Category Archives: Video Links

For an array of personal reasons, I haven't been back to New York since April of 2008 and it'll be a while before I get back there again. This means I'm missing a lot of great theater I'd like to see on and around Broadway. One show I'd really like to see is the new revival of Follies which stars Bernadette Peters, Jan Maxwell, Danny Burstein, Ron Raines and Elaine Paige. By the time I get back there again, it'll probably star kids who've been fired off Glee for being too realistic. So for the time being at least, I'll have to be content with this nine-minute preview…

This runs a hair over an hour and forty minutes but you might want to watch a little to see two fascinating people. In November of 1982, Shel Dorf did this video interview with his hero (and then-employer) Milton Caniff. Caniff was, of course, the creator of the great comic strip Steve Canyon…and the even-greater (some of us think) Terry and the Pirates before that. Dorf was, as most of you know, behind the institution we now know as the Comic-Con International down in San Diego every year. Others had a lot to do with its existence but Shel was generally afforded the title of Founder. He eventually had a bitter dispute with the institution and quit, whereupon it flourished without him.

The video is in eleven parts which should play sequentially in the player I've embedded below and I must admit that I haven't watched the entire thing yet myself. In it, I see a different story than the one Mr. Caniff tells about his life and his work. Instead, the video reminds me of all the contradictions of Shel's life. As should be obvious, he was in absolute awe of Caniff…and folks like Jack Kirby, Al Capp, Russ Manning…anyone who was able to make any sort of living, let alone a great one, in comic books or strips. He wanted desperately to be one of them but lacked the talent and — perhaps of greater liability — the work ethic.

Guys like Caniff and Kirby succeeded in part because they'd put in 60+ hours a week on their respective endeavors. They'd put in more if they had to. I knew Shel for many decades and he often came to me, as he went to others, for advice with his occasional attempts to find a place for himself in that world. I could never decide if he didn't put in more effort because he believed he couldn't succeed or if he couldn't succeed because he didn't put in more effort.

I am not a big believer in the advice often given to those who aspire to anything — "You can be anything in life if you try hard enough." The way I see it, we all have limitations — of opportunity along with ability — and that success has a lot to do with recognizing those limitations and finding something you want to do that is within the realm of reality. Tomorrow, if I decide that I want to be a successful jockey, that is not going to happen and it won't be because I didn't try hard enough. Shel was proof: He wanted to be Milton Caniff as much as any human being could possibly want to be Milton Caniff. He probably wanted to be Milton Caniff more than Milton Caniff wanted to be Milton Caniff. He only got as close as doing the lettering and minor grunt work on Steve Canyon…and he only got that because Caniff asked him to learn to letter and tutored him.

When Caniff died in 1988, just six years after this conversation, Shel briefly thought he'd be asked to "take over" the Steve Canyon strip. Caniff always wrote the feature but by then, he was doing only a small part of the artwork with the bulk being handled by Dick Rockwell. Under the impression that the syndicate would want the franchise to continue, Shel began planning. He came to me — and I suspect he approached others about this — and asked if I'd be willing to audition to take over the writing. Well, that isn't exactly accurate. He thought writing Steve Canyon — even without credit and for an undiscussed fee — was such a thrilling opportunity that anyone would leap at the offer. He would play Editor, keeping my work faithful to Milt's intent, and he'd also supervise Rockwell…and the new letterer he'd find because he [Shel] would be too busy running the strip to spend the two hours a week it took to letter it.

It sounded to me like a great project to avoid…and also one of those "probably not going to happen" offers that we all get all the time. And happen, it did not. The syndicate decided not to continue Steve Canyon and that was the end of Shel's life in comics. I'm pretty sure that if they had decided to keep it going, he would not have been placed in charge of it.

Based on as much of this video as I've watched, there's plenty of interesting insight into Caniff's history and modus operandi, so you can watch it for that. I found myself watching for the warm relationship and the jarring contrast between Interviewer and Interviewee. There probably was a place for Shel's unique set of skills in the world of comics but he never managed to find it, a fact that still makes me sad. He did leave us much of value including the convention and historical records like this, and for those we can be grateful. I just wish he'd found more of value for himself.

Here's Shel talking with his idol…

We were recently talking about Wicked here. Here's a little bit of Joel Grey from the original Broadway production…

Hey, are you in the mood to watch The Wizard of Oz? Don't worry if you don't have 103 minutes. This one's only thirteen and a half and it's a surprisingly crisp transfer of the 1910 version. Amazingly, it was not the first time L. Frank Baum's story was filmed but it seems to be the earliest which survives today.

Wikipedia, which as we all know is never wrong about anything, says "It was created to fulfill a contractual obligation associated with Baum's personal bankruptcy caused by The Fairylogue and Radio-Plays, from which it was once thought to have been derived. It was partly based on the 1902 stage musical, though much of the film deals with the Wicked Witch of the West, who does not appear in the musical." There were several sequels filmed by the same outfit but they are considered Lost Films. Anyway, here you go…

Before we lose the holiday spirit, let's go to Seattle and to the Fantagraphics Bookstore and Gallery. They're celebrating the release of the greatest comic strip reprint series ever (or so we think around here) with an exhibit of Walt Kelly Pogo strips. There recently, the Choir of the Sound — a local singing group that just happens to include the wife of the book's co-editor — favored the crowd with a stirring rendition of Mr. Kelly's classic carol, "Deck Us All With Boston Charlie." Maestro, if you please…

My favorite Christmas-time video is probably this commercial animated by R.O. Blechman. They don't make 'em like this anymore…

