In 1982, 1985 and 1990, producer Alexander Cohen brought forth specials called "The Night of 100 Stars," featuring at least that many famous folks, especially if you lowered the standards a bit of what you consider a "star." They were heaven for those who just wanted to see a lot of well-known faces and some of those faces even performed a little. The specials were all to raise awareness and some dough for the Actors Fund of America, which is why so many luminaries were willing to participate.

I showed some clips of this to my friend Shelly Goldstein the other day and we got to discussing just how hard these must have been to do — all those stars, all their agents, arranging for the outta-town ones to be in-town, hotel rooms, getting them all to Radio City Music Hall, dressing rooms, rehearsals, making sure everyone knew when to exit and not to pad their screen time. I know how tough variety shows can be with three stars, let alone more than a hundred.

As I said, there were a lot of great performances in these telecasts and there were also moments when stars just walked on and walked off. In each show, the closing was a parade of male stars, each accompanied by a Rockette.  These stars just walked on, tipped their hats and then were led off-camera, all to the strains of the song "One" from A Chorus Line. You can see that some of these leading men needed to be led by their respective Rockettes. Some had to be told when to tip their hats. Some seemed to be having too good a time while others looked like they were thinking, "Why the hell did I agree to this?"

And then at the end, everyone had to at least try to be part of a kick line. Now, that's Entertainment at its finest. Here is the "One" number from the 1982 show…

And here's the one from the 1985 show. This video clips off the first star in the parade, who was Mark Hamill…

Here's the 1990 one. As you'll see, they got a bit desperate for famous male stars and this one includes Geraldo Rivera, Henny Youngman, Larry "Bud" Melman and a few others who'll make you go "Huh?" I honestly don't know who some of these people are…

There are a lot of excerpts from all three specials on YouTube and they're all pretty interesting. The above excerpt from the 1990 show is from a pretty good video of the entire thing and if you want to watch it from the start, click here.

Here's a rundown of some of John Oliver's bonus segments in which he courageously did takedowns on Danbury, Connecticut — why, I don't understand and you won't, either…

Three times in my life, I got to tour the Ed Sullivan Theater in New York — first when the sitcom Kate and Allie taped there amidst much squalor. The place was in desperate need of repairs but Ed had left behind so much history that just gutting the place was not an option. The second time was after David Letterman had been there a few years. It got a wonderful renovation before Dave and his crew took up occupancy.

The last time was on a trip Amber and I made to New York. It was now the era of Colbert and the building never looked better. The Late Show was on hiatus that week but I got to talk to a number of crew guys who'd stayed on after Dave left and they had great stories. I wish I'd gotten a photo of me sitting behind Colbert's desk and Amber in the guest chair — or, better still, the other way around.

So now that The Late Show is ending, what will happen to the place? That question is not answered in this great article by Thomas Doherty — nothing's been announced — but you'll read a lot of great history about the building.

This is not a new Randy Rainbow video. It's an old Randy Rainbow video that I somehow missed when he posted it four years ago to celebrate/promote the release of a "new" (archival) Barbra Streisand album. I somehow never heard or noticed anything about the Barbra Streisand album either.

It reminds me of something I was going to mention here. If you've been following this blog for a while, you may remember a brief but intense discussion about reports that Ms. Streisand was going to star in — and even direct — a new film adaptation of Gypsy. I felt that while it would certainly be possible to turn that fine musical into a better movie than they did in 1962 with Rosalind Russell, I didn't think Barbra should play Momma Rose.

Well, let's just button that discussion by noting that that's never going to happen. I am not disappointed.

Here's Randy though extolling his love for The Greatest Star and I think he goes a bit over the top on this one. If he keeps this up, people may start suspecting he's gay…

"John G." told me this was on YouTube and I had to link to it. In the early seventies, someone got the idea that what TV needed was a show that combined old comedy films — mostly public domain footage — with a talk show welcoming present-day comedians — and they got Milton Berle to host it. In fact, they called it Milton Berle's Mad, Mad World of Comedy.

Berle was probably the wrong guy to topline this show as he was then, as he was for the last 25 years of his life, fighting a relentless but losing battle. It was to have comedians of his era — and him, especially — not to be regarded as out-of-date and irrelevant. To hear him tell it, stardom was forever and a great comedian was someone to be worshipped and hired and starred and never to be without an audience to love him, love him, love him.

