David Gantz has passed away at the age of 85. A native New Yorker, Gantz was a graduate of the High School of Music and Art, the National Academy of Design and, for some reason, the University of Iowa. Immediately after his schooling, he landed a job with what was then called Timely Comics, drawing and sometimes writing humor comics, including Mighty Mouse and Patsy Walker. (Timely is today known as Marvel.) He worked for an array of companies through the fifties at which time his career segued into magazine cartooning, political cartooning and the writing and/or illustration of books, primarily for children. His political cartoons were especially popular and he received the National Cartoonist Society Newspaper Panel Cartoon Award in 1997 for his feature, Gantz Glances.

One especially delightful creation of Mr. Gantz's was a newspaper strip called Don Q, which ran from 1975 to 1981 and deserved more attention than it received. It was the first, perhaps only comic strip ever syndicated by The New York Times, although it never actually appeared in that paper. (Before that, he'd written and drawn a strip called Dudley D from 1961 to 1964.) Gantz was also the author of Jews in America: A Cartoon History, along with his 75+ other books. A very prolific, talented man.

This is from the episode of I've Got a Secret from July 3, 1957. The panel has to guess a man's secret and his secret is that he invented electronic television. That's because the man is Dr. Philo T. Farnsworth. In addition to TV, he also invented or co-invented the electron microscope, incubators for babies and the system used by Air Traffic Controllers to stop planes from running into one another. An amazing person…and one who somehow managed to not reap many financial rewards for all his brilliance. On this show, as you'll see, all he gets is $80 and a carton of Winston Cigarettes which is about as much as he made off some of his inventions.

A couple of the questions asked by the panelists seem to me to be examples of a practice on some game shows (especially Goodman-Todman game shows) called gambitting. That was when the producers planted innocent questions with the panel that they thought would be funny to an audience that knew what the panelist didn't know. Bill Cullen, for instance, asks Dr. Farnsworth if his invention might be painful when used. I'm pretty sure they didn't tell Cullen what the secret was but it's likely they told him to ask that question in order to get a laugh. In fact, you'll notice they wait until after he asks it to buzz him and end his questioning. This was done a lot on panel shows in the fifties, though it was curtailed around '58 when the quiz show scandals broke. Shows like What's My Line? and I've Got a Secret weren't rigged — and of course, no one won any large sums of cash on them — but the producers were afraid that the public wouldn't understand if it got out that the panelists were being briefed in any way.

Anyway, here's Dr. Farnsworth. This isn't a particularly funny segment but how often do you get to see a genuine American genius? I mean, since I'm not on TV very often.

This whole thing with the strike is getting odder and more fraught with possible scenarios. David Letterman's company is going to seek an interim deal with the WGA that would allow its writers to go back to work and therefore, Late Show (and Craig Ferguson's show) to resume. CBS has issued a statement that says — well, here: Read it for yourself…

Regarding David Letterman's company, Worldwide Pants, seeking an interim agreement with the WGA: We respect the intent of Worldwide Pants to serve the interests of its independent production company and its employees by seeking this interim agreement with the WGA. However, this development should not confuse the fact that CBS remains unified with the AMPTP, and committed to working with the member companies to reach a fair and reasonable agreement with the WGA that positions everyone in our industry for success in a rapidly changing marketplace.

Nothing in there about CBS stopping Worldwide Pants from making a deal. That was not the way the network played it in past strikes. In '88, a lot of companies in a position comparable to Letterman's wanted to sign interim deals with the WGA and their networks stopped them. (By the way: I don't know how interim deals will work this time but in the past, they were "favored nations" contracts. The company signs with the WGA on the WGA's terms and then, whenever a deal gets struck with the AMPTP, the company can elect to switch to its terms, which presumably will be more favorable.)

