I'm planning a trip to New York later this month and attempting to procure house seats for Young Frankenstein. One by one, acquaintances and friends who've told me they could arrange these for the new Mel Brooks musical are finding out that they can't. I can apparently get house seats for anything playing in town except this one show…
…unless someone reading this has the necessary connections. If you are such a person, please do let me know.
If you have a Series 2 or Series 3 TiVo and you transfer recordings to your home computer, you will want to play around with VideoRedo Plus. It's a pretty good video editor but, more importantly for us, it works directly with ".tivo" files and will also convert them effortlessly to several other formats. With it, I could record an episode of Phenomenon on my TiVo, transfer it to my PC, edit out all the commercials and stupid parts and then put the show back onto the TiVo for viewing. Of course, I'd wind up with about a three minute show but…
The National Journal had a bunch of health care experts evaluate the various plans for "universal" (actually, expanded) health care from the various folks vying for the Oval Office. It should come as no surprise to anyone that the Democrats' plans fare better than the Republicans' if one really wants something that will achieve the stated goals.
I am reminded of a sketch that my friend/hero Stan Freberg used to do with a moon man puppet named Orville. Orville would announce that his people were offering to give Earth a nuclear device. The dialogue (Freberg providing both voices) went like this…
INTERVIEWER: We already have a nuclear device.
ORVILLE: Ours is better.
INTERVIEWER: Why is yours better?
ORVILLE: Ours doesn't work.
I was thinking of that the other day when I was listening to Mitt Romney explain the value of his. He was almost whispering aloud to his supporters, "Don't worry. Mine won't change anything. In fact, it may even make things so much worse that we'll all be able to say, 'See? Government health care is always a fiasco!'"
"Spleenk!" is the sound of me smiling. I've received and am generally enjoying MAD's Greatest Artists: The Completely MAD Don Martin, despite the fact that it's yet another fancy repackaging of stuff I already own. I did not resent paying for this collection of all the work "MAD's maddest artist" did for MAD Magazine. It's a handsome, classy two-book set with pages a bit larger than I was expecting. It also has decent reproduction, which has not been the case with every MAD project.
I'm happy to have these slipcased volumes on my shelf — or will be, just as soon as I can figure out what shelf the thing will fit on. If you'd like to go "Spleenk!" like me, here's a link to order your copy.
This runs six minutes and the video's terrible…but it's kinda funny. It's an excerpt from the Hollywood Squares game show during the period when it was hosted by Tom Bergeron. Let's go to Gilbert Gottfried for the win…
One of the best things about the classic Warner Brothers cartoons is the music. It was almost all the handiwork of a brilliant man named Carl Stalling who died in 1972. Fortunately for history, he was interviewed a few times before he left us…by Mike Barrier, Milt Gray and Bill Spicer. Barrier is sharing some of that material with us over on this page of his website.
Scott Dunbier, who is presently between editing/managerial gigs in the comic book business, tells the story of a freelancer with a great way to deal with the fact that he didn't have his work in. Go read Scott and then come back here to read the rest of this item.
Back so soon? Okay. I recently heard of what was probably even a better excuse. A certain artist did not have his work done. He sent his editor an e-mail and to it he attached a photo of an extremely beautiful model-actress wearing almost no clothing. The message said, "I had the choice between getting your assignment finished and having sex with this woman. What would you have done?"
The editor wrote back, "Congrats. You did it to her and me at the same time."
By the way: Scott quotes what he says is an old saying in the comic book industry about how to get steady work, a writer or artist must have two out of the following three qualities: He (or she) just be very good, very fast or very nice. I often cite that as an "old saying" in the business — I say "very reliable" instead of "very fast" — but I actually don't think it's an old saying. I think I made it up, sort of. There's a sign one often sees in print shops that says you can have Quality, Speed or Value…pick any two. I believe I modified it for the comic book industry. At least, I never heard it anywhere before I started saying it and I'd much rather have the credit for that than for Scrappy Doo.
Here's ten minutes of Robert Goulet just being Robert Goulet…
Paul Krugman says that we have nothing to fear but fear itself. He isn't the first person to say that but that doesn't mean he isn't right.
In 1967, Zero Mostel appeared in a TV special called Zero Hour. Does anyone have a copy?
