Monthly Archives: January 2017

The esteemed Anne Elk (Miss) has a new theory…

Yesterday, some news sites were reporting that Conan O'Brien's show on TBS was being cut from five-nights-a-week to one.  The Chief Creative Officer (that's the man's title) for the TBS Network hurriedly gave some big interviews to say that's not so…or at least not yet.  Changes, he said, are coming to Conan but they might be that, they might be to go to a nightly half-hour, they might be almost anything.  He stressed that the network will continue to be in business with Mr. O'Brien, not just on a talk show but on other programming from Conan's operation.  Here — you can read about it right here.

I think that's all true, though I blinked twice at one line. After listing many of Conan's successes on-air and on the net, the exec said, "In addition, he's also been the face of Comic-Con."

Really? Does anyone who isn't in business with Conan O'Brien think that? I'll give them this: Each year since Conan began doing his show from a theater near Comic-Con the week of the event, they've spent a ridiculous amount of dough plastering his face on trains, cabs, buildings, everywhere. When I attend, I'm afraid to stand in one place outside the hall for more than two minutes for fear someone will rush up and paste a Conan billboard on me.

But inside the hall, I see no evidence of his existence and it all seems to me like a matter of him cleverly using the event to boost his ratings for a week. I don't think when anyone thinks of Conan, they think of Comic-Con or vice-versa.

I don't have much to say about what may be happening with his TBS show. It seems to me the marriage was good for both sides for a while but maybe, with so many other talk shows courting the younger demographic, Conan has lost some of his value to the channel. I'm sure they will keep him around in some format…but now that he's the guy on late night TV who's been doing a talk show the longest, he's starting to look like old news. ("The longest", that is, if you don't count Carson Daly — and I can't believe anyone does.)

I loved Conan's 12:35 show on NBC for about the first half of its run but I lost interest and couldn't get involved in his Tonight Show or his show on TBS. On The Tonight Show, every third sentence out of his mouth seemed to be about how Conan O'Brien was now the host of The Tonight Show. When I watch him on TBS, it always seems like he's trying to make faces, dance and top his guests.

On Late Night, he was delightful interacting with others and the writing on the show was very, very sharp. At some point though, it felt like he'd lost a certain humility and deference to his guests and it wasn't as much fun for me. It was the same evolution I felt with Letterman, who began foregoing prepared material for just screwing around with the audience and at the desk. He loved it. The studio audience who came to see Dave loved it. I don't think the love though usually reached all the way to most folks at home.

There's a story about Jerry Lewis that one day, he summoned one of his writers to his dressing room. He picked up the script the writer had written, threw it on the floor and told the writer, "I don't need this crap! I can be great with just a table and some chairs."

The writer picked up his script and said, "Fine. From now on, you can be a Jewish waiter." Then he walked out and arranged his resignation.

I'm not suggesting it's come to that yet…and to be fair, I haven't watched Conan much in quite a while. Maybe he's calmed down. I just no longer feel the interest I once felt to tune in and see what he has for us tonight. It felt to me like along the way, he went from being the cleverest guy at the party to the one who was trying way too hard to be the center of attention.

I'm tempting fate by posting this year's first mushroom soup can and hoping it doesn't lead to this year's first obit. For those of you new to the party, the mushroom soup can is the symbol that the operator of this here blog is kinda busy and may not be posting much (if anything) today.

In the past, I have often posted one and thought, "Okay, I've given my readers fair warning not to expect much for a while. I hope some of them discover there are other things to read on the Internet apart from me." I then feel less guilt as I turn my attention to a script on deadline…

…only to suddenly learn that someone I care about has passed and I have to write about it. This has happened so often that I suspect whoever decides such things had seen the can and given the okay to off some great actor or creative talent or friend of mine or whatever. I have been known to momentarily think, "Oh, if only you hadn't posted that damned soup can!"

