For a month or three now, Dick Cavett has been writing an enjoyable column for The New York Times which I'm not linking to because you have to be a Times Select subscriber to read it. Either that or have a friend who is and sends it to you on occasion. I'm in the latter category.

The other day, Cavett wrote about an incident that occurred at a taping of his ABC show in 1971. A guest actually passed away in front of the cameras. Here's an excerpt from that column…

When I'm doing an appearance somewhere and taking questions from the audience, I can always count on: "Tell about the guy who died on your show!" I generally say, "I will, and I promise you that in a few moments you will be laughing." (That gets a laugh.) I go on: "First, who would be the logical person to drop dead on a television show? A health expert." (Laugh.) I go on to explain that he was Jerome I. Rodale, the publisher of (among other things) Today's Health Magazine. (Laugh.) The irony gets thicker.

He'd been on the cover of The New York Times Magazine that Sunday, and we needed one more guest. He was a slight man, and looked like Leon Trotsky with the little goatee.

He was extremely funny for half an hour, talking about health foods, and as a friendly gesture he offered me some of his special asparagus, boiled in urine. I think I said, "Anybody's we know?" while making a mental note to have him back.

I brought out the next guest, Pete Hamill, whose column ran in The New York Post. Rodale moved "down one" to the couch. As Pete and I began to chat, Mr. Rodale suddenly made a snoring sound. Comics would sometimes do that, which got a laugh while another comic was talking, pretending boredom. His head tilted to the side as Pete, in close-up as it happened, whispered audibly, "This looks bad."

The audience laughed at that. I didn't, because I knew Rodale was dead.
I've never met Dick Cavett but if I did, I'd lay the following addendum on him because he might find it amusing. On the chance that he may Google himself some day and come to this site, here it is…

That episode, for obvious reasons, never aired. A rerun was hastily selected and it happened to be a rerun where the featured guest was Jack Benny, who was then still very much among the living.

So that day in '71, I'm watching the afternoon movie on Channel 7, the ABC outlet in Los Angeles. One of those little teasers comes up during a commercial break and a local newsguy comes on and says, "Famous guest dies during taping of Dick Cavett Show. Details on the news at five."

Don't you just love when they do things like that? Give you a little bit of important information but not enough to let you know what's really going on? Anyway, this is followed by another commercial for something, and then there's an ABC network promo. You see a slide with a logo for The Dick Cavett Show as an announcer says, "Join Dick Cavett and his special guest Jack Benny, tonight."

Immediate assumption: Jack Benny is the famous guest who died during the taping of the show.

It takes me a few seconds to realize it probably isn't so. If it had been Jack Benny, that would have been the headline; that Jack Benny was dead, not that some unidentified guest died while chatting with Mr. Cavett. But it takes a moment before that occurs to me and of course, I have to wonder if others are leaping to the same immediate and erroneous deduction.

Sure enough, a minute later, the local newsman is back on ABC, interrupting the movie to say, "Uh, just to clarify…the guest who died at the Dick Cavett Show taping today was not Jack Benny. So you can stop calling the station…"

Speaking of Hanna-Barbera shows: A lot of you have seen this but I'll bet some of you haven't. It's the opening to Ruff & Reddy, the first cartoon show produced by that studio. It ran on NBC on Saturday mornings beginning in December of 1957, a few months before I turned six. Still, I remember getting up to watch it every week.

The show had a host named Jimmy Blaine who'd run a couple of episodes of Ruff & Reddy and then, in between them, he'd offer up an old Columbia theatrical cartoon, often one featuring The Fox and the Crow. Between the animated features, Mr. Blaine interacted with a couple of bird puppets — Rhubarb the Parrot and Jose the Toucan. They were operated by puppeteer Rufus Rose, who was the main puppeter on Howdy Doody, which was also a part of NBC's programming for kids. After a few years, the show with Mr. Blaine went off but Ruff & Reddy came back later in another series, this time hosted by Captain Bob Cottle.