Tom Lehrer's Chanukah song as performed by the Gay Men's Chorus of Los Angeles. But of course…

This is this year's obit reel from Turner Classic Movies. They always do a classy job on these, in part because they include many folks who aren't well enough known to make the reel they'll show in a couple months at the Oscars. But TCM also does theirs a few weeks before the year ends so they go back later and edit in anyone who passes away in the last few weeks of December. Let's see how this one changes…

Hey, it's Tom Lehrer with one of my favorite songs for this time of year…

By coincidence, as I was writing the previous posting, my pal Stu Shostak e-mailed me a link to a video taken outside the Pantages Theater in 1960. It's 24.5 minutes from that year's Santa Claus Lane Parade — an annual ritual back then to promote Christmas shopping in Hollywood. It usually took place the Wednesday night before Thanksgiving so it didn't have to follow the Macy's Parade with its huge floats and balloons. The promenade down Hollywood Boulevard lacked glitzy, expensive things like that but usually managed to compensate somewhat with local celebrities.

If you sit through this video, you'll see (among others) Chucko the Birthday Clown, Soupy Sales, Don DeFore, Bozo the Clown (Vance Colvig), Johnny Crawford, Sheriff John, the casts of many then-current shows like Leave it to Beaver and The Untouchables, newsman George Putnam (who always rode his horse in the parade) and even Del Moore, the gent I've mentioned here for his appearances in darn near everything Jerry Lewis ever did. You may even spot Bullwinkle. Around 12:30 into the proceedings, you can catch a quick glimpse of an unidentified June Foray and Bill Scott sitting on either side of someone in a moose suit. It was probably the Berkowitzes.

The announcer is Bill Welsh, who was a fixture of L.A. television from its inception through his death in 2000. He was the longtime president of the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, which was the group behind this parade. Welsh was one of the guys who did everything in early TV but was usually a sportscaster. In 1948, he covered the first telecast of the Rose Parade in Pasadena, then ran over and called the plays for the first telecast of the Rose Bowl game. Shortly before he died, he pushed through a major redevelopment project for Hollywood Boulevard that has cleaned up the place considerably…though not enough.

The parade, which has changed names a number of times, started in 1928 but didn't become a big deal until the mid-forties when Gene Autry, who rode it in every year he could, wrote a song about it. It went "Here comes Santa Claus, here comes Santa Claus, right down Santa Claus Lane," and it was a pretty big hit. Then when the parade went on television, it became an important annual event in Los Angeles…all the way into the seventies when interest fell off and it stopped being on TV. They discontinued the parade at one point, then brought it back as a smaller event…and I hear it's even televised on small channels now. But apart from hearing that Hollywood Boulevard is going to be closed for the evening, you never hear anything about it. It's not like the old days…

We love clips of Allan Sherman on this blog. Here from a 1965 special he did is a little segment with the British group Herman's Hermits and its leader, Peter Noone…

Here's an unusual animated special that the folks at Rankin-Bass produced in 1970 — or at least it aired in April of that year. It was called The Mad, Mad, Mad Comedians and I believe it was intended as the pilot for a series. The idea was that each week, the antics of a bevy of great funnymen and women — some from the past, some from the present — would be animated. This was the only episode produced and it featured Jack Benny, George Burns, Phyllis Diller, Flip Wilson, The Smothers Brothers, Henny Youngman, W.C. Fields, George Jessel, Jack E. Leonard and the Marx Brothers. Most of the voices were done for this show by the comedians themselves, though the Flip Wilson and Smothers Brothers material is from those gents' records.

The most interesting segment is probably the one with the Marx Brothers for which Groucho recorded his own voice. Paul Frees, who's also heard as the announcer throughout, did the voices of Chico and Zeppo with Joan Gardner as the Empress, and the script is adapted from I'll Say She Is, the first show the brothers did on Broadway. Later on, Mr. Frees impersonated W.C. Fields for a segment that used a chunk of one of Fields's classic routines.

The caricatures of all these folks were done by Bruce Stark, who was a sports cartoonist for a couple of decades for the New York Daily News and later branched out into drawing for all the major magazines, including MAD. His work was seen a lot in TV Guide back when everyone read TV Guide, as opposed to now when no one reads TV Guide. Likenesses aren't easy and it's particularly difficult to do them in a style simple enough for animation. I'd say Mr. Stark did a great job. What I suspect caused this to remain unsold as a pilot was the disjointed nature of the program…and the frequent repetition of the annoying theme didn't help. But see what you think.

This video is in two parts which should play one after the other in the player I've embedded below. The Marx segment starts around 11:10 into the first part and continues into the second…

Here's the latest installment of Bruce Kimmel's "Outside the Box" web series. Funny stuff…

On October 13, 1959, Jerry Lewis starred in a live TV drama — a remake of the oft-remade The Jazz Singer. Rarely if ever seen since then, it's going to get a DVD release early next year. Here's a link if you want to advance order it and here's a brief preview…

The fellow playing the boss in this clip is Del Moore, who was in practically everything Jerry did in the late fifties and sixties. He was even Jerry's announcer/sidekick on the short-lived live two-hour talk show Jerry did in prime time in 1963. The guy talking to him is comedian Joey Faye…and the cast also includes Anna Maria Alberghetti, Molly Picon, Alan Reed (just before he signed on to become Fred Flintstone) and playing Jerry's character as a boy, Barry Gordon.

Incidentally, the Encore channel is now running a documentary on Jer. It's called Jerry Lewis: Method to the Madness and I'm hearing good things about it. I just set my TiVo to record it tomorrow.