Category Archives: Uncategorized

A full-size replica of the robot from the Lost in Space TV series.

Tired of endlessly replaying William Shatner's stirring interpretation of Elton John's "Rocket Man?" Well, do I have a treat for you. Yes, it's William Shatner performing Harry Chapin's song, "Taxi" on an old episode of Dinah Shore's show. (If the ifilm link below doesn't play in your browser, go here.)

I've been a member of The Magic Castle for something like a quarter of a century…maybe longer. For the benefit of those of you who've never been there, it's a private club in Hollywood for magicians…or people who love magicians…or people who can cough up the initiation fee. You have dinner there — and the food, which once was pretty mediocre, is now pretty good. Then you can wander around and look at curios and wonderful decor and perhaps drop by one of several showrooms where magicians perform all evening. You can find out more about the place over at its website.

If you check out the "Now Appearing" page this week, you'll see that a performer named Jason Alexander is appearing in the Parlour of Prestidigitation. This is the mid-sized showroom there — it seats 68 people — and yes, this is "the" Jason Alexander, the guy from Seinfeld. We all know he can sing and dance and do comedy but it turns out, he also does magic. I don't know how good he is because everyone I know who's gone to see him has been unable to get in. Like I said, the room only seats 68.

But I think it's neat that he's doing it. The Castle is notoriously conservative in how much it pays its performers (some would say "stingy") and I would guess it's the worst money he's worked for in a long time. Of course, it's not like he needs it.

I've just read about a dozen reviews of United 93, the new movie about the fourth plane that was hijacked on 9/11. I will save you the trouble of reading any of them. They all say…

This film was made with great respect and integrity and skill and boy, do I wish I hadn't had to go see it.

It'll be interesting to see what the box office is like this weekend. There may be some kind of "thrill-seeking" audience, like the folks who rushed to see The Exorcist after they heard it caused audience members to faint. But I have the feeling that a lot of people will feel the way I did: Wait and see it at home, if at all. This was an option that wasn't available to those who saw The Exorcist when it came out.

I love acts that represent years of hard work and ingenuity — jugglers, magicians, etc. Today, we spotlight a great act…David and Dania, who tour the world doing a stunning "quick change" routine, often at halftime at sporting events. You can see many videos of them at work over on their website but if you click below, you'll see a minute and twenty seconds of what they do…

I get a lot of e-mail from folks who want to get into doing voices for cartoons. I'm always a little baffled by these inquiries. Somehow, the person found my website but though they claim to be passionate about breaking into the business and doing whatever it takes to make that happen, they never seem to have bothered to read the material I put up about how to do this. They just hit the e-mail link and write to ask me to tell them how to make their dreams come true. I usually direct them to this page which they could probably have found in ten seconds by going to Google and searching for almost any phrase similar to "break into cartoon voice work."

It's frustrating because some of the messages are so eager and sincere, and I wish I could give these folks a firmer route into a highly competitive profession. Fortunately, I can now offer a real good piece of advice…easily the best I could give to anyone who's interested in working in voiceover.

On May 9 at the Learning Annex in Los Angeles, my buddy Paul Doherty is conducting a class in how to break into the business. Paul is the head of the Los Angeles Division of Cunningham, Escott, Slevin & Doherty, which is one of the top agencies for folks who announce, narrate and act with their voices. I can't think of anyone who knows more about the field. If I was anywhere near Southern California and trying to launch a career in that area, I'd go to Paul's class and do absolutely everything he said. I'm serious about this.

George Tuska, who's been drawing comic books almost as long as there have been comic books, was born 90 years ago today in Hartford, Connecticut. His first comic art job was in 1939 assisting on the Scorchy Smith newspaper strip and soon after, he went to work for the Eisner-Iger Shop (that's Will Eisner) where he worked alongside artists like Lou Fine, Bob Powell and Nick Cardy, and soon proved himself as bold and skilled as anyone in the field. He drew super-heroes (including Captain Marvel) before going off to fight World War II…and it was upon his return that he really began to shine. Before long, one of the top-selling comics in the country was Crime Does Not Pay, and Tuska was the book's "star" artist — the one others tried to imitate.

He later returned to the Scorchy Smith newspaper feature, this time as lead artist, and drew the Buck Rogers strip for a time. In the sixties, he was a mainstay of the Marvel line, especially on Iron Man, X-Men and Luke Cage, Hero for Hire. For DC, he drew Challengers of the Unknown, Teen Titans and many other comics and he was among the illustrators on T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents for Tower. Lately, in semi-retirement, he's been doing commissions which show he's still got it.

Stan Lee dubbed him "Gorgeous George" Tuska for good reason. He could have also called him "Gentleman George" and "Gallant George," for he is a charming, delightful man. I don't think you're on the Internet, George…but please, someone tell him that a lot of us here on the World Wide Web are delighted to wish him a happy ninetieth.