Letterman, of course, doesn't have to worry about some of the "deal killer" issues that are presently said to be an obstacle to a WGA/AMPTP settlement. He doesn't produce any "reality" shows. He doesn't produce any cartoons. Excerpts from his shows do stream on the Internet via the CBS site but that could be curtailed or kept within a window that the WGA would agree was promotional. There are, as yet, no DVDs of old episodes of Dave's show. So it's hard to imagine they won't be able to make a workable interim deal.

Meanwhile, NBC is telling reporters that on Monday, it will announce the return of The Tonight Show and Late Night in new episodes, possibly January 7. (One source told me it may be even sooner than that.) Since those shows are produced by NBC, the network probably can't and won't make interim deals for them so if Jay Leno and Conan O'Brien elect to go back, they'll be crossing picket lines and working without their writing staffs. So far, no one has said for certain that Jay and Conan will do that, which leads me to suspect that's being argued about right now. It certainly puts those guys in an awkward, perhaps dangerous position. Apart from the obvious anger they'll feel from the Hollywood community — look at what's been directed towards Ellen DeGeneres and Carson Daly — there's the question of whether major stars will want to be a part of those shows.

Just taking Leno's situation, it sounds like lose/lose. He'll be out there doing a limited version of his show — hampered by a lack of writers and probably of top name guests — against Letterman with his full show and a lot of good will. If Jay does his usual long monologue, he'll be accused of employing scabs. If he doesn't do it, he'll lose his most valuable segment. His show has already taken a lot of hits from critics and doing it without writers will just give them fresh ammo to go after him again. And of course, he'll be working to save a program that NBC has already arranged to take away from him. About the only thing that may make him happy is not having to pay the staff out of his own pocket…which I thought was kind of a raw deal, the way he was pressured into it. (Hollywood is full of very wealthy people who are not paying their staffs during the strike, and no one faults them for it. And some of those people, unlike Leno, own their shows and are the actual employers.)

But the big question is what Letterman signing an interim deal will do to the strike situation. Will Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert follow? Will other shows? Is it just Dave who has enough clout that his network is not going to do what they've all done in the past and blocked interim deals? If Dave goes back on and starts clobbering Jay, will that add pressure to NBC to push for a quicker settlement? We're in uncharted territory here so it's gonna be interesting.

Fifty years ago yesterday, a new era in the field of animation began. NBC telecast the first episode of the first show produced for television by Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera, Ruff & Reddy.

It was not the first cartoon produced for television but it was darn close. More importantly, it was the business role model for all that followed. Bill and Joe showed there was money to be made in TV animation and others followed.

Ruff & Reddy wasn't a great show, especially compared with what followed. Today, the animation looks primitive even by Hanna-Barbera standards and the narrative seems a bit leaden. Still, the show had intriguing stories and colorful characters, as well as the expert voice work of Daws Butler and Don Messick, and I wasn't the only kid hooked from the start. I'm pretty sure I saw that first broadcast, which was hosted by a gentleman named Jimmy Blaine, assisted by two bird puppets, Rhubarb the Parrot and Jose the Toucan. That week and each week for years after, he showed two episodes of a Ruff & Reddy serial along with a vintage theatrical cartoon produced by the Columbia Cartoon Studio (usually, a Fox & Crow short).

I remember the impact on me of new cartoon characters. I was five and a half years old at the time but already, I had a lot of the constantly-repeating Bugs Bunny and Heckle & Jeckle cartoons committed to memory. Ruff the Cat and Reddy the Dog were new friends, so appealing that I didn't notice that they didn't move as smoothly or as much as other animated superstars. Or if I did, I didn't care. The following October, Bill and Joe introduced their second show, which was even better and all-cartoon…Huckleberry Hound. Before long, they were the kings of Childrens' Television.

When I'm around cartoon buffs and the topic turns to Hanna-Barbera, I hear two distinct reactions, sometimes from the same folks. One is negative, especially from those who began watching cartoons when the H-B output consisted of things like Scooby Doo and The Smurfs and Wheelie and the Chopper Bunch. The other is positive, fixing on how many people loved the shows and how many animation folks bought homes and fed their families thanks to Bill and Joe. Some called them the guys who saved the animation business when theatrical animation was dying out. There's some truth to all of that but it's especially positive to those of us who remember those early Hanna-Barbera shows and discovered them when they firsy debuted…starting with Ruff & Reddy.

