Category Archives: To Be Filed

Chris Bieniek wants to know about a cartoon show from my youth…

I have a simple question: Why can't I purchase a complete, unedited collection of the 1966 Marvel Super Heroes TV show on DVD or Blu-Ray? I know you think it's awful, but I'm sure there are a lot of people who would be interested, and I've never seen any kind of informed discussion about why it hasn't happened yet. If you don't know, would you be kind enough to hazard a guess?

Well, I don't think it's exactly awful. Most of the stories and drawings were taken from the comic books — without, of course, paying an extra nickel to the guys who did that work for low comic book rates. A lot of the material was so strong that even the cheapest-possible animation and voice work couldn't render it unentertaining…and I kinda like some of the theme songs.

Why isn't it out for home video? Well, this is somewhere between a guess and a real answer: At least twice, folks who were attempting to assemble an actual, non-bootleg release contacted me to ask if I had any idea where they could find negatives or better copies than they had…because they simply didn't have good enough source material, especially of the opening titles and closing credits. I dunno if the masters were lost or destroyed or what — but at that point, they just didn't have prints that didn't look like they'd been taped off Channel 9 onto Betamax cassettes.  I was of no use to them.

Has anyone since found good copies of everything?  If they haven't, that's probably your reason. If they have, there's probably no one at Disney who thinks the material would generate enough interest. Generally speaking, when something is not out on home video, one or more of five reasons apply…

1. There's a rights dispute over who owns the material or controls the home video rights. That's what held up the Adam West Batman show for some time.  Twentieth-Century Fox (which produced the series) said if anyone was going to put those out on DVD, said it would be them.  Time-Warner (which owns the characters) said it would be them.  It took a while to negotiate an arrangement.
2. There's music in the shows or films that would be very expensive to clear and so the material might not be cost-effective to release. This is the case with some of the early Hanna-Barbera cartoons.  Once in a while also, someone else had a contract, written before anyone envisioned a home video market, that causes complications.  Companies got worried about that after Disney put out Lady and the Tramp on VHS and singer Peggy Lee, who worked on the film in several capacities, pointed out that her old contract from 1955 didn't allow for that.  A jury awarded her a few million bucks that the studio wasn't cheerful about paying.
3. They would release it but they can't find copies of all the material…or copies that measure up to the necessary video standard. A lot of old shows simply do not exist or exist in such bad condition that expensive restoration work would be necessary and that reconstruction might not be cost effective. At one point, I believe it looked like I'm Dickens, He's Fenster would never be out of DVD for that reason but someone finally took the chance.
4. Someone in a position of power just doesn't think there would be enough customers for the material in question to justify the investment. I believe the Walt Disney Treasures DVDs came to an end because the sales caused some at the company to believe there just plain wasn't an audience for certain of the less well-known Disney films and shows.
5. They just haven't gotten around to it yet. This is less and less a reason as time goes by but years ago, there were a lot of angry animation fans who couldn't understand why all their favorite Hanna-Barbera or Warner Brothers cartoons couldn't all come out on home video at once. The company had determined, rightly or wrongly, that the market could only handle X number of releases at a time and so they wanted to space them out.

In some cases, more than one of these reasons can apply and at times, changes in management (or desperation for new product) has prompted the issuance of something on DVD that previously seemed like it would never be released that way. Also of course, it happens that rights problems get cleared up or someone in the warehouse stumbles across old negatives or tapes they didn't know they had.

In the case of the Marvel Super Heroes cartoons, it's probably Reason #4 but it might also be Reason #3 as well.  Maybe someday, neither will apply.

My first iPhone was the iPhone 3 and I now have a 5. I had kinda figured I'd just stick with the odd-numbered models but the iPhone 7 announced today doesn't give me a whole lotta motivation to upgrade. The camera is better (they say), there's no more headphone jack and it interfaces better with the Apple Watch. Other than that, I don't see a whole lotta difference.

I tend to use an actual camera when I want an actual photo of something, only using the cellphone camera for emergencies and to take visual notes. I don't like wearing a watch of any kind and I only use headphones on airplanes, which isn't often lately. So I may just wait for the next one, which doesn't appear to be far off.

You'd think they'd make an effort to include one cool and new must-have feature in each new iPhone. I might buy a 7 if it could tell me when the 8 is coming out, what's it going to do that the 7 doesn't and why it's going to cost me a lot in new accessories.

That's a photo of my friend Jewel Shepard. I would tell you how long I have known Jewel but you wouldn't believe it since it's more years than she looks to have lived on this planet. Let's just say it's been a while.

