Category Archives: Uncategorized

Here's a profile of Tom Kane, whose voice will be heard tomorrow night announcing the Academy Awards. That's about the most prestigious gig in the field of voiceovers.

A new production of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying is about to open on Broadway. Here are some interesting recollections of the making of the first one.

Keith Olbermann is blogging.

The Hollywood Reporter offers a few video clips of "failed" jokes at past Oscar ceremonies, leading off with David Letterman's famed "Oprah/Uma" joke that as you'll note in the clip there, didn't totally bomb the way some remember.

A friend of mine who worked on the Academy Awards that year told me the following: Letterman actually had a longer joke planned there that would have involved going through the audience and introducing a number of stars with odd first names to one another. The problem with it was that it would have involved getting cameras positioned to get shots of those stars…and Dave only decided shortly before airtime that he wanted to insert that joke into his monologue. When the director was informed of it, he said (approximately), "We can't do it. Right after his monologue, we're presenting Best Supporting Actor [or maybe it was Best Supporting Actress] and I need my cameras placed to get shots of the nominees. We mapped this out days ago and it's too late for me to rearrange everything to get shots of nine other people just before that."

Told that what he wanted couldn't be arranged at the last second, Dave instead opted to just do the first part of the joke, which was probably a mistake. The whole thing might have been a lot funnier. In any case, so what? It was just one joke that didn't get as large a laugh as someone hoped. You hear those in every monologue and I sure don't think it was the embarrassment that some made it out to be.

Within the Academy hierarchy though, they weren't fond of Letterman as host and the Oprah/Uma joke was a symbol of the problem. The complaint was along the lines of, "Dave didn't understand or care that this wasn't supposed to be The David Letterman Show with occasional interruptions to present some silly awards. The man only knows one way to do a TV show and he kept expecting everything to be done that way." My feeling was that it was a slightly-unfair criticism. You ask Dave Letterman to host your show, you shouldn't moan when he comes in and acts like Dave Letterman. I thought he was the wrong guy for the job but he did just what they should have expected and he was more entertaining than some Oscar hosts…like, say, most of them.

For the benefit of those who've asked — and to get this list up on Wikipedia where it belongs — here's a list of the segments in each of the 26 half-hour episodes of the second season of The Garfield Show. These are already airing in many countries and start next week in the U.S. on Cartoon Network. I have no idea if they'll run them all in order (Show 33 ran back in December and may not be back for a while) or how long it'll take before every show on this list gets its first airing…but here are the titles. I am currently working on Show 54 for Season 3 and it'll be quite some time before you see that.

And I apparently really did have to post this here before it could go up on Wikipedia. I sent it to someone in an e-mail but the rules of Wikipedia do not consider an e-mail a credible source, regardless of who it came from. This site, however, is credible…to them, anyway. So here's the rundown…

• Show 27: Ticket To Riches / Gravity of the Situation
• Show 28: The Art of Being Un-Cute / Night of the Bunny Slippers
• Show 29: Blasteroid / The Big Sneeze
• Show 30: The Spy Who Fed Me / Meet Max Mouse
• Show 31: The Haunted House / Which Witch
• Show 32: Cyber Mailman / Odie For Sale
• Show 33: Home for the Holidays / A Christmas Story (2-Part Episode)
• Show 34: Planet of Poultry / Honey, I Shrunk the Pets
• Show 35: Night of the Apparatuses / The Land of Hold
• Show 36: Farm Fresh Feline / Inside Eddie Gourmand
• Show 37: With Four You Get Pizza / The Guest From Beyond
• Show 38: History of Cats / Dog Days
• Show 39: Garfield Astray / Master Chef
• Show 40: Black Cat Blues / The Bluebird of Happiness
• Show 41: Penny Henny / Pirate Gold
• Show 42: The Great Pizza Race / Love and Lasagna
• Show 43: Fido Food Feline / Mind Over Mouse
• Show 44: A Gripping Tale / Jumbo Shrimpy
• Show 45: Everything's Relative / Stealing Home
• Show 46: Cuter Than Cute / Pampered Pussycat
• Show 47: Depths of a Salesman / Detective Odie
• Show 48: Wicked Wishes / Full of Beans
• Show 49: Me, Myself, Garfield And I / The Big Sleep
• Show 50: True Colors / The Mole Express
• Show 51: Rain Or Shine / Parrot Blues
• Show 52: Unfair Weather (2-Part Episode)

This season, by the way, our voice cast consists of our four regulars (Frank Welker, Gregg Berger, Wally Wingert and Jason Marsden) and guest players Julie Payne, Laura Summer, David L. Lander, Stan Freberg, June Foray, Grey DeLisle, Laraine Newman, April Winchell, Misty Lee, Jack Riley and Marvin Kaplan. Like I always say: Get the right cast members and a rhesus monkey could direct these things.

Nate Silver, who's pretty good at predicting elections, tries his hand at the Oscars…and I question some of his methodology. I do not believe the Academy Awards are predictable in some of the ways people think. There is a strong sense of "buzz" about them — you hear that The King's English is likely to sweep and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy — and I think Silver's right that if the call is close, voters will favor a drama over a comedy. I also think there's a strong trend to vote for courage: The studio that risked making a film with a decidedly non-commercial premise…the actor who risked his image and success on an emotionally-raw and/or controversial part, etc. All that can matter.

