Here, through the courtesy of a reader of this site, is another photo from the revival of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum starring Phil Silvers. The gent at far left is Carl Ballantine, better known to the world as "The Amazing Ballantine" and performer of what is easily the funniest […]
Pat O'Neill wrote to say, "It's probably worth mentioning that [Phil] Silvers did finally wind up in A Funny Thing…, if only in the film version." He wound up in the stage version, too. In 1971, a few years after the dreadful movie adaptation in which he played Marcus Lycus, Silvers starred as Pseudolus in […]
A little more than a month ago (in this posting), we said that there would soon be an announcement that Get Smart will get the full, entire-series-on-DVD treatment. Sure enough, it has now been confirmed that they're coming out in 2006. In the Sad News Department: We mentioned back here that Cartoonist PROfiles, the magazine […]
In 1959, CBS cancelled The Phil Silvers Show, which was the hit sitcom otherwise known as both You'll Never Get Rich and Sgt. Bilko. The series was still enormously popular but it was also very expensive to produce. (Some episodes had a speaking cast of twenty.) A genius at the network decided it was cost-efficient […]
I caught about half of the Emmy Awards last night and couldn't get too interested. Maybe if I'd seen most of the nominated shows, it would have been different. But it was a lot of the same old, same old…with stars singing (badly and intentionally so) a lot of vintage TV theme songs and no […]
Here's an interesting commentary from an investment website on the current health of Marvel Comics. The quick version of it is that the part of comic book publishing which involves making money publishing comic books is not doing so well, a fact obscured by merchandising and movie income. This has always been one of the […]
I just made a wrong turn on the Internet and found myself on this page of the website for the Luther Burbank Center for the Performing Arts in Santa Rosa, California. George Carlin is performing there in October and the above paragraph appears on the page ballyhooing his appearance. I know at least three people […]
Since I never resigned or got kicked out, I guess I'm still technically a member of the Archie Club, an organization I joined for a dime (I think) back around 1961. Even then, I thought it was kind of a scam. You got a pin and a certificate and a few other items and hey, […]
This is from Joseph Abbot. The beginning part of his message, which I'll not quote, is a long discourse about how much he enjoys this website. As I read it, I could almost hear the "however…" coming, and it did. So I'll start quoting there… However, I don't understand your comment that no one is […]
Here's a link to this weekend's New York Times column by Frank Rich. It's pretty brutal with its assessment of George W. Bush's new disaster relief stylings but like a majority of Americans, I think those efforts deserve a lot of condemnation. In fact, one might suspect that very little of what is being done […]
Just in case she stops celebrating her birthday today and figures out some way to finally use that computer of hers to get on the Internet, let's all send good thoughts out to The First Lady of Cartoon Voicing and my favorite actress, June Foray. There may be someone else who's as nice and talented […]
And yet another relic of Older Las Vegas is soon to crap out on us. The Westward Ho, which was built around 1975, will close on November 17. Soon after, it will be torn down and the new owners of the property will build a big condominium complex on the land, smack dab on a […]
Rumor has it that later today, George W. Bush is going to announce some staggering dollar figure that our government will spend on the clean-up and restoration of New Orleans and thereabouts. I think that will generally be a good thing, though I'd be happier if part of the plan involved an explanation of just […]
I had nothing to do with it but my occasional employer Jim Davis has set up a new educational website for kids. It's called Professor Garfield and while I didn't have time to browse the whole site, what I saw seems quite well done and, yes, even educational. Some nice music, some excellent Flash animation, […]
We're big fans of TiVo here at newsfromme.com but we're also uneasy about something. Recently, the TiVo folks rolled out version 7.2 of their software and my various TiVos received it in the last week or two. It has two new features — one a minor plus, one a major minus. The sorta-good one is […]