A brief interview with me all about our upcoming Groo mini-series.

Hey, I finally watched most of the Emmy Awards telecast…and by "most," I mean that I TiVoed the sucker and fast-forwarded through it, which brought the three hours down to about thirty-five minutes. This is the new technology, people, and it was designed to get us through long awards programs. If you watch without it and you're bored for three hours, you have no one to blame but yourself.

People complain it's three hours. This, to me, is like bitching that an episode of 60 Minutes lasts an entire hour. The Emmy Awards telecast is all about handing out a very long list of awards. If you give out X number of statuettes and each presentation — introducing the presenters, a bit of banter, reading the nominees, opening the envelope, bringing the winner(s) to the stage, acceptance speech — takes Y minutes…well, just do the math. The show's going to be X times Y minutes long, plus there will also be musical numbers, comedy spots, monologues, The Death Montage, etc.

What do you want them to cut? The entertainment interludes? That would be like PBS cancelling the show you want to watch but retaining the pledge breaks…or something like that.

They've already cut the majority of the Emmy Awards from the Emmy Awards broadcast. They don't reduce the total number. In fact, every year they give out more of them than ever before. They never cut the number because the Academy, let's remember, is made up of people who want to win Emmys. The more they give out, the better your chance of snagging one. So to streamline the telecast, they give out more and more of the awards at the non-televised event a few days earlier. The problem with that is as follows: As they move more and more of the "less important" awards to the other ceremony, the televised one becomes more and more about the biggest stars and the biggest shows. This makes that telecast all the more about Big Multi-Millionaire Stars congratulating one another.

To me, if there's anything interesting about an awards show, it's about when the award alters someone's life or career. Lorne Michaels winning his eleventh Emmy isn't going to make him any richer or more successful or powerful or anything. The Emmy for Outstanding Achievement in Art Direction For a Multi-Camera Series is probably life-changing for its recipient. It's a shame that the show is no longer about any of that.

Leaving that aside, what was right and wrong with the broadcast? Well, I seem to be the only one on the Internet but I really liked the "in the round" set…and admired the technical expertise that must have been necessary to pull that one off. I wasn't at the Shrine Auditorium (I think that's where they did it) but I wonder if that format caused more celebs to stay in their seats and feel involved in the show. Usually, a lot of your biggies are out in the lobby schmoozing for most of the show because…well, I wouldn't want to sit there for three hours, either. It certainly felt like the audience wasn't all out in the lobby.

What I didn't like: I felt sorry for Ryan Seacrest. He's probably fine on his own show (which I don't watch) but he lacked the sense of importance to preside over the Emmy Awards. He was not capable of coming out and doing a decent monologue so they hustled Ray Romano out there to do one. Romano can do a decent monologue but unfortunately, he didn't have one that had anything to do with television so it further knocked things off-kilter. What Lewis Black did later in the show would have worked up front. In fact, Lewis Black would have been a fine host but the Emmys were on Fox and he isn't the star of a series on Fox so forget that idea. Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert and Steve Carrell were all very good too, but they aren't on Fox, either. Too bad the Emmys will never be on Comedy Central.

In case you missed it, here's a video of Lewis Black. I liked this a lot and it seems like the audience did, too…

The Senate just voted a symbolic vote to condemn an ad placed by MoveOn.org that attacked General Petraeus. This is wrong in so many ways.

First of all, the Senate (or the House or any government institution) has no business voting en masse — and using the bully pulpit that we entrust to them — to criticize how Americans exercise their Freedom of Speech. Everyone can all say whatever they want on their own time but it isn't the job of our deliberative bodies to pass judgment on how tasteful or accurate a political ad may be.

Secondly, the whole thing's a cheap political stunt. You introduce a resolution like this to try and put your opponents on the spot and force them to vote. If they vote to condemn it, they pretty much have to condemn the whole thing, including portions with which they might agree had those sentiments been more graciously expressed. If they don't vote to condemn it, then their opponents will try to hold them as responsible for it as if they'd written it themselves…which is another distortion of reality. Just because you don't condemn something doesn't mean you agree with every word of it. It's all a trick to move the debate off of whatever legitimate issues the ad raises and make it instead about the manners and ethics of people you're running against.

Thirdly, our Senate has a large pile of issues to deal with that are causing people to lose their lives, their homes, their health insurance, their jobs, etc. Why the hell are they spending time on a symbolic vote about anything?

