Up in Ojai, there's a museum full of drawings by Sergio Aragonés. On this site, you can find out where it is and when you can go...and you can hear a 13-minute radio interview of the man.
Hey, when you have a moment, go over to the website of my buddy Leonard Maltin and read the story of how a "lost" Frank Capra movie was saved and restored. For those of us who've been saddened over the years by the deterioration and loss of old movies, it's exciting what's now being done via digital technology. And not only are movies being restored but they're also being preserved forever.
And while you're on Leonard's page, keep reading. Lots of good stuff there, including his piece on the Oliver Hardy Festival as well as that TV Stamps unveiling that we both attended.
The folks who run the Mid-Ohio-Con have assembled a nice birthday remembrance of Jack Kirby.
I'll be a guest at their fine convention October 3-4 in Columbus, Ohio. My pal Gregg Berger, one of the best cartoon voice actors out there, is also on the guest list so I imagine we'll be doing some sort of panel about acting for animation. The whole guest list is pretty impressive even if I am on it. This is always one of the best conventions...large enough to have something for everyone, small enough to not overwhelm you. Those of you who complain about monster-sized conventions would do well to attend Mid-Ohio-Con.
Hey, did you order a copy of June Foray's autobiography yet at www.juneforay.com? If you didn't, don't delay. June signed a huge pile of them Wednesday and they went in the mail that afternoon and are now en route.
If you have ordered, please read the following...
The folks offering the book have discovered a PayPal glitch. One of our friends thought he'd ordered the book but he really hadn't. He received an e-mailed receipt from PayPal that said the order was placed on Dec. 31, 1969. It had no transaction number on it. His account was not debited. And the folks fulfilling the orders on www.juneforay.com did not receive anything — no money, no notice of the order.
If you ordered a book, check your receipt or better still, check if PayPal actually deducted the fee from your account or charged your credit card. If no money was deducted from your account, your order was never transmitted.
If you can't tell that way or you just want to make sure, drop an e-mail to juneforaybook@gmail.com and say, "I think I ordered a book." If there's no record of you having ordered a book, someone will let you know that so you can order again.
Sorry about this but it seems to be PayPal's fault. An awful lot of orders have been received and filled...but at least one seems to have evaporated.
In the above photo, the gentleman at right is Shel Dorf, the comic buff who launched what we now know as the Comic-Con International in San Diego. Shel, sad to say, is in failing health...hospitalized for whatever remains of his life. I visited his room the day after this year's convention and he couldn't recognize me, even though I've known him since 1970. I still get depressed thinking about it.
The gentleman at left is, of course, Jack Kirby. Jack passed away in 1994 but if he'd lived, he'd be 92 years old today and still thinking "younger" than anyone around him. Darn near everyone familiar with his work says he was a brilliant artist. I think he was a brilliant person, period...and the more I think about him, the more I think that. Things Jack said or did that didn't make sense at the time make sense to me now, more than ever.
I've written so much about Jack over the years that I don't feel I have to write a lot today, just because it's today. So I'll just state that my admiration for the man continues to grow, as does my affection. Something has definitely been missing from the comic book industry — and some of our lives — since we lost him.
Since it's part of the season at the Ahmanson Theater downtown and I'm a subscriber, Carolyn and I went last evening to see Spamalot. It was my third time, her second....and we took along our friends Earl and Denise, who'd never seen it before. We all enjoyed it very much. Not that this means a lot but I enjoyed it a bit less than the production I saw with the National Touring Company in Columbus, Ohio and a lot more than the one I saw in Las Vegas. Carolyn liked this one better than Columbus.
The difference for me was partly in the audience and partly in the cast. The audience in Columbus seemed more like it was full of die-hard Python fans who knew little or nothing about the show in advance and therefore had many delightfully-unexpected moments. The audience at the Ahmanson seemed a tad less Python-savvy and I got the feeling that a lot of them had either experienced the show before or had seen and heard enough about it that they knew what was coming. That's always a problem with a show that depends a lot on surprise and has been around for a while.
Some members of all three casts were good but I thought overall, the folks in the National Touring Company were a bit stronger. John O'Hurley is playing Arthur here and he's quite good...and even slips in a reference to J. Peterman. The fellow playing Patsy, Jeff Dumas, is also extremely talented.
The show's here through September 6 and if you're local and haven't seen it, try to go. I don't know how much longer it will be possible to see a full-scale production with all the sets and costumes. Any month now, we'll start getting the local and community college stagings that will of necessity be produced on a thousandth the budget. I suspect some of them will be very funny and very creative because the material will lend itself to ingenious interpretations. But you oughta see it once in all its fully-mounted glory.
From The Kraft Music Hall for January 14, 1959: Host Milton Berle does a musical number with Harpo Marx. It's a nice little spot that reminds me why I always loved Harpo and rarely found Uncle Miltie all that funny. It's that fierce insistence that every ounce of attention has to be on him, no matter who else is on the stage and what they're doing. But it's still worth seeing...
August 27, 2009
