I'm imagining Donald Trump calling Rudy Giuliani in the hospital and saying, "No, I won't pay you the huge amount of money I owe you for legal fees. But I'll give you your choice of a Trump Bible, a poster of me as Superman or The Presidential Medal of Freedom!"

A follower of this site who shall remain nameless wrote to ask me to explain about the voice credits at the end of the early Hanna-Barbera cartoons. I've covered some of this before but here's a more detailed explanation…and the first thing you should know is that they were not complete and sometimes not accurate. For instance, here are the only end title voice credits that ever appeared on Quick Draw McGraw…

Three names: Daws Butler, Don Messick and Doug Young.  Daws was in every cartoon on that show.  In the Quick Draw McGraw cartoons, he voiced Quick Draw and Baba Looey.  In the cartoons of Augie Doggie and Doggie Daddy, Daws was Augie and Doug Young was Daddy.  In the Snooper and Blabber cartoons, Daws was always Snooper and usually Blabber.  A gent named Elliot Field was Blabber in the first four Snooper-Blabber cartoons, then Daws took over the part.

But there were other actors on that show besides Mr. Field.  While they did the occasional cartoon in which Daws did all the voices, they usually had two actors in them.  The other guy in the Quick Draw cartoons was often Don Messick but it was sometimes Doug Young, sometimes Hal Smith, sometimes Vance Colvig, sometimes Peter Leeds, etc.  There were very few roles for females but there were some and they were done by Jean Vander Pyl or Julie Bennett.  Messick was usually the second voice in Snooper & Blabber cartoons.

And when the little duck turned up in an Augie Doggie cartoon, that was a gent named Red Coffee.  As far as I know, Mr. Coffee never got a screen credit on any Hanna-Barbera cartoon.

Years ago, my great (and sadly, late) buddy Earl Kress made all our study over the years of H-B cartoons pay…not for us but for the estates of some of the voice actors we admired. We helped the studio identify a lot of actors in shows where the records were missing or incomplete. We helped those families collect some residual cash for streaming and DVD releases.

Now, most of what follows applies to the shows that the studio produced for syndication or Saturday morning time slots. When they got into network prime-time with shows like The Flintstones, The Jetsons and Top Cat, they made more of an effort to make the end credits complete and accurate…though as we shall see in a subsequent post that didn't help.

And the second thing you should know — or maybe this is the third; I'm not counting — is that even when the errors and omissions rankled the folks who voiced or even just plain worked on the cartoons, the applicable unions didn't care a lot. This changed to some extent in the eighties.  What follows is about the shows produced before the change.

So let's say we're the studio and we have a network order to produce and deliver thirteen episodes of a new show…and the year will be filled by running each episode four times. Because of the timing of how the networks made such an order and when they needed to put shows on the air, it is likely that Show #1 will air before the last few orders of the show are completed.

Some of the people who work on the show will work on every episode. Some will not. But when the time comes to prepare to deliver Show #1, we make up an end title for which we try to list all the major artists and crew members who have worked on that show up to that moment. And we're going to make up one end title sequence which can run on each week's show because it's easier and cheaper than making up credits that are specific to each individual episode.

So we list the main people in the various art departments that worked on the show. Those specific people might not have all worked on the show — or worked on it much — but we can't keep track of who drew what.  A layout artist mainly assigned to one show might have helped out for an afternoon or two on another show.  So we just kinda approximate who the artists and editors and supervisors were that season.

And then when it comes to the voices, we have the voice department make up a list of all the folks who were paid to do voice work on that show as of that moment.

We might be making this list up to put on Show #1 because it has to air next week. We haven't done the last show or two of three yet but it's time to make up the end credits so we put on all the names to date. Here is the card with the voice credits that aired on every episode of the first season of Dynomutt, which consisted of sixteen episodes that aired weekly beginning on September 11, 1976…

Okay now:  First thing we note is that there's no indication of who did what voices or who did regular characters and who did one-time minor characters.  Once in a while, an actor's agent might negotiate a special credit for the client…usually when the actor wanted more money but agreed to accept a special credit instead of more money.  A special credit costs the studio nothing.  More money costs them more money.

No one made such a deal on this series so there's nothing there to tell you who played which characters and who was in every episode. There were four recurring characters: Frank Welker was the voice of Dynomutt, Gary Owens supplied the voice of The Blue Falcon, Ron Feinberg was the Narrator and Larry McCormick gave voice to The Mayor. All four of those men were probably in every episode and all four could then have doubled or tripled performing other minor, one-time roles.  Welker — one of the most versatile actors ever in the voice biz — undoubtedly did.

The roles that appear once or infrequently — Cop #1, Man #3, the villain in the episode, etc. — are usually referred to as Incidentals.  All of the other folks on this list did incidental roles in the episodes that had been recorded as of the time the end titles were made up.  Or at least, that's what Hanna-Barbera's records said.  They were not always accurate…and of course, they only covered the shows that had been recorded as of the date the end credits were made up.  If that was before Show #12 and Show #13 were recorded, then an actor who only appeared in one or both of those episodes would not receive screen credit.

