Friday, January 21, 2011

P.S.

One other thing I should have mentioned about Keith Olbermann: Despite Conservative claims that absolutely no one was watching him, he had a healthy audience and his show was very profitable. So he will get offers and unless he opts to retire, he will be back. It wouldn't surprise me if it was part of a whole new network built around his approach, as opposed to the limited bloc of programming that he impacted on MSNBC.

• Posted at 9:43 PM · LINK

Count Downed

Like you, I don't know what prompted the sudden, unexpected end today to Countdown with Keith Olbermann, effective immediately. It looks like if Olbermann expected it, he didn't expect it tonight. Around 90 minutes before the start of this evening's broadcast, he sent out this Tweet to announce which James Thurber story he'd be reading to close the program...

Around 30 minutes before the broadcast commenced, he sent out this one to announce there'd be a different story...

The switch, of course, was to allow him some time to deliver his farewell address. So did he really find out a half-hour before airtime that it was the last Countdown? In the business of live radio, it's not unprecedented to fire someone by telling them, "You just did your last broadcast" or to give them but a few minutes to say bye-bye. I don't recall it happening often in television. If that's how it came down, he must have really had to hustle to craft that classy goodbye speech.

Then again, maybe he had it drafted already and just didn't expect to use it tonight.

So wha' happened? Why is he going off? The obvious guess is that it has something to do with the Comcast takeover of NBC. Someone there doesn't like what Olbermann says and wants his politics off the air, perhaps as the start of a general rebranding of MSNBC. Maybe. Another possibility is that Olbermann is sitting on another, better offer from another network...but I have no guesses as to which one and I suspect that if he knew for sure, his statement would have contained a little wink and a promise to "see you soon." Then again, if he doesn't have something else lined up, I'd have expected a little reference to "I'm not sure where I'm heading..." as a bit of personal advertising, a way of telling the industry, "Get your offers in now!" He didn't do that, either.

I'm perplexed...and also wondering if Rachel Maddow's absence from her show tonight was connected in any way.

Guess we'll find out soon enough.

[UPDATE: Just noticed Rachel Maddow is in Los Angeles tonight appearing on Real Time with Bill Maher, which I'm watching at the moment. That explains why she wasn't on. Let's see if she mentions Olbermann there.]

[SECOND UPDATE: She mentioned it but just said it was a mutual decision. Hmm...]

• Posted at 8:46 PM · LINK

From the E-Mailbag...

Someone named "jonesr" writes to ask...

I'm watching the complete Bullwinkle DVD box set, and everytime the credits roll for an episode, Daws Butler is conspicuous by his absence.

Was Daws moonlighting with Jay Ward while exclusive to Hanna-Barbera, and left out of credits for that reason? Were the credits taken from some repackaging where segments that may not have had Daws were not included?

I swear I hear Cap'n Crunch and Elroy Jetson, etc, amongst the set occasionally.

As far as I know, Daws was never exclusive to Hanna-Barbera but there was a period there when he was on so many of their shows, it sure seemed that way. He was concurrently doing shows for Jay Ward and on some seasons of Rocky and His Friends, his name was in the credits — misspelled, in fact, on one year of shows. After a while though, he decided that since he was becoming known as the voice of Hanna-Barbera, it would be an act of loyalty to Bill and Joe to not take credit on work he did for other studios. So he asked the Jay Ward folks to leave his name off.

This is a good place to remind folks that screen credits on old TV cartoons are often unreliable. In some cases, that's because they were never right in the first place. In others, the credits have been changed. None of the prints you see on TV from Top Cat have the real end credits on them. Those film elements were lost. Fortunately, they had the animation and music for the ending without the superimposed names so someone assembled a re-creation...but they only re-created one episode's end credits and then spliced that ending onto every episode. So every Top Cat that's rerun now says, for example, "Written by Kin Platt" on the end even though Mr. Platt only wrote a couple of episodes. Paul Lynde did voices on two cartoon shows for Hanna-Barbera — The Catanooga Cats and The Perils of Penelope Pitstop. The two shows were done at the same time but for some unknown reason, his name only appears on the former. It's absent from Ms. Pitstop's series even though Lynde had a larger part on that show. Mel Blanc's name is mysteriously absent from many episodes of The Flintstones on which he was heard. There are plenty of other examples.

• Posted at 7:24 PM · LINK

That X-tra $

I haven't been to Disneyland very often...and not in over ten years. It's one of those activities about which you think, "Oh, I can always do that next month" and since you think that way, you never do it. But I do recall one thing that bothered me a bit was what I call the Extra Dollar mentality.

