I really admire the effort and artistry of the JibJab videos. Out of just about nothing, those folks built an art form and a style and what I gather is a pretty successful company. One of the ways they've achieved this is by really putting maximum effort into each project. A lot of people out there think computer animation is easy; that you just click this and load that and the computer does all the labor that formerly had to be done by hand. Wrongo. Each JibJab video represents skillions of person hours and an awful lot of hands-on artistry. Here's a link to their latest — "Time for Some Campaignin'" — and here's a link to a production blog that should give you some idea how much perspiration went into it.

I like what they do so much that I'm hesitant to write this next part and toss in a "however."

However, I will. With so much effort going into each frame of animation, you'd think they'd expend a bit more time on their song parody lyrics, particularly in making them rhyme. In most cases, it wouldn't be difficult. For instance, this new video opens as follows…

Come gather 'round, Dick, Condi, Scooter and Rove
It's time to get packin', we must hit the road
But there's wars and recessions and bad mortgage loans
And our legacy needs savin'
So forget he's a jackass who's lib'rally prone
Oh, it's time for some campaignin'.

I'm not sure if the folks who wrote this thought "Rove" rhymes with "road" but if so, they're wrong. "Loans" doesn't rhyme with "prone" because "loans" is plural. "Savin'" does not rhyme with "campaignin'," either.

What baffles me about this kind of lyric is that it's so easy to fix. It could easily go like this…

Come gather 'round, Condi, Rove, Scooter and Dick
It's time to get packin' and hit the road quick
On account of each war and each bad mortgage loan
Our popularity's wainin'
So forget he's a jackass who's lib'rally prone
Oh, it's time for some campaignin'.

That took, literally, under a minute to redo. Give any decent songwriter a half hour and he or she might have improved it into Sondheim territory…or at least The Capitol Steps. The JibJab professionals are so thorough with their graphics and animation and details that it makes me wince that they rhyme "command" with "Vietnam" and "near" with "years." ("Exchange," by the way, does not rhyme with "change." It's the same syllable. It's like rhyming "moon" with "moon.")

Come on, guys. You do everything else so well. Get your lyrics up to the standard of your animation.

Every day until that monster in San Diego commences, I'm going to be plugging/promoting a couple of the panels I'll be doing down there. Today, let's talk about Cartoon Voices, which is one of my areas of interest and alleged expertise.

Saturday and Sunday, my buddy Earl Kress and I are hosting panels of folks who do that kind of thing for a living and do it well. These are extremely popular events at the con…and for a good reason. We gather six or so actors on each, have them demonstrate their silly sounds, talk about their craft, and then we stick them with what's called a Cold Reading. This means making actors act with a script they haven't had time to study and learn and think about. Wonderful, unpredictable things are sometimes heard when this is done.

The folks we have this year are as good as anyone I could find. They're all artists you've heard on loads of cartoons and as they'll show you, they also do commercials and dubbing and narration and other lucrative things with their talents. Some of you are already telling me how excited you are that the Saturday panel will include Mr. Chuck McCann, who gets mentioned on this blog more often than Jack Kirby, Groo the Wanderer or me. Here are listings for these two panels…

Saturday, July 26
12:30-2:00 Cartoon Voices I — It's the first of two gatherings this weekend of actors who lend their voices to animation, as they discuss and demonstrate their craft. Co-hosts Mark Evanier and Earl Kress welcome Jason Marsden (Fairly OddParents, Loonatics Unleashed), Wally Wingert (The Garfield Show, Family Guy), Phil LaMarr (Justice League, Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends), Alicyn Packard (The Mr. Men Show, World of Warcraft), TV legend Chuck McCann, Tom Kenny (SpongeBob SquarePants), and a few surprises. Room 6CDEF.

Sunday, July 27
1:15-2:30 Cartoon Voices II — It's another one of those panels where folks who do animation voice work demonstrate their craft and dazzle you with their talents. Co-hosts Mark Evanier and Earl Kress welcome Chris Edgerly (Harvey Birdman, Celebrity Deathmatch), Dee Baker (American Dad, SpongeBob SquarePants), Cheryl Chase (Rugrats, All Grown Up), Katie Leigh (Dungeons & Dragons, Totally Spies!), Billy West (Futurama, Ren & Stimpy) and a few surprises. Room 6B.

