Monthly Archives: October 2012

Our pal Robert J. Elisberg reminds us of something Barack Obama neglected to mention in the debate: That a large part of Mitt Romney's advisory team on foreign policy is men who championed the Iraq War and still insist that we did everything right there. That's scary.

Someone is now licensing clips from The Merv Griffin Show and putting examples on YouTube. Take a look at this 1966 one with Richard Pryor and Jerry Lewis. I don't think most people would make any connection between the two as comedians but here it is…

Word that Newsweek is discontinuing its print edition and going all-digital is stunning a lot of folks this morning. It shouldn't. It shouldn't surprise us when anything read on paper goes away these days. Yes, Newsweek once seemed like an ongoing force of nature. So did Life and Saturday Evening Post and Look and I can recall when TV Guide was the best-selling magazine in the history of mankind and most people couldn't exist without it.

Obviously, the Internet is a big reason for Newsweek's demise but those who think it's the sole reason are missing something. Disposable print media (newspapers, magazines) has been in a pretty steady decline in this country since…well, for magazines that didn't feature nude people, some time in the sixties. The Internet is a fairly recent factor. I noted in an article in 1980 that circulation of Playboy was in a slow but clear downslide and it wasn't because American males were losing their interest in seeing beautiful naked women. It wasn't even home video back then.

We simply don't want to read as much as we used to…and when we do, we want our reading targeted to specific topics of interest to us. We'll buy a book that focuses wholly on a particular subject but we don't have a whole lot of interest in a publication that contains diverse material. I can't fully explain this change but I'm convinced it has something to do with attention spans becoming shorter. When I've bought a magazine off the racks in the last decade or three, it's usually to read one specific article and I may not bother to do more than quickly scan the rest of the mag for other items of possible interest. This is in contrast to back in the sixties when I used to enjoy sitting down with the latest Esquire, starting at page one and seeing what they had for me that month. I only do that now with magazines when I'm in a waiting room and I neglected to bring along my iPad.

But I don't think the Internet, which seems to get most or all of the blame when a Newsweek goes away, is wholly or even largely to blame. I think it's the other way around: The Internet flourished because we were becoming less interested in reading words on paper, especially words that are not of immediate use and interest to us. It's a lot easier to do a global search of online articles to find the ones we care about than it is to browse the newsstand. Cheaper, too.

40 Black & White Photos That Cannot Be Explained.

Adam Tanner tells what it was like to be an impostor on the final (for a time) episode of the game show, To Tell the Truth.

The gent in the above photo is Jerry Beck. He's the one in the glasses. The other individual is a balloon-animal version of Droopy Dog. Try not to get them confused.

Jerry is an expert on animation. Now, some people call me an expert on animation but compared to Jerry, I'm Mitt Romney trying to talk about Libya. And it isn't just that Jerry is an expert. Better still is that he's an activist…an activist for animation. I can't think of anyone who has done so much to encourage and abet the preservation of animation and its exhibition. An awful lot of great cartoons have been saved, shown at film festivals and released on DVD because of this man.

My pal is doing even more for the cause of cartoons this Sunday when he co-hosts (with Robert Osborne) a six-hour chunk of vintage animation on Turner Classic Movies.  Here's the schedule…

• Max Fleischer's Gulliver's Travels (1939) at 8pm Eastern/5pm Pacific
• Max Fleischer's Mr. Bug Goes To Town (1941) at 9:30pm Eastern/6:30pm Pacific
• UPA's Jolly Frolics at 11pm Eastern/8pm Pacific
• New York Studio Silent Era Animation from the collection of Tom Stathes at 12 midnight Eastern/9pm Pacific
• Lotte Reiniger's The Adventures of Prince Achmed at 1am Eastern/11pm Pacific

If you can't watch or record them all, you might want to snag Gulliver's Travels which is to me the best of the lot.  Then again, most of the other offerings are scarcer and harder to see.

That TCM would schedule this is a big deal…for reasons Jerry can explain to you better than I can. He does so here. Do tune in and do spread the word. There are a lot of cartoons shown on TV these days but not a lot that aren't all about merchandisable current properties. Let's buck the trend and support this Sunday's mini-fest. Maybe it could lead to a maxi-fest somewhere.

A funny, on-point song parody from our friend, Chanteuse Extraordinaire Shelly Goldstein…

NOTE: Any time you see the wrong video in one of our little windows, it's probably a refresh problem. Try reloading the page. If that doesn't make the correct video appear, try clicking on the subject line of the item. That will take you to the individual listing of that item and that should be right. If it isn't, you may need to close and open your browser a few times. And if that doesn't work, maybe I screwed up the embed code. But I don't do that very often and the other possibilities are a lot more possible.

