Category Archives: To Be Filed

Yes, I saw that Pink Lady and Jeff, a show I worked on long ago and far away, made TV Guide's list of the 50 Worst TV Shows of All Time.  It clocked in at #35 and I think I'm annoyed that it wasn't either higher or lower.  I never quite understand these lists.  It always seems like some of the listings are "bad" in a good way, others are "bad" in a bad or incompetent way and still others are "bad" in an offensive way.  I also wonder if some of the folks who voted in this one, whoever they are, even saw all the shows — like Turn-On or You're In the Picture — or if they're just going by reputations.  (I saw both of those one-night wonders, by the way.  Turn-On was by no means a bad show.  It was yanked after one airing because some of the more conservative ABC affiliates didn't like its politics, though ABC found it easier to say viewers disliked it.  You're In the Picture wasn't much worse than the average game show of its day but it earned its "fame" because the host, Jackie Gleason, went out the following week and spent the entire half hour apologizing for the first episode.)

By the way: The show I worked on was never actually called Pink Lady and Jeff.  That's what everyone on the show and at the network wanted to call it, and it slipped into some NBC promos and publicity that way.  But the company that owned the Pink Lady act was quite insistent that the name of the show be Pink Lady and no Jeff.  At one point, they were threatening to sue anyone who called it Pink Lady and Jeff, or even to withhold their stars' services.  The second threat caused a lot of us to say, "Oh, please, please," but they never made good on it.  (The two girls who comprised Pink Lady, Mie and Kei, couldn't have cared less.  They just wanted to get the six episodes over with and go back to Japan.)

The title was argued about for weeks before the show debuted.  More effort went into it than into the show.  Finally, someone high up at NBC — it may have been Fred Silverman — went to the lawyers for the Pink Lady company and said, "We must have Jeff Altman's name in the title of the show."  The lawyers came back and said, okay, fine.  They would consent to it only if the title were phrased so as to make clear that Pink Lady was/were the star(s) of the show, more so than Jeff.  They suggested the title be — and it actually was, for a couple of days there — Pink Lady Starring Mie and Kei With Jeff Altman.  Everyone finally gave in and the title became Pink Lady, with the "and Jeff" used unofficially and with occasional threats of legal action.  I still think that if we could have gotten rid of the Pink Lady part and gone with just Jeff, it would have been a darn good show.

E-mail buddy Cory Strode writes:

I was a huge [Dennis] Miller fan, and love most of what he does, but this year the show just hasn't been as good as in year's past. He's lost that sharp edge and was really harping on older topics…it's time to let O.J., Bill Clinton and the like go.  Sadly, the last two times I saw him perform here in Minneapolis (a year apart) he did pretty much the same stand-up…you have talked in columns past about how comedians have a "solid 45" of old material they know works and use it if they feel the act not doing as well as they would like.  Sadly, Miller did his solid 45 with very few variations, which is bad for a comedian who is best known for his quick wit and topical humor.

I pretty much agree with the above.  Dennis Miller has no greater admirer than Yours Truly.  He genuinely brought a fresh, witty approach to stand-up at a time when too many guys were up there asking, "What's the deal with these people who work at 7-Eleven stores?"  I've had people tell me Dennis Miller jokes without identifying the source and I said, "That sounds like something Dennis Miller would come up with."  How many other comics of his generation have a distinctive style not just of delivery but of writing?

But I agree, that style does not lend itself to much repetition.  I could (and did) hear Sam Kinison do the bit about world hunger a dozen times and always enjoy it…but when Miller repeats something, it just sounds like old material.  I saw him live only once.  It was at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas with Rita Rudner as his opening act.  This is maybe seven years ago.  She was very funny but when Mr. Miller took stage, the show was darn near over.  He didn't do one line that I hadn't heard from him before and, even if I hadn't known the jokes, most of them were about "current events" that had long since been retired as topics from most other comics' acts.  Worse, he did the whole set with an attitude that suggested he had the limo double-parked and couldn't wait to get his check and get the hell outta there.  I felt like yelling back to the stage, "Hey, Cha-Cha!  We didn't fork over half a C-note apiece for the ducats to see some clown whose energy level makes Perry Como look like Roberto Benigni on crack."