And as I mentioned, mistakes were made all the time. I'll write about those in some follow-up posts soon.

Nine men and women of medicine who once led the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention under both Republican and Democratic administrations have written an open letter you might want to read. If you don't have the time, I'll summarize it for you: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a fucking idiot who doesn't know the first thing about medicines, diseases, vaccines or health and his uninformed decisions are going to get a lot of people killed.

I do not understand why Kennedy has any support from anyone. If nine people with a long history in the field of fire prevention told you that your home was in imminent danger of a major blaze, would you instead believe some guy who didn't understand what a hydrant was?

Just did some surfing on the Internet and saw an amazing number of rumors that Donald Trump is dead, is about to be dead, had a stroke, is having some limb amputated, etc. As far as I can tell, not one of these comes from anyone who would be in a position to know if one of those things was true. Someone heard it from someone who heard it from someone who heard it from someone who heard it from someone who heard it, etc…

I wish people wouldn't do this. I also wished that when other "sources" who also had zero credibility were saying Joe Biden's health was much worse than it obviously was. Some guy who got onto my Facebook friends list was at one point telling everyone that Biden had died…then when Biden was suddenly out in public again and looking pretty healthy, the "friend" decided that "That's a double who's been made up to look like Biden" was a more plausible explanation than "I was wrong." Needless to say, that rumormonger is no longer on my Facebook friends list.

It's September…the time when Summer winds down, the kids go back to school and Evanier hits you up for money. This blog costs me several thousands dollars a year to maintain and keep running…and yes, it can be done for less. But some years ago, I tired of it occasionally crashing and being off-line and I had one too many episodes where things went wrong from a technical standpoint and I had to drop everything — including paying work — and put in the hours to undo what had gone kablooey.

Also, the "tech" side of maintaining a blog was getting to be a little too much for my limited expertise in that area. Twice in the last twelve months, I've had to pay a few hundred bucks to a WordPress Expert to do things that would have made me feel like one of the Three Stooges trying to remove someone's spleen.

So I signed up with a service that has kept things online for your (and my) pleasure. It makes things easier for both of us but now, once a year, I ask you to donate so I can make up the outta-pocket expenses of blogging almost every day. I have turned down offers to sell paid advertising or allow sponsored guest posts or to section off parts of the blog that will be open only to subscribers…stuff like that. I want to keep it absolutely free for all and "free" can sometimes be expensive.

Thus, today we start a Send Me Money campaign that will annoy you no more than reading this post and subsequent reminders…and the reminders will go away as soon as I receive enough to cover my expenses. If you can't afford it, fine. I understand…and I want this blog to be not only ad-free but guilt-free, as well. If you can afford it, thank you very much…

I gave up watching most of Bill Maher on HBO because I felt that more and more of what he said and did on Real Time was click-baity (to coin a new term we need).  He also got on a kick of discussing medicine and health with all the expertise of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on a bad day.  Once in a while, Maher presents something I think is very perceptive and even very funny but not often enough to make it Must-See-TV for me.  I like him a little more on his Club Random podcasts if/when he gets a guest who interests me (as he does occasionally) and lets them talk (as he also does occasionally).

That said, I found it well worth my time to sit through all of the hour-and-a-half he spends this week with Woody Allen.  If you do, you'll wish Maher fawned less and talked less but there's a real good interview in there if you're patient…

I kept meaning to post this but I also kept not getting around to it. This was on Seth Meyer's show a few weeks ago and it's one of the cleverest things I've seen on late night teevee in many a year…

A recurring message on this blog is not to get your medical advice from (a) The Internet or (b) anyone who seems to have studied medicine on The Internet. Even before Robert F. Kennedy Jr. stepped into power and began managing our country's health care without the slightest fucking clue as to what he's doing…replacing the counsel of learned Men and Women of Medicine with the whims of know-nothings…I've been urging you to not believe what you see and hear online.

This does not apply to one corner of The Internet. The American Medical Association is stepping up to fill that void via this YouTube Channel. But even there, they constantly advise you to believe Your Doctor over anyone with a keyboard who thinks they know all about diseases and aches and chronic conditions…

I haven't mentioned it lately on this blog but I have an odd semi-preoccupation in the kind of high-speed car chases that seem to pop up about once a day in Southern California and, obviously, elsewhere.  My main fascination is with how the news covers them.  A police pursuit is one of the few times that TV brings us something live with no idea what might happen, when it will happen, etc.

