Friday, February 12, 2010

Recommended Reading

Bruce Bartlett discusses the budget-balancing program put forth by Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin. Being a Republican, Ryan is against raising taxes for anything so his idea is basically to slash spending, mainly by gutting Social Security and Medicare. This has about as much chance of passing as I do of getting a gold medal in figure skating at the 2010 Olympics. But read what Bartlett has to say about the mistaken notion of many Americans about how easy it would be to balance the budget by doing things like eliminating pork and foreign aid.

• Posted at 11:09 PM · LINK

Go Read It!

A bevy of illustrators and creative artists tell what they do when they hit their equivalent of Writer's Block. Some good ideas in there.

I don't have that problem often but when I do, I spend some time in utterly self-indulgent writing, writing (or just thinking through) a story not for sale or publication that has special meaning to me...and maybe only to me. That seems to unjam me enough to the point where I can then write whatever I can write. Another method is to just look at my American Express bill.

• Posted at 10:44 PM · LINK

Today's Video Link

I'm pretty much done with writing about the stage musical of Mary Poppins and I hope I didn't leave you with the impression that I found nothing to like about it. Here's a video of the best number in the show...which is also, by no coincidence, the best number in the movie. It's "Step in Time." Enjoy...

• Posted at 11:18 AM · LINK

Jettisoning Jetsons

A new, interesting fact has reached us in the matter of Morey Amsterdam and Pat Carroll being replaced as the voices of George and Jane Jetson. Reader-of-this-site Bill Mullins has found an old newspaper article in the Oxnard Press-Courier for January 27, 1965...and let's note that this is several years after the two actors were removed from the cast of The Jetsons. Heck, The Jetsons had long since been removed from the ABC prime time schedule by January of 1965. The article says...

Comedian Morey Amsterdam and actress Pat Carroll are seeking $12,000 each from Hanna-Barbera Productions, charging the firm signed them to provide voices for an animated television show called "The Jetsons" — but used their services only once, not 24 times as called for in their contracts.

The case went to trial Tuesday. Amsterdam and Miss Carroll said their contracts called for them to get $500 each for each of the shows, planned for the 1962-1963 season.

So apparently, one show was recorded. This makes us suspect — does it not? — that the main problem here was that someone (Hanna and Barbera, the network, the sponsors, some combination thereof) just plain wasn't wild about the voices of Morey and Pat. That is not uncommon. Not only was Michael O'Shea replaced as Top Cat after the first few shows were recorded but before that, Hanna and Barbera had to replace their original Fred and Barney voices on The Flintstones. Bill Thompson and Hal Smith recorded several episodes before the producers changed their minds and recast with Alan Reed and Mel Blanc. (There seems to be some debate among H-B scholars as to whether Thompson was Fred and Smith was Barney or the other way around. There's also some evidence that there may have been another cast at one point that featured Cliff Norton in one of the roles...and this is all after Daws Butler did the original presentation pilot as both Fred and Barney.)

Changing casts after one or more episodes were recorded was almost the norm. So that would make you wonder why H-B would give Amsterdam and Carroll a contract that didn't make it clear that if the studio changed its mind, it didn't have to pay the actors for an entire season.

In any case, the date of the trial suggests that H-B and the actors' reps spent some time haggling over a settlement, couldn't come to terms and so the lawsuit was filed. It may still have been settled out of court for some percentage. And I guess that's all we know about it...but it's more than we knew last night. Thanks, Bill. Maybe somebody can come up with a clipping about the outcome or settlement.

• Posted at 11:17 AM · LINK