Foreign Policy magazine picks The 10 Worst Predictions for 2009. I'm kinda bummed that mine about the Washingon Nationals winning the World Series didn't make the list.
My pal Joe Alaskey has written his autobiography. Joe's a little young for that but the book is a treasure for those of us interested in cartoons and especially cartoon voicing. One of most versatile talents in our field, Joe has been heard on dozens of animated shows including Rugrats and darn near everything funny the Warner Brothers studio has done in the last decade. Even while Mel Blanc was alive, Joe was (with Mel's blessing) taking over a number of his roles. In Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Mel did Bugs and Porky and several others but that was Joe you heard playing Yosemite Sam. Since Mel's passing, Joe has assumed other classic Blanc roles. When you hear Daffy Duck in anything new, you're probably hearing Joe...who even won an Emmy for the Duck Dodgers series. He also does a lot of original characters and once in a while, someone drags him in front of a camera to act or do impressions. Nobody does a better Gleason. In fact, if Gleason were still around, he wouldn't sound as much like himself as Joe does.
So consider this a plug for That's Still Not All, Folks, the autobiography of Joe Alaskey. It's full of great anecdotes about his life and the folks he's worked with...and there are even cartoons by Joe. There's gotta be something he can't do.
If you missed the fine piece by R.C. Harvey about our pal Shel Dorf, it's now available to read here.
Hey, remember that link I posted to buy the big Don Martin book dirt-cheap from Barnes & Noble? Well, my link moved over 100 copies for them and the online offer is now sold out. A few folks, however, have written to say they've seen them in the bargain section at their local Barnes & Noble stores. So if you still want one at that price, that's the place to go.
And lastly: Saturday memberships at the 2010 Comic-Con International are disappearing faster than Joe Lieberman's credibility. Both will be totally gone in about 48 hours.
This only runs ten seconds but folks who lived on the West Coast in the sixties will have their memories jogged. We had an airline out here called Western Airlines. It went away in 1986 when Delta absorbed it and did away with the name, which has since been adopted by an unrelated carrier. The old Western had low cost fares all around this half of the United States...and if the two or three times I flew it were indicative, a pretty terrible on-time record. They were especially good at overselling flights and not offering compensation or alternatives if you got bumped.
What kept them solvent for a while was a very friendly ad campaign. They blanketed the airwaves with short spots featuring a bird character reclining on the tail of one of their planes. The character's voice was not done by Jim Backus, as was occasionally reported. It was supplied by an actor named Shepard Menkin, who also sometimes spelled it "Menken." Shep was heard on a ridiculous number of radio and TV commercials and also dabbled in TV animation, most notably speaking for that great inventor, Clyde Crashcup of The Alvin Show.
He was also a cast member on the greatest comedy album ever made, Stan Freberg Presents the United States of America, Volume One. I hired him once for Garfield and Friends and at the session, he told me he was prouder of being part of that record than he was of anything else he'd done in a very full career. In 1995 when I helped Stan assemble Volume Two, he wanted to bring back everyone who was on the first album who was still alive...and I tried but was unable to locate Shep. His agent couldn't find him. The Screen Actors Guild couldn't find him. It finally turned out he'd dropped out of sight due to illness. He passed away in 1995.
Obits noted he'd voiced some of the most-heard commercials of all time and one cited some staggering sum he'd made voicing the Western Airlines bird. He probably did make a lot off them. These spots ran for years and there were an awful lot of them of varying lengths. Here's one that's just long enough to let you hear Shep's voice as he delivers the Western Airlines catch-phrase...one of the most successful in the history of advertising...
December 18, 2009