Here's the opening of the show…

We're hearing that David Letterman's company will attempt to make an interim deal with the Writers Guild to get his show back on the air. This could be interesting. In past strikes, the network hasn't allowed a supplier to make such contracts. Moreover, Leno and O'Brien couldn't do it as easily because their shows are produced not by their own companies but by NBC. Stay tuned.

Not a whole lot to talk about today. The Writers Guild has announced an informational meeting out at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium on Monday evening. This figures since I have another event I was looking forward to that evening and now must choose between them.

The Guild is about to try an end-run around the AMPTP, seeking to get companies to negotiate with us on an individual basis. I will be surprised if this yields anything in the way of results and I suspect we're doing it more for the p.r. value — hey, we're trying to make a deal here — than with any optimism than Universal or Sony or anyone will break ranks. This will probably be discussed at the Monday evening meeting but I wouldn't expect any real major announcements there. What I would expect is a couple of angry members (we always have angry members) getting up and arguing over what, if anything, we should do to get the negotiations going again. Personally, I think anything we give up to get the AMPTP back to the table is setting a suicidal precedent. It's telling them they can get us to give up things we care about just by refusing to negotiate if we don't.

I don't sense that there's a lot of sentiment in the Guild to go that route and start abandoning demands. But one thing I've learned about the WGA is that there's always dissent…about everything. It sometimes is very loud and it almost always gets publicity far in excess of its actual strength. The Guild has a tendency, because it's so firmly committed to Free Speech, to sometimes afford too much dignity and attention to complaints and contrary views. There's nothing wrong with fifty people expressing an opinion opposed to our leadership but they oughta be treated as fifty people, not as a meaningful faction in a union with 10,000+ members.

My pet peeve in the area of Member Complaints would best be described by example. All I have to do is re-create a conversation I witnessed during the 1988 strike between an angry WGA member and a man named Brian Walton, who was our Executive Director and chief negotiator. It was during a period when the AMPTP had walked away from the bargaining table (they like to do that) and was making noises like they were never coming back. The angry member told Walton that the strike was being egregiously mishandled and Walton asked him, "What would you do differently?" The exchange then went almost exactly like this…

MEMBER: I would get in there and negotiate with them.

WALTON: They're refusing to negotiate with us.

MEMBER: Well then, you have to make them negotiate with us.

WALTON: And just how are we supposed to do that?

MEMBER: You sit down with them. You establish a dialogue.

WALTON: Sit down with who? The people who are refusing to talk to us?

MEMBER: Whoever you have to talk to to get a dialogue going.

WALTON: We've been trying since Day One to have a dialogue with these people. They give us their terms and then they throw us out.

MEMBER: That's because you didn't get a dialogue going with them. My agent told me that if he'd been representing the Guild, he would have established a dialogue and that would have segued into a negotiation where he could have gotten us everything we want.

WALTON: When your agent negotiates for you, does he get you everything you want?

MEMBER: No, but then he doesn't have the clout of representing the whole Writers Guild.

As a general rule, you can't make even a great deal in this town without some agent telling you, "I could have gotten you more."

Meanwhile, the AMPTP is hammering our current Executive Director, David Young, selling the idea that he's the problem, especially because he's never negotiated this kind of deal before. It's more or less a fact of life that anyone we send into negotiations is either going to be attacked for inexperience or, if he has experience in this area, attacked for what he's done in the past. If the AMPTP weren't attacking our chief negotiator, I'd figure he wasn't doing a very good job for us.

I understand we're going to have the regular picketing schedule on Monday. Then Tuesday, whoever pickets is going to be waving signs outside AMPTP headquarters. Then after that, there'll be no picketing until 1/7/08. So I think I'll try to get some in Monday or Tuesday…and now that I'm in the mood, I'm leaning towards going to the meeting on Monday evening.

