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The seating at the Pantages Theater in Hollywood is even screwier than I thought. The front row in the orchestra is "A" and the last row is "ZZ." So wouldn't that make you think they have 52 rows? Yeah, but they don't.

Row "Z" is not followed as I thought by "AA." It's followed by "NN." So wouldn't that make you think they have 39 rows? Yeah, but they don't.

They skip rows "I," "O" and "OO." So they have 36 rows downstairs.

It's only slightly less confusing in the Mezzanine where it runs "A" through "Q" but skipping "I" and "O." Actually, "J" through "Q" are called the Balcony. Remember how I said no one should sit in the Mezzanine? That goes triple for the Balcony. I didn't notice if there was anyone up there for Wicked but I know they've closed off the Balcony for many of the shows that have played in that building. As well they should. You can see the stage from those seats but you'll need the Hubble Telescope to do it.

Thanks to readers Brian Monte and Jessica Bellman who sent me e-mails that helped straighten this out as much as it can be straightened out.

Before we end a year in which we lost a number of great veteran comic book creators, let's salute one who's still with us and still outputting fine work. Here's an article about Russ Heath, who has been drawing comic books since (to the best of my knowledge) 1946. And you know what? He's still terrific.

Douglas McEwan came up with an answer that had not occurred to me as to how those autograph-seekers knew to be outside with Star Wars posters after the play last night…

There's no mystery to how those people found out Harrison Ford was there. Twitter. No, as you said, he didn't tweet where he was going, but I'd guess somewhere between 10 and 100, or given the size of the Pantages, maybe 1000, people inside the theater did tweet: "OMG Harrison Ford is HERE!" All their followers retweeted it, and it spreads like wildfire.

Twitter is a disaster for celebrities hoping to go out in public unmolested. Also, Wicked's huge success is due in large part to it connecting with teenage girls. It gets the Twilight audience. When I saw it, several years ago (From the back row of the top balcony. It was Wicked's first L.A. engagement and tickets were hard to come by. Fortunately, I was dead center, so at least I had a good view of Eugene Lee's work.) and I had never before seen so many teenage girls in a theater audience. Every single one of them would be carrying a phone, and tweeting their brains out. Every one of them that spotted Harrison Ford undoubtedly tweeted about it.

You think Wicked is a prequel to the movie? I don't, though it's just an opinion, not any kind of factual knowledge of what Gregory Maguire had in mind when he wrote the book. It struck me as a prequel to the book far more than to the movie. I had read the novel first, which is darker, more complex, and more of a downer. The novel definitely reaches to be a prequel to the book, I think, but it's really more related to Maguire's now four-book series of adult Oz Books, and they've strayed so far from Baum or MGM that it can really only be consdered a prequel to his own Oz saga.

I tried to read the second, but got bummed and bored quickly, and abandoned it around Chapter Three. Have not read the other two. I was very impressed with how extremely well Winnie Holzman (married to Paul Dooley) managed to winnow down that sprawling, complicated book into a plotline that worked. I think the musical improves a lot on the book. And I agree that the look of it was magnificent. Given how extreme its popularity is, and that the stage production was partly financed by a movie studio (Universal, if I remember right), I can not fathom why they haven't filmed it yet. They should do it before their core audience outgrows it. Tweens can be fickle fans.

You may be right about the Twitterings but the folks who showed up outside last night were not Harrison Ford fans or teenage girls or anyone you'd think would be wired into a network with the kind of folks inside. The more I think about it, the more I think there was one person who'd passed around the posters for others to get signed, probably (as I theorized earlier) for small fees if they succeeded. From where I could see/hear, the signature-cravers did not even have anything fannish to say to Mr. Ford. No one said, "Oh, I'm such an admirer of your work" or "I loved the Star Wars movies." They just stood there with the posters and pens muttering, "Will you sign this?" It would not surprise me if some of them didn't know who Harrison Ford was.

I'm not really sure what Wicked was intended to be a prequel to — book or movie. I'm guessing that for legal reasons, they'd say it was the book (which is public domain) and opposed to the movie (which isn't) — but most of the attendees were obviously referencing the movie even if some of the plot details suggested the book. Actually, I haven't read Maguire's Oz books and it's been a long time since I read Baum's.

