Okay, let's answer two quick queries, starting with this one from Brad Ferguson who asks about the opening I posted from The Magic Land of Allakazam…
Re the Allakazam open (and thanks so much for that), is that Jackie Joseph on the left, in the back? Sure looks like her.
That may be because it is her. She played a recurring character on the show. And hey, while we're talking about that opening…
Watching this show when I was eight, I could never quite make out the last few words in the line about the Hanna-Barbera characters in that opening. Now at the age of sixty-eight, I still can't. Can anyone figure them out?
And in the last hour or two, Gary Cundall and a couple of other folks wrote to ask, as Gary did…
In today's post about Larry King you mentioned that you were back stage at the Craig Ferguson Show. Could you tell us more about that? Why you were there and what it was like? Did you get to meet Craig?
Briefly, I did. It was the Halloween show from 2011 and I was there because my pal Neil Gaiman was on the show and I had to bring him something. You may be able to figure out what it was from this post and you can read about the experience here. You can even watch Neil's segment on that episode here.
Craig was as nice offstage as a guy can be when he's about to do a show and a musical number and he has eighty-seven things to think about. We spent about two minutes talking — which is a lot when you're that busy — and he told me he krew of Groo and loved the comic. But I don't think he recognized my name, which never surprises me. I think Neil had told him who I was.
Reading again over my post about that evening, I should have said that I was impressed by how smoothly things went; how the crew there had been doing that show so long that everyone knew how to do their job and I didn't see any of panic and angst I've seen on shows I've worked on that were one-shot specials or that just went into production.
It was that way when I poached on the set of Johnny Carson's Tonight Show and later on Jay's. The warm-up guy (usually Ed McMahon in Johnny's case) knew exactly when they were going to roll tape and he knew exactly how long before that moment to begin chatting with the studio audience and he knew exactly what to say to fill that time. And I could see Johnny enter the studio at exactly the right moment in Ed's usually-the-same warm-up so as to be right in place to make his entrance at precisely the proper moment. Craig Ferguson's show had the same efficiency.
Just because a show's been in production for a while, that doesn't ensure it always goes like clockwork. I went to work on Welcome Back, Kotter in its second season and every single taping started late and with a great many screw-ups and problems.
And I recall being backstage for Letterman's show. This was in his NBC days but he'd been on for a while and most tapings were like Carson's with a good mood and a carefully-kept schedule. The one time I was there though, everything was thrown into chaos by a guest who was yelling and making demands and they had to stop tape and start over because the guest approached Dave while he was walking out to do his monologue and the guest wanted to argue.
I won't tell you the name of that rude guest but as of last Wednesday, he no longer had possession of the nuclear codes. Or maybe what they told him were the nuclear codes.
