Category Archives: Video Links

I could embed these but it'll be easier for both of us if you go to this page and click there. Editorial cartoonist Steve Brodner is hosting a series of videos for the website of the Sundance Channel in which he interviews cartoonists he admires.The series is called "Strokes of Genius" and there are two videos each up of chats with Al Jaffee and Sergio Aragonés. Enjoy.

I'll be writing more here about my panels at Comic-Con in the days to come but here's a little taste. This is from Sunday's Cartoon Voice Actor panel…me introducing the legendary Janet Waldo. The fellow you see seated next to her is my co-host, Earl Kress…

The first time I met Joe Barbera was in 1979. He came into a meeting to discuss a show I'd been hired to write, flopped down in a chair and began talking about how exhausted and overloaded he was with Things To Do. The list went something like this: "I have to pick out new carpeting for our living room at home, I have to give a speech at a luncheon tomorrow, we just bought Marineland…"

I laughed but it was almost true. Marineland was an aquatic amusement park out in Palos Verdes, California. You could see trained seals, a trained whale or two, lots of fish in a huge, multi-level aquarium…and that was about it. Not your most exciting day out with the family. The business opened in 1954 and thrived for about twenty years before business fell away. Around 1978, it was sold and for a time, producer Irwin Allen was going to take it over. Then that fell through and for a year or so there, you could pick up the L.A. Times each week and read about hostile takeovers and lawsuits and the new management team of the week. Finally, Hanna-Barbera got involved…and as I understand it, they didn't actually buy the place. The company that owned Hanna-Barbera bought it and they decided to involve Joe and Hanna-Barbera's intellectual property in a revamp.

The park had been losing money for years and J.B. was expected to change that. It was on his mind that day so before we got around to talking about what the meeting was supposed to be about, he talked about that for a while. The problem, he said, was weekdays. Saturday and Sunday, the place did okay…not great but it turned a decent profit. Monday through Friday, however, it took in almost nothing…but it had to be kept open and operating with a nearly-full crew of employees. "It would be great if we could shut it down those days," he said. "But you can't. If you want the trained seals to do six shows on Saturday and Sunday, they have to do six shows every day. On holidays if the place is closed and it's pouring rain, you still have to pay a staff to go there and have the seals do their act to empty seats."

He asked me if I'd been to it. I said yes, my parents took me there once…

Mr. B interrupted. "There's the problem right there. No repeat business. You can see everything there in about three hours. There's no reason to come back. It sure isn't like Disneyland."

I continued, "…and then when I was in elementary school, they took us there a few times via bus for field trips."

Joe nodded. "They used to do that. They had some deal with the city to bus classes there. The city paid them almost nothing but it was mid-week income they otherwise never got. The city won't do that now."

Soon after, Marineland of the Pacific was rechristened Hanna-Barbera's Marineland and they had walk-around costumes of Yogi Bear and Fred Flintstone. They also tried adding some rides but it didn't make a lot of difference. After a few years, the H-B logos were quietly removed and by 1987, the doors were closed and the property, fish, mammals and amphibians were acquired by Sea World in San Diego. If you want to search — and I don't recommend this — you can find some sad photos and videos on the 'net of the lovely building falling to vandalism and neglect before it was finally razed.

Here's a short TV commercial from '81 by which time they'd given up the Hanna-Barbera branding. It'll show you a little about what was fun about Marineland of the Pacific. There were a number of things but they just weren't enough to keep the place afloat…

Another amazing YouTube find: The night of May 6, 1971, Johnny Carson's guest host on The Tonight Show was Woody Allen, whose guests included Bob Hope and James Coco. Someone has uploaded pieces of this broadcast and the little player I've embedded below will play them, though not necessarily in the right order.

There are many points of interest in here. One is that you get to see the way Mr. Carson's show opened for a few years there with some odd graphics. Another is that you see Ed McMahon taking, as he often did with guest hosts, a more activist role in keeping the proceedings moving along.The mutual respect between Mr. Allen and Mr. Hope is obvious, especially the way Woody looks at Bob. And I suppose I'll find other things to enjoy when I have time to watch it again. Here's your chance to watch it now…

Last Tuesday evening, President Obama and the First Lady hosted an evening of Broadway music at the White House. The performers included Nathan Lane, Elaine Stritch, Audra McDonald, Tonya Pinkins, Marvin Hamlisch and Idina Menzel. The show was taped and will be run as a one-hour special on PBS on October 20, which I would imagine means a lot of it will be trimmed out.

