Monthly Archives: January 2006

My pal, TV critic Aaron Barnhart, has a little different view of Dick Clark's return to broadcasting on New Year's Eve. I don't have a strong opinion on this. I said at the time I was unsure which of two views to take of it and there are others I didn't even mess with.

Did it make some people uneasy? Sure. Did it gladden the hearts of others? Yes. Would some folks have preferred not to see it? Of course. Did others tune in just to see how Dick was? You bet.

Let me throw one other thought into the discussion, even though I'm not clear enough on my own feelings to have much of a discussion on it. As I said, I worked with Dick a number of times. I've had no contact with him in over a decade but I doubt this has changed: The guy was and I'll bet still is a workaholic. I don't know whether it's vanity or greed or just some inability to deal with the whole concept of leisure time but the Dick Clark I knew loved to work and lived to work. He would carefully plot his schedule to see how much he could do in a day and if someone came to him with a project or offer, he'd immediately rejuggle that schedule to see if he could fit the new thing in, whatever it was. All of us around him knew the Golden Rule when it came to Dick Clark: He was the most cooperative, professional person you could possibly deal with as long as you didn't waste his time.

Most of the discussions I'm reading about his reemergence, including my own first response, are about the impact Dick's New Year's Eve appearance had on us. The more I think about it, the more I think that may not have been even a significant consideration in his decision to do the show. I think he was just going nuts sitting in a wheelchair in Malibu not working. He may well have needed the goal of doing that broadcast to motivate his therapy in the preceding months. Aaron thinks Dick should refrain from public appearances until such time as he's truly overcome the crippling effects on the stroke, and in one sense — and for some people — Aaron is right. But I'd doubt Dick has the patience for that, and if doing the occasional TV show is going to help him get back to being the Dick Clark we know, or anything close to it, I'm fine with that. I see people on my set all the time who haven't had strokes but have a lot less right to be there and who make me a lot less comfortable.

Earlier, as you probably heard, it was reported that the twelve trapped miners in West Virginia were found alive. Now, it turns out that the report was erroneous; that all but one perished. We feel bad for the men who were killed and bad for their family members who lost them twice in about three hours.

When I heard this latest development — just as I was posting about Dave and Bill — I logged onto a couple of Internet discussion forums and read a batch of postings. When it seemed all had survived, people were posting, "This proves there's a God. He answered our prayers." Someone was quoting noted psychic Sylvia Browne, who'd been on the Coast to Coast radio show saying that her powers had told her the men were all alive. Then it turns out they weren't all alive.

I don't think their deaths prove there is no God any more than their survival would prove there was. I wish people would stop linking Him to specific events and deeds like that. We have tragedies and non-tragedies all the time in this world and neither means that God exists or doesn't exist or wants to smite down some state for its morality or anything. I once had a friend tell me that if the Dodgers didn't win the World Series, it would prove that there was no God. I could only wonder if there was some guy who was rooting for the other team and saying it would prove there was a God if the Dodgers lost.

On the other hand, Sylvia Browne's faulty reading proves plenty about her. How long are people going to fall for that snake oil?

And now on CNN, I'm watching them rerunning a clip of Anderson Cooper finding out on live TV — from a person he's interviewing — that the reports he and everyone else had been giving for hours about the miners being all alive were untrue. A woman came out of the church where the deaths were announced and told Cooper what was said in there. Amazing to see how this unfolded. Cooper is stunned, and you can almost see him worrying if he should be putting this out on the network without more confirmation. But you can also see him realizing that the woman couldn't be making this up. So one thinly-sourced report corrects another. Once upon a time, when TV news wasn't 24/7 and so competitive, both accounts would have been checked better before being released to the world.

Hold on a second. I'm going to flip channels.

Well, everyone's saying the same things about how awful it is for the families. I heard the term, "emotional roller coaster" on two different stations in the same sixty seconds. Everyone's saying they don't know how the miscommunication happened. At the same time, they're reporting on how the miscommunication happened and saying that there will be investigations into how the miscommunication happened.

A reporter on Fox News just said, "The miracle has been snuffed out," as if there really were a miracle earlier instead of just a bad news report. And with that, I think it's time to go to bed. Good night.

In case you didn't see it last night, David Letterman had Bill O'Reilly on. The money quote, which is probably already being repeated all over the 'net, came when Dave said to him, "I have the feeling that 60% of what you say is crap."