It's 11 AM where I am. Let's see if I can go 24 hours without having to write about someone dying…

The folks who make Guinness used the Sammy Davis version of "The Rhythm of Life" to create a great commercial that has nothing to do with drinking Guinness — unless you buy into the concept that their product can turn back the hands of time. Not being a drinker, I wouldn't know…

As I'm sure you noticed, a few days ago House Republicans held a quick, secret vote amongst themselves and decided to try and ram through without debate, a bill that would seriously weaken the policing of their own ethics. Some said it was like bank robbers voting to get rid of guards and security cameras, and to make it illegal for tellers to testify as to who pointed the gun at them. There was a public outcry against the bill — gee, I wonder why — and they reversed course and dropped the bill…for now. Some or all of it will probably return.

The website Talking Points Memo has been trying with limited success to find out which members of Congress voted for this idea in the first place. Some refuse to say, which probably means they were all in favor of no one being in a position to prosecute them if they accepted bribes, sought reimbursement for what they'd spent on hookers and cocaine, or molested small children and/or animals. It's probably not fair to presume that those who voted for this bill or wouldn't say that they opposed it are engaged in at least one of those activities. But I might anyway.

Reader-of-this-blog Andy Mansell just sent me four questions…

I just received my inscribed copy of Why and When the Dick Van Dyke Show was Born by Carl Reiner. For my inscription, I chose "Shut up, Mel!" I'm dying to know what you requested.

Since I already have Carl's other books autographed by him, I asked to have this one signed by Alan Brady. Mr. Brady signed it in big letters and farther down the title page, Carl signed it as well. For some odd reason, they have similar handwriting.

Can you (or have you already) list the quintessential Laurel and Hardy films for a newbie?

I think their three best features are Sons of the Desert, Our Relations and Way Out West. There are dozens of must-see sound shorts but I would suggest The Music Box, Towed in a Hole, Come Clean, The Laurel-Hardy Murder Case, Be Big!, Our Wife, Me and My Pal, One Good Turn, Busy Bodies and Scram! Silent comedies would be Big Business, Double Whoopee, Do Detectives Think? and From Soup to Nuts. But just about every film they made for Hal Roach has wonderful moments and even the non-Roach ones do. The non-Roach ones just have less of them.

Which version of "Up the Ladder to the Roof" is your fave? I gotta go with Bette Midler's voice-cracking version.

I really like the one from the Broadway show Everyday Rapture. But to me the interesting thing is how the many renditions are different or similar to each other.

I just watched I Know that Voice and enjoyed it but there should have been a bit more of you and a lot more Daws Butler and anything about Don Messick. Is there a retrospective about these two giants you'd recommend?

A gentleman named Arnold Kunert did a good documentary on Daws called Daws Butler, Voice Magician. You can probably find it on YouTube. I'm afraid there's been very little about Don Messick, although he is interviewed in the film about Daws.

I was just as happy for there not to be much of me in I Know That Voice because I'm never comfy in front of cameras and also because there were many voice actors who were not interviewed for that film and others who were but got little or no screen time. It's too vast a topic for any one film. You could do five hours just on Daws and the folks of his era without even getting into the hundreds of fine vocal talents of later decades.

But really, all voice actors — even Mel — have been under-celebrated. It's one of the reasons I started doing panels of those folks at Comic-Con back in the days when there were almost no voice actors in the programming unless I put them there. They all deserve a lot more attention even if some of them got into the field because they wanted to be actors but didn't want a lot of attention.

Thanks for the questions, Andy.

Our pal Jim Cummings provides the voices for many cartoon characters, mostly for Disney. Here he is doing what he does so well…

• For the next four years, the only two things that will be certain are Death and Rich People Not Paying Taxes.

Antenna TV has started airing reruns of The Joey Bishop Show, the sitcom in which Mr. Bishop starred from 1961 until 1965. The show had a checkered run during its four seasons but there was a period in there when it was pretty good. I was never fond of Joey as a comedian but even I like some of them.

