Category Archives: To Be Filed

Starting next week, MeTV Toons is running the 1979 Plastic Man cartoon show produced by the Ruby-Spears animation studio, which was then the newest cartoon maker in the business. I wrote several episodes including the first one MeTV Toons is airing — "The Weed," which according to my schedule, will air Tuesday morning, February 18 at 2:30 AM. That sounds like the perfect time slot for it. You won't be up watching and I won't be up watching.

I do not remember much about writing that episode except that I'm pretty certain no one mentioned any connection between a super-villain called The Weed and marijuana. I think (I'm not 100% positive) that I invented and named the character and I know (I'm 100% positive) the drug reference never dawned on me. As you may know, in my almost-73 years of life, I've never even experienced first-hand tobacco.

I was not involved in the development of the show that took Jack Cole's popular comic book character and changed an awful lot of things about him. And to be accurate, I believe the character was only popular when Jack Cole drew him and apparently had some input into the scripts. This would be from the time of the character's creation in Police Comics #1 — cover-dated August of 1941 — until sometime later that decade when Mr. Cole handed it off to others. There have been many versions of the character since then in comics and animation and I don't think any of them have wowed anybody that much. The cartoon show Ruby-Spears did for two seasons starting in '79 certainly didn't.

The development was mainly done by Norman Maurer, a former comic book artist himself. Norman was then a TV and movie producer and the manager of The Three Stooges — Moe was his father-in-law — and a much in-demand guy in the field of Saturday morning cartoons. I worked with him on Richie Rich at Hanna-Barbera and ABC loved him for that series. And like I said, I was not around when they decided Plastic Man should operate in a different world and format than he'd had in any of his comics.

A lot of it, I heard, had to do with the demands of the Standards and Practices Department at ABC and a lady there who felt cartoons for kids needed to be uplifting and clean and above all, free from violence. She hated the Super Friends show the network was then airing and I believe one of the reasons she was okay with Plastic Man was that the nature of his powers meant that he couldn't engage much in anything that fit her silly definition of "violence." It was pretty much anything you or I or a sane person would call "action."

So they put Plastic Man into this odd format of taking his marching orders from a sultry boss lady named The Chief. Then "Plas" would travel the world in a jet along with a lady named Penny and a sidekick named Hula-Hula. I wrote about Hula-Hula in this blog post here. As for Plastic Man himself, it's not how I would have handled the character but it's how we all had to handle the character. I wrote a few episodes and I also wrote the opening narration for each episode.

I am not recommending you watch this show. Just telling you what I know about its history.

It did pretty well ratings-wise for a while but back in those days of Saturday Morning Kidvid, the measure of a show was not how well it ran but how well it reran. They made 13 episodes per season (occasionally, a few more than that) and many a show would do well the first time they ran the thirteen, less well when they ran them the second time, even less well when they ran them the third time…and that series would probably be marked for cancellation before they could run them the fourth time.

Years later when I did the Garfield and Friends show, the episodes did well on first run, better on their second run and when they started doing even better on their third run, CBS decided to make the show an hour for its second season and renew it through its third. That was how the game was played.

Plastic Man's numbers went slowly in the opposite direction and eventually reached the level where ABC was unsure if they wanted to renew it for a second year. They said to Joe Ruby — the "Ruby" in "Ruby-Spears" — "We'll pick it up if you add some element to make the show new and different." My pal Steve Gerber, who was also writing episodes, and I went to Joe and suggested making it less like a super-hero show and more like a Jack Cole comic book.

That turned out to be exactly what ABC didn't want so Joe came up with the idea of having Plastic Man and Penny marry and have a baby with the powers of his father. I think I only wrote one episode with "Baby Plas" and that was under light duress. There was no third season.

I thought the first season was…well, better than a lot of what was then on Saturday A.M. teevee. It just wasn't Plastic Man. If you're up at 2:30 AM next week, you can probably find something better to watch…but if you give it a try, you might enjoy it more than you expect. Note that I said "might."

