Category Archives: Video Links

Here's a commercial for Soaky Toys, which were very big back in the early sixties. A Soaky Toy was a bottle full of bubble bath…and the bottle was in the shape of a cartoon character so after you used up the contents, you could play with it or make it into a bank or something. All the kids I knew who collected them just bought them and poured out the bubble bath.

The most interesting thing about Soaky Toys was that they released them two at a time and so did commercials that teamed characters from different proprietors. Some time ago, I linked to this one that featured Donald Duck and Porky Pig. Today, we have the immortal meeting between Dick Tracy and Muskie the Muskrat. Muskie was a character on the Deputy Dawg cartoon show.

Everett Sloane did the voice of Dick Tracy. Dayton Allen was Muskie. This was not Dick Tracy's finest hour.

Here's a two-part interview (embedded one after the other in the player below) of Arthur Laurents, book writer of West Side Story and Gypsy, among others. The two parts run a total of around twenty minutes.

Barry Mitchell is a funny guy who turns up in a wide variety of TV venues, often playing the accordion and/or conducting light-hearted interviews. One year, he went to the big ventriloquist convention and got to interview some biggies…

I'll make this as brief as possible. Around 1960, an animation producer named Sam Singer produced a series of cartoons called Sinbad Jr, featuring a young adventurer with a magic belt and a pet parrot. Rather quickly, Mr. Singer ran into two problems that prevented the distribution of these cartoons. One was that they weren't very good. The other was that the motion picture company American-International informed him, presumably via their attorneys, that they'd released a movie called The Magic Voyage of Sinbad and they owned the name.

I'm not sure how compelling their claim was but it held up the release of the films for several years…until '65 when a compromise of sorts was brokered, one which reportedly did not make Singer very happy. American-International wound up distributing his cartoons but they also funded another series of Sinbad Jr cartoons, which were produced by Hanna-Barbera. The idea apparently was to make a better show and to lose the Singer-produced cartoons amongst the new version. I remember my puzzlement in '65 when the cartoons turned up on local TV — same premise, same characters, different theme, different voices, etc. (The voice of Sinbad on the Singer version was Dallas McKinnon. On the H-B version, Sinbad's voice came from Tim Matheson, aka Tim Matthieson, and Mel Blanc was the parrot.)

What we have here today are the two openings. The first is from the Sam Singer version…

And now, here's the opening of the episodes done by Hanna-Barbera. When I was a kid, I thought this was just about the jazziest theme song ever on a cartoon show. It's still pretty good.

From David Frost's show in England in the sixties: Tom Lehrer sings one of his many ditties…

One of the joys of being at the Comic-Con last week was spending time with Mike Peters. Mike is this brilliant friend of mine who draws editorial cartoons and a splendid newspaper strip called Mother Goose and Grimm, and he's just as funny as anything he does on paper…which is pretty danged funny. We worked together years ago on an animated version of his strip and every moment around Mike was a moment I would have paid to experience. Most of the time, I just let him talk and I make like Oliver Hardy, pretending to be annoyed when I'm actually loving every minute of it.

I did that for an hour at the convention on Saturday, ostensibly moderating the Mike Peters Spotlight. I have never felt as useless and unnecessary in my entire life. I asked Mike something like, "How are you?" and he talked for the next twenty minutes about everything under the sun except how he was. Over on this site, you can see a few minutes of that one-sided conversation.

Just before that panel, I hosted one with four folks who were vital to MAD Magazine in its earlier days…and three of them still contribute to said publication. The one who doesn't is Al Feldstein, who was the editor there from 1956 to 1984. Still gracing its pages are Arnie Kogen (who started writing for MAD in 1959), Al Jaffee (there since '55) and Sergio Aragonés (a relative newcomer, having joined up in 1962). Someone shot shaky, handheld video of some or all of the proceedings, and they've posted the first 40 minutes of the panel to YouTube in six parts. I've aggregated the six parts into one video embed and here it is for your dining and dancing pleasure. Here they are…the Usual Gang of Idiots! (Well, some of them, anyway…)

Friday night, Conan O'Brien's show aired a nine-minute segment of Triumph the Insult Comic Dog (Robert Smigel) heckling folks at the Comic-Con in San Diego. I'm embedding it here even though I must admit that the one joke — convention-goers are all obese losers who can't get laid — has been pretty well beaten into the ground by now. Smigel's one of the cleverest, funniest guys on TV and I love the fact that he doesn't even try to be a real puppeteer as he manipulates Triumph. One of these days, I'm sure, he'll have more to say about fans and conventions.

