Monthly Archives: June 2010

We're still coming to you from the Africa Hot city of Las Vegas, Nevada where the temps are so high that everything in the Liberace Museum melted and sequin-studded lava is now oozing onto The Strip. As I mentioned, I'm here at the Licensing International Expo, which is where folks come if they (a) have a character or property to promote or (b) might be able to make some money from the exploitation of others' characters or properties. It's the kind of place where you often hear the word "monetize" used, as in: "I have these characters who are kinda like the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles crossed with Buffy the Vampire Slayer only they're mosquitoes and we're trying to monetize them."

Many of the characters being touted as The Hottest Property Out There are unknown to me…and since I'm somewhat involved in this world professionally, you can imagine how unknown they are at the moment to the average person. But in this kind of exploitation, the appearance of popularity is often self-correcting. There are booths pushing new cartoon characters, brand names, celebrities…everything. Some of the celebs are deceased, some are here. I saw Tony Curtis and Kareem Abdul-Jabaar, for instance…and Buzz Aldrin, who was on my flight to Vegas, has a booth in connection with some promotion called "Buzz Aldrin, Rocket Hero" that makes him look less like The Second Man on the Moon than the senior citizen version of Buck Rogers.

Of course, there are tons of characters you have heard of. Time-Warner is pushing the heck out of Yogi Bear, Scooby Doo, Green Lantern and all the others…and they must have a movie or something in the works of Top Cat because they have a Top Cat banner that probably cost about half the budget of the original series. And you have your Disney and your Dreamworks and your Sony and your Smurfs and I'm sorry I didn't get a photo of this great walkaround costume they had of the cartoon version of Mr. Bean. You'll have to settle for Miffy above.

I'll tell you more when I don't have to go pack for the flight home…including a report on Zumanity, the "sensual side of Cirque du Soleil," where the acrobats do much less spectacular feats but without nets or shirts. I also have to steel my courage to make the daring three-yard dash from the air-conditioned hotel to the air-conditioned taxi. That'll be more impressive than anything they tried last night at Zumanity even if I won't work topless.

It's the end of an era. Dr. Demento will still be heard via a streaming Internet show but after forty-some-odd years, he's leaving conventional radio. This article has all the details…and I don't think it gives nearly enough credit to what the good doctor has done for many, many careers. I also don't think it properly summarizes the reasons that his program lost listeners the last decade or so. I think some of it was a period when he was a bit too generous (I thought) in playing the works of new wanna-be recording artists. The show morphed from being a celebration of established successes in the world of comedy and novelty records to being a showcase for aspiring Weird Als. There should be a place for such works but I don't think that's what folks wanted when they tuned in to Dr. D. They wanted Stan Freberg and Tom Lehrer and Spike Jones, as well as records that were unintentionally funny.

The other problem (again, I thought) was that certain CD releases and Internet MP3 swapping have made that material fairly easy to acquire, slap on your computer and play whenever you feel like it. The irony, of course, is that the reason such recordings are now so readily available is that one man kept them alive and popular. Dr. Demento isn't going away. It's kind of like radio has gone away from him…

Fred Kaplan has all the intelligence on the guy nominated to control all the intelligence.

Maybe it was because Buzz Aldrin was on our flight but Southwest Airlines performed flawlessly yesterday afternoon. If they hadn't — if the flight here to Vegas had been as flawed as some I've had — I was going to ask him to compare and contrast it with going to the Moon. I can't even say, "It took him less time to get his luggage on the Moon" because Southwest delivered our bags quickly and efficiently.

So I just shook his hand and then I went and grabbed a taxi. Some of you will be amazed that my driver was not Dave Siegel.

BTW: There was only one odd occurrence, not on the flight but in the always-interesting security line at LAX. Some shriekingly homophobic lady had to be searched because, I'm guessing, her soul set off the metal detector. A female security person was attending to her and the searchee started loudly demanding assurance that the searcher was not a dyke. All that was going to happen was that the guard was going to wave one of those wand-thingies around the searchee's questionable areas but before this could be done, we all had to listen to this loud anti-gay paranoia from a woman who seemed to think that lesbians everywhere have nothing more they want to do than get their lesbian hands on her, even in a public place. By the time I got my shoes on and headed for the gate, this had not been resolved…and I suspect for that woman, it will never be resolved.