Plans are being made for a Celebration of Life, the life in this case being that of our friend Mike Schlesinger. Details will be posted here as soon as there are details that can be posted here.

And in case you didn't see Jon Stewart last night, here's his very funny/perceptive opening segment. It's 22 minutes long and if you don't have time to watch the whole thing, at least move the slider and watch it from the 16:00 mark…

I'm not paying as much attention to Donald Trump as…well, as much as some of my friends who are really stressing out over what he's doing and what he's saying he's going to do. Those are not always the same thing but sometimes they are — often enough that if he announced today he was going to execute everyone in the state of Michigan who refuses to become an Elvis Impersonator, two people I know would have the following conversation…

"Relax. He's never going to do that!"

"Maybe…but that's what we all thought when he said he's going to…" and you can fill in a description of any number of things he's actually done.

I guess some of his fans think this kind of "I'm in charge, I'll do any damned thing I want" attitude is an admirable quality in a leader. They will stop doing that when he does something more obviously detrimental to their lives…or the next time a Democrat is in power. It could be either one but I'll bet it's the first.

Anyway, I'm not writing a lot about politics here because I'm averting my gaze from a lot of it. I did though watch this video from Hank Green and it seems to me he's describing the situation perfectly…

Actually, it's not today's. This is from last Rosh Hashanah, which is when I should have posted it…

When I busted my ankle a little over a year ago, I made the decision that when I returned home to recover here, I would live upstairs in my two-story house. I only go downstairs — which is still kind of a struggle — when I have to go to doctor appointments. Oh, and I also left the upper story to attend Comic-Con last year. Today, I received this question from someone who asked me to omit their name…

Thank you first of all for the many years of pleasure that both your work and your blog have given me. My usual activity when I haven't kept up with the blog for a while is to binge, which I did today. Consequently, I was reading of the anniversary of your broken ankle, and I was curious about one thing since I'm physically handicapped myself. I hope you will excuse this nosy question, which is more a matter of what you might call professional curiosity.

I know how difficult stairs can be, and I was puzzled as to why you chose to modify your home in order to stay upstairs rather than downstairs. Was it because your office is upstairs? Wishing you a speedy recovery, and thanks again. Excuse my impertinence.

It's not impertinent and the answer is simple: It took much, much less remodeling and rearrangement to live upstairs. I have no bedrooms downstairs whereas I have my own, arranged-the-way-I-want-it bedroom upstairs. I have my arranged-the-way-I-want-it office upstairs. I have two bathrooms upstairs, both with showers, whereas the one bathroom downstairs has no shower.

The only necessity of life I didn't have upstairs was a kitchen so I got a microwave oven and a small refrigerator for upstairs and I moved some things like dishes, utensils and my toaster up. I also had one of the upstairs showers converted to what hotels call a "handicapped" shower. I have no idea how I could have set up a bedroom and office downstairs. It's worked pretty well. It might not work for someone else but given the way my home was already designed and how much time I was already spending upstairs as opposed to downstairs, it was the best for me.

I miss Charlie Callas — the only man in show business who could do this kind of stuff and call it an act…

The MeTV Toons has had to drop Rocky & Bullwinkle from their schedule at the request of its distributor. It may be back, it may not…but last I looked, they're still running 24/7 on a sub-channel of the Xumo Play channel and perhaps others. If you love Moose and Squirrel and can't live without them, it's still possible to buy the complete run of the series on DVD for thirty bucks. That strikes me as an offer not to be missed.

Coming to MeTV Toons in a week or so is a new series called House of Hanna-Barbera which consists of short cartoons from a number of early H-B shows like Huckleberry Hound, Yogi Bear, Pixie & Dixie, Hokey Wolf, Touché Turtle, Wally Gator, Snagglepuss, Yakky Doodle, Hillbilly Bears, Squiddly Diddly, Lippy and Hardy, Atom Ant, Secret Squirrel, Magilla Gorilla and others. I think some of those cartoons are pretty funny.

