Category Archives: Uncategorized

Jerry Lewis Stuff.

I asked about Thurl Ravenscroft's participation in the singing group, The Sportsmen. Tom Wagner, who sent me the earlier message I posted about Marty Sperzel, sent me this…

Thurl joined The Sportsmen shortly after they were formed. My best guess is that this is early 1938. He replaced Don Craig as bass. He stayed with the group until he left for the Air Transport Command in August 1942. He was replaced by Gurney Bell who previously had performed with a quartet called The Notables. The group after Thurl left was Bill Days, Max Smith, John Rarig and Bell. Thurl came back to civilian life in late 1947. He was supposed to get his job back. However, Gurney didn't want to give up the position and from what I can gather had the support of Marty Sperzel and Bill Days. Max Smith supported Thurl. Thurl did perform with the group on several recordings and a few radio shows but evidently Gurney's wife didn't want to see her husband lose such a profitable gig so she threatened to sue Jack Benny if Gurney was replaced. Jack then "fired" The Sportsmen (and this had no connection to the storyline firing in Feb/March 1947) for the summer of 1948 with the understanding that they would be hired back in the fall after they straightened out their personnel issues. Max and Thurl left the group and formed what was originally called The Java Jivers on the Edgar Bergen-Charlie McCarthy Show with Bill Lee and Bob Hamlin. After a few weeks they changed their name to The Mellomen and the rest is history. Max also became a member of Meredith Willson's Talking People replacing Bob Stevens who replaced Max in The Sportsmen. Stevens later on replaced Hamlin in The Mellomen. Got that?

I think so. All of these guys had amazing careers not only in their respective groups but as background singers on records and dubbing other actors in movies. I'm still amazed at all the places Thurl turns up. Thanks, Tom.

Just after Christmas, Warner Home Video will be releasing a DVD full of Pepe Le Pew cartoons. Great! I hope they don't forget to include the one where a female cat gets a white stripe down her back, then Pepe chases her around thinking she's a lady skunk.

Seriously, isn't this like a whole DVD of the same cartoon over and over? It wasn't a terrible thing that Chuck Jones and Michael Maltese used the identical plot every time back when they made one or two of these a year and audiences saw them many moons apart. But they weren't made to be seen one right after the other. I can't think of a way to make people bored with Pepe Le Pew cartoons better than to package all of them together like this.

By the way, you may not be able to make it out in the illo above but the packaging says the DVD contains 15 Cartoon Classics. The contents list has 17 cartoons on it. Is this someone's bad math or is it their way of telling us that two of them aren't very good?

Now that I've checked around, I've discovered there are no great photos of Eric Sevareid so that idea is out. I can't seem to do Great Photos of Myron Cohen, either.

I have one other idea and I'm going to start it tomorrow on this site and post another entry every day I post on this site, as long as it's humanly possible. Don't try to talk me out of this one, folks.

So nobody likes Great Photos of Bud Collyer. Fine. Starting tomorrow, I'm doing Great Photos of Eric Sevareid. I hope some of you will like that better.

Number two in a series…

I think we're going to hear a lot about Jerry Lewis this weekend even if he goes unmentioned on the telethon. Here, my pal Eddie Deezen gives us 11 Facts You May Not Know About Jerry Lewis. Thanks to "Devlin," who sent me the link.

Number one in a series…

A lot of folks who come to this site are interested in careers in cartoon voice work. They shouldn't be coming here. They should be going over to Rob Paulsen's site and listening to his podcasts and maybe consider taking one of his classes. Rob is the voice of Pinky on Pinky and the Brain. He's the voice of Yakko on Animaniacs. He's Mr. Opportunity in those Mr. Opportunity commercials. He's one of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. He works all the time and it's amazing (and admirable) that he finds the hours to teach and coach. There are a lot of voice tutors out there who don't know what they're doing. Rob is the other kind.

Quick! What's the name of the guy you perform surgery on in the Operation game? Aha. You don't know it either, do you? Well, you can find out in this article called "22 Fictional Characters Whose Names You Don't Know."

Roger Evans writes to thank me for posting his great re-creation of the Jonny Quest titles and to reassure me that no CGI was employed; that every bit of it was done via stop-motion animation. That makes it even more impressive than I thought. He has more info on this amazing creation at his website. He also notes his respect and indebtedness to Doug Wildey.

