Category Archives: To Be Filed

Among the millions of panels I appeared on at the 2025 Comic-Con International was one hosted by Gary Sassaman, producer-writer-director of the "Tales From My Spinner Rack" YouTube series. The panel was a three-way discussion of Jack Kirby's covers for his initial run on Fantastic Four, with the other "way" provided by John Morrow, the man behind The Jack Kirby Collector.

We discussed all those covers and picked our favorites…and Gary has used that at the basis of this installment of his blog series. If you loved Marvel Comics from that period, you'll probably love this video…

We here at newsfrome.com are always grateful for donations to keep this thing approximately breaking even. By "we," I mean me and by "this thing," I mean this blog which I have enjoyed producing — and continuing to produce — since December of 2000. I'm declaring our annual September blog-a-thon closed as we've (I've) received enough to pay for the last year's expenses. If you want to get a jump on next year's expenses, there's a box on this page to do that but I've been made whole for now and I really appreciate that.

Here's another episode of The Red Skelton Hour, this one from October 26, 1965. The musical guest is Johnny Mathis, an entertainer I've always kinda liked. I once saw him in Las Vegas and he put on a very good show — nothing flashy, nothing high-pressure. His opening act was Norm Crosby and then Mathis came out and…well, he was never a huge star but he had a long, long career making audiences happy.

Starting around the eight-minute mark, there's a snazzy little number with Mathis and the Tom Hansen Dancers, which was the house dance troupe on Skelton's show for years. He also had the Alan Copeland Singers and I was never quite sure where the Tom Hansen Dancers stopped and the Alan Copeland Singers began. I think sometimes they had the singers dancing or the dancers singing…or maybe the dancers lip-syncing to the singers.

One of the dancers you'll see in this — don't ask me which one he is or what his name is — is probably the guy who did a beautiful job fixing my front door. When I moved into my house in 1980, a rather magnificent door had some bad patches in it. Someone had assaulted the door with a hammer and chisel but according to the lady who sold me the place, they still were not able to break in. She'd had a temporary patch installed but never got around to bringing in someone who could do a better job. A few years after I took up residency, I decided it was time.

I had a contractor doing upgrades on my home and he brought in a finish carpenter he said was a genius. He was right. The gent cut out the patch, installed new wood, then painted it to perfectly match the color and grain of the rest of the door. Making it good as new took a lot of his time and my money…and as he worked, we talked a lot about his career. Woodwork was what he did when he couldn't get dancing jobs and in 1982 or '83 — whenever this was — he longed for the days when he was a Tom Hansen Dancer, working every week for about half the year.

He said they had almost no contact with Skelton. Red was only around once or twice when they'd fold him into a musical number just for a gag. I had also talked about the series with one of Skelton's longtime writers, Martin A. Ragaway, and he told me Red never had the slightest interest in those segments of his show. He liked that they were there but didn't even watch them. "All he cared about was telling jokes," Ragaway said. In my several encounters with Red, that was my impression too.

Here's the episode. There's a large cast in the big Sheriff Deadeye sketch and one of the supporting players is Walker Edmiston again. Also in there — and in a lot of Skelton's shows — is Dave Sharpe, an actor and stuntman whose career dated back to movie serials and even stunt-doubling, though not for the stars, in Laurel & Hardy films. Any time on a Red Skelton Hour you see someone crash through a wall or window, it's probably Dave Sharpe.

In case you missed it, Jimmy Kimmel had Spinal Tap on his show the other night.  This is the conversation part of it but they also performed a musical number at the end of which their drummer (for some reason) did not explode.  You can watch the musical number here.

David Letterman just did an interview in which he talks about the current state of late night TV including the Colbert situation.  Quite interesting.

