Since we were in a Julie Andrews mood here lately, I thought I'd treat you to this video of her 1995 Broadway musical version of the film Victor/Victoria.  It was directed, as was the movie, by her husband Blake Edwards and it had Michael Nouri in the role James Garner played on screen, Tony Roberts in the Robert Preston part and Rachel York imitating Lesley Ann Warren — who I thought stole the film. Shortly after seeing the show on Broadway, I met Ms. Warren and she asked me how her replacement had done. I thought for a second and told her, "It's kind of like you're Elvis and she's a real good Elvis impersonator."

This video was shot at the Marriott Marquis Theater in New York during a performance so that's genuine audience reaction you're hearing. Actually, I believe they shot several performances and then edited them together. It was done with robotic cameras on robotic arms which swung out over the audience and the reason I know that is because my wonderful friend Brinke Stevens and I were in one of those audiences.

There was an announcement before the show assuring us the robotics would not get in the way of our enjoyment (they didn't) and that the show was being recorded for Japanese television and the video would never be seen in America. A few years later of course, it was.

We thought it was a pretty good show but as some of you may remember, there was a brouhaha when the Tony nominations came out that year and it only received one — for Ms. Andrews, not for the show or anyone else in it. Ms. Andrews was incensed and at a performance soon after, she announced, "I have searched my conscience and my heart and find that I cannot accept this nomination, and prefer instead to stand with the egregiously overlooked."

The "snub" (if you want to call it that) kind of shocked the Broadway community. It had been expected that the nominees for Best Musical that year would be: Rent, Big, Victor/Victoria and Bring in 'Da Noise, Bring in 'Da Funk. Instead, Victor/Victoria wasn't nominated and neither was Big. The other two slots went to two musicals that had already closed after short runs — Swinging on a Star (96 performances) and Chronicle of a Death Foretold (37).

The producers of Victor/Victoria were upset because since their show had not been nominated for Best Musical and Julie was taking the stand she did, they couldn't have a number from their show on the Tony telecast — usually good for business. The producers of that telecast were also upset. They were sure that having Julie Andrews performing a number from that show would have been good for ratings. Nathan Lane, who hosted that show, did turn up on stage dressed as Julie Andrews and announced she couldn't be there that night because she was hosting a telethon for the Egregiously Overlooked. The Best Musical award that year went to Rent and though Julie's name stayed on the ballot for Best Actress in a Musical, the award went to Donna Murphy in a revival of The King and I.

Anyway, here it is. Enjoy…

Here's the trailer for the National Tour of Boop! The Musical. They're in Cincinnati tonight, Saturday and Sunday and then it's on to St. Louis. Thanks to Ben Varkentine for sending me this.

I briefly knew Grim Natwick, the animator credited with designing Ms. Boop when he worked at the Max Fleischer studio in 1930 — and she wasn't the only great cartoon lady he brought to life. He was later the primary animator of Snow White for Mr. Disney. I wonder what he would have made of his 1930 creation starring on Broadway almost a hundred years later…and his drawings of her on posters and playbills.

Here's Jordan Klepper doing what he does best: Finding the most clueless Trump supporters and getting them to look that way on camera…

A Halloween Special from Randy Rainbow…

And here are some times Julie Andrews performed on Ed Sullivan's program. Some of the video is not great but all of the performances are…

My current favorite talk show host, Dr. Z…

Donald Trump cheering on the Vivek Ramaswamy ad. I can’t wait to see what The Daily Show will make of this, probably tonight.

I’ve been posting links to some videos featuring great (I think) show tunes penned by Alan Jay Lerner and Fritz Loewe. Here’s a few minutes of those two gents telling — well, it’s either Will Jordan or Ed Sullivan — how they wrote My Fair Lady…

I hoped Vivek Ramaswamy would lose the upcoming election for the same reason I hope all the Trump supporters/enablers will lose.  But now I’m especially hoping Ramaswamy will lose and people will say “It was because of that dirty, misleading attack ad he hurled at his opponent” and that will make future elections a bit cleaner. It’s a lot to hope for, I suppose.  But elections in this country have become a festival of sliming and misrepresenting your opponent and anything that could tone that down would be a good thing.  When the current Republican governor of Ohio condemns an ad by someone running to be the new Ohio governor, that’s proof the guy who wants to be elected the new governor shouldn’t be.

I never thought Donald Trump’s approval rating could sink this low.  It’s down around the national approval rating for Painful Rectal Itch and the way he’s acting these days, it wouldn’t surprise me if it sank lower.  Even people who approve of the man’s political agenda have to be concluding he’s outta his freakin’ mind.