I'm here for a thing called the Licensing Show. I'll tell you all about it when I get back from it. Have to go meet folks for Breakfast, then scurry over to the convention. Hope they let me do at least three or four panels.

Around twelve readers of this site have volunteered copies of that Girl From U.N.C.L.E. episode I need for Stan Freberg so I think we have it. Thanks to all you generous folks.

Nate Silver over at fivethirtyeight.com (soon to be a part of The New York Times) is doing some lengthy analysis of the accuracy of the various pollsters. If you head over there, you may find yourself pretty deep in the weeds and I'd be fibbing if I claimed that I know exactly what he's talking about every moment. My math skills are about on a par with my talent for Kabuki Dancing.

But I do understand some things and one is that when pollsters brag about their accuracy level, what they're talking about is how close their final polling came to the final outcome. They can be wildly off until a day or so before the election and still claim they called it within the margin of error. Silver cites this example…

In the 2008 Democratic primary in Wisconsin, for instance, which Barack Obama won by 17 points, American Research Group had released a poll on the Saturday prior to the election showing Obama losing to Hillary Clinton by 6 points; it then released a new poll 48 hours later showing Obama beating Clinton by 10 points. (It is very unlikely that there was in fact such dramatic late movement toward Obama, as most other pollsters had shown him well ahead the whole time).

In other words, I can now confidently predict for the next two years and five months that in the next presidential election, there will be a massive write-in vote for the robot from the old Lost in Space show and he'll win with 99% of the vote. Then a day or two before the election, I'll switch to whatever Gallup says and I'll probably be able to claim a pretty good batting average for that contest and boast of my accuracy.

A lot of folks claim that certain polls are slanted to please certain clients that subscribe to them. Sometimes, that's just a childish way of denying that the election does not seem to be going your way. Now and then, there may be some level of validity to the charge, which I especially see made against the Rasmussen Poll. It often (not always) looks like an outlier in giving far rosier forecasts for Republicans than all the others.

When Rasmussen is called out for deliberate bias, the answer is usually to point out how accurate their polls have been lately, meaning that they were on target just before the actual voting. I'm not interested in debating that. I'm just pointing out that you can be wildly off — deliberately or not — until very late in the game and still claim vindication 'n' victory when the final numbers are tallied.

The man at left in the above photo is our friend/idol Stan Freberg. He's seen with his fellow guest stars, Jack Cassidy and Ann Sothern, in a still from an episode of the sixties' spy TV of The Girl From U.N.C.L.E. In particular, it's "The Carpathian Killer Affair" and it originally aired on February 14, 1967.

Do you, perchance, have a copy of this show? Stan doesn't and I'd like to find one for him. A link to my e-mail address can be found over in the right-hand margin somewhere.

Roger Ebert on the state of racial tolerance in this country. That state does not seem to be Arizona.

A major "thenk yew" to Glenn Hauman, who's the Vice President of Operations and the Production Manager over at the fine comic news blog, Comicmix. What did Glenn do to deserve our enduring gratitude? He volunteered to fix the RSS feeds on this blog and it looks like he dunnit. Let me know, folks, if you have any further problems with it…and Glenn, I owe you one. I don't know one what but I owe you one of something.

My friend Laraine Newman is the exact same age as I am to the day — almost to the hour, I believe. It's a great argument against Astrology since our lives have diverged in so many ways. One, which she writes about in this article, is in the kind of music that has underscored her life and inspired her. She grew up in this city and saw (among others) The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Willie Dixon, The Ike & Tina Turner Revue, Big Mama Thornton and Jimi Hendrix. I grew up in the same city at the same time and saw none of those. I did, however, go watch them film The Dick Van Dyke Show, watched them tape Laugh-In, watched Johnny Carson do The Tonight Show…

Go read Garrison Keillor about the end of an era in the world of publishing.