See that duck? That's Webster Webfoot, who was a star of local kids' TV in Los Angeles during the sixties. He was usually seen in the company of the man in the photo, "Uncle" Jimmy Weldon. I remember watching Tex Avery cartoons and Felix the Cat adventures on Channel 13 when I was a mere lad. As I later found out, Uncle Jimmy was one of the true pioneers of hosting shows for younger audiences.

I won't attempt to go through his history here. Why? Because he can tell the story much better than I can…and he'll be telling it later today on Stu's Show, hosted by the Johnny Carson of Internet Radio, Stuart Shostak. Each week, Stu welcomes someone important from the world of television onto his program for interviewing purposes. That is, if he can find someone important. When he can't, he has me on. But he finds great guests often enough that you're probably sick of seeing me tell you to tune in.

I'll be listening today from 4 PM to 6 PM Pacific Time on Shokus Internet Radio. The show is live so if you live on the East Coast, for instance, you need to tune in at 7 PM your time. Also please understand that this is not a podcast. You can't download this show and listen to it at your leisure. It's Internet Radio, which means it's like a radio station…you listen when it's on. If you can't be at your computer when it's on, you can catch one of the many reruns during the week but it's more fun if you listen live. (You can even call in and ask Jimmy a question.) The whole broadcast schedule is over on this page. Adjust the little time doo-hickey at the bottom to reflect your time zone.

Stu and Uncle Jimmy will be joined in the plush Shokus Internet Radio studio by my colleague, animation writer-historian Earl Kress. Earl will mostly be quizzing Weldon on his days voicing the cute duck, Yakky Doodle, on the Yogi Bear show, and on Jimmy's other work as an animation voice actor. And maybe they'll even chat about Jimmy's other career, which is as a motivational speaker. You can find out a lot about Uncle Jimmy over at his website.

Anyway, tune in. Call in. If you grew up in Los Angeles or one of the other cities where Uncle Jimmy and Webster did shows, you'll have the special thrill of hearing a fixture of local teevee. If you aren't familiar with Webster Webfoot…well, how often do you get to hear a man who talks like a duck? I mean, besides when you watch almost anyone on C-Span.

To access Shokus Internet Radio, go to this page and select an audio browser. And you don't have to wait 'til Stu's Show is on. If you go there right now, you may hear something else you'll like.

Today, we have the opening to the 1962 "Supermarionation" TV series, Fireball XL5. Even better, we have the closing credits with the show's super-cool theme song. I really liked this show at the time, and also Supercar, which came from the same producers, Gerry and Sylvia Anderson. Later, their shows got more sophisticated and turned more towards human action. I'm not sure if it was that or my age but I lost interest in them. I enjoyed watching this little clip though, and I thought some of you might, also.

Over on his website, Mike Barrier has posted brief but informative interviews with three men who supplied voices for Disney cartoons — Clarence Nash, Billy Bletcher and Jimmy MacDonald. When I get a chance here, I'm going to post stories about (a) a show I went to when I was nine at which Mr. Nash performed and (b) the sad story of how I tried to hire Billy Bletcher for a cartoon voice job but he died before we could record him. But never mind that now. Go read the interviews with those gentlemen.

I don't like being solicited. If you come to my door unasked or call my phone without an invite, I don't care what you're hawking. No sale. Even if it's something I need at a price I can't get anywhere else.

I especially don't like being solicited to subscribe to theatrical seasons. I go to a lot of plays but I've given up subscribing to the whole season of any company. It always comes down to me having tickets for some night I can't go and/or a play that I've paid for but really don't want to attend. It's like the Kellogg's Variety Pak. I bought the thing for the little boxes of Frosted Flakes and Sugar Smacks but I got stuck with the little box of Shredded Wheat which I couldn't stand.

And I really, really don't like being solicited to subscribe to the theatrical season of a theater company that I couldn't attend if I wanted to. This afternoon, I got a phone call asking me to sign up for the coming season of the Pittsburgh Civic Light Opera Company. This is because when I was in Pittsburgh last month for the first time in my life, I bought tickets to one play.

I live in Los Angeles and have no plans to go back to Pittsburgh at all, let alone four times in the next year. I'm sure the Pittsburgh CLO will have a fine season but I will be, if Mapquest is accurate, 2441.05 miles from the theater.

