Monthly Archives: July 2012

Kliph Nesteroff found this on YouTube and put it on his blog but it's so good, I have to steal it for mine. It's Strictly For Laffs, an unsold pilot starring Dave Barry. About every three years, someone does some variation of this idea: Have a bunch of comedians just sit around and tell jokes. This one's not bad and you may want to spend the 22 minutes it'll take to watch the whole thing. We can figure out roughly when this pilot was filmed from the content. There's a joke in there about John F. Kennedy getting votes of questionable validity so it would have to be after the presidential election on November 8, 1960. But Mel Blanc is in it and unharmed so it would have to be before his near-fatal auto accident on January 24, 1961.

I'm going to hazard a guess as to why it didn't sell. Given the rock-bottom budget and low production values, it was clearly done for syndication. But I'll bet that when they offered it to stations, they had no idea where to put it on their schedules. It's not a daytime show. It's not a prime-time show. It's not a late night show. If you put a half-hour on the air, you kind of have to "marry it" with a similar half-hour program and there were no similar half-hour programs.

I'm most interested in Dave Barry, who was a wonderful stand-up comic and an occasional cartoon voice actor. He's the guy who did Humphrey Bogart in most of the Warner Brothers cartoons where someone did Bogart. He also turned up in a lot of other cartoons and was briefly Elmer Fudd and Popeye's nemesis, Bluto. Also on Strictly For Laffs, we have Alan Reed (best known as the voice of Fred Flintstone), Rose Marie (from The Dick Van Dyke Show), Sid Melton (from The Danny Thomas Show and Green Acres), Harold Peary (The Great Gildersleeve), Willard Waterman (also The Great Gildersleeve), Marvin Miller (from The Millionaire) plus Jesse White, Mel Blanc, Ken Murray, Buddy Lester, Moe Howard (!), Jack Durant, Tommy Noonan, a few others and Paul Gilbert. Gilbert was a comic actor who was famous for being able to do an amazing flip/pratfall. He did it a number of times on Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In but was most famously the drunk who was judo-flipped by Laura Petrie in an episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show.

I think Rose Marie is the only person in it who's still with us. Next time I see her, I'll ask if she has any recollection of this at all…

Roger Ebert recalls his days as a science-fiction fan and fanzine publisher. If you want to know what s-f fans and fanzine publishers were like back then, they were exactly like Roger Ebert.

Obamacare is "the largest tax increase in the history of the world?" Not true. It isn't even as big as that one Reagan signed. But from now 'til Election Day, we're going to hear that it is because, you know, we shouldn't let math get in the way of a good talking point.

An "iso shot" in TV or movies is the feed from a camera acting independently from the main array, whether it's one or four or whatever. "Iso" is short for "isolated." For instance, a director on a TV show shot with three cameras might also have a fourth camera called an "iso" that is there to grab random shots outside of the main plan. Or a director on a movie with one camera might have a second camera around to grab a shot of something from a different angle. It's kind of like a bonus camera.

Two weeks from today, we'll be staggering around the San Diego Convention Center on not enough asleep, trying to make the best of the waning hours of the 2012 Comic-Con International and wishing it could go a few more days, if only to put off the arduous trip home to wherever we came from. We will also be attending events on its Sunday programming schedule, especially the ones below that involve me…

10AM-11:00 – The Annual Jack Kirby Tribute Panel
There might not be a comic book industry were it not for Jack Kirby…and if you don't know who that is, you really don't belong at this convention. Each year, his friends and co-workers gather to talk about Jack and his work and to marvel (no pun intended) at the length and breadth of his influence, not just on comics but on TV, movies, and all the arts. This year, the dais will include Herb Trimpe (Incredible Hulk), Stan Goldberg (Marvel colorist), Paul Dini (Batman), and Charles Hatfield (Hand of Fire), all chatting with moderator Mark Evanier (Kirby: King of Comics). Room 5AB

11:30AM-12:45 -Cartoon Voices II
It's the second of two panels this weekend featuring folks who supply the voices of your favorite animated characters. Moderator Mark Evanier will interrogate them about how they do what they do, ask them how they came to do what they do, and make them demonstrate what they do. Their ranks this time will include Dee Bradley Baker (American Dad, SpongeBob SquarePants), Rob Paulsen (Pinky and the Brain, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles), Audrey Wasilewski (The Garfield Show, My Life as a Teenage Robot), Jim Ward (The Avengers, The Fairly OddParents), Gregg Berger (The Garfield Show, Transformers), and Misty Lee (The Garfield Show, Spider-Man). Room 6A

2:00-3:00 Cover Story
Comic-Con's annual discussion about the art of the comic book cover. Mark Evanier interviews special guests Charlie Adlard (The Walking Dead), Tim Bradstreet (The Punisher), Becky Cloonan (Conan), and Mark Schultz (Xenozoic Tales) about their cover work, including design, execution, and what worked – and didn't – on some of their very own covers. Room 25ABC

3:00-4:00 The Business of Cartoon Voices
Have you ever been interested in a career doing voices for animated cartoons? Every year, voice director Mark Evanier (The Garfield Show) gathers together experienced actors and folks involved in casting and hiring and presents an informational panel on how the business works and how to avoid the most common mistakes of aspiring voice performers. The odds are against you, but they might get a little better if someone speaks the truth to you about what to expect and why. Room 25ABC

One correction on the above: Jim Ward is moving from the Sunday Cartoon Voice Panel to Saturday, swapping places with Fred Tatasciore. So Fred will be on the Sunday panel. Also, I think I'm on another panel at 1:00 that mysteriously fell off the schedule. I'll let you know if it falls back on.

