You can find plenty of articles online — some of them even from legal authorities! — telling you that the case against Donald Trump is very sound or very weak. Interesting to me is that I only seem to find the latter on right-wing sites but I find some of each on sites that are middle-of-the-road or even left-wing.
Me, I figure it doesn't matter what I think. The process will decide and I gather it might not decide for some time…maybe not even until he's gone through a few more arraignments. My guess is that being prosecuted will be good for Trump's fund-raising, bad for him winning over voters not already in his camp, and that whether or not he's the G.O.P. nominee will have more to do with who gets in the race and who doesn't.
And that's about as much as I want to write or think about him for a while.
Occasionally watching the news today, I saw George Santos wading through the crowds and I thought I saw Jordan Klepper asking him something about his volleyball career. It turned out I did…
I'm watching some of the live news coverage from New York. It's great if you enjoy hearing the ten minutes of actual information paraphrased and repeated over and over for hours. Every now and then, someone gets around to noting that at this moment, none of the folks taking stands and commenting on Donald Trump's guilt or innocence actually know what's in the indictment. And every now and then, someone suggests that the actual charges might matter. I suspect they don't with some people.
I'm turning the TV off and trying to get some work done.
Andrew Farago wrote a real good article about the late Joe Giella. You will be impressed with how much Joe did in his long, glorious career.
A number of you have written to ask what I thought of this article on the CNN website by Roy Schwartz. It's about Jack Kirby and Captain America…and what I think of it is that it's pretty good. There are a few minor quibbles — like I don't think Stan Lee asked Jack to try super-heroes again in 1961. I think Jack convinced Stan it was a good idea. But my main problem is that I don't think the piece gives Joe Simon enough credit for his contributions to the classic first ten issues of Captain America.
Here's a sketch from At Last, the 1948 Show, a British comedy program that helped set the stage for Monty Python. This sketch features Marty Feldman, Graham Chapman and John Cleese. Some years later, Mr. Cleese did a slightly different version of the sketch with Rowan Atkinson which I posted here back in 2012…
Way too much to deal with today. Will post later if I can. In the meantime, there are plenty of other things to read on the web, most of which have the word "indictment" in them.
This is from The Ed Sullivan Show for Sunday evening, November 13, 1960. It's Dick Van Dyke performing the number "Put on a Happy Face" from the then-running Broadway show, Bye Bye Birdie. If you're only familiar with the movie version of the show, you may be puzzled by the context. The book was heavily rewritten when it was made into a movie.
On stage, Albert Petersen (Van Dyke's character) was an aspiring English teacher who was writing songs for Elvis Presley Conrad Birdie and who hoped to get another song recorded by Birdie and on the Hit Parade charts before the recently-drafted singer went into the army. The happy ending [SPOILER ALERT!] is that Albert gives up songwriting, marries his long-waiting fiancée Rosie and they move to a small town so he can become an English teacher.
The movie inserted most (not all) of the songs into a new storyline. Albert was a biochemist who was pursuing songwriting to make money and to keep a promise to his mother. There was a weird subplot involving Russians along with ballet dancers and tortoises on speed and the happy ending this time is [SPOILER ALERT!] that Albert gives up songwriting, marries his long-waiting fiancée Rosie and they move to a small town so he can pursue his biochemistry.
That's why in this clip, he sings the song to a morose Conrad Birdie fan instead of to the woman he's going to marry. By the way, the script for the film was written by Irving Brecher, who also wrote At the Circus and Go West for the Marx Brothers.
Program with the names of Dick Gautier and Paul Lynde confused.
Some interesting dates: Bye Bye Birdie opened on Broadway on April 14, 1960. Business was probably sagging a bit by November, which is why the cast was doing numbers from it on Ed's show.
Dick took a week off in January of 1961 to fly to Hollywood and film the pilot for The Dick Van Dyke Show. His replacement for that week was Charles Nelson Reilly, who ordinarily played the role of Mr. Henkle in the show except on most Thursday nights when he filled in for Paul Lynde, who was playing Harry McAfee. Lynde had a contract to appear every week (live) on Perry Como's TV show. Whenever Reilly was playing Albert or Harry, a cast member named Lee Howard played Mr. Henkle and also covered Harry when necessary.