I can sure fathom why they haven't filmed this show yet: The play is still raking in money and they fear a movie will interfere with that. But once the show closes on Broadway and the touring companies go away, they'll get to work on it. That day may be a while off. Even in the huge Gershwin Theater, the Broadway play is still playing to 90%+ capacity after more than eight years. And in addition to the New York company, there are two touring companies in the U.S. that are scheduled through early 2013 and there are at least four international productions. It could easily be another eight years before that revenue slows to a trickle and Universal decides it's time to make a movie.

Someone who signs his e-mails "Jethro" writes to ask…

So why do some theaters put row AA in the front and some put it way in the back behind row X? Why isn't that kind of thing standardized?

It's probably not standardized because there's no controlling authority to standardize it. As for why they do it, I'd assume the problem is that some theaters have rows of seats in the front that can be removed if they need space there for performing or for an orchestra. So they name the front row of fixed seats "Row A" and then when the removable rows are inserted, the only way they can suggest they're closer than "A" is to call them AA, BB and so on. But then you have a place like the Pantages that has 52 fixed rows in its orchestra…and I think you can see the problem.

The Internet has made all this less of a problem — or it should have — because all the seating charts are online and sometimes, you even click on one to select your seats when you order tickets online. That's how I got pretty good seats to Wicked. I've learned the hard way to check before I buy.

You're looking at a photo of my long-time friend Tony Isabella. We met via mail around (I'm guessing) 1967. We met in person at my first comic book convention in New York in 1970. I took the above picture in a hotel room at another New York Con in either 1975 or 1976. We'd brought a pizza back to the room and in so doing, actually managed to find lousy pizza in New York. Being Jewish, I had an excuse…but you'd think an Italian guy could find decent pizza.

Tony was at the time working for Marvel as a writer and assistant editor. He was pretty good at it, just as he's been pretty good at all the writing and editing he's done for other companies in the years since. He's recently been writing a comic called The Grim Ghost for a new incarnation of the seventies' comic company, Atlas. I've only read two issues but if they're all that good, this book deserves a lot of attention. And I need to pick up the issues I don't have yet.

During all the years we've been pals, I don't recall Tony and I ever having a fight. Disagreements? Certainly…plenty of 'em. But good friends have a way of resolving disagreements without becoming disagreeable and we've somehow managed that. I can't speak for Tony but I intend to keep it that way for another 44 years.

Happy 60th birthday, Tony. Hope the next sixty are even better.

Since Stu Shostak was nice enough to send me that great link to the Santa Claus Lane Parade video, I'm going to thank him with a quick plug for today's episode of his Internet radio extravaganza, Stu's Show. Today, he's chatting with Barry Livingston from My Three Sons and with Dick DeBartolo. Dick is otherwise known as "The Giz Wiz Guy," talking about all sorts of new inventions you didn't know you needed until he told you they existed. He has also been a great writer of game shows like The Match Game, and he's been writing for MAD Magazine since about the time they fired their original cover artist, Leonardo daVinci, and brought in Norman Mingo. Leonardo drew a crappy Alfred anyway. He could never get the smile right.

It all starts today at 4 PM Pacific Time which is 7 PM in New York and other times in other places. Listen live as they webcast for free by going to stusshow.com at the appointed hour or go there later and download the show for a mere 99 cents. Stu is still running his big Xmas Sale. Download any four vintage episodes of Stu's Show and the checkout software will only charge you for three. Such a bargain.

Some time ago at a party, I heard a Very Big Star explaining (with great regrets) that he'd stopped attending live theater and concerts. He'd had a number of bad experiences where fans and autograph seekers had paid way too much attention to him to the extent of ruining the event for him, his family and others around them. Getting in, he said, was a problem. Getting out, he said, was a bigger problem. Being in his seat at Intermission or just before the show commenced was, he said, the biggest problem. At one play, he'd made the mistake of signing one autograph for someone. That had triggered a hundred more requests and the theater had actually had to delay the start of Act Two because so many folks were in the aisle, thrusting their Playbills and scraps of paper at him for a signature.

He'd tried, he explained, the "presidential" way of attendance. He'd arranged with the venue to have guards get him and his family to their seats just after the lights went down and get the party out just before they went up. "I felt stupid," he said, "like we thought we were the Royal Family or something." What's more, it didn't work. The sneaky entrances and exits had just made the audience more aware that Someone Important was in the house. So he'd stopped going, he explained…with real regret.