Come on, people. Look at the area code before you dial it. You're wasting your time and worse, you're wasting mine.

Boy, are some of you going to love this. Alan Light was the founder of what is now the Comics Buyer's Guide and he used to be all over every comic book convention with his camera. He recently came across a huge stash of photos that he took at the 1982 San Diego Comic Con, back in the days before it was called the Comic-Con International.

The picture above is of the great writer-artist of Disney ducks, Carl Barks, posing with Burne Hogarth, who was probably best known for drawing the Tarzan newspaper strip. But that's just a sample. Alan has posted a ton of these great photos…even a few with me in them. I think I'm about eleven in those shots which is odd because I was thirty years old in 1982. But don't let that concern you. Go take a look.

People on both Liberal and Conservative websites seem to be discussing this piece by David Frum on what Karl Rove meant to the Bush administration and our nation. I have to wonder if people don't give Rove too much credit for devious planning. It may be that he was as brilliant and ruthless as some pundits make him out to be. It could also be that a lot of things have happened in our world lately that no one could have predicted or can explain…but since they worked out for George W. Bush, and no political analyst ever wants to say "I can't explain this," it's easier to attribute them to clever Rovian strategy.

You might want to bookmark this link. It's Comedy Central's page for their Indecision 2008 and it's full of stuff from the Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert shows, including the latest video clips.

Okay, here's my Buffalo Bob Smith story. It took place at the Licensing Show in New York in the early nineties, and I guess it helps make the point if I explain what happens at those events. The Licensing Show is a place where companies exhibit, either because they own great properties (famous characters, copyrighted designs, etc.) that someone might want to put on a t-shirt or lunch box, or because they license the rights to put great properties on those t-shirts or lunch boxes, or because they broker deals to make that happen…

Well, anyway, just understand that this is a convention about the marketing and licensing of identifiable properties and that most of those present are involved in some way with licensing. There are exhibits all over and many of the booths are filled with celebrities and freebees, the better to attract wanderers to the displays.

This particular year, Buffalo Bob Smith — star of the legendary Howdy Doody kids' show — was there to promote a new wave of Howdy Doody licensing from King Features Syndicate. He was appearing in the King Features booth and when I heard this, I decided to amble over and see if I could meet him. That was until I saw the line. It looked like about a three hour wait to meet Buffalo Bob, get one of the autographed photos he was signing and shake his hand. The line, filled wholly with folks in the proper age bracket to have watched Howdy Doody when they were eight, snaked through the entire hall, down past booths where you could get your photo with W.W.F. wrestlers or Playboy models or some suffocating person in a giant Snoopy costume.

The length of the queue caused me to pass. I mean, with a line like that, how much time could you possibly get to talk to the guy? Twenty seconds? So I took a look at him — older but still handsome in his Buffalo Bob jacket with the leather fringe — and I continued walking.

Later on as I walked past, the line was still just as long, if not longer, but I heard someone call my name. It was a friend who worked for King Features. She welcomed me into their exhibit space and we chatted for a while. Then she said, "Would you like to meet Buffalo Bob?" I said sure but there was that long line…

"You don't need to stand in line," she said and she led me over to Buffalo Bob. We came up behind him and she interrupted his signing to do introductions. He threw down his pen, turned around and got up to shake my hand, then we talked for two minutes or maybe three, I, of course, said all the geeky stuff everyone said to him about watching him when I was a kid and being happy to see him mobbed by fans, etc. And all the time I was saying such things, I was eyeing the line of people who'd been waiting half the afternoon for thirty seconds with him. Eyes were glaring at me with raw hatred and I could hear them all thinking, "Who's this rude clown who thinks he's so much better than us that he doesn't have to wait in line?" Well, of course. If I'd been there for 3+ hours, I'd sure have resented the hell out of me.

It made me nervous so I said to Mr. Smith, "Listen, I'd love to talk to you longer but you have all these people here waiting to meet you…"

He ignored that and went on talking to me about whatever we'd been discussing. The lady who introduced us had told him I did the Garfield cartoon show, and he was telling me how much Garfield merchandise he was seeing everywhere. Again, I said, "I shouldn't monopolize you like this. These people have been waiting all afternoon for your autograph…"

And I will never forget this — and so help, me this is verbatim: Buffalo Bob Smith, the King of Doodyville himself, pulled me to one side and he whispered to me, "You don't understand…my job is to keep the line as long as possible."

