Category Archives: Uncategorized

Eleven of you have written since last night to say that I forgot one prime-time network animated show that came between the cancellation of The Flintstones (it went off in '66) and the debut of The Simpsons (it went on in '89) and you pointed to Wait 'til Your Father Gets Home, which aired from 1972 to 1974. Well, you're right and you're wrong. Wait 'til Your Father Gets Home was a Hanna-Barbera production which starred Tom Bosley as the voice of a working class guy. The show was created by the team of Harvey Bullock and R.S. Allen, who wrote some wonderful things both for animation and live, and the show was largely styled by the great magazine cartoonist, Marty Murphy. The advance publicity made it sound like it would replicate All in the Family as much as The Flintstones had echoed The Honeymooners but that wasn't particularly evident in the show when it got on the air.

It was not, however, really a prime-time network show. It was syndicated. In the early seventies, the F.C.C. instituted its Prime Time Access Rule, which forced networks to cut back on their evening programming, effectively returning a half-hour each night to local stations. This caused a flood of syndicated shows to be created for those time slots and Wait 'til Your Father Gets Home was one of them. Most of the NBC affiliates bought it and ran it Tuesday evenings at 7:30 so it may have looked like a network show…but it wasn't.

But I'll tell you what was. The messages about Wait 'til Your Father Gets Home reminded me that Hanna-Barbera produced ten episodes of a show called Where's Huddles? that ran on CBS in 1970 as a summer replacement (remember summer replacements?) for half of The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour (remember Glen Campbell? For that matter, remember Goodtime Hours?). This one was about football players and it starred the voice of Cliff Norton as Huddles, who for some reason looked but did not sound an awful lot like Walter Matthau. Mel Blanc did the voice of his buddy Bubba, and they had a kind of Fred-and-Barney relationship. This was probably quite intentional on Joe Barbera's part. Blanc, of course, was the voice of Barney Rubble and Cliff Norton had once been up for the role of Fred.

(Here's a quick trivial aside of the kind for which this weblog is famous: Throughout the development of The Flintstones, Hanna and Barbera were highly sensitive about getting close to The Honeymooners without getting too close. The original pilot had Daws Butler doing the voices of Fred and Barney, and June Foray as Wilma, and both Daws and June did the same impressions of Jackie Gleason, Art Carney and Audrey Meadows that they'd done for the Warner Brothers cartoon series, "The Honeymousers," which had been done with Mr. Gleason's blessing. It's just a theory, but probably a good one, that Daws and June were replaced because H-B was worried that the use of them would make it too easy for Gleason to take legal action. Anyway, Cliff Norton auditioned for both Fred and Barney, and I'm just wondering if they thought to call him in — and maybe if they ultimately rejected him — because his name recalled Carney's character on The Honeymooners, Ed Norton. Did they perhaps want him for Barney — he would have been great in the part — because Hanna said to Barbera, "We can't hire a guy named Norton to play a character we may have to swear in court was not inspired, even unconsciously, by a character named Norton"? Maybe, maybe not. I once startled Mr. Barbera by asking him if the name "Barney Rubble" was a conscious in-joke because it rhymed with "Carney Double." He did a Tex Avery-style double-take and swore to me that no one had ever brought that up before…but allowed as how it may have been a subliminal confession.)

Sorry, where was I? Oh, right: Where's Huddles? Well, that one was a pretty quick flop but it was a prime-time network animated show so I should have mentioned it. And now, I should get back to a script that's due.

Well, things don't seem to be going so well for Stan "The Man" Lee. First, he lost $225,000 and was reduced to working as a mailman. Then, I saved his life when he threw himself in front of my car. Now, he's selling his car.

What next? Pawning his no-prize collection for no-money? Renting Irving Forbush out for stud fees? My God, he could even be reduced to writing comic books.

If you're in the Los Angeles area, you ought to know about the Writer's Bloc. It's a group that sets up events where one interesting person interviews another…with the latter usually being a writer. At one of their events, I saw John Cleese interview William Goldman. At others, I've seen Rob Reiner interview Al Franken, George Schlatter interview Jerry Lewis, Harry Shearer interview George Carlin, Bruce Wagner interview Eric Idle, and I think there have been others — equally wonderful — I'm forgetting.

On Monday evening, April 3, director Bob Weide ("Curb Your Enthusiasm") will be interviewing Mort Sahl. I dunno if I'll be able to make it but you might want to. Mr. Sahl is one of the most important comedians of his generation…the man who made it okay to be on stage and presume the audience knows something. For information and reservations, visit this website. You'll be glad you did.