The series started life as an episode of The Danny Thomas Show (aka Make Room for Daddy) on CBS. Several shows, like The Andy Griffith Show and The Bill Dana Show, began that way with their pilots disguised as episodes of Danny's series. In the disguised pilot, Bishop played Joey Mason, a Hollywood public relations man. CBS passed on the show and it wound up on NBC, changed quite a bit from what was intended in the pilot. For one thing, Bishop's character was now named Joey Barnes.

The show struggled through its first season and was almost canceled…but NBC decided to give it another chance on the condition that it undergo major surgery. And so Joey Barnes the Hollywood P.R. man became the host of a late night talk show and he got a new wife (played by the stunning Abby Dalton) and supporting cast that included Guy Marks, Mary Treen and Joe Besser. This version was pretty good and there was a third season on NBC, then NBC dropped it and it did a fourth season back on CBS. It was canceled in 1965 and two years later, life imitated art and Bishop became the host of a late night talk show for real…on ABC.

There are some odd things about the show. They loaded it down with guest stars and as I recall, the best episodes were the ones not built around a guest star. The first and last seasons were in black-and-white and the second and third were in color. An awful lot of the writers and non-regular actors on it also turned up on The Dick Van Dyke Show, which was filmed on the same lot. And some of the problems that the writers had with Joey off-stage turned up on the Van Dyke program as problems Rob, Buddy and Sally had with Alan Brady.

There was also one "lost" episode. Comedian Vaughn Meader, who was then famous for his impersonation of John F. Kennedy, filmed an episode full of J.F.K. jokes a week or so before Kennedy was murdered. It never aired. I doubt Antenna TV has it but I'll be watching to see if it turns up. It would be about a third of the way through Season 3.

Antenna TV has started airing with the second season, which was when the show started to get good. They have two episodes on each morning Monday through Friday and two episodes each evening on the weekends — so that's fourteen a week. There were 123 in all. Frankly, I don't think I can take that much Joey Bishop but we all might enjoy an occasional dose.

Michelle Nicastro was a wonderful singer-actress who was part of the Los Angeles musical comedy scene. She left us at way too early an age. Here she is singing the hell out of a great song from the under-noticed musical, Smile…

Everyone cares about current outrages but not many of us care about old ones. I care a lot about this one…

Some pretty solid new evidence has emerged that while the 1968 Presidential Election was in full swing, then-President Johnson was on the verge of brokering a deal that might have ended the Vietnam War then and there. But since that might have helped Hubert Humphrey win the presidency, his rival Richard Nixon sabotaged that deal.

If that's true, that's one of the worst things a human being — and certainly a person who won the presidency — ever did.

It's Treason with a capital-T — real treason, not using the word the way we do now in politics as a charge any time any political opponent does anything you don't like. People found guilty of a lot less have been stood up against a wall and shot by a firing squad…and they got off easy.

Now, I understand that it's sometimes difficult to summon up emotions about long-ago deeds and long-dead people…but we do. The Holocaust still matters to some people. So does the assassination of John F. Kennedy and a few others. This one strikes me as something that's deserving of more than a shrug and a head-shake. But that's probably about all it will get from many Americans who are more upset about Steve Martin tweeting that he thought Carrie Fisher was beautiful.

Republicans have been vowing to destroy Obamacare and replace it with, in the words of the incoming Oval Office Occupant, "something terrific." But after years and years of vowing to come up with a better system, they still have no idea what that something will be. As Jonathan Chait notes, anything that would be as good as Obamacare (let alone better) would do all the same things that they find so loathsome about Obamacare…except that Obama wouldn't get the credit for it.

This would almost be funny except for the possibility of so many people suffering and dying in the transition process to whatever we wind up with. It'll probably be something called Trumpcare, which will be Obamacare with a coat of cheap gold paint and massive increases in the deficit.

• Well, no celebrities died on the first day of 2017 so we'll put a hundred dollars in the jackpot…