Category Archives: Uncategorized

Over on Slate, Timothy Noah says a lot of the same things I said an item or two ago about Hillary Clinton.

Sydney H. Schanberg discusses what George W. Bush has done for education. This is another one of those areas where Bush's supporters don't even attempt to mount a defense. They just change the subject to Saddam Hussein.

I have no idea what kind of president General Wesley Clark might make, or even what kind of candidate he'll be. He sounds good at a distance but then most of them do until we get to know them.

Since he entered the race, the thing that interests me the most is that he has the backing of Bill and Hillary Clinton. That doesn't make me like him more or less, but it seems to have an awful lot of pundits turning backflips to reconcile it with their past theories.

Hillary is very important to both Conservatives and Liberals, these days. She's important to Conservatives because she energizes their base. If you want to get right-wingers to donate money and turn out for a cause, you invoke the name of Hillary. She's important to Liberals because…well, because she makes right-wingers mad, and her ongoing career proves that all that nonsense about Whitewater, Filegate and Travelgate didn't live up to its hype.

I happen to think that Hillary Clinton will never be president; that she will get no closer to that office than Ted Kennedy did, which was never that close. But partisan activists on both sides have good reason to keep the notion of Hillary for President alive, so her support for Clark must be explained somehow. This has led to a wide array of theories…

• The plan is to position Hillary as Clark's vice-presidential running mate so they can win in 2004.
• The plan is to position Hillary as Clark's vice-presidential running mate so that the ticket will lose in 2004, making her the presumptive nominee in 2008.
• The plan is to let Clark split the Democratic party. Then Hillary will accept a draft to run for president in 2004 with Clark receiving the veep slot as his reward.
• The plan is that Hillary knows she won't run until 2008 so she'll support someone who is certain to lose this time so she won't have a Democratic incumbent next time.
• The plan is that Hillary won't run this time and maybe not next but she and Bill think that if Clark wins, they can run the country through him. And if he loses, he'll become well enough known to be her vice-presidential running mate in '08.

And there have been others…darn near every conceivable theory except that maybe she has no plans to run this time and thinks Clark would be the best candidate. I don't know if that's it but I'm amused that every possible scenario is out there except that one. But I guess that doesn't serve anyone's interests…not even the Clintons'.

In the late sixties, the hottest comedy writing team in Hollywood was Phil Hahn and Jack Hanrahan, two former MAD Magazine writers who had moved on to work for shows like Get Smart and Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In. They had split up by the time I got into their line of work but I got to know both men individually and found them to be two of the wittiest men in a business full of witty people.

Here, on the website for Cleveland Magazine, we find a reprint of a 1976 article on Hanrahan. It fingers him as the man responsible for making his home town into the butt of so many jokes. I'm not sure he deserves credit/blame for that but the rest of the piece has some good info about the backstage mood of TV shows back then.

Here's an interesting piece on Stan Lee. A few of the facts are slightly askew but the enthusiasm of the article is interesting. It well captures the way a lot of kids felt about Stan and Marvel back in the sixties.

Daniel Kravetz sends in the following info…

In your interesting piece on Sam Yorty, you are uncertain about how he first came to be elected mayor of Los Angeles in 1961. Yorty was a Democrat, running one year after the dramatic Kennedy presidential victory and one year before Pat Brown defeated Richard Nixon for the governorship. He was challenging incumbent mayor Norris Poulson, who was criticized by many progressives for giving too sweet a land deal to Walter O'Malley for bringing the Dodgers to L.A. Even more upsetting to voters was Poulson's program for separating paper trash from metal and glass trash before collection, which Yorty described as demeaning to housewives in many TV appearances, most notably on George Putnam's news show.

Yeah, I remember that now. For a brief time, we had separate collections: You had to sort your trash and put out separate trash cans, and some people howled. I recall a big press conference when the newly-elected Mayor Yorty got it changed. People cheered as he poured tin cans into the same trash can as wastepaper. Odd how there's been no similar outcry today when we sort our trash and put out material to be recycled in a separate container. Thanks, Daniel.

Claims that Jews control "the media" always seemed absurd to me but at one time, we had a pretty good grasp on the comic book industry. This article by writer Arie Kaplan is the first of three parts on "How the Jews Created the Comic Book Industry." I have a few quibbles with it but will withhold carping until all three chapters have appeared.

The L.A. Police Department has a section on their website for the Art Theft Detail. This is the division in charge of recovering lost paintings and drawings, and their jurisdiction extends to various collectibles. On their section of the L.A.P.D. site, they post pictures of items that have been stolen, ranging from Salvador Dali paintings to Peanuts cels. (Also on display and presumed stolen is an oil portrait of former L.A. mayor Sam Yorty…and you can only wonder what a thief would want with that. Maybe he's going to threaten the city: "Give me ten thousand dollars in cash or I return it!") Anyway, it seems like a good idea to me but I have to wonder about one thing: Over in the "collectibles" section, they have pictures of the covers of Action Comics #1, Detective Comics #1 and Detective Comics #27 which have been reported stolen.

