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The Grossmont College Touring Theater Group presents their interpretation of arguably the most important piece of American writing for the stage…

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Today, we have another demonstration of cheating-at-cards by Richard Turner. He's even more amazing in person…

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In 1966, with super-heroes becoming big on TV thanks to the Batman show with Adam West, Marvel Comics managed to get a cartoon seres made and syndicated featuring five of their then-popular super-hero comic characters — Thor, Hulk, Iron Man, Captain America and Sub-Mariner. The show was originally sold to local stations with Spider-Man instead of Sub-Mariner but then its producer, Steve Krantz, discovered there was network interest in Spider-Man for a Saturday morning cartoon show. Spider-Man was quickly removed from this venture and packaged into his own presentation. The Sub-Mariner was then substituted in his place.

For the most part, the Marvel Super-Heroes cartoon series used the actual stories and artwork that had been written and drawn for the pages of Marvel Comics. Never mind that the folks who'd drawn those comics hadn't designed their pages and panels for animation. What Grantray-Lawrence (the studio charged with "animating" the show) had in mind was some of the most limited limited-animation ever done for TV, producing the shows in record time and for a fraction of what was spent on other shows. Every possible corner was cut. While the show was produced mainly in Los Angeles, the Thor segments were farmed out to the then-almost-outta-business Paramount cartoon studio in New York and the music and voices were done for cut-rate prices in Canada. (One of the actors was John Vernon, who would soon gain fame as Dean Wormer in the movie, National Lampoon's Animal House.)

The artists who had drawn the Marvel Comics were not happy to see their work used on a TV show like that. Jack Kirby complained mightily. Steve Ditko appears to have decided to leave the company at about the time the material he'd drawn for Spider-Man was announced as part of the project. Marvel Comics owner Martin Goodman insisted to the artists via his intermediaries that he could not pay for the wider use of the art they'd done because he was receiving next-to-nothing for the rights to produce this series. This apparently was true. Goodman had let the license go for a small token payment because, he figured, the wider exposure of the characters would generate vast amounts of merchandising. At the time, Goodman was less interested in selling comic books than he was in selling his company and it seems to have worked out as he'd hoped. The show and a few others that were done around that time did indeed raise the licensing profile of those properties. That, plus an expanded publishing program raised the selling price of his firm when he sought and fielded offers the following year.

The last decade or so, the cartoons that made up the Marvel Super-Heroes show have been widely circulated on YouTube and bootleg CDs but no one seemed to have a decent copy of the opening or closing of the show. We have semi-decent copies for you today. Once you click, the opening will play in the player below and it will be followed by the closing, including the credits.

The credits are kinda interesting. Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Don Heck and Gene Colan all get a mention. Ditko does not, though he drew around half of the Hulk stories that were adapted and a few of the Iron Mans. A few other artists (and all the inkers) who drew comics that were used are also unmentioned.

The Grantray-Lawrence crew included a lot of Hollywood-based artists (and a few New York guys at Paramount) who'd drawn or would draw comic books at one time or another, some of them for Marvel. In there, you'll see the names of, among others, Doug Wildey, Mike Arens, Mike Royer, Kay Wright, Otto Feuer, Reuben Timmons, Doug Crane, Sparky Moore, Herb Hazelton and Ken Landau, whose name was spelled wrong. Wildey, Royer, Hazelton, Moore and Arens did a lot of art for Sub-Mariner cartoons that had to be written and drawn from scratch. At the time, not enough Sub-Mariner stories had been published in the comics so they had to go that route. Some of those Sub-Mariner cartoons were storyboarded by Jerry Grandenetti, who at the time was the artist of the Sub-Mariner stories in Marvel's Tales to Astonish comic.

I thought it was an awful show and so did the fellow who hosted the cartoons when they were run on KHJ here in Los Angeles. He was Gene Moss on the legendary kids' show, Shrimpenstein, and he used to introduce them as "Another Marvel Mediocrity" or by saying, "Here's another one of those cartoons where nothing ever moves." But it helped Goodman get the price he wanted for his company — a sale he later regretted, I'm told. And it had a bouncy closing theme song. Here's that opening and closing with some Captain America scenes between…

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Our friend Shelly Goldstein has a story to tell you. Pay close attention, kids…

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Here's one of my favorite comedians, Pete Barbutti, on The Tonight Show. This, people, is how you tell a joke…

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Once again, here's a valuable lesson for you all: Never play cards with a man named Richard Turner…

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Did you see Bill Maher's stand-up special the other night? It wasn't on HBO or television. It was streamed live on Yahoo!

I don't know if this was the case with the live transmission but the current online version has annoying bleeps where you have to mentally supply the missing words. Here it is…

UPDATE AT 4:52 AM: Okay, it was there a little while ago but they just took it down. Sorry.

UPDATE AT 4:58 AM: Here's a new embed of the video and this one is uncensored and unbleeped. Don't complain to me if you click and it tells you the video is unavailable.

VIDEO MISSING

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When I was a kid, I loved records featuring my favorite cartoon characters and felt cheated when I bought one and found phony voices on it. By "phony," I mean the cover would suggest I'd be getting the actual folks who did the voices on the cartoons but the record would instead feature impersonators.

This was often (not always but often) the case with Golden Records. When Capitol Records did discs of the Warner Brothers or Disney characters, they usually engaged the same actors working on the cartoons. Mel Blanc did most of the Bugs Bunny records for Capitol…though not all. For reasons unknown, there's at least one where Dave Barry did Bugs. Colpix had the original Hanna-Barbera voices on their H-B records — not a surprise since Colpix was a division of Columbia Pictures which was part owner of Hanna-Barbera…though there is one oddity. They issued one Yogi Bear public service record with Chuck McCann playing Yogi instead of Daws.