You get this in some businesses where you feel things are a bit pricey. It's that feeling that they've gone one petty step too far in trying to wring money out of the customers. The first time I bought a new car, we had the deal all made and I was just sitting down in the Finance Department's office to write a check...and as I wasn't financing the vehicle but buying outright, it was one of the largest checks I'd ever written in my life.

I was just about to put in the amount when a junior member of the sales crew walked in and asked if I wanted to spend something like three dollars more for a fancier keyring. I'm sure they thought, "Hey, he's spending all this money. What's three bucks more?" But I of course thought, "Hey, I'm spending all this money. Why are they trying to coerce three more bucks out of me?"

Never mind manners. That's just bad business, making the customer feel that extra level of exploitation. I once told the car-buying story to a gent who was a high muck-a-muck in a successful Vegas casino and he shook his head. "That's a great way to lose you as a repeat customer over three dollars," he said. The top casinos try real hard not to do that to their clientele. They want you to leave most of your money behind but not every dime, and they want you to feel you lost it fair-and-square, not played for some rube. I once read where another casino biggie said, "We'd much rather you lost 95% of your money and came back next year than to lose 100% and we never see you again."

There are times when I'm in some store and it feels to me like they're gone an inch too far, trying to turn their customers over and shake every last penny out of them. At the Westfield Mall over in Century City, it sometimes feels like the boss, whoever he is, walks around and if he spots six square inches of anything without an ad on it, he screams at his staff, "Why are we wasting that space?"

That's how I've usually felt at Disneyland. There's all this wonderful stuff and plenty of ways to have fun...and yes, a day there costs a handsome nickel but you feel like you're receiving the high end of Fair Value. And then they do something really, really greedy. This, which I just read about, sounds like yet another example. Instead of having those friendly walkaround character costumes all over the park, they're confining them to certain areas where they can be better utilized in the Disneyland PhotoPass promotion.

I had this quick mental flash of a Disney executive wandering the park with his staff and suddenly, he spots some father taking a snapshot of his daughter with Pluto. The Disney exec reacts in shock: "Wait a minute! Those people — they're getting something they'll treasure forever! Are we making any money off that?"

His aide quickly studies the situation and says, "Well, he's using a disposable Disneyland camera. We sell those at an 800% markup!"

The exec gasps, "Yes, but he could be using his own camera, right? And if he uses his own camera, we get nothing, right?"

The aide shudders. "Uh, I suppose so. But we addressed this not long ago. We started the PhotoPass program..."

"So why in the name of Michael Eisner is Pluto out here where you can take his picture without paying us? Why isn't he somewhere where people have to pay a PhotoPass photographer?

"I'll get right on it, sir."

As the aide scurries off, the boss yells after him, "And tell them to make it 1200% on the disposable cameras!" Then he spots a little girl getting a drink of water out of one of the fountains and he thinks, "Hey, wait one minute there..."

• Posted at 11:59 AM · LINK

Code Breaking

DC Comics has announced it will abandon the Comics Code, a move which Marvel Comics made back in 2001. Like Marvel, DC will have its own rating system. This leaves Archie Comics and Bongo Comics as the sole companies submitting their wares to this allegedly-outside censorship board.

I have mixed feelings about the Comics Code. In 1954 when comic book publishers were under fire for sometimes selling violent and/or sexy content, there was serious talk of government censorship of comic books either at the state or federal level. The major publishers banded together, invented the Comics Code and staved that off...and I guess when you look at that way, it was a good thing. But you can also look at it as the lesser of two evils. It infantilized the American comic book for a long time and, perhaps worse, consolidated control of the form in the hands of four men — the heads of four of the five largest companies. Thereafter, they pretty much controlled who could be in that marketplace and what they could publish. A lot of those who wrote and drew comics believed the members of that same star chamber were also conspiring to hold down the rates paid to writers and artists.

In case you're wondering, the Top Five company that refused to sign on was Dell Comics, then perhaps the biggest publisher of comic books. Execs at Dell believed that their line, which included the Disney comics and others unthreatened, didn't need the protection. They also saw no need to lend their squeaky-clean reputation to a rescue effort for those whose products had brought on the threats of comic book censorship. (Gilberton, which published Classics Illustrated, also declined to sign on for the same reason and because most of their line went through other distribution channels.)

At some point, the Code probably became unnecessary...probably by the seventies, maybe halfway through the sixties. The chance of outside censorship became pretty remote. But the publishers liked it as an instrument of intra-industry cooperation and as long as it didn't get in the way of putting out the product they felt would be most commercial, they saw it as a good thing. I'm not sure why they kept it on when even that part stopped working for them.

And now it's all but gone and I guess you can look at it two ways. It gave us some less-than-wonderful comics over the years...but it also kept the industry alive so there were comics at all. You kinda wish there'd been a better way.

• Posted at 2:12 AM · LINK

January 20, 2011 • Current • January 22, 2011