Category Archives: Uncategorized

Jacob Weisberg on a new proposal for Universal Health Care in this country. I think its time is coming. It's just a matter of how they'll corrupt and cripple whatever gets enacted.

The Wondercon starts tomorrow in San Francisco, a city that's easy to get to if you don't make the mistake of booking on United Airlines. I've been to quite a few of these and always had a good time. I have no reason to expect this time will be any different. Be there. See my panels. Say hello.

Here's my new theory. My new theory is that in 1924 when George Gershwin composed "Rhapsody in Blue," his friends all told him how wonderful it was and how it would be played forever in concert halls around the world. And George said, "Never mind that. What I want is for people who are stuck on hold for long periods of time on the United Airlines reservations line to have to listen to a real cheesy recording of the same 32 bars of it, over and over and over…"

Which bring us to today's topic: Let's say you have a $108 non-refundable ticket on this airline. Let's say you need to move it to another time because you have sudden meetings and must fly later in the day. Why is it that when you call up and attempt to do this, you have only the following two options?

1. Cancel the $108 ticket and use it instead on a later date for some other United Airlines flight, providing you do so within one year and pay the $100 change fee. This means that if by some chance you want to go somewhere during the next year and a flight on United represents your best ticket option, you can use that ticket and apply what's left, which would be eight dollars. But actually, it's worse than that because you can't really do that kind of rebooking through their website. You have to call up and book through a human being and when you do that now, they charge you an extra $15 service fee. So to use a ticket you paid for in the past costs seven dollars more than to throw it away and start from scratch.
2. You can have the lady on the phone find you a later flight…but the cheapest flight she has available for the same date is $709. Of course, she can apply the $108 you've already paid to that but she also has to charge you the $100 change fee and the $15 service fee.

Two pretty crummy options, wouldn't you say? That's why instead you should opt for…

3. Just throw those tickets away. They said "non-refundable" and they're just that. The money's gone and all this talk about fees for changing and rebooking is gobbledygook designed to fool people into thinking they're getting some of their cash back in some way. Wrong. Instead, you should jump on the Internet and hit the travel sites where you'll find plenty of new reservations available on almost any airline (including United, should you have some reason to still consider flying them) for — in this case — $258. Which is not as good as $108 but a whole lot better than $709 plus additional fees.

Guess what I've been dealing with for the last hour. I may not be able to stomach Gershwin for years to come.

This is a Wheaties commercial that dates from 1954 or thereabouts. It features a gentleman named Bil Baird who may have been the most famous puppeteer in America before Jim Henson usurped the title. The Bil Baird Marionettes turned up in a wide array of TV shows, movies, Broadway shows and commercials. In the late fifties, he did a couple of TV specials with Art Carney that I remember as being quite entertaining.

His star puppet, seen in this spot, was a lion who is here referred to as Champy but I think he had other names at other times. I don't know who did the character's voice but he does sound a lot like Tony the Tiger, doesn't he? This is about the same time Thurl Ravenscroft began doing Tony's voice and that character clicked into place, selling tons of Sugar Frosted Flakes for Kellogg's. One wonders if Tony came first and the Wheaties people thought the big cat was working and that they should bring in Baird and his character for its similarity…or was it the other way around? It could also be a coincidence, I suppose, but it wouldn't surprise me if one inspired the other.

Here's the commercial. It starts a bit slow but stick with it, at least until you hear the rabbit chorus and the recipe for serving Wheaties with ice cream…

Sam Fox is George W. Bush's nominee to serve as the new ambassador to Belgium. Mr. Fox got this nomination the way a lot of people get such nominations. He was a big donor to the campaigns of the Republican party…and let's stipulate up top that Democrats do that kind of thing too, whenever they're in a position to reward those who give cash to their electioneering.

Yesterday in his confirmation hearing, Mr. Fox was grilled by Senator John Kerry about why he'd donated $50,000 to the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. The exchange was quite extraordinary for a couple of reasons, one being the pathetic quality of Fox's reponses. He went out of his way to praise Kerry as an honest veteran who'd earned his medals and shown great heroism…in other words, the exact opposite of what was claimed by those commercials he helped put on the air. Asked why he gave money to the cause, Mr. Fox mumbled something about how one side engages in dirty politics so the other side has to, and then claimed he gave to so many charitable causes that he really didn't know who'd asked him to donate in this instance.