In the Broadway chat rooms, they're speculating Ms. Stritch's performance of "I'm Still Here" — one of two numbers she performed — will not make air. Reportedly, she kept forgetting the lyrics and there are reports that she uttered a few words that one usually does not say at the White House or in front of the presidential children. (The mainstream press is reporting the problem with lyrics but not the profanity, so perhaps the latter did not occur.) Stritch has recently taken over, along with Bernadette Peters, in the new revival of A Little Night Music, currently playing at the Walter Kerr Theater in New York. Several playgoers have said online that she is forgetting dialogue there, as well.

I hope this is not so…or if it is that someone will arrange for Ms. Stritch to retire gracefully. She's 84 and has had a wonderful career. It would be sad if it ended with her making audiences uncomfortable…and not in a good way.

In the mid-eighties, I saw Rex Harrison in his sold-out "farewell" tour of My Fair Lady. He was around 75 and generally fine for the first half of the show. But from about "The Rain in Spain" onward, you could feel his energy plunging and he began to take unplanned pauses in speeches while he strained to recall the ends of sentences, then finally and clumsily paraphrased what he was supposed to have said. Finally, in "I've Grown Accustomed to Her Face," he forgot the lyrics completely a few times and had to have someone off-stage prompt him with the words. Each time it happened, you could feel an entire audience at the Pantages Theater in Hollywood cringe in unison that everyone in the building knew the words and Mr. Harrison did not. In the end, we were all probably happy we went. We could all forever say, "I saw Rex Harrison in My Fair Lady," which was a lot of what the tour was all about, I'm sure. But a lot of it was rather sad.

Anyway, here are the President's opening remarks…

And now here, Nathan Lane — looking a bit like he's there under duress — introduces a scaled-down performance of the finale from Hairspray…

My two favorite performers, Mr. Stan Laurel and Mr. Oliver Hardy, star here in The Music Box, their Oscar-winning 1932 short subject. Nobody funnier…

I linked to this long ago but for some reason, I felt like watching it again…so you get to watch it again. Only a handful of YouTube videos have made me laugh out loud. This is one of them…

This is a very brief TV news item about the unveiling of the new postage stamps featuring five classic comic strips — Garfield, Beetle Bailey, Calvin & Hobbes, Archie and Dennis the Menace. Jim Davis is interviewed for five seconds and if you look quickly, you can see Mort Walker in there.To no one's surprise, Bill Watterson declined to participate but he did okay the stamp and one reporter scored a brief interview with him. Either the interviewer somehow didn't ask Watterson what he's working on these days or he did and the interviewee declined to answer.

The stamps are nice, of course…though I'm told that the copyright line for Dennis the Menace misspells the name of his creator, Hank Ketcham.There actually seems to be little mention of the cartoonists themselves in most of the p.r. material…and none whatsoever of the one who did the drawing of Archie that was selected for his stamp. Anyone know who it was? Doesn't look like Dan DeCarlo to me.

Here's the news report. It's very short…

A favorite moment (mine and yours) from Monty Python and the Holy Grail…

A musical comedy called It's a Bird, It's a Plane It's Superman debuted on Broadway on March 29, 1966. It lasted a measly 129 performances and those who see productions of it today rarely wonder at the brevity of its run.The songs, with one or two exceptions, are forgettable.The storyline is silly…and Superman spends much of the second act being whiny and un-super. Who wants to see that? Obviously, not enough for a healthy Broadway run.

But it gets revived a lot by local groups, especially at colleges.The same season Superman opened and closed at the Alvin Theater in New York, a musical called The Zulu and the Zayda opened and closed four blocks away at the Cort. The Zulu and the Zayda lasted 179 performances — even longer than Superman but I've never heard of it being revived anywhere. Obviously, the name of Superman and the mythos keep alive a musical that would otherwise have been forgotten.