Some of the videos I've been linking to here are ones I figured everyone has seen…but I'm getting e-mails that tell me otherwise. So here's a real commercial in which Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble sell Winston cigarettes. A lot of folks have forgotten (or perhaps never knew) that when The Flintstones first went on the air on September 30, 1960, it was ballyhooed as "an adult cartoon." I'm not sure what that meant in 1960…maybe that the leads weren't talking animals. Or maybe it just meant that the ads were targeted at grown-ups.

It aired Friday nights on ABC. That season, ABC opened the evening at 7:30 with Matty's Funday Funnies, a Mattel-sponsored series that recycled old Paramount cartoons like "Herman and Katnip." Then the 8:00 show was a series with no kid appeal at all — Harrigan and Son, a talky sitcom starring Pat O'Brien as a feisty old lawyer who was joined in his firm by his offspring. This then led into The Flintstones at 8:30, which was followed by 77 Sunset Strip, The Detectives and a great comedy/drama called The Law and Mr. Jones which starred James Whitmore.

Obviously, if you were a programmer looking to keep an audience around from show to show, you would have gone from Matty's Funday Funnies to The Flintstones and then to Harrigan and Son and the cop shows. But ABC obviously didn't figure that the kids who watched the 7:30 cartoon show would be interested in the Hanna-Barbera sitcom…or maybe it was the Winston people who felt that way, which is why they agreed to sponsor it. Either way, it wasn't long before someone decided The Flintstones had kid appeal. At first, they didn't move it. The following season, it was still at 8:30 on Fridays but its lead-in was The Hathaways, a sitcom that starred Jack Weston and Peggy Cass as a married couple raising the Marquis Chimps. Eventually, the Modern Stone Age Family was moved to Thursday nights at 7:30, by which time the tobacco commercials were gone and Fred and Wilma instead did commercials for Welch's grape juice and One-a-Day Multi-Vitamins. (That's how it is in life: One day, you're selling vitamins. The next day, you are one.)

In 1961, ABC had Top Cat and Calvin and the Colonel in 8:30 time slots on different nights, in both cases making no attempt to program a lead-in or lead-out with children in mind. (The program on before Top Cat was The Steve Allen Show.) Both series were considered failures and thereafter, networks put their prime-time cartoon shows in the earliest time slot they had. The Bullwinkle Show was on at 7:00, which is when prime-time network programming commenced on Sundays. The Jetsons, The Alvin Show, The Bugs Bunny Show and Jonny Quest all aired at 7:30, which is when prime-time started on other nights. (Only exception: The Famous Adventures of Mr. Magoo aired Saturday nights at 8:00 but it followed Flipper, which was a show for the very young.).

Prime-time cartoon shows went away after that and didn't reappear until the very end of 1989 when The Simpsons debuted. You could probably make a good case that it was the most "adult" cartoon show ever done, and that it held more appear for adults than many live-action shows of its day. Still, Fox did not buck the tradition: They put it in the earliest time slot they had, which was 8:00.

Anyway, here are Fred and Barney trying to get you to smoke. I believe this is what killed off the Cro-Magnon race.

Here, recommended to me by Shmuel Ross, is an interesting article about the immigration question. I think it's right that there's something wrong with a set of laws that remain on the books but are only enforced inconsistently and arbitrarily.

One thing I'd change in it is the line about how undocumented workers "do the work that Americans won't." As Krugman and others have been noting, they do the work that Americans won't do for that salary. And I guess with that should go the recognition that it isn't just the take home pay…it's also the working conditions.

Item before last, we asked if anyone could identify the woman in the photo with Phil Silvers. Several of you wrote me to say it's Polly Bergen. I think you're all wrong.

Charlene Ryan Aragonés (wife of some cartoonist) just phoned to say she thinks it's Julie Wilson. I think Charlene is right.

Several people in the last hour or so have sent me links to speeches George W. Bush has given recently about the immigration situation. I would like to retract where I just said "I sometimes find myself semi-agreeing with" the man. Or at least, I'd like to emphasize the exceptions noted in that statement.

Who is that woman in the photo with Phil Silvers? Obviously, it's from an episode of Sgt. Bilko (aka You'll Never Get Rich, aka The Phil Silvers Show). But who is she?

A friend of mine needs to know. Drop me a note if you do.

I don't necessarily agree with all of this column by Paul Krugman about the problem of illegal immigration. But I think every point he makes is an issue that will have to be addressed if the matter is ever to be settled. Certainly a lot of people who want all the illegals rounded up and deported are in denial about the economic impact it would have on our society. Frankly, I'm so conflicted and confused on this issue that I sometimes find myself semi-agreeing with George W. Bush on it.

