Hmm…you know what would make a good video link for this morning? Three minutes of World War II musical propaganda telling Americans how we're going to kick Hitler's ass. And what would make it even better is if it was performed by the guy who later played Fred Mertz on I Love Lucy.
But where would we find such a thing?
For some time now, the Writers Guild of America has made slow but undeniable progress in its attempt to represent those who write animation. Through a fluke of history, if you write a script for a live-action Disney film, you're covered by the WGA and if you write a script for an animated film for Disney, you're covered by the Animation Guild, Local 839. Having been a member of both and written both kinds of scripts for Disney and other studios, I can tell you there's no contest as to which labor organization does a better job for us. The WGA is equipped to handle the needs of writers, and not just in terms of getting them more money than 839 ever does. The WGA knows about things like creative rights and screen credits and multiple drafts and such. 839 primarily represents animators and background painters and other kinds of artists. They may well do a fine job on behalf of such folks but the writers seem to not get much attention and too many of their needs go unaddressed.
839 has jurisdiction at some but not all of the companies that produce animation. The WGA — reportedly with the Animation Guild's blessing — has managed to sign up to represent writers at many of the studios not covered by an 839 contract. The writers on The Simpsons, for instance, work under a WGA contract. The two labor groups have co-existed with only occasional rancor (and even moments of cooperation) for some time…but now it's starting to get ugly.
Obviously, I am with the WGA on this. During the years that I was directly involved in these battles, I couldn't see that the Screen Cartoonists Guild (as 839 was then called) wanted us for any reasons other than we paid the most dues and that when you threaten a strike, having the writers walk out is the first step in halting production. Though the leadership of 839 has improved considerably since then, those are still probably the only reasons they want us and they aren't good enough. If and when they realize that and stop keeping us in the wrong union, both organizations will be a lot better off.
Andrew Sullivan writes a good blog post about the revelations that Bush authorized the leaking of selective classified data to support his positions.
Were it not for the fact that I can't record it on my TiVo, The Cheap Show would be my current favorite TV program. The Cheap Show is only seen on PlumTV, a cable system that exists in several faraway cities…and, oh yeah, you can see it on the Internet. I don't know why they call it The Cheap Show since every three minute episode obviously costs many hundreds of thousands of dollars to produce. For the latest one, they took the entire crew — socks and all — to the show business capital of the world, Las Vegas. And just to dare me to plug it here, they dedicated it to me…which is, sad to say, the greatest honor I've received since the time Don Rickles called me a hockey puck. (I still don't know what he meant by that but I just know it was some kind of honor.)
You can see The Cheap Show, coming to you live from Vegas, over on this page. Look for the episode dedicated to me or pick out one of the others. And keep your eye on the actress known as Baby. I hear she's in the running to replace Meredith Vieira on The View.
Okay, I think I've figured out the strategy of the Bush administration. They formulated a policy that they won't comment on any matter that is currently under investigation. Then either Bush turned to Cheney or Cheney turned to Bush and said, "Okay now, we have to make sure we get everything we do under investigation." So far, it seems to be working.
Before there was Monty Python's Flying Circus, John Cleese and Graham Chapman were part of another, not-dissimilar program in which they starred with Marty Feldman and Tim Brooke-Taylor. It was called At Last, the 1948 Show and of course, with those four gents involved, it was quite wonderful. A number of the sketches from that series later turned up in other venues, and you may have seen a version of the one from today's video link in one of the tapes of charity performances in which some of those men were involved.
Where I first saw it performed was on Dean Martin Presents the Golddiggers in London, which was the series that replaced The Dean Martin Show on NBC for the summer of 1970. It starred — in addition to the comely song and dance troupe known as The Golddiggers — Charles Nelson Reilly, Tommy Tune and Marty Feldman. It was the first time America laid eyes, as it were, on Mr. Feldman. As I recall (and I haven't seen a trace of this show since it first aired), he stole the proceedings, largely by bringing along material that I later realized was from his earlier appearances on British TV.