I thought of that last night during Wicked. I was sitting in the aisle seat in the center section of Row J. Sitting in the seat across the aisle in Row I was Harrison Ford and he was with about seven people, mostly young children. I noticed he made a point of taking the aisle seat so (I'm guessing this was his reason) he could protect his group from fans who'd try to crawl across them to get to him. Everyone else in his entourage was either too young or too old to play bodyguard.

But I also didn't see anyone bother him. A lot of folks recognized him and some nodded and smiled and waved to acknowledge they liked him…and he'd nod and smile and wave back to acknowledge their acknowledgement. Not one of them, insofar as I could see, trampled on his or his group's theater-going experience.

Until they got outside. Waiting right outside the Pantages Theater were two limousines — one, a long white stretch that I think was for someone else; the other, a big black SUV-model that seated eight, I think. Mr. Ford steered his party towards that one which meant braving about six photographers who were snapping picture after picture, sometimes right in their faces, preventing them from getting to the vehicle.

He did not respond like Indiana Jones barrelling through a phalanx of ninjas, though I suspect the thought crossed his mind. He just made his way through, ignoring the cameras as much as possible and looking rather pained. He also ignored about a half-dozen folks waving Star Wars-related posters and pens…and these were clearly not loyal fans looking for treasured keepsakes. It was pretty obvious that Ford was being expected to sign stuff they could sell on eBay or wherever.

I'm still trying to figure that out. Presumably, Mr. Ford did not tweet earlier in the day, "Heading for Pantages Theater in Hollywood tonight." How did those folks who had the posters know he'd be there? They probably don't carry pictures of Han Solo with them everywhere they go. I'm guessing one or more of them had staked out the theater for any celebrities, saw him enter and then rushed off to buy the posters from a nearby memorabilia shop, of which there are many down that boulevard. All the posters looked like they were from the same source. I'm guessing one person bought them all, then passed them out to folks loitering outside the Pantages and said, "I'll pay you ten bucks if you get him to sign it." Ford, of course, signed not a one of them.

None of this is to suggest that anyone should feel sorry for poor Harrison Ford. No one becomes that big a star against his will and this kind of thing is a pretty small trade-off for fame 'n' fortune…and hey, you know, I didn't have a limo waiting for me in front of the theater. I was just impressed with how little fuss was made by anyone apart from the paparazzi at the curb. Everyone inside who recognized him respected a little zone of privacy. I'm sure there were loads of people who would have wanted a signature or a handshake or to just be able to tell the man they loved all his movies. But they didn't. They left him and his folks alone to enjoy the play. I liked that almost as much as I liked Wicked.

The late Bob Clampett directed great cartoons and was later a great repository of cartoon history. In the early seventies when most of his old co-workers couldn't be bothered to answer questions about "the old days," he was accessible and friendly to all. More to the point, he had a good memory and an amazing stash of stuff he'd saved — much of it reportedly fished out of wastebaskets and not necessarily his — to supplement his recollections. From time to time, he'd invite local animation buffs up to his dwelling in the Hollywood Hills just to watch his old cartoons and talk about them. One of the times I was so privileged, he ran his 1944 Merry Melody Russian Rhapsody and one of the young animators present asked Bob how a certain bit of animation — an unusual effect — had been done. Bob excused himself, disappeared into an off-limits room in his home, then returned with the actual cels and animation drawings for that sequence and proceeded to explain.

Animation historian Michael Barrier was one of the folks who tapped into Clampett's grand memory and archives. That Bob was often inflating his own role was inarguable to the point where he eventually joked about it. One time when we were lunching, he asked me, "Did I ever tell you how I invented the grilled cheese sandwich?" He was hardly the only one of his contemporaries to spin history in his own direction…as many did once Bob's interviews prompted them to agree to their own. At times, it almost seemed like if you worked in the Warner Brothers cartoon studio within a year either way of the birth of Bugs Bunny, you had to claim fathership. No one's tale of how they'd created the wabbit was uniquely believable and Bob eventually had to walk his (and a few other such assertions) back a few blocks. But if you could get around that with most of those guys and apply a little skepticism, there was much to be learned. You also had to deal with the fact that some of them hated each other and it was not always easy to remain friends with both sides.

