As you all know, the other night in the Republican debate, Texas guv'nor Rick Perry had a little trouble remembering the third of three government agencies he wanted to abolish. Pundits are calling it the greatest political gaffe of all time and I just watched Jon Stewart and Jay Leno have enormous fun with it on their shows tonight.
I may be alone in this viewpoint but it doesn't seem like that big a thing to me. So the guy froze up on live television and his brain skipped a channel and he looked foolish. If there was a chance in the world I might vote for this guy, this would not make me any less likely to vote for him. It isn't about his ideas for policy and what he'd do as president. It isn't really even about his intelligence. I have plenty of reasons in both of those categories to hope this man never gets near the Oval Office but nowhere in that list is "had one memory lapse on television."
I did not watch this debate live. When I heard about this greatest gaffe in history, I eagerly made a dash for a YouTube video to see what it was. I mean, I'm quite in favor of Rick Perry being so humiliated that his White House ambitions end. But when I saw the clip, I thought, "That's it? That's nothing?" For the record, and not just to draw a partisan equivalency, I feel that way about most Joe Biden statements that get hailed as withering foot-in-mouth gaffes.
Human beings make mistakes...and no matter what their particular opponents may claim, politicians are human. Except maybe Newt.
Fred Kaplan examines Mitt Romney's bold and fresh idea about what to do about Iran. Turns out it's pretty much the same thing the Obama administration is already doing.
I've always liked Billy Crystal as Oscar host. Yeah, he does sometimes have a moment of self-adoration but he always manages to follow it with a self-effacing twinkle. So I suppose I should be pleased that he's stepping in to fill the void caused by Eddie Murphy's abdication.
But I was kinda hoping it would be Neil Patrick Harris or Hugh Jackman. They're both good hosts who still have the capacity to surprise us. I mean, Crystal probably already has someone writing the song parody about J. Edgar to the tune of "Goldfinger," rhyming "J. Edgar" with "Gay Edgar." And you see that tweet above? Toss in a reference to Eddie M. and you have the premise of Billy's whole opening monologue right there.
You know what I think would have been classy? If Mr. Crystal stopped hosting the Academy Awards until he's old enough to be an elder statesman of show business, having completed his long-range transformation into Alan King. Maybe he can still do it then but it would be more exciting if he didn't keep coming back to it every few years.
Why does McDonald's only sell its McRib sandwich now and then as opposed to always? Willy Staley seems to have figured it out. (Found this via the fine blog of Kevin Drum.)
In light of Rick Perry's disastrous fumble in the most recent presidential debate, James Fallows recalls some other bad moments for debaters...with video clips, thereof.
In 1975, Richard M. Nixon (aka "Disgraced ex-president Richard M. Nixon) gave a long, under-oath testimony in matters relating to Watergate. The transcripts were sealed but now they're unsealed. Yesterday, they became available online. You haven't heard of any bombshells yet because, I would imagine, researchers are still wading through them. There's an awful lot and from my first looks at it, I'd say you have to be well-versed in that case and its history to understand all of it. I await the analysis of those who know more about this stuff than I do.
Also, the Nixon Library has online a new batch of Nixon's dictabelts. A dictabelt was like an audio tape. Nixon had a little machine into which he could dictate (hence the name) his recollections or orders. The newly-released ones, which I have yet to listen to, were done in 1970 and they give Nixon's version of a surreal-sounding visit he paid in the early morning hours of May 9 to the Lincoln Memorial. Anti-war protesters were camped there and for some reason, Nixon paid them an unannounced visit and...well, some say he was testing out a line of reasoning he hoped to use in public speeches. Others say he was trying to understand what was motivating the protesters. Whatever it was, we now have his recollections, plus other comments he made about the peace movement of the day. I can't wait to hear how much of it would also apply to the Occupy Wall Street protesters.
In the forties and fifties, Mel Blanc appeared in a series of kids' records with the Warner Brothers characters that were released (and recorded for) Capitol Records. They were quite wonderful, what with Capitol using the same orchestra that backed up Sinatra and other "adult" recording artists, and many of the same arrangers like Billy May. The records were mostly written by the same gagmen, like Mike Maltese and Warren Foster, who were writing WB cartoons. Some of them were kind of like Looney Tunes without the visuals.
Recently, someone over at Warner Bros. Animation had the bright idea to add visuals to a couple of them. The first one is I Tawt I Taw a Puddy Tat and it stars, as you might imagine, Tweety and Sylvester. Mel recorded the song in 1950 and it was a best seller for Christmas that year. It's basically a three-minute song sung by Tweety and Sylvester, both voiced by Mel...and now it's a cartoon directed by Matt O'Callaghan. They located Mel's old vocal tracks in a vault somewhere and applied them lovingly to a new arrangement of the song...and that adorns some pretty funny animation of Sylvester chasing the Tweety Bird while Granny snoozes.