It was a pretty pathetic defense. I'm not sure what the Ambassador to Belgium is called upon to do but I don't think Fox demonstrated he's up to the task. This site has a video clip of the exchange and it runs a little less than seventeen minutes.

A couple of other folks have blabbed this on websites so I might as well mention it…

The New York Comic Con last weekend seems to have been rough on veteran comic book creators. The great writer Arnold Drake appeared there, went home and was then hospitalized with pneumonia. The great artist Joe Sinnott appeared there, went home and was then hospitalized with a heart attack. Both, I hear, are on the mend and we expect full recoveries and quick returns to their respective homes. I'll let you know if I hear anything else and in the meantime, you might want to direct your good thoughts in their direction.

I liked this paragraph in a news story on the deliberations of the Scooter Libby jury. They sent a note to the judge and a reporter wrote…

The note may indicate that jurors have made it through two of the five charges and are debating the third — or at least were debating it Tuesday afternoon. But there's no guarantee that jurors are going in order and reading juries is an inexact science.

In other words, this might mean something unless it doesn't.

We're talking about Judy Jetson here lately so let's have a look at the lovely young lady when she's a bit older. As you may recall, after they did The Flintstones, Hanna-Barbera did a series in which the infants Pebbles and Bamm Bamm were advanced to teenage. Several times, they also tried to sell a series that would do likewise with the futuristic family, adding about ten years to Judy and her brother Elroy. This is one of about eighty thousand presentation drawings that were done over the years to try and make that show happen, most of them the handiwork of the late Iwao Takamoto.

At one point, I was asked to do some writing for it and it's kind of interesting why they picked me. Someone, probably Joe Barbera, decided that the key to the idea was to make them like Donny and Marie Osmond were on their hit variety series produced by Sid and Marty Krofft. I was working for H-B but I was also, at the same time, working for Sid and Marty Krofft. So it seemed logical to turn things over to me, even though I hadn't worked on the Donny and Marie show. I didn't understand that, either. In any case, I never did any development work on The Judy and Elroy Show (or whatever it might have been called) but I did have one short meeting with Mr. Barbera about it. I remember there was a drawing similar to this one and there was also a duplicate of it in which the boy had reddish hair. I asked why and Mr. B explained that they weren't certain if it should be a sister/brother show or, like Pebbles and Bamm Bamm, a girl friend/boy friend show. So they had some art in which the boy wasn't supposed to be an older Elroy. He was supposed to be a new character who was dating Judy. The Freudian possibilities were infinite.

There were also a couple versions of this show developed that revived the Jet Screamer character and had him dating Judy, or maybe one was about Judy chasing after him or something. All the permutations I saw also had Astro the Dog in them and some had the little character you see above who was Astro's nephew, I suppose. During the meeting to discuss my possible involvement, he didn't have a name yet. I suggested "Tralfaz" and Barbera looked at me oddly and asked, "Where have I heard that name before?" I explained to him that in one episode of The Jetsons, it was revealed that Astro's birth name was Tralfaz. J.B. laughed and said, "How come you know that kind of stuff and I don't?" There was also a version where Astro was somehow in charge of watching over a whole litter of little dogs like this one. Not long after that meeting, H-B did a cartoon no one remembers called Astro and the Space Mutts.

That's about all there is to this story. And don't worry, I haven't forgotten. Another chapter in the ongoing series of how Scrappy Doo was born will be along soon in this space.

Dahlia Lithwick discusses what a mess the whole Jose Padilla matter has become. Mr. Padilla, currently rotting in a cell somewhere, was once an example of how our brilliant anti-terrorist experts had caught a saboteur before he could set off a "dirty bomb." He has since become a sad test case for some viewpoint having to do with the effectiveness of presuming those who are arrested are undeniably guilty and should be treated like maggots.

I have no idea if Padilla is guilty or innocent. Perhaps he deserves that cell, though it might be nice if a fair trial said that before he spends so much time in it. I'm not even sure what the charges against him are, this week. (They seem to change every time there's a chance of him getting near a courtroom.) It does bother me that some people don't seem to care. They want to believe so badly that we've caught people like those who caused 9/11 that it makes them happy to presume he's one, and never mind the reality.