A cartoonist friend of mine is writing an article about his experiences back in the sixties trying to sell gag cartoons to some of the crummier men's magazines of the day. He would like to know the name of the publishing house responsible for Dude, Escapade, Gent, Caper, something called Gags and Dolls, and a magazine called either Army Laughs or Army Laffs. Can anyone drop me a line and help this person?

I don't think I'm going out this weekend to catch United 93, the new film dramatization of the events that occurred on 9/11 aboard United Flight 93. This is despite the fact that I keep hearing that the movie is expertly made and done with total respect and as much taste as anyone could bring to an account of such a horrible event.

When it was first announced, it sounded like something I'd want to see, that perhaps I should see. I've certainly read enough about the events of that day and seen at least a half-dozen documentaries with actual footage. But now that it's about to open at a theater near me, I think I'll wait for either the DVD or a showing on HBO. That's if I even watch it at all.

It figures to be an emotional experience. In this world, you can't always control when you have your emotional experiences but to the extent you can, I think you should. If I watch United 93 at home via DVD or TiVo, I can start it when I want, stop it when I want, pause it when I want. If I go to a theater, all of that will be out of my control. It's bad enough that it will be out of my power to change what happens on screen. Flight 93 will crash and kill everyone aboard whether I remain in my seat to see it or not…and I guess that's what I'm afraid of: That feeling of powerlessness. At home with remote close at hand, I'll feel a tiny bit in command, maybe not of the fate of that plane and the people aboard but certainly of myself.

You may call it cowardice. I call it not subjecting myself needlessly to things that may be unpleasant. It's the same reason I don't go on roller coasters or hang-glide or listen to The Howard Stern Show any more.

Some movies, of course, you want to watch on a big screen and/or with an audience. This one, I'm thinking I'd rather watch without anyone else around, or at least only with people I feel close to. That's if I watch it at all…and I'm thinking I might. Still, the problem with seeing it in a public place is that it's a public place. I don't want to deal with the grief of the lady sitting in front of me, the kids sitting behind me, the people on either side. I want to be able to cry or to get angry…and I may even feel like yelling at the screen. A good comedy should be shared with others and their laughter can make it a more enjoyable occurrence. But some tragedies — especially the kind you can't do a damn thing about — are best experienced alone.

This year's Comic-Con International in San Diego starts in 85 days. Might be a good time to start looking for a parking place down there.

Our friends at TiVo are quietly rolling out a new model — the Series 2 TiVo DT. This is not the new, improved Series 3 model that's been announced for later this year and which will shock everyone if we actually see it before New Year's Eve. The Series 3 will handle HD-TV. The big difference in the new Series 2 model is that "DT" stands for dual tuner. That means you can theoretically record two shows at once.

Here's why that may not be as wonderful as it sounds. To record two shows, you need two video sources and with this machine, neither one can be a plain, old-fashioned roof antenna and one must be analog cable without a cable box or descrambler. You could have a satellite feed or a digital (or analog) cable signal with premium channels for one…but the other would have to be basic analog cable, meaning you can't record HBO and Cinemax at the same time.

The new model comes initially in an 80-hour configuration with a 180-hour version to follow at some unspecified time. The first ones are supposed to be available already over at the TiVo website but I sure couldn't find them there. If you can't either, they're supposed to be at your local retailers on May 1. List price is $249 but there seem to be some $150 rebate deals available. Alas, that's not the main expenditure. Since lifetime service is no longer available for standalone TiVos, you'll have to pay as you go, which is $12.95 a month if you own one TiVo and an additional $6.95 per month for every other one you own. In addition, most people will probably have to shell out extra to their local cable company to get an analog cable signal as their second input and that will run them at least another ten bucks a month.

None of this sounds all that useful to me, though I suppose it will brighten the television experience for some folks. Overall, it's a disappointment. Most of the time, TiVo is wonderful but it does tend to let us down once in a while.

And here we have the Evian commercial with the naked babies doing water ballet to the song "Bye Bye Baby" from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Notice if you will that every single one of these kids displays more talent than Henny Youngman did in yesterday's video link.

Several folks have reminded me that Howard Hughes is said to have granted permission for the filming of Diamonds Are Forever on property he owned in exchange for, among other considerations, either a 16mm print of the finished movie or (accounts vary) 16mm prints of all the James Bond movies. So he presumably saw Diamonds. We just don't know what he thought of the way the character based on him was portrayed.

