Yearly Archives: 2021

Okay, I posted a link to a video where Liza Minnelli might not have realized how silly her performance was. Here she is being silly on purpose — with a song written by Kander and Ebb…

• Two hyenas at the Denver Zoo have been diagnosed with coronavirus. It's not surprising when you consider than none of the other animals at the zoo wear masks. Except the raccoons.

Just saw this news item…

Top cashew producer Ivory Coast is to open three new processing plants with the aim of tripling its output of shelled nuts by next year, its Cotton-Cashew Council said Tuesday. The African country last year produced a record one million tonnes of nuts, up from 850,000 tonnes in 2019, but just 10 percent have so far been processed domestically. Ivory Coast aims to process more of its own crop for sale in the huge American market.

This interests me because I like cashews and have recently noticed their price soaring higher than Jeff Bezos in his spaceship. For a few years now, I've been purchasing this from Mr. Bezos' company. It's a box containing eighteen little baggies, each holding 1.5 oz. of Planters Salted Cashew — just the right amount for a quick snack.

For quite a while, they were $11.24 a box but the last time I got them at that price was an order I placed on 5/24/21. When I ordered a box on 8/12/21, the price had doubled to $22.50. And right now, they're $27.49. Other, non-Amazon vendors, seem to have had similar price escalations. I dunno if this is COVID-related or climate-related or what. All I know is the price of cashews is going up and up. Will the new competition from Ivory Coast bring the price down? That would be nice.

Lewis Black on Daylight Saving Time…

This is too good to wait for tomorrow's Video Link here so I'm posting it now…

I've long been a fan of J.P. and Julia, a couple now based in Florida that makes wonderful videos for their two YouTube channels, Hellthy Junk Food and J.P. and Julia. Their videos are about cooking and travel and fast food and playing with your food and making huge versions of smaller edibles and…well, they're just fun and silly and always worth watching.

They recently did something especially amazing thanks to the viral properties of the Internet. Rather than try to describe it, I'll just suggest you watch this video which at the moment has less than 5,000 views. I'll bet you it has a zillion more in a few days.

You will love them for what they did and you'll admire the heck out of the 7-Eleven chain for recognizing the P.R. and marketing value of someone gaming their own system as they did. It wouldn't surprise me if someone made a movie about this.

• Facebook could win back some of my affection if they'd install a way I could filter out posts where people show off their cuts and abrasions; also, posts about restaurants more than 50 miles from where I live.

My friend Shelly Goldstein gets the credit/blame (pick one) for me putting this here for you to see. It's Liza Minnelli on a 1968 Ed Sullivan Show performing a…let's call it "unique" version of the Laura Nyro tune, "Sweet Blindness." I don't understand the choreography which she and the two male dancers seem way too happy to be doing on national TV.

If some day in the future, some younger person asks you to explain the "hippie movement" of the sixties, just show them this number. Make sure you call special attention to the outfits and the backdrop…

I don't believe in reviewing a movie I haven't seen — and by the way, I haven't seen The Eternals — let alone one that hasn't even been made yet. So I have no opinion of the announced casting of Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande in the forthcoming film of the Broadway smash Wicked. I do love Idina Menzel and Kristin Chenoweth. I didn't see them in the roles they created except in clips and if they were as good in the whole show as they were in those clips, I can't imagine anyone being better…

…but maybe the producers of the movie know what they're doing, bypassing the stars that originated the roles and bringing in what may seem like "hotter" names. I mean, just because that usually doesn't work doesn't mean it won't this time — he said, passive-aggressively…

Here's what I got up early this morning to do…

This week on Leonard Maltin's podcast, Leonard talks with two friends of his about animation.  One of them is the esteemed Jerry Beck.  The other one is the guy who runs this blog…

Somewhere on this blog, you'll see me writing about a pretty obscure TV show called Harry's Girls. It was on NBC from September 13, 1963 until January 3, 1964 — so not a big hit — and I've never seen its fifteen episodes rerun anywhere. It starred Larry Blyden as the leader of a vaudeville troupe that roamed about Europe — the show was shot on location — and that troupe consisted of three young women played by Dawn Nickerson, Diahn Williams and Susan Silo.

I thought it was a fun show and at age eleven-and-a-half, Susan Silo may have been my first TV crush. When I met her many, many years later, I told her that and she said, "Oh, you couldn't possibly remember Harry's Girls," to which I responded by singing her its catchy theme song. (In the above photo, Susan's the one on the right.)

