Category Archives: To Be Filed

We're hearing that a fine artist and a fine gentleman, Jim Silke, has passed. No cause is yet known but he was 93. Jim's long career moved from trying to draw comics to work as a graphic designer, then back to comics, particularly of the "glamour" variety. Much of his graphic design work was on record albums for Capitol Records and he was a multiple Grammy Award nominee and one-time winner in the category of "Best Recording Package." The time he won, it was for this record…

I took Stan Freberg to a WonderCon in San Francisco one year and Jim asked me if I'd introduce him to Stan. Jim had worked on several of Stan's records for Capitol and they'd never met. It was a very pleasant meeting for both men with lots of compliments exchanged.

Later in life, Jim pursued his personal muse and drew many comics — that's why he was at WonderCon — and became a close and treasured friend to many in the field. Dave Stevens never felt his work was complete until he'd shown it to Jim and received a thumbs-up, and once I saw them spent twenty minutes discussing the way Dave had drawn Bettie Page's foot. The two of them were the experts at drawing the lovely Ms. Page.

Jim was liked and respected by everyone who knew him. Here are a few of the comics he did…

I put up that video earlier of all the folks who'd been cast members on Saturday Night Live and I plumb forgot the point I was going to make: It would have been nice if they'd run something like that during the show. It was only two minutes.

I also forgot to say that I think it's inexcusable that in a show that long, they couldn't find more than — what was it? Thirty seconds? — to salute the writers. And yes, I know there have been a lot of them. I'm not saying they should all have been named but they could have acknowledged that there were a lot of them…and that a lot of what you laughed at on the show came from them.

I also should have mentioned the classiest moment in the whole show…

Hey, you remember earlier today, I showed you a photo taken by the guy fulfilling my Costco order? The one who told me they were all out of eggs? Well, when he delivered the order an hour or so later, it contained two dozen Kirkland Signature Free Range Large Eggs (USDA Grade A) for which he charged me $8.41. The Ralphs Market near me — which is usually the cheapest full-service market in the area — wants $7.99 for one dozen of those. That's if they even have them. Another reason we love Costco.

HBO has resumed releasing to YouTube each episode of — or at least the main story of — Last Week Tonight with John Oliver right when it debuts. Last year, they were delaying them for a few days but Mr. Oliver reportedly objected…so here it is. This is his first show back after a hiatus and it's all, beginning to end, about what the Trump Administration is doing. I find myself torn between wanting to watch John Oliver (because I think he's hilarious and usually on-target) and not wanting to watch a lot about Trump (because he continually distracts me from problems I can actually do something about).

I elected to watch this and it's pretty solid and pretty aggravating and you can decide for yourself how much of your life you want to devote to thinking about the runaway incompetence, greed and cruelty now emanating from the White House…

I placed a delivery order this morning with Costco and my designated shopper just sent me this…

If I understand this Bird Flu thing correctly, this would have happened no matter who we elected last November. If it had been Kamala Harris, Donald Trump would now be leading his supporters in blaming it wholly on the President and maybe the previous one…and saying it would never have happened under his administration.

Here's another one of these. Every cast member from Saturday Night Live in two minutes…

Well, that was long.

Some wonderful moments as well as others that remind me why I don't watch the entire show anymore…just the highlights on YouTube. It was nice to see certain folks back and even interacting with performers from different eras of the show. Then again, you could make a pretty long list of cast members who did excellent work on the series but didn't really exist insofar as this special was concerned. And folks on the 'net are already talking about who wasn't there at all and speculating why.

One thing that has bothered me a bit about the show is that for much of its run, it has clearly valued certain people — cast members and writers — more than others. And there's nothing wrong with that. Some of them contributed more than others. But the valuations seem to be based on what they did outside the series. It's like Kevin Nealon doesn't get much love because all he did was appear in and maybe write a lot of great sketches. He didn't become a movie star or have a hit TV series of his own. And I'm just picking him at random because there have been many others in that category.