Now then. When I started moderating Cartoon Voice panels at the convention, they were in smaller rooms and they were largely about how a person who thinks they have the ability can perhaps obtain a career in that line of work. As the panels got more popular, however, they became more about entertainment and performing, and less about agents and demos and classes and the stark realities of The Biz. This year, we aim to correct this a bit with yet another Cartoon Voice panel, a different kind. This year, and I suspect the next few years, Earl and/or I will be hosting a gathering that just focuses on the feasibility and possible attainment of employment. Here's the listing for this one…

Sunday, July 27
12:00-1:00 The Business of Cartoon Voices — Lots of people think they can do them…but how does one go about making a living as a voiceover actor? Co-hosts Mark Evanier and Earl Kress gather together a panel of agents, casting directors and performers to explain all about agents, casting directors, demos, classes, what to do and (most important) what not to do. If you've ever been interested in a career in the field, this is the panel you've been waiting for. Room 7AB.

I haven't listed the participants yet because schedules are still being juggled…but we'll have an agent or two, a casting director or maybe more than one, a couple of actors (Gregg Berger and Bob Bergen), plus you'll have Earl and me giving out some hard truths about the field.

We're doing this in large part because the Aspiring Animation Voice Actor is fast becoming prey. What with the Internet and home recording studios and online videos and zillions of new markets, we now have zillions of ways that folks are seeking to separate the wanna-bes from their wallets. There are some very good teachers and classes and advisory programs out there. There are also some in the "those who can't do, teach" category and a few outright thieves.

This is an area about which I am somewhat militant. Every month or so lately, I encounter someone who has spent an awful lot of their money and youthful years looking for love in all the wrong places, paying for lessons and demos and "access to casting people" (something for which one should never pay) and all they have to show for it is a couple of non-union, $50 jobs that if you amortize the money they've spent on lessons and guidance, comes down to about a thousand bucks per gig that it cost them.

(There's an old joke in the acting game: The agent tells a performer, "This gig will pay you $100." The performer says, "But it's going to cost me twice that to travel to that city and get a room." Whereupon the agent answers, "Yeah, well, you have to save up for some jobs.")

Let me emphasize: There are some very good, very helpful teachers and trainers out there. I'm sure some will be endorsed and recommended at the panel. But note that I am not saying they're the majority because I'm beginning to think that they are not. Those that are not can be divided into two categories — those that mean well and just aren't all that good, and those that just want to exploit someone's dreams.

Last month, I met a lady who's been, I believe, taken for all she could afford (and then some) by the latter. Someone should have told her how rough the business can be and, frankly, that she has certain deficiencies in the talent department. Alas, there's moola to be made by telling people what they want to hear; by saying, "Yes, yes…you can have everything you dream of…you just need to keep paying us money to train and steer you." Many thousands of bucks later, she's about as close to a real voiceover career as Teller.

I'd decided that a panel of Free Advice to such folks was needed before I met her, but she reinforced my notion. If you think you might have what it takes to be the new Mel/Daws/June, you might want to make it to this panel…and I'm sorry we only have an hour.

Who invented the hamburger? Well, a lot of people laid claim to that achievement. Here's a brief history of the world's most popular sandwich.

…and by that, I mean the stars recorded the messages, not that these messages appeared on stars' machines.

You may remember answering machine messages. Nowadays, it's unfashionable and downright geeky to have your voice mail say anything more than "Hi, I'm not in right now. Leave a message." It's insulting to the caller if you even say "wait for the beep" because everyone with a third of a brain in their heads knows you're supposed to wait for the beep.

But back when we all first got answering machines, we were all producing these elaborate, amusing outgoing messages to put on them. Cecil B. DeMille did not work as hard on some of his movies as acquaintances of mine did on their outgoing announcements…and frankly, some of what Mr. DeMille produced was not as entertaining. I wrote an intricate poem for my first machine, and I knew people who recorded songs or incorporated sound effects. Occasionally, professional recording studios were even involved. It was almost a sign of achievement to be able to say, "My friends just call to hear the message. They're disappointed if I'm home and I answer."

My current message is as bland and quick as can be…but back in the eighties, I had a series of messages recorded by the great voices of the cartoon business. Since I consider these some of their greatest performances, I'm going to share them with the world. Here's the first one…

If you want to know how to decorate a room, just follow The Pottery Barn Rule: Put a copy of my book on a shelf in it.