I never cared much for either Blaine or Cap'n Bob but I liked Ruff & Reddy…though I liked Hanna-Barbera's next few shows a lot more. It's a shame we aren't likely to see their first series out on DVD for a long time. There were 156 of the four minute Ruff & Reddy cartoons and they'd fit nicely on two DVD sets. In fact, they'd probably fare better there than they have anywhere else.

These were serialized stories and those don't work so well on a cable channel like Boomerang or Cartoon Network, especially the way those channels have usually run them on the rare occasions when they've run them. They were used as fillers. I don't think kids today ("those kids today") will really spark to the notion of following a serialized storyline. That's why no one makes serialized cartoons and why the Rocky & Bullwinkle cartoons, as wonderful as we all know them to be, don't do well on TV. But you really can't build an audience for a serialized cartoon show that doesn't air in a regularly scheduled time slot. A serial might, however, work just fine on a DVD. It's a pity that Warner Home Video will probably have to be right down to the bottom of its barrel before we get The Complete Ruff & Reddy. So for now, just enjoy the opening titles…

This is the third of an as-yet-undetermined number of parts. I'm serializing the tale of how Scrappy Doo became a part of the Scooby Doo cartoon show and I'm owning up as to what I had to do with that. If you haven't read Part One or Part Two you might want to do so before venturing into what follows, which is our third chapter…

Everyone in sync? Good. So I'd just written the script which convinced ABC to pick Scooby Doo up for its ninety-eighth (or whatever number it was) season. I was asked to story-edit the show but I'd accepted a job to serve as head writer for a couple of variety specials for Sid and Marty Krofft and had to pass. I still, however, had to do another rewrite on my Scooby script to address a few comments that folks at Hanna-Barbera and ABC had before it could be produced…and you'd think that would be simple. I mean, they all loved the script and it had gotten the show renewed for another year. So how many problems could it have?

As it turned out, plenty. Ordinarily, when you wrote a script for H-B, you got "notes" from one person at the network and maybe (and maybe not) someone at Hanna-Barbera. But this was a pilot, even if they'd denied as much when negotiating my fee. A pilot pays more because more people have input and they're always more concerned about teensy details. So I got notes. Boy, did I get notes. Johannes Brahms once wrote a piece called Ein Deutsches Requiem that runs seventy minutes in performance. It had fewer notes than I got.

Joe Barbera read the script, told me it was wonderful but he gave me notes in such volume that I found myself wondering how many I'd get if he hadn't liked it. The person who ran the studio's day to day operations gave me a set of notes that topped Barbera's in breadth and volume. The head of the story department gave me a pile of comments…and then there was a set from the fellow who was line-producing the Scooby Doo show and yet another from the team of writers who'd signed on to story-edit the series after I passed. That's five sets of comments and we hadn't even gotten to the network where the real power was wielded.

I got three sets from ABC — from different programming execs there — and another from the Standards and Practices Lady. I ignored the S&P Lady because…well, I always ignored her notes. But even then, I had eight sets and they could not be humanly reconciled. One set said, "Let's lose the joke at the top of page 19." Another said, "Love the joke at the top of page 19." Yet another said, "Hey, could we make that joke on the top of page 19 a running gag and do it a few more times?" Being a mystery, the story involved three suspects and one set of notes suggested switching whodunnit from Suspect A to Suspect B, while another set of notes thought all clues pointed to C. It went that way all through all the notes. I suspected the eight of them had gotten together and divided up my script in a devious plot to drive me insane. ("Okay, you'll hate the scene in the cave and I'll love it and Joe will tell him to change it to a Chinese restaurant…")

For maybe a week, I struggled with rounding off this odd trapezium my script had become. Finally, I went to the person I just mentioned who ran operations, laid eight sets of notes on this person's desk and said, "Pick any two." I was immediately told, "Throw out everyone's comments except Mr. B's" — "B" for Barbera — "and Squire's." Squire Rushnell was the Vice-President of Children's Programming at ABC, the guy who everyone said loved it when the new characters were inspired by Warner Brothers cartoons and voiced by Mel Blanc.