Y'know, I find it amazing that the filmmakers got permission. They had to submit the proposal to Hughes' underlings, all of whom were notorious for being terrified of what "the old man" would think about something. Hughes was already somewhat irrational by that time, especially about his privacy and image. This was the period where Hughes would hear that some journalist was readying a book or article about him and he'd call one of his lawyers and say, in effect, "Stop publication or you're fired." If I'd been a Hughes aide at the time, I'd have looked at the script, saw that it included a Hughes-like figure and thought, "Even if the boss okays this, he might hate the finished film and sack everyone who didn't stop it. There's nothing in it for him (or me) so I'd better stop it." But somehow, that isn't what happened.

The arrangement presumably was to allow some filming at the Landmark Hotel. As far as I know, the hotels where the movie was shot were Circus Circus, the Riviera, the International and the Landmark. Of these, the only one Hughes ever owned was the Landmark. (He also at times owned the Desert Inn, the Sands, Castaways, the Frontier and the Silver Slipper. The only one still standing is the Frontier and no one's betting on it being around for long.) The "Whyte House" — the hotel in the film owned by the Hughes doppelgänger, Willard Whyte — was played by the International, which Hughes never owned and which is now called the Las Vegas Hilton.

Scott Blacksher writes with regard to that story I related of Hughes buying TV station KLAS and phoning in to tell them what late movies he wanted to watch each night…

I've spoken to a couple of life-long residents of Las Vegas about things they remember. The funniest story was about how Howard Hughes kept falling asleep while the TV station ran Ice Station Zebra. Whenever Hughes dozed off and reawoke he'd have his people call KLAS-8 to put the movie on the last scene he remembered watching. It wasn't unusual for Vegas to watch the same segment of a movie more than once.

Talk about Video on Demand. I recall talking to one Vegas resident who recalled those days as rather exciting. Every night, he'd turn on KLAS and find some great, surprise movie run uncut and without commercial interruption. This was before home video or HBO so unexpurgated movies on your TV was a big deal. (I remember when we first got cable TV at our house — the legendary Theta Cable with its "Z Channel" — we'd watch anything. It must have been like the early days of talking pictures.)

A website called popcereal likes to scan old Gold Key comics and offer them for your downloading pleasure. They're currently featuring The Amazing Chan and the Chan Clan #1 from 1972 and I'm going to suggest two reasons why you should not download it. One is that the way they have it set up, it'll take you an awfully long time. Secondly, it's not a very good comic…and I oughta know. I wrote it.

It was, in fact, the first comic book script of mine to see print in this country. Previously, I'd written lots of comics published overseas and about a dozen scripts for Gold Key. As you may know, comics are not always published in the order they're written and if you're working on a book that's in no danger of cancellation, it's not uncommon to try and get way ahead. The first things I did for Gold Key were Disney comics that didn't come out until more than a year after I wrote them.

The Amazing Chan and the Chan Clan was a TV show that Hanna-Barbera produced for the CBS Saturday morning season that commenced in September of '72. As I later learned when I worked for H-B, there was always at least one "trouble" show that Joe Barbera would sell to one of the networks and then no one, including Joe, could figure out what to do with. Some years, they had way more than one. Chan Clan was about Charlie Chan and his ten (ten!) children solving mysteries that usually involved figuring out how some "impossible" crime had been committed — a kind of plot that was concurrently being featured on the prime-time show Banacek starring George Peppard. Banacek as a series debuted the same week that the Chan Clan debuted but the TV-Movie pilot for Banacek had aired the previous March when H-B was developing Chan Clan, and that's where someone got the idea.

I didn't work on the H-B TV show but heard about it from some who did. Between juggling all those regular characters and making that kind of gimmicky mystery work each week, the writers had a terrible time. One of them was an actor-writer named Jamie Farr who was struggling with a script when he got the call to run over to the Twentieth-Century Fox studio, put on a dress and make what was intended as a one-time appearance on a new show called M*A*S*H. I always figured that he was glad to do that because it meant he didn't have to write The Amazing Chan and the Chan Clan.

Another problem the show had was with the voice cast. The wonderful actor Keye Luke was signed to play Charlie Chan and then the original idea was to cast all Chinese (or at least, Asian) actors in the other roles. This gave Bill Hanna a fit because it meant hiring performers who were not experienced in voice acting, which usually means long and expensive recording sessions and employing folks who can't "double" (i.e., do multiple roles). With Keye Luke, ten kids and someone to bark for the Chans' dog, that meant twelve regular actors each episode plus two or three more to play the villains, witnesses and other roles in each episode. That's two or three times as many bodies to pay as your average H-B show…and it was actually worse than that. There may well have been good young voice actors around of Asian extraction but the H-B casting people didn't find many. Several members of the cast had to be replaced…in some cases, quietly by Caucasian actors. Among the latter was a then-unknown child actress named Jodie Foster.