I also told her I'd seen her on Alfred Hitchcock Presents and McHale's Navy and Batman and lots of other shows. She did a lot of on-camera roles then and later in life, focused more on voiceover and becoming one of the more in-demand talents in that field. One of those who demanded her, on several cartoon shows I voice-directed, was me.

The other day, I was talking with Susan and we would both like to track down some full episodes of Harry's Girls. There are three of them on YouTube — this one, this one and this one. The last of these three videos is in color as were all the episodes broadcast back in 1963.

For some reason, all three of these have the opening titles lopped-off. And for some reason, despite all my sleuthing, I've never come across any other episodes but these three, sans openings. Does anyone have any? Does anyone at least have a video of the opening?

The audio and video on this clip aren't too good but I'm going to post it anyway. It's from a Tonight Show with Johnny Carson from, I'm guessing, the mid-to-late sixties. Johnny's guest is one of my favorite close-up magicians, Don Alan. I used to do magic — never as seriously as some folks I know and never with the slightest thought of doing it professionally — and almost everything I did was a trick like Mr. Alan's with (I hoped) a funny punch line. He was a big influence on me and I was as excited to meet him as any "celebrity" I ever met.

There are several things of interest here. One is that the guest in Johnny's guest chair is Broadway producer David Merrick. Merrick — a very controversial figure in his business at the time — liked to go on talk shows and attack critics, other producers, the New York City government, producers of other shows, etc. At some point, Johnny got tired of him and Merrick moved his act over to The Merv Griffin Show and included in his "hit list," Johnny Carson.

Also of interest is how mystified and surprised filled with awe Johnny is of what Don Alan does. This was a fine acting job of Carson's part because as a fellow magician, he must have known how every one of those tricks worked…and if he didn't, he was in the perfect spot to see Alan doing all the sneaky stuff. But Johnny knew the reaction that made a magician's act work and he played along. (He probably also admired Alan's skill and snappy patter.) Take a look…

The nice folks at Heritage Auctions are selling some items that belonged to my late buddy Steve Sherman.  I suggest you browse and bid.

But on their site, Heritage also has a few paragraphs about Steve that could do with some corrections…

Like so many kids, Steve and his brother Gary saved up their allowance to buy comic books at the neighborhood liquor store. They joined a comic book club that met at a park in Venice, California, where they met Mark Evanier, the club's self-appointed president, in 1968.

Jack Kirby, who'd just arrived from New York to head up Marvelmania, recruited the comic book club to roll up posters and help in the office. Marvelmania was the official licensee for Marvel posters and merchandise. Kirby, naturally, was often asked to produce artwork for the company.

The comic book club met at a park in West Los Angeles and I was in no way self-appointed as its president. We had elections. And Jack did not come out from New York to "head up Marvelmania" in any way. He moved his family to California for other reasons and it was after he got here that the guy who ran Marvelmania contacted him and enlisted him to design and draw product for the company.

Jack also did not recruit or hire anyone for Marvelmania to roll posters. That guy who ran Marvelmania did that and he was a crook who fled into the night when his creditors came after him. Among the many he stiffed was Jack Kirby. Please don't make anyone think Jack set up that shady operation.

Come on, folks. I'm only an e-mail away when you need to fact-check this kind of thing.

One other nitpick with the CNN article on Jack Kirby: The lawsuit that was settled  by Disney was a lawsuit brought by Disney against Kirby's heirs, not the other way around.

And the article's right: The settlement got the family a lot of money and it got Jack's name on everything as co-creator.  Every so often, I see someone say that Stan Lee must have been happy to see that his "partner" (they weren't really partners) finally got co-credit.  Yes, Stan was happy…about as happy as Donald Trump was to see Joe Biden win the presidency.

CNN has two articles up about Jack Kirby, creator of The Eternals and an awful lot of other valuable properties. Some of us may live to see every single thing that man touched revived, dramatized, merchandised or otherwise make a heap of dough for its copyright holders and become beloved among new generations.

Roy Schwartz wrote an overview of Jack's life. And Brian Lowry writes about The Eternals and how it fits in with the amazing career of Mr. Kirby.

As you'll see, I was interviewed for the latter piece and my only quibble with it is the assertion that Jack's Fourth World comics for DC in the early seventies didn't sell. In this interview, you can hear Paul Levitz, former president of DC Comics, say that according to their files, the books sold decently.

No, they did not sell as high as some folks then at DC were hoping. Nothing DC published during that time sold as well as some folks then at DC were hoping. But they sold better than much of the line then and the reprints of them are now selling so well that one of the editors at the company said to me, "We wish we had a hundred issues of each title to reprint."