Still, it was a remarkable special and I'll probably think of other things to say about it in the days to come.

In the rerun of the first Saturday Night Live last night — and linked here — I noticed two interesting things in the closing credits and today, my pal Shelly Goldstein reminded me of the significance of one of them. She reminded me that in the Saturday Night movie, one of the thousand-and-one plot lines has to do with whether the very-important-to-the-series writer whose first name was Rosie was going to be listed in the end credits as Rosie Shuster (her birth name) or Rosie Michaels (her name after she married Lorne Michaels). At the last minute — probably too late to have it added in a real broadcast — she decides on Rosie Shuster.

Okay, fine. That's how it was in the movie. In the actual broadcast though, it was like this on the screen…

Just to explain: The "Bud" was a joke during the end credits. Almost everyone listed has "Bud" as a middle name. The point is that if she really did decide on Shuster, it didn't get on the air, at least the first week.

Another interesting thing I noticed: Near the end of the credits crawl, we saw this…

Dick Ebersol was very, very (insert a few verys) important person in the birthing of Saturday Night Live. It probably never would have happened without him and he later stepped into Lorne Michaels' position for several seasons. But at the time this first show aired, he was an NBC employee in a category where such credits were against company policy. Reportedly, there was a huge outrage in him getting this one in that particular form. He didn't get it again and some sources say it was edited out of rebroadcasts of this episode…yet it appeared in the rerun last night and I hear it's on the DVDs.

Okay. That's all I wanted to say here.

This blog used to track the fate of a stage musical called The Nutty Professor based on the 1963 movie starring Jerry Lewis. The musical was directed by Mr. Lewis and for several years, he kept announcing that it was going to open at this theater on Broadway or that theater not on Broadway and he gave dates as if they were firm and with one exception, they turned out to be imaginary. At one point, he announced that a tryout was booked for certain dates at the Old Globe Theater in San Diego and apparently, no one had spoken to anyone at the Old Globe Theater in San Diego about this.

That tryout never happened but the show did get a run in Nashville from July 24 through August 19 of 2012 and there was a production at the Ogunquit Playhouse in Ogunquit, Maine from July 1 through August 6 of 2022. There also seems to have been a production of it in Sandy. Utah from July 1 through August 1 of last year…and if anyone else has put it on, I haven't been able to find it on the Internet.

Recently, as they do every so often, Playbill posted a short list of shows that are soon to open on Broadway and a very long list of shows that are hovering about, most of them playing somewhere, waiting for the deal that will enable them to open on The Great White Way. There is no trace of The Nutty Professor on this list, nor has it been on the last few such lists.

So what's happened to it? The reviews in Nashville and Ogunquit were pretty good and most thought a New York residency was likely. The passing of Mr. Lewis in 2017 might have had some effect but it didn't stop the Ogunquit run and frankly, there hadn't been much movement in the five years before Jerry went to that big telethon in the sky. I don't have any answers to this question…and I'm wondering if anyone involved with the property has tried approaching any stars about doing it in New York.

I would think that if it's as good as the reviewers said and if they could get Martin Short to star in it, it would run as long as…well, as long as Martin Short was willing to do it. Of course, that's supposing there's anyone involved with the property trying to get the show up in Manhattan.

Here are some scenes from the Ogunquit production…

Last night, NBC reran the first episode of Saturday Night Live, which was then called NBC's Saturday Night. It looks a bit cheap and Public Access these days but you see the potential there. I wrote about this first episode back here and other places of this blog.

They've also made the episode available online so here it is. Note that with the commercials omitted, this 90-minute show runs a little under an hour and eight minutes…

It's been a while since I video-linked something that I wrote but I wrote this a long, long time ago. It's an episode of CBS Storybreak, a series which adapted kids' books into half-hour cartoon shows. It was hosted by Bob (Captain Kangaroo) Keeshan as Bob Keeshan, not Captain Kangaroo. One of many things I enjoyed about this particular job was spending tape day in Studio 33 — aka "The Bob Barker Stage" — at CBS Television City as he taped all the intros for the season.