Even though I feel that's about the right percentage, I couldn't help feel a twinge of sorry for O'Reilly…though I also think he's smart enough to have known he was going to get clobbered. It's just about impossible to beat a guy like Letterman when he has home court advantage.

The question I wish someone would put to Dave is, "Why do you have someone on your show if you think 60% of what they say is crap? Why give such a person a forum? Just so you can insult him to his face?" It's not like Bill O'Reilly doesn't have a place to express his opinions. I can understand booking such a guest to engage in a real debate but Dave wasn't primed for that. O'Reilly trotted out the story he keeps telling about how a school in Wisconsin wouldn't allow students to sing the real lyrics to "Silent Night" and Dave was unprepared to point out that what occurred there didn't happen the way O'Reilly keeps reporting it.

I hear people say they've given up watching Letterman because he strikes them as cranky and grouchy. I don't always agree…but then there are nights like last night. O'Reilly spouted his usual nonsense. Letterman insulted him. The studio audience cheered Dave. The home audience decided to see who Jay had on. Television doesn't always have to be pleasant and happy but if you're going to have friction, make it be about something.

One more item about the infamous Michael Larsen episodes of Press Your Luck…and yes, I know a lot of you couldn't care less about this. As I mentioned, GSN did a special documentary on the incident, replaying most of the footage with interruptions to tell Larsen's story. It was called Big Bucks: The Press Your Luck Scandal and it reruns next Monday night, January 9, on GSN.

I'm watching MSNBC and a reporter just said, "[Jack] Abramoff's plea bargain deal today should keep his prison time down to between nine and eleven years."

How guilty do you have to be to make that kind of deal? The charges could have put him away for thirty years but how often does anyone in a non-violent crime get the maximum? Abramoff and his lawyers had to be pretty sure he was heading for a lot more than fifteen or sixteen.

As mentioned here, the always-festive-shirted Scott Shaw! is commencing his Oddball Comics show this Saturday night at the Acme Comedy Theater at 10 PM. Here, once more, are the details.

Also that same Saturday night, the Totally Looped improv troupe, which ordinarily performs once a month on a weekday, is doing the first of four consecutive Saturday night performances at the Second City Comedy Theater at 8 PM. At this show, which I've plugged unmercifully in the past, several brilliant improvisational comedy performers dub in new dialogue to old films without ever having seen the films before. In my day, I've seen good improv and bad improv and even phony improv. This is the first of those three kinds and here are those details.

And I might point out that it is quite possible to do both shows in the same Saturday night. Totally Looped runs about an hour in a venue which is (I actually looked this up on Mapquest) 1.98 miles from where Scott will be performing his unnatural act. Mapquest figures travel time at five minutes so I'd guess you could make it in a half-hour. I always multiply estimated driving times from such services by six to figure how long it will take if you obey the speed limit, stop for red lights, have other cars on the road and don't run over too many people.

Five of you have sent me links to this webpage which tells the story of Michael Larsen and Press Your Luck. The article has some errors in it, most notably in claiming…

In order for Michael to keep his winnings, he'd have to remain trapped on the stage of Press Your Luck forever. His situation was an infinite loop from which there was no escape: he'd learned how to trigger only plunger-hitting patterns nailing a cash prize and a free spin. According to the game's rules, this "free" spin would eventually have to be spun. In other words, each plunger push would lead to another. Nobody else could play, and Larsen himself could never stop playing. The only way to break this loop would be for Larsen to abandon any pretext of surefire pattern matching. He would literally have to Press His Luck like a regular contestant, plunging the Big Board onto a non-winning square, a non free-spinning square, and one possibly yielding a Whammy capable of draining him of every penny. When he pushed the plunger the last and final time — Michael Larsen won a trip to the Bahamas. He stopped playing, to thunderous applause.

Absolutely wrong. The rules of the game allowed a player to pass his remaining spins at any time, which is exactly what Larsen did as soon as he crossed the $100,000 mark. The trip he won to the Bahamas was won when he slipped and didn't hit one of the two spaces for which he was aiming. At no point was he intentionally out of control of the board.