Each year at the Comic-Con International in San Diego, I get to preside over a game that people love. It's called Quick Draw!, and no matter how big a room they give us, we always seem to fill it.

Up front each year are three cartoonists seated at projectors that enable everyone in the house to see whatever they draw. One cartoonist is always Sergio Aragonés, my long-time collaborator and the man some call the Fastest Cartoonist on the planet. Another is always Scott Shaw!, my long-time friend and occasional collaborator and a man who does the impossible by keeping up with Sergio. The third slot rotates from year to year. At the most recent con, it was filled — and filled well — by Mike Kazaleh, an animator and comic book artist who proved he was good enough to play alongside Sergio and Scott.

I am out in the audience with a cordless microphone, getting suggestions and running little games that challenge the cartoonists to think on their feet, only with a pen. It's been described as Whose Line Is It Anyway? but with cartoonists. If you've seen it, you know how funny and amazing it all can be. If you haven't seen it…well, we have a little sampler here for you. Someone, quite without my permission, put two video clips up on YouTube of the one a few weeks ago. The video is shaky and the audio isn't grand — you'll hear people seated near the camera better than you hear me running the proceedings — but it may give you a bit of an idea of how it all works.

In the first clip, we're playing Secret Words, which is one of the improv-cartooning games I invented. I select someone out of the audience. In this case, it's the noted author Len Wein, who was there because I asked him to be. We show three words to the cartoonists and to the audience. Everyone in the place knows the three words but Len. The cartoonists then have to do drawings that will cause Len to guess what the words are, one at a time.

Here's the clip, which runs a bit over five minutes. I'm the one playing Game Show Host. Sergio is drawing on the large screen at left. Scott is drawing on the middle screen. Mike is on the screen at far right. Len is the guy guessing. Let's all click and watch…

…and that's how you play Secret Words. Now, this next game runs a lot longer. It's called Sergio Scenario and in it, I keep throwing ideas at Sergio and he must add each one to a drawing. The idea is to try and stump him…which I've yet to accomplish in more than a dozen attempts. The scene keeps getting more and more complicated and he somehow finds a way to include each new element, no matter how outrageous. This clip runs a little over thirteen minutes and it starts after we'd already done about five minutes. It started with me asking Sergio to draw our character, Groo the Wanderer, attacking someone…and then I had him add some bank robbers…and then I said to make it a blood bank, so he drew Dracula into the tableau…and you'll see how it grew from there. If you ever get to a convention where we're doing this, come see it in person because it's even more amazing than this clip would have you believe.

Stan Lee's doing an online chat on Wednesday. It's on Talk to America, which is — and I quote: "The Voice of America's premier global webchat." You can submit questions in advance via this page and maybe win a comic autographed by Stan the Man. Thanks to Joel O'Brien for letting me know about this.

Stuart Taylor Jr on an issue that ought to matter to more people than it does. It's the astounding number of people who get convicted in our courts, tossed in prison — sometimes for long stretches, sometimes even on Death Row — and are later proven innocent. Since a lot of these people look like they could have done it — i.e., they're poor and/or minorities and/or have records of proven crimes — much of the public isn't much bothered. It's like, "What's the big deal we threw the wrong Hispanic guy in the slammer?" A few years ago at a party, a guy I sorta knew caused jaws to drop when the topic drifted around to someone who'd just been freed from prison after 10+ years served for a crime he didn't commit. The partygoer said, and he didn't seem to be kidding, "They shouldn't have let him go. All those guys are guilty of something."

The thing I think some people really don't get is that if someone is wrongly convicted, the guy who really did it gets away scot free. That's really the Perfect Crime: You did it but you didn't get caught…and since someone else did, no one's looking for you. In fact, if evidence did come out that you'd dunnit, the authorities would probably try to not reopen the case because that would be embarrassed, if not sued.

There are many things we could argue about with regard to our judicial system. I just don't know why so little attention is paid to what seems to me like the single most inarguable point, which is that if you're going to convict people of crimes, you ought to convict the people who actually committed the crimes.

Snakes on a plane. For real.

For a second there when I read this story, I thought it was just Karl Rove going home to Texas.

Newsarama is reporting that comic book artist Mike Wieringo has died from a heart attack at the age of 44.