Still, you know what?  I like him so much, I was willing to write that one off as a bad night.

I'll even forgive him his last month or three of Dennis Miller Live, which have not been up to standard, making one suspect he knew the end was nigh.  There was a lot of crankiness there without a punch line attached.  Except when he's really, really liked his guest, he's been acting like the limo is triple-parked and blocking oncoming traffic…

And I still like the guy.  I'll miss that show and would love to see it land somewhere else because, when he was enjoying it, so was I…and I think it was the perfect vehicle for him.  Even if that show doesn't survive in some format, I'm sure he'll turn up in something else and be terrific in it.  At least, until he loses interest…

According to a press release I just received, NBC has purchased the right to rerun the 1962 Mr. Magoo's Christmas Carol later this year.  Also according to that press release, June Foray is in the voice cast of that holiday special, which is not true.  But, assuming the rest of it's accurate, this is an interesting move.  The animated adaptation of Dickens' A Christmas Carol was always, I felt, one of the two most entertaining cartoon specials ever produced for TV, the other being A Charlie Brown Christmas.  The Magoo affair succeeds despite rather dreadful animation…poor even by the standards of limited television animation.  Matter of fact, the special's previous owner was at one point considering whether it might have more marketability if they went back and, using the exact same audio track, did all new design and animation.  He (the late Henry Saperstein) never did…but when he told me he was contemplating the cost-benefit ratio, I said, "You're not going to touch the script, voices or songs, I trust" and he said, "Oh, God, no.  You couldn't improve on any of that."

He was right.  Jim Backus, Jack Cassidy, Paul Frees and the others are terrific, even if none of them was June Foray.  And the score by Jule Styne (whose name is misspelled in that press release) and Bob Merrill is first-rate…one of the few times an animated TV special has thought to go out and engage top Broadway composers.

Someone at Classic Media (new proprietors of the nearsighted Quincy Magoo) pulled off a deft move in arranging this.  The special has been out on tape and rerun on low-profile cable channels for years, and you wouldn't think it would go back to network.  I'm guessing someone at NBC was a big fan on it as a kid, plus Classic Media was probably willing to give it to them cheap to get Magoo back in the public eye.  Even if they let NBC run it for nothing, it would be a wise deal for them and, of course, for NBC.

I don't think a lot of people realize how prime-time network animated specials have virtually gone the way of the passenger pigeon.  Disney does a few for ABC but they're mostly a matter of that company producing something they can market in many venues, one of which is ABC prime-time.  And there are a few more Peanuts specials in the pipeline, which ABC is doing because they think it's sound marketing to marry one of their Winnie the Pooh specials with a Charlie Brown show to fill an hour slot.  But there are very few specials of any kind being produced these days for ABC, NBC and CBS, and even fewer of the animated variety.

Few people seem to have noticed this.  Every few months, I'm approached by someone who has a property — a comic strip or a character from some other venue — they hope to adapt for animation.  They often speak of the weekly series they see as inevitable and then toss off, "And we might be willing to warm up by doing four animated specials a year for one of the major networks."  I'm not sure the major networks, collectively, are producing four new animated specials a year of all the available and proven properties put together…and even at the peak of such production, you had to have a helluva track record to get more than one a year.  Managing one for a new character would be an incredible achievement…though that could change.  The few that are airing have done pretty well and if Magoo continues the trend, that could bode well for more production.

One hopes we'll see Mr. Magoo's Christmas Carol via a good, newly color-corrected print and that, assuming it's in an hour slot, the edits to allow more commercial time will be done more judiciously than has usually been the case.  The best Merrill-Styne song (the ballad, the name of which I do not know) usually hits the floor first, often followed by Magoo's opening "Broadway" song.  A friend of mine swears he once saw it with the one of the three ghosts eliminated, though I find that unlikely.

In any event, I think it's a terrific show.  It's also a pretty terrific adaptation of Mr. Dickens' story…in many ways, more faithful than some of the more serious, live-action attempts.

