Category Archives: Uncategorized

If I sound rushed here lately, I am.  We're in another one of those "Mark Vs. The Deadline" dust-ups.  Things will be more normal here after one of us wins.

As you probably know, there were 17 exquisite, magnificently designed Superman cartoons produced between 1941 and 1943.  The first half-dozen were produced by the Max Fleischer Studio, which released its wares through Paramount.  Then the lovely people at Paramount foreclosed on Fleischer, took over his operation and renamed it Famous Studios.  The quality remained generally high but the series soon expired.

Because they somehow lapsed into public domain, these shorts are widely available, often on cheapo videotapes of bad quality, but there are some good copies around on tape, Laserdisc and DVD.  And if you don't mind viewing them in a teensy frame, you can watch them on your computer screen (and even download them to view at your leisure) by going to this site.  And if you like Superman, browse around that website.  It's full of nifty Superman info.

I'm told there are still a few tickets left (but only a few) for the screening of a brand-new 35mm print of It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World on Wednesday, December 4 at the American Cinematheque in Hollywood.  Even better is that the film will be followed by a panel discussion featuring many of the movie's surviving stars including — schedules permitting — Sid Caesar, Edie Adams, Jonathan Winters, Mickey Rooney, Marvin Kaplan and Stan Freberg.  If you can't make it, check out this page early the following morn for a full report.  Info on the event is available over at this site, and I'd like to thank Daniel Frank, who alerted me to the event.  Daniel has a fine, funny weblog at this address, and it's always worth a visit — after, of course, you visit here.

All over Los Angeles, one can see billboards for The Wayne Brady Show.  I keep asking friends if they've seen it and I keep getting the same answer: Wayne Brady has a show?  Yes, a new morning or afternoon talk show which I've tried watching this week.  And you know what?  It's pretty good.  Mr. Brady is genuine and engaging and he's either a terrific actor or he's really interested in his guests…maybe both.  He's working with some sort of brace on due to a leg injury and this morn, he told a long, funny story about trying to hobble about and tend to the needs of a pregnant wife at the same time.  The mood is distinctly daytime, the emphasis is on relationships, and the humor is gentle.  Whoever had the idea to put this guy in that slot was a very wise person.

Johnny Hart still claims (as debunked in this column) that he is the most widely-syndicated cartoonist in the world.  And Jim Davis's one strip is still in more newspapers than Hart's two put together.  Jim's strip — the one about the lazy and gluttonous cat — is also the subject of a fancy new hardcover book celebrating its 25th year of life.  In Dog Years I'd Be Dead will tell you loads of things about Garfield — how it's done, the impact it has had, how it's evolved, etc., all nicely illustrated with rare art and pictures.  You can order a copy of this handsome volume from Amazon by clicking here.  [Caution: Book contains photos of me.  Approach with caution.]

As predicted here some time ago, Bill Maher is signing on to do a new talk show — a late-nighter for HBO, set to debut early next year.  While it's ridiculous to make a prediction about a show that probably doesn't even have office space yet, I have to say that I think Mr. Maher has all the necessary skills, including the show biz savvy, to do a hell of a good program.  On Politically Incorrect, he demonstrated a fine ability to kick-start boring chatter and make it more interesting, and a much greater willingness to work without a net than any host we've seen since the early days of Carson and Allen.  Freed from the P.I. format that forced him to tackle current events — whether his guests had anything of interest to say about them or not — and network lawyers and sponsors, he might really score big.  Then again, he might do a safe, studiously-planned show, and bomb.  Either way, I'll be setting the TiVo for a Season Pass.

Over at Newsarama, Matt Brady has an excellent overview of Stan Lee's lawsuit against Marvel and what it may lead to.  Here's that link.

The staff of the comic book Groo the Wanderer extends its congratulations to (and a certain amazement at the endurance of) Becky Grossmann of Olympia, Washington.  As of today, she has been married for 26 years to Gary Grossmann, the world-class undisputed champ of Groo collecting.  The man spends every cent they make on memorabilia of our silly barbarian, and has their home crammed full of the stuff.  If the marriage has survived this, it will survive anything.

I just fixed the Search function on this site.  It was broken.  It didn't work.  Now, it does.  I fixed it.  Because it was broken.  But it isn't now.

On many of his later films, W.C. Fields took to arriving on the set with a thermos bottle filled with straight gin. After every scene, he would dart for the thermos and refresh himself.

The producers, fretting over their schedule, begged him to refrain from alcohol. They even promised that when the film was done, they'd take him on an all-you-can-drink spree at the tavern of his choice.

Fields denied that the thermos contained gin. "It merely contains pineapple juice," he told them. "It soothes a slight stomach discomfort I've been experiencing." This fib, of course, fooled no one.

One day when Fields wasn't looking, a prop man grabbed the thermos, poured out its contents and refilled it with real pineapple juice. A few minutes later, when the comedian came over and took a swig, he was horrified. He spit the offending liquid out and screamed…

"Some bastard put pineapple juice in my pineapple juice!"