And I'd like to call your attention to my 3:00 panel, which I think is actually running until 4:30. My buddy, the late Earl Kress, and I were annoyed about some of the folks going around and exploiting young, wanna-be voice actors by charging them vast sums of cash for useless classes and useless coaching. To try and do something to stop this or at least whittle it down, we started this annual panel which is designed to give beginners some real, pragmatic info for free. I'm bringing in a couple of agents and some voice actors (I think we'll have Debi Derryberry, Rob Paulsen and Gregg Berger) and maybe a casting director to explain the biz and answer questions. These are not folks who'll say to you, "Oh, sure. Give me money and you'll have Billy West's career before the week is out." If you're interested in this field and in hearing truth as opposed to a sales pitch, check it out. This is one of my favorite things to do at the con because I can see that it actually helps people.

I'll tell you more about some of my other panels in the days before the con, fewer and fewer though they may be.

Here, delayed a day because I just plain forgot, is Part Two of The Top 10 Best Abbott and Costello Routines in the opinion of the guy who put this video together. Two things worth noting about these bits…

One is that almost all are old burlesque sketches that have been laundered and reconfigured. Bud and Lou originated none of them. They had on the payroll a writer named John Grant, a former burlesque producer (and according to some accounts, performer) who had a file with every sketch ever performed in burley-q. No matter what writer authored a screenplay, teleplay or radio script for Abbott and Costello to perform, Grant would be called in to insert and recalibrate time-tested burlesque material.

Second interesting thing: Costello was very bad at doing multiple takes of a scene and would sometimes refuse. He'd do it twice and then walk off the set, proclaiming that the director was incompetent if he needed more than that. In one-camera filmmaking, you need to do it several times from several different angles so Abbott and Costello movies were generally shot with two cameras — one trained wholly on Lou — at least during comedy routines. The packing/unpacking routine in here was obviously shot with a master shot that included Abbott and an iso shot of mainly Costello, and the portion of the scene excerpted for this video just used the iso shot.

Take a look…

There was a Tea Party person on C-Span a little while ago going on and on about how we have to do away with the Affordable Care Act (aka "Obamacare") so we can retain control over doctor-patient relationships. I actually worked my way through a couple of detailed explanations of the A.C.A. and that led me to the conclusion that much of the opposition to it flows from folks who have no clue what's actually in it, folks who do know but have decided to fib in order to rally the troops against it, and maybe folks who currently have some phenomenal health insurance that covers absolutely everything including pre-existing conditions and every single procedure and prescription that might be ordered by any doctor they go to.

This thing about "doctor-patient relationships" really stuns me. First off, I don't think these folks get that under the A.C.A., if you presently have health insurance, that will not change. Mine won't. I mean, it might change in ways that it would change with no Obamacare in the land and my premiums will surely go up (and up and up…) as health insurance premiums always do. The A.C.A. might actually lower them a tad but I'm sure not counting on that, and I'll be satisfied if we can just make them rise slower than my blood pressure does when I deal with my insurance company.

I'm with one of the five biggest health insurers in the land. They're always interfering with my relationship with my doctors, telling me they won't cover this or that. They recently decided to stop paying for a very expensive medicine one of my doctors has me on and recommended several others he could prescribe instead. He didn't like any of them as much so he gave me as many free samples as he could scrounge up and I'm now paying out-of-pocket for the balance of what I need. If I couldn't afford to do that then my insurance company would have effectively forced me into a medication other than the one my doctor recommended.

And the system as it stands interferes all the time. The best physician I ever had changed firms and my insurance was worthless at the new firm. But if I'd changed insurers to one that paid for him at the new firm (a big expense of time and money), the new insurer wouldn't have covered my gastroenterologist of choice. One insurance company or another would be telling me I couldn't have the guy I wanted to have treat me.

If Obamacare did that kind of thing (which it does not), opponents of that bill would scream that it's government-controlled health care that interferes with my relationship with my doctors…but they're fine with having Delta or Anthem or Blue Shield make those decrees. They think it should be a totally "open market" and don't get that it would still be just as much of one under the A.C.A.

The guy on C-Span was claiming falsely that under Obamacare, none of us could pick the insurance company we want to have cover us and it's of paramount importance that we be able to do that. If I could have spoken with him, I would have said, "You're right. I'd like to be able to pick the Public Option because I'm sick of being insured by a company motivated wholly by profits. Do you agree that folks like me should be able to make that choice? Or how do you feel about making Medicare available to all? Should Americans have the right to choose that?"

Ezra Klein on the Republican attitude about health insurance. Not that long ago, they wanted everyone to have it…or at least, they said they wanted everyone to have it. But now they're fighting for proposals that if successful would cause 40-50 million Americans who'd otherwise have health insurance to not have health insurance.