Category Archives: To Be Filed

Sez Les was a British sketch comedy show that ran from 1969 to 1976 and starred comic Les Dawson and a batch of funny people. John Cleese was occasionally among those funny people and here's one of the sketches with Mr. Dawson and Mr. Cleese. Not the best video quality, I'm sorry to say, but I can't do anything about that…

Dana S. wrote to ask…

What was the name of the bit that Carson would do on The Tonight Show? Some guy would send him an 8 or 16mm reel of film that had a bunch of little skits on them. They'd have a title, then the guy would act out what the title was about. Example: "How to annoy Your Neighbors." Then there would be a movie of a guy I don't think he ever showed his face) sitting on a sawhorse with his legs dangling in two metal trash cans, swing them around making a lot of noise. There'd be several of these per reel. I can't remember what he called them.

The guy was a filmmaker named Len Cella and he called his little films "Moron Movies." Carson ran them on his show for a while and then they wound up on TV's Bloopers & Practical Jokes, a series Carson's company did in partnership with Dick Clark's company. They were called "Silly Cinemas" over there. Here's an example from when they had the former name…

Our friend Gary Sassaman is back with another installment of Tales From My Spinner Rack…another penetrating look at comics of his (and my) youth. This time, he takes a look at a short-lived line of romance comics that Marvel tried in the late sixties.

They had great artwork but — and this is me giving my opinion, not necessarily Gary's — they also had the same kind of sappy, shallow scripts that had pretty much destroyed the genre by then. Marvel — actually, a handful of people who wrote and drew their comics — had once revolutionized super-hero comics to great success, injecting more action and personality. But they didn't apply that approach to love comics…as proven by the fact that the books sold poorly.

Worse, their response to the weak sales was not to make the comics more modern but less. They, like DC when their romance line was dying, took old stories from the fifties and early sixties and reprinted them with sloppily-retouched hair styles and wardrobe. It's like someone said, "Gee, this stuff isn't selling because it's out-of-date. Let's try making it more out-of-date!"

I'm not sure the Comics Code, which was then in antiquated force, would have permitted really modern, realistic romance stories but I can't imagine a worse approach than what both companies did. And I'm thinking I shouldn't hijack this intro for Gary's fine video with my views.

Speaking of Gary: On Saturday afternoon at WonderCon next month, he'll be presenting a live edition of Tales From My Spinner Rack focusing on The Fantastic Four and I'll be his guest discussing what Stan Lee and Jack Kirby did with that trend-setting comic in the sixties. I'll be doing other panels at WonderCon but again, this is an intro to Gary's video so I'll just shut up and embed…

Gary Kroeger, who was a cast member on Saturday Night Live in the Ebersol years, reports on his experiences at the big anniversary special/party.

Some "MAGA" folks are outraged at how Tom Hanks portrayed one of their kind on the show. It did strike me that the moment was a little gratuitous and unfair to some…but so is the way MAGA members usually caricature Liberals or other folks they see as The Enemy. Seems like kind of a wash to me.

What I find interesting about it is that so many of the complaints about it included the usual Trump dismissal that the magazine that criticizes him is so unpopular, it's going out of business or the TV show that mocks him is failing in the ratings. That insult is usually just plain wrong. That magazine's doing fine, the TV show's ratings are up, etc. I must have seen a half-dozen people saying something like, "This is why Saturday Night Live's ratings are abysmal"…and they aren't. The show does fine and that 50th Anniversary Special was NBC's most-watched prime-time entertainment telecast in five years.

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…