They made a few episodes of Milton Berle's Mad, Mad World of Comedy as half-hours and it never found the marketplace they sought. The material was edited into different forms including this fifty-minute episode with guests Flip Wilson, Don Adams and the then-relatively-new, relatively-young comedian, Albert Brooks. It is the Albert Brooks segment which is of the greatest interest because in a way, Brooks represented The Enemy to Berle. Brooks was being hailed for "the comedy of today," which must have sounded like an eviction notice to Uncle Miltie in his campaign to never be thought of as passé.

You can sense a certain amount of frustration on his part with the interview. He obviously felt very threatened by Albert and I remember hearing from someone who worked on it that lot of footage was cut because it made the host look bad. If you want to watch just that segment, this link will take you to where it begins but it might be better to watch it in the context of the whole, pasted-together program.

I had — and may still somewhere, have — this on Laserdisc and I always thought it symbolized a turning point in American comedy. It is worth noting that when this was done, Berle was around 65 and Brooks was around 26 — and that Albert Brooks is now 78. Also of note is that they taped these shows at The Masquers Clubhouse in Hollywood, the Masquers being an organization that sought in its way to fight the same battle that Berle fought. That clubhouse was emptied and demolished in 1985 and there's now an apartment building at 1765 N. Sycamore. Milton Berle died in 2002…

And if that interested you, here's another show they edited out of what they taped for this potential series. In this one, Berle shows more clips and chats with Dick Martin, Mort Sahl and Pat Buttram…

Like you, I've been waiting for much of my life to hear the theme song from The Flintstones played by a band of high school handbell ringers. Well, it's finally happened and no, don't thank me. Thank Jon Reeves, who sent me this link…

If you're a follower of this blog or of comic books in general, I don't have to tell you who Jack Kirby was…only the man whose ideas and artistry were among the main reasons that Marvel Comics — and maybe the entire industry — are here today. He was also a very sweet and talented man who has my eternal gratitude, as well as that of many others, for what he and his work meant and still means to me.

I was fortunate to know and work with this man and one of the many, many things I learned from him was the importance of good, old-fashioned hard work. One day, I looked at him and said to myself, "Self, you're never going to have anywhere near the talent of this man…but it might be possible to work as hard as he does."

That was how it was with Jack, who grew up in a very poor neighborhood. At a very young age — we're talking nine or ten here — he had to go out and earn whatever nickels and dimes he could earn to help his family with rent, groceries and other necessities of life. So he sold newspapers, he delivered newspapers, he (sometimes with his father) sold food items from pushcarts…whatever he could, he did until his creative skills emerged as a means of earning revenue.

Much of that selling and pushcarting took place at or around the NW intersection of Essex and Delancey Streets in the lower east side of Manhattan, not far from where the Kurtzberg family lived. Kirby was Kurtzberg back then but though his name changed, the significance of that area to him never did. The street gangs of his youth there had their names changed to the Yancy Street Gang in Fantastic Four.

Not long ago, as a promotion for a Fantastic Four movie, that intersection was briefly renamed "Jack Kirby Way" — and by "brief," I mean like for an hour or so, just long enough for the photo op. Many of us felt that was not long enough. It should have been more like "Forever." Some folks did the kind of petitioning to make that happen, chief among them a gent named Roy Schwartz.

Happily, the New York City Council agreed and at Noon on May 11, 2026, a new and permanent sign will be unveiled at that corner. There will be a celebration then and there, and everyone's invited — honest! Here's your invitation. Hope to see you there…

Matthew Wecksell sent me a couple of good questions to answer here. One, which requires a longer reply than I have time to write today, is about a mini-series I once instigated for DC called The DC Challenge. I'll get to that when I can but in the meantime, he asked about two comics called Sergio Aragonés Massacres Marvel and Sergio Aragonés Destroys DC that were done by Guess Who and Yours Truly. Matthew asked — tongue planted in cheek, I assume —

Did both companies need to agree to let you do both projects?

Okay, I'll treat that like a serious question: Yes, of course, since Marvel published one in which we lampooned their characters and DC published the other in which we spoofed their characters. It has been my experience that comic book companies almost never publish something without approving of it, however hard it may be to believe that of some projects.

What's more, we were somehow able to coordinate things so that they both — and don't ask me how we managed this — came out on the same day. I think. At least, that's my memory but online sources tell me that the Marvel one came out on April 3, 1996 and the DC one came out on May 1, 1996. I think one of those dates if wrong. Also, if you want get technical, the DC one was named Sergio Aragonés Destroys DC and the Marvel one was named Sergio Massacres Marvel. This mismatch was probably due to me not paying close enough attention to everything.

I also didn't catch that while Sergio's name was huge on the cover of each, and he and I were depicted on the front cover of the DC one and the back cover of the Marvel one, we forgot to put my name on the cover of either.  Fortunately, Sergio caught that one and had it added, albeit awkwardly, at the last minutes.