Kevin Drum makes what seems to me like a sound observation as to why so many Conservatives are lining up against Mike Huckabee when he would seem in so many ways to be their ideal candidate.

The Bullfighters was the last American feature to star Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy. I think it was their poorest film and you can almost tell that from the trailer…

The WGA has filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board charging that the AMPTP is in violation of labor law by refusing to negotiate in "good faith." I'm not sure the AMPTP has ever negotiated anything in what the other side of the table would consider "good faith." Perhaps some DGA contract has been that way…but part of the current dispute is about the Alliance's usual modus operandi, which is to decide what they're going to give the union in question and make them accept that without any meaningful give-and-take. The AMPTP has responded by declaring the WGA actions are "desperate," which is not a surprising rejoinder. Right now, the WGA could send out for Chinese Food and the AMPTP would issue a statement calling it an act of desperation.

I wouldn't expect the N.L.R.B. to do much, if anything. Traditionally, they don't like to get involved in this end of contract negotiations and they boot decisions down the line, delaying them until they're meaningless. Maybe this time will be different but the most likely outcome of this filing is no outcome. It's still worth a few P.R. points for the Guild, though…one more notch in a rather successful campaign by the WGA to make sure that most of those who are paying attention to the strike see that we're not the problem.

Often in a strike, there's a tendency to blame the workers for walking out, rather than blame Management for offering them a deal they couldn't accept. Obviously, either party could be in the wrong but that possibility usually doesn't occur to those who really, really want the strike to end. It's simply faster for the workers to surrender. There are also those out there who think (in this case) that those who write TV shows and movies should be so glad to have that glamorous job that it's sheer greed to expect anything more. For some reason, it's not sheer greed for the companies to try and maximize their take…and it's not even greedy for them to try and lop a few million off some union's health plan and add it to some CEO compensation package. But somehow it's greed when writers don't want their incomes to go down. Right. You can find that viewpoint expressed in some news articles and on the Internet but it's not as prevalent as it was in our past strikes.

(I don't think, by the way, that writing TV and movies is usually as glamorous as it may seem to some people. I guess if you're stuck in a career you hate, any job of choice can look like Nirvana, and the paychecks you hear that some writers receive can sound like all the money in the world. But it's one of those "you have to be there" things. I don't know what good pay or working conditions would be in the dry cleaning business and my dry cleaner can't really evaluate those matters in mine.)

Lastly: There are reports today that the late night hosts — Leno, Letterman, O'Brien and maybe Kimmel and/or Ferguson — will all return to their shows in January, perhaps on the same day. So far, the reports don't quote a single person involved with any of those shows, nor do they say anything that would suggest that anyone spreading the rumor has talked to anyone involved with any of the shows. The story in The New York Post quotes Letterman writer Bill Scheft as saying of Dave, "…when and if he decides to come back, it will be the right decision." But that quote is several weeks old and was not sparked by any current developments. The Post also spelled Scheft's name wrong which may give you a hint as to the accuracy level of the whole article. For now, file this one in the "I'll believe it when I see a real announcement" category.

The other day, I posted a link to a video of Abbott and Costello doing "Who's on First?" with Spanish subtitles. I just received an e-mail from my amigo, Sergio Aragonés, who says, "The translation is pretty good, but it is not funny as is it in English."

Here's a nice little mini-documentary (four and a half minutes) on the voices in some Disney cartoons. One of the guys you'll see in it is my pal Will Ryan who says he reads my weblog every day and can prove it by calling me when he reads this to set up a lunch. I think that's Buddy Ebsen narrating.

People are talking about George Mitchell's report on steroid use in baseball and many of them are acting oddly shocked that it goes on. I don't really care a lot about it one way or the other, nor is it something I think about. In fact, when I saw the headline —

Mitchell's 'Roid Report Fingers Baseball Stars

— my first thought was that someone was making a fuss because a bunch of ballplayers had hemorrhoids. And someone was (ick!) fingering them.