Lastly, if they're serious that it's the job of our government to scold people for smear campaigns, they're setting themselves up for quite a workload. I'll bet every member of Congress can cite a hundred ads or editorials that they think are as lacking in decorum and truth as the backers of today's symbolic vote claimed the MoveOn ad was. If they're not hypocrites, they'll introduce resolutions calling for symbolic condemnations of all of them…but they won't because there's no political mileage in most cases. Frankly, I think there should just be a symbolic vote to condemn today's symbolic vote…and then they should (to borrow an appropriate phrase in this instance) move on.

One of my favorite things to listen to are the CDs recorded by a band from Holland called The Beau Hunks. They named themselves after a Laurel and Hardy movie because their specialty is re-creating the great background music from the Hal Roach comedy shorts. It was primarily composed by a man named Leroy Shield and it's best known from the underscoring for the films of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy.

This article describes the extraordinary effort that went into reconstructing these tunes. Getting together an orchestra to play them was the easy part. The hard part was painstakingly re-creating the sheet music, which meant studying the films in minute detail. The output is utterly faithful to the originals except it's without the hisses and scratchiness and actors talking over it. Great stuff. If you'd like to try a CD, I'd recommend this one, which is mostly tunes from the Our Gang comedies but many of the same cues were used in the films of Stan and Ollie.

Here's two minutes of the Beau Hunks rehearsing for a live appearance…

Another damn obit for a friend: Writer-producer Bob Sabaroff passed away early this morning following an ugly bout with leukemia. Among the many, many TV shows he wrote for were Star Trek, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Bonanza, The Equalizer, High Chaparall, The Invaders and Tarzan. He was the co-creator of Then Came Bronson, a series that I remember fondly. I'll also remember Bob fondly. He was an intense person who'd been everywhere and knew everyone, often speaking of hush-hush government assignments and offering first-hand knowledge of world affairs. We had some interesting discussions and debates, and I regret that we didn't have more of them.

Okay, so here's how I'm figuring this Spector case. Forget what I said earlier.

The prosecution and the defense both agreed to go for broke: Either he's guilty of second-degree murder or he's innocent. The judge agreed. The jury was not allowed to come back with any other verdict. They could not, say, decide for involuntary manslaughter.

Now, let's say you're on the jury. I'm going to use you as an example because if it were me, I'd probably just declare the guy guilty and go shopping. But you have a more open mind than I do on this.

I don't think you think he's innocent and should just go free. He has serious mental problems and he likes to threaten people with guns and one of those people is dead from one of those guns.

But maybe this one going off was an accident. I don't think you buy the idea that poor Lana Clarkson was so suicidal that she grabbed the gun, stuck it in her own mouth and pulled the trigger…but maybe you think that the way the law is written, Spector shooting her by accident does not quite meet the definition of murder in the second degree. You can't vote for manslaughter so you vote the only other way you can…to acquit. You can do that because others in the jury room are going to vote to convict. That means you can vote to acquit without worrying that Spector's going to waltz away from this with no punishment, free to point guns at others.

I'm not saying your idea is, "Let's create a deadlock." Just that you've been given two possible votes and you decide the one that means "guilty as charged" doesn't exactly apply. There are five or maybe seven of you in the jury room who feel that way.

The judge says he may send the jury back to deliberate but give them the option of voting for manslaughter or some other slightly-lesser charge. He may order the lawyers to argue this or other salient points before deliberations resume…and it's always possible that the prosecutors and Spector's lawyers will cut a deal where Phil will plead "no contest" to a reduced charge. There's no telling what (if anything) is on Spector's mind but his attorneys have to be thinking that being able to vote the lesser crime is only going to drive acquittal votes towards that choice. It will not cause those who voted to convict to suddenly decide the guy should receive a "get out of jail free" card.

So that's my prediction: One way or another, he'll wind up with a reduced but still serious conviction. That will suffice for me and my murder spree will not be necessary.

But if I'm wrong and Spector does go free…watch out!

Speaking of friends of mine: Take five minutes and watch the lovely and talented Christine Pedi in performance. Christine has a wonderful voice of her own but here, she performs "I Am Telling You I Am Not Going" in the voices of — not necessarily in this order — Judy Garland, Joan Rivers, Ethel Merman, Katharine Hepburn, Julie Andrews, Carol Channing, Christine Ebersole in the musical Grey Gardens, Rosie O'Donnell, Bernadette Peters, and maybe somebody else. I lose track. And at the end, you'll hear a little of her awesome Liza Minnelli impression. She really is that good.

