While you're at the Comic-Con International in San Diego, you're going to swing by the booth (#501) of the Van Eaton Galleries and pick up a signed copy of June Foray's autobiography. Remember that she's only going to be there late Friday afternoon and intermittently on Saturday and Sunday.

And while you're there, I highly recommend grabbing a copy of Mark Arnold's new book, Created and Produced by Total Television. Total is the company responsible for King Leonardo and His Short Subjects, Tennessee Tuxedo and His Tales, Underdog and a few other shows of the sixties, and Mark has written a must-have book for anyone who recalls those programs. Based on extensive research and interviews, it tracks the history of this little-known studio and also offers up generous amounts of scripts, storyboards, merchandise and other visual material to tell its story.

They'll have copies at the Van Eaton booth. If you don't make it to the con, do yourself a favor and order one on Amazon via this link. You can also order June's book from Amazon with this one but if you can wait a week or so, I'll direct you to a site that will allow you to order hers autographed. That's worth waiting for, right?

I have so much to do that I've decided to call up the folks who run the Comic-Con and ask them if they'd mind postponing it for a couple of weeks. I'll get around to this on Monday and I'm pretty sure they'll do it for me. I mean, why wouldn't they?

But just in case there's some odd reason why they can't, here's the schedule again of events with which I'll be involved…

A brief history of the hamburger.

You might enjoy this 2001 audio interview with Walter Cronkite, conducted by radio whiz Paul Harris.

One wonders what Walter Cronkite would think of a newsroom that's reporting on the death of a legend and can't spell the legend's name right. They fixed it a few minutes later but I had to roll the TiVo back to make sure I'd seen what I thought I'd seen. And then I had to do a frame grab so you could see it.

About the time Oliver Stone's film JFK came out, I was in a group that was listening to Roger Ebert hold court outside a screening of another movie. Ebert was discussing the Stone film however, and stridently voicing an opinion with which I happen to disagree; that there was a conspiracy, as yet uncracked, and that someone other than Lee Harvey Oswald killed John Fitzgerald Kennedy. As if to prove his case with utter finality, Mr. Ebert asked, "Can you name one respected researcher or journalist who believes Oswald alone killed Kennedy?" From back in the crowd, several voices (one of them, mine) yelled, "Walter Cronkite."

There were quite a few other names that could have been hurled, including folks who'd spent years studying the case…but no names that would have had quite the same impact. It caused a brief silence in the conversation, a look from Ebert like he'd just been flattened and then a rapid change to a new topic. No one could argue that Walter Cronkite wasn't a respected journalist.

Whether he should have been or not, I dunno. That "most trusted man in America" bit was an advertising slogan, not something we all voted on. He may well have been the most trusted because everyone heard he was the most trusted. If he was, he at least never seemed undeserving. In times of crisis — and there were too many on his watch — he was a soothing, steady presence on our TV sets: No melodrama, no sensationalism…just the news, delivered in masculine, fatherly calm. It's hard to say if he or anyone could do that in today's more competitive, tabloid-influenced news industry but he deserves credit for doing it then and doing it so well.

And he was also a huge fan of the comic strip, Peanuts. That counts for a lot with me, too.

We're in for weeks, maybe months of obits and practically every one will reference his famous sign-off line, "And that's the way it is." I'd like to append, sadly, "…and will never be again."

So you may have heard that the popular animated series Futurama is going back into production for new episodes. This is so. You may also have heard that the entire voice act is being replaced. This is almost certainly not so, though the production company has announced that they'd welcome submissions of voice demos by folks who think they can do the characters. Allow me to explain…

What this all means is that members of the voice cast (Billy West, Maurice LaMarche and others) are asking for certain amounts of money higher than Fox wishes to pay. Fox no doubt thinks (or for the purposes of negotiation, is taking the position) that the amounts are insane and astronomical. This is unlikely. All these actors have wise and experienced agents who know how profitable Futurama has been in the past and how much loot it will likely gross in the future, and what would be a fair price for its vocal stars.

The company does not want to replace those actors. Those actors helped make the show popular enough that it's still a viable commodity. Moreover, the company looks to wind up with a huge library of Futurama episodes — the old ones plus the new ones — which can rerun together for all eternity and be packaged together in mega-DVD sets. They want the same actors so Philip J. Fry will still be the same Philip J. Fry and so on.

They want those actors and have, in fact, arranged to have most of them at a panel at the Comic-Con in San Diego a week from tomorrow. But they'd like those actors for less money because that will mean more money for the company. That is why they're soliciting replacements, not because they want replacements but because they want to plant the seed of fret; to make the actors and their reps wonder if maybe, just maybe, Fox is crazy enough to actually replace the whole cast with cheaper folks so they'd better grab the latest of what have probably been several final offers.

It's hard to believe Fox could be lunkheaded enough to change casts, especially given the way they're going about it. If they really did want to replace everyone, the way to do it would be to quietly talk with the top voice agents about the top voice talent. Imagine if you had to replace Alec Baldwin on 30 Rock…and imagine you weren't even looking to introduce a new character in his stead. You had to find a new guy to play Jack Donaghy, for God's sake. You wouldn't make a big, public show of it and invite guys who work at Target Stores to make and send in auditions. You'd realize Baldwin can't be replaced like that, if at all. He's too integral a part of why that show is making you Godzilla-sized piles of cash, and that it's foolish to risk the franchise with someone else in the role. Just as it would be foolish to lose Billy West as Fry if there was any possible way to make a deal with him. When it comes down to money in this town, there almost always is.