What always interested me about Press Your Luck (much like Deal or No Deal, recently discussed here) was that its rules were cleverly configured to usually promote an exciting conclusion. Yes, it was largely a game of chance — so is Deal or No Deal — but near the end, the player is forced into increasingly-tough decisions about how far to push that game of chance and must keep making decisions that mean the difference between a big cash win and going home with nada. What Larsen did was to take the rules used to foster those suspenseful conclusions and use them to wring serious dollars out of the show. Landing on a big money square also gives one an extra spin which therefore (usually) gives one another hard decision to pass or play. Larsen just kept using the extra spins to win more until he hit his target goal.

I'm not suggesting Larsen was heroic or admirable. From all reports, he seems to have been something of a creep. I just like the fact that a guy from out of nowhere could, with a little ingenuity, walk into a big time TV studio, make so much money and create so much chaos.

Robert Kuttner on why the new Medicare prescription plan for Seniors gives them terrible coverage but gives the drug companies and HMOs a lot of benefits.

Speaking of pressing one's luck this morning: Super-Lobbyist Jack Abramoff is pleading guilty in exchange for his cooperation in a government investigation. It is expected that his testimony will aid in the filing of charges against quite a few current and recent legislators and their staff members. One report says there may be as many as 20 indictments, which could lead to a fair number of Senators and/or Congresspeople deciding that though they're absolutely innocent, this would be a good time to resign and spend more time with their families.

Congressman Bob Ney is the only cohort identified in the case so far, though Abramoff was known to have close ties to Tom DeLay. Both those men are powerful Republicans so today, we have Liberal websites salivating at the thought that there will be more G.O.P. superstars on the hit list. Meanwhile, Conservative websites are selling the notion that if there is any honesty in the world, this will be viewed as a bi-partisan scandal since Abramoff also gave cash to some Democrats. I'm not sure that's quite accurate since by some reports, few if any Dems got money directly from Abramoff, though a number prospered indirectly.

Either way, it's wrong…and it's about time politicians of all kind saw that there can be accountability (i.e., prison time) for selling out the public trust for lobbyist dollars. I don't care what party they belong to or even which party did more of it in this particular case. I mean, if Democrats took less or took it indirectly, that may just be because Democrats are not in power and therefore not positioned to do as much for donors as Republicans. I also think that if I were a crooked politician — a life's goal that seems less and less attainable with each passing year — I'd feel a lot safer about taking bribes if my party controlled the government. So even if a lot more Republicans get swept up in the Abramoff investigation, that doesn't mean Democrats didn't or wouldn't. Throw all the rascals out, I say.

Aha! As half the known free world informs me this AM, the folks at GSN have changed their schedule. Instead of airing Press Your Luck reruns only on weekends, as I discussed in the previous message, they've now got them on seven days a week, effective this week. This means that the episode before Michael Larsen ran this morning…and sure enough, my beloved TiVo recorded it, even though I didn't know about the change. I therefore deduce, master of logic that I am, that the first of the Larsen episodes should rerun tomorrow morning and the second part on the following day. It's on at 9:30 AM on my satellite dish. Consult, as the saying goes, your local listing.

In 1984, a man named Michael Larsen went on the CBS daytime game show, Press Your Luck, and won $110,237. This was at a time when $10,000 was considered a huge win on a TV quiz program. Mr. Larsen had managed to figure out a loophole in the Press Your Luck game board and exploited it to rack up an amazing total in a game that went so long, it had to be split into two episodes. (Ordinarily, Press Your Luck played one game per day. Larsen's game was the only one in five years that ever ran two days.) A couple years ago, GSN ran a documentary on it all and included most of the footage from those two episodes, though with many interruptions to explain things. I thought it was interesting but not as interesting as watching the original shows as they originally aired.

GSN reruns two episodes of Press Your Luck each weekend — one on Saturday morning, one on Sunday morning. They've been going in sequence and they're nearing the Larsen shows. Next Saturday morn should bring us the episode from Thursday, June 7, 1984, which was the day before Larsen's appearance. On it, you'll see a contestant win $11,516 — an amount that seemed astronomical until they taped the Friday episode. On Sunday morning, unless they pull a switcheroo on us, GSN should be running the 6/8/84 episode in which the previous day's winner faces off against two new contestants, one of whom is Michael Larsen. Then the second part of the Larsen game would air on GSN the following Saturday. This is all assuming GSN doesn't skip over them, which is possible but unlikely.