On the strength of Feldman's showing, Greg Garrison — who produced Dean Martin's program and its summer replacements — sold a series to ABC called Marty Feldman's Comedy Machine, which came and went with barely a notice in '71. It was produced in London by Larry Gelbart and featured a number of top comedy writers from the U.S. including Rudy DeLuca, who owes me a lunch. It also had animations by Terry Gilliam. I would love to see someone dig those shows out and issue them on DVD. The one time I met Marty Feldman, he was both extremely proud of what he'd done on that project and extremely bitter about how the material had been chopped-up for U.S. television, with sketches truncated and edited and some of the silent ones even sped-up. He was also upset about what he called "mysteriously-appearing guest stars." Apparently, someone felt the show needed more faces familiar to the American viewer, so Garrison brought in some stand-up comedians, taped them in L.A. doing bits and cut them into the shows without Feldman's participation. Marty said, "I keep running into people I never heard of before who tell me, 'It was great to be a guest star on your program.'"
Even with all that, those shows are probably well worth putting out. Given that they looked an awful lot like Monty Python, what with Gilliam's cartoons and all, I think they'd would sell very decently now. I'd also like to see The Golddiggers in London turn up again somewhere, especially for its more elaborate version of the sketch you'll be watching when you click the link below. Feldman played the same part and Charles Nelson Reilly played the other man…and I remember laughing so hard that I missed a lot of it. Really, someone should dig up everything Marty Feldman did for television because he really was an enormously funny, clever man…and so, come to think of it, is Charles Nelson Reilly.
Here comes the sketch as performed on At Last, the 1948 Show. This is Tim Brooke-Taylor with Marty Feldman, and the cop who comes in at the end is Graham Chapman…
Harry Shearer has put up a video clip of Chris Matthews (of MSNBC) chatting with Tom DeLay chatting during a commercial break, unaware they could be seen or heard. It's fascinating how Matthews has managed to become simultaneously disliked by Conservatives because he keeps talking about how bad things are for Bush, and disliked by Liberals because he keeps claiming that America really likes Bush. In the clip Shearer snagged — I'm guessing off a satellite feed of raw MSNBC cameras — Matthews is too, too grateful to DeLay for letting him break the story about the Hammer's abdication.
The fine illustrator Steve Leialoha writes…
I stayed at the Hotel San Diego once or twice. The cockroaches were legendary. I do know that after the hotel was closed they filmed a few scenes of the film Traffic there. In it, the character played by Miguel Ferrer orders room service food and upon eating it, promptly dies. He should have known better.
Betcha Miguel never stayed there when he went to the con.
Another old San Diego hotel — the U.S. Grant — is undergoing a $52 million renovation and is scheduled to re-open for business in Fall of this year, too late for the Comic-Con. And probably too expensive for most attendees. I never stayed in the old U.S. Grant but it was the scene of the first San Diego Con, which I attended way back in 1970, back when we thought it was mobbed to have 500 comic fans in the same place at the same time. The hotel was undergoing a massive renovation then as well, but was merely upgrading from Extremely Shabby to merely Somewhat Shabby.
The place I still miss is the El Cortez Hotel, where the con was held for several years in the seventies. I'd say the place was a dump but that would be demeaning to dumps. Still, it was a fun dump, run by a management that didn't seem to care all that much what we did to it. Some people will be stunned to know that not only is the El Cortez still standing but it's been completely renovated — in some areas, restored to what it was in its glory days — and converted to condos. That's right: That crappy room that you stayed in for $20 a night in 1977…you can now live there. Or if you just have a yearning to visit, you can do so at the El Cortez website.
My buddy Earl Kress, whose new blog is simply bloggerific, suggested I link to this. It's a collage of George W. Bush speeches from the last three years that aired on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart. And it looks like it took three years to edit.
Those of you who've attended the Comic-Con International in San Diego for a good many years have probably at some point set foot in the Hotel San Diego, located in the heart of downtown. The venerable landmark was built in 1914 by the Spreckels Brothers, owners of the Spreckels Sugar Company. They were responsible for a lot of the development of San Diego and they gave the city what was for decades, one of its finest hotels.