I once heard Dick Van Dyke tell a very funny story about returning from California. He got back too late to do that evening's performance but not too late to get a seat in the audience and watch it with Reilly playing Albert. And then Dick did a very funny impression of C.N.R. trying to ad-lib his way through songs for which he did not know the lyrics. This one went: "Ya-da-da-da-da-da-da, put on a happy face…Ya-da-da-da-da-da-da, put on a happy face…" Here's how it was supposed to go…
The show finally closed on October 17, 1961, two weeks after The Dick Van Dyke Show debuted on CBS. The Broadway run was 607 performances but Van Dyke and Chita Rivera (the original Rosie) left after April 8, 1961 and were replaced by Gene Rayburn (yes, the game show host) and Gretchen Wyler.
But "Put on a Happy Face" long outlived the show. It was recorded by dozens of top recording artists and it even became the theme song for the TV series, The Hollywood Palace where it sounded like this…
I probably shouldn't be surprised by this but there are an awful lot of people on the web and the news who are absolutely, 100% certain that Donald Trump is innocent and an awful lot who are sure he's guilty. And none of them felt they ought to wait and hear exactly what he's being charged with before they locked into those opinions.
Another damned obit. Duane Poole, a fine writer and gentleman, passed away this evening following a battle with cancer over the last year or so. I knew Duane as an animation writer, mostly at Hanna-Barbera but also at other studios, but he also wrote dozens of live-action TV shows and movies and was both a playwright and an important figure in local theater. When we had lunch, we usually talked about plays and musicals, and he knew everything about them.
Between around 1975 and 1983, Duane (usually with a partner) wrote for all the major shows at H-B including Scooby Doo, Laff-a-Lympics, Captain Caveman, Super Friends, Jana of the Jungle and The Great Grape Ape. During that period, he also worked for Sid & Marty Krofft on shows like The Far-Out Space Nuts and ElectraWoman and DynaGirl. His live-action credits included Love Boat, Hart to Hart, Hotel and about forty TV movies, some of which are listed over on his IMDB page. At least the animation credits over there are quite incomplete. You can find a more complete list and a bio over on his website.
I have no idea how old he was but I can tell you he was as nice and bright a person as I've met in this business. I have no memories of him not smiling. Sympathies to his friends (he had a lot of them), his family and especially his husband Frank. I am so sick of writing these about people I liked.
Michael Tallan sent in this question which others have asked before and I don't know why I didn't answer it before…
What was the very first comic that had your name on it as a writer? (I'm not counting appearances in letter columns.) Could you talk about how you felt when you saw it?
And I just realized why I didn't answer this question before. The reason is that I don't know. I'll try and figure it out right here in front of you…
I started out (1) working with Jack Kirby, (2) writing foreign Disney comics for the Disney Studio and (3) writing American comics (some Disney, some not) for Gold Key Comics — in that order. My name was on letter pages that my partner Steve Sherman and I assembled for Jack but we're not counting letter columns here. And Jack put our names on Forever People #9 and #11 but I never thought of those as writer credits. They were kind of arbitrary. As far as I was concerned, he could have put our names on any issues during that period or left them off. We didn't contribute that much.
The first comic book published in America that I felt I actually wrote was the first issue of The Amazing Chan and the Chan Clan, a Gold Key publication that came out in February of 1973. I sold quite a few scripts to that company before I wrote that one but that was the first one to see print. But Gold Key didn't have credits on their books then — and they never added them to the licensed titles. It was still a bit of a thrill to hold an actual, for-real comic book in my hand that I wrote but not because of the credit because there weren't any.
There were a few comics for DC that my name should have been on. I wrote (with some help from Mr. Kirby) a ghost story that ran in House of Secrets #92, the infamous issue that featured the first Swamp Thing story. Two of the four stories in that comic carried credits but the one I wrote didn't — I don't know why — and some online sources credit it to Joe Orlando. Jack and I co-plotted and I dialogued a story for Spirit World #2 that wound up in Weird Mystery Tales #2 after they decided not to publish Spirit World #2. They credited it wholly to Jack.
