Category Archives: Uncategorized

Noel Murray over at the A.V. Club offers an interesting analysis about an episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show…the one entitled, "The Return of Happy Spangler." It may or may not have impacted what Murray wrote to note that the big monologue Rob Petrie delivers at the end is a routine that Van Dyke had performed on TV a number of times before that series…and he used it again from time to time after. He did it on that weird 1965 CBS variety special that was a tribute to Stan Laurel after he passed. So the script for "Happy Spangler" was probably written around that routine.

Monday through Friday, Cartoon Network here in the U.S. is running two different episodes of The Garfield Show, a series which employs Yours Truly. The morning episode they run is a rerun of a show from last season. The afternoon episodes at the moment are new, first-run cartoons…and the show scheduled to run tomorrow (i.e., Friday) is supposed to feature the odd-looking lady above.

Her name is Mrs. Cauldron and she's a dear sweet woman who may or may not be a witch. What makes us think she might be a witch? Well, her voice was done by June Foray. There's a strong indicator.

June Foray has been playing witches in cartoons since Trick or Treat, a Donald Duck cartoon released in 1952. In 1956, she voiced a witch in a Tom & Jerry cartoon (The Flying Sorceress) and a Bugs Bunny cartoon (Broomstick Bunny)…and there have been hundreds since then. She's done other things too, of course…but 59 years of witch-voicing deserves special mention. How does she do it? Well, I started to get suspicious when she arrived at the recording session on a broom…

If you're heading to your nearby Souplantation or Sweet Tomatoes for my favorite soup this month, these coupons (PDF file) will save you a few bucks. And you don't even have to eat Creamy Tomato Soup in order to use them.

When blogging time is sparse, I invoke the ancient Internet tradition that I made up of posting a picture of a can of Cream of Mushroom Soup. This proclaims to all that I may not be posting much or answering a lot of e-mail over the next few days.

This being March, I should probably change the graphic to can of Tomato Soup but I don't even have the time for that. Those of you who check this site for updates every twenty minutes will be repeatedly disappointed until I finish a pressing assignment. And I don't mean I'm ironing pants or anything like that…I'm just busy with a script. Back soon.

Thank you all for the birthday wishes. I'm getting hundreds of them over on Facebook, many of them (amazingly) from friends I actually know.

Posting will be light here today, not because I'm off partying but because I have a deadline that demands most of my attention. I may even be too busy to go eat Creamy Tomato Soup at Souplantation today. That should give you an idea about how busy I am. Back soon.

Bob Woodward, practitioner of occasional journalism, tells us that Donald Rumsfeld's new book does not quite tell the truth about his role in the Iraq War.

Comic art legend Jerry Robinson has his own website now. I could tell you about all the wonderful things this man has done but why listen to me when you can go to that site and see it all for yourself?

March is Creamy Tomato Soup month at your local Souplantation or Sweet Tomatoes. I like this soup a lot and regret that they only have it for the month of March plus one week in October…so guess where I'll be dining often during the next thirty days. If you would like to try it, you can find out if there's a Souplantation or Sweet Tomatoes in your neck of the woods on this page…and while you're there, check the menu and make sure they have it because it's possible some locations opt out. Some may have it today but most will start tomorrow.

Then go try this soup, guaranteed to give every male a perfect physique! It makes fat men thin! Thin men fat! It removes hair from where you don't want it and puts it where it counts the most! It broadens your shoulders, narrows your hips! It builds up your corpuscles, lowers your blood pressure! Wakes you up in the morning, puts you to sleep at night! It softens your beard, toughens your skin — and what's more it cleans your teeth and leaves your breath alone!

Shore got good manners, don't it?

If you do go there to try it, you might want to print out these coupons (it's a PDF file) which will give you discounts from now through Thursday. You might also want to remember that for all the fuss I make here about it, all it is is good tomato soup. If you go in expecting the nectar of the gods, you'll only be disappointed…but that's true just about everywhere and about everything, isn't it?

This article will be of interest to you if you fly Southwest Airlines. They're changing the way their Rapid Rewards (i.e., Frequent Flyer) program works. It used to be that after 16 Southwest flights of any kind, you got one free. Now, you accrue points based on how much your tickets cost.

Turns out Paul Feig originally did the dubbing of Bob Hope for that segment on the Oscars and they replaced him with Dave Thomas but credited both. Feig is, by the way, the fellow who created the TV show, Freaks and Geeks.

I see in the end credits of the Academy Awards that the redubbing of the Bob Hope clip was done by Dave Thomas. Figures. (Actually, it says "Voice of Bob Hope," then it lists Dave Thomas and Paul Feig. I'm guessing Mr. Feig directed the dubbing.)

Thanks to the miracle of the Internet, tonight's Academy Awards have already been resoundingly trashed around the world, especially the hosts and especially James Franco. I find myself thinking that the folks who rush to call most of these telecasts "The Worst Oscars Show Ever" are imagining a wonderful, wildly entertaining awards program that has never existed. I'm also baffled by those who moan it's 3+ hours of rich, successful people stroking one another. Well, yeah. Those who have this complaint are unclear on the concept. The premise is that a lot of people in the movie business tell others in their field how great they are. Yeah, some overdo but that's the value system going in. So is the idea that the show's going to run long.

It can get a little better and some years, it does…but it's never going to be as wonderful as we wish it could be. If it bothers you, try doing what I do: Don't watch it live. TiVo or tape the thing and watch it with judicious use of the Fast Forward button. I got through it this year in well under an hour…and I have to tell you: At that pace, it ain't a bad show.