In the seventies, when we all started going to San Diego Comic Book Conventions, back when they called them that, it was a frequent venue for con events. Some years, before it outgrew any available hotel ballroom, the Inkpot Awards presentation was held there. There were many memorable parties and gatherings, such as in 1982 when a group of Jack Kirby's friends staged a memorable surprise birthday party for him in one of its halls. Perhaps some year, you were either so hard up for money or so desperate for an available room (or both) that you even booked into its sadly-deteriorating accomodations. It was one of the cheaper places to sleep and con-goers took advantage of that up until June of 2001 when the building was declared structurally unsafe and was closed down.
On Saturday, April 15 at 8 AM, the Hotel San Diego will be imploded to make way for a new federal courthouse building. Which is silly. Anyone who's tried to find somewhere to stay for this year's Comic-Con International can tell you the city doesn't need a new federal courthouse one tenth as much as it needs more hotels.
Thanks to Jackie Estrada for letting me know about this. I have only fond memories of the place. Then again, I never stayed there.
This morning's feature presentation is a short clip of what Fred Astaire once called the best tap dance routine ever put on film. How's that for an endorsement?
A few months ago here, we lamented the passing of Fayard Nicholas, who was one half of the Nicholas Brothers. That's Fayard and his brother Harold you'll see dancing in the excerpt, which is from the 1943 movie called Stormy Weather. In the number, the great Cab Calloway sings and then the Nicholas Brothers hoof it up. Whoever edited this piece for the Internet cut off Mr. Calloway's part of it…but that's almost okay because this clip over on Google Video has Calloway singing and then it cuts off in the middle of the dance routine.
Actually, if you like either half, you oughta just spend the fourteen bucks and buy the DVD of the whole movie. There are a lot of great musical numbers in it.
Here then are the Nicholas Brothers doing what they did better than anybody else…
April, you may be fascinated to learn, is National Grilled Cheese Sandwich Month. Now, this raises all sorts of questions, not the least of which is who the heck designated it National Grilled Cheese Sandwich Month? Who has that authority? And what is it about April that makes it more conducive to a grilled cheese sandwich than, say, March or May? I'm guessing there's some sort of National Cheesemakers Council that looked at their month to month sales and noticed that people weren't making a lot of grilled cheese sandwiches in April. So someone there said to someone else there, "What can we do to promote the making of grilled cheese sandwiches in April?" And then the other person said, "Well, how about if we designate April as National Grilled Cheese Sandwich month?"
But never mind that. What bothers me is that in the interest of celebrating National Grilled Cheese Sandwich Month, some people are polluting the whole concept of the grilled cheese sandwich. As part of a promotion on this site, the DuPont Corporation has gathered close to 6,000 different recipes for grilled cheese sandwiches and they've posted a sampling of them.
This is very wrong. There aren't 6,000 recipes for a grilled cheese sandwich. There is one. You take two slices of bread, put a couple of slices of cheese between them and grill the thing. That's a grilled cheese sandwich. Even I can make them.
Flipping through the recipes there, I see concoctions involving all kinds of bread (including baguettes, bagels and crullers) and all kinds of cheese (including cream cheese and Brie) and all sorts of additives like walnuts and apples and sauerkraut and peppers and cinammon and molasses and pumpkin and pretty much the entire contents of a Whole Foods Market. On that site, they're all cooked in pans coated with Teflon® because DuPont makes Teflon®…and they may be great sandwiches but they're not grilled cheese sandwiches. A grilled cheese sandwich is two slices of bread and a couple of slices of cheese. And always will be.
According to this site, Americans make 2.2 billion grilled cheese sandwiches at home every year and the average American eats 8.4 grilled cheese sandwiches a year. If they're counting these creations that include sausage and maple syrup and peach chutney on a muffin, they're cheating. A grilled cheese sandwich is two slices of bread and a couple of slices of cheese. If these people had any brains, they'd know that.
Here's an article about Stan Lee's newest project.
Treasure Chest carried the Comics Code for a number of years, which raises an interesting question. As we all know, the Comics Code was formed in 1954 because their comic books were under attack from various groups that wanted to ban them or institute government-controlled censorship or something of the sort. So DC and Marvel and Archie and most of the other major publishers and their printers and distributors got together and formed this self-censorship board and henceforth, all their comics displayed the Comics Code symbol. It was there to assure parents and watchdog groups that the comic had been properly scrutinized and laundered. The smaller publishers had to go along with it or no one would carry their product.