Jewel is an actress whose screen credits have included Hollywood Hot Tubs, Hollywood Hot Tubs 2, Party Camp, My Tutor, Zapped!, Caged Heat 2 and The Artist. That's right. She was in all those B-Movies and in The Artist, which won the Academy Award for Best Picture for 2011. She didn't have any lines in it but then neither did John Goodman. She was also in the cult classic horror film, The Return of the Living Dead.

She's done a couple of horror movies and these present a problem for me since I don't care for horror movies, especially the kind they make today with loads of blood and no Vincent Price. If you like 'em, fine. I don't. You probably eat cole slaw, too.

Anyway, she has a new one out for which she's getting rave reviews (like this one and this one) and she's real proud of her role as a truly crazy lady.

The film is called slasher.com and it's about a couple that meets online and then they go on a date out into the isolated woods of Missouri. There, they rent a cabin from two insane people, one of whom is played by Jewel…and I don't know that much about what happens after that but it involves violence and blood and gore and it actually sounds a bit worse than any first date I ever went on.

As you might imagine from the notices she and it are receiving, Jewel is very proud of this film and she has asked me to mention it on my blog. Not having seen it — and not being up on the standards in this genre — I can't give it a recommendation other than to say if you like this kind of movie, this looks like one of the best. I did see enough of it to decide that Jewel is real good at playing a woman who should be locked up immediately, lest she murder, maim or vote Republican this November.

If it means anything to you, she never asked me to plug any of her other films, not even The Artist.

I'm not sure where you can see this movie except that it's being shown later this month at this horror convention. But it'll make the rounds so keep your eye peeled for it and for Jewel in it. She's always worth watching.

• How Trump says he'd defeat ISIS: He'd give our generals 30 days to devise a plan for wiping them out. My gardener could do that.

As a devout lover/expert of the movie It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, I get a lot of questions about it, one of the most common being, "Can I go see the Big W in person?" Answer: No. That filming location was on private, inaccessible property and it's all been bulldozed and cleared in recent years. There are other locations around where scenes were filmed…and most of them don't look anything like they did in 1962 when the movie was shot, either.

I could direct people to one location: The California Incline, a sloped street out in Santa Monica which connects down to the Pacific Coast Highway. Several scenes in the film were shot there and when I first saw the movie in 1963 — at the Pacific Cinerama Dome in Hollywood — everyone in the audience whooped in recognition. They recognized a number of spots where scenes were shot but they all recognized the California Incline. And until May of last year, it still looked pretty much like it did in the film.

In May, they closed it down, tore it down and started rebuilding it. It was supposed to be finished by Memorial Day of 2016 but you know how these things go. It reopened earlier this week and it's very lovely and probably much safer and more efficient. It just doesn't look quite like it did in the movie now. Here's a time-lapse video…

I should have told you about this earlier. Turner Classic Movies is running a "free, flexible online exploration of Slapstick comedy" class in connection with films they're running tonight and intermittently through the month. They have silent movies on this evening and tomorrow night. (The best film tomorrow night is Buster Keaton's Steamboat Bill, Jr.) Info on the course and the full schedule can be accessed here.

I'm a bit puzzled as to what definition of the word "slapstick" applies to the films selected — they mostly just seem to be broad comedies — but hey, I'm all for running broad comedies. On Wednesday the 21st, they have It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World followed by The Great Race, which I'm going to think of as a brief, unintended Marvin Kaplan Film Festival. More on Mad World in the next posting here…

I have no desire to watch this weekend's Comedy Central Roast of Rob Lowe. I don't particularly care about Rob Lowe one way or the other and apart from occasional moments with Jeff Ross and/or Gilbert Gottfried, find those roasts hard to take at all. A lot of them feel like a cavalcade of people who don't know the roastee but they need a job and/or exposure enough to show up, read nasty remarks someone else wrote about the "honoree" and force smiles and fake laughter at whatever shots are taken at them. The Friars, back when they started this tradition, used to say "We only roast those we love." Now it's more like, "Hey, gimme the check and let me outta this place!"

David Sims has more to say about it, especially about the odd inclusion of Ann Coulter as a roaster. Ms. Coulter makes a fine living saying vile things about certain people to the delight of an audience that wants to hear vile things said about those people. But then, that's kind of what "roasts" are becoming, isn't it?

Matt Taibbi on the Trump campaign. Here's my favorite line in it…

Apart perhaps from his most hardcore fans (and the occasional Wall Street Journal columnist), nobody seriously believes Trump has been trying to reach out to African-American voters. If he had, he might have spoken to some actual black people, and taken a position on an issue black audiences care about.

And speaking of the Republican nominee's ability to even speak to black voters, let alone win them over, read Jonathan Chait on the late Phyllis Schlafly. I cannot imagine the kind of person who would go to their graves proud that they did all they could to block equal rights for women and minorities.