You all remember Die Hard? That was the slightly implausible 1988 movie that starred Bruce Willis as a cop who battles crooks who have taken over an office building near where my mother lives. Well, what you may not know is that the film was a remake of a 1924 silent picture, The Ballad of John McClane.

Okay, you got the premise? Die Hard as a silent movie set in 1924. Good. Here's a nine minute version of that film…

Tom Spurgeon interviews Buzz Dixon, the fellow behind the Serenity comic book/manga that we discussed here.

Okay, the polls are closed. We asked you to vote on whether you were okay with having video links embedded in this weblog and an amazing 909 of you wrote in to tell me how you felt. I'm not sure what I would have predicted but it sure wasn't this: 858 of you voted in favor of the embedded videos. 14 of you voted against them. A bit of a landslide, wouldn't you say?

I feel sorry for some of the fourteen…the ones who wrote that the links crash their computers or just plain don't appear…or they're on dial-up connections and the thing loads at the speed of a boulder eroding. To make their visits here a little easier, I've changed something about the main page here. It used to feature the current day's postings plus the previous four days. Now, it features the current day plus three. To read earlier posts than that, you click on the link at the bottom of the page. That should speed page loading up a bit.

The remaining 37 voters said things that didn't fit wholly into the YES or NO categories but were mostly more in favor of the embedding than against…so I think the embedded video links are here to stay. Thanks to all who voted.

Here's an update on the condition of Art Buchwald. He's still dying but boy, does he seem to be making it about as enjoyable an experience as it could be. [New York Times, so register already.]

You may have already seen this. It's been e-mailed more times than that photo of George W. Bush playing the guitar during Hurricane Katrina, plus I linked to it about two months ago. But every day, six or seven people write to me and suggest I put up a video link to Chris Bliss and his incredible juggling finale, so here it is.

An interesting controversy is brewing about this in some circles. I don't know Mr. Bliss but he's a very successful comedian who closes his stand-up act juggling three balls to a Beatles medley. He put a video of it up on his website so that potential clients could see what he did and perhaps hire him…but non-bookers found it, loved it and it's being forwarded and reposted all over the World Wide Web. This has upset a number of professional jugglers who feel that what Bliss does in it, at least from a technical standpoint, isn't all that impressive, especially because he only uses three balls. If you scan the many public forums on which this is being discussed, you'll find an amazing number of irate jugglers writing things like, "My own mother sent me this video and asked why I don't do something wonderful like that."

There's obviously some petty jealousy at work there but there's also some honest (if misguided, I think) upset that people who practice for decades to master more complicated routines are not getting this kind of grass-roots attention. And it's certainly true that the rewards for an accomplished juggler these days are not great. There aren't even all that many places you can do it and make a buck. Then again, it's not Chris Bliss's fault that folks love the clip and are forwarding it to each other. As far as I can tell, he's making no claims other than that audiences enjoy his finale. Which they obviously do.

Recently, a championship juggler named Jason Garfield did his own version of the Bliss routine. He calls it a "parody" while others are suggesting that Garfield, who has apparently been quite outspoken against jugglers who rip off others' routines, has committed that very crime. If I were doing my own parody of someone's act, I don't think I would use his soundtrack, nor would I take bows at the end in response to the standing ovation that he received. I'd also try to parody what he does instead of trying to prove that I can do it better.

The two performances are not really comparable. Bliss did his in one take in front of a live audience. Garfield did his sans audience in a gymnasium somewhere and the tape appears to be edited together from multiple takes. My own reaction, just going by these two videos, is that Garfield is the more skilled of the two but his performance is cold and impersonal, and his juggling doesn't connect with the music the way Bliss's does. But it's not fair to judge either man by what they did under different conditions. Perhaps in front of a packed crowd, Garfield would have given a warmer performance. Perhaps with the luxury of editing, Bliss would have attempted more elaborate feats.

I admire both but if forced to choose, I'd rather watch Bliss. What's impressive to me is not that he can keep three balls in the air for four and a half minutes without dropping one but that he moves them (and himself) with the rhythm and emotion of his accompaniment. I'd also rather watch Michael Goudeau or Charlie Frye or Anthony Gatto or the Flying Karamazov Brothers or the Passing Zone or any of a number of other great jugglers out there who do what they do with style and personality, even if they aren't always keeping five balls aloft.

Jason Garfield's performance is our non-embedded video link today. Our embedded video link is Chris Bliss…

I spent some time today, as I sometimes do, reading the websites of folks whose views on the world do not often coincide with mine.

On the subject of the Iraq War, I would feel a lot more optimistic if the supporters of George W. Bush would spend less time trying to prove he was right to invade and more time arguing that he knows what to do now.