Last evening, I attended a screening that doubled as a party celebrating June Foray, who recorded a few new lines for the short as Granny. We toasted her, watched some other WB shorts for which she supplied voices, previewed the new short (in 3-D!) and then took in a Q-and-A with June, Matt and WB head honcho Sam Register.
So how is the new short? Well, some will have a hard time accepting those characters in CGI. Tweety has feathers. Sylvester has fur...and a frequent spray of saliva every time he says a word with an "S" sound in it. I think I've gotten past the traditionalist's objection to computer animation and especially to it being applied to characters who started life as line drawings. I've decided that if I can accept them in three-dimensional form as toys and statues, I can accept them that way on a screen. (And yes, it took me a while to get used to Garfield making the same transition, just as I've finally gotten used to Frank Welker doing his voice instead of Lorenzo Music.)
If you don't let something like that stop you, you'll probably enjoy it tremendously. It moves like crazy. It employs 3-D to maximum advantage. The Blanc vocals sound great. What more could you want? Oh, yeah: It's funny, too.
(And another nice thing: For years, Warner Brothers cartoons voiced by Mel and others only credited Mel. Daws Butler didn't get credit. Stan Freberg didn't get credit. Arthur Q. Bryan didn't get credit. Bea Benaderet didn't get credit. June didn't get credit...but on this one, she does. Finally.)
The party, by the way, was great...and long overdue since June hasn't been honored for at least a week.
If I understood correctly, I Tawt I Taw a Puddy Tat will reach screens as the warm-up for Happy Feet Two when it hits theaters in a few weeks.
I am informed by several members of David Letterman's staff that Dave no longer tapes the Friday show on Monday. They now tape two shows on Thursday and one airs the next day. So the show with Herman Cain will be taped Thursday to air Friday.
That is, if he shows up. Today on his show, Keith Olbermann wondered if he should be standing by to be a last-minute guest the way he was when John McCain cancelled on Letterman. I was thinking the same thing but then I had this other thought: I don't think Cain got into this race to become President. I think he was surprised as anyone to find himself at the top of the polls when all he was after was self-promotion. I don't think he'll be able to resist the opportunity to reach the Letterman audience so I think he'll show up. He may be polling about the same as Rick Santorum by then but I think he'll show up.
Most of you are probably not familiar with Me and My Girl, a musical first produced in London's West End in 1937 as a starring vehicle for Lupino Lane. Mr. Lane was a brilliant British comedian who was imported to America around 1919 — i.e., around the time Charlie Chaplin became the highest-paid performer in the world. Someone apparently thought the way to replicate Chaplin's success was to just get another agile guy from the U.K.
Equivalent popularity did not, of course, occur. Lane was a funny man and an incredible acrobat (at least as good as Keaton, many felt) and he made a lot of very amusing silent comedies which are largely forgotten. Some of them apparently no longer exist, which further limits his fame today. Still at the time, they brought him a limited stardom which petered out not long after sound came in...when moving funny became less important than talking funny. Actually, he was fine with dialogue and songs but not anything special in those capacities. Mr. Lane returned to England, thereafter working mostly on the stage. Me and My Girl was a spectacular hit and soon, everyone in the British Isles was singing and/or dancing to the musical's best song, "The Lambeth Walk." It was a great tune — one that almost always stops the show and leaves the audience cheering.
Me and My Girl ran for 1,646 performances in London. It would have run longer but when Hitler's forces began bombing London, several theaters were destroyed including one into which the show was planning to transfer. In fact, the show became a symbol of resistance against the Nazis, especially after a prominent Kraut denounced "The Lambeth Walk" as — and I quote — "Jewish mischief and animalistic hopping." That, of course, made the song all the more popular and many artists recorded it just to thumb their noses at Hitler.
It killed in subsequent, post-war revivals, here and in England, some of which featured a revised book by Stephen Fry. It's about as rousing and fun as any song that's ever been in any musical.
Here's the best version of the number I can post here, though you'll see several different ones on this site over the next week or so. If you think you got sick of seeing interpretations of "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang" on this site, wait'll you see what I have in store for this one.
This video is from the 1987 Tony Awards telecast and it features Robert Lindsay, who won that year's Best Actor Tony, in the scene from a revival that was then playing on Broadway. If you look carefully, you may spot George S. Irving in the company. Mr. Irving has had one of the longest, most glorious careers on the stage...and at age 88, he's still trodding the boards. His voice would be instantly recognizable to fans of New York-based animated shows of the sixties like Underdog.
There will be more on "The Lambeth Walk" here tomorrow. And the next day and the next day and the next day...
November 9, 2011