The chat is in conjunction with the new Letterman streaming channel which will only be available on Samsung TVs.  I don't have a Samsung TV and since there's Dave aplenty on You Tube, see no reason to change televisions.  I do have Samsung computer monitors in my little office here.  I'm staring at one as I type this.  But since they're around fifteen years old, I doubt they contain the technology to pick up the new Dave channel.  I will say though that Samsung does make pretty long-lasting monitors.

Playbill has posted some news about the upcoming 100th birthday of my favorite performer and yours, Dick Van Dyke. They also have up some photos of Dick in the 1980 stage revival of The Music Man at the New York City Center and later in a national tour. The production was directed and choreographed by Michael Kidd and it had Meg Bussert as Marian the Librarian and child actor Christian Slater — yes, that Christian Slater — as Winthrop (the Ron Howard part). Carol Arthur played Mrs. Paroo (Marian's mom) and Iggie Wolfington played Mayor Shinn. Mr. Wolfington played Marcellus Washburn and sang "Shipoopi" in the original production.

I have what I hope you'll think is an interesting story about that show. I didn't see it in New York but — always the fan of Mr. Van Dyke and this musical — I saw it at the Pantages Theater in Hollywood during the few weeks it was camped there on a tour of the U.S. In fact, I saw it twice. At the time, I was working on the infamous TV series, Pink Lady and Jeff, and when my date for that night had to cancel on me due to illness, one of the show's guest stars happened to wander into my office just as I was trying to think who to take in her stead.

I told him I had tickets in a couple of hours to see Dick Van Dyke in The Music Man and asked if he was interested in going with me. He said, as I already knew, "You know I played Harold Hill in the original production right after Robert Preston left the show." I said I knew that. He said he'd be delighted to go with me as long as I let him take me to dinner first at the Musso-Frank Grill a few blocks down Hollywood Boulevard from the Pantages. I agreed…

…and that's how I wound up dining with and then going to see The Music Man with Bert Parks. He loved the production and wished they'd asked him to do it. In fact, I believe he later contacted the producers and offered to return to the role if they wanted to continue the tour after Van Dyke left it. Which they didn't. But that night, he told me some wonderful stories about doing the show on Broadway and we got backstage after the performance, though Dick had already left. I've been fortunate to get to know him in recent years.

How did I like the show, you may ask? Well, even if you didn't ask, I'll tell you: I loved Dick Van Dyke (of course). In a way, he was a little too nice a guy to play someone trying to swindle a bunch of Iowans outta their hard-earned savings but I bought into it. What I really didn't like was the Pantages that night. They've upgraded it considerably since the eighties and now, if you can score good seats, it's a decent place to see a show. Back in the eighties though, the acoustics were awful and we didn't have the greatest seats.

All the actors in the show wore microphones, of course, but the sound was still not great. What made it worse was that Dick Van Dyke's mike was apparently on a separate circuit or something. His voice came out of one set of speakers that seemed to be way up in The Heavens. Everyone else's voices came out of speakers on either side of the stage. It was somewhat distracting, especially when he sang a duet with anyone. He was singing live but it gave him kind of a "dubbed" feeling. Again, not the fault of the actor who, in my book, could do no wrong except for English accents.

My date who phoned in sick was this lady, Kristine. She was apologetic and a few days later she was better, she asked if I could get more tickets and take her to see the show before it, as Professor Harold Hill was wont to do, skipped town. I had a connection then who could get me great tickets to shows…and all I had to do was pay a lot for them. He got me two great tickets — well, I thought he'd gotten me two great tickets — and we made plans. On the evening in question, Kristine would take a cab to the KTLA studios which is where we were doing Pink Lady. She'd be there at 5:30 PM, by which time I hoped to be done for the day, then I'd drive us to dine at Musso-Frank, then go see the show at the Pantages at 8 PM, then go back to my place for the night and…well, it didn't all work out that way.