(Later, Hanna-Barbera had its own record label for a time and things got inexplicably screwy. Daws Butler was, of course, the voice of Huckleberry Hound, Yogi Bear and many others…and Daws was on a number of the H-B records. But on their Huckleberry Hound record, Huck was voiced by Paul Frees and they did a Yogi Bear record with Allan Melvin as Yogi and June Foray as Boo Boo! Meanwhile, Daws voiced Top Cat on an H-B record even though Arnold Stang was the voice of Top Cat on TV. No one's ever figured out why they made these and many other cast substitutions.)

Anyway, Golden Records usually hired phony voices. Most of their H-B records which should have had the voice of Daws Butler had instead someone named Gil Mack. He wasn't terrible but he sure wasn't Daws. There probably was no one alive who could have replicated all of Daws's roles with any real degree of success.

Today's video link is really an audio one in two parts: Side A and Side B of a Golden Record called "What's Up, Doc?" with Bugs and other WB characters played by someone who is not Mel Blanc. I'm not 100% sure who it is but it's probably Gil Mack again. The choral singing is by the Sandpipers, which was not the same group that had a few hit records for adults in the sixties. This Sandpipers group consisted of Mike Stewart, Ralph Nyland, Dick Byron and Bob Miller, all under the musical direction of Mitch Miller. Yes, that's the same Mitch Miller who later had a hit TV show called Sing Along With Mitch These Sandpipers were heard on an awful lot of kids' records as well as commercials produced in New York.

Speaking of which: It's usually reported that Mel and Daws weren't on Golden Records because they were under exclusive contract to Capitol Records. That's possible but I doubt it. I'm pretty sure whatever deal Daws had once with Capitol was long expired by the time Golden put out records of Hanna-Barbera properties and I would think Mel's deal ended when Capitol stopped doing records of his Warner Brothers characters. My theory is simpler: Golden didn't want to spend the money. Mel and Daws got paid more than a Gil Mack. More significantly, Golden was set up to produce their records in New York but Mel and Daws were in Los Angeles…and working so steadily there that Golden couldn't have afforded to take them away from that work in L.A. and fly them back to Manhattan.

Golden did issue a few albums recorded in Los Angeles (a Flintstones album and a Rocky and His Friends, both with the real original casts of those shows) but those were either occasional extravagances or, I suspect, records produced by someone else and then acquired by Golden. For the most part, it was surely cheaper to work in New York with Gil Mack at whatever facilities Golden had back there. I do know that Hanna and Barbera would never have objected to impersonations so the folks at Golden may have felt, "If they don't have a problem with it, why shouldn't we use an imitator?"

Here's an imitator pretending to be Mel Blanc. It's kind of a cute tune otherwise and it's in two parts which should play one after the other in the player below…

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Last week, I told you about a luncheon I attended in honor of Lily Tomlin. Here's one of the high points. Actress-singer Kat Kramer performed a special musical tribute to Ms. Tomlin featuring special lyrics crafted for the occasion by our pal Shelly Goldstein. The audience was quite delighted as was the honoree…

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Here's another episode of Richard Turner's demonstration of how he can cheat you at cards. You'll notice he occasionally has to ask people the denomination of a card or if it's face-up or face-down.This is because his vision is so bad he sometimes can't make them out. His hands, however, never get confused…

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It's been a while since I featured anything here with the great Daws Butler. He's the voice of Yogi Bear while Don Messick speaks for Mr. Ranger, Sir in this Kellogg's commercial. I would wager serious money that Yogi's mispronunciation of "crispier" as "cripsier" was a Daws adjustment to the copy. He was always finding ways to make scripts more interesting with things like that.

I guess the Kellogg's folks don't make OKs anymore.They came out around 1960 or thereabout as that company's answer to Cheerios.This created a dilemma for me as I liked Cheerios better…but OKs had Yogi Bear on the box. I think I had my mother alternate. Anyway, here's Daws. Ignore the little snippet of Flintstones material on the end of this…

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Hugh Downs and Joe Garagiola host a promotional film to preview the Fall 1969 season on NBC.There were a couple of shows there I wouldn't mind seeing again…like My World and Welcome To It and Bracken's World

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I have occasionally made mention on this site of an incredible close-up magician named Richard Turner. Let me tell you what he does: He cheats.

Richard is the most amazing handler of cards I've ever seen. He can deal you four eights or four queens or anything else he wants. He sits there — and you'll see him do this in the video below — and he shuffles the deck and shuffles it and shuffles it and shuffles it and you'd bet your house that the cards are all thoroughly mixed.

But they aren't. He then spreads them out on the table and they're all still in New Deck order.

And then he deals Blackjack or Poker, placing each ace right where he wants it. He deals the second card in the pack and there's no way you'd catch him. You wouldn't catch him dealing off the bottom of the deck either…or straight out of the middle. I was a writer on That's Incredible! the first time I saw him and I immediately got him booked on the show where he lived up to its title.

This would be impressive even if he could see the cards…which he can't. (Oh, did I forget to mention that? Richard is legally blind. He can see a little but not much. He claims he could do the exact same act if you blindfolded him and I believe it.)

I see him up at the Magic Castle in Hollywood often. I saw him there during his most recent engagement as he dazzled not only visitors but seasoned magicians.They all shake their heads because he's doing something that they simply cannot do.

While Richard was there last time, he shot a series of videos. I'm going to be embedding them here off and on over the next week or two. I suggest you take them full-screen and pay careful attention.This is not camera trickery. He really can do this…

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Just click and enjoy.Thanks to Micki St. James for recommending this one…

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John Cleese comments on comments that folks have posted about Monty Python videos on YouTube. I think…