And no, this kind of thing didn't bother me. At the time, I didn't think I had much of a future in comic books. I was doing a lot of writing for things other than comic books and my name wasn't on very much of them either. I was so happy that my work was in print that I didn't care all that much that my moniker didn't accompany it. Some of that stuff, I'm glad didn't have credits.
I may be wrong but I think the first time I got an actual writing credit in a comic book was issue #4 of DC's Welcome Back, Kotter comic book, which came out in February of 1977. At the time, I was a story editor (i.e., writer) on the TV show and my name was on that every week so seeing it in the comic book didn't strike me as a big deal. I recall a huge, exciting tingle the first time I saw my name in a comic book letter column — that happened in 1966 — but no tingle whatsoever from seeing it in that issue of Welcome Back, Kotter or other projects that followed.
Steve Skeates, one of the best "new" writers of comic books in the sixties, died last night at the age of 80. Steve broke into comics in 1965 as an assistant to Stan Lee at Marvel. The job didn't work out and he was soon replaced by Roy Thomas but Steve went to write not only for Marvel but, in the following years, for Charlton, DC, Warren, Gold Key, Tower Comics and many other companies. Among the comics that featured his work were Aquaman, THUNDER Agents, Creepy, Eerie, Vampirella, Underdog, Plop!, The Many Ghosts of Doctor Graves, Abbott & Costello, The Hawk and the Dove and Hercules. That is a very partial list.
His stories were usually very fresh and, even when it might not have been appropriate, very funny. I did not meet Steve until 2012 when I called him to tell him he'd won that year's Bill Finger Award for Excellence in Comic Book Writing and he brought him out to Comic-Con to present him with the trophy. But I could tell him quite honestly that I always admired his work. That was not the only award he ever received because an awful lot of people shared my opinion that his work always stood out from the pack. We could use more writers like that.
Back in 2005 here, we lamented the then-imminent closing of Tail o' the Pup, an iconic hot dog stand here in Los Angeles. It did indeed close soon after that post and the stand itself went into storage somewhere. There were many reports about it being about to reopen here or there but it didn't…until finally, it has. Alison Martino, who crusades for and covers the preservation of important places in L.A. reports on the glorious return of the eatery from some storage facility somewhere…
I took some time out today to read some articles and watch some videos about the indictment of Donald Trump. In a way, it disappoints me that, so far, it's like everything else in politics these days. Whether he's guilty or not is a matter of party loyalty, quite apart from the facts of the case. I don't think everyone thoroughly believes what they're saying but, you know, you have to go with your party.
It's just like with the recent school shooting in Nashville — not to be confused with the recent school shootings darn near everywhere else. If you want to have a future in the Republican party, you can't be caught saying something insane like, "Well, maybe we ought to at least discuss some reasonable limits on clip size or background checks…" Mike Pence has to say the indictment is an "outrage" because he doesn't want to lose all those possible MAGA votes and donations with one interview. For now at least, he has to back the guy who wanted to see him lynched.
Based on what we know so far of the case against Trump, this doesn't seem like a slam-dunk prosecution. Then again, we don't know all the evidence or the wording of the relevant laws. Or how credible Michael Cohen will be on the witness stand. Or what Trump will say or do to make his lawyers' job harder. The other pending/possible indictments seem like stronger cases about greater wrongdoing. But it is nice that Trump's "Laws don't apply to me" attitude has suffered a pretty solid blow to the solar plexus. And he can take some comfort knowing that in the unlikely event he does go to prison for this, a lot of his attorneys will probably be in the same cell block.
Leo Sullivan, a much-loved and must-respected gent in the animation community, died last Saturday at the age of 82. That's really not a great photo of Leo above because he's not smiling or laughing in it. Every time I was with Leo, he was smiling and laughing. This obit will tell you some of the reasons he had to laugh and smile, helping create cartoons that made others laugh and smile.
A lot of the shows Leo worked on were shows when he was hired to animate, direct or supervise production on other folks' projects. He was called on all the time for such work because he was so good at it. But I was most impressed by all the projects that Leo launched and/or sold and/or produced himself. At a time when black people weren't all that visible in the cartoon business and certainly not running studios, Leo was opening doors and bring new talent of all colors through them.
Just a great guy. My condolences to his family and his friends. He sure had a lot of friends.