Doug Wildey, creator of Jonny Quest, is another guy I should write about. Doug was a colorful guy…even more so than the character Dave Stevens based on him in The Rocketeer. Around Hanna-Barbera, there were a lot of brilliant artists and creative talents even if all that artistry and creativity didn't always make its way to the screen. The studio was a mixed blessing for these guys. It gave them steady (for the most part) employment. Veve Risto, a very fine cartoonist who worked for H-B, too often on projects he didn't like, once said to me, "If not for Bill and Joe [meaning Hanna and Barbera], a lot of us [meaning artists, primarily older ones] would have wound up selling tires at Sears [meaning they would not have been drawing anything for anyone]."

But the place had a tendency to beat good people down; to turn them into assembly line workers who were satisfied to come in, do a decent day's work for a decent day's pay and then go home, unconcerned with how it all came out. Doug wasn't one of those. He was feisty. He was confrontational. He was willing to fight and campaign and even fib a little to get the best possible product. He could never quite understand why this was frowned-upon by the folks running the company, Mssrs. Hanna and Barbera included.

Doug had the office next door to mine for a while when he was producing the 1978+ Godzilla cartoon show for Hanna-Barbera. I won't claim it was the best animated series ever done or even in the top ten. But I'm quite sure it was as good as anyone could have done in that studio at that time. I once had to break up a possible fist fight that seemed about to happen between Doug and another H-B producer. Doug was unashamedly stealing all the good artists off this other guy's show and getting them assigned to Godzilla.

An observer of all this later made a comment that Doug was Godzilla in that he really didn't care who he stepped on. I'm sure he came across that way to some but I knew him well enough to know he did care. He just didn't always let that stop him. He felt that The System there stepped on everyone to some extent and that you had to do a little stepping of your own just to not get crushed. I wasn't around when he did Jonny Quest there in 1964 — I was home watching — but I heard enough to know the following: That Doug's style as both an artist and as a combatant was the answer to two questions. One was why that show was so good and the other was why Doug didn't work a lot for H-B.

I'm watching a televised police pursuit — a guy in a red car who's been leading cops on and off the Southbound 405 and other connecting roads for about an hour now. It's a fairly slow speed chase and the C.H.P. has about a dozen cars following him.

The TV newsfolks are talking about spike-strips and PIT maneuvers…and when I watch these things, I wonder why no one ever tries dropping a paint bomb on one of these fleeing cars. I'm thinking about something like a big water balloon full of some sort of water-based paint (so it could be washed off the streets easily). Some chemist could easily whip up a formula that would go on thick enough to block the driver's vision and not wash off via windshield washers and wipers. There are helicopters above and it probably wouldn't be hard to devise a "bomb sight" that would drop a load on a car below with some precision.

It couldn't be used with a lot of traffic around but this driver is nowhere near anyone except the officers in pursuit. Yeah, he might crash but if you blow out his tires with a spike-strip, he might crash. They take that risk.

This seems like such an obvious idea to me that I must be missing some reason it wouldn't work. Anyone have any idea what it might be?

One of my favorite conventions, WonderCon, will move to Anaheim for its 2012 show. It's traditionally held in San Francisco at the Moscone Center but that venue is undergoing major renovations and dates were not available. So instead, WonderCon will take place in Anaheim and the dates are March 16-18, 2012. So things don't get crowded there, Wizard World will postpone its April 2012 show and ReedPop's C2E2, which had been planning a March show in Chicago, will have it some other time.

I'm sorry to hear WonderCon couldn't get space in San Francisco as that location (the city and where they are in that city) has a lot to do with the wonderfulness of WonderCon. But it ain't everything. There's plenty that will be wonderful at WonderCon in Anaheim. More details to come.

The preceding photo of Mr. Keaton is the last one, at least for a while.

Commencing tomorrow, we will have a new series of daily photos…and this series won't stop at 100 or 102 or even 200. It may continue as long as this blog does. Buster Keaton is a hard act to follow but I think I've come up with a subject you'll enjoy looking at for a long, long time.

I am informed by quite a few folks, including one involved with the MDA Telethon, that the show coming out of Vegas is six hours and only six hours. There are, of course, little sub-telethons produced on local stations…the ones they go to in cutaways. Some of those stay on the air for a while after the national telecast is over or even go on before. If in a given city, the telethon consumes seven hours of airtime this weekend, it's because the local crew is piling on. They might even pad from the middle, expanding their segments so the Vegas part ends later. But the national feed is only six, probably-Jerryless hours.

I'm also informed that the times I gave for the telethon in Los Angeles, which I got off my TiVo, may not be accurate.