We talked at great length there and then we talked at greater length that evening when I took him out to dinner — or rather, he took me since he could charge our meal to CBS. We ate at RJ's, a favorite restaurant of mine that's no longer in business. No one recognized him on sight but our server said, "Your voice is so familiar" and later figured it out. Mr. Keeshan said he was almost never recognized visually but was often recognized by his voice. The folks in the next booth recognized him the same way.

I asked him, "How many of the people you meet say 'I grew up with you?'" He replied, "Just about all of them."

The book adapted for this CBS Storybreak was Mama Don't Allow by Thacher Hurd…and we had a great voice cast: Jeff Altman, Hamilton Camp, Roger C. Carmel, Brian Cummings, Michael Dees, June Foray, Mona Marshall and Pete Renaday. I believe this was Roger C. Carmel's last acting job as he passed away a few weeks after the recording session.

I recall him being very excited because he was going to spend the following weekend at a Star Trek convention — in Seattle, I think. He'd be signing autographs (and making $$$) because he'd played the role of Harcourt Fenton "Harry" Mudd on the original Star Trek series. William Shatner would be at the con and he'd insisted they fly Roger in and he also advised Roger on what to charge for his signature.

Mr. Carmel ticked off a list of TV shows he'd appeared on in the sixties and seventies and it was a pretty long list — Banacek, The Munsters, The Dick Van Dyke Show, Batman, Hogan's Heroes, The Man From U.N.C.L.E., Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Hawaii Five-O, All in the Family and on and on and on. His residuals for all those shows had either long since run out or trickled down to those pennies Donald Trump wants to get rid of. Then he said, "Isn't it amazing? I did two 3-day shoots on Star Trek and that's my pension!" He was referring to the money from autographing photos.

This was, I believe, the only musical episode of CBS Storybreak and it originally aired on September 19, 1987. A wonderful gent named Eddie Karam wrote the music and conducted. I wrote the script and the lyrics and the gent who played the saxophone in this episode was none other than Tom Scott, who a lot of folks would tell you was the best sax player in the business…and for this, we hired him to play badly for much of the half-hour. The animation was done by a firm called Southern Star which was otherwise referred to as "Hanna-Barbera Australia."

If you want to know more about this cartoon, I refer you to this piece I wrote back in 1998. Oh — and I want to mention this to devout Groo fans: You'll see the name of Gordon Kent in the end credits. Gordon was a dear friend of mine and he was the first colorist of that silly comic that Sergio Aragonés and I were doing then and, miraculously, still do. I wrote about Gordon here when we lost him and I still miss the guy. Here's the cartoon…

Recently here, we shared with you Richard Burton delivering an unusual performance of the title song from the musical, Camelot. Here is a more conventional — and seemingly sober — rendition which Richard Harris did on The Ed Sullivan Show for April 28, 1968. This was around a year after the release of the not-wonderful film version of the movie starring Mr. Harris…

Someone who signs himself "Johnny Enzyme" — and who I'm guessing is not really named "Johnny Enzyme" — came across some political cartoons by Jack Kirby, whose name at the time he did them was not "Jack Kirby," nor was it "Jack Curtiss," which is how he signed such work then. Mr. Enzyme asks…

I just saw these five images and was rather shocked by how talented the man was when his (evidently) full cartoonist sensibilities were unleashed.

I went on to comment: "I would guess then that Jack decided to work in an efficient, reductionist style for comic books, not so much trying to interject his full art sensibilities in to comics the way that someone like Bill Sienkiewicz or Walt Simonson did."

I'm interested to hear your thoughts on that, and perhaps just in general, hear about noteworthy examples of comic book artists who greatly streamlined their full fine arts talents in order to meet comic book deadlines and all that.

