Four weeks from today, the wonderful WonderCon opens in San Francisco. Those of you who feel intimidated and overwhelmed by the annual Comic-Con International in San Diego would do well to check out WonderCon, which is kind of like Comic-Con Lite. The same skilled crew operates it but it's about a fourth as packed. (Last year, WonderCon drew 34,000 attendees whereas Comic-Con had somewhere between 125,000 and 140,000.)
I will be among its guests and in a stunning reversal of past precedent, I will be hosting panels. The schedule will be up soon but Colleen Doran has already announced that she and I and a couple other folks will be doing one on Creator Rights. And you can assume I'll be interviewing WonderCon guests like Murphy Anderson, Joe Kubert and Adam Kubert, and that I'll be sharing a stage with the famously infamous Sergio Aragonés. I'm also pleased to remind you that Stan and Hunter Freberg will be there. An awful lot of folks told me that meeting Stan at last year's Comic-Con was among the great thrills of their lives.
And it's not that long until Comic-Con International happens again. The new issue of the Comic-Con magazine is reaching mailboxes even as we speak. If it doesn't reach yours, you can read it online. And remember that the mad dash for hotel reservations commences Thursday, March 18. I am told it will be a lot better this year than it has been in years past. So you may not wind up sleeping in a Public Storage locker in El Cajon.
Our pal Peter Sanderson takes a look at that most effectual Top Cat. A lot of cartoon shows I enjoyed as a youth don't hold up well when viewed today. For instance, I loved all the Woody Woodpecker cartoons when I was nine and today, there are about eight of them I can watch without pounding my head against a tree. But every so often when I catch a Top Cat, I'm delighted with how well they work.
The show only lasted one season in prime time, a fact Joe Barbera used to attribute to a theory that adults don't want to watch talking animals. I suspect there were just too many of them that season. In addition to Top Cat, the schedule also had The Bullwinkle Show, The Alvin Show, The Bugs Bunny Show and Calvin and the Colonel. (The Flintstones was also on that year but it was about funny cave people, not funny animals.) Also, Top Cat had an odd time slot. It was on at 8:30 following an hour of The Steve Allen Show and preceding the cop show, Hawaiian Eye. That wasn't a great place for kids to find it and if kids didn't, adults wouldn't, either.
When Top Cat left prime time, the same thirty episodes (that was how long a season was in '61) reran ad infinitum on Saturday morning and did quite well. In fact, when they finally started to peter out several years later, Hanna-Barbera almost engineered a deal to make some new ones to refresh the package. "Refresh" is programming exec talk for adding new episodes into a bunch of reruns. It never materialized but Joe Barbera spent a lot of time afterwards trying to find a way to bring T.C. and the gang back. They finally did a syndicated TV movie in 1987.
Anyway, Peter has some good thoughts on the show. Go take a peek.
A few weeks ago, we brought you a video of Ross Bagdasarian (aka David Seville) singing his 1958 hit record, "Witch Doctor." Here's a more modern rendition offered by a group called, for reasons that should be obvious, Cartoons...
March 6, 2010