In the category of "Movies I Kinda Liked Even If Nobody Else Seems To," we have the 1974 remake of The Front Page, directed by Billy Wilder and starring the two guys in the picture above.  No, it's not as wonderful as the 1931 version with Adolphe Menjou and Pat O'Brien, and it especially isn't as wonderful as the 1940 version, which was entitled His Girl Friday, which put Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell in the leads.  A lot of critics hated the '74 incarnation and legend has it that when Carol Burnett — who plays the heart-of-gold hooker — found herself on an airplane with The Front Page as the in-flight movie, she got up, commandeered the P.A. system and apologized to all aboard for contributing to such a stinker.  (She's actually the worst thing in it, and I say that as someone who usually loves Carol Burnett.  But she's miscast and her role is burdened with awkward expository dialogue and an over-the-top window-jumping scene.)

Still, no film with Lemmon and Matthau is without interest and there are quite a few terrific character actors aboard to support them, including Vincent Gardenia, Martin Balsam, Charles Durning, David Wayne and Herb Edelman.  Even when those guys are drowning, it's fun to watch them swim.  Austin Pendleton pretty much steals all his scenes in the role of a nervous leftist sentenced to swing…and gee, Susan Sarandon sure is pretty.

Anyway, I watched the DVD the other night and found myself enjoying the proceedings despite the overacting, a few curious anachronisms and a resolution that depends too much on a coincidence.  Maybe it's that's wonderful command that Lemmon and Matthau seem to possess.  Everything they say, everything they do seems convincing.  They did a few later films that not even their chemistry could salvage but this, I decided, was not one of them.  Wilder said that he felt he'd been "done in" (his term) by such obvious casting.  Jack and Walter were so perfect for the parts, he said, that he never stopped to think whether the movie itself was a good idea. It probably wasn't in terms of serving the underlying material…but I don't care.  I just love watching those guys.

Time to recall another toy from my childhood: I was never particularly into toy guns but around the time I was eight, Mattel brought out what momentarily seemed like a Must-Own.  It was the Shootin' Shell Buckle Gun…a tiny toy derringer built into a belt buckle.  The premise here was that you were caught unarmed by the bad guys.  "Put your hands up," they'd command and, since they had more conventional Mattel cap pistols (like the lethal Fanner 50 model) trained on you, you'd comply…and it would look like you were done-for.  But!  What they didn't realize was that you, shrewd lawman that you were, were wearing your Shootin' Shell Buckle Gun belt buckle.  Just as they were about to pull their triggers, you would stick your tummy out and spring the control on the obverse side of the buckle.  Suddenly, the derringer would pop out and fire at whoever was standing in front of you!  What a secret weapon.

Of course, in real life, it didn't work precisely the way it did in the commercials.  Few toys of my childhood ever did.  First off, if you exhaled too much — or sometimes, for no reason at all — the derringer would spring out and fire before you were ready.  The answer to this was that there was a little lock on the bottom of the buckle.  Just before you were ready to fire, you had to take the lock off…which, of course, telegraphed to the bad guys that you were up to something and they would kill you before you could.

Another problem was that, in the commercial, the good guy would pop the buckle and shoot one bad guy, then snatch the derringer off the buckle lever and use it to fire several more shots, felling the other villains.  This looked neat in the commercial but once you got your Shootin' Shell Buckle Gun, you discovered that it could only fire one shot before you had to stop and reload.

This took about five minutes.  Mattel Shootin' Shell guns worked with a three-part ammo.  One part was a plastic bullet — this was the part that actually fired.  The derringer came with ten of these and after you shot people, you had to run around and find your plastic bullets so you could reuse them.  Often, you couldn't, so you had to run out and buy another pack of plastic bullets.

You would insert one plastic bullet into a metal casing with a little spring in it.  The derringer buckle came with two.  Then, you'd take a page of Mattel's special caps — little round, green ones on a sheet of peel-off labels.  You'd apply one cap to the back end of the bullet casing and you'd have a complete bullet you could insert into the gun and fire.

It was all a clumsy, awkward assembly and half the time, the cap would not explode so the plastic part of the bullet would be launched with an unexciting thud.

I remember having a semi-wonderful time with my Shootin' Shell Buckle Gun for about three days, or until I'd acted out the big ambush scene with all five of my friends.  Then I stuck it in the back of my closet and got out my Chutes-'n'-Ladders board game.  It didn't make a loud bang but at least it didn't force me to crawl around in the grass looking for my plastic bullets.  Paladin — the guy on Have Gun, Will Travel — never had to do that.