This is one of those moments when this weblog's reputation works against it. I didn't know Mike Wieringo at all and have nothing to say about him other than that I'd always heard he and his work were well-liked. But if I don't post something, I'm going to get deluged with e-mails — they're already starting — telling me about it or asking me if it's true or even asking if the reason I haven't posted something is because I have something against Mike Wieringo. Obviously, none of these is the case. He was just one of those many folks whose path never crossed mine.

I'm sure the condolences of all go out to the friends and family of this much-respected artist. And a tiny, separate note of sympathy is due to all of us who are over the age of 44 and feeling just a bit older because of the news.

Okay, let's watch a little Johnny Carson. Here are three clips in a row. The first is Richard Nixon chatting with Carson in one of those conversations where, obviously, lines have been written in advance, and the host is cuing those lines, to make a politician seem wittier than he really is. I was told that at some point during the Vietnam War, Johnny had a change of mind or heart and he decided to not do that any longer. He would not have politicians on because, he said, he felt people like that should be quizzed by newspeople and not by comedians, and that it was doing the public a disservice to contribute to the establishment of a false image. This new policy was not set in concrete and he occasionally strayed from it…but for the most part, Carson stopped having guests who were angling to be on ballots.

Then comes a clip from the famous night that George Gobel had to follow Bob Hope and Dean Martin. And then we have a rooster taking a dump on Johnny's desk. Conan O'Brien has recently had on a duck named Quackers who does the same cute trick, proving that late night television has only evolved so far in all these years.

This is a LikeTV embed, which means that the clip may roll on and show you other things after the material I'm spotlighting. Watch the other stuff at your own peril. (It varies every time you load the page so I can't predict what it will be.)

Something else I should have mentioned in my piece on Merv Griffin. All the obits are saying that Merv was a good interviewer…and he generally was. But comedians often didn't like chatting with him on his show because of something I once heard Milton Berle call "The Frank Gorshin Rule." It flowed from a time when Frank Gorshin was on and Merv asked him, "Are you working on any new impressions?" Gorshin made the mistake of saying, "Well, I've been working on Charles Bronson."

The reason this was a mistake is because Mr. Gorshin had not yet perfected his Charles Bronson impression to the point where he was ready to do it in front of America. He didn't even have lines to go with the impression. Nevertheless, Merv pounced on the chance to debut Frank Gorshin's Charles Bronson impression and badgered the poor mimic into doing it. It wasn't very good and Gorshin was humiliated.

Merv did this kind of thing often. One time, he had Morey Amsterdam on…and as you may recall, Mr. Amsterdam sometimes played a few lines of music (and only a few) on a cello during his act. I'm not sure if he was ever much of a cello player but by the time of this particular appearance with Merv, Morey was way out of practice and genuinely unable to play more than a few bars of nothing. Merv, however, challenged him. He said something like, "Morey, you always promised me that some day, you'd play a real cello solo on my show here. Well, tonight's the night." And despite Amsterdam's insistence that he was rusty, Merv had just such an instrument brought out and The Human Joke Machine was forced to perform with it. It was one of the most embarrassing moments I've ever seen on a talk show because Morey couldn't play the thing and he couldn't even find a way to be funny about not being able to play it. Merv finally realized what he'd done and tried to alibi for Morey by saying the cello they'd supplied was woefully out of tune. But from the way Morey Amsterdam was sweating, that obviously was not the problem.

Anyway, The Frank Gorshin Rule, as it was explained to me is that you never say you can do anything around Merv Griffin unless you're prepared for him to make you do it on the air. If you said, "Next time I'm on your show, Merv, I'll juggle for you," you were going to juggle immediately whether you liked it or not. Berle told me about this and added that it came in handy. If there was something he wanted to be asked to do on the show — sing a certain song, tell a certain anecdote, whatever — all he had to do was tell Merv he wasn't prepared to do it. Suddenly, it was a Command Performance.

A few weeks after he told me this, Berle was on with Merv and I made a point of watching. Just as that segment was ending and Merv was about to introduce the next guest, Berle said, "I'm going to practice and some day when I come on here, I'll do a card trick." Griffin immediately brightened up and said, "Well, I bet the audience would love to see one right now." Uncle Miltie protested he wasn't prepared but at Merv's urging, the audience applauded and demanded a card trick. And lo and behold, Berle just happened to have a deck with him…