I went home, did a rewrite to please Joe and Squire, and the next day the script was marked "final."

A week or so later, I was in the Hanna-Barbera Xerox Room and I happened to see my script being mass-copied for distribution. I peeked to see if any rewrites had been done since it had left me and there didn't seem to be any. In fact, the script hadn't even been retyped. They were copying the printout I'd handed in, the one from my word processor.

But someone had typed a new title page and instead of saying, "Written by Mark Evanier," it now had my name plus that of another writer in the studio. In fact, the other writer was the son of an executive at the Hanna-Barbera studio.

Three minutes later, title page in hand, I barged into the office of that executive and you can pretty much imagine what I said. He explained that his son had been among the many writers who'd worked on Scrappy Doo before I'd been hired. He felt his son deserved some credit for all the hours he'd put in on the project. I said, "He may have put in many hours but he didn't put them in on this script. I wrote this script and you put his name on my work." The exec apologized and ordered the title pages reprinted…and I had yet another example to cite of how writers get abused when they work on projects not covered by the Writers Guild of America. That kind of thing would never have happened on a WGA show…or if it had, the Guild would have handled it in a jif.

Okay, so we had a script. Now, Scrappy needed a voice. In our next installment, whenever it appears, I'll tell you about the actor they selected as being the perfect voice of Scrappy Doo. And then I'll tell you about the actor they replaced him with. And the actor they replaced the second guy with. And the one who replaced the third guy. And the fourth guy and the fifth guy and so on. Scrappy's still quite some distance from being born.

If anyone ever asks you to explain what "timing" means in comedy, don't waste your time with words. Just show them this clip of Jack Benny and Mel Blanc. The other day, I sat for a video interview that will appear on the fifth DVD volume of The Golden Age of Looney Tunes and I made the point that Mel wasn't just a guy with a lot of voices. He was a very gifted, skilled comic actor. You had to be to play opposite Benny, Abbott and Costello, Bob Hope and all the other people he worked with on radio.

Even the bit in which he played the little Mexican guy opposite Benny, of which this is an abridged version, demonstrates superior acting. He doesn't have a wide variety of dialogue but what makes the bit work is not just Benny's expressions but Blanc's lack of any. He is perfectly deadpan throughout, making his character (the pun is unavoidable) an absolute blank and directing all attention to Mr. Benny. The routine wouldn't have been funny if you saw the slightest smirk or sign of life on Mel's part. As you'll see, Blanc knew how to do that. He didn't know how to play the bass but he knew how to get a laugh…

Here's an odd one. This article in Newsday about newspaper strips is apparently a current article. It makes reference to The Phantom being drawn by Paul Ryan, Graham Nolan and Tony DePaul. That's almost the current crew. Nolan only left it a few months ago, leaving it to Ryan and DePaul. But elsewhere in the same article, we learn…

When [Chic] Young died in 1973, one of his assistants, Alex Raymond, took over the strip. The current artist, Stan Drake, hasn't messed with the success that has given Blondie one of the largest circulations in comic land.

Alex Raymond, of course, never drew Blondie. His brother Jim ghosted it for a decade or two before Young passed away and the name of Jim Raymond began appearing on it. Jim Raymond died in 1981. Stan Drake, who began drawing the strip a few years before that, died in 1997 and was succeeded on Blondie by Mike Gersher, Dennis LeBrun and the current artist, John Marshall. And through most of this, Chic Young's son Dean has been credited as its writer. So the article's wrong about Blondie. Let's see what it has to say about the Archie newspaper strip…

Montana died in 1975, and the Riverdale High gang is kept alive today by chief illustrator Dan DeCarlo.