Are the polls wrong?  Any individual pollster can be and some certainly have been.  But almost all of them?  Including Fox News and others that have kissed this man’s keester?  I don’t think so.

What made me think he’d never lose this much of his base is a couple of encounters with now-former friends I thought wouldn’t abandon him if he gift-wrapped the nuclear codes and presented them to Putin for his birthday.  But I see on Facebook that at least one of those ex-acquaintances is praying  for a sky-colored tsunami.  I’m guessing it was the cost of a full tank for his Hummer that did it. 

I try not to be dangerously optimistic but the polls make that difficult — especially the ones that say around 66% of Americans think Trump is using his position for monetary gain.  I haven’t seen him asked about that but I assume he’d say that as the only good president this nation has ever had, he deserves every cent he’s made plus his name and/or face on everything he wants it on.  It’s going to be an interesting Election Night.  I can’t wait to see him simultaneously claim the vote was rigged and that every single thing that’s gone wrong is all Joe Biden’s fault.

It’s been a while since The Daily Show had this much of the kind of news that makes for great Daily Show segments…

In my folder of questions submitted for me to answer under this heading, I have a number asking me to name the folks I think are the ten — or twenty or some other number — all-time Best Comic Book Artists. I see such lists all over the Internet and most of them strike me as having been made up by folks who think "comic books" are only super-hero and adventure in nature and who couldn't properly place the great illustrators of Disney or "funny animal" comics on such a list because they've never heard of any of them except (maybe) Carl Barks and (even less likely) Warren Kremer. Some of them don't even seem to think that Archie Comics or Harvey Comics or Dell Comics about ducks even qualify as "comic books."

I'll grant you that some of the artists who I think are being overlooked did their best work in comics that didn't have credits. The late Harvey Eisenberg was as good at drawing Tom & Jerry or Hanna-Barbera comics (or others) as John Buscema was at drawing Conan or Gil Kane was at drawing the eighty zillion different comics Gil Kane drew. But an awful lot of people reading this don't know who Harvey Eisenberg was.

Or Pete Alvarado or Kay Wright or Owen Fitzgerald or Jack Manning or Howie Post or Dan DeCarlo or Marty Taras or John Carey or…well, it's a long list.

I'm not saying you have to know all those names but don't pretend you're an expert on comics when you're only an expert on some kinds of them. Imagine someone compiling their list of "The Fifty Greatest Sports Athletes of All Time" and it's only baseball players.

The term "comic books" includes books that are comical. When E.C. Comics was at its peak, one Dell comic book — Walt Disney's Comics and Stories — was outselling all the E.C. Comics collectively published in a month and I think there was greatness in its pages.

I have some serialized topics I'm behind on. When I finish them, I'm going to start spotlighting some of those writers and artists on this blog. I know there are a lot of folks out there who feel the same way I do; that you don't have to draw super-heroes to be a great comic book artist. I may invite some of you to assist me.

For years now, The Lincoln Project has produced powerful anti-Trump commercials. This new one strikes me as one of the most powerful ones they've done…

So here’s what Fred Kaplan has to say today…

Russian President Vladimir Putin has thrown Donald Trump a bone that’s so big and juicy, Trump must feel sorely tempted to chase it —- but it’s laced with so much poison that even Trump might calm himself and resist.

The bone, according to the Wall Street Journal, is the proposal of a tripartite summit — just Putin, Trump, and Chinese President Xi Jinping — to plot in an ending to the Russia–Ukraine war.

And Fred goes on to say that the ending they'd be plotting would be victory for Putin and surrender by Ukraine. For which, I'm thinking, Trump would immediately demand several Nobel Peace Prizes. There's a terrible deal.

Micki Dee St. James wrote to ask me…

Do you think it’s better for a writer to be interested in almost everything or should they try to specialize in some area?

Hmm…I think a writer should be interested in whatever he or she is interested in. There are a zillion things that don't interest me in the slightest and anything I'd write about them would almost certainly be pretty worthless. If I write about the things that do interest me, there's at least a chance that I'd say something interesting or enlightening about them.

A writer should let their areas of interest expand organically.

One of the things I enjoy about doing this blog is that it's all about things that interest me. It's the same reason I host a lot of panels at Comic-Con. There are hundreds of panels on that convention's schedule that don't interest me in the slightest. The sixteen panels I hosted this year or participated in were all panels that interested me.

I could diversify my areas of interest (I suppose) but I don't think that would make me a better writer. You kind of have to let your passions lead you. Does that answer your question?