One thing I did catch: In each, there was a full-page with an illustration of Sergio reading the comic books of one company and me looking annoyed at his dumb questions.  At the last possible moment to make the switch, I decided it would be funnier if the page with him reading DC Comics, which was then in the DC book, was in the Marvel book and vice-versa so I had them swapped.  So what we had was a  page drawn for a DC book printed in a Marvel book and a page drawn for a Marvel book printed in a DC book.  When else could that have happened?

How this whole silly thing came about isn't much of a story.  As I recall, Paul Levitz (who was then one of the main folks running DC) and I were talking and the idea materialized out of nowhere.  Paul said they'd do it and one of us said, "Hey, wouldn't it be neat if we did this for Marvel too?" and we both talked to someone at Marvel and I wish I could remember who it was but it was all arranged rather effortlessly.  Nothing in comics these days is as simple as it was then.

I wrote both issues with story input from Sergio.  He penciled the whole thing and inked the pages on which we appeared.  Guest artists inked the pages on which we parodied Superman and Spider-Man and Batman and whatever else we despoiled.  I learned — and I guess I knew this before we saw firm evidence — that though the guest inkers were some of the best in the business, Sergio's artwork was best when he inked it himself.  The pages certainly got done faster.

We were both pretty happy with how they came out and also with a book we did a little later called Sergio Stomps Star Wars — again, done in cooperation with the folks who owned the properties we were ridiculing — and we both have signed jillions of them.  I hope one of these days someone at DC will call someone at Marvel or someone at Marvel will call someone at DC and they'll arrange to reprint the DC and Marvel books in one volume but I've never heard of anyone trying to make that happen.  DC has just assembled a MAD special that does some of the same things to DC Comics and Sergio has contributed some pages to that.

And that's about all I can think of to write about this topic.  When I get more time, I'll tackle the challenge of writing about The DC Challenge.  Thanks, Matthew.

I'm not sure why I'm so interested in what's happening with Las Vegas.  I used to love the town — the casino areas, at least — and I traveled there often.  But the place now offers very little in the way of entertainment that interests me and everything — including the gambling — is configured to drain every possible nickel from your pockets.  And sure, they were always greedy but you didn't have that feeling of being "taken" every time you placed a bet, ate a meal, bought a ticket or looked at your hotel bill.

Someone at WonderCon asked me "Wha' happened?" and I think a large part of it was that after the hotels there lost so much money being shut down during COVID, they felt the need to raise prices and make some of it back in a hurry.  And in so doing, they learned that people who wanna go to Las Vegas didn't care.  Charging more didn't drive enough folks away to lower the over-all "take"…

…until fairly recently when it did, a little.  So now most hotels are offering "all-in" packages.  You pay a flat fee and get a lot of coupons for food and gaming and such…and it feels like a bargain.  "Feels like a bargain" has always been a big thing with Vegas.  If we have a $30 buffet, we can raise the price to $50, give you a $10 off coupon and it "feels like a bargain."

Most buffets now work that way…the ones that remain.  The MGM Grand just announced theirs is shutting down.  That leaves the Bacchanal Buffet at Caesars Palace, The Buffet at Wynn Las Vegas, Wicked Spoon at The Cosmopolitan, The Buffet at Excalibur, The Circus Buffet at Circus Circus, A.Y.C.E. Buffet at Palms and The Garden Court Buffet at Main Street Station.  Some of those are so overpriced that you'd have to eat like Mr. Creosote in the Monty Python movie to even come close to breaking even.

But here, I think, is one reason so many buffets are going away.  Howard Hughes — a man who had a lot to do with changing Vegas — used to have a motto.  It was "Use other people's money!"  Even when he was one of the richest men in the world, his goal always was not to risk his own dough on business ventures…to let others take those risks.  There was also a guy named Trump who practiced the same philosophy.  What he'd contribute to most enterprises was not his cash but his name.

At most buffets, the casino takes the financial risks…but if they rip out that buffet and put a Food Court in its place, all the merchants who set up in the Food Court take the risks.  The casino-hotel merely rents them the space.  Most restaurants in Vegas now operate on the same basis.  Somewhere, in some board meeting of the folks behind Caesars or MGM Resorts or any casino us saying, "We don't gamble…that's what customers are supposed to do!"

Sid and Marty Krofft treated me very well during the years when I was a writer — often, head writer — on most of what they produced for television. I was also involved with a couple of live shows they were trying to sell — and I think that if the money had been the same, they'd rather have sold one of those than one of their TV ventures.