A new production is currently playing in Dallas. It features a revised book by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa that has some people talking about a future for this version.That would be exciting. In the meantime, a member of the cast has filed this report…

The video quality of this isn't great but it's certainly worth a look. In 1960, the Bell Telephone Hour presented a highly-compressed version of the classic Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, The Mikado. The cast included Dennis King, Stanley Holloway and Helen Traubel…but the show was stolen and never returned by Groucho Marx. He played Ko-Ko, the tailor turned Lord High Executioner. Despite the odd casting and the many deletions in the show, a lot of people feel it was one of the best presentations ever of The Mikado. Here's Groucho performing Ko-Ko's big song…

This runs close to an hour but, hey, if you're reading this website, you can't have that many better things to do. It's a press conference with many of the stars of Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In. I believe it was done in 1993 to promote the big reunion TV special that aired that year.The man presiding over the festivities is the show's Executive Producer, George Schlatter.

Here we have an interview with my friend Jim Brochu, who is currently The King of Off-Broadway in New York playing Zero Mostel in the one-man show, Zero Hour. I've known Jim since the day we were hiring writers on the infamous variety show, Pink Lady. He came in to "audition" (chat) and as I was walking him out, he joked, "I live to grovel."That's a line from my favorite musical, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. I responded with another line from the show and he did another line…and pretty soon, we'd done about half the show in the outer office there, stopping just short of singing a few choruses of "Everyone Ought to Have a Maid."

Jim told me he'd not only seen the original production with Zero (envy, envy) but had gone backstage. His mentor in the theater was David Burns, who was the original Senex in the show. We talked of the play for a while and in that moment, we bonded and I thought, "Hmm, maybe we oughta hire this guy." Remember the line in Bob Fosse's All That Jazz where Roy Scheider says, "See?That's how you get a job." Well, that's how you get a job.

Anyway, I often talked about Zero with Jim, little realizing my pal would soon become him. Jim always had an innate understanding of…well, I was about to type "performers" but it probably applies to all human beings. We are, after all, all performers in some sense.That insight is evident in his play, which is currently viewable at the Actor's Temple Theater in New York. Click here for more details on how you can go see it, which I heartily recommend. And now, here's Jim…

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I'm in this — my part was shot in my dining room — but I somehow have no memory of it. It's a 8-and-a-half minute student film that a fellow named Michael Markowitz made back in '91 about Sergio Aragonés. Not much to add except that I wish I still had all that hair…

I'm amazed this still exists, let alone that it's up on YouTube. In January 20, 1961 (the same day John F. Kennedy was inaugurated), CBS debuted a new prime-time game show hosted by Jackie Gleason. It was called You're in the Picture. The show was done live despite a huge blizzard which blanketed New York. One of the scheduled panelists, Keenan Wynn, didn't show that evening and was replaced just before airtime by Pat Harrington, Jr. There seems to be some debate as to whether the blizzard kept Mr. Wynn away or if he smelled what was about to happen. Here is the full first (and only) episode that was broadcast of You're in the Picture…

The morning after it aired, critics hated the show…but not nearly as much as Gleason hated it. Though originally hired just to be the host, he seized control of the program, assembling meetings and calling in experts and show doctors to figure out what to do. One of those called in was producer Allan Sherman, a year before he recorded My Son, the Folk Singer, which would quickly become one of the fastest-selling records in history. Sherman's main contribution was apparently to convince Gleason that the basic premise of the show was unfixable.

However he decided it, Mr. Gleason told CBS he would not be doing that format again, no matter what. So the following Friday evening, the time slot was taken up by a half-hour of Jackie Gleason apologizing for the first episode. He just sat in a chair and trashed what they'd done the week before. You can watch that episode on this page.

This time, the critics were delighted, praising Mr. Gleason for his uncommon honesty and humility. Thereafter, he filled the time slot with a half hour of conversation called The Jackie Gleason Show — basically just him interviewing one of his show biz buddies. Eventually, CBS found some other program to air on Friday nights at 9:30 and the last of the talk shows aired on March 24. The episode of You're in the Picture that had been taped earlier next aired. One of the panelists on that one was apparently Johnny Carson.

The apology was a nice piece of damage control for Jackie Gleason. His popularity soared after it and in September of '62, he returned to CBS Television with a new version of his old variety show. It was a hit and a nice rebound from one of television's most celebrated favorites.