But when Silver starts in with how they might give Best Director to David Fincher for The Social Network because otherwise that film's likely to get shut out of the major awards…well, I think that's a theory out of thin air. There's no data that voters ever think like that. In fact, there's zero data as to why they've ever voted the way they have. When Mr. Silver tells you who's going to win a Senate seat in Maryland, he has all these stats on past elections that tell him that 46.7% of all Republicans with 2.8 children won't vote for a candidate who supports gay marriage or just listens to Liza Minnelli CDs. But when it comes to predicting Best Director, Silver has almost nothing. He has no exit polls on past voting. He has no vote totals that tell him if last year's winner got 92% of the vote or 37%.

He knows who won in the past but that doesn't translate to who'll win Oscars on Sunday. In politics, you can say, "In this Congressional district, Democrats have won the last six elections" and that tells you something about how the Democrat might do in the next one. But if you know that Sandra Bullock won last year for Best Actress, what does that tell you about Nicole Kidman's chances this time? Nothing.

Silver does lean heavily on who's won the other film awards this year, especially those not bestowed by critics…and that is an indicator. But I think what happens too much is that people make up a narrative to explain the unexplainable. If Jeff Bridges wins for Best Actor, someone will decide, "This is Hollywood flexing its muscles to assert Americanism over the British invasion of The King's Speech." If Bridges loses, we'll hear, "Obviously, it's because Bridges won last year so voters feel he's had his due." But whatever theory is pushed after the fact is just someone making up a reason. No one interviews the voters. No one does exit polls. No one even stops to think that the voters don't speak or vote with one voice. Not everyone who voted for Barack Obama had the same, easy-to-summarize reason but folks like to distill the Academy voters down to a body that votes en masse with one thing on their collective minds.

My predictions? I predict I'm going to TiVo the ceremony, watch it later with my thumb on the little button with the >> on it…and have a much better time than those of you who watch the whole thing and start wondering, around half past Best Sound Mixing, exactly why it is you're watching. (Oh, and listen for our friend Tom Kane as this year's announcer. Tom was on one of our Cartoon Voice Panels at Comic-Con last year and people loved him. Being The Voice of Oscar is a comedown from that but not a big one.)

March is almost upon us and longtime readers of this blog know what that means: Mark goes on and on about how he likes the Classic Creamy Tomato Soup which is available all month at Souplanation and Sweet Tomatoes restaurants. Well, this year I've decided I've exhausted the topic so I'm just going to go eat the stuff and (largely) shut up about it. All I'll say is that if you're near one of these establishments (here's a page to tell you if you are) you can have my favorite soup. I hope it's your favorite, as well.

There seems to be an argument brewing in your "talk" area about the veracity of various episode listings for the second season of The Garfield Show. I really appreciate you being so diligent about verifying info and weeding out that which is not credible.

I am the Supervising Producer and main writer of this program so I'm a real good source since, you know, I wrote the stuff you're talking about. I've supplied a trustworthy list to "codyrox" (I think that's this person's handle) and they'll post it shortly and I will verify it is correct. Thank you.

Today is the 90th birthday of character actor Abe Vigoda…so let's check and see if he's still alive.

I don't know if the news is saying this but I will: The storm we're going to have this weekend is shaping up to be a very interesting one. It should hit Los Angeles late on Friday, give us a 6-8 hour shot of moderate to heavy rain, then turn to scattered showers throughout the night and much of Saturday. The showers will be widely scattered and very, very cold…so cold, in fact, that some of areas of Southern California that don't usually see snow will receive a little dusting.

So, amateur meteorologist that I am, I'm predicting that. I'm also predicting that some yahoos who refuse to grasp that Global Warming is a theory that the climate is becoming more extreme in both directions will stupidly say, "Well, so much for that Global Warming nonsense."

Robert Reich was this nation's 22nd Secretary of Labor and is now a professor at the University of California at Berkeley. I met him once at The Tonight Show when he was a guest and I was loitering in the halls…a very nice man. Also a very short man but that's not relevant to anything I want to write about here. I've followed his writing and generally find that he states clearly the left-of-center viewpoint…or as they call it on Fox News, Radical Socialism and America-hating.

Today, I was reading this item on his blog. I came across this sentence and I found myself staring at it for quite some time…

The truth is that while the proximate cause of America's economic plunge was Wall Street's excesses leading up to the crash of 2008, its underlying cause — and the reason the economy continues to be lousy for most Americans — is so much income and wealth have been going to the very top that the vast majority no longer has the purchasing power to lift the economy out of its doldrums.

That seems so simple and obvious that it makes me suspicious. But I also can't figure out what could possibly be wrong about it.

Not long ago, I bought a new car and traded in my old one at the dealership. A mechanic there mentioned to me that he was going to try to purchase my trade-in because even though it had a lot of things wrong with it, it was in pretty good shape. He could fix the flaws on his own time and have a pretty good vehicle. The dealership, he said, gave its employees first shot at buying trade-ins for a decent price.