It's been a while since I've mentioned the black-and-white game show reruns on GSN. Each night, they run two of them. At Midnight (my time), they air an old What's My Line? in chronological order. The one last night was from February 27, 1955 and the Mystery Guest was Portland Hoffa, spouse of panelist Fred Allen. If my notes are right, the Mystery Guest tonight should be Lily Pons, then tomorrow night is Sammy Davis Jr.

Following that, they'd been airing I've Got a Secret but they reached the end of that show's run and now they've replaced it with The Name's the Same, a Goodson-Todman panel show that ran from December 5, 1951 until October 7, 1955 without ever being as successful as the other Goodson-Todman show it was imitating, What's My Line? If you watch the reruns, you'll see its producers trying desperately to save it with a fruitless litany of rule changes, panel changes and host changes. In four years, its stewardship changed four times (Robert Q. Lewis to Dennis James to the team of Bob & Ray to Clifton Fadiman) with several "fill-in" hosts on a try-out basis).

But the big way they tried to make it work was with the increasing use of "gambits." What the heck are those?, I hear you cry. Well, you haven't been studying old bloggings on this site because I explained it long ago. Here…I'll save you the trouble of searching for the explanation. In April of '02, I wrote here…

…the panel shows — like What's My Line?, To Tell the Truth and I've Got A Secret — were never rigged in that way. There was no point to it. The appeal of those shows was in the panel's interplay, and no great sums of cash were at stake. (The most you could win on Line was something like $50 and, at times, they paid each contestant the full amount so that nobody would whine that they'd been swindled out of cash by the frequent anomalies in the gameplay.) In fact, not only did the producers not give the players the right answers, they frequently gave them the wrong ones.

The practice was called "gambitting" and it was based on the premise that a lot of the fun on such a show was in the panelists naïvely asking questions that had great, unintentional meaning. For example, questioning a man she didn't know sold beds for a living, Dorothy Kilgallen might ask, "Could Bennett Cerf and I use one of these together?" Of course, the audience would get hysterical. Those funny situations occurred naturally but, to make sure they occurred a little more often, the producers would often go to the panelists and suggest an area of errant questioning. Dorothy Kilgallen, actually, would rarely engage in it. She wasn't a comedian and was more interested in winning the game than in getting laughs. But most of the panelists — the comics, especially — would dutifully ask the lady who made girdles, "Could I use your product?" Or they'd ask a man who sold elephants, "Might I have one of these in my living room?" They didn't know what the contestant's secret was but they knew that the questioning they'd been told to pursue would get big boffs.

Once you're aware of the practice, it becomes very obvious. That's especially true on a lesser-known Goodson-Todman show that Game Show Network runs on occasion called, The Name's The Same. As this one plunged in the ratings, its staff ratcheted up the use of gambits to the point where the show really came off as phony and its panelists look almost stupid at times.

If you start watching the reruns on GSN now, you'll see it get worse and worse to the point of absurdity. They had some witty panelists on the show — at times, Abe Burrows, Meredith Willson, Bill Cullen, Carl Reiner and others who could be pretty funny. But the producers didn't want to take that chance so they increasingly planted the panelists with naïve questions that would yield outrageous juxtapositions. Something similar infests today's so-called "reality" shows. They don't trust reality to be interesting so they have to massage it a bit, creating phony situations with folks who go along with the manipulation. It's a small transgression on The Name's The Same but it gets worse and worse as the ratings go down…and I suspect it made them worse.

One of the most-read articles on my site is my Christmas story about Mel Tormé. Recently, it inspired an artist named Josh Pincus to do an illustration. Here it is…and it looks almost exactly like Mel did that day.

I know three people on the web named Steven (or Steve) Thompson. One of them runs a blog full of interesting artifacts. On it, he recently posted a photo of actors Steve Holland and Chris Noel, both of whom often posed for photos that artists used as reference for the painting of movie posters or paperback book covers or pieces of that sort. (Mr. Holland was the guy James Bama used as model for those Doc Savage paperback covers where his shirt was always torn. Did you ever notice that Doc was always wearing the same torn shirt? Holland only had one.)

Anyway, Br'er Thompson is trying to help someone identify what this photo was used for: What movie poster? What paperback cover? Go over there and see if you can help him.

I've bragged that readers of my site can always come up with an answer to any mystery. Don't let me down. Our honor (yours and mine) is at stake. And while you're there, check out some of the other neat stuff he has posted.