Needless to say, I thought Barack Obama did a lot better in last night's debate than he did in the first one. Everyone's saying he took the reaction to the first one as a wake-up call and prepped better for this one. That may be so but I thought he was also better-served by the "town hall" format. I think he just related better than Romney does to non-rich people. Romney seemed a bit condescending and obvious with his promise-everyone-a-pony positions.

Like everyone else who wants to see Obama win, I was pleased by the little exchange in which Obama essentially called bullshit on a Romney factual recital — the thing about labeling the Benghazi attack as terrorism. Romney apparently wasn't quite as wrong as he seemed in that exchange. The administration was slow to adopt that as a formal position but he was wrong to suggest Obama hadn't used the "t" word in his Rose Garden speech the next day. The moment was a big win for Obama but I wonder what would have happened if he'd built on it by saying something like this…

You know, governor, I keep hearing these things from you and your campaign about me that I don't recognize. I don't know which Barack Obama you're talking about…maybe the imaginary one Clint Eastwood was debating and blaming for things the Bush administration did. The American people deserve facts, not fibs. We have one more of these debates scheduled. How about if you and I agree to bring in some fact-checkers to keep us both honest? There are all these fine operations out there like PolitiFact or Factcheck-dot-org. Your campaign even cites one of them occasionally when Joe Biden or I get something wrong. Let's invite representatives from one of these services to the next debate and if I say something you think is factually incorrect, you can call on them to arbitrate and I can do the same thing. What do you say to that?

What could Romney have said to that? If he said no, he'd look cowardly. It would be like he'd said, "No, I need my factual distortions to win this election." If he said, "Sure, bring it on," he'd first of all be saying yes to an Obama proposal and a lot of his base doesn't like that. Obama would look like a brave leader and Romney would be setting himself up to be smacked-down again in the next debate on inaccuracies. Obama got some things wrong last night too but he wasn't as bad as his opponent.

Anyway, that's just me musing over something that wasn't going to happen…and even without it, Obama did jes' fine. I still think (a) he's going to win and (b) before he does, we're in for more roller-coaster moments where it looks like he might not.

The current issue of Playboy has an interview with Stephen Colbert. It's not the most interesting conversation I've seen with the man but you might find it of interest. Here's a link to it. Beware of naked women pictures in the margins.

William Saletan makes a very good point: Republicans are scurrying to blame Barack Obama for not somehow preventing the attack in Benghazi that killed four Americans. To do so, they have to completely contradict the logic they offered as to why George W. Bush could not possibly have prevented the attacks of 9/11 that killed three thousand Americans.

We love these videos of old Los Angeles. This one's from the forties and the first few locations — Olvera Street and Union Station — haven't changed that much. Folks who attended the Comic-Con in San Diego back in the seventies may be interested in the last few moments…

Our pal Ken Levine tells you everything you need to know about why television is the way it is.

So just what is it that Bain Capital did and does…and is it really a Job Creator? (Increasingly, "Job Creator" sounds to me like a euphemism for "Rich guy who doesn't think he should pay taxes." It certainly doesn't seem to have much to do with any jobs actually being created.)

Anyway, David Stockman explains it all for you. If someone sees an article in a major publication that presents the story of Bain in a more positive light, please let me know about it so I can link.

We continue to lose members of the First Generation of comic book creators. Marc Swayze, who worked on Captain Marvel and co-created Mary Marvel, has died at the age of 99. He went to work for Fawcett Publishing, publishers of the Captain Marvel comics, in 1941. Apart from his time in the service, he drew for Fawcett until 1953 when the company folded its main comic line, though for a few years in there he also assisted on Russell Keaton's newspaper strip Flyin' Jenny, then tried unsuccessfully to keep it flying after Keaton died.

At Fawcett, Swayze drew super-heroes who were either Captain Marvel or were related to Captain Marvel but in his last few years there, Fawcett was cutting back on such material and Swayze worked on romance and horror titles. When Fawcett ceased publishing and sold some of its books to Charlton, Swayze went along with them for a time but the business was crashing and Charlton paid so poorly that he decided to get out. He retained a fondness for the industry though, as evidenced in his columns for Roy Thomas' Alter Ego entitled "We Didn't Know It Was The Golden Age." Here's a link to an obituary in his hometown newspaper.