That's Carl Reiner and he's my pick for the second-best practitioner I've ever seen in the art of the audience warm-up.  That's when they're taping or filming a TV show and someone comes out beforehand and tries to get the crowd into the proper mood to laugh and applaud.  Who was the best?  And while we're at it, who was the worst?  Well, to find all that out, you really need to check out a column I just posted here.  Click to read all about Audience Warm-Ups.

Amazon.com is now taking orders for the Segway Scooter, a single-user personal vehicle that can carry you around your neighborhood.  I don't expect any of you to shell out the five grand for one — though if you do, go through our links to get to Amazon.  But I did want to mention one nugget of trivia.  The Segway was invented by a gent named Dean Kamen.  Dean's father Jack is now retired from his career as a comic book artist, spent — most notably — drawing for EC Comics.  Surely in one of the EC science-fiction books, there's a picture of someone riding around on a single-user personal vehicle…

Fynsworth Alley is a company that releases Broadway-type albums.  They do both newly-recorded works along with CDs of great old records, and they're about to reissue what may be the worst record album ever made.  In 1979, for God knows what reason, one of Broadway's greatest stars recorded The Ethel Merman Disco Album, and it's really amazing.  It doesn't work as a Broadway album, it doesn't work as a comedy album…hell, it doesn't even work as a disco album!  The folks at Fynsworth Alley (pronounced Fins-worth) are not yet taking advance orders for its CD incarnation but never mind that.

You don't want to buy this.  Trust me.  What you might want to do is go to the Fynsworth Alley website and listen to a few of the short online samples they have available in RealAudio.  And if these don't convince you that you don't want it, this website has two entire songs available, also in RealAudio.  "I Got Rhythm" done disco?  "There's No Business Like Show Business?"  Good heavens.

Ethel Merman was a great talent with a corresponding ego.  You have to wonder just what she thought she was doing when she said yes to this.  Did she think a new generation would spark to her sound?  Disco was already a joke in '79 so the logical assumption is that she thought it was a spoof…but she went out and did the talk show circuit in dead-earnest, singing live (she refused to lip-sync) and doing little disco dance steps even though she was nearing 80.  I'm guessing the record company thought the curiosity factor would move sufficient product…but what was on her mind?  Maybe — and I'm only being half-serious when I suggest this — it was an early symptom of the brain cancer that killed her just a few years later.

I've often thought there should be a service to which celebrities can subscribe when they're young, still in possession of their faculties and concerned about maintaining an image.  The service would monitor their public performances and, at the appropriate moment, go to them and say, "Time to stop dancing" or "Time to lose the jet black toupee" or — eventually — "Time to stop performing."  For male comedians, there would be a special alert for the age when sex jokes become unbecoming.  (It's around the point when you begin using your genitalia strictly for waste elimination.)  Groucho needed such a service.  So did Uncle Miltie.  And wouldn't it have been nice if Sinatra hadn't made those last few albums?  Some loving soul should have stopped Ethel.

Anyway, we recommend taking a quick, free listen to Ms. Merman's oddest work.  But for the love of God, don't buy it.  Buy this, instead…

I want to thank all of you who've donated cash to this site as per the little tipping box below.  I try to write a personal "thank you" for each donation but I got way behind, and some of the ones I did send bounced back as "undeliverable."  Anyway, the gratuities are appreciated.  Rest assured it's all going to buy really stupid crap on eBay.

One other thing about the end of Pee-wee's Playhouse.  You may recall that, around the end of 1988, Ralph Nader went on a Boston-based radio program to complain about a pay raise that Congress was about to vote itself.  Somehow, the suggestion emerged that, in the spirit of the Boston Tea Party, irate citizens should protest this action by mailing a tea bag to their representatives.  The concept made the rounds of talk radio programs and before long, Congresspeople were waist-high in orange pekoe.  In February of 1989, Congress voted down that increase, and the radio hosts crowed about their supposed power.  (There was some question as to whether the bill would have been defeated anyway, but The Great Teabag Protest went into the history books and has not been repeated.  Matter of fact, I don't recall hearing a peep when subsequent raises were adopted.)

Not long after l'affaire teabag, Paul Reubens had his much-joked-about arrest and word got around — erroneously — that CBS had dropped his show because of it.  A talk radio host in San Francisco decided this was a major injustice and launched a similar protest.  For this one, folks were urged to register their outrage by mailing CBS a pink bow-tie since (I guess) Pee-wee wore pink bow-ties.

When you think about it, this is a really dumb idea — several really dumb ideas, actually.  Even if the show hadn't already stopped production, even if Reubens had unfairly lost a series he wanted to continue…there have to be more shameful injustices in the world.  Plus, if you want to inundate the offending party with mail, you ought to pick something easy for the protesters to send…like, say, a teabag.  Almost everyone has a teabag around the house and they cost around six cents apiece.  How many of you have a spare pink bow-tie handy?  How many of you, assuming you cared about Pee-wee's Playhouse, would go out and purchase one for a couple of bucks and mail it to CBS?