They don't seem to be running anything from the Quick Draw McGraw show, which I thought might have been the best of all the H-B shows that featured three short cartoons each week. That series has never been released on home video because it used a different music library than other H-B shows and the music is either not clearable or not clearable at a reasonable price. So maybe that's why MeTV Toons isn't running them…or maybe, because they were never put out on home video, clean, restored copies of those cartoons are not available. When someone asks why such-and-such a show isn't streaming these days, the answer is usually music clearances or the unavailability of good copies.

Oh — and the new H-B show on MeTV Toons also includes Loopy DeLoop cartoons. This was a series of shorts that was never seen on TV. They were theatrical shorts and, in my opinion, a lot less funny than what the studio was concurrently doing for television. I once asked Joe Barbera about them and all I got out of the man was "Don't bring up painful memories." It's a shame that the Quick Draw McGraw cartoons aren't on TV but Loopy's are.

That's a photo of my longtime friend Tony Isabella. We met by mail around 1967, by phone around 1968 and in person at the 1970 New York Comic Art Convention. Part of me is sad because there is no more Tony Isabella.

But this is not an obit. You see, that person is still alive. He's just no longer Tony Isabella…and here's where I get into what Daffy Duck would call "Pronoun Trouble." She is now Jenny Blake, having announced today that she has transitioned to what she feels is the proper gender identification for her. I've known about this for a while and as far as I'm concerned, the only bad part of this is the Pronoun Trouble it creates.

Jenny is not the first person in my life to do this and if you don't know anyone who's made this leap…well, maybe someone you know is considering it. Or maybe they've decided it's what's right for them but they're too scared of the reaction they might get from those around them. Sadly, there are some people who do get all discombobulated over this kind of thing.

I suspect that in most cases, they really don't care what the transitioner calls themselves or even what rest room they use. They're upset because the world is not being run the way they want it to be run. Here's a story that feels like it belongs in this post…

When I moved into the house in which I now live, which I did in 1980, I found I had a terrific neighbor. Mrs. Eckstein was just about the sweetest lady you ever met in your life. Dwelling right across the street and living all alone, she would occasionally call on me for help…changing a light bulb, driving her to a doctor appointment, being of aid when she locked herself out, etc. As she got older, there were more such calls for help. She gave me a key to her side door and a few times when she fell, I'd run over to help her up or — in a few of those few times — let in the paramedics.

Once in a while, I'd pass the lightbulb-changing or the driving over to my assistant John. Though we both kept telling her it was not necessary, Mrs. Eckstein insisted on thanking both of us with candy or cashews or sometimes, she even gave me a jar of her homemade chicken soup.

So one day a few years ago, John became Jane…and I have to tell you that Jane is a much happier person than John was. Those who are shaken by this whole concept of gender reassignment sometimes claim that all or most who undergo it regret their decisions. I'm sure somewhere there are a couple who do — it's not supposed to fix everything in one's life — but the stats don't bear that out and Jane sure doesn't. The only downside I can see from this transition is, of course, Pronoun Trouble.

As John became Jane, he she (see what I mean?) suggested I go tell Mrs. Eckstein about it so she wouldn't be mystified. I went over to see Mrs. Eckstein and let me tell you a little more about this wonderful lady. She was a retired schoolteacher in her early nineties. She kept a Kosher home. She never hurt anyone in her long, long life. If you were allowed in this world to design your own grandmother, you'd wind up with someone very much like Mrs. Eckstein. But I wasn't sure how she would take to the news about my assistant.

We sat down in her kitchen and I asked her if she'd seen on the news about how sometimes, someone who is born of one gender comes to feel that they don't belong in that category; how they decide they'd be oh-so-much-happier in the opposite gender and how they then undergo various changes, sometimes involving hormones or surgery, to reassign. Mrs. Eckstein had no idea where I was going with this but she nodded and said yes, she'd heard a little about this kind of thing.