A lot of filmmakers complain that distribution is a mug's game; that the system is so controlled by a small group of corporations that independent efforts are at a disadvantage. That's true but as Bob Elisberg notes over on The Huffington Post, some producers — like producer-writer-director Brendan Foley — are finding new ways to get their wares to audiences. (In the interest of Full Disclosure, Bob notes that Brendan is a friend of his. So I guess I should note that Bob and Brendan are both friends of mine. You don't catch Robert Novak being this honest.)

One thing that may be educational about the Spector trial, or at least worthy of discussion is this: We who sometimes follow trials from afar via news coverage often see a very different trial than the jurors in the courtroom. Logically, we know this, of course. The jurors sit there every day for six or seven hours a day, sometimes for months. The collective time I spent following the Spector trial probably comes to less than two hours and a lot of that was reading reporters' descriptions of what was said, not seeing and hearing the actual witnesses.

Still, we like to think that's enough; that we can formulate an opinion that is almost as valid as the jurors'…and I'm not saying we can't. Juries can be wrong, which is why verdicts are sometimes overturned on appeal or proven erroneous by DNA testing. The two juries that sat in judgment of O.J. Simpson obviously saw very different trials with different witnesses, different rules of evidence, different lawyers arguing, different standards of proof, etc. On the larger issue of whether Simpson hacked two people to death, one jury got it as wrong as wrong can be.

The Spector jury's deadlocked 7-5. We don't know which way but even if it's seven for conviction, it's stunning that nearly half of the jury thinks he didn't do it.

Or do they? Is it maybe that they think he did point the gun at her but that its discharge was enough of an accident that it doesn't rise to the level of second-degree murder? Perhaps they'd have voted to convict on a slightly-lesser charge…and perhaps, based on what the judge seemed to be saying a few minutes ago, they'll get that chance.

Or did at least five jurors buy into the idea, absurd as it may sound to us, that Lana Clarkson decided a visit to a stranger's home in the wee, small hours of the morn was a dandy opportunity for suicide? Seems absurd to me but so does a deadlocked jury in this case.

I'm not expecting anyone to answer any of this, and I supposed we'll know soon exactly what this deadlock is all about. Still, it and some other surprising verdicts we've seen, have to make you wonder. Maybe we don't know as much about these cases as we think we know. Or maybe it's the juries that don't know.

The Phil Spector jury is deadlocked 7-5. Looks like a "win" for his lawyers, especially if they get to charge him for another trial.

My killing spree is officially on hold for now.

Message before last, I gave you an e-mail address for mail to Groo the Wanderer. For some reason, I'm having tech problems with this address so I just changed it to one that should work. If you sent me an e-mail in the last two hours or so, it probably bounced so please try again with the new address. Yeesh. I guess if everything worked properly, it wouldn't be Groo.

My longtime buddy Scott Shaw! has this wonderful slide show he does at comic conventions. It's called Oddball Comics and for it, Scott digs up comic books so weird that even I don't know about some of them. Each week on his website, he spotlights one of them and this week, he has up Kit Karter, a Dell book I'd neither seen nor heard of. It's a teen-type comic involving go-karts and it was written and drawn by Dave Berg, who did the "Lighter Side" feature for hundreds of years in MAD Magazine. (The caricature at above left is of Mr. Berg and it's by his fellow MAD artist, Don "hinged feet" Martin.) Go take a look-see. Great stuff.

As I've mentioned here more times than the news deserves, we just released the first issue of Groo the Wanderer in a long time and there's a mini-series coming shortly. The issue just released doesn't contain a letter column but the mini-series will. If you'd like to submit something and maybe get it printed in an upcoming issue, here's the address…

We will not be responsible for any damage done to your reputation by the world finding out that you read Groo.

P.S. The above e-mail address has been encoded by an encoder that encodes e-mail addresses. We do this so that little spiders that crawl the Internet, searching for e-mail addresses to which they can direct ads for penis enlarging pills, won't find our e-mail address. If your browser cannot read the encoded e-mail address and you want to write to it, do the following. Type "groo" and then type one of those little "at" signs you never used much before the Internet was invented. Then type the domain name, which is "povonline.com" and you have it. Easy!

In 1964, Hanna-Barbera produced two cartoon series for the Ideal Toy folks. One was The Magilla Gorilla Show and each half-hour featured a cartoon of Magilla, a cartoon of Ricochet Rabbit and a cartoon of Punkin Puss & Mushmouse. The other series was…well, there's some argument as to what it was called. I remember it always being called The Peter Potamus Show. My friend Earl Kress says it was originally titled Peter Potamus and his Magic Balloon and that it was later changed to The Peter Potamus Show. Whatever it was called, each 30-minute episode featured a cartoon of Peter Potamus, a cartoon of The Goofy Guards and a cartoon of Breezly & Sneezly, who were a polar bear and a seal.

