You may have noticed some software weirdness if you tried to access this site in the last hour or so. Methinks it is all repaired now. Sorry for any inconvenience and thanks to the 73 million people who wrote to tell me about it.
The Little Orphan Annie newspaper strip ends on June 13. It started August 5, 1924, the creation of cartoonist Harold Gray, and I have to say that its appeal has long eluded me. I know its popularity had something to do with the taste then for Horatio Alger melodrama and that it really became a smash during the Great Depression...but I never understood why people of that era were so infatuated with the thing. It's nice to think that an affluent industrialist might take in a poor, parentless waif...but Daddy Warbucks always seemed like the worst kind of rich guy to me, filled as he was with patronizing speeches about how if you're not wealthy, it could only be because you haven't worked hard enough. It also never struck me that Annie had a particulary happy life. She always managed to look sad and homeless, even though her dialogue was peppered with clichés of optimism and hope. And of course, every few weeks something awful would happen to her and she'd be a sad case until someone came to her rescue.
I have friends, some of them scholars of comic strips, who love Orphan Annie and when I tell them I always found it a talky, reactionary bore, they tell me, "Oh, no! Read these weeks of it and you'll see how wonderful it can be!" So I read those weeks of it and I always decide it's even more of a talky, reactionary bore than I'd thought before. Perhaps my problem was that I first read the strip in the sixties when Gray really sounded like he was cribbing dialogue from pamphlets for the John Birch Society and there was very little in the strip besides that. It was just Daddy Warbucks standing around, lecturing people about some strange, friends-of-Richard-Nixon interpretation of the American work ethic. And then every so often, Gray would think of something awful to do to Annie and she'd be a sad case until someone came to her rescue.
Gray died in '68 and that's when Little Annie truly became an Orphan, handed off thereafter from one creative guardian to another. While I'm sure others will argue, I thought it was one of those rare cases when a strip got better when it was no longer done by its creator, particularly when Leonard Starr was in command from 1979 to 2000. Some of the others were good, too...though as Annie lost papers, they weren't playing to much of an audience. I read a few of those sequences and liked them more than anything I ever read by Harold Gray. I also preferred the Broadway musical and the movie made from it.
At times after Mr. Starr quit, the syndicate tried to find someone who'd write and draw it for rates commensurate with its income as a newspaper strip, which meant Depression Era wages. At one point, they got so desperate that they even offered the gig to a writer-artist team, of which I was the writer. I told the artist, "Well, if you want to do it, I'll do it," and then hoped he'd say no as I pondered what the heck I could bring to a feature that to my mind had outlived its relevance some time around when the New Deal kicked in. I sat there with my eyeballs probably as vacant as Annie's, pondering for almost a half-hour before the artist called and said (to my relief), "I just found out what the job pays. Forget about it." I assume the others who then took it on got more than they'd offered us. They must have.
While writing the above, I was interrupted by a call from a nice lady from CBS Radio who interviewed me about Annie's demise. I pretty much said what I just wrote above but she threw me when she asked what I thought would take Annie's place in the world. I should have said, "I don't think Annie has a place in the world and hasn't for a long time." Instead, I muttered something about how, well, I guess someone could come along and whip up a strip to cheerlead for victims of the current economic downturn. If they could just get everyone who's currently out of work to follow the strip, it could make its creator as rich as ol' Dad Warbucks.
Too much to do in the next few days so posting and e-mail response will be, like my best necktie, on the spotty side. Try to find something else to read on the Internet for a while...and yes, I know it won't be easy.
I'm sure I've linked to this before but there are some things you just can't see too many times. It's the parody that Your Show of Shows did of the TV program, This is Your Life. It features Sid Caesar, Carl Reiner, Howie Morris, Louis Nye and a couple of other folks no one seems to be able to identify. (The gentleman sitting next to Caesar in the audience is NBC executive David Tebet, who Johnny Carson used to occasionally mention on the air.) This sketch originally aired on April 3, 1953.
Howie Morris, of course, steals the very funny sketch in his role as Uncle Goopy. They showed this at Howie's funeral and I was sitting two rows behind Carl Reiner, who was laughing as hard as anyone, mostly at the physical interplay between Sid and Howie. According to all, what happened on the broadcast (live, remember) went way beyond what had been planned at rehearsal.
By the way: Last evening at the opening of How to Succeed (see previous post), I was sitting three rows behind Carl Reiner, who seemed to be enjoying the heck outta the show. Even more important, he seemed to be in darn good shape. It just makes me happy to see him and to be able to report that. Here he is in one of the funniest sketches ever done on television...
Carolyn and I are just back from opening night of the Reprise! production of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying up at the Freud Playhouse at UCLA. This one deserves a long, gushy rave that I don't have time to write tonight. If you're in the area and at all a fan of this musical, you'll really enjoy what they do with it. It's there through May 23 and when I get past the current work crunch, I'll write a long piece about why you should go see it. But don't wait for that. Get tickets as soon as you can. I gave you some links to discounts in this post.
And just to remind you: This Saturday and next, the 2 PM matinees will be preceded by a one-hour lecture at Noon on the history of the show. Both lectures will be delivered by me and at this Saturday's, I'll be joined on the stage by the wonderful Claudette Sutherland, who was a member of the original Broadway cast of How to Succeed. I'll be interviewing her, prying all sorts of secrets and history out of her memory. The lecture is free and you don't have to stay for the performance...but you should.
Sorry I'm so swamped. I'm going to post a video link, then put up a soup can and get back to work.
May 12, 2010