So then I said, "Well, my assistant John is doing this. It's called 'transitioning' and John is becoming Jane."

There was a pause while she absorbed what I was saying. Then she spoke and said, "Are you telling me that that nice young man who's been helping me is becoming a nice young woman?" I said yes. She said, "Okay. If that's what he wants, that's fine."

That was the extent of her reaction. And I suggest to you that that is always the proper reaction or it should be. Especially when politicians and those who surround them see dividing us as a tool to attain money and/or power, we need to remember that human beings are human beings even when they do something you would never do. Or could ever understand.

Nothing else changed as far as Mrs. Eckstein was concerned. Jane kept helping my neighbor by changing light bulbs and such until last year when Mrs. Eckstein passed away. The only real difference was that every so often, Mrs. Eckstein called her "John" and had to correct herself. I still occasionally make that mistake too, just as I'll probably forget and call Tony "Tony" instead of "Jenny."

And I'll have a bit of Pronoun Trouble, too. It's a small price to pay if it makes my friend Jenny happy.

I love the song "Camelot" from the Broadway show of the same name but…well, here's an odd performance of it by Richard Burton, who introduced the song in the show's first production. This was on the 1979 Jerry Lewis MDA Telethon and Burton looks like he's only doing this because someone offstage is pointing a gun at him…or something. I'd love to know what he was thinking…

John Cheves wrote to ask…

When I read the letters to the editor in 1960's Batman comics — where your own name occasionally appeared — I see fans who wrote in to compliment Bob Kane on his artwork. They truly seemed to believe that Kane drew those comics.

For example, in Batman no. 181 (June 1966), Jeff Sosnaud of San Francisco complimented Kane for getting better over recent issues, adding, "Looking at the work he is producing today, it seems almost incredible that he is the same artist."

Of course, Kane wasn't drawing the comics. Other artists drew them, with Kane — as per the terms of his contract with DC — getting the sole art credit on interiors. The artists behind the particular issue of Batman that Jeff praised were penciler Sheldon Moldoff and inkers Joe Giella and Sid Greene.

The weird thing is, based on their comments, the letter writers clearly understood that a stable of uncredited writers penned Batman's stories. They knew names like Robert Kanigher, Bill Finger and Gardner Fox, and in their letters, they speculated as to who wrote which tale.

And yet — the fans believed millionaire 50-something Bob Kane was drawing all of those comics every month? Or did they? Thanks for any insights you can provide.

First off, I wouldn't take the contents of any comic book letter column as indicative of what "the fans" thought. Some of those letters, at least after they stopped printing the readers' full addresses with them, were phony. Some of the real ones that came in were so highly edited or rewritten that they might as well have been phony. (A couple that I had published were almost unrecognizable to me.)

More importantly, the letters you read in those letter pages were selected by an editor from a pile that represented a fraction of a percent of the book's readers. And like I said, they were selected. If you or I had written in a letter that said, "Hey, I know Bob Kane isn't drawing this comic. Isn't that Shelly Moldoff?" the editor — or whoever assembled the letter column — wouldn't have printed it. Kane's deal then was that he would get sole credit for drawing the strip.

So the editors were free to say in the letters page that a given story was written by Gardner Fox but not to say who really drew it.

The one exception to that was that when Carmine Infantino began drawing some of the stories, editor Julius Schwartz said that he was able to get Kane to make an exception. He said he pointed out to Kane that Infantino's work was highly identifiable and his name was well known to readers from his work on other DC Comics. So they'd recognize those stories as drawn by Infantino and if DC tried to claim that was Bob Kane, it would blow the fiction. The readers — and I was one then — didn't know what Sheldon Moldoff art looked like so it was safe to say those stories were drawn by Bob Kane.

