What needs to be finished still needs to be finished but less of it needs to be finished than needed to be finished at this time yesterday. Rather than leave this blog looking sad and neglected, I'm posting another of my favorite episodes of my favorite TV program. It's The Dick Van Dyke Show for October 31, 1962. I remember laughing my fool head off at this when it was first broadcast and it startles me to realize I was about ten-and-a-half years old at the time.

It's a reminder of the awesome physical (along with verbal) comedy skills of the star of that series. I'm hard-pressed to think of anyone who has since starred in a situation comedy who could have pulled this off…maybe John Ritter? Watch it and see if you can come up with a name. I'll be back after the video embed to tell you an interesting (to me) thing about this episode…

The actor who played the hypnotist is Charles Aidman, who also played Rob Petrie's insurance man a year later in another episode. Mr. Aidman was one of those actors — as you may know, I love performers in this category — who worked constantly without ever becoming easily identifiable from one role on one series. Jamie Farr had that anonymous status before he became Max Klinger on M*A*S*H. If he hadn't landed that part, he probably would still have worked all the time but there'd be no way I could describe him in one sentence so most of you would know who I was talking about.

Aidman's career ran from about 1952 until his death in 1993 and his IMBD listing is very, very long and — I'm sure — very, very incomplete.

It presently lists his last job as a 1992 episode of Garfield and Friends but I know that's not right because when I booked him for it, we had to work around the shooting schedule of some movie he was working on. But I wanted him to be my narrator because he would give it a kind of Twilight Zone ambience. Aidman was so good at that kind of thing that he'd served as the narrator of the 1985 Twilight Zone revival on CBS. Pro that he was, he arrived at our studio right on time but with an attitude of "Are you sure it's me you wanted?" He did a lot of voiceover work but almost never for cartoons and certainly not for allegedly-funny ones.

I get asked, "How do you direct cartoon voices?" Here's a perfect example: You hire the right actor, show them which microphone to use and then get the hell out of their way. I don't think I gave him any more direction at the top than "Just forget it's a cartoon. Read the copy like it's a serious suspense film." And then the next bit of direction I gave him was, "That was great, Charles. Come out of the booth and sign some paperwork so we can pay you."

And yes, we did talk a little bit about some of the other things he'd done, including The Dick Van Dyke Show. Very nice man. Very good at what he did. If you'd like to see a little of the cartoon he narrated, it's online here. The other voices are by Lorenzo Music (of course), Gregg Berger, Thom Huge and June Foray. That's right: June Foray. Directing her or any of those folks was no more labor-intensive than directing Charles Aidman. All you need to do is hire the right people.

Apologies for the light posting of late. I'm trying to finish something that refuses to be finished. When it is, I'll be back in full force.

I haven't seen anything online about it but I'm told the nominations are out for this year's inductions into the Will Eisner Hall of Fame, which is kind of like the Baseball Hall of Fame except it's for people who do comics instead of pitching and throwing and running and spiking the catcher. Shockingly, my name is on this list.

This is just me but I have a lot of problems with awards of any sort. I love when they go to people who I think are deserving and who are made happy — and perhaps even given long-overdue attention — by them. I am uncomfy when I am a possible recipient which is why I didn't show for the ceremony two of the three times I was nominated for an Emmy or more than half the times I've been up for a Harvey or Eisner. I think the first award I ever got as a professional whatever-I-am was when the early Comic-Con decided to give me one of its Inkpot Awards. This would have been 1975.

I found out in advance and immediately altered my plans to attend the ceremony. Shel Dorf, who was then very visible at the San Diego cons mostly as a figurehead, spent the whole next day traipsing around the con with the trophy trying to present it to me and I treated him like a process server. He wanted to do it in a setting with an audience and applause and an acceptance speech and photos. I finally accepted it in private, took it home and didn't display it anywhere until years later when I bought my house and had walls to fill.

At the time, I told myself I was taking some sort of stand for a principle but as so often happens, I later couldn't really explain that principle. And because I couldn't, I realized I was just being a jerk about something that in my head, I'd blown all out of proportion.

I talked about it once with my friend/employer Lee Mendelson, who had more Emmy Awards than toes, and who may have been the wisest man I've known in the television business. He said, "It's simple. If you're nominated, say 'It's an honor to be nominated'" If you win, say 'It's an honor to win.'" Then find a place for the trophy and don't make a big hazari about it." "Hazari" — pronounced as "rye" with a "haza" (rhyming with "Gaza") in front of it — is a Yiddish word that means (roughly) "junk food" but a lot of folks use it to mean something that is way less important than people make it out to be.

So: To whoever nominated me…thanks. It's an honor to be nominated. And now, I have to go try and finish that thing which doesn't want to be finished. I'll be back when it is or when someone I think deserves an obit dies. I sure hope it's the former.

Jon Stewart is absolutely right. And this is not about Trump…

This post by Ankush Khardori and one or two others I've read this morning confirm my feelings that the current case against Trump could go either way and that by the time it does go either way, we might be knees deep in the next case against Trump or the one after that or the one after that. The case New York D.A. Bragg has just brought against the Trump that Trump Lovers love to love may be real old, unimportant news by the time it does go either way.

If I were D.J.T., I'd be thrilled at the fund-raising and attention-getting opportunities it's giving me…and a lot more worried about the other stuff. He seems to love every opportunity to blast anyone who isn't blindly on his side as a Trump Hater and that's one of those lies that becomes all the more true every time you say it. Tomorrow, if one of his limos got a ticket for parking in the wrong place, he'd be railing against the Trump-hating, Soros-funded meter maid.

One of the many things I don't like about this guy is how much time I have to spend paying attention to him. He's like one of those televised police chases except that he's on close to 24/7. I shall now do my best to look away for as long as I can.

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.

Randy Rainbow…

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.

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.

It's a sampler of You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown — in Japanese. Tomorrow, we'll have a number here from a Broadway show in English…

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.