I've been embedding videos here from stage productions written and directed by my pal, Bruce Kimmel. Bruce does a lot of things and one is that he operates Kritzerland, which is a company that issues CDs of show tunes and movie music. Many of their releases are limited-edition resurrections of great film scores and they're all great and well-produced. I'm sure that's the case with one he just announced — the soundtrack for It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. It's been issued before but Bruce has gone back to the original masters and found a few things that weren't on earlier issues...and if you want it, order it now because he's only pressing a thousand of 'em. These have a tendency to sell out quickly at twenty bucks and then if you want them, you have to pay many times that on eBay. Here's a link to the page and while you're there, shop around. I'm sure you'll find some other CD you want...and it may well be one of those that's sold out.
And I haven't forgotten that I've promised some new info here about the actual running times of the various cuts of It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. Just been too busy to get to it. It will happen.
Recently here, like in this post, I wrote about how comic historians and dealers in original art have a little blind spot when it comes to identifying unsigned art from Dell and Gold Key comic books of the past. If they don't know better, they usually attribute artwork to Pete Alvarado, a lovely and prolific man who drew tons of comics for Western Publishing, the company that assembled those comics. But like I said, Pete didn't draw everything. There were other artists.
It has been called to my attention that a few years ago, Heritage Auctions — the largest firm of its kind — auctioned off a number of pieces which they said were drawn by "Del Connell (attributed)". These pieces are still available for viewing in their online listings and...well, I dunno who attributed them to Del but they were wrong.
Del was a prolific writer-editor for Western Publishing from about 1951 until the firm stopped producing comics around 1984. He was my editor there for a time...a very nice, creative gentleman who wrote more comic book stories than most human beings have ever read. He drew a little for the purposes of art corrections and such but I'm not sure he ever drew an actual story or cover for publication. The pieces they attribute to him were actually drawn by several different artists including John Carey, Tony Strobl and John Langton. The above panel is from a Yosemite Sam comic there that was actually drawn by...yes, Pete Alvarado.
Heritage Auctions is a respectable outfit and I'm sure its staff did what it could to ascertain the proper credits. (I also suspect that they got these pieces from Del or someone close to him and may have been told they were Del's handiwork.) The problem is that there hasn't been much scholarship in this area and there's really no place you can look it up and check. To Heritage's credit, they put in that "attributed," which is all an identifier can really do in such circumstances and in the past when I've pointed these things out, they're really good about correcting bad info. I just mention it here because I want everyone to realize that an awful lot of the art identifications on this stuff are off...and most who err do not even have the decency to hedge their bets and say, "attributed."
About 24 hours ago here, I linked you all to a video of Steve Allen laughing his fool head off in skit. Here's some more information on it.
Mike Hylton writes to inform me that it's from The Steve Allen Show for March 16, 1958. This would be his Sunday night show, the one opposite Ed Sullivan. He was playing a recurring character, sportscaster Bill Allen.
And Barry Mitchell sends me the following, excerpted from the book, Inventing Late Night by Ben Alba...
Before the show, I had put some greasy tonic on my hair to make it stay down; the reverse occurred. Having no time to fix it, I grabbed the fedora I always wore for the routine and hurried onstage. When I glanced at myself in the monitor as I started the bit, the way I looked — like Mark Twain's Injun Joe in Tom Sawyer — struck me so funny that I began to laugh. The fact that it was striking me funny struck me funny. It was the old laughing-in-church syndrome. Another reason I kept laughing was that the always funny rotund comedian Jack E. Leonard, the next guest scheduled to appear, was yelling lines at me from the wings. I was eating into his time by laughing for so long. "Come on, goddamit," he bellowed. "I've got only five minutes and you've blown three of them already!"
I might have mentioned that one of the things that probably contributed to Mr. Allen's hysteria was that it was live television. When he started laughing at how much he was laughing, he knew all of America was seeing a grown man doing it at that very moment. There's an immediacy to being on live that adds to the risk...and therefore the potential silliness when things go wrong. Anyway, it's a funny clip.
Maybe if I spent some time on it, I could come up with an answer...but right this minute, I can't think of a living cartoonist whose work is more respected by his peers than is Mort Drucker. His caricatures for MAD have been nothing short of amazing and I doubt there's a person drawing likenesses anywhere who hasn't been influenced by his work. What's especially impressive about his MAD work is that most of it has been for multi-page parodies of movies and TV shows. It's one thing to draw a good rendition of a celebrity once...but to do four or five views of the person per page for five pages? There are a lot of good caricaturists out there who'd just wind up repeating one or two angles over and over. Not Mort.
Coming any day now — and you can order a copy over at this site — is a two-hour documentary/tutorial that I gather is like a video correspondence course. Here's a preview that runs a little less than eight minutes...
January 12, 2010