Also, I'm not sure Schwartz or any DC editor then knew that was Shelly Moldoff's penciling. Somewhere else on this blog, I probably quoted what DC editor George Kashdan said when I asked him about it: ""No one thought Kane did it all or even most of it. But Kane had this contract and it was easier to just do 'Don't ask, don't tell.' As long as the pages came in on time, which they almost always did, no one cared. I guess we figured Shelly was doing some of it and weren't shocked to hear he was doing all of it."

Shelly himself told me they didn't know…even though Shelly was inking (and occasionally penciling) for other DC books and often was hired by them to ink "Bob Kane pencil art." Me, I think they were just playing dumb.

They did know, of course, that there were Batman stories signed "Bob Kane" that Kane had nothing to do with. This confuses some people so I'd better explain it again: Kane's contract called for him to deliver a specified quantity of penciled pages that his "studio" would produce. DC editors would buy the scripts. Kane would have them drawn. They assumed he was doing some of it with help from various assistants he hired — and early on in this arrangement, when Lew Sayre Schwartz was assisting Kane, Bob did do some of the penciling. Eventually though, he scaled back to drawing either very, very little of it or none whatsoever of it.

This was not at all unprecedented in the business. Siegel and Shuster had a "studio" arrangement with other artists, all uncredited, assisting or ghosting for Shuster. A lot of artists in comic books had uncredited assistants. Kane might have been the only comic book artist whose assistant(s) did all of the work. (I said "comic book artist" because there were plenty of newspaper strips drawn wholly by assistants. One example of many: Walt Disney did not draw the Donald Duck or Mickey Mouse newspaper strips. They were even signed with his alleged signature long after his death.)

Now, if DC wanted to publish more stories of the Caped Crusader than that specified quantity, they could hire Curt Swan or Jim Mooney or Dick Sprang or Winslow Mortimer or anyone else they wanted to draw those stories. Sometimes, they even hired Shelly Moldoff to ink them. When Julie Schwartz took over as editor of Batman and Detective Comics in 1964, he decided that the stories in the eight issues of Batman a year would all be penciled by the Kane "studio." In the monthly Detective Comics, half the stories would be penciled by Kane and/or his mime(s) and half would be an artist Schwartz engaged directly. These were the stories drawn for a few years by Infantino and Carmine also did all the cover for both books.

A few years later, Kane's contract with DC expired and he got a new one which did not involve him or anyone working for him producing any art whatsoever. By that time, it was getting around that others were doing all the work signed "Bob Kane." But I don't think a lot of fans knew it before. And a lot of readers really don't care who drew a story.

The other day here, I mentioned Engineer Bill, who was a fixture of Los Angeles television when I was a kid. He had a couple of different shows and I was briefly (very briefly) on one of them before he went from being Bill Stulla to Engineer Bill. Anecdote here.

Here are some short clips from his show. The commercials and cartoons he showed have been truncated but you will get to see a complete round of "Red Light, Green Light," which was a signature game played every day on his show. You'll also get to see him prompt his youthful co-host to tell the story of The Three Bears and then decide it's running too long and cut her off before she can get to the part where Goldilocks comes into it.

His show was not quite this dense with commercials. It just seems that way because much of the actual entertainment has been edited out of this sampler…

Several of you have sent me either (a) copies of real John Dillinger Wanted Posters or (b) inquiries as to whether to see one. Apparently, some of you have never heard of this thing called Google. Look it up even if it means googling Google for the search term "Google." It will point you to many real (probably) Dillinger wanted posters like this one. And you will probably find my bogus one in there to remind you not to believe everything you read on the Internet — except, of course, if it's on this blog. Don't even believe this blog except for the part about not believing all the others.

A real good (and underappreciated) actor in a lot of real good movies and plays. I never met the man but I'm sorry to see him go.

Confession, some say, is good for the soul. I'm about to test that by admitting to something I did a long, long time ago and which I've felt guilty about for that long, long time. Call it an act of fraud. Call it a deception. Call it false advertising…whatever. Please though remember that at the time, I was young and naïve. Now that I am old and naïve, I know better.