If you're an aspiring cartoon voice actor who thinks "This is my break," think something else. They'll get thousands of submissions and it's unlikely that anyone with hiring capacity will ever listen to any of them. This is, like I said, not the way to really find a replacement. It's just a showy means of intimidating the actors and their agents…a way which costs the studio nothing. They don't even have to book time in a recording studio or have producers sit and listen to auditions. The whole idea is to be able to say to Billy West's agent, "Hey, we've got three thousand demos from guys who can imitate your boy's voice." But I know Billy's agent. He's been at this a long time and he knows how to not be intimidated and to arrive at a reasonable deal.

That's how these things end up, 96% of the time. What happens in 2% of such cases is that someone gets their ego in a tizzy and forgets that the goal is to make a deal, not to make the other guy bleed. So the bargaining explodes and everybody loses.

The other 2% of the time, it works the same way it works when a friend of yours says, "Don't pay those high garage prices. I got a guy who can fix your car cheap." So you get it fixed cheap and you honestly think you're saving money…all the way until the moment you try to shift gears while going up a slight incline and your axle shatters and your tires roll away. That's pretty much how it would go if they dumped the cast of Futurama. Which is why they won't do that.

A number of cartoonists and comic strip fans have mailed me (via paper mail, which amazingly still exists), a page that shows the actual size of newspaper comic strips over the years…how they've gotten smaller and smaller. There's no effective way for me to reproduce it here but it's quite amazing, seeing how they've diminished in size and therefore stature. If there's a person out there today who could do what Winsor McCay did in Little Nemo or what Walt Kelly did in Pogo, it almost wouldn't matter. The canvas is just too tiny to hold much of a painting.

Obviously, most newspapers are in trouble and they're condensing everything, not just the funnies. Obviously too, more and more will be folding up or trying to morph into some sort of web-only presence…and some of those that endure will dump comics in order to become leaner and meaner. I'm not even sure what kind of argument could be made as to why they shouldn't do this. I feel it's wrong but I can't explain why.

To some extent, the contraction of newspaper comics snowballed out of anyone's control. Over the years, economy drives and paper shortages occasionally caused papers to print their strips a notch smaller. This led to cartoonists simplifying their work, using fewer and bolder lines and making their lettering larger. And this, in turn, led to more newspapers deciding they could print the strips even smaller. Right now, if you put me in charge of a comic strip page and I took the bold step of taking strips back to their old size…well, some of those strips wouldn't look that wonderful. They aren't being drawn for that format.

I have no answer for this. I don't think anyone does. Garry Trudeau, who for contractual reasons has been less affected than some, made a good comment this week in Doonesbury. But the downsizing continues. It's made me not want to read any strips in the newspaper. If I read them on a website, I can at least enlarge the image to a more dignified, readable size.

Every year, I recommend all the events I'm involved in at Comic-Con but there's always one I want to super-recommend and underscore. This year, it's the first-ever appearance at any convention of the great Stan Freberg, accompanied by his superb spouse/partner, Hunter Freberg. I've gushed over Stan elsewhere on this site for years so I'll show a little restraint here. If there's such a thing as a Comic Genius, it's this guy.

He started as a cartoon voice actor and was heard in many a Warner Brothers cartoon…usually unbilled, thanks to Mel Blanc's contract. He was in movies like Lady and the Tramp, and he and Daws Butler were the first Beany and Cecil on the original Time for Beany puppet show. If he'd stopped there, he'd still be a fascinating guy…but Freberg was just getting started.

He began making funny records. There's been a handful of best-selling comedy records and Stan was responsible for about half of them. What's more, his have endured. They're still funny and most are still, in some form, in print. He also starred in the last real network comedy radio show in the classic tradition. Again, if he'd stopped there…

Then it was into advertising. In agencies, he became an adjective. Sponsors would say, "I want a Freberg campaign." That didn't necessarily mean hiring him, though many did. It meant any campaign that was outrageously funny and very, very smart. Or the star of a show would say, "I don't want any Freberg commercials during my show." That meant, "I don't want the ads to be funnier than the show."

The man's had other jobs: Author. Actor. More cartoon voices. Lecturer. But you get the idea. This is a very special guy and obviously, one of my personal heroes. And he and Hunter are coming to the convention.

So you want to do two things. You want to attend "Two Funny Frebergs" a spotlight panel on Friday at 3:30 in Room 6A. I'm going to introduce them and get out of the way so you can hear them talk and show some examples of Stan's fine work.

And then at some point during the con, preferably before that, you want to get over to Table AA-01 in Artist's Alley. That's where Stan and Hunter will be hanging out for much of the four days and you can purchase CDs and photos and get his signature on them. If you miss this chance to meet the man and get an autographed something, you'll regret it…because he doesn't do this often. Like, never before.

People attend these conventions for all different reasons but a biggie is the chance to meet a legend…to get a souvenir and/or to tell them how much their work has meant to you. If you're at all a fan o' Freberg, don't miss this opportunity.

The movies based on J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy have grossed more than $6 billion in box office receipts, DVD sales and other merchandising. Wow. Wouldn't you love to have a piece of that? Say, 7.5% or so? Well, maybe not. (Thanks to Tom Hegeman for the link.)