Police in San Diego have so far been unable to apprehend a serial bank robber. He's described as a man in his seventies who sometimes has an oxygen tank strapped to his back.
Steve Worth, over at the ASIFA Animation Archives, has posted a nice history of Alvin and the Chipmunks. He makes it sound like their maker, Ross Bagdasarian, started his recording career with "The Witch Doctor," then came up with the Chipmunks and never did anything else for records, which isn't so. But apart from that, it's a nice little summary of an impressive career, and there's some splendid artwork from The Alvin Show. I keep hearing that a complete DVD set of that fine series is coming out but it has yet to materialize. Someone oughta speed that process up the way David Seville sped up his voice.
Several people have written to ask me what I know about this. Answer: Very little. In 1967, the Hanna-Barbera studio produced an unsold (and apparently, unaired) pilot called The World — Color It Happy. It was to be a kind of anthology show mixing live-action and animation segments...and they brought in some formidable talent, starting with Hal David and Burt Bacharach to write the theme song, and Jack Jones to sing it.
Woody Allen was also involved, contributing a spy spoof. In this video clip, which just shows the opening and end credits, you'll see him listed, plus he also gets a writer credit along with veteran animation writers Michael Maltese and Charlie Shows. Makes me wonder if this is the source of an urban legend I used to hear around the halls of Hanna-Barbera when I worked there years later. The story was that Woody Allen had been hired to write an episode of The Flintstones and had handed in an unusable script that was essentially a Honeymooners episode set in the stone age. Among the things wrong with it was that it presumed the limited-animation Barney Rubble was capable of an extended pantomime scene a la Art Carney, and that it was all set in one room for the entire half hour. This never happened and Joe Barbera even told me it had never happened...but a lot of people believed it.
Hanna and Barbera themselves were to be the hosts in animated form. They were caricatured in a Jetsons-like opening (I think those are Iwao Takamoto designs) but they didn't do their own voices. Hanna's is done by Bill Idelson, who was famous for playing in the Vic and Sade radio show, and later in the role of Herman on TV for The Dick Van Dyke Show. Barbera's is done by veteran announcer Art Gilmore, who also did the rest of the voiceover on this opening. Also in the cast was actress Laraine Day, who just happened to be married to the show's producer, Michael Grilikhes. You can read the rest of the credits for yourselves.
The show did not sell, for which I heard (second-hand, so take this for what it's worth) that Barbera blamed "too many chefs," both in his studio and at the network. That was the reason Joe gave for most projects that failed, which doesn't mean it wasn't applicable. The whole thing was instigated by execs at Taft Broadcasting, which was the conglomerate that bought the Hanna-Barbera studio in '67. They reportedly were eager to turn their new purchase into the Disney studio and decided to start by imitating Disney's popular Sunday night show on NBC, which at the time was named Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color. Not only did the H-B version have a name that sounded similar but it also employed Paul Frees as a voice guy. Frees was heard often on the Disney series in many roles, including its occasional host, Ludwig Von Drake.
And that's about all I know about it. Take a look at this brief excerpt. It seems so lacking in focus that it doesn't surprise me it didn't sell...
October 11, 2009