I've always found this story fascinating. It's one of the few times a network TV show ever went totally out of control in the sense that the producers were sitting there wondering what the hell was going on. The studio audience went crazy and the reactions of host Peter Tomarken are priceless. If you're setting the TiVo and you're not familiar with Press Your Luck, set it to record the one before so you can get the hang of the game before you watch Michael Larsen knock it on its ass.

Rob Stolzer, who knew and interviewed Bud Blake, sends along some info. He also informs me that I accidentally gave Mr. Blake's real first name as Justin, not Julian. I went back and changed it to Julian and let's just pretend that it always said that, okay?

Rob confirms that Blake retired from drawing Tiger in March of 2004. The syndicate planned then to hand the strip over to a new creative team but began rerunning old Blake strips to get some lead time…then never stopped. So everything since then is Blake reprints.

Over on this page, Rob has a nice gallery of Blake's handiwork and a tribute written by Blake's son. It includes the revelation that Blake once worked as an assistant to the flamboyant designer, Cecil Beaton. That must have been quite an experience. No wonder he got into cartooning.

Feeling blue? Green? Plaid? Ask your doctor about Panexa.

Here are three more "biography" comics that Dell put out in the sixties. Adlai Stevenson was drawn by Jack Sparling while the life story of Dwight D. Eisenhower was illustrated by Jose Delbo. It wouldn't surprise me if Walter B. Gibson wrote both of them. It also wouldn't surprise me if these and the other political ones were done as part of some deal that involved selling educational materials to schools. They were distributed to regular newsstands but I'm guessing the initial impetus was to hawk them via other channels.

The Dell line was then full of funny animal, ghost comics and a whole lot of monsters…and I somehow can't see the editors who turned Dracula into a super-hero saying, "You know what the kids really want? A comic about the late United Nations ambassador and twice-failed presidential candidate, Adlai Stevenson!" It came out in 1966, not long after he passed away and what's odd is that they may have made money off it. The Eisenhower book was done after Ike's death in '69 and it's unlikely they'd have done it if they'd lost a bundle on Adlai.

You'd assume they made tons o' money off their 1964 Beatles book but that might not be so, even though it went into a second printing. The book itself was quite pleasant. The art was by Joe Sinnott with an assist from Dick Giordano who pencilled the chapter on George Harrison. The script by the super-prolific Paul S. Newman told the life stories of John, Paul, George and Ringo in squeaky-clean fashion, making them all sound like Pat Boone with slightly shaggier haircuts.

So how'd it sell? Newman told me once he'd heard, third-hand, that it was the best-selling thing Dell Comics put out after their break with Western Publishing — a traumatic event explained here — and that makes sense until you consider how rare the comic is. Copies in decent shape go for $200 and up…and you usually can't find them at all, making me suspect the press run was not as huge as one might imagine. Also, there's never been a best-selling comic book that didn't spawn a conspicuous gusher of imitations. Dell followed their Adlai book with Ike but they didn't follow their Beatles book with the Rolling Stones, the Dave Clark Five, Herman's Hermits or even more Beatles. In fact, they allowed the Beatles license to get away from them and the few other official Beatles comics of the sixties — adaptations of movies and of the Saturday morning cartoon series — were from Western/Gold Key. (In 1967, Dell did try a superhero group called The Fab Four but it wasn't the Fab Four.)

Its price also makes me skeptical that the Dell Beatles comic sold well. Apart from a few Classics Illustrated oddments, it was (I think) the first American comic book ever priced at more than a quarter. It sold for an unprecedented thirty-five cents. In the sixties, when comics were ten, then twelve, then fifteen cents, paying a few more pennies mattered a lot to buyers. With few exceptions, kids bought the lowest-priced comic on the racks, regardless of page count. Even if a 25-cent comic gave you more for your money, you still just got one comic book for your quarter. If you bought the twelve-centers, you could get two comic books plus a piece of Double Bubble Bubble Gum. At least, that's the way most of the kids in my neighborhood thought. (I bought the 25-cent books but I bought everything.) Even with Beatlemania at some merchandising apogee in '64, I have a hard time imagining a 35-cent Beatles comic book overcoming that mindset…or being noticed on the comic racks by hardcore Beatles fans who might have gone for it.

Still, most of this is just speculation on my part. I have no solid info on how it fared. What I think I'm most curious to know is if the Adlai Stevenson comic sold better than the Beatles comic. That would amuse me greatly.

For more on the Beatles comic, take a look at this article by the always-entertaining Fred Hembeck. And you can see some pages from it on this website.