I don't think too many comic book artists streamlined their full talents to meet deadlines so much as their styles evolved into what (a) felt comfortable to them and (b) got them work. Meeting deadlines is always important but I think with most, it wasn't the kind of conscious decision you postulate except in this sense: You couldn't make a living in comics drawing one page a week…and the companies paid the same for a page that took you two hours. If you couldn't find a style and approach that yielded a living wage in that arena and also pleased you, you got out of comics and into something else.

Jack Kirby's #1 goal was always to make the kind of money necessary to provide well for himself and his family. That didn't mean he didn't care about the quality of the work. Quite the contrary, he believed that doing better comics would lead to better sales and better sales would lead to better compensation and financial security. Sadly, it didn't always work out that way but he still believed that until right around the time he got out of comics and into animation.

I think your suggestion — that he "decided to work in an efficient, reductionist style for comic books" — is wrong. I think he always did what he felt would make for good comics that would tell good stories well. The style you saw in the comics, especially when he had a faithful inker, was what resulted from that attitude.

There are and always have been comic book artists who skewed their drawing in the direction of what got them work. Almost all of them are or were more versatile than the pages you saw them produce for DC or Marvel or Whoever. Most of them did that work but also made time to sketch or paint what they wanted to sketch or paint. An awful lot of them, I think, could have been very successful in other fields.

The first one who comes to mind for me is Mike Sekowsky. I knew Mike, I worked with Mike…and I think he was an example of a guy who had enormous talents that were never tapped by conventional comic books. Left to his own devices, I could see his wicked sense o' humor taking his career more where Jack Davis or even Charles Addams worked. I loved his work on super-hero comics but that was him drawing the way he had to draw to get work. I could certainly imagine John Buscema with a career that more resembled Frank Frazetta's…or vice-versa.

Generally speaking, artists — and this applies to writers, too — gravitate towards the kind of work that seems available to them and they produce what seems appropriate to that marketplace. This was especially true of the ones who grew up during The Great Depression but it's also true of most creative people of any era looking for an outlet for what they do. Commercial art usually requires at least a little consideration of what might be commercial.

Jerry Eisenberg had a little merry band of cartooning friends from the early days of Hanna-Barbera. The Three Tooners were made up of Jerry, Willie Ito and Tony Benedict and they appeared at conventions and various functions…and on Stu's Show, the program run by my pal Stu Shostak. On July 25, 2018, Stu had them on his program for what turned out to be a three-hour conversation about that studio and all the things each of them did away from H-B. Stu has put this extraordinary program online for free viewing and you can watch it here.

A truly great cartoonist and a helluva nice guy died last night at the age of 87. Jerry Eisenberg had been sick for some time — the official cause of death was Pneumonia — and the news is already shaking up the animation community. Everyone knew him. Everyone adored him.

Jerry was a second-generation great cartoonist. His father, Harvey Eisenberg, had quite a history in animation and comic books…and both Eisenbergs were responsible for some of the better things that the Hanna-Barbera studio ever did. Jerry broke into the field as an animator for the MGM cartoon studio in the fifties, then when it closed down, he worked for H-B for years, designing many of their characters including — this is a very partial list — Peter Potamus, all the racers on Wacky Races, most of the gang on Jabberjaw…oh, I shouldn't have started this list either. Suffice it to say there probably wasn't a single Hanna-Barbera production done between 1961 and 1977 that didn't have characters in it designed by Jerry. He even worked on the super-hero shows.

'77 was when he moved over to the then-new Ruby-Spears cartoon studio — the one I was writing about earlier today on this blog — and became a producer of most of their shows including Fangface, Plastic Man, Thundarr the Barbarian…again, a list I shouldn't have started. Later, he worked for Marvel Productions, Disney, Warner Brothers…just about everywhere in town. He was one of the fastest artists I've ever seen and one of the nicest, jolliest guys.

Condolences go out to Raymonde, his wife of many years…and our thanks because she took great care of him.

Wanna know more about this man? Here's a three-hour interview with him. You can learn all about him and even if you just watch a few minutes of it, you'll see why everyone loved him. I certainly did.