Okay, you got all that? This is going to get complicated.

Ideal Toys was going to place the shows on various local stations around the country. Because different kinds of deals would be made here and there, Ideal asked H-B to format the shows with a minute that could be dropped out. In some cities, it might be necessary to offer the local station an extra minute of commercial time and Ideal wanted the shows constructed so that was easy to do. Hanna-Barbera was pleased to do this since it meant that one minute of animation in every episode would be a rerun every week. So they produced two little "curtain call" minutes, one for each series. In each, all the heroes in the show would come out and dance around and say goodbye…and this minute could run or not, depending on the needs of the local broadcaster. When Magilla Gorilla and Peter Potamus debuted in Los Angeles, the "curtain call" minute in each was aired each week and it was, in some ways, a highlight. Each featured a catchy little tune and better than your average H-B animation.

The shows ran in syndication until 1965 when the Ideal deal expired. Soon after, Hanna-Barbera sold the shows (all reruns) to ABC to run on Saturday morning. For reasons unknown though, they decided to switch two segments: Ricochet Rabbit would move from The Magilla Gorilla Show to what was now definitely called The Peter Potamus Show. The Breezly & Sneezly cartoons would move from Peter's show to Magilla's. This meant that some changes had to be made. The opening to The Magilla Gorilla Show had Ricochet and his sidekick Droopalong in it so it would have to be reanimated to replace them with Breezly and Sneezly. The opening to The Peter Potamus Show didn't have any other characters in it so it could remain unchanged.

Then the "curtain calls" in both shows had to be redone to change around the characters. The one on Magilla's show was just a matter of animation changes…but on the Potamus program, not only did the animation have to change but the song did, too.

As the Peter Potamus "curtain call" was originally animated, there was a point where Sneezly, being a seal, was balancing Peter on his nose. They took out Sneezly and had Ricochet Rabbit just balance Mr. Potamus on his head. In fact, everywhere Sneezly appeared, they redrew him into Ricochet, and wherever Breezly Bear appeared, they redrew him into Droopalong.

All well and good…but Breezly Bear had also been mentioned in the song and to save a few bucks, H-B decided not to bring in singers and redo the whole tune. So what they did instead was to dub in the voices of some men yelling "Ricochet." They couldn't say "Ricochet Rabbit" because it had to be the same number of syllables as "Breezly Bear."

Our clip today is the second version of the "curtain call" from the Peter Potamus Show. Breezly and Sneezly are out. Ricochet and Droopalong are in…and you'll hear the men yelling Ricochet's name to drown out "Breezly Bear." It's actually a nice little spot if you ignore the patch job on the audio track.

I'm kinda busy tonight with deadlines, plus there's this: A friend of mine who has been watching the Phil Spector trial with great interest is convinced that tomorrow is Verdict Day. I don't know how she knows this but some people have actually given up studying the evidence in this case and are now studying what the jury is wearing when they report each morning. Apparently, if the foreman doesn't wear a tie and the rest of the deliberaters are in casual clothes, that means No Verdict Today and it's immediately reported on blogs that follow such things. I don't think my friend has any inside info on what the jurors will be wearing tomorrow but she seems to have some reason to believe this thing will be drawing to a close.

So just in case (a) she's right and (b) Spector is acquitted, I have to spend some time tonight planning my killing spree. I'd tentatively decided to start with my eleventh-grade Chemistry teacher but then I found out he's already dead so there's not much point in killing him…although it's still tempting. I was going to go after the guy who invented cole slaw but I decided killing's too good for him. So I think I'll off the neighbor whose car alarm goes off at 4 AM if a sparrow flies by and then maybe Osama Bin Laden (bet I can find him before Bush does) and after that, I'll just play it by ear. If you're smart, you'll stay out of my path.

Which is all my way of saying that I'm busy. I'll slap a great Video Link up here later — I have a whole batch that are already written — but posting will otherwise be light here for a few days. It'll still be busier than your average blog, which gets updated every time Halley's Comet goes overhead, but not as busy as usual.

Before I go, though: I've just received a copy of the Jonathan Ross documentary, In Search of Steve Ditko that aired the other night on BBC4. I haven't the time to watch it all now but the ten or so minutes I did see were quite well done and intriguing. I'll post an actual response soon. Oh, and also: I haven't forgotten that I promised a review of that Sony DVD Carousel I recently acquired and I have another long-awaited chapter in the story of Scrappy Doo. Also, a lot of you have sent e-mails that I should post here. We'll get to everything after Paying Work.