In fact, I myself stole the pictures above of Action #1 and Detective Comics #27 from their site and this brings us to a couple of questions. Are those photos of the actual copies of those three stolen books? Did someone think we might be able to identify the stolen Action Comics #1 from the picture and distinguish it from any other copy of Action Comics #1 we might come across? How does someone prove that a given copy of Action Comics #1 is their copy of Action Comics #1? Did whoever put that photo up think, "Maybe someone will see this picture and remember it when they see a picture of Action Comics #1 for sale? Putting up the pic of the Dali picture makes sense since that's a one-of-a-kind item. What do they think the pictures of the comic books will accomplish?

Paul Dini says that the image I posted of Tex Avery's Riding Hood character was from Red Hot Riding Hood. Says Paul…

The tell-tale signs: Red appears shorter and cartoonier in that film, with a shaded nose and three fingers and a thumb in most shots, whereas she gained some stature and a fourth finger in the later shorts. And while her appearance in Little Rural Riding Hood is all reuse (except for the photo of her seen at the beginning of the cartoon) her dance footage is from Swingshift Cinderella, not Red Hot Riding Hood.

And since I mentioned Tex Avery, I should have mentioned Preston Blair, who brought Ms. Riding Hood to life when he executed some of the most memorable animation ever done.

Had a nice time last night at the Reprise! production of Babes in Arms. Richard Rodgers and Larry Hart wrote it in 1937 and the consensus was that it had a silly, lightweight plot but a lot of great songs. Every few decades since, someone takes a crack at rewriting the book and what they wind up with is a silly, lightweight plot but a lot of great songs. The great songs include "The Lady is a Tramp," "I Wish I Were In Love Again," "My Funny Valentine," "Johnny One-Note" and "Where or When." Some shows never have one number as memorable as any of those five.

The plot, such as it is, revolves around a group of talented, unpaid interns who work in a regional theater that's in trouble due to a string of rotten plays. The heroine, Bunny, is a part owner but is about to lose her share of the theater to a bad guy named Fleming who has mismanaged the place into near-bankruptcy. His latest offering is a dreadful thing called The Deep North, written by, directed by and starring an inept, egomaniacal Southern playwright. A great Broadway producer is coming to see it so the salvation of the theater (or at least of Bunny's share) depends on the kids getting the bad play cancelled prematurely — like, during the first act — and getting the opportunity to show the producer a revue they've been developing in their spare time. There are a number of romantic entanglements but basically, that's what it's about, at least in the version Reprise! is doing, which is a 1959 rewrite of the book by George Oppenheimer.

But the inane script can almost be forgiven because the songs are so good, the dancing in this version is so good, and the cast is first-rate. Jodi Benson is terrific as Bunny. All the publicity material reminds us that she was the voice of The Little Mermaid and all around us, you could hear people whispering, "She was the Little Mermaid." And she was — but she's also a terrific musical comedy performer with the kind of voice you have to have to sustain that one endless note in "Johnny One-Note." Also wonderful in the cast were Beth Malone, Jeffrey Schecter, former "New Kid on the Block" Joey McIntyre, Bets Malone, Steve Vinovich, Jenna Leigh Green, old pro Ruta Lee and, in the role of the jerk playwright, Tom Beyer.

As with all these Reprise! shows, there aren't many performances and my subscription is for late in the run because the later you go, the more experience the cast has had in their roles. So you probably won't be able to catch this one, which closes Sunday. But there still tickets for the next two Reprise! shows. They're doing Kismet in January and Company in May. Details at their website. Looking forward to both.

Do not click on this link.

Our pal Scott Shaw! brings you one of the oddest of the oddball comics today over at Oddball Comics. That's right: It's another issue of The Adventures of Manuel Pacifico, Tuna Fisherman. And no, they weren't kidding.

Last week, many newspapers in the U.S. declined to run a Doonesbury strip that mentioned masturbation. According to this article, those that did run it received almost no complaints.

Also: According to this piece, a great many newspapers buried or did not run the recent admission by George W. Bush that there is no evidence that Iraq was directly involved in the 9/11 attacks. This kind of "coverage" goes a long way to expain why so much of America thinks Hussein was connected to those awful deeds.

Here's an obit for Jay Morton, the one-time animation and comic book writer who is said to have coined the famous "More powerful than a locomotive…" tagline for Superman. This one says he wrote "about 25" of the early Superman cartoons but there were actually only 17 Superman cartoons in that series and Morton probably didn't work on the last few.