I wasn't quite close enough to John and Terry B to be certain of precisely what happened (and it's been a few years now!) — but it seems to me that Terry B made the comment, just talking loudly enough for John to hear. John liked it and mentioned it to Terry J and the others, and it was in. Simple as that.
Everyone who works on a film as an extra or bit player has a fantasy about coming up with something like this...something that gives you a speaking part or a more prominent speaking part. Here it is actually happening...Terence Baylor inventing and getting to deliver what is to me the funniest line in one of the funniest movies ever made.
This is a 44 second excerpt that ends with Mr. Baylor's brilliant line. That line, by the way, is "I'm not."
April 19, 2009