When Jack Kirby left Marvel and joined DC Comics in 1970, he urged the company to experiment with new formats for comics. Comics these days come in different sizes and shapes, including many that Jack proposed…but at the time, DC was resistant to those ideas — or at least to gambling money on them. They kept saying they would try them but saying that and actually publishing were two separate things. Many of his ideas went unattempted and the few that they did try were watered down, dumbed down and produced with the smallest possible investment. One of these was a line of magazines (not comic books) the first and almost last of which was called In the Days of the Mob.

Jack wanted it to be slick and in color and thicker and filled with the work of many different writers and artists. What resulted was in black-and-white with cheap printing, a low page count and no one writing or drawing it but Jack. DC had so little confidence in it that they didn't even put the famous DC name on it.  Instead, they hid behind the moniker of Hampshire House Ltd., which (someone told me) was a dormant sub-company once used by some sister outfit that put out puzzle books.

Almost no one bought it. That was because almost no one saw it. DC, through its Independent News division, had perhaps the best distribution company in the business but they were unable to get this magazine — and the second one Jack did called Spirit World — on very many newsstands. A basic rule of any business is that you can't expect people to purchase your product if they don't know it exists and couldn't find it if they did. Jack also did a never-published-then magazine of stories about people in the throes of divorce.

My then-partner Steve Sherman and I helped Jack put these magazines together. We were all pessimistic about them selling at all, given what DC turned his proposal into…and when Jack saw finished, printed copies of In the Days of the Mob and Spirit World, he knew for sure. We finished up second issues of these but DC never published them. Some of the material for Spirit World went into other DC books. Most of what we did for the magazine projects has been printed in hardcover collections in recent years.

So now you're probably wondering just what I'm confessing to. Here is a chunk of one of the very few ads that DC arranged for the first issue of In the Days of the Mob…

I call your attention to the promise of a "free" (!) Giant Authentic John Dillinger Wanted Poster.  The magazine did indeed contain a pull-out poster that one might call a "John Dillinger Wanted Poster" but it was not particularly giant and it was about as authentic as a George Santos résumé.  Here — take a look at that poster.  The photos of Mr. Dillinger are his actual mug shots but does the rest of this thing look real to you?

Of course not. It looks like something that a 19-year-old kid would whip up on the drawing board in his bedroom in his parents' house. And seeing how it was done in 1971 before we all had computers with infinite fonts, he probably created the text by using rub-on lettering from some company like Letraset or Transfer Type without ever even seeing a genuine John Dillinger wanted poster. You can probably guess who that 19-year-old kid was.

This poster was not my idea. As I recall, DC head honcho Carmine Infantino phoned Jack and said he wanted the black-and-white magazines to have pull-out posters because that would make them thicker on the newsracks and it was way cheaper than adding more pages to the magazine. (Warren's Creepy, Eerie and Vampirella magazines were 50¢ and each had 64 pages. Ours were 48 pages for the same price — yet another reason ours didn't sell.)

Jack told Carmine the poster in In the Days of the Mob #1 would be a wanted poster of John Dillinger. I'm not sure if he said "authentic" or not but the ad they designed in New York said it would be and we were unable to find a real one…just the mug shots in some book we located. So Jack told me to make one and I made one. In more than half a century since this magazine came out, no one has ever mentioned to me what a shoddy fake it was but I still felt some guilt about it.

There's one other thing in that ad excerpt that I might mention. When DC tried to launch this line of comics in magazine format, it brought some intra-company complaints from Bill Gaines, publisher of MAD. He didn't like that another division of the same firm was publishing magazines that were the same size and shape as his…and he really didn't like that they'd be carrying work by MAD mainstay Sergio Aragonés and that MAD was mentioned in the ad. I don't know if this contributed to the distributors' lack of enthusiasm for the line or to their swift termination. But it sure didn't help.

Making my confession here though did. I feel a lot better about it now. Thank you for listening.