At one point, Clampett marked up a map of Los Angeles for Barrier and on it, he tried to pinpoint where certain moments in cartoon lore had occurred. Being a sucker for the history of both animation and old L.A., I was naturally fascinated. That map has now been scanned for posterity and the Internet and Michael is sharing it over at his website.

This is an add-on to the previous post. It occurs to me that the Mad, Mad, Mad Comedians special-pilot starts with and really features the Smothers Brothers…who at the time this aired (4/70) had been booted off CBS despite pretty good ratings. This leads me to suspect that the show was produced at least a year before it aired. I mean, if you were a TV producer, would you want to be shopping around a pilot starring two guys who'd just been kicked off network television because right-wing advertisers didn't want them on? The Brothers went off in September of '69 but their cancellation was final some time before that and looming in the previous months. Also, a year or so before, Flip Wilson was pretty hot and all the networks were courting him for a series. His NBC one went on the air in September of 1970.

Within the animation industry, there was a long, checkered history of proposed cartoon shows built around the Marx Brothers. For a time there, every time I turned around, a different producer either had the rights, thought he had the rights or was pitching the idea with the hope that he could secure the rights. My friend Earl Kress wrote an entire pilot for Filmation and not long after that failed to go anywhere, I was approached by another producer (not anyone you've ever heard of) who said he was "making a deal" with whoever you'd make a deal with for such things. He wanted me to write the pilot for his Marx Brothers cartoon series but there was a catch: No Groucho. He had the rights to use Chico and Harpo and he thought he could get Zeppo ("How expensive could he be?") if I thought Zeppo's inclusion would make up for the absence of the guy with the mustache. I told him it would be like hearing "I Heard It Through The Grapevine" performed by Pips only.

In the letter mentioned in the previous posting, Groucho Marx wrote to a Corporal Jerome G. Darrow who was stationed in Surinam in 1943.

A reader of this site, Brad Ferguson, was curious as to what became of Corporal Darrow and did a bit o' Googling. This would appear to be his gravesite, meaning that he survived the war, lived to the age of 73 and received a number of promotions along the way. I guess that's a happy ending. Nice detective work, Brad.

Groucho Marx writes a morale-boosting note to the troops in 1943. Thanks to Devlin Thompson for the link.

We often shill here for the Reprise! theater group which stages dandy, short-run productions of classic musicals up at UCLA. This year's season was supposed to consist of Cabaret followed by The Baker's Wife and then The Apple Tree.

Their Cabaret, which I reviewed here, was superb. But now they've announced that The Baker's Wife, which was to have run February 14 through 26 of '12, will not take place and there will be no replacement show in its place. Put simply, ticket sales and fundraising drives have been insufficient. Subscribers are being offered refunds with the hint that they could instead donate that money to Reprise! The Apple Tree is still scheduled to be produced in April.

This is very sad news for lovers of good theater in Los Angeles. I didn't think this year's choice of shows was as strong as some…but if Reprise! with its track record for delivering quality on stage isn't making it these days, that's a bad sign for all. Very bad.

I like Jerry Lewis. I like him enough that when he made his Broadway debut in Damn Yankees, my friend Paul Dini and I flew back just to be in the audience for opening night.

I like the guy but to be a Jerry Lewis fan is to cringe often at the man's excesses, ramblings, self-serving statements, angry lash-outs at those he thinks have wronged him, etc. On that great new boxed DVD set of Laurel and Hardy films (this one), he babbles on about their history, getting it all wrong, apparently unaware that there are in this world people who actually know the truth. If someone had made so many errors telling the story of Martin and Lewis, he'd have been furious…but he just goes on and on doing this stuff. Given that he's 85, you might excuse it because of age. Trouble is, he's been like this all his life.

Jerry Lewis: Method to the Madness is the new two-hour documentary that's now playing on the Encore channel. What's wrong with it is summarized in the second on-screen title card at the end — an Executive Producer credit for Jerry Lewis. I don't know how much he actually did on it or what kind of freedom filmmaker Gregg Barson had, but you wish someone could or would tell Jerry, "Uh, it isn't a great idea to announce you were the top guy in charge of an overexcessive tribute to yourself."