There were two exceptions. Dell Comics, which published in partnership with Western Publishing, refused to have any part of it. They had their own distribution and, more important perhaps, they had Mickey Mouse in their line. They felt the crusaders wouldn't come after them and that their spotless reputation shoudn't be used to repair the blemished name of the folks who'd published horror and crime comics. Later on, when Dell and Western split off (as explained here), Western also refused to have anything to do with the Comics Magazine Association of America and their Code. An editor at Western once told me that in some magazine somewhere, a representative of the C.M.A.A. was asked why Western hadn't joined and was quoted as saying something like, "Well, they have their reasons but believe me, they got copies of our guidelines and they told me they apply its principles to their books." According to this editor — it was Chase Craig, by the way — Western's lawyers immediately dispatched a letter that said, in effect, "That's a lie. We've never looked at your stupid Code and we'll sue you if you ever say that again."
The other company that didn't subscribe to the Code was Gilberton, the people who put out Classics Illustrated. Presumably, they felt that the reputation of the works they were adapting — books that were in most school libraries — made it unnecessary to join the Code. Besides, they had only limited distribution via conventional channels. They sold most of their product through educational outlets.
Okay, so why did Treasure Chest join the Code, which it seems to have done almost from the start? If the folks publishing Walt Disney's Comics and Stories didn't think they had anything to fear, why did the people putting out adaptations of The Holy Bible think they did? I mean, Treasure Chest was the comic that nuns encouraged kids to buy…and even if the occasional Biblical scene could get a little bloody, was anyone going to object to the content? So why did George A. Pflaum, the publisher of Treasure Chest, join up, which not only meant submitting his books to the Code's censor board but also financially supporting the organization? I'd think he'd have been happy to see the mainstream publishers sink. Why did he lend his squeaky-clean image to an organization designed to rehabilitate the reps of the people who brought you Chamber of Chills?
I don't know a lot about Mr. Pflaum other than that in addition to Treasure Chest, he published non-comic religious publications like Young Catholic Messenger, Junior Catholic Messenger and Our Little Messenger. That doesn't sound to me like someone who would have cared a lot if Atlas Comics, publishers of Adventures Into Terror, couldn't get their product on newsstands.
My first thought is that perhaps Pflaum's printer wouldn't print his comics if he didn't have the Code symbol on them. Some printers, like World Color Press, were motivators of the Code and might have insisted on it for all their clients. But there were certainly printers who would have welcomed that business. There were distributors who wouldn't carry books that did not bear the Code seal but Treasure Chest didn't go through newsstand distributors.
Or did it? It's possible that Pflaum thought he was just supporting a cause that would improve comics for all children and that this was of primary importance to him. It's also possible — and this is just me speculating aloud — that Treasure Chest did have some newsstand distribution in some areas. And since he wasn't going to set up his own distributor for that purpose, he had to go through the existing ones, some of whom might have insisted on Code approval.
I don't know if anyone can answer this or even if anyone cares. But one of the accusations against the Comics Code was that it was an alliance of publishers and distributors making a move that stank of anti-trust, telling all their competitors, "You join our group, pay in money and make your product conform or we'll see that you never get on a newsstand." Wouldn't it be interesting if even a guy printing Bible stories felt he had no choice but to go along with this?
Several folks have written to ask me about the Honda commercial I linked to this morn, specifically about the part where the tires roll uphill. Back when this spot first materialized, I read a number of articles about it, few of which seem to still be online. My recollection is that while there was no camera trickery involved and while all the action actually occurred in the studio, there were gimmicks used within a few pieces. For example, the tires had weights embedded in them that caused them to roll the way they did. Hold on. Let me see if I can find anything online about this…
Yeah, here over at the Snopes site is this page which says, among other things, "The sequence where the tyres roll up a slope looks particularly impressive but is very simple. Steiner says that there is a weight [in each] tyre and when the tyre is knocked, the weight is displaced and in an attempt to rebalance itself, the tyre rolls up the slope." Sounds possible to me. That page may answer other questions you have about the spot.