So the show was in trouble before it even debuted. Gold Key was then doing the comics based on H-B properties and had first refusal on the new ones. When they were offered The Chan Clan, they refused. The editor there, Chase Craig, was in close touch with writers and artists who worked at H-B and he'd heard about the problems the show was having and how those working on it didn't have much hope for its success. But the studio put some kind of pressure on Gold Key and one day, Chase was ordered to hurriedly get a first issue written and drawn. I got the assignment because I was, he felt, his fastest writer…and I also happened to walk into the office that day.

The show was still a few months from debuting on TV. Chase handed me a pile of storyboards and told me to read them all to get a feel for the property but to write an adaptation of one in particular. I don't think this was an episode by Jamie Farr and his then-partner, Eddie Carroll. My recollection, which may be faulty, is that Norman Maurer wrote it. Anyway, I was assigned to adapt it and later on if the comic continued, there would be original stories conceived fresh for the comics. As Chase explained to me, he preferred to launch a new H-B book in this manner. The studio had approval rights and the people there could get pointlessly picky about the material…but they rarely bothered looking at any issue after the first few. Therefore, it simplified the procedure to do the first issue as an adaptation and maybe the second. They couldn't very well complain that a plot taken from the show was inappropriate.

I wrote the script in one day, as I recall. It was drawn by a wonderful artist named Warren Tufts who is probably best known for his long-ago newspaper strip, Casey Ruggles. Tufts was much admired as an adventure artist but he was a slow, meticulous worker who never felt that the financial rewards matched the hours he put into his art. In the late sixties, he began telling everyone that his goal was to "become Ernie Bushmiller," Bushmiller being the guy who drew Nancy. This was a little like Sir Laurence Olivier announcing that since there was no money in doing Ibsen, he wanted to join the Three Stooges. Warren more or less made good on his goal. He later drew the Pink Panther comic books for several years with a Bushmiller simplicity. Chan Clan represented a transitional period between his adventure work and his more cartoony endeavors. He also dabbled in acting, filmmaking and even the building of airplanes. A few years later, he was killed while test-flying a plane that he built in his garage.

Tufts accepted the assignment without seeing the property because he figured it would go fast. When you drew a Hanna-Barbera comic book, you got a packet of model sheets with key poses of the characters and you could usually trace a lot of drawings right off the model sheets. Wherever possible in Chan Clan, Warren did that. But the comic had so many characters in it and they had to be in so many poses that weren't in the model packet that Warren hated the job…though he did stick with it for all four issues of the comic book. I was luckier: I only did the first issue before Chase decided my services were needed more on Bugs Bunny.

The first time I met Tufts was up in the Gold Key offices, not long after he'd drawn this story. He was just leaving as I arrived and someone introduced us. I told him how much I loved his drawing…and Warren made a curt remark about how he'd hated drawing my script. I said something like, "Gee, I'm sorry you felt that way" and then he left and I went in for my meeting. A half-hour later as I was leaving, Warren was waiting for me in the foyer. He'd gotten to his car, realized I'd probably taken his remarks the wrong way and returned to apologize and clarify. What he'd hated, he explained, was the Amazing Chan Clan and all the characters he'd had to draw for — he felt — insufficient pay. My script was fine, he said…and we wound up going downstairs to the Hamburger Hamlet for a long, late lunch. He was a fascinating man, very passionate about his work, and I guess I'm now happy we had that little misunderstanding because it led to my one chance to spend any amount of time with him. Thereafter when I encountered him, our conversations were brief. He always had to get home and put in more hours on a plane he was building.

Like I said, don't bother downloading the comic. It'll take you forever and you won't see either Tufts or me at our best. But having it online got me to thinking about what went into it. And I also recall the day when I was up in the office and someone handed me a printed copy — the first comic book script of mine to make it to print in English. You never forget your first time…even if it's The Amazing Chan and the Chan Clan.

The late Henny Youngman (who I wrote about here) was a funny guy. I tell you he was a funny guy because you'll have no way of knowing this from today's video link. This is a soundie that Youngman made in 1943. Soundies, in case you don't already know, were kind of the music videos of their day. They were short films that were exhibited mainly in little juke box devices that were marketed in candy stores, bars, restaurants and other such establishments.

Youngman became something of a success on Kate Smith's radio show in the late thirties but he had his heart set on movie stardom. As the story is told, when he got an offer to go to Hollywood and make some films, he wanted to grab it but his contract on The Kate Smith Show prevented it. He begged…and the producers said they'd release him only if he helped them find a suitable replacement. He looked around and recommended an act that was then trying to work its way out of burlesque — two comics named Bud Abbott and Lou Costello. Kate Smith's producers were skeptical but Youngman convinced them Abbott and Costello could work clean and work on radio…and Henny won his freedom. Of course, it didn't work out the way he'd planned. Just a few years later, Abbott and Costello were the hottest comedians in the movie business and Henny's film career never went anywhere. Today's clip pretty much explains why.