Foxy Fagan was a comic book published around 1947 by an obscure company called Dearfield Publishing. It never found an audience and ran only seven issues but it makes for quite an interesting bit of funnybook history. It was drawn by a gentleman named Harvey Eisenberg, who was one of the great draw-ers of silly creatures. He was the main artist for decades on the Tom & Jerry comic books, which were really good-looking comics. Eisenberg had a way of "posing" his characters that other cartoonists would avidly study. He gave them weight and personality and movement. He also did this with a lot of the comics based on the earlier Hanna-Barbera cartoon shows like The Flintstones and Huckleberry Hound.

Even more intriguing is who his partner was in the Foxy Fagan enterprise. It was Joe Barbera, moonlighting (without credit) from his day job, which then was co-directing (with Bill Hanna) the Tom & Jerry cartoons for MGM. Barbera apparently got it into his head that there was money in publishing comic books, which of course was not one of Joe's sounder financial decisions. He and Eisenberg created the comic, he wrote it, Eisenberg drew it, Joe assembled a group of backers and put in some bucks of his own…and they lost a lot of money. I wrote about the endeavor some time ago in this item and my pal Scott Shaw! wrote about it here and reproduced some samples of the Foxy Fagan comic.

I bring this up again because the ASIFA Hollywood Animation Archive has scanned and posted a whole story from Foxy Fagan #1 and you can see it here. Go have a look. It's good stuff.

We were just talking about The Jetsons so here's a one minute promo for the show, complete with narration by George O'Hanlon, who provided the voice of George.

Here's the kind of Hanna-Barbera trivia that I should know and apparently don't. In the commercial, reference is made to the series taking place in the 21st Century. Did they ever say that on the show? I have the idea that they deliberately kept it vague but maybe they said it somewhere, somehow. Earl? Scott? Anyone?

This is another post for folks who live in Los Angeles but it may apply elsewhere…

Have any of you folks taken the bus anywhere lately?

You remember the bus…that thing that took you to school before you had a car? The long vehicle you rode with other people on it? If you don't know what I'm talking about, rent the first Speed movie from Netflix. It's an extremely realistic depiction of how it is on an actual Los Angeles bus.

Seriously: Up until late last year and not counting free shuttles, I hadn't been on a bus for over thirty years. I didn't even know what it cost to ride a bus in this town (answer: $1.25) and if it had occurred to me to take one somewhere, I didn't know which bus to get on to go anywhere I might want to go.

But lately, I've bused it a few times, usually when I had to go somewhere where the parking was impossible. Also, I had a little minor surgery a few weeks ago…nothing critical, nothing important. But it was one of those procedures where they don't want you to drive home, which means I couldn't drive there. So I took a bus there and had someone pick me up afterward. The trip there was a lot easier than I would have imagined. (And the same bus goes past the place where I take my car for servicing. When I've had to leave it there, I've taken a cab home, then taken a cab back. The bus will be so much simpler, to say nothing of cheaper.)

Los Angeles also has these things called Dash buses, which cost 25 cents to ride. If I need to go over to Cedars-Sinai Hospital — and I occasionally do — I can walk one block from my home to where the Dash will pick me up and take me where I need to be in not much more time than it would take me to drive over and find a place to park. That's not even getting into what you spend to park at Cedars-Sinai if you drive there. It's about the same per-hour cost as being a patient at Cedars-Sinai but the amount isn't covered by Blue Cross.

What has made this revolutionary new mode of transportation possible for me is that I discovered the MTA website. I guess most transit systems across the country have something like this but I was unaware of them. They have a form where you enter the two locations between which you need to travel and their database tells you how to get from one place to another and on which bus(es). I entered a number of places where I sometimes go and realized that with some of them, a bus might be easier than taking my car, hassling with traffic, finding a parking place and paying for that parking. (It was twelve bucks the last time I parked in the medical building where my doctor is located. There's a bus that goes right there.) It's also environmentally better and while I'm not doing it for that reason, when I do take the bus I intend to say it's because of that.

If it's been a long time since you've taken a bus anywhere, you might want to take a look and see if it's easier than you think. It can also be fun. On the way in for that minor medical procedure, I got to talking with a lady who was wearing a jacket with the logo of the Rio Hotel in Vegas. She said she'd just gotten back from that town and I asked her how she did at the tables. She said, "Let me put it this way. Before the trip, I used to drive to work in a Mercury Marquis." I laughed all the way into surgery.

The lovely lady at left is Judy Jetson, daughter of George and Jane. We all love Judy Jetson. The lovely lady at right is Janet Waldo, voice of Judy Jetson. We all love Janet Waldo, too. For reasons that Ponce DeLeon could perhaps explain but I can't, Ms. Waldo has been performing in front of a microphone since the days of radio comedy programs and still manages to sound like a teen-age girl and look not that much older than one. The only way I've been able to fathom how this works involves cloning and robotics so I won't try.