Not only is Dan DeCarlo not keeping it alive today but sadly, no one's keeping Dan DeCarlo alive today. He stopped drawing that strip in the early nineties and died in 2001. These days, the strip is done by (and clearly signed by) Craig Boldman and Henry Scarpelli. Meanwhile, the article tells us this about the Dick Tracy strip…

Chester Gould retired in 1977, and the strip passed on to Dick Locher, who has kept it going in successful syndication.

That's not exactly wrong except insofar as it implies that Locher followed Gould on the strip. Actually, writer Max Collins and Gould assistant Rick Fletcher took it over for quite some time. The same kind of omission is present in what the article has to say about the Brenda Starr strip…

[Dale] Messick retired and was succeeded by artist Ramona Fradon and writer Mary Schmick.

True…but Ramona stopped drawing it in 1995 and June Brigman is the current artist, working with Mary Schmich, who spells her name that way. Which brings us to what the article has to say about Mary Worth…

Mary continues to dispense advice under the auspices of writer John Saunders and artist Bill Ziegler.

John Saunders died in 2004. Bill Ziegler died in 1990. Karen Moy has been writing it since Saunders died and Joe Giella has been drawing it since the guy who did it briefly after Ziegler left.

So, uh, what happened with this article? This is all very easy information to obtain. Just Googling the name of any of those strips will tell you in three seconds who's currently doing them. So my first assumption was that someone had taken an old article and passed it off as current. But the Phantom information is almost current. Why would someone update that and not update the rest of it?

Anyway, I just phoned Newsday and got hold of Bill McTernan, the author of the piece. He apparently wrote it recently and was unaware there was anything wrong with it. He said he'd gotten the information out of a "three volume comic encyclopedia" in the Newsday library. I told him some of the errors and said, "Well, I think you've got a big correction to write" and said I'd e-mail him a link to the item I was posting. Let's see what happens.

Harold Meyerson notes that it's been fifteen years since the "Rodney King Riots" here in Los Angeles. I guess that's right, though it seems like a far more distant, earlier time.

There are three things that sometimes remind me of those scary days. The rioting didn't get that close to my neighborhood but it wasn't that far away. There were buildings burned and/or looted in areas where I often go. There was one great electronics shop in Culver City where I often bought video equipment. I drove by a few days after the rioting had ended and it was empty: Windows broken out, inventory gone. A friend of mine who also shopped there told me the following story. He said that when the rioting began, someone threw a brick through the store's front window and grabbed a Walkman or something of the sort. The folks who owned the store — an Asian family, I recall — overreacted. When a crowd gathered to see what the commotion was, the owners threw their doors open, said "Take whatever you want…just don't hurt us" and then fled. The store never reopened after that and every time I drive past where it was, or need some connector that I would have bought there, I think of it.

Closer to my home, there are two shops I often see that make me flash back to that week. One is a little convenience store that sells groceries and liquor. I walked by it during the riots and saw that it had been burned out and had its windows boarded up. "How sad," I thought…but then closer inspection revealed it was a sham. No one had damaged the place. Its proprietors had put up the boards and rubbed charcoal on the front…and when the rioting was over, they took it all down and washed off the soot. I'm not sure it was necessary but it sure was clever.

On that same walk, I went by a nearby appliance store — the place I'd bought my refrigerator and several TV sets and other goodies. People were loading some of its wares into trucks and some police arrived, thinking it was being looted. It wasn't. The "looters" were the owners and their crew, and they were taking out the most expensive items and moving them elsewhere for safekeeping…but since they were all minorities, they were having trouble convincing the cops of this. One of the officers was black but he still wasn't quite buying their explanation. Then I — a complete stranger but a Caucasian one — walked up and said, "I'm a customer of this store and these people run it." That probably shouldn't have convinced the policemen but it did. I suspect that was indicative of something that was at the heart of the rioting but I'm not sure I can put it into words.