Working on variety shows, as I did back then, could be an all-consuming, all-demanding job. I mean, you can get six hours sleep some nights if you're lucky, then spend every other moment at the studio, sometimes trying to write jokes at 3 AM (when nothing is funny) or at 4 AM (when everything is funny…until the next morning.) Pink Lady was an extremely difficult show on which everything that could possibly go wrong did, along with several things that couldn't possibly go wrong…except they did. I did not finish work at 5:30 that afternoon when Kristine arrived.

I do not remember the specific multiple crises that day. There were so many on that show. I do remember Kristine arriving and looking so sweet and eager to be part of a fun evening…and I remember being so exhausted that I broke into tears. The folks I was working with were telling me, "You can't leave, Mark. Not until we fix this problem and this problem and this problem…" For one of the only two times on that show, I hit my limit of overwork. I announced that no matter what, I was taking Kristine that night to see Dick Van Dyke in The Music Man. They could fire me if they wanted to but I was going. The producers I was working for saw that I was serious…or maybe that I was going to explode if I didn't have that evening of R-and-R.

We did some quick re-planning. Dinner at Musso's was out. One of the assistants on the show ran across the street to Denny's and got some burgers for Kristine and me. She sat quietly in an empty office and ate hers. I ate mine while helping solve the most serious of the immediate problems. No matter what, we were heading for the Pantages at 7:30 for the 8 PM performance.

In the midst of this, I happened to check the envelope for our tickets and found not a pair of them but two pair. Four side-by-side seats. I called My Friend, The Scalper and he had some explanation I don't remember as to how I'd paid for two and received four. Okay, fine. I got on the phone and called a good friend of mine, Will Meugniot — a terrific artist with whom I did a number of comics — and he accepted the last minute invite. He and his wonderful wife Jo would meet us outside the Pantages at 7:45.

At 7:30 with some (not all) of the critical mass problems solved, I grabbed Kristine and we sped off to the theater. Will and Jo were waiting for us and we went in and sat in much better seats than Bert and I had…and I can't tell you how good I felt to be sitting in them. I enjoyed the show ten times as much as before. One of the things theater can do so well is take us away from our problems, at least for a while.

After the show, Kristine and went back to the studio. I put her in a cab and sent her home. Then I worked until two…maybe three in the morning, solving the remaining problems which, as I recall, involved collaborating with some of the other writers to create an entirely new main sketch for the show. I drove myself home feeling surprisingly refreshed and I got something resembling a good night's sleep. That was before I had to return to the studio the next day to tackle twice as many problems.

After we finished the six episodes of Pink Lady and Jeff — which was all there probably ever would have been — I moved on to other programs and occasionally, there were those work-all-day-into-the-wee-small-hours situations. Sometimes, someone who was laboring right along with me at 3 AM asked how I was able to get through the all-nighters without drugs or drink and I would tell them, "I just imagine I'm going to go see Dick Van Dyke in The Music Man." Dick was no longer doing the show by then but you'd be amazed how well that fantasy worked. When I'm slaving at this keyboard and it's approaching dawn, I still sometimes use it. Works like a charm.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. keeps going before hearings and spouting lies and misinformation. The Associated Press runs down some of his latest whoppers. Here and here, FactCheck.org lists other recent bullshit from this man.

Donald Trump keeps saying things about crime in Washington, D.C. that — according to Daniel Dale of CNN — simply ain't true. According to FactCheck.org, what he's saying about Chicago is also a pack o' lies.

Donald Trump claims — and now his stooges at the U.S. Energy Department are backing him up on this — that wind and solar are useless for bad ways to generate energy because, you know, sometimes it isn't windy, sometimes the sun isn't out. According to Politifact, that ain't true either.

Donald Trump insists that the drawing and signature on a decades-old (and raunchy) birthday card to Jeffrey Epstein are forgeries. And come on…you don't need a link to know what an obvious lie that is.