I met Robert Goulet a grand total of once. It was backstage after an appearance he made in Las Vegas and he was charming and friendly and able to tread an amazing line of ego, being simultaneously self-deprecating but very proud of the performance he had just finished.
Three things I remember. One is that even though he was getting on in years, you could see that at one point, this man was handsome enough to make you hate him. Secondly, that face lit up when I asked him about Alan Jay Lerner, his old friend and one of the creators of the Broadway play, Camelot, which brought stardom to Goulet and vice-versa. He said that in a perfect world, Lerner would still be alive and writing shows as good as that one (or My Fair Lady) and he [Goulet] would be happy to do nothing in life but star in them. Forget the movies and the TV appearances and the records and the concerts. He just wanted to be in shows as good as the one he did with Lerner and Loewe.
Well, at least that's what he said. I'm not sure I believe him, though I'm sure that at that moment, he believed it.
And the third thing I remember was that he told me a joke I can't repeat here, not because it was dirty but because the punch line was insulting to another performer — one who, if the rumors are true, will be the subject of an obit here before long. The funny thing is that a few years later, I worked with that other performer and he told me the same joke…but the punchline was about Robert Goulet. I'll tell it here after the other guy's gone.
I saw Goulet perform that night in Vegas and I saw him again a few years ago at Carnegie Hall in New York. It was part of a salute to Alan Jay Lerner, and he and Kristin Chenoweth did justice to the man's songs. He was very good that evening. But then he was always good, which is why he had such a long and magnificent career.
Here's another video you won't watch in full, at least not now. It's an entire episode — fifty-three whole minutes — of Jackie Gleason's American Scene Magazine, which was the variety show Mr. Gleason did for CBS beginning in 1962 and continuing for much of the sixties. They eventually dropped the "magazine" format and in any case, it was usually referred to as The Jackie Gleason Show, anyway.
This episode features Art Carney in a long Honeymooners sketch with Sue Ane Langdon as Alice. There's also Frank Fontaine and The June Taylor Dancers…and he doesn't get billing up front but there's a musical performance in there by an excruciatingly-young Wayne Newton. Also, there's a musical sketch with songs by James Shelton, Mary Rodgers and Martin Charnin, and your announcer is Johnny Olson. It is said that Mr. Gleason would not do a show without the high-energy warm-ups (written about here) of Johnny Olson. This show was done in New York, probably in the studio where Dave Letterman now tapes. But later, when Gleason moved his whole operation to Miami, he'd have Johnny fly down on tape days to do the warm-up and announcing chores.
And awaaaaay we go—!
Avi Klein has a fascinating article about the suicide of Lyndon LaRouche's printer. You all remember LaRouche, who pops up here and there with political goals that are, to say the least, a bit hard to fathom. Well, the guy who's been printing his pamphlets is no more, and it's triggered a rather odd chain of events.
By the way: The upcoming presidential election is the first time in 32 years that LaRouche has not been an active candidate. Given his past performance, it probably won't make any difference in his vote total. And he'll still finish ahead of Alan Keyes.
Last week, when fires were popping up all over Southern California like Pinkberry Yogurt Shops — and doing almost as much damage — the wonderful folks at FEMA staged a bogus press conference. You may have heard about it. It looked like reporters were asking questions but it was really FEMA staff members asking prearranged questions and…well, it was another embarrassment to an organization that you'd think, by this time, would be darn hard to embarrass.
The director of external affairs of FEMA, John "Pat" Philbin, is now the former director of external affairs for FEMA. In an interview today (a real one, oddly enough), he made the following statement that I felt needed to be stared at for a few minutes…
I did not have good situational awareness of what was happening.
Well, there's part of the problem right there. "Situational awareness?" We have a guy here who doesn't even know how to say, "I didn't know what the hell was going on," let alone figure it out.
The other day here, I told you about an episode of the old I've Got a Secret game show in which Groucho Marx appeared…and his secret was that he wasn't answering the questions asked by the panel. The panel was blindfolded and the questions were being answered by comedian Dayton Allen impersonating Groucho's voice.
Every few weeks, GSN runs an old I've Got a Secret very early Sunday morning. This A.M., by a strange coincidence, they ran that very episode, the one I was just talking about. It originally aired on 10/28/63, by the way.
That's about all I have to say on the subject. I just thought I ought to mention it and give you a frame grab to prove it. There. Now I can go to bed.