One night, the rioting ended. I remember watching one of the news broadcasts and hearing a helicopter reporter say, "For the first time in several days, we do not see a single fire and we have no reports of anything burning." The copter did a slow 360° pan around the city from its vantage point and there were no flames, no plumes of smoke. It was over and it did not start again. The article by Meyerson is skeptical that it will stay that way but I prefer to think he's wrong…although the way the L.A.P.D. treated those protesters the other day makes it hard to be optimistic.

Let's take three minutes and learn all about the Komodo Dragon with Bob and Ray…

I think it's silly to have these debates, months before anyone's going to get serious about picking a nominee to run for president, with ten candidates. No one has any time to say anything…which is okay because no one has much to say now.

However, if we're going to have them, there's a question that I think should be asked, and it should be asked at both Democratic and Republican debates. It would go roughly like this: "Is there any other candidate on this stage that you would hesitate to support if he or she secured the nomination of your party? And if so, who and why?"

I'd like to retract/expand upon something I said the other day here about Comicpacs, which were the bagged comics that DC sold back in the sixties. For the reasons stated, I didn't like them and neither did any of my friends. That's still true but I made the leap to saying they never sold well and that's not accurate. My longtime friend Paul Levitz, who's now the President of DC Comics, dropped me an e-mail and wrote, in part…

As a "failure" the DC program lasted well over a decade, with pretty high distribution numbers. The Western program was enormous — even well into the '70s they were taking very large numbers of DC titles for distribution (I recall 50,000+ copies offhand). The unknowable factor on the DC program was that a certain number of distributors and retailers simply split the packs open and returned the loose comics, making an arbitrage profit, and distorting the flow of actual sales data so it looked like the packs sold near 100%. There was no clear pattern of these "arbitraged" copies depressing the sell throughs of the regular releases for most of those years, though, until towards the end of the program.

What Paul's talking about is that regular newsstand comics went out to dealers on a returnable basis. The copies your local newsstand couldn't sell went back to the distributor and so the publisher didn't get paid for them. The comics sold in bags were sold on a non-returnable basis and the dealers who got them were supposed to pay for all they got. Instead, some were opening the bags and sneaking the non-returnable issues back into the returnable channels for credit. Western Publishing, which as Paul mentioned was moving tons of bagged comics for a time, dealt with this by printing two editions of each comic — one for the returnable market and one for the non-returnable distribution. Here are two issues of Walt Disney's Comics and Stories as an example…

As you can see, the one on the left has a Gold Key Comics logo in the upper left hand corner. These books were distributed via the returnable channels. The one at right has a logo for Whitman, which was another imprint of Western Publishing. The Whitman books were the ones put in plastic bags and sent to retailers on a non-returnable basis. This way, the recipient of non-returnable comics couldn't ship them back among returnable books. (Before anyone asks: Apart from the cover symbol, the two editions were identical. In fact, they were printed as part of one press run. World Color Press would print enough covers to go on the returnable issues, then they'd stop the presses, change the black printing plate for one with the Whitman logo, then restart the presses to print enough for the non-returnable issues. As far as I can tell, collectors do not value one over the other.)

While we're at it, take a look at these…

As Paul noted, Western not only distributed its comics in plastic bags in the seventies but some of DC's, as well. They put DC's Superman/Muhammad Ali special through that pipeline…not sealed in plastic but sold on a non-returnable basis. And on the non-returnable copies, they replaced the DC bullet with the Whitman logo.

Around 1978, I had a long conversation with the guy at Western Publishing who managed their program of distributing non-returnable comics to retailers. This was a few years before that program collapsed and he was bragging about how his company was the only one who'd ever been able to make that method work. I guess I took his comments too literally and didn't realize that DC had considerable success with it in the sixties and, as Paul notes above, well into the seventies. I still think it was an unpleasant way to sell comics but it did work in certain venues. I believe they managed to get a lot of them into airports, bus and train stations, as well as other outlets that weren't conducive to conventional comic racks. So I was wrong to suggest they'd never sold.