Go read my pal Bob Elisberg on the current status of the WGA/AMPTP Negotiations (or lack of any). Bob and I didn't discuss this at all but we both thought it over and came out in pretty much the same place. The Guild will get royally hosed if it starts giving in to ultimatums just to get the AMPTP back to the bargaining table…especially since the AMPTP will just repeat the tactic to try and get us to give in on more points.

In other news: The DGA says it will hold off on negotiating its usual "early deal" with the AMPTP until January, which is not much of a delay, especially with the holidays looming. The DGA never really strikes. They did once for fifteen minutes but they do not have any sort of serious strike capability. There are a couple of reasons for this, the main one being that the Directors Guild does not merely represent directors. Its membership includes assistant directors, stage managers, production associates, unit production managers, technical coordinators and other folks who are not as directly impacted by most of the so-called strike points. Many of these people, for instance, only receive residuals indirectly through their health and pension plans. Many have no stake in the "creative" issues.

The other problem the DGA has in striking is that many of its members who are directors are rather entrepreneurial. They often own pieces of the movies they direct so aren't all that concerned with DVD revenues, or think of themselves more as employers than employees. That's a generalization, of course, and many DGA members are fine, dedicated creative types who care about everyone. But it's not easy for a union that contains so many disparate types to find the common ground necessary for a successful strike. What the DGA usually does is to make quick-and-dirty deals that get them a little more of whatever they want, and the AMPTP tries to build concessions into those deals that don't matter much to the DGA but which will matter to SAG and the WGA if the same terms can be forced on them via Pattern Bargaining.

Standard Operating Procedure for the AMPTP in this case would be to figure out a deal covering Internet Streaming that would benefit the DGA but if applied to actors and writers, would not result in any real revenue for them. The DGA would grab those terms and then the AMPTP position would be, "This is the deal. The DGA took it so the WGA and SAG must take it and we will not discuss any other formula, end of discussion." The 1981 WGA Strike was essentially about us refusing to accept the deal that the DGA had accepted for home video and cable.

In that case, we had a three month strike and in the end, the AMPTP backed down and gave us a different deal…one tailored for writers and their different situation. It was not only better for us than what the DGA had accepted but the directors later decided it would be better for them, too. (It was also such a good deal that in 1985, the AMPTP insisted on renegotiating it and cutting it back…but that's another story and not a pretty one.)

Something similar may happen this time but I wouldn't rule out the possibility that DGA negotiations can help the WGA by knocking down some stone walls. The AMPTP will have to give the DGA something better than they've offered us regarding the Internet and that may open the door for us there. They also may not be able to figure out a way to give the DGA a good deal there that won't be good for us and SAG. Moreover, there are points on which the AMPTP has dug in its heels with us that they'll have to relent on to sign the DGA — this idea that they can call anything they want "promotional" and not pay for its use, for example. I can't imagine the DGA buying that even if it does mean going on strike. If they can get rid of it, we can get rid of it.

And who knows? The AMPTP may just overplay its hand — it wouldn't be the first time — and not be able to make a deal with the DGA. The Directors have until the end of July before they'd have to walk out, by which time either the WGA and SAG will have made their deals or the town will be in full-scale chaos. The DGA doesn't have to have a new contract for a long time so they don't have to accept something markedly less than what they want. They don't have to undermine the other unions. And if they can't arrive at reasonable terms with the AMPTP, that will pretty much prove that it isn't the WGA that's the problem.

John McCain said something in yesterday's debate about Global Warming that I thought was very wise…

Suppose that climate change is not real and all we do is adopt green technologies which our economy and technology is perfectly capable of, then all we've done is given our kids a cleaner world. But suppose they're wrong and climate change is real and we've done nothing? What kind of a planet are we going to pass on to the next generation of Americans?

I don't think it'll change any minds but I think it's a good way to look at the problem.

Try to follow the subtitles on this one…