Anyway, I was over at CBS, visiting the Childrens Programming Department a few weeks after this particular crusade was announced.  Posted on one wall was an article about the radio host and the movement he had spawned.  In the piece, he reported on the dozens of other radio shows that had picked up the cause and urged viewers to mail their pink bow-ties to CBS, along with irate letters and threats to boycott the Columbia Broadcasting System.  The campaign had been, he said, a smashing success.  An inside source had told him that the network was swimming in angry mail and pink bow-ties.

And posted next to this in the CBS office were all six protest letters they'd received, along with the one pink bow-tie.

Why is this child crying?  Hey, you'd cry if your father had dressed you up for Halloween as the idiot barbarian, Groo the Wanderer.  Devout Groo fan Jason Nuttall claims that his daughter Rebecca insisted on this costume, but I'm suspicious.  She was born 9/11/2002 to Jason and spouse Melissa, who promptly nicknamed her "Li'l Groo."  That means the kid was around six weeks of age at Halloween — a bit too young to really know about the Groo comic book, though emotionally mature enough to work on it.  But don't fear for young Rebecca.  She's young.  She'll have years to outgrow this traumatic childhood indignity.  And if she doesn't, that's okay.  She'll grow up like her dad and we can always use another reader.  (Thanks, Jason…)

The Associated Press is reporting that actor Paul Reubens — best known for the character Pee-wee Herman — is in legal trouble again, this time relating to a charge of possessing child pornography.  I have only the most casual acquaintance with the guy and know nothing about his sexual interests, past or present, that hasn't been in the newspapers.  Still, it struck me that his 1991 arrest (for indecent exposure) was a bit of a raw deal.  Whipping it out in an adult theater during a porn movie?  I haven't been in one of those places in a couple of decades but I have a hunch that such behavior is not unprecedented and that other patrons are not overly offended.  The crime, alas, lent itself to so many jokes that it got more attention than it deserved.

In any case, I think his career history is getting a bum rap here.  The AP story linked above contains the following line…

After Reubens' 1991 plea, his children's show was canceled and his star faded, but he has played supporting roles in the films "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Blow."

Not exactly accurate.  Almost a year before the arrest, Reubens and CBS had mutually agreed the time had come to close down Pee-wee's Playhouse.  At the time of the incident in the theater, its last episode had already had several airings and Reubens had pretty much abandoned the character, as was evident to anyone who saw the mug shot.  He had long hair and a beard, and had obviously not played the crewcut, clean-shaven Pee-wee in months.  The "scandal" caused advertisers to pull out of the last few scheduled reruns, so CBS dropped them.  Instead of all the episodes of the final season having the customary three reruns, a few had only two.  Implying that the show was canceled because of the bust is therefore, at the very least, misleading.  (A friend of mine who has worked with him maintains that the failure of Reubens' second movie — Big Top Pee-wee — did a lot more to kill off Mr. Herman and Paul's movie career than the arrest.)

Actually, in terms of employment, he hasn't done as badly as the above line would indicate, especially considering that he no longer plays the character that made him a star.  Beyond the jobs mentioned in the AP story, he also had nice parts in Batman Returns, Mystery Men, a number of other movies and a recurring role on the TV show, Murphy Brown.  For whatever it's worth, the industry buzz is that Reubens is occupied with his own projects and has turned down a lot of offers.

But I guess it makes a better story to say that the kids' show host got busted, his show got axed and his career hit the skids.  This new arrest may actually make him unemployable but, considering what some other stars have gotten away with, I wouldn't bet on that.

Two great newspaper strips — Terry and the Pirates and Steve Canyon — were created, written and drawn by the late Milton Caniff.  Mr. Caniff had assistance with the drawing part of the job from men like Dick Rockwell and Ray Bailey…but one of his most valuable aides never put pencil or pen to the illustration board.  That was Wilhelmina "Willie" Tuck, who functioned for decades, beginning in 1939, as his office manager, cook, messenger, and all-around protector.  Sometimes called "The Sweetheart of Palm Springs" after Caniff moved his home and office there — she was a splendid hostess for all who visited the great cartoonist.

Sad to report, she passed away November 11 at the age of 84.  According to Shel Dorf, who worked as Caniff's last letterer, "She was a key member of the Caniff operation, keeping him on deadline, getting his strips to the syndicate.  She was crucial to all that and well-loved by anyone who met her."

The intrepid Heidi "Ace" McDonald — comic book editor and reporter, par excellence — is on top of the Stan Lee lawsuit story.  She's even managed to scrounge up and post an actual copy of Stan's complaint, which she's posted over here at Comicon's Pulse News section.  Go there if you want to get the latest.