The company had started off doing live shows, including a scandalous "adult" puppet show called Les Poupées de Paris that toured for years and — I cut-and-pasted this out of Wikipedia — became a key attraction at the Seattle World's Fair in 1962, the New York World's Fair in 1964-1965, and the San Antonio HemisFair '68 in 1968.

Because of the years Sid Krofft spent as an opening act for Liberace, Judy Garland and a few other stars of that magnitude, they were able to get those folks to record voice tracks to which puppets of Liberace, Judy Garland, et al, could mime. They also had puppets and the voices of Pearl Bailey, Milton Berle, Cyd Charisse, Gene Kelly, Edie Adams, Maurice Chevalier, Jayne Mansfield, Tony Martin, Phil Silvers, Loretta Young and others.

The show was always a work-in-progress with new puppets and new bits being inserted all the time. Sid told stories of how the "naughty" factor had to change depending on where it played. There were towns where they were actually threatened with arrest for displaying topless puppets and had to cover them up. I never got to see the show and when I asked, Sid said (sadly) that they really didn't have good films of the show but they had clips. Here's four-and-a half minutes of an ice skater introduced by a recording of Paul Frees, who did a lot of work with them. She's followed by the Frankenstein Monster who is obviously not a puppet but a very small person in a costume…

The success of that show put them on the map (as they say) and Sid and Marty were always trying to get something of the sort going again. They had only limited success in those efforts, some of which involved me. Fortunately, they had much better luck selling TV shows, some of which involved me. As I look back on my time working with them, my main regret was that very few of their proposed live shows ever happened. Some of those projects would have been a lot of fun. But most of the TV shows sure were.

Ten minutes? Twenty? Whatever, it was probably not long enough for Aquaman to water-ski from The Persian Gulf to the Gulf of Oman. And by the way, I'm surprised our president hasn't announced yet that he's renaming both of those The Gulf of Trump.

What doesn't surprise me is him announcing some success before it's actually happened. That seems to be all he cares about — announcing some alleged success. If it turns out to not be true or not be true for long, well…that's not his fault, right?

I've been swamped the last week or two with legal matters, medical matters and deadlines such that I haven't been following the news as faithfully as I often do. This is not always bad because there's certainly such a thing as following the news too closely. There are a number of things I'll never understand even if I pay close attention…and no, I'm not asking any of you to explain because I'm not sure anyone can.

I will never understand someone like Eric Swalwell, who was a rising star in the Democratic Party and who stood a real good chance of becoming the next Governor of California, and why he did what he did. His public career exploded practically overnight and he withdrew from that race and Congress and will probably never be seen again in any significant capacity. And what I don't understand is the "How the hell did you think you could get away with that?" aspect. There's the obvious immorality of certain actions involving women but there's also the real, real bad judgment call to think he couldn't/wouldn't end up like Anthony Weiner. I thought the guy was smarter than that.

Speaking of The Dick Van Dyke Show — as I often am on this blog — I posted links to watch my Ten Favorite Episodes here a while back and talking about it the other day inspired my friend Shelly Goldstein to pick out her Ten Faves list and to invent a few extra categories.  Here's what Shelly thinks. Her list is not in order of preference, but in order of when they aired starting with Season 1…

1. It May Look Like a Walnut
2. I'm No Henry Walden
3. That's My Boy
4. Big Max Calvada
5. October Eve
6. The Impractical Joker
7. Baby Fat
8. 100 Terrible Hours
9. Coast-to-Coast Big Mouth
10. The Gunslinger

SPECIAL MENTION – EPISODE THAT FEATURES THE BRITISH INVASION
The Redcoats Are Coming (Hey! I love Chad & Jeremy speaking Liverpudlian)

SPECIAL MENTIONS FEATURING BUDDY & SALLY

1. The Life & Love of Joe Coogan (Rose's single best line delivery in the entire series: "Where's this tall, good-looking, charming PRIEST you wanted me to meet?!?!?!?!")
2. Buddy Sorrell, Man & Boy
3. Romance, Roses & Rye Bread (I love when the show made fun of 1960s avant-garde off-Broadway theatre)

SPECIAL MENTIONS – "LET'S PUT ON A SHOW" EPISODES

1. Too Many Stars – Ann Morgan Guilbert's "Sentimental Love Song" steals the show
2. The Sam Pomerantz Scandals
3. The Secret Life of Buddy & Sally

So that's Shelly's list. Please don't send me yours. And she inspired me to post links to ten more of my favorite episodes. So you can see my Top Twenty over on this section of this blog.. Happy viewing.