The E! Network has been running hour versions of the first five seasons of Saturday Night Live — shows I haven't seen in quite some time.  I recall liking the series a lot when it first debuted, even though I felt a lot of its "innovation" involved putting on TV, the kind of sketches that groups like Second City, The Committee, The Groundlings and various National Lampoon troupes had been doing for years.  (And, if we believe certain members of those teams, sometimes the exact same material.)  I thought SNL was fascinating to watch, often not because of what they were doing but just to see what they'd do next.  At the same time, there was a certain smugness about the show, and an occasional nastiness, that made it difficult to completely embrace.  I suppose I liked individual performers and sketches more than I liked the show as a whole.

Over the Fourth of July holiday, I watched about a half-dozen episodes from the first five years and found myself enjoying them very much.  Like most reruns, the shows looked chintzier than I remembered and, even with a half-hour lopped out of these shows, some had some deadly dull sketches.  Still, I'd forgotten how good most of the cast members were and how sharp most of the writing was.  The famed episode hosted by Richard Pryor had me laughing out loud, and even some of the "nasty" jokes didn't seem as arrogant as I'd recalled.  I was also amazed how many sketches I did not remember.  The running bits — things like the Coneheads and the Greek Diner and Emily Litella — stick in our mind and it's easy to remember the show as just those routines.

One thing which I think hurt my memories of this show is that it was syndicated many years ago in a half-hour version.  Some shows just don't work in short doses.  (Laugh-In was spectacularly ineffective when they syndicated it that way.)  I suspect that when they edited those 30-minute programs, they concentrated on the recurring sketches and dumped a lot of the one-shot bits.  If so, it would explain why the show seemed so repetitive when I watched those reruns and why so many of the non-series sketches seemed new to me this week.

E! runs the shows in no discernible pattern.  They've been running one a night, Monday through Friday, but they seem to be moving to a 2-a-day schedule this week with episodes hosted by Elliott Gould, Buck Henry, Julian Bond, Chevy Chase, Steve Martin (3 different), Lily Tomlin and Rick Nelson.  I'm watching to see if they're going to air the ones hosted by Milton Berle and Louise Lasser.  These were the two that Lorne Michaels felt were so awful that he decreed they would never be rerun.  But at least 30 minutes of the Lasser one made it into the syndication package of half-hour episodes…so perhaps he's softened on his pledge.

Everyone who ever avidly read comic books has a couple of issues in their past that made a big impression on them; that linger forever in the memory like a favored childhood toy.  They may not be the best comics ever done but they hit you at just the right moment with ideas and imagery that were at least new to you.  Just like a guy never forgets his first girl (or vice-versa), you never quite forget your first favorite comic book.

For most folks who are around my age — I hit the half-century mark last March — that favored first comic is usually a DC or Dell from the late fifties/early sixties.  My friend Al Vey — the comic book artist with the shortest name in the biz, one letter less than Jim Lee — always remembered a Dell/Disney special called Donald Duck in MathMagic Land, which came out in 1961.  He told me this some years ago at a party at one of the San Diego Conventions and, by one of those loopy coincidences, we were standing next to Don R. Christensen when he said it.  Don is a lovely, older gent who has been in animation and comics forever, and who was an extremely prolific funnybook author.  When Al said what he said, I immediately turned him around to face Don and made him repeat it.  The conversation went as follows:

Al: I was just telling Mark that my favorite comic book when I was growing up was a special called Donald Duck in MathMagic Land.

Don: (after a moment of reflection) Oh, yes, I wrote that.

I love moments like these: Al was thrilled to meet the man who'd created his favorite comic book.  Don was thrilled that someone Al's age (and in the business) remembered the book all those years and loved it so.

Anyway, it wasn't the first comic I bought or even the hundredth but I always liked Around the World With Huckleberry and his Friends, a Dell Giant that came out the same year as Al's fave.  The book was drawn by Pete Alvarado, Kay Wright, John Carey and Harvey Eisenberg.  Years later, when I began writing comics, I got to work with the first three of these gents and — I have to admit — there was a giddy little thrill there.  It was the same as the thrill I got working in TV with people like Stan Freberg and June Foray, whose work I vividly recalled loving as a kid.  Never got to write a comic drawn by Harvey Eisenberg — he died before I got into the field — but I did work with and became good buddies with his son, Jerry.