You can now listen online to Part Two of Groucho Was My Father, a three-part series in which Miriam Marx remembers her dad, Dr. Hackenbush. The third and final part airs next Saturday.

Also at the BBC Radio site, they're running a two-part series on The Chaplin Archive, a repository of work left by Charlie Chaplin. I apologize I didn't know about this earlier but as I write this, you have about four hours to go listen to (or if you know how to do it, capture) Part One. Part Two should be in its place after that. Thanks to Jeff Abraham for letting me know.

From John Liff…

Thank you for keeping us posted on the fate of the Spider-Man musical. I appreciate that you're reporting and letting us decide but I have a question. Do they have to open? Could they just go on doing the show in infinite previews? Has any show ever played Broadway without opening?

No law that says a Broadway show has to have an opening night. Conceivably they could go on, fixing this and fixing that. What an opening night does for a show is to define its award-eligibility period and to invite the critics to come and give the show that burst of publicity that comes with everyone reviewing it at once. That's all it accomplishes…and the show is already getting publicity and getting reviewed.

Assuming grosses stay high (they've lately been around 90% of capacity), they could just keep "previewing" and selling tickets…and could decide to open later if they thought more reviews would help business. Presumably, the reviewers who haven't come would attend and write about it whenever they felt like it but an official Opening Night would probably bring most of them back. Or they could just never open.

As far as I know, only one show ever tried to run for a time on Broadway without declaring an opening night. That was back in 1976 and the show was Let My People Come, a really sophomoric sex musical that seemed to be founded on two obvious principles. One was that most dirty words rhyme with other dirty words. The other was that in the seventies, people would pay good money to see a show with naked people in it. They still do but it's not quite the novelty it once was.

Let My People Come opened off-off-Broadway in Greenwich Village in January of '74. It did good business there for two a half years and then they moved it to the Morosco Theater on Broadway, which was located where the Marriott Marquis is now situated. It ran there for four months without ever officially opening because, one assumes, they knew the reviewers would savage it. The critics hadn't been that kind to it when it was on Bleecker Street…but that was Bleecker Street and expectations were lower there. I believe the Morosco had a few months open before its next show was coming in so its proprietors made a deal to let Let My People Come play there for a while for a reduced rental.

I didn't see it in New York but when it closed there, most of the original cast came to Los Angeles and the show played the Whisky-A-Go-Go up on Sunset. My then-current lady friend, who had yet to do with me any of the deeds sung about in the show, suggested we attend. I agreed because I was curious about it and because I figured, well, maybe that will get her in the "right" mood, if you know what I mean. So I got tickets and we went for one of the least wonderful evenings I've ever spent in a theater.

The place had cabaret-style seating and we were crammed onto an uncomfy bench right in the front. Just before the show started, a staff member came around and told all of us in the front that at the end of the show, in the final dance number, we were invited to climb up on the stage with the actors and join in, disrobing if we were so inclined. A quick survey of the couples at our table revealed that nothing in the world could make any of us so inclined.

The show was disturbing in large part because the performers were so talented and giving 110%. Sitting at the edge of the stage, you could just feel how hard they were trying to make silly material work and to act like they really wanted to be up there dancing naked. Perhaps some did but they sure didn't convey that. I have seen bad shows but I don't recall ever seeing one in which I felt so sorry for the actors. My date and I were exchanging looks about leaving but the "watch the train wreck" aspect of it kicked in. We just had to stay and see the thing through.

Near the end, there was a song called "Doesn't Anybody Love Anymore?" — not a bad tune and maybe the best one in the show. It's a plaintive, pain-filled cry…one of those songs that has to be sung at full volume by someone with serious pipes who half-screams the lyrics. They had a performer who was perfect for that task — a young black woman, maybe 25 years of age, with an extraordinary voice.

She was up there, about four feet from us, screaming the song into a wholly unnecessary microphone. It was raw. It was passionate. And about halfway through, we at ringside began to realize that we were not watching a woman singing. We were watching a full-scale emotional breakdown. She was supposed to finish the song and leave the stage. Instead, she just stood there, paralyzed and quivering, with tears streaming down her face and all of us out front feeling just awful about whatever had brought that lovely young lady to that moment.

Eventually, a gentleman involved with the show came out and gently led her off so the show could finish — and when it did, the audience quickly gave it a leaving ovation and got the hell outta there. My date and I went back to her place and did not have sex. The show, which purported to celebrate sexual freedom and hedonism, had put us in such a foul mood — especially on those topics — that it had the opposite impact. To this day, I think of it as the saltpeter of musical comedy.

There are currently sporadic attempts to revive it, usually in a kind of "party" setting where audience members can mingle, sip beverages and chat before and after the performance. I assume there's no emotional breakdown in it but it apparently has the same childish songs so I'm not interested. And that's the story of the one show ever on Broadway that never officially opened. Perhaps Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark will make it two.

The New York Times is reporting that the producers of Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark are discussing yet another delay of its opening night. They'd said March 15 would be it and that would not change but now, if the article is to believed, they're discussing June, which would mean the show would not be eligible for this year's Tony Awards.

That's quite a step to take but it makes sense, really. They can't change that much by 3/15 and if the critics who already panned the show come then, all they're going to write is, "I was right…they couldn't fix it." The article also says that while producers have talked to playwright Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa about helping rewrite the book, he has not been hired…yet. Same thing with director Philip William McKinley about coming in to assist Julie Taymor.

Performers from Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark are scheduled to perform a number from the show on David Letterman's show Tuesday night. Assuming they don't postpone that, you might want to tune in and get a little sampling.