On your local news, when the News Director decides to pre-empt regular programming or turn the news telecast over to one of those live events, he or she has no idea how long they'll be locked into that coverage and if it will end peacefully or with someone dying. Many of them lead us on and on and on and then turn out to be not very interesting. Sometimes, they last so long that the TV station has to cut away or their helicopter has to turn back without showing us the resolution.

But I'm also interested in the mechanics of how the police handle such matters. Somewhere back on this blog a few years ago — I can't locate it at the moment — I mentioned a new invention that was being tested out as a way of stopping fleeing automobiles. It's called The Grappler and some police forces around the nation have been using them.

Here's a recent chase in which the car being pursued was stopped by The Grappler — and what happened when the driver being pursued tried revving his or her engine to perhaps break free of that Grapple. There's no audio on this…

Every year on Saturday at Comic-Con, I host two back-to-back panels — Quick Draw! and Cartoon Voices I — that fill Hall 6BCF to the point where hundreds of folks who want to get in can't get in. And every year, some person posts on Facebook or somewhere that one or both of these panels failed to attract much of an audience. I don't know why they do this in their off-time from, I'm guessing, handling the fact-checking at Newsmax.

So every year (starting last year), I post a photo of the audience just to remind you that you can't believe everything (and sometimes, even anything) you read on the Internet. Here is a shot from the stage during this year's Quick Draw! game…

If you click on that image, it will get taller and wider on your screen. It was taken by Tom Richmond, who was one of our competing cartoonists in the game. Does that look like not that much of an audience to you?

Can you spare an hour and twenty-four minutes? I've been sleeping weird hours and this morning at 3 AM, I was lying awake in bed, trying to decide whether to get up and go to my office or try to get back to sleep. I picked up my cellphone, flipped over to YouTube and randomly began watching this interview with Stephen Colbert at the 2024 Paley Festival. I ended up watching the whole thing and found it fascinating and enlightening and it confirmed my belief that Mr. Colbert is one of the smartest people ever to appear regularly on television.

Ben Schwartz is the interviewer and he's also great. The conversation is not political and, of course, not about the current situation. It's just about Colbert and who he is and how he got that way and I couldn't go back to bed after watching every minute of it…

Believe it or call me a bigger liar than our president…but it's almost time to start thinking about next year's Comic-Con International in San Diego. As the subject line says, we have 328 days until it convenes — which, by an odd coincidence, is the same number of panels I expect to be hosting at the event.

But they've just announced that Returning Registration will take place on Saturday, October 4, 2025 at 9 AM West Coast Time. That means that if you had a paid attendee badge for the 2025 gathering, you can log in then to try and score one or more for '26. You can verify your eligibility for that badge sale by logging into Member ID account on this page. If you aren't eligible for this scramble, don't worry. Your day will come.

And I'm only kidding about the 328 panels. I probably won't even do half that number.

A lot of folks think that all the comic book creators of "The Golden Age" are gone. Well, almost. There are a few of them still with us…like Sy Barry, the longtime artist of the newspaper strip, The Phantom, and an important contributor to DC Comics, among other firms, from the late forties to the late fifties. Read all about him and a recent honor.

10 Debunked Lies Donald Trump Has Repeated In The Last Week Alone.

Some people (including Donald Trump Jr.) are claiming that trans people commit a disproportionate percentage of mass shootings. This is, of course, a lie.

The guy in the Oval Office — who, by the way, is redecorating it to look like a bathroom in Liberace's house — is claiming that since returning to that office, he has ended "six or seven" wars. You will not be surprised to learn that the list of them says otherwise.

And Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is lying again. I should probably make this a regular feature of these compilations.

Here's an episode of The Red Skelton Hour for January 29, 1963 with Red's guests Mickey Rooney and the Paris Sisters. I vaguely recall watching this when I was eleven and it helping form my opinion that Mickey Rooney, who later could be found all over television praising folks like himself who had God-given talents, didn't get a lot of them. Or at least enough of them to carry him past the time he'd outgrown the role of Andy Hardy. When he taped this appearance with Skelton, Mr. Rooney had recently wrapped filming on what would turn out to be my favorite movie.

I didn't think he was very good in it and I don't think he was very good in this hour with Red…although the long sketch is somewhat carried by Skelton's joy of performing and solid back-up support by character actors like Robert Strauss, Herb Vigran, Doris Singleton and a gent named Ray Kellogg, who was on almost as many episodes of Red Skelton's show as Red.

There's a musical number in there in which Mickey — surrounded as was inevitable by chorus girls taller than he was — does an awful job of dancing and lip-syncing to a pre-recorded voice that may have been that of a soundalike. If you're in my age bracket and the chosen song sounds familiar to you, here's where you know it from: It was used as theme song on The Bob Cummings Show. Watch a little of it if you can and catch some of the Silent Spot comedy bit at the end in which Skelton does a version of the hoary half-man/half-woman vaudeville routine that was otherwise extinct by 1963. The whole hour is an interesting glimpse into comedy-variety in the days of yore…