We love flash mobs appearing out of nowhere in public places and performing. We also love the song "Bohemian Rhapsody." So here, from the streets of Paris…

Lying awake in bed this morning at 3 AM, I started watching videos on my iPhone from last night's late night shows. I found myself laughing out loud at several segments from Stephen Colbert's program…and by the way, I'll make one of my occasionally-right predictions. Colbert's ratings are up and he and his staff are clever enough to ride their nonsensical cancelation to a lot of tune-in…so there will come a day soon when Mr. Colbert will be faced with a choice: He'll have (and may already have) lucrative, guaranteed-we-won't-cancel-you offers to do essentially the same show elsewhere.

And whoever's running CBS this week will decide they'll be better off with him than without him. Not only will they get the ratings but they'll avoid nine or ten months of being hammered as craven Trump supplicants and bad programmers. I have no idea what Colbert will elect to do but I'll bet staying right where he is will be among the options.

Anyway, he's now been doing Late Show for ten years so, acting oddly like the series started with him, he did this last night…

…followed by this, later on…

…followed by this…

And also last night, Jon Stewart returned from vacation and did one of his funniest, on-target pieces on The Daily Show…

And with that, I went back to sleep for a few hours. I'm so glad we have those guys and their shows around.

William Ray sent me a link to this real estate listing.  Someone is selling 196 Furnace Dock Road in Cortlandt Manor, NY and they're asking $5.5 million for the place. What's so special about it? Well, apart from its unusual "space age" design, it was owned for a time by Jackie Gleason before he decided to relocate his life down to Miami Beach. Did you know the Miami Beach audiences were the greatest audiences in the world? That's what Jackie screamed at the end of almost every show he did from that fair city.

Among the many interesting photos of the home on the realtor's site, we find this…

I have no idea if that picture was there when Mr. Gleason occupied the premises or if a subsequent owner put it there but it prompted William to ask this question of me…

Among all of the interesting things about the house, I'm as curious with Gleason being a pal of Nixon as I am of the side by side photos of Fred Flintstone and Gleason. That leads to my question – do you know if Mr. Gleason was flattered by the Flintstones or was he miffed by the blatant "homage" of the Honeymooners?

What I always heard — and I even heard this from Joe Barbera, not that he was an unimpeachable source — was that Gleason was initially pissed. He felt that, first of all, it was weakening his ownership of the Honeymooners property to have it so visibly infringed upon. He also thought that he oughta get a hefty percentage of the profits from the stone-age knock-off.

But, as the story is told, by the time he got around to addressing the matter with his attorneys, The Flintstones was a hit show beloved by children and adults everywhere. Gleason's handlers/agents/whoever advised him that to sue would be to make headlines and he'd come off as The Bad Guy. So he decided to be flattered instead of litigious.

As I've mentioned here before, I made a comment to Mr. Barbera one day — probably the day he told me his version of the events — about how Barney Rubble had obviously been named as a sly way of saying "Carney Double." Mr. B, as most of us called him, looked startled and told me I was the first person he'd ever heard point that out. You can believe that if you like but I don't.

By the way, it's worth pointing out that Henry Corden, who was the second voice of Fred Flintstone, was occasionally hired to do a Gleason imitation to dub dialogue for Jackie. For at least one of the Smokey and the Bandit movies, he revoiced lines for Gleason's character, Sheriff Buford T. Justice, for the prints shown on airplanes, TV and other places where naughty words were verboten. I asked him if he got the job because of his Flintstones connection and Henry said, "Probably." That, I believe.

This year marks 75 years since Mort Walker's Beetle Bailey debuted on the comic strip pages and there's a new book out celebrating its long, long run. You can order that book here and while you're Amazoning, you can also place an advance order for the book that's coming out next month celebrating 75 years of Charles Schulz's Peanuts. Seventy-five years ago was a good year for comic strips.