One other thing: At the top of this item, I have photos of two DC Comicpacs and as you may be able to see, the header card lists the comics in each package, though it doesn't tell you which issue you're getting. The one on the left says that the bag contains issues of Green Lantern, Jimmy Olsen, Brave & Bold and Fox & Crow. That's an odd mix, sticking Fox & Crow in there. I bought every comic that came out and loved Fox & Crow as much as I liked my super-hero comics but few comic buyers I knew felt that way. It sounds to me like another reason some kids wouldn't buy Comicpacs.

Well, I think I've exhausted this topic. My apologies for not getting it right the first time and my thanks to Paul Levitz for setting me straight.

Craig Yoe is interviewed on the history of the Big Boy comic books. I don't know how many of those comics — which are given out as freebees at Big Boy restaurants — are printed these days. But there was a long period in the seventies, back when Manny Stallman did them, when those were the most widely-circulated comic books in the country…and by a wide margin. It's amazing how few of them we see at comic conventions, given the massive numbers in which they were distributed.

Someone was just out on my back porch enjoying the cat food. I believe he's saying, "This isn't that stuff they recalled, is it?" (It isn't.)

This site has repeatedly suggested you go see Chanteuse Extraordinaire™ Shelly Goldstein perform. In fact, we recently plugged her upcoming day-before-Mother's Day show at The Gardenia in Hollywood. To give you some idea what this talented performer does, we offer you an excerpt — it's a little under three minutes — of one of her popular song parodies. Shelly sings a lot of tunes the way their composers meant them to be sung but she also sometimes displaces their lyrics with hers and this is an example of that. This is from a "sixties" show she did, which explains why she's wearing a drapery stolen from the set of Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In. Ignore the outfit and just enjoy the number…

One other point about this silly John Edwards haircut story. I understand that Republicans, who figure he might be the Democratic nominee in '08, are eager to portray him as womanly, sissy boy, non-masculine, etc. It's an established battle plan in politics, practiced by all sides, that you figure out a caricature of your opponent and try to sell the public on the idea that that's who he is.

My question is what good that caricature of Edwards will do them if he's the candidate and the Republican nominee is Rudy Giuliani. It's hard to portray the enemy as effeminate when there are photos of your guy dressed as Jean Harlow.

Eric Boehlert writes about the silliness of most/all political stories about what candidates pay for their haircuts. He's right.

But I have one comment, not about what candidates pay for their coifs but about Brian Williams. As Boehlert notes, the other night Williams was on Mr. Letterman's show and the discussion turned to this issue…

Asked what was the most he'd ever paid for a trim, Williams responded, "probably $12." Really? I have to pay $16, plus tip, for a trim at a little barbershop on Valley Avenue in the New Jersey 'burbs. But Williams, who lives in a restored farmhouse in Connecticut where he parks his 477-horsepower black Porsche GT2 (that is, when he's not decamping on the Upper East Side), gets his haircut for just $12. And remember, that's probably the most he's ever paid.

Williams enjoys a $10 million salary. He's a celebrity journalist and recent Men's Vogue cover boy, who, up until just a few years ago, was probably known as much for his perfectly coiffed locks as he was his reporting skills. Yet, eager to project himself as one of the guys, Williams insists his trims cost chump change.

Boehlert's correct that it's silly to think Williams pays twelve bucks for his haircuts but it's probably not true that the newsman pays more. He probably pays nothing. NBC has a make-up department. They have people on staff who cut and style hair…and probably some very good ones. (If they didn't keep Williams' "do" looking good, they'd be replaced in a second.) These people not only will cut his hair without him paying a cent, they'll give him a trim every time he sits in the make-up chair if he needs it. And he doesn't even have to tip.

Brian Williams has been on television, usually on a daily basis, since around 1985. It could easily have been that long since he had to pay someone to cut his hair.