And now here, running seven minutes, is the totality of Triumph's speech at the con, an excerpt of which is in the above video. I don't know why the "f" word is bleeped some times and not others but such are the ways of television…

We interrupt our Tom Lehrer Marathon for this clip from the 2006 Comic-Con in San Diego. It's Robert Smigel with Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, introduced by our friend Jerry Beck. Triumph was at the con again this year and he made a video which ran last night on Late Night With Conan O'Brien. If and when it's on the NBC site, I'll embed it here…but for now, here's three minutes from '06.

I'm getting a little Tom Lehrer Theme Week going here. This is a clip from a 1974 series that the brilliant and bizarre Marty Feldman did for the BBC called Marty Back Together Again. For some reason, he performed a number of Mr. Lehrer's tunes as production numbers on the show. Here's his version of "The Vatican Rag."

This is great. We're all fans of Tom Lehrer here, right? Of course. And so you're probably familiar with a song he wrote and recorded called "New Math." In it, Mr. Lehrer — a mathematician by trade — explained that cumbersome way of handling numbers in the sixties. Well, in this clip, he was in London performing on The Frost Report starring David Frost, and he came up with a nice variation on "New Math" to explain the frightening conflict of U.S. and British currency. Have a look 'n' listen…

Here's eight or so minutes of shaky video from the Cartoon Voices Panel we did on Saturday at the Comic-Con. Earl Kress and I introduce the panelists and run down a few of their credits, especially Chuck McCann's.

I don't recall when L.A. had streetcars. They were around when I was around but I was too young and, probably more significantly, they didn't seem to go to many places where I went. But someone has made a film about them and we have a preview of it here, and I enjoyed it just because I like to look at old Los Angeles…

Here, from the new Broadway musical version of The Little Mermaid, is the "Part of Your World" number. Friends who've seen the show (I haven't) say they've enjoyed it a lot but were a bit let down that there was less pageantry than was seen at Lion King or Beauty and the Beast. Actually, what may make this song work is the sheer simplicity of the staging.

We were talking here the other day about lyrics. Here's a few minutes with the master.

This is a tease for the full video, which runs an hour and costs forty bucks to view online. I've decided not to spring for the forty bucks but if anyone does, let me know if it's truly extraordinary. At that price, it would have to be.

My friend Brad Ellis dropped by yesterday afternoon with sandwiches from Canter's Deli. Brad's one of the most talented musicians I know and for some odd reason, he often lets me write the lyrics for tunes he composes. I met him when he was playing piano for Forbidden Broadway and he's since gone on to become one of the most in-demand arrangers, composers and accompanists.

One of his occasional gigs is writing arrangements for Forever Plaid, the eternal musical quartet. Here's a number he arranged for a charity appearance — a mash-up of "There Ain't Nobody Here But Us Chickens" and "How Do You Like Your Eggs In The Morning?" The video is a little dark but you should be able to hear the singing and the playing, which are what really count. The singers, in this particular assemblage of F.P., are Leo Daignault, David Engel, Neil Nash, and Larry Raben. Some day, they'll have a reunion of every actor who's earned a paycheck in Forever Plaid and they'll have to rent Shea Stadium.

Wait. I just realized they can't. Last evening, Billy Joel (and surprise guest star Paul McCartney) played a concert at Shea Stadium — the final event there before the place is demolished. Some of the songs Billy Joel performed were arranged by Brad Ellis.