And here's a segment that ran on CBS the other day about the Beetle Bailey book. I knew Mort Walker a little and he really was a nice, funny man who only seemed to care about doing nice, funny comic strips. There was a period there when he seemed to be doing about thirty-seven of them and I know other cartoonists were rankled about him occupying so much real estate on the funny pages…but the ones I heard grousing all seemed to be unable to produce anything better. I think he'd be proud to see how his friends and family are carrying on the traditions he started…

There are certain questions I receive over and over even after I've written about them on this blog.  Here's one from Robert Rowe…

I saw your name mentioned as having been featured as a character in a story in The Flash #195 from 1970.

What are your recollections of the event? Was it only editor Julie Schwartz having some fun with the fans of the time? Were you notified that you would appear or were you surprised to see yourself in an issue of The Flash? Maybe most importantly, did it change your opinion of the book?

I wrote about this but it was some time ago some of this is me quoting myself. We used to buy our comic books at newsstands or at racks in mini-markets or drugstores. They came out Tuesday and Thursday in most areas and if you were a devout fan (as was I), you hurried to the vendor each of those days to grab up the new releases. On January 20, 1970, I did just that and among my purchases of that day was the new issue of The Flash, #195.

I was at the time working on the fringes of the comic book business. And suddenly, I bought that issue of The Flash, opened it and discovered I was a character in it.

There was a scene of The Flash doing a whirlwind autograph signing at the Muscular Dystrophy Telethon and he was calling out the names of the folks who were receiving these autographs. The comic's editor, Julius Schwartz, had inserted the names of three folks who were frequent contributors to his letter columns: Me, Irene Vartanoff and Peter Sanderson. (All three of us, by the way, wound up working in comics.)

I think "weird" would describe how I felt. I just stopped and stared at it and told myself I was seeing what I thought I was seeing. And I remember looking around at the people passing me and realizing how little this would matter to any of them. But it meant a lot to me just as having letters of mine printed in comic books meant a lot to me. It didn't particularly change my opinion of that comic or any comic. It just broke down (a bit) the barrier I felt between being a reader of comic books and being part of the world that made them.

And then about two weeks later, Jack Kirby asked me to become his assistant and I really felt like I'd crossed over.

Very sad this morning to hear of the unexpected/sudden death of Philippe Vidal-Dumas (aka Philippe Vidal) at the age of 64. He was a giant in the French animation industry and a very nice, talented man who I had the honor of working with on five seasons of The Garfield Show. I was the Supervising Producer and I do not know what that title meant but I wrote most of the episodes, story-edited those by other writers, and cast and directed the American voice tracks.

Philippe was the Director and I know what that meant: He supervised and often drew and designed everything that made it into a TV series after it left me. I was delighted with just about everything that resulted and the few times I wasn't delighted were — I learned — instances where Philippe fought for something and lost. He was very good at his job.

The producers of the show kept trying to get me to fly over to France where all the heavy lifting was done and I kept refusing. But Philippe would come over every year and we'd hook up in Jim Davis's monster of a studio which was then in Muncie, Indiana. The show was done in such harmony that those few hours each year were all we needed. I could suggest something in one sentence and Philippe completely understood and made it work.

The first time we convened there, I had my dear friend Carolyn with me. Philippe was (of course) completely charming towards her and over a dinner meeting, included her in the discussion. Somehow — I forget how — mention of the Disney film Pinocchio came up and he turned to her and said, "I consider that the greatest animated film ever made." To which she replied, "Yes…and my father worked on it." I jumped in to explain that her father was the great Walt Kelly and he'd been one of the key animators on Pinocchio.

To Philippe, that was like hearing that he was in the presence of the daughter of some guy who'd helped Michelangelo paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. I will always remember his joy and how he pumped Carolyn for anything she could tell him about her father. Philippe was truly a lover of great cartooning and animation…and you could tell that by the way he approached every single job he did in those art forms. We wanted to work together again on something and I am very, very sorry that will never happen.

Here's Weird Al Yankovic with the definitive cover version of one of Paul Simon's best songs…

Here's the latest installment of this series. Hard to believe the guys who've been assembling these for so long and putting in such effort and passion are just now almost at the halfway mark…