I asked him if he got any sort of employee discount towards a new car and he laughed. He said, "No one who works here in the service department will ever be able to afford to buy a new car here." That surprised me. I mean, I guess it shouldn't have but it did. Didn't Henry Ford once say something about how he wanted to pay his employees well so they'd turn around and buy the Fords they were making?

I posted some charts here recently that showed the Income Inbalance in this country…how increasingly, the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. One Conservative friend wrote me that there's nothing wrong with that, morally. The American Way, he says, is that people should be able to get as wealthy as they possibly can. I'm not sure that's so but even if it is, there's a separate question as to whether that's even good for the rich. The way things are going, I guess we'll find out soon enough.

Here's someone's list of the 101 best restaurants in America. I've been to three and a half of them…

• Peter Luger's Steak House in Brooklyn, which I agree was wonderful. Easily the best steak I've ever had anywhere.
• Katz's Delicatessen in Manhattan, which I agree was terrific…but frankly not all that much better than about six other delicatessens I could name.
• Arthur Bryant's Barbeque in Kansas City, which I thought was okay but I wouldn't even put it on a Ten Best list of barbecue restaurants I've been to.
• And the half is Spago in Beverly Hills. Haven't been to the current one but I went to the original Spago in Hollywood twice and boy, was I unimpressed.

The thing that strikes me as I scroll through the other 97.5 is that I'm not likely to ever eat at most of them. Many are in locations I will never visit. Others wouldn't tempt me if they were across the street. I am not adventuresome in my dining. In fact, even when I go to a restaurant I've liked in the past, I do not think, "Hey, what else is there on the menu I can try?" I think, "Hey, what did I have last time I liked so much? I'll order that again."

My Aunt Dot used to treat it as a grotesque character flaw and lecture me on the value of trying new things. It had something to do with just becoming better as a human being…and how that followed, I still don't comprehend. She'd say, "Your world can't grow if you view it like that." And I'd think, "My world's not going to grow if I have the beef instead of the lamb?"

I also wonder how many restaurants are on this or any such list for reasons other than the taste of the food. Aunt Dot used to like one fancy restaurant in Beverly Hills because, I suspect, the ambiance was lush. The place was filled with celebrities. And the staff kissed every body part you allowed them to kiss…and then some.

The food? Not so hot. But the place had such a grand rep, you felt like a commoner to suggest it wasn't The Place To Be. (It's not, by the way, on this list of 101, probably because it went out of business in 1972. Some place else had become The Place To Be so the former The Place To Be became The Place To Avoid.)

I need to find a dining guide that bridges a gap, rating places better than Arby's but not as grand as The Four Seasons. Those are the kinds of places where I eat. Once at a convention outta town, I heard a friend ask the concierge at the hotel if she could recommend a restaurant that was, "like an Outback Steak House but not a chain."

Note that the assemblers of this list of 101 avoided such eateries except for barbecue places and delicatessens. There seems to be an unwritten law that applies to BBQ joints and delis: The crummier the decor, the more likely the food is to be great. And come to think of it, maybe that truism is the only dining guide you really need.

Eight charts that explain everything that's wrong with America.

Apropos of my link to Paul Begala's article on how some states live on the tax dollars paid by other states, I received a message from "Ruben Bolling," creator of the wonderful comic strip, Tom the Dancing Bug. He links me to this page and the info thereupon that shows, among other things, how much money each state gets back from the federal government in goods and services. For instance, for every dollar New Mexico and Mississippi pays to the U.S. treasury, they get back more than two dollars…or at least they did in '05, which is what the chart on that page covers. It may not be that way today but the principle, no doubt, lives on.

You should, by the way, be following Tom the Dancing Bug whenever and wherever you can. Here's a good place.

Proving that some convention organizers never learn, I will again be a Special Guest (or maybe it's just a Guest) at this year's WonderCon in San Francisco, April 1-3. For those of you who can't wait 'til or get tickets for Comic-Con…and those who are scared at the prospect of being in a hall with that many people dressed as Princess Leia…WonderCon provides a great alternative. Operated by the same folks who bring you that rogue nation down in San Diego every year, WonderCon is large enough to have something for everyone but small enough that maybe you could see all of it in a day.

It is also not sold-out and if you need a hotel room, they're not that difficult to book. (Another plus: WonderCon is downtown at the Moscone Center and there are a lot of great restaurants and museums and fun Frisco-type things to do around.) I always have a great time at these. Click on the link in the previous paragraph to find out how you can have an equally great time.

I will be moderating six panels at this fine event, including one on Writing for Animation, one on the history of WonderCon, one on what it was like to break into comics in the seventies and one in which Sergio Aragonés and I will exchange pointless banter and vow that a new Groo mini-series will be out soon. Not only will you not want to miss any of these panels but I won't want to miss any of them.

And while I've got you here: The Monday after the convention, I will be again teaching a course in How to Do Cartoon Voices at a fine studio/school up there called Voice One. Details on how to sign up may be found here. That's April 4th and it's always a lot of fun and — dare I say? — informative.