Nonetheless, she's been doing voice work — for cartoons and elsewhere — for some time. In addition to playing Judy, she was also Penelope Pitstop, Granny Sweet, Alice in that Hanna-Barbera special I keep writing here about, and many others.

Janet won't remember this but she was a voice on one of the first cartoon specials I ever wrote. The show had a director who was not overwhelmed with either tact or skill, and the way the recording session went for a time was roughly as follows. Janet would read a line and it would be perfect. The director would tell her she was way off base and he would then read the line the way he thought it should be done, which was all wrong. Janet would then read the line again, trying to do it the director's way but still managing somehow to do it right. The director would then scold her and say rude things and try to get her to do it his way. Janet would then do the line properly and he would get even madder at her and more insulting.

This went on until one of the other actors in the show — a leprechaun named Howard Morris — left his microphone, walked into the booth and said something to the effect of, "That woman knows what she's doing and you don't and if you don't knock it off, I'm going to knock several of your teeth out." Then he returned to his mike and thereafter, the director was much nicer to Janet and she was allowed to do the lines the way she wanted, which was exactly the way I, as author, wanted them.

It was a nice moment. On The Jetsons, Howie performed the role of a character named Jet Screamer, with whom Judy Jetson was very much in love. I always liked to think of our little recording session drama as a case of Jet defending Judy's honor.

Janet is, as I say, wonderful…and you can hear what I'm sure will be a wonderful interview with her, tomorrow on Stu's Show, which is live on Shokus Internet Radio from 4 PM to 6 PM, West Coast Time, or 7 PM to 9 PM, East Coast Time. Go to the station's site, pick an audio browser and you're in! I'll be listening.

The L.A. Times has a nice, formal obituary for our friend, Walker Edmiston.

We have here another one of those "best" lists where one entity — in this case, one person, it would seem — lists the best ten best or the fifty best or the hundred best in some category. I think we always take these things too seriously if they don't correspond to our own tastes but they can be fun.

This list is for The 51 Best Magazines Of All Time, as selected by Graydon Carter, who has been the editor of Vanity Fair for 15 years and apparently only thinks his own publication should place at #31, which is interesting. He selects Esquire during the Harold Hayes years as #1, The New Yorker as #2 and Life as #3.

Those aren't bad picks, I suppose. I was surprised to see — which is not to say I'd argue — his placing of MAD Magazine at #6. And what really surprised me was that he restricts his choice to "Post comic book, before the death of founder William Gaines (1955–1992)" and writes…

MAD was the skeptical wise guy. Ever ready to pounce on the illogical, hypocritical, self-serious and ludicrous, it was also essentially celebratory: to accurately parody something, you ultimately have to love it. MAD transposed onto the printed page the anarchic humor of the Marx Brothers and Looney Tunes, parodying comics, radio serials, movies, advertising, and the entire range of American pop culture. Nowadays, it's part of the oxygen we breathe; and Mel Brooks, Saturday Night Live, and The Simpsons would be unthinkable without it.

I think I'd debate much of that, starting with the claim that you have to love something to parody it. MAD loved tobacco companies? Misleading advertising? Lying politicians? I think it's usually the opposite. To parody something successfully, you must have some grasp of what's really wrong with it and the yearning to expose that. You can love something and still do that but I've interviewed almost every major MAD contributor from the years Carter praises. I sure got the impression they were most successful when trampling something they felt deserved trampling.

I would also quarrel with his choice of years. I don't see what part of his explanation doesn't apply to the comic book issues but unlike a lot of folks, I'm a big fan of the issues after it moved out of the comic book format and for many years thereafter. I just don't think the passing of Gaines was the end of a particularly good period. MAD seemed to me (and to many of those who worked on it) to be in considerable decline in the years before Bill died. Nothing against the man himself, but he'd have been the first to admit he got too set in his ways, too proprietary about keeping the magazine the same month to month. Some felt his passing may even have given the editors an opportunity to shake things up and clear out deadwood. In any case, I think it's now better than it's been in years.

Of course, you could argue the whole premise of comparing MAD to Sports Illustrated and National Geographic at all, and suggest that Spy (which Carter co-founded) is a bit high in the rankings. But it ain't a bad list. Have a peek.