That's a photo of my best friend (male division), Sergio Aragonés. Posting his picture on my blog is way cheaper than buying him a birthday present.

People keep asking us, "How did you two meet?" Between around 1966 and 1969, there was a thing called the Los Angeles Comic Book Club that met every Saturday afternoon at Palms Recreation Center, which was (and still is) located not far from where the San Diego Freeway crosses the Santa Monica Freeway. A whole bunch of teenagers would gather there each week to buy comics, sell comics, trade comics but most of all to talk about and argue about comics. I was not the founder but I was its president.

In the group's history, we had one guest speaker. It was Sergio. One of our members saw in a magazine article that Sergio lived in L.A. (in Beverly Hills, actually) and found him listed in the phone book. The member called him up and invited Sergio to come to one of our meetings…and he did. That was the first time we met, though we didn't talk much that day. Later, I ran into Sergio at a number of local events relating to comic books and we got to know each other.

I believe this was in 1968 so year after next, it'll be fifty years I've know this man. We will have been collaborating on comic books for about forty of those and in all that time, we've had exactly one argument that lasted more than thirty seconds. That one lasted about three minutes. That's pretty good.

We get along fine because of mutual respect. I get along with him because I know he is a brilliant humorist and cartoonist and a very smart, very nice man.

And he gets along with me because I know things that could get him arrested, deported and used to drum up support for that stupid wall Donald Trump wants to build. He probably could get Mexico to pay for that wall if he promised to keep Sergio on this side of it.

Happy Sergio Day, my friend. Please take the twenty minutes to draw the next issue of Groo before you go out celebrating.

So many to pick from. I think I'll go with Peter Beinart's article about how Trump, though he gets praised for speaking his mind, really doesn't do that. He tells audiences what he thinks they want to hear and when he addresses different audiences, he says different things…sometimes, very different things.

Back in this posting, I got to musing about what old TV show I would most like to see released on DVD.

So I guess my choice would be The Defenders, no relation to the current program of that name. Aired on CBS from 1961-1965, it was a courtroom drama starring E.G. Marshall and Robert Reed as a father-son lawyer team that handled important, polemic cases. Unlike the concurrent Perry Mason (which also aired on CBS), the accused was not always proven innocent and the stories were not whodunnits. Often, they had to do with the morality of our laws and the legality of our morals. A few years ago, someone sent me a VHS tape of four episodes and I thought they held up quite well…and every one of them gave me a lot to think about. Every bit of controversy in them was still controversial, though often not in the same way as in the sixties. So that's my vote: The Defenders. Will someone get on that, please?

More than half a decade later, someone finally has. The good folks at Shout Factory have issued Season One of The Defenders — 32 episodes plus an episode of Studio One that was kind of like (but not exactly) a pilot for the series. There are also interviews with folks who worked on the show and it's all on eight DVDs for — at this moment — $33.28. That's like a buck an episode for what I think is the best courtroom drama ever made for television.

I should probably also mention that the cast lists for some of these are stunning: Jack Klugman, Ossie Davis, Richard Thomas, Frank Gorshin, Robert Duvall, Robert Loggia, Julie Newmar, Martin Sheen and many others, plus someone in their casting department really, really liked hiring William Shatner. And has there ever been a better actor on a TV series than E.G. Marshall?

I haven't watched them all yet but the video and audio range from excellent to passable. A few of these look like all they could find was old 16mm prints…but there's something about the show that makes it feel more credible and real that way. They're in black-and-white, of course.

You can purchase a copy here. We highly recommend this and really, really want to see the three other seasons get released.

My cousin David recently wrote a very fine book about Woody Allen. Here, he writes about what it was like to write that really fine book about Woody Allen.

Happy Labor Day!

A whole bunch of Broadway actors name their favorite show tunes.

I am a late add to the guest roster for the Long Beach Comic Con, which takes place September 17th and 18th — Saturday and Sunday — at the Long Beach Convention Center in the splendid city of Long Beach, California. I will be around Saturday afternoon only and I think I'm on one panel and I will not (repeat: not) be sitting behind a table in the exhibit hall that has my name on it.

I don't do a lot of cons these days and when I do, I insist that they not give me a table with my name on it. This is because if they give you a table with your name on it, you have to sit behind it most of the time…and since I never sell things at cons and don't like sitting behind a table for very long, I don't want to feel obligated to do that.

But I'll be roaming about that day and maybe even poaching briefly at other folks' tables. If you're there and you see me, say howdy unless you're that rude guy who cornered me in San Diego and tried to convince me that the United States will be utterly destroyed if we don't elect Donald Trump. (Another good reason to not sit behind a table: It makes it easier to get away from people like that.)