Not only that but it's a tribute that so deifies its subject that the mortal can't measure up to the hype. The clips of his work do not demonstrate the brilliance described by the talking heads that range from Jerry Seinfeld's to Carol Burnett's. There may be no clips in the world by anyone that would. I can well imagine younger folks, unfamiliar with Lewis's body of work, watching this, hearing of his comedic genius…and then wondering what's so spectacular about wedging the entire mouth of a drinking glass in your mouth for half a century. All the material of Lewis on-stage in his eighties is a little sad in that way.

The film is primarily about Jerry's work, as opposed to his off-stage life, though there are exceptions such as the looks at his relationship with his father. In both categories — personal and professional — the good parts are mentioned and the bad parts are hurried past or in most cases, omitted altogether. There's plenty about how Jerry's successful films were successful; almost nothing about how or why they eventually stopped being successful. The superstar days of Martin and Lewis are dwelled upon in depth; very little about how or why they ended. There's the great moment of the reunion on the Muscular Dystrophy Telethon; almost nothing about criticisms of the telethon and zero about Jerry's ouster from it. Lewis has had many hills and many valleys but in this overview of the man, it's nearly all hills. Nothing about The Day the Clown Cried. Nothing about Jerry's failed TV projects or the Jerry Lewis Cinemas. There's Carol Burnett talking about the greatness of Jerry; nothing about his occasional statements that female comedians, Carol Burnett included, are never funny.

Why in two hours of telling us what a legend he was and is, wasn't there time for that? Most viewers, even before they see Jerry's Exec Producer credit, will leap to a simple assumption. The filmmaker wouldn't have gotten his "unlimited access" (as it was called in the press releases) if he'd wanted to visit the valleys.

We've had a number of these "life of great comedian" documentaries lately. I thought the one about Don Rickles had some of the same problems of fawning that the Jerry Lewis one had, though not as many…and it fawned over Rickles as a guy who was great on a Vegas stage, as opposed to a guy who revolutionized comedy and filmmaking. The one about Joan Rivers made her out to be about the unfunniest, most unpleasant woman on the planet. The one about Phyllis Diller (also by Mr. Barson) was incisive and revelatory, and it really put her career in the proper context and perspective.

This time, I'm afraid Barson tackled a subject with skin so thin that it could not withstand his own reality. The resulting portrait, intended or not, is of a star in need of unrelenting bootlicking and praise, far exceeding his own considerable achievements. I'm not suggesting that's inaccurate. In fact, it may well be that in that sense, Barson did the perfect job of showing us the real Jerry Lewis.

Here's a short profile of a short cartoonist. Irwin Hasen drew the newspaper strip Dondi for a long time and was a top, underappreciated super-hero artist for DC Comics before that. He has long been one of my favorite creators from his generation to dine with or to interview at comic conventions. Since we seem to be losing the comic book creators of his generation, let's celebrate one who's still with us.

A friend of mine recently wrote me to ask a good question. He has a ton of old Laserdiscs — hundreds of 'em — and he's wondering what to do with them. There seems to be a market for the few that contain material not yet released on DVD, though of course even that market diminishes as time goes by and more titles come out. Even plucking out those few and selling them off doesn't solve the big problem of all the rest. Does anyone have a good suggestion apart from throwing them all out or offering the lot on Craig's List for a hundred bucks providing you come over and haul them all away?

I ask not to help my friend but myself as I am in that same situation. I must have around 500, not a one of which has been played in ten years. I assume at least a few have undergone that ugly oxidation process some called "laser rot" back when anyone discussed laserdiscs at all.

I also have more than a thousand of these things called record albums…also unplayed for at least a decade. Some of those, I know, have a value because they're certain releases with important cover art and such. Actually, since a pretty high percentage of them are comedy records, a lot of them are not out on CD and perhaps will never be on CD except as transfers done by private collectors. About once a month, I stare at them and ponder what, if anything, I should do with this collection. I haven't the time or inclination to do such transfers myself so please don't suggest that. Any other ideas would be most welcome.

Hanna-Barbera maven Don Yowp offers more history on the first Hanna-Barbera cartoon series. I watched a few of them the other day and was pleasantly surprised at how well they held up — not great, not even as good as the H-B shows that immediately followed but quite watchable.