The writers are unknown but, at the time, a lot of these comics were being written by Vic Lockman, Jerry Belson, Del Connell, Lloyd Turner and several others.  Lockman and Don R. Christensen were the most prolific writers but Don tells me he didn't work on this particular book.

Its contents may seem unremarkable — short stories of various Hanna-Barbera characters of the day, each dispatched to a different foreign clime.  Huckleberry Hound went to Africa, Pixie and Dixie to Switzerland, Yakky Doodle to Australia, Augie Doggie and Doggie Daddy to Ireland, Yogi Bear to Egypt, Snagglepuss to Spain, Snooper and Blabber to England, Hokey Wolf to Italy and Quick Draw McGraw to the Sahara Desert.  I can't tell you what I found so delightful about it and I really don't want to oversell it, since the joy of most of the stories was in their simplicity.  But the Hokey Wolf tale, to name one, was about a criminal who was running around Rome, chopping up all the spaghetti so it was impossible to get long strands.  At age 9, that premise and its resolution (the culprit was a messy eater, traumatized by having stained his clothes, determined to make chopped-up spaghetti popular) struck me as outrageously funny.

I'm not suggesting you seek this comic out.  Unless you're nine, it probably won't have the same impact on you…and it also helps to have a certain fondness for the early H-B characters, as I still manage to retain.  I don't like everything that I liked then but somehow, the early Hanna-Barbera output — the characters primarily voiced by Daws Butler — still strike me as amusing.  And of course, when I devoured the comic books of them, I had Daws's superb voice and comic delivery in my head, and was able to read the word balloons accordingly.  It all made for a comic that has stayed with me for more than forty years.  Best twenty-five cents I ever spent…

Time to reminisce about another food product of my childhood…and I'm being very liberal with my definition of a "food product" by applying it to Flav-R Straws.  They were, of course, another plot by the chemical geniuses of Corporate America to turn kids' milk some odd color.  In this case, the options were pink and a pale beige, though they somehow claimed these had something to do with "strawberry," "chocolate" and other "flavors."

A Flav-R Straw was an ordinary drinking straw with a flexible section — so you could bend it towards your mouth instead of moving your head two inches — and an odd, semi-toxic filament.  Nestled inside each straw was a piece of porous material — a paper product, I suspect, though it could have been a sliver of animal skin, for all I know.  The tiny strip was impregnated with the alleged flavor — that is to say, alleged chocolate or alleged strawberry or alleged whatever — and a whole load of Industrial Strength Food Coloring in brown or red variety.

The premise was that you'd stick one of these suckers in a glass of milk and then, as you sucked upon it, the pristine, white moo juice would pass through the filter and take on the hue and taste of it.  And as you repeatedly dipped the straw, the remaining milk in the glass would be similarly transformed. My recollection is that it really didn't work that way or that well.  For one thing, to get the milk through the blockade at all, you had to suck so hard, you practically developed a compound hernia in your cheek muscles.  For another, even the small amount of milk that made it through was only faintly tinted or altered in any way.  You could transfer a bit more "flav-r" to the milk by rapidly dipping the straw into the glass and withdrawing it, over and over for about an hour, but this felt silly and it still turned the liquid only slightly off-white.

Most kids just gave up and removed the Flav-R strip from the straw and tried sucking directly on it.  Employed that way, it would yield a bitter taste but, at least, it turned your tongue brown so that had some value.  Still, Flav-R Straws were a colossal disappointment…and, now that I think of it, that had a value, as well.  We all have to learn in life that some things just don't work as advertised.  Better we should learn it on something as silly and low-cost as Flav-R Straws.  It fosters a kind of Consumer Skepticism that can be very handy, later in life.  Then again, so can learning to suck real hard.

One last remembrance of Flav-R Straws: One time when we were both straining to get milk through ours, the girl who lived down the street from me asked what would happen if you tried to use a Flav-R Straw in a glass of Coca-Cola.  I told her she would instantly die.  She decided not to chance it.